the freedom to develop their own chips while using ARM's common architecture that had become the industry standard.
The company and analysts had said that partnership model had made ARM less vulnerable to a takeover because an acquisition by the likes of Apple or Intel could put off its other partners.
SoftBank, a telecommunications and internet company with no presence in semiconductors, largely sidesteps that problem.
ARM chief executive Segars, who trained as an engineer, said he didn't ask the company's customers before agreeing the deal, relying instead on the analysis of the board.
"We weren't out consulting with our customers, we believe this is going to be a great thing for ARM, our partners, our employees, our shareholders and that's the judgment we've taken," he told Reuters.
British politicians were also kept largely in the dark, although new prime minister Theresa May and her finance minister Philip Hammond were briefed on the deal over the weekend.
After the early meeting in Turkey, the two sides retreated to the offices of financial advisers Lazard and Goldman Sachs in London, as well as the Berkeley Hotel. Due diligence was done in "literally 24 hours", a source said.
Son, seen as a unconventional visionary in the closed world of corporate Japan, said that unlike many of his fellow international investors, he was not put off by the turmoil that ensued from Britain's vote to leave the European Union.
"Talking is easy," said the man ranked by Forbes as Japan's second richest. "People say the UK is still a great country. That's easy to say.
"I'm proving that with cash ... I say this is the time to invest."
(Additional reporting by Freya Berry; editing by Kate Holton and Giles Elgood)
Reuters
Apple Inc on Thursday reported revenue and profit that topped Wall Street targets, one of the few bright spots in a tech sector battered by spending cutbacks due to inflation. While not providing specific numbers, Apple said revenue growth would fall below 8% in the December quarter but did not go as far as Amazon.com, whose dire holiday outlook sent its shares down 14%. Apple shares initially dipped in after-hours trading but recovered in positive territory.
Considering Kelly Anne Blount admits to being a total scaredy cat, its amazing she has written two young adult horror/thriller novels that have been optioned for possible movie adaptations.
Last weekend, the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse graduate decided to watch some horror movies (including The Shallows) to prepare for a meeting this week with the production team for Under, her most recent novel to be optioned.
The weekend was a nonstop nightmare, she said with a laugh. I write scary books, but I cant watch scary movies.
Being the author of scary stories, theres no element of surprise for Blount in her own books, so that helps. I think that being I control and knowing whats going to happen to my characters is really helpful, she said. I like to lead your imagination down a really dark path.
Under, which was completed at the beginning of the year, tells the story of Caden, who abducts his latest infatuation, Hadley, after weeks of stalking her. The story is told from both the main characters points of view, changing each chapter, which might seem like a difficult thing to adapt to the big screen, but Blount is confident Komixx Media Group, the company that bought the rights to the book, has a line on how to do that.
I think its going to come together really well, she said. I think its going to be the kind of movie that keeps you on the edge of your seat.
Blount said shed be more than willing to help with the screenplay if they needed her to, but there might be better choices. I didnt go to school to be a screenwriter, so I wouldnt be an expert at it, she said.
Then again, she didnt go to school to be a novelist either. After graduating from La Follette High School in Madison, Blount majored in education at UW-L (back then she was known as Kelly Flynn). But she had loved to write since she was a little girl she wrote a 28-page illustrated story about whales when she was in third grade and she said two UW-L professors really helped her improve her writing skills.
Robert Richardson was part of the education department at UW-L, but Blount said he taught her a lot about attention to detail and writing. She also was inspired by Bradley Butterfield, an English professor who recently published a memoir of his own accidental coming of age called Idiot Boys.
After graduating from UW-L in 2006, Blount earned her masters degree in early childhood special education at Old Dominion University. She taught first and third grade for a couple years in the Cayman Islands, where she met her British-born husband.
Blount got her start as a novelist after moving back to Virginia with her husband. She joined a critique group and in the course of six months completed her first novel and landed a three-book contract with Limitless Publishing. Her first novel, Grishma, kicked off a three-book series called The Necoh Saga, followed by Ayla and the soon-to-be finished Solutus. The books a young adult fantasy novels featuring imaginary creatures, romance and horror. Think Twilight but no vampires, Blount said.
The books in The Necoh Saga series and Impassioned, the romance-oriented novel leading off Blounts Hard Love series, are available in paperback and for Kindle through Amazon.com. Her novel, Shade, was included as part of a boxset called Pandora that made the USA Today Bestseller list.
Under and her other movie-optioned novel, Captured, on the other hand, are available to read free on a website called Wattpad.
Wattpad is a social storytelling community that offers authors and poets a chance to publish their work while getting immediate feedback from readers and building their own community of readers, and it gives readers free access to writings that cover the gamut of genres. Blount has become something of a star on Wattpad, notching 12 million readings of Captured, which is set in her native Madison and was published two years ago. Under, which is set in her current hometown of Ashville, N.C., has garnered more than 1 million reads and that total is rapidly growing.
While Blount said it feels great to sell books in the traditional sense, she also finds a lot of value in publishing on Wattpad, which offers fairly minimal compensation and even then for only stars like Blount.
Building your fan base is such a critical part of being an author, said Blount, who hosts a monthlong Wattpad Block Party online twice a year and will co-host a Wattpad convention in New York City in August. I think its all about making good connections and being open to putting yourself out there.
Microsoft just announced that advertising revenue from the Bing search engine was up 16% year-on-year during the last quarter, thanks to its deep integration with Windows 10.
By default, the Cortana virtual assistant thats built into Windows 10 opens links in the Microsoft Edge browser and performs searches using the Microsoft Bing search engine. Its a pretty shrewd bit of corporate synergy thats driving Bing to new heights.
In the month of June, Microsoft says in a slide deck for investors, 40% of all Bing search revenue came from Windows 10 users, up from 35% in March.
Microsoft is excluding traffic-acquisition costs from that figure, which are the costs paid to third parties to drive traffic to Bing, so we dont know exactly how much revenue Windows 10 is generating for Microsoft in this way.
But given that Microsoft recently locked users out from using Google with Cortana, it means that those users are a captive audience for Bing. And as Microsoft marches towards one billion Windows 10 users, as is its goal, it means more Bing users coming down the pipeline.
That said, Google, the worlds number one search engine, is doing just fine in the first quarter, Googles search revenue was up 16% to $18 billion, and its doubtful that thats going to slow down when Google announces its own earnings on July 28th.
Google doesnt have to lose for Bing to win, but its certainly a nice feather in Microsofts cap that they can capture some of a market where once they were thought of as an also-ran.
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Analysts said Netflix is still showing growth, but not at the breakneck pace expected when the company announced it had expanded its global footprint to 190 countries, making its streaming service available in 130 new markets (AFP Photo/Jonathan Nackstrand) (AFP/File)
San Francisco (AFP) - The plan by Netflix to conquer the world with its streaming video service is moving slower than expected.
Netflix shares skidded 13 percent to close at $85.84 Tuesday, a day after reporting weaker-than-expected growth in its subscriber base.
The company said it ended the second quarter with 83 million subscribers, adding 1.7 million. That was well below Netflix's own forecast of 2.5 million additions and lower than many analyst forecasts.
Netflix said growth was hurt, especially in the United States, when it raised rates on many long-time subscribers who had been "grandfathered" in when it hiked most prices.
Netflix's market value has dropped by around one-third from its peak late last year to some $37 billion, sparking speculation by some analysts that it could become a takeover target.
Analysts said Netflix is still showing growth, but not at the breakneck pace expected when the company announced it had expanded its global footprint to 190 countries, making its streaming service available in 130 new markets.
The company effectively raised its price for many customers, which provided a boost to revenue but hurt new subscriptions and may have caused some customers to turn to rivals such as Hulu or Amazon.
- Trouble in new markets -
"These price hikes now place Netflix into a similar price category as it competitors," said Jonathan Broughton at IHS Technology in a note to clients.
Broughton said growth in new markets was disappointing, adding that Netflix may need to do more to connect with viewers around the world.
"Netflix has been slow to invest in international content, even in larger countries, and this has stalled growth," he said.
"Local content has been cited as key to expansion in international markets and pulling back from this may be detrimental to the company outlook outside the US and UK."
Daniel Salmon at BMO Capital Markets said Netflix faces "a period of challenging visibility" as it seeks to expand globally.
Story continues
"While Netflix notes that local language content 'constitutes a small minority of viewing' we believe it has a higher likelihood than traditional, Western/Hollywood content to generate the positive word-of-mouth/local news coverage that could accelerate subscriber growth in a given country," Salmon said in a research note.
Michael Graham at Canaccord Genuity said Netflix may be seeing only a temporary pause in its growth spurt, and views the drop in Netflix as "a good long-term buying opportunity."
Graham said that he believes "that the full benefits from Netflix's international launch and content investments have yet to be realized."
Neil Saunders of the research firm Conlumino, said the troubling news from Netflix is in the United States, where it raised most subscribers to $10 per month from $8 after a period of "grandfathering."
"Inevitably, this change brought with it a great deal of churn, with some subscribers cancelling memberships," he said.
"As much as Netflix's growing international business affords it future potential, at present that division is loss-making. The US delivers the profits. And that means slower domestic growth will put a brake on bottom line expansion."
Good news for Android fans: the US Army Special Forces, all elite units like Delta Force and Army Rangers, currently use a system powered by Samsung handsets for battlefield applications.
Bad news for Android fans: those handsets have been crashing so much that Special Forces Command is switching to iPhones instead.
DON'T MISS: You should go download iOS 9.3.3 right now
The story was first reported by DOD Buzz, which quotes a source as saying the iPhone is faster; smoother. Android freezes up. Problems are particularly noticeable when trying to do heavy multitasking and livestreaming video, such as trying to view a map side-by-side with imagery from a drone.
As a result, special forces are switching to the iPhone 6S as the focal point of the iPhone Tactical Assault Kit. It basically comprises a smartphone connected to a networked radio. That can provide situational awareness, by showing the location of friendly and enemy forces on a map, but it can also be a useful tool for things like mapwork, viewing intelligence photos or communication with aerial assets.
Apparently, the Tactical Assault Kit currently uses some kind of Samsung handset that's underpowered for the job at hand. Given the lead time normally associated with military tech, it's very believable that an old-gen Samsung phone has been used for a few years. So, a comparison between an old Galaxy S3 and a brand-new iPhone 6S isn't really fair, but it's also not great PR for Samsung either.
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See the original version of this article on BGR.com
The Mississippi Land Connection and Timber Company LLC and Wisconsin Bluff Sands LLC filed an application for a permit for a mine in the town of Waumandee in 2013. The Buffalo County Board of Adjustment denied the application after hearing from experts that little vegetation would grow in the area after the mine closed and from members of the public concerned about potential traffic, declining air quality and declining property values.
One of the 2016 political party conventions is underway. The other will be soon. For the remainder of the month, party notables, as well as a sea of reporters, corporate representatives, celebrities and others will gather in Cleveland and Philadelphia to participate in this years convention circus.
Over the past several decades, the nominees largely have been selected by the time of the party conventions, and so many people are questioning the usefulness of the massive pageantry.
Have conventions outlived their usefulness?
It seems fair to say that there is still much utility in the events: The conventions provide a chance for the candidates in both parties to stump for our votes on a national stage, for new political superstars to rocket into our orbit (a la Barack Obama in 2004) with impressive speeches and rhetoric; for vice-presidential picks to vie for a place on the ticket; for the topics that will garner the most attention in the general election to be set; and for the parties to confirm their platforms and proclaim the policies that will become a reality in the event that they field the winning presidential candidate.
The convention moment in the electoral process seems to remain an important one, (and in this particularly strange 2016 election cycle, most likely an interesting and dramatic one as well), but one element has made political conventions feel outdated and ripe for reform and that is the corporate and special-interest trappings that surround them that take away from the gravitas and import of the moment.
The Democratic and Republican national conventions should be publicly financed electoral events with reasonable ethics restrictions on influence-peddling by lobbyists. But in 2014, Congress repealed the longstanding public financing of the conventions, (except for $50 million in security funds provided to each conventions state and local law enforcement authorities), and as a result, to keep the conventions at the appropriate level of grandeur, party officials eagerly have gravitated toward new private sources of convention funding like corporations, the super-wealthy 1 percent, and lobbying firms seeking to curry favor with policymakers.
Most of the special interest money that will finance the conventions will come through host committees, entities that presumably represent the host city. Since host committees are not formally classified as political committees, they are allowed to accept unlimited donations from corporations, unions and other special interests. This special interest money will slosh into party coffers and fund the soirees and other events surrounding the conventions.
The 2016 nominating conventions are likely to crush previous convention spending records. The Republican convention in Cleveland is projected to cost around $71 million with $64 million coming from private sources outside the party committee (such as from the city host committee) and an additional $7 million from the Republican Party. The Democratic convention in Philadelphia is expected to cost around $65 million, with $60 million coming from the host committee and an additional $5 million from the Democratic Party.
With the bulk of this money sourced to non-party entities, the tenure and tone of the event likely will reflect that of the interests spending the big bucks, reducing the ability of TV viewers to gain an unvarnished sense of the partys stances and the candidates goals. While in this day and age, the nominations themselves are fairly cooked before the convention, the events can and should still have profound meaning to the public.
Congress should work to correct the way the conventions are funded returning to public financing of the nominating conventions.
Reading the article La Crosses sustainability future bright'" (July 13 Tribune) was a positive way to start my day. I'm happy La Crosse and La Crosse County are progressing in their initiatives to increase sustainability. I hope these programs can help bring our community together to fight for sustainability nationally and globally.
While it is imperative that we all work as individuals to make environmentally friendly decisions in our lives and in our communities, it is equally important to work toward green initiatives on the national level. We can make our regional energy systems nonpolluting, but without federal reforms we can't stop the biggest greenhouse gas polluters in our country: power plants burning fossil fuels.
As the Coulee Region unites to fight against catastrophic climate and ecosystem changes on the horizon, we can look to groups like Citizens Climate Lobby for solutions. The organization's plan for a progressive, revenue-neutral carbon tax and dividend would help to rapidly curb carbon emissions. This would leave time for polluting industries to move away from using fossil fuels without pulling the rug out from under American industries and jobs.
Last month, lobby volunteers advocated for a price on carbon, meeting with legislators and aides from more than 500 Senate and House offices, including those of U.S. Rep. Ron Kind, D-La Crosse, and Wisconsin Sens. Tammy Baldwin and Ron Johnson. Its time we all pitch in and urge our representatives to pass revenue-neutral carbon tax legislation to keep our planet livable.
The Koch brothers are at it again. Theyre helping fund Concerned Veterans of America, which has the goal of privatizing some services provided by Veterans Affairs.
Charles and David Koch want to send some veterans to the private sector for care at the government's expense. Theyve found a friend in Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., who blames recent VA problems on a public sector model that lacks accountability. What kind of accountability do we have with for-profit health care? VA doctors often work longer days, have greater patient loads, and work for lower pay than their counterparts in the private sector. Many veterans rely on the VA and are extremely satisfied with the services it provides.
Its true: Operating the VA is getting more expensive all the time. Medics are using modern battlefield triage, resulting in more soldiers surviving their wounds. Thus, there are more patients. Were all living longer, and as veterans age and their health deteriorates, they, too, need more care and expensive treatments. According to a Congressional Services Report, approximately 850,000 Vietnam veterans are still alive, and the VA anticipates treating more than 757,000 veterans from the wars in the Middle East alone. The real VA scandal is that the system is not adequately funded.
Were obligated to take care of veterans who laid their lives on the line for us. Please contact President Barack Obama. Tell him that you support keeping the VA public. Privatization is no answer.
Purse left at La Crosse mall with nearly $12,000 returned to Illinois woman
An Illinois woman who lost her purse last week at Valley View Mall was reunited with it and nearly $12,000 cash thanks to an honest Hallmark worker.
Norberta Pickett said she and her husband were hoping to purchase a camper while riding motorcycles around Sparta, Wis., earlier this month. On the last day of their vacation, they visited Valley View Mall in La Crosse and stopped into the Hallmark Store, where Pickett said she asked to use the restroom.
When they got back to their motel, Pickett realized her purse was missing.
They searched through their van and the room. The next morning, while she and her husband returned to Rockford, her son went back to the mall and checked every store.
Pickett, 73, said she was most upset about losing her husbands checkbook and pictures of her kids and grandkids, including a son who died last year.
Meanwhile, a Hallmark employee who found the purse in the restroom assumed it belonged to a coworker. When no one had claimed it by Friday, she checked for an ID and turned it over to police, who found $11,773 in cash as well as several gift cards. Police contacted Pickett, who made the 3 1/2-hour drive up to La Crosse to claim it.
La Crosse Tribune
Onalaska man fined for trespassing
An Onalaska, Wis., man acquitted of molesting his colleagues dog was ordered Friday to pay $1,347 for entering the mans house.
A La Crosse County jury last month convicted Daniel Reinsvold, 44, of criminal trespass and disorderly conduct but found him not guilty of sexual gratification with an animal and animal mistreatment.
The teenager daughter of Reinsvolds co-worker testified she came home Feb. 29 to find him on top of the familys golden retriever, Cooper. Reinsvold denied sexual contact with the dog, telling the jury he let himself into the West Salem house because he was in urgent need of a restroom.
Reinsvolds reason for entering the house didnt make sense, La Crosse County Circuit Judge Todd Bjerke said. The judge told Reinsvold the jury didnt find him innocent, but not guilty of the charges relating to the dog because prosecutors didnt have quite enough evidence.
Reinsvold wont acknowledge the severity of his conduct that impacted the familys sense of security in their own home, said Assistant District Attorney Susan Donskey, who deferred to the court for the sentence.
La Crosse Tribune
Traffic stop leads to multiple drug charges
An attempted traffic stop with a fleeing suspect has led to two people being referred to the Monroe County District Attorney on multiple drug charges.
Police attempted to pull over a vehicle driven by Edward Jonathan Nicholas, 25, Hudson, shortly after midnight July 6. Nicholas reportedly ignored the emergency lights and siren and continued through a stop sign without stopping before pulling into a parking stall at Walmart.
Nicholas, according to the report, exited the vehicle and ignored an order by an officer to stop. The officer pursued Nicholas to the eastern end of the Walmart building, where Nicholas climbed over a fence and into a heavily wooded area. Police lost sight of Nicholas, and a passenger who was reportedly in the vehicle, later identified as Tasha Marie King, 30, Black River Falls, Wis., also exited the vehicle as the officer pursued Nicholas.
A search of the vehicle reportedly uncovered syringes and other drug-related items and a light-colored substance later identified as heroin.
Police learned the vehicle had been reported stolen, and the vehicles owner, Nicholas sister, positively identified both Nicholas and King, who were taken into custody later in the day. Nicholas acknowledged fleeing from police, but both he and King denied any knowledge of the drugs in the vehicle.
Nicholas was referred for bail jumping, resisting arrest, fleeing a police officer, possession of heroin, possession of drug paraphernalia and possession of a prescription drug without a prescription.
King was referred for bail jumping, possession of heroin, possession of drug paraphernalia and possession of a prescription drug without a prescription.
Tomah Journal
Two rural Viroqua residents were arrested and are suspects in a methamphetamine production operation, Tuesday, July 12.
According to the Vernon County Sheriffs Department, Donald L. Bell, 29, and Taeryn K. Johnson, 35, were arrested at their residence on Tri-State Road.
The arrest was the result of an investigation by the sheriffs department and the West Central MEG Unit. Also assisting were the Vernon County Hazardous Materials Response Team, Viroqua Fire Department, Vernon County Department of Human Services and Vernon County Health Department.
Both Bell and Johnson are currently on probation. According to the Wisconsin Circuit Court System, Bell was convicted of felony burglary in 2014 and Johnson has previously been convicted of felony bailjumping and felony theft in 2009. She also was found guilty of several other felony charges.
Charges will be sought through the Vernon County District Attorneys Office. The case remains under investigation by the Vernon County Sheriffs Department.
This article appears in the June 10, 2016 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
INTERVIEW
Iran at the Crossroads of
the Eurasian Land-Bridge
[PDF version of this article]
May 27With the recent historic visit to Tehran of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, for the first time in nearly 40 years, Iran has the opportunity to resume its historic role as a crossroads for trade and cultural collaboration between East and West, across the vast Eurasian landmass. EIRs Copenhagen Bureau Chief Tom Gillesberg had the opportunity on March 15 to discuss Irans potential role in this Eurasian vision with H.E. Mr. Morteza Moradian, the Ambassador of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Copenhagen, Denmark.
courtesy of Embassy of Iran, Copenhagen
Ambassador Moradian emphasized the historic role of Iran and also the common vision of Eurasian development, which was a vital element in the talks during Chinese President Xi Jinpings visit to Iran in January 2016. Both Iran and China have high ambitions regarding transportation issues, the Ambassador emphasized. I think that there is extreme potential for economic development, arising from the idea raised by the Chinese President. Iran is situated at a very important juncture from a transportation point of view. This has nothing to do with the issues of today or yesterday, but it is an historical issue. Iran, and the region around it, is located along a very, very important corridor.
If we look at the most important corridors in the world, there are three. We can see that the North-South corridor, and the East-West corridors, all pass through Iran. The important thing is that transportation corridors necessarily lead to the growth of economic development, and also, when economic development takes place, what follows is peace and stability. Our country, and all of the countries of Western Asia, are trying to find and develop these transportation routes. In this regard, the idea raised by China can have important consequences for the region. Just to sum it up, this idea of reviving the old Silk Road would have a very positive influence on development.
The Ambassador emphasized Irans multi-modal transportation system:
Iran enjoys a very good position in regard to all forms of transportationair, sea, and land. Iran has always followed up on the issue of reviving the old Silk Road, with China. We now see that the Chinese idea and the Iranian idea are now meeting at some point. I think that within the framework of two very important agreements, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and also the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), we can have very, very good cooperation.
Russia, China, and Iran
Iran has developed strong ties to both China and Russia, and the relations among the three can be a driver for economic integration and growth, the Ambassador emphasized.
I think the conditions are now conducive for good cooperation and development. During the years of the sanctions, we had extensive relations with China. There is now about $50 billion of trade between Iran and China. This has fluctuated in some years, but it is between $50 billion and $52 billion. China is the biggest importer of Iranian oil. We also had extensive relations with Russia during the years of the sanctions. Its natural, now that the sanctions have been removed, that the relationship between these three nations would develop further. The important point that I would like to make is that the three countries have common interests, and common threats facing them. We are neighbors with the Russians. We have common interests with Russia regarding the Caspian Sea, transportation, energy, the environment, and peace in the world. So we have quite a number of areas where our interests coincide. Other areas where we have common interests are drug trafficking and other forms of smuggling, and combating extremism and terrorism. We also have quite a number of common interests with China. They include energy, reviving the Silk Road, combating terrorism, the transportation corridors, and, also, in the framework of the SCOquite a number of areas where we have common interests. China needs 9 million barrels of oil on a daily basis. As I said, our trade relations amount to about $52 billion. Iran enjoys some very important advantages. First of all, it has enormous amounts of energy resources. Its coastline, along the Persian Gulf, runs 3,000 kilometers. We are neighbors with 15 countries in the region. I think that cooperation between these three powers, namely Russia, China, and Iran, can ultimately lead to stability and peace in the region. So the four areasthe combination of economics, trade, energy, and transitthese are areas that can lead to the goals that I mentioned. The revival of the old Silk Road, at this juncture of time, would be very meaningful. During the recent visit to Iran by the Chinese President, the two sides agreed to increase the volume of trade between the two countries, in the next ten years, to $600 billion. Also, in the recent visit to Iran by President Putin, there was agreement on Russian investment in Iran. It has to be said that our trade relations, economic relations, with Russia are not as great as they should be. But among the topics discussed when President Putin visited Iran, was making sure that the volume of economic cooperation increases between Iran and Russia.
Ambassador Moradian noted that the arrival of the first freight train in Tehran from China, in February, further underscored the potential arising from Iran-China collaboration on the Silk Road program.:
President Rouhani has very clear views on the Silk Road. In fact, President Rouhani is a specialist in transportation routes and communication. He believes that the basis for development lies in the development of transportation infrastructure. He and the Chinese President have talked over the revival of the Silk Road on a number of occasions.
The Ambassador sharply criticized the efforts of Washington to bypass Iran in any Eurasian development plans:
There was a discussion . . . being propagated during the past few yearsthe idea of the new Silk Road, or the American Silk Road, so to speak. Basically, they wanted to bypass Iran, and divert the route. No one can fight against economic and geographical realities on the ground. The route through Iran is the shortest route, and the cost-effective route, and, therefore, nobody can go against that. And because the Chinese ideas were more realistic, Iran and China were able to come to some sort of understanding on the development and revival of the Silk Road. We witnessed good investment by the Chinese in this regard, in the recent years. China has invested heavily in Pakistan, in the Gwadar port.
Transport Corridors to Defeat War
The Ambassador next turned to the immediate prospects of building the East-West and North-South transport corridors, linking Iran to Central Asia, and creating the opportunity to bring stability back to Afghanistan after more than 30 years of continual war.
Sharif in Afghanistan, is an important connection. The Khaf-Herat section has been completed, but the Herat-Mazar-i-Sharif section is still to be constructed. I think this is an important route that we believe, in my opinion, China would be advised to invest in. If this route between Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif were to be completed, then from there, there are two routesone leading to Uzbekistan and the other leading to Tajikistan, and that can be an important connection. At the moment, China is making good investments in both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, to establish the links. In fact, the link connecting China, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Iran is one of the most important links of the Silk Road. And there is a missing link between Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif, as I said, and I hope that the countries concerned, especially China, can help establish that link. Over the past two years, the corridor between Kazakstan, Turkmenistan, and Iran has borne fruit, and is now connected. In fact, the train that arrived in Teheran actually came through this route, and this corridor has extreme potential. I hear that quite a number of countries in the region are interested in joining this corridor. We have another corridor linking Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran, and Oman, which is called the fourth corridor. And this has also come into operation over the past year-and-a-half. We also have other corridors, which I call subsidiary corridors. All of these subsidiary corridors can actually enhance and complement the main East-West Silk Road. One very important corridor that you are aware of, is the North-South corridor, and a section along this corridor is now under constructionthe connection between the city of Rasht, and Astara on the Caspian coast. In fact, we have reached agreement with Azerbaijan on the connection between the two cities of Rasht in Iran, and Astara in Azerbaijan. This corridor also needs some investment, and we hope that countries like China can help us in developing this.
The Ambassador noted that 17 agreements were signed during the visit of President Xi Jinping to Iran in January.
The areas included energy, financial investment, communication, science, the environment, and know-how. Specifically, on the core of the Silk Road, the two countries agreed to play a leading, and a key role, in the development and operation of this link. They agreed to have cooperation on infrastructure, both railroad and road. For example, electrification of the railroad link between Teheran and Mashhad, is part of this connection of the Silk Road that was agreed to. The other important thing is cooperation on the Port of Chabahar in Iran. The two sides agreed to cooperate in this, and the Chinese agreed to invest in Chabahar. Regarding industry and other production areas, they agreed that China would cooperate and invest in twenty areas. Regarding tourism and cultural cooperation, the two sides also agreed to develop cooperation in this regard, within the framework of the Silk Road. I think you can see that within the framework of the Silk Road, there are quite important agreements between the two countries.
Nuclear Energy Is Vital
Another vital area in which cooperation among Iran, Russia, and China is increasing, is energy, the Ambassador noted. He emphasized the role that Russia played in the completion of Irans nuclear power plant at Bushehr:
Because of the reneging of the Western governments, the construction of the Bushehr nuclear power plant was left unfinished, and after the Russians agreed to pick up the pieces, we reached an agreement, and were able to develop, and make this very important plant operational. The cooperation between Iran and Russia on peaceful nuclear energy has been very constructive. All of Irans atomic activities have been under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). As we have had no deviation from our peaceful nuclear program, after ten or twelve years, the Western countries, the P5+1, finally came to the conclusion that Irans nuclear program has always been peaceful. I believe that they knew this at the beginning, as well. This was just a political game. We have also had a sort of constructive cooperation with China over the past two decades on peaceful nuclear energy. During the recent visit to Iran by the Chinese President, an agreement was also signed in this regard. In the implementation of the P5+1 agreement, China, Iran, and America are also the three countries forming the committee for the implementation of the agreement. It was agreed during the recent visit that China will reconfigure the Arak heavy water plant. The Chinese and the Iranians have also agreed to cooperate on the building of small-scale nuclear power plants. This, I think, is very important for Iran, in terms of producing electricity, and the Chinese welcome this. We have also signed a number of agreements with China on the construction of a number of nuclear power plants in the past. Iran, because of the large extent of the country, has always welcomed cooperation in the development of peaceful nuclear energy for the production of electricity, and other things. In fact, based on the cooperation agreement between Iran and the P5+1, there will be agreements with a number of the members of the P5+1 regarding the nuclear issue.
Expanding Rail Grid
The Ambassador turned next to Irans internal transport infrastructure needs and progress.
Iran has made endeavors, extensive efforts, to actually complete what I call the subsidiary corridors. Right now in Iran, we have 10,000 kilometers of operational railroad lines. For our present government, the further development of railroad links is very important. We have plans to build another 10,000 kilometers in the future. It is my view that in the next couple of years, we will see a revolution in transportation. There are some missing links, which we think should be completed as soon as possible. We have the link to the Chabahar Port. If this port is developed to utilize its full capacity, then this will serve as an important link in the North-South corridor. In the Persian Gulf we also have an island called Qeshm, which has great potential. In fact, because Qeshm itself also has gas, and has a strategic location in the Persian Gulf, it can play an important role in the North-South corridor. We are seeing that various countries such as China, Japan, and South Korea are interested in entering into these areas.
The Ambassador added that progress is also significant on the East-West corridor, where some very important developments have taken place.
We have had good negotiations with the Turkish side. One of the most important links in the East-West corridor is the link between the cities of Sarakhs and Sero. Sero is located on the border with Turkey, and the Turks and the Iranians are now in very extensive negotiations to develop this route. The other route is the railway link between Iran and Iraq, and this is also being built on an extensive level. As I said, the subsidiary corridorsthe one connecting Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Iran; and the one connecting Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran, and Omanare now operational, and we are also planning on developing and making other subsidiary routes operational.
The Water Crisis
Turning next to one of the great challenges facing Iran, Ambassador Moradian acknowledged that Iran is faced with a shortage of water. Work is underway to tackle this crucial problem, he said.
We have quite a number of projects for water desalination on the Persian Gulf. In fact, one of the main reasons that we wanted nuclear power plants on the Persian Gulf was to use that energy to desalinate water. Currently, a number of Iranian companies are engaged in this. One of the very big projects has come on stream during the past couple of years. Regarding the desalination plants, there is good cooperation between Iran and foreign countries. I think that this is another area where Danish companies can enter into the competition. President Rouhani made a trip to the city of Yazd, in the center of Iran, and he said there, that transfer of water from the Persian Gulf to the center of Iran, to the city of Yazd, is one of the important projects that the government has in mind. Regarding nuclear fuel, the framework of the P5+1 agreement with Iran envisages extensive cooperation between Iran and these countries on nuclear fuel. Iran is now one of the countries that have the legal right to enrich uranium, and this has been recognized. So, based on the capacities that Iran has, we can exchange nuclear fuel. Within this framework, we have exchanged quite a lot of fuel with the Russians, and we have cooperation plans with China on the heavy water plant in Arak.
SCO and the War on Terrorism
No discussion about the Greater Middle East and Persian Gulf can ignore the threat posed by terrorism and the flow of illegal drugs across borders, to markets in Europe and beyond. Ambassador Moradian was blunt:
Cuba's new entrepreneurs have complained that one of the things missing from President Raul Castros reforms is a wholesale market.
Currently, restaurant owners, hairdressers and snack-store owners have to buy their products in supermarkets at the same high prices as everyday consumers.
But one store may show that change is coming to Cuba.
At Zona+, produce is piled high up to the ceiling, like in a warehouse. Shop employees say the plan is eventually to sell everything in large amounts at discounted rates. They want to focus specifically on giving discounts to small businesses.
So far, Zona+ is offering only a few goods in bulk for reduced prices. But shoppers at Zona+ said it already has an advantage because it has more items than other stores in Cuba. Usually Cuba's supermarkets are half-empty.
Officials at CIMEX, the state commercial corporation that owns Zona+, declined to comment.
Last April, the Cuban government announced that some small companies would be able to buy supplies directly from government producers and wholesale outlets for the first time. However, this announcement did not say whether the reform would extend to the private sector.
Cuba often likes to experiment with ideas before making them official and extending them across the country. Reforms can also be reversed.
Im Mehrnoush Karimian-Ainsworth.
Mehrnoush Karimian-Ainsworth adapted this story for Learning English from a report by Reuters. Kelly Jean Kelly was the editor.
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Words in This Story
entrepreneur n. a person who starts a business and is willing to risk loss in order to make money
wholesale n. the business of selling things in large amounts to other businesses rather than to individual customers
in bulk n. in large quantities
advantage n. something (such as a good position or condition) that helps to make someone or something better or more likely to succeed than others
declined v. to say that you will not or cannot do something
private sector n. the part of an economy which is not controlled or owned by the government
reversed v. to change your decision or opinion about something
Do you have wholesale stores where you live? Let us know in the Comments Section.
Chinas detention of five Hong Kong booksellers has raised concerns about its support for the one country, two systems policy.
The policy was put in place when Britain returned Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997. It was to ensure Hong Kongs right to govern itself for 50 years -- until 2047.
Over three months in late 2015, four booksellers based in Hong Kong disappeared while they were away from the city. Lee Bo is the general manager of the publishing company where the four worked. He also disappeared. He was the only one who disappeared while he was in Hong Kong.
All five reappeared in January and February. They said on television that they had been detained by Chinese officials for selling books that mainland Chinese are not permitted to read. China let Lee and two others return to Hong Kong in March on bail. Lam Wing-kee was released later.
At a news conference in Hong Kong last month, Lam said Chinese security agents kept him in a cell by himself for five months n the eastern city of Ningbo. He said they forced him to give up his legal rights and confess to so-called crimes on television.
Many people were angered by Lams story of poor treatment for publishing and selling books that were legal in Hong Kong. Members of pro-democracy parties said Hong Kongs right to govern itself had been violated. They noted that Article 4 of Hong Kongs Basic Law -- or constitution -- protects freedom of speech and publication.
Seanon Wong is a professor of government and public administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In an interview with VOA, he said China wanted to know who bought books from him and who wrote the books.
This is a direct attack against the one country, two systems principle. People will no longer feel safe to publish or purchase politically-sensitive items in Hong Kong, Wong said.
Wong Guangya is the director of Chinas Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office. He spoke in Beijing this month. He accused Lam Wing-kee and his colleagues of destroying the policy of one country, two systems by publishing and selling books that attack Chinas political system.
Leung Chun-ying is the chief executive of Hong Kong. Last month he said he would tell Chinas central government that many people are worried about the detention of the booksellers.
He said he would also call for a review of how law-enforcement agencies in Hong Kong and mainland China announce when residents of the territory are detained in China.
Democratic Party leader Emily Lau recently spoke on VOAs Asia Weekly podcast. She called on Chief Executive Leung to travel to Beijing to tell Chinese leaders that the one country, two systems policy is threatened.
Regina Ip is a lawmaker in Hong Kong who supports the Chinese government. VOA asked for her opinion about the detention of the booksellers, but she did not answer.
Im Mario Ritter.
Correspondent Kinnie Li reported this story from Washington. Christopher Jones-Cruise adapted the report for Learning English. Hai Do was the editor.
We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section, or visit our Facebook page.
_______________________________________________________________
Words in This Story
bail n. an amount of money given to a court to let a prisoner to leave jail and return later for a trial
principle n. a basic truth or theory; an idea that forms the basis of something
purchase v. to buy (property, goods, etc.); to get (something) by paying money for it
A former U.S. Marine has been identified as the gunman who killed three police officers Sunday in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
The gunman was killed by police officers during the attack. Three other officers were injured. One remains in critical condition.
The suspect, Gavin Long of Kansas City, Missouri, turned 29 on Sunday. He was dressed in black and wearing a mask when he opened fire on officers with an assault rifle.
Long served in the U.S. Marines from 2005 to 2010, reaching the rank of sergeant. He was deployed to Iraq from 2008 to 2009.
The officers were killed after responding to a report of a man carrying an assault weapon. Colonel Mike Edmonson is head of the Louisiana State Police. He said Monday the gunman ambushed officers and certainly was seeking out police. He added: His movements, his direction, his attention was on police officers.
In online writings, Long sometimes described violence as an answer to what he viewed as oppression of African Americans.
One post on Sunday to a Twitter account linked to Long read: At what point do you stand up so that your people dont become the Native Americans...EXTINCT?
Another message posted hours before the shootings read: And just bc [because] you shed your physical body doesn't mean that you're dead.
The killings came about two weeks after police officers in Baton Rouge shot and killed a black man, 37-year-old Alton Sterling. The incident was captured on video and widely viewed on social media. Large protests against Sterlings killing followed in Baton Rouge, as well as several other U.S. cities.
Long, Sundays shooter, was black. One of the officers he killed was black, the other two were white.
The Baton Rouge shootings came less than two weeks after five police officers were shot and killed in Dallas, Texas.
The Dallas killings happened during a peaceful demonstration to protest police shootings of black Americans. Police in the Dallas case said they believed the suspect acted alone. The gunman told police he was targeting white officers. He was killed in an explosion by a law enforcement robot.
U.S President Barack Obama and other officials attended a memorial for the slain officers in Dallas last week. Obama called for unity and urged Americans to channel their anger about police shootings and race into a search for peaceful solutions.
On Sunday, he also condemned the Baton Rouge killings. The death of these three brave officers underscores the danger that police across the country confront every single day. We as a nation have to be loud and clear that nothing justifies violence against law enforcement. Attacks on police are an attack on all of us, and the rule of law that makes society possible.
Obama also noted that Sundays shootings came just ahead of the Republican and Democratic Party presidential nominating conventions. The Republican convention started Monday in Cleveland, Ohio. The Democratic convention begins July 25 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
He said the conventions can involve rhetoric that tends to get hotter than usual. He urged candidates and their supporters to avoid careless accusations that could further heighten racial tensions.
Im Bryan Lynn.
Bryan Lynn adapted this VOANews.com story for Learning English. Additional information came from the Associated Press. Hai Do was the editor.
We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page.
________________________________________________________________
Words in This Story
ambush v. to attack by surprise from a hidden place
extinct adj. no longer existing
transformation n. a complete or major change in somethings or someones appearance, form, etc.
reassure v. say or do something to remove someones doubts or fears
heinous adj. very bad or evil
channel v. direct toward a particular objective
rhetoric n. language intended to influence people that may not be honest or reasonable
Two United States senators released a commentary this week saying America will continue to support its Asian allies.
Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona and Democratic Senator Robert Menendez of Florida wrote in the South Korean Joongang Daily newspaper.
In the commentary, the senators made a bipartisan pledge. They wrote that no matter who wins the presidential election in November, the U.S. will stay active in Asia. The American politicians said the alliance with South Korea will never waver.
McCain and Menendez wrote: Any political rhetoric to the contrary, any talk of pulling back from our commitment should be taken with a grain of salt on both sides of the Pacific.
The two senators also referred to presidential candidates who suggested that we ought to negotiate better deals with our partners and allies.
Presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has, in the past, criticized both Japan and South Korea. During the campaign to get the Republican Party nomination, he said Japan and South Korea pay too little for American troops in their countries.
Trump has said he would consider withdrawing troops from the region if Japan and South Korea refuse to increase security payments to the U.S.
The two U.S. senators did not name Trump in the article.
McCain and Trump have not agreed in the past. McCain has endorsed Trump for president. McCain is one of many prominent Republicans who will not be attending the convention this week in Cleveland. McCain is also running for reelection and has indicated he will to stay close to home to campaign.
Trumps position has drawn harsh comments from many in Asia. They say changes would hurt trust in the U.S. Experts argue that a nuclear arms race would start in Asia. They also note that any arms buildup would hurt international efforts to pressure North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons.
The senators noted there has been military cooperation between South Korea and the U.S. That cooperation followed North Koreas fourth nuclear test and long-range rocket launches earlier this year.
Recently the U.S. and South Korea agreed to deploy the American Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile system, or THAAD. China and Russia opposed the deployment of the THAAD system.
China considers THAAD part of an increasing U.S. military buildup in Asia. Chinese officials are concerned that the systems powerful radar could cover Chinese territory.
THAAD has also caused protests in South Korean communities. Some in the South are worried about public health and safety concerns.
Im Marsha James.
Brian Padden wrote this story for VOA news. Youmi Kim in Seoul contributed to this report. Jim Dresbach adapted the story for Learning English. Mario Ritter was the editor.
We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section or visit our Facebook page.
________________________________________________________________
Words in This Story
presumptive adj. giving grounds for reasonable opinion of belief
grain of salt n. to understand that something is likely to be untrue or incorrect
bipartisan adj. relating to or involving members of two political parties
pledge n. a serious promise or agreement
rhetoric n. language that is intended to influence people and that may not be honest or reasonable
endorse v. to publicly or officially say that you support or approve of someone
Probation Reporting Center opens new office
The move wasnt far just across the parking lot. But the new Probation Reporting Center in North Platte means opportunity both for those on probation and the officials they work with.
Open since January, the center hosted a reception Monday that included remarks from Chief Justice Mike Heavican of the Nebraska Supreme Court.
As Heavican talked to community members, Lincoln County Court officials and those who work in the reporting center, he spoke of the cost benefits of the reporting center as opposed to incarceration. At the reporting center, those on probation have more access to classes, job training, and mental health and drug abuse treatment. The center helps those on probation avoid their former habits and prevents them from entering jail repeatedly, he said.
While classes have always been available, the larger space and more funds from the state have helped in the last seven months, said Kurt Stevens, Probation Reporting Center coordinator.
Additionally, drug testing can be done on site instead of at a third-party facility.
A one-stop shopping facility, if you will, said state Sen. Mike Groene, who also attended the reception.
Heavican credited lawmakers such as Groene for supporting the effort, as well as those who work in the reporting center.
I know they enjoy their work, he said.
Clerk magistrate sworn in
While in town, Heavican also swore in Melissa Ireland as Lincoln County clerk magistrate.
Ireland most recently served as an assistant clerk for the Lancaster County Court in Lincoln, and will now provide administrative duties for County Judges Michael Piccolo and Kent Turnbull, as well as overseeing Lincoln County Court.
Ireland is working on a masters degree in forensic science, specializing in investigative work, from Nebraska Wesleyan University. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Parkside with a bachelor of arts in criminal justice.
Behemoth dam still shows muscle after 75 years
[JUMP]Project is likely more impressive than founders ever imagined
By David Hendee
World-Herald staff writer
OGALLALA, Neb. The big boy that holds back Big Mac is an active 75 years old.
Kingsley Dam, the worlds second-largest earthen dam when it was completed in 1941 on the North Platte River in western Nebraska, will be the backdrop to two days of festivities at Lake McConaughy and Lake Ogallala this week.
Lake McConaughy is the big reservoir the states largest, with 76 miles of shoreline along its 22-mile length sprawling behind the dam. Lake Ogallala is the little reservoir below the dam.
The early 20th century dreamers behind the behemoth dam would be amazed, surprised and pleased not only at how the project turned out, but how hard the water works, said Don Kraus, general manager of Central Public Power and Irrigation District in Holdrege,. Central owns and operates the dam and reservoir.
Its a little different than what the founders of the project were thinking about, Kraus said.
Among the founders were Charles McConaughy, a Holdrege businessman and civic leader, and George P. Kingsley, a Minden banker.
McConaughys inspiration to irrigate out of the Platte River with canals came in about 1910. Kingsley heard about it two years later and became the projects biggest promoter and financial supporter. They spent most of the rest of their lives gaining the legal rights and financing to create the dam and reservoir that would carry their names.
Work on the dam started north of Ogallala in 1936. The scale of the project was staggering for the time, according to historian Robert Richters account in Lake McConaughy: A Geographic Portrait.
The dam would be almost a quarter mile wide at its base. It would rise 162 feet above the river to a top width of 28 feet and contain 26 million cubic yards of fill. It would stretch 3.1 miles across the valley floor.
To make room for the reservoir, 33 miles of Union Pacific track was relocated, along with stations, sidings and stockyards. Twenty miles of oil pipelines, 39 miles of state and federal highways, 22 miles of county roads, and telegraph and telephone lines were moved.
And the entire town of Lemoyne was moved to higher ground on the north shore because it was sacrificed for the lake.
Construction of the dam ran at peak capacity through 1938 with more than 1,000 men working in the field and more than 30 engineers, draftsmen and office workers on site.
There were accidents and injuries, but no deaths during construction.
One of the seriously injured was Neale Petersen, who moved to Ogallala from Bloomington, Nebraska, to work on the dam in 1939.
Petersen was a mechanic on the project, repairing anything that needed work, said his son, Duane Petersen of Oshkosh, Nebraska.
A hydraulic key used to raise and lower the gates on the outlet tower (the smaller of the two towers at the dam) malfunctioned. The steel key, about 3 or 4 inches long, blew out of place and lodged in Petersens left eye.
The family lived in a little house in a workers complex near the spillway known as Kingsleyville. Lorie Oneal of Ogallala said her grandmother drove her injured grandfather to the Ogallala hospital.
It was the first time she had ever driven a car, Oneal said.
The doctor sent Petersen on a train to Omaha for special treatment that night. Petersen lost the eye.
But dad got along pretty well the rest of the years, Petersen said.
Maggie Headrick of Highlands Ranch, Colorado, said her father, Howard Brown, is credited with rescuing another worker when both were high on the outside of one of the two towers at the dam.
Jobs were hard to come by during the Depression, she said. Dad farmed and was a mechanic in Grant, but he wasnt making a living.
Brown applied at the dam, but the foreman wasnt hiring. Brown sat on the bank and watched the men work. The next day he showed up with a shovel and started working. The foreman reminded Brown that he hadnt been hired.
Dad said, I wanted to show you how hard I work, Headrick said. He was hired.
One day Brown and another worker were on platforms suspended by ropes on a tower far above the riverbed. A windstorm hit and one of the ropes on the other workers platform broke, threatening to launch the man to the ground.
Dad somehow swung his basket over and saved the man, Headrick said.
Brown didnt tell his family of the incident because his wife didnt know he was working high above the ground to earn extra wages, Headrick said. A newspaper story of the rescue the next week spoiled the secret. Headricks mother insisted her husband stop working at the dam.
By May 1941, final work at the top of the dam was underway and the reservoir was filling with spring floodwater.
A crowd of 2,000 people turned out in 100-degree heat July 22, 1941, for the Kingsley Dam dedication ceremony. Neither Kingsley nor McConaughy lived to witness the completion of their dream.
Most Nebraskans and the thousands of Coloradans and others who make summer pilgrimages to the lake to boat and fish or camp on the white-sand beaches know McConaughy as a playground.
Lake McConaughy State Recreation Area records about 1 million visitations a year, generating more than $44 million in retail sales. The annual economic impact is more than $73 million and supports more than 950 jobs in Ogallala and Keith County, according to the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission.
The tremendous recreational aspect is much greater than ever envisioned, Kraus said.
But Kingsley Dam primarily was built to store water for south-central Nebraska farmers to irrigate their crops. Most of it is delivered via 575 miles of canals and pipelines to 110,000 acres of cropland mostly on the south side of the Platte River between North Platte and Minden.
The reservoir is more than just a source of water for Nebraskas largest irrigation district.
The water stored behind Kingsley Dam cools the states largest power plant at Sutherland. Its part of a system that is a source of water for four of Nebraskas five largest cities: Omaha, Lincoln, Grand Island and Kearney.
It provides flows for habitat critical to endangered species. It recharges the south-central Nebraska aquifer from water oozing out of the canals. And, since 1984, a hydroplant on the dam generates electricity.
The estimated annual economic benefits of the dam and lake for irrigation, hydropower generation and recreation range from $556 million to $806 million, according to a study by the federal Bureau of Reclamation.
We have a responsibility to manage that resource for multiple purposes, Kraus said. Thats the reality of today.
Contact the writer:
Keith County News
On July 22, 1941, about 2,000 people turned out in scorching heat for the Kingsley Dam dedication ceremony. Inspiration for the project came in 1910, and after gaining legal rights and financing, work began in 1936. It was the worlds second-largest earthen dam at the time.
Jim McMurphy, left, of Omaha and his grandson, Michael Wiseman of Colorado Springs, Colorado, watch Lake McConaughy water spray out of Kingsley Dam and into the stilling basin at Lake Ogallala. The spray adds oxygen to the water to benefit trout and other fish in Lake Ogallala. The men were part of a vacationing family group that floated the Niobrara River near Valentine, Nebraska, and then traveled to Ogallala.
CLEVELAND Arizona GOP leaders called for unity Monday as they kicked off the Republican National Convention, just hours before the party erupted into chaos over a procedural rules vote on the floor.
Lets clearly state our purpose here this morning, its to put a Republican back in the White House, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey said at the state GOP delegations breakfast meeting. It is to a put a vice president who is a Republican back in Washington. And those Republicans are Donald Trump and Mike Pence.
But disorder was the order during the opening session of the full convention, as a typically noncontroversial motion to adopt the rules lead to a shouting match.
The motion to accept the rules passed despite hollered nays from multiple state delegations. Arkansas Rep. Steve Womacks gavel boomed through the arena as he declared the ayes in the majority, causing the opposition, chiefly the delegation from Colorado, to stand on their seats and chant roll call vote.
The Never Trump movement, which has pushed for delegates to be allowed to vote their conscience even if it doesnt align with who won their states primary, is led by Kendal Unruh, a delegate from Colorado.
Smaller factions from other states joined with Colorado on the floor, exposing the divisiveness that the Arizona delegation had earlier dismissed.
The rest of the floor shouted U-S-A or we want Trump to drown out the opposition.
A delegate from Utah then unsuccessfully called for a roll call vote, which Womack rejected, saying there werent enough states signed on. He said there were initially the nine states necessary, but that three states withdrew their support for a roll call vote.
After the convention took a recess, Unruh told a barrage of press that she would reconvene with her supporters to strategize a Plan B.
It was the sort of display the more than 200 Arizona Republican leaders and delegates who have gathered in Cleveland had hoped to avoid.
The state delegations cry for a united front to nominate Trump came after Arizona delegate Lori Hack of Peoria showed up demanding her credentials and a convention vote. Hack, who had been turned away for saying earlier that she would not vote for Trump on the first ballot, as state law requires, was turned away again by party officials Monday.
During the states morning meeting, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio called out Republicans who shy away from vocalizing their support for Trump, questioning why some GOP members refer to Trump simply as the nominee.
Why dont they say the name? Arpaio asked. They should be saying, We will support Donald Trump for president. What is this, We will support whoever the nominee is? Are they afraid to say his name?
I think some people dont want him to be the president, Arpaio said. They dont even want to mention his name, and thats sad. I hope today and this week everybody comes together and understands he, Donald Trump, is the one whos running for president.
Several Arizona lawmakers have shied away from formally endorsing Trump, most notably Sen. John McCain, who publicly sparred with Trump last summer after he questioned McCains status as a war hero.
McCain told Arizona radio station KTAR in May that he always said I would support the nominee of the party.
Ducey said that in regard to use of Trumps name, people should be able to speak for themselves, but that the GOP has come together to make sure the party regains the White House.
I think what people are united around is to see a Republican in the White House and to see Hillary Clinton back in the private sector, Ducey said.
Ducey, who noted the competitive presidential primary, said now its time to unify and focus on November.
As contested and difficult as this primary was, this general election is really an easy choice isnt it? Ducey said. He added that one candidate would grow the federal government, while the other would turn Washington, D.C. upside down, to applause from the crowd of delegates.
A geologist has confirmed that the hole that opened underneath a home in Holiday is a sinkhole.
Sinkhole discovered by weed, pest control workers
Homeowner responsible for repair, county says
Geologist doesn't think sinkhole will expand
Five homes were voluntarily evacuated Monday when a sinkhole opened up under a home on Genesis Avenue. It was discovered by two men doing weed and pest control.
Roger Bowman said the sinkhole kept getting bigger, so he called 911. Right after, he called the homeowner, 72-year-old Alice Hammond, who is in New York visiting her children.
"I was sick, sick, sick cause I did not expect this," Hammond said.
Hammond said she was glad she wasnt home when it happened.
"I just had my granddaughter there. That would have been awful," she said. "If something would have happened when she was there... I'm glad I wasn't there."
The home has not been condemned, but the county posted an unsafe notice on the home. However, Hammond could go in at her own risk.
The front porch of this entire home is literally about 6 to 12 inches from falling into Mother Earth, so it's a very scary situation," Emergency Services Director Kevin Guthrie said.
The county updated Hammond on Tuesday, letting her know she is ultimately responsible for filling and repairing the sinkhole.
"He told me to concentrate on getting the hole filled first. Once you get the hole filled, he says then that will make it sturdier so you can get in there and get stuff out," Hammond said.
Hammond is not sure when shell be coming home. Right now, she is focusing her efforts on getting repairs done as soon as possible.
The county says the geologist who surveyed the sinkhole doesn't think it will expand, but it is vulnerable for water intrusion and natural erosion from heavy rain storms.
Temperatures were in the 70s to low 80s this morning with an east-northeast wind at 5 to 15 mph across the area.
Temperatures in the 90s
Rain chance is 40 percent
Strong storms possible by the afternoon
The east coast sea breeze came over quickly again today, thanks to easterly winds at all levels of the atmosphere. So scattered showers and thunderstorms formed over Polk County starting at about noon.
With the earlier start to the scattered showers and thunderstorms, the activity should move toward the west coast and out into the Gulf of Mexico through the evening.
We'll have mostly clear skies overnight with low temperatures in the 70s.
Surface high pressure from the western Atlantic extending west across the southeast states will remain in place with an east wind across the Florida peninsula.
Wednesday will start dry and sunny, but building clouds in the afternoon heat will mean a few showers and thunderstorms could form. It'll be hot with the highs in the mid-90s.
Rain chances look to increase Thursday and Friday with a weak sea breeze pinned to the coast each afternoon.
 
The first South African Travel Blog Awards, hosted at the Table Bay Hotel in Cape Town, saw eight winners, including the Pretty Blog winning overall.
The South African Travel Blog Awards were aimed at acknowledging the top travel and travel related lifestyle bloggers in South Africa. The event included a morning workshop, a lunch of canapes and a networking cocktail party. Furthermore, Stevie French, TV presenter, actress and radio personality served as MC.
The esteemed panel of judges namely Desiree Haakonsen, Natalia Rosa, Deon Kitching and Veli Ngubane, each with their own experience in the travel and lifestyle industry, were tasked to score each blogger according to pre-selected judging criterion. Each blog received a score out of ten for each relevant category.
Winners were chosen in eight categories and each winner walked away with prizes offered by the sponsors involved.
Category Winner Sponsor Prize Best social media Fiona Rossiter - Sun International Weekend to the Lost City and game drive Inspired Living Blog Best design James Kydd Ranger Dairies blog Lufthansa and Swiss air Remoa suitcase valued R10,000 New comer of the year Lydia Afonso Green Lydia blog Virgin Atlantic Night in London with whirlwind trip through London Best content Matthew Sterne Rhino Africa LAEO Tom-Tom GPS with live traffic updates Most seasoned traveller Dawn Jorgensen - Delsey CHATELET HARD Suitcase The Incidental Tourist Best lifestyle Megan Peta - Avis Weekend rental in group B vehicle Boring Cape Town Chick Best photographic Christine Meintjes - Tom - Tom Tom Tom Camera Pretty Blog Best overall Christine Meintjes - Le Boat A week on a luxury barge from Le Boat. Barging through Europe or the UK is an ideal holiday. Pretty Blog
All funds raised for the awards went towards conserving South Africas unique natural heritage through the Lawrence Anthony Earth Organisation where proceeds were donated to their multi-media youth education programme.
www.travelblogawards.co.za
Jolly LLB 2 the sequel to the surprise 2013 courtroom comedy hit of the same name has a release date all the way in February 2017.
However, the sequel has been making news ever since the star cast Akshay Kumar and Huma Qureshi was announced. From the original film, Arshad Warsi also returns in the film, while Annu Kapoor and Saurabh Shukla round off the team.
Akshay and Annu Kapoor play lawyers who are pitted against each other in court in Jolly LLB 2.
While not too many details of the film have been released so far, the first look was released on Monday by Akshay Kumar.
Akshay showed off his character's "look" in the film, while a caricature of him and Annu Kapoor, in lawyers' garb and fighting it out in court, was also released.
"In character" Akshay looks subdued, and is dressed in the typical starched white shirt and black jacket combination that is an advocate's uniform. A small tilak on his forehead and hair slicked back makes his Jolly LLB 2 look very different from his suave naval officer's avatar in the upcoming Rustom.
New day with a new look for a new film, let the mayhem begin! #JollyLLB2 it is! Judgement day 10th February, 2017! pic.twitter.com/QgfuXkrxFh Akshay Kumar (@akshaykumar) July 18, 2016
In the meantime, Saurabh Shukla shared caricatures of the Jolly LLB 2 actors, including Akshay, Annu and Shukla himself. The cartoon depicts Shukla as a presiding judge looking over sternly at lawyers Akshay and Annu, who have struck the "finger-wagging" pose.
Jolly LLB 2's shoot is taking place across Lucknow, Varanasi and Kashmir. The film releases on 10 February 2017.
He's still riding high on the success of Bajirao Mastani, and the buzz surrounding his new project, Befikre.
She's been winning kudos for her de-glam role in Udta Punjab.
So when Ranveer Singh and Alia Bhatt team up, you can be sure that all kinds of magic takes place.
It was not too long ago that Alia and Ranveer had caused quite the social media storm when photos of the two of them shooting together for a "mystery project" began to do the rounds.
The photos which showed Alia dressed as a cabbie and Ranveer as a traveller; and also her as a hotel receptionist and him as a guest, in another had fans wondering if the pair had a movie in the offing.
But while everyone appreciated the pairing, it soon emerged that the actors were only shooting a commercial. They had been signed on as a the brand ambassadors of a travel portal, and the short ad film featuring Alia and Ranveer became quite popular.
Now, Alia and Ranveer have been spotted shooting together again.
It is believed hat this may be for a new ad film for the same portal.
However, rather than the posed shoot, this time fans can see some candid photos of Alia and Ranveer, thanks to the latter's Instagram account.
On Monday, Ranveer shared a cheeky photo of himself presenting a flower to Alia, captioned: "Ladki beauty-phool kar gayi chul" a reference to the hit song from her film Kapoor & Sons.
Ladki Beauty-Phool Kar Gayi Chool ! ! ! @aliaabhatt A photo posted by Ranveer Singh (@ranveersingh) on Jul 18, 2016 at 11:16am PDT
And while there has been no confirmation forthcoming, fans may soon have a real, big screen outing of Alia and Ranveer to look forward to rumours abound that the actors have been signed on by Zoya Akhtar for her next. Until that happens, we have this photo to look at!
Bengaluru: Co-Founder and former CII President Kris Gopalakrishnan on Monday, said almost 70 percent of start-ups globally will fail and only 5-10 percent will become large and scale up.
"Almost seventy percent of start-ups will fail. About 20 percent will survive but will not grow. They will remain small enterprises, and may be only five to ten percent will become large and scale up - that is the spastics globally," he told reporters at the announcement of the 12th Innovation Summit 2016 here, of which he is the chairman.
This should not, however, be treated as a concern or a challenge, but it is a part of natural process of evolution, he added.
"The key is what are the learnings, and how do we continue to nurture this," he said.
Asked who has made a mark globally as of now, Gopalakrishnan said Flipkart and Snapdeal have made a mark and may be in three to five years from now, people would start talking about these companies in a big way.
"I would say Flipkart and Snapdeal - these companies have made a mark. Paytm and Freshdesk - there are so many of them actually. They have made a mark and that process will continue. May be three years from now and five years from now, you would start talking about these companies in a big way," he said.
Asked if it is a worrying factor that most of the e-retailers are not making profits, Gopalakrishnan said there will be some consolidation and hoped some Indian-startup entity will remain because global domination is possible in the internet field as it is not bound by any borders.
"When you look at transport, hospitality, logistics - these are the companies, which will be the names in future in years to come," he added.
Replying to a query, Gopalakrishnan said both private equity and venture capital funding has slowed down for different reason because the exits are not happening.
"Both private equity and venture funding have slowed down for a different reason because exits are not there. When this happens, money is not recycled," he said.
"Most of the venture funds are waiting for some exits to happen and the exits are happening through mergers and acquisitions - consolidation where you may no be able to get the full value of investment," he said.
Asked if he sees a Google-type company emerging out of India, Gopalakrishnan said, "Yes it is possible, but we also need to remember that, across the world there is one Google."
The Summit will be held here on 28 & 29 July.
Boeing Co said on Tuesday it expects Indian airlines to order 1,850 new aircraft worth $265 billion over the next 20 years, up from an earlier forecast, thanks to the new aviation rules that the manufacturer said will boost demand.
In March, the company had projected that demand from India would add up to orders for 1,740 planes over 20 years.
"India continues to have a strong commercial aerospace market and the highest domestic traffic growth in the world," said Dinesh Keskar, senior vice president, Asia Pacific and India sales at Boeing Commercial Airplanes.
"With the new aviation policies in place, we even see greater opportunities, and remain confident in the market and airlines sector in India," Keskar said adding "Lower fuel prices, economic expansion, competitive fares and rising incomes of the large middle class are helping boost air-travel demand."
Keskar also commented on the government's regional connectivity push, saying even as it has capped prices, the promise of refunding 80 per cent of losses, if any, will help the airlines drive the business.
Last month, India overhauled rules governing its aviation industry, liberalising norms for domestic carriers to fly overseas and spreading the country's air travel boom to smaller cities by capping airfares and opening new airports.
Boeing said in an email that it forecasts single-aisle planes, such as the next generation 737 and 737 Max, to make up the bulk of new deliveries, with India likely to need about 1,560 such aircraft.
Speaking to reporters, Keskar said regional jets with 10-seater capacity will constitute 90 units out of the total demand, or around $1 billion in
value.
This will make India contributing to over 4.6 percent of the global demand for 39,620 airplanes by 2035, and 4.5 percent of world demand in terms of value, Keskar said, adding these new planes will continue to support growth of low-cost carriers and replace older ones.
Boeing says it has more than 85 percent share of the wide-body airplane market in India, while competitor Airbus sells the bulk of small planes preferred by low-cost carriers (LCCs) such as InterGlobe Aviation's IndiGo.
LCCs dominate Indian skies and account for more than 60 percent of the flights in the country.
The upbeat outlook comes after the country's domestic air traffic grew 18.8 per cent in 2015 to 80 million, which is the fastest in the world, as per the latest IATA numbers.
Domestic carriers like the largest player IndiGo, GoAir and SpiceJet have been ordering new planes in the hope demand will stay strong and the country will become the third-largest civil aviation market in the world after China and the US by 2026.
Earlier this month, low-cost carrier GoAir, which is planning an IPO, ordered 72 A320neo planes from Airbus, while Jet Airways had ordered 75 Boeing 737 Max last November.
IndiGo has placed an order for 240 planes, the largest in aviation history, from Airbus.
While refusing to share its market share in India, Keskar told PTI, "Currently, as many as 240 Boeing planes are in service in the country. We also continue to be the preferred choice for wide-body airplanes here with over 85 percent of the market share."
Indian air traffic growth remains the highest in the world at 8.6 percent, while domestic passenger traffic jumped 21 percent in 2015 over 2014, which is a record high for global aviation.
Keskar said low-cost carriers account for over 60 percent of all flights in the country and they will continue to do so going forward.
The Congress party has finally agreed for a five-hour debate in Rajya Sabha on the crucial Goods and Services Tax (GST) Bill, which brightens the hopes for the passage of the key piece of reform in this session.
This is a crucial development since passage of GST, seen as the biggest tax reform in a decade, has much more weight if passed with unanimous support of all parties including principal opposition Congress, than the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) merely winning the number game.
Passing the constitutional amendment is only the beginning of the process. To implement the uniform tax regime, the government will require the support of all states including the Congress-ruled ones. Given the magnitude of change GST will bring in to abolish Indias convoluted tax infrastructure and its consequential near-term pain on certain sections, it is critical that Congress be on board of the GST bandwagon.
Riders from Congress
While the agreement of the debate is indeed a positive sign, the Congress has put forward a condition that the BJP should reach out to all opposition parties and give a written offer on how to address the three demands it has posed for consensus on the Bill. These are inclusion of the GST rate in the constitution, doing away with the 1 percent inter-state levy and the creation of an effective dispute resolution mechanism. This is where the BJP should jump in and do what the Congress asked, precisely.
Lets be clear on one point. The Congress is only trying for a graceful surrender in the GST battle. The party has already indicated that it is willing to give up the demand for inclusion of GST rate in the constitution and is amenable for an alternative mechanism to ensure the standard GST rate doesnt shoot through the roof if assured by proper rules that are weaved into the Bill.
The white flag has been raised twice by senior Congress leaders, Anand Sharma and Jairam Ramesh. Also, there are apparent differences within the Congress party itself on the GST.
According to this Business Standard report, which has quoted an unnamed source, the Congress in the Rajya Sabha is divided into those who were pro-GST and others indifferent to its passage. Also, many of the regional parties who had earlier held reservations on GST is now batting for the Bill playing the interest of the nation card. That makes Congress isolated and vulnerable in the Padmavyuha, whose boundaries have been breached by the enemy and the remaining allies have deserted it.
Its time for the BJP to follow the Chanakya Sutra on the war strategy. It should give its stubborn approach on the Bill and agree to consensus and, if needed, agree to what the enemy seeks. Chanakya says in his famed work, Arthashastra, He should strike the enemy when the latter's army is under trouble or is furiously attacked; or he who has secured a favourable position may strike the enemy entangled in an unfavourable positionmake a false impression of his own defeat on the mind of the enemy who is entrenched in a favourable position, and having thus dragged the enemy into an unfavourable position, he may strike the latter.
This is exactly the position where the BJP and the Congress is positioned in the GST war.
GST, BJP's trump card
Clearing GST is the trump card for BJP in the 2019 general elections when it will have to confront the question of big-bang reforms. The BJP-government has managed to keep up the pace of incremental reform steps across segments, although by emulating what the UPA has done through a number of schemes in the areas of subsidy reforms, bank account opening drive, encouraging small entrepreneurs and opening up doors for further foreign investment.
But, beyond these steps, it doesnt have any big-ticket reforms to show on its performance card yet. To make India, the world manufacturing hub, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi envisages, the government's first and foremost job is to unclog the countrys convoluted tax regime once and for all.
As the next step, it should make it easy for foreigners who want to invest in India to gets access to land, power and a level playing field in operations (doing away with the idea of protectionism, except wherever is necessary) and freedom from archaic rules. A combined progress on all these fronts will take India to the next level of growth and help generate jobs for millions of skilled youth joining the workforce every year.
The fact is that, beyond the housekeeping issues, the only productive part that one looks at from the Monsoon session of Parliament is GST. If Modi misses the GST battle in his term, he will be termed as a loser internationally on the reforms-front, no matter what the domestic perception is on the progress on incremental reforms such as subsidy streamlining. One cannot even rule out the negative perception of rating agencies on sovereign ratings if India fails to pass the GST test.
Warnings issued
In November, 2015, global rating agency, Standard and Poors had warned that Indias rating would come under stress if the country fails to get its fiscal deficit under check and push ahead the key reforms, especially GST.
The global credit rating agency would formally review India's ratings in November 2016, and monitor the reform process, S&Ps Rating Services India Sovereign Analyst Kyran Curry had told PTI. "The ratings could come under stress if we see that government is backing away from reform commitment and fiscal deficit is not in control," Curry said.
Perception battle
Whether the Congress gets credit or the BJP for GST is only a concern and a matter of interest for Indian politicians and the local media. But for the outside world, this is a reform that is pending in Asias third largest economy for around eight years and something on which India has missed the April 2016 roll out deadline already. The next deadline for the roll out is April, 2017. Even after the Centre passes the amendment, state assemblies have to pass it separately and prepare the ground for its actual implementation. Not just the S&P, even the World Bank had warned the Narendra Modi-government early this year on GST.
Failure to pass the Goods and Services Tax (GST) bill by Parliament could hamper the Indian government's ability to ramp up spending on infrastructure. "A failure to pass the Goods and Services Tax could hamper the government's ability to ramp up spending on infrastructure needs and preserve the status quo of fragmented domestic markets," the World Bank said in its latest report Global Economic Outlook in January.
If the BJP delays or hesitates to reciprocate to the Congress demand for truce on GST issue now, the latter will get an upper hand and the Modi-government will be blamed for its failure to act on time.
It is indeed time for the BJP to invoke the Chanakya Sutra and finish the GST war.
New Delhi: Though there is awareness amongst Indian companies about the new mandatory firm rotation (MFR) requirements, a majority of them are yet to start planning to comply with the requirements, says a report.
As per a survey by Grant Thornton India in association with Prime Database, 82 percent of companies in India are yet to start planning or only have an informal plan agreed with the Board of Directors to meet the requirement of MFR, and only 18 percent have either appointed auditors or have a comprehensive plan in place.
"The survey results clearly show the need for a majority of India Inc to start planning their approach towards Audit Firm rotation early, and not to underestimate the complexity and importance of this generational shift in regulations," Vishesh C Chandiok, National Managing Partner, Grant Thornton India LLP said.
In order to reduce the risks of excessive familiarity and bring in much-needed transparency into the auditing process, the Companies Act 2013 provides for MFR for all the listed and certain classes of unlisted companies, such that audit firms
completing a term of 10 years or more need to be rotated beginning April 1, 2017.
Despite the fact that corporate India is not completely ready for the transition, the survey noted that a whopping 78 percent believe that MFR is a step in the right direction and would lead to improved financial reporting.
It further noted, about 73 percent of the companies have either already taken steps to comply with the independence requirements of the 2013 Act or are in the process of such compliance.
"MFR is a step in the right direction and will surely result in greater transparency, higher accountability and better corporate governance," said Pranav Haldea, Managing Director, Prime Database Group.
According to Prime Database, out of 1,480 companies listed on the National Stock Exchange, only 131 companies have changed their auditors in the years 2015 and 2016.
Sanjiv Kapoor, chief strategy and commercial officer of full-service carrier Vistara, has flayed the last-minute discounts offered by a slew of rival airlines, saying the strategy is not sustainable in the long run.
In a tweet, Kapoor, who was earlier chief operating officer of SpiceJet, said the fares offered by budget carriers IndiGo and GoAir and Air India in the New Delhi-Mumbai sector were 'simply crazy' and unsustainable regardless of the business model.
On one of the travel sites, the fares quoted by these airlines were as low as Rs 2,893 for one-way travel. The fare war was kicked off by Air India when it started offering fares matching Rajdhani AC-II tickets in select routes, including the metros, for last minute travel.
The Air India strategy has prompted other budget carriers to follow suit and offer discounted fares for last-minute travel.
Kapoor, however, has said in his tweets that discounts were always for advance purchase, never such last minute fares. According to him, extra inventory should be sold off in advance, and not used to trash last minute fares.
"Last minute deep discounts are like a drug - short term false fix, long term disaster," he has said.
Unbelievable all-in fares day before flight! Simply crazy low fares on offer, unsustainable. pic.twitter.com/HFJJzYML8u Sanjiv Kapoor (@TheSanjivKapoor) July 18, 2016
.@vppati No such guideline, the days of Govt set fares long gone And the DELBOM flight is 2 hours. Sanjiv Kapoor (@TheSanjivKapoor) July 18, 2016
.@craditya NO airline can sustain such low last minute fares, regardless of business model. Sanjiv Kapoor (@TheSanjivKapoor) July 18, 2016
.@RohitESS No. Discounts were always for advance purchase, never such last minute fares. Sanjiv Kapoor (@TheSanjivKapoor) July 18, 2016
.@vppati No. Last minute deep discounts are like a drug - short term false fix, long term disaster. Sanjiv Kapoor (@TheSanjivKapoor) July 18, 2016
.@SagarBedmutha @RohitESS Doesn't work that way. Extra inventory should be sold off in advance, and not used to trash last minute fares. Sanjiv Kapoor (@TheSanjivKapoor) July 18, 2016
.@shachinb @RohitESS @SagarBedmutha Doesn't work that way in the long run. And impossible to teach airline revenue management in 140 chars. Sanjiv Kapoor (@TheSanjivKapoor) July 18, 2016
Earlier, aviation industry experts had told Firstpost that Air India's strategy to offer cheaper last-minute tickets could increase the passenger traffic but is unlikely to improve its revenue.
According to them, while the strategy may help the airline fill every fourth seat which otherwise goes vacant on its domestic flights, it may also change passenger booking behaviour as well.
If one knows that tickets are sure to be available at significant discounts to the average air fare four hours before every flight, why would one want to book a ticket on normal fares at all?
However, by offering cheaper last-minute tickets through Air India, the government seems to be trying to rein in the airlines fares as such.
An Air India official had told Firstpost that the scheme has been launched to check exorbitant last minute fares, a practice followed by airlines world over. Clearly, it looked like an indirect way of regulating airfares.
If its been a year since you have graduated from college and landing your first job, July 31st would be a date that ought to be firmly etched into your mind. Why? Because it is going to be the first time that youd have become an income tax assessee and hence filing your tax returns. While you may have spent a better part of the last twelve months learning the ropes of your career and firming your position on the first rung of the corporate ladder,you may have been oblivious to the need for tax planning until you actually get down to filing your tax returns and waking up to the reality of how much of your hard earned salary goes into the governments coffers.
Paying your rent and credit card bills may have become an inescapable part of your life and so have the EMI payments for your swanky bike that makes heads turn or those of your recently purchased nifty smartphone. Tax planning however remains low in the pecking order and one of the primary reasons for it would be tax deducted from your salary by the employer aka TDS (Tax Deducted at Source) that leads you to reconcile to the net salary credited into your bank account being what you actually earn. The reality however is far from it.
Through this article which is presented as a Q&A, I will look to clear some common misconceptions and guide you through the procedure of tax returns filing, while making an attempt to drive home the importance of tax planning.
I earn a salary and there is a TDS every month. Do I still have to file tax returns? If yes, how do I account for TDS?
Even if you earn a salary and tax is deducted at source by your employer, you need to file an income tax return. Paying tax and filing a return are separate activities. The former is paying your due to the government; the latter consists of providing the government with a declaration that you have paid what is due. Your employer deducts tax every month with appropriate deductions based on your investment declarations to them. If you have worked with one employer for the entire financial year then this will be taken care of in your Form 16 document that will be provided by your employer.
I get the importance of filing my returns, but do I now have to use the services of a Chartered Accountant (CA) or use online tax filing portals to file my returns?
Those with complex tax filing requirements such as those with other sources of income (apart from salary) which merit advance tax payments and if they havent been paid on time, attract penalties and penal interest may require the advice of a CA to compute and file their taxes. For those of you with a single source of income like a salary, the tax filing is usually straight through based on the Form 16 provided by your respective employers. In most cases you just need to enter the numbers from your Form 16 into the tax filing portal and the platform guides you through the relevant steps. You can visit the Income Tax Departments portal and file your returns there with your authentication credentials.
What are the mistakes that I am likely to commit while filing tax returns?
Often sources of income like interest on fixed deposits, savings bank interest and capital gains (both short term and long term) are not included by the tax assesses. Remember the government tracks such information since all your bank accounts, mutual fund folios, trading accounts, etc. are linked to your PAN. Not declaring this is a violation and may lead to incorrect tax computation. In fact even non-taxable income like interest on PPF, dividends received (under Rs 10 lakhs), and savings bank interest (less than Rs. 10,000) need to be declared in your tax filing. Not computing tax payable correctly will lead to penalties (on the unpaid amount) and penal interest on the delayed payment.
What are the benefits of filing tax returns online?
It generates an instant record, with faster turnaround of acknowledgements and responses.
While computing my income tax payable, I was shocked to see the amount! I have heard about investments made to save on tax. Is that what you call Tax Planning?
Good tax planning is about reducing your tax outgo by structuring your finances around your goals and ensuring protection. Tax planning helps you meet these objectives through investment instruments which provide maximum bang for the buck. For instance, is there a point in buying an insurance plan with very high commissions to save tax? Absolutely not, since what you save as tax could get paid out as commission, thereby leaving you no better off.
Good tax planning is about structuring your salary, (for instance, making sure your House Rent Allowance is appropriate for the rent you pay) and making sure you are correctly investing your money (for instance not putting your long term savings in FDs, but in debt or equity mutual funds which provide you with more tax efficient returns and are taxed only when the capital gain is realized).
If you are looking to get married, structuring your home purchases and the home loan repayments can benefit you immensely. This can be done by holding a joint property and taking a joint loan with your spouse with both taking advantage of the interest deductible.
These measures go beyond what can be done by purchasing the right tax saving products and provide bigger savings. Afterall, knowing about these is essential to make you make your hard earned money work harder for you!
(The author is CEO, BigDecisions.com)
BATON ROUGE, La. The Iraq war veteran who shot three policemen dead in Louisiana's capital methodically targeted the officers for assassination, authorities said on Monday, as America confronted racially charged gun violence against law enforcement for the second time this month.
During an update on Sunday's ambush in Baton Rouge, police described how video footage showed the former U.S. Marine Corps sergeant, Gavin Eugene Long, 29, hunting down police officers even as he bypassed civilians he encountered.
The carnage came to an abrupt end less than 10 minutes after it began when Long himself was shot dead by a police marksman, firing from a position about 100 yards away.
Police said they believe that Long, armed with two rifles and a pistol, had intended to make his way to the headquarters of the Baton Rouge Police Department a short distance away to take additional lives.
"There is no doubt whatsoever that these officers were intentionally targeted and assassinated," Louisiana State Police Superintendent Colonel Mike Edmonson told reporters. "It was a calculated act against those who work to protect this community every single day."
The ambush came 10 days after a similar attack that left five police officers dead in Dallas and nearly two weeks after police in Baton Rouge fatally shot a 37-year-old black man, Alton Sterling, who was selling CDs outside a convenience store, igniting nationwide protests.
Police declined to say whether the attack by Long, who was black, was racially motivated. Two of the lawmen killed on Sunday were white, and a third was black. Three other officers were wounded. One them was hospitalized in critical condition, described as fighting for his life with gunshots to his head and stomach.
PRAISE FOR DALLAS AMBUSH
But an imprint from the gunman left behind on social media included online videos in which he decried mistreatment of African-Americans by law enforcement and praised the July 7 killings of Dallas policemen by another black U.S. military veteran.
The fatal ambush in Dallas in turn shattered an otherwise peaceful street protest that night denouncing the Sterling slaying on July 5 and a second shooting death of a black man by police near St. Paul, Minnesota on July 6, Philando Castile, 32.
Edmonson said Long, a resident of Kansas City, Missouri, was had been in the Baton Rouge area for several days before the shooting, and while he acted alone in the ambush itself, police have yet to rule out his having assistance in planning the attack.
Military records released by the Pentagon showed Long, listed as a data network specialist, served five years in the Marine Corps until his discharge in August 2010, including a six-month deployment to Iraq.
According to public records in Jackson County, Missouri, Long sought to legally change his name to Cosmo Ausar Setepenra in May 2015, but court officials said he never completed the process.
Long also affiliated himself with the Washitaw Nation, an African-American offshoot of the Sovereign Citizen Movement, whose adherents view the federal government as illegitimate.
Police in Baton Rouge, a city with a long history of distrust and tension between its African-American residents and law enforcement, sought to deflect criticism from civil rights activists that the police force there had become over-militarised.
"Our militarised tactics, as theyre being called, saved lives," said Police Chief Carl Dabadie.
The dead officers in Baton Rouge were identified as Montrell Jackson, 32; Matthew Gerald, 41; and Brad Garafola, 45.
President Barack Obama offered his condolences for the fallen officers and their families in telephone calls on Monday to the victims' loved ones as well as top law enforcement officials in the city.
MEMORIAL AT SHOOTING SCENE
At the B Quick gas station where the shootings occurred, people left flowers and balloons in memory of the slain officers.
"I just want us to have peace and drive down the road and not feel like we have to duck our heads and look around and see if someone's going to be on top of a roof," said Pam Collins, a resident of the Baton Rouge suburb of Prairieville who brought three shiny balloons to honour the officers.
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, in a speech to the NAACP civil rights group in Cincinnati, said she would bring the "full weight of the law to bear" against cop killers but added that here is "another hard truth at the heart of this complex matter: Many African-Americans fear the police."
Her rival, Donald Trump, on the brink of his formal nomination at the Republican convention in Cleveland, tweeted that "our country is a divided crime scene" and called for stronger leadership on law and order issues.
The violence has heightened security concerns at the convention that began Monday and next week's Democratic convention in Philadelphia.
(Additional reporting by Sam Karlin in Baton Rouge, David Alexander and Eric Walsh in Washington, Laila Kearney in New York; Writing by Grant McCool and Steve Gorman; Editing by Toni Reinhold and Mary Milliken)
This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Patna: At least 10 CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force) commandos belonging to its elite COBRA battalion were killed and five others injured in a Naxal IED blast in the jungles of Bihar's Aurangabad district, officials said.
The jawans of the COBRA unit were ambushed in the IED blast after which an encounter started Monday afternoon between the two resulting in the killing of three naxals by late night, they said.
"While eight personnel were killed on the spot, two others succumbed to their injuries when they were being evacuated," a senior official said.
The incident was reported from Chakarbanda-Dumarinala forests of the said district, bordering Gaya. Some arms and ammunition, including an AK-47 rifle, INSAS rifle and under barrel grenade launcher were also recovered from the site.
Officials said five other personnel were critically injured in the fierce gun battle that ensued after the IED (Improvised Explosive Device) blast.
The jawans belonged to the 205th COBRA battalion and were deployed in the state for conducting anti-naxal operations. This is one of the biggest casualties of the elite COBRA unit which has been raised by the CRPF for undertaking special jungle warfare operations.
Addition reinforcements of the state police and CRPF have reached the spot and a search operation has been launched.
CRPF Director General K Durga Prasad and other senior officers are expected to visit the ambush site on Tuesday. Officials said over a dozen IED blasts were triggered by the Naxals.
The martyred CRPF men have been identified as Head Constables Anil Kumar Singh, a resident of Buxar in Bihar and K Opendra Singh of Thoubal, Manipur, Constables Sinod Kumar of Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh, Ramesh Kumar from Hoshiarpur in Punjab, Diwakar Kumar from Khagariya in Bihar, Polash Mondal from South Denajpur in West Bengal, Deepak Ghosh of Nadia in West Bengal, Manoj Kumar of Betul in Madhya Pradesh, Harvender Panwar of Muzaffarnagar in UP and Ravi Kumar from Siwan in Bihar.
Ahmednagar: Veteran social worker Anna Hazare on Tuesday demanded the hangman's noose for all the accused in the brutal gang rape and inhuman murder of a minor schoolgirl in Kopardi village last week.
In a statement, Hazare condemned the incident which he described as "extremely shocking and a dark blot on humanity".
"The perpetrators of this crime deserve to be severely punished and they must be hanged. This would serve as an example to others," Hazare said.
The 79-year old anti-corruption crusader said that in recent times, people have been campaigning against the capital punishment for criminals in the name of humanity.
"There is no point in showing any mercy towards those who have blackened the face of humanity itself in such incidents," Hazare said.
Welcoming the proposed appointment of Special Public Prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam to fight the case in a fast track court, Hazare said the government must make all-out efforts and ensure the culprits are punished at the earliest.
He expressed concerns over the growing insecurity women encounter in our society and urged the police and the government to remain ever vigilant and prevent such recurrences.
On 13 July in Kopardi, the family of a 14-year-old schoolgirl found her badly mutilated, blood-splattered body under a tree in a field sending shockwaves across the state.
She was brutally gang raped by at least three personsher teeth and arms were broken, flesh from all over her body was ripped off, her hair were pulled out, and she was strangulated to death.
The incident sparked off a major political controversy in Maharashtra with the opposition, the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party, targeting the Bharatiya Janata Party-Shiv Sena government in the monsoon session of the assembly that started on Monday.
Ahmednagar Superintendent of Police Saurabh Tripathi said three persons were arrested and police teams were trying to track down others who may be involved.
They were identified as Jitendra, Nitin G Bhailume and Santosh G Bhaval, Tripathi said. The police were searching for at least two other accomplices.
The trio was produced before a local court and remanded in police custody for seven days each.
In view of the statewide uproar, Hazare has advised all political parties not to create controversies, view the sad incident on humanitarian grounds and also provide social support and security to the aggrieved family.
Srinagar: The Indian Army "deeply regretted" Monday's firing incident in Qazigund in Anantang district in which three persons were killed, and ordered an inquiry into it.
"The army deeply regrets the unfortunate loss of life in the incident at Churat, Qaziund, where the troops were forced
to open fire after a large mob turned violent, resorting to heavy stone pelting and attempted to snatch weapons from the soldiers," a defence spokesman said here.
He said the army will provide all possible assistance to the bereaved families and to those injured in the unfortunate incident. "An inquiry has been ordered into the incident," he said.
The army also appealed to the people to maintain peace and refrain from attacking security forces or their vehicles. "The army has appealed to the people to maintain peace and refrain from attacking security forces or their vehicles or establishments thus creating situations where the security forces are left with no option but to retaliate in self-defence," the spokesman added.
A police spokesman said a security force party while removing a road blockade at Churaht Qazigund came under heavy stone pelting by miscreants from two sides.
"Some miscreants tried to snatch weapons from them and tried to set ablaze the vehicles. Despite repeated warnings, the mob did not disperse and army fired in self-defence in an effort to move out from the spot," the spokesman said, adding that three persons were killed in the incident. Six others were injured.
New Delhi: The BJP-led Centre wants to "control" everything due to its "extreme dictatorial" tendencies, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said on Tuesday wondering whether he can at least have the food of his own choice.
Alluding to Navjot Singh Sidhu's resignation from Rajya Sabha, Kejriwal tweeted that honest people are feeling "suffocated" within BJP due to "dictatorial attitude" of its top leadership.
"Honest and good people are feeling extremely suffocated within BJP due to dictatorial attitude of its top leadership,"
he said in another tweet. Yesterday, he had "saluted" Sidhu's decision to relinquish his membership of the Upper House.
"Can I have food of my choice? Extreme dictatorial tendencies. They want to control everythng," Kejriwal tweeted.
He was referring to reports that the Ministry of Home Affairs, in a letter to him, has stated that the Chief Minister does not have the powers to issue suspension orders on his own.
The Chief Minister had recently issued an order suspending his principal secretary Rajendra Kumar, who has been arrested
by the CBI over charges of corruption.
As per government rules, an IAS officer who remains in police custody for more than 48 hours is "deemed to have been
suspended" automatically.
Every couple of months, an article appears in the Indian media that launches a broadside against the country's civilian nuclear establishment. In principle, this would not be a bad thing if they were accurate and focussed critiques that revealed flaws in the the way India manages its nuclear energy sector. However, most authors seem content to smear the nuclear conclave hoping that even the appearance of any impropriety would be enough to imply wrongdoing and scandal.
To be fair, the Nuclear Power Corporation of India (NPCIL) does little to endear itself to the public. Despite its under-publicised yet generous public outreach, the organisation remains unduly secretive and often promises far more than it can deliver. The scientists at NPCIL are undoubtedly capable their technical excellence has been recognised several times by international bodies ever since India began to allow international inspection of its nuclear facilities pursuant to the India-US nuclear deal in 2008.
India has had no catastrophic nuclear failures until now and its only major accident, at Narora in 1993, was dealt with quickly and in a professional manner.
Yet this technical distinction is only matched by NPCIL's administrative incompetence. The nuclear renaissance India was supposed to undergo after the India-US nuclear deal has so far been a dud. Domestic critics argued that India did not require the deal, that indigenous capacity could easily provide for the country's nuclear growth. Yet after 72 years, India has only 22 reactors in operation about the same as China has under construction at present.
Having signed the deal, the troublesome nuclear liability law scuttled any hope that there might be rapid nuclear growth 63,000 MW by 2032, according to the government in the country. Although there has been impressive progress in improved efficiency and greater power generation capacity via solar and thermal sources, nuclear energy the best option for clean and reliable energy has embarrassingly lagged behind.
The failure of the Indian nuclear energy sector, contrary to frequent media speculation, is not in safety but in marketing.
As a public sector unit, albeit autonomous, NPCIL does not solicit business with the same aggressiveness that may be expected from a private firm. It lobbies neither the central not state governments to consider nuclear energy in lieu of other options nor does it emphasise the several benefits of nuclear power. With foreign vendors balking at India's nuclear liability law, NPCIL has not used the opportunity to step up and offer to substitute foreign reactors with its own.
Nuclear projects in India are frequently late, but this must be seen in the context of a nation where everything is perennially late.
Delays occur due to several factors change in specifications (eg post-Fukushima), citizen protests (eg Kudankulam), shortfalls in financing (eg the dissolution of the Soviet Union), delays in sourcing, and delays in construction. All of these can be avoided with better planning and greater public outreach from the land acquisition stage onwards. Even delays in sourcing can be mitigated if there are healthy growth prospects for the nuclear industry private vendors of sub-components will not be eager to expand production capacity in either volume or pace unless there are profit incentives. Most components for the nuclear power industry are made to order with special characteristics that make them nuclear grade.
Efficiency of construction can be increased if the present policy of building only two reactors at a time is amended to allow greater simultaneous construction. The experience from the nuclear power project at Barakah in the United Arab Emirates clearly highlights the benefits of constructing four or more reactors at once. NPCIL seems to have failed at even making a technical case to the government for these operational efficiencies to be adopted as policy.
For the government's part, it has not applied sufficient scrutiny to the Atomic Energy Commission for its generally lackadaisical performance. Still trapped in the mentality of a colonial police state, it has not even entertained the thought of allowing private players entry into the nuclear energy sector as not just component manufacturers, but as operators and utility companies. It may not be a widely-known fact that nuclear power, rather than logically being consolidated with the Ministry for Power, comes under the Prime Minister's Office. Transferring responsibility would make a lot of sense, especially since India has already separated its civilian nuclear programme from its military efforts in concordance with the India-US nuclear deal.
The Fourth Estate has a penchant for blaming Prime Minister Narendra Modi even for the most tertiary things for once, in this case, it is actually he who must answer.
New Delhi: The Centre on Tuesday said it has not allowed culling of any species posing a threat to farmers, but said wild boar, nilgai and monkeys have been placed in Schedule V of the Wild Life Protection Act that allows people to drive them away in specific areas.
Responding to a question in Lok Sabha, his first as a Minister of State for Environment and Forest, Anil Dave said Bihar, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh had requested to include "problematic wild animals" in schedule V in accordance with section 62 of the Wild Life (Protection) Act 1972.
Accordingly, nilgai has been placed in the category in 31 and wild boar in 10 districts of Bihar. Wild boars have been placed in Schedule V in 13 districts of Uttarkhand for a year.
The order was issued in December 2015 for Bihar and in February 2016 for Uttarakhand.
A similar order was issued for Shimla in Himachal Pradesh in March this year for a period of six months where in a species of monkey (Rhesus Maccaque) was placed in the category. A similar order was extended in 10 districts of the state on 24 May for a year.
"I want to clarify that the Centre has not given any order to cull animals, nor has any state government has asked permission for it," Dave said.
With certain animals brought in Schedule V, this, the minister said, gives them the right "to drive the animal with a stick".
After the issue of compensation and man-animal conflict was raised, Minister said the matter could be given a thought with sensitivity.
On 23 June, parents of young Vinupriya, a third year BSc student living in Salem, Tamil Nadu, walked into the office of the Superintendent of Police of Salem district. They wanted action to be taken with a rider a complaint must not be filed. This case should be off the books.
The police complied Vinupriyas father was anguished that morphed images of his 21-year-old daughter, showing her in a scantily clad outfit, had been uploaded onto Facebook. A complaint was registered that evening in the Community Service Register (CSR) instead and the police began to investigate the case.
There were three actionable points in the case, said an officer involved in the case who did not wish to be named. The account which was used to put up the morphed picture was a fake profile. That is an offence under Section 65C of the IT Act. Sections 67 and 67A too applied since it could be deemed to be pornographic content, he explained.
In the wee hours of 24 June, they picked up one young man for questioning. This youngster was said to have been in a relationship with Vinupriya earlier. The police let him off as they realised he was not the culprit.
Another angle of investigation was a mobile number from which Vinupriyas father had received a number of calls. This number too was a dead end it turned out to be in the name of a tea seller in Coimbatore a fake ID was used to buy the SIM card. On 24 June itself, an email was sent from the Salem Cyber Cell police to Facebook, asking for IP details of the concerned account as also to block the offending account.
Faced with dead ends all round, Salem police were hoping to get word from Facebook so that their investigations could lead them to the actual offender. A senior officer put in a word to the CB-CID (Crime Branch-Criminal Investigation Department, a special unit of state police) Cyber Crime Cell, asking them to lean on Facebook India officials to send IP details speedily. That was just a shot in the dark, said the officer. The CB-CID had organised a workshop some time back for their team on cyber crime and someone from Facebook had come down to give a talk. The CB-CID put in a word unofficially for us, he said.
But by 27 June, unable to stand the shame, Vinupriya committed suicide. On 28 June, Facebook emailed across to Salem Cyber Crime police, the IP details of the account which put up the morphed pictures. Once they had the IP addresses, it was a matter of hours sifting through 50 IP addresses, zeroing in on 300 phone numbers and then crossing off the red herrings took a mere 12 hours. The accused was arrested from next door to Vinupriyas home, a jilted boyfriend, who wanted revenge.
Miffed with Facebook
The trouble with Facebook, according to Tamil Nadu police, is that they are pretty much a law unto themselves. The process of communication with the social media giant itself is rather vague. Facebook has a list of email addresses provided by respective governments, authorised to make such requests. Send an email from any other account and Facebook will not respond.
Once an email is sent from the authorised law enforcers email address, Facebook sends back an automated reply with a link the link shows the status of the senders request. We ourselves cannot block any account on Facebook in such cases, explained the police officer. We can only request Facebook to do so. We have no one to contact personally in Facebook India either. We just have to send the email and wait and pray that Facebook will respond soon, he said.
In Vinupriyas case, thanks to the state CB-CID putting in a word unofficially, Facebook blocked the account and coughed up the IP details within five days. But in most other cases, Facebook has taken as long as a month to respond, say law enforcers.
The police can effectively combat cyber crime where Facebook is involved, if Facebook does two things, said Amit Kumar Singh, Superintendent of Police (SP), Salem district. First, Facebook should treat a report of abuse from Law Enforcement agencies seriously by blocking the account or taking the picture down immediately. Second, they should not delay in responding to law enforcement agencies everything is digital as far as Facebook is concerned. Why then is there a delay of five days or a month? Send the details requested immediately, he said.
Officers are also frustrated because in many cases, Facebook refuses to block content, citing its own policies. Facebook usually blocks content which is violent and related to child pornography or abuse. In cases where pictures are uploaded without the consent of the subject, Facebook has, in the past, refused to remove such offending pictures, citing freedom of expression.
Freedom of expression has been taken by Facebook to an imaginary infinite level, said G Thilakavathy, former Director General of Police, Tamil Nadu. It is being seen in the American context. But the Indian mindset is different. Facebook has to look at things in terms of the culture of the respective country, she said.
In Vinupriyas case, it was a clearly morphed picture, said the police officer who was involved in the case. What happens in the case of a real picture, an intimate one, being uploaded? It could happen to anyone. A girl and a boy in a relationship may share such pictures on WhatsApp or email. If the relationship breaks up, the boy, in anger, may upload it to spite the girl. There are so many cases like this. What happens then if Facebook refuses to respond or remove the picture which is clearly used without her consent? Imagine the poor girls plight and the stigma she will face, he said.
Thilakavathy agrees that it is important for Facebook to engage with law enforcers more actively so that young lives like Vinupriyas are not lost. Their (American) world view is very different to ours, she said. I do not think Facebook will engage with our culture. They will ask what is wrong if she sent it to her boyfriend and he uploaded it? If Facebook decides to at least act immediately on complaints and take down offending pictures or videos, that in itself is a big thing. But the state government cannot do anything, it is the Centre that must make the negotiations, she added.
Cyber experts though feel that Facebook is doing its best to ensure privacy in its global network. I think privacy as a matter would be the same whether you are an Indian or a Pakistani or a Mexican, said Kiruba Shankar, CEO of Business Blogging and a professor of Digital Marketing. Honestly I am impressed with the way Facebook has been putting privacy at the top of its priorities. I think the problem arises with our lack of knowledge about Facebooks settings. Many of us are not aware that we can micro-target who sees our posts. You can turn off people who you dont want to see on your timeline, he said.
Facebook staring at criminal proceedings?
The Tamil Nadu police have suddenly been jolted into action in the wake of the untimely death of Vinupriya. Complaints of a similar nature of identity theft and photos being uploaded on Facebook without prior consent of the subject have been increasing at the Cyber Crime cell of the state, although exact details are not public. Most of these cases, police say, are easily detected since the offender is usually someone known to the victim. Vinupriyas is the first case that has resulted in death. And Tamil Nadu police want to pre-empt any more such cases.
We are examining all legal aspects on how to enforce compliance of Indian laws by Facebook, said Amit Kumar Singh, Salem SP. We are also exploring the possibility of holding Facebook accountable in this case, since a life has been lost and one of the factors was the delay on the part of Facebook in cooperating with the investigation.
The police though are flummoxed by a few knotty details. Facebook is faceless at present the police have no idea who to serve the summons to Mark Zuckerberg? Facebook India CEO? The person who maintains the servers? Another issue is where to send any legal notice or summons to Facebook has offices all over the world but its servers are in Ireland.
This is something that needs to be taken up by the Central government since Facebooks servers are in Dublin, said former DGP Thilakavathy. India has to tell Facebook firmly - once a complaint is made our country, Facebook has to do the needful immediately, on request of law enforcement agencies, she said.
Cyber experts and police agree on one point the need for Facebook to take into account the sensitivity of the Indian society and to ensure that more tools are given to the user to protect themselves from online harassment.
Facebook has the capability to match pictures what is called facial recognition, said Salem SP Amit Kumar Singh. While images are being uploaded, Facebook should alert you if the picture looks like you it can ask a question this looks like you, XYZ is trying to upload this picture, are you okay with this? That could solve a lot of privacy issues and prevent unwanted uploads of pictures, he opined.
Cyber expert Kiruba Shankar agrees. Facebook has facial recognition software in place. It is not refined yet, but I am sure over a period of time, this will be implemented. Facebook has a very strong reporting feature on Facebook. Unfortunately the reporting feature is currently automated so only if a critical mass of people report an issue, then Facebook reacts. That is a system that they can definitely develop further, he said. Shankar also added that Facebook would do well to conduct an awareness program online to educate young users on the dos and donts of using the social network.
What then of the likes of Vinupriya, who did not even own a Facebook account? All that we can do is tell the people, especially our young girls, not to worry about these kinds of things, said former DGP Thilakavathy. Be bold enough to face it. It is not the end of the world if a picture real or morphed appears on social media. That is what they need to learn, she said.
Facebook did not respond to an email questionnaire sent on this issue.
New Delhi: JNUSU President Kanhaiya Kumar does not appear to hamper probe in the sedition case, the Delhi High Court said on Tuesday and wanted to know from police whether there was any circumstance which requires cancellation of the interim bail granted to him.
"When your investigation is going on smoothly, what is there which requires his (Kanhaiya's) bail cancellation? He is not hampering the ongoing investigation," Justice P S Teji asked advocate Shailendra Babbar who was appointed as special
public prosecutor (SPP) for representing Delhi Police in the matter.
Responding to the court's query, Babbar said there was no application by the police seeking cancellation of the bail.
"We are not asking for it (bail cancellation)," he said during the hearing in which private persons have filed pleas
seeking cancellation of six months interim bail granted to Kanhaiya on the ground that his speech after his release from
Tihar Jail in March was "anti-national" and he had violated the bail conditions.
Kanhaiya, who was granted interim bail on 2 March by the High Court, is facing sedition charge in connection with an
event at JNU on 9 February where anti-national slogans were allegedly raised and Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru was
hailed as a 'martyr'.
During the hearing on Tuesday, the court also pulled up police for not filing its reply on the petitions after the SPP said
that they had filed a status report in the matter.
"It is a reply in the form of a status report," he said. To this, the judge said, "I want a reply not a status report. Last time it was made clear that you have to file a reply and not a status report".
When the court said that it would hear the matter after the police filed its reply, advocate R P Luthra, appearing for one of the petitioners, said, "What is the purpose of hearing this petition if the period of six months bail will be over. This plea is for cancellation of bail".
The court said if he would argue the matter then it would pass an order. When the petitioner's counsel said that he would argue the matter, the judge said, "Let them (police) file a reply".
"You cannot teach the court how court should function," the judge said and posted the matter for hearing on 9 August.
The court also disagreed with the contention of SPP who said that since Kanhaiya has been named as a respondent in the
plea, he should also be heard.
During the hearing, Luthra told the court that it should decide on his plea before the period of six-month interim bail
is over.
When the counsel insisted that the matter should be heard, the judge said, "I will now pass an order. Nobody is with you for cancellation of bail. You cannot be above the court. You have filed the petition and the court will decide on it."
Earlier on 28 April, the hearing in the matter witnessed a confrontation between the AAP government and Delhi Police over the issue of representing the state.
Delhi government's senior standing counsel Rahul Mehra had objected to presence of Lieutenant Governor-appointed SPP in the matter.
AAP government had earlier told the court that there was no violation of any bail condition by the student leader.
The police had earlier said that it cannot comment on the pleas seeking cancellation of interim bail granted to Kanhaiya
without verifying facts and they were investigating whether any bail condition was violated.
Three indigenously-developed 155 mm 'Dhanush' artillery guns have been handed over to the Indian Army by the Jabalpur-based Gun Carriage Factory (GCF).
"Three 155 mm howitzers (Dhanush) have been handed over to the army recently for user's trial," GCF's Joint General Manager and PRO Sanjay Shrivastava told PTI on Sunday.
GCF is an ordnance factory, which received its first order of 500 transport carts in 1905.
"Another consignment of three guns is being readied and these howitzers too will be delivered to the army shortly," Shrivastava said.
The gun, a towed howitzer with a strike range of 38 km, has been developed by Ordnance Factory Board (OFB), Kolkata, after going through the design and voluminous documents running into over 12,000 pages which were delivered to India under the first phase of Transfer of Technology (ToT) as part of the Bofors gun deal in the late 80s, another official said.
The Dhanush artillery guns are important because this acquisition is the first one of such weapon systems by the Army in three decades since the Bofors scandal.
According a report in The Telegraph, "the Indian army's 'field artillery rationalisation programme' (FARP) had gone haywire since the allegations of Bofors kickbacks against then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi snowballed into a political row that cast a shadow on successive governments. The institutionalised bureaucracy simply staved off decision-making on big guns."
The plans to acquire such guns were first mooted under Army's Field Artillery Rationalisation Plan (FARP) formulated in 1999.
The army had demanded the six howitzers following successful summer and winter trials of the artillery gun.
The trials saw some 2,000 rounds being successfully fired from the gun in different climatic conditions like in snowy, desert and hostile areas in the country, he said.
The army had been looking for a total of 114 Dhanush guns from GCF to augment its firepower, he further said.
According to the official, the army needs a huge number of howitzers of different types, and Indian firms, some with the help of foreign manufacturers, are in the race to fulfil the demand with the gun's variants.
Costing around Rs 14 crore a piece, Dhanush, (aka 'Desi Bofors') is comparable to most current generation weapon systems which are in use by different countries, he said.
Along with electronic gun-laying and sighting systems and other features, the indigenous gun has an enhanced 11-km range as against the 27-km range of the imported Bofors.
The Indian Army had stationed a special team of officers at the GCF to help monitor the progress, coordinate proof resources and provide guidance regarding the qualitative requirements vis-a-vis the gun system from the user's perspective, the official said.
With inputs from PTI
New Delhi: Arvind Kejriwal on Tuesday alleged that a few chief ministers, including him, were not allowed to carry mobile phones to the the Inter-State Council meet and that he raised the issue with Prime Minister Narendra Modi wondering whether they posed a "security threat."
Kejriwal said some of the chief ministers were allowed to take their phones inside the meeting venue.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who was among those who were barred, objected to the move, and she was not allowed to speak while his speech faced "interferences," the AAP chief said.
"They made few a Chief Ministers, including me, to leave our phones outside. It was very strange. They kept phones of few Chief Ministers outside while few were allowed to take their phones inside. I raised the issue in my speech as well. I asked the Prime Minister whether few Chief Ministers pose security threats to him," Kejriwal said.
He was speaking at the launch of a book 'Arvind Kejriwal and the Aam Aadmi Party', authored by Pran Kurup, his IIT Kharagpur batchmate, at the Constitution Club here.
"In fact, Mamataji protested. She said return (the phone) otherwise I will leave. She asked what if there is an emergency in West Bengal, how will people contact her then? Then they allowed her to take her phone inside. But they did not let Mamataji speak. I also had to face a lot of interferences," Kejriwal said.
Kejriwal wondered why they were invited in the first place if the Centre "does not want to listen to the voice of the opposition".
"Others did not protest (for not being allowed to carry their cell phones inside), maybe because they are under the threat of CBI.
The Inter-State Council meeting had taken place on Saturday last after a gap of 10 years.
Under attack from opposition BJP over the alleged suicide of a Deputy Superintendent of Police M K Ganapathy, Karnataka Chief Minister on Tuesday hit back at the rival party, rejecting its demand for a probe into the case that led to the exit of K J George as a minister, and questioning continuance of central ministers facing FIRs.
In a counter-offensive against the Opposition a day after George quit "voluntarily", Siddaramaiah sought to turn the tables on BJP, saying several Union ministers were facing FIRs and criminal cases but "why have they not resigned?".
He said Union ministers Bandaru Dattatreya, Smriti Irani and Uma Bharti were facing FIRs and seven of the newly
inducted 19 Union ministers had criminal cases registered against them "but BJP was silent on this and singling out George", who resigned hours after a court ordered registration of FIR against him and two police officials over the DySP
suicide.
He said that mere filing of an FIR does not warrant action but still George stepped down as a "loyal soldier" of the
party, saying he did not want to embarass Congress, the Chief Minister and the government.
"Let them (BJP) get the resignations of Dattatreya, Smriti Irani and seven ministers facing criminal cases. Is there a
separate law for us and them?" he told reporters here.
George resigned on Monday shortly after a court at Madikeri in Kodagu district directed police to register an FIR against him and two top police officers in connection with alleged suicide of 51-year old .
The body of Mangaluru DySP Ganapathy was found hanging from the ceiling fan in a room at a lodge in Madikeri on 7 July.
Hours before his death, in an interview to a local TV channel, he had said George and A M Prasad (IG-Intelligence)
and Pranab Mohanty (IGP-Lokayukta) were harassing him and they would be responsible "if anything happens to me."
Accusing BJP of "moral bankruptcy", Siddaramaiah said Congress would "expose their true colours" and "false propaganda" with statewide party programmes.
"I have accepted George's resignation with pain. We have not taken his resignation. He himself resigned voluntarily," he said, adding, his ministerial colleagues had advised him (George) against stepping down.
Siddaramaiah said Prasad and Mohanty were asked to go on leave as was being speculated. Lashing out at BJP for persisting with its demand for a CBI probe, he said "there is no need to hand over the case to CBI. A judicial commission has already been formed. The matter has also gone to the courtso no need to refer the matter to CBI."
Siddaramiah said the government had no disrespect for CBI and is also not afraid of it. "It has faith in the investigation agency unlike BJP which has belittled it when in power in the state and refused to refer even one single case to it," he said.
He said his government had referred eight cases to CBI under the NDA government.
Siddaramaiah further added that BJP was portraying itself as honest but its leaders themselves were facing multiple cases, including B S Yeddyurappa, Jagadish Shettar and K S Eshwarappa.
Hitting out at JDS, he said, "Doesn't (H D) Kumaraswamy have criminal cases. His wife is also facing a criminal case.
They (both BJP and JDS) should introspect. Those living in glass houses should not pelt others with stones."
Siddaramaiah also dismissed Kumaraswamy's charge that the Chief Minister was facing five cases, which he had not
disclosed in the election affidavit.
He said all the five cases registered during his fight for public cause were closed in 2008 itself. Siddaramaiah flayed
BJP and JDS for using the suicide of Ganapathy as a "political tool."
Quoting National Crime Records Bureau statistics, he said 122 police officials had committed suicide from 2003 to 2013
in Karnataka under the governments of JDS' H D Kumaraswamy and BJP's B S Yeddyurappa and Jagadish Shettar.
Karnataka Home Minister and KPCC President G Parameshwara said Congress would expose the "false propoganda" and "politics" of BJP and JDS through its statewide programme involving, MPs, MLAs and local leaders.
"We will not let them off the hook so easily," he said.
Srinagar: Army Chief General Dalbir Singh will be on a day-long visit on Wednesday to review the security situation in Kashmir valley and along the Line of Control.
"The Chief of Army Staff will review the security situation in Kashmir during meetings with the Corps Commander of China Corp and other officers," a defence source said.
Gen Singh, who is scheduled to arrive at Army's Badamibagh Cantonment area in the morning, will be briefed about the situation in the valley and the counter-infiltration operations along the LoC.
Gen Singh's visit to the curfew-bound Valley comes in the backdrop of violent mobs attacking army camps and installations in the wake of killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani in an encounter on 8 July.
Three persons, including two women, were killed in firing by army personnel yesterday at Qazigund in Anantnag district when their vehicle came under stone pelting.
Army has ordered an inquiry into the incident.
Srinagar: A woman injured in clashes between security forces and protesters in South Kashmir succumbed at a hospital, taking the death toll in the ongoing unrest to 42, even as curfew remained in force in the Valley on Tuesday.
Neelofar was injured in retaliatory firing on Monday after the protesters pelted stones at an Army vehicle in Qazigund. Her eight-year-old is battling for life in the hospital, reported DNA.
Two other persons, including a woman, were killed and seven others injured in the incident.
Authorities decided to impose curfew in the Valley on Tuesday for the 12th day running while separatists extended the protest shutdown for another three days here in Jammu and Kashmir.
A police spokesman, giving details of the incident, said an army mobile domination patrol party while moving towards Devsar tried to clear a road blockade erected by some persons at Churaht Qazigund.
"The security force party while removing the obstructions came under heavy stone pelting by the miscreants from two sides. The Army party warned the mob to maintain distance but it did not relent. Some miscreants tried to snatch weapons from them and tried to set ablaze the vehicles. Despite repeated warnings the mob did not disperse and army fired in self defence in an effort to move out from the spot," the spokesman said, adding six persons were injured in the incident out of which two had succumbed last night.
Curfew, meanwhile, remained in force across the 10 districts of the Valley as there was no sign of deadly clashes between protestors and security forces ending.
The clashes began soon after the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani in an encounter with security forces on 8 July.
Police and paramilitary personnel have been deployed in strength across the Valley for strict implementation of the prohibitory orders, the official said.
He said there were no reports of fresh violence from anywhere in the Valley so far.
Normal life also remained paralysed for the 11th day on Tuesday due to separatist sponsored strike, which has now been extended till 22 July. Schools, colleges and universities have been closed by the authorities till July 25 because of the prevailing law and order situation in the Valley.
In a joint statement, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Mohammad Yasin Malik yesterday said the shutdown in the Valley will continue till 22 July. However, they have announced a relaxation of half day from 2 pm onwards on 21 July.
Mobile telephone and mobile Internet services also remained shut while newspapers failed to hit stands for the fourth day.
Limited mobile phone connectivity is, however, available to subscribers on post paid mobile phones provided by Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL).
Amitabh Mattoo, advisor to the state Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, told media that the decision to ban publication of newspapers was not taken at the instance of the Chief Minister. Mattoo said the decision was taken at "the local level and heads would soon roll for taking such a harsh decision".
With inputs from agencies
Patna: Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Tuesday condoled the death of 10 CRPF commandos in an encounter with Naxals on the borders of Gaya and Aurangabad districts in the state and announced compensation to their families.
The commandos of CRPF's COBRA unit were ambushed in the IED blast triggered by Naxals near Chakarbanda-Dumarinala forests after which an encounter started yesterday in which three Naxals were also killed.
While eight CRPF personnel were killed on the spot, two others succumbed to their injuries later. Kumar instructed top officials of the state, including Chief Secretary Anjani Kumar Singh, state police chief PK Thakur and Principal Secretary Home Amir Subhani, to rush to Gaya to take stock of the situation and ensure that needful action is taken, an official statement said.
He also had a telephonic conversation with Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh over the incident. The Chief Minister directed the Home department to immediately pay Rs 5 lakh compensation to the next of kin of each deceased as per provisions of the state government, the statement said.
Additionally, he ordered officials to make available to the kin of the jawans killed, insurance of Rs 20 lakh under the provisions of special scheme in the Naxal-hit districts, it said, adding Kumar also ordered to provide all medical assistance to the injured jawans.
The Chief Secretary would lay wreath on bodies of deceased jawans on behalf of the Chief Minister.
New Delhi: Seeking to rename Bombay, Madras and Calcutta high courts to reflect the change in the names of the cities they are located in, the central government moved a bill in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday, one day after the Calcutta high court judges unanimously rejected such a proposal.
Law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad introduced the High Courts (Alteration of Names) Bill which, once passed by
Parliament, will replace Bombay, Madras and Calcutta with Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata respectively in the names of corresponding high courts.
"The high courts were named after the cities in which they were located. Consequence to the changes in the names of
these cities, there has been demands for change in the names. It is appropriate and logical that the names of these high courts are also changed as per the request of the state governments," the bill says. "It will also fulfil the aspirations of the people of the states concerned," it says.
Earlier, judges of Calcutta high court had unanimously declined to accept the Centre's proposal for renaming it as Kolkata high court and communicated the view of the full court to the Union Law Ministry.
When the Cabinet had approved the bill earlier this month, it had proposed changes in the names of Bombay and Chennai high courts only. The Calcutta High Court has the distinction of being the first high court and one of the three chartered high courts to be set up in India, along with the high courts of Bombay and Madras. It was formally opened on 1 July, 1862.
Earlier, the government had planned to vest the President with powers to rename a high court in consultation with the governor, chief minister and the chief justice of that state. But the idea had been shelved. The government now
plans to consider such demands of change in name on a case-by-case basis, sources said.
New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday asked BJP parliamentarians to take out 'Tiranga Yatras' in their constituencies to mark India's 70th Independence Day and inform people about 70 achievements of his government.
Addressing the Bharatiya Janata Party's parliamentary party meeting, Modi said the 'Tiranga Yatras' (Tricolour Marches) should be held between 15 and 22 August, according to informed sources.
"The MPs were asked to hold yatras on bikes while carrying Tricolours hoisted on eight-foot tall masts," said a source.
Modi urged the MPs to "work hard and study" to raise the level of discourse in parliament.
"To revive the feelings of patriotism among the youth and to make them aware of the sacrifices of our heroes, organise various programmes in your constituencies," Modi told the MPs.
Information and Broadcasting Minister M. Venkaiah Naidu told reporters later that during the meeting, a discussion was held on celebrating India's 70th Independence Day.
"The government has worked out a programme schedule for the day. It will be finalised after consultations with Bharatiya Janata Party President Amit Shah and others," Naidu said.
Modi described success of 'Vikas Parva' programme, organised to mark the completion of two years of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government at the Centre.
The Prime Minister is reported to have said that due to development-oriented initiatives, people responded enthusiastically to government programmes across the country.
The BJP has also constituted an eight-member committee of Ministers of State to chalk out programmes to celebrate the 100th birth anniversary of Bharatiya Jana Sangh founder-leader Deen Dayal Upadhyay on 25 September. Jana Sangh was the forerunner of the Bharatiya Janata Party.
After finalising the draft of the programmes, the committee will submit it to Naidu and Minister for External Affairs Sushma Swaraj.
At the meeting, Sushma Swaraj told the parliamentarians about the Prime Minister's recent foreign visits, said the sources.
Mumbai: It has been over a year now since the Malvani hooch tragedy in Mumbai claimed 104 lives within a span of four days from 17-20 June 2015. Thanks to the apathy of the excise department, the officials who were charged with dereliction of duty, are still to face any concrete action.
Although the excise department released a statement on 21 June last year saying it suspended four officialsRajendra Salunkhe, Jagdish Deshmukh, Varsha Vengulkar and Dhanaji Dalvifor negligence of duty, the departmental inquiry it ordered is nowhere near conclusion.
"If you find the slightest evidence of connivance by police/excise officers, take immediate strict action, including suspension, by following the procedure laid down by the law. Such actions should be taken against those found to be involved or found to be conniving, howsoever senior he or she might be, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis had said on 23 June, 2015.
However, even a year after the tragedy the excise department continues with its then Superintendent of Western Suburb Subhash Bodke, without any departmental enquiry instituted against him. Not only that, the principal secretary of the excise department, Rajesh Kumar Meena went on to give an extension by one year to the tainted official, keeping the enquiry on hold.
Nothing can be more ironical than this as Fadnavis had earlier warned that he won't spare anyone for illicit practices. In fact, the alleged grabbing of MIDC land, even saw the exit of then excise minister Eknath Khadse on 4 June, 2016. After cabinet reshuffle of 8 July, 2016, Chandrashekhar Bawankule took over as the excise minister.
Sources said that in the interim period between Khadse's exit and Bawankule's appointment, the Chief Minister who was overseeing the excise department had approved transfers of 220 inspectors and senior inspectors 180 of whom are police sub-inspectors and the rest are higher officials. The transfers took place on the advice of State Excise Commissioner Vijay Singhal and Principal Secretary Meena on 2 and 3 July, 2016.
The sources also said that more than two dozen senior officials got plum postings in the 35-day period when Fadnavis was heading the excise department. What raised eyebrows in the bureaucratic and political circles was that tainted and suspended bureaucrats of the state excise department got reinstated without facing proper probe.
According to a senior government official, these controversial excise officials have not only been reinstated, but also awarded plum postings and promotions. However, despite completion of three years in June this year, Bodke still got an extension without an enquiry even when such a huge tragedy occurred under his jurisdictional area.
IPS officer BG Shekhar, who was on deputation from the Maharashtra Police and officiating as the Director (Implementation and Vigilance) after the Malvani tragedy, was surprisingly shunted out on 1 July this year even when he took stern steps to curb illegal activities in the department. His deputation was abruptly cancelled even before he completed a year in his new capacity, sources said. Fisrtpost has a copy of the order that sends Shekhar back to his parent department.
BG Shekhar's transfer order
Another officer TR Salunkhe, who was earlier posted as the private secretary to Leader of Opposition in the Maharashtra Assembly Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil, had brazenly disregarded his appointment as a deputy commissioner of police in Nagpur. Instead of facing action for absence of duty since April 2016, Salunkhe was dished out in the same rank in Thane, near Mumbai. Needless to say, Thane is considered a fat posting.
TR Salunkhe's transfer order
The Maharashtra State Excise Department has got its own stamp of notoriety as postings in Kolhapur, Mumbai, Thane, Pune, Ahmednagar, Nashik, Dhule and Jalgaon are considered to be fast money-spinners, albeit not in the right way.
Vijay Chinchawalkar, who was caught red-handed accepting a bribe of Rs 5 lakh in June 2013 while he was posted as a superintendent in Ratnagiri, is now back from his punishment transfer in Chandrapur. He was in an non-executive post in Chandrapur since August 2015. Before his punishment transfer, he was under suspension. However, on 2 July, he was posted as superintendent of the Kolhapur zone.
Another senior official who was under suspension for taking a bribe and now brought out of suspension is Manohar Anchule. The Thane excise superintendent was caught red-handed by the anti-corruption bureau (ACB) for accepting a bribe of Rs 18 lakh in 2015. As per the latest mass transfer order, Anchule has now been posted to Dhule district.
Thane excise inspector Rajendra Shirsat, who was embroiled in a molestation-bribery case, now stands reinstated and posted in Pune. Shirsat was suspended after a woman from his department had filed a molestation complaint against him in January 2015. To shield himself from official action, he had allegedly tried to bribe the complainant by offering her Rs 50 lakh. She had then complained to the ACB and Shirsat was caught red-handed in March 2015.
Although Firstpost tried to contact Singhal, he neither answered the calls nor replied to the text messages.
NCP spokesperson Nawab Malik said the state government, rather than taking action against these "corrupt officials", is protecting them and reinstating them in prime posts.
"It will send a wrong message to the people. Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis should look into the matter and take appropriate action. These transfers have happened with his approval, so he must fix responsibility," Malik said.
The state government, has however, denied that any out of turn promotions or transfers have taken place.
"All transfers and promotions took place as per rules under the instructions from the Chief Minister who was then in-charge of the state excise department," said Meena.
Chandigarh: Three persons have been arrested in connection with a case of alleged gangrape of a 21-year-old Dalit woman, Haryana police said on Tuesday.
The victim, a college student, was allegedly raped by five persons in Rohtak district on 13 July. This is said to be a repeat offence on the woman with two of the accused also involved in the first case of gangrape three years ago in Bhiwani, Haryana DGP KP Singh told reporters in Chandigarh on Tuesday.
In the latest incident, two of the accused in the Bhiwani case, who are out on bail, allegedly raped her again, along with three other men.
"We have arrested three persons. One more who has been named (as an accused) will be arrested soon. As for the fifth accused, his address is not complete. As soon as we ascertain the address, we will apprehend him," said the DGP, adding that stringent action will be taken against the accused as per law.
Singh said doctors of a Rohtak hospital, where the woman is admitted, have not ruled out the possibility of rape.
"We are treating it as a case of gangrape as per the woman's statement. We will arrest all the accused, get her statement recorded under section 164, CrPC and submit the challan before the court," he added.
Asked about some of the accused reportedly producing CCTV footage to show they were not in Rohtak on the day of the incident, the DGP said, "At the moment, we are investigating the case as that of a gangrape."
Singh confirmed that the victim has lodged a police complaint regarding the horrific incident.
"She was found by the police at Sukhpora Chowk in an inebriated state on July 13. In her statement, she said she was gangraped by five persons who have been named in the FIR. Police lodged a case, took her to PGIMS, Rohtak, recorded her statement and got her medically examined," he said, adding that the police had immediately launched raids and inspected the scene of crime.
Talking about the earlier rape case in Bhiwani in 2013, Singh said the victim had first alleged that she was kidnapped by five boys who took her to Chandigarh.
A case was lodged, the accused were taken into custody but at the time of recording her statement under section 164, CrPC, the victim told the magistrate that she had willingly gone to Chandigarh with the boys, he said.
"A few days later, she approached the police saying she wanted to get her statement recorded under section 164, CrPC again," said the DGP, adding that in the second statement before the magistrate, she alleged gangrape by five persons.
The police took cognizance, arrested two persons and submitted challans against them but could not find enough evidence against the rest of the three accused, he said.
Subsequently, the woman's family approached the Sessions Court under section 319, CrPC and urged it to name the other three as accused in the case and issue summonses to them.
"However, the court rejected the application and the woman's family went to the High Court which is due to hear the petition today itself," said Singh.
"Meanwhile, the Rohtak incident (in Rohtak) has been reported and we are looking into it," he added.
According to the police, the victim was found lying in an inebriated condition near Sukhpura Chowk in Rohtak on 13 July.
On 14 July, a case was registered at a women's police station under various sections of the IPC and the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act against Amit, Jagmohan, Sandeep, Mausam and Akash for kidnapping and gangrape on the basis of the woman's statement.
Investigations revealed that an FIR for kidnapping of the woman was lodged by her relatives at Bhiwani in October, 2013. In that case, police had challaned Amit and Jagmohan who got bail from the court subsequently.
"In the meantime, the present case was registered by the woman against five persons, including Amit and Jagmohan, which is being investigated by a special team. Three of the five accused Amit, Jagmohan and Sandeep have been arrested. Police have approached the victim to get her statement recorded under section 164, CrPC before the Judicial Magistrate," said a release.
Earlier, the woman's family had alleged that they were threatened by the accused in the Bhiwani case to withdraw the complaint, and as a result, they were forced to shift to Rohtak.
They had told the police that the victim had gone to college on 13 July but did not return. At night, she was found by the police lying unconscious near Sukhpura Chowk with her clothes torn after which she was rushed to Rohtak Civil Hospital.
The victim had told the police that the accused bundled her into a car, drugged her and took turns to rape while she was unconscious.
Shah Faesal's opinion for The Indian Express on how news channels push an aggressive agenda of Kashmir, thereby edging out the state further away from the country, is the piece we need right now and the one we deserve.
Faesal's indictment (of news channels) comes after a popular news channel juxtaposed his photos and videos with that of dead and alive young militants indicating a difference in role models. What infuriated Faesal, an IAS officer who is the director, school education in Kashmir, was that it was a thoughtless effort, not just because it posed a threat to his life, but because it misrepresented India's idea of Kashmir. He further writes that this isn't the first time that news channels have projected a wrong idea of Kashmir and that it happened before "in 2008, in 2010, and in 2014".
What made the current round of commercial savagery by a few news channels even more tragic was that they continued to promote falsehoods, dividing people, creating hatred, completely disregarding the values of democracy and secularism, even when people were dying and the government was trying hard to calm down peoples passions. It did not stop even after appeals were made to de-escalate. This brazenness to market TRPs as national interest and do business over the dead bodies of young men was the worst aspect of these loud newsrooms.
India's prime time news is all about one thing: loud newsrooms, as Faesal so precisely puts it. The crusaders of television news channels encourage shouting matches, create a right and a wrong boundary for issues, cultivate a bias, and grab TRPs along the way.
David Devadas echoed the same view in his piece for Firstpost, calling Indian news channels "anti-national" and that they were pouring oil on the Kashmir fire.
Lets get one thing straight. This is not journalism. The so-called debate 'shows that several television anchors now run in India are more like Roman circuses or wrestling akhadas. No wonder that the programme that first laid the pattern for these shows was shamelessly called 'the big fight'.
Where the channels went wrong was in contrasting the two; in terms of pure black and white, thereby whipping up passion and dividing opinions, as some MPs chose to call it in 18 July's session of the Rajya Sabha.
"Some prime-time shows have also attempted to divide the nation on communal lines," said Leader of Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad, adding that rather than being rational and reflecting sanity, these shows have only fanned passions.
"They place four Hindu and four Muslim fundamentalists on their panel, who would fight each other and inflame passions among the people on communal lines," he added, and singled out foreign authors like Tarek Fatah and Taslima Nasreen for vitiating the atmosphere.
Azad was supported by JD(U) leader Sharad Yadav, who indicated at what seemed like media regulation. A visibly upset Yadav said that the government has failed to restrain the electronic media which continuously showed statements from separatists and, at times, "mad persons" from abroad who compromised the dignity of the nation. "Why is this drama allowed? ...Can't we tell the media to stop showing the propaganda of people supporting Islamic State in India?"
But it's not just us journalists or politicians who see through the media circus. Viewers called out on jingoistic anchors and their news channels making the Kashmir issue about themselves than for what it really is. (Of course, there are always exceptions)
Sympathize with Shah Faesal's right to live peacefully without 24X7 news cycles not of his own making 1/n https://t.co/DIp3y0HO4L Shivani Sahay (@Savitri4Ever) July 19, 2016
Kashmir could really had a role model in Shah Faesal, IAS. Then #bZeepNews et al turned him into an enemy of Kashmir https://t.co/nop15Fmnkg Samar (@Samar_Anarya) July 19, 2016
+1. Also read Shah Faesal's scathing indictment of tv channels in today's IE. https://t.co/scyfeSTAXK growingthinnah (@growingthinnah) July 19, 2016
Read wise words of IAS topper Shah Faesal: Jingoistic anchors in pursuit of TRPs are driving Kashmir away from Indiahttps://t.co/ol6Li61dGI Prashant Bhushan (@pbhushan1) July 19, 2016
I don't agree with all that Shah Faesal writes on #Kashmir, but I do agree with his assessment that certain media... https://t.co/Kr3wn3FMBQ Kavita Krishnan (@kavita_krishnan) July 19, 2016
Sued for defamation over his comments blaming the Rashtriya Swayamseva Sangh for Mahatma Gandhi's assassination, Rahul Gandhi was told by the Supreme Court on Tuesday, "You can't make wholesale denunciation of an organisation."
"If you won't apologise, you will have to face trial," the court said pulling up the Congress leader for his remarks.
In a series of tweets, ANI reported that the SC refused to stay a Bombay High Court order dismissing his plea for quashing a defamation case against him for allegedly blaming RSS for the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.
On Tuesday, the SC said, "You must face trial. Case must be decided on merits, whether what you spoke was for public good or not. You can't make wholesale denunciation of an organisation. Purpose of law is not to turn citizens into litigants, history is the biggest enemy of privacy."
Defamation case against Rahul Gandhi blaming RSS for assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. SC observes: You must face trial (cont) ANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2016
Supreme Court observes: You can't make wholesale denunciation of an organisation. ANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2016
The top court has given time till 27 July (Wednesday) for Rahul Gandhi to detail his arguments in the case. Rahul Gandhi in May 2016 had moved the Supreme Court to cancel the defamation case against him. "We will examine whether what the petitioner (Rahul) said comes within the ambit of defamation," the court reportedly said.
RSS activist Rajesh Kunte, who also is the secretary of Bhiwandi unit of RSS, in 2015 had alleged that that Rahul told an election rally at Sonale on 6 March that "RSS people killed Gandhiji".
"RSS people killed Gandhiji and today their people (BJP) talk of him...They opposed Sardar Patel and Gandhiji," Rahul had said.
He said the Congress leader had sought to tarnish the reputation of the Sangh through his speech. Following the complaint, the magistrates court had initiated proceedings and issued notice to Rahul directing him to appear before it.
The Congress leader then approached the High Court seeking exemption from appearance and quashing of the complaint. Rahuls lawyers had argued that complaint was motivated and malafide and deserved to be quashed.
The prosecution had opposed the petition and argued that Rahul can plead his case and lead evidence during trial before the magistrate.
The Congress leader then approached the High Court seeking exemption from appearance and quashing of the complaint. Rahul's lawyers argued that the complaint was motivated and malafide and deserved to be quashed.
They argued that no case was made out against Rahul and the criminal proceedings initiated against him were part of BJP's election campaign.
The prosecution had opposed the petition and argued that Rahul can plead his case and lead evidence during trial before the magistrate.
The High Court on Wednesday dismissed the petition and refused to grant stay on its order to allow the Congress leader time to appeal against it in the Supreme Court.
New Delhi: Ahead of the GST test in Rajya Sabha, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Tuesday met Bihar Chief Minister and JDU leader Nitish Kumar and is likely to court senior leadership of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana parties TDP and TRS this weekend.
Jaitley, who is counting on support of regional parties for passage for the Constitutional Amendment Bill on Goods and Services Tax (GST), met Kumar in Parliament House in New Delhi.
GST and support for government stand against Congress demand for a constitutional cap on the tax rate figured in the discussions, official sources said.
Kumar, they said, supported government stand that tax rate should not be mentioned in the Bill and the decision should be left to the GST Council.
Also figured in discussions was Bihar government's demand for release of backward region grant for the state.
The government, which has agreed to a five hour debate on the GST bill in the Rajya Sabha, is keen to get the law passed during the current Monsoon Session of Parliament that ends on 12 August.
Jaitley, sources said, will visit Hyderabad this weekend and is likely to meet TDP leaders and Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu and TRS supremo and Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao.
TDP has six members in the 247 member house, while TRS has three. JDU has 10 members in a House where the ruling NDA does not have a majority. Congress with 60 members is the single largest party in Rajya Sabha. BJP has 53 members.
The Congress, which originally mooted the GST in 2009 to replace all indirect taxes, has been demanding that the overall rate be capped at 18 per cent and scrapping of an additional 1 per cent tax designed to compensate manufacturing states that fear losing revenue.
GST Bill, which intends to convert 29 states into a single market through a new indirect tax regime, was earlier planned to be introduced from April 1 this year, but the deadline was missed as the Bill to roll it out remains in a limbo in the Opposition-dominated Rajya Sabha.
After Parliament approves the constitutional amendment to allow GST, it needs to be ratified by more than half of the states. Then, Parliament must pass another Bill to implement GST.
After the Constitution Amendment Bill is passed in Parliament, there are three more legislations - Central GST (CGST), State GST (SGST) and Integrated GST (iGST) - which are required to be passed.
The GST Bill, which will help create a single national sales tax to replace several state and central levies, has already been approved by the Lok Sabha and is pending in the Upper House.
Mumbai: Jaidev Thackeray, son of late Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray, has claimed before the Bombay high court that his father wanted him to be his political heir, but he himself was not keen. He has also claimed that ex-wife Smita had her own political ambitions.
He also alleged that his brother and present Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray had his (Jaidev's) name removed from the ration card in the name of the family. Jaidev, Thackeray's estranged son, has challenged the
Sena supremo's will from December 2011 which bequeaths a large chunk of the estate to Uddhav and does not give him anything.
He told the court that as far back as 1973, during Sena's early years, he used to accompany Bal Thackeray to
meetings. "He always nursed a desire that I should be his political heir. But I did not cherish this and wanted to keep away from politics," he said, during cross-examination by Uddhav's lawyer Rohit Kapadia. "I was never interested in joining politics because it is a different ball game altogether."
"My previous wife Smita had political ambitions. I tried to reason with her that we were comfortable in our own way and I had no interest in politics. However, her involvement continued to grow. After my mother passed away in 1995, I told Smita we were neglecting our son Rahul...and it was inappropriate for her to meet official visitors at Matoshree (the Thackeray residence)," he said.
However, Smita insisted that she wanted to pursue her career in politics. "I even suggested to her that we should shift to my flat at Kalina so that we can stay as a family," he said, adding that this was around the time when Bal Thackeray had undergone a bypass surgery.
The disagreements between him and Smita were becoming too much for his father and it was he who suggested that he (Jaidev) should spend his nights at the Kalina flat, he said. During the day he stayed with his father at Matoshree,
he said. "It was my father who had suggested that I should stay temporarily in Kalina so that there are no disputes. He also did not like Smita's involvement in politics."
Jaidev said that after the death (in a road accident) of Bindumadhav, (another son of Bal Thackeray), his mother wanted the whole family to live together at a rebuilt and expanded Matoshree.
When reconstruction was going on, he also contributed in cash for the construction expenses, but kept no receipts from the contractor, he said to a question.
"From 2003 onwards, Uddhav's influence over the family and household was increasing. In 2005, someone came to me with certain documents and asked me to sign. I noticed that my name was being removed (from the ration card) so I asked him who had sent the papers. He said 'Saheb' has sent," Jaidev said.
When he took up the issue with his father, the latter assured him that he would find out who was behind it and take
corrective steps, but it did not happen, Jaidev said. Bal Thackeray passed away in November 2012 after a prolonged illness. Jaidev has challenged his will on the ground that his father was of "unsound mind" and was influenced by Uddhav when he signed the will on 13 December, 2011.
The cross-examination before Justice Gautam Patel would continue on Wednesday.
Dehradun: Buoyed by the Supreme Court's ruling on Arunachal Pradesh, BJP on Tuesday demanded the resignation of Uttarakhand Assembly Speaker and Deputy Speaker saying the apex court's order makes it clear that the Speaker cannot disqualify a member until the disposal of no-confidence motion pending against himself.
Describing the recent Supreme Court ruling as a "life-saver" for the disqualified MLAs of Uttarakhand, state BJP president and Leader of Opposition in the state Assembly Ajay Bhatt in a statement said the order has the potential to put the clock back in the state.
Questioning the action of Speaker Govind Singh Kunjwal of ousting the rebel MLAs, Bhatt asked how could the Speaker and his deputy initiate the process of disqualifying the legislators even before the disposal of a no-confidence motion against himself (Kunjwal) for his "unconstitutional conduct" in the state Assembly.
Accusing Kunjwal of setting aside Constitutional norms in disqualifying rebel MLAs with the intention of saving the Harish Rawat government by "hook or by crook", Bhatt demanded the resignations of both the Speaker and his deputy Anusuya Prasad Maikhuri, saying they could at least partially atone for "their sin of murdering democracy" by quitting their offices.
26 BJP MLAs supported by nine rebel Congress legislators had brought a no-confidence motion against the Speaker on the evening of 18 March when he rejected their demand for a division of votes on the appropriation bill in the Assembly. However, even before taking a call on the motion, the Speaker began the process of disqualifying the MLAs who had revolted against their own government.
Disqualification of the nine disgruntled MLAs had helped Rawat in a big way as he won a Supreme Court-monitored floor test in the state Assembly with relative ease.
New Delhi: Nine disqualified Congress MLAs of Uttarakhand on Tuesday moved a fresh plea in the Supreme Court seeking its nod for participating in the assembly session commencing from 21 July.
The lawmakers including Kunwar Pranav Singh Champion, in their fresh plea in a pending appeal, referred to the recent apex court judgement in the Arunachal Pradesh case in support of their petition that they cannot be disqualified by the speaker facing resolution for removal.
The Nainital High Court had upheld the decision of the Assembly speaker Govind Singh Kunjwal to disqualify Champion and others including former Chief Minister Vijay Bahuguna and two sets of appeal are pending in the apex court against the disqualification.
Referring to para 175 of the landmark verdict of the Supreme Court, re-installing the Congress government in Arunachal Pradesh, the MLAs have said that Article 179 (c) of the constitution disentitles the speaker against whom a resolution for removal is pending from disqualifying any member of the House.
The five-judge constitution bench headed by Justice JS Khehar had said, "We are satisfied, that the words 'passed by a majority of all the then members of the Assembly', would prohibit the Speaker from going ahead with disqualification proceedings under the Tenth Schedule, as the same would negate the effect of the words 'all the then members', after the disqualification of one or more MLAs from the House.
"The words "all the then members", demonstrate an expression of definiteness. Any change in the strength and composition of the Assembly, by disqualifying sitting MLAs, for the period during which the notice of resolution for the removal of the Speaker (or the Deputy Speaker) is pending, would conflict with the express mandate of Article 179(c), requiring all "the then members" to determine the right of the Speaker to continue."
Relying on the observation, the disqualified MLAs have sought setting aside of Speaker's 27 March, 2016 decision to disqualify them.
Alternatively, they have sought permission to take part in the assembly session starting from 21 July.
The Harish Rawat government had won the floor test ordered by the apex court on 10 May in which the rebels were barred from casting their vote.
The National Democratic Alliance government is taking all steps possible to push the GST Bill in the current Parliament session, with the Business Advisory Committee of Rajya Sabha setting aside five-and-half hours to debate the legislation. The date of the debate, however, has not been decided.
The government also promised to engage with the Congress to resolve pending issues. A meeting is likely between Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad and Anand Sharma on Tuesday (19 July), the PTI reported.
However, Sharma said he has not yet heard anything from the government about Tuesday's meeting.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday also vowed to work for a consensus on the passage of the GST bill which he said was in the interest of the states.
At a meeting of the NDA constituents, he said the government will talk to all parties and seek to build a consensus for its passage.
Information and Broadcasting Minister M Venkaiah Naidu told reporters that Modi explained to NDA leaders the importance of the GST bill and the need to pass it.
"All parties (of NDA) are together on the GST bill. The PM explained to them its importance and the need to pass it," he said.
According to official sources, the government will hold more meetings with Opposition parties to build a consensus on the GST bill.
"On our part, we have made it clear to all political parties that we are ready for more discussions and have an open mind. We are ready to go the extra mile to build consensus over the GST bill," a senior minister told PTI after the meeting.
"All political parties appear positive for passing the GST bill," he said.
Meanwhile, brightening the chance for the passage of the bill, the Congress on Monday said it was "constructively engaged" with the government on the issue but wanted to prevent the executive from "tinkering" with the proposed tax reform.
"The Congress has insisted on a cap on the GST rate. We are very clear that there has to be a cap and there should not be any tinkering with that rate of GST. We will not leave it to the Executive or the Government of the day on its own to change that. That is why we have said it has to be firmly ring-fenced," senior Congress spokesman Anand Sharma said.
He said the Bill will bring about unprecedented, sweeping changes in the taxation structure and the manner in which indirect taxes like excise, service tax, sales tax or VAT are levied.
"We need to have clarity therefore about the levies of these taxes. The threshold which is acceptable to Indian economy, the consumer and the industry, that is why the Congress Party has insisted on capping it. We hope the government has registered a very legitimate demand of the Congress Party which has rich merit," he said.
Noting that his party is "constructively engaged" with the government on the pending tax reform legislation, Sharma said, "Discussions with the government on the Bill are ongoing and we are waiting for the next meeting on the issue. Government, on its part, was to reach their own internal decision about the nature of response on Congress concerns and demands."
Sharma said the party will now wait for the next meeting which will be a formal consultation where the government would give a concrete response to take forward the matter.
Asked whether the Congress was softening its stand on GST, he said, "Congress is inherently pragmatic" and that it had never said it would not support the Bill.
Sharma accused the BJP of having opposed the GST Bill in the past due to its "partisan politics". He also said the Modi government had been "non-engaged, confrontationist and arrogant" on the issue but the Congress stand was "principled" and had "merit".
"We have also said that unlike the present ruling dispensation - the BJP - which opposed it for partisan politics, the Congress opposition is principled and has rich merit on all the issues that we have raised. And that is why we are now engaged constructively," he said.
"The government was non-engaged, confrontationist and arrogant. Instead of seeking our support, the PM and his senior colleagues were insulting and berating our leaders. Their attitude is changing," he said.
Sharma said the government agreed to discuss the unrest in Kashmir, an issue of national importance, in Rajya Sabha on the first day and "this is good start for consensus building".
With PTI
New Delhi: The government on Tuesday continued with its efforts to build a consensus over the passage of the GST bill in this Parliament session even as Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar met Finance Minister Arun Jaitley after which he offered JD(U)'s support to the legislation.
However, Congress remained non-committal on its support to the bill and hoped that the government given its mandate will show "magnanimity" in creating a platform where all the parties can come together and ensure that it gets passed.
Amid government's outreach to get Opposition support on the bill, Kumar met Jaitley, who earlier in the Rajya Sabha pitched for its expeditious passage to enable states get a share of the Service Tax which is not shared under the provisions of 14th Finance Commission.
"We have always supported the GST. We supported it during the UPA and support it now. This is in the interest of the country and states. Our party fully supports it," the JD(U) chief told reporters after the meeting.
His party spokesperson KC Tyagi said the bill should be passed in this session.
Briefing reporters, Congress spokesman Gaurav Gogoi said his party has stated its position prior to the session which was very clear and conveyed to the government.
"The Congress party wants to see the GST in principle to be enforced, a strong GST bill with strong enough provisions and we hope that the government given its mandate will show a magnanimity in allowing a different set of opinions and will allow that platform to be created so that all of us can come together and ensure that the GST gets passed," he said.
On whether the party was invited for more consultations, he said as of now he had no information regarding any further invitation by the government for a meeting.
Earlier in the BJP's Parliamentary Party meeting, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar had listed passage of the bill in the current session as a priority for government.
Asserting that GST is in the interest of the nation, Kumar later told reporters that the approach of all political parties including Congress is "positive" towards this bill and the government was hopeful that there will be a consensus.
He had earlier said they will hold more meetings with Opposition parties including Congress to build a consensus on the GST bill.
"We are ready to go the extra mile to build consensus over this bill," he had said.
The GST bill, which will help to create a single national sales tax to replace several state and central levies, has already been approved by the Lok Sabha and is pending in the Upper House where the government doesn't have a majority.
It intends to convert 29 states into a single market through a new indirect tax regime, was earlier planned to be introduced from April 1, but the deadline was missed as the bill to roll it out remains in a limbo in the Opposition-dominated Rajya Sabha.
After Parliament approves the constitutional amendment to allow GST, it needs to be ratified by more than half of the states. Then, Parliament must pass another bill to implement GST.
The government is also banking on support from smaller regional parties to pass the national sales tax legislation in the Upper House of Parliament and then get supporting laws enacted by the year-end so that GST is introduced from April 2017.
A day after Navjot Singh Sidhu, a BJP member of the Rajya Sabha resigned from his post, his wife and Punjab MLA Navjot Kaur Sidhu has come out to clarify their positions.
"I have not resigned from BJP, but it's understood that Navjot Singh Sidhu has resigned," Navjot Kaur Sidhu said. Quelling rumours and doubts, she added, "When he has resigned from Rajya Sabha, it only has one meaning that he has resigned from BJP as well."
Navjot Kaur Sidhu says 'I have not resigned from BJP'. When asked about Navjot Singh Sidhu, she said 'Its understood that he has resigned'. ANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2016
She also explained her husband's move by saying that he has a clear vision to serve Punjab. "He wasn't ready for any other option besides Punjab," she added.
WATCH: Navjot Kaur Sidhu says ' Navjot Singh wants to serve Punjab, not ready for any other option besides Punjab'https://t.co/ofh0VDHYqn ANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2016
On being asked if he will join the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) after his resignation from BJP, she said that he will decide on the matter and it's better if it comes from his mouth only.
Both Navjot Singh Sidhu and his wife are reportedly upset over the BJP forming an alliance with the Akali Dal in Punjab. Navjot Kaur said that if there is a clear message that they will fight together, there is no door for his husband.
When there was a clear message that they(Akali Dal&BJP)want to fight together, its obvious theres no door for him(Navjot Singh):Navjot Kaur ANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2016
Navjot Kaur also slammed the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD)-BJP alliance government in Punjab, reported The Statesman. In my opinion the BJP-SAD government has not performed well in Punjab. They have failed to fulfill promises, she said. She further added that "AAP is a new alternative in the state."
Navjot Singh Sidhu announced his resignation from the Rajya Sabha having been nominated by the BJP in April on the first day of the Monsoon Session of the Parliament.
Meanwhile, Navjot Kaur Sidhu, who is currently the chief parliamentary secretary in Punjab, recently did a U-turn after having announcing her decision to quit BJP, reported The Indian Express.
New Delhi: Senior Congress leader Salman Khurshid on Tuesday hit back at RSS over a defamation case against party vice president Rahul Gandhi, saying "no one is better at politicising lies than RSS".
The former external affairs minster was responding to accusations from RSS that Congress was "maligning" it and "consistently spreading lies" about it, after the Supreme Court observed that Gandhi should not have made a "collective denunciation" of an organisation.
A bench of the apex court today heard an appeal filed by Gandhi seeking quashing of a criminal defamation case ordered by a magisterial court in Bhiwandi in Maharashtra for a public speech in 2015 in which he had allegedly linked RSS to Mahatma Gandhi's killing.
The SC made it clear to Gandhi that he will have to face trial if he does not express regret over his alleged statement.
"The practice of speaking lies, to politicise lies, no one is better at politicising lies than RSS," Kurshid alleged.
"So, if they think that after some court's observation their entire history and work culture has been whitewashed, then it is not that," he said.
"A matter comes to SC only on a specific issue which either party feels needs to be examined by a higher court...ultimately a trial has to take place, under what circumstances and conditions the trial will take place depending on any issue that has arisen that has come to the SC, the apex court merely clarifies that issue and sends it back to the trial," Khurshid told reporters on the sidelines of the launch of a book, titled 'Justice at Heart', co- authored by him.
In his reaction, RSS' Communications Department Head Manmohan Vaidya had earlier said the "Congress had been consistently trying to spread lies and baseless allegations about RSS. Today's Supreme Court ruling has exposed the Congress."
Khurshid hit back, saying, "What they may feel what the law of the land is...but, it will be what the court will decide. What is justified or not justified I don't think the RSS should take it upon itself to decide."
The book details the life and career of eminent judge, justice (retd.) VR Krishna Iyer. The event was attended a host of legal luminaries, including, justice Dipak Misra, Supreme Court judge, and former judges and governors.
New Delhi: Prakash Javadekar on the occasion of Guru Purnima on Tuesday felicitated about 40 members of parliament who have an "academic background".
Speaking at a gathering in parliament premises, Union Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javadekar paid glowing tributes to gurus or teachers and hastened to add that "today's function would also send out a right message about parliament".
"In both the houses we have over 50 members of parliament with academic background. Similarly we have good number of doctors and over 300 post-graduates," he said.
Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh too was invited but could not attend. BJP veteran Murli Manohar Joshi also missed the occasion as he is abroad, Javadekar said.
The MPs who were felicitated included the following: Karan Singh, Janardhan Dwivedi, Rajeev Gowda, K.V. Thomas, Bhubaneshwar Kalita, Thokchom Meinya (all Congress), Subramanian Swamy, Faggan Singh Kulaste, Ravindra Pandey, Jitendra Singh, C.P. Thakur (BJP), Ram Gopal Yadav (Samajwadi Party), Sugata Bose, Saugata Roy (both Trinamool Congress), Chandumajra Singh (Akali Dal), P.K. Teacher (CPI-M), and P.J. Kurien (Deputy Chairperson of Rajya Sabha).
Javadekar said changes in the existing education system can come with focus on four points: Education for all, quality education, education that is affordable, and an education system that is accountable but also respectful to the teachers.
In a lighter vein, he said, "I ensured good attendance of media for this function by requesting Subramanian Swamy to tweet because all of you follow his tweets religiously."
Swamy belongs to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and is a member of the Rajya Sabha.
Earlier in the day, he tweeted in his inimitable style-
On Guru Poornima, advice to Indian media: You have been so wrong, so often, and for so long. Improve !! Subramanian Swamy (@Swamy39) July 19, 2016
In his brief remarks at the function, Karan Singh stressed on the importance of teachers (gurus) in Indian culture.
"From time immemorial we have cherished the saying: Swadeshey Pujyatey Raja, Vidwan Sarvatra Pujyatey (a king is venerated only in his kingdom, but a learned man is venerated everywhere)".
Guru Purnima is generally regarded as an occasion to reflect on the role one's guru plays in one's life and to show respect and gratitude to him.
The occasion is observed on the full moon day (Purnima) in the Hindu month of Ashadha i.e. June-July period and is popular in India and Nepal.
Javadekar, known for being amiable and soft spoken, was elevated to the cabinet rank on 5 July and given the responsibility of Human Resource Department by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Each of the felicitated MPs was given a DVD on Mahatma Gandhi and a Tulsi plant.
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"I will not accept that this problem is just one created by Pakistan or separatists," he said.
"You cannot escape the issue by just blaming Pakistan for the problems in Kashmir," he said. "Just because of good tourism in one season in Kashmir, you cannot think you solved the problem. If you do not pay attention to this problem, it will turn into a law and order problem."
"There must be a conspiracy being hatched by Pakistan. But you have to look at the measures you are taking to counter it," Yechury told the government in Rajya Sabha.
In response, a beleaguered Arun Jaitley said that BJP will take strict action against Dayashankar Singh. "I should tell Mayawati ji that the party shares her grief over this issue, I will look into this matter, we stand with her...I am personally hurt that a BJP party person used such derogatory words against Mayawati," he said.
"This is not only a woman's issue. This is a man's issue," said TMC MP Derek O'Brien.
Congress leader Renuka Chowdhury stressed on the fact that the man making such remarks was none other than the vice president of the UP unit of BJP and demanded that he be arrested. "A man speaks with such language on the day both houses are discussing issues on violence on Dalits?" she said.
"The nation will not forgive BJP for this, especially with what is going in Gujarat," ANI quoted Mayawati as saying. "There are wars of thoughts and ideas in the House, but never have I used derogatory words against anyone ever," she said.
"The insulting words used against me are against all of womankind," said Mayawati. "Dayashankar Singh should be arrested. Otherwise, if in response to this people get violent, it will not be on my conscience," she added.
UP BJP vice president Dayashankar Singh's cheap remark against BSP chief Mayawati created uproar in the Parliament as Opposition leaders attacked the Modi government over the issue.
Rajya Sabha adjourned till 11 am on Thursday due to uproar over BJP leader's remark against Mayawati
In response, a beleaguered Arun Jaitley said that BJP will take strict action against Dayashankar Singh. "I should tell Mayawati ji that the party shares her grief over this issue, I will look into this matter, we stand with her...I am personally hurt that a BJP party person used such derogatory words against Mayawati," he said.
"This is not only a woman's issue. This is a man's issue," said TMC MP Derek O'Brien.
Congress leader Renuka Chowdhury stressed on the fact that the man making such remarks was none other than the vice president of the UP unit of BJP and demanded that he be arrested. "A man speaks with such language on the day both houses are discussing issues on violence on Dalits?" she said.
"The nation will not forgive BJP for this, especially with what is going in Gujarat," ANI quoted Mayawati as saying. "There are wars of thoughts and ideas in the House, but never have I used derogatory words against anyone ever," she said.
"The insulting words used against me are against all of womankind," said Mayawati. "Dayashankar Singh should be arrested. Otherwise, if in response to this people get violent, it will not be on my conscience," she added.
UP BJP vice president Dayashankar Singh's cheap remark against BSP chief Mayawati created uproar in the Parliament as Opposition leaders attacked the Modi government over the issue.
Rajya Sabha adjourned till 11 am on Thursday due to uproar over BJP leader's remark against Mayawati
"On one hand, BJP did a lot of things to celebrate Ambedkar Jayanti and assured Dalits that they will do a lot to celebrate it. On the other hand, Dalits still do not have reservation rights in the private sector," she added.
"The legal rights which Ambedkar created for the backward sections of the society will only reach the society when honest work is done for providing those rights to them," she said.
"Even after the country got independence, whether it is Congress rule or BJP rule, the sad truth is that the Dalits are still suffering," Mayawati said in the Rajya Sabha.
"There is an urgent need to change the mindset of the major political parties of the country towards Dalits," she said. "I have to tell the Union government that this is a serious matter. I ask the government to give justice to the Dalit victims in Gujarat. It is not enough to just send the Gujarat CM to meet them. Action needs to be taken against authorities which were negligent. They should be arrested," she said.
"In the name of protection of cows, a lot of unfair things are being done. Injustice against Dalits is being done in the name of protection of cows," said Mayawati in the Rajya Sabha.
Crimes against Dalits being done in the name of cow protection, says Mayawati
"Instead of making Dalits a political weapon, Congress, BJP and other parties should be reminded that they should rise above petty politics and work for the development of backward sections," she said.
"The victims often do not get justice in case of a CID probe," said Mayawati in the Rajya Sabha. "Gujarat government did not act quickly enough. It was only when the media picked up this issue that some action was taken."
"This Una incident case should run in a fast track court. We also demand that one of the judges should be a Dalit," Mayawati said. "Forget about Dalits getting justice, even their FIR is not filed many times and the latest example is the Una (Gujrat) incident," she also said.
After the Rajya Sabha hotly debated this issue, Kurien called for adjournment of the House till 12 pm.
Deputy Chariman PJ Kurien denies that the House is taking the subject lightly. Rajya Sabha is currently debating Aam Aadmi Party lawmaker Bhagwant Mann's video of him entering Parliament by crossing several security layers. Mann then posted it on social media, inviting attack from MPs across party line, who termed his act as a security breach.
In the video, which went viral, Mann was seen showing entry gate through which MPs enter Parliament House and saying how strong is the security. "The car is registered with the Lok Sabha. It has a censor, which has the vehicle details. As soon as so you come near the gate, the censor identifies the car and announces the name and number of the car," Mann says in the video with him crossing several layers of the security.
On the fifth day of the Monsoon Session (Friday), Aam Aadmi Party MLA Bhagwant Mann's filmed a video entering Parliament by crossing several security layers, which eventually caused uproar in both the Houses. Mann, who posted it on social media, invited attack from MPs across party line, who termed his act as a security breach.
As soon as the House assembled, she informed it about the action being taken on the issue which had led to the adjournment of Lok Sabha proceedings on July 22. "The inquiry committee shall inquire into the serious security implications and related aspects.... (and) suggest suitable remedial measures to avoid recurrence of such incidents in future and recommend appropriate action in the matter," the Speaker said.
The member is "advised not to attend the sittings of the House" until a decision is taken in the matter, Mahajan said. Mann was not present in the House.
The panel has also been asked to "suggest remedial measures" so that such episodes are not repeated.
Mahajan has formed the nine member panel headed by BJP MP Kirit Somaiya which includes Anandrao Adsul (Shiv Sena), Meenakshi Lekhi, Satya Pal Singh (both BJP), B Mahtab (Biju Janata Dal), Ratna De Nag (Trinamool) and K. C. Venugopal (Congress) and other members.
Therefore, the "act of the member" has put the security of the Parliament in peril, she said. Mahajan said she had consulted leaders of all political parties and everyone supported her actions on this issue.
Describing Parliament as "sanctum sanctorum" of democracy, Mahajan recalled that on 13 December, 2001, security personnel had sacrificed their lives protecting the parliament and after that entire security system was reviewed and overhauled.
It put "security of the parliament in peril", Mahajan added. Mann has been asked to appear before the panel by 10.30 am tomorrow and make his submission.
Addressing the Lok Sabha as soon as it reassembled after the weekend break, Mahajan said taking audio video footage of security zones in the parliament by Punjab's Sangrur MP Mann on July 21 and putting them on social networking site was improper.
"The act of the member of audio-visual recording of the Parliament and posting it on the social media puts the security of Parliament in peril," the Speaker said, adding that several members had expressed concern over the issue on Friday last.
The panel, chaired by BJP member Kirit Somaiya, has been asked to submit its report by August 3, while Mann has time till tomorrow morning to submit his explanation to the committee.
Acting tough, Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan today said AAP MP Bhagwant Mann's videography of the Parliament House complex had put its security "in peril" and asked him not to attend the House till a decision is taken on the matter while setting up a nine-member panel to probe the issue.
The Lok Sabha is likely to discuss The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Bill today. Apart from this, the Lower House is also slated to discuss The Institutes of Technology (Amendment) Bill.
Sasikala Pushpa began crying in the House over the issue of attacks on women in the country. She has alleged that she was harassed and was being forced to quit her post.
"So what if we disagreed with you? This is not the country we are used to living in," O'Brien said. "The Prime Minister needs to come in the House and say that we can live in the India we know, the India of unity and diversity."
"For Rs 15, they (Dalits) are being killed because they are Dalits. I am a gau sevak. But in the name of gau sevaks, don't cross the line. This is a sitaution which has gone beyond the border of this country. Since they are taking these decisions, they must listen to what the UN had to say about this country," he said.
"The curb on religious fundamentalism, this is a dangerous situation. If it happens and happens and happens, it is a decision. This is a decision of this government. Otherwise, the Defence Minister would not have said what he said yesterday," TMC MP Derek O'Brien said, referring to Parrikar's remarks that Aamir Khan needs to be taught a "lesson" because of his remarks on intolerance.
An angry Parrikar responded by saying that he did not take the name of any person in the video.
"Since the BJP government came to power, they targeted Muslims first. Now, they are committing atrocities against the Dalits. The Prime Minister should come to the Parliament and clarify on what is happening," Mayawati said.
CPI(M)'s Sitaram Yechury responded to Parrikar and said, "What he said is objectionable. That cannot be acceptable. Tomorrow, are you going to threaten me? If he is raksha mantri, kiska raksha ho raha hai?"
Defence Minister Parrikar responded to the uproar in the Rajya Sabha over his remarks against Aamir Khan and said, "Let them see the video themselves and make up their minds."
"We should think about the respect for women. In Bareilly, a teacher was abducted during daytime. This is not right. The government should speak. Why is the government silent?" she said.
"There are rapes taking place against Dalit women everywhere in the country. The government should take this matter seriously," Mayawati said.
Naqvi agreed with her and said the government was ready for a discussion.
"I am really embarrassed for standing here and talking about the same issue once again, even after the Nirbhaya gangrape...I want a discussion on women's protection. I do not care which place. I do not want politicising of this issue," Jaya Bachchan said in the Rajya Sabha.
An emotional Jaya Bachchan got up in the Rajya Sabha and demanded a discussion on the issue of safety of women.
"In view of seriousness of matter, Bhagwant Mann is further advised not to attend the sessions of Parliament for further two weeks," she said.
"The chairperson (of the committee) has sought extension of time for further two weeks. I have accepted the request for extension," Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan said.
On the issue of AAP MP Bhagwant Mann being barred from the Parliament for making a video of the Parliament House complex, Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan said that the committee probing this issue had asked for more time.
Bhagwant Mann not to attend Parliament for two more weeks
"This legislation will only be passed after a serious discussion. I hope the Finance Minister passes the Bill not on the strength of his numbers, but on the basis of logic," Chidambaram said.
"Government tried to pass the GST Bill without the support of the principal Opposition and I am happy they failed," he said.
"Many issues are still outstanding issues and still need to be resolved. We had earlier tried to pass the GST Bill with the support of the Opposition and we failed," he said.
"I welcome the friendly tone of the Finance Minister's speech. I think the tone and approach has changed over the last few weeks," Congress leader and former Finance Minister P Chidambaram said.
There are still outstanding issues: Chidambaram on GST in Rajya Sabha
"The standard rate of GST should not exceed 18," he said.
"People of India expect low indirect taxes. There are many voices in the government which speak for the corporate, but someone must speak for the people. I am doing that," Chidambaram said in the Rajya Sabha.
"When this Bill is passed today, we will prepare for the next stage of the debate, which is the Central GST Bill. I want an assurance from the Finance Minister....This is a very important legislation. I want an assurance that when that Bill is brought, that will be brought as a Financial Bill and not as a Money Bill," Chidambaram said.
"Persuade all parties and sections of the people that a standard of 18 percent is the most appropriate," he added.
"The worry that we have is creeping taxation. But that is what Parliament is for. Taxation is the exclusive power of the Parliament. It is ultimately Parliament which calls the shots in taxes," he said.
"I, on behalf of my party, loudly and clearly demand that the GST rate should not exceed 18 percent," Chidambaram said in the Rajya Sabha.
Bill in next stage of GST debate should be brought as a Financial Bill: Chidambaram
Chidambaram warns that a rate too high, something like 23 percent, will be inflationary. He insists that the Bill needs to be passed as a finance Bill. The critical point we shouldnt be miss here is that the Congress is pitching for 18 percent standard GST rate and isnt ready to give up on this point in any case.
This comment is crucial since the NDA government has not yet arrived on a single rate. Chidambaram attacks the Narendra Modi government, saying it does not care about the problems of the common people. Chidambaram stresses on the point that the rate should be changed only with the permission of Parliament, and thus makes Congress compromise formula that the GST rate should be included in the GST Bill, though his party is willing to compromise on the earlier demand that the rate should be included in the constitution.
According to Firstpost Financial Editor Dinesh Unnikrishnan, P Chidambaram has hit the core point in his speech the final GST rate. Chidambaram positions Congress as the voice of poor and emphasises on the fact that standard GST rate should not exceed 18 percent on the lines of what governments chief economic advisor, Arvind Subrmanian, suggested.
"It (GST) violates states' autonomy. It results in permanent revenue loss to the state of Tamil Nadu. We strongly oppose this Bill," AIADMK MP A Navaneethakrishnan said in the Rajya Sabha.
"We have moved an amendment that the compensation should be for at least 5 years," he added.
"Tamil Nadu will lose Rs 9270 crore because of GST. This is not a small amount," he said.
"Till date, the revenue-neutral rate has not been fixed by the government," he said, adding that this was a problem in the GST Bill.
"Petroleum and petroleum products must be kept outside GST permanently. We can save our people only then," he said. "It is a well-known fact that Tamil Nadu is a manufacturing state. It is also known that this method of taxation is destination-based. We strongly oppose that," he said.
He then went on to elaborate on the changes which AIADMK wanted in the GST Bill.
"GST has different implications for different states," he said.
"The composition of the GST Council is not fair. The weightage of each state's vote should be in proportion to their representation in the country," said the AIADMK MP in the Rajya Sabha.
"Now let me tell you about the ping pong match," O'Brien said
"I'm feeling like a teenager in the presence of these senior lawyers," O'Brien said. "There is the politics of the Bill. GST can also be interpreted as the Girgit Samjhauta Tax," TMC MP Derek O'Brien said in the Rajya Sabha.
TMC MP Derek O'Brien has always been dramatic in his speeches, and his speech during the GST Bill is a perfect example.
The money has to first come from Centre to states and then from states to local bodies. If the availability of funds to local bodies gets delayed, that can seriously hamper functioning of local bodies, Patel cites. In a larger context, this problem is not for MCGB alone. It would apply to all big and small local bodies across the country in the GST regime. Patels remarks suggest the magnitude of challenge the Modi government has while implementing the revolutionary tax regime.
Patel raises the challenge of GST implementation. Under the GST regime, when various indirect taxes including sales tax, VAT and Octroi get consolidated in one uniform tax rate, will large local bodies such as MCGB get funds on time for its daily functioning? Patel asks.
Firstpost Financial Editor Dinesh Unnikrishnan says that NCP Rajya Sabha MP Praful Patel raises an interesting case of states within the states, citing the example of Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGB), which under Octroi alone garners about Rs 8000 crore to Rs 9000 crore per annum.
"The Prime Minister should come to the House apologise to the nation. If he cannot come, we will be happy even if Finance Minister Jaitley apologises," Budania said. "It was Congress which forced you to follow the right path of this Bill."
"At that time, the then Gujarat CM had said that this Bill is against the welfare of the nation. Today, the same man who is now PM, said that this Bill is benefitial for the nation," he said.
"When the Congress had brought this Bill to the Parliament, then BJP had protested against it," said Narendra Budania, Congress MP from Rajasthan.
PM Modi should apologise to the nation for his U-turn on GST Bill: Congress in Rajya Sabha
"We have given this notice for discussion to wake up the government. It is unfortunate that the Taj of Hindustan is burning but the central government cannot feel the heat. Which kind of heat will wake up the Kashmir government?" Azad said.
"Today, it has been 30 days since curfew was imposed in Jammu and Kashmir. I do not think that any state in India has seen curfew for 30 days since Independence," Congress leader Azad said.
It has been 30 days of curfew in Kashmir: Ghulam Nabi Azad in RS
"Please call for an all-party meeting and send a delegation to Kashmir," he said.
"This cannot be solved through law and order machinery," he said. "The silence of the Prime Minister is more eloquent than words. He is sending the message that the government does not care about the situation in Kashmir."
"This is one of the most grave situations I have risen in to speak. I have not seen continuous curfew for 30 days in my life. How can we remain silent? More than 1000 incidents of firing have been reported in a month. More than 8000 have been injured. 60 are dead. It is inhuman and criminal. Why are we using pellet guns? I am told that even Israel does not use pellet guns against Palestinians," CPI(M)'s Sitaram Yechury said.
Congress walks out of Lok Sabha in protest against violence faced by Dalits
"If you (BJP) were not opposing this Bill at that time, this Bill would have been passed two years ago. So, you are actually responsible for delaying the Parliament passing this Bill, but we are taking the blame," he said.
"Why was it that in 2011, some ministers who are sitting on that side were opposing this Bill?" Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge said in the Lok Sabha.
You were responsible for delaying the GST Bill: Congress tells govt in Lok Sabha
"Today, the Parliament is going to take a big step for the freedom from tax terrorism," he said. "Some people will know the condition of taxation in our country," he added.
"Today is 8 August. On this day many years ago, Mahatma Gandhi had moved the nation with 'Bharat choro' slogan," PM Narendra Modi said in the Lok Sabha.
Parliament going to take big step for freedom from tax terrorism: PM Modi in Lok Sabha
"GST means Great Step Towards Transformation. It means Great Steps Towards Transparency. 'Ek Bharat, sreshth Bharat' is everyone's dream," Modi said.
"Therefore, who won and who lost is not a matter of debate," the Prime Minister further said.
"But the credit for this Bill does not belong to one party. It belongs to the culture of Indian democracy," Modi said.
"It is true that someone created this Bill while someone else nurtured it," he said. "Just as someone gave birth to Krishna and someone else raised him," he said.
"I thank all political parties involved for this step," said PM Modi in Lok Sabha.
"The most important requirement was the creation of trust between Centre and the states. The most important thing was to not decide this on the basis of sheer numbers. That is why I have earlier said that democracy is not just about numbers," he said.
"We were successful in taking care of a lot of flaws with the GST Bill. 'Ek manch, ek manth, ek marg, ek manzil' is the mantra behind GST which all of us have experienced," the PM said.
"Sometimes, there were doubts about the GST. When I was the CM, even I had doubts about GST. And today, because of seeing GST continuously as a CM, my viewpoint changed when I viewed it as Prime Minister," Modi said.
"All Centre and states need to unite to create a mechanism for Ek Bharat," PM Modi said in the Lok Sabha.
I had different view of GST because I looked at it earlier from the point of view of a CM: PM Modi in Lok Sabha
"A message will go to the people through GST that the consumer is the king," Modi said. "GST gives a guarantee of security to small traders and businessmen. It will result in economic growth."
"Despite our differences, we made efforts to take GST forward," he said. "A uniformity in the processing of taxation will come through GST."
"In the entire discussion of GST, none of us used it as a platform for politics. We rose above politics for the welfare of the nation," Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in the Lok Sabha.
GST will send the message that the consumer is the king: PM Modi in LS
"Even during the all-party meeting, I had said that the credit for the GST Bill goes to all political parties," the Prime Minister said.
"It is a matter of great strength for Indian democracy that all of us are making efforts to take this forward together," he said.
"It is also true that we need to have IT-preparedness and legal preparedness. In the world, even the countries which are praised for their democracy find it tough to deal with Bills," he said.
"Because of GST, the taxpayer will realise that he will benefit from honesty. Therefore, we will succeed in bringing down the generation of black money," Modi said.
"There will be data integration. Because of a strong cross-checking mechanism, a seamless method which will help in catching any wrongdoing will be created," the PM said.
"GST will help in curbing corruption and black money," Modi said. "Corruption will move towards zero because of GST," he said.
"When something happens in Africa, the Prime Minister tweets about it. But when the Taj of India is burning, the heat is not reaching the central government," he added.
"We were told that he spoke on Kashmir issue in Madhya Pradesh because the CM told him to do so. This shows that the Parliament means nothing to the PM and he would not have spoken on the Kashmir issue if the Chief Minister had not asked him to do so," he said.
"This is the fourth time we are asking the Prime Minister to provide a statement in the House," Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said in the Rajya Sabha.
PM spoke on Kashmir in Madhya Pradesh just because the CM told him to do so: Azad in RS
"When you truly feel pain from the heart, it will reach Kashmir," he said.
"When you say Kashmir is an integral part of India, it should not only be on paper. There should be integration of hearts and minds. What about the integration between federal and state government?" said Azad.
"Law and order in Kashmir in not just in the hands of Jammu and Kashmir police, but also in the hands of paramilitary forces," Azad further said. "If someone says that Mehbooba Mufti should alone solve the problem in Kashmir, that is not possible for her," he added.
"Kashmir is secular. The destruction of Kashmiriyat and insaniyat is not happening because of democracy but because of the pellet guns," he said.
"There is a difference between communalism and separatism. Militants are also targeting Muslims. Militancy has no religion," Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said in the Rajya Sabha.
Law and order in Kashmir is not just Mehbooba's problem: Congress in RS
"You can only keep Kashmir in India when you treat Kashmiris as equals," he said. "Shoot the people but do not use pellet guns. Pellet Guns are worse than live bullets. It is worse than killing people," he further said.
"The Prime Minister said that the people of the country love Kashmir. But the people of Kashmir should also love the country," JD(U)'s Sharad Yadav said.
Shoot the people but don't use pellet guns: Sharad Yadav in Rajya Sabha on Kashmir issue
"Merely repeating what Atal Bihari Vajpayee said is not going to create that trust. Create that trust by stopping the communal polarisation that is taking place in the country," he said.
"If everyday you talk about abrogating Article 370, you talk about love jihad, ghar wapsi, are you creating trust?" said Yechury.
"Unless you address the central question of the promises made to the people of Kashmir at the time of independence, this problem will not be solved," he said. "The problem today can only be solved if you initiate a political dialogue. I have urging this government that this can only come through with an atmosphere of trust.
"The trust deficit exists (in Kashmir) because of the string of betrayals of the promises made," said the CPI(M) leader.
He also took a dig at the government's foreign policy and said, "When you want to wish Happy Birthday, you go to Pakistan."
"If other governments have engaged in dialogue in the past, what is preventing this government from initiating the political dialogue?" Yechury said.
"The threat we face today is not a mere question of autonomy. There is also an orchestrated terrorist threat in Kashmir," he said.
"Today, there is an attempt to create dual power in Kashmir," Dasgupta further said. "Let us remember that dialogue cannot be done if we are going to tie the hands of the executive."
"While I agree with Sitaram Yechury that we need a form of political approach, the form and time of that approach should be different," he said.
"We have been talking about development and healing hearts and unfortunately, we have come across a rather big emotional divide. At an earlier time, it was thought that Article 370 would facilitate the process of integration. But we may have actually hardened the emotional divide," he said.
"A lot of the people who have taken to the streets may be spontaneous. But there is also a large degree of pre-meditation in the protests," he said.
"That was the death of Burhan Wani. The death of any Indian should be a source of anguish. But Burhan Wani never considered himself an Indian. And what do you say about a person who glamourises terrorism?" Dasgupta said.
"The problem we face in Kashmir today is somewhat different from the problems we have faced earlier," he said. "Three months ago, Kashmir was peaceful. We had a unique political experiment. It was an alliance between the Valley and Jammu, something which was unique and encouraging. And then something broke loose," he added.
"While we try to evolve a consensus on this issue, we should sometimes be brutally frank about what we are dealing with," Swapan Dasgupta, nominated MP, said in the Rajya Sabha.
"I wish people in this Parliament talked about sending a delegation to AIIMS, where a girl injured by pellet guns is admitted," he said.
"Why do we only remember Kashmir when it is burning? Guns will not solve any problem," he said. "The people of this country should understand what the problem in Jammu and Kashmir is."
"Why wasn't there any problem in Kashmir until 1987?" said a dramatic PDP MP Nazir Ahmad Laway in the Rajya Sabha.
Why do we remember Kashmir only when it is burning? asks PDP MP in Rajya Sabha
Congress MP Jyotiraditya Scindia: When we are talking about Swachh Bharat, we should first clean our minds. Fringe elements have now turned into the Centre today. Why the Home Minister didn't visit Rohith Vemula?
PM made a strong statement: Shoot me, not the Dalits. But why he didn't include Muslims? Muslims can never be part of Hindu nationalism but they are a part of Indian nationalism.
Sexual violence against Dalit women has increased. About eight lakh Dalits are dependent on selling skins, bones of dead cows, what will they do now?
AIMIM MP Asaduddin Owaisi: No democracy in the world has prioritise animal life over human life. But the Indian democracy has. Why do gua rakshaks have come to power? The credit goes to the idealogy of ruling party. What right do so-called gau rakshaks have to look at what I eat?
NK Premchandran, RSP MP from Kollam: The attrocities against the Dalits is politics. Educational, economical and social upliftment is the need of the poor.
We all should work together and committ ourselves in taking action in order to stop the atrocities on Dalit. Also, I would appeal all the state governments to take strictest action against anti-social elements who try to disrupt the harmony of secular fabric of the country.
It is pointless to blame the other government. Why did we celebrate Ambedkar's 125th anniversary with such genuinty? Respecting Ambedkar is like respecting India.
Seva Bharati, an RSS organisation, is one of the organisations which has been majorly active at the grassroots for the upliftment of Dalits.
Dalit community has contributed a lot towards Indian heritage. When India was under the British Rule, no matter how atrocities were inflicted on them, still they stood by India. They never demanded a separate country. We in the government emphathise with the Dalits.
On PM Modi's silence, Singh said, "Has any PM spoken during all discussions in Parliament? When PM spoke on the atrocities, and gau rakshaks, I issued an advisory that strict action should be taken against such gau rakshaks.
Our biggest challenge is to counter the twisted mentality of the perpetrators. What happened in Una was extremely condemnable.
"This is rumour that after BJP came to power that the atrocities on Dalit have increased. Just ask yourselves if this is true. Show me the data records. I don't want to point fingers at any political party. But following figures would explain: In 2013, 39,346 cases were registered against atrocities, 40,300 and 35,564 were registered respectively," Singh said.
"We can make India world's best country if we consider humanity above all. There are many articles in our Indian constitution for Dalits. But there is a need for effective laws to act on these articles. Our government is working at socio-economic development of the Dalits."
"It is painful that even after 70 years of independence we are still discussing atrocities on Dalits. We cannot deny that there are people from several castes and religion. We should not politicise the atrocities on Dalits," Singh said.
Home Minister Rajnath Singh replies to the discussion on atrocities on Dalits in Lok Sabha:
Bills for consideration and passing in the Rajya Sabha are Appropriation No.3 Bill, 2016, Employee's Compensation (Amendment) Bill, 2016, Taxation Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2016, Factories (Amendment) Bill, 2016.
On Friday, 12 August, 2016 the bills for consideration and passing in the Lok Sabha are Mental Health care Bill,2016 and Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2016.
Congress leader Anand Sharma said that the government should not be hypocritical. He said, "When administrators have high salary, MLAs have a good rise, why don't we get the same treatment?"
Ram Gopal Yadav, SP, Uttar Pradesh raised the issue of the low wages of the members of Parliament. He said, "The pay of the MP's is only a fraction of ministers in Telangana Assembly or Delhi Legislative Assembly. We are asked to reduce our expenditure but we cannot do that when we have to entertain people of our constituency. The rising inflation also makes it difficult for us to sustain ourselves."
In the Question Hour in the Lok Sabha Congress leader Shashi Tharoor raised the issue of failing start-ups in India. He said, "The government has given tax incentives to the start-ups but everyone knows that they don't make any money in the first few years. Hence the tax incentives should be given to the angel investors."
After GST this is the second resolution which has been adopted unanimously.
She added, "This house earnestly appeals to all sections of society in India to work for the early restoration of normalcy and harmony. This is to restore confidence in people and youth in general. The resolution is adopted unanimously."
Lok Sabha speaker Sumitra Mahajan announced that the resolutions proposed on the Kashmir issue has been passed. She said,"This house expresses serious concern over the violence in Kashmir Valley. Everyone here conveys loss of life caused by the deteriorating situation. The house is of the firm view that there cannot be a compromise on security."
A significant bill aimed at putting in place a single common examination for medical and
dental courses was on Tuesday passed by the Lok Sabha, with the government saying even private colleges will be under its ambit.
The Indian Medical Council (Amendment) Bill, 2016 and the The Dentists (Amendment) Bill, 2016 provides a Constitutional status to the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) examination" which is intended to be introduced in the academic session next year.
With the second day of the Parliament's Monsoon session, the BJD and JD(U) members demanded a separate Ministry to deal with natural calamities like flood and drought, even as they sought a more pro-active approach by the Centre in releasing funds to affected states.
Participating in a discussion in Rajya Sabha on a Calling Attention Motion regarding the situation arising due to floods, several leaders also questioned the official data on damages caused in the calamities and sought steps to put in place a warning system for floods and cloudbursts.
Responding to the members, Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju admitted that 196 people have lost their lives, 2,184 cattle perished and 38,285 houses and huts damaged besides 0.357 lakh hectares of crop area damaged this year due to floods.
He, however, said the primary responsibility to deal with natural calamities lies with the state government concerned. Maintaining that the country received heavy rainfall from June to September each year during the southwest monsoons, he said "the rainfall during this period accounts for about 70-90 percent of the total rainfall over India. As a consequence of this rainfall, flooding of rivers is a natural phenomenon."
Dilip Kumar Tirkey (BJD) sought a separate Ministry to deal with the calamities saying the present system of having the department under the Home Ministry, was not functioning well.
He got support from JD(U) leader Sharad Yadav who questioned the effectiveness of the National Disaster Management Authority and also demanded a separate Ministry to take care of the matter.
Many other leaders questions the effectiveness of the concerned authorities and agencies.
"You talk about steps taken after the flood, but what are the steps being taken for prevention of flood," questioned A U Singh Deo of BJD.
He said that there was urban flooding, river side flooding and flooding in the hills due to various reasons, including rampant construction activity.
Deo said it was a national shame that New Delhi also gets flooded even after an hour of rain.
Raising the issue of Polavaram project, he accused the Chhattisgarh government to making barrages despite objections by Odisha and sought a meeting at the level of Prime Minister or the Home Minister to resolve the issue.
The much awaited session of the Parliament began on Monday with the BJP government expecting the passage of the GST bill to pave through, started with Speaker Sumitra Mahajan paying tribute to Dalpat Singh Paraste, Lok Sabha MP Shahdol in Madhya Pradesh who passed away on 1 June.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi introduced the new ministers of his cabinet to the members of Parliament, as per the custom.
However, soon after Modis address, the Lok Sabha was adjourned till Tuesday to pay tribute to Paraste.
Lok Sabha adjourns till tomorrow on account of passing away of Dalpat Singh Paraste, Lok Sabha MP from Shahdol (Madhya Pradesh) ANI (@ANI_news) July 18, 2016
After the adjournment, Modi moved to the Upper House to oversee the oath-taking ceremony of new Rajya Sabha members, including senior Congress leader P Chidambaram, Union minister Piyush Goyal and NCP leader Praful Patel, who was cheered by members of the House.
Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad gave a notice in the Rajya Sabha to discuss the violence in Kashmir.
In view of the ongoing unrest in the volatile state of Jammu and Kashmir, the matter was discussed extensively in the House with Azad leading the discussion.
Opposition Parties accused the government of mismanaging Kashmir issue
Azad began the discussion on the Kashmir issue by questioning the use of excessive force in the state. The attitude of the central government should be that of a parent when it comes to Jammu and Kashmir," he said.
The Congress leader further said that the problem in Kashmir has multiple aspects. The internal situation of Kashmir, role of central and state government and external forces, especially Pakistan, have influenced the prevailing situation, he said.
He further talked about the incompetence of the BJP while working for the development of the state. "What the Congress had done to end militancy, no one can ever do even in 50 years," Azad added.
He further asked the government to distinguish between the common people and the militants, adding that both cannot be treated in the same way.
Before ending his speech, Azad expressed his partys support to end militancy but made it amply clear that he does not approve of the way civilians are treated in Kashmir.
While blaming Pakistan for the rapidly deteriorating situation in the state, he sent out a strong message for them : People who stay in homes made of glass should not throw stones at others. We are capable and we beg you (Pakistan) to leave us alone with our problems.
Naresh Agarwal of SP also attacked Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif over his comments after violence in Kashmir. Sharif had declared that they will observe Black Day on 19 July and called Burhan Wani a soldier.
Agarwal reiterated Azads view that the people of Kashmir have no trust in the central government.
Derek oBrien of TMC accused the union government of mishandling the Kashmir situation. He also urged the government to comprehend and effectively use the power of the digital media.
Sharad Yadav of the JD(U) also lashed out at the Modi government, saying, "Even your government admits that the people injured in this conflict are common people of India.
CPI(M) leader Sitaram Yechury said that the government could not use Pakistan as an excuse for all their problems. He said that the power of diplomacy was available to the government to deal with Pakistan. "I will not accept that this problem is just one created by Pakistan or separatists," he said.
Yechury further appealed to the government to convene an all-party meeting on the Kashmir issue.
Satish Chandra Misra of BSP urged the people of Kashmir to assist the government and maintain calm.
Newly elected member NCP leader Praful Patel said, "I won't blame any government but let's unite as a country and work to restore peace in the Kashmir Valley. He also said that the very existence of the Pakistan army is to keep the fight between India and Pakistan going.
Azad addressed the House again to bring up the issue of lack of essential commodities to the people of Kashmir. Essential commodities, like LPG and medicines, are still not available in Kashmir, he said.
Government responds by blaming Pakistan
Arun Jaitley spoke on behalf of the central government. "We agree with the Congress that the situation in Jammu and Kashmir is very serious. The situation was more than normal till now. It was a bumper tourist season and that sends out a message to the whole world. The state's economy is healthier because of that. We had even expected that pilgrims will be more for Amarnath yatra. But thinking that PDP-BJP government is behind the Kashmir unrest is a political thought. I am not going to stand here and recall Congress' history with Kashmir," he said.
He added that Pakistan has never accepted Kashmir as part of India, which has led to three conventional wars.
Rajnath Singh too addressed the House to respond to the allegations of the Opposition parties. He defended Modi and said that the entire government is worried about the escalating tension in Kashmir.
According to a report that Singh cited, 1948 civilians have been injured up till now and 1671 security personnel. He said that Wani worked with Pakistan to wage jihad in India and the situation in Kashmir is sponsored by Pakistan.
Singh assured Azad that the Centre will try its best to make essential commodities available to the people of Kashmir.
Apart from the unrest in Kashmir, which dominated the House proceeding on the first day of the monsoon session, atrocities on Dalits, GST and the clean Ganga mission was also discussed.
BSP chief Mayawati raised the issue of recent incident in which some members of the dalit community, engaged in skinning dead animals, were beaten up in Gujarat in the Question Hour.
Congress leader P Chidambaram said that Azad and Anand Sharma have held talks with Jaitley, who has promised to come back with concrete proposals. Congress will respond after looking at the draft, he added.
Questions were raised about the steps taken by the government to clean river Ganga. Water Resources minister Uma Bharti responded by saying that industries have been warned not even to release the treated water In the holy river.
After an eventful day and substantial discussion on important issues, the Rajya Sabha was also adjourned.
The second day of Parliament's Monsoon session saw passage of three bills that were hugely debated and discussed in both the houses. While Lok Sabha passed Medical Council (Amendment) Bill and Dentists (Amendment) Bill to replace the NEET ordinances, the Upper House passed the much debated Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2012 on Tuesday.
Here are the highlights of the second day of Parliament's Monsoon Session:
Bills introduced in Lok Sabha
- Bill to bring six new IITs, ISM under IIT Act
A bill, introduced by HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar, aims at bringing the six new IITs as well as the Indian School of Mines (ISM), Dhanbad under the ambit of the IIT Act.
HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar, who introduced the bill, in the statement of objects and reasons said the government has set up six new IITs as registered societies.
"These institutes need to be brought within the ambit of the aforesaid Act for the purpose of declaring them as institutions of national importance," he said.
The bill also aims at declaring ISM Dhanbad as an institute of national importance, integrate it with the IIT system and it would be called IIT (Indian School of Mines), Dhanbad.
The new IITs which the bill intends to incorporate in the system are IIT Tirupati, IIT Palakkad, IIT Goa, IIT Dharwar, IIT Bhilai and IIT Jammu.
Javadekar also introduced The National Institutes of Technology, Science Education and Research (Amendment) Bill, 2016 in the Lok Sabha.
This bill aims at amending the National Institutes of Technology, Science Education and Research Act of 2007 and proposes the establishment of a NIT in Andhra Pradesh with effect from 20 August, 2015 which has has already been set up as registered society.
-Bill to amend Citizenship Act
Keeping its promise to provide succour to refugees from neighbouring countries, the government introduced a bill to amend the Citizenship Act so that Hindus, Sikhs and other minorities of these nations could be granted citizenship even if they do not provide required documents.
Introducing the bill, Home Minister Rajnath Singh said many persons of Indian origin of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan have applied for citizenship but unable to provide proof of their Indian origin.
Singh said hence they are forced to apply for citizenship by naturalisation under the Citizenship Act which required 12 years of residency as qualifications for naturalisation in terms of the law.
This denies them many opportunities and advantages which are available only to Indian citizens even though they are likely to stay in India permanently, he said.
"It is proposed to amend the Schedule 3 of the Act to make applicants belonging to minority communities from the aforesaid countries eligible for citizenship by naturalisation in 7 years instead of existing 12 years," he said.
- Govt moves High Courts (Alteration of Names) Bill
A day after Calcutta High Court judges unanimously rejected a proposal seeking to rename Bombay, Madras and Calcutta high courts to reflect the change in the names of cities they are located in government moved a bill in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday.
Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad introduced the High Courts (Alteration of Names) Bill which, once passed by Parliament, will replace Bombay, Madras and Calcutta with Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata respectively in the names of corresponding high courts.
Issues raised and debated in Lok Sabha
- Suspected Islamic State links of 21 missing people from Kerala
MPs from Kerala raised the issue of 21 people from the state who have gone missing and are suspected to have links with terror group Islamic State while asking the government to confirm whether they have joined any the banned organisation.
"There are some unconfirmed media reports that they have joined some terrorist organisation. It should be confirmed only by the central investigating agency, that is, NIA," KC Venugopal (Cong) said.
He alleged that there is a deliberate attempt to spread out "Islamophobia" among the people and said that all Muslim organisations and influential Islamic scholars in the country have criticised and rejected the radical ideology put forward by the Islamic State.
"The government should come forward and say if they have got any information about it. They should come forward and clear the ambiguity," he said.
P Karunakaran (CPI) said it was a very serious matter and asked the government to take all possible steps to find them and reveal the reasons for their disappearance.
- Spiralling prices of of essential goods including drugs
P Karunakaran (CPI) also said, "Prices of essential goods including drugs are increasing. Price is increasing due to the malpractices of traders who create artificial shortage."
BB Patil (TRS) raised the issue of price rise and sought government's intervention in this regard.
"Prices of essential goods including drugs are increasing. Price is increasing due to the malpractices of traders who create artificial shortage," he said.
Patil said that it is high time that the government should have a control on the prices of essential goods and drugs.
- Killing of 10 CRPF commandos in IED blast in Bihar on 18 July
On the killing of 10 CRPF commandos in IED blast in Bihar on Monday, Sushil Kumar Singh (BJP) said that the state government is not being able to handle the situation.
"The state government has no interest in resolving the matter. Poor and innocent are getting killed in these blasts. This is a danger to India's internal security," he said.
He asked the Union government to put pressure on the state to do policing and developmental work.
Ram Prasad Sarmah (BJP) said there was a "tremendous increase" in jihadi activities in Assam.
"Those jihadis, who are intruding from Bangladesh, are also making Assam their playing field. I would request the government to fully seal the border between India and Bangladesh," he said.
Issues raised and debated in Rajya Sabha
- Release of Indian fishermen
MPs sought government intervention in ensuring the release of a large number of Indian fishermen, arrested by the Sri Lankan navy in the recent past. Vijila Sathyananth (AIADMK) raised the issue of arrest of fishermen by Sri Lankan Navy, blaming it for infringing upon rights of Indian fishermen. She said four fishermen were arrested on 15 July and asked the Centre to ensure their immediate release and sought immediate intervention of the Ministry of External Affairs to secure their release as well as that of their fishing boats.
Tiruchi Siva (DMK) also raised the issue of "atrocities" on fishermen by Sri Lankan navy, saying 76 fishermen have been arrested in the recent past. He alleged that the Lankan navy had manhandled fishermen and damanged their boats even in Indian waters. Stressing that fishermen have been rendered "totally out of profession", Siva sought immediate release of 76 fishermen and 102 fishing boats.
- Neglect of historic National Musuem at Kolkata
P Bhattacharya (Cong) raised the issue of neglect of historic National Musuem at Kolkata and complained that the Centre was not paying enough attention to the library. He said senior posts at the library are lying vacant and the post of Director there has been vacant for long time. He urged the central government to ensure that such an old and historic library is run properly.
- Issue of brutal rape of the 14-year-old Kabbadi player in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra
Rajani Patil (Congress) raised the issue of brutal rape and killing of a 14-year old Kabaddi player in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra and demand stringent punishment for the accused. "The fear of law has to be established in minds of criminals," she said.
Husain Dalwai (Cong) demanded a House Committee to investigate the incident.
- Categorising Scheduled Castes for job reservation in jobs and education
Ananda Bhaskar Rapuolu (Congress) demanded powers to the state government to categorise Scheduled Castes (SC) for reservation in jobs and education.
- Oil fields in Assam
Ripun Bora (Congress) said Assam was "burning" for last 25 days and there was agitation going on against the Petroleum Ministry's decision to auction 12 oil fields in the state.
He said that as per the Oil Field Regulation and Development Act 1948, the central government has to regulate and develop the fields, but the "real owner" of the land and resources was the state government.
Bora said that if oil fields in Gujarat could be handed over the state-run GSPLC by the Centre, why this cannot be done in Assam. He said Assam too has three state-run oil companies.
Asserting that the auction of the oil fields will not create jobs, he asked the Centre to scrap the decision.
- No law to regulate nursing homes and private hospitals
Naresh Agrawal (Samajwadi Party) spoke on the plight of poor people who end up spending lot of money for treatment at private hospitals or nursing homes and said there was no law to regulate nursing homes and private hospitals.
Referring to a recently unearthed kidney transplant racket, Agrawal said no action has been taken against any big hospital.
- Issue of Ram Temple
BJP leader Subramanian Swamy raised the issue of Ram temple and sought day-to-day hearing of the case in the Supreme Court for construction of the shrine in Ayodhya.
In a special mention, Swamy, a nominated member, made a demand for expediting the "steps for early listing and disposal of the case relating to dispute for construction of Ram Temple at Ayodhya".
- Pellete guns in Kashmir
Hussain Dalvai of Congress demanded immediate ban on use of pellet guns in Kashmir which
are being used for dispersing violent mobs.
- Drug menace in Goa
Shantaram Naik of Congress raised the issue of drug abuse in Goa and sought a "balanced approach" to deal with the menace.
Apparently referring to the recent controversy over such an issue in Punjab with regard to movie 'Udta Punjab', he said, "Goa should not become 'Udta Goa'.
With inputs from PTI
On 10 April, 1917, Mahatma Gandhi landed in Motihari to launch an agitation on behalf of farmers of the region. Fearing unrest and protests under his leadership, the British arrested the Mahatma and produced him in front of a magistrate.
In his eponymous film on Gandhi, Richard Attenborough describes what happened next:
Magistrate: You have been ordered out of the province on the grounds of disturbing the peace.
Gandhi (defiantly): With respect, I refuse to go.
(The magistrate stares. The journalists write. The clerk swallows.)
Magistrate (sternly): Do you want to go to jail?
Gandhi (not giving him an inch): As you wish.
(The clerk lowers his eyes to his pad. The magistrate searches the distant wall, the top of his desk and his twitching hands, for an answer.)
Magistrate (as much sternness as he can muster): All right. I will release you on bail of one hundred rupees until I reach a sentence.
Gandhi: I refuse to pay one hundred rupees.
(Again the magistrate stares. And so do the journalists. The magistrate wets his lips.)
Magistrate: Then I I will grant release without bail until I reach a decision.
I have narrated this incident for the benefit of Rahul Gandhi in the aftermath of a Supreme Court directive to him to either apologise or face trial for his remarks on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
If Rahul has an iota of Gandhi in him, if he has imbibed even a trace of the Mahatma's ideals or courage, the trait of being defiant in the face of adversity, he should learn from the Motihari episode. Instead of apologising and backing down, he should face the consequences of his words and actions.
The court has asked Rahul to face trial or apologise for his alleged reference to the RSS in connection with the Mahatma's assassination. At a rally in Thane during the 2014 election campaign, Rahul had reportedly said: RSS people killed Gandhiji and today their people (BJP) talk of himThey opposed Sardar Patel and Gandhiji.
Apart from proving his own integrity, intelligence, leadership and courage, this is a court-sent opportunity for Rahul to discuss a subject that has been mired in controversy, rumours, canards and propaganda: The Sangh's role (or its absence) in Gandhi's assassination.
Let facts come out and the debate begin.
Eight persons faced trial for Gandhi's assassination on 30 January, 1948. They were: Nathuram and Gopal Godse, Narayan Apte, Madanlal Pahwa, Vinayak Damodardas Savarkar, Vishnu Karkare, Dattatraya Parchure and a servant of Digambar Badge, a co-conspirator who turned a witness for the state. Except for Savarkar, all of them were convicted and sentenced. (Parchure's conviction was later reversed.)
Nathuram Godse, a rigid, celibate, drifter who had started out as a follower of Gandhi, was the man who pulled the trigger of the Beretta M 1934 that was used to kill Gandhi. He was sentenced to death.
Apte, the man who accompanied Godse to the gallows, was fond of the good life, whiskey and, as Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre write in Freedom At Midnight, most of the other pleasures life offered.
"For years he (Apte) had taught mathematics at an American mission high school in Ahmedabad. His real interest there had been introducing his female students to the erotic massage of the Kama Sutra rather than the principles of Algebra," write Collins and Lapierre.
Badge, the state witness, was accused of crimes ranging from murder to robbery. He was arrested 37 times before being charged for Gandhi's murder.
On 20 January, 1948, Pahwa exploded a bomb close to Gandhi during his morning prayer. His accomplices, Gopal Godse and Karkare, fled after the failed bid on the Mahatma's life. Pahwa was caught and grilled by cops. But the enquiry progressed at such a slow rate that it allowed the other assassins to mount another successful bid on Gandhi's life just a few days later.
All this, including the fact that Godse was Savarkar's devoted disciple, is well established. It is also undisputed that Godse and his co-conspirators were members of the Hindu Mahasabha and proponents of Hindutva.
The question is: Did RSS have a role in the plot? Were Gandhi's assassins its members?
Though the RSS was banned by the BJP's current poster boy and the then home minister Vallabhbhai Patel, after Gandhi's assassination no clinching evidence was found to link the assassins to the organisation.
The Jeevanlal Commission that probed Gandhi's murder noted that the "RSS and militant Hindu Mahasabha leaders" created "conditions... conducive to strong anti-Gandhi activities including a kind of encouragement to those who thought that Mahatma Gandhi's removal will bring about a millennium of Hindu Raj." But it acquitted the RSS of charges of direct involvement.
In a piece titled RSS and Godse for the Frontline, AG Noorani says Gandhi's secretary Pyarelal was convinced of the Sangh's role in the conspiracy. ...members of the RSS at some places had been instructed beforehand to tune in their radio sets on the fateful Friday for the good news, and sweets were distributed by the members at many places, Noorani quotes the secretary.
Then there was the quote attributed to Gopal Godse: All the brothers were in the RSS. Nathuram, Dattatreya, myself and Govind. You can say we grew up in the RSS rather than in our home. It was like a family to us. Nathuram had become a baudhik karyavah [intellectual worker] in the RSS." At the launch of his book, Godse was quoted saying he had never left the RSS but the organisation disowned them because its leaders were scared after Gandhi's assassination.
The RSS maintains that Godse had left the organisation in 1933 and had in fact starting despising the organisation.
All this shows that Rahul is not the first Indian to have linked the RSS to Gandhi's assassination. Several attempts have been made in the past to connect the organisation to the conspirators and murderers. The RSS has challenged all these versions, calling them lies and malicious propaganda.
Is it right to cast aspersions on an entire organisation just because of the acts of certain individuals? This questions can be debated later. But, there needs to be some clarity on the ideological and political roots of the men who killed Gandhi.
New Delhi: Rajya Sabha on Tuesday passed a bill which prohibits employment of children below 14 years in all occupations or processes except where the child helps his family, with the provision for imprisonment up to two years for any violation.
'The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Bill' makes employment of children below 14 years as cognizable offence for employers and provides for penalty for parents.
The Bill, which was almost unanimously passed by voice vote, defines children between 14-18 years as adolescents and lays down that they should not be employed in any hazardous occupations and processes.
It provides for enhanced punishment for violators. The penalty for employing a child has been increased to imprisonment between 6 months and two years (from 3 months to one year) or a fine of Rs 20,000 to Rs 50,000 (from Rs 10,000-20,000) or both.
The second time offence will attract imprisonment of one year to three years from the earlier 6 months and two years.
According to provisions of the Bill, no child should be employed in any occupation or process except where he or she helps his family after school hours or helps his family in fields, home based work, forest gathering or attends technical institutions during vacations for the purpose of learning.
Hailing the development as a "historic" step, Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya said it is aimed at "total abolition of child labour".
Explaining the exception, Dattatreya said that 'family' has been exempted as the relationship between employer and employee does not exist and that a law should be framed keeping in mind the ground realities as well as ensuring that it is implementable.
Recalling his own childhood, he said even he used to help his family.
Earlier, participating in the debate on the Child Labour Bill, Satyanarayan Jatia (BJP) stressed the need for proper coordination among three ministries responsible for formulating schemes for welfare of children.
Three ministries - Human Resources Development, Women and Child Development and Labour should come out with composite schemes for welfare of child labour and trade unions should be consulted while formulating these, Jatiya said.
Ravi Prakash Verma (SP) alleged, "India has become an organised system for exploitation of children" and "it is a matter of shame" that government is working in piecemeal.
He alleged that unfortunately the government is pressing for the Bill despite a Parliamentary Standing Committee saying that changes are not good.
Verma said it seems the government is doing this to promote "ease of doing business" and has surrendered before the industrial lobby instead of eliminating child labour.
Warning that "India is on the brink of a demographic disaster" he said one of the accused in Nirbhaya case was child labour and is an example of moral degradation.
A Navaneethakrishnan (AIADMK) rued that recommendations of parliamentary standing committee on Labour has not been incorporated in the Bill.
Vivek Gupta (Trinamool) said while agriculture has been put under non-hazardous category in the bill, it involves hazards like spray of pesticide. He added that family enterprises like carpet weaving, beedi making too were hazardous for the children.
Jharna Das Baidya (CPI-M) said her party strongly opposes the Bill as it is a move towards legalising child labour.
"We are opposing the bill as it is an exit road by the government to allow children to work," she said.
At the same time, she said five states - Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra -- accounted for more than 50 per cent of the child labour.
She added that Uttar Pradesh has the highest concentration of child labour with every fifth child labour belonging to UP.
Baidya demanded that government should immediately initiate steps for welfare of such children.
Sarojini Hembram (BJD), in her maiden speech, stressed the need for monitoring of child labour at district level for their welfare.
There is a need for monitoring of child labour at district level and it may be done through the respective members of Parliament, she said.
Shaadi Lal Batra (Cong) stressed on providing education to children so that they could earn money and support family, and do not get engaged anti-social activities.
He said 40 per cent families fall in the BPL category and they find it difficult to send their children for studies. Batra said such families should be given some stipend to support study of their children.
Rajaram (BSP) said the nodal authority to monitor the application is the district magistrate, who already has a lot of duties and responsibilities. A separate authority should be appointed to check its implementation.
Nominated member Narendra Jadhav said the meaning of 'Hazardous Occupation' in the bill needs to be specified.
D Raja (CPI) said he has "very strong reservations" on the bill and wanted it to be referred to the Select Committee for further scrutiny.
He too asked the government to clarify the definition of 'Hazardous Occupation' as well as to elaborate on the definition of 'Family Enterprise'.
Renuka Chowdhury (Congress) said child labour is an "oxymoron" as associating child with labour is in itself destroying childhood.
"We need to address child labour in relation of all other sectors of development and progress. Poverty is a big element and it plays a major role in child labour," she added.
She too raised the issue of the definitions of 'Hazardous Occupation', adding that the government has cut down the number of hazardous occupation from 18 to 3 and asked the
government to explain it.
R Ramakrishna (BJP) said there is a need to look into the issue where the children between 14 to 18 years can be employed even if they have not completed their elementary education.
He also said there should be guidelines for child actors who work in mega serials that run for long periods of time.
K Keshava Rao (TRS) said he is supporting the bill, but is "unhappy" with it. He too attacked the definition of hazardous occupation as well as the monitoring system.
Kanimozhi (DMK) questioned whether the members will accept that their children come from schools and go to work in their family enterprise.
She added that inter-ministerial coordination is crucial for effective implementation of rehabilitation of children.
Madhusudan Mistry (Congress) said that the state labour department lacks infrastructure and questioned its ability to monitor the implementation of the bill.
BEIRUT/WASHINGTON Montreal academic Homa Hoodfar was preparing to return to Canada from Iran in March when agents from Iran's powerful paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps raided her Tehran home and took her laptop, phone, books and passport, her family said.
Over the course of the next three months, Hoodfar, an Iranian, Canadian and Irish citizen, was called in regularly for day-long interrogations. On June 6, she went in for yet another interrogation session but was not released.
Nine days later, the hardline Mashregh site, which is affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, published what it alleged were her crimes: creating security problems within the Islamic Republic by taking part in feminist activities.
It pointed to her link with Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML), a network of women and organisations that do advocacy and academic work.
Hoodfar's niece said the 65-year old anthropology and sociology professor at Concordia University in Montreal was in Iran on a personal trip.
Those allegations are not backed with any facts and theyre baseless, Amanda Ghahremani told Reuters by phone from Canada.
Attempts to reach the Revolutionary Guards via their official news site and the media office of the Iranian judiciary for comment were unsuccessful. There was no immediate comment from Iran's U.N. mission in New York to Reuters about the arrest of dual-national Iranians.
In the past nine months, the Revolutionary Guards have arrested at least six dual-national Iranians, their friends and family members say, the highest number of Iranians with dual-nationality detained at one time in recent years to have been acknowledged. The government has confirmed most of the detentions, without giving details of any charges.
Analysts say the circumstances are often similar: arrest on arrival or departure from Tehrans airport, the announcement of a period of interrogation followed by a hardline website publishing a list of alleged crimes, usually plotting to overthrow the government, before they set foot in court.
The Iranian government does not recognise dual nationality, which prevents relevant Western embassies from seeing individuals who have been detained.
In March, the U.S. State Department issued a warning noting that Iranian-Americans are particularly at risk of being detained or imprisoned if they travel to Iran.
According to former prisoners, families of current ones and diplomats, in some cases the detainees are kept to be used for a prisoner exchange with Western countries. In January, the United States and Iran reached a historic prisoner swap deal that saw Iranians held or charged in the US, mostly for sanctions violations, released in return for Americans imprisoned in Iran.
Among the dual-nationals currently being held is Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, an Iranian-British citizen, who was detained at Tehran's airport in April while travelling with her two-year old daughter. Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 37, works for the Thomson-Reuters foundation, a London-based charity that is independent of Thomson Reuters and operates independently of Reuters News.
Monique Villa, the foundation's CEO, said Zaghari-Ratcliffe had no dealings with Iran in her professional capacity.
Last month, the Revolutionary Guards in a statement accused Zaghari-Ratcliffe of trying to topple the government, a charge that her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, called preposterous.
In late June, Zaghari-Ratcliffes lead interrogator presented an unusual proposal: her husband should pressure the UK government "to reach an agreement" and in exchange her case would be closed before going to court. The interrogator did not give any further details on what the agreement would entail, Ratcliffe told Reuters.
He said he relayed the proposal to the UK Foreign Office and was told they had no information about any agreement.
The interrogator also told her mother during a visit to Evin prison last Wednesday that the agreement he was referring to was an "exchange," Ratcliffe added.
The UK Foreign Office has raised Zaghari-Ratcliffe's case with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and other senior Iranian officials but its representatives in Tehran have not been granted access to see her, according to a Foreign Office spokeswoman who replied to a query from Reuters.
The timing of the detentions appears to undermine President Hassan Rouhanis outreach to the West after signing the nuclear deal last summer, analysts say.
In October, Siamak Namazi, former head of strategic planning for Crescent Petroleum in Dubai, was arrested in Tehran. The Iranian American had previously worked as a consultant in Iran for years encouraging foreign firms to invest in the Islamic Republic.
Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Namazi's arrest appeared to be designed to send a signal to other dual-nationals who could potentially help foreign firms invest in the country.
The risk of detention would deter wealthy dual-national Iranians from the diaspora from investing in Iran, which would reduce economic competition with the Guards, he said.
The Revolutionary Guards are the most powerful military force in Iran with business interests worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
Namazis father Baquer, an 80-year-old former official with the United Nations' Childrens Fund, went to Iran last February and was also arrested. Baquer, who is also Iranian-American, is now in Evin prison with his son.
There was no immediate response from Crescent Petroleum.
A key event in the foundation of the Islamic Republic was the capture of 52 employees at the US embassy in Tehran in 1979 who were held hostage for 444 days.
Hostage-taking for political goals continued through the 1980s when Hezbollah, which was founded, trained and funded by Iran, captured Western hostages, including Americans in Lebanon. The complex deal to swap those US hostages for arms shipped to Iran became known as the Iran-Contra affair.
Last January, four Iranian-Americans held in Iran, including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, were released as part of an exchange. Seven Iranians held or charged in the US, mostly for sanctions violations, were granted clemency in return.
Last week, Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi announced that indictments had been issued for Hoodfar, Siamak Namazi and Zaghari-Ratcliffe and that their cases are being transferred to court for processing, according to the judiciarys official news site Mizan.
No details were provided about what charges any of them face.
(Reporting by Babak Dehghanpisheh and Yeganeh Torbati; Editing by Samia Nakhoul and Philippa Fletcher)
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Wilson Barreto was blinded by a Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) bomb attack in Bogota when he was 19 years old.
Now, he is featured in a documentary naked, standing in Bogota's Bolivar Plaza with more than 6,000 other Colombians from all sides of the civil war, which began in the early 1960s.
The short film, "Keep Walking Colombia," released to coincide with the country's Independence Day, charts the stories of five Colombians as they take part in American photographer Spencer Tunick's most recent nude photo art project.
"After the attack, I don't remember a thing. I woke up five days later and my fellow officers had already been buried," Barreto said. "It was very hard, waking up in the day, opening my eyes and seeing nothing."
Also appearing in the documentary is Maria del Pilar Navarrete, who talked about the abduction and disappearance of her husband, Hector Jaime Beltran, following a 1985 assault on Bogota's Palace of Justice by M-19 rebels, in which over 100 people died, including almost half of the country's Supreme Court justices.
"On 6th November, it will be 30 years and six months since I last saw my husband," Navarrete said, underscoring that her role in Tunick's project made her feel as though she was "paying homage" to her husband.
"I'm going to bare my soul and my body to tell everyone who he was," she added.
More than two weeks ago, FARC leaders and the government announced a ceasefire deal in Cuba after talks that lasted almost four years.
President Juan Manuel Santos has said the peace talks, aimed at ending a conflict which has killed more than 220,000 and displaced millions, may conclude as early as this month. Any deal would be put to Colombians for approval in a public vote.
Beyond the official processes towards peace, Navarrete says a lasting outcome will depend on the people.
"True peace is born from being able to understand each other, take each other by the hand, hug each other and say, 'We will move forward'," said Navarrete.
Tunick's photographs will be exhibited in Bogota's Museum of Modern Art later this year, while each of the participants will receive a limited edition print.
The film, which is being presented by Scotch whisky brand Johnnie Walker and the Bogota Museum of Modern Art, can be seen at: (youtu.be/eFtaVzy70aQ)
(Reporting by Antonia Eklund; Writing by Melissa Fares in New York; Editing by Alan Crosby)
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Berlin: Europe cannot be intimated by terrorism, said German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier as he expressed his sadness at the deaths of two German school students and their teacher in last week's attack in Nice, France.
"We will not allow ourselves to be intimidated," Steinmeier said as he confirmed that the students and the teacher from Berlin's Paula-Fuerst school had died.
"(We) continue to stand side by side with our European and international partners against hate, violence and terror.
"It is difficult to put our grief into words," the Paula-Fuerst school wrote in a statement, adding that its thoughts were now with the relatives and friends of those who died.
Baton Rouge Police Department(BATON ROUGE, La.) -- Montrell Jackson, one of the law enforcement officers killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was the kind of person who would pull over to help strangers change flat tires.
"He went out of his way to try to help all people," his uncle, Charles Cavalier, told ABC station KTRK-TV in Houston. "He went that extra mile,"
Jackson, a 32-year-old husband and father, was among the three officers killed by gunman Gavin Long in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Sunday morning. Three other officers were wounded.
Jackson "loved his community, and he loved being a police officer," Cavalier said. Jackson served on the force 10 years.
Baton Rouge Police Chief Carl Dabadie Jr. said at a press conference Monday that he was Jackson's instructor at the police academy.
"For 20 weeks I tested Montrell physically, mentally and emotionally, every single day," Dabadie said. "Montrell stood tall every day and never wavered. Never quit. His heart was in service to this community."
Dabadie said that a couple of days before the shooting, he was talking to the department's officers, "trying to lift their spirits. Montrell ended up giving me a pep talk."
The chief said, "That was the last time I spoke to Montrell, and I'll never forget it."
Montrell Jackson and his wife, Trenisha Jackson, were together 10 years, and their son turned 4 months old Monday, Dabadie said.
"Montrell was my everything," Trenisha Jackson said in a message that Dabadie read aloud. "He was an amazing husband, an outstanding father, respectful son and a loving brother and an amazing uncle."
He loved his fellow officers, his job and his city, she said.
"Knowing this is what gives me a little peace and comfort," she said. "I know he made the ultimate sacrifice and paid the ultimate price in doing what he loved protecting and serving a city that he loved."
Montrell Jackson wrote on Facebook July 8 after the fatal police shooting of a black man in Baton Rouge on July 5 and the murder of five police officers in Dallas on July 7 that he had "experienced so much in my short life and these last 3 days have tested me to the core."
"I swear to God I love this city, but I wonder if this city loves me," he wrote. "Please don't let hate infect your heart."
U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch echoed Jackson's thoughts Monday. "We are devastated by [Jackson's] passing and that of his comrades," she said. "But if we are truly to honor his service and mourn his loss and the loss of his friends and colleagues and of too many others who have been taken from us we must not let hatred infect our hearts. We must remember that no matter who we are, we all feel the same pain when we lose a friend or loved one. We all share the same hopes for our children's future and the same anxiety for their safety."
Copyright 2016, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
Paris: French lawmakers were set to debate an extension to the country's state of emergency measures on Tuesday, as some of the victims were still being identified after an attack in Nice last week that left 84 people dead.
The state of emergency measures, implemented after terrorist attacks around Paris in November in which 130 people were killed, were set to expire at the end of July. With the rampage on Bastille Day in Nice, the third large-scale act on French soil in 19 months, officials are puzzling over how the seemingly lone attacker radicalized so quickly.
While officials have said that France continues to face a extremely high security threat, French President Francois Hollande said in a television interview last week that there was no need to extend the measures as legal mechanisms to fight against terrorism had been ramped up in parliament.
That changed after the attack in Nice. Hollande said in the hours after a truck ploughed down a crowded 2-kilometre strip in the southern city during Bastille Day celebrations that the emergency measures would be extended.
Some parts of the emergency measures that had not been approved for extension through the summer sporting events that France hosted were set to be reincorporated - including police power to conduct house searches without a warrant, a government spokesman said.
A debate has erupted in France over whether the government has done enough to protect the country, despite having taken a series of steps to ramp up security.
But officials are still trying to find formal ties between the man identified as the Nice attacker, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, and terrorist networks.
While Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, the 31-year-old, Tunisian-born truck driver had not shown signs of radicalization until just weeks before the attack, prosecutors said.
In Nice, the seaside promenade that was targeted was re-opening to traffic, as flowers and tributes accumulated near the place where 84 people were killed and more than 300 injured last week.
Two German school students and a teacher on a class trip to Nice were among victims of the attack, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said on Tuesday.
The students were part of a group of 28 students from the Paula-Fuerst school in Berlin, who had joined celebrations on Nice's seafront promenade marking France's national day.
Five Italians were also among the victims, according to the Italian Foreign Ministry.
BERLIN Two of the five victims of a young Afghan refugee who used a knife and axe to attack passengers on a train in southern Germany are in a critical condition, police in the town of Wuerzburg said on Tuesday.
"We have several badly wounded from the attack - five altogether - of which two victims are in a life-threatening condition," a police official said.
(Reporting by Caroline Copley and Paul Carrel)
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Berlin: There is no evidence to suggest that a teenaged Afghan who injured five people on a commuter train in southern Germany with a knife and axe had ties to an Islamist terrorist network, Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Hermann said Tuesday.
A hand-painted Islamic State flag and Pashto-language writings found in the Afghan refugee's room - including a goodbye letter to his father and a text calling on Muslims to arm themselves - is evidence suggesting he "radicalized himself," Hermann said during a press conference.
German police shot the 17-year-old dead late Monday following the attack, when he turned on them after fleeing the scene of the crime. Police say they are still investigating whether he was motivated by radical Islam.
Earlier on Tuesday, the Islamic State extremist group claimed responsibility for the attack through the affiliated Aamaq News Agency.
The teen was an "Islamic State fighter" and "carried out the operation in response to calls to target states in the coalition fighting Islamic State," the news agency said via its channels on the secure messaging app Telegram.
The teen's stabbing spree with a knife and an axe took place at 9:15 pm (1915 GMT) on a commuter train near the southern German city of Wuerzburg. He reportedly yelled an "Allahu Akbar" (God is great) before being shot dead by police.
The Aamaq claim is typical of the way Islamic State has sought to claim responsibility for recent so-called lone wolf attacks. The claim is phrased in the same way as the group's claim of the truck attack that killed 84 people in southern France last week.
Analysts say Islamic State claims such attackers as members even if they have had no prior contact with the group, as long as they have pledged allegiance to the group's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Official statements from Germany contradicted the claim of responsibility. Justice Minister Heiko Maas referred to the Afghan as a "lone perpetrator" who had "not coordinated [his actions] with third parties."
Though the teen's motive has not yet been established, similar attacks in Germany have been linked to radical forms of Islam, if not organized networks.
In May, a man allegedly shouted "Allahu Akbar" before killing one person and wounding three at a train station near Munich.
Four of the five victims of Monday's attack were members of a family of tourists from Hong Kong.
The 62-year-old father, his 58-year-old wife, their daughter, 26, and her boyfriend, 30, were injured, while the couple's 17-year-old son escaped unscathed.
Another person sustained minor injuries as the attacker was fleeing the scene, while 14 train passengers suffered from shock.
Three of the victims are still in critical condition, according to the Wuerzburg hospital where they are receiving treatment.
A witness who lives near the location where the train was brought to a halt told dpa the compartment looked "like a slaughterhouse" after the attack.
The Afghan is one of nearly 15,000 unaccompanied minors who applied for asylum in Germany in 2015, according to the BAMF agency for refugees. Many of them suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
He came to Germany as an asylum seeker "over a year ago," and lived in a home for young refugees until was placed with a foster family in a town near Wuerzburg two weeks ago, according to Hermann.
"Witnesses have not described him as in any way radicalized or fanatic," Hermann said. "He went to mosques on Muslim holidays but did not seem particularly devout."
German police have also launched an internal investigation into whether shooting him dead was justified, a spokesman said.
Renate Kuenast, a leading politician from Germany's Green Party, has criticized the police's behaviour, saying he should have been incapacitated - not killed.
GUATEMALA CITY A former army captain convicted of murdering a Guatemalan bishop was killed on Monday in a prison riot in which 13 people died, the National Institute of Forensic Sciences said.
A spokesman for the institute said the death of Byron Lima Oliva, who was serving 20 years for the murder of Bishop Juan Gerardi in 1998, took place in Pavoncito, a prison 18 miles (30 km) from the capital, Guatemala City.
Twelve other inmates were killed in the riot, said spokesman Roberto Garza. A defence attorney for Lima, Moises Galindo, said he did not know the motive for the attack.
The killing of the bishop was one of the most notorious crimes in recent Guatemalan history.
Gerardi was killed on April 26, 1998, two days after presenting testimony about atrocities committed by the military in Guatemala's civil war, mainly against indigenous populations.
About 250,000 people were killed in the civil war, which ran from 1960 to 1996.
In recent years, Lima became infamous for heading a criminal network inside and outside the prison system, running illicit businesses including food stalls and a transportation enterprise for relatives of inmates from his prison cell.
(Reporting by Sofia Menchu; Writing by Natalie Schachar; Editing by Peter Cooney)
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MEXICO CITY Gunmen killed eight fishermen in the popular Mexican surf resort of Puerto Escondido late on Monday, prosecutors said, in a rare shooting for a part of the country that has largely avoided serious gang violence.
The shark fishermen were in a house in the Pacific port when the gunmen entered and opened fire. Four were killed at the scene while the other four died soon after being taken to a local hospital, prosecutors from the southern state of Oaxaca said on Tuesday.
One of the main lines of investigation is whether the men also engaged in other activities at sea aside from fishing, the prosecutors said in a statement.
Monitored by federal police and the Mexican Navy, the coast of Oaxaca is a strategic point for traffickers moving drugs from Central and South America to the United States. Shark hunters fish offshore using vessels larger than ordinary fishing boats.
More than 120,000 people have been killed in Mexico in violence linked to drug gangs since the start of 2007.
Famous for the powerful waves that roll into the Zicatela beach, Puerto Escondido is a small resort frequented by visitors from the United States and Europe, particularly Italians.
(Reporting by Anahi Rama and Lizbeth Diaz; Writing by Alizeh Kohari; Editing by Dave Graham and Andrew Hay)
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GENEVA Dozens of people have fallen ill with suspected cholera in South Sudan's capital of Juba, while a U.N. food warehouse was looted and destroyed, incurring $20 million of damage, the United Nations said on Tuesday.
"We expect a huge humanitarian crisis. Even before the current crisis, the health system in South Sudan was facing a crisis due to near economic collapse," World Health Organization spokeswoman Fadela Chaib said.
Cholera is a type of acute watery diarrhoea which kills fewer than 1 percent of sufferers if there is proper treatment with oral rehydration salts, according to the World Health Organisation.
But conditions in Juba, where fighting erupted on July 7 between forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and those loyal to his deputy, Riek Machar, are far from ideal, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) says.
The fighting uprooted about 36,000 people who sought shelter at U.N. compounds, and 14,900 are still displaced, IOM said.
Other parts of the country have subsequently reported clashes, and the U.N. has recommended aid agencies reduce staff in hotspot locations.
Over 5,000 people fled to Uganda, almost all women and children who had walked for days, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said.
The violence in Juba prompted many traders and markets to shut down, and insecurity along supply routes meant food supplies were likely to dwindle further, the U.N.'s World Food Programme (WFP) said.
South Sudan has 4.8 million people who are severely short of food, and about 1.6 million people who have been displaced since a civil war broke out in December 2013. A further 743,000 have fled the country, a number the U.N. expects to reach 1 million in the coming months.
WFP lost 4,500 tonnes of commodities as well as vehicles, fuel, office and IT equipment when its warehouse was looted. The losses included specialised foods aimed at reducing "unprecedented" rates of malnutrition.
Two U.N. aircraft were also damaged in the fighting.
WFP is now considering moving food stocks to safe locations and airdropping food to some areas outside Juba, but the government is restricting its helicopter movements.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization also said seeds and tools had been looted from its warehouse, just weeks before harvesting of the main maize and sorghum crop and a second planting season.
IOM, which is mapping potential disease hotspots and setting up oral reydration stations, has a health care clinic at Tong Ping, where one suspected cholera case was identified on July 16. IOM teams are building additional latrines.
"As more people continue to arrive at the site, concerns are increasing over the impact of the rainy season and the spread of other waterborne diseases. Without proper drainage, the rainy season can lead to flooding and extremely muddy conditions for IDPs (internally displaced persons)," an IOM statement said.
Chaib said estimates of the suspected number of cholera victims ranged from about 30 to 70, including six or seven deaths, but laboratory confirmation of the disease was pending.
(Reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by Stephanie Nebehay and Catherine Evans)
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ROME Some 3,200 migrants were plucked from overcrowded boats off the coast of Libya on Tuesday and one dead body was recovered, Italy's coast guard said, as people smugglers operating in Libya took advantage of calm seas and warm weather.
A coast guard spokesman said the smugglers had sent at least 26 boats toward Italy, the latest in a tide of migrants fleeing war and poverty in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
Three Italian navy ships took part in rescues, picking up more than 1,000 of those brought to safety. British and Spanish ships operating within the European Union's anti-people-smuggling mission also conducted rescues.
The Doctors Without Borders charity and migrant rescue groups MOAS and Sea Watch also participated. An Irish navy ship and a private tug boat completed the cast of rescuers.
A deal struck between the EU and Turkey and border closures have helped to stem the flow of migrants from the Middle East and Asia coming through Turkey and Greece. But Italy has received about the same number of migrants setting off from North Africa this year as during the same period of 2015.
As of Monday, 79,861 migrants had arrived in Italy by sea, compared with 83,119 during the same period of last year, while the number of migrants arriving in Greece from Turkey was down 95 percent. [nB5N18F00F]
Almost 3,000 boat migrants have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean this year, according to the International Organization for Migration.
(Reporting by Steve Scherer and Isla Binnie; Editing by Kevin Liffey and James Dalgleish)
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YANGON Myanmar's powerful army chief and Aung San Suu Kyi, head of the newly elected government, made a rare public appearance together on Tuesday during annual celebrations of independence hero General Aung San, Suu Kyi's father.
Relations between Min Aung Hlaing, the head of the armed forces, and Suu Kyi will define the success of Myanmar's emergence from decades of isolation and military rule that began when the army seized power in 1962.
For the first time in years, the army chief paid respects at a mausoleum dedicated to Aung San. He and other military officials also visited Suu Kyi's house, where the Nobel Peace Prize winner spent 15 years under house arrest.
"Platoons, raise your arms - salute fallen leaders," a soldier said in a loud voice as ministers and parliament members bowed their heads, while military men saluted to the sound of trumpets at Yangon's Martyrs' Mausoleum.
"This behaviour will help promote the military's respect among the people," said Aung Shin, historian and editor of D-Wave journal, a publication of the National League for Democracy party led by Suu Kyi.
Aung San has remained a powerful force in Myanmar's politics in the 69 years since his death. His image has been used not only by Suu Kyi but also by her political rivals to give themselves legitimacy and gain popular support among a public that still largely reveres him.
That admiration was on full display on the streets of Yangon, where hundreds of people wearing headbands, colourful T-shirts with Aung San's name and inscriptions "We won't forget July 19" lined up to visit historic sites related to him.
"I feel like this time is very different from the previous five years I've attended this ceremony," said Zaw Zaw Aung, 22.
Aung San fought with the Japanese against the colonial British who ruled Myanmar, then Burma, during World War II, before switching sides to drive out the Japanese and set Myanmar on the path to independence.
On July 19, 1947, Aung San, then 32, was gunned down along with several colleagues by political rivals. The assassination plot has never been fully explained. A year later, Aung San's dream of an independent Myanmar was realized.
In death, he became a symbol of Myanmar's struggle for independence. But use of his image was curbed by the military junta starting in 1988 for fear of bolstering his daughter, who had returned to Myanmar from England and emerged as the leading figure in the country's democracy movement.
(Editing by Hugh Lawson)
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JERUSALEM A Palestinian boy was killed on Tuesday during a clash with Israeli troops in the occupied West Bank on the outskirts of Arab East Jerusalem, the Palestinian health ministry said.
Muhey al-Tabakhi, 12, died in a Palestinian hospital of a wound inflicted by a projectile that struck his chest and caused heart failure, a ministry spokesman said.
An Israeli police spokeswoman said paramilitary Border Police officers used only tear gas and stun grenades in the clash at al-Ram after a petrol bomb was thrown at forces and that initial details at hand suggested there had been no firing.
Earlier, a Palestinian assailant who stabbed two Israeli soldiers and wounded them lightly in an incident near the occupied West Bank town of Hebron on Monday, died of wounds in an Israeli hospital, officials said.
Since October, Palestinian street attacks have killed at least 33 Israelis and two visiting Americans. Israel has killed at least 204 Palestinians, 138 of whom it said were assailants. Others were killed during clashes and protests.
Palestinian stabbings, shootings, rock throwing and car rammings against Israelis that began late last year and included almost daily incidents have tapered off significantly and attacks have become less frequent.
Palestinian leaders say assailants have acted out of desperation over the collapse of peace talks in 2014 and Israeli settlement expansion in occupied territory that Palestinians seek for an independent state. Most countries view the settlements as illegal. Israel disputes this.
Israel says incitement in the Palestinian media and personal problems at home have been important factors that have spurred assailants, often teenagers, to launch attacks.
Tensions over Jewish access to a contested Jerusalem holy site, revered by Muslims as Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary) and Jews as Temple Mount, have also fuelled the violence.
(Reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi, writing by Ori Lewis, editing by Larry King)
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Islamabad: Pakistani authorities have barred the family of a murdered social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch from legally "forgiving" their son for strangling her, sources said, in a rare stand against the so-called practice of "honour killings".
Muhammad Waseem drugged and strangled Baloch on Friday, in a murder that has shocked Pakistan, a deeply conservative Muslim nation, where the 26-year-old both titillated and outraged with her risque social media photos and videos.
Waseem told media he had "no regrets" about killing his sister as she violated the family's honour by her social media pictures, including "selfie" photographs with prominent Muslim cleric Abdul Qavi. In a video post with Qavi, she appears to sit on his lap.
A police source said the government of Punjab, the country's largest province, has made it impossible for the family to forgive the son who murdered her, a common legal loophole that sees many honour killings go unpunished in Pakistan. "It was done on the instructions of the government. But it happens rarely," said the Punjab police official.
A senior government official in Islamabad confirmed the order came from the Punjab government.
More than 500 people, almost all of them women, die in honour killings in Pakistan every year, usually at the hands of relatives who believe the person has brought shame upon the family.
It was not immediately clear if the Punjab government's decision would lead to any meaningful reforms. An anti-honour killing bill that aims to close the family forgiveness loophole has been bogged down in Parliament. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in February promised to speed up the passage of the proposed law, but right groups say there has been no progress.
"There is no honour in killing in the name of honour," Sharif said about Baloch's murder, according to his daughter, Maryam.
Baloch's father, Muhammad Azeem, has filed a police complaint against Waseem and another one of his sons for their roles in Baloch's murder.
The police also said they were widening their investigations to include Qavi, the Muslim cleric who was removed from a prominent Muslim committee after the selfie photos were published. He has denied any wrongdoing.
Baloch built a modelling career on the back of her social media fame and was the family breadwinner. The media often described her as Pakistan's Kim Kardashian and she called herself a modern-day feminist.
But her pictures and videos outraged religious conservatives who viewed her as a disgrace to the cultural values of Islam and Pakistan. She often received death threats.
After a harsh primary, Republicans kicked off Donald Trump's general election campaign with a warm and personal validation from his wife, Melania Trump, who emotionally assured GOP convention delegates and voters across the country that the brash candidate has the character and determination to unite a divided nation
"If you want someone to fight for you and your country, I can assure you, he is the guy," Mrs Trump told delegates in her highest profile appearance of the presidential campaign.
Her husband made a brief, but showy entrance, into the convention hall to introduce her, emerging from shadows and declaring, "We're going to win, we're going to win so big." He returned to the stage after his wife's remarks, greeting her warmly with a kiss and cheering her on along with the crowd.
Melania Trump's appearance was a sharp contrast to most of the night's other speakers, who painted a bleak picture of an American future that they said only her husband can correct. The evening's "Make America Safe Again" theme took on new resonance given the nation's unsettlingly violent summer.
A parade of speakers told detailed stories about deadly combat missions and loved ones killed at the hands of people in the United States illegally. And they cast the turbulent times as a direct result of weak leadership by President Barack Obama and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who spent four years in the administration.
"Who would trust Hillary Clinton to protect them? I wouldn't," Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said in one of the night's most fiery addresses.
Many of the party's past and future stars were glaringly missing from the lineup, underscoring the concerns some GOP leaders have with closely aligning themselves with Trump. The businessman has cast aside decades of Republican orthodoxy in his unexpected political rise, creating a crisis within the GOP about its future.
Republican divisions erupted briefly on the convention floor Monday afternoon after party officials adopted rules by a shouted voice vote. Anti-Trump forces seeking to derail his nomination responded with loud and angry chants, though they were quickly quieted and there were no lingering signs of the protests as delegates returned to the cavernous convention hall for the evening program.
Trump hoped the chaos would be little more than a footnote. Despite persistent party divisions, his campaign is confident Republicans will come together behind their shared disdain for Clinton.
Convention speakers highlighted at length the deadly 2012 attacks on Americans in Benghazi, Libya, while Clinton was serving as Secretary of State. The mother of one of the victims choked back tears as she personally blamed Clinton for her son's death and accused her of giving a false explanation for the attack.
"If Hilary Clinton can't give us the truth, why should we give her the presidency," Pat Smith said.
The convention comes amid a wrenching period of violence and unrest, both in the United States and around the world. In a matter of weeks, Americans have seen deadly police shootings, a shocking ambush of police in Texas and escalating racial tensions, not to mention a failed coup in Turkey and gruesome Bastille Day attack in Nice, France. Three police officers were killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on the eve of the convention's opening day.
Convention speakers relentlessly cast the troubling times as a result of ineffective leadership by President Barack Obama and Clinton, who spent four years in his administration.
"Hillary Clinton cannot be trusted. Her judgment and character are not suited to be sitting in the most powerful office in the world," said Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa. Ernst is one of the Republican Party's rising stars, but the speaking schedule had her appearing late in the night before a nearly empty hall.
Trump has been vague about how he would put the nation on a different course, offering virtually no details of his policy prescriptions despite repeated vows to be tough.
Campaign chairman Paul Manafort said Trump would "eventually" outline policy specifics but not at the convention. However, Trump said in a Monday night interview with Fox News that his convention speech Thursday would discuss a "major, major" tax cut, immigration, getting rid of burdensome regulations and taking care of veterans.
The line-up of speakers and no-shows for the four-night convention was a visual representation of Trump's struggles to unify Republicans. From the party's former presidents to the host state governor, many leaders were staying away from the convention stage, or Cleveland altogether, wary of being linked to a man whose proposals and temperament have sparked an identity crisis within the GOP.
Trump's team insists that by the end of the week, Republicans will plunge into the general election campaign united in their mission to defeat Clinton. But campaign officials undermined their own effort Monday by picking a fight with Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who is not attending the convention and has yet to endorse Trump."
Manafort, in remarks to reporters at a Bloomberg breakfast, called Kasich "petulant" and said the governor was "embarrassing" his party in his home state.
Even some of those participating in the convention seemed to be avoiding their party's nominee. When House Speaker Paul Ryan spoke to Wisconsin delegates Monday morning, he made no mention of Trump in his remarks.
Ryan, asked at a later event whether Trump was really a conservative, said: "Define conservative; he's not my kind of conservative."
One delegate said everyone fell in love with her. Another compared her to Jackie Kennedy.
Melania Trump's star turn at the Republican National Convention Monday night captivated a GOP crowd that had rarely heard from her through months of her husband's tumultuous 2016 White House campaign.
Her speech also drew attention after the discovery that two passages of her remarks matched nearly word-for-word the speech that first lady Michelle Obama delivered in 2008 at the Democratic National Convention. The passages in question focused on lessons that Trump's wife says she learned from her parents and the relevance of their lessons in her experience as a mother. Melania's address was otherwise distinct from the address that Michelle Obama gave when then-Sen. Barack Obama was being nominated for president.
Trump's campaign had no immediate reaction when asked about the similarities in the two speeches. White House officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment late Monday evening.
On the whole, Melania presented a softer and gentler candidate. She said: "He is tough when he has to be, but he is also kind and fair and caring. This kindness is not always noted, but it is there for all to see. That is one reason I fell in love with him to begin with."
The Slovenian-born former model, 24 years her husband's junior, also reintroduced herself, showing poise as well as devotion to her adopted country and to her husband's cause. Melania, appearing in a striking white dress with elbow-length sleeves ending in big, puffy cuffs, spoke after an uncharacteristically brief introduction from her husband, who kissed her and called her "my wife, an amazing mother, an incredible woman."
Prior to Monday, Melania had spoken on her husband's behalf only a few times, and briefly, and her remarks on Monday lasted roughly 10 minutes as she spoke slowly in heavily accented English. But afterward delegates were gushing.
"I think she's going to be a great asset. She's just magnificent," said John Salm, a delegate from Virginia. "Honestly she reminds me of Jackie Kennedy."
"I think everybody fell in love with her tonight," said Deedee Kelly, a delegate from Omaha, Nebraska. "She seemed to talk from her heart, she really did."
The 46-year-old made clear her love for her husband, testifying to a softer side of the blustering real estate mogul the country knows. And without dwelling on her own humble upbringing in an industrial town in what was then a part of communist Yugoslavia, she spoke of her family, her sister Ines, her "elegant and hard-working mother Amalia," and her father Viktor, who "instilled in me a passion for business and travel."
"From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say," Melania said, adding that she has passed those values to the couple's 10-year-old son, Barron.
Melania also gave a hint of what she might try to do as first lady.
"I will use that wonderful privilege to try to help people in our country who need it the most," she said, describing helping children and women as "one of the many causes dear to my heart."
Even as she largely avoided the spotlight prior to Monday, Mrs. Trump briefly became an issue in the race in March, when an anti-Trump super PAC released an ad with a risque photo of her from a GQ magazine photo shoot, showing her handcuffed to a briefcase, lying on a fur blanket.
"Meet Melania Trump. Your Next First Lady," the ad said.
Trump responded by re-tweeting side-by-side images of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's wife, with an unflattering grimace, and Melania in a gauzy, glamorous pose.
If Trump were to be elected president, Melania would be the only first lady who is the third wife of a president and the first to be born and raised in a communist nation. She wouldn't be the first model Pat Nixon and Betty Ford both modeled, too. And Louisa Adams, who was born in England, was the first president's wife to be born in another country.
The glitter and glitz of being Donald Trump's wife is a far cry from the sleepy southeastern industrial town of Sevnica, where she was born in 1970 as Melanija Knavs. Her father was a car dealer while her mother worked in a textile factory. The family lived in apartment blocks overlooking a river and smoking factory chimneys.
She found an escape through modeling when she was spotted in the Slovenian capital by a photographer. At age 16, she took modeling jobs in Milan and Paris. She changed her name to Melania Knauss and settled in New York in 1996. Two years later, she met her future husband at a party in Manhattan.
Cleveland: Making a strong case against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, top Republican leaders on Tuesday described her as a careless and dishonest person who has put America at extremely high risk.
"I have called on Hillary Clinton to drop out of the race because she put our nations security at extremely high risk
with her careless use of a private email server," Lieutenant General (rtd) Michael Flynn said capping up hours of anti-
Clinton rhetoric at the Republican National Convention.
"If I did a tenth of what she did, I would be in jail. Crooked Hillary Clinton leave this race now!" he said amidst
a loud applause from the audience and shouting of slogans "Lock her up".
Michael McCaul, Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, alleged that Clinton is the architect of the "failed" foreign policy of the Obama Administration.
"Today our allies no longer trust us, our adversaries no longer fear us, and our enemies are plotting against us. This did not happen by accident, it happened by design," he said.
"It is the work of Barack Obamaand the architect of his failed foreign policy, Hillary Clinton. For years they
presided over America's retreat. And the consequence is clear-leading from behind has led us into danger," he said.
Senator Jeff Sessions alleged that Clinton as president plans more taxes, more regulation, more immigration and more
debt. "She has been a champion of globalist trade agreements. But the facts are in. They have not worked for our people," he
said.
"When those agreements were signed, Presidents Clinton and Obama promised our dangerous trade deficits with China and
Korea would be reduced. But, the deficit with China has increased five-fold and the deficit with Korea doubled. These
are job-killing numbers. Worst of all, they are now pushing the disastrous 5,554-page Obama trade the Trans-Pacific
Partnership agreement," he added.
Senator Joni Ernest alleged that Clinton cannot be trusted."Her judgment and character are not suited to be sitting
in the most powerful office in the world. She has already failed us too many times before," she alleged.
"Hillary Clinton has failed to stop the expansion of terrorismher policies in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria
have created more safe havens for terrorism. Shockingly, she continues to support a policy that brings captured terrorists
into our back yards. All of us up here believe thats unacceptable," she said.
"She jeopardized our safety by deciding our laws don't apply to her, setting up her own private e-mail server and
then lying about how it was used," Ernest alleged.
"She has proven time and again that she is entirely unfit to serve our nation as Commander-in-Chief," the Senator said.
"And releasing terrorists will not end this war; on the contrary, it simply emboldens the terrorists and prolongs
war. Under Barack Obama, we have no coherent strategy to protect our citizens, and under Hillary Clinton, it will be
more of the same," he said.
Ankara: Turkey jailed over two dozen generals, including a former air force chief, on suspicion of planning the coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as Ankara on Tuesday stepped up a relentless crackdown, despite international concern.
Erdogan has denounced the coup, which left more than 300 dead on all sides, as a treacherous bid to oust him from power devised from the Pennsylvania compound of his arch-enemy, the US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen.
But with the authorities detaining over 7,500 people so far in a massive legal crackdown, Turkey's EU and NATO allies have urged Ankara to keep the rule of law in place.
Erdogan's suggestion that the death penalty in Turkey could be reinstated has sent shudders through Europe and sparked warnings such a move would be the nail in the coffin of its already embattled EU bid.
An Ankara court late on Monday placed under arrest 26 former generals suspected of planning the coup, including former Turkish air force chief General Akin Ozturk, whom some Turkish media have painted as the mastermind of the plot.
The generals have now been jailed ahead of their trials, a date for which has not been sent.
They have been charged with crimes including seeking to overturn the constitutional order, leading an armed group and seeking to assassinate the president.
In his statement to prosecutors, Ozturk denied he was the coup ringleader.
"I am not the person who planned or led the coup. Who planned it and directed it, I do not know," state-run news agency Anadolu quoted him as saying.
'Betrayal of Turkish nation'
Turkey's treatment of the coup suspects has alarmed its allies especially after the suspects were paraded before the media and shown being subjected to rough treatment.
Anadolu published images of Ozturk and other suspects on the stairs inside the Ankara court house, staring blankly into the camera with their hands tied behind their backs.
Ozturk has looked tired and haggard in images published by state media, with one of his ears heavily bandaged.
The interior ministry said almost 9,000 people, including nearly 8,000 police but also municipal governors and other officials, had also been dismissed in a widening purge.
Turkey has blamed Friday's coup bid on supporters within the military of Gulen, who Ankara accused of running a group it dubs the "Fetullahci Terror Organisation".
Ankara has piled the pressure on Washington to extradite Gulen to face trial at home but US Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday he wanted to see evidence and not allegations.
Gulen said in an interview with several media outlets including AFP at his compound in the Pennsylvania that he has "no concerns personally" about the extradition request.
The United States "is a country of law," added the cleric.
"The rule of law reigns supreme here. I don't believe this government will pay attention to anything that is not legally sound."
In addition to denying his own involvement, Gulen "condemned" the coup, saying: "I have always been against military interventions in domestic politics."
He called the putsch attempt "treason, a betrayal of the Turkish nation."
'Cracking down not justice'
Turkey abolished the death penalty for all forms of crime in 2004 but the government now claims there is growing public pressure to reinstate it for the coup plotters.
Erdogan told CNN in his first media interview since the coup that he would approve any decision taken by parliament to reimpose the death penalty on Turkey's books.
"There is a clear crime of treason," he said.
But the EU which Turkey has for years tried to join in a stalled accession process warned of the consequences of such a move.
"Let me be very clear," EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini said. "No country can become an EU state if it introduces the death penalty."
Amnesty International said it was alarmed by the widening crackdown.
"The coup attempt unleashed appalling violence and those responsible for unlawful killings and other human rights abuses must be brought to justice," said John Dalhuisen, Amnesty International's Director for Europe and Central Asia.
"But cracking down on dissent and threatening to bring back the death penalty are not justice."
The president has remained in Istanbul ever since he dramatically flew back on Saturday to the city from the holiday resort of Marmaris where he was staying when the coup struck.
It was unclear when he would be coming to the capital Ankara. Every night since the coup he has spoken to supporters in the Istanbul district of Kisikli, where he has a home, urging them to maintain a "vigil" for democracy.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said 208 people were killed during the coup bid, including 145 civilians, 60 police and three loyalist soldiers.
In addition, the military said 104 coup plotters were killed.
President Barack Obama revealed in his interview with Ingrid Nilsen, an American YouTube personality that he always carries an idol of Lord Hanuman with him.
Nevertheless, this soap opera actor cum underwear model Antonio Sabato Jr is convinced that Obama is a Muslim. While campaigning for Donald Trump, on the first night of the Republican National Convention, he said "I believe we need Donald Trump, who shares my beliefs and my faith, to get our country back on track."
And, just to remind us all, how exactly does Trump feel about the Muslims?
To quote him, he wants "total and complete shutdown" of the country's borders to Muslims. Sabato possibly echoes this belief and on the sidelines of his speech, he told ABC News reporters that he "absolutely" believes Obama is a Muslim.
"We had a Muslim president for seven-and-a-half years," Sabato said, adding "I don't believe he is (a Christian)."
Sabato further escalated his attack on Obama by saying that he has seen the country take "bad turn" under the present president.
"I believe that he's on the other side... the Middle East," he further told ABC News. "He's with the bad guys."
According to CNN, Trump has been one of the most vocal skeptics about Obama's birthplace and faith. He even told Fox News that Obama does not have a birth certificate and it might say that he is a Muslim.
When Madonna suggested that Obama was a "black Muslim", Trump tweeted:
Does Madonna know something we all don't about Barack? At a concert she said "we have a black Muslim in the White House." Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 27, 2012
It is also surprising to note that a poll conducted by CNN/ORC International, 29 percent Americans think that Obama is a Muslim, including 43 percent Republicans.
The question that arises now is, if Trump wins the 2016 Presidential Election by some fluke, will he ban Obama as well?
It might be tricky, but let's hope he has more sense than that.
Six suspected Islamic State operatives were allegedly conspiring to carry out terror activities in the national capital and adjoining regions during the Ardh Kumbh in Haridwar to terrorise people, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) told a special court on Monday, reports said.
According to sources, the NIA, in its chargesheet filed before district judge Amar Nath, claimed that the accused were planning to assemble Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) from explosive materials extracted from "match sticks".
The chargesheet was filed against Akhlakur Rehman, Md Azeemushan, Md Meraj, Md Osama, Mohsin Ibrahim Sayyed and Yusuf al-Hindi under Section 120 (conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and sections 18 and 20 of Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA).
While the others were remanded to judicial custody, al-Hindi, who also goes by the name Shafi Armar, is reportedly on the run. He is the head of a group of Indian jihadists based out of Raqqa in Syria and is believed to be working for the Islamic State. Armar's arrest could be a big step for the Indian intelligence agencies, and a sign that they need to crack down on miniature terror modules inspired by the Islamic State.
In April this year, an IANS report quoted official sources and said Armar was killed during a US airstrike in Syria. The report went on to say that his death ended a large hunt of security agencies for a man considered "extremely crucial" in setting up the Islamic State's fledgling bases in India.
"The sources said India was informed by American officials about the death of Mohammed Shafi Armar, a resident of Bhatkal in Karnataka, who headed and recruited Indians for the IS and its regional franchisee Jund ul Khalifa-e-Hind (the army of the Indian caliphate)," an IANS report said. But the report was later refuted by several counter-terror organisations, who confirmed that Armar was very much alive and recruiting.
Speaking to Hindustan Times on condition of anonymity, an official said, "Some social media platforms announced Armar's death, but as per our information, he is still communicating with prospective recruits who are under the scanner of security agencies for showing jehadi tendencies."
NIA's Monday chargesheet said:
"They were conspiring to carry out a terror activity in the area of Delhi/NCR during the Ardh Kumbh festival in Haridwar in order to create terror in the minds of people of India and to send a global message that they are representatives of Islamic State in India."
It further added that the "accused owed their allegiance to Islamic State to further its activities in India by way of motivating Muslim youth in this regard, to ultimately train and prepare them to carry out terror activities in India and also to shift them to countries like Syria, Iraq etc."
"...they were conspiring to carry out terror acts by planting IEDs during the Ardh Kumbh Mela in Haridwar, and for this, they were in the process of acquiring explosives and the necessary expertise in assembling the IEDs with the help of literature provided to one of them through internet," the chargesheet added.
While this is a huge breakthrough for the agency, the bigger problem could be Armar, the mysterious recruiter who was formally an Indian Mujahideen operative, and is currently absconding.
Who is Yusuf Al-Hindi?
Al-Hindi is a common surname that is given or taken by Indian Muslims who join the Islamic State in Syria or Iraq and it is done for identification purposes. Hailing from the port town of Bhatkal in Karnataka, Yusuf al-Hindi was a former Indian Mujahideen (IM) terrorist. Wanted in previous cases related to the IM, Armar allegedly told Mudabbir Mustaq Sheikh, who along with 13 others, was arrested by the NIA in January, that he is an ally of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed Caliph of the captured territory in Syria and Iraq and the dreaded chief of Islamic State.
Armar also told Sheikh that he was a follower of Baghdadi and the Islamic State group and that he was on his way to Syria to join the terrorist organisation. Armar is four years younger than Mudabbir, who was better known as 'Abu Musab'. In fact, he was given this name by Armar, who was his Syria-based handler.
According to a report in The Indian Express, Armar is alleged to be the chief of Ansar-Ut-Tauheed (AuT), a group that pledged its allegiance to IS.
Armar's name first cropped up when NIA was investigating Islamic State-inspired suspects in Madhya Pradesh's Ratlam. While interrogating more than 30 alleged Islamic State operatives, Armar's name popped up for motivatng and radicalising the Muslim youth in India.
It was even harder to put a face to the name as the Syrian handler was only active online and "real details remained sketchy," DNA report said.
Armar recruited youngsters for the Jund ul Khalifa-e-Hind by radicalising them online and luring them to jihad. He earlier headed the Ansar-ul Tawhid fil Bilad al-Hind "Supporters of Monotheism in the land of India" a breakaway faction of the IM.
Armar had also recruited 14 Indian men who were arrested by the NIA in January while they were planning terror strikes in India. The United Arab Emirates deported three Indians in January this year who were allegedly working for Armar.
Recruiting and training
In June this year, NIA arrested five men from Hyderabad who alleged that they were members of an Islamic State cell that was operating under the command of Muhammad Shafi Armar. NIA officials, on previous occasions, have said that Armar was believed to have been in touch with at least 800 Indians through social media like Facebook and WhatsApp.
Many captured sympathisers of the terror group told interrogators that the person who communicates with them identifies himself as Yusuf al-Hindi from Bhatkal. The Islamic State, which governs a vast territory in Iraq and Syria, has a faction in Afghanistan and Pakistan called 'Wilayat-e-Khorasan'. The faction is headed by Khan Saeed, who formerly fought alongside the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan.
The special cell of the Delhi police earlier this year had arrested another suspected Islamic State operative, Mohsin Ibrahim Sayeed. Sayeed, too, had informed the police about Yusuf aka Armar.
"Yusuf tasked them to cause a blast in a train going to Hardwar or during Ardh Kumbh Mela there. For this purpose, the accused collected explosive material, received money to procure explosive materials, purchased SIM cards and mobiles and conducted recce in Haridwar," the police said.
The NIA considers Armar the brain behind the Islamic State's online recruitment in India. The five alleged Islamic State suspects, who were charged by the NIA on Monday, allegedly learned bomb-making techniques from the Syrian-based handler through social networking platforms, including Trillian, WhatsApp and Facebook.
One of the suspects charged on Monday, Akhlakur Rehman, was using Trillian, an instant messaging app that works on phones, tablets, and desktops. He used the Trillian ID "wafabhai 7861" for chatting with al-Hindi, who was available on the same platform in the name of "gummnambhai", the NIA said in the chargesheet.
"Rehman received a link on his Trillian ID regarding 'bomb banana ka asan tariqa' (easy steps to make bombs) from al-Hindi of Indian origin, a IS handler based in Syria," NIA said.
"In compliance with the instructions, they collected explosives (match stick heads)," it said. On al-Hindi's instructions, Osama and Azeemushan carried out a recce of the area of the Ardh Kumbh at Haridwar on 18 January to plant IED. They carried out a recce of other probable places also where they could plant the IEDs to send out a message to the world that they are representatives of the Islamic State in India, the NIA alleged.
The whole conspiracy was hatched at Landhaura near Haridwar in January 2016. "The necessary expertise in assembling the IEDs with the help of literature was provided to one of them through internet by Yusuf-Al-Hindi," the NIA chargesheet said.
With agency inputs
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China is closing off a part of the South China Sea for military exercises this week, the government said yesterday, days after an international tribunal ruled against Beijings claim to ownership of virtually the entire strategic waterway.
Hainans maritime administration said an area southeast of the island province would be closed from yesterday to Thursday, but gave no details about the nature of the exercises. The navy and Defense Ministry had no immediate comment.
Six governments claim territory in the South China Sea, although the area where the Chinese naval exercises are being held is not considered a particular hotspot. Chinas navy and coast guard operate extensively throughout the South China Sea and regularly stage live firing exercises in the area.
The announcement of the drills came in the middle of a three-day visit to China by the U.S. Navys top admiral, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson, to discuss the South China Sea dispute and ways to boost interactions between the two militaries.
Although the tribunals ruling was likely to be raised in Richardsons discussions, the head of the Chinese navy, Adm. Wu Shengli, did not mention it directly in opening remarks before reporters at a meeting yesterday between the two men at navy headquarters in Beijing.
Wu noted the importance both sides place on military-to-military relations and maritime security, and said the timing of Richardsons visit further elevated such concerns.
It is very helpful for us to strengthen communication between us and build confidence, Wu said. Of course it can help to improve our working and personal relationship.
Richardson made no comments before reporters were ushered from the room.
China rejected last weeks ruling by the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration in a case initiated by the Philippines, and refused to take part in the arbitration. It has responded by asserting that islands in the South China Sea are Chinas inherent territory, and says it could declare an air defense identification zone over the waters if it felt threatened.
In a further show of defiance, Beijing followed the ruling by landing two civilian aircraft on new airstrips on disputed Mischief and Subi reefs and dispatched its coast guard to block a Philippine fishing boat from reaching a contested shoal.
Beijing has increasingly criticized Washington for encouraging the Philippines to pursue the arbitration case, saying that it, along with the strong presence of the U.S. Navy in the South China Sea, was heightening tensions in the volatile region.
Last month, the United States deployed two aircraft carriers in seas east of the Philippines and started monitoring the South China Sea with guided-missile destroyers, Chinas official Xinhua News Agency said yesterday, noting that the actions came a few days before a law-abusing ad hoc tribunal issued an ill-founded award on the South China Sea arbitration case.
The official China News Service reported that Chinese air force fighters and bombers had recently conducted patrols over the South China Sea, something that is not new in itself, although the timing of the report seemed notable.
Last week, Dennis Blair, a former commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, told a congressional hearing that the United States should be willing to use military force to oppose Chinese aggression at a disputed reef off the coast of the Philippines. Blair said the objective of such an action was not to pick a fight with China at the disputed Scarborough Shoal, but to set a limit on its military coercion.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who said before the ruling that he wanted to start talks with China on the issue, has not commented on the tribunals decision, but described the territorial disputes as a complicated issue that may affect his countrys economy as well as ties with the U.S., a key treaty ally.
Duterte has been more conciliatory with China than his predecessor, Benigno Aquino III, who filed the arbitration complaint against Beijing.
The tribunal ruled that China violated international maritime law by building up artificial islands in the South China Sea that destroyed coral reefs, and by disrupting fishing and oil exploration.
Chinas island development has inflamed regional tensions, with many fearing that Beijing will use the construction of new islands complete with airfields and military facilities to extend its military reach and perhaps try to restrict navigation.
Several times in the past year, U.S. warships have deliberately sailed close to one of those islands to exercise freedom of navigation and challenge the claims. In response, China has deployed fighter jets and ships to track and warn off the American ships, and accused the U.S. of threatening its national security. AP
New British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who recently likened the European Union to Adolf Hitlers vision for Europe, came to Brussels yesterday to meet for the first time with his EU colleagues, and said he hopes to cooperate closely.
Johnson led a winning campaign to persuade British voters to leave the European Union, but said the referendums outcome last month in no sense means we are leaving Europe.
We are not going to be in any way abandoning our leading role in European cooperation and participation of all kinds, Johnson said before the start of an EU foreign ministers meeting. He said last weeks attack in Nice, France showed the need for European countries to coordinate their response to terrorism, and that he would support an EU call for restraint and moderation in Turkey following the failed military putsch there.
Despite Johnsons anti-EU stance, Federica Mogherini, the blocs foreign policy chief, told reporters that our common work on foreign and security policy continues and today we will welcome him as a new member of the family.
Johnson and Mogherini met privately in Brussels on Sunday evening and had a good exchange on the main issues on the agenda today, the EU official said.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, who has said Johnson lied a lot to turn British public opinion against the EU, said yesterday he would speak him with the greatest sincerity and frankness. Ayrault also called for a quick start to formal talks on Britains exit from the 28-nation bloc to end what he called the current situation of uncertainty as to the countrys intentions and relationship with its European partners.
Johnson, a former London mayor and Brussels-
based journalist, was appointed foreign secretary by new Prime Minister Theresa May last week.
It is very good to be here for my first overseas trip, he told reporters yesterday morning as he arrived at EU headquarters, also referring to his colleagues from other member states as our friends.
In an interview with the Daily Telegraph in May, during the referendum campaign, Johnson said the EU was trying to build a super-state, recreating the Roman Empire.
Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods, he was quoted as saying. John-Thor Dahlburg, Brussels, AP
Copper fell with most industrial metals amid speculation that credit conditions in China, the biggest user, will curb demand in the second half of the year. Nickel held last weeks advance as the Philippines shuttered more mines as part of as environmental crackdown.
While new lending figures released last week topped estimates, the stimulative effects of the easing of credit conditions in real estate look to be moderating, Barclays Plc said. Copper also retreated after data yesterday showed Chinas home-price gains tapered off last month, as second-tier cities joined some of the nations largest hubs in imposing housing curbs to cool surging prices.
Our overall read for Chinas recent economic data, as it relates to copper, is one of caution, Dane Davis, an analyst at Barclays in London, said in a report. We see few reasons to believe that this rally has staying power.
Copper for delivery in three months fell 0.8 percent to USD4,881 a metric ton by 11 a.m. on the London Metal Exchange. Prices reached $5,032 on July 13, the highest since April 29. The bourse said on Sunday that ring trading will move outside London to Chelmsford for at least a few days after a structural fault closed its building.
Metals rallied last week as investors bought commodities and equities on speculation that policy makers around the world would take steps to shore up economic growth following the U.K.s June 23 vote to leave the European Union. MDT/Bloomberg
The 30th edition of the Portuguese Language Summer Course of the University of Macau commenced yesterday with 388 participants, over a hundred students more than in last years edition.
This year, the program is divided into five language-teaching levels, from basic to advanced levels and has also launched a Portuguese-Chinese translation course.
According to one of the program coordinators, Ricardo Moutinho, two new activities will be included in the three-week event such as the study of Macaus history and a Fitness activity.
Students have the opportunity to learn new [vocations] that they will have not learned inside the classroom, he told the Times.
They will have opportunities to develop not only in the institutions space but [also in] other spaces, where they can develop [speaking and listening] capacities in Portuguese.
Aside from lectures, students would also be involved in extra-curricular activities and cultural visits to sites in Macau.
The 30th edition of the summer course attracted students from Macau, mainland China, Australia, the United Kingdom, the U.S., South Korea, Thailand and East Timor.
Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Hong Gang Jin, said the program also aims to develop skills and abilities such as communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity.
Learning in different formats, lectures, small group activities, hands on projects [] are the best way to learn a foreign language, as well as to develop global skills, she added.
Meanwhile, Pasko Ho, a participant of the course told the Times that the program would offer him more knowledge about the university and Lusophone countries.
Im going to study at UM this coming August so thats why I want to come here, said Ho. I think there are a lot of different students from other countries [] and I could [also] learn from them.
Although several students attend the course to speak the language proficiently, some students are just keen on being immersed in Portuguese culture while learning the language at the institution. Lynzy Valles
The Public Administration and Civil Service Bureau (SAFP) has denied a report published in a local newspaper, claiming that the front line civil servants who were victims of assault while performing their duties had to pay the expenses related to their care.
According to the statement from SAFP, there are several measures to ensure front line workers safety while carrying out their work. When facing situations of non-cooperation or violence that could constitute a crime against civil servants, they may request an immediate support from the police, the statement explains. If a frontline worker is implicated in a legal action while in the performance of his duties he may also solicit judiciary support.
The bureau also reaffirmed that in the event of an incident or accident in the performance of their duties which results in physical damages to the employee, he or she is granted access to health care under the law.
SAFP also recalled that in relation to civil or criminal proceedings initiated by frontline workers based on threats or injuries suffered while working, the Macau SAR government has also proposed a new measure aiming to attribute legal aid to the civil servants. The proposal was later suspended as a result of unfavorable opinions arising from society.
The governments proposal to build two tunnels connecting Taipa and the Macau peninsula has raised controversial debates within the city.
A notice published in the Official Gazette last week indicated that China Communications Construction Company (CCCC Highways Consultants Co.), a subsidiary of a state-owned transportation infrastructure group, will study the feasibility for the construction of two tunnels linking Macau and Taipa.
The Land, Public Works and Transport Bureau (DSSOPT) released information indicating that the current plan is for two tunnels to be constructed next to the Governor Nobre de Carvalho Bridge, located at Zone C and Zone D of Novos Aterros Urbanos of Taipa and Zone B of Novos Aterros Urbanos of Macau. A preliminary estimation says that each tunnel will be 1,200 meters long, comprising at least two lanes, one in the direction of Macau and the other to Taipa. Three proposals have been made regarding the project design, either featuring a tunnel on each side of the bridge or both tunnels on the same side.
Professor Sio In Way, visiting professor at the University of Macau, hopes the government can think over and over again about the connection of both sides of Macau via tunnels. In Sios opinion, the geographical conditions around the old bridge are peculiar, whereby excavating the tunnels will be a highly difficult task, not only spawning a long construction period but also incurring tremendous costs.
According to a Macao Daily News report, Sio is familiar with the soil and the geography of the place since he was involved in construction plans of several local property projects, including ones concerning large casino entities. The scholar said that the river bed under the bridge is shallow and only a few meters deep and that the first 20 meters of soil under the sea are made up of soft mud. Further below the soil, is a mixture of 30 meters of alluvium and original soil. Layers of rocks can only be found by going deeper, he said.
The facts stated above are considered by Sio to pose serious challenges when building the tunnels in the sense that in order to carry out the excavation it will be necessary to get through all the mud and soils until the layer of rocks is reached. Sio even mentioned that a past similar project in Hong Kong took the city more than ten years to finish. He also suggested that the city should consider building bridges instead of tunnels, because building a bridge, relatively speaking, is easier and takes less time and less money. He believes that building a bridge will take less than five years to construct.
The research period will last for 260 days, and a preliminary report is expected to come out by the middle of next year. Staff reporter
The Philippines crime-fighting president says he plans to ask Chinese officials why some Chinese citizens who visit his country are allegedly involved in illegal drugs.
President Rodrigo Duterte, who has vowed to end crime within six months of taking office on June 30, also said late Sunday that he would not hesitate to grant presidential pardons to law enforcers accused by human rights advocates of abusing their authority in cracking down on narcotics, as long as the soldiers and police involved tell the truth and do not fabricate evidence.
Duterte made the comments amid an outcry from rights advocates about the deaths of at least 212 suspected drug traffickers in confrontations with law enforcers since he won the May 9 presidential election.
In the town of Tanauan, south of Manila, around 1,100 drug dealers and users voluntarily surrendered to authorities Monday at a packed gymnasium, where they pledged to reform and report regularly to their village leaders after filling out forms and having their mugshots and fingerprints taken. They were also given counseling in groups by social welfare officers.
KC Saniano, Mayor Antonio Halilis chief aide, said 1,279 people were invited after their names were on a list of drug dealers and users gathered by intelligence agents and village officials. Only around 1,000 of those invited showed up, but another 100 not on the list voluntarily surrendered.
Halili warned those who were invited but did not show up, I cannot assure your safety anymore.
Duterte said 72,000 people have already surrendered since his administration launched the crackdown. He said many of the unclaimed bodies of suspected drug criminals were Chinese nationals.
Thats my lamentation, he said in a video released by his office yesterday. One day I will ask China, Why is the situation like this? I wont say why are you sending them, but why is it that most of the guys who come here do drugs, even inside jail?
Duterte said he will prepare pre-signed presidential pardons, adding, I will not hesitate to pardon 10, 15 military and policemen every day. Bullit Marquez, Tanauan, AP
HAILEY To better fit its mission of providing support to businesses throughout the Wood River Valley, The Hailey Chamber of Commerce is changing its name to The Chamber of The Wood River Valley.
While the mission of The Chamber is not changing, we felt it important to change the name to better describe the services we offer all businesses in the Wood River Valley, Chamber president Richard Stahl said. Frequently, we find ourselves working with our members in other cities in the valley and doing that under the banner of Hailey Chamber of Commerce feels a bit disingenuous. Changing the name to be more inclusive of our current membership rolls feels like the appropriate move.
The decision to change the name to The Chamber of the Wood River Valley came after several months of discussions, strategy meetings and outreach to some of the organizations membership.
The name change will not affect how we work with our member businesses in the city of Hailey or the city itself, board member Patrick Buchanan said. The Chamber has been and remains a strong supporter of the City of Hailey and looks forward to continuing our work promoting Hailey as a visitor destination in the Wood River Valley.
As part of its planning to implement the name change, the Hailey Chamber has developed a Request for Quote (RFQ) and will begin accepting quotes from local graphic artists.
Its important to note that while we want to work with a local artist, its equally important that the company or individual we choose is also a member of the Chamber, Membership Director Jeff Bacon said. The RFQ will be sent out to our entire membership and were really looking forward to seeing the response.
Information: Contact the Chamber at 208-788-3484 or members@HaileyIdaho.com.
Elk hunters can double their hunting opportunity at a discount in August by buying a second tag to extend their season and have a chance to harvest two elk.
Starting Aug. 1, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game is offering nonresident elk tags for $299 (plus $1.75 vendor fee), which is discounted from the regular price of $416. It will return to the regular price Sept. 1.
Second deer tags will not be discounted this year due to high demand but will still be available for $301.75 while supplies last.
The second-tag program has been popular with hunters. For many years, portions of the nonresident quota of 12,815 elk tags and 15,500 deer tags went unsold. Since 2000, they have been available as second tags for residents and nonresidents alike, although the majority of second tags (about 70 percent) are sold to residents.
Starting in 2014, Fish and Game discounted the second tags, but due to popularity and growing demand, only elk tags will be discounted this year, and only during August.
Second elk and deer tags can be bought at any Fish and Game office that sells licenses, at any license and tag vendor, online at idfg.idaho.gov and by phone with a credit card at 800-554-8685.
Here are frequently asked questions about nonresident tags as second tags:
Q. Who can buy a second tag?
A. Any hunter, no matter where they live, who has purchased a hunting license and a 2016 deer or elk tag starting Aug. 1.
Q. Can I buy a second deer tag?
A. Yes, but second deer tags will not be discounted this year due to high demand. Deer tags will still be available as second tags for $300 (not including vendor fees) while supplies last.
Q. Can I buy a second elk tag?
A. Yes. Second elk tags will be discounted to $299 this year during August. Starting September, any remaining tags will return to the regular nonresident price of $415.
Q. How many tags are there?
A. Supplies are limited to the available nonresident tag quota, which is 12,815 for elk and 15,500 for deer.
Q. Where can I use my second deer tag?
A. Deer tags can be used in any general hunt in the state for the selected species within their seasons.
Q. Where can I use my second elk tag?
A. When hunting elk in Idaho, you must hunt within the zone and season for which each tag is designated.
Q. Can I use a second elk tag in a different elk zone than my first tag?
A. Yes.
Q. Can I use a second tag in a capped elk zone?
A. Yes, as long as there are still nonresident tags available for that zone at the time you purchase a second tag. You must designate the zone for the hunt where the second tag will be used.
Q. If my first deer tag is a regular tag, can my second tag be a white-tailed tag?
A. Yes, and vice versa. Or they can both be the same type of deer tag.
Q. Can my second tag be a controlled hunt?
A. No. Second tags are available as over-the counter general hunt tags.
Q. How will this affect game populations?
A: There will likely be no effects, or minor ones. In 2015, second deer tags accounted for about 3.5 percent of the statewide deer harvest, and second elk tags accounted for about 1.4 percent of the statewide elk harvest. There were more than 168,000 deer and 101,000 elk tags sold in Idaho in 2015.
Because second tags are tags are already allocated for nonresident hunters, harvest is already accounted for, and there is not expected to be any negative impacts from harvest by second tag holders. In areas where populations or harvest rates fall below Fish and Games objectives, hunting rules are adjusted by limiting hunting opportunity, shortening seasons, converting to controlled hunts or limiting tags available in some areas. These restrictions would also apply to hunters using second tags.
TWIN FALLS Hollywood stuntman Eddie Braun announced Monday he will ride a rocket across the Snake River Canyon on Sept. 17.
Braun will ride a replica of the rocket Evel Knievel rode into the canyon in 1974, he says. The launch ramp is visible from Idaho Highway 50 east of the Hansen bridge.
He calls it his epic dream.
The launch is also the dream of Scott Truax, whose father, Robert Truax, designed and built the steam engine that powered Knievels Skycycle.
Knievels attempt to jump the canyon east of the Perrine Bridge failed famously, but Truax is determined to vindicate his father.
Truax began his Evel Spirit project before his father died in 2010.
My dad was a good man and a smart man, he said in January at his home in Twin Falls. Sadly, this brilliant rocket scientist is best remembered for a failure.
The team will launch Braun from Kelly Klostermans property in Jerome County and land on Kami Beals property in Twin Falls County.
The teams official announcement will come Tuesday via the Associated Press, Truax said Monday.
Braun spilled the beans Monday when he posted on Facebook a picture of a handwritten message:
On Sat. Sept. 17th I will attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon, Lord willing, in the Evel Spirit. Details to follow. Thank you so much for your support, prayers and well wishes.
JEROME A Producers Livestock employee accused of working with a state brand inspector to steal more than $6,500 from her employer has pleaded guilty to a felony count of grand theft.
Georgina Zamora, 39, of Jerome is accused of writing a $6,571.91 check to Justin Archer, 31, of Kimberly, a former state brand inspector who told police he kept half the money and gave half to Zamora.
The duo was charged in early May with felony counts of grand theft and conspiracy to commit grand theft. During a Monday arraignment, Zamora pleaded guilty to the grand theft charge, while court records show the conspiracy charge will be dismissed.
Zamora was arraigned Monday in district court after waiving her July 1 preliminary hearing. Archer, whose charges were bound over to district court after his July 1 preliminary hearing, was also set for a district court arraignment Monday, but it was delayed until Aug. 8.
During an investigation into the alleged theft, Archer told police he and Zamora had been friends for quite some time when Zamora one day pointed out that there was several thousand dollars in a hold account from the sale of cattle, court documents said.
Archer said Zamora told him this money was just sitting there and these people dont even exist anymore, court documents said. He admitted to police that he asked Zamora to write the check out to him and that they each kept half the money.
Zamora told investigators she only wrote the check out to Archer because he had asked her to, but she said she didnt split the money with Archer, court documents said. Texts between the two from March 27 seemed to show them panicking when they knew theyd been caught.
After Zamora sent a text telling Archer her bosses found records of the check, according to court documents, Archer texted back: Thought you said theyd never look at it?? We (expletive)??
Later, Archer texted, They already know what we did. I bet they will know exactly what we did Im sure.
Archer resigned as a brand inspector May 2, the same day he was arrested, Idaho State Police said in a statement at the time.
The check had no relation to Archers duties as a brand inspector and the agency will continue to cooperate with the sheriffs office and prosecutors office, ISP said in May. The Idaho State Brand Inspector expects all employees to obey all laws and maintain the highest standards of professionalism and integrity both on and off duty.
The maximum penalty for grand theft is 14 years in prison, and the maximum fine is $5,000. Zamora is set for sentencing Sep. 12.
TWIN FALLS The public comment at Monday evenings City Council meeting was shorter and more subdued than it has been for most of the past few weeks.
The public comment period has gotten longer and more contentious than usual ever since news came out last month of a five-year-old girl who, authorities say, was sexually assaulted at the Fawnbrook Apartments on June 2. Two boys, from Iraq and Sudan, have been charged. The incident prompted some to accuse city officials a coverup and renewed debate on Islam and refugee resettlement in Twin Falls. The cases against the boys are pending in juvenile court.
Mayor Shawn Barigar imposed a three-minute time limit on public comment Monday and four people spoke. Two said they support the City Councils handling of things and one appealed for help in finding a new home for the girls family, who still live at Fawnbrook near one of the families of the alleged perpetrators. The complex started eviction proceedings against both families late last month.
The last few meetings have been something of a circus and have ... made a mockery of what this body is supposed to mean and represent, Lucy Wills said.
Wills said the rancor of the past few meetings has gotten in the way of city business and public comment has become a bitter and angry attention-seeking tactic for a few. She said she, as a Christian, would not want to be associated with the views of some people who have testified at recent meetings.
Just (as) there is not room for radical Muslims in Twin Falls, I do not believe that there is any room for radical Christians in Twin Falls, she said.
But refugee resettlement opponent Terry Edwards said Council members need to remember that the 5-year-old girl, and not they, are the victims, and that they need to do their jobs.
If you cant stand the heat, get out of the kitchen, he said.
Police body cameras and the budget
The Council accepted a $127,510 bid to buy police body cameras from Taser International. And, it discussed the 2017 budget. City Manager Travis Rothweiler unveiled his proposal a week ago, and Council members will discuss it over the next few meetings before likely voting to adopt a budget at the end of August.
Monday, Rothweiler went over how his budget proposal helps to further the responsible community and internal organization areas of the citys strategic plan. The latter, he said, would be furthered by raises for city employees included in the budget, which city officials have said are necessary to stem turnover and attract qualified employees.
Public service professionals are scarce resources, Rothweiler said.
Councilman Chris Talkington again called for reducing sanitation fees on poorer seniors who dont produce a lot of garbage, saying they are effectively subsidizing pickup for people who generate more trash. Rothweiler said he is looking at ways to give them a break, but that most pickup costs are fixed, and he is looking at how this could affect the cost to other sanitation users. The city would need to figure out how to ensure the smaller can discounts are going to people who truly need them, he said.
Weve searched, Rothweiler said. We have yet to find it.
Councilman Don Hall suggested city police hire a victims advocate, saying recent events, apparently referring to the assault at Fawnbrook, highlight the need for the position. The legal system isnt always the most user-friendly, he said, and crime victims sometimes need help navigating it.
If the Council wants to do this, there is more than $200,000 in the proposed budget that hasnt been allocated Rothweiler put his proposal together with a lower estimate of how much new construction there has been than turned out to be the case. Rothweiler said hiring a victims advocate would likely cost about $62,000 a year.
RUPERT The city of Rupert swept up five awards in Southern Idaho Economic Development Organizations Operation Facelift New Look, New Attitude and New Business, a program that aims to spruce up southern Idaho downtown communities.
Rupert won the gold award for community project for its Rupert Water Tower, the gold award for business project, Rupert Kidd building, the bronze award for community project, the Rupert YMCA Community Center and the bronze award for business project, Rupert Gathering Place.
Rupert City Administrator Kelly Anthon said the contest takes months of planning and coordination between the city, private businesses and volunteers.
Anthon said hundred of volunteers turned out on June 15 to participate in the projects that had been identified by a committee.
This program is about everybody helping to make the community look better, he said.
One project from all participating southern Idaho communities was selected as the most improved business and will receive a $1,000 credit to run a television advertisement on KMVT. Lilys Dress Shop in Rupert was selected as the winner.
The two week regional effort to spruce up southern Idaho downtown communities concluded with 24 businesses, buildings and community projects completed.
The silver award for community project went to Heyburn for its post office project and the silver award for business project was awarded to Jerome for Adams Building-Decoraciones Reyla.
Jerome also received an award for the most improved facade or building with the former Dog House building on Main Street. Randy Shroll, Idaho Department of Commerce, and Joe Lozano, Idaho Department of Labor, served as judges for the projects.
Over 120 projects and nearly 2,000 volunteers have shown pride in their community by sprucing up their business districts and communities over the past six years, Shroll said. This is a terrific program we hope to see implemented throughout Idaho.
Anthon said the program brings out a good cross section of the community to help.
Anthon said the citys water tower is no longer a part of the citys water system but it would have cost $40,000 to tear it down, and because it is part of the citys communications system, it would have cost another $80,000 to replace.
The citys cost for the tower makeover was $45,000.
We preserved some of Ruperts history and saved some taxpayer money, Anthon said.
Other sponsors included KMVT, the Times-News, D.L. Evans Bank and Idaho Power.
JEROME People whose gas service was interrupted when utility crews struck a line between Third Avenue East and Fourth Avenue East on Tuesday morning were set to have their gas turned back on by Tuesday evening.
Intermountain Gas and the Jerome City Fire Department advised the residents of the 60 homes in the Third to Sixth Avenue East block from North Adams to North Cleveland to evacuate Tuesday morning, then lifted the evacuation mid-afternoon after the gas was shut off in the area.
Late Tuesday afternoon, Intermountain Gas was repairing the line. They planned to go door to door and turn peoples gas back on individually, City Administrator Mike Williams said. He said the gas company would leave door hangers advising people to call if the residents arent home.
The city opened the City Council chambers during the evacuation if anyone needed a place to go, but city officials weren't immediately aware of anyone who had taken them up.
TWIN FALLS The National Weather Service issued a red flag warning for most of Cassia County, the Wood River Valley and much of southern Twin Falls County on Tuesday and more warnings could follow this week.
The weather service warns people against burning anything outdoors and said that any fires that ignite will likely spread rapidly.
Gusty winds and low humidity were predicted for Tuesday afternoon, according to the weather services Pocatello office, with wind gusts of 25 to 30 mph expected Tuesday afternoon and early evening and afternoon humidity falling to 8 to 16 percent.
The area covered by the warning extended east to the Wyoming border and north into Custer and Lemhi counties. The warning was in effect until 9 p.m. Tuesday, but similar conditions will likely continue through Friday, said Jeff Hedges, senior meteorologist with the weather services Pocatello office. Thursday, he said, would be a little cooler but probably drier and with stronger winds.
Northern Twin Falls County and the rest of the Magic Valley were not covered by the red flag warning. Stephen Parker, senior forecaster with the weather services Boise office, said fire conditions in the area his office covers are pretty typical for this point in July, and that the winds will be stronger Tuesday in southern Twin Falls County than in the northern part.
Thats the main consideration, some southwest winds that are going to reach the higher terrain in the southern part of Twin Falls County, Parker said.
Parker said the rest of the week would be dry, and that Thursday, in particular, would be windier than Tuesday and also probably about five degrees warmer. Parker said there could be a red flag warning for some of the area covered by the Boise office on Thursday, but no decision has been made yet.
Thursday is looking like a potentially windy day, he said.
As of Tuesday, crews were fighting a few wildfires in the Boise and Idaho City areas. Locally, a fire on the top of Fleck Summit, north of Fairfield, is still burning but is about 90 percent contained, Julie Thomas, spokeswoman for the Sawtooth National Forest, said Tuesday afternoon. She said it would likely be contained as of 6 p.m. Wednesday evening.
Currently, firefighters are just working on hot spots in the interior (to) make sure if the wind were to come up it wouldnt be a problem, she said.
The cause of the fire is still under investigation, but it seems likely it was human caused, as there hasnt been any lightning in the area in recent days. The fire was 400 acres when it was first reported on Saturday.
We caught this one, (but) it definitely did its business, Thomas said. We really want to encourage people to make sure theyre putting their campfires out. And the woods are dry.
There arent any fires right now in the Bureau of Land Managements Twin Falls District, said spokesman Ryan Berlin. He said its possible some fire crews could be called on to work extended hours as a result of the warning, although that hadnt happened as of Tuesday afternoon.
Its just a heightened awareness of whats going on, he said of the red flag warning.
There is plenty to be disturbed about by the recent Fawnbrook Apartment assault. First is that the victim was a 5-year-old girl. My hope that this child is receiving the right help, but we see reports almost daily of local white men victimizing young girls and only in this case do we see such outrage. The difference, of course, is because the young perpetrators are of Iraqi and Somali decent and therefore assumed to be Muslim.
Several African countries have been urging Morocco to return to the African Union for many years. They say they want to see the North African Kingdom, one of the founding members of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) regain its legitimate seat.
On Monday, 28 African nations submitted a motion to the President of Chad Driss Deby who holds the rotating presidency of the African Union, calling for suspending the membership of the Algeria-based republic from all the bodies and activities of the African Union.
Morocco left the African bloc in 1984 in protest after the phantom entity was illegally admitted, violating OAU charter and membership requirements.
On Sunday, King Mohammed VI sent a message to the 27th Summit of the African Union (AU) held in Kigali (Rwanda) wherein the Sovereign announced officially his countrys intention to rejoin its African family.
Today, Morocco wishes resolutely and unequivocally to regain its place within its institutional family and to continue to live up to its responsibilities, with even more resolve and enthusiasm, said the royal message, stressing that the North African country firmly believes in the wisdom of the AU and its ability to restore legality and correct mistakes along the way.
Our friends have long been asking us to return among them so that Morocco may take its natural place within its institutional family. That time has now come , added the Sovereign, affirming that Morocco is an African nation and it always will be and will remain at the service of African causes.
Following the Kings message, 28 member States of the African Union tabled the motion demanding the immediate suspension of the membership of the so-called RASD.
The text was addressed to the AU by president Ali Bongo Ondimba of Gabon on behalf of Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cape Verde, Comoros, Congo, Cote dIvoire, Djibouti, Eritrea, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, Liberia, Libya, Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sao Tome, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Swaziland, Togo, Zambia.
All these African countries have made a powerful political statement, expressing support to Moroccos move and its reintegration in the African organization, dealing a hard blow to Moroccan foes by calling for the freezing of separatists adhesion.
They explained that their joint initiative seeks to enhance the unity and solidarity between African States, the protection of their sovereignty and territorial integrity, the promotion of peace, security and stability in the continent.
They also said they deplored the absence of Morocco in the AU bodies, commending the key role played by the North African country for the stability and development of the Continent.
Negotiations between Yemens warring parties began in Kuwait after the Aid-break. UN special envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed pointed out that talks will be centered on maintaining cessation of combat actions in a full and comprehensive manner, activate the pacification committee and other commissions namely the military one tasked with overseeing fighters withdrawal, arms handover and opening safe passage routes for dispatch of humanitarian aid.
The talks have not stopped the fighting in Yemen as clashes and explosive attacks continue on both sides. Special envoy Ismail reminded the delegates that they have reached a critical period of time wherein both Yemenis and international communities are monitoring the progress of the talks.
The basis of the talks continue to be the UN Security Council resolution 2216, outcome of the Yemeni national dialogue and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) initiative, but the two parties engaged in the talks continue to disagree on the points to agree on.
Ahead of the beginning of the new round of negotiations, Ismail held separate meetings with the delegates of the Houthi Movement and the Yemeni government. He discussed several political, security and humanitarian issues with them while buttressing on the need for a compromise to end a war that has killed more than 6500 people and displaced 2.8 million.
The two sides, in a released statement, agreed on not pursuing any other agendas or diversions in the talks except for those that had been previously agreed upon before the break. However, president Hadi has warned that his government will withdraw from the talks if Ismail tries to legitimize the coup detat of the Houthis with his proposal of forming a coalition government.
Turkey has reacted to Egypts actions that stopped the UN Security Council from releasing a statement condemning the attempted coup detat against President Erdogan.
It is natural for those who have come to power through coup to refrain from taking a stance against the coup attempt at our president and government, who came to office through democratic elections, Spokesman for the Turkish Foreign Ministry Tanju Bilgic said.
Cairo has denied blocking the US drafted statement as its Ambassador to the UN Amr Abul Atta said Egypt proposed a different language that respects democratic and constitutional principles but the Americans refused to engage.
Egypt is serving as a non-permanent member at the UN Security Council and a consensus must be reached before a statement can be released by the council.
Bilgic told reporters at a press conference that Egypts objection to the phrase democratically-elected in the statement was meaningful in reference to the accession to power of the countrys current president, Al-Sisi, who ousted Mohammed Morsi from power in a military-backed coup detat before being elected in a landslide election a year later.
Cairo, according to diplomatic sources, defends that the UN Security Council in not qualified to determine if a government is democratically elected or not. Egypt wanted the phrase to be replaced by respects the democratic and constitutional principles and the rule of law.
The draft statement dwelled on the Security Councils deep concerns over the instability in security, the rising violence and unrest and the need to respect the democratically-elected government.
Egypt and Turkey have been at odds since the coup detat against Morsi in 2013. Ankara had close ties with the Muslim Brotherhood and has often questioned the legitimacy of Sisis authority and government.
Philanthropist and co-founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates on Monday said his foundation will invest $5 billion in Africa over the next five years in addition to the $9 billion already invested in the continent.
The philanthropist made the pledge while he was delivering the 2016 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture at the University of Pretoria on the eve of the global peace icons birthday.
He called on African leaders to do everything in their power to realize global peace icon Nelson Mandelas dream of a bright future for the youth in the continent.
Gates explained how, while on a visit to Soweto, Mandela inspired him to form the foundation he and his wife Melinda now head.
The theme of this years Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture is living together. This is fitting, because in many ways, living together was also the theme of Nelson Mandelas life, Gates said as he recalled how he first met Mandela in 1994, when the leader was spearheading South Africas first democratic elections.
He [Mandela] called to ask me to help fund South Africas election. I was running Microsoft and thinking about software most of my waking hours. But I admired Nelson Mandela very much, I knew the election was historic, and I did what I could to help, Gates said.
Gates recalled how Mandela had also inspired him to take on the fight against HIV/AIDS one of the first issues his foundation worked on, with the peace icon becoming an adviser on the project.
He said while the continent has made great strides in addressing the scourge of HIV/Aids, much still needs to be done.
In sub-Saharan Africa, more than 2,000 young people under the age of 24 are newly-infected every single day.
The Come-Back of Morocco
The highlight of the 27th summit of the African Union (AU) held in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, was Moroccos official call for regaining its seat within the pan-African organization it quitted 32 years ago.
It has been a long time that our friends have been asking Morocco to take back its seat in its natural institutional place (AU), and now the time has come, Moroccos King Mohammed VI said in a historic message addressed on Sunday to the 27th summit of the African Union held in Kigali, Rwanda.
In his message, King Mohammed VI made a strong case in favor of Moroccos commitment to Africa and stressed the need for a neutral African Union in line with international legality.
The royal message was followed by a motion submitted on Monday by 28 African nations to the President of Chad Driss Deby who holds the rotating presidency of the African Union.
The 28 signatory countries of the motion described the admission of the pseudo-Sahrawi Republic as a regrettable event. They stressed the need to mend such an error by suspending the membership of the separatist Polisario and enabling the legitimate return to the African Union of Morocco.
They underscored that the suspension of the SADR will pave the way for the AU to positively contribute to the UN efforts to find a lasting settlement to the regional dispute over the Sahara.
African passport launched
Another milestone of the African Union summit was the launch of the African passport.
As suggested by the AUs 2063 agenda, the African passport has finally been launched and the first two copies issued.
The outgoing Chairperson of the African Union Commission, Dr Dlamini-Zuma, issued the first two copies to Chadian president and Chairperson of the AU, Idris Deby Itno, and to Rwandan president Paul Kagame.
Dr. Dlamini-Zuma said even though the initial plan was to issue the passports to Heads of State, Foreign affairs ministers and top diplomats, the AU had been overwhelmed by calls from many who want to share in the privilege of holding African passports.
Failure to elect new AU Commission leader
The failure to elect a new Chairperson of the AU Commission was not much an issue as Dr Dlamini Zuma, the outgoing Chairperson of the AU Commission, has officially accepted to carry on in her role until January 2017, when new elections are held to find her successor.
The Heads of State have asked us to carry on our duties till the next elections in Jan 2017. Well just do that, Zuma confirmed during remarks at the closing ceremony of the summit.
Three candidates are vying for the position of African Union chairperson: Specioza Wandira Kazibwe, former Ugandan vice president, Pelonomi Venson Moitoi, Botswana Foreign Minister, and Agapito Mba Mokuy, Equatorial Guinea Foreign Minister.
New $1.2 Billion tax plan
AU Member states have agreed during the summit to fund 100% of the operations of the body instead of relying on donations from foreign countries.
The new plan, which will start in 2017, will see 0.2 percent of member states eligible imports go to funding the AU Commissions programs.
The leaders and their representatives have in the past been finding ways of addressing the bodys funding gap, which they have agreed has been a handicap for its operations.
At present, the bloc sources only 28 percent of its half-billion dollar operational budget from its own members. It has to source an additional $750 million for peacekeeping operations with the funding gap filled mostly by the European Union, United States, World Bank, China and Turkey.
AU to pull out of the ICC
The African Union Advisory Committee, tasked to come up with a joint position on the International Criminal Court (ICC,) has recommended that the union pull out of the court, which it accused of lacking objectivity.
The committee recommended that AU member states quit the ICC unless it meets three conditions, including giving heads of state immunity from prosecution.
The Hague-based court was accused by AU officials of bias toward African countries and lacking fairness. With 10 active investigations, only one is outside Africa.
The 27th AU Summit was held under the theme: 2016: Year of Human Rights with a particular focus on the Rights of Women.
An agreement signed under the auspices of the Prime Minister of Niger on Monday indicated that members of the coalition of movements of Azawad and the combatants of the Gatia are now in charge of the management of the city of Kidal, north of Mali.
The agreement, which provides for a group of security management would enable the two rival movements a joint presence at the various check-points in the Northern region of Mali.
Local media reported that the signing of the Agreement between the two rival groups would, in addition, help reduce the tension between the two militias who clashed in recent months for the control of Kidal.
The facilitators of the Niger and Algiers agreement hoped that the document of agreement of Niamey is a first step for the stabilization of the North of Mali.
The initiators said they are committed to the Algiers Agreement signed in May 2015 with the Government of Bamako.
The West African country is seeking to put an end to successive bouts of Tuareg uprisings dating back to independence from France in 1960.
Most recently in 2012, Tuareg rebels formed an alliance with Islamist militant groups and seized the desert north until a French invasion scattered them a year later.
Despite a U.N.-backed deal in June last year, the Malian army and thousands of peacekeepers are struggling to impose order amid deep inter-communal tensions and frequent attacks by jihadists.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) has condemned South African governments silence as a brutal crackdown on people protesting the economic collapse and widespread poverty in neighboring Zimbabwe.
In a paper entitled: A Betrayal of Mandelas Legacy, Dewa Mavhinga, a Senior Researcher of HRW Africa Division said South Africa has long failed to call out the Zimbabwean government for its abuses against opposition members and ordinary citizens.
According to the right group, the silence of the Jacob Zuma led-government is in discord with the values that South Africas first black leader, Nelson Mandela, stood for.
The group expressed shock at comments by the ruling Africa National Congress (ANC) general secretary accusing protesters in Zimbabwe as being sponsored elements seeking regime change.
A week ago, a burgeoning anti-corruption movement in Zimbabwe successfully organized a nationwide stay away that left businesses and schools closed.
The protest was precipitated by an economic implosion that has left banks cashless and government workers unpaid.
More than 100 people were arrested across the country, and numerous processions of protesters were met with tear gas and baton charges.
President Mugabe, the only ruler the southern African nation has known since achieving independence 36 years ago, has been criticized for repeatedly failing to follow through on promised political and economic reforms. The countrys economy has collapsed, leaving an estimated 90 percent of Zimbabweans out of work.
Tourists visit Yehliu Geopark in New Taipei of southeast China's Taiwan, July 18, 2016. The geopark features stunning geological landscape formed by wave attack, rock weathering, earth movement and crustal movement, which make it a famous destination for tourists. [Photo/Xinhua]
New research from the University of Adelaide is raising the curtain on the not-so-glamorous aspects of being a professional actor, with psychology experts finding that Australian actors experience a wide range of threats to their mental wellbeing.
Researchers from the University's School of Psychology conducted in-depth interviews with a group of 20 Australian professional actors, after realising that little had been done to understand the psychological experience of the acting profession in this country.
The results are now published online ahead of print in the journal Australian Psychologist.
"There are many positives associated with acting, such as feelings of personal growth and a sense of purpose in the actors' work. Many of them see it as a 'calling' and couldn't imagine doing anything else professionally; they feel driven to do it," says lead author Alison Robb, who has been conducting this research as part of her PhD in Psychology at the University of Adelaide.
"However, we also found that actors are highly vulnerable to depression and symptoms of anxiety.
"Their mental wellbeing is threatened in a range of ways, such as: a lack of autonomy in their profession, lack of control over their employment and general working environment, complex interpersonal relationships, a high level of self-criticism, a high level of criticism by family and friends for their choice of profession, and a heavy drinking culture.
"Actors also report experiencing vicarious trauma through their acting experiences they are so emotionally, intellectually and physically engaged in their roles that it can be difficult to switch off. Some report having nightmares and intrusive thoughts related to their roles," she says.
Ms Robb who herself is a former theatre director says acting has a false reputation of being a glamorous profession.
"Many professional actors find themselves out of work for long periods of time. This creates a high level of instability in their lives, adding to feelings of anxiety," she says.
"They usually have no control over whether or not they get a particular role. If they aren't successful, they can feel demoralised and humiliated. When they do find work, it's often for very little money."
Ms Robb says these findings are relevant to both the acting profession and to psychologists.
"Quite opposite to the Hollywood stereotype of the attention-seeking, neurotic actor who is always in therapy, our research has found that Australian actors are extremely unlikely to seek help for the problems they're experiencing.
"As clinicians, psychologists need to think about how to apply their services to people with particular needs. Actors are such a group, and our recommendation is that psychologists find a way to reach out to them in a meaningful way," she says.
More information: Alison E Robb et al. Exploring Psychological wellbeing in a Sample of Australian Actors, Australian Psychologist (2016). Alison E Robb et al. Exploring Psychological wellbeing in a Sample of Australian Actors,(2016). DOI: 10.1111/ap.12221
The American Cancer Society (ACS) has endorsed HPV vaccination recommendations from the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the principal source of guidance on U.S. immunization policy. The ACS's updated guideline supports the ACIP recommendation to vaccinate males as well as females at ages 11 to 12 to protect against HPV, which is associated not only with cervical cancers, but also penile, anal, oropharyngeal (mouth/throat), and other cancers.
The ACS first published a guideline for the use of prophylactic HPV vaccines for the prevention of cervical cancer and pre-cancer in 2007. At the time, the vaccine was not approved for use in males and there was insufficient evidence for vaccinations beyond the age of 18.
Since then, additional studies have added to the evidence, new versions of the vaccine have been licensed for use in the United States, and there have been new immunization recommendations from ACIP.
Studies indicate that vaccination in males will be effective against cancers related to HPV in males, as it is in females. Those cancers include penile cancer in males, cervical, vaginal, and vulvar cancer in females, and anal and oropharyngeal cancers in males and females. Vaccinating males may also provide additional protection to females.
To update its recommendations, the ACS implemented a guideline endorsement process, similar to the approach taken by the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) for endorsing another organization's guidelines. The adapted ACS endorsement process for the HPV vaccine update included a methodologic assessment of the ACIP recommendations, a supplemental evidence review, a content review of the ACIP recommendations, approval of recommendations and endorsement statements by the ACS Guideline Development Group, review of the evidence report and endorsement manuscript by expert advisors, and finally approval of by the ACS National Board of Directors.
A summary of the recommendations:
Routine HPV vaccination of all children should be initiated at age 11 or 12. The vaccination series can be started beginning as early as age 9.
Vaccination is also recommended for females ages 13 to 26 and for males aged 13 to 21 who have not been vaccinated previously or who have not completed the 3-dose series. Males 22 through 26 years old may also be vaccinated. o The guideline emphasizes that late vaccination for adolescents who were not vaccinated at the recommended age should be completed as soon as possible. o Individuals ages 22 to 26 who were not previously vaccinated should be informed that vaccination at older ages is less effective in lowering cancer risk, which is not specifically recommended by the ACIP.
Vaccination of females is recommended with any of the three available vaccines: 2vHPV, 4vHPV (as long as this formulation is available), or 9vHPV. Vaccination of males is recommended with 4vHPV (as long as this formulation is available) or 9vHPV. Vaccination is also recommended through age 26 for men who have sex with men and for immunocompromised persons (including those with HIV infection) if not vaccinated previously.
"HPV vaccination has the potential to prevent tens of thousands of cancers and hundreds of thousands of pre-cancers each year," said Debbie Saslow, PhD, director of cancer control intervention for HPV vaccination and women's cancers, and lead author of the report. "It is critical that all stakeholdersfamilies, health care providers, and othersmake HPV vaccination a priority, so that prevention of the vast majority of cervical, vaginal, vulvar, anal, penile, and oropharyngeal cancers can become a reality."
The report appears early online in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians.
More information: Human Papillomavirus Vaccination Guideline Update: American Cancer Society Guideline Endorsement. CA: Can J Clin. DOI: 10.3322/caac.21355 Human Papillomavirus Vaccination Guideline Update: American Cancer Society Guideline Endorsement.
A major new analysis from the Global Burden of Disease 2015 (GBD 2015) study, published today in The Lancet HIV journal, reveals that although deaths from HIV/AIDS have been steadily declining from a peak in 2005, 2.5 million people worldwide became newly infected with HIV in 2015, a number that hasn't changed substantially in the past 10 years.
The new GBD estimates show a slow pace of decline in new HIV infections worldwide, with a drop of just 0.7% a year between 2005 and 2015 compared to the fall of 2.7% a year between 1997 and 2005. The study is being launched at the International AIDS meeting in Durban, South Africa on Tuesday 19 July.
Improvements and updates in GBD's data sources and methodology indicate that the number of people living with HIV has been increasing steadily from 27.96 million in 2000 to 38.8 million in 2015. Annual deaths from HIV/AIDS have been declining at a steady pace from a peak of 1.8 million in 2005, to 1.2 million in 2015, partly due to the scale-up of antiretroviral therapy (ART). Furthermore, the proportion of people living with HIV on ART increased rapidly between 2005 and 2015, from 6.4% to 38.6% for men, and from 3.3% to 42.4% for women (figure 1D). Yet, most countries are still far from achieving the UNAIDS 90-90-90 target of 81% by 2020.
While the annual number of new infections has decreased since its peak at 3.3 million per year in 1997, it has stayed relatively constant at around an estimated 2.5 million a year worldwide for the past decade.
"Although scale-up of antiretroviral therapy and measures to prevent mother-to-child transmission have had a huge impact on saving lives, our new findings present a worrying picture of slow progress in reducing new HIV infections over the past 10 years", says lead author Dr Haidong Wang from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA.
"Development assistance for HIV/AIDS is stagnating and health resources in many low-income countries are expected to plateau over the next 15 years. Therefore, a massive scale-up of efforts from governments and international agencies will be required to meet the estimated $36 billion needed every year to realise the goal of ending AIDS by 2030, along with better detection and treatment programmes and improving the affordability of antiretroviral drugs", says the Director of IHME, Professor Christopher Murray.
The findings come from a comprehensive new analysis of HIV incidence, prevalence, deaths and coverage of antiretroviral therapy (ART) at the global, regional, and national level for 195 countries between 1980 and 2015 (see table 1 for country-by-country data).
Despite years of strong progress in reducing HIV at the global level, success in different countries and regions varies as the HIV epidemic has peaked and declined at different times, and depending on access to, and quality of ART, and other care.
Key regional and country GBD 2015 findings include:
In 2015, three-quarters of new infections (1.8 million) were in sub-Saharan Africa. Outside of Africa, south Asia accounted for 8.5% (212500), southeast Asia for 4.7% (117500), and east Asia for 2.3% (57500; figure 2A).
Within Europe, the highest number of new infections in 2015 were in Russia (57340), Ukraine (13490), Spain (2350), Portugal (2220), UK (2060), Italy (1960), and Germany (1760; table).
Between 2005 and 2015, 74 countries experienced a rise in age-standardised incidence rates, notably in Indonesia and the Philippines, north Africa and the Middle East, and eastern Europe, but also in some countries in western Europe (Spain and Greece; table).
In 2015, especially high rates of incidence (new infections in 2015 divided by the total population) were recorded in southern Africa, with more than 1% of the population becoming infected with HIV in Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland, compared with around 39 per 100000 in Ethiopia and 42 per 100000 in Congo (figure 2B).
In 2015, the highest incidence rates in Europe were in Russia (exceeding 20 per 100000), while Cambodia (above 46 per 100000) had the highest rates in Asia. In parts of Latin America and the Caribbean (Belize, Guyana, and Haiti), rates exceed 50 per 100000 people (figure 2B).
No country has achieved the UNAIDS 90-90-90 target that 81% of people living with HIV should be receiving ART by 2020 yet, Sweden (76%), the USA, Netherlands, and Argentina (all at about 70%) are close.
ART coverage is highly variable and massive scale-up of treatment is needed in the Middle East, north Africa, eastern Europe, and east Asia where only around a fifth of people living with HIV receive ART, and in central Asia where treatment reaches less than a third of people with HIV (figure 3).
Although global HIV mortality has been declining at 5.5% a year since the mid-2000s, progress has been mixed between regions and countries (figure 1C). In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, mass scale-up of ART and interventions to prevent mother-to-child transmission have led to huge declines in HIV death rates over the past decade, while in many countries in north Africa and the Middle East like Morocco, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Tunisia, progress has been nonexistent (table and figure 4).
In a linked Comment, Dr Virginie Supervie and Dr Dominique Costagliola from the Pierre Louis Institute of Epidemiology and Public Health, Sorbonne Universites, Inserm/UPMC, Paris, France discuss the reliability of current approaches to estimate trends in HIV incidence and say that even the most recent estimates of the worldwide HIV burden may still underestimate the scale of the problem. They say, "The GBD estimates of HIV incidence are significantly lower (two to ten times) than the reported number of newly diagnosed HIV cases for most countries in North America, Europe, central Asia, and Australia (table). The study reveals that there are still large uncertainties and gaps in knowledge about the HIV incidence in many settings. Without timely and reliable assessment of HIV incidence it will be impossible to end the HIV epidemic."
Explore further Rate of new HIV infections increased in 74 countries over past decade
More information: The Lancet HIV, www.thelancet.com/journals/lan (16)30087-X/abstract
When it comes to messaging users on dating websites, men tend to be more aggressive and contact users they are interested in, whereas women tend to be more conscious of their own attractiveness to other users, according to new research.
Using data collected from Baihe, one of the largest dating websites in China, researchers from Binghamton University, University of Massachusetts Lowell and Northeastern University developed a reciprocal recommendation system that better matches users who are mutually interested in and likely to communicate with each other. The data revealed behavioral differences between male and female users when it comes to contacting potential partners. In particular, males tend to be focused on their own interests and be oblivious toward their attractiveness to potential dates, while females are more conscious of their own attractiveness.
Binghamton University PhD candidate Shuangfei Zhai is co-author of the paper, along with Benyuan Liu, Yizhou Sun, Cindy Chen and lead researcher Peng Xia. "We found that males like to send a lot of messages to attractive female users, but they don't get a lot of responses," said Zhai.
When looking for potential matches, the research shows that women take their own attractiveness into consideration, whereas men are more oblivious to this.
"For females, they're self-conscious because they tend to evaluate the likelihood of getting a response to the user that they're sending messages to. In terms of the data, it shows that women have a much larger chance of getting responses from users that they send messages to," said Zhai.
The study, "Design of Reciprocal Recommendation Systems for Online Dating," was published in Social Network Analysis and Mining.
Explore further The secret formula to successful online dating
More information: Peng Xia et al, Design of reciprocal recommendation systems for online dating, Social Network Analysis and Mining (2016). Peng Xia et al, Design of reciprocal recommendation systems for online dating,(2016). DOI: 10.1007/s13278-016-0340-2
A new report in Biological Psychiatry reports that brain alterations in infants at risk for autism may be widespread and affect multiple systems, in contrast to the widely held assumption of impairment specifically in social brain networks.
Autism is diagnosed based on impairments in social and communication behaviors. These symptoms tend to emerge in the second year of life, but identifying abnormalities in early infancy could help researchers understand how autism develops and potentially allow clinicians to predict the disorder before it emerges.
Attempts to identify precursors have primarily focused on social behaviors, based on the assumption that abnormalities in social brain networks arise early in life and compound throughout development. But Dr. Mayada Elsabbagh from McGill University in Canada, and Dr. Mark Johnson, from Birkbeck, University of London, suggest that recent studies do not support the idea of a singular pathway in the development of autism.
In their synthesis of studies examining infants at risk for autism, Elsabbagh and Johnson highlight behavioral research providing evidence for general abnormalities during the first year of life. These include delayed motor maturation, higher level of perceptual sensitivity, and poor attention flexibility. The authors also highlight brain imaging studies that provide evidence for widespread alterations throughout brain networks, rather than focal deficits in social networks.
The behavioral and imaging studies challenge the assumption of early social network abnormalities that persist throughout development and lead to emergence of the disorder.
"Our review reveals little support for localized deficits in social brain network systems within the first year of life," said Elsabbagh. "It instead favors the view that atypical development involving perceptual, attentional, motor, and social systems precede emerging autism and lead to overt behavioral symptoms by the second year."
The review suggests that focusing on a single deficit may not be sufficient to identify early warning signs and will likely adjust how researchers conceptualize the disorder.
"There has been a concerted effort to identify the final common neural pathways underlying symptoms and deficits for psychiatric disorders," said Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry. "Yet the perspective shared by Elsabbagh and Johnson suggests that there are widespread disturbances in brain development in autism spectrum disorder and that the prominent social deficits either reflect the fact that circuits underlying social behaviors are among the many circuits affected or that some functional deficits are emergent properties of multiple affected circuits."
Explore further Newly identified pathway links fetal brain development to adult social behavior
More information: Mayada Elsabbagh et al. Autism and the Social Brain: The First-Year Puzzle, Biological Psychiatry (2016). Journal information: Biological Psychiatry Mayada Elsabbagh et al. Autism and the Social Brain: The First-Year Puzzle,(2016). DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2016.02.019
In recent years, measures have been introduced to reduce the rate of "antipsychotic polypharmacy"taking more than one antipsychotic drugamong patients with schizophrenia and other serious mental illnesses. But at least 12 percent of patients are still prescribed multiple antipsychotics after an inpatient stay at a state psychiatric hospital, according to an analysis of U.S. data in the July Journal of Psychiatric Practice.
"Antipsychotic polypharmacy continues at a high enough rate to impact nearly 10,000 patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia each year in state psychiatric inpatient hospitals," write Glorimar Ortiz, Vera Hollen, and Lucille Schacht, of the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors Research Institute (NRI) in Falls Church, Virginia, which supported the study. The results "provide insights into quality initiatives that could help further reduce the use of antipsychotic polypharmacy and reduce practices that are not consistent with best-practice guidelines," the researchers write.
Despite New Best Practice Guidelines, Many Patients Receive Multiple Antipsychotics
The study included data on more than 86,000 adult patients discharged from 160 state psychiatric inpatient hospitals during 2011. Data were obtained from the Behavioral Healthcare Performance Measurement Systema comprehensive proprietary national database maintained by the NRI, representing 80 percent of all US state psychiatric hospitals.
Most schizophrenia treatment guidelines recommend against using antipsychotic polypharmacy, or using it only as a last resort. Taking more than one antipsychotic can increase the risk for complicationsincluding drug interactions, medication side effects, and metabolic disorderswithout improving outcomes. More complex medication regimens may also increase the risk that patients won't follow their prescribed treatment.
In 2011, the Joint Commission introduced performance measures to reduce antipsychotic polypharmacy. Those standards defined some situations where using more than one antipsychotic is scientifically validated: multiple failed attempts at single-drug treatment, adjusting doses to work toward single-drug therapy, or to augment the effects of the antipsychotic drug clozapine.
The data showed that 12 percent of patients were discharged with a prescription for multiple antipsychotic drugs. Of the discharged patients who were prescribed at least one antipsychotic medication, 18 percent were prescribed more than one antipsychotic.
The most common reason for antipsychotic polypharmacy was to "reduce symptoms"cited for 37 percent of patients. Meanwhile, only 36 percent met one of the three criteria established by The Joint Commission for appropriate use of multiple antipsychotics.
Two factors were identified as strong predictors of antipsychotic polypharmacy: a diagnosis of schizophrenia and an inpatient stay of 90 days or more. The researchers note that 40 percent of patients at state psychiatric inpatient hospitals have a diagnosis of schizophrenia, while nearly 20 percent experience a longer hospital stay"suggesting a high-risk population needing special attention."
The results highlight the need for continued efforts to reduce the rate of antipsychotic polypharmacy. "Low percentages for the three appropriate justifications suggest that implementation of the proposed best practices are taking place at a low rate," Ms. Ortiz and coauthors write. They believe their findings suggest that need for revised standards and definitions that are more appropriate for psychiatric inpatient hospitals.
Explore further Antipsychotic drugs are linked with an increased risk of heart attacks
More information: GLORIMAR ORTIZ et al. Antipsychotic Medication Prescribing Practices Among Adult Patients Discharged From State Psychiatric Inpatient Hospitals, Journal of Psychiatric Practice (2016). GLORIMAR ORTIZ et al. Antipsychotic Medication Prescribing Practices Among Adult Patients Discharged From State Psychiatric Inpatient Hospitals,(2016). DOI: 10.1097/PRA.0000000000000163
Obama vows to support Georgias self-defence capabilities
By Messenger Staff
NATO will support Georgia in strengthening its defence capabilities, U.S. President Barack Obama said at the summarizing press conference after the Warsaw summit.According to Obama, NATO will try to strengthen its southern flank. It will also take part in Mediterranean operations planned by the EU that are aimed at stopping smugglers.Washington and NATO pledged support to North African and Central European countries in their efforts to combat terrorism.The NATO summit lasted for two days, on July 8-9, in the Polish capital city. The next summit will be held in Brussels."Were bolstering our efforts on NATOs southern flank. The alliance will increase support to EU naval operations in the Mediterranean to stop arms traffickers and go after criminals that are exploiting desperate migrants, Obama said."And were going to do more to help partners from North Africa to the Middle East and to Georgia to strengthen their own defence capacity, he added.The White House also published on its website a fact sheet about US and NATO efforts in support of NATO partners, including Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova."The United States strongly supports NATOs cooperation with partners as a means to more effectively share burdens and further our common security goals, the document said.The statement said the US had enhanced bilateral security assistance to Georgia to increase the defence capacity and NATO interoperability of its forces."In FY15, the United States committed an additional $20 million in Foreign Military Financing through the European Reassurance Initiative, bringing Georgias security assistance up to $30 million. Security assistance to Georgia remains high in FY16, and is projected to remain so in FY17, the White House said.Prior to the Warsaw Summit, the US Senate also released an unanimous resolution, appealing to NATO to support Georgia.After the Summit, Georgia was promised that NATO will help Georgia boost its air defence and surveillance capabilities, and that Georgia will be one of the key partners for the alliance in its Black Sea Security project.It is obvious Georgia still has to walk a long way to gain a Membership Action Plan of NATO and an even longer route to full membership in the alliance.However, gradual support for Georgia remains more beneficial for the alliances members currently, rather than the countrys fast integration, which might cause complications in the region.
Typical of so much video associated with the beloved, charismatic cellist Yo-Yo Ma, The Music of Strangers is full of humanitarian philosophy and picturesque shots of artist and cello in exotic locales.
But preemptive skepticism is best placed on hold. Morgan Nevilles high-budget HBO documentary about Ma and the musicians in his cross-cultural Silk Road Ensemble captures all manner of real-life moments especially as the initial kumbaya purpose behind the groups formation in 2000 becomes complicated and heightened with the geopolitics of our time.
Backing up for a sec, the documentary spells out how Ma, now 60 and raised in America by Chinese parents, came so early and easily to classical music success that much of the rest of his career has been about answering the Now what? question.
Ma also admits that the touring life was such that leaving home made him physically ill his son Nicholas says he once thought his dad worked at Bostons Logan Airport and left him looking for greater social purpose amid the rigors of fame.
The idea of bringing together musicians from seemingly irreconcilable folk traditions was fairly new in 2000, though not radical. The high visibility of the Silk Road Ensemble helped legitimize the practice by assembling musicians from China to Persia to the U.S. for six CDs now (the latest is Sing Me Home on the Sony Masterworks label) and numerous concerts.
In some ways, Silk Road has now been overtaken by groups such as Hesperion XXI that meld East, West, ancient, and modern with greater vision. But what makes The Music of Strangers a thoroughly worthwhile film is the stories of the individuals.
Chinese pipa player Wu Man, seen with an electrified version of her instrument, has created a niche where none previously existed. Galician bagpiper Cristina Pato is a magnetic screen presence, starting with archival footage of her early years translating her folk tradition into rock-and-roll and then in later performances with Silk Road Ensemble.
Syrian clarinetist Kinan Azmeh works with children in a refugee camp. Iranian kamancheh player Kayhan Kalhor becomes increasingly melancholic as he is repeatedly exiled from his home and maintains his marriage on Skype. I dont know who writes the scripts for these revolutions, he says wearily, but they all look the same and affect peoples lives the same way.
All of these stories unfurl with their own, refreshingly unrushed sense of time. And unlike some music documentaries, theres plenty of music, though the choice of high-energy excerpts might suggest that Silk Road Ensemble is mainly about ecstatic jam sessions. Its not.
I do wonder if the group will have lasting impact. (The new album has an adaptation of Dvoraks New World Symphony thats puzzlingly awful). But the symbolic value of diverse musicians finding musically rich common ground is a crucial statement that cant be made often enough.
HAMILTON The eighth annual Hardtimes Bluegrass Festival south of Hamilton is featuring five new bands, 11 bands total, three bluegrass pioneers and lots of jamming.
The festival on Friday through Sunday, July 22-24, is organized by Mike and Tari Conroy and has a family-friendly atmosphere, music and activities.
Mike Conroy said this will be an exciting year.
The vision was to have an old-timey festival back in the hills, he said. It is a mountain festival in the trees and you can see Hamilton and Darby. The drive up there alone is worth five bucks.
The festival is on the Janice Heiland and Pat and Mary Thomas ranch properties amongst the trees.
They let us build an old stage up there it is run by a generator as theres no electricity, Mike said. Well have three days of fabulous bluegrass and well feature pioneers. Theyve been at it a long time.
Pioneers include Gary Moore from Dry Gulch, Idaho, Glen Stephens from Boise, Idaho, and Forrest Clark from Clinton. The new bands are Kevin Pace and the Early Edition from Spokane, Brothers Parker from Montana and Arizona, Ladd Canyon Ramblers from Oregon, Lochwood from Montana and Portneuf Gap from Pocatello, Idaho.
The old standby bands are Pinegrass from Montana, Spring Thaw, Gravely Mountain, Darby Sireens (from Montana and Idaho) and Mike and Tari Conroy.
Trinity River from Florida was here last year and they will be here this year, Mike said. They are a professional touring band who sold 101 CDs after their first set here last year. They are really good.
The show starts Friday at 6 p.m., on Saturday it kicks off with Kids in Bluegrass at noon and all bands play on Saturday in 45-minute sets. Sunday the stage music is from noon to 3:40 p.m.
The festival has a raffle every year and this year it includes a violin made by the Conroys, a Hardtimes quilt made by Janice Heiland and an ornate mirror made by Dave Tobel from Ronan.
Mike said there are two special activities at the festival, a tribute and a Sunday gospel session.
On Saturday at 6 p.m. well feature the pioneers and will have a tribute to legendary fiddler from Darby, Jim Widmer, who passed away Feb. 29, Mike said. He was something special.
On Sunday at 10 a.m. well have an open Bluegrass Gospel show. Teri and I will play and people come up to the stage and sing. Its quite a deal and at noon the regular bands start again.
The Hardtimes Bluegrass Festival schedule:
On Friday, July 22, stage music starts at 5:45 p.m. with landowner musicians Ted Heiland, Ramona and Rachel Potter; 6-6:40 Portneuf Gap; 6:45-7:25 p.m. Gravely Mountain; 7:30-8:10 p.m. Lochwood; 8:15-8:55 p.m. - Kevin Pace & The Early Edition; 9-9:40 p.m. Trinity River.
On Saturday, July 23, stage music starts at noon with Kids In Bluegrass; 12:40-1:20 p.m. Brothers Parker; 1:25-2:05 p.m. Darby Sireens; 2:10-2:50 p.m. Spring Thaw; 2:55-3:35 p.m. Gravely Mountain; 3:40-4:20 p.m. Lochwood, 4:25-5:05 p.m. Mike & Tari Conroy Band; 5:10-5:55 p.m. Throw together band contest; 6-6:50 p.m. Pioneers In Northwest Bluegrass with a special tribute to legendary fiddler from Darby Jim Widmer; 6:55-7:35 p.m. Portneuf Gap; 7:40-8:20 p.m. Ladd Canyon Ramblers; 8:25-9:05 p.m. Pinegrass; 9:10-9:50 p.m. Kevin Pace and the Early Edition; 9:55-10:35 p.m. Trinity River.
On Sunday, July 24, the stage music starts at 10 a.m. with an Open Bluegrass Gospel Show. Everyone is welcome to sing and play. Regular bands follow. Noon to 12:40 p.m. Brothers Parker; 12:45-1:25 p.m. Pinegrass; 1:30-2:10 p.m. Mike & Tari Conroy Band; 2:15-2:55 p.m. Spring Thaw and 3-3:40 p.m. Ladd Canyon Ramblers.
The festival costs for the weekend are $15 for adults and $7.50 for children under 12. This year there is a Sunday only price of $10. There is plenty of room for camping. The site opens on Thursday at 10 a.m. for campers. The cost of camping is $15 for the weekend. Only dry camping is available. All sizes of campers are welcome.
The festival is 10 miles south of Hamilton on U.S. Highway 93. At the 37 mile marker turn west on Forest Hill Road and follow the signs about a mile to parking at the Pat and Mary Thomas Ranch. The festival site is on the adjoining Janice Heiland Ranch.
The festival is off the highway and there will be lots of signs, Mike said. Bring your lawn chairs and put your dogs on a leash. Well have food vendors on site.
Food vendors include Betty Carter with Burgers and Beyond and a wood-fired pizza wagon from Phillipsburg. There will also be a country store just like an old-time mercantile.
Our festival is an affordable, family friendly gathering in a beautiful setting that is geared towards having good clean fun while celebrating the sounds of traditional bluegrass music Mike said.
For more information, call Mike Conroy at 406-821-3777 or online visit hardtimesbluegrass.com.
Coming soon
Red Willow Center For more information on the following classes at the learning center, 825 W. Kent, call 721-0033 or visit redwillowlearning.org:
Meditation for Beginners with Glenn Tousignant, July 28-Aug. 25, noon-1 p.m. Thursdays, $50.
"Yoga for Round Bodies" with Leslie Burgess, Aug. 10-Sept. 28, 1:15 p.m. Wednesdays, $80, doctor's release required.
"Basics of Resilience" with Kathy Mangan, 6-8 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 9. Free.
"Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction" with Greg Satya Shanks, Sept. 13-Nov. 8, 6-8:30 p.m. Tuesdays, $300. Attendance at one of these free classes is required: Aug. 23 or Aug. 30, 6-8:30 p.m.
"Qigong Self-Massage" with Libby McIntyre, 6-8 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 25, $55.
Ongoing classes include "Yoga for Wellness" at noon Mondays, $12 or $40 for four weeks; "Mindfulness Meditation" at 12:10 p.m. Tuesdays, $12 or $40 for four weeks; "Yoga Beyond Cancer" at 4 p.m. Tuesdays, $40 for any weeks; "Yoga for Chronic Pain" at 4 p.m. Wednesdays, $40 for four weeks plus $50 for prerequisite screening.
Advance care planning A free one-hour information session on selecting, completing and submitting advance directives forms will be held at 5 p.m. Thursday, July 28, at the Providence St. Patrick Health & Services Broadway Building, 500 W. Broadway, in Conference Center 1. For more information, call 327-1950.
The Women's Club For more information on the following classes at The Women's Club, 2105 Bow St., call 728-4410:
Yoga Nidra, 1-2 p.m. Saturday, July 23. $10 members, $12 guests. Join Celeste for a guided relaxation meditation.
Foundation Training, 12:15-1 p.m. Monday and Thursday. Improve posture, strength and athletic ability.
Pickle ball open play, 1-4 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday. Paddles provided. All levels welcome.
Kick and Core high-intensity cardio workout with focus on strengthening core.
Ongoing programs
AA and Al-Anon For the latest Alcoholics Anonymous meetings list, visit aa-montana.org or call the Missoula hotline at 543-0011. For more information on Al-Anon and Alateen, which are 12-step recovery programs for relatives and friends whose lives have been affected by alcoholism, visit mt.al-anon.alateen.org.
Acupuncture for cancer caregivers Missoula Community Acupuncture, located in the Radio Central Building, 127 E Main St., Suite 314, offers free acupuncture treatments for friends, family, nurses, doctors or anyone who takes care of cancer patients 5-7 p.m. Wednesdays. No appointment is necessary. For more information, call Michael Peluso at 406-926-1611.
Adult Asperger's support group An open meeting for those with Asperger's as well as their family and friends is held every Thursday from 4:30 to 6 p.m. at the University Center, Room 216, on campus. Contact Monique Casbeer at 721-3947 or Cindy Bacon Janego at cjanego@communitymed.org for more information.
Alzheimers support Meets the second Wednesday of each month at noon at the Summit Independent Living conference room, 700 S.W. Higgins Ave. Another group meets the fourth Monday at 6:30 p.m. at the Missoula Senior Center, 705 S. Higgins Ave. For more information, contact Jackie Johnson at 549-3433 or jackiej45@yahoo.com.
Alzheimers caregivers support group Meets the fourth Monday at 6:30 p.m. of each month at the Missoula Senior Center, 705 S. Higgins Ave. For more information, call Jackie Johnson at 549-3433.
Arthritis programs The Montana Arthritis Program offers physical activity and self-management education programs, such as the Arthritis Foundation Exercise Program, Walk with Ease and Stanfords Chronic Disease Self-Management Program. Classes are available in several communities including Florence, Hamilton, Kalispell, Libby, Missoula, Plains and Polson. To find a class or for more information, visit dphhs.mt.gov/publichealth/arthritis.
Bereavement support groups Frontier Hospice offers open door meetings 6-7 p.m. Thursdays at the following locations: The Springs at Whitefish on the first Thursday; Rising Mountains Assisted Living Community in Bigfork on the third Thursday; and Frontier Hospice in Kalispell on the second and fourth Thursdays. Call 406-755-4923 for more information.
Breast cancer support group Meets the first and third Wednesday of the month from 11 a.m. to noon at the Montana Cancer Center, St. Patrick Hospital Broadway Building, second floor. Call 329-5656.
Cancer Center support group Meets noon-1:30 p.m. the second Thursday of each month at the Montana Cancer Center, 500 W. Broadway. For more information, call Bonnie at 240-0996.
Cancer Resource Guide The online guide covers resources including support groups, treatment centers, camps and retreats, in Missoula, Mineral and Ravalli counties. It is available at CancerResourcesMT.org.
Cancer support group A support group for anyone affected by cancer meets noon-1 p.m. on the second and fourth Mondays at the Polson United Methodist Church, 301 16th Ave. For more information, call Tammy at 406-883-7284 or 824-2868.
Celebrate Recovery The Christian-based 12-step recovery program meets 6-9:30 p.m. every Friday at Christian Assembly Foursquare Church, 1001 Cleveland St. Dinner is available from 6 to 7 p.m. and child care is provided for ages birth to 11. For more information, call 721-6884 or email cafc@4bible.com.
Cheerful Heart Lake County cancer patients in treatment can receive a massage and help with hair and skin problems, free of charge, from local therapists and cosmetologists. Other non-medical services include transportation to treatment and doctor appointments, running errands, yard work and meal preparation. Appointments may be scheduled by calling 406-883-3070.
Colorectal Cancer Support Group Meets 1-2 p.m. the third Friday of every month through March 20, Community Cancer Care Conference Room, 2827 Fort Missoula Road.
"Coping, Education & Support for Women with All Cancer Types" The support group for women in all stages of cancer treatment or survivorship will be held noon-1:30 p.m. the second Monday of every month through March 14, 2016, at the Community Cancer Care Conference Room, 2837 Fort Missoula Road. For more information, call Deb Rivey at 327-3912, Terri Paxinos at 327-3957 or Kimberly Hardwick at 327-3906.
Diabetes program At 6:30 p.m. on the first Wednesday of every month, there will be a short presentation on a topic related to the management of type 1 diabetes at the YMCA, 3000 S. Russell St. It will be followed by the option for socializing in the foyer or being active together at the Y. A fee of $5 per individual will be collected at the door for those choosing to use the facility. Designed for ages 14 and older, children are welcome but must be accompanied by a parent/caregiver.
Double Trouble in Recovery The 12-step program for people with mental health and addiction issues meets 3-4 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at the Winds of Change Recovery Mall, 2685 Palmer St., No. C (second floor). Coffee is provided. For more information, call Veronica at 721-2038.
Epilepsy support group Meets the first Monday of the month from 2 to 3:30 p.m. at the Summit Independent Living Center, 700 S.W. Higgins Ave., Suite 101. Patients, friends, family and caregivers welcome. Call Debbie at 721-0707 for more information.
Free health exams Women ages 30 to 64 who meet necessary income guidelines and either have no health insurance or have insurance that will not pay for breast and cervical health exams can receive free exams through Partnership Health Centers Montana Cancer Screening Program. Call 258-4162 for more information.
Gentle yoga class The Missoula Senior Citizen Center, 705 S. Higgins Ave., offers a class that focuses on balance training, back strength and core conditioning through gentle yoga matwork every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday at 9 a.m. Fee is $4 per class. All ages welcome. For more information, call 543-7154.
Health Insurance Assistance Service Montana cancer patients can call the American Cancer Societys 24-hour toll-free number to be connected to a health insurance specialist to ask about coverage and insurance programs specific to the state. The number is 800-227-2345.
Mens cancer support group Open to men in all phases of testing, treatment and followup, the group meets the fourth Tuesday of the month from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the Montana Cancer Center, 500 W. Broadway. It is facilitated by Gary Weisbrich and Tom King. Call 329-5628 or email gary.weisbrich@providence.org for more information.
Narcotics Anonymous Meets at 6:30 p.m. Friday, Alano Club, 8 Third Ave. W., Polson. Call 406-883-4135.
National Alliance on Mental Illness NAMI Missoula meets every Thursday from 10 a.m. to noon in the lower level (behind the cafeteria) of the Providence Center. It is open to anyone affected by mental illness or interested in learning more about the group. The NAMI Connection group for adults living with mental illness meets 1:30-3 p.m. Thursdays at the NAMI offices, 202 Brooks St., Room 210. Call 880-1013 with questions.
NAMI Family Support Group National Alliance on Mental Illness Missoula meets Wednesdays from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at St. Paul Lutheran Church, 202 Brooks St., in Room 210. The peer-led support for adult family members, caregivers and loved ones of individuals with mental illness is free. For more information, call 406-880-1013 or email namimissoula@gmail.com.
My No-Nonsense Nutrition Program A seven-week webinar course to improve your nutrition and fitness. Faith based approach to better health. Free initial consult with Judy Gilman, registered nurse, diabetes and wellness educator. mynononsensenutrition.com or 546-7819.
Overeaters Anonymous Local meetings include 7 p.m. Monday and 9 a.m. Saturday at St. Paul Lutheran Church, 202 Brooks St. A meeting for newcomers is at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday followed by a "Back to Basics" meeting at 7 p.m. at St. Paul's. Everyone who wants to stop eating compulsively is welcome. There are no dues, weigh-ins or lectures. For more meeting information, visit oa.org.
SAA For the latest Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting list visit saa-recovery.org, call the Missoula hotline at 241-4005 or email MissoulaBetterway@yahoo.com. SAA is a 12-step fellowship of men and women who share experience, strength and hope for the purpose of finding freedom from addictive sexual behavior and helping others recover from sex addiction.
S-Anon Local meetings are held weekly for this recovery program for people affected by another persons sexual behavior. Visit sanonmontana.org or call 406-544-1271 to learn more.
Stroke and Brain Injury Support Group Meets the second Thursday of each month from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m. at the Providence Center, 902 N. Orange St., in the dining area on the fourth floor. For details, call 329-5784.
Tai Chi for Arthritis Class offered 9:15 a.m. Mondays at the Missoula Senior Citizens Center, 705 S. Higgins Ave. $4 per class. All ages welcome.
Tai Chi Chih Classes are offered at the following locations: Missoula Senior Citizens Center, 705 S. Higgins Ave., 9:15 a.m. Wednesdays, $4 per class; PEAK Health & Wellness Center, 5000 Blue Mountain Road, 11 a.m. Tuesdays, call 251-3344; and The Womens Club, 2105 Bow St., 9 a.m. Fridays, call 728-4410.
TOPS Take Off Pounds Sensibly, an affordable, nonprofit, weight-loss support and wellness organization, meets at 10 a.m. Tuesday at the First Christian Church, 2701 S. Russell St. Another TOPS meeting is 6:30 p.m. Monday at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church, 2512 Sunset Lane. For additional meetings, go to tops.org, click on "Find a Meeting" and enter your zip code or call 800-932-8677.
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Submit items to newsdesk@missoulian.com by noon Friday for publication the following Tuesday.
For Viola Spain of Missoula, dealing with a visual impairment meant she gave up riding bicycle years ago due to her worries about balance, speed and the frightening thought of crashing into someone.
I go faster than I can see, she joked.
But traveling faster than the speed of sight is no longer an issue for her. Shes just been fitted out with a three-wheel cycle that makes balancing a snap. Its also low to the ground, where she feels comfortable. It will allow her some mobility once more.
And she already has a pretty good idea what she will do with it.
There are so many trails to explore in Missoula, she said.
Spain was one of the people attending this past Friday when the Wheels Across Montana program held its inaugural Adaptive Bike Clinic at McCormick Park. The statewide initiative is spearheaded through the University of Montana, where UMs Rural Institute for Inclusive Communities recently landed a $75,000 High Impact Innovative Assistive Technology grant from the Dana and Christopher Reeve Foundation to help carry out the project.
Mindy Renfro, principal investigator for the UM Rural Institute for Inclusive Communities, said many people dont realize how many designs of adaptive bikes are available.
If someone came in with almost any need, we could find a bike for them, she said.
Adaptive trikes also arrive later this month in Dillon, Billings and Fort Peck, where each community will host events to deliver the adaptive equipment and encourage people to use it to stay active in spite of paralysis, disabilities and chronic diseases. People with such conditions face additional barriers when they live in rural areas, and thats what the grant will help address in four major areas of the state.
Renfro said in each region two organizations one with recreation experience and the other with health care experience related to serving people with disabilities will work together to store adaptive equipment and to lead safe, fun, inclusive community programs.
Jared Hartley, a physical therapist at Community Medical Center who also worked with the Friday event in Missoula, said staying active is especially important in a place such as Missoula.
Missoula is an outdoor recreation-type place and our goal is to make it so more people can participate in those outdoor activities, he said. This year I think weve had the most variety weve ever had in handcycles and footcycles.
Renfro noted that people living with disabilities experience a much higher prevalence of chronic disease, falls and depression than others. She said promoting physical activity and social engagement is an important part of prevention.
Hartley added that recreation is only one factor. Some people with paralysis or disabilities also use adaptive bikes simply as a preferred means of transportation.
Taking the bus is OK, but a lot of people would rather be more active. Several people use it to transport themselves to work and back, Hartley said.
For more information about UMs Rural Institute for Inclusive Communities, visit ruralinstitute.umt.edu or call 406-243-5467. For more about the Wheels Across Montana project, call Renfro at 406-243-2841.
Edward Abregos bail was set at $10,000 in Missoula County Justice Court on Monday after he allegedly lied to an officer about his identity and then was found with 2.8 grams of heroin during a Friday traffic stop.
Abrego, 24, was in the back seat of a pulled-over car on July 15 when he twice gave police a phony identity. When other people in the car provided Abrego's real name, the officer found Abrego had warrants out for his arrest in Washington and Montana, according to the affidavit.
When Abrego heard he was under arrest, he locked his door and pulled a black baggie from his breast pocket which he then threw out the window, according to the affidavit. Abrego allegedly admitted that he had recently used heroin and, according to the affidavit, heroin was found in the baggie.
Abrego is being charged with felony criminal possession of dangerous drugs, and misdemeanors for obstructing a peace officer and resisting arrest.
Deputy Missoula County Attorney Selene Koepke said Abrego has a criminal history in Illinois, Washington and Montana and a warrant out for his arrest in Hill County for failing to comply with a sentencing order.
His bail was set at $585 for the Hill County warrant, and $10,000 in Missoula County due to what Koepke termed his danger of being a "high flight risk." If he posts his bond, Justice of the Peace Landee Holloway said Abrego must be monitored for drug use.
Lawyers for Mountain Water Co. and The Carlyle Group shouldn't get reimbursed for limousine rides, and they shouldn't get to bill $30,000 to write just one brief.
So said lawyer Natasha Jones of Boone Karlberg on behalf of the city of Missoula in Missoula County District Court.
Lawyer Joe Conner, though, said some of the costs Mountain Water wants to collect are ones the city already agreed to pay and hasn't yet, such as the cost to inspect pipes.
Conner, who represented Mountain Water, also said his legal team had to do extra work because the city produced documents in a cumbersome way an allegation a court-appointed special master agreed with.
Last June, the city of Missoula won the right to use its power of eminent domain to buy the water company, and the defendants appealed the case to the Montana Supreme Court, where it's pending.
To date, the city of Missoula has spent more than $6 million on its own litigation fees. If the city loses, it has to pay reasonable and necessary legal fees of Carlyle and Mountain Water. But the city also may have to pick up that legal bill even if it wins.
The amount, however, is in dispute. Judge Townsend heard arguments Monday over how much of the Carlyle and Mountain Water legal and expert costs are, by law, "reasonable and necessary" for the city to pay.
Jones suggested Judge Townsend reduce the $7.8 million the defendants, Carlyle and Mountain Water, are requesting and omit some costs altogether.
The city generally argued the defendants sent business to costly out-of-state lawyers and experts including lawyers who billed airfare to fly here 12 separate times when it could have hired highly competent and more affordable professionals based in Montana and in Missoula.
The city also accused global equity firm The Carlyle Group of running up legal bills on purpose.
"They engaged in litigation luxuries or conveniences that are nice when you have a client like Robert Dove (of The Carlyle Group), but are not necessary," Jones said, noting a mock trial in particular.
Lawyer Bill Mercer, who represented Carlyle, flatly denied anyone at the firm suggested that the defense bill in a profligate manner.
"We did what we did in this case as efficiently as we believed we could do it while zealously representing our client," said Mercer, of Holland and Hart. "And any insinuation that our client ever told us, 'Hey, let's drive up the price of these bills,' I categorically deny."
Additionally, Conner said the defense did consider experts based in Montana, but in at least one case, the local firm was more expensive. Engineering company WGM Group quoted a price of $250,000 compared to the $88,000 plus expenses from Black and Veatch, he said.
The defense's legal team also had to respond to the city's actions, Conner said. In this case, the plaintiff listed more potential witnesses than he had ever seen in a condemnation case, and the defense had to spend time to prepare.
"It was strictly driven by what the city was doing in their case," Conner said.
The defense also noted the city of Missoula employs some of the same strategies it protests, such as partnering with an out-of-state law firm for its expertise.
Kathleen DeSoto, who represented Mountain Water, said her firm, Garlington, Lohn and Robinson, does not have expertise in the niche area of utility condemnation. Since the case was moving quickly, the local firm worked with Conner at Baker Donelson, who handles eminent domain cases.
"I think that's kind of a typical and very common setup when you have cases of these types, and I'm assuming that's why you have Harry Schneider sitting at your table as well," DeSoto said, referencing lawyer Schneider of the Seattle-based firm Perkins Coie.
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Although lawyers for Mountain Water and Carlyle both defended their fees, Mountain Water also noted areas where it could reduce its billing, partly in response to a court order.
Originally, Mountain Water requested an estimated $3.1 million, according to a chart provided by DeSoto; she reviewed various scenarios by which lawyers and paralegals could reduce their rates, with a maximum reduction of some $600,000.
In her opening remarks, though, Jones said applying local billings rates alone cuts $1.5 million from the total. She and Schneider also questioned how the city and the court were to evaluate the amounts submitted as "reasonable and necessary" when the defense accounted for hours upon hours with just a couple words of description.
In an odd twist, the lawyers themselves took the stand to defend or explain their bills, and Judge Townsend quizzed Conner at the end of his testimony. He admitted he understood he had the opportunity to have the city pay his legal fees, depending on how the case was resolved.
"You basically had a two-out-of-three chance of getting your fees and costs paid," Townsend said.
"I like those odds," Conner said.
"I assume you do," Townsend said.
She also noted his firm, Baker Donelson, was recently featured in a legal journal for being conservative in the way it bills its clients. She wanted to know if Conner was just as careful about his billing in this instance, when he might have the opportunity to shift the costs.
"Would you say you took that same kind of care about being conservative ... ?" Townsend said.
"Absolutely, your honor," Conner said.
The judge also said Conner had talked about creating a budget for the case, and she asked how close his fees reflected his original budget.
Conner said he had submitted the budget before he knew how the case would proceed and that his firm would be a lead a situation that developed when a law firm based in Helena broke up and stepped away from the case.
"I'll guarantee you, we blew the budget," Conner said.
As scheduled, Mercer will continue his testimony on Monday, July 25.
A man arrested for his eighth charge of driving under the influence has been ordered held on a $40,000 bond.
James McKinley, 37, had been arrested early Sunday morning after an officer noticed him driving 51 mph in a 35 mph area of West Broadway, according to the affidavit.
The officer reported smelling alcohol on McKinleys breath. McKinley allegedly admitted to drinking three beers at Westside Lanes and performed poorly during field sobriety tests, according to the affidavit. McKinley was arrested and his blood alcohol level was 0.176 when he was booked into jail.
McKinley was released around 9:30 a.m. Sunday, roughly seven hours after his arrest, after posting a $10,000 bond. He made his initial court appearance on Monday, where Justice of the Peace Landee Holloway ordered that he be returned to jail and that his bail be increased by $30,000.
McKinley has previously been convicted of three DUIs in Colorado and four in Montana, according to the affidavit. Three of McKinleys Montana DUI convictions were from 2011. Fourth and subsequent DUIs are felonies in the state.
Senior deputy county attorney Jordan Kilby said it was unclear if McKinleys Colorado DUIs would count in terms of his cumulative total in Montana. For the convictions to count, she said the language of the statute he was convicted under would have to be similar to Montanas, but that either way, his newest charged offense would be a felony.
UPDATE: The Missoula Police Department announced Wednesday that Silvia Olson has been contacted. She informed an officer she is OK and was advised that family members were worried about her.
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The Missoula Police Department is looking for a 32-year-old Texas woman who they say left her home in College Station, Texas, under peculiar circumstances and may now be in the Missoula area.
On July 2, Sylvia Olsons belongings, including her identification, were found in a barn near Stevensville.
Sgt. Travis Welsh, public information officer for the Missoula Police Department, said they were contacted about Olson's disappearance on July 16.
Olsons mother is reportedly concerned that something has happened to her, and Missoula police are asking anyone with information about Olsons whereabouts to contact law enforcement immediately.
What difference, at this point, does it make? Doesn't that sound like an epitaph on a tombstone?
This snide remark by Hillary Clinton concerning dying soldiers in Benghazi reminds me of another queen, Marie Antoinette, over two centuries ago: Well, if the peasants don't have any bread, let them eat cake! She lost her head the following year.
The FBI director defied the judicial system and common sense with a double standard. Responding to his free pass, Hillary Clinton remarked, He was only speculating! That's arrogance.
At one point, the Clintons were given $140 million to their foundation for arranging a uranium deal with the Russians and banks, while she was Secretary of State. Where was the FBI?
Say goodbye to Hollywood, the ball game is over! Does she walk back into the White House for a third time?
A double standard of justice is no justice at all. A poor man sells marijuana, he goes to jail for a year. He ends up with a computerized record with a litany of petty violations that alarm police officers every time they spot his auto license.
Yet Clinton robs taxpayers, curries favor with foreign nations with a bogus charity, allows American soldiers to be murdered, then gets to scream at a duly elected Congress, What difference, at this point, does it make?
Presently, streets throughout our nation are exploding with violence. Coincidence? Some need an FBI director to figure out injustice, others simply feel it. One thing's for sure, Clinton has been given immunity for criminal activity by a weakling who damaged the integrity of the FBI.
This level of corruption was never imagined by the founders of this nation. Does America still believe in justice for all? Or should I ask, "What difference, at this point, does it make?"
Mike Donohue,
Kalispell
Considering that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the most unpopular candidates for president in American history, and the fact that I am the most hated man in Montana, Im going to run for governor of Montana.
This would be a write-in campaign. Just write in Socialist Dan. This will be for a socialist commonwealth of Montana: single-payer health care, state bank, distribution of state taxes and royalties to the people of Montana, state support from small business, and limiting corporate stores and their influence on Montanas economy.
A statewide public transit system so all of Montana can travel anywhere in the state, including our state capitol, Helena. A guaranteed annual income for all Montana citizens. End drug wars, free all prisoners because all are poor and therefore political prisoners.
Strike all debt, public and private. Jail Donald Rumsfeld in Deer Lodge for the criminal war in Iraq. Make Montana a socialist commonwealth.
Daniel Gawain Waters,
Troy
A 41-year-old Hamilton man faces a series of felony charges after prosecutors say he was involved in a forgery scheme in May, then ran from law enforcement when they attempted to arrest him on Saturday.
James Stanley Patterson, 41, made his initial appearance in Ravalli County Justice Court on Monday. He faces charges in two cases, one for felony accountability for forgery and theft, and the other for attempted escape, evidence tampering and drug possession.
In the first case, Ravalli County prosecutors say Patterson helped another man obtain and cash fraudulent coin counting receipts.
According to a court affidavit, a Hamilton police detective was dispatched to the Super One Foods grocery store in late May after a manager reported that a man had cashed a Coin Star counting machine receipt for more than $550. The receipt was later found to have been fraudulent.
That same day, Stevensville police were sent to a grocery store after a manager said a similar transaction was currently taking place, with a receipt for the exact same amount. That man, Nicholas Wilson, was taken into custody. Law enforcement reviewed surveillance footage and determined that Wilson was the same man who had cashed the receipt in Hamilton.
Stevensville police made contact with Patterson during the arrest of Wilson, but did not take him into custody.
The Hamilton detective who reviewed security footage of the Stevensville store found that a man, identified as Patterson, had been at the grocery store two days before police were called there. He allegedly went up to the Coin Star machine and pressed some buttons, receiving a receipt without depositing any money.
A criminal case against Patterson for felony accountability for forgery and felony theft was filed in late June, and a warrant was issued for his arrest.
On July 16, a warden with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks received a complaint that Patterson was taking too long in a restroom at Kiwanis Park in Hamilton. Given the active arrest warrant, a deputy was dispatched to the scene to assist the warden.
When they made contact with Patterson and started to place him in handcuffs, Patterson allegedly broke free and ran away. According to his court affidavit, Patterson made it a short distance before he stumbled while trying to cross a ditch and was assisted to the ground by the warden and deputy.
They found a glass pipe, as well as methamphetamine and marijuana, in a small pouch Patterson had thrown down while running. He has been charged with felony attempted escape, felony evidence tampering, felony and misdemeanor counts of drug possession and a misdemeanor for possession of drug paraphernalia.
Ravalli County Deputy County Attorney Thorin Geist said this was not the first time Patterson had run from law enforcement. In March of 2014, deputies had gone to a home he was staying at after hearing that Patterson, who was a wanted fugitive at the time, was in Ravalli County. When they arrived, Patterson attempted to run before being arrested. He later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of obstructing a peace officer.
Geist said Patterson has an extensive criminal history that includes 11 felony convictions and 12 violations of probation and parole.
In Ravalli County Justice Court on Monday, Justice of the Peace Jennifer Ray set Pattersons bail at $85,000 across both cases.
BUTTE Watching chunks of ore get crushed into money is billionaire Dennis Washington's favorite pastime when he visits Montana Resources, the mine he owns in Butte.
Not so surprising for the Montanan with a Midas touch.
Now 82, Washington has built an empire that includes not only the Butte mine, but also rail and shipping companies, as well as aviation technology, environmental remediation and heavy equipment companies. Forbes magazine ranks Washington as the 241st richest man in the U.S. and estimates his worth at $6 billion. Forbes lists Washington as the richest man in the state.
But it wasnt always so. He started with virtually nothing. The Missoula-based Washington launched his construction empire in 1966 with a D-8 Caterpillar bulldozer, a $30,000 loan and a contract to build roads for the Forest Service.
Washington believes the key to his success came from a simple formula hard work and a love for the work. In an emailed response, Washington described how he got MRs Butte operations once a defunct mine no one else would buy off the ground:
I believe (we benefited from) my discipline to be a very hard worker, and (that I) always did the best I could do. (And from) my passion for anything to do with equipment. I also have always pursued opportunities that have come before me with passion and discipline.
Retired MR president Frank Gardner, 82, attributes Washingtons success and his Midas touch to more than that. Gardner, who has known Washington for 35 years, says Washington takes chances.
He always said, Im not a gambler, but Im a risk-taker, Gardner said.
In the beginning
The story of Dennis Washington is also the story of Montana Resources and Butte. All three are intimately entwined.
When Atlantic Richfield Company bought the nearly 100-year old Anaconda Copper Mining Company in 1977, times were still good in Butte and nearby Anaconda. But it didnt last.
Gardner, a third-generation Butte miner, had relocated to Butte in the late 1970s after spending a few years working in mines abroad. ARCO hired Gardner to run Buttes Berkeley Pit at the time one of the worlds largest open pit copper mines and he remembers that by 1979 the operation was losing money.
ARCO lost $100 million over two years, Gardner recalls. We were asking to shut down. There was no hope left.
By the time the shovels fell silent for good in the Berkeley Pit in June 1983, ARCO had laid off 1,300 workers in Butte. This blow came on top of ARCO shutting down the Anaconda smelter in 1980. These were bleak times for the Richest Hill on Earth.
Copper prices were less than 79 cents a pound when ARCO ended its operations. It was costing the company $1.30 a pound to mine copper in Butte, a New York Times article reported in 1982.
Current Butte-Silver Bow Chief Executive Matt Vincent moved in the late 1970s with his family to Butte, where his father, a bricklayer, found plenty of work.
He distinctly remembers how, at 13, the closure impacted his family.
Nobody knew what was going to happen when the mine shut down. It was right after we had put down roots. (Vincents dad) ended up working out of state all the time, Vincent said.
Don Peoples Sr., who was chief executive of Butte-Silver Bow from 1979 to 1990, said the smelter and mining closures sent shock waves through the community. Unemployment in Butte rose to 20 percent. The countys tax revenue fell sharply.
A lot of people were really hurting, Peoples said.
With precipitously falling mineral prices, Gardners plan was to close the mine, with the hope of reopening it a year later. But ARCO, an oil giant, decided to get out of the mining business altogether and sought to divest itself of the property.
Peoples remembers trying to shop the mine around to different mining companies.
We went to every major copper company. Everybody (but Washington) said, bye-bye, Peoples said.
Washington steps in
Washington was willing to take a chance on a mine and a town that no one else would.
If it hadnt been for Dennis Peoples said, his voice trailing off.
The risk was that much greater because the Berkeley Pit was an environmental disaster. With the closure of the underground mines, the pit began to slowly fill with water contaminated by heavy metals.
The Environmental Protection Agency had declared the Berkeley Pit, Silver Bow Creek, a portion of the Clark Fork River and the towns of both Butte and Anaconda as Superfund sites in the early to mid-1980s. This made the area one of the largest Superfund sites in the U.S.
When Peoples and Gardner were trying to find a new owner for the mining operation, no one knew for sure what they were buying into on top of the uncertain commodity prices.
In addition, ARCO made a deal with Butte-Silver Bow that if the county couldnt find a buyer by 1986, the company would tear down the concentrator, an integral part of the pits mining operation. Without that, Peoples felt no one would ever again mine in Butte.
It was September 1985. The clock on the concentrator was ticking. Washington expressed interest.
Washington was busy building a stretch of Interstate 15 between Butte and Helena, Peoples said.
Gardner knew Washington because he had supplied trucks for the Berkeley Pit. Washington showed up to view the defunct mining site with a friend who had experience in scrapping a mine in Wyoming.
But by December 1985, Washington had changed his mind.
Gardner, who said Washington was willing to listen, said he talked Washington into going into a different direction. In his emailed statement to The Standard, Washington explained what happened:
"Frank Gardner had a plan that he felt confident would be successful if we decided to open the mine. ARCO said they would pay until the end of the year for approximately 60 people, which gave us time to do the things we had to get done to make it work: power, smelting, labor, financing. (I believed) in the people Frank put together, and (had) confidence in Frank. The work force wanted to get the mine going."
Gardner said that once Washington made up his mind to reopen the operations as an active open pit copper mine, there was no turning back, no matter what the risks.
He thinks (things) out in his mind, Gardner said of Washingtons decision-making process. Once hes made a decision, thats it.
After Washington bought the operation, he and Gardner flew to Butte. On that day, laid-off miners who had built a giant replica of the Virgin Mary called Our Lady of the Rockies atop the East Ridge were putting the final piece onto the statue. Gardner remembers standing with Washington watching the helicopter as it hovered over the ridge. They stood outside of MRs office building on Continental Drive for the first time.
They were putting the head on the Lady of the Rockies. That was a good sign, Gardner said.
Butte-Silver Bow Commissioner Jim Fisher, who began working in the mines in 1975 while still in high school, called that moment "a spark of light for the community."
How MR came to be
By then, the price of copper had dropped to 60 cents a pound. Molybdenum, a metal used to harden steel, among other uses, hovered at $3 a pound. Within the next seven months, copper slipped again to 58 cents a pound.
Everyone kept saying we cant do it, Gardner said. The mill wont run. But he stood with us. It took my breath away, but he said, lets go with it, and we did.
The Continental Pit, only partially dug under ARCO, became the new open pit copper mine. On July 16, 1986, at 12:08 p.m., the first blast went off on the floor of the Continental Pit, located just east of the defunct Berkeley Pit, launching the new era of mining in Butte.
Now, 30 years later, MR has weathered the ups and downs of commodity prices, taking on partial liability for the Berkeley Pit Superfund site and a temporary closure in the early 2000s. Today, the Continental Pit employs around 350 people and provides some of the highest-paying jobs in the county. The mine that in 1986 was expected to have a 16-year operation has a mining permit that runs through 2040.
Of all the businesses Washington has touched, MR might be the one that best proves that the man who started with next to nothing has an almost uncanny ability to turn that nothing into gold or perhaps copper.
Gardner remembered a joke he told Washington once. He repeated it with an impish grin.
I told him not to buy a mortuary. If he did, everybody would die the next day.
***
Hunter Pauli contributed to this story.
MEXICO CITY Convicted of killing a bishop who had cataloged human rights crimes during Guatemalas long civil war, Byron Lima Oliva, an army captain, went to prison and, prosecutors said, built a powerful criminal operation from behind bars.
Yet it did not keep him safe. On Monday, Mr. Lima was attacked and killed inside the Pavon prison, Interior Minister Francisco Rivas said at a news conference. Twelve other people, including an Argentine model, Joanna Birriel, who was visiting Mr. Lima, were killed in ensuing unrest at the prison.
The police retook control of the prison late in the afternoon.
Mr. Rivas said the attack had been planned by another inmate, Marvin Montiel Marin, known as El Taquero, who is serving an 826-year sentence for a 2008 attack on a bus that killed 16 people. Mr. Montiel and Mr. Lima led rival groups in the prison that clashed over drug sales, prisoner transfers and internal discipline, Mr. Rivas said.
Mr. Lima, 46, was serving a 20-year sentence for the 1998 murder of Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi, who was bludgeoned in his quarters just two days after presenting a voluminous human rights report on atrocities in the civil war.
KABUL, Afghanistan As a young girl, Zahra became consumed with the idea of a life of learning, seizing on every new opportunity that trickled to her isolated town in the western Afghan province of Ghor.
In a school drama, she performed the role of Parisa, a young girl barred from attending school by her conservative family. When an educational circus traveled through about three years ago, she was one of the enthusiastic participants, selected as one of three students among 70 to take her new juggling act to Kabul.
But within the short span of her life, she was bartered away.
When her mother was paralyzed and her father decided to marry again, Zahra, then around 11 years old, became part of the dowry, according to her fathers accounts to reporters. Then, about two years later, as a sixth grader, she was married off.
Last week, Zahra arrived at the central hospital in Ghor with burns over 90 percent of her body. She died six days later, on Saturday, in a Kabul hospital. She was four months pregnant, and she was 14 years old, her father said.
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With the failure of the attempted coup of 15 July, the true danger begins now: an attempt to transform the de facto presidential system into overt fascism with the support of a racist and reactionary militant mass movement buoyed by the rhetoric that the coup was thwarted by popular resistance
And so there you have it: a coup attempt by the Peace in the Homeland Junta that was composed of unknown elements and whose ultimate reach into the state was unclear has been thwarted. Over 100 putschists were killed, and 3,000 active officers have been detained.
The fact that the putschists first act was to detain the top commanders suggests that the coups priority was to strike a blow at the commanding echelons of the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK). The coup was the continuation of a battle within the mechanism of state power.
Both the attempted coup and the movements to thwart the coup are not initiatives from below. The putative civilians who answered the governments call to pour onto the streets are none other but the same mobile groups of Justice and Development Party (AKP) supporters under the control of the police that we have encountered previously in various lynching attempts.
The putschists declared a line designed to attract support from the United States and the European Union but failed to do so.
The coup plotters also appear to have been isolated politically. In declaring a curfew, they at once proclaimed that they would not attempt to attract active popular support for their actions. Despite displaying a progressive, democratic and liberal rhetoric in their communique, the putschists neither sought nor received any support from any civilian political power. No party in parliament approved of the coup attempt, and the left also withheld its support.
Forces from the National Intelligence Organization (MIT), the Special Forces Command and the Turkish National Police all played a strategic role in suppressing the coup, while counter-guerrillas did not participate in the putsch.
Ultimately, there was no possibility that a coup lacking US support and execution by counter-guerrillas would succeed.
Now, however, we are faced with the biggest danger: an attempt to transform the countrys present, de facto presidential system into overt fascism through a racist and reactionary militant mass movement that has emerged amid a narrative that the coup was thwarted by popular resistance.
Accordingly, it is of critical importance that progressive democratic forces hit the streets for equality, freedom and democracy to demand a program of democratization. All centers of progressive opposition and other democratic forces must call the populace onto the streets for an alternative to the government to resist the reactionary, fascist wave of aggression currently on the ascendance.
Now is not the time to wait with apprehension to gauge the direction of the winds of revanchist Erdoganist fascism; now is the time for democratic forces to show that they can stand against all forms of reaction and fascism.
Follow Ferda Koc on Twitter @FerdaKoc. The original article Zaman endise icinde bekleme zaman degil was published by Sendika.org on 16 July 2016. This article is adapted from Sendika.orgs translation.
Several studies exist regarding the science behind the three evidence-based home visiting programs offered in Butte-Silver Bow the Nurse Family Partnership (NFP), Parents as Teachers (PAT) and SafeCare all of which focus on families with children ages 0 to 5.
One particular recent study was a qualitative look at the NFP program, a home visiting program provided by registered nurses to young, low-income, first-time mothers during pregnancy and through the first two years of the childs life.
NFP goals are to improve pregnancy outcomes; improve child health and development through more responsible and competent parenting; and improve families economic self-sufficiency by helping parents to plan for their future, continue their education or find work and plan subsequent pregnancies.
The study, which focused on mothers experiences and perceptions of home visiting by nurses, was conducted by McMaster University-Hamilton Public Health Services in Hamilton, Ontario this Canadian collaboration has been sanctioned by the University of Colorados Prevention Research Center NFP International Program to lead all NFP evaluations in Canada.
According to a 2012 article in BioMed Central Nursing (http://www.biomedcentral.com), several U.S. studies of NFP had already proven the programs value: reductions in childhood injuries; improved school readiness; reductions in the number and increased spacing of subsequent pregnancies; reductions in welfare dependence; increased maternal employment; and reduced involvement in substance abuse and crime. The Canadian study focused solely on the experiences of mothers participating in NFP.
First, women described getting into NFP, relaying that they thought they were referred to the program because they were young, needed support, and as first-time mothers, wanted information about pregnancy and parenting. Women participating in the study went on to relay how they felt about their home-visiting nurse that the nurse had positive personality attributes; that the nurse was like a friend who supported them; that the nurse was respectful, trusting, empowering and an advocate; and that the nurse was an honest expert, and easy to access when help was needed.
In the study, most mothers shared that they felt they were becoming better parents because of NFP that they were learning much about self care, healthy living, breastfeeding, infant behavior, infant developmental milestones, physical care of infants, healthy relationships with partners and family members, and community resources.
All of the women interviewed (for the study) felt their participation in the program was helping them to become good mothers, said the BioMed Central Nursing article. They identified they had learning needs about pregnancy, infant care and parenting before entering the program mothers in this study valued receiving sound advice and correct information from their nurses.
The article continued, The strong positive relationship (the mothers) had developed with their nurses, recognition of their nurses as experts and the accessibility of their nurses was key to empowering them to identify their learning needs and to ask questions. This included questions they were not comfortable asking other health care and social services professionals.
The three home visiting programs offered in Butte by the Butte-Silver Bow Health Department, AWARE/Early Head Start and the Butte 4-Cs work. Anyone can refer a family or child to any of the three programs; families also can self-refer.
This may be done by calling 497-5015. If those referring are confused by which program may work best, our gatekeeper answering at this number will assist to ensure the right fit.
Our home visiting programs are low-cost interventions that happen in early childhood. They are an incredible investment when compared to interventions that happen later in life, such as a young persons entry into the corrections system.
We at the Healthy Families Network, the collaborative umbrella over the three programs, are celebrating two years of existence. We know are having an impact on our community.
And for that, we are incredibly thankful and proud.
Police reports
INDECENT EXPOSURE
A 61-year-old man was arrested for indecent exposure, a misdemeanor, at Maryland and Aluminum south of Butte High School about 12:45 p.m. Monday. Two girls apparently had observed the man masturbating, according to the report. Police got a description of the man, who had left on foot. They recognized the suspect as Ryan Hunt, 40, and went to his nearby home. Hunt was arrested. He also faces a misdemeanor obstruction of justice charge for trying to close the door on police.
CRIMINAL TRESPASS
A Butte woman was arrested for misdemeanor trespass Monday just before 4 p.m. Kristina Garvey, 32, entered a home on South Arizona Street where no one knew her, and sat down on a couch. Residents called police. Garvey gave multiple names and said she didnt know how she got there. Police used one alias to determine Garveys identity. She is in jail awaiting a mental health evaluation.
WINDOW PUNCHER
Upset over his emergency room treatment, police said Ricky Griffis, 31, began punching car windows in the parking lot of St. James Healthcare about 4 a.m. Tuesday. Police arrested Griffis on a criminal mischief charge.
DEER LODGE The city of Deer Lodge is asking for an injunction to put the brakes on the states decision to move the Title and Registration Bureau and 37 jobs to Helena.
Council members voted Monday to give the city attorney Jeffrey Hindoien the OK to file the request, which he did shortly thereafter in Deer Lodge district court.
The suit contends the decision to close the office violates the public participation requirements of the Montana Constitution.
Plaintiffs in addition to the city are Mayor Zane Cozby, Councilman Terry Jennings and Gerald Bender, a small business owner in the town.
The injunction is intended to stop the state from implementing the decision until a judge can fully adjudicate the matter.
Sarah Garcia, administrator of the Motor Vehicle Division, announced in Deer Lodge on June 17 that the state had decided to relocate the bureau and all employees to Helena. The division falls under the administrative umbrella of the Department of Justice and attorney general.
The decision has sent a shock wave through Deer Lodge. Residents packed a recent meeting to discuss the impact the decision will have on the 37 employees who have been offered their jobs in Helena and community.
Hindoien said Montana law guarantees the public the right to expect governmental agencies cities, counties, school boards and others, including the Department of Justice, to give residents a reasonable opportunity to comment before such a decision is made.
The Montana Constitution requires all agencies, and the attorney general and Department of Justice, to have administrative rules implementing that statutory framework, Hindoien told the city council.
The complaint contends the closure decision was made in violation of these statutory and administrative requirements.
The plaintiffs want the court to order the agencies to allow the required public participation in that decision-making process prior to reaching any new and subsequent decision. They also want the court to forbid the defendants from implementing any action on the decision already reached until the matter is fully adjudicated.
Also, Powell County commissioners unanimously approved a resolution in support of the citys lawsuit to overturn the decision, saying the bureau offers good state jobs and benefits that are important to the countys economy.
The bureau has been located in Deer Lodge for over 100 years.
Garcia told bureau employees on June 17 that the bureau will close in November.
We were on vacation. Nice is a favorite destination of ours. That night, we decided to watch the Bastille Day fireworks from our rental-apartment balcony, overlooking the beautiful Mediterranean. It's a good thing we did. As the last Roman candles sputtered and the thousands of spectators started to depart, a truck driven by a madman ran some flimsy barricades, jumped onto the crowded walkway just below our window and slammed into the pedestrians. Witnesses say he deliberately ran down men, women, children.
My wife and I had turned away and were in another room when we heard the screaming below. Thousands were stampeding, running literally for their lives. Both of us are journalists, so we did what reporters do: We raced down the stairs and stepped into the dark uncertainty, trying to understand what had happened.
I emphasize that we did not see the truck slaughter the innocents. It was already more than a mile away, its murderous driver killed in a hail of bullets during a gunfight with police.
What we did see was gruesome. Dozens of bodies were scattered around, the injured were pleading for help. Worst of all were the screams of family members who had seen their loved ones suddenly mowed down after a night of celebration at one of the planet's loveliest spots. The images will inhabit my nightmares forever.
Like any newsperson, I've seen catastrophes before, including man-made ones. When someone asks how I handle my feelings, I truly don't want to answer. It's not that I want to suppress my feelings, or engage in denial or some other psychobabble label. It's just that however much emotional pain I need to handle, it is nothing compared with the victims', and to the tortuous agony that their survivors will deal with all of their lives.
I do think we all need to reflect on the ingrained feelings of futility that we all share because of our inability to stop the carnage, to effectively contain the maniacal terrorists. They may be insane, but if they're willing to pay the price, they will find a way to commit their cowardly mass murder.
As my wife and I headed to dinner several hours before the fireworks show, we barely noticed that there were police everywhere, carrying their automatic weapons. Sadly, that has become commonplace. France, the rest of Europe, everywhere else and certainly the United States have become security-armed camps. And yet, somehow, this fanatic -- if that was what he was -- had been able to come up with a surprise, a decidedly low-tech surprise, using a truck as a homicidal projectile.
So now, we have to add trucks to the growing list of mass-murder weapons. I've always been amused by the saying promoted by officials: "If you see something, say something." Will we now need to say something about every truck? The answer is that we are now forced to be suspicious, make that frightened, of everything. We always need to be at least a little bit afraid as we move about our ordinary lives. For good reason.
In that regard, the terrorists have succeeded, as they have every time demagogic politicians stoke our fears and scapegoat those who are only trying to be normal citizens.
To a lesser degree -- certainly less than the immediate victims, whose lives are shredded by the psychopaths -- we all suffer.
It has become all too monstrously routine. We react with horror, but then soon everything goes from mournful to normal, until still another bloody attack. Law-enforcement leaders will assure us they are improving their tactics, but inevitably they will encounter some other surprise. There seems to be little we can do short of becoming a police state.
As a reporter, I've covered wars and have witnessed the tragedy of battlefields. These days, the entire world is a battlefield, where lethal brutality can also be inflicted at any moment. In Nice, my wife and I witnessed that firsthand.
(c) 2016 Bob Franken
Distributed by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
MUSCATINE, Iowa Due to erosion from heavy rains, Muscatine County Conservation Board Director Curt Weiss is proposing some changes to the water drainage tubes at Deep Lakes Park beach.
Weiss said Wednesday's heavy rains caused sand to be washed into Lake Chester.
"Some people said we got three inches, some said we got two," Weiss said. "Either way, if we had gotten that amount in like a six-hour period, it would have been fine. Since we had that much in a short time, it washed away some of the sand."
Weiss said the beach area on Lake Chester was most affected by the rains, and the volleyball court area on the beach was the most washed-out area.
Weiss' plans are for the tubing to be changed to divert the drainage of the water to the concrete portion and dock part of the beach to limit erosion.
Also, the size of the tubing might need to be changed.
"We are looking at different options but we'll have the NRCS (Natural Resources Conservation Service Iowa) look at it," Weiss said.
The repairs won't fix the problem permanently, but Weiss said they will help prevent some of the erosion.
"It's something we'll have to deal with on a yearly basis," Weiss said.
COLUMBUS JUNCTION , Iowa Two state officials assured the Columbus School Board and a half-dozen district residents Monday that a site visit earlier this year by state education officials, and the resulting report on the fiscal status of the Columbus School District, were intended to help the district return to a positive financial position.
Apparently sensing that local officials and residents might compare Columbus situation to the 2015 state-forced Farragut school closing in southwest Iowa, Jeff Berger, deputy director of the Iowa Department of Education (IDE), stressed the two districts situations were different.
Set that one aside. Its a whole different thing. You are not remotely like Farragut, he said, explaining that district had accumulated a $1 million negative balance in a $1.9 million budget.
By comparison, the Columbus School District ended fiscal year Fiscal Year 2014 with a negative unspent balance of $183,017, which the School Budget Review Committee erased by granting the school a modified supplemental amount; and a $366,654 unspent balance in Fiscal Year 2015. The school was also able to obtain additional modified supplemental amount for that unspent balance after the district submitted a corrective action plan.
Columbus Business Manager Neil Mills told Berger and Tom Cooley, chief of the IDEs Bureau of Finance, Facilities, Operation and Transportation Services, the district would likely end FY16 with a positive unspent balance.
Berger said that would be an important step for the district.
The long-term vitality of the district is the goal, he said, pointing out the purpose for the site visit and report was to help ensure state and district officials maintained a common focus in resolving the districts financial issues.
The SBRC was not picking on you, Berger reassured the school board.
Berger acknowledged Columbus had characteristics that were not shared by most other small, rural districts in Iowa and had not received much financial support from the state to address those issues.
I think the state had done a lousy job of supporting public education in the last couple of years, he said, explaining state aid has not kept up with enrollment declines and higher operating expenses.
He also noted Columbus high minority population and conceded the district needed to provide additional support for limited English and other special needs students, which put the district on a tricky financial footing.
Columbus School Board President Sandy Martin agreed the districts unique demographics had contributed to its financial worries, leading her to ask the state officials why Columbus had been compared to other 10 supposedly similar districts in the site visit report.
There were none in southeast Iowa and they did not have our demographics, she pointed out.
Cooley agreed, but explained the site visitors had used the most current enrollment size for the comparisons.
Matching demographics is extremely difficult, he said.
Berger said state officials would continue to monitor Columbus financial status.
We cant advise until we know what is going to happen, he said.
In other action, the board:
Learned recent student assessments showed positive growth in several areas, although some content areas/groups remained under the districts 50 percent proficient goal;
Accepted a $4,545 bid from D& N Fence Co, Cedar Rapids, to install a fence at the Roundy Elementary School;
Was presented with several current sharing agreements with the Winfield-Mt. Union School District for review and possible later action.
ASHLAND, Wis. Born at home Oct. 27, 1931, in Elizabethton, Tennessee, to Lawrence and Myrtle (Buchanan) Cyphers, Jo Anne died at Memorial Medical Center, July 14, 2016, of heart failure, leaving us quickly at the age of 84.
Jo Anne moved to Ashland on Oct. 31, 2014, with her husband Bill, where they shared a room at Golden Living Court Manor. After the loss of their son, William Noble Jr., in Carter County Tennessee in 2014, they moved to Ashland to be closer to their daughter, Beverly (Noble) Patterson. Jo Anne was preceded in death by her brother, Lawrence (Buddy) Cyphers Jr., and sister Jeanne (Cyphers) Hicks, both of Tennessee; and both parents, brother- in-laws, P.G. (Jeanne) Hicks of Tennessee, John Noble, Muscatine, and Johns wife, Pat.
Jo Anne met and married her husband, William Bill Noble, while working for the FBI in Washington, D.C. They married on Apr. 23, 1951, recently celebrating their 65th wedding anniversary. She is survived by her husband, her daughter Beverly (Noble) Patterson, and Bevs husband, Charles Patterson. She also has many nieces and nephews, step-grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Surviving also are sister-in-law, Betty (Gary) Holtz of Fairborn, Ohio; brother-in-law, James (Mary) Noble of Muscatine; sister-in-law, Phyllis Marine, also of Muscatine; and sister-in-law, Gayle (Bud) Cyphers of Georgia.
Jo Anne was a certified medical assistant and a Realtor in Walled Lake, Michigan, where they lived before retiring to Bluff City, Tennessee, in 1999. Prior to Michigan, they lived in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Cedar Falls and Waterloo, Iowa, beginning their life together in Muscatine, after leaving D.C. They left D.C. in anticipation of Dad being drafted into the Korean War, which he was not.
She graduated from Elizabethton High School in 1950, where she played French horn in the band. Most of her career was spent doing bookkeeping. She was very involved in community services, serving as president of Welcome Wagon/Newcomers clubs and of PTAs in Dalton, Illinois, and Cedar Falls, Iowa, and as a room mother for both children in grades 1-8. She was an assistant 4H leader, a Cub Scout den mother, and in mothers club for Boy Scouts.
Jo Anne loved to travel with her husband in their RV, loved crossword puzzles, and was hoping to live to see the U.S elect our first woman president. She kept the staff at Court Manor, and her daughter, Bev, updated on current events by watching the news many hours per day.
Services will be Saturday, July 23, 2016, at the Frost Funeral Home, with visitation from 2-3 p.m. and services at 3 p.m. A meal will follow at the funeral home.
Les blattes ou cafards (Blatta orientalis) sont des insectes qui appartiennent a la famille des Blattoptera. Ils se caracterisent par leur forme allongee, leurs ailes []
Telkom has promised to no longer claim it has South Africas biggest, fastest broadband network in its advertising, following a complaint by Vodacom to the Advertising Standards Authority of South Africa (ASA).
Vodacom said Telkom advertised its products with the lines: Flick to your connected life with SAs biggest, fastest broadband network, and Start living connected with SAs biggest, fastest broadband network.
Vodacom argued that broadband includes virtually all data services in South Africa 3G, 4G/LTE, Wi-Fi, ADSL, and fibre.
Given that the respondents claim includes the term broadband, it is making a wide-sweeping statement that it is the biggest and fastest in each, and across all, of the broadband services in South Africa, stated the ASA report.
Vodacom defines coverage in terms of geographic coverage, population coverage, and subscriber base. The respondent should show it has the biggest population coverage, geographical coverage, and subscriber base in South Africa.
Telkom stated that the adverts in question were no longer in circulation, and the company had no intention of using the contested wording in future advertisements.
The ASA accepted Telkoms promise to not use the biggest, fastest broadband network wording in its current form in future, and ruled that this addressed the concerns of Vodacom.
The ruling follows a similar complaint laid by Vodacom against Telkom, which was upheld by the ASA, where a TV advert by Telkom laid claim to it having SAs biggest, fastest network.
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The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa recently launched its investigation into South Africas subscription television broadcasting market.
The investigation is meant to address concerns raised by stakeholders, and is a way for ICASA to determine why so few subscription TV services have launched in South Africa.
Despite multiple attempts to introduce competition in the subscription broadcasting market, only two licensees have been able to launch services, said ICASA.
It was referring to players like TopTV, which applied for business rescue in 2012, was bought by StarTimes, and renamed to StarSat.
The two entrants have been plagued with sustainability challenges and the others have not yet begun operations.
As part of its investigation, ICASA has asked stakeholders to complete a questionnaire.
Questionnaire
The questions broadcasters such as DStv operator MultiChoice were asked included:
What has the impact of OTT services been on your business?
OTT stands for over-the-top, and refers to services like Netflix, ShowMax, iTunes Movies, and Google Play Movies.
What are your views on a la carte vs bouquet model in payTV?
ICASA is asking what stakeholders think of being able to choose their own channels, rather than buying fixed packages of channels.
How have the prices you pay for rights to key content assets changed through time?
MultiChoice said these costs have increased significantly over the years.
The weakness of the rand increased costs even further as much of its content is bought in US dollars.
Other questions included:
What are your processes for acquiring international content?
Do you consider the payTV market to be competitive? If not, what are some of the impediments to competition in this market?
What barriers to entry do you envisage new entrants would encounter when entering your market?
Please provide your content spend for the past 5 years and content budget for the next 5 years per genre.
Provide a breakdown of your content in terms of own production, commissioned content, 3rd-party exclusive contracts.
The full questionnaire is available on the ICASA website.
ICASA will also conduct meetings and gather written submissions from stakeholders.
After this, it will publish a discussion document for public comment, followed by a findings document.
ICASA said it expects the discussion document to be published before the end of September 2016.
The entire process is scheduled to be finished before the end of the current financial year, provided stakeholders stick to deadlines.
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Load shedding has not been a problem for Eskom for the past 11 months and the power utility projects that there will be no load shedding for the remainder of winter and possibly until March 2017.
This is according to chief executive Brian Molefe, who delivered the state of the quarter address at the POWER-GEN DistribuTECH Africa 2016 conference in Sandton on Tuesday.
[Eskom] has sufficient generation capacity to meet demand, said Molefe. The energy availability for June 2016 was reported at 81%, a record high since July 2013. Unplanned maintenance has also been reduced to 9.3%. The new capital build programme has increased generation capability. The power utility is working to stabilise the distribution network in the country to ensure customers have a continuous supply of electricity
Power outages that have been experienced in the winter months are largely due to the overloading of the distribution networks and technical faults, said group chairperson Baldwin Ngubane. The load shedding experienced last year was linked to generation. However, this year its distribution systems and not generation which is the problem, explained Molefe.
Power outages are not load shedding, but create an inconvenience to the customers quality of life, acknowledged Ngubane. Eskom will be working to mitigate risk to the distribution system and will try to strengthen the network to minimise the impact of power outages when they occur, said Ngubane.
The failure of distribution systems was due to the impact of localised incidents related to cable theft, illegal connections and plant failure due to the overload of demand. We have learnt lessons and will improve on them going forward, said Molefe.
The power utility also managed to make the required replacements to damaged or failed equipment, and upgraded infrastructure in response to power outages. So far, 31 substations and 287 transformers have been repaired. People work hard to ensure electricity is restored within six hours, Molefe said.
The increased incidence of illegal connections is becoming a problem for Eskom and a more sustainable approach will be taken to address it, said Molefe.
[Eskom] has the capability to electrify informal settlements, but must go through local municipalities to do so, he explained. The company is awaiting a pending case before it can supply electricity to an informal settlement in Grabouw, which is on land owned by a nature conservation agency.
If we cant electrify a settlement, people resort to their own means. So far there have been 228 arrests for activities related to illegal meter tampering, he said.
Eskoms milestones
The power utility boasts financial stability and reliability of its electricity supply to South Africans. This is due to the dedication and commitment of management and its employees to stick to planned maintenance, said Ngubane.
Medupi Unit 5 is expected to be ready by March 2018, and Ingula units are ahead of schedule, said Ngubane. However, the dwindling coal supply remains a problem with year-on-year increases at 7%, according to Matshela Koko, group executive for generation.
In response to a question about a possible strike based on the outcome of wage negotiations, group executive of human resources Elsie Pule said wage negotiations have not collapsed. As Eskom supplies an essential service, the group does not anticipate a strike. There will be no impact on load shedding either, she said.
Molefe said the company would be moving to prepaid meters to solve the problem of payments in arrears. There have been 6 000 conversions in the Sandton and Midrand area so far and 32 000 are projected for March next year, said Ayanda Noah, group executive of customer service.
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Two brothers allegedly linked to ISIS (Islamic State) who planned to set off explosives at a US embassy and Jewish institutions in South Africa are due back at the Johannesburg Magistrates Court on Tuesday.
Brandon-Lee and Tony-Lee Thulsie, both 24, face terrorism-related charges.
Two others who were arrested with them in Newclare and Florida were granted bail at the Kagiso Magistrates Court on Monday, BDLive reported.
According to the site, Ibrahim and Fatima Patel were each granted R5 000 bail after their lawyer Yousha Tayob brought an urgent application before the High Court in Johannesburg for their release.
The NPA could not be reached by News24 to confirm reports of their release.
All four were arrested by officers during anti-terrorist raids carried out in Newclare Florida and Azaadville last week.
The Patels were arrested and charged with being in possession of unlicensed ammunition and explosives.
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CLEVELAND Painting a bleak picture of Americas future, Republicans promised a new era of security with Donald Trump as president as they opened a four-day convention against the backdrop of an unsettling summer and deep party divisions.
The doom-and-gloom message was expected to be offset later Monday night by the candidates wife, Melania Trump, who was taking a rare turn in the political spotlight to show a kinder, gentler side of her brash husband. In an unusual step for a candidate, Trump announced he would come to Cleveland and introduce her.
Mrs. Trump was the first of several family members and friends who will take the stage in Cleveland during the convention that officially kicks of the businessmans general election battle with Democrat Hillary Clinton. But many of the partys past and future stars are glaringly missing from the lineup, underscoring the concerns GOP leaders have with closely aligning themselves with Trump.
Republican divisions erupted briefly on the convention floor Monday afternoon after party officials adopted rules by a shouted voice vote. Anti-Trump forces seeking to derail his nomination responded with loud and angry chants, though they were quickly quieted and there were no lingering signs of the protests as delegates returned to the cavernous convention hall for the evening program.
Trump hoped the chaos would be little more than a footnote. Despite persistent party divisions, his campaign is confident Republicans will come together behind their shared disdain for Clinton.
The theme of the opening night was Make America Safe Again and a parade of speakers told emotional stories about loved ones killed while serving in the military or at the hands of people in the United States illegally.
Republicans also highlighted at length the deadly 2012 attacks on Americans in Benghazi, Libya, while Clinton was serving as secretary of state. The mother of one of the victims choked back tears as she personally blamed Clinton for her sons death and accused her of giving a false explanation for the attack.
If Hillary Clinton cant give us the truth, why should we give her the presidency, Pat Smith said.
The convention comes amid a wrenching period of violence and unrest, both in the United States and around the world. In a matter of weeks, Americans have seen deadly police shootings, a shocking ambush of police in Texas and escalating racial tensions, not to mention a failed coup in Turkey and gruesome Bastille Day attack in Nice, France. Three police officers were killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on the eve of the conventions opening day.
In one of the nights most impassioned speeches, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani bemoaned racial divisions that he said have only gotten worse.
What happened to theres no black America, theres no white America, there is just America? he said. A longtime friend of Trumps, Giuliani also vigorously defended the candidates character, saying he was sick and tired of the defamation of Donald Trump by the media and the Clinton campaign.
Convention speakers relentlessly cast the troubling times as a result of ineffective leadership by President Barack Obama and Clinton, who spent four years in his administration.
Hillary Clinton cannot be trusted. Her judgment and character are not suited to be sitting in the most powerful office in the world, said Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, according to excerpts of her speech released in advance.
Clinton, during remarks Monday at the NAACPs annual convention, said there was no justification for directing violence at law enforcement.
As president, I will bring the full weight of the law to bear in making sure those who kill police officers are brought to justice, she said.
Trump has been vague about how he would put the nation on a different course, offering virtually no details of his policy prescriptions despite repeated vows to be tough.
Campaign chairman Paul Manafort said Trump would eventually outline policy specifics but not at the convention. However, Trump said in a Monday night interview with Fox News that his convention speech Thursday would discuss a major, major tax cut, immigration, getting rid of burdensome regulations and taking care of veterans.
Yet the line-up of speakers and no-shows for the four-night convention was a visual representation of Trumps struggles to unify Republicans. From the partys former presidents to the host state governor, many leaders were staying away from the convention stage, or Cleveland altogether, wary of being linked to a man whose proposals and temperament have sparked an identity crisis within the GOP.
That left Trump with an eclectic array of validators, including Scott Baio and Willie Robertson, star of Duck Dynasty, who took the stage with an American flag bandanna wrapped around his head.
No matter who you are, Donald Trump will have your back, Robertson said as he opened the evening program.
Trumps team insists that by the end of the week, Republicans will plunge into the general election campaign united in their mission to defeat Clinton. But campaign officials undermined their own effort Monday by picking a fight with Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who is not attending the convention and has yet to endorse Trump.
Manafort, in remarks to reporters at a Bloomberg breakfast, called Kasich petulant and said the governor was embarrassing his party in his home state.
Even some of those participating in the convention seemed to be avoiding their partys nominee. When House Speaker Paul Ryan spoke to Wisconsin delegates Monday morning, he made no mention of Trump in his remarks.
Ryan, asked at a later event whether Trump was really a conservative, said: Define conservative; hes not my kind of conservative.
July 9
2:36 a.m.: Officers responded to a report of loud music coming from a residence in the 1600 block of Foothill Boulevard. Officers located the residence and confirmed the noise was excessive. A First Response Notice was issued in accordance with Calistoga Municipal Code 9.16.040 for a loud or unruly gathering.
2:37 a.m.: Officers responded to a noise complaint at a residence in the 1500 block of Fair Way. Officers did not observe any excessive noise when they arrived. Officers remained on scene for several minutes, and no excessive noise was observed.
5:43 a.m.: Officers responded to a report of a vehicle with a mechanical issue on Lake County Highway. The officer observed sparks coming from the front of the vehicle as it drove southbound on the highway. Officers stopped the vehicle, contacted a towing company for the driver and provided the driver a ride back into Calistoga to arrange alternate transportation.
7:08 p.m.: Officers responded to a report of a subject selling items in the 1400 block of Lincoln Avenue. Officers contacted the subject and determined they did not have the proper permits. The subject was advised to close up shop and acquire a permit before returning.
10:21 p.m.: Officers responded to a report of a barking dog in the 2000 block of Oat Hill Court. Officers located the dog, who was home alone and unhappy about the situation. A notice was left for the residents advising them of the complaint.
July 10
1:25 p.m.: Officers responded for a possibly intoxicated driver in the 1700 block of Lincoln Avenue. Officers located the vehicle, which was stopped, and evaluated the driver. Officers determined the driver was not intoxicated. The driver was from out of state and claimed they were not familiar with California roads.
July 11
1:28 a.m.: Officers responded for a loud music complaint in the 1300 block of Spring Street. Officers arrived and found a group of subjects drinking and talking loudly. The subjects agreed to move their gathering inside and quiet down.
9:11 a.m.: Officers responded to a report of vandalism at the Monhoff Center. Officers documented the graffiti and Public Works will be repairing the damage. Please remember, damaging public property is not artistic and simply wastes city resources that can be put to better use.
11:57 a.m.: Officers responded to a juvenile problem at the Calistoga Community Pool. Two subjects were taking a picnic table down into the river area. Officers located the two subjects and determined that one was an adult. Officers detained both subjects, one of which was arrested for violation of probation. The juvenile was released to a parent.
4:01 p.m.: Officers responded for a dispute in the 100 block of Foothill Boulevard. Officers located the involved parties, determined it was a civil dispute between neighbors. Officers spoke with both neighbors and provided them information to assist with the problem.
July 12
8:26 a.m.: Officers responded to a report of a subject trespassing in the 1400 block of Fair Way. Officers contacted a subject who had been sleeping on private property. Officers admonished the subject for trespassing and the subject agreed to leave the area.
10:05 a.m.: Fire, EMS and officers responded for a medical call on Fair Way near Park Street. The subject was evaluated by medical personnel and refused transport. However, officers recognized the subject from the previous trespassing incident. Unlike the previous contact, the subject was now unable to maintain a conversation and appeared extremely intoxicated. Officers detained the subject for being drunk in public.
2:21 p.m.: While on routine patrol, an officer recognized a vehicle associated with an armed bank robbery that had just occurred in the city of Windsor. Please see the associated press release for the full details of the incident. Calistoga Police Department is extremely thankful to all of the agencies that responded to assist with this incident.
July 13
9:55 a.m.: Officers responded for a possible theft that had occurred in the 1800 block of Fair Way. Upon arrival, officers determined no theft had occurred and the items had simply been misplaced.
5:32 p.m.: A local resident contacted Calistoga Police Department to report a fraudulent phone call. An unknown subject called and claimed to be a relative stuck in a Peruvian jail. This is a known scam where the suspects attempt to get a victim to wire money overseas under false pretenses. Thankfully, the local resident did not send money and was easily able to confirm that no family members had traveled to Peru.
July 14
2:37 a.m.: While on routine patrol, an officer noticed a vehicle driving erratically on Lincoln Avenue near Cedar Street. Officers witnessed the vehicle driving slowly and then suddenly pulling over to the curb. Officers contacted the driver and evaluated them for possible intoxication. The driver was not intoxicated, just simply attempting to play Pokemon Go. Please, be aware of the dangers of distracted driving and put your cellphones away while driving a vehicle.
2:49 p.m.: Officers responded for a loose cat in the 1500 block of Lake Street. Officers responded to the area, but the elusive feline was nowhere to be found.
10:24 p.m.: Officers responded to a suspicious vehicle parked in the 1300 block of Washington Street. The vehicle appeared to have been left with the door open. Officers located the vehicle, and several subjects playing Pokemon Go. It appears Calistoga has been hit with the Pokemon Go Fever. Please be aware of your surroundings while playing and be sure to secure your vehicle while searching for digital creatures.
July 15
6:27 p.m.: Officers responded for a report of a disturbance on Pine Street near Foothill Boulevard. Upon arrival, officers found two subjects fighting in the street. Officers separated the subjects and had medical personnel respond to check both subjects. One subject was transported to an area hospital and both subjects were placed under arrest for battery.
10:24 p.m.: Officers responded for a noise complaint in the 900 block of Washington Street. Officers located subjects playing loud music and advised them to turn the music down.
When the daughter-mother-team of Jennifer and Tracy Kniesel decided to create a donation fund for Alzheimers research, they werent thinking about cars. But once they chose the idea of a car show, its been pedal-to-the-metal for them both.
About 20 classic cars, 1975 or older, were on display at the Napa County Fairgrounds last Saturday at the 1st Annual Cabernet Cruise Classic Car Show. There were 50s-era Chevrolets and a couple of 40s-era Ford Deluxes as well as a 56 black T-bird that could take your breath away. Vendors of car accessories lined one side of the field, and music was piped in as the car owners sat behind their polished vehicles, smiling and answering questions from spectators.
Leellen Trayler and her husband Doug came over from Windsor each bringing a beautifully restored vehicle to the show. Leellens pride and joy is her gorgeous 1956 Ford Thunderbird that she calls Dreams Really Do Come True. This black beauty, complete with black and white vinyl interior and furry dice hanging from the mirror, sported a placard that detailed the cars history all the way back to its assembly on Feb. 3, 1956 in Dearborn, Mich. There was an attention to detail that was spell-binding, and Leellen was more than happy to talk about how she had longed for such a vehicle since childhood.
Asked how she felt the car show was going, she was enthusiastic. Next year will be better, she said about the light attendance of spectators. This was the first year for the organizers here, and I think with a little more promotion next year theyll have 200 cars here.
The Autos for Alzheimers Car Show initially started in 2013 after Jennifer Kniesels grandmother, Kathy Riolo, was reaching the final stages of Alzheimers. Jennifer told her mother Tracy that she wanted to do something to honor her grandmother, whom Jennifer thought of as a second mother. Could they do something like the Walk for Alzheimers, she wondered.
Jennifers mom and dad own Utopia Auto Body in Sacramento, and it didnt take a lot of head-scratching to come up with the idea of a classic car show.
They held the 1st Annual Autos for Alzheimers Car Show in the parking lot of Utopia Auto Body, and 48 cars came out. At that show, owners of restored and customized classic cars displayed their vehicles and won donated raffle prizes. Mother Tracy did the marketing of the event, and Jennifer did the organizational leg-work. Tracy said they were able to raise a couple of thousand dollars that first year, which they donated to the Alzheimers Foundation.
Since then the family has continued the car event, moving it to Rusch Park in Sacramento where theyve been hosting more than 100 classic cars each year.
The show came to Calistoga as a way of expanding their appeal. This year the daughter-mother team titled the Napa Fairgrounds event as the 1st Annual Cabernet Cruise Classic Car Show. The event on Saturday was free to spectators, and there were vendors, music, food and raffles.
We didnt realize how welcoming the town of Calistoga would be, said Tracy. Next year will be a much larger event. And Im exploring the best way to work with the Chamber of Commerce.
Meanwhile, the pair will be holding their 5th Annual Autos for Alzheimers from 4-8 p.m., Saturday, Aug. 13 at Rusch Park, 7801 Antelope Road in Citrus Heights.
For more information about the Autos for Alzheimers Car Show visit autosforalzheimers.com or contact Jennifer Kniesel at 916-960-6873.
Napa County wants to see local construction workers have first shot at building the planned $16.8 million, 72-bed re-entry facility that will help low-risk offenders prepare for life outside jail.
The Board of Supervisors last week directed staff to analyze a first source hiring policy. It also directed staff to begin negotiations on a project labor agreement that local unions have been urging.
All of this, should it come to fruition, would apply to the re-entry facility on county property along Highway 221 that could begin construction in 2017.
Supervisor Mark Luce called the re-entry facility a possible pilot for these construction methods. If things went well, the county could use the same approach for other large county building projects, such as the new jail the county wants to someday build.
Well see what we can learn, Luce said.
County staff researched how to create a legally defensible local hiring law. That entails showing why local construction workers deserve different treatment from those living elsewhere.
Napa County would have trouble using the justification of a high unemployment rate, as some counties with local hire policies have done. The county in March had a 4.4 percent unemployment rate, lower than the states 5.6 percent and the nations 5.1 percent.
But young adults ages 20 to 24 have a 13.3 percent rate, second-highest in the Bay Area. Veterans under age 35 have a 22.6 percent rate, second-highest in the Bay Area, a county report said.
Part of the boards discussion was how to get people in these underemployed segments into the building trades. Talk turned to the Napa-Lake Workforce Investment Board and training programs.
San Francisco has a local hire policy that is mandatory for its large county projects. Napa County, in contrast, is looking at a policy that would give local residents first chance to apply for a job, but wouldnt force contractors to hire them.
A hiring policy with no mandatory goals is less subject to legal challenges, the county report said.
A Dec. 15, 2015, county report said a project labor agreement for the re-entry facility could add $915,000 to the cost by driving down bidding among nonunion contractors. Some supervisors and local union leaders were skeptical.
The board last week directed staff to begin negotiating a project labor agreement with labor groups and unions. The discussion will continue at a future meeting.
Napa Countys construction industry accounts for 3,300 jobs, a county study found. The building trades industry will need an additional 7,136 workers over the coming five years to meet predicted demand growth and to replace retiring workers, it said.
Project labor agreements are pre-hire collective bargaining agreements negotiated with labor organizations that must be followed by contractors. They stipulate such things as wages and benefits for construction projects.
Proponents say the agreements guarantee projects come in on time and on budget. Opponents say they drive up costs by reducing the number of contractors and subcontractors that bid on projects.
YOUNTVILLE How many lives can a man touch in 50 years? A man who came from his native Mexico to the Napa Valley half a century ago spent the past week finding out, firsthand.
On July 11, Jose Gallegos Sr. left the grounds of Beringer Vineyards for the final time, after about 150 employees held a party to honor the longtime laborer, mechanic and foremans 50 years at the St. Helena winery.
On Sunday, the celebration took a more personal turn.
The backyard of the Yountville bungalow where he and his wife, Josefina, have lived for 30 years was transformed into another banquet space, with children, grandchildren, friends and fellow winery workers crowding in for greetings and reminiscences. A wooden placard was passed from hand to hand, well-wishes scribbled in Spanish and English. More messages in gold-leaf marker adorned a trio of enormous wine bottles including those saved from Gallegos 30th and 40th years with Beringer.
It was a festive farewell for the native of El Llano, Michoacan, and a celebration he scarcely could have imagined as a homesick young man only a few years removed from Mexico.
The hardest part was leaving the family behind: my mother, my younger brothers, family, friends, leaving all you know, he recalled as his son, Jose Jr., at once translated for him and played with his 18-month-old grandson Jose III. When I came to America I had difficulty learning the rules and regulations. Coming to America when youre 16 and by yourself, who teaches you anything?
I lived sad. It was very difficult for me and at some point I wanted to call it quits, but I toughed it out. My dad had retired from Beringer (and returned to Mexico), and I wanted the name to keep on going; thats what made me tough it out.
Sticking it out led to lifetime employment with one of the Upvalleys best-known winemakers, handling the roles of tractor driving, planting and pruning before being made a vineyard foreman in 1990. Along the way came a wife and three children who have had six children of their own and, always, the work ethic his family said drove him to stay with Beringer for a little longer.
I feel happy satisfied for accomplishing the 50 years, said Gallegos outside the family home of the past 30 years. I feel excited because Beringer let me work that 50th year; I turned 65 last year and I could have retired, but they let me work another year.
I tell people to be responsible at work, and when you do something, to do it to the best of your knowledge. I wanted to retire at age 66 and on my birthday, and I asked God to let me get those 50 years.
Some of the numerous people to have worked with Gallegos over the decades remembered his love of the job even in the most trivial of details trivial to almost anyone but him.
When I was in the field and I asked Jose about something, if he didnt know the answer he literally ran back to his truck, where he kept his notebooks, to go get the answer, remembered Drew Johnson, who spent eight years at Beringer as a viticulturist. And in 25 years, that never changed.
Once I was driving out after work and Jose was following me, and there was a vine that toppled over, added Bob Steinhauer, a onetime Beringer general manager. I drove past it but he stopped, after work, to tie it upright again.
The example he set in the vineyards became an example under his own roof, his children remembered.
One thing hes always told me is how to be a worker and a man: Do whats right, and always think of tomorrow, said Jose Jr., 32, who works in a winery warehouse. I had my first job when I was 15 I was a dishwasher and when Dad dropped me off his only advice to me was, Dont steal nothing.
As a father, his lesson was always to take care of yours, because no one else will take care of them in life. As a worker, it was to enjoy what you do, and whatever you do, to do it right. My respect goes out to him for 50 years in the fields; I dont think I can last five hours.
He was able to raise us, send me to school, support us when we were going to school, said the new retirees daughter Karina Gallegos-Ruiz. Its helped us to grow and its provided an example of what we need to provide our children.
Even as glasses of rose were poured and more guests streamed in to offer their greetings and hugs, Gallegos, the man of the day, remained modest, friendly but unassuming, at times fetching more bottles of wine as if he were the host for another guest. At last, however, he had his chance to cut loose.
Guitarists, trumpeters and violinists in uniform arrived a seven-piece mariachi band come to serenade Gallegos on his entry into retirement. As the musicians launched into the brassy opening bars of Cuatro Caminos (Four Roads), he took his place among them and, arms outstretched, with full throat began to sing.
Tuesday, July 12
1255 -- A sachet bag containing a necklace with a stone pendant was found at Meily Park on July 9.
1433 -- Police responded to Calistoga to help search for an armed robbery suspect. One suspect had just fired at a Calistoga police officer, who rammed him with a patrol car. Police found the second suspect a few hours later.
2309 -- Report of four juveniles near a school gym on Grayson Avenue after hours. Police checked the area.
Wednesday, July 13
1122 -- Report of a tour bus parked in front of a fire hydrant at Main Street and Hunt Avenue.
1345 -- Report of suspicious people living out of a bus parked on Magnolia Avenue for the last three days.
1352 -- A large moving truck caused traffic to back up as it crossed the Pope Street bridge. It was gone by the time police arrived.
1722 -- A black camera bag containing two Canon lenses was lost downtown on July 12.
2002 -- Report of a drunk man sitting on a bench on Main Street. Police arrested the 65-year-old St. Helena man on suspicion of public intoxication.
2307 -- Report of an ongoing problem with loud people in the front yard of a house on Magnolia Avenue.
Thursday, July 14
0836 -- A package that had been delivered to Hunt Avenue on Wednesday had been tampered with and left empty. It had contained medication.
0842 -- A Crinella Drive home was evacuated after a construction crew broke a small gas line. PG&E responded and pinched the line until it could be repaired.
1316 -- A man said he and his new girlfriend are being harassed by her ex-husband in Mexico, whos been calling her employers office 10 times a day and jeopardizing her employment. Hes also texted the couple a few hundred times in the last few weeks. They blocked his line, but he got a new number and continued harassing them.
1706 -- Police were notified of a child custody issue.
1709 -- A caller requested extra patrol of an employee parking lot near Main/Charter Oak after two vehicles were vandalized in the last week. One was keyed and the other had its side mirrors smashed.
1827 -- A debit card was reported lost.
2142 -- A man reported an ongoing issue with neighbor dogs entering his property and agitating his own dogs.
Friday, July 15
1056 -- A car rear-ended a limo on Main Street just north of Madrona Avenue. A passenger in the car was injured, and there was some pushing and shoving between the two drivers.
1057 -- Police were told to be on the lookout for a flatbed truck that had damaged the railroad crossing arms at Salvador Avenue in Napa.
1615 -- Police assisted with a dispute between neighbors on Kidd Ranch Road involving tree limbs.
2016 -- Firefighters contained two wildfires on White Sulphur Springs Road. No structures were threatened, and the cause of each fire is under investigation.
2221 -- Report of a family dispute.
Saturday, July 16
0421 -- An SUV parked on Crinella Drive had its wheels stolen.
0836 -- Report of a reckless driver on northbound Highway 29. The car turned into the gas station at Main/Pope.
0922 -- Report of two new-looking Nissan rims with Dunlop tires stacked in the middle of Howell Mountain Road.
1058 -- A resident turned in two very old hunting rifles that once belonged to his late grandfather. Police will dispose of them.
1108 -- Report of a loud leaf blower near Hunt Avenue.
1242 -- A painting contractor reported that a loud and obnoxious woman was harassing him on a Main Street job site. The woman is currently separated from her husband, who is one of the contractors employees. She was escorted off the property once but now she was back.
1504 -- Report of someone skateboarding on the church labyrinth on Spring Street. Police checked the area.
1614 -- A caller reported that two intoxicated men got into a car and drove away from a restaurant near Main/Spring. Police checked the area.
1620 -- A wallet was reported lost, possibly downtown.
2055 -- Report of an SUV parked more than 18 inches from the curb on Crinella Drive. Police determined it was parked legally.
2216 -- Medical aid on Hunt Avenue.
Sunday, July 17
0204 -- Report of loud people in the front yard of a house on Magnolia Avenue.
0816 -- An officer heard yelling in Lyman Park, so he checked the area. He found a woman yelling at her dog whod been trying to run off.
1008 -- Report of a parked car blocking a gate at the corner of Silverado Trail and Deer Park Road. Police had the car towed.
1015 -- Report of a car fleeing the scene after hitting a bicyclist at Highway 29 and Dwyer Road. St. Helena police and the CHP stopped the vehicle at Main/Pine and arrested the driver on suspicion of hit-and-run, possessing stolen property and driving with a suspended license.
1127 -- Report of a possible drunk driver weaving all over Deer Park Road and northbound Highway 29 heading toward Calistoga. Calistoga police were notified.
1503 -- Report of a stray dog wandering around the Oak/Tainter area.
2112 -- Report of a loud party somewhere near Scott Street.
2308 -- Police responded to a car accident on Madrona Avenue and arrested a 36-year-old St. Helena woman on suspicion of DUI.
Monday, July 18
0813 -- Report of a car parked in a No Parking zone on Elmhurst Avenue. The area has been marked as a tow-away zone because road resurfacing is starting soon.
0948 -- Police contacted the owner of a car parked in a No Parking tow-away zone on Vineyard Avenue. The driver moved the car and apologized.
1402 -- Report of an Audi weaving on Silverado Trail.
1443 -- Report of a Sonata passing over double yellows, cutting people off, and driving on the wrong side of the road in Rutherford.
1557 -- Two women came to the lobby asking for help with a male relative who lives in his car and continually asks for money. They said he cant hold a job, becomes agitated, and seems mentally unstable. The mans mother moved from the East Bay to St. Helena to get away from him, but she and another relative are concerned that the man will find out where they live and cause problems.
1800 -- Police responded to a domestic dispute on Crinella Drive.
1813 -- Report of a car speeding and passing over double yellows on Silverado Trail at Pope Street.
1824 -- Report of a possible drunk driver driving in the bike lane on Highway 29 near Larkmead Lane.
2321 -- Medical aid for an unconscious man in a car on Silverado Trail south of Pope Street.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg will visit the United States on Wednesday 20 July 2016.
Mr. Stoltenberg will participate in the Global Coalition to Counter-ISIL Defense Ministerial hosted by the US Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, which will take place at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland.
The Secretary General will also attend an Air Power Demonstration at the base.
Still and video imagery of the events will be available from the NATO website.
Follow us on Twitter (@NATOPress and @jensstoltenberg)
A boy plays at a KFC restaurant in Nantong, Jiangsu province. Yum Brands Inc, owner of KFC and Pizza Hut chains, gets more than half of its revenue from China. [Photo/China Daily]
US and Philippine businesses and products, from the American fast food chain KFC and Apple's iPhones to dried mangoes from the Philippines, have become the targets of online calls for mass boycott in the week following the ruling of the arbitral tribunal in the case initiated by Manila against Beijing over the South China Sea dispute.
The boycott call reportedly prompted a number of youths to assemble in front of a KFC outlet in Laoting county, Hebei province, on Sunday where they tried to dissuade people from entering the restaurant. The video of this event has hit the internet but its authenticity is yet to be proved. There is no denying, however, that the online call to boycott Philippine and US goods is related to the arbitration case because those two countries were behind the move on the South China Sea issue.
The boycott call is reminiscent of the mass protests in 2012, when China-Japan relations soured because of their dispute over Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea. During the protests, Li Jianli, the driver of a Toyota car in Xi'an, Shaanxi province, was hit by a young protestor in the head and was paralyzed in the right side of his body.
Although no violence was involved in the KFC incident, the rising clamor for boycotting products from the US, the Philippines, Japan and the Republic of Korea (for its decision to deploy the US' Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense system, which poses a threat to China's national security) is worrisome. And if this goes unchecked, there could be unexpected outcomes that, like the protests in 2012, cause serious social and personal damage.
It is understandable that some people want to vent their anger by boycotting Philippine and US businesses and products, but they should not violate the law or disrupt the normal operation of businesses, Chinese and foreign both.
Not buying products or availing of the services of US, Japan or Philippine companies is a personal choice. And although it may seem unreasonable, people have the freedom to choose what to do so long as their activities do not damage the interests of others.
Unfortunately, what happened in the past, especially the brutal attack on the Toyota driver in Xi'an and smashing of cars made by Japanese companies in some Chinese cities four years ago, shows that things often go out of control if not properly managed from the start.
In the KFC boycott case, the normal operation of the restaurant must have been disrupted. In such cases, police are obliged to step in to restore order.
After China launched its reform and opening-up more than three decades ago, large numbers of foreign enterprises invested in the country and thus helped boost its economic growth and create jobs for the local people. China today is the world's second-largest economy and foreign-funded enterprises played a vital role in its miraculous economic achievement.
No doubt, foreign-funded companies should not be exempt from punishment if they violate Chinese laws and regulations. For instance, British drug-maker GlaxoSmithKline China was fined about $500 million in 2014 for bribing hospital personnel, and medical institutions and organizations to inflate drug prices.
But the normal operation of law-abiding foreign companies should be protected. It is part of the serious commitment China has made to the world, without which few enterprises from abroad would like to continue to invest in the country.
Moreover, it is well known that many of the foreign-funded enterprises in China, such as KFC, have been localized and mostly employ local people and purchase raw materials from China. So by boycotting them we would compromise the livelihoods of many Chinese.
The author is a senior writer with China Daily. xinzhiming@chinadaily.com.cn
Residents of Moldova asked not to go out into street in dark
Lebanon, Israel sign deal on maritime border demarcation
Spanish prime minister twice mistakes Kenya for Senegal during his speech
Peskov: CSTO meeting to be held before Armenia-Azerbaijan-Russia summit
Putin says he is ready to negotiate with Ukraine
Putin compares Indian Prime Minister Modi to icebreaker
Putin warns Seoul about risk of ruining relations with Russia by supplying weapons to Ukraine
Interpol Secretary General visits Armenia
Putin: Russia will not abandon the historical legacy of the USSR and the Russian Tsarist Empire
Putin sees no point in nuclear strike on Ukraine
Olaf Scholz says solution can be found to curb speculative spikes in gas prices
Putin calls Russians and Ukrainians one people who find themselves in different states
Putin: We proposed Armenia give 5 districts
Putin: Washington version provides for recognition of Azerbaijan's sovereignty over whole Karabakh
Putin calls Erdogan consistent and reliable partner, although not easy one
Italy plans to double national gas production to 6 billion cubic meters a year
Putin: The West, as a minority, has no right to impose values on the world
Putin: As long as nuclear weapons exist, there is always a danger of their use
Putin outraged by US assassination of General Soleimani: What is this all about?
FM Abdollahian: Iran will not allow its interests to become plaything of terrorists
Mirzoyan and Lavrov discuss preparations for CSTO Collective Security Council
Putin proposes to discuss changing structure of UN and UN Security Council
Pashinyan's wife accompanied in Tavush by mothers of servicemen who died in first and last days of war
Shell reports almost $9.5 billion in profits
Putin calls on West not to shift blame on intrigues of Kremlin
Hungarian PM expresses readiness to buy electricity from Azerbaijan via Georgia
Newsweek: The biggest foreign threat to the U.S. is not Russia or China. It's the EU
Putin: In recent years, West has taken steps to exacerbate situation in world
Armenian Defense Minister and French delegation discuss possibilities of developing defense cooperation
Australia to send 70 soldiers to UK to help train Ukrainian troops
Scholz condemns Turkey's stance questioning Greek sovereignty
Armenian Defense Ministry: Azerbaijan hands over 10 bodies of killed servicemen to Armenian side
Dollar, euro lose value in Armenia
Turkish Central Bank raises inflation forecast for the end of 2022 to 65.2%
U.S. State Department official visits Tsitsernakaberd Memorial Complex in Yerevan
Prime Minister Pashinyan sends letter of condolence to Seyyed Ebrahim Raisi
Secretary of Armenian Security Council and representatives of French Ministry of Defense discuss cooperation prospects
Israel and Turkey to resume defense cooperation
Scholz says solidarity is the only way to deal with the energy crisis
Israeli and Turkish defense ministers meet in Ankara
Turkey to rewrite inflation forecasts again after rate cut
Azerbaijan does not want checkpoint on border with Armenia, it wants only 'corridor'
Putin plans to attend meeting of CSTO leaders
CSTO special session to be held Friday, assistance to Armenia to be discussed
Estonia urges Rishi Sunak to increase UK defense spending
Moscow perplexed by information about ban to enter Armenia for Konstantin Zatulin and Margarita Simonyan
Armenia PM honors October 27, 1999 parliament tragedy victims
U.S. and Western officials finalize plans to limit Russian oil prices
EU seeks Armenia-Azerbaijan peace for its own energy interests?
World economy is approaching recession
US Armenians demand Senate member candidate Mehmet Oz to stop his Armenian Genocide denial
Azerbaijan president, Russia deputy PM discuss prospects for unblocking South Caucasus communications
Armenia opposition MP: Azerbaijan attempting to fulfill much bigger task with its attacks of aggression
Armenia opposition pledges to become active again
Syria MFA: Terrorist attack in Shiraz shows that terrorism has become U.S. policy main tool
Lebanon and Israel approve maritime border agreement
Pashinyan to Sunak: Armenia attaches great importance to further development of cooperation with UK
U.S. accelerates deployment of modernized version of nuclear bomb at NATO bases in Europe
Armenian Foreign Ministry expresses condolences to Iran over Shiraz terrorist act
Premier: Armenia set new absolute record in income-salary jobs
Armenia premier: We need to ensure 7% economic growth in 2023 also
Gazprom: Creating gas hub will benefit Russia, Turkey, Europe and Azerbaijan
Ruling force MP: Azerbaijan must withdraw its troops from sovereign territory of Armenia
Armenia parliament speaker: We hope Uzbekistan will also remain part of building peace in our region
CNN: CIA Director visits Ukraine
OSCE needs assessment mission briefs deputy FM on their work in Armenia
European Parliament report amendment condemns Azerbaijan policy of erasing Armenian cultural heritage in Artsakh
Armenia to provide around $50M loan to Artsakh
EU monitors in Armenia set off on first patrol on Azerbaijan border
Armenia to introduce system of transition from compulsory to contractual military service
Newsweek: American troops are preparing for war with Russia
Azerbaijan and Russia discuss increasing number of checkpoints on border between 2 countries
Ombudsperson to attorneys of Frances Montpelier: POWs trials in Azerbaijan are aimed at terrorizing Armenian society
Karabakh parliament to convene special session Sunday
Today marks 23rd anniversary of Armenia parliament tragedy
Newspaper: October 31 trilateral meeting in Russias Sochi to not be groundbreaking
US State Department: Armenia-Azerbaijan direct dialogue is key to resolving issues, reaching lasting peace
Armenia MOD: No wounded soldiers in military hospitals who are in severe or critical condition
Ukraine Presidents Office: Kherson direction situation changing unpleasantly for Kyiv
Raisi: Terrorist attack in Shiraz will not go unanswered
Turkey arrests doctor who called for investigation into chemical weapons use in northern Iraq
Blinken: China has decided that the status quo in Taiwan is no longer acceptable
Steven Mnuchin says China will face significant economic downturn that will affect rest of world
German government allows Chinese company to buy reduced stake in Hamburg port terminal
'Corridor' between Armenia and Azerbaijan becomes subject of heated debate in European Parliament
Awkward lunch: Macron humiliates Scholz in Paris
Polish government prepares for 'potential use of nuclear or chemical weapons' by Kremlin
Iran: Unknown shoot and kill 2 IRGC members
EU calls on defense ministers of bloc countries to coordinate arms purchases
What will Israeli defense minister discuss in Turkey
Erdogan: We cannot allow 'terrorist organizations' to take the issue of Sweden's membership in NATO hostage
KGB: Opponents of authorities will begin to rock situation in country in November-December
Finance Ministry: Armenia plans to increase pensions in July next year
Terrorist who carried out shooting in Shiraz is foreigner
Saudi Arabia slams countries for using emergency oil reserves to manipulate prices
Azerbaijani who fought in ranks of AFU killed in Kiev as result of Iranian drone strike
Konstantin Zatulin: You don't have to be Armenian to love Armenia and Armenians
Biden's approval rating approaches lowest level of his presidency just 2 weeks before election
White House tones down its previous optimism about the midterm elections
Ford Motor leaves Russian market by selling its stake in Sollers joint venture
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The newly-appointed British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson is famous for his tenure as mayor of London, his colorful personality, and the leader of the Brexit campaign in the June referendum. Far less known was his personal background reflecting a wide mix of the British ethnic heritage, including a Turkish ancestor, Ali Kemal, who truly distinguished himself as one of the bravest voices opposed to the leaders perpetrating the 1915-1923 Armenian Genocide and was brutally assassinated by racist forces in 1922, the Armenian Assembly of America (Assembly) reported.
In 1909, for fear of his life as a journalist, Ali Kemal fled to England in exile with his wife Winifred and his daughter. But, shortly after giving birth to a son at Bournemouth, Dorset, his wife passed away from puerperal fever. A few years later in 1912, he returned to the Ottoman Empire and married again with Sabiha Hanim, the daughter of an Ottoman pasha. Ali Kemal's children from his first wife, still living in England, adopted their maternal grandmother's maiden name of Johnson. Ali Kemal's son, originally named Osman, later began to use his middle name of Wilfred as his first name, and is the grandfather of Boris Johnson.
Johnson's great-grandfather Ali Kemal happens to be the most significant Turkish critic of the annihilationist policies of the Ottoman state. Ali Kemal was a journalist and public speaker, who even had a short stint as minister in the post-war Ottoman cabinet in 1919.
Dr. Vahakn Dadrian, whose numerous publications have revealed the breadth of German and Ottoman evidence on the Armenian Genocide, provided a compelling description of Ali Kemal's role in Young Turk era politics. Ali Kemal was a proponent of liberal ideas that were suppressed by both the Young Turk extremists and Turkish Nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal.
Ali Kemal, with a passion unequalled by any Turk, condemned the genocide against the Armenians and inveighed against the Ittihadist chieftains as the authors of that crime, relentlessly demanding their prosecution and punishment. In line with this attitude he campaigned also against the Kemalist movement which then was being propped up by the clandestine partisans of the defunct Ittihad. He was kidnapped from a barber shop at Tokatlyan Hotel in Istanbul, and was being carried to the Asiatic side of the city by a motor boat en route to Ankara for a trial on charges of treason. The party was intercepted, however, at Ismit by General Nureddin, then Commander of the First Army which was aligned with Mustafa Kemal. Ali Kemal was lynched by a mob set up by the General. His head was smashed by cudgels and he was stoned to death. As described by Nureddin personally to Dr. Riza Nur, who with Ismet (Inonu) was on his way to Lausanne to negotiate peace with the Allies, "his blood-covered body was subsequently hanged with an epitaph across his chest which read, "Artin Kemal.'" Through the bestowal of an improvised Armenian name to the victim, a blue-blooded Turk, was thus administered the supreme indignity of depiction as a member of a despised nation.
Historically reviled in Turkey as a traitor, attempts were made to revisit Ali Kemal's legacy with the rise of Boris Johnson to prominence. He was recast as a dissident and advocate of minority rights. In 2004, the Turkish Journalists' Association listed Ali Kemal among the martyred journalists of the Republic of Turkey. That list was soon augmented by Hrant Dink, who was assassinated in 2007 for encouraging Turks to reconcile with the Armenian Genocide and whose murder investigations are still not closed because of clear official complicity. In 2011, the Turkish Journalists' Association added 10 names of Armenian journalists who were killed in 1915, including Krikor Zohrab, a prominent writer and lawyer who was a sitting deputy in the Ottoman parliament at the time of his execution.
Kemal Ali was remembered by Armenians and mainstream historians as an extraordinary person who was truly one of the most righteous and brave Turkish notables during and after the Armenian Genocide era; the linkage to the new Foreign Secretary of Great Britain, Boris Johnson is remarkable.
14:11
Delhi court grants interim bail to DG Corporate affairs BK Bansal who was in CBI custody after he was arrested in a bribery case. Bansal has been granted bail to perform the last rites of his wife and daughter.The wife and daughter of Director General Corporate Affairs B K Bansal, who was arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation two days ago for alleged bribery, committed suicide on Tuesday at their apartment, police said.
Bansals wife Satyabala, 58, and daughter Neha, 28, allegedly hung themselves from ceiling fans in two separate rooms at their residence in Nilkanth Apartments in east Delhis Madhu Vihar, leaving separate suicide notes, saying the CBI raid had caused great humiliation and they did not want to live after that. They, however, held nobody responsible for their death.
Two separate suicide notes were recovered. They said that the CBI raid caused them (the family) great humiliation in the society and they did not want to live any more. Nobody is responsible for our death, Deputy Commissioner of Police (East) Rishipal Singh said.
Bansal, an additional secretary-rank officer in the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, was arrested by the CBI on July 16 for allegedly accepting bribe from a prominent pharmaceutical company.
The CBI had carried out searches at eight locations in connection with the case during which the agency had claimed to have made cash recoveries.
CBI spokesperson Devpreet Singh said, We are deeply shocked and saddened by the incident. It may be mentioned here that both the deceased were neither accused nor questioned or summoned in the ongoing investigation. The matter is being looked into by the local police.
Tuesdays incident came to light after the Bansals domestic help arrived around noon but no one opened the door for a long time. She managed to force open the door and found the bodies hanging from stoles, a police official said.
Bansals son was not present at home at the time of the incident. Neighbours told police that they had not seen him at least for the past four days.
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The court, in a hearing of the high treason case against Musharraf, instructed the banks to freeze all his accounts, and asked the revenue departments to confiscate assets of the former President, Xinhua news agency reported.
Musharraf's lawyer Faisal Chaudhry said the former president had gifted all his assets to his wife and daughter and the gifted assets could not be confiscated. He will challenge the verdict in the Supreme Court.
The court rejected the prosecution's request to continue the hearing in the absence of the accused.
Musharraf, who had gone to the UAE for treatment in March 2016, is still living there.
Prosecution lawyer Akram Sheikh suggested to the court to record Musharraf's statement through video conferencing. Musharraf has neither been admitted in hospital nor has he any health problem, the lawyer said.
The case will not be heard unless Musharraf is arrested and produced before the court, the court said.
Musharraf, who stepped down in 2008, is the first military ruler in Pakistan's history to be tried for high treason, a crime punishable by death or life imprisonment, according to legal experts.
His imposition of emergency rule and suspension of the Constitution in 2007 are viewed as treason.
Weeks after assuming office for the third time, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had in June 2013 informed parliament about the filing of high treason charges against Musharraf.
--IANS sm/py/dg
( 269 Words)
2016-07-19-17:58:00 (IANS)
"The fighters, including three key Taliban commanders, surrendered to the government," Xinhua news agency quoted the official as saying.
Taliban militants were yet to make comment.
--IANS py/dg
( 64 Words)
2016-07-19-19:54:01 (IANS)
Top-ranked Australia and second-ranked India will have to complete the comprehensive wins in their upcoming Test series against Sri Lanka and the West Indies respectively so that they do not lose crucial points in the MRF Tyres ICC Team Team Rankings. The West Indies will host India in a four-Test series starting in Antigua on July 21, while Australia will go head to head with Sri Lanka in Pallekele from July 26 in a three-Test series. India are ahead of eighth-ranked the West Indies by 44 points and Australia leads seventh-ranked Sri Lanka by 33 points, and because the rankings are weighted to reflect this difference, India and Australia's failure to win their series convincingly will mean they will drop points. India will have to defeat the West Indies by a margin of 3-0 or better to stay at 112 points. Even a 3-1 or 2-0 win for India will see it slip to 110 points. On the other hand, a 3-1 or 2-0 win by the West Indies will see it rise to 79 points with India dropping below the 100-point mark to 98. Similarly, Australia will have to win 2-0 or better against seventh-ranked Sri Lanka to ensure it does not go below its current 118 points. In contrast, even Sri Lanka's 1-0 win over Australia will earn it seven points and move to 92 while Steve Smith's side will slip to 111 points. With England and Pakistan already involved in a four-Test series in England, major shake-up on top of the Test table is on the cards depending how the three series pan out. Meanwhile, India off-spinner Ravichandran Ashwin will be gunning for the No.1 spot in the MRF Tyres ICC Player Rankings for Test bowlers as an interesting contest promises to develop with Pakistan leg-spinner Yasir Shah, who wrested the top spot following a 10-wicket haul in the Lord's Test that ended on Sunday. Yasir is seven points ahead of Ashwin with three more matches to go against England. One will have to wait and see how long the two can continue the rare occurrence of two spinners at the top. The last time slow bowlers took the top two slots was in March 2006 when Sri Lanka off-spinner Muttiah Muralidaran and Australian leg-spinner Shane Warne peaked to number-one and two positions, respectively. India's left-arm spinner Ravindra Jadeja is the other India bowler inside the top 10 in sixth spot, while fast bowler Ishant Sharma is ranked in 20th place. For the West Indies and in the absence of an injured 21st-raned Kemar Roach, Jerome Taylor will start the series as his side's top-ranked bowler in 24th place. India's Ajinkya Rahane will be the top-ranked batsman from either side in 12th spot and hoping to break back into the top 10. India captain Virat Kohli, who has been ranked No.1 in both ODIs and T20s but never higher than eighth in Tests, will also be looking to improve his current ranking of 14th. For the West Indies, stylish left-hander Darren Bravo is in 23rd spot, while Kraigg Braithwaite is 32nd and the experienced Marlon Samuels 43rd, according to statistics developed by David Kendix. The Sri Lanka-Australia series will see several leading batsmen in action, including skipper Steven Smith, who is the top ranked batsman in the MRF Tyres ICC Player Rankings for Test batsmen Adam Voges (sixth) and vice-captain David Warner (eighth) have opportunities to improve their rankings, while Sri Lanka captain Angelo Mathews is the only batsman from his side inside the top 10 in 10th position. Australia fast bowler Josh Hazlewood in eighth position is the highest-ranked bowler in the series, but team-mates Nathan Lyon (12th), Mitchell Starc (14th) and James Pattinson (19th) all have enough incentive to move up the ladder. The player rankings will now be updated following the conclusion of Antigua and Old Trafford Tests. Series schedule:West Indies vs India21-25 July - 1st Test, Antigua30 July- 3 Aug 3- 2nd Test, Kingston9-13 Aug 3rd Test, Gros Islet18-22 Aug - 4th Test, Port of SpainSri Lanka vs Australia26-30 July 1st Test, Pallekele4-8 Aug 2nd Test, Galle13-17 Aug 3rd Test, ColomboMRF Tyres ICC Test Team Rankings (as of 19 July 2016, before the start of India-West Indies and Sri Lanka-Australia series)Rank Team Points: 1. Australia 118, 2. India 112, 3. Pakistan 111, 4. England 108, 5. New Zealand 98, 6. South Africa 92, 7. Sri Lanka 85, 8. West Indies 65, 9. Bangladesh 57.UNI XC AE AN2227 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0136-845228.Xml
"It is currently difficult to estimate effects of Brexit on the German economy, but it could remain limited, at least in the short term," said the Bundesbank in its monthly report, forecasting that the German economy would grow strongly in coming months following a slowdown in the second quarter.
"The underlying trend is still quite strong, and a significant increase in economic output can be expected for the summer quarter," Xinhua news agency quoted it as saying.
According to the central bank, the driving factors of domestically supported upswing, including the excellent labour market, rising real wages and an expansionary fiscal policy, remain intact.
"The continued favourable business and household sentiment suggests a purely temporary breather in the second quarter," it said.
Europe's biggest economy grew by 0.7 per cent in the first quarter of 2016. Economists expected the growth to have slowed in the second quarter.
--IANS lok/
( 191 Words)
2016-07-19-03:04:01 (IANS)
Bilateral trade between China and Asean rose to $472 billion in 2015 from $7 billion in 1991, with an annual growth rate of 18.5 per cent, Vice Commerce Minister Gao Yan said at a news conference.
During the January-May 2016 period, bilateral trade fell 7.1 per cent year on year to $173 billion, Xinhua news agency reported.
The two sides are trying their best to "get bilateral-trade growth back on track as soon as possible", Gao said.
China currently is Asean's biggest trading partner, while Asean is China's third biggest.
By the end of May, two-way investment had exceeded $160 billions, with Asean remaining a major destination for Chinese companies.
--IANS ksk
( 148 Words)
2016-07-19-11:08:02 (IANS)
The resolution on temporary adjustment of regulations for administrative approvals in the Shanghai, Guangdong, Tianjin and Fujian FTZs was passed by the National People's Congress Standing Committee, Xinhua quoted the government website, as saying.
The adjustment contains a total of 51 items, with more than 20 of them involving changes from administrative approval to managerial registration for foreign investment.
It also approved wholly foreign owned enterprises in dozens of areas outside of the negative list on foreign investment, covering sectors ranging from agriculture to transportation. (ANI with inputs)
The Afghanistan government on Tuesday urged the Indian government and investors to utilise the trade opportunities in the agricultural sector of the country and sought assistance in marketing, packaging and processing of goods to boost its economy. "Developing business to business relationships between Afghan producers and Indian retail and direct wholesale markets for our agricultural products will be critical for sustaining private sector business during the years ahead," Abdul Qadeer Jawad, Deputy Minister of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock of Afghanistan, said here. He was speaking at a conference 'Made in Afghanistan' held under the aegis of Confidence Building Measure (CBM) of the 'Heart of Asia' process for Rebuilding Afghanistan. Jawad requested the investors to take "advantage" of the investment opportunities that agriculture offers in his country. "We are looking for potential investors in areas such as processing of dry fruits and nuts, processing and cotton yarn production, establishment of cold chains and supply chains while in packaging the potential areas were fresh and dry fruit boxes, jars, lids, tins, glass and plastic bottles, tetra pack packaging etc.," he said. "In trading and marketing, investment opportunities exist in transport and logistics services such as cargo villages inside airports, trade partnership building services, marketing and branding services." The conference, organised by Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Ficci) also hosted an exhibition in which entrepreneurs from Afghanistan showcased their skilled products, dry fruits and stone-work objects. The Afghan government has also coordinated with the civil aviation authority to establish a cargo village at Kabul Airport, he said. "The cargo village would further help in trade facilitation. It will help in establishment of a huge cold storage facility with a capacity of over 10,000 metric tons," Jawad said. A memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed between FICCI Ladies Organisation (FLO) and Afghanistan Women Business Federation to help develop the entrepreneurship opportunities for Afghan women in India. "The 'Heart of Asia' process was a shining example of Indian engagement with the Afghanistan and this will make a significant contribution to rebuilding Afghanistan and bring peace and stability in the entire region," Shaida Mohammad Abdali, Afghan envoy in India said. --IANS ruwa/rn/vt ( 372 Words) 2016-07-19-17:26:00 (IANS)
Looks like Shah Rukh Khan really wants things to work out to avoid the biggest clash next year between 'Raees' and 'Kaabil,' hence he paid a visit at Hrithik Roshan's Juhu home last night. Reportedly, the 'Dilwale' actor had a chat with producer of the film Rakesh Roshan for few hours. He then took to his Twitter handle to post, "Met friend/mentor/family after many a days.Mr. R.Roshan reminded me.it's not important to do 2 much, it's important to get 1 right. Thx sir." This shows, the meeting must have ended on a happy note. Ritesh Sidhwani was too spotted with SRK outside the Roshans' house. Although, nothing about the meeting has been officially announced out yet. Earlier, while interacting with the media during Eid, SRK said, "We have spoken to Hrithik and also Ritesh Sidhwani and Farhan Akhtar (producers of Raees). That was a month ago, but I guess now we can do some adjustments. Rakeshji (Kaabil producer Rakesh Roshan) and Ritesh and Farhan will be meeting again. We are trying to figure things out, so we don't have a clash." Further explaining the reason, the actor said, "I think a big film should release in 3,500-4,000 theatres. When two big films release, we don't get the magnitude of theatrical release we want. Till the time we don't have 8,000-10,000 theatres, no two big films can come. Raees is nearly ready, we are only left to shoot that last shot." Hrithik too was quizzed about the same at the 'Mohenjo Daro' press conference, where he said, "SRK and I are actors and this should be left to the producers to discuss." However, giving an interesting turn to the tale, director Sanjay Gupta took to Twitter handle to announce, he wrote, "Dear All, KAABIL releases on Jan 26, 2017. Absolutely no change in date. Hope this clears all unnecessary rumours. Warm regards." (ANI)
In the wake of prevailing security situation in the Valley, the batch of pilgrims has been halted near Shaitani Nallah area of Banihal in Ramban on Jammu Srinagar National Highway.
The pilgrims would be allowed to go ahead only after the authorities are assured of their security in the valley.
No fresh batch of pilgrims has been allowed for yatra from Jammu today. (ANI)
At least ten CRPF personnel were killed and five injured in an encounter between the Naxal and the Cobra battalion near the border of Imamganj and Aurangabad police station here.
The bodies of three Naxals were also recovered.
As per reports, the jawans of the COBRA unit were ambushed in an IED blast after which an encounter started between the two.
Bihar Director General of Police P.K. Thakur told ANI that eight jawans died on spot, while two of them died on their way to the hospital.
The encounter started late last night and is continuing.
Search operation is still going on. (ANI)
Director general of police P K Thakur told UNI that eight commandos were killed on the spot and two others succumbed to their injuries yesterday on way to Anugrah Narayan Medical College hospital in Gaya. However three among the injured have been airlifted to Patna as their medical condition were critical.
The jawans of the COBRA battalion were ambushed when they were engaged in combing operations against the rebels in the dense Dumrinala forest.
In the encounter that followed yesterday afternoon, three naxals were also killed and a huge cache of arms and ammunition including AK 47 and INSAS rifles were recovered ,he added.
CRPF DIG Kamal Kishor while confirming killing of commandos said that all the jawans belonged to the 205th COBRA battalion and were conducting anti- naxal operations.
Meanwhile, a massive man hunt had been launched and borders with Jharkhand and Chattisgarh were sealed to nab the naxals.UNI IS PS ADG 930
-- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0421-843632.Xml
Trade sources said her recent pictures in a bikini , which the actress shared on the social media, were actually stills from the shooting of her upcoming film project.
Sources associated with film project say that pictures of the actress, which send the social media abuzz, were snapshots of the shooting for her debut Bollywood film in the picturesque location of Mauritius.
Touted as a 'horror romance'_ 'Saansein -The Last Breath' features Sonalika opposite model turned actor Rajneish Duggal. After creating waves in small screen and doing superhit films down south, Sonarika is now looking forward to her Bollywood debut. Also starring Hiten Tejwani, Neetha Shetty, Vishal Malhotra, Amir Dalvi, the film is directed by Rajiv S Ruia under the banner of GPA Productions .UNI AR RSA 1254
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Rubbishing reports that the authorities have banned publication of newspapers for three days in Kashmir, Information and Broadcasting Minister M. Venkaiah Naidu today said that Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti has assured him that no such decision has been made. Naidu told the media, "Yesterday I spoke to Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti and inquired about the reports that newspapers are not being published in Kashmir to that she replied and assure me that no such decision has been taken nor anything of this sort will happen in the future." According to reports, the authorities last week banned newspaper publication in Kashmir for three days after the police raided media houses and shut down a major printing press. According to reports, Mobile and internet services were also blocked in the valley. Cable TV was also blocked, but was restored on Saturday evening. Meanwhile, the curfew imposed in the valley in wake of the protest over the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Muzaffar Wani continued for the eleventh consecutive day today. Two civilians were killed in retaliatory firing last evening after locals clashed with armed forced in Qazigund area of South Kashmir. With this, the death toll of civilians has reached around 40. (ANI) (ANI)
According to official sources, Naidu spoke to Mehbooba Mufti on Monday night on the issue of ban on newspapers in the state.
Amitabh Mattoo, a top aide of Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, on Monday denied that the state government has imposed a ban on the media in Kashmir, saying "heads will roll" after it is clear who took the decision.
The editors and newspaper owners of Srinagar-based dailies were told by a government spokesman and minister on Saturday evening that they should stop publication in view of the strict curfew in the Kashmir Valley.
--IANS sid/rn/vt
( 142 Words)
2016-07-19-13:20:01 (IANS)
Veteran social worker Anna Hazare on Tuesday demanded the hangman's noose for all the accused in the brutal gang rape and inhuman murder of a minor schoolgirl in Kopardi village here last week. In a statement, Hazare condemned the incident which he described as "extremely shocking and a dark blot on humanity". "The perpetrators of this crime deserve to be severely punished and they must be hanged. This would serve as an example to others," Hazare said. The 79-year old anti-corruption crusader said that in recent times, people have been campaigning against the capital punishment for criminals in the name of humanity. "There is no point in showing any mercy towards those who have blackened the face of humanity itself in such incidents," Hazare said. Welcoming the proposed appointment of Special Public Prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam to fight the case in a fast track court, Hazare said the government must make all-out efforts and ensure the culprits are punished at the earliest. He expressed concerns over the growing insecurity women encounter in our society and urged the police and the government to remain ever vigilant and prevent such recurrences. On July 13 in Kopardi, the family of a 14-year-old schoolgirl found her badly mutilated, blood-splattered body under a tree in a field sending shockwaves across the state. She was brutally gang raped by at least three persons, her teeth and arms were broken, flesh from all over her body was ripped off, her hair were pulled out, and she was strangulated to death. The incident sparked off a major political controversy in Maharashtra with the opposition, the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party, targeting the Bharatiya Janata Party-Shiv Sena government in the monsoon session of the assembly that started here on Monday. Ahmednagar Superintendent of Police Saurabh Tripathi said three persons were arrested and police teams were trying to track down others who may be involved. They were identified as Jitendra, Nitin G. Bhailume and Santosh G. Bhaval, Tripathi said. The police were searching for at least two other accomplices. The trio was produced before a local court and remanded in police custody for seven days each. In view of the statewide uproar, Hazare has advised all political parties not to create controversies, view the sad incident on humanitarian grounds and also provide social support and security to the aggrieved family. --IANS qn/py/vm ( 403 Words) 2016-07-19-13:26:04 (IANS)
Even as Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is locked in a one-upmanship race with the Army chief Gen Raheel Sharif on cornering India over violence in the Srinagar valley, Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) is getting ready for army - supervised assembly elections under the shadow of violence and arson. The field is open only to parties that have accepted accession of PoK with Pakistan More than 17,000 army personnel and 15,200 paramilitary personal are already on "election" duty, prompting Pakistan People's Party to cry foul. In fact, the PPP has already hit the streets saying that the Sharifs are rigging the one day- ballot on July 21. Elections in PoK are generally a mere formality with the King's party in the saddle in Islamabad securing the mandate. Pakistan Muslim League -N (PML-N) is the front runner this time around though Rawalpindi's Team B (Imran Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, PTI) is giving both PML-N and PTI a run for their money. Repeated clashes between PML-N and PPP have claimed several lives. Minister for Electricity Faisal Mumtaz Rathore was attacked during a campaign meeting. And at an Eid Milan party, activists of both parties opened indiscriminate fire, and indulged in acts of arson. Scores of people including a former minister were injured. As many as 427 candidates are in the race for the 41-elected seats in the 49-member PoK assembly, which has very limited powers. Of them, 328 are contesting in the 29 constituencies in PoK and 99 will be competing for 12 Kashmiri refugee constituencies spread across Pakistan. An estimated 21.81 lakh voters will decide their political fortunes. While the PPP is going alone, the PML-N has entered into an alliance with Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) and Jammu Kashmir People's Party (JKPP). The Sharifs party tried to woo the Muslim conference (MC) chief, Sardar Attique but without success. The big brother wanted the Sardar to vacate his party' strong holds for PML-N. This was not acceptable to the MC supremo, and he closed ranks with Imran Khan's party. The new combine has fielded joint candidates for seven seats. POLITICS SANS PRINCIPLES In a bizarre display of politics without principles, the Jamaat has struck a deal with the Muslim Conference for one seat. With N-support, it is trying its luck in two seats. In all, the JI has eight candidates in the fray. The pro independence parties, the All Parties National Alliance (APNA) and Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) have refused to sign the condition of accession of PoK with Pakistan. And have not fielded any candidate. Kashmir National Party (KNP) headed by London -based Dr. Shabir Chaudhary has put up one candidate, Mir Afzal Suleria from Muzaffarabad. The KNP has a two-point manifesto. One: AJK should get 70% profit out of major projects launched by Pakistan in its territory. Two: 12 seats of Pakistan based refugees should be abolished. Many local stalwarts are vying to enter the PoK assembly. Prominent amongst them are PoK Prime Minister Abdul Majid, PoK PTI President, Sultan Mahmud Chaudhary, who is also a former PoK premier, and PoK PML-N President Raja Farook Haider. PPP is seeking a fresh mandate based on its 'stellar' performance. "The outgoing Mehdi Shah Governmentopened three medical colleges while its predecessor had failed to set up even one medical college", the party manifesto says. But the PPP's Achilles heel is its poor governance record, sayspolitical analyst, ErshadMahmud,who blames PPP's central leadership for the poor show by PoK unit. "PPP government in PoK was not given a free hand by the central party leadership to run the local affairs", he remarks. PPP dissidents have generally migrated to PTI giving it a leg-up. At least three cabinet ministers joined the PTI along with their supporters after elections were announced. No doubt, PPP is in trouble following this setback, its chairman Bilawal Bhutto had an extensive tour of PoK districts and addressed huge rallies. In these rallies, he accused that Nawaz Sharif is "jeopardizing the issue of Kashmir by building his associations with the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi" and pledged that he would take back the entire Kashmir from India. PTI its manifesto has vowed to make PoK self-reliant in all respects. Women empowerment is its talking point though it has not fielded a single woman candidate. Special attention to education, health and industry are the other electoral planks of PTI. The PML- N has pledged the "revival of self-rule in Azad Jammu and Kashmir" if voted to power. It promised a "responsible, authoritative and dignified" government. It has vowed to facilitate intra-Kashmir trade and travel, "as a continuation 1999 Lahore declaration". And has committed to spend an additional Rs 50 billion on roads and other infrastructure. Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) of London- based Muhajir leader Altaf Hussain is once again trying its luck in two constituencies in Karachi which are reserved for Kashmiri refugees. The party had won these seats in the 2006 and 2011 elections but observers say the wind is no longer favourable to the MQM as the party is at the receiving end of the para-military force, Rangers, which has been asked to 'clean up' Karachi. PML-N has already established its vote bank in PoK. It has an edge in nine Kashmiri refugee constituencies located in Punjab, ruled by prime minister's younger brother, Shahbaz Sharif, according to political Maqsood Muntazar. Moreover, PML-N is on a strong wicket as it has allied with JI and JKPP. Party-wise position in the outgoing assembly: PPP -29; PML (N) - 11, MC- 5,MQM-2, JKPNP -1 and PTI- 1. Eight seats in the 49-member assembly are filled through nomination; five of these seats are reserved for women while one seat each is earmarked for religious scholars, professionals and for Kashmiris settled abroad. The views expressed in the above article are that of Mr.Surinder Kumar Sharma who is associated with the Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis (ANI).
Congress today staged a walkout in the Lok Sabha expressing dissatisfaction over the response of Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh on the Uttarakhand and Arunachal crisis. Responding to the issue raised by Congress Leader M Mallikarjun Kharge during Zero Hour about the alleged toppling of elected governments in non BJP ruled states, including Uttarakhand and Arunachal Pradesh, by the Union Government, the Home Minister said Mr Kharge has levelled charges against the government that it is ''our nature and a habit of destablising the popular governments''.Countering the attack, Mr Singh said, ''Destablising democratically elected and popular governments in the states is the old habit of Congress.'' ''Our government has never destablised any democratically elected government but it is the Congress which in the past had destablised popular governments in the states 105 times,'' he said. Mr Singh said he feels that the crisis in Uttarakhand and Arunachal Pradesh was ''unfortunate''.He said what happened in Uttarakhand and Arunachal Pradesh was due to the internal crisis of the Congress and the BJP had nothing to do with it. Attacking the Congress, the Union Home Minister said, "If there is a hole in your boat then you cannot blame the water. If there is hole in your boat then it is certain that it will sink and it would be wrong to blame water.'' Congress Members created an uproar soon after the Union Home Minister's accusation.More UNI NY RSA 1345 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0099-843890.Xml
The Central government today appealed to the Opposition not to politicise the Gujarat Dalit incident and said the government had taken the required action. "Such incidents should not be politicised. The government has taken immediate action in the matter," Minister for Information and Broadcasting Venkaiah Naidu told reporters here after a meeting of the BJP Parliamentary committee. Last week, a video showing some men beating half-naked members of the Dalit community went viral. The men, who claimed to be cow protectors, were shown beating the Dalit men allegedly for skinning a dead cow in Una town of Gir Somnath district. Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati had also raised the issue in the Rajya Sabha yesterday. She alleged that some persons, practicing their profession of skinning, were publicly insulted by some people in Gujarat while the local police remained a mute spectator to the incident. She also demanded that the Central government intervene into the matter and take action against those involved in the incident.UNI NY-RBE PS SV 1407 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0427-843903.Xml
Officials of the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) today seized a satellite phone from a 69-year-old French passenger, who was heading for hishome country via Dubai, at the Chennai International Airport. Airport sources said since the passenger was carrying the phone without proper permission, it was seized by the authorities and he was detained for interrogation. Acting on information, the personnel searched his hand baggage and seized the phone. The sources said, the passenger, being a Foreigner, should have declared to the police that he was having a satellite phone in his possession and obtained proper permission. Since he has not disclosed it, he was detained for questioning, the sources added.UNI GV ADB 1400 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0434-843971.Xml
The Biodiversity Conservation Councilof India, a non-profitable Public Charitable Trust, today urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to ensure that the traditional bull taming sport of Jallikattu was held during Pongal festivities in Tamil Nadu from next year onwards. Talking to reporters here, Council Managing Trustee Karthikeyaa Sivasenapathy thanked the Prime Minister for initiating steps for the conduct of Jallikattu in Tamil Nadu, Bailgada in Maharashtra, Sethali in Kerala, Kambala in Karnataka and Sathiya Bullock Cart races held during Diwali in North Gujarat. In a letter to Mr Modi, which was released to media, he said the Supreme Court had imposed a total ban on Jallikattu in May 2014 after the previous Congress-led UPA regime issued a notification including bulls in the list of performing animals along with bear, tiger, lion and monkey. Stating that Jallikattu has a recorded history of over 4000 years, he said the bull taming sport, alongwith Manjuvirattu, Erthu Vidum Thiruvizha and Rekla were part and parcel of temple festival celebrations in Tamil Nadu. Mr Sivasenapathy, who is also the Managing Trustee of Senaapathy Kangeyam Cattle Research Foundation, that rears the famous Kangeyam Bulls, said following the ban, people of Tamil Nadu were utterly disappointed that they could not hold Jallikattu during Pongal festival in 2015 and 2016. Exuding confidence of holding the event next year, he urged the Prime Minister to remove bulls for the list of performing animals by passing a special law or by bringing in amendments to the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960, to ensure that the event was held without any hitch in future. Mr Senapathy said he has also sent a draft of the proposed amendments to the Act to the Prime Minister along with his letter.UNI GV ADB 1430 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0434-844042.Xml
Informing this at the court, Additional Advocate General told the court that though the order appointing him as the Chief Minister's advisor was issued earlier, he had not accepted it so far and there was no need to quit the post.
The High Court Bench comprising acting chief justice Thottathil Radhakrishnan and justice Anu Sivaraman, said a detailed argument would be heard in this regard as a dispute had broken out over it in the past.
The plea would be considered again on Thursday.
Mr Damodaran had appeared in the High Court in many cases for his clients against the Kerala government while he was the legal advisor of the Chief Minister, which invited wide spread criticism against the Chief Minister.
However, the Chief Minister had justified Mr Damadaran's appearance in the High court for his clients against the Kerala government. BJP Kerala President Kummanam Rajasekharan approached the High court seeking cancellation of Mr Damodaran's appointment as the legal advisor to the Chief Minister.UNI CGV PR RJ 1550
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The Government today said that it was making all necessary efforts to minimise loss of lives in natural disasters and calamities across the country . Replying to a Calling Attention Notice on 'situation arising out of floods in the country, particularly in Odisha, and preventive measures taken by the Government', Minister of State for Home Affairs Kiren Rijiju said, ''We are constantly making efforts to minimise the loss of life and property in natural disasters.'' He said that India is the only country that has been implementing the National disaster management effectively. The Indian Government had earned praise from the global community for its efforts towards disaster relief. He also allayed the concerns by Members about delay in release of funds for disaster relief. ''There is no question of delay in the release of funds for disaster relief. In fact, the funds to states for the purpose are given at the beginning of the year so that they can utilise them when needed. Thereafter, the second installment of the funds is released as per the laid down norms,' 'Mr Rijiju said. Stating that the primary responsibility of disaster relief lies with the state government, the Minister, however, said that the Centre was shirking its responsibility in the matter. ''When I say that the primary responsibility for disaster relief lies with the state government, it is because only the state government can best determine the extent of damage caused due to a calamity and the amount that is required for disaster mitigation,'' the Minister said. Her said the Central Government was ready to pitch in with efforts to provide additional funds for disaster relief.More UNI AR SB/RSA 1628 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0092-844339.Xml
Almost all farmer unions in the state have decided to hold prootest marches and and stage rallies at all district headquarters from July 26 to 28.The decision was taken last evening by the heads of ryot unions, including the BKU Ekta, (Ugrahana, BKU Ekta, Dakaundhk, BKU Krantikari Punjab Kisan Sabha, Kisan Sabha Punjab, Kisan Sangrash committee Punjab, Punjab Kisan Sangrash Commeetti (Azad), Jamhori Kisan sabhi and Kirti Kisan union).This was announced here today by Sukhdev Singh Kokari, General Secretary BKU Ekta Ugrahana and Nirbhai Singh Punjab Kirti Kisan Sabha.They also stated peasant unions would submit a memorandum of their demands to respective Deputy Commissioners of the district. The protest would continue for three days, round the clock .The ryots' demands of waving of loan of dead farmers and farm labourers, Rs five five lakh to the families of peasants who committed suicide.They also demanded survey of farmer suicide cases to ascertain the actual number of ryots suicides, compensation of s 40,000 per acre for loss of cotton crop by white fly attack last year. They also criticised the anti-farmer policies of the state government.UNI XC RJ VN1812 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0138-844669.Xml
There has been a spurt in infiltration attempts from across the border, resulting in terrorists also increasingly being neutralised, the Lok Sabha was informed today. "There has been a spurt in infiltration attempts from across the border, which have been responded by the state government and security forces,'' Minister of State for Home Affairs Hansraj Gangaram said in a written reply. "As a result, infiltrating terrorists are increasingly being neutralised, which has frustrated the evil designs of terrorist organisations and led them to target the security forces deployed in Jammu and Kashmir," Mr Hansraj added. Giving details about the recent attack on a bus carrying CRPF personnel, he said, "On June 25, after completion of the Annual Range Classification Firing at Lethpora, a convoy of 161 Bn of CRPF consisting of four vehicles carrying 74 personnel was returning towards their unit headquarters Srinagar around 1600 hrs."When the convoy was passing through Pampore town, two militants armed with AK-47 rifles appeared all of a sudden and opened know discriminate fire. In the encounter, both militants were neutralised. However, 8 CRPF personnel sacrificed their lives and 27 CRPF personnel were injured," he added.UNI SM SB 1827 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0271-844661.Xml
Odisha government today decided to celebrate the completion of 200years of revolt of Paika's in Odisha against the British empire, this year by organizing a series ofevents both in state and in national levels. Long before the 1857 Sepoy mutiny, the Paikas in Odisha have revolted against the Britishempire in 1817. The decision was taken at a high level meeting held under the Chairmanship of Chief SecretaryA P Padhi here. The meeting decided to educate the Odia girls about the tricks of Paika akhada (a form of self defence) and honour the best performing girls with Sukha dei award. A decision was also taken to organise a national seminar at Delhi ,set up a light and soundgallery in the state museum and to conserve old documents relating to Paika revolt in the statearchive. The meeting decided to set up an Amar Jyoti pillar at Barunei and organize an exhibition onthe foothills of Barunei hills, the centre of activity of the Paikas during the revolt. A decision was taken to prepare documentation of the revolt based on research and historicdata, organise Kabi sammelanis, meetings, essay, drawing and debate competitions among the students to educate them about the glorious historic deeds of the brave warriors of Odisha. The meeting also decided to conserve and protect the Khorda fort and develop the roadleading to the fort. A work schedule for the implementations of all the decisions taken at the meeting would beprepared within the next eight to 10 days, sources here said.UNI BD BM PR RJ BD1930 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0136-844903.Xml
Noted women rights activist Falvia Agnes has called for improving the provisions of the Hindu Code Bill, saying the code was not so much egalitarian and free from anti-woman biases, as it was presented to be. In interaction with journalists of the Indian Women's Press Corps here this week, Ms Agnes said opposed by a conservative nationalist leadership, the Hindu Code Bill, was in essence a balancing act, its contradictions and lacunae unfolding in subsequent years. She pointed that it was a misconception that Hindus forsook personal laws and embraced a secular, egalitarian and gender code, which, it was felt, should be extended to minority communities. Anti-women biases, suggested the rights lawyer, continued to prevail as part of the Hindu cultural ethos, adversely impacting women's rights. '' With strong evidence of discriminatory gender practices still prevalent, had the codified Hindu law provided the necessary foundation on which a strong edifice of a uniform and gender just family code could be built?'' the lawyer said speaking on 'Has the Codified Hindu Law Changed Gender Relationship. Ms Agnes, who is a pioneer of the women's movement and had had worked consistently on issues of gender and law reform, in her argument explored whether the enactment of the Hindu Code Bill had in any way lead to a social transformation. In her presentation, she revisited the debates that formed the backdrop of enacting these laws, and the compromises and political compulsions that preceded them. A strong proponent of legal pluralism, emphasising the premise of 'reforms from within', Ms Agnes has played an important role in reforming the Christian Personal Laws as well as advancing the rights of Muslim women.UNI NAZ CJ RJ 1936 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0400-844921.Xml
The Puducherry unit of the Bharathiya Janata Party today paid rich tributes to those killed in the terrorist attack in France on July 14 during the "Bastille Day" celebrations. Led by state president V Saminathan,the BJP volunteers gathered at the beach here and stood in silence with candles in their hands. Some priests from the churches here also joined to pay homage.UNI PAB CJ RJ BD1941 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0400-844932.Xml
Accusing the state government of using all available tactics to dent the credibility of media institutions in the valley, all Kashmir-based media houses today said they will not publish newspapers, till the time the current regime comes clean on the ban.The decision of the media houses comes a day after Advisor to Chief Minister Professor Amitabh Mattoo on national news channel said the government was not aware of the gag on newspapers in Kashmir."On Monday, Prof Mattoo approached us insisting that it (ban) was a mistake for which he apologized," Kashmir-based media houses said in a statement, after a meeting of the editors and proprietors of the newspapers."At the same time, the state government resorted to propaganda blitzkrieg insisting that there was no ban. Editors took this issue very seriously and asked the Prof Matto that government must own the ban and issue a statement guaranteeing that media operations are not being hampered," it read.The statement further said that they haven't heard from Prof Matto as if now, adding till the time the government comes clean on the ban, no newspaper will not be published in the valley."We haven't heard anything from anyone in the government since then. It indicates that the Government has not changed its press emergency. In wake of these developments, it may not be possible for us to resume publication of newspapers," it said. The government came under serious criticism over the alleged gag on newspapers from the opposition and different sections of the society in Kashmir and rest of the country. The government again had to face an awkward moment when Prof Matto said that the ban didn't have consent from the Chief Minister and people responsible for it will be punished.Meanwhile, upping the ante on PDP-led government over Prof Mattoo's statement, main opposition National Conference Omar Abdullah yesterday said his comments show that no one is in charge in Srinagar at the moment. "If you needed an admission that NO ONE is in charge in Srinagar at the moment you got it from the advisor to the CM," Mr Abdullah, who is the former chief minister of the state, wrote on micro-blogging site twitter. "Miscommunication. If that is all it was why did it take 48 hours to correct?," he asked.UNI ABS CJ RJ 2009 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0400-845013.Xml
The Rajanagaram police on a tip-off, intercepted a Van near GIET engineering complex on the national highway-16 in the early hours today and on search found 316 kg ganja stuffed in ten gunny bags. Police here said the van along with the ganja was seized. The police arrested three persons travelling in the van and seized from them four cell phones, Rs 38,000 in cash. The ganja is suspected to have been procured in interior forests adjoining Orissa and being smuggled to Chennai. A case under Narcotics act was registered and being handed over to excise department for further action, the police said.UNI XR-DP CJ AE 2022 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0400-845046.Xml
Prime Minister Narendra Modi today expressed grief on the loss of lives of CRPF personnel in an ambush that took place last night in the jungles of Bihar's Aurangabad district. The Prime Minister has prayed for the speedy recovery of the injured and extended his condolences to the families of the martyred CRPF personnel in this hour of sadness. Meanwhile, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh spoke to Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar in this regard. He has also instructed the Director General, CRPF to rush to Aurangabad to assess the situation, post the ambush. At least 10 commandos of CRPF elite COBRA battalion were killed after a group of Naxalites surrounded troops and blew off 22 IEDs in the jungles of Bihar's Aurangabad district. Mr. Singh expressed his condolences to the families of martyred CRPF personnel. He also prayed for the speedy recovery of the injured. The Cobra unit was raised in the year 2008 and this was one of the biggest casualty to this unit since then. UNI XC AE 2033 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0400-845086.Xml
The Gross Non Performing Assets (GNPA) of Scheduled Commercial Banks (SCBs) has gone above Rs 5,41,763, whereas the GNPA of Public Sector Banks (PSBs) has risen to 4,76,816 crore during Financial Year 2016, the Rajya Sabha was informed today. Altogether the total Non Performing Assets of these banks have gone up to 10,18,579 crore. In a written reply, Minister of State for Finance Santosh Kumar Gangwar said the main reasons for increase in NPAs of banks include sluggishness in the domestic growth during the recent past, slowdown in recovery in the global economy and continuing uncertainty in the global markets leading to lower exports of various products like textiles, engineering goods, leather, gems. The government has taken specific measures to address issues in sectors such as Infrastructure (Power, Roads etc.), Steel and Textiles, where incidence of NPAs is high. Mr Gangwar said the government has also approved establishment of six (6) new Debt Recovery Tribunals (DRTs), to speed up the recovery of bad loans of the banking sector, in addition to existing thirty three. Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has also undertaken steps which include (i) Formation of Joint Lenders' Forum (JLF) for revitalizing stressed assets in the system, (ii) Flexible Structuring for long term project loans to Infrastructure and Core industries, and (iii) Strategic Debt Restructuring (SDR) scheme. (iv) Scheme for Sustainable Structuring of Stressed Assets (S4A). The Government has recently issued advisory to banks to take action against guarantors in event of default by borrower under relevant sections of SARFAESI Act, Indian Contract Act & RDDB&FI Act, since in the event of default; the liability of the guarantor is co-extensive with the borrower, the Minister added.UNI ADP SB 2040 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0429-845068.Xml
The Assam government today decided to forward the demand of the people of Raha for awarding the AIIMS to be set up in the state to this central Assam town. The decision was taken at a meeting between Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal and AIIMS Demand Committee of Rana here this evening, an official statement said. Mr Sonowal has decided to write a letter to the Central Government highlighting the concerns and proposals of the AIIMS demand committees of Raha. Chairing a meeting with various organisations of AIIMS Demand Committee in the conference room of his office in Assam Secretariat, Mr Sonowal said, "The Government will prepare a draft with full participation of the leaders of the AIIMS Demand Committees highlighting their concerns and proposals and send a letter to the Central Government to do the needful." The decision to write to the Union Health and Family Welfare Ministry was taken considering the deep rooted human interests involved in the issue and it is the prerogative of the Centre to take appropriate decision considering all relevant issues. The decision to set up AIIMS at Jalah, Changsari, in Kamrup district was taken by the then Congress Government in the State in February 2016 which was given due approval by the then Chief Minister of Assam. Following the decision, the organisations leading the agitations for setting up of AIIMS like institution in Raha decided to put their agitations on hold. Giving a patient hearing of the concerns and grievances of the demand committees, Sonowal said, "State Government exhibits fullest sensitivity to the concerns of the people of Central Assam and will do the needful for the interests of the people of State". Condemning the incident that took place in Raha where one person lost his life during a protest for AIIMS last week, Sonowal said, "State Government will show no leniency to anybody found to be guilty in the incident and the Government will take action based on the findings of the one-man inquiry commission headed by the Additional Chief Secretary Rajib Bora". The Chief Minister said his government paid the ex-gratia amounting to Rs. 5 lakh and handed over an appointment letter giving government job to the wife of deceased within 48 hours. Minister for Commerce and Industry, Chandra Mohan Patowary, Minister for Water Resources Keshab Mahanta, MLAs, Chief Secretary VK Pipersenia, few senior government officers along with a 17 member delegation representing AIIMS Demand Committees were present in the meeting. The state government has already handed over land at Changsari to Centre for the medical institute but protests in Raha have been mounting, demanding change of site in favour of Raha. UNI SG CJ AE 2124 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0400-845167.Xml
Thirty two-year-old Rehman and Hussaini and as well as two others, Mohammed Ibrahim Yazdani and Mohammed Ilyas Yazdani, whose custody ended today were produced before the Nampally court here.
However, NIA sought Rehman's custody for seven more days for further investigation but the court granted five days while other three, whose judicial custody was till July 26, were sent to Chenchelguda jail here.
In its report, NIA had claimed that Rehman involved in radicalising youth, arranging finances for terror strikes.UNI KNR CJ AE 2322
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The Puducherry unit of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) today called upon Lt Governor Kiren Bedi not to function in such a way to hide the ''partisan'' attitude of the BJP government at the Centre to Puducherry and function, along with the elected government without "misusing" powers. CPM Secretary R Rajangam in a statement said the Lt Governor failed to resolve important issues in Puducherry and instead, concentrated on issues, which would get publicity. Mr Rajangam said with these remarks he was not criticising the Lt.Governor's meeting with the public or accepting complaints from them. But instead of joining the elected government ti resolve issues doing it alone is an act of ''misuse'' of powers, he added. Mr Rajangam said Chief Minster V Narayanasamy had expressed some views about the appointment of governors at the inter-state council meeting in New Delhi and added that perhaps he might have talked so with Puducherry Lt.Governor in his mind. He said change of the Lt.Governor in Puducherry even before the new government assuming office and the Lt.Governor convening a high-level official meeting before assuming office are intervention into the rights of the state government and the CPM had pointed out it then itself, he said. He said the Lt.Governor, whatever may be her views should give respect to the elected representatives and function along with them. But the issues which need to be decided and resolved through a cabinet meeting is being resolved by the Lt.Governor if her own, he said, adding that while, giving weekly off to a section of the police personnel,the Lt.Govenror had cancelled the weekly off of garbage cleaners and making them work on Sundays also that means on all the seven days of a week.This is with some political motives, he added. Pointing out the exodus of industrial units from Puducherry and closure of business establishments here, Mr Rajangam said 20 per cent of the total population in Puducherry are without a job. Law and order is deteriorating day by day and the legacy loan of the territory crossed Rs 6,000 crore, he said adding that if the central government was willing to help,the textile mills here could have been made functional.The central team's recommendation during natural calamity was also not provided to Puducherry by the BJP government and hence, the Lt.Governor should indulge in such people welfare issues, he added.UNI PAB CJ AE 2351 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0105-844703.Xml
Puducherry Chief Minister V Narayansamy who is camping in New Delhi today called on Union Tourism Minister Mahesh Verma and urged for the setting up of a planetarium in Karaikal as the one in Puducherry. The Chief Minister along with PWD Minister A Namasivayam and Tourism Minister Malladi Krishna Rao went to New Delhi today to meet the union ministers and seek assistance for developmental projects in Puducherry. He also urged for introducing a shipping service between Chennai and Puducherry, since, the latter is a tourist spot. They also met union ministers Pon Radhakrishnan,Uma Bharathi, Prakash Javadekar today held discussion regarding the development of the union territory. They will be meeting Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Home Minister Rajnath Singh tomorrow and press for the waiver of the legacy loan and for implementing developmental schemes.UNI PAB CJ AE 2358 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0105-844708.Xml
The Republican National Convention began on Monday in Cleveland, Ohio, for the purpose of officially designating real estate mogul Donald Trump as the party's candidate for the November 8 elections to the White House. "Welcome to the 2016 Republican National Convention," Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus said to open the meeting at the Quicken Loans Arena in downtown Cleveland, which is shielded by more than 3,000 policemen providing security for the conclave, Efe news reported. Priebus asked for a moment of silence in honour of the five police officers gunned down by a sniper in Dallas last July 7, and for the three officers who lost their lives the same way this Sunday in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Some 50,000 people are attending the convention, of whom about 15,000 are reporters and other media personnel. Also at the opening day of the convention, which ends next Thursday, are some 5,000 delegates representing the country's 50 states, the District of Colombia and five US territories. Those delegates will be in charge of formalising this Thursday Trump's designation as the party's Presidential candidate, who will then contest the election with Democratic ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who will in turn be nominated next week at her party's convention in Philadelphia. The debates at Monday's meeting, which has as its theme "Make America Safe Again", will focus on issues of security, including the war on terrorism, a subject Trump has dealt with extensively in his campaign, during which he has presented himself and his running mate Mike Pence as "the law and order candidates". Among the speakers at the convention on Monday will be Trump's wife, the former Slovene model Melania Knauss. The magnate let it be known that he will be there for his wife's speech. "I'd love to be there when my wife speaks. So the answer is yes, I will be there," the New York multimillionaire said in an interview on Fox News on Monday, adding that "I'll bet she gives a great speech. She's worked hard on it." The Republican National Convention kicked off after Trump announced last Friday that his running mate and Vice-Presidential candidate will be Indiana Governor Mike Pence. The convention began in an air of tension, partly because of the murders of police officers on Sunday in Louisiana, and partly because of the many protests expected during the conclave. --IANS lok/ ( 407 Words) 2016-07-19-03:42:00 (IANS)
Protesters have slammed what they called US presidential nominee Donald Trump's bigotry and xenophobia in rallies held on the first day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. United in their message against the celebrity tycoon, the protesters marched on Monday in the Cleveland area outside the security parameter where the convention was being held under tight security, Al Jazeera reported. Approximately a third of Cleveland's police officers were deployed around the convention area, and approximately 2,500 others from different areas were brought in to help, as the city expects 50,000 visitors during the three-day convention. Republican delegates attending the convention to officially nominate Trump as their nominee for president should realise that there was "another America with a different message against the hate and fear that Trump is spreading," Al Jazeera quoted said Tom Burke, spokesman for The Coalition to Stop Trump and March on the RNC - a bloc of 40 groups, as saying. "We are hoping to impact the election and build a movement that will outlast the elections to oppose racism, to oppose anti-immigration and to stand up for Muslims and other religious minorities in this country," he told Al Jazeera. Throughout his campaign, the business mogul has raised the ire of many Americans with controversial statements; he declared he would build a wall at the border with Mexico to prevent immigrants from entering the country irregularly and proposed to ban Muslims from entering the US. The former reality TV star made his incendiary proposals against Muslims, from banning to scrutinising them, a pillar of his campaign. Since the Paris, San Bernardino, Orlando and Nice attacks, Trump has sought to cast himself as tough on national security and able to address the issue of "terrorism", Al Jazeera noted. In Cleveland, members of the Muslim community gathered to denounce Trump's rhetoric, which some said "was dividing American in two". At The convention, there some 5,000 delegates representing the country's 50 states, the District of Colombia and five US territories. Those delegates will be in charge of formalising Trump's designation as the party's presidential candidate, who will then contest the November 8 election with Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, who will in turn be nominated next week at her party's convention in Philadelphia. The Republican National Convention kicked off after Trump announced on July 15 that his running mate and vice-presidential candidate will be Indiana Governor Mike Pence. --IANS ksk ( 409 Words) 2016-07-19-08:28:00 (IANS)
In a series of tweets, Military spokesperson Lt General Asim Saleem Bajwa said an intelligence-based operation was carried out near Tank district in which three terrorists were killed and the Chief Justice's son was rescued, daily The News said.
"Awais Shah is safe with security forces, will be transported back to his parents during the day. Chief of the Army Staff General Raheel Sharif telephoned the Chief Justice and congratulated him over his recovery of his son.
Awais was kidnapped on June 20 from Clifton area of Karachi.UNI XC SV SS
-- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0103-843653.Xml
The Philippines has turned down a Chinese proposal to start bilateral talks, its foreign minister said today, because of Beijing's pre-condition of not discussing a court ruling that nullified most of its South China Sea claims.Perfecto Yasay said he had met his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on the sidelines of a summit of Asian and European leaders on the weekend and after raising the topic of last week's ruling, it became clear that was a no-go area.China has angrily rejected the verdict by the Permanent Court of Arbitration and the initial case as illegal and farcical. It has repeatedly said it will not change its approach or its sovereignty claims in the South China Sea."They said if you will insist on the ruling, discussing it along those lines, then we might be headed for a confrontation," Yasay said during an interview with the news channel of broadcaster ABS-CBN."But I really honestly feel that this is something they have to make on a public basis but I also sensed there was room for us to talk very quietly using backdoor channelling."Yasay said Yi had proposed bilateral talks but only on issues "outside, or (in) disregard of, the arbitral ruling," which he declined because it was not in the Philippines' national interests.Yasay's account of the meeting highlights the challenge ahead for the Philippines, a US ally, in getting China to comply with the decision which has ramped up tensions in the vital trade route.The ruling laid out what maritime rights Manila had and where Beijing had violated its rights under international law, including its massive construction works on Mischief Reef.Manila wanted to enforce the points of the complex ruling step-by-step but as a priority had asked China to let its fishermen go to the Scarborough Shoal without being harassed by its coastguard, Yasay said.China's coastguard was preventing Filipino boats from fishing around the hotly contested Scarborough Shoal, fishermen and officials said on Friday, and China's air force has released pictures showing bombers recently flying over the area.China claims most of the South China Sea, through which more than $5 trillion of trade moves annually. Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam have rival claims.Yasay said hoped the ruling would lead to other Southeast Asian countries issuing a joint statement, adding that it could help neighbours also locked in disputes with China."We are not yet engaged in bilateral talks with anyone," he said. "But I would like to see how we can pursue certain provisional arrangements so that it would lead to opening of bilateral or multilateral engagements should that be necessary."REUTERS SDR VN0848 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0431-843616.Xml
Aspiring first lady Melania Trump's speech at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland contained a section strikingly similar to that delivered by current First Lady Michelle Obama at the Democratic convention in 2008."My parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise; that you treat people with respect," Melania, the wife of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, told the convention."They taught me to show the values and morals in my daily life. That is the lesson that I continue to pass along to our son," she added."And we need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow, because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them."That small section of Melania Trump's roughly 15-minute speech yesterday, a highlight of the opening day of the convention, was similar to part of Michelle Obama's convention speech in 2008, in support of her husband Barack Obama."And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you're going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them, and even if you don't agree with them," Michelle Obama said in her speech."And Barack Obama and I set out to build lives guided by these values, and pass them on to the next generations," she added."Because we want our children, and all children in this nation, to know that the only limit to the height of your achievement is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them."Before yesterday's speech, Melania, a Slovenian-born jewelry designer and former model, told NBC's Matt Lauer: "I wrote it...with as little help as possible."A representative of the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.REUTERS SDR GC1130 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0386-843711.Xml
In a possible first, the wife of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's wife Melania Trump is being accused of plagiarising a speech of U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama. As Melania praised her husband, she went on to borrow some parts of Michelle Obama's convention speech in 2008, reports CNN. Michelle Obama in her convention speech has said, "Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values, like you work hard for what you want in life. That your word is your bond that you do what you are saying you are going to do. That you treat people with dignity and respect even if you don't know them and even if you don't agree with them. And Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values and pass them on to the next generation, because we want our children and all children in this nation to know that the only limits to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work hard for them." In her speech Melania said, "My parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life. That your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise, that you treat people with respect. They taught me values and moral in their daily lives. That is a lesson that I continue to pass along to my son and we need to pass these lessons on to the many generations to follow, because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them." (ANI)
The Afghan Taliban said today they were launching new operations after the end of the holy month of Ramadan, dismissing reports that they had been weakened following a change of leadership in May.Afghan government and NATO officials have said government forces have had growing success against the Taliban since US commanders were granted more freedom to conduct air strikes and other operations against the insurgents.They have also pointed to apparent leadership problems within the Taliban since former leader Mullah Mohammad Akhtar Mansour was killed in a US drone strike and replaced by the hardline cleric Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada.The Taliban's chief spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said reports of a reduction in insurgent operations during Ramadan reflected a natural slowdown during one of the hottest periods of the year when Muslims are required not to eat or drink during daylight hours."But the commanders of the American occupation forces and the puppet figures in Kabul got the wrong impression from this situation and think that Mujahideen have been weakened or are facing problems due to the change in leadership," he said.With the end of Ramadan and the Eid holiday immediately afterwards, the insurgents, who are seeking to force the NATO-led coalition out of Afghanistan and bring in Islamic law, were moving on to the offensive and had seized three district centres in the past 24 hours. REUTERS SDR GC1259 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0431-843839.Xml
In a statement, Tokyo said that North Korea's missile launches violate UN Security Council resolutions, and vowed to step up coordination with South Korea, the United States and other related countries to deal with the matter.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Tuesday directed relevant departments to thoroughly gather and analyze information on missile launches by DPRK, reports the Xinhua news agency.
Japan's Defense Minister Gneral Nakatani has also denounced the North Korean missiles launches as provocative acts that harm the peace and security of the global community.
North Korea reportedly launched three ballistic missiles Tuesday morning, following the launch of two last month, reports said. (ANI with inputs)
A former minister of China's State Council Information Office has said that the ongoing dispute over the South China Sea should not hamper relations between Beijing and other member states of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). Participating in a think tank seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development held in Singapore, Zhao Qizheng said Tuesday, "Although the Chinese government has dismissed the ill-founded arbitration unilaterally initiated by the Aquino III administration (of The Philippines), China remains open to the Philippines, and disputes in South China Sea shouldn't hamper China-ASEAN relations." Zhao said China fully understood that ASEAN countries have common interests on the whole, and each country in the region has its own interests. China and ASEAN should maintain friendly exchanges, as well as friendly relations. He further stated that China-ASEAN relations should be based on common interests and aim for deepening political communications and enhance cultural exchanges in the future. Li Guoqiang, deputy director of Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, echoed with Zhao's view, saying that ASEAN is the priority of China's diplomacy with neighboring countries. He stressed that China and ASEAN should work together to maintain peace and stability in the region. Qizheng, was quoted by Xinhua news agency, as saying that he was hopeful about China and the Philippines restarting bilateral negotiations on the South China Sea, and moving step-by-step. "China and Philippines can temporarily put aside differences, and discuss issues of joint exploration first," Zhao said. "Joint developments are very broad, including resources, fisheries, maritime rescue, meteorologic data exchange as well as disaster relief at sea. We should move step by step," he added. Organised by the Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the one-day seminar attracted more than 20 experts from academic institutes in China and Southeast Asian countries, including Thailand, Cambodia and Malaysia. The government of former Philippine President Benigno S. Aquino III filed the arbitration against China in 2013, despite the agreement his country had reached with China on resolving disputes in the South China Sea through bilateral negotiations. Since then, China-Philippines relations have been severely deteriorated. However, current Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has expressed readiness and willingness to hold bilateral talks with China, saying that he is planning to send envoy to China to restart negotiations. (ANI with inputs)
Reacting to reports that China will close part of the South China Sea for military drills, the US State Department has said that concerned parties in the dispute should seek non-military mechanisms and instead take diplomatic routes to look for peaceful solutions. During a briefing on Monday, Deputy Spokesperson Mark C. Toner said that Washington does not want any escalation in the South China Sea dispute and thus, the claimants should refrain from provocative actions. "We would call on China to really, in the aftermath of the ruling, to seize the opportunity that it presents to look at all of the claimants' concerns and to seek out legal and diplomatic processes to resolve them. And so we don't want to see escalation, we don't want to see further escalation in the South China Sea," said Toner. "We would call on all claimants to de-escalate and to seek mechanisms that don't involve military assets or any kind of construction or any kind of artificial construction that only increase tensions in the South China Sea," he added. On questions about Washington's involvement in any form of assistance to Philippines, Toner reiterated that the US had no involvement in legal process that was carried out by the tribunal. "The U.S. didn't have any sway or any influence on the tribunal, and nor would we have attempted to weigh in," said Toner. The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, Netherlands, in a ruling on a dispute between the Philippines and China over maritime claims in the South China Sea on July 12, ruled that China has no "historic title" over the waters of the South China Sea. However, China refused to acknowledge the Tribunal's reward, citing it as 'illegal'. (ANI)
The accident occurred at 1.03 p.m. on the No. 2 national highway, near Taiwan's main international airport, located in Taoyuan, around 40 km from capital Taipei, EFE news reported.
All the victims, except the driver, who is Taiwanese, were Chinese tourists from the northern province of Liaoning.
The passengers did not have time to exit the bus before it burst into flames and exploded, officials said.
The cause of the fire remains unclear.
--IANS ksk/vm
( 111 Words)
2016-07-19-13:38:07 (IANS)
A special court hearing treason charges against retd. General Pervez Musharraf today ordered authorities to freeze the former Pakistan President's bank accounts and confiscate his property. A three-member bench of the special court headed by Chief Justice, Peshawar High Court, Justice Mazhar Alam Miankhel passed the orders over the non-appearance of the accused before the court despite repeated notices, Pakistan daily Dawn reported. The court also adjourned the hearing of the case until the former President is arrested or he surrenders. Justice Miankhel remarked that the court cannot initiate further proceedings in the absence of the accused. "According to law, the accused cannot be trialed in absentia," he said. Justice Miankhel said the attitude of the accused left no option for the court, and the special court ordered authorities to freeze retd General Musharraf's bank accounts and confiscate his property. "A compliance report of the orders must be submitted with the court," the court ordered. The former President's counsel said that his client is ailing and currently abroad for treatment. The counsel's request to record his client's statement via Skype was turned down by the bench. Retd General Musharraf had left the country on March 18, soon after the Supreme Court upheld the Sindh High Court directions to remove his name from the exit control list (ECL). Earlier, the court also seized the surety bonds submitted by the former President's guarantor, Rashid Qureshi, and ordered him to submit a sum of Rs 2.5 million as security deposit to the Registrar of the special court. UNI XC ADG1310 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0404-843847.Xml
The three lawmen shot dead in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, were deliberately "targeted and assassinated" by a US Marine Corps veteran who appeared to go out of his way to spare the civilians he encountered during his assault, police officials said.Former Sergeant Gavin Eugene Long, an Iraq war veteran with ties to an African-American anti-government group, seemed determined to slay as many police officers as possible before a SWAT team marksman cut short his attack on Sunday, according to authorities' account the next day.The single gunshot that killed Long, 29, was fired by an officer from about a hundred yards away, police officials said yesterday as they deepened their investigation into the second racially charged armed assault on US law enforcement this month.The ambush came a week and a half after another former US serviceman espousing militant black nationalist views cut down five Dallas officers in a sniper attack that shattered an otherwise peaceful protest denouncing the fatal police shootings of two black men days earlier, one of them in Baton Rouge.Police have declined to say what role race might have played in Sunday's shooting rampage, which left two white officers and one black officer dead, and three more lawmen wounded, one of them critically.But Long, who was black, said in a series of social media messages posted in recent days, some from Dallas, that he was fed up with the mistreatment of African-Americans at the hands of law enforcement, and praised the attack on Dallas police.Legal papers filed in his home state of Missouri showed he was affiliated with Washitaw Nation, a black offshoot of the Sovereign Citizen movement, which challenges the legitimacy of the federal government.As evidence of Long's single-minded intent to level his violent rage exclusively at police, authorities yesterday cited video footage of the shooting that they said showed him hunting down officers while bypassing civilians in his path."There is no doubt whatsoever that these officers were intentionally targeted and assassinated," Louisiana State Police Superintendent Colonel Mike Edmonson told a news conference. "It was a calculated act against those who work to protect this community every single day."Police said they believed that Long, armed with two rifles and a pistol, had intended to make his way to the headquarters of the Baton Rouge Police Department a short distance away to take more lives.The carnage rocked a city still shaken from days of angry protests and tension over the fatal police shooting on July 5 of a 37-year-old black man, Alton Sterling, who was confronted by officers while selling CDs outside a Baton Rouge convenience store. Sterling was buried just last Friday.A day after his killing, another black man, Philando Castile, 32, was shot to death by a policeman during a traffic stop near St Paul, Minnesota.The back-to-back killings reignited nationwide protests over the use of force by police against minorities, including the fateful rally in Dallas on July 7.Edmonson said Long, a resident of Kansas City, Missouri, had been in the Baton Rouge area for several days before the shooting and, while he acted alone in the ambush itself, police had not ruled out the possibility that he might have had help in planning the attack.Military records released by the Pentagon showed Long, listed as a data network specialist, served five years in the Marine Corps until his discharge in August 2010, including a six-month deployment to Iraq.The dead officers in Baton Rouge were identified as Matthew Gerald, 41, also an Iraq war veteran and father of two; Montrell Jackson, 32, who was black and had served as a Baton Rouge police officer for a decade; and sheriff's deputy Brad Garafola, 45, a father of four.President Barack Obama offered his condolences in telephone calls yesterday to the victims' loved ones as well as top law enforcement officials in the city.Hundreds of mourners held a candlelight vigil on last evening at a church in south Baton Rouge in memory of Gerald, a rookie on the police force who had served in both the US Army and the Marines.REUTERS SDR GC1335 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0431-843886.Xml
The apex court's ruling paved the way for Arroyo, 69, to walk out of the Veterans Memorial Medical Centre, where she was detained since October 2012, Xinhua news agency reported.
Theodore Te, a spokesman for the court, told a news conference that the Supreme Court, voting 11-4, annulled the criminal case against Arroyo for "insufficiency of evidence".
He said the court also ordered the "immediate release of the detained" former president.
Arroyo is currently a member of the Philippine House of Representatives having won the May elections for another term.
The Ombudsman filed the plunder case against Arroyo and nine other former government officials who allegedly misused some 366 million pesos ($7 million) lottery funds of the state-run Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office from 2007 to 2010.
Arroyo is the second Philippine president to be jailed for plunder.
In 2001, ousted President Joseph Estrada was also jailed after an anti-graft court convicted and sentenced him to life in prison in 2007. Estrada was later freed after Arroyo pardoned him.
--IANS ksk/dg
( 197 Words)
2016-07-19-14:24:01 (IANS)
Kremlin called today "regrettable" comments from the Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May about a potential threat from countries such as Russia and North Korea."Russia has always been committed to good relations with Great Britain", a Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a conference call with reporters.In her first statement in parliament as prime minister, May has mentioned growing threats from Russia and North Korea. REUTERS AKC GC1749 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0432-844541.Xml
Turkey should maintain its democratic institutions and the rule of law in the wake of a failed coup last week, British Foreign Office junior minister Alan Duncan said today.Turkey has carried out a deep purge of the army, police and judiciary after the abortive military uprising on Friday in which at least 232 people were killed."We encourage Turkey to maintain its democratic institutions and the rule of a law as a fundamental part of NATO's value agenda," Duncan told parliament, adding that he would visit Ankara tomorrow.REUTERS AKC AN1816 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0432-844610.Xml
Turkey's ambassador to Athens said today that the Turkish soldiers who fled to Greece in a military helicopter after the weekend coup attempt would have a fair and transparent trial back home.Ambassador Kerim Uras was speaking to journalists.The eight men, who have sought political asylum in Greece, landed in the city of Alexandroupolis on Saturday. They were arrested and charged with crossing into the country illegally.Turkey has branded them "traitors" and asked Greece to extradite them. Their lawyers say the men fear for their lives in Turkey and do not want to be returned. REUTERS AKC AN1832 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0432-844723.Xml
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at the opening ceremony. [Photo by Liu Hongjie/chinadaily.com.cn]
The 14th Session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development opened in Nairobi, Kenya on Sunday.
Addressing the opening ceremony, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged participants to focus on strong collaboration, equality and inclusion in trade, finance and investment in order to better align action with agreed-upon sustainable development targets and help restore trust in the global economy.
The theme of the Conference is "From decision to action: moving toward an inclusive and equitable global economic environment for trade and development."
The Conference will feature ministerial debates, high-level round tables, thematic events, a World Investment Forum, a Global Commodities Forum, a Youth Forum and a Civil Society Forum, among other events.
UNCTAD 14 takes place as governments operationalize the 17 Sustainable Development Goals under the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted by world leaders at the United Nations summit for the adoption of the post-2015 development agenda in September 2015, and in the wake of the Paris climate change deal.
In his speech at the opening ceremony, Kenya President Kenyatta has also asked for a solution to high commodity prices which he says are a burden to developing countries.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today that Bahrain's dissolution of its main opposition group risked escalating tensions in the Gulf Arab kingdom beset by a growing rift between a Shi'ite Muslim majority and its Sunni rulers.Since June Bahrain has taken a series of steps that activists describe as a renewed opposition crackdown, including the arrest of prominent activist Nabeel Rajab and stripping top Shi'ite cleric Isa Qassim of his citizenship."The Secretary-General deplores the dissolution of al-Wefaq, the main opposition political party in Bahrain," a statement from Ban's spokesman said."(The moves) risk escalating an already tense situation in the country. He calls for the resumption of an all-inclusive national dialogue," the statement said.The authorities announced the closure of al Wefaq in June, accusing it of fostering violence and terrorism.Bahrain, host of the US Fifth Fleet, dismissed US and British criticism of this move as "unacceptable interference". Its high court ratified the decision on Sunday.Al Wefaq played a leading role in a 2011 uprising during which mostly Shi'ite protesters called for a greater share in power and an end to discrimination by the government. The government denies discriminating against Shi'ites.Bahrain suppressed the uprising with military help from fellow Sunni-ruled neighbours like Saudi Arabia.Al Wefaq leader Sheikh Ali Salman had his sentence more than doubled last month to nine years after an appeals court convicted him on charges of seeking the violent overthrow of the government.Ban's office described the dissolution of al Wefaq as part of a wider clampdown on freedom by the Bahraini authorities."The move is the latest in a series of restrictions of the rights to peaceful assembly, freedom of association, and freedom of expression in Bahrain," the statement said.Bahrain says a minority inspired by Iran are trying to foment sectarian unrest in the kingdom and blamed them for a series of bomb attacks targeting security forces in recent years.A group of four top Shi'ite clerics said today that the government actions threatened their sect's existence in Bahrain. REUTERS AKC AN1835 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0432-844733.Xml
The IS moved them to an unknown location following their arrests overnight in various parts of Mosul, a security official told EFE news.
The official said the group accused those people of conspiring against the IS with government forces.
--IANS sm/py/dg
( 79 Words)
2016-07-19-19:06:07 (IANS)
France's government, smarting from accusations that it did not do enough to prevent last week's deadly truck attack in Nice, urged lawmakers today to extend a period of emergency rule that gives police greater search-and-arrest powers.Criticised by opposition politicians and jeered by crowds at a remembrance ceremony yesterday, Prime Minister Manuel Valls wants lawmakers to back a three-month rollover of the emergency regime imposed after a previous lethal attack last November."We need people to stay together, we want to move fast with broad backing," said government spokesman Stephane Le Foll.The move came as Nice's seafront boulevard, the Promenade des Anglais, reopened after Thursday's attack, in which Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove a truck into crowds of Bastille Day revellers, killing 84, before being shot dead by police.Dozens more were hurt and 19 people remain on life support five days after the carnage that prosecutor Francois Molins described as terrorist. Islamic State has claimed the attack although no hard evidence linking Bouhlel to the militant group has been found.Molins said Bouhlel had shown sudden signs of interest in hardline Islamist propaganda in the days before he ran amok while noting that he also ate pork, drank alcohol and engaged in "unbridled sexual activity".Speaking ahead today evening's parliamentary debate on the emergency rule plan, Le Foll said President Francois Hollande's Socialist government was willing to consider a longer, six-month extension of emergency rule in line with demands from right-wing members of the National Assembly.Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said French fighter jets would keep bombing the strongholds of Islamic State, which has seized control of parts of Syria and Iraq and called for believers to attack France because of its bombardments."This is not just symbolic," Le Drian said of the emergency rule bill, adding that France was second only to the United States in the number of air strikes against Islamic State bases."We can see from what happened in Germany that the threat is everywhere," the minister said, alluding to news of yet another attack overnight in Germany in which a man hit train commuters with an axe, seriously injuring four.As tension ran high over risks of further attacks in France, police officials also confirmed that explosives had been found at the flat of an arrested taxi driver who was on an intelligence services watchlist.The number of French people who believe Francois Hollande is up to the task of tackling terrorism plunged to 33 percent after the attack in Nice, from confidence ratings of 50 percent or so in the wake of the two other big attacks in early and late 2015.France imposed emergency rule after the November 13 attacks in which Islamist militants killed 130 people in Paris, giving the police powers to search homes and place people under immediate house arrest without advance clearance from judges.The bill to be debated in parliament today night would also grant police and spy services greater powers to dig into suspects' computers and mobile phone communications.Another poll published today asked voters who they absolutely did not want to see elected leader of France next June: 73 per cent said Hollande, but the percentage hostile to far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who some believe will benefit from a climate of voter alienation, topped 60 per cent. REUTERS AKC BD1940 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0432-844935.Xml
Rebels from the Hutu ethnic group in eastern Congo are suspected of killing at least seven civilians in revenge for the killing of one of their number, local activists said today.Hundreds of civilians have died in inter-ethnic violence and a series of massacres by armed groups in Democratic Republic of Congo's conflict-ravaged east, which borders Rwanda and Uganda.An ethnic Nande militia group, the Mai-Mai Mazembe, killed a Hutu on Sunday in Kibirizi, leading to the reprisal attack by the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), said Innocent Gasigwa, spokesman for Civil Society of Rutshuru.The FDLR "came to take vengeance .... There were clashes last night and into this morning," Gasigwa said by telephone, adding that the army restored calm this morning.An FDLR spokesman denied that his forces were involved in the attack. An army spokesman said he was aware of the incident but declined to give details.Lawless eastern Congo is plagued by dozens of armed groups that prey on the local population and exploit mineral reserves. Millions died there between 1996 and 2003 as regional conflict caused hunger and disease. REUTERS DS0005 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0177-845275.Xml
A young Afghan who attacked passengers on a train in Bavaria with an axe had entered Germany last summer with a wave of migrants, officials said today, raising more questions about Chancellor Angela Merkel's open-door refugee policy.The 17-year-old, who a witness said shouted "Allahu Akbar" (God is Great) during the attack, severely wounded four Hong Kong residents on the train late on Monday, then injured a local woman after fleeing, before police shot him dead.The case is likely to deepen worries about so-called "lone wolf" attacks in Europe and could put political pressure on Merkel, who has welcomed hundreds of thousands of migrants to Germany over the past year.The attacker came to Germany as an unaccompanied minor and was registered as a refugee on June 30 last year in Passau, officials said. Germany welcomed about 1 million migrants in 2015, many fleeing war in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq."In the minds of many people, his arrival is directly linked to Merkel and her liberal refugee policies," said Frank Decker, political scientist at Bonn University.The attack took place days after a Tunisian delivery man ploughed a truck into crowds of Bastille Day revelers in the southern French city of Nice, killing 84. Islamic State has also claimed responsibility for that incident.Public support for Merkel has risen since Britain voted on June 23 to leave the European Union, helping reverse a fall in her popularity caused by the refugee crisis. Decker said a Nice-style attack here could quickly end those gains."It would boost those who have called Merkel's policies a mistake," he said. "Merkel would be blamed."Unlike neighbours France and Belgium, Germany has not been the victim of a major attack by Islamic militants in recent years, although security officials say they have thwarted a large number of plots.A leader of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) said Merkel and her supporters were to blame for the dangerous security situation because their "welcoming policies had brought too many young, uneducated and radical Muslim men to Germany".Imam Arbab Ahmad, whose mosque in Wuerzburg lies about 12 kilometres from the scene of the attack, said he feared a backlash against Muslims after the attack."I am anxious," he said. "It was a totally inhumane attack on innocent people. Every human being should condemn it, not just Muslims."Police found a hand-painted Islamic State flag in the refugee's room at his foster family's home, along with a letter he appeared to have written to his father, which officials said read: "And now pray for me that I can get revenge on these non-believers, pray for me that I go to heaven."SUICIDE VIDEOIslamic State posted a video in which a man whom it identifies as the Afghan refugee vows to carry out a suicide mission and urges other Muslims to do the same.In the two minute and 20 second video, entitled "Germany - Video of the Islamic State Soldier Muhammad Riyad Who Carried out the Wuerzburg Attack", a young man wields a small knife, which he says he will use to slaughter infidels and avenge the deaths of men, women and children in Muslim countries."I will carry out a suicide operation in Germany," the young man says in the video. "I will slaughter you in your houses."German officials were checking if the man in the video was in fact the attacker. Merkel's chief of staff, Peter Altmaier, told ZDF television: "The security authorities expect that this video is in all likelihood authentic, and also the letter."Authorities have not released the attacker's name publicly, because he was a minor. They have said he was not on any of the intelligence services' watch lists.Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, according to its Amaq news agency. But Erik Ohlenschlager, public prosecutor in Bamberg, said there was no evidence the attacker had been in contact with Islamic State, though he said the IS flag the young man appeared to have painted suggested he had developed a sympathy for the group.Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said people who knew the attacker had described him as a "quiet and balanced person who went to the mosque for important holidays, but wasn't necessarily there every week."He was described as a devout Muslim, but not in any way one who was a radical or fanatic," Herrmann added.The young man started attacking his passengers with an axe and a knife around 9 pm local time as the train was approaching its last stop, the Bavarian city of Wuerzburg, Herrmann said.Ohlenschlager said the attacker, who had learned on Saturday that a friend of his had died in Afghanistan, struck his victims with full force in the body and head, adding: "The injuries are very bad". Two victims were in a critical condition.After a passenger pulled the train's emergency brake, the attacker fled and struck in the face a woman who was walking her dog. He was pursued by a police unit who shot him dead. REUTERS DS0019 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0177-845281.Xml
Ibrahim Mayaki, Chief Executive Officer of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), speaks at a press conference on July 16 in Kigali, capital of Rwanda. (Xinhua/Pan Siwei)
KIGALI, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The commitments by China are set to promote Africa industrialization once they come to fruition, a Senior African Union (AU) official has said.
Ibrahim Mayaki, Chief Executive Officer of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), an AU development agency, observed on Saturday that the commitments that were made during the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) need to be implemented.
"We are counting on China to continue promoting industrialization in Africa given that Africa is the youngest continent in the world," Mayaki said this on the sidelines of NEPAD's Heads of State and Government Orientation Committee meeting in Kigali, Rwanda.
Mayaki revealed that negotiations are at an advanced stage to have FOCAC projects aligned to regional bodies.
He said that Africa is a long term sustainability partner, adding that the world's stability depends on Africa's stability.
He said that the coming September 2016 G20 conference in China has come at the right time when the relationship between Africa and China is at its peak.
"Africa has a lot to learn from China including engineering," he said, adding Africa trains less than 30,000 every year while China graduates nearly 300,000 per year.
Mayaki said that with serious industrialization in Africa there will be additional jobs to college leavers.
"We need to embark on value addition to enable African commodities acquire new markets globally besides the big African market that is under-utilized," he added.
He said that political leaders are currently embracing priorities towards regional integration as a way to promoting cross-boundary trade.
Nepad is also currently implementing a project on gender, climate change agriculture in 10 countries with the aim of scaling it up in other countries.
He revealed that NEPAD has a climate change fund which helps countries to design projects to tackle the issues of impact of climate change on agriculture and give them the necessary tools and resources on specific projects in order to cope with the adverse situation.
"The program is women centered with the aim of bringing women's informal businesses to higher levels," he noted.
Photo taken on July 16, 2016, shows a view of the 35th New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) Heads of State and Government Orientation Committee meeting, in Kigali, capital of Rwanda. (Xinhua/Pan Siwei)
NEPAD is a planning and coordinating technical body of the AU that seeks to eradicate poverty and create sustainable growth on the continent.
It has 16 regional cross-border projects in infrastructure in collaboration with the private sector and includes a gas pipeline project between Nigeria to Algeria, the Congo Brazzaville-Kinshasa bridge which will be expanded by a railway and a road.
The projects are undertaken with the African Development Bank and Regional Economic Communities.
"We are soon launching a youth and skills development on technical vocational centre's to increase capacities of countries to focus on professional training and also link those centres to the private sector in order to boost youth employment.
BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Brunei sees great potential to attract more investment from Chinese companies, as China continues to provide support and incentives to encourage its companies to invest overseas, Brunei's Deputy Minister of Finance Dato Mohd Amin Liew said on Monday.
In his keynote speech on the establishment of the Chinese Enterprise Association in Brunei (CEAB), Amin Liew, who is also chairman of the Brunei Economic Development Board, said direct investment from China grew from 12.9 million Brunei dollars (9.6 million U.S. dollars) in 2015 to 116.1 million Brunei dollars (86.1 million U.S. dollars) in the first quarter of this year.
He also noted that China has put forward a series of new initiatives such as the Belt and Road Initiative which is aimed at reviving the ancient trade routes spanning from Asia, Europe to Africa.
"Brunei, as one of the countries along the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, will work closely with our Chinese partners to use the kingdom as the central point of BIMP-EAGA (Brunei-Indonesia-Malaysia-the Philippines East ASEAN Growth Area) region to build connectivity between the countries."
He also said Brunei and China has "long shared strong bilateral relationship with growing economic and cultural ties."
"In September, we will be celebrating the 25th anniversary of the diplomatic relations of our two countries."
Chinese Ambassador Yang Jian said in a speech that the establishment of CEAB symbolizes stronger economic ties between the two countries.
"China is willing to join hands with Brunei to build the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road in synergy with Brunei's Wawasan 2035," she said. "By bring into full paly our respective strengths, I am confident that our joint efforts will bring more opportunities to the people of our two countries."
Flowers offered to the victims of the terrorist attack of Promenade des Anglais are seen on a bench at seaside in Nice, France, July 16, 2016. (Xinhua file photo)
PARIS, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Investigations on the truck attack in the southern French city of Nice showed the attacker's "certain, recent interest in radical jihadist movements," but no evidence have been found on his links with the Islamic State(IS),the Paris prosecutor said Monday.
The prosecutor Francois Molins told reporters,"There are no elements in the investigation at this stage suggesting an allegiance to Islamic State, nor links of individuals with the group ... he (Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel) showed a certain recent interest in radical jihadist movements."
Last Thursday, the Franco-Tunisian man drove a heavy truck into crowds celebrating Bastille Day in Nice. His truck careered 2 km through mass of revellers before being stopped by police units.
According to official data, 84 people were killed, including 10 kids, 300 others were wounded with scores remain in serious situation.
Delegates pose for a group photo at the "Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development" held in Singapore, July 18, 2016. (Xinhua/Then Chih Wey)
by Bao Xuelin
SINGAPORE, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Dialogues, negotiations and consultations are the best way to solve disputes in the South China Sea, a Singapore-based expert said on Monday during a seminar on South China Sea and regional cooperation.
The final award, issued by an arbitral tribunal on July 12, sweepingly sided with the Philippines and denied China's long-standing historical rights in the South China Sea.
The Chinese government has dismissed the ill-founded award as "null and void with no binding force."
Li Mingjiang, associate professor at S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, told Xinhua that related countries have showed political will to exercise restraint since the biased award was issued.
In the short term, the impact of the arbitration was not very obvious, he said.
"Over the past a few days, the situation of South China Sea is relatively stable, which is reassuring," said Li, adding that negotiations and consultations were the best way to solve the maritime disputes.
"International law, to some extent, can be used as an auxiliary tool, but a large number of cases in international relations prove that negotiations are much more effective, and this way is also more pragmatic," he said.
Positive interactions were witnessed between China and the Philippines recently, which could be reflected through diplomacy, politics and communications, said Li. He was optimistic about the interactions, saying no matter whether they touched the core of the South China Sea issue, it was a good start.
Li pointed out that how Manila dealt with the so-called arbitration was a key issue that would impact the China-Philippine relations. The Aquino III administration had soured its relations with China, while the new Philippine government expressed willingness to talk and negotiate with Beijing.
"At the first stage of interactions, it's of more symbolic meaning to some extent," Li said. "Such kind of interactions neither need to touch upon the core of the South China Sea issue, nor talk about the arbitration."
At present stage, it might still be premature to start negotiations on maritime delimitation and fisheries disputes, he said. "Perhaps, related countries are not ready for such negotiations."
As for the China-ASEAN relations, Li believed the seminar helped the participants make clear their opinions and enhance communications while reducing the possibility of strategic misjudgment.
"Based on communications over the past years, claimants, non-claimants in the region and countries outside of the region have gradually achieved consensus that the situation of South China Sea should be cool down, and peace and stability should be secured," said Li. "Meanwhile, countries could strengthen cooperation in possible areas."
Organized by the Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the seminar attracted more than 20 experts from China and Southeast Asian countries, including Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia.
SHENNONGJIA, July 17, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Photo taken on Oct. 17, 2012 shows the scenery of the wetland of Dajiu Lake in the Shennongjia Forestry District, central China's Hubei Province. The 40th session of the World Heritage Committee on Sunday decided to put China's Hubei Shennongjia on the pretigious World Heritage List as a natural site, bringing to 50 the number of listed Chinese sites. Located in the northwestern mountains of Hubei Province, the Shennongjia Forestry District was established in 1970. As the only well-preserved sub-tropical forest ecosystem in the world's mid-latitudes, Shennongjia boasts rich natural forest resources with more than 5,000 species of animals and plants. (Xinhua/Du Huaju)
WUHAN, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Following the inclusion of central China's Shennongjia on UNESCO's World Heritage list on Sunday, a series of protection measures and plans will debut, local authorities said Monday.
At its 40th session in Istanbul, the World Heritage Committee recognized Shennongjia in Hubei Province as a natural site on the World Heritage List, bringing the number of listed Chinese sites to 50.
"Shennongjia's inclusion on the World Cultural Heritage List reflects approval of our previous protection work," said Luo Dongliang, deputy director of the Shennongjia Forest District.
Located in the northwestern mountains of Hubei Province, the Shennongjia Forestry District, which administers the Shennongjia nature reserve, was established in 1970.
The Shennongjia World Natural Heritage site, covering a total of 73,318 hectares, includes two areas: the western Shennongding-Badong area and the eastern Laojunshan area.
Shennongjia is home to 3,767 species of vascular plants, more than 600 species of vertebrates, as well as 4,365 species of insects. There are also about 1,300 golden monkeys living at the site, which are under the state's top level protection.
"We are confronting a more difficult historical mission, so we will strengthen our measures to protect the site following Shennongjia's inclusion on the UNESCO World Heritage list," said Wang Zhixian, director of Shennongjia's national geological park administration office.
Wang said they will designate an area for tourism while strengthening monitoring and administration at the site, adding that the current scenic areas will not be expanded.
Wang noted that Shennongjia will build a passage linking the western area with the eastern area, which is important for animals at the site, according to requirements by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
The tourism scheme for Shennongjia will be updated. The number of tourists, surrounding environment and traffic conditions around the site will also be considered when coming up with a new plan, according to Wang.
Li Faping, director of the Shennongjia Forestry District, said they will step up protection of the natural resources in Shennongjia through scientific management.
Shennongjia will be divided into four functional areas, including a protection area, ecological conservation area, tourism area, and a traditional developed area.
Li said Shennongjia's UNESCO status will boost the protection and administration of the site to bring them to international standards. It will also promote international protection and research collaboration in the area.
A group of rock paintings dating back over 2,000 years in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region was also included on UNESCO's world heritage list on Friday during the 40th session of the World Heritage Committee in Istanbul.
Artist concept. A crop of more than 100 planets, discovered by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, includes four in Earth's size-range orbiting a single dwarf star. Two of these planets are too hot to support life as we know it, but two are in the star' s "habitable" zone, where liquid water could exist on the surface. Credits: NASA/JPL
WASHINGTON, July 18 (Xinhua) -- An international team of astronomers using the U.S. Kepler telescope announced Monday the discovery of over 100 alien planets, the largest haul obtained since the space observatory transitioned to a different observing mode.
The team observed a total of 197 planet candidates discovered using data from the first year of the Kepler's so-called K2 mission and verified the existence of 104 new planets orbiting stars outside our solar system.
One of the most interesting set of planets discovered is a planetary system comprising four planets potentially similar to Earth, according to the team's paper, which was published online in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.
The four planets, all between 20 and 50 percent larger than Earth by diameter, are orbiting the M dwarf star K2-72, found 181 light years away in the direction of the Aquarius constellation and less than half the size of the sun and less bright.
The planets' orbital periods range from five and a half to 24 days, and two of them may experience irradiation levels from their star comparable to those on Earth.
Despite their tight orbits -- closer than Mercury's orbit around the sun -- the possibility that life could arise on a planet around such a star cannot be ruled out, according to lead author Ian Crossfield of the University of Arizona.
"Because these smaller stars are so common in the Milky Way, it could be that life occurs much more frequently on planets orbiting cool, red stars rather than planets around stars like our Sun," Crossfield said in a statement.
The researchers achieved this extraordinary "roundup" of exoplanets by combining data with follow-up observations by Earth-based telescopes including the North Gemini telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
Launched in March 2009, Kepler is the U.S. space agency NASA's first mission to find potentially habitable Earth-size planets. It does this by measuring the subtle dip in a star's brightness caused by a planet passing in front of its star.
In its initial mission, Kepler surveyed just one patch of sky in the northern hemisphere, measuring the frequency of planets whose size and temperature might be similar to Earth orbiting stars similar to our sun.
In 2013, it lost its ability to precisely stare at its original target area, but continued to find new planets after a fix that created a second life for the telescope, known as the K2 mission.
"Our analysis shows that by the end of the K2 mission, we expect to double or triple the number of relatively small planets orbiting nearby, bright stars," Crossfield said.
"And because these planets orbit brighter stars, we'll be able to more easily study everything possible about them, whether it's measuring their masses ... or measuring their atmospheric makeup."
ISLAMABAD, July 18 (Xinhua) -- At least seven people were killed and two others injured when a bomb went off near a vehicle of tribal elders in Pakistan's northwest Upper Dir district on Monday, officials said.
Station House Officer Gul Fazel said that the vehicle carrying tribal elders was targeted by a remote controlled device in Sheringal town of Upper Dir, the district located in the country's northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
He said that the tribal elders were on their way to the town for resolving dispute between two groups over construction of a road in the area when their vehicle came under attack.
Fazel said that the explosive materials were fixed at the back of the vehicle by the militants who fled the scene after blowing them up.
He said that the target of the attack was a pro-government peace militiaman who changed the vehicle shortly before the attack and remained safe in the blast.
The injured people were shifted to a nearby hospital.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack yet.
Police cordoned off the area and kicked off a search operation in the area. Enditem
TEHRAN, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Iran said Monday that the UN report on the implementation of nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, known as the JCPOA, is "imbalanced and biased," official IRNA news agency said.
Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qasemi said "the report has been prepared under open pressure by the United States and the allegations against the Islamic republic are baseless," according to the report.
Western media said that a half-yearly report prepared by Ban on implementing JCPOA says that Iran's developing missile program is "not consistent" with the spirit of the nuclear deal.
Iran reiterates that its ballistic missiles are not designed to carry nuclear warheads and it will not allow anybody to interfere in its defense program, Qasemi said.
Last week, Qasemi dismissed concerns raised recently by NATO members over its missiles program, saying that Iran's missile program has nothing to do with the country's nuclear deal with major powers and does not violate any UN resolution.
U.S. presumptive Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event in New York, the United States, July 16, 2016. U.S. presumptive Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump announced on Friday he had chosen Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate. (Xinhua/Li Muzi)
By Matthew Rusling
WASHINGTON, July 18 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump needs to make the election a referendum on rival Hillary Clinton if he wants to clinch the White House in November, experts said.
The brash and argumentative Trump risks losing votes to Americans who could choose Clinton simply because she's an alternative to Trump, who is struggling to overcome perceptions that he's a hot head and does not possess the temperament to be president.
Trump has galvanized rank-and-file Republicans who are fed up with elites in Washington they believe do not represent them, and are fed up with the weak economy that has taken a serious toll on the country's working class, despite denial in Washington.
At the same time, Trump has made outlandish statements that have sparked serious concern about him, comparing Mexicans to rapists and calling for a ban on Muslims coming to the United States. That has offended the crucial Latino voting block and has turned off many independents.
But if Trump can turn the tables on Clinton and make the elections a referendum on Clinton's many scandals and perceived leadership failures, he could well clinch the White House, experts argued.
"Right now the election is a referendum on Trump," Republican strategist Ford O' Connell told Xinhua. "If he can make it a referendum on Hillary Clinton, or what the white working class voter perceives as a rigged economy, he will win."
"Trump wants to make it a referendum on Clinton and Clinton wants to make it a referendum on Trump. Whoever wins that war is going to win the election," O' Connell said.
Monday kicked off the long awaited Republican National Convention, where Trump is expected to pick up the party's official endorsement as their presidential candidate.
At a time when the U.S. is reeling from the ambush and murder of nearly a dozen police officers within less than two weeks, and tensions between blacks and police are at a decades-long high, Trump is touting as the "law and order" candidate.
This also comes at a time when terrorists are on the march worldwide, having carried out major terror attacks in the last month in the U.S. state of Florida, Istanbul of Turkey and Paris of France, resulting in the death of hundreds of innocent civilians.
Trump has labelled Clinton as incompetent while serving as Secretary of State under President Barack Obama, because the world has become more dangerous under Obama's watch, and Clinton played a role in the resurgence of terrorism.
Trump has also argued that the recent spate of anti-police violence, in which five officers in Dallas, Texas and three officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana were ambushed and killed by black gunmen, threatens to spiral into a total breakdown of law and order in the United States.
The New York real estate tycoon has contended that a Clinton victory would make these situations worse, and experts said if he continues this narrative successfully, he may well win.
In a recent Gallup poll, the only two institutions in the U.S. that currently have majority popular support are the military and the police, at a time when Americans take a dim view on most institutions, especially Congress. That may bode well for Trump, experts said.
Democratic nominee Clinton leads the bombastic billionaire by just 3.2 points in Monday's Real Clear Politics' national poll average - which is essentially a tie, given the 2-point margin of error.
But Trump is leading in a number of crucial swing states, according to recent polls.
The Quinnipiac University's swing states poll showed Trump is ahead in the states of Florida and Pennsylvania, while he is tied with Clinton in Ohio. That bodes well for Trump in a system whereby winning or losing those states often makes or breaks a candidate.
"He can win, but he obviously doesn't have time on his side. But the recent bad week for Hillary Clinton with the emails really helped him out a lot," O' Connell noted.
Indeed, recent weeks saw the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) fail to indict Clinton over accusations that her use of a non-government email account and a server in her home was a breach of national security standards while she served as secretary of state.
But, while Clinton was cleared, FBI chief James Comey said publicly that the candidate was irresponsible in dealing with the nation's security.
DUBAI, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Banks in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the second largest financial market in the Gulf Arab region after Saudi Arabia, reported mixed results for the first six months in 2016, due to the ongoing headwinds in the oil market.
The UAE's biggest bank Emirates NBD said on Monday it generated a 12 percent increase in net profit in the first six months of 2016, amounting to 3.7 billion dirhams (1 billion U.S. dollars).
The bank will invest 500 million dirhams (136.23 million U.S. dollars) in digital innovation over the next three years as it looks to launch the UAE's first digital bank, according to Shayne Nelson, Emirates NBD's chief executive officer.
However, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank reported a 15 percent profit slide for the same period, amounting to 2.15 billion dirhams (585.21 million U.S. dollars).
The ongoing slump in the price of oil will continue to weigh on economic growth in the UAE, said the International Monetary Fund in April, slashing the expected GDP growth for 2016 to 2.4 percent, down from 3.9 percent in 2015.
United Arab Bank (UAB), based in the UAE's capital Abu Dhabi, said its net income in the first six months reaches 71 million dirhams (19.34 million U.S. dollars), compared to a net loss of 511 million dirhams (139.23 million U.S. dollars) in the second half of 2015. Enditem
NEW DELHI, July 18 (Xinhua) -- At least eight paramilitary commandos were killed by an improvised explosive device triggered by suspected leftwing rebels Monday in the eastern Indian state of Bihar, said officials.
The attack took place when the Central Reserve Police Force was launching an anti-insurgency operation in a jungle area of the state.
Four rebels of the leftwing Naxalite organization were also killed at Dumari Nala forest area located at the border area of Aurangabad and Gaya district about 172 km from state capital Patna.
An army helicopter was sent by the security forces to evacuate the injured from the Sarkha Ka Bathan area inside the forest, while attacking the rebels. Enditem
TEHRAN, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Iran will start natural gas exports to Georgia in near future, said an Iranian energy official, reported Tasnim news agency on Monday.
A supply station and a border village used for gas delivering from Iran to Armenia would be adopted for delivery to Georgia, managing director of National Iranian Gas Exports Company, Alireza Kameli, said.
He mentioned that the gas metering station in Nurduz, bordering Armenia, has sufficient capacity for the delivery to Georgia.
Reports said that Iran has built a pipeline of 113 kilometers from northwestern city of Tabriz to Nurduz. And Armenia completed construction of the gas pipeline inside its territory in 2007. Enditem
WASHINGTON, July 18 (Xinhua) -- U.S. presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Friday announced Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate, but voters hardly know Pence, found a Gallup poll on Monday.
More than six in 10 voters either have no opinion (18 percent) on Pence or have never heard of him (44 percent), according to the poll.
One of the jobs of a running mate is to help the presidential nominee fire up his political base, and it appears that Pence has yet to achieve that, as the poll found that only 37 percent of voters call him an "excellent" choice for vice president.
This rating falls short of the 39 percent rating of former Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, now the House Speaker, in 2012.
Roughly three in four registered voters claim that having Pence on the ticket will not influence their likelihood of voting for Trump for president. This is typical, as Gallup finds that usually the majority of voters say this about the vice presidential selection in every election.
At the same time, 10 percent to 14 percent of voters say Pence makes them more likely to support Trump in November rather than less likely, Gallup found.
Still, this is also typical, although this minimal positive tilt is one of the weaker ones of the past eight elections, Gallup found.
Pence has yet to accomplish another important job -- helping to patch one of the nominee's image weaknesses. In Trump's case, that includes a perceived lack of experience needed to be president, Gallup found.
By 46 percent to 33 percent, more voters say Pence is qualified to serve as president should it become necessary, Gallup found.
These views may reflect voters' awareness that Pence is a governor and has at least earned Trump's confidence.
However, with 22 percent of voters expressing no opinion on Pence's qualifications, there is room for change on this front as the campaign continues. In selecting Pence as his running mate, Trump seems to have neither scored a home run nor struck out, Gallup said. Enditem
KIGALI, July 18 (Xinhua) -- There is no need for Africans paying mobile phone roaming charges when travelling across the continent, Rwandan President Paul Kagame told delegates at the African Union Summit in Kigali on Monday.
Rwanda and Gabon on Monday launched a one area network, scrapping roaming charges among the two countries, and expected to bring down calling rates.
The initiative was launched by President Kagame and his Gabonese counterpart Ali Bongo as a side event of the AU summit, dubbed smart Africa luncheon.
"When integrating, why should one pay roaming charges when travelling to the next country? Of course we want to treat the integrated region as one area where you can be served without making it very expensive," said Kagame.
President Kagame noted that the one area network is compatible with integration agenda which can enable citizens to communicate cheaply.
"The one Area Network marks one step forward towards our goal of having a single digital market for Africa. I hope to see more of these launches to serve our citizens to communicate more cheaply," he said.
Gabon is among the several African states that previously agreed to implement the One Africa Network.
The decision, binding to 11 countries across Africa, was reached in April 2016, at a high level meeting of ICT ministers and Regulators convened under the Smart Africa Initiative, in Kigali.
The other countries include; Ivory Coast, Kenya, Mali, Uganda, Senegal, South Sudan, Chad, Rwanda and Burkina Faso.
The implementation of the One Africa Network is supposed to see harmonization of tariffs on mobile voice calls, SMS and data transmission across the 11 countries.
International traffic among Smart Africa member countries is also meant to be tax exempt to bring down the calling charges.
The April ministers meeting also agreed on scraping charges incurred when receiving calls while roaming, thus someone could be only required to pay the domestic rates for making calls.
Implementation started in May. It follows a model of the One Network Area implemented by Northern Corridor of East Africa countries of Kenya, Uganda South Sudan and Rwanda.
The East African Community One Network Area began in October 2014, and has been credited for significant increase in traffic. Enditem
LAGOS, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari says the judiciary must remain impartial in playing its role in the fight against corruption in the country.
Buhari stated this in Abuja, the nation's capital city on Monday while declaring open a workshop on the "Roles of Judiciary in the fight corruption".
The workshop was organized by the Presidential Advisory Committee against Corruption in collaboration with National Judicial Institute, Commonwealth Secretariat and UNODC.
The president urged the judiciary to be in the forefront of efforts at developing rights-based jurisprudence as an element in the multi-disciplinary approach advocated in the fight against corruption.
According to him, the judiciary has a role to play in the fight against corruption by enforcing the applicable laws.
He said the judiciary had the sacred duty to ensure that criminal justice administration was not delayed.
Buhari, who frowned at what he called the use of delay tactics by some defense lawyers and prosecutors in corruption cases, said such habit was frustrating his administration's ongoing crusade against corruption.
According to him, an efficient and fair judiciary is key to the success of all anti-corruption initiatives.
The president said the fight against corruption would remain one of the top priorities of his administration in the hope of restoring the economy and building a new Nigeria.
He said the eradication of corruption was a joint task involving not only judges and members of the legal profession, but literally all stakeholders, including all levels of government, the media and the civil society.
Buhari observed that the future of anti-corruption efforts in Nigeria rested not only on functional preventive systems, but also on an effective sanctions and enforcement regime in accordance with the laws.
He stated that his administration is counting on the judiciary to assist in this regard.
He assured of the government's commitment to promoting and supporting the judiciary to establish a judicial system that is well-staffed, well-resourced, promotes and recognizes dedicated, committed and motivated Judges. Enditem
LAGOS, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari will fully comply with the provisions of the Fiscal Responsibility Act and other extant laws, the presidency said Monday.
Presidential spokesperson Garba Shehu gave the reassurance in Abuja, while reacting to the submission of budget proposals of government agencies and corporations to the National Assembly.
According to him, the submission of the proposed budgets of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) and others clearly indicated the president's commitment to accountability and transparency.
He said the transmission of budgets for the MDAs to the National Assembly, particularly those regarding the CBN and the NNPC is clearly unprecedented.
He added that the President is determined to make the budgeting process more transparent and participatory.
"It is all part of the re-engineering of the entire processes of governance for the benefit of ordinary citizens," he said.
According to Shehu, the president strongly believes that good governance and transparency are integral to the nation's progress and key to the government's program to revamp the economy.
He said by responding positively to the demand by the National Assembly that MDAs budgets be laid before it for scrutiny, was a clear indication of the president's commitment to an open, transparent and people-oriented government for Nigerians.
Shehu said the demand before now was mostly ignored by past administrations.
The presidential spokesman added that the current administration had also demonstrated its respect for the parliament as a principal arm of government in a constitutional democracy.
This, he said was to ensure that the momentum of growth of the economy which had begun to build up, would be sustained. Enditem
TEHRAN, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Iran's President Hassan Rouhani on Monday hailed the victory of democracy against the coup attempt in a telephone conversation with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Press TV reported.
Rouhani hailed the great political maturity of Turkish people throughout coup as well as the return of stability and security in Turkey. He said it proved that "bullying approaches have no place in our region."
He said that Turkey's peace and stability will strengthen peace and stability across the region, adding that "certain major powers as well as terrorists do not want to see stability in Muslim countries."
Rouhani also said that his country is "duty-bound to feel responsible for the stability and security of neighbors and friendly Muslim countries."
Parts of the Turkish military had launched a coup on Friday night which was struck down a few hours later. Thousands of people were arrested, among them top army commanders, judges, and prosecutors. The Turkish government has already announced severe penalties for the insurgents. Enditem
LJUBLJANA, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Slovenian President Borut Pahor has called on Turkish authorities to show restraint after a failed coup in Turkey that began last Friday and was crushed the next day.
It is important for the country as well as peace and stability in the region that "democratically elected authorities do not exceed their powers in addressing the consequences of the coup," he was quoted by Slovenian Press Agency as saying on Monday.
It is unacceptable for any army to interfere in a country's democratic life but if the action against the perpetrators of the coup attempt in Turkey is disproportionate, it will "undermine the trust of the international community" in the democratically elected authorities, which would "not benefit anyone", Pahor told a news conference which was also attended by Georgian President Giorgi Margvelashvili, who is currently on a visit to Slovenia.
A total of 7,543 people -- 6,038 soldiers, 755 judges and prosecutors, 100 police officers and 650 civilians -- have been detained following the failed coup in Turkey, Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yildirim told a press conference on Monday. Enditem
MUNICH, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Four passengers were wounded in an attack launched by a man with axe on a regional train near Wuerzburg in the southern German state of Bavaria on Monday night, local police have confirmed.
Among the four passengers, three were in critical condition while one suffered from minor injuries, German media Focus Online has reported, quoting police sources.
According to local media reports, the man who wounded the passengers was shot dead by police.
So far, the motive of the attack remains unclear.
WASHINGTON, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. government said Monday it has not yet received a request from Turkey for extraditing the U.S.-based Turkish cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who was blamed by Ankara for plotting a failed military coup.
Speaking at a daily briefing, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that "we've not yet received an extradition request from the Turkish government as it relates to Mr. Gulen."
Earnest added that if such request is received, the U.S. "will evaluate that request based on the Extradition Treaty that was signed by the United States and Turkey more than 30 years ago."
After receiving the request, the U.S. will take two steps as follows: first, the request would be evaluated to determine whether or not it was related to crimes that are covered by the Extradition Treaty; second, there would be an evaluation made jointly by the State Department and Justice Department to determine whether or not the evidentiary standard in the treaty is met, Earnest elaborated.
At the same time, Earnest said the suggestion that the U.S. is harboring Gulen "is factually incorrect."
He revealed that U.S. President Barack Obama will make a phone call to his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan to discuss the U.S.-Turkey ties in the wake of the failed coup in Turkey.
Obama was expected to "renew his call for restraint and urge everyone in Turkey to respect that country's democratic institutions," Earnest said.
"And that's certainly consistent with our forceful support for the democratically elected civilian government of Turkey," he said.
Commenting on the recent massive arrests of suspected coup plotters made in Turkey, Earnest reiterated that the Turkish government should exercise restraint, demonstrate a commitment to due process and a continued commitment to the values that are enshrined in Turkey's Constitution.
More than 290 people were killed Friday in a failed military coup in Turkey, which has strained Ankara's ties with the U.S. amid Turkey's accusations that the U.S. is harboring Gulen, who is blamed by the Turkish government for plotting the coup attempt.
Turkey and the U.S. are NATO allies in fighting terrorism, but their relations had already become tricky before the coup attempt after Turkey tried to repair its relationship with Russia. U.S. lawmakers also expressed deep concern about Erdogan government's clampdown on the opposition and on free journalism.
Turkey cut the power supply to and closed the airspace of the Incirlik Air Base after the Friday coup attempt, forcing the U.S.-led coalition to temporarily halt its flight missions from the base to launch airstrikes against Islamic State (IS) terrorists in Syria and Iraq.
Although the airspace of the base was reopened for resuming the counter-IS strikes on Sunday, the commercial power supply was still not restored as of Monday, Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook told a press briefing. Enditem
UNITED NATIONS, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) reported that the situation in Juba remains calm but tense, and the mission also reported instances of sporadic firing in Leer over the weekend, including near UNMISS' temporary operating base, a UN spokesman told reporters here Monday.
"Further to previous search operations for weapons at the UN Tomping compound, the mission reports that a similar exercise was conducted in the Protection of Civilians site 1 adjacent to UN House on 16 July," Farhan Haq, the deputy UN spokesman, said at a daily news briefing here.
"The operation resulted in a number of items confiscated, including small arms and ammunition rounds, machetes and military uniforms."
Meanwhile, a total of 140 non-critical UNMISS staff have been temporarily relocated from Juba, Haq said. "The mission continues to carry out all its critical operations."
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) also reported new arrivals into several of the sites for internally displaced people in Juba, including both UN sites (UN House and Tomping), he said.
The number of people displaced following the recent fighting is now estimated to be nearly 15,000, including more than 10,830 at the UNMISS sites and more than 4,100 outside, he said. "Humanitarian organisations continue to respond in several of the affected locations."
"The humanitarian community condemns the recent looting of the World Food Programme (WFP) and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warehouses in Juba, which stored food for at least 220,000 people and livelihood support for thousands of vulnerable families across South Sudan," he said.
"Humanitarians also condemn the looting of humanitarian compounds in Leer during the recent fighting," he said.
"They note that these incidents will have a substantial impact on the humanitarian operations at a time when needs are growing," he said. "They stress that the destruction and damage to humanitarian facilities and violence against aid workers are unacceptable and must stop."
The latest round of violence followed deadly clashes between the rival factions on July 7-8 in the capital city. South Sudan's Health Ministry says at least 271 people were killed in the July 8 clashes.
The world's youngest country again plunged into conflict in December 2013 after President Salva Kiir accused his deputy Riek Machar of plotting a coup, which the latter denied, leading to a cycle of retaliatory killings.
President Kiir and former rebel leader and now First Vice President Machar signed a peace deal in August that paved way for the formation of the transitional unity government to end more than two years of civil conflict. Enditem
UNITED NATIONS, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The implementation of the nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, known as JCPOA, needs continued joint efforts from all parties, a Chinese envoy to the UN said Monday.
The implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is a long process, Wu Haitao, China's deputy permanent representative to the UN told a Security Council meeting, adding that "inevitably, there will be difficulties and challenges."
Wu held that all parties need to abide by the JCPOA and adhere to the principle of step-by-step and reciprocity and fully implement the commitment. He also stressed the importance of consolidating mutual trust and seeking consensus in the implementation process.
On July 14, 2015, the P5+1 (China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States), and Iran reached the JCPOA to ensure that Iran's nuclear program will be exclusively peaceful, which also puts Iran on the path of sanctions relief.
The deal, which was endorsed by the UN Security Council Resolution 2231 on July 20, 2015, has been formally implemented since Jan.16, 2016.
On the UN report released Monday regarding the implementation of JCPOA in the past months, Wu said that "we believe it is important for the relevant report to reflect implementation of JCPOA by all parties in an objective and balanced manner," adding that "the efforts made by all parties should be reflected by the report."
The report was rejected by Iran as "imbalanced and biased." Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qasemi said on Monday that "the report has been prepared under open pressure by the United States and the allegations against the Islamic republic are baseless," according to the official IRNA news agency.
China has always advocated the settlement of Iranian nuclear program through political and diplomatic means and has been committed to the consolidation of international nuclear non-proliferation regime and maintenance of international and regional peace and stability, Wu noted at the meeting.
"China is ready to work with all parties to seriously implement JCPOA and Resolution 2231 and make new contribution to the facilitation of comprehensive, long-term and proper solution of Iranian nuclear issue," he said. Enditem
LONDON, July 18 (Xinhua) -- British lawmakers on Monday agreed by 472 votes to 117 to replace the country's submarine-based Trident nuclear missile system, a multi-billion pound project to maintain the country's military status, after Britain's vote to leave the European Union.
Theresa May, making her first appearance in parliament as prime minister, led the debate to pave the way for the building of four nuclear ballistic submarines, its Trident system.
The 54-billion-U.S. dollar fleet will be built at a shipyard at Barrow in northern England to replace its aging fleet of nuclear submarines.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn voted against the Trident program, even though many of his lawmakers supported it. There was also opposition from Scottish National Party politicians opposed to the nuclear submarines being based at the Faslane base on the Clyde in Scotland.
May earlier told lawmakers it would be an act of gross irresponsibility for Britain to abandon its nuclear weapons. Pressed during questioning in the chamber May was asked if she would sanction the use of nuclear missiles if it meant the deaths of 100,000 innocent men, women and children. She responded with an emphatic Yes. May told a packed chamber that Britain cannot afford to relax its guard.
She accused critics of the Trident system of being "the first to defend the country's enemies", adding "the nuclear threat had not gone away, if anything it has increased." She described Trident as Britain's "ultimate insurance policy."
Defense Secretary Michael Fallon closed the debate by saying nuclear threats were growing around the world and Trident "puts doubts in the minds of our adversaries".
For almost 50 years a British submarine carrying nuclear weapons has patrolled the oceans to deter a nuclear attack on Britain. The logic was that if Britain's defense capabilities were destroyed, the submarine could launch a catastrophic retaliatory strike on an aggressor.
The Trident program was introduced by then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s to replace the Polaris missile system used since the 1960s. But now a new generation of submarines will continue the program into the second half of the 21st century. The existing Vanguard submarines that carry the Trident nuclear deterrent will be retired when the new submarines are built.
Opponents of Trident accused May of generating the debate so early into her leadership of the country to take advantage of the civil war currently engulfing the main opposition Labour Party. The rift has seen leader Corbyn estranged from the vast majority of his own MPs, with a leadership challenge currently underway. Some Labour lawmakers even heckled their own leader as he spoke out against Trident during the debate. Enditem
UNITED NATIONS, July 18 (Xinhua) -- A top UN official on Monday called upon all the 193 UN member states to accelerate the implementation pace of the "ambitious and transformative" development agenda by boosting efforts to overcome persistent challenges, new obstacles and unforeseen setbacks in today's turbulent world.
"Achieving the SDGs (the sustainable development goals) is a monumental task. There is no country in the world where all people have equal opportunities to fulfil their aspirations," UN Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson said at the opening of a three-day ministerial meeting of the high-level political forum on sustainable development at UN Headquarters in New York.
"Every country has poverty and inequalities to address," he said. "Every country has environmental problems to remedy."
The forum, convened under the auspices of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), is part of a 2016 high-level segment being held here on July 18-22.
Bringing together representatives from UN member states, civil society actors, academia and the private sector, the forum represents the culmination of ECOSOC's 2016 cycle and addresses the Security Council's overall annual theme, "Implementing the post-2015 development agenda: moving from commitments to results."
"Different countries have different challenges. But we know we will all need to change our mindsets and how we act to effectively implement this ambitious new agenda," Eliasson said on behalf of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon who is currently in South Africa for the International AIDS Conference.
The deputy secretary-general noted that when member states met at the same forum last year, they were just weeks away from the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development -- a 15-year anti-poverty, pro-planet action plan -- although they did not reduce the level of ambition during those negotiations.
Meanwhile, he also highlighted that it is reassuring that many countries have already started a "serious process" of implementation, building on lessons learned from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of eight anti-poverty targets to be reached by the end of 2015, as well as their own experiences, while other countries are working on setting the stage for implementation.
"The shift from the MDGs to the SDGs is huge," Eliasson said. "The Sustainable Development Goals are universal, integrated, indivisible and mutually re-enforcing."
The SDGs, approved by world leaders in September 2015, serves as the blueprint for the global development efforts for the next 15 years.
New ways of thinking, acting and organizing, particularly at the country level, are needed, along with different ways of communicating and clear ways of measuring progress, he said.
For its part, the forum has a unique and crucial role in following up and reviewing implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, Eliasson said, noting that the complexity of the meeting's tasks will require progressive adjustments, especially with regard to national voluntary reviews.
"We live in a turbulent world with growing uncertainties about the road ahead," he said. "There are polarizing, inward-looking trends. At the same time, the world is a world of promises and opportunity with many, many working to fulfil the dreams and aspirations of our peoples."
"If we work together, both inside and between nations mobilizing all good forces we can achieve a better world of peace, opportunity and dignity for all," he said.
In addition to the ministerial-level meeting, the high-level segment also includes a dialogue with international financial and trade institutions, a thematic discussion and a dialogue with the executive secretaries of the regional commissions.
Also speaking at the forum was ECOSOC President Oh Joon, the South Kirean UN ambassador who highlighted that the council's role is essential for successful implementation of the 2030 Agenda.
"This year's work, in particular, represents a threshold, a new beginning, and a higher level of expectation for how the multilateral system will function at the global level in keeping with the Agenda's vision," Oh said.
"The world is watching to see how we use this precious opportunity," he added.
Oh noted that the theme of this year's forum, "Ensuring that no one is left behind," represents the solemn promise made to the world when the international community agreed on the 2030 Agenda.
In order to deliver on that promise, the voices of all UN member states must be heard, from all regions and all sectors, he said, adding that the forum must be the "global early warning system to ensure that we act together in time and adjust our actions when needed." Enditem
DURBAN, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The 21st International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2016) officially opened here on Monday, calling for eradication of the deadly pandemic by 2030.
Over 18,000 scientists, policymakers, advocates and people living with HIV are attending the conference.
AIDS 2016 will highlight the latest achievements in addressing the disease and challenges. Research results are expected to be released during the conference.
In an opening speech, South African Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa said such conferences always come up with decisions which change the course of history.
He said, "It is these conferences that challenge all of us to act with unprecedented action and scale. It is through these conferences that we understand the epidemic, raise the level of consciousness and challenges our misconception."
Ramaphosa said the conference "will inspire us, give us the hope in dealing with the epidemic."
Ramaphosa, also co-chairperson of the South African National AIDS Council, said HIV/AIDS has destroyed lives, depleted resources and altered the lives of many people in the world.
He said the challenges brought by the disease have also galvanised the global community to unite and fight the pandemic.
The deputy president pledged total support and working with all stakeholders in fighting the epidemic.
"Let us change tragedy to triumph. I would like to reaffirm my government's unwavering commitment to working with everyone in the society and our developmental partners. No person should die from a condition that could be effectively treated. That is our commitment," he said.
No person regardless of social standing or level of income should be denied access to the treatment and services, Ramaphosa said.
Michel Sidibe, Executive Director of UNAIDS, said many lives have been lost and there is no time to be complacent.
He called on the delegates to "re-engineer the approach" to addressing the disease.
Countries should invest more in research and innovation to fight the disease, he said.
"We should make a commitment to finish what we started, to end AIDS. If we miss the opportunity history will never forgive us," he said.
Chris Beyrer, co-chairperson of the International AIDS Society, said delegates are not gathering to celebrate about past achievements but to face the mammoth task ahead to eliminate HIV/AIDS.
He called for tolerance and end to stigmatisation to gays, lesbians and transgender people in the world.
"To truly succeed in all places and for all people, we must ensure that every action we take is grounded in all places and for all people, we must ensure that every action we take is grounded in science, respects human rights, and is fully funded for success. Let us use AIDS 2016 to bring our movements closer together. Everyone deserves services in safety and dignity. No exceptions," he noted.
Delegates are expected to come up with concrete interventions to ensure that the dream of an AIDS free society by 2030 becomes a reality.
by Sylvia B. Zarate
BOGOTA, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Almost two weeks after the Colombian government and the FARC guerrilla group announced a historic end to their armed conflict in Havana, Cuba, concerns are mounting that not all FARC members are keen on giving up their struggle.
On July 6, the Armando Rios First Front, one of the main blocs of the revolutionary group, released a statement that it would not lay down its arms.
"The Armando Rios First Front has decided not to demobilize. We will continue the fight to take power, by the people and for the people, independently of the decision taken by the rest of the members of our organization," said the statement.
The First Front has around 350 members and operates in the departments of Vaupes, Guaviare and Guainia. It is best known for having kidnapped Colombian-French politician Ingrid Betancourt, a former senator, whom they kept in captivity for over six years from 2002-2008. It is thought this group is mainly financed through drug trafficking and illegal mining.
President Juan Manuel Santos immediately responded to their declaration, saying that "certain people within the FARC's First Front have doubts about whether to join the peace process or not. Those with doubts should leave them aside and join us, as this is their last chance to change their life. Otherwise, I assure them they will end either in a grave or in jail."
The ruling body of the FARC also issued a statement, saying that no decisions taken by the First Front could be carried out with the name, the weapons or the assets of the rebel group.
"The fighters of the First Front have decided to give up their principles and are using ideological and political arguments to try and hide the obvious influence of those who have economic interests in not ending the conflict," said the group.
The First Front's main complaint is that, according to the Havana deal, all FARC guerrillas would have to stay for 180 days in a number of camps to guarantee the disarmament process.
"The concentration areas are for defeated guerrillas. The Armando Rios First Front of the FARC has never suffered a military defeat. Any ordinary Colombian will understand that these zones are open-air prisons. Surely, nobody will want to enter these traps," read the statement.
According to this offshoot of the FARC, the government of President Juan Manuel Santos is only seeking to disarm the rebels without seeking a real solution to Colombia's economic and social problems.
The First Front also invited all guerrillas who disagree with the peace deal to join forces with them and keep fighting.
In an interview with Xinhua, Alirio Uribe, a lawmaker for the left-wing Alternative Democratic Pole, stated that it was natural for differences to appear in any peace process.
"I believe this does not hurt the success of the negotiations which took a lot of effort. I think the FARC is a very hierarchical organization...which can guarantee that most of its blocs will demobilize," said Uribe.
However, Uribe warned that the full impact of the peace process and the opposition to it will only be measured once the disarmament process finishes in the concentration zones.
Photo provided by Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on April 24, 2016 shows a scene of an underwater test-fire of submarine ballistic missile in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). (Xinhua/KCNA)
SEOUL, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) Tuesday morning fired off three ballistic missiles, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported, quoting Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).
The missiles, presumed to be Scud-types, were launched from North Hwanghae Province from 5:45 a.m. to 6:05 a.m. and flew some 500 to 600 kilometers, the military said.
The range of the missiles is enough to reach all of South Korea, the JCS said.
WASHINGTON, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. Justice Department on Monday filed a request to the Supreme Court for a review of its plan to protect millions of illegal immigrants from deportation.
The Department argued in its filing that the immigration case is so important that it hopes the Supreme Court will rehear the case when it has the full complement of nine justices.
"This filing is consistent with historical practice and reflects the need for prompt and definitive resolution of this important case," Justice Department spokeswoman Melanie Newman said in a statement.
On June 23, the Supreme Court, in a 4-4 split vote, left intact a lower court' ruling to block the implementation of the immigration plan, or Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents.
Under the plan unveiled in late 2014, about 4 million undocumented immigrants would be protected from deportation and issued work permits if they have lived in the U.S. since 2010 and have children who are either American citizens or lawful permanent residents.
Despite the Justice Department's filing, the case is not expected to be reviewed by the Supreme Court until after U.S. President Barack Obama leaves office early next year at end of his eight-year term.
Currently, the Republican-controlled Senate refuses to consider Obama's nomination of Washington D.C. appeals court's chief judge Merrick Garland to replace Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia who died in February.
Chinese telecommunications company ZTE launched its newest smartphone ZMAX PRO on July 18 2016 in New York, the United States. (Xinhua/Wang Naishui)
NEW YORK, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Chinese telecommunications company ZTE launched its newest smartphone ZMAX PRO Monday in New York.
As the latest from its ZMAX lineup, the 6-inch ZMAX PRO features a 13 megapixel camera, a fingerprint sensor, and 3400mAh battery, with a price of 99 USD.
The features have made ZMAX PRO unique for its price range, which has long been the company's goal, combining affordability and technology.
"Our objective is to be able to take feature from our flagship Axon and bring them as quickly as possible to the masses," said Jeff Yee, Vice President of ZTE USA.
The new device can be pre-ordered on MetroPCS starting on Monday.
ZTE, a Chinese multinational telecommunications equipment and systems company headquartered in Shenzhen, Guangdong province in south China, brought its businesses to the U.S. 18 years ago, and has now become the second largest prepaid phone provider, selling 15 million phones in the U.S. in 2015.
SEOUL, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Tuesday test-fired three short-range ballistic missiles in a show of force against the decision between Seoul and Washington to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) to South Korean soil.
Yonhap news agency quoted South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) as saying that the DPRK fired off three ballistic missiles, which are believed to have been a Scud-C type, from the western region of Hwangju in North Hwanghae province between 5:45 a.m. and 6:05 a.m.
The missiles were directed toward the East Sea, traveling about 500 to 600 kilometers, which are a flight enough to reach the entire South Korean territory.
The test-launch came six days after Seoul and Washington agreed to deploy one THAAD battery to the Seongju county, some 250 km southeast of Seoul, by the end of next year.
The DPRK's military threatened to take "physical measures" against THAAD when the deployment site is determined in response to the THAAD deployment decision.
SEOUL, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Tuesday test-fired three short-range ballistic missiles in a show of force against the decision between Seoul and Washington to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) to South Korean soil.
Yonhap news agency quoted South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) as saying that the DPRK fired off three ballistic missiles, which are believed to have been a Scud-C type, from the western region of Hwangju in North Hwanghae province between 5:45 a.m. and 6:05 a.m. local time.
The missiles were directed toward the East Sea, traveling about 500 to 600 kilometers, which are a flight enough to reach the entire South Korean territory.
It marked the first time in about four months since March that Pyongyang launched Scud-type missiles.
The test-launch came six days after Seoul and Washington agreed to deploy one THAAD battery to the Seongju county, some 250 km southeast of Seoul, by the end of next year.
The DPRK's military threatened to take"physical measures"against THAAD when the deployment site is determined in response to the THAAD deployment decision.
THAAD is an advanced U.S. missile defense system designed to shoot down missiles at a relatively high altitude of 40-150 km using a hit-to-kill technology. The DPRK's short-range missiles are known to fly at a lower altitude of about 20 km incapable of being intercepted by THAAD missiles.
On July 8, military authorities of South Korea and the United States announced their decision to install the THAAD system to an unidentified region in South Korea.
A day later, the DPRK test-fired a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) off its east coast to protest against the installation decision. In times of military conflict, it is hard to detect and track missiles launched from a submarine with the THAAD's X-band radar.
Seoul's unification ministry said Monday that Pyongyang appeared to have been in a state of conducting another nuclear test at any time given increased activity in its main Punggye-ri nuclear test site where the country carried out four underground nuclear tests since 2006.
The move of many trucks and personnel reportedly started to be spotted in the test site since July 8, with the activity observed over the past week having been the most brisk in recent months.
Related:
S.Korea denounces DPRK's missile launch provocation
CLEVELAND, the United States, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Republican National Convention for the 2016 U.S. election kicked off on Monday with absence of high-profile party leaders as Donald Trump was scrambling to showcase his ability to unify the party.
Relations between Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, and party leaders were constantly strained during the chaotic primary season where the bombastic and bellicose candidate hurled insults at party establishment and alienated a wide swath of constituencies with controversial remarks.
Long before the GOP convention, lasting from July 18 to 21, four previous GOP presidential nominees, namely George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney had already announced that they would not attend the GOP national convention where Trump would be formally nominated as the party's standard-bearer.
While the two Bushes, the 41st and 43rd former U.S. president, did not attend the 2012 GOP convention in person, they appeared that year in recorded messages in which they showered praise on that year's GOP nominee Romney.
According to an earlier statement by Bush senior who endorsed every Republican presidential nominee for the past five election cycles, for the first time since his own presidency, the 41st U.S. president "is retired from politics," and had no plan to endorse Trump this year.
Bush junior, meanwhile, also had no plan to "participate in or comment on the presidential campaign," according to an earlier remark by his personal aide.
In contrary to the silence from the Bushes, Romney had for long been a vocal critic of Trump and once played a major role in the "Never Trump" movement within the party early on. Romney's absence was also a rare break from the party's tradition of having the last nominee delivering a major speech at the convention.
Meanwhile, Trump's four former rivals in the nomination race, including Ohio Governor John Kasich, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, also did not attend this year's convention.
Compared with others, Kasich's decision to dodge was even more conspicuous since the convention was being held in the state where he was the governor.
The Trump campaign on Monday blasted Kasich and other party leaders who did not appear at the convention for belonging to the past.
"He (Kasich) is making a big mistake," said Trump's campaign Chief Paul Manafort in an interview with MSNBC. "Most of the Republicans who aren't coming are people who have been part of the past."
Trump first drew widespread criticism last June when he said in his presidential announcement speech that Mexico was sending "rapists" and drug dealers to the United States. Since then, he had repeatedly vowed, if elected president, to deport about 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country.
In another outburst of emotional remarks, Trump called for a "total and complete" ban on Muslims entering the United States in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks in November 2015.
Since then, the targets of Trump's insults expanded to include women, African-American protesters, family members of rivals, etc.
His audacious remarks not only caused wide division among the Republicans, but also among the Americans.
Even before the arrival of Trump at the Republican National Convention for the 2016 U.S. election, tumult broke out on the convention floor and delegates erupted in competing chants in a televised dispute Republican leaders had hoped to avoid.
With the theme of the night "Make America Safe Again" against the backdrop of violence and unrest in the United States and throughout the world, whether the four-day GOP convention can achieve party unity remains a question.
RIO DE JANEIRO, July 17, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Soldiers attend a drill on external attack at the Deodoro Station as preparations for the Rio 2016 Games, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on July 16, 2016. (Xinhua/Li Ming)
RIO DE JANEIRO, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Security forces in Rio de Janeiro have successfully completed two large-scale simulation exercises to prepare for next month's Olympic Games, organizers said on Monday.
An operation aimed at averting a terrorist threat was carried out at Deodoro - home to the second largest Games venue cluster - on Friday and Saturday. On Sunday, a full-rehearsal of the security plan for the opening ceremony took place at the Maracana stadium.
Security coordinator Christiano Sampaio said the drills were based on input and expertise from 55 countries and regions.
"We're exchanging experiences with various countries, all of which will be reflected here in Rio de Janeiro," Sampaio told Rio2016.com. "This exercise had been previously planned, though with the recent happenings in Nice we are ever more alert."
The exercise at Deodoro included around 1,000 security personnel from 20 institutions. Among them were Rio's special operations police (BOPE), the army and the fire brigade.
The simulation required police to enter a train carriage and defuse a bomb using a robot.
On Sunday, around 2000 security personnel simulated the transportation of athletes and officials to the Maracana stadium.
"We are confident that now we are ready for the opening ceremony and to transport athletes and authorities," said Felipe Seixas, director of special projects and coordinator of the simulation.
Seixas added that all security forces would work 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
"We're not preparing for a war, we're preparing for a party, obviously while taking into consideration all possible risks," he added.
South America's largest country plans to deploy 85,000 soldiers and police during the Olympics, about double the number used at the London 2012 Games.
CANBERRA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- A piece of possible aircraft debris which washed up on Pemba Island off the coast of Tanzania last month has arrived in Australia for examination, according to a joint statement from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) and the Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) Malaysia.
The large piece was found by locals on the island on June 23, and is thought to be from a wing flap. The location at which the debris washed up is consistent with predicted MH370 debris drift modeling.
The ATSB released a statement late on Monday saying it would be investigated for any signs it is from the missing Boeing 777 jet.
"Malaysia and Australia have worked with Tanzanian officials to assume responsibility for the wing flap," the statement read.
The ATSB said other pieces of debris previously found in the region were determined to be "almost certainly" from the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, however, the investigation would go ahead before investigators make a statement regarding the origin of the "wing flap."
"To date, the ATSB has examined four pieces of debris on behalf of Malaysia and determined them to be almost certainly from MH370," the statement said.
"Technical specialists from the ATSB are working with Malaysian investigators to determine if it is from the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777, MH370."
Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was a scheduled passenger service bound from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. It disappeared with 239 passengers and crew on board.
People protest against Donald Trump on the first day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, the United States, July 18, 2016. (Xinhua/Yin Bogu)
CLEVELAND, the United States, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Republican National Convention for the 2016 U.S. election kicked off on Monday with absence of high-profile party leaders as Donald Trump was scrambling to showcase his ability to unify the party.
Relations between Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, and party leaders were constantly strained during the chaotic primary season where the bombastic and bellicose candidate hurled insults at party establishment and alienated a wide swath of constituencies with controversial remarks.
Long before the GOP convention, lasting from July 18 to 21, four previous GOP presidential nominees, namely George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney had already announced that they would not attend the GOP national convention where Trump would be formally nominated as the party's standard-bearer.
While the two Bushes, the 41st and 43rd former U.S. president, did not attend the 2012 GOP convention in person, they appeared that year in recorded messages in which they showered praise on that year's GOP nominee Romney.
According to an earlier statement by Bush senior who endorsed every Republican presidential nominee for the past five election cycles, for the first time since his own presidency, the 41st U.S. president "is retired from politics," and had no plan to endorse Trump this year.
Bush junior, meanwhile, also had no plan to "participate in or comment on the presidential campaign," according to an earlier remark by his personal aide.
In contrary to the silence from the Bushes, Romney had for long been a vocal critic of Trump and once played a major role in the "Never Trump" movement within the party early on. Romney's absence was also a rare break from the party's tradition of having the last nominee delivering a major speech at the convention.
Meanwhile, Trump's four former rivals in the nomination race, including Ohio Governor John Kasich, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, also did not attend this year's convention.
Compared with others, Kasich's decision to dodge was even more conspicuous since the convention was being held in the state where he was the governor.
The Trump campaign on Monday blasted Kasich and other party leaders who did not appear at the convention for belonging to the past.
"He (Kasich) is making a big mistake," said Trump's campaign Chief Paul Manafort in an interview with MSNBC. "Most of the Republicans who aren't coming are people who have been part of the past."
Activists with Code Pink protest presumptive Republicanpresidential candidate Donald Trump and corporations before a Prophets of Rage pop-up concert at the 2016 Republican National Convention on Monday, July 18, 2016 in Cleveland, Ohio. (AFP PHOTO / Patrick T. Fallon)
Trump first drew widespread criticism last June when he said in his presidential announcement speech that Mexico was sending "rapists" and drug dealers to the United States. Since then, he had repeatedly vowed, if elected president, to deport about 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country.
In another outburst of emotional remarks, Trump called for a "total and complete" ban on Muslims entering the United States in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks in November 2015.
Since then, the targets of Trump's insults expanded to include women, African-American protesters, family members of rivals, etc.
His audacious remarks not only caused wide division among the Republicans, but also among the Americans.
Even before the arrival of Trump at the Republican National Convention for the 2016 U.S. election, tumult broke out on the convention floor and delegates erupted in competing chants in a televised dispute Republican leaders had hoped to avoid.
With the theme of the night "Make America Safe Again" against the backdrop of violence and unrest in the United States and throughout the world, whether the four-day GOP convention can achieve party unity remains a question.
FRANKFURT, July 19, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Photo taken on July 19, 2016 shows the blocked road at the site of an attack near Wuerzburg in the southern German state of Bavaria. An axe wielding man wounded four passengers in a late Monday night attack on a regional train near Wuerzburg, local police confirmed. The attacker was shot dead by the police, said a spokesperson for the Bavarian Interior Ministry, adding that he appeared to have acted alone. (Xinhua/Luo Huanhuan)
MUNICH, July 19 (Xinhua) -- An axe wielding man wounded four passengers in a late Monday night attack on a regional train near Wuerzburg in the southern German state of Bavaria, local police confirmed.
A police spokesperson said among the four passengers, three were in critical condition while the other one suffered from minor injuries. The rest 14 passengers on the train, which runs between Treuchlingen and Wuerzburg in Bavaria, were left unhurt.
The attacker was shot dead by the police, said a spokesperson for the Bavarian Interior Ministry, adding that he appeared to have acted alone.
The spokesperson also said the man attacked the passengers with an axe and a knife shortly after arriving at Wuerzburg.
Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said the man, identified as a 17-year-old Afghan asylum seeker, was shot while trying to attack the police.
The minister also noted that the young man possibly shouted Islamic words, but he would not go into details, noting that it has to be verified.
The police at the moment refused to comment on the motive of the attack.
In May, a 27-year-old young man stabbed four victims at a train station near Munich in Germany, killing one and injuring the other three.
MEXICO CITY, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Mexico, with its rich cultural heritage and traditions related to death, has become a fertile ground for "dark tourism," a Mexican scholar said Monday.
Dark tourism, which offers experiences linked to death, risks and disasters, is growing every year and has become a genuine tourist sector, Alvaro Lopez Lopez, a tourism researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico told a press release.
Lopez Lopez, who is currently trying to track dark tourism in all forms in Mexico, believes that dark tourism helps remove social taboos and fears of people about visiting places once considered unthinkable.
Another tourist attraction is to feel the experience of being an illegal immigrant, said Lopez Lopez. In the town of Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo, one company offers "night walks," where tourists can pretend to be illegal immigrants trying to cross the U.S. border, with locals acting as guards or people smugglers.
The terrain is rough, the trip is uncomfortable and throughout the experience, tourists are insulted, searched and roughed up by the actors.
There is also growing interest in exploring sites linked to drug trafficking, he said.
BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- GlaxoSmithKline's human papilloma virus vaccine has been approved for sale, China Food and Drug Administration told Xinhua on Monday.
In a separate statement, GSK said the vaccine, commercially named Cervarix, is the first HPV vaccine licensed for use in China.
The World Health Organization recommends the appropriate use of HPV vaccine to prevent cervical cancer.
BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Chinese procuratorates had filed 30 public interest lawsuits to courts as of the end of June in a pilot reform, the Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP) said Monday.
They include 11 civil litigation cases, 18 administrative litigation cases and one with both civil and administrative litigation, the SPP said.
There were 23 cases for environmental protection-related litigation, accounting for over 76 percent of the total, the SPP added.
In July 2015, the SPP began a two-year pilot program that has allowed prosecutors in 13 provincial divisions to initiate public interest litigation cases on environmental protection, preservation of state assets as well as food and drug safety.
SEOUL, July 19 (Xinhua) -- South Korea's military on Tuesday denounced the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) for its test-launch of ballistic missiles, which came in protest against the decision between Seoul and Washington to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) to South Korean soil.
An official with South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) told a regular briefing of the defense ministry that the DPRK's missile launches were a provocative act threatening South Korea's national security and safety of its people, slamming Pyongyang's repeated"reckless provocations."
The denunciation came after Pyongyang test-fired three short-range ballistic missiles earlier in the morning in an apparent show of force to protest against the THAAD deployment decision.
The DPRK fired off three ballistic missiles from the western region of Hwangju in North Hwanghae province between 5:45 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. local time, according to the JCS.
Those missiles are estimated to be a short-range Scud-type, but there is a possibility for medium-range Rodong ballistic missiles to be fired from a high angle to reduce a flight distance.
Two of the three projectiles traveled about 500 to 600 kilometers, which are a flight enough to reach the entire South Korean territory. The remaining one is still under analysis due to an unclear trajectory, the JCS official said.
All of the three missiles were directed toward the East Sea, but it is not clear whether the projectiles landed in waters. It marked the first time in about four months since March that Pyongyang launched short-range ballistic missiles.
The test-launches came after Seoul and Washington agreed last Wednesday to deploy one THAAD battery to the Seongju county, some 250 km southeast of Seoul, by the end of next year.
The DPRK's military threatened to take"physical measures"against THAAD when the deployment site is determined in response to the THAAD deployment decision.
THAAD is an advanced U.S. missile defense system designed to shoot down missiles at a relatively high altitude of 40-150 km using a hit-to-kill technology. The DPRK's short-range missiles are known to fly at a lower altitude of about 20 km incapable of being intercepted by THAAD missiles.
On July 8, military authorities of South Korea and the United States announced their decision to install the THAAD system to an unidentified region in South Korea.
A day later, the DPRK test-fired a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) off its east coast to protest against the installation decision. In times of military conflict, it is hard to detect and track missiles launched from a submarine with the THAAD's X-band radar.
Seoul's unification ministry said Monday that Pyongyang appeared to have been in a state of conducting another nuclear test at any time given increased activity in its main Punggye-ri nuclear test site where the country carried out four underground nuclear tests since 2006.
The move of many trucks and personnel reportedly started to be spotted in the test site since July 8, with the activity observed over the past week having been the most brisk in recent months.
MEXICO CITY, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto on Monday signed into law a new package of anti-corruption bills, the Latin American country's strongest measure aiming to root out the evil at all levels of government.
At the National Palace in Mexico City, Pena Nieto unveiled the new package of laws that increases oversight of politicians, by a citizens' committee to be established, and provides for stiffer penalties against corruption.
The package of seven laws demands that public servants declare their tax-paying information, their wealth and any potential conflicts of interest.
Pena Nieto expressed the hope the mechanism will restore public confidence in the government, assuring Mexicans of a difference to be made.
"We will work to eradicate abuses by those who do not obey the law, " he said.
Meanwhile, Pena Nieto used the occasion to offer "my profound and sincere apology for the offense and indignation I have caused" over his wife's purchase of a luxury home worth seven million U.S. dollars from a government contractor.
Pena Nieto admitted he "made a mistake" in the deal exposed by media reports in late 2014. He said "this error affected my family, hurt the presidential office and hurt confidence in the government."
A government-sponsored investigation later found no conflict of interest in the purchase.
The official leading the probe resigned earlier on Monday as head of the public administration department.
Eduardo Bohorquez, director of Transparencia Mexicana, one of the non-governmental organizations behind the new set of anti-corruption rules, said the new system is a step forward, while describing corruption as "an open wound" and a tax "Mexican homes pay every day" in the country.
"Thirty-three percent of the income of a family on minimum wage goes towards the payment of bribes for access to services," he added.
MELBOURNE, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The Australian state of Victoria's transformation from coal power to clean energy was given another positive boost on Tuesday when the state government approved the plans for a new 488 US dollar wind farm.
The state, which has had a reliance on "dirty" brown coal power for much of the past century, has stated its ambition to promote renewable energy projects, such as the wind farm approved by the Andrews Labor Government on Tuesday.
The wind farm will have 96-turnbines, making it the state's largest, and will be located near Dundonnell, a district in Victoria's south-west.
The farm will generate enough power and clean energy for 140,000 houses per year, and will save gas emissions equivalent to removing 170,000 cars from Victorian roads.
The project is expected to create 300 construction jobs, with 16 operational positions to be continued once built.
Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews said the new project reflected the confidence in the future of renewable energies.
"There's nothing ugly about windfarms, because there's nothing ugly about jobs," Andrews said on Tuesday.
"The world is shifting to renewable energy and Victoria can't get left behind."
The approval of the new wind farm is further coup for the state government, as they try to embrace clean power and energy, through their commitment to end carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.
The Andrews Government has under pressure to follow through on this pledge, by replacing one of Australia's "dirtiest" power plants known as Hazelwood with clean energy.
Earlier this year, the plant's French owner, ENGIE, said it was considering closing or selling Hazelwood as the state moves away from coal.
The state's Minister for Planning Richard Wynne said they approved the project after the government streamlined wind farm approvals early last year.
"Wind farms are expected to attract $35 billion (AUD) worth of investment nationally by 2020, which is great for jobs, the environment and protecting our way of life."
Trustpower will lead the project and is expected to begin construction within about 12 months.
SYDNEY, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Controversial Australian senator-elect Pauline Hanson has come under renewed criticism for her anti-Islam stance after claiming Australians are scared to walk the streets on fears of terrorism.
Amid clashes between Hanson's supporters and anti-racism protestors outside the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's headquarters on Monday night, the controversial parliamentarian renewed her calls for a royal commission into Islam and a ban on Muslim migration.
Her comments were attacked on Australian social media on Tuesday as hate speech while newly elected government ministers are publicly disagreeing with her views.
"There are individuals in our community that, yes, subscribe to the Muslim faith and want to do us damage, and we need to have a strong security, border protection and other policies place to deal with those issues," newly crowned Australian Resources Minister Matt Canavan told broadcaster Sky News on Tuesday.
"But don't put people into groups -- that is not the basis of our society."
Hanson's 20-year hiatus from Australian political life hasn't changed her discriminatory views on immigration, especially toward Asians and those of the Muslim faith, causing a lot of concern among Australia's vibrant multi-cultural communities.
"You are creating a dysfunctional country by isolating a religion, 20 years ago isolating a race, and if you keep on going down this track I will fear for my wife's life, I will fear for my kid's life," audience member Khaled Elomar said, after claiming he taught his son about Islamophobia by showing videos of the senator speak.
But Hanson has been given an olive branch by one person, 30-year-old psychologist Mohammed Attai, who invited the senator to his home for a meal so she can get a deeper understanding of his culture.
"I believe the best way to increase understanding and mutual respect is through interaction,"Attai said.
LONDON, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The British Home Office has listed the East Turkistan Islamic Movement as an Islamic terrorist and separatist organization.
Britain's latest list of proscribed terrorist organizations, published Friday by the Home Office, has officially proscribed the terrorist group Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), also known as the East Turkistan Islamic Party, East Turkistan Islamic Movement or Hizb al-Islami al-Turkistani.
"TIP is an Islamic terrorist and separatist organization founded in 1989 by Uygur militants in western China," the Home Office says in the official document.
TIP aims to establish an independent caliphate in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China and to name it East Turkistan, says the document.
It is based in Pakistan and operates in China, Central Asia, South Asia and Syria, says the document. "The group has claimed responsibility for a number of attacks in China, the latest of these being in April 2014. TIP has links to a number of terrorist groups, including al-Qaida."
In November 2015, TIP released the 18th issue of its magazine Islamic Turkistan through the Global Islamic Media Front, detailing TIP's jihad against the Chinese authorities, says the document.
"Video footage from September 2015 shows TIP hosting training camps in areas controlled by the Pakistani Taliban in North Waziristan," it says.
"More recently TIP has maintained an active and visible presence in the Syrian war and has published a number of video clips of its activities."
Examples of TIP involvement in Syria from March to April 2016 include TIP claiming a joint attack with Jund al-Aqsa in Sahl al-Ghab and publishing a video of a suicide bomb attack in April 2016.
A video published by the terrorist group in March 2016 promotes the victories of TIP in Syria and calls for Muslims to join jihad; and a video slide show published in April 2016 shows fighters and children in training, the Home Office file says.
"TIP has been banned by the UN and is also sanctioned by the USA under the Terrorist Exclusion list," it notes.
Delegates pose for a group photo at the "Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development" held in Singapore, July 18, 2016. (Xinhua/Then Chih Wey)
SINGAPORE, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Dialogues, negotiations and consultations are the best way to solve disputes in the South China Sea, a Singapore-based expert said on Monday during a seminar on South China Sea and regional cooperation.
The final award, issued by an arbitral tribunal on July 12, sweepingly sided with the Philippines and denied China's long-standing historical rights in the South China Sea.
The Chinese government has dismissed the ill-founded award as "null and void with no binding force."
Li Mingjiang, associate professor at S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, told Xinhua that related countries have showed political will to exercise restraint since the biased award was issued.
In the short term, the impact of the arbitration was not very obvious, he said.
"Over the past a few days, the situation of South China Sea is relatively stable, which is reassuring," said Li, adding that negotiations and consultations were the best way to solve the maritime disputes.
"International law, to some extent, can be used as an auxiliary tool, but a large number of cases in international relations prove that negotiations are much more effective, and this way is also more pragmatic," he said.
Photo taken on July 18, 2016 shows the Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development held in Singapore. (Xinhua/Then Chih Wey)
Positive interactions were witnessed between China and the Philippines recently, which could be reflected through diplomacy, politics and communications, said Li. He was optimistic about the interactions, saying no matter whether they touched the core of the South China Sea issue, it was a good start.
Li pointed out that how Manila dealt with the so-called arbitration was a key issue that would impact the China-Philippine relations. The Aquino III administration had soured its relations with China, while the new Philippine government expressed willingness to talk and negotiate with Beijing.
"At the first stage of interactions, it's of more symbolic meaning to some extent," Li said. "Such kind of interactions neither need to touch upon the core of the South China Sea issue, nor talk about the arbitration."
At present stage, it might still be premature to start negotiations on maritime delimitation and fisheries disputes, he said. "Perhaps, related countries are not ready for such negotiations."
As for the China-ASEAN relations, Li believed the seminar helped the participants make clear their opinions and enhance communications while reducing the possibility of strategic misjudgment.
"Based on communications over the past years, claimants, non-claimants in the region and countries outside of the region have gradually achieved consensus that the situation of South China Sea should be cool down, and peace and stability should be secured," said Li. "Meanwhile, countries could strengthen cooperation in possible areas."
Organized by the Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the seminar attracted more than 20 experts from China and Southeast Asian countries, including Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia.
Zheng Yongnian, director of the East Asian Institute of the National University of Singapore, delivers a keynote speech at the "Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development" held in Singapore, July 18, 2016. (Xinhua/Then Chih Wey)
SINGAPORE, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The South China Sea issue is a product of contemporary geopolitics amid the relative decline of the United States and the rise of China, Zheng Yongnian, director of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore, said on Monday.
Zheng made the remarks in a keynote speech at the Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development.
He said the United States has made a wrong judgment toward the rise of China, who always understands China based on its own experiences. In fact, China has said it admits and welcomes the U.S. existence in the region, and hopes the United States can play a neutral role on the South China Sea issue.
"If the U.S. can keep its neutral stance, it can play a very good role in promoting China-ASEAN relations. On the contrary, the U.S. chose to strengthen its alliance, which it in turn has been kidnapped by its alliances to some extent," Zheng noted.
Zheng Yongnian, director of the East Asian Institute of the National University of Singapore, delivers a keynote speech at the "Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development" held in Singapore, July 18, 2016. (Xinhua/Then Chih Wey)
Highlighting China and ASEAN countries have established a stable interaction model, Zheng said the U.S. existence in the Asia Pacific region has changed the way China and ASEAN countries get along over the last decades.
With regard to Japan's activeness in the South China Sea arbitration, Zheng said Japan needs to set up its own geopolitical influence, in order to proceed its normalization, and that influence is among the ASEAN countries. That's also why the administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has always been active over the South China Sea issue.
Zheng said that China's rise is mainly the rise of economy, and it's hard for China to give up its core national interests such as the South China Sea.
He believed that the South China Sea will largely maintain peaceful as China and the United States in fact maintain a very good relationship.
"The Sino-U.S. relationship is quite different from that between America and the Soviet Union, and the two countries also have no direct geopolitical conflicts," he added.
HANOI, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The coffee price in Vietnam's Central Highlands Dak Lak province at one time reached 38.9 million Vietnamese dong (1,729 U.S. dollars) per ton during the week, the highest since June 29, 2015, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) on Tuesday.
Compared to the previous week, the prices of green Robusta coffee beans in Vietnam's Central Highlands provinces have risen to 37.6-38.3 million Vietnamese dong (1,671-1,702 U.S. dollars) per ton, up 600,000 Vietnamese dong (26.7 U.S. dollars) each ton, Vietnam's state-run news agency VNA quoted the MARD as saying.
Meanwhile, the freight on board (FOB) price of Robusta coffee gained 24 U.S. dollars per ton to reach 1,756 U.S. dollars per ton.
The rising trend was attributed to the global price hike in the previous week due to concerns over the prolonged drought's impact on coffee harvest in Vietnam and India, two among the world's top Robusta coffee producers.
According to the ministry, coffee exports of Vietnam, the world's largest Robusta coffee exporter, reached an estimated 1.32 million tons in the first nine months of the 2015-2016 crop year, up 32 percent compared to a year earlier.
Meanwhile, in the first half of 2016, the country earned 1.71 billion U.S. dollars from exporting 985,000 tons of coffee, up 17.6 percent in value and 39.8 percent in volume year-on-year.
During five-month period, Germany and the United States continued to be top consumers of Vietnamese coffee, with respective market shares of 15.85 percent and 12.89 percent.
Vietnam witnessed strong growth in coffee exports to China (up 54.63 percent year-on-year), Russia (48.73 percent), the U.S. (30.59 percent) and Germany (17.59 percent), said the ministry.
LONDON, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Fossil fuel subsidies from the British and German governments have undermined the spirit of the Paris climate deal aimed at reducing emissions worldwide and limiting global average temperatures, the UN climate change envoy said Monday.
Mary Robinson, former Irish president and UN special envoy on climate change and El Nino, said she had to speak out after Germany's compensation for coal power and British tax breaks for oil and gas.
"The British government introduced new tax breaks for oil and gas in 2015 that will cost the UK taxpayer billions between 2015 and 2020, and at the same time they have cut support for renewables and for energy efficiency," Robinson told The Guardian newspaper.
"It's regrettable. That's not in the spirit (of Paris)," she said. "In many ways, the UK was a real leader (on climate change) and hopefully the UK will become again a real leader. But it's not at the moment."
In December 2015, nearly 200 countries adopted the Paris Agreement, the first global pact to jointly fight climate change, pledging to collectively cut greenhouse gas emissions, most of which come from the burning of oil, coal and gas for energy.
Early in July, newly appointed British Prime Minister Theresa May abolished the country's Department of Energy and Climate Change, which sparked criticism from former ministers and international organizations.
The UN envoy also accused Germany. "Germany says it's on track to end coal subsidies by 2018 but the German government is also introducing new mechanisms that provide payment to power companies for their ability to provide a constant supply of electricity, even if they are polluting forms, such as diesel and coal," Robinson said.
She urged the German government to make a real commitment to get out of coal, adding that all countries should end fossil fuel subsidies.
BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- China's northern coast will experience a storm surge from Tuesday evening to Wednesday, said China's National Marine Environmental Forecasting Center.
The center issued yellow warnings, third in the four-color warning system, for the ports of Qinhuangdao and Jingtang in north China's Hebei Province and blue warnings to other coast regions in Tianjin, Hebei and Liaoning.
The elevation may range from 50 to 150 cm and the peak is likely to arrive on Wednesday afternoon, the center statement said.
Meanwhile, waves measuring three to four meters will occur in the northern part of the Bohai Sea and Yellow Sea.
Several popular summer resorts along the coast have attracted a large crowd of tourists. The center urged them to stay away from the shore.
SINGAPORE, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Zhao Qizheng, dean of the school of journalism at the Renmin University of China, said here Tuesday that it is hoped that China and the Philippines could restart bilateral negotiations, and the negotiations should move step by step.
Zhao, who is also former minister of China's State Council Information Office, made the remarks at the media briefing after the Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development held here on Monday.
Highlighting that China and the Philippines share lots of common interests, Zhao said that there are also contradictions and conflicts both countries face.
The conflict between China and the Philippines over the South China Sea has been decades, and the problem is difficult to solve in the near future, Zhao said, adding that the best way is to start with problems that are easy to reach agreements, before moving to more complex issues.
"China and Philippines can temporarily put aside differences, and discuss issues of joint exploration first,"Zhao said.
"Joint developments are very broad, including resources, fisheries, maritime rescue, meteorologic data exchange as well as disaster relief at sea. We should move step by step."
Li Guoqiang, deputy director of the Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), said that China's door to dialogue has always been open, and bilateral negotiations and peaceful settlement of disputes are always welcomed.
The government of former Philippine President Benigno S. Aquino III filed the arbitration against China in 2013, despite the agreement his country had reached with China on resolving disputes in the South China Sea through bilateral negotiations. Since then, China-Philippines relations have been severely deteriorated.
However, current Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has expressed readiness and willingness to hold bilateral talks with China, saying that he is planning to send envoy to China to restart negotiations.
Li said that he hopes the South China Sea issue would be properly re-pulled back on the track of diplomatic negotiations on the basis of mutual respect and joint consultation.
He stressed that if China and Philippines decide to restart diplomatic mechanism, under no circumstances should the South China Sea arbitration be used as reference.
Organized by the Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the one-day seminar attracted more than 20 experts from academic institutes in China and Southeast Asian countries, including Thailand, Cambodia and Malaysia.
TOKYO, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The Japanese government on Tuesday protested against missile launches by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) earlier in the morning, warning further military threats possible.
The Japanese government released a statement on Tuesday morning, saying DPRK's missile launches violate UN Security Council resolutions, which bans DPRK's development of nuclear and missile technologies.
The statement also vowed to step up coordination with South Korea, the United States and other related countries to deal with the matter.
Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Tuesday directed relevant departments to thoroughly gather and analyze information on missile launches by DPRK.
Meanwhile, Japan's Defense Minister Nakatani denounced the launches as provocative act that harm the peace and security of the global community, saying they absolutely cannot be accepted.
Nakatani also gave warning that further military threats are possible.
The DPRK reportedly launched three ballistic missiles Tuesday morning, following the launch of two last month, according to reports.
SINGAPORE, July 19 (Xinhua) -- "Although the Chinese government has dismissed the ill-founded arbitration unilaterally initiated by the Aquino III administration, China remains open to the Philippines, and disputes in South China Sea shouldn't hamper China-ASEAN relations," Zhao Qizheng, former minister of China's State Council Information Office, said here on Tuesday.
Zhao made such remarks at the Media Briefing on South China Sea following Monday's Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development held in Singapore.
Zhao said China fully understand that ASEAN countries have common interests on the whole, and each country in the region has its own interests. China and ASEAN should maintain friendly exchanges, as well as friendly relations.
"Although the Chinese government has dismissed the ill-founded arbitration unilaterally initiated by the Aquino III administration, China remains open to the Philippines, and disputes in South China Sea shouldn't hamper China-ASEAN relations," Zhao stressed.
The former minister said the development of China-ASEAN relations should be based on common interests. China and ASEAN countries could deepen political communications, strengthen economic interactions as well as enhance cultural exchanges in the future.
Li Guoqiang, deputy director of Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, echoed with Zhao's view.
Li said ASEAN is the priority of China's diplomacy with neighboring countries, the two sides have enjoyed friendly relations in various fields. China supports the integrity of ASEAN, and China is willing to cooperate with a united ASEAN.
As for the award issued by the ad hoc arbitral tribunal, Li said that China's position has been made very clear, and he expected ASEAN countries can understand China's position, while making the related parties back to negotiation table.
"Disputes in the South China Sea isn't an issue between China and ASEAN, and the disputes should be and only can be solved by negotiations between the claimants," Li added.
Li also stressed that China and ASEAN should work together to maintain peace and stability in the region. "China can only play one part, the two sides need to join hands and move towards each other to secure peace and stability."
Organized by the Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the one-day seminar attracted more than 20 experts from academic institutes in China and Southeast Asian countries, including Thailand, Cambodia and Malaysia.
MANILA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The Philippine Supreme Court acquitted on Tuesday former Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo of plunder, granting the former leader's plea to drop the case against her.
The High Court's ruling paved the way for Arroyo, 69, to walk out of the Veterans Memorial Medical Centre, where she has been detained since October 2012.
Theodore Te, a spokesman for the court, told a news conference that the Supreme Court, voting 11-4, annulled the criminal case against Arroyo for"insufficiency of evidence."
He said the court also ordered the"immediate release of the detained" former president.
Arroyo is currently a member of the Philippine House of Representatives having won the May elections for another term.
The Ombudsman filed the plunder case against Arroyo and nine other former government officials who allegedly misused some 366 million pesos (7.8 million U.S. dollars) lottery funds of the state-run Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office from 2007 to 2010.
Arroyo is the second Philippine president to be jailed for plunder.
In 2001, ousted President Joseph Estrada was also jailed after anti-graft court convicted and sentenced him to life in prison in 2007. Estrada was later freed after Arroyo pardoned him.
KUALA LUMPUR, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Malaysia and Singapore signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) Tuesday on the long-anticipated high-speed rail linking the two countries.
The signing was witnessed by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and his Singaporean counterpart Lee Hsien Loong, a significant milestone since the project was first announced in 2013.
The signing of MoU will be followed by detailed negotiations and officials say a formal bilateral agreement is expected to be signed by the end of the year.
Najib wrote on his blog on Monday that the high-speed rail will enhance people-to-people ties and improve business linkages between the two countries.
The proposed high-speed rail is expected to cut the traveling time between the Malaysian capital and the city state to 90 minutes.
File photo taken on Nov. 13, 2014 shows Chinese Premier Li Keqiang attends the 17th China-ASEAN summit in Nay Pyi Taw, Myanmar. (Xinhua Photo by Wang Ye)
SINGAPORE, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The so-called South China Sea arbitration award will not hamper cooperation between China and the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), experts said here on Monday.
The ad hoc arbitral tribunal in the South China Sea arbitration, set up at the unilateral request of the former Philippine government, last Tuesday issued an ill-founded award sweepingly sided with Manila, denying China's long-standing historic rights in the South China Sea.
China has refused to participate in the proceedings, reiterating that the tribunal has no jurisdiction over the case, which is in essence related to territorial sovereignty and maritime delimitation, and has also made clear that it neither accepts nor recognizes the award and the award "is null and void and has no binding force."
China has also reaffirmed that it will continue to endeavor to peacefully resolve disputes in the South China Sea with parties directly concerned through negotiation and consultation on the basis of respecting historical facts and in accordance with international law.
Nearly one week after the so-called award was rendered, more than 20 experts on international law and foreign relations from academic institutes in China and Southeast Asian countries including Thailand, Cambodia and Malaysia convened here Monday for the Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development, which was organized by the Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
In a keynote speech at the seminar, Zhao Qizheng, former minister of China's State Council Information Office, reiterated that the ad hoc arbitral tribunal has no jurisdiction over the case.
Zhao said the Philippine tax payers' money was used for a pile of waste paper, blasting the tribunal for "taking big money to do dirty things" and describing its proceedings as "amateurish and unsightly, null and void."
Zhao's remarks were echoed by attendees, who also agreed with Zhao that the disputes can only be settled through dialogue and by deepening China-ASEAN ties.
Kong Lingjie, vice dean of China Institute of Boundary and Ocean Studies, China's Wuhan University, criticized the so-called arbitration, branding it as "a bold interpretation and ambitious development of article 123(1) of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
"The most absurd ruling was on the Taiping Island's status as a rock," said Kong, adding that the ruling would deny most of the Nansha Islands' rights to exclusive economic zones.
In this case, Kong said, the arbitration violated the international law and fabricated "an illegal definition of the distinction between islands and reefs."
Experts at the seminar also voiced support for the notion of bringing concerned parties involved in the South China Sea issue back to the negotiating table.
Zheng Yongnian, director of the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore, said he believes that China and the Philippines should start the dialogue process to solve the dispute.
"It is not true that a great power has been bullying small countries," Zheng said, noting that certain countries in the region kowtow too much to the United States.
Zheng suggested that China and other concerned parties over the South China Sea issue could firstly initiate cooperation in maritime rescue efforts, fishery and protection of maritime resources.
At the one-day seminar, experts, in addition, all agreed that the arbitration would not impede the cooperation process between China and the ASEAN countries.
Li Guoqiang, deputy director of the Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies, told Xinhua in an exclusive interview on the sidelines of the seminar that there lies a huge potential for the development of China-ASEAN ties.
"With the strategic opportunity produced by China's 21st Century Maritime Silk Road initiative, the two sides are planning to upgrade their free trade agreement," Li said.
Zhao Qizheng, meanwhile, underscored the fact that China became ASEAN's biggest trade partner in 2009.
He said that despite the difficulties, including territorial disputes, the intervention of countries outside the region and the not well-established cooperation mechanism, the communication and cooperation between China and the ASEAN members has never ceased and has brought great benefits to all countries.
"It is beyond doubt that maintaining regional peace and stability, and keeping the momentum of cooperation and development is in the best interest of all," Zhao said.
NEW DELHI, July 19 (Xinhua) -- At least 10 paramilitary commandos of India's Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) were killed and five others wounded after Naxals attacked them in eastern Indian state of Bihar, officials said Tuesday.
The Naxals ambushed the CRPF men Monday night triggering a series of blasts at Sondaha forest area bordering Gaya and Aurangabad districts, about 172 km south of Patna city, the capital of Bihar.
Officials said three Naxals were killed in gunfight with the CRPF personnel in the area.
"Eight personnel were killed on the spot and two others died while being evacuated from the spot," an official said. "Five others wounded in the attack were hospitalised."
Reports said the paramilitary troopers belonged to the elite COBRA battalion of CRPF and were lured into the forest area. However, officials said the commandos were assisting another team that was searching part of the forest area following specific information about presence of Naxals there.
Authorities have rushed reinforcements to the forest area to take on Naxals and carry out searches.
Indian Home Minister Rajnath Singh spoke to Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar Tuesday morning and assured him of federal government's support. Singh has also asked the CRPF chief to visit the spot and assess the situation.
India's former prime minister Manmohan Singh once termed the Naxalite movement as India's "greatest internal security challenge."
New Delhi has deployed several companies of its paramilitary forces to take on Naxals in their strongholds.
The insurgency so far has claimed more than 6,000 lives and rendered thousands of poor inhabitants homeless.
JAKARTA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Indonesia's police chief said on Tuesday the country's most-wanted terrorist Santoso, who has been hiding in the mountainous jungles of Central Sulawesi, was killed in a shootout on Monday evening.
"We are 80-90 percent sure that (the body) is of Santoso," General Tito Karnavian told reporters in Jakarta, adding that officers also killed another man who they believed to be Santoso's deputy Basri, who was imprisoned in 2007 for beheading three Christian students but escaped jail five years later.
According to Tito, the bodies are currently going through a series of forensic tests at the police's hospital in Central Sulawesi.
More than 3,000 officers from the Indonesian military and the police have been deployed to capture the man, who has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group.
Indonesia's President Joko Widodo, who took office in October 2014, vowed to make capturing Santoso -- whose armed faction has attracted militants from other parts of Indonesia -- a top priority.
This is the second time police have suggested to have taken down the elusive terrorist. The police had previously thought Santoso, who broke free from prison five years ago, was killed in January during a gunfight.
by Xinhua writer Zhu Lei
NEW YORK, July 19 (Xinhua) -- While tensions between U.S. blacks and police are still mounting, the shooting deaths of three police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, seem to have provided more ammunition for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to paint himself as a "law and order" candidate.
However, this spate of violence involving law enforcement is stealing the limelight from the Republican National Convention that opened on Monday in Cleveland in the state of Ohio to nominate the brash New York billionaire developer as the party's standard-bearer to run for the Nov. 8 election.
Republicans gathering at the four-day convention will try hard to pitch the political outsider as a strong leader who can protect Americans from the threat of violence at a time of sensitive racial relations.
Within hours of Sunday's killings in Baton Rouge, an attack apparently targeted at police that came on the heels of a series of police killings of African-Americans, Trump said that "our country is divided and out of control" and that the Islamic State terrorist group was watching as Americans killed police officers.
Trump, 70, has never held elective office before. He cast the recent events as a direct result of the failed leadership of U.S. President Barack Obama and the presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
"How many law enforcement and people have to die because of a lack of leadership in our country? We demand law and order," he wrote on his Facebook page.
The Baton Rouge killings came nearly two weeks after the police shooting death of a black man there and another such killing in the state of Minnesota triggered nationwide protests. Earlier, retaliatory violence against police officers in the Texas city of Dallas also claimed five officers.
The recent shootings and the activation of the Black Lives Matter movement, which campaigns against violence toward black people, "work against the Democrats in arousing racial resentment among white voters," said Robert Y. Shapiro, a professor who specializes in political science at Columbia University.
Those events are "more likely than not increasing opposition to the Democrats because they are perceived as not being sufficiently supportive of law enforcement and the police," Shapiro told Xinhua.
On Monday, Clinton, 68, who is poised to clinch her party's nomination at next week's Democratic National Convention, condemned the Baton Rouge killings, the fourth high-profile deadly encounter involving police in the past two weeks, vowing to hold those who killed police accountable.
However, the former first lady expressed empathy with blacks who fear for their lives in encounters with the police, painting Trump as someone who divides the United States along racial, ethnic and religious lines.
"We have difficult, painful, essential work ahead of us to repair the bonds between our police and our communities and between and among each other," she told a largely black audience at the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Clinton's campaign strategy is apparently aimed to resonate with her party's voting bases as the black vote was a critical part of Obama's two election victories.
"Most African-American voters will vote the Democratic ticket so Clinton needs to be responsive to those concerns," Brandon Rottinghaus, an associate professor of political science at the University of Houston, told Xinhua.
"Trump's law and order message plays with the voters who worry about such violence spilling into the streets. Trump's inflammatory rhetoric on the subject is easier to rally his base than Clinton's ability to solve the problem adequately," he said.
However, Rottinghaus is cautious in suggesting such violence just played to the strength of Trump. "There will be some effect, mostly manifesting as damage to the Obama administration rather than as a boon to the Trump campaign," he said.
"The events make it look like the Obama administration is less than capable of handling the problems of racial relations and law enforcement," he said.
SYDNEY, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Australia's footprint in Iraq is set to become larger as its training mandate is expanded to include the fledgling nation's federal and local law enforcement agencies.
In a joint press conference with visiting U.S. Vice President Joe Biden in Sydney on Tuesday, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said one of the most important objectives now in Iraq is to make sure peace is maintained once the security forces have liberated areas from Islamic State.
Australia's current program is restricted to training the Iraqi security forces in their counter-terrorism operations, but Biden said the close ally is up to the task.
"Your folks are the best trainers in the world," Biden told reporters in Sydney on Tuesday, adding the current training operations were "part of the reason why (counter terrorism forces) succeeded in Ramadi."
A significant number of police is needed to stay behind to help reconstruct and ensure safety and security in areas that have been liberated from Islamic State forces, thus the invitation by Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi for Australia to expand its operation, Biden said.
"He understands your guys and women are the best in the world," Biden said.
"I can't tell you how much your commitment is appreciated."
SINGAPORE, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Freedom of navigation should not be the excuse of the United States and other countries' military exercises in the South China Sea, an expert said here on Tuesday.
Zhang Junshe, senior research fellow of the Military and Academic Institute of the Chinese Navy, told a press briefing that around 100,000 vessels sail through the South China Sea every year, none has made complains regarding freedom of navigation.
In the press briefing following Monday's Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development, Zhang said the U.S. deployed heavy military power in the South China Sea, upgrading tension rather than "maintaining peace and stability."
"Countries outside the region could stir up tension and say farewell, but the consequences will fall on parties really concerned," said the expert.
He reminded certain countries in the South China Sea of the recently released investigation report on the Iraq war, saying kowtowing too much to the U.S. is proved to be dangerous.
A long-awaited report by former British civil servant John Chilcot released earlier this month revealed the invasion led by the U.S. and Britain was planned on flawed intelligence and lack of adequate preparation for the post-war governance.
The Chinese expert also called on the U.S. and its allies to stop provocative military drills in the region, saying the Chinese military has its right and might to protect the country's sovereignty.
ANKARA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Attackers opened fire on police officers on Tuesday in the Macka district of the northern Turkish province of Trabzon, Dogan News Agency reported.
A police unit was conducting road control when unknown assailants opened fire from a forested area. According to initial reports, there were injuries in the attack.
Additional police units and ambulances were deployed to the scene.
Meanwhile, a group of armed citizens headed toward the forested area to apprehend the assailants, as clashes were reported.
BEIJING, July 19, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Vice President Li Yuanchao (R) meets with Lao Defense Minister Chansamone Chanyalath in Beijing, capital of China, July 19, 2016. (Xinhua/Ding Lin)
BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Vice President Li Yuanchao on Tuesday met with Lao Defense Minister Chansamone Chanyalath, expressing China's appreciation for Laos' support on the South China Sea issue.
"China appreciates Laos' firm support on the South China Sea issue," Li told Chansamone during their meeting in Beijing.
China holds that the issue can only be solved through dialogue and negotiation, said Li, adding that this position was "consistent and unwavering."
Stressing that the two countries share common development opportunities through cooperation, Li said he hoped China and Laos could deepen mutually beneficial cooperation to advance their comprehensive strategic partnership.
Chansamone said Laos greatly valued cooperation with China.
Laos has always understood and supported China's stance on the South China Sea issue, backing the peaceful settlement of disputes through negotiation between the countries directly concerned, he said.
BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Chinese search engine giant Baidu is being investigated for allegedly advertising gambling websites, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) confirmed Tuesday.
The CAC Beijing branch is responsible for the probe, said a spokesperson of the CAC, the country's cyberspace regulator.
Reports this week revealed that Baidu returned search results that included ads for gambling websites in its commercial section.
The report also said that the names and information of some legal entities had been appropriated to make the gambling websites appear to be verified companies. It was not disclosed whether Baidu knowingly allowed such practice.
The CAC called on Baidu and other search engines to observe a recent regulation on search services, as it is their social obligation to stop the spread of illegal content.
This is not the first time Baidu has been under fire due to its business model. Earlier in May, it was implicated in a controversial cancer treatment case due to its advertisement model to "pay for higher ranking," which was not properly supervised.
Both CAC and the CAC Beijing branch promised that those who are held accountable for facilitating the spread of misleading or false advertisements online would face serious punishments.
ISLAMABAD, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Pakistani army recovered the abducted son of a provincial High Court chief justice in an operation launched near the country's northwest Tank district, officials said Tuesday.
Advocate Owais Ali Shah, the son of the chief justice of the High Court of the country's south Sindh province, was kidnapped from the provincial capital of Karachi on June 20 this year.
Asim Bajwa, director general of the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), Pakistani army's media wing, said in a Tuesday morning tweet that the troops carried out an intelligence-based operation in the Tank district of the country's northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, during which three militants were killed and Owais was recovered safely.
He did not mention the nature of the operation, but local Urdu TV channels said that the army men tried to stop a suspected car carrying three men and a "woman" wearing a burqa, a tradition black dress worn by women covering them from head to toe, at a security checkpost for snap checking.
The men inside the car tried to flee the scene by opening fire on the troops who gave a befitting response and gunned down all the three men inside, but saved the woman who turned out to be Shah whose kidnappers ordered him to wear the women's dress for hiding his identity.
The army men were checking the vehicles at the checkpost after receiving a tip-off by the intelligence agencies regarding Shah's possible shifting to Afghanistan through tribal areas by the kidnappers.
Shah was later airlifted from Tank to Karachi's airbase in a special aircraft and drove back to his home by a senior army officer.
The country's army chief, General Raheel Sharif commended the army for the successful operation and congratulated the Chief Justice for the recovery of his son.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif also called the chief justice to congratulate him.
Kidnapping of the chief justice's son was a continuation of the abduction of influential people's children for ransom or exchange of prisoners.
Earlier, the militants kidnapped ex-PM Yousaf Raza Gillani and governor of Punjab province Salman Taseer's sons, both of whom were recovered after three and five years respectively.
A woman walks between old homes in Al-Assal, one of the oldest slums in the Shubra district of Cairo, Egypt June 1, 2016. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo)
CAIRO, July 19 (Xinhua) -- "It makes me avoid thinking about things that make me sad, which are many things," Abouda, a 32-year-old rickshaw driver, said in Boulak el-Dakrour neighborhood in Giza, referring to his habit of taking hashish.
"I drive rickshaws since they were introduced in Egypt, for about 15 years now, only to be able to afford buying hashish. It is not prevailing only in slums, but everywhere," the man told Xinhua after parking his old rickshaw at one of the streets.
As for Ayman, 28, who works as a delivery man at a restaurant in Giza, said that he used to take a painkiller called Tramadol to feel active at work, but he finally managed to quit due to the physical perils he heard about the drug.
"Before I gave up drugs, I did not feel tired to run from building to building as a delivery man, but when I went to bed at night I slept like a dead body. I used to take Tramadol and Tamol but I quit all of them and I hope all the youth do the same," Ayman narrated.
Abouda and Ayman, one skipped school since a kid and the other never went to school, are among millions of Egyptians out of the country's over 90-million population who took drugs supposedly for fun and for facing life pressures.
Hashish, painkilling tablets such as Tramadol and Tamol and others, heroin and marijuana are the most prevailing types of drugs in Egypt, taken by about 10.4 of the people in the most populous Arab country.
"About 10.4 percent of the population aged from 15 to 65 take drugs, while 2 percent are drug addicts. This means there are about 1.5 million addicts in Egypt, which is an alarming number," Amr Osman, director of Egypt's Drug Control and Addiction Treatment Fund, told Xinhua.
Osman said that hashish is the most popular among drug-takers while Tramadol is number one among addicts and then comes the heroin, stressing that unemployment, poverty and the prevailing slums and street children are among the reasons leading to drugs.
Taking drugs in Egypt started to prevail among minors, which is why the anti-drug fund opened a special section for teenagers in Helwan hospital in Cairo and Mamoura hospital in Alexandria.
Drug dealing is the second top illegal trade in Egypt after arms. Averagely, the police seize around 200 drug-related cases every day. Over the past two days, 419 cases related to drug dealing were registered by the police nationwide.
"Drug-taking is connected with crimes. We made a study at a prison and we found that 80 percent of the crimes were committed under influence of drugs," the official told Xinhua, blaming several Egyptian TV series for playing a negative role by displaying about 12,000 smoking and drug-taking scenes over the past five years.
Osman pointed out that those working as drivers used to constitute to 24 percent of Egyptian drug-takers, but they have been reduced to 14 percent thanks to the awareness media campaigns sponsored by his drug control fund.
Tarek, a drug addict in his early 30s from Cairo's Shubra neighborhood and is currently receiving treatment, said that drugs spread in slums "because their dwellers suffer difficult lives, services, etc."
"Plus, the youth of slums and impoverished neighborhoods like to stay up late, so they take Tramadol as it is a stimulant drug," Tarek told Xinhua, noting he learned that it destroys the kidneys, the digestive system and the brain cells, and so he decided to quit and resorted to treatment.
Originally as a painkiller for tough diseases including cancer, Tramadol used to be available at pharmacies for a cheap price, around one U.S. dollar for a strip, but since abused by drug-takers, it was classified by the health ministry to be restricted to patients with valid prescriptions.
Through corruption, some notorious pharmacies get their official quota of drugs and illegally sell them to users 20 times their prices as a kind of profitable trade, which could subject them to jail.
"In my pharmacy, I avoid getting a drug quota to avoid the official inspection headache. Plus, a pharmacist who should sell Tramadol has to keep a copy of the patient's ID card and the prescription for inspection references," said Medhat, 55, a pharmacist at one of Cairo pharmacies.
"Now drug buyers know where to get them without having to go to pharmacies, as drugs are publicly sold in some slums," the pharmacist told Xinhua, noting Tramadol can even be found in some large, highly supervised state-run pharmacies in downtown Cairo.
Another pharmacist in Giza, Mohamed, 41, said that all drug tablets are considered amphetamines that stimulate the nerve system, "and that is why you can hear about people who stay awake for two or three days."
As for illegal trade of such tablets, the chemist said that the government cannot just shut down the source, because they are vital for some patients in cancer institutes and anti-drug addiction clinics who need strong painkillers such as Morphine and Tramadol.
"The solution is easy. Control the source! Stop providing pharmacies with drugs and make them restricted to hospitals and institutes. This will greatly limit the circulation of drug tablets. The hospitals and institutes will also be inspected, but the whole process will already be limited and controlled," the pharmacist told Xinhua.
MANILA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Philippine peace adviser Jesus Dureza hailed Tuesday the decision of the Supreme Court to dismiss the plunder case against former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.
"I am elated that justice has been served with this decision," Dureza told a news conference at the Malacanang presidential palace.
Dureza, who served during the Arroyo administration, added, "I rejoice over this decision that had given her what she rightly deserves. This is justice."
He said he congratulated Arroyo on the phone on his way to the palace, saying he and his wife used to visit her in her detention room inside a hospital in the capital.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said last May that he wants to see Arroyo walk free from her hospital detention cell. Duterte, a lawyer, said Arroyo has been detained for four years without trial.
"She deserves to be released. She has been detained for so long, the trial delayed," Duterte said at the time, adding Arroyo is a victim of slow justice.
The Philippine Supreme Court acquitted Tuesday former Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo of plunder, granting the former leader's plea to drop the case against her.
The High Court's ruling paved the way for Arroyo, 69, to walk out of the Veterans Memorial Medical Centre, where she has been detained since October 2012.
Theodore Te, a spokesman for the court, told a news conference that the Supreme Court, voting 11-4, annulled the criminal case against Arroyo for "insufficiency of evidence.' He said the court also ordered the "immediate release of the detained" former president.
Arroyo is currently a member of the Philippine House of Representatives having won the May elections for another term.
The Ombudsman filed the plunder case against Arroyo and nine other former government officials who allegedly misused some P366 million (7.8 million U.S. dollars) lottery funds of the state-run Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office from 2007 to 2010.
Arroyo is the second Philippine president to be jailed for plunder.
In 2001, ousted President Joseph Estrada was also jailed after anti-graft court convicted and sentenced him to life in prison in 2007. Estrada was later freed after Arroyo pardoned him.
Presidential Spokesperson Ernesto Abella said the Duterte administration recognizes the Supreme Court's independence and it will abide by its decision.
Arroyo's husband, former First Gentleman Jose Miguel Arroyo, welcomed the high court's ruling.
"The dawn of a new administration has brought about new hope for great positive change, which includes freedom from false and malicious accusations and unceasing lies and disinformation," he said.
Arroyo said they support the new government on its fight against criminality, corruption and its economic and political reforms that "will surely usher in new golden age for our country and people."
After serving as president for nine years until 2010, the former president ran as representative in her province. She has been reelected as congresswoman in the May polls for the third time even if under hospital arrest.
President Rodrigo Duterte earlier admitted that he offered pardon for Arroyo, which the latter declined because it would be considered as admitting on the accusation hurled against her.
MOSCOW, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Russia will not resume charter flights to Turkey this year, a Russian tourism officer said Tuesday, citing the failed military coup as the negative factor behind the dropping number of Russian visitors.
"Charter flights between Russia and Turkey will not be resumed in 2016, and it's unknown whether they will be resumed in 2017," the Russian newspaper Izvestiya quoted Maya Lomidze, executive director of the Association of Tour Operators of Russia, as saying.
According to experts, this year's tourist season in Turkey has already seen a significant decrease in visitors. Tour operators had expected about 300,000 Russian tourists would travel to Turkey for the holidays.
"The military coup attempt in Turkey has had a negative impact on the desire of Russians to spend their holidays in Turkey. The demand is greatly decreased," Lomidze said.
The military coup in Turkey ocurred on Saturday, killing at least 290 people, including 161 civilians, and wounding around 1,440 others, according to the Turkish Foreign Ministry.
KUALA LUMPUR, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Malaysia and Singapore signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) Tuesday on the long-anticipated high-speed rail linking the two countries.
The signing was witnessed by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and his Singaporean counterpart Lee Hsien Loong, a significant milestone since the project was first announced in 2013.
"The signing of MoU signifies Malaysia and Singapore's firmest commitment to this iconic project," said Najib during a joint press conference with Lee.
The MoU captures key points of agreement between the two countries on the project such as the details on technical parameter, commercial model as well as custom, immigration, quarantine (CIQ) clearance, safety and security matters, regulatory framework and project management, he said.
The two governments are committed to sign a bilateral agreement that will contain details relating to the project by the end of this year, targeting the commencement of operations by 2026, he added.
For his part, Lee said one or two issues and some details still need to be worked out, "but the main picture is there."
He urged the two countries to work closely together on the many joint decisions and many difficult implementation issues that may arise.
A joint project team would be set up by Malaysia's high-speed rail corporation and Land Transport Authority of Singapore to jointly implement and address integration project, among others. Following the signing of bilateral agreement, it will work on the preparation of a tender for the project, which is expected to be issued next year.
The high-speed rail is expected to enhance people-to-people ties and improve business linkages between the two countries, and both prime ministers said it would change the lifestyles of the people of the two countries.
The proposed high-speed rail is expected to cut the traveling time between the Malaysian capital and the city state to 90 minutes.
Railway companies from China, Japan and Europe have long expressed interests in this project. Singaporean and Malaysian transport authorities said the joint project team will call an international tender in August to appoint a joint development partner to provide technical support.
LUSAKA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The Zambian government said on Monday that its power utility, Zesco Limited, was currently conducting a study of its transmission system to determine how much solar power could be injected into its national grid system.
The outcome of the study will determine how much solar power will be injected into the national grid system, according to a statement released by the Ministry of Energy and Water Development.
It added that the ministry has so far approved the purchase of 300 megawatts of solar power to be injected into the national grid.
"The ministry would like to inform stakeholders in the power sector, particularly, investors that are interested in developing on-grid solar power projects. Zesco is currently carrying out a study of its transmission system to determine how much solar energy and at what points such energy can be injected in its transmission system, without compromising system integrity," the statement said.
According to the statement, the first phase of scaling up solar electricity covering 100 megawatts was already under implementation with two successful developers having already been sealed while the second phase of the scaling up solar tender will cover 150 megawatts.
BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- China's top legislature is organizing nationwide inspections to check the enforcement of a law giving academics and inventors incentives to commercially exploit their work, a year after the law was revised.
Five teams of senior lawmakers will be dispatched to five provincial-level regions of Beijing, Zhejiang, Hunan, Guangdong and Guizhou in July and August, according to a statement issued by the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee on Tuesday.
Local lawmakers in eight other provincial localities will manage their own inspections.
Inspectors will review policies and measures adopted by local authorities in empowering enterprises and incentivizing universities and research institutions to commercialize scientific and technological achievements, and in providing related public services.
Lawmakers will also inspect execution of the law in terms of the uses of scientific and technological achievements, yield management and the reward given to individuals.
The inspection teams will produce a report on the implementation of the law and submit it to the NPC Standing Committee in October.
NAIROBI, July 19 (Xinhua) -- East African Business Council (EABC), a regional business lobby on Tuesday called for the speedy conclusion of the ongoing East African Community (EAC)-European Union (EU) trade talks.
EABC Executive Director Lillian Awinja told Xinhua here that the delay in signing the agreement is causing anxiety among the EAC business community.
"We are concerned that if the agreement is not reached before the Oct. 1 deadline, Kenyan exports into the EU will begin to pay import duty," Awinja said during the Financial Services Sector Forum that took place as part of the UNCTAD 14.
If an agreement is not reached, Kenyan goods will be subjected to import duty in order to access the EU market while goods and services from the other EAC member states will still access the EU duty free because they are considered Least Developed Countries (LDCs).
Awinja noted that lack of a trade deal will not only affect Kenyan goods because Kenyan exporters currently have working arrangements with the companies in the other EACs nation in order to meet quantity requirements.
She noted that some of the EAC member states are reluctant to sign the EU-EAC trade deal because they will not get additional benefits from the agreement.
"We therefore need to bring on the table, the contentious issues and renegotiate as soon as possible in the spirit of the EAC," Awinja said.
She added that some of the EAC states will take about two years to graduate into becoming developing countries and will soon be in the same situation as Kenya.
Awinja said that it will be beneficial if all the EAC partner states signed a trade agreement as a bloc because it will portray the region as a single working customs union.
SYDNEY, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Even as prices start to pull back, Australia's iron ore glut has continued with Rio Tinto pumping out more of the steelmaking ingredient in the second quarter for the year.
Shipments from Rio's Western Australia state operations lifted 6 percent to 82.2 million tonnes in the quarter to June 30, while production jumped 8 percent to 80.9 million tonnes in the same period, the company announced on Tuesday.
Analysts had expected a greater boost to the miner's shipments to make up for a weak March quarter that was marred by bad weather disruptions and issues with its automated rail project in the Pilbara, but will now have to make up the slack in the second half to meet its full-year guidance of roughly 330 million tonnes.
Global annual guidance will also be maintained, the company said, with its Canadian operations adding another 20 million tonnes over the year to hit the giant's 350 million tonnes target.
ISLAMABAD, July 19 (Xinhua) -- A court in Pakistan on Tuesday ordered confiscation of all property and bank accounts of former President Pervez Musharraf for not appearing in a high treason case, lawyers said.
Pervez Musharraf, who quit in 2008, faces high treason charges for abrogating the country's constitution when he imposed emergency rule in 2007. He had dismissed the government of Nawaz Sharif in 1999 in a bloodless coup.
Musharraf had gone to UAE for treatment in March this year and is still living there.
The three-member special court, hearing the high treason case against Musharraf, instructed the State Bank of Pakistan to freeze all accounts of the former leader and inform the court. The court also asked the revenue departments across Pakistan to confiscate assets of the former President.
Mushararf's defence lawyer Faisal Chaudhry told the court the former President had gifted all his assets to his wife and daughter and the gifted assets could not be confiscated. He said he will challenge the verdict in the Supreme Court.
The court rejected request by the prosecution to continue the hearing in the absence of the accused.
Justice Mazhar Alam Mian who heads the court said the case will not be heard unless Musharraf is arrested and produced in the court.
Prosecution lawyer Akram Sheikh suggested the court that if the accused cannot come to the country and court could record Musharraf's statement through internet. He also said Musharraf has neither been admitted in hospital nor he has any health problem.
The court, however, said the presence of the accused is a must for hearing the case.
Musharraf is the first military ruler in Pakistan's history to be tried for high treason, a crime punishable by the death or life imprisonment, according to the legal experts.
His imposition of emergency rule and suspension of the Constitution in 2007 were viewed as treason. Prime Minister Sharif had announced the filing of high treason charges against Pervez Musharraf in his speech to the parliament in June 2013, weeks after he assumed the office of the Prime Minister for third time.
NAIROBI, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The African Development Bank (AfDB) said on Tuesday that it has approved 12.4 million U.S. dollar grant to help empower women in the continent.
A statement from AfDB said the funds will be used for a project called "50 million Women Speak" to create a networking platform dedicated to sub-Saharan women entrepreneurs.
"Platform users will learn about their rights and the way to obtain financial support," said Salieu Jack, Chief ICT Engineer & Project's Team Leader at the AfDB.
According to Jack, the rate of women entrepreneurs with access to banking loans in sub-Saharan Africa could jump from 4 percent to 10 percent by 2022.
The grant will be spread between the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), the East African Community (EAC) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).
The project is an innovative social media platform to enable women to start, grow and scale their business through the dynamic exchange of ideas.
Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, the AfDB's Special Envoy on Gender said this digital/virtual marketplace will connect business-women to encourage peer-to-peer learning, mentoring, information and knowledge sharing.
The platform which will cover 36 countries and will be accessible on mobile phones, will enable women to access business training, mentor-ship, financial services and locally-relevant business information, while building their own networks of contacts.
"The project will be implemented within a period of three years starting from 2017. The number of monthly platform user could reach 50,000 women in 2022, and by developing their businesses they expected to create 10 percent more jobs," AfDB said.
The Bank said the launch of the regional platform will be coordinated with the creation of Country Teams which will include Regional Economic Communities (RECs), specialized institutions for content gathering and dissemination, publicity, outreach, and advocacy, targeting women entrepreneurs in their respective member states.
Hosted by COMESA and co-piloted by East Africa Community and Economic Community of West Africa States, the platform will also provide an opportunity to capture important statistics on financial inclusion in Africa.
Its related statistical database should be able to provide sound and accurate data both on SMEs led by women and Financial Institutions products by country.
It should hence contribute to generating and sharing knowledge on women's access to financial and non-financial services in Regional Member Countries.
BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- China has set aside more funds from its central budget to support the development of poor regions this year.
The Ministry of Finance (MOF) said on Tuesday that more than 66 billion yuan (around 10 billion U.S. dollars) has been approved for local authorities, up over 40 percent year on year.
The funds will be used to relocate rural households, help minorities, increase work relief and revive state-owned farms, said an MOF statement.
Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang said early this month that the government should reinforce capital and personnel support to achieve the annual target of poverty reduction.
The country aims to reduce the population in poverty by more than 10 million this year, part of an ambitious plan to completely eliminating poverty by 2020.
JUBA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The UN refugee agency on Tuesday decried influx of South Sudanese into Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda despite the ceasefire which was announced last week by the two leaders.
The UNHCR said the number of people seeking shelter and safety in Uganda from South Sudan has risen significantly in the past few days, expressing concern that the influx will keep increasing in the days ahead as tensions remain high across the border.
"A total of 1,326 crossed into Uganda between Friday and Saturday, with 1,633 more arriving on Sunday. The majority are South Sudanese, but there are some Ugandans," UNHCR said in a statement received in Juba.
"Prior to Friday, the average daily rate was 233. These new arrivals bring the total number to have fled to Uganda since the latest violence in South Sudan began on July 7 to 5,015. More than 90 per cent of the new arrivals were women and children under the age of 18 years," said the statement.
The statement comes after days of heightened concern in the wake of the deadly clashes that erupted in and around the capital, Juba, between forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and those backing Vice-President Riek Machar.
The UN has said that at least 300 people were killed and over 10,000 fled their homes after the violence in Juba.
The UNHCR said the number of new arrivals in western Ethiopia's Gambella region has not risen significantly since June 11, but the fresh fighting has dampened hopes of returning home soon.
It said the Kenya-South Sudan border has also been relatively quiet. "To date UNHCR has transferred 169 new arrivals from the Nadapal border to Kakuma camp," it said.
The UN refugee agency said the fresh displacement will put a further strain on UNHCR's resources for the South Sudan operation and agency's ability to provide timely and life-saving assistance.
Last week, UN agencies launched a revised appeal for its South Sudanese refugees operations, seeking 701 million U.S. dollars.
The earlier appeal for 638 million dollars was only 17 per cent funded.
Ann Encontre, Regional Refugee Coordinator for the South Sudan situation, who launched the appeal, said the overall planning figure had risen from 867,239 refugees to 973,000. She warned that it could pass the 1 million mark in the coming months.
UNHCR said it expects more people to flee to Uganda, especially now that the 200-kilometre Juba-Nimule road, linking the South Sudan capital to Uganda, has been cleared of checkpoints.
"As a result, more people are now coming by truck, and this explains the rising numbers of arrivals. Many are also bringing belongings," it said, condemning violent attacks against humanitarian workers, which have left at least one person dead.
"Several countries have evacuated their nationals. UNHCR, as part of the overall humanitarian response, is undertaking assessments and providing assistance in displacement sites," it said.
Despite a fragile ceasefire has held since late Monday, the UN has warned of the possibility of fresh fighting in Juba.
The situation is being exacerbated by the devaluation of the South Sudanese pound, leading to skyrocketing prices and making the food that is available too expensive for many.
The fighting also disrupted supply routes from Uganda into South Sudan, including aid and food.
Thousands of people have entered Uganda's northern region via the border crossing points at Moyo, Kuluba, Lamwo, Yumbe and Elegu, while some are heading directly to Kiryandongo refugee settlement in the mid-west of the country.
The border was previously closed on the South Sudan side, but restrictions have been eased.
"The new arrivals are mostly fleeing from Eastern Equatoria state, with a smaller number arriving from Juba. They report that the security situation remains volatile and fighting could return at any time. The refugees talk of an increase in looting," UNHCR said.
BERLIN, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Four Hong Kong citizens were injured, including two seriously, in a late night Monday attack on a regional train near Wuerzburg in the southern German state of Bavaria, the Chinese Consulate General in Munich confirmed on Tuesday.
A refugee wielding ax and knife wounded a total of five passengers on late Monday night, Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann told German ZDF public television on Tuesday morning. Most victims were Chinese tourists, among whom two were critically wounded.
Herrmann said the man, identified as a 17-year-old Afghan asylum seeker, was shot dead while trying to attack the police.
The police reported finding a "hand-painted Islamic State (IS) flag" in the asylum seeker's room.
However, it is currently not certain whether the act was motivated by Islamic extremism. The police are still investigating this element, according to the minister.
Chinese Consulate General in Munich has released security bulletin for Chinese citizens advising them to be vigilant about their safety.
Related:
Axe attack on German train injures four
MUNICH, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Four passengers were wounded in an attack launched by a man with axe on a regional train near Wuerzburg in the southern German state of Bavaria on Monday night, local police have confirmed.
JAKARTA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Indonesia on Tuesday confirmed the death of the country's most-wanted terrorist who was killed in a gunfight with officers in the vast jungles of Central Sulawesi on early Monday evening.
"Yes, (Santoso's death) has (been confirmed)," Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan told reporters at his office in Jakarta.
He also said that the other body belonged to one of Santoso's followers, who was identified as Mukhtar.
Previously, it was reported that the body was of Santoso's deputy named Basri, who apparently managed to escape into the forest during the shootout.
Luhut added that troops involved in Operation Tinombala -- the kill-or-capture mission against Santoso's group -- would continue going after the rest of them.
Santoso was arrested in 2005, but broke free from jail five years later.
More than 3,000 officers from the Indonesian military and the police have been deployed to take him and his followers down over the past few years.
President Joko Widodo, who took office in October 2014, vowed to make capturing Santoso a top priority.
HANOI, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The number of people who are 65 years old or older in Vietnam is expected to almost triple than current figure to hit 18.4 million by 2040, said World Bank (WB) Vietnam on Tuesday.
The bank made the announcement at a launching ceremony of a publication named "Taking Stock: An Update on Vietnam's Recent Economic Developments July 2016" held in capital Hanoi on Tuesday.
According to the report with special focus on "Promoting healthy and productive aging in Vietnam," today, there are only around 6.5 million people in Vietnam who are over 65 years old.
"The speed of aging in Vietnam is among the fastest globally to date," said Philip O'Keefe, lead economist for the WB, adding that Vietnam is undergoing this demographic transition at lower income than most currently old countries.
While looking at Vietnam's rapid aging pace, the economist said population aging will have wide ranging implications on labor markets, and pose new challenges to policy makers, employers and the whole population.
The report suggested that in order to mitigate these impacts, Vietnam is required to implement policy actions in labor markets, pension system as well as healthcare and long-term care system.
BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- As the Chinese government and people's stance on the South China Sea issue wins increasing support worldwide despite the so-called arbitration initiated by the Philippines, the expectation of isolating China has proved unrealistic.
Domestically, China's legislature, non-government organizations, citizens and media outlets have overwhelmingly backed the government's rejection of the arbitration award and call for negotiation and consultation between the states directly concerned to resolve disputes.
In addition to the outcry on the Chinese mainland, Taiwan has also said it "absolutely will not accept" the decision in the South China Sea arbitration. The island's leader's office said the award "is not legally binding."
Internationally, a wider range of nations, including members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), have voiced their recognition of China's position.
The 11th Asia-Europe Meeting last week became one of the latest arenas where China's arguments gained traction.
Thongloun Sisoulith, prime minister of Laos, which holds ASEAN's rotating chairmanship this year, said that Laos supports China's stance over the South China Sea issue, and stands ready to work with China to maintain peace and stability in the region.
Vietnam's Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said his nation respects China's position on the arbitration, adding the disputes should be solved peacefully through negotiations.
Russia opposes the internationalization of the South China Sea disputes or any interference by forces outside the region, said Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.
Notably, the attempt by Japan, a country not directly involved in the South China Sea, to include the arbitration case into the chair's statement of the summit was defeated, according to a Chinese diplomat.
China has clarified the merits of its stance, but the country's proven track record in resolving disputes concerning territory and maritime rights and interests with neighboring countries through negotiations and consultations is more convincing.
China borders 14 countries on land and has a land boundary of about 22,000 km. China has signed border treaties with 12 land neighbors, with over 20,000 km of delineated and demarcated borderlines.
After more than 20 years of negotiations, China and Vietnam completed the delimitation of maritime boundary in the Beibu Gulf. Such tremendous progress would not have been possible without China's observance of international law.
In the case of the South China Sea, "friendly consultations and negotiations by sovereign states directly concerned" were the form of resolution agreed upon in case of territorial and jurisdictional disputes in the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea signed by China and ASEAN member states in 2002.
Encouraged by the governments of China, the Philippines and Vietnam, oil companies in the region signed the tripartite Agreement for Joint Marine Seismic Undertaking in Certain Areas in the South China Sea in 2005 to facilitate joint oil and gas development.
If history is any indication, China is a reasonable partner in such matters. Negotiations and consultations can best represent the principle of equality among sovereign states and are the most effective way to settle disputes.
DAMASCUS, July 19 (Xinhua) -- U.S.-led airstrikes are accused to have killed over 56 civilians in a besieged Syrian town near Turkey on Tuesday morning, according to a monitor group.
The "massacre" targeted Manbej, a town controlled by the Islamic State (IS) group in the northern countryside of Aleppo province.
The U.S.-led anti-terror coalition has been backing the rebels' Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to capture the town since last May, succeeding so far to lay a siege on the IS fighters and some 100,000 civilians in the town.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 11 children were among those killed when the airstrikes targeted the northern countryside of Manbej at dawn Tuesday.
The UK-based watchdog group had already raised the death toll of civilians by the U.S. coalition in Manbej to over 104, who it said were killed between May and July 18.
Manbej has a strategic importance to the U.S.-backed rebels due to its location near Turkey.
Capturing Manbej would deprive IS from a key stronghold near Turkey.
Related:
U.S. resumes airstrikes against IS as Turkey reopens air base
WASHINGTON, July 17 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. on Sunday resumed flight operations from a Turkish airbase to launch airstrikes against Islamic State (IS) after Turkey reopened its airspace closed in the wake of a failed coup attempt.
BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) - China's precedent-setting extradition of a suspected criminal from Latin America is built on increasing recognition of the country's progress in human rights and will have long-lasting implications, according to Chinese authorities and experts.
After exhausting all legal remedies through Peruvian courts and Inter-American procedures, Huang Haiyong, who is suspected of smuggling crude soybean oil into China, was repatriated Sunday, the General Administration of Customs (GAC) said.
Since his capture by Interpol in 2008, Huang fought an eight-year battle against his extradition from Peru, and the case went as far as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Constitutional Court of Peru, the GAC said.
It was the first time that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights heard an extradition case that concerned China, which emerged victorious in the judgment, said the GAC.
The case also marks China's first extradition of a criminal suspect from Latin America, and the repatriation was the first of its kind under an extradition treaty between China and Peru, according to the GAC.
LENGTHY EXTRADITION
Despite the eventual success, the extradition was not always smooth, said Liu Huawen, a researcher with the Institute of International Law under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, whose expert opinion was provided by Peru to the Inter-American Court.
"Huang Haiyong created a number of obstacles to evade legal punishment, including claims that he could face the death penalty and risk of torture upon extradition," said the GAC, adding that Chinese officials traveled to Peru as many as six times.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had sided with a number of Huang's arguments against extradition before submitting the case to the Inter-American Court, said Liu.
The court, however, found that extradition would not expose Huang to "a real, foreseeable and personal risk" of torture, according to its judgement.
The court also found that, based on China's standing criminal law, Huang could not possibly be sentenced to death upon repatriation.
China's criminal law used to allow for the death penalty for smugglers of ordinary merchandise, which included crude soybean oil.
But an amendment eliminating capital punishment for various economic crimes, including smuggling ordinary merchandise, came into force in May 2011.
RESPECT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS
Huang's capture is part of China's global campaign, nicknamed Fox Hunt, to capture fugitives. Data given by the Chinese Ministry of Public Security showed that the campaign helped return 857 fugitives to China between April and December last year.
Unlike other cases, China had to deal not only with a foreign country's legal system, but also the Inter-American mechanism, which emphasizes human rights protection, said Liu.
"China's progress in rule of law and human rights laid the foundation upon which the Inter-American Court rendered its judgment," said Liu, who specializes in human rights law. The Chinese government participated to exhaust nearly all possible legal proceedings sought by Huang, showing considerable respect for the rule of law in Peru and Latin America, said Tan Daoming, an associate researcher with the Research Institute of Latin America of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
PRECEDENT SET
The process to extradite Huang has closely followed all relevant legal proceedings and is itself a prime example of China's respect for the rule of law, said Tan.
"The extradition provides valuable experience for further cooperation on extradition and law enforcement," the GAC said.
"Geographically and culturally speaking, Latin America is quite a distance from China. But the case sends a signal that Latin America will not be a shelter for criminal suspects," said Yang Zhimin, a researcher with the Research Institute of Latin America at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
DHAKA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Bangladesh's anti-crime elite force Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) has released a video identifying four individuals who are suspected of being involved in early this month's horrendous terror attack at a Spanish restaurant in capital Dhaka in which 18 foreigners were killed.
The video showed the individuals -- three youths and a young lady -- walking on the streets and the footpaths near the cafe in Dhaka's diplomatic enclave Gulshan on the night of July 1 at about 8:42 p.m. (local time) when the terrorists stormed it.
On Tuesday afternoon the video was posted on a social media page of RAB. Many people have been requested to provide information on the suspects.
Nine Italians, seven Japanese, two Bangladeshis, an Indian and a Bangladeshi-born U.S. citizen were among the 20 people killed by the attackers on Friday night.
The gunmen also murdered two Bangladeshi police officers in the early hour of the attack.
Responsibility for the attack has been claimed by the Islamic State group. But Bangladesh has ruled out IS link to the deadly terror attack and once again blamed "homegrown" Islamist terrorists. Six of the gunmen were killed while one was captured and detained alive, who later died in a hospital.
NEW DELHI, July 19 (Xinhua) -- India's Supreme Court Tuesday refused to cancel a defamation suit against Nehru-Gandhi scion Rahul Gandhi and indicated that he may have to face a trial in the case.
The 45-year-old second-in-command of the country's main opposition Congress party has been sued by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's ideological mentor organisation Rashtriya Swamsewak Sangh (RSS)for blaming the Hindu group in 2014 for the assassination of India's pre-independence icon Mahatma Gandhi.
"You can't make collective denunciations. We have upheld the defamation law. The purpose of the law is to obey law so that there is harmony rather than anarchy," the top court made it clear to Gandhi's lawyer, fixing the next date of hearing on July 27.
The judges also quashed Gandhi's argument that the defamation law comes in between Constitutional right to freedom of speech. "Freedom is not crippled or cut. Everyday a writer, politician will speak something. The purpose of the law is not to turn people into litigants," the court said.
Gandhi had moved the court to quash the case against him, after declining to it's suggestion to apologize to the RSS in order to put an end to the suit.
BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese official has expressed concern about protectionism in view of increasing trade probes in the first half of the year.
"Protectionism is rising," Ministry of Commerce spokesperson Shen Danyang said during a routine press conference on Tuesday, citing a surge in trade remedy cases over Chinese products.
Seventeen countries and regions launched 65 investigations, mostly anti-dumping and anti-subsidy, against Chinese products, from January to June, up two thirds year on year, according to Shen.
Around 8.54 billion U.S. dollars' worth of goods were involved, up 156 percent from a year ago, said the spokesperson.
The United States, China's second-largest trade partner, filed 18 cases, followed by India with 15.
Trade remedy policies cannot help economic recovery and on the contrary have compounded already-sluggish global trade, Shen said, calling for concerted effort from the global community to weather the ongoing hardships.
KABUL, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Eight Taliban militants including a key commander have been killed as clash erupted in Sangin district of the southern Helmand province on Tuesday, Interior Ministry said in a statement released here.
"Eight Taliban terrorists including their key commander Mawlawi Agha have been killed in Sangin district today and their attempt to overcome Sangin has been foiled," the statement added.
The clash took place after the militants launched organized offensives on several security checkpoints Tuesday morning and police strongly retaliated, forcing the insurgents to flee, the statement attested.
"The situation is normal in Sangin district and any report about its fall is utterly baseless propaganda," Interior Ministry stresed in the statement.
Taliban militants have intensified activities over the past couple of days.
The militants also launched coordinated offensives in parts of the northern Kunduz, Badakhshan, Helmand, Samangan and Jauzjan provinces on Sunday and Monday.
However, all their attempts to gain ground have been failed, officials said.
Meantime, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Majahid in contact with media claimed that the Taliban fighters have gained grounds and inflicted huge casualties to government forces in the said provinces.
RAMALLAH, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Secretary General of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) on Tuesday called for international intervention to force Israel to release bodies of Palestinians it has been withholding.
Erekat made the call in identical messages he sent on behalf of the Palestinian president and the PLO Executive Committee to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and foreign ministers of European Union states.
In the messages, the Palestinian official called for "moving immediately and exerting political and diplomatic pressure to oblige Israel to release withheld bodies of Palestinian martyrs without preconditions."
Erekat said in a statement that the Israeli decision to withhold bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces over the past months is a political decision and comes as part of Israel's blackmail and collective punishment of mourning families.
He described the withholding of Palestinians bodies as equivalent to psychological torture, which increases tensions.
Israel has been withholding bodies of Palestinians who were killed in the mounting tensions since last October, which have led to the killing of over 200 Palestinians and nearly 40 Israelis.
BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Xinhua News Agency will give more coverage to intellectual property rights (IPR) in a bid to encourage innovation, said President of Xinhua News Agency Cai Mingzhao Tuesday.
In a meeting with Director General Francis Gurry of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) at Xinhua's headquarters in Beijing, Cai said the role of IPR protection must be highlighted as Chinese government encourages more creative thinking and invention.
As a news agency, Xinhua not only produces intellectual property but also shoulders a social obligation to protect it, said Cai, stressing Xinhua stands ready to cooperate with the WIPO to raise public awareness of the issue.
BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Leaders of China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) on Tuesday exchanged congratulations to mark the 25th anniversary of the dialogue relationship between the two sides.
In a congratulatory message sent to Lao Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith, the ASEAN's rotating chair, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang noted that China and ASEAN are friendly neighbors linked by mountains and rivers.
China became ASEAN's dialogue partner in 1991. The two sides established a strategic partnership in 2003 and built the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area in 2010.
In the message, the Chinese premier said since the establishment of the dialogue relationship 25 years ago, the two sides have maintained mutual respect, understanding, trust and support.
The China-ASEAN relations have withstood various tests and the two-way cooperation has achieved plentiful fruits, bringing tangible benefits to the peoples of both sides, and setting up a paradigm of equal treatment and common development between countries of different sizes, Li said.
China congratulates the formal establishment of ASEAN Community and is glad to see a peace-loving, prosperous and vigorous ASEAN play a bigger role in international and regional affairs, he added.
China will as always support the integration process of ASEAN and its central role in regional cooperation. China is willing to work with the ASEAN to further two-way ties and jointly contribute to regional peace, stability and prosperity, Li added.
In his message, Thongloun said the ASEAN-China ties have made significant progress since the establishment of the dialogue relationship, as their cooperation gradually expands and deepens to cover political, security, economic, social and cultural fields.
Among the ASEAN's dialogue partners, China is the first to ink the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia (TAC), and the first to become ASEAN's strategic partner, as the two-way comprehensive strategic cooperation continues to grow, the Lao prime minister said.
Looking forward to the summit marking the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the China-ASEAN dialogue relationship in September, Thongloun called on the two sides to take that opportunity to outline the direction of future cooperation and become closer, in order to realize the common goal of bringing benefits to the peoples of both sides.
The ASEAN is ready to deepen the strategic partnership with China, and thus contribute to promoting global peace, security, stability and prosperity and sustainable development of the region, he added.
Related:
Chinese ambassador calls for closer cooperation to promote China-ASEAN ties
HONG KONG, July 8 (Xinhua) -- China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) should join hands and work closely together to promote new progress in bilateral ties, Chinese Ambassador to ASEAN Xu Bu said on Friday.
CLEVELAND, the United States, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. Republican National Convention adopted the party's platform for the 2016 elections on Monday with rich Donald Trump style, vowing to lead a turnaround from the policies of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
"We believe in American exceptionalism," the 66-page document writes at the beginning, echoing the "America First" speech on foreign affairs by Trump during the primaries.
Claiming "America has been led in the wrong direction" under the Obama presidency, the GOP platform finds common grounds shared by the Republican establishment and the New York real estate mogul.
"Our enemies no longer fear us and our friends no longer trust us," the document laments, accusing that the Obama government has made U.S. economy "unnecessarily weak" and the U.S. standing in world affairs decline significantly. All are high-frequency sayings in the Trump campaign.
"In all of our country's history, there is no parallel to what President Obama and his former Secretary of State have done to weaken our nation," said the GOP's roadmap.
Moreover, the platform, viewed by Texas delegate David Barton as "the most conservative platform in modern history," resonates to Trump's tone while starkly contrasting with Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party when listing social policies.
On marriage, it said "we do not accept the Supreme Court's redefinition of marriage and we urge its reversal."
On abortion, it said, "We assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed."
The platform also seeks a repeal of the so-called "Obamacare," as "It weighs like the dead hand of the past upon American medicine."
Besides, on economic growth, the Republicans consider the establishment of a pro-growth tax code a moral imperative.
Following Trump on the United States' foreign trade, the platform calls for "better negotiated trade agreements that put America first."
On foreign policy, the GOP platform sees the Iran nuclear deal as a "non-binding" agreement for the future Republican president.
"The Republican Party's platform provides good insight into the direction the GOP is looking to take. This is particularly illuminating since Trump has been rather mum on policy issues on the campaign trail," a local media report commented.
Late in the deep night, Obama refuted in a letter emailed to Clinton's online supporters, saying "The Republicans will attack everything we stand for at their convention."
"The Republican convention will show how wrong the GOP's ideas are for Americans, and that Hillary is the president we need," said Obama.
However, though fiercely attacking the Obama government, the GOP platform did share with the Democrats on goals like keeping American military superiority in the world and securing the U.S. leadership in the Asian Pacific area, local analysts noted.
Trump is expected to be formally nominated as the party's standard-bearer during the four-day GOP convention ending Thursday.
Rotating African Union chairperson Idriss Deby, President of the Republic of Chad, addresses the opening ceremony of the 27th ordinary session of the AU Heads of States in Kigali, capital of Rwanda, on July 17, 2016. (Xinhua/Pan Siwei)
KIGALI, July 19 (Xinhua) -- African heads of state and government have adopted a comprehensive new roadmap to eliminate malaria in the continent by 2030.
The leaders endorsed the new framework which outlines a pathway to eliminate malaria incidence and mortality, and prevent its transmission and re-establishment in all countries by 2030.
In a gradual process, the framework also outlines milestones and targets, with the aim to reduce malaria incidence and mortality rates by at least 40 percent by 2020, and 75 percent by 2025.
"We are calling for increased external and domestic funding and commitments that could help save the continent from unnecessary deaths," Idriss Deby, Chad's President and also chair of the African Union, chair of African Leaders Malaria Alliance (ALMA) said during the ongoing 27th African Union (AU) Summit in Kigali, Rwanda.
Deby said that Africa-wide consensus by leaders indicate that malaria will soon be eliminated from the continent.
Malaria is the leading cause of morbidity and children deaths in the continent and is mainly common in countries within the tropics during rainy seasons.
He urged countries to redouble their efforts to sustain existing donor funding and ramp up domestic resources to ensure the success of the roadmap and implementation of innovative health solutions to eliminate malaria.
According to ALMA, malaria mortality rates in Africa have fallen by 66 percent since 2000 among all age groups and by 71 percent among children under 5 years old.
Annual malaria deaths in Africa have decreased from an estimated 764,000 in 2000 to 395,000 in 2015.
But malaria still remains one of the top causes of morbidity in pregnant women and mortality in children under 5.
President of the Republic of Chad and rotating African Union chairperson Idriss Deby (4th R, on stage), President of Rwanda Paul Kagame (2nd L, on stage), Chairperson of the African Union Commission (AUC) Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma (4th L, on stage) and Deputy Chairperson of the AUC Erastus Mwencha (1st L, on stage) attend the opening ceremony of the 27th ordinary session of the AU Heads of States, in Kigali, Rwanda, July 17, 2016. (Xinhua/Pan Siwei)
Since its founding in 2009, ALMA has supported countries to keep malaria high on the national and international development agendas.
"African leadership is our most powerful weapon in the war against malaria," said Joy Phumaphi, the Executive Secretary of ALMA told Xinhua in an Interview.
She observed that in renewing their commitment to fight malaria and endorsing a framework, African leaders have come a step closer to an Africa free of malaria.
"The ultimate goal is the elimination of malaria incidence and mortality, and to prevent its transmission and re-establishment in all countries by 2030 through a sustained commitment to finish the fight," she noted.
She hailed Swaziland as the only country in Africa that has met over 15 percent of requirements by allocating five percent of its Domestic Gross Product (GDP) towards malaria intervention and has also met the World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations.
"Eight countries in Southern Africa are also making strides towards eliminating malaria through their joint elimination group," she reveled.
Phumaphi said that the new framework, which also defines continent-wide goals for HIV/Aids and TB, focuses on the guiding principles of country ownership and leadership, financial and political commitment, equal access to health services for vulnerable and hard-to-reach populations, and robust malaria surveillance and response systems.
Chinese Ambassador to Kenya Liu Xianfa (C) speaks during the 14th Ministerial Meeting of the Group of 77 and China in Kenyan capital Nairobi July 17, 2016. China said on Sunday it will help developing nations implement the UN's 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). (Xinhua/Li Baishun)
NAIROBI, July 19 (Xinhua) -- China has said it will help developing nations implement the UN's 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Chinese Ambassador to Kenya Liu Xianfa told a UN forum in Nairobi that SDGs have come at a right time as they will ensure an end to poverty by the year 2030.
"China stands ready to assist all developing nations for the mutual benefit of a new world economic order," Liu said during the 14th Ministerial Meeting of the Group of 77 and China taking place on the sidelines of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
Liu noted that the world economy is currently undergoing a restructuring against a background of widening wealth gap between developed and developing countries.
"It is therefore important that we reinforce solidarity among the developing countries by building on the current momentum of economic growth in the developing nations," he said.
The envoy noted that global cooperation is possible despite the different national interests. "Peaceful co-existence calls for mutual cooperation in all spheres of human life," he noted.
The Chinese official urged developed countries to honor their Overseas Development Assistance commitments they have made to developing nations.
The Vice-Chair of the Group of 77 and China, Geneva Chapter John Mwijage said the global economic order should ensure that developing nations also benefit from globalization.
Mukhisa Kituyi (R), Secretary General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) attends the second day of the UNCTAD meeting in Nairobi, capital of Kenya, July 18, 2016. The 14th session of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD 14) kicked off in Nairobi on Sunday amid calls from delegates for governments to reduce global economic inequality.(Xinhua/Allan Mutiso)
"The global economy remains unbalanced and this makes it difficult for the developing nations to lift its citizens out of poverty," he added.
Mwijage, who is also Tanzania's Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, said developing nations need to work together in order to secure larger policy in the global arena.
UNCTAD Deputy Secretary General Joakim Reiter said UNCTAD was established by developing countries for the developing countries.
"So UNCTAD must play a key role in addressing the challenges that developing nations face," he said.
BEIJING, July, 19 (Xinhua) -- China has sent inspectors to check whether central authorities' environmental protection policies are being implemented in eight provincial-level regions.
Eight groups headed by ministerial-level officials, legislators and political advisors will spend about a month in Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang, Jiangsu, Jiangxi, Henan, Guangxi, Yunnan and Ningxia.
They will also check treatment of polluted areas, focusing particularly on issues of concern for local people.
In a pep-rally before the inspection, Communist Party of China chiefs of the eight regions urged local authorities there to cooperate with the inspection.
BERLIN, July 19 (Xinhua) -- After the axe attack on a German train, Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann announced on Tuesday a comprehensive package to strengthen security.
"We want to reinforce the police presence," said Herrmann during a press conference.
"The worst victims are a family from Hong Kong," said Herrmann, adding that one person from the family of five is currently in danger of life.
Four Hong Kong citizens were injured, including two seriously, in a late Monday night attack on a regional train near Wuerzburg in the southern German state of Bavaria, Chinese Consulate General in Munich confirmed on Tuesday.
"We are all shocked and horrified by the terrible event last night," said Herrmann.
"According to the current status of investigations, there are no evidence that indicate a network of young men with the IS," he said, adding that there were also no signs that the offender went off specifically for the Chinese family.
Herrmann confirmed that the Afghan has injured another woman while fleeing.
After the man aggressively approached the police with the axe, the officers shot him down.
Chinese Consulate General in Munich has released security bulletin for Chinese citizens advising them to be vigilant about their safety.
As German media Spiegel Online reported, the police have found a "hand painted IS flag" in the room of the 17-year-old Afghan.
Britain's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson listens to Spain's Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo (L) during an European Union foreign ministers meeting in Brussels, Belgium, July 18, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]
BRUSSELS - Britain's newly appointed Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson here on Monday said Britain was not going to be abandoning its leading role in European cooperation participation.
He made the remarks as he arrived for a European Union (EU) foreign ministers meeting.
"We have to give effect to the will of the people and leave the EU. But in no sense does that mean we are leaving Europe," he stressed.
Johnson noted he had had a "very good conversation" Sunday night with EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini and "she agreed very much that that was a role Britain should continue to play."
"Clearly, when you look at the discussion on the table this morning over the horrific events in Nice and Turkey, where we have to work very closely together, you can see the importance of that," he said.
"We will ensure that we coordinate our response to terror. On Turkey, I think it's very important, in view of the failed coup, that we see restraint and moderation on all sides and that's what I will be calling for," said Johnson.
Former London mayor and leading "Leave" campaigner in the lead-up to the Brexit referendum, Johnson was made foreign secretary by new British Prime Minister Theresa May last Wednesday.
JERUSALEM, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned on Tuesday that any aggression against Israel would be met with a "powerful reaction."
He was speaking during the country's official ceremony held in Jerusalem to mark the tenth anniversary of a major military conflict between Israel and the Lebanese Shiite organization Hezbollah.
Israel is prepared for "any scenario," Netanyahu said. "If our peace is kept, those who stand against us will also enjoy peace."
If Israel is attacked, it will forcefully fight back, he warned.
"Anyone who thinks they will find a spider web, will receive an iron wall, an iron fist," he said.
The 2006 war is known in Israel as the "Second Lebanon War" and in Lebanon as the "July War." The 34 days of fighting in southern Lebanon and northern Israel claimed the lives of at least 1,700 Lebanese, mostly civilians, and 164 Israelis, mostly soldiers.
A tensed truce has been largely kept since then, with occasional Israeli bombings of Hezbollah weapons convoys and a few deadly exchanges of fire, including one in 2015 that killed two Israeli soldiers.
MADRID, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Acting Minister of Public Works Ana Pastor was elected Tuesday to be the Speaker of the Spanish Congress after the People's Party and center-right party Ciudadanos (Citizens) reached an agreement to try to end the political deadlock in the country.
Pastor won against the Socialist Workers Party's (PSOE) Patxi Lopez who had 155 votes to the 169 of Pastor. Lopez had been elected in January as Speaker of the Spanish Congress thanks to an agreement between Ciudadanos and PSOE after the December 2015 general election.
However, after the general election in June, the People's Party won more seats. As such, the PSOE considered the agreement between the People's Party and Ciudadanos "reasonable" and "legitimate."
However, the election of Pastor was not free from controversy.
Pastor was minister of public works when, in July 2014, a trained crash in Santiago de Compostela, killing 79 people. Some claim she did not respond to the accident in a way that assumed political responsibility. A member of the association of victims of the crash read out the names of the victims while she was being proclaimed Speaker.
Meanwhile, Pio Garcia-Escudero will be the Speaker of the Spanish Senate.
Parliamentary groups will be formed in the following five days and Spanish King Felipe VI will start a round of meetings with the representatives of the political parties in the parliament.
The June general election resulted in a second hung parliament in Spain, a situation that is forcing the political forces to negotiate so that a government can be formed.
BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- As many Chinese companies tackle excess capacity, one high-tech company in the southwestern city of Chongqing is facing the opposite problem.
Chongqing Zisun Technology Corp. Ltd. has been producing at full capacity but is still under pressure to meet deadlines as it has received more orders for August, said Shu Zhan, a media officer from the company.
The company specializes in manufacturing "glass microfiber paper," which is used for filters in clean and energy-saving fields. Glass microfiber filters are produced using a process similar to paper production.
The filters have exceptional dust-holding capacity and offer the highest efficiency with minimal air flow resistance.
The economic growth rate of the city of Chongqing has led the nation for nine consecutive quarters, thanks to thriving new industry pioneers such as Zisun.
Since 2014, the city has prioritized development of ten new industries including robots, new materials, and new energy vehicles to inject new vitality into the economy.
"In 2003, there was only one company in Chongqing whose annual sales revenue exceeded 10 billion yuan, and it is now the indebted Chongqing Iron and Steel Company," said Guo Jian, director of the Chongqing Economic and Information Commission.
"If we don't map out a new plan to encourage development of new industries, the city will only become a bigger version of the company," he said.
Zisun's annual turnover hit 200 million yuan last year. When it started in 2007, it was less than 1 million.
The overall output of Chongqing's new industries reached 166 billion yuan last year, up 150 percent year on year, and the figure is expected to reach 1 trillion by 2020.
On Friday, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) released the country's GDP growth rate of 6.7 percent for the second quarter, slightly higher than expectations but stable from the first quarter.
As the country's economy heads for a period of steady but slower development, China must transfer its excess capacity to industries that need it, analysts say.
Take Liaoning Province for example, where problems of industrial structure have resulted in sluggish economic growth, said Zhang Wanqiang, director of the Institute of Economics, Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences.
Liaoning's GDP growth in the first quarter was negative, ranking lowest among 31 provincial-level regions on the Chinese mainland.
Equipment manufacturing, the petrochemical industry, metallurgy and agriculture products processing are four of the province's pillar industries, and all have been hit hard by downward pressure, said Zhang.
The provincial economy will linger near the bottom for some time and Liaoning needs to grasp opportunities to develop new industries while stabilizing traditional sectors to achieve recovery as soon as possible, according to Zhang.
Driven by China's emerging industries, it is expected that a "new industrial revolution" is near, said Miao Wei, Minister of China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
For Chongqing's Zisun, future economic growth lies in the pieces of "glass paper."
"Now we can only produce upstream products, meaning we have to give our glass microfiber filters to other companies to be used in fields such as home appliances, medical equipment and aviation," said Zisun's Shu.
"But we have built production and operation centers in Jiangsu and Shanghai," she said. "Once our production capacity increases, we absolutely could do more."
Soldiers suspected of being involved in the coup attempt are escorted by policemen as they arrive at a courthouse in the resort town of Marmaris, Turkey, July 17, 2016. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo)
ANKARA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Two Turkish pilots involved in the downing of a Russian jet last November are in custody over the July 15 failed coup in Turkey, an official told media on late Monday, Dogan News Agency reported.
"Two pilots who were part of the operation to down the Russian Su-24 in November 2015 are in custody," a Turkish official told journalists, adding that they were detained of been part of coup bid.
The downing of the Russian fighter jet on the Syrian border sparked an unprecedented diplomatic crisis between Turkey and Russia, which ended last month when the two countries agreed to restore ties.
Russian President Vladimir Putin called his Turkish President Recep Erdogan on July 17, describing the attempted coup as unacceptable and voicing hope for a speedy return to stability.
The two presidents are expected to meet in the first week of August, in their first face-to-face meeting since the rapprochement.
Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yildirim told press on Monday over 7,500 people have been detained over the failed coup, including 103 generals and admirals.
JAKARTA, July 19, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Indonesian National Police spokesman Major General Boy Rafli Amar (C) speaks to the media after a press conference at the National Police headquarters in Jakarta, Indonesia, July 19, 2016. Indonesia orders all militants hiding in forests in Poso of Central Sulawesi province to surrender to the security forces after their leader, the most-wanted Santoso, was shot dead. (Xinhua/Zulkarnain)
JAKARTA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Indonesia orders all militants hiding in forests in Poso of Central Sulawesi province to surrender to the security forces after their leader, the most-wanted Santoso, was shot dead.
National Police chief General Tito Karnavian on Tuesday asked them to come out from their hideouts and terminate their terrorist acts.
"They (must) leave their hideouts and undergo legal process," the general said at the State Palace.
The police has reported around 19 members of the militant group, the Mujahidin Indonesia Timur, led by Santoso, remain in the jungle of Poso.
The figure has significantly decreased since the Indonesian police and armed forces launched a military operation, starting earlier this year.
Santoso was shot dead by Indonesian soldiers in the forest on Monday, Indonesian Security Chief Minister Luhut Pandjaitan confirmed.
The militant group has links with the IS group and has involved in scores of terrorist strikes in Indonesia, including the suicide bombings in the country's capital of Jakarta on Jan. 24 that killed 8 people and injured nearly 30 others.
MANILA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The Philippine government is set to hold the formal peace talks with the leftist Communist Party of the Philippines-New People's Army-National Democratic Front (CPP-NPA-NDF) next month, a senior government official said Tuesday.
Presidential adviser on the peace process Jesus Dureza said the talks will be held from Aug. 20 to 27 in Oslo, Norway.
"We look forward to engaging with our counterparts on the other side of the table," he said in a press conference in Malacanang, the presidential palace.
Prior to the formal resumption of the peace talks, he said President Rodrigo Duterte has ordered the concerned government agencies, such as the Department of Justice, to work for possible "temporary release" of some detained members of the CPP-NPA-NDF who will be participating in the negotiation.
He refused to name yet who will be the detained leftist rebels who might be granted temporary liberty.
During the talks, Dureza said they would discuss the activation of the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees, which provides for the safe conduct pass to some rebels; to affirm the previously signed agreements; and for the possible declaration of ceasefire.
The formal peace talks between the Philippine government and the leftist rebel group bogged down in 2011 under the administration of former President Benigno S. Aquino III.
The CPP-NPA-NDF has been waging war against the government for over four decades.
BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The arbitration over the South China Sea dispute unilaterally initiated by the former Philippine government is in fact a celebration among rogue arbitrators, who have hidden their selfish motives under the guise of the rule of law.
In 2013, the Aquino III administration brought an arbitration case over its South China Sea dispute with China, prompting a five-member ad hoc arbitral tribunal.
By doing so, the Philippines violated its standing agreement with China to settle the their disputes through bilateral negotiation. The country also violated China's right to decide its own means of settling a dispute as a State Party to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
Last Tuesday, the tribunal issued a so-called final award, denying China's long-standing historic rights in the South China Sea.
The Chinese government said in a white paper that as the arbitration had no jurisdiction over this particular case, awards rendered by it are null and void and have no binding force.
"China's territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests in the South China Sea shall under no circumstances be affected by those awards. China does not accept or recognize those awards. China opposes and will never accept any claim or action based on those awards," it said.
BIASED TRIBUNAL
Most of the members of the ad hoc tribunal were picked by Shunji Yanai, then president of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea and former Japanese ambassador to the United States.
Yanai presented a report to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that called for the lifting of a ban on Japan's ability to send its military abroad in a combat role, something that would run counter to its constitution.
Yanai's creation of the arbitral tribunal is believed to be biased as he initially picked Judge Chris Pinto of Sri Lanka -- whose wife is a Filipino -- as one of the tribunal's members.
Pinto was later replaced by Judge Thomas A. Mensah of Ghana, who pursued long-term studies in Britain and the United States.
The other four members are Judge Jean-Pierre Cot of France, Judge Stanislaw Pawlak of Poland, Professor Alfred Soons of the Netherlands and Judge Rudiger Wolfrum of Germany.
Four members have extensive experience in arbitration, among whom Mensah participated in five arbitration cases over maritime disputes and Wolfrum, three.
However, some members' stances in past cases are questionable as they have set the precedent of expanding tribunal jurisdiction at will and ignoring sovereignty issues.
Wolfrum, who was designated by Manila in the South China Sea arbitration case, participated in an arbitration case over the Chagos Archipelago dispute between Britain and Mauritius from December 2010 to March 2015. He was an arbitrator designated by Mauritius in the case.
Britain maintained that the tribunal had no jurisdiction over the case as it touched upon sovereignty issues. But Wolfrum, along with other arbitrators, rejected Britain's appeal.
When the Netherlands sued Russia after the latter's navy boarded and detained the crew of a Dutch vessel in waters off the Russian coast in 2013, Moscow asserted that the court had no jurisdiction in the matter and refused to participate in the hearings.
Wolfrum, who was not an arbitrator in the Russian case, released an opinion with another judge, in which they strongly criticized Russia's stance.
International law experts say that the long-standing opinion that an arbitrator holds on some kind of dispute may influence his or her judgement in other cases, prompting him or her to make a presumptive decision and affecting the impartiality of arbitration.
Shunji Yanai knows this all too well. He also knows that he can easily create a tribunal biased against China by choosing some arbitrators who are more inclined to ignore sovereignty issues.
Of course, biased arbitrators are not enough. The role of the United States as global policeman was key.
Evidence shows that the United States has long been instigating and manipulating the Philippines to act on a so-called legal front.
Experts point out that without the careful planning of the Untied States, the Philippines alone would not have been able to file the arbitration case.
The U.S. legal team not only appeared before the ad hoc tribunal, but also took charge of the drafting of the several-thousand page legal document.
But the most important merit of the legal team, said the experts, is its inextricable connection with the tribunal.
U.S. lawyer Bernard Oxman, who represented the Philippines in the arbitration, had previously worked with Shunji on many occasions.
Oxman also has close ties to the U.S. government. He used to be the Assistant Legal Adviser for Oceans, Environment, and Scientific Affairs of the U.S. Department of State from 1968 to 1977.
Oxman was also the vice-president of the U.S. delegation to the third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III) and one of the coordinators of the English language group of the drafting committees of the Conference. This despite the fact that the United State has yet to join UNCLOS.
Experts point to the fact that the complicated and inextricable connections between the arbitrators and the Japanese and U.S. governments as well as the Philippines have constituted a huge network of political interests, which trampled justice by abusing the international law and order.
AYBAK, Afghanistan, July 19 (Xinhua) -- A total of 260 Taliban militants gave up fighting in the northern Samangan province and handed over their weapons to local authorities on Tuesday, provincial police chief Mohammad Baqir Masoud said.
"A total of 260 Taliban fighters including three key commanders namely Mullah Faisal, Raes Ibrahim and Mullah Almas in a ceremony held in Dara-e-Suf Payan district surrendered to government and handed in their weapons to police," Baqir Masoud told Xinhua.
In the ceremony attended among others by ranking civil and military officials, commanders of the former rebels vowed to defend peace and security from now on.
The former militants were active against government over the past couple of years, the official said, adding with surrendering these people to government, peace and security will be further improved in Samangan and the northern region at large.
Army spokesman Nasratullah Jamshidi also confirmed surrendering of countless militants in Samangan province on Tuesday.
Taliban militants are yet to make comment on the report.
HELSINKI, July 19 (Xinhua) -- A young man was shot dead by another here Monday night, police said on Tuesday.
The incident caused an intense police operation in the suburb of Mellunmaki, northern Helsinki.
The alleged shooter was detained by police later.
Inspector Kirsi Kanth of Helsinki police defined the men as Finnish both. She said the motive remained unclear.
BRATISLAVA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The Slovak Foreign and European Affairs Ministry has advised people to reconsider travelling to certain Turkish cities and provinces, in the wake of an army faction of the military staging an attempted coup.
Locations on the hotspot list include: Adana, Hatay, Kilis, Gaziantep, Sanliurfa, Mardin, Diyarbakir, Sirnak, Tunceli, Hakkari, Siirt, Kars, Agri and Van, as well the Turkish-Syrian and Turkish-Iraqi borders.
While flights are still running to Turkey from Kosice Airport in Eastern Slovakia and won't be altered in view of the troubled political situation, the ministry recommended avoiding Ankara and Istanbul.
"Airports in Ankara and Istanbul are fully operational, but you need to count on certain restrictions or delays," stated the ministry.
The ministry also recommended that Slovaks currently in Turkey should remain calm, stay in their accommodation facilities, and not join public rallies or street events, especially in Ankara and Istanbul. According to the ministry, Slovaks should limit their movements around the country and strictly observe instructions issued by local security forces.
A violent, chaotic night on Friday saw an army faction in Turkey attempting to stage a coup, which ultimately failed. According to official information, more than 6,000 people were arrested, including some 3,000 members of the Turkish military, while at least 290 people lost their lives and more than 1,400 were injured.
The Slovak Embassy in Ankara and the Slovak Consulate General in Istanbul are monitoring the situation in the country. They recommend Slovaks make use of the voluntary e-registration service if they travel to Turkey.
SOFIA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Beer sales in Bulgaria rose by 2.0 percent year-on-year in 2015 to reach 5.3 million hectoliters, the country's industry association said here on Tuesday.
Ivana Radomirova, executive director of the Union of Brewers in Bulgaria, said at a press conference that last year beer consumption in the country was 73.5 liters per capita.
"It is interesting that for the last five years, the average consumption was 72 liters per capita, just as much as it was in the European Union," Radomirova said.
The figure was similar to countries with traditional beer culture such as Belgium and the Netherlands, but far from the achievements of the Czech Republic, 144 liters, or Germany -- 107 liters, Radomirova said.
She said that consumption in Bulgaria remained at this good level because over the past five years, domestic producers have positioned in the market over 42 new brands and varieties of beer, and over 102 new packagings.
More and more people are looking for new flavors, and want to experiment, Radomirova added.
by Abu Hanifah
JAKARTA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Indonesia is now gearing up to welcome the repatriation of funds from its taxpayers deposited in foreign countries through the implementation of tax amnesty program with many of its agencies now prepare additional services to welcome the funds and possible investments at home to accommodate the funds.
The formation of additional services was to follow suit the technical procedure direction recently issued by the financial ministry to accommodate the Law No. 11/2016 on tax amnesty initiated by the government.
The law provides ransom tax rates from 2 to 5 percent for taxpayers who are willing to repatriate their funds from foreign countries, depended on how fast they filed in their assets in countries abroad to Indonesian authorized institution.
For those who are only willing to declare their assets in countries abroad without the intention to repatriate their funds to Indonesia, government provides ransom tax rates between 4 to 10 percent, also depended on how fast they file in reports on their assets.
The tax amnesty policy was expected to bring in some 165 trillion rupiah (about 12.6 billion U.S. Dollars) into the country.
Based on government data, 3.14 quadrillion rupiah (about 239.89 billion U.S. Dollars) of Indonesian funds is parked abroad to evade tax.
Indonesia's Investment Coordination Agency (BKPM) established a particular team featured with account officers to accommodate taxpayers intending to invest their repatriated funds to Indonesia.
"The account officers would be tasked to escort those investors," Head of BKPM Franky Sibarani said in his office on Monday.
The direct investment prepared by BKPM was an alternative to accommodate the influx of repatriated funds. The other investment portfolios prepared by government for the repatriated funds were bonds, sovereign notes and stock market.
The BKPM would provide integrated services comprised of three-hour investment permission process, rapid green-lane for import process, tax holiday and tax allowance based on the existing terms and conditions.
Taxation Directorate General at Financial Ministry also established a particular task force available in each of its tax service offices (KPP) across the country to serve taxpayers participating in tax amnesty program.
Officers in the KPP were also told to update the taxpayers' data and reactivate their ID numbers after they were recognized as "non-effective" in taxation term.
Indonesia also endorsed 19 banks, comprised of domestic and foreign banks, to accommodate the repatriation of huge sum of funds from the taxpayers into the nation.
Despite all of those services, government warned bogus taxpayers should they were found of intentionally falsifying their data, they would be entitled to pay Income Tax (PPh) up to 200 percent.
According to a senior central bank official, the tax amnesty program would bring positive impact for the exchange rate of the nation's currency against the U.S. dollar.
"Tax amnesty would further strengthen the rupiah in the future as they (the taxpayers) would invest their repatriated funds in investment portfolios," Indonesian central bank, Bank Indonesia, Deputy Governor Perry Warjiyo said on Tuesday, adding that the tax amnesty would further supply to the nation's foreign currency reserves.
Image provided by shows Cuba s President Raul Castro (L), shaking hands with U.S. President Barack Obama during their meeting at the Palace of the Revolution, in Havana, capital of Cuba, on March 21, 2016. (Xinhua/Zuma)
By Raimundo Urrechaga
HAVANA, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Almost a year after restoring diplomatic ties, Cuba-U.S.economic ties have been stagnant due to the complex legal framework of the blockade which Washington still imposes on the island, a Cuban expert has said.
U.S. President Barack Obama has already issued several executive measures loosening up certain parts of the blockade, but many of them have not been adopted.
Cuban economist Esteban Morales told Xinhua that Obama's measures are aimed at enhancing financial cooperation with the emerging private sector in Cuba.
Over the past year, Washington has allowed certain companies to do business with the Cuban government in such fields as tourism, agriculture and telecommunications. However, the majority of them still await the embargo to be totally lifted in order to engage extensively in business.
Starwood has inaugurated its first joint hotel in Havana while cruise company Carnival docked in the Cuban capital last May, making it the first U.S. leisure ship to do so in over 50 years.
The White House has also authorized U.S. banks to establish correspondent accounts in Cuba, but only one bank has done so. Meanwhile, Cuban financial institutions are still banned from doing the same in the United States.
Besides that, no major bank in the United States has allowed their clients to use credit cards while visiting Cuba. Only Stonegate Bank, a Florida-based institution, has issued a Mastercard that works in the island country.
A tourist from U.S. cruise ship Adonia dances Salsa at a Cuban port in Havana, Cuba, May 2, 2016. (Xinhua/Liu Bin)
Though Cuba has been able to use the U.S. dollar in international financial transactions since March, Havana has not done a single transaction with the currency.
"The U.S. government is gradually taking economic measures and authorizing a few companies to do business in the island as part of a slow political process with the strategy to see if Cuba holds on or falls apart," said the Cuban researcher.
Morales believed the White House still has the goal of "taking over Cuba," but it has modified its "failed" confrontation policy with new methods.
"The way Washington is negotiating its economic relation with the island country is subordinated to a political interest of gaining space in Cuban society and creating a new financial order," he said.
Political interests, Morales said, have also interfered with the possibility of U.S. citizens freely traveling to Cuba as tourists.
While the United States maintains a ban on tourism to Cuba, it has authorized exceptions. U.S. citizens can visit Cuba if they meet one of 12 criteria, such as visiting for educational purposes.
Over 100,000 U.S. citizens visited the island country in the first four months of this year, doubling the amount of travelers during the same period of 2015.
"Freeing up Americans to travel to Cuba would mean an avalanche of U.S. tourism to the island that could bring substantial revenues for the economy," said Morales.
In recent weeks, the U.S. House of Representatives has moved to intensify sanctions against Cuba in what seems to be the most difficult moment in the last 15 months after both nations announced they would end their 50-year enmity.
A group of U.S. lawmakers is currently working to block the Obama administration's efforts to open up U.S. airways to flights from Cuba.
Citing concerns about Cuba's security infrastructure, four members of the U.S. Congress have officially called for a halt to recently announced commercial flights between the United States and Cuba pending a closer review of security measures at Cuba's airports.
The U.S. Department of Transportation announced two weeks ago that 10 cities, including four in Florida, and eight airlines had won tentative U.S. government approval to schedule commercial air service between the two countries.
Last month, the department gave approval to six airlines to fly to nine other Cuban cities.
People pose for a group photo in front of the building of the US embassy in Havana, in the city of Havana, capital of Cuba, on July 20, 2015. (Xinhua/Joaquin Hernandez)
Meanwhile, amendments were made to remove restrictions on agricultural exports to Cuba that would have allowed Cuban companies to buy U.S. agricultural products. However, the Republican and Cuban-American lobby at the legislative body rejected such actions.
"Cuba has no way to obtain credits to buy agricultural products in the U.S. because the law doesn't allow it and the government must pay in cash," said the professor.
Morales said Raul Castro's administration must work on dismantling the unilateral measures Obama has taken in the last few months and push for fair rules of international trade.
The expert believed that Cuba's emblematic goods such as rum, cigars, pharmaceutical and biotechnological products should enter the U.S. market as a sign of thawing ties and real commitment from Washington to increase bilateral commerce.
"It's vital that both countries advance in their economic talks to make this process irreversible," said the Cuban academic.
On July 20 of last year, Cuba and the United States formally reestablished diplomatic relations. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry traveled to the Cuban capital a month later for the official flag-raising ceremony at the U.S. Embassy in Havana.
DURBAN, July 19 (Xinhua) -- South African scientists are working around the clock with various international counterparts on finding a cure to HIV and other diseases, a government minister said on Tuesday.
In an interview with Xinhua, Minister of Science and Technology Naledi Pandor said the government is now funding one of the country's biggest research centres, Caprica for the research.
"Caprica which is one of the major beneficiaries of our funding has discovered that there are some women in KwaZulu-Natal Province who have a strong immunity against the HIV virus. They are currently working on it to see if we can extract something and use it a vaccine for treatment or immune booster," Pandor said.
"Sometimes we work with a consortium of scientist from overseas,"she added.
Pandor said there are various research centres in the country pursuing different approaches.
The government, she said, is also providing human capital to research institutes in the country.
She was speaking on the sidelines of the 21st International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2016)taking place in Durban.
One of the issues raised by many experts at the conference is lack of funding for researches and innovations in addressing HIV/Aids.
Pandor said she agreed that there should be more researches and innovations in combating HIV/Aids.
SA scientists are currently studying the traditional vaccine to ascertain the claim that it could cure a certain disease like HIV.
Pandor said, "There is a need for much more research and innovation. We are moving away from the treatment linked to prevention to empower people especially women and girls. We are not going to sit on our laurels. We have a team of scientist working on various researches,"she said.
Pandor revealed that SA scientists are about to make a major breakthrough in treating malaria with a single dose.
This would be a great success if proven successful, Pandor said, adding that SA scientist are still perfecting it.
Scientists, she said, are also working with America doctors in researches on vaginal gel which would be seen as a breakthrough in preventing the HIV/Aids.
Pandor said, "The South African government response to the pandemic have been robust. We support research and want to do more. We have also introduced the wellness centre ad we encourage people to test for HIV/Aids. I have also tested for HIV."
The minister acknowledged that access to HIV treatment remains a problem for those marginalized especially in the rural areas.
She said people should not ignore other diseases like malaria and tuberculosis which would have given opportunistic infections.
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos (L) and Timoleon Jimenez (R), the top leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), exchange pacts while Cuban President Raul Castro witnesses in Havana, capital of Cuba, June 23, 2016. (Xinhua/Liu Bin)
by Sylvia B. Zarate
BOGOTA, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Almost two weeks after the Colombian government and the FARC guerrilla group announced a historic end to their armed conflict in Havana, Cuba, concerns are mounting that not all FARC members are keen on giving up their struggle.
On July 6, the Armando Rios First Front, one of the main blocs of the revolutionary group, released a statement that it would not lay down its arms.
"The Armando Rios First Front has decided not to demobilize. We will continue the fight to take power, by the people and for the people, independently of the decision taken by the rest of the members of our organization," said the statement.
The First Front has around 350 members and operates in the departments of Vaupes, Guaviare and Guainia. It is best known for having kidnapped Colombian-French politician Ingrid Betancourt, a former senator, whom they kept in captivity for over six years from 2002-2008. It is thought this group is mainly financed through drug trafficking and illegal mining.
President Juan Manuel Santos immediately responded to their declaration, saying that "certain people within the FARC's First Front have doubts about whether to join the peace process or not. Those with doubts should leave them aside and join us, as this is their last chance to change their life. Otherwise, I assure them they will end either in a grave or in jail."
The ruling body of the FARC also issued a statement, saying that no decisions taken by the First Front could be carried out with the name, the weapons or the assets of the rebel group.
"The fighters of the First Front have decided to give up their principles and are using ideological and political arguments to try and hide the obvious influence of those who have economic interests in not ending the conflict," said the group.
A resident reacts during the broadcast of the signing ceremony of the ceasefire agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrilla group in Havana, in Bogota, capital of Colombia, on June 23, 2016. (Xinhua/Jhon Paz)
The First Front's main complaint is that, according to the Havana deal, all FARC guerrillas would have to stay for 180 days in a number of camps to guarantee the disarmament process.
"The concentration areas are for defeated guerrillas. The Armando Rios First Front of the FARC has never suffered a military defeat. Any ordinary Colombian will understand that these zones are open-air prisons. Surely, nobody will want to enter these traps," read the statement.
According to this offshoot of the FARC, the government of President Juan Manuel Santos is only seeking to disarm the rebels without seeking a real solution to Colombia's economic and social problems.
The First Front also invited all guerrillas who disagree with the peace deal to join forces with them and keep fighting.
In an interview with Xinhua, Alirio Uribe, a lawmaker for the left-wing Alternative Democratic Pole, stated that it was natural for differences to appear in any peace process.
"I believe this does not hurt the success of the negotiations which took a lot of effort. I think the FARC is a very hierarchical organization...which can guarantee that most of its blocs will demobilize," said Uribe.
However, Uribe warned that the full impact of the peace process and the opposition to it will only be measured once the disarmament process finishes in the concentration zones.
ACCRA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Ghana's efforts in advancing economic and social rights of women through empowering women and mainstreaming gender issues in national development has received recognition on the continent.
At the ongoing Africa Union (AU) summit in Kigali, Rwanda, Ghana received the Africa Gender Awards for these efforts, the Presidency said in a statement here late Monday.
"Minister for Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration, Hanna Tetteh received the African Gender Award on the country's behalf at the Kigali Summit of the African Union," the statement announced.
The African Gender Scorecard sponsored by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and the African Development Bank (AfDB), measures the performance of gender equality and women's empowerment.
The release revealed that Ghana was scored with other countries on social, economic, political and civil rights.
The government said Ghana, under President John Dramani Mahama, has been working to lift the economic rights of women with the enhancement of small loans for market women and traders, increase in the benefits under the Livelihood Enhancement Against Poverty (LEAP) program and continues to ensure equitable representation of women in the government.
The Affirmative Action Bill has been approved by Cabinet and waiting for parliamentary approval to serve as an additional intervention to advance the frontiers of gender equality and female empowerment in Ghana, added the statement.
In his capacity as Co-Chair of the UN Eminent Persons on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Ghana President Jogn Dramani Mahama is expected to host a special working session at the ongoing AU summit for heads of state on the attainment of the goals within the framework of the African Union's Agenda 2063. Enditem
A boy takes part in a protest in central Athens, Greece on July 14, 2016. About 1,000 people protested in front of the Greek parliament calling for "Open Borders" and better living conditions in the accommodation centers for the refugees stranded in Greece since February. (Xinhua/Marios Lolos)
GENEVA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) reported Tuesday that some 2,954 migrants and refugees have drowned attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea this year.
Most of these deaths (2,526) have taken place on the Central Mediterranean route linking North Africa with Italy.
A further 383 individuals have perished on the Eastern Mediterranean passage separating Turkey and Greece while 45 migrants have died on the Western Mediterranean and Western African routes.
This year's death toll is significantly higher than fatality figures over the same period in 2015, when 1,906 migrant and refugee deaths were recorded through July 30.
The number of arrivals so far this year however is similar to that registered over the same period a year ago.
According to statistics, 240,884 migrants have reached European shores in 2016, up from 220,054 maritime entries between January and July last year.
BENI SUEF, July 19, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Workers from China Electric Power Equipment and Technology Co. Ltd (CET) prepare a drone for stringing the wire between power gird towers across the Nile River at Beni Suef Governorate, Egypt, June 30, 2016. Along the Nile River, the Egypt EETC 500kV Transmission Lines Project (EETC Project), a cooperative one between China Electric Power Equipment and Technology Co. Ltd (CET) and Egypt is under construction. The over-650-million-dollar EETC Project, which covers almost the whole area of the Nile River delta, is the largest transmission lines project in Egypt's history. (Xinhua/Meng Tao)
by Wang Xue, Zheng Kailun
CAIRO, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Besides the Nile River, a Chinese worker was working on a power grid tower at the height of over 100 meters. Instead of the breathtaking landscape, he had to focus on those high-voltage power lines and the swaying spot he was sitting on.
Along the river, the Egypt EETC 500kV Transmission Lines Project (EETC Project), a cooperative one between China Electric Power Equipment and Technology Co. Ltd (CET) and Egypt is under construction.
Echoing China's "Belt and Road" Initiative, which is to promote strategic cooperation with overseas markets in all fields, Chinese companies nowadays are searching for more opportunities in Egypt and helping to improve people's life there by investing in fields like energy, infrastructure, high-tech sector, etc,.
"Thanks to the upgraded relations between China and Egypt and supports from both countries, it only took us several months to communicate the details of the project and then we signed the contract," Liu Guanghui, CET Middle East Chief Representative told Xinhua.
"As a subsidiary of State Grid Corporation of China, CET owns China's most advantageous technologies and most experienced workers in this field," he said, adding that "this is the first time for CET to operate a project concerning people's livelihood in this most populous country in the region and we have attached our greatest importance on it."
Liu told Xinhua that the over-650-million-dollar EETC Project, which covers almost the whole area of the Nile River delta, is the largest transmission lines project in Egypt's history.
Considering Egypt's urgent demands on power, the project will play a key role to improve the country's power system and boost economic development after it is completed 18 months later.
"I came here with over 500 Chinese colleagues in January, " Bai Lu, a 29-year-old Chinese worker, who manages the fieldwork team, told Xinhua.
"The width of the river beside us is about 600 meters, we firstly built the towers and then our staffs climbed on them to string the lines," he said so to introduce the crossing river towers.
"In the heat of summer, Chinese staffers have to spend two hours to climb over 100 meters to the top of the tower every time they need to work on the lines," the young worker added.
Bai Lu also told Xinhua that his team is cooperating with Egyptian workers on the project. For most parts of the project, Egyptians help with the basic construction and the Chinese staffers focus on the project design, tower work and the most dangerous and high-tech parts of the grid construction.
"We have successfully made some technological breakthroughs in this area of river banks and large deserts. After finishing the news towers and the transmission lines, we will also help upgrade some parts of the old grid," another young worker with a safety hat named Li Yongli said.
Sitting under the tower, Li and others were enjoying their most precious relaxing time at noon.
Normally, the land surface temperature can be as high as over 50 degree Celsius, making aerial work really tough and risky.
Most of the Chinese workers would like to call their family far away or chat with each other beside the beautiful views during the hottest hours of a day.
"The tower is 175 meters high and 400 tons weight. To finish the project on schedule, every day we start to work from 3 a.m. till sunset, with three hours off at noon," Li told Xinhua.
"With better transmission efficiency and larger coverage, the new project, with other power stations also under construction, will for sure improve the power supply in Egypt," the Chinese young man said with a pride smile.
"Every tower is related to the life of all of the family here, I'm glad that we can make some change to the life of people," he added.
NAIROBI, July 19 (Xinhua) -- If you thought China and Kenya's relations come to the picture only when roads, railway and industrial construction is concerned, then you must be wrong.
Kenyans are slowly learning and taking up more Chinese trends. Eveline Nyambura, a second year political science student at The University of Nairobi knows this better than anyone else.
Nyambura's fashion sense makes her one of the most sought after girls in the campus. She gets hit on even by her senior students. Her nickname is Kim Kardashian.
During the interview with Xinhua on Monday, Nyambura wore a dusty black rugged jeans and a white high-low top that accentuated her African carves leaving both men and women admiring her fashion sense.
Nyambura said she changes her entire wardrobe every three months, thanks to China where most of her outfits come from.
"Most of my friends now call me Kim Kardashian because of my high profile fashion sense, most of them however don't know where I get my outfits from, save for a few friends who know the secret," Nyambura said.
"Well...it took me time before really knowing how to dress my body but I did a lot of research online and voila! I came across a host of Chinese models who gave me exactly what I wanted," she added.
Even though Nyambura is studying political science and this is where she has always dreamt making her career at, she says her deep sense of fashion which she has slowly worked on after getting more and more tips from her role models in China, might change her mind.
"I have realized I can make a good designer since I learn quite fast, I get some of my designs online and I haven't been disappointed in what I pick, my tailor too does a wonderful job. If I ever take this path, China will be my first choice to enhance my skills, what I have seen online and from the stall where I get most of my outfits is worth exploring," she said.
Julius Kibor's clothes store in the city is where Nyambura gets most of her outfits from. Kibor though a man, is also a favorite among many young women who are keeping up with the global fashion trends.
Kibor says browsing through fashion websites like TINYDEAL, Aliexpress and Sammydress has sharpened his skills in the clothing business which he says is very competitive.
"I took time understanding what my clients want and used what I learnt in getting the right clothes for them. Last year I got the privilege of dressing one of the winners in the Kenyan Miss Tourism Counties edition competition. China has given us access to some of the clothes only supermodels like Naomi Campbell would afford," said Kibor.
June Wanjiru, a mother of one and an accountant at a Nakuru-based security firm says she is thinking of establishing a business as an image consultant, thanks to her high fashion sense.
"I have a lot of friends who now come for tips on how to dress. I have learnt most of my dressing tips from websites where models pose with different outfits. I take time going through these websites but so far I have learnt a lot," she says.
Beatrice Kavengi's bridal shop in town is a beehive of activity as women check in and out. Kavengi's shop has now become famous due to her relatively affordable prices on wedding items.
"I started this business to cater for that group of bride's to be who don't want to spend a fortune on gowns," she said, adding "I get all my wares from China and there you get all you want at such huge discounts," she said.
A small survey by Xinhua in the Nairobi's Central Business District shows that most cloth shops get their stock from China.
Most women clothes go for as little as 6 U.S. dollars which is affordable to even low income earners.
"There were days when I only wore second-hand clothes as 'new' clothes were really expensive. Nowadays things are different I can comfortably walk into a shop in town and get something I like, China came to rescue some of us," says Wafula Wakoli, a security guard.
Gone are the days when Kenyan fashionistas looked west for inspiration, nowadays most designers look up to the Asian country to grow their careers.
Dennis Ndung'u, a fashion designer student at the Kenya Technical University says he gets most of his designs for his class assignments from Chinese websites.
"In our class I'm the best so far, I hope to go to China one day and have a clear picture of what happens there," he said.
JUBA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Despite once experiencing an oil boom, South Sudan needs to invest more in trade facilitation, production and building access to external markets to create jobs and reduce on imports, experts have observed.
Oil exports dominate the economy and government revenue. They generated large revenues of about 20 billion U.S. dollars from 2005 to 2014, equivalent to 98 percent of the annual government budget, but weak governance has meant that these have not been used to invest in building productive capacity.
The country's trade surplus is largely a result of its oil exports, and increased from 3.99 million dollars in 2009 to 6.93 million dollars in 2012, reflecting the increase in oil exports.
However, since outbreak of the December 2013 conflict and the recent renewed clashes, South Sudan imports have been greater than exports resulting in trade deficit.
Oil production plummeted from 350,000 barrels a day to less than 160,000 bpd due to conflict and drop in global oil prices.
The undersecretary Ministry of Trade, Industry and Commerce Biel Jock Thich told Xinhua in Juba on Tuesday that the country has for the past three years been having a trade deficit and that it is incumbent upon them to diversify the economy.
"For all this time we have a trade deficit because we import everything from outside," he explained.
He added that to facilitate trade, they plan to eliminate the persistent Non-Tarrif Barriers (NTBs) despite having joined the East African Community in April and even set up a one border stop post at main Nimule border with Uganda.
"We are working to eliminate NTBs. Most of them are on our side and we are working on that with support from Trademark East Africa," Biel revealed.
The government recently put restrictions on export of timber, charcoal and steel products in a bid to widen the narrow non-oil tax base.
Top of these it prioritized investments in gum Arabic, a soft drink emulsifier, fish, mining and embarking on agriculture to give the country competitive trade edge in the region.
Undersecretary Ministry of Mining, Andu Ezbon, told Xinhua that they have gold, copper, uranium, iron ore in abundance but due to lack of developed infrastructure like roads and energy, the mining sector is redundant.
"We have the gold, iron ore but transporting it to the market is still very hard because we don't have roads and power for example extraction of iron ore, copper require power in abundance," Andu explained.
The Secretary General South Sudan Chamber of Industry, Agriculture and Commerce, Simon Akuei, said that much effort must be geared toward cutting expenditure on manufacturing, agriculture and transport to help ease cost of doing business.
"More investments must be put toward funding agriculture at local level and transport that helps in subsidizing rural agriculture," Akuei revealed.
Meanwhile, economists Alic Garang and Yurendra Basnett in their paper: Exiting the cycle of conflict in South Sudan, diversifying trade for sustained and inclusive prosperity, argue that producers in South Sudan face many constraints, including lack of infrastructure, finance and poor governance.
"This includes simplifying documentation requirements, training of Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in best business practices and resolving issues of land title deeds," the two experts said.
"The financing of SMEs can be through embracing a financial inclusion agenda, strengthening the current institutional regulatory framework and channeling parts of the oil revenue to the economy through the banking sector," they added.
They observed that 99 percent of all firms in South Sudan are classified as SMEs and that building private sector capacity will be essential for the functioning of local markets and for trade diversification.
"The business environment in South Sudan is unfavourable to trade. One problem is the issue of tax multiplicity at legal check points and extortion at illegal road blocks which adds extra cost of transport," it noted.
According to the World Bank, it takes for entrepreneurs in South Sudan 12 documents, 130 days and 9,300 dollars to import a standard container of goods, and 10 days documents, 55 days and 5,400 dollars to export one.
"Increasing production will require an active role by government in addressing infrastructure, credit, land tenure system and corporate governance," it said. Enditem
GUANGZHOU, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Fan Changlong, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), has called for troops to be ready for combat and for improvements to equipment and logistical preparation.
Fan made the remarks, which were carried in a statement released on Tuesday, in an recent inspection tour of the Southern Theater Command.
Officers and soldiers need to be aware of current threats to China's sovereignty, security and interests, he said, urging the military to research combat methods and strategies pertinent to different situations and foster special forces reserved for key missions and scenarios.
"Air and sea patrols should be tightly organized to handle all kinds of emergencies and safeguard air and sea security in border areas," Fan said.
He also called for strengthened leadership to root out corruption.
JINGMEN, July 19, 2016 (Xinhua) -- An aerial photo taken on July 19, 2016 shows waterlogged fields in Chaihu Town of Jingmen, central China's Hubei Province. Rainstorm hit Hubei Province on Tuesday, especially severe in Jingmen. (Xinhua)
WUHAN/SHIJIAZHUANG, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The latest downpours to hit China have killed seven people and left at least seven missing, authorities said Tuesday.
Tuesday's heavy rain in central China's Hubei Province has killed five residents in Enshi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, bringing the death toll in Hubei to six, according to the provincial bureau of civil affairs. One person remains missing.
The downpours since Sunday have affected 807,800 people in 35 cities and counties in Hubei, according to the bureau.
In north China's Hebei Province, strong rain killed one person and left at least six residents missing on Tuesday in Cixian County, according to the local government. Three people are still trapped. Rescuers are trying to reach the site, but flooded roads are hampering rescue efforts.
More heavy rain is forecast to hit China in the coming days, said the China Meteorological Administration. The National Meteorological Center has also raised its storm alert from yellow to orange.
China has a four-tier color-coded system for severe weather, with red being the most serious, followed by orange, yellow and blue.
The center advised residents to take precautions against possible floods, landslides, mudslides and rock flows.
KUALA LUMPUR, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Malaysia and Singapore signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) Tuesday on the long anticipated high speed rail linking the two countries, a major step to boost connectivity between the neighbors.
The signing was witnessed by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and his Singaporean counterpart Lee Hsien Loong, a significant milestone since the project was first announced in 2013.
FIRMEST COMMITMENT
"The signing of MoU signifies Malaysia and Singapore's firmest commitment to this iconic project," said Najib during a joint press conference with Lee after witnessing the signing of the MoU.
The MoU captures key points of agreement between the two countries on the project such as the details on technical parameter, commercial model as well as custom, immigration, quarantine (CIQ) clearance, safety and security matters, regulatory framework and project management, he said.
The two governments are committed to sign a bilateral agreement that will contain details related to the project by the end to this year, while targeting the commencing of operations by 2026, he added.
The proposed high speed rail, with the top operation speed of over 300 kilometers per hours, is expected to cut the traveling time between the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur and the city state to 90 minutes.
BRINGING BENEFIT
The high speed rail is expected to enhance people-to-people ties and improve business linkages between the two countries, and both prime ministers said it would change the lifestyles of the people.
"One can have breakfast in Kuala Lumpur, lunch in Singapore, and back in time for dinner in Kuala Lumpur," said Najib, adding that cities along the line will be benefited.
For his part, Lee said the project would boost economic growth for the two countries by bringing in more opportunities.
According to a joint statement issued by the transport authorities of the two countries, eight stations will be built along the line, including the two termini in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, respectively, as well as six intermediate stations in Malaysia.
Goh Bok Yen, a well-known transportation planning consultant in Malaysia, said he was not optimistic that the two countries could iron out the details for the law-binding agreement, citing past bilateral plans that failed to realize.
Lee admitted that one or two issues and some details still need to be worked out, but stressed that "the main picture is there."
He urged the two countries to work closely together on the many joint decisions and many difficult implementation issues that may arise.
COMPETITION FOR TENDER
Najib said a joint project team would be set up by Malaysia's high speed rail corporation and Land Transport Authority of Singapore to implement and address the integration project. Following the signing of bilateral agreement, it will work on the preparation of a tender for the project, which is expected to be issue next year.
Local media estimated that project would cost some 15 billion U.S. dollars, a figure Najib denied to confirm, citing factors like the technology progress in coming years.
Railway companies from China, Japan and Europe have long expressed interests in this major infrastructure project. Singaporean and Malaysian transport authorities said the joint project team will call for an international tender in August to appoint a Joint Development Partner to provide technical support.
Sheng Guangzu, general manager of the China Railway Corp., said during a visit to Malaysia and Singapore in May that China has unique advantages in technology and safety as its companies eye participation in the high speed rail linking the two countries. Enditem
Pro-Erdogan supporters chant slogans and gesture as they gather for a rally at Taksim square in Istanbul on July 18, 2016 following the military failed coup attempt of July 15. (Xinhua/AFP)
ANKARA, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim confirmed on Tuesday that an official request has been sent to the U.S. government for the extradition of Fethullah Gulen, who was accused by Ankara of plotting a failed military coup.
"We have no doubt on the source of this vicious coup and we know all the details over who guided it and how." Yildirim said.
The Turkish government claimed the failed coup was organized by followers of Gulen, a U.S.-based cleric.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Monday that his country has "a formal process for dealing with extradition requests" and asked Turkey to provide evidence of Gulen's involvement in the coup attempt.
"It is already clear," the prime minister responded, adding that "we will provide them with a pile of evidence."
The U.S. extraditing Gulen would be the "greatest sign of solidarity," the deputy prime minister Numan Kurtulmus said on Tuesday.
When asked whether the Turkish government is considering any strategic help from the U.S. after the coup, the deputy prime minister responded that "sending Gulen to Turkey would be the number one solidarity display."
More than 290 people were killed Friday in a failed coup in Turkey, which has strained Ankara's ties with the U.S. amid Turkey's accusations that the U.S. is harboring Gulen.
CLEVELAND, the United States, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are in a direct head-to-head match-up, 46 percent to 45 percent, according to a poll issued Tuesday, the second day of the on-going Republican National Convention.
Later on Tuesday, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are expected to lead the convention's formal nomination of the Republican Party's presumptive candidates for president and vice president, Trump and his runmate Indiana Governor Mike Pence.
For Clinton, this is slightly down from the 3-point lead she held in last week's tracking poll numbers, according to the latest NBC News|SurveyMonkey Weekly Election Tracking Poll.
The contest is also competitive in a four-way general election scenario between Clinton (39 percent), Trump (40 percent), Libertarian Gary Johnson (10 percent) and Green Party candidate Jill Stein (5 percent), the poll finds.
Meanwhile, half of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters think the party is divided now; nearly four in 10 think the GOP will still be divided in November. Only 11 percent think the party is unified now.
These numbers are virtually unchanged since they were last asked in the middle of June, said a NBC report.
However, Republican National Convention on Monday adopted the party's platform for the 2016 elections with rich Donald Trump style, vowing to lead a turnaround from the policies of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
It is expected as the Republican National Convention gets underway this week, party leaders will focus on rallying Republicans behind the New York billionaire, though many prominent Republicans will be noticeably absent from the convention, including the convention's host state Ohio's governor John Kasich.
The survey was conducted online July 11 through July 17 among a national sample of 9,436 adults who say they are registered to vote. Respondents were selected from the nearly three million people who take surveys on the SurveyMonkey platform each day. Results have an error estimate of plus or minus 1.4 percentage points. Enditem
DURBAN, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Some of the HIV positive people attending the 21st International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, complained on Tuesday that they face various challenges like access to medication, stigma and ill-treatment at health institutions.
South African Constitutional Court Judge Edwin Cameron, who tested HIV positive in 1986, said they are often stigmatized and ostracized by the society.
He told Xinhua that the stigma is discouraging people from testing.
Judge Cameron, who has openly disclosed his status said, "HIV positive are victims of hatred, ignorance and fear. Some suffer from internal condemnation, shame and disgrace. We do not beg for acceptance but demand to be treated as humans as we have that right."
Maureen Murenga from Kenya said that when she tested positive there was no information on how to survive with the disease.
Murenga tested positive in 2000 but gave birth to an HIV negative child in 2013.
She said there is no adequate support for the HIV positive.
Murenga said, "There is still forced sterilization of women in some countries. There is still stigma and discrimination. When I tested positive I thought I had few days to live but did not know how I will die. I did not know if I will be found dead with children nearby or discovered days after the death. I was afraid."
Another HIV positive Fikile Boyce, 49, said he faced lots of challenges due to the depletion in funding by donors.
He said the reduction in funding makes it impossible for the civil society and those infected to continue their fight against the disease.
Boyce said there is no proper coordination between healthcare givers and the HIV positive.
There is some stock outs in some healthcare institutions, resulting in the failure to adhere to treatment, he said.
"Defaulting on our treatment makes us vulnerable to death," he added.
Tuberculosis (TB) has been identified as the major killer of most HIV positive people in South Africa.
Boyce said they want TB to be prioritized just like HIV.
The country, he said, should not rely on donors to combat HIV but should have a budget for that.
Boyce said they also fail to access medication at some places and at times.
"At this conference I want government, civil society and donor agencies to come together and implement any resolutions adopted and ensure that there is money for activists to make interventions," he added.
The conference, which started on Monday and will last until Friday, brought together more than 18,000 government officials, scientists, AIDS activists and HIV patients to discuss ways to achieve the goal of eradicating the disease by 2030.
BEIJING, July 19, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Yu Zhengsheng (C), chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, presides over a consultation on industrial upgrading in northeast China's Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces, in Beijing, capital of China, July 19, 2016. Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli (2nd R) attended the conference. (Xinhua/Yao Dawei)
BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Political advisors called for reform of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in a high-level consultation on industrial upgrading in northeast China's Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces.
The conference was presided over by Yu Zhengsheng, chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference National Committee and attended by Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli.
The advisors suggested that SOE corporate governance should be overhauled, social security be improved, and overstaffed companies be downsized properly, according to a statement released after the meeting.
The three provinces were an important industrial base in China. But their growth rates are now among the lowest, mainly due to inefficient SOEs, which were and are the economic backbone in the region.
After hearing the suggestions, Zhang said the government will deepen SOE reform and support private businesses as well.
He also reiterated the significance of mass innovation and entrepreneurship in industrial upgrading in the three provinces.
RAMALLAH, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Israeli soldiers shot dead on Tuesday evening a 12-year-old Palestinian boy during clashes with dozens of Palestinians at the town of al-Ram in northern Jerusalem, Palestinian health ministry said.
It said that the boy Muhyee al-Tabakhi was critically wounded and died shortly after the soldiers opened fire at dozens of Palestinian stone-throwers.
So far no immediate Israeli army comment has been made on the incident.
Earlier on Tuesday, the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) health ministry said in a statement that a 51-year-old Palestinian man from the southern West Bank city of Hebron died of wounds on Monday.
On Monday afternoon, the man Mustafa Barade'ya was critically wounded after Israeli soldiers opened fire at him at al-Aroub Palestinian refugee camp close to the city of Hebron.
Since early October last year, a wave of violence broke out between Israel and the Palestinians in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. Official figures said that 217 Palestinians and 40 Israelis have been killed since then.
Related:
Israel denies knows death of Palestinian boy in north Jerusalem
JERUSALEM, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Israeli authorities on Tuesday evening denied having knowledge of a 12-year-old Palestinian reported dead in clashes between Palestinians and Israeli forces north of Jerusalem.
by Xinhua writer Ma Guihua
MEXICO CITY, July 19 (Xinhua) -- For Cuba and the United States, two Cold War foes for over half a century, a belated rapprochement presents exciting possibilities. Cuba is hot now, with tourism, culture and small businesses starting to blossom.
But the thaw in U.S.-Cuba relations could be like watching ice slowly melt.
Yes, there was the initial fanfare in Havana and Washington marking the restoration of U.S.-Cuban diplomatic relations on July 20, 2015. In March of this year, President Barack Obama made an historic trip to Cuba, accompanied by a high-profile business entourage eager to be part of the Cuba boom.
The run-up to Obama's Cuba visit, the first by a sitting president in 88 years, was marked by a loosening of restrictions, allowing U.S. individuals to have people-to-people educational travel to Cuba without government permission while lifting restrictions on the use of American dollars in transactions with the Caribbean island.
Also in March, hotel chain Starwood signed a deal with Cuba to manage three hotels in Havana, and Marriott and Airbnb announced new opportunities in the island country. Cuba, in turn, removed the 10 percent tax on U.S. dollar.
In May, about 700 U.S. passengers boarded the first cruise in almost 40 years to travel from Miami to Havana. A month later, U.S. Department of Transport approved six airlines to establish regular flights to nine destinations in Cuba.
Tourism, a key foreign currency earner for the Caribbean island, is the first to benefit from the U.S.-Cuba thaw, with a record 3.5 million inbound visitors in 2015. The number of American tourists increased 77 percent in 2015 from the previous year. Estimates suggest that Cuba is now bracing for as many as 10 million U.S. tourists per year.
Yet despite Obama's efforts to chip away through executive orders the over five-decade U.S. embargo on Cuba, really normalizing relations will not be easy, or quick.
"Charting this new course for the Cuban government means starting the clock on an economy that has been stuck in time over the past several decades," said Stefan Selig, Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade, U.S. Department of Commerce.
But he was concerned that "if the embargo is not lifted in the near term, the excitement will begin to wane."
The commercial, economic, and financial embargo the United States has imposed on Cuba since 1962 can only be lifted by the Congress under the conditions that Cuba, in its view, has a democratically elected government and an improved human rights record.
The embargo, or "blockade" as Cubans see it, since it also blocks third countries from doing business with the Caribbean island, has cost it nearly 834 billion U.S. dollars, Cuba claims.
Andres van Hoole, a Cuban-American businessman born in Cuba, sees Cuba now as going through "an evolution of the revolution", but he couldn't help asking: "Is the embargo not an embargo on U.S. businesses and companies and U.S. individuals from visiting Cuba like you can elsewhere in the world?"
Indeed. Estimates from U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Cuba Policy Foundation place the cost of the Cuban embargo to the U.S. economy at between 1.2 billion and 4.84 billion dollars annually. A study by Texas A&M University calculated that 6,000 American jobs could be created by lifting the embargo.
For 24 years in a row, the United Nations General Assembly has adopted resolutions calling for an end to the U.S. embargo against Cuba, but to no avail.
Two months after the two neighbors resumed diplomatic ties, Cuban President Raul Castro urged the U.S. to lift the embargo, return the land it occupied as military base in Guantanamo Bay, and stop anti-government radio and television broadcasts as well as "subversive and destabilizing" programs.
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez told the UN General Assembly that "Any attempt to condition the lifting or modification of the blockade to the introduction of internal changes in Cuba will be in no way acceptable nor productive."
In April, during the opening of the Seventh Congress of Cuba's Communist Party (PCC), President Castro said all Cubans should know Washington's intention toward the government in Havana remain the same -- regime change.
"We must be more vigilant than ever, since the U.S. has changed its strategy, but not its objective," said Castro, warning "the methods used will be more difficult to counteract."
Ted Piccone, senior fellow with the Latin America Initiative at the Brookings Institution, highlighted the "longstanding feuds" between U.S. and Cuba, noting "it will take longer than a year or two to unwind the accumulated distrust and build support for this new normalcy."
Obama's Cuba visit is intended to make the normalization of U.S.-Cuban ties irreversible. Toward that goal, the two governments have also been having bilateral commission meetings on telecommunications, U.S. property claims, environmental protection and cooperation, human trafficking, human rights, migration, law enforcement, civil aviation, and direct mail.
However, this month, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to approve new restrictive measures against Cuba, on travel to Cuba for certain educational exchanges, importation of property confiscated by the Cuban government, and financial transactions with the Cuban military. What's more, restrictions on agricultural exports and travel to Cuba, which have been widely expected to be lifted, remain in place.
Archibald Ritter, research professor with Carleton University, believes there is a correlation between U.S. embargo and reforms in Cuba.
"If the embargo were to end quickly, that would encourage a much more rapid process of reform in Cuba," he said.
For Cuba, a country which has learned the dangers of relying heavily on a single country, be it the United States in the pre-revolutionary years, or Soviet Union, or Venezuela, as some analysts say, now that it's determined to update its economic model, it will take its time to diversify its economy and trading partners. "Cuba still has to decide how much it wants to open up its market in specific areas, and how much it wants to privatize that market," said Jay Brickman, vice-president of government services and Cuba service at Crowley Maritime.
Amid all the hustle and bustle from the in-streaming Americans trying to see the pristine island "frozen in time" before the big commercial chain stores spoil it, changes are coming. But this time, it's at Cuba's own pace.
LAGOS, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The Nigerian Navy (NN) on Tuesday restated commitment of the service to protecting the nation's maritime domain for better service delivery.
Chief of Naval Staff (CNS), Vice Adm. Ibok-Ete Ibas, said this when the Senate Committee on Navy paid him an oversight visit in Abuja, the nation's capital.
Ibas said the navy had recorded tremendous achievements principally in the area of maritime domain awareness, Policing operations, fleet recapitalization and training.
Others include: exercises and operations, personnel motivation, research and development and disposal of expired ammunition.
He expressed optimism that the ongoing integration with Falcon Eye project and Boat Tracker would ensure versatility in the NN operations.
The chief of naval staff said the vigorous patrol embarked upon by the NN had yielded positive result and much difference in its operations in recent times.
According to him, these operations enabled the Nigerian National Petroleum Cooperation (NNPC) to nominate 883 tankers to load about 426,290,855 barrels of crude oil and allied products.
Ibas said the navy had also adopted a double-pronged strategy toward acquiring ships to carry out its operations.
He said the navy could be more successful in countering the maritime crimes if given the necessary platforms and equipment. Enditem
Workers from China Electric Power Equipment and Technology Co. Ltd (CET) prepare a drone for stringing the wire between power gird towers across the Nile River at Beni Suef Governorate, Egypt, June 30, 2016. (Xinhua/Meng Tao)
by Wang Xue, Zheng Kailun
CAIRO, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Besides the Nile River, a Chinese worker was working on a power grid tower at the height of over 100 meters. Instead of the breathtaking landscape, he had to focus on those high-voltage power lines and the swaying spot he was sitting on.
Along the river, the Egypt EETC 500kV Transmission Lines Project (EETC Project), a cooperative one between China Electric Power Equipment and Technology Co. Ltd (CET) and Egypt is under construction.
Echoing China's "Belt and Road" Initiative, which is to promote strategic cooperation with overseas markets in all fields, Chinese companies nowadays are searching for more opportunities in Egypt and helping to improve people's life there by investing in fields like energy, infrastructure, high-tech sector, etc,.
"Thanks to the upgraded relations between China and Egypt and supports from both countries, it only took us several months to communicate the details of the project and then we signed the contract," Liu Guanghui, CET Middle East Chief Representative told Xinhua.
"As a subsidiary of State Grid Corporation of China, CET owns China's most advantageous technologies and most experienced workers in this field," he said, adding that "this is the first time for CET to operate a project concerning people's livelihood in this most populous country in the region and we have attached our greatest importance on it."
Liu told Xinhua that the over-650-million-dollar EETC Project, which covers almost the whole area of the Nile River delta, is the largest transmission lines project in Egypt's history.
Considering Egypt's urgent demands on power, the project will play a key role to improve the country's power system and boost economic development after it is completed 18 months later.
"I came here with over 500 Chinese colleagues in January, " Bai Lu, a 29-year-old Chinese worker, who manages the fieldwork team, told Xinhua.
A drone is used to help string the wire between power gird towers across the Nile River at Beni Suef Governorate, Egypt, June 30, 2016. (Xinhua/Meng Tao)
"The width of the river beside us is about 600 meters, we firstly built the towers and then our staffs climbed on them to string the lines," he said so to introduce the crossing river towers.
"In the heat of summer, Chinese staffers have to spend two hours to climb over 100 meters to the top of the tower every time they need to work on the lines," the young worker added.
Bai Lu also told Xinhua that his team is cooperating with Egyptian workers on the project. For most parts of the project, Egyptians help with the basic construction and the Chinese staffers focus on the project design, tower work and the most dangerous and high-tech parts of the grid construction.
"We have successfully made some technological breakthroughs in this area of river banks and large deserts. After finishing the news towers and the transmission lines, we will also help upgrade some parts of the old grid," another young worker with a safety hat named Li Yongli said.
Sitting under the tower, Li and others were enjoying their most precious relaxing time at noon.
Normally, the land surface temperature can be as high as over 50 degree Celsius, making aerial work really tough and risky.
Most of the Chinese workers would like to call their family far away or chat with each other beside the beautiful views during the hottest hours of a day.
"The tower is 175 meters high and 400 tons weight. To finish the project on schedule, every day we start to work from 3 a.m. till sunset, with three hours off at noon," Li told Xinhua.
"With better transmission efficiency and larger coverage, the new project, with other power stations also under construction, will for sure improve the power supply in Egypt," the Chinese young man said with a pride smile.
"Every tower is related to the life of all of the family here, I'm glad that we can make some change to the life of people," he added.
Presumptive Republican presidential candidateDonald Trump stands on stage with his wife Melania Trump following her address to delegates on the first day of the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2016 at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio. The Republican Party opened its national convention, kicking off a four-day political jamboree that will anoint billionaire Donald Trumpas its presidential nominee. / AFP PHOTO / Robyn BECK
CLEVELAND, the United States, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. Republican National Convention adopted the party's platform for the 2016 elections on Monday with rich Donald Trump style, vowing to lead a turnaround from the policies of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
"We believe in American exceptionalism," the 66-page document writes at the beginning, echoing the "America First" speech on foreign affairs by Trump during the primaries.
Claiming "America has been led in the wrong direction" under the Obama presidency, the GOP platform finds common grounds shared by the Republican establishment and the New York real estate mogul.
"Our enemies no longer fear us and our friends no longer trust us," the document laments, accusing that the Obama government has made U.S. economy "unnecessarily weak" and the U.S. standing in world affairs decline significantly. All are high-frequency sayings in the Trump campaign.
"In all of our country's history, there is no parallel to what President Obama and his former Secretary of State have done to weaken our nation," said the GOP's roadmap.
Moreover, the platform, viewed by Texas delegate David Barton as "the most conservative platform in modern history," resonates to Trump's tone while starkly contrasting with Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party when listing social policies.
On marriage, it said "we do not accept the Supreme Court's redefinition of marriage and we urge its reversal."
On abortion, it said, "We assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed."
The platform also seeks a repeal of the so-called "Obamacare," as "It weighs like the dead hand of the past upon American medicine."
Besides, on economic growth, the Republicans consider the establishment of a pro-growth tax code a moral imperative.
Following Trump on the United States' foreign trade, the platform calls for "better negotiated trade agreements that put America first."
On foreign policy, the GOP platform sees the Iran nuclear deal as a "non-binding" agreement for the future Republican president.
A hut made of straw to look like the hair of Donald Trump, sending a message about wealth inequality - Trump in his tower, the rest of us in a hut is viewed in Cleveland, Ohio on July 19, 2016. About 50,000 people are expected in Cleveland this week for the Republican National Convention, at which Donald Trump will be formally nominated to run for the US presidency in November. / AFP PHOTO / Nova SAFO
"The Republican Party's platform provides good insight into the direction the GOP is looking to take. This is particularly illuminating since Trump has been rather mum on policy issues on the campaign trail," a local media report commented.
Late in the deep night, Obama refuted in a letter emailed to Clinton's online supporters, saying "The Republicans will attack everything we stand for at their convention."
"The Republican convention will show how wrong the GOP's ideas are for Americans, and that Hillary is the president we need," said Obama.
However, though fiercely attacking the Obama government, the GOP platform did share with the Democrats on goals like keeping American military superiority in the world and securing the U.S. leadership in the Asian Pacific area, local analysts noted.
Trump is expected to be formally nominated as the party's standard-bearer during the four-day GOP convention ending Thursday.
By Xinhua writers Quan Xiaoshu & Yu Fei
BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- Are we alone? Scientists say they are on the cusp of answering the age-old question about extraterrestrial (ET) life.
"We are lucky to be in a special era, with the next generation of giant telescopes on the way. There may be some exciting discoveries in the following 10 to 20 years," says Mao Shude, director of the Center for Astrophysics of the Beijing-based Tsinghua University.
According to mainstream scientific opinion, it is possible that extraterrestrial life exists, as the Earth is not unique in the universe. Our galaxy has hundreds of billions of stars, many with solar-like planetary systems, and there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe. So it' s reasonable to infer that Earth-like planets might be common, and the universe could teem with life.
"I think primitive life is likely to be abundant, but intelligent life might be rarer," says Mao, also director of the Galaxy and Cosmology Division of the National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC), Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The next generation of giant telescopes might help astronomers resolve some long-standing issues, such as analyzing the spectrum of distant planets, making it possible to detect biomarkers of life.
Biomarkers are certain elements that might indicate the existence of life. An important biomarker, oxygen molecules, without supporting life, can only last for a short time compared with the 13.7 billion-year history of the universe.
Oxygen easily reacts with other elements, and Mars appears red as a result of oxidation. "If we find a lot of oxygen molecules in the atmosphere of an extraterrestrial planet, they are probably produced by life activities," Mao explains.
WILD IMAGINATION
The most common method of searching for extraterrestrial life is to search first for planets similar to Earth, with plenty of sunshine, liquid water and a protective atmosphere.
However, that method is constantly questioned as some speculate that life elsewhere in the universe might be quite different from that on Earth.
"We don't know how to start if we don' t know what kind of life we are looking for. At least, we know what conditions are needed for life on Earth," Mao says. "So scientists tend to search for planets around Sun-like stars and put forward the concept of the 'habitable zone' ."
The "habitable zone" is the distance from a star where a planet could have liquid water.
"Nature, however, has a much more wild imagination than we do. For example, whether life can exist in ice at extremely low temperatures is unknown to us," Mao says. "It' s easy for scientists to start with familiar conditions and then gradually expand the search to an unknown territory."
Over the past decade, astronomers around the world have identified more than 3,000 extra-solar planets. However, most are giant planets, probably composed of gas, because they are more easily detectable.
A few dozen are Earth-like planets, which are likely composed of silicate rocks or metals and may have water on them. "Astronomers first pick sample planets suitable for life, and then think about further study and analysis, or even communication with them," Mao says.
To further analyze the atmospheric composition of a planet, the telescope must be very sensitive to the sharp contrast of the light intensity between the star and the planet. The Earth is about one billionth of the Sun in brightness in the optical, a contrast still far beyond the range of current telescopes.
For more effective observation, astronomers are also striving for breakthroughs in another critical technology - adaptive optics.
When light from a star or any other astronomical object enters the Earth's atmosphere, it can be distorted by atmospheric turbulence, which can blur images produced by any telescope larger than tens of centimeters.
This annoyed Isaac Newton more than 300 years ago when he discovered that larger telescopes could not form clearer images due to atmospheric distortions.
But today, after years of development, many observatories around the world, including those with telescopes of 8 to 10 meters in diameter, are equipped with adaptive optics systems.
Adaptive optics is a technology that aims to correct the distortions induced by atmospheric turbulence. The system is mainly composed by three parts: a wavefront sensor, a deformable mirror and a real time controller. The wavefront sensor is like the eye of the system, and it measures the light distortions a few hundred or even thousand times in one second, so that the turbulence distortion almost looks like a cartoon played frame by frame to the system; the real time controller acts like a super fast brain, and it calculates how correction should be applied and sends commands to the deformable mirror; and finally, like the hand of the system, the deformable mirror actually carries out those commands, and changes its surface shape accordingly to correct the distortions before the arrival of the next command.
The next generation of ground-based telescopes, including the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) and the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), will have better adaptive optics systems, so they will be central to future observations, says Feng Lu, an associate researcher with the NAOC.
Compared with space telescopes, ground-based telescopes can be larger and connected to more instruments, and can work longer and look deeper into space. The adaptive optics technology will improve their resolution close to or even above space telescopes, making them capable of observation tasks previously impossible on the ground, such as tracking extra-solar planet candidates, Feng says.
For example, with the assistance of adaptive optics, TMT will have a resolving power and sensitivity much greater than the Hubble Space Telescope when it goes into use around mid-2020s. One of its major tasks will be to analyze the spectrum of extra-solar planets.
But the next generation of space telescopes will also revolutionize astronomy. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), to be launched by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 2017, is one of them.
Kepler, TESS' predecessor launched by NASA in 2009, is the world's first space observatory dedicated to the search for planets outside our solar system. So far, Kepler has confirmed 2,325 extra-solar planets, more than 70 percent of the total. Twenty-one of them are Earth-like, staying in habitable zone and within twice the size of Earth.
While both can monitor planetary transits, TESS is capable of carrying out all-sky surveys, while Kepler can only observe a small part of our region of the Milky Way.
"More importantly, TESS will look for extra-solar planets in orbit around the brightest stars, which will help analyze the physical nature of these planets. Kepler's planets are often around dim stars, which makes it difficult to carry out follow-up studies," Mao says.
"The number of planets that TESS will detect is not necessarily much more (than Kepler), but the quality will be more advanced."
by Zeng Fanhua & Zhangzhou / Guangming Online
Recently, Mr. Mirosaw Gajewski, Ambassador of the Republic of Poland to the People's Republic of China, talked about topics, including details of President Xi Jinpings visit to Poland last June, Poland-China relations, Belt and Road initiative and Polish companies development in China, in an exclusive video interview with Guangming Online (http://en.gmw.cn/).
As for Poland-China relations, Ambassador Gajewski pointed out the very high dynamic in Poland-China relations over the past year. The two countries have witnessed exchanges of visits by Presidents and Foreign Ministers, as well as a number of other visits, creating a very good political climate for the development of their relations. President Xis visit to Poland will promote further cooperation in new areas.
When talking about President Xi Jinpings visit to Poland last June, Mr. Gajewski shared some interesting details, for example a performance by a Polish song and dance group singing Chinese songs in Chinese for President Xi and the Chinese First Lady. One of the most iconic pictures from the visit will be that of the Chinese President tasting Polish apples. The presidential visit will help Polish apples, which are the tastiest, cheapest and healthiest in Europe, to get access to the Chinese market, the Ambassador said.
According to Mr. Gajewski, the Chinese Belt and Road initiative and Polish national development plans can provide opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation between the two countries. Polish and Chinese companies can work together along the Belt and Road, furthermore, this initiative can also boost cooperation in people-to-people exchanges, environmental protection and the promotion of eco-civilization.
The Belt and Road initiative is a bridge for strategic and long-term integration of China and Europe, which not only includes economic component, but also is an opportunity to develop cooperation in culture, tourism, students exchanges as well as security and stability along the Belt and Road, Mirosaw Gajewski said. Poland welcomes Chinas contribution to the security and stability along the Belt and Road.
The Polish Ambassador also discussed the assistance provided by the Embassy to Polish companies entering the Chinese market. Polish commercial offices in China provides support and any kind of assistance needed to Polish companies present in Chinese market, he said.
Asked about problems that Polish enterprises encounter in China, Mr. Gajewski said that they are usually rooted in lack of knowledge of local realities. One of the Embassys tasks is providing information on Chinas legal system to Polish companies. In the Ambassadors view, well-educated persons who can speak both Polish and Chinese and are familiar with realities and business practices in both countries will be instrumental in helping Polish companies do business in China.
(Source: gmw.cn)
ANKARA, July 17, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Police guard outside the building of Turkish general staff in Ankara, Turkey, July 17, 2016. Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Saturday that at least 161 people, including 20 coup plotters, were killed and 1,440 others wounded in the coup attempt that swept mostly Istanbul and Ankara, the national capital. According to the Interior Ministry, at least 1,563 army personnel were detained across Turkey. The commanders of air staff, naval staff and the second chief of general staff were saved from the Akinci Base on Saturday. (Xinhua/Zou Le)
I just want to know why
I just want to know why this man killed my son just so, Joseph told Newsday. Right now, that is what the whole village wants to know, Joseph told Newsday yesterday at the Forensic Science Centre in St James. She said that Michael was heading to his home near the Guanapo Dump last Friday at about 9.30 am, when he got into an argument with a 25-year-old man.
The argument quickly became physical and during the fracas, the 25-year-old man stabbed Joseph in the neck. He died on the spot. Police and emergency services were immediately called and officers of the Northern Division immediately responded.
The 25-year-old man was then taken into custody and is currently at the Arima Police Station.
Newsday was told that Joseph was a labourer who worked for a scrap metal dealer in the area.
Margaret said she had no idea why the man would want to stab her son. The whole village is vexed right now, she said, you see incidents happen, and sometimes nobody knows why.
I just want justice for my son. An autopsy on Josephs body is expected to be done today at the Forensic Science Centre in Federation Park.
Man promises to pull himself up
San Fernando Senior Magistrate Nanette Forde-John made the order yesterday after Boodoo pleaded guilty to unlawfully and maliciously causing damage to the windscreen of a car, property of Bertrand Persad. Additionally, the magistrate fined Boodoo $1000 for the offence. PC Ryan Ramdath laid the charge.
After he entered the guilty plea, court prosecutor Cleydon Seedan told the court that on Thursday last, at about 9 pm, Persad and Boodoo were at the car park of a restaurant at SS Erin Road, Debe, where an argument ensued and Boodoo began pounding the windscreen of Persads car.
Yesterday Boodoo, who represented himself, admitted to Forde-John that at the time he was under the influence of alcohol.
He further admitted that he was unable to recall most of what the argument was about. He repeatedly apologised for his actions and added he has to pull himself up. Failure to pay the fine and compensation within 21 days will result in Boodoo serving 30 days in prison
Mechanic on ammo, weed charges
Cpl Emrith of the Gasparillo Police Station laid the charges. Police officers allegedly executed a search warrant at a house and found the illegal items. Both charges were laid indictably and so Sirjusingh was not called upon to enter any pleas yesterday. Attorney Lester Charriah, who represented Sirjusingh, told the court that his client has five pending matters, all of which resulted from one incident.
The attorney also made an application for disclosure as it relates to the two new charges yesterday.
After the magistrate granted the $35,000 bail to be approved by a Clerk of the Peace, she adjourned the matter to August 15.
Fuad Abu Bakr stabbed
Newsday understands that Bakr was outside his home in Diego Martin, at about 10pm, when he was approached by an unknown man who was wielding a knife.
Bakr told police that the man stabbed him and he (Bakr) ran to a neighbours house to get assistance.
He was rushed to the West Shore Medical Complex where he was treated.
Bakr took to social media to assure the public that he was safe and sound. He thanked the Almighty for life and thanked all the persons who helped him during the attack.
Thank God for life everyday, he said. I have a minor injury to my hand. I live life with love.
You never know when its time to go. Just Saturday I hugged some of my workers. I laughed as they squirmed and laughed. There are crazy people walking among us.
Money and life cannot be equated.
Live better T&T, live better please.
Thank you to all for the concerns and care,
Elderly businessman robbed of $60,000
According to reports, Ramnanlal Patel, 79, of Cascade, withdrew the cash, which he placed in a bag, and was walking along Chacon Street to the Trinity Cathedral Car Park.
According to police reports, while attempting to get into his vehicle, he was approached by a man who snatched the bag and ran away. Patel raised an alarm but the bandit was not found.
A report was made to the Portof- Spain CID and officers secured CCTV footage from the area which, they hope, will be used to identify the suspect.
A distraught Patel was interviewed by investigators and contacted relatives who comforted him following the incident.
Gran Couva woman raped
According to reports, the victim was at home at about 10 am when her ex-boyfriend, who is 37 years old, asked the woman to use her bathroom. When she opened the door, the man reportedly began struggling with her, then proceeded to rape her.
The woman made a report at the Gran Couva Police Station and the suspect was arrested.
The victim was medically examined by a District Medical Officer and investigations are continuing.
Attorney: Justice served
At the end of the inquest, the Coronor will make a determination on whether or not the woman should face a criminal charge for Sharmas death. Attorney Fareed Ali yesterday confirmed that the woman was released after spending six days in a holding cell at the Arouca Police station.
According to reports, at about 11 pm last week Tuesday, the couple was heard arguing at their Bamboo Settlement #1 home, after witnesses saw them drinking heavily earlier in the day.
When the arguing subsided, a neighbour checked at the home, only to see Sharma entering the living room clutching his chest and bleeding from a stab wound. Sharma later collapsed and died in the house.
When police officers were called the woman who also suffered injuries was taken to the Eric Williams Medical Science Complex in Mt Hope where she was treated and discharged. She was then taken to the Arouca Police Station where she assisted police with their investigation.
In a statement sent by Ali yesterday, the attorney praised the justice system. Justice has been served. She deserved to be released. Sharma subjected her to untold abuses through their four-year relationship - the attorney claimed.
Trini elected by Lions International
The election took place at the 99th Lions Club International Annual Convention, held in Fukuoka, Japan, from June 24 to 28. She was endorsed by the Lions of the English- speaking Caribbean, the area known as Multiple District 60 (MD60), extending from Guyana and Suriname to Jamaica and the Cayman Islands.
The election means that Moore will sit on the board of directors for the next two years, working to set policies and programmes for the 44,000 plus Lions clubs worldwide, including 29 in TT . She is the first Caribbean female to hold this position, said a media release.
Moore has served for 36 years as a member of the Lions organisation. Over the years, she has held several prestigious positions, including president of the Arima Santa Rosa Lions Clubs and District Governor in 2010-2011. During her Lions career she has won several accolades including Lioness of the Year, Lion of the Year, the Club President Excellence Award and the District Governor Team Excellence Award.
Moore holds a BSc (Hons) in Natural Sciences, a Diploma in Education, a Masters in Education and a Diploma in Airline Management.
She has had a successful career in the education sector and in the private sector she has held managerial positions in the areas of human resource training and customer relations. Since November, she has been a member of the board of governors of the University of Trinidad and Tobago.
Moore and her spouse, Rudy have three children and two granddaughters. Moore is highly regarded by her fellow Lions. Terence Boswell Inniss, of the Port-of-Spain Central Lions Club, who served as an international director from 1996- 1998, says in the release: Nicolin has been at the forefront of leadership
LIVING IN FEAR
We are calling for a lockdown of the hotspots in the Enterprise area to protect innocent citizens living under siege there and to protect the lives and livelihood of the people of Chaguanas and Central Trinidad, said the Chaguanas Chamber of Commerce in a media release yesterday. We also call on the Commissioner of Police to immediately increase visible policing in the Enterprise and Chaguanas areas so that our citizens can feel safer and especially- protected during this period of uncertainty. Alexis fell to a hail of bullets at his Enterprise business place late Sunday afternoon but not before he was able to kill one of his assailants who moments earlier alighted a vehicle with guns blazing.
Another man identified as Kevin Escayag of San Fernando, said to be one of Alexis customers, also died in the shooting. Escayays four-year-old son who was on the premises was also severely wounded. (See Page 8A) The Chaguanas Chamber also lamented the bloodshed has come at a time when the leadership at the polices Central Division is in transition. The body called for all necessary support to be given to Ag Sr Supt Florice Hodge-Griffith, holding the reins now that Snr Supt Jason Ford has proceeded on two years leave, so that she can take firm and necessary action to halt the alarming rise of crime in Chaguanas. SWIFT ACTION NEEDED The Minister of National Security and the Commissioner of Police must act swiftly and take a tough stance to quell any uprising amongst gangs, the Chamber said. We would wish that all concerned put the best needs of the community first, to honour the right to life and liberty of all persons and to preserve peace at a time when the country is already facing difficult social and economic times, the Chamber stated in its release.
The people of Enterprise have been living in fear for too long as a result of the ongoing gang warfare there and the murder of Mr Alexis can only increase these fears and tension, the body said.
The Chaguanas Chamber of Commerce is horrified at the brutal murders in Enterprise on Sunday which resulted in the deaths of Mr Alexis and two others. Our community and our country must not be allowed to fall into the hands of criminals, nor must we be crippled by war amongst them. Residents and regular commuters through Enterprise Chaguanas, expressed similar sentiments, saying that they are afraid that the killings could escalate into an allout gang war. Long-time Enterprise resident, Dennis Peters told Newsday yesterday, Ive lived in this part of Chaguanas for over 20 years and Ive never seen anything quite like this. My children grew up here and now Im afraid to tell them to come back to visit me. Its really very sad that these young guys dont know how to live with one another in peace. Another Enterprise resident who preferred to remain anonymous, said that Robocop became a folk-hero to the community as he (Alexis) supported many families financially he was often the subject of fear by many residents.
The resident went on to say that Robocops death could cause unrest in the embattled community and urged the protective services to do whatever is necessary to maintain law and order.
TAXI DRIVERS UNAFRAID Despite the Sunday slayings, several taxi-drivers say that they are unfazed by recent violence in the area and claim that they are not in any immediate danger.
Ive been working this route for a few years well now and there have been dangerous times in the past, but Im not really afraid of anything like that. Those gunmen know who they are coming for so Im not afraid. As residents tried to come to terms with Sundays violent incident, there was a noticeable absence of street vendors yesterday, while certain business places had their locks secured bolted in place. There also seemed to be an absence of police patrols along the Enterprise main road.
Alexiss murder prompted Chaguanas Mayor Gopaul Boodhan, as well as Chaguanas East MP, Fazal Karim also to call for immediate action by the Ministry of National Security which included the establishment of an Army/ Police post in the troubled district.
Boodhan also noted that an unsettling calm seemed to have descended on Enterprise, adding that lives are destroyed and citizens are being affected as they go about their daily lives due to the growing incidents in the area. I would like to publicly appeal to residents in Enterprise and adjacent communities to co-operate with law enforcement officers as they conduct inquires and patrol the area to maintain peace and order, he said. Boodhan continued: I also urge the Ministry of National Security and the Minister (of National Security to deploy the necessary resources to keep the situation under control and also for the establishment of an Army/ Police post as crisis situations demand crisis action. Chaguanas East MP Fazal Karim while endorsing Boodhans call for an Army/Police post, observed that National Security Minister Edmund Dillon had shot down that proposal when it was raised in Parliament by Karim himself.
I have a made a request before to the honourable Minister of National Security for the construction of a permanent police station in the Enterprise, Karim said. I subsequently raised the question in Parliament and was told and answered by the Minister of National Security that on the advice of the Commissioner of Police, that it was felt that a police station in Enterprise was not necessary at this point in time. I wish to state that I totally disagree with that answer and within the recent past and particularly from yesterday, it has made it even more necessary for us to have a permanent police presence, the MP said.
Hitmans relatives: We will not fear
We dont fear, said Peter Sharpe, brother of the deceased alleged hitman. We come from a community that doesnt fear.
We are a Muslim family so we will leave all things in the hands of Allah. We have and will not fear, Sharpe said during an interview with Newsday yesterday at the Forensic Science Centre in St James. Because no pathologist was present, no autopsy was done and all have been rescheduled for later this week.
Sharpe described Hamza as a good person. He was a good fellah but just did not like advantage, said Sharpe. He was a straightforward guy. I dont know exactly what caused the rift between him and Mr Alexis, but I understand that Robocop had interfered with him before. In self defence he hit Robocop with a shovel, but that incident took place a long time ago. I really dont know what happened this time on Sunday. Thomas said Sharpe was a religious person. He recalled that from an early age he frequented the mosque near his Caroni home, sharing readings from the Holy Quran. He was the only fellah his age that did what an Imam could do. He started at a very young age. He used to go to the Caroni mosque, then he went to Munroe Road Mosque, Thomas said.
Newsday understands that none of the pathologists were available yesterday to conduct the autopsies, as pathologist Dr Valery Alexandrov was out of the country and pathologist Dr Eastlyn Mc Donald-Burris was on leave. Alexis and Sharpe were among at least five persons killed over the weekend.
Alexis two wives, along with other family members were seen entering and exiting Forensics, but refused to speak to reporters.
Nothing but brotherly love
The fact that tens of thousands of Jamaicans live comfortably in TT, Rowley said in a statement during his ongoing visit to Jamaica, moving in and out without hassle, means the glass is more than half full. The statement was made at the opening of bilateral talks between Rowley and Holness at the Office of the Prime Minister in Kingston. Rowley said that 97 percent of Jamaicans who come to TT, did so with no problem.
The three percent who have some issues, those issues must and will be dealt with dignity and we have committed ourselves to do that at the level of Caricom, Rowley said. The TT Prime Minister is on a four-day visit against the background of a report made to Caricom by a number of Jamaican nationals who claim they have been wrongfully denied entry into TT.
Meanwhile, Holness in brief welcome remarks said he was happy that Rowley accepted his invitation (to visit Jamaica). His presence, Holness said, will enable them to address the issues (including immigration) that may affect relations between the two countries. The fact that over 13,000 TT nationals travelled to Jamaica in 2015 and over 15,000 Jamaicans to TT, Holness said, clearly indicates our nationals have accepted the vision of those before us who created the architecture that is Caricom. Regional integration, he said, must not be a theoretical concept in the minds of policy makers and together, as leaders, they must finds ways to facilitate hassle free travel that would be relevant to the ordinary man- in-the-street, otherwise as leaders they would have failed.
Responding to the welcome, Rowley said, We in Trinidad and Tobago need to put our credentials on the table. Let me put them now. Caricom has required countries in the region take steps, Rowley said, to ensure all people crossing all borders are treated with dignity. If there are arrivals, which for one reason or the other do not qualify for entry, that is part of the process. What we as politicians need to do is to ensure that our people understand the basis on which we can visit each other, Rowley said.
As sovereign states working within Caricom, Rowley said, we do have some significant element of freedom of movement but there are restrictions. That qualification takes place at the border. It was likely, he added, that some citizens who may not meet certain requirements will be denied entry from time to time at borders.
It is for us to let our population know that and also to look askance at those who will attempt to intervene on behalf of those persons and create an environment of distrust or anger where such sentiments are not really required, he said. Noting that TT was called to explain its conduct at its borders at the level of the recent Caricom Heads of Government meeting in Guyana, Rowley said, we have done so. He said TT is taking steps to ensure there is no situation where, we can be justifiably accused of not being able to respond appropriately if a person or persons have to be treated with a referral or a denial of entry. This includes taking steps to ensure the necessary training and sensitisation at the level of immigration officers.
Contending that leaders ought to clear the way for easier movement of people, goods and services, and better investment opportunities, Rowley said, Investments from Trinidad and Tobago into Jamaica ought not to be seen as anything else other than welcomed foreign investment. Local businessmen, he said, go out of their way to attract foreign investments from Jamaica and further afield to TT.
If there are sentiments where TT products are to be treated in an unwelcomed way, he said, one has to ask who will be the beneficiaries of that? Where will that lead us? We see Caricom as our market and we want you to see (TT) as your (Jamaica) market, as part of Caricom, Rowley said, adding, What we need to do is to maximise this little market of ours and one day go beyond this little market as some of our companies are doing. Looking inwards and attempting to chastise local manufacturers in anyway, Rowley said, serves no purpose for the interest of the wider populations of TT and Jamaica.
Garcia concerned about GATE leak
He said the ministry was still awaiting Cabinets decision on the recommendations put forward by the GATE task force which was formed to give recommendations on the future of the programme.
Despite this, Garcia reassured the student population that the recommendations of the task force were not yet final.
It is common knowledge that there are inefficiencies in the GATE programme, and the ministry saw it fit to embark on an exercise to review the process. We needed to be presented with feasible solutions, hence, the production of a report was commissioned.
The report has been submitted and is yet to be considered by the ministrys higher authority. As it stands at present, any views on the issue are solely those of the report makers, and not the ministry as no final decision has been made. Garcia said Cabinet would consider the report, both its merits and demerits, and decide on the best way forward to all seeking higher education as part of the larger mandate of ensuring education for all.
Some of the students who have been utilising the GATE programme are unsure about their future studies, worried that they would not be able to afford their tuition.
Right now my daughter is thinking about dropping out because without this programme, she would not be able to afford the fees to continue with her studies, one concerned mother told the Newsday.
A 16-person task force, chaired by management consultant Errol Simms, had been appointed by Cabinet to investigate the programmes operations over the past 11 years.
The investigation was to determine whether the programme was making a significant contribution to the nations economy.
The task force was charged with finding ways to reduce the cost of GATE to the State, and to recommend what programmes and which institutions should qualify.
Boy, 5, undergoes surgery
Newsday understands that a single bullet penetrated the childs abdomen but because of swift response by a medical team, doctors were able to stop the internal bleeding through an emergency surgery which has resulted in the boys life being saved.
Newsday understands that the boy was struck by a high calibre bullet which caused some internal injuries, but doctors were hopeful that he will survive but will be constantly monitored at the childrens hospital at the EW MSC.
Kirschard was in company with his father Kevin Escayg 43, at project manager of Macoya a car wash belonging to Selwyn Robocop Alexis 50, on Sunday afternoon.
Escayg had gone to the car wash to meet with Alexis who was considered one of his close associates.
At about 4.30 pm a silver Nissan vehicle with a group of men began firing at Alexis and Escayg.
One of the bullets struck little Kirschard but Alexis and Escayg were not so fortunate as they were both felled by a hail of gunfire.
A third man identified as Thomas Sharpe alias Hamza 32, of Crown Trace, Enterprise was also found dead at the scene.
Police believe that Sharpe was with the group of shooters who killed Alexis and Escayg. Following the brazen gun attack, a group calling themselves the unruly gang have been taking credit for the shooting deaths.
Hours after Alexis was killed, a team of officers from the Central Division led by Senior Superintendent Jayson Forde raided Alexis home at Railway Road, Enterprise for arms and ammunition but nothing illegal was found. However, during an early morning exercise yesterday nine persons from the Enterprise area were detained in connection with the murders, the nine were being quizzed at the Cageyness police station yesterday.
Police investigators told Newsday that officers of the Inter Agency Task Force (IATF), the Cageyness CID, the Central Division Task Force, Homicide Officers as well as other officers have been mandated to do static patrols, foot patrols and round the clock patrols because of a concern that the death of Alexis will result in further bloodshed in the Enterprise area.
One of the detainees is an Imam from the Enterprise area.
Missing teens found
Yesterday at 12.31 pm one of Bartletts relatives posted on her Facebook page: Want to give all honour and glory to God... And a special thanks to all of you friends, family and well-wishers for all the support and aid in assisting me in locating my daughters..... Their (sic) has been found and seems to be in good health.... Again thank you all from the bottom of my heart it could have been done without all of you all support and assistance. Speaking with Newsday yesterday, one of Toussaints relatives said the family was happy the search is over.
However Newsday was also told that Toussaint had indicated to investigators that she preferred not to return home but to be placed at a home for girls.
On July 9, the two friends attended a Brain Cooler fete at a popular liming spot in Gulf City Mall, La Romaine but never returned to their respective homes in Gasparillo and Tarodale, Ste Madeleine causing panic among relatives. The pictures of the girls were posted on Facebook and relatives asked the public for their assistance in locating them.
Two days after they were reported missing, the pictures of the two friends were posted on Facebook saying that they were safe and not in any danger.
A voice note was sent out by one of the girls saying that she would only return home when she was ready. In a subsequent interview with one of Toussaints relatives, Newsday was told that the teen, a student of the Pleasantville Secondary School, was a habitual runaway although she had undergone counselling sessions several times
As a native Hoosier, I feel like I am in the unique position to express both sadness that the hateful, enemy-of-all-women Mike Pence will (presumably) be Donald Trump's running mate in the 2016 election, but also great joy that he will be out of my home state and ceasing to make us look bad. Being saddled with the dying city of Gary is bad enough.
As Samantha Bee said, "Indiana hates Mike Pence as much as Indiana Jones hates snakes." And it's true. The Indiana Governor is so out-of-touch that in a 1999 op-ed he wrote that Disney's Mulan was a ploy to get women to enlist in the military, describing it as "mischievous liberal propaganda." About as mischievous as, say, trying to mandate funerals for aborted fetuses. Pence also claimed in a 2001 essay that "despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn't kill. In fact, two out of every three smokers does not die from a smoking related illness." Meaning: one in three smokers does die from a smoking related illness, which seems like a pretty high number to me, but you know, I'm not in line for the presidency or anything.
In summary: Mike Pence is somehow even crazier than other notable, absolutely out-of-their-mind Indiana natives like both Michael and La Toya Jackson and Axl Rose. Hands down zanier and more of a bigot than Red Skelton.
We don't have the best legacy in Indiana, but we do have Plan-It-X records, Bloomington and Indianapolis, the Hoosier National Forest and Clifty Falls State Park, Larry Bird and Brendan Frasier.
That Mike Pence will be added to Indiana's legacy, instead of written from history as the terrible, bumbling governor he is, is a regional tragedy, and sadly,on track to become a national one.
Farm workers protest for back pay
They also protested, what they said, is the failure of Agriculture Minister, Clarence Rambharat, to take action to secure the Mora Valley Farm and its workers and to protect the remaining number of Buffalypso.
Maharaj spoke with reporters while a handful of protestors stood behind him.
He said, We are here to highlight to the national community, the failure of the Minister of Agriculture to live up to his promises, made on June 14, to deal with the outstanding back pay (and) outstanding annual vacation leave for these workers; his failure to make these workers permanent employees of the Ministry of Agriculture; his failure to deal with the health and safety issues and his failure to put measures in place to help save the Buffalypso an animal that is unique to Trinidad and Tobago, and an animal where we have the last head of 1000 remaining.
The animals are starving; we have appealed to the ministry, but they have turned a blind eye. Maharaj said, that about two months ago, someone entered the farm with a cutlass and threatened the manager.
He called for security arrangements to be improved.
He said, to date, the Agriculture Ministry has not addressed their concerns.
Clico Policyholders feel betrayed
In a statement, CPG president Peter Permell claimed, the so-called bailout plan for depositors at Clico, which Imbert recently announced will deal a devastating blow to retirees and other persons on fixed incomes.
He alleged the Governments insensitive approach to this matter is also a complete deviation from the humane rescue initiative of the former Peoples National Movement (PNM) government.
Mickela Panday sad over UNC eviction from Rienzi
The All Trinidad General Workers Trade Union (ATGWTU) has given the UNC until July 31, to vacate the premises after not seeing eye to eye with new arrangements including the jump in rental from $2,500 to $25,000. Union officials reported that before 2012, UNC paid the small stipend and before that enjoyed the free use of office space at the facility.
Panday told Newsday, I think your base is your base and Rienzi Complex to the UNC, whether you like it or not, is what Balisier House is to the PNM (Peoples National Movement). To simply disregard this, you can build, you can grow, you can modernise, you can do all those things by staying with your base and where your liver string is buried. She said she was not surprised at the turn of events but instead saddened.
According to Panday, over the last six years, Rienzi Complex has become more symbolic than functioning and just like the building, the party too has developed into a shell and graveyard. She described the latest development as a disappointment and wonders why Persad- Bissessar has not yet issued a statement on the matter. The party needs to really evaluate and make a decision where they are going, she said.
Recalling her days as a child running in and out of the building, Panday told Newsday that Rienzi Complex means nothing to Persad- Bissessar and her current executive as they are not attached as the grassroot supporters are.
They dont have that love and connection for Rienzi Complex.
On a personal level I grew up there.
At Rienzi there was always some Indian dance class, a singing competition, or something happening there. She thinks that the rank and file of UNC have been disrespected, discarded and kicked to the curb once again. In a statement to the media yesterday, ATGWTU president general Nirvan Maharaj outlined the details leading up to the unions decision to finally issue an eviction notice to the party.
With regard to the rent increase, Maharaj said he held a meeting with party chairman David Lee, MP Rudranath Indarsingh and Rajindra Mohan - ATGWTUs general secretary/ legal counsel.
Maharaj said the meeting lasted 15 minutes as the UNC representatives indicated that they were not ready to meet the unions terms for the continued rental of office space.
According to Maharaj, by their actions, they behaved as though it had a divine right to occupy the said premises. He went on to accuse the UNC of never paying for electricity, water, air condition or even toiletries during their tenancy and repairing the damage that was done to the car park. Maharaj said the union had no other choice but to ask them to leave.
Since 2012, the UNC has been a month to month tenant of the union and was allowed leeway in the matter because of the historical dynamics of the unique relationship both parties enjoyed even from the days of the ULF (United Labour Front) in the hope that there could be a resolution which never happened, Maharaj said.
What you need to know about the Octagon Art Festival on Sunday in Ames
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Heres what the abandoned Red Zone of Fukushima looks like years after 2011
While most people visit a country to see its sight and sounds, Malaysian photographer Keow Wee Loong chose an unexpected tourist destination the Fukushima exclusion zone in Japan.
(Article by Mei Mei Chu)
Thats right, the town that suffered the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. Located only an hour and a half away from Tokyo, Fukushima was once a popular tourist destination with its hot spring villages (onsen) and traditional kokeshi dolls. The 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant triple meltdown devasted the affected towns into a ghost town. 470,000 people were evacuated from the area. They dropped everything and left immediately, leaving their possessions behind. To protect people from radiation poisoning, the government designated a 20KM radius around the power plant that is until now still prohibited without a special permit from the local council.
Keow snuck into the Fukushima Exclusion Zone with a Japanese friend and photographed the eerie scenes of the abandoned town. The photos, reminiscent of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, are haunting. All the items, from parked cars to half-folded laundry, are still exactly where they left them five years ago.
Not many people [have] seen this town for the last 5 years [Its] like it vanished I can find food, money, gold, laptops and other valuables in the red zone Im [amazed] that nobody looted this town clean. Unlike Chernobyl [where] the entire town [had] been looted clean, Keow said in his Facebook post.
It was as if time stood still.
The radiation levels are still very high in the Red Zone. Keow could feel it as soon as he crossed the borders. When I entered the red zone, I could feel a burning sensation in my eyes and thick chemical smell in the air, he said.
In the photos, Keow is seen wearing a full-face gas mask, gloves, hoodie, shorts, and sandals. His friend wore a cap, face mask, hoodie, long pants, and shoes.
The photos have gone viral on Facebook since it was published on Sunday. While many are in awe of Keows photos, the other camp is horrified by his stunt. Angry commenters say his action is irresponsible and risky not only to his own health but to the health of his family and those he comes in contact with. On top of that, they said he, as a visitor to the country, broke the law when he entered it illegally.
**[Update 12/6/2016] As the virality of Keows photos reached international shores, people living in Fukushima are offended by it. The Fukushima nuclear accident and how it has affected the locals and their livelihood is an issue close to their hearts. For them, breaking into the site was a very insensitive and rude action. Explaining that the photos are a misrepresentation of the Fukushima community, they questioned how he could blatantly disrespect the Fukushima community and the lives and livelihoods that were lost. One angry commenter described his act as an exploitation of the Fukushima prefecture and its people for his own agenda.
**[Update 14/6/2016] As someone living in Fukushima, I think we (sic) can speak for all of us when I say that we are upset that this man illegally entered [the area]. Not only is what he did illegal, but beyond disrespectful to victims of the disaster. Additionally, his post is full of misinformation about the disaster, radiation, and much more. The spread of incorrect information is exactly what the people of Fukushima have struggled with, and are continuing to fight against, says 23-year-old Emily Liew, a Malaysian who has lived in Fukushima for a year as an Assistant Language Teacher.
There is also concerns the photos are encouraging others to engage in the risky behaviour as people are seen tagging their friends in the photos and commenting that they too want to visit Fukushima. Some have gone to the extent of reporting his photo album to the authorities and Facebook. At publishing time, Keow is barred on Facebook for inflicting violence.
We spoke to Keow to understand why he did this, his fears of radiation poisoning, and peoples criticism of him.
Why did you go to the Fukushima Exclusion Zone of all places?
Since young, Ive always wanted to see what a ghost town would look like. I wanted to see the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant disaster. And as a photographer, I wanted to capture what I could and share it with the world as not many photographers have access to these places.
Werent you worried about the radiation?
I was just going there for a day, so I wasnt too worried about it. During my research, safety information stated that it is okay to be there for no longer than a day. Besides, there were many policemen and Tepco (Tokyo Electric Power Company) employees working in the area too. Residents are granted a visitor pass every month so they can return home to clean up for five hours. Tepco employees go there every weekend to remove radioactive waste.
What preparation or safety precautions did you do before entering the Red Zone?
I wanted to purchase a safety suit in Japan but I lost all my cash and credit cards in Tokyo. I was literally left penniless. So I had to use whatever I had on me. But I couldnt abandon the Fukushima project because I had lost too much. It was a do or die situation. Most of my trip is self-funded and heavily relied on the sale of my photos to foreign press. I needed to go on with the project and use those photos to recuperate my losses.
Did you go for safety checks after leaving the Red Zone?
Yes. There is a safety booth at the Yellow Zone where I went for a check before leaving. I went for a scan and was rated normal. They said I was fine as I did not overstay. So it (the visit to Fukushima) wont bring any serious health hazards.
People are angry at your stunt. They say you are being irresponsible, especially now that you have a risk of contaminating your friends and family.
I would say that these people understand nothing. The air in Japan in contaminated, the food supply in the Pacific Ocean is contaminated, yet the Japanese are consuming it every day. These people look at radiation as if it is some sort of virus like Ebola or SARS that will kill others upon contact. The contamination I had is nothing more than people receiving radiotherapy for cancer. People wont die or have health issues when I touch them. Its like you wont die from entering X-Ray two or three times a day. The human body is not as weak as we think. We are exposed to radiation every day but we dont even know it.
What is more dangerous that me is (sic) secondhand smoke or fried foods that Malaysians consume every day. These people are just too paranoid and freaked out.
(Editors note: A reader who works in the medical healthcare field dealing with x-ray radiation and radiation safety has informed us that radiation is not like eating bad food. It stays with you & depending on the severity of the exposure, may cause damage on a molecular level that is not visible for many years.)
Look, I am a photographer and photography is my job. A lot of these commentators say I am seeking publicity. Thats a stupid thing to say because as photographers, of course we want our photos to be published! Every photo published is a sale for us. Without publicity, we cant survive as a photographer. Whats the point of capturing the images and not publish it?! How could a photographer survive without the publicity of his or her work? What I did is not a stunt. I just did what I needed to do as a photographer to capture images, to document my journey, and share it with the world. Most of my photos are published worldwide in Europe, China, US, and most countries in Southeast Asia.
I am only doing this because it is not something everyone can do. If everyone can afford to go to Japan and visit Fukushima, then there is no need for me to be there. People can just go there and see it for themselves.
Would you recommend this to anyone else?
No, of course. There is a big risk of getting arrested, navigation is tricky and you might get lost. You have to be prepared not to have children for the next two years, just to be safe. You need to put on a full gas mask to avoid inhaling the air into your organs, even if you dont have a proper protection suit.
**[Update 12/7/2016]
Some have commented that you broke in illegally.
I walked into the area through the woods, and that to me wasnt breaking in.
But you have said yourself there is a special permit by the local council needed to enter.
Yes, there is a special permit that needs to be approved by a local council, it takes two to three weeks. I wanted to apply for the permit and had allocated 300,000 yen (USD2918.54) to cover the cost of the application and to stay in Fukushima throughout the waiting period. However, I lost all 300,000 yen and my cards when I was in Tokyo. I made a police report, stayed for a week hoping for someone to return the money but it didnt happen.
So, it wasnt that I didnt want to follow the protocol, I couldnt afford to anymore. I had lost too much to give up on this project.
Did you think it would be insensitive or disrespectful to the locals?
To me, I was just photographing, doing my job to show people what had happened in Fukushima. There are many photographers who have done the exact same thing (of photographing the Red Zone). Would it then mean that people with the permit are sensitive, but because I didnt have a permit I am insensitive? I dont believe I was being rude, I didnt break any glasses, loot, or remove anything from the area.
People working in Fukushima say the photos give a false impression of Fukushima as the towns outside the restricted area are healthy, happy, and beautiful. Did you photograph other parts of Fukushima?
I only visited the restricted area. I didnt go to the central town as I couldnt afford to. Besides, that was not the story that I wanted to cover. I was there to cover the main story (of the aftermath of the nuclear disaster).
You seem to have angered a community of people in Fukushima.
If the residents of Fukushima were offended, then I sincerely apologise. I did not mean any offense.
I just wanted to tell the story and show whats happening in Fukushima itself. There are many Japanese people who had entered the Red Zone the same way I did, the only difference is, they go undetected. (Editors note: A Japanese friend accompanied Keow through the woods into the Red Zone). My downfall is my photos went viral.
Again, if the residents of Fukushima are hurt from what I did, I humbly apologise.
These photos are published with full permission from the photographer. To see the full album, go to Keow Wee Loongs Facebook page.
Read more at: //zafigo.com
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Obama administration is ignoring evidence that Iran is buying nuclear and missile materials
(NationalSecurity.news) The White House is brushing aside new evidence from German intelligence reports that indicate Iran is speeding up efforts to obtain key nuclear materials, despite the accord signed with the U.S. and other nations last year, a U.S. official told the Washington Free Beacon.
In a recent report Germanys internal intelligence agency concluded that sources have witnessed extensive Iranian attempts to acquire illicit materials, especially goods that can be used in the field of nuclear technology, according to the report.
The report appears to indicate that Iran is not living up to its pledges made in the Obama administration-initiated nuclear agreement signed last summer.
In recent days German Chancellor Angela Merkel was clear hat the intelligence shows Iran continued unabated to develop its rocket program in conflict with the relevant provisions of the UN Security Council, especially a Security Council resolution that bans Iran from pursuing ballistic missile technology.
The intel report and subsequent warnings were greeted with a underwhelming response from the Obama White House, which refused to comment on the report. Instead, the administration told the Free Beacon that it continues to view Iran as being in compliance with the nuclear accord.
The administrations refusal to acknowledge the contents of the German intelligence report is in contrast to comments made by a number of lawmakers who view it as proof that Tehran is violating the international accords.
In comments to the Free Beacon, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said the White House is choosing to ignore mounting evidence of Irans alleged cheating.
The Obama Administration cant ignore the sheer weight of evidence showing Iran isnt upholding its side of the bargain, McCarthy said. From illicit procurement for its nuclear program to testing ballistic missiles, Iran is showing that it had no intention of ever following international agreements, even ones that granted them enormous concessions.
The administrations decision to continue implementing the deal and ignore Irans actions isnt just delusional, its dangerous, he went onto to say. Iran must be stopped, which is why we need the sanctions legislation we are voting on this week.
Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.), a member of the House intelligence committee, also said Irans behavior indicates that it is not faithfully abiding by the nuclear deal, the Free Beacon noted.
The latest German intelligence report on Irans efforts to secure nuclear and missile technology and material is extremely troubling, Pompeo told the web site. While the Obama administration deletes public videos and alters transcripts related to the nuclear deal, at least our allies are speaking out on the threat from Irans nuclear program.
The German intelligence reports naming of more than 1,000 associates of Iranian-backed terrorist groups that are living in Germany should serve as a wake-up call to the U.S. and other European countries who are prefer to ignore Tehrans active support for entities like Hezbollah and Hamas, Pompeo said.
Other congressional officials familiar with the Iran deal said that Irans activities have forced the administration to walk back certain previously-made claims.
The administration isnt even sure what to say any more. Sometimes they say that the nuclear deal is so weak Iran cant violate it even if it illegally imports nuclear technology, a senior congressional adviser who works closely on the Iran portfolio told the WFB. Other times they say the nuclear deal is really strong, and they just ignore what even they admit are violations, like when Iran accumulated more heavy water than allowed a few months ago.
Just days ago the Jerusalem Post reported that had sought chemical and biological weapons technology in Germany.
The vast scale of the Islamic Republics network to obtain nuclear and missile technology goes beyond what was disclosed in recent German intelligence reports released recently, the Post reported.
The German state of Saarland wrote in its 2015 intelligence report released last month that so-called danger states, for example, Iran and North Korea, make efforts to obtain technology for atomic, biological or chemical weapons. Iran also seeks missile delivery systems as well as goods and know-how for proliferation.
Also, the Post noted, according to the intelligence report from Rhineland-Palatinate state, which was released in June, Iran was one of the foreign countries that targeted German companies in the state whose equipment could be implemented for atomic, biological and chemical weapons in a war.
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The Hillary Effect: Prospective diplomatic security agents cant tell if its safe to work for the State Dept.
(BigGovernment.news) As the 2012 tragedy at Benghazi remains part of public discourse, would-be Diplomatic Security agents are asking whether its safe to work for the State Department.
AMI Newswire has learned that prospective security agents want to know whether the State Department will give agents the training and support they need in order to work in dangerous locales, multiple sources said.
This is an important question for any employer in this line of work, but its front and center when applying to State Department, one career security agent said. They dont have the greatest reputation for supporting those of us in the field.
The reputation stems most recently from the 2012 attack on Benghazi, when security failures led to the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. The attacks spawned a number of inquiries, including a congressional select committee investigation led by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC). The committee, which formed in 2014, recently released its final report, and soon will disband.
Concerns surrounding the State Departments Diplomatic Security (DS) long predate Benghazi, one security agent said.
In 2004, when private contractors linked up with DS agents in Iraq, the contractors were greeted like rescuing cavalry, the agent said.
The regional security officer met with us and said: were glad youre here, because we dont have the skill set. Our people did, said Eric Parker, a former Blackwater contractor and currently a protective security specialist.
In years past, imparting the skill set did not seem to be a priority with Foggy Bottom during training, a former DS agent said.
The PT test was a joke, said the former DS agent, referring to physical training. Part of the test was a timed run. People started the test walking because they knew it was a participation-only event. They couldnt fail unless they died during the test.
AMI Newswire attempted several times over the course of 48 hours to reach the State Department for comment. Although a spokesperson responded to an initial inquiry, the spokesperson did not respond to followup contacts.
The departments website, though, tells potential recruits what to expect when working diplomatic security. Security work is exciting, the website reads, referring readers to a page containing profiles of two women agents.
One of the agents, Wendy Bashnan, wrote in her profile that, while serving abroad, she learned to scuba dive and got to see the pyramids in Egypt. There have been many exciting assignments, such as protecting the Israeli team during the Atlanta Olympics, Bashnan wrote.
Excitement seems to be a consistent leitmotif from the State Department when publicizing DS assignments.
In December 2011 nine months prior to the fatal attack on Americans in Benghazi the State Departments employee magazine featured an article portraying the outpost as an exhilarating danger zone and casting Stevens, the ambassador, as an intrepid expeditionary leader who ventured headlong into insurrection.
In a layout featuring ink-spatter artwork depicting chaos, the State magazine article Mission to a Revolution, by DS agent Mario Montoya depicts Stevens and others slipping into Benghazi via Malta on board a Greek cargo ship. The group had arrived earlier in Malta from Libya aboard a catamaran.
As related by Montoya, the twin-hulled vessel that carried the group to Malta was not so much a ferry as a rescue ship: Her passengers included American diplomats, who had hurriedly evacuated after conflict erupted in Libya and their safety and security could no longer be assured in Tripoli.
The group returned to Libya to set up an outpost in Benghazi, the cradle of the revolution. There, they found an unstable setting. Wrote Montoya: The crackle of gunfire in the dark is not the sound a Bureau of Diplomatic Security agent longs to hear, but during the past six months in Benghazi, Libya, it was all too common as exuberant fighters celebrated the days revolutionary successes with rounds dispatched randomly into the night sky.
Adventure and excitement notwithstanding, potential DS recruits told AMI they remain focused on physical security.
People got killed in Benghazi, said former job seeker Andrew Michaels, who considered applying for a DS position, but rejected the idea. Those guys didnt have support. Did the State Department learn from that? Has anything changed? I didnt get a good answer.
He also was concerned about training. I wanted to know if the person next to me could step up when it gets bad.
Michaels asked recruiters specifically about physical training while attending a job fair on June 28 at Fort Stewart Georgia, he said.
His buddy, who still is looking for security work, asked similar questions. They told us it was all good, said the buddy, who was satisfied with the answers and submitted an application. They have standards.
A number of the standards are listed on the State Departments DS recruitment web page. Among other qualifications, the candidates must pass physical fitness tests and be fit for strenuous physical exertion, the site reads.
For example, female DS candidates aged 65 and older must complete two pushups within two minutes. At the other end of the age spectrum, males aged 20 must complete 42 pushups in the same allotted time. Varied standards also apply for sit-ups and the 1.5 mile run.
Those standards are pathetic, the career security agent said. They fit into the entire culture of what went wrong at Benghazi. Is it safe to work in diplomatic security? You tell me.
I hope Congress keeps it up, the agent said. I hope they investigate.
If anyone does, it wont be the House select committee.
Our committees work is done, Gowdy, the chairman, told reporters on July 8. If youre asking whether or not the investigation into Benghazi is over, thats a question the folks in your line of work are better able to answer than mine.
Our committee will cease to exist in the very near future. You wont.
By Susan Katz Keating, AMI Newswire
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1. Planetaria Astronomers image massive exoplanet in triple-star system
The planet, known as HD 131399Ab, is 320 light-years from Earth and orbits the brightest of the three stars in the triple-star system. This orbit is the widest known of any planets in similar star systems, and for this reason was very surprising to astronomers. The gravitational interaction between the three stars is always changing, making larger orbits of planets inherently unstable
Artists conception of the star system HD 131399, with the planet HD 131399Ab in the foreground. Image Credit: ESO/L. Calcada/M. Kornmesser
2. Universe Today ESA Prepares revolutionary air breathing rocket engine A new funding agreement with the ESA will provide Reaction Engines with 10 million Euros for continued development of SABRE. This will add to the 50 million Pounds that the UK Space Agency has already contributed.
Reaction Engines wants to build a ground demonstrator engine by 2020. If the continued development of SABRE goes well, and if testing by 2020 is successful, then these Air Breathing rocket engines will be in a position to truly revolutionize access to space.
In ESAs words, ESA are confident that a ground test of a sub-scale engine can be successfully performed to demonstrate the flight regime and cycle and will be a critical milestone in the development of this program and a major breakthrough in propulsion worldwide.
3. Universe Today Lightweight Telescopes in cubesats using carbon nanotube mirrors
4. Universe Today The moon is a real attention junkie
5. Chandra X-ray space telescope blog Chandra Finds Evidence for Violent Stellar Merger
6. Urban Astronomer A reader asked why we cant determine the absolute speed of the Earth by using the site of the Big Bang as a reference point. In this article we explain how the Big Bang was not an explosion that happened somewhere in the universe, but was the event that created the Universe itself, including time and all of space. Which means that the Big Bang actually happened everywhere.
7. TheSpacewriter recaps the events of a year ago, when she and a cast of hundreds lauded the New Horizons mission flyby of Pluto from Pluto HQ at the Applied Physics Lab. In the year since then, many scientific discoveries have been made about the planet. She talks about the highlights in this blog entry.
8. Nextbigfuture A metallic ring big enough for astronauts and cargo to fit through is scheduled to fly to the International Space Station in July as part of the cargo aboard a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft loaded with materials for the orbiting laboratory and its crew. The ring is known as an International Docking Adapter, or IDA, and its main purpose is to provide a port for spacecraft bringing astronauts to the station in the future.
The Dragon and its cargo will fly into orbit aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that will take about 10 minutes to lift the spacecraft from its launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida to an orbit to catch up with the station. It will take about two days for the Dragon to reach the station. Once within reach of the stations robotic arm, the Dragon will be berthed to the orbital complex by the astronauts already on the station.
9. Nextbigfuture Reaction Engines Ltd. announces today the signing of a 10m Development Contract with the European Space Agency, finalizing the UK Governments 60m commitment.
Reaction Engines Ltd., today announces the signing of a 10m European Space Agency (ESA) contract which will enable the development of a ground based demonstrator of SABRE, a new class of aerospace engine which is highly scalable with multiple potential applications in hypersonic travel and space access.
SABRE is at heart a rocket engine designed to power aircraft directly into space (single-stage to orbit) to allow reliable, responsive and cost effective space access, and in a different configuration to allow aircraft to cruise at high speeds (five times the speed of sound) within the atmosphere.
In the past, attempts to design single stage to orbit propulsion systems have been unsuccessful largely due to the weight of an on-board oxidiser such as liquid oxygen, needed by conventional rocket engines. One possible solution to reduce the quantity of on-board oxidizer required is by using oxygen already present in the atmosphere in the combustion process just like an ordinary jet engine. This weight saving would enable the transition from single-use multi-stage launch vehicles to multi-use single stage launch vehicles.
10. An international team of astronomers have discovered a new dwarf planet orbiting in the disk of small icy worlds beyond Neptune. The new object is roughly 700 kilometers in size and has one of the largest orbits for a dwarf planet. Designated 2015 RR245 by the International Astronomical Unions Minor Planet Center, it was found using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Maunakea, Hawaii, as part of the ongoing Outer Solar System Origins Survey (OSSOS).
China North Industries Corporation (Norinco), has developed a new variant of its Type 96 (ZTZ-96) main battle tank (MBT) in time to participate in the 30 July to 16 August International Army Games organized by the Russian Ministry of Defense.
At least five T-96Bs arrived in Russia on 7 July to take part in the Masters of Automobile and Tank Hardware competition, according to Russian media reports. The Tank Biathlon portion of this competition received wide coverage in Chinese state media last year when Norincos 50-tonne T-96A MBT was allowed to participate.
Except for an improved ventilation system, the T-96B appears to show no visible changes to the turret, optical sensors or main 125 mm gun armament.
Unconfirmed Chinese reports indicate that computer and digital communication systems have been improved, allowing tank commanders to benefit from common integrated intelligence of the battlefield processed at higher levels of command.
The reports also point to improvements reportedly made to the T-96Bs engine, exhaust system, suspension, and running wheels.
The engine and new rear-mounted exhaust system appear to have benefited from those developed for Norincos VT-4 export MBT. If this is the case, the T-96B may have a 1,200 hp liquid-cooled diesel engine.
Images have emerged of a new variant of Norincos Type 96 (ZTZ-96) main battle tank. Source: CJDBY website
SOURCE- IHS Janes
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An Algiers criminal court Monday handed the head of the private KBC TV channel, his production manager and an official of the ministry of culture suspended prison terms in the affair related to the recording of TV programs in alleged outlawed studios.
Mehdi Benaissa, head of critical KBC TV and his production manager, Ryad Hartouf received respectively six-month-suspended sentences for recording Ki Hna Ki Ness and Ness Stah programs in an outlawed studio. Critics say they were rather punished for the content of the programs deemed critical of the state.
Mounia Nedjai, chief director at the ministry of culture also received one year suspended prison term. The trio was arrested on June 24 and charged for false declaration and abuse of function.
The judge has set them free but their lawyers said they would challenge the ruling and ask for a verdict of innocence. They argued that their clients were victim of the states crackdown on freedom of expression.
Khaled Bergheul, one of the defendants lawyers, chided the state for granting permit to anti-opposition media while denying media critical of the state.
Journalists, politicians, civil society organisations and NGOs held supporting rallies across the country and in Europe to demand the release of the three defendants.
Morocco is one of the three countries to have immediately expressed support for Turkeys democratic institutions as the coup was unfolding, British renowned journalist David Hearst said.
In an op-ed published on the news website, the Middle East Eye, Hearst denounced western ambiguity during the coup and lauded Moroccos clear stance in support of the democratically elected government.
Only three countries in the world clearly supported Erdogan from the start Morocco, Qatar, and Sudan, Hearst said.
He drew a contrast between the three countries immediate denunciation of the coup, and the sluggishness of western countries to do the same as they waited 3 hours before condemning the failed military take-over, while the Saudi government had to wait 15 hours before voicing support for Erdogan.
He deplored that the US embassy described the coup as uprising, adding that some media outlets in the west and the Arab World broadcasted biased reporting and analyses saying the coup was successful.
Turkeys reaction last night was that of a mature democracy. The Wests was that of corrupted democracy tainted by its support of autocracy, Hearst deplored.
A group of lawmakers of Libyas internationally recognized House of Representatives (HoR) has fired shots at head of UNSMIL and at the Presidency Council (PC); accusing them of behaving pompously and of corruption.
The 71-member group gathered under the banner of the National Sovereignty Bloc (NSB) rapped Martin Kobler for his arrogance. For the 71 lawmakers, Kobler behaves as if he were real governor of Libya, and running the country according to his whims, reports say.
HoR has repeatedly delayed the recognition of the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) birthed in Morocco in December under the Libyan Political Agreement (LPA) signed by rival parties.
The HoR based in the eastern part of the country regards the GNA as an outside-imposed government.
The NSB did not spare the Presidency Council led by Prime Minister Faiez Serraj. For the anti-GNA bloc, the PC is using bribe to win over politicians and or their relatives by giving them positions.
The accusations, which were formulated on Sunday, came as various rival political figures met in Tunis to try to save the LPA put in danger as the political process is in a stalemate.
But the Tunis talks stumbled upon the structure of the future army and changes to the Libyan Political Agreement (LPA) as suggested by HoR.
Delegates take the floor before the start of the first day of the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2016 at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images
Welcome, I guess, to my New York live-blog of the two conventions of 2016. Settle in, calm your nerves (mine will be frayed enough for all of us), have a drink (or a joint), and enjoy!
If you want to send me your thoughts as the events proceed, email me at sully@nymag.com (if youre a recovering dishhead, you can also always use the old email address).
11.24 p.m. Im done with Joni Ernst as is everyone else, it seems.
Joni Ernst: "Distinguished delegates, fellow Republicans, and empty seats...my veneers and I are very happy to be here." #RNC dina martina (@dinamartina) July 19, 2016
So Ill leave you with some other gems from Dina Martinas live-blog of Melanias speech:
Melania: "Donald Trump is da man dat will brin Gus to gedder." #RNC dina martina (@dinamartina) July 19, 2016
Melania: "I arrive in New York 20 years ago, and I see the joist and the heart ships". #RNC dina martina (@dinamartina) July 19, 2016
Yes, it was surreal.
11:09 p.m. Just mulling over the events tonight, theres one obvious stand-out. I didnt hear any specific policy proposals to tackle clearly stated public problems. It is almost as if governing, for the Republican right, is fundamentally about an attitude, rather than about experience or practicality or reasoning. The degeneracy of conservatism its descent into literally mindless appeals to tribalism and fear and hatred was on full display. You might also say the same about the religious right, the members of whom have eagerly embraced a racist, a nativist, a believer in war crimes, and a lover of the tyrants that conservatism once defined itself against. Their movement long lost any claim to a serious Christian conscience. But that they would so readily embrace such an unreconstructed pagan is indeed a revelation.
If you think of the conservative movement as beginning in 1964 and climaxing in the 1990s, then the era we are now in is suffering from a cancer of the mind and the soul. That the GOP has finally found a creature that can personify these urges to purge, a man for whom the word shameless could have been invented, a bully and a creep, a liar and cheat, a con man and wannabe tyrant, a dedicated loather of individual liberty, and an opponent of the pricelessly important conventions of liberal democracy is perhaps a fitting end.
This is the gutter, ladies and gentlemen, and it runs into a sewer. May whats left of conservatism be carried out to sea.
11:04 p.m.
Obama totally concealed the role of bin Laden. Yup, that's it. That's what Obama did. Good point. Jonathan Bernstein (@jbview) July 19, 2016
What makes me actually afraid is the thought that this absurd clown was actually in a senior leadership role in the military. And well-regarded! The networks will end their coverage with this angry, rambling old white guy. Its been quite a night, hasnt it?
11:00 p.m. Lock her up! Lock her up! This is the reddest of red meat. Now hes leading a chant of Lock her up! The misogyny seems pretty close to the surface.
10:58 p.m. We should all be up at night, the general insist, scared stupid by Islamist terrorism. Now hes actually whipping out the Cheney line about these Islamists having WMDS! This speech could have been given in 2003. Nothing has been learned from the Bush years, in this mans terrified mind. Its particularly weird given Trumps apparent distaste for foreign intervention.
10:56 p.m.
I'm not in the hall right now, but wonder if Michael Flynn has gone totally off-script and is just rambling endlessly. Ed Kilgore (@ed_kilgore) July 19, 2016
10:50 p.m. Ive never heard so many vacuous cliches repeated endlessly. Just some feeling about an allegedly lost America. (And suddenly we have a mention of bathrooms. That was out of left field.) Then this rather ominous statement: War is about winning. This is code for war crimes, I think. I cannot imagine how this will win more converts. Displays of empathy for terrorists? Who is doing that? Again, I think the subtext is about torture and the mass murder of civilians. And, of course, the notion that Obama is in league with international terrorism.
10:46 p.m. This Flynn dude is awful. Just blather. No policy proposals. An argument for a more aggressive internationalist footprint by a demagogue making the case for retreat. Its so incoherent it beggars belief. Now hes just yelling USA! USA! in some deranged rant about American power. Who thought hed be a good follow-up to the question-and-answer segment of a beauty pageant? McKay:
Convention floor emptying out now that Trump and Melania are off the stage McKay Coppins (@mckaycoppins) July 19, 2016
10:43 p.m. A reader writes:
Your whole emotion vs. rationality argument puts me in mind of Newt Gingrichs response to his wife when he told her he was leaving her. When she pointed out that was in direct contradiction to the family values he espoused as a Republican, Newt argued back that what was important wasnt what he actually did, it was the narrative. Thats what the convention-goers want the narrative. And by god, Trump and his acolytes are going to give it to them.
And this is the narrative: an alien president is deliberately subverting the United States, the country is lawless chaos, the world a total fireball and we need STRENGTH.
10:42 p.m. No anecdotes, as I noted. No actual evidence of anything:
Yes -- where are stories like this? Seriously. https://t.co/56A6cphVGg Marc Ambinder (@marcambinder) July 19, 2016
10:40 p.m. So good:
Let us acknowledge both that Melania is doing a good job and that history has become a fever dream from which we are struggling to awake. Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) July 19, 2016
10:39 p.m. Leave. Freddie. Mercury. Alone.
10:38 p.m. The speech sounds like one given by the winner in one of Trumps beauty pageants. Bland, vacuous, devoid of fact or even anecdote. And I just wonder how this foreign beauty will go down among the Duck Dynasty crowd.
10:37 p.m. A reader writes:
Melania just said that Donald will never give up and he will never let us down. Did she just Rick Roll us?
10:36 p.m. Heh:
"Donald is intensely loyal," said his third wife. Neil Irwin (@Neil_Irwin) July 19, 2016
10:31 p.m. Im sorry but I cant handle this right now. Its so surreal. So deeply weird. We need new programs to help the poor. Which ones has Trump endorsed? Or did I miss something? Now she says Donald wants to help the poor and the middle class, even though his economic plan shovels truckloads of money toward the super-rich. Whatevs, I guess.
10:30 p.m. Melania is losing the audience, it seems to me. Lewis agrees:
I've seen Melania shine in interviews. So far, this speech lacks the same charm. #RNCinCLE Matt Lewis (@mattklewis) July 19, 2016
10:27 p.m. That Slovenian accent in the middle of this orgasm over white working class America has my jaw dropping a little. Amazing how Trump pulls this off. But Dole will probably get a medically enhanced boner now.
10:26 p.m. Sleep tight, America:
10:25 p.m. Melania disagrees with her husband in believing his opponents deserve respect.
10:24 p.m. That silhouette in the smoke. Its gonna give me nightmares tonight. And now for the second immigrant super-model speech. Its getting weirder.
10:23 p.m. Nicely put:
Rudy's depiction of Trump as a publicity-averse do-gooder is at odds with basically all reported accounts of his actual personality Dana Rubinstein (@danarubinstein) July 19, 2016
10:20 p.m. Rudy ended his angry orgasm shouting USA! USA! Oy.
10:19 p.m.
For hours, convention was mostly quiet. Respectful viewing of various speakers, golf-type applause. Now, w/ Rudy, has feel of a TRUMP show. Robert Costa (@costareports) July 19, 2016
10:17 p.m. The Hillary-is-a-heartless-murderer theme is ramping up. Meanwhile, Trump will lead by leading. Yep.
10:16 p.m. He seems a little excitable:
Rudy is very persuasive pic.twitter.com/0JZkkgjvTs Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) July 19, 2016
10:15 p.m. But we have secured a nuclear-free Iran! Is that not part of their reality?
10:13 p.m. Do any of these speakers actually believe that Osama bin Laden is dead? Or that ISIS is in retreat in Iraq and Syria? Or would that interrupt their feeling?
10:12 p.m. Notice how the right believes that saying certain things does certain things. Its as if this party were a talk radio show. It never has to govern; it never has to take responsibility; it simply has to insist that its opponents cannot say the right words.
10:11 p.m. Heh:
WHERE IS AMERICA? WHERE DID IT GO?! Rudy Giuliani has a senior moment. #RNCinCLE Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) July 19, 2016
10:09 p.m. Does Giuliani believe that the president of the United States has the same power and role as a mayor of a major city? And how could Trump bring down crime rates the way Giuliani did? Theyre already at rock bottom. But again this is about feeling, not reason.
10:05 p.m. Notice Guilianis repeating the notion that people feel afraid rather than they have reason to feel afraid. And that fear is, of course, fomented by the rightwing propaganda machine. Fox News is fear every day. Drudge is racial panic and fear every minute. And the fear they create helps sustain the turn toward authoritarianism. I have barely heard anyone talking about freedom tonight. Trump has as much interest in freedom as he has in paying his bills.
10:01 p.m. Heres the link to the Harvard study debunking the BLM argument. I find it conclusive. Feelings do not, er, trump data in a deliberative democracy. A reader writes:
I understand that there has been the recent study suggesting that given an interaction with a police officer occurs, then the police officer is no more likely to use a gun with a black person than with a white person. However, given that many black men have a much higher rate of interaction with police (such as, anecdotally, Philando Castile, with 52 traffic stops), then is it not fair to say that black men are disproportionately killed by cops?
The point is that there is no evidence of individual racism in these police encounters, despite the impression from many chilling phone videos. The structural bias still exists as a whole, as I said, but the narrative about cops being more likely to kill a black member of the public when encountering him is false.
9:59 p.m. Sometimes you have to take a second to absorb the GOP as a protectionist party. In just four short years, a complete reversal of a defining plank of the party in modern times.
9:54 p.m. Now we have an argument for ending the core laws of warfare. I wondered when someone would make the case for war crimes which is now official Republican policy. Lead with strength means torture and murder of civilians. The vagueness here is deeply disturbing and also fascistic. The military is operating under the same rules of war these past seven years as the previous eight. The GOP nominee wants to end the Geneva Conventions and authorize war crimes of unimaginable ferocity. No candidate in the history of the United States has ever campaigned on a platform of war crimes as an ideal form of warfare.
This is why I have no hesitation calling this out as neo-fascist. Trump is attacking the core civilizational norms that actually do keep us safe.
9:53 p.m. Another grieving mother?
9:50 p.m. Can I name a war that Tom Cotton ever opposed? Not off the top of my head.
9:47 p.m. A reader dissents:
Are you talking about the recent Harvard report that came out? I guess you are TECHNICALLY correct- the data in a few of the thousands of police districts in the US (the data came mainly from large metropolitan areas with diverse populations, which are generally not the districts where the most publicized deaths have occurred, but I digress) shows that black men are not more likely to die, but they ARE much more likely to experience non-lethal force (like kicking and punching) than other groups, and are far and away more likely to be targeted by police- having more interactions with the police leads to more violent interactions simply by the numbers. Equating the frustration and anguish of the Black Lives Matter movement with the fiction that America in general is less safe than it was whenever it is that these people think America was great is insulting.
The key argument of BLM is that black lives are at stake, and can be killed with impunity by racist cops. That is false. So much else about police interactions with black men is painful and appalling. But their lives are as safe as white lives, when confronting cops.
9:44 p.m. Theres nothing this crowd loves more than calling for Hillary Clinton to be in jail. Its worth noting that this is not normal politics. This is stab-in-the-back neo-fascist rhetoric. Obama refused to prosecute or even threaten to prosecute officials guilty of brutal war crimes so as not to criminalize politics. This parody of a political party wants to jail their political opponent for extremely careless storage of emails.
9:42 p.m. America 2016: Blue Lives Matter vs Black Lives Matter. As if they are incompatible! As if they are alternatives!
9:38 p.m. Another African-American. Redder than red. But he just ripped off Obamas 2004 speech. A reader writes:
Can you call it dog-whistling when it is at such a low tone? There isnt even anything veiled about it anymore. I feel like I am watching dramatic readings of my aunt Millie Jos Facebook wall.
9:37 p.m. Im reaching peak hathos right now. Can it get peaker? Im waiting for Melania.
9:36 p.m. True this:
Notice how RNC speakers describe an edenic pre-Obama era when America was respected, safe etc but never mention George W. Bush Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart) July 19, 2016
9:28 p.m. A sheriff is trying to argue against the facts of a drop in crime. He offers instead a feeling: that people do not feel secure in their communities. Again, it is vital to avoid the data or the facts. What matters is pure feeling. This goes of course also for the Black Lives Matter activists, whose core and central argument is that black men are disproportionately killed by cops. The best data shows this is false just as their narrative about Michael Brown was false. Thanks in part to the radicalized racial left we now have merely one identity politics waging war against another. They have a terrible inter-relationship, these two illiberalisms. They foment each other.
9:24 p.m. Here comes the Sheriff! And he has a message: Blue lives matter! What has happened that this sentiment could be used as a partisan political rallying cry? And now we have a politicized celebration of a cop being found not guilty in a Baltimore incident. This is gasoline on a fire. More will be poured before this week is over.
9:19 p.m. The man who destroyed al Qaeda and killed Osama bin Laden, authorized drone attacks, and has been slowly cornering ISIL hes someone who let the wildfires of Jihadism go unchecked, according to Texas congressman McCaul. He also seems to imply that Trump will shake the ground [the Jihadists] walk on. How? Or is that far too rational a question?
9:17 p.m. Conservatism 1989: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
Conservatism 2016: Build That Wall! Build That Wall!
9:15 p.m. Heh:
I've been really anti-Trump, but this Antonio Sabato is bringing me around. Jacob Weisberg (@jacobwe) July 19, 2016
9:10 p.m. Now the first African-American on the podium is speaking of his sons bleeding after a murderous attack by an illegal immigrant. He says his son was targeted because he was black. So black lives do matter if killed by an immigrant. Only Trump mentions Americans killed by illegal immigrants Trump is sent by God. Again, this is the politicization of a fathers grief.
9:09 p.m. Another mothers grief weaponized. This time from a mother whose son was killed by an illegal immigrant.
9:06 p.m. From the hall:
I see a lot of delegates looking at their phones or otherwise not paying attention. Henry J. Gomez (@HenryJGomez) July 19, 2016
9:04 p.m. Thats about right:
So theme of the week: violence, death and betrayal by political enemies. Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 19, 2016
Trump is the first candidate to campaign for jailing his opponent.
9:03 p.m. Antonio Sabato Jr. invokes Jesus Jesus as a reason to vote for a fascist. Not since Franco
9:01 p.m. The sheer personal hatred of Hillary Clinton is another primary emotion coursing through the RNC bloodstream:
Mother of Benghazi victim: "Hillary for prison. She deserves to be in stripes." John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) July 19, 2016
Let me say as a card-carrying Hillary-hater of many years this strikes me as deranged
8:51 p.m. A reader writes:
Youve hit on something with absence of reason. Theres a chasm between those folks at that convention and the other side, and I dont think it can be bridged. How in the world does this play out?
If this convention were culminating in the nomination of Mitt Romney for instance, I guess Id say the distance can be bridged. Well persevere. But we are looking at the very, very real possibility that Donald Trump is our next President. That is different, isnt it? And judging from what just went down at this convention, what happens if Hillary wins?
8:50 p.m. Even the hard right is having some issues with the theme of Hillary Clinton arranging the murder of U.S. service members:
Benghazi is a completely legitimate issue that Hillary has never answered for. Still, this is a bit much, imo David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) July 19, 2016
8:46 p.m. Scott Baio is telling CNN that he was asked to speak last Thursday. He was gobsmacked. Then he explains why he backs Trump: He was a guy who will fight back Republicans never fight back. This is the mindset that we have to come to terms with. After eight years of intense and unprecedented obstructionism, after risking the credit of the U.S., after refusing to hold hearings on a Supreme Court nominee we hear that the GOP has never fought back.
8:43 p.m. Meanwhile back at Fox News:
Here you go: pic.twitter.com/JHlxim0NNE John Mark N Reynolds (@JMNR) July 19, 2016
8:38 p.m. A reader writes:
Can you imagine then-Senator Barack Obama weaponizing a 9/11 widow on stage in Denver, in 2008, to rant and rage against George Bush? Ive never seen anything more stomach-churningly distasteful on a political stage, and Ive attended a Sarah Palin rally.
The exploitation of that womans emotions is, yes, another new low. But I suspect we are going to have an orgy of this kind of gut, primary feeling this week, and trying to counter it rationally is close to impossible. Thats how deliberative democracy is dismantled, bit by bit, feeling by feeling. Yes, its preaching to a very small choir, but Trump has no rational, calm side. He is pure id. So it is completely appropriate and predictable that his convention will simply channel the crudest, strongest emotions fear, patriotism, family, tribe. These are the key themes of the authoritarian soul. And hes just getting started.
8:35 p.m. I take Lewis point. This is an appeal to the gut, using ordinary people to foment primal passions. Its a hyper-democratic spin on visceral feelings, fears and hatred. What were getting is an absence of reason a critical move if you are going to get a neo-fascist in power. Reason will never cut it.
8:34 p.m. Matt Lewis likes what hes seeing:
Folks, the big takeaway so far is that these speakers (save for a few) aren't politicians. More real. Not the same old same old. #RNCinCLE Matt Lewis (@mattklewis) July 19, 2016
8:30 p.m.
8:28 p.m. And now a grieving mother gets up to blame Hillary Clinton personally for her sons military death. Can you imagine the 2008 Democratic convention if they had asked mother after mother to blame George W. Bush for the deaths of their sons personally. How could she do this to me? Incredible and quite disgusting emotional blackmail. So beyond any parameters of good taste or decency it beggars belief. But its a primary color and will rile up the base.
8:27 p.m. Ouch:
Ironic that as Ailes loses control of Fox News, Fox News B-listers are taking over the Republican Convention. Gabriel Snyder (@gabrielsnyder) July 19, 2016
8:21 p.m. Luttrell dispenses with the TeleptompTer. But this is becoming a bit of a train wreck. Hes now calling for the next generation to take the fight to the enemy at home because its here. Nothing said about Trump. Just a veiled swipe at Black Lives Matter.
8:16 p.m. Now a guy in glasses who once called Trump a cancer is rhapsodizing about Marcus Luttrell, the war hero.
did Perry mention Trump? nope... Philip Gourevitch (@PGourevitch) July 19, 2016
8:15 p.m. Lets make America America again. The dog whistle there is even reaching my ear drums.
8:14 p.m. Now a rather terrified sitcom star is saying something.
8:12 p.m. We need a president who has our back. The Obama-is-a-traitor theme is introduced. Now, an implication that the president does not back the police.
8:11 p.m. Good beard at the podium as one reality TV star introduces another.
8:10 p.m. A reader writes:
Heres a question for you to answer right at the top: in your wildest imagination, could you ever have seen the Republican party in the state it is now when Barack Obama was elected in 2008, i.e. if you could have hopped in a time machine and advanced 8 years (from 2008 to 2016), how shocked/surprised/appalled would you be?
I wish I were more surprised. What actually shocked me was the response of the GOP to the first black president. I actually believed they might have seen the historical significance of that, and extended a modicum of respect and even some deference to the new figure as he took over in a moment of national crisis. I was wrong. Their ideological extremism and their clearly revealed racial animus became very quickly clear. I see the nomination of Trump a white racist nationalist as the GOPs final response to that opportunity. Its tragic. But helps frame what this election has now become about: decency and democracy against foul demagoguery, authoritarian brutality and race hatred.
I see no reason to moderate my loathing of what the GOP has revealed itself to be in 2016. Its defeat is a global necessity.
8:05 p.m. The theme tonight is Making America Safe Again. As others have noted, this is a strange formulation. Crime rates are bobbing along the bottom of the historical trends, making this country safer than at any time since the early 1960s. The military supremacy of the U.S. across the globe is unparalleled.
8:00 p.m. Of course, quite how to cover this convention compared with previous ones presents something of a challenge. Do I sit here with my mouth open, jaw dropped, eyes popping, reaching for the weed? Do I take it in any way seriously? Or do I take it extremely seriously, as the only moment in my own lifetime that a major democracy has stood poised to elect a neo-fascist demagogue, bent on mass deportation, evisceration of due process, restrictions on the press, an alliance with dictatorships, and war crimes as the core principle of military action? Or all of the above?
Photo: KARL-JOSEF HILDENBRAND/AFP/Getty Images
The Islamic State declared the ax-wielding assailant who wounded at least four people on a German train a soldier in an announcement from its news agency Tuesday. The 17-year-old attacker reportedly shouted Allahu Akbar before hurting four travelers from Hong Kong with an ax and a knife on a rail line near the southern German town of Wurzburg. The suspect tried to flee after a passenger pulled the trains emergency brake, but he was pursued and surrounded by police. The teen rushed at authorities and was shot and killed.
Police also found a hand-drawn ISIS flag after raiding Riayads apartment. Authorities are trying to figure out if the teen had contact with ISIS and if so, when or if he was self-radicalized by propaganda. It appears that this was a lone wolf attack, but authorities have not ruled out accomplices just yet, reports the New York Times.
The ax attack comes as Europe is on edge following the brutal truck rampage in Nice, France, which left more than 80 dead. ISIS took credit for that massacre, though French investigators have found no evidence that the suspect identified as Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian man who lived in Nice had direct contact with ISIS. This most recent train attack is also likely to complicate the migrant debate in Germany and across the European Union. Germany took in more than 1 million refugees last year, but that welcome soured after public pushback and the mass sexual assaults in Cologne on New Years Eve, believed to have been perpetrated by some asylum-seekers.
Photo: Rembert Browne
The official name of Mondays anti-Trump protest in Cleveland, according to the Facebook group that organized the event, was March on the RNC: Dump Trump; Say No to the Republican Agenda; Stand Against Racist Anti-Immigrant and Anti-Muslim Attacks.
Photo: Rembert Browne
The scene reinforced a sense that I had earlier in the morning, following my first trip into the area surrounding the Quicken Loans Arena, site of the Republican National Convention: There were not many black people around even in a town thats half black.
To put it another way, the Republican National Convention is white as hell.
I caught up with a much larger group of protesters, who were already mid-march, just beyond the square. It was hot, an unfortunate circumstance given that I had just put on a suit and tie. Earlier in the day, I had been a black man in the middle of the RNC, wearing red high-top Nikes, gray pants, a polo, and a hat that said New York in cursive a tell that perhaps I was associated with the liberal East Coast media. In that getup, I was turned away from an event, greeted with Can I help you? followed by, This is a private event, followed by four individuals behind me gaining entry without question.
I decided a better strategy might be dressing like a young, black Republican intern say, from Charleston or Savannah. The protests movement through the streets of Cleveland was oddly organized and calm, as were the interactions with the authorities, who were around in large numbers.
Photo: Rembert Browne
There were groups of all types, signs of all types, and chants of all types. The signs ranged from Defend Black Lives Matter to Dump Trump, Reject The Neoliberal Republican Agenda to Stop the World War on Migrants to Fuck Nazi Scum. The chants included, The people / united / will never be defeated, We shut shit down, and Donald Trump / Go Away / Racist, Sexist, Anti-Gay.
Photo: Rembert Browne
As is true in many protests, the people with megaphones had a lot of power over what was chanted. In this case, there were a lot of people with megaphones. But there wasnt a moment when it appeared as if any rule would be broken. There wasnt a moment that felt dangerous, as if conflict were possible between the police and the protestors. And, with the huge scrum of cameras and reporters in the front of the actual protest, walking backwards, filming the event, it felt like it was made more for Facebook Live than Cleveland, Ohio.
Photo: Rembert Browne
Making my way through the crowd to the back of the protest, I heard a chant of Black Lives Matter. It was a small group of black people, as a united front, here with one message.
I feel you, @hawk.newsome A video posted by Rembert Browne (@rembert) on Jul 18, 2016 at 3:05pm PDT
Each participant was wearing a black shirt that had Uncle Sams picture on the front with red Xs over his eyes, with the text I Aint Voting Until #BlackLivesMatter. They were the last line of defense in the rally, with dozens of cops behind them pulling up the rear.
Photo: Rembert Browne
The leader of this group was a man named Hawk Newsome. His group drove to Cleveland from New York and is turning back around tomorrow. He quickly echoed my sentiment from the morning: Theres not a lot of us here.
I met the rest of the men that accompanied him, and was given a shirt. Walking away, I tried to make sense of what had happened over the past 90 minutes. The protest was not typical. There was no unified voice, no obvious leadership. There was almost no latent sense of conflict. Perhaps in this setting, that was a good thing.
What the protest was most of all, however, was a display of how many different types of discriminated-against people feel as if they and the people they love will be in jeopardy if Donald Trump becomes the president of the United States.
Are all of these groups sorely outnumbered in Cleveland this week? Absolutely. But there seemed to be an understanding that, at least today, the point wasnt to win the week it was to show how many people are fed up and how much is on the line in November.
The desire to send the presumptive Democratic nominee to the slammer has emerged from right-wing fever swamps and is being promoted from the podium at the Republican convention. Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images
While covering a Ted Cruz event just prior to the Iowa caucuses in February, I noticed that a remarkably large number of attendees were wearing buttons with an image of Hillary Clintons face behind bars and the legend Hillary for Prison. While it was no surprise these movement-conservative activists held the former secretary of State in minimum regard, the savage intention of seeing her incarcerated added a new, banana-republic-style savagery to the usual partisanship. It was also a reminder of the conservative preoccupation with claims of Clintons alleged responsibility for the American deaths in Benghazi in 2012.
To be clear, the jail-my-opponents idea wasnt entirely unprecedented among ideologues and partisans; after all, many liberals routinely described former vice-president Dick Cheney as a war criminal.
But the desire that Hillary Clinton be sent to the hoosegow has risen to the level of an official Trump campaign meme, and perhaps even a campaign promise. The mainstreaming of this meme began, like many of the hounds of hell unleashed in this election cycle, with a remark by Donald Trump himself, in response to a Clinton speech disputing his national-security credentials:
After what she said about me today in her phony speech that was a phony speech, that was a Donald Trump hit job I will say this, Hillary Clinton has to go to jail. Shes guilty as hell.
Trumps extended argument, so to speak, was that Clinton was defending Obamas foreign policies out of fear that she would otherwise be prosecuted over her email usage at the State Department. So he did not specifically endorse the very popular conservative idea that she deserved a stretch in the slammer for Benghazi, or, indeed, for Whitewater and other massively investigated pseudo-scandals of the 1990s. But Trumps statement that Hillary Clinton has to go to jail set a new level of discourse between major-party presumptive presidential nominees.
One suspects the polling after the FBI announced it would not pursue criminal charges in the email case emboldened Trump and Republicans generally to take the Hillary for Prison meme out of the closet and rattle it at Democrats like a hobgoblin. According to some surveys, a majority of Americans were disappointed by the FBIs decision. Its not clear whether most non-Republicans expressing that sentiment understood the complex question of how criminal liability is established, and its even less clear if they wanted to see Clinton in leg irons.
But after the first night of the Republican convention, it is clear GOP inhibitions on this subject have been entirely lost. As Voxs Andrew Prokop noted, calls for Clintons incarceration were made by three separate speakers Monday:
During retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynns speech, the delegates began to chant, Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up! Soon, Flynn agreed, saying, Lock her up, thats right! Its unbelievable! Earlier, Colorado Senate nominee Darryl Glenn had said that since Clinton loves her pantsuits, we should send her an email and tell her she deserves a bright orange jumpsuit. And Pat Smith, mother of a victim of the Benghazi attacks, said, I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son, as she choked back tears. When an attendee yelled out, Hillary for prison, Smith responded, Thats right, Hillary for prison! She deserves to be in stripes!
It does not appear that these exclamations (with the possible exception of Glenns) were part of prepared remarks vetted by convention officials. But in a well-run convention, speakers are warned not to go off-script, particularly in response to chants from delegates wanting the bloodiest red meat available, as they often do.
Photo: AP; Bryan Thomas/Getty Images
At a breakfast briefing this morning in Cleveland, Trump convention majordomo and campaign chairman Paul Manafort indicated that his bosss acceptance speech Thursday night will be modeled on Richard Nixons in 1968. That makes a lot of sense from the point of view of a campaign that wants to normalize its candidate and cast him as a healer rather than as a perpetrator of the nasty and divisive tone of national politics at the moment. But Trump is an even less likely messenger for the gospel of peace and concord than Tricky Dick was, and its a bit of a reach to believe it will work.
Nixons 1968 speech sought to nestle the Republican nominee in a sweet spot between riotous African-American and antiwar protesters and the backlash they engendered. It also nicely anticipated the disorder that broke out a few weeks later at the Democratic convention in Chicago, in which the Donkey Party came to represent both sides in that years battles between forces of social protest and of law and order. In words that would soon sound strange coming from the lips of one of the most divisive presidents in American history, Nixon called for peace and harmony:
As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame. We hear sirens in the night. We see Americans dying on distant battlefields abroad. We see Americans hating each other; fighting each other; killing each other at home. And as we see and hear these things, millions of Americans cry out in anguish: Did we come all this way for this? Did American boys die in Normandy and Korea and in Valley Forge for this? Listen to the answers to those questions. It is another voice, it is a quiet voice in the tumult of the shouting. It is the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the non shouters, the non demonstrators. Theyre not racists or sick; theyre not guilty of the crime that plagues the land; they are black, they are white; theyre native born and foreign born; theyre young and theyre old.
In something of a preview of Nixons 1969 silent majority speech outlining his strategy for winning the Vietnam War, the nominee identified himself with a sort of third way alternative to the angry left and right. And if the results of the 1968 general election are any indication, it worked, albeit very narrowly.
Trump borrowed the silent majority moniker for his put-upon, fed-up army of core supporters back during the nomination contest. And you can imagine him finding additional words of inspiration in Nixons earlier convention address:
Lets never forget that despite her faults, America is a great nation. And America is great because her people are great. With Winston Churchill we say, we have not journeyed all this way, across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies because we are made of sugar candy. Americas in trouble today not because her people have failed but because her leaders have failed. And what America wants are leaders to match the greatness of her people.
Sounds familiar, eh?
The real question, of course, is whether a nominee who has so openly and consistently battened on anger and divisiveness can suddenly pose as the leader who can calm the waters and unite the country. Isnt all this feel-good stuff politically correct? Dont we need the good people of America to take charge and get rid of the bad people? Will a unity plea ring a tad false after four days of fulmination at Crooked Hillary and the crypto-Muslim Obama and the secular socialists of the Democratic Party?
Maybe Manafort was just jollying us along, and Trump will actually give us a ferocious speech against the losers and the looters that chars our cerebral arteries and inspires the violence in the streets we all fear. Or maybe nobody knows what the wiggy dude will say including Trump himself.
Inside Quicken Loans Arena there is a large teleprompter screen visible from around the hall, designed to serve as a fallback if the screens on the podium somehow fail. Ill be watching tonight to see how often speakers go off-script. If they do, it could be a sign anything could happen when Trump speaks on Thursday: even a plea for calm and national unity.
Lili Huang was charged with human labor trafficking. Photo: Washington County Jail
A Minnesota woman is accused of starving and beating her Chinese nanny in a wealthy suburb outside St. Paul. She was charged with human labor trafficking and four other felonies on Friday. A county attorney likened the nannys conditions to slavery or indentured servitude.
The unnamed 58-year-old nanny claims Lili Huang, 35, beat and starved her. Police discovered the nanny wandering a street in Woodbury, Minnesota, on Thursday night. She had two black eyes, broken ribs, and a broken sternum.
Through a translator, the nanny told police she began working for the Huang family in Shanghai and moved to their Minnesota home in March. Given a room and promised $890 per month, the nanny said she was forced to work 18 hours a day while cooking, cleaning, and caring for the familys children work that amounted to less than $2 an hour, payment she reportedly never received. Huang allegedly never let her out of the house and often assaulted her in front of the children, according to a press release from Washington Countys attorney.
The alleged attacks happened in a large red-brick home in Woodbury, an upscale suburb east of St. Paul. When the nanny told Huang she wanted to return to China, Huang apparently took her passport and said she was not going anywhere. The abuse apparently escalated this month: On July 4, Huang allegedly grabbed the nannys hair and smashed her head on a table and other objects. The nanny said she was so hurt by the beatings on July 10 that she couldnt rise from her hands and knees for four hours. On July 13, Huang allegedly chased her with a knife and threatened to kill her after she accidentally spilled food on a counter.
When the nanny was found last Thursday, she told police she fled the house in search of an airport to go home. The nanny said she was 120 pounds when she came to the U.S. and now, after four months at the Huang residence, weighs 88 pounds. She said she was given scraps of food.
Agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and police from four cities arrested Huang. While searching the home, they found a bag of hair under the nannys mattress, which the nanny said Huang had ripped from her head. She said she hid the hair so she wouldnt be forced to eat it.
Huang appeared in court on Friday and was charged with five felony counts, including labor trafficking, seizing a passport while intending to violate labor trafficking, false imprisonment, assault with a dangerous weapon, and assault causing substantial bodily harm. She was held on $1 million unconditional bail and $350,000 conditional bail. Her next initial court appearance is set for August 18.
Nearly 21 million people were victims of forced labor worldwide, according to the International Labour Organization. In a press release announcing Huangs charges, Washington County attorney Pete Orput said human labor trafficking amounts to nothing less than slavery in the 21st century. We are determined, as part of this offices Major Prosecution unit, to attack this issue just as we have attacked sex trafficking of juveniles.
I have been saying that 2016 is the Year of the Scammer!!
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what is this from? I saw someone use it the other day as well and I need to know
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She is literally Britta.
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to be fair to britta, would she date a neo nazi? i mean her ex boyfriends usually involve people who treat her bad, not "bad" people. (except for lukka whom she ditched after finding about his crimes.)
/sorry for the community rant. i missed this show so much.
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mte
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lmao she's exactly the type of person they were making fun of w/her character.
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lol that was the first thing I thought when I saw the video. I mean ripping off the guy is horrible, but there were other reasons long before to stop promoting him.
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lol right? like girl you dont get brownie points for pointing out your friend is racist if, in the same breath, you say you excused that behavior
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She did say in the vid she wishes she had spoken up sooner
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What is Jeffree's obsession with blocking people? lmao
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He doesn't like conflict.
I mean, he doesn't like dealing with the consequences of conflicts. He's the type who thinks that he can just drag somebody and they should just take it.
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He think he's a QUEEN BITCH REgina Jones wannabe
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he seems to be khole kardashian levels of being unpleasent and awful
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Yup. They're both demons.
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I had to google who Khole was, there's so many of them I didn't realize it was a typo
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When Caitlyn Jenner first came out, I saw all these people freaking out like HOLY SHIT CAITLYN JENNER YASSSS QUEEN
And my first assumption was that there was a Kardashian sister named Kaitlyn who was dropping the K and going with a C to distance herself and that's why everyone was freaking out.
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They can both drop dead, honestly.
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No one witnessed Kat write the message, but Chris Garver, another tattoo artist on Miami Ink, tells TMZ Kat personally handed him the photo.
TLC tried to cover it up to protect their new star, until Ami brought in the lawyers. At that point, TLC went to a handwriting analyst who concluded there is a 99% probability that Kat Von D wrote the message. In early July 2007, Avis lawyer went to TLC with the analysis. They simply sent him a letter back that acknowledged receiving the results and said, We trust that this information will be kept strictly confidential.
http://www.tmz.com/2008/02/08/kat-von-d-anti-semite/
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I never got why people sided with Kat on Miami Ink. She was outwardly an insane bitch towards Ami all the freaking time.
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Hooboy. That can't be good for the Von Drachenbergs
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yikes, what a fucking asshole
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thank you for posting this. idk why everyone is siding with Kat like they are both trash lol
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didn't this turnout to be fake?
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The only person who said it was fake was somebody who was hired by TLC
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That does NOT look like her handwriting at all.
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First of all, take a look at the handwriting on this. You think that's her handwriting? That looks like a man's take on a woman's handwriting. It's sloppy, messy and definitely not the stylistic expectation of someone who is super artistic and tattoos for a living!!! Come on! People, use your brains. The dudes at that shop were super immature and shitty, someone could have totally forged that.
This is her signature.
THIS HAS TO BE A HOAX.First of all, take a look at the handwriting on this. You think that's her handwriting? That looks like a man's take on a woman's handwriting. It's sloppy, messy and definitely not the stylistic expectation of someone who is super artistic and tattoos for a living!!! Come on! People, use your brains. The dudes at that shop were super immature and shitty, someone could have totally forged that.This is her signature.
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Apparently there was enough bullshit behind the scenes where the authenticity of the photo is moot. There's a reason Ami stuck to the spirit of this story.
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theyre both trash but her entire IG rant had me rme so hard
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i missed the "rme" in this comment and i was scandalized for a sec
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omg lmaoo
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LOL same- i was like why are they admitting that?!?!?
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omg
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I did too! lmao
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Omg lmao
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Appreciate that she did that. That's a real case of an artist getting ripped off.
But can I just say that people on Tumblr tend to be way too precious about propriety of GIFs from movies and shows? I make them too but goddamn, it's not high art. The base material is copyrighted so we're lucky they're not ripped down by studios for that alone.
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Tumblr "artists" are so weird. Like I can understand if it's original art but gif'ing clips or making icons? Really!? I about rolled my eyes the other day when I saw someone tagging their "aesthetics" and I wanted to be like...YOU KNOW YOU ARENT CREDITING THE ORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPHERS.
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i get so mad when people on tumblr remove THE ARTISTS/PHOTOGRAPHERS caption/credit, and then they're like ~lol idk who did this~ yeah right bitch, reverse image search that shit, the artist's name always pops up in multiple results. >.>
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u never lived during livejournal ~icon drama where ppl were pissed others took icons they made without crediting them like bye you're all using the same source material (which isn't yours) and adding 2 filters. back the fuck up, i made some pretty creative icons (dgaf at this brag, i liked my shit) but i'd never even come close to wanting a copyright claim when i used a damn screenshot or pic from a photoshoot like rly...
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i rolled my eyes every time i saw that one tumblr post going around recently about how much WORK AND EFFORT goes into making gifs and how underappreciated gifmakers are. like, please. i make gifs too and it's really not that serious. nearly 100% of the time we're all gifing off video files we acquired illegally either way lmao.
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lol tumblr creators can be so ott
i remember seeing this guilt trip of a post going around about how you're basically a bad person for not commenting on people's art or their writing
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I don't like when my gifs get reposted but I just send a message to support and it usually gets taken down so I don't understand these people that get so dramatic about it lol
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lol people who take their gif creations~ super serious are so weird to me, it does feel like the icon journals of the past, even then i never went after people who didnt credit me on ursinia...
like i feel like they have no accomplishments outside of them, which is probably a bitchy thing to say, but i've made probably 200+ gifs that are used all the fucking time (here and on tumblr), just glad people can get some use out of them...
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Omg, I only have please credit me on my icons because I just wanted someone to be able to find more if they liked it. I made sure to try and credit original artists or fan art but that was it.
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I can't stand either of them.
(Still enjoying my first Kat von D liquid lipsticks though)
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they're both pretentious shitstains.
can anyone recommend a good moisturizer for dry skin? for some reason, my skin has been drying out a lot more this summer. i've been getting dry patches on my cheeks, under my eyes, etc. it's so frustrating!
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cetaphil works best for me. i just use the basic one which i actually don't think is intended for use on the face, but i haven't had any problems. they do make a face-specific one tho.
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i used to use that, and it worked pretty well. i'll have to give it another try! thanks :)
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my skin is combo (but dry as FUCK about 6 months out of the year) and cetaphil has saved my ass. especially when i was on accutane and my skin was basically peeling off. cerave is also good but i found cetaphil to be more effective.
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i love pond's dry skin cream!
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it's pricey but I use the Josie Maran daily argan stuff and it's great, one bottle lasts me months bc I only need 2 pumps for my whole face
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Literally the best thing you will ever do for your skin. You will never go back to anything else. Argan oil is from the heavens.
Edited at 2016-07-19 06:54 pm (UTC) Literally the best thing you will ever do for your skin. You will never go back to anything else. Argan oil is from the heavens.
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I've fallen in love with this: http://www.ulta.com/hydro-boost-water-gel?productId=xlsImpprod12041835
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Moisture Surge. It works like a charm!
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I have bottles of this at home and work. I love it because it doesn't feel greasy at all and it's vegan-friendly
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Yo, thanks for this. I've been wanting to ask this for months, but I always show up to these posts so late. Lol
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holika holika good cera super cream or banila co miss flower and mr honey cream
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After I wash my face and rinse, I leave it wet and apply 5-6 drops of jojoba oil, really massaging it into dry areas, then let my face air dry. It really makes a difference in how my skin feels.
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Clinique Moisture Surge for dry skin
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I'm in love with the Drunk Elephant Lala cream.
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Pevonia Dry Skin cream
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cerave am! it has spf 35.
but you should also look at chemical exfoliants (glycolic pads are available at CVS at varying price points) that really helped with my dry patches
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Hearing the name Jeffree Star really takes me back to the MySpace days. Or users like ForBiddeN lol.
Edited at 2016-07-19 06:15 pm (UTC)
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Lol seriously all I think of is Myspace with him, I can't believe he's still relevant.
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The scene queens community on here man. I lived for Kiki Kannibal's and Melissa Marie's sloppy asses when I was like 11.
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it really sends me back to my lolscenequeens days
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lmao and getoffmyspace!!!
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She doesn't come off as very well spoke. (observation) but everything she said was pretty reasonable. she doesn't want anyone to troll him or some shit, she just wants him to do the right thing, pay people, and take it down a notch or ten.
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so Jeffrey was telling the truth somewhat, anyhow I knew it wasn't based on his racism
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ofc it wasn't. She's been a racist long before meeting him, lol.
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Yep.
Was on MUA on Reddit, and the excuses people make for Kat on there is so annoying.
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no to both of them tbh
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Yaaaass. Stephanie Nicole is the best. She turned down a sponsorship a few days ago and i give her props for that tbh. i feel like any other person would have jumped on it right away.
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oooh which one? i really like her. she looks like she had too much plastic surgery but i like her
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he gives a bad name to us scorpios lol
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lmaoo. i love her
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I'll fully back her when she finally doesn't excuse Doe Deere's fuckery.
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She's ok, I guess. Her voice makes it unbearable to sit through her 40 minute videos, tho.
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self-proclaimed [insert astrology sign here] ppl are the most annoying istg
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after the revelation that there was a 13th zodiac sign, I wanted to have a bar trivia team called You're Not a Scorpio, You're Just an Asshole
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i love her. I tested and purchased Good Genes/Luna Oil bc of ha!
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I just started watching stephanie and I already love her
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What killed the dinosaurs? Its a question as old as well the dinosaurs themselves, and one that everyone from school children to scientists have been asking for decades. Movies like Jurassic Park and the Land Before Time only heighten that sense of wonder and raise the stakes behind that question. Now according to a new scientific study, it seems that black gold may have been the source of the dinos demise.
Japanese researchers at Tohuku University and the Meteorological Research Institute authored a recent study in the research journal Scientific Reports suggesting that a meteor impact 66 million years ago on an oil rich region of Yucatan Peninsula led to the death of the dinosaurs. When the asteroid hit the vast oil deposits of Mexico, it sent thick black smoke into the atmosphere, changing the climate around the world. That soot blocked out the sun leading to a significant cooling of the planet. Equally importantly, it also led to a substantial drought around the world.
The asteroid in question was roughly 6 miles wide and its impacted created the 110 mile wide crater that exists in the Yucatan today the third largest crater on Earth. The impact was the equivalent of roughly 1 billion atomic bombs of the equivalent power to what struck Hiroshima at the end of World War 2.
The researchers calculate that the amount of soot released would have lowered sunlight exposure by 85 percent and reduced rainfall by 80 percent. That would have had a significant impact on plant growth, which in turn would have limited food options for most dinosaurs. In addition, the soot cooled the Earth by 16 degrees Celsius (about 28.8 degrees Fahrenheit) over the course of just 3 years. Think of the event as the reverse of global warming and on steroids. Related: What Will Trumps Nuclear Energy Policy Look Like?
Against this backdrop it is not surprising that dinosaurs all died out. Only smaller mammals that could live underground would have survived. In fact, the fossil record suggests that only 12 percent of the pre-asteroid life was able to survive after the impact. It was not just dinosaurs that died either, contrary to myths about the Ice Age around 93 percent of mammal species were killed off as well, according to a separate research study by scientists at the University of Bath. The largest animals that would have survived the extinction event were about the size of a house cat.
Still, life bounced back fairly quickly researchers say, with about twice as many species existing 300,000 years after the event versus before it. Of course, given that the course of human history only goes back around 25,000 years, three-hundred thousand years is still a long period of time. It reflects the reality that the asteroid strike had a significant enough impact that its effects took tens of thousands of years to dissipate. It was the adaptability of mammals after the strike versus various reptiles that led the mammals to ultimately come to dominate the planet. Dinosaurs were in decline for millions of years before the asteroid strike, but that event aided by the oil rich soil of the Yucatan finished them off.
Its ironic that oil, so fundamental for modern human life was ultimately the catalyst that wiped out the dinosaurs. Had the asteroid stuck in a less oil rich region, back of the envelope calculations suggest its impact would have only been around one-third as devastating. Its impossible to say if that would have allowed any of the dinosaurs to live or not, but it is at least a possibility. Perhaps if not for the existence of oil, none of us would have cars, but maybe we would all have a pet brontosaurus.
By Michael McDonald of Oilprice.com
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A lot of people in Europe are wondering why political leaders on the continent seem to be ready to agree with whatever Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says, and do anything he demands. Many resent Erdogans hand-twisting approach to the migrant crisis and worry about Turkey turning into a dictatorship, plain and simple.
Now, the attempted coup by the Turkish military over the weekend has become the latest event to highlight Turkeys major role in the global energy market and the implications of any political shakeup in the country for this same market.
The Bosphorus is where around 3 percent of daily global crude oil shipments pass, or some 3 million barrels. This may not be a lot in percentage terms, but for Europe it accounts for well over a quarter of its total crude oil imports. Europe imported 1.559 billion barrels from the former Soviet Union last year, or an average of 4 million barrels daily, according to European Commission figures.
Besides the Bosphorus, Turkey is also home to two pipelines for Caspian and Iraqi crude, as well as the Southern Gas Corridor, which should provide Europe with an alternative source of natural gas in hopes of undermining the leading position of Russias Gazprom on the European market.
There is also the Ceyhan port, Turkeys main crude export terminal. This is where the two pipelines from Azerbaijan and Iraq end up, and this is also allegedly where a lot of ISIS oil ends up. In short, Turkey is already a major hub for oil and gas coming from the Middle East and Central Asia, and its importance in this respect will only grow as new projectsespecially gas projectscome online.
Then there is the Syrian war, and Turkeys vested interest in it in light of plans for a pipeline that would carry gas from Qatar to Turkey, and from there, on to Europe. This pipeline would serve the geopolitical interests of Saudi Arabia, helping it to get the upper hand over Iran, which, now that most of the economic sanctions against it have been lifted, is eager to return to the global energy market. It would also, some would argue, serve U.S. geopolitical interests by once again undermining Russias dominance as gas supplier to the European continent. Related: Why Oil Prices Might Never Recover
These geopolitical interests largely overlap with European ones. The European Union (EU) has made it abundantly clear that it wants a variety of energy supply sources. Natural gas is especially important as a cleaner and cheaper alternative to crude. Europe will need more gas in the years to come, and it doesnt want it to come from Russiaor at least not so much of it.
This is why Europe is tip-toeing around Erdogan; and this is why European leaders seem to dance to any tune Ankaras boss plays. Thats also why European leaders were not too enthusiastic when the attempted coup failed, despite official declarations in support of Erdogans government. They did have enough dignity left to warn him to watch himself when dealing with the coup plotters; yet one cannot help but ask: what is Europe going to do if Erdogan decides to re-introduce the death penalty, especially for them? What is it going to do if he uses the coup to further curb civil rights and cement himself at the helm? Refuse to admit Turkey into the European Union? Not a big deal as far as Erdogan and his vision of a new imperial Turkey that dominates the region are concerned.
Erdogan will in all likelihood be the new master of the European gas tap. Its ironic how democratic Europe seems to be forever dependent on dictators for its energy, at least until it goes fully renewable, which is not going to happen any time soon.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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Crude is drifting lower, looking rather trepidative ahead of another weekly inventory report, while dollar strength is also helping to put the kibosh on a rally. Hark, here are five things to consider in crude markets today:
1) According to Reuters, strong demand from India for heavy crude has helped lift Iraqi exports above Saudi volumes for the first time on a quarterly basis. We can see this below in our ClipperData, as Iraqi flows account for over 20 percent of total Indian crude imports for a second consecutive quarter, while Saudi flows have dropped below this threshold.
As India looks to keep up its pace of building 40 kilometers of road per day this year, its appetite for bitumen is spurring on its pursuit of heavier Iraqi oil.
2) While on the topic of India, the chart below highlights how Indias demand continues to rise, boosting its need to import from the likes of the aforementioned Iraq and Saudi Arabia. It is also looking to build its own strategic petroleum reserve (SPR), currently adding 39.1 million barrels of capacity at three locations: Visakhaptnam, Mangalore and Padur.
It is looking to add a further 91 million barrels of SPR capacity in a second phase by 2020. As the gap between Indias demand and supply is set to continue to widen, its need for energy security via an SPR is growing as well:
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3) U.S. exports of LPG (Liquefied Petroleum Gas) have ramped up strongly in recent years, and specifically from the Gulf Coast. As a bi-product of the shale boom, the U.S. has shifted from being an LPG importer to being the worlds largest exporter (sending out ~80% propane, ~20% butane).
But just as the U.S. shale oil boom created a supply glut in the global crude market, we are seeing a similar situation play out for LPG. With Chinese demand faltering and failing to absorb new supplies, we are hearing companies are cancelling U.S. LPG loadings in July, choosing instead to incur hefty penalties (hark, $1 million per cargo).
From a ClipperData perspective, we expect loadings to come under further pressure going forward, as oversupply gives buyers the upper hand to renegotiate or even cancel their contracts especially as global LPG spreads have shrunk to make U.S. cargoes uneconomical to Asian buyers. Hark, our ClipperData loadings from the US Gulf and Arab Gulf: Related: Why Another Oil Price Downturn Is A Distinct Possibility
(Click to enlarge)
4) A new report from the EPA projects that the U.S. will fall short of its fuel efficiency target of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025 driven by the changing behavior of consumers amid lower gasoline prices. Gas prices continue to drop, now down 35 of the last 36 days to $2.21/gallon their lowest level for this time of year since 2014. Hence consumers cannot help themselves from buying gas guzzlers (aka pickup trucks, vans, and SUVs).
All is not lost, however. Both the EPA and NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) say that fuel standards could be met through improvements in gasoline vehicles and not just through widespread introduction of electric or hybrid cars.
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5) Finally, the cost of decommissioning for North Sea oil-fields is set to rise over the next ten years, as an increasing number of older platforms are retired amid a lower price environment; upgrades are not a consideration at the current price point. Wood Mackenzie projects decommissioning costs to rise to 23 billion pounds by 2025.
Production in the North Sea peaked in 1999 at 2.9 million barrels per day; volumes last year dropped to 965,000 bpd, according to BP.
By Matt Smith
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Oil continued to trade lower on Tuesday as traders fear today and tomorrow's inventory data reports from the API and EIA.
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Chart of the Week
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The free cash flow picture for U.S. onshore oil and gas companies is improving.
Capex still exceeds cash flow, but the gap is shrinking.
Still, the improvement comes because drilling is at a virtual standstill. The financing gap has narrowed, but only because spending is so low. Cash flow for the industry in the first quarter was at a five-year low.
E&Ps may need less external sources of financing moving forward, but capex budgets will likely increase if drilling picks up, presenting financing challenges once again.
Market Movers
Barrons says that Royal Dutch Shell (NYSE: RDS.A) is the worlds best big oil stock, citing cost declines and divestments. Barrons writer Jack Hough says the companys moves have increased confidence in the stability of its 6.6 percent dividend yield.
Around 400 union workers in the North Sea working on oil platforms for Royal Dutch Shell voted for a 24-hour strike, with a few shorter strikes to follow in the coming weeks. The workers oppose cost cutting measures that will hurt wages.
Tesoro (NYSE: TSO) has reached a $425 million settlement with the U.S. Justice Department over air quality violations in six western U.S. states. Tesoro will have to invest $403 million in new equipment to control emissions.
Tuesday July 19, 2016
Oil prices are still hovering around levels at the close of last week WTI sitting just above $45 per barrel and Brent around $47 per barrel. High levels of refined products are weighing on the market (more below), and while all major analysts see the market continuing down the path towards supply/demand balance, there is disagreement over how quickly that will arrive. In the very short-term, there do not seem to be a lot of bullish catalysts on the horizon, although weekly EIA data could provide a lift if stock drawdowns are stronger than expected.
Three weeks of rig count increases. The rig count increased for a third consecutive time for the week ending on July 15, rising to 357. That brings the total increase to 41 rigs since the end of May, a clear sign that more than a few companies feel that they can get back to work. However, since the rig count data lags behind the oil markets, it often reflects conditions from weeks prior. The increase likely has more to do with $50 oil in June than it does with $45 oil in July.
High inventories move to forefront. After rallying to $50 per barrel in June, and then faltering, the markets have recently sent conflicting signals about what to expect in the coming months. Now, after several weeks of new data, the problem of excess inventories for gasoline and diesel are taking center stage as the elephant in the room for any price rally. Elevated levels of refined products are found not just in the U.S., but in Europe and Asia as well a global problem of too much supply. A glut of refined products is increasing the incidence of tankers being used for floating storage, a sure sign of a near-term glut. New York saw some gasoline tankers backed up because onshore storage was at a premium. Reuters reports that some floating storage is cropping up off the coast of the UK. Oil prices will run into a price ceiling until these inventories are drawn down. Related: Energy Is The Reason Europe Is Still Backing Erdogan
Seasonal changes raise concerns. The high levels of refined product stocks come even though we are in the midst of peak demand season. In the U.S., driving peaks in the summer, and in places like Saudi Arabia, crude oil demand hits a seasonal peak in the summer because of higher air conditioning needs. However, peak summer demand is doing very little to whittle down inventories. That raises some concerns as summer starts to come to a close, which could result in a knock to global demand. On top of that, refiners could also begin to slow down production a move that comes both because of seasonal maintenance and because there is already too much volume on the market. Lower refinery runs will dampen demand for crude oil. In other words, seasonal changes could see lower demand for oil in the coming months.
More oil companies hedging. Bloomberg reports that more oil companies are hedging their production for 2016 and 2017 at todays prices, not gambling on hopes for a stronger price rally. Locking in sales at $40 to $50 will hurt if the markets rally much higher, but it will protect companies from downside risk. And after a false rally in 2015, oil producers are not taking any risks.
U.S. fuel efficiency projection revised lower because of cheap gas. U.S. government forecasters lowered their projection for fleet-wide vehicle efficiency as more motorists purchase trucks and SUVs, a trend that is taking place because of cheap gasoline. Regulators estimate the fleet efficiency will hit 50 to 52.6 miles per gallon in 2025 instead of the previous estimate of 54.5 mpg. As a result, the auto industry is arguing that the fuel efficiency regulations will be more difficult to meet and are pushing for a change. At the same time, the silver lining for government regulators is that they also underestimated how fast the cost of batteries would fall for electric vehicles.
North Sea oil companies benefit from Brexit. The Brexit vote has pushed the British pound to a 31-year low, helping to reduce the costs for oil companies operating in the North Sea. Oil companies in the North Sea tend to pay costs for salaries and equipment in pounds, but sell their oil in dollars, so a weaker pound cuts down on expenses. I dont really see any negatives, other than general market uncertainty, said Tony Durrant, CEO of Premier Oil PLC (LON: PMO), according to the WSJ. Premier said that on one of their projects, named Catcher, the company is saving $100 million on development costs because of the exchange rate movements. The share prices of BP (NYSE: BP) and Shell (NYSE: RDS.A) jumped to 14-month highs after the Brexit vote. Not everyone is convinced, however. Wood Mackenzie says the uncertainty surrounding North Sea investments because of the Brexit could accelerate the decommissioning of old oil fields and platforms.
ExxonMobil offers $2.5 billion for InterOil. ExxonMobil (NYSE: XOM) has been patient during the oil price downturn, not leaping to make any acquisitions even while rival Royal Dutch Shell spent a fortune for BG Group. But Exxon offered $2.2 billion plus debt for InterOil a few days ago, a move made to boost its LNG position in Papua New Guinea. The offer surpasses that of Oil Search, which is backed by Total (NYSE: TOT). Importantly, as Reuters notes, the potential acquisition presents two benefits to Exxon making a purchase at the bottom of a commodity cycle, and acquiring a company that could provide long-term returns.
Saudi Arabia to make largest tanker fleet. Arab Petroleum Investment Corp. and National Shipping Co. of Saudi Arabia will create the largest fleet of oil tankers in the world. The move will help boost Saudi crude oil exports. The companies setup a $1.5 billion investment fund to add 15 very large crude carriers (VLCCs) on top of its existing 46 VLCCs.
By Evan Kelly of Oilprice.com
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The global bitumen market is forecast to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of four percent between 2015 to 2020, and the worlds largest energy traders such as the Vitol Group and the Trafigura Group Pte. are in a race to increase their market share.
The bitumen market was valued at around $75 billion in 2014 and is expected to reach $94 billion in 2020, according to a report by Zion Research, titled, Bitumen (Paving Bitumen, Oxidized Bitumen, Cutback Bitumen, Bitumen Emulsion, Polymer Modified Bitumen and Others) Market for Roadways, Waterproofing, Adhesives, Insulation and Other Applications - Global Industry Perspective, Comprehensive Analysis and Forecast, 2014 2020.
Bitumen is a semi-solid form of petroleum, which is used to make asphalt for roads, waterproofing for roofs, insulation, and adhesives. It is either obtained by distillation of petroleum or is available naturally, such as in Canadas oil sands.
Bitumen is used mainly in road manufacturing. A surge in road construction activity in Asia will propel growth for the product going forward. 75 percent of the global consumption of bitumen was used for road construction in 2014.
Waterproofing of roofing and building construction was the second major consumer of bitumen in 2014. Increased construction of homes to cater for the growing population is likely to add to the bitumen demand in the future. Related: Energy Is The Reason Europe Is Still Backing Erdogan
Along with roofing, polymer modified bitumen (PMB), which is used as a chemical additive and adhesive, will witness rapid growth compared to other forms of bitumen.
The chart below shows the U.S. bitumen market for various segments.
Source: Grand View Research
Trucks, trains, and barges have been used traditionally to transport bitumen from refineries to local consumers; however, a drop in supply from the aging refineries in the U.S. and Europe has necessitated the use of oceangoing tankers, to supply the material from its source of production to the end consumer.
Vitol, the largest independent oil-trading house teamed up with U.S.-based Sargeant Marine Inc., which distributes asphalt to customers worldwide to form Valt, which operates the worlds largest dedicated asphalt fleet, handling parcel sizes from 20 metric tons up to 37,000 metric tons through its fleet of fourteen specialist vessels, according to its website.
It used to be mostly a small distribution business, Chris Bake, a senior executive at Rotterdam-based Vitol, said in an interview. Now it is more of a whole arbitrage business requiring a global reach and shipping capacity, reports Bloomberg.
Trafigura group is also not far behind. Its Singapore-based unit, Puma Energy has added four new bitumen vessels, taking the total number of vessels to 11, which cater to the Asian markets.
We see a definite upward trend in the number of nautical miles for bitumen, said Valt Chief Commercial Officer Nick Fay, who estimates an annual increase of about 7 percent. All the new refineries that are getting built dont make bitumen, reports Bloomberg.
The chart below shows the increasing fleet of ships from the two trading houses carrying bitumen.
(Click to enlarge)
The Guvnor Group is planning to invest in the Perth Amboy asphalt refinery and storage facility in New Jersey, which has been shut since 2008, reports Bloomberg. Related: Who Really Won The Oil Price War?
There is hardly any public information about the bitumen market, which makes it ideal for the large energy traders, who use their energy expertise and global connection to supply to far-off markets.
There is a perception that the world is going to be more disconnected -- supply and demand-wise -- and we are there to help connect the dots, Klintholm said.
Nonetheless, increased use of asphalt for roads and environmental concerns with bitumen manufacturing could pose a risk for the growth of the bitumen industry in the future.
By Rakesh Upadhyay for Oilprice.com
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In June 2015, oil prices surged to $60 per barrel, raising hopes that the oil price downturn would have been brief and the recovery swift. But by July, oil prices were heading back down, the beginning of a deeper slump that would continue for months.
A year later, a similar pattern could be playing out, or at least, that is what oil producers are fearing. After hitting a low point in February of this year, oil prices began a four-month rally, rising from $26 to $51 per barrel by June, the third year in a row in which the month of June saw a relative peak for oil prices. Now, July could once again mark a renewed nose-dive.
This time around, an array of oil producers are not taking any chances. According to Bloomberg, more and more E&Ps are hedging their production, protecting themselves against a crash in prices. Earlier this month, Laredo Petroleum Inc., for instance, hedged more than 2 million barrels of its 2017 production. The producers have sold the hell out of this rally, Stephen Schork, president of Schork Group Inc., told Bloomberg. The companies that did survive, theyve been hedging into this rally. And theyre counting their blessings.
Hedging even began before prices rallied. Reuters surveyed shale firms earlier this month, finding that 17 out of 30 had increased their hedging in the first quarter when oil prices were at a low point. Even though they locked in at low prices, doing so offered some stability and certainty in their revenue projections.
But it was also an indication of the level of anxiety with which E&Ps were approaching 2016. The rally since February has buoyed spirits, but with oil prices back to $45 per barrel, negative sentiment once again pervades the market. For the week ending on July 12, oil traders increased their short bets by 1.6 percent, the third week in a row that shorts climbed.
The logic is straightforward. Production is falling but global supplies are still elevated. Worse, inventories are only coming down slowly from record highs. Then there is the possibility of new drilling the rig count rose again last week, with the industry adding 6 oil rigs and 1 natural gas rig, according to Baker Hughes. On the other hand, although drillers could get back to work, the markets are likely overestimating the impact of a few dozen rigs coming back into operation. Related: Big Oil Begins To Worry About Trumps Wall
Meanwhile, the botched coup attempt in Turkey barely registered in oil. Supply disruptions through the Bosporus, where 3 percent of global crude travels, were certainly plausible, but the straits were reopened only hours after the overthrow failed. "The market is looking past the coup," Ric Spooner, chief market analyst at Sydney's CMC Markets, told Reuters.
At this point, the very large overhang of refined products weighing on the market is one of the most important indicators to watch, a glut that will take time to work through. The rapid buildup in storage levels of gasoline and diesel this year have taken the markets by surprise, and could ultimately delay what everyone thought would be a rebalance in the next few months.
The rising inventories of gasoline have got the markets attention, John Kilduff, partner at Again Capital LLC, said in an interview with Bloomberg. The oil market is getting ready to break. Related: Is Oil Going Back Under $40?
The one bullish factor for oil prices is India, which has taken over from China as the main driver of demand growth. India just grew at its fastest three-month period in the past decade, the most recent data shows. "We think India is roaring right now and will be a key driver of demand," Helima Croft, managing director and Global Head of Commodity Strategy at RBC Capital Markets, told CNBC's "Futures Now in a recent interview. Despite all the negative factors pointing to ongoing oversupply, RBC still thinks that crude prices could close out the year in the mid$50s per barrel, largely because of India.
But another downturn in prices is also a distinct possibility, and one that looks a bit more likely than it did a month ago. At the very least, it will take quite a bit of time before a serious price rally arrives. "Fundamental headwinds are growing, supply-demand rebalancing is likely still a mid-2017 event, but tail risks are admittedly large in both directions, as geopolitics add to uncertainty," Morgan Stanley concluded in a recent report.
By Nick Cunningham of Oilprice.com
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The China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) evacuated 191 of its employees in South Sudan amid worries over an escalation in the armed conflict between the government and opposition troops.
A CNPC statement issued on 19 June mentioned that only 77 of their workers remain in the African country manning the companys oilfields. The communique further detailed that CNPC will try maintain normal operations in South Sudan. Nevertheless, the firm warns that it may remove all its personnel should the situation worsen.
China spent US$20 billion in Sudan before it split into two separate countries in 2011, and initially the investment paid off as nearly 14 million barrels of oil were produced in the first ten months of 2013. Yet the advent of civil war starting in December 2013 between forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and former Vice President Riek Machar led to tens of thousands of people dead and output plummeting to 120,000 barrel per day.
Clashes erupted earlier this month in the Southern Sudanese capital of Juba that left 272 people dead, including two United Nations peacekeepers from China. Both sides in the conflict declared a ceasefire on 12 July, but fighting could resume over the mobilization of 3000 rebels threatening to attack Juba.
Related: Algeria Plans To Boost Oil Output By 30%
We are communicating with them to stop this and disperse, said Army spokesman Lul Ruai Koang to Bloomberg. If they insist to fight, we will attack them with our air force. This is the warning we are giving them.
In light of the reescalation of the conflict, Germany, Britain, Italy, Japan, India, and Uganda have all attempted to pull their citizens out of South Sudan.
The conflict has limited oil production to the northern Upper Nile state even though South Sudan maintained 75 percent of Sudans oil supply following independence. Sudan holds a vital importance over its landlocked neighbor, which maintains pipelines and other facilities used in order to export South Sudanese oil via the Bashayer port along the Red Sea.
By Erwin Cifuentes for Oilprice.com
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The Olympic Target supertanker, carrying two million barrels of Iranian crude, is en route to the eastern Chinese port of Shandong, Reuters reports, citing sources in the know. The load will be supplied to small independent refineries called teapots, which have been gaining prominence over the last couple of years.
Irans national Oil Company (NIOC) sold the cargo to global oil trading giant Trafigura late in June. This makes Trafigura the first among its peers to start selling crude to Chinese teapots. Neither the trading firm, nor NIOC, however, responded to Reuters requests for comment.
In any case, this move confirms Irans intentions to regain its global market sharenot soon, but soonerand its been quick to orient itself correctly in terms of demand. Just a few months ago, Saudi Arabia, OPECs biggest exporter, started selling crude to Chinas teapots on the spot marketsomething it had never done up to that point. This turned the spotlight firmly on teapots: refineries that until recently had to make do with whatever crude they could get their hands on but have now been allowed their own import quotas by Beijing. A lot of the fuels they produce are then exported.
Iran, which is Saudi Arabias possibly greatest rival in the region, seems to have followed events and trends closely, jumping on the teapot bandwagon as soon as it got the chance. According to Reuters sources, Tehran only agreed to sell the cargo to Trafigura on condition that it would ship it to Chinas teapots.
Though the Saudis had historically been Chinas biggest oil supplier, Russia has managed to take the top spot several times since, thanks to the teapot refineries. The fight for the Chinese market is raging with full force between the worlds top two exporters, and now it seems they have a new rival to contend with in the face of Iran.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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An uptick in drilling activity aimed at reaching shale and tight gas, tough environmental rules, and the lower price of crude oil are all factors that are helping to drive a potential boost for the well cementing services market on a global scale. A report by Grandview Research forecasts market growth reaching $11.08 billion in U.S. dollars by the year 2024. That growth could also be fueled by untapped reserves in Brazil, China and Russia. There have also been improvements in cementing technology services by industry service providers.
In the report, Grandview notes that in 2015, the market size for cementing services was at $7.44 billion. The report also states that for that same year, primary well cementing made up 78.6 percent of the market. 84.1 percent of the work was done for onshore wells last year. Onshore wells in the United States, Russia and Saudi Arabia, and an anticipated increase in the demand for oil and gas are expected to contribute to industry growth. For 2016 to 2024, Grandview anticipates that remedial well cementing will be a market driver and will see an increase of 6.9 percent. Russia, the Gulf of Mexico, North America and the North Sea are all expected to require an increase in remedial cementing. Grandview also reports that growth is also expected in deep sour gas wells.
Grandview predicts that offshore drilling will also become a major segment in the cementing industry and will see a compound annual growth rate of 7.1 percent between 2016 and 2024. The development of offshore wells in the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, the Persian Gulf and the South China Sea is expected to increase demand. There have also been recent discoveries of oil and gas deposits in Africa, a factor that is expected to contribute to the growth of well cementing services. Additionally, the well cementing services market will be driven by the energy sector in the Middle East. That region is expected to see average growth in the coming years as large oil and gas reserves there are developed, according to the report.
By Lincoln Brown for Oilprice.com
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The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) of the United Kingdom announced today that it would bring up criminal charges against Monaco-based Unaoil over alleged involvement in a major international bribery scandal.
The SFO is conducting a criminal investigation into the activities of Unaoil, its officers, its employees and its agents in connection with suspected offences of bribery, corruption and money laundering, according to an SFO statement cited by The Guardian.
We have been approached by a number of sources who may have information relevant to this investigation. If you have any information please contact us through our secure and confidential reporting channel, the statement concluded.
Unaoil did not provide an official response to The Guardian.
The SFO probe was launched last March shortly after journalists with The Huffington Post and Australias Fairfax Media revealed that Unaoil purportedly bribed officials in countries around the world including Iran, Syria, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.
Among the multinational firms who used Unaoils services were Halliburton, KBR, Rolls-Royce, Samsung, and Petrofac.
In one example, Oilprice.com mentioned a prior report of Unaoils supposed wrongdoing that the president of a Canadian fracking company approached Unaoil for advice on how to approach a bribe in Libya:
What we are curious about is to what type of Baksheesh [a common slang term for bribery] is needed to present to these men in order to get work startedIs this something that needs to be done after work hours one on one? An added value amount to the ticket for them, or a flat fee a month, we are not sure. What are your thoughts on this?
The same law firm behind the Panama Papers, Mossack Fonseca, was said to help organize Unaoils subsidiaries in the British Virgin Islands. One document unearthed via the Panama Papers leak revealed that BP had signed a multimillion-dollar contract with Unaoil for the provision of engineering services at the Kirkuk oil field in northern Iraq.
Monegasque authorities in April launched a raid against Unaoils offices in the principality allegedly at the behest of the SFO though they declined to comment at the time.
By Erwin Cifuentes for Oilprice.com
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The opinions expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the opinions of OnMilwaukee.com, its advertisers or editorial staff.
To: Newt Gingrich
From: Jay Bullock
Re: A Test for Muslims
Mr. Gingrich, last week you said, "We should frankly test every person here who is of a Muslim background, and if they believe in Sharia law, they should be deported."
While many people got offended by that remark, what I heard instead was a call to design a test. This is my wheelhouse! As a high school teacher, I design assessments all the time; it's one of my favorite parts of the job.
So, Mr. Gingrich, I offer to you, free of charge, this test that you can administer to whomever you wish. I have included an answer key as well, just in case. Thank you for your consideration. The test begins below.
*****
Section 1: Multiple choice
1. How many articles are there in the Constitution of the United States?
A.) One
B.) Seven
C.) 12
D.) 27
Answer: B.) Seven.
This is important. If you want to be considered a real American, you ought to know some basic facts about its foundational document! Not knowing the Constitution might be a sign that you are disloyal to the U.S. and its freedoms.
2. Is Barack Obama ...
A.) Dumb
B.) A Muslim
C.) A Muslim sympathizer
D.) None of the above
Answer: D.) None of the above.
People are probably going to find this question easy, since Republican National Convention speaker Scott Baio got the process of elimination started by saying, "I don't think he's dumb." People of true Muslim faith would also recognize that Obama's long history of being Christian means he's not a Muslim, and "sympathizer" is a weasel word used by people who don't know what they're really talking about, so the answer has to be none of the above.
3. Which of these is not protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States?
A.) Freedom to assemble
B.) Freedom of the press
C.) Freedom to seek redress of grievances
D.) Freedom of speech
Answer: Trick question!
They are all there in the First Amendment! Those four freedoms and only those four freedoms. There is no way, Mr. Gingrich, you or I would ignore one of the freedoms found in the First Amendment. Nope. No way.
4. Which of these tenets of Sharia law is most incompatible with the American way of life?
A.) The prohibition against making a big show of your religious piety
B.) The prohibition against usury or getting rich by exploiting others
C.) The obligation to help the poor and sick among us
D.) The prohibition against cheating on your spouse and divorce
Answer: This is a tough one. Really, you should probably give credit for any answer here; the Republican Party, yourself and your presidential nominee included, rejects every single one of those, and we all know Republicans are the real Americans!
5. Terrorist attacks on American soil are most likely to be committed by ...
A.) Foreign-born Muslim extremists
B.) Radicalized American-born Muslims or other Muslim U.S. citizens
C.) Far-right American-born conservatives
D.) The Canadian band Nickelback?
Answer: C, by a longshot.
6. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has flip-flopped on whether to "ban Muslims" from entering the United States ...
A.) One time
B.) Three times
C.) Four times
D.) Five or more times
Answer: Currently C, but depending on when you administer this test, the answer may well be D.
Section 2: Short answer
7. Does President Obama have a serious plan to screen out terrorists from Syrian refugees? If so, explain it. If not, explain what such a process should be.
Suggested answer: Refugees should be subject to the highest possible level of security screening of anyone who wants to come to the United States. It should involve as many as nine separate steps and should take up to 18 months to get through. It must include checks by agencies ranging from our own FBI and State Department to the Department of Defense and Interpol. Refugees should be denied entry to the U.S. for any connections at all to any known "bad actors" or terrorists anywhere in the world. They should be repeatedly interviewed by many different interrogators who undergo strict training to identify potential threats. In the end, the U.S. should admit fewer than one per cent of the worldwide refugee population. Seems thorough and serious, doesn't it? And yes, that is Obama's current plan!
8. Was the post-9/11 Muslim surveillance plan implemented by the New York City Police Department a major success at stopping terrorist attacks or a brazen violation of civil liberties that ended in a lawsuit and the program being shut down by hardline police Commissioner Bill Bratton? Show your work.
Suggested answer: The NYPD program was not very good at stopping terrorist plots, and Bratton totally scrapped the program, which did lead to a lawsuit against the NYPD settled earlier this year. Anyone who cites that program as a justification for "tests" against Muslims or increased surveillance of Muslim communities would be an idiot, right?
Section 3: Essay question
9. Imagine the year is 2017. Donald Trump is president, and Newt Gingrich is secretary of state (I know, Mr. Gingrich, that you're itching to be included in a Trump administration!). In a 300-500 word essay, explain what day-to-day life would be like if you're a practicing Muslim in the U.S.
Suggested answer: Since the question calls for people to use their imaginations, answers will vary. However, there are some things we know will probably happen in Muslim communities around the country.
First, the anti-Muslim rhetoric from a Trump White House and his cabinet could compromise the safety of Muslims across the U.S. It is already true that Islam attracts those who hate; we see that in everything from record numbers of attacks on mosques to the 2012 Sikh temple shooting here in Wisconsin where the murdered mistook turban-wearing Sikh worshippers for Muslims. Imagine how much worse it would be with the tacit or even explicit permission from the Commander in Chief to go ahead and hate and scapegoat Muslims for whatever grievances people may have.
Second, whatever remaining standing the United States may have left in the international community will be compromised. Barack Obama and the current administration has done what it could to make up for the sins of the recent Bush administration, whose foreign policy seemed designed to intimidate and antagonize the Muslim world. Even today, when our allies in Europe are seeing a marked increase in violence perpetrated or inspired by groups like ISIS, their leadership is unimpressed with Trump's call to ban Muslims from entering this country and stoking fears against Islam worldwide. This may hold repercussions for American Muslims, if their international friends and families won't or can't come to the U.S. to visit. It affects us all if the U.S. is ostracized from the international community as a whole.
Finally, if we learned nothing from the last, oh, 450 or so years of American history, it's that creating an underclass, using demagoguery and the power of the state to tear down others because it's easier than lifting yourself up out of the depths of your own prejudice, is a terrible idea. The toll in human lives, dignity and even capital I mean, if you can't get someone like Trump to care about people, you might be able to get him to care about the economics! is breathtaking in its historical scope and heartbreaking in its continued depth.
America at its best is so much better than that. We are a nation that began from the crazy idea that all men are created equal, that there should not be that there must not be an underclass. As many people smarter than I have pointed out over the years, we're still working toward that ideal. The last few weeks, at home and abroad, have taught us that what the world needs more of now is not hate but love, not exclusion but inclusion, not trumpery but authentic truth, not discrimination but inclusion.
*****
So, Mr. Gingrich, there you go: a whole test that you can give to all the Muslims in the country and any asking for entry. If you need anything else, you know where to find me. Good luck in all your future exclusionary endeavors!
Religion and hatred infused the first day of the convention. OK, sometimes they're the same thing.
Especially if the religion - the REAL religion - is money.
Yesterday's invocation at the Republican National Convention was performed by a substitute rabbi*, Rabbi Ari Wolf, the chaplain of the Cleveland police force. Tump's supporters didn't miss a beat:
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the live chat accompanying the Republican National Convention's official YouTube live stream was bombarded with anti-Semitic comments and images of swastikas seconds after Wolf began to speak.
APOPKA, FL -- Paula White is partnering with French cosmetics company L'Oreal to launch a new line of make-up products aimed specifically at meeting the significant cosmetic needs of pretend pastors.
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(CNS): A recent UNAIDS report shows that decline in new HIV infections among adults has stalled. In 2014, key populations, including gay men and other men who have sex with men (MSM), sex workers and their clients, transgender people, people who inject drugs, and prisoners, accounted for 35% of new HIV infections globally. It is estimated that MSM are 24 times more likely to become infected with HIV and transgender people are 49 times more likely to be living with HIV than adults in the general population.
At XXI International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2016), in a pre-conference meet, some of the major issues got the spotlight: Are countries doing accurate size estimates for MSM and transgender populations? Is the money coming to these countries from global donors reaching the programmes for MSM and transgender or sitting in banks? And what is the connect between criminalizing same-sex behaviour, and size estimates of MSM population and service coverage among them?
Midnight Poonkasetwattana, Executive Director of Asia Pacific Coalition on Male Sexual Health (APCOM), said to CNS (Citizen News Service, citizen-news.org), "Asia Pacific region is lacking in terms of investment for HIV prevention (especially among MSM and transgender) and also political will. If we want to achieve fast track to meet UNAIDS '90-90-90' targets by 2020, time is now for urgent and increased investment in innovative and regional, national and local approaches for programmes of key populations to break down the structural barriers that affects and makes them vulnerable to HIV, especially for young gay men and MSM and transgender people in Asia Pacific."
It is essential for key populations to have access to the full range of HIV-prevention options in order to protect themselves and their sexual partners from HIV. This underscores the urgent need for the UNAIDS "90-90-90" targets to be met to realize the full potential of antiretroviral therapy (ART). The 90-90-90 targets are 90% of people knowing their HIV status, 90% of people who know their status accessing antiretroviral treatment and 90% of people on treatment having suppressed viral loads.
Are we counting properly?
Midnight Poonkasetwattana of APCOM questioned the silence on size estimates of MSM populations in Asia-Pacific countries. "Countries like China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Myanmar, Thailand and Viet Nam estimates MSM population to be over 5% when prevalence in cities like Bangkok, Hanoi and Jakarta is hiking to 15-20% or even more! Why is that access to condoms still remains very low in our region and 90% of MSM in Asia Pacific do not have access to HIV prevention services that they need because of discriminatory roles. 18 out of 58 countries in our region still criminalize same-sex behaviour. Since July 2012 when PrEP was approved by US-FDA and in 2014 WHO recommendations came in for PrEP as an effective HIV prevention tool for MSM, why are we not doing very well in rolling PrEP in Asia Pacific?
"Spending on HIV prevention in Asia Pacific remains very low, especially for key populations. Funding for HIV prevention among MSM population in Asia Pacific is less than 7% of overall HIV budget. This is unacceptable for a region that is home to over 60% of world's population and yet the funding does not match the estimated epidemic among MSM and transgender people! Critical components like advocacy, community mobilization and prevention are still getting largely funded by international donors and not domestically," added Midnight.
Criminalizing same-sex behaviour leads to lower size estimates, inflated service coverage
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Reprinted from Counterpunch
After years of no one -- at least not the white people who control the media -- giving a damn about what happens to black people at the hands of white cops, suddenly the terrible relationship between people and the police is a huge problem.
This is what happens when the power dynamic gets reversed, when aggressors find themselves in the unhappy role of victims. First, five policemen were assassinated in Dallas, as payback for police violence in general. Now three more have been killed in Baton Rouge, apparently to retaliate for the murder of another unarmed black man, Alton Sterling, by local police.
Cops are getting shot. So the media is finally paying attention.
Airing the issue is long overdue, but as usual it's playing out in hackneyed catchphrases that are unlikely to lead to meaningful improvement.
What we need, liberal wise men of the media tell us, is more community policing. Cops and the community need to get to know each other. Cops should get out of the squad car, walk around, talk to the locals before they shoot them.
Conservatives have a different answer: they think people, especially black people, need to have more appreciation for the extremely hard job the police are asked to do. Except that being a cop isn't really that hard or that dangerous. You are far more likely to die on the job if you are a logger, a pilot, a steelworker, a garbageman, a construction labor, a farmer, or president of the United States. The reason so many people join the police is that it's actually a sweet gig: pretty well paid (especially with overtime), and you get to retire after 20 years.
Fixing people's terrible relationship with the police who are paid to protect and serve them will require radical rather than incremental change.
(Notice that I said "people," not "minorities." The racial dynamic between police and minority neighborhoods that they patrol like occupied enemy territory in a war zone captures the headlines, but not the reality of a country in which many people, not just blacks, view the police with a mixture of fear and contempt. 41% of whites, for example, don't have a high degree of confidence in the police or view them as being honest.)
Three major structural changes would go along way towards fixing the problem.
First, the police should stop carrying guns.
In many countries, including countries where citizens have the right to bear arms, the police generally don't carry a weapon on duty. Places like Norway, Iceland, Japan, New Zealand, Britain, and Ireland haven't disintegrated into anarchy as a result. Nor have many policemen lost their lives. There are, of course, many reasons why disarming the police works, but there's one that jumps to mind right away: when you get pulled over by a cop here, you know that the only way you're going to get away clean is by shooting the police officer. Traffic stops often turn deadly. Taking guns away from the police reduces the stakes in confrontations between law enforcement and suspects. It makes everyone, including the police, safer.
If someone is robbing a bank, there's the option of picking up some guns at the police station and waiting outside. That's what they do in Britain.
Second, cops shouldn't be writing tickets.
As school children, we learned that Officer Friendly is here to help us in the event that we run into trouble. In other words, the police are our guardians. But how do you reconcile that image with getting pulled over for a minor traffic infraction like a broken taillight?
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Reprinted from Smirking Chimp
Donald Trump
(Image by twitter.com) Details DMCA
One of the main themes of Donald Trump's presidential campaign has been the idea of getting tough with our trading partners. He has attacked President Obama and his predecessors for negotiating bad deals. Trump promises to get tough with the Chinese, Mexicans, and other trading partners and thereby bring jobs back to the United States.
While many working people would agree that recent trade deals have not benefited them, they have good cause to be skeptical about Trump's get tough promises. Most immediately his vice-presidential pick, Governor Mike Pence, has been a strong supporter of NAFTA and other trade deals. But choosing vice-presidents with differing views certainly has precedents.
More importantly, it is not clear what Trump thinks he is going to do when he gets tough with the Chinese and the other bad guys in his story. It's true that China and Mexico and many other countries are running trade surpluses with the United States. And it's also true that these surpluses have cost the jobs of millions of workers. In some cases these workers have been able to find new jobs, generally at much lower pay. However in many cases these workers remain unemployed and end up dropping out of the labor force altogether.
The trade deficit poses an especially severe problem in the context of secular stagnation: a situation in which the economy faces a sustained shortfall in demand. In the years prior to the collapse of the housing bubble most economists did not take the idea of a secular stagnation seriously. Their view was that if we saw a loss of demand due to a trade deficit, we could simply make it up with increased demand from consumption or investment spending.
Fewer economists hold this view eight and a half years after the collapse of the housing bubble threw the economy into a recession. While we clearly have seen enormous improvements in the labor market from the low-points in 2009 and 2010, by most measures the labor market has still not recovered to its pre-recession condition.
It is no longer credible to say that we don't have to worry about a large trade deficit because the economy will just generate demand elsewhere to fill the gap. This is clearly not true.
While we may be able to agree that a $500 billion-plus trade deficit (@3.0 percent of GDP) is a real problem, the question is what does Donald Trump propose to do about it? He might be a tough guy and all that, but it isn't clear that he even knows who has to get tough with.
Trump seems to think the problem is that other countries are pulling fast ones on our "stupid" trade negotiators. They aren't. The problem is that our trade negotiators are not focused on reducing the trade deficit.
Let's take the case of China, where we have the largest trade deficit. Our trade negotiators are not especially focused on the trade deficit with China. They want China to grant more access to its financial markets to Goldman Sachs and other banks. They want also want more access for our telecommunications companies, our insurance companies, and our retail and restaurant chains. They want China to do a better job enforcing Microsoft's copyrights and Pfizer's drug patents.
When it comes to our trade deficit, our trade negotiators are getting conflicting signals. Unions and workers in the U.S. would like China to raise the value of its currency to reduce its competitive advantage. But GE and other U.S. companies that produce goods in China and export back to the United States aren't anxious to see their costs rise due to a higher valued Chinese currency. The same logic applies to Walmart that has spent years developing a low-cost supply chain in China and other developing countries.
So if Trump thinks this is a story of beating up China he has missed the boat. It's a story first and foremost of beating up the U.S. corporations that profit from the trade deficit with China. And, it means telling a lot of other companies that their concerns are going to take a back seat in negotiations with China, since our priority is getting the trade deficit down.
If Trump understands this reality he has done a good job of hiding it. If he doesn't understand the realities of trade, then he is not likely to be able to improve the situation for working people in the United States.
Reprinted from Nation of Change
Even as Bernie Sanders was endorsing Hillary Clinton Tuesday in New Hampshire, expressions of dismay and outrage from his supporters flooded social media. Naturally, Donald Trump piled on, tweeting that Bernie Sanders "has totally sold out to corrupt Hillary Clinton," and that his supporters are "not happy that he is selling out."
Those gathering under #selloutsanders are, of course, a small minority of activists. Polls show that 85 percent of Sanders voters are ready to support Hillary Clinton, and that number will surely grow when the Democratic Convention launches her formal candidacy. But the sentiment is real. The Sanders insurgency was fueled by a revolt against the big-money politics that Clinton personifies. Clinton delivered one of her most populist speeches in response to the Sanders endorsement, but doubts about her commitments are widespread, even among those intending to vote for her.
Sanders, however, did not "sell out." His endorsement was carefully framed. He began by celebrating the extraordinary movement that grew behind his candidacy -- 13 million votes, hundreds of thousands of volunteers, 2.5 million small donors, victories in 22 caucuses and primaries and 1,900 delegates. "Together, we have begun a political revolution to transform America and that revolution continues. Together, we continue the fight to create a government which represents all of us, and not just the one percent -- a government based on the principles of economic, social, racial and environmental justice."
Sanders has it right. It will take a political revolution to transform our politics, revive our democracy, and make government the instrument of the many and not just the few. That is not a task of one campaign or one presidency. The movement has to build -- in fits and starts, waves and tides -- over time. And Sanders is right: The next step in building that movement is defeating Donald Trump and electing Hillary Clinton as president.
The Movement Must Work To Crush Trump
Populist movements in this country have often floundered on the shoals of race and nativism. The established are quick to play on racial division or fears of the other to divide working and poor people. The South perfected this politics, but it works, sometimes with greater subtlety, across the nation and across party lines. Clinton fended off Sanders' surge in part by contrasting her social liberalism -- "breaking down barriers" for people of color and women -- with what she termed Sanders' "single issue" focus on the economy. Sanders succeeded in winning the majority of votes of African Americans under 30, but the political revolution has work to do to consolidate a powerful multiracial movement for fundamental change.
Thrashing Donald Trump is the next step in that process. Trump has risen as a fake populist, preying on racial and nativist fears. His slurs against Mexican immigrants, Moslems, blacks and women are classic, if raw, politics of division. His bet is that he can profit from consolidating the votes of white working and middle-class men by stoking their fears and anger.
The Sanders political revolution -- the activists, the volunteers, the young, the independents looking for a new politics -- have to be central to making November a resounding rejection of the politics of division. There is no way to consolidate a broad multi-racial populist majority without standing up shoulder to shoulder with the people of color who are the targets of Trump's venom. It is not enough that Trump is beaten; he needs to be routed, repudiated. And that can only happen with the energy of the movement that Sanders has helped to build.
Fighting on Our Agenda
For the movement, there is a profound difference between a Clinton presidency and a Trump presidency. One needn't harbor hopes that there is a populist Superwoman hidden beneath Hillary Clinton's Clark Kent pantsuits to see this.
If Trump is president, Republicans surely control the House and most likely the Senate. They set the agenda. We will spend the next four years fighting against reaction -- austerity budgets, massive increases in defense spending, attacks on choice, civil rights, environmental protection. They'll seek to repeal Obamacare, financial reform and President Obama's climate initiatives. As Sanders noted, Trump carries the right's agenda -- against the minimum wage, against extending Medicaid, denial of climate change and more. And of course, there is the Supreme Court.
The populist movement will be forced to fight battles that have already been won, to defend half-measures -- like Dodd-Frank financial reform and Obamacare -- from getting rolled back. In those defensive battles, virtually every Democrat looks like a hero. Against the nightmare, even the dimmest bulb seems like a dawn. Corporate Democrats gain cheap grace by standing up boldly for Dodd Frank or Obamacare. The space for left alternatives -- and for education about those alternatives -- virtually disappears.
If Clinton is president, the political revolution will not have won. But we will fight on our agenda -- sometimes with and sometimes against the president. Sanders made that clear in his endorsement, focusing on the promises exacted from Clinton in the course of the campaign and the platform fights: a $15 minimum wage, commitment to rebuild America, further health care reform -- opt-in to Medicare at 55, a public option, Medicare empowered to negotiate bulk discounts on prescription drugs, a more than doubling of resources for community health care centers, progressive tax reform, tuition-free college for over 80 percent of students, action on climate change, comprehensive immigration reform, reform of our broken criminal justice system. Clinton responded by pledging to push for populist reforms, including opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Clinton will be looking to cut deals with Republicans, and her foreign policy team is likely to be an utterly terrifying combination of neo-conservative and indispensable nation interventionists.
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Trump Role Model: Saddam Hussein
(Image by Mike Licht) Details DMCA
In a 2011 interview with former New York City cable news show host Dominic Carter, Trump rejected term limits for all politicians. Responding to the question of whether Michael Bloomberg should have been allowed to extend his term of office to a third term, Trump stated, "I'm not a believer in term limits.... I see so many very good politicians, great politicians, be literally thrown out of office at the height of their power. I don't know why it's popular. Because the ultimate term limit is you vote against a politician...I am a big Fan of Michael and I am not a big fan of term limits. Regardless of Michael, I am not a big fan of term limits." So, for a President Trump, at the "height of his power," the only way to get him out of office would be to vote him out. But Trump has explicitly denied the need for presidential elections, at least in his own case.
At a campaign rally in Alabama, on August 21, 2015, amid shouts of "White Power!" from some of his "fans," Donald Trump proclaimed, "We could maybe call for an expedited election, right? I would love that! Can we do that? Can we do that?"... I'd like to have the election tomorrow! I don't want to wait! " As I said, why do we need an election? We don't need an election!" From here it is easy to do the math. Trump does not believe he needs to be elected; nor does he think his term in office should be limited. This would make him a monarch, serving at his pleasure, not ours. So if he is elected in November, we may never get rid of him!
The 22nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1951, makes clear that, "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice"" The Amendment was introduced after Franklin Roosevelt won a fourth term in 1944. Prior to that, beginning with George Washington, the unwritten rule was for U.S. presidents to serve no more than two terms. After Franklin, however, it was clear that the unwritten rule was inadequate and that a constitutional amendment was necessary to stay off the very real possibility of a monarchical ruler coming to power. As Americans, many of us have faith in our constitution and believe that its provisions guarantee that such a possibility will never happen in the United States. Unfortunately, such absolute faith is historically naive. For instance, after coming to power in 1933, Adolf Hitler invoked the emergency power provision of the German Weimar Constitution (Article 48) to suspend constitutionally protected civil liberties such as freedom of speech and assembly, habeas corpus, and privacy. More recently, Vladimir Putin, whom Trump admires, was able to extend his time in office without violating the letter of law of the Russian constitution. Putin served two four-year terms as Russian president from 2000 to 2008. Because the Russian constitution prohibits a president from serving more than two consecutive terms, Putin assumed the role of prime minister, which allowed him to remain in power until 2012 when he again became president. Moreover, in 2011, Dmitry Medvedev, the individual who occupied the presidency while Putin was prime minister, extended the presidential term of office to six years. This has now made it possible for Putin to serve until 2024. Putin has been willing to agree to a prohibition against any future president serving more than two terms, consecutive or otherwise. As such, the amendment would not apply retroactively to him.
So, as history shows, there are patently legal ways around constitutional safeguards designed to constrain executive authority, including the length of time a chief executive can remain in office. For example, while the U.S. Constitution does not explicitly grant presidents authority to bypass congress in a national emergency (unlike the Weimar Constitution), Article 2 has generally been interpreted by legal scholars as implying such authority. Accordingly, Trump could invoke this presumptive power in response to a terrorist attack or the ongoing threat of one; or find other "legal" grounds for circumventing the 22nd Amendment.
Indeed, Trump's lack of respect for the Constitution is already evident, having demonstrated blatant disregard for First Amendment protections such as freedom of speech, assembly, and religion (denouncing the media, barring news organizations such as the Washington Post from his press conferences; encouraging violence against anti-Trump protesters; and advocating the registration of all Muslims). He has advocated torture "worse than" water boarding as well as the assassination of the families of terrorists in contravention of both national and international law. So it would not be shocking if this self-proclaimed "law and order" candidate circumvented the constitutional provisions of presidential term limits and elections.
Some would argue that congress and the judiciary would not stand for such assaults on the U.S. Constitution; and that we are, after all, a nation of laws, not persons. However, it has already been eye-opening how the GOP has managed to support such a candidate who has openly praised dictators like Saddam Hussein and Omar Kadafi; denounced the press; called for a judge to step down because he is "Mexican"; tweeted a blatantly anti-Semitic image originating from a white supremacist website; advocated banning Muslims from entering the nation; advocated registering Muslims; proclaimed the dispensability of presidential elections; and failed to understand why term limits are "popular." So why would one think that these same individuals and their congressional colleagues would cease to continue to support the same dubious policies espoused by a President Trump should he ascend to the most powerful office in the world.
Imagine, for the moment, that Trump does, in fact, assume the presidency and does indeed "legally" nullify constitutional protections to prevent his timely departure. Imagine further that he has bankrupted the nation, as he has managed to do with some of his businesses; aggravated the already serious terrorism problem with aggressive tactics that don't work; and made a world-wide laughing stock of us. If this happened, we could not simply wait for him to leave office because he would have already destroyed this failsafe mechanism. We would then be trapped with no way out of the mess he would have created through his ineptitude.
The great 19th century defender of liberty, John Stuart Mill, once said that people should not be free to sell themselves into slavery. Liberty itself, he maintained, has its limits. Likewise, the nation should not be free to destroy its freedom. The GOP needs to wake up before freedom may no longer be an option. Republican officers such as RNC Chairperson Reince Priebus, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who have committed their support to Trump, notwithstanding his decadent pattern of racist comments, anti-democratic proposals, and inflammatory rhetoric, can still reassess their priorities: lockstep party loyalty versus allegiance to national (and international) welfare. The two are not necessarily the same. Conscientious and caring Republican officials and their constituents can still disavow allegiance to Trump. Those who are willing to gamble that Trump will suddenly morph into such a candidate should be careful about risking the welfare of millions of Americans, a substantial number of whom are desperate for positive change and therefore vulnerable to being manipulated by vacuous promises about "making America great (and safe) again," fear mongering, and personal attacks launched by the Trump campaign. Indeed, if Trump does, in fact, assume the presidency, then, true to his words, there may be no turning back; no waiting for the opportunity to rectify the indelible blight. Then, it would be of small consolation that Trump was democratically elected.
(Article changed on July 19, 2016 at 10:48)
(Article changed on July 19, 2016 at 22:23)
There are scandals and then there are the things that should be scandals. Melania Trump gave a speech on Monday plagiarizing a speech by Michelle Obama, not to mention a song by Rick Astley (that, like these speeches, someone else wrote). Yes, that's funny. The accented immigrant spouse campaigning for the xenophobic bigot is funny in itself. So are her pornographic photos in the context of the Republican Party's denunciation of pornography as a major threat. But, between you and me, if you base your voting on someone's spouse's mindless cynical blather about "values," you've got worse problems than trying to choose between two parties that can swap such blather word-for-word with each other -- and so, consequently, do we all.
And if you can take a look at opening night of the Republican Convention and worry more about Melania's nonsense than about the endless repetition of the dogma that holds 96% of humanity in contempt, that declares the United States to be the only place in the world that matters, then you're missing the forest for the trees and the arsenal for the guns. Go back and watch Virginia Foxx suggesting that only in the United States does anyone value families. Or watch a crazed looking Michael Flynn declare that "the destructive pattern of putting the interests of other nations ahead of our own will end." Then please devote some moments to trying to identify all the nations whose interests the United States puts ahead of its own. Flynn, by the way, said he favored "a new American century." Should the fact that he didn't call it "the project for" really get him off the hook? Yes, yes, it's too short and common a phrase to truly count as plagiarism, but it has already killed a lot more people than Michelle's/Melania's "your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise."
Also on Monday the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Theresa May declared that she would be willing to kill a hundred thousand innocent men, women, and children, and that she would be willing to do it using a weapon that in reality is likely to kill several times that many. How is that not a scandal? If she'd said "American" men, women, and children, you can bet your fat french-fry ass it'd be the biggest roaring scandal of the week. That she is assumed to have meant some other variety of men, women, and children avoids any scandal in the U.S. media, as other people must surely be a bit more deserving of dying. However, there's a problem with that unarticulated thought process, namely that the modifier May did use was precisely this: "innocent." You can't get any more innocent than "innocent," and that's who she's willing to slaughter.
And for what purpose is Theresa "Seven Days in" May, just seven days into her prime ministership, willing to commit mass murder? In order, she says, to ensure that her enemies know she is willing to, because that knowledge will deter them from something or other. Of course, Tony Blair was warned that attacking countries would create anti-UK violence, not deter it. And that warning proved accurate. Imagine how many enemies Theresa May would have if she started nuking people? She'd have the whole surviving world for enemies. ISIS could blow its whole recruitment budget on self-flagellation or whatever ISISers do for fun. May would have it covered. In trying to defend her nuclearism, May is not just plagiarizing Genghis Kahn, but plagiarizing the false claims of her U.S. and UK predecessors, and doing so just as mindlessly as Melania Trump.
When Spain was victimized by a terrorist attack it pulled out of the war on Iraq, and the terrorist attacks stopped. That's an important lesson. And the lesson is not to do whatever a bully demands. The lesson is to stop being a bully if you don't want your victims to hit back. Spain didn't agree to commit some new crime. It just agreed to stop committing a larger crime. This was the lesson when George W. Bush pulled the U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia or Ronald Reagan pulled them out of Lebanon. But pulling out of Saudi Arabia and moving into Iraq was not well thought through, unless the goal was chaos.
There was a bit of a scandal on Monday in the UK. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn declared that mass murder is not a good way to handle international affairs. It would have been nice last December if the Democratic or Republican Party in the United States had had a Jeremy Corbyn in it. That was when CNN's Hugh Hewitt asked Republican candidate Ben Carson if he would be willing to kill hundreds and thousands of children. To Carson's great credit, he responded by answering a question from an exam he'd taken in medical school for which the answer had only just occurred to him, and then wandered off into recounting a dream or something. But the asking of the question, the assumption that a president's basic duty is mass murder created no scandal, and won't unless someone answers it by plagiarizing Ben Carson.
TURKEY'S PRESIDENT RECEP Tayyip Erdogan places the blame for this weekend's failed coup attempt on an Islamic preacher and one-time ally, Fethullah Gulen (above), who now resides in Pennsylvania with a green card. Erdogan is demanding the U.S. extradite Gulen, citing prior extraditions by the Turkish government of terror suspects demanded by the U.S.: "Now we're saying deliver this guy who's on our terrorist list to us." Erdogan has been requesting Gulen's extradition from the U.S. for at least two years, on the ground that he has been subverting the Turkish government while harbored by the U.S. Thus far, the U.S. is refusing, with Secretary of State John Kerry demanding of Turkey: "Give us the evidence, show us the evidence. We need a solid legal foundation that meets the standard of extradition."
In light of the presence on U.S. soil of someone the Turkish government regards as a "terrorist" and a direct threat to its national security, would Turkey be justified in dispatching a weaponized drone over Pennsylvania to find and kill Gulen if the U.S. continues to refuse to turn him over, or sending covert operatives to kidnap him? That was the question posed yesterday by Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor of Guantanamo's military commissions who resigned in protest over the use of torture-obtained evidence:
Copyrighted Image? DMCA
If Fethullah Gulen is considered a threat to Erdogan & Turkey's gov't doesn't Turkey have a right to drone strike him in Pennsylvania? @ CNN
12:38 PM - 16 Jul 2016
That question, of course, is raised by the fact that the U.S. has spent many years now doing exactly this: employing various means -- including but not limited to drones -- to abduct and kill people in multiple countries whom it has unilaterally decided (with no legal process) are "terrorists" or who otherwise are alleged to pose a threat to its national security. Since it cannot possibly be the case that the U.S. possesses legal rights that no other country can claim -- right? -- the question naturally arises whether Turkey would be entitled to abduct or kill someone it regards as a terrorist when the U.S. is harboring him and refuses to turn him over.
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In many countries, political parties have created special institutes for the political education of its members that regularly offers training activities for party members. Such institutions include, for example, the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the Republican Institute (IRI) in the USA, the Konrad-Adenauer Stiftung in Germany.
In Ghana, apart from the study of political science at the university, I have keenly observed the absence of meaningful political education and cadre development programs-at party levels, in all our political parties.
The biggest challenge is therefore, the dearth of knowledge and information- even amongst leaders and generally among the rank and file membership of political parties- about what and how political parties are meant to contribute towards the effective functioning of society; to which every society owes its very survival.
In Ghana, because such education is absent, political parties and even people who aspire the highest office in the country, in their dire situations, have resorted to brain-washing; instigations, agitations and inflammatory conversations.
Through this many political party activists supporters and functionaries alike are rather led to believe something else other than the truth.
So rather than politically mature, forward-looking quality corps of party functionaries and well groomed members the ranks of the leading political parties in Ghana have swelled by outsized armies of principally uninformed political pundits, whose only expertise is in mudslinging, and name calling via radio, television and social media.
Historical Antecedents
Historically, Kwame Nkrumahs Convention Peoples Party (CPP), is the party that is reputed to have sought, in very practical terms, to institutionalize the training and education of its Cadre Corps and party functionaries. As part of its party structures, the CPP established the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute at Winneba, primarily to educate and train its members and to raise future political leaders for the country.
And even though people may take exception as was the case then to the Partys ideological inclinations which was Socialism, the existence of the Institute symbolized a progressive mind-set; of a Party organization which regarded the opportunity to govern the country as one of sacred and onerous responsibility.
It had ethos and mores which averred a creed to the effect that election into power of a Political party is a sublime call by a people, for public service. As such, the people deserved nothing but the best, from its politicians.
Political Education.
Political education first and foremost must be about the ethos and mores of the Parties themselves. Education targeting all strata on membership should cover lessons on the character, spirit, moral beliefs, tenet, attitude, and a party code of conduct that guides all activists.
Members must be well versed in the philosophy- the political economic theory espoused by the Party, including the primary thoughts on their world view- that expresses the common thought within the group. Education must include the values, customs, and traditions; moral and ethical behaviors to define reasoned behavior what is reasonable? and who will be held accountable. This attitude stands in sharp contrast with what pertains today-violence. And this is without apologies.
Today, executives and leaders of political parties and followers alike, claim ownership of the country and consequently, demand for its leadership as of right. Political appointments and election of parties into power is no more accepted with any sense of responsibility, neither is it seen as a call to service.
It is little surprising therefore, and this is without prejudice to any group of persons- the level of intolerance, insults and threats the country has witnessed of late.
Election periods in Ghana are always fretting times, because of warped electioneering activities by Political Parties and their politicians. The period is always marked by unsavory utterances, trickery, provocative communication, and all kinds of activities that have the tendency of sparking mayhem in our society. That is why in 2012, in this very paper, I admonished political parties to seriously factor cadre development in their scheme of activities.
Today, as we stand at the brink of another National Election, it is not surprising that the euphoria of the times should, once again, usher to the forefront, the important question as to whether the people of Ghana are advancing and will ever achieve the full benefits of the political system we have adopted for ourselves - multi-party parliamentary democracy.
The National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP) have dominated electoral politics since the reintroduction of party politics in the year 2000.
Unfortunately, the two have embarked on new ways of recruitment which excludes membership development through training and education; that does not augur well for democracy and the future of the nation as well.
It is now obvious that hired media experts and sponsored phone in callers determine how politics is done in Ghana.
The manifestation of offensive political attitudes we see among party functionaries and fanatics shows clearly that there is no political training at political party levels.
Since political education lost its priority and place in the gambit, the nation has grown so polarized, it is becoming virtually impossible to enforce even basic laws; like laws on sanitation and road-use.
Mediocrity, corruption, ineffectiveness or non-performance and blatant disregard for truth get applauded or condemned on party lines-on which side of the divide people stands. Declaring something to be right or wrong is not based on principles anymore but on party lines; very much oblivious to what the opinion does to the growth and stability of the country.
Leading politicians as well as, political activists, rather than expressing their aversion to politically instigated violence, vigorously articulate positions to the effect that violence was very much a part of their political swagger.
What is most worrisome about the situation is the fact that our fledging democracy is not in position to deal with such disaster- inducing challenges when they begin to crank; much worse, the nation is not in any good position to mitigate its effects, should it ever occur in this country.
The extent to which political parties are the subject of both contempt and general public indifference should be a cause of concern to all who are interested in how our country is run.
The least a nation expects of its politicians and their parties is to raise hope for the future and not to sound the war cry.
Source: Rt. Rev. Dr. Nana Anyani-Boadum
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Charcoal export volumes decreased by third in the first quarter of 2016
This number was given by the trade-analytical system of Ukrainian Biofuel Portal. 80% of Ukrainian charcoal is imported by only 4 EU state members.
Ukraine exported more than 162 thousand MT of charcoal in 2015
Ukraine exported 162,208.33 MT of charcoal in 2015 MY. March and April 2015 saw the biggest import volumes, with 22,392.52 MT and 21,404.35 MT respectively. The smallest activity of the importers was registered in August and September of the previous year, with 6,845.51 and 7,543.30 MT bought respectively. Export dynamics of 2015 MY is as follows: 1 quarter 53,439.61 MT, 2 quarter 52,127.36 MT, 3 quarter 26,025.80 MT, 4 quarter 30,615.55 MT. Hence, basing on the above given data prepared by Ukrainian Biofuel Portal we can conclude that the importers were at the peak of their activity in the first half of the last year while the third quarter of the previous year saw a significant fall of export operations, which can be explained by the summer season.
In 2015 MY charcoal was exported to 40 countries
Although the majority of the list is the countries of the Eurozone, the US, a spectacular oversea player, can be seen among the purchasers. A few countries from the Middle East are also interested in Ukrainian charcoal, among them Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, the UAE. The Reunion island, an exotic purchaser, is also to be seen among the importing countries. But at the same time it should be noted that it was the countries of the EU that purchased the main volume of Ukrainian charcoal.
74 % of Ukrainian charcoal was imported by only 4 countries
According to the Database of the European Importers of Ukrainian charcoal, in the period between 2015 and the first quarter of 2016 7,5435.80 MT were purchased by Poland, followed by Germany with 19,981.33 MT and Belgium with 17,184.58 MT. The Czech Republic with 7,573.20 MT of purchased charcoal takes the fourth place on the list of importing countries. In total, in 2015 MY these four countries purchased 12,0174.91 MT of Ukrainian charcoal. According to Sergey Kozlov, the leading market expert of the Ukrainian Biofuel Portal, for many years the Eurozone countries have been holding the lead in the import of Ukrainian charcoal. It is mostly due to the minimizing of logistic expenses as it is the logistic element that plays the key role as far as final prices for charcoal are concerned.
1st quarter of 2016: charcoal export results
The first quarter of this year saw 38,056.14 MT of export volumes. Ukrainian charcoal was exported to 35 countries of the world. As in the previous year, the list of the exporting countries was also quite extensive, with the EU members, Libya, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and even Panama. The main volume of the export share is accounted for by the European countries, and the same tendency could be seen in the last few years. According to the Ukrainian biofuel portal database of the European purchasers of Ukrainian charcoal, only in the first quarter of the current year the fuel was purchased by 272 foreign companies. 10,789.15 MT of charcoal were exported in January, 12,044.86 MT in February and 15,222.13 MT in March. Similar to the previous marketing year, March saw the biggest export activity of the Ukrainian charcoal manufacturers. Like in 2015, European countries have the main export share. The four importing countries from the EU are as follows: Poland (17,028 t), Belgium (7, 368 t) and Romania (1, 795 t). In total, in the first quarter of the current year these four countries imported 30, 489 MT of Ukrainian charcoal, which is almost 80 % of the overall volume of the Ukrainian charcoal export in the given period. It can be seen that the separate shares of the main European importers stay almost the same.
Export volumes dropped almost by third in the first quarter of the current year
As compared to the similar period in 2015 MY, so far in 2016 Ukraine has sold 15, 383 MT of charcoal less, thus, in the first quarter of 2016 the export volumes of charcoal fell by 29 % as compared with the first quarter of the previous year. The main importers, Poland in particular, are showing somewhat less interest in purchasing Ukrainian charcoal. It remains to be seen whether the tendency will continue. Alongside with the cut of export to the major purchasers from Europe, the Ukrainian manufacturers significantly extended the geographic boarders of their business. There are now countries from the Middle East and North Africa to be seen on the list of importers and more European countries are purchasing Ukrainian charcoal.
The supplies of the product to the contractors in the period between 2015 MY and the first quarter of 2016 MY were carried out on CIF, CIP, CPT, DAP, DDP, DDU, EXW, FAS, FCA, FOB terms of supply.
Charcoal market: expert view
According to Sergey Kozlov, the fall of the Ukrainian charcoal export volumes is a temporal phenomenon. "Our information resource [Ukrainian Biofuel Portal] prepared the European charcoal importers database, which includes detailed information about 187 importing companies from 25 countries", the expert says. "The database gives precise information on export dynamics for the given period in value and real terms, which helps draw necessary conclusions. As far as price policies are concerned, the database includes information on the terms and prices of supply. Here, both newly-minted and experienced charcoal manufacturers from Ukraine will find detailed information on the European charcoal purchasers. This will help them study the international market in order to make necessary decisions. In my opinion, factors which reduced Ukrainian charcoal export volumes are caused by market dynamics and do not reflect any negative tendencies of the world biofuel market. Certainly, specific climate conditions of the previous winter on the European continent are also factors which negatively influenced the export dynamics ", says the expert.
Ukrainian charcoal manufacturers became export-oriented
The detailed analysis of the Ukrainian Biofuel Portal Database clearly shows that the Ukrainian manufacturers have been export oriented. The key principle of the export is long terms and productive cooperation with a foreign purchaser helping manufacturers find stability in times of economic crisis. Poland, the closest neighbor of Ukraine, has been the main charcoal purchaser for the last years. The Polish share of charcoal export accounted for 45% in 2015. Surely, Poland defines the export activity of Ukrainian charcoal manufacturers being important strategic partner for many of them. Nevertheless, a lot of market traders are indecisive concerning the Polish contractors, saying that it is hard to negotiate with them in terms of prices and terms of supply as the latter ones often try to benefit from the predicament of the Ukrainian economy during the last two years.
Prospects of Ukrainian charcoal exporters
According to the experts of the Biofuel market, in the nearest future the Ukrainian charcoal manufacturing will continue to be export-oriented, though a significant part of the product is consumed by the national market. Two factors make possible the development and increase of export volumes. The first one is the increase of export volumes on the well utilized European market. In order to make it work effectively, one should be at home with European contractors as well as be familiar with relevant market prices and support a steady contact with the contractors. This requires full, true and up-to-date information as to the situation on the European biofuel market, which reflects the current state of things to the full extent and can help foresee its development in the nearest future. The given database of the European importers of Ukrainian charcoal prepared by the Ukrainian Biofuel Portal pellets-wood.com gives the Ukrainian manufacturers all the necessary information including the contacts of the companies.
The second thing is that the Ukrainian charcoal exporters should actively seek and utilize new markets. Judging from the extending purchasers audience, the marketing services of the Ukrainian manufacturers are quite effective. The market of the Middle East could be of special interest as potentially it is rather receptive and there is a traditionally high demand for charcoal, which is mainly due to the customs of the Middle East countries.
Developers at Kenyas Ushahidi. Credit: afromusing/flickr, CC BY-SA
Africa is coming online rapidly. Internet penetration in the continent is growing faster than in any other region in the world, giving millions more people access to better communication, information and business opportunities. Although only around 20% of people in Africa have internet access (compared to a global average of 40%), this has increased from less than 5% ten years ago.
What's missing, however, is a significant amount of locally created, owned and hosted online services. For example, there are just 12 secure web servers for every million people in Africa, compared to 1,171 in North America. Instead of using home-grown services, many countries favour globally popular brands based in other parts of the world, such as Google and Facebook. This lack of local African online presence is putting the continent at a serious disadvantage, denying people the chance to take full advantage of the net's potential. The difficult question is what to do about it.
You could argue that Africa's appetite for international online brands is a good thing as it shows how the internet is seamlessly connecting emerging regions to the global market. But it comes at a cost. Flooding emerging regions with highly developed competition runs the risk of stifling new local alternatives, a problem that economists and politicians have worried about for hundreds of years.
How, for example, can a fledgling, locally created, online service compete against the likes of Google? It's possible this obstacle could limit the economic benefits for African countries and prevents them from helping to further enrich and diversify the web away from a few big players.
In my own recent research, I found that Africa's internet problems are not only to do with creation and ownership of websites. Even services that are locally designed in Africa (such as news websites) are often hosted and operated outside of the continent, often in the US and Europe. The main reason for this is the cheaper and more reliable hosting services available abroad. A recent report from the Internet Society found that Rwandan content providers could save $111 per year by hosting their content overseas.
Slower, more expensive
But this is a double-edged sword. It might be cheaper for the websites, but it's much more expensive for the local internet service providers or ISPs (the companies that connect users to the internet), who have to fetch the data from across the world. In the example of Rwanda, local ISPs who deliver the content to internet users had to pay $13,500 a year more than if they had been able to connect to Africa-based servers, pushing up the costs for everybody.
The problems don't stop there. Having to connect to foreign-based websites also produces far slower download times. This can be mind-numbingly frustrating for users, which then discourages them from using the sites that perform poorly.
However, the example of China shows that it doesn't have to be this way. The country's strict censorship regime has limited the import of foreign websites. This has actually helped produce a number of alternative, locally created and hosted websites. In turn, this has helped the country develop a rapidly growing web-tech industry with giants such as search engine Baidu, online shopping site Taobao, and video site Youku creating a huge capacity for innovation, as well as the related economic benefits.
On moral grounds it is hard to justify encouraging such censorship in Africa. Denying people access to videos on YouTube or the global reach of Facebook seems fundamentally wrong. It would also undermine the idea of net neutrality that ISPs should provide access to all internet content equally which many see as a core principle of the internet.
And while many countries throughout history have used trade protectionism to protect their so-called infant industries, the internet is a different beast. Its global nature and the way it can underpin other industries means that limiting foreign websites, even for a few years, may have too many negative effects. Imagine an online business suddenly losing access to eBay.
Positive solutions
Instead of banning foreign sites, we should look for more positive solutions. Proper regulation, infrastructural investment and, most importantly, training are key ways to encourage local innovation. A good starting point would be to look for the types of services that desperately need the local touch. Many of the needs of African users mirror those of other global users. So devising a unique selling point that can break through the competition of the big international players is tricky. Taking the local approach and focusing on the types of services that are not met by the global elite would be an effective way to sidestep this issue.
Luckily, countless examples have begun to emerge, such as Ushahidi, which was designed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the 2008 elections. Services in other emerging economies can also provide inspiration, such as the Indian rickshaw-booking service Autowale. These fantastic examples show innovation at its best: finding solutions to real problems on the doorstep. And from the small seeds of a local start-up, maybe the next global tech giant will grow. By expanding this local expertise and capacity, a foundation is being built for the future. It is only a matter of time before we see an African website among the bookmarks of internet users all over the world.
Explore further Microsoft opens wallet to extend Internet in remote areas
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Three chimps are engaging with honey trap experiment in Kibale National Park. Credit: Andrew Bernard
Chimpanzees who travel are more frequent tool users, according to new findings from the University of Neuchatel and the University of Geneva, Switzerland, to be published in eLife.
Hawa is a wild chimpanzee from the Budongo Forest in Uganda who burns up a lot of energy travelling, which he has learnt to replenish with a dose of honey. His friend Squibs makes less of an effort to roam and has not acquired the skills needed to enjoy this high-energy treat. This pattern was repeated in other members of the study group over seven years of observation.
A low quantity of ripe fruit also increases chimpanzees' motivation to acquire new foraging skills, but the effect is less pronounced than travel.
"Our results show that travel fosters tool use in wild chimpanzees and it may also have been a driving force in early technological evolution by humans," says Dr Thibaud Gruber from the University of Geneva.
The team reviewed data from nine other chimpanzee communities to confirm the pattern. Chimpanzees' closest relative, the Bonobo, travels around the same average distance as the Sonso and other Ugandan chimpanzees and uses a similar set of tools. Gorillas and most orangutans show limited or no feeding-related tool use and spend significantly less time travelling per day on the ground compared to chimpanzees. In contrast, modern human hunter-gatherers walk on average 11.4-14.1 km per day and use many more tools than any of the great apes.
Gruber studied 70 individuals of the Sonso community of chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii, known for its limited tool use behaviour. This made them ideal subjects to study how tool use emerges. The only feeding-related tools they use are folded leaves, usually to collect water, and moss to soak up mineral deposits from a clay pit. 52 of them engaged with the experiment.
"After seven years of field work, I had a massive amount of data and there was clear variation in how chimpanzees engaged with the experiment. I thought it would be interesting to analyse why," says Gruber.
He deployed the "honey trap experiment". The Sonso chimpanzees already used their fingers to take honey from bees' nests, with limited success. In the "honey trap" experiment, a hole is drilled into a log and partially filled with this tempting prize so it can only be accessed with an implement. Most of the individuals who successfully extracted honey employed the community's habitual tool, a folded leaf sponge, while two used a stick. A total of 21 instances of tool use were observed in 11 individuals.
The team reviewed the data against a whole range of variables including the quantity of ripe fruits eaten and the average daily distance the chimpanzees travelled.
"We didn't expect travel to be that important, and were surprised that it had an even greater influence than if they fed less on their preferred food of ripe fruits," says Gruber.
The team conclude that travel created an extra need for high-energy food while the challenge of inaccessible honey created an opportunity for innovation. The team did not analyse the potential influence of social learning to influence it. In 2011, Gruber and a colleague Catherine Hobaiter from the University of St Andrews discovered that the community's use of moss as a sponge emerged from one individual named Nick, whose behavior was copied by a dominant female and quickly spread.
The study also reveals the influence of local ecology in the development of tool use. The Budongo Forest has provided a rich environment for chimpanzees, which could explain the previous lack of tool use in the Sonso community. However, in the last few decades, the food supply has steadily decreased.
It has been suggested that the development of tool use and sociality in early humans could likewise have been adaptive responses to heightened habitat instability caused by climate change.
"When times are changing, you have to adapt your behavior and our data illustrate that chimps will pay more attention to the possibilities offered by their environment in more demanding periods," says Gruber.
Explore further Study shows how chimpanzees share skills
More information: Thibaud Gruber et al, Travel fosters tool use in wild chimpanzees, eLife (2016). Journal information: eLife Thibaud Gruber et al, Travel fosters tool use in wild chimpanzees,(2016). DOI: 10.7554/eLife.16371
Provided by eLife
Top Basque chef Andoni Luis Aduriz works in the kitchen at Mugaritz restaurant in the northern Spanish Basque village of Renteria on May 9, 2014
Do genetics influence what we like to eat? Why does food taste better when hungry? High-profile chefs and scientists will get together in a symposium in Spain to try and find out.
The gathering will be held in the Basque seaside resort of San Sebastian on October 24-26the first event organised by "Brainy Tongue," a project launched by the Barcelona-based Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), a biomedical research institute, and the Basque Culinary Center, a gastronomy school.
At the symposium, Andoni Luis Aduriz, whose avant-garde Mugaritz restaurant is rated the world's seventh best by Britain's influential Restaurant magazine, Britain's Heston Blumenthal and Singapore pastry chef Janice Wong will work with geneticists, physicists and neuroscientists from Oxford, Cambridge or Yale universities.
"The world of cooking has always been close to science and that of science to cooking," Aduriz said at the presentation of the Brainy Tongue project in Barcelona.
"But there was still something missing."
Chefs the world over know how to pleasure their guests with their dishes and what products go well with others, and "the magic of this process is based in neuroscience," said CRG researcher Matthieu Louis.
Picture shows ingredients at the laboratory of the Basque Culinary Center of San Sebastian on February 1, 2016
But "we don't know most of the scientific principles that lie behind exceptional food."
Understanding these could enable the creation of menus tailor-made to someone's genetic profile or general health, for instance, or even virtual olfactory or gustatory realities.
Spain's northern Basque country, where San Sebastian is located, is famous for its traditional and avant-garde haute cuisine.
San Sebastian itself boasts the world's biggest number of Michelin stars per square metre after Japan's Kyoto.
Explore further Top chefs tout anchovies, sardines to save the oceans
2016 AFP
A trajectory of a microswimmer displaying a circle pattern. Credit: Kim/Drexel
When scaling down robots to the micrometer scale for tiny tasks such as incising tissue and puncturing retinal veins, minimalism is key. To make smaller, simpler microrobots, researchers at Drexel University have developed a fabrication method which utilizes the minimum geometric requirements for fluid motionconsisting of just two conjoined microparticles coated with bits of magnetic debris.
When a microrobot is exposed to an external magnetic fieldthe offboard power source, given the difficulty in shrinking batteries to the size of bacteriait begins to spin and move in a manner similar to bacterial flagella, courtesy of the iron oxide debris.
"Such simple microswimmers circumvent the technical limitations of fabrication technologies, which effectively allow for a focus on the functionalization of microswimmers," said MinJun Kim, a professor in the Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics Department at Drexel University in Philadelphia. "Furthermore, the use of particles to create these microswimmers will synergize well with other micro- and nanoparticle based technologies such as nanoparticle drug delivery systems."
Kim and his colleagues discuss their work this week in Applied Physics Letters. Previous work for the researchers had included a paper on the minimal geometrical requirements to fabricate microswimmers that operate at low Reynolds numbers, a ratio of forces that determines the degree of turbulence for fluids and objects under flow conditions.
At low Reynolds numbers, Kim said, inertial forces become negligible, and viscous forces become dominant. This rules out reciprocal motionsuch as the way a fish uses their finsso the microswimmers must rely on nonreciprocal motion similar to that of bacterial flagella, in which rotational motion is converted to translational motion.
The researchers fabricated their particle-based microswimmers through chemical conjugation and magnetic self-assembly. To bind the four micrometer-wide magnetic beads into pairs, Kim and his colleagues prepared two batches separately coated with avidin and biotin proteins, which create one of the strongest naturally found non-covalent bonds. They then exposed these conjoined pairs to one-micrometer iron oxide flakes, which became magnetically adhered to the microsphere surfaces.
This stands in contrast to many existing methods of fabrication in which microrobots are fabricated using specialized chemistry and lithography methods, which involve molds and elastomeric materials.
After fabrication, the researchers placed samples of the microswimmers inside a simple chamber fabricated from PDMS, a common silicon-based organic polymer. The chamber was then placed inside an electromagnetic coil system that was mounted onto a microscope with external controls to manipulate the strength, rotation frequency and direction of the magnetic field. These allowed for control over the swimming motion, speed and heading direction of the microswimmers.
"Our results demonstrated successful control over the microswimmers' swimming speed and direction," Kim said. "The significance of the results is the demonstration that such extremely simple microswimmer can be fully controllable at low Reynolds number."
Future work for Kim's labwhich has recently been relocated to Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texaswill include replacing the magnetic debris with nanoparticles for a systematic investigation of particle size, ultimately testing the range of applications of the robots.
Explore further Microscale 'transformer' robots are joining forces to break through blocked arteries
More information: Fabrication and control of simple low Reynolds number microswimmers, Applied Physics Letters, DOI: 10.1063/1.4954946 Journal information: Applied Physics Letters Fabrication and control of simple low Reynolds number microswimmers,
Larkmead School. Credit: CC-BY-SA-2.5,2.0,1.0
(Phys.org)A trio of researchers from Stanford University has found that high school children living in poverty who have a growth mindset tend to do better in school than those with a fixed mindset. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Susana Claro, David Paunesku and Carol Dweck describe a study they carried out with high school sophomores in Chile, what they learned, and what their findings may indicate regarding children, education and poverty.
The concept of intelligence is difficult to pin down, much less measure. So, too, is answering the question of whether it is possible for a person to become more intelligent by tryingmost scientists in the field believe that it is mostly fixed at birth. But because it cannot be proven, people tend to have their own opinionsthose who believe that a person can become more intelligent through hard work are referred to in psychological terms as having a growth mindset. Conversely, those who believe that intelligence is fixed at birth are referred to has having a fixed mindset.
In order to gain some insight into whether such beliefs can have an impact on academic performance, the researchers worked with the public school system in Chile in 2012they tested 75 percent of the entire class of 10th grade students and then monitored their academic performance. In addition to demographic questions, students were also asked questions about whether they believed intelligence was fixed at birth or whether it could be improved through hard work, such as by studying schoolwork.
In studying the data, the researchers found that as expected students living in poverty tended to have much less academic success. They also found that students living in poverty were much more likely to have a fixed mindset. But they also found that those students living in poverty who had a growth mindset tended to do much better academically than those living in poverty who had a fixed mindsetso much better that their scores were nearly equal to students who were not living in poverty but who had a fixed mindset. These results, the researchers suggest, indicate that targeted interventions may help low-achieving students living in poverty perform at a higher level; however, the researchers are quick to point out that they are not advocating substituting mindset manipulation for poverty reduction programs.
Explore further Seeing the benefits of failure shapes kids' beliefs about intelligence
More information: Susana Claro et al. Growth mindset tempers the effects of poverty on academic achievement, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2016). Susana Claro et al. Growth mindset tempers the effects of poverty on academic achievement,(2016). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1608207113 Abstract
Two largely separate bodies of empirical research have shown that academic achievement is influenced by structural factors, such as socioeconomic background, and psychological factors, such as students' beliefs about their abilities. In this research, we use a nationwide sample of high school students from Chile to investigate how these factors interact on a systemic level. Confirming prior research, we find that family income is a strong predictor of achievement. Extending prior research, we find that a growth mindset (the belief that intelligence is not fixed and can be developed) is a comparably strong predictor of achievement and that it exhibits a positive relationship with achievement across all of the socioeconomic strata in the country. Furthermore, we find that students from lower-income families were less likely to hold a growth mindset than their wealthier peers, but those who did hold a growth mindset were appreciably buffered against the deleterious effects of poverty on achievement: students in the lowest 10th percentile of family income who exhibited a growth mindset showed academic performance as high as that of fixed mindset students from the 80th income percentile. These results suggest that students' mindsets may temper or exacerbate the effects of economic disadvantage on a systemic level. Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
2016 Phys.org
Credit: NASA MODIS Rapid Response, Jeff Schmaltz, Text: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Rob Gutro
NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Arizona on July 16 and captured a visible image of smoke from the Fuller Fire.
The Fuller Fire was sparked by lightning on June 29, 2016. It is located on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, near Point Imperial. The fire has covered 13,685 acres and is being managed by the Grand Canyon National Park Service (GCNP) fire managers.
On July 16 at 20:20 UTC (4:20 p.m. EDT) The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image of the smoke from the Fuller Fire. The large red outlines indicate the heat signature from the fire. The smoke, blowing to the northeast, appears as a light brown color.
On July 17, GCNP noted "Firefighters will continue to hold fire to the east of Cape Royal Road using firing operations when needed. To the north, the fire has moved out of the Wilderness into grasses in the South Canyon Point area of the Kaibab National Forest. Crews will use existing roads and natural features wherever possible to limit future fire spread in this area. To the west, low and moderate fire behavior will continue to benefit the spruce-fir ecosystem of the North Rim."
Light to moderate smoke from today's fire activity will spread to the northeast reaching into Page, Kayenta, and the northeast areas of the Navajo Nation. For more information on smoke and air quality please visit: wildlandfire.az.gov/links.asp#smoke.
Epipoli and Sagarmatha Shopper Insight Services Strengthen Relationship Marketing
Now Brands Get Better Information About Their Best Customers
Kfar Saba, Israel & Milan July 19, 2016 Sagarmatha, the leading 1:1 personalized marketing company, and Epipoli, a leading Italian CRM and Gift Card provider, announce a new partnership. Their joint offering combines Sagarmathas Apex Shopper Insight solution and the Summit Personalization Engine with Epipolis services to strengthen the relationships between retailers and their shoppers. The partnership lets retailers monetize their data to provide suppliers with specific shopper insights.
We have selected Sagarmathas solution set thanks to its ability to completely analyze individual customer behavior down to their preferred communication channels, said Gaetano Giannetto, Founder and CEO, Epipoli. Since 2003, we have pioneering the monetization of retail data and today the combination of Epipolis services and Sagarmathas 1:1 shopper insight technology allows retailers and suppliers to analyze what worked, what didnt, and where to focus marketing budgets to efficiently drive sales, profit, long-term customer loyalty and increase share of wallet.
Epipoli has developed innovative technology and marketing solutions aimed to improve one-to-one consumer engagement and drive the organizations strategy with better execution.
The data contained with the Apex solution, such as specific product data, spending per household and trip, and share of category and related trends allows Epipolis clients to benefit from a single data language across the organization, making it easier to work toward the common goal of satisfying both the customer and the bottom line.
Retailers are sitting on thousands of data points representing individual customer behaviors, said Chen Katz, VP of Sales at Sagarmatha. With Sagarmatha services and Epipolis retailers and suppliers relationships, the Italian retail market will get more value from its existing marketing efforts and can better plan targeted, effective customer-focused campaigns.
Sagramatha Apex and Summit complex data-mining analytics solutions combine automation with the ability to adjust parameters to calibrate, measure, optimize, and reach specific goals or test concepts, based on geography, segments, time frame, market basket, individual profitability, messaging, channel, demographics, etc.
About Sagarmatha
Sagarmatha, founded in 1999, the personalization expert, works with retailers and brand owners to optimize their data driven marketing via a suite of science-based solutions. Offering highly automated shopper analysis, insight, and targeting solutions enables retailers and suppliers to collaboratively grow sales by linking every shopper to a 1:1 personalization strategy while measuring ongoing impact, shopper by shopper. Sagarmatha is a privately held company with headquarters in Kfar Saba, Israel. www.sag121.com
About Epipoli
Epipoli, founded in 2000, is a trusted international partner for relationship marketing solutions and advanced modelling. In 2006 Epipoli introduced the Gift Cards in Italy and today is a leading European prepaid payment network, offering 250 content partners in over 25.000 retail locations, through its brand Mygiftcard. Headquartered in Milan, Epipoli operates through subsidiaries and partners in all European countries. www.epipoli.com www.mygiftcard.it
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Our state's forest rangers are the men and women who are called out when hikers become lost, injured or otherwise have trouble. And this time of year, there are tens of thousands of hikers headed to the bountiful trails of our beautiful region. It doesn't always go smoothly. Prepare for bad weather, darkness and other possible impediments.
Here are summaries of some recent ranger rescues:
DEC Statewide Forest Ranger Search and Rescue Highlights
Forest Ranger Actions for 7/11 - 7/17/16
New York State Department of Environmental Conservation Forest Rangers respond to search and rescue incidents statewide. Working with other state agencies, local emergency response organizations and volunteer search and rescue groups, Forest Rangers locate and extract lost, injured or distressed people from the backcountry.
Across New York, DECs Forest Rangers are on the front lines helping people safely enjoy the great outdoors, said DEC Commissioner Basil Seggos. Their knowledge of first aid, land navigation and technical rescue techniques are critical to the success of their missions which take them from remote wilderness areas, with rugged mountainous peaks to white-water rivers, and throughout our vast forested areas statewide.
Recent missions carried out by DEC Forest Rangers include:
Warren County
Town of Lake George
Lake George Wild Forest
Injured hiker: On July 14, 2016, at 12:21 p.m., DEC Ray Brook Dispatch received radio transmissions from DEC Forest Rangers reporting they were contacted by DEC Pack Forest employees requesting assistance for a 15-year-old boy from Concord, Ontario, CA with a possible lower leg injury on Tongue Mountain. Forest Rangers located the youth and assisted him down the mountain with crutches. Pack Forest employees transported him to an area hospital for medical treatment. The incident concluded at 4:22 p.m.
Town of Bolton
Lake George Wild Forest
Lost Hikers: On Saturday July 17, 2016, at 4:39 p.m. DEC Ray Brook Dispatch received a call from a hiker stating she and two friends were lost on Cat Mountain. The 18-year-old female, a 19-year-old female, and a 17-year-old-female, all from Albany, NY, had gotten turned around while descending the mountain. A DEC Forest Ranger responded and contacted the group by cell phone. The Forest Ranger was able to direct them to a nearby cabin. He met the group there and assisted them back to the trailhead. The trio of hikers left the trailhead at 6:53 p.m.
Essex County
Town of Keene
High Peaks Wilderness
Injured hiker: On Monday July 11, 2016, at 1:31 p.m., DEC Ray Brook Dispatch received a radio transmission from an Assistant Forest Ranger requesting assistance for a 55-year-old male hiker from Palmetto, FL with a possible lower leg inquiry on Big Slide. DEC Forest Rangers responded and requested assistance from New York State Police Aviation. Forest Rangers stabilized the injured man and the helicopter transported the man to an area hospital for medical treatment. The incident concluded at 4:07 p.m.
Town of North Elba
High Peaks Wilderness
Distressed hiker: On July 13, 2016, at 9:48 p.m., DEC Central Dispatch received a call requesting assistance for a 30-year-old man from Middletown, NJ in medical distress on the trail to Mt. Marcy, in close proximity to Marcy Dam. DEC Forest Rangers responded, located and stabilized the man. They assisted him out to the trailhead where Lake Placid EMS transported him to an area hospital for medical treatment. The incident concluded at 1:09 a.m. on July 14.
Town of Wilmington
McKenzie Mountain Wilderness
Lost Hikers: On July 16, 2016, at 8:16 p.m., DEC Ray Brook Dispatch received a report of a 56-year-old man and a 14-year old boy both from Howell, NJ, lost on Whiteface Mountain. The two hikers became disoriented during the descent. Two DEC Forest Rangers responded. Essex County provided coordinates which indicated the hikers were 700 feet off the trail. Forest Rangers contacted the hikers by cell phone from the Whiteface Landing Trailhead and directed them back to the trail. The Forest Rangers maintained communications with the hikers throughout the remainder of their descent. They eventually reached the trailhead and after an interview by Forest Rangers were released at 11:40 p.m.
Town of North Elba
High Peaks Wilderness
Injured Hiker: On July 17, 2016, at 8:12 a.m. DEC Ray Brook Dispatch received a call from the DEC Caretaker at Marcy Dam Outpost requesting assistance for a 31-year-old man from Rochester, NY. The man sustained a non-weight bearing leg injury while hiking. Two DEC Forest Rangers responded with a UTV and transported the hiker back to the South Meadow Trailhead. The hiker left to seek further medical attention at 10:04 a.m.
Ulster County
Town of Olive
Catskill Forest Preserve
Lost Hiker: On July 11, 2016, at 3:32 p.m. New Jersey Police received a call from the daughter of a 62-year-old New Jersey man who had not returned from a hiking trip to the Catskills. The mans computer history showed he researched several locations and trails in the area. His cell phone last pinged at Sams Point Tower on 7/10/16 at 6:10 p.m. Soon after receiving the call from New Jersey Police, the mans car was found at Moon Haw Road in Shandaken in the Slide Mt. Wilderness. On July 12, 2016, at 7:13 a.m. DEC Forest Rangers began assisting in the search, combing marked and unmarked trails in the Slide Mt. area, including Balsam Cap, one of the locations from the mans computer history. At 7:15 p.m. that day, Rangers located the man walking along Moon Haw Rd. He had made it to Balsam Cap but got turned around and hiked several other trails and peaks looking for a way back to his car. Rangers brought him back to his car where he was evaluated by local EMS and released shortly after 7:15 p.m.
Be sure to properly prepare and plan before entering the backcountry. Visit DECs Hiking Safety (http://www.dec.ny.gov/outdoor/28708.html) and Adirondack Backcountry Information (http://www.dec.ny.gov/outdoor/7865.html) webpage for more information.
Rachel Seeber got a lesson from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on social networking at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
He talked to us about social media and Facebook live, she said, referring to a presentation Gingrich made to the New York delelation on Monday. Frankly, its the first time Id heard about Facebook live.
At the main arena on Monday evening, she did her homework.
In the middle, right before Mayor Giuliani was to speak, I did a live stream and I did a stream out to all our Facebook followers, Seeber, a convention delegate from Queensbury, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday.
Seeber also made it onto live television when she was speaking with a South Carolina delegate on the way out the arena after the Monday evening session and a C-SPAN reporter asked to interview them.
It was about 11:30 or quarter-to-twelve at night when every thing ended. We were walking out, she said.
He (the reporter) said, Its for C-SPAN, and I thought, Here we go!
Seeber, a Queensbury at-large supervisor, said of course she spoke about Warren County.
He gave a nice shout out to the Lake George area and Warren County and New Yorks 21st, she said.
Seeber said attending the convention is a great experience.
Certainly a lot of energy in the room, and a lot of unity, she said. Really my goal is that I am there representing the primary (election) voters in the New Yorks 21st District. They spoke loud for a new direction, new leadership.
Kevin Tolman presents his abstract works that are primarily influenced by the natural world and informed by a sense of place.
OASIS Albuquerque is pleased to announce a new art exhibit at the OASIS Art Gallery:
Sense of Place: Paintings by Kevin Tolman
May 12 August 26, 2016
Opening reception: Thursday, May 12, 5:00-6:30pm
Kevin Tolman creates abstract works primarily influenced by the natural world and informed by a sense of place. He can often be found working under the trees at a large easel next to his studio near the Rio Grande. His pieces are created slowly in layer after layer. By taking risks and paying attention to the chance circumstances that arise during this process, he allows each piece to reveal its individual direction and character.
Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1949, Kevin Tolman attended classes at the Detroit Institute of Arts and Cass Tech as a youth, and he is a graduate of the Art School of the Society of Arts and Crafts in Detroit. In 1981 he moved to the Ramah Navajo Reservation in western New Mexico. Feeling at home in the Southwest, he later settled in a north valley area of Albuquerque, building an adobe house and studio in 1987.
For over four decades, Kevin Tolman has been exhibiting his work in galleries, museums, and universities across the United States, where his paintings are included in numerous private, corporate, and public collections. His work has also been exhibited internationally in Canada, Mexico, Germany, France, England, and Portugal.
I thought Winston Churchill's history of World War II was five volumes, but it turns out it's six. So, having finished "The Hinge of Fate" yesterday, I am now on the penultimate volume, "Closing the Ring." "Hinge of Fate" was great, dealing with the turning of the war from one the Germans and Japanese (and Italians, in the background) were winning to one in which the Allies were not only scoring victories but appeared likely to eventually win. Churchill covers the British defeats in northern Africa, which eventually, with some help from the Americans, became smashing victories; and refers frequently to the titanic Russian struggle against the Nazis. The scale of the Russian battles was so huge and so much larger than anything else going on in the war, that you get the impression that, essentially, that was the war -- that Russia was tearing the heart out of the German military, and what was left for the Allies (in the European theater, not in Asia) were fringe battles and the mopping-up.
GRANVILLE Granville is the latest school district to be faulted by the New York Comptrollers Office for keeping too much money in savings.
School districts are required by law to keep no more than 4 percent of next years budget in their unrestricted fund balance. Granville had nearly $5.43 million in fund balance in 2015, which is 20.3 percent of the districts nearly $26.67 million budget for 2015-2016.
The district had nearly $5.56 million at the end of the 2011-12 school year 22.6 percent of the following years budget. That decreased to $5.238 million 20.9 percent at the end of the 2012-13 school year.
The fund balance at the end of the 2013-14 school year decreased slightly to $5.237 million, which was 20.2 percent of the next years budget.
The auditors report recommended the district use surplus funds to finance projects, fund one-time expenditures, put money into dedicated reserve funds or reduce property taxes.
Superintendent Mark Bessen said in his response to the state auditors that the district kept a lot of money in fund balance to keep the tax levy low and offset declining state aid. During the past five years, $4.5 million was withheld from Granville by the state through the Gap Elimination Adjustment.
Bessen said Tuesday that the district has been transparent about how much the district has been keeping in reserve and the reason.
Weve been using the fund balance to reduce the impact of raising the tax levy, he said. Weve been able to maintain our programs.
Bessen said state officials are hammering school districts on keeping too much money in fund balance at the same time New York was holding money back from schools for the gap elimination adjustment.
School districts are also criticized if they use too much surplus.
When a school district does comply with the 4 percent rule, you put them under fiscal distress, he said.
Bessen pointed out that if the district had complied with the 4 percent limit in 2011-12, it would have had $983,000 in fund balance. That year, the district lost $1.56 million because of the GEA cut. School officials would have needed to eliminate programs and services to make up the deficit.
You dont want to put yourself where you have no margin for error and it could cost people dearly, in this case the kids, he said.
Auditors showed the district had to put together a five-year financial plan, according to Bessen. He said the district is going to put money in capital reserve and other reserves and use the funds for one-time expenditures.
Business Manager Cathy Somich said the auditors found no problems with the districts internal financial procedures and showed the district even better methods.
Somich said the district intends to keep the tax levy flat for the time being, since it does not need to raise taxes with a fund balance this large.
Schuylerville and Saratoga Springs school districts also were recently cited for keeping too much money in their fund balance.
If the 22 people interviewed on the streets of Lake George and in Glens Falls City Park are any indication, Donald Trump is headed for the White House.
Heres the tally: Donald Trump, 11; Hillary Clinton, 5; and the undecideds or totally disgusted with these two choices, 6.
I dont like either of them. Ill write you in, Amy Rainwater of Queensbury said to a reporter as she soaked up the sun and tunes in City Park during the weekly Out to Lunch event. And you can write that Im embarrassed with the choices.
While her sentiments were shared by a few others, half of those interviewed Tuesday said theyd support Trump some fervently while some said they like him as the lesser of two evils.
Even if hes wrong, he doesnt change his mind. He sticks with what he believes, said Carl Rizzo of Rochester, who was vacationing in Lake George and said he was a Trump fan.
Plus he doesnt sugarcoat anything, his wife Lisa Rizzo added.
Twenty-year-old Jessica Morehouse of Warrensburg also will be voting for Trump. The Lake George village worker said she is a big supporter of his plans, like building a wall between Mexico and the United States.
I think Hillary Clinton is going to kill us. Shes not strong enough to handle all the foreign stuff, she said.
Ron Bergeron, from Connecticut, will vote for Trump, in part because of homeland security issues. He said he feels Trump is better suited to keep terrorists out of the country.
Plus, hes a proven businessman and the politicians we have in now arent doing enough, he said, as his wife Paula nodded in agreement.
Steven and Ann Williams of Glens Falls, seated on a bench in City Park, cited Trumps ability to handle national security and ISIS and felt he was better poised to improve the country overall.
He wants to make America great again. Its not great now, Ann Williams said.
But three women vacationing together in Lake George from Utica, the state of Florida and Liverpool, New York respectively couldnt agree at all. Elizabeth Paul said she will write in someone else, Jean Lee said shell vote for Trump while holding up her nose because the other alternative is untenable, and Laura Palmer will vote for Clinton.
Im afraid Trump is just too irrational. I like his financial aspects, but I fear for the country with all the nuclear weapons that hed get angry and push the button, Palmer said.
And while Clinton had her supporters, none gushed about her the way some of the Trump supporters did for him.
Cie McCullough of Queensbury groaned and took a lengthy pause before saying shed likely vote for Clinton. But she likes Bernie Sanders a lot more and seemed hopeful he somehow still might end up on the ballot.
Debra Meier also agonized before uttering the word Hillary.
Not because I like her, but because I like Trump a lot less, she said.
Meier, like others interviewed, said she wishes there were better choices.
Of all the intelligent, amazing people we have in this country, she said, and this is the best we got?
CLEVELAND Republicans were told by conservative commenter Larry Kudlow that they must stand behind the blue line and defend our cops, when he addressed them at the New York delegate breakfast Monday morning during the GOP convention.
Referring to the police killings in Dallas, he said, In the war on cops there were false statements against cops ... this is about cops; black and white cops running toward the killer, not away. This is about the black woman who came on the air and said cops were hiding her, they were falling on top of her to protect her.
He admonished Hillary Clinton for comments that he said she made on either the day of the Dallas killings or the day before.
Hillary Clinton has the gall to tell a CNN reporter that there are 18,000 police departments in this country and they are all racist and need training. That is wrong, he said.
Clinton didnt say that, but she did, in a July discussion with Judy Woodruff on PBS about policing, mention the implicit bias that, unfortunately, too many of us still have.
In Warren County, Undersheriff Shawn Lamouree said, the areas in the country that are seeing the most trouble tend to have longstanding issues of ill feelings between the police and the minority communities.
The demographic makeup of Warren County, he said is quite a bit different and, thankfully, we dont have segments of our communities feeling as though theyre completely disengaged from the police.
Warren County is 97 percent white.
Partnerships
Proactive measures in the Warren County Sheriffs Office are built around the idea, the police are the public and the public are the police, Lamouree said. We insert our officers into as many community groups and organizations as we possibly can, including and especially our schools, in an effort to create relationships and build partnerships.
Partnerships, he said, are made with groups to stay ahead of any matters of concern brought to our attention by our community partners. Simply put, we avoid problems of misperception by answering questions, staying engaged and being responsive.
Lamouree said the officers appreciate the support they get from the community, some which will be on display Wednesday night in Glens Falls.
Kelly Lepley Stevens of Queensbury put a call out on Facebook, asking for A Time to Reflect to be held at City Park from 7 to 8 p.m.
The gathering is meant to show support for local police officers, she said.
Its not about race, she said. We all bleed red. Unfortunately, cops are the targets.
She had the idea after one of her sons mentioned a desire to be a police officer when he grows up, she said.
Her husband, a 911 supervisor in Washington County and part-time dispatcher in Warren County, said, Not right now, you dont want to be.
Officers her husband knows are having second thoughts about the career they chose, she said.
We dont want to discourage him, she said of their son. We just wanted to give an opportunity for something positive.
Positivity
Jefferson County Undersheriff Brian McDermott said the Sheriffs Office and other law enforcement agencies in his region have not been subject to negativity from the community.
One resident recently paid for breakfast for a group of deputies, he said.
Its terrible to see whats going on, but weve had really good relationships with the people in this community.
Lewis County Sheriff Michael P. Carpinelli argued that racism being reported by the media is nowhere near the extremes of decades ago. He said he hopes the political process can look past movements such as Black Lives Matter.
In St. Lawrence County, said Undersheriff Thomas Jenison, We have quite a lot of colleges. With the colleges, we have different types of situations, he said noting a population of black, hispanic and gay students.
Our police are really aware of the situations. They defuse anything that happens right away and they do a tremendous job doing that, he said.
Inventory needs to be managed and managed well, or you are going to get in recurring trouble, and lose your credibility and hard-earned conversions, whether
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However, the Remain Camp have dismissed the assertion saying that the Asian firm only decided to purchase the company because it was cheaper to do so because of the weakness of the pound. Britains currency has fallen ever since voters decided to the country should leave the EU.
Related: Meet Britain's Ministers Handling Brexit
According to analysts, the deal is 30 percent cheaper for the Japanese compared to what it would have paid for a year ago.
ARMs chips can be found in most mobile phones, home gadgets and drones. The companys shares have risen following the announcement. Founded in 1990 and based in Cambridge, ARMs 3,000 staff is expected to double over the next five years.
According to Softbanks chief executive Masayoshi Son this deal will make the company a significant player in the internet of things market.
"This is one of the most important acquisitions we have ever made, and I expect ARM to be a key pillar of SoftBank's growth strategy going forward. We have long admired ARM as a world renowned and highly respected technology company that is by some distance the market leader in its field."
"ARM will be an excellent strategic fit with the Softbank group as we invest to capture the very significant opportunities provided by the internet of things"
Related: Ghanaian businesses to benefit from Vodafone Ghana's new four-in-one global SIM
President of the Ghana Chamber of Commerce, Nana Dr. Appiahgyei Dankawoso I, said just as if someone has not paid his/her taxes for a certain period of time, penalties are imposed on them, if the drawback delays beyond two years, we want to sit down with them (GRA) to see if anything could be done about that by way of penalties or interests being paid to us.The duty drawback is the refund of duties and taxes paid on raw material or inputs that are used in the manufacture of scarce goods or exported substitution goods. It is one of the trade policy instruments being used to enhance the competitiveness of Ghanas exports.
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Director of the Faculty of Academic Affairs and Research at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping and Training Centre, Dr Emmanuel Kwesi Aning says the latest string of attacks across the world shows that no country can be fully prepared to combat a terror attack.
In a frank analysis, he tells pulse.com.gh "any terrorists group that wants to attack a particular country will always be able to do it, particularly with respect to free societies where people are not unduly checked and scrutinized as they go about their business.
Ghana was doing what it could to prevent a terror attack, with the police and military coordinating, but being an open society where people can travel freely, we are at risk just like any other country is at risk.
Since November last year, Mali, Burkina Faso and Cote dIvoire have all been targeted by Al-Qaeda or affiliates of the terror group.
Those attacks reflected the struggle between Al-Qaeda and Islamic State.
Islamic State is making a lot of noise about how daring it is in its ability to strike when it wants, Al-Qaeda has only responded by striking former French colonies where there is a French presence.
"In all three countries there was a French presence, but my personal analysis is, it's going to get worse.
These three attacks were carried out by Al-Qaeda I think as Islamic State is driven out of Syria and Iraq and they come to Libya they will begin to come down south and will be looking for more spectacular attacks, he told pulse.com.gh
This is far from the end of what we are seeing...as the struggle between the two groups deepens and worsens, certainly Ghana will be at risk.
Ghana could be a target due to its involvement in international peacekeeping, its economy doing relatively well and its democracy deepening.
The propaganda value of attacking any critical infrastructure in Ghana - even if we were not to lose lives - just the fact that such an attack has been successful itself will dent Ghana's image. We have an interest in preventing this from happening but also those who want to hurt us also in terms of their calculating will know coming to Ghana and trying to do something here will also embellish their own image.
Islamic State was focused on attacking European and French targets on French soil, while Al-Qaeda was focused on former French colonies.
I think it is based on the operational capabilities of both organisations and where each of them think they can get into and strike, Dr Aning said.
He said expatriates, particularly Caucasians had been targeted in the West Africa attacks.
In both Mali and Burkina Faso hotels were targeted, while in Cote dIvoire a beach resort was targeted by gun men.
I think people with a Caucasian background are now more at risk, but I do think if any such thing was to happen in Ghana where Caucasians frequent will not the target, I think the target will be the Ghanaian elite where they gather and where their children go to school.
And, like no country is safe from a terror attack, Dr Aning notes no democracy is safe from a coup attempt if and when those who govern that democracy don't play by the rule of law," he said, referring to Friday's attempted coup in Turkey which has left 232 dead and nearly 20,000 members of the police, civil service, judiciary and army detained or suspended since Friday night.
This crackdown and the calls to reinstate the death penalty for those plotters has drawn concern from Western allies who said Ankara must uphold the rule of law in the country - it is a NATO member, and Washington's most powerful Muslim ally.
There has been widespread concern that President Tayyip Erdogan was using the opportunity to consolidate his power and further a process of silencing dissent.
Dr Aning said a leader or state can be extremely powerful but if that state or leader does not play by the rule of law, people will be alienated, and some of them would want to take the law into their own hands.
It was important the response to an attempted coup was met within the rule of law.
The 45-year-old trader, Margaret Agwu, said for the husbands deceitfulness she was calling it quits after 33 years in Agwu Onus house.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that her husband refused to appear in court after several summonses.
Margaret had filed the suit seeking the dissolution of the union, citing the mans duplicity.
According to Margaret, who had five children for him, her husband also lied to her parents that he had a provision store.
"When I was 12 years old, my husband came to my village to ask for my hand in marriage.
"He told my parents that he lived in a flat and that he is a businessman and owned a provision store.
"My parents told him that they cannot release me for marriage because I was too young and besides I was still schooling.
Margaret regretted that on getting to the city, she discovered that her husband was not what he made her and her parents believe he was.
"When I got to his house, I discovered that he was staying in one-room apartment, selling popcorn at the roadside.
"He also refused to fulfill his promise of sending me to school."
The frustrated woman said she would not have reminded herself of the husbands deceit but because he had turned out to be a brute, who beats her at the slightest provocation.
She added:"My husband turned me into a punching bag; sometimes he will strip me and beat the hell out of me.
"He once punched me in my stomach and I lost my first pregnancy after the fight. I have lived every minute of my life in fear but I cannot go back to my parents because of the bride price."
Margret said also accused her of absconding with their children 16 years ago.
"When I called him after he packed out, he just told me that he was no longer interested in the marriage and since then he refused to pick my calls.
"His relations told me he relocated with the children to Port Harcourt, Rivers State. It is 16 years now that I have not seen nor heard from them.
"I heard that my husband gave our first daughter's hand in marriage without my knowledge and that she had given birth to a baby," she said.
Margaret urged the court to help her to return the N600 bride price paid by her husband and dissolve the marriage, saying "I am no longer in love and I want to move on with my life.
NAN reports that when an official of the court called the man on telephone as directed, he said: "She is no longer my wife.
The President of the court, Mr Adegboyega Omilola, ordered the petitioner (the wife) to pay back the bride price to the court for onward transfer to the estranged husband.
It was learnt that the suspect and the deceased were both members of the same community in Rore village in Irepodun Local Government Area of state, when Bamidele, a welder, trailed Owolabi to his farm and murdered him on Saturday, July 16, 2016.
It was in the process of the culprit's looking for a buyer for the head that he was apprehended and he allegedly confessed to the crime.
A police source reported thus:
The farmer had gone to his farm that last Saturday but never returned. This development got his relatives concerned and therefore commenced a search for him and later discovered the headless body the next day on the farmland.
The suspect tried to sell the severed head to one Aliyu, who turned him down. Aliyu thereafter reported the case to a community leader who in turn informed the village head.
Upon interrogation by the community leader, Bamidele confessed to have acted under the influence of alcohol."
According to the report, the little infant was picked when the operatives were on a patrol along the New Elelenwo Manifold in Akpajo, Eleme Local Government Area of the state, when they saw the baby tucked inside a carton of noodles and placed in the refuse dump, on Friday, July 15, July 2016.
The statement adds that though the baby who was in a critical condition at the time it was rescued due to the rain and bad weather it had been exposed to, she was doing well after the officials rushed her to a hospital where she was given prompt and adequate medical attention.
Addressing the International AIDS Conference in South Africa which took place on Monday, July 18, 2016, the Executive Director of UNICEF, Anthony Lake indicated that AIDS ranks as the second cause of death amongst teenagers globally and ranks as one in Africa.
The battle against AIDS will not be over until we redouble prevention and treatment efforts; until we reach those young lives still being denied the progress that millions before them have enjoyed; and until we end the stigma and fear that prevent so many young people from getting tested, he said.
Read also:UNICEF
Meanwhile, mother-to-child transmission at birth and during breastfeeding has dropped by 70 per cent.
READ MORE: Fire Prevention Lack of fire hydrants, challenge to the fire service - AnaglateyAccra-based Class FM reported that residents were unable to salvage anything. No casualty was recorded. Ridwan said one lady who was preparing to get married had all her bridal dress and items consumed by the fire.Residents, however, said they suspected the fire was started by an electric spark.
Confirming the news on his social media page, Dr. Gyampo, who is also a research fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), said: So they broke into my car too and see how they ransacked it like a mad man's house. I don't care; once I have life, I am ok. Those things they took away...we will get them back by the grace of God.
READ MORE: Domestic Flights Grounded Talks between Aviation workers and Govt fail Speaking to the Daily Searchlight from her base in London, Ms. Obiri Yeboah said that she left Accra at close to midnight because the flight to the UK had delayed.
When I arrived at UK to clear my bag I realised instantly that the bags had been tempered with because they were very light in weight. I waited until I got home before opening, only to discover that virtually all the things in my bag had been stolen, she said.These included several pieces of brand new African clothes that she had bought to use while in the UK. Over several weeks the Daily Searchlight had been receiving reports of similar petty thefts. One old woman was robbed of her tablet and other valuables after going through the KIA.
Some legal practitioners have argued that the directors and not the owners of Montie FM should be the ones facing contempt charges along with the three others.
But speaking on Accra-based Joy FM, Monday, Mr Davies said the discretion is entirely theirs [Judges]. They can decide to convict them [owners], they can decide to fine them.
He explained that as far as the Supreme Court hauled the owners, directors, and the three others before it for contempt, they are all liable for sentencing.
The Supreme Court of Ghana on Monday, found the alleged contemnors in the Montie FM case guilty.
READ ALSO: Montie FM Saga
The alleged contemnors include two panellists, Godwin Ako Gunn and Alistair Nelson, talk show host Mugabe, as well as owners of Montie FM based in Accra.
The accused were found guilty for scandalizing the court, defying and lowering the authority of the court and bringing it into disrepute by the court presided over by Justice Sophia Akuffo.
Lawyers for the three however pleaded with the court to temper justice with mercy.
The alleged contemnors include two panellists, Godwin Ako Gunn and Alistair Nelson, talk show host Mugabe, as well as owners of Montie FM based in Accra.
The accused were found guilty for scandalizing the court, defying and lowering the authority of the court and bringing it into disrepute by the court presided over by Justice Sophia Akuffo.
Lawyers for the three however pleaded with the court to temper justice with mercy.
The case has been adjourned to July 27 for sentencing.
Meanwhile, one of the Montie FM panellists blamed his comments in which he and another panelist threatened to kill the judges to a disease called kpokpogbligbli.
According to Alistair Nelson, kpokpogbligbli is an unknown disease that takes over a persons body and controls what he says and does."
He made this known when he appeared before the Supreme Court to explain why he and others should not be committed to prison for contempt of court, for scandalizing the court, defying and lowering the authority of the court, and bringing the authority of the court into disrepute.
READ ALSO: Supreme Court plays contemptuous audio tapes
The Supreme Court also played in open court, audiotapes which contained alleged threats issued by two radio pundits Godwin Ako Gunn and Alistair Nelson against justices of the apex court.
The tapes were played on the insistence of presiding judge Justice Sophia Akuffo, despite pleas from counsel for the alleged contemnors' tapes not to be played.
The two panellists, Nelson and Gunn told the court they were liable to the offence and expressed regret.
The host of the said programme, Mugabe, even though admitting that he was liable to the offence, said that he had an explanation for his conduct.
The court in a letter last Thursday, asked the owners to explain why they should not be committed to prison for contempt of court, for scandalising the court, defying and lowering the authority of the court, and bringing the authority of the court into disrepute.
The Chief Justice, Georgina Theodora Wood, and another judge of the Supreme Court, Sulley Gbadegbe stepped down from the panel hearing the contempt case against owners of Accra-based Montie FM, the host of the stations Pampaso programme, and the two panelists, who threatened to kill judges over their handling of the Abu Ramadan suit on the credibility of the voters register.
The survey, conducted in 2015, also revealed other problems mentioned in the report but of relatively low priority include poor infrastructure, corruption, low income and salary, quality of education, inadequate supply of portable water, immigration, ethnicity, crime, and the high price of goods and services.
The survey was on The Most Important Problems Confronting Ghana and it sampled views of 1500 citizens in all ten regions of the country between November and December 2015.
The results of the survey showed that Ghanaians wanted the government to tackle unemployment (25.8%) first, followed by poverty (23%) and then the erratic power supply (16.3%) before other issues.
The report further indicated that people in the Volta Region (42%), Eastern Region (29%) and Western Region (28%) saw unemployment as an issue that needed governments urgent attention.
Read also: Volta Region records highest unemployment rate in Ghana
Meanwhile, the five regions in the country saw poverty as an challenge that needs urgent attention. These regions are Central, Brong Ahafo, Northern, Upper West, and Upper East regions. The Ghana Living Standards (GLS) survey of the Ghana Statistics Service corroborates this with their study which indicates that poverty is a rural problem.
The Greater Accra (31.5%) and Ashanti (33%) regions which are mainly urban, with many businesses had the erratic power supply ranking high from the survey.
The study also showed that a greater number of women (26.7%) were concerned about unemployment than their male counterparts (24.4%). The same applied to poverty. But more men (13.4 %) were concerned about corruption than women (7.5%).
The report also indicated that urban dwellers are faced with unemployment issues while poverty was a major challenge facing rural residents. The IEA in a similar report in 2014 revealed that businesses in the country were collapsing. This was because of the poor power supply (dumsor) in the country at that time.
Two groups; Bawumia Youth for Change linked to the opposition New Patriotic Party and Zaadiaya Youth; associated with the governing National Democratic Congress, faced of after they launched their campaign simultaneously near each other.
Even though one person sustained some injuries, the regional police commander DCOP Ken Yeboah in an interview with Accra based Unique FM said the situation is very calm. The reportage was exaggerated. The way it was published as if there was a serious clash between the supporters of the NDC and NPP, that is not the situation on the ground.
He narrated that the leadership of the NDC in the Walewale constituency informed the police that they wanted to organise an inauguration of a youth club. And then the NPP also wanted to organise a programme at a particular place, but they did not inform that the police that they were going to do anything. After the NPP supporters have finished what they were going to do and they were going back to their various houses, the NDC Youth Club, was still at the meeting. And the NPP supporters were riding motorbikes, making noise and jubilating. And then the NDC sympathisers went there and told them they were disturbing their programme.
This according to DCOP Ken Yeboah brought about some misunderstanding but then the police went there and settled them and everybody went home, he added.
He said the police command is concerned about how one of the supporters sustained injury and has therefore launched an investigation to ascertain the facts of the matter.
But one person sustained injury. And we are concerned about it because our information was that he tried to hit somebody but he hit a glass. But whether it is true or not, that is what we are investigating because if you hit a glass, you will definitely have some broken glasses on your hand or the scratches is different from somebody using a knife or machete to cut you.
He mentioned that despite what happened over the weekend they are well prepared to secure Walewale and other flash points in the region before, during and after the elections.
Read also: 16 rooms gutted by fire at 37 Police Barracks
Minister for Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration, Hanna S. Tetteh (MP), received the African Gender Award for Ghana at the Kigali Summit of the African Union.
READ ALSO: Why we need to move Gender Activism from posh hotels to the streets
The African Gender Scorecard, which measures the performance of gender equality and womens empowerment, is being sponsored by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and the African Development Bank.
Ghana has over the years introduced some social intervention programmes to advance the economic rights of women.
Many women have already benefited from small loans and other policies such as the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme which have helped cushion them.
The statement noted that: "Petroleum consumers in Ghana expect prices to go down to commensurate movements on the world markets but the various oil marketing companies (OMCS) with the exception of a few who have adjusted downwards by a few points, a majority of these OMCS seem to have turned a deaf ear to doing the needful as far as reducing pump prices is concerned and are still charging very high prices at the pumps."
According to the statement signed by COPECGH'S Executive Secretary Duncan Amoah, "world market indexes continue to hover around $45/barrel as of this day and time representing over 7% since the last decreases in the early part of the month when the world market indexes were trading around $49/ barrel."
The phenomenon where consumers continue to be shortchanged when the time comes for reductions in pump prices is clearly becoming institutionalized and must be checked forthwith, the statement said.
It said the very same Oil Marketing Companies have left no stone unturned in the past when the opportunity comes for increases but demonstrate reluctance and unwillingness when prices have to go down under the deregulation programme.
Many criticised the police for thinking about banning a platform it does not even use.
The Director of Communications at the Police Service, Cephas Arthur later indicated that the IGPs comments were misconstrued.
Let us not be alarmed. The IGP is not about to block social media on election day and we are going to have our social media, Cephas Arthur said.
READ ALSO: Ghanaians criticise proposed ban on social media on election day
But interacting with Police personnel during a tour of the Eastern region Tuesday, the IGP said he still stands by his earlier intentions to ban the platform.
At a news conference Tuesday, regional chairperson of the NPP, Bugri Nabu, alleged that Abubakari was distributing arms to NDC activists in Walewale and other parts of the region to attack NPP members.
He also called on the government to bring the minister to book or the NPP will be forced to defend its members.
"NDC government should bring the regional minister to book. if they bring him to come and bring conflict in the northern region then the conflict will come, Bugri Nabu said. "I hear he has distributed AK47 to his boys in Walewlae to attack our boys... and even in [the] northern region here."
Do you think that after seeing happened in Walewale, I should wait for another incident to occur," a furious Bugri Nabu said.
Nii Armah Ashitey lost the chance to seek re-election to the legislature after he was beaten in the November 2015 primaries by the daughter of the founder of the party Dr Zenator Rawlings.
Ashitey challenged the eligibility of Dr Agyeman-Rawlings in court, arguing that she was not a registered voter at the time of the primaries. She subsequently registered as a voter during the Electoral Commissions limited voter registration exercise in April 2015.
However the Supreme Court ruled in favour Dr Agyeman-Rawlings on Monday, July 18, 2016, paving a way for her to contest the Korle Klottey seat on the ticket of the NDC in the forthcoming polls.
The Supreme Court also directed the High Court to deliver a ruling in that regard since an individual can only be a candidate after the Electoral Commission (EC) has opened the opportunity for filing. The apex court, therefore, said since the EC was yet to take that action, the argument of Dr Rawlings not being eligible did not hold water.
Read also:Klottey Korle Case
Speaking on an Accra-based Accra FM, Nana Kwasi Abram Korankye dared individuals spreading such rumours to show up and reveal the source of their rumours.
According to him, sanctions were one of the tools used to ensure that the service providers give off the best of service.
"I am sure you will agree with me that the service quality has improved over the years because of the stringent measures the NCA has put in place to make sure that the quality is really improved in terms of making sure the various technologies are employed within the deliver proper service to the consumer," he told journalists at a symposium organised by the authority under the theme:
"We have been giving out fines. For example, we have giving fines out to MTN, to Vodafone, to Tigo, Airtel for not doing certain things in certain areas. For example, they have certain obligations, and if they don't meet those obligations, it affects the consumer," he added.
Tevie said the NCA continuously measures the performances of the mobile service operators to ensure that they improve their service.
Kruger, 40, and Jackson, 38, only recently moved into an apartment in New York in March 2016, before which the 'Troy' actress had been shuttling Paris and Vancouver, only moving to be closer to Jackson.
Speaking on her move with The Edit, Kruger said:
Moving was a major commitment, thats a big step into adulthood for me, to allow that time for someone else out of my time.
Sharing an Instagram video of the New York skyline from her plane seat on Saturday, July 16, further proving her split from Jackson, Kruger wrote, Its just an au revoir, not an adieu."
She also shared a picture of a Jimi Hendrix quote on Monday, July 18, with words, "the story of life is quicker than the wink of an eye. The story of love is hello and good-bye until we meet again.
ALSO READ: Actress unveiled as ambassador for Martell Cognac in stunning ad campaign
Fans were treated to hours of fun inside the studio where some of Nigeria's biggest hits have been crafted. Besides gisting with Don Jazzy, and Dr. Sid, fans were also treated to exclusive listens of yet-to-be released tracks by Reekado Banks, a highly impressive new video by DPrince and other new productions.
Don Jazzy, who recently signed a deal with Temple Management Company, expressed his pleasure playing host to the fans.
I always wanted to take time off my busy schedule to meet my young fans and inspire them. I am happy that Temple Management Company with support from MTN is making it happen. Thanks to every organization who supported us to make this happen, he said.
In the convo Kanye West told Taylor Swift about the controversial line of his song
After the video was leaked, Taylor Swift quickly released a statement about the whole issue. Later in the day Taylor Swift reached out to her lawyers and is considering taking legal action against Kanye West. Apparently, Taylor Swift knew about the video for months and sent a letter written by her lawyers to Kanye West.
ALSO READ: Kim Kardashian smears Taylor Swift's clean image
"Demand is hereby made that you immediately destroy all such recordings, provide us of assurance that this has been done, and also assurance that these recordings have not been previously disseminated" read a section of the letter.
In California laws, anyone who secretly records a telephone conversation with another person within the state, commits a felony. According to TMZ, a source close to Kanye West claims the phone conversation was recorded in a studio in Los Angeles.
In the state of California, it is a crime to record or eavesdrop on a phone call, private conversation and any other form of verbal communication without the consent of the parties involved. The punishment for this crime is a year in county jail or a $2,500 fine. Beyond this, Taylor Swift could also pursue civil damages with a lawsuit.
California is an all-party consent wiretapping state. What that means is, even on things like a conference call, before you record it, youre supposed to announce to everyone, Im going to record this call Chris Hoofnagle, professor of law at the University of California told Guardian.
Clearly Kanye West fell foul of the law here. It would be interesting to see Kanye West locked up behind bars for this. There is only a small chance that he could end up in jail but weirder things have happened in Hollywood. For a rapper who doesn't embody violence in his music, Kanye West has had a few legal issues recently.
In March 2014, Mr. West was hit with two years' probation for the misdemeanor battery conviction after assaulting a paparazzi Daniel Ramos in 2013. Kanye West was required to 24 anger management sessions and also perform 250 hours of community service. He was also ordered to pay restitution to Ramos.
Kanye West loves courting trouble. Last month the eccentric rapper dared the celebrities whose wax images appeared in his music video 'Famous' to sue him. You've just got to love the brashness of Kanye West sometimes.
Welcome to the Pulse Community! We will now be sending you a daily newsletter on news, entertainment and more. Also join us across all of our other channels - we love to be connected! Welcome to the Pulse Community! We will now be sending you a daily newsletter on news, entertainment and more. Also join us across all of our other channels - we love to be connected!
Also sentenced alongside Stephen by the president of the court, Justice Geraldine Imadegbelo, were her accomplices, Johnson Ogbeide and Nancy Aiwuyor, both of them school teachers for conspiracy and the murder of the toddler.
In her judgment, Justice Imadegbelo, said the prosecution proved its case beyond reasonable doubt, noting that it was clear that Stephen gave out the three-year-old girl to Ogbeide, who in turn handed her over to his colleague, Aiwuyor, to be sold for ritual purposes.
While reviewing the evidence before her, the judge said the child was left in the custody of her stepmother by her parents who went to the farm on the day she was killed.
When the victims parents returned, they could not find the child, only for the stepmother to confess that she stole the child and handed her over to the two other convicts.
Seven years after the victim disappeared in the hands of the convicts without being found, the court was safe to hold that the child was dead.
The prosecution has also established that the victim was sold for N1.5 million, her nine fingers cut off and her hair shaved as directed for the ritual.
The acts of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd accused persons, which caused the death of the deceased were unlawful.
They are hereby sentenced to death by hanging, Justice Imadegbelo handed down.
According to a a post on the activity of the man, the thief had gone to the office located on the fifth floor of a complex and made away with the computer, not knowing that his image had been captured and would take a mater of time before he is caught.
Read the appeal for people to be on the lookout for the criminal:
"Please, be on the lookout for that man. And this should serve as a warning to the general public in order to avert future occurrence of this kind. People now immediately familiarize with an environment via greetings and chatting, to establishing an atmosphere devoid of suspicion to operate in.
My wife once lost her phone to same scheme; a man (the thief) followed a woman and her kid to my wifes office for a medical test.
While my wife was thinking the man was with the woman and her kid after buying the kid biscuits, and making funny remarks, the woman was also thinking the man was one of the staff in the office."
Face of a laptop thief
Photo Credit: Instagram
"It was too late when they both discovered the man belonged to neither of them. The phone was long gone! Please, when some persons come to your office, ensure if they are together or not, and when you see a strange face, ask questions.
According to a release by her family, the mother of seven will be buried in Abuja by the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RRCG), after a service of songs to be held in her honour at her residence in the Gbazango community in Kubwa, a satellite town in Bwari Area Council, on Friday, July 22.
The woman was allegedly murdered by some Muslim youths on the orders of an Imam in charge of a Mosque in the area she used to preach.
It was gathered that while Olawale was doing her early morning preaching in the area, the Islamic cleric ordered her to leave the area but when she went about her preaching, he ordered some boys to chase her away.
The man who has been faking his disability outside a market in Yiwu, Zhejiang province of China, was nabbed by a security guard.
The security guard had decided to take off the man's shirt only to find both of his arms crossed in front of him underneath his T-shirt.
With the limp hand of his shirt hanging at his sides, he looked like a double amputee desperately in need of help, that is, until his exposure which forced him to pack up his sign from the spot he usually begged from.
The Public Relations Officer of the state Police Command, DSP Magaji Majiya, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) that the command had already commenced investigation into the incident with a view to arresting perpetrators of the dastardly act.
After we received the report of the incident around 5:30 a.m. on Sunday, the Crime Investigation Department swung into action.
"As the Police reported to the scene, they found that the late bride was raped before she was stabbed to death in her matrimonial room.
We have so far launched an investigation into the incident and that will lead us to the arrest of the assailants," Majiya said.
He reminded members of the public on the need to always be security conscious.
NAN recalls that the victim was stabbed to death on Saturday night in her room few days after her wedding and the husband returned to Abuja where he runs his business.
But in this instance, it took a different dimension as, according to stories emanating from the Upper Chamber, the distinguished Senator representing Lagos Central Senatorial District, Remi Tinubu, the wife of the strongman of Nigerian politics, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the Jagaban himself, got into an altercation with the ever cantankerous Senator representing Kogi West, Dino Melaye.
From what we heard, during the acrimonious exchange, she reportedly called Melaye a thug and a dog. Not one to suffer fools silently, (He actually came out to say he does not have the anointing to keep quiet when insulted), Melaye reportedly gave it back to Madam Jagaban, saying he would beat her up and also impregnate her.
That would have sufficed as the legislators always have a way of settling their disputes and fights when, especially, they have some millions to throw amongst themselves, but Nigerians have refused to allow the 'insults' Melaye heaped on Madam to die as many have been polarised in their support and counter-support.
Women groups have not taken the affront on one of their own lying low, with many taking to the streets staging one form of protest or the other in her support, conveniently forgetting what led to the fight in the first place.
No one has found it necessary to also tell Iyawo Jagaban that as a woman, decorum should be expected of her, especially when in the chambers. Dino Melaye, in their eyes, should be chained and thrown out to the dogs, for daring to insult a woman of her status.
But these women did not spare a thought to the female preacher that was stoned to death in Abuja while going about her early morning call to worship.
Before then, a female trader was murdered in cold blood in Kano State by Muslim fundamentalists and the women group did not rise up to demand for justice. But because a colleague verbally assaulted her, they have been all over the place, calling for his head.
No one is supporting Dino on what he did (In fact, going by his past antecedents as a wife beater, it is no surprise he could react that way), but do these women know the precedents they are setting?
They are clearly telling Nigerians that those women who were murdered do not matter because they were not married to their leader and they do not stand to gain anything by fighting for them.
They are not bothered that the lawmakers have not done anything since they were voted into power rather than fighting for their pockets and selfish interests, especially when it involves money. Our mothers and wives are comfortable with pounding the streets to fight for a woman just because she is who she is.
This is contained in a communique issued by it at the end of its 17th Ordinary OAFLA General Assembly on the sidelines of the 27th AU Summit in Kigali, Rwanda on Monday.
It called on the global community to support the global fund replenishment to particularly end AIDS, Tuberclosis and Malaria by 2030, and also build resilient and sustainable health systems.
The women also pledged to collaborate with relevant partners to reduce mortality rate from cervical cancer by advocating for adequate resource allocation for the prevention and treatment of the disease and create awareness about prevention methods among the youth.
They further called upon governments and national institutions to ensure ratification, domestication and reporting on the implementation of international and regional instruments and legal frameworks that protect women and young peoples rights.
They also committed to continue to ensure the launch of the campaign to End Child Marriage in all their countries.
In her welcome remarks, First Lady of Rwanda, Mrs Jeannette Kagame, she underscored the importance of Africa to rise up against all odds.
"Indeed what we have managed to do by rising up again is to us a symbol and testament to what Africans can accomplish and overcome when we foster the will to work together and walk the same path towards a future of our making.
She called on others to consistently assess and re-assess their commitments to the organisation which was born 15 years ago, adding that it is born of their duty to lend a voice to Africas most vulnerable populations.
Chairperson of the assembly, First Lady of Ghana, Dr Nana Mahama, in her opening remarks outlined some of the activities undertaken by OAFLA since its last convention in January 2016.
She was represented by the first lady of Kenya, Mrs Margaret Kenyatta.
They activities includes commemoration of African Vaccination week and national chapters in reaffirming their commitment to advocate for access and investments to life saving vaccines for Africas mothers, new born, children and adolescents.
In Ghana, there was the launch of united continental, "All IN adolescent Campaign, UN high level meeting on ending AIDS.
She further noted that the assembly celebrates the AU theme ``African year of human rights with particular focus on the rights of women.
She said that past success and achievements would not have been possible without the support of the long lasting partnerships that they had developed.
Dr Mustapha Kaloko, Commissioner for Social Affairs of the AU, stated that ending paediatric AIDS by 2030 was a prerequisite for achieving all the seven aspirations of Agenda 2063.
"As we put it in the common Africa position to the High Level Meeting on HIV (HLM), while the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are broad and comprehensive, not focusing resources to high impact areas will reverse the gains achieved in the AIDS response.
NLC President Ayuba Wabba told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Tuesday in Abuja that security vote had become an avenue for siphoning public funds.
"The issue of security vote is another form of corruption; in fact, there was a particular state which took N1 billion in one month as security vote.
"It is an avenue for corruption. In good governance, all monies spent by government are budgeted and transparently applied.
"That is what happens in other spheres; so for our sake, the issue of security vote should be done away with.
"All monies to be spent should be transparently budget for, including the so-called security vote, so that it can be tracked, to prevent corruption.
Also, Waba called for the removal of the immunity clause from the constitution, to enable the president, his vice, governors and their deputies to be prosecuted for a criminal offence.
He noted that such political leaders in other parts of the world do not enjoy immunity against criminal prosecution, adding that Nigeria should not be an exception.
The NLC president said that immunity was hindering the fight against corruption and decried a situation whereby political office holders could not be prosecuted for criminal offence.
"Even after they leave office, they use their influence and resources they have accumulated to frustrate prosecution.
"I have seen cases that lasted for eight to 14 years and were inconclusive. Some of these cases outlived the life of the administration that started the probe, due to this particular challenge.
"There are some cases that started before the administration of former President Olusegun Obansajo till now, it is still ongoing."
Waba said that nobody should be given immunity against criminal prosecution while in office.
President Buhari stated this in Abuja on Monday while declaring open a workshop on the ``Roles of Judiciary in the fight corruption.
The workshop was organised by the Presidential Advisory Committee against Corruption in collaboration with National Judicial Institute, Commonwealth Secretariat and UNODC.
``Now, in carrying out its role in the fight against corruption, the judiciary must remain impartial and be seen to be impartial.
``It is indeed incumbent on the judiciary to carefully and fully analyse the facts based on applicable law without prejudice and penchant regarding the case they are dealing with, and without acting in any way that would favour the interests of any of the concerned parties.
``Where judicial corruption occurs, the damage can be pervasive and extremely difficult to reverse.
``It undermines citizens morale, violates their human rights, harms national development and degrades the quality of governance.
``Judges should hear and handle their assigned cases without any external pressure or influence either by state powers, or by their hierarchical superiors, stakeholders or economic interest groups.
``The judiciary must take steps to ensure that it is not seen as being partisan.
``Hence, judicial officers and all other members of this profession must always demonstrate manifest integrity.
The President further urged the judiciary to be in the forefront of efforts at developing rights-based jurisprudence as an element in the multi-disciplinary approach advocated in the fight against corruption.
According to him, the judiciary has a role to play in the fight against corruption by enforcing the applicable laws.
Buhari, who frowned at what he called ``the use of delay tactics by some defence lawyers and prosecutors in corruption cases, said such habit was frustrating his administrations ongoing crusade against corruption.
According to him, an efficient and fair judiciary is key to the success of all anti-corruption initiatives.
``I am worried that the expectation of the public is yet to be met by the judiciary with regard to the removal of delay and the toleration of delay tactics by lawyers.
``When cases are not concluded the negative impression is given that crime pays.
``So far, the corruption cases filed by government are not progressing as speedily as they should in spite of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act of 2015 essentially because the courts allow some lawyers to frustrate the reforms introduced by law.
``This certainly needs to change if we are to make success in our collective effort in the fight against corruption.
The President said the fight against corruption would remain one of the top priorities of his administration in the hope of restoring the economy and building a new Nigeria.
He, however, noted that the eradication of corruption was a joint task involving not only judges and members of the legal profession, but literally all stakeholders, including all levels of government, the media and the civil society.
``The challenge is to come up with an integrated approach that balances process and substance, promote clarity to ensure a coherent and realistic formulation of objectives.
``To this end, the Judiciary is under a duty to keep its house in order and to ensure that the public, which it serves, sees this.
``Thus, we cannot expect to make any gains in the war against corruption in our society when the judiciary is seen as being distant from the crusade.
``This will not augur well and its negative effect will impact all sectors of society.
``The judiciary must fight delay of cases in court as well as it fights corruption in its own ranks, perceived or otherwise.
``We expect to see less tolerance to delay tactics used by defense lawyers or even the prosecution in taking cases to conclusion.
Buhari observed that the future of anti-corruption efforts in Nigeria rested not only on functional preventive systems, but also on an effective sanctions and enforcement regime inaccordance with the laws.
He stated that his administration is counting on the judiciary to assist in this regard.
He assured of the Federal Governments commitment to promoting and supporting the judiciary to establish ``a judicial system that is well-staffed, well-resourced, promotes and recognises dedicated, committed and motivated Judges.
``The judiciary can count on me for this so that together we can rid our nation of the cancer of corruption.
``A corruption-free Nigeria is possible; therefore, let every arm of government be the change we want to see in our country.
Buhari congratulated the Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption and the National Judicial Institute for their collaboration and initiative.
He expressed the hope that the outcome of the workshop would serve as a veritable input to the collective effort at ``killing corruption before it kills Nigeria.
Prof. Itsey Sagay, the Chairman, Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption, had narrated how some judges frustrated government anti-corruption efforts in the country.
He expressed dismay that since 2007, only one out of the 15 corruption cases against 15 ex-governors was successfully prosecuted, saying that even the affected ex-governor was only fined N3million for a fraud case that involved N4 billion.
He said the committee had so far trained 160 prosecutors to ensure effective prosecution of high-level corruption cases in the country.
"I am worried that the expectation of the public is yet to be met by the judiciary with regard to the removal of delay and the toleration of delay tactics by lawyers," he said.
"When cases are not concluded the negative impression is given that crime pays," Buhari told a summit examining the role of the judiciary in the overall drive against corruption.
Buhari, who was elected last year on a platform to tackle graft, has said "mind-boggling" sums of public funds were stolen over decades and has made recovering the money a central plank of his presidency.
Most of those currently on trial are linked to the former administration of his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan, and centre around an alleged $2.1 billion (1.9 billion-euro) "arms scam".
Former national security advisor Sambo Dasuki is accused of overseeing a sprawling embezzlement scheme that saw money earmarked to fight Boko Haram diverted for political purposes.
But there have been repeated delays and adjournments in that case and others, leaving Buhari without a single high-profile conviction since starting the crackdown in May last year.
Buhari told the summit that government corruption cases "are not progressing as speedily as they should be... because the courts allow the lawyers to frustrate the reforms introduced by the law."
Jonathan's main opposition Peoples Democratic Party has accused Buhari of a political witch-hunt, as most of those on trial are PDP members, supporters or linked to the former government.
Buhari and his government have been criticised for disregarding the separation of powers of the executive and judiciary by keeping suspects in custody, despite courts having granted them bail.
The letter accompanying the budget, which was read by President of the Senate, Bukola Saraki, at plenary, indicated that the agencies budgets were in line with provisions of the Fiscal Responsibility Act, 2007.
The list also contained Nigerian Shippers Council, National Maritime Authority, Raw Materials Research and Development Council, National Sugar Development Council, Nigerian Postal Service, Nigerian Ports Authority and Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria.
Also in the budget are Securities and Exchange Commission, Nigerian Tourism Development Corporation, National Communications Commission, National Agency for Food and Drugs Administration and Control and Nigerian Customs Service.
National Broadcasting Commission, National Insurance Commission, Nigerian Copyrights Commission, Nigerian Deposit Insurance Corporation, Nigerian Immigration Service and Federal Inland Revenue Service are on the list.
Equally listed were Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria, Federal Housing Authority, Nigerian Television Authority, National Automotive Design and Development Council.
Others are Nigerian Nuclear Regulatory Authority, National Business and Technical Examination Board, Federal Mortgage Board, National Environmental Standards and Regulations Enforcement Agency and Industrial Training Fund.
They agencies also include Corporate Affairs Commission, Standards Organisation of Nigeria as well as Oil and Gas Free Zone Authority.
"Please note that in line with the provisions of the Act, budget of the agencies and corporations which have been privatised or otherwise cease to exist are not included therein.
"May I please pray the senate to expeditiously consider and approve the budget of these agencies and corporations to enable them effectively execute their mandate, Saraki quoted the presidents letter as saying.
Meanwhile, Sen. Dino Melaye (APC-Kogi West) has alerted the Senate absence of due process in some activities of the Central Bank of Nigeria, alleging non-compliance with extant rules by the apex bank.
On a Point-of-Order, Melaye, who read from Order 42 of the 2015 Senate Standing Order, pleaded to be given an opportunity to present a motion to that effect.
"I have some disturbing reasons why the senate has not received report from the CBN with regard to their financial dealings.
"From the report duly signed by CBN Governor, Mr Godwin Emefiele, I want to say there has been a lot of non-compliance with the extant rule, Melaye said. (NAN)
The women made the demand at a press conference held in the state today, July 19, 2016.
The women are seen wearing shirts which read Kogi women support Dino Melaye. They also displayed banners which had the demand for an apology written on them.
Melaye and Mrs Tinubu have been at loggerheads since the altercation which occurred on July 12, leading the latter to write Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris to request protection against Melaye.
ALSO READ: Women protest against Dino Melaye in Lagos
The Libertarian comedian performs. Featuring comedians Kristine Levine and Brett Erickson.
Doug Stanhope is a stand-up comic. Has been since 1990.
His material ranges from true-life graphic perversion to volatile social criticism. Doug is vulgar, opinionated, brutally honest and shockingly uninhibited and is certainly not for everybody.
He started his career in Las Vegas doing jack-off jokes for free drinks. Not much has changed, save for the mullet.
Doug has built a wide-ranging television resume of dubious achievement. He hosted The Man Show on Comedy Central as well as the ubiquitous pseudo-porn for the sexually crippled, "Girls Gone Wild", both solely and shamelessly for financial gain. He has appeared on "The Howard Stern Show", "Comedy Central Presents", "Premium Blend", NBC's "Late Friday", "Spy TV" BBC's "Floor Show Live" while on ecstasy and wrote, produced and starred in Fox's "Invasion of the Hidden Cameras" and has even popped up on "Fox News with Greta Van Sustern" and "The Jerry Springer Show". In 2010, he was the Voice of America on the BBCs Charlie Brookers Newswipe.
None of it compares to seeing him live; Doug is a two-time winner of Time Out New Yorks Best Comedy Performance of the Year.
Hes appeared at multiple major comedy festivals including Montreal Just For Laughs, Aspen US Comedy Arts, Chicago Comedy Festival and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Scotland, where he won the Strathmore Press Award for Best Act of the Fringe in his debut year.
Selected by both Variety and the Hollywood Reporter as one of the Top Ten Comics To Watch, Doug has released four CDs and three DVDs including "No Refunds" on Showtime in 2008.
He made the allegation via a post on Facebook. He wrote:
A civil rights movement, Committee for the Defence of Women's Rights, has uncovered a plan by the wife of a former governor of Lagos State and chairman, Senate Committee on Women Affairs, Mrs. Oluremi Tinubu to sponsor a protest against Senator Dino Melaye this coming Wednesday in Abuja.
The organisation said she has released N75 million to Lagos State APC Woman Leader, Mrs. Kemi Nelson through one of her sisters simply identified as Funlola.
The National President of CDWR, Prof. Taibat Majekodunmi, made the revelation in a statement issued on Monday in Abuja. Already, the protesters have stormed Abuja and have booked for 300 rooms in many hotels in Abuja.
She said, We have it on good authority that N75 million has been released by Senator Okuremi Tinubu to Mrs. Kemi Nelson through Mrs. Tinubu's sister called Funlola.
The money is to organise a protest in Abuja on Wednesday against the chairman, Senate Committee on the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Dino Melaye, with 1,000 protesters from Lagos. The protesters have booked for 300 rooms in some in hotels in Abuja. Why did she not organise a protest against the hardship of Nigerian women and widows.
An associate of Fayose, Mr. Abiodun Agbele, who is currently in EFCC custody, had allegedly received N1.219 billion from a former Minister of State for Defence, Musiliu Obanikoro, on behalf of the Governor during the build-up to the Ekiti governorship election in June 2014.
The anti-graft agency alleged that a large portion of the money, along with some money from the Ekiti State coffers, was used to buy Fayose's Abuja and Lagos properties, with Agbele as the frontman.
The EFCC says it has now discovered that the two houses in Abuja were bought with bank loans from Skye Bank and Zenith Bank, to make the source of the look money legitimate on the surface.
However, the stolen money, the Commission says, was used to offset the bank loans.
From the Dasuki funds, they had about N300m stashed in one account. However, when they were going to buy the N270m property located on Yedseram Street, they did not use the N300m from the stolen funds. Rather, they obtained a loan of N120m in the name of Spotless Hotel from Zenith Bank to deposit for the house," an EFCC investigator told Punch.
They then took about N150m out of the Dasuki money to pay the balance on the house and then used the same Dasuki funds to offset the loan. They went through all this stress to cover their tracks and make it look as if it was a bank loan they used in buying the property.
Why did they take a loan that would be gathering interest when they had more than enough money to buy the house?
According to the source, when they wanted to buy the four duplexes in Lagos, Fayose and Agbele were alleged to have overpaid the seller of the houses and then told the seller to use the balance which was N200m, to pay for another house in Abuja.
The worth of the four duplexes in Lagos is N1.1bn which was sold by Still Earth Nigeria Ltd. However, Fayose and Agbele paid Still Earth N1.3bn in cash and then told the company to transfer the balance of N200m to Skye Bank. It was that N200m that was used in purchasing the building at 44 Osun River Crescent, Abuja. This was done so that no one would be able to trace the fund to them, the investigator said.
Another N60 million has also been traced to a Diamond Bank account - BYKD Consultant Limited - owned by Agbele, the EFCC says.
The account reportedly received some funds from Ekiti State local governments under the heading, Millennium Development Goals.
According to Punch, which sighted a copy of the statement of account, about N18, 159, 050 was paid into the account on February 18, 2015. On the same day, about N15, 319, 650 was paid into the same account while about N11, 238, 500 was deposited into the account on the same day among other transactions.
Agbele, according to the transaction history, paid about N40 million and N15 million into the account of Affordable Motors.
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Fowler said this at the 2016 Tax Week of the Chartered Institute of Taxation of Nigeria (CITN) with the theme``The dilemma of improving tax revenue generation in tough economic times on Tuesday in Abuja.
He said that taxation was based on profit and income, therefore people must pay tax.
``All we are saying is they should pay taxes, for individuals who are not doing well, the tax also is not very high and for those who are not making any income, there is no tax.
``Looking at membership in the small scale sector, they are said to have 37.5 million members; the total tax base for individuals in Nigeria is 10 million, so theres a short fall of over 27.5 million.
``When you look at the corporate sectors as well, half a million are not paying taxes, some are collecting VAT but are not remitting to government.
``Some have deducted, including taxes and stopped remitting and some have just stopped being paid income.
``Now it has gotten to a stage of enforcement and we make sure that all these taxes are collected, Fowler said.
The Chairman said that revenue collected in the second quarter was high, adding that revenue collected by the service in in the first quarter was quite low.
``In terms of actual collections of the second quarter, it was close to 90 per cent.
``looking at it cumulatively, first and second quarter is about 73 per cent so we hope to achieve a 100 per cent rate this year.
``You got to realise that revenue is seasonal and I wouldnt want to give the wrong impression that we have collected as much as we should have.
``All we are saying is that those who are making income and making profit pay your taxes, he added.CITN President and Chairman of the Council, Dr Teju Somorin, said that government must do what was required to diversify resource to achieve the desired goal of the country.
Somorin said that the aim of the tax week was to deliberate on topical issues affecting taxation in the country and come up with recommendations.
``I believe that the recommendations that will come out of the deliberation will get to the relevant stakeholders for implementation.
The Chairman, CITN Abuja and District Society, Mr Simon Kato, said that if government wanted to diversify, there must be need to increase productivity.
``One thing that we hope this tax week will bring out is that we will be making recommendations to government to ensure that the tax process is made much simple a convenient for the tax payer.
``It is our desire to see that we reach that time where tax as a whole will be a one stop payment in this country, where you dont have to pay taxes at different locations which is the situation we have with the multiple taxation complaints.''
``My advice to government is that we must look inwards; the issue of diversification we are talking about has to be practical.
Idris lamented to journalists on Sunday, July 17, 2016, that his predecessor, Solomon Arase had taken away all the police cars and left him with an old car, a claim which Arase has denied.
A week before I was announced IG, when you look through my office window, you could see so many cars. But the cars all disappeared when I came in, Idris said.
When I took over, there were no vehicles. I discovered that the last IG went away with 24 vehicles, including two BMWs. The DIGs some took seven, others eight. And they left me with an old vehicle, he added.
Notice that Idris wasnt concerned about the corruption involved in the carting away of 24 cars, rather he was concerned about not being able to ride in a fancy vehicle.
He also unwittingly revealed that he had formed the habit of looking longingly at the many cars outside his window before becoming IG.
Its astonishing that a man now charged with protecting a country facing serious security challenges in the form of terrorism, kidnapping, militancy can have the presence of mind to complain about official cars.
Idris has said nothing about his strategy to combat the rampaging Fulani herdsmen, he has not issued any firm statement on how his tenure will be better than Arases.
We dont know how our new Inspector General plans to combat the rising spate of kidnappings in the country or how he will address the recent violence in Ikorodu.
We dont know if he will succeed in stopping his officers from brutalizing innocent Nigerians or if hell quell their penchant for bribery and corruption, but we do know that our new police boss loves cars, and he loves them new.
Idris comments highlight the gross misplacement of priorities which is common among public officials in Nigeria, it also shows that President Muhammadu Buhari has probably hired an unserious person to occupy a very serious office.
Nigerias police force is in need of a major overhaul, because now, more than ever, citizens need capable officers to protect them from the many bands of marauders running loose in the country.
ALSO READ: Arase denies taking 24 police cars away
Thats why the position of Inspector General is one of the most sensitive in the country at this time, one that should be occupied by a person of strategy and strong will, a person with strong moral fibre and impeccable scruples.
For five days now, Fulani herdsmen invaded our farm lands; they attacked women who went to their farm. Traders from Akwa Ibom state who were on their way to our Orie market said to me that they were also attacked, he said according to Vanguard.
Some of the women said the herdsmen were shooting guns. We invited the Police, but the herdsmen ran away and came back when the Police left. There is tension in this community; every resident is afraid of his life and property. They have used their cows to destroy our crops.
"This is the way they invaded Ukpabi Nimbo community in Enugu state and killed people. We dont want to be killed in our home. So, we are appealing to Gov. Okezie Ikpeazu to deploy security agents to help secure Abala community, he added.
A mother of two, Lami, 27, lost her husband, parents and grand parents in one night to Boko Haram attacked her small village in Gwoza local government of Borno state on Saturday, September 27, 2014.
"They (Boko Haram insurgents) killed my husband, both parents and grandparents all in one night. They burnt my family and asked me to accept Islam. They threatened to behead me if I don't accept Islam but I refused. So they took me to Sambisa forest," she said.
Lami who spoke in smattering English told Pulse that she escaped from the terrorist camp during a face-off between the insurgents and the military.
"I escaped with my children during their fight with the soldiers to a mountain close to Cameroon. I spent 24 days from Sambisa to Cameroon without food; then two months and five days to Mubi in Adamawa state where I boarded a lorry to Abuja," she said.
She developed several health conditions due to poor feeding; a situation which almost led to her death but for the timely intervention of a Catholic Church close to the camp
"There in no medical care in this camp. Last month, I was diagnosed of malaria, ulcer, appendix and typhoid and a blood pressure. It was a Catholic Church that took care of my hospital bills. Feeding here is so poor. Its been over five months since the last supply of food to this camp," Lami told our correspondent.
When asked how she wants the government to help her and other IDPs in the camp, Lami said; "The government should provide us with food, we are not feeding well here. Then they should fight the Boko Haram so we can return to our villages."
The United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF) has said that 250,000 children in Borno state are severely malnourished and face a high risk of death.
This was disclosed by UNICEF Regional Director for Western and Central Africa, Manuel Fontaine after a visit to the state, Daily Trust reports.
As more areas in the northeast become accessible to humanitarian assistance, the extent of the nutrition crisis affecting children is becoming even more apparent, Fontaine said.
Some 134 children on average will die every day from causes linked to acute malnutrition if the response is not scaled up quickly. We need all partners and donors to step forward to prevent any more children from dying. No one can take on a crisis of this scale alone.
There are 2 million people we are still not able to reach in Borno state, which means that the true scope of this crisis has yet to be revealed to the world. There are organizations on the ground doing great work, but none of us are able to work at the scale and quality that we need. We must all scale up, Fontaine added.
ALSO READ: NEMA to tackle malnutrition in Borno
Alhaji Satome Ahmed, the Executive Chairman of the State Emergency Management Agency (SEMA) said in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Maiduguri.
Ahmed said that the decision followed complaints by IDPs on the centralised cooking system, adding that the government would, instead, provide foodstuff to households.
"We plan to abolish the central cooking system in all IDP camps by next months, our action is based on complaints from the Displaced Persons on the operation of the system.
"We have already introduced household feeding system in most camps where households are given foodstuffs that will last for some time instead of centralised system.
The workers who staged a peaceful protest in front of the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) headquarters in Marina, Lagos told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) that what they were paid was on tonnage.
The ex-workers said that apart from the unpaid minimum dockworkers salary, the annual increment of 10 per cent on the minimum wage had also piled up.
ENL Consortium is the operator of Terminals C and D of the Lagos Port Complex, Apapa.
The workers, who spoke through Mr Hope Ogolekwu, said that though the company had disengaged them, their full entitlements should be paid.
They also demanded a revisit and review of the payment of N350,000 redundancy, terminal and hazardous benefits .
Ogolekwu frowned at the non-remittance of their contributory pension funds from 2006 to 2011.
He further alleged that the management of the terminal did not pay their annual leave allowance for 10 years.
``We did not get our tax clearance certificate and no health insurance, Ogolekwu said.
In a reaction, the management of ENL Consortium disowned the dockworkers who staged a protest at the NPA headquarters.
The Legal Adviser of ENL Consortium, Mr Uzamot Boye, said that at the time of the protest, its staffs were all at their duty posts inside the port carrying out their various tasks.
``It is malicious to say our dockworkers protested. It is not true. All our workers are at work.
``Those who protested were those who have since been disengaged from the port and who have been paid their terminal benefits. You can verify this from the Maritime Workers Union of Nigeria (MWUN).
``All our workers are at their duty posts as we speak. They are happy on their jobs. They are all very busy, NAN quotes Boye as saying.
He said that the Maritime Workers Union of Nigeria (MWUN) would have issued notice and been in the forefront of the protest if the protesters were genuine port workers.
It would be recalled that the same set of people had carried out similar protest in the past at the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) headquarters in Apapa but were told that they had been disengaged from service and due allowance paid to them.
``ENL Consortium is a people-focused organisation. We empower our people and enable them to be the best.
``Our Executive Vice Chairman/Chief Executive Officer places the welfare of workers above every other consideration, NAN quotes him as saying.
Mr Adewale Adeyanju, the President, Dockworkers Branch of the Maritime Workers Union of Nigeria (MWUN), confirmed that the protesting dockworkers had been disengaged from the port and paid their entitlements as stipulated under the National Joint Industrial Council (NJIC) agreement, warning against the return of thuggery at the port.
Adeyanju said issues affecting maritime labour must be discussed at the table with employers, rather than the resort to the arm-twisting tactics of the past.
He said the payment of gratuity to disengaged dockworkers happened for the first time in the history of the maritime industry in the country this year, ``a development which highlights a big plus for both the union and terminal operators.
``For the past 30 to 40 years, we have not had anything like terminal benefit for dockworkers and it is under our administration that we are getting what a responsible dockworker ought to get. It is a starting point in the industry, Adeyanju said.
He said the dockworkers that elected to leave the service of their employers were misguided on what they were entitled to collect as retirement benefits.
He said, This has never happened before and I think someone is inciting these dockworkers by saying they are entitled to N33,000 a month plus the amount of tonnage they stevedore. But you know this is not correct.
``I think there is a mix up somewhere and I have addressed all of them to let them know that we have permanent staff and people that are on tonnage.
One of the sons, Mr Saheed Oseni, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Monday in Lagos that the family has resorted to prayers to get him protected and released soonest.
The traditional ruler was abducted in his Palace at Iba on Saturday at about 8 p.m.
However, the wife and the others are recuperating in the hospital.
Saheed said that prayers became necessary since the kidnappers had not contacted any of the family members after more than 48 hours.According to him, several religious groups, including traditional worshippers, Christians and Muslims were at the palace to offer prayers for the monarchs release and safe return.
"We are praying and hopeful that the traditional ruler will be released and return home soonest since we have yet to hear anything from the abductors, he said.
Saheed confirmed that the monarchs younger wife and two other persons shot during the incident were recuperating at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH), Ikeja.
He said the whereabouts of the monarch was still unknown, adding that security operatives were searching for him.
Justice Eni Esan of the the Oyo State High Court sitting in Ibadan on Monday, July 18, sentenced the former NURTW boss for conspiracy to murder.
Auxiliary was jailed alongside three others - Saidi Kareem, Abu Kareem and Kazeem Kayode.
The fifth accused person, Taiwo Tijani, who would have also been jailed, is already dead.
Auxiliary and others, who were also tried for murder, were sentenced for conspiracy to murder because the prosecuting counsel failed to convince the court beyond reasonable doubt over the allegations of murder and attempted murder, Justice Esan said.
Counsel to the accused persons, Olalekan Ojo and Adeleke Bakare, pleaded the court for a light sentence given that they had already spent two years in jail since the commencement of trial.
The judge therefore ruled that the two years they had spent in jail would be removed from their six-year jail term without any option of fine.
Auxiliary was on May 10, 2014, arrested by the Lagos Police Command's Special Anti- Robbery Squad, led by Aba Kyari at the Olodo area of Ibadan following an incriminating statement made by an illegal arms dealer, Abdulazeez Amao, who was arrested with arms hidden in bags of flour.
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The monarch , identified as Lawrence Agaie, was said to be his way home on Monday, July 18, after visiting his farm in Sha District when he was attacked by the armed men.
The monarch's police orderly, Sunday Wuyah, his wife, as well as his son, Shagari were also killed in the attack.
A woman, however, survived the gun shots and currently undergoing treatment at a hospital in Bokkos.
Confirming the killings, spokesman of the special task force (STF), in charge of security in Plateau, Ikedichi Iweha, said corpses of the victims have been deposited at an undisclosed hospital in Jos.
According to Iweha, no arrests have been made yet.
It reads:
From May 23, 2000 to May 22, 2013, the group lost about 3,006 of its members to the murderous security agencies, even as unrecorded causality figures may be close to this number, yet the struggle has refused to die, rather it continued to wax stronger.
They also destroyed my cars in Lagos and confiscated my three SUV jeeps, BMW motorcycle out-rider machine and a Yamaha generator, all in a bid for the former Imo state Governor, Chief Achike Udenwa to win the heart of his Abuja political masters for a second term.
The Area Controller, Mr Victor Dimka, a Comptroller, disclosed this at a briefing held at the vehicle seat in the command.
He disclosed that individuals who desired to import bullet-proof cars into the country must get clearance from the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA).
"The command seized three bullet-proof cars with a Duty Paid Value of N76million and this was done through intelligence gathering by officers of the command.
"A particular bullet-proofcar, which was a 2012 Mercedes C300, was intercepted at the Gbaji area of Badagry and it had an official plate number of FG 35 S02.
`"process must be followed in the importation of bullet-proof cars and the process is that the individual must apply to the ONSA and if it is approved, the office would send an approval certificate to the NCS and the individual would be allowed.
"All the cars that were seized have been handed over to the Department of State Security Service, for further investigation, he said.
The Area Controller warned that any further attack by smugglers on its officers would no longer be tolerated.
"A situation where officers performing their legitimate duties are always ambushed and maimed with dangerous weapons would no longer be accepted or tolerated.
"Enough is enough. We are backed up by law so we are carrying out our legitimate duties by working to stem smuggling, so we are ready for war over this matter.
"Smuggling is dangerous to the economy, so anyone involved in it is considered as an enemy of the nation.
"We have upgraded ourselves and we have everything we need, so people should desist from smuggling or be ready to face the full wrath of the law," Dimka said.
This is contained in a statement issued by the Force Spokesman, Deputy Commissioner of Police, DCP Don Awunah, in Abuja.
It would be recalled that Ogunranti was kidnapped on May 16, by some unknown gunmen in Osun.
He said that following the slow pace of the investigation, the Inspector-General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, ordered the Intelligence Response Team (IRT) to take over the matter.
"The Intelligence Response Team swung into action using all the technical resources of the Force available to them for the arrest of five prime suspects.
Awunah said that a 32-year-old graduates confession led IRT operatives to Ibukun River, in Ibukun Local Government Area of Osun, where the mutilated body of Ogunranti was recovered.
He said that other suspects were arrested in Lagos and Ondo states, respectively.
The spokesman said all the suspects confessed they kidnapped, killed and mutilated the body of Ogunranti to stop him from disturbing them about the huge sums of money they took from him.
Atiku who came in company of his media team held a closed door meeting with the APC national chairman, John Odigie-Oyegun.
The former vice president declined speaking with journalists after the two National Working Committee (NWC) members; Lawan Shuaibu and Bala Mohammed Gwagwaruwa advised him not to do so.
It was gathered that Atiku actually came to familiarise himself with the party leaders ahead of the partys presidential primary in 2019.
The former Vice President has largely stayed away from the party secretariat since President Muhammadu Buhari's inauguration.
People are very interested in our party and how the impasse will be settled, before the Port Harcourt convention was aborted by a court order, Sheriff made the comment on Monday, July 18, 2016, during a meeting with a delegation of the party.
Yes, we have met and issues were discussed but all the issues I put forward for them was for the Makarfi Caretaker Committee to resign. That is when peace would return to the party.
If he resigns tomorrow I will ask the members of my NWC whose tenure still lasts till 2018, to resign including myself, and set up a convention committee in Abuja and put respected members of the party as members of the committee.
In that convention, I will give away my mandate which does not expire until 2018, but for now I remain the national chairman of this party until 2018. If the leaders of our party felt that we can find a solution without exhausting the court, then I am open to it we can find a political solution," he added.
He said the committee has no place in the PDP constitution, therefore should be dissolved.
He stated this in Abuja on Monday, July 19, when he hosted a delegation of party members from the 17 local governments in Abia state.
Sheriff had earlier at a peace meeting organised to resolve the crisis in the party ruled out the possibility of truce outside the court verdict, insisting the committee must go.
Instead, he proposed that he should be allowed to nominate a chairman, and 10 persons into the new convention committee.
People are very interested in our party and how the impasse will be settled before the Port Harcourt convention which was aborted by a court order, he said.
Yes, we have met and issues were discussed but all the issues I put forward for them was for the Makarfi-led caretaker committee to resign.
It is an aberration as far as our party constitution is concern. I told them that I am not ready to be a permanent chairman but I want the party to be placed in proper stead.
If he resigns tomorrow, I will ask the members of my NWC whose tenure still lasts to 2018, including myself, to set up a convention committee in Abuja and put respected members into the committee.
In that convention, I will give away my mandate, which does not expire until 2018.
If the leaders of our party feel that we can find a solution without exhausting the court process, then I am open to it; we can find a political solution.
I have given the people the opportunity to see that Sheriff is not the problem. The problem is that some people want to make the party their personal property and that will not happen under Sheriff.
However, an Ogun State Senator, Buruji Kashamu, has urged Sheriff to embrace peace in the interest of the party and members alike.
The lawmaker said since Sheriff said he is not interested in remaining as the party's chairman, he should have no problem encouraging all his supporters to participate in the process leading to the rescheduled August 17 convention.
Kashamu, who is believed to be Sheriff's godfather, said the factional leader has proved that he is a principled and a courageous person.
------------------------------------------------
You know it very well that Atiku had not been at the secretariat for a very long time. He was here partly to see how the APC will rise up and find solution to the protracted misunderstanding between the Presidency and the National Assembly, a source said.
Indeed, he was worried by the happenings in the Senate, occasioned by the trial of the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, as well as the last weeks untoward happenings in the Senate. This is all I can say, the source added.
To greater extent, the APC is still living like an opposition instead of a ruling party, there is deepening crisis and serious leaders must talk, Nigerians are complaining, Atiku said according to another source.
The fight between Senator Dino Melaye and Senator Remi Tinubu is a serious minus to the APC as a party, we cant continue living in denial that the APC house is not in order and Nigerians are watching, he added.
The lawmaker allegedly threatened to beat up and impregnate Mrs Oluremi Tinubu, the wife of the national leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Tinubu on the floor of the Senate on Tuesday, July 12, 2016.
His comment triggered reactions from Nigerians with most people calling for an open apology from the Kogi West lawmaker to Mrs Tinubu.
The senate urged Melaye to apologise to Mrs Tinubu in the spirit camaraderie, but he refused to do so saying; great minds dont dwell on issues; they act and move on. Theobject of my dander has already arrived menopause," he added.
Melaye also accused Senator Tinubu of paying N75 million to unknown persons to launch a protest against him on Wednesday, July 20, 2016 in Abuja.
Meanwhile, some members of the Women Concern Group held a protest in Lagos on Monday, July 18, against Mr Melaye over his comment on Mrs Tinubu.
National President of ASUU, Comrade Biodun Ogunyemi, who spoke in Abuja on Monday, July 18, kicked against the proposed plan by the federal government to scrap the post-University Matriculation Tertiary Examination, saying the Joint Admission and Matriculations Board, JAMB, could not admit students for universities.
He added that it is unfortunate that instead of the budgetary allocation to improve, it was only reducing.
Ogunyemi called on the government to commence the process for the payment of N623 billion, being backlog of earned academic allowances and funding of universities.
While condemning the decision by the federal government to scrap the conduct of POST-UME, the union explained that the decision did not serve the interest of Nigerians and that the university tertiary matriculation examination, UTME, conducted by JAMB is not credible enough to warrant the cancellation of the post UTME tests.
Ogunyemi said the action by government was typical of its current lukewarm attitude towards the spirit and letters of the FGN/ASUU agreement of 2009, vowing that the union as an important stakeholder in the university system will continue to draw the attention of all concerned to possible threat to peaceful development and growth of the Nigerian Education System.
He said: We consider it appalling that no consultation with stakeholders especially with ASUU and the Vice Chancellors was held before such far reaching national policy like the cancellation of Post Ume was pronounced.
In a fundamental way, the policy undermines the autonomy of universities and powers of universities senate as the highest policy making body on academic matters, particularly admission of students and award of university degrees.
The arrests of 23-year-old twins Brandon-Lee and Tony-Lee Thulsie earlier this month were the first in South Africa relating to alleged IS membership.
"Both the defence and the state were not ready to proceed, hence the trial was postponed until July 25," National Prosecuting Authority spokeswoman Phindi Louw told reporters outside Johannesburg magistrates' court.
"We have reasonable and probable cause to believe that an offence was committed."
They are also alleged to have attempted to travel to Syria to join IS.
The brothers waved to family members in court after the short hearing.
The United States and Britain warned last month of the possibility of imminent attacks by jihadist extremists in South Africa's major cities.
"The UN doesn't have the mandate to impose peace," African Union (AU) Peace and Security Commissioner Smail Chergui said at a summit in Kigali.
"They are there where there is peace to keep. African troops are ready to engage in very difficult situations. It is our responsibility," he added.
A shaky ceasefire has held in South Sudan for a week after four days of bloody clashes between forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and those supporting his rival Vice-President Riek Machar.
At least 300 people were killed, and tens of thousands fled their homes.
The violence raised fears of a breakdown in protracted efforts to end a civil war that began in December 2013 with battles in Juba between the same rival groups.
The 12,000-strong UN peacekeeping mission in South Sudan, UNMISS, has faced criticism for failing to stem the latest bloodshed or fully protect civilians during the fighting.
Chergui said the mooted force for South Sudan would be modelled on the 3,000 strong Force Intervention Brigade deployed within the UN's mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which proved decisive in neutralising the M23 rebellion in 2013.
IGAD, a bloc of east African states and the key player behind the proposed force, on Sunday called on the UN Security Council to give it a mandate that would allow it to separate the parties to the conflict and "pacify Juba".
Chergui said the international community would have to persuade Kiir to drop his opposition to the deployment of the new force.
While IGAD had backed UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's call for an arms embargo on South Sudan, this did not get past the AU summit because of opposition from Uganda, which has strong ties to Kiir.
The summit also endorsed a plan for the AU to start withdrawing its 20,000 troops deployed in Somalia in the UN-endorsed AMISOM mission starting from October 2018.
Before that date, there would be "very robust and collective attacks" on Shabab insurgents in the south of the country.
- Welcome back Morocco? -
The summit also saw the first steps of the possible return to the AU of Morocco, the only African state that is not part of the union.
Morocco quit the bloc 32 years ago in protest at its decision to accept Western Sahara as a member.
Morocco maintains that Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony, is an integral part of the kingdom even though local Sahrawi people led by the Polisario Front have long campaigned for the right to self-determination.
"For a long time our friends have been asking us to return to them, so that Morocco can take up its natural place within its institutional family. The moment has now come," King Mohammed VI said in a message sent to the summit.
"We consider Morocco a brother country and would be very happy to welcome them back," said Nigerian Foreign Minister Geoffrey Onyeama.
"But I think a lot will also depend on the terms on which Morocco would like to come back," he cautioned.
The heads of state failed to name a successor to Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma to become the AU's new commission chair.
None of the three candidates garnered the two-thirds majority necessary, and a new ballot will be held at the next AU summit, due in January 2017 in Addis Ababa.
The leaders did agree on financing the bloc through a 0.2 percent levy on imports, so as to reduce its dependence on donors, who currently contribute 73 percent of the $781 million (708 million euro) budget.
Rwanda's Finance Minister Claver Gatete said this could bring in as much as $1.2 billion (1.1 billion euros).
Dlamini-Zuma welcomed the "historic landmark decision" as "an unprecedented leap forward for African self-reliance and dignity".
Rwanda's President Paul Kagame, hosting the summit, said the plan "puts responsibility and ownership in our hands".
"I don't even know him... I don't know if he is a man of religion. A man of religion, we would hope, would preach biblical peace," Mugabe told mourners at the funeral of a senior government official.
The public rebuke was Mugabe's first reaction to the "ThisFlag" protest movement that was started by Mawarire and has fuelled a series of rare demonstrations.
Earlier this month, many offices, shops and some government department were closed for a one-day national strike against the country's worsening economic crisis.
Last week hundreds of Mawarire supporters rallied outside a Harare court until he was released when a case of attempting to overthrow the government was dismissed.
"You can't urge people to adopt violence... as a way of solving grievances," said Mugabe, 92, who also accused unnamed foreign countries of "sponsoring" Mawarire.
Mugabe, who has previously used his ruthless security forces to crack down on any public show of dissent, warned people to be aware of some preachers
Akinyelure is the second person and first Nigerian to ever win this award.
She is a news anchor at CNBC Africa and presents business news. Her journey into journalism started a few years ago when she embarked on producing her first documentary.
The Komla Dumor Award was created in memory of BBC World News presenter Komla Dumor who passed away in 2014 at the age of 41.
Dumor was a Ghanaian journalist and one of the main presenters of BBC's 'Focus on Africa'. In 2013 he was listed as one of 100 most influential Africans by publication New African.
The first Komla Dumor Award was won by Ugandan news anchor Nancy Kacungira.
Part of the award includes Akinyelure taking on a three-month placement at the BBC office in London from September 2016.
The journalist told the BBC she held the late Dumor in high regard.
Melania has been accused of plagiarizing Michelle Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2008.
After a side-by-side comparison of the two speeches, it would seem Melania 'borrowed' lines from parts of the US First Lady's 2008 speech.
CNN reports that The Donald Trump campaign signed off on the controversial Melania speech.
"I read once over it, that's all, because I wrote it ... with (as) little help as possible," Melania was quoted to have told NBC earlier on Monday.
Read and watch some of the similarities in Michelle and Melania's speech below:
Melania Trump on Monday, July 18, 2016:
"From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise, that you treat people with respect. They taught and showed me values and morals in their daily lives. That is a lesson that I continue to pass along to our son," Trump said.
And we need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow. Because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them."
Michelle Obama on August 25, 2008:
According to a report by Bloomerang, Priebus said Melania is not to be blamed and if the whole decision were his only, he'd "probably" fire the speechwriter.
Speaking with journalists on Tuesday, July 19, 2016, Priebus had said, "I don't blame her. Some of these things are pretty common types of themes."
"The distraction gets you off message a little bit this morning, but I think we'll get back to action this afternoon," he said of Donald Trump's wife.
"We have a candidate who for whatever reason is doing well in places that we normally don't do well in, and they have some shoring up to do in other places where we have to make sure that we stay competitive. We're going to be close in the traditional battleground states," he said. "But, I think, it's also one of these things where we put a couple people in places like Connecticut where we used to do really well, but we haven't lately," he said further.
Perfecto Yasay said he had met his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on the sidelines of a summit of Asian and European leaders on the weekend and after raising the topic of last week's ruling, it became clear that was a no-go area.
China has angrily rejected the verdict by the Permanent Court of Arbitration and the initial case as illegal and farcical. It has repeatedly said it will not change its approach or its sovereignty claims in the South China Sea.
"They said if you will insist on the ruling, discussing it along those lines, then we might be headed for a confrontation," Yasay said during an interview with the news channel of broadcaster ABS-CBN.
Yasay said Yi had proposed bilateral talks but only on issues "outside, or (in) disregard of, the arbitral ruling," which he declined because it was not in the Philippines' national interests.
Yasay's account of the meeting highlights the challenge ahead for the Philippines, a U.S. ally, in getting China to comply with the decision which has ramped up tensions in the vital trade route.
The ruling laid out what maritime rights Manila had and where Beijing had violated its rights under international law, including its massive construction works on Mischief Reef.
Manila wanted to enforce the points of the complex ruling step-by-step but as a priority had asked China to let its fishermen go to the Scarborough Shoal without being harassed by its coastguard, Yasay said.
China's coastguard was preventing Filipino boats from fishing around the hotly contested Scarborough Shoal, fishermen and officials said on Friday, and China's air force has released pictures showing bombers recently flying over the area.
China claims most of the South China Sea, through which more than $5 trillion of trade moves annually. Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam have rival claims.
Yasay said hoped the ruling would lead to other Southeast Asian countries issuing a joint statement, adding that it could help neighbours also locked in disputes with China.
The Quad-City International Airport could see potential growth in capacity, but passenger numbers are expected to be flat in the new fiscal year, a consultant told the airport's governing board Tuesday.
In an update to the Rock Island County Metropolitan Airport Authority, Mike Bown of Trillion Aviation predicted a stable year for the Quad-City airport. "Traffic growth will be limited. I think it will be roughly flat," he said.
After meeting with the airlines, Bown said the strongest chances for growth would be Delta Airlines increasing capacity on its existing flights and possibly new routes with American Airlines. "They are our No. 1 target," he said, adding that American has been continuing to "connect dots" in its service areas.
But the Moline airport could be passed up because, he said, American has a stronger presence in Cedar Rapids and Peoria. Delta, however, is the Moline airport's No. 1 airline with almost 34 percent of the market share.
The airport could see a new destination with Allegiant, which has been adding service to Destin, Florida. ''They told us it could be the best growth opportunity for them," he said.
But while local service to Punta Gorda, Florida, still will be available seasonally, he said the Quad-Cities will not have service there this fall. "Financially speaking, it's not the strong performer (in Moline)."
"We felt Vegas was at risk of being cut, but right now that route is safe," he said of the Allegiant service.
Meanwhile, airport officials are continuing to work with other airlines on options to restore the short-lived service to Washington, D.C. "We're developing a presentation to be targeted at airlines that can fly to D.C.," he said after the meeting.
He added that landing the service, which would be less than daily, "is going to require a lot of money again."
United Airlines ended the startup Q-C-to-D.C. air service on June 9, after announcing in March that it was discontinuing the new direct service due to low ridership.
Bown said the Quad-City airport continues to lag behind Eastern Iowa Airport in Cedar Rapids. "When Moline had AirTran, you were above the trend. Since losing AirTran, we're back to equilibrium with Cedar Rapids," he said. Based on economic activity of the two regions, he added "We're where we should be."
Leakage of travelers to Chicago remains an issue, he said.
The huge corn statue right out front might be the most photographed part of the Country Cupboard in Donahue. But its not the most talked about.
That goes to this feeling: Walking in the doors, picking out bread, pork, cheese, soap, jam or a soda, and not seeing anyone to give your money to.
At first it, Im sure it can be a little jarring, Joan Maxwell, who owns the store with her husband, said. But when people figure it out, they love it and they want to come back.
Eventually, of course, you figure it out: Add up your items, use the provided scratch paper or calculators if needed, and drop cash or check into the money slot. If you want, wave to the video surveillance camera on the way out.
The honors payment system might seem old-fashioned, but it has worked well since John and Joan Maxwell opened the Country Cupboard in 2007. It houses products made and raised by their family-run farm, Cinnamon Ridge Farms, which is just up the hill from the shed-like store.
Peoples buying interests have changed, John, who started the farm in 1988, said. Years ago, theyd buy a whole beef or half beef and now theyre interested in buying a steak for tonights dinner I heard that enough that I need to find a way to give it to them.
He couldnt afford to pay an attendant to stay down there, so he decided early-on to install a money slot and a video surveillance system, and just plain ol trust people.
The door is unlocked 24 hours per day, seven days a week.
A lot of people are taken aback that theres some place in the world that is honest, he said. It works, and the only reason it does is because people want it to work.
The system isnt crime-proof, but the Maxwells have only had two incidents over the years. One person only put $1 in the money slot for $30 worth of goods, and another person made the motions of paying, but didnt drop any cash in the slot.
After Joan watched the video, she printed out photos of the thieves and taped them to the front door with this caption: Do you like our new surveillance system? Doesnt it take nice pictures?
Both customers later paid the store back.
These stories dont faze John and Joan, who say loyal customers are quick to call if they see someone leave without paying. If theres not a price on an item, customers usually take a guess and leave behind their phone number.
Im more surprised at how honest people are thats what I would want people to know, she said. We dont have a problem at all, because 90 percent of our customers are local and know us.
On a dry-erase whiteboard, customers also leave notes or requests for baked goods or a certain type of artisan cheese. A cork-board is full with currencies left behind by visitors from Brazil, Canada, China and other places.
We are the face of it rather than this big corporation, John said. When its a big entity or fuzzy who is in charge, its a lot easier to steal from.
Putting a face to the farmers goes further at Cinnamon Ridge Farms.
Their dairy cattle operation was toured 6,000 times last year, by school groups, foreign travelers and others, according to Joan. Its the sort of Iowa charm that brought an October visit from Mike Huckabee, then a Republican presidential candidate, to the farm on a campaign stop.
No matter what season you come here, youre missing something, Joan, a farmers daughter originally from Wisconsin, said. Year round, were doing something different in the farming process.
That includes milking Jersey dairy cows (the Maxwells use robots), raising beef cattle, pigs and chickens. They grow corn, soybeans and winter wheat and make cheese from the milk.
This summer, for the first time, theyre set up at the Freight House Farmers Market in Davenport.
People like to have choices, she said. We want to offer consumers another choice where you dont have to go through the middle man.
Along with the store and farmers market, the Maxwells sell to businesses like The Depot in Donahue, Barley and Rye Bistro in Moline and several Hy-Vee locations.
No matter where you find it, John hopes the name on the logo means "something worth trusting."
We're a family farm, and that shows people that we care and that our lives and our livelihood are on the line here," he said. "What theyre consuming was valued way before they even thought about buying it.
A roundup of news items from the 2016 Republican National Convention this week in Cleveland:
SENATOR DELAYED
Iowa's convention delegates were dismayed Monday night as they watched retired U.S. Army Lt. General Michael Flynn run out the clock on Sen. Joni Ernst's prime-time TV debut.
"I was mad. I was ready to go take that general off the stage. He repeated himself, and he went on way too long," a visibly miffed Gov. Terry Branstad told reporters Tuesday morning. "I was disappointed that Joni Ernst's speech got pushed back off of prime time."
Ernst was scheduled to speak at 9:36 p.m. Iowa time, but it was halfway into many television stations' local news reports when Iowa's junior senator took the stage to talk about national security due to a behind-schedule program exacerbated by Flynn's remarks.
"I was really proud of her, but I have to say I also was disappointed," added Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds. "I was watching the clock and, I don't want to be disrespectful of any of the speakers, but she was told that she was going to have prime time, and we watched the time just tick away."
Jeff Kaufmann, chairman of the Republican Party of Iowa, shared Branstad's disappointment but was surprised with the governor's impatience in Quicken Loans Arena waiting for Ernst's turn.
"He was up, and he was pacing back and forth," Kaufmann said.
For her part, Ernst called the opportunity "a great moment" and praised her Iowa colleagues for hanging with her to the end after about two-thirds of the delegates had exited by the time she reached the microphone. She laughed when a reporter told her the governor almost charged the stage with impatience: "I know, God bless, Governor Branstad. He's wonderful," she said.
"The Iowa delegation stayed with me. They stood the whole speech," Ernst added. "I enjoyed giving the speech. I was glad to have the national stage."
U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Kiron, shared his frustration over the delay as he waited with other Iowa delegates, calling it "a significant disappointment" that Ernst's remarks were not carried to a wider TV audience, but he noted the speech is available for viewing on the internet.
"Gen. Flynn took a stab at elevating his national posture last night. He probably didn't help himself in Iowa a lot," King said. "I thought the governor was going to walk up on stage and give him the hook."
KING DEFENDS COMMENTS
U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, on Tuesday defended controversial remarks at the Republican National Convention that were taken to dismiss the contributions of minority groups to civilization.
In an interview with Iowa reporters early Tuesday, King said liberals are constantly denigrating "old white people," and there was a need for him to respond.
"That comes out of the mouths of liberals on a daily basis around this country. They're disparaging a group of people. And it's about time somebody stood up for that group of people," King said.
King caused an uproar in a television appearance on Monday, when he responded to Charlie Pierce, an Esquire writer, who'd said an optimistic view would be that "old white people" would no longer be commanding the Republican Party's attention.
King then jumped in. "This 'old white people' business does get a little tired, Charlie. I mean, I'd ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you're talking about, where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?"
The comment drew widespread condemnation. Iowa Democratic Party Chair Andy McGuire called the comments "blatantly racist."
Gov. Terry Branstad also told reporters Tuesday: "I just think they were inappropriate. I think I'll just leave it there, that it was inappropriate.
Asked Tuesday what he meant by "subgroup," King said: "You can divide that any way you want, but I brought that back to western civilization itself, the very foundation of western civilization. And there's no culture, no civilization in the history of the world that's contributed more in the area of math, or science or technology or medicine or literature. That's just a clear fact. And it runs directly contrary to their theory of multiculturalism, which is every culture is equal. They're not. They're not equal in their contribution. And we ought to be selecting the best we can from what each culture has to offer."
As for Branstad's criticism, King said he should live by the Reagan-esque dictum that Republicans shouldn't criticize one another. "Did he listen to the tape? The answer is no," King said. "My response is there is an 11th commandment. At least go listen to the tape."
ERNST JUST HELPING A FRIEND: So, what to make of Sen. Joni Ernst's visit Tuesday morning to the New Hampshire delegation to the Republican National Convention?
Don't make anything out of it at all, said Ernst, Iowa's first-term senator and a rising star in Republican Party politics.
Ernst, R-Iowa, laughed off the idea that she might be testing the waters for a future presidential bid by checking in with the state with the nation's first presidential primary.
"Just helping a friend," she told reporters at a downtown brewery where she, Sen. Chuck Grassley and other Republicans were joined by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas for a forum on the economy.
Ernst said she is friends with U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-New Hampshire, and that she visited with Granite Staters to talk about national security, not national politics. "What you should read into is I'm very, very good friends with Kelly Ayotte," she said.
Still, when a national figure visits one of the early nominating states Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina it's hard to escape the idea they may have an eye on a future election.
Cotton, too, is thought to be a future presidential candidate. He is reportedly visiting three early states at this convention.
However, Ernst told reporters any speculation on a presidential election other than the one in November isn't appropriate. "I don't think we should be focusing on 2020. I think that we focus on this election," she said.
MELANIA SPEECH-GATE
Iowa's GOP delegates were willing to cut Melania Trump some slack Tuesday in the glare of media reports the presumptive presidential nominee's wife allegedly plagiarized portions of her speech to the 2016 Republican National Convention from remarks delivered by Michelle Obama in 2008.
Gov. Terry Branstad called the post-speech brouhaha "much to-do about nothing" over remarks by Mrs. Trump that he said overall were "very well done" but may have had a few lines "that were very similar" to Mrs. Obama's comments.
Iowa GOP chairman Jeff Kaufmann and delegate Randy Feenstra of Hull both adjunct community college instructors took a dim view of lifting passages from other speeches without proper attribution, but said they would have to compare the speeches to make a judgment call on plagiarism.
Feenstra said students who take his courses in public administration and U.S. political history likely would get "a zero" if they were caught plagiarizing, but he noted that Mrs. Trump's speech was "probably rewritten" by others and the situation was more of a "sideline issue" compared to more important matters facing the nation.
Kaufmann said he saw the media reports but noted as a teacher of both speech and English he would "never make any kind of a judgment" until he had a chance to compare copies of both speeches that included themes and phrases that "are out there in the public domain."
"I didn't see anything there that just screamed it was lifted," said Kaufmann, adding "this smells a little bit like the Clinton campaign folks or the pro-Clinton folks much ado about nothing, trying to derail things."
U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst, who also spoke to convention delegates Monday night, told reporters she thought Mrs. Trump's address was "beautiful" but declined to get caught up in the controversy. "I don't know whether it was lifted or not. I don't want to go there. I think she delivered a very heart-felt message. She loves her husband. She's glad to stand beside him, and I think that's the take away."
Ernst said she wrote her own speech and was given "plenty of leeway" with "some minor edits" by party and Trump campaign officials.
"I was just really proud to take the stage last night," she said.
Compiled by Ed Tibbetts and Rod Boshart
Two police officers are on administrative leave after an officer-involved shooting late Monday in Davenport.
Police were called to 1300 Ripley St. at 11:40 p.m. in reference to a shots fired call.
A witness provided information on a possible suspect vehicle which officers observed leaving the area at a high rate of speed.
According to a news release from the Davenport Police Department, officers then attempted to stop the vehicle in a parking lot at 1600 Rockingham Road. The suspect vehicle then rammed a marked squad car.
The two officers fired their weapons. The suspect vehicle then drove over the curb and fled westbound on Rockingham Road. The empty vehicle was later recovered in the 500 block of Pine Street.
At 12:39 a.m. officers responded to Genesis Medical Center in reference to an adult male with a gunshot wound who had been transported to the hospital by private vehicle.
The man was identified as the driver of the vehicle from Rockingham Road. He is currently in stable condition with a non-life threatening injury. The name of the victim is not being released at this time.
The names of the two police officers involved in the incident are not being released at this time. Both have been placed on administrative leave per department policy.
As a Davenport Police Department protocol, the Scott County Sheriffs Office and the Iowa Department of Public Safety, Division of Criminal Investigation, were notified and will investigate the incident.
Parts of Rockingham Road are closed this morning while officers investigate the scene.
Corri Spiegel can remove interim from her title as Davenport City Administrator.
Davenport Mayor Frank Klipsch announced Tuesday that he will ask the City Council to approve Spiegel, 38, as the next city administrator during a special council meeting following tonight's committee-of-the-whole meeting, which begins at 5:30 p.m.
Her annual salary will be $178,000.
Asked Tuesday what stood out about Spiegel compared with two other strong finalists, Klipsch said that, obviously her experience with the city, her enthusiasm and her ability to community with all the different constituencies.
Spiegels diversity of skills also stood out, he said.
She has a proven track record that shes been able to build during her year as interim city administrator, and also in the 6 months Ive been mayor, Klipsch added.
Spiegel was appointed interim city administrator in July 2015 and has overseen the day-to-day operations of the citys municipal services and its executive leadership team while leading the economic development programs of the city. Before that, she had served as the assistant to the city administrator from August 2014 through June 2015.
This was a highly vetted set of candidates, Klipsch said. They were all excellent candidates who brought to the table a lot of skills and talents.
Corri is just the best fit for our situation, and she stood up very well against some very accomplished candidates, he added. This was good for the council that it was a tough decision. We all did our work to make sure we had the best candidate for the position.
In a news release Tuesday, Spiegel said she is "extremely honored to have served the citizens of Davenport as the interim city administrator and am looking forward to continuing the momentum that weve built over the past year."
"I am proud of the great strides we have made in our transparency efforts, customer experience platform, public safety initiatives, and economic development and I look forward to continuing the progress.
During her public interviews earlier this month, Spiegel said that, From a style standpoint, Corri Spiegel is Corri Spiegel, in answer to how her role in a permanent post will differ from the interim position she now holds. I enjoy collaborating with people. That wont change.
However, she expects her management style will change.
Its time to put my foot on the gas, she said in the interview. In a permanent capacity, I will push harder, build talent and expect more. Ill have the authority to do that.
The other finalists were Stephen Riley, town manager of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, and Kevin Woods, city manager of Stallings, North Carolina.
A total of 34 people applied for the position in a national search conducted by executive search firm Strategic Government Resources, or SGR, of based in Keller, Texas.
Before coming to Davenport, Spiegel was economic development manager for the city of Centennial, Colorado. She holds a master of science in organizational leadership from Colorado State University and a master of public administration from Arizona State University. She also is a certified economic developer.
Confusing. Chaotic. Unforgettable.
John Martorana, a battalion chief with the Fire Department of New York, used those words Monday to describe the fateful day of Sept. 11, 2001.
The Brooklyn resident was at home when he heard about the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center Twin Towers. Off duty at the time, he never reported to Ground Zero, but spent that night calling families of fallen first responders and friends from his firehouse.
This week, Martorana will help lead tours through the 9/11 Never Forget Mobile Exhibit on the Rock Island riverfront to educate, inform and honor the legacy of those who served and lost their lives almost 15 years ago.
"Everybody lost people they knew not just firemen," Martorana stressed. "Bringing this to people here who can't make it to New York to see the museum keeps it alive in their memory."
As part of the company's Be an Everyday Hero project, Modern Woodmen of America arranged for the exhibit's five-day stay at Schwiebert Riverfront Park, and is sponsoring free tours Tuesday through Saturday.
In September 2013, the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation dedicated the built-to-travel museum, a high tech, 53-foot tractor-trailer that unfolds into a 1,000-square-foot memorial. It was created to honor Stephen Siller, one of 343 New York firefighters who gave their lives to evacuate thousands of people from the World Trade Center before the towers collapsed.
Leah White, marketing manager for Modern Woodmen, led the volunteer effort. In 2001, she was a 21-year-old college student at the University of Iowa.
"I know we weren't there, but it's important to remember the people we lost," said White, whose father served as a volunteer firefighter in LeClaire for 32 years. "What they do every day matters."
The exhibit includes a timeline and explanation of when and how the Twin Towers were built.
GRANDVIEW, Iowa -- Children 3 years old to those going into sixth grade are invited to sign up for Ocean Commotion, a Vacation Bible School program offered by Grandview Community Bible Church.
The program takes place July 29 and 30 from 6 to 8:30 p.m. at the church, 206 W. Monroe St., Grandview. Registration and check-in begin at 5:45.
The lesson is about how Noah stood for God during the time of the Great Flood, according to a news release from the church. Crafts, games, goodies and dramas are part of the experience.
Sunday, July 31 will be the VBS program followed by lunch and the Oceans of Fun carnival.
For information, call Teri at 563-272-8583.
They aren't just two men and a truck.
And their already-popular concoctions dont resemble your grandmothers grilled cheese.
Standing inside their 1979 GMC Vandura, Dan Bush and Drake DeRegules are busy greasing their separate griddles while groups of curious customers debate which gooey spin on the classic to order.
Under the name, Static Melt, the duo launched their mobile snack shop last week, and plans to roll out their daily lunch service Aug. 1 at various locations in the Iowa Quad-Cities.
We plan on moving around a lot, said Bush, 33, who co-owns Analog Arcade Bar, 302 Brady St., Davenport. If you have a truck, you might as well use it.
That is, until they run out of food or propane fuel for that matter which happened Saturday about five hours into their shift outside Analog. They were one loaf away from calling it a day.
It really comes down to what runs out first, DeRegules, 25, said. Well go until we cant serve anymore.
Static Melt arrives on the scene as one of the newest additions to the swelling cluster of 20-plus food trucks, trailers and pushcarts scattered throughout the Quad-Cities.
Although they're not locked in to a specific address or set of hours, operating a mobile business presents its own challenges. Since city regulations in Davenport require vendors to set up on private property, they simply can't drive around neighborhoods and stop on the street when they see potential customers.
But these guys won't have to worry about finding a spot away from their home base downtown.
Marketing their recipes on Facebook, they developed a following before they announced their starting date.
I don't know many people who don't like grilled cheese, said Bush, whose wife, Megan, also lends a hand behind the counter. They're quick, easy and consistent.
Following a successful first night out last week, they woke up to a flurry of messages from businesses proposing parking-lot partnerships.
No surprises there. One glimpse at the small-scale production's eclectic menu is bound to lure hungry passersby.
Take their favorite, coined Sabotage, for example. Order the buttery blend of Provel cheese and raspberry jalapeno jam smothered between two pepperjack cheese-infused slices of Texas toast for $5.
For an extra $1, throw on two slices of bacon, or substitute the Texas toast with gluten-free bread for another $1.
You'll have to bring your own tomato soup, though. The Static bros, who first met through the local restaurant scene in 2011, are sticking to four staple sandwiches for now. They plan to add weekly features, as well, including a melt topped with Provel, prosciutto and pesto.
In the coming weeks, DeRegules, a North Scott High School grad who lives in Davenport, said he plans to quit his current full-time job before transitioning to the food truck life.
I came to him (Bush) looking for something to do where I could be my own boss, and he had been sitting on this idea, he added, calling Bush his mentor. With this, we can get away from the corporate world and make up our own rules.
The friends, both fathers who jam to punk rock when they cook, dont consider themselves culinary experts by any means.
Were just grilled cheese enthusiasts, Bush said.
A series of public meetings will allow Rock Island County residents to give feedback on a proposed half-cent sales tax and learn more about the 2017 budget and the financial issues facing the county.
County Administrator Dave Ross will lead the meetings.
Among the priorities from the county boards strategic planning process are commitments to fiscal accountability and to greater transparency, Ross said. As we consider the possibility of a public safety referendum that would ask voters to approve a half-cent sales tax increase in November, we want to share our plans with the voters and hear their ideas.
Each session will include an overview of the county's strategic objectives by county board vice-chair Nick Camlin, a budget outlook by Ross, and a review of possible budget scenarios by Sheriff Gerry Bustos.
During hearings in March and April about possible budgets and their effect on the countys future, Ross explained four possible budgets: A, B, C, and D.
The budget option that Ross and others favor is Budget B, which includes a half-cent sales tax for public safety.
If the tax is approved by voters, Ross said that the countys portion of property taxes will drop by 12 percent next year.
The half-cent tax also will allow for a slow but steady growth in the general fund of 27 percent over the next five years.
The other three budgets were considered but quickly dismissed.
With Budget A, the county does nothing and continues down the same road. Doing so, Ross said, would leave the countys general fund with a deficit of more than $27 million. Clearly, we cant do that, he said.
Budget C would increase the countys portion of property taxes in the first year by 101.5 percent. That money would go into the general fund.
Budget D, Ross said, would provide for no new sources of revenue and achieve a general fund balance of more than $5 million, a 21.3 percent increase. It also would lower property taxes in the first year by 11.63 percent, and by 8.83 percent cumulatively over the five years.
But that budget would call for laying off 116 people, including 60 out of the sheriffs department, six from the circuit clerks office, eight from the states attorneys office, nine from court services or probation, four from the county clerks office, and 29 other positions. It also would eliminate several deferred maintenance needs.
I cannot even imagine how the county will function if we have to do that, Ross told the board during those meetings. Multiple offices and departments are not going to be able to do their job if it comes to Budget D.
The countys elected officials and department heads have looked at Budget D and in meetings earlier this year said there is no way it would allow their offices could provide the residents of the county with the services either they deserve or that the Illinois statutes demand.
U.S. Rep. Steve King was on point Tuesday afternoon, when calling for immediate trade talks between the U.S. and United Kingdom.
Earlier this year, President Barack Obama warned that it could take a decade for a deal to get done, should the U.K. exit the European Union. The nation of just 64 million doesn't hold the economic clout of the half billion-strong E.U.
British voters ignored the warnings and, on June 23, opted to leave Europe's single market within the next two years.
The U.K. should "go to the front of the line," King said, when pushing back against GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump isolationist trade policies.
King said the decades-long 'special relationship' mandates U.S. relations with the U.K. His more compelling argument, however, was purely practical: Britain's economic health post-E.U. requires engagement with fellow world powers.
Immediate engagement by the U.S. would force the remainder of the G7 to take seriously the British economy, he said. It could potentially reduce the upheaval caused by the erosion of E.U membership.
King came under fire Tuesday for comments made the previous day about what he considers the outsized contributions of Western civilization. He doubled down Tuesday, saying that Western culture has contributed more in the way of "science, technology and medicine" than any other. Liberal multiculturalists, King said, can't accept this "objective fact." Critics have pushed back, calling King's remarks inappropriate and racially insensitive.
Look for Ed Tibbetts' report on the row over King's nativism in the Quad-City Times and at qctimes.com.
Welcome back to our little furry friend who hasnt been in this column since early spring. The biggest news of the summer around our place is that Molly is back to her real home in Davenport. At night, she snuggles in bed with us, sometimes between our heads. She still sits up, perky as a performing circus dog, and does patty cake when offered a treat. To make her homecoming, she attended the blessing of the animals at First Presbyterian in Davenport. Tiffany Horvath, who conducted the service, even gave Molly a hug.
Going back to Jan. 9. Molly squeezed into a carrier and flew with Helen and me to Florida. Life was good until but Helen took a terrible fall on our final day of sunshine. She was badly hurt and, when we flew back, went directly from the airport in Moline to Genesis West in Davenport for surgery. And Molly? Fred Whiteside of Rock Island was in Florida to drive our car home. Molly was his passenger. She slept 1,500 miles on his lap.
Life has been something of a drag since our return. Molly found a grand guardian, Ginny Tudeen of Bettendorf, who lovingly adopted her for months while Helen was hospitalized or in therapy. In the interim, I was lonely, rattling alone around our condo. But things are looking up. Helen is back home, recovering. Molly is back home, playful as always.
Once a-pun a time
DOCTOR: How does your humerus differ from your fibula?
NURSE; Ones funny and the other lies a lot.
More on that $250,000 circus wagon
Once you write about a subject, some readers hang onto it like a dog on a bone.
On June 25, I wrote that B.J. Palmers gigantic circus wagon was sold for $250,000 and how the next day a picture card of the wagon, postmarked 1957, mysteriously showed up in our garage. The caption said that a man named Ken, who was working at a sign shop at 119 18th St., Rock Island, painted that red behemoth. Bob Johnson, who lives on the West Coast, writes:
I DONT REMEMBER too much about yesterday or last week, but 70 years ago seems to pop right up. You may have written about the residents at 119 18th St., but if my memory serves me right, Madame Mamie ran a house of pleasure there. At least, that was what the big boys told me. I wonder if Ken might have been entertained there?
How the card mysteriously appeared on the day I had written about the circus wagon gave me the shivers. Joy Strasser, a spiritualist from Davenport, says that such things happen. She said she communicated with the spirit of the late B.J. Palmer. He shared the love of circuses with you and enjoyed the story you wrote about the bandwagon. He left the card for you. We call that aporting, or communication.
Add-cetera
Whenever I drop into the office of my specialist for a cancer checkup, I spot Charlene Woods, one of his nurses, and I hum Roy Orbisons Pretty Woman from the movie. I enjoy having her taking my vitals. She smiles, I know what youre thinking. So many patients and people say it. Charlene is a mirror-perfect look-alike for Julia Roberts, who played the part of Vivian, a heart of gold hooker, in Pretty Woman.
THANKS FOR your complaints about teeny-tiny print, says Sharon Carlson. Dates on coupons, directions on medicine bottles, and yes the telephone books. Im never far from a magnifying glass. Also, thank you for mentioning the need for a first-floor restroom at the Adler Theatre. I wanted to see the Chinese dancers so badly, but decided not to go because I use a walker and Im not able to negotiate all those stairs down to the restroom.
SPRINGFIELD Participants in drug court programs across Illinois will be allowed to use medication to combat opioid addiction under a new state law that will take effect Jan. 1.
Gov. Bruce Rauner signed a measure late last week that prevents judges from barring drug court participants from using medications such as methadone when prescribed by a doctor to treat opioid addiction. At the same time, Rauner signed another measure, also effective Jan. 1, requiring substance abuse programs licensed by the Illinois Department of Human Services to provide educational information on medication-based treatments and the use of anti-overdose drugs.
Kathie Kane-Willis, director of the Illinois Consortium on Drug Policy at Roosevelt University in Chicago, said the new laws are important steps in strengthening efforts to combat the states growing heroin- and opioid-addiction crisis.
The drug court bill in particular will ensure that people struggling with addiction have access to the most effective treatments, Kane-Willis said.
Drug courts are an alternative to jail or prison for people who have been convicted of nonviolent drug crimes. Participants make regular court appearances and undergo addiction treatment.
However, despite research showing the effectiveness of medication-based treatments, some courts have required participants to refrain using medications as a condition of completing the program, according to the Illinois Consortium on Drug Policy.
People have died as a result of being forced to get off of medication-assisted treatment to complete drug court, Kane-Willis said.
Both laws were designed to fill in gaps in a major anti-opioid law the General Assembly passed last year with overwhelming bipartisan support. State Rep. Lou Lang, D-Skokie, was the lead sponsor of last years package and this years bills, and state Sen. Melinda Bush, D-Grayslake, shepherded them through the upper chamber.
This is part of our continued shift toward treating drug addiction like what it is: A devastating health concern that becomes the root cause of other personal and societal ills, Bush of the drug court bill in a prepared statement. We want to ensure that there is no gap in doctor-prescribed medication for those trying to overcome addiction. We wont deny someone the treatment they need.
Dennis McGuire, deputy director of the drug court program in McLean County, said officials there will need to review and discuss the new law, but he doesnt foresee it requiring any major changes.
Were going to rely on our treatment providers to come up with the best course of action on how to treat the individual client, McGuire said.
There are currently about 40 people going through the program, which he said is reserved for high-risk, high-need individuals.
Having gone several years without doing a tour as extensive as her outing this summer nearing 50 dates so far and counting one might think Dolly Parton would bring out a big production to mark the occasion.
Instead the country music legend is taking a fairly low-key approach. Like the title to her forthcoming collection of new original songs, Pure & Simple, shes doing nothing to distract from her songs and personality in her show, which she brings to Deadwood Mountain Grand Event Center on July 23.
Its done pretty simple because we dont have the full band with full sets of drums and all of that, Parton said in a recent interview. As far as the band, its just the four of us on stage, Richard Dennison (keyboards), Tom Rutledge (guitar) and Kent Wells (guitar). We just kind of swap off different instruments. Its pretty much scaled down, not a lot of loud music. We dont have a bunch of videos or anything going on in the background. So its pretty much just us, just us-ns.
Gospel and folk roots
Pure & Simple is actually one disc in a two-disc set coming out to coincide with the tour. The other CD will feature some of Partons biggest hits, hence the title of the package, Pure & Simple with Dolly's Biggest Hits. The shows this summer, Parton said, will lean heavily on songs included in that double disc set, with plenty of her hits, three or four of her new songs and segments spotlighting her gospel and folk roots.
Well be doing on stage all the favorites, Jolene, I Will Always Love You, 9 to 5, Islands in the Stream, all of that stuff, Parton said. Then well do our little gospel things. Well have our corny jokes and all of those kinds of things. So I think well have some fun things for everybody. We have a little folk song section that well do.
I always talk about the Coat of Many Colors (song) and my mom, she added. And of course, now that the Coat of Many Colors movie did so well, Ive also written a song called Mama that Ill probably sing before I start talking about the home section and the Coat of Many Colors.
"So Ill just be talking about all the different types of things, about my grandpa and being brought up and just how I was brought up and why it means a lot to me. Ill be doing my little gospel segment based on the fact that I grew up in my grandpas church.
The story of Partons hardscrabble upbringing, as she mentioned, was brought to television in 2015 with the movie Coat of Many Colors. The film, which drew more than 15 million viewers in its initial airing, was released on DVD on May 3 and is helping bring a new round of attention to Parton, who has 25 No. 1 country hits to her credit and has been inducted into numerous music halls of fame, including the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Growing up 'dirt poor'
The fourth of 12 children, Parton grew up, as she has often put it, dirt poor, in rural Tennessee in a one-room cabin. Her grandfather, Jake, indeed was a preacher, and it was in church where Parton, now a youthful 70, first began singing in public. Coat of Many Colors, a chart-topping single from 1971, told the story of how Partons mother, Avie, stitched together a coat for her out of rags given to her parents. The care her mother put into that coat demonstrated the love she had for all of her children and symbolized that while her family lacked money, it was rich with love and faith and gave her the foundation for the life she has lived ever since.
Pure & Simple is Partons 43rd album, and it features the rootsy country sound embodied in the albums title. Parton said she was pleased with the songs she wrote for the Pure & Simple disc to go with the hits on Dollys Biggest Hits.
The title track was the first song Parton wrote for the project, and it spurred her to find a connecting thread for the album.
I thought well, whats this album going to be about? And is it all going to be just pure and just simple plain songs? she said. But then I started to write and they all turned out to just be songs about love, different kinds of love, not story things, but just love songs. And so I just really thought it felt really good.
So I just took off and acted on faith and just wrote what songs came to mind, what thoughts and feelings I had, thinking OK, Ill need a fast one here, Ill need a half fast one here, if youll pardon the expression, and Ill need a real slow one here, she said.
And so actually I just thought what are good subjects about love? And I just thought well, love is something I know about, so hopefully youre going to enjoy this album.
WASHINGTON | Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today signed a proclamation declaring Aug. 7-13, 2016, as "National Farmers Market Week." This year marks the 17th annual National Farmers Market Week to honor and celebrate the important role that farmers markets play in local economies.
"Farmers markets are an important part of strong local and regional food systems that connect farmers with new customers and grow rural economies. In many areas, they are also expanding access to fresh, healthy food for people of all income levels," said Secretary Vilsack. "National Farmers Market Week recognizes the growth of these markets and their role in supporting both urban and rural communities."
Throughout the week, USDA officials will celebrate at farmers market locations across the country. On Saturday, Aug. 6, Elanor Starmer, the Administrator of USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) which conducts research, provides technical assistance, and awards grants to support local and regional food systems will kick off the week visiting a farmers market and wrap up the week at USDA's own farmers market in Washington, D.C., on Friday, Aug. 12.
"Farmers markets are a gathering place where you can buy locally produced food, and at the same time, get to know the farmer and story behind the food you purchase," said Administrator Starmer. "These types of markets improve earning potential for farmers and ranchers, building stronger community ties and access to local foods."
To help farmers market managers across the country promote and celebrate National Farmers Market Week, USDA is sharing online free farmers market related graphics that market managers and others can use to customize posters, emails, websites and other promotional materials. The graphics, along with a short demonstration video, can be found at: www.ams.usda.gov/resources/NFMW
Over the course of the Obama Administration, USDA has invested close to $1 billion in 40,000 local food businesses and infrastructure projects. Farmers markets provide consumers with fresh, affordable, convenient, and healthy products from local producers. With support from USDA, more farmers markets offer customers the opportunity to make purchases with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; the Women, Infants, and Children Nutrition Program; and the Senior Farmers' Market Nutrition Programs.
Supporting farmers markets is a part of the USDA's Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food (KYF2) Initiative, which coordinates the Department's work to develop strong local and regional food systems. USDA is committed to helping farmers, ranchers, and businesses access the growing market for local and regional foods, which was valued at $12 billion in 2014 according to industry estimates. You can also find local and regional supply chain resources on the newly-revamped KYF2 website and use the KYF2 Compass to locate USDA investments in your community.
More information on how USDA investments are connecting producers with consumers and expanding rural economic opportunities is available in Chapter IV of USDA Results on Medium.
HOT SPRINGS - For the last several Fall River County commissioners meetings, Emergency Manager Frank Maynard has talked to the commissioners about instituting a burn ban across the county, due mostly to his concern about hot, dry weather conditions making fires, especially those created by a lighting strike, more likely.
Maynard never received his total burn ban, but he did get some concessions towards it when the commissioners, in June, lowered the level at which open burning was permitted.
Still Maynard worries about fires, especially one created when a lighting strike ignites tinder-dry grasslands or forests into a conflagration.
Tuesday afternoon, July 12, Maynard clarified some of this: The county does have a burn ban in place, he noted, that is different from what it previously was.
In the past, whenever the National Weather Services (NWS) grassland fire index rose above the medium level, open burning using burn barrels, lighting up ditches, burning slash piles, etc. was prohibited.
Now, the county commissioners reduced this to say that any time the NWS grassland fire index is above the low level, open burning is banned.
Maynard was quick to point out that this burn ban applies only to Fall River County south of the Cheyenne River.
Everything north of the river is a different story, because this ground falls under the auspices of the Black Hills Fire Protection District (BHFPD), a state entity under the Department of the Environment and Natural Resources.
The district was established in 1941, primarily to protect timber from unusual fire dangers. According to DENR rules, a permit is required to do any open burning in the BHFPD. This permit is issued by the state forester or from a United States Forest Service supervisor. The criteria for issuing a permit involves keeping lives or property safe from harm.
Currently, the Black Hills National Forest -- the federal agency, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Forest Service, the agency in charge of the forest and the nearby Buffalo Gap National Grasslands along with federal National Parks, Bureau of Land Management ground, and other federal lands are restricting campfires, fireworks, smoking, charcoal grills, wood stoves, even ATV travel across some locations. (For a synopsis of this, visit the website http://www.blackhillsfirerestrictions.com/.)
Also, the city of Hot Springs also has its own regulations. City Administrator Nolan Schroeder noted that Ordinance 9 A pertains to fires and fireworks. Schroeder noted that nothing in the ordinance states recreational campfires (contained) cant occur within the city under a red flag warning. However, the city is considering some revisions to this, because there are deficiencies in it regarding fireworks and fire pit construction.
What Maynard mostly worries about is lighting strike fires, sparked when a bolt from the blue hits dry grass or forestlands and ignites a blaze. When May and June rains keep moisture levels in grasslands and forest up, theres not so much of a problem -- that was the circumstance last year. This year, however, is more like 2012 when it was very hot and very dry, and the number of fires is up.
Every Tuesday at 10 a.m., Maynard, along with other representatives from Fall River County, and people from Butte, Meade, Pennington, Lawrence and Custer counties, plus state and federal representatives of the BHNF, BLM sit down for a conference call with the National Weather Service to discuss fire danger for the upcoming time. Their objective, Maynard said, is to discuss their circumstances and present a unified front on fire regulations, like burn bans, so there is some regional standardization.
Maynard said that as of Tuesday afternoon, NWS was calling for a couple of days of cooler weather, then a potential storm, followed by two to three weeks of 90-plus degree weather without precipitation. And its those dry, hot weeks that concern him and others.
As of Tuesday, July 12, fire danger across the Black Hills was very high, and extreme in prairie grassland adjacent.
In extreme conditions, fires start quickly, spread furiously and burn intensely. Any fire is potentially a serious threat because of the speed it could develop. Fires that gain some headway over firefighters could become unmanageable under these circumstances, and can burn until the weather changes or the fuel supply is gone.
Very high conditions are similar, with fires starting easily from all causes, spreading rapidly and quickly increasing in intensity.
Maynard said he doesnt like the idea of implementing a total burn ban this can hurt tourism, because campers, for instance, like to have a campfire to make the experience complete but with the current conditions, fire has to be a top priority for everyone.
Maynard urged everyone to watch what they are doing and be mindful of what might create a fire -- dont drive or park a vehicle in tall grass, because the hot muffler could spark a fire. If you see smoke, even a little, let authorities know. Maynard said a quick response can keep a little fire from becoming a conflagration. He cited the ugly, July 7, 2007 Alabaugh fire. Ignited by lightning, it killed a person and burned 32 structures. And small fires that can be put out quickly wont develop into fires like the White Draw fire, growing from 50 to 75 to 100 then 500 acres. These fires are often in places firefighters cant get into, and they grow quickly.
Still, Maynard cited a high level of preparedness for fires from both local regional firefighting resources, including the single engine air tanker (SEAT) plane at the airport, along with heavy tankers that can be called down from Rapid City, and other gear.
Sidebar 1
Weather forecast offers little hope for rain
HOT SPRINGS Across the Black Hills the D-word keeps popping up. Abnormally dry conditions exist across northeastern Wyoming and western South Dakota, and are expected to continue through mid-month, says the National Weather Service.
Extreme drought conditions continued across portions of western South Dakota and northeastern Wyoming. The extreme (D3) drought area covers the eastern foothills, mainly along and east of Interstate 90 from Spearfish to Rapid City, and in northeast Wyoming, says NWS. Satellite-derived vegetation health imagery and rainfall data indicated extreme drought (D3) conditions in a small area immediately adjacent to the Black Hills.
Severe (D2) drought conditions cover other Wyoming counties and most of the Black Hills, including Lawrence, southern Butte, western Meade, and western Pennington counties. Severe drought conditions occur when areas get less than 60 percent of normal rainfall, with locally less than 50 percent, across the last 90 days.
Moderate (D1) drought conditions are found in the rest of Butte, Meade, Pennington, Harding, Perkins, Ziebach, Haakon, Jackson, western Custer, western Mellette counties and northwestern Fall River counties.
While recent rains helped keep drought conditions from intensifying, the rain has been spotty. Areas hardest hit are around the Black Hills and Bear Lodge Mountains.
Sidebar 2
Recent local fires
Since June 23, there have been 12 local fires:
June 23 grass fire, Smithwich and Oelrichs, man-caused
June 24 grass fire, BNSF right-of-way, Ardmore, train caused
June 25 Structure fire, Hot Springs, electrical cause
June 27 Several fires, including a lighting-sparked grass fire across from the Hot Springs Airport, a man-caused fire near Angostura Reservoir, a grass fire along Highway 18 sparked by lightning, and a Buffalo Gap structure fire.
June 28 A lightning-caused structure fire damaged a storage building,
July 4 Two fires ignited: a lightning-caused grass fire lit up 20 acres and another similar fire burned grasslands along Smithwick Road.
July 7 - The lightning-sparked Teepee Fire burned a small acreage west of Jewel Cave.
July 11 The Red Canyon fire burned 13 acres about six miles west of Argyle.
Add any other fires
Sidebar 3
Gov. Daugaard Issues Emergency Fire Declaration
PIERRE, S.D. Gov. Dennis Daugaard has issued an emergency fire declaration for 13 central and western South Dakota counties that have been impacted by drought conditions.
The counties are: Butte, Custer, Fall River, Haakon, Harding, Hughes, Jackson, Jones, Lawrence, Meade, Pennington, Perkins and Stanley.
Gov. Daugaard said the declaration allows state government services to be used as necessary to help the counties that are part of the declaration. The declaration was recommended by the state Drought Task Force which was activated by the Governor this week.
Widespread drought, low humidity and high temperatures have led to a serious fire hazard in those 13 counties, said Gov. Daugaard. Persistent prairie fires could diminish the feed and water supplies needed for livestock; or create hardships for individuals, businesses and governments by destroying public, private and agricultural property. (Audio)
The declaration allows one single engine air tanker (SEAT) plane to be stationed in Pierre and be managed by the South Dakota Department of Agricultures Division of Wildland Fire. The plane will respond as needed to fires in the declared counties. If used, the state would cover 90 percent of the cost while the counties would pay the other 10 percent. Additionally, the SEAT will be available to use on prairie fires affecting federal and tribal lands through existing agreements.
It has been a dry year in parts of South Dakota. Sixty percent of the land in our state is abnormally dry and counties primarily west of the river are experiencing moderate to extreme drought, Gov. Daugaard said. By declaring an emergency the state will be prepared to assist counties when and if fires break out.
The Black Hills Forest Fire Protection District is not included in the declaration. The declaration period begins Friday, July 16, 2016 and will last no longer than Dec. 31, 2016.
HOT SPRINGS - Since June 23, there have been 12 local fires:
June 23 grass fire, Smithwich and Oelrichs, man-caused
June 24 grass fire, BNSF right-of-way, Ardmore, train caused
June 25 Structure fire, Hot Springs, electrical cause
June 27 Several fires, including a lighting-sparked grass fire across from the Hot Springs Airport, a man-caused fire near Angostura Reservoir, a grass fire along Highway 18 sparked by lightning, and a Buffalo Gap structure fire.
June 28 A lightning-caused structure fire damaged a storage building,
July 4 Two fires ignited: a lightning-caused grass fire lit up 20 acres, another fire burned grasslands along Smithwick Road.
July 7 - The lightning-sparked Teepee Fire burned a small acreage west of Jewel Cave.
July 11 The Red Canyon fire burned 13 acres west of Argyle.
July 16 - Indian Canyon fire, 12,000 acres and still going.
Emergency Fire declaration issued
PIERRE Gov. Dennis Daugaard has issued an emergency fire declaration for 13 West River counties, including Fall River County, hard hit by drought conditions.
The declaration allows state government services to be used as necessary to help the counties, including a SEAT plane.
It has been a dry year in parts of South Dakota. Sixty percent of the land in South Dakota is abnormally dry and counties west of the river and in the northeast are experiencing moderate to extreme drought. Drought is most severe in the Lawrence County area where the fire at Crow Peak burned more than 2,700 acres over the course of two weeks.
As I write this, the Crow Peak fire has just reached 100 percent containment. Under the lead of an Incident Management Team from Colorado, no structures were lost and no one was seriously injured or killed. The team had help from local, volunteer and municipal fire departments from across the state that put in many hours and sacrificed their Fourth of July weekend to assist the Incident Management team.
Our state fire crew, the South Dakota Department of Agricultures Division of Wildland Fire, also played a critical role in managing the Crow Peak fire. They offered air support, equipment and hand crews to assist the Black Hills National Forest and the Incident Management Team with containment.
Created by Gov. Bill Janklow in 2001 to assume the duties of wildland fire management in South Dakota, our Wildland Fire Division assists in large fire suppression efforts by sending personnel and equipment. Wildland Fire has its own fleet of fire engines with full-time and seasonal firefighters who are stationed at four locations around the Black Hills. Division employees also work with the South Dakota National Guard which lends military heavy left helicopters, pilots and crews to fight wildfires. Wildland Fires efforts arent limited to South Dakota. They help fight fires in Canada and across the United States.
When they are not on the ground fighting fires, Wildland Fire employees are engaging in fire prevention efforts. Agency hand crews are involved in fuel reduction activities that include tree thinning and brush disposal through chipping and burning at various locations in the Black Hills. They also have a fire prevention program called One Less Spark.
South Dakota is fortunate to have a well-operating fire crew. Wildland Fire division director Jay Esperance and his employees work very hard to limit the damage from wildfires. We are also lucky to have so many volunteer firefighters in our state who are willing to dedicate their time to help with fire suppression efforts. They routinely put their lives on the line to keep us safe.
For our part, we must not add to their workload. Respect county burn bans when theyre in place. Where fires are permitted, never leave a fire unattended, completely extinguish fires before leaving the area and remind others to be cautious. Also, be mindful when operating equipment in dry areas.
South Dakota weather is anything but predictable. We cant prevent lightning strikes or control how much moisture we receive. But we should do all that is within our power to prevent fires, especially this year.
Effort intends to build bridges between cultures
HOT SPRINGS Hot Springs High School teacher Doug Gaulke was busy building his home on Argyle Road he just finished putting the roof on earlier this year when the South Dakota Community Foundation announced that Hot Springs School District won a Community Innovation Grant for $10,000.
The grant is designed to bridge the racial disparity gap within the school districts course offerings, staff and institutional culture. And Gaulke wrote the application that earned the grant money.
This grant will create a panel of concerned administrators, faculty and parents to discuss and propose solutions to the issue of racial disparity within the school districts course offerings, staff and institutional culture. Three solutions will be implemented, including: community outreach, student cultural advocacy/education and integration, and staff training in cultural awareness, according to the South Dakota Community Foundation (SDCF).
Were excited about an opportunity to promote Native American language and culture, said School Superintendent Kevin Coles. This is a great chance to move forward.
Gaulke, in the grant proposal, noted, The problem that we have identified in our community involves a large racial disparity that is over 125 years old. Even while 158 Lakota students attend our school district, they were not given the opportunity to learn their own language, history, or art until August of 2015. Besides a brief overview of Native Americans in U.S. History classes, Lakota and Non-Native children have not been educated about the rich history and culture that the Lakota people have maintained within South Dakota for thousands of years. This has fueled resentment and subsequently permeates the community.
Within our schools, he writes, racially-based student conflict does arise yet is rarely addressed in a meaningful manner. Unfortunately, due to a nearly non-existent Native American teacher base within our school district, cultural insensitivity is commonplace among teacher/student interactions. Even well-meaning educators find themselves lacking the necessary skills to overcome deficient personal worldviews. In October of 2014, a small panel of concerned administrators and faculty conducted a meeting to discuss the issue of racial disparity within the context of our school districts course offerings, staff, and institutional culture. A consensus was formed that in order to increase the collective understanding of the problem of racism within our school district, more stakeholders needed to be involved.
Shortly after this meeting our Indian Education Parent Committee was formed in order to include broader community involvement and generate meaningful ideas, the grant proposal continues. Through this collaboration, three main solutions were highlighted as the most promising. The first solution of community outreach was suggested in order to inform, educate, and engage more of the community. Secondly, the fostering of student cultural advocacy/education was seen as paramount in order to ensure that Native American students cultures and identities are considered when developing school courses, curricula, and special programs. Lastly, the implementation of staff training was viewed as an essential method to develop cultural awareness during existing school district in-service days and regional professional development opportunities. We intend to test these solutions and expand the number of those involved in our on-going process. It is our belief that the process we have embarked upon within our school district and community will act as a sounding board for change and inspiration. It is our hope that long held cultural divisions within our community will begin to mend through this model for community innovation.
Gaulke explained the program further Wednesday, July 13.
I wrote it (the grant application) to focus on teaching kids the language, and adding some cultural things to this getting guest speakers, Lakota elders, to come in, he said. It is a three pronged approach teaching the kids, educating the staff to bridge the cultural gap and understand each other, and a community outreach, like the adult language class. We want to build support within the community.
The $10,000 will fund the creation of all of this, including:
Learning resources, books and language materials for students.
Community outreach Additional adult education classes that teach Lakota language and culture. For example, Hot Springs High School offered adult education classes in Lakota earlier this year, each Thursday evening from 6 8 p.m., from March 10 April 28. Funding for more of this type of class is included in the grant.
Staff training The school will send two teachers to the Lakota Summer Institute, held in June at Sitting Bull College in Ft. Yates, North Dakota, and run by the Lakota Language Consortium (LLC). The Institute is billed as the premier Lakota and Dakota language teacher professional development event in the nation, by LLC. Since 2007, more than 250 teachers from eight reservations and six states have participated in three-week immersion into the language and culture. During 2016, the 10th anniversary of the Institute, more than 100 additional participants shared the experience, earning college credits at the same time.
Teacher training has been a hot topic for the last 30 years, Gaulke said. There are (Lakota) speakers left, but the difficulty is to create learning like a person would have if they grew up in a home speaking Lakota in a classroom setting. This teacher training should help with this.
Gaulke, Coles said, will be running the Indian Education Parent Program.
According to SCDFs Beth Massa, with the West River Development Office in Rapid City, the Grant committee, made up of volunteer board members, really liked the fact that Hot Springs High School is being proactive in order to address the issues and build bridges in the relationship between native people and non-natives
Massa said the grant will give the school the materials and supplies to address these issues, keep the kids engaged and coming to school.
That is the foremost thing, she said.
She also lauded Gaulke for his effort in writing the grant.
How great is it that a teacher took it upon himself to write the grant for this. This was very impressive, she said. Our grants are not labor intensive, but you have to prepare and budget and other things. What he is doing is wonderful to help deal with issues and help kids protect their rich traditions.
The $10,000 grant was one of four grants issued by SDCF in the West River region. The others were:
Community Services Connections of the Black Hills, in Rapid City, received $1,000 to connect community members with the resources to support proactive aging, including housing options, home modifications, preplanning, legal and financial issues, retirement options and volunteer opportunities.
Custer Economic Development Corporation in Custer received $10,000 to collaborate with the city, the Chamber of Commerce and citizens to strengthen community vitality and economic growth through civic engagement.
Hope in Life, of Rapid City, received $8,305 to address suicide among youth and young adults at the Western South Dakota Juvenile Services Center through a suicide-prevention curriculum and support group.
SDCF partners with the Bush Foundation in order to off Community Innovation Grants. These are more selective grants that focus on specifically supporting community problem-solving projects. A total of $400,000 was available to award in 2016 through the Community Innovation program and other grants.
STURGIS | A former senior care worker will spend nearly 10 months in the state penitentiary after pleading guilty to three counts of elder abuse and neglect of a patient at Sturgis Regional Senior Care.
Donald R. Brown, 62, was a nurse assistant at the nursing home when he hit and manhandled the 66-year-old victim.
The woman is wheelchair bound and has limited mobility and communication skills. She suffered a brain aneurysm at age 39 and then a massive stroke while on the operating table. She was in the courtroom for a short time Monday.
Sturgis police were alerted to the abuse when relatives Brittany Boyd and Vicki Hullinger decided to place a hidden camera in the womans room at the senior care facility. The videos were streamed live online using a commercial "nest" cam and archived so that police could view them.
The alleged abuse happened in the fall of 2015. Brittany Boyd said the camera caught Donald Brown hitting and suffocating the victim on numerous occasions.
"I just felt terrified at what I was seeing," Boyd said.
An indictment in the case was handed down in January.
Meade County State's Attorney Kevin Krull characterized the case as "disgusting."
"We played the video for the grand jury when we first indicted this case, and some of them were crying," he said.
This is the first elder abuse case Krull has brought before the court.
"I have been presented with one or two other ones that we ended up not charging, and that was years ago when I worked down in Rapid City," he said.
Originally, there were six counts of abuse or neglect of an elder with a disability. But in a plea agreement, Brown pleaded guilty to three felony Class 6 counts on April 25.
Brittany Boyd spoke at the sentencing hearing Monday before Judge Jerome Eckrich saying the incident is a "surreal nightmare."
"The situation overall has impacted me and my family greatly," she said. "It's been traumatizing."
Boyd said she and Hullinger had suspicion of abuse and wanted to know how their relative was being treated. She said there was nothing Donald Brown said or did that prompted them to install the camera. The victim did have some curious injuries, such as a broken arm in 2010.
"The camera was the only way we would have ever known that he was doing anything to (the victim)," she said.
Boyd said the surveillance laws in South Dakota prohibit putting cameras in private facilities where it could invade patient's privacy.
"I wasn't charged with anything," Boyd said. "I didn't know what I could do with the video evidence or who I could go to with it if it was illegal."
Only three states in the United States Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico have laws allowing hidden cameras in nursing homes. Although not legal in South Dakota, the video evidence was allowed in this case. It's the first of its kind to come through Meade County under Krull.
"I don't know what the nursing home rules are about that, and frankly, don't really care," he said. "This is one of those cases you know that this type of thing happens, but you just fear it."
At the hearing Monday, Brown apologized to both the family and Eckrich.
Brown said he loved and cared for the victim, but because of medical issues and what he termed "illnesses" in his life, he just suffered a "meltdown."
He told of how he had purchased some musical CDs for the woman at Christmas a few years back, then spent time listening to them with her while eating ice cream.
Eckrich sentenced Brown to two years in prison on each of the counts, but suspended all but 10 months. He also said Brown, who now lives at Bismarck, N.D., would need to forfeit his Certified Nursing Assistant license and spend four years on probation.
Brown was taken into custody immediately. As he was handcuffed, his daughter wept openly in the courtroom and left before he was led out the door by a deputy.
Sturgis Regional Senior Care is part of the Rapid City-based Regional Health network. Spokesperson Denise Dancy, said Regional Health cannot comment about ongoing legal matters, but did say: The safety of our residents is our primary focus. We appreciate the work that law enforcement and the Meade County State's Attorney have done.
At the urging of state Supreme Court Chief Justice David Gilbertson last year, state lawmakers formed the South Dakota Elder Abuse Task Force. Legislators this year adopted several panel recommendations to additionally protect the states oldest residents.
Gilbertson said estimates indicate one in 14 cases of elder abuse physical, emotional and financial get reported nationally.
He said because seniors are the fastest-growing segment of the population the number of people over 65 will outstrip the number of elementary students by 2025 abuse will expand unless others intervene.
STURGIS | A former senior care worker will spend nearly 10 months in the state penitentiary after pleading guilty to three counts of elder abuse and neglect of a patient at Sturgis Regional Senior Care.
Donald R. Brown, 62, was a nurse assistant at the nursing home when he hit and manhandled the 66-year-old victim.
The woman is wheelchair-bound and has limited mobility and communication skills. She suffered a brain aneurysm at age 39 and then a massive stroke while on the operating table. She was in the courtroom for a short time Monday.
Sturgis police were alerted to the abuse when Brittany Boyd and Vicki Hullinger decided to place a hidden camera in their relatives room at the senior care facility. The videos were streamed live online using a commercial "nest" cam and archived so that police could view them.
The alleged abuse happened in the fall of 2015. Brittany Boyd said the camera caught Donald Brown hitting and suffocating the victim on numerous occasions.
"I just felt terrified at what I was seeing," Boyd said.
An indictment in the case was handed down in January.
Meade County State's Attorney Kevin Krull characterized the case as "disgusting."
"We played the video for the grand jury when we first indicted this case, and some of them were crying," he said.
This is the first elder abuse case Krull has brought before the court.
"I have been presented with one or two other ones that we ended up not charging, and that was years ago when I worked down in Rapid City," he said.
Originally, there were six counts of abuse or neglect of an elder with a disability. But in a plea agreement, Brown pleaded guilty to three felony Class 6 counts on April 25.
Brittany Boyd spoke at the sentencing hearing Monday before Judge Jerome Eckrich saying the incident is a "surreal nightmare."
"The situation overall has impacted me and my family greatly," she said. "It's been traumatizing."
Boyd said she and Hullinger had suspicion of abuse and wanted to know how their relative was being treated. She said there was nothing Donald Brown said or did that prompted them to install the camera. The victim did have some curious injuries, such as a broken arm in 2010.
"The camera was the only way we would have ever known that he was doing anything to (the victim)," she said.
Boyd said the surveillance laws in South Dakota prohibit putting cameras in private facilities where it could invade patient's privacy.
"I wasn't charged with anything," Boyd said. "I didn't know what I could do with the video evidence or who I could go to with it if it was illegal."
Only three states in the United States Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico have laws allowing hidden cameras in nursing homes. Although not legal in South Dakota, the video evidence was allowed in this case. It's the first of its kind to come through Meade County under Krull.
"I don't know what the nursing home rules are about that, and frankly, don't really care," he said. "This is one of those cases you know that this type of thing happens, but you just fear it."
EDGEMONT | The calm that settled Monday over Edgemont belied the tense struggle that firefighters waged a day earlier against wildfires that burned to within a mile of the city.
The closest threat was at the Custer-Fall River Landfill, about four-fifths of a mile from Edgemonts southeastern city limits. Firefighters bulldozed lines of barren dirt there to serve as fire barriers, and a massive DC-10 tanker plane dropped fire retardant near the lines. It was reportedly the first time a tanker of that kind and size capable of carrying 11,600 gallons of retardant had been used in South Dakota.
Residents of the small Cottonwood residential area just east of Edgemont were evacuated Sunday afternoon but were allowed to return Sunday evening after firefighters stopped the advancing flames.
Rain on Sunday night doused many of the fires, but only after firefighters had protected the city of about 750 residents.
The stuff that was pushing toward Edgemont, that was taken care of by firefighters, said Steve Esser, the state wildland fire official who served as incident commander.
Lightning is the suspected cause of the fires that began Saturday evening and burned across an estimated 13,500 acres, or about 21 square miles, on the southwestern edge of the Black Hills.
The burned acreage was difficult to estimate and was still being evaluated Monday, in part because the windblown fire skipped across the grasslands and burned some patches of land while leaving other areas untouched. Some pine trees and steep slopes also burned in Indian Canyon just southeast of Edgemont.
Most of the damaged grassland is privately owned. There were reports of burned hay bales and escaped livestock, but there were no reports of damaged structures, human injuries or killed livestock as of Monday morning.
Some ranchers lost large swaths of pasture forage and now must figure out how to feed their cattle for the rest of the summer and into the fall and winter.
Ken Cassens, a rancher and outfitter who has cattle, bison and elk, estimated that about half of his grazing land was burned. He plans to sell some cattle and buy feed for his animals to subsist on until next spring.
At one point during the spread of the fires, Cassens home and buildings were nearly surrounded.
When the fires all the way around three sides, why, yeah, you get a little worried, he said.
Besides the lost forage, Cassens also suffered some downed fences because of burned wooden posts and because of the necessity of cutting through some fences to let firefighters access the flames. Cassens said some of his bison seemed to be missing because of the downed fences, but he expects to find them.
The firefighting force remained large Monday morning as about 150 people, plus up to 60 engines and tenders and several aircraft, were still on the scene, using a staging area near a ranch and also manning a makeshift headquarters in a fairgrounds building in Edgemont.
Most of the visible flames and smoke plumes were gone, leaving only a haze in the sky and black charring stretching for miles across the ground. By 4 p.m. Monday, the fires were 60 percent contained.
Firefighters and equipment came from as far as Montana, Colorado, Wyoming and eastern South Dakota as the fire burned to Edgemonts doorstep Sunday, but Esser said the resources will probably be allowed to dwindle today. Many roads in the burned areas were reopened to public traffic Monday morning.
If things go well today, Esser said Monday, well start looking at downsizing things.
The South Dakota Women in Agriculture board is seeking nominations for two new awards to be presented at the annual South Dakota Women in Ag's Rural Women's Conference in October.
The South Dakota Ag Woman of the Year and the South Dakota Young Gun of Ag awards will be presented during the evening program on October 6 at K bar S Resort in Keystone.
Nominees must be South Dakota women involved on the farm, ranch, as an ag-educator or in another facet of the industry. The South Dakota Ag Woman of the Year award is open to all women who are involved in agriculture. The South Dakota Young Gun of Ag award is open to women who are 25 years old or younger.
The nomination process is open through August 15. Printable and online forms can be found at SouthDakotaWomenInAg.com. Finalists will be selected from the nominations received and final voting will take place on the South Dakota Women in Ag Facebook page in September.
For more details about the award or to learn more about the annual conference, visit SouthDakotaWomenInAg.com or visit the organization's Facebook page.
PIERRE | No high school teams from South Dakota are participating in the North American Envirothon competition this summer.
That means a $4,000 state grant for their travel isnt being used.
The Butte Conservation Districts wanted to convert the travel grant to a new purpose: Helping pay for a full-time Envirothon coordinator already under contract.
But the South Dakota Conservation Commission deadlocked Monday, unable to summon a five-member majority to deny the request or to approve it.
If the Butte district applies again, the commission will consider the matter when it next meets in Deadwood as part of the conservation districts state convention Sept. 25-27.
Tim Reich, chairman of the Butte district, told the state commission a $100,000 budget is planned as part of restructuring Envirothon activities in South Dakota, including a full-time coordinator.
He said the South Dakota Envirothon steering committee is receiving some funds from the state Department of Environment and Natural Resources.
It also has a pledge from the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service and private donations are part of the plan too, he said.
Weve done a four-month contract at this point, Reich said. He later explained the contract currently runs through October.
The state Agriculture Department, of which the conservation commission is a part, received the Butte districts request May 24.
State commission member Charlie Moe of Rosebud objected Monday.
Moe questioned whether it was appropriate to shift $4,000 that was granted for a specific purpose to a new purpose that wasnt previously authorized.
I have a concern about that, Moe said.
Commission member Wayne Bunge of Rapid City sided with Moe. I agree 100 percent with Charlies thought process, Bunge said.
Moe made a motion to deny the Butte request. After a long silence, Bunge seconded it. The denial failed on a 2-5 vote.
That seemed to signal approval would be next but it didnt happen.
Reich told the commission South Dakota hadnt seen much participation in Envirothon, with four or five teams, depending on the year, from 2012 through 2015.
He said the new coordinator already has scheduled activities including group meetings with school superintendents and Black Hills State University science faculty for the coming weeks.
Commission member Doug Hansen of Webster spoke in favor of allowing the $4,000 shift, describing it as a high reward, small risk request.
But the roll call for approval hit a snag when commission member Alan Vedvei of Lake Preston abstained. He didnt give a reason. He had previously voted against the denial.
The roll call came out 4-2 with one abstention. A majority of five was needed.
Vedvei asked that the matter be put on the September agenda.
The commission didnt vote on his request but left the situation open-ended, so that if the Butte district returns with the request the commission would then consider it again.
Seems kind of odd that this summer's annual Dakotafest, which bills itself as "The Northern Plains' Premier Ag Event," won't be hosting debates between South Dakota's U.S. representatives and challengers this year.
The event has had a tradition of providing event-goers and television viewers around the state with a venue that focuses on agricultural issues, which of course are the mainstays of South Dakota's rural economy.
In 2014, Sen. Rounds debated his two opponents and Rep. Noem debated hers at the event. I was looking forward to a similar match-up this year but just learned that there are no plans to hold debates, just a roundtable discussion involving our three Republican congressional reps, Sens. Thune and Rounds and Rep. Noem.
Apparently "The Northern Plains' Premier Ag Event" doesn't deem a brisk political dialogue between opposing U.S. representatives a worthy feature of its schedule this year.
How they come about this decision is the business of event planners, but given that this election cycle will focus on trade policies that are ultra-important to South Dakota's ag producers, it mystifies me as to why a debate between candidates is being shunted aside in favor of a relatively stress-free chum-fest among our Republican representatives.
Paula Hawks, the Democrat running for our lone House seat against incumbent Kristi Noem, and Jay Williams, the Democratic challenger to John Thune, are being shut out of probably the highest-profile ag gathering in South Dakota.
Doesn't seem fair, but I guess it's their venue. Unlike Thune and his hissy-fit over Facebook's management of its news content a couple of months ago, I'm inclined to shrug it off when private enterprises run their businesses the way they want to.
Meanwhile, I'm sorry that we'll miss a confrontation between Hawks and Noem, because Paula Hawks impresses me as an articulate and knowledgeable candidate when it comes to ag issues.
She grew up on a farm and her husband has a background in livestock production. Most pointedly, she'll call attention to Noem's perplexing decision to quit the House Agriculture Committee. I'd also like to hear Noem's (and for that matter Thune's and Rounds') plans for reinstating country of origin labeling, which was unceremoniously dumped at last winter's federal budget deliberations.
And as relevant as ever, trade issues need some airing out. Considering that all the Republicans in our delegation have done their pro forma political duties and endorsed Donald Trump, I'd want to know how that squares with Trump's well-known contempt for trade deals (NAFTA, the TransPacific Partnership come immediately to mind) that are uniformly supported in a big way by all the mainstream farm and livestock production organizations.
I've written here before about how the surge in freer trade via these agreements has led to a substantial increase in South Dakota's ag exports. Now they back the guy that wants to undo all that. Explanations, please?
In the meantime, Dakotafest or no Dakotafest, I hope that some way, somehow, we can get these incumbents on to a stage with their challengers and give South Dakotans some reason to send them back to D.C. or just plain send them packing.
When it comes to crop production, most long-term farm operators are often heard saying that no two years are the same. That statement is certainly true in many portions of southern Minnesota and northern Iowa as it relates to the 2016 growing season, in comparison to the previous year.The 2015 crop year featured almost ideal growing conditions across the region, and resulted in record corn and soybean yields in both Minnesota and Iowa, as well as for many individual producers. The first half of the 2016 growing season has been much different with some areas dealing with very late planting, while other portions of the region have experienced a late frost, excessive rainfall, and hail damage.In southwest Minnesota, northwest Iowa, and eastern South Dakota, a considerable amount of 2016 corn was not planted until late May or early June, leaving the crop development well behind normal. From an agronomic standpoint a significant amount of corn in this region is two-three weeks or more behind normal development.This increases the likelihood that a large amount of corn could have maturity issues this fall, and that the 2016 corn crop is much more susceptible to a normal or earlier than normal first frost. It also increases the odds of wetter corn at harvest, which will likely lead to higher corn drying costs this fall.Some of these same locations, as well as a large area in the western portions of south central Minnesota, were severely impacted by heavy rainfall events during mid-June, which caused considerable drown-out damage in some areas. It was too late to replant corn acres at that point, but many farmers planted some early varieties of soybeans. However, some of those replanted soybeans have drowned-out again, due to heavy rainfall events in early July.In addition, there have been numerous severe storms across southern and western Minnesota that have featured hail and wind damage to crops. Some of the more extensive hail damage resulted in some replanting of soybeans. Similar to the late planted corn, farm operators that replanted soybeans will need to hope for a long growing season, and some favorable weather conditions in August and September.In areas of the Upper Midwest that have not dealt with these weather challenges, crop conditions look good to excellent at most locations. Above normal growing degree units (GDUs), along with adequate soil moisture, has resulted in very favorable growing conditions in many areas.The accumulation of GDUs at the U of M Southern Minnesota Research Center totaled 1,121 GDUs from May 1 through July 8, 2016, which is about 8 percent above the normal GDU accumulation of 1,034 on July 8.By comparison, there were 982 GDUs accumulated by July 8, 2015; 1,005 GDUs in 2014, and 985 GDUs in 2013. Much of the corn that was planted in April, and was not impacted by the severe weather in June, was beginning to tassel and pollinate by July 8, under very favorable conditions.June rainfall amounts were quite variable across the region, with some areas of Upper Midwest, receiving excessive amounts of rainfall during June, while other areas ended the month a bit dry. Total rainfall at the Waseca Research Center in the month of June was 4.75 inches, which nearly the same as the long-term average June rainfall. The total precipitation for 2016 through June 30 at Waseca is now at 13.68 inches, which is about 3 inches below normal.Many areas of western south central Minnesota received more than double their normal precipitation during the month of June, receiving 4-6 inches in single rainfall events. There are also some areas of western Minnesota and the eastern Dakotas that ended June quite dry. Fortunately, some widespread rainfall across the region in early July has alleviated most drought concerns for the time being.In addition to drown-out damage, the frequent excessive rainfall amounts during the month of June have also resulted in shallow corn root development, as well as some leaching of available nitrogen in the soil profile. This has resulted in very uneven corn stands and some corn showing nitrogen deficiency in portions of fields.There are also areas with yellow, chlorotic-looking soybeans, due to the excessively wet soil conditions. Close to maximum levels of stored soil moisture exist in most areas of southern Minnesota, so any major rainfall events can quickly result in large amount of standing water in crop fields.Based on the weekly USDA Crop Progress Report for July 3, 75 percent of the corn and 70 percent of the soybeans in the United States were rated good to excellent, and only 5 percent of the corn and 7 percent of the soybeans were rated poor. In both Minnesota and Iowa, 79 percent of the corn was rated good to excellent, with soybeans at 74 percent in Minnesota and 77 percent in Iowa rated in the higher categories. Only 3 percent of the corn and 4 percent of the soybeans in Minnesota were rated in the poor category as of July 3, which could be a bit understated, given the weather challenges in many areas of south central and southwest Minnesota during June.
Pat LaMarche still hears stories about how people bought jewelry in her home when it was still a business.
"Everybody has a memory of buying jewelry, buying a ring or a diamond here," she said. "The jewelry store closed, I think, in 2012, and then it was sold to us."
It took LaMarche and Chad Bruce, her husband, three years to renovate the three-and-a-half story building at 21 Dickinson Ave. in Carlisle. The structure was built in the 1800s, but LaMarche said some of its doors and windows were taken from a bank that once stood along Hanover Street as early as the 1700s. The building also has five sides since it was constructed on a corner, which LaMarche compares to a "flatiron building."
The front door opens into a foyer that's made to look like a street. The floor is paved with recycled street bricks from Chicago, though LaMarche said she would've preferred ones from Boston. They bought those bricks because the company that sold it to them was based in the Midwest, she said.
There's a sunken living to the right that's cordoned off with a wrought-iron fence, and an ashwood staircase to the left that leads up to the loft. The wall at the end of the foyer is made to look like the side of a building with its light fixture, window and arched door leading to the back of the house.
As you make your way through the archway, you'll find a sunken bedroom to the right -- the "bunkhouse," LaMarche calls it -- that's connected to the living room through a shared fireplace. There's also a room to the left that LaMarche compares to a mudroom, where they both keep their bicycles and shoes.
The back of the house also a walk-in safe from its time as a jewelry store, she said. It's right next to the elevator. The floor also has a bathroom with its own laundry units.
The loft at the top of the stairs is decorated with period 19th century wallpaper. It continues into the library, which LaMarche said is made to look like the Amelia S. Givens Library in Mt. Holly Springs. The bathroom on this floor also has black-and-white tiles and a toilet that uses a chain to flush.
The second floor -- right above the loft level -- has a dining room and kitchen; and the third floor has the master bedroom and bathroom.
The Lines owned the building from when it was built up to when it was sold to LaMarche and Bruce. It served as either law offices or a jewelry store during that time, though LaMarche said there was a brief period during the Great Depression when the Lines would rent out desks.
There's still work that the couple would like to do on the home. LaMarche said they'd like to add a deck once they get more money. For now, she's happy with her new home.
" I used to live in tiny apartments that are smaller than any of the floors (in the house)," she said.
PATNA: At least 10 Indian paramilitary soldiers were killed in an attack by Maoist rebels in a forest area in eastern India, police said Tuesday.
P.K. Thakur, the director-general of state police, said three insurgents were also killed in an exchange of gunfire on Monday in the Dumrinala area, nearly 105 miles (170 kilometers) south of Patna, the capital of Bihar state.
The rebels used improvised explosive devices and fired at paramilitary soldiers in the area that is known to be a rebel stronghold, P. K. Sahu, another police officer, said.
Thakur said eight paramilitary soldiers were killed immediately and two of the five wounded died later in a hospital.
The bodies of three dead insurgents were recovered, he said.
The Press Trust of India news agency said the soldiers of the Cobra battalion of the Central Reserve Police Force were conducting anti-rebel operations in the area over the last two days. The Cobra unit is especially trained for jungle warfare.
The rebels have been called Indias biggest internal security threat. They operate in 20 of Indias 28 states and have thousands of fighters, according to the Home Ministry.
The insurgents, who say they are inspired by Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, have been fighting for more than three decades in central and eastern India, staging hit-and-run attacks against authorities as they demand a greater share of wealth from the areas natural resources and more jobs for farmers and the poor.
The rebels say they represent poor farmers and members of tribal groups who depend on the forests for food, fuel and building materials for their thatched huts.
Kathmandu, Nepal: The Nepali Congress, the largest party in the parliament, has on Tuesday discussed no-confidence motion registered in the parliament.
A central committee meeting of the party held on Tuesday discussed on ranges of issues including the recent decision of the party regarding the formation of new government and implementation of Constitution.
Following the CPN Maoist Centers decision to withdraw support to the CPN UML chairman KP Sharma led incumbent government, the Nepali Congress and the Maoist Center had jointly registered no confidence motion, which is scheduled to discuss from coming Thursday.
Kathmandu, Nepal: The supporters of the fasting doctor Govinda KC and Police briefly clashed at in-front of the Prime Minister KP Sharma Olis official residence on Tuesday.
According to the protesters, four doctors and eight medical students were arrested by the police. The police have said that they were arrested after they violated the prohibited zone.
The doctors and the medical students had taken out a rally in-front of the Prime Minister KP Olis official residence on Tuesday afternoon to press the government to address the concerns raised by the fasting Dr. KC
KATHMANDU, July 19: House Speaker Onsari Gharti today termed it as unfortunate for the country and people that the political parties were divided on formation of the new government rather than focusing on implementing the constitution.
"The people want to see the parties united to implement the constitution, but they are divided over forming a government, it is not good that the parties who were united in establishing republican set up and making the new constitution are now divided," she said.
At an international seminar on vaccine organized by the Health Ministry, the House Speaker spoke of the division which emerged among the parties after registration of the no-confidence motion at the parliament and added it did not send a positive message.
She also drew the attention of the government on procuring enough vaccines for the children in time and making Nepal fully vaccinated.
Campaign for declaring country fully vaccinated
On the occasion, Minister for Health, Ram Janam Chaudhary said the Ministry lending top priority to the vaccination programme and that it will increase the types of vaccines. The government is working on a campaign for administering enough necessary vaccines to the children and declaring Nepal fully vaccinated.
President of the Women, Children, Senior Citizens and Social Welfare Committee under the Legislature-Parliament Ranju Kumari Jha said that in order to make vaccination programmes effective in the days to come, the Vaccination Act has been passed and that the process to create regulations for the Act has been in the final stage.
Likewise, newly appointed secretary of the Ministry Dr Senendra Upreti said that the Ministry prioritises the access to vaccination for potential children.
Child Health Division Chief Dr Rajendra Panta claimed that over 90 percent of children were within the reach of vaccination in Nepal.
Likewise, Nepal's representative for the World Health Organisation Dr Nehal Singh, Nepal's representative for the United Nations Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) Tomoo Hozumi, representative for Rotary Club Jaya Shah, joint secretary of Finance Ministry Lok Darshan Regmi, representative for the World Bank Dr Manab Bhattarai and representative for the Sabin Vaccine Institute Dr Jon Andrus also shed light on the management of vaccination.
Vaccine experiences were shared at the three-day seminar attended by high level officials from legislation and health ministries of 22 countries including Nepal, Kenya, Senegal, Uganda and Magnolia.
Children up to 23 months of age are provided with various 11 types of vaccinations for free in Nepal with financial and technical support of various non-governmental and international non-governmental organisations. RSS
BOJANIC ANNOUNCED
Either Boycott or together in the elections
A new political organization has been presented today in Podgorica, a civic movement that calls for resistance to hopelessness with the slogan "Trust the people, not parties."
The Party leader is the former Positive Montenegro MP Mladen Bojanic, who said it was time "to turn the citizens", which should be placed in the first row.
"We are gathered for the purpose of self-defense against irresponsible and insatiable power that threatens to swallow the future of this country, its people, but also the future generations," Bojanic said.
He urged all opposition representatives to join together to boycott the elections or, if they decide to run for elections, to join one electoral list "All together".
"We do not want to share the opposition on the sincere and the insincere, those for or against accession to NATO, according to the rhetoric of moderate and radical, national or civil, or to those who are closer to the protests and those who are part of the VIP," Bojanic said.
He said that the program of the new political organization rests on four pillars - an uncompromising fight against corruption, a turn from the wrong economic policy based on myth or a hoax on the free market, insistence on sustainable development in harmony with nature, and mandatory referendums for important issues, crucial to the future of the country.
Former leader of the Movement for neutrality Marko Milacic also joined the new Movement saying that their policy will be clear and civil.
"We will not remain silent on the most important issues for the sake of political calculations. The policy will not be based on any national sign," he said, adding that Montenegro should be a neutral country.
He said he would give his best that the entire opposition, "with all its defects, unites".
"Together in the elections or together in a boycott of the elections - but if we see that they do not want to - we're going alone. So: either together with all the others, or alone," Milacic said.
Salina photographer brings exhibit to Kansas Wesleyan
The exhibit features Wichita War Dancer, a member of the Tohono Odham and Ponca nations who has been performing the war dance for several years.
Helaine Fendelman and Joe Rosson have written a number of books on antiques. Do you have an item youd like to know more about? Contact them at Joe Rosson, 2504 Seymour Ave., Knoxville TN 37917, or email them at treasures@knology.net. If youd like your question to be considered for their column, please include a high-resolution photo of the subject, which must be in focus, with your inquiry.
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About This Quiz In the game show world of the '80s, old school options aired in between more modern alternatives that captured the spirit of a brand new decade. Take our quiz to test your knowledge of the greatest moments from '80s game shows.
With the recent news that John Woo was finally returning to the gangster genre with his remake of the Japanese movie Manhunt (1976), I thought that it would be good to look back at the series of films that turned Woos career around, the Better Tomorrow series. Before A Better Tomorrow (1986), John Woo had worked in a number of genres such as comedy, romance and martial arts films. Although he had made action movies before such as the early martial arts movie Hand of Death (1976), which featured an early role for a young Jackie Chan, it wasnt until A Better Tomorrow that his signature style and themes started to take shape. The closest he had perhaps come to a movie with similar themes would have been Last Hurrah for Chivalry (1979), or the underrated Heroes Shed No Tears (1986). Both of these movies share similar themes of brotherhood, loyalty and betrayal but are not shot in the same style that would have come to define Woos later work.
The Better Tomorrow series isnt only the work of John Woo, as the series has had contributions from other directors, mainly the great Tsui Hark, who took over the series with part 3. There have also been a great number of rip-offs and homages due to the success of the first movie. It would be hard to count how many Heroic Bloodshed movies (a term created by Rick Baker, editor for Eastern Heroes magazine at the time) were released in the ensuing years after the release of the first movie in 1986. For the purpose of this, I will mainly focus on the original series, but may include some asides to other films of the time.
A Better Tomorrow 1986
Prior to the release of A Better Tomorrow, John Woo had a bit of a crisis with his career and felt burnt out. Luckily Tsui Hark came along and offered to produce a long gestating project that Woo wanted to direct. Loosely inspired by the Chinese movie Story of a Discharged Prisoner (1967), A Better Tomorrow went on to make John Woo one of the most significant action movie directors in the world. As well as this it revived the failing career of Shaw Brothers star Ti Lung, and contributed to making Chow Yun Fat and Leslie Cheung stars.
Considering how famous Chow Yun Fat has become in the years since the movies release, it is interesting to note that he is not actually the star of the movie. The main character of Sung Tse-Ho is played by the excellent Ti lung. Yun Fat plays the more flamboyant (in the beginning of the movie at least) Mark Gor, who unfortunately does overshadow both Ti Lung and co-star Leslie Cheung, who is also good but is quite annoying as the whiney Sung Tse-Kit.
Originally the production company did not want to hire Chow Yun Fat. At this point, Yun Fat had only done a few movies, all considerably lower budget fare, and none of them financially successful. He had considerable success as a television star, starring in the TVB series The Bund at the start of the 80s. Audiences had thought at the time there was no point in paying money to see Chow Yun Fat in the cinema when you could see him for free on television each week. Luckily Woo stuck to his laurels, Yun Fat was cast, and a star was made.
The main plot revolves around gangsters Sung Tse-Ho and Mark Gor, whose organisations main operation is the printing and distribution of counterfeit currency. Ho has a younger brother Kit, who is a police officer in training. Ho keeps his criminal activities a secret from his younger brother. Their father is aware of Hos occupation and wishes for his to go straight. Ho decides that his next job in Taiwan will be his last. On the job he brings along gangster apprentice Shing (Waise Lee). The job turns out to be a trap, and Ho is forced to give himself up to the police in order for Shing to escape.
In order to keep Ho quiet, the gang from Taiwan send someone to kidnap his father. In the ensuing struggle, which also involves Kit and his girlfriend, their father is murdered. For retribution Mark decides to confront the gang. In one of the most famous scenes from the movie, Chow Yun Fat places guns within plant pots in the lobby of the restaurant. Once the shootout begins, he recollects his guns to save him from reloading. This scene went on to be copied in numerous action film, and not just ones from Hong Kong. Woo had commented in interviews, that the opening shot of the scene, where Chow Yun Fat walks into the restaurant in slow motion was his homage to Martin Scorseses Mean Streets (1973).
After the shootout, Marks life goes to hell, until he is reunited with Ho and they decide to get back at the organisation that betrayed them both. This leads to a number of violent confrontations. Those who know Woo more for The Killer (1989) and Hard Boiled (1992) may be disappointed at the scale of the action, as there are no action scenes with the scope of the Church shootout from The Killer or the hospital set finale of Hard Boiled. This is not to diminish the action scenes included in A Better Tomorrow. There are three main action scenes in the movie, with smaller skirmishes also taking place, but they are more spaced out in the movie. A Better Tomorrow is more an action drama than a full on action movie. It would be good to see Woo going back to something this scale in the future, as his later movies such as Red Cliff (2008/09) & The Crossing (2014/15), have been large scale epics, being released in two parts due to their length.
As mentioned before, the main performances from the three leads are great, with Chow Yun Fat standing out in his star making role. Waise lee makes an impression as the slimy Shing, the villain of the movie. There are also a number of smaller roles which also stand out such as Kenneth Tsang as a reformed gang boss and Big Silly Head himself, Shing Fui On. Woo also has a cameo appearance as a cop. Only actress Emily Chu is wasted in the thankless girlfriend role.
There are a number of scenes and themes used in A Better Tomorrow that Woo would continue to use throughout his career. Although there are no doves, there is some religious iconography used in the film. Loyalty and the brotherly bond between characters is also something which he has continued to focus on. Some people sometimes view this as somewhat homo-erotic. This could also be due to his characters seemingly being more comfortable around men, than women. One of Woos weak points in his filmography has been the lack of strong female roles. There have been notable exceptions perhaps, but these are in the minority in most of his films.
Woos use of slow-motion also began to develop with A Better Tomorrow. Woo doesnt only use this in his action scenes, but sometimes to emphasise something within a scene or a characters feeling at that time. There are also scenes that Woo would revisit. In one scene, when Mark, Ho and Shing are at a bar, Mark tells Shing a story of being confronted by someone who pointed a gun at his head and tried to force his to drink his piss. This scene that Mark speaks of is actually shown in Woos masterpiece Bullet in the Head (1990), although this time it is Tony Leung Chiu-Wai that it happens to.
The soundtrack for the movie has also become iconic, but like other Hong Kong movies incorporates music from other movies. Its not clear if they cleared the copyright to do this, as a lot of Chinese movies use music cues from other movies without permission. Although the main score by Joseph Koo is great, it does incorporate Peter Gabriels score from Birdy (1984). This wasnt the only Woo movie to do this, with The Killer using musical cues from Walter Hills Red Heat (1988). Years later Walter Hill would try to return the favour by working on an American remake of The Killer.
John Woo and Tsui Hark would both go on to bigger and better movies, but A Better Tomorrow still manages to stand out from the crowd, and even after 30 years is still in most peoples 10 best Hong Kong movies of all time lists.
Regarding the previously mentioned The Bund. Tsui Hark went on to produce a remake of that show, with Shanghai Grand (1996), directed by Poon Man-Kit. The movie starred Leslie Cheung and Andy Lau. Cheung starred as Hui Man-Keung, the role made famous by his A Better Tomorrow co star Chow Yun Fat. For fans of A Better Tomorrow and heroic bloodshed movies I would definitely recommend it.
A Better Tomorrow 2 1987
Set a number of years after the first movie, A Better Tomorrow 2 works as a direct sequel to the original, and also as a pastiche to the many copy cat films that arrived in its wake.
Both John Woo and Tsui Hark return as Director and Producer. Ti Lung, Leslie Cheung and Chow Yun Fat also return from the first movie. The return of Chow Yun Fat is one of the silliest aspects of the film, and one that places the movie in a kind of hyper reality, much removed from the original film. This time round Fat plays Ken Gor, identical brother to Mark Gor, his character from the first movie. Obviously due to the success of the original movie and the popularity of Chow Yun Fat, there was no way that Fat wouldnt be involved. It is good that he is back, even if his character does feel shoehorned in.
A good percentage of Fats part in the film takes place in America, which does give the film a different feel from the usual Hong Kong fare of the time. This does mean that there is some unintentional hilarity by some of the poor acting by the westerners in the film. This is when Hong Kong productions seemed to pick any white guy off the street to be in their movie. As well as this some of the English dialogue delivered by Chow Yun Fat seems to be done phonetically, so is a bit jarring in some scenes.
Ti Lungs Ho is still the main character. This time round he is permitted early parole on the condition that he spies on his old mentor Lung Sei, played by Dean Shek. The authorities suspect that Lung Sei is involved in counterfeiting. Ho initially declines the offer of parole, but changes his mind when he finds out Kit; his younger brother is also involved in the case.
A good portion of the film revolves around Dean Sheks character, as he is really put through the ringer. His daughter is murdered; he has a psychological breakdown, survives numerous assassination attempts and gets shot multiple times in the blood soaked finale. Unfortunately Shek is guilty in the film of going over the top, especially when his character has his breakdown. He isnt terrible in the film, just that he is inconsistent in the role. You cant really complain though, as Sheks production company Cinema City, which he co-founded with fellow actors Karl Maka and Raymond Wong, financed and released the film.
Leslie Cheungs Kit is more likeable this time round, as his character has come to terms with his brothers gangster lifestyle, and the two of them seem to get on a lot better. This means there is a lot less of Cheung whining, and more of him being a bit of a bad ass. He takes part in quite a few of the films action scenes, which Woo directs here with a much more sure hand than the previous entry.
Kenneth Tsang is also back, and gets more involved than he did in the previous entry. As well as Tsang, Shing Fui-On is back but in a different role from the first film. He has an extremely brutal fight scene with Ti Lung during the finale.
There is a lot more action this time round, all of it extremely well done and over the top. Whereas the first film was a gangster movie with violent action, this is a straight up Hong Kong action movie, with characters being shot multiple times and still going. The finale to A Better Tomorrow 2 is in my opinion one of the best action scenes he ever produced. Although the sequel is not as good overall as the first in the series, it does work better as a straight up action movie.
Like the first movie, A Better Tomorrow 2, uses music from other movies. Most noticeable is again the theme from Birdy, but you can also notice excerpts from Jerry Goldsmiths score for Extreme Prejudice (1987), and Gary Changs score for 52 Pick Up (1986).
Unfortunately the production of A Better Tomorrow 2 caused a rift between John Woo and Tsui Hark. The studio had said that the first cut ran too long. Both Woo and Hark then separately worked on their own preferred cut of the film. According to producer Terence Chang, a long time collaborator of Woos, Hark felt that Woo had ruined the film, and wanted Woo to be fired from the studio. Apparently Harks preferred cut of the film focused more on Dean Sheks character. After A Better Tomorrow 2, any ideas for future film projects that Woo proposed were then rejected by Woo. This pretty much signified the end of their partnership, with Hark only producing Just Heroes (1989) & then The Killer, when both stars of the movie, Danny Lee & Chow Yun Fat, got their production companies to co-produce the movie. Recently it seemed Woo and Hark were back on speaking terms, and in 2014 there was even talk of them collaborating on a Wuxia movie. Since then it has been reported that Tsui had been brought on to re-cut Woos The Crossing part 2. It is not clear if he done this with Woos blessing.
A Better Tomorrow 2 would be the last in the series to be directed by John Woo. He would revisit the series somewhat with the similar Just Heroes which he co-directed with actor Wu-Ma. The movie has very similar characters and themes to A Better Tomorrow and even has a cameo appearance by Ti Lung. As mentioned earlier it was also produced by Tsui Hark. There probably werent as many clashes between Hark and Woo as the film was made as a benefit to the Directors Union, in order to aid legendary film director Chang Cheh, who had some financial difficulty. The film was developed by actors David Chiang and Danny Lee to closely resemble the popular A Better Tomorrow. The film, although a lesser entry in the Woo canon, is still worth watching. It also works as a reunion of sorts for Shaw Brothers stars David Chiang, Danny Lee, Chen Kuan Tai, Ti Lung and also producer Chang Cheh. Hong Kong superstar Chow Sing Chi also shows up in a rare villainous role. There are numerous nods to A Better Tomorrow throughout, especially a character obsessed by the film who tries to replicate scenes throughout, nearly getting him-self killed in the process.
A Better Tomorrow 3: Love & Death in Saigon 1989
With John Woo stepping aside from the franchise, it was up to producer Tsui Hark to take the reigns as director this time round. John Woo had originally written a script for A Better Tomorrow 3, but due to his and Tsui Harks differences during the production of the sequel he left the project. The script that Woo developed would go on to form the basis of his movie Bullet in the Head, a film which A Better Tomorrow 3 shares many similarities with.
The third in the series is actually a prequel to the first movie, bring back one of Chow Yun Fats most popular characters, Mark Gor. Set in 1974, the film outlines how the inept Mark Gor of this movie became the character audiences came to love in the original film. The plot concerns Mark visiting Saigon towards the end of the Vietnam War, in order to bring his cousin and his uncle back to Hong Kong. Whilst in the airport, Mark is accosted by the local authorities who strip and attempt to steal from him. He is saved by Chow Ying-Kit, played by a scene stealing Anita Mui, who it turns out, is involved in gun running. She takes an interest in Mark and his cousin Cheung Chi-mun (Tony Leung Ka-fai). Throughout the film a love triangle develops between the three, and we begin to see Mark become the killer he was introduced as in the first movie. Around three thirds of the way through, Ho Cheung-ching (Saburo Tokito) shows up to mess everything up for them, culminating in an impressive action climax that involves helicopters, tanks and motorbikes.
Unlike the first two movies in the series, A Better Tomorrow 3, has a very strong female character as one of its leads. In matter of fact it is Anita Mui and not Chow Yun Fat that gets the majority of the films action. Chow Yun Fat does get more involved in the action towards the end of the film. With a twist on his usual image of brandishing two handguns, Mark brings two M-16s to a gunfight, one in each hand.
Chow Yun Fat is once again excellent in the role of a very different Mark Gor. He goes through a range of emotions in this film. This time round Mark is more of a romantic lead than he was given the opportunity to be in the previous two movies. Tony Leung Ka-fai as Marks cousin Mun is also good in a bit of a gormless role. He does get involved in the action though and looks crazy in the films climax. Anita Mui as Kit is the true scene stealer of the film. Like Chow Yun Fat did in the original, she takes a supporting role and runs away with the film, essentially becoming the star of the movie. Of the supporting roles, Japanese actor Saburo Tokito makes an impression with the limited screen time he has. Shih Kien, most famous as the villain in Enter the Dragon (1973) also makes a small appearance as Marks uncle, but looks quite frail in the part.
As being directed by Tsui Hark, the film does have a very different look to the original movies, with having much richer colours akin to his other movies such as Peking Opera Blues (1986) and Once Upon a Time in China (1991). As previously mentioned there is also more of a focus on strong female characters. The action scenes are also quite different. Although still excellent, they look very different from the bullet ballets featured in Woos movies. Harks action can also go quite over the top, which is true of the finale, with Mark firing M-16s in two hands, and with him facing down a tank with a motorbike.
A Better Tomorrow 3 was quite a financial failure in comparison to the first two films in the series. Some critics put this down to the change in director. This is a shame, as I actually think that out of the two sequels, the third is the better film. It is a more emotional movie than the sequel, only let down by the fact that it is a prequel, so we are never in doubt to Mark surviving the film.
There is an alternative version of the film from Taiwan which runs to 145 minutes, which is the full uncut version. It was released on Taiwanese VCD a number of years ago but is since out of print.
A Better Tomorrow 3 would prove to be the last part of the original series. Although there were a number of rip-offs and homages still to come, the series essentially ended here. One noteworthy rip off would be Return to a Better Tomorrow (1994), directed by the prolific Wong Jing. Starring future Hong Kong stars Ekin Cheng (credited here as Dior Cheng), Lau Ching Wan (credited as Sean Lau), Collin Chou (credited as Ngai Sing) and Michael Wong (credited as Michael Wong, unfortunately), the film is one of Wong Jings better efforts, and he seems to raise his game. It doesnt come close to the work of Woo or Hark, but it is an enjoyable exploitation action movie, happy enough to ride the coat tails of a Hong Kong classic. I wouldnt let the fact it being a rip off put you off seeking it out.
A Better Tomorrow 2010
The Korean movie A Better Tomorrow is the only official remake of the original movie. This time it was directed by Song Hae-sung and executive produced by John Woo. Although the framework of the film is essentially the same as the original, focusing on the relationship of a gangster and his policeman brother, there are added elements to the plot to make it more culturally significant to a Korean audience.
The plot this time centres round Kim Hyuk (Joo Jin-mo), who is this films version of Ti Lungs Ho character. Unlike the original film, he is also a police officer. He moonlights as an arms smuggler on the side. The film opens with him defecting from North Korea. He is forced to leave behind his mother and brother, Kim Chul (Kim Kang-woo). He later finds out that his mother has died and his brother, who is in an internment camp, wants nothing to do with him, blaming him for his mothers death.
Like the original movie, Hyuk wants to go straight, and is betrayed on a job in Thailand. He is set up by young gangster Jung Tae-min played by Jo Han-sun. He is equally as slimy as Waise Lee in the original movie. A shootout ensues, with Hyuk being captured by the local authorities, and Jungs duplicity is kept a secret. Hyuks friend, Lee Young-choon enraged at the capture of his friend, confronts the Thai gang, and like the original movie ends up crippled. Song Seung-hon plays Lee, this films version of Mark Gor. Unlike that film, this wont give him the same kind of worldwide fame that the original gave Chow Yun Fat, as he doesnt make the same kind of impression.
Performance wise, no one really stands out. There arent any bad performances, but they also dont stand heavy scrutiny when compared with the performers in the original movie. Song Hae-sung also doesnt make as much as in impression in the directors chair as John Woo did with the original. He made more of an impression with his earlier film, the excellent wrestling biopic Rikidozan (2004). He does have a sure hand when it comes to the films action scenes, and the finale is a lot larger in scale to the original film.
There are slight differences between the remake and the original. The main character is also a policeman, and not just a gangster. They are arms dealers instead of counterfeiters and Hyuk knows that he was betrayed by Jung, where in the original the character of the villain, Shings motives are not known until later in the film. To the detriment of the film, the run time is also considerably longer than the original, running at 124 minutes compared to the originals 95 minute run time.
For people that complained about the homo-erotic overtones of the original, they really should give this film a miss, as they are turned up to 11. Like a lot of Korean dramas the characters are very emotional, and cry a lot. Every reunion or farewell has scenes of men crying. It kind of ruins the supposed tough guy mystique. Of course you want the characters to appear somewhat realistic, but I dont think hardened gangsters wear their hearts on their sleeves like these guys do. There are also no main female roles at all, not even a poorly written girlfriend role.
Compared to other Korean action thrillers of the time, such as Kim Jee-woons I Saw the Devil (2010), A Better Tomorrow really pales in comparison. Compared to the original film it is also a failure, being more of a curio for fans of the original series than being able to stand on its own.
South African director Daryne Joshua - writer of stellar short film Nommer 37, which we covered in these pages a while back - makes his feature debut with the upcoming period set crime drama Call Me Thief (Noem My Skollie).
Based on the actual experiences of screenwriter John W Fredericks, the film tells the story of a group of friends growing up in the notorious Cape Flats who form a pact with one another as a means of self preservation and quickly slide into a life of petty gangsterism. When a pair of the group end up in prison one discovers a talent for telling stories and carves out a protected space for himself as the 'prison cinema' and tries to carve out a life for himself on release only to be indicted for a muder he did not commit.
Due for release in South African cinemas in September the first trailer has just arrived and looks quite promising. Take a look below.
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The popular East Bay pastime of having illegal Sunday afternoon sideshows was brought to an abrupt halt around 3:30 p.m. Sunday when reports came into CHP of three vehicles with paper dealer plates weaving through Bay Bridge traffic at high speeds and then halting traffic just west of Yerba Buena Island in order to do donuts. As the CHP reports via Facebook, a private citizen who captured much of the incident on her cell phone also called it in, resulting in two of the individuals responsible to be apprehended immediately.
The drivers were speeding in a black and a white Ford Mustang, respectively, and one driver was cited and released while the driver of the black vehicle was arrested and his vehicle impounded. Charges will be filed against him with the San Francisco DA's Office.
According to CBS 5, the arrested man is 20-year-old Moises Rosales. The third car, a Camaro, got away and the driver remains at large. Witnesses are asked to call Officer Vu Williams at 415-557-1094.
Says San Francisco Area CHP Commander Christopher Sherry, "Im pleased the CHP was able to apprehend the subjects responsible for this unsafe and disruptive behavior. A recklessly driven vehicle is a deadly weapon. If one chooses to drive recklessly, they could be jailed, be fatally injured, or take someones life; perhaps the life of someone they love."
Indeed, while plenty popular on social media, sideshows have led to fatalities in recent years, including this incident in which a motorcyclist died in 2014, and this November shooting of a man at a sideshow holding a replica weapon.
A similar sideshow happened on the Bay Bridge in February 2016, though it's unclear if any arrests were ever made in that case.
Below, video taken by a bystander at the scene and posted to Instagram.
Heading to d10e in San Francisco.
Bitcoin techies are dangerous folks. Can't be too safe. pic.twitter.com/Rlt0hr5qtm John McAfee (@officialmcafee) July 18, 2016
The fifth annual d10e conference, which has something to do with bitcoin, "disruptive tech," and "the hottest developments in decentralization," is happening today and tomorrow at the Marriott Marquis downtown, and guess who's still not in jail and is headed here to deliver the keynote address! John McAffee. And he will be armed.
McAfee tweeted the above yesterday showing the guns he's bringing to SF, saying (jokingly?), "Bitcoin techies are dangerous folks. Can't be too safe." (Hat tip: SF Weekly.)
As Yahoo Finance tells us, McAfee will be delivering the morning keynote at the conference on Wednesday, and there are apparently tickets available for a private meet-and-greet with him at Ozumo restaurant at 6 p.m. today.
Though we can not confirm that McAfee has a mental illness that may or may not have been brought on by years of drug use McAfee himself has insisted he is not crazy, and that all of his internet and on-camera craziness was just an act he did make headlines four years ago after being arrested in Belize, where he was living, on suspicion of manufacturing crystal meth. He was never charged in the crime, but then was on the run from Belizian authorities a few months later after a neighbor of his was found dead. McAfee was wanted for questioning in the crime, because he'd notably had a dispute with this neighbor, but claimed he did not trust the police and sought asylum in Guatemala before ultimately returning to the US via Miami and giving an interview to NBC Bay Area's Raj Mathai. He admitted to having multiple teenage girlfriends, two of whom he was trying to bring to the States, but would not talk about the dead neighbor.
As he told Wired in 2012, you could blame some of his erratic behavior on a bad trip he had in 1969, mistakenly snorting a whole bag of the drug DMT and having severe hallucinations and panic. Within an hour my mind was shattered, he said. And... "Part of him believes hes still on that trip, that everything since has been one giant hallucination and that one day hell snap out of it and find himself back on his couch in St. Louis, listening to Pink Floyds Dark Side of the Moon."
Since then, though, he founded McAfee Associates in 1989 in his Santa Clara home, makers of the 1990s-popular cybersecurity software, which was acquired by Intel in 2010 for $7.68 billion, and had multiple homes around the country until he sold them and disappeared into the jungles of Belize in 2009, claiming he was setting up a lab to research new antibiotics. His arrest in April 2014 on the meth charges he says was based on a fabrication by the government, as was the murder for which he was never arrested or charged but he's remained weirdly obsessed with guns, and many photos of him in the last several years feature him holding a firearm of some kind.
So, it's wholly in character that he would travel to a tech conference in SF with guns, it's just a little bit disturbing given the general mood of the country right now and the fact that the last thing we need is an arguably unstable millionaire (he claimed in 2013 to not have any money left, but it's believed he has a few million left of his onetime $100 million fortune), waving his guns around at a bunch of bitcoin Libertarians.
Oh, and did I mention he's running for President? Because he is.
Previously: Video: John McAfee Opens Up to NBC's Raj Mathai
In a move that should surprise no one, President Barack Obama has endorsed California Attorney General Kamala Harris in her campaign to become the state's next US senator.
In a statement sent to media Tuesday, Obama said I am proud to endorse Kamala Harris for United States Senate because Ive seen her work."
Kamala is a lifelong courtroom prosecutor with only one client: the people of the State of California. Thats the approach shell take to the United States Senate."
Tuesday's words were far more circumspect than those Obama used a few years ago, when he praised her appearance at a Silicon Valley fundraising event.
"She's brilliant and she's dedicated, she's tough... She also happens to be, by far, the best-looking attorney general," Obama said during a Atherton lunch in April, 2013.
Later that day, the president called Harris to apologize for the remark.
You know, they are old friends and good friends, then-White House press secretary Jay Carney, told the New York Times. "he did not want in any way to diminish the attorney generals professional accomplishments and her capabilities.
Kamalas experience has taught her that if youre going to give everybody a fair shot, youve got to take on the special interests that too often stand in the way of progress, Obama said in today's statement.
Vice-President Joe Biden also gave his nod to Harris, saying via press release Tuesday that Todays Senate needs people like her - leaders who will always fight to make a difference and who never forget where they come from.
Harris served two terms as San Francisco's District Attorney before being elected as CA AG in 2010. In January of last year she announced her campaign to run for the US Senate seat presently occupied by Barbara Boxer, who has represented California in the Senate since 1992 and will be retiring. From her announcement on, Harris was seen as the frontrunner for the seat, roundly beating her opponent, Orange County Democratic congresswoman Loretta Sanchez, in both polling and fundraising.
If elected, Harris will make history: As the daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica, she would be the first Indian woman and second black woman elected to the Senate. In a brief email sent Tuesday morning, Harris responded to the endorsements, saying that she was was honored to receive the support of two incredible leaders for our nation.
Yet another of the "first generation" Hayes Valley businesses those that have been around since the neighborhood first began its current gentrification, after the double-decker section of the Central Freeway that went over Hayes Street came down due to damage in the '89 earthquake, in 1992 is biting the dust, as Eater informs us. Momi Toby's Revolution Cafe and Art Bar is giving up the ghost after 23 years on Laguna Street, and via a liquor license transfer application, they learn that local restaurant PR person Jen Pelka is teaming up with a couple partners to open a Champagne bar in the space to be called The Riddler.
Momi Toby's owner Anthony Shou, who's only owned the business since 2013, told Hoodline a full year ago that he'd received nine offers to buy the place just in two years, but he seemed to be holding out for a buyer who'd keep the place going as the scrappy neighborhood cafe and bar that it had been for two decades. It sounds like Pelka finally made him an offer he couldn't turn down, however.
The name, The Riddler, derives from the part of the Champagne making process known as riddling a turning and gradual tilting of the bottles, neck down, so that the yeast and sediment from the bottle-fermentation process collects in the neck and can be removed. The process, pioneered by Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin, known as the Widow Clicquot ("veuve" is "widow" in French) is mostly done by huge machines these days, but was originally done by hand using large wooden racks and it's still done this way at Schramsberg in the Napa Valley, if you ever want to see. As the story goes, the Widow Clicquot inherited the Champagne house and became the first woman ever to run one in 1805. Unhappy with the cloudy, sediment-filled bottles that were being produced, she and her cellar master, Antoine de Muller, invented riddling racks and she began making the brand famous in royal courts throughout Europe and in imperial Russia, for its clarity and quality.
Pelka is paying tribute to Ponsardin with the name in part because The Riddler will be an entirely female-run business.
It remains unclear when Momi Toby's may close, and it remains open for now liquor license transfers typically take a couple of months. After that, there will be renovations, and an opening date for the Champagne bar remains TBA. Stay tuned.
If you're into the intrigue that happens at City Hall especially where Chinatown power player Rose Pak is concerned, then get this: You know how Pak had her whole falling out with Ed Lee in the last two years because he failed to appoint her choice Cindy Wu for District 3 Supervisor when David Chiu vacated his seat to go to the state Assembly? Well, Wu is back in play, potentially, and has perhaps made the strategic move to an apartment in District 6 in order to position herself as a successor to Jane Kim, if Kim should win the election to State Senate in the fall. As Nevius reports, Pak is behind a push for Wu, who this week may end up getting elected chair of the local Democratic County Central Committee, and who could become a progressive replacement for Kim something the mayor may not want, politically, but he may not want to get on Pak's bad side again.
And this week there were two rallies in support of Mayor Ed Lee, and against a recall effort, both organized by Pak as an apparent gesture of goodwill and perhaps the first in a quid pro quo campaign to get him to support Wu.
There is the possibility that Wiener wins the senate seat, in which case the mayor will get to appoint another moderate to Wiener's chair on the Board, but Pak is apparently putting her money behind Kim which isn't surprising since Pak likes supporting Asian-American candidates, and she says she still supports the mayor for that reason, despite their differences. Pak previously supported Kim to replace Chiu as president of the Board, but that job went to London Breed.
And in part thanks to Pak's campaign help, the mayor's appointee to the D3 seat, Julie Christensen, was pushed out of office last November by returning Supervisor Aaron Peskin.
Pak only recently returned from China where she'd spent six months rehabilitating from a reported kidney problem. But she's already hard at work, at seems, getting her hands dirty in the upcoming election, which will also see replacements elected for two termed-out progressives, John Avalos and David Campos.
Previously: Rose Pak Returns Following Extended Medical Stay In China
Though much ink has been spilled on the increasingly-divided nature of San Francisco's Board of Supervisors, two of the Supes who are in frequent opposition came together late Monday, agreeing on legislation that, if approved, would pave the way for as many as 30,000 new residences in San Francisco. That is, if building owners chose to take advantage of it.
In a joint press release, D2 Supe Mark Farrell and D3's Aaron Peskin announced that the often-at-odds duo had merged their battling ordinances on Accessory Dwelling Units the residences most commonly known as "in-laws" in San Francisco.
According to the release sent by both their offices, "the landmark legislation paves the way for the creation of tens of thousands of new permanently rent-controlled residential units, while protecting neighborhood diversity and small businesses. It gives appropriate consideration to neighborhood noticing and public process, while maximizing the potential for additional density within the existing built envelope of projects."
It was decided at the Board of Supes' Land Use and Transportation Committee meeting Monday, the Chron reports, when Peskin, Farrell, and D8 Supe Scott Wiener amended the dueling measures, following months of quarreling "over how those in-law units should be constructed and what regulations they would fall under."
Peskin had first introduced legislation to allow the construction of new units within existing buildings in March. Farrell introduced a competing proposal in May, and last month submitted a November ballot measure on the issue, spurring Peskin to send "a scathing note to the board, saying that Wiener and Farrell had gone behind his back to craft an alternative proposal," the Chron reports.
But all that is water under the bridge, as Farrell will now be pulling his ballot measure, and the Board will this afternoon vote on the legislation, which would, per the Supes' release, "would allow the unlimited construction of ADUs within buildings that are five units or more and will cap new units at no more than one unit in buildings that are four units or less."
"Each new unit constructed would be allowed to be built or expanded within a buildings existing envelope. All ADUs would be rent-controlled rental properties, except for ADUs built in existing condominium buildings with no prior eviction history, which would also provide for new home ownership opportunities."
The legislation would not allow any new ADUs to become short-term rentals (such as Airbnbs). It also "bans such units altogether in parts of The City zoned for single-family homes," the Ex reports.
Already, some are complaining that the legislation is too restrictive. Speaking with the Ex, Sonja Trauss, founder of the San Francisco Bay Area Renters Federation, says that units should be allowed outside the boundaries of the current structure, for example, in a building's back yard.
People should be able to build to the buildable envelope, Trauss said. It is buildable. I dont really see any downside at all besides the fact that some neighbors might have to let their eyes pass over a new thing that looks different and unfriendly to them.
Farrell disagrees, however, saying that I have three little kids. We need a backyard as well...It is a balancing act, and we need to do something that everybody can live with. We have gotten pretty darn close to that.
"Our housing crisis continues in San Francisco, and I believe we need to do everything possible at the Board of Supervisors to build more housing at every income level," Farrell says via press release.
This law will help realize thousands of new permanently rent-controlled units, protect and promote neighborhood character and diversity, and will make a meaningful impact in our Citys housing shortage and crisis.
The full Board of Supes is expected to pass the legislation today. Following a second vote on July 26, it'll hit Mayor Ed Lee's desk for approval, and will become law 30 days after that. The next question is, will any building owners actually take advantage of it?
According to the Ex, that's unclear. Though Wiener passed legislation legalizing construction of ADUs is his district in 2014 and then-D3 Supe Julie Christensen passed similar legislation in hers shortly thereafter, no new units have been constructed. (This, despite the spiffy booklet Planning made for building owners and contractors!) Will the rest of the city be any different? Perhaps if the application process is streamlined, Peskin says, arguing the Planning Department's current hoops are why ADU construction never moved forward in those areas.
A city outreach program for property owners that provides "technical assistance and reference to possible financial assistance through banks" will also be provided, Peskin says, which might encourage more to build.
"I am focused on ensuring that the City does everything possible to incentivize the use of the affordable housing tools we are creating, Peskin says via release.
I want the City to work with property owners to encourage use of this program, so we start reaping the benefits as soon as possible.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. More than 150 years after slaves were freed in the U.S., voters in five states will soon decide whether to close loopholes that led to the proliferation of a different form of slavery forced labor by people convicted of certain crimes.
SIOUX CITY | Century 21 ProLink in Sioux City will merge with Le Mars-based real estate brokerage Property Pros, company officials said Thursday.
The combined real estate brokerage will now include 51 real estate agents specializing in residential, commercial and relocation property sales and property management, making it the largest firm in Siouxland, according to a Century 21 ProLink news release.
"The power of the Century 21 ProLink brand will help us take full advantage of the fast-changing world of real estate technology," Property Pros co-owner and broker Lisa Wagner said in the release. "It will not only give our agents access to more tools but will also increase the exposure of our clients' properties."
Wagner, Property Pros co-owner and broker Jim Gergeni and Century 21 ProLink owner and broker Kyle Kelly will lead the firm, the release said, with each focusing on a specific piece of the firm. The staff from both firms will be retained.
Kelly said in the release that he, Wagner and Gergeni share similar values and run their businesses in similar ways.
"We are confident that this merger will greatly benefit our clients and agents," he said.
Current Century 21 ProLink chief operating officer Virginia Anderson will continue as the firm's CEO, the release said.
Century 21 ProLink's headquarters will remain in the Plymouth Block building at 1114 Fourth St. in Sioux City. Property Pro's former office at 41 Central Ave. NW in Le Mars also will remain open.
SOUTH SIOUX CITY | Ryan Moore has maintained a connection with Hillary Clinton ever since the then-first lady held a then-6-year-old Moore while she testified at a congressional hearing on health care reform.
More than two decades later, Moores connection with Clinton has remained, and next week Moore will speak in support of Clintons presidential bid at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
When I was asked to do it, I was really, honestly in shock, said Moore, who has a rare form of dwarfism. Moore is now 29 years old and works as an instructional technology leader for the South Sioux City school district. Weve kind of maintained a great friendship over the years, and its overwhelming to think Ill be speaking at the Democratic National Convention. Its pretty humbling.
Clinton, the former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state, is the presumptive Democratic candidate for president. Her nomination becomes official at next weeks national convention in Philadelphia.
Moore, who will speak at the convention on Tuesday, said he plans to share his personal story and how Clinton has supported him.
When Moore was young, his father had difficulty finding work because employers were hesitant to insure the family. A health care advocacy organization selected Moore and his family among 10 from across the country to participate in a congressional hearing on health care reform. The organization was looking for families with health care issues.
That is when Moore and his family first met Clinton, who picked up Moore and held him throughout her remarks.
Moore said Clinton remained in touch over the years. She mentioned him in two books she has written, including the 1996 "It Takes a Village."
She was always willing to give an encouraging thought or word whenever I was getting ready to have surgery, Moore said. We just clicked, it seemed like, from that first time when she picked me up for her speech.
Moore said in his convention speech he hopes to convey that he thinks Clinton is compassionate, strong and genuine. He said he thinks those traits he sees in her will make her a great commander-in-chief.
I believe she would take those same characteristics and more to the White House, Moore said.
Moore is one of the "everyday Americans who will share their stories and experiences at the convention of an America that is stronger together," the Democratic National Committee said in a late Monday news release. The only speaker on the list from Iowa, Nebraska or South Dakota, Moore is a part of a lineup Tuesday that will highlight Clinton's "Lifetime of Fighting for Children and Families."
Additional convention speakers, including national leaders, advocates and celebrities, will be announced in the coming days.
ONAWA, Iowa | A Blencoe, Iowa, man has pleaded not guilty to pointing a gun at his family and a police officer.
John Gibson Jr., 38, entered his written plea Monday in Monona County District Court to felon in possession of a firearm, assault on a peace officer and two counts each of child endangerment and assault while participating in a felony.
According to court documents, Gibson pointed a loaded .22-caliber rifle at a police officer who responded to a disturbance call on June 20 at 178 Main St. in Blencoe. Gibson was taken into custody after several minutes of negotiations.
Authorities said police determined that Gibson had pointed a firearm at family members prior to the officer's arrival.
SIOUX CITY | It took a few contacts, but police officers were able to find the gun believed to be used to shoot and kill Dustin Wilder.
South Sioux City police officers Jeanette McFee, Clint Nelson and Jeremy Grace testified Tuesday that they found the Taurus .40-caliber handgun in a trailer home in South Sioux City.
Their search had begun with information given by Amanda Schroeder, the wife of the defendant, Timothy Schroeder.
Timothy Schroeder, 30, of Sioux City, has pleaded not guilty in Woodbury County District Court to first-degree murder, going armed with intent and being a felon in possession of a firearm in connection with the Jan. 9, 2015, shooting death of Dustin Wilder, 29, of Sloan, Iowa. Schroeder and his wife gave Wilder a ride home from the Sloan Tap early in the morning. Wilder was found unconscious in his home at 621 Buckley St. later that morning by a dog sitter and was declared dead at the scene.
On Monday, Amanda Schroeder testified that she had friends Jose Guzman and Carlos Reynosa-Mendez clean out her car and take the gun from the back seat in the afternoon of Jan. 9, after Timothy Schroeder had turned himself in to his parole officer for a prior offense. She testified that she wanted nothing to do with the gun and asked her friends to take it.
When police interviewed Guzman and Reynosa-Mendez, they told officers the gun had been taken to another friend's house. Officers recovered the weapon at that location.
Guzman and Reynosa-Mendez were not arrested or charged. Woodbury County Sheriff's investigator Norm Peterson testified Tuesday that investigators asked the two where they had been the night Wilder was shot, but he did not recall if officers did any followup investigation to verify their stories.
Under questioning from public defender Jennifer Solberg, Peterson said that Amanda Schroeder's account of events that night differed during her three interviews with authorities.
"Each time, we learned some new information," Peterson said.
Amanda Schroeder has testified that her husband told her to leave the kitchen moments before she heard a gunshot. When she turned around, she testified, she saw Wilder lying on the kitchen floor and Timothy Schroeder holding the gun.
An autopsy showed Wilder died of a single gunshot to the head.
The trial will resume Wednesday morning.
PRIMGHAR, Iowa | A Paullina, Iowa, woman is facing several charges after authorities said she defrauded an 81-year-old of about $7,500 last year while working as his home health aide.
According to court documents, 36-year-old Rebecca Anna Marie Rutledge began working in April 2015 as a home health aide for an 81-year-old male. Documents say Rutledge had access to the man's credit card, permission to write checks from his account and access to a rubber stamp of his signature, which he used because he had difficulty writing.
Court documents say that between June 30 and Sept. 9 of 2015, Rutledge entered the mans debit card number into a card processing account on her mobile phone 28 times, with charges totaling $4,428.67. Bank records obtained by authorities show corresponding amounts of money leaving the mans account and entering Rutledge's.
In addition, documents say Rutledge wrote multiple checks to her photography business using the man's checkbook and deposited them in her account, as well as deposited an extra monthly paycheck for $2,800 dated for the month of July 2015.
In an interview with law enforcement, Rutledge admitted to making the transactions while the man was unaware and said that he did not owe her those payments for any services, documents say.
A warrant for Rutledge's arrest was served by the O'Brien County Sheriff's Office on July 12. Rutledge was charged with three counts of forgery and one count each of second-degree theft and unauthorized use of a credit card -- all class D felonies.
Rutledge was held in the O'Brien County Jail and released on a unsecured appearance bond of $10,000. Her preliminary hearing will be July 26.
CLEVELAND U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, told the Republican National Convention here Monday the nation is shrinking from its place of leadership in the world, and she accused Hillary Clinton of being unfit to be president.
Ernst, a first-term senator and Iraq War veteran, joined a former Navy SEAL and ex-member of the Army Special Forces on stage at the convention on a night aimed at making the case that presumptive nominee Donald Trump would make America safe."
Ernst faulted the Obama administration for failing to lead in a world jeopardized by a range of potential dangers. But while criticizing the president, she mostly trained her remarks on Clinton.
Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton cannot be trusted, Ernst said. Her judgment and character are not suited to be sitting in the most powerful office in the world.
Ernst also faulted Clinton for failing to put a stop to the expansion of terrorism in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, as well as lying about her private email server.
She also said Clinton backs policies that would bring captured terrorists "into our back yards."
Unlike a range of speakers earlier in the evening who faulted Clinton for the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Ernst made no mention of the attack. As for Trump, she praised him as someone who will not hesitate to call radical Islamic terrorism by its name, and he will not hesitate to destroy those that wish to harm our nation.
The claim that Clinton is not fit to be president in many ways echoes the doubts Democrats have been raising about Trump, questioning his temperament and judgment. And that is what Democrats did in response to Ernsts speech Monday night.
Tonight, Joni Ernst urged Iowans to support Donald Trump, a man who is temperamentally unfit to be commander in chief of the United States of America, whose foreign policy ideas are reckless, erratic and contradict our fundamental values, Iowa Democratic Party Chair Andy McGuire said, adding Trump has previously called the U.S. weak and praised Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Ernst, who has been battling a cold, was making a yet another foray Monday onto the national stage. In 2015, she gave the Republican Partys response to President Barack Obamas State of the Union address.
At the time, the speech drew a lot of attention for her mention of wearing bread bags on her shoes in bad weather as a child, a sign of rural Iowa frugality.
There was no mention of shoe coverings this time, but Ernst did talk of her upbringing and her mother, who she had earlier in the day said would be watching the speech back home. Ernst said her mother had instilled a tenacity in her that she linked with the can-do attitude she said has served as the foundation of our country for 240 years.
Also on stage with Ernst were Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Montana, a former Navy SEAL, and Jason Beardsley, a former Master Sergeant who was in U.S. Army Special Operations.
Walker speaks to Iowans
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker told Iowa Republican convention delegates Monday that whatever misgivings they may have had about presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump during the caucus season he is better than Democrat Hillary Clinton even if he was "your 17th choice."
Walker, who ran an ill-fated presidential bid that ended before Iowa's Feb. 1 precinct caucuses, said his backing for Trump was boosted by the recent addition of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate while an FBI report on Clinton's careless handling of sensitive documents via her private email server made her "unfit" to be president.
And, he said, even though he backed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz over Trump in Wisconsin's primary, the presumptive GOP nominee is the best hope to enact conservative changes to cut taxes, curb onerous government regulations, reduce debt, balance the federal budge and return power to states.
"America deserves better than Barack Obama and America deserves better than Hillary Clinton, that's for sure," he said.
Walker conceded that Trump "wasn't my first pick. I was my first pick," but he noted that he pledged to back the GOP nominee and advised his fellow Republicans to do the same now that the primary season is over.
WASHINGTON -- Neither the unanimous decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, nor China's rejection of it, was surprising. The timing of it was, however, as serendipitous as China's rejection is ominous. Coming as Republican delegates convene on Lake Erie's shore, the tribunal's opinion about the South China Sea underscores the current frivolousness of American politics, which is fixated on a fictitious wall that will never exist but silent about realities on and above the waters that now are the world's most dangerous cockpit of national rivalries.
China's "nine-dash line" aggression -- asserting sovereignty over the South China Sea -- is being steadily implemented by the manufacture and militarization of artificial "islands" far from China's mainland, and by increasingly reckless air and naval actions in the region. China is attempting to intimidate the six nations (the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and Indonesia) whose claims conflict with China's. China has threatened these nations', and others', freedom on the seas, fishing rights, oil exploration and more.
In 2013, the Philippines took its case to the Court of Arbitration, whose jurisdiction China pre-emptively rejected. The Philippines has now won most of its claims but has achieved nothing unless the United States leads regional powers in enforcing this decision. The Hague has no navy.
International law fulfills important functions but often is most successful when least important: It arbitrates disputes about rights and duties among likeminded nations that acknowledge its underlying norms. When, however, a rising nation's interests and aspirations conflict with those norms, trying to restrain this nation with those norms is like lassoing a locomotive with a cobweb.
So, although it was prudent for the Philippines to bring this case, and although the court conscientiously measured China's claims and behavior next to the pertinent precedents, the court's correct legal decision makes the world more dangerous: China now knows that only force can achieve its ends. We are, as Secretary of Defense Ash Carter has said with notable understatement, in a "long-term competitive situation."
The projection of U.S. power to the far side of the Pacific depends on alliances and cooperation -- including access to bases -- with Australia, India, the Philippines, Thailand, Japan, South Korea and others. China's aim of dominance in the region can only be achieved by weakening the U.S. allies' confidence -- particularly that of the Philippines, which seems susceptible to China's promises of development projects -- in U.S. resolve. And confidence in U.S. skill at calibrating the pressure requisite for countering China's ambitions without provoking a Chinese miscalculation in a region where U.S. military assets, especially naval, still dominate.
Two U.S. carrier groups have visited the region this year. China is developing and deploying a modern nuclear submarine fleet, land-based aircraft and anti-ship ballistic missiles, and other means of pushing back the U.S. presence. Chinese military aircraft have made dangerous approaches to U.S. military aircraft. A Taiwanese naval vessel accidentally sank, with an anti-ship missile, a Taiwanese shrimp boat. Accidents happen. And intentional acts can have unintended consequences. A single assassination loosed the cascade of events that produced the war that was devouring Europe 100 years ago.
At the start of the turn of the 20th century, the world's most formidable challenge was to integrate into the international system a rising, restless, assertive Germany. This did not go well. Early in the 21st century, China poses a comparable challenge. If this does not go well, the differences might be arbitrated by weapons undreamt of a century ago.
This week, the Republican Party will formalize its judgment that the Navy, the nuclear launch codes and other important things should be placed in the hands of someone not known for nuance, patience or interest in allies and collective security. Americans, dismayed by two consecutive commanders in chief -- the recklessness of one and the inconstancy of his successor -- must now decide whether, and if so how and by whom, they want U.S. power to be projected.
In the South China Sea, says Secretary Carter, America must steel itself for "a long campaign of firmness, and gentle but strong pushback." This will require freedom of navigation assertions, involving naval and air operations that challenge, among other things, China's expansive claims to sovereignty over islands and waters far from its mainland.
If the next president does not conduct such operations with steady, measured skill, the result could be the collapse of America's position in the world's most populous, dynamic and perhaps dangerous region, or war. Is any of this on anyone's mind in Cleveland?
CLEVELAND | Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker told Iowa Republican convention delegates Monday that whatever misgivings they may have had about presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump during the caucus season he is better than Democrat Hillary Clinton even if he was "your 17th choice."
Walker, who ran an ill-fated presidential bid that ended before Iowa's Feb. 1 precinct caucuses, said his backing for Trump was boosted by the recent addition of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate while an FBI report on Clinton's careless handling of sensitive documents via her private email server made her "unfit" to be president.
And, he said, even though he backed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz over Trump in Wisconsin's primary, the presumptive GOP nominee is the best hope to enact conservative changes to cut taxes, curb onerous government regulations, reduce debt, balance the federal budge and return power to states.
"America deserves better than Barack Obama and America deserves better than Hillary Clinton, that's for sure," he said.
Walker conceded that Trump "wasn't my first pick. I was my first pick," but he noted that he pledged to back the GOP nominee and advised his fellow Republicans to do the same now that the primary season is over.
"It is clear that whether Donald Trump was your first choice or your second choice or your 17th choice, I hope you understand that Donald Trump is better than Hillary Clinton," Walker said.
Walker, who will address the Republican National Convention Wednesday evening, said this week's GOP proceedings provides an opportunity to show Americans Republicans would offer a path to "true freedom and prosperity" by empowering people to live their own lives rather than turn over control to "the mighty and clumsy hand of the government."
"I think it's an incredible opportunity for us to show what a better America would be under Republican leadership," he said.
Walker, whose family lived in Iowa for awhile when he was growing up, told reporters after his speech that he hasn't ruled out another run for the White House but he plans to seek re-election as governor in 2018 so he would not seek another office in he wins another term.
"We'll have to see," the Wisconsin governor said in regard to a future presidential bid. "Somebody told me in September I could wait 20 years and I'd still be younger than Hillary. "I don't know if I'll do that, but - if anything - I'll probably focus on running for reelection in 2018 as governor."
Kasich absence
Ohio Gov. John Kasichs absence at this weeks Republican National Convention in Cleveland has not gone unnoticed by the head of Iowas Republican Party.
Kasich who ran an unsuccessful 2016 presidential bid -- has meetings with various state delegations, business groups and events at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame but he is steering clear of the convention floor at the Quicken Loans Arena.
State GOP chairman Jeff Kaufmann says thats not being part of a team.
We are bringing tens of millions of dollars into the state of Ohio, tens of millions into one of his cities that needs this kind of economic growth more than anything else, Kaufmann told an Iowa group before heading to Cleveland.
Youre the governor of that state and youre not going to go to the convention thats bringing tens of millions in? Give me a break. Regardless of what you think about Donald Trump, what message does that send? I dont have time for that.
The Pence effect
Jim Kirkpatrick, a former Quad-Citian, may be a prime example for how Mike Pence helps Donald Trump this election with the GOP rank and file.
Kirkpatrick -- a financial adviser who now lives near Indianapolis and was a county chair for Ted Cruz in his state -- wasnt sold on Trump as the GOP nominee. But thats not the case any longer.
Picking Pence would probably be the only thing that would get me off the fence, Kirkpatrick said while attending the Iowa delegations breakfast reception in Ohio.
Kirkpatrick attended the breakfast with his sister, Kay Quirck, an alternate delegate from Alta in northwest Iowa.
He had high praise for Pence. The two go to the same church, and he said the governor is a good balance for Trump.
Want to advertise on Pinterest but not sure where to start? Even brands with budgets of $50 or less can create Promoted Pins to increase their reach on Pinterest. To learn how to make the most of your advertising budget on Pinterest, take a look at the tips below.
How to Advertise on Pinterest Without Spending a Ton
Choose Your Objective
On Pinterest, you can choose from a couple of different objectives for Promoted Pin campaigns engagement and traffic. So you have to consider your businesss goals and determine which is more important to you getting more engagement on Pinterest or getting more clicks to your website.
Ideally, getting engagement like repins on Pinterest will eventually lead to more traffic to your website. But if youre promoting something specific or time sensitive, youll likely want to set up a campaign where you pay for actual clicks to your site so that you can then direct users to your offerings or to a signup form for your list. Of course, you can also consider breaking up your advertising budget to do a few different Promoted Pins that fit with different objectives.
Promote Pins That Fit with Your Goals
Once youve decided on the overall goal for your campaign, you need to choose or create the right pin to promote. Your pin should fit with the goal that you are trying to achieve with your Pinterest ad campaign. So if youve decided to go with a traffic campaign so you can promote your new product line, youll need a pin that showcases your products clearly and in a visually pleasing way.
Alternatively, if you want to increase your engagement through Pinterest ads, you might want to go a different direction. Instead of just trying to sell something, offer something of value like an interesting piece of content that your ideal audience is likely to interact with. It should still be at least somewhat relevant to your business. But if you can get people interested enough to interact with those pins, they might be more likely to interact with and click on more of your future pins.
Use Compelling Images
Regardless of what type of ad you choose, you need to really focus on promoting strong images. Pinterest is such a visually inclined platform. So if you create a boring image, people are just going to keep scrolling. Instead, go with an image that stands out through bright colors, contrast, text overlay or some kind of other unique style element that can set your pins apart.
In addition, pins that are long or portrait style, rather than landscape images, tend to do better since they stay on users screens longer and take up more real estate. You dont want to pay a bunch of money to promote a pin if its going to be tiny and difficult to see. So make sure its going to look great and be easily readable in a thumbnail size.
Add a Relevant Description
Your pin description is also important in letting Pinterest users know what your pin is and why they should care. Try to use at least a couple of relevant keywords, but make sure the caption is also readable and offers value. In addition, hashtags dont have the same type of usability as they do on other platforms like Instagram and Twitter. So dont clutter your descriptions with tons of them.
Having a relevant and valuable description for your pins is important whether youre promoting a pin or not. But if youre paying to promote a pin, you need to show even more care in making sure you have a good caption. You dont want to pay to reach a ton of Pinterest users only to have them scroll past your pin because they dont really understand or know the value behind your post.
Include a Call to Action
Another great way to add some value to your Pinterest advertising campaign is through powerful and relevant calls to action. If you want someone to click through your pin to visit your website for some kind of exclusive offer, tell them! People often scroll through content and maybe save it when they see something that catches their eye. But if you want people to take a specific kind of action upon seeing your Promoted Pin, make it really easy for them.
Track Metrics
After youve launched a Promoted Pin campaign, you can access insights about the campaigns performance on the Pinterest Ads dashboard. From there, you can see your campaigns budget, the cost per engagement, and engagement rates and click-through rates.
Taking a look at those analytics periodically can help you determine what is working and what might need to change. You might also find that a particular pin is doing so well that you want to keep it going. If youre coming up on the end date you set for your campaign or the end of the budget you initially set, you can change your settings to keep your campaign going if youre happy with the results.
Promote Your Most Popular Pins
In addition to the budget and engagement rates, the Pinterest Ads dashboard also gives you the opportunity to view your highest and lowest performing Promoted Pins. If you have a limited budget to work with or want to make the most of your advertising dollars, you might consider halting your lowest performing pins and reallocating those funds to the pins that are doing well and bringing you lots of great results.
LEONARDTOWN, Md.
Jonathan Mclain Barnes, age 24, of Callaway.
Disclaimer: In the U.S.A., all persons accused of a crime by the State are presumed to be innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. See: http://so.md/presumed-innocence. Additionally, all of the information provided above is solely from the perspective of the respective law enforcement agency and does not provide any direct input from the accused or persons otherwise mentioned. You can find additional information about the case by searching the Maryland Judiciary Case Search Database using the accused's name and date of birth. The database is online at http://so.md/mdcasesearch . Persons named who have been found innocent or not guilty of all charges in the respective case, and/or have had the case ordered expunged by the court can have their name, age, and city redacted by following the process defined at http://so.md/expungeme.
(July 19, 2016)The St. Mary's County Sheriff's Office released the following incident and arrest reports.On July 17, sheriff's office units, Deputy J. Lacey, Deputy J. Bare, Deputy D. Potter, Deputy B. Foor, and Sgt. H. Young, responded to the Lexington Lounge located at 21736 Great Mills Road in Lexington Park for the report of an armed robbery. Upon arrival, the officers were told the suspect was hiding in the wood line near the Lexington Lounge. Officers located the suspect, who was later identified as Jonathan Mclain Barnes, age 24, of Callaway. Deputies also recovered a hat, mask, and handgun (not loaded) near the suspect in the woods.The officers made contact with bouncers of the Lexington Lounge who advised the suspect was walking outside the business in a suspicious manner. The bouncers asked everyone to enter the business to avoid the suspect. The suspect then approached the bouncers, produced a handgun, and held it to the throat of one of the bouncers while making threatening statements. The suspect lowered the gun and then fled across the street to a woodline behind a local business, where the bouncers kept an eye on him until officers arrived.Barnes was taken into custody without incident and transported to the St. Mary's County Detention Center. He was charged with Two Counts of First Degree Assault, Two Counts of Second Degree Assault, Handgun on Person, Use of a Firearm in the Commission of a Crime of Violence, Possession of a Regulated Firearm after Being a Person Convicted of a Disqualifying Crime, Possession of a Regulated Firearm after Being a Person Convicted of a Crime of Violence.Barnes has been remanded to the Detention Center and is being held on a $250,000 bond.On July 8, between the hours of 3 p.m. and 1 a.m., deputies conducted an operation at Myrtle Point Park, 24054 Patuxent Boulevard, in California. These proactive actions were in response to reports of criminal activity at the park and violations of park guidelines, received through the St. Mary's County Department of Recreation and Parks.Deputies observed numerous violations and the following individuals were issued citations during the operation: Ryan Alexander Walls, age 21, of California, criminal citation for consuming alcoholic beverages on public property Rion O'Neil Brooks, age 24, of Mechanicsville, criminal citation for consuming alcoholic beverages on public property Alphonso Warren Brooks, age 21, of Mechanicsville, civil citation for possessing marijuana less than 10 grams Brett Ladislaus Dvorak, age 19, of California, adult civil citation for possessing alcohol under 21 years of age Juvenile civil citation for possessing alcohol under 21 years of age Nicholas Anthony Morris, age 19 of Leonardtown, adult civil citation for possessing alcohol under 21 years of ageDuring the evening hours, deputies conducted speed enforcement on Patuxent Boulevard issuing six citations and 14 written warnings. Officers also stopped sixteen motor vehicles at the front gate of Myrtle Point Park, who had the intention of entering the park after closing hours to fish.The St. Mary's County Sheriff's Office and the St. Mary's County Department of Recreation and Parks, extends appreciation to visitors for their cooperation during enforcement and education operations. They also remind citizens to call the Sheriff's Office non-emergency line at 301-475-8008, to report suspicious activity.ASSAULT: Unknown suspect(s) fired rounds at a residence in the 22000 block of Oakley Road in Avenue. The case is being investigated by Deputy J. Kerns. CASE# 35826-16BURGLARY: A backpack was found in a trashcan near the fuel pumps at the Sheetz on Old Great Mills Road. The items inside the bag were returned to the owner. The investigation revealed unknown suspect(s) entered a victim's residence and stole the backpack in the 44000 block of Boxwood Drive in Callaway. The case is being investigated by Deputy K. Molitor. CASE# 35930-16BURGLARY: Unknown suspect(s) attempted to force entry into a church in the 22000 block of Benswood Drive in California. Corporal J. Vezzosi is investigating the case. CASE# 36441-16BURGLARY: Unknown suspect(s) entered a shed and stole property in the 28000 block of Three Notch Road in Mechanicsville. Deputy M. McCuen is investigating the case. CASE# 36443-167/16/2016 BURGLARY: On 7/15/2016, unknown suspect(s) entered a garage and stole property in the 45000 block of Buttercup Lane in Great Mills. Deputy First Class T. Teague is investigating the case. CASE# 36666-167/16/2016 BURGLARY: Between 7/15/2016 and 7/16/2016, unknown suspect(s) entered ransacked a residence in the 21000 block of Jettison Court in Lexington Park. There were no signs of forced entry, and Deputy J. Bare is investigating the case. CASE# 36579-167-16-2016 COUNTERFEIT COMPLAINT: Deputy McClure responded to WaWa for a counterfeit complaint. A counterfeit $5 bill was recovered. The case remains under investigation. CASE# 36744-167-16-2016 VANDALISM: A realtor's lock was cut from the door of a vacant residence in the 42000 block of Ridge Road in Ridge. Corporal L. Johnson is investigating the case. CASE# 36847-167-17-2016 BREAKING AND ENTERING TO A MOTOR VEHICLE: Unknown suspect(s() entered a motor vehicle and stole property in the 45000 block of Settlers Lane in California. Deputy D. McClure is investigating the case. CASE# 33498-167-18-2016 ROBBERY: Unknown suspect(s) knocked a victim to the ground and demanded money. The victim fell to the ground, and the suspects stole the victim's wallet and necklace, then fled the scene. Corporal J. Sommerville. CASE# 37050-16
PRINCE FREDERICK, Md.
Disclaimer: In the U.S.A., all persons accused of a crime by the State are presumed to be innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. See: http://so.md/presumed-innocence. Additionally, all of the information provided above is solely from the perspective of the respective law enforcement agency and does not provide any direct input from the accused or persons otherwise mentioned. You can find additional information about the case by searching the Maryland Judiciary Case Search Database using the accused's name and date of birth. The database is online at http://so.md/mdcasesearch . Persons named who have been found innocent or not guilty of all charges in the respective case, and/or have had the case ordered expunged by the court can have their name, age, and city redacted by following the process defined at http://so.md/expungeme.
(July 19, 2016)The Calvert County Sheriff's Office released the following incident and arrest reports.WEEKLY SUMMARY: During the week of July 11 through July 17, deputies responded to 1,256 calls for service throughout the community.BURGLARY CASE #16-39148: On July 13, at approximately 12:30pm, Deputy R. Spalding responded to Chesapeake Avenue, in St. Leonard, for the report of a burglary. The victim reported stepping away from their home for about 30 minutes and returned to find a purse missing from where it was left on a kitchen table. It appears the suspect(s) made entry through a back door, which the victim acknowledged they had not locked. Items stolen from the home include a brown leather purse and wallet, miscellaneous makeup, Rose & Keller prescription sunglasses with pink frames, a MD driver's license, health insurance card, a credit card, bottle of Oxycontin and bottle of Xanax prescription pills.BURGLARY CASE #16-39120: On July 13, Deputy O'Donnell and Detective M. Mudd conducted a burglary investigation of a business located on Steeple Chase Drive in Prince Frederick. The complainant reported arriving the morning of July 13, and discovered his business, Home Town Reality, had been burglarized. They were able to develop a suspect, Michael Steele, as the one responsible., was arrested and charged with Burglary4th Degree Theft, Burglary2nd Degree, Theft $1000 to under $10,000 and Destruction of Property.BURGLARY CASE #16-38933: On July 12, Deputy K. Williamson was called to the Sheriff's Office to speak with a victim who wanted to report a burglary of their home located on Broome's Island Road in Port Republic. The complainant reported leaving their home around 12:00pm on July 7 and returned at 2:00pm on July 10. During this period of time, an unknown person(s) made entry into the home and removed an Innovations Trail Camera.CDS VIOLATION CASE #16-39947: On July 17, at approximately 9:00pm, Deputy N. Buckler observed a vehicle strike a curb on Lynn Acres Lane in Lusby; the driver continued to travel south with the wheel squealing, smoking and emitting the smell of burnt rubber. He was able to eventually bring the vehicle driven by, to a stop on Newtown Road, in Lusby. Due to observing Ms. Staples' driving and the results of her Field Sobriety Tests, she was placed in handcuffs. She was charged with Possession of a Synthetic Narcotic (Percocet), Possession of a Dangerous Drug without a Prescription (Tramadol), Possession of Paraphernalia (cut straw), Driving While Under the Influence of Alcohol, Driving While Impaired by Alcohol, Driving While Under the Influence of Alcohol Per Se, and Failure to Return to and Remain at Scene of Accident Involving Vehicle Property Damage.CDS VIOLATION CASE #16-39737: On July 16, while Deputy K. Williamson was conducting traffic enforcement in the area of Breezy Point Beach, he observed a driver not restrained by their seat belt. He conducted a traffic stop and noticed a distinct odor of Marijuana coming from inside the vehicle The driver,, was found to be in Possession with Intent to Distribute Marijuana, Possession of Marijuana over 10 grams and Possession of Paraphernalia (plastic baggies). She was also issued a traffic citation for not wearing her seat-belt and transported to the Detention Center.CDS VIOLATION CASE #16-39354: On July 14, Deputy S. Trotter was dispatched to attend to an accident on Solomons Island Road, just south of the Prince Frederick Walmart. One of the drivers,, was found to be in Possession of Cocaine and Possession of Paraphernalia (plastic bag). He was transported to the Detention Center and charged accordingly.CDS VIOLATION CASE #16-38856: On July 11, Deputy C. Fox was called to Abners Marina on Harbor Road, Chesapeake Beach, for the report of a disorderly subject. Upon arrival Deputy Fox discovered, to be wanted through the Calvert County Sheriff's Office. While being processed at the Detention Center, it was discovered he was in possession of two Suboxone strips, with no proof of a prescription for the drug. He was charged with CDS: Possession of a Synthetic narcotic (Suboxone).CDS VIOLATION CASE #16-38782: On July 11, at approximately 1:00pm, Deputy K. Williamson received a lookout for a possible drunk driver operating a vehicle heading southbound on MD Rt. 4 in the area of Cox Road. The Control Center contacted him to report the vehicle had struck a guardrail and was stopped in the middle of the roadway. He finally caught up to the vehicle driven by, in the area of Southbound Rt. 4/South View Drive. She was placed under arrest for Possession of a Dangerous Substance (Heroin), Possession of Paraphernalia (syringe), Driving while Impaired by a Controlled Dangerous Substance (Suboxone), Driving While Impaired by Drug(s) or Drug(s) and Alcohol and Fail to Display Registration Card on Demand.DESTRUCTION OF PROPERTY CASE #16-39813: On July 16, at approximately 11:15pm, Deputy G. Gott responded to the area of S. Solomon's Island Road/Lore Road in Solomon's for the report of damaged property. The complainant reported seeing 45 youths throwing rocks at his vehicle, causing damage to the paint on the driver's side door. A canvass of the area was conducted, but Deputy Gott was not able to locate the suspects.DESTRUCTION OF PROPERTY CASE #16-39545: On July 15, at approximately 4:00pm, Deputy J. Migliaccio received a call for a destruction of property on Good Shepherd Way in Owings. The victim stated that sometime between July 9th12th, someone tampered with a vehicle, parked in their driveway, by cutting a sensor wire. A professional mechanic had confirmed the wire was deliberately cut; it was not damaged accidentally.DESTRUCTION OF PROPERTY CASE #16-38788: On July 11, Deputy R. Burggraff responded to Loring Drive in Huntingtown for a destruction of property complaint. The victim reported hearing a dog barking in their front yard, at approximately 7:00am that morning, and later that day, discovered a pillow belonging on one of their porch chairs was torn and another pillow was found in their driveway. A seashell was also stolen from a table on the porch.DISORDERLY CONDUCT CASE #16-39039: On July 12, Deputy N. Buckler responded to Hernandez Lane in Lusby for the report of a disorderly person armed with a knife and smashing car windows. The victim reported Tavaughn Weeks was in his house and was not welcome there. When he asked Mr. Weeks to leave, he became disorderly and smashed his car windows. Nicole Simone Gray, also on the scene, was repeatedly told to calm down and also became disorderly. Both parties,, and, were transported to the Detention Center. Ms. Gray was charged with Disorderly Conduct and Resist/Interfere with Arrest. Mr. Weeks was charged with Disorderly Conduct, Resist/Interfere with Arrest and Malicious Destruction of Property $1,000 plus.FLEEING AND ELUDING CASE #16-39046: On July 12, at approximately 10:15pm, Deputy C. Fox observed a vehicle driving unsafely and was alerted that the tags were possibly stolen. A pursuit ensued with the suspect vehicle traveling at speeds of 110mph in a posted 40mph zone. The vehicle continued to be driven recklessly, failing to yield right of ways, excessive speeding and operating with its' headlights off. Once on Randle Avenue, the driver,, bailed out of the car and the passenger,, was detained. Shaffer was charged with Hindering an Investigation (for providing a false name of the driver) and for Theft Under $1000 (for Possession of Stolen Tags). An arrest warrant has been issued for Jason Marks, who will be charged with fleeing and eluding, possession of stolen property and the following traffic violations: negligent driving, reckless driving, driving vehicle in excess of reasonable and prudent speed, changing lanes when unsafe, failure to drive right of center, failure to obey a traffic control device, unauthorized display of registration plates, driving vehicle with tags to another vehicle, driving an uninsured vehicle, driving unregistered vehicle, driving without a license, driving while suspended out of state, failure to display license and failure to display registration.HATE CRIME CASE #16-39654: On July 16, Deputy S. Morder responded to Dartmoor Drive in Huntingtown in reference to a disorderly call. The complainant reported that someone pulled his solar lights out of the ground and laid them down in a swastika design. He also reported the suspect(s) used a white caulk material and wrote "US" on the sidewalk in front of his house. No known suspects at this time.HOME INVASION CASE #16-39649: In the early morning hours on July 16, Sheriff deputies assisted the Maryland State Police with a home invasion that took place on Easy Street in Owings. The victim reported waking up from being beaten unconscious by 2 to 3 black males, who had kicked in the back door of his home and were able to gain entry. Once inside a brief struggle ensued when the suspects demanded money and knocked the victim unconscious. The suspects stole prescription medication and two (2) firearms (.357 caliber Taurus Revolver/Model 65 and a .44 caliber Sturm Ruger Revolver/Model Black Hawk). Paramedics arrived to assist with the victim's injuries.THEFT CASE #16-39952: On July 17, Deputy A. Locke received a theft complaint from a victim who works at the Chesapeake Beach Water Park on Gordon Stinnett Avenue. The victim reported leaving their Apple iPhone 6 plus sitting near the first aid station and when they returned to retrieve the phone, it was missing.THEFT CASE #16-39743: On July 16, Deputy A. Woodford made contact with a complainant in the lobby of the Sheriff's Office who wanted to report the theft of a Next brand bicycle. Sometime between 10:00pm on July 15 and 10:00am on July 16, someone cut the chain attached to a black 24" boys 'Next' brand mountain bike. The bike had red lettering and red trim.THEFT CASE #16-38828: On July 11, Deputy A. Woodford responded to a theft complaint, the victim stated had taken place earlier in the day at Driftwood Beach in Lusby. The victim arrived home and discovered a gold and white Tommy Hilfiger purse, with all its' contents (driver license, credit cards, money, Sephora gift card, wallet, student ID and iPhone 6 charger) to be missing.
(WB) Over the course of one night at the Republican National Convention, two different speakers Monday exemplified the partys desire of LGBT outreach on one hand and continuing attacks on LGBT people on the other.
Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan before becoming director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, criticized the Obama administrations effort to advance LGBT rights in which he called President Obama spineless and Hillary Clinton reckless.
Our soldiers, our soldiers deserve to hear from our leaders with clarity and precision, Flynn said. Too often, way too often, our troops are instead are distracted by trivial matters, trivial matters about what words to use, what terminology is politically correct and what bathroom door to open up. My God, my God, war is not about bathrooms, war is not about political correctness or words that are meaningless.
Its hard to say what exactly the bathroom remarks were intended to mean, but given the recent national debate on transgender use of restrooms, it could be a reference to the end of the ban on transgender military service. It could also be an attack on Obamas effort to repeal Dont Ask, Dont Tell, a law that prohibited openly gay people from serving in the armed forces.
The nations largest LGBT group, the Human Rights Campaign, took the remarks as an attack on transgender service and condemned Flynn via Twitter.
It took 10 years for transgender heroes to be able to serve openly. At #RNCinCLE Gen. Flynn treats them as a punchline. Shame on him. HumanRightsCampaign (@HRC) July 19, 2016
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who energized the crowd more than any other speaker Monday night, on the other hand offered a gay-inclusive vision as he praised police officers in the aftermath of fatal attacks targeting them.
We say thank you to every police officer and law enforcement agent whos out tonight, protecting us, black, white, Latino, of every race, every color, every creed, every sexual orientation, Giuliani said. When they come to save your life, they dont ask if you are black or white, they just come to save you.
Related: Clyburn: Election Most Consequential of Lifetime
The line may have inspired the loudest applause for the night at the convention, although Giuliani was well-received throughout his entire speech as he bashed Obamas policies, criticized Hillary Clintons handling of Benghazi and praised the potential of a Trump presidency.
Gregory Angelo, president of Log Cabin Republicans, said Giulianis remarks had a greater effect on the crowd than Flynns attack.
Judging by the reaction from the crowd I witnessed in the arena, its clear Giulianis inclusive message resonated far more than Flynns rambling remarks, Angelo said.
Both speakers made the remarks just hours after the delegates ratified a Republican platform considered the most anti-LGBT in history. Among other things, the platform seeks to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court decision in favor of same-sex marriage and opposes laws enabling transgender people to use the restroom consistent with their gender identity.
TJ Helmstetter, a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee, said the GOPs extremism was on full display regardless of remarks from Giuliani.
Even the Log Cabin Republicans admit their party just adopted the most anti-LGBT platform in history, Helmstetter said. Not enough fog machines in the world exist to hide the discrimination and divisiveness at the RNC this week.
Another speaker on Monday was Willie Robertson, CEO of Duck Commander and star of A&Es hit series Duck Dynasty, which is known for stars who hold anti-LGBT views. Although Robertson didnt say anything anti-LGBT during his remarks, his show was once cancelled after co-star Phil Robertson decried homosexuality as a sin.
Melania Trump, wife of presumptive nominee Donald Trump, was the highlighted speaker of the evening. Despite Trumps reputation for running a campaign based on demonizing minority groups, Melania Trump insisted he would be an inclusive leader as president.
Related: Trump and Cruz Kissing On Billboard Near RNC
Donald intends to represent all of the people, not just some of the people, Melania Trump said. That includes Christians, Jews and Muslims. It includes Hispanics and African Americans and Asians and the poor and the middle class.
As first noticed on Twitter by Los Angeles-based Jarrett Hill, large portions of Melania Trumps speech seemed to have been lifted from first lady Michelle Obamas speech during the 2008 Democratic National Convention.
Also on Monday, the Never Trump movement, which sought to deprive Trump of the Republican presidential nomination, seems to have met its end after the delegates approved the rules as written by the Rules Committee.
Republican opponents of Trump were seeking a conscience clause allowing delegates to select a nominee of their choice as opposed to being forced to vote for Trump, which didnt make it into the final rules.
Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), presiding as chair, sought a voice vote twice on accepting the rules but after the second vote, determined the ayes had won. A brief floor fight ensued in which delegates alternately chanted, U-S-A! U-S-A! and Trump! Trump! Trump!
A Utah delegate sought a roll-call vote. Although nine states initially supported it, Womack said some delegates withdrew support and only six states had valid requests. Seven were necessary.
Christian Berle, a gay D.C. delegate pledged to Ohio Gov. John Kasich and a proponent of the Never Trump effort, said the delegates decision to accept the rules as proposed is very disappointing.
There are a large degree of delegates from across the country who believe that the rules report should have included a conscience clause in particular to allow delegates to support who they fully believe should run the party and run the country, Berle said.
U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power addressed a United Nations conference on the integration of LGBTI rights into foreign policy last week in Uruguay.
The I in the LGBTI acronym stands for intersex.
In her remarks to the conference, Power, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., said advocating for LGBTBI rights in 2016 can feel almost schizophrenic. She noted 50 countries worldwide now prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, however, there are 70 more criminalizing consensual same-sex conduct.
Governments do not have to choose between advancing LGBTI rights within their own countries and around the world. We can and must do both, Power said.
Referencing the gains made in the United States where same-sex marriage is now legal and openly LGBT individuals can serve in the U.S. military, Power also listed incidents of concern. In Brazil, she said, there is approximately one LGBTI killing per day. This stat has not changed since 2012, Power said.
RELATED: State Department Designates New Terrorist Organization
In the Philippines, Powers schizophrenic comment played out in the election of a senator who described gay people as worse than animals along with the election of the southeastern Asian countrys first transgender representative.
On transgender issues, Power said America needed to counter an alarming statistic showing 40 percent of trans people attempt suicide far above the national average. Power said the U.N. has the necessary tools to make it happen.
First, we must be willing to use all the tools in our toolkit to shift the policies and attitudes of the governments that condone or even fuel discrimination and violence against LGBTI people, Power said.
Its not every cafe that gets to celebrate more than one grand opening, but New York City plays to extremes. Enter, or re-enter if you will, Black Fox Coffee, an ambitious and unusual coffee project in the Financial District near the Seaport, which cast its doors back open again this week after a brief bureaucratic hiatus.
A collaborative partnership between partners Daniel Murphy and Gary Hardwick, marketing and media entrepreneurs, and Melbourne coffee veteran Kris Wood, the 1,500-square-foot cafe occupies the retail level of what was once known as the Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street, a 1930s-era Art Deco skyscraper, which at 66 stories was once the tallest building in downtown New Yorkuntil the 1970s construction of the World Trade Center.
The building, which has been amid renovation into luxury apartments and includes a 23,000-square-foot gym, will also play host to a four-level penthouse and rooftop dining space helmed by award-winning chef April Bloomfield. The chance to serve fine coffees to this buildings clientele would be quite a score for any business owner. For Wood, its an opportunity thats been worth the wait. And wait.
On the heels of an already chock-full Aussie coffee career at St. Ali, Proud Mary, and Sensory Lab, Wood left his position at Clement Coffee, a small espresso bar he founded in Melbourne, with sights on relocating to the New York coffee world. He landed in the city in the fall of 2015, only to learn the intricaciesand patiencerequired of opening a restaurant in New York. Replete with surprise plumber complications and a mandated, business-closing sprinkler repositioning, just after the cafe first opened in May.
Initially, it was planned that we were going to open January 2015, Wood told Sprudge, explaining that the Black Fox space was one of the first retail ventures within the owners billion-dollar refurbishment of the tower. While waiting for the space to become ready for build-out, Wood studied to become a sommelier and picked up work at Cafe Grumpys bustling Grand Central Terminal and Fashion District locations.
It was very beneficial, said Wood of his time behind the busy midtown bars. It gave me very good insight into the customer and how they react to certain things, nodding toward the different temperament of Manhattan customers to those back in Melbourne.
In the 70 Pine storefront, Wood saw the potential to deliver service and quality beyond the fast-casual, medium-quality offerings he saw proliferating the Financial District. Across the street looms the Deustche Bank building, and a few blocks further, the tourist-heavy South Street Seaport. He and his partners are aiming to deliver a higher quality, all with an Australian approach to service that Wood describes as a bit more interactive than people have become accustomed to in New York.
The visual feel of Black Fox is credited to Samantha Eades, with whom Wood worked in Melbourne. Weve got quite similar approaches to aesthetic and design, Wood said of the designer, adding, its about comfort.
The huge-for-New-York-City space is indeed welcoming, with kiln-dried walnut seating and tabletops softening the high-ceilinged concrete space. Angled wood-grain panels along the bar echo the historic buildings Art Deco lines, as does the strategically hung wiring for the shops handsome Ladies and Gentlemen light fixtures. Bench seating and a standing bar are complemented by a people-watching-ready row of window seats with handsome sunken magazine slots, all the better to emphasize the idea of the cafe as a break from the busy world surrounding it. Wi-fi is not offered.
Black Fox bucks the citys micro-roasting boom by bringing in a variety of international roasters to fill out its offerings: expect a quality selection of coffees roasted near and far, from the likes of Brooklyn-based Parlor, Wisconsins Ruby (who created a special Black Fox filter blend), Portlands Heart, 49th Parallel from Vancouver, Canada, and of course Melbournes own Small Batch, where Woods brother Aaron roasts coffee.
The shop will offer a full kitchen on weekdays, with an eye to rolling out breakfast and brunch on weekends soon. The food program, led by Allison Black (formerly of Portlands Pepe Le Moko) features upgraded American/Australian daytime food like housemade granola with striations of chia, flax, golden flax, and hemp seeds, coconut, yogurt, goji berries, fresh fruit, and a few rose petals thrown in for good measure. Theres also a classic bagel served with smoked salmon, beetroot pickled onions, and fresh herbs.
We didnt want the food program just to be avocado toast, said Wood of the ubiquitous menu item that the cafe, naturally, offerswith feta, and microgreens. Its a lovely thing, it does its job, its greatwe just want it to be elevated.
And beyond the relieving reopening of the cafes doors, Black Fox looks forward later this month to playing host to the first New York installment in a series of intensive coffee education weekends called Coffee Kaizen, led by Mecca Roasters Sam Sgambellone. The first of these workshops, which are open to the public, will take place July 30-31.
There was always the idea here to do education, sharing information, said Wood of the partners philosophy to be open to sharing everything about how and why they do things. Theres no secrets, he says. If someone wants to do the same thing as you, let em do it. Sharing is positive.
And for now, one can plainly see that past even the avocado toasttheres no one doing quite what Black Fox is doing in New York City.
Liz Clayton is the associate editor and New York City bureau chief at Sprudge.com. Read more Liz Clayton on Sprudge.
Kigali (Rwanda), July 18, 2016 (SPS) - The 27th ordinary session of African Union Heads of State and Government reiterated Sunday in Kigali, Rwanda, its unfailing support to Western Sahara people's right to self-determination.
"African Union reiterates its support to Saharawi people and their right to self-determination," AU Commission chairwoman Dlamini-Zuma said in an opening address at the African Union Summit.
"We seize this opportunity to send again our condolences to our people of the Arab Saharawi Democratic Republic (SADR) and pay tribute to the late Saharawi President Mohamed Abdelaziz".
AU heads of State and Government observed a minute's silence in the memory of the late president at the Summit's opening.
Zuma, in addition, greeted the new Saharawi president, Ibrahim Ghali. (SPS)
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MOSCOW (Sputnik) Militants on Tuesday attacked and seized a military base in the town of Nampala in central Mali, local media reported.
The attack on the town near the Mauritanian border has resulted in casualties, Radio France Internationale (RFI) said.
Mali has been in turmoil since a 2012 military coup that saw separatist Tuareg tribes seize control over large areas in the northern part of the country. Islamist groups that emerged in Mali in the last decade have recently staged several terrorist attacks in the country.
CLEVELAND (Sputnik) He added that if Trump becomes president, "we are going to see cooperation with Russia, and once that happens I think we are going to start winning the war on terror."
"I believe that Trump will reduce tensions with Russia," Black said.
In June, Donald Trump said he would be inclined to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin to Washington if he became president. He also emphasized how cooperation between the United States and Russia could have led to the destruction of the Islamic State terror group, which is outlawed in both countries.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) Late last week, Swiss President Johann Schneider-Ammann met with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker on the sidelines of an international summit in Mongolia to discuss a mutually agreeable solution to the Swiss initiative to curb the number of migrants coming to the country.
In a statement on Saturday, the Swiss government said technical discussions between the two sides would be intensified but that they would not meet again until September 19.
Concerning the relationship between the EU and Switzerland, I can say that I expected no more results. The EU will never give us more rights than EU states have. We will find now a unilateral way and hope that this way will be expected, Schneider-Schneiter, who is vice-chair of the National Council's Foreign Affairs Committee, stated.
Johnson also noted that very few members of the UK parliament were aware of the UN multilateral talks on nuclear disarmament that London boycotted this February in Geneva. She stressed that these talks could produce a nuclear ban treaty long before even the first of the new so-called successor submarines in the Trident program would be built.
So this is a very short-sighted decision taken for quite shameful tactical partly political reasons on an issue of absolutely fundamental importance for future security not only of Britain, but of the world, Johnson said.
The Trident system is deployed at the UK Royal Navys Faslane submarine base in Scotland. The UK Conservative Party has been campaigning to renew the nuclear deterrent despite rising maintenance costs.
The total estimated cost of renewing Trident is 167 billion pounds ($244 billion) over the 32-year lifespan of the system, between 2028 and 2060, according to the International Monetary Fund.
During a closed-door forum on Monday, Sun Jianguo, admiral and deputy chief of the Joint Staff Department of Chinas Central Military Commission, stressed that freedom of navigation has never been threatened, but added that further acts of military aggression could have dire consequences.
"When has freedom of navigation in the South China Sea ever been affected? It has not, whether in the past or now, and in the future there wont be a problem as long as nobody plays tricks," he said.
TOKYO (Sputnik) Russian Economic Development Minister Alexey Ulyukaev considers the possibility of Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to Japan, noting that meetings with the Japanese side should be filled with the economic content.
"We are expecting further contacts, as well as President Putin's visit to Japan," Ulyukaev told the NHK television broadcaster, commenting on the upcoming meeting of the Russian and Japanese leaders at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok in September.
According to Ulyukaev, it is "very important" to include a specific economic content in the agenda of the upcoming talks.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) Earlier in the day, North Korea fired three ballistic missiles from North Hwanghae province in the southern part of the country.
"The [South Korean] government strongly condemns the latest launch, which is a blatant violation of relevant United Nations resolutions and a provocation threatening the safety and peace of the Korean Peninsula as well as the region," Cho June-hyuck told reporters, as quoted by Yonhap news agency.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) The shooting in the southern Kazakh city of Almaty on Monday, described as an act of terrorism by Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, claimed lives of five people and injured seven others.
"There are currently seven patients in Almaty hospitals three are in critical condition, two are also in the intensive care unit in stable critical condition," Isabekov said as quoted by the Tengrinews agency.
Following the incident, the two suspects in the attack have been detained, while the terror alert level in Kazakhstan's largest city has been increased to the highest "red" one.
"Statements about the harmful impact of electronic waves from THAAD radars may be an exaggeration, but the yes-everything-will-be-fine-trust-us mantra is nothing but enforcement. People should receive security from the state and the government, not seek confirmation of security," he said.
He added that "if the government cannot provide simple and clear scientific evidence [of the THAAD system's safety], it is necessary to immediately suspend its deployment."
Noh was echoed by a young man from Seongju, who, speaking to Sputnik on condition of anonymity, lashed out at the South Korean Prime Minister and other officials over their allegations about coming to Seongju and persuading residents to agree to THAAD's deployment.
"Convincing comes during a negotiation process when the final decision is still pending. As for us, we had just been informed," he said.
In a recent interview with the newspaper Kyunghyang Shinmun, chairman of Seongju County Kim Hangon said that a decision to deploy the THAAD system has never been coordinated with local authorities. He said that no one elaborated on the possible harmful effects of electromagnetic radiation due to the THAAD system, and that he learned about the deployment from the media.
"This is why it is small surprise that Seongju residents are highly concerned about the deployment," he said.
Based on a map drawn by the Chinese government under the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) in 1947, the vaguely defined nine-dash line, which defines Beijing's claim to the South China Sea, encompasses around 90 percent of its area, according to Anthony Fensom, an Australia-based expert in Asia-Pacific politics.
It spans an area the size of Mexico, extending more than one thousand kilometers from China, and which encompasses territory claimed by Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam.
An estimated $5 trillion worth of goods are transported through South China Sea shipping lanes each year, including more than half the worlds annual merchant fleet tonnage and a third of all maritime traffic worldwide, he explained in his article for The National Interest.
Replying to a question in Parliament, Kiren Rijuju, India's Home Affairs Minister, said "a proposal in this regard (visa waiver/visa on arrival), received from the Department of Commerce, is under consideration."
Initially, the Ministry of Home Affairs was against the Ministry of Commerce & Industry's proposal to offer business travelers and tourists from Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa visa-free travel or visas upon arrival, but later decided to consider the proposal after the Prime Minister's Office intervened. T
Days after the Dhaka cafe siege and the terror attack on the Eid gathering, Bangladesh's elite anti-crime force conducted a search in the city of Bogra to locate militant training camps and also promised a million Bangladeshi Taka (US $12,800) to any activist in exchange for specific information about the activities of militants.
"If someone wants to return to a normal life from the banned outfits and provide us information about his fellow militants, he will be given Taka 1,000,000 and all support for his social rehabilitation," the Director General of Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) Benazir Ahmed told a media briefing at Bogra.
A highly-contested region through which roughly $5 trillion in international trade passes annually, most of the waterway is claimed by China, though there are overlapping claims by Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei.
The US and its Pacific allies have expressed opposition to Chinas construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea, accusing Beijing of attempting to establish an air defense zone. China maintains it has every right to build within its own territory and that the island will be used primarily for civilian purposes.
In addition to combat patrols, China is conducting a series of maritime drills in the waterway, through Thursday. Beijing has warned all civilian ships to avoid waters where the exercises are taking place.
TOKYO (Sputnik) The platform is planned to be established with the involvement of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF).
"The Russian side is the Russian Direct Investment Fund, which was established to invest jointly with foreign investors, give them legal and financial comfort. As for the Japanese side, we are working with major institutions such as the JBIC [Japan Bank for International Cooperation] in this direction," Ulyukayev said at a business meeting.
Russian Economic Development Minister Alexei Ulyukayev's visit to Japan gives an impetus to cultivate political and economic ties between the countries ahead of the Russian and Japanese leaders' possible meeting this fall, Japan's Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroshige Seko said earlier.
Crimea boasts up to 30,000 hectares of vineyards, with a further 50,000 hectares ready to be used for viticulture on the Black Sea peninsula.
Crimea reunified with Russia in March 2014 following a political referendum in the region, in which 96 percent of the population voted in favor of joining Russia. Ukraine and the West have to date refused to recognize the vote, imposing economic sanctions against the peninsula that include investment bans and restrictive measures targeting Crimean individuals and entities.
KIEV (Sputnik) On July 3, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed an amendment to the decree on providing economic safety and Russian national interests, adding Kyrgyzstan to the active legislature, stipulating that Ukrainian goods may be transferred to Kazakhstan only through determined check points, routes and with special customs convoy. The decree was prolonged till the end of 2017.
"Yes, we discussed this issue [transit restrictions imposed by the Russia]. I brought that topic up with our European partners, in particular, with the European Commissioner for Trade We will continue to work together, so that there are no more such cases in transit of goods," Groysman told the 112 Ukraine TV channel.
NEW DELHI (Sputnik) India has cautioned that the controversial High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) developed by the US could be causing global warming. Replying to a question raised by a parliamentarian, Anil Dave, India's Minister of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, said "the US has developed a type of weapon called HAARP. HAARP is an advanced model of a super-powerful ionospheric heater which may cause the globe to warm and have a global warming effect."
According to the website of the University of Alaska, where further research on HAARP is going on, "The US Air Force built and operated a world-class ionospheric research facility for HAARP, located in Gakona, Alaska, from 1990 until 2013. The Air Force and the university negotiated an agreement. Responsibility for the facilities and equipment formally transferred from the military to the university on Aug. 11, 2015."
MOSCOW (Sputnik) A truck rammed into a large crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice last Thursday, killing at least 84 people and hurting hundreds, including children and foreign tourists from all over the world.
"We expect the government to tell the truth about the chain of events leading up to the tragedy in Nice. The victims and their relatives demand this. The nation must know this. We demand that a parliamentary inquiry commission be put in place. Nothing must remain hidden," the communique reads.
The partys core members in the political bureau also proposed extending the current state of emergency in France by a minimum of six months, and allow customs and police officers to carry out identity and vehicle checks in order to boost national security.
The people taking the square are debating what action should the government take in the future.
Earlier on Monday, the rally participants in the center of Yerevan headed to the Erebuni district but were blocked by the police. The first deputy head of Armenian Police Hunan Poghosyan persuaded the protesters to return to Liberty Square.
According to the agency, a departure by the UK from the EU will put the bloc on the verge of a collapse, leading to deep economic and political implications for Brussels. Subsequently, the EU will be more focused on resolving inner issues, rather than on expanding its borders to the east.
The for-profit intelligence firm suggests that an environment of uncertainty will struck Chisinau, Kiev and Tbilisi, which have long attempted to attain EU membership.The political turmoil gripping Europe in the wake of Brexit has dimmed the chances of the three countries, despite EU lawmakers recommended granting visa-free travel to them.
Now, the countries are preparing for a worst-case scenario in which visa liberalization, an important landmark in obtaining EU membership, is postponed even further, making accession as distant a promise as it ever was, according to the Stratfor report.
BERLIN (Sputnik) Earlier, the refugee armed with an axe attacked passengers of the train, injuring three of them.
The attacker, a 17-year-old teenager from Afghanistan, was shot dead by police.
"The search of the room he used to live in during the last time revealed a hand-drawn flag of the Islamic State," Herrmann said, as quoted by the German ARD broadcaster.
BERLIN (Sputnik) Police uncovered further evidence suggesting an Afghan refugee who attacked passengers on a train in Germany had been linked to Daesh, German television reported Tuesday.
Searches uncovered a hand-drawn Daesh flag in the 17-year-old refugees room, Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said earlier in the day. The teen was shot dead by police after injuring three train passengers in an axe attack early Tuesday.
"It is now known that not only a hand-drawn flag of the Islamic State group was found in the suspects room, but also documents indicating links to Daesh," an N24 broadcasters correspondent reported live on air, adding that authorities seized the documents for inspection and analysis.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) According to a Greenpeace Energydesk investigation, Vatican Bank board member Sir Michael Hintze is the chief executive of the private hedge fund CQS Cayman, registered on the Cayman islands. The fund holds stocks worth $8.3 million in energy companies.
It is noted that Hintze previously maintained ties with energy sector-related companies.
Jean-Baptiste Douville de Franssu, the Vatican Bank board president, is an adviser to two funds that hold multimillion dollar shares in oil and gas companies, according to the investigation.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) According to the national Spending Review presented in 2015, London planned to allocate an additional 8.4 billion pounds (some $11 billion) by 2020-2021, but an audit conducted by the Committee found that the government only increased health funding for this period by 4.5 billion pounds in real terms.
"While the NHS has been treated favourably in comparison with other departments, the funding allocated for the NHS in the Spending Review is less than would appear to be the case from official pronouncements," the report reads.
ALMATY (Sputnik) A police officer died in southern Kazakhstan after a shooting the previous day described by the president as a terrorist act, bringing the death toll from the attack to six people, Almaty city police said in a statement Tuesday.
"Chief inspector of the specialized battalion of the road patrol police Lieutenant Timur Begasilov died today in the intensive care unit of a hospital emergency room," Almaty police said in a statement.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) Three people were shot dead in the UK county of Lincolnshire, including the gunman, on Tuesday, with the incident not being considered as terrorist-related, local police confirmed.
"We can confirm that there has been a firearms incident on Pinchbeck Road in Spalding in which three people have been fatally wounded, including the suspected offender. There is an ongoing police investigation and at this stage we are not looking for anyone else in connection with the incident," Lincolnshire Police said in a statement.
"There is no indication that this is a terrorist related incident and no shots have been fired by police," the statement read.
"Our report was submitted to the Senate Defense Commission chaired by Mr. Raffarin in the morning of July 13. Although the report came ahead of the Nice events, its bottom line was the risk of new terrorist attacks and unrest that may follow. Regrettably, we anticipated such an attack related to our work," he said.
He recalled that the National Guard is a term that has existed in France since the French Revolution. It was established on July 13, 1789, a day prior to the storming of the Bastille, and survived until the military's restructuring following the defeat of the Paris Commune.
According to him, the French National Guard will be a new name to refer to the country's military reserve, which Bockel said has significantly decreased after the abolition of compulsory enlistment. The past few years have seen many stressing the need to restore the military reserve's role in the French army.
"We need a military reserve of National Defense of the French army, namely, the National Guard, which in addition to the resources of the Gendarmerie, will be able to better cover the territory of the country in order to grapple with serious issues," Bockel said, referring to the terrorist attacks.
Earlier, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve urged all French patriots to join the country's operating reserve on a voluntary basis so as to "to increase the maximum capacity of this resource in the next few days." Right now, the operating reserve includes 9,000 gendarmes and 3,000 police officers.
Speaking to Radio Sputnik, French political analyst Thomas Guenole said that the proposals to restore the French National Guard are nothing but a PR stunt.
"Fighting terrorism is the work of professionals. Ask anyone if he could join the National Guard to combat terrorism it is not serious. Appealing to patriotism is also irrelevant given that a similar structure already exists in this field, namely, the single reserve," he said.
According to him, a recent parliamentary report showed that deploying people in public places to ensure security does not work because it eats up a huge amount of material resources and human resources, but does not reduce the terrorist threat.
"It would be much more necessary to deal with the real problems, such as the sources of terrorism funding. I mean the fundraising activity which can take place in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait," he said.
#Lavrov: Our work on fighting terrorism has taken on new urgency in light of heinous terrorist attack in Nice https://t.co/k1M8m1iCfG MFA Russia (@mfa_russia) 15 2016 .
Separately, Guenole touched upon the budget and economic policy-related issues which he said currently affect the police and special services in France.
He added that the budgetary policy, including with respect to human resources, leads to " absurd things when, for example, an average cop spends plenty of time on purely administrative work."
BERLIN (Sputnik) Germany has not experienced acts of terrorism prior to the axe attack by an Afghan refugee in the state of Bavaria, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas said Tuesday, urging an investigation into the motives of the crime.
"The motives of the crime should be fully investigated. It is difficult to keep a loner, who has not colluded with third parties, from committing the crime in a timely matter. We have been able to do it until now. There were no terrorist attacks in Germany until now," Maas said in a short statement televised by the N24 broadcaster.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) According to the statement, the sharp decline accounts for stricter border controls on the Macedonian-Greek border, as well as the EU-Turkey deal reached in March to counter the massive refugee crisis.
"The number of migrants on the Eastern Mediterranean route in June, mainly arriving in Greece, remained well below the monthly figures from earlier this year and reached some 1450. This represented a 95% drop from the same month of 2015," the statement reads.
Syrian migrants constitute the majority of arrivals in Greece, with Pakistanis, Afghans and Iraqis lagging behind, the EU borer agency said.
Many @EP_ForeignAff MEPs call on #Turkey to stick to democracy, rule of law and basic human rights, otherwise risk future relations w/ EU. AFET Committee Press (@EP_ForeignAff) July 19, 2016
The issue is crucial because the EU is negotiating a deal with Turkey over migrants, under which "irregular migrants" those refused asylum in Greece are relocated to Turkey, which is being paid US$6.6 billion over two years to improve refugee camps. The deal is intended to stem the flow of migrants making their way into Europe.
Red Line
As part of the deal, Turkish citizens would be allowed visa-free access the Schengen zone of Europe and Turkey's accession into the EU would be speeded up. However, recent events following the failed coup have led many MEPs to suggest Turkey is now in breach of many EU principles.
.@ElmarBrok_MEP: There is a danger that #Turkey could move further away from Europe. AFET Committee Press (@EP_ForeignAff) July 19, 2016
"This attempted coup has been condemned. Further developments do give us cause for concern. There have been about 8,000 arrests from the army and about 12,000 members of the justice system have either been suspended or excluded, but also some people from the executive. Twenty percent of judges have either been suspended or replaced and that will have a direct impact on judicial rulings," Hahn told MEPs.
The reintroduction of the death penalty in Turkey is an absolute red line and should be treated as such by the #EU https://t.co/TYSrfFvIuZ Guy Verhofstadt (@GuyVerhofstadt) 18 July 2016
Guy Verhofstadt, leader of the Liberals and Democrats in the European Parliament, said: "President Erdogan clearly is abusing the coup to prosecute his political opponents. It is a good thing that Turkey escaped a new military dictatorship, but only if democracy is being maintained.
"What we see now is a further crackdown by the AKP on the freedom of the press, on the independence of the judiciary and on the rule of law. This will deteriorate the EU-Turkey relationship. The reintroduction of the death penalty is an absolute red line that should not be crossed," Verhofstadt said.
"The French side confirmed the woman's death, though we have not received yet the confirmation, whether she had the Russian citizenship. Her grandchildren have Russian and Estonian passports, her husband has a Russian passport, she precisely has an Estonian. Her son has not confirmed that she has a Russian one," Molchanov said.
On Monday, Molchanov said that three more Russian nationals had been hospitalized in France a man with a Russian citizenship and his two grandchildren with dual Russian-Estonian citizenship.
On July 14, a truck rammed into a large crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, killing at least 84 people, including children, and injuring hundreds. The French police confirmed that Russian citizen Victoria Savchenko was among the casualties. The fate of Bogdanova was unknown at the time.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) Deployment of four NATO battalions in Eastern Europe on a rotational basis does not violate the NATO-Russia Founding Act, UK Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said Tuesday.
NATO Summit in Poland's capital was held on July 8-9 and focused on relations with Russia. During the summit the Alliance decided to strengthen its military presence in Eastern Europe on a rotational basis with four battalions in Poland and in the Baltic nations.
"The rotational format for the four extra battalions does not violate the NATO-Russia Founding Act," Fallon said.
Theresa May says it's 'sheer madness' to give up #Trident. Here's what we think. Retweet if you agree. #StopTrident pic.twitter.com/SAULq7VcEl CND (@CNDuk) 18 July 2016
Trident renewal was opposed by all Scottish National Party (SNP) MPs, the Lib Dems, as well as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who spoke out against the plans during the debate in the House of Commons on July 18. He was joined by 47 other Labour MPs who joined him by voting against Trident.
Shadow defense secretary, Clive Lewis and the shadow foreign affairs secretary, Emily Thornberry abstained from the vote as they believed the government had turned an issue of national security into a political game.
This however, didn't stop leadership challengers, Angela Eagle and Owen Smith voting in favor of renewing Trident. 41 Labor MPs were absent or decided to abstain.
Full list of Labour MPs who abstained or were absent in Trident vote pic.twitter.com/39OLZCCKPP Paul Waugh (@paulwaugh) 18 July 2016
Before the vote hundreds took to the streets outside Parliament to protest against what they saw as a blatant waste of money, especially when the NHS was in desperate need of a financial boost. Crowds gathered by Parliament Square, in London on the same day and chanted their discontent at the fact Trident was not necessary and that it would cause the deaths of millions of innocent people if ever used.
Headed by Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) leader, Kate Hudson, the protesters discussed why a Trident renewal would only lead to further war and destruction.
They were joined by Diane Abbott MP, who said that she had decided what her position was and would be voting against Trident.
"Nobody really believes that the Trident nuclear weapons system would protect us from threat that we face today," Diane Abbott said at the protest meeting.
UK needs to have nuclear weapons because it is a world power #TridentVote https://t.co/pWrEyKBlbz pic.twitter.com/YPbQj6Tb6r Sputnik UK (@SputnikNewsUK) July 18, 2016
"There's a phrase I would like to use about it but I won't, but it's just the boys demonstrating how boyish they are," Abbott added.
With NHS activists @CNDuk #StopTrident rally.NHS deficit has risen to 2.45bn but we can apparently afford #Trident pic.twitter.com/f5SqvmHIsc Diane Abbott MP (@HackneyAbbott) 18 July 2016
Abbott's comments were echoed by others, including Russell Whiting, the Parliamentary officer at the CND. Whiting said that Trident was costing way too much money and would not keep Britain safe from 21st century threats such as climate change.
"What you see in Parliament Square now is that the mood on Trident is changing. We will stay here and keep campaigning. We will continue to talk to our MPs and push the governments to engage in international treaties in order to save the lives of millions," Whiting told Sputnik.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) UK Defense Secretary Michael Fallon on Tuesday expressed hope that Montenegro will complete NATO membership accession by early October.
"Montenegro has met the criteria that are required [by the Alliance] and attended [NATOs] Warsaw [summit] as an observer and it's membership accession, I hope will be completed by early October," Fallon said.
Following Montenegro's invitation to join the Alliance, the 13th Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, said that its accession would demonstrate that the NATO's door remains open despite the aggravating tensions and the painful reaction by the Russian side to NATO enlargement.
"In that, if there's clear evidence of a majority of people wishing to leave the United Kingdom and join the Republic that should be catered for in the discussions that take place."
Kenny's comments are significant given he has previously remained coy on the issue of Irish unity.
Fears of Post-Brexit Dissolution
While the thought of a united Ireland had seemed an unrealistic prospect for many, the Brexit vote and Northern Ireland's decision to vote to stay in the EU has raised questions about whether Northern Ireland and Scotland could break away from the UK.
There are also concerns over Northern Ireland's border with the Republic of Ireland.
Brexit against the wishes of Scotland and Northern Ireland would violate the UKs constitutional settlement https://t.co/E4M0KWf5P3 LSE EUROPP blog (@LSEEuroppblog) July 13, 2016
While border checkpoints were in place during previous decades, they have since been disbanded, with concerns some border controls may need to be introduced again.
There have also been fears that the Brexit vote could lead to a flare up in sectarian violence between unionists and pro-independence republicans.
Talk of 'All-Island Solution'
The power to call a referendum on Irish reunification ultimately lies with the British Secretary of State, however the Good Friday Agreement stipulates that a vote can be called if there is evidence of a strong change in opinion in favor of Irish unity.
Kenny said the possibility of an "all-island solution" should be considered, saying pro-reunification sentiment could grow with the UK leaving the EU.
"It may be, in the eyes of some, a fanciful theory but who knows what happens in 10, 20 years' time," Kenny said, pointing to the successful reunification of Germany.
"In the same way as it was possible for the former East Germany to be associated with West Germany, and not to have to go through a long and tortuous process to join the European Union and these negotiations should take these kinds of things into account as well."
Enda Kenny also compared the possible reunification of Ireland to the 'absorbing' of East Germany into West Germany after the wall came down Jennifer Bray (@Jennifer_Bray) July 18, 2016
Kenny's comments directly contradict those of new Northern Ireland Secretary James Brokenshire, who ruled out a vote on unification.
He said there was a "clear, constitutional settlement in relation to the border poll and it's also clear to be that opinion does not support a change."
"We do need to move on now. I think that we do need to focus on the best possible outcome for Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom outside the European Union."
BRUSSELS (Sputnik) On Monday, police opened an investigation into a group of Iraqi refugees from Mosul and Baghdad, who have been relocated to different refugee reception houses.
The suspects came to Belgium at different times under the guise of asylum seekers, La Derniere Heure reported. They are believed to belong to the same terrorist cell, which has links to Daesh, which is outlawed in Russia and many other countries.
A 40-year-old woman of Moroccan descent, who resides in the Belgian city of Charleroi, is suspected of being an accomplice to the group of Iraqi refugees, the daily added. Police confirmed to the media outlet that the woman assisted the Iraqis in receiving accommodation and money and had been constantly in contact with an Islamic center in the city of Verviers. On January 2015, three Islamists, who plotted a terrorist attack on the territory of Belgium, were killed in Verviers during a counter-terrorism operation.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) May cited a very real threat from Russia and North Korea that the UK faced, as she advanced her argument on Monday in favor of renewing the aging Trident nuclear deterrent. British lawmakers voted later that day to approve the multibillion-dollar program to build four Vanguard-class nuclear submarines.
The Kremlin regards these statements with regret. Apparently Mrs. Prime Minister has not yet fully caught up with the course of international affairs. Russia, in fact, is one of the main guarantors of international stability and nuclear security, strategic security, and this is an absolutely indisputable fact," Peskov told reporters.
Peskov, noting Russia's active role in the non-proliferation process, voiced hope that "an objective point of view with regard to our country would prevail" within May's administration.
PARIS (Sputnik) President Francois Hollande said on Friday that a bill, seeking to extend by three months the state of emergency in the wake of the Nice truck attack, would go before the Parliament on Wednesday.
"The government-proposed text requests an extension by three months. As for six months, we are open to debate on this but lets wait until tonight," Valls told reporters.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) The suspended BurgasAlexandroupoli oil pipeline project for bringing Russian oil into southern Europe has not been closed and may be resumed, Nikolai Tokarev, the president of Russia's Transneft oil transport company, said Tuesday.
The pipeline was planned to diversify supply routes for Russian oil, bypassing Turkey's Bosporus and the Dardanelles straits before its suspension by Bulgaria in 2011 over environmental concerns.
"Our Bulgarian partners have pleasantly surprised us. Just recently, we received an official notification that they support keeping the BurgasAlexandroupoli project alive. They are against dissolving the operator that had been created to implement the project. Its activities were later frozen. Now, everyone is interested in it, including the Bulgarians," Tokarev told reporters, when replying to a question on the possible impact of the events in Turkey on the company's transport routes.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) Bulgarian police detained about 100 people in an operation to counter irregular migration on July 18-19, local media reported Tuesday, citing the country's Interior Ministry.
According to the Sofia Globe newspaper, the police checks were conducted in the capital of Sofia, and were ongoing in several parts of the city.
Undocumented migrants were taken to police stations so their identities and reasons for being in the country could be determined.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) The key concern is that UK Prime Minister Theresa May does not have the authority to invoke Article 50 of the EU Lisbon Treaty to start a two-year countdown for Brexit without a parliamentary act.
The parliament wants to vote on whether to start the proceedings to leave the 28-nation union. The majority of lawmakers are reportedly pro-Remain, while 52 percent of Britons voted to quit.
The panel of judges meeting in the Royal Courts of Justice will hear at least seven cases, The Guardian newspaper said.
May has her work cut out, following the historic referendum result, June 23, when Britain voted to leave the EU. The decision ended years of division within her own Conservative Party, but has clearly left those in her own government including herself who wanted to remain, dissatisfied.
Theresa May's first 3 days as PM: arriving in No10, calling @POTUS, meeting police officers & visiting @ScotGovFM pic.twitter.com/B0KVPwAwT5 UK Prime Minister (@Number10gov) 16 July 2016
May was quick to pull together a cabinet made up of both those who voted for Brexit and those who did not, in an attempt to pull together the party, which has been riven with division ever since the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, which changed what had been the European Economic Community into the EU as it is today.
In a statement released ahead of the meeting, May said:
MOSCOW (Sputnik) All people killed in last week's deadly attack in southern French city of Nice have been identified, the Paris prosecutor's office said Tuesday, as cited by local Europe1 broadcaster.
On Thursday, a truck rammed into a large crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice. At least 84 people, including children, were killed and hundreds of others were injured. The French investigators found that the person behind the attack was 31-year-old Nice resident of Tunisian origin Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel.
The decision comes after a legal challenge was brought to the ECJ by UK Labour Party Deputy Leader Tom Watson and Conservative MP David Davis, with the latter subsequently withdrawing from the case after being appointed the UK's new Brexit minister.
Civil liberties champ David Davis cheekily dropped his name from ECJ case on Snoopers charter against his new boss pic.twitter.com/oYHWmduG5s Mehreen (@MehreenKhn) July 19, 2016
It comes after the pair had successfully challenged the UK government's Data Retention and Investigation Powers Act (DRIPA) in the British High Court.
Headaches Loom for May Over Snooper's Charter
While the opinion of the ECJ advocate-general is not legally binding, it is almost certain to be followed by the full court, which will then have a great impact in shaping the UK's proposed surveillance legislation, currently being scrutinized by parliament.
The highly controversial Investigatory Powers Bill, also known as the Snoopers' Charter, was developed by current prime minister May during her six years as Home Secretary and has called for UK law enforcement to be given greater powers to intercept emails and phone calls of citizens.
Kind of feel this mural needs a bit more attention Snooper's Charter by Cashman & Slow #theresamay pic.twitter.com/WNZi52j3Ip Danielle Rose (@_RosyD) July 13, 2016
Government officials say such powers are integral to stopping serious crime and the threat of terrorism, while critics argue such a development would turn the UK into a surveillance state and breach the privacy of the population.
In fact Davis, the UK's new Brexit minister, had traveled to the Luxembourg-based court earlier this year and argued that the British government was "treating the entire nation as suspects" with its proposals.
Meanwhile James Welch, legal director of human rights organization Liberty, said the ECJ ruling showed a "clear message to our [UK] blinkered government your proposed new law breaches our human rights."
#IPBill in Lords. Security-at-all-costs brigade hate it when I describe massive scale of UK surveillance powers but I'll keep doing it. Paul Strasburger (@LordStras) July 11, 2016
Despite the government's calls for greater powers, the ECJ ruling looks set to ensure that any British legislation has a number of safeguards in place to ensure that any extra powers are used for tackling serious crime and not merely mass surveillance.
The final ECJ decision looks set to be delivered within the next couple of months.
According to the International Organization for Migration, as of July 13 2016 a total of 248,418 migrants and refugees arrived in Europe since the start of the year, the majority of whom entered by sea through Greece (158,977) and Italy (78,487).
The newspaper poll was conducted by Germany's Allensbach Institute, a respected market research and polling company. It surveyed 506 German business leaders and high-ranking politicians at the federal or state level.
The respondents said that the closure of the Balkan migration route is key to the decline in migration to Europe, but worry that current instability in Turkey may harm the deal the EU reached with Turkey to curb migration.
While 75 percent of respondents support the agreement with Turkey, 63 percent now fear an increase in refugee numbers because of threats to the deal's implementation.
A majority, 60 percent, rejects the institution of a visa-free regime for Turkish citizens, and 98 percent believe that it is impossible for Turkey to meet the conditions for EU membership in the near future.
At an EU-Turkey summit in March 2016 the EU's leaders and the Turkish government agreed that migrants crossing from Turkey to the Greek islands who are not applying for asylum in Europe should be returned to Turkey, and Turkey agreed to control its borders to prevent illegal migration.
DONETSK (Sputnik) Nearly 500 people have been killed in shelling of the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk by Kiev forces since the beginning of the conflict in Donbass, local authorities said on Tuesday.
"To date, in the Kuibyshev district, 213 victims have been registered, 197 people were killed in the Kiev district and 67 civilians died in the Pertovsky district, " Ivan Prikhodko, the head of administration of the Donetsk Kuibyshev district, said during a parliamentary hearing.
Ukraines southeast has been severely affected by Kievs special military operation, launched in the southeastern Donetsk and Lugansk regions in April 2014. The operation was a response to local residents' refusal to recognize the new coup-installed government in the country.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) The United Kingdom's prison system has seen rising rates of violence and self-harm over the past year, the HM Inspectorate of Prisons said in a statement after releasing its 2015-2016 annual report on Tuesday.
Analyzing Ministry of Justice data, the inspecting body said that prison assaults increased by 27 percent to over 20,000 in 2015, with a 31 percent rise in serious assaults in the same period.
Self-harm incidents increased 25 percent in 2015, while self-inflicted deaths were up 27 percent between April 2015 and March 2016 compared to the previous period, amounting to a total of 100. The number of homicides in the 2015-2016 period increased from four to six, according to the independent inspectorate.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) The United Kingdom should become more outward-looking, closing itself off to the world is not an answer, UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said Tuesday.
Speaking at a press conference with US State Secretary John Kerry, Johnson claimed that some people did not feel the benefits of globalization. The answer to this issue is investing in skills and increasing productivity, according to the UK foreign secretary.
"It is not about the UK post-Brexit. It is not to close ourselves off or to become any less internationalist. On the contrary, weve got to become more outward-looking, more free trading, do more deals around the world," he said.
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EDINBURGH (Sputnik) It would take independent Scotland years to safely remove the Trident nuclear deterrent, a Scottish lawmaker in the UK lower house told Sputnik on Tuesday.
"I would back the immediate safe removal of Trident, but the procedures would take several years. It would be for the UK Government to decide if the system would be better built from scratch and decommissioned rather than moved," Douglas Chapman said.
The UK parliament backed the renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons system on Monday by a margin of 472 votes to 117, despite 58 of Scotlands 59 lawmakers in the House of Commons voting against.
EDINBURGH (Sputnik) An independent Scotland would not have sufficient expertise to decommission UK's Trident weapons system, Nuclear Information Service (NIS) research manager Peter Burt told Sputnik on Tuesday.
"Although decommissioning by an independent Scotland would be, in theory, an attractive way of disarming around 200 nuclear weapons, unfortunately it would be very difficult to achieve in practical terms," Burt said.
All but one of Scotland's 59 members in the UK House of Commons voted Monday against renewal of Trident. Despite that, UK lawmakers overwhelmingly backed the multi-billion-dollar system that is based on the west coast of Scotland.
At the Oasis of Bidderosa, entrance to the car park is limited to 130 cars per day, and similar limits have been placed on visiting the National Park of Abruzzo and other national parks.
"The relationship between visitors and residents is in danger of becoming confrontational," said Luigi Brugnaro, the mayor of Venice.
Evelina Christillin, President of ENIT, Italy's National Tourism Agency, told La Stampa that the authorities need to coordinate their activities, to keep everybody happy.
"It would be bad to reject a visitor in front of a bar and say, 'we are full,'" Christillin said, who proposes informing prospective tourists on the internet, before they book their trip, how many visitors have already booked to go to a particular location.
"They will understand that there are already too many people to enjoy the beauty of this place, that the facilities will be overcrowded, that it will be hard to find a place to eat, or stay the night."
Emanuele Moggia, mayor of Monterosso, in Liguria, said that tourist quotas are just common sense.
"The problem is that it is impossible for them to all come to old fishing villages, without a redistribution of visitors," Moggia said.
The Turkish government has launched an unprecedented crackdown on thousands of individuals suspected of being involved in last week's failed coup attempt, including governors, prosecutors, intelligence officers, judges, and military personnel.
Mete Sohtaoglu (@metesohtaoglu) July 19, 2016
Earlier on Tuesday, the Turkish government filed a formal request with the US government for the extradition of political and religious figure Fetullah Gulen, who Ankara has blamed for the coup attempt.
Fighting in the streets of Istanbul and Ankara left nearly 300 people dead and over 1,400 injured as part of the Turkish military attempted to overthrow the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
"Poland's consulate general in Lyon has received an official confirmation from France that the Nice terror attack on July 14 left two female Polish nationals dead," Rafal Sobczak told the Polish news agency PAP.
The attacker was killed in a standoff with police. He was identified as Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Nice resident of Tunisian descent who the Daesh terror group claimed was its follower.
Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) July 19, 2016
On Tuesday, Johnson was asked by a reporter if he intended to apologize for disparaging remarks he has made about world leaders in the past, now that he is responsible for representing the UK abroad.
"We can spend an awfully long time going over lots of stuff that Ive written over the last 30 yearsall of which in my view has been taken out of context, but never mind, some serious issues call us today," he answered.
Annabelle McAsey (@Annabelle_mac) July 19, 2016 james (@blatantdoomtrip) July 13, 2016 Johnson was asked specifically if he planned to apologize for comments he made about US President Barack Obama.
"Im afraid that there is such a rich thesaurus now of things that I have said that have been one way or another, through what alchemy I do not know, somehow misconstrued that it would really take me too long to engage in a fully global itinerary of apology to all concerned," he said.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) In June, Argentina's state media authority RTA SE announced that RT Spanish would be excluded from free transmission starting in August, but would nonetheless remain in paid TV packages.
According to RT, representatives of the broadcaster and Argentinian officials reached an agreement to implement joint projects and to exchange television production after a meeting on July 15.
The broadcaster added that within the framework of the reached accords, RT Spanish would not be suspended from Argentina's free transmission.
Nighttime clashes erupted in the town of Qabatiya, in the north of the occupied West Bank, as a military bulldozer moved to demolish the family home of Bilal Abu Zeid, accused of having assisted Palestinian attackers in a February 3 incident outside the Old City's Damascus Gate.
According to Israeli authorities, Abu Zeid, currently in an Israeli prison, supplied a gun and transported the three Palestinians who killed 19-year-old Hadar Cohen in a shooting and stabbing attack. The attackers were killed at the scene and their homes in the town of Kabatiya, in the Jenin area, were demolished some two months later.
A military convoy attempting to demolish Abu Zeid's home was attacked by Palestinians armed with pipe bombs and improvised weapons. The troops responded to the attack, shooting three Palestinians, according to Israeli army claims.
But in an article that appeared in place of the deleted story, the Turkish general was quoted as saying that, "I am not the person who planned, led and implemented the military putsch."
Around 290 people were killed and over a thousand wounded in the failed attempt by the military to grab power in Turkey. The Turkish government has accused US-based Muslim cleric Muhammed Fethullah Gulen of having played a key role in the coup.
Bagdasarov added that Syrian President Bashar Assad may also benefit from the failed coup in Turkey because Ankara will most likely reduce significantly its assistance to "terrorist groups and other structures in Syria."
Isayev, for his part, said Erdogan is ready to face Turkey's fading military clout in the region in order to achieve full control over the army.
"Given the experience of the Middle East conflicts, the color revolutions and coups, for those who fought the army as an institution, internal political problems had always been a priority," he said.
Isayev also said that the failed coup will further add to Erdogan pushing for a presidential system of government in Turkey, something that he said one of Erdogan's "political ambitions."
"He can seize the opportunity now that the country is still in shock after the failed coup. Even the opposition forces will not interfere with this, because any criticism of Erdogan will be perceived as an indirect help to those who staged the coup," according to Isayev.
He added that it will be necessary for the government to comply with certain formalities and procedures when it takes the bold step of amending the country's constitution to give more powers to Erdogan.
"But the mood of the population has already changed, and people will be prepared for such upheavals," he pointed out.
As far as Turkey's relations with Russia are concerned, most experts have said that the failed coup will further contribute to the normalization of bilateral ties, with Isayev remaining cautiously optimistic about the matter.
"It seems that the main phase of normalization is already behind us and the failed coup will unlikely change drastically the current nature of Russian-Turkish relations," he said.
He was echoed by Bagdasarov, who said that despite the resumption of several bilateral economic projects, "changes in bilateral relations will be purely cosmetic in nature."
Meanwhile, many in Europe have already lashed out at Erdogan's clampdown on the army and the opposition, as well as his drive to introduce capital punishment in Turkey.
"Currently, Europe is at least paying lip-service to the purge of the opposition in Turkey," Isayev said, also citing the EU's concerns about the Turkish anti-terrorist legislation and the arrest of judges in the country.
Bagdasarov in turn said that despite the criticism, the EU is unlikely to back away from Turkey, given the ongoing migration crisis. According to him, Europeans have yet to find an alternative to Turkey's assistance as far as migrants are concerned.
ANKARA (Sputnik) According to the Hurriyet newspaper, the police post was attacked in the province's district of Macka at 8:45 a.m. local time (05:45 GMT).
The newspaper added that at least four police officers, as well as one civilian were injured in the incident.
The operation to catch the attackers, who have disappeared in nearby woods, is ongoing.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) On Monday, Fathi held a meeting with Russian Transport Minister Maxim Sokolov.
"Information provided by Fathi on the final stage of investigation in Egypt into the causes of the aviation accident with the Russian plane over the Sinai Peninsula in October 2015 became an important moment of the meeting," the ministerial statement said.
On October 31, 2015, Airbus A321 operated by the Russian airline Kogalymavia crashed in the Sinai Peninsula. The plane, carrying 224 people, was heading to St. Petersburg from the Egyptian resort city of Sharm El-Sheikh.
ANKARA (Sputnik) Following the Friday unsuccessful coup in Turkey, the Interior Ministry sacked close to 9,000 personnel across the country, including members of the armed forces, from foot soldiers to commanders, as well as police officers, governors, military advisers, prosecutors and judges.
On Sunday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told crowds of supporters gathered outside his residence in Istanbul that parliament must consider the public demand for the death penalty to be applied in the case of the coup plotters.
"The issue of return of the death penalty is now raised. If the ruling party is ready, we will stay together and do everything necessary with peace of mind," Bahceli said at his party's weekly parliamentary group meeting at the Grand National Assembly of Turkey.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) Media reports emerged that an uncovered plot forced the faction to move the coup's date initially it had been planned to be carried out in the early hours of July 16.
"On July 15 the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MIT) was informed [about the coup attempt] in this regard the countrys airspace was closed, military aircraft flights were prohibited," the armed forces said.
BRUSSELS (Sputnik) About half of the Syrian refugees who are currently in Turkey are seeking to return to their homeland, EU Commissioner for Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations Johannes Hahn said Tuesday.
"I can say, that around 50 percent [of the refugees] are wiling to stay in Turkey, while 50 percent want to come back to Syria when the conditions for this are established. Some people have already returned to certain Syrian regions," he said at a session of the European Parliament Committee on Foreign Affairs.
The US-led coalition of more than 60 nations has been carrying out airstrikes against the Daesh in Syria and Iraq since the summer of 2014.
Manbij, located between Daesh's de facto capital of Raqqa and the Syrian-Turkish border, is a strategically important area for the terrorist group.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) About half of all Syrian refugee children currently registered in Lebanon are out of school, an international human rights watchdog said on Tuesday.
"Five years after the start of the conflict, more than 250,000 children approximately half of the nearly 500,000 school-aged Syrian children registered in Lebanon are out of school. Older children are particularly affected: of the 82,744 registered Syrian refugees aged 15-18 as of August 2015, less than 3 percent enrolled in public secondary schools during the 2015-2016 school year," Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report.
According to the report, the Lebanese authorities had taken steps to help Syrian children engage in the public education system, in particular, allowed refugees to enroll in school without providing proof of legal residency, waived school enrollment fees, and opened second shift classes in over 200 schools.
TEHRAN(Sputnik) Iranian Interior Ministry put forward a proposal to hold presidential elections in the country on May 19, 2017, minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli said on Tuesday.
"If the Experts Council approves the date for the elections, proposed by the Interior Ministry, the elections will take place on May 19 of 2017. In this case, election campaigns will be launched on December 21, 2016," he told journalists.
It will be the 12th presidential elections in the country. The most recent presidential election elections were held in the country on June14, 2013.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) The side effects of the Syrian civil war, in particular, hosting refugees, has already cost neighboring Lebanon over $13 billion, an international watchdog said in Tuesday.
"Lost revenue due to the war in Syria and the burden of hosting refugees have cost Lebanon an estimated $13.1 billion, and the refugee influx has strained public services and infrastructure, including health, energy, water, waste collection, and education," Human Right Watch (HRW) said in a report published on its website.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) The US-led coalition against the Islamic State (ISIL or Daesh) carried out 31 airstrikes against the terror groups positions and infrastructure in Iraq and Syria on Monday, the Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve said in a press release.
In Syria, coalition military forces conducted 21 strikes using bomber, attack, fighter, and remotely piloted aircraft against ISIL [Islamic State] targets, the release said on Tuesday. Additionally in Iraq, coalition military forces conducted 10 strikes coordinated with and in support of the Government of Iraq using rocket artillery and attack, fighter, and remotely piloted aircraft against ISIL targets.
In Syria, the coalition airstrikes were waged near three towns of Dayr Az Zawr, Manbij, and Mara, and destroyed an Daesh crane, an Daesh front-end loader, multiple Daesh positions and vehicles, as well as a heavy machine gun and a tactical vehicle.
Turker Erturk explained that under this project, they dont want the forces which oppose the setup of hegemony in the Middle East to be present in the region, where Turkey, Russia, Iran, Iraq and Syria are the key nations.
Hence they try to polarize the key players according to ethnic or religious criteria. And the high-ranking American officials are openly saying: do what you want, but without an attack on the Turkish military; it is impossible to implement the part of the project which involves Turkey.
The first blow, he says, was leveled by the court trials Sledgehammer and Ergenekon. And the recent attempt comes as the second blow under the very same project.
Its purpose was to deliver a fatal blow to the image and influence of the Turkish Armed Forces, who tried to hamper the revamping of the region in a new way. It was a success: the Turkish Armed Forces have been practically destroyed.
Turker Erturk claims that the "imperialist forces" did not actually want to see Erdogan ousted. They actually wanted a coup attempt to weaken the power of the military, factor them out of the active ongoing processes, and liquidate the mere opportunity that Ankara would pose a threat to projects aimed against Syria, Iraq and Russia, as well as projects aimed at breaking down Turkey.
This is why I am saying that the coup has failed but the coup attempt has reached its goal, the retired Turkish Admiral told Sputnik.
The expert recounts that Recep Tayyip Erdogan had actually wanted to change the countrys constitution but failed due to the lack of a parliamentary majority.
Thus he makes use of this, in order to change the constitution of 1982 and to pass on his own autocratic idea of the governmental system. And he is going to do it now, Dr. Liedtke said.
The expert noted that already-strained relations between the EU and Ankara are poised to deteriorate even further as the possible reintroduction of the death penalty in Turkey has caused concerns within the European block.
Those in the European Union who were not only against Turkeys accession into the EU but also criticized the mere idea of Turkeys candidacy for EU membership, now have the upper hand and will certainly use the debates on the reintroduction of the death penalty to strip Turkey of its status as a candidate for full membership, he said.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) The rights watchdog urged on Tuesday the US-led coalition forces, which are carrying out airstrikes in Syria, to redouble their efforts to prevent civilian deaths amid the recent reports of many men, women and children being killed in the airstrikes.
Earlier in the day, a local source told Sputnik that over 100 Syrian civilians have been killed in US-led coalition airstrikes against the Islamic State (ISIL or Daesh) terrorist group near the city of Manbij in the Aleppo governorate. The strike was carried out on Tuesday morning, with women and children among the victims, the source said.
"International humanitarian law requires all parties to a conflict to prevent the needless loss of civilian life. Even if the coalition forces believed that fighters from the armed group calling itself Islamic State were present around al-Tukhar, they should have taken the necessary precaution to identify who else was present to avoid or at least minimize civilian casualties," interim Deputy Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Amnesty International Magdalena Mughrabi was cited in the statement.
"This failed coup is a signal to the Turkish Prime Minister, and to those who support the terrorist groups including Washington and the Saudi monarchy, that they need to change their policy in Syria," Sheikholeslam added.
"Given that some Western countries saw it as a priority to support the terrorists in Syria via Turkey, their intelligence services, together with those of Israel, planned out and attempted to carry out this coup. At the same time, they acted in a rather disorganized, hasty and thoughtless manner. The only thing we have witnessed in response is a change of the Turkish authorities' position on regional issues, including Syria."
Asked to comment on President Erdogan's words about 'working hand in hand with Iran and Russia' to ensure regional stability, Sheikholeslam suggested this was quite natural. "After all, Erdogan has witnessed the cohesive manner in which Russia and Iran have worked and continue to work in the fight against the terrorists."
Ultimately, the official noted, "we hope that Turkey will change its position on Syria not just in words, but in actions. For this reason, it's difficult to say whether Tehran is ready to accept Ankara's proposal. We need to see that the Turkish leader's words are backed up by his actions."
As far as Damascus is concerned, the road to rapproachement with Ankara is likely to be even longer than that with Tehran and Moscow, in light of Turkey's consistent policy of supporting the terrorist groups which have terrorized Syria over the last five years. Nevertheless, if Ankara is serious, the Syrian government cannot but welcome the closure of the Syrian-Turkish border, through which much of Daesh's fighters, weapons and supplies presently flow. The ball is in Ankara's court to make that decision.
WASHINGTON(Sputnik) Syrian Arab Coalition forces backed by US airpower captured the Daeshs headquarters in the Syrian city of Manbij, although fierce fighting continues nearby, US Central Commands Combined Joint Task Force announced in a press release on Tuesday.
"The Daesh [Islamic State] headquarters, located in a hospital, was being used as a command center and logistics hub," the release explained. "The SAC [Syrian Arab Coalition] also seized a significant amount of the city during the operation, which provided civilians the opportunity to escape."
The capture on Sunday was preceded by more than 450 coalition airstrikes in and near the mid-sized city close to the Turkish border, according to the release.
"But this didn't help the critical and independent journalists in Turkey, because a day after the failed coup, twenty news portals were shut down by the government. And if we look at the track record of these news portals, all of them were opposed to the coup; one of them actually broke the story on the developing coup." The sites were shuttered without the necessary court orders, the journalist pointed out.
Effectively, Bozkurt suggested, as far as social media is concerned, "what the government is preaching and what it is doing doesn't add up."
Prior to the coup attempt, the Turkish government had already become infamous for attempts to control media, censoring social media and closing down and taking over multiple news outlets.
Bozkurt warned that ultimately, "what we are looking at is intensified pressure on what's left of the critical, independent or even opposition media in Turkey."
The danger, aside from the curtailment of basic democratic rights, is that the state will be left with the opportunity to spread outright misinformation. "For example, former Air Force Chief [Akin Ozturk] was arrested on the charge of leading this coup, and state run news agencies filed reports saying that he admitted all these charges. But when you see the actual three-page testimony, he never admitted culpability in this coup; he actually said that he tried to thwart it with the general chief of staff in the headquarters."
"There are a lot of stories going out, and social media appears to be the only outlet for many people to learn about this information or to post information in the public domain for journalists." If it disappears, so too will a resource valuable to both Turkish citizens and the international community, Bozkurt concluded.
With a wealth of historic architecture, including six UNESCO World Heritage sites, Syria was once a popular destination for foreign tourists seeking historical tours.
Five years of civil war have decimated the country's tourist industry, and Daesh terrorists even destroyed treasures at Palmyra, in central Syria, before Syrian government forces retook the ancient city in March 2016.
Backed by Russian air forces, Syrian government forces have also liberated 80 percent of Latakia Governorate from terrorists, a coastal province in the north-west of the country.
"Fathy invited Russian experts to visit Egypt to resolve all remaining issues as soon as possible. The Russian side agreed to visit Egypt in the next few weeks," the ministry said in a statement.
Russia suspended all flights to and from Egypt last fall after a Russian A321 plane crashed in the Sinai desert on October 31 while flying from the resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh to St. Petersburg following a terrorist attack claimed by the Daesh jihadist group, outlawed in Russia.
Hezbollah released a statement later saying the drone was "part of an operation against Israel."
With a 200 km range,and 5,000-meter maximum altitude, a Yasir can stay aloft for eight hours. The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) exhibited atypical maneuverability, lending credence to claims that the vehicle used advanced electronic systems from the US, based on an American ScanEagle drone intercepted over Iran on December 12, 2012. Its been reported that cyber warfare specialists from China are responsible for these upgrades.
Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), the US Air Force and other Western military units are interested in learning how many replicas of the US ScanEagle have been reproduced by Iranian forces.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) The Yonhap agency reported that the ministry was in the process of upgrading the PAC-2 Patriot anti-missile system at a military base in Gangwon Province into more effective PAC-3 Patriot system.
"Once the upgrading process for the Gangwon-based missiles is completed in 2018, the PAC-3 missiles there will be relocated to a base near Seoul," the ministry official said as quoted by the media.
Earlier in the day, it was reported that North Korea fired off three ballistic missiles. They were launched from North Hwanghae Province and flew around 600 kilometers (373 miles).
SOCHI (Sputnik) Korotkov indicated that MiG-35 serial deliveries to the ministry could be contracted after the tests.
"The aircraft is completing the general assembly stage, and should move to flight tests in accordance with the schedule. We will begin state tests as part of the Ministry of Defense program at the end of summer. The tests will be carried out until next year," Korotkov told RIA Novosti at the Sirius education center for gifted children.
The MiG-35 is a multipurpose 4 ++ generation fighter, it is a further development of the MiG-29K/KUB and MiG-29M/M2 combat aircraft with improved combat effectiveness and versatility, as well as improved performance.
NEW DELHI (Sputnik) Manohar Parrikar, India's Defense Minister, says "the negotiations are underway and the inter-government agreement and offset contract are yet to be finalized.
The details, including a transfer of technology through offsets, will emerge after the negotiations are completed."
Replying to a query over the Rafale deal, Manohar Parrikar informed parliamentarians that the parties to the deal will decide whether or not the fighter jets are manufactured locally once negotiations are completed.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) Late on Friday, Turkish authorities said that an attempted coup took place in the country. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other officials have blamed Gulen staying in self-imposed exile in the United States and his supporters for the coup attempt and called on his US counterpart Barack Obama to extradite the cleric, while speaking to a crowd of his supporters.
The coup attempt was suppressed by early Saturday, with Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim stating that all coup supporters were identified and would be apprehended as the country was returning to normal life. Over 290 people were killed and hundreds were injured during the events, while nearly 6,000 people have already been detained.
What the United States has offered to do is to assist where possible in the investigation of what transpired over the weekend, Earnest stated.
VIENNA (Sputnik) On July 14, a truck rammed into a large crowd celebrating Bastille Day in the city of Nice. At least 84 people, including children, were killed and hundreds of others were injured. The French investigation found that the person behind the attack was 31-year-old resident of Nice of Tunisian origin Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel.
According to the French government, Bouhlel was rapidly radicalized by the Daesh extremist group prior to the attack.
"In the current situation, I believe that we have done well so far, but now a new phase has started and it is necessary to develop a strategy for deradicalization," Kern told OE1 radio station.
"Even where they haven't had a democratically elected government they have been members of NATO. That is a relevant fact," Earnest told the daily White House press briefing.
Earnest said the partnership between the two countries as NATO members and in fighting mutual security threats, especially from Daesh and other Islamist movements, remained strong and was expected to continued, despite Fridays failed coup attempt.
"We [the Republican Party] support maintaining and if warranted, increasing sanctions, together with our allies, against Russia unless and until Ukraines sovereignty and territorial integrity are fully restored," the platform approved on Monday stated.
Moreover, the Republican platform also said the party will "support providing appropriate assistance to the armed forces of Ukraine and greater coordination with NATO defense planning."
MOSCOW (Sputnik) On July 21, Johnson will arrive to Washington for a series of meetings with international counterparts on countering the threat of Daesh.
"The Foreign Secretary will host US Secretary of State John Kerry for a bilateral meeting, underlining the importance of the Special Relationship following Britains decision to withdraw from the European Union," the statement reads.
Daesh is a terror group outlawed in Russia and numerous other countries.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) Around 290 people were killed and over 1,400 wounded in the failed attempt by the military to grab power in Turkey on Friday.
"Our government is in an important preparation and hopefully we will convene the National Security Council on Wednesday, he told a crowd gathered near his Istanbul residence as quoted by Anadolu news agency.
The Turkish government has accused US-based Muslim cleric Muhammed Fethullah Gulen of having played a key role in the coup.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) Stoltenberg plans to attend a demonstration of military airpower at the base, the press office added.
"Mr. Stoltenberg will participate in the Global Coalition to Counter-ISIL Defense Ministerial hosted by the US Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, which will take place at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland," the press office said.
Mr. Stoltenberg will participate in the Global Coalition to Counter-ISIL Defense Ministerial hosted by the US Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, which will take place at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland.
Georgia, TVN24 recalled, had first declared its wish to join the North Atlantic Alliance in the 1990s, during the reign of former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. In 2008, an advisory referendum staged by former President Mikheil Saakashvili found that over three-quarters of the population supported NATO membership. Western officials promised the Caucasian nation eventual membership at the alliance's 2008 Bucharest summit.
However, the broadcaster pointed out, following a failed attempt by Tbilisi to crush restless regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in August 2008, "the West, while continuing to support Georgia's efforts to get closer to Europe, began to evade its formal obligations to Tbilisi, fearing the escalation of a conflict with Russia."
At the alliance's summits in Chicago in 2012 and Newport in 2014, Georgia was not granted an official list of conditions for membership. "The Georgians did not receive such a list in Warsaw either," TVN24 noted. "After praise for reforms in the military and the progress of democracy, officials returned to Tbilisi with promises only of greater military assistance and reassuring parting words that there will come a day when Georgia is admitted into NATO."
Speaking to the broadcaster, Wojciech Gorecki, a former diplomat and Caucasus expert at the Warsaw Center for Eastern Studies, emphasized that he did not believe that Georgia had any hopes of joining the North Atlantic Alliance in the coming years. "NATO, and especially Germany and France, are opposed to the alliance being pulled into another troubled region, with the Caucasus seen as such a region," he explained.
"Of course, if it came to an escalation of the confrontation between the West and Russia, NATO, looking for every possible ally, would invite the Georgians into the alliance; but for now they are being made to understand that they should be satisfied with strengthened military cooperation, joint exercises, political support and praise for their fulfillment of the objectives and conditions which the West has set for them," Gorecki added.
Last Thursday, a truck deliberately rammed into a large crowd in the southern French city of Nice during the country's Bastille Day celebrations. Eighty-four people were killed, and hundreds more injured in what has since been described as 'the worst day in the city's history'. The violence was the third major attack against France by jihadist terrorists since January 2015.
As was the case after the previous attacks, in addition to offering their condolences, Russian officials and commentators also reiterated proposals for cooperation by the international community in the fight against terror.
For his part, Russian President Vladimir Putin issued an emotional appeal addressed to French President Francois Hollande and the French people, saying that "the cruelty and cynicism of this crime, committed on your National Day, is astonishing," and emphasizing that "only by working together can we defeat terrorism."
Hurriyet Daily News reported Tuesday that Ankara does not rule out death penalty for those suspected of plotting against the Turkish government.
"Turkish people have made it clear they want death for the 'terrorists' who plotted the coup," Erdogan told Becky Anderson of CNN, as quoted by the media outlet.
"The people now have the idea, after so many terrorist incidents, that these terrorists should be killed. That's where they are, they don't see any other outcome to it 'Why should I keep them and feed them in prisons, for years to come?' That's what the people say," the Turkish president underscored.
It is worth mentioning that Ankara completely abolished capital punishment in 2004 as part of the human rights reforms it launched in order to satisfy EU membership requirements.
Angela Merkel responded to Erdogan by urging that "he abide by rule of law in response to the recent attempted military coup," during her Monday phone call with the Turkish leader, Deutsche Welle highlighted.
Crucially, the columnist emphasized, "even a large, cohesive majority, fused by blood and tears and led by their rescued leader has no right to persecute minorities, to go after thousands of judges, or to send journalists doing their jobs to jail."
Erdogan's announcement of a merciless purge is a mistake which the European Union will not be able to tolerate, Muller added, noting that the suppression of the coup must not mean an automatic license for Turkey's government for arbitrary rule.
"But what will the EU do?" the journalist pondered. "Erdogan has already implied that he has no need for membership in the bloc, and indicated that Turkey would not ask anyone's permission to reintroduce the death penalty. "In turn, German Chancellor Angela Merkel considers the 'steeled ruler of the Bosporus' a reliable partner who has kept his word in resolving the migration crisis and on security issues."
On every major international issue, Knutov noted, "Moscow is fighting for the preservation and precedency of international law. We prove that the Americans, in invading Iraq, violated international law; that France and its allies, having bombed Libya, trampled international law; that when Yugoslavia was destroyed, international law too was violated."
From this perspective, the expert suggested, "a withdrawal from the treaty would be akin to violating the requirements of international law, and this is unacceptable. We must on the contrary do everything in our power to ensure that all agreements are adhered to. Only in this way will it be possible to ensure international stability."
Effectively, Knutov noted, "when these flights are carried out, it's a good thing. It was a bad thing when Turkey, for example, prohibits us from doing so." In February, at the height of Russian-Turkish tensions, Ankara refused to grant Moscow permission for an observation flight over the Turkish-Syrian border, a direct violation of the treaty.
Therefore, the analyst suggested that the present crisis in NATO-Russia relations is all the more reason to continue the overflights.
Following the NATO summit in Warsaw earlier this month, the alliance agreed to the deployment of four battalions in Poland and the Baltic states. Before that, NATO carried out a series of mass exercises across Eastern Europe, which also saw the transfer of heavy equipment, including armored vehicles, tanks and artillery, to the region.
For his part, US Secretary of State John Kerry told American journalists Sunday that "progress" has been made in the course of the recent US-Russian talks.
"The United States is running out of options in Syria, and the Obama administration is becoming increasingly desperate. That was the broad assessment from the White House's harshest critics on Syria policy upon news that Washington is willing to offer another quid pro quo to Moscow," Daniel R. DePetris, an analyst at geostrategic consulting firm Wikistrat, Inc., writes in his article for the National Interest.
The analyst remarks that the news was first broken by Josh Rogin of the Washington Post. The journalist was given a working proposal entitled "Terms of Reference for the Joint Implementation Group" by an unnamed source that shed some light on the possibility of closer interaction between US and Russian military forces in Syria.
"The following is designed to allow Russia and the US to intensify joint and mutual efforts to bring about the destruction of al-Nusra Front and Daesh in the context of a strengthened COH [Cessation of Hostilities] with all COH parties adhering to COH terms. To this end, Russia and the US reconfirm their commitment to intensifying support and assistance to regional allies to help them prevent the flow of fighters, weapons, or financial support to UN-designated terrorist groups across the Syrian border," it reads.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) Turkey has arrested at least 70 generals and admirals following Fridays unsuccessful coup by members of the Turkish military.
In wider signs of a massive purge, 21,000 teachers have been fired across the country and the dean of every university in Turkey has been suspended.
"It's not for us to support or not support," Toner stated. "We don't have role to play about whether another government would consider that option [the death penalty]."
MOSCOW (Sputnik) Turkish officials have accused Gulen, who has lived in the US state of Pennsylvania since 1999, of orchestrating Friday's failed military coup.
"Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan today once again demonstrated he will go to any length necessary to solidify his power and persecute his critics. It is ridiculous, irresponsible and false to suggest I had anything to do with the horrific failed coup. I urge the US government to reject any effort to abuse the extradition process to carry out political vendettas," Gulen said in a statement.
On Tuesday, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said Ankara had submitted a formal extradition request for Gulen.
Its absurd some of the allegations that are out there, weve seen in some of the Turkish media and other media as well, Toner stated. Its absurd to think that the United States was complicit or in any way connected to the events of Friday.
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters Tuesday that US President Barack Obama urged Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to respect democratic values during the investigation into Fridays failed military coup attempt.
On this episode of "By Any Means Necessary" host Eugene Puryear is joined by a robust range of guests including Kondwani Russell, spoken word poet and writer; Reverend Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou, pastor, writer and musician; Perry Redd, activist and organizer; and Sean Blackmon, Organizer with the Stop Police Terror Project DC. The group talks about the recent military veteran shootings of police in Dallas and Baton Rouge, what the response and next steps should be for the Black Lives Matter movement, and the impact of the government's legacy of violence.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) On Monday, the broadcaster announced that Trushnin who was sent to prepare a report about the military coup attempt in Turkey was detained in an Istanbul airport.
"The detained journalist flew to Russia," the press service said.
REN TV is one of the largest private federal TV channels in Russia.
In short, Siri is trying to translate voice into text, experiences errors 7-30 percent of the time, and then figure out what to do with the text. That is, the system always chooses from a vocabulary of several million words and is equally bad all the time. Then the system accumulates statistics on a certain user and, applying its assumptions on what the man said, selects the most probable variants, according to Lamin.
"A person never acts in such a way, which is also the case with our system. Our technology uses the context, the environment, and the previous dialogue to predict which general phrases can make sense at the moment. This is also a huge number, but significantly less than a few million," he said.
Lamin recalled that his company was the first to receive the 2001 Best Software Award for its Speereo Voice Organizer for Pocket PC, and that more than three million people installed the system at the time, when he said there were no iPhones.
Ratnik New future soldier russian soldier individual gear equipement sys https://t.co/eTNhKI1EOb @YouTube
(@Diesirae41) 26 2015 .
"Thanks to the most advanced mathematics developed by our vice president, Oleg Maleyev, the Speereo system shows the accuracy of management tasks at a level of 99.9 percent and works on any device which has 5 MB of memory and 200 MIPS, which is not the case with Siri," he said.
Additionally, the Russian voice control system is noise resistant and capable of working in a very noisy environment, where a man is powerless to do anything, according to Lamin.
NEW YORK (Sputnik) The 2016 Annual International Conference on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures (BICA) is part of a joint effort between other major conferences and academic events targeting work towards the computational recreation of human-level intelligence.
"It is actually the first time we had approximately 250 participants all together, certainly this shows a steady progress over many years," Samsonovich said on Monday.
John Laird, a professor of engineering at the University of Michigan, told Sputnik the conference is unique in that it involves collaboration between numerous experts and universities.
MOSCOW, (Sputnik) Earlier in the day, it was reported that Trushnin had departed for Moscow.
"He landed at [Moscow] Vnukovo airport at 17:38 [14:38 GMT]," the press service said.
The response recalled comments US President Barack Obama made at a town hall meeting last week, speaking to a group of activists, law enforcement officers and elected officials. "I think it's important for us to also understand that the phrase 'black lives matter' simply refers to the notion that there's a specific vulnerability for African Americans that needs to be addressed," he said, adding, "We shouldn't get too caught up in this notion that somehow people who are asking for fair treatment are somehow, automatically, anti-police, are trying to only look out for black lives as opposed to others. I think we have to be careful about playing that game."
On July 7 five police officers were shot and killed at the end of an otherwise peaceful Black Lives Matter march. The shooter was not affiliated with BLM, but had been previously suspended from the Houston, Texas, chapter of the New Black Panther Nation.
Baca made his false statements to FBI agents and US attorneys in April 2013. During a voluntary interview he said that he was not aware that his department had tried to block the federal inquiry.
Later Baca admitted that he knew his statement was untrue, and acknowledged that he was aware that it is illegal to lie to federal authorities.
As part of the plea agreement he reached with the FBI, Baca was facing up to a six-month federal prison sentence. His attorney, Michael Zweiback, pushed for no prison time, after Baca learned that he is in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. The attorney argued that in jail Baca would be vulnerable and unable to get proper medical attention.
On Monday, Republicans voted for the possible extension of existing anti-Russian sanctions, and the ability to provide authorities in Kiev with appropriate [military] assistance.
Earlier, many Republicans pushed for what they termed lethal defensive weapons.
The change to the amendments wording came at the hands of Trump delegates attending the GOP platform meeting in Cleveland. Trump-supporting delegates insisted that the language in the initial proposal be altered, and wrote a new amendment ruling out sending US weapons to Ukraine.
American energy producers should be free to export their product to foreign markets, the platform, which was adopted at the Republican National Convention stated on Monday. We remain committed to aggressively expanding trade opportunities and opening new markets for American energy
It also expressed support for the development of all forms of energy that were marketable in a free economy without subsidies, including coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear power and hydropower.
CLEVELAND (Sputnik) Trump made a brief appearance to introduce his wife, Melania Trump, as "the next first lady."
Melania Trump was scheduled as the keynote speaker on Monday night to emphasize the personality and values of the candidate.
"We are going to win so big," Trump said Monday night as he took the stage to the popular song 'We Are the Champions.'
The Turkish government said it had already arrested more than 6,000 people accused of participating in the failed coup on Friday night.
Turkey's crackdown on journalists and restrictions on freedom of speech have been condemned by the international community, including the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and Russia.
Late on Friday, the Turkish authorities said that an attempted coup was taking place in the country. The coup attempt was suppressed by early Saturday.
Turkish authorities have already sacked thousands of people across the country, including members of the armed forces, governors, military advisers, prosecutors, intelligence officers and judges.
"There were materials presented by the Turkish government in electronic form to the US government related to Mr. Gulen's status, and the Department of Justice and Department of State will review those materials consistent with the requirements of the extradition treaty between the United States and Turkey that's been on the books for more than 30 years now," Earnest told reporters.
The request followed a discussion between US President Barack Obama and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erodgan on Tuesday, in which Obama offered his assistance to Erdogan in investigating the coup, but urged the Turkish leader to lighten its stance against opposition figures.
"CNN is the biggest troll of them all lmao #Petty" the tweet read, with a link to a CNN article titled "Campaign denies Melania Trump's speech plagiarizes parts of Michelle Obama's."
Margaret Cho (@margaretcho) July 19, 2016 Aaron Holland (@AaronHolland1) July 19, 2016 The Justice Department issued a statement explaining the tweet.
"A staffer in the public affairs office erroneously used the official Department of Justice Twitter handle to post a tweet that was intended for a personal account," the DOJ said in a statement. "The tweet does not represent the Departments views and was inappropriate for the Department of Justices official account, so it was immediately deleted."
The official statement wasnt released until three hours after the tweet was posted.
Mark Critch (@markcritch) July 19, 2016 Marc Metry (@MarcMetry) July 19, 2016 "As a result of the incident, the Office of Public Affairs has implemented procedural changes to the way we use our social media accounts and will provide additional social media training for employees," the statement reads.
"The Justice Department takes this matter very seriously and will continue to take the appropriate steps to prevent it from happening in the future."
Randy Haas (@Randy_Haas) July 19, 2016
In light of Melanias plagiarism, many have begun to wonder what other famous quotes the potential first lady might crib.
Tuesday nights speakers will include House speaker Paul Ryan, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and former presidential hopeful Ben Carson, who, unlike Melania, has built a reputation for making comments that are wholly and inarguably unique.
Nichols asked, rhetorically, "Why are climate activists, who are only calling on the BLM to follow President Obamas lead and heed universally accepted science, facing this kind of uphill response? Its a shame that the BLM has turned climate concerns into a law enforcement issue instead of a genuine policy discussion."
In a March congressional hearing, BLM director Neil Kornze compared the anti-fracking movement to the armed militia group who occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon.
He told GOP Congress members that the agency faced "abnormal security" issues. "We have had a situation where we have had militia; weve had people raising arms at different times. We are on heightened alert and we are concerned about safety. And so a situation that we are not used to, separating out who is a bidder and who is not, gives us pause," he said.
The website for the bureau maintains that it uses special agents only to investigate crimes that take place on public lands. The BLM states "Investigations may require the use of undercover officers, informants, surveillance and travel to various locations throughout the United States."
"The aircraft was detected prior to entering the nations territory and was fully tracked by the Israel Air Force," according to the statement. "From the initial investigation, it was found that three intercept attempts took place as per procedure. No hit of the target was identified."
The circumstances surrounding the attempted intercepts and the kind of UAV are both being investigated.
Earlier in the day German police uncovered further evidence suggesting Daesh (also known as Islamic State/ISIL/ISIS/IS) links of an Afghan refugee who attacked passengers on a train in Germany, N24 TV channel reported.
Searches uncovered a hand-drawn Daesh flag in the 17-year-old refugees room, Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said earlier in the day.
"It is now known that not only a hand-drawn flag of the Islamic State group was found in the suspects room, but also documents indicating links to the Daesh," an N24 broadcasters correspondent reported live on air, adding that authorities seized the documents for inspection and analysis.
ROME (Sputnik) Brussels may halt talks on EU accession negotiations with Turkey if Ankara reintroduces capital punishment in the country, Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni said Tuesday.
"It is obvious that there won't be any possibility to continue any negotiation process with the country, which would have reintroduced the capital punishment, as EU values prescribe the abolition of the death penalty among other things," Gentiloni told Radio Anch'io broadcaster.
ANKARA (Sputnik) Turkey has filed an official request for the extradition of the Turkish Muslim cleric Muhammed Fethullah Gulen, who is currently living in self-imposed exile in the United States, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said Tuesday.
Turkish officials have accused Gulen of orchestrating Friday's failed coup and called on the United States to extradite him to Turkey. On Monday, the White House said that no formal request had been received by the US presidential administration.
"We have requested the United States to extradite the terrorist [Gulen] and have submitted a formal request, this was done by the justice minister. Four folders with documents were sent," Yildirim said at the ruling Justice and Development Party's parliamentary faction meeting.
From my point of view, there is a third power, an aspect of world politics, which even NATO is powerless to withstand, Vladimir Lepekhin, who is also Director of EurAsEc (The Eurasian Economic Community) Institute, wrote in an analytical piece for RIA Novosti.
The two countries have some certain things in common, which are being defined by the global causes of the ongoing processes within these countries, the author adds.
He further explains that France and Turkey are the only NATO member states which strive to maintain independent foreign and internal policies.
Greek media earlier reported that Turkish military coup supporters had seized Yavuz frigate and taken the head of Turkish fleet as a hostage.
Late on Friday, the Turkish authorities said that an attempted coup was taking place in the country. The coup attempt was suppressed by early Saturday. Nearly 300 people were killed and over 1,400 were injured, while thousands of people have been detained.
"At least four Turkish Navy ships are in the Black Sea now: two ships in the Romanian port of Constanta, one in the Bulgarian Burgas and one in the sea. There are no Turkish ships in Russian ports," the source said.
Late on Friday, the Turkish authorities said that an attempted coup was taking place in the country. The coup attempt was suppressed by early Saturday, with Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim stating that all coup supporters had been identified and would be apprehended as the country was returning to normal life.
Thousands of judiciary and senior civil service members have been removed from office in Turkey and thousands of military personnel were arrested.
However, fears in the EU that a default on Greek debt could spread panic throughout the Eurozone, led European leaders like German Chancellor Angela Merkel to demand IMF involvement in the Greek bailout.
Under the leadership of then-Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF thus rewrote its rules to allow lending to countries judged to be of "systemic" importance, like Greece.
Along with the European Central Bank and the European Commission, the IMF became part of the Troika group of creditors, and took part in Greece's first 110 billion ($122 billion) bailout.
According to the latest report seen by German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung, the IMF enabled its role in the bailout under political pressure from Brussels, and created overly optimistic forecasts to justify its lending to Greece.
In the negotiations between the Greek government and the Troika, the IMF "lost its characteristic facility as a crisis manager," the report says.
As the EU Commission acted on behalf of European countries in the debt negotiations, IMF representatives "were subjected, from the beginning, to political pressure in their technical analyses."
The 80-page report, most of whose authors are non-European, also point out that the IMF provided the financing to Greece despite initially referring to Greece's ability to repay the extra debts as "unlikely."
In addition, it failed to produce any guidelines about the loan conditions for countries in a monetary union, like Greece, which have no prospect of devaluing the national currency to increase exports or tourism.
The issue of over-optimistic economic forecasts is not confined to Greece; the report's authors say the IMF gave unrealistic forecasts for other Eurozone economies like Portugal, again allowing lending to occur in spite of concerns about the nation's ability to sustain the debt.
The experts call the IMF's activities "inconsistent," and contrary to its claim that it is an "independent, technocratic" institution.
In 2010 Greece's national debt was 146.2 percent of GDP; by 2015 it had soared to 176.9 percent.
In June last year, Greece became the first Western country to default on its IMF loan after missing two deadlines to pay the fund 1.6bn ($1.8bn) in debt interest on loans it had already received.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) US President Barack Obama offered to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan any assistance necessary to help investigate last weeks failed coup attempt in Turkey, White House spokesperson Josh Earnest said during a press briefing on Tuesday.
"The President [Obama] pledged any needed assistance to the Turkish government as they conduct an investigation to determine exactly what happened," Earnest told reporters.
Barack Obama urgies Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Turkish officials to respect democratic values during the investigation into Fridays failed military coup attempt in theit country, according to White House spokesperson.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) The United States strongly condemns what US Strategic Command assessed were three North Korean missile launches on Monday, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said at his briefing.
"The United States strongly condemns this and North Koreas other recent missile tests all of which violate UN Security Council resolutions explicitly prohibiting North Koreas launches using ballistic missile technology," Earnest stated on Tuesday.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) A total of 70 Kosovars are currently fighting for Daesh in Syria and Iraq, Kosovo Minister of Interior Skender Hyseni said Tuesday.
Hyseni informed Parliamentary Commission for Security on the rise of extremism and the data on Kosovars currently engaged in the armed conflicts outside of the country.
"There are 70 active Kosovar fighters in Syria and Iraq today. Unfortunately, there also are 38 women and 27 children in conflict zones, while 57 Kosovo citizens have been declared dead," Hyseni told Parliament members, as quoted by the Prishtina Insight newspaper.
Certified Ideal rallied three wide out of the final turn to pull off a 12-1 upset in Mondays $18,000 Filly & Mare Not Listed Preferred/Preferred Handicap Pace at The Meadows.
Certified Ideal followed the live, first-over cover of Very Loudly before Tony Hall sent her wide through the lane. The six-year-old daughter of Western Ideal-Arebas Last blazed home in :28.1 and scored in 1:51.4. Show Runner was second, 1-1/4 lengths back, while Spreester shot the Lightning Lane for show.
Randy Bendis trains Certified Ideal, who now boasts $478,973 in career earnings, and owns with Mike Novosel, Jr., Tom Pollack and James Walton.
Dave Palone piloted five winners and Hall four on the 14-race card.
Tuesdays card at The Meadows features a $140,000 Pennsylvania Stallion Series stake for freshman colt and gelding pacers. First post is 1 p.m.
(The Meadows)
Grand River Raceways 26th annual Industry Day Celebration is just around the corner, and the event esteems to be one of the best days of the summer for harness racing fans.
Festivities and the TV broadcast kick off at 1:00 p.m. on Monday, August 1. Post time for the first dash is 1:30 p.m.
The annual event showcases an 11-race card featuring Grand River Raceways major dash, the 19th annual Battle Of Waterloo. There are 73 Ontario-sired two-year-old pacing colts eligible to start in the $200,000 (estimated) race.
The eighth annual Battle Of The Belles will be contested for $140,000 (estimated) and 91 Ontario-sired two-year-old pacing fillies remain eligible.
The nine finalists for each of those races will be determined during eliminations contested a week prior (July 25, post time 6:30 p.m.). Post position draws for both finals will be conducted during the TV broadcast on July 25.
The Industry Day undercard includes Racing Under Saddle, consolation races for the Battles, and a Gold Leg for three-year-old pacing fillies in the Ontario Sires Stakes.
As always, Industry Day offers many other delights:
An All-Access Kids Pass is available onsite for $5 and includes face painting, balloon artists, bouncy castles, pony rides and a petting zoo (1:00 4:30).
Garage Sale in the Paddock Annex: all sales benefit the Ontario Standardbred Adoption Society (12:30 p.m. 4:30 p.m.). Donations of horse-related and horse racing-related memorabilia/collectibles/household items will be accepted until July 29. Contact (519) 846-5455 ext. 238 or [email protected] to make arrangements for drop-off.
HPIbet 3% Cash Back for wagers through your account on Industry Day races (minimum $50 wager, maximum $100 cash back; other restrictions may apply).
Enter to win one of 11 prizes valued at more than $4,000.
The prizes include a print of New Kid on the Block by artist Vickie Lawrence. This limited edition (of 100) giclee print is 18 x 22 and is signed and numbered 4/100. It is from Lawrences original coloured pencil drawing of the same size and features a frame constructed from wood salvaged from a 100-year-old barn west of Kitchener, Ont. The original drawing was recently published in a book, CP Treasures Colored Pencil Masterworks From Around The Globe, Volume IV by Ann Kullberg. Only 120 pieces were accepted from the 840+ international entries.
Other prizes include designer watches, a purse by Rebecca Minkoff, Nexgrill Portable Grill, Oster Prima Espresso Maker, and Poulan Pro Gas Mower.
An Industry Day program purchase is required to enter the draw.
First Bet Is On Us (some restrictions apply).
Horse Meet N Greet (1:00 3:00).
Standardbred Canadas I Love Canadian Harness Racing Fan Club will be on-hand with the Wheel Of Fame and Fan Club merchandise.
The Ontario Sires Stakes will provide OSS hats for race participants and lip balm giveaway for fans (limited quantities).
The 12th annual Drivers Edition of the Bouncy Pony Stakes.
Greg Blanchard returns to provide commentary for the broadcast which kicks off at 1:00 p.m. To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Canadian Horse Racing Hall Of Fame, Blanchard will be joined by a handful of Hall Of Fame inductees as guest commentators throughout the afternoon.
For complete event details, visit the official Industry Day website. The event hashtag is #industryday26.
(with files from Grand River)
Shes at home both at Queens Park and on the Woodbine Racetrack backstretch. She has a desire to go to Morocco and also become C.J. Cregg when she gets older. Get to know Gabrielle Gallant.
Meet Ontario Racing's director of communications and stakeholder relations, someone who doesnt mind watching reruns of a certain TV series, and someone who would love to hang out at the races with a certain The Big Bang Theory star.
A familiar Wing to it.
I'm a West Wing junkie. I must have watched the whole series at least 10 times. It's almost always on in the background at home when I'm writing. I haven't given up wanting to be C.J. Cregg when I grow up.
She landed her dream job.
"My background is in politics at Queen's Park, and as a consultant and lobbyist. But my No. 1 love is horses. I can't quite believe that I'm lucky enough to get to bring it all together in this job."
Her No. 1 travel destination is
Morocco is on my dream travel list. I think anywhere that has the east-meets-west vibe is magical. Istanbul is the most magical place I've ever been, and that's because there's a little bit of every piece of culture and history there. I love an adventure. I hope I make it to Marakesh someday soon.
The celebrity shed love to hang out at the races with is
I have a niche-love for celebrities who have horses. My favourite is Kaley Cuoco she loves her horses so much! It would be fun to go to the races with her, because she's such a horse lover.
Remember me?
I worked on the backstretch at Woodbine when I was a teenager, and on my first day at Ontario Racing, I included went back to see some old friends and their horses, and watch a few sets on the main track.
(Courtesy Ontario Racing)
Judicial Watch and Allied Educational Foundation File Amici Curiae in Support of North Carolina Election Integrity Law in Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals
'[T]he District Court carefully examined the pertinent questions in its determination that the changes to North Carolina's voting laws do not cause racial minorities to be deprived of the opportunity to participate equally in the political process.'
Contact: Jill Farrell, Judicial Watch, 202-646-5172
WASHINGTON, July 19, 2016 /Standard Newswire/ -- Judicial Watch announced today it has joined with the Allied Educational Foundation (AEF) in filing an amici curiae brief with the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in the case NAACP v. McCrory (No. 16-1468). The brief argues in support of a lower court ruling that the 2013 North Carolina election-integrity law, which includes, among other provisions, a requirement that voters show a photo identification card before casting a ballot, is valid.
The Judicial Watch/AEF brief was filed in support of North Carolina Governor Patrick L. McCrory, who is asking the court to sustain the decision of U.S. District Court Judge Thomas D. Schroeder, upholding the North Carolina voter law.
The case concerns North Carolina's adoption of common-sense election integrity measures requiring voter ID, eliminating "same-day" voter registration, reducing the early voting period, and prohibiting voters from casting provisional ballots outside of their voting precincts. The Department of Justice and other groups represented by the NAACP and the League of Women Voters filed suit, alleging this law was racially discriminatory against black voters in violation of Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act ("VRA").
In their amici brief, JW and AEF explained that the Department of Justice was wrong. First, Section 2 of the VRA only prohibits state laws that directly cause increased difficulty for voters to exercise their right to vote "because of" or "on account of" their race. The North Carolina law causes no such injury to minority voters. Furthermore, JW and AEF explained that state's voting laws are not illegal under the VRA just because plaintiffs show a statistical "disparate impact" of the law on racial groups, but rather the law must actually deny people an equal opportunity to participate based upon their race. North Carolina's requirement that voters show identification does not deny opportunities to vote based upon race. Finally, JW and AEF explained that the Department of Justice is wrongly trying to resuscitate Section 5 of the VRA, which imposed more stringent limits on states' election laws but was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder.
Judicial Watch and AEF cite statistical evidence indicating that not only has African-American voter registration and voting not declined since enactment of the North Carolina law; it has actually increased:
Elections since the enactment of SL 2013-381 [the North Carolina election integrity law] have provided real life proof that the challenged provisions of SL 2013-381 do not cause any discernible disadvantage to minority voters. Rather, both black and white voters adapt to the new rules and continue to turn out to vote at rates higher than under the former voting rules changed by SL 2013-381.
MORE: www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judicial-watch-allied-educational-foundation-file-amici-curiae-support-north-carolina-election-integrity-law-fourth-circuit-court-appeals
Editors note: Today we begin profiles of the five candidates for Cowlitz County Commissioner District 1. Three profiles those for challengers Curtis Hart, Jim Hill and incumbent Mike Karnofski appear today. Those for challengers Marilee McCall and Arne Mortensen will appear Wednesday.
The Cowlitz County commissioner races are highly contested this year, with five candidates running for District 1 and four for District 2.
Ballots mailed out Friday for the primary election on Aug. 2, which will eliminate all but the top two candidates for every race. Residents will only be able to vote for commissioner candidates in their prospective districts.
Five candidates are running for Cowlitz County commissioner for District 1: Curtis Hart, Jim Hill, Mike Karnofski, Marilee McCall and Arne Mortensen.
District 1 comprises Kelso east of the Cowlitz River and the southern part of the county.
Curtis Hart
Curtis Hart thinks of himself as just a regular guy.
Most well-known for starting the Punisher Squad, a citizen group created to capture sex offenders, he said he doesnt consider himself a politician. I think my lack of experience and being able to think of things outside of the box is my strong point, Hart said.
He said his passion for activism started at a young age. He was in grade school when his mother brought him to a march on the Gulf War.
Hart supports the Millennium coal terminal and Northwest Innovations methanol plant. He wants fewer regulations in the county and is concerned about property rights.
He also wants the Cowlitz County Jail to be run by the Sheriffs Office instead of the Department of Corrections, saying it would hold an elected official accountable for the jails actions. Hart said his cousin died about 13 years ago while she was on suicide watch at the jail.
He says commissioner meetings to be held in the evenings to allow more people to attend.
I think there needs to be more accountability there, Hart said.
As secretary of the Cowlitz County Libertarian Party, he said he got involved after his son was born three years ago, wishing he could be as free as I was.
If you want to be free, you need to make sure and do something to retain those freedoms, he said. Hart carries a gun with him when he can, a practice he began after his sex stings. He added, I live my life as closely as possible to a libertarian philosophy.
Hart is using GoFundMe for his campaign, on which he has raised a little over $1,000.
Jim Hill
Kelso City Councilman Jim Hill said he wants people to trust him and thats why hes campaigning only with his own money.
Self-finance represents that people can trust what I say is what I feel and what I am about, warts and all, Hill wrote in an email.
Hill supports both the Millennium coal terminal and Northwest Innovations methanol plant. He said he has diverse business experiences and would bring a different perspective to the commission that would help economic development.
Hill left Hammon, Okla., his Native American hometown, as a high school graduate with only $16 in his pocket. He said his father was an alcoholic and his mother intellectually challenged. Hill said it wasnt the best of circumstances, but there was a strong tradition among Native families to take care of each other.
He hitchhiked to California and worked odd jobs for years until he ended up in Kelso and has stayed for nearly 30 years.
He pulled out of the race shortly after intially entering late last spring, saying he could not win as an independent. But he jumped back into the fray after callers and visitors urged him to reconsider.
Besides economic development, he wants to address the root causes of drug use and invest in the countys young people.
Its a hopelessness that young people feel more so than anything, Hill said. They see that there is no real future for them in the community.
He is a staunch critic of Love Overwhelming, saying the manager have a lot of love for their fellow human beings, but didnt understand the consequences of a low-barrier shelter in downtown Kelso.
He also wants more funding for the 911 center and expand its staffing. He is the only commissioner candidate to set a $5,000 limit to his campaign.
Mike Karnofski
At age 67, Mike Karnofski said he initially wavered about seeking re-election. But he has much more he wants to do and projects to complete.
I thought about the things I think are important to the community, he said.
Karnofski, who has been the chairman of the board of commissioners since 2012, also serves on the Cowlitz Economic Development Council. He touted $2.9 billion worth of active projects during his term that will improve the economy, including the Northwest Innovations methanol plant and the McMenamins hotel in Kalama and Millennium coal terminal in Longview.
Ive positioned myself well for economic development, and Ive done that on purpose, he said.
Karnofski also boasted improvements in the Building and Planning Department after complaints about the departments inefficiency and lack of customer service. He also said housing starts and property values in the county have improved significantly.
People dont see that work thats going on, he said. Karnofski, a former Weyerhaeuser Co. manager, said he works behind the scenes and gets the right people working together on the right problems.
In addressing the controversy with Love Overwhelming, Karnofski said he wants the funding and review process for shelters to be put in the hands of the Health and Human Services Department instead of the Office of Financial Management. But he said the county will continue to use the state-mandated coordinated entry program.
Theres a perception that people are getting funded unfairly, Karnofski said. Karnofski said one of his major goals is to improve the countys health ranking. Cowlitz County ranked 31st out of 39 counties in the state for overall health this year. It ranked 35th for unhealthy behaviors such as smoking, obesity and sexually transmitted diseases, an improvement from being dead last in the previous five years.
Karnofski has raised more than $3,000 and spent most of his campaign money ahead of the primary election.
The fatal shootings of five police officers in Dallas jarred the nation, but for police officers across the country, the event was personal.
Thousands of men and women in blue attended the funerals of the slain officers last weekend in Dallas, including two from the Longview Police Department, patrol officers Kevin Sawyer and Dawn Taylor.
Even if they didnt know the victims personally, it still was an injury to the blue family, Sawyer said.
The officers paid the ultimate sacrifice for their job, Sawyer said.
On their own time, Sawyer and Taylor attended services for Officer Michael Leslie Krol on Friday, July 15, and for Patrick E. Zamarripa on Saturday, July 16.
Southwest Airlines provided free flights for Sawyer and Taylor to Dallas. A citizen donated $100 toward the trip, Bachofner Electric covered hotel costs and the Longview Police Benefit Association paid for the rental car and other expenses. Police administration worked to get the officers shifts covered so they could travel.
While the two were out for a meal, they happened upon the crime scene, which was surrounded by a makeshift metal fence, but still covered in measurements and markings from the investigation.
That was just sombering to see, said Sawyer, 43. They understood the meaning behind all the markings, which tracked the events of July 7 when a gunman attacked police officers at a protest in Dallas, killing five and injuring nine more.
I could see the events unfolding, just looking at the evidence, Sawyer said. You could see the bullet holes in the building; you could see the glass shattered. That was probably the hardest part for me.
Throughout the trip, members of the community approached Sawyer and Taylor to thank them for their service and express their support.
At the service for Krol, Taylor described a poignant speech from his girlfriend, a biracial woman who had dated the white police officer for two years.
She said, He was wonderful, he loved me for everything, for who I am, and then hate took him away, recalled Taylor, 47. The service, held at a Baptist church, was followed by a 21-gun salute.
You cant help but crying. There were tears all around me it was very painful, Taylor added.
Zamarripas service was held in Fort Worth, and was followed by a several-mile-long procession of emergency vehicles to the DFW National Cemetery. People hung banners from a freeway overpass, Sawyer said.
The two returned to Longview Saturday night. The next day, three more officers were slain in Baton Rouge.
In total there have been 31 officers killed in line of duty this year, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.
The recent shootings have heightened officers awareness of the dangers of the job, Sawyer said.
In the mornings, sometimes Taylors daughter begs her not to go to work for fear of her life.
But she said the funerals reminded them of why they continue to serve and revived my belief in my career.
I know this job is dangerous, but I love it the good things we see out weigh the bad, Sawyer added.
During a state sting, two businesses in Columbia county were caught selling alcohol to minors, according to the Oregon Liquor Control Commission.
A minor decoy operation was conducted earlier this month between July 2 and July 3. In total, 61 businesses were visited, including stores in Rainier, Clatskanie, Astoria, Warrenton, Gearhart and Seaside. Of the businesses visited, seven failed including one business in Rainier and one in Clatskanie.
New Bridgeview Deli in Rainier and Conestoga Pub & Grill in Clatskanie both sold alcohol to the minor decoy, and were notified at the time of the operation that they had failed.
The OLCC uses minor volunteers ages 17 to 20 to attempt to buy alcohol at licensed locations with a legal identification card. At both Columbia County locations, an alcohol sale was completed with the minor decoy. The businesses were notified immediately that the sale was part of a minor decoy operation, according to OLCC officials.
The businesses will not lose their licenses because of this infraction. The OLCC has a progressive sanction schedule with sanctions running from category one to category five. Category one is reserved for the most egregious violations, while category five is the least extreme.
Both the New Bridgeview Deli and Conestoga Pub & Grill received category three violations. Businesses are allowed up to four category three violations before being subject to liquor license cancellation.
New Bridgeview Deli was also caught selling alcohol to a minor decoy in May 2015, the last time a sting operation of this kind was conducted in Rainier.
Management of New Bridgeview Deli decline to comment. Management of Conestoga Pub & Grill could not be reached.
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Keeping child pornography and online trolling in check will be high on the agenda of a cyber-control hub being set up by the Home Ministry.
The Rs 400-crore state-of-the-art centre, Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (IC4), is being set up to tackle all cyber crime including child pornography and online abuse.
The work on IC4 has been going on. Once it is ready, it will deal with cyber crimes like child pornography and online trolling with priority, a Home Ministry official said.
Key objectives of IC4 are: to act as a nodal point in the fight against cyber crime and as an early warning system for law enforcement agencies with active cyber crime monitoring.
It will also set up an open platform for victims to lodge cyber crime complaints, besides support and coordinate electronic investigation of cyber crime and assist the law enforcement agencies in criminal investigation.
There has been almost 40 per cent annual increase in cyber crimes registered in the country during the past two-three years, according to an official estimate.
The Supreme Court too had pulled up the government for not doing much to check child pornography.
The government has already taken a serious note of the issue of child pornography and in recent months asked Internet Service Providers to block over 800 sites which had such content.
The IC4 is being set up following recommendations of an expert committee constituted to prepare a roadmap for effectively tackling cyber crime in the country.
According to the recommendations of the expert committee, there is a need to drastically reduce the crime against children and women, especially online abuse.
These kind of content and websites need to be monitored and blocked. The supporting laws need to be strengthened, parents need to be educated to monitor childrens activities in cyber space and educate them about good cyber behaviour, the committee suggested.
The expert committee found that India lacked centralised online reporting mechanism and skilled cyber professionals, besides having inadequate infrastructure for cyber crime monitoring and investigation.
Other drawbacks included challenges related to technology and research and development; legal and jurisdictional issues; lack of citizen awareness, SOPs for cyber crime investigation, adequate institutional structure, funding and a clear-cut roadmap for tackling cyber crime.
The IC4 will fill all these gaps, the official said.
The IC4 will have linkages with CCTNS and NATGRID, the two database having information related to various kinds of crime and criminals.
Another key priority of IC4 will be how to check attempts by of international gangs to penetrate Indian governments official communication network and hack them.
The centre is expected to provide all necessary technical assistance to CBI and state police on all cyber crime related issues, the official said.
PTI
tech2 News Staff
If youve been following the news lately, youd have noticed that theres quite a bit of chatter surrounding Americas HAARP research facility. Most notably, Indias environmental minister Anil Madhav Dave told the Rajya Sabha that HAARP was directly responsible for global warming.
Dave insists that the Alaskan HAARP facility functions as an ionospheric heater that can be used to heat the atmosphere, create localised weather affects and generally create havoc the world over. Does he actually know what an ionospheric heater is? Who knows.
But why stop at global warming? HAARP has been accused of creating everything from earthquakes to tornadoes to even mind-controlling hapless humans from half the world away. And yes, that's a heavy dose of sarcasm that you're detecting.
HAARP stands for High frequency Active Auroral Research Program. The research facility in question consists of an array of radio antennae spread over many acres. Combined, the facility is capable of pumping 3.6MW (Holy sh**!) or 70ERP of radio energy into the ionosphere and destroying the world as we know it. America is on the verge of ushering a new age of superweapon and world domination is just a Donald Trump away.
Rubbish.
Ionospheric heaters and HAARP-style facilities have existed since at least 1939. Global warming started long before that. Oh, and did you know that India has its own HAARP facility in the form of the National MST Radar Facility near Tirupati? It's not exactly the same, but it's similar enough to be worth mentioning in the same breath as HAARP. Also, did you know that Russia has a 180ERP ionospheric heater on their land? Did you know that there are dozens of such facilities the world over?
All HAARP actually does is bounce radio waves off the ionosphere to determine the scattering effect on radio waves when they pass through the atmosphere. Bouncing radio waves off the atmosphere is essential for radio communication over great distances, particularly when your military is scattered all over the world.
Words like ionisation and electron bombardment can sound terrifying, as do the megawatts of energy being pumped into the atmosphere. But these are only terrifying to the uninformed.
Firstly, a radio wave would lose a massive amount of energy by the time it reached the atmosphere. Secondly, the radio energy generated is nowhere near enough to vaporise a cloud, let alone impact the atmosphere, even locally, in any significant fashion. Thirdly, lightning strikes routinely generate over 1 gigawatt of power and ionise the air around them while reaching temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun. Lightning also strikes the earth an estimated 30 times a second. If 3.6MW of power is capable of vapourising clouds and inducing global warming, imagine what 400 times that power would do, and more than 3 million times a day at that.
Wed be sitting on a glass planet.
If you don't believe us, just ask any competent scientist.
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SoftBank Corp founder Masayoshi Son, who created a $68 billion tech investment behemoth from a $50,000 start-up, has divided investors and analysts with his latest "crazy idea", the $32 billion acquisition of chip designer ARM Holdings. Visionary, risky, or both, the deal announced on Monday caught them all on the hop. But in the way it was struck and presented, they all recognized the signature style of the man whose chutzpah led to successes like early investments in Yahoo! and Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, which briefly made him Japan's richest man.
Many investors had been hoping Son would use cash from recent asset sales to buy back shares or pay down its hefty debt, so SoftBank's Tokyo shares were hit by a glut of sell orders on Tuesday morning, trading down almost 11 percent. "A fresh acquisition is not what the market wants from SoftBank," said Mitsushige Akino, chief fund manager at Ichiyoshi Asset Management. "It's Mr. Son's style to keep expanding, but isn't he stretching too much?"
Investors fret the purchase of ARM, Japan's largest-ever outbound deal, may be too much for SoftBank, still in the throes of turning around U.S. carrier Sprint and tackling a $112 billion debt pile. Others take the longer view. "There is little synergy with SoftBank's existing businesses, but it makes sense if we look at ARM's future potential," said Tomoaki Kawasaki, senior analyst at IwaiCosmo Securities Co.
"Mr. Son is prioritizing investment for the future over shoring up the balance sheet. It's very Mr. Son-like." A self-made entrepreneur whom one investment banker described as thinking "in decades", Son, of Korean descent, has long been something of an outsider in corporate Japan. He wears the somber suits of Japan's salarymen but is an outspoken sometimes outrageous voice, with a celebrity status and 2.5 million followers on Twitter.
Selling his ARM deal to investors and analysts in London on Monday, he quoted Yoda, the diminutive Star Wars Jedi Master, with an urging to "listen to the force", and told them Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, had called immediately to discuss a partnership. Until last month, Son, known as "Masa", had been on the way out. Instead, the 58-year-old abruptly scrapped retirement plans and said he would stay on to create "SoftBank 2.0" and work on "a few more crazy ideas".
When presenting the ARM deal, he breezily dismissed his doubters. "If the investors do not like it, they will sell," he said. "I am the largest shareholder in SoftBank; I share the same interest as the other shareholders." Kazuyuki Terao, chief investment officer at Allianz Global Investors Japan, was among the skeptics. "It's hard to see returns that justify the more than 40 percent premium, or synergies with its existing business," he said, adding that it could hinder short-term profit growth, though longer-term gains were possible.
Son said he sealed the deal in just two weeks with a handful of advisers. These include Jeffrey Sine, co-founder of niche U.S. merchant bank Raine, who has advised Son for years. He did not have the input of his once hand-picked heir, the more circumspect former Google executive Nikesh Arora, who stepped down last month after Son decided to stay on. Arora had been credited with streamlining the SoftBank portfolio. "The deal was done quickly, without debate, but thats how Son-san always does these things," said Masayuki Otani, chief market analyst at Securities Japan Inc.
Son, who holds a 19 percent stake in the company, said investors should capitalize on what he called a "paradigm shift" in technology. ARM, he argues, will be central as the world moves to connected gadgets. That struck a chord with some. "Japanese companies are often too cautious to take decisive action, but Mr. Son is different," said one retail bondholder, a 72-year-old pensioner who declined to give her name.
"Thats why I bought the bonds. I want to support his challenging spirit." Even so, the deal carries significant risks, especially if it distracts Son and top management from resolving the Sprint headache. It has turned in loss after loss since acquisition in 2013, though he told investors on Monday the group would soon break even. "To us, the ARM acquisition announced yesterday appears largely inconsistent with Softbank's investment strategy," said analyst Atul Goyal at Jefferies, adding it was unclear how ARM, already trading at a premium, would benefit SoftBank investors. "It does not inspire much confidence and requires deeper review."
Reuters
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Germany plans new legislation to require manufacturers of cars equipped with an autopilot function to install a black box to help determine responsibility in the event of an accident, transport ministry sources told Reuters on Monday. The fatal crash of a Tesla Motors Inc Model S car in its Autopilot mode has increased the pressure on industry executives and regulators to ensure that automated driving technology can be deployed safely.
Under the proposal from Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt, drivers will not have to pay attention to traffic or concentrate on steering, but must remain seated at the wheel so they can intervene in the event of an emergency. Manufacturers will also be required to install a black box that records when the autopilot system was active, when the driver drove and when the system requested that the driver take over, according to the proposals.
The draft is due to be sent to other ministries for approval this summer, a transport ministry spokesman said. Germany is home to some of the world's largest car companies including Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW and the government wants the industry to become a global player in the market for self-driving vehicles. Chancellor Angela Merkel said in April the industry should draw up a wish list for Berlin to help develop self-driving vehicles, ideally with a timetable.
Companies around the globe are working on prototypes for self-driving vehicles, but such cars are not expected to be available for the mass market before 2020.
Reuters
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A $1.2 billion takeover of Opera Software by a group of Chinese internet firms fell through on Monday after failing to get regulatory approval in time, sending the Norwegian browser firm's shares to a seven-month low. The deal needed a green light from the United States and China, and one firm in the Chinese consortium said U.S. privacy concerns would have led to an investigation into some of Opera's products that risked delaying the acquisition for up to a year.
Opera and the Chinese group have instead come up with an alternative deal worth $600 million which strips out some products and services in a bid to overcome regulatory hurdles. The so-called Kunqi consortium, which includes online and mobile games distributor Beijing Kunlun Tech Co and search and security business Qihoo 360 Technology Co, will now buy certain parts of Opera's consumer business.
It will acquire Opera's mobile phone and desktop computer browser business, its performance and privacy apps division, its technology licensing business, as well as its stake in Chinese joint venture nHorizon. However, the consortium will no longer buy Opera's advertising and marketing business, its TV operations, nor its game-related apps.
The hope is that the alternative deal will make it easier to win regulatory approval from U.S. authorities, one of the Chinese partners told Reuters on Monday. "According to what we know, it was because of Opera's other services, and involves very many users' privacy. This would be extremely rigorously investigated during the U.S. government's audit and probably would have delayed the entire acquisition process by six months to a year," a Kunlun spokeswoman said.
"So we opted for a better method, and chose Opera's core assets, namely the consumer business, as the target of the acquisition. That greatly accelerates the acquisition process," she said in an emailed statement. Opera declined to comment Kunlun's statement to Reuters. The acquisition was part of a complex of deals being done by the Chinese buyers seeking to join forces in their home market, which is dominated by giant rivals such as Alibaba and Tencent. Buying Opera will also help the group expand into emerging markets in Asia, Africa and elsewhere.
Shares in Opera, which had flagged potential regulatory issues last week, slumped as much as 17 percent but recovered to trade at 54.25 crowns by 1210 GMT, 11 percent higher than before the original deal was announced in February. Earlier on Monday, Opera said the original deal was lacking regulatory approval, without saying whether it was awaiting the green light from China, the United States, or both. The final deadline for the offer, and the deadline for approval by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, were both on Friday.
"No regulators have said no. We have not received an answer within the agreed deadline," Opera Chairman Sverre Munck told Reuters, adding that the parties could have postponed the deal but decided to pursue the alternative instead. "A vast part of the investors are disappointed. We understand that, and we are also disappointed that the original offer didn't go through," said Munck. "People had expected a payout of 71 crowns, they won't get that. Instead, they will get an extraordinary dividend by autumn at some point," he said, without giving a figure for the payout.
The hope is that the new deal, which has been approved by Opera's board of directors, will close late in the third quarter. It is expected the proceeds will be used for a distribution to shareholders, share buyback and debt repayment. "Since it will not repay all its net debt, but maybe reduce net debt by around half ... the expected distribution of one time dividends and share buy backs is likely to be between 25-30 crowns per share," Norne Securities analyst Karl-Johan Molnes said.
Qihoo and the Kunqi consortium, which also includes Golden Brick Silk Road (Shenzhen) Equity Investment Fund and its Yonglian Investment affiliate, declined to comment. Chinese regulators did not immediately reply to a request for comment. The U.S. Department of the Treasury, which handles media inquiries for the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, was not immediately reachable for comment outside regular office hours.
Reuters
Kunal Khullar
OnePlus started off in 2014 as an ambitious brand with a motive of making a smartphone that could compete against flagship devices at almost half the cost. It had a unique sales strategy, an online invite system, which not only brought a sense of exclusivity, but also gave the company leverage to maintain their supply chains.
The OnePlus One created a huge buzz and was the hottest and one of the most in-demand smartphones from a Chinese company. So much so that the OEM found it difficult to maintain the supply chain. The next iteration, however, didnt do so well as it faced a bunch of hardware issues especially overheating of the Snapdragon 810 SoC and also the fact that people had to wait long for the invites which was frustrating for a lot of people. Also the fact that OnePlus had promised better invites-management and failed on that front. To a point where Carl Pei had to issue an apology.
The company then went on to launch the OnePlus X, a more affordable option for the consumers, which again failed to match expectations as it got lost among the competition.
Today the Oppo backed company has matured with experience. While it struggled with its last two smartphones, it is slowly progressing towards its goal of earning a decent share of the smartphone market along with a well known identity. The company is learning from its past mistakes and it seems that it is going back to its initial strategy of one device per year so that it can focus on making more refined devices which can compete against big names rather than making huge profits or churning out volumes. The company recently announced its third high-end smartphone, the OnePlus 3, which has been received well and is now one of the best smartphones to own under the Rs 30,000 segment.
We have always been committed to make a product better than what is currently available. Creating a strong identity is our primary goal. Today we have captured 7 percent of the market share of smartphones priced above Rs 20,000, said co-founder and global business head Carl Pei.
The past two years have seen a visible shift and budding smartphone makers, especially the Chinese players, have shaken the stronghold of Samsung, Apple, HTC and Sony. They have proved that making a quality smartphone doesn't necessarily mean a premium price. OnePlus has played a major role in this, as it went head-on against big and established names.
Only 15 percent of smartphones were selling online when OnePlus entered India, things are now completely different, replies Pei when asked about moving to the offline space. The brands business model is based online and we will continue to stay there. Since we are a young brand with a small team we cannot take risks as moving offline will increase our costs. We are however open to offline retailers who are willing to take up the cost while we maintain our prices. The company recently struck a deal with an offline distributor in Finland which is already selling the OnePlus 3 as their most demanding smartphone.
The co-founder also gave us a hint that from now on the company will be focusing a lot more on fine details, Just a few days before the production of the OnePlus 3 started, we decided to make changes to the curve on the back of the handset. An extra 0.1mm from the curve shaved off just because it felt right. The raised camera lens is lined with stainless steel which gives it a distinct look and protects the glass covering the camera. To ensure it isnt very sharp, we double checked every unit manually by hand.
In a highly populated and dynamic smartphone market like India, OEMs are competing against each other specifically in the budget segment. It is too early to say if we can or even want to enter that (budget) segment, maybe if we are desperate. We want to make smartphones that can match devices like the Samsung Galaxy S7 or the Apple iPhone 6s. Nothing less.
Nimish Sawant
This week has started with a major announcement in the technology world SoftBank acquiring chip designer ARM Holdings for $32 bn. For SoftBank, this is a huge investment and $32 bn makes it the largest ever acquisition deal in Europe from an Asian country.
SoftBank chairman Masayoshi Son has been known to make smart investments which give back great returns. He is calling the ARM acquisition his company's most important one yet. SoftBank had invested $20mn in Alibaba in 2000, an investment thats worth $65bn today. Also the $15bn acquisition of Vodafones Japanese arm has made SoftBank the third largest telecom player in Japan. SoftBank is also a majority investor in Sprint, which is the fourth largest telco in the US.
So what does this acquisition signify for SoftBank? That a Japanese firm has bought out a British technology company which is globally renowned for its IP, has certainly got everyone's attention apart from the huge asking price of $32 bn.
Speaking to tech2 Shiv Putcha, Associate Director, Consumer, Mobility and Telecom for IDC, said that there are two ways to look at the acquisition for SoftBank. "As a telecom player, it doesn't make much sense. It would have made sense if they acquired a hardware maker. But if you look at it from an investment firm's perspective, it makes perfect sense. The smartphone wave has peaked and we are looking at the next wave of devices," he said.
Internet of Things (IoT) is the category is already becoming mainstream. A look at the technology conferences of the last few years and you will realise that IoT was a major theme everywhere. ARM Holdings' chip designs apart from being used in smartphones are also being used in these IoT devices such as wearables, trackers, devices for smart city implementations and so on.
"Internet of Things, Connected Cars are future growth areas. With ARM designs being used in this larger addressable market, investing in a company that stands to have a much bigger install base makes perfect sense for SoftBank from an investment perspective," said Putcha.
ARM Holdings has been speculated in the past to be acquired by Apple, one of its biggest customers. Intel, the leader when it comes to making desktop and server chips, ceded the smartphone ground to ARM when it opted out of making chipsets for smartphones earlier this year. With a backer such as SoftBank behind ARM, should Intel worry? According to Putscha, Intel is a strong enough company and there is no immediate worry for it yet.
SoftBank has made it clear that ARM will continue to operate out of its Cambridge headquarters in the UK, and that its team strength will be doubled in the next 5 years. Masayoshi Son has said that he does not want to make any major changes in the way ARM functions.
A lot of publications have commented how Son got a good deal thanks to the weakening Pound Sterling after Brexit. Putcha says that it may have been a factor, after the fact. "Deals of this magnitude do not happen overnight. I am sure talks about the acquisition would have been on from much before," he said. According to Reuters, Son said he sealed the deal in just two weeks with a handful of advisers. These include Jeffrey Sine, co-founder of niche US merchant bank Raine, who has advised Son for years.
According to Putcha, the buyout should not have any major impact on the chip industry as such, specially in the short term. One of the reasons can be the fact that it has been bought by a player who does not have immediate gains to be had from the acquisition. As Son has already stated, the work culture and business models will pretty much remain as they are. Putcha also dismissed any fears about rise in chip prices or royalties, since there will have been long term agreements which prevent random decisions.
However, some analysts in Japan have expressed concern over the amount SoftBank has paid for the ARM Holdings acquisition, specially when SoftBank is itself in a $112 bn debt.
"To us, the ARM acquisition announced yesterday appears largely inconsistent with Softbank's investment strategy," said analyst Atul Goyal at Jefferies, adding it was unclear how ARM, already trading at a premium, would benefit SoftBank investors. "It does not inspire much confidence and requires deeper review." SoftBank share prices fell after the news of the buyout emerged.
Son, on the other hand, is quite upbeat about the deal. According to him since he is the biggest share holder in SoftBank, he shares the interests as other shareholders. Going by some of his past acquisitions such as Alibaba, Vodafone Japan and many more and with the apparent promise that IoT offers, the investment does seem like SoftBank is onto something big with ARM. But how soon the investment will see returns and break even, that is anybody's guess right now.
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Google CEO Sundar Pichai hit back Sunday at accusations that the global Internet giant failed to pay enough taxes in Europe, and warned of the potential fallout from Britain leaving the EU. As Google faces a raft of fiscal probes across the continent, Pichai told Germany's Welt am Sonntag newspaper that the US company invested "very heavily" in Europe and employed 14,000 people there. "As a global company, we find ourselves between the conflicting priorities of international tax law," he said, in remarks published in German.
"Based on the structure of existing tax law, most companies pay the bulk of their taxes in their home countries." He said that Google respected the laws on the books, and that governments would have to take action if they wanted to ensure more revenues stayed at home. "Only the further development of the global tax system by politicians can lead to better results," he said.
Asked about a Brexit or British exit from the EU following last month's watershed referendum, Pichai underlined the importance to Google of a "unified digital market" in Europe. He said it was a "challenge" for a multinational company "to come to terms with different laws and regulations in each country". "This complexity makes greater engagement difficult, which also plays out in investment," he said, stressing however that large companies were better able to deal with such issues than small firms.
European officials have raised questions about the tax liabilities of companies including Google, Amazon and Apple. Some firms have taken advantage of tax breaks offered from Ireland, Belgium and Luxembourg. Google's offices in Madrid were searched in a tax probe in late June, just over a month after police raided the Internet giant in Paris in a similar investigation.
The European Union also filed new antitrust charges against Google last week, piling pressure on the company over the alleged abuse of its market dominance. Pichai said Google's Android mobile phone operating system was "among the most open computer systems ever invented" and insisted that most Android phones "have several apps that aren't from Google".
AFP
tech2 News Staff
Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi, has sent out invites, encouraging fans to join the company at its mystery launch event on 27 July. While it does not give any hints as to what is going to be announced, the invite mentions that the tickets for the same will be available from 18 July.
There has been plenty of online chatter with regards to two smartphones that Xiaomi is said to be working on. First would be the a Mi Note, which would be the successor to the currently available Mi Note (in China) and the second, a premium device that is expected to be Xiaomi's first attempt at the premium smartphone segment.
A recent leak that showed up soon after Xiaomi co-founder, Liwan Jiang comment on a premium smartphone, led many (including us) to believe that this could be that Rs 40,000 device. Turns out there is a chance that this could also be the metal clad successor to the Redmi Note 3, tagged as the Redmi Note 4. There is also a big chance that mystery device could be the successor to the Mi Note, a smartphone from Xiaomi made for the Chinese market that did not make it to India. We say "big" because an earlier teaser hinted to the same with the words "2>5" hinting that the new Mi Note 2 is bigger than the Mi 5.
The mystery smartphone also appeared in another photograph with actor Haoran Liu (Xiaomi's brand ambassador in China). The smartphone shows off a finish similar to the HTC One M8 and the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3, where the fingerprint reader seems to be replaced with a secondary camera unit.
Dual camera smartphones are not new, still then, this could be Xiaomi's attempt to present its second all-metal smartphone after the Mi 3. Whatever the name, the smartphone's focus is clearly the camera. While the smartphone looks polished from afar, the close-up image reveals a not so impressive (or smooth) finish, which could hint that this is not the premium device many were waiting for. Still then, Mi Fans would be happy to know that another Redmi Note 4 or a Mi Note 2 is headed their way.
Philippine court dismisses graft case against Arroyo
AP, Sydney :
US and Australian troops plan to step up training so they are "fully prepared" to answer challenges in the Pacific, US Vice President Joe Biden said today amid rising tensions over Beijing's claims in the South China Sea.
Speaking in Sydney after meeting Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Biden said the two nations were a "genuine brotherhood" committed to "making sure the sea lanes are open and the skies are free for navigation".
"They are the life bloodlines of commerce and the economic growth worldwide," Biden said in the wake of last week's ruling by a UN-backed tribunal against Beijing's claims in the disputed waters.
Beijing asserts sovereignty over almost all of the South China Sea, despite rival claims from its Southeast Asian neighbours most notably US ally the Philippines, which took the case to the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration.
The United States, like Australia, has no claims of its own in the South China Sea, but insists that all shipping has a right to pass through seas it regards as international waters.
"We also discussed the steps that Australia and the United States are taking so our troops can train more together and increase our interoperability so that we are fully prepared to respond to any challenges, any challenges, in the Pacific with a united front," Biden said.
"It's important we stand together," he added, as he stressed that the United States was a Pacific power and intended to remain so.
Turnbull used a short media briefing alongside Biden to announce that Australia was expanding its role in Iraq to include the training of law enforcement officers and police as well as its current training of the Iraqi army.
Australia has been a staunch ally of the United States in Iraq and in the fight against the Islamic State group.
Biden's visit, which comes as President Barack Obama enters the final months of his administration, ends on Wednesday when he travels to New Zealand.
Turkey jails 85 generals, admirals as concern grows over crackdown
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses his supporters outside his residence in Istambul on Tuesday.
AFP, Ankara :Turkey's state-run news agency says courts have ordered 85 generals and admirals jailed pending trial over their roles in a botched coup attempt. Dozens of others were still being questioned as Ankara Tuesday stepped up a relentless crackdown despite international concern.Anadolu Agency said Tuesday that those formally arrested include former air force commander General Akin Ozturk, alleged to be the ringleader of the July 15 uprising, and General Adem Hududi, commander of Turkey's 2nd Army, which is in charge of countering possible threats to Turkey from Syria, Iran and Iraq.Erdogan has denounced the coup, which left more than 300 dead on all sides, as a treacherous bid to oust him from power devised from the Pennsylvania compound of his arch-enemy, the US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen.But with the authorities detaining over 7,500 people so far in a massive legal crackdown, Turkey's EU and Nato allies have urged Ankara to keep the rule of law in place.Erdogan's suggestion that the death penalty in Turkey could be reinstated has sent shudders through Europe and sparked warnings such a move would be the nail in the coffin of its already embattled EU bid.An Ankara court late Monday placed under arrest 26 former generals suspected of planning the coup, including former Turkish air force chief General Akin Ozturk, whom some Turkish media have painted as the mastermind of the plot.The generals have now been jailed ahead of their trials, a date for which has not been sent.They have been charged with crimes including seeking to overturn the constitutional order, leading an armed group and seeking to assassinate the president.In his statement to prosecutors, Ozturk denied he was the coup ringleader."I am not the person who planned or led the coup. Who planned it and directed it, I do not know," state-run news agency Anadolu quoted him as saying.Turkey's treatment of the coup suspects has alarmed its allies especially after the suspects were paraded before the media and shown being subjected to rough treatment.Anadolu published images of Ozturk and other suspects on the stairs inside the Ankara court house, staring blankly into the camera with their hands tied behind their backs.Ozturk has looked tired and haggard in images published by state media, with one of his ears heavily bandaged.The interior ministry said almost 9,000 people, including nearly 8,000 police but also municipal governors and other officials, had also been dismissed in a widening purge.Turkey has blamed Friday's coup bid on supporters within the military of Gulen, who Ankara accused of running a group it dubs the "Fetullahci Terror Organisation".Ankara has piled the pressure on Washington to extradite Gulen to face trial at home but US Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday he wanted to see evidence and not allegations.Gulen said in an interview with several media outlets including AFP at his compound in Pennsylvania that he has "no concerns personally" about the extradition request.The United States "is a country of law," added the cleric."The rule of law reigns supreme here. I don't believe this government will pay attention to anything that is not legally sound." In addition to denying his own involvement, Gulen "condemned" the coup, saying: "I have always been against military interventions in domestic politics." He called the putsch attempt "treason, a betrayal of the Turkish nation."
Spirit of Liberation War to fight militancy underscored
General Secretary of Samyabadi Dal (SD) Dilip Barua on Tuesday called upon all to come forward to form national unity on the basis of the spirit of the Liberation War to tackle militancy.
"People should join hands together to form a national unity based on the spirit of the Liberation War to fight militancy" he told a press briefing while replying to queries about the country's current political situation.
Stressing the need for forming anti-militancy committees under the banner of the 14-party to stamp out the social menaces, he said, "Jamaat should be banned for doing so and establishing a secular Bangladesh as well."
Barua, also former industries minister, demanded government interference to bring under its control different commercial and financial institutions such as Islami Bank and different educational institutions run by the Jamaat and their followers to stop terror financing.
Speaking about the foreign and local conspiracy to hinder the development works taken by the government, he said, "We along with the people will be always by the side of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to face together any imminent trouble."
At the briefing, he announced that national council of the Sammyabadi Dal will be held between December 18 and 22 next.
Democratic basis of Turkish government foiled the coup
THE coup attempt by a section of Turkish generals to unseat the elected government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has come as a victory of the people who took to the streets to foil the move but the aftermath of the failed coup also appears terrible.
In the quick purge in civil and military establishments President Erdogan has vowed to revive death sentence abolished in 2004 and so far suspended or detained close to 20,000 soldiers, police officers, judges and civil servants to prompt Turkey's Western allies which is also a NATO member state to call for respect of human rights and refrain from further stifling of the dissents.
We also make similar appeal to the Turkish government when the attempted coup has brought the biggest threat to the Turkish society. Its success could destroy the nation's democratic process but the vindictive attitude of Erdogan may equally prove disruptive to the stability of the state.
But it is the elected legitimacy of the government and the democratic practice of the government, however inadequate it was, that saved the government of Erdogan. By destroying democracy or the rule of law and resorting to revenge the government may not find it easy to restore calm and peace in the country.
President Erdogan has blamed the reclusive religious leader Fethullah Gulen, now living in the USA for having the hands behind the coup. He is very influential and operate powerful network in Turkish civil administration and military. Initially Gulen was a political ally of Erdogan but in recent years he turned hostile and reportedly asked followers to unseat the government.
It is the fourth military coup in modern Turkey and the only one that failed since 1960. Turkish generals ruled the country for many years as the guardian of the secular state. But the popularity of Erdogan whose AK Party is ruling Turkey since 2004 on an Islamist platform has denied the generals the opportunity this time throwing the nation to a total chaos. What is most noticeable is that all Turkish opposition parties in Parliament supported the government this time to foil the coup showing the commitment of the nation to democracy but there is also every fear that Erdogan may become more authoritarian in the new situation.
Turkey has been facing a violent time in recent years. Kurdish separatists and IS militants are frequently bombing the country's sensitive installations like city centers, airports and military outposts. Its southern border with Syria is equally volatile fighting attacks from Kurdish autonomous zone and from IS and Syrian forces. The five-year Syrian civil war has drawn heavily on the Turkish establishments and the coup has come at no bad time when the unity of the nation was all the more important to thwart destabilization from home and abroad.
Media reports suggest more than 7500 soldiers have been detained, 8,000 police officers and 3000 judges and prosecutors were so far purged. A court remanded 26 generals and admirals in custody.
The government itself is making all, nationally and internationally believe that the coup has involved all sections of people including judges and teachers. It shows terrible weakness somewhere in the government for so many people from all walks of life came forward in support of the coup. This weakness is undeniable.
Turkey as a brotherly Muslim nation, we in Bangladesh wish well but at the same time we advise caution. We see it as a victory of democracy and weakening of democracy in Turkey will mean weakening of the democratic strength of Erdogan government.
Soaring sugar price
CONSUMERS' helplessness is growing day by day due to continuous rise in sugar price since last May. Sugar was selling after Eid-ul-Fitr at around Tk 40 per kg. Then it started to rise and sold upto Tk 48 per kg during the first week of this month. It sold at Tk 52 per kg on last Friday and then the price sharply rose from Tk 72 to Tk 80 per kg this week. There is no indication whether it will stop; nothing should be said about declining of sugar price. Not only sugar, prices of all kind of spices have also increased in wholesale and retail markets after Eid holidays blaming price hike in the global markets.
The traders also partly attributed the price hike to a rise in dollar prices against taka couple with reduction of sugar import, higher shipping charge and rising of preshipment inspection duty. So many reasons but nothing credible so far. They also said, illegal sugar import from India has decreased due to tight security in the border to control militant activities in the country, which is also a major reason for price hike of sugar. Moreover, due to various reasons importers are now in confusion whether to import sugar or not. But consumers believe these are routine cover for traders to rise the price and the situation will not improve unless the competent authorities of the government intervene without delay.
There is no doubt it is an artificial scarcity. It appears that our monthly domestic demand for sugar stands 50 to 60 thousand tonnes of which 90 percent is imported. The local sugar mills supplied 11,000 tonnes of sugar a day in the last month. So, there is no reason to say that due to lack of supply, sugar price is rising. In reality, a syndicate is controlling the sugar market. Before Eid it was said the market has more than sufficient amount of sugar in stock. So there is hardly any possibility of sugar shortage. It is not so that demand of sugar has shot up suddenly. It is also not that internal supply chain of sugar has disrupted. So, there is no genuine cause for abnormal price hike of sugar. The greed of dishonest businessmen may only be held responsible for it. Punishment to those dishonest people and strict vigilance by law enforcement agencies may bring the situation to normal level.
Concern over possible new terror attack
Adequate security measures were taken by the law enforcers around the city\'s Jamuna Future Park following the possible terror attack by unidentified miscreants on Tuesday.
Staff Reporter :The government on Tuesday has increased security to its Cabinet members as police warned about possible terror attacks on them. On Monday night the Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) Commissioner through Short Message Service (SMS warned all members of the Cabinet about possible terror attacks on them.The DMP Commissioner in his SMS said that the police obtained intelligence report that militant groups might attack any minister any time. The ministers have been requested to remain alert. Police is responsible for the security of the cabinet members and their family. On Tuesday several ministers said that they received the text message from the police 'Source received Intel that militant group may carry out attack on any Minister any time. We have given proper instructions to all concern. Please take care and brief your gunman/protection party,' quoting SMS sent to the Minister, sources said on Tuesday. Later Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal confirmed text messages sent to the Cabinet members about the threat.On Tuesday talking to journalists several Ministers expressed concern over the alert, saying they will have to be careful. "We will have to remain alert and be careful about the possible terror attack on us. There is no reason to take the matter lightly after the Gulshan attack on July 1," Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Anisul Haque told journalists at his Secretariat office on Tuesday. However, the Law Minister said that they are careful but not worried over the threat. Meanwhile the Civil Aviation and Tourism Minister Rashed Khan Menon admitted that he and his other Cabinet colleagues also got the text messages about the alert. "I received a SMS from DMP Commissioner in this regard on Monday," he told journalists at his Secretariat office on Tuesday. "No security can stop them (terrorists) if they want to kill us," replying to a query Menon said.Apart from them, the State Minister for Health and Family Welfare Affairs Zahid Malek on Tuesday said like other Ministers he also received the SMS from the DMP Commissioner. "But there is nothing to fear. We are not worried over the threat. We will continue our regular job," he told journalists at his Secretariat office in city. Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal said based on intelligence report the Cabinet members and the high officials of the government have been told to remain careful. At the same time their gunmen and house gourds also have been briefed to be carefully. "The alert will be in effect until the next message," the minister said. Earlier, apprehending more terror attacks like ones at Gulshan and Sholakia, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina asked her all Cabinet members to be more alert and careful. Meanwhile, the government has taken various security measures to foil further terror attacks following reports that militants may try to carry out attacks similar to the Gulshan Cafe and Sholakia Eidgah attacks.Members of all law enforcement and intelligence agencies are on high alert. Holidays and leave of police personnel have been cancelled.Apart from strengthening security measures, the government has made moves to build social resistance against militant activities.
19 Shibir activists held in city
Crude bombs recovered
Police in a drive arrested alleged 19 Shibir activists(not seen) and recovered some Jihadi books, cocktails, mobile sets and laptops from city\'s Khilgaon area on Monday night.
Staff Reporter :Police detained 19 activists of the Islami Chhatra Shibir with crude bombs and sharp weapons from the city's Khilgaon area early Tuesday.Police detained also owner of the house Reazul Karim, said Dhaka Metropolitan Police's Deputy Commissioner (Media) Masudur Rahman. A large number of jihadi books, seven improvised bombs, four machetes and a computer were also recovered," the police official said. When contacted, Khilgaon Police Station Officer-in-Charge (OC) Mainul Islam said that the drive was conducted in a mess of Khilgaon Blocd C early in the morning and arrested 20 people, including two Shibir leaders, identified as Khilgaon unit President Motaher Hossain, 27, and General Secretary Abdur Razzaq, 24.They will be produced in the court today (Wednesday), he said.
Bail to the militants AG suggests co-ord cell
Staff Reporter :
Attorney General Mahbubey Alam on Tuesday suggested to form a co-ordination cell about granting bail to the militants.
The cell will preserve the data of all militants in order to check whether they have move other courts for bail for informing to the concern authority.
He was speaking in a press briefing at his office on the Supreme Court premises.
If the public prosecutors are informed that the bail petition of the militants have been submitted, the Attorney General's Office will take necessary steps to stop granting their bail, he said.
The Attorney General's Office will take strong step against their bail petition, he reiterated.
All missing youths not militants in hiding
Police probing links with radicals
The issue of missing youths has hit the headlines after militants' attacks at Gulshan cafe and Sholakia as the attackers were reportedly absent from their families for several months before staging the attacks. Police said the five Gulshan cafe attackers and one Sholakia assailant are among about 200 youths missing for several months. But it is not correct to assume that whoever is missing from homes have joined militancy. There may be many more reasons for stay away from homes maintaining or without maintaining contacts. According to general diaries (GD) filed at police stations across the country, the number of missing persons is 59 in Dhaka division, 22 in Sylhet, 52 in Bogra, 15 in Barisal, 27 in Rajshahi, 18 in Khulna and 25 were in Chittagong. The number may further rise. Most of the missing people with good educational background have reportedly stopped communication with their families raising the fear that they might have joined militancy by way of radicalization. But it is only 'speculation' without having any concrete evidence.The security agencies are now in massive hunt for missing youths to ascertain their hideouts and gather other information whether they plugged into local militant networks or left the country for other reasons. The Police Headquarters has already formed a special cell to coordinate verifications of the missing youths. "We have already asked the concerned officer of all police stations to send reports on missing youths to the Police Headquarters. A list of the missing persons would be finalised after tracing all necessary information of whereabouts of the persons after searching hospitals, hospital morgues, immigrations desk at airports and such other points. Whether a person is missing because of abductions or enforced disappearances will also be looked into," a senior police official at the Police Headquarters told The New Nation yesterday.Many believe that some persons may be lured by IS recruiters as they offer people jobs and money and people in needs may readily take the offer. We must have enough jobs and awareness to protect our youths from being falling into trap. Report said a five member family from Khilgaon disappeared last year and they were last reported at Turkey. Indications suggest that they have gone to IS territories in Syria where they give jobs and houses. Some other cares were similarly reported. There might be some other reasons such as fear of life and personal security that a young man may suffer from to decide about going into hiding inside the country or outside. At a time of political hostility at the peak, young people belonging to opposition parties may keep away from home and even their families may not like to disclose where they are living for safety. Many may also leave families out of frustration and anger and remain out of contact, although they are not criminal any way. Many also may leave the country for jobs abroad through informal channels where the possibility of documentation may not be possible. This is how thousands of our young people left the country by sea routes for Thailand and Malaysia. The number of Bangladeshi nationals going to Europe by crossing the Mediterranean through Italy and Turkey is plenty and many of them have also died. Families usually don't want to make the information public. People who died or killed without credible information are essentially not missing for joining militancy but it is not possible either to prove that their missing is in persuit in jobs abroad.
IU student killed in shootout
Jhenaidah Correspondent :
An activist of the Islami Chhatra Shibir (ICS), the student wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami, studying at Islamic University was killed in a 'shootout' with the police near Aruakandi graveyard on the Jhenaidah-Magura highway under Madhupur union of Jhenaidah Sadar upazila on Tuesday early morning.
The deceased was identified as Shafiul Islam alias Mamun, 22, son of Lutfar Rahman from Putimari village under Sailkupa upazila of the district. He was the Secretary of ICS, Dudhsar union unit, in Sailkupa upazila.
On the other hand, the family sources said, he was picked up by plainclothes men on July 1 from the house of Tulu Mia situated at Pobahati area under Jhenaidah municipality. Earlier three ICS men were killed in separate police shootout in the same upazila two weeks ago. The death toll of the ICS workers in the district rose to four in last three weeks.
Shafiul was studying at Islamic University. Two police men reportedly sustained injuries during the time. the police said.
Azbahar Ali Seikh, Additional Superintendent of Police, Jhenaidah, said, a team of police were patrolling at about 3.00 am. When they reached near the graveyard beside the Magura-Jhenaidah highway, the Shibirmen threw bombs targeting the law enforcers. The police men in self-defence opened fire that resulted in the death of Shafiul.
The police recovered the dead body, a shutter gun, five bombs and two swords from the possession of the deceased.
Earlrier on July 1 two activists of Islami Chhatra Shibir (ICS) Shahid Al Mamun and Anisur Rahman were killed in a 'gunfight' with the police during the small hours of the day. The occurrence took place at Tetulbaria village under Jhenaidah Sadar Upazila at about 2.30 AM.
The following morning, another Shibir activist Ibnul Islam Parvez, 29, was killed at Madhupur graveyard, near the Kastosagra Radhamadan Math temple in Jhenaidah Sadar Upazila where the Shebayet Shymananda Sarker of Radhamadan Math was hacked to death by some unidentified miscreants.
Youth killed in crossfire in Jessore
Jessore Correspondent :Nesar Uddin, 32, son of Abdul Gaffar, a resident of Bezpara in Jessore, was shot dead allegedly by the police at Barandipara of Jessore town at 3am. But the police claimed that the youth was killed in cross firing among drug peddlers, robbers and the patrol police. Ilias Hossain, Officer in-Charge, Kotwali told that the youth, accused in 7 cases, was killed in a cross firing among a gang of robbers, drug peddlers and the police. Ali Hasan, elder brother of the victim, told a group of newsmen that he was killed by the police for a feud with an Awami League man of the area.
Law enforcers` hunt for missing men
Over 100 people listed in districts
Md Joynal Abedin Khan :The members of law enforcing agencies are hunting for missing men across country though the cops usually refused to take any complaint in connection with the misfortunate people.They have already started to take special concern about the missing people, particularly the youths, after experiencing the activities of home-abandoned men who took part in the sensational terror attack in Gulshan Cafe and Sholakia Eidgah."The law enforcers also speculated that most of the missing men might have link with the recent terror attacks," Deputy Inspector General (Crime and Operation) of Police Headquarters Humayun Kabir told The New Nation on Tuesday. "It is tough to mention the exact number of missing men as the list is under process. We will provide a final list after justifying the district level data of misfortunate people," the police official said. He estimated the number of missing people around one hundred who are still remaining out of their family contact for a long time. All districts and metropolitans police have been asked to make lists of the missing people and give final reports in a short time, the DIG said. The law enforcers trying to make clear the list after verifying cases, general diaries, and complaints with the police stations across the country, he said. Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) Legal and Media Wing Director Commander Mufti Mahmud Khan told The New Nation that over 80 missing people have been listed in several districts. He expected that the list will be finalized soon and it will be supplied to the media. Meanwhile, a doctor with his four other family members have also been missing over a year. They are Pediatrician Khandaker Rokonuddin, 50, his wife Nayma Akhter, 45, daughters Rezwana Rokon, 23, and Ramita Rokon, 15, and son-in-law Saad Qayes, 30, left Dhaka on Oct 10 last year. Since then they went missing.In Sirajganj, at least 16 youths went missing in the district, said Md Ziaul Hasan Talukder, Superintendent of Police (SP). Of them, 11 victims are Aminul Islam, 35, Zahangir 27, Kawsar 40, Momin, 23, Habibur Rahman, 27, Zaved, 25, Abdul Momin 27, Rakibul, 23, Hafej Masud Rana, 27, Zakir, 16, and Arman Reza 15. The SP said that details about them will not be published in the shake of the investigation. The victims' family filed at least seven cases and four GDs seeking to trace them, he said. In Sunamganj, at least three madrasah students went missing for around three years, said SP Mohammad Harun Or Rashid. A general diary has been filed with Tahirpur Police Station on July 14. In Mymensingh, at least seven youths went missing, said SP Syed Harun-Ar-Rashid. The victims are Forhad Mia, 16, Mozahidur Rahman, 14, shajhawat Hossain, 26, Jahirul Islam, 16, Nayedullah, 13, Rajesh Kabi, 24, Abdur Rahman alias Jyoti, 26, In Jhenaidah, at least 10 youths went missing, said Gupinath Kanjilal, (ASP Sadar-Cricle).In Pabna, at least three youths had gone missing from Atgharia and Iswardi upazilas, said Liton Kumar Shaha, SP of the district. They victims are Likhon 19, Sajeeb Sheikh, 29, and Sumon 25, he said. In Joypurhat, a university student went missing for around nine months from Begun area of Kalai upazila in the district. The victim has been identified as Aminul Islam Apu, 20. A GD has been filed on October 6 in the last year, said Sirazul Islam, OC of Kalai Police Station.In Munshiganj, a college student went missing fro a month in Sreenagar upazila. The victima was identified as Nurun Nahar, 18. She is also a first year student of Sreenagar Governemnt College. In Nilphamari, a youth went missing from Syedpur upazila on Saturday morning, SP Zakir Hossain Khan said. They victim has been identified as Shariful Islam Chowdhury, 28.
Dy Mayor of Istanbul shot dead
Cemil Candas
The Times of Israel :
A senior official working for Istanbul's Sisli district city hall died Monday after two gunmen walked into his office and shot him in
the head. It was not immediately clear if the incident was related to the failed coup that has been roiling Turkey for the past several days.
Deputy Mayor in charge of Development Cemil Candas was rushed to a nearby hospital, but succumbed to his injuries afterwards. Police detained the two gunmen, who were taken out by the rear entrance.
Various reports inaccurately stated that Candas was Jewish. Sisli is home to some of Istanbul's remaining Jews, as well as the Jewish newspaper and the Ottoman-Turkish Sephardic Culture Research Center.
The Sisli municipality is run by the opposition Republican People's Party, or CHP.
"The TPP will directly impact Louisiana businesses and open the pathway for improved commerce and trade between the United States and our Pacific Rim partners.
A far-reaching trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership pulls in 12 different countries and has earned the support of Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards.
Edwards made his announcement recently alongside a bipartisan group of governors attending the National Governors Associations summer conference. The group included Gov. Terry Branstad of Iowa, Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia, Gov. Brian Sandoval of Nevada and Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa.
Louisiana is a trade powerhouse, said Edwards. We have built a thriving international commerce and trade economy and have one of the largest port complexes in the world. The TPP will directly impact Louisiana businesses and open the pathway for improved commerce and trade between the United States and our Pacific Rim partners.
In 2015, Louisiana exported over $49 billion worth of goods and continues to rank among the top 10 exporting states in the nation. According to the U.S. International Trade Administration, $17.5 billion in Louisiana products were exported to TPP countries in 2014, equaling 27 percent of all Louisiana goods exports.
In addition to the United States, there are 11 Trans-Pacific Partnership countries, including Australia, Brunei Daraussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.
The text of the trade agreement needs to be signed and ratified by all 12 participating countries.
The trade deal eliminates more than 18,000 tariffs on goods made and grown in the United States, including a 40 percent tariff on poultry, a 7 percent tariff on oysters, a 25 percent tariff on paint and a 33 percent tariff on soybean products.
Speaking during Acadiana Press Clubs Monday forum are, from left, Marja Broussard, David Khey, Art LeBreton and Reggie Thomas. Photo by Patrick Flanagan
Is Lafayette's sense of community strong enough to insulate it against what's been playing out nationally in recent weeks as people take to the streets in protest of yet another round of fatal police shootings of black males? That was one of the main topics of an Acadiana Press Club gathering Monday.
Baton Rouge is less than an hour away, and the recent police killing of Alton Sterling turned our neighbor to the east into one of the most popular destinations in the country for Black Lives Matter protesters.
Police met the protesters in full riot gear, and there were hundreds of arrests. But the tragedy turned even more tragic and violent Sunday when a lone shooter from out of state ambushed and murdered three law enforcement officers. Three additional officers sustained injuries during the ambush; one is still fighting for his life.
That Sunday massacre came on the heels of a similar incident in Dallas, where another gunman targeted and killed five police officers as a self-described act of revenge.
We're not in a good place right now in this country when it comes to the relationship between black Americans and law enforcement. And that raises an important question: What about Lafayette?
What happens if a Lafayette officer is involved in fatally shooting one of our black citizens? Recent history of the Lafayette Police Department shows it's happened before, 11 times under retired former Chief Jim Craft. The difference between those incidents and the shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile in Minnesota is all about timing. Even though Lafayette's past police shootings were all investigated and the officers eventually cleared of any wrongdoing, there's a fundamental difference between those and the killings of late; namely, when they happened. In the time since Lafayette's last fatal shootings by one of its officers, much has changed. People are now watching and reacting in protests that grow bigger with each shooting. Black Lives Matter has gone from slogan to movement.
"This is a scary time for law enforcement officers," says Reggie Thomas, a 26-year veteran of the Lafayette Police Department who has served as interim chief since Craft's retirement from the force in January.
Thomas was among four panelists featured Monday at the law enforcement forum, held at The Daily Advertiser. Thomas was joined by Lafayette Parish Sheriff's Office Enforcement Commander Maj. Art LeBreton; David Khey, head of UL Lafayette's Criminal Justice Department; and Marja Broussard, a community organizer who also serves as leader of the Lafayette chapter of the NAACP.
"The uniform, it is a target," Thomas continued. "Police officers can continue to be professionals, well-trained and in touch with the people they're policing. You have to know the people you're policing. Right now, I'm concerned about keeping my officers and the community safe."
Despite recent events, Thomas is optimistic for Lafayette as a community, saying that by taking the right steps, the local PD can bridge the long-standing divide between itself and black residents. Also optimistic is LPSO's LeBreton.
"In Acadiana we benefit from a good relationship with the community," said LeBreton. "This region hasn't seen a great deal of civil unrest. The police department and sheriff's office, we are members of the community. It sets standards for what are the expectations of the community. I think our community is best served by local law enforcement."
That sentiment, however, was not shared by all in attendance at Monday's forum.
The NAACP's Broussard said there is a problem and it's real. Pointing out that black men have in fact been killed during past encounters with the Lafayette Police, Broussard raised a number of questions about who should be policing whom.
"There's definitely a problem, and my solution is to let African Americans patrol the African-American communities," urged Broussard. "I wonder, how many white officers have killed black males? How many black officers have killed black males? How many white officers kill white males? It's in the stats, white officers kill African-American citizens. The officers don't know us. African Americans need to train white officers in how to handle African Americans."
John Milton, a local lawyer and pastor who was in the audience, pointed to the recent statute passed by the Louisiana Legislature making it a hate crime to target law enforcement officers with violence.
"Our Legislature passed a law recently giving greater protection to our law enforcement," noted Milton, who is black. "You know, All Lives Matter really doesn't come up unless you say Black Lives Matter."
And for Milton, this is not a new issue; he says it goes back centuries.
"We're not living in a post-racial America," said Milton. "We've never gotten to real solutions. From slavery to Jim Crow to segregation, we never really talked about it. We need to learn to talk about black people not as the object but as the subject. We're being talked about but not being talked to. Fixing the disease of white guilt ... we thought we did that by electing a black president. But that's a lie. We need to have the dialogue. We have to address this. But I don't think this community is ready to do that."
Another black member of Monday's audience, Tonya Bolden-Ball, warned that what happened to Alton Sterling and Philando Castile will happen here.
"It's gonna happen," she said. "Now it's time for us to take notes ... we can't afford to be reactive. Lafayette needs to start taking notes. We're just a bullet away ... we need to start having conversations that are uncomfortable."
Another audience member, a 38-year-old black man who withheld his name during the forum, shared a story of what his life has been like as a black man living in the American.
"The reality of it is, when I drive to work every day, I'm looking in the mirror," he said. "I shouldn't feel I'm about to wet my pants because I'm about to step out of a car and get shot because I reach for my phone."
This dread has led him to always prepare for the worst, like how he types up a pre-text message to his girlfriend in the event that he's pulled over and arrested.
The 38-year-old black man questioned why he isn't treated like his fellow white residents.
The answer likely lies hidden in what David Khey calls "mountains of research" containing ways to effectively fix the problem. Yet, as Khey warned during Monday's forum, this will require a long-term effort, and will probably take more than one generation to make right. Khey, who's spent 15 years researching these issues, says understanding the roots of all that's been playing out in the last two years between police and the Black Lives Matter movement is hugely complex.
"Given the amount of coverage we've seen on this, it seems like our ship is headed in the wrong direction," warned Khey. "There's mountains of research to rely on to get this right. There's a deterioration of trust where it impacts our lives on both side the fence. Since Jim Crow we've just been putting a Band-aid on it. But research shows there are disparities in society that are persistent. On the individual level, it doesn't seem that bad. But on a larger scale there are disparities that just aren't fair. What's happening now is an example of how these disparities impact us over time."
Khey points to the loss of public investment in mental health and substance abuse treatment, and the lack of educational resources for low-income students. This "divestment" as he calls it, has resulted in our law enforcement officers now being the go-to for handling these societal issues.
"There's a breakdown in mistrust in our communities," said Khey. "There's fear of our neighbor, fear of law enforcement, and if you're someone suffering from mental illness or addiction, who do you turn to? Law enforcement becomes the face for all these things: domestic violence, substance abuse, mental health. All of these are heavily concentrated in black communities. There's just a whole lot of complexity to this issue. Shootings are just symptoms of a greater problem."
The worst thing Lafayette can do, adds Khey, is ignore the problem.
"It's going to take a very long time to address these trust issues," continued Khey. "But to ignore, to put another Band-aid will just not suffice. I do think it's going to take another generation or two before we'll see change. We must understand what lives get pushed away in society."
Yet Lafayette's interim police chief does believe the conversation is starting and the change happening.
Thomas believes the gap between law enforcement and Lafayette's black citizens can be bridged with what he calls "community policing." It's an often-heard term, but Thomas says it's simple; it's just a matter of police learning to talk to the community. "I believe in community policing. It's a philosophy. If you talk to your community, show you're willing to back and work with that community. I think by doing that this community will never have the problems we've seen. I know I'm all in."
Thomas pointed to Lafayette's black population and the makeup of its police department. Given that only 17 percent of Lafayette's police officers are black compared to a citywide population of 32 percent, Thomas said recruitment would be another good place to start.
"I believe the police department should mirror the community it serves," said Thomas. "We can do better. It starts with recruitment."
And what about Marja Broussard's idea of having only black officers policing black citizens?
"Can African Americans police African Americans better than a white guy can?" questioned Thomas. "Look I need African Americans all over the police department. Do we need more diversity? Yes. We have to recruit better. Not just college, but from the military, churches, by getting our officers to go out in the community to help recruit. I believe by having better diversity all over the department we'll have better policing."
Thomas also believes higher ranking officers need to be out in the community, accessible to the public, in order to make the necessary changes happen.
"Community policing starts at the top," he explained. "People want to see the chief sit down and talk to people. We should demand our higher ranking officers come talk to the community. They need to be out there because they can make changes happen immediately. People have been saying, 'I'm not used to seeing the chief out here.' You can't talk to everybody, it's a very busy job, but I have no problem talking to people." (Thomas is unable to apply for the permanent police chief post because he lacks a bachelor's degree.)
Bridging this divide is also going to take new approaches to training, noted Thomas. Lafayette officers undergo 40 hours of required training every year, and this does include diversity training. Thomas did stress that more hours could be devoted to diversity-focused training. "That's something I'm going to continue to push."
Additionally, work has been under way since earlier this year to improve community relations, Thomas told the audience.
"Right now I'm concerned about keeping my officers and the community safe," said Thomas. "You have to know the people you're policing. Community relations. We started a committee with members of the Northside of town. The Lafayette Police Department is at the table ready to work with whoever will sit with us. Communication is key to it all."
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The sextoy market is growing quite rapidly in India right now.
Although it is not a big trend, it is a hot topic on the internet as it is secretly expanding its market.
In this article, we will focus on sextoy and introduce recommended sextoy for Indian beginners of sextoy by gender.
India, the birthplace of the Kama Sutra, is very strict about sex.
Also, premarital sex is basically not allowed. Therefore, there are many people who are sexually restricted.
But what happens when you continue to be sexually restricted?
Frustration may build up and you may end up taking your sexual stress out on your partner.
If you are able to adopt sextoy in a timely manner, you can get rid of those problems.
I want to have more exciting sex than Im having now.
I want more variation in masturbation
I want to get even stronger pleasure than I do on my own.
If you have any of these problems, please stay with me until the end.
What is sex toys for Indian?
Sextoy, as the name implies, is a toy used during sex and masturbation.
It is a generic term for vibrators, Egg-vibrators, Electric massagers, dildo, handcuffs and condoms.
They are used to make regular sex more exciting or to make masturbation more pleasurable.
Because sextoy is very stimulating, it can help you to get rid of the problems and frustrations of being in a rut of sex with your partner for a long time, or if you are unhappy with the lack of pleasure in sex with your partner.
The ability to satisfy your desires with movement, texture, and size, which cannot be done by a normal human being, can help you to be satisfied with sex and, as a result, improve your relationship with your partner.
It is also said to help improve sexual dysfunction (inability to get an erection or ejaculate) and difficulty in feeling during sex (insensitivity), which is attracting more attention than in the past.
In recent years, the demand for sextoy has increased due to the spread of smartphones and the Internet and the increasing number of people using online shopping.
Even those who are concerned about the appearance of sextoy (and find it difficult to purchase) can now easily obtain it by using mail order.
In the case of online shopping, most of the stores have taken steps to ensure that the contents of the products delivered to you are not revealed, so you can purchase them without your family members knowing.
Until a while ago, you had to go to the store where the adult goods were sold to buy them, so it was quite a hurdle to overcome.
Also, many people may have an image that sextoy is somehow embarrassing to own.
But nowadays, some of them are so stylish and cute that you cant believe they are sextoy at a glance.
More and more people are using them for travel and outdoor use because they are not too bulky and are suitable for carrying around.
Sextoy situation in India
Before introducing the recommended sextoy for Indians, lets talk about one of the sextoy situations in India in recent years.
In India, due to the high concentration of population, the following six cities have particularly high sales of sextoy in India.
Mumbai
Kolkata
Bangalore
Delhi
Chennai
Hyderabad
These cities account for roughly 70 percent of sextoy sales in India.
In the future, the percentage of sextoy use will gradually increase in other cities in India as well.
If you never talk about sextoy publicly, that girl in your neighborhood might be a sextoy user too.
If you are interested in sextoy, you dont have to suppress your desire for it.
What are Sextoys for beginner?
Among all sextoys, sextoy for beginners are vibrators, dildo, masturbators, Sex Lubricants, and condoms.
Sex Lubricants and condoms, which are familiar to people who have had sex, are also a great beginners sextoy.
I will explain the details of each toy later, but there are many sextoy products that are painful to use and can only be used after some anal expansion.
I assume that the Indian readers of this article are people who have not had much experience with sextoy.
If such people use professional sextoy suddenly, they are at risk of injury or trauma.
Therefore, to introduce sextoy, you need to start with a beginners version and gradually become familiar with it.
Advantages of using sextoy for Indians
There are three advantages of using sextoy for Indians
You can masturbate in a wide variety of ways.
Can have stimulating sex
Can develop new sexual zones
If you try to masturbate with your own fingers or hands, it tends to be a pattern.
However, with sextoy, you can easily masturbate in a variety of ways.
You will definitely be fascinated by the attraction of new stimulation.
Also, your daily sex life will be more exciting than ever.
There are many things in sextoy that are visually stimulating and give you a strong and intense feeling of pleasure.
This allows you to see your partners promiscuity in a way that you wouldnt normally see it.
When you are in a relationship, sex with your partner may become a pattern, but it can also eliminate these problems.
It can also lead to the development of new sexual zones (which is the training of sexual stimulation to allow you to feel orgasms).
For more information on the development of new sexual zones, see the following articles
[Women's Erogenous Zone]How to find and develop, 7 hidden sexual zones !![In India] In this issue, we will dissect the female erogenous zone! ..." Many of you may be like that. Men, in particular, shou...
Thus, the use of sextoy can only be a good thing for the men and women of India.
Sextoy for beginner men in India
So, lets continue with the recommended goods for Indian sextoy beginners.
For ease of understanding, we will introduce them by gender. Lets start with the men!
The following five goods are recommended for novice Indian sextoy men
Masturbator
Cock rings
Love Doll
Sex Lubricants
Toys for the prostate
Lets check each one in detail.
Masturbator
The masturbator is a sextoy for men that elaborately reproduces a womans vagina, mouth, and anus, and is one of the most popular sextoy products.
It is used by men to masturbate, and it is popular because it provides stronger stimulation and pleasure more easily than using hands.
Most are made of good quality silicone, and their softness is something that cannot be achieved with ones own hands.
They can provide stronger pleasure than a real womans vagina, so be careful not to overuse them. (You wont be able to have an orgasm in a womans vagina anymore.)
Again Male masturbators are a wonderful toy. I do not need any favourite timing, bothersome bargaining. You do not have to worry too much.
Revolutionize your masturbation time! ! !
Made in Japan is a wonderful kinky toy.#sextoysindia #SexToyIndia #Japanhttps://t.co/4k70QGzoTP pic.twitter.com/tRVdxTKPpa SEXToys India PR (@SextoysIndia) November 12, 2018
Some of them are disposable, while others can be washed and used over and over again, so its fun to buy a few to use depending on your mood.
If you want to know more about masturbator, please click here
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Cock Ring
A cock ring is literally a ring-shaped sextoy that is worn on a mans penis.
It maintains an erection by binding the penis with a ring of rubber and blocking blood flow.
It is sometimes used as an accessory to be worn on the penis, and may be made of metal or plastic as well as rubber.
In some cases, cock rings have parts or vibrators attached to them that stimulate the vagina, so they kill two birds with one stone, giving a woman pleasure while maintaining an erection.
Cock rings are also sometimes used to treat erectile dysfunction.
It can help with erectile dysfunction, where the penis doesnt get hard when you get an erection or doesnt last long when you try to insert it.
Men who are prone to breakage or who are unsure of the hardness and size of their erections can use a cock ring to increase the size of their penis and maintain an erection for a longer period of time.
Cock rings vary in price from around RS700 to over RS2000 with a vibrator function.
Some of them do not fit your penis, so you should check the size of the cock ring before you buy.
You should know the size of your partners or your own penis when it is erect.
[Penis enlargement] What is a cock ring? Types and usage Cock rings can make your penis bigger and harder. It also makes sex with women more fulfilling and increases your sat...
Love Doll
Love dolls, also known as Dutchwives, are dolls with the appearance of a woman who can experience simulated sex.
There are dolls that look like a woman, but they have no face and only have their breasts and lower torso cut off, and some dolls are so realistic that they can actually be mistaken for real women.
Some expensive dolls can cost more than 1 million yen, and the quality of the doll is easily influenced by the price.
The higher the price, the higher the quality of the doll will be, the closer it will be to the real woman, and the cheaper the doll will be, the less elaborate it will be, making it look like a real doll! Something is wrong! That is also true.
You cant go wrong if you choose a balance between price and taste.
There are stores that allow you to make custom-made love dolls, so you can create a girl of your choice.
You can make a girl of your choice. You can start with inexpensive love dolls at first, and once you get used to it, you can try custom-made love dolls.
If you want to know more about Love doll, please click here
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Sex lubricants
Sex lubricants are used as a substitute for lubricating fluid during sex or as a lubricant for men to use masturbator rules.
It is not uncommon for women to have difficulty getting wet, depending on their physical condition, or to have difficulty getting wet due to their constitution.
Forcing the penis into the vagina at such times can cause painful intercourse.
There are various types of Sex Lubricants, some with a warming effect, some with a cooling effect, and some with a scent.
Changing the Sex Lubricant used during play is recommended as a good sex accent.
If you want to learn more about Sex Lubricants, click here.
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Toys for the Prostate
Another sextoy for men is prostate toys.
The most famous prostate toys include Enemagra, which was originally a prostate massager developed by an American urologist to treat an enlarged prostate line.
Modern prostate toys are imitations of Enemagra that have spread as sextoy for men.
Many people think of prostate toys as being used by gay men, but in fact they are often used by straight men.
What is the prostate?
The prostate is an organ found only in men. It is a walnut-sized organ located deep in the pelvis, just below the bladder, and its primary role is to protect and nourish sperm.
You cannot touch the prostate gland from outside the body, but you can touch it by inserting a finger or sextoy through the anus.
By inserting a finger or sextoy through the anus and touching the prostate and developing it, you can feel intense orgasms.
Orgasms felt in the prostate are mainly dry orgasms, which are orgasms that do not involve ejaculation. (You can also feel orgasms with ejaculation through prostate stimulation.)
The prostate is called the male G-spot, and dry orgasms can be much more intense than ejaculation.
Therefore, men who are able to develop a prostate can become addicted to the pleasure.
sextoy for beinner women in India
The following are the recommended goods for Indian women who are new to sextoy.
The following three are recommended for use by women who are new to sextoy.
Vibrator.
Dildo
Electric Masserger
Lets check out what each one is in detail.
If you want to check out womens toys, click here.
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Vibrators
A vibrator is a sextoy that vibrates with an Egg-Vibrator to provide stimulation and is often referred to simply as a vibrator.
Some vibrate as well as rotate, and there are many variations of sextoy.
It is quite a popular sextoy, and is well recognized by people who do not know much about sextoy.
Its usage is similar to that of a massager, but it is more compact and easier to carry than a massager, and many of them look as cute as a lipstick or a macaroon, so they are popular among women.
For a while, a famous influencer on twitter said, This is good! You may have heard of the topic of this article by introducing the recommended vibrators.
Vibrators are great for women to use on their own, but they are also recommended for men who have difficulty satisfying women with sex.
Since it is powered by electricity, it is far less tiring than moving your hands by yourself.
This makes it easier to satisfy a woman with sex because you can caress her for longer than usual.
Vibrators are mainly used on the female side, but they can also be used on men.
When used on men, they are used to attack the nipples and glans, and in both cases it is recommended to wear a condom for hygiene reasons.
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Dildo
A dildo is a model sextoy made to mimic a male penis.
It can be made of silicone, elastomer (think of it as a material similar to PVC), metal or glass.
A dildo can be used by a man for his female partner during sex, or by a woman for masturbation to get pleasure from it.
They are mainly inserted into women, but some can be used in the male anus as well.
It is sometimes used synonymously with vibrators, but the vibrator is not the same thing as a vibrating device.
A model of a penis that does not vibrate is a dildo.
Some of them have suction cups that can be attached to the floor or wall so that you can enjoy realistic masturbation without using your hands.
For fun, there is a dildo made in the shape of your partners penis.
This one is also popular as a gift, and if youve been together for a long time and are having trouble finding a gift for your partner, you might want to pick one.
To learn more about dildo, please click here.
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Electric Masserger
A Electric Masserger is a hand-held electric massager, also known as a handheld massager, and can usually be purchased at electronics stores.
It was originally designed to relieve stiff shoulders and back pain, so the hurdle of buying one in a physical store is quite low.
Many people may have seen or used it in some form or another, as it is often installed in leisure hotels.
Such a massager is highly recommended for beginners because it is easy for women to get pleasure from it when they use it during masturbation.
It is larger than Egg-Vibrator and vibrations are stronger than those of Egg-Vibrators and vibrators, so even just hitting the clitoris can give you a great deal of pleasure.
For those women who have never had an orgasm during sex with their man, the massager may be a good way to get a feel for what it feels like to have an orgasm.
It looks and feels like an electric massager, so you wont have to feel awkward if your roommate finds out.
If you are in a rut of having sex with your partner, if you want to feel an orgasm through masturbation, or if you are thinking of using a sextoy, why dont you try it from a simple massager?
To learn more about Electric Masserger, click here.
What is a massager? Introducing types, selection methods, and usage Originally, the Magic-wand vibrator and the massage machine were sold as a home massage machine used for the back and th...
How to choose a sextoy for Indian
Now that weve covered the different types of sextoy, heres how to choose one.
Especially if you are trying sextoy for the first time, pay attention to the following three points: Does the size fit you (the partner)?
Does the size fit you (your partner)?
Is the environment able to produce sound without problems?
Price range
First of all, the choice of size is quite important.
Most sextoy are used against or inserted into the genitals, but the genitals are very delicate organs for both men and women.
For this reason, using an inappropriate size may cause damage.
Secondly, the environment should be able to produce sound without problems.
Some sextoys not only wear, but also rotate and vibrate. Its easier to get pleasure from something that moves than something that doesnt, but the fact that it moves means that the internal rotors make some noise.
If you live in a house with thin walls or if you have roommates, you may not be able to concentrate because of the noise, so it is best to choose one that is silent or has a low noise level.
Especially in India, where many people live with their families, it is very important that you dont have to worry about sound when you use it.
Finally, there is the price range.
The price range of sextoy ranges widely, from around RS500 at the cheapest to RS10,000 or more at the highest.
Its good to consider how much money you can afford and how much you want to buy.
Do you want your family to not find out about sextoy?
I live with my family and want to use sextoy without them finding out! If you are a man, you should buy a camouflage sextoy that does not look like a sextoy at first glance.
For men, there are many masturbators that do not look like a sextoy, and for women, there are vibrators that only look like cosmetics.
If you choose such a type, youll be safe in case your family members find out.
How to buy sextoys in India
The best way to purchase sextoy is through online shopping.
For more information on how to purchase sextoy, please see the article below.
Sextoy is one of them.
Therefore, you can easily get sextoy in India by using online shopping.
SexToysINDIA is a long established and stable sextoy store and you can have sextoy delivered to any place in India.
They also offer cash on delivery, so those who are worried about shopping with a credit card do not have to worry.
Of course, the latest security is in place, so your information will not be taken out when you use your credit card.
To begin with, many people may be concerned about whether they are legally allowed to purchase sextoy.
ikmAs it turns out, its not illegal.
Right now, it is not open to the public because the Indian adult market is still in the development stage, but it will gradually spread from now on.
Take advantage of sextoy and open the door to new pleasures and culture.
Cautions for Indians using sextoy
When using sextoy, keep the following three things in mind
Keep sex toys clean
Watch out for electrical leakage
Beware of the heat generated by the body while using a sex toy
As I mentioned earlier, many sextoy products are used for the delicate zone.
Therefore, it is most important to keep the sextoy itself clean. It is very important to keep the sextoy itself clean, because if a slight scratch is created by friction, bacteria can enter and breed there.
It is safe to wear a condom when using the masturbator, just in case.
In addition, many sextoy devices are powered by a power source, so if they are not waterproof, there is a possibility of electric shock or malfunction due to wetness.
Some may even develop heat during continuous use. If the fever becomes too much, you may get burned, so be careful.
If you get a fever during use, stop driving the sextoy immediately and refrain from using it.
You will enjoy sex more if you keep it safe and use it correctly.
Summary
What did you think?
In this article, we have introduced the recommended sextoy for the beginners of sextoy in India.
The sextoy market is growing rapidly in India and it will continue to grow steadily in the future.
As India is a rather closed-minded country, it can be difficult to be open about ones sexual habits and values.
However, being faithful to ones desires by properly dissolving ones sexual desire is very effective for ones physical and mental health.
If this is your first time to learn about sextoy, or if you are interested in using sextoy, why not give it a try?
Indian Sextoys for ur best! will introduce you to sextoy and other trivia about sextoy, sexuality, and sexuality for men and women.
I want to read more! If you think its a great idea, please bookmark it.
Dear Abby: I am in shock. My grown son, "Ryan," recently told me he was molested by his late father when he was a young boy. I had no idea, but I believe him. Ryan is an only child and has recently started seeing a counselor.
I loved my husband very much and I believed he loved me, but I no longer know what to think or how to feel. If he were still alive, I would most likely leave him. But what do I do with more than 40 years of mostly good memories? When I think about my late husband now, I just feel numb. Please help.
-- Not A Clue in Indiana
Dear Not A Clue: That your son didn't tell you sooner, while you could have intervened, is regrettable. And that he is now seeing a counselor about it is laudable -- you should give him all the love and support you can. I don't blame you for having mixed emotions, but at this point it is too late for you to change anything. Hang onto the good memories and let them comfort you, because you can't change history.
Dear Abby: I saw myself in the Jan. 15 letter from "Diana in San Diego," the lifelong compulsive nail biter who wants to stop. I was diagnosed with trichotillomania (hair pulling and skin picking) three years ago, and it is closely related to nail biting. The trichotillomania learning center website, www.trich.org, is worth checking out for treatment options such as medications, behavioral therapy and support groups.
-- Erica in Massachusetts
Dear Erica: Thank you for the information. I received a deluge of helpful, caring responses to Diana's letter, and several readers mentioned trichotillomania in the more severe cases. Some had taken my advice to keep an emery board and cuticle scissors nearby a step further, by learning to do a full manicure and suggested she paint her nails a dark or bright color to help her stop biting.
Buffing was mentioned as a way to smooth imperfections that could be "triggers." A reader in Virginia added decorations to her nails -- decals, stencils and rhinestones -- that served as an impediment and cured her of the habit.
Other readers have used artificial (acrylic) nails as a way to allow their natural fingernails to grow out. James in Delaware helped his ashamed then-fiancee hide her bitten-off, stubby nails when showing off her engagement ring by suggesting she put on artificial ones. While she proudly showed off the ring to everyone, her own nails grew out beautifully and she never chewed them again.
Additional growing-out tips mentioned by readers were: coating the nails with a hardening solution, keeping the cuticles moist with petroleum jelly, cuticle cream -- even lip balm. A reader reassured Diana that there are indeed "bad-tasting" products that successfully work as a deterrent.
Keeping the hands busy has helped many readers. Breaking off a corner of one of her front teeth stopped Pat in Texas. Others found addressing a vitamin deficiency did the trick for them. Wearing a tight rubber band around the wrist to snap when the urge hits can give a nail-biter the incentive to stop. And from Sandi in San Francisco: "A teacher showed me an enlarged picture taken from a microscope of what was under fingernails. Now I don't even think about biting!"
CARBONDALE Seven young people ranging in age from 13 to 25 met Friday afternoon at Turley Park to discuss race relations in America, and their own communities, for a roundtable discussion hosted by The Southern Illinoisan.
For about an hour, they shared their feelings on race relations in their schools and neighborhoods, stereotypes and discrimination, relationships with police, and ideas they have for leaving behind a more inclusive America than the one into which they were born.
They were frank with their answers. Several of the youth said they have personally experienced discrimination or stereotyping based on their appearance.
But they also were optimistic, about the countrys future, about the community of Carbondale and about the next generations ability to heal longstanding racial divides through acts big and small, and including the simple but profound gesture of extending friendship and understanding to people who are different than them, racially, economically, and in terms of lifestyle choices and religious beliefs.
Noah Guyton, 15, said many people at school are very open and accepting. All of the youth said that people of different races and backgrounds play and study together throughout Carbondales school systems. But Guyton said hes seen cases where people have been stereotyped based on the way they look.
Its more in the high school, he said. Im not saying everyone does it, but certain people ... its not racism or it might be racism its more stereotyping, like, Uh, you look like this so youre like this. You think because of the way they look theyre going to be a certain way.
You cant do that, he said. Just because someone looks some way, doesnt mean thats (their) personality. So I think that needs to change.
Fernando Sanchez, 18, who just graduated from Carbondale Community High School, said hes been the subject of that type of profiling at school. He said there were times when people would express surprise that he was in the advanced academic classes.
I knew people were surprised I was in the higher track, he said. And theyre like, Whoa, wait, youre not in the lower tracks? Sanchez, who is headed to college in Florida in a few weeks, said he took some of the most rigorous classes to prepare himself academically. Id be sitting next to someone, and theyre like, Whoa, youre in the class? And Im like, Why not?
Jerry Sanders, 15, said he feels as though most people at his school get along well, and that he has a diverse group of friends. His concerns were more about the problems he sees in his neighborhood.
I know in the community, in the streets, theres a lot of racism, Sanders said. No doubt about it. Its dangerous out there.
Sanders said he lives near Attucks Park, but doesnt feel safe hanging out there outside or in other parts of the neighborhood after 9 p.m. Theres too many shootings over where I live, down at the park and everything, he said.
Sanders said he doesnt know what can be done about it. He said he sees police regularly patrolling the area, but it hasnt been enough to control the crime, he said, and he is concerned about that.
Kat Hughes, 16, said her father was a police officer in Carbondale and Murphysboro for 11 years, and she talked about the positive ways she witnessed him interact with the community in that role. We used to live over by Attucks Park and hed talk to them and try to get to know why people would do things.
Hughes said that her dad would arrest people who violated the law, but hed also extend some understanding to try to understand them better. Thats another side of law enforcement that people dont always think about, she said, because the incidents that are more often publicized are situations that have escalated for whatever reason.
Talking to them gives them a change of heart because someone actually cares, she said. I think there should be more people who actually open up to others to help them change.
She said its really important that adults set positive examples for their children with regards to accepting people who may be different than them in a variety of ways because children repeat what they hear from their parents, and ultimately they are shaped in large part by their upbringing.
Brianna Pay, 25, the teen coordinator at the Boys & Girls Club, also joined in the discussion. Pay said she can sense that a number of highly publicized incidents of violence are having an effect on local teens. Its a little unsettling because I can feel the tension among the teens, she said. I can feel that they dont feel as safe as they used to.
Still, she said shes lived in several other places in the United States, as well as in cities around the world. She said Carbondale has much to celebrate.
I am thankful Carbondale is such an accepting community, she said. Its different in that way. I feel like a lot of people have open minds and open hearts.
Aisha Ruperto, 14, said shes also thankful to call Carbondale home. Ive lived in Carbondale my entire life. I dont know what its like to live in a big city and be fearful of going out, she said.
Ruperto said she knows that a lot is riding on her generation. She talked about the need for todays youth to prepare themselves to come together to solve the major political and social issues confronting the world.
Eli Krawczykowski, 13, also spoke highly of his experiences living in Carbondale. He says he likes how diverse the community is. Several of the students also added that Southern Illinois University helps with that diversity because it draws people from other parts of the country as well as around the world who come to Carbondale to study or teach.
Its so diverse, Krawczykowski said. I really love it like that. Youre not just with one race. I like culture and always have.
The students who attended were black, white, Hispanic and of mixed racial backgrounds. Representatives of the Boys & Girls of Carbondale and the Carbondale Park District extended invites to the attendees. The newspaper's intention in holding roundtables -- this one and others -- is to hear opinions from a variety of people on the topic of race relations and to facilitate conversations. The beliefs and opinions expressed belong to the individuals making them.
MURPHYSBORO Southern Illinois Airport was a sea of Kelly green shirts Tuesday as Justice for Molly supporters gathered to watch Gov. Bruce Rauner and State Rep. Terri Bryant sign two bills, collectively known as Mollys Law.
HB6083 extends the statute of limitations for wrongful death cases and allows a lawsuit to be brought within five years after the date or the death, or within one year after a criminal case against a perpetrator concludes.
HB4715 increases the fines for public bodies for not releasing information that has been requested under the Freedom of Information Act to $10,000, plus $1,000 for each day information is withheld.
The law is named after Molly Young, a 21-year-old woman who died in 2012 from a gunshot wound to head in the apartment of former boyfriend, Richie Minton, who was a Carbondale Police dispatcher at the time. Several questions have remained about Youngs death, including whether she was murdered or committed suicide.
A Jackson County Coroners Inquest in January 2013 ruled there was not enough evidence to rule one way or another on the cause of Youngs death. The manner of her death has not been determined and no criminal charges have been brought.
Larry Young, Molly Youngs father, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Minton in June 2014, two years and three months after Molly Youngs death, but the case was dismissed by Jackson County Circuit Judge W. Charles Grace because Larry Young failed to file the lawsuit within two years of his daughters death, as required by statute.
Bryant, R-Murphysboro, said Larry Young came to her office 18 months ago and told her about the case, specifically the frustration he has had obtaining documents about the investigation into his daughters death.
I can remember what I felt when Larry left and just thinking this is an impossible task before us, Bryant said Tuesday. I promised Larry that we would do everything that we could do to seek some kind of justice in this case.
We can never bring Molly back. We can never get back the years that have been put into this, or the work that has gone before us, but we can certainly get some justice for families going forward.
Rauner said Tuesday that it is important in America that the government and justice system work for the people.
Our system is not perfect, he said. We need to constantly work together so we get fairness and justice for all.
He called Tuesday an important and positive day.
From a tragedy, hopefully we can bring something good, Rauner said. We can change our system so it works for the people. That is what today is about.
He said Mollys Law is important protection for families and victims who have suffered from violent action who need to bring justice and closure from that process.
This is a step toward allowing that, Rauner said moments before signing the two bills.
After Rauner signed the bill, Larry Young thanked the governor and Bryant for their work getting the bill signed. But he had one more request for Rauner.
I am requesting Gov. Rauner to arrange a meeting with the Illinois State Police director to help coordinate the efforts of our investigation, Young said, then thanked his supporters for all their efforts.
TAYLORVILLE Christian County Sheriff Bruce Kettelkamp says a new state law banning retailers from selling synthetic drugs known as bath salts will be an important tool for law enforcement in combating substances that have become a scourge to rural communities like his.
With this law, were going to be able to go after the retailers, and itll help us tremendously, the sheriff said. Its been very frustrating for us in law enforcement dealing with the problem with bath salts because these chemists are out in front of us.
Kettelkamp joined Gov. Bruce Rauner on Monday at the Christian County Courthouse in Taylorville as the governor signed the bill creating the ban. Effective Jan. 1, it will be a Class 3 felony, publishable by a fine of up to $150,000, to sell or offer for sale any synthetic or natural material containing any quantity of a cathinone chemical structure. The law also will allow local governments to revoke the licenses of retailers who are convicted of a violation.
Synthetic cathinones are stimulants that are chemically similar to a controlled substance found in the khat plant and have been sold at retailers such as adult stores, independent convenience stores and head shops, according to a 2011 report from the U.S. Justice Departments National Drug Intelligence Center. They are typically packaged to look like normal consumer products, hence the nickname bath salts.
As Kettelkamp alluded to, those manufacturing the drugs have eluded authorities by slightly altering the chemical compounds in the drugs.
This law that were signing today helps law enforcement get after the broad category of these cathinones and gets after the labeling the false, misleading labeling that can go on these compounds at retailers so we can try to put an end to the ready availability of these very dangerous, very lethal drugs, Rauner said.
Joining Rauner at the bill-signing event were state Rep. Avery Bourne, R-Raymond, and state Sen. Andy Manar, D-Bunker Hill, who sponsored the bill in their respective chambers.
Bourne called the measure the first small step toward addressing an issue that is plaguing communities in her district.
We will have to continue to stay up on it, continue to hear from our law enforcement on how we can help them at the state level to combat this and help the people not only of Christian County but across the state, she said.
Manar thanked Christian County States Attorney Mike Havera for helping bring the issue to his and Bournes attention and for drafting the legislation.
This is something thats going to continue, but this bill is another tool in the toolbox for law enforcement officials across the state to combat this growing crisis, he said.
Alec Laird, manager of government affairs for the Illinois Retail Merchants Association, said the new law doesnt really impact our members, who dont sell the targeted products.
Kathie Kane-Willis, director of the Illinois Consortium on Drug Policy, said the new law may keep novice users from getting their hands on cathinones at a retail establishment but most likely wont cut off the supply.
People who are looking for bath salts or cathinones will purchase them online, she said, adding that those purchased online may be more potent than whats available in stores.
Sometimes when you control one thing, you actually get something thats worse in its place, Kane-Willis said.
A dome of high pressure enveloped much of the Midwest this week and sent Southern Illinois heat indices skyrocketing up to 105 degrees.
The National Weather Service issued a heat advisory through 7 p.m. Wednesday, and theyll likely extend that notice, said Paducah NWS meteorologist Kelly Hooper.
I would say youd end up with an advisory at the least and possibly a warning probably through Sunday, Hooper said.
The agency typically issues warnings when the heat index is 110 degrees or higher. If the heat index sits above 100 degrees for four days or more, theyll upgrade the advisory to a warning because of the dangerous effects of the heats longevity.
We have a large high-pressure system sitting over us, and with the high pressure that means the air is sinking, Hooper said. When air sinks, it compresses and heats, so youve got the combined original air mass that was already hot, with little wind, under a high-pressure system, and the abundant moisture over the area thats what creates high heat indices.
The Red Cross issued a statement Tuesday advising central and Southern Illinois residents on how to stay safe in the sweltering temperatures.
Excessive heat and humidity is a dangerous combination and can quickly lead to sunburn, heat cramps, heat exhaustion and heat stroke, said Lyn Hruska, regional chief executive officer for the American Red Cross Central and Southern Illinois Region.
People should wear loose-fitting, lightweight, light-colored clothing; drink more water than usual; check on family and friends who dont have air conditioning; take frequent breaks when working outdoors; never leave children or pets alone in vehicles and bring pets inside if possible, the organization said.
While this weeks oppressive heat has the potential to be dangerous, it isnt out of the ordinary for the region.
Weve seen worse, Hooper said. Weve had actual ambient air temperatures, less than 10 years ago, at 105 and thats not the heat index, thats just the air temperature.
Its somewhat rare to see air temperatures in the triple digits when the humidity is high, Hooper said. Thats because it takes more energy to heat a moist air mass than a dry one.
There are several state-run cooling centers in the Southern Illinois region that provide residents with a place to stay cool and comfortable. More information is available at keepcool.illinois.gov.
Alee Quick Local news editor Alee Quick is the local news editor for The Southern. Follow Alee Quick Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Save Manage followed notifications Close Followed notifications Please log in to use this feature Log In Don't have an account? Sign Up Today
It's hot out there. Really, really hot.
Much of Southern Illinois is under a heat advisory until Wednesday evening, according to a message on the National Weather Service website. The advisory says heat indices are expected to reach 105 degrees, and an excessive heat warning may be in effect after Wednesday.
Yes, that makes us more susceptible to heat exhaustion and heat stroke. We should be drinking plenty of water and taking things slow when working or playing outside.
But today's temps seem tame compared to the heat wave of 1954, which boiled Southern Illinois for weeks.
According to a post on the Illinois Department of Natural Resources website, July 14, 1954, saw the hottest temperature ever recorded in the state 117 degrees in East St. Louis.
The Southern's archives from July 14 and 15, 1954, describe the oppressive heat the region experienced:
From The Southern, July 14, 1954:
"Little Heat Relief Ahead
"100 Plus Weather to Continue; Windshields Crack
"Some relief is in store for parched Southern Illinois, but temperatures will continue over the 100 degree mark ...
"Record temperatures in Southern Illinois were recorded Tuesday and windshields cracked because of the heat, were reported in Herrin area Tuesday ...
"Pinckneyville's recorded high Tuesday was between 103 and 104 degrees ...
"The Du Quoin State Police Headquarters reported a high of 104 Tuesday."
From The Southern, July 15, 1954:
"Relief In Sight
"Windshields, Crops, Highways Damaged by Heat
"With indications that the heat wave may be breaking in Southern Illinois, some damage has been reported to corps highways and windshields ...
"Miss Joan Barlow 212 S. 16th St., Herrin, heard a noise 'like a tire blowout' Wednesday and discovered the rear window of her car had shattered in the heat.
"The rear window of Robert McMillian's car cracked into a 'jigsaw puzzle' in front of his home Wednesday at 805 S. Oak St., Herrin.
"Roy Ramsey, Central Illinois Public Service Co., Carbondale, said power failure in local barber shops and a motel was caused by a transformer burning out because of the heat. The transformer is between Illinois and University avenues near the Walker Swartz building ...
"Heat prostration in man or beast has not been reported. Ice cream sales are good, soft drinks and ice sales are excellent, yet liquor sales are normal. Tree crops have not been damaged, but root crops have suffered in the heat. Vapor locks on automobiles have given motorists difficulty. One highway blowout north of Du Quoin on Rt. 51 has been reported the Illinois Highway Department said.
"The SIU Health Service said it has made available salt tablets to anyone wanting them on the campus and has supplied certain departments of the school ...
"Carbondale soft drink bottlers report sales are up appreciably. The Coca-Cola plant is doing some bottling at night to meet the demand ...
"Growers Sales Service Inc. said root crops like beans, tomatoes, and cucumbers had been hurt by the heat, but that peaces thrive in hot weather and apples won't be damaged if the heat wave subsides before too long ...
"A home owner in Murphysboro reported the mercury reached 128 on his garage roof Wednesday where he started a patching job but quit because of the heat.
"Wednesday temperature readings were:
"Carbondale Filtration Plant: 104
"Murdale Airport: 105
"Williamson County Airport: 104
"Herrin Water Department's Pumping Station Laboratory: 110
"Hartline's, Anna: 102 ...
"An unofficial reading from a store front register near the Mississippi River was reported at 111 at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday."
The Price Companies, Inc. headquartered in Monticello, Arkansas, has recently announced plans to build a new facility near Holly Hill in Orangeburg County.
The new wood chip processing mill, named Carolina Chips, will be the companys second facility in South Carolina.
The operation will produce wood chips and processed bark for the KapStone paper mill in North Charleston.
It is anticipated that once the facility is complete they will employ a minimum of 15 people and have a minimum capital investment of approximately $32 million over the next five years. This investment will cover all personnel, buildings, and equipment to be installed into the new chip mill facility.
The chip mill and wood storage yard are scheduled for completion and start-up in the first half of 2017.
Its indeed another Great Day in South Carolina and Orangeburg County. This validates the importance of our strategic location in South Carolinas Global Logistics Triangle and our close proximity to Charleston. We welcome Carolina Chips to Holly Hill with open arms and are committed to a partnership of success. Sen. John W. Matthews, Jr. said.
The company processes over 14 million tons of wood per year at 20 facilities in the Southeast and Maine.
Price provides complete wood supply chain services including procurement and collection; transportation and logistics; processing to specifications; facilities financing; long-term agreements and turnkey solutions.
The development may be the most relevant directly pertaining to South Carolina at Clevelands Republican National Convention.
During the RNC Rules Committee meeting on Thursday, the Palmetto State along with Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada withstood efforts by representatives from other states to reconfigure the order in which states cast ballots in the primary election season.
That means South Carolina is likely to retain its first-in-the-South status, holding a primary just ahead of Super Tuesday when a host of other Republican-dominated Southern states make their decisions.
The primary gives the state relevance in the presidential selection process that it otherwise would not have.
South Carolina's Republican presidential primary was born in 1980 to help elect Ronald Reagan. It worked, giving birth to a primary open to all registered voters in the state.
From 1980 through 2016, the primary has made the Palmetto State a key player in the process, following Iowa and New Hampshire. Candidates with names such as George Bush, Jack Kemp, Bob Dole, Pat Buchanan, George W. Bush, John McCain and Newt Gingrich have become fixtures here during their campaigns.
The GOP presidential primary contributed to the growth of the party in South Carolina, which prior to the 1980s was a state totally dominated by Democrats. But since 1980, the state has held the distinction of the eventual nominee winning its primary in all but one election cycle.
In 2016, Trump won big here, signaling what was to come elsewhere in the South.
The strength of the primary is the openness born of the late political strategist Lee Atwater convincing state GOP leaders in 1979 that South Carolina could build its Republican party and reap political importance by dumping the tradition of picking presidential candidates at state conventions and holding an open, early primary election.
With Democrats and independents turning out then and now for the GOP voting, the state GOP would be wise to resist any attempt by the national GOP to force a different process.
That was possible during Thursdays rules meeting, when anti-Trump forces were pressuring the committee to vote on closing all early primaries, meaning only registered Republicans could participate.
Such a decision would have left the Republican-controlled S.C. Legislature in the position of deciding whether to change state election law that does not require registration by party affiliation.
According to reporting by Emma Dumain of The Post and Courier, such a change would not in theory bother Moore, who said the state party has been trying for years to close its primary without success. But Moore and others do not want the national party to tell the state what it must do.
No matter why they oppose such a change, Moore and others in the GOP should never forget the roots of the partys growth here are in the open primary process. Closing the doors to voters being able to choose the primary in which they want to participate would be signaling an exclusionary approach that could have long-term negative impact on a party that has seen its internal divisions grow as its base of elected officials expands.
For now, the first-in-the-South status appears safe for the presidential primary, though officially the Republican National Committee will sometime between now and the next general election form an advisory panel to continue the conversation about the primary order.
We appreciate our fellow Rules Committee delegates recognizing the importance of the grassroots-driven primary process, and that changes to that process shouldnt be made lightly, Moore said.
He should remember just that.
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Armenian armed forces have 11 times violated the ceasefire on the line of contact of the Azerbaijani and Armenian troops over the past 24 hours, said Azerbaijans Defense Ministry July 19.
Armenian army was using large-caliber machine guns.
Armenian armed forces, stationed in the Chinari village of Armenias Berd district and on nameless heights of the Krasnoselsk district opened fire at Azerbaijani positions located in the Aghbulag village of Azerbaijans Tovuz district and on nameless heights of the Gadabay district.
Moreover, Azerbaijani troops underwent fire from the positions located near the Marzili village of the Aghdam district and on nameless heights of the Goranboy and Khojavand districts.
The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations.
Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
/By Trend/
President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev made a phone call to President of the Republic of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan on July 18.
The head of state sharply condemned the attempted military coup in Turkey, and said that as always the people and government of Azerbaijan stood by the Turkish people and government.
President Ilham Aliyev extended his condolences to families and loved ones of those who were killed while preventing the coup attempt, as well as the President of Turkey, and wished the injured the swiftest possible recovery.
The head of state expressed his confidence that no force could ever avert Turkey from the path of development and democracy.
Highly appreciating President Ilham Aliyev's and Azerbaijani people's fraternal stance, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan noted that the Turkish government was taking all necessary measures to normalize the situation in the country.
Amendments to the constitution have been proposed in Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijans President Ilham Aliyev has signed a decree on submitting the draft Referendum Act On making amendments to Azerbaijans constitution to the Constitutional Court.
It is proposed to establish first vice-president and vice-president positions in Azerbaijan. First vice-president and vise-presidents are appointed and dismissed by Azerbaijans president.
It is proposed to remove not younger than 35 in Article 100 on requirements to candidates to the post of the president of Azerbaijan: Citizen of the Azerbaijan Republic not younger than 35, permanently living on the territory of the Azerbaijan Republic longer than 10 years, possessing voting right, without previous conviction, having no liabilities in other states, with university degree, not having double citizenship may be elected the President of the Azerbaijan Republic.
Moreover, it is proposed to make amendments to the part 1 of Article 101 on procedure of elections of the president of Azerbaijan, according to which it is planned to extend the office term of the president from 5 years to 7 years.
At the same time, it is proposed to add the following words to the part 1 of the Article 101: Azerbaijans president can declare extraordinary election of Azerbaijans president.
Moreover, the following amendments have been proposed:
To replace within three months with during the period of 60 days in Article 105 on implementation of powers of the President of the Azerbaijan Republic on his resignation: Whenever the President of the Azerbaijan Republic resigns from his post ahead of time, extraordinary elections of the President of the Azerbaijan Republic are held within three months.
To replace prime minister with first vice-president in the following sentence: In such case, until new President of the Azerbaijan Republic is elected, the Prime Minister of Azerbaijan Republic will carry out powers of the President of the Azerbaijan Republic.
To replace prime minister with first vice-president in the second part of this article: If during said term the Prime Minister of Azerbaijan Republic carrying out powers of the President of the Azerbaijan Republic resigns, becomes incapable of carrying out his powers due to illness, Chairman of Milli Majlis of Azerbaijan Republic will carry out powers of the President of the Azerbaijan Republic.
At the same time, according to the amendments to this article, if the first vice-president resigns, becomes incapable of carrying out his powers due to illness, vice-president of Azerbaijan gets the status of the first vice-president and carries out duties of the president.
Additionally, according to the proposed amendments, persons who have the right to participate in the elections (at the age of 18) can be elected to Milli Majlis. Previously, persons no younger than 25, had the right to be elected to the parliament.
It is also proposed to add an article on dissolution of parliament, rights to conclude interstate and intergovernmental international agreements, responsibilities of municipalities and others.
China`s unchangeable and principal position is to support the territorial integrity of the states, said the newly appointed ambassador Wei Jinghua as he met Azerbaijan`s Minister of Foreign Affairs Elmar Mammadyarov.
Prior to the conversation, the Ambassador presented the copy his credentials to the Minister.
Wei Jinghua assured that he would try his best for further expanding ties between the two countries.
The parties stressed the role of President Ilham Aliyev`s visit to China, as well as meetings held and documents signed in developing bilateral ties between the two countries.
Mr. Mammadyarov praised China`s support the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, its sovereignty, borders` inviolability within the international organizations.
The Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) of the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) and the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) have signed an agreement to facilitate cross-border activities and enhance regulatory collaboration between the two jurisdictions.
The MoU provides a framework for assistance, exchanging regulatory information and co-operation in the supervision of financial institutions with respective securities and derivatives markets laws and regulations to uphold high standards, said a statement from ADGM.
The agreement enables both regulators to work on initiatives such as joint training and technical assistance to strengthen high regulatory standards and practices in both markets, it said.
The agreement was signed by Liu Shiyu, chairman of CSRC and Richard Teng, chief executive officer of FSRSA of ADGM on July 14 in Beijing, China, it added.
This initiative follows closely after and complements FSRAs recent partnership with the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) in May and discussion on areas of cooperation for banks and financial institutions to engage in cross-border activities and business expansions, said a statement.
The newly inked agreements with CSRA and CBRC reconfirm ADGMs commitment to support Chinas One Belt, One Road initiative, it stated.
On the agreement, Teng said: We are very pleased to cooperate with CSRC and believe the concerted efforts from both authorities will serve the longterm interests of our respective stakeholders and markets.
The growing economies of both China and the UAE have, and will continue to offer investment opportunities for investors worldwide, he stated.
As an international financial centre based in the heart of the Middle East, our institution is committed to providing a well-regulated and strategic platform for companies and investors to access the UAEs growth and advance their business aspirations in this region, noted Teng.
With the agreement, we will strengthen regulatory cooperation between both markets to support increasing cross-border activities, he added.-TradeArabia News Service
Emirates NBD Egypt said on Tuesday it would not suspend use of its credit and debit cards abroad, contradicting an earlier notice informing customers their cards would be disabled outside Egypt from July 24.
Egypt's central bank last month asked banks to "ensure that debit cards, including pre-paid cards, issued in local currency by Egyptian banks are only used within the country" -- a move aimed at combatting an acute foreign currency shortage that has hampered trade.
Emirates NBD Egypt told customers via SMS on Monday night that "Emirates NBD cards will be disabled for international use outside Egypt only effective 24th of July 2016 till further notice. Apologies for any inconvenience."
It later sent a "corrective statement" in which it said the cards would continue to function abroad.
"They will not be stopped at all," Sahar Al Damatti, a board member of Emirates NBD Egypt, said in a statement.
"The bank is conducting a study to set credit limits for cards and will offer cards in foreign currency and this will be announced soon."
An acute shortage of dollars in the banking system is sapping import-dependent Egypt's ability to pay for purchases of everything from food to fuel.
Egypt's foreign reserves have more than halved since the 2011 uprising ushered in a period of instability that scared off tourists and foreign investors, major sources of hard currency.
The shortage has forced the central bank to ration foreign currency, prompting some Egyptians to use increasingly creative means to get their hands on dollars.
The central bank said the letter it sent to banks last month was not intended to signal a blanket ban, but was a request that banks prevent individuals from misusing debit cards to acquire large quantities of foreign currency while abroad.
Other banks have already reduced spending limits of credit cards used overseas.
On Monday, Lebanon's Bank Audi told customers it was reducing the maximum purchase limit outside Egypt for holders of its Mastercard Titanium card to $4,000 from $7,000, and that its withdrawal limit was $400 per month.
Arab African International Bank cut international cash withdrawal limits to $1,000 a month for its Classic credit card and $2,000 for its Titanium card, according to its website. It did not say what the previous limits were.
The central bank was not immediately available for comment.-Reuters
UAE Infrastructure Development Minister Dr. Abdullah bin Mohammed Belhaif Al Nuaimi has endorsed a plan to emiratise 100 per cent of work categories in his ministry by the end of 2017, said a report.
Abdul Rahman Khamis Al Mazmi, the director of the HRD at the ministry, said the proportion of emiratisation in the categories of leadership and supervisory totalled 100 per cent, while in the proportion of specialised category, it stood at 89 per cent reported state news agency Wam.
Al Mazmi pointed out that the ministry was upgrading employees performances based on the federal government's philosophy associated with the strategic objectives of the ministry.
The ministry aims to attract the most talented and qualified Emiratis to achieve the UAE Vision 2021 and its national agenda, said the official.
The strategic plan of the ministry was aimed at honing the skills of Emiratis and developing human capital in accordance with the best international practices, stated Al Mazmi.
The ministry was interested in signing a number of agreements with prestigious educational institutions to develop the skills of employees through training programmes, conferences and initiatives that would have a profound impact on the development of human resources in various fields, he added.
Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) is set to open the entire Jumeirah Bridge starting from July 21 as part of the work related to the second phase of the Dubai Water Canal project.
The bridge comprises three lanes in each direction and rises 8.5 meters above the canal, thus enabling free navigation around-the-clock.
The Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) said the lanes of this bridge were being opened in phases.
Two lanes inbound from Jumeirah 3 (south) outbound to Jumeirah 2 (north) and two lanes coming from Jumeirah 2 (north) heading towards Jumeirah 3 (South) have already been opened and now all lanes will be in full operation in both directions starting from July 21, it stated.
Mattar Al Tayer, the director-general and chairman of the board of executive directors at RTA, said: "Opening the Jumeirah Bridge, means that RTA has finally accomplished all works in bridges crossing the Dubai Water Canal. Work would now focus on digging a sector of the canal underneath the bridges, building quay walls, constructing three footbridges linking the two shores of the canal at prime locations, and building 10 marine transport stations."
The project also involves landfilling for making a synthetic peninsula along the stretch of Jumeirah Park, which would double the beachside of the Jumeirah Park, increase the area of the park, and make a room for adding a host of recreational activities.
"At the start of this month, RTA opened the southern bridge on the Sheikh Zayed Road from Dubai to Abu Dhabi as part of Phase I of the Dubai Water Canal Project," explained Al Tayer.
Works included the construction of an 800 meter-long bridge on the Sheikh Zayed Road comprising 8 lanes in each direction, modifying the route of affected roads to ensure streamlined traffic movement between the two sides of the canal, and shifting utility lines affected by the course of the canal.
Last June, RTA opened Al Wasl Bridge consisting of three lanes in the direction of Dubai, and two lanes in the direction of Abu Dhabi, in addition to a 2-lane ramp to serve the traffic from Al Wasl Road to Al Aathar Road, stated Al Tayer.
The smooth traffic flow on the Bridge has led to a tremendous improvement of traffic on Al Wasl Road from Jumeirah 1 in the direction of Jumeirah 2 & 3, Al Hadiqa Road and the other way back, which has raised the intake of the bridge to as much as 50,000 vehicles per day.
"As part of the contract of Phase II of the project, RTA opened last March a flyover serving the traffic movement from Al Aathar Road in the direction of Al Hadiqa Road across Al Wasl Road. The bridge has facilitated the mobility of motorists coming from Jumeirah Road and Al Aathar Road heading in the direction of Al Hadiqa Road and Sheikh Zayed Road," explained Al Tayer.
According to him, the work is progressing well in the fourth and fifth phase of the Dubai Water Canal Project.
"The contract of Phase IV, which is part of the infrastructure for serving urban developments on both sides of the canal, includes infrastructural works for serving urban developments including roads and utilities. The contract of Phase V includes completing quay walls of the Canal using precast concrete slabs all along the stretch of the canal, and completing the diversion of utility lines & key services to give way for completing the construction works of the Canal as well as the removal of affected services," stated Al Tayer.
"Works also include the treatment of hyper-saline water of the Business Bay Lakes, removing sand barriers from the course of the canal, and constructing three marine transport stations on both sides of the canal, he added.-TradeArabia News Service
UAE-based telecom group Etisalat has on-boarded its first virtualised telecom function using Affirmed Networks virtualised Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) solution.
vEPC is a framework for providing converged voice and data on a 4G LTE network becoming the foundation of any mobile service.
Marking another first for the telecom leader, Etisalat made its first live LTE data and voice calls on the cloud platform in April this year.
The telecom aims to position its vEPC to rapidly deliver broadband and voice services for both mobile and fixed users, in addition to providing advanced connected car and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) services.
Etisalat also plans to leverage the benefits of virtualisation and software to economically spin-up virtual mobile network cores for Internet of Things (IoT), wi-fi calling and Smart City initiatives in a matter of hours and daysinstead of months with traditional EPC solutions.
Projects, proof of concepts and various trials aimed at the transformation of the corporation for the cloud era have started as early as 2013, with the telecom industrys fostering and adoption of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN)two of the enabling technologies behind smart cities, IoT and 5G initiatives.
The vEPC project comes as part of a corporate-wide program launched in 2016 to cloudify the network, dubbed Sahaaban Arabic word that translates to cloud. The program is focused on deploying the right mix of the hardware-centric telecom services and software-centric cloud services.
The corporations digital transformation effort strives to support the UAEs Vision 2021 national agenda for a competitive, digital economy driven by innovative Emiratis.
Deployments such as this, and a history of serving our customers with the latest technologies, have earned us a leadership position as an innovator in the region and across the telecommunications industry, said Esmaeel Alhammadi, senior vice president of Network Development in Etisalat and Sahaab program lead.
This national deployment of vEPC now provides Etisalat with an innovative and flexible way to deliver services and connectivity to customers across the UAE, regardless of their location.
As an analogy, the NFV telco cloud can be considered like a smartphone, and vEPC is like our first app on this smartphone. With the footprint expansion of this NFV telco cloud, we plan to launch more apps to provide more agile and innovative services to customers, like vCPE for home and business customers and vIMS for multimedia communications, he added.
Affirmed Networks vEPC solution advances the state of mobile networks by evolving from legacy infrastructure to a more agile and flexible virtualized architecture capable of handling dynamic requests for additional capacity.
Etisalat is focused on doing whatever it takes to ensure they are delivering the best coverage, capacity and services to their customers across the region, said Mohammed Shanableh, vice president of Global Operations of Affirmed Networks.
By embracing a virtualized LTE solution, Etisalat is putting in place a network that is capable of handling the ever-changing expectations of consumers-both today and in the future where increased connectivity to devices, applications and services will place new demands on operator networks. This evolution represents yet another example of why Etisalat maintains such a stellar reputation as an innovative provider of Communications Services, not just in the Middle East, but across the globe, he added. TradeArabia News Service
Beat Diabetes, a unit of Landmark Group, has partnered with Dubais food enthusiasts - Nadia Parekh, founder of home-based catering company Melange, as well as Nabih and Ghalia, home chefs and founders of Nabz&G to create a selection of 40 health-friendly recipes.
These recipes are free-to-download and available on beatdiabetes.me, a statement said.
Nisha Jagtiani, director, Landmark Group said: Our Beat Diabetes programme is focussed on motivating the community to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Through our year-round initiatives, we encourage individuals to take three simple steps Eat Healthy, Get Active and Take a Yearly Medical Test.
These healthy recipes are part of our various ongoing efforts to reach out to the community with healthy alternatives. We believe that by creating interesting and adoptable programs that can be weaved into the daily lives of people with ease and simplicity, we can help them embrace a better lifestyle, she added.
Through the free-to-download cookbook the Beat Diabetes initiative aims to provide an appealing selection of dishes for families to cook this summer. The cookbook offers tips to recreate well-loved regional and international recipes prepared using nutritious ingredients and alternatives.
The recipes range from traditional Middle Eastern treats such as Mahashi Khodra and Tabat Tamir repurposed in a contemporary style by culinary duo and raw food proponents Nabih and Ghalia of Nabz&G to international delicacies such as Fish en Papillote and Vegan Quinoa Chili created by Le Cordon Bleu trained Chef Nadia Parekh of Melange Dubai.
The chefs have creatively infused superfoods with familiar, comforting ingredients to offer a tasty surprise to foodies looking for nutritious, occasion-appropriate fare, using easy to recreate techniques.
Alongside the cookbook, the initiative will share interesting recipe videos and tips for healthy eating, available on the website and across the initiatives social media platforms. TradeArabia News Service
Donald Trump's wife Melania speaks during the second session on the first day of the 2016 Republican National Convention at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio, USA on July 18. The four-day convention is expected to end with Donald Trump formally accepting the nomination of the Republican Party as their presidential candidate in the 2016 election. EPA/Michael Reynolds
Following the approval of shareholders at a recent meeting, AccorHotels Group has officially announced the acquisition of FRHI Hotels & Resorts and its three prestigious luxury hotel brands: Fairmont, Raffles and Swissotel.
This addition of three remarkable brands instantly positions AccorHotels as a leading player in the global luxury hotel market, increases long term growth potential and profitability, and significantly expands the companys footprint in North America, the worlds largest and most influential consumer market.
With this acquisition, AccorHotels will have 150 hotels in operation and under management - in the Middle East region, presenting more than 45,000 rooms across the luxury to economy segments.
Today is a great day for our Group. The acquisition of these three emblematic luxury hotel brands is a historical milestone for AccorHotels. It will open up amazing growth prospects, lift our international presence to unprecedented heights, and build value over the long term, said Sebastien Bazin, chairman and chief executive officer of AccorHotels.
Joining AccorHotels global network is a portfolio of globally admired brands, which includes management of many of the worlds most iconic and historic hotels located in key strategic cities around the world, including: The Savoy in London, Raffles Singapore, Fairmont San Francisco, New Yorks The Plaza, Fairmont Le Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City, and Le Royal Monceau Raffles Paris.
Combining FRHIs proven track record and deep expertise in operating and marketing luxury hotels, with AccorHotels robust global operating platform, extensive loyalty base and industry leading digital capabilities, means the Group is uniquely positioned to deliver the most profitable returns and best growth potential across all market segments.
We remain committed to providing guests with unparalleled service, while also keeping the ambition to deliver exceptional return on investment for our shareholders and hotel owners, added Bazin. By leveraging the operational synergies between FRHI and AccorHotels, we are well-positioned to accelerate the growth of our luxury brands and offer guests even more exciting hotel choices and destinations to explore.
The transaction with Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) and Kingdom Holding Company (KHC) of Saudi Arabia provided $840 million cash payment and the issuance of 46.7 million AccorHotels shares in consideration for the contributed FRHI shares. The transaction gives QIA and KHC respective stakes of 10.4 per cent and 5.8 per cent in Accors share capital.
The shareholders also approved the appointment of six new directors: Aziz Aluthman Fakhroo and Ali Bouzarif, proposed by Qatar Investment Authority, Sarmad Zok, proposed by Kingdom Holding Company, and Jiang Qiong Er, Isabelle Simon and Natacha Valla as independent directors.
Bazin said: The six new Board members who have been appointed by our shareholders today are bringing tremendous diversity and experience to AccorHotels Board. I am convinced that their complementary backgrounds and views will be of great support to continue developing our growth and innovation strategy in the future.
The changes in the Groups shareholder structure and in the composition of its Board of Directors are governed by individual shareholder agreements between Accor and each of QIA and KHC setting out the principles and objectives of their individual shareholdings. - TradeArabia News Service
An Oman Air plane carrying 158 passengers and six crew members from Muscat suffered a tyre burst while landing at Julius Nyerere International Airport in Dar es Salaam on Saturday, said a report.
"We would like to confirm that flight WY707 from Muscat to Dar es Salaam suffered a tyre burst while landing at Dar Airport on July 16th," WAM reported citing a tweet from Oman Air.
"All the passengers deplaned safely without any injuries. The airline has ordered a probe into the incident. The flight departed from Muscat International Airport at 7:15 p.m. on Saturday," the airline said.
ForKnife Restaurant at Movenpick Hotel West Bay Doha recently won the Luxury Hotel Restaurant Award' at the World Luxury Restaurant Awards held in Switzerland.
In its first year, the World Luxury Restaurant Awards programme, a global event that encourages top restaurants to offer their guests world-class facilities and excellent service, presented the awards in an array of different categories and on an international level. The winners were voted by professionals in the hospitality industry and members of the public.
It is a great honour to receive the prestigious distinction of Luxury Hotel Restaurant Award for Forknife at the World Luxury Restaurant Awards, said Ghada Sadek, general manager. This honour rewards the ongoing investments of our owning company and the effort put forth by the entire team at Movenpick Hotel West Bay Doha. It is truly exciting to be recognised at an international level for our services and products at ForKnife restaurant.
The World Luxury Restaurant Awards aims to maintain an overall service excellence in food and beverage outlets all around the world. It also hopes to appreciate a job well done by the staff, as success is a collective effort of a restaurants entire team. Acknowledging committed quality customer care is crucial to maintaining a consistent level of service.
Located in the heart of the city, Movenpick Hotel West Bay Doha offers 347 delightfully furnished rooms, perfect for both short and long-term guests. The hotel is in close proximity to Doha landmarks, including the City Centre Mall, Katara Cultural Village, The Pearl, Souq Waqif, Museum of Islamic Art and many more. - TradeArabia News Service
Oman Air is inviting passengers between four and 12 years of age to participate in a campaign and win a free flight.
Launching the first campaign of Junior Sindbad Flyer, the distribution of Junior Sindbad Flyer Passports is set to be completed by August 10 throughout the airlines international network.
Paul Gregorowitsch, CEO at Oman Air, said: At Oman Air we aim to make air travel an exciting and enjoyable experience for every customer. So we are particularly pleased to be unveiling our Junior Sindbad Flyer Passports for our young customers."
Every Junior Sindbad Flyer will receive their own Oman Air passport which will be stamped and signed by the captain on every flight they take. Once they have collected 10 stamps and signatures, they will be able to claim a free flight to any destination within our network what better opportunity to discover the world?
To signal the start of this fantastic new campaign, I am delighted to say that we have presented Sultan, Mayar and Maram, the children of Sheikh Aimen Bin Ahmed Al Hosni, CEO of Oman Airports Management Company, with the very first Junior Sindbad Flyer passports. They are now the trailblazers for Junior Sindbad Flyer and we look forward to welcoming many more young flyers from around the world over the coming months.
Sindbad is the name of Oman Airs frequent flyer programme, which has thousands of members throughout the airlines international network. Every member enjoys access to a wide range of benefits, special offers and tailor-made services. The launch of Junior Sindbad Flyer now enables younger passengers to enjoy some of the privileges offered to Oman Airs most loyal and valued customers. - TradeArabia News Service
Cafe 302, a new cafe concept located in the heart of Abu Dhabi within Al Maha Arjaan by Rotana, has officially opened its doors.
A haven of earthy colours set amidst a chic ambience, Cafe 302 is a perfect place to relax and chat whilst enjoying a delicious selection of food and beverages. Ideal for people on-the-go, guests have the choice to take away coffee or food for the road. In addition to takeaways, Cafe 302 also provides a range of retail products, such as its premium pressed virgin olive oils and organic food items.
Sherif Madkour, Al Maha Arjaans general manager, said: We are pleased to launch our latest cafe, which aims to cater to the refined tastes of our residents and visitors. We are confident that all our guests will enjoy the exceptional range of culinary delights, treats, coffees and signature healthy beverages from our talented chefs and baristas. The cafe is a sterling addition to our brand and we look forward to welcoming both long-standing and new customers.
Gastronomes can enjoy an array of delicious food from an exclusive menu. The cuisine options include hand-crafted savoury masterpieces of steak and seafood, healthy bowls of greens, selections of freshly baked breads and buns with tantalising fillings, savoury pies and quiches. This delicious selection can all be washed down with the cafes freshly made coffees and range of healthy beverages. One of Cafe 302s must-have drinks is its signature Kyoto Coffee, which originates from Japan. The coffee takes 10 12 hours for brewing and is best served over ice. Brewing towers are placed within the cafe for fresh blends, giving guests the chance to indulge and enjoy.
Cafe 302 offers a trendy and comfortable lounge area that guests can call their own. The cosy space is ideal to sit down, read, have long conversations, hold short meetings or even let individual thoughts flow.
Al Maha Arjaan by Rotana provides its guests comfortable and spacious accommodation in a luxurious ambience. With 288 rooms and suites, it welcomes business travellers, residents, families and holiday makers, providing the perfect home-like atmosphere. - TradeArabia News Service
Make fleece
blankets
The Fleece Blanket Project provides a time of fun and fellowship while working on a community service project to benefit others. The group will be meeting at First Christian Church, 520 CY Avenue, Saturday, August 20, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; and Saturday, September 17, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. This informal group welcomes volunteers of all ages from churches, agencies, and groups, as well as anyone who would like to help cut and tie fleece to make blankets to be given to the homeless and those in need in Natrona County.
To date, volunteers have made 190 blankets which were given to individuals and agencies that provide help to those in need of warmth and comfort. In addition to volunteering your time, you may donate fleece (2 yards each of two complementary colors/patterns). Bring sharp scissors if you have them or just come and tie! Parking is in back of the church. If you have any questions, please call First Christian Church at 234-8964.
Blood donors have chance to win Ranger
Blood Donors who give at United Blood Services blood center or blood drives through September 9, 2016, will be automatically entered to win a 2016 Polaris Ranger 900XP in the Rollin Up for a Ranger Giveaway.
We are excited to offer this giveaway particularly now because donations have been down, said Jennifer Bredahl, regional donor recruitment cirector, United Blood Services. We encourage new and existing donors to participate in this fun promotion to ultimately save lives and to ensure our supply is strong enough to respond to any emergencies or traumas.
To make an appointment please call 877-827-4376 or go to www.UnitedBloodServices.org.
To save time, donors can now fill out their Fast Track Health History Questionnaire online at www.UnitedBloodServices.org the day of their donation. To donate blood, volunteers must be at least 16 years old (16 year old donors need a minor donor permit which is available online) and be in good health. Must be 18 years or older to win. Offer applies to participating United Blood Services blood centers and mobile blood drives operated within Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana.
Thanks to Blue
Envelope
Pathfinder Boat and Fishing Club would like to thank Blue Envelope Health Fund for their donation of an AED. This piece of equipment will be housed at Pathfinder Marina and would be used in a life saving event. The board and members of Pathfinder Boat Club thank you for your generosity.
Suggestions for food bags
The Wyoming Food for Thought Project is now providing weekend food bags to nearly 600 children in Natrona County weekly. While all donations are appreciated and used, this year the staff has compiled a list of things to donate monthly, in order to stock the shelves of the pantry at the program center.
Here is a list of suggestions for the entire year: July, canned vegetables; August, Chef Boyardee products; September, pork and beans; October, cereal; November, soup; December, canned chili.
Donations can be dropped off any time at Food for Thought drop site locations, which include Great Harvest Bread, eastside WAC, Reliant FCU, Mary Anns Beans, Casper College Library, Aspen Ridge Dental, and the Food for Thought Program Center, 900 St. John St.
CHEYENNE Cheyenne Regional Airport leaders heard some good news recently.
On Wednesday, the U.S. House and Senate approved a bill to help rural airports affected by downturns in regional air service.
The bill would make sure that rural airports would get federal money from the Airport Improvement Program.
It would provide $850,000 in federal money to the Cheyenne airport in fiscal year 2017. President Barack Obama still must decide whether to sign it.
Its great news; its excellent news, Jim Schell said of the bill. He is the deputy director of aviation at the Cheyenne airport.
Were glad that albeit a bit later than we had hoped Congress has passed the bill, he said.
The money will help build a new passenger terminal at the airport.
The Federal Aviation Administration provides rural airports with $1 million a year if they meet certain passenger requirements.
They must have 10,000 enplanements a year, which means 10,000 passengers who leave from the local airport.
Airports that miss the mark get $150,000.
Cheyenne met the standard year after year until 2015, when its enplanements fell well below 10,000.
The reason was because Great Lakes Airlines, the commercial air service for Cheyenne, experienced a drastic decline in flights.
Great Lakes officials said the drop occurred because of a pilot shortage brought about by new federal flying time regulations for regional airline pilots.
The new legislation allows airports to use the number of enplanements recorded in 2012. This was before the new pilot regulations took effect.
Airports that had more than 10,000 enplanements in 2012 would get full funding for fiscal year 2017.
U.S. Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyoming, said in a news release that the bill would provide the critical funds that small airports in Wyoming need to play a vital transportation role.
What happens after that is not clear because the bill speaks only to fiscal year 2017.
It is a temporary fix for a systematic problem. Its not just Cheyenne that is feeling the effects of this, Schell said.
A Cheyenne man died Sunday from injuries sustained in a crash east of Laramie, according to the Wyoming Highway Patrol.
Mitchell Kenning, 51, was driving a motorcycle east on Interstate 80 when the motorcycle drove off the highway, crossed the median and entered the westbound lanes, according to a news release. Then, the motorcycle was laid down, and both Kenning and his passenger, Stephanie Kenning, 46, also of Cheyenne, were thrown from the motorcycle.
The release says neither person was wearing a helmet. Mitchell Kenning was taken by helicopter ambulance to Cheyenne Regional Medical Center, where he died Sunday. Stephanie Kenning was taken by ground ambulance to the medical center and hospitalized.
The crash, which marked the 49th highway death in the state this year, is still under investigation, according to the release. There were 75 fatalities on Wyoming highways by this time in 2015.
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Investors continue to snap up multifamily complexes in the Tucson market.
As the secondary market for investors, Tucson offers well-located apartments with high occupancy rates, commercial brokers say.
One such complex, with 16 units at 1315 N. Sixth Ave., has sold for $565,000.
Tom N. and Candy Lanza bought Sunrise Apartments, near the University of Arizona, from Max Performance Inc. Allan Mendelsberg, with Picor, represented both parties.
Other recent commercial transactions include:
St. Lukes Home in midtown Tucson feels more like a bustling dormitory than an assisted-living facility.
It wouldnt be a stretch, given its location near the University of Arizona. And while it is a residence for seniors, St. Lukes is also a learning lab for aspiring medical professionals.
On a recent morning, the St. Lukes dog, Rio, an energetic black Lab, had jumped into the fountain. Soaking wet and tracking puddles of water, he was chased through the hallway by resident elders and some visiting teenagers.
The facilitys bird, Pedro, chirped happily in an alcove. A group of residents sat in the front room socializing near a cooler full of cucumber/lemon water. In another room, more teenagers sat at a table with some elders playing an intense game of Uno.
In the dining room, a couple of residents looked over a mixed-media project they had just finished with the teens. The elder council had already decided the tree and mountain design, which will decorate the dining room wall, was missing something. They requested Tucson artist Lily Curtis help them to put an owl in the tree.
The scene was a typical one at St. Lukes, which for many reasons is not a typical assisted-living facility. For one thing, unlike a current local trend of corporate ownership in local assisted living, St. Lukes is not-for-profit and caters to low-income seniors.
Also, St. Lukes is governed by its residents, who are called elders. The elders have a council that makes decisions on everything from the artwork in the dining room to the kind of programming they get.
Hospital avoidance
Perhaps most unique about the sprawling residence is its academic affiliation. St. Lukes is the official academic assisted-living center of UA Health Sciences.
That academic relationship means the elders at St. Lukes teach aspiring medical professionals and other UA students about what its like to age both physically and emotionally.
The primary care and screening clinics the students hold at St. Lukes teach them first-hand about concepts like hospital avoidance that they dont always learn in the classrooms and clinical rotations, said Jane Mohler, associate director of the UA Center on Aging.
The hospital is the worst place for these people to be, Mohler said of the St. Lukes elders. Some amazing relationships have developed. The students dont always know the older people are teaching them something, but they are.
Students learn about speaking clearly and loudly to older people, and also about the importance of connecting and building trust. And they learn that while many of the elders have chronic conditions like asthma, anxiety disorders and diabetes, there are ways to manage those conditions to prevent future health crises.
Regular clinics held at St. Lukes help get residents glasses and hearing devices, and with an interdisciplinary approach to their care, student nurses, pharmacists, doctors, public health students and others come up with comprehensive ways to care for the elders they see.
Social-work students from Arizona State University also participate in clinics, as do dental-hygiene students from Pima Community College.
Research with elders
Students also talk to residents for research projects.
This past school year, three UA College of Pharmacy students conducted a research project with St. Lukes elders, including 90-year-old Elaine Coons, who said she looked forward to their visits every week.
I felt so close to them, they were just the greatest three people and I have no doubt theyll be back for a visit, Coons said
The students spoke with Coons about her medications and her health, but also about other things, like her love of John Grisham books and how her hearing problem prevented her from enjoying some of her favorite films. At the end of the research project, the students gave her a captioned DVD of the movie Lion in Winter.
This summer, St. Lukes partnered for the first time with the UA College of Medicines Med-Start program, which is for Arizona high school students who want to pursue careers in the health field.
Every Sunday for six weeks, the high school students played cards, did artwork, shared meals and socialized with the residents. Sometimes the students approached elders to interact, and other times it was vice versa. It wasnt always easy, which is why 17-year-old Jordan Ortega said the students had a script of questions to ask to help move things along.
But Ortega, who is from Morenci and is interested in psychiatry, said he quickly abandoned the script.
I believe they need to have someone interested in them from the outside, he said. I met one woman and she was alone and said she doesnt get too involved in things here. It took her a while, but then she started telling me about herself. She had a lot of wisdom to give.
Eden Alternative
LDon Sawyer, chief executive officer of St. Lukes Home, says the facility is whats known as an Eden Alternative community, which has a philosophy of elder care that says no matter how old we are or what challenges we live with, life is about continuing to grow.
The Eden Alternative was developed by geriatrician Dr. William Thomas when he could find nothing in his medical teachings about healing loneliness in older people.
Sawyer says the Eden Alternative model values community where life revolves around continued contact with people of all ages, as well as with plants and animals. Such relationships enrich the lives of both young and old people, she says.
At 71, Albert Heilman has been living at St. Lukes for only a month and hes still getting used to the fact that hes in a senior facility and not at his own house with his girlfriend.
But Heilman said hes had health problems, including seizures, heart attacks and diabetes.
I didnt think Id ever live in a place like this. I imagined rows of beds and a nurse like Nurse Ratched (from One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest), he said. Now that I am here I have no real complaints and I welcome the students. They can see that I still have a good sense of humor, that I still have some fight left in me.
The students have been helping St. Lukes elders with yard work,, and a few built a habitat for the two desert tortoises the facility keeps, said Med-Start program coordinator Alma Aguirre.
Personal health care
Med-Start is highly selective about the teens it chooses 46 were selected this year from an applicant pool of 500. And the students are serious about having careers in a wide range of jobs, including paramedics, pharmacists and bio-engineering. So are some of the Med-Start staff.
Approaching health care in a personal way doesnt match up with what people expect, said Nick Bruno, a 21-year-old Med-Start counselor and UA student who hopes to pursue a career in nursing. Bruno is considering specializing in critical care or rehabilitation, which would bring him in contact with a lot of older patients.
Elders want to be treated with respect and dignity, not as though you are helping them and its charity, he said. No one wants that. Once you make the connection and establish respect, its a warmer connection.
About 13 percent of the U.S. population is 65 or older, but that percentage will spike to about 30 percent in 2050, Mohler said at a recent Med-Start lunch.
She asked students and elders to share their experiences with the program. One student said she was grateful because Med-Start requires living away from home for six weeks and shed been missing her grandmother. Others said they were considering future work with elderly people.
Mohler encouraged them to seriously consider geriatric care.
Candidates vying for the open seat in Congressional District 1 seat have again raised nearly $1 million in the last three months.
Federal Election Commission records show the majority of the cash raised in this period $709,966 was among the seven Republican candidates. But crisscrossing the massive district, which runs from northern and eastern Arizona to northern Pima County, to get the message out has been costly, with those candidates spending $745,761 during the same period.
One candidate, former state legislator Carlyle Begay, dropped out in late June.
The remaining candidates are vying to fill the seat being vacated by U.S. Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, who is running for the U.S. Senate. The primary election is Aug. 30.
Retired Air Force pilot Wendy Rogers raised the most of the seven GOP candidates between the beginning of April and the end of June, taking in a total of $209,066. This is her third time running for Congress.
She also has the largest amount left, with $277,384 in her campaign coffers at the end of June.
Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu came in second in terms of fundraising on the Republican side. He raised $157,895, according to the FEC. He has slightly more than $250,000 in his campaign war chest.
Former Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett raised $55,639 in contributions, while Begay brought in $51,355 before dropping out.
Arizona House Speaker David Gowan raised $37,023 during the last reporting period, but had the second-largest campaign war chest at the end of June with $267,342 .
Rancher Gary Kiehne raised $25,756 in the last three months, but has put in $17,216 of his own money into his campaign.
Two years ago, Kiehne spent $430,000 of his own money in the 2014 Republican primary, which he lost to Andy Tobin.
Republican Shawn Redds FEC report was not available Monday afternoon.
On the Democratic side, former state lawmaker Tom OHalleran raised $275,690
in donations, and $492,268 remains in his coffers.
Businessman James Maloney, also a Democrat, raised $6,455 during the same time frame.
The illegitimate child of a wealthy Mexican landowner and a Tehueco Indian servant, Teresita Urrea was born in Ocoroni, Sinaloa, Mexico, on Oct. 15, 1873.
She lived with her mother Cayetana Chavez who worked for her father, Don Tomas. Her full name was Nina Garcia Nona Maria Rebecca Chavez but her petite stature and lively spirit soon earned her the nickname Teresita.
She was born shortly before Mexico fell under the autocracy of General Porfirio Diaz who became president in 1876. The general ordered Tomas, who refused to support Diaz, to abandon his Ocoroni homestead.
Tomas settled most of his flock on his ranch in Cabora in Sonora, but relocated some of his servants, including young Teresita and her mother, on his property in nearby Aquihuuiquichi. Around 1888, Don Tomas sent for the 15-year-old to live with him at Cabora.
Spending much of her time with the curandera (healer) Huila, who had overseen the Tomas household for years, Teresita learned about the herbs and plants that the old woman used to cure ills and set the bones of those at the hacienda and surrounding villages.
Weeds, grass, tree roots, even cactus were all part of the Huilas medicine bag. Before long, Teresita could distinguish the plants that would ease the pain of childbirth, cure a lingering illness, or calm a distressed patient.
About a year after she arrived at Cabora, Teresita was stricken with an unexplainable cataleptic state. For almost 2 weeks she lay without moving, taking no food or water, her breathing barely discernible. Don Tomas ordered the construction of her coffin.
Suddenly, Teresita sat up and proclaimed she had spoken with the Virgin Mary who told Teresita she now possessed extraordinary powers and should use them to cure and comfort those in need.
Seeing the coffin, Teresita proffered it would soon be needed for someone else. Huila died 3 days later and was placed in the coffin meant for Teresita.
Villagers flocked to the Urrea hacienda in search of a miracle cure from Teresita. Often, she would go into a trance only to wake and administer her healing powers. Sometimes she scooped up a handful of earth and mixed it with her saliva to elicit a cure while her compelling eyes held the patient in a trancelike state. Her ministrations bewitched the local Indians, particularly the Tomochic who hailed her as their patron saint, calling her La Santa de Cabora.
As word spread of Teresitas skills and talents, she attracted the attention of the Catholic church and Porfirio Diaz. She drew the wrath of the church by suggesting the prayers of priests were not necessary, that one could pray directly to God. In 1891, the church denounced her as a heretic.
President Diaz considered her an agitator who riled the Indians against his government. He destroyed the Tarahumara village of the Tomochic and placed Teresita under surveillance. In 1892, he ordered her to leave Mexico. Don Tomas and Teresita crossed into the United States at Nogales that July.
Diaz soon realized his mistake in letting the girl go, as he had no control over her influence among the native people. His request to U.S. authorities to return her to Mexico went unheeded.
Don Tomas first took his daughter to Tucson and later to the community of San Jose near the New Mexico border. They eventually moved to El Paso, Texas, but wherever she lived, the sick and injured followed, begging for the touch of Teresitas hand.
In 1897, they moved to Clifton, Arizona. Local citizens soon came knocking on Teresitas door for respite from innumerable troubles. Stories circulated that she helped ease the suffering of a young Clifton boy stricken with polio.
Teresita foresaw her own marriage but also envisioned her husband would try to kill her.
In 1899, she fell in love with a local miner, Guadalupe Rodriguez. Defying her father, Teresita married Rodriguez on June 22, 1900.
The following day, Rodriguez ordered Teresita to prepare to return to Mexico. When she refused, he forced her out of the house, dragging her along the railroad tracks. He rushed ahead of her, pulled his gun, and shot at his new wife, barely missing her.
Eventually caught, Rodriguez was found insane and sent to an asylum. Whatever his motives, Teresita presumed her husband was an agent of President Diaz sent to return her to Mexico. The marriage lasted all of one day.
Knowing she had hurt her father by marrying against his wishes, Teresita moved to California, hoping distance would heal the wounds between father and daughter. She never saw Don Tomas again.
Newspapers in California exploited the story of the miracle worker. One report said she cured a young girl while another story claimed she alleviated the pain of a boy suffering from spinal meningitis even though five doctors had pronounced him incurable.
A medical company hired her to travel across the country to heal people free of charge. Needing a translator, she traveled with a young man she had known in Clifton, 19-year-old John Van Order. News soon spread that Van Order and Teresita had married, even though her divorce from Rodriquez would not be final for 3 years.
In 1902, while living in New York, Teresita gave birth to a daughter, Laura. That same year, Don Tomas died of typhoid fever without reconciling with Teresita. He is buried in the Clifton cemetery.
After moving to Los Angeles, Teresita found herself pregnant again. She returned to Clifton where her daughter, Magdalena, was born in 1904.
With her earnings from the medical company, Teresita built a house in Clifton and planned to nurse the sick to health and to heal the wounds of the injured. When she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, doctors forbid her to see patients.
As time began to run out for Teresita, she predicted that her mother, who she had not seen for many years, was on her way to see her. Cayetana Chavez arrived just before Teresita died on Jan. 11, 1906, at the age of 33.
More than 400 attended her funeral in Clifton. She is buried in the area in an unmarked grave.
Indiana delegate William Springer, sporting an elephant hat, makes no secret of his politics.
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite Melania Trump, wife of Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump walks to the stage as Donald Trump applauds during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
CLEVELAND After a harsh primary, Donald Trumps general election campaign officially opened with a warm and personal validation from his wife, Melania, who kicked off the Republican convention by assuring voters that the brash candidate has the character and determination to unite a divided nation.
If you want someone to fight for you and your country, I can assure you, he is the guy, she told delegates in her highest-profile appearance of the presidential campaign.
Her husband made a brief, but showy, entrance into the convention hall to introduce her, emerging from shadows and declaring to cheers, Were going to win, were going to win so big. He returned to the stage after his wifes remarks, greeting her warmly with a kiss and cheering her on along with the crowd.
Mrs. Trumps appearance was a sharp contrast to most of the nights other speakers, who painted a bleak picture of an American future that they said only her husband can correct.
A parade of speakers told emotional stories about loved ones killed while serving in the military or at the hands of people in the United States illegally. And they cast the turbulent times as a direct result of weak leadership by President Obama and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who spent four years in the administration.
Who would trust Hillary Clinton to protect them? I wouldnt, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said in one of the nights most fiery addresses.
Many of the partys past and future stars were glaringly missing from the lineup, underscoring the concerns GOP leaders have with closely aligning themselves with Trump. The businessman has cast aside decades of Republican orthodoxy in his unexpected political rise, creating a crisis within the GOP about its future.
Republican divisions erupted briefly on the convention floor Monday afternoon after party officials adopted rules by a shouted voice vote. Anti-Trump forces seeking to derail his nomination responded with loud and angry chants, though they were quickly quieted and there were no lingering signs of the protests as delegates returned to the cavernous convention hall for the evening program.
Trump hoped the chaos would be little more than a footnote. Despite persistent party divisions, his campaign is confident Republicans will come together behind their shared disdain for Clinton.
Republicans also highlighted at length the deadly 2012 attacks on Americans in Benghazi, Libya, while Clinton was serving as secretary of state. The mother of one of the victims choked back tears as she personally blamed Clinton for her sons death and accused her of giving a false explanation for the attack.
If Hilary Clinton cant give us the truth, why should we give her the presidency? Pat Smith asked.
The convention comes amid a wrenching period of violence and unrest, both in the United States and around the world. In a matter of weeks, Americans have seen deadly police shootings, a shocking ambush of police in Texas and escalating racial tensions, not to mention a failed coup in Turkey and gruesome Bastille Day attack in Nice, France.
Three police officers were killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on the eve of the conventions opening day.
Convention speakers relentlessly cast the troubling times as a result of ineffective leadership by Obama and Clinton.
Hillary Clinton cannot be trusted. Her judgment and character are not suited to be sitting in the most powerful office in the world, said Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, according to excerpts of her speech released in advance.
Clinton, during remarks Monday at the NAACPs annual convention, said there was no justification for directing violence at law enforcement.
As president, I will bring the full weight of the law to bear in making sure those who kill police officers are brought to justice, she said.
Trump has been vague about how he would put the nation on a different course, offering virtually no details of his policy.
Sometime this week youll find out when you can finally visit grandma in the nursing home or your uncle who lives in assisted living.
Thats because these facilities are required to have written plans in place by the end of the week, Sept. 4, for how and when they will once again allow face-to-face visits with their residents. In most cases, no visits have been permitted since the COVID-19 emergency was declared in March.
In Arizonas counties currently listed as having a minimal or moderate chance of coronavirus spread nine at last count, including Pima County the rules require all congregate care settings to offer limited outdoor visitation. Screening of visitors for symptoms, and wearing of cloth masks, will be required.
There is a mandate for 6 feet of distance between residents and visitors, so there wont be hand holding.
There is a second option for anywhere in the state, regardless of how widespread its viral infection. Facilities there can allow in-person visits from anyone who presents results of a test taken within the last 48 hours showing a negative result for COVID-19, if that person signs a form saying he or she has been isolated since and is free of symptoms.
Taking that test may be a hurdle. But its one worth pursuing, said Dana Kennedy, state director of AARP.
Lets face it: In Arizona right now its really hot, she said. So that outdoor visit may not be safe.
There are other advantages, as well, for visitors who present a negative COVID-19 test.
If the person lives in a private residence, they could actually go into their residence and visit with them for 15 minutes, Kennedy said. And then theyre supposed to move to a congregate setting after that 15 minutes.
But at that point, she said, they can stay and visit as long as they like.
This was something that was really important to families, said Christina Corieri, the health care policy advisor to Gov. Doug Ducey.
They wanted to be able to see the individuals personal living space, assess what the situation looks like, she said. Then, after getting that look around, family members can continue their visit in whatever area is designated for getting together.
Kennedy pushed the governor to form the special task force to create standards for visitation, even as the virus remains active in Arizona.
There have been options for maintaining some type of contact, with facilities setting up phone calls and, often, video chats with family. Residents whose rooms have first-floor windows facing out to the street also had the chance to see their relatives, albeit through closed glass.
But there are limits to that.
People are dying of loneliness and isolation, Kennedy said.
Moreover, people with some form of dementia, they may not understand why their loved one is not visiting them, she said.
Plus, theres the fact that the shutdown of visits occurred pretty much overnight.
Families didnt get enough closure, she said. So I think this (upcoming change) is really meaningful.
With no end to the virus in sight and no clear deadline for when residents and families would be able to see each other again Kennedy said it became crucial to come up with some interim solution.
The task forces final plan isnt as simple as Kennedy had hoped the process would be. She said families will still need to jump through a few hoops to get visitation.
But theyre all reasonable requests if you want to see your loved one during the middle of a pandemic, Kennedy said.
Corieri said there are limits. You couldnt necessarily walk in at 1 in the morning, she said.
Facilities can limit not only the times visits will be allowed but also how long they can last and how many people can visit on any given day, Corieri said.
And even in cases where the visitor produces a negative test result for COVID-19, Corieri said there is still a requirement for minimal contact.
As to whether potential visitors will be able to get test results back within 48 hours, Corieri said Sonora Quest says it can get results turned around within 24 hours. Ditto, she said, at Arizona State University, which is offering saliva tests.
At the University of Arizona there are tests available for antibodies. But these are being promoted for health-care workers, first responders and other employees considered at high risk for exposure to the virus.
If it turns out the 48-hour turnaround requirement for tests is too aggressive, Corieri said the task force remains active and can consider modifications.
Overall, she said the governor supports the plan.
We think that these guidelines offer a safe way to reopen visitation in these facilities while still protecting the residents, and reuniting these families who we know that personal contact is so important to, Corieri said.
If these guidelines need tweaking we will continue to be open to it, she said. That is why we have another meeting of the task force scheduled in less than three weeks so that we can have that open feedback loop to hear how things are going and where we can continually improve.
PHOENIX No, youre not seeing double.
The Arizona Public Health Association has submitted an argument supporting legalizing marijuana for recreational use. It will appear in the ballot brochure being mailed to voters ahead of the November election.
It also submitted one against the measure.
But former state Health Director Will Humble, a member of the associations board, said theres a good reason for that.
He said the group believes there are positive things that could come out of voter approval of the measure in November. Those range from eliminating the possibility of felony convictions for small amounts of marijuana as well as reducing violence from the current illegal marijuana trade.
Humble said, though, there also are risks to the public, including more impaired drivers and easier access to the drug for children.
The bottom line, he said, depends on how a new state regulatory agency the initiative would write the rules for the sale and use of the drug.
Humble said that could make all the difference on whether legalizing recreational use is a good or bad thing from a public health perspective.
But the Arizona law that lets individuals and groups weigh in on pending ballot measures allows for only pro and con statements. He said that left the group with only one option: Submit identical 300-word arguments on both sides.
Our goal isnt to persuade voters, its to inform voters, Humble said. And that means reaching as many voters as possible.
If theyre already for it, theyre probably just going to read the pros, he said.
Or maybe theyll just read the cons, Humble continued. But we wanted to be in both places.
Humble said the decision to include the associations position in both the pro and con arguments that will go into the brochures is more than a laundry list of the potential good and bad things that could happen if adults are allowed to buy and use marijuana for recreational purposes. He said its also a call on Arizonans to take an active role in monitoring the program if it is approved.
More significant, Humble said voters need to keep an eye on and pressure if necessary the Arizona Department of Marijuana Licenses and Control to enact the proper safeguards. It would be that agency, created if the initiative is approved, that would craft the rules that will govern much of how the drug is peddled in the state.
The statute the voters approve is just the skeleton, Humble explained.
Its not the actual organism, he continued. That is what the rule making is for.
What that means, Humble explained, is a lot of how recreational marijuana unfolds in Arizona depends on how that agency ... chooses to use its newfound statutory authority.
For example, he said the initiative states that recreational marijuana is available only to those 21 and older.
But it is up to the commission to adopt rules to ensure the state-licensed shops live up to that law. That means deciding what forms of identification are acceptable.
And Humble said even if dealers can be prosecuted criminally for selling marijuana to those younger than 21, the new agency could adopt rules creating additional punishments, like the suspension or loss of the license to sell the drug.
Theres things you could do in the administrative code that really matter in terms of how this gets implemented in the long run, he said.
Then theres how the product is promoted.
The language in the proposed new law specifically requires the new state agency to enact requirements for the marketing, display and advertising of marijuana and accessories. And it also mandates restrictions on marketing or advertising that appeals to children.
But how far those limits can go remains up for debate.
They can create restrictions on advertising but they cannot ban it, said attorney Ryan Hurley, who has been intimately involved with the initiative. He declined to spell out what would be permitted.
Whether any particular restriction would be valid or not would have to be determined on an individual basis, he said.
And theres more.
Help India!
New Delhi : The Lok Sabha on Tuesday urged the global community to adopt zero tolerance policy towards terrorism and eliminate the menace worldwide. The members also mourned the deaths due to recent terror attacks in Bangladesh, France and Saudi Arabia.
Making a detailed reference to the tragic incidents in the country and overseas in the recent past, Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan said: These terrorist attacks are yet another tragic reminder of the need for concerted action by the international community to fight the scourge of terrorism uncompromisingly.
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Referring to terror strike in Jeddah on July 4, Mahajan said: India remains firmly committed to working closely and actively with Saudi Arabia to combat the menace of terrorism in all its forms and menifestations.
On the terror strike in Dhaka in Bangladesh, she termed it a cowardly attack and asserted: We stand together with the government and people of Bangladesh in the war against terrorism.
Mahajan also referred to tragic incidents in the country, including the killing of CRPF personnel and civilians in Jammu and Kashmir and in Pulgaon in Maharashtra.
She also referred to the deaths of 96 people due to natural calamities across Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Assam, Maharashtra, Arunachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh and Odisha.
The members of the Lower House of Parliament observed silence for a while as a mark of tribute to those killed.
Help India!
By Amjad Suri and Mohammed Imteyaz Ahmed for Twocircles.net
The multi-sectoral development programme (MsDP) division of the Ministry of Minority affairs has been presented as one of the most important action taken by the central government to address the condition of the countrys minorities. As recently as May 2016, former Union Minister Nejma Heputllah said the NDA government made available 18.4 per cent more funds under the MSDP for minorities as compared to UPA. However, a closer look beyond the claims of the NDA government shows that if one considers the North East region of the country, the scheme remains mainly on paper and the scheme suffers from alarming discrepancies and lack of transparency.
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In response to an RTI to the Ministry of Minority Affairs seeking answers on details of village clusters identification and reminders issued to the respective states government, we were informed that only 13 village-level clusters have been identified in the states of Tripura, Manipur and Meghalaya by the MsDP division of ministry of minority affairs. More worryingly, for the other states, no such data is available on village level cluster identification.
MsDP is a centrally sponsored scheme(CSS) approved by the government of India in 2008-09 to follow up action on the Sachar committee recommendations. It was launched in 90 Minority Concentrations Districts (MCDs) to address the development deficits of minority concentration areas by creating favorable socio-economic infrastructure. The objective of the scheme would be to fill the gaps in the existing schemes of the Govt. of India by providing additional resources and to take up non-gap filling projects (innovative projects) for the welfare of the minorities.
Plans and schemes under the MsDP seeks to improve the socio-economic conditions of minorities by providing improvising of facilities such as better infrastructure, sanitation, education, health-care and income generation schemes in districts where minorities constitute 25 per cent of the population or more. Thus far, previous governments at the Centre have identified blocks in 90 minority concentrated districts across the country.
Cluster of minority concentration villages falling outside the identified minority concentration blocks:
Within the blocks of backward districts not selected as MCBs, cluster of contiguous minority concentration villages (having at least 50% minority population) would be identified. In case of hilly areas of North Eastern States, such villages having minority population of 25% may be identified. About 500 villages, which fall outside the Minority Concentration Block, would be covered through such clusters.
The identification of the clusters which meets the above criteria would be done by the States/UTs.
For this purpose, the Ministry of Minority Affairs sent a letter to states and UTs to send the identified villages. However, till date they have not received the details from backward districts. This points out to a complete lack of communication in on the level of information sharing between the ministry of minority and the concerned states.
The circulars were issued to states/UTs for village level clusters across India in July-August, 2015 and is available on ministry of minority website.
Only 3 districts in UP, Shahjahanpur, Pilibhit and Allahabad have sent the identified backward villages with more than 50 percent minority population and. But if you think this is bad, in Bihar, which has a sizeable minority population, the district administration is yet to even identify the village level clusters in backward districts with more than 50% Muslim minority population. This too, came to our attention courtesy the central public grievance system for Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in reply to the grievance filed.
This shows that no matter how much the funding for such programmes increase, the end product will remain disappointing until there is accountability too. The state government should be proactive in identifying the village-level clusters for the development of minority concentrated villages in backward districts of India. This is also a call for raising the issue by all concerned parties, including Muslims, to get the development projects meant for their benefit, like, MsDP, Minority Cybergram, Nai Roshni, and Minority scholarship reach the respective beneficiaries.
Amjad suri is a financial consultant and Mohammed Imteyaz Ahmed is a medical practitioner.
Walt Disney World is promoting Awaken Summer, with new attractions at three of its theme parks to draw in guests in the busy summer months and beyond. Two new rides, a stage show, and a Star Wars spectacular are all on tap at the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, and Disney's Hollywood Studios.
Mickey's Royal Friendship Faire at the Magic Kingdom.
Although the Disney characters appear at all four theme parks, Mickey Mouse is most closely associated with the Magic Kingdom, Last month, Walt Disney World debuted a brand-new show that takes place several times a day on the stage in front of Cinderella Castle.
Mickey and Minnie are both on hand, joined by friends from three popular Disney movies: Rapunzel, The Princess and the Frog, and Frozen.
The show appears flawless when you see it, enjoying familiar songs like, "I Have a Dream." "Dig a Little Deeper," and "Let It Go," as well as an all-new number created just for Mickey's Royal Friendship Faire. However, there's a lot of work that goes into a brand-new production, as Show Director Tara Anderson explains in this video:
Frozen Attractions at Epcot
That same level of planning went into the Frozen ride and meet & greet with Anna and Elsa at Epcot. The Norway pavilion is host to the "Frozen Ever After" boat ride that takes guests into the sisters' world, complete with an ice-skating Olaf, trolls, Kristoff, Sven, and a dazzling scene set to "Let It Go." For the meet & greet, and queen and princess meet up with guests in their Royal Sommerhus, a quaintly decorated cottage filled with themed trinkets to explore while you wait.
Assistant Project Manager Lauren Niederhiser at Walt Disney Imagineering has the inside scoop on what it took to pull these new attractions together:
Soarin' Around the World.
Epcot is also home to Soarin' Around the World, a re-imagining of the popular Soarin' ride. The old Soarin' took flight over California, but now riders have a hang glider experience in exotic locales like Switzerland, India, and China before returning to a familiar place.
The new Soarin' incarnation pays homage to the former ride by adapting the old Jerry Goldsmith soundtrack, with a local flavor for each scene. It also keeps Patrick Warburton as "Patrick, your chief flight attendant" in the safety spiel,
Art Director Jason Grandt knows all about the shooting to capture breathtaking world scenes, and he talks about the process in this interview:
Star Wars: A Galactic Spectacular
Disney's Hollywood Studios has featured Star Wars themed fireworks for a while now, but they're kicked things up several notches for Awaken Summer.
The show, "Star Wars: A Galactic Spectacular," still has fancy pyrotechnics, but they're joined by lasers and projections that put guests right in the middle of several movies scenes, all set to familiar John Williams music. Show Director Michael Roddy helped to bring the show to life, and he talks about the process of picking just what to put into the show in this interview:
Even thought these new experiences all debuted in time for Awaken Summer, they'll continue through the fall and beyond. If you visit in the fall, you can combine the new attractions with a visit to the Epcot International Food and Wine Festival, which runs September 14 through November 14, 2016, or enjoy them during the holiday season.
In an interview with Bloomberg Politics, actor and rapper Ice Cube talks politics, including his belief that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's use of the phrase super-predators in the 1990s was a big indictment of people that gave authorities justification of how they treated people.
If Im a black kid thats not in a gang but I look like a gang member to this white officer than its a war on me, and thats the problem with a term like super-predators, Ice Cube said. He went on to say he felt that democrats believe they are exempt from criticism when they should not be.
Everybodys a little guilty of turning their back or passing bad legislation and everyone should be called out on that, he said.
Hillary Clinton's 1996 'super-predator' remark.
In 1996, when Bill Clinton was running for reelection, then first lady Hillary spoke out in favor of Clintons Violent Crime Control and Violence Act. In a speech given at Keene State College in New Hampshire, Clinton spoke of the kind of kids that are called super-predators who had no conscience or empathy. The 1994 crime billed and Clintons support of it has been criticized during her 2016 campaign for president. Sen. Bernie Sanders referred to Clintons use of the term "super-predators" during one of the presidential debates saying, it was a racist term and everybody knew it was a racist term. Clinton has apologized for the use of the term, Looking back, I shouldn't have used those words, and I wouldn't use them today.
Ice Cube on Donald Trump.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump was also on Ice Cube's mind saying that he believes Trump is what Americans love and what Americans aspire to be, rich, powerful, do what you want to do, say what you want to say, be how you want to be thats kind of been the American Dream.
Calling Trump a rich white guy, Ice Cube said he doubts Trump will be able to do anything to help poor people or people who are struggling.
Trump is unable to relate to those people, although he believes Trump is like a boss and that Americans love having a boss.
On assessing politicians and Obama.
Saying he feels like politicians just provide lip service, Ice Cube says he is looking for concrete plans that politicians have to fix problems. I can stand up there and say we need more jobs, we need better health care, he said.
In assessing President Obamas presidency, Ice Cube blames congress, specifically Blue Dog Democrats and the Congressional Black Congress for not helping Obama to achieve the things he was attempting. He believes the president has been a success and a great president who has held the country together. Ice Cube summed up Congresses attitude toward working with Obama saying they treated him like he was like a black kid that goes to a white school, they wont play with him.
New CPC rule bolsters accountability Updated: 2016-07-18 09:41 By Cao Yin(China Daily)
The Communist Party of China on Sunday unveiled a full version of an accountability regulation that makes Party officials answerable for poor leadership.
The new regulation introduced an internal Party accountability mechanism to be applied to its members across all levels and divisions.
The regulation holds Party officials responsible for serious consequences caused by negligence or poor work performance. They also are accountable if they make mistakes or lack leadership in dealing with problems or projects, or do not implement the Party's frugality rules.
The rule, approved by the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee on June 28, also makes it clear that leading officials will face punishment according to the severity of their wrongdoing, such as being named and shamed within certain ranks, receiving oral or written warnings, being suspended from their posts, transferred, forced to resign, demoted or dismissed.
The public will be informed of serious cases. Officials will be held responsible for life for serious breaches of duty, even if they have been transferred, promoted or have retired, the regulation says.
Wu Hui, a professor specializing in Party-building at the Party School of the Central Committee of the CPC, spoke highly of the regulation, saying that it is the first time that the Party has created such a rule and specified the conditions for being held accountable.
"It's a further step to strictly govern the Party, followed by revising the Code of Ethics for Party Cadres and the Disciplinary Ordinance last year," he said. "The more specific the rule is, the more effective and practical it will be.
"In the past, we often found problems in the Party, but the responsible officials were seldom blamed," he said. "I believe the situation will be changed under the new rule."
Wu regarded the rule as an external restriction or pressure for Party members, urging them to be strict with themselves.
Xin Ming, another professor with the school, said that the clarification in the rule is timely for the Party, which has a huge number of members.
The latest statistics issued by the central leadership in early July showed that the Party has more than 88 million members.
Xin said the rule has made clear which behaviors will be subject to accountability measures and their corresponding punishments, which is key for its implementation.
Xinhua contributed to this story.
China prosecutors file 30 public interest lawsuits Updated: 2016-07-19 11:22 (Xinhua)
BEIJING -- Chinese procuratorates had filed 30 public interest lawsuits to courts as of the end of June in a pilot reform, the Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP) said Monday.
They include 11 civil litigation cases, 18 administrative litigation cases and one with both civil and administrative litigation, the SPP said.
There were 23 cases for environmental protection-related litigation, accounting for over 76 percent of the total, the SPP added.
In July 2015, the SPP began a two-year pilot program that has allowed prosecutors in 13 provincial divisions to initiate public interest litigation cases on environmental protection, preservation of state assets as well as food and drug safety.
Glass of gold Updated: 2016-07-19 07:27 By Mike Peters(China Daily)
Hungary's fabled Tokaj region is pushing hard to bring its famous sweet wines, and intriguing new dry whites, to the global market, Mike Peters reports.
If you believe in medieval legend, I'm about to take a sip of pure gold.
The wine in my glass is the color of saffron, and equally precious. In the days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, this honeyed nectar was so extraordinary that it was reserved for royalty - and mere mortals were convinced it literally had gold in it. Some fortune hunters showed up in the vineyards with shovels.
Super-sweet "aszu berries" are carefully picked by hand, as the grapes have been for centuries. Photos Provided to China Daily Aszu berries are mashed and blended with wine for up to 48 hours during the wine's fermentation process, before a long, cool aging.
I'm standing in a tasting room that overlooks a picture-perfect vineyard in the largely rural part of Hungary known as Tokaj. The folks around me are eager to restore the international luster of these classic wines famously enjoyed by Holy Roman Emperor Franz Joseph - and Sherlock Holmes.
"Nowadays, sugar is so common that we are used to it in all kinds of foods, from desserts to bread to barbecue sauce," says Peter Szappanos, CEO of Grand Tokaj. "Back then, this kind of rich sweetness was only to be found in honey and in wines like this - and monks and kings pretty much had control of the production of both."
Grand Tokaj is a recently constituted maker and trader of wines, a state-owned organization that grew out of a chaotic effort to privatize the wine industry in the 1990s. Today the company accounts for roughly 40 percent of the total wine production of Tokaj-Hegyalja, a region declared to be the world's first demarcated wine region in 1737.
Szappanos, a former finance executive, is a modest, down-to-earth guy but his vision is big: "Re-establish Tokaji as the world's most valuable and highest quality wine.
Roots of tradition
Since medieval times, "Tokay" has largely meant the rich sweet wine known as aszu. Like all late-harvest wines - and aszu is the latest harvest of all except for ice wines, it is expensive because growers have to gamble, leaving grapes on the vine well past the usual picking time so they develop extra sugars. Some years the weather doesn't play along, and a sudden freeze catches growers off-guard. Even if the grapes don't freeze, sometimes the growing season isn't long enough to produce "aszu berries" - shriveled bronzed grapes with an intense sweetness.
"If we're lucky, we get three harvests of aszu berries in 10 years," says Istvan Balassa, the vineyard boss at Grand Tokaj. The production process also demands extra time and labor. Although a bottle of aged Tokaj aszu can command $150 - and collectors pay much more for bottles from the harvest of their birth year, many winemakers don't want to risk everything on aszu.
So most are also making something less-traditional, a dry white. The antithesis of aszu, it's not sweet, it's not expensive, and earlier harvests mean you get drinkable wine virtually every year.
The Tokaj industry thrives on two principal grapes, furmint and harslevelu. To oversimplify, furmint has a richer palate, while harslevelu delivers a more compelling aroma - which is why many Hungarian whites are blends of the two.
But tasting reveals it's far from simple, notwithstanding the different ways winemakers make dry whites.
I find myself frowning at a glass.
"I feel like I should know the flavors coming through," I murmur as I swirl and spit yet again.
"The descriptors for furmint include chamomile, loquat and dill," says Grand Tokaj's award-winning chief winemaker, Karoly Ats. We can taste them all with that prompting, including the haunting light fugue of dill.
"That's really interesting," I say, swirling again.
The challenge: Nobody agrees on what "dry furmint" is.
Variety, however, isn't necessarily bad.
"I believe we need very different, hand-crafted furmint wines, reflecting on the maker and the terroir," says David Varga-Sabjan, who has been importing Hungarian wines into China for more than two years. "Then we need a million bottles of standard style, easy to enjoy 50 yuan ($7.50) furmint."
Retaking the crown
Hungary's wine industry went largely below radar in the last half of the 20th century, as the collective farms of the postwar era focused on producing wine in volume, not in quality. "People generally had an average of about half of 1 hectare to farm during those years," says Szappanos, of Grand Tokaj, which has consolidated some holdings to create a 10 million-bottle annual capacity. The goal: Create a stable mix of large and small producers as well as promoting standards and providing marketing support in and beyond the region - a multi-year process.
Across town, Zoltan Demeter pours his take on a dry white. His production is boutique compared with operations like Grand Tokaj and the French-owned winery Disznoko, a favorite in high-end restaurants and duty-free shops. But the region has no stronger champion than Demeter, who has created a foundation to promote the wine region and celebrate the local vineyards' geological diversity.
In his tasting room, he foreshadows the arrival of each glass by presenting a rock from the vineyard that produced it. The soils of the area reflect two different volcanic eras, producing different mineralities from hill to hill - a key reason that equally tasty dry whites are quite different even from adjacent vineyards.
Demeter, however, is most eager to celebrate his sweet wines, the premium aszus that put Tokaj on the map.
"We need to have blind tastings against the top French sauternes," he insists. "People may have forgotten about us, but there is no reason we can't take the crown back after 100 years."
Contact the writer at mikepeters@chinadaily.com.cn
Eye on China
Hungary is one of many countries eager to make a place in the growing Chinese wine market.
"This wine is just making its debut," says David Varga-Sabjan, an importer who recently hosted a tasting at the Hungarian embassy's cultural center in Beijing. "The first professional introduction was organized by our federation two years ago." A professional panel's seminar and tastings followed last summer, he says. "It's a slow process. We are currently working on a large deal with Grand Tokaj."
The Association of Hungarian Handmade Wines has organized events for several years to explain the country's wine culture to Chinese drinkers. It has produced Hungarian Wines in Chinese Gastronomy, written by Agnes Herczeg and published in both Hungarian and Chinese, which explains how to match different Hungarian wines with Chinese dishes.
The best-known Hungarian brands in China are the "Tokaji" and "Egri Bikaver" (Bull's Blood), but there is growing interest in other Hungarian brands as well, agriculture expert Agnes Karteszi told Chinese media in 2012. "This is partly due to the fact that a relatively large number of Hungarian winemakers are represented in major wine exhibitions and wine dinners with high-quality wines."
Hungary's wine tradition has reached Chinese drinkers in another way: Hungarian oak is used by several winemakers in China, including award-winning Helan Qingxue.
Hungarian barrel maker Trust Hungary announced in 2014 it would build a cooperage in the Huailai area in China's Hebei province after signing a joint venture deal with local wine producer Huailai Amethyst Winery. The volcanic soil of Tokaj means that oak trees grow more slowly, producing wood with a greater hardness; all of the barrels made in China are produced with imported Hungarian oak.
(China Daily 07/19/2016 page19)
No safe haven for fugitives Updated: 2016-07-19 07:45 (China Daily)
Having remained at large in Peru for 18 years, Huang Haiyong, who is suspected of involvement in smuggling and tax evasion, was brought back to China on Sunday, the first case of successful extradition of a criminal suspect from Latin America to China.
In 2001, at the request of Chinese authorities, Interpol issued a global arrest warrant for Huang. He was caught in Peru by Interpol in 2008 and China held negotiations with the Peruvian authorities to repatriate him.
Huang's repatriation once again demonstrates China's law enforcement authorities' firm resolve to track down any fugitives and bring them to justice.
It is the result of coordinated efforts by China's judicial, diplomatic and customs departments in the context of the central authorities' escalated crackdown on corrupt officials, including those who have fled abroad, and will offer precious experience for similar cooperation between China and other countries.
For many years, Huang had convinced Peruvian authorities that he would face the risk of execution or torture if repatriated to China. Peru's final nod to Huang's repatriation indicates that China has reached consensuses on combating cross-border crimes with an increasing number of countries.
Since March last year, when China launched an escalated campaign to pursue fugitive corrupt officials, nearly one-third of the top 100 most-wanted fugitives have already been captured and brought back to China. Such kind of breakthrough progress in its judicial cooperation with foreign countries will be a deterrent to potential corrupt officials who attempt to use certain foreign countries as safe harbors to escape their due punishments in China.
The perseverance the authorities have shown in bringing the suspects back so they can be held accountable for their crimes shows the determination to smash any possible illusion that foreign countries may be viewed as havens by criminals.
A few of us were chatting in the newsroom recently, and we touched on the topic of table manners. In particular, we compared the Asian tradition of slurping noodle soup with the Western acceptance of nose-blowing at the dinner table.
Slurping has something of a childlike innocence to it. It also signals the slurper's appreciation of the dish. That said, a slurp can seem interminably long and irritating, and when numerous diners are slurping, the cacophony can be disquieting.
Still, I have to say that, growing up, I never understood what made nose-blowing acceptable at the table.
It's something of an unwritten rule; someone somewhere some time ago decided it was OK, so some nose-blowers act with impunity. And just because it's legal, doesn't mean you have to do it.
What is also irksome is when the honker has a handkerchief that is already sodden with mucus, and he or she has to fold it over to find a dry spot.
To add insult to those present, the offender then refolds the rag and returns it to its place of origin, not infrequently before digging into a nostril or two to remove some other unwanted substances.
I would rather see both practices kept away from the dinner table, particularly in public.
Chen Weihua, China Daily USA deputy editor and chief Washington correspondent, is firmly in the slurpers' camp. In fact, the visiting Chen said he was headed out to a noodle shop in Manhattan on Monday evening, where he admittedly would quietly slurp. And Chen said contemptuously that he has heard nose-blowing at some of the capital's finest establishments.
"There is no doubt to me that blowing your nose, especially at the dinner table, is much more disgusting than eating noodles with some noise," Chen proffered. "Of course, in Chinese and Japanese culture, eating noodles with the sound means they are delicious. But that of course is not seen this way in the Western culture.
"There are many Chinese who don't approve of the noise, especially loud noise, at the dinner table," the Shanghai native said. "It is not considered good manners. But eating noodles might be one of the exceptions. I think it is because the Western civilization prevails in today's world, so Western standards are used in unfairly judging the Asian culture. But blowing your nose should not be allowed at the dinner table, especially by those people who deliberately blow as hard as they could."
"Chinese tradition calls for a birthday girl or boy to slurp a bowl of noodles as a celebration of the many years ahead," Lawrence Lo, founder of LHY Etiquette Consultancy Limited, said in a 2011 story on CNN's travel page. Lo said "that long strip of noodle is a metaphor for the long walk of life. Yet this tradition comes with an addendum: Do not cut the noodles. That symbolizes cutting your life off.
"You should slurp your noodles," he added. "That means it tastes good. It's like swishing wine in your mouth so that it mixes with oxygen."
According to the Japan National Tourism Organization website, "noodles served on a wooden tray are simply picked up in bite-size portions. If served in a hot broth, alternate between picking them up and lifting the bowl to sip the broth. Slurping is a sign of a good appetite and eating with pleasure."
As for discharging one's nose, a 2013 Etiquette Daily blog on the Emily Post Institute website called for restraint: "Nose-blowing at the table should be limited to small puffs. If what is required is big, noisy nose-blowing, this should be conducted away from the table. It is distasteful to others to hear or see someone beleaguered by mucus deal with it at the table."
Belching is another bodily function that repulses most Westerners, but in some cultures it is a shoutout to the chef.
Here in the US we also have the annual Nathan's hot dog-eating contest on Coney Island in New York. My quibble with this, beyond the nitrates one would consume by downing 70 hot dogs, is that the contestants wet the buns before they shove them down their throats. Wet bread is not appetizing.
Despite how one feels about dinner table issues, no one should take the approach that a Minnesota man did in 2015 when, according to The Smoking Gun website, he bludgeoned his 84-year-old grandmother to death with a hammer because she blew her nose at the table.
Contact the writer at williamhennelly@chinadailyusa.com
Boris Johnson says UK not abandoning leading role in Europe Updated: 2016-07-19 10:25 (Xinhua)
Britain's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson listens to Spain's Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo (L) during an European Union foreign ministers meeting in Brussels, Belgium, July 18, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]
BRUSSELS - Britain's newly appointed Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson here on Monday said Britain was not going to be abandoning its leading role in European cooperation participation.
He made the remarks as he arrived for a European Union (EU) foreign ministers meeting.
"We have to give effect to the will of the people and leave the EU. But in no sense does that mean we are leaving Europe," he stressed.
Johnson noted he had had a "very good conversation" Sunday night with EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini and "she agreed very much that that was a role Britain should continue to play."
"Clearly, when you look at the discussion on the table this morning over the horrific events in Nice and Turkey, where we have to work very closely together, you can see the importance of that," he said.
"We will ensure that we coordinate our response to terror. On Turkey, I think it's very important, in view of the failed coup, that we see restraint and moderation on all sides and that's what I will be calling for," said Johnson.
Former London mayor and leading "Leave" campaigner in the lead-up to the Brexit referendum, Johnson was made foreign secretary by new British Prime Minister Theresa May last Wednesday.
Negotiation between China, Philippines should move 'step by step': Chinese scholar Updated: 2016-07-19 14:19 (Xinhua)
SINGAPORE -- Zhao Qizheng, dean of the school of journalism at the Renmin University of China, said Tuesday that it is hoped that China and the Philippines could restart bilateral negotiations, and the negotiations should move step by step.
Zhao, who is also former minister of China's State Council Information Office, made the remarks at the media briefing after the Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development held here on Monday.
Highlighting that China and the Philippines share lots of common interests, Zhao said that there are also contradictions and conflicts both countries face.
The conflict between China and the Philippines over the South China Sea has been decades, and the problem is difficult to solve in the near future, Zhao said, adding that the best way is to start with problems that are easy to reach agreements, before moving to more complex issues.
"China and Philippines can temporarily put aside differences, and discuss issues of joint exploration first,"Zhao said.
"Joint developments are very broad, including resources, fisheries, maritime rescue, meteorologic data exchange as well as disaster relief at sea. We should move step by step."
Li Guoqiang, deputy director of the Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), said that China's door to dialogue has always been open, and bilateral negotiations and peaceful settlement of disputes are always welcomed.
The government of former Philippine President Benigno S. Aquino III filed the arbitration against China in 2013, despite the agreement his country had reached with China on resolving disputes in the South China Sea through bilateral negotiations. Since then, China-Philippines relations have been severely deteriorated.
EC top officials to debate market economy status for China Updated: 2016-07-19 14:29 By Fu Jing in Brussels(chinadaily.com.cn)
The European Commission's top officials will on Wednesday debate the question of market economy status for China, which Beijing and its supporters say should be awarded to China in line with World Trade Organization accession rules by the end of this year.
The scheduled debate, which may lead to a EC position on the issue soon for member states and European Parliament to approve, is among two burning events involving China and the EU in recent days; the EU also is dealing with the unfolding aftermath of Britain's Brexit vote and terrorism attacks.
On Monday, the union's foreign ministers endorsed Brussels'new foreign policy strategy towards Beijing, which the observers said is "timely but not visionary."
Last Friday, Brussels declared that it would not take sides in the sovereignty issues in the South China Sea arbitration after the two sides held their annual summit in Beijing last week.
On the issue of market economy status, Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker underlined that the EU will stick to its international obligations and is producing an impact assessment looking at the consequences for each EU Member State.
"Only following this process, will the Commission take a decision. And as far as the market economy status for China is concerned, the Commission has not made up its mind," said Juncker in Beijing.
He hinted that there is a clear link between the steel over-capacity of China and the market economy status for China.
But Beijing has repeatedly said that Brussels should fulfil its commitment of obeying Article 15 of the WTO accession agreement with China.
Article 15 of the Accession Protocol of China's entry into the WTO says all WTO members should stop following country measures in anti-dumping cases against China by Dec 11, 2016.
Beijing has even said it is not a matter for further negotiations.
On Monday, the foreign ministers unveiled a nine-page statement on EU's new strategy on China, which European Commission made a communication paper last month.
The ministers agreed that both sides should finish investment talks before coming to free trade negotiations.
But Beijing said it is ready for free trade talks and some experts have even requested both sides to combine the two talks into one.
"Right now, it is for China to request but if EU will not respond urgently, China may ignore it when EU realizes such importance years later," said Chi Fulin, president of China Institute of Reform and Development, urging both sides to set a goal to finish such talks by 2020.
Chi also said that China and UK should prepare such combined trade talks while London prepares to negotiate to leave the EU.
The statement on the EU's strategy also covers investment, mega-project synergy, global cooperation and shared role in international affairs.
But it stated that EU's stance remained unchanged regarding to arms embargo against China.
After reading the documents, Tony Payne, director of the University of Sheffield's Political Economy Research Institute in UK, said the document is "timely but not visionary."
"It is timely coming 10 years after the last such strategy communication and lot has changed in the global political economy since then," said Payne.
He said it is good that it covers economic and security problems and was also honest in conceding that issues such as steel overcapacity are a problem in EU-China relations and accepting that they need to be addressed, not ignored.
"In my opinion, it is not visionary. But instead, it seeks to cover the oblivious issues, running from trade to investment, to migration and security," said Payne.
Payne said the European Commission hasn't set any overarching rationale for the EU and China coming together.
"Why is this important? Why is it important now? What values underpin the engagement?" he said.
"In other words, the substantial parts of the communication paper could have been framed eloquently and with effort."
Fredrik Erixon, Director of the Brussels-based European Centre for International Political Economy in Brussels, said it is an EU strategy document and its purpose is to build internal cohesion without making any commitment to specific policies.
"Even by that standard, it is a bland strategy. It's more concerned with immediate issues like steel over-capacity rather than ideas about what the EU wants to do with China," said Erixon.
Erxion suggested that it should first and foremost be focused at delivering results.
He said China and the EU should cooperate on several issues, including trade, science, energy and military affairs and it should set out areas of practical cooperation and build on them.
Erixon agreed the document is not visionary.
"It should set out a clear idea for what the EU wants to do with China over the next five years, but the fact that it does not indicates how deep the rift inside the EU is about China policy," said Erixon.
Contact the reporter at fujing@chinadaily.com.cn
Trump's wife seeks to soften his image at raucous Republican convention Updated: 2016-07-19 15:39 (Agencies)
Melania Trump gestures at her husband Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump as they leave the stage, after she concluded her remarks at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, US July 18, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]
CLEVELAND - Donald Trump's wife Melania, in her first major political speech on Monday, portrayed her husband as a talented, compassionate and unrelenting leader who would unify rather than divide the country if elected to the White House.
The Slovenian-born jewelry designer and former model delivered the speech, part of which strongly resembled an address given by current First Lady Michelle Obama in 2008, to a cheering crowd at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland after a one-minute introduction from Trump.
The presumptive Republican nominee made a dramatic entrance, silhouetted against a white background, to the accompaniment of Queen's 1977 rock anthem, "We Are the Champions."
"I have been with Donald for 18 years and I have been aware of his love for this country since we first met," the aspiring first lady told the convention. "He's tough when he has to be, but he's also kind and fair and caring."
"Donald wants prosperity for all Americans," she said, reading from a teleprompter, as people applauded.
Her roughly 15-minute speech was a bid to soften the image of the New York businessman-turned-politician, who has been accused of bigotry and callousness for his calls to suspend Muslim immigration and deport millions of undocumented immigrants if elected. He has also been criticized for insults directed at women, political opponents and journalists.
Part of the text referring to the values held by her family was strikingly similar to a section of Michelle Obama's speech to the Democratic convention in 2008. A Trump campaign official suggested the similarity was the result of an error by her speech writers.
Roll-call vote is blocked on floor in rules fight Updated: 2016-07-19 11:08 By Paul WelitzkinN and wang Linyan in Cleveland(China Daily USA)
Confusion erupted at the Republican National Convention on Monday in Cleveland when critics of Donald Trump attempted to force a roll call vote by all 2,472 convention delegates on the proposed rules that were written by a committee last week.
Republican leaders blocked a recorded roll call vote on the rules.
The anti-Trump group was opposed to the rules because they required pledged delegates to vote in accordance with the results of their state's primaries and caucuses.
Delegates from nine states had signed a petition challenging a vote on the rules. The fight was over whether to allow delegates to vote their conscience and ignore the primary or caucus results in their states.
The chair, US Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas, called for a voice vote, shutting off debate. He declared the "yes" votes the winner, and moved onto the next item of business. Later, the chair returned and said three states had withdrawn their delegates' names from the petitions.
"The chair has found insufficient support for a recorded vote," Womack said. He did not identify which states withdrew.
Trump, GOP eager to reveal new brand
Seeking to recast the Donald Trump candidacy, the Republican National Convention had a series of speeches discussing how to "Make America Safe Again".
The goal was to show US voters that Trump - the presumptive Republican nominee - possesses the skills and personal characteristics to serve as leader of the country. The recent shootings of police officers in Texas and Louisiana have left Trump eager to be seen as the law-and-order candidate.
Scheduled speakers included former Texas governor Rick Perry and Mark Geist, a Marine Corps veteran who fought in Benghazi, Libya.
Trump's wife, Melania, was also scheduled to talk. Speculation arose that Trump would appear at the convention and introduce his wife.
Nancy Kong contributed to this story. Contact the writers at paulwelitzkin@chinadailyusa.com
'Will never' halt island work Updated: 2016-07-19 07:29 By Zhang Yunbi and Zhao Lei(China Daily)
Commander of the Chinese Navy, Admiral Wu Shengli (right), points out the layout of the Chinese Navy Headquarters to Admiral John Richardson, US chief of naval operations, during a welcoming ceremony in Beijing on Monday. Ng Han Guan / Reuters
China's naval chief told a visiting US Navy officer on Monday that Beijing "will never give up halfway" the construction of its islands in the South China Sea.
Admiral Wu Shengli, commander of the People's Liberation Army Navy, also told Admiral John Richardson, US chief of naval operations, that the Chinese Navy has made "sufficient preparations" to deal with any sovereignty infringement or provocation.
Despite negative factors, Beijing is still willing to peacefully resolve disputes via negotiations and "manage and control crisis through rules and mechanisms", Wu said.
Washington has militarily pressured Beijing this year by sending military ships and planes to approach or intrude on Chinese territorial space in the South China Sea.
Wu said any attempt to intimidate China by flexing military muscle "will only backfire".
Beijing will "advance and complete island and reef construction as planned", no matter which country or individual pressures China to do otherwise, and "the level of our defense on these islands and reefs depends on the threats facing us", Wu said.
Richardson began his first visit to China on Sunday and will stay until Wednesday.
He told Wu in Beijing on Monday that he is ready to join hands in boosting trust and friendship to achieve lasting development of ties between the two navies, militaries and countries.
Fan Jishe, a US researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the US "has played a negative role in the South China Sea disputes, and its proactive engagement in the Asia-Pacific region has aggravated conflicts".
Zuo Xiying, an international studies specialist at Renmin University of China, said the South China Sea has become the forefront of China-US competition, and "it would be a good thing if they reinforce strategic communication and formulate more rules accepted by both".
Su Ge, president of the China Institute of International Studies, told the World Peace Forum in Beijing over the weekend that "although cooperation between Beijing and Washington cannot end all the issues in the world, not a single major issue could be resolved if the two sides walk into full-scale confrontation".
On Monday, Chinese Air Force spokesman Shen Jinke said the PLA Air Force recently conducted a combat readiness patrol in the South China Sea, including sending its H-6K bombers to patrol around Huangyan Island.
Such combat readiness patrols in the South China Sea "will continue on a regular basis", Shen said.
Meanwhile, a navigation alert issued on Monday at the website of China's Maritime Safety Administration said military activities will be conducted from Tuesday to Thursday in designated waters in the South China Sea.
The alert gave coordinates to define the designated area in which entry by other vessels will be prohibited. The area is southeast of Hainan Island.
Melania Trump's speech has an echo of Michelle Obama words Updated: 2016-07-19 23:05 (AGENCIES)
Melania Trump (L), wife of Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump, speaks at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S. July 18, 2016 and Michelle Obama addresses the opening session of the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado August 25, 2008 in a combination of file photos. [Photo/Agencies]
Melania Trump's speech at the Republican National Convention has ignited controversy because it contained a section strikingly similar to words delivered at the Democratic convention in 2008 by the woman she hopes to succeed as US first lady, Michelle Obama.
An official with the campaign of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump suggested the similarity in the section to Michelle Obama's speech may have been the result of an error by her team of speech writers.
Donald Trump made no mention of the issue in a Twitter post early on Tuesday, saying simply: "It was truly an honor to introduce my wife, Melania Trump last night. Her speech and demeanor were absolutely incredible. Very proud!"
A small section of Melania Trump's roughly 15-minute speech, a highlight of Monday's opening day of the convention, was similar to a part of Michelle Obama's speech in 2008 in support of Barack Obama, who was then campaigning for president.
"My parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise; that you treat people with respect," said Melania Trump, a Slovenian-born jewelry designer and former model.
"They taught me to show the values and morals in my daily life. That is the lesson that I continue to pass along to our son," she said.
"And we need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow, because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them."
In 2008, Michelle Obama said, "And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you're going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect.
"...And Barack Obama and I set out to build lives guided by these values, and pass them on to the next generations," she added.
"Because we want our children, and all children in this nation, to know that the only limit to the height of your achievement is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them."
Before Monday's speech, Melania Trump told NBC in remarks that were aired on several networks: "I wrote it... with as little help as possible."
A spokesman for the Trump campaign called the speech a success, but suggested her writers might have mistakenly injected some borrowed language.
"In writing her beautiful speech, Melania's team of writers took notes on her life's inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking," Jason Miller, Trump's senior communications adviser, said in a statement.
Paul Manafort, chairman of the Trump campaign, played down the similarities in the Trump and Obama speeches.
"There aren't that many similarities. There are a couple of phrases," Manafort told CBS News on Tuesday. "It's basically three places in the speech and it's fragments of words.''
"There was nothing that she did in that speech that she thought was anybody's words but herself," Manafort said. Asked if she wrote it herself, he said it was a collaboration and he didn't know how much exactly she had written.
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The Can Tho City Traffic Safety Committee last week destroyed several traffic police effigies because it did not have money to fix them.
The effigies, made from plastic and sponge, were seriously downgraded and dirty after being installed along Highway 91 in Thot Not District for a year.
The effigy in Long Thanh, a residential quarter in Thot Not Ward, was broken, its color had faded and wild grass grew at its feet.
A local resident told the at Viet (Vietnam Land) e-newspaper that the effigy broke some months ago but was not fixed by local authorities. Some other effigies were very dirty with graffiti drawings on their faces.
Another resident, who has a small shop near an effigy, said that when the effigy was first installed, it was useful because people thought that it was a real traffic policeman and they obeyed the law.
But after a while, the only people who took it seriously were those from other provinces and cities, she said. Locals still surpassed the speed limit and ran red traffic lights.
The Thot Not District Police installed 12 traffic police effigies on May 20, 2015 at a cost of VN40 million (US$1,700).
At that time, captain Le Viet Trung, director of the Thot Not District Police, told media they were aimed at raising peoples awareness of traffic laws.
Thanks to the effigies, the number of people driving at high speed, not wearing helmets and driving in the wrong lanes decreased sharply, he said.
But just like real traffic police, effigies too can become worn out and need to retire. VNS
The Binh Thuan Police, in co-ordination with the Soc Trang Police, on July 10 transferred a 49-year-old man to southern province of Binh Thuan for further investigation after he escaped 21 years ago.
Nguyen Huy Cuong in 1988 was sentenced to 13 years of imprisonment for robbery.
While being kept at the prison, Cuong made friend with Nguyen Van Hen, from the southern province of Soc Trang. Cuong and Hen escaped from the prison and then used guns to rob from a number of local residents.
Cuong was caught again and sentenced to seven more years of imprisonment.
In 1995 he once again escaped from prison.
Cuong went to the southern province of Soc Trang and changed his name to Nguyen Hung and then Nguyen Truong Giang and continued to conduct robberies.
In 1997 the Ba Ria-Vung Tau Police asked the public for information about a victim of a murder. The victim had the same name and characteristics as Cuong, so everyone believed that Cuong had died. His family set up an altar for him and held a death anniversary for him each year.
But this year, after a long investigation, the Soc Trang Police discovered that Nguyen Hung was Nguyen Huy Cuong.
Cuong proved to be quite intelligent to have run away for such a long time, but in the end, he could not escape the police and the law. If only he completed his sentence from the start, he wouldnt have wasted so much time. VNS
HA NOI The Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) yesterday decided to impose additional tariffs on imported steel products as an official safeguard measure against cheap imports that were allegedly threatening the domestic industry.
Previously, on March 22 this year, the ministry imposed provisional safeguard duties of 23.3 per cent on steel ingots and 14.2 per cent on steel rods for a maximum of 200 days.
Under the new decision, which will take effect from early next month and last for four years, the safeguard duties will be imposed on alloy and non-alloy steel ingots and steel rods. The steel products are coded 7207.11.00; 7207.19.00; 7202.20.99; 7224.90.00; 7213.10.00; 7213.91.20; 7214.20.31; 7214.20.41; 7227.90.00; 7228.30.10; 9811.00.00.
According to the new regulation, a duty of 23.3 per cent will be imposed on steel ingots until March 21, 2017. The rate then will be reduced to 21.3 per cent,19.3 per cent and 17.3 per cent over the following three years.
As for steel rods, the safeguard duty will be 14.2 per cent until August 1, 2016 and then be increased to 15.4 per cent until March 21, 2017. The rate then will be reduced to 13.9 per cent, 12.4 per cent and 10.9 per cent over the following three years.
From March 22, 2020, the duties on both steel ingots and steel rods will be zero per cent if no extension is made.
However, these safeguards will not be applicable on products from developing and under-developed countries, whose steel exports to Viet Nam account for less than 3 per cent of the countrys total imports.
The duty measure was imposed after the MoIT conducted a safeguard investigation into imports of steel ingots and steel rods in the wake of complaints lodged by local producers Hoa Phat Steel Joint Stock Company (JSC), Southern Steel Co Ltd, Thai Nguyen Iron and Steel JSC and Viet Nam-Italy Steel JSC.
The four companies said the proposal for investigations came from a surge of imported steel ingots and steel rods.
Specifically, the amount of imported steel ingots rose from more than 466,000 tonnes in 2012 to 1.5 million tonnes in 2015. The amount of imported steel rods also rose from more than 387,000 tonnes in 2012 to 1.2 million tonnes in 2015.
Many others, however, called for a halt to the investigation as unlike big companies they depended on imported steel ingots for production, and high duties would increase their input costs and lowering profit margin.
Viet Nam has already been imposing trade tariffs of up to 20 per cent on these products.
VSA forecasts decline in steel demand
The Viet Nam Steel Association (VSA) has forecast a downward trend for steel demand in the next two or three months despite strong consumption and production of the commodity in the beginning of the year.
The downward trend started in June with a 6.6 per cent month-on-month decrease in the production output of steel enterprises and a 12 per cent plunge in consumption volume compared with the previous months figures.
Compared with the same period last year, the production output in June reached 1.5 million tonnes, representing a surge of 19.7 per cent, and there was a modest increase in consumption of 2.4 per cent.
According to VSA, the volume of steel produced for construction reached 680,000 tonnes in June, rising 16 per cent year-on-year, but sales went down strongly by 9 per cent to 484,000 tonnes.
VSA deputy chairman Nguyen Van Sua said that the fall in demand was partly a seasonal factor. Another reason was that traders did not want to stockpile to mitigate risks caused by quick fall in prices.
The fall in prices was foreseeable, Sua said, adding that it was a result of fierce competition for market share among traders and the supply glut in both the local and global markets.
In June, prices of steel materials declined by US$15-20 per tonne while finished steel products decreased strongly by between VN800,000 ($36) and VN1 million per tonne.
Sua said to protect local steel producers, Viet Nam had taken some measures, such as trade defence or anti-dumping lawsuits, but they were only short-term solutions.
Amidst the stiff competition with steel imports and the decrease in steel demand, local steel producers needed to improve the quality of their goods and save on production costs to maintain their market share. VNS
Deputy Prime Minister Vuong inh Hue called on Slovakian businesses to make further investments in Viet Nam during a business conference yesterday in the capital. Photo toquoc.vn
HA NOI Deputy Prime Minister Vuong inh Hue called on Slovakian businesses to make further investments in Viet Nam during a business conference yesterday in the capital.
We will create the most favourable conditions for Slovakian firms to invest in sectors such as electronic component manufacturing, information and technology, pharmaceuticals, energy and agricultural products in the country, the deputy PM said.
Given the establishment of the ASEAN Economic Community, Slovakian enterprises would also have opportunities to access huge markets in ASEAN if they started their investment in Viet Nam.
The deputy PM said he hoped that Slovakia in return would facilitate exports of Vietnamese goods, including textiles and garments, footwear, agro-forestry products and electronics, to the lucrative market.
In order to increase bilateral economic relations between the two nations, which remain modest, Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico suggested the two governments draw up and then exchange with each other a list of prioritised sectors for co-operation.
He also stressed the importance of accelerating exchanges of high level delegations and business communities along with perfecting the legal framework in an attempt to boost two-way ties in trade and investment.
Meanwhile, Nguyen Thao Hien, deputy head of the European Market Department under the Ministry of Industry and Trade said both sides had enormous strengths that could supplement each other.
Hien said Slovakias demand for consumer goods, farm produce, apparel and footwear could give a boost to Viet Nams exports. In return, with its strength in machinery and engineering, as well as being a supplier of parts, Slovakia could help Viet Nam develop these sectors.
The event yesterday also saw several agreements and MoUs inked among the Vietnamese and Slovakian sides. Among them included a co-operation agreement signed between the Viet Nam Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Slovak Investment and Trade Development Agency, and an agreement inked between An Phu Mineral and Energy Co and Lachot Joint Stock Co to establish a joint venture with a total investment capital of one million euro.
Last year, two-way trade reached approximately US$294 million with $276 million coming from Vietnamese exports, according to Viet Nams General Department of Customs.
Meanwhile, the Foreign Investment Agencys latest statistics revealed that as of June, Slovakia had only five projects, worth US$240 million, in Viet Nam, ranking 36th among 116 countries and territories investing in the country. VNS
HA NOI Vietnamese shares recovered from a two-day decline as steel producers advanced on Governments support and higher second-quarter performances.
The benchmark VN Index on the HCM Stock Exchange rose 1.4 per cent to finish at 673.50 points. The southern market index declined by 1.6 per cent in the previous two sessions.
The HNX Index on the Ha Noi Stock Exchange edged up 0.5 per cent to close at 87.05 points, rebounding after a two-day fall of 0.9 per cent.
Top steel producers such as Hoa Phat Group (HPG), Hoa Sen Group (HSG), Tien Len Steel Corp (TLH), Viet Nam-Germany Steel Pipe JSC (VGS), SMC Investment Trading JSC (SMC) and Viet Nam-Italy Steel JSC (VIS) took turns to drive markets up.
Steel companies rose on expectations that the local steel industry will improve after the Ministry of Industry and Trade yesterday issued a decision to impose a four-year safeguard tax on imported steel products, Bao Viet Securities Corp (BVSC) wrote in its daily report.
Confidence in steel stocks has been high during the past four months since the ministry in March issued a temporary tariff on imported steel products and global prices increased.
Some of the listed steel producers have reported higher profits for the second quarter of the year and they are heading to better results during the remaining months.
TLH late last week reported a net profit of VN155 billion (US$6.9 million), an increase of 47.6 per cent from the first quarter. SMC earned a net profit of VN170 billion, nearly twice the figure in the first quarter.
On the stock market, TLH, HSG, VIS and VGS surged between 6.1 per cent and 6.7 per cent, SMC added 1.8 per cent and HPG jumped 4.2 per cent.
Energy stocks also helped boost the markets after oil prices were able to rise during the last two sessions of last week.
PetroVietnam Gas Corp (GAS) gained 1.6 per cent, PetroVietnam Coating Corp (PVB) increased by 1 per cent and PetroVietnam Technical Service Corp (PVS) jumped 3.3 per cent.
Viet Nam Dairy Products JSC (VNM) yesterday was up 2 per cent to hit a new high of VN150,000 per share. The companys market capitalisation is now equal to VN180 trillion or $8 billion.
Coteccons Construction JSC (CTD) rose 2.3 per cent to hit a new high of VN218,000 per share, becoming the highest-value stock on the market.
Investors yesterday traded 185.4 million shares worth VN3.08 trillion, a decrease of 26 per cent from last weeks daily trading value. VNS
HCM CITY Around 200 business leaders, industry experts, policymakers and Government officials will participate in the 2016 Viet Nam Singapore Business Forum starting in HCM City on July 20.
Hosted by the Viet Nam Chamber of Commerce and Industry, this business platform connects companies in Viet Nam and Singapore, enabling them to explore co-operation opportunities.
The VSBF will also focus on Viet Nams consistent efforts to improve the investment environment.
Four panel discussions to be moderated by industry leaders, experts and government officials will centre on four key topics: financial services, processing and manufacturing, real estate development, tourism and hospitality.
VCCI vice chairman oan Duy Khuong said VSBF 2016 is an important event which will further contribute to the success of multifaceted bilateral co-operation relations between Viet Nam and Singapore, especially after the two countries reached the strategic partnership agreement in 2013.
This is also a practical platform for businesses to promote international economic integration since both countries have become members of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the ASEAN Economic Community.
VSBF has been organised in the past in 2011, 2013 and 2014. This year it is organised with support from Viet Nams Ministry of Planning and Investment, International Enterprise Singapore, Singapore Business Federation, Singapore Business Group, Singapore Business Association in Viet Nam, Singapore Tourism Board and International Womens Federation of Commerce and Industry Singapore. VNS
HA NOI The United States (US) and Viet Nam signed an agreement on Monday (US time) to resolve disputes over American anti-dumping duties on Vietnamese shrimp, Viet Nam News Agency reported.
Accordingly, the two countries agreed on a framework to resolve two World Trade Organisation (WTO) disputes, DS404 and DS492, in which Viet Nam objected to American anti-dumping measures against Vietnamese shrimp.
As a result, Minh Phu Seafood Corporation, the largest shrimp exporter of Viet Nam, will no longer be subjected to anti-dumping duties while exporting shrimp to the US.
Under the US Department of Commerces decision, Minh Phu Seafood Corporations dumping margin was found to be zero or not significant in three consecutive administrative reviews.
Minh Phu Seafood Corporation would be refunded part of the anti-dumping duties the company had deposited in previous years, estimated to be worth millions of dollars, the Viet Nam News Agency said.
However, the anti-dumping duty order will remain in place for all other Vietnamese warm water shrimp exporters.
The agreement demonstrates the two countries goodwill and efforts to address outstanding issues and promote bilateral ties to a higher level, especially when the Trans-Pacific Partnership has been signed and is expected to soon come into force.
According to the Viet Nam Seafood Exporters and Processors, Viet Nam exported shrimp worth US$249.3 million to the US in the first five months of this year, rising 17.4 per cent year-on-year. - VNS
A NANG (Biz Hub) Slovakia will boost co-operation with a Nang in tourism, information technology (IT) and software, Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico said in a meeting during his visit to the city on July 19.
The Slovakian PM said the central city and Viet Nam were seen as peaceful and safe tourist destinations by Slovakian tourists, as favourite destinations in Turkey and Egypt were facing instability and security issues.
"a Nang has a long coastline and is an ideal destination for Slovakian tourists. I have witnessed the development of Viet Nam since I visited the country in 2008," Fico said.
"However, direct air routes from Slovakia to a Nang and other cities of Viet Nam are yet to be established to facilitate for tourism development and co-operation. We are also eyeing streamlining of procedures for tourist visa applications to enter Slovakia, as Viet Nam plans to exempt visa fees for Slovakia tourists visiting the country," he said.
The PM also said Slovakia was home to the Vietnamese community and he would urge Slovakian people to visit a Nang, which has ideal and pristine beach destinations.
He said FPT, an IT group of Viet Nam, has been working in IT development in Slovakia for years.
The Slovakia leader also visited the FPT Complex, the largest IT service centre in the central region built to contribute $1 billion to FPTs software exports revenue by 2020, and which contributed 37 per cent of the citys software export revenue in 2015 ($50 million).
Chairman of the central citys Peoples Committee Huynh uc Tho said the city hoped to boost co-operation with Slovakia in tourism, port services, software and high-tech, besides manufacturing and human resource training, based on the long-term friendship between Viet Nam and Slovakia.
He said a Nang had signed a memorandum of understanding on co-operation and friendship with Kosice City, Slovakia, to boost investment, trade, education and tourism between the two cities in 2015, on the occasion of the 65th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between Viet Nam and Slovakia.
Bilateral trade between a Nang and Slovakia reached a modest US$200,000 in garments in 2015. Slovakia is currently the largest Central European investor in Viet Nam.
In 2014, FPT Software acquired RWE IT Slovakia a subsidiary of the RWE Group in Eastern Europe to strengthen its global delivery capabilities in Europe, as well as to turn RWE IT Slovakia into a future FPT Slovakia, a member of the FPT family. VNS
HA NOI Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and his Slovakian counterpart Robert Fico agreed on measures to step up cooperation between the two countries during their talks in Ha Noi yesterday.
The two leaders said bilateral economic and trade ties has developed steadily in recent years, with an average annual two-way trade of about US$300 million. Slovakia is running five projects in Viet Nam, while the Southeast Asian country has only one project in Slovakia.
In an effort to advance economic links, they agreed to improve the efficiency of the Viet Nam-Slovakia Joint Committee on Economic Cooperation, and increase trade and investment promotion.
The countries will also create optimal conditions for their businesses to set up partnerships, particularly in infrastructure construction, food processing, pharmaceutical production, urban and public transport planning, environmental protection and water resource management.
The PMs were also unanimous about the need to foster collaboration in national defence and security, culture, education-training, science and technology.
PM Phuc said PM Robert Ficos visit would create a momentum to deepen the time-honoured friendship and cooperation between the two countries in an effective and pragmatic fashion.
Congratulating PM Fico and the Slovakian Government on Slovakias assumption of the EUs rotating presidency, the host expressed his belief that the country would perform this post well in the face of the challenges facing the Union.
For his part, the guest said Slovakia always considered Viet Nam a friendly and long-standing partner, and wished to beef up ties with the Southeast Asian country in all fields.
Fico underlined Slovakias backing of enhanced relations between Viet Nam and the EU as well as the signing and ratification of the EU-Viet Nam Free Trade Agreement. He promised to accelerate the EUs recognition of Viet Nams full market economy at the same time with the official signing of the pact.
The two leaders shared their concerns over recent developments in the East Sea and stressed the need to address disputes in the waters through peaceful measures and in line with international law, the UN Charter and the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and seriously observe the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the East Sea towards the early formation of a Code of Conduct in the East Sea.
PM Fico invited PM Phuc to pay an official visit to Slovakia and the Vietnamese PM accepted the invitation with pleasure.
Following their talks, the two PMs witnessed the signing of a handful of cooperation documents in transportation, information and communications, investment and education. They then held a press briefing to announce the outcome of their talks.
Meeting with other leaders
On the same day, Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, President Tran ai Quang and National Assembly Chairwoman Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan hosted separate receptions for visiting Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico in Ha Noi.
Meeting with the Slovakian PM, the Party leader praised the high-level political talks between the two countries and urged for continued exchanges of visits and cooperation.
He thanked the Slovakian government for facilitating the Vietnamese community there and called on Slovakia to continue supporting the views of Viet Nam and ASEAN on the East Sea issue.
During the reception for the Slovakian guest, President Tran ai Quang said the Vietnamese people treasured the precious and effective assistance the Slovakian people gave during Viet Nams previous struggles for national liberation and todays national construction and defense. He reiterated the unswerving policy of facilitating Slovakian businesses to invest in Viet Nam.
The top legislator, Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan, during her reception, asked the Slovakian government to create favourable conditions for the Vietnamese community there, helping to boost the friendship and cooperation between the two countries.
She added that as Slovakia will be the Chair of the EU from July 2016, PM Fico will help boost ties with Viet Nam, speed up the Viet Nam-EU Free Trade Agreement and recognise Viet Nams full market economy.--VNS
Joint statement
The two sides have issued a joint statement, in which they agreed to enhance exchanges and mutual support in all regional and international issues of mutual concern. Co-operation in climate change and water security will also be fostered, including water resource management with Mekong Danube rivers.
The parties also committed to co-operate more closely at the United Nations and the Asia Europe Meeting, while affirming their willingness to promote peace, maritime security, free aviation transport and maritime transport in the East Sea area.
They also agreed on legal and peaceful dispute resolutions in accordance with international laws, including the Convention of the United Nations 1982 Law of the Sea.--VNS
HA NOI Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong has ordered the continuation of investigations into the case of a dismissed National Assembly (NA) delegate after receiving a report indicating violations were suspected.
Trinh Xuan Thanh, the former deputy chairman of the Hau Giang Province Peoples Committee, last week, was dismissed from the NA after being found accountable for massive losses at a major State-owned oil company, PetroVietnam, and was censured for illegally using a Government license plate on his private car.
The Party Chief on Monday asked the Central Personnel Committee and leaders of PetroVietnam, as well as the authorities of the Hau Giang Province and the Ministry of Home Affairs, to review and clarify the responsibility of individuals or groups of people who were involved, related to or supported Thanhs violations and to determine the relevant penalties.
He also ordered an investigation into whether any suspected individuals or groups were involved in the process of awarding the Labour Order for 2009 and 2010 and the Labour Hero 2011 title to the Viet Nam Oil and Gas Construction Joint Stock Corporation. Penalties will also be issued, where guilt is established.
Police at all levels should intensify their investigations to determine how the corporation had allowed a loss of VN3 trillion (US$135 million) to occur in the 2011-2013 period, according to the Party General Secretary.
The Party Chief also demanded police to find the violators involved in the illegal granting of a Government license plate for Thanhs private car.
On June 1, media reported public outrage in Hau Giang Province when a Lexus car worth some VN5 billion ($224,000), registered with a Government plate, was found to belong to the vice chairman of the Peoples Committee of Hau Giang, a poor southern province.
Prior to being assigned to his position in Hau Giang, Thanh was the chairman of PetroVietnam Corporation from 2007 to 2013.
Thanh later denied that he owned the car but had borrowed it from a friend in Ha Noi when he was transferred to Hau Giang. VNS
Ha Noi traffic police have proposed a plan to the Ministry of Public Security to strictly handle cases of traffic law violations. VNA/VNS Photo
HA NOI Ha Noi traffic police have proposed a plan to the Ministry of Public Security to strictly handle cases of traffic law violations.
Over the past months, police have detected and solved tens of violations, Col Pham Van Hau said at the meeting to review the results of work on ensuring order and traffic safety in the first six months of the year on Thursday.
The violation cases included vehicles with private number plates using badges granted by the Public Security Ministry, press and other State agencies for travelling, Hau said.
The ministrys badge is granted to officials and staff to use in the parking area of the ministry office and it is not effective while travelling, he said.
The press agency badges are used at certain times when the vehicle is used to serve for a parliamentary session or other important meetings.
The press agency badge will be recovered after the meeting ends and is not to be used as a priority signal when travelling.
To deal with violators, the ministry should strictly handle these cases and enhance inspections to detect vehicles that use invalid badges, Hau said.
Col Le Xuan uc, deputy director of the Traffic Police Department, said the ministry did not grant these badges for any individual or office to use them as a priority signal.
Violators will be strictly punished, uc said.
At the meeting he also asked traffic police to strengthen checking and patrolling of overloaded vehicles travelling during banned times as many media have recently reported on.
To better manage overloaded vehicles, the traffic police need to join hands with other agencies, uc said.
Transport inspections should be increased on key routes which lead to the central city such as Pham Hung, Khuat Duy Tien, Nguyen Xien and Nguyen Khoai roads, Col ao Thanh Hai said.
He also asked Ha Noi traffic police to put in place more unexpected inspections of illegal sand mining areas. Traffic police teams should closely work together to detect early and prevent violations, he said.
uc said the recent report of the Transport Ministry showed that overloaded vehicle violations had been reduced by 80 per cent. VNS
HCM CITY The number of cases of diphtheria increased to 60 as of yesterday in Binh Phuoc, according to the south-eastern provinces Preventive Health Centre.
The epidemic has spread to one more commune, ong Tien in ong Phu District, after sweeping through Thuan Loi and Thuan Phu.
The epidemic was declared on July 15 after three people died.
The head of the national Preventive Health Department, Tran ac Phu last weekend led a Ministry of Health study team to the two communes hit earlier and held discussions with provincial authorities.
He instructed the deployment of all available preventive methods in the affected areas and the monitoring of family members who have been in contact with patients.
Non-epidemic-hit areas should also be surveilled to prevent its spread, he said.
The provincial health department should work closely with the HCM City Pasteur Institute to obtain vaccines and ensure the coverage rate in rural and mountainous areas is more than 95 per cent, he added.
As of yesterday health officials vaccinated nearly 1,200 of 7,700 people aged from a few months to 26 years who have not been immunised. Authorities said all patients are aged 26 or less.
Dr Nguyen Thanh Truong, head of the Binh Phuoc General Hospital, said the hospitals quarantine area is filled with patients.
Eight patients were discharged from the hospital last week, Truong said.
If the disease continues to spread, the quarantine area would not have any more vacant beds, and patients might have to be put in a corridor, he said.
Because diphtheria is highly contagious, Truong said people should not transport patients by private vehicle but should instead call for hospital ambulance.
The main areas where the disease has broken out are home to the Stieng ethnic minority, many of whom are poor.
Truong told the health ministry delegation that hospital fees should be waived for poor ethnic patients.
Phu said diphtheria used to be common in the country, claiming many lives until the national expanded programme on immunisation helped virtually eliminate it.
But every year a few cases occur in mountainous provinces, he said.
Dr Nguyen Trung Cap of the National Hospital of Tropical Diseases in Ha Noi told the meeting that diphtheria could cause complications like nerve damage or lung infection.
The rate of mortality is 10-20 per cent, he said, adding that if the disease is diagnosed in time patients would recover without any after-effects.
Its symptoms are sore throat, high fever and swollen neck glands. VNS
HCM CITY A HCM City court today began the trial of the chief of a public bank and 35 of his accomplices for allegedly faking documents to borrow from the bank, causing losses of over VN9 trillion (US$403.5 million) to the Government.
According to the courts verdict, between 2012 and 2014, Pham Cong Danh, chairman of Viet Nam Construction Bank (VNCB) -- and also chairman and CEO of Thien Thanh construction group -- instructed the bank management and his subordinates at the company to fake documents to borrow from VNCB to clear his debts and for personal expenses.
The 36 face a combination of the charges of intentionally violating State regulations on economic management, causing serious consequences, violating rules on lenders activities, or dereliction of duty, causing serious consequences.
The trial will go on for a month. VNS
LAO CAI Almost 1,100 households in the northwestern mountainous provinces of Lao Cai, Son La and Lai Chau are in areas with a high risk of landslides, erosion and flash floods.
The National Department for Natural Disaster Prevention and Control under the Water Resource Directorate, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, have said landslides, erosion and flash floods are occurring more frequently and with greater severity in the northwestern provinces.
The impact of climate change and deforestation and the risky custom of living at the foot of sloping hills or mountains are blamed for the increases in natural disasters and high death rates, said Van Phu Chinh, head of the National Department for Natural Disaster Prevention and Control.
Chinh said local residents were so reckless that they had encroached on rivers and springs to build their houses, blocking the flow of water.
I see that local residents have lots of experience in preventing land erosion and flash floods, but they ignore the warning signs, he said.
They build houses at the foot of sloping hills and delay evacuation to safer areas, he said.
In the last decade, Lao Cai Province experienced 22 flash floods and erosion, which killed 312 people and caused losses of VN2.4 trillion (US$107.6 million) while Son La Province had 108 flash floods and erosion, killing 125 people and causing losses of VN1.6 trillion.
Chinh also said local authorities were not determined enough in punishing violators and speeding up the resettlement of people in erosion-prone areas.
They usually blame this on the shortage of funds for resettlement, he said.
For example, 23 families in Nam Bat Hamlet, Tan Tien Commune, Lao Cai Province, need to move their houses as, since 2014, cracks up to 60cm wide have appeared on the summit of the mountain next to their hamlet.
However, local authorities have failed to arrange their resettlement so far.
Local resident Truong Van Lan said they have built makeshift houses in potentially safer places while awaiting government assistance to move to a new area. VNS
HA NOI Health experts from Viet Nam and Australia have exchanged medical knowledge at a conference on health services and medical science that began on Tuesday in Ha Noi.
The two-day event, entitled Health Services Viet Nam Australia 2016, is jointly organised by the Ministry of Health and the Australia Embassy in Viet Nam.
Speaking at the opening ceremony, Australian Ambassador in Viet Nam Craig Chittick said that health was one of the priority areas under the Agreement on Scientific and Technological Cooperation between Viet Nam and Australia ratified in July 2014.
Viet Nam and Australia have a long standing education relationship built largely on scholarships, which has now become increasingly diverse. As Viet Nam builds its research capability, internationalises its university sector and modernises its health sector, Australia stands ready to partner with Viet Nam on its health and medical priorities and industry development, Chittick said.
Deputy Minister of Health Le Quang Cuong said that an agreement on science and technology cooperation was ratified in 2014 and health was one of the priority areas identified under the agreement.
Practical recommendations and suggestions from all delegates and speakers from Viet Nam and Australia could be made to strengthen and promote co-operation in health between the two countries, Cuong said.
According to Cuong, the Australian government and non-governmental organisations have offered valuable support to the health sector in Viet Nam. This support focusses on areas such as HIV/AIDS, strengthening the preventive medicine system, improving environmental health, and training human resources.
During the event, participants will focus on discussing a range of topics including non-communicable diseases and stem cell research, improving the quality of medical and healthcare services through innovation in technology, and on Viet Nams healthcare education, service delivery and financing reforms.
It is also a chance for both sides to evaluate the co-operation potential in improving research capacity in medical innovations, linkage between research activity and consultancy, and making policy for the prevention of non-communicable diseases, in addition to quality improvement of healthcare services and hospital administration, and application of stem cell technology and innovation in medical training system. VNS
BINH THUAN More than 70 tourists have needed emergency medical aid after being hospitalised with symptoms of food poisoning, local food safety authority reported.
The tourists, staying at a resort in Phan Thiet District, in the southern coastal province of Binh Thuan, on Tuesday complained of severe abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhoea and fever.
They were immediately rushed to local health care centres for some initial emergency assistance.
Fifty of them were then moved to a private clinic while 20 others were hospitalised at the An Phuoc General Hospital.
Doctors at the clinic and hospital suspected the tourists were suffering from food poisoning and prescribed antibiotics, an infusion and injection for relief from the pain.
The number of victims are part of a vast group of 800 tourists, all of whom are employees of the Sai Gon Good Joint Stock Company from HCM City.
They were under a contract with the Rong Viet Travel Company for staying in different hotels and resorts near Ham Tien-Mui Ne Beach in Phan Thiet since last Sunday.
On Monday, they gathered to attend a gala dinner at the Sealink City Phan Thiet and suffered food poisoning at night and early morning the next day, the Voice of Viet Nam online paper reported.
Right after hearing about the case, the Binh Thuan Provinces Food Safety Department sent a team to the local clinic and hospital where the patients are being treated.
The department said the team was responsible for consulting, supervising and investigating the case.
The cause would be confirmed soon and reported to the department. VNS
GUATEMALA CITY Thirteen people were killed on Monday in a prison riot in Guatemala, among them an ex-soldier imprisoned forkilling a Roman Catholic bishop almost two decades ago, authorities said.
"Among the dead is Mr (Byron) Lima," who was convicted for his role in the 1998 murder of Juan Gerardi, and died during a "brawl" among inmates, Interior Minister Francisco Rivas told reporters. A previous toll had just two dead.
The clash took place inside Pavon prison, just outside the capital, after authorities tossed a grenade at the inmates "security detail."
Rivas said the deadly uprising was linked to Guatemalan drug lord Marvin Montiel Marin, alias "El Taquero," who has been in the same prison for the 2008 killings of 15 Nicaraguans and a Dutch national.
The bishop had investigated atrocities committed during Guatemalas civil war, documenting more than 50,000 human rights violations -- most attributed to the army -- during the 1960-1996 armed conflict.
Lima was serving a 20-year prison sentence handed down in 2001. Three others, including his father, a former colonel, were convicted over the bishops murder.
While serving his sentence, Lima was considered one of the most powerful figures inside Guatemalas prison system.
In 2014, a judge charged Lima with leading a criminal network that effectively controlled prison life, including arranging inmate transfers, conjugal visits and access to phones. AFP
UNITED NATIONS, United States UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has warned that Islamic State fighters could set up new cells across Libya and north Africa as they are driven from their, stronghold of Sirte.
Ban Monday outlined the threat from foreign terrorist fighters (FTF) in Libya in a confidential report to the Security Council.
"The recent pressure against ISIL in Libya could lead its members, including FTFs, to relocate and regroup in smaller and geographically dispersed cells throughout Libya and in neighboring countries," Ban said in the report.
The defeat of IS fighters in Sirte "appears to be a distinct possibility", leading many to flee south as well as west, to Tunisia.
"The future impact of scattered ISIL combatants on southern local armed groups may become an issue of concern," he said.
Libyan forces allied with the UN-backed government in Tripoli have been battling to take Sirte from IS fighters for the past two months.
The coastal city is considered one of ISs most important rear bases outside of Syria and Iraq.
There are between 2,000 and 5,000 IS fighters from Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Mali, Morocco and Mauritania deployed in Sirte, Tripoli and Derna, according to the report.
Dozens of foreign fighters from Tunisia have returned home from Libya "with the intent to conduct attacks," it added.
The ties extend further afield, with funds from Libya sent to Ansar Bait al-Maqdis, a jihadist group that operates in Egypts Sinai peninsula, the report said.
Ban said Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which is active in Mali and across the Sahel region, continues to use Libya as a sanctuary and a base to buy arms and ammunition.
Mokhtar Belmokhtar, leader of the Al-Mourabitoun group active in the Sahel, is able to travel throughout Libya with relative ease while the head of Ansar
Dine in northern Mali, Iyad Ag Ghaly, maintains a foothold in southern Libya, the report said. AFP
SEOUL North Korea test-fired three ballistic missiles on Tuesday, South Koreas military said, just over a week after issuing threats to respond to the planned deployment of a US anti-missile system in the South.
The missiles, launched early on Tuesday from the western city of Hwangju, flew between 500 and 600 kilometres toward the Sea of Japan, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JSC) said in a press statement.
The range of what were believed to be SCUD missiles could reach anywhere in South Korea, the JCS said, adding the military was keeping close tabs on the Norths movement.
North Korea last week threatened to take "physical action" after Washington and Seoul announced plans deploy a sophisticated US anti-missile defence system to counter the growing menace from Pyongyang.
The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, will be deployed in Seongju county by the end of next year.
An unidentified military official said that todays launch was believed to be linked to the Norths latest threats.
The North previously launched relatively short-ranged SCUDs in March, as it flexed its muscles in response to joint US-South Korea military drills just south of the border.
North Korea reportedly has some 600 SCUDs, developed in the former Soviet Union and modified by Pyongyang, whose ranges are estimated to be somewhere between 300 and 700 km.
Tensions have soared since Pyongyang carried out its fourth nuclear test in January, followed by a series of missile launches that analysts say shows that the North is making progress toward being able to strike the US mainland.
Both South Korean and US troops stationed in the South have Patriot anti-air defence systems that can intercept enemy missiles at low altitudes.
Alongside the Patriot systems, the THAAD system is necessary to form a multi-layered anti-air defence system, South Korean military authorities say.
The announcement to deploy the THAAD system in Seongju sparked fierce protests by residents who are concerned it will ruin the towns economic main stay, melon farming, and create health and environmental hazards. AFP
The gunman who killed three police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Sunday was a former US Marine sergeant who served in Iraq and made the dean's list in college, government officials with knowledge of the case said.
SoftBank Group agreed to buy ARM Holdings for 24.3 billion ($32 billion), securing a slice of virtually every mobile computing gadget on the planet and future connected devices in the home. The Japanese company is offering 1,700 pence in cash per share or a 43 per cent premium to Friday close, according to a statement on Monday. The deal would be the biggest-ever for SoftBank, which under Chairman Masayoshi Son became one of Japan's most acquisitive companies with stakes in wireless carrier Sprint and Alibaba Group Holding. SoftBank will gain control of a cash-generating mobile ...
China on Monday said it is closing off a part of the South China Sea for military exercises this week, days after an international tribunal ruled against Beijing's claim to ownership of virtually the entire strategic waterway.
33:42 IN FULL: Peter Dutton delivers budget reply speech Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has delivered the Coalitions reply to the Albanese governments first budget, saying it was a missed opportunity...
14:24 Correct for Dutton to compare Australias energy plight to Europe Sky News host Rowan Dean says it was absolutely correct for Opposition Leader Peter Dutton in his budget reply speech to compare Australias...
07:40 Duttons budget reply speech an absolute statement of values Sky News host Paul Murray says Opposition Leader Peter Duttons budget reply speech was an absolute statement of values.
05:11 Rishi Sunak has tendencies that arent truly conservative Writer and broadcaster Esther Krakue says its too early to tell how Rishi Sunak will go as the UKs Prime Minister.
JESUP -- Buchanan County Economic Development Commission, the Jesup Chamber of Commerce and the Jesup Public Library are teaming up to host Jesups first Business Jelly.
A Jelly is a casual co-working event where entrepreneurs, freelancers, home workers and people running businesses meet in a social environment in order to get out of their normal work space.
The Jelly will be held at the Jesup Public Library Community Room on Wednesday from 9 a.m. to noon at 712 Sixth St.
Participants are encouraged to bring their own laptops and spend a day working outside their office and networking with other business professionals. There will be free coffee, water and Wi-Fi.
At 11:30 a.m., Farmers Bank President Todd Rohlfsen, will discuss what financial awareness for new and growing businesses.
For more information, go to www.growbuchanan.com.
WATERLOO - IowaWORKS Cedar Valley, in partnership with the Employers Council of Iowa, is sponsoring a three-hour workshop July 28 that focuses on hot topics in labor law.
Changes to the Family Medical Leave Act, American Disabilities Act, and Fair Labor Standards Act will be addressed.
Jesse Marzen, Marzen Law Office, Waverly, will discuss FMLA; J.R. Schemmel, U.S. Department of Labor, Iowa Wage and Hour investigator in the Cedar Rapids field office, will discuss FLSA and the Impact of the new overtime ruling; and Rebecca Johnson, human rights specialist, Waterloo Commission on Human Rights, will discuss ADA insight into accommodations.
The workshop is from 8 to 11:30 a.m. Registration fee is $25. Checks made payable to ECI must be presented at registration. Prior registration is required by July 25. To register, email sherryle@veridiancu.org.
WAVERLY Some 175 employees of Terex Cranes are out of a job as the Waverly plant ceased operations Tuesday, marking the end of a manufacturing operation that has been a staple of the community for 75 years.
People are upset; its their lives, you know? said Kent Fisher of Nashua, a 30-year employee and president of United Auto Workers Local 411, whose members heard the news in a plant meeting Tuesday. They didnt care about us, evidently. They said they did. They didnt. We were told we could go home immediately and have to make appointments to pick up our personal items and our tool boxes.
City Administrator James Bronner said he was notified by company officials of the closing following meetings at the plant Tuesday.
Some 100 unionized manufacturing workers, affiliated with UAW Local 411, were idled immediately, Bronner said, and another 75 nonproduction, nonunion personnel, including commercial office, design-engineering and purchasing team members will be phased out gradually.
Longtime Terex executive Dave Stevenson broke the news to Bronner in compliance with provision of the federal Worker Adjustment Retraining and Notification Act, also known as the WARN Act.
I asked him if there was anything the city could have done to prevent it, Bronner said. He said, No, not really. It was the oil prices and the construction industry being down. He said the decision was made at the corporate offices in Westport, Conn.
Its unfortunate these people are losing their jobs, its unfortunate for the families affected, and were going to pull together all available resources and try to assist them in gaining other employment and whatever we can do to help, Bronner added.
We appreciate Terex and everything theyve done for the community, Bronner said. Their accounting office is staying here, and thats great. Company officials said that accounting operation, the companys global business systems office, employs 100 people.
Some of he nonproduction workers apparently may be given a chance to relocate, but company communications officials could not confirm that.
Bronner, former chief financial officer for Black Hawk County, was hired as Waverlys city administrator earlier this year. Six months into this job, I didnt expect this, he said.
Ron McInroy, formerly of Waterloo and a UAW regional director in Lincolnshire, Ill., near Chicago, said the total Terex-UAW membership is about 120 workers, some of whom had been on layoff prior to Tuesdays announcement.
Company officials confirmed the move in a press release.
Terex Cranes has announced it will expand its North American cranes production at its facility in Oklahoma City, allowing the company to maximize its existing manufacturing footprint and better serve customers, the release said. As a result, the company will close production of its Rough Terrain Cranes, Truck Cranes and Boom Trucks in Waverly, Iowa, effective July 19, 2016. Production in OKC of the lines formerly built in Waverly is expected to commence in September.
The release noted the company has made multi-millon dollar upgrades at the Terex campus in Oklahoma City to handle the additional manufacturing.
Fisher said the Terex Waverly production employees worked hard and efficiently to move product out the door and had, in fact, made money for the company to pick up additional work.
McInroy said the UAW will help the displaced Waverly workers make sure they receive everything they are contractually entitled to, and with unemployment assistance. Bronner also said all state and local economic development resources will be brought to bear to aid the displaced workers and their families, noting the Iowa Economic Development Authority and Iowa Workforce Development have been notified.
According to the company website, the Waverly operation was established in 1941 by brothers Vern and Wilbur Schield. They named their new products after the Bantam Rooster and the Schield Bantam product line was born. In 1963 the Koehring products filled in the larger end of the crane and excavator lines, creating a family. In 1987 the company became part of the Terex Corp.
The company manufactures rough terrain cranes, boom trucks and truck cranes, according to its website.
The company had employed 240 people as recently as 2012, having called back workers from a 2009 layoff. More recently, Terex has been selling off certain product lines and terminated talks with Zoomlion Heavy Industry Science and Technology Co., a Chinese company, regarding a purchase of Terex, according to press releases on the company website.
MARBLE ROCK Due to routine cleaning and inspection of the towns water tower Wednesday, the city of Marble Rock is advising residents to boil water during the maintenance and until bacteria samples come back clean.
Low pressure in the drinking water system during the maintenance creates the potential for bacteria to enter the system. City officials and the Iowa Department of Natural Resources are asking Marble Rock residents to boil their water until testing shows the water is again safe to drink.
Residents should let water boil for one minute, then cool it before using. They should use boiled or bottled water for drinking, making ice, brushing teeth and food preparation until further notice. Boiling kills bacteria and other organisms in the water.
Tap water can be used for bathing and similar purposes.
CEDAR RAPIDS A Waterloo agricultural supplier who had evaded Iowa authorities by living in Brazil for nearly four years after being indicted pleaded guilty Monday to a federal bank fraud charge.
Kelly Freese, 52, was charged last month with four counts of bank fraud and one count of making false statements to a bank. He pleaded guilty to only one of the bank fraud charges Monday in U.S. District Court.
Freese, owner and operator of the Christy Corp. in Waterloo, during the hearing admitted to selling assets and inflating the companys accounts receivables that were used as collateral to get a $1,035,687 loan from Lincoln Savings Bank in Cedar Falls in 1998.
Freeses primary business operations were in the agricultural industry, spreading lime and chemicals on farm fields. But the company also handled snow removal, trucking and sales of used farming equipment, documents show. Christy Corp. also did business as Freese Ag Services and Ag-Zone.
The plea agreement shows Freese inflated the value of accounts receivable to falsely claim the company was owed more than $260,000 when it was really owed $115,000.
Freese also sold equipment pledged as collateral, according to the plea. For example, he sold equipment to Ag-Zone, a company formed by his wife and his parents, who in turn sold the equipment at auctions and gave the proceeds to Freese. Christy Corp. failed to repay the money it had borrowed, causing a loss to the bank of $541,911, records show.
The equipment, including conveyors, tractors, dump trucks, pickup trucks, road graders and forklifts, was valued at more than $1.1 million. It had been transferred to Ag-Zone, and some was sold to third parties, records show.
Freese, indicted in November 2012, was living with his family in Brazil and was arrested several months ago but fought extradition to Iowa, prosecutors said last month.
He was returned June 18 to Cedar Rapids.
Freese remains in custody pending sentencing. He faces up to 30 years in federal prison and a fine of at least $1 million.
DECORAH Its the 50th anniversary of Decorahs Nordic Fest.
During this citywide celebration of Nordic traditions and heritage, Vesterheim, the national Norwegian-American museum and heritage center, will host a Viking encampment, Norwegian and American artists, Scandinavian films and more.
The festival kicks off with opening ceremonies July 28. Vesterheim will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily with free admission and special events all day on Friday and Saturday, July 29-30.
Vesterheims Open Air Division of 12 historic buildings is open from noon to 4 p.m. Friday and Saturday for self-guided tours with no admission fee. Guided tours of the Open Air Division are at 10:30 a.m. and 1:30 and 2:30 p.m. Thursday for free and Sunday with an admission ticket.
Vesterheim Event Highlights include:
Best-selling author Lauraine Snelling will sign books 9-11 a.m. and noon-3 p.m. Saturday in the Museum Store. Snelling will celebrate the release of her newest novel, The Second Half, and previous works.
Trunk Show of Nordic-inspired wool blankets and clothing by Laurie Jacobi, award-winning textile designer from Minnesota.
Vesterheims National Exhibition of Folk Art in the Norwegian Tradition will be on view through July 30 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. Visitors can seen an exhibition of knifemaking, rosemaling, weaving and woodworking by contemporary American artists. Many of the pieces will be for sale by silent auction.
Norwegian-tradition folk artists will demonstrate their crafts throughout the campus.
The museums Open Air Division will feature living heritage demonstrators from Minnesota, South Dakota and Wisconsin in blacksmithing, figure carving, leather work, knifemaking, woodworking, chair-making and more.
The re-enactment group Skjaldborg from Elk Horn will have a Viking camp in the museums Open Air Division with full combat demonstrations.
The Oneota Film Festival presents a film from Norway and Driftless: A Film About Decorah, By Decorah at 3:30 p.m. on both Friday and Saturday in the museums Bethania Church.
Representatives from the Norwegian-American Genealogical Center will be available from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 5 p.m. both days.
To learn more about other aspects of the fest, call (800) 382-FEST, or go to www.nordicfest.com.
A roundup of news items from the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland:
Help from Walker
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said Monday hell be back in Iowa this summer to help Republicans try to win control of the state Senate, an occasion thats likely to galvanize both sides of the political aisle. Walker, who ran for the Republican nomination but was one of the first to drop out, said he expects to help raise money in August for GOP state senators. Walkers help also is likely to motivate Iowa Democrats, who argue Walker and the Republican-controlled Legislature in Wisconsin have swung too far to the right, particularly when it comes to bargaining rights for labor unions. Speaking to Iowa convention delegates, Walker portrayed GOP control as a blessing. Theres no end to the good you can do, he said.
Kasich absence
Ohio Gov. John Kasichs absence at this weeks Republican National Convention in Cleveland has not gone unnoticed by the head of Iowas Republican Party. Kasich who ran an unsuccessful 2016 presidential bid has meetings with various state delegations, business groups and events at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame but he is steering clear of the convention floor at the Quicken Loans Arena. State GOP chairman Jeff Kaufmann says thats not being part of a team. We are bringing tens of millions of dollars into the state of Ohio, tens of millions into one of his cities that needs this kind of economic growth more than anything else, Kaufmann told an Iowa group before heading to Cleveland. Youre the governor of that state and youre not going to go to the convention thats bringing tens of millions in? Give me a break. Regardless of what you think about Donald Trump, what message does that send?
Pence effect
Jim Kirkpatrick, a former Quad-Citian, may be a prime example for how Mike Pence helps Donald Trump this election with the GOP rank and file. Kirkpatrick a financial advisor who now lives near Indianapolis and was a county chair for Ted Cruz in his state wasnt sold on Trump as the GOP nominee. But thats not the case any longer. Picking Pence would probably be the only thing that would get me off the fence, Kirkpatrick said while attending the Iowa delegations breakfast reception in Ohio. Kirkpatrick attended the breakfast with his sister, Kay Quirck, an alternate delegate from Alta in northwest Iowa, had high praise for Pence. The two go to the same church, and he said the governor is a good balance for Trump.
VINTON The Benton County Disaster Recovery Coalition is asking for the publics help so it can assist local families impacted by the EF2 tornado on Sunday.
The coalition is asking for monetary donations to help affected families in Benton County meet needs they have after other assistance is gone.
Individuals and organizations can make monetary donations to the Benton County Disaster Recovery Coalition by mailing donations to P.O. Box 125, Vinton, IA 52349. Questions can be directed to Teresa Floyd at 443-3570. All funds are used in Benton County.
The Benton County Disaster Recovery Coalition has already received help from the Iowa Individual Assistance Program, which can provide up to $5,000 for eligible disaster impacted families meeting specific guidelines. Assistance is primarily for food, clothing and housing assistance.
The local Disaster Recovery Coalition then supports any unmet needs families have after state assistance is gone. Applications for assistance for both the state assistance program and the Disaster Recovery Coalition can be made through the Red Cross at the Vinton-Shellsburg High School at the Benton County Social Services Office located in the Governor Sherman Building at 303 1st Ave., Vinton, after Tuesday.
On April 4, 1968 the day Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed by a sniper Robert Kennedy gave (arguably) one of the greatest American speeches not given by a president. Speaking in a tough section of Indianapolis, Kennedy informed the shocked crowd King was dead, quoted Aeschylus on the wisdom that comes drop by drop from pain, and set out the ideal of a politics that could make gentle the life of this world. Kennedy urged Americans to make an effort to understand offering empathy as the best hope in rather difficult times.
Indianapolis was calm that night, but there were soon riots in 110 other American cities. So, on April 5, 1968, Kennedy spoke in Cleveland, giving a brief speech, undeservedly neglected. No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders, he said. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of the people.
This balance between empathy and a concern for order is what many leaders strive for today. Our country is less riven than in 1968, but our leaders are not as skilled, at least when it comes to rhetoric. We are not asking for Aeschylus, and would probably mock his appearance in a speech today, but it would be nice if politicians did not immediately fall into partisan ruts or post Facebook banalities.
What American leader is equal to explaining this moment and moving us forward? The question just echoes.
President Obama, as he demonstrated in a fine speech on the 50th anniversary of Selma, can sometimes find the words. But he has become symbolic of the limits of symbolism. Many thought his election was a fundamental turning point on issues of race. But just 15 percent of Americans now believe his presidency has brought blacks and whites together. It is a failure not entirely his fault, but it contributes to an atmosphere of cynicism.
Hillary Clinton argues we are stronger together, but she remains one of the most divisive and distrusted politicians in America. Speaker Paul Ryan spoke movingly on the floor of the House in reaction to Dallas, urging Americans to defy the predictions of division but he is at least partially discredited by his endorsement of a presidential candidate who thrives on discord. Chuck Todd of NBC News wonders if support for Trump will be a stain or a tattoo. I would bet a tattoo, leaving only a handful of Republicans unmarked by exclusion.
Trump is the entrepreneur of enmity, employing ethnic stereotypes on the first day of his campaign and breaking through imagined ceilings of GOP support by encouraging fear of Muslims after the San Bernardino attack. Some in the conservative media are actively practicing a white identity politics witness the Drudge Reports headline Black Lives Kill. The whole political enterprise of turning out the white vote the only real hope of the Trump campaign is morally problematic and dangerous.
In fact, there are people on the left and right who benefit from encouraging just enough division, just enough fear, to motivate their supporters, without tipping them over into violence. They are playing with fire in a parched and withered land.
Even as an outsider to the world of liberal advocacy, I think it is possible to see some troubling trends. Civil rights movement-era figures thought they could improve society by changing institutions passing legislation or winning judicial battles. And the aspirations of the movement were carried in the durable institution of the African-American church. But younger activists seem to have less faith in institutional reform because they have less faith in institutions including religious ones. But without a belief in reform, how is justified anger channeled into constructive purposes? Maybe it just sags/like a heavy load, offered Langston Hughes. Or does it explode?
Even if we cannot, as individuals, hope to change systemic racism, most of us have the ability to defy our times and reach out across lines of race and religion.
And religious people have a particular calling in this area. A pastor friend who runs a retreat center in rural Virginia found an abandoned slave cemetery on the property. His religious community reached out to African-American leaders and together they rededicated the cemetery, asking for forgiveness and praying for healing. None who participated came away unchanged.
While waiting for leaders, perhaps the most practical and hopeful path is to become them.
As we have said in this space before, we respect and admire much about U.S. Rep. Steve King.
Iowas 4th District congressman is a principled family man possessed of deep roots in our congressional district, intelligence, analytical skills, a firm grasp of issues important to his constituents, honesty and integrity.
Sometimes, though, we can only scratch our heads and wonder, What in the world is he thinking?
For example, why does King choose to display a Confederate flag?
At a time when even states in the South are, properly, taking steps away from this symbol of a dark chapter in our nations history, King keeps a miniature version of the rebel flag atop the desk in his congressional office.
Discussion of this topic began last week. The Confederate flag was visible on Kings desk in video from a local television report about Kings support for Sarahs Law (the bill would require U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to take into custody illegal aliens who have been charged in the United States with a crime resulting in the death or serious bodily injury of another person). At his weekly news conference Monday, in fact, Gov. Terry Branstad was asked about Kings display of the Confederate flag.
I dont agree with that. I guess thats his decision, Branstad said. People have a right to display whatever they want to, but Im proud to say that (Iowa was) on the side of the Union and we won the war.
First, we wish to be clear about this: We applaud Kings advocacy for Sarahs Law, a laudable piece of legislation named for Sarah Root, a 21-year-old Iowa woman who died in February from injuries sustained when another driver whose blood-alcohol content was, according to court records, more than three times the legal limit slammed into the back of her vehicle at an intersection in Omaha. The driver, who was in the United States illegally, was charged with motor vehicle homicide, but he posted bond, was released from custody ... and disappeared. Like King, we do not wish to see the Root story repeated, and we support Kings bill.
Still, we wont ignore the troubling image during the television report of Kings backing for Sarahs Law of a Confederate flag on our congressmans desk.
Beyond the ugliness symbolized by the flag lies the fact Iowa was part of the Union in the Civil War. In other words, the Confederate flag was flown by the enemy of our state, Kings state. More than 76,000 Iowans fought for the Union and against the Confederacy and everything it stood for; more than 13,000, or nearly one in five, of them died. In the 1862 Battle of Shiloh alone, more than 2,400 Iowans were left dead, wounded or missing.
Bottom line: King should remove the Stars and Bars from his desk.
Search of a Mayfield home snares alleged meth trafficker and two others
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It's no secret that California is home to some incredible outdoor destinations. From the serrated ridge lines of the High Sierra to the gargantuan ancient coast redwoods of the North Coast, the Golden State is diverse, alluring, and awe-inspiring.
With so much terrain to cover, the question then becomes where to focus your time? We've culled together 30 must-do California outdoor adventures and destinations. From easily accessible yet strikingly scenic waterfalls and state parks to multi-day backpacking excursions and demanding climbing routes, there's something in here for everyone.
Old growth redwoods along Damnation Creek Trail (Aron Bosworth)
Redwood National and State Parks
Few places in the world command the awe of a redwood grove in Redwood National and State Parks. The collective of Redwood National Park and Prairie Creek Redwoods, Del Norte Coast Redwoods and Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Parks along northern California's Pacific coast is home to some of the finest forest scenery in the world. Delving into this international biosphere reserve is a must for anyone who appreciates forest beauty. Read more.
PROS: Largest aggregation of old growth coast redwoods in world. Tallest living organism.
Largest aggregation of old growth coast redwoods in world. Tallest living organism. CONS: None
None REGION: Redwoods + Del Norte Coast, CA
Redwoods + Del Norte Coast, CA CONGESTION: Moderate
Moderate PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall
Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: State Park Fee ($8.00)
State Park Fee ($8.00) DOGS ALLOWED: Yes, with restrictions
Stout Memorial Grove (Aron Bosworth)
Stout Memorial Grove
Tucked away from the drive-through limelight of Highway 199, Stout Memorial Grove is out of sight and out of mind for many, if not most, redwood-bound visitors. Those who do make the side trip down Howland Hill Road to see Stout Grove's magnificent coast redwoods are well rewarded. Stout Grove is arguably the most scenic of the coast redwood groves in Jedidiah Smith Redwood State Park, and the location on the other side of the Smith River from the highway keeps the visitor count down. Read more.
PROS: Cathedral-like redwood grove. Few people.
Cathedral-like redwood grove. Few people. CONS: Tougher to find than other nearby groves.
Tougher to find than other nearby groves. REGION: Redwoods + Del Norte Coast, CA
Redwoods + Del Norte Coast, CA CONGESTION: Low
Low PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall
Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: Not Required
Not Required DOGS ALLOWED: No
Fern Canyon (Aron Bosworth)
Fern Canyon
Fern Canyon is one of the West Coast's most exquisite natural hallways, where a blanket of brilliant ferns and moss provide the art. Carved over millennia by Home Creek eroding through the coastal bluffs, Fern Canyon provides a portal into an ancient canyon habitat, with some of the inhabitant fern species dating back hundreds of millions of years. Read more.
PROS : Easily navigable fern-lined slot canyon. Family-friendly.
: Easily navigable fern-lined slot canyon. Family-friendly. CONS: Long unpaved access road.
Long unpaved access road. REGION: Humboldt, CA
Humboldt, CA CONGESTION: High
High PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall
Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED : State Park Fee ($8.00)
: State Park Fee ($8.00) DOGS ALLOWED: No
The sunset at Buck Creek on the Lost Coast Trail (Brandon Katcher)
The Lost Coast Trail
The Lost Coast Trail is a wild and unique backpacking adventure along one of the most rugged sections of the Northern California Coast. The trail provides incredible views, a variety of wildlife and flora, and a glimpse of some rarely seen California coastal terrain. Keep in mind that portions of this trip take a great deal of effort; the majority of the 25-mile, 3-day trip takes place on sandy beaches, which can be exhausting for legs and feet. Read more.
PROS: Beautiful landscape. Only backpackers. Wildflowers. Plenty of water.
Beautiful landscape. Only backpackers. Wildflowers. Plenty of water. CONS: Long shuttle ride. Hard on legs and feet. Many river crossings.
Long shuttle ride. Hard on legs and feet. Many river crossings. REGION: Humboldt, CA
Humboldt, CA CONGESTION: Low
Low PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Spring, Summer, Fall
Spring, Summer, Fall DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: Not Required
Not Required TOTAL DISTANCE : 24.60 mi (39.59 km)
: 24.60 mi (39.59 km) DOGS ALLOWED: Yes
Gibson Peak visible from the trail (Jason Mandly)
Granite Lake and Seven Up Pass
The bridge that begins the Granite Lake Trail is adjacent to a nice creekside beach that makes for a great rest stop. You will be embedded in impressive old-growth forest for the next 1.5 miles of trail paralleling Granite Creek. Most people on this trail will go no further than Granite Lake, but the 1.5-mile push from Granite Lake to Seven Up Pass is well worth the effort. Summer wildflowers will vie for your attention in the foreground, and the red versus white battle of Seven Up Peak (to your north) and Gibson Peak (to the south) will be the backdrop of your climb. A large percentage of the Trinity Alps will open up before you once you make the pass, and these mountains will try to convince you to keep hiking. Read more.
PROS: Great views. Wildflowers. Further hiking options.
Great views. Wildflowers. Further hiking options. CONS: Popular destination.
Popular destination. REGION: Trinity Alps + Marble Mountain Wilderness, CA
Trinity Alps + Marble Mountain Wilderness, CA CONGESTION: Moderate
Moderate PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Summer, Fall
Summer, Fall DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: Not Required
Not Required TOTAL DISTANCE: 13.10 mi (21.08 km)
13.10 mi (21.08 km) DOGS ALLOWED: Yes
(Josh Lupkin)
Mount Shasta, Avalanche Gulch
Standing at an impressive 10,000 feet above its base, Mount Shasta offers an approach hike through a red fir forest followed by a steep ascent above tree line to the popular base camp at Helen Lake. The hike presents views of Mount Lassen to the south, the snowcapped California Coast Range to the west, and spectacular views of the volcanic ridges flanking the snow covered Avalanche Gulch. Read more.
PROS : Clear route. Views of surrounding valleys. Classic alpine climb.
: Clear route. Views of surrounding valleys. Classic alpine climb. CONS: Crowded on weekends. Acute mountain sickness. Avalanche hazard. High winds.
Crowded on weekends. Acute mountain sickness. Avalanche hazard. High winds. REGION: Mount Shasta + Medicine Lake Area, CA
Mount Shasta + Medicine Lake Area, CA CONGESTION: Moderate
Moderate PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Spring, Summer
Spring, Summer DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: Wilderness/Climbing Permit required above 10,000 ft. ($20/3 days or $30 for annual pass)
Wilderness/Climbing Permit required above 10,000 ft. ($20/3 days or $30 for annual pass) TOTAL DISTANCE: 13.60 mi (21.89 km)
13.60 mi (21.89 km) DOGS ALLOWED: No
Looking into the caldera from the highest point (Patrick Mueller)
Lassen Peak
Mount Lassen is the world's largest plug dome volcano and the southernmost active volcano in the Cascade Mountain Range. This volcano was formed from redirected lava flow after a larger nearby volcano (known as Mount Tehama) went extinct around 400,000 years ago. A special animal is found on the slopes of Mount Lassen: the American pika (Ochotona princeps) is a small mammal that helps scientists study climate change. Read more.
PROS : Great views. Active volcano. Mountain summit. Short trail.
: Great views. Active volcano. Mountain summit. Short trail. CONS: Strenuous. High elevation. Exposed.
Strenuous. High elevation. Exposed. REGION: Mount Lassen Volcanic Area, CA
Mount Lassen Volcanic Area, CA CONGESTION: Moderate
Moderate PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Summer, Fall
Summer, Fall DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: National Park Pass
National Park Pass DOGS ALLOWED: No
McArthur-Burney Falls (Patrick Mueller)
McArthur-Burney Falls Memorial State Park
McArthur-Burney Falls State Park may be a ways off the beaten trail, but that should not sway anyone from visiting. The 129-foot waterfall around which the state park is built is one of the most beautiful waterfalls in California. President Theodore Roosevelt visited here and was so impressed that he declared them the eighth wonder of the world. These falls are fed from an underground spring a quarter mile upstream, so there is never any worry that the falls will run dry. Read more.
PROS: Gorgeous waterfall with year-round flow. Several picnic areas. Excellent wildlife viewing. New visitor center.
Gorgeous waterfall with year-round flow. Several picnic areas. Excellent wildlife viewing. New visitor center. CONS: Big crowds in summer. Limited hiking trails. Trails can be icy in winter. Far from a major city.
Big crowds in summer. Limited hiking trails. Trails can be icy in winter. Far from a major city. REGION: Mount Shasta + Medicine Lake Area, CA
Mount Shasta + Medicine Lake Area, CA CONGESTION: High
High PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Spring, Summer, Fall
Spring, Summer, Fall DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: State Park Fee ($8.00)
State Park Fee ($8.00) DOGS ALLOWED: Yes, with restrictions
Ravine Falls in the spring (Jason Mandly)
Ravine and Phantom Falls, North Table Mountain Ecological Reserve
A solitary oak greets you at the North Table Mountain Ecological Reserve parking area. As there are currently no established trails, you should note the oak as a landmark while you embark on your cross-country walkabout. There are plenty of nooks and crannies to explore in this reserve, and some of the highlights are the twin cascades of Ravine Falls and Phantom Falls. Read more.
PROS: Wildflowers. Waterfalls. Room to explore.
Wildflowers. Waterfalls. Room to explore. CONS: Short hiking season. Crowds on weekends.
Short hiking season. Crowds on weekends. REGION: Northern Sacramento Valley, CA
Northern Sacramento Valley, CA CONGESTION: HighPREFERABLE SEASON(S): Winter, Spring
Winter, Spring DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: Required
Required DOGS ALLOWED: Yes
Round Lake (Aron Bosworth)
Bear Lakes Loop Via Round Lake
Bear Lakes are in the heart of the Lakes Basin Recreation Area, the northernmost section of the Sierra Nevada. Less visited than Sierra regions to the south, the area is home to spectacular alpine lakes set among a forested and granitic mountain backdrop. Multiple trails weave through the Bear Lakes area forming various loops that provide access to the lakes. Read more.
PROS: Plenty of serene mountain lakes. Dog friendly.
Plenty of serene mountain lakes. Dog friendly. CONS: No backcountry camping.
No backcountry camping. REGION: Lake Tahoe + Northern Sierra, CA
Lake Tahoe + Northern Sierra, CA CONGESTION: Moderate
Moderate PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Summer, Fall
Summer, Fall DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: Not Required
Not Required DOGS ALLOWED: Yes
Sierra Buttes as seen from the road leading up to Packer Saddle. (Aron Bosworth)
Sierra Buttes Trail
At 8,857 feet in elevation, Sierra Buttes is the tallest peak in the Lakes Basin region, and offers a fantastic day hike excursion. During summer months, open road access allows an approach up from Packer Lake that abbreviates a 2,800-foot climb to a very doable 1,600 feet over 2.5 miles (County Route 621 climbs to Packer Saddle and connects to Butcher Ranch Road, which leads to the Sierra Buttes Trailhead a short distance past the Saddle).Read more.
PROS: Hiking to the top of the region's highest peak. Fire lookout tower.
Hiking to the top of the region's highest peak. Fire lookout tower. CONS: The height factor may be problematic for some.
The height factor may be problematic for some. REGION: Lake Tahoe + Northern Sierra, CA
Lake Tahoe + Northern Sierra, CA CONGESTION: Low
Low PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Summer, Fall
Summer, Fall DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: Not Required
Not Required DOGS ALLOWED: Yes
Chimney Rock Trail (Aron Bosworth)
Point Reyes National Seashore
A stunning California coastal territory managed under the National Park Service, Point Reyes National Seashore comprises the majority of land on the Point Reyes Peninsula as well as the surrounding near-shore Pacific waters. A wonderful network of trails exists throughout Point Reyes, and there are excellent trail options for day hiking and backpacking that traverse the coastline, forests, and uplands of the peninnsula. Outstanding day hikes include Chimney Rock, Tomales Point, and the Palomarin-Alamere Falls trail.Read more.
PROS: Scenic coastal hiking. Abundant wildlife. Historic lighthouse. Expansive beaches.
Scenic coastal hiking. Abundant wildlife. Historic lighthouse. Expansive beaches. CONS: Often foggy and windy.
Often foggy and windy. REGION: Marin, CA
Marin, CA CONGESTION: Moderate
Moderate PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Winter, Spring, Fall
Winter, Spring, Fall DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: Not Required
Not Required DOGS ALLOWED: No
Lake Tahoe is an impressive sight from Tallac's summit (Aron Bosworth)
Mount Tallac, Summer Trail
Most who have visited Lake Tahoe have heard of Mount Tallac, or at the very least, have laid their eyes on it. Rising above the southwest shore of the lake, Mount Tallac is part of Desolation Wilderness and the tallest mountain on the lake's immediate shoreline. At 9,738 feet, the mountain stands as a commanding landmark, and it is a continual draw for hikers in the summer and backcountry skiers in the winter. Read more.
PROS: Hike Lake Tahoe's tallest peak. Fantastic lake views.
Hike Lake Tahoe's tallest peak. Fantastic lake views. CONS: None.
None. REGION: Lake Tahoe + Northern Sierra, CA
Lake Tahoe + Northern Sierra, CA CONGESTION: Moderate
Moderate PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Summer, Fall
Summer, Fall DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: Not Required
Not Required DOGS ALLOWED: Yes
Views south along the Rubicon Trail (Aron Bosworth)
Rubicon Trail
If you have a free day in Tahoe or are just looking for a fantastic summer, hike we highly recommend checking out the Rubicon Trail on Tahoe's southwest shore. Not to be confused with the 22-mile long, four-wheel drive route west of the lake, this lakeside foot trail is 6.5 miles long and connects two of Tahoe's premier state parks, D.L. Bliss and Emerald Bay. Most people set out do the section between Rubicon Point and Vikingsholm (4.6 miles one way), but the full length of the trail extends from Rubicon Point south around Emerald Bay to Eagle Point Campground. Read more.
PROS: Lakeside trail. Lofty cliff section. Connects two state parks.
Lakeside trail. Lofty cliff section. Connects two state parks. CONS: None.
None. REGION: Lake Tahoe + Northern Sierra, CA
Lake Tahoe + Northern Sierra, CA CONGESTION: Moderate
Moderate PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Spring, Summer, Fall
Spring, Summer, Fall DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: State Park Fee ($10.00)
State Park Fee ($10.00) DOGS ALLOWED: No
Biker's view of Upper Yosemite Falls (Aron Bosworth)
Yosemite Valley Bicycle Loop
Exploring Yosemite Valley by bicycle opens a world of possibilities that aren't afforded by car. In addition to having an endless supply of bike parking (you can pull off just about anywhere), you have the open air freedom to take in the scenery while cruising and can stop on a whim to tour an a magnificent meadow, gaze up at granite monoliths, or warm up in front of a fire at the historic Ahwahnee Hotel. Read more.
PROS: Great way to sightsee and cover the valley landmarks. Don't have to deal with parking.
Great way to sightsee and cover the valley landmarks. Don't have to deal with parking. CONS: Bike path network is limited. Must share roads with cars.
Bike path network is limited. Must share roads with cars. REGION: Yosemite + Central Sierra, CA
Yosemite + Central Sierra, CA CONGESTION: Moderate
Moderate PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Spring, Summer, Fall
Spring, Summer, Fall DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: National Park Pass
National Park Pass TOTAL DISTANCE: 20.50 mi (32.99 km)
20.50 mi (32.99 km) DOGS ALLOWED: No
Tuolumne River (Aron Bosworth)
Tuolumne Meadows
Yosemite's high country is an outdoor enthusiast's dreamscape, filled with jagged peaks, granite domes, expansive meadows, and glacially-carved lakes. At the heart of it all lies Tuolumne Meadows, one of the largest meadows in the Sierra Nevada and the main access point for exploring much of Yosemite's higher elevations. Read more.
PROS: Yosemite high-country scenery. Hiking and climbing access. One of the largest meadows in the Sierra.
Yosemite high-country scenery. Hiking and climbing access. One of the largest meadows in the Sierra. CONS: Accessible by car only seasonally.
Accessible by car only seasonally. REGION: Yosemite + Central Sierra, CA
Yosemite + Central Sierra, CA CONGESTION: High
High PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Summer, Fall
Summer, Fall DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: National Park Pass
National Park Pass DOGS ALLOWED: No
View south with climbers on route (Aron Bosworth)
Matthes Crest Traverse
Matthes Crest is a 1-mile, fifth-class ridge traverse in the High Sierra of Yosemite National Park's Tuolumne Meadows. This route is one of a kind, and it features wild movements, breathtaking views, incredible exposure, and excellent rock quality. It's undoubtedly one of the best traverse routes of it's kind in the United States. Read more.
PROS : Excellent climbing. Incredible location. Unique style of route.
: Excellent climbing. Incredible location. Unique style of route. CONS: May be crowded during summer months.
May be crowded during summer months. REGION: Yosemite + Central Sierra, CA
Yosemite + Central Sierra, CA CONGESTION: Moderate
Moderate PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Summer
Summer DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: National Park Pass
National Park Pass TOTAL DISTANCE: 7.50 mi (12.07 km)
7.50 mi (12.07 km) DOGS ALLOWED: No
Summit view facing east overlooking the Sierras (Jackie Arnal)
Half Dome Hike via John Muir Trail
The Half Dome Hike in Yosemite National Park is easily among the most iconic and challenging in the United States. This hike will test you physically and mentally as you climb the last quarter-mile of trail and ascend the sheer flank of Half Dome using bolted cables. The hike up this Yosemite icon features incredible mountain and valley views, wildflowers, waterfalls, old-growth sequoias, and fascinating glimpses of some of California's most dynamic geological history. Read more.
PROS: Great views. Wildflowers. Waterfalls. Giant sequoias.
Great views. Wildflowers. Waterfalls. Giant sequoias. CONS: Big crowds. Afternoon lightening storms in summer.
Big crowds. Afternoon lightening storms in summer. REGION: Yosemite + Central Sierra, CA
Yosemite + Central Sierra, CA CONGESTION: High
High PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Summer, Fall
Summer, Fall DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: National Park Pass
National Park Pass TOTAL DISTANCE: 16.50 mi (26.55 km)
16.50 mi (26.55 km) DOGS ALLOWED: No
Sunrise from the Whitney Massif (Rini Sugianto)
John Muir Trail (JMT) Overview
Anyone hiking a section or the entirety of the JMT will experience firsthand the impact Muir left on these iconic lands, as the trail runs entirely through national park lands and/or designated wilderness. The vast majority of the JMT shares footsteps with one of the most scenic sections of the Pacific Crest Trail, where mile after mile of High Sierra peaks, passes and lakes will leave the hiker awe-struck by the display nature has on offer. Read more.
PROS: One of the top scenic trails in the country. Trail goes through three national parks. High Sierra scenery.
One of the top scenic trails in the country. Trail goes through three national parks. High Sierra scenery. CONS: Hard to get permit. Thru-hiking is logistically complex.
Hard to get permit. Thru-hiking is logistically complex. REGION: Yosemite + Central Sierra, CA
Yosemite + Central Sierra, CA CONGESTION: Moderate
Moderate PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Summer
Summer DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: Not Required
Not Required TOTAL DISTANCE: 211.00 mi (339.57 km)
211.00 mi (339.57 km) DOGS ALLOWED: No
Rae Lakes region (Alix Sorrell)
Rae Lakes Loop
Rae Lakes loop is a scenic Sierra multi-day loop and truly a backpacking trip that has it all. Stunning lake basins, rushing waterfalls, and splendidly carved canyons envelop your being for the three to six days necessary to complete the circuit in Kings Canyon National Park. Read more.
PROS: Beautiful lakes. Great High Sierra scenery. Well maintained trail.
Beautiful lakes. Great High Sierra scenery. Well maintained trail. CONS: Summer crowds. Heavily used campsites.
Summer crowds. Heavily used campsites. REGION: Southern Sierra, CA
Southern Sierra, CA CONGESTION: Moderate
Moderate PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Summer, Fall
Summer, Fall DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: National Park Pass
National Park Pass TOTAL DISTANCE: 42.00 mi (67.59 km)
42.00 mi (67.59 km) DOGS ALLOWED: No
Crescent Meadow lies nestled among the ancient sequoia trees of the Giant Forest. Sequoia National Park. (Aron Bosworth)
Crescent Meadow
Surrounded by giant sequoias and filled with burgeoning flowers, lush grasses, and ferns in the summer, it's easy to see why John Muir called Crescent Meadow the "Gem of the Sierra." A beautiful 1.5-mile trail encircles the boot-shaped portion of the meadow, and this is a great walk for families looking to extend their exploration of the Giant Forest. Crescent Creek enters the meadow at the south end, and a trail also leads to Log Meadow, which sits just east of Crescent Meadow. Read more.
PROS: Picturesque meadow backed by massive trees. Start of High Sierra Trail.
Picturesque meadow backed by massive trees. Start of High Sierra Trail. CONS: None.
None. REGION: Southern Sierra, CA
Southern Sierra, CA CONGESTION: Moderate
Moderate PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Spring, Summer, Fall
Spring, Summer, Fall DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: National Park Pass
National Park Pass DOGS ALLOWED: No
Mineral King Valley (Aron Bosworth)
Mineral King Valley
The access point to a handful of trailheads leading up to the lakes, passes, and peaks of the surrounding high country, Mineral King is a popular recreation area for hikers and backpackers exploring the southern portions of the park from late spring to early fall. Mineral King offers a spectacular, verdant explosion in spring and early summer and a brilliant foliage display in fall led by the quaking aspen inhabitants. Read more.
PROS: Access to southern Sequoia National Park. Numerous hiking trails. Fall Colors.
Access to southern Sequoia National Park. Numerous hiking trails. Fall Colors. CONS: Seasonal access.
Seasonal access. REGION: Southern Sierra, CA
Southern Sierra, CA CONGESTION: Moderate
Moderate PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Summer, Fall
Summer, Fall DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: National Park Pass
National Park Pass DOGS ALLOWED: Yes
Middle Little Five Lakes reflection (Aron Bosworth)
Glacier Pass, Sawtooth Pass and Big Five Lakes Hiking Loop
There are several day and multi-day backcountry hiking loop options available from the Mineral King Valley. Hiking the Glacier Pass to Sawtooth Pass Loop via Big Five Lakes qualifies at the top of this list. If you are interested in a loop that is approximately 27 miles long and blends cross-country route finding and on-trail travel, stunning alpine landscape, and high Sierra lake fishing, this hike is for you. Read more.
PROS : Quick access to the high Sierra. Good Fishing. Nice mix of trail and cross-country travel.
: Quick access to the high Sierra. Good Fishing. Nice mix of trail and cross-country travel. CONS : Rough access road. Marmot issues at trailhead in late spring and early summer.
: Rough access road. Marmot issues at trailhead in late spring and early summer. REGION : Southern Sierra, CA
: Southern Sierra, CA CONGESTION : Low
: Low PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Summer
Summer DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: National Park Pass
National Park Pass TOTAL DISTANCE: 27.00 mi (43.45 km)
27.00 mi (43.45 km) DOGS ALLOWED: No
Mono Lake's South Tufa (Gina Teichert)
Mono Basin National Scenic Area
Mono Basin National Scenic Area encompasses the salty waters of Mono Lake and unique geological features that include tufa towers and the Mono Craters. Paoha and Negit Islands, along with Mono Lake itself, are home to over a million migrating birds that feed on alkali flies and brine shrimp. Read more.
PROS: Diversity of activities. Photogenic. Educational.
Diversity of activities. Photogenic. Educational. CONS: Some areas are very crowded. Winter road closures.
Some areas are very crowded. Winter road closures. REGION: Eastern Sierra + White Mountains Area, CA
Eastern Sierra + White Mountains Area, CA CONGESTION: High
High PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall
Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: General Day Use Fee ($3.00)
General Day Use Fee ($3.00) DOGS ALLOWED: Yes
Big Pine Creek South Fork Canyon (Taylor Reilly)
Big Pine Creek North Fork Hiking Trail, First and Second Lake
The Big Pine Creek North Fork Hiking Trail rises into California's High Sierra toward the southernmost glaciers in the United States. Palisade glacier sits above a series of lakes, named First Lake through Seventh Lake, where you'll find some of the best trout fishing in the Sierra Nevada. Read more.
PROS: Access to Palisades Range and High Sierra.
Access to Palisades Range and High Sierra. CONS: Trailhead access closed in winter.
Trailhead access closed in winter. REGION: Eastern Sierra + White Mountains Area, CA
Eastern Sierra + White Mountains Area, CA CONGESTION : Low
: Low PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Spring, Summer, Fall
Spring, Summer, Fall DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: Not Required
Not Required DOGS ALLOWED: Yes
The Mount Whitney Trail just before Trail Camp (Runi Sugianto)
Mount Whitney Hike Via Whitney Portal
The 22-mile round-trip Mount Whitney Trail is often a hiker's first experience with high-altitudes, which is certainly a factor to consider when planning the pace of an ascent. Strong and experienced hikers can complete the Mount Whitney Trail in one long day, but for most, a two-day approach provides much needed time for rest and acclimatization. Many hikers on this two-day schedule will camp at Trail Camp, which sits at 12,039 feet and a little over 6 miles from the trailhead. Read more.
PROS: Amazing views. Wildflowers. Alpine lakes.
Amazing views. Wildflowers. Alpine lakes. CONS: Crowded. Permits are difficlut to obtain. Bear and marmot country.
Crowded. Permits are difficlut to obtain. Bear and marmot country. REGION: Eastern Sierra + White Mountains Area, CA
Eastern Sierra + White Mountains Area, CA CONGESTION: High
High PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Spring, Summer, Fall
Spring, Summer, Fall DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: Not Required
Not Required TOTAL DISTANCE : 22.00 mi (35.41 km)
: 22.00 mi (35.41 km) DOGS ALLOWED: No
Sea Lion Post and Sea Lion Rocks in Point Lobos State Natural Reserve (Aron Bosworth)
Point Lobos State Natural Reserve
For the nature lover, Point Lobos State Natural Reserve is nothing short of spectacular. Hidden from Highway 1, this cove-laden coastline situated between Carmel and Big Sur teems with wildlife that is attracted to the nutrient-rich waters prevalent around Monterey Bay. A network of trails makes exploring the reserve both easy and accessible. Read more.
PROS: Diversity of marine life. Scenic coves.
Diversity of marine life. Scenic coves. CONS: None.
None. REGION: Big Sur Coastline, CA
Big Sur Coastline, CA CONGESTION: High
High PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall
Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: State Park Fee ($10.00)
State Park Fee ($10.00) DOGS ALLOWED: No
Andrew Molera State Park framed by Molera Point headland (Aron Bosworth)
Andrew Molera State Park
Located on the northern stretch of the Big Sur coast, Andrew Molera State Park is the largest of the state parks within the magnificent Big Sur area. With over 20 miles of hiking trails, a scenic and accessible beach, an abundance of wildlife, and the Big Sur River, the park offers something for just about everyone. Read more.
PROS: Wildlife. Scenic beach. Diversity of hiking trails. Surf.
Wildlife. Scenic beach. Diversity of hiking trails. Surf. CONS: Can get crowded on weekends and holidays.
Can get crowded on weekends and holidays. REGION: Big Sur Coastline, CA
Big Sur Coastline, CA CONGESTION: High
High PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall
Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: State Park Fee ($10.00)
State Park Fee ($10.00) DOGS ALLOWED: No
View north from Mcway Falls (Patrick Mueller)
Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park
Of Big Sur's iconic coastal landscapes, the one that is likely to be pictured in most people's minds is the stretch of coast comprising Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park. This dramatic section of central Big Sur is one of the most picturesque settings in California.The park is best known for its centerpiece attraction: McWay Falls gracefully plunges onto the sands of McWay Cove some 80 feet below. Read more.
PROS: Oceanside waterfall. Big coastal vistas. Cove and moutainside hikes.
Oceanside waterfall. Big coastal vistas. Cove and moutainside hikes. CONS: Limited beach access.
Limited beach access. REGION: Big Sur Coastline, CA
Big Sur Coastline, CA CONGESTION: High
High PREFERABLE SEASON(S): Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall
Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall DAY-USE/PARKING PASS REQUIRED: State Park Fee ($10.00)
State Park Fee ($10.00) DOGS ALLOWED: No
Valley view from Marion Mountain Trail (Runi Sugianto)
Mount San Jacinto via Marion Mountain Trail
Mount San Jacinto is the highest peak in San Jacinto Mountains and the second highest point in Southern California. This summit receives a lot of visitors everyday, facilitated in part by the tram that runs up from Palm Springs to 8,500 feet. The Marion Mountain Trail stays on the southwest aspect of Mount San Jacinto, and apart from the Skyline Trail hike, it is one of the most challenging routes to the San Jacinto summit. Read more.
Number of CHS students taking ACT jumps, composite score above average
Universities may be moving away from using an ACT score as an admission requirement, but the test is still used as a benchmark for scholarships.
An elderly Utah man who died after contracting Zika from travel abroad may have spread the virus to a family contact who did not leave the country, raising troubling questions about a possible new route of transmission of the mosquito-borne virus, state and federal officials said Monday.
Officials said they are investigating how the second person became infected. One possibility is close contact between the critically ill patient and the caregiver, who has since recovered.
This case is unusual. The individual does not have any of the known risk factors weve seen thus far with Zika virus, Gary Edwards, health officer at the Salt Lake County Health Department, said during a news conference.
Edwards said the person had not traveled to a Zika-affected country and had not had sexual contact with anyone with the virus. But the individual had helped provide care for the deceased patient. Citing privacy, he and other officials declined to provide additional details.
The primary mosquitoes known for carrying Zika are not present in Utah, Edwards noted. As a precaution, officials are trapping and testing mosquitoes around both persons homes to definitively rule out that mode of transmission.
At this time we dont know if the contact between the new case and the deceased patient played any role in the transmission of the disease, Edwards said. There is uncertainty about how this new case contracted Zika. But we do not believe that there is risk of Zika transmission among the general population in Utah based on what we know so far.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday said that the elderly man had traveled to a Zika-affected area and that subsequent lab tests showed he had uniquely high amounts of virus in his blood more than 100,000 times higher than that seen in samples of other infected people.
Public health investigators in Utah are interviewing the caregiver who was infected and additional family contacts to learn more about the types of interaction they had with the patient before he died. They also are collecting samples for testing, as well as working with facilities where that patient was to determine what contacts health-care workers there had.
CDC Director Tom Frieden said in an interview that scientists are conducting genomic sequencing to determine whether there have been any mutations in the viral strain that infected the elderly man or the second person.
Researchers are looking into the possibility that an infected mosquito may have traveled from the affected region back to Utah in the clothing or luggage of the man and then bitten the second person. Frieden said such infection, while rare, has occurred with malaria cases in Queens.
But the questions raised by the caregivers case illustrate how little scientists know about the virus. Until the Zika epidemic exploded in Brazil last year, researchers had never seen a situation where a mosquito-borne illness causes birth defects, Frieden said. No other similar viruses are sexually transmitted as Zika is.
This is a unique situation, he said. This is the first time where there is a suspected spread of one person to another beyond sex.
Even if such transmission is confirmed, Frieden said it would be unusual. He noted that the continental United States currently has more than 1,300 travel-related cases of Zika, and if this type of transmission is not rare, its likely that we would have seen this before.
The elderly man became very ill and was hospitalized at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. The family contact cared for him at his home and at the hospital and could have been exposed to that individuals sweat or tears or bodily fluids, Frieden said.
Researchers have detected Zika virus in several bodily fluids, including blood, urine, semen, saliva, and breast milk. Its also been found in genital tract swabs and fluid inside the eye, CDC officials said Monday. Scientists are investigating whether it is also present in sweat and tears.
Its not immediately clear why the elderly man had such high levels of virus in his body, although he had an underlying disease that could have contributed, officials said. Its also possible that he had some unique genetic susceptibility unrelated to Zika, Frieden said.
Officials said the second person showed symptoms of Zika, but did not have the same kind of high viral load that was present in the deceased patient.
With infectious diseases in general, people who are more severely ill and showing symptoms tend to be more infectious than individuals who arent as sick.
If another type of person-to-person transmission is confirmed, Frieden said it would be hard to determine whether it has taken place in Brazil, the epicenter of the epidemic, because Zika has been so widely spread by infected mosquitoes there. Person-to-person transmission is much more likely to be identified in places like the United States, where there have not yet been documented cases of local mosquito transmission.
If normal routes of transmission mosquito bites and sexual contact are ruled out, that leaves us with an unknown, possibly new mode of transmission, said William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He said it will be important to determine whether Zika can be transmitted through saliva, a known pathway for other diseases.
Officials are interviewing and testing all the health-care workers who could have come into contact with the elderly man. That investigation is likely to take at least several weeks. At the moment, CDC does not plan to change its guidance for hospitals or health-care workers, Frieden said.
The CDC team includes two senior scientists with expertise in public health investigations, five epidemiologists, a public health advisor, two entomologists and others.
The mans death in late June was the first Zika-related adult death in the continental United States. Salt Lake County health department officials said the exact cause of his death has not been determined.
Zika is spread primarily through the bite of an infected Aedes aegypti or Aedes albopictus mosquito. About 80 percent of infected individuals have no symptoms, while the rest tend to experience only mild problems that last for several days to a week.
Symptoms include mild fever, skin rash, conjunctivitis (pink eye), muscle and joint pain, malaise or headache.
In rare cases, though, the virus has been linked to a nervous system disorder that can cause muscle weakness and sometimes paralysis. It poses its biggest danger during pregnancy, when infection can cause a range of severe fetal abnormalities.
In April, the CDC reported the first U.S. adult death from Zika in a patient in Puerto Rico. That man, who was in his 70s, died from internal bleeding after developing severe thrombocytopenia a rare immune reaction to his infection that causes low levels of blood-clotting platelets.
Last week, the CDC and New York City health department reported for the first time that a woman had transmitted the virus to her male partner during sex. All previously reported cases of sexually transmitted Zika infection have been spread from men.
As of July 13, no cases of locally transmitted, mosquito-borne Zika have been reported in the continental United States. As of July 13, a total of 1,305 cases of travel-associated Zika have been reported in the 50 states and District of Columbia. Federal, state and local officials are preparing for the possibility of local spread of Zika.
It was a dire situation. Eight U.S. soldiers with the 101st Airborne Division had been left on a Vietnam battlefield after not reaching helicopters in time for an emergency extraction from a gun-swept river valley. Enemy fighters were closing in, and the soldiers would almost certainly be taken prisoner or killed in the next few minutes.
Army helicopter pilot Charles Kettles, now 86, learned of their predicament through a radio transmission moments after lifting other soldiers out of the firestorm. Hed already made three trips into the melee below, but made a snap judgment: There wasnt enough time to return to a base nearby for reinforcements, Kettles reasoned, so he broke away from his formation of aircraft and went back to retrieve the soldiers.
That decision and Kettless ensuing actions led to President Barack Obama on Monday awarding him the Medal of Honor, the nations highest award for valor in combat. The graying grandfather sat in a chair in the East Room of the White House paying close attention as the president recounted with amazement his actions on May 15, 1967.
Couldnt make this up, Obama exclaimed at one point while describing the rescue effort, drawing laughter. This is like a bad Rambo movie. . . . Youre listening to this; you cant believe it.
Kettles, then a major, maneuvered his UH-1 Huey into a hail of enemy fire as he made his fourth trip of the day into the valley. He landed hard enough that the helicopter bounced for several hundred feet before coming to a stop, and moments later a mortar round shattered the aircrafts windshield, Obama recalled.
The eight soldiers nonetheless sprinted for the Huey and piled aboard. With 13 people on board, the aircraft was 600 pounds overweight, but Kettles improvised and bounced it across the ground until it picked up enough speed to take off, Obama said.
The helicopter was hit in the tail moments later by another mortar, but Kettles piloted them to safety anyway. The ride was so rough that one soldier fell out of the helicopter, and clung to a skid beneath to stay alive. In total, Kettles was credited with saving the lives of 44 soldiers that day.
Kettles, of Ypsilanti, Mich., was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross, the Armys second-highest award for valor, after the battle. But the retired lieutenant colonels case for the highest military award was jump-started by William Vollano, a Rotary Club volunteer who interviewed Kettles for a project that recorded the oral histories of veterans.
Obama credited Vollano on Monday with embarking on a five-year mission along with Kettless son, Mike, to get the Army pilot greater recognition. Army officials and Defense Secretary Ashton Carter eventually recommended the upgrade, and Congress passed legislation that waived an Army restriction that states that a Medal of Honor recommendation must be made within two years.
Kettles deployed once more to Vietnam from fall 1969 through 1970, Army officials said. He retired from the military in 1978 and returned home to Michigan. He and his wife, Ann, had 10 children and celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary next year, Obama said.
Obama, who has awarded numerous Medals of Honor to veterans decades after the fact, said that the extra effort that went into getting Kettles the award is one more reason this story is quintessentially American. It demonstrates the belief, Obama said, that nobody should be left behind.
This is a country thats never finished in its mission to improve, to do better, to learn from our history, to work to form a more perfect union, Obama said. For us to remember the goodness and decency of the American people and the way that we can all look out for each other, even when times are tough, even when the odds are against us what a wonderful inspiration. What a great gift for us to be able to celebrate something like this.
DENHAM SPRINGS, La. Fresh out of the police academy, Matthew Gerald was so proud to bring his cruiser home that he stood in the driveway, wiping it down under the hot Louisiana sun. His neighbor Ashley Poe watched as he flicked the blue lights on and off, on and off.
Poe and her husband shared a laugh. The 41-year-old former soldier and Marine looked like an excited kid.
Its like living out the dream, she said.
Gerald got to live it only for a few months. He was one of three officers gunned down in an ambush Sunday in Baton Rouge, traumatizing a nation already on edge.
In the span of 10 turbulent days, 10 law enforcement officers have been killed by attackers at a protest march in Dallas, a courthouse in Michigan and now a convenience store in Baton Rouge.
The officers who died Sunday all lived just outside Denham Springs, a quiet bedroom community across the Amite River from Baton Rouge, which has been in turmoil for two weeks. Tensions rose sharply after the death of Alton Sterling, a black man killed by white Baton Rouge officers after a scuffle at a convenience store. The killing was captured on cellphone video.
As the nation debates race and policing, this community is mourning three of its sons all husbands and fathers described by friends as being committed to protecting and serving the public.
You hear about these things happening across the country to officers just trying to defend us, but this brings it right here, to our home, Livingston Parish President Layton Ricks said. These are our families. These are good men. Theyre the only line of defense between good and evil. We say we dont want to let this evil affect how we live our daily lives. But it does.
Gavin Long, a former Marine from Missouri dressed in black and carrying extra ammunition, opened fire on officers around 8:45 a.m. Sunday, police said.
The gunfire also killed 45-year-old Brad Garafola, an East Baton Rouge Parish sheriffs deputy and a father of four, and 32-year-old Montrell Jackson, a 10-year veteran of the Baton Rouge Police Department with a newborn baby at home.
Garafola and Gerald were white. Jackson was black, as was the gunman.
The world is crazy right now. It is complete chaos, Jacksons sister-in-law Lauren Rose said. And it all needs to stop, everything. We all need peace.
Three other officers were wounded. One of them, Deputy Nicholas Tullier, remained in critical condition Monday. The gunman was killed at the scene.
Poe watched from the window Sunday morning as a line of police cars pulled up in front of Geralds house. She woke up her husband, a former city police officer.
He said, Whats wrong? and I said, Theres units everywhere, and youve told me thats never a good sign,' she said. They turned on the news.
The gunman shot Gerald and Jackson first.
Gerald was a Marine from 1994 to 1998. He later joined the Army and served as a decorated soldier from 2002 to 2009, including three tours in Iraq. Less than a year ago, he joined the Baton Rouge Police Department.
He had a wife and two daughters, Poe said, and was devoted to them.
Poe said her 14-year-old son was interested in the military, and Gerald was always ready to answer his questions.
Hed tell him how he was proud to protect his country, she said. It seemed like that was his passion to do that.
Denham Springs, population 10,000, is the sort of town where everyone is connected, said Mayor Gerard Landry. Theres a palpable sense of anger and despair.
Theres no way to describe what it does to a small city like this, Marilyn Wallace said Monday, standing behind the counter of the store she and her husband, Randy, own on a two-block long stretch of antique shops in the historic district of Denham Springs.
The city is in Livingston Parish, about 13 miles from Baton Rouge, with a history of racial tension. But that history and the racial divide in nearby Baton Rouge seem remote here.
Jacksons father-in-law, Lonnie Jordan, called him a gentle giant tall and stout and formidable looking, but with a peaceful disposition.
Jordan said his son-in-law had been working long hours since Sterling was killed.
Jackson posted on Facebook that he was physically and emotionally tired. He wrote that while in uniform he gets nasty looks and out of uniform some consider him a threat.
I swear to God I love this city, he wrote, but I wonder if this city loves me.
The police chief described at a news conference how he had gone to the district where Jackson worked just days earlier in an attempt to boost the spirits of the officers. Instead Jackson ended up giving him the pep talk.
He had been on the force 10 years and risen to the rank of corporal, said Kedrick Pitts, his half-brother. He worked hard, sometimes seven days a week.
He was funny and good natured, Pitts said. He collected shoes, 500 pairs, including special Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan lines.
But what he loved most was his wife and 4-month-old son.
Hes going to grow up without a father, sister-in-law Rose said. But well be there to give him memories and let him know how his dad was a great man, and how he died with honor Hopefully one day, hell be like his dad.
At the convenience store Sunday, Garafola tried to intervene and help the fallen officers.
Surveillance video showed Garafola firing at the gunman from behind a dumpster as bullets hit the concrete around him, East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff Sid Gautreaux said.
My deputy went down fighting. He returned fire to the very end, the sheriff said.
Garafolas friends described him as a man committed to public service and devoted to his family.
He had a wife and four children: a 21-year-old son, a 15-year-old daughter, a 12-year-old son and a 7-year-old daughter.
Sgt. Gerald Parker, a close friend, described him as a jack of all trades who enjoyed helping people in his neighborhood, like mending their fences or mowing their lawns. He worked hard, often picking up extra hours.
He was a man of strong character, Parker said. All these officers are heroes. Some people would run. But these gentlemen leave their families knowing something can happen.
His colleague, Deputy Nicholas Tullier, a father of two teenage sons, is surrounded by family at the hospital.
Carol Sue McManus, a relative, said hes a workaholic who serves on two units, one patrol and the other motorcycle. She said he was injured at one point when he was run over while escorting a funeral procession.
Im mad, she said with tears in her eyes. I wish all this madness would stop.
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Galofaro reported from Louisville, Kentucky.
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Associated Press Writer Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this report.
SAN DIEGO Dallas Police Chief David Brown spoke volumes when he said recently that Americans expect police officers to do too much, provide too many services and serve too many functions.
Yet the problem is bigger than that. Many people also have unrealistic expectations about what is required for police officers to do their jobs.
Take, for instance, the fact that in the aftermath of a series of police shootings of African-American men by police officers some Americans seem bothered that police are armed at all.
At a recent protest in Baton Rouge, a young woman screamed at the officers standing in front of her in riot gear: Youre the only ones here with guns. Put your guns down and then we can talk.
Oh, please. Where do they find these people?
A gun is a tool police officers need to do their job just like a doctor needs a scalpel, a firefighter needs a hose, a banker needs a spreadsheet.
Its been said that police often encounter people at their worst. And, even at their best, human beings dont always act rationally. So police learn to expect the unexpected.
For example, one of the most dangerous calls that any cop can get is a report of domestic violence, where a female victim might, one minute, shout expletives at her husband and, the next minute, fight officers who try to arrest him.
But there is another way to look at what that protester in Baton Rouge said about how police should lay down their firearms. Its about the larger notion of equality.
Some people mistakenly assume that when Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal, he meant that we should all be given the same privileges.
The way the activist saw it, there was an inherent unfairness in the fact that police were armed and the protesters werent. It didnt matter to her that police officers go through special training on how to properly handle weapons, or that they swear an oath to protect the public and might need a firearm to uphold it, or that a gun could come in handy if they had to defend their lives or those of others.
As Americans, what are we supposed to do when our need for public safety conflicts with our assumptions about equality?
As the five Dallas police officers who died in an ambush recently are memorialized and laid to rest, thats where we have arrived.
Some anti-police violence activists on the radical fringe want police departments disbanded altogether, while others would be content if police were simply disarmed and placed at the mercy of violent criminals who would still have access to deadly weapons.
This perverted notion of equality even carries over to how were supposed to talk about the victims of street violence. Here, the police reform activists and their liberal advocates in the media have painted themselves into a corner.
On the one hand, maintaining that all lives are equally precious, they insist that Americans should mourn not just the dead officers in Dallas, but also the various victims of police violence.
New York Times columnist Frank Bruni recently wrote that President Obama had gone to Dallas in an attempt to calm a nation reeling from [the officers] deaths and the ones just beforehand of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota.
Does anyone believe that most Americans would equate the murderous ambush in Dallas which resulted in five police officers targeted and killed, seven other officers wounded and a major city paralyzed for several hours with the unfortunate deaths of two individuals during encounters with police?
But on the other hand, the reform advocates push back against the suggestion that they should be more concerned about black-on-black crime because, they claim, theres a difference between someone meeting his demise at the hands of a fellow citizen and that person being killed by an agency of the state i.e. the police.
They cant have it both ways. Are the police just like everyone else, or arent they?
Heres the answer: They arent.
When someone kills a police officer, its a blow against civilization. After all, if someone were to kill enough of them, the result would be chaos and the end of society.
Email: ruben@rubennavarrette.com. Copyright, The Washington Post Writers Group.
The welcome mat is being pulled back in France and potentially other countries in the wake of repeated, savage terrorist attacks that have rocked France, Belgium and the United States.
The backlash against immigrants, especially those from Muslim countries, is growing. Calls by French President Francois Hollande for unity and tolerance after three terrorist attacks in 18 months are falling on more and more deaf ears as criticism of his center-left Socialist government mounts.
The fantasyland heyday of open borders, virtually uncontrolled immigration by millions with different cultural values and no desire to assimilate in their host countries is growing to a close.
The recent Bastille Day terrorist attack in which 84 people, including 10 children, were run down could well be the tipping point for Europeans and French citizens. This in the wake of Brexit.
The man who plotted and staged the Nice attack, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, as well as the attackers in the November 2015 bombings in Paris and the January 2015 AZle-de-France attacks that began with the shootings at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper office in Paris all were Islamic extremists.
The Nice attack reinforces the need for improved vetting of people seeking to immigrate to European countries and to the United States, though identifying lone wolves remains a daunting task. Bouhlel was a Tunisian who had lived in Nice for several years and only recently had become radicalized.
But the attacks make clear that the world is torn by an ideological war fueled by the rise of Islamic extremism.
They also show the importance of assimilating immigrants into their new homelands. Too often large groups hunker down together instead of learning the language or the culture of the society they are entering. Within these confines, resentment grows both toward society and the government and so does the violence.
Without better control over who gets to live in a democratic society and who should be returned to sender, more deaths and violence are inevitable.
This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by members of the editorial board and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers.
Silver City Police Chief Ed Reynolds apologized to the local community Monday for members of his department failing to do their jobs when they responded to a traffic call involving 6th Judicial District Attorney Francesca Estevez on June 11.
Reynolds said officers at the scene had enough evidence to initiate an impaired-driving investigation. At the very least, he said, law enforcement should have had Estevez perform a standard field sobriety test, according to the Silver City Daily Press.
A driver on U.S. 180 recorded Estevezs government car driving erratically into Silver City on his cellphone. He notified police dispatch but lost sight of the vehicle once in town.
He located it later parked near a government building with a flat tire, where local police officers and a State Police officer responded.
Police spent an hour talking with Estevez and viewed the video taken by the other driver. But none of the officers asked Esetevez to perform any sobriety tests.
Instead, they helped arrange for Estevez to get her flat tire fixed before she left the scene.
The DA should have not been allowed to leave the scene without proper DUI investigation being conducted, Reynolds said, according to the newspaper. In essence, the videos speak for themselves, and I think the public can decide through the information as to what is valid and what is not valid.
Reynolds said two of the Silver City police officers responding to the scene faced internal discipline. KOAT-TV reported that the officers will not be fired.
State Police said their officer also was subjected to internal punishment. Reynolds, who stopped briefly at the scene, said he expected the situation to be handled properly.
I take responsibility for ensuring this does not happen again, he said.
SANTA FE The city of Santa Fes Finance Committee on Monday approved several changes to the governing bodys procedural rules that, according to a staff memo, are intended to ensure a more fair, judicious and efficient public process.
But some proposed changes to the rules were rejected based on concerns raised during a public hearing that the alterations made the process less transparent and infringed on the First Amendment right of freedom of speech.
Two of the proposals would have placed restrictions on how many times and for how long a city councilor could speak on an issue during a meeting. One proposal would have limited the number of times a councilor could speak on any matter to three times and for no more than a total of 10 minutes. Another would have set the same restrictions on discussion of any motion, not counting the one minute they would have to explain their vote.
We feel this could hinder discussion of complex issues, former City Councilor Karen Heldmeyer who was representing a consortium of groups that included New Mexico Common Cause, the Old Santa Fe Association, the Santa Fe Neighborhood Network and the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government said during the public hearing.
Heldmeyer and others worked with City Councilor Carmichael Dominguez, who introduced the changes, and city staff on modifications of an original draft.
She said that it was important that councilors not be restricted when discussing issues that were in the best interest of the citizenry and that it would require additional resources to keep track of how much time each councilor had used to speak.
Dominguez explained that the intent of the proposals was to make meetings go quicker by limiting the amount of time councilors could pontificate.
Also rejected by the committee was an amendment that would have allowed the chairman to have a person removed from the meeting. The panel was warned by two of the nine people who spoke during the public comment period that such a rule could lead to a lawsuit over freedom of speech. The committee left in language that says the chair may call a person to order if they make personal, intemperate or slanderous remarks.
The panel also turned down a proposal that would have required any action item concerning contracts, agreements or other matters that had a fiscal impact of more than $100,000 during a fiscal year to automatically be pulled off the consent calendar to be addressed by the governing body individually.
The committee accepted an amendment that requires the governing body to state with reasonable specificity what it was voting on after it returned from executive session.
Twice in the past 20 months the City Council has come out of executive session and voted to approve what had been discussed in executive session, without disclosing what that discussion was about.
The amended legislation is scheduled to come before the full City Council on July 27.
Copyright 2016 Albuquerque Journal
Albuquerque Police Chief Gorden Eden testified recently that an internal affairs investigation into the fatal police shooting of a 19-year-old woman was launched shortly after it occurred but was shut down before it was completed a detail that hadnt been publicly disclosed.
Then-Albuquerque police officer Jeremy Dear shot Mary Hawkes, a suspected car thief, on April 21, 2014, and investigations were opened into both a potential criminal case against Dear and possibly other officers, along with an administrative inquiry to see whether they had violated any policies.
But the administrative investigation was stopped at some point, and the city has not provided records of what was done in response to a June 7 request by the Journal. The city said June 24 that the Journal request under the states Inspection of Public Records Act was burdensome and that it needed more time to comply.
Edens comments under oath, which came in a deposition in a civil lawsuit brought by Hawkes family, raise questions of when APD begins, or should begin, administrative investigations into police shootings.
Thats important because those investigations are the basis of possible discipline of officers who may have violated policy, which can be a different issue from whether they acted criminally in their use of deadly force. The administrative investigations also are intended to be the basis for any changes in policies, procedures and training that are identified.
Dear was fired not for the Hawkes case itself, but after Eden concluded he had a pattern of insubordination in not turning on his lapel camera, which did not record the Hawkes shooting.
Dear won an appeal of his termination at the city Labor Board, but the city has appealed to District Court. Eden and other police officials have said APDs policy at the time of Hawkes death was for the administrative investigations, also known as internal affairs investigations, to start after a criminal investigation had been submitted to the District Attorneys Office, which would then decide whether criminal charges should be filed.
Eden said during the deposition that he couldnt remember whether he was briefed on the administrative investigation while it was ongoing, but he recalled that former Deputy City Attorney Kathryn Levy told him it should be stopped. Its been dormant for more than two years.
Eden said the internal affairs investigation will start again once District Attorney Kari Brandenburg decides whether to bring charges in the case, which she has had for several months.
I dont think ongoing is the right word, Eden said of the investigation, according to a transcript of the deposition, taken in June. I think its just been stopped until the DA has finished the case.
Brandenburg, however, says there is no need for APD to delay until her decision is made.
She said internal affairs investigations dont factor into criminal reviews of police shootings by her office.
It doesnt matter what the departments administrative investigation finds, because thats not the law, she said.
DOJ settlements
Department of Justice settlement agreements in Albuquerque and some other cities contain language that calls for criminal and administrative investigations into use-of-force cases to take place simultaneously, though the two types of investigative teams are supposed to remain separate. Those policies allow for departments to discipline or retrain officers before waiting for a district attorney to decide whether charges will be filed.
In Albuquerque, the settlement agreement outlines a series of reforms after the DOJ found that APD demonstrated a pattern of excessive force. Albuquerques agreement says police should complete an administrative investigation within two months of a serious use-of-force case.
The agreement says that although the two types of investigations are separate, Albuquerque police dont necessarily have to wait for a criminal case to be finished or for prosecutors to decide whether charges will be filed before investigating whether policies were broken although it calls for consultation with the prosecuting agency.
The Chief need not delay the imposition of discipline until the outcome of the criminal investigation, the settlement says.
Albuquerques agreement also says that if police plan to recommend that an officer be charged criminally, they should consult with the District Attorneys Office or the U.S. Attorneys Office before having the suspected officer make a compelled statement for the administrative case.
Unlike a criminal prosecution, in which the accused cannot be compelled to testify, Albuquerque officers are required to answer questions during internal affairs investigations or face being fired. Those compelled statements cannot be used in a criminal prosecution against the officer but can be used in personnel decisions.
Other than the compelled statement, the rest of the administrative investigation can go forward unless the chief and prosecutors decide otherwise.
It is unknown what recommendation, if any, APD made in forwarding the Dear case to the District Attorneys Office.
The Albuquerque agreement contains a provision that, in consultation with prosecutors, the compelled statement can be delayed as the rest of the administrative investigation proceeds.
A settlement between the DOJ and the Portland Police Bureau said criminal and administrative investigations should happen concurrently, with the latter being finished within 180 days of a use-of-force case.
The settlement between the DOJ and Seattle police said the two types of investigations can parallel each other, but that police will create policies so that only a team of investigators called the exposed team conducting the administrative investigation will have access to compelled statements. Detectives who investigate officers for possible criminal charges related to use-of-force cases are called the clean team, and they dont have access to compelled statements.
The IA investigation
After the Hawkes shooting, someone in the Albuquerque police command staff told an internal affairs investigator to investigate the shooting and finish the case fairly quickly, according to court documents from the civil suit.
Assistant Police Chief Robert Huntsman said in a statement to the Journal that police wait until a criminal case is completed before starting internal affairs investigation so one case doesnt influence the other.
But he said that in this case, police officials became concerned shortly after the shooting that Dear has misused the camera.
While this internal affairs investigation was still pending, there were questions concerning Jeremy Dears overall camera usage, Huntsman said. A decision was then made to initiate a more comprehensive investigation into Jeremy Dears overall camera usage to determine whether he was in compliance with department policy and directives. It was this comprehensive investigation which ultimately led to the Departments decision to terminate Jeremy Dear.
Eden said hes never seen any police reports from the internal affairs investigation and that it was after that investigation was stopped that the department launched the new investigation into Dears overall use of his lapel camera.
That investigation found that Dear didnt make recordings for about half the calls to which he was dispatched. Eden decided to fire Dear based on that investigation, saying Dear had been under orders to record all interactions with citizens because he had a high number of use-of-force incidents and the chief considered him insubordinate when he didnt make recordings.
Records sought
Both Shannon Kennedy, an Albuquerque attorney representing the Hawkes family in its civil case, and Tom Grover, an attorney representing Dear, have asked the city to release the internal affairs investigation.
I hope the file sheds light on why there was an aggressive vindictiveness against him, Grover said. We all know if there were anything (in the file) that was negative to Jeremy, it would have been used against him.
Kennedy said investigative files may shed more light on the departments immediate investigation into the shooting and answer questions about what happened that night. She said she plans to file a lawsuit to enforce the Inspection of Public Records Act to get the document.
I think (not releasing the file) is evidence that the City Attorneys Office is continuing to defend officers who violate peoples constitutional rights by hiding what the truth is, she said.
City and police officials declined to comment on the internal affairs investigation.
CLEVELAND Hillary Clinton said Republican Donald Trump is the most dangerous candidate to seek the U.S. presidency because of his stances on nuclear weapons, dictators, torture and foreign policy that are far outside the mainstream.
In an hourlong interview with Charlie Rose for CBS News on the opening day of the Republican National Convention, Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, said her rival has shown that he is dangerous. What he has laid out is the most dangerous, reckless approach to being president than I think weve ever seen.
He has shown no self-discipline, no self-control, no sense of history, no understanding of the limits, of the kind of power, that any president should impose upon himself, Clinton said. He has shown none of that. And so I am looking at someone who, if I were not running against him, I would be going everywhere I could in this country speaking to wherever two or more are gathered to make the same point.
She also criticized Indiana Gov. Mike Pence for his opposition to abortion rights and gay rights and called the Trump-Pence ticket deeply distressing.
Clinton called on white Americans to show more humility toward black Americans experience with the criminal justice system, in the wake of fatal attacks on police officers in Baton Rouge, La., and in Dallas, and fatal shootings of black men by white police officers in Louisiana and Minnesota.
Were either going to come together and face up to these challenges or were going to get even further divided, aided and abetted by the voices of bias and bigotry in our midst, Clinton said.
I want white people to really think hard about what it would feel like to have the talk where you sit your youngster down and say, You know, youre a good kid but Im just warning you, youve gotta do everything to stay out of trouble with the police.
Too many Americans feel like the economy has failed them and government has failed them, and just forget about politics, Clinton said. If we dont get an economy that produces results for an increasing number of Americans, then were gonna see more of this demagoguery and this kind of rhetorical fear-mongering. And there are some terrible examples in history of where that leads. If we dont get the government to get off its back and start functioning and get over the ideology and produce results, the same path could possibly be waiting for us.
Clinton declined to discuss individual potential running mates ahead of a decision expected to be announced at the end of the week. She said she has met with a bunch of candidates and said, I am blessed with a broad group of people to choose from.
The Democrats decision to nominate the first woman from a major U.S. party as president is revolutionary, Clinton said. And it is something that Im very conscious of. And I intend to fight for every single vote that I can possibly get in this general election.
CLEVELAND The Republican National Convention started off with a bang or a debacle, according to your point of view. Donald Trump must hope that Day 2 hews a little closer to the script.
A day after an angry convention-floor eruption laid bare how many Republicans are still reluctant to nominate Trump, his team lined up a roster of supporters eager to showcase their belief that the flashy business mogul should be president. Among them: Trumps son, Donald J. Trump Jr., and two fellow White House hopefuls he defeated in the primary.
Thats not to say there may not be some awkward moments, especially as Trump is feted by party luminaries who have walked a tightrope this year trying to show support for the presumptive nominee without embracing his more provocative positions.
What to watch for at the convention on Tuesday:
NEVER TRUMP, NEVERMORE?
On the opening day, GOP leaders approved rules for the convention over furious objections. Anti-Trump delegates had tried to force a state-by-state roll call vote on the rules, which to their dismay require delegates to vote for a nominee based on their state primaries and caucuses. Despite what initially appeared to be a successful attempt to force a full vote, Republican leaders proceeded with a quick voice vote and Trumps team declared the dump Trump movement vanquished.
Indeed, with Trump laying claim to a solid majority of delegates, the anti-Trump movement appears all but defeated. But that doesnt mean theyll go quietly.
CALL THE ROLL
If there is a last-gasp flare-up, itll almost certainly come Tuesday when Republicans hold their formal roll call for the nomination, in which every state gets to say how its delegates are voting and to throw in a few plugs for the state. Watch for the most die-hard anti-Trump delegates to cause a ruckus, and expect plenty of corny references to a states famous foods or prized natural wonders.
MELANIA VS MICHELLE
Delegates are sure to be asked about the speech Donald Trumps wife, Melania Trump, delivered Monday evening. Though well-received, the speech contained two passages that match nearly word-for-word the speech that first lady Michelle Obama delivered in 2008 at the Democratic National Convention.
The passages in question focus on lessons that Mrs. Trump said she learned from her parents and the relevance of their lessons in her experience as a mother. The similarities quickly started garnering attention on social media and on cable TV.
THE HOUSE SPEAKER SPEAKS
Though hes the official chairman of the convention, House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin didnt appear publicly on Monday. But hell give a speech Tuesday that will be closely watched to see how hell handle his delicate relationship with Trump.
Reluctantly, and only after long deliberation, Ryan endorsed Trump, saying that hed be better than Hillary Clinton and that it was important that the speaker back the partys nominee. Yet Ryan has continued to criticize Trump for his positions on trade and Muslim immigration, even accusing Trump of using textbook racist language. In an appearance Monday with his home-state delegation, Ryan never mentioned Trump, but focused on poverty and economic issues themes he plans to hit in his speech.
CHRISTIES FALL FROM GRACE
Four years ago, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was honored by being tapped to give the keynote speech at the GOP convention in Tampa, Florida, reflecting his up-and-comer status in the party at the time. Yet he was criticized for giving a lackluster speech that focused on himself and barely mentioned the nominee, Mitt Romney.
The past few months have been harsh on Christie, who ran against Trump in the primary, sharply criticized him, lost, endorsed him, then appeared diminished as he played Trumps sidekick at campaign events. Christie lobbied hard to be Trumps vice presidential pick but was passed over, just as his Bridgegate political retribution scandal continues to evolve.
JOBS, JOBS, JOBS
Tuesdays stated theme is Make America Work Again. Trump hopes the day will cast him as the successful businessman who can create jobs for the whole country. Its a theme that taps into the deep economic anxiety that many Americans are feeling especially Trumps supporters.
But the argument may be complicated by the fact that America is already going back to work at least judging by unemployment. Under President Barack Obama, the jobless rate has fallen from close to 10 percent at the height of the recession to under 5 percent.
UNDER THE GUN
Chris Cox, the top lobbyist for the National Rifle Association, will take the stage at a time of deep unease about gun violence and shootings both by and against police. The day before the convention opened, three officers were killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where weeks earlier the fatal police shooting of a black man had sparked a national outcry.
Expect Trumps supporters to voice overwhelming support for police officers and overwhelming opposition to stricter gun control measures, in line with the NRA. Yet that full-throated call will come just as Trump is working to expand his appeal to Democrats and Clinton supporters who by and large want to see new gun laws in the wake of mass shootings like the recent one in Orlando, Florida.
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Reach Josh Lederman on Twitter at http://twitter.com/joshledermanAP
It has been accepted wisdom for some time now that physicians are better at dying than the rest of us.
Physicians, it is said, pass up some of the more aggressive treatment at the end of their lives that other patients might demand. As professionals, they know that in addition to being expensive, much of that care doesnt accomplish much and that some of it is even harmful.
A 2011 essay by Ken Murray, a physician in California, said most doctors have seen the medical system bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. The cost is tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. Knowing this, physicians choose less aggressive, more palliative care and try to enjoy the time they have left, Murray said.
A 1997 survey published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that physicians were far more likely to say they wanted less treatment at end of life than their patients said they wanted.
Of course, as a new study of the Journal of American Geriatrics Society reports, sayin aint doin. Researchers looked at care provided to 200,000 Medicare beneficiaries and found there was no meaningful difference in the care provided to physicians and non-physicians at end of life. Doctors were slightly more likely to use hospice care than other patients studied 46.4 percent of doctors and 43.2 percent of non-doctors entered a hospice program. But they were as likely as other patients to be treated in an intensive care unit, which is where they keep those tubes, machines and drugs Murray mentioned.
Researchers speculate that the medical system often acts like a machine, and once a patient enters the system the machine just kicks in and starts delivering standardized care to everyone. Its hard to turn off the machine once it gets going, even if as a physician you know the results wont be worth the cost in pain and money.
It is also true that doctors are human beings who are as frightened by end of life as the rest of us, despite having experienced so much death in their professional lives.
Margaret Nolan, an owner of Albuquerque-based Hospice of New Mexico, is a physician who is board-certified in internal medicine and in hospice and palliative care. The new findings dont surprise her. In nine years of specializing in hospice and palliative care, she has treated several physicians. In general, she said, physicians believe in the health care system and know how to use it. They tend to request an end to aggressive care later than is probably best for them. As death gets closer, though, they are usually more accepting when comfort care is the appropriate option.
Nolan sees generational differences in the way physicians seek care. Doctors from the so-called Greatest Generation dont give up easily, she said. They are stoic. They also grew up in the golden age of medicine when discoveries and treatment options came in a seemingly endless, miraculous stream. Nolan expects physicians who face end of life 20 years from now will expect less from medical care. This generation sees the downside of holding medicine in such high regard, she said. They have seen too many treatments that did little more than extend suffering.
The National Institute of Medicine defines a good death as one that is free from avoidable distress and suffering, for patients, family, and caregivers; in general accord with the patients and families wishes; and reasonably consistent with clinical, cultural, and ethical standards. The way a good death is achieved is the challenge facing the patient, the patients family and the patients team of caregivers.
Any dying patients problem, including a patient who is a physician, is that he needs to understand the process of dying, the course a disease might take, the treatment options that are available and the costs and benefits of those options. Physicians come to the end of life with all sorts of medical expertise, but they are not usually experts at end-of-life care, Nolan said.
Every patient has to decide for himself what a good death is, but all patients need good information and guidance from experts, Nolan said.
When Nolan thinks of a good death that she has attended, The first thing that comes to mind has nothing to do with medicine. A Christian Scientist had been admitted to hospice, but for religious reasons would not accept any drugs. Nolan and her team provided emotional support and non-pharmacological ways to help the patient die comfortably.
Its hard for many of us to imagine making a career out of helping people die well, but Nolan loves her job.
It is some of the most meaningful work Ive ever done, she said. When youre dealing with declining health and end of life, youre dealing with intense matters that have great meaning to people.
UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Winthrop Quigley at 823-3896 or wquigley@abqjournal.com. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
Justice, restraint are needed
THE ATMOSPHERE in America is very concerning for all Americans. The relationship between black Americans and police is currently tangled. What is the fix? What is the answer? This is the quagmire that America is wrestling with.
After nearly 43 years in law enforcement, there appears to me a few factors that have added depth to the problem. Can the problem be fixed? Certainly not in the immediate future with some miracle solution. Here are some of the problems Ive observed that could and should be addressed:
There are police officers who have used unnecessary excessive force, some of these against black Americans. Unfortunately, our court system has given these police an undeserved imbalance in judicial matters. In other words, the judges have given police unwarranted leeway in court prosecution where abuse of force is more obvious than the courts will admit.
Additionally, the police unions in America have contributed to the problem by unfairly supporting bad police officers in department administrative actions including dismissals. Often, even when an officer is about to be fired for cause, the officer will resign instead and seek police employment elsewhere. This allows him/her to retain their police officer certification.
Lastly, the American population that feels the need to conduct disruptive and/or criminal behavior unfairly use use of force incidents to support their actions. Examples of these are (Michael) Brown in (Ferguson) Missouri and (Tamir) Rice in (Cleveland) Ohio.
In these two cases, for example, the use of deadly force was so obviously justified there is no room for reasonable question. However, in the Ferguson case, Hands Up has become a rally call regardless of the true facts in that case.
Adding these justified officer use of force cases into the media mix only strengthens the resolve of overzealous activists, including some black Americans, in believing they are unjustly treated. Violent demonstrations orchestrated by hate groups/activists and criminals only magnify the national problem and often result in police leniency in controlling these criminal acts to avoid perceptions of excessive use of force.
The problems in this American conflict can be addressed. But dont expect immediate change/action. The solution must be a change in the criminal justice system, honest media coverage, lawful peaceful demonstrations and community resolve.
We must all do our part in contributing to the solution in our own very small way.
DARRYL RICE
Albuquerque
Follow example set by King
WHAT WOULD Martin Luther King Jr., say today? What would he do, 50 years after he led the Freedom Sunday rally in Chicago in 1966?
What would he say about the police shootings of black men in Baton Rouge, La., and St. Paul, Minn.? He would have organized and led peaceful protests against these shootings, because he believed in nonviolent protest against injustice.
He would have joined the recent protesters in Dallas gathered across the nation on the streets with banners and signs walking down the street protesting against the police shootings, discrimination, and violence, shouting, Black lives matter! This was a protest against the police killings of two African-American men, Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La., and Philando Castile in St. Paul, Minn.
What would he have said at the end of the Black Lives Matter demonstration after a sniper shot a dozen policemen, leaving five dead, to retaliate against the Louisiana and Minnesota shootings? He would have been saddened, because yes, black lives matter; but more importantly, all lives matter!
Martin Luther King, Jr., would pray for the men who died in Louisiana and Minnesota; he would also pray for the men who died in Dallas. He would pray for the men who were wounded and are still recovering. He would pray for all the families who were directly affected. He would then pray for ALL Americans.
President Barack Obama condemned the attack on law enforcement in Dallas, just as Martin Luther King, Jr., would have done. Just the day before, Obama had condemned the recent shootings by police of black men in Minnesota and Louisiana. He addressed all Americans, saying, When you see something thats not right, not fair, we have a moral obligation to take a stand.
Now it is time for all Americans to take a stand against violence and intolerance and injustice. Lets not forget the lessons we learned from Martin Luther King, Jr.
His message today would have been: All lives matter!
LUDELLA AWAD
Albuquerque
Treat Black Lives Matter fairly
THE LIVES MATTER cartoon in Saturdays (July 9) Journal is both insensitive and offensive.
By now, its been explained many times that the slogan Black Lives Matter is a protest against the unjustified killing of blacks by police officers, not a claim that only black lives matter. To cross out Black is dishonest and implies that blacks are asking for special treatment in demanding not to be gunned down by law enforcement. Moreover, the badge background suggests that the Black Lives Matter movement is responsible for the deaths of police officers such as those in Dallas.
Racism in law enforcement is a long-term problem that will take decades to solve, if it ever can be, but short-term remedies to police misbehavior can be implemented now. They require that citizens be free to record all interactions with police, and that their recordings cannot be seized by law enforcement. Citizen boards must be allowed a say in hiring and firing officers, and oversight of their training. Judges and juries have to be willing to convict officers for unjustified killings.
Blacks have a right to be angry, and dismissing or demonizing their protests will guarantee another Dallas in the near future. Saturdays Journal cartoon is a step in the wrong direction.
PETER ROGERS
Albuquerque
YOUR BIAS IS evident. Kudos to Nan Burke, who pointed out your excessive attention to (Hillary) Clintons faults in todays (July 12) paper. As New Mexicos leading news source, be accurate. Call the health care plan adopted under President Obama by its proper name: the Affordable Care Act not Obamacare. S.F.
PRESBYTERIAN JOINED Obamacare and the premium for my policy with the highest deductible automatically quadrupled! Now that they are dropping out, will my premium go back to what it was? M.H.
LAW ENFORCEMENT personnel and the news media need to stop referring to non-law enforcement as civilians. Last time I checked, law enforcement personnel are also civilians. Citizen is a better term as it does not carry a military connotation. J.E.H.
IN LIGHT OF APDs lack of motivation in stopping auto thefts, its important to remember that, at one time, stealing your mode of transportation a horse was considered a hanging offense. J.B.
WHEN THEY SPEAK of (bus) passengers, they always refer to students, professionals and shoppers. Get on a bus and see the reality. The majority are homeless, vagrants, street loiterers, felons and thugs. D.P.
I WONDERED when your paper would finally endorse the GOP presumptive nominee, but when I read Sundays (July 10) editorial blasting Sec. (Hillary) Clinton your de facto endorsement was immediately made clear. Im disappointed. G.E.M.
POLICE OFFICERS need to treat everyone with respect from the very first contact, I am tired of police officers profiling me as a threatening Hispanic male because of my tattoos, then treating me with respect after they find out I am a retired APD police officer. T.M.
ONE RECENT Speakup! writer was offended by a political cartoon suggesting that the politically correct policies of our president and attorney general might be helping ISIS. Fair enough, but what about the cartoon suggesting that the NRA is aiding and abetting terrorists? Is a cartoon disgusting only when progressive Democrats are being criticized? B.L.
WOULD IT HELP to slow down the killings in New Mexico if we actually put killers in prison for a full 30 years no time off for good behavior, suspended time or other fancy means for friends? D.H.
WHY DO WE need to pay someone $60,000 to tell us that we have a gang problem, a drug trafficking problem, a homeless problem, poverty, poor education and a police force that is only half the size that it needs to be? W.D.L.
IN THE OLDEN days of government email, my memory recalls being able to email any/all Congress people. Interestingly, they block you nowadays from doing that. Hmm. B.M.
TOO MANY PEOPLE get cats and then decide that they do not want them and just let them go. Time to charge them with a crime. Too many times, I have seen cats killed; laying by the side of the road because they the people let them go. M.C.
WHEN I GREW up in Southern Oregon, we used to cut trees and make them into lumber. Now we just get stoned and watch the forest burn. D.S.
THE BEST THING New Mexico could do is remove Santa Fe as the state capitol. B.S.
WE LOSE REVENUE what will replace it? Legalize marijuana and enjoy the boom Colorado has going. S.F.
PLEASE NOTICE guns are extremely dangerous! Their purpose is to cause death or severe harm. So, even more than less dangerous things like driving, alcohol and drugs, we must regulate guns and restrict their users appropriately through due process. The Second Amendment can handle this. P.S.W.
Politics is putting gray wolves at risk
AN INSPECTOR generals report on the reintroduction of Mexican gray wolves, (Fed investigation: Wolf program was mishandled, July 11) should have revealed that its New Mexicos 47 lobos not Catron Countys well-connected livestock industry that get the short end of the stick.
For example, transcending the supposed failure to quickly remove nuisance wolves is the fact that, at the behest of the livestock industry, the government has systematically trapped and removed dozens of wolves from the wild and shot an additional 14 over the 18 years of this reintroduction program. In the process, they removed the most genetically diverse wolves, causing inbreeding that has lowered litter sizes and pup survival rates.
And then theres the high rate of illegal wolf killings and suspicious disappearances. To help livestock owners protect their stock, the Fish and Wildlife Service provides them with telemetry receivers programmed to the wolves radio collars which may explain how some poachers locate their victims. Yet, now Catron County officials who have advocated the wolves destruction want their own receiver which might increase the risks to surviving wolves.
The inspector generals finding of incomplete compensation for losses to wolves relies entirely on unverified assertions by ranchers, including, for example, a complaint of missing cattle in 55,000 remote acres of the rugged Gila National Forest. In fact, multiple spigots of money are available to indemnify the occasional loss of stock to wolves, including with funds controlled by the livestock industry through the Mexican Wolf/Livestock Coexistence Council.
Over the past century, the Supreme Court ruled repeatedly that leasing public lands for livestock is a privilege, not a right. Yet, your right to have Mexican gray wolves help keep the natural balance on your national forest part of what the Endangered Species Act effectively promises is at risk to political shenanigans, including this one-sided inspector general report.
MICHAEL J. ROBINSON
Center for Biological Diversity
Silver City
Put a time limit on roadside memorials
THIS CONCERNS those roadside memorials to people who have perished in traffic accidents. They often appear tacky and unsightly. It is not so much the cross I refer to, but the artificial flowers, stuffed animals, flags, etc.
Is not the proper place for a memorial to a deceased loved one a cemetery?
Some of those by the roads have been in place for years; in fact, there is one near Jemez Springs, maybe a mile south of Vista Linda Campground, which has been there for over 20 years. It is made of iron embedded in concrete and has a date of 1985 or 1995. Also, it appears to be in the national forest. Now I ask you, do you think citizens have the right to place such memorials of a personal nature in our national forests? Of course not.
My request to our state legislature and city council is that removal of those memorials be required at two months. The total time from installation to removal should be set at two months or they should not be allowed at all.
PATRICIA KNOEBEL
Albuquerque
Remember what Barbara Bruin achieved
I READ, WITH great interest, your front page story about Barbara Bruin leaving the Animal Welfare Department (Barbara Bruin leaving Animal Welfare Dept., July 7).
Now is the time that some of her many accomplishments need to be recognized. The fact that the euthanasia rates have dramatically dropped under her leadership has been reported many times and is truly remarkable, but that is only one of her many accomplishments. Kennel cough in dogs and upper respiratory infections in cats are no longer death sentences. Orphaned dog and cat litters are now fostered, allowing the kittens and puppies to be adopted. Injured, abandoned animals now routinely receive medical care.
The volunteer program has been greatly expanded because of the respect that she has shown to the volunteers. The expanded foster program has allowed many more dogs and cats to get out of the shelter environment and into a home for a respite. The transfer program has increased, allowing many of Albuquerques homeless animals to be moved to areas where there is a greater demand. A shy dog program has been initiated, allowing timid dogs to become socialized. Most rescue groups have improved relationships with AWD because of her leadership.
The Animal Welfare Department facilities have become more welcoming to the public. There have been significant improvements in the staff over these past six and one-half years.
The director of any organization is held accountable for what goes on in their department. The bad has been reported on at great length, but now is the time to remember the good that has been accomplished. I commend the mayor on the wisdom of his selection six and a half years ago. And I thank Barbara Bruin for what she has done for our homeless animals and the people who deeply care about their well-being.
I admire the poise that she has demonstrated under the most trying of circumstances. Albuquerque is a better place for what she has done and accomplished. And I am deeply sorry to see her leave.
RALPH LEVINE
People for Animal Welfare of New Mexico
Albuquerque
Why not just use Chinas Zika research?
I READ YOUR article Zika a grave risk for U.S. in the July 10 newspaper and found it quite interesting. What I found specifically interesting is to learn that Dr. (Kathryn) Hanley from NMSU has been doing research on the Zika virus for years.
I was reading the latest issue of the In These Times magazine and I ran across a snapshot with the following caption: Guangzhou, China Chinese residents drive by an information poster on the Zika virus on Shezai Island near Guangzhou, China. The island hosts one of the worlds largest mosquito research labs, which has been testing bacteria that inhibit procreation in Zika-carrying mosquito species. After a year of field trials, the lab claims 99 percent suppression of these species. Researchers hope their discoveries will help eradicate Zika around the world.
If the preceding is true, why isnt the Unites States looking into this matter and negotiating some kind of agreement with China for the use of their findings for use in our country? It would certainly save a lot of research time and money!
NAHUM CASTILLO
Albuquerque
The death knell sounds for the U.S.A.
THIS OBITUARY should appear in every newspaper in the United States of America.
The United States of America born: July 4, 1776; died: July 5, 2016. Cause of death crooked politicians. Preceded in death by U.S. Constitution and presidential oath of office Jan. 20, 2009.
The United States will be deeply missed by many citizens and friends around the world.
Funeral services Nov. 5, 2016.
DUSTY BURNETT
Albuquerque
We ought to ban trapping in New Mexico
THANK YOU FOR your editorial suggesting the N.M. Game Commission take a second look at expanding trapping of cougars and mandatory killing of wildlife (NMs fighting the wrong battles for your wildlife, July 5).
I would like to clarify, for the general public, your sentence, Regarding trapping, until last year trapping on private land required a special permit from the department and was not allowed elsewhere. This is only true for cougars.
For other fur-bearing wildlife bobcat, raccoon, badger, weasel, fox, ringtail, muskrat, beaver, nutria, coyote, skunk we continue to allow this archaic, cruel and indiscriminate method of killing for $20 the cost of a trapping permit. And with this permit, a person can trap an unlimited number of these species.
For the year 2014-15, $35,360 worth of permits 1,768 were sold to kill 5,225 protected species, which does not include skunks and coyotes. Of these 5,225 protected species, 1,649 were bobcats and 2,290 were grey foxes.
Picture what it is like to be caught in a leg hold trap is this how you want your wildlife treated? Please support banning trapping in N.M. as 80 countries and several surrounding states have done.
PEGGY NORTON
Albuquerque
NMs history was not colorful or exciting
AS I READ the Journal column (Staff cuts for historic sites worry advocates) authored by Ollie Reed Jr., this morning (July 5), I reacted strongly to his description of Mississippi and New Mexico history as colorful and exciting, as well as wild and woolly. Reed noted that the romanticized stories of mountain men, Indian Warriors, gunfighters and cowboys drew him to live in our state. This retroactive distortion of history, with its Disneyesque polish, is an offensive and, frankly, silly repackaging of New Mexicos past.
If one honestly studies our states history, there is little to suggest that it was exciting, colorful or attractive. It is, rather, a history of exploitation, starvation, slavery, torture, intolerance and murder. Native peoples were cruelly dispossessed of their land, enslaved and murdered; lawless bandits roamed about gleefully killing and raping. Religious intolerance decimated native culture, frontier tribal wars brought destruction and suffering, starvation was frequent and corruption was rampant. There is little in New Mexico history to suggest that it was colorful and exciting.
Obviously, Reed feels the need to repackage history to fit his imagination, seeing death and suffering, war and enslavement as wild and woolly. While I hate to rain on Reeds parade, it is incumbent on New Mexicans to honestly and accurately remember our history, which was neither colorful nor exciting. We should feel angry at the cultural and human destruction that gave rise to our state, saddened by the death, suffering and intolerance that was part of everyday life. We should embrace this history as it was and vow never to repeat the horrors which typified our colonial struggles.
Perhaps one day the Serbs and the Bosnians, the Hutu and the Tutsi, and the people in war-torn Syria will look back at their violent history and consider the colorful and exciting nature of the conflicts. I hope not. We must be determined not to glorify, sanitize and romanticize our history.
Our past offers us valuable lessons. We must understand and accept the mistakes, horrors and inequities of New Mexico history, and vow never to repeat them.
EDWARD GOODMAN
Corrales
New Mexicos kids deserve much better
AS WEVE LEARNED, mental health (services) in New Mexico are non-existent, unless you are very lucky and happen to be the right age, skin color and gender.
Since we have one of the highest teen suicide rates in the nation especially among Latino and Native youth perhaps we should pay attention. Our education system is built to support and coddle only testing and e-learning corporations, and our mental health infrastructure has been effectively run out of the state by corruption.
Teachers do their best with the shrinking resources we have. Just like the police, who are consistently pulled away from preventing crime to act as street counselors. And then, both teachers and cops get blamed for not being effective.
Kids are suffering. I always thought thats where the buck stopped: when kids suffer. Its time for new leadership, new ideas and a new direction for New Mexicans.
KRIS NIELSEN
Albuquerque
There is no place for unions in teaching
IT IS NO wonder that the New Mexico public school system ranks so low with respect to the rest of the nation (Futures in Jeopardy, June 26). More money is certainly not the answer better leadership would be a start.
One major reason for the low ranking is that many teachers automatically receive tenure before they are proven in the classroom it is called joining the union. Persons who graduate from a university with a degree are considered educated and professional. If so, then what is the need to join a union in the first place?
I understand that one has a choice and that membership is voluntary it is a pity and a problem. The union eliminates the need for competition in the work environment and, in a large number of cases, the incentive to be better is lost. What results is a guaranteed position for life, keeping the system in a static state. It is very difficult to dismiss a unionized person.
The ones who suffer are the students. Get rid of the unions and see how many teachers really want to teach under individual contracts with identified metrics of success.
This same argument applies to organized labor unions of government employees a large number of whom have little incentive to perform to a given standard, leading to the inept bureaucracy we have today. Unions have their place in labor-intensive industries, such as coal and steel, and perhaps for firemen and the police. They are not needed in school systems or most government bureaucracies.
CHARLES WHITEHURST
Albuquerque
FARMINGTON The father and son ranchers whose hundreds of roosters and chickens said to be worth $200,000 were seized and killed in 2009 after a cockfighting investigation have settled their federal lawsuit against a New Mexico State Police agent for an undisclosed amount.
John Boyd, an attorney for father-and-son plaintiffs Reyes and Mario Marin, confirmed Monday that an agreement was reached on Friday at a settlement conference but declined to discuss the terms until the agreement is signed, which is expected to happen later this week.
Reyes and Mario Marin alleged in the lawsuit that New Mexico State Police agent Max Salas, along with other local and state officials, violated their constitutional rights by seizing about 435 roosters and chickens from the Marins ranch in San Juan County on May 4, 2009.
Salas seized the birds during a joint investigation into cockfighting at the ranch by New Mexico State Police, the San Juan County Sheriffs Office and the New Mexico Attorney Generals Animal Cruelty Task Force, according to court records.
The agent also seized about 285 chicks and 200 eggs, records state. The seized poultry were killed due to concerns the birds may have been fed steroids and other non-prescribed medications.
Boyd said the poultry slaughtered were valued at more than $200,000.
The Marins were never charged with cockfighting, and they filed their lawsuit alleging unlawful search and seizure in April 2012.
The initial complaint named the San Juan County Sheriffs Office and sheriffs office Capt. Brice Current as defendants, but those claims were dismissed in January 2014 after Current agreed to provide a sworn statement regarding the role of the sheriffs office in the investigation.
A judge later dismissed as defendants former New Mexico Attorney General Gary King, Assistant Attorney General Steven Suttle and members of the animal cruelty task force after determining the public officials were protected from litigation under qualified immunity.
Boyd said the Marins intend to appeal those dismissals now that a settlement has been reached.
Officials with the New Mexico Department of Public Safety did not respond to a request for comment. An attorney for Salas also did not respond to requests for comment.
TULAROSA As the 71st anniversary of the atomic bomb testing at the Trinity Site came to a close, over 700 luminarias were lit to honor community members that have died from cancer.
At precisely 5:29:45 a.m. on July 16, 1945, the worlds first atomic bomb was tested at the Trinity Site north of Alamogordo as part of the Manhattan Project. According to White Sands Missile Range, the atomic bomb released 19 kilotons of power, instantly vaporizing the tower it was on and turning the surrounding asphalt and sand into green glass. The shock of the bomb broke windows 120 miles away and was felt by many as far away as 160 miles.
Success of the Trinity test meant an atomic bomb using plutonium could be used by the United States military in Japan during World War II.
The Tularosa Basin Downwinders believe the Trinity test changed the gene pools of residents in surrounding communities, leaving a cluster of cancer and illness in the descendants of those who witnessed the atomic bomb.
Rosemary Cordova, a Tularosa Basin Downwinder, has a story that is not uncommon to hear in the Village of Tularosa.
I lost my mom to breast cancer in 1987 and not even a year later my son was diagnosed with a brain tumor, Cordova said. My baby sister was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2000. The only one still alive is my son and hes been sick 27 years.
Cordovas son, who has undergone four brain surgeries and a Gamma Knife, has been told by his doctors that his tumor is back and they can no longer operate.
My dream for my son is that we could buy a little piece of land in Ruidoso or Cloudcroft, put a trailer or a small cabin on it so that he could be in a cooler temperature, Cordova said. Hes completely shut in, his room has refrigerated air I cant afford refrigerated air in the rest of my house but my son is literally shut in his room, especially during the summer.
Cordova estimates that 75 percent of her family has had or lost their battle with cancer.
We have suffered from watching our loved ones suffer from this radiation, she said. What the government did to us is not right and we havent even gotten an apology. They just dropped the bomb, they never told people to not eat the cattle, to not drink the milk, to not drink the water in the cisterns.
The Tularosa Basin Downwinders was started over 10 years by Tina Cordova and Fred Tyler. After Tyler passed away, his wife Katherine Tyler stepped into continue his fight.
Cordova, niece of Rosemary Cordova, joined the cause after undergoing her own battle with thyroid cancer and watching her father die from cancer. Cordovas father was four years old and living in Tularosa when the bomb was detonated.
Cordova and Tyler lead the charge for the communities surrounding the Trinity Site to be recognized by the government. They are currently fighting for amendments to the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act so that compensation and apologies can be extended to New Mexicans who have suffered from the fallout of the bomb.
We do this vigil every year and every year we add more names to the list, Cordova said. Its heartbreaking to hear all the names, its just unbelievable. Its ridiculous that we cant get the attention we deserve as human beings for our effort to just be treated fairly, like people in other parts of the country.
In their continued effort for inclusion in the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, the Downwinders started collecting health surveys from residents in Tularosa and Socorro, the two communities closest to the Trinity Site. In March, the Downwinders were awarded a grant from the Santa Fe Community Foundation which allowed them to hire an expert to interpret the data and evaluate the findings.
The people in these communities are going to continue to fight, to be heard and to bring justice back to our communities, Cordova said. If you think this is one of those things that cant affect you, you are sadly mistaken because look at Flint, Mich. The government and industry make decisions all the time that have far-reaching health consequences. Innocent people were going about their lives and the government damaged their entire future.
For more information about the Tularosa Basin Downwinders, email Cordova at tcordova@queston.net or visit their website at www.trinitydownwinders.com
2016 the Alamogordo Daily News (Alamogordo, N.M.)
Visit the Alamogordo Daily News (Alamogordo, N.M.) at www.alamogordonews.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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New Mexico Gas Co. is moving forward with plans to build the states first natural gas pipeline to Mexico.
Teala Kail, a spokeswoman for the utility, said the company will seek a federal permit to begin building the pipeline and expects construction to be completed within a year.
Its a big opportunity for the state, Kail said. To be able to export natural gas to Mexico thats real economic development.
Kail said the $5 million project will involve extending the companys existing pipeline in Santa Teresa about five miles to the Mexican border, as well as making it wider in order to increase capacity. Additional facilities would need to be built on the Mexican side of the border to begin exporting.
The project will be funded at shareholder expense, said Kail, meaning the costs associated with the pipeline will not be passed on to customers.
Wally Drangmeister, a spokesman for the New Mexico Oil & Gas Association, said he is aware of several natural gas producers who are meeting with Mexican energy industry representatives in the hopes of taking advantage of the new pipeline once it is constructed.
Any time there are new markets for oil and natural gas, thats a very good thing, he said. Theres a lot of excitement.
A presidential permit issued by the U.S. Department of State is required for pipelines that reach the border between the United States and Canada or Mexico. The company expects the permit process will take a few months to complete, said Kail.
The plans come amid Canadian energy company Emera Inc.s acquisition of New Mexico Gas Co.s parent company. Under a June settlement related to the New Mexico Public Regulation Commissions approval of the transaction, New Mexico Gas agreed to construct the pipeline in order to enhance the states ability to export gas.
In PRC hearing testimony quoted by the settlement, Emera President and CEO Chris Huskilson said investing in economic development projects is beneficial for both the state and Emera.
Our business does better when the economy of the state does better, Huskilson stated in the testimony. And so to invest in economic development in this state is something that is very easy, again, for us to agree to. Because its critically important to our business that the state is healthy and that the state is growing.
New Mexico Gas Co. is the states largest natural gas utility, serving more than 515,000 customers. It was acquired by the Florida-based TECO Energy in 2014. On July 1 of this year, Emera acquired TECO in a $10.4 billion all-cash deal. In addition to the PRC, the deal was also approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and TECO shareholders.
Under the settlement filed with the PRC, New Mexico Gas also has committed to keeping 675 full-time jobs in the state and will create a $10 million matching fund to build pipelines in unserved and underserved communities.
Mike Lonergan, a spokesman for Gov. Susana Martinez, said in an email that the governor had received a briefing on the pipeline from Emera.
Shes encouraged by plans to help continue to find new markets for our abundant energy resources, said Lonergan in the email.
Correction: This article originally reported that the pipeline would be completed by the end of the year. New Mexico Gas Co. said they expect the pipeline to be completed within a year.
Telemundo, the Spanish-language network, is about to get a boost in New Mexico, thanks to a proposed $2.5 million purchase of KASA-TV.
The purchase, which is subject to federal approval, also means that FOX Broadcasting programs now airing on KASA-TV, Channel 2.1, will move to Channel 13.2.
KASA, now owned by Media General, is to be sold to Ramar Communications. Ramar is a Lubbock-based company with New Mexico roots that owns seven radio stations and eight TV channels in Lubbock. It also owns the Telemundo affiliate in Albuquerque.
Telemundo which is available on Channels 15 or 25, depending on the viewers location will move to Channel 2.1 with the capability of reaching a wider audience in the state, said Brad Moran, president of Ramar.
We think this will allow us to become the strongest Spanish-language station in New Mexico, Moran said. KASA is the strongest signal in the state.
Ramar was started in the early 1970s in Albuquerque, Moran said.
KRQE, also owned by Media General, is to be sold to Nexstar Broadcasing Inc., a media giant involving 104 television stations that reaches 62 markets.
ACAs library of educational tools help members improve their business practices. ACA also holds the most popular industry conferences and offers credentialing for collectors, attorneys, and more. ACAs Training Zone subscription gives agencies access to almost all of our education for one low cost.
York University in Toronto announced on Tuesday that their School of Continuing Studies will start offering Post-Graduate Accounting Certificates this September, approved by the Chartered Professional Accountants (CPA) of Ontario. The courses look to further prepare students to thrive in the accounting profession, as well as gaining an advantage in applying to the Schulich School of Business' Masters of Accounting program.
Two certificates will be offered, with the opportunity to continue on to earn a master's and/or professional designation, allowing students to tailor their studies to their respective career paths.
"Preparing for such a dynamic industry necessitates a dynamic program of study," said Lina Perrone, program manager, per a statement. "This is why we have included professional competencies and applied capstone courses in each of the certificates. This design embraces the reality that the world of accountants is much broader and diverse than people tend to think."
Graduates of the new program will gain prerequisites for entry to the CPA Professional Education Program (CPA PEP), as well as crucial soft skills (leadership skills, verbal and written communication, decision-making) into their early careers.
"We have worked in partnership with CPA Ontario to ensure the design of our program not only meets the specific knowledge requirements for entry to the CPA PEP, but that we provide an exceptional competency-based learning experience for our students," stated Tracey Taylor-O'Reilly, assistant vice-president for Continuing Studies.
"The field has undergone significant changes in recent years and we are proud to officially be part of what is a growing and evolving landscape," Taylor-O'Reilly added. "This program takes learning to another level that is more integrated and comprehensive within a rigorous program that better prepares students for the CPA track. Our goal isn't just to position our graduates to get hired, but to be able to demonstrate that they have what it takes to do more and to get promoted. That includes preparing our graduates for success in academic programs that they will likely take to get to the later stages of their career."
The Post-Graduate Certificate in Accounting will be offered full-time on-campus, part-time online, or a mix of online and on-campus study beginning September 2016. The Post-Graduate Certificate in Advanced Professional Accounting will begin the following September.
For more on York's post-graduate accounting program and the School of Continuing Studies, head to the University's site here.
The Asia-Pacific pay-TV industry will grow at a 5.8 per cent average annual rate from 2016 to 2021, according to a new report, Asia Pacific Pay-TV & Broadband Markets, published by Media Partners Asia (MPA).
MPA projects pay-TV industry sales across 18 major markets in Asia Pacific to climb from US$54 billion in 2016 to US$72 billion by 2021, rising thereafter to US$81 billion by 2025. The pace of pay-TV subscriber and revenue growth is slowing however, weakened by an economic slowdown and increasing competition from both legal and illegal alternatives. PayTV subscriber growth declined or substantially decelerated in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, in particular.
At the same time, however, India and Korea remain two of the regions largest and most scalable pay-TV opportunities. Revenue growth will also accelerate in Australia and the Philippines, largely thanks to subscriber growth.
However, MPA analysts have lowered subscriber growth forecasts across much of Southeast Asia, especially for Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, although ARPU (average revenue per user) should remain resilient in both Malaysia and Singapore.
The pay-TV industry in China, meanwhile, remains the largest in the region and is becoming increasingly digitalised. Pay-TV growth opportunities for broadcasters are limited however, due to increasing regulation as well as competition from free and paid online video services.
Elsewhere in the region, subscription-based video-on-demand (SVOD) services have had a negligible impact on pay-TV so far, despite the global launch of Netflix earlier this year, in addition to increasing competition among lower-priced regional and local SVOD services.
Most pay-TV subscribers downgrading or cancelling pay-TV services are moving instead to illegal services, as well as to free, ad-supported options across both TV and online video.
At the same time, more pay-TV operators are rolling out connected set-top boxes that can incorporate OTT video services. In addition, some operators (telcos in particular) are aggressively hard-bundling video content, including pay-TV channels, with high-speed broadband. This is helping drive subscriber growth, especially in a number of Southeast Asian markets.
Commenting on the report, MPA Executive Director Vivek Couto, said, Pay-TV providers are increasingly focused on repackaging and re-pricing both linear and on-demand services. Local and regional Asian programming is also becoming increasingly important. At the same time, sports, kids, infotainment and Hollywood movies will remain mainstays of the pay-TV bundle, although channels offering Hollywood TV series are being disrupted by both legal and illegal OTT. Few pay-TV operators have been able to capture or monetise large-scale online video viewing so far, although early results in Hong Kong and
Korea are encouraging. The goal is driving the next cycle of customer growth and consumer spend. Pay-TV user interfaces and data analytics are improving, although often too slowly to effectively compete with legal and illegal OTT rivals. Increasingly, viable pay-TV operators will become drivers and targets for M&A and consolidation, as the worlds of pay-TV, broadband and OTT collide and converge in the wider context of media and telecoms.
Ex-China, which remains a utility-oriented and highly regulated pay-TV market, Asia Pacific added ~9.6 million net new pay-TV customers last year, the slowest pace of growth since 1997-98. MPA analysts project a spike to 10.4 million net additions ex-China this year, driven by government-mandated cable digitalisation in India. Subscriber growth should decelerate again from next year onwards, moderating to between 4 million to 8 million net adds per annum between 2018 and 2022.
Including China, MPA sees total pay-TV subscribers in Asia Pacific growing from ~567 million in 2016 to ~764 million by 2025. Adjusted for multiple connections in a household, pay-TV penetration in Asia Pacific will grow from 55% of TV households in 2016 to 61% by 2025.
Digital pay-TV penetration in Asia Pacific will increase from 80 per cent of pay-TV subs in 2016 to 91 per cent by 2025, as pay-TV networks in most markets go 90-100 per cent digital, with the exception of India (~70 per cent) and Pakistan (32 per cent) in the 18 markets covered in the report. HD penetration of digital pay-TV subs in Asia Pacific will grow from 30 per cent in 2016 to 46 per cent in 2025.
The fastest growing segment within the Asia Pacific pay-TV industry over 2016-21 will be value-added services (VAS), driven by VOD, as revenues climb at an 11 per cent CAGR over the next five years. Australia, China, Japan and Korea will be the biggest markets for VOD revenue growth. Malaysia will lead amongst smaller markets.
In standout pay-TV markets such as India and Korea, pay-TV subscription revenue growth will be driven by high volumes and a level of ARPU upside (partially offset by price competition). Higher yields will also boost subscription revenue growth in Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam.
Pay-TV advertising will expand from US$11.6 billion in spend in 2016 to US$16.2 billion by 2021, with growth driven by markets with high levels of pay-TV penetration such as India and Korea, along with China. Meanwhile, pay-TV ad spend in Australia, Japan and Taiwan will remain material, although growth in each of these markets will soften. Malaysia and the Philippines will remain the standout markets for pay-TV advertising in Southeast Asia.
In a rapid growth mode, Indias premier public consultancy Concept PR has appointed senior professionals in key positions - Ziegler Colaco as its Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) and Tina Pawar as Head of BFSI vertical.
As we are undergoing a new growth phase, we keep strengthening our teams as well as our service offerings. We are confident that both Ziegler and Tina will contribute in our endeavour to scale new heights. Also, the team is feeling enthused as this will give them a super opportunity to learn from the vast experience of these veterans said Ashish Jalan, CEO and Director of Concept PR.
With an experience of 23 years, Ziegler Colaco has donned Servicing, Planning and Creative hats.
An MBA in Marketing from Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Ziegler began his career in Tata Press as a Management Trainee. He began his advertising career at Lintas, and moved on to Mode and iContract.
His belief in technology being a Computer Science graduate saw him join Indbazaar.com during the dotcom boom. The subsequent bust did not diminish his belief in technology saw him as an Instructional Design professional at Lionbridge, Learningmate and Aptara.
As they say, you cant keep an ad guy out of advertising forever! And so Ziegler was back as Client Services Director at Seagull Advertising. Before joining ConceptPR, he was Vice-President Advertising Services at Publicis Beehive Communications.
Tina has and over a decades experience driving brand and corporate communication programmes for leading multi-national organizations. She was previously with the Everstone Group as their head of Corporate Communications, and prior to that with IIFL and Reliance Capital.
With her business acumen and knowledge of brands, Tina combines her experience in corporate communications and sound media relations to produce the desired output.
She holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree (Computer Science) from the University of Mumbai, and a PGeMBA (Finance) from the Asian Management Development Centre. She also holds a certificate in Digital Marketing from the Mudra Institute of Communications (MICA).
Flight trials of the E-Scan radar have begun following the successful completion of ground tests using a UK Eurofighter Typhoon test aircraft, clearing the path towards full integration of the radar.
Copyright Eurofighter
The ground tests were carried out on Instrumented Production Aircraft (IPA) 5 with the detection and tracking of airborne targets at significant range.
Flight tests have now begun at BAE Systems site in Warton, Lancashire, where IPA5 undertook a flight of around one hour in duration on Friday 8th July. A second test aircraft, IPA8 based in Germany, is also set to join the integration programme.
The trials are designed to ensure the radar and weapons system reach the required capability in time for first deliveries to the Kuwait Air Force, which became the aircrafts eighth customer earlier this year.
Copyright Eurofighter
Alan Barton, Delivery Director Typhoon Radar Programmes for BAE Systems, said: "Following the successful completion of this ground testing phase, flight testing using IPA5 has now commenced, where we will prove in-flight what we have successfully demonstrated during the ground tests. The industry teams across Europe are working very collaboratively to drive this key Typhoon capability programme successfully forward."
Andrew Cowdery, Chairman of Euroradar, said: "The Typhoon Captor-E provides significantly more power than most competing systems and were looking forward to demonstrating the combat edge this brings to the platform in live flight trials. Combined with the fighter's large nose aperture and the ability to move the radar antenna, the Typhoon has a field of view of 200 degrees and the flight tests will show the discriminating advantages this will bring."
The E-Scan Radar equipment and Weapons System capability will be incrementally enhanced over the next three years to enable the required capability (P3E Standard) to be available for the first deliveries to the Kuwait Air Force.
The new radar, provided by the Euroradar consortium, which is led by Leonardo-Finmeccanica, underpins the Typhoons current and future capability evolution.
Founded in 2004, the Pat Tillman Foundations mission is to invest in military veterans and their spouses through academic scholarships building a diverse community of leaders committed to service to others.
According to their website, the scholars chosen show extraordinary academic and leadership potential, a true sense of vocation, and a deep commitment to create positive change through their work in the fields of medicine, law, business, education and the arts. The Pat Tillman Foundation has nearly 460 scholars with more than $14 million in academic scholarships and support attending more than 100 universities.
Recently, Katelyn Newton, spouse of Tech. Sgt. Michael Newton, 366th Training Squadron Explosive Ordnance Disposal instructor, was selected in June, 2016, as one of 60 nationwide to receive the Pat Tillman Foundation Scholarship.
I didnt think I would get a scholarship in a million years, Katelyn said. It is pretty humbling to be recognized among this group of really elite students I have a very large interest in serving children with cancer, but I also have a very large interest in pediatric palliative care (a specialized medical care that provides relief for children with serious illnesses and their families). There are very few programs catered towards kids in that situation and I want to change that.
Katelyn is an Arizona State University pediatric oncology nurse, pursuing her doctorate of nursing practice with the vison to make a positive impact in the lives of children and families during their greatest times of need.
Her husbands commitment to serving in the Air Force has inspired her to volunteer her medical skills at camps for children with cancer, events serving children in foster care and their families and at schools around the globe. She has worked in pediatric care for five years and currently works in Dallas.
I knew she was going to get it from day one, her husband said. She says she has no idea how I do my job, and I have absolutely no idea how she does hers She works three to four nights a week and has clinical two to three days a week. So I see her on average one to two days a week, if she doesn't have to travel to Phoenix for school. Thank God, she has family in Dallas that she can stay with; thats helped us out immensely as far as having a safe place to stay. Still, not being able to see my wife for that stretch of time is difficult.
Shes told me before that the greatest gift she could ever receive is for a family to allow her to help them through the end of life for their child, and to make it easier for them, he said. Id rather walk out on an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) than have to talk to a parent whos losing their kid.
Somewhere inside, we hear a voice. It leads us in the direction of who we wish to become. But it is up to us whether or not to follow. Pat Tillman
US personnel in Turkey safe, Pentagon spokesman says
All U.S. service members and civilians in Turkey are safe in the wake of the July 15 attempted coup there, Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook told reporters July 18.
We've taken appropriate steps to maintain the safety and security of our civilian and military personnel, their families and our facilities, and we will continue to do so, he said of the roughly 3,000 Americans in Turkey.
Family departure previously ordered
Cook noted a departure order that was previously issued for families, particularly in reference to those who were at Turkeys Incirlik Air Base, where the U.S.-led coalition is a tenant and is using the base to conduct counter-Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant airstrikes and other operations. Turkey is a NATO ally and is a member of the counter-ISIL coalition.
We've had a clear assessment of what the situation is now with regard to safety and security of our people, Cook said. And that was our primary concern throughout this entire process.
U.S. operations continue
Defense Secretary Ash Carter is focused on making sure U.S. operations continue, personnel remain secure and the relationship with Turkey continues to progress, the press secretary said.
We are confident that the measures we have in place and the support we're receiving from the Turkish government is adequate to address any security concerns we have at this time, and we'll continue to watch it very, very closely, as you would expect we would, Cook added.
Force protection efforts also have ensured U.S. assets are safe, he said.
We were, of course, concerned enough that we elevated our force protection, the press secretary said. So, this was clearly a situation of unrest in Turkey that was a cause of concern for us. We took steps to protect our people and our facilities, and I think that was the appropriate thing to do in light of the circumstances.
Power at Incirlik AB not restored
Cook said power has not yet been restored at Incirlik AB, but U.S. operations there continue.
(Well take) whatever steps we need to try to mitigate any impact that there could be on the (counter-ISIL) campaign, Cook said, and he confirmed that the United States has backup power to conduct its operations.
We adjust as we need to, to make sure we keep the pressure on ISIL (and) that we keep our operations going, Cook said. And we are very thankful the coalition is able to adjust in other ways, should there be any sort of delay or some sort of impact on our operations going forward.
The kidnapped son of the Chief Justice of Sindh High Court was rescued from the clutches of Pakistani Taliban by the military in an early morning raid in the restive northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, the third high-profile abduction case to be solved in recent months.
Awais Ali Shah, a lawyer himself, was abducted last month from Karachi. He was found in Tank, which lies close to the tribal region bordering Afghanistan, where the military has been battling Taliban.
Three militants were killed during the operation.
Awais Shah, son of Sindh High Court Chief Justice Sajjad Ali Shah, recovered through an IBO from custody of terrorists from near Tank, three terrorists killed, Director-General of the Inter-Services Public Relations Lieutenant General Asim Bajwa tweeted.
Mr. Shah, who is in his late 20s, was reunited with his family around 9:30 a.m. I got a call from General Raheel Sharif at 3:00 a.m. informing me my son has been rescued, Justice Sajjad Ali Shah told the media after being reunited with his son.
A Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) splinter group was behind Awais Ali Shahs kidnapping. The group were in touch with us and did communicate with us, but cannot say anything further due to security reasons, Mr. Bajwa said.
Masked men kidnapped Mr. Shah from outside a supermarket in Karachi on June 20. It was feared that he could be used as a bargaining chip in negotiations to free imprisoned militants.
Mr. Shahs recovery comes months after sons of two high-profile politicians returned home after spending years in captivity.
Shahbaz Taseer, son of the former slain Punjab Governor, Salman Taseer, was recovered in March from the Balochistan province after spending five years in captivity. He was kidnapped by militants and kept in Afghanistan.
In May, Ali Haider, son of the former Prime Minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, who was kidnapped from Multan was recovered from Afghanistan after three years in captivity of militant outfits.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif congratulated Justice Shah on the recovery of his son and praised the security forces.
The Prime Minister lauded the role of intelligence agencies and security forces in recovering Awais Shah and said that the professional and operational excellence of our security forces has made it possible for which they deserve immense appreciation, a statement issued by the Prime Minister House said.
No matter how sinful the offender might be; it is only the One who has given life possesses the right to take it back. And when He Himself is ever forgiving then who on this Earth are some stagnant primitive minds to claim others lives that too in the name of honour masked behind religious ethics.
Qandeel Balochs murder exposes the horror of honour killings in Pakistan. According to a leading daily of Pakistan, hundreds of women are killed each year in the country in the name of honour.
Indian media seems to be over-taken by the news coming from across the border, as if the horror of honour killing is something alien to its own country. The situation is even worse here, only difference being, out there females get murdered in the name of religion and here due to caste-ism.
Recently, there has been a spate of honour killings in the country, mainly in the states of Punjab, Rajasthan, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. It can be defined as a death that is awarded to a woman of the family for marrying against her parents wishes.
Another worse gender-based brutality commonly prevalent here in India is the dowry deaths, where the perpetrators claim that they have not been given enough material rewards for accepting the woman into the family. Due to which a lot of harassment is caused by in-laws to a point where the woman is left with no option but to commit suicide, thus saving themselves from being accused of murdering her.
We have had a tradition of honour killing. This tradition was viewed in its most horrible form during the partition of the country when many women were forcefully killed so that family honour could be preserved.
Reasons why family decides to kill the daughter in the name of preserving their family honour have been many. The most obvious reason being the fact that the caste system continues to be at its rigid best in India.
The mentality of people has to change. Parents should accept their childrens wishes regarding marriage, as it is they who have to lead a life with their partners. And if they are not satisfied with them then they will lead a horrible married life which might even end in suicide. Further, stricter laws must be laid out to tackle these kinds of gender-based killings as this is a crime which cannot be pardoned. Humans do not have the right to write down death sentences of innocent fellow humans.
Superficially, even if agreed over killing innocents in keen desire to keep the so-called-honour intact for once, how could anyone escape from the hounding guilt one will have to live for the rest of the life for snatching away someone elses right to breath!
(The views expressed by the author in the article are his/her own.)
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim on Tuesday warned against revenge and mob violence in the aftermath of a failed coup targeting his government.
Nobody can have a feeling of revenge. This is unacceptable in a state governed by rule of law, Yildirim said, referring to images purportedly showing government supporters physically attacking alleged coup backers.
He vowed however that whoever had acted against the law would be punished. Today we need unity, he said, speaking after a meeting with Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the opposition Republican Peoples Party (CHP).
Turkey has jailed over two dozen generals, including a former air force chief, as well as two pilots believed to have been shot down by a Russian jet in November, on suspicion of planning Fridays attempt to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Late on Monday, Erdogan told in an interview to a news channel that he would approve any decision by the countrys parliament to reinstate the death penalty as calls grow for executions in the plots aftermath.
Parliament needs to discuss it and if the leaders agree and discuss it then I as president will approve any decision to come out of the parliament, he said.
Why should I keep them and feed them in prisons, for years to come? Thats what the people say.
Devlet Bahceli, leader of the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) also expressed his support for the reinstatement of the death penalty, already a longstanding demand of his party.
Gulenist coup supporters taking orders from the imam in Pennsylvania are no different than Daesh, PKK terror organizations he said, referring to the Islamic State (IS) group and Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), two group who have carried out attacks inside Turkey.
Our party has never supported coup and has always sided with democracy.
Details have emerged in the plots aftermath that 40 soldiers backed by three helicopters had intended to kill or capture the president, who was on vacation in the southwest resort town of Marmaris.
Had I stayed 10, 15 additional minutes, I would have been killed or I would have been taken, Erdogan said to a television news channel.
A lengthy list, exclusively revealed by Middle East Eye, showing which military officers and officials were set to take over critical posts once the coup was over, suggest that the plot was planned well in advance.
Government officials have said they will make an important announcement on Wednesday, but have not elaborated further. Presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin is also scheduled to hold a press conference at 2pm in Istanbul on Tuesday.
More than 200 people were killed and over 1400 wounded on Friday and Saturday in the violence that followed an attempt by a faction of the Turkish army to seize control of the country, most of them civilians.
The wife and daughter of Director General Corporate Affairs BK Bansal, an additional secretary-rank officer in Ministry of Corporate Affairs, who was arrested by CBI in a bribery case on July 16, were found dead in their home on Tuesday.
Corporate affairs director general BK Bansals 58-year-old wife Satya Bala and daughter Neha, 28, were found hanging from ceiling fans of two rooms at Neelkanth Apartment in east Delhis Madhu Vihar area, police said.
Sources said they left separate suicide notes, details of which were awaited.
The CBI on Monday said that they had arrested BK Bansal, who was dealing with matters related to alleged violations by a Mumbai-based pharmaceutical company, on charges of bribery.
An official said, Bansal, who was detained by sleuths of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Saturday while allegedly receiving the second lot of the bribe amount, was arrested on Sunday.
CBI spokesperson, Devpreet Singh said that Bansal was arrested for receiving a bribe of Rs nine lakh for extending favours to a corporate firm. The money was being given outside a Delhi hotel.
Along with Bansal, a middleman named Vishwadeep Bansal, who worked as the distributor for Elder Pharmaceuticals, was also arrested by the investigating agency.
We are deeply shocked and saddened by the incident. It maybe mentioned here that both the deceased were neither accused nor questioned or summoned in the ongoing investigation. The matter is being looked into by the local police, said a statement from the CBI.
The alleged violations were detected during an inspection by the Regional Director of Western Region (Mumbai) of the Ministry of Corporate Affairs.
An agency official, requesting anonymity, said they siphoned money to some Dubai-based companies and were also acquiring a company in Bulgaria.
The CBI investigation also revealed that the ministry official was holding 20 properties in Haryanas Sirsa, Gurgaon, Faridabad as well as Delhi that have now been seized. All the properties were bought in the last 2 years and most of them were in his name as well as in the name of his wife and son.
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When a guest decided to do a late check out at Holiday Inn's flagship hotel at 30 Carlton Street he had no idea that he would become a victim of theft. By the time the guest came back, Holiday Inn housekeepers took everything except a sweat bottom. Only a handful of items like a toothbrush, dish detergent and vinegar were recovered the next day.
Apparently, Holiday Inn refuses to refund the guest and only wanted to replace the mangoes that were stolen. The guest remains without his cell phone and is concerned that the Revenue Canada letters could be used for an identity theft ring against guests staying at the hotel - So if you become a victim of theft at Toronto's main downtown Holiday Inn expect that management will compensate you for much more than the commercial value of a mango.
The guest posted a review of the hotel on TripAdvisor and talked about the incident.
He tells us that his room was completely cleared when he came back in the late afternoon.
I asked for a late check out because I had too much stuff to move out of the hotel quickly. By the time I came back in the late afternoon the room was cleared.
He talks about being offered only a sweat pant bottom by the client services when he enquired about his stuff.
Then I asked client services staff in the lobby the whereabouts of all my stuff that was in the room. They came back with only a sweat pant bottom.
He lists the stuff that went missing / were stolen.
Here's a short list of my stolen / missing stuff. These include my extra cell phone that I had bought from Bell Canada; the extension cord; organic hayden mangoes; organic royal gala apples; natural toothpaste without flouride; special toothbrush I ordered online; large palmolive soap; Oasis brand mango, orange, banana smoothie; while vinegar and even Lays potato chips.
The guest advises people to itemize their belongings when they stay at this hotel.
I respectfully advise anyone staying at this hotel to itemize your personal belongings to ensure your stuff does not "go missing" and you ten become a victim of the atrocious customer service of this hotel's manager.
He further says that the hotel staff refused to offer him a refund.
I asked staff for a refund on my visit for the bad experience and they refused!
He says that it was the worst experience he had ever had in a hotel and also says that the hotel staff were rude to him.
This is the worst experience that I have ever had at a hotel; and the worst customer services that I have ever received from any company anywhere. In the face of my representation hotel staff was curt, rude and showed callous disregard.
The Canadian hopes that Holiday Inn reaches out to the guest to compensate him for this terrible experience.
WASHINGTON, July 19, 2016 Monsanto Co. has rejected Bayer Ags latest takeover bid, saying its board views the $125 a share offer as financially inadequate and insufficient to ensure deal certainty.
In a brief statement, the St. Louis-based company said it remains open to continued and constructive conversations with Bayer and other parties to assess whether a transaction that the board believes is in the best interest of Monsanto shareowners can be realized."
Last week, Germany-based Bayer offered to pay $125 a share for Monsanto, up from $122 a share offered in May, a bid valued at $62 billion. Monsanto, the worlds biggest producer of genetically modified seeds, also called that offer financially inadequate.
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Bayer also has proposed a $1.5 billion breakup fee if a merger doesn't work out. However, Bayer said last week it was confident in its ability to obtain all necessary regulatory approvals in a timely manner given complementary geographic and product portfolios.
Combining Monsanto with Bayer, which makes a wide variety of pesticides, would create an industrial and agricultural powerhouse with annual sales of $67 billion.
#30
For more news, go to: www.Agri-Pulse.com
Terra Incognita: ISIS, Nazism and Iraq Destruction
'To punish them for supporting ISIS, Mosul should be left under their control for another two years,' a man told me recently. He was familiar with the city before Islamic State conquered it in June of 2014. An ancient city, once home to Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, Yazidis, Shabaks, Kurds, Turkmen, Jews, Armenians, Mandeans and Sunni Arabs, after ISIS arrived its minorities were systematically cleansed and their places of worship and archaeological treasures destroyed. Now after two years of occupation, ISIS is beginning to weaken its hold on the remaining Sunni Arapopulation. But the horrors of these two years have destroyed more than 2,000 years of history. The mass rape, slavery and extermination of Yazidis in neighboring areas, was a genocide. It is the tip of the iceberg of what ISIS has wrought on this landscape. It was the evils of ISIS that made me feel I had to go to Iraq, and particularly to the Kurdish region, to document the war on this group. I'm returning from my third trip there now. What is always fascinating about the Kurdistan Regional Government, which is an autonomous area in Iraq with its own army called the peshmerga and a successful government, is how it is the mirror opposite of ISIS. That cannot be said about the areas of Iraq under the influence of Shia militias, some of whom have been involved in cleansing of Sunnis. In the Kurdish peshmerga there are Kakei units, Assyrian units, and Yazidis, all fighting side by side Kurdish Muslims against the extremists. On Sunday I watched a group of Arab refugees fleeing ISIS escape through a checkpoint manned by Kurds. The men and women were separated and the men were frisked and then allowed to proceed. As this scene transpired, with the sun setting behind the row of Kurdish soldiers, AK-47s held firmly by their chests, it conjured up the diametrically opposite image of what ISIS had done to Yazidis in August of 2014. Instead of helping them, the way Kurdish soldiers gave out water to fleeing Arab refugees from ISIS, the extremists had preyed on the weak and vulnerable. ISIS had also separated Yazidi men and women. Then they murdered the men and buried them in mass graves, and raped the women. How could that have happened in our modern time, in full visibility of drones and broadcast on social media? How is it that the abuses of women by ISIS still go on. A recent video of two overweight ISIS fighters joking while eating as their friend rapes his "slave" in the background, was recently released. On a tour of recently liberated Kakei villages on the Khazir frontline, a local Kakei leader showed the remains of temples and graveyards desecrated by the Islamists. The Kakei (sometimes spelled Kaka'is) are a small religious minority in Iraq and Iran. They fled ISIS en masse in August 2014 after hearing about the targeting of Christians and Yazidis. The systematic destruction of their holy sites and the way ISIS carved its logo into their houses and laced them with explosives was an attempt at cultural genocide. In each case of ISIS abuses the images of the Nazi period come to mind. When ISIS came to the Sunni areas of Iraq it was often greeted with cheers by locals who thought it would restore their pride in face of Shia power in Baghdad. But as with Hitler, they sought to harness the mob's popularity to direct it towards its intolerant impulses. ISIS created a radical new society, shutting women up in houses in all black robes, taking away basic daily-life enjoyments such as smoking, and forcing men to mosque. It organized its slave trade and mass murder not on spasms of spontaneous violence, but on carefully planned ethnic-cleansing and mass murder. Documents show that it wasn't some chaotic outburst of massacres, but a systematic genocide of minorities, much like the Nazi planning that went into the elimination of Jewish presence. What ISIS provoked was a massive response, not only among the Shia in central and southern Iraq, but among all the minorities targeted and among the Kurds. ISIS targeted women, so women have joined the peshmerga to fight. All of these minorities, most of whom did not have a military tradition the way the Kurds have had in fighting oppression, have signed up for war, much like the total mobilization of democracies and the Soviet Union to crush Nazism. COULD WE have predicted ISIS? Al-Qaida and other extremist groups targeted minorities after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In April 2007 twenty-three Yazidi workers were separated from their Christian and Muslim colleagues and machine-gunned near Mosul. In August 2007 the Yazidi village of Kahtaniya was hit by massive bombings, killing 400 people. In August 2009 truck bombs struck the Shabak village of Khazna, killing 34 people. In September 2009 the Kakei village of Wardak was bombed and 25 murdered. In June 2014 Kurds were targeted by bombs in Tuz Khurmato, killing 28. In 2004 bombings targeted churches in Mosul and in 2008 numerous Christians were executed in attacks in Mosul. There was a clear progression in intolerance and mass murder leading to ISIS in Iraq. This is similar to how everyday anti-semitism and hatred of Jews helped lay the foundations for mass society accepting Nazism. The ability of many in places like Mosul to turn their backs on persecutions of their neighbors in 2014, is also similar to the way many people were quiet collaborators with Nazism. There is also quiet collaboration in Western countries. When I posted a video over the weekend of a peshmerga firing a sniper rifle at ISIS positions, one American intellectual commented that it was "imperialism." Imperialism to defend against ISIS? To defend minorities, women, to fight against intolerance? There has been a quiescence in almost all wealthy western states to the mass murder and cleansing of minorities in northern Iraq. There are no student movements protesting for these minorities, not one protest, or college-student-led campaign to aid the victims. More than 5,000 Europeans are estimated to have traveled to join ISIS, which is more than ever protested against ISIS. Perhaps that reminds us of so many who willingly joined the Nazis as collaborators in the war, and the few who took up arms as partisans. It is marvelous that Kurds were able to blunt the ISIS blitzkrieg in 2014. But it is an enduring tragedy that Iraq has been permanently altered and its diverse fabric destroyed in these two short years. It is unlikely it will recover, even if some minorities return. There is no humanitarian plan for aiding these people, rebuilding their villages, restoring their temples and monuments. It illustrates that while you can defeat genocidal groups, such as what happened in Rwanda or Cambodia, you can never return what was lost.
July 18, 2016
A recent meeting between Israeli and Egyptian leaders has people wondering what kind of support the Egyptian public might have for normalizing relations between the countries and how normalization might affect the Palestinian issue.
Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sameh Shoukry met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu July 10 in Jerusalem. The meeting marked the first visit for an Egyptian foreign minister to Israel since 2007. Shoukry said he considered the visit significant to advancing the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians.
Mohamed El-Orabi, head of the Egyptian parliaments Foreign Relations Committee, said Shoukrys visit to Israel is part of Egypt's role in reviving the Palestinian issue. He told Al-Monitor that, as Egypt and Israel have a peace accord, there are naturally mutual visits between officials in Cairo and Tel Aviv.
Egyptian experts following up on the visit criticized the fact that Netanyahu welcomed Shoukry at his place in Jerusalem instead of criticizing the official meeting itself. They specifically pointed to photos posted on Facebook by Netanyahu's spokesman, Ofir Gendelman, showing Shoukry and Netanyahu watching the final game of the Euro Cup.
The Egyptian parliament had agreed in early March, with a majority of 465 out of 490 parliament members, to oust Tawfiq Okasha after he welcomed Israel's ambassador to Egypt, Haim Koren, in his home, sparking a wave of public criticism. Citizens of Okashas electoral district even signed a petition to withdraw his membership from the parliament. At that time, parliament members asserted in statements they made before the House of Representatives that Okasha was dismissed because the public rejects any normalization with Israel.
Orabi refused to equate the circumstances of Shoukrys visit to Jerusalem with Okashas welcoming of Koren at his home. He noted that Shoukry and Netanyahus meeting was based on instructions from the political leadership and cannot be compared with what Okasha did. Okasha discussed the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam issue with Koren and proposed supplying 1 billion cubic meters (265 billion gallons) of Nile waters to Israel. Orabi believes that this is a national security matter for Egyptians and that Okasha shouldnt have brought it up.
Noha Bakr, who teaches international relations at the American University of Cairo, noted that during the period around 1981, at the end of the rule of former President Anwar Sadat and the beginning of President Hosni Mubaraks rule, there was public normalization between Egypt and Israel, especially regarding agriculture and Israeli tourism in Egypt. However, since the public was not interested in advancing the normalization process, "both countries stuck to the legal aspect of the peace accord, security coordination, diplomatic missions and some rare official visits.
Egyptians who have lived through wars will always consider Israel the Zionist enemy, said Bakr, who noted that many Egyptians also sympathize with the Palestinian cause. She asserted that some Egyptians, however, are being influenced by what appears to be some media outlets' waning sympathy for the Palestinians.
Souraya El Badaoui, a professor in the faculty of communications at Cairo University, told Al-Monitor, Some Egyptian media channels broadcast messages that undermine Egyptians sympathy for the Palestinian cause. This is an attempt to raise future generations on reconciling with Israel. These messages have not influenced the elderly in Egypt, who were subject to media rhetoric that described Israel as the enemy for more than six decades.
The media seems to take its cues from the current political system, she said. She asserted that rhetoric on most Egyptian channels leans toward more coordination with Israel at the expense of the Palestinian cause. This can be explained by possible political interests that favor the Israeli-Egyptian rapprochement and widen the horizons of the peace accord. She expressed her fears that young people who are not well-aware of the nature and history of the Palestinian cause might change their perspective due to the media rhetoric.
She added that Israel is taking advantage of social media channels to influence Arab youths opinion, while an Arab counterbalance seems completely absent. She noted that while she was supervising a research thesis about young people's opinion of normalizing relations with Israel, she found that some welcomed it.
Badaoui said those youngsters are under the influence of the "global citizenship" notion linked to tolerance and brotherhood despite religious differences and conflicts between nations.
Ammar Ali Hassan, a researcher at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, believes most Egyptians are still in solidarity with the Palestinian popular struggle, be they leftist groups or Islamist organizations. He told Al-Monitor that this solidarity appears in the wake of each Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people. But he believes the Muslim Brotherhoods rise in Egypt in 2011 and the belief that Hamas is a branch of it in the Gaza Strip have given Egyptian media outlets a chance to attack Hamas in the framework of their constant attack on the Brotherhood.
Hassan added that many Egyptians were affected by the media rhetoric attacking Hamas, especially after pro-government journalists on Egyptian media outlets linked the party to terrorist groups in the Sinai Peninsula, and Minister of Interior Magdy Abdel Ghaffar accused Hamas members of assassinating the public prosecutor, Hisham Barakat, in 2015. Hassan said the rhetoric used nationalist sentiment to portray Hamas as Egypts enemy
Nevertheless, Hassan believes that Egyptians do not want relations with Israelis. However, they are afraid of another war with Israel, like the four previous ones they suffered through. Therefore, they now realize the importance of official relations for them and Israelis alike.
July 19, 2016
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip After failing to persuade Israel to lift its siege on the Gaza Strip, Turkey is taking steps to help Gaza resolve its 10-year-old electricity crisis.
In exchange for normalizing relations with Israel in June, Turkey pledged to provide an economic projects package to Palestinians that includes establishing a power plant in Gaza. Toward that end, a delegation of eight Turkish energy experts, accompanied by Turkey's ambassador to the Palestinian Authority (PA), Mustafa Sarnic, arrived July 12 in Gaza to be briefed on the electricity crisis by the Palestinian Energy and Natural Resources Authority (PENRA) and to study proposed solutions.
The delegation had met with different PA officials and others the day before in Israel to address the crisis. Turkey's state-run Anadolu Agency revealed that the Turkish delegation suggested during the meeting, as it has before, sending an electricity vessel to Gaza's shores, but Israel has yet to respond.
Ahmet Varol, a leader in Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the AKP official in charge of Gaza affairs, told Al-Monitor, "The Turkish project to generate electricity in Gaza has begun to be implemented on the ground. Several Turkish officials and experts have arrived to the Palestinian territories to inspect the problem and study the proposed solutions to be raised to the Turkish leadership."
The project will take a year or two to be fully implemented, Varol said.
"The responsibility lies now squarely on the shoulders of the Israelis, who might seek to put a spoke in the wheel of implementation, because all the infrastructure and construction materials for the establishment of the power station will enter Gaza through Israel," he added.
Varol further stated that successive and clear steps are expected to be taken in Gaza in a bid to alleviate the Israeli blockade, through Turkish projects, mainly a solution to the electricity crisis. He stressed that Turkey has not renounced its demand that Israel lift its Gaza blockade. Varol added that getting the blockade lifted will require the PA, the Arab countries and Turkey to use a firm hand with Israel.
The electricity problem in Gaza emerged in 2006 when Israel bombed and destroyed parts of Gaza's only power plant, causing a blackout in the majority of cities and camps and depriving more than 700,000 citizens of electricity for many days.
The plant has been operating at less than 50% of its original capacity since it was bombed. Israeli and Egyptian power lines provide some electricity, but all in all, the Gaza Strip receives a total of 212 megawatts per day while it needs 400 megawatts. Electricity is available for only 12 hours a day.
"The PA has made several proposals to the Turkish delegation, some of which are instant solutions and other strategic, in a bid to overcome the electricity crisis," Fathi al-Sheikh Khalil, the deputy chairman of PENRA in Gaza, told Al-Monitor.
The immediate solutions include supplying the power plant with the necessary fuel to operate at full capacity; it needs 500 tons of fuel per day to run the four generators in the plant. However, the Ministry of Finance in Ramallah imposes taxes of 200% on PENRA in Gaza for the fuel it buys from Israel, making it possible to purchase only 200 tons of fuel per day, enough to run two generators only, Sheikh said.
Other quick solutions include increasing the power line supply from Israel and accelerating the setup of the natural gas pipeline from Israel to the Gaza power station, which Qatar offered to finance a year ago.
One strategic solution the PA proposes is to become part of the Eight Countries Electric Interconnection Project. This would link the Palestinian electricity grid in the Gaza Strip with the Arab network, Sheikh said. Another strategic solution would be to establish a new power plant capable of producing all the electricity needed in Gaza, which is what Turkey has been working on.
Khalil added that the Turkish delegation has been studying the possibility of expanding and repairing the current power plant.
Turkey's official news organization, TRT, reported July 12 that the delegation will submit a detailed report to Turkish Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Berat Albayrak on the production, transmission and distribution of energy, the Gaza infrastructure problems and what could be achieved in the short, medium and long terms. In turn, the minister will present the report to the Turkish government and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. A road map will then be put forward for implementing approved proposals.
Amjad Shawa is the director of the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations Network (PNGO), which was among the mediators when the Palestinian internal parties met about the electricity crisis. Shawa told Al-Monitor, "The electricity bill in the Gaza Strip is the highest in the world, standing at 0.6 kwh per 1 shekel [about 26 cents]. Yet, electricity outages are frequent and widespread in Gaza." He urged a focus on permanent and swift solutions to save time, effort and money to resolve the crisis.
Shawa pointed out that any effort undertaken by local or international parties to end the electricity crisis will face several obstacles, most importantly the Israeli blockade, which is at the basis of the dilemmas plaguing the Gaza Strip.
He expressed hope that future efforts will focus on alternative energy, to liberate Palestinians from Israeli restrictions on electricity. He also called on the PA in Ramallah to cancel any taxes levied on the supply of alternative energy equipment to Gaza.
Gazans, who have become fed up with the electricity problem, are no longer buying any talks about solutions to the crisis until they are effectively implemented. Several promises and proposals have been made before such as the one to build a gas pipeline from Israel to Gaza with Qatari fundings but none of them has seen the light of day.
July 19, 2016
As July 15 was coming to an end in Tehran, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was on the phone with his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu, whose government was under the threat of being overthrown by a military coup. Meanwhile, Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Irans Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), was on another line with security officials in Ankara. All the while, Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force, Irans regional military arm, was busy pursuing and reviewing various scenarios that might emerge.
Its not a secret anymore, an Iranian official told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. Zarif, Shamkhani and Soleimani were executing higher orders. The whole establishment was too concerned. Turkey is a neighboring state. President [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan and his government are strong partners of Iran. Our nations enjoy strong brotherly ties, so its the least we can do to show solidarity and try to offer any help they might need in such critical times.
Within hours after the coup attempt began late July 15, the SNSC convened to discuss developments in Turkey. Following the meeting, which was chaired by President Hassan Rouhani, Shamkhani publicly condemned the coup attempt, telling local media outlets, We support Turkey's legal government and oppose any type of coup either [initiated] domestically or supported by foreign sides. Shamkhani said, What determined the fate of developments in Turkey were the will and presence of the [Turkish] nation and the vigilance of political parties, whose contribution thwarted this coup. Shamkhani concluded, Our stance is not exclusive to Turkey either. We have pursued the same stance in Syria too. Our position toward all regional countries is that we always prefer people's votes [to decide governments] rather than tribal, sectarian and hereditary governments, and this means democracy."
A coup in Turkey isnt something Iran can tolerate, another Iranian politician told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. Its true that there are differences over Syria, and sometimes in Iraq. Yet the fact is that there is no direct problem between Iran and Turkey; on the contrary, [bilateral] relations are always advancing for the better. Besides, Iran is opposed to any kind of change by force, and especially when the government [in question] is democratically elected. The Iranian politician added, The most important thing is that this experience [the coup attempt] might be an opportunity for Mr. Erdogan to understand the situation in neighboring Syria.
Indeed, multiple Iranian officials, including Ali Akbar Velayati foreign policy adviser to Irans Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei brought up Syria in their condemnation of the coup attempt in Turkey. While condemning the coup, Velayati a former foreign minister said he hopes the Turkish government will respect the views and votes of the Syrian people and allow them to decide their own government. It was a clear message from Iran to Turkey regarding Syria and the future of the struggle in the region. For five years now, Iranian officials have on repeated occasions stated that they have been trying to engage the Turks on a path to address the situation in Syria, and while unsuccessful, have never given up on this approach.
But why is Iran so concerned about the coup attempt in Turkey?
The stability of the region would have been seriously threatened if the coup attempt had succeeded. Turkey is a major player. Besides, there is the fear that such a move might trigger internal strife, an Iranian official told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. He explained that given the past five bloody years in the region, any such development in Turkey will shake the whole region in addition to Europe, Iran and the Caucasus. The Iranian official added, Besides the already shaken Arab countries, what about the [various] ethnic groups within Turkey? Has anyone thought about what they might do?
Some conservative figures and journalists in Tehran have shown a different reaction toward development in Turkey, influenced mainly by the crisis in Syria.
It was clear that theres a gap between the street and the government with respect to what was going on in Turkey," a conservative Iranian political figure told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. Many whose understanding of the region is influenced by the war in Syria think the fall of Erdogan would have been a positive development not only in Iran but also in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. In this vein, the Iranian political source said that many within this camp were surprised to see the Iranian government reacting before any other government in the whole world and backing the legitimate [Turkish] government.
It is important to bear in mind the other important reasons why Iran sees the security and stability of Turkey as pivotal to its own national security. With an Islamic-oriented government in power in Ankara, bilateral relations have improved in the past decade, paving the way for common ground despite differences over regional developments. The latter has been possible thanks to Iranian-Turkish proximity in terms of grander objectives and also similarities in their ways of thinking. Indeed, at the height of the nuclear-related sanctions on Iran, Turkey played a vital role in easing the pressure on its eastern neighbor. Erdogan certainly paid the price for the holes he was accused of creating in the web of sanctions imposed on Iran through what came to be known as the "gold-for-oil scheme" even while economic ties between the two countries greatly expanded in the sanctions era. With the implementation of the nuclear deal, the two countries now plan to triple their trade volume to $30 billion.
So, beside its public condemnations, did Iran play a role in directly thwarting the coup? Did it, for instance, share intelligence that helped Erdogan preserve his reign? Al-Monitor put forward this question to a senior Iranian official who was in direct contact with Turkish officials during the hours of the coup attempt. His answer was short but to the point: No.
Another Iranian official saw parallels between the successful coup against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 and this year's coup attempt in Turkey. The official told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, What we know is that this move was triggered by foreign hands. We went through the same in the past, and because Mr. Erdogan is today looking forward to playing a better role in the region, they want him down. The Iranian official said, There was a message that was conveyed to Turkish security officials: Dont leave the streets. This coup might be made up of several waves; it happened in Iran in 1953. When the first coup failed, they had another one ready and they succeeded.
July 19, 2016
In a phone conversation July 18, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani congratulated Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the people of Turkey for pushing back against a coup attempt by members of the military.
Fortunately in this coup detat, the people of Turkey showed themselves to have a high political maturity and proved that methods of force have no place in the region, Rouhani said, according to the presidents website. We are happy that under the shadow of your good management and the resistance of the honorable Turkish people, we are witnessing the return of stability in a friendly country.
Rouhani continued, Stability and calm in Turkey will cause the reinforcement of stability and calm in the region. He added, We have no doubt that some great powers as well as terrorists do not want an Islamic country to have stability. He also stressed that the countries in the region should work together to eradicate terrorism. Rouhani said, This event was a test to identify your domestic and foreign friends and enemies.
Erdogan thanked Rouhani for the show of support, saying, Its possible tanks and guns may martyr a number of people, but they cannot bring down the ideals of a nation. He also said that while the country has returned to normal, We cannot think that everything is over.
Erdogan added, We are determined to resolve regional issues by joining hands with Iran and Russia, and with our efforts to return peace and stability to the region.
Erdogans comment about working with Russia in the region is perhaps the most surprising given the events of the last year. In November 2015, Turkish jets shot down a Russian jet that was flying over the Syria-Turkey border. Turkey claimed that the jet entered its airspace. Russia, which at that time had recently intervened in the Syrian civil war and was conducting air raids against opposition groups, denied the claim.
As a result of the downing of its plane, Russia severed relations with Turkey. In June, seven months after the event, Erdogan sent a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin expressing condolences for the death of the Russian pilot. In a bizarre twist, the Turkish pilots who downed the Russian jet were arrested as being involved in the coup attempt.
Turkey has been one of the main sponsors of Syrias opposition groups. It is unclear how Russia, Iran and Turkey could work together to bring stability in the region when they are on opposing sides in the regions bloodiest war.
Despite being on opposing sides in Syria, Iran and Turkey have continued to maintain their economic ties. According to a retired Turkish general and former head of intelligence for Turkeys gendarmerie, Hasan Atilla Ugur, had the coup succeeded, it would have had a negative impact on Iran-Turkey relations. Without any doubt, they would have cut all relations, including diplomatic, trade and political ones, Ugur said of the coup leaders to Irans Tasnim News Agency in Istanbul.
Ugur said that a cleric residing in the United States, Fethullah Gulen, was behind the coup and that his actions would have been at the service of America. Ugur is most well-known for fighting against Kurdish separatists in southeast Turkey and is the first person to interrogate Kurdistan Workers Party leader Abdullah Ocalan after his arrest. Ugur himself was previously arrested for a coup attempt and sentenced to 29 years, but he was released early.
July 19, 2016
ERBIL, Iraq Almost four months into the launch of the Ninevah Liberation Operation, Iraqi forces managed to secure a major gain July 9 by capturing the strategic Qayyarah air base in the southern countryside of Ninevah province. The victory is expected to invigorate the Iraqi offensive in this key northern province, the location of Mosul, the largest city controlled by the Islamic State (IS).
The Ninevah offensive, which began in late March, has been largely characterized by slow progress and has at times appeared stalled, such as when the Iraqi forces struggled to capture al-Nasr, a village near Makhmur, during the first couple of months of the operation. The victory in Qayyarah will bring strategic benefit to the several layers of the Iraqi security forces and their local Sunni tribal allies by helping facilitate the delivery of military and logistical supplies via the air base.
It is an important, strategic air base, and we will use it in the future as a major base for operations in the area, Gen. Firas Bashar, the head of media relations at the Ninevah Operations Command, told Al-Monitor. This was also a major base used by IS for recruiting and training purposes and a launch site for operations.
By controlling the air base and the surrounding area, the Iraqis are now also in control of the road linking Mosul to the IS-held territories of Shirqat and Hawija, in Salahuddin and Kirkuk provinces, respectively. The Qayyarah facility, previously called Saddam Air Base, was captured by Iraqi forces led by the elite counterterrorism and army units approaching from the direction of Salahuddin province, to the south, Bashar said.
Michael Knights, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy specializing in Iraqi military and security affairs, told Al-Monitor that Qayyarah will give the US-led coalition a base that can easily be fortified and developed to hold US artillery and most importantly helicopters.
Qayyarah is close enough to Mosul to ensure that the United States can have advisers in the forward headquarters executing the Mosul battle and also for US artillery and helicopters to provide direct support to the battle, said Knights. Qayyarah now has a secure line of supply across the Tigris to Erbil airport, so it can serve as a supply base too.
Although many have raised doubts about the ability of the Iraqi security forces to undertake the challenging task of expelling IS from Mosul, Knights spoke of the Iraqi military's powerful recovery with its victories in Ramadi, Fallujah and Tikrit without much involvement by the Shiite paramilitary units, which are largely backed by neighboring Iran.
The Iraqi forces have now managed to cross the Tigris River in the area between the towns of Makhmur and Qayyarah, in southern Ninevah, and are currently battling the extremist organization on the western side of the river with the aim of liberating the town of Qayyarah after having seized the air base.
After capturing the Qayyarah air base and other areas, we are certainly in a far stronger and better position now than we were in the past, Bashar said. IS fighters have been experiencing a major loss of morale, and our force's fighting capabilities are much better than theirs.
The importance of this area in the Ninevah countryside in no way compares to the city of Mosul, the place where IS declared the establishment of a caliphate in late June 2014. Iraqi forces are likely to experience a far tougher battle for Mosul, Iraq's second-largest urban area, with more than 1 million residents remaining there, and IS' prized possession in the country. The jihadist organization is said to already be preparing for a final showdown with Iraqi forces, planting bombs and digging trenches around the city.
Another important issue is gaining the trust of the local population in Ninevah. When IS and a number of other Sunni insurgent groups took control of Mosul in June 2014, they were largely welcomed by residents who were fed up with the daily discrimination they were experiencing at the hands of the Iraqi security forces under then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government.
Aware of the past tensions between the province's civilian population and the security forces, Iraqi officials are trying hard to win the hearts and minds of Mosul's population ahead of an eventual charge toward the Sunni Arab-dominated city.
Your army has come to liberate you from the filth of IS, and you will only see respect, appreciation and good treatment from [the Iraqi army], Defense Minister Khaled al-Obeidi told Mosul's residents in a reassuring audio message released July 13. And do not pay attention to the rumors spread by the hateful and the grudging. The goal is liberating you and protecting your lives and properties.
July 19, 2016
On July 17, the results of the internal Arab Balad Party elections were made public: Knesset member Haneen Zoabi was pushed to an unrealistic place on her party list. Just 24 hours later, the Knessets Constitution, Law and Justice Committee convened to vote on the suspension bill, also known as the Zoabi bill, toward its final ratification in the plenum during its second and third readings.
Following the elections in her party, Zoabi will probably not serve in the next Knesset and may even conclude her political activities. It turns out that Zoabi succeeded in creating pockets of resistance and anger due to her provocative methods even in her own party. Speaking on condition of anonymity, one of her opponents within the Joint List (unified slate of predominantly Arab parties) said that her irresponsible and unwise behavior not only did nothing to strengthen her within the faction, but caused the faction irreversible damage. Evidently she will be forced to pay a political price for her behavior.
The Balad Partys electorate voted on a list of party members in June, and the factions political committee publicized the results July 17. Zoabi was pushed down from third to fifth place on the partys list, which effectively puts her out of the running to be re-elected to the Knesset. But the damage has already been done: Zoabi has inflicted great harm on the Joint List and on Jewish-Arab relations in general.
Zoabi was first elected to the 18th Knesset in 2009, and during her three terms in office she became a red flag for the Jewish public as well as for a broad swath of the Arab-Israeli sector, which views her as being responsible for deepening the widening chasm between Jews and Arabs. Most of the members of the Joint List and its activists objected to her modus operandi mainly her statements more than her actions. However, they found themselves forced to defend her, if only to maintain the integrity of the Joint List and its political future. Zoabis antics played into the hands of right-wing Knesset members, and the suspension bill will be wielded as a threat against Arab members of the Knesset even after Zoabi leaves the legislature.
The suspension bill initiated by Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked with the support and encouragement of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu states that the Knesset can suspend a member from his or her term in office with a three-fourths majority of 90 votes. When the bill passed its first reading in February, Balad Chairman and Knesset member Jamal Zahalka warned, If they start to expel Arabs as the laws supporters hope, the Arab public will boycott the elections and the Knesset will be for Jews only. Then we will found our own parliament and seek world recognition with the claim that we are a minority in danger. We wanted to be in the Knesset, but the tyranny of the majority prevents us.
And this is, indeed, the question that worries the members of the Joint List. How will they act, if and when the Knesset activates Zoabis suspension procedure? On the one hand, they oppose her behavior and resent her for putting them all in the same sinking boat as far as the public is concerned. But on the other hand, it will be difficult for them to stay mum when faced with a law that will enable suspension of a Knesset member from their faction; they will be forced to adopt some kind of dramatic act. The Joint List, which was stitched together from three Arab parties in order to survive the hike in the electoral threshold in the last election in March 2015, may well spiral into an internal storm that will end with the coalition falling apart.
The Arab members of the Knesset and faction leaders have not yet decided what they will do if Zoabis suspension process commences. But it is possible that they will soon be forced to make a fateful decision due to a Knesset member who has been pushed to an impracticable spot in her faction (with Balad having three of the Arab List's 12 Knesset seats).
Publicly, most of the Joint Lists Knesset members and activists argue that the suspension bill is racist legislation directed against them by the right in Israel and especially by the prime minister. But in conversations with Al-Monitor, they also admit that Zoabi has brought this on herself and tragically on them as well. Some even express relief and joy that the Zoabi albatross will soon be removed from around their necks.
In response to a request from Al-Monitor, Joint List Chairman Ayman Odeh said his party's members have not yet decided what to do. In the event that one of the Knesset members is actually suspended from the Knesset, we will have to examine all our options. That includes turning to the courts and the international community, he said. Odeh accused Netanyahu of spearheading the suspension bill with a clear goal in mind: to alienate and anger the Arab public to the point that it will boycott the next elections. Then the Arab sector would no longer constitute a political power capable of tipping the political scale and bringing down the government. (Arabs eligible to vote make up about 15% of the total number of Israelis eligible to vote hence, in theory, 18 Knesset seats.) But even Odeh knows that the mission he faces now is to find the magic formula that will keep the Joint List intact, following the crisis it would undoubtedly face after the bill is conclusively passed into law by the Knesset.
Ever since the Joint List was created, the alliance and faction heads composing it have made every effort to maintain its makeup and unity, despite differences of opinions, the diverse viewpoints and ideologies of its constituents and the personal-religious tensions among its members Muslim religious and secular. Until now this has been accomplished with great success. Nevertheless, the suspension bill may well be the hardest test the Joint List has faced so far.
It is likely that the Balad Party, despite the ambivalence of its members toward Zoabi, will demand that its alliance partners withdraw from the Knesset and seek international assistance from other countries in its struggle against the law. By contrast, the members of other factions Hadash, the United Arab List and Taal who are less committed to Zoabi will probably limit themselves to perfunctory lip-service denunciations in order to preserve the integrity of the Joint List and the future of the Arab parties.
Thus, the key now lies in the hands of the Balad Party; it will determine the height of the flames and its actions will determine whether the Joint List will survive, or whether it will fall apart because of a Knesset member who might be too provocative even for Balad's own taste.
July 18, 2016
The request for a travel permit seemed terribly innocent. An international filmmaker was debuting a film about Israeli and Palestinian peace activists and wanted the Palestinian activist to be present at the premier in West Jerusalem. But the Israeli authorities denied Shifa al-Qudsi's request.
In an interview with Al-Monitor, Qudsi expressed perplexity, though she wasnt totally surprised. I have received permits to visit my brother in jail in Israel, so why do they deny me a chance to attend a peace documentary? she commented in a phone call with Al-Monitor from her home in Tulkarm.
Stephen Apkon and Andrew Young's Disturbing the Peace, about a brave group of Israelis and Palestinians, was screened July 14 at the Jerusalem Cinematheque. The film features four Israelis and four Palestinians, including Qudsi, who are part of Combatants for Peace, a nonviolent organization originally made up exclusively of members who had participated in the conflict as armed combatants on one side or the other.
Udi Gur, an Israeli who did his mandatory military service but refused to carry out his reserve duties in the occupied territories, told Al-Monitor that he joined Combatants for Peace because he wanted to act for change. Israeli society has to change, he said. "The left has to find a leader. The Israeli media must stop its constant dehumanization of Palestinians.
Gur, however, is not confident that Israel will transform anytime soon. He expressed higher expectations from the outside world than from his fellow Israelis. He said, Strong pressure needs to come from outside. If we are able to continue to participate with Palestinians in a nonviolent movement that resists occupation, we can convince the world that Palestinians have a just cause.
The objective that Gur and other combatants have agreed to and has defined the movements vision by is a total and unambiguous commitment to ending the occupation. There is no military solution, Gur added. "No amount of force that one side can use to stop this cycle of violence.
Riyad al-Halees, from the southern West Bank town of Yatta, calls himself a Palestinian soldier for peace. He told Al-Monitor, When I heard about Yonatan Shapira and other Israeli pilots' refusal to bomb Palestinians in Gaza, I wanted to meet with him and others to try and build bridges for peace. In a powerful protest move, 27 Israeli pilots signed a statement in 2003 that they would not participate in the bombing raids against Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
Halees, who was shot during the second intifada in 2001 and left handicapped, said that what makes Combatants for Peace unique is its Israeli and Palestinian wings, both committed to ending the occupation. Over the years we had a lot of discussions about the situation, but we agree that the occupation is the basis of violence, and we agreed that as soldiers for peace, we wanted to be armed with justice and freedom on the basis of international law.
The total commitment to nonviolence is what differentiates this one from other Israeli-Palestinian groups. In the two years I was in hospital being treated, I learned a lot about Ghandi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. They produced good results, Halees said.
He added that Israeli and Palestinian members use personal stories to speak out against occupation. We were Palestinians who were injured during resistance or spent time in Israeli jails and Israeli soldiers who refused to serve in the occupied territories. We created joint groups that were geographically close: Nablus and Tel Aviv, Ramallah and Jerusalem, Hebron and Beer Sheva. We carried out small demonstrations to express our resistance to the occupation.
Halees is proud of the over 700 people who showed up July 15 for the Freedom March near the Beit Jala-Jerusalem tunnel.
Avner Wishnitzer, an Israeli founding member of Combatants for Peace, echoed Halees pride in the success of the groups activities despite so much opposition on both sides. Our biggest achievement is the very existence of our community and the fact that we are able to maintain resistance to occupation despite the pressures from both sides together, he told Al-Monitor.
Sami Awad, the executive director of the Bethlehem-based Holy Land Trust, a Palestinian nongovernmental organization committed to advocating nonviolence, spoke at the rally near Beit Jala. Later in an interview with Al-Monitor, Awad praised Combatants for Peace, describing its members as genuine supporters of peace and saying, "Combatants for Peace is a network of Palestinians and Israelis who are not only engaging in dialogue, but are committed to nonviolent activism to bring the Israeli military occupation to an end. For me, they represent real commitment to achieving peace."
Also attending the rally were two combatants from Northern Ireland who had come to show support for Palestinians and Israelis. Alistair Little and Jerry Foster, a Catholic and a Protestant who fought in Northern Ireland on opposing sides, posted a message on the Combatants for Peace Facebook page, You are not alone in your struggle. Our journey is to humanize each other and understand each other. You are an inspiration to the international community.
While Qudsi was unable to watch the documentary she starred in at the Jerusalem Cinematheque, she will have a chance to see its July 21 screening against the Israeli wall built in Beit Jala. Speaking to Al-Monitor, Qudsi repeated what she has been saying ever since her release from a six-year prison term in 2008: that she is committed to peace, and like so many other Palestinians and Israelis, she is sick of bloodshed and violence.
I am against violence against anyone, whether Israeli or Palestinian. This is not what God wants. We need to do everything we can to save human beings that God has created, she said.
Halees and Gur said that while they have in the past focused on highly committed members, they now feel that the time has come to expand their activities and increase their numbers so that they can have much more impact in reaching their joint goal of ending the occupation.
Editor's note: This article has been updated since its initial publication.
July 18, 2016
NASIRIYAH, Iraq The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) added Iraq's Ahwar marshes, including the sites of Uruk, Ur and Tell Eridu, to its World Heritage List on July 17. Iraq has many other sites deserving of such recognition, among them the ancient Sumerian city of Lagash.
A desert wind has been blowing for hundreds of years over the hills of Lagash, today's al-Hiba, in al-Dawayah district, north of Nasiriyah. There have been intermittent excavations since the city was first excavated by a group of German archaeologists led by Robert Koldewey in 1877, but the majority of the city's ruins remain buried beneath sand.
What distinguishes the site from many others is that it extends over a large area, some 15 square miles. The city of Lagash was the political capital of the Lagash city-state. The site is considered an archaeological treasure in the Middle East.
Amer Abdul Razzaq, the director of the archaeology department of Dhi Qar province and lecturer in the faculty of archaeology at Baghdad University, told Al-Monitor, Lagash is one the most important Sumerian cities in the Shinar plain in Iraq, where the first Sumerian cities emerged more than 4,000 years ago. Lagash was the most important one founded by King Ur in 1900 B.C., with its temples and palaces.
He said, The excavation works have revealed valuable artistic, literary, cultural and religious relics, most important, the mud paintings with cuneiform writings by the thinker and writer Dudu and other relics highlighting the beginning of writing and the invention of the pottery wheel and schools.
Abdul Razzaq added, Only 5% of the city had been excavated, as work came to a halt because of the Iraq-Iran War [1980-1988]. The last archaeological mission had been in the 1980s. At the moment, there is a French mission working in the religious center of Lagash, Girsu. Indeed, a French archaeological mission resumed excavations at the site on Nov. 5, 2015. In 2013, French Ambassador Deni Gauer visited Lagash and promised that his government would support further work at the location.
Unfortunately, the site is also being excavated by thieves, who are well aware of the lax and rudimentary security measures over this vast area. Abdul Razzaq said, There are only 13 guards at the religious capital in the city and the political center. The tribes living in the vicinity of the city have noticed the illegal excavation works and thefts at the site and have been keen on chasing after smuggling gangs and preventing them from entering the site. In 2009, a smuggler was arrested in possession of eight pots dating to the reign of Lagash Prince Gudea, who ruled circa 2144-2124 B.C. One of the jars bore the Sumerian inscription I am the prince of Lagash City, Gudea.
While passing through the area, some nomads and shepherds come across antique pieces and relics that emerge without excavation, due to soil erosion and rainwater, Alaa Kouli, a journalist and writer who lives in nearby Shatrah, told Al-Monitor. Much of the excavating at the site is illegal.
The Dhi Qar Council reported on its website in 2015 that mud paintings had been stolen from the site before eventually ending up in museums. Some 30,000 mud slabs with cuneiform writing have been found in a temple.
A string of light brown hills welcomes visitors to the site. They are the remains of the 50 temples of the city of Lagash and date back to the Gutian era, during the reign of King Gudea, the most famous [king], who revived Sumerian literature and humanities, Abdul Razzaq said. It is not easy to access the city of the Lagash given the surrounding marshes. Excavators usually use a small boat to get to the site.
In July 2003, Henry Wright, a professor of Near Eastern archaeology at the University of Chicago, visited Dhi Qar province, which is home to hundreds of archaeological sites. He called the province a relic museum that needed local efforts backed by financial and technical international support to rehabilitate the area's heritage, which he said did not belong to Iraqis only, but to all peoples and histories.
Mouna al-Ghurabi, a parliamentarian from Dhi Qar, told Al-Monitor that Western archaeologists, international financial and technical organizations and tourism companies will not invest in Lagash and other archaeological sites across Iraq until security is established in the country, In Baghdad, there are several exploration missions that have showed a willingness to start working in Lagash and other archaeological areas, but their decision depends on security stability, she said.
The Iraqi government ought to develop the monument protection police, increase the number of guards deployed at the sites and install sensors and surveillance cameras at archaeological sites to help prevent the widespread theft of antiquities, she added. Ghurabi also criticized the lack of interest in relics and archaeological monuments in the community, particularly in al-Hiba, as there are no voluntary cultural awareness campaigns to raise awareness about the importance of the city and the need to preserve it.
Community-based efforts and lobbying through media and cultural events to communicate with international organization, such as museums, universities and institutes, could also help arrive at possible ways and means to save Iraq's relics.
July 19, 2016
Mohammad Karim Khudair, 13, quickly pushes his luggage trolley through the streets of Najaf. The small three-wheel trolley is loaded with the luggage of an Iranian tourist who came to the city to visit the Shrine of Imam Ali. Next to the bags, an elderly woman managed to squeeze herself onto the trolley.
Just like Khudair, many workers push their heavily loaded trolleys and race each other to the X-ray scanner at the checkpoint at the entrance of al-Sadeq Street in the old city of Najaf, 160 kilometers (100 miles) southwest of Baghdad.
These trolleys, pushed by men and children such as Khudair, fill the streets of the old city where vehicles are denied entry. This security setup forces visitors to rent trolleys to get their luggage delivered to their hotels or serve as a means of transportation for the elderly who cannot walk.
Khudair said that he came from the city of Samawah in al-Khoder region which is administratively part of the Muthanna province, 145 kilometers south of Najaf and that his father had sent him to Najaf to work, since he is the breadwinner in a family consisting of his parents, five younger siblings and himself.
Taleb Hamid, 40, said he came from al-Khoder region, too. He told Al-Monitor that he was forced to move to Najaf to work in order to support his large family following the drought that hit the agricultural lands in al-Khoder and in light of local agriculture's inability to compete with imported products.
Mortada Abed, 17, said he came to Najaf from the city of al-Diwaniyah in Qadisiyah province (33 kilometers east of Najaf) to work because there are no jobs in his hometown.
All the workers Al-Monitor spoke with said that many youths and men had left their cities to look for work in Najaf.
It is hard to verify the numbers because the local administration and the provincial council in Najaf do not possess any data on workers who came from outside the city.
Officials in both the local and provincial councils told Al-Monitor, We cannot count the number of those who enter the province. There is no way to find out whether these displaced people have left the city or are still working here, as millions visit the city each year.
These workers live and work under challenging circumstances, and some sleep on their own trolleys. After midnight in the old city, between al-Midan Square and the intersection between the old bus station and Abu Khamsin mall, a long line of trolleys are parked in front of the big hotels.
The men and children who try to make a living by providing services with trolleys sleep out in the open; they wake up at dawn to start their workday and return late at night. In the alleys of the old city, workers from out of town often sleep on the doorsteps of shops that are closed at night.
Mohammad Hussein Abu Saiba, a doctoral student in political science and the chairman of the Development Association for Political Sciences in Najaf, told Al-Monitor, These workers stay in large caravansaries near al-Hatef Street in Khan al-Mokhdar area, where the trolleys are parked at night and each worker sleeps on his own trolley. On holidays these workers sleep in the large tents that are set up to receive visitors, as well as in permanent tents set up by some political parties in front of their headquarters. These parties allow the workers to sleep there in order to protect the children among the workers.
Earlier this year, Najafs 3rd Emergency Regiment had required these workers to paint their trolleys silver and to wear matching outfits in order to allow them easy access to the caravansaries.
Abu Saiba was unable also to provide accurate figures and statistics on the numbers of these workers, but he thinks there are hundreds in Najaf.
Al-Monitor witnessed incidents where members from the emergency regiment, sometimes with reason and sometimes not, prevented many of these workers from entering the old city. Some workers were beaten by members of the security forces. A first lieutenant in one of the security units in the old city told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, Some of them are robbing the visitors.
On the causes of the problem, the Ministry of Planning conducted a study in 2010 monitoring the levels of poverty in Iraq in terms of basic needs, job opportunities and good health. The study showed that Muthanna and Qadisiyah provinces came in second and registered 44.3% in terms of the high level of poverty, followed by the province of Dhi Qar. A number of workers who Al-Monitor met in Najaf came from these provinces. Since this study, no other reports on the topic have been published by the ministry. However, the situation has gotten worse in recent years due to the economic crisis and ongoing war with the Islamic State.
A comprehensive study by Sulafa Tariq al-Shaalan published in her book Legal studies on Iraqi legislation says several reasons led to this state of poverty and to the decline of agricultural production, which has been deteriorating since 2003 in these provinces.
The government lifted agriculture subsidies, and the Coalition Provisional Authority issued decisions restricting Iraqi agricultural production and significantly reducing economic agricultural returns, causing a sharp decline in employment. This triggered workers from outside the holy cities to come to Najaf, for instance, in search of jobs, no matter how arduous, to provide for their families.
The thefts reported by some security force members as well as the risks that these working children may face reveal a deeper problem. Will these children and workers be dragged into committing offenses and misdemeanors in light of not having their families around and not having having proper care from the state?
July 18, 2016
One year after the signing of the comprehensive nuclear deal between Iran and the six world powers, a number of obstacles surrounding the landmark deal remain, most notably the remaining US sanctions on Iran that were not part of the deal. While Iran's top nuclear negotiators have been making media rounds selling the achievements of the deal to the Iranian public, which will be heading for voting booths in 10 months to elect a president, the delivery of the Russian S-300 long-range surface-to-air missile defense system stands out as one particular obstacle that has been removed as a result of the nuclear deal.
According to the Tasnim News Agency, the missiles for the S-300 have been shipped to Iran. In April, Iran's Foreign Ministry announced that the first phase of the delivery of the missile defense system had begun, just four months after implementation of the nuclear deal and one year after Russian President Vladimir Putin lifted the ban on the sale of the system as the result of the interim deal in the nuclear negotiations. On July 1, Brig. Gen. Farzad Esmaili, commander of the Khatam al-Anbia Air Defense Base, said the S-300 missile defense system would be fully operational by March 2017.
Tehran and Moscow had initially agreed to the S-300 deal in 2007, worth $800 million, but delivery was held up by UN Security Council resolutions prohibiting the sale of high-tech weapons to Iran. This led Iran to file a complaint with the International Court of Arbitration in Geneva.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who led the nuclear negotiations on behalf of Iran, spoke to Iranian television about the one-year anniversary of the deal. "If we want to give a grade to the BARJAM [the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action], in consideration of the time passed and international situation certainly, it will receive a good grade," Zarif said. "But if we want to give a grade to the method of implementation by the Americans, likely they will receive a low grade."
According to Zarif, some of the most significant accomplishments of the nuclear deal are that Iran's right to enrichment was recognized, UN Security Council resolutions against the country were removed and new sanctions against Iran were avoided. He added that in every agreement, most sides must leave happy, and there are no agreements where both sides acquire everything they want.
Abbas Araghchi, a nuclear negotiator and deputy foreign minister, spoke to the Young Journalists Club about some of the compromises Iran had had to make as a result of the nuclear deal. "No one can accuse us of making rogue decisions," Araghchi said. "On certain matters, red lines were moved [from one place to another], the first one being that all the sanctions would be removed. The Americans said that the administration cannot remove all the sanctions passed by Congress. If we would have insisted, it would have meant us not coming to an agreement. On two or three matters, the foreign minister [Zarif] gave reports to the supreme leader [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei], and the red lines were moved. It was not like this that we took rogue actions."
Araghchis statement coincides with comments made by Khamenei in March on the occasion of the Iranian New Year. During that speech, Khamenei said that Zarif had told him that during the nuclear negotiations, "We were not able to maintain some of the red lines."
July 19, 2016
Perhaps the hasty coup attempt in Turkey last week was doomed to fail. The leaders setting up a WhatsApp group to coordinate a major takeover was a sure indication of their unpreparedness.
The attempt began the night of July 15 and ended soon after. In the current tally, as of the morning of July 19, plotters had killed 60 police, three soldiers and 145 civilians. Some 100 also died among the coup forces. More than 6,000 soldiers were detained, including about 4,000 conscripts and about 2,000 ranked personnel, 15% with the rank of major or above. Among the detainees were 118 generals one-third of the all generals in the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK).
Of the detainees, about 2,400 soldiers were taken into custody in Ankara and 1,500 in Istanbul. As of July 19, about 60 of the detained generals had been questioned and arrested, and three were released. Mass detentions were not limited to the TSK: Some 8,000 police were suspended from their posts, and 4,000 more were detained from the Ministry of Interior, which includes the Gendarmerie Command and other government offices.
The basic reason the coup failed was its premature birth. How? First, the coup was planned for a later date but was moved up. Then the rescheduled coup, which was to have started at 3 a.m. July 16, was moved up yet again by five hours, to around 10 p.m. July 15, after the coup attempt was discovered.
Well-placed sources in Ankara who spoke to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity said coup forces were an assortment of members of the so-called Fethullah Gulen Terror Organization (FETO) secularists who oppose the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan; pragmatists who joined the plotters for career advancement and personal interests; soldiers who had to join under pressure or blackmail; and lower-ranking soldiers who couldnt defy orders because of the TSK's absolute-obedience culture. The plan failed because they took action before the planned time. Why did they act so hastily?
The primary reason was because they knew the forthcoming Supreme Military Council, which decides on promotions and appointments of TSK generals and admirals, was set to convene the first week of August. Last year, in an Aug. 3 article for Al-Monitor titled "Shakeup expected for Turkish military leadership," I had written that one of the most important missions of newly appointed Chief of General Staff Gen. Hulusi Akar would be to combat the Gulenists in the TSK, and that there were several lists circulating with names of such officers. The AKP government was favoring a purge of these officers, while the military command was advocating a phased, deliberate process based on solid evidence.
FETO partisans in the TSK had gotten away relatively unscathed from the 2015 council meeting, but there were sure signs that this year would be different.
Developments prior to the Supreme Military Council meeting this year seem to indicate that the divergence of views between the government and the military had been somewhat reconciled. Last week, during the military espionage hearings in Izmir, six serving officers were detained, including an admiral and two generals. Four of the detained officers were consequently arrested. In an earlier "military espionage case," also in Izmir, 359 defendants, including serving officers, were all acquitted of charges of keeping secret documents.
With the indictments in last week's Izmir espionage case, the Turkish judiciary was gearing up to target about 1,000 Gulenists in the TSK prior to the supreme council meeting. With so many detentions just before the meeting, the government was intending to compel the TSK command to carry out mass purges.
When the coup planners learned of that intention, they moved up the date to precede the council meeting. This turned out to be a suicidal move.
Why the night of July 15? Former four-star air force Commander Gen. Akin Ozturk, now accused of leading the coup, knew that the current head of the air force, Gen. Abidin Unal, and other key air force generals would all be at a wedding, which would give the air force freedom to act against the government.
Reports said the coup leaders had informed all participating units that they would launch operations at 5 a.m., and that as of 6 a.m. there would be a nationwide curfew.
Al-Monitors sources said coup leaders had planned to move at 3 a.m. to take over by 5 a.m., when people would be asleep and streets would be empty. But this didnt work. Around 4 p.m. July 15, 11 hours before the coup was to start, the national intelligence service MIT learned from radio and telephone intercepts of TSK personnel known to be Gulenists that some units were gearing up. MIT informed the chief of general staff at 5 p.m. At a meeting at the chief of general staff headquarters, officials decided to close Turkish air space to all flights as of 6 p.m. and bar military units from leaving their barracks. While that order was being written, Land Forces Commander Gen. Salih Zeki Colak was called to the general staff headquarters.
By 7 p.m., coup plotters realized that their plan was exposed and were able to take Akar hostage. When Akar refused for two hours to sign an order commanding all units to join the coup action and to go on TV to tell the nation that the army with its entire chain of command had taken over, they were further delayed. At the end, the plotters couldnt get Akar's signature, so they sent out an order signed by a brigadier general and launched their coup around 9:30 p.m. that is, 5 hours before the planned time. The first indication of the rash, reckless actions by the Istanbul wing of the coup was sending out small units commanded by junior ranks to streets on the pretense of exercising or fighting terror.
These officers who were trying to coordinate their action through WhatsApp made a monumental mistake of closing the two bridges over the Bosporus River when everybody was out enjoying Friday night and traffic was heavy. That is when all of Turkey realized a coup attempt was in the offing.
Meanwhile, the commander of the first army in Istanbul, Gen. Umit Dundar, and the commander of special forces, Maj. Gen. Zekai Aksakalli who could not be persuaded to join the coup publicly declared the coup was not a decision of the TSK chain of command, was illegal and had nothing to do with the army. Their statements were severe blows to the plotters. At 10 p.m., the coup leaders sent 12 F-16s to make low-altitude flights over Ankara and Istanbul, trying to intimidate people to remain at home. The planes' insane bombing of symbolic places such as the parliament building and presidential compound came when the plotters realized they had lost control.
Coup plotters had no set plans to control the airwaves. Unexpectedly at 11 p.m., Prime Minister Binali Yildirim appeared on TV to inform the public of the attempt, and then at 11:30 p.m., President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called in, urging the public to take to the streets against the coup. He repeated that call at 3 a.m. at Istanbul Ataturk Airport, bringing coup units face to face with an angry public marching into sensitive areas.
By then, the coup had disintegrated and its planners were looking for ways to save themselves.
Turkey has successfully driven through a critical curve. The question is, did democracy win with the collapse of the coup? We'll have to wait a bit to find out.
Meanwhile, in a communique issued July 19, the high command said the TSK had fought bravely against bloody assassins who did not deserve to be in honored uniforms of the country. It said, TSK, from its youngest conscript to its highest-ranking generals and admirals, are all at their posts, under orders of the state and nation.
One can only hope that the TSK will somehow regain its prestige, which is essential to the security and well-being of the country.
July 19, 2016
The military coup attempt against the Turkish government over the weekend fell flat as a deeply divided nation stood united in solidarity. The rare display of unity, including opposition parties and media outlets critical of the government, has offered a glimmer of hope that Turkeys long-standing polarization could be thawed to some extent. Yet any prospect of reconciliation and the fate of Turkeys crippled democracy remain uncertain in the wake of the unrest, with the final say resting with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Just days before the botched coup attempt, a heavyweight member of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) had made a remarkable appeal, saying that fence-mending deals with Russia and Israel should be followed with efforts to heal internal rifts. Now its time to multiply friends at home, AKP co-founder and former parliament Speaker Cemil Cicek said in early July, referring to Ankaras new slogan of more friends, less enemies in the region.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim lent support to Ciceks appeal, pledging on several occasions to expand the circle of friendship both at home and abroad. The premiers message was important, for he is known as a staunch Erdogan loyalist unlikely to utter anything the president disapproves of, and even less so to repeat it several times. Moreover, Erdogan who has a record of publicly contradicting and embarrassing ministers who cross the line kept silent on the issue, which seemed to suggest a tacit blessing.
In its 14-year rule under Erdogans leadership, the AKP has relied heavily on a policy of polarization, centered around an omnipresent enemy to be constantly fought and shown as a target to the party base. The enemies have varied. Today, chief among them are the followers of US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, held responsible for the coup attempt and branded a terrorist organization after a 12-year comradeship with the AKP. At other times, they have been the Gezi Park protesters or Kurdish militants and politicians who were once the governments partners in a settlement process. Opposition parties and critical media outlets have also taken their share of the onslaughts. This strategy has kept producing electoral victories for the AKP at the expense of alienating large segments of Turkish society, which remain highly demoralized, exasperated and gloomy over their future. In this context, the coup attempt has added to their gloom, exacerbating worries over democracy and the direction Turkey is heading.
Yet even those alienated quarters, including opposition parties and the press, stood up against the coup attempt. The AKP found its enemies standing by its side, despite all the repression they have suffered at government hands.
At an emergency parliamentary session on July 16, hours after the coup was suppressed, both Yildirim and parliament Speaker Ismail Kahraman acknowledged this wide support. Hailing the beginning of a new chapter, Yildirim said, I promise before the nation that well stick tightly to the spirit of unity that has emerged today. Opposition leaders, for their part, reasserted support for the government against the coup, while emphasizing democracy and the rule of law. Pleased by the show of solidarity, Erdogan called opposition leaders Kemal Kilicdaroglu and Devlet Bahceli to thank them no small gesture on his part in the toxic climate that has dominated the political scene.
Still, Erdogan has appeared less willing to sustain the message of reconciliation in the daily speeches he has been making to crowds of supporters who remain mobilized in the streets after coming out on the night of July 15, heeding the presidents appeal to confront the soldiers. Erdogan has lent his support to calls for reinstating the death penalty. Any legislative move in this direction threatens to open new political rifts, finish off what remains of Turkeys EU membership prospects and stoke popular fears over the countrys course.
Many are already appalled by scenes that unfolded during the coup attempt, as some who took to the streets seemed to be driven more by religious fervor than a resolve to defend democracy. Violent crowds mobbed soldiers, beating and whipping young conscripts who seemed clueless about what was going on. Some carried guns, many chanted Allahu akbar and some tried to march on Alevi neighborhoods, shouting inflammatory slogans. An Erdogan aide, meanwhile, suggested that gun-licensing rules should be loosened so that people could arm themselves against future coup attempts.
This anxiety was expressed as a question to Yildirim after a Cabinet meeting July 18. The premier cautioned against provocations and maintained his conciliatory message. Today is not a day to care about differences in attire, he said, in an apparent reference to conservative and secular lifestyles. Today is a day for unity and togetherness.
Yet tension and turmoil continue in the aftermath of the unrest. Along with the thousands of military officers arrested, thousands of judges and prosecutors, police officers and senior public servants have been removed from office in an ongoing purge targeting alleged Gulenists entrenched in the state. Where Turkey goes from here remains to be seen, but Erdogan is the undisputed power steering the wheel.
For Cicek, the direction the country should take is clear. My appeal is not a momentary or seasonal one. Its something that Turkey needs permanently, Cicek told Al-Monitor days before the coup attempt. We live in a difficult region, where divided nations can be easily [undermined]. Hence, barring those who take aim at the countrys peace and unity, people must be reconciled, on friendly terms and respectful with each other, regardless of their political convictions, faiths and ideas. Thats how civilized, modern societies are.
The veteran politician stressed that the prime minister shared his message and Turkish society in general is eager to see tensions defused. As far as I can see, everybody is hopeful on this issue. If we can have dialogue with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, then we can have dialogue with the leaders of Turkeys political parties as well. And when we used to have that dialogue, we accomplished great things, Cicek said, pointing to a series of EU-demanded reforms that the AKP had passed in cooperation with the main opposition in the early days of its rule.
Now, the necessity is even greater, he said. Compromise is not some weakness in faith or an ideological detour; its a must for coexistence.
July 18, 2016
Who was behind Turkeys bloody coup attempt, which cost more than 160 lives, saw the nations parliament bombed and brought the country to the brink of brutal military rule for the first time since 1983?
Since the first moment of the coup attempt, the government pointed to the Fethullah Gulen community, an Islamic sect with a clandestine network within the Turkish state. No wonder the coup plot was followed by a massive crackdown on Gulenists, as they are called, within the military, judiciary, police and other institutions. Many observers in the West, however, seem quite reluctant to accept that the Gulenists had anything to do with the coup, saying that there is no evidence. Some even suspect that the coup attempt might be a hoax by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, his version of the Reichstag fire.
There are two likely reasons for this skepticism: Lately Erdogan has pumped out many fantastical conspiracy theories, as I have criticized repeatedly in Al-Monitor. Also, Erdogans deepening authoritarianism rightly concerns people about Turkey, and many observers think that this is the main problem in the county. However, some conspiracies are real, as evidenced by the coup plot itself. Moreover, the Gulenist problem is not just real, but lethal, as shown by the events of the past several days.
The Gulen movement has hundreds of thousands of members, who all seem to believe that the former mosque preacher has some special divine guidance and wisdom. People from the group's inner circle have personally told me that they see him as the chosen one the Mahdi, the Islamic version of the messiah concept. This belief makes the community very tight knit with full obedience to Gulen. There is no room for any dissent, let alone criticism.
Now, if the Gulenists had merely established schools, charities and nongovernmental organizations all over the world which seems to be the case at first glance then there would no problem. (Over the years, I personally have gotten to know the civilian side of the Gulen movement and met many nice people, for whom I had only sympathy.) However, as numerous events, anecdotes and journalistic reports show, the Gulenists also have a dark side: their covert organization within the state, a project that's been going on for decades with the aim of establishing bureaucratic control over the state.
I had written about this dark side for Al-Monitor about two years ago, by interviewing Hanefi Avci, an ex-police chief who exposed Gulenist infiltration of the police force back in 2010 with a bestselling book only to be quickly imprisoned on trumped-up charges. Avci had explained how Gulenists obtained state secrets and committed other crimes by illegal wiretaps and forging documents. He also warned that the Gulenists were very powerful in the military as well and that they could try to use that influence as a last resort in their existential war with Erdogan.
This is the background of Friday's coup plot. Notably, it came about a month before the annual reshuffling of the Turkish military, in which Erdogan was planning to purge or demote suspected Gulenists. Most of the officers who became involved in the plot had been promoted to their ranks after the notorious Sledgehammer case of 2009, run by the Gulenist prosecutors who were then endorsed by Erdogan as his allies against a secularist coup one must appreciate the irony.
That Sledgehammer case, which imprisoned more than 300 secularist officers for years, was exposed as a hoax by Dani Rodrik, a Harvard professor who also happens to be the son-in-law of one the top generals accused in the case. Hence Rodrik, who is a Western liberal and certainly no fan of Erdogan, can be considered as a knowledgeable voice in these matters. In his recent piece for Project Syndicate, Turkeys Baffling Coup, he noted the following about the Gulenist involvement:
The claim is less outlandish than it may seem. We know that there is a strong Gulenist presence in the military. In fact, the military was the last remaining Gulenist stronghold in Turkey, since Erdogan had already purged the movements sympathizers in the police, judiciary and media. We also know that Erdogan was preparing to make a major move against the Gulenists in the military. So the Gulenists had a motive, and the timing of the attempt supports their involvement.
It is also quite possible that some non-Gulenist, secular officers, who despised Erdogan for other reasons, might be involved in the coup plot, as pointed out by Metin Gurcan in his own analysis for Al-Monitor. Yet the claim that Gulenists must be the driving force is no crazy conspiracy theory. It is the most plausible theory.
So what does this all mean? It means that Gulen, based in Pennsylvania since the late 1990s, must face trial. Previous accusations were made against him by the Turkish government on admittedly shaky grounds. For example, the corruption probe Gulenists launched against government members in December 2013 were dubbed by the government a coup attempt, whereas it could be only seen as a corruption probe with covert political motives, as I then argued in Al-Monitor. But last Friday's bloody coup attempt is at a whole new level. It is a horrendous attack on Turkey that has to be prosecuted and punished.
In other words, Gulen must face trial, and for this, the US government must extradite him to Turkey. Naturally, there will be worries about whether he will face a fair trial with due process. There were similar worries for Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the terrorist Kurdistan Workers Party, when he was captured in 1999 by the Americans and handed over to Turkey. Ocalan faced a fair trial; Gulen must face one, too. This is vital for not just Turkish-American relations, or for calming the dangerous political euphoria in Turkey and initiating normalization. It is vital also for justice.
July 19, 2016
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan may have averted a military coup, but the domestic and international fallout from the violent attempt to topple him on July 15 is set to continue for quite some time. Turkeys ties with the United States already strained over a host of issues, including the state of Turkeys democracy and Ankaras discordant positions on regional issues, such as the Syrian crisis are in line for what might be their most serious stress test to date.
At the core of the problem is the Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, Erdogans one-time ally and current archenemy, whom Mustafa Akyol and Murat Bilgincan have profiled for Al-Monitor, providing background on Gulen and his war with Erdogan that has now taken an even nastier turn with the blood spilled by rebellious soldiers during the coup attempt that caught everyone by surprise. The coup organizers are accused of being members of the FETO the so-called Fethullah Terrorist Organization. The group is also referred to as the parallel structure, because its sympathizers are said to have infiltrated organs of state and established a state within the state.
Gulens lawful permanent residency in Pennsylvania has been a thorn in the side of Turkish-US relations for some time, with Ankara demanding his extradition and Washington refusing in the absence of a formal application and of evidence implicating Gulen.
US Secretary of State John Kerry revealed after the coup attempt that Ankara has not lodged such a formal application, despite countless calls by the Turkish government for him to be expelled to Turkey. A Western diplomat in Ankara, who requested anonymity, told Al-Monitor, Erdogan is behaving like a vengeful sultan by demanding Gulen be sent to him in chains with no regard to international law on extraditions.
Erdogan blinded by anger after news that the perpetrators of the coup had sent a team to the resort town of Marmaris, where he had been on holiday, to allegedly kill him is in no mood to accept legalistic arguments regarding Gulens extradition. He and Prime Minister Binali Yildirim repeated calls to Washington after the failed coup, using language that suggested the matter will determine the future of Turkish-US ties.
Addressing supporters in Istanbul July 16, Erdogan railed, I call on the United States and President Barack Obama: Dear Mr. President, I told you this before, either arrest Fethullah Gulen or return him to Turkey. You didn't listen. He continued, Now after this coup attempt I call on you again. Hand over the person in Pennsylvania to Turkey.
Arguing that Turkey had extradited every terrorist suspect Washington requested, Erdogan said the United States should behave similarly if it considered Turkey a strategic ally. Yildirim was more direct in a July 18 statement, asserting the Gulen issue would be the test of Washingtons friendship. Any country that stands behind Fethullah Gulen is not our friend, Yildirim said.
Labor and Social Security Minister Suleyman Soylu went even further, claiming on television, The United States of America is behind this coup The psychopath named Fethullah Gulen is being supported by America. The pro-Erdogan media did its share and floated inflammatory allegations aimed at fanning anti-American sentiment among conservative Turks. Ibrahim Karagul, the editor in chief of the Islamist daily Yeni Safak, claimed that the United States had tried to kill Erdogan in the coup.
Given Washingtons soft response to Egypt after the military toppled that countrys elected Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi, Turkish Islamists believe the United States would happily cooperate with any military regime that toppled Erdogan for the sake of its own interests.
None of this has gone down well in Washington since Obama was among the first leaders to condemn the coup attempt and support Turkeys elected government. In a phone conversation after the coup attempt, Kerry told his Turkish counterpart, Mevlut Cavusoglu, Public insinuations or claims about any role by the United States in the failed coup attempt are utterly false and harmful to our bilateral relations.
John Bass, the US ambassador to Turkey, issued a statement reiterating Washingtons willingness to assist Turkish authorities in any investigation regarding the attempted coup. If Turkey decides to submit an extradition request for anyone legally resident in the United States, it will be considered under the terms of the US-Turkey extradition agreement, Bass said. I underscore that our extradition treaty and US laws have specific requirements that must be met before a suspect individual can be transferred to another nations jurisdiction.
Not everyone in Washington is convinced that Gulen is behind the coup attempt. W. Robert Pearson, a former US ambassador to Ankara (2000-2003), is among the skeptical.
It sounds convenient for the government to charge Fethullah Gulen with an armed coup attempt when there are so many other reasons why unrest might have erupted within a military charged by Ataturk with preserving democracy and the secular nature of the Republic, Pearson wrote in Politico Magazine.
Ankara is currently trying to meet the requirements to have Gulen extradited. Any delay in the extradition process due to legal complications will add grist to the mill of those who claim the United States is supporting Gulen. In addition, if Ankaras application is rejected on legal grounds, it is not hard to predict that ties will suffer a serious blow because of the anger stoked in Turkey by Erdogan and other government officials.
This is a highly messy situation for Washington, given Turkeys crucial role in the fight against the Islamic State (IS). Tellingly, Incirlik Air Base, which the US-led anti-IS coalition uses, was temporarily closed during the coup attempt, forcing the Pentagon to possibly consider other bases in the region to continue operations against IS before Ankara reopened the facility.
Another statement by Kerry, in which he effectively called on Erdogan to remain within democratic and legal bounds as he goes after suspected coup supporters, also points to fresh tensions ahead between the two countries. Addressing a press conference in Brussels with the European Unions foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, Kerry said, We will certainly support bringing the perpetrators of the coup to justice but we also caution against a reach that goes well beyond that.
His remark came after thousands of officials from the military, the judiciary and the bureaucracy began to be rounded up in Turkey as suspected coup supporters. The fear is that it will turn into an undemocratic witch hunt against Erdogans opponents, resulting in what amounts to a civilian coup.
Kerrys words angered Ankara, which is still smarting from Obamas remarks in April openly criticizing the government for curbing press freedoms. It's no secret that there are some trends within Turkey that I have been troubled with, Obama had said, shortly after meeting Erdogan in Washington.
The coming days and weeks will be important as Ankara and Washington try to sort out this mess with minimal damage to their strategic ties. Tensions over Gulen appear set to linger nevertheless and could undermine relations in an unprecedented manner given the angry and vengeful way Erdogan and his supporters are clamoring for Gulen's head.
July 19, 2016
One year after al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) took over Mukalla, the capital of Hadramaut governorate, in early April 2015, the Yemeni exiled government backed by Gulf countries announced it was regaining control of the city. To sustain its control and keep al-Qaeda at bay, the government created a new security entity: the Hadrami Elite, which is supervised by United Arab Emirates' (UAE) security personnel, funded by Saudi Arabia and supported technically by US forces.
The Hadrami Elite forces are composed of the tribal fighters who sided with the Yemeni government in exile as well as local recruits from Hadramaut, some of whom initially worked with Sons of Hadramaut to install security in the governorate. The main defining feature of this force is that it is purely composed of Hadrami locals, which means that Yemenis from other regions are not allowed to join. The newly created security force, which is governing the second military zone of the main coastal areas, is being trained by UAE and Jordanian security officers and has been provided with tanks, arms and logistics paid for mostly by the Saudis.
The United States also provides the Hadrami Elite tactical and technical anti-terrorism support, including trained police dogs. However, it is unlikely for the newly created force to succeed. Today, this elite security forces' main challenge is not keeping AQAP away from Hadramaut, but rather the Islamic State's (IS) branch in Yemen, which has claimed responsibility for several of the attacks since the Yemeni government took over Hadramaut in April.
To the Hadrami, the aggressive IS is a feared terrorist organization compared to AQAP, which not only had a local name Sons of Hadramaut associating with the locals, but also provided much-needed services such as fuel, water, electricity and most importantly security in a time when the official government failed to do so.
At the start of its reign over the governorate, AQAP introduced itself to the locals as Abnaa Hadramaut (Sons of Hadramaut) in an attempt to dissociate from the al-Qaeda brand integrate itself in the local community. What made matters easier for Sons of Hadramaut was the acceptance by local dignitaries and tribal sheikhs of this movement.
On April 13, 2015, the Hadramaut Domestic Council was created and composed of local leaders and Sons of Hadramaut to jointly manage the governorate. The council's secretary-general, Abdul-Hakeem bin Mahfood, said in an interview with Al Jazeera in September 2015 that the local leaders of Hadramaut saw no way other than working with Sons of Hadramaut in order to prevent bloodshed in the governorate.
With the government fleeing to Saudi Arabia, Shiite Houthis fighting to control the dominantly Sunni Hadramaut, and with the desperate need for services, locals saw in Sons of Hadramaut the answer and welcomed their control with open arms. However, by November 2015, it was clear that the Hadramaut Domestic Council was not working because of Sons of Hadramaut's reluctance to share control.
Concerned with the failure of the council coupled with the increased presence of extremist Salafists, the Yemeni government in exile decided in April to launch a massive operation against al-Qaeda in Hadramaut. This was also due to intensive pressure from the United States, which had a problem with AQAP comfortably presiding over the rich and strategically located governorate. Moreover, although Sons of Hadramaut were extremist Salafists, they agreed politically with the Muslim Brotherhood a fact that did not sit well with the UAE.
The operations that included Saudi fighter jets, Yemeni and UAE ground forces, and US drones eventually took back the city on April 30 and reported killing around 800 AQAP militants. This claim, however, was soon denied by Sons of Hadramaut.
Following the liberation, the majority of the AQAP members were forced to retreat to the neighboring area of Rada'a in al-Bayda governorate, where it has many strong Salafi sympathizers. Some of the AQAP members went into hiding in Hadramaut itself, while others simply switched sides transitioning from Sons of Hadramaut to the Hadrami Elite, and joined the new government forces in charge of the city.
Interestingly, the popularity of al-Qaeda in Hadramaut among local youth, men and women increased significantly during its one-year control over the city as it provided many jobs and delivered stipends to needy families.
A female lawyer from Mukalla, who requested anonymity for security reasons, told Al-Monitor how until today and even after the recapturing of the main areas of the governorate by Yemeni government troops, and the creation of the Hadrami Elite forces, there are many youth who are still loyal to Sons of Hadramaut. It is not only a matter of a religious sentiment; in fact, the local identity and affiliation with Hadramaut as a particular closed socio-geographic context is stronger than the religious one.
The Hadrami in general have always been conservative Sunni Muslims, some of whom went to extreme lengths religiously. However, their common goal to maintain and protect the Hadrami community identity is so strong to the extent that politically differing Hadrami factions are willing to work together to achieve this objective. Furthermore, AQAP in Yemen seems to have learned from its mistakes in Abyan, which was its regional hub for many years in the last two decades. Instead of seeming foreign and overtly strict, AQAP in Hadramaut adopted a rather accommodative rule, which was somewhat democratic, and it collaborated with other factions in the governorate.
This particularity of Hadramaut has been severely misunderstood by many outsiders to Yemen, especially Western security forces that rely on intelligence information to fight AQAP. Although the takeover from AQAP was said to have been accelerated by tip-offs from locals, the reality is that these were attempts to minimize the bloodshed caused by the takeover.
Dealing with AQAP in Hadramaut must be handled differently from any other terrorist group in the region al-Qaeda related or not. Removing terrorism will never happen in Hadramaut by means of security offenses or harsh security measures. Sons of Hadramaut are seen as part of the local community, and many locals see an attack against them as an attack against the Hadrami community, especially since many of the AQAP members in Hadramaut are in fact members of well-known families in the area. The real challenge the Hadrami Elite faces is the fight against IS and the stabilization of the governorate in order to allow state institutions to deliver services and take care of their citizens. Otherwise, it is very likely that the Hadrami would rather be ruled by AQAP than starve or be subjected to IS suicide bombers.
A tombstone in Wesley Methodist Church Cemetery in Geneva leaves those who visit it wondering about the death of the young man lying beneath it. The stone is inscribed: Talmadge Warren July 12, 1914- May 16, 1935/Farewell Father and Mother/I found my watery grave. We can assume Talmadge drowned at the young age of 20 but it's an unusual and mysterious message to leave behind. In other cases, details about how a person lived or died can be found on their tombstones. Following is a look at a few in Alabama.
Killed in steamboat explosion;
Grave of Abraham Flinn
Mesopotamia Cemetery
Eutaw, AL
Abraham Flinn (1810-Jan. 28, 1847) was born in South Carolina but later moved to Alabama, where he served with the Eutaw Rangers during the Mexican War. While in camp. he was struck by disease, as were many American soldiers, according to Ben Windham in a 2005 article in The Tuscaloosa News. He was sent home but after making it safely to Mobile, he boarded the steamboat Tuscaloosa, which exploded 10 miles from shore.
His headstone explains: "ABRAHAM FLINN, a native of So. Carolina who perished by the explosions of the St. Boat Tuscaloosa on the night of the 28th January 1847 in the 37th year of his age. The deceased was a member of the Eutaw Rangers and was on his return from Mexico for the restoration of his health when he was thus suddenly called from Time to Eternity. In the midst of life we are in Death unto thy bosom faithful tomb."
The one-armed statue
Grave of Edmund Troup Randle Sr.
Oak Hill Cemetery
Union Springs, AL
The monument to E.T. Randle Sr. (Sept. 18, 1825-March 14, 1903) is one of the most distinctive in Union Springs' Oak Hill Cemetery. Not only is it a full-figure statue of the deceased, the most expensive and least-used form of funerary statue, it is one of the only known statues in Alabama to show a person's disability. Typically, people have statues made of themselves at their best but in this case, Randle's statue was carved with a pinned-up sleeve to show he lost an arm in the Civil War.
Much of the story of how he lost his arm is etched on his tombstone, which explains he "lost his right arm at the battle of Chancellorsville, Va., May 2, 1863 and ... only surrendered when Gen. R.E. Lee gave up his sword."
According to his entry on FindaGrave.com, Randle continued to fight despite the injury. "At Chancellorsville he led the Third Alabama through the Wilderness over the Federal works, where he was wounded, his arm being shattered; having it sashed to his waist, he remained on the battlefield until the battle closed; after injuring the arm the bullet came out through his breast, tearing it into shreds; the arm was amputated ..."
Still, Randle's spirit never faltered and he was known for his "cheerfulness" and "ready wit." He was a farmer who served as sheriff of Dallas County for a year and father to seven children.
Monument to Italian miners
Italian Catholic Cemetery
West Blocton, AL
Four men killed in an 1897 mine explosion are remembered on a stone in the historic Italian Catholic Cemetery. Many of the beautiful markers are etched in Italian but this marker, placed years later, is in English. It reads: "Charley Taltolfo, Aged 44; Frank Tanburini, Aged 27; John Nani, Aged 27; Marcho Richetti, Aged 21; Killed April 23, 1897, Blocton No. 2
A story in the Birmingham Age-Herald on April 25 reported: "Yesterday morning about 4 o'clock an explosion occurred in slope No. 2 of the Blocton mines, and four men are imprisoned. It is very probably they are now dead. The men are Italians and were driving a heading when the accumulated gas exploded. The props were blown away and the roof caved in. Whether they were crushed to death or not is not known, but the coal, slate and earth bar their fellow workmen from reaching them ... Rescue parties were organized at once by Superintendent Moore and efforts are being made to reach the imprisoned men in the hopes that they are alive. Great excitement prevails in Blocton, and many citizens have joined in the work of rescue."
The Lightning Grave
Grave of William Yedell Cosper
Childersburg City Cemetery
Childersburg, AL
William Yedell "Bill" Cosper (1844-1919) of Childersburg was what some might call unlucky. In 1919, when he was about 75 years old, he was struck by lightning while standing on his front porch. He survived, only to be struck again sometime later. This time, the strike was fatal. Bill's family buried him in Childersburg City Cemetery but he didn't rest in peace: the headstone his family erected was struck by lightning and destroyed. After a second headstone was also demolished by a lightning strike, Bill's family gave up and left the pile of rubble to mark his grave but Bill was immortalized by a listing in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
Slave's monument to former master
Grave of John Godwin
Godwin Family Cemetery
Phenix City, AL
Typical for wealthy white men of his time, John Godwin (Oct. 17, 1798-Feb. 26, 1859) of Phenix City was a slave owner, and the story of his special bond with a talented slave is forever etched on his tombstone. Horace King was born into slavery and was sold to John Godwin. However, Godwin, a builder who recognized King's innate talent for bridge building and architecture, treated King as his partner on numerous building projects, according to the Encyclopedia of Alabama. Unlike most slaves, King married a free woman of color, he earned good wages for his work, and he earned a reputation as an outstanding builder. In his later life, he served in the Alabama House of Representatives.
Numerous bridges and buildings in Alabama were built by King and his former owner Godwin before King bought his freedom and continued his work on his own. One of King's best-known projects is the double spiral staircase in the Alabama State Capitol Building. When Godwin died in 1859, it was King who erected the monument on his grave in the Godwin Family Cemetery on the family's plantation.
It says: "This stone was placed here by Horace King, in lasting remembrance of the love and gratitude he felt for his lost friend and former master."
The train engineer who gave all
Grave of Joseph Avery
Odd Fellows Cemetery
Gainesville, AL
Joseph Avery (1826-March 22, 1862) was a railroad engineer with the Mississippi, Gainesville and Tuscaloosa Railroad who died after what was known as a heroic train run in an effort to aid the confederacy. Kathryn Tucker Windham tells the story of Joe Avery's Run in her book "Alabama: One Big Front Porch." Avery was 36 years old in 1862 and ending a shift on the rails when Confederate officers rushed up to him, saying they had to make it to the steamer in order to get to Chattanooga. The reason for the urgency is lost to history but, according to legend, it was a make-or-break mission for the Confederacy that may have had to do with the upcoming battle at Shiloh. So Joe Avery ordered the stokers to keep pouring fat pine on the fires and sped toward Gainesville, where the Warrior was docked. Avery reportedly pushed the train to speeds it had never seen. The men made it to their destination but, moments after they left the train, two boilers exploded, killing Joe Avery instantly.
His grave is marked with a tall monument with a relief of a train.
It says, in part: "The President and Directors record their testimony to his Ability, Faithfulness and Integrity in the discharge of all the duties of his position... The deceased was well versed in the science and skillful in the practice of his profession and the general excellence of his character won for him the confidence and esteem of all who knew him. He was a diligent student of the Bible and left to his friends the savor of a good name and the comfort of hope."
'Creama Tarter' nickname memorial
Grave of Caroline Bostick Catlen
Harrogate Springs Cemetery
Wetumpka, AL
The headstone for Caroline Bostick Catlen (1843-1852) is no longer on her grave but it has perhaps the strangest story of all. It is unclear how the 9-year-old little girl died but her headstone listed a series of nicknames and names that made passersby scratch their heads. The tombstone read: "Henry Ritter / Ema Ritter / Dema Ritter / Sweet Potato / Creama Tarter / Caroline Bostick / Daughter of / Bob & Suckey Catlen, / Born at Social Circle, / 1843 / Died at Wetumpka 1852."
The marker was so unusual that postcards were apparently printed of it. The one on file with the ADAH is dated June 10, 1916.
Information was scant on the daughter of Bob and Suckey Catlen, but a 1947 article in The Tuscaloosa News says they were an African American family and Suckey worked as a waitress at the Harrogate Springs Resort Hotel, a three-story building on the west side of Wetumpka where people came to bathe in the healing waters. The News article states the words on the little girl's headstone came from menu items at the hotel, as well as names of favorite guests. Her entry on FindaGrave.com says the child worked with her mother at the hotel and the marker was erected by patrons listing the nicknames they had called the little girl.
At some point, the unusual stone was removed from the grave and it is now displayed at the Elmore County Museum in Wetumpka, according to curator Joe Allen Turner. The museum at 112 South Main Street is open from 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays.
Updated at 9:30 p.m. July 19 with the location of the Creama Tarter headstone.
Join AL.com reporter Kelly Kazek for Grave Encounters, her features about the history of Southern graves and burial customs. Find her on Facebook or follow her Odd Travels and Real Alabama boards on Pinterest.
Clay Hammac stared down at the battered and broken body of a 15-month-old girl, and it changed him.
Down deep and forever. It's like the little girl's soul reached up to touch him, to remind him of a world where the most helpless, too often, can find no help.
He didn't know it right then, but Kara Nicole Lee would change his course, and the course of his entire family. "It was very personal," said Hammac, a Shelby County sheriff's lieutenant and commander of the Shelby County Drug Enforcement Task Force. "Just the innocence of a child made it very real."
The girl - she was about the age of his own child - had been abused, beaten to death with her own doll. There was nothing he could do to save her, except punish the killer. But he came away determined to help other children.
And he followed through. He looked for the abused and the neglected, the children born drug addicted and facing insurmountable odds, and he took them in.
Hammac, 36, and his wife, Laura, 34, have fostered 18 children in the past six years and, just weeks ago, adopted one of those children as a permanent member of their family. "When people think of mission fields, they usually think of people traveling to Africa or China or India, and yes there are mission fields there, but we have a mission field in our own community,'' he said. "Never in a million years when Laura and I met in college did we think this is where God would lead us."
The death of Kara Lee
It was December 23, 2009, and Hammac was the violent crime on-call detective. His pager sounded, and he was dispatched to Children's Hospital. "I thought that was a little strange, so I called the officer and said, 'What do I need to know?' The officer said, "It's a pretty bad case.'"
"I get there and meet with the charge nurse and I know this a child abuse case,'' he said. "The charge nurse takes me to NICU, and I see this precious little child laying in this hospital bed with tubes and wires and everything. I could see instantly that she was a tragic victim of child abuse. I saw that she was bruised from head to toe."
"I remember rolling her poor little body over to photograph and document the injuries and that made it difficult,'' he said. ""I had worked violent crime scenes before, but this was affecting me like I had never experienced before."
Emergency workers had responded to Kara's home on Shelby County 405 where she lived with her mother, 19-year-old Brittany Lee, and Lee's boyfriend, 22-year-old James Wesley Howard, in a single-wide trailer. A neighbor had called 911 at Brittany Lee's request, authorities said. Kara was taken to Shelby Baptist Medical Center, and from there airlifted to Children's Hospital.
It didn't take long to develop Howard as a suspect, and the police interview with him stretched into a second day. "It was a very long interview, probably one of the longest interviews of my investigative career,'' Hammac recalled. "I remember finally whenever he finally decided to share with us the graphic details about what happened to the child and what he did to the child, I remember telling myself over, and over, and over in my mind, that if this child had just been with a family who loved her, she would still be alive."
This is what detectives learned: Kara had recently been diagnosed with pneumonia and the family was living in their trailer in the south end of Shelby County, with no heat or air. "It was the middle of December, very cold outside. Holes in the floor and walls, and this child was crying,'' Hammac said. "She was crying probably for several reasons: She was cold, and she was uncomfortable suffering from pneumonia. I can only imagine in my heart that she was crying because she wanted to be comforted. She wanted that pain to go away, or at least have the comfort of know that at least everything was going to be OK."
Howard, now serving life without parole for Kara's murder, was under the influence of methamphetamine when Kara started to cry. "I suspect that her cries were interfering with the euphoric high that he was trying to capture. He became very impatient, very aggravated and began physically abusing the child,'' he said. "There was a small doll in the child's bed, and this was one of those plush, cloth dolls with the hard plastic face. As he described to us when he confessed the details of the crime, he picked the doll up because the child wouldn't stop crying and began to hit her until she did stop crying. Unfortunately that was the last time she cried."
"We had a young child of our own and it was really hurting our hearts to think about this,'' Hammac said. "That was very hard, just before Christmas. We tried not to let it distract from my son, who was similar in age, enjoying the magic of Christmas that every child understands, but it was still very difficult."
Kara died four days later, on Dec. 27. Hammac wasn't prepared for the pain. "This was new for me, because I had worked a lot of violent crimes in the past. Some horrible scenes,'' he said. "I've always had an ability to separate work from family life. But this one really pierced my heart. I dwelled on it for quite some time."
Hammac shared his feelings with his wife, who he said is his sounding board and biggest supporter. "Our faith is very important to us, it's certainly a foundation in our marriage, so we prayed about this,'' he said. "We were very open in our prayer and asked God to heal us from this agony and this hurt. I know it sounds strange, but we prayed that somehow God would be glorified through this tragedy."
A few weeks later, a friend approached the couple about becoming foster parents. "That was the farthest thing from our minds. We had just recently welcomed our second child and our family was growing just how we had forseen it,'' he said. "We asked God to open our hearts so that if that was His will, He would open our hearts to that."
18 foster children in 6 years
The Hammacs trained for three months, and then received their first foster child. She was 2 months old, came from a family of substance abuse and was taken by social workers from her mother in Birmingham's Gate City community. It was supposed to be a short-term placement, but she ended up in the Hammac home for nearly two years. "She came into our life and we loved on her,'' he said. "She quickly became part of our family. We couldn't think of our family being complete without her. She was a sweetheart."
However, the case evolved and she was eventually placed with a distant family member back in her Birmingham community. "It was a genuine grief. Almost the same as losing a child. I can't imagine what that pain and suffering is like, but that's the closest thing I could think of what it would be like,'' Hammac said. "She was walking and talking and calling us Mama and Daddy. We were the only family she ever knew and that certainly was hard."
"What was most difficult for us was thinking about how she felt. Thinking about everything she knew to be constant and normal in her life, like smells and sounds, what Mama's voice sounds like and all that being taken quickly from her an put into a new environment,'' he said. "I'm not casting doubt on the family that she went to, but imagine the fear and anxiety she must have gone through during that initial phase."
The loss was tremendous. "I remember that bedroom door, we kept it closed for a whole month,'' he said. "The whole purpose of foster care is trying to reunite the child with the family. We accept that, we embrace that. But it was hard."
Then another call came, asking the Hammacs to take yet another little girl. "At first we were heartbroken, and we thought, 'We can't do this again. This is not the journey that we thought God was going to lead us on,'' he said. "But we knew we had to be faithful, and we said yes."
This little girl had a horrific history that Hammac asked not be shared publicly. "She was a sweet 3-year-old girl and she was just beaming with life,'' he said. "She was with us nine months, and she is probably one of our biggest success stories that we have personally experience."
Eventually she was adopted by a couple who had tried unsuccessfully for 15 years to have a child of their own.
"From what I understand she's thriving and doing well. The family is able to give her the attention she deserves and the counseling she needs and she has accomplished a lot,'' Hammac said. "Given what she came from, she is an incredible survival story, a shining light of God's grace."
The Hammacs had another biological child for a total of three, and continued to open their home to more foster children - 16 more to be exact. Their most recent long-term placement was a newborn, who was taken from her mother upon birth and placed into the Hammac home.
This little girl, sadly, has a similar story to many in the system. Her parents battled drug addiction and drug abuse, and she was born addicted as well. "To watch a newborn child go through withdrawals is heart-wrenching. It's life-changing,'' Hammac said. "It will either open your heart to do everything that you can to help every child that you can, or it will break your heart. It's done a little bit of both to my family."
"We've been able to walk alongside her these first couple of years, and get her the assistance and therapy she needs,'' he said. "She has thrived.
Ultimately, the courts determined the girl was eligible for adoption and nobody in her immediately family qualified. "Our family jumped to the front of the line. She is family. We couldn't imagine our family without her,'' Hammac said.
It was not what they had planned. "Whenever we felt God calling our hearts to become foster parents, it really was a mission for us to love on the motherless and the fatherless until they got to a point where they could be reunited with their family,'' Hammac said. "We began to realize we couldn't imagine our family without our child so (adoption) began to enter into our minds. There's very little question involved when you've made that kind of bond."
The adoption was final June 23. Hammac flooded Facebook with photos of his newest child, pictures he had not been allowed to post during the years she was their foster child. "She's a fiery redhead that we've nicknamed The General. At 2 1/2, she is in charge. She's our little cruise director. She tells everybody where to sit and what shoes to wear,'' he said. "It's funny to realize God had a plan for our family long before Laura and I ever were born, and before we ever met."
From accountant to cop
The couple met at the University of South Alabama, where he was in a fraternity and SGA president, and she was in a sorority. They met at an SGA meeting, and their relationship moved quickly.
They moved to Birmingham and married during graduate school where Laura Hammac was working toward dual master's degrees in business and hospital administration. "She was going to be an aggressive young hospital executive and I was an accountant, finishing up my MBA and working as an accountant for a private firm in Vestavia Hills,'' he said. "Then, I felt God calling to law enforcement. It was kind of strange, but I felt really strongly about it."
Former Shelby County Sheriff Chris Curry hired Hammac and, at age 24, he became a rookie working nightshift patrol. Eventually, he moved to investigations where he initially, because of his accounting background, gravitated to white collar and financial crimes, which evolved into organized crime which progressed into violent crime. "Probably the time I felt most fulfilled in my career was working criminal investigations,'' he said.
"Once we had our first child, we both felt God calling her to be a full-time mom and minister to our children. She felt strongly about that, and I certainly supported that decision,'' he said. "It's been hard being a cop but we wanted to be faithful to God's calling and we've been able to manage. We clip a lot of coupons. But it works out. It certainly does work out. We also homeschool, so that certainly adds a new dynamic to things."
"God knew exactly what he was going to use our family for and we surrender and submit to that plan,'' he said.
Most recently, Hammac became commander of the drug task force. "I went into this unit as their new commander with a great sense of humility. I told these guys, 'I'm not going to keep it a secret, I've never worked narcotics other than the occasional traffic stop so I'm going to lean on you guys greatly to help me help you,''' he said. The result was a marriage, of sorts, of his background in financial crimes and the officers' expertise in drug investigations.
"We're taking a systematic approach of going after the dealer and the supplier. We're not focusing our efforts on the street level consumers,'' Hammac said. "If we come in contact with the street level consumers, we're going to do everything we can realistically to get them the help that they need, but there's so much more we can be doing as law enforcement officers."
He knows it's no coincidence that his work in drug enforcement ties in so completely with the children he and his family have fostered. "When I was a rookie on patrol, I remember an older patrol officer told me, 'You've got to learn to shut it off when you go home. It'll kill you. You'll get wrapped up in the emotions of this job and you'll burn out. I have not been successful in doing that,''' Hammac said. "Based on our experience as foster parents, it does become a personal mission for my wife and I and I'm very grateful to be in this position with the drug task force because it is a sense of urgency for me."
"I am passionate about my work because I've seen firsthand what happens whenever someone becomes a victim of addiction and drug abuse. I've delivered death notifications to some of the most affluent neighborhoods in the county and I've delivered death notifications to some of the most impoverished neighborhoods in the county, all because of narcotics abuse and addiction,'' he said. "There's nothing more life changing in a cop's career than telling a mother or father or spouse that their loved one is not coming home."
"My personal experiences as a foster parent rocking a child to sleep at 2 a.m. because they're going through opiate withdrawals, all of that compounds things and I do become passionate about my work,'' he said. "I do make a genuine effort to find that supply chain in Shelby County and cut it off, and to go after the dealers relentlessly and unapologetically."
Hammac said they are often asked if they're afraid they will get too attached to the foster children. "At first Laura didn't how to answer but now she's developed a great response and this is her response: Yes, it terrifies me but nothing's going to hold me back from getting attached. Every child that comes to us, we take mostly newborns from the hospital that are suffering from withdrawals, I am working tirelessly to become attached and for that child to become attached because that child needs the attachment. That child needs to know there is someone here on this earth that will love her or him and move mountains for him or her and make him or her feel safe. That's critical in a child's development."
"She does not build any walls,'' he said. "She openly loves all of them."
Hammac said his children don't know any different. It is a way of life for them. "We remember the names of every child that has come into our home so, at night when we say our family prayers, it becomes funny for our small, younger children to try to recite all of the names and see who can do it the fastest and we continue to pray for every single child that has come to our family,'' he said.
Even with the adoption of their new daughter, they will continue to take in foster children. "We know our limits. We have four children ages 8 and under right now, with two of them in diapers, so only one at a time in addition to our children,'' he said. "We jokingly say as long as we have room at the dinner table, we will continue to foster. We recently bought a really large dining room table."
As they remember the name of every child that has, and will, come into their hearts and home, the Hammacs will also always remember Kara Lee. "We still remember her clearly,'' he said. "It's hard to imagine in that moment praying for God to be glorified through something so tragic, but I would like to think that with the opportunity we've had to love on these kids, that somehow good has come from bad."
The family of a missing Bessemer man whose burned van was found earlier this month will hold a funeral on Wednesday.
James Andrew Morrison, 75, was reported missing Jan. 3. Morrison, who suffered from several illnesses, was last heard from when his daughter spoke with him that day. He was at the Deer Springs Grocery on Highway 11 in Pelham. He was last seen about 8 p.m. near Pelham High School, wearing blue jeans, a plaid shirt and hat that says, "Jesus Loves Me."
On July 4, Morrison's van was found by someone riding a four-wheeler in a remote area of the Cahaba River Wildlife Management Area. Human remains were found inside that van.
"The coroner has released the remains that were found to the family but has not been able to officially identify them due to their condition,'' Shelby County sheriff's Capt. Jeff Hartley told AL.com today. "This is a tragic story and one where the family is looking for some closure and hopefully this will provide a small measure of it."
Morrison's daughter, Frances Gann, has previously said she was supposed to meet her father that night on Shelby County Road 11, but he wasn't there. Investigators say he was last seen near Pelham High School. Gann said her father went from there to a convenience store off U.S. 280. She said he struck up a conversation with a stranger who gave him $10 for gas. Gann described he father as "old school" and a "very Godly man."
At the time of his disappearance, Morrison was driving the black 2014 Kia Sedona minivan. He suffered from dementia and diabetes, and did not have his medication with him.
"My heart goes out to the Morrison family as they wait on official notification of the van's occupant,'' Shelby County Sheriff John Samaniego said when announcing the van's discovery with remains inside. "This is one of those occasions where I know the possible outcome will bring grief to an already grieving family and I wish I had the words to help them with their loss."
The investigation is ongoing by the Shelby County Sheriff's Office and the Bessemer Police Department.
According to Morrison's obituary, he was a member of Grant Street Baptist Church and was a Vietnam Army Veteran. He retired from the Alabama National Guard with 30 years of service and also retired from CSX Railroad with 30 years of service.
Visitation will be held today from 6 p.m. until 8 p.m. at McCalla Memorial Funeral Home. The funeral will be held at 11 a.m. Wednesday, also at McCalla Memorial Funeral Home, with burial to follow at the Alabama National Cemetery in Montevallo.
Anyone with information about the investigation is asked to call the Shelby County Sheriff's Office at 205-669-4181, the Secret Witness line at 205-669-9116 or through the website at www.ShelbySO.com by clicking on the "Report Criminal Activity" link and choosing the "General Information" category.
CLEVELAND -- More than 500 people and hundreds of police officers collided after demonstrators got into a shoving match after racial epithets were yelled during protests in Public Square on the second day of the Republican National Convention.
Bystanders are chanting, "Nazi scum, off our streets."
Police are currently trying to separate the demonstrators with a fortified line of bikes.
There is a presence of Black Lives Matters protesters along with several fundamentalist religious groups.
Officers said over a police scanner that some demonstrators are throwing urine.
Tension mounted as the Westboro Baptist Church demonstrated briefly then marched down Euclid Avenue. The hate-group returned to Public Square as the crowd began to swell and protesters began to clash.
A man with a megaphone is telling BLM protesters that Michael X. Johnson, the sniper who killed five Dallas police officers at a protest about police-involved killings, is the leader of their movement. The protesters countered him by chanting: "Love trumps hate."
Officers are trying to separate the protesters based on their particular ideologies. Police Chief Calvin Williams and U.S. Secret Service officials told cleveland.com last week that they observed officers employing this tactic at protests in Washington D.C.
Officers are currently stationed on the Cleveland Soldiers and Sailors Monument and have most of Public Square surrounded.
One of the groups is the Industrial Workers of the World, a Chicago-based organization that describes itself as "a union dedicated to organizing on the job, in our industries and in our communities."
Noted activist Dr. Cornell West arrived at Public Square about 4:50 p.m.
Officials on the scanner noted that some of the protesters are starting to wear masks, something Williams said the he discouraged.
Public Square 4:45 pm Posted by Mark Naymik on Tuesday, July 19, 2016
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A Colbert County man accused of killing his girlfriend and getting caught trying to bury her body in a wooded area of Jackson County will remain jailed in lieu of $1 million bond.
Timothy Wade Warhurst's request to have his bond reduced was denied Monday by Colbert County District Judge Chad Coker. Warhurst also waived his right to a preliminary hearing, sending the case straight to a grand jury.
Warhurst, 55, of Tuscumbia is charged with murder in the June 19 shooting death of 47-year-old Wanda Ivey. Warhurst is accused of shooting Ivey twice - once in the chest and once in the back, court records show.
Jackson County deputies acting on a tip found Warhurst the next day digging a grave for Ivey's body in a wooded area near Scottsboro. Ivey's body and the gun allegedly used to kill her were in the bed of his truck nearby.
In the defense motion for reduction of Warhurst's bond, his attorney cited his many familial ties to Colbert County and his lack of available cash to flee the charge against him. The motion also pointed out that all of Warhurst's guns had been removed from his home by authorities during the processing of the crime scene.
He asked that his bond be reduced to $200,000.
Prosecutors argued, however, that the search of Warhurst's house also turned up marijuana, Xanax, Valium, oxycodone and cocaine packaged for sale. Investigators also found a Ruger M77 Mark II rifle that had been reported stolen from a home in Huntsville in March.
He faces drug charges and one count of receiving stolen property for those items.
Prosecutors also argued in their motion that Warhurst allegedly made statements to witnesses admitting to the homicide and that he'd forced one witness to drive to a location where Ivey's body could be concealed.
Warhurst had two prior felony convictions for drugs, as well as an April 2015 domestic violence charge for punching Ivey in the face, which was later dismissed.
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Federal courthouse in downtown Huntsville (file)
More than a half century since her grandfather sued to end dual schooling in Huntsville, Catherine Hereford took the witness stand in an attempt to fill his shoes.
"I want to continue the work my grandfather did and see it through to completion," Hereford told U.S. District Judge Madeline Hughes Haikala on Monday in a crowded federal courtroom in downtown Huntsville
At stake is who gets a seat in the negotiations to end the city's long-running desegregation case.
"Right now everyone is not at the table," attorney Mark Debro said in opening statements ahead of a four-hour hearing in front of more than 60 spectators, most of whom were African-American.
He represents Hereford and three other parents who argue the U.S. Department of Justice does not communicate with them and does not adequately represent black parents in north Huntsville. The four parents asked to be added as new private plaintiffs in the lawsuit Hereford's late grandfather, Sonnie Hereford III, first filed in 1963.
Debro said the federal attorneys don't answer questions, return emails or update the local community.
But the Justice Department said they can handle the case and don't need help from new local plaintiffs. "The United States has been working tirelessly this past school year to monitor implementation of the consent order," said Justice Department attorney Andrea Hamilton on Monday.
And Huntsville attorneys argue that new parties would prolong the process of putting to rest a lawsuit that has governed school board decisions for decades -- a lawsuit that forces Huntsville to consider race in all aspects of its school system while most of the nation, at least legally, is required not to consider the race of students.
"Please don't put us in a position that it's so unwieldy we cannot deal with," said J.R. Brooks, the school board attorney, in his closing appeal to the judge. He said that four new plaintiffs could open the door to even more new plaintiffs.
Parent volunteers under attack
Much of the testimony on Monday revolved around the Desegregation Advisory Committee, a group of 10 parents and two students set up last year to monitor the school system's compliance with the 2015 consent decree.
North Huntsville Community United for Action holds a press conference on July 13, 2016, to call for new plaintiffs in Huntsville's school desegregation case. (cstephens@al.com)
Three of the four parents who asked to be added as new plaintiffs said they applied to be DAC volunteers and were rejected.
That includes Catherine Hereford, whose father, Sonnie Hereford IV, integrated Huntsville schools. She read a form letter from Superintendent Casey Wardynski denying her a seat on the advisory committee monitoring a case brought by her family.
Justice Department and school attorneys argued that volunteers were picked through interviews with both sides and were chosen to represent certain categories.
Two represent elementary schools, two represent middle schools, two represent high schools, two represent magnet schools and two are parents whose children used a race-based transfer. There are also two high school students.
But Madison County Commissioner Bob Harrison, the first to testify on Monday, said DAC parents were selected in way that limited input from north Huntsville. "It has been an effort not to include us in the process," said Harrison.
The point was raised that seven of the 12 members of the DAC last year were black.
Harrison said that those people didn't speak for north Huntsville. "The folks know who they are," he said, before telling the judge: "Just because we have the same skin, sometimes doesn't mean we are kin."
Call security
Eddgra Fallin, a longtime activist in Huntsville, told the judge about an incident last week.
The initial motion to add new plaintiffs referred to the Desegregation Advisory Committee as "servants of the superintendent." The parent volunteers held a press conference last Thursday to object.
At that press conference, Pam Hill, a school board candidate, tried to ask a question. David Driscoll, the school board's public relations consultant, said the conference was for media only and had two security guards remove her from the area in front of the system's central office.
Fallin, draped in an American flag on the stand, testified: "He tried to get us to shut up and not ask questions." Driscoll watched from the back row.
Fallin also told the judge that despite not taking questions the parents on the DAC said that the press conference counted as a public meeting. Fallin, same as several others on Monday, also testified that the DAC did not represent north Huntsville.
Isha Greens speaks at a press conference held by the Desegregation Advisory Committee on July 14, 2016 at the Merts Center in Huntsville. (cstephens@al.com)
Isha Greene is a volunteer on the DAC. At that press conference last week, Greene said the DAC was not hand-selected and did speak for African-American parents.
But Greene also explained that she came to the area three years ago and became interested in the schools when she thought she was in Madison, but was actually zoned for Huntsville schools.
The judge allowed Debro to enter a recording of the press conference. He said the video would show that Greene is not a long-term resident and provide the judge with a "full snapshot of what is going on in this community."
One-way conversations
Alice Sams, who works with Harrison and is vice president of the local chapter of the NAACP, told the judge that she had often contacted the Justice Department and never heard back.
"It's always like a one-way conversation," testified Sams, later adding: "If they represent us adequately, we don't know it, because we never hear from them."
She said, as an example, that she complained about a child being kicked out of a magnet school over a discipline issue. Brooks, attorney for the school board, said messages are getting through, as the Justice Department called and then they stopped the school from removing the child.
But Brooks seemed to make Sams' point when he asked her if she knew about the change in policy based on her call. "No, I get no response," said Sams.
Judge Haikala asked the Justice Department about the lack of feedback and at one point asked if a lawyer in the local office for the U.S. Attorney might be a better contact than attorneys in Washington D.C.
Growing pains
Judge Haikala at one point called Monday's issues "growing pains."
In 2015, the consent decree replaced a desegregation order that dated back more than two generations with a new roadmap on how to erase lingering vestiges of dual schooling and finally reach the end of the case.
She said there were bound to be bumps in the road. Debro argued that the court knew of these bumps because of the local community and that new local plaintiffs would speed up the process.
Late Monday, Haikala also asked several questions about the members of the Desegregation Advisory Committee.
Judge Madeline Haikala (file)
"I think northwest Huntsville was more represented on the DAC than other section of the city," Brooks told her at one point.
But the judge asked Rev. Gregory Bentley -- one of the four parents seeking to join the suit -- if he thought the DAC spoke for north Huntsville. Bentley said no and pointed to low attendance. He said that one DAC member from north Huntsville only attended two of the meetings.
Along with Hereford and Bentley, parents Lamisha Jennings and Paul Proctor also wish to join the suit.
Judge Haikala said she would sit down herself and talk with the 12 members of the Desegregation Advisory Committee before ruling.
"Either mechanisms need to be in put in place or the motion granted," she said.
The criminal charge filed against an Elmore County man days after he posted his encounter with Wetumpka police officers to YouTube was recently dropped.
An Elmore County grand jury didn't indict Lynwood Keith Golden, of Coosada, when it convened last week, court records show. Golden was charged with interference with public safety communications due to the "chaos" the police department claimed his video created.
"We are happy criminal charges are no longer lingering over his head," said Dustin Fowler, a civil rights attorney with Buntin, Etheredge & Fowler LLC in Dothan, who represented Golden.
Golden, who operates the YouTube channel Bama Camera, said he set up video cameras and filmed outside the Wetumpka Police Department headquarters on June 2, 2016 to exercise his First Amendment rights.
When officers approached Golden and asked why he was filming, Golden said he was a journalist working on a story. He declined to provide the officers identification.
"I don't care about your First Amendment rights," one officer, on the video, said. "I am asking why you are filming.
"I don't know if you are terrorist," another officer said.
Wetumpka police claim Golden's refusal to show his ID was "deemed suspicious," but after a "brief investigation, Mr. Golden was deemed to be no immediate threat and released at that time."
Golden was arrested five days later, on June 7 after, Wetumpka police say, the man's video created "chaos" and jammed the police department's phone system, according to a press release from the city of Wetumpka.
The police department received a barrage of "obscene, threatening and racially motivated" phone calls that crippled the phone system, the release stated. The response also forced the department to shut down its Facebook page.
For at least a week callers to the Wetumpka Police Department were greeted with the message: "Due to a technical difficulty, we can't accept your call at this time."
Wetumpka police claim Golden asked his followers "to begin mass communications" against the department.
"This sparks computer generated calling to the parties filmed in the videos, social media attacks on the municipalities involved, family members of officers and civilians, emails to the local governments and threats to the officer's lives," the city of Wetumpka stated in a release.
Wetumpka police say the large volume of calls jammed the department's phone system blocking their "ability to notify ambulance and fire service of emergency calls."
The police department also claims the city's emergency domestic violence shelter was forced to close because the department lacked manpower to properly manage the facility while assisting dispatchers in fielding the barrage of calls.
See related: 'He just hauled off, shot him:' Alabama man awarded $450,000 after illegally shot by police officer
Gavin Long won't be remembered by many for his series of unusual and, at times, vitriolic Youtube videos where he spoke of black oppression, revolution and bloodshed, but instead for his slaying of three Baton Rouge police officers with an semi-automatic rifle Sunday morning.
Yet, as investigators look for motives behind the brutal slaying, the second by a U.S. military veteran against police officers in a little over a week, the videos will play a significant role in piecing together Long's character and what mental state he was in before and during the attack.
While many would be forgiven for believing that Long's violent and deadly outburst was the most recent iteration of a former U.S. combat veteran suffering the tragic effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, medical experts and former veterans with PTSD have said that the 'crazy war vet' stereotype is completely wrong.
"A vast majority of sufferers of PTSD would be incapable of doing what the Dallas and Baton Rouge gunmen did," said Doctor Roger K. Pitman, a medical doctor and expert on PTSD, who said that there was no evidence to suggest that people with PTSD create deliberate acts of violence. Pitman conceded that PTSD sufferers do exhibit what he described as "increased aggression" and "self-deceptive behavior," but said there were probably other underlying causes to explain why Long, and Micah Johnson, who killed five police officers in Dallas on July 7, went on shooting sprees.
The inaccurate PTSD narrative was furthered Monday when New Black Panthers Party leader Quanell X said during an interview with Houston-based Matt Patrick radio show that he believed Long was a "ticking time bomb" and probably suffered from PTSD. Long worked with the Black Panthers in Texas for around six months, primarily as part of a security detail during various events. Quanell X said that he got rid of Long because he seemed to be "out of his mind."
Long served in the Marines between 2005 and 2010, undertaking one tour in Iraq from June 2008 to January 2009. Military officials told AL.com off-the-record that Long did not experience ground combat and had no recorded mental health issues.
According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, PTSD is characterized by a wide variety of symptoms that have more to do with memory and mood rather than violence and psychosis. Those suffering from it often experience nightmares connected to the traumatic event, known as flashbacks, and look to avoid being in situations that could replicate whatever happened to them. PTSD also leads to negative changes in beliefs and feelings, as well as sleeping and concentration issues.
Yet veterans across the country who suffer from the disorder are often portrayed as unstable and potentially violent, said U.S. Army veteran Sgt. Brendan O'Byrne, 32, who toured the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan for 15 months over 2007 and 2008, and featured prominently in the Oscar nominated documentary Restrepo.
"The veteran with PTSD is much more likely to sit in their apartment and drink themselves to death before they go out and find a fight," said the six-year Army veteran. "PTSD can create violent behavior in certain situations where someone is in direct danger. The overreaction to that danger could create a violent response but it is only to defend themselves."
An important turning point for O'Byrne's in his own recovery from PTSD was in 2009, a year after he left the Army. After an evening mixing alcohol and antidepressants, O'Byrne slapped his wife in the face. Shocked at his actions, he immediately checked himself into a hospital as a mental inpatient.
"I was saying [to the doctor] how PTSD made me hit her and how I never hit her before and there is no reason I would ever do that, so it must have been PTSD," said O'Byrne via an interview over social media with AL.com. "His response was very important for me to hear. He said something like: 'You are a smart guy Brendan, don't lie to yourself and pretend that PTSD did this. You did this. You hit her. Maybe because you were drunk. Maybe because you couldn't control your anger. But nothing in war made you do this.'"
O'Byrne's story, he says, is a perfect example of how PTSD is often used as a convenient excuse by politicians, by the public and even by those suffering from it themselves to account for violent acts, and in some cases, as an excuse to act violently. This, in part, is why the disorder is viewed poorly by the general public, said O'Byrne.
Despite attempts by the Department of Veterans Affairs to inform the public about the reality of PTSD, which first came to prominence in the 1980s and was initially associated with Vietnam veterans, the mischaracterization of the disorder as violent has often been unhelpfully furthered in Holywood and on Prime-Time TV.
For example, one only needs to look at the movies Taxi Driver, Deer Hunter and even the Rambo movies, where veterans are portrayed as deranged, vengeful and bitter. According to movie critic Patrick Hackeling, author of the film essay 'The Evolution of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in American Cinema and Culture,' these movies that came about after the end of the Vietnam War were the catalyst for the next 40 years of inaccurate depictions of PTSD in film and TV. Even in comedies such as The Simpsons, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Modern Family and Saturday Night Live, sufferers of PTSD have been portrayed as violent and out of control.
While it could be weeks before law enforcement investigators and military officials confirm why Long and Johnson shot three and five police officers, respectively, it's clear that their actions were not related to PSTD, regardless if either man was diagnosed with the disorder or not.
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Controversy swirled early Tuesday morning over whether Melania Trump's speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention ripped off a speech that First Lady Michelle Obama delivered at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. (Contributed photo / Wikimedia)
A highly observant political observer set the Internet on fire late Monday night when he tweeted an allegation that Melania Trump had plagiarized part of her Republican National Convention speech from 2008 remarks by First Lady Michelle Obama.
The claim quickly spread and within an hour fast-moving video editors had already spliced together the relevant bits of Obama's 2008 Democratic National Convention address and Trump's Monday speech:
Melania Trump apparently plagiarized a section of Michelle Obama's 2008 convention speech https://t.co/mfej8VD6Bv pic.twitter.com/QHeCKRUIQG Gawker (@Gawker) July 19, 2016
The similarities are strikingly similar, as thousands of people attested to on social media Monday night, raising the question of how Trump ended up using language so similar to Obama's without attributing it to her.
Jason Miller, a spokesman for Donald Trump's campaign, issued a statement early Tuesday morning responding to the controversy about the speech, as the Los Angeles Times reported:
"In writing her beautiful speech, Melania's team of writers took notes on her life's inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking. Melania's immigrant experience and love for America shone through in her speech, which made it such a success," the statement said.
The speech by Melania Trump was perhaps the most-anticipated of the events to take place on the first day of the 2016 RNC in Cleveland.
But instead of serving as a means to humanize Donald Trump and help roll out the red carpet for him, it quickly led to his camp being the butt of many jokes, as the hashtag #FamousMelaniaTrumpQuotes became a top national trending topic on Twitter, with users tweeting it along with famous quotes from throughout history.
Twitter user Jarrett Hill, who describes himself as a journalist and designer in his Twitter profile, kicked off the controversy Monday evening with the following tweet:
Hill's observation was posted about an hour after Donald Trump tweeted praise for his wife and the words she delivered Monday evening:
South African actor stuns thousands in her homeland with sharp observations about societys role in failing to end AIDS.
It feels nonsensical to open my account at the 21st International Aids Conference in Durban to write about Charlize Theron. But here I am, sitting at my desk, looking at my notes from this landmark conference, and the Hollywood stars speech is one of the highlights of the conference so far.
It was a memorable performance.
On Monday evening, 40-year-old Theron opened the AIDS conference with an address that brought delegates, researchers, policy-makers, doctors, scientists and activists to their feet.
Charlize Theron: If we are going to end AIDS we must cure the disease in our hearts & in our minds first #AIDS2016 pic.twitter.com/da7qXlIPV2 South African Government (@GovernmentZA) July 18, 2016
Its not that Theron said anything that any of us had never heard before. It was not even about her delivery. It was instead the politics she espoused that left some of us a little surprised, others perhaps a little stunned.
Theron, one of South Africas most famous daughters, told the audience that there was no honour in South Africa hosting a second conference on AIDS. She pointed out that the fight against the pandemic should have been won by now.
Theron said that the reason AIDS had not been solved was because we value some lives more than others.
READ MORE: All you need to know about AIDS 2016
It is easy to mock the malleable conscience of celebrities who are used to front campaigns against war and disease. I mean, seriously, a messenger for peace. Come on. But there was no mistaking the potency of Therons words at the conference.
We value men more than women, straight love more than gay love, white skin more than black skin, the rich, more than the poor and adults more than adolescents, she said.
And she continued.
I know this, because AIDS doesnt discriminate on its own. It has no biological preference for black bodies, for womens bodies, for gay bodies, for youth, or the poor. It doesnt single out the vulnerable or
the oppressed, or the abused. We single out the vulnerable, the oppressed, and the abused. We ignore them, we let them suffer, and then, we let them die.
The most challenging speech made at the #InternationalAidsConference in Durban so far was by #CharlizeTheron https://t.co/PaRX180vuj ProfTinyiko Maluleke (@ProfTinyiko) July 18, 2016
Her message was not necessarily directed to her immediate audience, the best minds in the world working to end HIV/AIDS, but rather to the millions of people beyond.
It was remarkable. She diffused blame and pinned responsibility.
Its the culture that condones rape and shames victims into silence. Its the cycle of poverty and violence that traps girls into teen marriages and forces them to sell their bodies to provide for their bodies. Its the racism that allows the white and the wealthy to exploit the black and the poor and then blame them for their own suffering, she said of AIDS.
HIV may be a virus, but the epidemic has always been an expression of disenfranchisement.
Sexism, racism, poverty, homophobia
For instance, Edwin Cameron, the South African Constitutional Court Judge, who is openly gay and living with HIV, has spoken ceaselessly about how he used to spend $400 a month when the majority of South Africans could not afford the life-saving anti-retroviral treatment. He described it as buying life.
It is little wonder that while so many gains have been made in the struggle to alleviate and contain HIV/Aids worldwide, it is still the most disenfranchised who are most at risk: young female adolescents who cannot negotiate sex, gay men, sex workers and transgender people.
The epidemic has always been borne of hate, judgement and discrimination masquerading as a mere health emergency.
HIV is not just transmitted by sex. It is transmitted by sexism, racism, poverty and homophobia, Theron said to rousing applause.
When Theron was done, I was left in a quandary.
We ask Hollywood stars to be peace ambassadors, to draw attention to refugees, human rights and womens rights, because we hope their stardom will bring light and dollars to a cause. We all know its mostly an act or voyeurism. It is further proof of purely conceived white saviour complex.
Of course the participation of these stars rarely brings any real change. Because their participation is not designed to change the status quo. They are simply around to pander to news values that hold celebrity as a form of divinity.
But on Monday night, Charlize Theron urged us to consider it another way.
Lets ask ourselves why havent we beaten this epidemic, could it be because we dont want to? she asked.
In response, the room, filled with thousands of people, fell silent.
For more coverage on #AIDS2016, follow @azadessa
Activists point to the Kremlins abandonment of internationally accepted prevention methods for the mounting crisis.
Moscow, Russia Svetlana Izambayeva, 36, is one of Russias most unusual beauty queens.
The former hairdresser from the Volga River city of Cheboksary was crowned Miss Positive during a 2005 pageant for HIV-positive women.
She was one of the first Russians to publicly disclose their status; tens of millions saw her do so on national television.
Four years later, Izambayevas widowed mother died, and she was denied custody of her two little brothers.
Russian law does not allow an HIV-positive person to become a childs legal guardian. The boys ended up in an orphanage where they were beaten, had their belongings stolen and got lice.
I went through eight trials to win them back, Izambayeva, red-haired and bespectacled, told Al Jazeera at a conference on HIV/Aids in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, held in Moscow in late March.
Izambayeva, her brothers, husband and two children, now live in a cramped one-bedroom apartment in Kazan, a city of 1.2 million with a sizeable Muslim population.
There she heads a charity which helps people living with the HIV virus, and moonlights as a part-time psychologist at a state-run clinic for $60 a month.
Izambayeva is also on the frontlines of the fight against Russias soaring HIV/Aids epidemic.
Russia: in the top 10
The number of registered HIV-positive Russians surpassed one million in January, almost doubling since 2011, Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova told the conference. She admitted that this number may reach 2.5 million by 2020.
The current rate of HIV is less than 1 percent of the countrys population of 143 million. It seems miniscule in comparison to South Africas estimated 12.2 percent, Botswanas 17.6 percent and even Surinames 1.1 percent.
READ MORE: Dorcas Makgato: Botswana worked hard at confronting HIV
But these nations epidemics have been contained and are on their way down, while Russia is among the top 10 countries with the fastest-growing incidence of HIV/Aids.
Here, it claims 300 new victims a day, or almost 30,000 deaths a year.
Russia, along with four African nations and Indonesia, face the triple threat of high HIV burden, low treatment coverage and no or little decline in new HIV infections, according to a 2014 report by UNAIDS, a United Nations programme on HIV and Aids.
UNAIDS has warned that Russia is facing a large and growing HIV epidemic. Its one which has become irreversible in many ways, Russias Federal Aids Centre has said.
On July 11, UNAIDS, in its 2016 Prevention Gap Report on how unequal access to HIV prevention options caused a rise in infections between 2010 2015, singled out Eastern Europe and Central Asia as the only region in the world where the HIV epidemic continued to rise rapidly.
Elsewhere, the decline in adult infections has largely stalled. In this new global report, the agency said that the region saw a dramatic 57 percent annual increase in new HIV infections since 2010. Russia accounted for 80 percent of new cases in 2015 in what consitutes as the regions largest HIV epidemic.
Low coverage of prevention programmes, in particular harm-reduction interventions among people who inject drugs, is largely to blame for this continued rise, the report said.
At the March conference, Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev told audiences that the epidemic is a matter of national security and a real tragedy for our country.
The Kremlins fault?
Independent Russian experts and HIV activists claim that the epidemic is fuelled by the Kremlins policies, or, rather, its abandonment of internationally accepted prevention methods such as sex education in schools, distribution of condoms to sex workers, and clean needles and methadone therapy for drug addicts, let alone awareness-raising campaigns such as the pageant Izambayeva won more than a decade ago.
The trend accelerated after Vladimir Putins return to a third presidency in 2012, which was marked by massive protests, mostly by middle-class, pro-Western urbanites.
The Kremlin responded by cracking down on opposition and all things Western, be that political trends, tolerance towards sexual minorities or programmes on HIV/Aids reduction run by foreign-funded NGOs.
[Putins by Anna
directly sabotaging HIV prevention by not allocating its own funds and blocking the work of international donors and Russian NGOs]
Putins government is directly sabotaging HIV prevention by not allocating its own funds and blocking the work of international donors and Russian NGOs, said Anna Sarang, head of the Andrey Rylkov Foundation, the only NGO distributing clean needles to drug addicts in Moscow.
In 2012, Russia adopted a law that requires foreign-funded NGOs to register as foreign agents, and the Justice Ministry has listed some 100 groups as such. These groups are frequently audited, denied registration with authorities, their offices searched, their staff detained, arrested and interrogated. Many have been forced to close. In late June, the Andrey Rylkov Foundation was listed as a foreign agent.
The Silver Rose, an NGO in St Petersburg, Russias second-largest city, which protects the rights of sex workers and uses Western funds for advocacy work among them, has been denied registration three times.
We really remain the last barrier to the epidemic, the groups head, Irina Maslova, told Al Jazeera. But sex education goes against the Orthodox [Christian] morals.
Persecuted and decimated in Soviet times, the Russian Orthodox Church now claims two-thirds of Russias population as its flock. Though polls show a fraction to be devout, the Church enjoys unprecedented government support and its doctrine plays a crucial role in the Kremlins neoconservative agenda.
READ MORE: AIDS 2016 This pandemic is far from over
In mid-April, a court in the city of Engels declared Socium an NGO which used grants from Western donors to distribute condoms and clean needles to drug addicts and HIV-infected people a foreign agent.
Moreover, Ivan Konovalov, a sociology expert, told the court that the NGO participated in a hybrid war that aims to change the political regime in our country, the Russian daily newspaper the Kommersant reported.
Its operations in principle contradict the goals and objectives of our state, the daily quoted him as saying. They destroy our traditions and national values.
Traditions and values was the mantra the Kremlin used in 2013, when Putin signed the infamous legislation banning the distribution of information defined as propaganda of sodomy, lesbianism, bisexuality and transgenderism to minors.
Russias policies are aimed at discriminating [against] all vulnerable groups drug users, LGBT, sex workers and directly oppose scientifically proven methods of prevention that are used worldwide, Sarang says, adding that these methods are replaced with the policies of spreading hate and homophobia.
Already widespread, homophobia grew rampant, hate attacks and persecution of LGBT Russians skyrocketed, and education materials on HIV/Aids describing same-sex relations and distributed by international agencies and Russian NGOs are often treated as the banned propaganda.
The fight against HIV is the very litmus test that measures the level of humanity and tolerance, and thats where we fail the most, political analyst Sergey Medvedev said at the Moscow conference.
Despite several requests, Russias health ministry was not available for comment.
Roots of the scourge
The start of the epidemic dates back to the initial years after the 1991 Soviet collapse.
For the Soviets, sex out of wedlock was frowned upon, abortion was the most common method of family planning and homosexuality was a crime punishable by up to five years in jail.
Those diagnosed with a venereal disease could face criminal charges if they refused to identify their sexual partners. Families and reputations were ruined, but the transmission chain was cut short.
The fall of communism brought an unprecedented openness of borders, ways of life and sexual mores along with painful, disorienting economic problems. Partying went along with promiscuity; nightclubs, including for gay patrons, mushroomed.
The attitude to sex became, just like in the West during the student revolutions of the 1970s, one of the main symbols of the new, liberal, pro-Western, anti-Soviet, individualistic and hedonistic mentality that had been repressed and persecuted by the Communist Party, wrote Igor Kon, the late Russian scholar whose books on human sexuality became eye-opening bestsellers in the early 1990s.
Prostitution became ubiquitous. Sex workers lined up along Tverskaya Street in Moscow, a short walk uphill from the Kremlin. Newspapers were filled with countless ads promising all kinds of massage.
Then came the drugs.
Intravenous drug use was virtually unknown, limited to only a small group of users with access, in the Soviet Union.
But by the early 2000s, Russia became the worlds largest consumer of Afghan heroin, injecting, sniffing or toking up to 20 tonnes of it a year.
Moscow accused Washington of forbidding NATO troops to destroy Afghan poppy fields to win the hearts and minds of local farmers, and allowing the smuggling of heroin to ex-Soviet Central Asia.
Some 1.5 million Russians are still addicted to heroin, according to FSKN, the federal anti-drugs agency that was headed by Viktor Ivanov, Putins ex-KGB colleague, before being disbanded in April.
FSKN preferred heavy-handed policies of dealing with addiction. Methadone was outlawed in 1997, and FSKN pushed for tougher punishment for drug users and wants to be able to forcibly commit them to state-run rehab clinics.
The idea that drug addicts, gays and prostitutes are the primary, if not the only victims of HIV/Aids, persists in the minds of many Russians today.
According to a 2012 survey by FOM, a state-run pollster, 48 percent of Russians think that drug users mostly contract HIV, and 26 percent believe that promiscuous people, prostitutes are most at risk.
Thirty-nine percent of those surveyed think those infected had it coming, and their status is their fault.
In recent years, things have changed. The amount of heroin entering Russia decreased and the epidemic spread beyond the risk groups, says Vadim Pokrovsky, head of the Federal Aids Center.
About 43 percent of new HIV infections occur during heterosexual sex, he says.
Overcoming the stigma
Thats how Izambayeva got infected during a fling with a young man she met on a holiday in southern Russia something people here call a resort romance.
She recalls her own deep depression after she learned about her status in 2003. All she knew about the virus at the time was that it would kill her soon, and she kept repeating a line in her head from a popular Russian rock song: And now you have Aids / which means were gonna die.
HIV will keep progressing in Russia until we overcome the stigma by Svetlana Izambayeva, head of a Kazan-based charity helping people with HIV
It was only after meeting HIV activists and learning more about anti-retroviral treatment that she felt ready to fight the virus. Then she won the pageant, met and married her HIV-positive husband and founded her charity. She has consulted hundreds of HIV-infected people and their families, helping them to tackle the stigma and getting them on to treatment, and often educating them about the most basic facts about HIV/Aids.
She discovered that combating the stigma surrounding HIV is far more difficult than observing the treatment.
HIV will keep progressing in Russia until we overcome the stigma, she says.
The lives of many HIV-positive Russians are filled with fear of disclosure and daily abuses.
WATCH: Witness Rachels HIV Revolution
Some refuse to start their anti-retroviral treatment because they know very little about its results and end up choosing shorter, closeted lives over monthly visits to health clinics where they fear their status will be divulged to outsiders.
This happens all too often.
Medical secrecy does not exist, Ruslan, an HIV-positive resident of Kazan, who only gave his first name, told Al Jazeera. He said his doctor revealed his status to people outside the clinic who knew Ruslan and they spread the news.
What also prevents many HIV-positive people from starting treatment is the lack of information about the most basic facts about the virus, especially when it comes to teenagers and people in their early 20s who appear to know very little about prevention, Izambayeva says.
People say, Your treatment will kill me faster than Aids,' she says about some of her patients whose knowledge about the virus is mostly based on hearsay.
Because of compulsory screening, pregnant women represent the most tragic stratum of the epidemic.
They comprise almost a quarter of newly diagnosed cases and sometimes reject treatment, passing along the infection to their child.
Some pregnant women tell me, You cant do anything to me, this is my foetus, Ill do anything I want with it,' says Izambayeva, who adhered to a drug regimen during her pregnancy and gave birth to two HIV-negative children.
Dostoevsky and immorality
While HIV activists blame the growing epidemic on the Kremlins neoconservative bent, officials and the dominant Orthodox Church back it.
The Church has adamantly opposed needle-exchange programmes, methadone therapy and the use of condoms because they condone sin and has instructed its clergy to bring their HIV-infected parishioners closer to Christ and seek medical help.
Of course, we are very glad that the so-called harm-reduction programmes and free distribution of condoms, replacement of [heroin] with methadone are not accepted in our country, Bishop Panteleimon said in October, addressing a government panel on HIV/Aids.
We understand that there is a need for other methods and other programmes, he added, referring to the Churchs emphasis on chastity and tougher drug-control measures.
Like no other disease, Aids has moral, or, to be more exact, immoral reasons, said the bishop, who runs an Orthodox rehabilitation centre for heroin addicts in his parish of Orekhovo-Zuevo, a region near Moscow.
To hear it from Russias child rights ombudsman, one of the most outspoken critics of the West, would be to think Dostoevsky and Tolstoy offer better prevention strategies than the UN.
Today, the best sexual education is Russian literature, Pavel Astakhov said in televised remarks in 2013, referring to the Orthodox morals that the classics draw upon, evidently forgetting the prostitution and adultery vividly described in them.
Western sexual education, he added, destroys childrens mentality and causes irreparable danger.
Such thinking has resulted in the omission of sex education and information about contraception on state-backed public service announcements.
When condoms are considered a crime, things get complicated, Natalya Vershinina, an HIV activist from the Volga River city of Samara, told Al Jazeera.
She says that many Russian couples havent fully embraced the necessity of getting tested for HIV before starting a relationship. She points to the slapstick television series How I Became a Russian, which aired in 2015 on the national STS channel, as an example.
When condoms are considered a crime, things get complicated by Natalya Vershinina, an HIV activist from the Volga River city of Samara
In the series, an American journalist falls in love with Russia, and a Russian girl. In one episode, he shows her a fake certificate proving that he is HIV-negative. She immediately recognises forgery, but says, I trust you and, apparently, has unprotected sex with him. The episode reflects an opportunist attitude many young Russians have when it comes to sex.
A 2012 poll by the NewsEffector monitoring agency showed that more than 63 percent of Russians aged 16-35 dont use protection when they have casual sex.
Russias struggling economy is also affecting the HIV/Aids epidemic.
The Health Ministry said that fewer than 200,000 HIV-infected Russians are getting free anti-retroviral therapy in 2016 because of Russias deepening economic meltdown. Compared to last year, 50,000 fewer people are now receiving treatment; in 2015, the Ministry had also pledged to expand treatment to 60 percent of the estimated one million Russians infected with the virus.
Tens of thousands of patients are being transferred from expensive, foreign-made drugs to cheaper, domestically produced pills, which cause more side-effects, including vomiting.
Now, each month when she visits the health clinic, Izambayeva worries shell be given the Russian-made drugs.
But I pity the infected children the most, she says. How could they follow up on their treatment if they keep throwing up?
Malawis Minister of Health, Peter Kumpalume, on the approach to HIV in a country where 10 percent are infected.
Since its first diagnosis in 1985, Malawi has come a long way in the struggle to overcome HIV/Aids. At least 10 percent of the countrys population has HIV. In 2013, some 48,000 people in this country of 16 million died from HIV-related illnesses. But experts across the board agree that the country, nestled deep in southern Africa, has made significant progress.
According to UNAIDS, there has been a reduction in new infections. Malawis treatment programme, which began in 2004, has reportedly saved 260,000 lives. Crucially, it has seen a 67 percent reduction in the number of children acquiring HIV, the biggest success story across all sub-Saharan nations
But the story is far from over. Women and girls, sex workers and men who have sex with men are still very vulnerable. Moreover, young people account for 50 percent of new infections.
Ahead of the 21st International Aids Conference in Durban, South Africa, Al Jazeera spoke to Peter Kumpalume, Malawis minister of health, in Lilongwe.
Al Jazeera: Malawi has managed to reduce new infections as well as the number of people dying from HIV. How has it done this?
Peter Kampalume: We have had a very high infection rate. I think at some point it was estimated to be around 25 percent but we have managed to reduce it to about 10 percent.
Its been hanging around there for some time and, indeed, we have reduced the infection rate significantly to about 40,000 a year.
How have we done that? I think in two ways.
Number one: there has been a concerted effort from government and civil society organisations to sensitise the people about the decisions they make. So the messages have been going out loud and clear.
The second aspect of it, of course, is the availability of medicines.
Al Jazeera: So would you say this success has been a result of better information and education?
PK: I think the prevention aspect has worked significantly better than the curing or treatment aspect. Because of the messages there has been a behaviour change. There is no question about it.
For instance, the vast majority of reasonable people would not go out on the streets and sleep with prostitutes without protection. There would still be some risk-takers; you always have those in society. But also I think generally people have been cautious in starting new relationships.
Al Jazeera: Why are urban Malawians disproportionately affected by HIV?
PK: I think there are two reasons. In any country where you have more people in one area, if there is going to be an epidemic, it is likely to affect those people more than those people that are scattered.
Then, if you go back to the 1960s, when we had some kind of revolution, particularly in Western cultures, where we had, lets call it loose morals from the Western perspective. And that has properly expanded in the 1960s and 1970s and because of globalisation and because of TV and so on, people kind of copied Western mentalities and the first people that tend to embrace globalisation and liberalisation, as they call it, are urban people and not so much the village people.
So the risky behaviours if I may put it that way are more pronounced in urban areas than in the rural areas. And as a result the infection rate has been higher in the urban areas than in the rural areas.
Al Jazeera: If this risky behaviour was copied from the West, why do you think the developed world hasnt been as affected by HIV/Aids as the developing world?
PK: I think to an extent it is information. We know that HIV was first manifested in Western countries. But the precautions, the information went out faster to people, and people generally adhered to the messages. But also you need the critical mass of infections in order for it to become an epidemic. I guess they never went through the phases that we, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, have experienced with HIV/Aids. That would be my explanation: information went out faster in those countries. Also, we kind of lived in denial for some time; it took us time to accept that this was a problem and we needed to do something about it.
Another aspect was that, again, we just didnt have the money to combat it. So people were just dying, or if you like, spreading the virus to other people.
Al Jazeera: Why was sub-Saharan Africa more affected than other regions?
PK: I think what we need to understand is that there are several factors that have necessitated the spread of HIV, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa more than in other places.
Now, generally, if you look at the figures globally, it is actually the developing nations that are disproportionately affected by HIV/Aids.
So could it be nutrition? That because HIV attacks the immune system and if you are malnourished, its going to manifest itself more than it would have if you were well nourished. Thats a possibility and that could be one of the contributing factors as to why particularly sub-Saharan Africa was affected the most. This is where most poor people live, after all.
It is pretty difficult to know with certainty that this is the main reason.
The leading factors are information, cultural practices, nutrition and, of course, the availability of medicines. Those all contribute towards the disparities that we observe between the developing nations and the developed nations.
How can we handle something of this sort in future? We have to remember one thing, that the world is becoming smaller and smaller. So a problem in one part of the world is a problem for all. The days where we would say: Oh, thats an African problem, or Oh, thats a European problem, and so on, are all gone.
Al Jazeera: Women and young people are still most at risk of contracting HIV in Malawi. Is it an issue of power?
PK: I know that it may be a big issue in other parts of the world, say other developing nations, but not so much here. So if you look at the behaviours, we do know that in some instances there will be some issues where a man doesnt want to use a condom, and the woman may find it difficult to persuade him otherwise. With education there has been a significant change in mindsets.
I am not saying that the issue does not exist in Malawi but I think its not as big a problem as you would find in other parts of the world, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.
The vast majority [of new infections] is related to risky behaviours of both males and females.
Al Jazeera: But women are most at risk.
PK: Yes, but the driver for infections among the 15 to 29-year-old group is not related to power dynamics. This is just the risky behaviours of young people. There is always a vicious cycle between men in their late 20s and young girls and so on and so on. So its not about power dynamics in the family setting. Thats not the driver, the driver is completely different.
Al Jazeera: But Malawi has significant difficulties with regard to family planning.
PK: We have done significantly well in Malawi, in terms of convincing both husbands and wives in terms of reducing the number of children. So, for example, five years ago an average family in Malawi was six children, today the statistics say it is about four children per family.
I think to an extent, education is key. If you look at the number of children that educated people have in Malawi, it is about two on average.
Al Jazeera: How difficult is it as the department of health to manage a pandemic like HIV when so many Malawians are moving around sub-Saharan Africa? So many Malawians are working in South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe countries that have been hit hard by the virus.
PK: I think to an extent we need a global solution to the problem. We cannot have a system where medicines are available here and when that person goes to another country, they dont have access to Aids or TB medicines.
If we dont have this kind of cross-border understanding and methods of targeting HIV/Aids, we would basically be at the mercy of the behaviour of the people and we know that willpower alone is not the most reliable means of controlling the spread of HIV.
So we need to make sure that as a global village particularly in southern Africa that we come together and agree on modalities on how we can help patients irrespective of where they come from.
Al Jazeera: how successful have you been in convincing a country like South Africa to have a process or a policy of universal healthcare for a regional block?
PK: I dont think that it would be fair for universal health coverage for all. Because you have got to remember that health coverage comes from taxes, from the people, and its not fair to ask a particular country to increase their health budget because they have foreigners in that country. Thats not the way to do it. The fight against HIV/Aids is being driven by UNAIDS through the funds that every country accesses globally.
The solution has to come from that. We need to put aside money to treat people with HIV across borders.
Al Jazeera: Malawi is reliant on foreign funding. Just under 70 percent of your treatment programmes are funded from overseas. How much longer will that continue?
KP: Well as long as we have got the will of the friends that keep on helping us, yes it is sustainable. But thats not how we should plan it nationally.
You cannot rely on the neighbour to keep on providing sugar and salt for your household. So we are in a programme of setting up new modalities of funds for health that should generate extra resources.
Al Jazeera: You have managed to improve life expectancy. But are peoples lives better as well as longer?
PK: It is important to make sure that the quality of life is as good as the length of ones life. Thats what we hope to do. Of course, the alternative is still worse. What tends to happen is that when a mother or a father dies, the young children are raised either by their uncles, aunties or their grandparents. Because their grandparents are not young enough to work, the quality of life, both of the grandparents and the children, becomes very poor.
So if we dont treat people, we end up pushing people into a life of poverty.
So this is the reason we think that test and treat is a good alternative. Its not just that it gives people long life but it also means we can save those still in their prime.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Follow Azad Essa on Twitter @azadessa for comprehensive coverage of #AIDS2016
To be able to have children is so important for a woman. When they took that away from me, I felt worthless.
Ostrava, Czech Republic To be able to have children is so important for a woman, says Elena Gorolova. When they took that away from me, I felt worthless. I completely lost my self-esteem.
Elena, a 47-year-old social worker, was sterilised against her will as a young woman. She is one of four Czech Roma women, all victims of involuntary sterilisation, who tell their stories in a theatre play called Stories that Have (Never) Begun. The play premiered last month in Ostrava, a city in the Czech Republic with a large Roma community.
The systematic sterilisation of Roma women without their full and informed consent [PDF] aimed at bringing down their high birth rate was state policy in the former Czechoslovakia during the communist era. It was officially abolished in 1993 [PDF], but according to the European Roma Rights Centre, it continued throughout the 1990s and 2000s, with the last known case in the Czech Republic taking place in 2007.
Finding a voice
For more than 10 years, Elena has been active in a group of Roma women who have put this issue on the political agenda and have successfully fought to stop involuntary sterilisation in the Czech Republic.
They are also demanding financial compensation for what was done to them. But its not only about money. Its about the recognition that our rights have been violated, she says.
In 2009, the Czech government expressed its regret over the illegal sterilisations. But last year it rejected a law that proposed compensation for the victims. Thats when Elena and her fellow activists decided they had to find a new way to draw attention to their cause.
READ MORE: I can see now that it was so wrong
The result is the play, which they set up together with the Czech NGO League of Human Rights and the European Roma Rights Centre.
The play is another way for these women to express their frustration, says Katerina Cervena of the League of Human Rights. Its a way for them to find an alternative voice.
As a lawyer she has been working closely with the women for almost eight years now, representing them in court.
The play is based on the life stories of the four Roma women. The stories are told by the women themselves, dressed in black.
I am still in pain after all these years
In a series of scenes in which the women are being interviewed by somebody playing the role of a journalist, they highlight the different ways in which they were coerced into sterilisation.
I was totally misinformed, Olga Jonasova says. A social worker who came to visit me told me it would only be for five years and I would be able to have children afterwards. She said all the other women of the community already had it done.
When I was giving birth to my fourth child, they handed me a blank paper to sign, recounts Natasa Botosova. I was in a lot of pain, so I just did what they asked. After that I was anaesthetised and then they sterilised me. I only found out what had happened because afterwards there was a scar on my abdomen.
I was pressured by a social worker, says Sona Karolova. First she promised me money. When I refused, she threatened that they would take my children away. She said my husband would lose his job. In the end I gave in to stop her pressuring me.
READ MORE: Forced sterilisations stoke Kenyan anger
At the end of the play, there is a scene in which Elena explains why she decided to speak out. I do it because I am not alone, she says. I do it because there are other women who are not able to stand up for their rights.
Its an emotional moment there are tears in her eyes. In the audience there are many Roma women; some are visibly touched.
Among them is Jirina Dzurkova. She went through the same experience as the women on the stage. She is a tiny woman of 49, but looks much younger.
I was 34 when it happened. Not too long after the birth of my son I had an ectopic pregnancy. I was brought to the hospital and they decided to operate on me immediately. They didnt tell me anything, they didnt make me sign a paper, there was no talk of sterilisation at all.
Some time afterwards she went with her son to the doctor for a regular medical check up. The doctor studied her medical file and said: I see you have been sterilised.
At first I didnt understand what he said, because he used a word I didnt know. When he explained to me, I was devastated. It was the worst day of my life. It took a long time before I summoned up the courage to tell my husband. We always wanted more children.
When her husband heard what happened he wanted to go to the hospital to beat up the doctor who sterilised his wife. I convinced him not to do it, because it would only have meant more trouble. But he was so shocked. After that he started drinking, Jirina says.
In 2001, she filed a complaint against the hospital, but the case was postponed many times before it was eventually dropped. It was a terrible blow when that happened. I felt punished for a second time, she says.
I am still in pain, after all these years, she adds. One day my son said to me: I would like to have a little brother. I had to explain to him why this was not possible and we both cried. They stole my dignity. I feel I dont have the same worth as other women.
I will continue the fight
Jirina was lucky that her marriage survived. Some victims of forced sterilisation not only lost their fertility but also their husbands. These men felt betrayed by their wives, explains Natasa Botosova.
Her husband divorced her after she was sterilised. He took it very badly. He said: you did this on purpose, so you can cheat on me without any consequences.
Olga Jonasovas husband also left her. After this, I met another man. But we broke up because I couldnt have any babies. He said he was going abroad for one month, but he never came back. I was lucky to have a big family. They all did their best to comfort me, she says.
After the performance, Elena sits down in the open-air bar outside the theatre. She is a humorous, energetic woman with big brown eyes. It happened when I was 21 and gave birth to my second son, she explains. My first child was delivered by C-section and the doctor told me I would need another one. Nobody said anything about sterilisation.
READ MORE: Perus history of forced sterilisation overshadows vote
When she was brought to the operation room, she was given a paper to sign, she says. It was an agreement to sterilisation. But I was in a stressful situation. They were preparing the C-section and I was in pain. I was in such a state that I didnt know what I was signing.
After the operation the doctor told her that he had sterilised her. He told me to be happy. He said that by sterilising me he had saved my life.
She cried when she heard the news. I couldnt believe it was true, that they really had done this to me.
When she told her husband, they had a fierce argument, because, like Natasas husband, he was convinced that she had done it willingly. It is a custom among Roma families to have many children and he felt ashamed we would never have more than two, she says. In the end I managed to convince him that it was done against my will.
Several years later, in 2004, she met a group of Roma women who, like her, were sterilised against their will. She became their spokesperson. I no longer felt alone. Fighting together with other women who went through this made me feel much stronger.
The group organised a demonstration in front of the hospital in Ostrava where many women were sterilised. They also set up meetings with young Roma women to inform them about sterilisation and their rights. Elena spoke three times before the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women she delivered her last speech in February this year.
And now there is the play.
She says she felt very insecure when working on it. I dont think I have a great talent for acting. It wasnt easy for me. But now that weve had the premiere, all the stress is gone. I think this is a great way to draw attention to our case. I felt so angry when the government rejected the compensation law.
They said that a special law is unnecessary, because the women can take their cases to court, explains Marek Szilvasi of the European Roma Rights Centre, which is supporting the women. But the problem is that many of their cases are barred, because according to Czech law, the women need to file their complaint within a certain amount of years.
He says there are no data on the exact number of victims. But we estimate that several hundreds of women have been sterilised against their will. Among them are also non-Roma women: women with disabilities or with a lower social status.
When the government rejected the compensation law, I was so disappointed that I wanted to stop being an activist, Elena says. But I wont. I still have hope that one day we will be compensated for what is done to us. I will continue the fight. For sure.
The protests may turn into an uprising if India continues to misrepresent the fury as Pakistan-sponsored terrorism.
The furious protests that erupted in Indian-administered Kashmir on July 8 are a poignant reminder that popular sentiment cannot be ignored merely because it does not fit in with the nationalist narrative of an unrepresentative government.
That is especially true where popular sentiment is grounded in the cause of a unique identity.
In the absence of legitimate political forums, such sentiment foments unrest which builds until circumstances provide a martyr such as Burhan Wani, the young rebel whose killing by Indian security forces has ignited the protests in Kashmir.
Historical misconception
Often, such protest movements are acts of desperation without a chance of success, so they ebb and flow in cycles linked with angry violence and inconclusive attempts at political engagement.
The outcome is more violence between armed occupiers and young activists who become increasingly militant over time.
Unsurprisingly, the emergent generation of stone-pelting young Kashmiris identify with their Palestinian counterparts and are calling the new wave of protests an Intifada.
Another similarity is that the situation in Kashmir is a mess created by departing Western colonialists.
In drawing up the map for the division of the Indian Subcontinent in 1947, the British viewed Kashmir entirely through the spectacles of recent history.
If India continues to treat Kashmiri sentiment with violent disdain and Pakistan reverts to its policy of exploiting the situation, both may find that the space in between is filled by non-state actors who specialise in turning political violence into chaos. by
The Sikh king, Maharaja Ranjit Singh, had conquered Kashmir in the early 19th century and the British seized it from his successors.
In the couple of millennia before that, Kashmir was mostly a participant in the struggles for power between China, Tibet and various Muslim empires based in Central Asia.
It was both influential and coveted because it controlled a handful of barely traversable passes in the Himalayan and Karakorum mountain ranges through which Silk Road trade was conducted between China and India.
Those linkages are what sparked British colonial interest in Kashmir in the 19th century.
In consolidating its power in India, the colonial regime was mindful of the southward expansion of tsarist Russia into Central Asia and sold the territory in 1846 to Gulab Singh, a ranking turncoat from Ranjit Singhs court.
OPINION: India and Pakistan must compromise over Kashmir
The Dogra dynasty he established was cruel and greedy in the extreme, prompting the southward migration of many Kashmiri families into the neighbouring state of Punjab, where there was an abundance of work and business opportunities, as well as protection from persecution, ironically, because it was directly governed by the British.
Their numbers swelled in the lead up to the 1947 partition of the Subcontinent as the last of the Dogras, Hari Singh, ruthlessly prevented attempts by Kashmirs Muslim majority to have a say in their future.
Eminently resolvable
Since then, Kashmir has become a ping-pong ball in the rivalry between India and Pakistan. The latter ceded part of the territory to China in 1962 to secure an alliance against India.
Three localised conflicts and a full-fledged war later, however, a trilateral initiative between 2004 and 2007 involving India, Pakistan and Kashmiri separatists demonstrated that the issue is eminently resolvable.
OPINION: The ghosts of Kashmirs past
Pakistans military ruler General Pervez Musharraf acknowledged that no lasting progress could be made if Kashmir was addressed solely as a bilateral territorial dispute.
Under the Composite Dialogue Process, the diplomatic status of Kashmir took a back seat to the immediate priority of taking practical measures that gave the people there reason for optimism.
The chosen method was the dismantling of barriers between Kashmiris, for whom it became possible to travel and trade across the Line of Control, which roughly divides the state into Indian and Pakistani-administered halves.
According to Khurshid Kasuri, the foreign minister of Musharrafs regime, by 2006 India and Pakistan had agreed in principle to sign a series of agreements resolving their long-standing territorial disputes.
Those signings were to have led to an agreement on the joint administration of Kashmir by India and Pakistan, under which both would withdraw their military forces from the region, setting up final status talks.
Another setback
Sadly, the process fell victim to Indias electoral cycle and the fall of the Musharraf regime in Pakistan.
Its remnants were buried under the carnage perpetrated upon Mumbai in November 2008 by militants of the Lashkar-i-Taiba, a Pakistan-based terrorist group that misrepresents itself as an army of popular resistance to the Indian occupation of Kashmir.
To many in Kashmir, the sentiment driving the ongoing protests is reminiscent of the dark mood seen there in 1989, when the last popular uprising began.
India responded with a brutal crackdown in which all manner of human rights atrocities were rife.
The struggle became increasingly violent and radicalised because of the influx of thousands of Pakistan-based militants, many of them led by mujahideen veterans from the successful resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
Indeed, the casualty toll in Kashmir came to rival that of Afghanistan by the time Musharraf, under severe US pressure, reined in the militants in 2003.
As always, history is instructive. If India continues to treat Kashmiri sentiment with violent disdain and Pakistan reverts to its policy of exploiting the situation, both may find that the space in between is filled by non-state actors who specialise in turning political violence into chaos.
Tom Hussain is a journalist and Pakistan affairs analyst based in Islamabad.
The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
The coming months will reveal whether the US and Turkeys political divergences will trump their strategic interests.
Turkey-United States relations are once again at a crossroads and could quickly deteriorate if presidents Barack Obama and Recep Tayyip Erdogan dont move swiftly to restore trust.
Tensions are rising rapidly as Turkish officials insinuate or openly accuse Washington of backing last weeks failed military coup and demand that the Obama administration extradite Turkish expat Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara accuses of standing behind the coup.
And the the US response is not improving matters. The Secretary of State John Kerry has rejected any such accusations as utterly false and harmful, and he warned that Turkeys NATO membership could be in jeopardy if it continues to purge thousands of officials and civil servants.
Will the failed coup and Erdogans purge of the military and bureaucracy affect their relationship?
US stutters
President Obama voiced his support for the democratically elected government during the coup attempt, but the overall response from the US establishment was mute at best.
Washingtons ambivalence was best expressed by the President of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, who told The New York Times that the coup attempt presents a dilemma to the United States and European governments: Do you support a nondemocratic coup, or an increasingly nondemocratic leader?
Is this really a dilemma? Even if everything Erdogans critics say about him is true, does this justify the reluctance to take sides with the democratically elected government of a NATO ally over mutinous military officers?
READ MORE: Turkey Coup silence and pointing fingers at the West
Needless to say, Washington has long supported undemocratic leaders across the globe when it suited its interests. Arming General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi after he mounted a military coup against Egypts democratically elected government is one recent example.
Be that as it may, why is Obama proving less friendly to a moderate Turkey than George W Bush, even though he promised to improve relations between the US and the Muslim world?
Dizzying ups and downs
Since the Justice and Development Party (AK party) won elections 14 years ago, Turkish-American relations have gone through dizzying ups and downs, equally divided between Bush and Obama.
The Bush administration viewed the conservative AK party as a powerful and moderate Islamist voice in the Muslim world after the 9/11 attacks, but the relationship got complicated after the US-led invasion of Iraq.
Complicated didnt necessarily translate into worse.
Ankara and Washington might disagree on a whole number of issues concerning human rights, democracy and the rule of law that are political in nature, yet they continue to share important strategic interests. by
In fact, despite the Turkish parliaments rejection of the US request to use its territory for a ground deployment to invade Iraq, Bush maintained strong relations with Turkey under the AK party leadership.
In 2005, he told Erdogan at the White House: Turkeys democracy is an important example for the people in the broader Middle East, and I want to thank you for your leadership.
Bush also supported Erdogans efforts to contain Kurdish rebels who used northern Iraq as a base to stage attacks on Turkish targets. Bush called the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) an enemy of Turkey, a free Iraq and the United States.
Syria was a major point of friction between Bush and Erdogan. Washington wanted President Bashar al-Assads Syria isolated, while Erdogan was bringing it out of its isolation.
Turkey reversed its favourable policy towards Syria after Assads crackdown on unarmed Syrians in 2011 with the beginning of the Arab Spring. But Syria continued to be a point of contention between Ankara and Washington.
And so did Israel and Palestine.
Standing up to Israel
In January 2009, Erdogan rebuked Israeli President Shimon Peres at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos. During a session on Gaza, Erdogan said When it comes to killing, you know well how to kill, in reference to the Israeli invasion of the strip the year before.
The following year, Turkey severed its relations with Israel after Israeli commandos boarded the Mavi Marmara ship which was leading the Gaza-bound flotilla to break the siege and killed 10 Turkish activists. Since then, tensions have deepened with each and every Israeli offensive against the Palestinians.
As Turkeys Israel relations worsened, so did Turkeys image in the Israel-friendly mainstream US media. One could indeed easily link the demonisation of Erdogan in the West to his initial public hostility towards Israel and the rise of Islamophobia.
Obama, to no avail
After their initial hesitation in responding to the Arab Spring in 2011, Turkish leaders supported an American-led NATO role in the Middle East along the lines of its 1990s support for democracy in Eastern Europe (PDF).
But that wasnt on the agenda of the Obama administration, which hoped to extricate itself militarily from the Middle East.
OPINION: People defeated the coup in Turkey
Turkeys frustration with Washington grew from one year to the next. While both sides agreed that Assad must go, they disagreed on how it would happen, with the Obama administration rejecting Ankaras suggestions for a bolder, more decisive role in Syria and beyond.
In 2012, Obama turned down any appeal for a military intervention in Syria and even after Assad crossed Obamas redline and used chemical weapons against his people, the US president backed away from his threat to use military force in favour of a Russian-brokered diplomatic solution.
When the flux of Syrian refugees to neighbouring countries proliferated, Obama rejected Turkeys suggestion for a humanitarian intervention in Syria and the imposition of a no-fly zone in northern Syria to accommodate fleeing Syrian refugees from the war.
To Turkeys ire, Obama rejected the proposal for a terror-free zone on the Syrian side of the Turkish border and instead supported a Kurdish drive against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS). How can we trust you? Erdogan asked one Obama envoy. Who is your partner is it me or those terrorists in Kobane?
By autumn 2015, after three years of destruction and more than 300,000 Syrian deaths, Russia took advantage of the US hesitation to intervene militarily, ending Turkeys dim hopes, and creating a whole new nightmare on its southern borders.
Resolving differences
Its clear that Obama and Erdogan have had differences on Syria, Egypt, Israel and the rest of the region.
From the outset, while Obama hoped to downsize US military commitments in the region, Erdogan was hoping to expand Turkeys influence and prestige.
And even when the region descended into chaos, Obama avoided grand military commitments in the Middle East and instead focused narrowly on the terror threats.
But Erdogan believes Turkey has a national and historic responsibility to act when regional turmoil is harming its own security and the Middle Easts long-term stability.
OPINION: The strategic consequences of Turkeys failed coup
And yet, despite their differences and in spite of Erdogans apprehension, Turkey has mostly refrained from acting unilaterally in Syria or elsewhere.
And in order to stay in tune with Washingtons strategy of conflict containment and resolution through diplomatic means, Erdogan tried to repair Turkeys damaged relationship with Russia and Israel.
Ankara and Washington might disagree on a whole number of issues concerning human rights, democracy and the rule of law that are political in nature, yet they continue to share important strategic interests.
Surrounded by unfriendly, even hostile regimes in Russia, Iran, Israel, Egypt and Syria, Turkey is in need of NATOs backing, and it has long chosen to coordinate its regional strategy with the US-led alliance.
Likewise, the US needs Turkey as a strategic buffer between Russia and the Middle East, just as Europe needs it as a shield against the spillover of instability from the east.
The coming months will reveal whether their political divergences will trump Turkish-American strategic interests. I doubt it.
Marwan Bishara is the senior political analyst at Al Jazeera. Follow him on Facebook.
The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
Italy and its mafia are not known as bulwarks of progressivism. In the public eye Italy is still a conservative country, with a relatively small amount of women among its workforce. And, of course, the mafia is still associated with ancient laws of honour and blood.
In movies and series, the mafia is pictured as patriarchal and extremely traditional: a world with maybe a creative flexibility around business matters, but an iron cast worldview about the role of men and women, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons. All the godfathers and soldiers, friends and enemies are with no exceptions men.
This image of the mafia exists for a reason, because the mafia grew in a rural society: the pater familias took decisions and gave orders, while woman were in a subservient position, taking care of the house and the children, functioning as a kind of cradle of mafia ideals and values.
Gender roles in the mafia?
Women were also expected to accept an arranged marriage, as pawn in the politics between leading clans, but they were indeed more than wives, sisters or relatives of mafiosi.
The women of the mafia supported and defended their husbands, denying their criminal involvement in front of the judges and when the husbands decided to become a state witness, in other words pentito, regretted repudiated them, in order to be faithful to their blood families and their irreversible laws, or even committed suicide. But there is also another side to the history of women in the mafia.
As early as the beginning of the 20th century, there are examples of the complex and articulated involvement of women in Cosa Nostra our thing.
OPINION: The new face of the mafia in Italy
For example, in a landmark trial in 1927, seven women were accused of mafia crimes; and the career of Maria Grazia Genova (1909-1990) can only be described as real mafia she was arrested more than 20 times.
More recently, Angela Russo, called nonna eroina hero grandmother was arrested. At first the court believed she played a central, yet not vital role as a drug courier. Russo herself was not satisfied with this accusation and explained that she had much more power, and had been acting like a boss, coordinating effectively the mafia activities.
Another famous woman boss or actually a substitute boss was Giusy Vitale, who in 1998 organised the family mafia activities after her brothers were arrested. After her arrest, she became a pentita, collaborating with the prosecutors and thus betraying her family and the rules of the mafia.
READ MORE: Helen Mirren My mafia connection
With brothers, fathers and sons in prison, Giusy is an example of a woman who jumped in to take care of the business. Because they were the only ones allowed to visit their relatives in prison, wives or sisters had key access to information and represented their official bosses.
If the men served their time, most women took the back seat again, but not all. Some became acting boss after their husbands were killed or jailed, but succeeded in creating their own powerful positions.
Women fighting against the mafia
Women played a big role in the fight against organised crime in Italy in other ways as well. Rita Adria (1974-1992) is considered a hero in the antimafia movement.
She inspired films and books, since she decided to collaborate with the ministry of justice after her brother was killed by the mafia.
At the beginning, breaking the law of omerta non-cooperation with authorities to her was a way of finding a vendetta, so, paradoxically, to obey the mafia law to kill the ones who killed ones relatives, in a systematic chain of murders.
During her collaboration with the famous antimafia judge Paolo Borsellino, she continued helping him, becoming more interested in a broader idea of justice, risking her life and losing the respect of friends and family and even of her mother, since she was considered a traitor.
After Borsellino had been killed by the mafia, Adria committed suicide since she no longer felt safe. But she is still an inspiration for many other women who had and have the courage to fight for personal reasons or for ideals against the mafia.
Against or inside the mafia, women have always played an active role. In many ways, the mafia can be seen as a mirror of Italian society.
The old days of a group of men sitting around a wooden table in the shadow, making the decisions, smoking and enjoying the wine and dinner while the women cooked, are over by a long shot.
Silvia Mazzini is an assistant professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin. She is the author of Fur eine mannigfaltige mogliche Welt. Kunst und Politik bei Ernst Bloch und Gianni Vattimo (For a Many-fold Possible World. Arts and Politics in Ernst Bloch and Gianni Vattimo) and of numerous articles on aesthetics, political philosophy and theatre sciences. She works as dramaturge and author for several theatre companies.
The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
Trident programme involves four new vessels at an estimated cost of $54bn over the next 20 years.
Members of the British parliament have strongly voted to renew the countrys ageing nuclear weapons system, a multibillion-dollar project regarded as key to maintaining the countrys status as a world power following its vote to leave the European Union.
Despite opposition from the pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP) and some in the opposition Labour Party, parliament approved the Scottish-based nuclear-armed Trident submarines by 472 to 117 votes.
In her first statement in parliament as prime minister on Monday, Theresa May said Britain needed to retain its nuclear deterrent, which had been an insurance policy for the countrys security for nearly 50 years.
Whistleblower reignites UKs nuclear-deterrent debate
What this country needs to do is to recognise that it faces a variety of threats and to ensure we have the capabilities that are necessary and appropriate to deal with each of those threats, May said before the vote to approve the manufacture of four new nuclear-armed submarines.
The Trident programme replaces the countrys fleet of nuclear-armed submarines with four new vessels at an estimated cost of $54bn over the next 20 years.
May did not hesitate when a member of the opposition asked whether she would be willing to order a nuclear strike.
Yes, May said.
Nuclear-free world
The nuclear threat has not gone away; if anything, it has increased, May said, referencing a newly assertive Russia and a desire from countries including North Korea to acquire nuclear weapons in defiance of the international community.
May also said that while Britain has voted to leave the European Union, we will not leave our NATO and European allies behind.
We cannot outsource the grave responsibility we shoulder for keeping our people safe, she said, adding that scrapping the Trident submarine-based weapons system would be a reckless gamble, a gamble that would enfeeble our allies and embolden our enemies.
Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, a life-long nuclear disarmament campaigner, questioned the need for Britain to possess weapons of mass destruction and said the country should, instead, press for a nuclear-free world.
I would not take a decision that kills millions of people, I do not believe the threat of mass murder is a legitimate way to go about dealing with international relations, said Corbyn, though many of his own party members voted in favour of replacing the nuclear weapons system.
Al Jazeeras Europe Correspondent Barnaby Phillips said the vote to renew the weapons system was important for May following Britains recent decision to leave the European Union.
Theresa May hopes that this vote will send a message to Britains allies, all of which were so disappointed by the Brexit vote. She argues that Britain is still an outward-looking country; a major military power prepared to take on international responsibilities in a dangerous and unpredictable world, he said.
But, it also means that the chilling logic of mutually assured destruction is still with us, more than a quarter of a century after the end of the Cold War, Phillips said.
Durban, South Africa Sixteen years ago, Botswana found itself at the centre of a major health crisis. At least 36 percent of the adult population were HIV positive, and life expectancy had plummeted to 49. Over the past decade, however, the country worked to turn the crisis around.
In 2002, it became the first African country to roll out Antiretroviral, or ARV, treatment and today the infection rate has dropped to 20 percent, while life expectancy has increased to 64. Mother to child transmission of the virus is now 1.9 percent from a high of 40 percent a decade back.
Al Jazeera spoke to health minister Dorcas Makgato about the next phase of the treatment plan and how Botswana plans on reaching key populations still vulnerable to the virus.
Al Jazeera: Botswana is a success story. How did it happen?
Dorcas Makgato: Right from the beginning we decided to approach the issue boldly. We were very open about the size of the scourge and not shying away from the problem.
Bold in the sense that we admitted that there was a problem and bold in bringing all stakeholders together, to have a common purpose in fighting HIV and Aids.
Those critical steps were the foundation of where we are today. You recall that we were the first African country to start the roll out of treatment.
I think we are also the first to start the testing across the board and we are one of the first now again taking it to the next level with the Treat All strategy . It is that boldness and resolve, I think, that has taken us to where we are today.
READ MORE: Can a team of doctors end Aids by 2030?
Al Jazeera: What is Treat All?
DM: So we dont discriminate, if you go to our facility today and you find that you are HIV positive, we put you on treatment. We dont ask how you got it or about your orientation. I think what also helps is that the treatment itself is no longer the treatment of early days which was very strong to the liver.
With science theres improvements and so forth, so I think we are well on our way to achieving the 90-90-90 as well as ending AIDS by 2030. [90-90-90 is the UNAIDS ambitious strategy: By 2020, 90 percent of all people living with HIV will know their HIV status; 90 percent of all people with diagnosed HIV infection will receive sustained antiretroviral therapy; 90 percent of all people receiving antiretroviral therapy will have viral suppression.]
To me, the figures speak for themselves we had a funding gap at the beginning, but in the longer term it was beneficial for Botswana and the return that we expect is epidemic control.
I come from the background of trade. And I looked at it as a matter of a return on investment. So it made a lot of sense for us to say, based on the research, based on our figures, based on the stats, it makes sense for us to go now for a treat all [approach].
Al Jazeera: While there is talk of ending AIDS, tensions have grown regarding donors reducing funding. How do you navigate this?
It's about time that each and every health minister looks at sustainability as part of the modelling of any approach or any initiative by Dorcas Makgato, Botswana health minister
DM: I think first of all its getting your story and contextualising it in economic terms. Because you must be able to show, this is what its costing me now and you cannot just look at HIV/AIDS, you must look at all the relatives of HIV and AIDS. You must look at how much you are spending on TB, how much you are spending on STDs, how much you are spending on all these other diseases that are associated with HIV and AIDS.
How much you are losing in terms of productivity and the minute you start doing that, it will show you that you dont have any choice but to basically confront this issue now. I think its about time that each and every health minister looks at sustainability as part of the modelling of any approach or any initiative.
Secondly, I think we must continue to argue.
Botswana as you know, is now a middle-income country. Ive argued forcefully that my disease burden matters to me. Therefore if I go and ask for funding and ask for partners to come in, they cannot just talk about my GDP per capita income and stuff like that, they must also look at the challenges that I am faced with.
I think the fact that so far we have put in more than 60 percent of our funding for HIV and AIDS, the fact that the government of Botswana has surpassed the Abuja Declaration of spending 17 percent on the health budget. Surely there must be partners out there that will say, This country is doing the best that it can, we want to be associated with the success that will come with that boldness and the resolve.
Al Jazeera: Is Botswana still looking for partners. Can you afford it on your own?
DM: No, we cannot afford it on our own I can tell you now. Even as a middle income country, I had a funding gap of about US $15.6 million and I had to go to the US and say, Look do you want to help me or not? Well I didnt put it that way. I was much nicer, and they did.
READ MORE: Aids 2016: All you need to know about key summit
Al Jazeera: Which demographic remains the most vulnerable to HIV in Botswana?
DM: The youth, the girl child, in particular, that is where all our energies must be. For me, if you say key population there is this whole debate of key population being confined to what others want it to be.
I must focus on is the youth, because they are the leaders of tomorrow. They are the ones that are going to live much longer than us and we have to intensify our efforts and make sure that whatever our efforts are, our initiatives are, we are listening to the voice of the youth, were in alignment with what works for them.
We cant prescribe for them, we cant think for them, so they must be included in this transition, but they must be at the core of the strategy.
Al Jazeera: The youth have always been affected disproportionately. Why are we still stuck in that space?
DM: We are stuck in that space because it is my sincere belief that we have come up with solutions for the youth, rather than getting youth to be part of creating the solution. We think we are older and we know better.
We must listen to their voices so that as we tailor programmes, it has to be a programme that works for them. We had role models before, but our role models were not young people. They did not speak the language of the youth. Also, clinics are often not youth-friendly. Those who run clinics look at those kids as a mother, and they are often scared. He or she is not able to understand the challenges.
So I think it needs to be comprehensive. The parents, the community, and government and initiators of programme need to be on the same level.
Al Jazeera: Has Botswana become a type of case study or example for other countries?
A lot of countries do come to benchmark, pick up what we have excelled in, learn from the mistakes that we have made and learn from the challenges that we still have.
We are quite happy to share with all countries, were not saying that all things are perfect in Botswana, but were just saying that, we have worked very hard at confronting the problem of HIV/AIDS and it seems to be paying off.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Follow Azad Essa on Twitter: @azadessa
At least 10 killed in renewed violence in the countrys troubled eastern region as ethnic tensions simmer.
Ten people were killed in the Democratic Republic of Congos volatile east, an army spokesman said, adding that the military had intervened to restore order.
We denounce the killing of 10 civilians and huts being torched, said Captain Guillaume Djike on Tuesday, adding that the violence broke out overnight in Kibirizi, about 85 kilometres (50 miles) north of Goma, the main city of the troubled Nord Kivu province.
Gaston Kakule, a resident of the area, blamed rebels from the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), which is active in the area, of staging the attack.
Kakule said all those killed belonged to the Nande ethnic group, referring to a local tribe.
The army intervened and re-established order, army spokesman Djike said.
The director of the Congo-based Center for Studies of Peace and Defense of Human Rights, Omar Kavota, told The Associated Press that the victims included a one-year-old child.
The victims were shot dead or decapitated by machetes in the attack by an armed group, he said.
READ MORE: Survival and resurrection after Congos civil war
Dozens of people have been killed in the region in clashes between the Nandes and Congolese Hutus, whom the locals accuse of backing the Rwandan rebels.
The FDLR was set up by Rwandan Hutu refugees in eastern DR Congo after the 1994 genocide in their country which claimed 800,000 lives.
The group is accused of targeting moderate Hutus as well as people from the Tutsi minority and is regularly blamed for serious human rights violations against civilians in eastern DR Congo
The Congolese army last February announced a broad offensive against the FDLR, not just in Nord Kivu, but also in Sud Kivu and the northern part of Katanga province, in a bid to sweep the group clear of national territory.
The Rwandan government, however, accuses the Congolese authorities of doing nothing to tackle the rebels, whom Kigali presents as a major strategic threat even though the FDLR has not launched a major offensive on Rwandan soil in years.
Dozens of armed groups are active in North Kivu, where government troops have also been accused of preying on the civilian population.
Western Europe is in the middle of a brief but intense heatwave.
The town of Orense in Galicia in northwestern Spain was less than one degree Celsius from breaking its temperature record on Monday. At 41.7C it was more than 11 degrees above normal. Spains capital city, Madrid, was six degrees above average att 38C.
Spains national weather agency, Aemet, has put 38 provinces on alert for high temperatures, 13 of which are at high risk. Temperatures are forecast to reach the high 30s in Galicia, Cantabria and the Basque Country. Central Spain, including the capital, Madrid, faces temperatures of over 40C.
Heat has been building in Spain and spreading up the western side of Europe. The French Riviera is sweltering in the mid thirties, more than 10 degrees above average. Paris hit 37C on Monday, 12C above average.
The French Weather Service, Meteo France, has issued a severe weather warning for western and central parts of the country. Meteo France said the heatwave would bring short but very severe periods of heat, requiring particular vigilance.
The English Channel has been no bar to the heat invasion. London was the hottest place in the United Kingdom on Monday at 30C on what was the hottest day of the year so far.
Tuesday was hotter still throughout the UK and London reached 33C, but the inevitable end to a British summer will arrive just as quickly; thunderstorms are expected to bring in cooler weather before the end of the week.
After recent attacks, Israel sealed off several towns throughout Hebron a policy that has drawn widespread criticism.
Hebron, occupied West Bank Dont drive through Younis they shoot at people there, Um Ahmad said through a bus window to the driver as he left Hebrons central bus station.
Younis is a checkpoint at the main entrance to the occupied West Bank village of Sair, which was sealed earlier this month by the Israeli military after gunmen opened fire on an Israeli vehicle and injured the driver before fleeing into the village.
Um Ahmad and a dozen other Palestinians bound for the blockaded town told Al Jazeera that the junction in front of the checkpoint is notorious, as Palestinians have been shot dead there in the past during alleged attacks on Israeli forces. They debate which route to take home, before piling into another bus headed for the villages southern entrance.
We think this will be safer, Um Ahmad told Al Jazeera, motioning to her nieces young family. We are scared. This is probably the best way.
READ MORE: Israel escalates forced transfer of Palestinians
The bus moved through the neighbouring village of Beit Einun and passed by armed Israeli soldiers at a makeshift checkpoint before stopping on the outskirts of Sair, where passengers disembarked and crossed over cement roadblocks on foot.
Sair is one of several towns throughout the Hebron district that has been fully or partially closed by Israel since the start of the month, when deadly attacks carried out by locals left two Israeli settlers dead, marking the most widespread lockdown since 2014. The closures, accompanied by nightly detention raids that have left dozens injured, have severely disrupted the movement of an estimated 400,000 Palestinians, according to the United Nations.
A spokesperson for the Israeli army told Al Jazeera that the recent measures were carried out according to security assessments in light of the latest attacks.
In recent months, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus government has also ordered revocations of work and visitation permits to Israel, punitive home demolitions and withholding of bodies of Palestinians killed while perpetrating attacks.
The measures come despite mounting reports of opposition to such punitive policies by leaders of Israels military and security establishments. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak last month said such policies opposed long-standing analyses by security and military sectors, while the Israeli armys chief of staff, Gadi Eizenkot, has warned that closures and permit revocations could increase frustration and lead to future unrest.
Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman has rejected such criticisms, vowing after a deadly Tel Aviv attack last month to make residents of the attackers hometown of Yatta pay the price.
In Sair, meanwhile, residents frustration is palpable. Near the city centre, Palestinian lawyer Jarrar Jabarin described the closures as collective punishment.
[The Israeli army] distributed leaflets across the village, saying they wont stop the closures until the citizens give them the wanted people, Jabarin told Al Jazeera, sitting outside a shop with two friends.
The trio said that the army has carried out nightly raids throughout the village all month some of which kept residents up until dawn. Several locals also reported seeing mistaaravim, Israeli security forces who enter Palestinian areas posing as Arabs.
We by Husan
causing them to be more violent.]
Sair resident Muhammad Jaradat said that while the village has grown accustomed to frequent closures since a fresh wave of violence began rippling through Israel and the occupied West Bank in October, the current lockdown was tighter than previous ones.
Critics attribute the harsher measures to Netanyahus efforts to cement his authority, as he has ushered increasingly hard-line politicians into his inner circle. Israeli rights group BTselem described the measures carried out in Hebron as an ostentatious act of vengeance taken by Israeli authorities for domestic political reasons, at the expense of Palestinian residents in the Hebron area.
An apparent divide growing between the military and government came to a head in May, when former Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon resigned after urging members of the military to express their opinions even those that contradict the official line. At the time, he said Netanyahus government had lost its moral compass.
According to Tel Aviv University political analyst Dahlia Scheindlin, the security establishment is willing to say theres a connection between economic opportunity and terror, and the political establishment doesnt like that narrative, or refuses to see [the narrative] as a legitimate way to respond to security incidents.
READ MORE: Israel to revoke Jerusalem residency of Palestinians
Such opposition by security and military leadership goes back decades, but its recent increase is a natural outgrowth of an unsustainable political policy, Scheindlin said, citing Israels military control over 4.5 million Palestinians.
[The current government policy] is not status quo. Theres nothing static about it, she said. Its dynamic, in that its deepening and expanding Israels presence in the West Bank It contributes to and perpetuates lack of economic opportunity and lack of political realisation, all the things we know that are among the contributors to the violence.
Barak, in his scathing review of Netanyahus government, also implied such policies were untenable, noting that the agenda being carried out by the current government would collide directly with the values of the [Israeli army], the principles of Israel, international law and common sense.
Back in Sair, local teacher Husan Jabarin told Al Jazeera that the recent measures were pushing the community away from the peace it has been seeking.
Theyre pushing us into depression, he said. We just want to live peacefully and live our lives, nothing else. But the situation that were facing today Its affecting the new generation [and] causing them to be more violent.
We are really sad for that its not what we want, but thats what the occupation is creating.
Mohiyeh al-Tabakhi suffered fatal heart attack after being hit with a rubber-coated bullet, medical sources say.
A Palestinian boy was killed by Israeli soldiers who fired rubber-coated bullets at demonstrators near Jerusalem, said the Palestinian health ministry.
Mohiyeh al-Tabakhi, 12, was killed by shots fired by occupation soldiers in the Al-Ram area near Jerusalem, the ministry said in a statement on Tuesday.
The Palestinian suburb in the occupied West Bank near Jerusalem is cut off from the Holy City by the separation wall built by Israel. The boy was hit in the chest by a rubber-coated bullet which caused cardiac arrest, medical sources were quoted by the Palestinian news agency WAFA as saying.
READ MORE: Israel killed 25 Palestinian children in three months
Israeli police said tear gas grenades and sound bombs had been used against demonstrators in the area.
After being pelted with Molotov cocktails, police used tear gas and stun grenades to disperse the protesters, police spokeswoman Luba Samri told AFP.
There was no live fire, she added.
Earlier on Tuesday, a Palestinian was shot after stabbing two Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank. He died of his wounds, a hospital spokeswoman said.
Mustafa Baradeah, 51, lightly wounded the soldiers with a screwdriver before being shot, the army said. They said he had a knife in his possession.
Mondays attack took place near Al-Arroub, north of the flashpoint West Bank city of Hebron.
READ MORE: Palestinian woman shot dead by Israeli army
Baradeahs brother Ibrahim was killed in April after carrying out an attack with an axe that left a soldier lightly wounded.
Baradeah was from Al-Arroub refugee camp, located about half way between Bethlehem and Hebron.
Violence in the Palestinian territories and Israel since last October has killed at least 217 Palestinians, 34 Israelis, two Americans, an Eritrean and a Sudanese, according to an AFP count.
Activists say discrimination has heightened in recent weeks and Syrians are being blamed for the citys woes.
Protesters took to the streets of Beirut to march against racism toward Syrian refugees, which they say has been growing in recent weeks.
At least 200 people gathered on Monday in an anti-discrimination protest in the Lebanese capital under the banner all against racism.
Chanting slogans such as: The refugee was killed the first time when he ran away from the war, dont kill him again with your racism and Politicians who incite hatred must be held accountable, they marched from the ministry of foreign affairs to the interior ministry.
Everybody in the Lebanese establishment is bigoted and racist beyond belief, Kareem Chehayeb, a 24-year-old political activist who attended the protest, told Al Jazeera.
They use Syrians as scapegoats for their political gain, to consolidate their power and distract people from their corruption.
According to activists, several events in recent weeks fuelled negative attitudes among ordinary citizens as well as institutions towards Syrian refugees.
In late June, a series of deadly suicide bombings that took place in the northern Lebanese village of al-Qaa saw Lebanese troops respond by raiding Syrian refugee camps and arresting more than 100 Syrians. Curfews have also been put in place in several villages.
Lebanons military prosecutor charged three people, including two Syrians, with links to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group, over the attack which left five people dead, according to AFP.
This caused so much negativity towards Syrian refugees. Despite the interior ministers comments that the attackers were not refugees and did not come from camps, said Chehayeb.
Images which circulated online last week appeared to show Lebanese police blindfolding and beating Syrian refugees in the coastal town of Amchit, 40 kilometres from Beirut, according to activists.
Abuse has increased
In a statement released on July 14 in response to the reports in Amchit, Lebanese Minister of Interior and Municipalities, Nohad Machnouk, ordered strict instructions to Lebanons municipal police against the abuse of force.
Abuses, especially against Syrian refugees, have increased in the last period, tarnishing the image of the local police, read the statement.
READ MORE: Syrian refugees in Lebanon live in fear of deportation
Sarah Shmaitilly, another activist, told Al Jazeera: We heard people saying they wanted to take Syrians out in the streets and beat them.
She added that protesters were scolded by passers-by for supporting Syrian refugees.
You cannot find anyone who does not have a racist comment about Syrians. Its pretty ridiculous, she said.
The registered refugee population of Syrians in Lebanon stands at 1.1 million, in Lebanons 4.7 million population.
Human rights groups and activists say refugees are often blamed for the citys electricity, employment and traffic problems.
We are here to remind ourselves and everyone else that we did not have electricity, water, telecommunication, and roads, even before the Syrian refugee crisis, one of the protest organisers said.
The visa and the sponsorship system is not in our name. The trafficking of Syrian women and hiring forced Syrian labour is not in our name. The arrests and raids and humiliation at checkpoints is not in our name. The illegal curfews are not in our name. The expulsion of Syrian students from schools is not in our name, said the organiser, who did not give his name.
READ MORE: Syrians to face visa restrictions for Lebanon
The protest came as a new Human Rights Watch report, released on Tuesday, said that more than half of the 500,000 school-age Syrian children registered in Lebanon are not enrolled in formal education.
Citing limited resources and harsh regulations on residency and work for Syrians, the rights group said Lebanon needs to do more to support the influx of refugee children in schools.
The Syrian civil war, which started in March 2011 after protests against President Bashar al-Assad, has killed more than 250,000 people and displaced 4.5 million Syrians who now mostly reside in Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt.
Follow Zena Tahhan on Twitter: @ZenaTahhan
Coalition strikes on northern Manbij kill 56 civilians, bringing death toll to 167 in past two months, monitor says.
Dozens of civilians have been killed in US-led air strikes against areas in Syria held by the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant group (ISIL, also known as ISIS), a monitoring group said.
At least 56 civilians, including 11 children, were killed in air strikes on the Tokhar area in the northern city of Manbij in the Aleppo governate on Tuesday, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Ten others, including four children, were killed in coalition strikes on the village of Hamira, in the southern suburbs of Manbij.
The UK-based Observatory has put the total number of civilians killed by coalition strikes on Manbij since the Democratic Forces of Syria (DFS) launched their campaign there at the end of May, at 167.
Among the dead were about 44 children, 17 women and eight prisoners, the Observatory said.
The US central command has confirmed to Al Jazeera that it was conducting air strikes in the area and says it needs to investigate allegations of whether civilians were injured or killed in this incident, Al Jazeeras Rosiland Jordan, reporting from Washington, said.
READ MORE: Syria Civil War The sky is falling in Aleppo
Director of the Observatory Rami Abdel-Rahman told German news agency DPA: We believe that the raids which were carried out Tuesday were by US [or] allied planes, but it was by mistake.
We're aware of these reports. Reviewing all information we have to determine credibility & next appropriate steps 1/2 U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) July 19, 2016
Residents in the area say the death toll could be upwards of 200.
It seems that the Syrian Democratic Forces under the leadership of the International coalition which is in charge of planning have decided to adopt a scorched earth policy, Hasan al-Nifi, a community leader in Manbij, told Al Jazeera.
Manbij is full of residents, a quarter of a million residents, used by ISIL as human shields. Yesterday the coalition struck al-Zahuna neighbourhood, where more than 23 people were killed. Then it struck the western gate of the city, killing people.
Today the residents of Tokhar woke to a horrific massacre. The death toll rose to 212 and the numbers are rising.
The Manbij area has seen intense US-led air strikes in support of Kurdish-led forces who are trying to seize the city from ISIL, so as to block the armed groups access to the nearby Turkish border.
The SDF, an alliance of Arab and Kurdish fighters backed by the US, launched an offensive against ISIL to retake the city of Manbij late last month.
They have besieged the town and are advancing to the city centre under the cover of air strikes by the US-led international coalition.
ISIL has held the city since 2014, the year that the armed group seized control of large parts of Syria and neighbouring Iraq and declared its caliphate.
Aleppo besieged
On Monday, Chris Gunness, spokesman for the United Nations agency that supports Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), said a driver who works for the agency in Syria was killed after suffering a shrapnel wound in the northern city of Aleppo.
Gunness said Yaser Mahmoud Shuaeeb, a 45-year-old father of six, died on Sunday.
Aleppo has witnessed some of the worst fighting in Syria over the past months. On Sunday, government forces besieged rebel-held neighbourhoods of the contested city.
READ MORE: Pressure mounts in Aleppo after supply line cut
Gunness said that UNRWA reported two other incidents on Sunday.
In one, a mortar shell landed 600 metres from the UN agencys office in Damascus. In the other, a missile hit close to the Nairab refugee camp south of Aleppo. The incidents caused no injuries, he said.
The death toll in the Syrian conflict, which began with mostly unarmed demonstrations against President Bashar al-Assad in March 2011, has risen to more than 280,000 people, while half the countrys population have been forced from their homes, according to UN estimates.
Staffan de Mistura, UN special envoy to Syria, estimated last month that the actual death toll could be as high as 400,000 people.
Ten paramilitary soldiers were killed in an ambush by Maoist rebels in eastern Bihar state.
Suspected Maoist rebels have ambushed and killed 10 paramilitary soldiers in one of Indias deadliest attacks so far this year.
Eight soldiers died instantly, and two died on the way to the hospital, while five other soldiers were wounded, P K Thakur, the state of Bihars director general, told Reuters news agency on Tuesday.
Three rebels were also killed in the incident on Monday afternoon.
Police said the paramilitary soldiers were carrying out an anti-Maoist operation in the forests of Bihar states Aurangbad district, when rebels detonated a series of homemade bombs.
READ MORE: Soldiers killed in Indian army convoy ambush
Following the explosions, the soldiers found themselves isolated on lower ground, PK Thakur said.
The police party had almost 100 troops. The first group got trapped in an area of landmines and there were serial blasts, Thakur said.
We are investigating if we were lured to the area, Kundan Krishnan, Bihar inspector general of police, told AFP news agency, adding that it was a well-planned attack.
We called off the operation late at night as we suspect more mines were planted in the area, said Saurabh Kumar, a deputy inspector-general of police in the region.
READ MORE: Indian soldiers killed in rebel ambush in Manipur state
We are in control now.
Maoist rebels said they are fighting to secure the rights of the poor and marginalised.
The ambush was just their most recent in a string of attacks.
In March, seven police officers were killed when their truck hit a rebel-planted landmine in central Chhattisgarh state.
Maoists also killed 13 police officers and wounded 12 in a remote part of Chhattisgarh in December 2014.
The Indian government describes the Maoist rebellion as the countrys most serious internal security threat.
Parts of Melania Trumps speech at Republican convention had striking similarities to Michelle Obamas speech in 2008.
Donald Trumps wife, Melania, took centre stage on the first day of the Republican National Convention, but found herself in the midst of an embarrassing plagiarism controversy.
The billionaire businessmans wife appeared to have taken liberal inspiration from a 2008 speech by US First Lady Michelle Obama for her own address to the Republican convention on Monday night.
A Trump campaign official suggested the similarity to Obamas speech may have been the result of an error by her team of speech writers.
However, before her speech, Mrs Trump, a Slovenian-born jewelry designer and former model, told NBCs Matt Lauer: I wrote it with as little help as possible.
A spokesman for the Trump campaign called the speech a success, but suggested her writers may have mistakenly injected some borrowed language.
In writing her beautiful speech, Melanias team of writers took notes on her lifes inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking, Jason Miller, Trumps senior communications adviser, said in a statement.
The fragments in question included the following:
My parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise; that you treat people with respect, Mrs Trump told the convention in Cleveland.
READ MORE: Cleveland Protesters gather to denounce Trump at RNC
In her 2008 speech, Obama said: And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say youre going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect.
Also in her speech, Mrs Trump said: And we need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow, because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.
And in 2008, Obama said: Because we want our children, and all children in this nation, to know that the only limit to the height of your achievement is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.
READ MORE: Cleveland braces for protests ahead of GOP convention
Kind and fair
Mrs Trumps speech was the highlight of a chaotic opening day at the Republican convention that is set to formally nominate her husband as the partys presidential candidate later this week.
The row over the speech will drown out everything else, including the split in the party, said Al Jazeeras Alan Fisher, who was at the convention in Cleveland.
For a convention that was meant to be about competence and unity, its off to a very bad start, he said.
A beaming Trump personally introduced his wife to delegates gathered in Cleveland, which was a break with tradition to appear before his actual nomination.
Mrs Trump used the occasion to take some of the rough edges off her combative husband, who has roiled the campaign trail with inflammatory attacks on Muslims, Mexicans and his many political rivals.
READ MORE: Republican convention and Donald Trumps party victory
Hes tough when he has to be, but hes also kind and fair and caring, Mrs Trump said, describing her husband as intensely loyal to family, friends, employees and the country.
If you want someone to fight for you and your country, I can assure you, hes the guy, she said.
Anti-Trump delegates at the convention walked out in protests after a vote to oppose his candidacy failed.
Some of the biggest Republican names the Bush family and John McCain were also absent from the convention while on the streets of Cleveland, protesters marched against Trumps bigotry and xenophobia.
Zimbabwean president accuses pastor who led protests of being backed by countries set on destabilising the government.
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has accused a pastor who organised a nationwide strike against the government of being sponsored by foreign countries allegedly trying to destabilise his administration.
It was the first time President Robert Mugabe had mentioned Evan Mawarire publicly by name.
Mawarire last week was briefly arrested and charged with subverting a constitutionally elected government before being freed by a court in the capital, Harare. Hundreds of cheering supporters greeted his release.
His calls on social media for a boycott earlier this month drew a strong response from people frustrated by Zimbabwes deepening economic problems.
Mawarire was arrested ahead of the strike.
The 92-year-old Mugabe accused the pastor of urging Zimbabweans to engage in violent protests, questioning whether he was a true preacher.
You cant urge people to adopt violence, violent demonstrations as the way of life or a way of solving grievances, no. We will say no, forever no, Mugabe said at the burial of a senior politician in Harare.
So beware these men of cloth, not all of them are true preachers of the Bible. I dont know whether they are serving God. They spell God in reverse, the president said.
READ MORE: Zimbabwe: Evan Mawarire calls for continued protests
The Mawarires, if they dont like to live with us, let them go to those who are sponsoring them, to the countries that are sponsoring them, Mugabe added.
Mawarire left the country last week but has denied reports he fled to seek asylum elsewhere.
Mugabes government has previously accused French and American ambassadors in Harare of supporting Mawarires #ThisFlag movement. The diplomats have denied the accusations.
Mawarire, who is currently in South Africa, says his protests are peaceful and are against government corruption, alleged police brutality, delays in paying state workers salaries and cash shortages.
Mugabes government is struggling to pay its workers and was on Tuesday expected to meet civil service union leaders, where it is expected to set dates for July salaries. The government last week failed to pay the army.
Latest launch comes after South Korea and the US announced the deployment of an advanced missile-defence system.
North Korea has launched three ballistic missiles in Pyongyangs latest defiance of United Nations resolutions against the use of such military technology.
South Koreas Joint Chiefs of Staff said Tuesday the short-range ballistic missiles were fired from northern North Korea and flew about 600km before crashing into the sea east of the Korean peninsula. The missiles are believed to be modified from outdated Soviet SCUD missile systems.
Pyongyang has fired several missiles in recent months. The last launch was July 9 when a North Korea ballistic missile exploded shortly after being fired from a submarine.
South Korea and the United States said earlier this month they would deploy an advanced missile defence system in South Korea, drawing a sharp and swift protest from neighbouring China, Pyongyangs sole major ally.
Seoul and Washington started talks on a Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, system deployment after North Korea conducted a fourth nuclear test and a long-range rocket launch earlier this year.
The North has warned it will take physical counter-action against the THAAD location.
Pyongyang also conducted a test of a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) in April, calling it a great success that provided one more means for powerful nuclear attack.
The UN Security Council has imposed harsh new sanctions on the country in response.
President Barack Obama spoke to Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, offering US assistance as Ankara investigates last weeks attempted coup, but urging the government to show restraint as it pursues those connected in the failed attempt.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the two leaders discussed the status of US-based Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan has accused of being behind the coup attempt and whose extradition Turkey has said it will seek.
Earnest said the Turkish government had filed materials in electronic form with the US government, which US officials were reviewing.
He said any extradition request from Turkey, once submitted, would be evaluated under the terms of a treaty between the two countries.
The US state department later said it was still in the process of analysing materials submitted by Turkey, but that it could not characterise the documents as an official extradition request for Gulen.
Gulen, who is resident in the US, has denied any involvement in the military plot to topple the government, and hinted that the coup might have been staged to justify his arrest.
Widening purge
Around 50,000 soldiers, police, judges, civil servants and teachers have been suspended or detained since the coup attempt, stirring tensions across the country of 80 million which borders Syrias chaos and is a Western ally against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS).
This parallel terrorist organisation will no longer be an effective pawn for any country, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said, referring to what the government has long alleged is a state within a state controlled by followers of Gulen.
We will dig them up by their roots, he told parliament.
Al Jazeeras Bernard Smith, reporting from Istanbul on Tuesday, said as many as 20,000 government employees have been detained, or are being pursued by the authorities, including 185 admirals and colonels, and 1,500 finance ministry officials.
They are part of a widening purge by the Erdogan government targeting alleged supporters of a coup attempt on Friday.
Reuters reported on Tuesday that 257 employees from Yildirim own office had been removed from duty.
Turkeys Education Ministry on Tuesday suspended 15,200 personnel in connection with the failed coup, state media reported. Later, the High Education Board ordered the resignation of all 1,577 deans employed at all universities, TRT reported.
Turkeys religious directorate issued a statement on Tuesday, saying it would not offer religious funerary services, including funeral prayers, for soldiers involved in the failed coup attempt, except for those who had been forcibly dragged into the military actions attempting to overthrow the government.
Supreme Court also ordered the immediate release of the former leader after nearly five years of detention in hospital.
The Philippine Supreme Court has dismissed a plunder charge against former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, ordering her immediate release after nearly five years of detention in hospital.
Supreme Court spokesman Theodore Te said on Tuesday that 15 justices had voted 11-4 to grant Arroyos petition seeking the dismissal of her corruption case owing to a lack of evidence.
The case involved the alleged misuse of $7.8 million from the governments charity office.
The 69-year-old Arroyo, who is suffering from a neck ailment, finished her tumultuous nine-year term in 2010. She was arrested the following year on an election fraud charge, for which she was allowed to post bail.
Later charged with plunder, she was arrested in hospital while receiving treatment for a spinal condition and it was decided she could serve her detention there.
Despite her detention in hospital, she was re-elected as a member of Congress in May.
Of the 11 justices who voted for Arroyos acquittal, eight were her appointees.
Raul Lambino, a lawyer for Arroyo, said the plunder case was the only remaining criminal charge against the former president.
We hope that by today the [former] president will be able to go home to her residence, he said.
Arroyos husband, Jose Miguel, also welcomed the Supreme Courts decision, saying: Thank God. They took away six years of her life an innocent woman. Were very happy.
Amid growing calls post-coup attempt for capital punishment, Turkeys leader says democracy is demanding its return.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said he is ready to reinstate the death penalty if the Turkish people demand it and parliament approves the necessary legislation.
Erdogan spoke early on Tuesday to thousands of supporters outside his Istanbul residence who were chanting for Turkey to restore capital punishment following the failed coup.
Today, is there no capital punishment in America? In Russia? In China? In countries around the world? Only in European Union countries is there no capital punishment, Erdogan said.
The president added Turkey is a democratic state run by rule of law, and you cannot put aside the peoples demands.
Erdogan calls on US to extradite cleric Gulen
Parliament is expected to meet on Wednesday to discuss the issue.
European Union officials had warned that long-stalled talks on Turkeys bid to join the EU would end if Ankara restores the death penalty.
Turkey abolished capital punishment in 2004 under reforms aimed at obtaining European Union membership.
Al Jazeeras Stefanie Dekker, reporting from Ankara, said leaders of the EU will be closely watching the death penalty discussion in Turkey.
We do know when it comes to Turkeys accession to the European Union, there has been a very clear message given to President Erdogan. The German Chancellor Merkel in a phone call said if the death penalty gets reinstated here, then that will no longer happen.
Turkey: Coup silence and pointing fingers at the West
Howard Eissenstat of St Lawrence University told Al Jazeera the president does not appear concerned about following the dictates of the West post-coup attempt.
Erdogan isnt particularly interested at joining the EU at this point Were he to reinstate the death penalty, that in and of itself alone would be enough to scuttle any EU membership, Eissenstat said.
Thousands of alleged coup plotters have been rounded up since Fridays failed putsch, in which more than 260 people were killed.
Turkey failed coup: Thousands detained or dismissed
The practice of forgiving allows many honour killings to go unpunished in Pakistan.
Pakistani authorities barred the family of murdered social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch from legally forgiving their son, who is accused of strangling his sister, sources said.
A police source told the Reuters news agency on Monday that the government in Punjab, in a rare decision, has barred the family from forgiving their son after he confessed to murdering 26-year-old Baloch on Friday.
It was done on the instructions of the government. But it happens rarely, a Punjab police official told Reuters.
The practice of forgiving is a common legal loophole that sees many honour killings go unpunished in Pakistan.
READ MORE: Pakistanis on Qandeel Baloch the problem is society
Baloch was found dead in her family home, having been strangled by her brother, Waseem Azeem, who later said he had no regrets and confessed to killing his famous sister for violating the familys honour with her provocative social media posts.
It was not immediately clear if the Punjab governments decision would lead to any meaningful reforms.
The slain womans father, Muhammad Azeem, filed a police complaint against Waseem and another one of his sons for their role in the murder.
Police on Monday also said they were widening their investigations to include a leading Muslim scholar, Mufti Abdul Qavi, who was removed from a prominent Muslim committee after a video showed Baloch sitting on the scholars lap, while photos show her wearing his traditional wool cap.
READ MORE: Pakistan Laws fail to check violence against women
More than 500 people, mostly women, die in Pakistan each year in such killings. They are usually carried out by members of the victims family meting out punishment for bringing so-called shame on the community.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in February promised to speed up the passage of a law to tackle honour killings but right groups say there has been no progress.
Baloch built a modelling career on the back of her social media fame and was the family breadwinner.
Media often described her as Pakistans Kim Kardashian and she called herself a modern-day feminist. However, she faced frequent abuse and death threats for her pictures and videos, but continued to post material on social media.
READ MORE: Anger after honour killing of Qandeel Baloch
Many condemned the killing outright, others said she deserved to be killed, and some said while she should not have been killed, they could understand the brothers motive.
Before her death, Baloch spoke of worries about her safety and had appealed to the interior ministry to provide her with security for protection. No help was provided and the interior ministry has not commented on her murder.
PM Binali Yildirim says evidence has been sent to US for arrest of exiled cleric, as detentions and dismissals continue.
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim announced that the United States has been given evidence of exiled opposition leader Fethullah Gulens involvement in the failed coup, as he warned that further criminal activity will be forcefully dealt with.
In an address on Tuesday before members of his party in parliament, Yildirim denounced the despicable and cowardly coup plotters, whom he said were being directed by a cleric from abroad, referring to Gulen.
The power of the tank has not been able to overcome the power of the people, he said, adding that all those involved in the coup will be severely punished.
Turks pessimistic about future after coup attempt
Yildirim did not say whether the evidence provided by the Turkish government to the US constitutes a formal extradition request.
But later on Tuesday, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the Turkish government had filed materials in electronic form with the US government, which were in review.
Ankara had earlier demanded Washington hand Gulen over to Turkish authorities.
Gulen, who is resident in the US, has denied any involvement in the military plot to topple the government of President Recep Tayipp Erdogan, and hinted that the coup might have been staged to justify his arrest.
Yildirims speech came as the government detains government workers, including police officers, members of the civil service and the judiciary.
Al Jazeeras Bernard Smith, reporting from Istanbul, said as many as 20,000 government employees have been detained, or are being pursued by the authorities, including 185 admirals and colonels, and 1,500 finance ministry officials.
Reuters also reported that 257 personnel from the prime ministers own office have also been removed from duty.
Turkeys Education Ministry on Tuesday suspended 15,200 personnel in connection with the failed coup, state media reported. Later, the High Education Board ordered the resignation of all 1,577 deans employed at all universities, TRT reported.
Turkeys religious directorate issued a statement on Tuesday, saying it would not offer religious funerary services, including funeral prayers, for soldiers involved in the failed coup attempt, except for those who had been forcibly dragged into the military actions attempting to overthrow the government.
Serious alarm
Yildirim said that the government will make a major announcement on Wednesday in response to the coup attempt.
He did not specify what action the government would take, but earlier on Tuesday, President Erdogan said he is ready to reinstate the death penalty.
There is no time to rest, Yildirim said to cheers from party colleagues. There is a group of people who are going to be punished.
A top United Nations human rights official urged Turkey to uphold the rule of law, and voiced serious alarm at the mass suspension of judges and prosecutors.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad Al Hussein also called for independent observers to visit places of detention in Turkey to check on conditions, and for detainees to have access to lawyers and their families.
In the aftermath of such a traumatic experience, it is particularly crucial to ensure that human rights are not squandered in the name of security and in the rush to punish those perceived to be responsible, Zeid said in a statement.
Reintroduction of the death penalty would be in breach of Turkeys obligations under international human rights law a big step in the wrong direction, he said.
The European Union has also warned that Turkeys accession to the European Union would halted if the death penalty is reinstated.
Turkish pilots involved in downing of Russian Su-24 are detained over links to coup attempt, a Turkish official says.
Two Turkish pilots who played a role in the downing of a Russian jet in November are in custody over the July 15 failed coup in Turkey, a Turkish official said.
The downing of the Russian fighter jet on the Syrian border last November sparked an unprecedented diplomatic crisis between Turkey and Russia, which ended last month when the two countries agreed to restore ties.
Two pilots who were part of the operation to down the Russian Su-24 in November 2015 are in custody, a Turkish official told AFP late on Monday.
When asked about the issue by the Turkish media, Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said there were reports of the pilots being detained but they were yet to be confirmed.
READ MORE: Turkey says US given evidence of Gulens role in coup
The official talking to AFP insisted that the military pilots have been arrested over links to the coup and not because of the attack on the Russian plane.
But, Ankara Mayor Melih Gokcek argued that the pilots, who are allegedly supporters of the US-based Muslim cleric Fettullah Gulen, may have shot the Russian plane as part of a conspiracy to harm the Turkish government.
The Turkish government and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blame Gulens movement, which they refer to as the parallel state, and his supporters within the army for trying to stage the failed coup.
Talking to CNN Turk in the aftermath of the coup attempt, Gokcek said: The parallels are responsible for the tension between Russia and us. That incident [the downing of the Russian plane] was orchestrated by a pilot who belongs to the parallel state.
I say this one hundred percent. We were not voicing this before, we were gulping this down, he said.
But, now I say this, as Melih Gokcek, these rascals caused the rift between Russia and us.
Why? Because they wanted to isolate us in world politics. Yesterday I had a guest from Russia, an adviser for Putin. He agrees with me.
READ MORE: Erdogan supporters on the streets of Turkey
Russian President Vladimir Putin called his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan on July 17, describing the attempted coup as unacceptable and voicing hope for a speedy return to stability.
The two men are expected to meet in the first week of August, in their first face-to-face meeting since the rapprochement.
A faction in the Turkish military attempted to stage a coup late on Friday night. In dramatic scenes, tanks blocked bridges in Istanbul, jets were seen in the skies over at least two cities, and the parliament and the headquarters of the intelligence services were strafed with gunfire from attack helicopters.
At least 290 people were killed and more than 1,400 wounded. Erdogan has blamed his former ally who has since become a bitter rival, Fethullah Gulen, for the attempt.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Monday that more than 7,500 suspects had been detained in connection to the coup attempt.
Alex Sunnarborg will have 90 seconds to pitch his company to a crowd of about 400 investors, industry experts and possible partners.
Sunnarborg, 25, graduated from UF in May 2013 with a degree in finance. He is now a co-founder and the chief financial officer of Lawnmower, an app for iPhone and Android that helps people learn about cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, and invest in them.
UF alumni founded two of the 10 startup companies participating in Wednesdays New York Demo Day, with the other being CFX, an online service for investors.
Startupbootcamp FinTech, which also includes several UF alumni, hosts the event each year. The company runs a three-month program that accepts startups from the financial technology industry and connects them to an international network of investors and partners.
The three-month program leads up to Demo Day, said 26-year-old Victoria Cacicedo, the head of the platform at Startupbootcamp FinTech New York.
It is a celebration of all the work that the teams have been doing over the past three months, Cacicedo said.
Cacicedo graduated in 2012 with a degree in industrial and systems engineering.
Sunnarborg said that he and his other co-founders stayed in Florida until early 2015, when they decided it was time to move to San Francisco and build Lawnmower in Silicon Valley.
After Cacicedo called the company and suggested its founders join Startupbootcamp FinTech in the summer, Sunnarborg and his team then moved the startup to New York.
Sunnarborg said UF helped him and his team form connections and learn information that led to the creation of Lawnmower.
We still make UF and Gator jokes regularly in the office, he said. Gator Nation definitely continues to help.
Cacicedo said the teams status as UF alumni was simply an added bonus.
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Its because they have a solid team and a solid product, she said.
Startupbootcamp FinTech has helped push both the Lawnmower business and its app forward, Sunnarborg said.
They are really trying to let us leverage their network as best as possible, he said.
Following Demo Day, Sunnarborg said his team will likely stay in New York, building relationships with similar companies and working with other cryptocurrencies, such as Ripple and Ethereum.
Connections are what opens doors in business, he said.
UF law school alumnus Zee Asghar formed an online business to help international students find housing in the U.S.
Homestay Anywhere launched in June and has about 180 registered hosts in eight to 10 states, including popular cities such as Miami and Orlando, Asghar said. His business offers pictures of the rooms along with descriptions and photos of the family living in each house.
We want to make sure the students know exactly the type of home theyre moving into, the 33-year-old said.
In 2011, Asghar created his first company, Global Student Housing, where he matched host families with international students.
However, everything was done through phone calls, and the soon-to-be-roommates never directly spoke to each other.
Those experiences led Asghar to create an online-based program where international students could view photos of rooms and get to know potential hosts.
Allison VanDenend, 29, was a host about two years ago through Global Student Housing and he offered a room and bathroom to Tina Chung, an international student from Taiwan.
Chung stayed with her for about eight to 10 weeks while studying at UFs English Language Institute. VanDenend said there was not a large language barrier, and that she helped Chung learn the bus routes and get acquainted with living in Gainesville.
I myself studied abroad in undergrad, so I could relate to maybe how she was feeling or what she was experiencing, she said.
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Over the next week and a half, the political elite of both major parties will evolve themselves from the primaries to the general election. Afterward, the candidates will ready themselves for battle in the gym we call America, and the two political parties will find themselves, according to The New York Times, $150 million in debt to the private entities (gym leaders) that will write checks for the conventions this year all the more reason for our representatives to prioritize donors over constituents.
While the festivities transpire yes, including the tidal wave of balloons (How do they get that many balloons? Do the two parties hire the guy from Up?) a harsh truth will remain.
The American people are suffering, stuck between a rock of fear and a hard place of inaction. The fear? After a week of unjust killings by police, we awoke Sunday morning to an unjust killing of police: A lone ex-marine, possibly outraged by Alton Sterlings death, fatally shot down three Baton Rouge officers and injured three others. As if that werent enough, Sunday marked the two-year anniversary of Eric Garners death.
The inaction? Congress brought down the major bills proposed after the Orlando massacre and House Democrats subsequent sit-in. Even then, groups as liberal as the American Civil Liberties Union took issue with Democrats proposals, calling out the terror watchlist provisions as error prone and unfair.
Thus far, demonstrators, protesters and grassroots organizers across the country are the true sources of action weve seen, as well as officers like Baton Rouge police officer Montrell Jackson, who took to Facebook to tell his community, Please dont let hate infect your heart. This city MUST and WILL get better. Im working in these streets so any protesters, officers, friends, family, or whoever, if you see me and need a hug or want to say a prayer. I got you. And yet, this genuine soul was taken from us Sunday morning.
This country desperately needs a two-fold consensus: one among we the people, and another between us and our elected leaders. We can argue until were blue in the face over gun regulations, but until we agree on basic values, well be at a loss. You can support black lives and blue lives all the same while fighting institutionalized racism and police brutality. Those two positions arent mutually exclusive: Thats where justice resides.
Now, through social media, we can grow our awareness and capacity to act on these racial tensions and acts of violence. Of course, with a growing awareness comes heightened emotions and fears, but we have an opportunity for change: hence the dozens of demonstrations across this country between two weekends. The next step is our leadership, such as the orchestrators of these conventions.
As we highlighted in a May editorial, the host committee of the Democrats convention includes ardent opponents of net neutrality, pro-frackers and major donors who contribute huge sums of money to both Democratic and GOP congressional elections alike (which says wonders for who our representatives actually represent).
The last thing you could reasonably expect from this group is genuine action on racial and police-community tensions; whatever happens with the police or Black America, their investments and interests are safe.
Our best hope is that somewhere amidst the sea of donors, false promises and balloons (Seriously, have you seen the pictures? Its almost an offensive amount of balloons: Surely they trigger our nations clowns.) theres a group of leaders willing to take one for the team on behalf of the people. Otherwise, our country is set to crash harder than a Pokemon Go server.
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On Monday night, at the Republican National Convention, Melania Trump wore an off-white bell-sleeved dress by Serbian-born, London-based designer Roksanda Ilincic rather than one made by an American designer.
Trump bought the $2,190 dress herself on Net-a-Porter, according to a spokeswoman, who also told WWD that Trump "isn't working with any designers." The dress is now sold out online.
Trump has a history of taking fashion risks. She wed Donald Trump wearing a Christian Dior gown designed by John Galliano. Her mother, Amalija Knavs, was a fashion designer, and Trump herself worked as a model at the young age of 16 with top photographers such as Arthur Elgort and Helmut Newton. She also had her own QVC jewelry and watch collection.
Known for her simple and modest silhouettes with graphic pops of color, Ilincic has dressed multiple high-profile women. First Lady Michelle Obama has worn the brand several times, including a violet frock on a state visit to England in 2011. Samantha Cameron donned a navy and coral dress by the label when she left Downing Street with her family last week. During her 2014 visit to Australia, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, wore a yellow Roksanda Illincic dress that her husband, Prince William, said made her look "like a banana."
2005 ..
It now appears the regulators are trying to rein in the monster that is the pages and pages of international capital rules. But the problem is their effort to simplify years of Basel Committee standards and separate regulations by domestic rulemaking agencies may just make matters worse.
For lack of a better title, this "simplification" effort is known as Basel IV. I know there is no document with that heading and regulators will deny that a Basel IV exists. But no other term can describe it. And the goals of this effort as fragmented as it is are laudable. Regulatory capital standards before and after the crisis have been impossibly complex. The international Basel Committee created Basel I, II and III, and U.S. regulators have multiplied the capital measures on their own.
The largest banks are required to monitor over a dozen regulatory capital dials. Added to this are less well defined but more demanding regulatory capital expectations with annual stress tests, such as the Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review. The U.S. regulators have also created more stringent versions of Basel standards, such as the "capital conservation buffer" and a capital surcharge for "global systemically important banks." Community banks are not subject to this full array of capital standards, but their capital requirements are also far more complex than is necessary.
Which brings me back to Basel IV. Although the Basel Committee has recognized the need to rein in the complexity of so many different capital rules, the proposed solution is just more rules.
Over the past two years, the committee has issued more than a dozen new regulatory capital proposals in a bid to simplify. The proposals have been released in a piecemeal fashion, with each new proposal seemingly unrelated to the previous one. If the process were more streamlined, it would be easier for banks to comment publicly on the effort, including how the various different rules might be interconnected. It has been difficult for even the largest and most sophisticated banking organization to provide informed comment on the proposals. For community banks, which could potentially be impacted by some of the proposals, it is downright impossible.
But further complicating efforts is that the U.S. banking agencies have separately been discussing the simplification of regulatory capital standards domestically. They appear to be considering a path that differs from the Basel Committee. It is unclear from regulators' public statements whether they will continue to allow large banks to use internal modeling for calculating risk-based capital levels. For community banks, U.S. regulators have also been exploring how to simplify capital requirements.
Of course, all of this is very important, which is why it is unfortunate that, much like previous Basel projects, neither the public, Congress, nor industry have been effectively involved in the Basel deliberations.
The U.S. banking agencies should broaden the discussion, including the issuance of an "advance notice of proposed rulemaking" to bring greater transparency to the options being considered. Such an ANPR should include discussion of the problems to be addressed, the scope of potential changes, what is being considered for adoption domestically, and how potential changes would be applied and to which banks.
Issuing an ANPR when such fundamental changes are being considered would be consistent with past practices. During the development of the Basel II standards in 2003, regulators issued an ANPR that clearly outlined the scope and potential regulatory requirements, and asked for comments so the agencies could "seek appropriate modifications" at the international level. As a result of the Basel II ANPR, every bank knew whether the Basel process would affect them and could decide whether to participate in the comment process armed with that information. Moreover, consideration of all of the miscellaneous Basel pieces together would allow banks to provide more informed comments to the regulators.
Whatever options U.S. regulators are considering to simplify the standards, it is essential that they engage the public, the Congress and industry in the discussion. This would allow the public to weigh in on crucial questions that need to be debated, including whether agencies are striking the right balance between risk sensitivity and simplicity, whether simplification is being done in a capital-neutral manner, whether the U.S. approach is consistent with Basel, and how community banks will be affected. The federal banking agencies would do themselves and all who must live with the results a great service by encouraging the debate.
Hugh Carney is vice president of capital policy for the American Bankers Association.
There might not be the will for banks to get into small-dollar consumer lending, but technology is providing a way.
Although many observers say the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's recent proposal for payday lending guidelines will keep banks, especially community ones, from making small-dollar consumer loans, there will likely be a few willing to maneuver the regulatory framework to get an edge. They'll just need to figure out how to do it profitably.
Banks often avoid small loans because the economics aren't there they take a lot of work upfront and often don't add much to the bottom line. But tech solutions focused on streamlining and automating the process have already helped banks get back into small business loans and now similar products are popping up for small-dollar consumer loans.
"The whole industry started treating small dollar as an afterthought," said Pierre Naude, chief executive of the tech vendor nCino. "They were focused on bigger loans in the commercial sectors. The wisdom became that is where they make their money. Retail and small-dollar loans were seen as afterthought and a loss leader. And give the nonbank lenders credit, they uncovered this marketplace."
nCino is one of the firms that have helped banks expand small-business lending through automation and it released an "auto-decisioning" product for consumer lending earlier this year. The company in Wilmington, N.C., was spun out of internal technology developed at Live Oak Bancshares, also in Wilmington.
Naude says the manual processes involved with writing small-dollar loans makes it unappealing.
"It involves going to the branch, paperwork, it can be a nightmare," he said. "But if you can make these loans with the click of a button, that's different."
QCash, another vendor focused on helping banks make small-dollar loans, said the business's labor-intensive tasks had been a barrier to entry.
"With the manual processes involved [in making loan decisions], many financial institutions didn't want to make these loans because the margins are so much smaller," said Ben Morales, chief executive of the technology provider QCash, which was also developed in house at $2.3 billion-asset Washington State Employees Credit Union and then spun off into its own company. QCash allows consumers to get loans ranging from $50 to $4,000 with six taps on a mobile app. The credit decision is automated and near-instantaneous. QCash primarily targets the credit union market, though also is in talks with some community banks, too, Morales said.
But many say technology alone will not bring these loans back to regulated financial institutions en masse.
The challenge for financial institutions is not that they lack tools to make quick decisions, it's that most do not use them for the consumer loan process, said Christine Pratt, a senior analyst with Aite Group.
Instead, information technology resources are sucked up by the demands from "unrelenting new regulatory reporting" rules from the Dodd-Frank Act.
Some of it is also a human factor, she said. Despite years of experience and results that show more consistency and accuracy in automated decisions, many financial institutions still display an unwilling to trust technology to make simple even complex credit decisions, she said.
Technology such as that being offering by QCash and nCino could help address the small margins of consumer loans, but that won't be enough to overcome the regulatory scrutiny they face, Pratt said.
"It's hard to reconcile the risk with the cost of doing business," she said. "And figuring out how to price these products so [the bank] can make money and satisfy regulators."
Like Pratt, Bob Conery, chief operating officer of Avidia Bank in Hudson, Mass., said it's not so much a lack of technology, but an unwillingness to deal with the risk and regulatory scrutiny that comes with writing short term loans that will still largely keep banks out of this market.
"I don't see there being an uptick in banks providing these services," said Conery. "banks are facing the same level of regulatory scrutiny as the non-bank lenders, I don't see many bank changing their underwriting standards" to offer these loans.
Ultimately, Pratt believes credit unions are more likely than banks to get back into this market, since their nonprofit status means the business case is more palatable. Indeed, the Credit Union National Association in June sent a seven-page letter to Rick Metsger, chairman of the National Credit Union Administration, asking that credit unions be exempt from the CFPB's proposal.
"There are already some large credit unions that have done a good job in this area, and they are well positioned in this space," she said.
One of QCash's customers, USAlliance Federal Credit Union in Rye, N.Y., said it was seeking for several years to start offering these kind of loans and now can do so with QCash's technology.
"We know for a fact there is certainly a need out there among our members, they are using other sources for these kind of loans," said Kris VanBeek, chief executive of the $1 billion-asset credit union.
Van Beek said USAlliance will go live with QCash in the third quarter of 2016, as it wanted to see what the CFPB's rulings in this space would be before moving forward.
"Our best read on the regulations is that they are very much in line with what we are planning to do," he said.
It's no surprise that most bank chief information security officers say they are expanding their cybersecurity budgets this year. More interesting is their main motivator.
More than half (56%) of bank chief information security officers surveyed this summer by SourceMedia Research say their cybersecurity budgets are growing in 2016. Only 6% of those surveyed said they're decreasing security spending.
Reasons to increase spending abound, from the international multimillion-dollar bank heists that exploited the Swift messaging network to new malware strains and fraud rings to increased business email compromise fraud.
Yet ask bank CISOs why they're stepping up cybersecurity spending, and the most common answer is a familiar refrain: regulators' concerns 62.5% cited that as their top driver for security spending. Next were protecting servers and databases from hackers (50%), protecting employees and customers from phishing attacks (47.9%), and protecting employees and customers from malware (47.9%).
Even with all the threats out there, compliance requirements may be necessary to light a fire under some banks.
"You can question how much regulation we have and maybe it's too much and it's counterproductive at some point, but that's the job of the government, to make sure we're protected," said Avivah Litan, vice president of Gartner. "Banks don't have a natural inclination to spend money on security. It's not something that drives revenue. So if it weren't for the regulators driving it, they probably wouldn't spend as much money."
This is all good news for vendors. Market Research, a firm based in Pune, India, predicted the global cybersecurity market will grow at a compounded annual rate of 8% to 11% from 2016 to 2021, and that it will surpass $150 billion by 2021.
Where the Money Is Going
Most banks (54%) are stepping up their spending on network security this year, according to the survey by SourceMedia Research, an affiliate of American Banker.
Network security always tends to be the top security category after all, networks are the gateway that's supposed to keep hackers out, and cybercriminals are constantly scanning networks for opportunity. The Swift hacks this year made a lot of CISOs take a harder look at how they were securing their Swift operations and their networks at large.
Mobile banking security is the next most common area of growth 44% of CISOs said they're increasing budgets for it. Online banking was a little farther down the list, with 38% reporting increased spending there.
"The way I interpret that is they've already spent a lot on online banking security," Litan said. "The primary channel of online banking is pretty well saturated and mature now, and the growth is at the edges."
About half of bank customers use mobile devices, the Federal Reserve said in a recent study (53% of smartphone owners with a bank account use mobile banking, the central bank said). Meanwhile, security vendor Lookout recently examined 100 million devices with one or more mobile banking apps installed, and found Trojans and other vulnerabilities in one out of ten.
"There's more mobile malware, more functionality and more users of mobile banking," Litan said. "It's time to tighten that up."
Almost half (42%) of the security chiefs said they're investing more in fraud detection this year.
Many bankers say that doing better fraud analytics behind the scenes, including behavioral analytics, is a far better way to catch fraud than stiffer authentication processes that can lock out legitimate customers.
"There's still a lot of room for growth in fraud analytics," Litan said.
Data First
Asked their top priorities, bank CISOs put data security first, then keeping up with threats and managing vendors.
"Data security refers to keeping the data on customers and intellectual property -- the customer list, M&A plans safe so hackers can't get outside and steal it," Litan said. "That's a bigger concern than fraud."
Keeping up with the latest security threats is critical, Litan observes, because 75% of cybersecurity budgets are spent on prevention, according to Gartner's research, "and prevention is where we've failed. It doesn't mean you shouldn't have a lock on your door, but they've been getting through the locks so there is this move to spend more on detection at the end point and around data."
Physical security and cybersecurity incident sharing were at the bottom of the heap. This reflects the reduction in branch networks and the nascent nature of cybersecurity incident sharing it's not being done in a timely enough way yet to make a big difference.
Cybersecurity vendor management and reporting to management and boards were high on the list, probably due to regulatory requirements.
Recruiting, Outsourcing
In a recent bank CIO roundtable, everyone present vented about how hard it is to find good security people. For the SourceMedia Research survey, CISOs were asked about their recruitment efforts. The responses were the usual: 58% go by employee referrals, 40% use career web sites, 40% do internal job posting. A few mentioned partnering with higher education.
"The best solution is for them to get their own data scientists and data security experts to come in and customize solutions for them, but they're competing with Silicon Valley companies like Facebook, Google and Apple, and they can't offer them the kind of salary and benefits these high-tech firms can," Litan said. "Or they don't have the lure of the startup. So they find it almost impossible to compete. Some of them are going into colleges and trying to get kids who don't know better."
The dearth of in-house talent leads to a reliance on vendors and outsourcers.
Research by Moody's Investors Service has found banks increasingly turning to outsourcing. Banks use a median of 12 cybersecurity vendors and have a median of just 21 full-time equivalent employees.
This is a particular challenge for small banks, said Jason Grohotolski, vice president and senior credit officer at Moody's.
"If you lose a couple of people, given the low absolute number of internal employees you have, that's something you have to recover from," he said. "When you're using outsource vendors as well, they can smooth those situations."
A final takeaway for bank executives from our research is that your chief information security officers could use some love.
In answer to the question, "In just a few words, what is it like being a security executive at your institution?" 18 used the word "challenging" or "very challenging" in their answer. Three used the word "stressful," three "unappreciated," two said "exhausting," another two said "hectic." (There were also two "funs" and two "greats" the misery is not universal.)
One wrote, "Challenging, thankless, need to seek self-rewards, anxious, just waiting for something bad to happen." Another said, "Interesting, but daunting. Front lines of war."
Editor at Large Penny Crosman welcomes feedback at penny.crosman@sourcemedia.com.
Mercantile Bank Corp. in Grand Rapids, Mich., announced Tuesday that Michael Price plans to retire as president and chief executive at the end of the year after a decade at the helm of the company.
Robert B. Kaminski Jr., the chief operating officer, will succeed Price as president and CEO of the $3 billion-asset Mercantile, the holding company for Mercantile Bank of Michigan.
Price, 58, succeeded Gerald R. Johnson as chairman and CEO in July 2007. He will remain chairman until May 2018.
Kaminski, who is 53 and has been COO since 2000, was named CEO of Mercantile Bank of Michigan in May 2015. Price, Kaminski and Johnson were founding employees of Mercantile, which opened its doors in 1997.
"This decision reflects the ongoing management succession process that our Board has developed over many years," Price said in a press release. "I have worked closely with Bob for over 32 years, since before we were both founding executives of our Company. I have absolute confidence that Bob will be an excellent CEO going forward."
John Donnelly, managing director of Donnelly Penman & Partners, a Grosse Pointe, Mich., investment banking firm, called Price "as talented an individual as I've ever seen" but said Mercantile "is being left in very good hands" with Kaminski.
"They all came out of that First Michigan system that sold to Huntington so many years ago," Donnelly said.
Mercantile also announced its second-quarter results Tuesday. It said that its net income rose 12% from a year earlier to $7.4 million and that robust revenue growth was driven in part by the movement of assets from securities into higher-yielding loans. That shift helped Mercantile improve its margin to 4.01%, versus 3.83% a year earlier.
Revenue rose 7.2% from a year earlier, to $31.2 million.
Mercantile also reported continued asset-quality improvement. Nonperforming loans fell 36% from a year earlier to $5.6 million, or 0.22% of total loans.
"We're firing on all cylinders," Price said during a conference call with investment analysts.
Hawaiian Electric Industries has nixed a plan to spin off its American Savings Bank subsidiary after utility regulators rejected Hawaiian Electric's sale to an out-of-state energy company.
The spinoff of the $6.1 billion-asset bank was contingent on the sale of Hawaiian Electric to NextEra Energy in Juno Beach, Fla., but the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission vetoed the merger agreement, the companies said in separate press releases Monday. The commission late last week decided that the deal was not in the best interests of the public, according to news reports.
"With the termination of that transaction, the spin-off of [American Savings] is not contemplated at this time," Hawaiian Electric said in its press release.
Moreover, Connie Lau, the chairman and chief executive of Hawaiian Electric and American Savings, was quoted in the release as saying, "ASB will continue to serve and invest in Hawaii, helping residents and businesses grow and prosper."
The utility, which has owned American Savings since 1998, announced its plan to spin off the bank as a publicly traded company in December 2014. Under the merger agreement, NextEra Energy is required to pay Hawaiian Electric a $90 million breakup fee and as much as $5 million for reimbursement of transaction-related expenses.
The Hawaiian banking industry has been in transition recently. This month the $19 billion-asset First Hawaiian Bank in Honolulu, a unit of BNP Paribas, said that it would be spun off and that its shares would be listed on Nasdaq. BNP Paribas said in December that it was exploring alternatives for the bank, including a possible sale or an initial public offering to boost capital.
Seventy senators signed a letter urging the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to exempt credit unions and community banks from certain regulations.
The overwhelming show of support for a small institution carveouts comes after three-fourths of House lawmakers in March also called for exemptions from CFPB rulemakings.
The Senate letter, sent late Monday to CFPB Director Richard Cordray, urges the agency to grant relief from certain rulemakings through its exemption authority under the Dodd-Frank Act.
Law and regulation Cordray Receives Semiannual Upbraiding from Republicans In what has become almost a grim ritual, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director Richard Cordray faced a barrage of hostile questioning from Republican members of the House Financial Services Committee, who hammered him over everything from payday lending to regulatory relief for small banks. March 16
Law and regulation Majority of House Calls for CFPB to Exempt Small Banks from Rules Three-fourths of House lawmakers signed a bipartisan letter that calls on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to take more steps to carve out community banks and credit unions from onerous regulations. But will it make a difference? March 15
"We request that the CFPB carefully tailor its regulations to match the unique nature of community banks and credit unions," said the letter, which was drafted by Sen. Joe Donnelly, D-Ind., and Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., and signed by 68 others.
The one-page letter does not specify which rulemakings are at issue, though mortgage underwriting and remittances have been identified in the past as areas that were intended primarily for large banks.
Since the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010, credit unions and community banks have repeatedly asked for exemptions from the CFPB's rules.
A key argument has been that small institutions did not cause the financial crisis and therefore should not be burdened with increased compliance costs.
Congress gave the CFPB authority under Dodd-Frank to grant exemptions on a rule-by-rule basis.
But Cordray has pushed back, arguing most recently in March that credit unions were at the table seeking broad exemption from oversight when Dodd-Frank was being debated.
"I feel Congress has spoken on that," Cordray said in response to harsh questioning from House Republicans during his semiannual report to Congress.
Two predictable things happen after every terrorist attack in North America and Europe. Okay, actually all sorts of predictable things happen, but Im not talking about the usual call for more gun control or the frantic effort to point the finger at conservatives somehow. The two things I am talking about are the creation of odd little shrines of flowers and artifacts placed at the scene of the atrocity, and the candlelight vigils that are inevitably organized almost before the smoke has cleared. These things are noteworthy because, frankly, they are out of place. Why would tradition-hating, supposedly irreligious, post-modern science worshipers stand around in the dark holding little paraffin fires and wallowing in sentiment? They did this in Nice, in Orlando, in Paris, in Brussels, and in San Bernardino. Little piles of flowers and photos. Candles in the dark. Most of these people are, if not actual atheists, at least non-believers -- especially in Europe. What on Earth are they up to? Shouldnt they be going to their therapists and grief counselors rather than emulating the traditional rituals of remembrance and prayer? Shouldnt Christians be incensed with this most obvious of cultural appropriations?
It is plain enough that many individual progressives do have a religion of sorts -- and that it is merely a sad shadow of the one their parents or their grandparents had. They pray despite denying that there is any value in praying. They have long ago renounced the Holy Trinity as no more than a primitive superstition. This is 2016, they have snickered at believers. But now they are afraid. Their own gods -- the belief in human wisdom, goodness, and the blessed power of state authority -- have left them naked and unprotected. They do not know where to turn. Unlike their remote ancestors, they have lost the habit of chipping gods out of stone or casting them out of gold. They havent the craft skills to carve Asherah for themselves. They are sophisticated people, these Americans and Europeans -- yet they hanker after rituals any illiterate bronze-age shepherd would have recognized.
I understand them all too well. I have stood in front of that abyss and stitched together vague prayers out of my wavering unbelief. I have stood on my weak legs in front of the universe and paled to insignificance. I, too, have been afraid. What people feel when the world is crumbling around them has not been markedly altered by the invention of computers and cell phones. Human beings remain human beings. It doesnt take any special insight to understand that our ability to have the universe conform to our wishes is strictly limited. It isnt hard to see what comes of too little honest reflection or too much human pride. No one on Earth exceeds the committed atheist at being holier-than-thou. No one, in their misery, is more wretched -- or the greater fool.
It is unseemly and uncharitable to mock anyone in their suffering. It is certainly un-Christian. But what is the good of a ritual created on the spot then cast to the wind? Properly done rituals are the physical expressions an underlying faith -- it is not the ritual that makes the meaning, but the meaning that makes the ritual. What is the point of a candlelight vigil if you walk away from it with nothing but an uncertain feeling you forget the next day? If you will forgive a trite post-modern term -- wheres the sense of closure in that? No doubt, now and then, some watered-down cleric from some watered-down, interdenominational church turns up at such events to offer some sort of watered-down, interdenominational, interfaith, neutral-gendered parody of Gods mercy. The pseudo-spiritual handout given to all without regard even to their beliefs. One-size-fits-all, nonjudgmental, doctrine-free, generic blessings. The Gospel of redemption from nothing, because there never could have been such thing as sin in the eyes of such a loving God. This is another sad parody of faith -- a belief in nothing in particular.
Western governments, in all of their wise magnanimity, are untroubled by street religion -- no doubt because it poses no threat to them. Who cares what idiotic things the little people believe or do, so long as they obey their masters? The elites hate and fear real Christianity because it gives its followers standards that make them impossible to mold and shape at will. Islam is equally inflexible, but Western governments seem to have forgotten to fear it. In the lefts dream of the world all religion is nonsense, but only their own ancestral religion can really be considered dangerous nonsense. One can hardly think more arrogantly, or foolishly, than that.
Leading from behind is a business concept where leaders steer their organizations much as shepherds guiding their flocks, from behind. It is contingent on a basic reality, One can lead from behind only if one knows what lies ahead and what it will take to get there. President Obamas foreign policy style has been described as leading from behind particularly in the Middle East. Another view of Obamas style: A foreign policy of hesitation, delay and indecision. One look at the current Middle East shows how that is working out.
Shifting from foreign to domestic affairs, how has the Presidents leadership worked with Obamacare? Does Mr. Obama know what lies ahead and how to get there in the world of healthcare? Or have the past six years since passage of the Affordable Care Act been one of hesitation, delay and indecision? Has the Presidents signature piece of legislation, bearing his name, been shepherded forward in a thoughtful and logical manner, responsive to the needs of patients, providers, and the insurance entities footing much of the bill? Its quite obvious that just as with foreign policy, Obamacare is failing from behind.
Given the run of Obamacare co-op closures, it seems the President is not tending his flock, instead allowing predators, harsh weather, and lack of food to decimate his sheep. This week the Illinois Department of Insurance shut down the Land of Lincoln co-op, leaving nearly 50,000 policyholders high and dry.
For those losing their insurance, there is good and bad news. The good news is, Policyholders will be able to buy insurance from a different carrier to cover them for the rest of 2016. The bad news is, The co-pays and deductibles enrollees have been paying since January will not transfer to new plans. A double whammy for those who have already met their deductible and out-of-pocket maximums for the year and now have to do it all again now. And then again in January 2017.
We all remember the Presidents big lie, If you like your health care plan, you can keep it. Except when insurance companies go broke due to a variety of unfavorable business conditions and regulations. These include essential benefits, making everyone purchase insurance to provide coverage they dont want or need. Then there is guaranteed issue, allowing one to purchase insurance after they are sick, not quite the concept of insurance. And adverse selection where sick people purchase insurance and healthy people dont, leaving the insurance companies covering a sick and expensive group of individuals.
These forces choked the Illinois exchange. They lost $90 million in 2015 with incoming premiums far below the outgoing healthcare costs of its enrollees. They ran into Captain Obvious, The newly insured were sicker than carriers had expected.
For all the hype and fanfare, only 11.3 million people have signed up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, just over 3 percent of the US population. And in the process, how many more have had their lives and wallets disrupted by Obamacare?
Higher premiums are a fact of life under Obamacare. And they continue to go up each year. But thats only the beginning. Pay the premium to have insurance, not to use it. That carries another cost, the deductible, which must be paid in full before any insurance benefits kick in. Even after you pay the deductible your healthcare is still not free. Dont forget the copay, anywhere from 10 to 40% of your bill that you must pay, on top of the deductible and monthly premium. This also assumes the doctor or hospital you choose is in-network, otherwise insurance may not cover anything.
Imagine a monthly premium of $500 for your family, a $6000 deductible and a 20 percent copay. Pay $12,000 out of pocket to reach the point of having to pay 20 percent of prescriptions, lab tests, doctor visits or hospitalizations. Fortunately, most policies have an out of pocket maximum, but if its tens of thousands of dollars, you may be bankrupt before ever reaching the maximum. And this is for the year. Ring in the New Year and the financial clock starts all over again.
The Illinois co-op was one of 23 co-ops created under Obamacare. Only 7 remain open for business. Three-quarters of the co-ops have gone the way of Donald Trumps primary opponents. And of those still open, for how long? What happens when they close? Obama the shepherd has a rapidly thinning flock of insurance co-ops, which he is leading from behind, assuming he even knows where it is going or how to get there. Most of the flock already have been led off a cliff.
What if he does know where he is going? What if his goal is well beyond Obamacare into the realm of single-payer? It struck out in Vermont, but is on the ballot in Colorado. Obama is a fan of single-payer plans. Could he actually and cleverly be leading the country from behind into a national single-payer plan, one that Bernie Sanders enthusiastically supports and Hillary Clinton dances around depending on her political audience at the moment.
In 2003, as a state senator, Obama said of single-payer, We may not get there immediately. As President, has his shepherding of Obamacare been failing from behind as it looks to the casual observer? Or is he truly, but craftily, leading from behind, using Obamacare to create chaos and financial collapse to the point where the only solution is for a government rescue? Its looking more and more like the latter option.
Brian C Joondeph, MD, MPS, a Denver based retina surgeon, radio personality, and writer. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.
The British press is going ballistic over a statement made by President Obama to a magazine that places the onus for the disaster in Libya on Prime Minister David Cameron.
The British press on Friday accused President Barack Obama of launching an unprecedented verbal attack on British Prime Minister David Cameron in a magazine interview.
In a lengthy interview with The Atlantic, Obama faults Cameron and other European allies for shortcomings in dealing with Libya after the 2011 ouster of longtime dictator Col. Moammar Gadhafi.
The Times newspaper said Obama's criticism was "extraordinary" and said Obama was blaming Cameron for the "Libya mess."
The Independent front page headline says "Obama savages Cameron over Libya."
In the magazine interview, Obama said Cameron had been "distracted" by other issues after Gadhafi's fall.
Britain and other European nations had joined the U.S. in military action there to prevent a massacre of civilians. Obama told the magazine he had expected European nations to take a more active role in helping Libya during its reconstruction.
"When I go back and I ask myself what went wrong there's room for criticism, because I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libya's proximity, being invested in the follow-up," he said.
Obama also criticized former French President Nicolas Sarkozy for taking too much credit for France's military role.
Libya has since descended into chaos and emerged as a potential safe haven for Islamic State extremists.
U.S. officials have tried to squelch the controversy by telling British media that the United States places a high priority on Britain's support.
"Prime Minister Cameron has been as close a partner as the president has had, and we deeply value the UK's contributions on our shared national security and foreign policy objectives which reflect our special and essential relationship," spokesman Edward Price told ITV News.
It is good to know who the real conservatives are, who in Congress, which governors, which former candidates for president are stand-up people, and which of them are sore losers. The list of the latter is shameful and depressing. We knew that a great many of the establishment Republicans are cowards interested only in preserving their own privilege and power.
We didn't know how many. Now we do. The Bush family, Romney, McCain, even Kasich, the governor in whose state the convention is taking place. They are not there. Most of Trump's former opponents are not there. The list of senators and members of the House is long and disgraceful. Very bad form all around.
They are telegraphing their support for Hillary Clinton, the most corrupt, dishonest politician to prevail for so long on the national stage in American history. Another term with a radical progressive Alinskyite in the White House will be the end of America. It will hasten our slide into Venezuela territory as the bank accounts of the Clintons and their sycophants swell like Chavez's, Fidel Castro's, and Putin's as they bankrupt their people to enrich themselves. She used her position as secretary of state to make millions selling favors and access, past and future. She will do worse if president.
Mr. Trump was last on the list of preferred candidates for a great many of us, for good reasons; he is uninformed about national security issues, foreign policy, domestic policy, the military, and more. He is hardly a true conservative. We learned this week that he "does not read books." How to describe how he speaks? To say like a fifth-grader may be an insult to fifth-graders. But he has won the primary. His simple message has resonated with millions of Americans who have been disenfranchised, disrespected, and dis-employed over the last nearly eight years. They have seen the cost of their medical care skyrocket or their access to it vanish. They have seen Obama dismiss ISIS as a jayvee team while Islamic terrorism has exploded around the globe. They have seen Obama and Clinton embrace the racist anti-police rhetoric and violence of the BlackLivesMatter crowd, which is riled up and funded by George Soros with a litany of misinformation. Millions of these Trump supporters voted Republican majorities into the House and Senate to no avail. Obama has done whatever he has wanted to do, no matter how unconstitutional, illegal, or dangerous.
How do we square the facts of Trump's seeming lack of qualification for the office with his business success (and failures) around the world? His adult children seem to be hardworking, intelligent, gracious, and successful. The same cannot be said for the children of all very wealthy people. And they behave nothing like their unruly and unpredictable father. We all have to respect that; raising children to be productive citizens is the hardest job on the planet.
So whatever so many of us did not see in Trump a year ago, millions of others did see as a potential savior of a kind, and he is the candidate. For so many Republicans to snub the convention and refuse to endorse him is a pathetic display of bad sportsmanship. It is classless and graceless. And now we know who they all are. No Republican should ever respect or vote for any one of them ever again.
Trump must win to keep the Clintons out of the White House. They turned it into a tabloid soap opera for eight years in the nineties. This time they will turn the country into their own personal cash cow while they rob the American people of their freedoms (1st Amendment, 2nd Amendment), their opportunities to rise and thrive, and further adulterate the population with refugees so that an American culture will no longer exist.
Politico's Glenn Thrush penned an article about his interview with Senator Ted Cruz and Cruzs failure to endorse Donald Trump as of yet. Thrush has Cruz holding off endorsing Trump for now. In the lead sentence, he states, "One of these days, and maybe soon, Ted Cruz just might have to endorse Donald Trump."
Thrush elaborates:
But hell never concede Trump could have beaten him in a fair fight and hell never accept that Trumps me-first philosophy represents a sustainable future for the GOP. Above all, Cruz wants to use the big stage in Cleveland to present a non-Trump alternative vision for his partys future, one rooted in constitutional conservative principles and competent campaign management modeled, oddly enough, on Barack Obamas 2008 and 2012 White House runs. 'In this election I am where a great many voters are, which is that I am listening and watching and coming to a decision,' Cruz, the highest-profile Trump holdout heading into this weeks convention, told me when I asked him if he intended to throw his support behind the former reality TV star imminently.
Before I get into why the time for "listening and watching and coming to a decision" is over, I need to provide full disclosure. Prior to Trump garnering sufficient pledged delegates, I was an ardent Ted Cruz supporter. I voted for him in my state's primary. I still like him. I hope to see him continue his great work in the Senate and ultimately become president of the United States.
However, Trump has won this round, fair and square. He has done so by using the very rules the GOPe put in place to keep people like him and Cruz from being nominated. He has essentially beaten them at their own game. In this regard, Trump and Cruz have some commonality for one, they are both outsiders who got a lot farther along the presidential nomination process than their erstwhile GOPe naysayers.
The continued caterwauling by the "Never Trump" crowd needs to stop. The tepid support of GOPe stalwarts, such as Speaker Paul Ryan and majority leader Mitch McConnell, at best, damning Trump with faint praise and at worst publicly decrying his policy positions, needs to stop. All these fair weather soldiers are doing is undermining their own candidate to the benefit of the Criminal from Chappaqua. (If you think this part is too rough, we can change to simply "Clinton.")
There is one guy to lead this final coalescence of the Republican Party. That man is Ted Cruz, who was the last man standing until Trump, in Cruz's own words, "whipped me." Ted Cruz and and his supporters, including the websites RedState.com/Leon Wolf and TheResurgent.com/Erick Erickson, need to get on board the Trump Train. They need to embody the Eleventh Commandment of Ronaldus Magnus and stop criticizing Trump and focus their energies on Clinton/Obama.
It's time for Achilles (Cruz) to stop sulking in his tent and march forward to help rally the troops.
Mike Ford is a sometime contributor to American Thinker, frequently edited by his lovely bride, who is a retired English teacher and high school principal.
The Cleveland chapter of Black Lives Matter announced they would boycott the demonstration on Monday at the Republican National Convention because liberal activists have hijacked the movement and are exploiting the deaths of young black men at the hands of police.
Washington Times:
They talk about uniting to end poverty but what they are really interested in is solidifying their political power to advance their agenda, Mr. Mixon told The Washington Times.
Mr. Mixon blamed black voters for allowing the Democratic Party and its allies take their votes for granted, which he said propitiates the imbalance in the justice system.
Black people have bad voting habits. We just vote for anybody who has a D next to their name, said Mr. Mixon, whose group endorsed Republican Sen. Rob Portman in the states U.S. Senate race.
The boycott exposed rifts within the national coalition of liberal groups operating with Black Lives Matter movement, which has faced increasing criticism amid deadly attacks on police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Mr. Mixon defended the national movement, saying the attack on police were the product of frustration in the black community over decades of injustice by police and courts.
Some people believe the only way to bring justice is with a sniper rifle, he said. If the justice system did its job, black people would be safer and police officers would be safer.
The demonstration on the opening day of the Republican convention was dubbed United Clevelanders Against Poverty and was put together by Organize Ohio.
Mr. Mixon said the advocacy groups do not support black communities.
We are boycotting the protest because the people who started the protests are people in segregated unions and segregated communities, he said.
The Associated Press has obtained a document not made public with the rest of the Iran nuclear deal that allows Iran to accelerate its nuclear program years earlier than the White House claimed.
The document, a secret text linked to the deal between Iran and six other nations, says the country can replace 5,060 inefficient centrifuges with up to 3,500 advanced machines after 11 to 13 years, the AP reported. The advanced centrifuges, which are five times as efficient, would cut the time Iran would need to build a nuclear weapon referred to as "breakout time" from a year to six months. The provision appears to be part of the deal's "sunset clause," though it was not public, said Omri Ceren of The Israel Project, a group that advocated against the agreement. Ceren said some experts expressed worry to Congress that limits on Iran's centrifuge research and development were too weak during the first 10 years of the agreement. But whether the administration briefed lawmakers on the newly discovered document is unclear.
It's doubtful this would have altered the vote in Congress to approve the deal. In fact, at this point it's doubtful that any revelation would have changed the minds of Democrats in the Senate who held firm and prevented a vote from taking place.
Here's the money quote from David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, during a congressional hearing before the agreement was finalized last year:
"No bans exist on Irans research and development of the IR-6 and IR-8 centrifuges, the latter of which is up to 16 times more powerful than the IR-1 centrifuge," he said. "Failing to achieve such bans, the interim agreement does not appear to mitigate the risks of Iran being able to deploy these more powerful centrifuges after year 13, other than some negotiators stating that they believe that Iran will have trouble actually deploying them in the future," he said.
Does giving Iran a year or two extra matter? It will probably take two years to install the upgraded centrifuges. You don't just plug these things in. They have to be carefully calibrated to spin at different speeds to enrich the uranium properly.
But that's beside the point. Once again, the president is caught in a lie about the nuclear deal. And Iran is saying it can rebuild its enrichment program even sooner:
Iran's foreign minister on Tuesday extolled the country's ability to bring its nuclear program back on track as limits on the landmark 15-year accord between Tehran and world powers ease in the coming years. Mohammad Javad Zarif said a document, submitted by Iran to the International Atomic Energy Agency and outlining plans to expand Iran's uranium enrichment program, is a "matter of pride." He said it was created by Iran's "negotiators and industry experts" and that even foreign media have noted Iran is likely to strive for restoring its full enrichment after 10 years.
By then, President Obama will have been out of office, and his successor will have to deal with the consequences of his weakness and stupidity.
Back in 1968, former V.P. Nixon, with a big help from Governor Wallace and demonstrators in Chicago, emphasized "law and order." Some say this is 1968 all over again!
Today, Mr. Trump is calling himself "the law and order candidate."
So what happens to Mrs. Clinton in this new political climate?
She will have to walk a fine line between sounding like Nixon '68 and keeping the Sanders voters on board. Many of Sanders's voters are already not happy and will likely stay home!
Hillary Clinton and the Democrats have only themselves to blame for their dilemma. I guess we can say the chickens of "identity politics" have come home to roost!
The party created "Black Lives Matter" by letting the protesters get away with the lie that police officers are targeting black young men.
President Obama and Secretary Clinton did not push back after Ferguson. In fact, BLM even shut down a Sanders event.
No major Democrat stood up to the irresponsible message, and now they own it, as John Hinderaker wrote over the weekend:
After seven years of inflammatory rhetoric that has deliberately divided Americans by race, Obama wants others to smooth over the hatreds he has helped to sow. Sorry, Mr. President. Racial division was your political strategy. You own it.
I would add that Mrs. Clinton and the liberal wing own it, too!
Back in 1992, the other Clinton had his "Sister Souljah" moment, when he challenged an irresponsible black entertainer. Clinton, whatever his political motives may have been, understood that he had to separate his campaign from extremists in the party.
Mrs. Clinton now faces a real-world dilemma. She is tied to Black Lives Matter but knows that recent police shootings demand a different candidate posture.
How does she disown the left without losing the left? I don't know, but those chickens are preparing to roost!
P.S. You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.
A $25-billion-a-year public agency is on the way to being taken over by management, with the publics representatives sidetracked and silenced, while former Homeland Security honcho Janet Napolitano gets the ability to run the place as she pleases. Lurking beneath the bureaucratic language of the revision of the by-laws lies a gigantic power-grab by a bureaucracy seeking even less scrutiny, much less accountability. On Wednesday, the Regents are scheduled to discuss the proposed changes.
Writing on these pages, former Regent and UCLA professor Velma Montoya has twice analyzed the coup detat being run through the formal processes of by-laws revision.
Now, The California Association of Scholars has stepped forward with an insightful analysis of what is wrong with the changes. I reprint it in its entirety below. But for now, consider:
Two proposals appear inconsistent with the fundamental purpose of a Board of Regents. First, Regents are the interface between the University and the public. Thus it has always been understood that any individual Regent must be free to raise a matter of public concern at a plenary meeting with minimal restrictions. The new By-Laws could stop that, and in so doing might change what it means to be a UC Regent. Second, it is proposed to establish what in effect would be a very small super-committee that would control much of what happens in the Board. Because the UC President would be one of its tiny number, this would change the relationship between the Board and the University administration: the President would be a much more dominant presence in a small group. This would not be a more efficient arrangement: it would be one in which the role of the Regents as watchdog over the University is seriously diminished.
Here is the entire statement, in the form of a letter from U.C. professors John Ellis, chairman, and Matthew Malkan, president of the California Association.
The California Association of Scholars is deeply concerned by the University administrations attempt to secure Regental approval for its repeal of all existing By-Laws and Standing Orders of the Regents, replacing them with a completely new set. There are several problems with the proposed re-write from the Presidents office, which the Regents are scheduled to discuss this Wednesday:
1. By-Laws should properly be amended paragraph by paragraph, with the rationale for each change carefully explained, and that explanation subject to public debate. When one entire set is to be replaced by another, what is essentially being demanded of every Regent is that they search out and compare the original and the replacement for every single provision, and consider carefully the rationale for each change. That is self-evidently impossible. It is both incompetent and irresponsible to ask each Regent to do something that cannot possibly be done. The By-Laws are the Regents constitution. They are far too important to be treated in this frivolous way.
2. If the By-Laws are the Boards constitution, the Standing Orders are the record of its legislation. The distinction between these two utterly different kinds of documents is well understood in many different contexts. A proposal to abolish the one and incorporate it into the other can only rest on a failure to understand this fundamental difference. Nor can Standing Orders be replaced by policies. The Standing Orders are publicly available records of Regental decisions. They must remain so, and they are not By-Laws.
3. Many of the proposals enshrined in the new By-Laws seem to us extremely unwise, but in at least one case, it is also plainly illegal: Each Regent is appointed to the Board for a set term, and the power to appoint is vested by the state constitution in the Governor. The Board cannot suddenly vest in itself the power to determine the length of a particular Regents term. We are surprised that General Counsel did not warn the administration that this proposed By-Law would be null and void. If he missed something as obvious as this, what else did he miss in his scrutiny of the proposed changes
4. Two proposals appear inconsistent with the fundamental purpose of a Board of Regents. First, Regents are the interface between the University and the public. Thus it has always been understood that any individual Regent must be free to raise a matter of public concern at a plenary meeting with minimal restrictions. The new By-Laws could stop that, and in so doing might change what it means to be a UC Regent. Second, it is proposed to establish what in effect would be a very small super-committee that would control much of what happens in the Board. Because the UC President would be one of its tiny number, this would change the relationship between the Board and the University administration: the President would be a much more dominant presence in a small group. This would not be a more efficient arrangement: it would be one in which the role of the Regents as watchdog over the University is seriously diminished.
5. Public statements so far do not identify the exact source of these proposals. It is natural to assume that it would have taken the considerable staff resources of the Presidents office to produce so far reaching and complex a revision. If that is soand we do not see that it could be otherwisethen these proposals should have been accompanied by a clear statement from the President as to why she thinks that the major individual provisions she is suggesting are necessary. She should particularly address those provisions that would seem to have the effect of consolidating more power in her office, and diluting the oversight function of the Regents.
We understand that severe criticism of these proposals has resulted in their being somewhat modified at the last minute. But modification is not enough: they are so fundamentally flawed that they should be dropped in their entirety.
Normally, political competitors websites are so off the shelf and banal that they dont present much of a contrast. That is not the case in the 2016 presidential race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, which is set for official launching at the Republican and Democrat conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia, respectively, over the next two weeks.
Intentionally or not, the websites reveal much about each candidate.
Say you were visiting the Clinton and Trump websites to see what positions they stake out for themselves on education.
On Hillary Clintons site, under the heading Issues, you will find statements on no fewer than 32 subjects, beginning alphabetically with addiction and substance abuse and ending with workforce skills and job training.
Along the way are three specifically relating to education: Early Childhood Education, K12 Education, and Making College Affordable and Taking on Student Debt.
The variety of concerns Clinton deems appropriate for governmental action is remarkable. The list evinces intent to include just about everybody and everything: protecting animals and wildlife, raising incomes and fighting inequality, rural communities, seeking a cure for Alzheimers disease, small business, and on and on.
For education, the Trump website has zero entries under the heading positions. Thats right: as incredible as it may sound, there is absolutely nothing listed related to education as of the week before the GOP convention.
Only seven positions are spelled out: Pay for The Wall, Healthcare Reform, U.S.-China Trade Reform, Veterans Administration Reform, Tax Reform, Second Amendment Rights, and Immigration Reform. And if you click on Issue No. 1, it sets out theoretical ways to compel Mexico to pay for the wall, such as tariffs and fees on visas.
His website suggests that Trumps main themes include immigration, fair trade, and fighting terrorism and that might be politically savvy. The education world may crave more love, but in these turbulent times, it is doubtful that many voters are focused on charter schools or class sizes.
Viewed charitably, Trumps exclusion of education could signal his conviction that the federal government has no constitutional role in schooling, and therefore the U.S. Department of Education should be scrapped. Perhaps Trump would block-grant the freed up megabillions and let states and localities decide how they would be most productively spent.
Viewed realistically, Trump has not bothered to think all this out. If he had a bold plan of education devolution, it would be on his website.
On the other end of the spectrum, Hillarys website vividly illustrates her belief that big government can solve practically any problem by manipulation and control through the use of taxation and redistribution.
With regard to education, Clinton long has pushed for subsidized universal preschool, which under her model would be shaped by Washington, D.C., but it doesnt stop there. Clinton is also now hawking the plan of avowed socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) to make public college free for most American families. Of course, because there is no free lunch, her plan, in reality, would mean sticking taxpayers with the bill more than $500 billion over ten years while further lowering intellectual standards in higher education.
While a majority of Americans currently have negative views of both major-party candidates in this Novembers election, its unreasonable to say after examining the two candidates websites that there are no differences between the two.
Robert Holland (holland@heartland.org) is a senior fellow for education policy for The Heartland Institute.
An elite school in New York City has a diversity program that teaches white children, as young as six, about their inherent racism rooted in inordinate privilege. They are told this stems from their European heritage and is a corruption of their moral worth. The Diversity Program seeks to rectify the distortions imposed by whiteness about what is good, normal, and American.
Privilege is an interesting word, given how it has been used in the past. The forerunner of the German Workers Party, the Thule Society, used it to delegitimize the success and influence of Jews post-World War 1 Germany. It argued that Jewish privilege blocked the poorer German working class.
Being Jewish, or now being white, was and is being offered as a mark of advantage and immunity. If that word is allowed to take hold again, the American conversation about racism and equal opportunity will forever change.
In the 20th-century United States, laws that were attentive to race amended the goal of equality of opportunity. Affirmative action, even acknowledging the debate it fosters, bestows advantage for being a minority i.e., to be selected by using race not as a neutral factor, but as a positive weight on the balance. It affirms one race but does not openly undermine another.
It has been reported that children at the Banks School come home distraught at having been told they were bad people. This works both ways, for black children will also come to believe that whites are born bad and pave the way for negative opinions and acts that will feel justified.
Long before the concentration camps, "privilege" allowed Jewish academics to be fired, Jewish apartments to be confiscated, and Jewish shops to be boycotted, and all replaced by non-Jews. With one social shift in belief, the unjust becomes just, and social conscience goes to sleep.
The article in the Atlantic last year, which argued that ISIS is not just Islamic but very Islamic, predictably created an uproar of indignation and accusations of fomenting Islamophobia from the usual suspects, from the NYT to the Huffington Post. By contrast, very little has been heard from the same quarters about the treatment of Yazidis, Christians, and other religious minorities in Iraq mustnt criticize Muslims for fear of offending Muslim sensibilities or that ultimate crime against humanity fomenting Islamophobia.
But let me leave aside these obvious bases for criticizing Islamic practice and even leave aside terrorist acts from 9/11 to the Boston Bomber to Charlie Hebdo and now Nice. Instead, the case here will be argued just on the basis of the prevailing behavior and mindset of the young males of Europes new immigrants.
In one day alone, there were 1,200+ sexual assaults on German women by approximately 2,000 Muslim immigrants. Angela Merkels reaction? To cut a deal with Facebook and Twitter so that next time Muslims commit thousands of sexual assaults, it will be much harder for the populace to get the news out through the digital curtain of dot-com censorship and propaganda. And those fewer than 1% who do get prosecuted? The poor dears have just been miseducated and need courses in deportment and a gentle nudging into accepting the astounding concept that infidel women have feelings, sensibilities, and rights.
Miseducated?
There is no shortage of apologists for Islam who will insist that the mass rape and sexual abuse of European women by Muslim men in Cologne and elsewhere does not fit Koranic doctrine, which basically permits rape only of captive women taken in battle (Ar-Rahim), but, as Raymond Ibrahim points out, other interrelated Islamic doctrines command Muslim men to hate all non-Muslims and to see women especially infidel women as little more than sex objects. (In the words of a Muslim who recently murdered a Christian girl in Pakistan for refusing him sex, Christian girls are only meant for one thing: the [sexual] pleasure of Muslim men.)
But textual exegesis aside, as Jack Jenkins, senior religion reporter for ThinkProgress (gasp) maintained, it is a mistake (fools errand) to believe that a religion is defined solely by what is in its texts. Religion is a community. Religion, whether its Islam or Christianity, whether its Hinduism, is a group of people that interpret things, whether thats text, whether thats different sorts of rituals and then move on from them.
And that is the point.
Europes new immigrants who are convinced that infidel women are legitimate prey are the product of Islamic communities and the Muslim clerics who guide them. Islamic communities produce such creatures en masse, regardless of what Western apologists claim is the real Islam. The scholars may argue til they are blue in the face, but the fact is, there is enough there in Islamic holy books for clerics to indoctrinate and send their zombie rapists abroad to propagate the infidel sluts. They are not forthcoming under the aegis of any other religion. They are bred nowhere but in cultures and culture cells claiming the authority of Islam.
The United Kingdoms decision to leave the European Union, known as Brexit, was an insanely huge piece of news. It affected the worth of the Pound, stock prices worldwide, and a number of other economic factors on the world stage. The UK was left in a somewhat vulnerable state, with many companies watching their worth sink with their national currency. Even chip giant ARM was affected, with the falling Pound barely being leveled out for them by their rising stock prices despite the sweeping economic change. Faith in British businesses seemed to be in short supply, even for the biggest names in the country, but that is exactly what Softbank chairman Masayoshi Son professed by betting big on ARM. If regulators see fit to approve it, Softbank will be handing over 24 Billion (roughly $32 Billion) to ARM in exchange for full ownership of the company.
According to Son, the deal was pretty much on from the day he met ARM chairman Stuart Chambers about two weeks prior. Talking about that fateful day, Son said, quite plainly, that was the day I said I was interested in acquiring ARM This was after many meetings with current and former executives high in the ranks of ARM had failed to spark his interest. Even knowing that ARM was the chip designer that just about everybody outside of the PC space went to for their reference designs and licenses, it was not until Son saw what he saw in Chambers that he began to seriously consider an acquisition.
As for the timing, it did not have much to do with Brexit. Rather, SoftBanks operating capital had been all tied up until recently. They sold off a huge portion of their holdings in Alibaba, got rid of sizeable stake in Supercell, and got themselves a loan to the tune of about $9 Billion for the purpose of capital expenditure. It was only with the convergence of these three factors that Son saw enough cash in SoftBanks pocket to make a move on a company of ARMs size. With the move all set to launch SoftBank headfirst into the Internet of Things revolution, they might just stand to get that investment back in due time, along with a good bit more.
Samsungs Galaxy Note 7 is due to be announced in just a few weeks. Now we have a leaked screenshot showing some internal information from Korean Telecom about the upcoming device. It shows that their variant of the Galaxy Note 7 will indeed come with 64GB of internal storage. There arent any variants listed with 32GB of storage or 128GB of storage. So it is possible that this could have 64GB by default, and that it could be the only storage capacity that Samsung is launching with the Galaxy Note 7.
While this shows that the Korean market is getting a 64GB model, that doesnt mean that other markets will be seeing this. Its still possible that other markets could be stuck with a 32GB model. So, for now, its a good idea to take this leak with a grain of salt. As these listings could change between now and August 2nd, when the device is being announced and supposedly going up for pre-order. However, the Galaxy Note 7 should still support expandable storage. The rumor mill is pointing to Samsung using a hybrid card slot, that would support both UFS and micro SD cards. Samsung just announced new UFS cards not too long ago, so it wouldnt be surprising to see them put out a flagship smartphone that supported them.
The Galaxy Note 7 is turning out to be a pretty amazing device so far. Many have already called it the smartphone of the year. Rumors are pointing at it sporting a 5.8-inch quad HD Super AMOLED display, powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 or the Exynos 8893 depending on the market, along with 6GB of RAM and what looks like 64GB of storage now. Of course, when it comes to cameras, the Galaxy Note 7 will have an amazing one once again, as that has been the case with Samsungs past few smartphones like the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy Note 5. While these specs are also all rumored and not confirmed, we should know the full spec sheet within the next few weeks when Samsung takes the stage at Unpacked in New York City on August 2nd.
Samsung has been one of the early adopters of virtual reality. The Gear VR has done pretty well for Samsung, despite only being available for a select few Samsung smartphones and not all Android smartphones. The Gear VR was developed in partnership with Oculus, which is why all of the content for the Gear VR is delivered via the Oculus Store. However, Samsung has noted that they are working on their own standalone virtual reality headset. What that means, is that this is a headset that will workout without a smartphone. Similar to the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. Now where this would be a direct competitor to the Oculus Rift, its safe to say that Samsung isnt working with Oculus on this headset.
Back in April of this year, when Samsung confirmed their plans, there wasnt much else known about the product at the time. However, according to Galaxy Club, who has supposedly gotten their hands on a trademark application from Samsung. It appears that the device will be named Odyssey at least for now. That may always change in the future, and it could even be part of the Gear line that Samsung has developed over the years. This trademark application doesnt reveal much about Odyssey, since this is essentially for the name and not the product itself, that shouldnt be too surprising. However, it does mention headsets for use with computers theres also another line stating virtual reality game headsets. Which pretty much confirms that this is a virtual reality headset of some kind.
This application also doesnt show us how close we are to seeing the product. Whether Samsung may announce it at Unpacked in about two weeks, or it may be announced later on perhaps with the Galaxy S8 next year in Barcelona. It is, however, likely that this wont be the successor to the Gear VR, and would be offered alongside the Gear VR. A new Gear VR will be announced with the Galaxy Note 7 on August 2nd, since the Galaxy Note 7 is using a USB Type-C port, and the existing Gear VR only supports micro USB. The Samsung Odyssey shouldnt be too far out, and itll be interesting to see how it stacks up to the likes of the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and other standalone virtual reality headsets that come out between now and then.
Ever since its beginning, Project Fi has always been a U.S.-based service, establishing Googles stateside presence as an MVNO for interested subscribers. Since Google didnt own their own towers and is not technically a wireless carrier, they provide service based on (at the time) T-Mobile and Sprints networks, and now U.S. Cellular, with data roaming in many countries globally. Earlier this month, back on July 12th, to be exact, Google announced that they were boosting speeds of Project Fi internet use internationally so subscribers were able to get even faster speeds than before. Now it appears that Google may be looking to establish itself as an MVNO in Europe, according to a new report that states Google has partnered with Hutchison Whampoa to deliver connectivity to customers of Project Fi outside the U.S.
The details of the report mention that this new partnership is aimed at customers who will need service when traveling throughout Europe, although there isnt much to be said for specifics of the partnership and what it will include for those who already subscribe to Googles MVNO service. It is also not stated that Google is preparing to offer Project Fi to European customers, although the partnership is seemingly suggesting a potential for it in the future as this is being referred to as a step closer and could be a stepping stone leading in that particular direction. It also is not made clear which countries in Europe the Hutchison partnership includes.
According to Hutchisons statement, Hue, which is Hutchisons Mobile Virtual Network Enabler, will be the company providing international data services for Project Fi customers when theyre traveling in Europe. Based on the rumored details, Hues involvement as Hutchisons MVNE could allow them to make deals on behalf of Google to multiple networks throughout Europe, as Hutchison already owns multiple networks in European countries such as Austria, Italy, and Denmark among others which operate under Hutchisons 3 brand. While Google have not stated that they have plans to bring Project Fi to European customers, it isnt out of the realm of possibility that the partnership with Hutchison could be a way to see if Project Fi in the region would work.
Brexit balls: nationalists stole my brie
Brexit Balls aplenty in the Guardian, where Rachel Cooke is remembering past holidays in those halcyon days of the 1970s, when Europe was still called The Continent:
In France she eats a croissant:
Even as I finished it, licking my finger to gather every last flake, I worried that such an ambrosial delight might never pass my lips again. If this turned out to be so, I wasnt sure life was going to be worth living.
She would go on to drink fizzy water, eat white yoghurt, sticky cheese that was stinky, snails and enjoy the superiority of French food. She was a miniature gastronomic zealot high on French supermarket fodder. And then it all ended:
You know where this is going. Brexit feels to me like grief, and, deep in mourning, I cant stop thinking of the loved one, and all that she brought me. Of course, its possible to exaggerate the effect the EU has had on our eating habits.
Possible. And here it is. The European Union makes the apricot jam thicker and the butter more creamy. The EU allowed you to travel to France and eat food. The EU gave you bottled water. The EU did it all.
Things would have changed anyway, in the end; British supermarkets, for better or worse, sell sushi now.
Sushi is from Japan a country NOT in the EU (yet). We eat sushi and more expensive foods because we are richer than before, and many of us spend large chunks of our considerable down time watching cheap-to-make cooking shows and celebrity travelogues on the telly.
In the 1970s, British foodies could watch Graham Kerr on telly, The Galloping Gourmet, a celebrity chef the Guardian calls The Roger Moore of the mandolin, the Nigel Havers of the hob, the David Niven of the knife block.
The wealthy British imported coffee and tea and spices long before the EU existed.
Buy Cooke says its difficult not to see this as a door closing a refrigerator door, behind which there sits, in my dreams, an oozing brie de Meaux, a blushing hunk of culatello, and a small bowl of salty Nardin boquerones. How much more expensive are such treats likely soon to be?
Well, that would depend on demand for already pricey foodstuffs. Theres a reason they dont sell frozen snails at Tesco and they do sell sushi for better or worse. They also sell Thai food (again, not from the EU) and lots of things from Australia, Canada and America.
She then accuses the people who voted for Brexit of being culturally backward, tasteless to the core, a slack-jawed, reactionary majority of bad-food lovers.
The celebrating Brexiteers are in a frenzy of nationalistic pride right now Do they think freedom lies in grey meat and flaccid pastry?
No. See The Great British Bake Off.
Is it a case, for them, of better-the-cheap-British-cheese-you-know-than-the-dubious-foreign-stuff-you-dont?
No. Its a case of wine, a box of curry, a few spring rolls, kebabs, nachos, burgers and reruns of Fanny Cradocks Fannys Kitchen on the magic box.
Anorak
Posted: 19th, July 2016 | In: Broadsheets, Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
Brexit: Mishcon De Reya and Theresa May kicks democracy into the long grass
More than three weeks ago, the British electorate voted to Leave the European Union. But Article 50, that part in the Lisbon Treaty dealing with Brexit, has not been invoked. Article 50 gives Britain a maximum two-year deadline to leave the EU.
Theresa May, the new prime minister, says she wont invoke the mechanism before the end of the 2016.
Today legal outfit Mishcon De Reya made progress in its bid to thwart the will of the people. Mischons wants Brexit be put to a vote in parliament. The courts will hear their bid in October.
judges ruled that the lead case in the action should be that of Mishcon client Gina Miller, 51, an investment manager and philanthropist living in London who voted Remain in the EU referendum. Other applicants include London hairdresser Deir Dos Santos, 37, as well as Britons living in France campaigning as Fair Deal for Expats.
They should be laughed out of court. They wont be. The powers that be are scared. They dont want change. They want to kick it into the long grass.
Anorak
Posted: 19th, July 2016 | In: Reviews Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
(ANSA) - Rome, July 19 - Rome Mayor Virginia Raggi of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) said Tuesday she would take a decision on the city's bid to host the 2024 Olympics in October.
"October is a good month for drawing conclusions," Raggi said in an interview with local freesheet Metro. "We have never precluded dialogue but for now our position remains unchanged: first we will attend to potholes, waste, transport, then we will evaluate the extraordinary," she added. The mayor also said she "wouldn't hesitate" to call a referendum on the issue if Romans asked for one.
Raggi said she was due to meet with Premier Matteo Renzi "straight after the summer" and that the renegotiation of Rome's massive debt would be top of the agenda.
Morocco: Valeo invests 50 mln euro for Tangier plant French car components group reinforces presence
(ANSAmed) - TANGIER, JULY 19 - French car parts supplier Valeo plans to invest 50 million euros in a new industrial centre in the port of Tangier in Morocco.
Production, which will take place inside the Tanger-Med Automotive City, will in part supply Peugeot-Citroen in Kenitra and Renault TangerMed, and the other part will be exported towards Europe and the United States.
Construction work is expected to begin in coming weeks and should be completed during 2017, the port authority said.
(ANSAmed).
ISTANBUL - If Turkey reintroduces the death penalty in the wake of the failed coup at the weekend negotiations to join the European Union will be interrupted, Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni said on Tuesday. "It is clear that there can be no question of continuing negotiations with a country that reintroduces the death penalty, given that abolition of the death penalty is one of the principles of the EU," Gentiloni told Radio Anch'io.
On Tuesday the leader of nationalist opposition party MHP, Devlet Bahceli, said he would vote with the government the day after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he was ready to reinstate capital punishment if this is ratified by parliament. "If AKP (Erdogan's party) is ready, so are we," Bahceli said. "We will consider the death penalty and everything that is necessary," he added. Also on Tuesday, Erdogan reiterated claims that Imam Fethullah Gulen, who lives in self-imposed exile in the United states, is a terrorist, comparing him to 'Bin Laden' and condemning his interviews with US media.
Meanwhile the mass purges and arrests continue. Erdogan's vendetta against the presumed instigators and supporters of the failed uprising seems to have no end, while the situation in the country is anything but calm. According to the deputy premier and spokesman of the Ankara government, Numan Kurtulmus, 9,322 people have been arrested so far, accused of complicity in the attempted coup.
Turkey's education minister said on Tuesday he had suspended 15,200 employees for suspected links to a network led by Gulen, NTV national news channel reported. The ministry has also revoked the licences of 21,000 private school teachers on suspicion of links with Gulen, NTV reported.
(ANSAmed) - Rome - The six biggest economies - United States, China, Japan, Germany, France and United Kingdom - together host just 2.1 million refugees and aylum seekers, or 8.88% of the global total, according to an Oxfam report released on Monday.
Conversely, Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, Pakistan, South Africa and the Palestinian Territories, which together represent less than 2% of the global economy, have taken in over 11.9 million people. Italy, the eighth largest global economy, hosts approximately 135,000 refugees. Oxfam is calling on global leaders for a "change of direction" ahead of two summits on the migration crisis in New York in September. Some 65 million people are currently dispalced globally as a result of war or persecution. Of these, approximately one third have sought refuge or asylum in another country. The exodus is largely due to the war in Syria but also due to instability in other countries such as South Sudan, Burundi, Iraq and Yemen. (ANSAmed).
(ANSAmed) - Cairo - The Egyptian government is to standardise the sermons preached during Friday prayer across the over 100,000 mosques in the country, pro-government daily Al Ahram reported the minister for religious affairs Mohamed Mokhtar Gomaa as saying on Tuesday. A joint sermon will be issued to all preachers as a sort of written "guideline" in order to combat extremism and radicalism in Egypt. The measure has sparked criticism among preachers, who fear it will limit their freedom of expression. However, Gomaa has said the decision is "irreversible" and announced the possible creation of a committee of experts and academics to draft the sermons. Imams are free to modify or embellish the texts but must not depart from their basic spirit. The government begun to post weekly sermons on its website two weeks ago.
EU talks to stop if Turkey restores death penalty, Gentiloni Opposition party MHP ready to vote with Erdogan
(ANSAmed) - Istanbul, July 19 - If Turkey reintroduces the death penalty in the wake of the failed coup at the weekend negotiations to join the European Union will be interrupted, Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni said on Tuesday. "It is clear that there can be no question of continuing negotiations with a country that reintroduces the death penalty, given that abolition of the death penalty is one of the principles of the EU," Gentiloni told Radio Anch'io.
On Tuesday the leader of nationalist opposition party MHP, Devlet Bahceli, said he would vote with the government the day after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he was ready to reinstate capital punishment if this is ratified by parliament. "If AKP (Erdogan's party) is ready, so are we," Bahceli said. "We will consider the death penalty and everything that is necessary," he added. Also on Tuesday, Erdogan reiterated claims that Imam Fethullah Gulen, who lives in self-imposed exile in the United states, is a terrorist, comparing him to 'Bin Laden' and condemning his interviews with US media. Meanwhile Turkish media reported that the two officers who downed the Russian jet on the Syrian border in May were among the members of the coup attempt and that two helicopters and 25 anti-Erdogan soldiers who attacked the hotel in Marmaris where the president should hgave been staying have disappeared.
As a global leading aviation company we are exploring new digital avenues and IflyA380.com illustrates this transformation journey. said Marc Fontaine, Airbus digital transformation officer. Booking systems today do not allow the passengers to easily choose their preferred aircraft and we decided to fill that gap by easing the access to the iconic A380 aircraft, for everybody. For the first time, a booking service puts the aircraft type as the criteria for flight selection. This seamless experience is a win for Airbus A380, its a win for the airlines operators and its a win for the passengers.
The booking assistant will appeal to travellers as it is the only place where all 13 A380 operators can present the on-board services they offer and the destinations they serve. Inspirational information about each city will also help travellers choose their next vacation. Its simple: users select their departure and destination airports/cities, dates and class of travel, the number of travellers and hit search. They can then click on the desired flight and be taken seamlessly to the website of the selected airline, allowing users to book securely and with confidence at no extra cost. A380 operators are supportive in the development of this booking assistant.
In March, Hyslop, 57, was named senior vice president, engineering, test & technology, assuming responsibility for the development and implementation of the companys enterprise technology investment strategy, as well as Boeings research and technology, test and evaluation, and companywide engineering functions. He will continue in that role, reporting to Boeing chairman, President and CEO Dennis Muilenburg and serving on the companys Executive Council, while taking on the CTO duties. The appointment is effective immediately.
With a unique combination of advanced technology leadership and business acumen sharpened through many years as a program manager, Greg has the right skills and experiences to help ensure Boeing remains a world-class technology company in its second century, Muilenburg said. Greg recognizes the most effective technological leaps are those that exceed customers expectations for performance and innovation at a price they can afford.
Prior to his current assignment, Hyslop served as vice president and general manager of Boeing Research & Technology, the companys research and development organisation. From 2009 to 2013, he served as vice president and general manager of Boeing Strategic Missile & Defense Systems.
Hyslop joined Boeing in 1982 as a guidance and control systems engineer on missile programs. A member of the Aeronautics Committee of the NASA Advisory Council, Hyslop holds a bachelors degree in electrical engineering and a masters degree in mathematics, from the University of Nebraska, and a doctor of science degree in systems science and mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis.
Services to New York and Halifax are scheduled with a frequency of one flight per week every Wednesday from Luxembourg, its new European hub, operated with a Boeing 777-200 freighter that offers 103 tonnes of cargo capacity. In addition to regular cargo goods, these new flights will allow Qatar Airways Cargo to facilitate the transport of lobster and seafood, major exports from both cities, to Europe, the Middle East, South and North East Asia via Doha.
The new Cargo service complements existing belly-hold cargo on the airlines commercial flights, which recently doubled. Increasing passenger demand to Americas financial centre, New York (JFK) prompted Qatar Airways to add a second daily service with an Airbus A350 XWB to the city from 1 March this year. The airline has served the city daily since the initial route launch in 2007 with a Boeing 777 aircraft. The double-daily passenger flights to New York (JFK) currently offer 125 tonnes of belly-hold cargo capacity each week.
YEREVAN, JULY 19, ARMENPRESS. A teenage Afghan refugee armed with an axe and knife injured four people on a train in southern Germany before being shot dead by police, officials say, reports BBC.
Three people were seriously hurt and one suffered minor injuries in the attack in Wurzburg, police said. Another 14 were treated for shock.
Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said the attacker was killed as he tried to flee the scene.
The motive for the attack is not yet clear.
The injured include members of a family from Hong Kong, authorities there said, although their exact condition was not revealed.
Herrmann said the attacker was a 17-year-old Afghan refugee who had been living in the nearby town of Ochsenfurt.
He told public broadcaster ARD that the teenager appeared to have traveled to Germany as an unaccompanied minor.
Herrmann said authorities were looking into reports that the attacker had yelled out "an exclamation". Some witnesses quoted by German media said they had heard him shout "Allahu akbar" ("God is great") during the attack.
The incident happened at about 21:15 (19:15 GMT) on the train which runs between Treuchlingen and Wurzburg.
"Shortly after arriving at Wurzburg, a man attacked passengers with an axe and a knife," a police spokesman said.
Police said the attacker had fled the train but was chased by officers who shot him dead.
One local man told DPA news agency that the train carriage where the attack took place "looked like a slaughterhouse".
He said he saw people crawl from the carriage and ask for a first-aid kit while other victims lay on the floor inside.
Although the motive has not been established, the BBC's Damien McGuinness in Berlin says there is nervousness in Germany about attacks by Islamist extremists following the attacks across the border in France.
YEREVAN, JULY 19, ARMENPRESS. Open discord and revolt broke out on the floor of the Republican National Convention on July 18 as GOP officials crushed an attempt to change party rules, a maneuver that could have embarrassed presumptive nominee Donald Trump, reports CNN.
In a highly unusual show of disunity and anger on the floor of a modern party convention, a group of states tried to force a state-by-state roll call vote on the rules of the convention. The rebellion apparently caught Trump's campaign team by surprise, and his lieutenants were seen frantically whipping votes on the floor to squelch the effort amid scenes of deepening disarray.
The dramatic scenes that unfolded around a normally routine procedure in passing the convention rules effectively turned into the last stand of party forces who had opposed the billionaire in the contentious Republican primary. Those holdouts were not trying to deprive Trump of the nomination -- in the knowledge they didn't have the votes.
But their protest, which highlighted antipathy toward Trump in some parts of the party, may also turn out to have been one of the opening salvos of the Ted Cruz 2020 campaign, as it was driven by several of the Texas senator's most prominent supporters who were keen to make the battlefield more favorable for conservatives in future Republican primaries.
Backers of the effort said they would continue to protest Tuesday, when delegates are expected to formally make Trump their nominee.
"This race isn't over and I'm running to the finish line," Kendal Unruh, a Colorado delegate who is leading the Free the Delegates effort, told reporters on the floor Monday night.
The tumult of the afternoon receded by the evening as delegates heard from a prime-time lineup of speakers who addressed national security issues. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani gave an especially impassioned speech that brought many Republicans in the arena to their feet.
The afternoon furor erupted when Arkansas Rep. Steve Womack, who was serving as convention chair, put the rules for the convention to a voice vote, and amid a chorus of boos and cheers from anti-Trump supporters declared those in favor of the motion had prevailed, while apparently ignoring objections from several state delegations on the cacophonous floor of the convention.
Womack explained that seven states were required to demonstrate a majority of their delegates wanted a roll call vote. While those backing a vote believed they had achieved that number by filing nine petitions, Womack told the convention that three states had subsequently withdrawn their petitions for a roll call vote, meaning there were not sufficient votes to force such a roll call vote.
Even had there been a roll call vote, the Trump forces would likely have prevailed since the billionaire managed to win a majority of delegates in the GOP primary. The Trump forces were also backed by Republican National Committee officials in a sign of new coordination between the insurgent candidate and the institutional party establishment.
Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort said the roll call push "was not about Trump."
"It would have been a meaningless gesture," Manafort said. "We knew the result, everybody knew the result and it would have affected the schedule for tonight so it wasn't something that was a wise choice."
YEREVAN, JULY 19, ARMENPRESS. Turkey's President refuses to rule out the death penalty for thousands of people arrested after a failed military coup Friday, despite warnings that reintroducing capital punishment could dash Turkey's chances of joining the European Union, CNN reported.
Speaking through his translator in an exclusive interview with CNN's Becky Anderson, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the failed military coup a "clear crime of treason."
The Turkish people have made it clear they want death for the "terrorists" who plotted the coup, Erdogan said in his first interview since the July 15 attempt.
"The people now have the idea, after so many terrorist incidents, that these terrorists should be killed, that's where they are, they don't see any other outcome to it," he said.
"Why should I keep them and feed them in prisons, for years to come? That's what the people say," he said. "They want a swift end to it, because people lost relatives, lost neighbors, lost children ... they're suffering, so the people are very sensitive and we have to act very sensibly and sensitively."
The comments come in the wake of the President's vow over the weekend that those responsible "will pay a heavy price for this act of treason."
A total of 8,777 officers from the Turkish Ministry of Interior have so far been removed from office, according to the state-run Anadolu news agency.
"Leaders will have to get together and discuss it and if they accept to discuss it then I as President will approve any decision that comes out of the parliament," he said.
Turkey abolished the death penalty for peacetime crimes in 2002, followed by a total ban in 2004 as part of a series of human rights reforms undertaken for its membership bid for the European Union.
If Turkey does reintroduce the death penalty, it won't be joining the European Union, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said earlier Monday.
YEREVAN, JULY 19, ARMENPRESS. French Diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church Archbishop Vahan Hovhannisyan delivered a mass in St. Philip Church of Nice in memory of the July 14 Nice terror victims, Nouvelles dArmenie reports.
The Armenian clerical representatives from different states, as well as representatives of the Armenian community of France took part in the mass.
10 year old boy miraculously saved during the Nice terror attack also participated in the mass. He is a member of the Church choir.
After the mass the participants led by Archbishop Hovhannisyan went to Promenade des Anglais where the terror attack occurred and prayed for the victims.
We came to pay our tribute to the victims and express our solidarity, to share the grief of the Nice residents. Remembering is a step of faith and resistance since by this we maintain the hope of life, Archbishop Vahan Hovhannisyan said.
84 people were killed in terror truck attack in Nice, France in the evening of July 14. Dozens of people were wounded. The driver opened fire on people in the crowd, according to local reports. Police fired back and the driver was eventually shot dead.
YEREVAN, JULY 19, ARMENPRESS. Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag has confirmed the arrest of two pilots that downed a Russian Su-24 jet in November 2015 in Syria, Haberturk TV channel said on Tuesday, TASS reports.
"The pilots that downed the Russian jet were arrested," the TV channel quoted Bozdag as saying.
The Turkish Air Forces F-16 fighter on November 24, 2015 shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24M bomber, involved in Russia's antiterrorism operation in Syria, that Ankara claimed violated the countrys airspace on the border with Syria.
Russias Defense Ministry said the Su-24M was above Syrian territory and "there was no violation of Turkeys airspace." Pilot Oleg Peshkov was killed by militants from the ground after ejecting, the second pilot was rescued and taken to the Russian base. The incident resulted in the severing of nearly all trade and economic ties between the two countries. Ankara refused to apologize for the downed jet and death of the pilot.
On June 27, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, told reporters Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sent Russian President Vladimir Putin a message in which he apologized for the downed Su-24 plane and "underscored the readiness to do everything possible for restoration of the traditionally friendly relations between Turkey and Russia."
On June 29, the presidents had a telephone conversation - first in past seven months, where they agreed to consider a meeting. After the conversation, Putin ordered the government to begin discussions with Ankara for resuming cooperation in trade and other spheres.
YEREVAN, JULY 19, ARMENPRESS. European Commissioner Guenther Oettinger has said he did not see the European Union granting Turks visa-free travel this year - as agreed in a migration deal - due to Ankara's crackdown after a failed military coup, reports Reuters.
The EU sealed a controversial deal with Turkey in March intended to halt illegal migration flows to Europe in return for financial and political rewards for Ankara.
Nearly 20,000 members of the police, civil service, judiciary and army have been detained or suspended since Friday night's failed coup, in which more than 200 people were killed when a faction of the armed forces tried to seize power.
"The draft law (on ending visa requirements for Turks) is being debated in the European Parliament right now," Oettinger, commissioner for digital economy and society, told several regional German newspapers in an interview published on Tuesday.
"But I predict that we won't have regulation on visa-free travel before the end of the year," said Oettinger, an ally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the key driving force behind the migration deal with Turkey.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan must address the EU's concerns regarding the principle of the rule of law, he said, adding: "And that's not what it's looking like at the moment."
Oettinger criticised Ankara's recent decision to lift lawmakers' immunity from prosecution, a constitutional change likely to remove a pro-Kurdish opposition party from parliament.
He also slammed the Turkish government for shutting down opposition newspapers and intimidating journalists critical of government policies.
"And it cannot be that judges the government does not like are being removed by the thousands. The independence of the judiciary is a tremendous asset," Oettinger said.
The broad post-coup crackdown and calls to reinstate the death penalty for plotters drew concern from Western allies who said Ankara must uphold the rule of law in the country.
"The death penalty is irreconcilable with our order of values and our treaties. No country can become a member state of the EU if it introduces the death penalty," Oettinger said.
Erdogan has said there could be no delay in using capital punishment after the failed coup attempt, adding the government would discuss it with opposition parties.
Food, bread and other basic necessities lacking for days. United Nations denounces block in aid distribution. The government's siege of the eastern part of the city could be a turning point in the Syrian conflict. In the northeast of the country a Syrian Orthodox Church on fire; behind the raid (maybe) Islamic State militiamen.
Aleppo (AsiaNews / Agencies) The humanitarian tragedy unfolding in Aleppo has reached a critical stage especially in the rebel-held eastern districts where over 200 thousand civilians are caught under siege by the Syrian Army. Local sources report that the people have been without food and basic necessities for days. Last weekend, government troops seized the Castle road, isolating neighborhoods east of the second largest city in Syria.
Experts say the advance of the Damascus army in Aleppo, backed by Russian air raids, has laid a serious blow to the ambitions of the rebels and it could be a turning point in a conflict that has so far caused 280 thousand deaths.
The United Nations is concerned about the situation. The siege prevents freedom of movement and blocks the distribution of aid, making it impossible for humanitarian agencies to respond to the needs for medicine, food, water and fuel.
Much of Aleppo, once Syrias economic and commercial hub, has been divided in two since 2012 - government and rebel and has been brought to its knees by months of intense fighting. Clashes have intensified with the failure of the indirect UN peace negotiations and the non-application of the partial truce promoted by the US and Russia earlier this year.
According to the United Nations more than 600 thousand people in Syria live in areas under siege, mostly surrounded by government army units. In these malnutrition is widespread. According to the UN Office for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), in Aleppo there is food to feed only 145 thousand people for a month, then the all supplies will be exhausted.
The eastern part of the metropolis has been without any form of aid since July 7.
Meanwhile, a group of armed men yesterday evening attacked a Syrian Orthodox church in Qamishli, a city in the northeast of the country. Local witnesses report that the assailants hit the St. Charnel church in Watwatiyah district, "around midnight, destroying much of the building". The militiamen detonated grenades inside the church, causing serious damage to the structure that has been "completely destroyed." The perpetrators have yet to be identified, although activists and local faithful point the finger at militants of the Islamic State (IS), as the most likely the authors of the attack.
The letters were left in temples where they work or delivered to staff. Another assistant received verbal threats: "Prepare to die." The police have been alerted, but the minorities live in fear.
Dhaka (AsiaNews) - In recent days, three Bangladeshi Hindu priests have received anonymous letters in which they are threatened with death. The letters were delivered to the temples where the religious serve and now even the local faithful fear for their lives, because of yet another threat against religious minorities in the country.
Bangladesh has witnessed a succession of targeted killings against members of the Christian, Hindu and Buddhist communities, as well as against those who dare to speak of a liberal and democratic society. The latest in a long series of murders took place on the morning of July 1 to the detriment of another Hindu priest, hacked to death on the same day in which the Islamic terrorists stormed a Dhaka cafe frequented by foreigners and killed 20 people.
The three threatened priests are Bijoy Chakraborty of Rangpur (in the north), Ruhidas Pal and Salil Mukherjee Sibu of Pirojpur (in the south). That have all alerted local authorities and lodged a complaint. The form of threat is similar in all cases: a letter, contained in a manila envelope, was left in the temple or delivered into the hands of an attendant.
The one delivered to the priest Ruhidas Pal, who works in the temple Palpara Durga-Kali says: "The death mission starts now. No need for you to know who we are. All Hindu priests, leaders and staff employed will be killed one by one.
In addition to the three priests, verbal threats have reached an assistant ashram Deshbondhu Bishwakalyan Geeta, in the administrative division of Baufal. The 70-year-old man was approached by a stranger who was wearing a rain jacket, who told him: "Your days are over. Prepare to die".
by Nirmala Carvalho
The archbishop of New York praised the great diversity of the Indian Catholic Church, speaking at the celebrations in honour of Aboon Geevarghese Mar Ivanios, founder of the rite and "Servant of God." Strong bonds of friendship have tied the Archdiocese of New York and the Syro-Malankara Church since the late forties.
Mumbai (AsiaNews) The Syro-Malankara Church in India has commemorated the 63rd anniversary of the death of Aboon Geevarghese Mar Ivanios, the founder of the rite. Card Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York, was present at the event as guest of honor.
The US prelate came on the personal invitation Card Baselios Cleemis, head of the Syro-Malankara Church and president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI).
Speaking to AsiaNews, Card Cleemis expressed joy for Card Dolans presence, noting the long-standing bonds between the Syro-Malankara Church and the Archdiocese of New York.
In 1948, he said, "Archbishop Mar Ivanios visited the diocese and since then we have always maintained a close bond of friendship".
Over the years, for the celebrations of the anniversary of the founders death, now Servant of God, the leaders of the Catholic rite invited various members of the universal Church.
"We had the privilege of hosting Card Luis Antonio Tagle (archbishop of Manila), and Card Peter Turkson (president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace), along with other prelates and Eparchs," the CBCI president said.
Card Dolan spoke at the memorial ceremony held on 15 July for Mar Ivanios in Thiruvananthapuram, capital of the state of Kerala. On that occasion, he praised the Indian Catholic Church for its "great diversity".
The day before he attended a candlelight vigil. The day after, 16 July, he celebrated Mass and then met the Latin Patriarch and the laity.
He left the capital of Kerala for Poland, where next week he will participate in the meetings of the World Youth Day in Krakow.
by Bernardo Cervellera
Some 2,000 young people from mainland China are expected in Krakow. However, many would-be participants have no money or sponsors. The authorities have banned official and underground priests from going because they are too friendly with the pope. Police have stopped young people at airports minutes before embarkation. Some fear that once home participants will be subjected to interrogation.
Rome (AsiaNews) Chinese sources told AsiaNews that Chinese authorities have blocked dozens of young people and priests from several dioceses in China to prevent them from travelling to Poland to meet Pope Francis and attend World Youth Day (WYD).
The 31st World Youth Day will be held in Krakow from 26 to 31 July and the Pope will be present from Thursday, 28 July, until the end. At least, 2,000 youth from mainland China are expected in Krakow.
A young man from southern China told AsiaNews that number is lower than those who went to Seoul in August 2014 for Asian Youth Day, which Pope Francis attended.
Many have had to give up plans to go to Krakow because the cost of airfare is too high. The economic crisis has also dried up traditional sources of aid, and many have not been able to find sponsors within or outside of China.
Some young people have had their visa application rejected. Many of them had also hoped to travel to Rome during their European trip as well as other Christian sites. Others were planning to go to France, with stops at Lourdes and Lisieux, to visit the shrine and the places of St Therese of the Child Jesus.
In Beijing, in northern China, and in the dioceses of the east coast, government authorities have banned official and unofficial priests from leaving the country because they are deemed too close to the pope.
Police questioned a priest in central China about his intentions. "You want to go to Europe to participate in the global religious gathering? If so, you cannot go, he was told. The priest lied, "No, I just want to go for tourism."
In some cases, the authorities have not delivered passports to young people. Others got their passport, visa and ticket, but were stopped at the airport just before boarding the plane that was to carry them to Europe.
"The authorities know everything, said a young man from Beijing. They know that those who go to Europe at this time may go to Krakow.
In his view, The problem will be when these young people and priests return to China. Undoubtedly, they will undergo lengthy interrogations because they dared to mingle with young people from other nations.
Indeed, Control over religion and the idea of developing a national and independent Church are at odds with global gatherings such as World Youth Day".
A priest from the official Church in Beijing said that if a colleague goes to Krakow unofficially, on his return he is likely to lose his pastoral office or government aid for his parish.
Perfecto Yasay says government rejected an offer of talks "outside, and [in] contempt" of the International Court verdict. A proposal, he adds, that "is not in line" with "our national interests". The Philippines priority is to negotiate the return of fishermen to Scarborough Shoal. Beijing wants to continue its expansionist policy in the area.
Manila (AsiaNews / Agencies) - The Philippine Foreign Minister Perfecto Yasay says that Manila has rejected an offer of talks proposed by China "outside, and [in] contempt" of the verdict of the Hague Court.
The Chinese government had asked the Philippines to "ignore" the Permanent Court of Arbitration (CPA) ruling on the Law of the Sea, that Beijing "has no sovereignty" rights over the disputed territories in the South China Sea.
The judgment delivered on 12 July, is not binding, and Beijing has already announced it has no intention of complying because it came from a "failed court". The verdict was, however, welcomed by the Philippines which first promoted arbitration in January 2013.
"[The Chinese Foreign Ministry] asked us to open bilateral negotiations - said Yasay - but outside, [or] in utter disregard of international arbitration." All this, he adds, "is not in line with the dictates of our Constitution and our national interest".
After hearing Manila, he concludes, Beijing pointed out that a "clash" between the two countries is inevitable.
China has refused to comment on the Philippine Ministers statements. However, on the sidelines of a meeting with the United States on the issue of maritime security, the Beijing government has remained defiant on the issue.
According to reports from Xinhua, the official news agency, a Chinese military official has already said that Beijing "will never stop construction" on the Nansha Islands.
Meanwhile, Manilas priority is to negotiate the right of Filipino fishermen to return to fish in the waters of the disputed Scarborough Shoal. The application of other provisions of the judgment will have to be considered over time.
The long-running dispute over the region's seas has been dragging on for years. It first began when Beijing claimed a large chunk of ocean including the Spratly and Paracel islands which are also claimed by Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, Brunei and Malaysia.
Despite this, China has begun construction of a series of artificial islands with military bases, lighthouses and has also torpedoed several Vietnamese and Filipino fishing boats, provoking a continuous rise in tension.
The suspect is a 26-year-old man, who had managed to escape after attacking a police station. He apparently embraced radical Islam whilst in prison on robbery and weapons possession. Meanwhile, the government is cracking down on terrorism. Some 300 young people went to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State.
Astana (AsiaNews/Agencies) Kazakh authorities announced the capture of the man who yesterday opened fire on a police station in Almaty, the countrys commercial capital, killing three policemen and two passers-by.
The head of the country's National Security Committee identified the suspect as Ruslan Kulikbayev, a 26-year-old man who adopted radical Islam whilst serving a sentence for robbery and weapons possession.
Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev described the incident as a "terrorist act."
Police said that the suspect had no accomplices and acted alone. Authorities had initially said they rounded up two suspects, but later described the other man as a motorist forced to drive the suspect away from the scene of the attack.
Kulikbayev became close to Salafists ultra-conservative Muslims when serving a prison sentence, security officials said.
After the capture, the authorities in the largest Central Asian country lowered the threat level from red to yellow.
However, in recent months, Kazakhstan has had to face the threat of Islamic terrorism, which is spreading among young people. In fact, Kazakh authorities say some 300 Kazakh nationals have joined the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria and Iraq.
Meanwhile, a court in Aqtobe, in north-western Kazakhstan, last week sentenced 12 men for attempting to join IS group in Syria.
The court decision is part of a crackdown sparked by last months attack in the same town, perhaps by Islamic militants, that left 18 people dead.
The weapons have a range of 500-600 km, capable of hitting all of South Korea up to Busan. Experts concerned about the quality of the experiments on new fuels and cooling system. China criticizes Washington and Seoul deal on the new anti-missile system.
Seoul (AsiaNews) - North Korea launched three ballistic missiles eastward this morning. Experts are increasingly concerned about the military capabilities of the communist country.
The missiles were launched from the western area Hwangju towards the east between 5:45 and 6:40 (local time), with a range of 500-600 km. According to the Souths military authorities, the range makes all of South Korea a target, including the city of Busan, the port in the far south of the peninsula.
In recent months, Pyongyang has carried out several missile tests, including an experiment with medium-range missiles and one from a submarine base (v. Photo). According to nuclear experts contacted by AsiaNews, these experiments - taken lightly by the international community - are designed to test new fuels and new cylinder head cooling systems to extend the range of the missiles, which in the future could affect not only South Korean and Japan, but also Russia and the United States.
Today's launch also appears as a "physical" response to the "threat" posed by the US and Seoul, who want to deploy an anti-missile system in the South to counter the North. The system is called "Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD)" and is able to hit short and medium-range missiles in the terminal phase of their flight.
Beijing has criticized Washington and Seouls decision as a provocation that could further destabilize regional security.
Although the Turkish president denies wanting to take advantage of the situation, there seems to be no end to the wave of arrests taking place, as well as thousands of military and police officers, generals and judges. In this regard, experts from the Council of Europe yesterday stated that "mass arrests and referrals of judges are not an acceptable means to restore democracy".
Ankara (AsiaNews / Agencies) - The reintroduction of the death penalty is the next target of the repression unleashed by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the aftermath of the attempted coup. On several occasions, "the sultan" has in fact said that the death penalty will return "if the people demand it," repeating this morning in an impromptu speech to a group of his supporters gathered outside from the presidential palace, "you cannot ignore what the people demand".
"Today - he continued - Today is there no capital punishment in America? In Russia? In China? In countries around the world? Only in European Union countries is there no capital punishment". In fact there have been many voices raised in Europe, calling on Erdogan not to reintroduce the death penalty that Turkey abolished in 2004, as part of the process for entry into the EU. They were joined by the US Secretary of State John Kerry, after a meeting with EU foreign ministers, who said: "we also urge the government of Turkey to uphold the highest standards of respect for the nation's democratic institutions and the rule of law ".
Yesterday the Turkish president also denied he was taking advantage of the attempted coup to eliminate all forms of opposition and push through the presidential reform which he has long desired. Erdogan has termed such criticism as "libel", adding " If Tayyip Erdogan was an oppressive figure, he wouldn't have won 52% of the vote at the presidential elections".
Beyond his statements, there seems to be no end to the wave of arrests that is taking place, as well as thousands of military and police officers, generals and three thousand judges. In this regard, experts from the Council of Europe yesterday stated that "mass arrests and referrals of judges are not an acceptable means to restore democracy". "Like any citizen, any judge is entitled to a fair procedure - disciplinary and / or criminal - during which his responsibility must be duly proven and his right to defense respected," read a statement released by Gianni Buquicchio, President of the Venice Commission, an advisory body of constitutional experts of the Council of Europe.
Erdogan ultimately appears determined to use this opportunity to eliminate all those who in one way or another, are considered to support Fethullah Gulen positions, the cleric who is a former ally of the president but today his main opponent. Erdogan has again asked the United States, where Gulen currently lives, to extradite him to Turkey, accusing him of being the mastermind of the failed coup. Turkey, Kerry replied, "must provide evidence, not charges".
by Mathias Hariyadi
The story of counterfeit drugs has taken a violent turn. Angry people stormed two hospitals and attacked medical personnel. The ministry blames health care facilities and professionals. Doctors and hospital associations come up with rapid solutions to minimise the crisis.
Jakarta (AsiaNews) Hit by the scandal of fake vaccines, Indonesias healthcare system ha launched a counterattack by pointing at those responsible and suggesting actions for the families involved.
Yesterday, three medical organisations, the Indonesian Medical Doctors Association (IDI), the Indonesian Hospital Association (ARSI) and the Union of Indonesian Hospitals (PERSI) released a joint statement in which they refute allegations of widespread corruption and inefficiency.
The use of fake vaccines began in 2003, but its full extent came to light only this year when the a child died after he was administered fake vaccine.
When the media picked up the story, the hitherto complacent police was forced to act. This placed the spotlight on the countrys health care system and its practitioners, tarnishing their reputation.
Angry families slammed doctors and medical staff for using fake vaccines to save money. The Indonesian Ministry of Health and Drug Agency exploited popular anger against doctors to hide their own responsibility.
Last week, Health Minister Nila F. Moeloek released the names of 14 hospitals and clinics involved in the scandal, fuelling public anger and resentment.
In some cases, this anger turned violent. Last Friday, some doctors, nurses and other medical staff were attacked at the Harapan Bunda Hospital in East Jakarta. The same thing happened the next day at St Elizabeth Hospital in Bekasi. The latter is also the only Catholic health facility involved in the vaccine affair.
IDI president Ilham Oetama Marsis slammed the Ministry of Health for exacerbating the crisis and fuelling public anger. This has tainted all of the countrys hospitals.
"We want to see strong action before this crisis does not deteriorate further," he said.
The heads of the three associations have come up with some immediate steps to address the emergency.
This includes showing solidarity to the families affected by the scandal as well as preventive action to stop further violence against doctors and health care workers.
The Health Ministry and Drug Agency must also assume their responsibility and provide actual solutions in the near future.
At the same time, there must be an acknowledgement that most doctors and nurses are victims of a few elements who perpetrated the wrongdoing.
Finally, crisis centres should be set up rapidly to minimise the problem and provide new vaccines to children who received the counterfeit drug.
Research Finds More Women Wanting A Same Sex Affair
Turns Out More Women Are Turning To A Same Sex Affair When They Cheat
This article was originally published by AskMen UK.
For most people, marriage is a sacred bond. It is the closing of a door on your relationships past, a barbaric yawp from the rooftops which tells the world YOU ARE MINE AND I AM YOURS AND WE ARE FOR EACH OTHER ONLY; an eternal dibs, all swathed in ribbon with flowers pinned to it.
And we love it. We root for you lovebirds. We give you toasters and John Lewis vouchers and cash for your honeymoon as a token of our investment in your marriage. That ring is a symbol of your together-foreverness, but sometimes that ring ceases to mean a thing and, for whatever reason, one of you finds yourself in the midst of an affair.
With cheating becoming so easily accessible in the age of the app, choosing your ideal fuck-buddy is as easy as swiping right. So does this effortless formula for cheating inspire us to experiment with our sexualities? It seems so.
Extra-marital dating website Gleeden.com recently surveyed its members, asking them whether they would consider having an affair with a member of the same sex, with 18% of heterosexual women said that they were interested in a homosexual encounter when they registered a rise from 15% in 2009, when the site first began. And whilst there was also a 3% rise in the amount of men from 2009 who would also consider switching teams in the case of an affair, the number sits much lower at just 6%.
This is actually way more common than you think. The phenomenon of women discovering their attraction to the same sex after marrying a dude has earned them the moniker late-blooming lesbians. We already have several high-profile celeb cases: Sex and the Citys Cynthia Nixon was in a relationship with a man for 15 years before meeting her wife in 2004, and more recently Orange Is the New Black writer Lauren Morelli left her husband of just a few months for Samira Wiley, who plays Poussey Washington in the series.
So why would hetero women choose a same-sex tryst over an affair with a guy? Well, according to Gleedens members, more than half (52%) did admit to having a real desire for people of the same sex. But 76% said that a sexual experience with a woman would spice up their everyday sex life, creating a welcome break from their usual routine, whilst for others the idea of violating the classic taboo of a lesbian fling is enough to get the juices flowing, as it were.
It has been well established that women have more 'erotic plasticity' than men, says Juliet Grayson, a sex and relationships therapist and author of Landscapes of the Heart: The Working World Of A Sex and Relationship Therapist. This means that once a mans sexual orientation is fixed, then they tend to stay with it, whereas women are more likely to be open to changing their sexual orientation throughout their lifetime.
"Maybe they also feel that sex with another woman would be less devastating to their husband or male partner than if they were unfaithful with a man. Grayson, however, is quick to point out that her own experience counselling couples goes against this, and that men whose female partner had sex with a woman felt completely devastated by this as well.
So what do guys make of all this? Is there an element of American Pie optimism when it comes to your GF doing the dirty with another woman? Not really: according to an IPSOS survey conducted in 2014 for Gleeden, a one night stand would be forgivable for 44% of men in the case of a homosexual relationship compared to 40% in the event of a heterosexual affair.
RELATED: Is Cheating In Our Nature? This Psychologist Says Absolutely
Lets consider this notion for a minute. Its hardly a surprise, is it? We exist in one of the most liberated periods in history. The idea of two people of the same sex enjoying each other sexually no longer has the nation clutching at its pearls. In the past, our orientation would be set in stone: you were either straight, or gay.
Now, those solid sexualities are no longer boiled down to those two strict dichotomies, but have liquefied, the fluidity of our sexual persuasion becoming universally accepted. We no longer have to put ourselves in a box you are not this or that, you can be this and that and maybe a bit of this over here as well.
For me, its not all women, just one woman, says Sarah*. Im not really attracted to any other women apart from my girlfriend. Sarah tells me that she had always dated men until she met her new partner, a woman, at work. She had never been attracted to women before, but maintains that when it comes to her lesbian relationships, it begins and ends with her girlfriend.
However, research suggests it is possible for women to switch sexualities over time what Grayson referred to as erotic plasticity. In 2010 Christan Moran, a researcher at Southern Connecticut State University presented her research entitled Sexual Fluidity and Late-Blooming Lesbians which showed that, after interviewing over 200 married lesbians, there was great potential for heterosexual women to experience a first same-sex experience well into adulthood.
Moran studied the lives of hetero women over 30 who were married to men but began having sexual attractions to women. Moran told the Telegraph that it was possible that a heterosexual woman might make a full transition to a singular lesbian identity.
Did Sarah agree with this statement? Well, shes not sure. Whilst it may be possible for some women to cross over to the other team without glancing back over her shoulder, Sarah is not so sure that would be her future should her relationship with her girlfriend come to an end.
Theres plenty of other research that indicates an increase in women becoming late-blooming lesbians. Regardless of any investigations, we know that men and women are more sexually liberated than ever before. I mean, by now we are used to a womans sexuality being flexible, so why cant their affairs be, too?
Netflix Announces New 'Making A Murderer' Episodes
Trending News: We're Getting New 'Making A Murderer' Episodes From Netflix
Why Is This Important?
Because the mystery is far from being solved.
Long Story Short
Per Variety, Netflix announced that their hit docuseries Making a Murderer will be continued, either in the form of add-on episodes or a whole new season. They did not say when it would air, however.
Long Story
The internet lost its collective goddamn mind last winter over Making a Murderer, Netflix's surprise-hit docuseries following the legal struggles of Stephen Avery. Avery, who had already spent 18 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, was quickly charged and convicted of murdering photographer Teresa Halbach not long after his release. The series was compelling because, at least the way it was presented, it seemed clear that the local police and prosecution were up to something fishy in their quest to railroad the much-maligned Avery.
The original series ended with his conviction, but the absurd attention paid by the viewing public meant that the story was far from over. Top Chicago defense attorney Kathleen Zellner also took an interest in the case. As a lawyer who specializes in overturning wrongful convictions, she decided to lend her services to Avery in hopes of finding him some justice. And according to Variety, Netflix just announced that her work will be the focus of new episodes of Making a Murderer.
You can spend literal days reading theories online about how Avery was framed and the ensuing coverup, and you wouldn't be alone Zellner also likes to take to social media to point out what she feels are holes in the case. Brobible put together a nice little video summarizing her accomplishments and keen legal mind.
We are extremely grateful for the tremendous response to, and support of, the series. The viewers interest and attention has ensured that the story is not over, and we are fully committed to continuing to document events as they unfold, said creators Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos.
Because of Ricciardis and Demos incredible vision, commitment and keen eye, audiences around the globe became completely captivated by the personal stories of Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey and the unique lens their experiences provide into the criminal justice system, said Lisa Nishimura, Netflix VP of Original Documentary Programming. Were thrilled to be continuing our longstanding relationship with the filmmakers, and look forward to giving our global viewers eagerly anticipated updates on this story.
Netflix hasn't said when the new episodes will air or how many of them there will be. It could be a whole batch released at once, or they could theoretically produce and release them as Avery's story continues to unfold. While the former is much more Netflix's style, they'll have a hard time staying ahead of the internet now that the case is in the national spotlight.
Either way, crank up the conspiracy mill again, and remember to never talk to the police.
Own The Conversation
Ask The Big Question
Can this lady get Steven Avery out of jail?
Disrupt Your Feed
I care less about Avery than I do about his nephew, Brendan Dassey. He was clearly mistreated.
Drop This Fact
Before meeting with Netflix, Demos and Ricciardi met with executives at PBS and HBO, but neither network was interested in the project.
There are two PokeStops and a Gym within range of my desk at work. Pokemon Go presents a real threat to my productivity. Apparently, it also presents a threat to justice in Australia.
Last Monday, the New South Wales Department of Justice issued a warning through its Facebook page:
GOING TO COURT IS NOT A GAME: POKEMON GO TRAINERS SHOULD LOOK ELSEWHERE FOR DIGITAL CRITTERS. Attention budding Pokemon trainers: you do not need to step inside a courthouse to find Pokemon. A reminder that the use of recording devices in NSW courts is prohibited under the Court Security Act 2005 - Section 9 - and carries a $22,000 fine or imprisonment for 12 months (or both). Stay safe and catch em all!
So why cant you use a recording device in court?
The post identifies NSW legislation prohibiting the use of recording devices to record sound or images in courts. However, unless you are taking a screenshot of a wild Pokemon in court premises, it is unlikely that you would contravene the relevant provision. Other Australian states do not have equivalent legislation, but their courts can still prohibit recording inside the...
By Simon Gandevia, Deputy Director, Neuroscience Research Australia
Shutterstock/Looker Studio
Spectacular failures to replicate key scientific findings have been documented of late, particularly in biology, psychology and medicine.
A report on the issue, published in Nature this May, found that about 90% of some 1,576 researchers surveyed now believe there is a reproducibility crisis in science.
While this rightly tarnishes the public belief in science, it also has serious consequences for governments and philanthropic agencies that fund research, as well as the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors. It means they could be wasting billions of dollars on research each year.
One contributing factor is easily identified. It is the high rate of so-called false discoveries in the literature. They are false-positive findings and lead to the erroneous perception that a definitive scientific discovery has been made.
This high rate occurs because the studies that are published often have low statistical power to identify a genuine discovery when it is there, and the effects being sought are often small.
Further, dubious scientific practices boost the chance of finding a statistically significant result, usually at a probability of less than one in 20. In fact, our probability threshold for acceptance of a discovery should be more stringent, just as it is for discoveries of new particles in physics.
The English mathematician and the father of computing Charles Babbage noted the problem in his 1830 book Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, and on Some of Its Causes. He formally split these practices into hoaxing, forging, trimming and cooking.
Trimming and cooking the data today
In the current jargon, trimming and cooking include failing to report all the data, all the experimental conditions, all the statistics and reworking the probabilities until they appear significant.
The frequency of many of these indefensible practices is above 50%, as reported by scientists themselves when they are given some incentive for telling the truth.
The English philosopher Francis Bacon wrote almost 400 years ago that we are influenced more by affirmation than negatives and added:
Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.
Deep-seated cognitive biases, consciously and unconsciously, drive scientific corner-cutting in the name of discovery.
This includes fiddling the primary hypothesis being tested after knowing the actual results or fiddling the statistical tests, the data or both until a statistically significant result is found. Such practices are common.
Even large randomised controlled clinical trials published in the leading medical journals are affected (see compare-trials.org) despite research plans being specified and registered before the trial starts.
Researchers rarely stick exactly to the plans (about 15% do). Instead, they commonly remove registered planned outcomes (which are presumably negative) and add unregistered ones (which are presumably positive).
Publish or perish
We do not need to look far to expose the fundamental cause for the problematic practices pervading many of the sciences. The publish or perish mantra says it all.
Academic progression is hindered by failure to publish in the journals controlled by peers, while it is enhanced by frequent publication of, nearly always positive, research findings. Does this sort of competitive selection sound familiar?
It is a form of cultural natural selection natural, in that it is embedded in the modern culture of science, and selective in that only survivors progress. The parallels between biological natural selection and selection related to culture have long been accepted. Charles Darwin even described its role in development of language in his The Descent of Man (1871).
Starkly put, the rate of publication varies between scientists. Scientists who publish at a higher rate are preferentially selected for positions and promotions. Such scientists have children who establish new laboratories and continue the publication practices of the parent.
Good science suffers
In another study published in May, researchers modelled the intuitive but complex interactions between the pressure and effort to publish new findings and the need to replicate them to nail down true discoveries. It is a well-argued simulation of the operation and culture of modern science.
They also conclude that there is natural selection for bad scientific practice because of incentives that simply reward publication quantity:
Scrupulous research on difficult problems may require years of intense work before yielding coherent, publishable results. If shallower work generating more publications is favored, then researchers interested in pursuing complex questions may find themselves without jobs, perhaps to the detriment of the scientific community more broadly.
The authors also reiterate the low power of many studies to find a phenomenon if it was truly there. Despite entreaties to increase statistical power, for example by collection of more observations, it has remained consistently low for the last 50 years.
In some fields, it averages only 20% to 30%. Natural academic selection has favoured publication of a result, rather than generation of new knowledge.
The impact of Darwinian selection among scientists is amplified when government support for science is low, growth in the scientific literature continues unabated, and universities produce an increasing number of PhD graduates in science.
We hold an idealised view that science is rarely fallible, particularly biology and medicine. Yet many fields are filled with publications of low-powered studies with perhaps the majority being wrong.
This problem requires action from scientists, their teachers, their institutions and governments. We will not turn natural selection around but we need to put in place selection pressures for getting the right answer rather than simply published.
Simon Gandevia receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council.
Originally published in The Conversation.
The Migration Institute of Australia has reacted to a call for Muslim immigration to be banned and said that religion must not be a definition of who can and cannot live and work in the country.It was responding to comments from television personality Sonia Kruger that Australia should stop accepting Muslim immigrants, which the MIA said showed a complete lack of understanding of Australia's immigration programme. The MIA pointed out in a statement that Muslims make a contribution to Australian society on a daily basis, that there are plenty of Australian-born Muslims in the country and that security arrangements and checks are already in place to combat perceived Muslim terrorism threats.'These security arrangements make sure whoever is granted a visa into Australia meets our security standards, no matter where they come from in the world, no matter what their religious beliefs are. The Migration Institute of Australia's position on this issue is that a person's religious beliefs should never be a determining factor for their Australian visa application,' the statement said.Kruger defended her point of view, saying that she had been very upset by images from the Nice massacre in France in which 84 people were killed by a suspected Muslim terrorist, including 10 children. She added that the image of a child lying dead under a sheet with her doll next to her has been particularly upsetting.She said she had 'a lot of friends who are Muslim who are peace loving, who are beautiful people, but there are fanatics. Personally I would like to see it (the immigration of Muslims) stopped now for Australia because I would like to feel safe as all of our citizens do when they go out to celebrate Australia Day and I'd like to see freedom of speech'.However, the MIA statement said that such comments made by a prominent media personality are 'dangerous and only continue to stigmatise a section of our community while encouraging racist and xenophobic sentiments towards migrants'.'Migrants will continue to contribute to Australia's social and economic development. This contribution has been made by a variety of races and religions, including Muslims. The very real fact is that Australia has an ageing population and does not produce enough of its own citizens to fill skills shortages and drive a taxation base to pay for health, education and all other elements needed to make Australia a strong and prosperous nation,' it explained.'Because of this, Australia will always need migrants, including those who happen to be Muslim. Sentiments like those expressed by Ms Kruger only serve to make Australia less appealing to potential migrants which Australia needs. The Migration Institute of Australia does believe that more community education and political leadership needs to happen to help explain to all Australians,' it added.The Migration Institute of Australia has also called for increased government funding of settlement and social cohesion programme which it says have proven to reduce the risk of marginalisation of migrants in their new communities.The Migration Institute of Australia would welcome any opportunity to meet with Ms Kruger to discuss the important role migration has and will continue to play in Australia and to discuss her wider concerns about Australia's immigration programme.
My partner (who is Japanese) submitted an application for an onshore partner visa (820) only last month and was granted a bridging visa A (BVA).
An opportunity has now come up for me to work in Japan on a 2-3 year secondment. We would like to take this opportunity, but are worried about how to proceed with the visa application, as we want to return to Australia after the work assignment is finished.
Is there a way to change the application from an onshore application to an offshore application? Or is there a way that we can move to Japan whilst still maintaining the visa application?
It is all a bit confusing, so help would be much appreciated.
Hi,I'm PR and helping my spouse applying for 309 visa.However, I got several basic questions.Any help would be much appreciated.1, about the relationship details sectionI'm no English native speaker, so I'm confused about how should I make the statement. Should I make it in first person or third person? I mean, should I say "XXX(the name of the applicant) and I had been XXX" or "the applicant and the sponsor had been XXX"?Moreover, is it OK that if I had the content exactly the same in both applicant's form and sponsor's form? I mean, if I made the statement in third person, can I just copy what I had written in the applicant's form and paste it into the sponsor's form?2, about evidenceI'm preparing to have evidence like chat logs in IM app. But, as I have mentioned above. we are no native English speakers, should I translate and certify such screenshots before I submit it?3, about our planSomeone told me that, when the application is submitted, there's no way to revise it. So can I write about our plan in advance?Thanks a lot!
Abablau is a common color for Audi; you see it all the time on the SQ5. But this is a nicer matt finish that gives it a classier, more unique look.We don't know how much the customer paid to have this finish added to his R8 Spider, but we do know the car is currently on display at Audi Forum Neckarsulm in the heart of Germany.The R8 in question also features a classy black canvas top and a Titanschwarz exterior pack. As we've come to expect from Audi's one and only supercar, carbon fiber is sprinkled liberally throughout the design.There's no question that while Audi BMW made the sportscar of the future, the i8 , this is more of a conventional tool. However, it might be one of the best ones for the money.The matt blue paint works well with the 10-Y-spoked black wheels that sit in front of carbon ceramic brake disks with custom calipers.The cabin is also the work of the Audi Exclusive division, as it features "the finest Nappa leather" seats with Rautensteppung design pattern in Alabaster White. We wonder if it gets hot in the summer...Considering how cool the seats look, they could have done a lot more with the steering wheel. The blue dash trim looks out of place, like it's been borrowed from the Q2 crossover.There are no performance updates, not that any are needed right now. As standard, this R8 can be had with the same 610 PS 5.2-liter engine as the Huracan. It's paired to a with the seven-speed S Tronic dual-clutch transmission known and can do the 0 to 100 km/h (0-62 mph) sprint in just 3.6 seconds, pushing onwards to a top speed of 318 km/h (197.6 mph).
The investigation focuses on allegations previously made by dealers enrolled in FCA s network in the USA , which complained that the corporation is falsely reporting sales figures.According to sources quoted by Bloomberg in the Securities and Exchange Commission, the inquiry of the Justice Department is at an early stage, and details are scarce because the matter is confidential. Meanwhile, prosecutors are reportedly preparing a criminal investigation for a potential securities fraud, but this information has not been confirmed yet.As we previously reported, two FCA dealers in the Chicago area filed civil lawsuits against the Italian-American group, and they accused the automaker of allegedly paying some dealers to report selling more cars than their actual results. At the time, FCA lost approximately $1 Billion in market value after the accusations went public, even if the company denied the claims According to Bloomberg , agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation visited the addresses of the nine people who run Fiat Chrysler business hubs across the USA. The lawyers that represent the dealers that sued Fiat Chrysler Automobiles say that the nine people whose homes were visited by the FBI on July 11 have had conversations about reporting inflated sales inventory.Like General Motors, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles went through a bankruptcy in 2009, and then the company was bailed out. Fiat obtained full control of Chrysler in 2014 with the aid of the U.S. Government, and its sales figures are carefully monitored to ensure the company will not be at risk again.According to the lawsuit filed this January, one dealer claims a district manager (one of the nine people questioned by the FBI) proposed a deal falsely to report the sale of 40 vehicles in exchange for $20,000. The same complaint described the sum as a cooperative advertising support, which meant that other dealerships might have received similar offers. FCA is not the only automaker blamed of stating false sales figures by inflating the results of their dealers. BMW has been accused of paying some of its dealers in its network in the USA to put new cars on their replacement service vehicle fleet, so that the company would reach its sales targets. However, the alleged alterations made by BMW are not as severe and problematic as Fiat Chrysler Automobiles.
Needless to say, it all comes following the recent incidents involving Tesla's Autopilot where the logs kept by the vehicles proved to be extremely valuable. For instance, Tesla was able to prove that, despite the driver's statements saying the opposite, the Autopilot feature was not operating at the moment the Model X hit the concrete median and flipped over. Had the company not have access to this information, it would have been nearly impossible to say for sure whether that was the case or not.The German Federal Ministry of Transport is now preparing a draft that would make the inclusion of a black box-style data recorder mandatory in all new vehicles offering semi-autonomous capabilities. According to the BBC , the device would be responsible with recording the decisions made by the car's AI, as well as logging whether the driver or the autonomous systems were in control at a certain time and highlighting the instances when the driver was required to intervene.The law proposal also touches on the regimentation regarding the driver's legal obligations while using a semi-autonomous vehicle. According to the current draft, they would be absolved from actively steering or monitoring traffic, but their presence behind the wheel would still be required, as they might have to take charge under certain circumstances. This part is weird, to say the least since the driver would be asked to take a decision based on very little information, considering he was allowed to forget about the signs and the steering over a long period.However, some companies have complained about similar proposals in the US claiming they were hindering the advancement of autonomous cars by forcing the presence of a steering wheel. Google, for instance, plans to release its vehicle only when it reaches the level where it can safely operate in fully-autonomous mode, at which point the steering wheel - or a forward-facing seat, for that matter - would become redundant.But the German proposal is yet to be voted, so it can still suffer some changes. Besides, it is more suited for the level of technology available today, so there's no reason why it couldn't be modified once self-driving cars become more advanced.Whatever its final form, the law is supposed to be voted this summer, so we'll know soon enough how the German authorities see fit to tackle this problem. What's clear is that Tesla 's Autopilot has opened a box that should have had its lid lifted earlier.
Brian Frosh, Maryland Attorney General, has said that his state and others intend to sue Volkswagen for the damage caused by the defeat devices used in its diesel-engined vehicles.According to Frosh, the state of Maryland is acting in coordination with New York and Massachusetts, along with others, and each of the attorneys generals is communicating with their equivalents to prepare the case.As Bloomberg notes, the Attorney General of Maryland will have a press conference in Baltimore to announced the plans regarding a lawsuit against Volkswagen AG.Along with other U.S. states, Marylands Attorney General wants to hold the German automaker accountable for its actions over the past years regarding defrauding regulators, as well as pollution caused without any penalty.Volkswagen settled with US regulators last month to pay approximately $15.3 billion, but the deal only involved payments to clients of the dieselgate-affected vehicles . Now, the German corporation is facing lawsuits from both government authorities and consumer groups alike.The lawsuits we mentioned are not only happening in the USA, as South Korea plans an independent action on the matter. Meanwhile, European laws do not work in a way that allows this kind of lawsuits for consumer groups, but individual countries could find solutions to sanction Volkswagen for its behavior.In the case of Maryland, Volkswagen will be taken to court for violating the states environmental laws. Regarding other U.S. states, like California , environmental protection laws enforced across the state allow authorities to sanction automakers if they discover any irregularities in emission testing.In the case of Volkswagen, a company that has recognized a cheating scheme applied worldwide, including in the USA, prosecutors will not have to focus on demonstrating the blame, but rather find a way to calculate the penalty that they will apply to the automaker.
His preferred subject in the last couple of weeks has been defending the Autopilot system, which has come under fire after it was involved in a fatal crash earlier in May. Ever since the information became public (almost two months later), Tesla semi-autonomous system has come under scrutiny from officials and the media alike.While the NHTSA is still investigating the crash together with another one that happened more recently (but with no casualties), the media has been debating whether there was anything Tesla could do to prevent situations like these, or if there's any action it should take as soon as possible.Everybody agrees that, ultimately, whatever happens while using the Autopilot is the driver's fault , but some people argue that Tesla might be feeding them a wrong impression of the capabilities of its semi-autonomous feature, starting with the name. One of the most vocal publications that went as far as to suggest Tesla should be temporarily disabling the Autopilot until improvements can be made was Consumer Reports Now you can't accuse Consumer Reports of hating Tesla after the Model S was the first vehicle to go off-chart in their rating system, scoring 103 points initially. But it looks like it takes the lives of people very seriously, and does not approve the false sense of security that the Autopilot gives. And you just have to be baffled about how it can manage very complicated situations, but it fails to perform the most simple tasks such as braking when there's a car stopped in the lane.After the publication made its opinions known, Tesla said it would not disable the function on any of its vehicles. Its decision seems to be confirmed by a recent poll among Tesla owners that Elon Musk quoted in one of his tweets. It would appear that none of the people who bought a Tesla would like to have the Autopilot switched off. "Tesla customers are v[ery] smart & don't want media speaking on their behalf ab[ou]t Autopilot. Recent poll: 0.0% want it disabled -- not 0.1%, 0.0%."Of course, we would probably vote the same way if we were in that situation. On the other hand, we're pretty sure that Joshua Brown, the man who died in that unfortunate incident, would have chosen the same option had he still been alive. We all tend to think we're not like the others and nothing is going to happen to us. So is this really relevant? No. Or maybe it is, but only until the next crash where the Autopilot is involved.
It happened in Palm Coast, Florida , and the incident involved an unidentified man who fired at a vehicle that was stopped in front of his house. Even though the homeowner did not live in a secluded area, he decided to take his small-caliber semi-automatic gun and shoot at the vehicle sitting in front of the house with its brake lights on.The two occupants of the vehicle, a 19-year-old and a 16-year old , were players of Pokemon Go, and stopped there to catch Pokemons at 1:30 a.m. According to News4jax , they caught a Tauros and a Maowak while they were on Primrose Lane, but they could have snagged a few bullets too if they had been less lucky.While the homeowner was eventually found, but his identity was not revealed, the two parties have conflicting stories regarding the sequence of events that led to a car having a flat tire and bullet holes in its bumper and fender.The two teenagers claim they heard gunshots and sped away, while driving directly home. They thought someone tried to scare them, and did not mention the incident to their parents until the shots were spotted on the vehicle's body, along with the flat tire.Meanwhile, the homeowner says he stepped in front of the car and requested its occupants to stay still, but the teens sped away, and he fired at them after getting out of the way. As you can observe, the two reports are conflicting, as one side claims the driver and passenger spotted the armed man, while the other says differently.Both reports do mention the vehicle speeding away after gunshots were fired, but the homeowner claims he believed the car was about to strike him, and that was his reason to shoot at it.Local authorities insist that home proprietors and Pokemon Go players behave in a more cautious manner, and asks all citizens to call 911 if they spot something peculiar that they feel endangers them.Gun owners are requested not to fire their weapons unless their lives are directly put at risk, in an attempt to avoid situations like these, where the teenagers were stationed legally on a public road, but risked getting shot because of a zealous and paranoid homeowner.We must note it is wise to never trespass someone's property, as well as to exercise caution while playing games like Pokemon Go.
EV
Over in Nevada, Tesla is working with Panasonic on its grandiose project, with the Japanese firm contributing with both technical know-how, but also funds. Panasonic will be responsible for building the battery cells themselves, while Tesla will assemble them into larger packs. A few days ago, Panasonic said it expects its battery sales to double thanks to the release of Tesla's Model 3.Still fighting with the aftermath of Dieselgate - the only recent scandal in the automotive world that came close to the Takata airbag fiasco - Volkswagen is now shifting its efforts towards electric vehicles. With Tesla having taken care of the most difficult part - making EVs desirable - the biggest German manufacturer is now eyeing this segment as the best solution to a change in the way the company is perceived by the public.Volkswagen plans to sell at least one million electric cars over the ten years, with figures potentially going as high as three million. To do that, not only does it need to come up with very appealing and competitive electric models, but it also needs to find a way of ensuring a steady supply of battery cells.It looks like VW will follow Tesla's example and build its own factory costing close to two billion euros, and to do that, it's going to need help from somebody who has a history of making battery cells that's longer than the zero years Volkswagen can brag with. A Bloomberg report says that VW has narrowed it down to two possible names, out of which one stands out for obvious reasons: it's Panasonic or LG Chem.With Panasonic busy worrying about meeting Tesla's future demands, Volkswagen seems to be left with just one option, even though LG Chem too is working with GM on its Bolt. But we're sure any company would be happy to leave everything and work with what was once the world's biggest carmaker, even if only for a month or two.
The Fleet Hall of Fame was instituted in 2008. Three new members will be added in 2016. Photo by Vince Taroc.
Automotive Fleet magazine and the Automotive Fleet & Leasing Association (AFLA) are proud to announce the 2016 nominees for the Fleet Hall of Fame.
The Hall of Fame recognizes fleet industry leaders and pioneers who have contributed significantly to the commercial fleet management profession. Inductees must have fleet careers spanning 10 years or more, and are selected by their peers via an online ballot.
Three honorees are inducted into the Hall of Fame annually. The Hall of Fame began with 10 inductees when it was founded in 2008, a number that decreased each year by one. The honorees will be inducted in the Fleet Hall of Fame at AFLAs annual conference.
There are currently 72 members of the Fleet Hall of Fame to date. This years list of industry veteran nominees are as follows:
Michael Braude
EMKAY, Inc.
Dates in Fleet: 1946-1973 (Deceased)
Braude
Braude was the founder and first president of Emkay, Inc. After moving from Russia to the U.S. in 1920 and graduating from the University of Denver in 1930, Braude eventually joined his brother-in-law Sam Katzin, and Katzins business partner Morton Weiss, who operated Mid-City Chevrolet and founded Midway Chevrolet in 1939. In 1946, Braude was informed that he was being made president of a new venture startup in his office at Midway Chevrolet Dealership, named Emkay Car Leasing Co., Inc. In just two years, Braude grew the car leasing business, requiring a move out of Midway down the street to Emkays own building. Braude grew the business from Chevrolet cars to leasing multiple automobile brands. He helped grow the company through the 1950s with steady growth and saw Emkay buying out the accounts from Chicago-based Wilson Leasing. He oversaw the leasing of Cessna private airplanes in the 1960s and set up billing on an IBM punch card system, as well as venturing into leasing vehicles in Europe and South America. By 1970, Braude helped grow Emkays customer list to some of the major companies of that time. In 1973, Braude and Katzin (Weiss passed away in 1963) sold Emkay to Indiana Capital Corp., in Fort Wayne, Ind.
Tom Callahan
Ford, GE Commercial Finance, Donlen
Dates in Fleet: 1987-Present
Callahan
Callahan is currently president of Donlen, setting the strategic direction and driving the execution of key growth initiatives. He began his career at Ford Motor Company where he held various sales and management positions. Additionally, Callahan held global leadership positions in general management, sales management, product development, quality, and operations in North America, the U.K., Japan, and Australasia with GE Commercial Finance Fleet Services and GE Consumer Finance. Callahan was recently named AALA VP of energy & environmental affairs. Under Callahans guidance, Donlen has received numerous awards for its customer service, employee satisfaction & engagement, product development and technology platforms. Callahan is a member of the Hertz Executive Committee and served as president of AFLA from 2012 to 2013.
Mark Conroy
LMV Leasing, LeasePlan USA, Union Leasing
Dates in Fleet: 1978-Present
Conroy
Conroy has been in the fleet management industry funding and managing fleets of vehicles to companies since 1978. His experience has included duties in direct B2B sales, sales management, marketing, and international marketing/coordination. He has managed national sales forces for both large- and medium-sized fleet management lessors during his 34-year career. As VP of sales & marketing for Union Leasing, he manages a sales force that assists companies seeking solutions to reduce costs and keep their fleets innovative. He was also president of AFLA from 2007 to 2008.
Jim Christiano
Buick, PARS
Dates in Fleet: 1969-Present
Christiano
Christiano joined Buick in 1971, serving as director of fleet sales, among other positions. He led Buicks Olympics project, placing 10,000 Buicks on the ground in Los Angeles. After leaving Buick, he opened a dealership for a time, managed sales for a drive-away business, and founded PARS in 1998. He led PARS until 2006 (when his daughter, Lori, took over), but remains active in the business.
Katherine Croze
The CEI Group, Inc.
Dates in Fleet: 1972-present
Croze
Croze began her career in fleet management in 1972 as a division fleet administrator with Hughes Aircraft Company. During her time with the company, she created the first driver safety training program and van pool program. She joined Computer Sciences Corporation in 1981 as a fleet and travel manager, where she implemented a vanpool and ride share program, took the fleet from insured to self-insured and introduced open-end leasing. Croze serves as The CEI Groups western region sales manager. In 1997 she received the NAFA Affiliate Outstanding Award and in 2013, she received the National Conference of State Fleet Administrators distinguished member award, which recognizes the member who exemplifies exceptional leadership skills in fleet management. She has also been a Club NAFA Honoree. In 2012, she was named as one of the most influential women in fleet by Automotive Fleet.
Dave Dahm
LeasePlan USA
Dates in Fleet:1981-Present
Dahm
Dahm is executive vice president and CFO for LeasePlan USA. A 35-year industry veteran, he began at LeasePlan as controller in 1988, worked his way up to CFO, and became president and CEO in 2000. During that time, Dahm oversaw three successful acquisitions for LeasePlan, including Consolidated Service Corporation (CSC), which more than tripled LeasePlans market share at the time. Dahm has also served on the AALA Board of Directors and was treasurer of the Association from 2000 to 2005. Dahms returned to his former position as CFO in late 2008. Dahm was named a CFO of the Year Award finalist in 2011 by the Atlanta Business Chronicle for his contributions in improving processes and profitability for LeasePlan.
Warren Feirer
Standard Brands/Nabisco (Retired)
Feirer
Feirer served as NAFA president from 1979 to 1981, is a past president of the NAFA Foundation, and is a recipient of NAFAs Distinguished Service Award. During his career, he accepted an award on behalf of NAFA from President Jimmy Carter for NAFAs efforts in planning fuel conservation during the height of the 1970s fuel crisis.
Dave Hansen
GM Fleet & Commercial Operations
Dates in Fleet: 1998-2008 (Retired)
Hansen
Hansen joined General Motors in 1965 after graduating from high school, working in a GM assembly plant while attending college. After graduating from college with an engineering degree, he worked in several roles, including chief engineer for the Chevrolet Division. Hansen often comments that the highlight of his career was serving as general manager of GM Fleet & Commercial Operations in the late 1990s and into the next century. After leaving GM, Hansen became COO for Tecstar, a second-stage manufacturer for GM, then assisted SCT with its fleet fuel economy software device. He is now retired, but provides pro-bono support of the North Carolina Center for Automotive Research.
Paul Lauria
Mercury Associates, Inc.
Dates in Fleet: 1984-Present
Lauria
Lauria is co-founder and president of Mercury Associates, Inc., a role he has held since 2002. Mercury is a provider of management consulting services for public and private sector clients to evaluate and identify ways to improve their fleet management and operating practices. Mercury provides service to numerous organizations globally, including companies such as Aramark, Cox Enterprises, and State Farm. Lauria began his career in fleet management with Ernst & Youngs transportation consulting group in 1984, where he worked until 1992. He then moved on to become vice president of Maximus, Inc., a position he held for 10 years.
Ron Mawaka Sr.
Fleet Response
Dates in Fleet: 1986-Present
Mawaka Sr.
Mawaka Sr. created Rental Concepts, Inc. in February 1986. A unique rental consortium and first of its kind, it provided temporary cars, trucks, and specialty vehicles to fleets nationwide. His vision was a centralized service for fleet managers to eliminate multiple vendors and invoices. Today, Mawakas vision has become Fleet Response a fully customized accident management, maintenance management, salvage, subrogation, and safety service provider (in addition to continuing to offer the rental services). Mawakas sons, Scott and Ron Jr., carry on his work at Fleet Response. He has been a member of NAFA since 1984. Mawaka gives credit for his success to his friend and mentor, Pat Starr, retired CEO of Consolidated Service Corporation (CSC).
Jim McCallum
GM Fleet & Commercial Operations
Dates in Fleet: 1979-2008 (Retired)
McCallum
McCallum was employed at General Motors for 37 years before retiring in November 2008. He began working in the Chevrolet Fleet Department in 1979 under the legendary George Frink. He served in a number of areas of GM Fleet, including fleet distribution, field operations, GM global fleet, and fleet dealer operations. He was a NAFA Affiliate and member of the Affiliates Committee and served on the NAFA Foundation Board of Directors. At GM, he helped to establish the first fleet secondary codes, convened the initial Chevrolet Fleet Sounding Board, expanded Chevrolets in-shop warranty presence, and guided its initial efforts in global fleet.
Kevin McGrath
Fleet Street Remarketing
Dates in Fleet: 1980-Present
McGrath
McGrath entered the auto business in 1980, working for a multi-line dealership in St. Petersburg, Fla. After selling used cars, working in the finance department, and buying autos and trucks at wholesale for the dealership, McGrath struck out on his own in 1985 and formed a wholesale auto business, called RAM Auto Leasing, with friend Bob McDevitt. Along with one employee who handled administrative tasks, the three bought and sold 20-40 used corporate cars per month. RAM soon transitioned to Eastern Fleet Remarketing after McDevitt moved on to another venture, and ultimately the company was rebranded as Fleet Street Remarketing to better capture the companys new remarketing focus and global reach. As owner of Fleet Street Remarketing, McGrath helps businesses achieve maximum returns on the resale of each vehicle. McGrath has also been a member of the Automotive Fleet & Leasing Association (AFLA) for more than 20 years, and has served on the board of directors for the Association.
Henry Paetzel
General Mills
Dates in Fleet: 1970-2007 (Retired)
Paetzel
In charge of the General Mills fleet for 30 years, Paetzel was the winner of the 2004 AF Professional Fleet Manager of the Year Award. In 1967, he accepted a position with General Mills. In 1968, Paetzel began his career in the corporations management-training program, which ultimately placed him in the transportation department to work on an automobile tracking system. In 1970, the fleet supervisor left the company and Paetzel was offered the position. The fleet size was about 1,100 units and all vehicles were leased. In 1976, he was promoted to manager, automotive fleet services and was responsible for the purchase, administration, and sale of the growing fleet (about 1,400 vehicles). In 1985, supervision of the employee automotive service center was added to Paetzels responsibilities, and, in 1988, he assumed responsibility for the car rental program for the business traveler.
Phil Procida
ARI
Dates in Fleet: 1960-2005 (Retired)
Procida
Procida joined ARI in 1960 as a clerk in operations and administration,and then transferred to New York City in 1962 as part of its sales effort. Later, Procida transferred around the U.S., first moving back to ARIs home office to handle major corporate accounts, then to Chicago to assist with the developing Midwest market in 1973, and later in charge of the office as a Regional Manager until 1982. He moved back to the home office in 1985 as a Zone Vice President for the western part of the U.S. In 1989, Procida took on responsibility for global operations, starting with Canada. In 1992, he scouted various automotive companies in Mexico to handle vehicle deliveries for ARI clients. There, he met the Zapata family, and fostered a relationship that led to the creation of ARIZA, the joint venture between ARI and Zapata, in 1993. For the remainder of his career, Procida traveled the globe to find fleet companies outside the U.S., helping ARI establish and introduce Global Fleet Services, the first alliance of leading global fleet companies. Procida retired from ARI in 2005 as VP, International Operations and GFS President and Chairman of the board.
Josie Sharp, CAFM
Bell & Howell Phillipsburg Co., Rhone-Poulenc Rorer Pharmaceutical Co., Aventis Pharmaceuticals, Commonwealth of PA, Shire Pharmaceuticals
Dates in Fleet: 1987-2012 (Retired)
Sharp
Sharp began as fleet coordinator at Bell & Howell, managing around 500 vehicles in the U.S. She was then offered a position with Rhone-Poulenc Rorer (RPR) managing a 1,500-vehicle fleet, growing to around 3,500 vehicles, and adding fleet safety to her role. After a merger, RPR became Aventis, and Sharp became manager of fleet and safety with about 5,000-plus vehicles. In 2003, she was offered the position of bureau director for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. At Shire Pharmaceuticals, she handled fleet, fleet safety, and field-related programs. She held positions on fleet advisory boards including Ford, GM, and OnStar, and was a member of groups, including AFLA, the NAFA Fleet Management Association, National Safety Council, and the National Conference of State Fleet Administrators.
Michael Sims
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
Dates in Fleet: 1975-Present
Sims
Sims has been the Global Fleet Planning and Acquisitions Manager for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints since 1983. A 41-year industry veteran, Sims is responsible for the vendor relations and acquisition of the Churchs global fleet, which contains a number of vehicles in 142 countries. His overall responsibilities include planning, sourcing vehicles, and manufacture relationships. He has led initiatives to increase the Churchs efficiencies and maximize operational cost effectiveness globally. Sims was named fleet manager of the year by Automotive Fleet in 2010, and he has been a member of NAFA, Rocky Mountain Fleet Management Association, and the Automotive Fleet & Leasing Association. He has also chaired GMs U.S. and Global Fleet Sounding Boards.
Ron Shoemaker
Flexco Fleet Services (FFS), Innovative Funding Services (IFS), Hourglass Management Corp.
Dates in Fleet: 1989-Present
Shoemaker
Shoemaker incorporated Flexco Fleet Services in 1992. Flexcos services and cutting-edge technology have helped its clients better understand the importance of remarketing as a major part of fleet vehicle lifecycles. In 2009, Shoemaker co-founded Innovative Funding Services, a top-tier finance company working with Fortune 100 companies, banks, and OEMs. He joined AFLA in 1992 and has served on AFLAs board as director of Remarketing.
Bret Watson, CAFM
GE Capital Fleet Services, Sprint
Dates in Fleet:1984-Present
Watson
Watson began working at GELCO in 1984, which later became GE Capital Fleet Services. In 1989, he joined Sprint and has worked for the companys fleet for more than 27 years. He started as a fleet administrator, becoming a fleet manager a few years later. He operates a fleet of 2,950 vehicles with one direct report and many outsourced suppliers for additional support. Sprint had been with GELCO/GE Fleet before Watson joined Sprint. About 75% of Sprints fleet are cars and SUVs, with about 25% of the vehicles being medium- to heavy-duty trucks. Watson also served as Chapter chair of the NAFA Mid-America Chapter, chair of NAFAs Editorial and Certification Committees, and served as AFLA treasurer. He serves on Elements client advisory board and Fleet Responses client advisory board.
David Zuidema
Accenture, PHH Arval, Consultant
Dates in Fleet: 1981-2014
Zuidema
Throughout his career, Zuidema has been a key leader in the development of new breakthroughs in fleet service and technology. In the 1980s, he led a project to create PHH FleetLine, the first PC-based system to manage a fleet, and led the PHH team that developed the first data warehouse in 1996. He also helped developed PHH InterActive and formally introduced the concept of customer experience in 2010, opening the industrys first innovation center. Under his leadership, PHH launched Clarus, a platform for delivering fleet management information and functionality that uses an app-like approach for personalization and integrates guided analytics to identify management actions.
Fiat Chrysler Automobiles confirmed Tuesday that it's facing civil and criminal probes into it monthly sales reporting. The announcement comes as the automaker fends off an Illinois dealer group that has accused the company of inflating its numbers.
FCA acknowledged Tuesday that it's under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice. FBI agents visited the homes of nine people who run FCA business centers on July 11, reports Bloomberg.
"In its annual and quarterly financial statements, FCA records revenues based on shipments to dealers and customers and not on reported vehicle unit sales to end customers," FCA said in the statement.
The investigations follow civil lawsuits filed by the Ed Napleton Automotive Group in January that accused the automaker of inflating its sales numbers. Napleton operates 37 dealers in Illinois, Florida, and other states. The Napleton Fleet Group provides vehicles to commercial fleets.
Napleton alleged that a FCA district manager asked him to falsely report 40 vehicles as sold in exchange for a $20,000 payment, reports Bloomberg.
Kermit Weeks always makes a splash at AirVenture but this may be his biggest ever. The serial aircraft collector and owner of Fantasy of Flight Museum in Florida will be part of the crew flying the massive Martin Mars flying boat from Vancouver Island in British Columbia to the seaplane base on Lake Winnebago on Saturday. Weeks has been in Port Alberni, B.C., the past week learning the ropes of the aircraft. According to local news reports, he bought his seat on the flight deck by paying the $40,000 fuel bill for the eight-hour flight. My personal thing here is I truly believe Im being part of history, Weeks told CTV News. I have my doubts whether the airplane will continue flying.
The Mars, owned by the Coulson Group, will be a star attraction at AirVenture and will fly during at least some of the afternoon airshows, undoubtedly showing the fire-dousing ability of its 8,000-gallon tanks. The aircraft has been used for more than 40 years in western North America as an air tanker but a change in tactics by firefighting authorities and the huge expense of keeping the Second World War-era aircraft airworthy have left it grounded for most of the past few fire seasons. Coulson is offering type ratings on the plane and looking for new revenue prospects for it on the Oshkosh trip. More than $1 million was spent getting it ready for the flight.
The aircraft, one of two complete aircraft owned by Coulson, was built at the end of the Second World War and served as a troop transport by the U.S. Navy for several years. Five production models were built but one was lost in a fire. The remaining four were sold as surplus to a consortium of B.C. forest companies in 1959 and converted to fire tankers. One crashed, one was wrecked in a storm while on the water and the remaining two had long careers fighting forest fires. Weeks will fly the Hawaii Mars to Oshkosh while its sister ship the Philippine Mars is back on the water in Sproat Lake in U.S. Navy livery. The Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida, has been trying to acquire the Philippine Mars for almost a decade but there are government and military issues on both sides of the border preventing the transfer.
Pilatus officials held a groundbreaking ceremony last week for a new facility at Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport in Broomfield, Colorado, which will provide completions, sales, and service support for the fleet, including the PC-24 twinjet. The new facility is expected to open in the spring of 2018, on the currently undeveloped west side of the airport, and will employ about 140 workers by 2020, when the PC-24 is in full production. Pilatus said their current facility, on the east side of the airport, which provides PC-12 support, will be closed and those 80 workers will move to the new 118,000-square-foot building.
Thomas Bosshard, CEO of Pilatus Business Aircraft, hosted the ceremony. We are extremely happy and proud to begin construction of this new facility, he said.Pilatus has enjoyed steady growth in the business aviation market in our 20 years at Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport, and we are delighted to have the confidence to expand our operations and employment here in Jefferson County. Our employees, partners, and customers for the top-selling PC-12 NG business turboprop and the new PC-24 Super Versatile Jet are very excited to move into this state-of-the-art building, which will bring our entire team under one roof.
19 July 2016 10:11 (UTC+04:00)
Armenian armed forces have 11 times violated the ceasefire on the line of contact of the Azerbaijani and Armenian troops over the past 24 hours, Azerbaijans Defense Ministry reported on July 19.
Armenian army was using large-caliber machine guns.
Armenian armed forces, stationed in the Chinari village of Armenias Berd district and on nameless heights of the Krasnoselsk district opened fire at Azerbaijani positions located in the Aghbulag village of Azerbaijans Tovuz district and on nameless heights of the Gadabay district.
Moreover, Azerbaijani troops underwent fire from the positions located near the Marzili village of the Aghdam district and on nameless heights of the Goranboy and Khojavand districts.
The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations.
Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
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19 July 2016 12:37 (UTC+04:00)
By Rashid Shirinov
About 400 people went out to the central streets of Yerevan demanding the resignation of the Armenian authorities.
The protesters expressed support to the armed group that has been seizing the building of the police station since July 17, Interfax news agency states. People, chanting anti-government slogans Free, Independent Armenia and No Robbery, demanded not to use force against the attackers. The procession was escorted by the police squads.
A group of 5-6 young people who prepared a banner with the slogan of There is no alternative, were put in police cars and taken away.
According to various reports, the Armenian police have detained about 200 people in different districts of Yerevan, and many of them speak about violence. A number of detainees claimed the violation of their rights and the use of physical violence by the police, the office of the Armenian Ombudsman Arman Tatoyan announced.
Some of the protesters, including Levon Zakarian and Artush Chibukhchan, were hospitalized.
On Sunday morning, a group of armed men entered the territory of the Armenian police patrol department in the Erebuni district of Yerevan and took several people hostage. The police states that during the seizure of the building one policeman was killed and four injured.
Currently, the attackers hold five policemen hostage, including the deputy chief of Armenian police major-General Vardan Yeghiazaryan and the deputy chief of Yerevan police, Colonel Valeri Osipyan. The armed group refuses to lay arms down and surrender to the authorities.
The attackers demand the release of Armenian opposition figure Jirair Sefilyan, who was arrested nearly a month ago on charges of illegal possession of arms. They also claim resignation of the Armenian president Serzh Sargsyan.
The Armenian opposition party Heritage stated that the Armenian authorities are to be blamed for the armed attack. Not allowing to solve the problems of the country through the electoral process and in the framework of the law, the authorities follow path of lawlessness and violence, the party claims.
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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov
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19 July 2016 13:45 (UTC+04:00)
Iran has gained access to $400 million in frozen assets in a bank in Azerbaijan, an Iranian envoy said.
Irans Ambassador to Azerbaijan Mohsen Pak Ayeen has said that after the implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, aka nuclear deal), the International Bank of Azerbaijan unblocked Islamic Republics frozen assets, Fars news agency reported.
The assets belonged to the Naftiran Intertrade Company (NICO) and the Central Bank of Iran, the envoy added.
Pak Ayeen further noted that bilateral ties between Baku and Tehran, particularly economic ties have improved following the implementation of the JCPOA.
The nuclear deal has also contributed to settling legal disagreements between Iranian and Azerbaijani traders, the ambassador added.
Elaborating on friendly ties between Tehran and Baku, Pak Ayeen announced that Azerbaijan is likely to ease visa requirements for Iranian citizens within the next couple of months.
Speaking about President Hassan Rouhanis upcoming visit to Baku for trilateral talks with Azerbaijani and Russian counterparts, the ambassador voiced Irans readiness to help settling the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations.
Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
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19 July 2016 17:42 (UTC+04:00)
By Nigar Abbasova
The next stage of talks on Azerbaijans joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) started in Geneva, Trend reported citing the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry.
Delegation of Azerbaijan at the talks is headed by the Deputy Foreign Minister Mahmud Mammad-Guliyev.
The Azerbaijani side is expected to respond to the certain questions which were submitted at a meeting in 2015.
Earlier it was reported that main issues to be discussed within the framework of the meeting with the representatives of the WTO member states cover ability of the country to support the economy given low oil prices, as well as economic development strategic plan in such situation.
Joining the WTO may give a number of privileges to Azerbaijan including greater access to international financial institutions, which in its turn may boost the economic well-being of the country.
Membership will open foreign markets to Azerbaijani goods, as well as support competition in domestic market.
Moreover, a country with the developing status can qualify for subsidies at a level of 10 percent of GDP while the figure stands at five percent for developed countries.
Azerbaijan has had an observer status at the WTO since 1997. Azerbaijan began negotiations with WTO member states in 2004. Currently, the country negotiates with 19 countries.
As of today, Azerbaijan has completed the negotiations and has signed protocols with Turkey, Oman, the UAE, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. The country is currently at the stage of signing protocols with China and Moldova.
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19 July 2016 13:37 (UTC+04:00)
By Laman Ismayilova
The anniversary exhibition of incredibly talented artist Vidadi Narimanbekov opened at National Art Museum of Azerbaijan.
The exhibition, organized by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, is dedicated to the 90th birth anniversary of national artist, Trend Life reported.
Addressing the opening ceremony, Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Adalet Valiyev spoke about the life and creativity of great artist, stressing the fact that Vidadi volunteered for the front of World War II when he was only 18. In future, one of the most bitter struggles of human history had influenced Narimanbekov so much that it became the main theme in his creativity.
Worthy successors to the creativity of People's Artist were his children Amirbek Narimanbekov and Nigar Narimanbekova.
Speaking at the ceremony, rector of the Azerbaijan State Academy of Art People's Artist Omar Eldarov shared his personal memories about the artist.
"Me and Vidadi Narimanbekov went to the same art school. And when I looked at his works at exam, I was very surprised. It seemed to me so unusual that I wondered how a freshman could be such a good artist," he said.
As for the human qualities, Eldarov characterized him as modest and wise man.
Then, daughter of outstanding painters, also well-known artist Nigar Narimanbekova, who lives and works in Paris, expressed her gratitude to the organization of such an event honoring 90th anniversary of his father. .
"July 13 sees the 90th birthday of my father. I'm pleased that National Art Museum of Azerbaijan has opened the exhibition of his works. Everyone who loves my father, all his friends gathered together in such a heartwarming day for our family. He was a wonderful, and fantastically talented man. He loved the young people and always helped the young artists to take their first steps in art," said Narimanbekova.
She stressed that Vidadi Narimanbekov made sketches dedicated to the military theme while serving on the frontline.
The stunning and epic painting "Under the banner of the Motherland" will be presented for the first time in Baku, which is still kept in his studio. The picture was finished just a few days before the death of truly inspiring representative of national art. The painting was dedicated to Azerbaijani soldiers who lost their lives during the bloody Nagorno-Karabakh War. The theme of patriotism runs through all his paintings.
Further, the guests enjoyed more than stunning 30 works by great artist.
The main heroes of Narimanbekov's works are soldiers, heroically fighting for their homeland, women who accompanied their husbands and sons to the frontline and children who experienced all the hardships of war.
The exhibition became an amazing memorable gift for art lovers.
You wont want anything to distract you from portraits that tell a story someone's life.
Vidadi Narimanbekov is considered one of the most fascinating art figures of the 20th century.
One of the most influential artists was born in Caen, Northern France. His father Yaqub Farman comes from the ancient and noble family Narimanbekov. He studied engineering in Toulouse, where he met his future wife, Irma Larude, a French woman. In 1930, the young family returned to Baku.
Naribanbekov successfully graduated from the Tbilisi Academy of arts. His works were showcased at the most prestigious international art exhibitions in Hungary, Finland, Italy, Austria, Turkey, India and other countries. He is a holder of "Shohrat order (The Order of Glory).
The national artist skillfully used the severe style in order to express his ideas. For example, the painting "Great Patriotic War", painted in 1971, creates the impression of wall paintings, murals.
His another work "Portrait of a woman. Nazifa", painted in 1973, shows another pictorial strategy of the painter. The portrait was painted in a quick, sketchy manner. The canvas with its sweeping strokes and bight colors express the feeling of spring.
A lot more could be said about creativity of Azerbaijani artist. Thought his rich cultural life, the artist made interesting discoveries that are still waiting to be explored.
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Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova
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19 July 2016 17:51 (UTC+04:00)
July 16 turned out a true victory of the national democracy in Turkey who woke up to a morning making a real history.
The failed coup attempt in Turkey once again reminded of a win of democracy traditions and strong will of the nation to defend the statehood. The people were fighting for the future of their state, well-being and most importantly, the future of its children.
It was like a nightmarish deja vu for the Turkish people, who has faced several military interventions in politics, and seen four coups over the past 50 years, to live through the atmosphere of a coup attempt again. Fridays coup attempt began with the partial closure by troops of two major bridges over the Bosphorus in Istanbul.
Their immediate goal was to seize control of key areas like the Bosphorus Bridge or Taksim Square, storm the Presidential Palace, the Prime Minister's office, the National Intelligence Organization and in some areas, seize control of telecommunications hubs.
The parliament has been bombed, the Turkish general staff headquarters were occupied, top military commanders were detained, TV stations were taken over, while at least 290 died and more than 1,400 were wounded as a result.
But the coup attempt crumbled thanks to quick reaction by President Erdogan, who urged people to take to the streets to protest against what he described as a coup attempt by a minority faction within the military, vowing that it would meet with a "necessary response".
In its modern history Turkey has faced four coups, two of them forcing a change of government without taking over. All coups had huge and grave consequences, and shattered many lives, throwing the back country for several decades.
President Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Binali Yldrm named Fethullah Gulen, the Islamist ideologue living in the U.S., as the mastermind of the failed coup attack. There is a suspicion that some officers were approached by the Gulen group to take part and agreed out of their dislike of Erdogan.
While the government has been keen to suggest a small band of militaries were behind the coup, emerging reports and the released names of military figures linked to the plot suggests it ran much deeper, as among those detained were top military commanders.
Some 7,500 people detained in Turkey in connection with the military coup attempt, said Turkeys Prime Minister Binali Yildirim as he was addressing the meeting of the countrys Cabinet of Ministers on July 18.
A successful overthrow of President Erdogan would be another seismic shift in the Middle East, which still suffers from the Arab uprisings erupted years ago and Syrias civil war. Turkey is a NATO member and hosts U.S. military bases. The country is also a key partner in Europes attempt to stop migration flows, an important energy link between Europe and Asia, along with its key transportation position.
Since the beginning of the year, Turkey has been repeatedly hit by suicide bombers, has a civil war on its border and is a front for the war against terror. But the country stood strong and starting this June began to regain its friends, with whom it had strained ties over the past few years. Some experts argue that followers of Gulen decided to make this move as a last chance to take the state apparatus under control.
Thus, democracy and people have won in Turkey with the defeat of the coup attempt, while world leaders have unequivocally condemned the attempted military coup.
Azerbaijans President Ilham Aliyev sent a letter to his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, saying that the coup attempt is a terrible crime against Turkeys statehood, on the other hand, against the people of Turkey, its will and choice.
The Azerbaijani people and state, which always stand by the Turkish people and state, strongly condemn this crime against the Constitution and democracy of Turkey and consider it unacceptable, said the letter.
German chancellor Angela Merkel said she condemned the coup attempt, saying democratic institutions must be respected.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Saturday said the U.S. opposed any attempt to overthrow a democratically elected leader and change must come through a constitutional process.
The only good to come out of the coup attempt is a New Turkey, where people did not afraid to support the government, where APK supporters and those who didnt agree with the ruling regime stood next to each other to stand against the coup attempt and where the unity was shown by all parties in parliament to defend democracy together - a rare sight indeed.
The government of Erdogan, whose party scores over half of votes in all elections, proved that it is in a stronger position than previous civilian administrations, with the presidents position shored up during a decade of economic success.
The Turkish people have come out victorious in the battle against anti-democratic forces. But they still need to remain vigilant and the presidential administration warned about possibility of new attempts.
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19 July 2016 14:50 (UTC+04:00)
By Gunay Camal
A soldier of Azerbaijani Armed Forces, Vusal Aliyev became the latest victim of Armenian provocation on the contact-line of the troops.
Aliyev was shot dead by a sniper shot from the Armenian side on July 5 despite the truce reached earlier between the sides to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict
The South Caucasus is home to one of the bloodiest conflicts in the world Nagorno-Karabakh, which is exacerbating with every passing year.
Over the past 20 years of unsuccessful peace talks between the aggressor country Armenia and its suffering neighbor country Azerbaijan was casting a shadow over the security of the region. Once again, the conflict emerged as the real and big danger to the security and development of the region in April 2016 mainly because of the inactivity of the mediators and international community.
Now, the diplomatic talks over the Nagorno-Karabakh are proceeding apace, as the world realized that unless talks mediated by the OSCE MG bring tangible results, a further escalation of the conflict cannot be ruled out.
For the past two months the two sides have engaged in intensive talks, while two presidential summits were held, where President Ilham Aliyev and President Serzh Sargsyan voiced a will to continue peace talks.
Baku hopes and believes that such an intensive continuation of negotiations will lead to some progress, while emphasizing that the conflict must be solved gradually step by step.
Meanwhile, Yerevan is not happy with the intensification of talks, as it realizes that the status quo will be elaborated, which means liberation of the internationally recognized lands of Azerbaijan. Thus the country continues to stage provocation on the contact-line, shooting Azerbaijani positions and killing soldiers.
Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov, commenting on the provocation, said that it once again proves that the negotiations must be further intensified.
Emphasizing that some forces in Armenia are not pleased with the intensive talks, he noted that they are trying to cause provocation on the contact-line or borders. As you know, prior to that a similar incident had also happened. One of our soldiers had been shot down by a sniper. It indicates that some forces dont want the negotiations to be ended with results. To stop this kind of incidents we must intensify the talks, he said.
While the battlefield has been fairly quiet since early April, diplomacy has remained in high gear following the escalation, as it brought the long-lasting conflict back to international attention. The OSCE MG chairs have become active mediators in monthly talks between the two presidents, while Moscow has become the most active mediator between Baku and Yerevan.
When Lavrov was in Baku, he mentioned that we are following the right direction in order to achieve progress soon, Mammadyarov continued. The troops of Armenia must be withdrawn. This is unambiguous term. Otherwise, such unpleasant incidents can occur frequently. And this is unacceptable.
Azerbaijan does not seek to hold meaningless talks, President Ilham Aliyev said earlier, adding that it is time for concrete step to be taken toward resolving the conflict as soon as possible.
"If someone thinks that we will continue to hold meaningless talks for next 20 years, they are mistakenMeaningful talks must start immediately and unconditionally. If that happens, a peaceful settlement can be hastened," he said before the St.Ptersburg meeting on Nagorno-Karabakh.
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18 July 2016 23:40 (UTC+04:00)
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev made a phone call to President of the Republic of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan on July 18, Azertac reported.
The head of state sharply condemned the attempted military coup in Turkey, and said that as always the people and government of Azerbaijan stood by the Turkish people and government.
President Ilham Aliyev extended his condolences to families and loved ones of those who were killed while preventing the coup attempt, as well as the President of Turkey, and wished the injured the swiftest possible recovery.
The head of state expressed his confidence that no force could ever avert Turkey from the path of development and democracy.
Highly appreciating President Ilham Aliyev's and Azerbaijani people's fraternal stance, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan noted that the Turkish government was taking all necessary measures to normalize the situation in the country.
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19 July 2016 10:37 (UTC+04:00)
China`s unchangeable and principal position is to support the territorial integrity of the states, said the newly appointed ambassador Wei Jinghua as he met Azerbaijan`s Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov in Baku, Azertac reported.
Prior to the conversation, the Ambassador presented the copy his credentials to the Minister.
Wei Jinghua assured that he would try his best for further expanding ties between the two countries.
The parties stressed the role of President Ilham Aliyev`s visit to China, as well as meetings held and documents signed in developing bilateral ties between the two countries.
Mammadyarov praised China`s support the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, its sovereignty, borders` inviolability within the international organizations.
Azerbaijan and China opened a new page in their relations after President Ilham Aliyev visited China in December 2015. During the visit, several meetings, negotiations were held and 10 documents were signed. Cooperation issues almost in all spheres were discussed.
China is a huge opportunity and a priority market for Azerbaijan. More than 50 agreements were signed between the two countries so far. Azerbaijan Export and Investment Promotion Foundation (AZPROMO) has recently opened a representative office in China to support and encourage relations between the two countries businessmen, as well as expand Azerbaijani goods export to the Chinese market and attract China's leading investment funds to the Azerbaijan economy.
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19 July 2016 11:26 (UTC+04:00)
By Laman Ismayilova
Azerbaijan is a strategic partner for Romania, said NATO resident coordinator and Romanias ambassador to Azerbaijan Daniel Cristian Ciobanu.
Ciobanu made the remarks at the event on the occasion of his diplomatic missions completion in Baku on July 18.
The ambassador said the cooperation between Azerbaijan and Romania has strongly developed in all fields during his diplomatic term since November 2011.
I want to express my warmest gratitude to Azerbaijani authorities for their permanent support during my mission, said Ciobanu.
The diplomat noted that during these years, firstly, an expansion of political dialogue was achieved through joint visits.
Secondly, the cooperation at the level of the two countries Ministries of Foreign Affairs intensified and the first ever official visit of Romanian Prime Minister to Azerbaijan took place, he added.
Thirdly, the export of Romanian goods to Azerbaijan increased significantly over four years, and the figures of the last two years were the best in the history, said the diplomat.
Romanias export to Azerbaijan increased by 4.3 times in 2015 compared to 2011, noted Ciobanu. During the first five months of 2016, the countrys export to Azerbaijan increased by 106.89 percent, compared to the same period of 2015.
Fourthly, Azerbaijan increased investments in Romania and Azerbaijans state oil company SOCAR substantially expanded its presence on Romanian market, added the envoy.
Azerbaijan and Romania consolidated cooperation in the field of energy, he noted adding that the two countries also diversified bilateral relations in the cultural field.
Last, but not least, the Romanian embassy successfully fulfilled the tasks of NATO coordinator in Azerbaijan, said the ambassador.
Romania, which has been the second country in the world to recognize Azerbaijan's independence and established since 2009 a strategic partnership with Baku, actively supports Azerbaijans efforts to enhance its relations with the European and Euro-Atlantic institutions.
The Romanian diplomatic mission in Baku started its 1st NATO Contact Point Embassy mandate in Azerbaijan in January 2009 and nowadays is already performing its 4th successive mandate. The embassy of Romania operates as a channel for disseminating information in Azerbaijan about the role and policies of the North-Atlantic Alliance. Within its activity Romanian diplomatic mission pays a constant attention to promotion of Euro-Atlantic values, principles and standards in Azerbaijan
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19 July 2016 17:29 (UTC+04:00)
By Nigar Abbasova
Azerbaijan and Afghanistan have considered creation of joint enterprises for the production of food products.
The issue was on the highest agenda during the meeting between Azerbaijani Economy Minister Shahin Mustafayev and Mohammad Taqi Khalili, Ambassador of Afghanistan to Baku.
The sides have discussed economic cooperation between the two countries and other issues of mutual interest. They mentioned that the two countries have a huge potential for the cooperation in different spheres including transportation, logistics, agriculture and trade.
The sides also exchanged views on construction of a cement plant in Afghanistan.
Baku strongly supports Afghanistan on its path towards reaching stability. The contribution of Azerbaijan to the stability and development of Afghanistan is not restricted in the involvement in NATO operations. Azerbaijan supports the Afghan way of reforms by its assistance in the areas of education, infrastructure and transport development, investments and enhancing the role of women in the society.
Earlier, it was reported that ASAN service, an innovative Azerbaijani model of public service delivery, will also be established in Afghanistan. The relevant document was signed between the ASAN and Finance Ministry of Afghanistan.
Trade turnover between Azerbaijan and Afghanistan was $23.47 million in the first half of 2016, according to Azerbaijans State Customs Committee, and the entire amount accounted for the export of Azerbaijani goods to Afghanistan.
The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan recognized the independence of the Republic of Azerbaijan on December 21, 1991. The diplomatic relations between the two countries were established on November 16, 1994.
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Nigar Abbasova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @nigyar_abbasova
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19 July 2016 11:51 (UTC+04:00)
By Nigar Abbasoava
The assets of Azerbaijans state oil fund increased by 4.6 percent and amounted to $35.1 billion in July 2016 compared to $33.57 billion in early 2016, the Fund reported.
The income of the Fund in the first half of the year totaled 4 billion manats ($ 2.5 billion) while expenditures amounted to 2.256 billion manats ($ 1.44 billion).
The revenues acquired from the realization of oil and gas contracts in the reported period amounted to 3.689 billion manats ($ 2.36 billion) including an income of 3.68 billion manats ($ 2.3 billion) received from the sale of profitable oil and gas. Revenues from transit operations and bonus payments totaled 8.8 million and 0.1 million manats ($5.6 and $0.06 million) respectively.
The revenues acquired from the management of the assets amounted to 301.5 million manats ($ 193.2 million).
Transfers to the state budget amounted to 1.76 billion manats ($ 1.12 billion ) while expenditures on improvement of social and living conditions of IDP amounted to 55.2 million manats ($ 35.3 million).
Some 19.6 million manats ($ 12.5 million) were directed to finance the reconstruction of the Samur-Absheron irrigation system while 9.2 million manats ($ 5.8 million) was allocated to financing the state program on the education of Azerbaijani youth abroad for the period 2007-2015. As much as 35.3 million manats ($ 22.6 million) was directed to financing Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway construction while expenditures on the financing the share of state in the Southern Gas Corridor joint-stock company established as part of TANAP and TAP projects to ensure Azerbaijani gas supply to Europe amounted to 241.9 million manats ($ 155.0 million) in the reported period. Some 127 million manats ($ 81.4 million) was allocated for the construction of the STAR refinery complex.
SOFAZ was established in 1999 with assets of $271 million. The funds of the entity may be used for the construction and reconstruction of strategically important infrastructural objects as well as for tackling national problems.
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19 July 2016 13:15 (UTC+04:00)
The Trans Adriatic Pipeline project, envisaging the transportation of Azerbaijani gas to Europe, remains a priority of the U.S. government.
Amos Hochstein, Special Envoy and Coordinator for International Energy Affairs, US Department of State, told about this in his interview with Greek news website Ekathimerini.
Ive spent much more time on this one project than any other project Ive ever worked on. Even though there are no American companies in that project, we have still made this a US government priority. Thats why I was here in Thessaloniki for the groundbreaking of TAP, Hochstein said.
The TAP pipeline, construction of which was launched on May 17 2016, is a part of the Southern Gas Corridor. The pipeline is expected to improve European energy security and lessen Europes dependence on Russian gas. With a starting capacity of 10 billion cubic meters a year, TAP will satisfy the energy consumption of close to seven million households in Europe.
Both the EU and the US are hoping TAP will help to boost up Europes energy security.
At 878 kilometers in length and 1.2 meters in diameter, the pipelines highest point will be at 1,800 meters in Albania, and its lowest point will be 820 meters below sea level on the bed of the Adriatic Sea. The $40 billion-pipeline will become operational in 2020 and deliver gas from Azerbaijans Shah Deniz field to Italy, transiting Georgia, Turkey, Greece and Albania.
Hochstein further added that the United States made so much progress in the relations between Greece and Bulgaria, and the U.S. is working hard with the EU to make the Interconnector Greece-Bulgaria (IGB) a reality.
Bulgaria and Greece signed last December a final investment agreement to build a natural gas pipeline, IGB. The pipeline, which is expected to be connected to TAP, will allow Bulgaria to receive the Azerbaijani gas.
IGB, with an initial capacity of 3 to 5 billion cubic meters of gas a year, potentially increased to 10 bcm, is expected to be up and running in mid-2018.
Greece's state natural gas company DEPA received nine expressions of interest to transport gas within a Greek-Bulgarian natural gas pipeline scheme in May 2016.
Interested parties had been invited to submit initial interest for transporting 4.3 billion cubic metres of gas per year from Greece to Bulgaria and about 1 billion cubic metres from Bulgaria to Greece, DEPA said in a statement.
After years of delays, the construction of IGB is expected to start in October 2016.
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19 July 2016 10:47 (UTC+04:00)
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu will pay a visit to the USA on 19, RIA Novosti reported.
Turkish FM will discuss the extradition of Fetullah Gulen.
On July 15 evening, Turkish authorities said a military coup attempt took place in the country.
Meanwhile, a group of servicemen announced about transition of power to them.
However, the rebelling servicemen started to surrender July 16 and Turkish authorities said the coup attempt failed.
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said earlier that 208 people lost their lives in the July 15 military coup attempt.
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19 July 2016 15:42 (UTC+04:00)
By Nigar Abbasova
Kazakhstan has tightened security measures across the country following recent bloody attack that hit Almaty, the largest city of the country.
At least five people were killed and eight injured in an attack on a police station in Almaty on June 18.
Group of armed men attempted to break into the interior ministry building in the city center. The Ministry reported that a district police department and the building that houses Kazakhstan's National Security Committee were also attacked.
An anti-terror operation was held in the country. Kazakh authorities have raised the security threat level in Almaty to red which is considered to be the highest, meaning that the level of danger is critical. Kazakhstans National Security Committee replaced the red level of terrorist threat by yellow level following anti-terrorist operation.
Two suspects have already been detained. President of Kazkahstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev referred the shooting as an act of terrorism and ordered to increase the provision of security all over the country.
Today a terrorist attack has been committed in Almaty that unfortunately, again led to casualties, Nazarbayev said.
Residents of the city were called not to leave their apartments and avoid public places. They were also asked to be vigilant, inform police of any suspicious people, and treat the situation with understanding.
The suspected attacker was wounded and detained by the police. The attackers supposed accomplice was detained, as well.
Earlier, the suspect was reported to be a 27 year-old resident of Kyzylorda district, according to preliminary information. The detainee was previously convicted and is also suspected of killing a woman over the weekend.
The attack in Almaty came a month after a deadly assault that hit Aktobe, the north-western city of the country. Groups of gunmen attacked two weapon shops and military base in the northwestern Kazakh city of Aktobe.
Eight persons were killed with three being military personnel, while as many as 37 suffered injuries. A total of 18 criminals were killed and nine were taken into custody in an anti-terrorist operation.
Earlier, the countrys National Security Committee said that all participants of the recent attacks in Aktobe have been neutralized and arrested, and their weapons have been confiscated.
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19 July 2016 15:02 (UTC+04:00)
The Turkish parliament will launch a comprehensive probe over the July 15 failed coup attempt next week, a ruling party official has said, recalling that it was one of the main targets of the plotters, Hurriyet reported.
They attacked so many places but the parliament was on the top of their list, Naci Bostanc, deputy parliamentary group leader of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), told Anadolu Agency on July 19. Bostanc said the AKP would submit its proposal next week and then lead the formation of an investigation committee.
Its only rational for the parliament to investigate. It will of course do it, Bostanc said. He also recalled that all political parties represented in parliament submitted their own motions for establishing an investigation committee, saying, Well make the necessary talks next week and then will form the investigation committee.
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19 July 2016 16:29 (UTC+04:00)
Georgias Prime Minister Georgi Kvirikashvili arrived in Turkey for an official visit on July 19, RIA Novosti reported citing the prime ministers press service.
During the visit, it is planned to hold the first meeting of the Georgia-Turkey Strategic Cooperation Council, after which a memorandum of cooperation will be signed between the two governments.
Kvirikashvili will hold meetings with his Turkish counterpart Binali Yildirim and Speaker of Turkeys Grand National Assembly Ismail Kahraman during the one-day visit.
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Chris Ormrod, managing director of Taunton-based Ministry of Cake, has been announced as winner of the CEO of the Year award for the south west in the Management Team Awards 2016, organised by the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (BVCA).
Regional winners are announced throughout the year and presented at the BVCA National Dinners, held across the country. However, the overall national winners will be revealed at a gala dinner held at the Hilton Park Lane in London on 8 December, where Ormrod will face competition from other regional CEO winners from around the country.
The awards are given to directors, who demonstrate good growth in their chosen categories, and have a clear and focused strategy for future growth. They also reflect businesses that have strong relationships with staff and, often, a good, local corporate profile.
Ormrod has managed Ministry of Cake for almost 12 years and previously worked for Richard Branson, helping to set up the soft drinks company Virgin Cola.
The nomination follows a string of successes for the company, which was also named as the winner of PwCs West of England Business of the Year.
Speaking exclusively to British Baker, Ormrod said: I was really pleased to be nominated for this one and to win the BVCA CEO of the Year for the South West. Maybe one day Ill set up a Ministry of Cake Airline in homage.
Over the last five years the company has changed markedly, with turnover increasing by 30%, two new manufacturing sites, an increase in export sales and a change of ownership.
Ministry of Cake is a privately owned manufacturer of frozen desserts for the UK and export foodservice market.
In May, Ministry of Cake subsidiary Ministry of Pudding produced its 10 millionth pudding at its new factory in Torquay.
A bakery that specialises in artisan wheat- and gluten-free breads, Wheat Free Bakery Direct, has purchased the new FP016 evo flow wrapper from packaging supplier KernPack.
The FP016 evo flowing wrapping machine is capable of processing 150 packs per minute, at a consistent high quality, claimed the company.
The bakery believes it will be able to significantly increase its UK output and expand into the Canadian free-from market.
Colin Sneddon, owner of the Wheat Free Bakery Direct, said: I am delighted with our new system and the results it has achieved, as Im always looking to move my business forward.
He added: We are now able to sell our products to [a] wider discerning customer base, and to know that the flow wrapper can cater for additional volumes in the future is a big plus for us.
Wheat Free Bakery Direct is an independent, family-owned business based in Scotland specialising in gluten- and wheat-free products.
KernPack has over 60 years experience in packaging machinery solutions and automation and is innovating to develop new technologies, products and services to be one step ahead in the market.
Despite his early endorsement of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his status as the leader of a preeminent swing state, Gov. Rick Scott has been passed over for a prime-time speaking slot at the Republican National Convention.
While the governor will be addressing the convention Wednesday, his appearance will take place before the nationally televised portion of the proceedings.
According to the convention's official schedule, speakers slated to appear during Wednesday's prime-time lineup include Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, radio host Laura Ingraham and Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. The evening's headliner will be Trump's running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence.
Scott, who had urged skeptical Republicans to "coalesce behind" Trump following the real estate mogul's decisive win in the March 15 Florida primary, had been widely expected to receive a choice speaking slot. That so many prominent establishment Republicans have chosen to boycott Trump's coronation only served to bolster Scott's standing as a high-level supporter of the soon-to-be nominee.
"We need somebody that's going to go to Washington, D.C., cut taxes, reduce regulation, streamline the permitting process," Scott has said of Trump's appeal as a businessman. "Don't create an incentive for companies to move out of this country, create an incentive for companies to move to this country."
While Trump has said he values the governor's embrace of his candidacy, he hasn't spoken glowingly of Scott at campaign events to the degree he has other Republican politicians, including Bondi.
"I think the most popular person in Florida, by far, right? Pam," Trump exclaimed at a March rally in Tampa.
The rhetoric and the convention scheduling could be strategic. Polls indicate Trump will enter the general election campaign with a significant deficit of support from female voters. Including several well-known women in the convention's prime-time program, even if that means moving politicians like Scott to earlier time slots, might help Trump's campaign make inroads with a critical voting bloc.
Surveys also show Scott continues to suffer from relatively low popularity in Florida, one reason the Trump campaign didn't seriously consider the governor as a vice presidential pick. In the same vein, giving Scott a prime-time convention role could have complicated Trump's efforts to win over undecided voters.
For the Republican Party's rank-and-file, however, Scott's economic message - even if not delivered in prime-time - is likely to be well-received. Like Trump, Scott has been a constant critic of government policies he says stifle private sector growth.
Melania Trump's speech doesn't come without controversy as she's now being accused of plagiarism.
Many of the lines in her speech that she delivered at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on Monday night were very similar to the one First Lady Michelle Obama gave at the Democratic National Convention in 2008 and people are definitely taking notice.
Now the wife of the presumed Republican presidential nominee is the top trend on social media and some people are using the hashtag #SpeechGate.
But Donald Trump isn't tweeting about the speech drama.
It was truly an honor to introduce my wife, Melania. Her speech and demeanor were absolutely incredible. Very proud! #GOPConvention Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2016
Melania's Twitter account sort of addresses the controversy in a statement from the Trumps senior communication advisor.
Statement on Melania Trump Speech pic.twitter.com/80KgS0jxXz MELANIA TRUMP (@MELANIATRUMP) July 19, 2016
The statement doesn't confirm or deny the plagiarism accusations.
However, according to Trump campaign chairman Pual Manafort in an Associated Press interview, the entire incident is being blown out of proportion.
"Nobody believes she did it. Nobody believes it. There were a few words on it, but they're not words that were unique words. Ninety-nine percent of that speech talked about her being an immigrant and love of country and love of family and everything else," he said.
But Manafort went further and blamed Hillary Clinton.
"I mean, this is, once again, an example of when a woman threatens Hillary Clinton, how she seeks out to demean her and take her down. It's not going to work," Manafort said.
Social media has exploded in reaction to #SpeechGate, with many blasting Melania Trump.
#RNCinCLE every College student for Trump should change their vote based alone on the merits of #speechgate. Be offended! #plagiarism Anthony Hardaway (@HardawayAnthony) July 19, 2016
However, not everyone is attacking Melania Trump for alleged plagiarism. A YouTuber posted a side-by-side comparison of President Barack Obama allegedly lifting speeches.
 
The White House nor the president or First Lady commented on the accusations.
Republicans vs. Republicans
But Melania Trump's speech wasn't the only thing that caused drama for the GOP on Monday. Republicans approved the rules for the convention in a vote that turned out to be contentious.
Anti-Trump delegates tried to call for a state-by-state roll call vote on the rules. They had collected petition signatures from a majority of the delegates in nine states more than needed.
However, the chair took the unusual step of calling for two separate voice votes, and claimed that delegates from three states withdrew their signatures.
That caused an uproar among anti-Trump delegates who wanted to try to vote down the rule, in a convention that Republicans need to show unity in a party that has been largely divided all season long.
Trump whose campaign manager said would speak at the RNC tonight to introduce his wife, Melania, on stage before her speech has to show how he can bring together a very divided party.
Less contentious appears to be the vote for the Republican Party platform. Christian conservatives hailed the platform as the most conservative statement of party principles in recent memory.
Florida's newest teacher of the year is from Polk County.
Florida teacher of the year from Polk County
Jessica Solano teaches third grade math
Second straight winner from Highlands Grove Elementary
Back to School 2016-17
Jessica Solano is a third grade math teacher and Highlands Grove Elementary in Lakeland.
Solano was back in Lakeland Monday after winning the award last week in Orlando. She was part of a press conference with her principal and the school superintendent.
Solano relived the moment her name was called as the winner.
"It was a complete shock," she said. "It was surreal. You listen to it and then think they did not say my name. But they did so it was very exciting."
Solano won for her use of technology in the classroom. All of her students use pads to do much of their work. She used innovative ways to keep the students interested in math. That included taking a virtual field trip to Times Square in New York city.
They saw people so they started asking those math questions. Well I wonder how tall this building is? I wonder what the square footage of this building will be," she said.
Solano is the second Florida teacher of the year from Highlands Grove.
Christie Bassett was Florida's 2015 teacher of the year. Principal Benjamin Henry was very proud of the dual honor.
Just great teachers. Thats the secret sauce," he said. "We just got great teachers. Ha, ha."
Solano will take a year away from the classroom to travel the state as an ambassador for education and Florida teachers.
What do you give a manatee on his 68th birthday? Balloons well, because balloons! And beets.
Snooty the manatee is 68 years old
He weighs nearly 1,200 pounds
Saturday event planned to celebrate birthday
Yes, those gentle vegetarian sea cows like beets for sweet tweets.
It's Snooty the manatee's birth week. And his caretakers at his home in the South Florida Museum in Bradenton are preparing for their annual blowout Saturday.
They'll have free outdoor activities and reduced admission prices to visit Snooty. Birthday cards are pouring in for the annual contest with notes such as, "We all love you so much," and "I hope your birthday is super day!"
Saturday's event is from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
It's another milestone for Snooty, the museum's resident manatee, listed in the Guinness World Records book as the oldest-living, captive-born manatee.
During Tuesday's Bay News 9 behind-the-scenes shoot, Snooty became very interested in news intern Christine Forbes. He leaned toward her, hoisted his 1,197 pound, 9-foot-plus body and peered into her eyes.
She smiled, and he hammed it up for the camera.
Because Snooty's vegetable and fruit birthday cake is such a big deal every year, Bay News 9 reporter Virginia Johnson opened her own vegetable drawer to see what humans and manatees both enjoy in addition to the aforementioned beets.
Here's the lowdown:
Carrots: Snooty eats for treats everyday.
Pineapples: Snooty is crazy about this annual birthday treat.
Oranges: Snooty doesn't care about this citrus fruit.
Kale: Snooty eats this every day.
Romaine lettuce: Snooty eats this everyday food.
Snooty got his annual check-up in June, and doctors gave him a clean bill of health. So they approved some birthday sweets.
This weekend's planned festivities highlight the special place Snooty holds in the human community. And they also highlight the special place he holds in his own.
Snooty serves as a foster parent for manatees orphaned or injured in the wild. So far he's helped 30 of his kind, and he's got two tank mates right now, Icecube and Sarasolo.
"We are very lucky to have an animal like Snooty that's an iconic manatee," said Marilyn Margold, the museum's director of living collections. "It allows us to tell one educational story, and it allows people to see that these manatees are really intelligent animals."
No one knows how long manatees live in captivity. But based on their cousins, the elephant, Margold said they could thrive into their 80s.
Margold hopes the love for Snooty translates into a protective love for manatees in the wild.
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Saying the comments were "inappropriate" and "offensive," a Jefferson County district judge on Tuesday fired her court coordinator for remarks the woman posted on Facebook over the weekend about the Black Lives Matter movement.
Patricia Kloefkorn, court coordinator for State District Judge Raquel West, posted, among other things, on her personal Facebook account Sunday that Black Lives Matter protesters should "get a job" and "since when did being black ... give you the right to shoot people."
Kloefkorn, 58, also accused President Barack Obama of creating the environment that led to recent killings of eight police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge.
After it was announced that Kloefkorn had been terminated, West said in a prepared statement that the court's integrity is her top priority.
"Inappropriate and offensive comments made by court personnel will not be tolerated," West said.
Jefferson County does not have a countywide social media policy for employees, though the sheriff's office recently adopted one of its own, said Assistant District Attorney Kathleen Kennedy, who runs the office's civil division.
Kennedy said while county employees maintain First Amendment rights,"government employers can restrict speech that affect the entity's operations."
There is a draft social media policy for county employees, but it has yet to reach a public forum, said Kennedy. The proposed policy had been put on hold in recent months because of scheduling, she said.
The draft policy, which Kennedy said should be ready for commissioners court to consider in a few weeks, would prohibit employees from discussing open investigations or sharing documents obtained from the job.
Last fall, the city of Port Arthur introduced a social media policy after three police officers and a civilian employee were accused of posting profanity-laced, racially-tinged remarks on an invitation-only Facebook group.
The PAPD employees - a sergeant, a detective, an officer and a civilian who works in the evidence room - allegedly used foul language to refer to First Lady Michelle Obama and activist Al Sharpton.
Their comments offended some of the group's subscribers, who reported them to the city.
None of the employees were fired because of their posts.
Port Arthur's new social media policy "gives more specific direction than the personnel manual does," Port Arthur city manager Brian McDougal said. "We wanted to make sure the employees know what the parameters are," he said.
Jefferson County Judge Jeff Branick, who will vote on any proposed social media policy for county employees, said he is willing to defend the right to express ideas, even when in disagreement.
Branick acknowledged comments made by employees working in different county offices could be deemed more damaging than others, complicating the idea of a uniform social media policy.
"I think that anybody ought to be able to express any opinions they want to express," Branick said. "They also need to be cognizant of the fact, that particularly when one works for a court as opposed to the county or district clerk, and the court is charged with fair administration of justice, maintaining the appearance of propriety and fair treatment, some of their posts can affect the public's perception of the court's fairness."
West's court, where Kloefkorn worked, handles criminal cases.
Social media policies are difficult to navigate, said Orange County District Attorney John Kimbrough.
Orange County officials suggested writing a new social media policy last year. The county's most recent policy was adopted in 2013.
It deals mostly with county associated accounts and requires employees to offer a disclaimer separating their views from the county's.
"You've got to kind of control what people do when they represent your office, but they have a First Amendment right to the expression of ideas," Kimbrough said. "It's a very difficult balance between those two things."
Hardin County's social media policy, which also requires employees to separate their personal views from the county's, says off-duty employees "may use (social media) to express their thoughts or promote their ideas as long as they do not conflict with County policies or business." It also says "ethnic slurs, personal insults or language that may be considered inflammatory should be avoided."
Kloefkorn, who did not respond to requests seeking comment, expressed anger in her post in the hours after three Louisiana law enforcement officers were gunned down and three others were injured in Baton Rouge.
Just 10 days earlier, a gunman killed five Dallas police officers and wounded nine others as a Black Lives Matter protest concluded.
These killings came after two black men were fatally shot by police, first Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge on July 5 and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota on July 6.
"With (Kloefkorn) being a public employee, the question comes down to whether that posting affects the government entity's job, or that court," Kennedy said.
BScott@BeaumontEnterprise.comTwitter.com/BrandonKScott
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While the Texas Education Agency announced on Monday it was canceling a training session scheduled next month for prospective Beaumont ISD trustees because it conflicted with Lamar University's graduation ceremony, at least two community leaders said they believe the decision was made because of the NAACP's involvement with the event.
Region 5 Executive Director Danny Lovett said that he was contacted by TEA officials about moving the date to avoid a conflict with Lamar's Aug. 20 commencement.
Lovett said Region 5 had agreed to host the event for interested community members and prospective candidates at its building downtown. The training session was to be co-sponsored by the Beaumont Chapter of the NAACP, the Ministerial Brotherhood Alliance, and the Greater Beaumont Chamber of Commerce.
TEA Deputy Commissioner of Governance A.J. Crabill had been invited to speak about "governance to improve student outcomes," according to TEA Director of School Governance Ron Rowell.
Paul Jones, executive director of the Beaumont NAACP, said TEA official notified him of the cancelation and said they would let him know when a new date was selected.
Jones said he suspects the event was canceled because some people in the community were unhappy about the NAACP's involvement.
Mike Getz, Ward 2 city councilman, said that he had contacted the TEA to express his concern about the NAACP's involvement in the training, though he had not heard from the TEA about the cancellation.
"They (the NAACP) were the most ardent supporters of the former regime, which was swept away by the TEA because of their complete inability to govern," Getz said.
Getz said he wrote in an email to Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath "that their involvement would be very divisive," and asked him to reconsider including the NAACP.
The training session, which was announced at the Board of Managers meeting on July 7, was planned following a meeting between Commissioner Morath and members of the NAACP, the MBA and the Minister's Union, Jones said.
"This came out of a meeting with TEA" when Morath was in Beaumont, Jones said. "They said they have this type of training and that if we requested it, they would come, so we requested it right away."
Jones said that he and the members of the NAACP would have no role in what content would be presented during the training. The training session was to be led by Crabill, he said.
"We weren't putting on the training. TEA is the only one that has the knowledge and expertise to put on the training," he said. "We were hoping that that (the training) would transfer over to a better school district and a better process of educating our kids and that's unfortunate" that it's been cancelled, he said.
Lovett said Region 5 would host the rescheduled training session on the alternate date. He said the new date will be announced publicly.
LTeitz@BeaumontEnterprise.comTwitter.com/LizTeitz
Erik Franck, MD, a former anesthesiologist with Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente, has filed a $9 million lawsuit against the health system, according to an Oregon Live report.
Here are eight things to know:
1. The suit claims that Dr. Franck was fired after he complained about Kaiser's cost-cutting measures. He claimed the cost-cutting measures endangered patient safety.
2. Allegedly, one of the measures was a mandate telling anesthesiologists to reduce the amount of anesthetic or anti-anxiety medication given so patients could be discharged sooner.
3. Management at Kaiser allegedly told anesthesiologists to warn patients that they were going to be in pain post-surgery, according to the suit.
4. Dr. Franck's suit is the third of its kind to be filed against Kaiser. An oncologist and sleep-clinic physician also claimed that certain measurers were endangering patients.
5. Dr. Franck joined Kaiser in 2013 and provided care in its Portland, Ore., area clinics.
6. In August 2015, Kaiser told Dr. Franck that his contract would not be renewed.
7. According to the suit, he had repeatedly voiced concerns regarding the measures during his time with Kaiser.
8. The lawsuit was filed last week in Multnomah County Circuit Court.
Millennials are more likely drawn toward non-traditional ways of paying medical expenses, according to the 2016 Aflac WorkForce Report, reported in Compensation BLR.
The study examined 1,500 benefits decision-makers and 5,000 employees across the country. The researchers found:
1. Millennials are more likely to regularly underestimate total costs of injury or illness; 65 percent underestimated those costs including medical, household and out-of-pocket costs. By contrast, 45 percent of non-millennials reported the same.
2. More than half 65 percent of Millennials reported they couldnt afford $1,000 in unexpected out-of-pocket medical expenses.
3. The Millennials were more likely to borrow money from friends and family as well as crowdsource to achieve out-of-pocket expenses than non-Millennials.
4. Voluntary insurance could be a solution to out-of-pocket expenses; around 79 percent of employees reported a need for voluntary insurance and 60 percent said rising medical costs drive that need.
White Rock, British Columbia-based Peace Arch Hospital staff members implemented a program to determine if minimizing operating room traffic yielded a decrease in orthopedic surgical site infections, according to Medical Xpress.
The hospital implemented a Comprehensive Unit-Based Program, where researchers asked surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses and other staff members who spend at least 60 percent of their time in the OR to complete a survey. The survey asked respondents to list what they believed caused patient harm and key strategies to prevent patient harm.
In the two-day study, two nursing students conducted a manual count of door openings during nine total joint replacements and one revision operation. The students counted between 42 openings and 70 openings per operation from incision to closing time. The average operation totaled 75 minutes.
Here are four takeaways:
1. Researchers noted subsequent traffic audits taken every six months represented a decrease in OR traffic from between 42 opens and 70 openings to only 3.2 door openings per procedure.
2. This figure may have played a part in a decreased orthopedic SSI rate from 2.8 percent to 2.1 percent.
3. In the survey, many surgeons and nurses cited too much OR traffic as a primary reason for patient harm in the OR.
4. Based on the study, researchers devised key strategies to lower orthopedic SSIs including:
Ceasing all traffic in and out of the OR between total joint capsule opening and closure.
To reduce traffic, surgical team members should communicate by phone.
Increasingly use templates to identify implant size before each procedure.
Place a sign on the OR door to remind all staff members to limit OR traffic.
Ask staff members to list why they are entering an OR during a procedure.
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Greater Fairbanks (Ark.) Community Hospital Foundation is aiming to raise $1.2 million to replace its surgery center, according to KTUU 2.
Here are five key points:
1. The project's estimated cost totals $88 million.
2. Featuring seven surgery suites, the foundation expects the center to be fully operational by April 2017.
3. Greater Fairbanks Community Hospital Foundation is funding the project with $55 million in bond sales and $33 million from the foundation's cash reserves.
4. The foundation will put the fundraised money back into the cash reserves. The money will also help maintain the foundation's bond's rating.
5. Greater Fairbanks Community Hospital Foundation's existing surgery suites are running out ample room for equipment, leading the foundation to replace the center.
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Mark Laret, CEO of UCSF Medical Center has received payments totaling more than $5 million in stock awards and cash since 2007 for his role on the boards of two companies that do millions of dollars of business with his hospital, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
On top of the $1.6 million Mr. Laret earns at UCSF Medical Center, he has received an average of $556,000 annually in cash fees and equity from Palo Alto, Calif.-based Varian Medical Systems and Burlington, Mass.-based Nuance Communications, a review of company filings shows, according to the report.
Here are four things to know about Mr. Laret's compensation for his role on the two boards.
1. UCSF allows senior managers to participate in "outside professional activities" if the executives do the extra work on personal time, and if the engagements don't present a conflict of interest or the appearance of one, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Each year, UCSF executives need to obtain approval of their outside professional activities from their immediate superior. In Mr. Laret's case, this is UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood.
2. UCSF maintains there is nothing improper about Mr. Laret's roles on the two boards. "Laret fully complied with UC policy in obtaining approvals," UCSF spokesperson Barbara French said in a statement on behalf of Mr. Laret, who declined to be interviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle. Ms. French said Mr. Laret works for the companies during his personal time and is not involved in UCSF's purchasing decisions involving Varian and Nuance products.
3. However, several ethics experts and union officials representing UCSF employees contend Mr. Laret's role on the two boards give the appearance of the conflict, since the companies do business with the medical center and Mr. Laret's primary role on the boards is to maximize the companies' profits. UCSF has given Varian and Nuance nearly $8 million in business since Mr. Laret joined the boards, according to the report.
4. The UC Board of Regents plans Thursday to discuss strengthening its policy on executives' outside activities, including a new policy that would require executives to explain how external roles would support the university. However, the proposal would not apply to Mr. Laret because it would only apply to future cases, not current executives' activities, according to the report.
For more details, read the full San Francisco Chronicle report.
To help navigate the changing waters of revenue cycle management in healthcare, including value-based reimbursement, patients shouldering more financial responsibilities and alternate payment models, Cerner has created a new position senior vice president of revenue cycle management and president of RevWorks, Cerner's revenue management services unit. The Kansas City, Mo.-based company selected Jeff Hurst to fill that role.
Mr. Hurst's appointment is effective Sept. 1. He joins Cerner after spending 19 years with Florida Hospital, part of Altamonte Springs, Fla.-based Adventist Health System, where he most recently was senior vice president of finance, directing all financial and clinical revenue cycle functions. Prior, Mr. Hurst spent 10 years serving in the United States Air Force.
Mr. Hurst and Cerner president Zane Burke spoke with Becker's Hospital Review about the new position, Mr. Hurst's transition from the provider and client side to the vendor side, and the most pressing revenue cycle needs today.
Note: Interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: This is a new position at Cerner, correct?
Zane Burke: It is an additive position at Cerner. We're creating a new role as part of our continued commitment around revenue cycle to bring our clients the best success. We've made a lot of progress in revenue cycle, and the trajectory is very positive. There is still so much to do with clients, whether it's regarding bundled payments, changes in reform from a payer perspective, the business model evolution, and even population health. We continue to grow our talent internally as well as look for strong people externally, and we have the opportunity with Jeff, which is really unique to have someone that has been a partner client of ours. We have a lot of respect for the Adventist Health System as well as the work of FloridaHospital, and the work they've done with us from a development perspective has been very strong and has really benefited all of our clients.
Q: Jeff, how do you plan to use your experience in the provider industry as you move to the vendor side of revenue cycle management?
Jeff Hurst: Over the last several years, or really over the last several decades, the healthcare industry in its entirety has been very fragmented and siloed, whether you're talking physicians and hospitals, ambulatory versus acute, IT versus operational or clinical versus financial. We're really operating in an environment now where connectivity, integration, alignment and partnerships are becoming increasingly important. We've had a fantastic relationship between Cerner and Adventist Health System over the last decade. As Cerner continues to bring value-add solutions to the market, having that end user experience, someone who's really lived revenue cycle on a daily basis, understands the intricacies and details of revenue cycle and really has a vision for the future in mind, it's a perfect partnership between the operational side of the industry and the technology side of the industry in terms of how we bring opportunities and improvementsto market and deliver to the end consumer.
Q: Can you talk more about this partnership between Cerner and Adventist? What were some of the key parts coming out of it?
ZB: Adventist was really one of the pioneers with us around our acute revenue cycle solution at a big scale. An organization like Adventist with over 40 hospitals and with the largest hospital in the country, they were working with us to really fully develop some of the capabilities we scale to larger organizations. Adventist has also been one of the highest performing financial organizations in the country. We've been able to take some of the work they've done to optimize the business operations and make that part of the core solution set. It's a living lab, if you will.
JH: The other thing I would add to that is Cerner is a leader in the healthcare IT space. From an end user client perspective like Adventist, the other advantage beyond just our individual partnership is the fact that Cerner provides value solutions to large, sophisticated health systems across the United States: Advocate, Banner, Memorial Hermann, Intermountain. As the industry is becoming more complex and as change in the industry is moving at a pace and magnitude really at unprecedented levels, our ability on the provider side to leverage a partnership with someone like Cerner and to learn what Cerner is doing with other clients in the space really creates a multiplier effect, in terms of our ability to take not just our internal learnings but learnings they've had from their other leading clients and leverage that.
Q: What are you seeing from clients as their most pressing RCM needs?
JH: It really comes down to two things: transparency from both a consumer and a purchaser standpoint, and simplification. From a transparency standpoint, obviously there are lots of conversations and discussions around transparency how providers are paid for services they provide, whether the value proposition exists with respect to the payment stream in the clinical and experience outcomes, why hospitals charge the prices they charge and whether those make sense from a rational pricing standpoint. As we move into this next evolution and iteration from a consumerism standpoint, I think there's going to be more and more pressure on the provider side which puts more and more pressure and creates more opportunities for Cerner to deliver solutions that allow us to create that transparency that the end customers are seeking from a provider side.
The second piece of that from the simplification standpoint the reality is Florida Hospital todayhas multiple business units, all of which in many cases bill separately and have different C schedules and different contracts in place. From an end user perspective, it becomes very, very complicated and very, very difficult for the patient to ultimately figure out not just how to navigate the clinical side of the industry, but how to navigate the financial side of the industry. This partnership with Cerner has created opportunities for us to try to streamline, simplify and create transparency in the revenue cycle.
ZB: The simple side of me just says the vision of the single bill for the patient at the end of the day, and the ability of our clients to be able to financially track the patient no matter where they are in the system. It's either transparency through a single bill or transparency through being able to track the person through the healthcare system, no matter where they are.
Q: Jeff, what are you most looking forward to about heading to Missouri?
JH: The opportunity with Cerner really for me is the next evolution, next step on my journey. It will give me the opportunity to take everything that I've learned from a provider side, from a client side, and really build upon the success that Cerner already has in the healthcare space. It's a great time to be in healthcare, and Cerner is a great company to be with. I'm really looking forward to the opportunity.
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The International Federation of Health Plans has released its 2015 Comparative Price Report, which aims to highlight the variation in healthcare prices around the world.
The report, released July 19, examines the price of medical procedures, tests, scans and treatments in seven countries. Prices for seven specialty prescription drugs are also included in the survey.
Here are average prescription drug prices from around the world, as stated in the report.
Xarelto (prescribed to prevent or treat blood clots) (30 capsules, 20mg, 30 day supply)
$48 - South Africa
$101 - Spain
$102 - Switzerland
$126 - United Kingdom
$292 - United States
Humira (prescribed to treat rheumatoid arthritis) (one prefilled syringe carton, two syringes, 28 day supply)
$552 - South Africa
$822 - Switzerland
$1,253 - Spain
$1,362 - United Kingdom
$2,669 - United States
Harvoni (prescribed to treat hepatitis C) (28 tablets, 4-week supply)
$16,861 - Switzerland
$18,165 - Spain
$22,554 - United Kingdom
$32,114 - United States
Truvada (prescribed to treat HIV/AIDS) (30 tablets, 30 day supply)
$559 - Spain
$689 - United Kingdom
$906 - Switzerland
$1,301 - United States
Tecfidera (prescribed to treat relapsing multiple sclerosis) (60 capsules, 240 mg, 30 day supply)
$663 - United Kingdom
$1,399 - Spain
$1,855 - Switzerland
$5,089 - United States
Avastin (prescribed to treat certain types of cancer) (400 mg vial)
$470 - United Kingdom
$956 - South Africa
$1,534 - Spain
$1,752 - Switzerland
$3,930 - United States
OxyContin (prescribed to treat severe ongoing pain) (60 tablets, 20 mg, 30+ day supply)
$36 - Spain
$84 - South Africa
$95 - Switzerland
$265 - United States
$590 - United Kingdom
The report also examined the price of medical procedures, tests, scans and treatments. Here are average prices for a few of these, as stated in the report.
Angiogram
$191 - Switzerland
$240 - Spain
$270 - Australia
$1,089 - New Zealand
$1,164 - United States
$2,149 - United Kingdom
MRI
$130- Spain
$215 - Australia
$455 - South Africa
$503 - Switzerland
$788 - United Kingdom
$811 - New Zealand
$1,119 - United States
Colonoscopy
$372 - Australia
$589 - Spain
$604 - Switzerland
$632 - South Africa
$1,301 - United States
$1,421 - New Zealand
$3,059 - United Kingdom
Prices examined in the study included those from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom and United States. The data for the report was gathered from participating iFHP member organizations in each country. Prices for the United States came from more than 370 million medical claims and more than 170 million pharmacy claims that reflect prices negotiated and paid to healthcare providers.
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The following healthcare mergers, acquisitions and general partnerships took place or were announced in the past week.
1. McLeod Heath to acquire Clarendon Health System
The board of Manning, S.C.-based Clarendon Health System finalized the agreement with Florence, S.C.-based McLeod Health to merge the two facilities.
2. Washington Health System, UPMC strike cardiac surgery partnership
Officials at Washington (Pa.) Health System announced their intent to partner with the Pittsburgh-based UPMC Heart and Vascular Institute to expand cardiac services in the area, effective this month.
3. Evolent Health is acquiring the majority of Valence Health
Arlington, Va.-based Evolent Health entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Valence Health in Chicago for approximately $145 million.
4. Princeton HealthCare, University of Pennsylvania Health System explore partnership
Plainsboro, N.J.-based Princeton HealthCare System and the University of Pennsylvania Health System in Philadelphia announced their intent to pursue a partnership.
5. Little River Healthcare to partner with Memorial Hospital of Texas County
Rockdale, Texas-based Little River Healthcare agreed to provide administrative and management services to Memorial Hospital of Texas County in Guymon, Oklahoma.
6. Seton Hall, Hackensack Meridian Health cinch site for new medical school
South Orange, N.J.-based SetonHallUniversity and Hackensack (N.J.) Meridian Health in signed a long-term lease agreement to lease 16 acres and two buildings on the former Hoffmann-La Roche biomedical campus to serve as the home of their new health and medical sciences campus.
7. HealthSouth, Novant plan to build inpatient rehabilitation hospital
Birmingham, Ala.-based HealthSouth and Novant Health in Winston-Salem, N.C. formed a joint venture to file a Certificate of Need application to build a 68-bed, freestanding inpatient rehabilitation hospital in Winston-Salem.
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State regulators approved the sale of Waterbury (Conn.) Hospital to Los Angeles-based Prospect Medical Holdings for $43.3 million, according to documents released by the Attorney General's office.
Prospect will purchase Waterbury Hospital, its outpatient practices, visiting nurse services and its shares in the for-profit Waterbury Heart Center and regional cancer center. Prospect officials plan to spend roughly $55 million at the property over the next several years.
The Connecticut Attorney General's Office put 15 stipulations on the sale, including that Prospect must obtain court approval for any charitable funds and must file reports detailing the net profit made from the sale.
Documents filed in the Office of Health Care Access said Prospect was not expected to obtain any net profits on the sale. Instead, it will assume $27 million in unfunded nurses' pension liabilities and another $12 million in liabilities for a cash-balance pension plan for other employees, according to a report in the Hartford Courant.
The Office of Health Care Access will continue to track Prospect's promised capital funding and will regularly review the organization's cost savings strategies.
The U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of a former employee's lawsuit alleging Miami-based Sun Healthcare Group committed Medicare fraud, according to documents released by the court.
The court's decision said that the case brought forth by ex-employee Margaret Jallali lacked specific allegations of a false claim for government reimbursement.
In 2015, Ms. Jallai filed a lawsuit against Sun Healthcare alleging that employees changed patient records and partook in other improper documentation practices. She also alleged that the organization violated the Anti-Kickback Statute by paying employees for falsifying records.
The government declined to take part in the lawsuit.
On appeal, Ms. Jallali argued that U.S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams ruled erroneously. She also said that the court should not ignore testimonies from former employees detailing the organization's misdeeds.
In response, Sun Healthcare argued that Ms. Jallali's allegations were insufficiently supported.
According to the opinion released by the 11th Circuit Court, Ms. Jallali's alleged personal knowledge of Sun Healthcare committing billing fraud was not enough to allow the case to go forward.
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State officials have cleared Taunton, Mass.-based Morton Hospital and a contracted employee of any wrongdoing after a patient killed two people and injured five just hours after his discharge, according to the Boston Herald.
Arthur DaRosa was brought to the Morton emergency room on the evening of May 9 and discharged the following morning. That night, he stabbed two people in their home, killing one. He then drove four miles, crashed into a Macy's, and attacked others, killing one more victim. Mr. DaRosa was later shot by an off-duty deputy sheriff.
State and federal officials launched investigations, which focused on Morton Hospital and state-contracted emergency services providers who conduct mental health evaluations of Medicare patients.
State officials concluded that the state-contracted clinician who treated Mr. DaRosa was properly licensed and did a "thorough and comprehensive evaluation" of Mr. DaRosa's mental health.
However, the federal review of the hospital, which was conducted in May, cited numerous issues at Morton, including that none of the 10 social workers there at the time were credentialed by Morton. The investigation also cites various other failures, including that the hospital "failed to ensure quality care was provided" and lacked oversight of the social workers.
Federal officials did a follow-up evaluation of MortonHospital in early July and determined it was in compliance with federal standards, according to the report.
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The gunman charged with killing two people Sunday at Parrish Medical Center in Titusville, Fla., is claiming mental illness, according to an Associated Press report published by WWSB.
Harley Gutin, an attorney for the 29-year-old suspect, David Owens of Titusville, said in the report his client is severely mentally ill and incompetent to stand trial.
Authorities told CNN Mr. Owens entered a patient's room at PMC early Sunday and opened fire, killing an elderly female patient and a hospital employee in what appears to be a random attack.
Two security guards restrained the shooter moments after he opened fire around 2 a.m. Sunday. The guards were not armed and held the suspect down until police arrived to take him into custody, according to CNN.
The victims are 88-year-old patient Cynthia Zingsheim and hospital employee Carrie Rouzer, who was sitting in Ms. Zingsheim's room, the Associated Press reports. As of Monday, Mr. Owens was being held without bond in the Brevard County Jail on two counts of first-degree premeditated murder.
Mr. Gutin said in the Associated Press report his client's family had been making efforts in recent weeks to get Mr. Owens long-term mental healthcare. According to WFTV, Mr. Owens was awaiting a court-ordered mental evaluation and has been ordered to get help at least five times in the last 10 years.
Mr. Gutin did not know how Mr. Owens was able to get a gun.
Michael Gleiber, MD, is a spine surgeon in Boca Raton, Fla. He operates a concierge spine practice focusing on patients with simple and complex back pain issues. He is also a brand ambassador for Rolls-Royce.
In an interview with Forbes, Dr. Gleiber discussed his strategy behind becoming a brand ambassador and staying active on social media. As a lifelong auto enthusiast, Dr. Gleiber was excited for the opportunity to partner with Rolls-Royce.
To have a personal brand name that an audience can relate to is quite unique and special to me, but I dont use it in the same way as other professionals in other industries would leverage it, said Dr. Gleiber in the report. I make a concerted effort never to use my influence on social media to impact a patients decision making.
When people ask for medical advice via social media channels, Dr. Gleiber steers them toward professional societies such as the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons website to gather additional information. He uses social media to build trust with his audience and provide objective analysis on big stories.
But the personal brand and social media presence dont necessarily translate to more business.
What I do best is take care of patients from around the world who have serious problems with their spine, said Dr. Gleiber in the report. As long as I continue to practice medicine, this will always take priority over personal branding.
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Esmond Birnie has warned of zero growth by the end of the year
Northern Ireland will just about avoid a post-Brexit recession, but remain the UK's poorest region, it was claimed today.
Growth will reach just 0.2% in 2017 and could even slow to zero, PwC NI's UK economic outlook said.
The business advisers said expansion had already slowed from around 3% to 2% ahead of last month's vote to leave the EU.
But now UK growth is likely to decline to 1.6% this year and 0.6% next year.
And growth here in Northern Ireland will be 1% this year - before slumping to 0.2% next year.
That will leave it trailing behind other UK regions, with Scotland tipped for 0.3% growth and Wales for 0.4%.
PwC NI chief economist Dr Esmond Birnie said we could even face zero growth towards the end of this year and the beginning of 2017.
But he added: "Overall UK economic activity is projected to recover gradually later in 2017 as the immediate post-referendum shock starts to fade.
"This scenario suggests that the UK and Northern Ireland would avoid recession, although there are still significant uncertainties around this view."
The slowdown would be a result in a reduction in business investment, particularly from overseas - but any slump was unlikely to amount to the severe recession of the early 1980s or 2008.
Dr Birnie added: "The weaker pound should also boost net exports, which should move from being a drag on overall UK GDP growth in 2015 to a positive contributor in 2017."
Consumer spending could slow down as a result of the weaker pound pushing up import prices, he said.
Renewable energy giant Lightsource has plans to build solar parks for some of Northern Ireland's biggest employers, its boss Nick Boyle has said.
Mr Boyle told the Belfast Telegraph that it hoped to enter into arrangements with at least two major firms here in coming months. Earlier this year, the company opened Crookedstone Farm, a solar park built with Belfast International Airport to meet around 30% of its electricity needs. Mr Boyle, who is from Lisburn and now lives in Saintfield, set up Lightsource Renewable Energy six years ago.
The London-based firm now employs around 300 people. And while Northern Ireland isn't famed for its sunny climate, Mr Boyle said solar panels required daylight rather than the sun.
Northern Ireland medical equipment firm Hospital Services Ltd (HSL) has taken over a business whose parent company was at the centre of allegations into breaches of procurement procedures.
And HSL said the purchase would ensure it continued its growth - particularly following the uncertainty created by the Brexit vote.
Endosurgical Ireland is currently in liquidation following the allegations made against it last year in an RTE investigation.
Now its Northern Ireland subsidiary, which is based on Belmont Road, has been bought by HSL.
HSL chief executive Dominic Walsh said: "We now have a very strong presence in Northern Ireland and Ireland with our Belfast headquarters and offices in Sandyford, Dublin, both of which have highly experienced and knowledgeable teams.
"As we operate across both jurisdictions, we have a very focused business plan to ensure that we are able to continue our growth, particularly in this time of uncertainty following the Brexit vote, and ultimately have ambitions to further extend our customer base in Great Britain in due course."
Abbreviated accounts for Endosurgical NI showed net liabilities suffered a loss of over 55,000 in the financial year ending December 2014.
The same year, the company employed seven staff with an average salary of almost 44,000.
A spokeswoman said: "Endosurgical NI Ltd was not part of the RTE investigation and the underlying normalised trading business is and remains profitable."
The deal will save the jobs at Endosurgical, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Eurosurgical Ireland. Bosses at HSL say they hope the deal will allow the firm to up turnover from 10m to 18m.
It is also hoped the takeover will allow the firm to grow its workforce from 33 employees in the UK and Ireland to 56.
HSL was bought out by management in October last year. The deal was supported by private equity investment management company, the Foresight Group, which invested 4.5m. The company was established in Northern Ireland in 1962 and branched out to the Republic the following year.
Mr Walsh said: "Following our MBO last year, the Foresight Group has proven to be a supportive investor in our business. From the outset, we planned to develop the business significantly through strategic acquisitions and organic growth.
"We have a very clear vision for our business and this acquisition has provided us with an accelerated growth opportunity at exactly the right time.
"The purchase of Endosurgical (NI) Ltd complements HSL's existing portfolio and will give us an unparalleled range of surgical equipment, medical devices and consumables."
HSL supplies equipment for radiology, ophthalmic, endoscopy and surgery. It also sells surgical gloves and instruments for keyhole surgery.
Arm Holdings, Britain's most successful technology company, is on course to double its workforce after being snapped up in a 24bn deal by Japan's SoftBank.
SoftBank pledged to embark on a major recruitment drive and hold on to ARM's existing management team following its swoop for the Cambridge-based firm, which supplies technology for Apple's iPhone.
The deal was branded "one of the largest ever from Asia into the UK" by Chancellor Philip Hammond and valued the technology firm at 1700p per share, a 43% premium on Friday's closing share price of 1189p.
The combined group hopes the acquisition will allow it to seize opportunities in the "internet of things" - giving everyday objects a connection to the internet.
Stuart Chambers, chairman of ARM, said: "SoftBank has given assurances that it will invest considerably in the business, including doubling the UK headcount over the next five years and maintaining ARM's unique culture and business model."
However, experts have warned that the deal could lead to a "brain drain" if ARM Holdings' businesses are moved out of the UK.
Analysts also expect more British firms to become foreign takeover targets, with the plunge in the value of the pound making UK firms cheaper following the Brexit vote.
The announcement comes as an early test for Prime Minister Theresa May, who has vowed to defend British companies from foreign buyers.
But Mr Hammond said the tie-up between ARM Holdings and SoftBank would "guarantee to double the number of jobs in ARM and turn this great British company into a global phenomenon".
He added: "Just three weeks after the referendum decision, it shows that Britain has lost none of its allure to international investors. Britain is open for business - and open to foreign investment.
"Softbank's decision confirms that Britain remains one of the most attractive destinations globally for investors."
As part of the deal, ARM Holdings will keep its headquarters in Cambridge while efforts will be made to grow ARM's workforce outside of the UK.
The firm, which employs 3,000 people in the UK, saw its results come in ahead of expectations in April as pre-tax profits lifted 14% to 137.5m in the first quarter year-on-year, while revenues also stepped up 22% to 276.4m.
ARM's directors will recommend the deal is accepted by ARM shareholders.
Masayoshi Son, chairman and chief executive of SoftBank, said the investment marked its strong commitment to the UK and the "competitive advantage" of the science and technology industries in Cambridge.
However, Mark Skilton, a professor of practice at Warwick Business School, warned that it could lead to a loss of skills and knowledge from the UK.
He added: "The concern of brain drain and ARM business moving from the UK must be considered in this equation based on its know-how and leadership in chip design."
A growing number of Northern Ireland businesses are likely to be the targets of takeovers by European and US companies in the coming months as the pound continues to weaken, it is claimed.
An "increase in acquisitions" by companies outside the UK can be expected, attracted by a slump in the value of sterling in the wake of Brexit, according to John-George Willis, head of the corporate department at Belfast law firm Tughans.
"What we will see in the short to medium term is a heightened level of interest, where companies are running their eye over targets," he said.
"I anticipate that we will see firms in Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, acquired by European and US companies... given the drop in sterling."
His comments come as ARM Holdings, the UK's most successful technology company, was snapped up in a 24bn deal by Japan's SoftBank.
"It is cheaper for companies based in the eurozone and the US (to buy companies in the UK) - the forecasts are sterling will continue to drop," Mr Willis said.
"You can expect US and eurozone companies will be running their eyes over Northern Ireland."
In the period since the EU referendum on June 23 - less than a month ago - the value of sterling against the US dollar has plummeted from $1.48 to $1.32.
And against the euro, the pound dropped from 1.31 on June 23 to just under 1.20 yesterday.
Mr Willis said takeover deals for Northern Ireland businesses could be largely positive.
"The upside is that you have investment going into businesses here," he said.
"Very rarely are businesses taken over here at a substantial price, where there is employment restructuring. Employee numbers will increase, and they will be stronger as part of a larger organisation."
However, he said the "downside" is that it "further cements the case that we are part of a branch economy".
"Someone could take a decision in Dusseldorf or Chicago to restructure operations worldwide."
Meanwhile, ARM Holdings's new owner SoftBank pledged to embark on a major recruitment drive and hold onto the existing management team following its swoop for the Cambridge-based firm, which supplies technology for Apple's iPhone.
Some recent European takeovers of Northern Ireland firms include Belfast medical software firm PathXL, which was bought over by Dutch technology giant Philips last month.
Mr Willis' comments come amid reports that the sale of energy giant Gaelectric's cross-border wind farm portfolio has come under pressure amid Brexit uncertainty.
According to the Sunday Business Post, sources close to potential bidders of the portfolio - whose wind farms are said to be worth more than 200m - said issues around the volatility of the pound was impacting price.
But Mr Willis questioned whether anyone in the US or eurozone would be put off by Brexit.
"I'd question why a potential buyer based in a euro territory or dollar territory would get cold feet at such a purchase in relation to the Northern Ireland assets, given the drop in the level of sterling."
He also said the uncertainty among businesses here post-Brexit was "temporary".
Prime Minister Theresa May has told Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau the UK wants a close trading relationship with his country after Brexit.
A trade deal between Canada and the European Union has been concluded but is yet to come into force and Mrs May said the UK would remain a strong supporter of the agreement while it remains part of the bloc.
She added that the UK would want a close relationship to continue after leaving the EU.
Downing Street said the Canadian PM offered his "firm support" during a phone call to congratulate Mrs May on entering Number 10.
A Downing Street spokeswoman said: "Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada called the Prime Minister this evening to congratulate her on her appointment.
"The Prime Minister set out her vision for an engaged, outward-looking UK and made clear that Britain remains fully open for business.
"They agreed that Britain and Canada share an especially close relationship and they committed to working together to sustain this as the UK leaves the European Union.
"They discussed the importance of trade between our countries, noting their shared view that more needs to be done to spread the benefits of trade to everyone and to address the concerns of some about the impact of globalisation.
"In this context, the Prime Minister underlined that the UK would continue to be a strong supporter of the trade agreement between the EU and Canada while we remain a member of the EU and that we would want a close trading relationship with Canada outside the EU. Prime Minister Trudeau offered Canada's firm support as we set out on the path forwards.
"They ended by looking forward to meeting at the G20 meeting in China in September."
Premium
Margaret Canning Opinion Conservatives have gone back to traditional territory with a mini-budget that just might cost the party the next election
Many of the measures in Kwasi Kwartengs first big statement as Chancellor had been trailed in advance changes to stamp duty, the cancellation of both the rise in National Insurance and the rise in corporation tax, and bringing forward a cut in the basic rate of income tax to 19 pence.
One-time Conservative leadership candidate Michael Gove bears similarities with Shakespeare's scheming Richard III, actor Ralph Fiennes has said.
Fiennes stars in Shakespeare's history play at the Almeida Theatre, where he plays the villainous Richard III who manoeuvres his way to the crown despite saying he has no interest in ruling.
Asked which political figure is most like Richard, Fiennes said: "Michael Gove is closest because all those protestations about not being fit, 'I could never lead, it's not in my DNA to lead' - it's classic Richard."
But he insisted his version of the character was not exactly a Gove or a Boris Johnson: "It's my Richard."
Artistic director of the Almeida Theatre Rupert Goold said: "No one expects it to be Richard, so in that sense he is more Michael Gove.
"But clearly we still, as in Shakespeare's time, live in a period of big beasts."
Fiennes, 53, said the period of post-Brexit political uncertainty and division had given the production added pertinence and changed the audience's reaction.
He said: "I think in most Shakespeare plays that deal with power, whether they're the history plays or the Roman plays, you can always probably, broadly speaking, find a parallel somewhere in the world to what's going on, but it's quite rare that you actually are close to a political crisis, political uncertainty.
"And of course we went into this not knowing what the referendum result was going to be, and so when it was as divisive as it was and we saw all these political players making a play for leadership - Boris Johnson, Michael Gove - that was immediately, the audience suddenly, it changed. Not through our doing but just through events that were happening around.
"And suddenly it became full of a pertinence that perhaps it hadn't had before."
Goold added: "That was one of the things this summer, I really felt, when you have instability, hysteria sets in and also events move incredibly quickly - and that's how Richard works."
The play opened in June, shortly before the EU referendum.
On July 21, it will be broadcast live in cinemas around the world.
Fiennes said he hoped the live screening would preserve the "intimacy" of the performance.
Watching the live broadcast could be like watching Glastonbury Festival on television, Goold said.
He explained: "It reminds me a bit of Glastonbury - which most of us watch on TV now anyway. So you're aware of the audience and the excitement of the crowd, but you're closer than the crowd are."
Police are investigating the rape of a teenage boy as he walked home in west Belfast.
Police investigating the rape of a teenage boy as he walked home in west Belfast in the early hours of Saturday morning have arrested a man.
The 16-year-old was making his way from the Falls Park, where he left his friends at around 1am, when he was approached by a man who started shouting at him to "come here".
Terrified, the young victim tried to hurry away but was overpowered by the man who sexually assaulted him on a pathway near Ardmonagh Family Centre in Turf Lodge.
Speaking to Belfast Live, the teenager's sister said he had been left "severely traumatised". "He had just left his friends and was walking home by himself," she said.
"The man had been following him and shouting 'come here, come here' - my brother was scared.
"He just kept walking on because obviously he didn't know him and the fellow kept shouting at him, but my brother is shy, he wouldn't just stop and talk to anyone.
"Then the next thing he knew the fellow came running up behind him and grabbed him by the back of the T-shirt and trailed him into the bushes, and pulled down his trousers.
"He was crying his eyes out, he ended up managing to get away and ran home, and the man was shouting after him, he was in a terrible state," she added.
Following the sexual assault, the victim rushed home in a distressed state and police were contacted straight away.
Officers had to take him back to the scene as he could not remember exactly where the attack happened.
It is believed an item of clothing, possibly belonging to the rapist, was retrieved from the scene by police and has been taken for analysis.
The attacker is described as having cropped dark hair which was longer at the top and a slight beard, and is aged in his late 30s to early 40s.
Yesterday, the PSNI said officers investigating the report of the serious sexual assault had arrested a man aged in his 30s and taken him into custody.
Detective Inspector Zoe McKee said: "I would like to thank the local community for their continued help and support during this investigation.
"I would urge anyone who has any further information about this incident to contact detectives on the non-emergency number 101, quoting reference number 158 16/07/16."
SDLP West Belfast councillor Tim Attwood said the local community was shocked by the "horrendous incident" and he urged people to assist police with their enquiries.
The SDLP's Dr Alasdair McDonnell warned that the uncertainty about the border could erode the fragile political settlement
MPs have clashed over fears about Northern Ireland's border with the Republic of Ireland in the wake of the vote to leave the EU.
The SDLP's Dr Alasdair McDonnell warned that the uncertainty about the border could erode the fragile political settlement and lead to renewed dissident and paramilitary activity.
Shadow Northern Ireland minister Stephen Pound insisted that a Brexit would result in a "division" between the two countries.
But DUP MP Sammy Wilson said concerns about border controls were just another scare story "without any substance".
In a Westminster Hall debate in Parliament, Dr McDonnell stressed the need for the UK Government to guarantee at least one Northern Ireland representative at the Brexit negotiating table.
Northern Ireland may also have to make "common cause" with Scotland and Gibraltar, whose populations also voted to remain with the EU, he added.
The Belfast South MP said: "I believe that Northern Ireland's interests cannot receive the full recognition or the full protection they deserve unless Northern Ireland has at least one, preferably two, seats at the negotiating table as we go forward."
He added: "Further uncertainty around what the border will look like in 10 years' time leaves us vulnerable to those that will seek to take advantage of that uncertainty and weakened state, including dissident and other paramilitaries.
"And I don't make that as a threat - I make that as an observation."
Labour's Mr Pound, a pro-Remain campaigner, said the Government must accept the "dark clouds over Northern Ireland".
He said: "If anyone thinks for a moment that the history of Ireland somehow means that there will not be a hard border, a soft border, a customs border, a tariff border, a physical border - there will be a border.
"There cannot be a negotiation when one party has decided to leave the relationship. That is the reality."
But Mr Wilson said there had so far been no political appetite for new border controls.
The East Antrim MP said: "This is one of the scare stories that was used by those who have tried to persuade people in Northern Ireland that leaving the EU is not in their interests.
"Again we have heard the same rhetoric but there is not substance to it.
"The Irish Government has said they do not wish to have border controls, the British government has said they do not wish to have border controls, the Northern Ireland Assembly has said they don't wish to have border controls and we already have seen through history how the common travel area has worked effectively to ensure that there is no need for border controls."
Home Office Minister Robert Goodwill said the UK and the Republic of Ireland share a common objective of preserving the common travel area and avoiding a hard border.
He said: "It has been agreed that the UK and Ireland would work together on priority areas within the British-Irish relationship in the forthcoming negotiations on the future relationship between the UK and the EU.
"The Government will ensure the interests of all parts of the UK are protected."
A campaign has been launched to have a treasure of the north coast kept open to the public.
St Gobban's in Portbradden is believed to be the smallest church in Ireland.
Built in the 1950s, the tiny non-denominational place of worship close to the Giant's Causeway is just 11ft 4in x 6ft 9in (3.45m x 2.06m).
It has hosted dozens of marriage services over the years and boasts breathtaking views of Whitepark Bay to Rathlin Island and the Irish Sea towards Scotland.
The church, a house and boathouse - owned by retired clergyman and teacher the Rev Con Auld, a former mayor of North Down - was put on the market and is believed to have been sold earlier this year.
Since then a 'Keep Out' sign has appeared on a wooden fence, sparking concern among the local community they may lose what is viewed as popular a visitor attraction.
There is also evidence of refurbishment work at the property.
The community have set up a campaign to keep the church open to visitors, and have even approached the National Trust to request that it buys the property to run it as a tourist attraction. Blogger Nevin Taggart is keen to find a way to keep the church accessible.
"The clachan at Portbradden is one of the tourism gems on the north coast of Co Antrim," he said.
"It nestles in a small gorge at the western end of Whitepark Bay and is well sheltered from the prevailing Westerlies.
"It would be a great shame if such a magical part of our local heritage was hidden from public view.
"It's been very much appreciated by local people as well as by visitors from distant shores."
He said previous owner the Rev Auld had a collection box in the church that raised over 1,000 each year for charity, which he believes shows the building does attract tourists.
Since Mr Taggart started his campaign he said he had received responses from scores of people expressing concern at it no longer being open.
A former soldier facing prosecution over the fatal shooting of an Official IRA commander more than 40 years ago has branded the justice system a disgrace.
Two ex-paratroopers could be dragged before the courts over the death of Joe McCann.
McCann, one of the Official IRA's most prominent activists, was shot by soldiers in disputed circumstances in 1972.
Three years ago, a report by the now-defunct Historical Enquiries Team (HET) concluded the killing was not justified.
The two former paratroopers cooperated with the HET's investigation and believed the matter was closed.
But they have been told that files have now been passed to the Public Prosecution Service (PPS).
The men, who served with the 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment, could be ordered to stand trial - and face jail if convicted.
It has led to claims of a two-tier justice system.
One of the men, Soldier C, is a grandfather from Hampshire, England, who served with distinction for 23 years.
"How can this be justice?" he asked. "It is a disgrace. I was doing my duty in Northern Ireland, trying to protect the public and keep the peace. Now I am being thrown to the wolves."
McCann (24) was commander of the Official IRA's third Belfast battalion.
His unit's seizure of Inglis bakery in the Markets area during internment became part of republican folklore.
In February 1972, McCann was involved in the attempted assassination of Ulster Unionist politician John Taylor.
He was regarded by the security forces as a dangerous terrorist.
McCann was shot by soldiers in disputed circumstances in Joy Street in the Markets area, close to his home, on April 15, 1972.
A HET report from January 2013 said he was shot several times while unarmed as he ran away from police. An RUC investigation conducted at the time concluded with the soldiers being told they would face no further action.
But in 2010, the troops were traced by the HET and were interviewed under caution in London.
A third who lives abroad did not cooperate.
The PPS confirmed the original decision not to prosecute was currently being reviewed.
But the threat of prosecution has been strongly criticised. Philip Barden, from Devonshires Solicitors in London, who is acting for the soldiers, said that it was further evidence of a two-tier approach to justice.
"Former soldiers who served in Northern Ireland in the 1970s see that there is one law for the terrorist, who walks away, and another for the soldiers, who were only there to protect civilians and who are being investigated and prosecuted," he added.
Mr Barden also told how the soldiers would fight to clear their names.
"They are accused of killing a murderer who was on the run and was an Official IRA leader," he added. "They acted lawfully, as has been upheld before."
Comparisons have been drawn with the case of John Downey, who escaped facing the courts for the 1982 Hyde Park bombing after being given a letter stating he was immune from prosecution. Downey denies involvement in the attack.
Ulster Unionist MP Tom Elliott said there was a reluctance to pursue republicans over past crimes.
"It highlights the unfairness that there is within the system," he added.
"I have been at several HET reviews with families, and I don't remember any of them questioning Sinn Fein or the republican movement.
"Yet they are quite open about asking soldiers to cooperate, and when they do cooperate this is what happens."
DUP MP Ian Paisley said justice had been turned on its head.
"The soldiers were trying to uphold the law," he explained. "This turns them into villains, and the villain into a victim.
A spokesman for the PPS told the Belfast Telegraph:"A review of the original decision not to prosecute in the case relating to the fatal shooting of Mr Joseph McCann in 1972 is currently being conducted.
"This follows a referral of the case to the Director of Public Prosecutions by the Attorney General of Northern Ireland."
A holiday turned to tragedy when 21-year-old Newtownabbey man Alan Drennan died in controversial circumstances hours after arriving in Ibiza. Here, his heartbroken father, Alan, who still weeps every day for his lost son, says friends and family will today mark the first anniversary of the death by dedicating a bench and releasing lanterns in his memory.
The heartbroken family of young Newtownabbey man Alan Drennan, who died a year ago today in controversial circumstances in Ibiza, are to hold a special memorial service this morning in tribute to their son, followed by a poignant lantern release tonight.
The 21-year-old's parents, Alan (56) and Verona (53), and his brothers, Lee (24) and 16-year-old Karl, will be joined by other family members and friends as they mark the first anniversary of Alan's death by dedicating three benches at the shore in Jordanstown.
Tonight, many who knew the well-loved young man are expected to gather again on the shorefront to release lanterns in tribute to him. Two trees are also to be planted in the area in tribute to the young mechanic.
A year on, it remains unclear how Alan died. Last night, his father revealed that an independent international organisation that specialises in investigating cases of police brutality abroad was looking into the circumstances.
Alan, a fun-loving, kind young man who was passionate about music, was found dead in his hotel room in Ibiza less than 24 hours after arriving there for a holiday.
Friends alleged that he was beaten by police when he was arrested on arrival following an incident on the flight to the Spanish island.
Despite investigations by local police and the PSNI, and two post-mortems in Spain and Dublin, the exact cause of death remains unknown.
Spanish police denied allegations of brutality, but a post-mortem in the Republic confirmed Alan had suffered injuries to his head.
While he welcomed the chance of an investigation, Alan's devastated dad said last night that nothing would bring his beloved son back.
The distraught father added that not a day had gone by in the past year without him shedding a tear.
He explained that the entire family were still struggling to find a way to carry on without Alan, and that the young man's mother had found the loss of her son unbearable.
"It has been a terrible year," Alan said. "You don't realise how precious something is until you lose it. I wouldn't wish what we are going through on anyone.
"Every single day, all you think about is that he is not here, that he is not with you. We miss him so much. It was my birthday in May, and it was the worst day of my life. I cried my heart out.
"Verona is in a terrible way, God love her. She just can't get her head around it at all. It is a terrible thing to be lying in bed at night listening to your wife crying, and yet there is nothing that you can do about it.
"I know that people say that time is a healer, but it isn't helping us. I shed a tear for Alan every single day and miss him every single day."
Around 600 mourners packed St Dorothea's Parish Church for Alan's funeral, including hundreds of friends of the young man. The turnout was testament to the regard in which he was held.
During the service, a moving tribute from Alan's brother, Lee, was read out by the Rev Nigel Kirkpatrick. It included the following heartfelt and touching sentiments: "The support has been phenomenal. One of the hardest things in life is losing a loved one, especially when they have been there throughout your whole life.
"I recently heard a speech that summed up my brother's legacy perfectly to me. Every man's heart one day beats its final beat, his lungs breathe their final breath and if what that man did in his life makes the blood pulse through the body of others and makes them believe deeper in something larger than life, then his essence, his spirit will be immortalised. That was my brother -he touched so many of you."
Alan said that, as a father, he has always believed in old-fashioned values and brought his boys up to have good manners. He added that while his son was fun-loving, he was also hugely caring and respectful.
Reinforcing the point, he told how his son had stopped to save a man's life just months before he himself died. "He was coming home from work on the Boucher Road in Belfast when he saw all these cars swerving on the West Link and he saw a man in the middle of the road," he explained.
"Alan stopped and brought him to the Royal Victoria Hospital. Apparently, he had been suffering from a diabetic fit. Alan came home and didn't tell anyone about it, but the next thing it was all over Facebook as the man appealed to try and find the Good Samaritan who helped him. That's the only reason we know about what he did that day.
"Alan was a wee raker and the joker in the pack, but he was also a sensible lad, and people would have come to him with their problems. There was no badness in him, and I am so proud of him."
Mr Drennan revealed that while his family had received the full report last December on the post-mortem carried out in Dublin, they could not bring themselves to read it.
He said that how Alan died was too much for the family to think about, although he did welcome the possibility of an investigation.
"My wife begged me not to open the results and we haven't," he told the Belfast Telegraph. "We know he had injuries, and we just can't deal with that right now.
"An independent body in England is looking at it for us, but it is not going to change anything. Hopefully, though, it will highlight what is going on over there, as no one deserves that."
Mr Drennan explained that Alan cancelled the holiday, before his friends persuaded him to change his mind at the last minute.
His 10 pals were all seated together at the front of the plane, while Alan was at the back because he had booked late.
On board the flight, the boys enjoyed a bit of a drink, and Alan was going back and forward to his friends up at the front of the plane.
His dad said: "There was a few drinks taken and a bit of craic, and when the plane landed the pilot asked everyone to remain seated and asked Alan to get off the plane on his own and to meet the police.
"They took him away and when he was released later that night he had injuries and told his friends the police had beaten him.
"We do have statements from two people he shared a taxi with who saw the state he was in. I just feel so bad that I wasn't there to protect him."
Police in Spain denied touching Alan, and the post-mortem conducted there indicated that the young man had died of organ failure.
Now, as his heartbroken parents continue to mourn his loss, they are focusing on creating a special memorial to their son.
Their local council is supplying three benches that will be dedicated today - one in memory of Alan, another, at his family's request, to be dedicated to the Kevin Bell Repatriation Trust that brought his body home, and the third for anyone who has lost a loved one.
Two trees and plaques will also be planted in November - one in memory of Alan and the other in memory of Kevin Bell.
The Kevin Bell Trust was set up by Newry man Colin Bell in memory of his son, Kevin (26), who died in a hit and run in New York in 2013.
To date, it has helped bring home the bodies of more than 70 Irish people who died overseas.
Mr Drennan also revealed that Alan's brothers and his friends had so far raised 13,000 for the trust.
He added: "We wanted a bench to remember Kevin as well. We will be holding a service to dedicate the benches at 11am and a prayer service tonight at 7.30pm, when we will also be letting lanterns off in memory of Alan.
"Even doing something like that kills you because he's not there. We just miss him so much."
Northern Ireland's hottest day of the year so far caused some to go to extreme lengths to cool down as they turned on a fire hydrant in Belfast - prompting a warning from NI Water.
On Tuesday temperatures soared to 29C in parts of the country.
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Flooding was caused in the Laganbank Road area at the back of the Waterfront Hall in Belfast due to a fire hydrant being turned on.
NI Water said a team was dispatched to repair the damage and restore the hydrant.
A spokesman issued a warning saying that it can have "serious implications" for customers.
NI Water said in a statement: "Some may regard this activity as harmless fun on a warm day, but fire hydrant abuse can have serious implications for customers, who may be left with low or zero water pressure, or even worse the Fire Service may find that water pressure is insufficient to deal with a fire.
"We would appeal to local community leaders and political representatives who have supported us in the past to continue to do so, and we would encourage the whole community to take a stand against fire hydrant abuse, which has the potential to cause so much damage. Vandalism should be reported to the PSNI or to Waterline on 03457 440088.
"Fire hydrant abuse is an offence under Article 236 of the 2006 Water and Sewerage Services Order, and carries a fine of up to 2,500. In addition, if the hydrant is damaged in any way, then this constitutes a separate offence of Criminal Damage for which the maximum penalty is a fine of 5,000 and/or a prison sentence of up to two years."
The pallets the police were able to save. Pic PSNI
Police have apologised over a post on Facebook about the attempted theft of pallets from a Newtownabbey business.
Last week the PSNI appealed to young "scallywag firebugs" to contact its officers over an attempt to steal pallets from a Newtownabbey business.
Officers attended to a report of suspicious activity in the Longlands area close to the Abbey Centre shopping centre.
They caught a youth at the scene while others managed to evade capture.
However, they left behind their coats and an expensive smartphone.
Police urged their owners to contact officers - before they are able to access the information held on the phone - in a post with the hash tag "keeping pallets safe."
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In the early hours of Friday morning, an officer wrote on Facebook : "Tonight we got a call from a concerned member of the public in The Longlands area.
"A number of young scallywags were seen attempting to steal pallets from a local business.
"We managed to catch up with at least one of the young boys and he will be dealt with accordingly. Although pallets are seen by some as just bits of wood, they are quite costly to businesses to replace and its usually a local person owns that business."
The officer added: "A number of the the firebugs did however get away.
"Theyll be feeling the cold tonight though as they left behind the coats their Mammy bought them for Christmas. One of them even left behind an expensive smart phone. If anyone would like to come forward and claim their belongings we would be very very very keen to speak with you! (Before we go through your phone)."
Hundreds responded to the post on the social media site. Many were quick to point out the use of the language chosen to describe the youths and others questioned the police response to Eleventh Night bonfires and how so many pallets are found to burn on them.
Yesterday the police apologised.
An officer wrote: "It is clear this post has got plenty of people talking.
"Firstly, we would like to apologise for the language we used - it was never our intention to cause offence. We were responding to a report of theft and took the opportunity to use the power of social media to help us identify the owners of the property left behind.
"We are here to keep everyone safe and when crimes are reported to us we will investigate however there is learning for us here too and we aim to do better next time. We appreciate those who follow us on Facebook and Twitter and constructive criticism is always welcome."
The emergency services are at the scene and police have closed the road.
Police at the scene after a fatal accident on the main road between Bangor and Belfast on July 19, 2016 Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker
Police at the scene after a fatal accident on the main road between Bangor and Belfast on July 19, 2016 Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker
Police at the scene after a fatal accident on the main road between Bangor and Belfast on July 19, 2016 Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker
Police at the scene after a fatal accident on the main road between Bangor and Belfast on July 19, 2016 Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker
Police at the scene after a fatal accident on the main road between Bangor and Belfast on July 19, 2016 Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker
Police at the scene after a fatal accident on the main road between Bangor and Belfast on July 19, 2016 Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker
Police at the scene after a fatal accident on the main road between Bangor and Belfast on July 19, 2016 Pic Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker
A male cyclist has been killed in a crash on the Belfast to Bangor A2 road.
It happened close to Cultra on Tuesday morning, closing the road.
The man, aged in his 60s, was cycling in the Bangor direction with another cyclist when he was involved in a collision with a white Mazda car shortly before 6.30am.
The other cyclist, a man aged in his 30s, sustained minor injuries.
Police are also appealing for information.
The road has been reopened to traffic.
Some family doctors have been demanding fees in return for filling out postal vote application forms, it has emerged.
GPs are already paid for providing information on Disability Living Allowance (DLA) claims and on people suffering from terminal illness.
They receive 33.50 for each DLA or new welfare reform form, and 20 in cases where a patient is terminally ill.
But former minister Michelle Gildernew revealed yesterday that there had been reports of GPs also wanting payment for postal voter forms.
The MLA, now deputy chair of the Stormont committee monitoring the Department for Communities, said: "You could not be up to them sometimes."
Her Sinn Fein colleague Fra McCann said it was crucial for people to understand how much providing information on benefits costs, "including the fees that are being paid".
But a spokesman for the British Medical Association in Northern Ireland highlighted: "GPs are not obliged to provide these reports as part of their terms of service, which is why they attract a fee."
Dr Tom Black, chair of BMA Northern Ireland's General Practitioners Committee, added: "The majority of reports are provided free by GPs as part of their terms of service.
"GPs want to focus on the clinical care of their patients, and one of the best ways to do this is by limiting paperwork and bureaucracy.
"Northern Ireland has the lowest number of GPs per head of the population out of the four countries in the UK, along with the highest clinical workload.
"As a result, we now have a severe workload and workforce crisis, which means that GPs now face having less time to spend on the one-on-one clinical care of their patients."
Dr Black claimed that to ensure patients continued to receive high-quality care, GPs rightly prioritised clinical needs over the filling in of forms.
"Some GPs try to limit unnecessary paperwork by charging a fee for it, and that is a decision for their practice to make," he explained.
"My advice would be to simply decline to do unnecessary paperwork and focus their time on clinical care. The majority of reports are provided free by GPs as part of their terms of service. A minority of reports, such as DLA, attract a fee, and that is the contract arrangements at present.
Mr McCann said: "Sometimes, there is a fractured relationship between the department and doctors and doctors and their patients in the provision of updated information, and doctors are seeking compensation for providing that.
"Sometimes, patients feel the need to run and ask for these reports because they believe that their appeal is not going to get heard if a report has not been provided. It is just about the information supply."
A spokesperson for the Department for Communities said: "There is a contractual obligation on any GP who has issued a Med3 (fit note) to provide medical reports free of charge to the Department for Communities in relation to Employment and Support Allowance on a form called an ESA113.
"In other benefits, such as Disability Living Allowance or Personal Independence Payments, where the Department for Communities or their medical assessment provider requests a report from a GP, a payment of 33.50 is made whenever the report is returned. The same arrangement applies across Great Britain.
"Where a GP has completed a report to confirm the details of terminal illness for benefit purposes, a payment of 20 is made."
Temperatures have hit the glorious 20s in Northern Ireland. Belfast City Hall. Picture by Freddie Parkinson/Press Eye - Tuesday 16th August 2016
Temperatures have hit the glorious 20s in Northern Ireland. Belfast City Hall. Picture by Freddie Parkinson/Press Eye - Tuesday 16th August 2016
Temperatures have hit the glorious 20s in Northern Ireland. Belfast City Hall. Picture by Freddie Parkinson/Press Eye - Tuesday 16th August 2016
Seapark, Holywood, Co Down. Temperatures have hit the glorious 20s in Northern Ireland. Picture by Freddie Parkinson/Press Eye
Seapark, Holywood, Co Down. Temperatures have hit the glorious 20s in Northern Ireland. Picture by Freddie Parkinson/Press Eye
Seapark, Holywood, Co Down. Temperatures have hit the glorious 20s in Northern Ireland. Picture: Freddie Parkinson/Press Eye
Seapark, Holywood, Co Down. Temperatures have hit the glorious 20s in Northern Ireland. Freddie Parkinson/Press Eye
Aaron Callaghan and Sophie Jefferies on the beach at Newcastle
Belfast Telegraph 01-05-2017 In the sunshine at the Waterworks North Belfast. Grace McGuigan 8. Picture Colm O'Reilly 01-05-2017
Belfast Telegraph 01-05-2017 In the sunshine at the Waterworks North Belfast. Aisling Denny Siberian huskies Nanook, nando and shadow. Picture Colm O'Reilly 01-05-2017
Belfast Telegraph 01-05-2017 In the sunshine at the Waterworks North Belfast. Lisa Marie McCambridge 9 Picture Colm O'Reilly 01-05-2017
Belfast Telegraph 01-05-2017 In the sunshine at the Waterworks North Belfast. Picture Colm O'Reilly 01-05-2017
Belfast Telegraph 01-05-2017 In the sunshine at the Waterworks North Belfast. Picture Colm O'Reilly 01-05-2017
Belfast Telegraph 01-05-2017 In the sunshine at the Waterworks North Belfast. Picture Colm O'Reilly 01-05-2017
Belfast Telegraph 01-05-2017 In the sunshine at the Waterworks North Belfast. Picture Colm O'Reilly 01-05-2017
Belfast Telegraph 01-05-2017 In the sunshine at the Waterworks North Belfast. Picture Colm O'Reilly 01-05-2017
Belfast Telegraph 01-05-2017 In the sunshine at the Waterworks North Belfast. Picture Colm O'Reilly 01-05-2017
Belfast Telegraph 01-05-2017 In the sunshine at the Waterworks North Belfast. Leah, Rebecca and Hannah McMurray. Picture Colm O'Reilly 01-05-2017
Press Eye - Weather Pictures - 7th May 2017 Photograph By Declan Roughan William Crawshaw and Becky Holdich from Leeds visiting Belfast for the weekend enjoy the sunshine in Botanic Gardens.
5 May 2017 - Picture by Darren Kidd / Press Eye. The glorious May weather continues today (Fri 5th May) as the gates open to Northern Irelands premier gardening event - Allianz Garden Show Ireland at Antrim Castle Gardens. Promising a fabulous Festival of Flowers, Food and Fun, the three day Show is set to welcome a bumper crowd to the stunning Antrim setting over the weekend. Enjoying the sunshine is Eden John Robinson from Antrim. The Allianz Garden Show Ireland will run from 5th - 7th May at Antrim Castle Gardens and is open daily from 10am-6pm with parking in town centre car parks and at The Junction with a shuttle bus running. Adults tickets cost 10 (concession 8), the event is FREE for children under 16 and there is a reduced rate for online booking. For more information visit www.gardenshowireland.com.
5 May 2017 - Picture by Darren Kidd / Press Eye. The glorious May weather continues today (Fri 5th May) as the gates open to Northern Irelands premier gardening event - Allianz Garden Show Ireland at Antrim Castle Gardens. Promising a fabulous Festival of Flowers, Food and Fun, the three day Show is set to welcome a bumper crowd to the stunning Antrim setting over the weekend. Enjoying the sunshine are P5s Philip and James with Mr Thompson from Kilbroney IPS. The Allianz Garden Show Ireland will run from 5th - 7th May at Antrim Castle Gardens and is open daily from 10am-6pm with parking in town centre car parks and at The Junction with a shuttle bus running. Adults tickets cost 10 (concession 8), the event is FREE for children under 16 and there is a reduced rate for online booking. For more information visit www.gardenshowireland.com.
5 May 2017 - Picture by Darren Kidd / Press Eye. The glorious May weather continues today (Fri 5th May) as the gates open to Northern IrelandOs premier gardening event - Allianz Garden Show Ireland at Antrim Castle Gardens. Promising a fabulous Festival of Flowers, Food and Fun, the three day Show is set to welcome a bumper crowd to the stunning Antrim setting over the weekend. Enjoying the sunshine is Alice Smyth from Ballymena. The Allianz Garden Show Ireland will run from 5th - 7th May at Antrim Castle Gardens and is open daily from 10am-6pm with parking in town centre car parks and at The Junction with a shuttle bus running. Adults tickets cost 10 (concession 8), the event is FREE for children under 16 and there is a reduced rate for online booking. For more information visit www.gardenshowireland.com.
5 May 2017 - Picture by Darren Kidd / Press Eye. The glorious May weather continues today (Fri 5th May) as the gates open to Northern IrelandOs premier gardening event - Allianz Garden Show Ireland at Antrim Castle Gardens. Promising a fabulous Festival of Flowers, Food and Fun, the three day Show is set to welcome a bumper crowd to the stunning Antrim setting over the weekend. Enjoying the sunshine is Finlay Smyth from Ballymena. The Allianz Garden Show Ireland will run from 5th - 7th May at Antrim Castle Gardens and is open daily from 10am-6pm with parking in town centre car parks and at The Junction with a shuttle bus running. Adults tickets cost 10 (concession 8), the event is FREE for children under 16 and there is a reduced rate for online booking. For more information visit www.gardenshowireland.com.
5 May 2017 - Picture by Darren Kidd / Press Eye. The glorious May weather continues today (Fri 5th May) as the gates open to Northern IrelandOs premier gardening event - Allianz Garden Show Ireland at Antrim Castle Gardens. Promising a fabulous Festival of Flowers, Food and Fun, the three day Show is set to welcome a bumper crowd to the stunning Antrim setting over the weekend. Enjoying the sunshine is Finlay Smyth from Ballymena. The Allianz Garden Show Ireland will run from 5th - 7th May at Antrim Castle Gardens and is open daily from 10am-6pm with parking in town centre car parks and at The Junction with a shuttle bus running. Adults tickets cost 10 (concession 8), the event is FREE for children under 16 and there is a reduced rate for online booking. For more information visit www.gardenshowireland.com.
5 May 2017 - Picture by Darren Kidd / Press Eye. The glorious May weather continues today (Fri 5th May) as the gates open to Northern IrelandOs premier gardening event - Allianz Garden Show Ireland at Antrim Castle Gardens. Promising a fabulous Festival of Flowers, Food and Fun, the three day Show is set to welcome a bumper crowd to the stunning Antrim setting over the weekend. Enjoying the sunshine is Alice Smyth from Ballymena. The Allianz Garden Show Ireland will run from 5th - 7th May at Antrim Castle Gardens and is open daily from 10am-6pm with parking in town centre car parks and at The Junction with a shuttle bus running. Adults tickets cost 10 (concession 8), the event is FREE for children under 16 and there is a reduced rate for online booking. For more information visit www.gardenshowireland.com.
Press Eye - Weather Pictures - 7th May 2017 Photograph By Declan Roughan (L-R) Sarah McGarry from Belfast and Catherine laverty from Birmingham enjoy the sunshine in Botanic Gardens.
Press Eye - Weather Pictures - 7th May 2017 Photograph By Declan Roughan William Crawshaw and Becky Holdich from Leeds visiting Belfast for the weekend enjoy the sunshine in Botanic Gardens.
Press Eye - Weather Pictures - 7th May 2017 Photograph By Declan Roughan Tom Clarke from Wexford enjoys the sunshine in Botanic Gardens.
Press Eye - Weather Pictures - 7th May 2017 Photograph By Declan Roughan Tom Clarke from Wexford enjoys the sunshine in Botanic Gardens.
Press Eye - Weather Pictures - 7th May 2017 Photograph By Declan Roughan Clare Miller, Sion Mills, Emma Arkinson, Killyclougher Roisin Campbell, Dungannon and Cathy O'Neill Dungannon, enjoy the sunshine in Botanic Gardens.
Pacemaker Press 7/5/2017 Enjoying the sunshine at Helen's Bay Beach in Co Down , during the warm weather across Northern Ireland on Sunday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker
Pacemaker Press 7/5/2017 Enjoying the sunshine at Helen's Bay Beach in Co Down , during the warm weather across Northern Ireland on Sunday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker
Pacemaker Press 7/5/2017 Enjoying the sunshine at Belfast City Hall , during the warm weather across Northern Ireland on Sunday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker
Pacemaker Press 7/5/2017 Enjoying the sunshine at Belfast City Hall , during the warm weather across Northern Ireland on Sunday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker
Pacemaker Press 7/5/2017 Enjoying the sunshine at Belfast City Hall , during the warm weather across Northern Ireland on Sunday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker
Pacemaker Press 7/5/2017 Enjoying the sunshine at Helen's Bay Beach in Co Down , during the warm weather across Northern Ireland on Sunday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker
Pacemaker Press 7/5/2017 Enjoying the sunshine at Belfast City Hall , during the warm weather across Northern Ireland on Sunday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker
Pacemaker Press 7/5/2017 Enjoying the sunshine at Helen's Bay Beach in Co Down , during the warm weather across Northern Ireland on Sunday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker
Pacemaker Press 7/5/2017 Enjoying the sunshine at Helen's Bay Beach in Co Down , during the warm weather across Northern Ireland on Sunday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker
Press Eye - Weather Pictures - 7th May 2017 Photograph By Declan Roughan William Crawshaw and Becky Holdich from Leeds visiting Belfast for the weekend enjoy the sunshine in Botanic Gardens.
Press Eye - Weather Pictures - 7th May 2017 Photograph By Declan Roughan William Crawshaw and Becky Holdich from Leeds visiting Belfast for the weekend enjoy the sunshine in Botanic Gardens.
Press Eye - Weather Pictures - 7th May 2017 Photograph By Declan Roughan (L-R) Sarah McGarry from Belfast and Catherine laverty from Birmingham enjoy the sunshine in Botanic Gardens.
Press Eye - Weather Pictures - 7th May 2017 Photograph By Declan Roughan William Crawshaw and Becky Holdich from Leeds visiting Belfast for the weekend enjoy the sunshine in Botanic Gardens.
Press Eye - Weather Pictures - 7th May 2017 Photograph By Declan Roughan Tom Clarke from Wexford enjoys the sunshine in Botanic Gardens.
Press Eye - Weather Pictures - 7th May 2017 Photograph By Declan Roughan Sunshine in Botanic Gardens Belfast getting some ice cream
Niamh Cooper from Belfast shows her running skills on a sunny day at Portstewart Strand Beach. PICTURE MARK JAMIESON.
Students Amy Gallagher and Claire Beattie soak up the sun at Portrstewart Strand Beach. PICTURE MARK JAMIESON.
Press Eye Belfast - Northern Ireland 17th July 2017 People enjoy the sunny and warm weather at Seamark outside Holywood in Co. Down. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye.com
Press Eye Belfast - Northern Ireland 17th July 2017 People enjoy the sunny and warm weather at Seamark outside Holywood in Co. Down. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye.com
Press Eye Belfast - Northern Ireland 17th July 2017 People enjoy the sunny and warm weather at Seamark outside Holywood in Co. Down. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye.com
PACEMAKER BELFAST 17/07/2017 People enjoy the summer weather in Botanic Gardens in Belfast Northern Ireland. Picture By: Arthur Allison/Pacemaker Press
(L-R) Clare Miller, Sion Mills, Emma Arkinson, Killyclougher Roisin Campbell, Dungannon and Cathy O'Neill Dungannon, enjoy the sunshine in Botanic Gardens. Photograph By Declan Roughan Presseye
There were calls for a national holiday when Northern Ireland qualified for the Euros - and now all eyes are on Stormont as we celebrate the hottest day of the year so far.
It was a welcome change over the weekend when the mercury started rising with much of the province basking in sunshine.
Monday's peak temperature was 25.9C in Castlederg, Co Tyrone, with today's expected to be 29C.
The Met Office has forecast a dry and humid afternoon with plenty of sunshine.
And due to the rarity of our allocation of sunshine - BBC weatherman Barra Best has called upon Northern Ireland's First and Deputy First Ministers to call a national holiday.
Right @DUPleader & @M_McGuinness_SF - how about calling a national holiday? It's a scorcher out there! pic.twitter.com/nWEsP2cLbO Barra Best (@barrabest) July 19, 2016
#TapsAff - barely a cloud and it's at 24C at 10:00 for some. On course to be the hottest day of the year, so far: pic.twitter.com/XMylRfgKUN Barra Best (@barrabest) July 19, 2016
Meanwhile Crawfordsburn Country Park has been so busy that the gates have been shut.
Police would like to advise visitors that the staff at Crawfordsburn Country Park have closed their gates as park is now at its capacity. PSNI Bangor (@PSNIBangor) July 19, 2016
However don't pack the raincoats and umbrellas too far away, as scattered heavy showers are expected to breakout later.
Tonight there will be scattered heavy showers with thunder and hail. They will clear away early in the night to give largely dry but mild and humid conditions overnight.
Temperature are set to drop a little on Wednesday down to the low 20s. However it will be another warm day but rather cloudy.
Looking ahead to the rest of the week, there will be outbreaks of rain spread east on Thursday with dry sunny spells on Friday.
More persistent rain is expected on Saturday clearing later in the day.
Taoiseach Enda Kenny said EU/UK negotiations should factor in the possibility that a border poll could be held in years to come
The SDLP's Dr Alasdair McDonnell warned that the uncertainty about the border could erode the fragile political settlement
MPs have clashed over fears about Northern Ireland's border with the Republic of Ireland in the wake of the vote to leave the EU.
The SDLP's Dr Alasdair McDonnell warned that the uncertainty about the border could erode the fragile political settlement and lead to renewed dissident and paramilitary activity.
Shadow Northern Ireland minister Stephen Pound insisted that a Brexit would result in a "division" between the two countries.
But DUP MP Sammy Wilson said concerns about border controls were just another scare story "without any substance".
In a Westminster Hall debate in Parliament, Dr McDonnell stressed the need for the UK Government to guarantee at least one Northern Ireland representative at the Brexit negotiating table.
Northern Ireland may also have to make "common cause" with Scotland and Gibraltar, whose populations also voted to remain with the EU, he added.
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The Belfast South MP said: "I believe that Northern Ireland's interests cannot receive the full recognition or the full protection they deserve unless Northern Ireland has at least one, preferably two, seats at the negotiating table as we go forward."
He added: "Further uncertainty around what the border will look like in 10 years' time leaves us vulnerable to those that will seek to take advantage of that uncertainty and weakened state, including dissident and other paramilitaries.
"And I don't make that as a threat - I make that as an observation."
Labour's Mr Pound, a pro-Remain campaigner, said the Government must accept the "dark clouds over Northern Ireland".
He said: "If anyone thinks for a moment that the history of Ireland somehow means that there will not be a hard border, a soft border, a customs border, a tariff border, a physical border - there will be a border.
"There cannot be a negotiation when one party has decided to leave the relationship. That is the reality."
But Mr Wilson said there had so far been no political appetite for new border controls.
The East Antrim MP said: "This is one of the scare stories that was used by those who have tried to persuade people in Northern Ireland that leaving the EU is not in their interests.
"Again we have heard the same rhetoric but there is not substance to it.
"The Irish Government has said they do not wish to have border controls, the British government has said they do not wish to have border controls, the Northern Ireland Assembly has said they don't wish to have border controls and we already have seen through history how the common travel area has worked effectively to ensure that there is no need for border controls."
Home Office Minister Robert Goodwill said the UK and the Republic of Ireland share a common objective of preserving the common travel area and avoiding a hard border.
He said: "It has been agreed that the UK and Ireland would work together on priority areas within the British-Irish relationship in the forthcoming negotiations on the future relationship between the UK and the EU.
"The Government will ensure the interests of all parts of the UK are protected."
On Monday Taoiseach Enda Kenny called on the EU to prepare for the prospect of Northern Ireland seeking to join the Republic.
The Fine Gael leader said a future border poll was now possible in light of the decision by Britain to leave the EU.
And Mr Kenny even likened it to West and East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
"The discussion and negotiations that take place over the next period should take into account the possibility, however far out it might be, that the clause in the Good Friday Agreement might be triggered," he said, "in that if there is a clear evidence of a majority of people wishing to leave the United Kingdom and join the Republic, that should be catered for in the discussions.
"Because if that possibility were to happen, you would have Northern Ireland wishing to leave the United Kingdom, not being a member of the European Union, and joining the Republic, which will be a member of the EU."
The Taoiseach made the remarks to reporters following his speech at the MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Donegal.
He alluded to the prospect of a border poll during off-script comments and agreed to clarify the remarks afterwards.
The Taoiseach told an audience that the North-South trade links were more important in terms of volume to the North, which would suggest an appetite for such a vote there.
Mr Kenny also suggested that the Common Travel Area had a "legal status" and officials were working to clarify this.
He later said there had once been the view that it would "impossible" for Britain to leave the EU but this had now been thrown on its head. The Taoiseach said the matter of a border poll must now be considered in negotiations on Brexit.
"So in the same way as East Germany was dealt with when the wall came down, was able to be absorbed into West Germany and not to have to have to go through a torturous and long process of applying for membership of the European Union," the Taoiseach said.
"So when Northern Ireland voted to stay (in the EU), who knows what might happen in the time ahead? I am just making the point that these are the kinds of things that should be looked at in the broadest of ways in discussions that take place.
"People said it would be impossible that Britain would leave the European Union; that has taken place now."
He said discussions would take place about the "connections between the Republic and Northern Ireland, between Northern Ireland and the UK and the EU and our relationship with both" and "these are things that should be looked at in the context that they might happen in some time in the future".
The decision by Mr Kenny to throw open the prospect to a border poll will set him on a collision course with the DUP.
A fortnight ago, Mr Kenny was left humiliated after the Government's attempts to establish an all-island forum was shot down by First Minister and DUP leader Arlene Foster.
The newly appointed Secretary of State to Northern Ireland, James Brokenshire, has also ruled out a border poll.
Sinn Fein has embarked on a campaign to have such a vote, but Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin said a vote was unlikely in the near future.
Earlier, Mr Kenny said a second secretary-general in the Department of An Taoiseach would be appointed to deal with the Brexit talks.
A two-day-old western lowland gorilla born at Dublin Zoo has been shielded by its mother from staff and the heatwave sun.
The healthy youngster was born in the e arly hours of Saturday, just two months after its father Harry died, and weighs in at about 1.8 kilos.
Zookeepers have been unable to determine the baby's gender as 32-year-old mother Lena kept the new arrival - her seventh baby - close to her chest.
And it is likely it will stay that way for weeks as gorilla mothers cradle their young in their arms non-stop for up to three months.
Even when the baby is given some freedom, Lena will have her within arm's reach.
On one of their first days in full view of the public the doting mother kept her newest addition close to her chest, out of the sun and taking full advantage of shade under a tree.
Helen Clarke-Bennett, leader of the animal care team responsible for the gorillas, said: "The youngster is doing very well and is very bright and alert. Within minutes the baby was feeding from mum Lena which is a very good sign."
Western lowland gorillas are critically endangered and their numbers in the wild are expected to fall by over 80% between 1980 and 2046 - with commercial hunting and the Ebola virus the two main threats to their survival.
The baby's father, Harry, was a silverback gorilla and the leader of the troop.
He died in May after 21 years with Lena.
Ms Clarke-Bennett said: "It has been a sad time for the team after Harry's death and this has really put a smile on everyone's face.
"Big brother Kituba is taking a keen interest in the new arrival and the rest of the troop has reacted very well. The new arrival is a great success for Dublin Zoo as part of the European breeding programme for these critically endangered primates."
Western lowland gorillas are a little smaller than their mountain relatives.
It has been difficult for conservationists to put a number on how many survive but there are populations in Cameroon, Central African Republic, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Taoiseach Enda Kenny has called for a commitment to a united Ireland to be included in the final Brexit treaty
Taoiseach Enda Kenny has for the first time opened the door to a future referendum on Irish unity.
In a significant move, Mr Kenny called on the European Union to prepare for the prospect of Northern Ireland seeking to join the Republic.
The Fine Gael leader said a future border poll was now possible in light of the decision by Britain to leave the EU.
And Mr Kenny even likened it to West and East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
"The discussion and negotiations that take place over the next period should take into account the possibility, however far out it might be, that the clause in the Good Friday Agreement might be triggered," he said, "in that if there is a clear evidence of a majority of people wishing to leave the United Kingdom and join the Republic, that should be catered for in the discussions.
"Because if that possibility were to happen, you would have Northern Ireland wishing to leave the United Kingdom, not being a member of the European Union, and joining the Republic, which will be a member of the EU."
The Taoiseach made the remarks to reporters following his speech at the MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Donegal.
He alluded to the prospect of a border poll during off-script comments and agreed to clarify the remarks afterwards.
The Taoiseach told an audience that the North-South trade links were more important in terms of volume to the North, which would suggest an appetite for such a vote there.
Mr Kenny also suggested that the Common Travel Area had a "legal status" and officials were working to clarify this.
He later said there had once been the view that it would "impossible" for Britain to leave the EU but this had now been thrown on its head. The Taoiseach said the matter of a border poll must now be considered in negotiations on Brexit.
"So in the same way as East Germany was dealt with when the wall came down, was able to be absorbed into West Germany and not to have to have to go through a torturous and long process of applying for membership of the European Union," the Taoiseach said.
"So when Northern Ireland voted to stay (in the EU), who knows what might happen in the time ahead? I am just making the point that these are the kinds of things that should be looked at in the broadest of ways in discussions that take place.
"People said it would be impossible that Britain would leave the European Union; that has taken place now."
He said discussions would take place about the "connections between the Republic and Northern Ireland, between Northern Ireland and the UK and the EU and our relationship with both" and "these are things that should be looked at in the context that they might happen in some time in the future".
The decision by Mr Kenny to throw open the prospect to a border poll will set him on a collision course with the DUP.
A fortnight ago, Mr Kenny was left humiliated after the Government's attempts to establish an all-island forum was shot down by First Minister and DUP leader Arlene Foster.
The newly appointed Secretary of State to Northern Ireland, James Brokenshire, has also ruled out a border poll.
Sinn Fein has embarked on a campaign to have such a vote, but Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin said a vote was unlikely in the near future.
Earlier, Mr Kenny said a second secretary-general in the Department of An Taoiseach would be appointed to deal with the Brexit talks.
Irish Independent
A family was left "sickened" after their dream holiday was cancelled via text message.
Janice Turkington booked a two-week trip to Menorca on the Balearic Islands through online firm Lowcostholidays and was due to travel next week.
But the company collapsed on Friday, leaving tens of thousands of holidaymakers stranded and more than 110,000 travellers with nowhere to go.
Janice, from Belfast, forked out more than 3,500 for her holiday with her family when she booked it two months ago.
She said she was disgusted at how the company had treated her family of four.
"I was at home on Saturday and I got a text message from someone called Hoopa," she explained.
"They said that our booking was cancelled, but it was all abbreviated and it didn't make sense to me. We actually thought that it was spam.
"I checked my husband's email and he also had the same and then it snowballed from there.
"We went online and saw the notice that they had gone into receivership. Their phone number was also dead.
"We have yet to be contacted by Lowcostholidays - we heard nothing from them. We were so disgusted and sickened by it all.
"It got to the point where we thought that we would book another holiday and just deal with the lost money.
"But, thankfully, PayPal got in touch and said we would get a full refund, so hopefully they will honour that."
A Newtownabbey man and his fiancee also lost more than 700 and had to pay twice to save their summer holiday to Portugal because of the firm's collapse.
Stuart Briers, from Rathcoole, and Emma Boyd found out on Friday that the company had gone into liquidation.
"I felt sickened when I found out," Stuart said. "The company had been Atol-protected until a few years ago, when it moved out to Spain.
"We have lost our money because I paid originally by debit card when I made the booking in March. There seems to be no real way to get the money back."
MPs voted by 472 to 117 - a majority of 355 - to renew Trident, the UK's continuous at-sea nuclear deterrent.
The motion supports the Government's plans to replace four ageing Vanguard class submarines that carry the Trident missiles with four Successor vessels.
Of the 18 Northern Ireland MPs, 10 voted.
The DUP's Nigel Dodds, Ian Paisley, Gavin Robinson, Jim Shannon and David Simpson voted in favour. As too did the UUP's two MPs Tom Elliott and Danny Kinahan.
The SDLP's Mark Durkan, Alastair McDonnell and Margaret Ritchie all voted against.
During yesterday's debate the Prime Minister told MPs she would be prepared to authorise a nuclear strike as she warned that Jeremy Corbyn's opposition to maintaining the UK's deterrent is "quite wrong".
Theresa May, making her first Commons speech since entering Number 10, said the "very real" threat posed by Russia and North Korea meant the UK could not afford to "relax our guard".
But Mr Corbyn repeated his position that he would not be prepared to press the nuclear button if he was in Number 10, arguing that threatening "mass murder" was not the way to handle international relations.
Labour was deeply split on the issue. Party sources said they believe 138 Labour MPs voted for the motion, 48 against, with 45 not present.
In the vote, 58 of Scotland's 59 MPs voted against Trident renewal, with Scotland's only Tory MP being the sole supporter.
In a swipe at the Labour leader, Mrs May said: "Some people suggest to us that we should actually be removing our nuclear deterrent. This has been a vital part of our national security and defence for nearly half-a-century now and it would be quite wrong for us to go down that path."
Challenged in the Commons on whether she would be prepared to authorise a nuclear strike that could kill thousands of "innocent men, women and children", Mrs May firmly replied: "Yes."
Setting out the case for remaining a nuclear power, the Prime Minister said: "We must continually convince any potential aggressors that the benefits of an attack on Britain are far outweighed by their consequences.
"And we cannot afford to relax our guard or rule out further shifts which would put our country in grave danger. We need to be prepared to deter threats to our lives and our livelihoods and to those of generations who are yet to be born."
Mr Corbyn reiterated his opposition to the potential use of the weapons - one of the key elements of the doctrine of nuclear deterrence. He said: "I make it clear today that I would not take a decision that kills millions of innocent people. I do not believe the threat of mass murder is a legitimate way to go about dealing with international relations."
The DUP backed the motion. Ian Paisley told the Commons: "Could I congratulate the Prime Minister for her sure-footedness today on bringing this motion before the House and at last allowing Parliament, in this session, to make a decision.
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"We will proudly stand behind the Government on this issue."
The Ulster Unionist MP Danny Kinahan added: "I strongly believe that our nuclear deterrent has and will continue to prevent many conflicts that would place our service personnel in mortal danger. Those who oppose our nuclear capabilities often argue against their cost as if they were a luxury that we could do without.
"They are not a luxury, they safeguard our nation and ensure that we play our part as a leading global peacekeeper."
However, the SDLP voted against. Margaret Ritchie MP said: "I fear renewing Trident will make the world less secure by increasing tensions and by increasing the risk of potentially catastrophic mechanical and human error."
British Airways passengers suffered severe disruption at the UK's two busiest airports due to a glitch in the airline's new check-in system.
There were long queues at Heathrow and Gatwick as travellers were delayed from going through to the departure lounge.
TV presenter Phillip Schofield posted a series of angry messages directly to BA on social media after being held up at Heathrow for more than two hours on Sunday before returning home.
He claimed there was "not one single member of staff to talk to", adding: "It's not that there's a problem, they happen. There's no announcements, no info when the planes left, no help at all."
Schofield, who hosts This Morning, also sent the airline a photo of the packed check-in area with the caption: "Plane leaves in half an hour, been in the queue for 2 hours and not one member of staff to talk to. Love you usually, today you are s***."
BA began installing its new system at airports across the world in October and the roll-out was completed around two months ago.
A spokeswoman for the airline said: "Our IT teams worked very hard to quickly fix a short-lived problem with our check-in system. We are sorry for the delays some customers had as they checked in for their flights."
Disgruntled passengers also expressed their frustration to BA on Twitter.
Ben Middleton said he had received no apology for the "awful queues" at Gatwick, while Rachel Carter pledged to travel with easyJet in future due to BA's "shocking service".
The two men were arrested at Glasgow Airport, before an Air Transat A310 was due to fly to Canada
Two pilots were arrested on suspicion of being under the influence of alcohol as they prepared to fly a transatlantic passenger jet from Scotland to Canada.
Staff are understood to have raised concerns over the pilots' behaviour before the Air Transat A310, carrying up to 250 passengers on board, was due to depart from Glasgow to Toronto on Monday afternoon.
Officers arrested the men, aged 37 and 39, on suspicion of being "impaired through alcohol" before they were due to take off at 1pm.
Police Scotland said the pair will appear in custody at Paisley Sheriff Court later.
A spokeswoman said: "Police Scotland can confirm that two men aged 39 and 37 years have been arrested in relation to being allegedly impaired through alcohol under the Railway and Transport Safety Act 2003 (Section 93)."
The Canadian airline confirmed the arrest of its employees, adding that the flight had been rescheduled and the passengers put up in hotels.
A spokesman said: "Air Transat has learned of the arrest on July 18 of two crew members assigned to its Glasgow-Toronto flight.
"We will await the results of the investigation and judicial proceedings before commenting on the matter before making any further comments. The safety of our crews and passengers is, and will remain, a top priority at Air Transat."
Some passengers voiced their anger over an apparent lack of an official explanation over the delay.
Toronto resident Nick Davis tweeted that he had been "Ignored all day by @airtransat", while @sdp0313 tweeted: "TS725 22 hr delay. Thinking the op issue was more of a staff issue, police involved, why? Answers plz @airtransat."
Apologising for the delay to Sean Brown, who had been on holiday in Scotland from Ontario, the airline tweeted "for operational reasons we have no choice".
A rescheduled flight is expected to depart on Tuesday.
The European Union has imposed its biggest ever cartel fine, worth 2.93 billion euros (2.46 billion), on several of Europe's top lorry producers for colluding to keep prices artificially high at the expense of consumers.
EU Antitrust Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said EU-based MAN, Volvo/Renault, Daimler, Iveco and DAF "colluded on the pricing and on passing on the costs for meeting environmental standards to customers".
Germany's Daimler received the biggest fine of 1 billion euros (840 million), followed by 752 million euros (631 million) for DAF of the Netherlands, 670 million euros (563 million) for Volvo/Renault and 494 million euros (415 million) for Iveco of Italy.
MAN escaped a 1.2 billion euro (1 billion) fine for revealing the cartel, granting it full immunity. "It pays off to denounce a cartel and end your participation," said Ms Vestager, adding: "This cartel concerns a very important part of our economy."
Together the targeted companies account for 90% of all medium and heavy goods vehicles produced in Europe.
Ms Vestager said the cartel was set up during a meeting of high officials "in a cosy hotel" in Brussels in 1997 and continued for 14 years.
Halfway through that time period, lower-level officials took over the cartel's organisation through subsidiary companies, often through email exchange.
Before Tuesday's fine, the previous record was from 2012, when seven companies were fined 1.47 billion euros (1.23 billion) for rigging the market of television and computer monitor tubes.
The lorry companies now have three months to pay the fines, which will go into EU coffers and help alleviate contributions of member nations to the EU budget.
Ms Vestager said that one other producer, Scania, was not covered in Wednesday's decision and an investigation continues.
AP
Police officers dressed in riot gear walk around the Pavon prison after a riot broke out in Guatemala City (AP) ,
Byron Lima pictured in 2012 - the former Guatemalan army captain has been killed in a prison riot (AP)
A former army officer serving a prison sentence for the 1998 murder of a Roman Catholic bishop died in a Guatemala jail riot that killed a dozen inmates and a female visitor.
Byron Lima was convicted of killing Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi, who was an outspoken critic of military abuses during the country's 36-year civil war.
Lima's death was confirmed by firefighter Julio Sanchez, but no other details were released.
Interior minister Francisco Rivas said four of the dead had been decapitated.
He said the riot involved a fight between Lima's inmate group and a rival gang headed by Marvin Montiel, who was sentenced to 820 years in prison for the murder of 15 Nicaraguans and a Dutch tourist in 2008.
Mr Rivas said the riot began when someone threw a hand grenade at Lima and the inmates protecting him and then attacked them with guns.
An Argentine woman who regularly visited Lima in prison was among the dead, the minister said
Lima was an army captain in 2001 when he was sentenced to 30 years for the killing. The term was later reduced to 20 years. Three other men were also convicted in the case, including Lima's father.
The bishop was bludgeoned to death with a concrete block at his seminary on April 26, 1998, two days after he presented a report blaming the military for most of the 200,000 deaths in the 1960-1996 conflict.
Lima had been considered the most powerful inmate in Guatemala's prison system. He was facing additional charges for his activities behind bars.
Prosecutors alleged he built a multimillion-dollar illicit prison empire based on threats and corruption. They said Lima took money from other inmates in return for favours such as prohibited mobile phones as well as special food and conjugal visits.
AP
People gather at the makeshift memorial to victims of the Nice truck attack (AP)
French President Francois Hollande defended his government's military actions against Islamic extremists as he vowed to continue the fight against terror.
But Mr Hollande acknowledged the actions are part of the reason for repeated attacks on his country.
Speaking during a visit to Portugal, the president said France is so often targeted because of its traditions of liberty and human rights.
He said it is also "because France is fighting against terrorism, against fundamentalism, against fanaticism".
Mr Hollande said France will continue its military operations abroad, which include air strikes in Iraq and Syria, anti-terrorism operations in Africa and special operations in Libya, adding: "It is our honour and our duty."
He also urged politicians to approve an extension to the state of emergency in place since the deadly attacks in Paris on November 13.
Earlier, two more suspects in the Bastille Day lorry attack that killed 84 people were transferred to French intelligence headquarters in Paris to face likely terrorism charges.
The July 14 attack occurred when Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove through crowds watching fireworks on Nice's famed Promenade des Anglais on the French Riviera before he was shot by police.
The two suspects are among six people who remain in custody, according to an official at the Paris prosecutor's office.
Back in Nice, signs of normal life returned to the promenade, with joggers and visitors enjoying the sunshine, and businesses reopening.
But elsewhere in the city the grief was still raw as families said farewell to their loved ones and some demanded to know from the authorities how security measures had failed to prevent a man from driving a truck through crowds of revellers.
At the ar-Rahma mosque in the eastern Nice suburb of Ariane, worshippers held prayers for three of those killed in Thursday's attack, including four-year-old Kylan Mejri and his mother Olfa Kalfallah, 31.
"What happened mustn't tear society apart," said Abdelkader Sadouni, a Muslim imam from Nice, who called for unity in the face of an attack that indiscriminately hit men, women and children, Christian and Muslims, residents and foreign tourists enjoying France's national day fireworks together.
Mourners rallied around Kylan's father, Tahar Mejri, who carried his son's plain white coffin out to a waiting hearse.
Holding photos of his son, Mr Mejri spoke of his grief and described the moment that he arrived on the promenade to find his wife dead and Kylan's scooter lying on the floor. He spent all night going from one hospital to another before learning that his son had not survived.
Mr Mejri said he plans to sue the authorities over what happened.
"A festival like that with nearly 33,000 and the promenade was open," he said. "There was no security."
AP
A balanced relationship between Westminster and the four countries of the UK is required, says the Constitution Reform Group
It would be an understatement to say that the political and constitutional events in recent weeks have been traumatic - the Brexit vote, the resigning of the Prime Minister, the sacking of the Chancellor, the internal rebellion in the Labour Party, horrific terrorism in Nice, the failed coup in Turkey and a wide-open Presidential race in the United States; things are moving so fast you cannot blink without something major happening.
On top of that change and uncertainty many citizens feel insecure about the future of the United Kingdom. We in the Constitution Reform Group (CRG), formed last year, are from parties across the political spectrum and have been working on a stabilising relationship for the four countries of the United Kingdom and have produced a new, unifying Act of Union.
Historically, devolution has taken place from the centre following pressure from the periphery. Devolution for Scotland and Wales came because of pressure from those two countries.
The Northern Ireland devolved institutions had history in Stormont, but were an integral part of a political process established to bring an end to the Troubles and enshrine the principle of consent from the pro-British unionists and pro-Irish nationalists.
The governance of England is all over the place - some, but certainly not a majority, would consider an English parliament, and some opinion wishes more powers to be devolved to the English regions.
We want to turn devolution upside down into a new, overarching settlement for the whole of the United Kingdom, whereby the four countries - England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland - agree the powers to be controlled centrally and transfer sovereignty to Westminster for those reserved powers, such as foreign affairs, defence, security, indirect tax such as VAT, while retaining the power over local issues, such as health, education, planning and policing.
One of the reasons we came together to form the CRG despite being from very different political backgrounds - ranging from high Tories like Robert Salisbury to Labour/Liberal reformers like Peter Hain, Gisela Stuart, Menzies Campbell to Robert Lisvane, the former Clerk of the House of Commons and Daniel Greenberg, a parliamentary draughtsman - was the threat of Scottish separatism.
We believe that Scottish separatists will not be contained by a drip-feed of more devolution, and while the Scottish referendum campaign defeated the separatists in the short-term, it failed to provide a satisfactory alternative to the SNP.
The Labour Party in Scotland has been shaken to its very foundation and it is now questionable whether it will recover. The pro-Union Conservative Party is now the official Opposition in Edinburgh, but the SNP remains dominant, led by three capable political leaders in Sturgeon, Salmond and Robertson. While the people of Scotland may vote SNP to form their devolved Government, it is our strong belief there is an underlying pro-Union majority in Scotland which may contain as much as 15% of the SNP vote.
We recommend there should be four legislatures for the UK - an English parliament, sitting in the House of Commons, or alternative forms of local government in the regions of England; a Scottish parliament; a Welsh parliament and the Northern Ireland Assembly.
The governance of England will be a major challenge and we propose two options. An English parliament, directly elected from English constituencies, sitting in the present House of Commons, or a number of English regional powerhouses, following the example of Manchester.
After agreement for the governance of the four countries, the unity of the UK demands that there would have to be a new, directly elected parliament and Government at Westminster.
All of us in the CRG, whatever our background and tribal allegiances, recommend that the present House of Lords must be phased out and replaced by a national/federal parliament of around 150 members, directly elected from every part of the UK.
Our Supreme Court is already established and we recommend renaming the Bank of England to Bank UK, with its board of governors drawn from each country of the UK.
Our proposals are radical. Countries that do not change and evolve get stuck in an historical rut, and that is where we are now.
The last Conservative Government thought that changing Standing Orders in the House of Commons would deal with Evel (English votes for English laws). It will not.
The UK needs a new, balanced relationship between Westminster and the four countries, and what better time to do this than now, in parallel with the Brexit negotiations which will restore the sovereignty of the UK which, for the last 40 years, has ceded responsibility to Brussels to run us by unaccountable directives, rather than accountable democracy.
We will try to gain widespread support, or at least acceptance, for our new Act at Westminster from all parties, including the SNP and Plaid Cmyru, and in Stormont from Alliance, Greens, SDLP, Sinn Fein and all unionist parties.
We want everyone to be involved in the process to provide stability and consensus across the whole of the UK on how we are governed. Our new Act of Union must be approved by referendum by the people in all countries of the UK.
In conclusion, centralised Westminster elitism has been knocked back by Brexit.
Constitutional reform needs consensus from the bottom up and not from the top down if our nation is to be secure, safe and prosperous in the years ahead.
David W B Burnside is chairman of New Century, the London-based international corporate, financial and political communications consultancy, and a former Ulster Unionist MP for South Antrim. Download the Constitution Reform Group's new Act of Union at www.constitutionreformgroup.co.uk
We cannot deny it. These are perilous times we are living in. You can turn on your television or scroll through your Facebook newsfeed right now and see that there is so much violence, fear and hatred in the hearts of those around us. Many feel like God has been removed from everything, especially when it comes to the public square. Courts have taken prayer out of the classroom and public institutions. The Ten Commandments have been removed from parks, schools, and courthouses. Through the banner of separation of church and state and political correctness, many institutions have succeeded in removing God from the essence of our American society. Some feel that God is absent or simply doesnt exist to take on these great challenges.
Is America becoming a secular nation? For actor Kevin Sorbo, 57, known not only for his roles in Gods Not Dead, and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, but also for his outspoken Christian views, the answer is self-evident. Our country is falling apart; he believes that many of the problems we are facing today are a result of our nation becoming too secular.
"We live in a really strange world with the violence going on, with all the terrorism, Sorbo said. America is turning into a secular country.
Because we are taking God out of everything, many people in our country lack biblical and moral principles to guide them in their decision-making and hope for a better future. Sorbo spoke at a Youth for Christ event in Baltimore just days after the riot broke out and he asked those who were gathered if they believed those who were doing the destruction the vandalizing, the looting, the destruction of private and public property would be doing it if they had any sort of biblical principles in their life? His answer: no.
We need something that sends a message out there to people that there is hope out there, that theres real opportunity to grow and to better yourself as a human, Sorbo said.
Its clear that the world is broken right now full of spiritual apathy, selfishness, religious extremism, violence and terrorism, and the list goes on. But we know from Scripture that when light stands in the darkness, light always wins. Jesus said, I am the Light of the world; He who follows Me will not walk in the darkness, but will have the light of life (John 8:12). We also know from Joel 2:25 that God can restore what is broken and change it into something amazing. All we need is faith. We may live in dark times, but we have hope, because light always wins. At our lowest points, God is our hope and at our weakest points, God is our strength.
Sorbo believes that faith-based films can help capture a strong message of hope. While he says that faith-based films have gotten far better in recent years, he acknowledges that there is a lack of these types of stories out there.
People are tired of the violence and the sexuality in every television show and in every movie. People dont want their kids watching that, Sorbo said. Nighttime TV now is nothing like nighttime TV growing up.
Faith-based films prove that theres an audience out there starving for these films. The problem is, what Hollywood does with these films, Sorbo said.
The trouble is, they do movies likes Exodus and Noah and hire atheist directors. That makes no sense to me, Sorbo said. Thats why these movies didnt do well. In these instances, Hollywood couldnt get it.
Sorbo believes that when you get a group of people together that actually have a belief in God, and theyre doing a movie that deals with God, that the set is blessed in some degree. There are a lot of people out here that have Christian values that are making better movies and people want to see these. Movies today dont have to be heavily violent or overly sexualized to capture a large audience.
Sorbos latest faith-based film, Joseph and Mary, out on DVD focuses on the story of Mary and Joseph as their newborn son inspires faith in unlikely places. In the film, Elijah, a devout Rabbi, during a time of unrest when King Herod the Greats slaughter of innocents claims the lives of two boys Elijah had sworn to protect. Elijah makes it his lifes mission to avenge their deaths, but when he meets Joseph and Mary and their young son Jesus, the beliefs furling his revenge are put into question.
The movie really deals with the birth of Jesus and the first years of His life. However, it doesnt cover Jesus life as much as it covers what Joseph and Mary had to go through in terms of hiding who Jesus was given King Herod was hell bent on destroying this king who had been prophesied, Sorbo said.
Sorbo really wanted to work on this film not only because of his interest in Christian films, but also because of his interest in the direction the writers went with Josephs story.
People know about Mary, they certainly know about Jesus. But no one really talks about Joseph, Sorbo said.
Theres little we know about Joseph given there are no recorded words for him in Scripture. We can learn a lot from Josephs story. His actions speak louder than his words and theres a lot he can teach us through them.
The way that the writers went with this was really to show that [Joseph] was obviously a man of faith already and he felt more than humbled, more than blessed that he was chosen to take on this position and task so to speak as a protector of the Son of God, Sorbo said. I think he was in awe more than anything else and I hope it comes off that way in the movie.
Lesli White is a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth with a Bachelors degree in Mass Communications and a concentration in print and online journalism. In college, she took a number of religious studies courses and harnessed her talent for storytelling. White has a rich faith background. Her father, a Lutheran pastor and life coach was a big influence in her faith life, helping her to see the value of sharing the message of Christ with others. She has served in the church from an early age. Some of these roles include assisting ministry, mutual ministry, worship and music ministry and church council.
Bangladeshi Rapid Action Battalion personnel stand guard in Dhaka, May 6, 2013. RAB members on Monday raided two locations in Bogra district, where those responsible for a deadly attack on a cafe in Dhaka trained.
Bangladeshi police said Monday they had identified two homes in Dhaka which militants may have used before carrying out an attack on a cafe in the diplomatic quarter that killed 20 hostages and two policemen.
Five men, including a college professor who owned one of the properties, have been arrested over suspected links to the people who attacked the Holey Artisan Bakery cafe in Dhakas Gulshan 2 neighborhood on July 1-2, Deputy Inspector General of Police A.K.M. Shahidur Rahman told BenarNews.
One house is in the Bashundhara residential area and the other is in Shewrapara. We have recovered grenades from the Shewrapara house and sand-packed cantons for keeping grenades from the Bashundhara house, he said.
The recovered grenades were similar to those used in the attack, he said.
He identified the five men in police custody as S.M. Gias Uddin Ahsan, a professor at North South University in Dhaka; his nephew Alam Chowdhury; Mahbubur Rahman, a man who managed Ahsans property; Nurul Islam, the owner of the house in Shewrapara; and Milon Hossain, a schoolteacher.
The two homeowners were arrested because they did not keep information on the people who were staying in their homes, and they did not provide police with forms giving details on tenants, Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal told BenarNews.
Four months ago Dhaka police announced that they were implementing a policy to require such information from all landlords in the city as part of an effort to prevent militants from infiltrating it and setting up local dens.
Khan also revealed that intelligence agencies had alerted the government about the potential for an attack in Dhaka around July 1.
But we had no specific information where the attack would take place. Due to the intelligence information, the police reached the site in three minutes and confined the attackers who planned to flee, Khan told BenarNews on Monday.
Attack on Bauls
The cafe attack by religious extremists marked the first one that targeted a large group of people in Bangladesh. Most of the victims who were killed with machetes inside the cafe were foreigners. The attack followed a deadly spate of smaller-scale attacks that had targeted secular writers, members of religious minorities and others since February 2013.
On Saturday, suspected hardliners injured three Bauls or followers of the Bengali philosopher and poet Lalon in a machete-attack in southwestern Chuadanga district, police said.
Police have arrested three suspects in connection with that attack, Humayun Kabir, the officer-in-charge of Jobonnagar police station, told BenarNews.
Some local hardline people did not like Baul Shahidul Islam who set up a house to practice Lalon poems, Kabir said. They attacked three Bauls with sharp weapons as they were sleeping Saturday night. One woman was seriously injured.
Followers of Lalon do not shun Islam, but they do not pray, which is a requirement for Muslims, he said.
Bounty for Militants
In other news, law enforcement agencies on Monday said they had uncovered a training ground in northern Bogra district, where the perpetrators of the cafe attack were trained to use weapons.
They trained here. We have recovered jihadi books and sharp weapons in the operation, Benazir Ahmed, the director general of the counter-terrorist Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), told a news conference according to media reports.
Ahmed announced a reward of 1 million taka (U.S. $12,760) to militants who denounce their groups and aid police and military intelligence in arresting radicals.
Two men still missing
Meanwhile, Dhaka Metropolitan Police spokesman Masudur Rahman told BenarNews that two men who were inside the cafe during the attack British citizen Hasnat Karim and Canadian resident and University of Toronto student Tahmid Hasnat Khan were not in police custody, as alleged by human rights advocacy groups.
But last week anonymous police sources who were familiar with the investigation into the attack said that the authorities were still holding the two men on suspicion of having been part of the plot, after police announced that had been released after being questioned.
Human rights groups have challenged the official statement about the whereabouts of the two men.
Karim and Khan have not had access to a lawyer, and the police continue to deny holding them although they are clearly still being held by the Detective Branch. The authorities need to either charge or release them immediately, Brad Adams, Asia director at the New York-based Human Rights Watch, said in a statement issued over the weekend.
On Monday, officials at the British and Canadian officials did not respond to questions from BenarNews about whether they had any information on the two or whether they were providing them with consular services.
This screenshot from a video shows Eastern Indonesia Mujahideen leader Santoso (left) with one of his men, as they were filmed while hiding out in the forests of Central Sulawesi province in February 2016.
Indonesian security forces Monday shot dead two militants in Central Sulawesi province, one of whom could be Indonesias most wanted militant whose group is linked to the Islamic State (IS), authorities said.
They said they had yet to confirm whether Eastern Indonesian Mujahideen (MIT) leader Santoso (alias Abu Wardah) died in a shootout with members of a taskforce in Poso regency, but that facial features of one of the two slain men resembled Santosos.
"Indeed, there is a mole on his forehead that characterizes Santoso. But, again, I have not been able to confirm. My colleagues are still evacuating the bodies [of the two men] for further identification," National police chief Gen. Tito Karnavian told reporters in Jakarta, according to the Indonesian news website detik.com.
Santoso and his band of men have been the target of a manhunt lasting at least 17 months and involving hundreds of security personnel drawn from the military and police, who have scoured the jungles and mountains of central Sulawesi island in search of Indonesias most elusive militant.
Santoso and his members, who have been wanted over the years in connection with killings of civilians and police officers and attacks on police stations, had pledged allegiance to the Middle East-based extremist group IS.
Its possible, but were still confirming the news, Indonesia Security minister Luhut Pandjaitan said of reports about Santosos death as he confirmed that two members of the MIT were killed around 5:30 p.m. (Jakarta time; 6:30 p.m. in Central Sulawesi) in the village of Tambarana on Sulawesi, the Jakarta Post reported.
The newspaper quoted a source in the field as saying that one of the two militants killed in the firefight with the Alpha 29 taskforce had long hair, a long beard, and a mole on his face features that matched those of Santoso.
In Palu, the provincial capital of Central Sulawesi, local police spokesman Hari Suprapto confirmed that the shootout had occurred in Tambarana.
It is right, [the firefight] happened this afternoon, but we cannot ensure yet that [one of the persons] killed was Santoso, Hari told BenarNews.
The topography is quite difficult there. When the evacuation is complete the two bodies will be immediately dispatched to Bhayangkara hospital in Palu for further identification, he added, referring to a local military hospital.
According to the Straits-Times newspaper of Singapore, the body that may belong to Santoso was to undergo a gamut of forensic tests, including tests on DNA samples. In addition, jailed militants were to be summoned by Indonesian authorities to identify the corpse.
Shootout
The firefight erupted when the Alpha 29 team encountered five suspected MIT members, including three men and two women, while patrolling in the area around the village, officials said.
The firefight lasted around 30 minutes and three of the militants ran away after Alpha 29 killed two of them, according to officials.
When we combed the area, the Alfa 29 found a firearm along with some shells and live ammunition, said Hari.
From the report of my staff, they are carrying M-16 rifles. That is why all the members of the taskforce are instructed to remain cautious, Central Sulawesi Deputy Police Chief Lubis Leo Bona told BenarNews by phone, referring to the three militants at-large.
Counterattack
News of Santosos possible death came only five days after Tito Karnavian, the former head of the police anti-terrorist squad Densus 88, vowed to capture the MIT leader dead or alive as he was sworn in as Indonesias national police chief.
The hunt for Santoso has been long and difficult, with Indonesian security forces launching two major operations to catch him since January 2015. The first of two operations launched in the jungles of Poso, Operation Camar Maleo, was extended three times until Jan. 8, 2016, when a new operation, code-named Tinombala, began.
Before Mondays firefight, 13 suspected MIT members, including five Uyghurs from Chinas Xinjiang province, were killed during the latest operation, while five other militants were captured alive, officials said.
Three months ago, the U.S. State Department, added Santosos name to its list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists. Under Santoso, MIT carried out killings and kidnappings in Indonesia over the past few years, according to the State Department, which also listed his group as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist entity.
In announcing the designations, U.S. officials cited the killings of two policemen by MIT in August 2012; the bombing of a police station a month later; the November 2012 shooting of a police chief; and the shootings of four members of the national polices Mobile Brigade (Brimob) in December 2012.
In April, Indonesian authorities claimed they had cornered the remnants of Santosos band in the jungle, and that the militants were running out of food.
As evidence of a chronic food shortage, officials pointed to pictures and images from a video, which were taken on mobile phones and cameras that were seized from captured MIT fighters.
Authorities released footage that showed Santoso and his men eating the flesh of endangered species, including a maleo, a native bird of Sulawesi. In one soundless video, Santoso was seen eating a midget buffalo, known locally as anoa, also an endangered species.
Buddhists walk as they complete three circles during a candlelight procession at the Phra Pathom Chedi in Nakhon Pathom province, July 19, 2016 (Nontarat Phaicharoen/BenarNews)
Women walk around the Golden Mountain Chedi during a daylight procession at the Wat Saket temple in Bangkok, July 19, 2016. (Pimuk Rakkanam/BenarNews)
Teachers and students from a local school offer phansa candles to monks at Wangmai temple in Betong district, Yala province, July 18, 2016. (Nasueroh/BenarNews)
Buddhists across Thailand gave offerings to local temples as they celebrated Asanha Bucha Day on Monday and their religions version of Lent on Tuesday.
The Asanha Bucha holiday falls every year on the full moon of the eighth lunar month. It is the day that Buddhism was established when the Buddha established gave his first sermon to five disciples after attaining Nirvana in the Maruekhathayawan forest in India more than 2,500 years ago.
Buddhisms Lent Day, which falls the day after Asanha Bucha, marks the beginning of Buddhist monks three-month retreat to their temples during the rainy season.
In Narathiwat, a predominantly Muslim province in Thailands Deep South that is in the throes of a separatist insurgency, Buddhists offered alms in the morning at Khao Kong Park temple in Sri Sakhon district. Soldiers from the 9th Ranger Task Force and villagers attended the religious ceremony, carrying Lenten candles as part of the tradition.
In nearby Yala province, teachers and students from a local school offered phansa candles to monks. Traditionally, candles are given to the monks for use during their retreat.
In the Deep South, a traditional candlelight procession was held during the daylight hours for security reasons.
In Bangkok, Buddhists from Myanmar who work in Thailand joined Thai Buddhists during festivities at the famous Golden Mountain Chedi, at the Wat Saket temple.
This is a sacred place, you can wish for anything, Nopeh, a Karen woman told BenarNews, referring to the Golden Mountain, which she visits at least once a year.
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Von: Von N. BLOME und R. KLEINE*
Norbert Hofer will now have another chance to win the presidential election in Austria at the beginning of October after the Constitutional Court ordered a re-run. A national poll shows him in a dead heat with his rival, Alexander van der Bellen from the Greens.
Hofer is according to some descriptions the friendly face of Austrias far-right Freedom Party (FPO). Every once in a while during the interivew, he takes a drag on his e-cigarette. He would rather smoke pipe tobacco, but a pipe does not suit him well, he says.
BILD: You have campaigned on an Austria first platform. Would it instill fear into you if a German party were to campaign on a German first platform?
Norbert Hofer: No, not at all. It seems clear to me that every politician has to act in the interest of their own country. It does not imply that the interests of their own country are going to betray those of another country. To believe that something that is good for my country is bad for Europe, is a EU-related problem. An intelligent decision must bring benefits to both, your own country and Europe.
By saying Austria first, it is insinuating that all the other countries are put in the row behind. Austrians come first, followed by the rest of Europeans?
Hofer: Thats not what we meant to say. We are meaning to pose the question, for example, Should every migrant receive access to social benefits automatically? In our opinion, the answer is 'no`. I believe that social benefits should be held back until a person has lived here for a while, has worked consistently and has paid taxes.
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But exactly that is possible according to the European Court of Justice and the EU Commission
Hofer: Still, we have to explain to our citizens how their tax money is being spent. And there is no doubt that people come from very far to receive social benefits and they dont accept that.
More than 500 million people live in Europe. You call one million refugees a mass migration. Are you kidding
Hofer: We call it mass migration because many of our citizens feel that way. Austria is a small country, much smaller than Germany. It becomes a problem when every tenth person in a community is a refugee from a Muslim country.
The fact remains, EU rules and regulations are there but not adhered to. As an example, refugees should apply for asylum in the first safe country they reach. Or, refugees should be fairly distributed across EU member states. If everyone sticks to the rules, we shouldnt have any problems.
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What would Austrias response have been, if the German government would have sent refugees back to them in the summer of 2015, using the exact same argument?
Hofer: Austria would have closed its borders. The problem would have simply been deferred to the Southeast.
Why then, did you criticize the German governments decision not to close borders to refugees?
Hofer: Angela Merkels statement, 'We can do it', raised hopes which we are unable to fulfill. Besides, asylum - to me - is a way of giving temporary protection. People have the right to protection as long as war and chaos reign in their home country. However, they have to leave afterwards.
Hence, it would be best not to integrate refugees into society?
Hofer: There is a big difference between asylum, i.e. temporary protection, and regular immigration. Immigrants who live and work here permanently will of course be integrated into society.
Is xenophobia a bigger problem in Austria than anywhere else?
Hofer: Idiots exist everywhere and people who wont get it, too. But we are, overall, a nation ready to help. We have always taken in those who seek sanctuary. Hungarian refugees in 1956, and civil war refugees from former Yugoslavia. But we must not lose sight of our main objective: We cannot exceed our limits, because it would create a number of problems. A community that hosts one percent of refugees is devoid of problems unlike a community that hosts 10 percent of refugees.
and if the numbers were higher?
Hofer: It generates reservations and fears among the population. Fear for jobs, cultural identity and Islamization. We have to take that into consideration, in Austria and in Europe. If Europe cant handle the problem, it will have failed politically.
What exactly do you mean by Islamization?
Hofer: Islamization equals a terror threat; Islam is brought into the country, an aggressive form of Islam, that does not differentiate between state and religion - like we differentiate between these two in the Western World.
Do you really believe that the terror threat in Austria would drop if Muslims would not reside in the country?
Hofer: Yes, I do.
Austria used to be a multinational state were Muslims were part of the landscape. Where has this good tradition gone?
Hofer: It still does exist. Croats, Slovenes, Romani people and Austrians live peacefully together in all parts of our country.
What is a true Austrian to you?
Hofer: Everyone who carries an Austrian passport is a true Austrian.
Back in the day, you voted against the accession into the EU. Would you make a different decision today?
Hofer: No. If Austria werent a EU member today, it would be in a similar situation as Switzerland is, which is not joining the EU.
You are saying that an exit is not a taboo, but at the same time you are against an Oxit (Austria leaving the EU). Which side are you on?
Hofer: I dont want Austria to leave the EU. An Oxit would be a big mistake that would cause serious damage to the economy. I did vote against joining the EU because I believed that the EU makes numerous promises that are not kept. And I was right.
But, there are situations that call for extreme measures in which the population should decide whether it wants to remain in the EU or leave.
Which ones?
Hofer: If, for example, Turkey joins the EU.
Austria, like any other country, could prevent Turkeys EU accession with a veto. Hence, your country will remain in the EU forever?
Hofer: I hope so.
Your party platform includes the sentence: Our future depends upon the Schilling. Is that a serious statement?
Hofer: Is that truly what it says? Thats new to me, and it does not represent my opinion.
The Brexit and its consequences did this lead your country to change the course in European affairs?
Hofer: No. It has always been clear to us that, as net payers, we have a special responsibility to Europe. By the way, we have a different opinion than our partner parties in other EU countries.
You are referring to right-wing populists such as Le Pen in France and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. How much demagoguery is allowed in politics?
Hofer: Why is it considered demagoguery when you use the word homeland in your election campaign? When we give warning about terror threats? Or, when we say that Islam has something to do with Islamic terror? That has nothing to do with demagoguery, it has something to do with realism.
In regard to a possible leadership, you issued a threat, saying the words, Youll be surprised . What do you mean? Do you want to dissolve parliament, dismiss the government?
Hofer: No, of course not! The statement you are quoting was a mistake on my part. I admit that. It was a well-intended comment. Of course, I am going to get involved.
Thus, you are not going to sign every bill into law?
Hofer: I wouldnt sign a TTIP law. Treaties can be rejected by the Federal President in Austria. And if the parliament agrees, then Id say, its the people who have to decide in a national referendum.
Why of all things TTIP?
Hofer: Being a small country, TTIP would completely change us. We cant compete with the U.S. in terms of agriculture. We have different environmental standards and higher social standards. We are committed to renewable energy. This is incompatible with TTIP.
Who is closest to your political views, Angela Merkel or Hungarys Viktor Orban?
Hofer: Angela Merkel is a good politician, with one exception. Her statement, `We can do it', stood out like an island from the rest of her policy making. Viktor Orban is a leader who represents the interests of his country strongly. Im in favour of representing the interests of my country softer and gentler.
However, your real partner in Germany is the AfD, correct?
Hofer: To call them a partner is an exaggeration. We are watching the development of this young party with great interest. We share similar views on some, but not all, issues.
Where do you draw the line between the political right and right-wing politics?
Hofer: That varies from country to country. If you were to transfer the party platform of the United States Republican Party onto Austria, it would be considered far-right. The most important criteria is that if a party is on the center-right spectrum, the party should never have antisemetic views. That would be considered breaking a taboo.
*translated into english from Claudia Haj Ali
For Immediate Release, July 19, 2016 Contact: Tanya Sanerib, (503) 544-8512, tsanerib@biologicaldiversity.org Feds Strip Protections From Lesser Prairie Chickens Without Offering New Plan to Save Birds Swift Action Required to Save Species Down by 13 Percent Since 2015 TUCSON, Ariz. In response to a court ruling last fall, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today removed Endangered Species Act protection for lesser prairie chickens without proposing new protections for the birds, which have lost more than 90 percent of their prairie habitat. Last years legal ruling required the agency to vacate its 2014 decision to protect the rare grouse as threatened but in no way prohibited it from proposing much-needed new protections for the bird, whose population has dropped by more than 13 percent since last year. Photo courtesy USFWS. This photo is available for media use. The Services own scientists have warned that losing even a small amount of suitable habitat could send these magical birds into a death spiral, said Tanya Sanerib, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. Yet, even with populations declining and habitat dwindling to dangerous levels, the agency is giving up and failing to propose new protections critical to this unique birds survival. For centuries lesser prairie chickens have displayed their unusual springtime courtship rituals across eastern New Mexico, the Texas panhandle, Oklahoma, Kansas and southeastern Colorado. But their populations have now declined by up to 99 percent from historic levels. To try to head off the 2014 Endangered Species Act protections for the birds, the five states banded together to create a range-wide plan for conserving the grouse. The Fish and Wildlife Service said the voluntary plan failed to reduce threats to the birds. Still a Texas judge last year, responding to a lawsuit brought by oil and gas interests and several counties in New Mexico, ordered the Service to get rid of the listing and to reconsider the voluntary plan. Despite the voluntary plan, habitat loss, fragmentation and conversion remain major threats to the birds, isolating them in smaller populations as their numbers continue to drop. Its clear the voluntary plans created by state agencies and energy interests have failed to give lesser prairie chickens the help they desperately need, said Sanerib. Without Endangered Species Act protections theres an ever-escalating chance well lose these rare birds forever. After conservation groups petitioned the Service to protect the birds in 1995, they were put on the candidate waiting list for protection in 1998, and listed as a threatened species in 2014. The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places. www.biologicaldiversity.org
Right: Photograph during excavation exhibiting excellent dry preservation of plant remains
Left: A well-preserved, desiccated barley grain found at Yoram Cave An international team of researchers has succeeded for the first time in sequencing the genome of Chalcolithic barley grains. This is the oldest plant genome to be reconstructed to date. The 6,000-year-old seeds were retrieved from Yoram Cave in the southern cliff of Masada fortress in the Judean Desert in Israel, close to the Dead Sea. Genetically, the prehistoric barley is very similar to present-day barley grown in the Southern Levant, supporting the existing hypothesis of barley domestication having occurred in the Upper Jordan Valley.
Members of the research team are from the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) in Gatersleben, Germany; Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel; Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel; the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany; and the University of Haifa, Israel; The James Hutton Institute, UK; University of California, Santa Cruz, USA; University of Minnesota St. Paul, USA; University of Tubingen, Germany.
The analyzed grains, together with tens of thousands of other plant remains, were retrieved during a systematic archaeological excavation headed by Uri Davidovich, from the Institute of Archaeology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Nimrod Marom, from Zinman Institute of Archaeology, University of Haifa, Israel. The archaeobotanical analysis was led by Ehud Weiss, of Bar-Ilan University. The cave is very difficult to access and was used only for a short time by humans, some 6,000 years ago, probably as ephemeral refuge.
Oldest plant genome reconstructed to date
Most examination of archaeobotanical findings has been limited to the comparison of ancient and present-day specimens based on their morphology. Up to now, only prehistoric corn has been genetically reconstructed. In this research, the team succeeded in sequencing the complete genome of the 6,000-year-old barley grains. The results are now published in the online version of the journal Nature Genetics.
"These archaeological remains provided a unique opportunity for us to finally sequence a Chalcolithic plant genome. The genetic material has been well-preserved for several millennia due to the extreme dryness of the region," explains Ehud Weiss, of Bar-Ilan University. In order to determine the age of the ancient seeds, the researchers split the grains and subjected half of them to radiocarbon dating while the other half was used to extract the ancient DNA. "For us, ancient DNA works like a time capsule that allows us to travel back in history and look into the domestication of crop plants at distinct time points in the past," explains Johannes Krause, Director of the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena. The genome of Chalcolithic barley grains is the oldest plant genome to be reconstructed to date.
Domestication of barley completed very early
Wheat and barley were already grown 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, a sickle-shaped region stretching from present-day Iraq and Iran through Turkey and Syria into Lebanon, Jordan and Israel. Up to this day, the wild forms of these two crops persist in the region and are among the major model species studied at the Institute of Evolution in the University of Haifa. "It was from there that grain farming originated and later spread to Europe, Asia and North Africa," explains Tzion Fahima, of the University of Haifa.
"Our analyses show that the seeds cultivated 6,000 years ago greatly differ genetically from the wild forms we find today in the region. However, they show considerable genetic overlap with present-day domesticated lines from the region," explains Nils Stein, who directed the comparison of the ancient genome with modern genomes at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK), Gatersleben, with the support of Robbie Waugh and colleagues at the James Hutton Institute, Dundee, Scotland, and Gary Muehlbauer, University of Minnesota, USA. "This demonstrates that the domestication of barley in the Fertile Crescent was already well advanced very early."
The comparison of the ancient seeds with wild forms from the region and with so-called 'landraces' (i.e., local barley lines grown by farmers in the Near East) enabled to geographically suggest, according to Tzion Fahima and his colleagues at the University of Haifa and Israel's Tel-Hai College, "the origin of the domestication of barley within the Upper Jordan Valley - a hypothesis that is also supported by two archaeological sites in the surrounding area where the hitherto earliest remains of barley cultivation have been found.
Immigrants "trust" in extant landraces
Also the genetic overlap with present-day domesticated lines from the region is revealing to the researchers. "This similarity is an amazing finding considering to what extent the climate, but also the local flora and fauna, as well as the agricultural methods, have changed over this long period of time," says Martin Mascher, from the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research, the lead author of the study. The researchers therefore assume that conquerors and immigrants coming to the region did not bring their own crop seeds from their former homelands, but continued cultivating the locally adapted extant landraces.
New insights into the origins of our crop plants
Combining archaeology, archaeobotany, genetics and computational genomics in an interdisciplinary study has produced novel insights into the origins of our crop plants. "This is just the beginning of a new and exciting line of research," predicts Verena Schuenemann, from Tuebingen University, the second lead author of the study. "DNA-analysis of archaeological remains of prehistoric plants will provide us with novel insights into the origin, domestication and spread of crop plants."
Source: Bar-Ilan University
In this paper we attempt to clarify the identity of two purportedly new species of amnicolid snails in Pacific Northwest lakes that were vaguely described in grey literature and recently petitioned for federal listing. As currently understood the western American amnicolid fauna consists of the endemic genus Colligyrus (three species) and Amnicola limosa, which is distributed in a single site in western Montana (and also throughout much of eastern North America). The Washington duskysnail was proposed for the Montana population of A. limosa and two recently discovered populations in northern Washington. The masked duskysnail is a small amnicolid of uncertain generic status from two lakes in northern Washington. Our assessment of these putative species was based on genetic and morphological study of specimens from previously reported sites and recently discovered localities in Montana (both snails) and Washington (the first only). Molecular analyses (based on the mtCOI gene) resolved the western American populations of Amnicola as a weakly supported subunit of a clade that also contained eastern A. limosa and A. dalli; the western Amnicola differed from eastern A. limosa and A. dalli by 2.1% mean sequence divergence. We also found that western Amnicola and eastern A. limosa do not differ in body pigmentation as previously postulated and that these snails are closely similar in all other morphological details. We conclude that the Washington duskysnail is not a distinct species and that all of the western populations of Amnicola are A. limosa. This finding extends the range of A. limosa westward almost to the Pacific margin. Our molecular phylogenetic analyses and study of the female reproductive anatomy of the masked duskysnail congruently indicated that this snail, which was previously compared with other western amnicolids, belongs to the genus Lyogyrus, which is otherwise restricted to eastern North America. We were unable to resolve the taxonomic status of the masked duskysnail further, owing to the paucity of pertinent data for the poorly known eastern Lyogyrus fauna. We recommend that the masked duskysnail be treated as Lyogyrus sp. pending further study of this genus.
Autoren: Hsiu-Ping Liu; Darcy Marceau; Robert Hershler Journal: Journal of Molluscan Studies Band: 82 Ausgabe: 3 Jahrgang: 2016 Seiten: 464 DOI: 10.1093/mollus/eyw009 Erscheinungsdatum: 01.08.2016
National and international objections to AKPs assertions on death penalty
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Following the coup attempt on the night of Friday, July 15, certain groups among the masses on the streets shouted we want to see executions! Erdogans response was its your right to demand it. Several other AKP officials, including PM Yldrm, have also made statements openly sharing their intention to bring it to discussion within the Parliament.
Death penalty was abolished de facto in 1984, and legally in 2004 during AKP rule, with efforts to join the EU.
Now, AKPs mentioning of such legal reversing got reactions and objections both within and outside of Turkey. Two of the opposition parties, CHP and HDP have expressed their stand against it. Numerous civil society groups and unions in Turkey are also fundamentally in opposition and the Union of the Judges has already shared their concerns over it.
The subject matter has also drawn attention and opposition internationally. Foreign Minister of Belgium Didier Reynders expressed their worry over the implications of death penalty being brought back to the table. German Chancellor Merkel has also underlined, during a phone conversation with President Erdogan, that considering death penalty would by no means be acceptable. Though not specifically referring to the question of discussing death penalty, EU chief of foreign policy Federica Mogherini has firmly stated that rule of law should not be damaged and democratic institutions should be protected.
On the other hand, along with certain groups within Turkey, one of the three opposition parties, MHP, has stated that if a bill is brought forth in the Parliament, they would evaluate public demands and make the necessary considerations.
Russia has remained neutral on the topic. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated that they would probably not find themselves in a position to comment on something like this.
Sources: BirGun, CNN, Reuters
Several papers at this year's PAMRO conference will tackle OOH measurement across Africa, set to take place at Elephant Hills Resort in Zimbabwe 21-24 August 2016. The theme of this year's PAMRO conference is 'Africa Media Research in a Globally Connected World'.
Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe
Its been a red letter year for out of home (OOH) advertising measurement in South Africa (SA), with the launch in May of the Outdoor Measurement Councils (OMC) Outdoor Industry Audience Research.
Many of the key players from this achievement will be speaking at PAMRO, including JC Decauxs Lyn Jones, who will present on the OMCs successful launch of the first OOH ratings in South Africa for over a decade. She will be discussing some of the challenges that were overcome to achieve this, along with the introduction of an ESOMAR gold standard rated currency for Africa.
Africa OOH measurement
Daniel Cuende and Max Richman of Cuende and Geopoll, two of the institutions behind the OMCs measurement tool, will present A Hybrid Methodology for Out of Home Measurement. This responds to the difficulties of measuring OOH advertisements across Africa, with a new approach that uses satellite imagery and mobile survey data to collect data on Out of Home reach and impact.
Cuende and Geopolls presentation will include reach and GRP data for billboards and other OOH advertisements in major metropolitan areas throughout Africa; information on trip habits of different demographic groups on weekends and weekdays; and popular transport methods foot, car, taxi, bus broken down by demographics. They will also provide an overview of initial results from cities in South Africa and Kenya.
Crowdsourcing approach
Justin Schwellnus, managing partner at Dashboard Marketing Intelligence, presents A New Approach to OOH measurement using Crowdsourcing. Schwellnus notes two points with regard to the measurement of out of home advertising: first, the wide geographical spread of OOH advertising, along with the rotation of advertising and the possibility of site damage, complicates the accuracy of OOH measurements.
Second, certain marketing metrics such as What is my share of voice? and What campaigns are my competitors running? are critical to clients in this arena, and need to be addressed. Schwellnus therefore aims to demonstrate how this information can be regularly, effectively and cost efficiently obtained using a crowdsourced approach. Dashboard Marketing Intelligence have deployed an App that records GPS location as well as date/time stamped data and a brief assessment of each site, in a bid to answer these issues.
OOH measurement makes up one facet of the media measurement landscape to be addressed at this years PAMRO conference. Between presentations, delegates will have the opportunity to network against the backdrop of the spectacular Victoria Falls at the venue, the Elephant Hills Resort.
*Register as a delegate at the conference.
WASHINGTON D.C., USA - In a press statement, Elizabeth Trudeau, director, Office of Press Relations Washington, DC, expressed the United States' deep concern for the increasing pressure on the media in Lesotho, particularly noting the 9 July 2016 shooting of Lesotho Times/Sunday Express editor Lloyd Mutungamiri.
Journalists in Lesotho have also expressed concern for their safety in the current climate of harassment and intimidation.
The statement read: We welcome the statement by the Minister of Communications, Science and Technology condemning the shooting and encourage the government to investigate it fully and hold those responsible to account.
Freedom of expression is a constitutional right in Lesotho and journalists must be able to do their critically important jobs without fear of intimidation, harassment, and violence, the statement concluded.
WASHINGTON - It may be inside a protest rally, or in front of a deadly shooting. Smartphones, video and social media are empowering citizens to tell their stories like never before.
This became clear with the live video earlier this month from Diamond Reynolds when she captured the aftermath of the shooting by a police officer of her boyfriend Philando Castile in Minnesota and streamed it live on Facebook.
The unprecedented live feed was just the latest in a series of events highlighting the power of citizen journalists to bring to light events and viewpoints that would otherwise not be part of mainstream media.
Citizen journalism has been around for centuries, but each technological advance has made it easier to reach more people, said Valerie Belair-Gagnon, who heads the Yale University Information Society Project and is an incoming professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota.
Ahmet Ihsan Ariturk via 123RF
Prominent examples from the past include the 1963 Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination and the 1991 beating by Los Angeles police of Rodney King and the events of the Arab Spring.
More recently, citizen videos offered immediate and intimate perspectives from Thursday's truck attack in the southern French city of Nice and the 2015 rampage in Paris, as well as dozens of citizen confrontations with police in the United States.
"In each case, a new technology prompted us to be aware that citizens can contribute journalism in certain ways," Belair-Gagnon said. "In the shift we are seeing since 2004, citizen media is becoming fully integrated to journalism."
Belair-Gagnon said the rise of citizen journalism is not necessarily negative for the mainstream media. "For me, it's a positive story because journalists are not the only gatekeepers," she told AFP. "The fact that the public or citizens are able to gather information and distribute it to the public provides an opportunity for richer storytelling."
Jeff Achen, executive editor of the Minnesota nonprofit group The UpTake, which trains citizen journalists, said the latest incidents show a "democratization" of the news media. "Media can't be everywhere, but there is something with a citizen telling their own story from their own perspective which can be very valuable."
Achen, a former television and print reporter, said citizen journalism won't necessarily replace traditional media but may augment it. "With the legacy media, some of the news can feel manufactured and manipulated. It can feel corporate sponsored," he said.
Citizens can enhance journalism's traditional role of holding powerful institutions like the police accountable. Platforms such as Twitter's Periscope and Facebook Live, which allow anyone to broadcast an event, can create "excitement" in this effort, said Achen.
"I think this will become more prevalent," he added. "Everyone is going to make it routine. They will take out their cellphones whenever a police officer pulls over and does something" to bear witness to the facts, Achen said.
Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the ability for citizens to reach the masses can help drive social change. "Powerful as these videos are for mobilizing activists, they may be more powerful in bringing new participants into the racial justice movement," he said in a blog post.
Dan Gillmor, an Arizona State University professor and author of a book on citizen journalism, said Reynolds "changed our perception of media" with the "shocking and heartbreaking real-time web video of the last minutes of Philando Castile's life."
Gillmor said the Reynolds video was not necessarily something new but showed "the velocity of change is accelerating" in citizen news production. "Her video was a three-faceted act: witnessing, activism and journalism," Gillmor said in a blog post.
"Even though few people saw it in real time, she was saving it to the data cloud in real time, creating and -- one hopes -- preserving a record of what may or may not be judged eventually to have been a crime by a police officer. What Reynolds did was brave, and important for all kinds of reasons."
Gillmor said Reynolds "taught the rest of us something vital: We all have an obligation to witness and record some things even if we are not directly part of what's happening."
These events also raise questions about how platforms such as Facebook respond to their role as conduits for citizen journalism. Facebook's role came into question when it briefly took down Reynolds video, before restoring it.
Gillmor and others argue that the event underscores that Facebook is part of the news industry, despite its claim to be a neutral platform. "Facebook hasn't given a plausible explanation for its initial removal of Reynolds' video," Gillmor said. "The point is that the video remains visible because Facebook allows it to be visible."
Gillmor added that it is "enormously dangerous that an enormously powerful enterprise can decide what free speech will be. I don't want a few people's whims in Menlo Park overruling the First Amendment and other free speech 'guarantees.'"
Source: AFP
The Galliova Food Writers' Awards 2016, which acknowledge the country's top food and health writers across all print media, including online publications, has opened for entries, which need to be in by Wednesday 7 September.
Once again sponsored by the South African Poultry Association (SAPA), these awards carry substantial prize money across six categories including the Galliova Food Writer of the Year, Galliova Egg Champion Award, Galliova Health Writer of the Year and the Galliova Online Food or Health Writer.
With the reintroduction of the online category, organisers are anticipating another bumper year and they are particularly hopeful of increased numbers of entries in the Up & Coming Food or Health Writer category, which carries a R15,000 prize.
The judging panel comprises experts from the food, media, health and egg industries who will be looking for excellence in food writing, food styling and the overall promotion of the countrys food culture as well as writing excellence and balanced reporting on health and nutrition issues. Submissions will also be judged on the quality of information provided to the reader.
Chairman of SAPA and a member of the Galliova sub-committee, Agmat Brinkhuis, said as a farmer it was easy to focus only on the industrys value chain without realising the important role played by media and writers. However, the Galliova Awards, named after the Latin words for chicken (galli) and egg (ova), draw attention to their vital contribution and we should strive to uphold this wonderful event.
Winners will be announced at a celebratory function to be held on 21 October in Cape Town. In a break from tradition, organisers have planned a new urban venue for the function with an out-of-the-box theme.
For more information, click here.
Four of the eight journalists facing SABC disciplinary charges, have been fired via e-mail, trade union Solidarity said yesterday.
123RF
Solidarity labour court division head Anton van der Bijl said Krivani Pillay, Foeta Krige, Jacques Steenkamp, and Suna Venter were sent e-mail yesterday evening.
He said no reason for their dismissal was given. "We are taking [the SABC] to Labour Court and we will fight them with everything we have," he said.
Van der Bijl said Solidarity would consult its legal team, and could lay a personal cost claim against the SABC's chief operating officer, Hlaudi Motsoeneng.
He said the four were "shell-shocked" after receiving the e-mail. He wasn't sure if the other four had been sent dismissal letters, since they were not union members.
Spokesman for the SABC, Kaizer Kganyago said dismissal letters had been sent but he could not say how many.
"The process started today, but this is an employer/employee issue," Kganyago said. "They know why they have been dismissed."
In June Krige, Venter and Thandeka Gqubule were suspended after objecting to the SABC's policy on coverage of protests.
Busiswe Ntuli, Pillay, Steenkamp, Lukhanyo Calata and Vuyo Mvoko then also objected to SABC practices and were charged.
On Friday Solidarity filed affidavits with the Constitutional Court.
Source: The Times
Interactive print and new media agency, Digital Narrative, has teamed up with global digital marketing agency, Clicks2Customers, to form C2C Labs, an innovation hub that will focus on augmented, virtual and mixed realities. The new entity has also announced that it is now a certified partner for Blippar in South Africa.
Wren Handman via Pixabay
Although it made its mark as a search-engine performance specialist, Clicks2Customers, which is part of the incuBeta Group, has expanded into a full-service digital media agency. Its offering includes digital strategy, performance display, DoubleClick technology, data analytics and SEO.
Digital Narrative specialises in connecting offline with online campaigns, making use of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), underpinned with DoubleClick integration. C2C Labs will operate out of the Clicks2Customers Cape Town offices where the team will design and develop solutions for Clicks2Customers global clients.
Blippar is a mobile visual discovery app, using augmented reality and artificial intelligence to connect 65 million users with more than 1,000 global brands using content-rich, consumer-centric interactive experiences.
Over the past few years, Digital Narrative was a Layar Certified Partner. Going forward as C2C Labs, we are excited to also be part of the Blippar Partner network and continue to grow the adoption of AR in South Africa. As a partner, C2C Labs can now provide personalised local service. It will integrate AR into the marketing mix and apply best practice measurements, giving our clients a full view of the customer journey, both on and offline, explains Johan Walters, founder of Digital Narrative.
Walters will head up C2C Labs, overseeing delivery and product development as it expands its services into the Clicks2Customers global markets.
BRUSSELS - EU regulators are set to imposed a record fine this week on several of Europe's biggest truck-makers that are accused of colluding to rig higher prices, sources close to the matter told AFP.
Scania has the capacity to dramatically increase production of trucks and buses.Picture: BDlive
Volkswagen-owned MAN and Scania, as well as Daimler, DAF, Iveco and Volvo are accused by the European Commission of running a cartel from 1999 to 2011.
"The decision could land as early as Tuesday," a source told AFP, on condition of anonymity.
A spokesman for the commission, the EUs regulatory arm, refused to comment.
If confirmed, the fine will be the second major decision this month by Margrethe Vestager, the EUs powerful competition commissioner, who last week filed new anti-trust charges against US Internet giant Google.
The rap sheet against the five European companies would also counter accusations by Washington that Vestager unfairly targets US firms.
The investigation is based on raids carried out on large truck manufacturers in 2011, based on a tip-off by MAN.
The charge sheet includes accusations of price-fixing, but also alleges the existence of a secret agreement by the companies to delay the introduction of anti-pollution technology.
This accusation, first revealed by the Financial Times, could prove the most embarrassing in the wake of revelations last year of pollution test cheating by Volkswagen that has rocked the auto industry.
Volvo Trucks last month increased its provision in regards to the case to a total of 650m, in a sign that the final decision by the EU was imminent.
"The provision made ... is based on the companys best assessment of the financial impact of the investigation at the present time," the company said on June 25.
Daimler in 2014 already set aside 650m in connection with the case. But MAN and Scania have not provisioned for the case, with expectations high the groups will be largely spared by the EU after providing key evidence on the cartel.
The commissions existing record of a 1.5bn fine dates back to 2012. Seven television and computer screen makers, including LG Electronics and Philips, were found guilty of running a decade-long price-fixing scheme.
Woolworths recently hosted its annual 'Inside Retail' programme, targeting 32 technical vocational education and training colleges in Cape Town through a week-long, embedded course aimed at providing practical experience and knowledge of the retail value chain in South Africa.
The course also took the participants to various Woolworths distribution centres and suppliers around the Western Cape to give leaners a first-hand practical view of how a world class retailer operates.
The programme, launched in 2013, seeks to provide meaningful and tangible outcomes to raising the quality of tertiary education in the South Africa, specifically in retail management. The Inside Retail programme is Woolworths contribution to meeting the Department of Higher Education and Trainings strategic plan to develop a skilled and capable workforce to support an inclusive growth path in South Africa.
Sibongile Antoni, Woolworths head of human resources for learning and development said, Woolworths is committed to the advancement of skills development in South Africa. Collectively, government, labour and the private sector have a responsibility to the country to find ways to collaborate more closely to finding solutions to growing our economy and preparing our young people for the world of work. To this end, Woolworths is attempting to promote skills development to unlock transformation of the retail industry, which is in line with our commitment to ensuring that our business is making a positive contribution in the broader context of South Africa.
The lecturers who participate in the programme are not only accountable for providing students with the knowledge and skills that they will need to succeed in the Retail Management course, but also have the challenging task of ensuring that they supply industry and the country with skilled individuals to meet the skills shortage in South Africa.
Nathaniel Masiza
After completing the five-day programme, Nathaniel Masiza, a lecturer from the College of Cape Town said, I wish I could turn back the hands of time and teach my students what I know now about retail. I would have taught very differently.
Woolworths investment into the Inside Retail programme symbolises the brands corporate ethos and commitment to offer high quality learning opportunities to not only improve the level of tertiary education in South Africa, but to also tangible and positively impact the retail industry for generations to come.
This programme provides lecturers a chance to better understand the complexities of retail so that together, we can be part of the skills development transformation that we want to see in our country, added Antoni.
By offering the lecturers industry-related exposure, were helping to ensure that our institutions of learning have the capability to deliver the knowledge and skills that are required in the sector, concluded Antoni.
In 1975, Pepsi started a campaign showing ordinary consumers who said they are Coca-Cola users taking a blind taste test of Pepsi and Coca-Cola.
Invariably, more people preferred Pepsi in the blind taste test. You can see one of these ads here.
The implication being that Coca-Colas marketing is causing consumers to behave irrationally; making them drink an inferior product. This was at a time when the public was suspicious of the intentions of advertising (see my previous paper).
The successes of this campaign by Pepsi led to Coca-Cola reformulating their product. This became known as New Coke. There was significant consumer backlash and the original formulation was brought back.
Prof. Read Montague, a neuroscientist, repeated this challenge in 2004 inside a brain-scanning machine (fMRI). The published paper, titled Neural Correlates of Behavioral Preference for Culturally Familiar Drinks can be read here.
Unfortunately, some of the reports on this experiment in popular press played on its implications that advertising is unethically causing a brand preference for an inferior brand (or, at least, non-discriminated brands).
In this paper, I want to discuss the much more valid implication of Montagues research: Advertising creates a new reality, which adds to the value of the brand and even the experience of consuming the brand.
According to Millward Browns 2016 BrandZ study, Coca-Cola is the worlds 13th most valuable brand. In the USA, BrandZ estimates the Coca-Cola brand value to be $68 billion and Pepsis to be $10 billion.
In this paper, I discuss the importance of Montagues experiment with Coke and Pepsi and the implication that brand equity is really the outcome of neural structures in the brain relating to the brand. Simply put: Brand equity is not just a term based in accountancy principles, but is also based on neuroscientific biological facts.
The published paper contains scarcely a marketing word. It makes interesting reading to see how neuroscientists describe the marketing problem:
However, the modern problem is different. Cultural influences on our behavioral preferences for food and drink are now intertwined with the biological expediency that shaped the early version of the underlying preference mechanisms. In many cases, cultural influences dominate what we eat and drink. Behavioral evidence suggests that cultural messages can insinuate themselves into the decision-making processes that yield preferences for one consumable or another. Consequently, the appeal or repulsion of culturally relevant sights, sounds, and their associated memories all contribute to the modern construction of food and drink preferences. The neural substrates underlying food and drink preferences and their influence by cultural images have not been explored. As alluded to above, the majority of work on olfaction and gustation has focused on sensory processing. In this paper, we combine simple taste tests and event-related, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to probe the neural responses that correlate with the behavioral preference for noncarbonated versions of Coke and Pepsi. We further investigate the influence of the brand image on behavioral choice and brain response to both drinks.
An fMRI machine looks like the jet engine of an aeroplane. When it runs, the sound is similar to that of the engines of a Boeing. Having signed a disclaimer and taken off all the metal objects you have, you are strapped on a gurney which is inserted in the middle of this. Your head has to be kept still and is trapped. You can communicate via earphones and a mic, all this while clutching an emergency eject button in case of claustrophobia. (I know because I had my brain scanned for one of my books and it is not for the faint hearted.)
Feeding a liquid to a person, lying on his back in this environment, without him moving his head or choking is a challenge. They used a plastic tube to squirt 6ml into the respondents mouth after a visual signal. This signal was also used as the brand cue, sometimes a brand name and sometimes just a flash.
The study comprised 67 respondents divided into 4 groups. (Note: In neuroscientific experiments, much smaller samples than what we use in market research is standard. This has to do with the variance of the phenomenon being measured and is statistically viable. Example: if you want to determine the number of legs people have you need a small sample; if you want to determine the average height of males versus females, you need a much bigger sample.)
All these groups had to express their preferred brand and were put through a taste test. Some of the taste test contained branded samples and some a mixture of branded samples, etc. Then they were scanned with different cues being given to the different groups about the products that they were tasting. In some cases no information, in some branded information about the one sample, in some they were told that they were tasting two brands and given branded samples where, in fact, both samples were of the same brand. In some cases they were given a brand name, but the opposite brand was given. This was a truly comprehensive design.
Here are some quotes from the Montague paper:
Thus, it seems that brand knowledge for Coke and Pepsi have truly different responses both in terms of affecting behavioral preference and in terms of modifying brain responses.
In these experiments, we used functional brain scanning to find correlates of people's preferences for two similar sugared drinks: Coke and Pepsi. We report the finding that two separate systems are involved in generating preferences. When judgments are based solely on sensory information, relative activity in the VMPFC predicts people's preferences. However, in the case of Coke and Pepsi, sensory information plays only a part in determining people's behavior. Indeed, brand knowledge (at least in the case of Coke in our study) biases preference decisions and recruits the hippocampus, DLPFC, and midbrain. Our results suggest that the VMPFC and hippocampus/DLPFC/midbrain might function independently to bias preferences based on sensory and cultural information, respectively.
To test for effects of brand knowledge, we conducted a series of semianonymous taste tests and imaging experiments. In the taste tests, we found no significant influence of brand knowledge for Pepsi contrasted with the anonymous task. However, there is a dramatic effect of the Coke label on subjects' behavioral preference. Despite the fact that there was Coke in all cups during the taste test, subjects in this part of the experiment preferred Coke in the labeled cups significantly more than Coke in the anonymous task and significantly more than Pepsi in the parallel semianonymous task.
It is an interesting possibility that the hippocampus and DLPFC are specifically involved in biasing perception based on prior affective bias, whereas the other brain areas listed above are more involved in altering behavioral output.
Determining preferences in our experiment appears to result from the interaction of two separate brain systems situated principally in the prefrontal cortex. The ventromedial region of the prefrontal cortex plays a prominent role when preferences are determined solely from sensory information. The relative activity in the VMPFC is a very good indicator of which sensory stimulus is preferred by the subject. However, cultural influences have a strong influence on expressed behavioral preferences. We found this to be particularly the case with Coca-Cola, for which brand information significantly influences subjects' expressed preferences. We hypothesize that cultural information biases preference decisions through the dorsolateral region of the prefrontal cortex, with the hippocampus engaged to recall the associated information. These two systems appear to function independently in our experiment, since VMPFC activity was unaffected by brand knowledge. In judging stimuli based on multifaceted sensory and cultural influences, independent brain systems appear to cooperate to bias preferences.
This study was undertaken for neuroscientists to better understand the contribution of different brain regions to the decision-making process and not to help marketers better understand what they do. This would be why the report itself is difficult to understand if you are a marketer rather than a neuroscientist. This could also be why some of the reports in the popular press report the findings in a negative light to advertising.
The most important conclusion of this study is that cultural influences can develop responses from the hippocampus, which is the area associated with feelings (and memory formation).
When this area reacts to a brand name, it influences stated brand preference and also behaviour (buying). The result of this behaviour, when viewed from a marketers perspective, is brand equity.
Under the term cultural influences would be included advertising, all forms of marketing, promotions, pack design, and the actual experiences of past consumption. In modern marketing, the relevant term would be all touchpoints.
In marketing terminology, we would call this hippocampal reaction that Montague talks about a number of things: Brand image, extrinsics, emotional reactions, etc.
This hippocampal reaction was only found for Coca-Cola among Coke users. The experimental design was such that if there was a similar reaction for Pepsi, it would have been found. This was not so. The implication is that some brands in a category can have no reaction in the hippocampus. This is a finding one has to start to consider from a marketing perspective.
Questions arising:
There are at least two important questions, to my mind, that arise from this study:
1. Feelings influence decisions, all marketers know that. However, when a consumer evaluates two brands, do they have hippocampal reactions (feelings) for both and then get influenced to choose the one they have the strongest affinity to?
This would imply that one should be looking for relative brand preferences in our research design. Should one be asking for preference by rating scales or simply which brand do you prefer? Or as first choice, second choice etc?
How should one then treat the attribute association information one collected if these are dichotomous associations?
This study indicates that there is no hippocampal reaction to Pepsi. What are the implications for the way we interpret research findings?
2. All biological systems work on two counter systems controlling it. Your limbs have one set of muscles pulling in one direction and another pulling in another the same muscles that pull do not push. Hunger is created by a hormone called ghrelin, but stopping the feeling of hunger is controlled by a hormone called leptin, etc.
The major function of the brain is to create an approach avoid behaviour. It seems possible, to me, that Montague identified the approach Coke centres in the brains of the Coke users. Is there an avoid centre in the brain that he missed? In other words, do Pepsi users have an avoid Coke reaction, rather than an approach Pepsi reaction?
If this is the case, then their marketing strategy would be significantly different.
*Note that Bizcommunity staff and management do not necessarily share the views of its contributors - the opinions and statements expressed herein are solely those of the author.*
Effective 1 July 2016, Times Media will drive airtime sales for the Zulu-language television channel 1KZN TV. For the past three years, it has been the fastest growing community stations in South Africa and has a past 7-day audience of 1.7 million viewers.
Petro Teslenko via 123RF
Vernon Matzopoulos, head of broadcast at Times Media says, This channel is a gem. It knows and understands its audience intimately and delivers exactly what they want. It has done the hard work in building the viewership, now it is our job to bring in the revenue these numbers deserve.
1KZN TV is available as a free to-air channel in Kwa-Zulu Natal, as well as in five million homes on DStv 261 and on StarSat channel 482. The strong local focus (up to six hours a day of Zulu-language shows including news and current affairs) is tailored for its core 25-45 year old market.
Station manager of 1KZN TV, Edwin Mncwango, emphasises that the revenues generated by Times Media will help the channels staff of 52 to expand local content further. Because we are in control of the production process, we are able to tailor shows specifically to the needs of advertisers targeting our community.
Times Media believes regional advertising is poised for growth, as brands look for more cost-effective and resonant ways to engage.
Now that the Treasury has published for comment its policy paper on the tax of sugar-sweetened beverages, a debate about the sugar tax proposal can begin in earnest. And once the industry and its critics start crunching numbers and probing the consequences, intended and unintended, it could become a hot debate.
Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan announced in his February budget that the government was looking to introduce such a tax but details of the Treasurys thinking emerged only in the policy paper last week, which proposes a tax of R0.029 (2.9c) per gram of sugar in all sweetened drinks except for 100% fruit juices. The tax, which would make SA one of the first countries to introduce a "dose-based" tax on sugar, would add about 20% to the price of a can of Coca-Cola, for example.
Oddly enough, SA has done this before in some form with an excise tax on soft drinks and mineral water which was in place until 2002 as a revenue-raising measure.
And the new tax would serve to raise as much as R4.5bn, about R3bn of which would come from carbonated soft drinks, according to an industry estimate that followed the release of the policy paper last week.
This is higher than earlier estimates of slightly more than R2bn. But either way, the sugar tax would raise a lot less revenue than the "sin taxes" on beer which in 2015 raised about R8bn or tobacco (R12bn).
Treasury officials were quick to emphasise last week that the new tax is not about revenue. The amount that would be raised is minuscule in the context of total revenue of about R1-trillion, and there are much easier ways for government to raise it if it just declined to compensate tax payers for fiscal drag, for example, that could add R13b-R15bn to revenue in the current year (fiscal drag boosts the tax take when individuals receive salary increases which notch them up to higher tax brackets).
The sugar tax is designed to change behaviour, to "nudge" people to make healthier choices that will help curb the incidence of sugar-related diseases such as obesity and diabetes which are increasing at a rapid rate in SA, burdening the health system and the economy.
No one disputes that SA has a big problem. SA has one of the highest rates of obesity in the world and the highest in sub-Saharan Africa. Diabetes in SA has doubled over the past decade and is being diagnosed not just in older people but in teenagers, and it impacts on poor households particularly severely.
Wits Universitys Centre for Public Health estimates diabetes and heart disease are costing R1.8bn a year of GDP and this will balloon in the next decade, says the centres Professor Karen Hofman "if we dont start with a simple first step" in the form of a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages.
Why beverages? The evidence is, says Hofman, that "liquid sugar in particular is very toxic because when you drink it in liquid form it goes into your bloodstream very quickly". Many sugar-sweetened beverages also have little or no nutritional value.
The pure fruit juice industry has welcomed the exemption for 100% pure fruit juices but Hofman believes this is an omission by the Treasury and that all sweetened drinks should be taxed. The dose-based tax, she argues, will give producers an incentive to reformulate drinks so that they contain less sugar. She hopes too that it will force them to start marketing water.
Research and evidence is that tax on sugar-sweetened beverages is the most important and most effective measure, says Hofman. The next choice is food advertising regulation, which would for example stop the Coca-Cola billboards which the Centre for Public Health found in the grounds of 50% of Soweto schools despite a voluntary pledge by the industry to stop marketing to children
Will the sugar tax help? When Mexico introduced it in 2014 it cut consumption by 12% and among the very poor the decrease was 17%. Hofman says the centre estimates the tax will cut the number of obese people in SA by 250,000 in three years and if it is not introduced, the number will jump by half a million in those three years. Hofman adds that obese people cost employers 50% more than non-obese workers, because of higher rates of illness and time off.
A key question, however, is the unintended consequences for the sugar-sweetened beverage industry. Pioneer Foods, which produces Liqui-Fruit, has welcomed the exemption of 100% fruit juices, in part because it will be positive for the fruit value chain in agriculture and agro-processing. But what of the value chains in carbonated soft drinks or other drinks?
A recent study by KPMG raised the question of potential implications for the industry, with manufacturers, employees and shareholders standing to lose. In the UK, which plans to introduce a sugar tax in 2018, the share prices of the beverage manufacturers fell when the tax was announced.
In Mexico, a reported 1,700 jobs were lost due to the tax implemented in 2014 with estimates of a total 11,000 jobs having been lost along the value chain.
The Beverage Association of SA (BevSA), whose members include the bottlers of Coca-Cola and a range of other sweetened drinks, has said the tax was discriminatory. It did not respond last week to repeated requests for comment on the policy paper. However, it said in June that "the targeting of a single product with a tax will not help the government meet its objectives. The tax is discriminatory and will have a disproportionate effect on lower income earners, who spend a greater proportion of their budget on food.
"There is also a growing body of evidence that shows that a sugar tax on sugar-sweetened beverages doesnt reduce calorie intake," BevSA said.
There has been debate in the UK about whether, if the government is going to tax fizzy drinks, it should not also be taxing crisps or other junk food which are just as implicated in obesity and other lifestyle diseases.
On its own, the tax clearly is not going to solve SAs obesity and diabetes problems and the policy paper recommends it should be part of a suite of measures to improve the nations health. The question is whether the expected benefits will be substantial enough to outweigh the expected costs.
With the paper now open for comment, the discussion promises to be heated.
Hollard customers will no longer have to first gain authorisation for certain medical emergencies while travelling.
Authorisation for medical expenses while travelling has been a point of contention among customers, particularly given the nature of certain emergency situations, so Hollard Travel Insurance has recently updated its policy to take this into consideration.
There are certain conditions in which travellers dont have the time to sit down and phone for authorisation, says Uriah Jansen, MD of Oojah Travel Protection which administers Hollard Travel Insurance.
As such, Hollard investigated which conditions are life threatening and have come up with a list, including cardiac arrest, strokes, seizures, constricted airways and heavy bleeding among others. In these cases, travellers would only need to gain authorisation for treatment given once they are stable.
Cancel for any reason
Hollard has also recently updated its cancel for any reason product to include cover for senior travellers. The product, which was first launched two years ago, enables travellers to cancel their trips for any reason.
Jansen explains that most cancellations must be unexpected and related to a specific event in order for payment to be refunded but with cancel for any reason insurance, travellers could, for example, book a trip knowing their elderly parent is sick and then should they tragically pass away before the trip happens, they would be able to cancel and receive 50% of their money back.
The volatility of international travel at the moment makes this an interesting product for travellers to consider because should a terror attack occur at a specific destination, travellers are able to cancel should they be concerned for their safety.
The only condition is that travellers must take out this cover within 24 hours of booking their trip. She says travellers sometimes forget that travel insurance is the same as any other kind of insurance, pointing out that you would not be able to take out car insurance after having had an accident.
The Council for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) has dismissed an application by the National Education, Health and Allied Workers' Union (Nehawu) in relation to the payment of bonuses in 2015.
Nehawu had approached the CCMA to have Parliaments review of employees performance scores in December 2015 declared as unfair labour practice.
The CCMA, however, on Monday, 18 July, said it is the legislative duty of the Secretary to Parliament to ensure that the resources of [Parliament] are used efficiently. Parliament had not achieved its overall targets, and found this irreconcilable with the performance achievements of 91% of its individual employees.
In the evidence before the CCMA, Parliament stated that the review of the performance scores was a fair measure and done in accordance with its policies, as a result of inconsistency between the performance of the institution -- based on audited results by the Auditor General -- and the individual scores of the employees. The CCMAs ruling has now confirmed this position.
This finding goes directly against a position assumed by the local branch of Nehawu in its submission to the commission and in public statements the union had issued.
The CCMA found that Parliament had tried to make arrangements for employees and members of Nehawu, who were dissatisfied with the revised scores, to address the issue through the correct channels.
Only a few objections were lodged... by dissatisfied members of Nehawu This suggests a general acceptance by its employees of the manner in which Parliament had gone about the payment of bonuses and dealing with subsequent disputes, said the CCMA.
The CCMAs ruling also makes a finding in respect of issues that made it difficult for Parliament to conclude the matter timeously. It cited the illegal strike Nehawu had embarked on and other administrative issues such as union members not submitting the required documentation on time.
The CCMA said it was satisfied that Parliament had not acted with negligence or malice when it reduced the performance scores. It said Parliament acted fairly and in good faith in its engagement with employee issues.
Parliament said it hopes that this ruling will close the chapter of negative engagement and help solidify a commitment to work together.
Purchasing a home is an exciting time in one's life; it is a milestone that many aspire to and a symbol of success. However, according to studies, nearly 80% of homebuyers have at least one significant regret regarding their property purchase decision.
So many homebuyers get caught up in the emotional journey of purchasing a property and sometimes overlook certain important elements. It is only once they have moved into their new home and everything has settled that the reality of the situation sets in and they start to see the things they previously didnt.
Buying a home is a massive financial commitment, yet many buyers base their home buying decision on only a few minutes of viewing the property. If buyers are not fully prepared and do not have an idea of exactly what they are looking for, it could be easy for them to miss something or make an incorrect decision.
There are a few tips the homebuyers can use to avoid buyers regretting their purchase:
Stay focused
Ideally, before a buyer starts to look for a home, they should have made a list of their needs and wants, prioritising the must-haves and noting the elements that they are willing to compromise on. It is important to not get distracted by the wants and remain focused on the must-haves. If the house has many of the buyers wants, but does not meet their main objectives it is not the right house. Considering the fact that purchasing a property is a long-term commitment, buyers will have to deal with their compromises for a long period. For this reason, it is essential that they make the right decision upfront. Working with an experienced, reputable real estate professional will assist the buyer to keep on track and find a home that meets all their criteria.
Check the finances, and then check them again
One of the main reasons that buyers regret their home purchase is unexpected costs. It is vital for buyers to calculate how much they can afford, taking into account all the associated costs that go along with homeownership such as homeowners insurance and maintenance. A bond origination company or a professional financial adviser will be able to provide potential buyers with a list of costs that they can expect to pay when purchasing a home.
Having the home inspected will also give buyers an idea of the type of repairs that they can expect so that they can budget for this beforehand.
Dont get caught up in a bidding war
With inventory stock still an issue in many sectors of the market, it may be possible to get sucked into a bidding war and lose some perspective. A competitive offer from another prospective purchaser could make a home seem more attractive than it really is and lead the buyer to push up their offer. However, it is important to stay objective and keep in mind that you are trying to buy the right home not win an auction. It is best to walk away from a home, than overpay as a result of a bidding battle. Paying more for a property will mean larger deposit requirements, higher transfer costs and thousands of rand of additional interest on a larger bond. Another down side is that it will take much longer to build up any equity.
Purchasing a home is one of the largest financial investments most people will make in their lives. While finding the right home can be an emotional rollercoaster, it is important to keep things in perspective and focus on what really matters to avoid any remorse.
Microsoft said it will take longer than initially expected for Windows 10 to reach a billion devices due to the lack of traction in its smartphone business. The company had set an ambitious goal of having a billion gadgets running on Windows 10 monthly when the latest generation operating software was release nearly a year ago.
The US technology giant said Windows 10 is already powering more than 350 million devices monthly in what it described as "the hottest start in history".
"We're pleased with our progress to date, but due to the focusing of our phone hardware business, it will take longer than FY18 for us to reach our goal of 1 billion monthly active devices," a Microsoft statement read.
The spread of Windows 10 in the year ahead was expected to be driven by use in businesses and in new devices. Microsoft has aggressively promoted upgrades from old versions of Windows, and has made Windows 10 available as a free upgrade until the operating system turns one year old on July 29.
After that, it will be available pre-installed on new devices or for purchase separately, with a home computer version priced at $119, according to the Redmond, Washington-based company. Microsoft provoked ire by pushing people to upgrade to Windows 10 by automating the process and, for a time, modifying the red "x" in a corner of an upgrade notice pop-up box to approve the action instead of simply closing the message.
Apple said this year it has one billion active devices running iOS software that powers the California-based companies iPhones, iPads and iPods.
Anniversary update
Microsoft will mark the one-year anniversary of Windows 10 with a major update to the software. "The Anniversary Update will help people be more productive, stay safer online and, of course have fun," Windows and Devices Group corporate vice president Yusuf Mehdi said in a blog post.
The Windows 10 update set for release on 2 August promised improved security and enhanced capabilities for the Microsoft Edge browser. It also adds Microsoft Ink, which supports the use of digital pens for tasks such as writing, drawing or working on math problems.
The new Windows 10 lets virtual assistant Cortana handles more commands, and opens the door to sync with Xbox One consoles to play video games. Windows 10 operating system is designed to work on laptops, desktops, smartphones, Xbox One consoles, HoloLens augmented reality headsets and more.
Source: AFP
Edcon announced on Monday that it was bidding farewell to some members of its executive management team and introducing new ones amid a restructuring of the retailer's operations.
The company said Urin Ferndale had been appointed CE of the Jet division. Ferndale replaces Andy Williams, who the company said would return to England for family reasons.
Edcon said it had appointed Andy Jury as CE of the speciality stores division and he would replace Garth Napier, "who had indicated that he would move once the group advanced the change in its debt position, and who has decided to pursue other interests outside the group".
Williams and Napier follow Toon Clerckx formerly chief financial officer of the group who left late in June as members of the executive management who had resigned.
As part of efforts to improve its financial performance and maximise its liquidity position, Edcon is undertaking a comprehensive reform of its entire capital structure. The apparel group expects the streamlining of its business to culminate in a significant reduction of its debt.
Boston-based Bain Capital bought Edcon for R25bn in a leveraged buyout in 2007. The global economic crisis, which began soon after the deal was finalised, hit the group hard.
Other changes to management include the appointment of Andrew Levermore as CE of Edgars.
Edcon CEO Bernie Brookes said he was confident the new team could steer the group into its next phase of growth and allow it "to focus on our core business of retail".
"This is the executive management team that has largely been driving the significant change that is under way at Edcon. In addition to advancing the process of correcting the capital structure, we have already eliminated numerous complexities in the business and total costs are being well managed.
"We have intensified our focus on customer needs and our realigned plan is designed to drive meaningful customer change in the near term and create long-term value. I want to thank Andy Williams and Garth Napier for their significant contributions, guidance and input over the last years. It has been a pleasure working with both of them," said Brookes.
Edcon is SAs largest nonfood retailer. The group trades under three divisions: Edgars, which serves middle- and upper-income markets; Jet and Jet Mart, which serve middle- to lower-income markets; and the speciality division, made up of brands such as Red Square, Boardmans and Legit. It trades in SA, Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, Lesotho, Zambia, Ghana and Zimbabwe.
South African Airways (SAA) has not agreed to the terms of a demand from the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa) to proceed with its flawed transaction with BnP Capital, and the matter is increasingly likely to go to court.
Ivan Herselman, the legal director of Outa, said on Tuesday that the response from SAA to Outas letter was "not good enough".
Earlier this month Outa detailed as many as 19 contraventions of SAAs own supply chain management policy and breaches of a number of acts such as Public Finance Management Act, the Preferential Procurement Policy Framework Act as well as the Constitution.
"They have said they are in discussions with BnP and (SAA) only agreed to suspend payments to BnP until the end of the month. That is not what we asked for," he said.
"We will be writing to them to insist that they give us an undertaking not to pay them at all. We dont want to be in a situation where on August 1 they pay them and then we have to go to court and try to undo something that has been concluded," he said.
It is increasingly likely that the legal fight for which Outa has been preparing will unfold soon.
BnP was hired to give financial advice to SAA on its dire debt position. It is alleged BnP then alerted SAA to how dire its financial crisis was and that large loan payments were due for which the airline did not have money.
SAA then extended BnPs contract to include raising debt, as much as R7.3bn, in order to keep the airline afloat, it said.
However, this version of events has been met with scorn as the extent of the airlines debt has long been known and the job could have been done by SAAs own financial staff.
The transaction was opposed by SAAs treasurer, Cynthia Stimpel, after she said BnP was charging as much as three times more than market rates, and that the work the board wanted done could be done internally.
Stimpel has since been suspended, and joins a long list of experienced SAA senior staff who have been removed from the airline for opposing the directions from the board.
The airline has no permanent CEO, chief financial officer, chief commercial officer, head of strategy or head of human resources, and almost 80% of the senior staff in the airlines commercial division have resigned or been suspended.
Going by the enthusiastic response of African music artistes, music professionals and journalists who have flooded the AFRIMA website with entries from across the continent and from Africans in the Diaspora for the 2016 All Africa Music Awards (AFRIMA), the International Committee of AFRIMA is appealing to other music professionals, yet to submit their works, that there will be no extension after the deadline for submission on 30 July 2016.
Cassper Nyovest
In partnership with the African Union Commission (AUC) The All Africa Music Awards is a music and cultural initiative developed to celebrate, reward and showcase the rich musical heritage of Africa.
AFRIMA also hopes to stimulate conversations among Africans and between Africa and the rest of the globe, about the great potential and values of the African culture and artistic legacy for the purpose of creating jobs, reducing poverty, calling attention of world leaders to Africa and promoting the positive image of Africa to the world.
Explaining further, project director, Kemi Ashefon, said: I must say we are impressed by the level of participation by African artistes, on the continent and in the Diaspora, in the on-going AFRIMA 3.0 entries submission process so far. This is an encouraging success marker for us considering the fact that we have surpassed the 1500 mark before the close of entries in two weeks time.
Speaking further on what to expect after the close of entries in July 30, AFRIMA president and executive producer, Mike Dada, said We would not want to distort the calendar for this years edition. Sticking to the deadline will enable an early screening on the list of entries submitted for the adjudication process and nominees announcement.
The 13-person AFRIMA jury which represents the five regions of Africa and the Diaspora will be arriving from August 16 to 23 for the crucial responsibility of screening, categorising, assessing and selecting nominees from the body of works submitted for award consideration. Concluding the adjudication process, on August 22 will be the World Media Announcement of the continental Awards.
Gabina VOA is designed to be an infotainment youth radio show broadcasting to Ethiopia and Eritrea in the Amharic language. The show brings varied perspectives on issues concerning young people in the Horn of Africa region. Gabina in the Amharic language is a front row taxi ridesymbolic of the shows content as a fun ride that takes audiences from point A to point B. Gabina VOAs main goal is Enlightening young people, introducing them to cutting-edge technological innovations, exposing them to new processes and ideas so they can be productive, informed and self-governing citizens.
Czech daily newspaper Lidove noviny: "The white man in Europe is being threatened by genocide"
19. 7. 2016
cas cteni 1 minuta
In the wake of the Nice attack, the Czech daily Lidove noviny, which often pretends to be the Czech equivalent of The Times of London, has published an openly racist commentary:
"The European Union is incapable of providing safety for 'its own people'. Everything is camouflaged by political correctness. It is the fault of the European politicians. In the past, they started their colonialist conquest and now, since the Second World War, they have been reaping its rotten fruit by opening the European borders to the inhabitants of their former colonies. But the Czechs have not shared in any colonial wealth and so they do not have any moral duty to accept refugees from these former colonies.
Thus the era of multiculturalism, the era of social engineering, supported by dozens of activist organisations, started. The European countries opened their arms to everyone regardless of the interests of the original inhabitants of Europe.
Races are being mixed in Europe these days practically as a result of the European politicians' orders. Of course, races do mix in various parts of the world continually, but normally this is a natural, slow process. Our European politicians are trying to mix the races quickly, during their time in power. No wonder this produces violence and terrorism. Immigrants have always been coming as hordes who have never assimilated, but created ghettoes which maintain their hatred.
Mrs Merkel and politicians like her have started a forced mixing of races. The white race will be gradually liquidated and we, Europeans, will be brown or black. This is a genocide of the white people.
I do not want to defend the mass murderer Joseph Stalin but the contemporary European policy is probably much worse in many respects than his.
What is to be done? We must depose our politicians before they replace the population of Europe!"
Source in Czech HERE
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WASHINGTON Republicans delegates adopted a 2016 platform at their national convention in Cleveland that supports statehood for Puerto Rico, but not for the District of Columbia. The GOP also wants to abolish the Internal Revenue Service, overhaul the federal tax code, and expand the use of P3s for infrastructure projects.
The 66-page platform, which lists the GOP's principles and policies, "provides a thorough look at how we will restore prosperity and security to our country," party officials said Monday.
The GOP regularly releases its platform at the Republican National Convention each presidential election cycle, but it is not specifically authorized by any candidate of committee.
The platform also addresses technology, homeownership, healthcare, education and other areas.
Puerto Rico
Under the platform, Republicans said they support Puerto Rico, currently a U.S. territory, becoming a sovereign state of the United States if the commonwealth's residents want that.
The GOP cited a 2012 local referendum where 54% of island residents voted to end Puerto Rico's standing as a territory, and 61% chose the option of statehood for Puerto Rico over nationhood. Once this vote is ratified, Republicans said they would urge Congress to approve an enabling act to allow for the opportunity for Puerto Rico to become a state.
The finances of the territory, which is currently facing $70 billion of debt and $46 billion of unfunded pension liabilities, are to be overseen by a federally-appointed oversight board as established by the Puerto Rico Oversight Management and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) signed into law by President Obama last month. The board also has authority to file debt restructuring proposals with a federal court if voluntary negotiations with creditors fail.
District of Columbia
Conversely, Republicans want to stifle statehood for D.C., which district residents will vote on in November following its council's approval of the ballot measure last week. Approval of that vote could lead to a vote by Congress on whether to make D.C. the nation's 51st state.
The GOP has resisted D.C. statehood because it would likely mean adding Democrats to a Republican-controlled Congress.
"Statehood for the district can be advanced only by a constitutional amendment," stated the platform. "Any other approach would be invalid."
The D.C council submitted its $13.4 billion fiscal 2017 budget to Congress and President Obama in June despite a bill passed by House that would prevent any such action without congressional approval. The budget submission is seen as a step toward home rule for the district, which the president supports.
Internal Revenue Service
Calling the Internal Revenue Service a "toxic" agency in their platform, the GOP officials say the organization should be abolished. This would be accomplished by simplifying the federal tax code, essentially making the agency "obsolete," the party said. The GOP believes the IRS has targeted conservative groups through audits and other actions. "It systematically targets conservative, pro-life, and libertarian organization, harassing them with repeated audits and denying their tax exempt status," officials wrote. "The IRS has become an ideological attack dog for the worst elements of today's Democratic party."
The GOP also echoed previous Republican calls for the impeachment of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, who they said has "lied to Congress, hidden evidence, and stonewalled investigations."
Tax
In the platform, Republicans called for a simplification of the current tax code, though they provide only a general overview of what such a code would look like and how it would be achieved.
Admitting it would be an enormous undertaking, GOP officials said establishing a new, pro-growth tax code is a "moral imperative" and improving the tax code would be the most important factor in developing a prosperous economy.
Similar to the House GOP blueprint for tax reform released last month, the Republican platform does not mention municipal bonds but proposes eliminating unnamed special interest provisions.
"We will eliminate as many special interest provisions and loopholes as possible and curb corporate welfare, especially where their erosion of the tax base has created pressure for higher rates," the platform reads.
The platform principles on taxation are in line with those of the Republican blueprint for tax reform, which calls for a reduction in the corporate tax rate as well as the number of individual tax brackets to make the federal tax code "simpler, fairer and flatter."
The Republicans also call for maintaining of the tax-exempt status of religious organizations and charities. Donations made to them should remain deductible.
Transportation/Infrastructure
A core policy goal of the Republican platform includes eliminating certain Highway Trust Fund programs the party believes the federal government should not be involved in, including the federal transit program, which Republicans said they want to phase out over time.
Provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act would also be amended so they would no longer delay and drive up costs for transportation projects, Republicans added.
The GOP took issue with one fifth of the Highway Trust Fund's spending going toward mass transit, which it called an "inherently local affair that serves only a small portion of the population" in six urban areas.
The GOP also stressed the importance of P3s to save taxpayer dollars and help fund infrastructure projects that it said can help bring in additional state and local revenue. The party said it will "remove legal roadblocks to public-private partnership agreements" to allow outside investment to help subsidize the cost of road and bridge improvements.
Republicans also opposed any increase to the federal gas tax, which is currently at 18.4 cents-per-gallon, to fund transportation projects.
President Obama signed a five-year, $305 billion transportation funding bill in December.
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Horse lovers will again get the chance to learn all about the breeds featured at the Canadian National Arabian and Half-Arabian Champion Horse Show coming to Brandon next month.
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FP Canadian Newspapers Limited Partnership (FPLP) announced the appointment of Jim Mihaly as publisher of the Brandon Sun on Monday.
Mihaly brings 35 years of newspaper experience to the Sun and most recently served as publisher of the Surrey Leader and Cloverdale Reporter in British Columbia.
My wife and I look forward to becoming a part of the community in Brandon, Mihaly said. The Brandon Sun has played an important role in Westman for more than 130 years and we will continue to build on that trusted reputation.
Matt Goerzen/The Brandon Sun The Brandon Suns new publisher, Jim Mihaly, and his wife are looking forward to becoming part of the local community. Mihaly most recently served as publisher of two newspapers in British Columbia.
Mihalys career spans all aspects of the newspaper industry. After starting as a reporter in his familys chain of newspapers in Alberta in 1981, Mihaly worked his way up through the company before purchasing the business.
He has also held executive positions with Black Press and Sun Media.
Mihaly graduated from Thompson Rivers Universitys executive general management program and has been involved with several community-based organizations, including serving as the former president of Surrey Board of Trade and director with the Surrey Homelessness Society.
The Brandon Sun publishes six days a week, serving the western Manitoba region with an average circulation of approximately 15,000 copies.
The Brandon Sun
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Fifty bright yellow signs will soon dot a large stretch of Manitoba Highway 10, redesignating it as the John Bracken Highway honouring a farmer who became the provinces longest-serving premier after an election he forgot to vote in.
Michael Bracken, Johns grandson, spoke to a crowd that included local dignitaries and more than 50 extended family members from Winnipeg, Kelowna, Manotick, Ont., Seattle and Cincinnati, Ohio, who spent Monday in the Wheat City celebrating the new moniker.
I think its a great, great thing to have grandpa remembered this way anybody going by will see it and I know where it is and I think thats a great deal for grandpa, he said on the lawn at the Riverbank Discovery Centre, with the portion of John Bracken Highway that cuts through Brandon in the background.
Tim Smith/The Brandon Sun Members of former premier John Brackens family pose for photos with a highway sign bearing his name during an announcement at the Riverbank Discovery Centre on Monday. The name of Highway 10 from the North Dakota border to Riding Mountain National Park will now be known as the John Bracken Highway.
About 195 kilometres of Highway 10, starting at the American border and running north through Brandon to Riding Mountain National Park, will now be named after the provinces 11th premier.
Michael spoke on behalf of the family to the gathering, joking the highway ought to have been called the John and Alice Highway for the role Brackens wife played in his career.
Honest John Bracken came into power in July 1922, when he was asked to lead the United Farmers of Manitoba, who had unexpectedly taken office without a leader. After some reluctance, the 39-year-old agronomist and president of the Manitoba Agricultural College agreed to come on board and was elected to represent The Pas.
With a plainspoken style, Bracken began a 21-year term spanning both the Great Depression and the Second World War.
Brackens government knocked down provincial debt, invested in the provincial school system and pushed the Government Liquor Commission to administer and sell alcohol. In subsequent terms, Bracken pushed to expand the railway north and went toe-to-toe with the federal government for better economic compensation for Manitoba.
Through his premiership, Bracken was known for building coalitions: uniting the Manitoba Liberal and Progressive parties against the federal Liberals during the Great Depression and bringing together three parties during wartime, when he offered to replace members of his cabinet with opposition members.
In 1942, Bracken was asked to take over leadership of the federal Conservative party brokering its change of name to the Progressive Conservatives. He held the position until 1948 when he retired from political life.
In the 1950s, Bracken led two commissions, one studying the Liquor Control Act and one on the distribution of railway cars. He and his wife Alice, received the Manitoba Order of the Buffalo Hunt, an honorary degree from the University of Manitoba and a spot in the Manitoba Agriculture Hall of Fame.
A small Saskatchewan village, noted as having 25 people in the 2006 census, is also named after Bracken.
A lot of Manitobans wont recognize the name and they for sure wont recognize that he was premier for 21 years, which is just a tremendous accomplishment. Obviously, Manitobans had a great deal of faith in him and they believed in what he was doing to re-elect him that many times, said Growth, Enterprise and Trade Minister Cliff Cullen, who also spoke at the event.
The Progressive Conservative MLA for Spruce Woods said that efforts to recognize Bracken were started by the province before the spring election, but that it was Pallister and his government that settled on the southern stretch of Highway 10.
Cullen figures the project will cost about $10,000, and the signs should hopefully be up by the end of the summer.
(Bracken) was a rural person, he studied agriculture, believed strongly in agriculture and did a lot of work in the industry. I think its fitting that we take a rural piece of highway like No. 10 that now has his name attached to it, Cullen said.
Another grandson, John Bracken of Winnipeg, said that he didnt know his grandfather well, but from the people hes talked to, Bracken would probably be quite uncomfortable with the back-and-forth or insults that go on in politics these days.
Tim Smith/The Brandon Sun Michael Bracken, one of former premier John Brackens grandsons, speaks during an announcement at the Riverbank Discovery Centre on Monday to change the name of Highway 10 from the North Dakota border to Riding Mountain National Park to the John Bracken Highway.
He was a very honest man and Im not sure that works in politics anymore, he said.
Michael, also from Winnipeg, agreed, suggesting their grandfathers enduring characteristic will be his honesty.
I cant imagine him doing anything untoward. He did a great job for Manitoba, and pulling it out of debt and things like that.
Thats a message Cullen said he and his legislative colleagues can take to heart.
The more people, and politicians in particular, came work together the more we can accomplish, he said.
After going north through Riding Mountain National Park, Highway 10 is already named as part of the Northern Woods and Water Route, which travels through Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta to Dawson Creek, B.C.
Dwight MacAulay, Manitobas chief of protocol, had been working with the Bracken family for years on finding a way to memorialize Honest John. It turns out a stretch of provincial highway is distinct honour.
To his recollection, the only other provincial roadway bearing the name of a Manitoba premier is Winnipegs Sterling Lyon Parkway.
This is relatively unique, absolutely, MacAulay said.
tbateman@brandonsun.com
Twitter: @tombatemann
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Since he dropped the band name 4 Hole Punch, Brendan Lyons has had a lot more success in the music industry.
Its not a great name, the Brandon-born drummer said with a laugh.
Great name it was not, but 4 Hole Punch was the name of one of Lyons early bands. A group of friends who were going to Brandon University at the time, 4 Hole Punch played at Westman festivals and The 40 when they could. Later in their career 2011, to be exact the friends decided to pursue a music career and degrees in Edmonton.
Now, that hes one of 2016s Fred Sherratt Award recipients, Lyons is glad he made the move.
After leaving Manitoba in 2012, he enrolled in MacEwan Universitys bachelor of music in jazz and contemporary popular music program.
Five weeks ago, he graduated as part the programs second class with a major in drumset performance.
Class starts at eight and were there till midnight every day, so, you know, I think thats like 14-hour days every day for four years, rehearsing, playing, (and) there was performances all the time, Lyons said of his workload.
Although the program was intense, Lyons drew the attention of faculty members who later nominated him for the MusiCounts award.
At a presentation in Toronto on June 28, Lyons and 11 other winners were presented with the Fred Sherratt Award as well as $2,500.
As the trip sets winners up with members of the music industry, Lyons met members from Universal Music Canada and Gavin Brown, who helped produce the Tragically Hip and Barenaked Ladies.
An opportunity to kick-start their career like that is considered invaluable to young artists like Lyon, who isnt always confident what his future will look like.
I could tell you what Id like it to look like. Id just like to play music for a living play music, produce, engineer, write. As long as I can sustain some sort of, you know, living doing that, I think thats all I can ask for, really.
For now, he is playing in Edmonton bands Vera, Push and Pull, and the Madi Allen Band, and teaches 25 students a week.
He hopes to visit the Wheat City soon now that school is officially over.
aantoneshyn@brandonsun.com
Twitter: @AAntoneshyn
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They were once inseparable but a love triangle tore twin brothers apart, leading to a fight in which one stabbed the other.
Forced by a no-contact order to remain separated since the incident, the brother responsible for the stabbing says he misses his sibling.
I regret this every day, every day that I cant talk to my brother, Jonathan Jose Mykle told Judge Kelly Moar.
Mykle, 26, was sentenced to 16 months house arrest on Monday for assault causing bodily harm.
He was also fined $400 for mischief for damaging his brothers car and room and admitted to failing to abide by an order at the time of the stabbing by having no contact with his brother.
Court documents state that Mykle is the adopted son of retired Brandon Court of Queens Bench judge Rodney Mykle and former resource teacher Lori McBeth.
The Brandon couple adopted the twins when they were babies. The brothers were born in Peru while it was embroiled in civil war. Members of their community were dying from dysentery, starvation and violence.
According to their parents, the brothers were inseparable until they fell in love with the same woman.
On July 4, 2015, Mykle took an axe to his twin brothers car and room. After trashing the car, he urinated on it, Crown attorney Deidre Badcock said.
Mykle told police he was upset because hed found out his brother, Christopher Mykle, and his estranged girlfriend were involved.
He maintains that there had been some overlap in their relationships.
Following his arrest for that matter, he was released with a condition that he have no contact with Christopher.
Christopher and the woman who was the subject of both brothers affections then stopped seeing each other. Jonathan started to date her again.
Despite the no-contact order, the siblings and friends were drinking together at Jonathans home on the 300 block of Ninth Street on the night of Sept. 28, 2015, when the heavily intoxicated men began to fight.
One officer arrived to find Jonathan on top of his brother in the street, with their love interest between them trying to protect Christopher.
All three were taken to hospital with cuts. Christopher had two puncture wounds to his back and another to his abdomen, and a cut on his face.
Jonathan had cuts to his hands severed tendons in fact and other injuries, and the woman needed to have a cut to her head stitched.
According to police reports, Christopher didnt want to press charges against his brother while the woman told officers: This is just what brothers do.
Back at the scene, officers found three large pools of blood and a pair of scissors, although Jonathan told police hed stabbed his brother with a knife.
Various knives, along with a significant amount of blood, were found in the home.
Christopher told police that hed left the gathering at his brothers expecting that the woman would follow him to her home. The friends also left the apartment.
When the woman didnt show up, Christopher returned to Jonathans apartment and could hear his brother and the woman yelling.
Christopher said that, when he entered, Jonathan went for him and they started fighting.
Christopher told police that his brother had stabbed him, that theyd fought over a knife, wrestled and kicked, and that Jonathan had choked him and bit him multiple times.
He was covered in puncture wounds, cuts, scrapes and bite marks.
On his part, Jonathan maintains that his brother kicked in his door and tried to choke him (although those allegations were never proven). Jonathan said he bit his brother, grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed him a number of times.
Jonathan was going to bed and was naked when the fight began. After stabbing his brother in the back, he pursued him into the street where the struggle continued.
When a witness told Jonathan police were on the way, he responded by entering his home, putting on boxers, and returning to continue the attack on his brother.
On his part, Jonathan had slashes to his back, and bruises, cuts and scratches across his body. The cuts to his hands may have resulted from the struggle over the knife.
The woman involved had tried to break up the fight, and didnt know how she was injured.
Christopher was initially also charged in relation to the fight. However, Badcock told court that the charges against him were dropped as the evidence showed Jonathan was the aggressor.
Badcock sought a sentence of 15 months jail for Jonathan, but Moar agreed to defence lawyer Bob Harrisons request for a conditional sentence Jonathan accepted responsibility and had no prior record.
The 16 months of house arrest will be followed by one year of probation.
Jonathan has been on a no-contact order with his brother since the incidents, and Harrison said his client would call him and express a desire to talk to his twin, who he described as his best friend.
A full reunion, however, will have to wait for now as Jonathan is to have no contact with his brother during his house arrest and probation.
Theres an exception to that order for counselling, or with the permission of a probation officer.
ihitchen@brandonsun.com
Twitter: @IanHitchen
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This article was published 19/07/2016 (2291 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
After the departure of a major tenant last year, the owners of Shoppers Mall are looking forward to a transformed future thanks to a bevy of new tenants.
Brandons largest shopping centre announced Monday that it would be welcoming seven new retailers and restaurants onto the premises the anchor tenant being a 62,500-square-foot Sobeys Extra store in the former Target location.
You get the anchor and the rest just falls into place, said John Levac, vice-president of asset management at Morguard REIT. Its definitely the preferred choice for us reintroducing grocery to the mall, I think, is very important.
Rendering courtesy of Morguard A current snapshot (inset) and future rendering of Shoppers Mall, which is welcoming several new tenants that will transform the look of the citys largest shopping centre. The east entrance of the mall will be expanded and Sobeys will be opening in the former Target location.
The mall has been without a grocer since 2014 when Safeway closed its south end location.
In addition to a full-fledged market, the new Sobeys will include a multi-use community room for in-store events, including cooking classes and well-being counsellor sessions.
Shoppers Mall is also welcoming the citys first and the provinces largest GoodLife Fitness centre. The co-ed gym will take up 24,670 square feet and Levac says the regular gymgoers will be a welcome addition to the mall.
Its the regularity of the visits, which is attractive for a landlord and both these tenants bring these for us, he said. That traffic will hopefully permeate into the mall, which helps your food tenants, your juice tenants, your vitamin guy, etc.
The shopping centre is planning on boosting its food offerings with a Thai Express opening in the existing food court in November and a number of new freestanding restaurants proposed to be built in the parking lot along 18th Street.
One of the two freestanding complexes will include a Swiss Chalet and a Harveys, while the other will be made up of an East Side Marios and Fionn MacCools an Canadian Irish pub chain.
Tim Smith/The Brandon Sun Renovations on the exterior of Shoppers Mall take place on Monday in preparation for new businesses coming to the shopping centre.
(The restaurants) were introducing are a really good fit for that market, so its all about catering to the needs of the market, Levac said.
The locations of the freestanding restaurants are still pending final municipal approval.
Shoppers Mall is requesting community feedback on the expansion plans. Visit shoppersmallbrandon.com/redevelopment for more information.
The malls east entrance is also set to be revamped and based on renderings provided by Morguard, there will be an expansion where Five Guys Burgers and Fries is located.
We may have to rework things. A lot of times when youre into this, some things have to be relocated, but well try to work within the parameters, Levac said.
Sobeys and GoodLife are expected to open in early 2017 at the latest, while there is currently no timeline for the construction of the freestanding restaurants.
Rendering courtesy of Morguard Mall ownership is looking to develop freestanding restaurant areas in the parking lot along 18th Street, including East Side Marios and Fionn MacCools.
ewasney@brandonsun.com
Twitter: @evawasney
Opinion
Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/07/2016 (2291 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
WINNIPEG A few months ago, Manitoba proclaimed an important historical event for the year 2016: the 125th anniversary of the arrival of the first Ukrainians to Canada, and in particular, to Manitoba.
For Ukrainian-Canadians, it is an honour to be recognized by the government and acknowledged as one of the ethno-cultural leaders in our country.
No one leaves their country unless inspired by some selfless ideal, or compelled by imperative political or economic reasons. It was in early September 1891 that Ukrainian settlers came to Canada from western Ukraine.
This first wave of Ukrainians left their homeland and settled in a wilderness unknown to them, to endure all the trials of a tough pioneering venture in order to establish a new homestead and a new life.
This first group established numerous new communities that formed a long and almost continuous belt, commencing in the southeastern corner of Manitoba and scattering diagonally across the three Prairie provinces northwest to the Peace River area in northern Alberta.
These first Ukrainian settlers were of peasant stock or farmers who arrived with a few personal belongings and limited financial means.
Many were illiterate with inadequate knowledge of the English language, but they were determined to create a new life in Canada. Their gradual success they owed to their zest for life, love of freedom and a belief they would have a better life in this new land.
Manitoba played a significant role in Ukrainians settlement in Canada.
From 1891 to 1914, our province was the first stopping place for these dispersed immigrants.
They were instrumental in developing homesteads in the southeast, the Interlake and the Riding Mountain area of Dauphin.
Through hard work, this first wave of Ukrainians transformed much of Manitobas wilderness into productive farm fields, carved out roads, built railways, developed commercial enterprises, established cultural educational centres and enhanced the political life of the province. These pioneers brought with them the qualities required for the making of a new nation: a sense of daring, dedication, self-discipline, imagination, optimism and a healthy spirit.
Over the past 125 years, many instrumental key values have meshed into Canadas life and culture.
Ukrainians have played a significant role in advancing a multicultural concept for Canada by maintaining the dignity of the individual.
There have been four waves of Ukrainian immigration to Canada, the most recent beginning in 1991. Every group came from a different region of Ukraine and settled in a different area of Canada. Each group had its own distinctive experiences and desires, and each wave had something special to offer to Canada.
Ukrainians came to Canada to find freedom from oppression and with the lure of a brighter future. They abandoned their families, friends and native soil for the perilous voyage abroad.
The first Ukrainian settlers of 1891 had faith in Canada; they set the framework for future Ukrainian immigration and a journey for other streams of immigrants who have contributed to our great country in many ways.
Those first Ukrainians came to this land dedicated, self-disciplined and with tremendous stamina and unbelievable courage to start a new life.
As always, Canada has been in a position of accepting many cultures, displaying a long history of caring for all Canadians.
That warm welcome is evident to this present day.
As Ukrainian-Canadians celebrate 125 years of their first settlement in Canada, we salute the many accomplishments and contributions made by Ukrainians to Canada.
The dedication and self-discipline of those first settlers should serve as a living example and an inspiration not only to their descendants, but to every Canadian who loves this beautiful and rich country of opportunity and peace.
Despite the many rapid changes Canada is now undergoing, Canadians should be courageous to follow the footsteps of their descendants and help Canada become a model for the world to show that we accept and adapt diverse cultures into our society.
Peter J. Manastyrsky is an active member of the Ukrainian community in Winnipeg. His column was recently published by the Winnipeg Free Press.
Never seen before photos of the Fukushima exclusion zone have been released by 27-year-old photographer Keow Wee Loong.
Loong illegally snuck into the exclusion zone, equipped with a gas mask, and exposed himself to high levels of radiation to take photos of towns untouched by humans since 2011.
He said: "The radiation level is still very high in the red zone... I can find food, money, gold, laptops and other valuables in the red zone."
One photo sticks out like a sore thumb from the rest, it's of an empty bar.
There is not one bottle of alcohol in sight, in stark contrast to the food items, magazines, electrical items and money spotted elsewhere.
Loong has asked people to share these photos to spread awareness of the dangers of using nuclear energy.
One can't help to imagine what the small towns and villages of Ireland would look like if we suffered such a disaster.
A cleared out pub is probably likely.
If you can't see the photos, you can visit Loong's Facebook page here.
The first steps to establishing a public sector pay commission will be taken by the Cabinet this morning.
The commission is to be tasked with making recommendations by the middle of next year in a bid to influence a successor to the Lansdowne Road Agreement.
The government has insisted the LRA is the "only show in town" and is the only way for public servants to secure some pay restoration.
But it will expire in 2018, meaning a new agreement will have to be negotiated in time to be announced in the Budget in October of next year.
This morning the Public Expenditure Minister Paschal Donohoe will ask Cabinet to approve a consultation process.
That will begin next week and last about a month before the commission gets underway proper in the autumn.
Along with members of the public, trade unions and employers in both the public and private sectors will be able to make submissions.
After the consultation the cabinet will then be asked to establish the commission in the autumn and it will look at benchmarking pay to public sectors in the UK and other European countries and is likely to examine giving higher pay rises to doctors, nurses and other staff that are difficult to retain.
It must make recommendations to the Government by the second quarter of next year.
Up to 30,000 mothers and children are being excluded from the Commission of Inquiry into Mother and Baby homes, according to a group of survivors.
The Coalition of Mother and Baby Home Survivors lodged a formal complaint at the offices of the inquiry in Dublin this afternoon, calling for the terms of reference to be widened to include all homes.
UK MPs have clashed over fears about the North's border with Ireland in the wake of the vote to leave the EU.
The SDLP's Dr Alasdair McDonnell warned that the uncertainty about the border could erode the fragile political settlement and lead to renewed dissident and paramilitary activity.
The Norths shadow minister Stephen Pound insisted that a Brexit would result in a "division" between the two countries.
But DUP MP Sammy Wilson said concerns about border controls were just another scare story "without any substance".
In a Westminster Hall debate in Parliament, Dr McDonnell stressed the need for the UK government to guarantee at least one representative for the North at the Brexit negotiating table.
The North may also have to make "common cause" with Scotland and Gibraltar, whose populations also voted to remain with the EU, he added.
The Belfast South MP said: "I believe that Northern Ireland's interests cannot receive the full recognition or the full protection they deserve unless Northern Ireland has at least one, preferably two, seats at the negotiating table as we go forward."
He added: "Further uncertainty around what the border will look like in 10 years' time leaves us vulnerable to those that will seek to take advantage of that uncertainty and weakened state, including dissident and other paramilitaries.
"And I don't make that as a threat - I make that as an observation."
Labour's Mr Pound, a pro-Remain campaigner, said the Government must accept the "dark clouds over Northern Ireland".
He said: "If anyone thinks for a moment that the history of Ireland somehow means that there will not be a hard border, a soft border, a customs border, a tariff border, a physical border - there will be a border.
"There cannot be a negotiation when one party has decided to leave the relationship. That is the reality."
But Mr Wilson said there had so far been no political appetite for new border controls.
The East Antrim MP said: "This is one of the scare stories that was used by those who have tried to persuade people in Northern Ireland that leaving the EU is not in their interests.
"Again we have heard the same rhetoric but there is not substance to it.
"The Irish Government has said they do not wish to have border controls, the British government has said they do not wish to have border controls, the Northern Ireland Assembly has said they don't wish to have border controls and we already have seen through history how the common travel area has worked effectively to ensure that there is no need for border controls."
UK home office Minister Robert Goodwill said Ireland and the share a common objective of preserving the common travel area and avoiding a hard border.
He said: "It has been agreed that the UK and Ireland would work together on priority areas within the British-Irish relationship in the forthcoming negotiations on the future relationship between the UK and the EU.
"The government will ensure the interests of all parts of the UK are protected."
Irish Naval officers have rescued 128 people off the coast of Libya today.
Following a request from the Italian Maritime Rescue Co-ordination Centre, the LE James Joyce successfully located and rescued the refugees from a rubber craft located in the Mediterranean sea northwest of Tripoli.
The rescue operation was launched at 6:30am, and all people were safely taken on board by 9:20am.
They are now receiving food, water and medical treatment where required.
Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams has dismissed predictions from a senior frontbench TD he will step down within five years, writes Fiachra O Cionnaith, Political Reporter.
Mr Adams insisted that he will not set a deadline as he is "not as foolish" as Taoiseach Enda Kenny,
Speaking at the MacGill summer school in the Glenties, Co Donegal yesterday, Sinn Fein's housing spokesperson Eoin O Broin said it is "quite possible" Mr Adams will step down by 2021.
"Is it [a change of party leadership] going to happen in the next year or two? I don't think so. Is it likely to happen in the next five years or so? That's quite possible," he said.
Mr O Broin's comments came just 24 hours after prominent Sinn Fein Co Cavan member, Tommy McNulty, took the extremely rare step of writing a letter to Belfast-based newspaper The Irish News to say Mr Adams' continuing reign is damaging the party and that he should leave now.
Referencing the party's 1986 ard fheis when Mr Adams and other Northern leaders took control of Sinn Fein from southerners like Ruairi O Bradiagh and Daithi O Conaill, Mr McNulty - who is the chair of the Virginia-Mullagh Sinn Fein cumann - said: "Just as there was a time for change in 1986, there is a time for change again in 2016.
"Sammy Davis junior once famously said that one of the greatest secrets of life was 'knowing when to get on the stage and knowing when to get off it'. I believe the time has come for Mr Adams to get off it."
The comments have re-ignited debate over when 67-year-old Mr Adams will eventually step down.
However, speaking to reporters in Leinster House today, the Sinn Fein leader said he has no plans to do so.
"He [Eoin O Broin] must know something I don't.
"No, not at all [in terms of whether he is planning to step down]. I don't have anything I want to discuss.
"My problem if I tell you, you're going to tell everybody.
"I'm not as foolish as [Taoiseach] Enda [Kenny], he did put a time frame and then had to crawl back on it," he said.
Speaking on Newstalk's Lunchtime programme this afternoon, Mr Adams' close confidante and Northern Ireland's deputy first minister Martin McGuinness said his leader has no intention of stepping down.
Mr McGuinness said Mr Adams will stay "as long as he wishes" and said it always "amuses me" to hear critics of Sinn Fein suggest the party would do better without him as they in reality "don't want Sinn Fein to do better".
However, he added that it is obvious the current hierarchy of Sinn Fein - including Mr Adams and McGuinness - "cannot go on forever" and that "we are consistently thinking of issues like transition".
Update 5.30pm: The three-year old boy killed today in crash outside Oola, Co Limerick, has been named locally and by neighbours as Alex James Velocci.
His father who also died in the crash has been named locally as Marco Velocci, aged 28. Mr Velocci was born in Ireland; his father is Italian.
The boy's mother who was stabbed at her home this morning has been named locally and by neighbours as Jodie Power, aged 26. She is in a stable condition in hospital.
Update 1.54pm: The woman involved in the domestic incident which may be linked to a fatal road crash in Co Limerick today is understood to be in a stable condition in hospital.
She had been in a relationship with the man who died, but they separated about a year ago.
They were the parents of the young boy killed in the crash, who is understood to have been three years old.
Update 11.40am: Gardai are investigating a possible link between a domestic incident and a fatal crash in Co Limerick today.
It is believed that a man, who had been living in Lattin, Co Tipperary, arrived at his ex-partner's house in Oola in Limerick at about 8.30am today.
After a subsequent altercation at the womans home, gardai were alerted to the house, where they found the woman had received a number of injuries.
After the incident, the man left with the child. A short time later his Audi car crashed into an articulated truck.
Update 11.26am: Gardai believe today's fatal crash in Limerick may be linked to an earlier domestic incident at a housing estate in Oola.
It is believed that a man was involved in an incident with his ex-partner.
The woman who was in the house received a serious injury to her arm and was removed to University Hospital Limerick.
The man then left the house with the child.
Earlier:
Gardai are investigating after a man and a child were killed in a head-on collision on the Limerick to Tipperary stretch of the N24, this morning, writes David Raleigh.
A 2005 registered black coloured Audi, carrying a man and a young child, and a truck driven by another man, were in collision at around 8.30am at Brook's Bridge between Pallasgreen and Oola, Co Limerick.
The man and child in the car were pronounced dead at the scene, gardai said.
The truck driver was not injured but is being treated for shock, gardai added.
The investigation is being headed up by Inspector Luke Conlon, the Acting Superintendent at Bruff Garda Station.
Inspector Conlon said the road was closed in both directions with diversions in place.
LIMERICK: Collision on the N24 at Brooks Bridge on Limerick side of Oola. Road expected to be closed. Avoid. https://t.co/qvBPcgxUj8 AA Ireland (@aaroadwatch) July 19, 2016
"The road is likely to be closed for a good while, as we are awaiting the arrival of a Forensic Collision Inspector who is based in Cork," Insp Conlon said.
The front of the truck was seriously damaged in the impact.
A Garda source said: "It appears the front of the truck bore the brunt of it."
"The truck driver is in shock. The driver of the car and the young child have unfortunately been pronounced dead at the scene," the source added.
Gardai have appealed to anyone who may have witnesses the collision or may have travelled this road between 8am and 8.30amto contact the Gardai at Bruff on 061 382940, The Garda Confidential Telephone Line 1800 666 111 or any Garda Station.
A toddler has died after falling from the seventh floor of a block of flats in the UK, it has emerged.
The 18-month-old girl was declared dead at the scene in Great Hampton Row, in the Hockley area of Birmingham, shortly before noon on Monday.
West Midlands Police said today that an investigation has been launched, with a spokeswoman saying: "The death is currently being treated as unexplained."
A West Midlands Ambulance Service spokesman said: "Crews arrived to find a girl who had fallen from a window.
"Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that nothing could be done to save her and she was confirmed dead at the scene."
A local shop owner, who did not want to be named, said: "I was inside my shop when I heard people shouting and screaming and heard the bad news.
"People are very, very sad - they are feeling it very bad. I don't know the family, they might have been new to the area.
"It is quite a close community, there are two big communities here - the Jamaican community and Somalian community, they have a good relationship with each other.
"From what I saw people are very sad from this incident."
Hillary Clinton has dismissed the first day of the Republican National Convention as a "surreal" experience - and compared the gathering led by Donald Trump to the classic fantasy film The Wizard of Oz.
The presumptive Democratic presidential hopeful told an audience of 6,000 people in Las Vegas: "There were similarities that appeared to me. Lots of sound and fury - even a fog machine.
"But when you pull back the curtain, it was just Donald Trump with nothing to offer to the American people."
Mrs Clinton's comments came as Republicans meet in Cleveland for the second day of their national convention, where delegates are expected to officially select Mr Trump as their party's nominee for the autumn election.
Speaking to long-standing Democratic allies, Mrs Clinton noted Mr Trump's shadowy appearance before he introduced his wife, Melania Trump, but made no mention of allegations that she lifted passages of her speech from first lady Michelle Obama's 2008 address.
Mrs Clinton noted that viewers heard a lot about Mrs Trump and her husband, but "not a single solution" that would help workers and their families.
The former secretary of state was addressing 6,000 members of AFSCME, a union representing 1.6 million public sector workers which endorsed Mrs Clinton's presidential tilt last October.
She pointed to ongoing struggles with Republican governors in the American Midwest, accusing Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, a former Republican presidential hopeful, of ripping "the heart out of public sector workers' right to bargain".
In Illinois, she accused governor Bruce Rauner, a Republican elected in 2014, of "holding the budget hostage for months", hurting families and demanding "outrageous concessions" to fix a multibillion-dollar deficit.
She also warned that Donald Trump would undercut the Dodd-Frank Act passed six years ago this week by US Congress in response to the financial crisis.
Mrs Clinton said that Mr Trump wanted to "tear up Dodd-Frank and let Wall Street run wild again".
Vandals prompted a fire at the Gare du Nord train station in Paris that halted traffic to Britain and many other destinations, authorities have said.
The SNCF national rail service said the fire on Tuesday was caused by a "malicious incident", without elaborating.
A police official said the fire started in an electrical station and prompted an immediate cut-off of power to the rails.
The fire was quickly extinguished and presented no danger to passengers, the official said.
No one has yet been detained, but there is no sign of any terrorist intent, said the official.
The incident came amid nationwide jitters following a truck attack in Nice last week that killed 84 people and was claimed by the Islamic State group, the third major attack in France in 18 months.
SNCF told passengers that traffic would resume on commuter lines late on Tuesday night, but passengers on Eurostar trains across the English Channel were told they would have to wait until Wednesday to leave.
Trains to Brussels, Amsterdam and other international destinations also leave from the Gare du Nord.
Theresa Pietrangelo, of Toronto, who was trying to return to London with her daughter Emily, said: "This is a disaster. Nobody knows what's going on and they told us our train isn't leaving tonight.
"We have tickets to fly to Edinburgh tomorrow morning and now I don't know what to do."
They had spent a week in London and this was supposed to be their one fun day in Paris -Tuesday was Emily's 21st birthday.
A man has been arrested after a woman and her three daughters were stabbed at an Alps resort in southern France, authorities said.
Jean-Marc Duprat, a deputy mayor for the town of Laragne-Monteglin in the Hautes-Alpes region, said the mother and her girls, aged eight, 12 and 14, were on holiday at a nearby resort when they were attacked on Tuesday morning.
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Westpac will try out artificial intelligence in its digital banking systems, a move that would allow customers to have simple questions about their finances answered by a machine instead of a person.
As consumers do more of their banking digitally, especially on smartphones, the bank's general manager of consumer digital, Travis Tyler, said it was looking at using "bots" to respond to customers with simple questions.
It comes as banks are competing fiercely over their mobile banking offerings, with a new report from US market research firm Forrester predicting banks would increasingly use banking apps to provide money management tips to consumers.
Already a growing number of wealth managers are using "robo-advice" to make recommendations on asset allocation for investors, and Mr Tyler said Westpac was investigating how artificial intelligence could be rolled out to answer commonly asked queries.
The concept of scientific truth was best put by Orson Scott Card in his book Speaker for the Dead: "...that's as sure as we ever are about anything. We believe it enough to act as though it is true. When we are that sure we call it knowledge. Facts. We bet our life on it." It is in this sense that climate science is settled. Tony Eggleton, Belconnen Rehabilitating reef Until the recent furore focused on global warming, which I do not dispute, I was under the impression that other factors were also at work with coral bleaching, including agricultural chemicals washing down coastal rivers, and changes in fresh water flows. I would be glad to see a scientist write a review in your paper about this issue, because it would be a shame to miss an important step in rehabilitation of the reef because of concentrating on only one issue.
Stewart Bath, Isabella Plains On probation If Malcolm Turnbull believes that the Mediscare campaign was a crime and should be outlawed, then surely this must also apply to his and his ministers' claims that the newly elected government has an absolute mandate for its policies. The narrowness of the victory and the loss of so many seats provides no such mandate. If anything, the result places the government on probation, with electors expecting good government for Australia, rather than the "rule of the entitled" witnessed in the previous three years. J. Grant, Gowrie
Turnbull donation John Richardson (Letters, July 18) ponders whether PM Malcolm Turnbull's $1 million donation to the Liberal Party was a case of putting his hand in his own pocket rather than the public's. That may depend on how Malcolm treats it in his tax return. Was it a donation, contribution or gift? Perhaps the $1 million contribution or gift to the Liberal Party to possibly help guarantee his continuation as PM will end up being a $1 million income tax deduction. John Gillies, Lyneham Represent the people
Many years ago, at school and at university, I was taught about representative government, the concept that a person was elected to Parliament by a group, to represent the members of that group, and to express their views and to speak for them. On the issue of same-sex marriage, can we get back to basics? Each member of parliament should canvass his or her electorate to find out the majority view of the people comprising that electorate. Armed with that information, he or she returns to Parliament and votes; not according to his or her conscience, not along party lines, but in accordance with the wishes of the people he or she is elected to represent. The estimated cost of the non-binding plebiscite could then be directed to some useful purpose such as health or education. Let's step back in time and get our MPs to do what they are elected to do, ie, represent us. Bob Gilleland, Gungahlin
Our way of life Recurrent amidst the schmaltzy, vacuous tripe that passes for reportage and commentary on every new terrorist attack, is the evergreen "people here are defiant that it will not change their way of life". Apart, that is, from the diversion of more and more tax revenue and the levying of greater and greater fees towards a now supposedly vital, but otherwise unproductively parasitic, ever larger security industry? And ignoring the likely tank-stopping barricades to come on the Champs Elysees and Promenade des Anglais? Remember, incidentally, when you could still expect to communicate electronically in private? Perhaps the dupable ways of life in question could interrupt their facile horrified incomprehension not to mention their intense Facebooking and Pokemon gaming long enough to consider what Middle Eastern events in the last few generations might have led to Islam's terrible grievances now. Alex Mattea, Kingston Make GP rebate levels fair
The article "Co-op model in good health" (Forum, July 16, p2), promoting the bulk-billing co-op GP clinic model which began in West Belconnen in 2010, could leave the reader with the impression, already strongly held by many, that every GP clinic should bulk-bill all their patients. Perhaps those that don't are just a little greedy? However, three words in the article are very significant. The co-op received "two $200,000 grants" from government. In my experience of running a small GP clinic in Belconnen from 1989 to 2011, no such grants were ever offered. Bulk-billing by GPs is obviously popular with patients, understandably. Anything that helps a tight household budget is welcome. However, Medicare rebates are unrealistic. The rebate for a standard GP consultation is $37.05 (with an extra $6.15 incentive for children and concession-card holders), and for a more complex problem $71.70. Which other professionals with similar training, responsibility and expenses would accept such a fee as full payment for their services, especially taking into account the large amounts of non-billable time that GPs spend every day on patient care?
Higher bulk-billing rates would be best achieved by not only scrapping of the current rebate freeze, but an increase in rebates to levels that are fair payment for GP efforts. And, without implying any criticism of the West Belconnen Co-op, if practices are to be compared, those that receive large government grants should not be compared with those that don't. Dr Sue Wareham, Cook Long wait for care When I fell and broke my arm I had to wait six days until a community care organisation could find a person to assist me with personal care, to shower and dress me each morning. Why did I have to wait for six days? Obviously, because people do not want to work for the low hourly rate of pay. The ACT government has the ability to legislate a higher minimum hourly rate. Elder abuse is not perpetrated only by families. It is perpetrated by our ACT government. Would Andrew Barr allow his mother be left in a chair for six days with a broken arm?
Lynn Parry, Crace Reconciliation Day I warmly support Gary Kent (Letters, July 18) regarding the proposed Reconciliation Day, to be marked by a public holiday in the ACT. He is right to oppose the suggestion that it replace the Queen's Birthday holiday. The fact is that the Queen, as head of the Commonwealth, has herself been an immense force for reconciliation. Her visit to Ireland a few years ago was a personal triumph in sweeping away centuries of bitterness and heralding a new era in Anglo-Irish relations. So let us cherish the Queen's Birthday holiday. It is the oldest public celebration in the history of Australia, going back to the First Fleet in 1788. Perhaps "Reconciliation Day" could be marked by a holiday replacing the one originally introduced in the ACT to mark the Melbourne Cup.
Robert Willson, Deakin Basic maintenance Months ago I notified the National Capital Authority of a faulty bubbler leaking water on the Lake Burley Griffin foreshore and received the usual motherhood tripe in response. The position is now worse with one basin full of water while a pond has expanded under a seat. From here water is spreading across the R.G. Menzies Walk. Nearby one wall of the Carillon is disfigured by graffiti. Untold millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent creating this place yet its guardians are so apathetic that basic maintenance is beyond them. Could someone please give the slumbering NCA a prod to wake it up.
Graeme Barrow, Hackett Greyhound ban irony It's obvious Jan Darby (Letters, July 15) does not see the irony in banning greyhound racing due to the number of dogs killed over the past 12 years, but supports the slaughter of 6000 dogs due to the ban. Her suggestion they could be kept as pets by their owners/trainers is beyond laughable. Most would have on average 10 to 50 dogs plus pups, which is not feasible. Even if it was possible to keep some dogs how would they feed them as the livelihood of the trainers is being taken away from them by the ban. As it is, the trainers will not only lose their livelihood, but in some cases their houses after having invested heavily in the industry. We now see reported that the McHugh Report has gaping holes in it and has been dramatically undermined! As far as her response to government spending on the GWS is concerned I suggest she reads the relevant letter published in letters to the Canberra Times on Sunday, July 10. The author of this letter was making the point governments should not have to provide financial support to any professional sport.
Lets face it; if the ACT government (taxpayer) had not promised GWS $26 million they would not be playing any competition games in Canberra. Kevin Coughlan, Chisholm Great drought story I agree with Graham Downie (Letters, July 15) that Canberra needed a larger Cotter Dam. But the furphy of the Great Millennial Drought needs to be put down. The 11 years from 2000 to 2010 had rainfall of 6151.2mm, close to the Canberra average from 1939 and in line with the real average recorded at Queanbeyan since 1870 of 570mm per year. Poor water management and the Great Warming Swindle combined to make people believe arrant nonsense, and the prophesies of Professor Tim Flannery to build six desalination plants that were never needed, each of which costs $1 million per day to lie idle. A total of 36 years unused capacity at a cost of $79 billion.
Brian Hatch, Berrima, NSW TO THE POINT The Canberra Times wants to hear from you in short bursts. Email views in 50 words or fewer to letters.editor@canberratimes.com.au. COLONIAL RELIC Gary Kent (Letters, July 18) is right, despite his monarchial affiliations. Reconciliation must be kept separate from the issue of the republic.
The Queen's birthday public holiday should simply be abandoned on its merits as a relic of colonial cultural cringe and its constitutional irrelevance. Forelock tugging should be conducted in private. Mike Hutchinson, Reid WE'RE ALL RIGHT The old union motto of "we're all right, Jack!" is alive and well ("Productivity clause in light rail pay deal", July 18, p4). And while the ACT government may not itself have negotiated these outrageous employment conditions, it's condoned them and the direct, continuing veto of the unions over employment matters under the contract agreement with the Canberra Metro consortium.
M. Silex, Erindale COPYING KATE Gosh, aren't the righties in a tizz over Andrew Barr's removal of Brendan Smyth from the political arena (Letters, July 19)? All sorts of pejorative comments over his character (as usual), motives, etc. But isn't he just copying what Kate Carnell did with the two leading Labor lights, Rosemary Follett and Terry Connolly back in the 1990s? S.W. Davey, Torrens
GET OFF FENCE When will Jeremy Hanson announce that, if he wins government, he will immediately abolish the position of Commissioner for International Engagement to which the Liberal rat Brendan Smyth has been appointed? For that matter when will Hanson get off the fence and say, definitively, what he's going to do about the silly Gunghalin to City tram project? Peter Moran, Watson CAN THE TRAM The Gungahlin-Civic light rail project is merely a very costly way of trying to force-feed employment growth at the centre of Canberra, to the detriment of the town centres.
And it's going to be so slow that it will fail to meet even that undesirable objective. The whole of Canberra will continue to get better service from buses. Paying off the contractors, so as to can the tram, will cost us a whole lot less than letting it go ahead. Ian W. Morison, Barton DO-NOTHING ZED Congratulations to the do-nothing Senator Zed Seselja on being promoted to the Turnbull outer ministry. Good to see treachery rewarded. Now he has department to ensure that he does something.
It's never too soon for our mainstream politicians to stand up publicly and defend the right of all Australians to lead a life free of harassment and prejudice ("Academics say calls to stop Muslim immigration must be denounced by government", July 19). Unfortunately, voices such as that of Sonia Kruger are the ones that are heard and the media producers and directors must take some responsibility for that.
The main responsibility, however, lies with our government and opposition. I would suspect part of the reason France has had to endure so many terrorist attacks over the past years is because the French government has tried to appease many extreme voices in their own community by passing laws targeting Muslims. The French 2004 laws on secularity and conspicuous religious symbols were explained as adhering to France's strict belief in separating church and state. However, it is widely believed they were targeting the wearing of the Muslim head scarf. When this is coupled with unemployment and disadvantage in a society it will breed terrorists.
In our own multicultural society we must be very careful not to focus on denigrating any particular group. We know politicians like Pauline Hanson have used this to further their own causes.
Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten must continue to come out publicly and condemn this so called "free speech" for what it is, "hate speech".
Mary Lawson Mortdale
Sonia, Pauline, back in the '60s people thought we were being swamped by people "of Mediterranean appearance". We called them "wops", "wogs", "dagos" and "Ities". But the sky did not fall and Australia's culture survived. In fact it was enriched. And as for the mosques give it a generation or two and they will be as empty as our churches. Now go and have a Bex and a good lie down.
Genevieve Milton Newtown
Illustration: Glen Le Lievre
I have no particular brief for Sonia Kruger but surely she is entitled to express a view publicly ("Comments 'tip of racist iceberg' ", July 19). But in this country, which lauds itself for tolerating free speech, is she to be pilloried for doing so? There is no law that I am aware of that says I cannot like something, or someone, or some group as long as I am not breaking any other law by saying so. Yes, I may cause offence through my views, but what Sonia has said is likely to be said 10 times every night in hotel bars that can hold more than nine people.
Healthy and informed debate is to be encouraged rather than stifled.
Many readers will have been trolled on social media, or know someone who has. The rise of social media has made trolling, which is just another form of bullying, almost an occupational hazard for some people. Journalists seem particularly at risk.
Being trolled is a pretty unpleasant thing to have happen to anyone, as my colleague Madonna King has made clear. An altogether different experience is being tolled.
Coalition MP George Christensen joined Bill O'Chee in the 22 pushup challange. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
What is tolling? Well, it is when you challenge someone to do something, or pay some money, to advance a cause. It is a way of starting social media movements, and often tolling campaigns promote some very important causes.
One tolling campaign that is going around is the 22 pushup challenge. This originated in the US to highlight the number of American veterans said to commit suicide each day. The idea is to do 22 pushups for 22 days, or make a donation to support our veterans. Here in Australia, more veterans have taken their lives recently than have been killed in the entire Afghan War.
Television presenter Sonia Kruger's Trump-esque call for a ban on Muslim immigration and the subsequent social media and talkback radio conflagration show how quickly our national discourse can descend into fear and loathing.
Yet, while political and media voices calling for discriminatory policies pose a challenge to our social harmony, there is a growing movement of people standing up for fairness and decency particularly when it comes to how we treat people seeking asylum.
Sonia Kruger: echoed calls to stop Muslim immigration. Credit:Nine
Over the past few months the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre has been overwhelmed with people wanting to help in some way to create a community that reflects their values and which supports people who come here seeking to rebuild their lives. We need to empower these voices to counter the disproportionate attention given to those who sow outrage and anger.
Prior to the recent federal election our centre worked actively with communities across Victoria, talking about our vision for a fair system that treats people seeking asylum with dignity and decency, and which reflects the values we all hold as being intrinsic to the society we want to live in.
1. Boris' brutal press conference in first outing
Awks on steroids. US journalists did not hold back as Britain's new Foreign Secretary held a media conference (his first) with Secretary of State John Kerry in London.
Boris Johnson relied on his usual diversionary tactics of making a few gags, including suggesting "surplus German water cannon" could be used to abate the 35C weather (London is deliciously hot today). This was a reference to the water cannon that Johnson purchased as London Mayor, which the then Home Secretary Theresa May forbade him from using in 2015. May recounted this anecdote to devastating effect when she announced she was running for prime minister to replace David Cameron after the Brexit result.
Johnson was directly asked if he would apologise for referring to US President Barack Obama, who opposed Brexit, as "part-Kenyan" and Hillary Clinton as a "sadistic nurse" and "Lady Macbeth."
Almost a decade after Sydney man Matthew Leveson disappeared after leaving a nightclub, his former boyfriend and the final known person to see him alive is seeking to derail a last ditch attempt to find out what happened to him.
Michael Atkins, 53, who was acquitted of both the murder and manslaughter of Mr Leveson in 2009, is seeking to have an inquest into Mr Leveson's death, requested by his family, stopped in its tracks.
Michael Atkins was acquitted in 2009 of murdering Matthew Leveson. Credit:Brook Mitchell
Lawyers for Mr Atkins are also attempting to overturn a groundbreaking decision in the NSW Coroner's Court in May, where deputy state coroner Elaine Truscott ordered Mr Atkins be compelled to give evidence at the inquest.
Confronted with circumstances she described as "so exceptional and compelling", Ms Truscott found Mr Atkins was "likely to be able to give important evidence about the manner and cause of Matthew's death".
The government has revealed more details about how a planned theatre mysteriously disappeared from the proposal for the Queens Wharf redevelopment and how a new theatre could become home to Queensland Ballet.
Prompted by questions from Fairfax Media, opposition leader Tim Nicholls asked premier Annastacia Palaszczuk what happened to the plan after it had been publicly advertised and disclosed to shareholders.
Queensland Ballet could have a new home if another theatre is built in Brisbane. Credit:Katarina Kroslakova
Ms Palaszczuk said the option for a theatre wasn't available to her government when it took office last year before reiterating the need for a business case.
Her director general Dave Stewart delved further into the situation.
Labor MP Jo-Ann Miller has proved a more formidable opponent to the government than the Opposition, revealing flaws in hallmark Labor policies, staffing issues and calling for a Royal Commission into an emerging Queensland health problem, in a series of questions that blindsided her colleagues.
The Bundamba MP, who was described by a grateful LNP MP as "for all intents and purposes an independent MP", applied to sit on the committee in order to grill Parliamentary staff, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, Treasurer Curtis Pitt and Industrial Relations Minister Grace Grace.
Labor MP Jo-Ann Miller speaks during the Estimates hearings. Credit:Bradley Kanaris
Ms Miller often abandoned the government script, leaving the ministers floundering to answer her questions with their prepared answers.
The former Police Minister, who fell out with the Labor Party late last year when she resigned from Cabinet after Ms Palaszczuk demoted her, following an Ethics Committee report that found a "pattern of reckless conduct" in relation to Ms Miller's behaviour.
The Liberal National Party has snared victory in Queensland's Toowoomba South by-election, with the town's former mayor conceding defeat.
Independent candidate Di Thorley conceded she had lost her battle on Tuesday afternoon, a day after the LNP's David Janetzki declared he had been elected in the seat vacated by now federal MP John McVeigh.
Former Toowoomba mayor Di Thorley has conceded defeat for the seat of Toowoomba South. Credit:Glenn Hunt
"Although the Electoral Commission Queensland is yet to formally call the election result it appears the LNP have won on preferences. I again thank all the volunteers and people of Toowoomba South that supported me," Ms Thorley posted on Facebook.
Real-time donation disclosures will be in place by the next Queensland election.
After years of lobbying, which intensified after the Newman government hitched the state donation declaration limit to the Commonwealth's indexed threshold, raising it from $1000 to $12,800, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said the government would finally follow through on its commitment to independent MP Peter Wellington, 18 months after first making it, and introduce real-time disclosure.
Money Credit:Tanya Lake
"That means when voters go to the ballot box, they will be fully informed about who is donating to which candidates, and how much they're donating," Ms Palaszczuk told a budget estimates hearing on Tuesday.
Uber continues to be a cash cow for the state government even as the future of the unregulated ride-sharing industry remains up in the air.
The service's drivers were fined almost as much in the past three months as they were in the entire first year the service was operating.
As of Sunday, transport officers had slapped $1,717,184 million worth of fines on the service's drivers since law changes in late April kick-started a crackdown.
At $2,356 a pop since the Katter's Australian Party-driven increase, that makes the figure only a handful of infringements short of the $1,732,262 million dished out in the year to June 2015.
It's not every day a successful entrepreneur steps in to buy a $2.5 million building, then leases it to you for just $5 a year for the next half-century.
Yet that was the almost unbelievable situation Melbourne social enterprise Streat found itself in after Flight Centre co-founder Geoff Harris read a story in The Age in November 2012.
Trainees Sam, Nina and Adam outside Streat's new headquarters. Credit:Jason South
The entrepreneur, also a major investor in Boost Juice and the Fonda chain of Mexican eateries, initially got in touch with the youth homelessness charity to offer his services as a business mentor.
But, impressed by Streat's model of using business ventures to fund hospitality training for struggling youth, he eventually went much further.
Transit police have asked for the public's help to catch a man who masturbated in front of a 15-year-old girl on a tram in Melbourne's south-east.
The girl told police she got on a St Kilda tram on Clarendon Street in Southbank on June 19 about 7.15pm when a man began touching himself while staring at her.
The man sat about a metre away from the victim as he touched himself.
She moved to the other end of the tram, but he continued to watch her.
She got off the tram on Acland Street, St Kilda, and reported the incident to police.
A woman who brutally kicked a teenager in the head and stole her purse has been sentenced to 14 months imprisonment.
Kimberley Louise Reale, 21, pleaded guilty to one charge of robbery in the Bunbury District Court on Monday, after spending 92 days in custody.
Kimberley Louise Reale was jailed for 14 months for a violent robbery in the Bunbury CBD. Credit:Facebook
An enraged Reale yelled out "dog" as she exited the courtroom and proceeded to bash the walls of her holding cell after her sentence was handed down.
State prosecutor Mark Hunter told the court the defendant attacked 18-year-old Caroline Reimers from behind, outside The Commercial Club on Wittenoom Street on Thursday, March 31.
Jakarta: Indonesian police are "90 per cent certain" the nation's most wanted terrorist has finally been killed, ending a hunt for the self-proclaimed commander of the Islamic State army in Indonesia that has dragged on for years.
Two terror suspects, believed to be Santoso, the leader of the East Indonesia Mujahidin and Mukhtar, were shot dead in a gunfight in Poso, Central Sulawesi, on Monday night.
Indonesian police spokesman Major-General Boy Rafli Amar addresses the media in Jakarta in July, after wanted Islamist militant Santoso was shot dead in Sulawesi. Credit:AP
Santoso's scalp is a coup for the newly installed national police chief Tito Karnavian, given the fugitive has eluded authorities for years in the jungles of Poso.
"We are 90 per cent certain that it is his body," General Tito said.
For a time, would-be first lady Melania Trump was the high point of a Republican convention in which speakers alternately scared the bejesus out of delegates and then pledged to make them safe.
Mrs Trump was human and engaging as she spoke of the wonders of her husband the GOP's presumptive nominee.
But even before delegates had cleared the convention centre in downtown Cleveland, a New York journalist had identified great similarities in what Mrs Trump had to say and how Michelle Obama spoke at the 2008 Democratic convention.
At issue were the values Mrs Trump said she had learnt from her parents, which were uncannily similar to those instilled in Mrs Obama.
WARNING: STRONG LANGUAGE
When Melania Trump took to the stage on Monday night, the stakes were high.
As the wife of Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States, she was set to speak in support of him.
It was hoped she could help "unite the Republican party". She also hoped to revive her personal image, with a Gallup poll showing she is the least-liked potential first lady since 1992.
Latest News Westpac predicts another RBA double hike If it is correct, an average borrower with a $500k loan could be paying an additional $800 a month, expert says
Properties listed for sale in Australia down significantly Just two capital cities have experienced spring growth, says PropTrack
Major mortgage aggregator AFG has partnered with ASX-listed online real estate company buyMyplace to help its expansion into mortgage lending.buyMyplaces main business advocates for consumers to become their own real estate agent. Home owners are able to list and sell their properties online through its platform, without having to pay commission to real estate agents.The partnership with AFG will allow the online real estate company to expand into mortgage lending too, by becoming a licensed credit representative of AFG.AFG general manager of sales and operations, Mark Hewitt, said that under the partnership, buyMyplace will be able to offer mortgage and other finance products through AFGs network of brokers.We are still working through the final details of how [the partnership] is going to work out in practice. Our intention is [buyMyPlace] will be a credit licensee under our licence and they will be able to offer their customers a bespoke comparison tool, he told Australian Broker.buyMyplace vendors will also be able to directly engage with AFG brokers local to their area, who can help them find the best loan for their needs, and provide them with a seamless customer experience.Their clients will then be able to come through to our contact centre and we will place them with a broker.According to a report in the Australian Financial Review, buyMyplace expects to offer its customers these services in September and will be earning upfront and trailing commissions from AFG.Hewitt told Australian Broker that the partnership was a natural fit for both companies and reflects AFGs commitment to embracing innovation in the sector.We have had a relationship with buyMyPlace for the last four or five years and we work well together.[buyMyPlace] was looking to for a partner to expand its product offering into finance and mortgages, so it is a natural fit for both of our businesses.
Latest News Westpac predicts another RBA double hike If it is correct, an average borrower with a $500k loan could be paying an additional $800 a month, expert says
Properties listed for sale in Australia down significantly Just two capital cities have experienced spring growth, says PropTrack
Non-major lender Suncorp Bank has launched online submissions for small business lending, in a move which it touts as an industry first.Brokers lodging small business loan applications to Suncorp will now be able to do so electronically via NextGen .Nets ApplyOnline system. The non-major says this will translate to increased efficiencies, faster turnaround times and improved functionality for brokers.Suncorps national small business manager, Robynne Frost, said the new process is one the solutions Suncorp is offering as a part of its commitment to support brokers diversify into small business lending.Suncorp Bank is committed to investing in technology to improve the lending experience for brokers and their customers, she said.The addition of small business lodgement through ApplyOnline enables brokers to easily transition from home loans to small business with a streamlined combination application.The non-major is also offering SME Masterclasses, BDM support and improved commissions for brokers operating in the SME sector.The SME sector represents a significant opportunity for our broker partners and Suncorp Bank is committed to supporting them as they look to expand and diversify their businesses, Frost said.NextGen.Net sales director Tony Carn said this announcement is market leading."Suncorp Bank has again shown market leadership in the broker channel through the rollout of ApplyOnline electronic lodgement for small business loans.In such a competitive and ever-changing market it is great to see Suncorp Bank going above and beyond to meet the needs of Australian brokers.
Latest News Westpac predicts another RBA double hike If it is correct, an average borrower with a $500k loan could be paying an additional $800 a month, expert says
Properties listed for sale in Australia down significantly Just two capital cities have experienced spring growth, says PropTrack
Yellow Brick Roads (YBR) chief executive of wealth management, Matt Lawler, has announced his resignation after five years in the top role.According to a statement released by YBR, Lawler will conclude his tenure with the mortgage and wealth franchise on 30 September 2016. YBR executive chairman, Mark Bouris , has thanked Lawler for laying the foundations of the YBR branch network and creating a strategic platform for the wealth management business.Matt has delivered the strategy for the wealth management business and has developed the right talent to take the business forward, Bouris said.Our wealth management business is in good shape, delivering its best ever monthly result in June 2016. It remains a strategic priority and we will continue to invest in the necessary resources to make it a core contributor of revenue to our business.Lawler joined YBR as CEO in May 2011. In February this year, YBR announced a management reshuffle which saw Lawler appointed to the newly created CEO Wealth Management position across both the YBR and Vow businesses. Former head of Vow Financial, Tim Brown, was also appointed to the newly created CEO Lending position across the two businesses as a part of the reshuffle.
Where are the Phillies' players from 2008 World Series title team?
The 2022 Phillies are back in the World Series against Houston but where are the members of the 2008 team?
The first petrochemical reactors manufactured by the Republic of Korea have been dispatched from the port city of Ulsan. The freight is now making its way to the port of Sabetta via the Northern Sea Route, TASS reports citing Russia's Trade Mission in Seoul.
The vessel is scheduled to arrive at the port of Sabetta on August 15. On August 25, the reactors are expected in Pavlodar, Kazakhstan, where Russia's Irtysh Shipping Company will forward the reactors by river.
According to the TASS news agency, this is the first time South Korea is using the Northern Sea Route to transport high-tech equipment. The reactors, which are used for the catalytic dehydrogenation of hydrocarbons, were produced by Hyundai Heavy Industries for the Pavlodar Oil Chemistry Refinery (Kazakhstan) under a contract with Global Engineering Technology. Each of the two reactors weighs about 600 metric tons. To deliver the reactors via the Northern Sea Route, the Dutch ship Happy Dover was chartered.
"Opening the Northern Sea Route for international shipping will turn foreign transport and logistics companies toward Russian ports, the navigation system and the icebreaker fleet," representatives of the Trade Mission explained. If this shipment is completed successfully, South Korea's shipping companies will use the Northern Sea Route regularly.
latest news
October 3, 2022
Dee Gambit
Hundreds if not thousands of new and returning TV shows and movies are released every month your options of what to watch are endless. Variety, they say is ...
All of the kids on So You Think You Can Dance performed their hearts out in the first live show, proving that they very well may be The Next Generation. Paula, Jason, Nigel and newcomer judge Maddie Ziegler were more impressed by each performance leading up to cute little J.T., who showed the judges and America that hes taking this competition very seriously.
Im pretty pumped to see whats in store for week two of the live competition, though Im sad to see one performer go. If I had to pick one to go home, Id say it will be Daniela. While she was great with her salsa routine, I think the other nine kids might have outshined her. But only time will tell.
So You Think You Can Dance: The Next Generation Predictions: Which Dancer Will Leave the Top 10? >>>
Opening Number
The contestants will perform out of their styles, but first is a group Bollywood number featuring the All-Stars and the contestants to Lets Nacho from the Kapoor & Sons (Since 1921) soundtrack, which is choreographed by Nakul Dev Mahajan. Its a pretty fun piece with a lot of classic Bollywood moves.
At the judges table, All-Star Twitch sits in for Jason, who is traveling. The kids are paired up and perform two routines.
Pairs Out of Style
The first pair to perform is Jordan and Ruby to an African jazz routine by Sean Cheesman. Jordan describes the number as scary and dangerous, though they both do pretty well to Breath Connect Us All by Professor Trance & The Energizers. I think Jordan looks more comfortable than Ruby during the performance, but all of the judges love it.
Sheaden has a little fun behind the scenes with a preview of Ice Age: Collision Course, explaining that he thinks awkward silences are funny. His duet with his mentor, Marco, set to Treasure by Bruno Mars, is pretty good.
Tate tells a joke behind the scenes and lets us know who her favorite character from Ice Age is. She then performs a short and powerful piece with her mentor, Kathryn.
Next to step out of their styles are J.T. and Emma. They tackle a Nappytabs (Napoleon and Tabitha) hip-hop number, and the choreographers say they didnt go easy on the kids, pushing them to their limits. Both try their best during Dessert (Remix) by Dawin featuring Silento. I happen to think that J.T. does a little better than Emma, but Im partial to him. Nigel thinks that Emma has great rhythm, but J.T. needs to keep working on the hip-hop style during the competition. Twitch thinks they both did great, calling them a sweet treat of funk and giving them the nickname Swag Tarts.
Kida likes jokes that arent funny, but he laughs anyway. But its no laughing matter when he gets serious during his pop-and-lock duet with Fik-Shun to TRNSTTR (Lucian Remix) by Black Coast featuring M. Maggie, which gets a standing ovation from the judges.
Taking on Bullying
Tahani and Jake not only take on a contemporary piece far from their styles, but they also take on the subject of bullying. Choreography Bonnie Story explains that her piece is not only about bullying but also the process of coming out from under bullying. She wants Tahani and Jake to show that there is a way out from bullying. During their performance of Tell Your Heart to Beat Again by Danny Cokey, they do just that. While they start off a little shaky, somewhere in the middle, they focus and help each other make it a great, emotional performance. And all the judges agree.
So You Think You Can Dance Recap: The Top 10 Perform >>>
Keeping It Moving
After the emotions run high, Ruby gets the show back on track with her infectious laugh as she explains that she only knows really bad jokes. Her salsa ballroom routine with Paul, set to Muchacho by Jonny Good, features another crazy leg flip, showing that she still brings the Latin heat to the stage.
Jordan explains that she loves home videos and cartoons to make her laugh. She performs with Sasha to Pure4Sure by Sunless 97.
Then Daniela and Sheaden hit the stage for their number. Choreographer Umario Diallo manages to find Sheadens strength in personality, which shines during the performance. Daniela seems to take over the stage a bit, though, despite having some trouble during rehearsal. The piece, set to I Love It by Icona Pop featuring Charli XCX, has a lot of energy, but as I said, the chemistry doesnt seem to get there. Paula suggests that Daniela let go a little bit and just have fun to match her partner.
And fun is something Emma seems to have down, as she makes funny faces during her time behind the camera. Her tap duet with Gabby to Boogie Shoes by KC and the Sunshine Band is a fun little number.
Bringing the funk to the stage is Kida and Tate, who finds herself right at home during a hip-hop number by Nappytabs. Kida, as well as the judges, is impressed as Tate steps out of her genre; however, most of the judges agree that she needs to get down and loosen up a little bit more. That said, I think the chemistry between the pair during Manolo by Trip Lee featuring Lecrae is the best of the night so far.
During the Ice Age preview, Jake acts out his favorite part and explains that telling jokes is all about delivery. His duet with Jenna to Aint Your Mama by Jennifer Lopez is fun, with Jenna dropping him (on purpose) at the end.
Second Duets of the Night
Before the contestants take the stage for their second number of the night, the All-Stars perform a Nick and RJ number set to Move Your Body by Sia, which is inspired by Romeo and Juliet.
For their second routine together, J.T. and Emma perform a Broadway number by Spencer Liff. The West Side Story-inspired routine features lots of flips and jumps set to The Jet Song by Dave Grusin, and both nail the choreography. However, all of the judges agree that the pair needs to work on the chemistry, as they were a little off during the performance.
During her funny moment, Tahani explains that sometimes shes funny even when shes trying not to be. Her hip-hop number with Comfort is set to Pep Rally by Missy Elliott.
Daniela liked the love scene in Ice Age. She seems more at home in her routine, set to Marchina (Remix 14) by DJ DLVG, with Jonathan than she was with Sheaden. She even does this crazy flip over Jonathans back at the end.
For their second number together, Jordan and Ruby get a contemporary piece by Dee Caspary. The number, set to My Own by Whitaker, features towels and clothes and is about a broken home. They are supposed to be friends who are there for each other, though I find the connection a little lacking during the performance. However, technique-wise, it is beautiful. The judges, on the other hand, think they connected well, and Twitch is impressed with how they are consistent in their commitment.
The first time around for Tate and Kida, Tate was out of her element. The second time, Kida has to do a jazz routine. And just as Tate nailed hip-hop, Kida nails the routine by Nick and RJ. Its a high-energy number set to I Do What I Love by Ellie Goulding. Its also a very bright and very physical performance. All of the judges are impressed with the pairing of the two, with Maddie saying she likes the way they dance together.
J.T. lets us know that he likes slapstick comedy but doesnt like when people get hurt. He adds that hes also very sarcastic. His duet with All-Star Robert, set to Change is Everything by Son Lux, is a moving piece.
Winding Down
Rounding out the final performances are Daniela and Sheaden, and Tahani and Jake. Daniela and Sheaden head out first with another Spencer Liff Broadway routine. This time around, its about a prince and princess bored inside. But the classic Bob Fosse number is anything but boring. Daniela and Sheaden play off each other a little better this time around to Rich Mans Frug from Sweet Charity.
Wrapping up the performances is Tahani and Jake with an Emma Slater and Sasha Farber jive number. The pair are a couple of jailbirds breaking and jiving their way out of prison. The routine, set to Jailhouse Rock by J-Lew & The Crew, involves a lot of tricks, speed and trust, as there are a bunch of flips involved. The pair nails them all, though. And while they do have to work on a little bit of technique, all the judges love the number.
The Elimination
As always on So You Think You Can Dance, America votes and someone has to leave each week. But as Cat explains, even though someone gets eliminated, the journey is not over, since out of the 10 All-Stars, only two Fik-Shun and Gaby actually won the competition. So it should be a celebration rather than an end.
The bottom two are Daniela and Sheaden. And as I predicted, the judges decide that Daniela has to head home.
I imagine each week will only get tougher and tougher for the contestants as another one gets eliminated, but it is a competition, so they should be prepared. As Cat says, though, its really just a beginning for these kids. They should all be proud of what they accomplish, especially in such a short period of time.
My favorite performers from this episode were Tate and Kida, and Emma and J.T. I also liked Tahani and Jake. I think that every single one of the Top 9 now have to really step up their game, as each week will only get harder to see who is the strongest.
Play So You Think You Can Dance Fantasy TV! Pick Who You Think is Going Home Before 12pm PST the Day of the Results >>>
So You Think You Can Dance: The Next Generation airs Mondays at 8pm on FOX.
(Image courtesy of FOX)
Designing a home for all, for the long haul
UB-Habitat for Humanity pilot project aims to incorporate universal design principles into agencys home renovation, construction
I cannot think of a more complete package partnership than this: UB students design and build a house that will actually go to a Habitat family. Its awesome.
BUFFALO, N.Y. Later this summer, a family will move into their new home on Buffalos East Side. Thanks to a pilot project between Habitat for Humanity and the University at Buffalos School of Architecture and Planning, the family will be comfortable staying in the house for a long time, even as its members reach their elderly years.
Students created designs for the home renovation that feature principles of universal design a first for Habitat Buffalo.
Universal design seeks to increase usability, health and social participation for a diverse population. The home on Sussex Street, near Erie County Medical Center, will be the first to be completed as part of the UB-Habitat pilot project.
It started in the fall with a one-semester studio taught by Ed Steinfeld and Peter Russell. Steinfeld is a professor of architecture and director of the Center for Inclusive Design and Environmental Access (IDeA Center) in UBs School of Architecture and Planning. He's also an internationally renowned expert on universal design. Russell is the manager of the schools Materials and Methods Shop.
Steinfeld and Russell challenged their students to develop innovative solutions to difficult problems of affordable housing design and construction that Habitat for Humanity could adopt. Students produced construction documents, research reports and visualizations to communicate their innovative ideas.
In a spring construction course taught by Russell, students then worked on the home, performing demolition and building alongside Habitats team of volunteers. The house is close to being ready for occupancy.
I cannot think of a more complete package partnership than this: UB students design and build a house that will actually go to a Habitat family. Its awesome, said Barry Weiss, the construction manager for Habitat Buffalo.
The studio portion of this pilot was hugely successful, he said. Normally, we have one designer develop a blueprint for our houses. For the Sussex Street home, we had 12 students offering different ideas. That allowed us to choose from a variety of options to find a design that would be most appropriate for that particular family and for the way that we build. It was an exciting opportunity for us and we look forward to doing it again in the future.
Campus News
Club helps members be their best selves inside and out
Each workout begins with Elijah Tyson reciting one of the eight guiding principles that club members must abide by and explaining how it will correlate to that session. At the end, he says a few words about how the law applies to a real-world situation. Photo: Douglas Levere
A typical workout is split into two portions: full body which includes pullups, diamond pushups, squats, a Russian twist and jumping lunges and front-lever strength-progression exercises, such as leg lifts, side plank raises, back extensions and planks. Photo: Douglas Levere
By DAVID J. HILL
You dont need to spend $30 a month for a gym membership or set up a Bowflex in your spare room. All it takes to get fit is the equipment you can find at almost any outdoor park. And the encouragement of your peers.
Thats the philosophy behind a new fitness club, UB BarbarianZ, created by student Elijah Tyson. The clubs workouts feature a style of exercise known as bodyweight fitness, which emphasizes calisthenics used in combination with bars, poles and other typical equipment you might find outside over traditional free weights. These workouts are versatile, says Tyson, who will be a senior this fall majoring in business with a minor in nutrition. Everything we use, you can find outdoors.
Tyson turned to bodyweight fitness as a freshman. He had been using free weights, but didnt like the wear and tear on his body, so he began integrating calisthenics into his regimen. A typical Tyson workout is split into two portions: full body which includes pullups, diamond pushups, squats, a Russian twist and jumping lunges and whats called front-lever strength-progression exercises, such as leg lifts, side plank raises, back extensions and planks. Every day Im trying to do new things with my body, he says.
A certified personal trainer, Tyson formed the club last fall, taking inspiration from the urban bodyweight fitness groups that proliferate in his hometown of Copiague, on Long Island not just in terms of the workout, but also the ethos surrounding it. All these street fitness crews promote self-improvement values and community involvement, he says. That was the culture I wanted to create with my club.
So he developed a set of eight guiding principles, or laws the BarbarianZ Scripture that club members must abide by. Each law is designed to complement the workout and a real-life situation. Examples include No shortcuts to success and Bye, haters. As Tyson explains, his club does not tolerate discriminators of any kind. We kick them out, he says.
Each workout begins with Tyson reciting one of the laws and explaining how it will correlate to that session. At the end, he says a few words about how the law applies to a real-world situation.
That capital Z at the end of the clubs name refers to what Tyson calls the Law of Z. Its the last letter in the alphabet, and every letter before that represents an obstacle or challenge you will go through in life when youre trying to accomplish something big, he explains. When you get to Z, youve done it.
While the workouts can seem intimidating at first, club members are there to help. Every exercise we do is acclimated to a persons fitness goals, says Tyson, whose postgraduation plans include opening his own gym and starting a nonprofit for youth. Were not going to make you feel like youre not good enough.
U.S. Rep. John Katko has officially launched his re-election campaign in the 24th Congressional District with the release of a television commercial touting his record.
Katko, R-Camillus, is the featured speaker in the ad titled "Miles," which shows him driving a red Chevrolet Silverado through southern Onondaga County.
In other scenes, he's shown walking in downtown Syracuse. Onondaga County Executive Joanie Mahoney, a Republican who first endorsed Katko in 2014, makes a cameo appearance in the ad.
"I spent two decades as a federal prosecutor and the last two years as central New York representative in Congress," Katko says in the ad. "We've had great success, passing more bills than any first term member from either party. Working across the aisle to get things done right.
"Because the best solutions to our problems come from right here, no matter how many back road trips it takes to find them."
The commercial is part of a "significant" ad buy, according to a Katko campaign spokesperson. The cost of the ad buy wasn't disclosed.
Katko's ad is the first released during the general election campaign. Democratic challenger Colleen Deacon unveiled three TV ads during the primary campaign.
So far, Deacon, D-Syracuse, hasn't released a general election commercial.
Since taking office in January 2015, Katko has introduced 23 bills. Twelve have been approved by the House of Representatives and two have been signed into law by President Barack Obama.
According to GovTrack, Katko was tied for fifth among all members of the House of Representatives with two laws enacted in 2015. Only one other House freshman had more than one bill that was signed into law last year.
Among New York's congressional delegation, Katko had the most bills signed by Obama.
Katko hasn't had any bills signed into law this year, but he recently had three national security measures included in a major aviation bill that was signed by Obama last week.
Legislation he sponsored to help the Treasury Department crack down on drug kingpins was included in a larger package approved by Congress that aims to address the opioid epidemic.
He's had other bills approved by the House this year, including legislation that would require the federal government to study whether Fort Ontario in Oswego should be designated as a national park.
Katko has said in interviews that he's looking forward to running on his record. That will be one of many issues voters judge him on in the 24th District race.
Bryan Lesswing, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, criticized Katko's record in a statement Tuesday.
"Vulnerable House Republican John Katko wants us to believe he is a moderate, but the reality is that he broke a campaign promise by voting to defund Planned Parenthood four times and repeatedly voting against bipartisan efforts to keep guns out of the hands of suspected terrorists," Lesswing said.
"Congressman John Katko needs to explain why he puts his own party's agenda ahead of the safety and security of central New York."
The race between Deacon and Katko is expected to be a tight contest. Both parties have made the seat a top priority in this year's election.
Most political prognosticators rate the 24th District race as a toss up.
Worcester, Bosch Group has boosted the profile of its national sales team with the appointment of Rob Leonard as national specification manager.
Mr Leonard joined Worcester in 1993, where he worked on the factory floor helping to manufacture the companys heating and hot water technologies. Since then Mr Leonard has held various roles including regional sales manager central and most recently specification operations manager.
The new role will involve Mr Leonard overseeing specification sales for Worcester and taking responsibility for key accounts. As part of his new position, he is aiming to maintain the performance of Worcester in the specification market, grow the manufacturers sales within the newbuild sector and continue Worcesters strong performance in the eco sector.
Mr Leonard said: I consider this an excellent opportunity to bring my years of experience from all areas of the business to the specification market. The dedicated specification sales team work closely with customers to provide tailored solutions and support on a variety of projects. My ultimate aim is to take the company forward, building on the strong foundation that we have already established in the sector.
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both hail from New York. And when the Democratic and Republican candidates for president square off this fall, they will debate in their home state.
The Commission on Presidential Debates announced Tuesday that the first Clinton-Trump debate will be held Sept. 26 at Hofstra University in Hempstead.
The debate was initially scheduled to be held at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. But the school opted not to host the debate due to rising costs.
According to the Dayton Daily News, the university said the costs, mainly for security, were set to increase from $3.5 million to more than $8 million. The school is also dealing with budget issues, which contributed to the decision to withdraw from the debate lineup.
Hofstra agreed to serve as an alternate site when the Commission on Presidential Debates unveiled its lineup last year. With Wright State pulling out of the debate lineup, the commission said it "looks forward" to working with the Long Island university again.
This will be the third consecutive presidential election that Hofstra has served as a host site for a presidential debate. In 2008 and 2012, presidential debates were held at the school.
The debate at Hofstra will feature a traditional format, with a moderator asking questions on various issues. The candidates are also scheduled to participate in a town hall-style debate on Oct. 9 at Washington University in St. Louis and another traditional debate on Oct. 19 at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.
The vice presidential debate will be held Oct. 4 at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia.
US auto major said that it is investing Rs 1,300 crore to set up a new Global Technology and Business Centre in Chennai. The centre may design cars in the future as the new facility will be integrated with the global engineering centre, said company's senior official.
Speaking on the sidelines of IACC's conclave on Indo-US Partnership 'The March towards $100 billion trade' David Dubensky, managing director, Pvt Ltd said that the company will be consolidating IT and IT-enabled services under one roof. The new centre is expected to commence operations in the first quarter (calender year) of 2019.
On Monday, CEO Vishal Sikka sent a letter to about 1.97 lakh employees of Infosys, describing what went wrong with the company's performance in the June quarter. Sikka's email comes a few days after the company disappointed investors with tepid revenue growth.
The Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of the Mumbai Police on Tuesday secured Rs 2,000 crore worth of real estate and financial assets of Financial Technologies (India), or FTIL - the parent company of the National Spot Exchange (NSEL) - for attachment.
State-owned on Tuesday said it will strive to generate 248 billion units during the current financial year.
" ...signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Government of India for the year 2016-17...According to the signed MoU, shall strive to generate 248 billion units during the year under "excellent" category," the company said in a statement.
Further, NTPC has a capital expenditure (CAPEX) target of Rs 30,000 crore under Excellent category, the statement said.
Moreover, parameters related to operational efficiency, projects monitoring and financial performance are also part of signed pact in line with MoU guidelines of Department of Public Enterprises, it said.
The MoU was signed by Power Secretary Pradeep Kumar Pujari and NTPC CMD Gurdeep Singh.
NTPC is fulfilling power needs of the country through 18 coal-based, seven gas-based, one hydro-based, nine renewable energy projects and nine JVs/subsidiaries.
The company has a total installed capacity of 47,178 MW at present.
Ricoh India, a subsidiary of Japanese imaging and electronics firm Ricoh, has admitted that some of its companies violated accounting principles and are responsible for falsification in the books of accounts.
With a personal-best fundraising performance, U.S. Rep. John Katko has a significant financial advantage over Democratic challenger Colleen Deacon in 24th Congressional District race.
Katko, R-Camillus, raised $522,491.19 in the second quarter of 2016, according to his Federal Election Commission filing. The fundraising period covered the period from April 1 through June 30.
Katko's campaign spent $167,610.11 and has $1,454,902.05 cash on hand.
Deacon, D-Syracuse, raised $349,423.55 over the past three months. Her campaign spent $405,246.35 and has $90,587.99 in the bank.
The two candidates were in different positions. Katko, as an incumbent, was able to raise funds and keep expenses to a minimum.
Deacon, though, was in a three-way primary for the Democratic nomination. She faced Eric Kingson and Steve Williams in the race, which she ultimately won on June 28 two days before the end of the second fundraising quarter.
Before the primary, Deacon received donations from Democratic members of Congress, most notably House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi.
Pelosi's campaign and political action committee donated a combined $7,000 to Deacon.
A couple of Katko's notable donors include U.S. Sen. John Cornyn's political action committee, Alamo PAC, which gave $5,000 to the central New York congressman's campaign. He also received $2,450 from the National Rifle Association's PAC.
Katko said most of his campaign contributions 75 percent came from individuals living in New York state. While $74,901.86 of the total he raised came from individuals, a larger chunk of funding $177,633.16 was donated by PACs and other political committees.
"Inn Congress, I've focused on being a strong and independent voice, fighting through gridlock to deliver results on the issues that matter most to our community," Katko said in a statement. "With the generous support that we've received, our campaign will be able to spread our message to voters across central New York to ensure that we are victorious in November."
The Deacon-Katko is expected to be a tight race. The Republicans are looking to retain the seat Katko first won in 2014, while Democrats are hopeful that Deacon will be able to get the seat back in the party's control.
Wipro has called off the agreement to acquire Viteos Group, a New Jersey-based back office services provider it had agreed to acquire in December last year for a consideration of $130 million (around Rs 860 crore).
The killing of 10 commandos of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) on Monday in Bihar has once again sent a grim reminder to the security forces that though the number of Maoists has depleted over the years in the country, they still have the capability and resources to cause extensive damage.
The Afghanistan government on Tuesday urged the Indian government and investors to utilise the trade opportunities in the agricultural sector of the country and sought assistance in marketing, packaging and processing of goods to boost its economy.
"Developing business to business relationships between Afghan producers and Indian retail and direct wholesale markets for our agricultural products will be critical for sustaining private sector business during the years ahead," Abdul Qadeer Jawad, Deputy Minister of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock of Afghanistan, said here.
He was speaking at a conference 'Made in Afghanistan' held under the aegis of Confidence Building Measure (CBM) of the 'Heart of Asia' process for Rebuilding Afghanistan.
Jawad requested the investors to take "advantage" of the investment opportunities that agriculture offers in his country.
"We are looking for potential investors in areas such as processing of dry fruits and nuts, processing and cotton yarn production, establishment of cold chains and supply chains while in packaging the potential areas were fresh and dry fruit boxes, jars, lids, tins, glass and plastic bottles, tetra pack packaging etc.," he said.
"In trading and marketing, investment opportunities exist in transport and logistics services such as cargo villages inside airports, trade partnership building services, marketing and branding services."
The conference, organised by Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Ficci) also hosted an exhibition in which entrepreneurs from Afghanistan showcased their skilled products, dry fruits and stone-work objects.
The Afghan government has also coordinated with the civil aviation authority to establish a cargo village at Kabul Airport, he said.
"The cargo village would further help in trade facilitation. It will help in establishment of a huge cold storage facility with a capacity of over 10,000 metric tons," Jawad said.
A memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed between FICCI Ladies Organisation (FLO) and Afghanistan Women Business Federation to help develop the entrepreneurship opportunities for Afghan women in India.
"The 'Heart of Asia' process was a shining example of Indian engagement with the Afghanistan and this will make a significant contribution to rebuilding Afghanistan and bring peace and stability in the entire region," Shaida Mohammad Abdali, Afghan envoy in India said.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday directed Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi to apologise for his comment that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was responsible for Mahatma Gandhi's death or face a defamation trial.
Rajnath Singh on Tuesday spoke to Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar regarding the ambush on the CRPF team in Aurangabad region, in which at least ten defence personnel were killed and five injured.
Rajnath instructed Director General, CRPF to rush to Aurangabad to assess the situation post the ambush.
The Home Minister also expressed his heartfelt condolences to the families of the slain CRPF personnel and prayed for the speedy recovery of the injured.
At least ten CRPF personnel were killed and five injured in an encounter between the Naxal and the Cobra battalion near the border of Imamganj and Aurangabad police station here.
The bodies of three Naxals were also recovered.
As per reports, the jawans of the COBRA unit were ambushed in an IED blast after which an encounter started between the two.
Bihar Director General of Police P K Thakur told ANI that eight jawans died on spot, while two of them died on their way to the hospital.
The encounter started late last night and is continuing.
Meanwhile, combing operations are still going on.
The government is readying to isolate the Congress in the Rajya Sabha on the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA) amendment Bill and, if need be, even the Goods and Services Tax (GST) constitutional amendment Bill.
The High Court today issued notices to health department officials and an emergency health services provider company on a petition seeking initiation of contempt proceedings against them for alleged non-compliance of its order.
The notices were issued to Secretary Health Prabodh Saxena, Director Health Services Beldave Thakur, Mission Director ( Health Mission) Hans Raj Sharma.
The notice was also issued to Mehul Sukumaran, State Head, GVK-EMRI (Emergency Management and Research Institute), TB, Sanatorium Complex, Dharampur, Solan.
A division bench comprising Chief Justice Mansoor Ahmad Mir and Justice Tarlok Singh Chauhan passed the order on a petition filed by HP 108 Contract Workers Union.
Earlier, the petitioner had filed a writ alleging that the respondents were not following labour laws and illegally terminating services of the employees.
The petition had sought reinstatement of terminated employees.
The high court had on March 14, 2014 directed the respondents to consider the petitioners for appointment keeping in view the experience they had gained while working on the post in question.
It was further alleged in the petition that despite the orders passed by the high court the state head of GVK-EMRI did not consider the case of terminated employees.
On April 9, 2015, the HC directed the employer not to terminate the services of the employees who had not completed their contractual period.
The petitioner alleged the orders were not complied with.
An Iraqi woman who went to a hospital here for treatment was allegedly molested and sexually harassed by a staff of the hospital.
In her complaint to the police the woman alleged that she was molested and sexually harassed by a unknown person in the hospital premises during the course of treatment while she was admitted to the hospital.
The police on Monday said the incident occurred on May 5, 2016 when the woman went to the Fortis hospital for check-up.
The (Previously known as Gurgaon) police received a letter from Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) to conduct investigation into the matter after registering a case, PRO of Gurgaon Police, Hawa Singh said.
Police said the Police Commissioner's Office received the MEA letter on Monday.
A complaint has been made to the Embassy of Iraq by a female Iraqi that she was sexually harassed while she was admitted in Fortis hospital, . MEA has informed Gurgram Police about this," the PRO said.
After receiving the letter from MEA, Gururam Police have registered an FIR in this connection at Sushant Lok police station.
"Although FIR has been registered in Sushant Lok, police station, Gurgram Police is yet to receive the original complaint made by the lady.
"Further investigation will be carried out upon receiving the lady's complaint", said Deepak Saharan, DCP-East Gurugram.
An official Spokesperson of Fortis Memorial Research Institute said, this is a case dating back over two months back allegedly involving a contractual worker employed by an external agency.
The worker was immediately relieved of his duties.
The external agency is co-operating fully with the concerned authorities who are looking into the matter, the Spokesperson added.
Demanding withdrawal of the controversial bill seeking to amend the Land Acquisition Act of 2013, a group of activists on Monday announced they would be start a pan-India movement against forced land acquisition.
The announcement was made here today on the last day of a convention of public movements related to land rights, held under the aegis of 'Bhumi Adhikar Andolan'.
Addressing a press conference after the convention ended, former MP from West Bengal and general secretary of All India Kisan Sabha, Hannan Mollah, claimed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's agricultural policies were the "worst" since the Independence.
"After a long struggle, the new Land Acquisition Act was legislated in 2013, which had some pro-farmer elements, such as prior consent, Social Impact Assessment and safeguards for food security. However, after assuming power, Modi-led government tried to amend it through the bill and through ordinance, so that benefits can be extended to corporates," said Mollah.
"The ordinance to amend the Act was promulgated thrice. Due to the widespread protests it was not promulgated for the fourth time. Withdrawal of the amendment Bill from Parliament is still pending, which is a matter of concern. So on August 10, we will meet the President and urge him to do the needful," Mollah said.
The convention saw participation of around 500 activists, including the Narmada Bachao Andolan leader Medha Patkar.
"Unless the bill is withdrawn, the Act of 2013 will not come into force. State governments are also not implementing it and grabbing lakhs of acres of land without giving fair compensation," alleged Mollah.
"It was decided in the convention that we will launch a movement in each state against such anti-farmer policies. We will also tell people that the so called Gujarat model of development is a myth, the people here are fighting against the government which takes their land and give it to corporates," said Mollah.
In another chilling reminder of the costs of the festering Naxal insurgency, at least 10 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) commandos belonging to the elite COBRA unit were killed and five others injured on Monday when Naxals targeted them with an improvised-explosive device (IED).
According to reports, officials said that the attack took place in the jungles of Bihar's Aurangabad district.
According to the officials, an encounter occurred between the jawans of the COBRA unit and the Naxals after the IED blast. The officials revealed that the encounter resulted in the killing of three Naxals by late Monday night.
The attack comes months after Naxals killed seven CRPF men in Chhattisgarh with a powerful landmine.
It is not just the security forces which have faced the brunt so far. Earlier this year, Home Ministry statistics showed that 53 people were executed by after 'kangaroo courts' found them 'guilty' in the five worst Naxal-hit states of the country in the last three years.
According to the ministry, 18 people were killed following the directives of 'kangaroo courts' or 'Jan Adalats' in 2015 for being alleged police informers or "for not believing in Maoist ideology".
During 2015, 41 'Jan Adalats' were held by Naxal cadres in five Left wing extremism affected states Andhra Pradesh (1), Bihar (6), Chhattisgarh (14), Jharkhand (14) and Odisha (6).
Over the years, have struck at security forces and civilians alike with impunity.
Here are the 10 most lethal Naxal attacks and encounters in the last 10 years:
1) Kandhamal encounter: Earlier this month, at least five people, including one child, were reportedly killed after getting caught in a crossfire between security personnel and Naxals in Odisha's Kandhamal district.
Speaking to IANS, Kandhamal district Superintendent of Police Pinak Mishra said, "Five villagers including two women, one minor and two men were killed during the gun battle with the ."
2) Dantewara attack: On March 30 this year, seven CRPF men were killed in Chhattisgarh's Dantewara district in a landmine explosion.
The CRPF personnel of the 230 Battalion were heading towards Mokapal area from Kuankora police station for patrolling when their vehicle was caught in a landmine explosion. The CRPF men were also fired upon just after the explosion, sources said.
The Naxals took away the arms and ammunition the killed personnel were carrying.
Such was the intensity of the attack, which came just weeks after a CRPF jawan was killed and four others injured in an IED blast in Chhattisgarhs Maoist-hit Sukma district, that it left a deep crater in the metalled road, according to media reports.
3) Palamau attack: Towards the end of January this year, the Maoists triggered an IED blast in Palamau district of Jharkahnd killing seven security personnel.
The Commandant of 134 Battalion of CRPF, S K Linda, had said the police were on an anti-Naxal operation when the vehicle carrying these personnel drove over the IED. CRPF and district policemen were walking at a distance behind the vehicle when the blast took place.
4) Taking a village hostage: In May of 2015, a hostage situation developed in Chhattisgarh's Sukma district where around 250 villagers were seized by Maoist rebels on the eve of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to neighbouring Dantewada.
Chief Minister Raman Singh had said that anywhere between 200 and 250 villagers were abducted by the Naxals from a few villages in Sukma district and efforts were being made by the local administration for their release.
"Around 200-250 villagers have been abducted and 4-5 others (locals) are negotiating their release," Singh told journalists after conflicting claims were made by police officials on the number of villagers kidnapped by the ultras.
5) Attack on senior Congress leaders: In May of 2013, heavily-armed Maoists ambushed a convoy of Congress leaders in Chattisgarh's Sukma district, killing 27 people, including senior Congress leader Mahendra Karma, and injuring senior leader V C Shukla and 31 others.
A day after the attack, bullet-riddled bodies of abducted Chhattisgarh Congress chief Nand Kumar Patel, his son and eight others were found in Bastar.
6) 2010 Narayanpur attack: In June of 2010, 26 personnel of the CRPF's 39 Battalion were killed in a Maoist ambush in Chhattisgarh's Narayanpur district.
The ambush was one in a string of lethal attacks which were perpetrated by the ultras between February and June that year.
7) 2010 Dantewada attack: In April of 2010, at least 75 jawans of the CRPF were killed in an ambush by Maoists in Chhattisgarh's Dantewada region.
According to reports, the Maoists attacked the CRPF convoy in the Tademetla forests. Opening indiscriminate fire and triggering an IED blast, the Maoists struck the convoy and the reinforcements which were sent in to aid the security forces.
The attack came just two days after Maoists had triggered another landmine blast and killed 11 security personnel of the anti-Naxal force Special Operations Group in Odisha's Koraput district.
8) 2010 Midnapore attack: On February 15, 2010, 24 personnel of the Eastern Frontier Rifles were killed in their camp in Silda in West Midnapore district of West Bengal in what was the most devastating Maoist attack in the state.
9) Malkangiri landmine attack: In July of 2008, Maoists blew up a police van in a landmine blast and killed 21 policemen in Odisha's Malkangiri district.
10) 2008 boat attack: In June of that year, Maoists attacked a boat at Odisha's Balimela reservoir. The boat, which was carrying four police officials and 60 Greyhound commandos, came under ambush and 38 troops were killed in the action.
AUBURN An Auburn teen has filed a lawsuit after allegedly being held in solitary confinement at the Cayuga County Jail while he awaits trial.
Jermaine Gotham a 16-year-old boy diagnosed with bipolar disorder, ADHD and an I.Q. of approximately 70 was arrested in January and charged with robbery, burglary and kidnapping.
According to a complaint filed June 8, Gotham has been placed in solitary confinement twice since his arrest.
In March, he was allegedly punished with a 60-day "lock-in" at the jail's Restrictive Housing Unit for walking into another inmate's cell.
"Lock-in is another name for solitary confinement at the Jail," Gotham's attorney, Josh Cotter, wrote in the complaint. "Inmates are let out for about an hour at 6 a.m. for recreation and also allowed out for three hours a day Monday through Friday for school."
After being returned to the general cellblocks in May, Gotham received another misbehavior report for "playing catch with a piece of rubber" and "shooting spitballs."
According to Gotham, he admitted to tossing a piece of rubber in his cell, but said another inmate "Mike" shot spit balls at a window.
"Mike testified that I didn't shoot any spit balls," Gotham wrote. "However, I was found guilty of both offenses and given 50 days total of lock-in."
But Judge Mark Fandrich released Gotham from solitary 10 days early after the lawsuit was filed against Cayuga County Sheriff David Gould and Capt. John Mack, the chief custody deputy at the jail.
"I am worried that continuing to do time in solitary will make my mental health problems a lot worse than they already are," Gotham wrote, adding that he had been receiving counseling at Cayuga County Mental Health before his arrest. "It is really messing with my head ... I feel sad, depressed, angry, I become irritated very easily and have trouble sleeping. Sometimes being locked in becomes so hard that I feel like I want to physically hurt myself."
Gotham's lawsuit comes at a time when solitary confinement has been criticized both statewide and nationally. In December, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision would reform its solitary confinement policies to release inmates serving long sanctions in solitary to the general prison population. And in January, President Barack Obama banned solitary confinement for juveniles in federal prisons.
Cotter, Gotham's public interest lawyer from Legal Services of Central New York, said he could not comment on the case as he is currently in settlement negotiations with the county. County officials also declined comment.
Gotham's case will continue in Cayuga County court Aug. 23.
The Centre on Tuesday assured that it would speak to Maharashtra government to get the demolished at Dadar in Mumbai restored as a memorial.
The assurance came after opposition parties in Rajya Sabha vociferously demanded rebuilding of the heritage building that was brought down last month.
"It is a serious issue. We will talk to the state government and attempt to get it restored as memorial," Minister for Social Justice Thawar Chand Gehlot said. "We have taken cognizance of the demolition."
Had the building not been demolished, it would have been better, he said after Sitaram Yechury, CPI (M), raised the issue through a zero hour mention.
Yechury said the state government and the municipality have not just demolished a heritage structure, but a building that represents the "heritage of freedom movement, a building that represents heritage of the Dalit movement."
The building was built by B R Ambedkar out of his own money to provide place for ostracised dalits at that time. It also housed a printing press for publishing dalit literature.
The CPI (M) leader said all structures of social justice like the Planning Commission have been demolished by the BJP-led government. With the unwinding of Planning Commission, there are no longer sub-plans made for uplift of the dalit community.
"Not only a physical structure of social justice but a vision of social justice has been demolished," Yechury said.
Anand Sharma (Congress) said the government cannot remain silent on the issue.
Mayawati (BSP) said while the government talks of buying and converting the room in London where Ambedkar spent his days, a building built on the land bought by him out of his own money has been demolished.
She demanded rebuilding of a grand structure at the site of the demolition.
With other opposition members joining the demand, Gehlot said the government has given respect to all symbols associated with Ambedkar.
Amar Shankar Sable (BJP) said the state government was no way involved in the demolition of the building and it was done by People's Improvement Trust.
The and the Buddha Bhushan printing press started by Babasaheb Ambedkar were demolished by People's Improvement Trust last month claiming that it was dilapidated and a grand 'Ambedkar Bhavan' would come up in its place.
Deputy Chairman P J Kurien said the government has accepted that the building has been demolished and it will be restored.
A Pakistani has been arrested by the Border Security Force (BSF) near in the district.
The 24-year-old Pakistani had crossed into this side of International Border (IB) in Arnia forward area early today and was arrested by BSF troops, a BSF officer said.
The youth has been identified as Warris from Zaffarwal of Pakistan's Punjab province, he said, adding that he is being questioned.
is appointed by the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) on recommendation of the Finance Minister, Parliament was informed on Tuesday.
"Whereas the appointment of Governor, RBI, is approved by Prime Minister's Office on the recommendation of Finance Minister," Minister of State for Finance Santosh Kumar Gangwar said in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha.
To a separate query, Gangwar said Appointment Committee of Cabinet (ACC) guidelines for appointment of Deputy Governors are still the same, but the composition of the search committee has been changed.
"Now, a search committee, namely Financial Sector Regulatory Appointment Search Committee (FSRASC) has been constituted with the approval of ACC. The committee will recommend names for appointment of Chairperson and Members of financial sector regulatory bodies, including those of the Governor and Deputy Governors," the minister said.
Deputy Governors are appointed on the basis of ACC-approved guidelines, which stipulate that the search committee constituted for the purpose will recommend the person to be appointed as a Deputy Governor.
Gangwar said section 8(1)(a) of the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934, provides that there shall be one Governor and not more than four Deputy Governors to be appointed by the central government on the central board of RBI.
Sources in the Finance Ministry said the government is close to picking a successor of Raghuram Rajan, who has announced his decision not to seek a second term after his current term comes to an end on September 4.
District Collector of Puri, Aravind Aagrwal, on Monday, lodged an FIR against some servitors who allegedly abused him, while a priest was arrested on charge of launching an attack on journalists during the final 'Pahandi' ritual of Lord Jaganath's Ratha Yatra festival.
Agarwal, who was present at the site during the ritual last night, objected to Damodar Mahasuara who was taking his daughter onto the chariots defying an Orissa High Court order.
The High Court in 2014 had ordered that none other than the authorised servitors could climb the chariots.
Apart from taking his daughter to the chariots, Mahasuara also provoked others to take law into hands.
"I was abused in filthy language by a group of servitors led by Mahasuara when I objected to his act of taking his daughter on to the chariots," Agarwal said in the FIR which was handed over to Puri S P Sarthak Sadangi.
Agarwal said he remained silent at the spot as the Pahandi rituals were going on for taking the deities back into the temple.
"I chose not to take any action on the spot as they (servitors) threatened me to stop rituals," Agarwal said adding he lodged the complaint after the first 'Abadha' (cooked prasad) came out of the temple kitchen today after a gap of about one month in view of the annual car festival.
The District Collector has also sent copy of the FIR to the Revenue Divisional Commissioner (RDC) to bring the matter to his knowledge.
Asked about the intention of a section of servitors, Agarwal said "They try to arm twist the administration by threatening to stop rituals of the Lord. Therefore, we were under pressure while taking action against erring servitors.
Sources said Agarwal has filed two FIRs with the SP.
While one FIR deals with misbehaviour and threatening him, another was on hurting the religious sentiments of devotees by stopping Pahandi ritual mid way.
The district magistrate has named six servitors in the two FIRs, they said.
Voicing concern over the episode, Gajapati King of Puri, Divya Singha Deba, in a statement said "I am hurt and worried over chaos during the Ratha Yatra. The administration should ensure that such incidents are not repeated in future."
Meanwhile, the police arrested a servitor of Shri Jagannath Temple for physically assaulting and mounting attack on media persons during the final ritual of the festival.
The servitor, identified as Madan Khuntia, was arrested on attempt to murder and other charges after around 25 journalists lodged an FIR at Simhadwara Police Station about the incident that took place last night, said Additional Superintendent of Police, B B Sahu.
While Khuntia was identified and arrested after examining the CCTV footage, search was on to nab some others for the incident that took place before the deities were slated to be carried from the chariots in 'Pahandi' into the 12th century shrine during the Niladri Bije ritual, he said.
As a group of servitors including Mahasuar forcibly took their family members on to the chariots in violation of the High Court directive, unruly scenes were witnessed before the Pahandi ceremony for Niladri Bije, marking culmination of the annual festival that began with Ratha Yatra on July 6.
The servitors allegedly misbehaved and abused the government officials present at the site. Some of them allegedly attacked media persons present on the spot to cover the event.
A team of journalists later lodged an FIR with police demanding action, police said.
Members in Rajya Sabha on Tuesday sought government intervention in ensuring the release of a large number of Indian fishermen, arrested by the Sri Lankan navy in the recent past.
Vijila Sathyananth (AIADMK) raised the issue of arrest of by Sri Lankan Navy, blaming it for infringing upon rights of Indian .
She said four were arrested on July 15 and asked the Centre to ensure their immediate release and sought immediate intervention of the Ministry of External Affairs to secure their release as well as that of their fishing boats.
Tiruchi Siva (DMK) also raised the issue of "atrocities" on fishermen by Sri Lankan navy, saying 76 fishermen have been arrested in the recent past.
He alleged that the Lankan navy had manhandled fishermen and damaged their boats even in Indian waters.
Stressing that fishermen have been rendered "totally out of profession", Siva sought immediate release of 76 fishermen and 102 fishing boats.
P Bhattacharya (Cong) raised the issue of neglect of historic Musuem at Kolkata and complained that the Centre was not paying enough attention to the library. He said senior posts at the library are lying vacant and the post of Director there has been vacant for long time.
He urged the central government to ensure that such an old and historic library is run properly.
Rajani Patil (Cong) raised the issue of brutal rape and killing of a 14-year old Kabaddi player in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra and demand stringent punishment for the accused.
"The fear of law has to be established in minds of criminals," she said.
Husain Dalwai (Cong) demanded a House Committee to investigate the incident.
Ananda Bhaskar Rapuolu (Cong) demanded powers to the state government to categorise Scheduled Castes (SC) for reservation in jobs and education.
A former minister of China's State Council Information Office has said that the ongoing dispute over the should not hamper relations between Beijing and other member states of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN).
Participating in a think tank seminar on and Regional Cooperation and Development held in Singapore, Zhao Qizheng said on Tuesday, "Although the Chinese government has dismissed the ill-founded arbitration unilaterally initiated by the Aquino III administration (of the Philippines), China remains open to the Philippines, and disputes in shouldn't hamper China-ASEAN relations."
Zhao said China fully understood that ASEAN countries have common interests on the whole, and each country in the region has its own interests. China and ASEAN should maintain friendly exchanges, as well as friendly relations.
He further stated that China-ASEAN relations should be based on common interests and aim for deepening political communications and enhance cultural exchanges in the future.
Li Guoqiang, deputy director of Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, echoed with Zhao's view, saying that ASEAN is the priority of China's diplomacy with neighbouring countries.
He stressed that China and ASEAN should work together to maintain peace and stability in the region.
Qizheng, was quoted by Xinhua news agency, as saying that he was hopeful about China and the Philippines restarting bilateral negotiations on the South China Sea, and moving step-by-step.
"China and Philippines can temporarily put aside differences, and discuss issues of joint exploration first," Zhao said.
"Joint developments are very broad, including resources, fisheries, maritime rescue, meteorologic data exchange as well as disaster relief at sea. We should move step by step," he added.
Organised by the Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the one-day seminar attracted more than 20 experts from academic institutes in China and Southeast Asian countries, including Thailand, Cambodia and Malaysia.
The government of former Philippine President Benigno S. Aquino III filed the arbitration against China in 2013, despite the agreement his country had reached with China on resolving disputes in the South China Sea through bilateral negotiations. Since then, China-Philippines relations have been severely deteriorated.
However, current Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has expressed readiness and willingness to hold bilateral talks with China, saying that he is planning to send envoy to China to restart negotiations.
Officers of the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence here have arrested two employees of on charges of smuggling gold.
Acting on intelligence report, the officers seized 22 pieces of gold biscuits weighing a total of 2566.05 gm from a aircraft which landed at the Mangaluru International Airport (MIA) from Dubai on July 15, DRI Deputy Director, Vinayak Bhat said on Monday.
The total value of the gold seized is estimated at Rs 75,26,225, he said in a release here.
The gold biscuits were smuggled into the country by concealing them under a seat of the aircraft during its international flight from Dubai to Mumbai by a carrier hired for the job. Thereafter, once the aircraft was deployed on its assignment in the domestic sector, it operated between Mumbai and Mangaluru, Bhat said.
The arrested employees of working at MIA who were part of the conspiracy were passing on advance information to the smugglers regarding the itinerary of the aircraft, he said.
They helped the smugglers by retrieving the gold from the aircraft upon its landing at Mangaluru and delivering them outside later misusing their position to smuggle gold out of the airport by avoiding customs check, he said.
The two employees confessed to their crime on interrogation and admitted that they were doing it for the lure of hefty money offered by the smugglers. They also admitted that they had done it on six occasions earlier, the release said.
Meanwhile, Spicejet said in a statement here said the two employees had been suspended "with immediate effect pending complete inquiry and investigation by agencies."
The suspended employees were Mohammed Haneef from city (senior CSE, Airport Services) and Muddayya from Kodagu (Security Officer).
The Centre on Tuesday admitted that rate of conviction of those accused of committing is low, but said it is taking steps to fight the threat posed by such offences to security.
"We cannot make a claim that the system what we have now to check cyber crime is foolproof. We are working in this direction," Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh told the Lok Sabha during question hour.
Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju said the threat from cyber crime is a "reality" that needs to be tackled by sensitising the police and taking other steps.
To a supplementary question from Trinamool Congress (TMC) floor leader Sudip Bandyopadhyay, Rijiju said: "It is true that the rate of conviction of those arrested in connection with cyber crime is low."
But, he said, the government is taking "massive steps" to embolden the strategies for actions against cyber crime.
The entire canvas of cyber crime is "complicated" and at times even cases are not reported, Rijiju said.
Bandyopadhyay said the rate of conviction of those charged with committing is very low. In 2013 and 2014 the conviction rate was very low; in 2015, out of 844 people arrested only 224 persons have been convicted, he said.
"What major steps is the government taking on this," the TMC leader wanted to know.
Rajnath Singh said the Democratic Alliance (NDA) government had set up an expert group to deal with within 6-7 months of coming to power.
"The report is now available with us. Now we are working in that direction to fight the cyber crime menace," Rajnath Singh said.
The steps being taken include improved training of cyber professionals and adequate research on technology front, Rajnath Singh said.
AUBURN A Port Byron man admitted his involvement in two separate cases Tuesday in Cayuga County criminal court.
First, Jeffrey Marshall, of 9031 High Bridge Road, pleaded guilty to fourth-degree grand larceny and second-degree identity theft for using a stolen credit card in September 2015. The 26-year-old said he stole a woman's credit card and used it at various retail locations in Auburn, purchasing nearly $1,800 worth of merchandise.
"I stole a credit card and bought gift cards, a sump pump and shoes for my kids," Marshall told Judge Mark Fandrich. "And I signed her name on the receipt."
In a separate case, Marshall pleaded guilty to third-degree burglary for illegally entering a barn or garage on Creek Road in Genoa in April and stealing some scrap metal.
In exchange for his guilty pleas, Marshall will be sentenced to one to three years in prison on each count in the first case and two to six years in prison for the burglary. All sentences will run concurrently to one another for a total of two to six years.
Sentencing is scheduled for Sept. 20.
Also in court:
An Onondaga County man was remanded to Cayuga County Jail Tuesday for violating his probation less than 24 hours after he was sentenced.
Tyler Prescott, of I7 Cedar Circle in Liverpool, received five years probation in May for third-degree criminal sale of marijuana. At the time, the 24-year-old admitted to selling an ounce of marijuana in March 2015.
However, the day after his sentence in Cayuga County, Prescott was arrested in the town of Mexico for criminal mischief.
Prescott is due back in court Sept. 13.
A warrant has been issued for a local sex offender who admitted to having sexual contact with two teenage girls in Cayuga County.
William Harrington, 31, was sentenced to 10 years probation in April for third-degree rape and third-degree sexual abuse. He pleaded guilty to having sexual contact with a 16-year-old on Nov. 8, 2015 and a 14-year-old on Dec. 5, 2015 in Genoa.
Harrington was scheduled to be back in Cayuga County court twice in July for a risk level assessment. However, according to his defense attorney Rome Canzano, attempts to locate Harrington since his sentence have failed.
"It seems that Harrington may have fled our jurisdiction," Fandrich said Tuesday when the defendant again failed to show up in court. A warrant was issued for Harrington's arrest, and his risk level assessment proceeded without him.
Fandrich ruled that Harrington would have to register as a level two sex offender.
Kolkata Police today summoned Trinamool Congress leader and MLA Iqbal Ahmed in connection with its probe into the operation.
According to a senior officer the TMC MLA has been asked to appear before the Economic Offences Wing at the Kolkata Police headquarters at Lalbazar tomorrow evening.
Iqbal, the younger brother of TMC MP Sultan Ahmed, was purportedly shown accepting money in a controversial tapes.
Kolkata Police sleuths had last week questioned IPS officer S M Hussain Mirza twice in connection with the investigation into the sting operation.
Mirza's statements were recorded and video graphed during his long hours of grilling.
On June 17, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had ordered a probe by police into the sting operation and had claimed her party had not taken "a single penny" from anyone in the Saradha chit fund scam and the operation.
A Special Investigation Team under Kolkata Police Commissioner Rajeev Kumar was formed to conduct the probe.
The next day, Kolkata Mayor and Minister Sovan Chattopadhyay's wife Ratna filed a complaint against Narada News CEO Mathew Samuel, who was then booked under IPC sections 469 (forgery for purpose of harming reputation), 500 (defamation), 505 (statements conducing to public mischief), 171 (G) (false statement in connection with an election) and 120(B) (criminal conspiracy).
An investigation into the Narada sting operation is on by the Lok Sabha Ethics Committee, while a case on the issue is pending in the Calcutta High Court.
Andhra Pradesh government agency on Monday initiated an international competitive bidding process through the 'Swiss Challenge' approach for development of "start-up area" of the state's new capital city .
The area is spread over 6.84 sq km (1,691 acres).
Andhra Pradesh Capital Region Development Authority (APCRDA) has invited competing counter proposals from eligible prospective bidders for selection of the master developer for the capital city.
The Andhra Pradesh government entered into a memorandum of understanding with the government of Singapore in December 2014 for development of the new capital city on the banks of the Krishna river, between Vijayawada and Guntur.
Singapore, in turn, nominated Ascendas-Singbridge and Sembcorp Development Ltd to participate in the development of as the master developer.
The Singapore consortium on March 12 submitted a suo motu proposal, through 'Swiss Challenge' approach according to the Andhra Pradesh Infrastructure Development Enabling Act-2001, to be the master developer of .
The consortium estimated the cost of developing infrastructure in the "start-up area", which includes a central business district, commercial hubs, business parks and high-density residential zones, at Rs 3,137.3 crore.
It proposed to undertake development of the area in three phases over a period of 15 years (five years for each phase).
The state Cabinet, on June 24, approved the Singapore consortium's proposal and it was subsequently notified by a government order (GO) on July 4.
Based on the GO, the APCRDA on Monday invited international competitive bids from eligible developers to counter the Singapore proposal.
Under 'Swiss Challenge' route, a developer is asked to presents a bid. Then, other prospective developers would be asked to present counter bids. If the latter is lower, the first bidder will be asked to submit another bid. If the first bidder comes up with lower bid, then he gets the right or if he fails, the one with lower bid gets the project.
September 1 has been set as the last date for submitting the competing counter proposals.
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Exports of -- a citrus mandarin fruit that first made its way from India into the international market last year -- are expected to grow three fold during the current year.
A senior official at Punjab Agro Industries Corporation said about 5,000 tonnes of were exported to Russia, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and Dubai from the state last year and they have fixed an export target of at least 15,000 tonnes during the current year. The demand had increased in the existing markets due to good quality of fruit and efforts are also being made to explore new markets. is mainly grown in Punjab and parts of Haryana and Rajasthan.
Are signs of revival visible in the highway sector? Have the investors started coming back?
There is a lot of traction in the highway sector in terms of private sector investment and also enthusiasm from both the government and the . This can also be gauged from the consumption of material and sales of connected equipment. Private sector investment last year (2015-16) was 40 per cent more than it was the previous year (2014-15). If we look at government sector spending, including the NHAI, it was also 40 per cent last year.
Less than a year into his tenure as chairman of National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), Raghav Chandra is looking forward to a real time recovery in the highway sector. NHAI has not only managed to set the ball rolling for fresh fund infusion into languishing projects, it sees big companies returning to the sector soon. In an interview with Megha Manchanda & Jyoti Mukul, Chandra says the spill off effect on other sectors like cement, bitumen and steel have started showing. Edited Excerpts:
Are signs of revival visible in the highway sector? Have the investors started coming back?
There is a lot of traction in the highway sector in terms of private sector investment and also enthusiasm from both the government and NHAI. This can also be gauged from the consumption of material and sales of connected equipment. Private sector investment last year (2015-16) was 40 per cent more than it was the previous year (2014-15). If we look at government sector spending, including NHAI, it was also 40 per cent last year. Both in terms of project award and construction, in the first quarter (April-June) of the current financial year, we have performed better than the corresponding period, last year. So far, we have bid out 55 projects totalling a length of about 3,000 km and cost of about Rs 45,000 crore, of which 11 have been awarded, 30 are under evaluation and bids have been invited for another 14. I am hopeful in the coming weeks there would be some further movement on those projects. And if we look at sale of equipment, most of the construction equipment players say their sales have gone up by 40 per cent. Cement sales have gone up by 5 per cent and last year's bitumen production figures were 35 per cent more than the previous year. I would like to say that things are going out in full steam and we shall be able to maintain this momentum because there are projects to do, there are projects which were not done and we need to do them.
Amitav Ghosh, the author of The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, speaks to Nitin Sethi about the language of concealment in which the Paris agreement was scripted. Edited excerpts
You make an argument that turning it into a moral issue will not work to resolve climate change. But that is the argument globally civil society deploys. Do you think it's the failure of civil society to use the moral argument better or the argument is inherently built to fail?
I think it is an approach that is very ill suited to this particular problem. This whole issue of presenting it as a moral issue to my mind that actually is a capitulation to a kind of neo-liberal ideology which tries to reduce all collective action to cases of individual choices. As I say in the book, I think that you can actually argue the morality of it very easily. What are the dominant parameters of morality, especially in the English-speaking world in neo-classical economics of one kind or another? Looking at a lot of literature on the justice literature on climate change, which was very striking to me. How many approach it from a Rawlsian perspective. Essentially within that perspective the results that you get in relation to morality are not at all what you and I would imagine.
The financial services industry was one of the early adopters of emerging technologies in India but are still not on a par with their global peers in leveraging mobility and cloud. None of the six Indian banks, Axis Bank, Citibank India, DBS Digibank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, and State Bank of India (SBI), reviewed by research firm in its 2016 Global Mobile Banking Benchmark late last week, scored above the global average of 65 out of 100.
Rise in loan ticket size and shift of borrower base in favour of urban areas marked a strong rebound in Indian industry, whose combined gross loan portfolio (GLP) grew 84 per cent to Rs 53,200 crore in FY16 from Rs 28,900 crore in the previous year.
This and other emerging trends of the micro sector, which has been on a growth path for he past years after taking a bit hit in the aftermath of the curbs imposed in 2010 by the government of the undivided Andhra Pradesh, have been captured in a report titled 'Evolving landscape of institutions in India'.
The sector reported a significant surge of 84 per cent in GLP in FY16, since MFIs indulged in issuing large loans to clients after the RBI relaxed indebted exposure to single borrower from Rs 50,000 to Rs 100,000 in April 2015, according to the report.
It was launched at the National Summit on Microfinance, organised by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Assocham) on Tuesday.
MFIs have reported a 58 per cent jump in average loan size per customer from Rs 10,364 in FY14 to Rs 16,394 in FY16, since during the same period gross loan portfolio has increased three-fold while there was a two-fold increase in client base.
"Some industry experts have ascertained the high growth pattern to the rise in clients, increase in general income levels and ease of lending rules by the RBI. However, according to others, increased lending to same clients may be risky for MFIs, since they serve vulnerable segments, which entails increased underlying risk," the report prepared by global consultancy firm EY.
About 60 per cent of GLP was still attributed to the rural sector while the remaining 40 per cent was from metros, urban and semi-urban areas. About 31 per cent of the loans were given for agriculture and allied activities while 64 per cent given for non-agriculture and 5 per cent for household as of March 2016.
In terms of regional break up, south India had the highest share at 35 per cent of GLP followed by west and north India at 25 per cent share each.
Since, inception the Indian MFI sector has been perceived as a predominantly rural-focused sector, largely different from the MFI sector in Latin America as well as parts of America and Africa. However, recently, MFIs have shifted their focus from rural hinterlands to urban pockets. The industry's outreach to urban clients was increasing every year and in FY15, for the first time in its history, Indian MFIs reported more urban clients than rural ones. The share of rural customers has drastically declined from 69 per cent in FY12 to 33 per cent in FY15.
A large number of MFIs have shifted to an urban-centric business model to cut-down operating costs and maximise operational efficiency. "The rise in urban clients of MFIs also underlines reluctance of banks to lend to small borrowers. In spite of the presence of banking infrastructure in urban areas, there is a strong demand from the unorganised sector and migrants for loans," the report added.
The Indian microfinance industry is dominated by NBFC MFIs with an 88 percent market share. After 2010, MFIs consolidated their operations since the sector faced more stringent regulatory requirements. Number of MFIs declined from over 70 in pre-2010 to 56 in early 2016. Following the initial consolidation, microfinance companies started aggressively expanding operations. From FY13 to FY16, branch network expanded at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27 per cent.
Debt funding for MFIs has increased at a CAGR of 67 per cent from FY13 to FY16. However, microfinance companies have started tapping non-bank financing sources such as mutual funds with the aim to diversify their funding sources. Share of non-bank funding has doubled to 40 per cent in FY16 from the previous year.
During FY16 several large MFIs have raised funds by issuing non-convertible debentures to mutual funds houses. Large MFIs accounted for 89 per cent of total debt funding received in FY16 while medium and small MFIs accounted for just 9 per cent and 2 per cent respectively.
With eight Ford Model T's of their own, Dan and Ellen Killecut are more than just car enthusiasts. They've toured the country together for the past 12 years (Dan more than 20), as part of the Model T Ford Club International Annual Tour.
"Once you get a Model T, it's just a wonderful feeling," Ellen said. "You slow down. You enjoy the sights. We've been to so many beautiful areas, and we do a lot of driving, my husband and I, and I said, 'We really have to host a tour.'"
So for the past two years, the Hannibal couple has driven up and down the back country roads of the Finger Lakes, mapping and planning. The preparation is all building up for a nearly 300-car gathering in Auburn, with leisurely drives and tourist stops starting July 17 and ending on the 22nd.
This is the first time the club is making its annual stop in New York state, and the Killecuts are thrilled to be its hosts. For the occasion, they will be driving around their 1914 For Model T.
About 650 people are expected to come in their antique cars, some coming as far as the United Kingdom. Others, more nationally, are coming from California and Texas, Ellen said.
Meg Vanek, executive director of the Cayuga County Office of Tourism, said that the area hotels have been filling up for the upcoming week, due in part to the turnout of the Model T Tour. The office has also helped out by providing maps and visitor information for the tour.
"Because the Finger Lakes region is so picturesque, they're really gotten a great response for this gathering," Vanek said.
The office will have more information next month, Vanek said, about what sort of economic impact the event will have on the area.
Ellen said she has set up several back country road drives for the Model T's to take. They won't necessarily all leave at once, but she said to expect groups of 20 or so cars driving together.
Also planned are several events including a car show at Emerson Park on Sunday, July 17 and a car display outside The Wonderful Life Museum in Seneca Falls Monday. Karolyn Grimes, who played Zuzu in the movie, "It's a Wonderful Life," will be at the event, and Dan will drive her in his Model T across the bridge that inspired the holiday classic.
"There's just so many beautiful drives, no matter where you go," Ellen said.
For more information on the tour and where to see some Model T's, visit modelt.org.
Cachar Paper Mill (CPM), a unit of Hindustan Paper Corporation (HPC) is facing financial crisis on account of non-availability of coal owing to blanket ban imposed by National Green Tribunal on mining and transportation of coal in the state of Meghalaya wherefrom 100% requirement of CPM used to come. Coal cannot be sourced from other sources as there is no broad gauge linkage inside CPM premises. .
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This paper mill has been shutting down every now and then for last few years due to shortage of raw material thereby incurring huge losses. .
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The Government of India after realizing the problems faced by CPM has taken a slew of measures which includes grant for meeting its operational costs on account of transportation exclusively to mitigate the logistic disadvantages of CPM. Department of Heavy Industry has also provided working capital support for Cachar Paper Mill. Moreover, Government has provided assistance for conversion of Meter Gauge (MG) to Broad Gauge (BG) from Panchgram Station to inside Cachar Paper Mill (CPM) premises. .
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This information was given by Minister of State In the Ministry of Heavy Industries and Public Enterprises Shri Babul Supriyo in reply to a written question in the Lok Sabha today. .
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On 7th April 2016, Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL) reported Net Loss of Rs. 877 Crore for the financial year 2015-16 as per the then tentative/provisional Flash results. Subsequently on 27th May 2016, BHEL reported Net Loss of Rs. 913 Crore after Statutory Audit of the Company for the financial year 2015-16. .
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The performance of BHEL during the year 2015-16 was impacted mainly due to continued subdued business environment, resulting in reduced level of operations and non-lifting of hold in many of the stranded projects of various customers in which the Company is engaged as a contractor/ supplier. .
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Government issues advisories/ suggestions which may be policy related or specific issue related as and when required depending on the nature of the case and exigency. As a result of this, BHEL has pursued initiatives in diversification, eyeing new business opportunities emerging in defence, railways, water, solar and also in the conventional power sector. .
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The Government has also appointed 2 Directors [Government Nominees] on the Board of BHEL who actively contribute in overseeing the Companys strategic direction, reviewing and monitoring corporate performance, ensuring regulatory compliance and Corporate Governance, and safeguarding the interests of the shareholders. Also, 5 Independent Directors having vast experience in the focus areas of BHEL, have been inducted in the Board of the company. .
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Further, the performance of BHEL is reviewed by Department of Heavy Industry (DHI) on a regular basis. DHI also assists the Company in the achievement of growth plan through policy initiatives, suitable inter-ministerial interventions, and taking up specific issues from time to time. .
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This information was given by Minister of State In the Ministry of Heavy Industries and Public Enterprises Shri Babul Supriyo in reply to a written question in the Lok Sabha today. .
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The Honble Finance Minister in his Budget Speech for 2016-17 on 29.02.2016 announced that Government will launch a new health protection scheme which will provide health cover up to Rs. One lakh per family belonging to poor and economically weak families". A proposal in this regard is under consideration of the Government. .
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For Senior Citizens of age 60 years and above, an additional top-up package up to Rs. 30,000 per senior citizen per year, has already been implemented w.e.f 01.04.2016. .
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The Scheme is proposed to be launched w.e.f. 01.04.2017. .
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The Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare, Sh J P Nadda stated this in a written reply in the Rajya Sabha here today. .
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In a unique event on occasion of Guru Purnima Divas, Union HRD Minister Sh. Prakash Javadekar honored the MPs who hail from academic background. The function was organized in Parliament house today. As a mark of respect, the Minister presented a Tulsi sapling and a CD containing Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi to everyone. Presenting the gift first to Dr. Karan Singh, the senior most among the MPs present, the Minister saluted the teacher community who works for the transformation of the nation. Education prospers only in those places, where teachers are respected", he said. .
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He said, with the Parliament having about 50 members from the academic background, it is indeed an institution of immense quality, contrary to the general perception. .
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In the address, he mentioned that Guru Pranaam- respecting his teachers at Pune- was among the first function he attended after assuming the charge. The Minister also focused on the necessity of affordable quality education for all and expressed his faith that accountability of teachers could do real miracles in education. In this regard, he recounted the success he had in the school in his adopted village in Bundelkhand which could reap a pass percentage of 82% from 28% in 7 months. He also pointed out that, in the recent Inter State Council, all the CMs keenly interacted on the issue of quality education. .
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In his address, Dr. Karan Singh thanked the Minister for an initiative like this, honoring the teachers and said it is in the continuity of Indias tradition of giving utmost importance to Guru. Guru is the repository of knowledge which will dispel the darkness of ignorance, he added. .
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Prof. P.J Kurien, the honble Vice Chairperson of Rajya Sabha, Sh. Upendra Kushwaha MoS (HRD), Dr. M.N Pandey MoS (HRD), Dr. Jitendra Singh MoS (DoNER), Rajiv Pratap Rudy MoS (SD&E), Prof. Ram Shankar Katheria, Prof. Saugata Roy, Dr. Satyanarayan Jatiya, Shri Janardan Dwivedi, Prof. Ram Gopal Yadav, Prof.K.V.Thomas, Dr. Subramanian Swamy, Dr. C.P Thakur, Prof. M.V Rajeev Gowda, Sh. Prem Singh Chandumajra were among the Parliamentarians who graced the occasion. .
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There have been no instances of incursions by Chinese troops into Indian territory. There is no commonly delineated Line of Actual Control (LAC) between India and China. There are areas along the Indo-China border where both sides have differing perception of LAC. Due to both sides undertaking patrolling upto their perception of the LAC, transgressions do occur. .
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Government regularly takes up any transgression along LAC with the Chinese side through established mechanisms including Flag meetings, Border Personnel meetings, meetings of Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination on India-China Border Affairs and diplomatic channels. .
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As regard to India Pakistan border, appropriate retaliation to the ceasefire violations, as required, has been carried out by Indian Army / BSF. In addition, all violations of ceasefire are taken up with Pakistan authorities at the appropriate level through the established mechanism of hotlines, flag meetings as well as weekly talks between the Directorate Generals of Military Operations of the two countries. BSF, too, holds talks at various levels with its counterpart viz. Pakistan Rangers .
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This information was given by Defence Minister Shri Manohar Parrikar in a written reply to Shri M.P Veerendra Kumar in Rajya Sabha today. .
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DM/NAMPI/RAJ
Providing health care facilities to its people is the prime responsibility of the respective State Governments as health is a State subject and, as such, no information is maintained centrally. However, in so far as three Central Government hospitals located in Delhi viz. Safdarjung Hospital, Dr. RML Hospital and Lady Hardinge Medical College & its Associated Hospitals located in Delhi are concerned, these hospitals as tertiary care hospitals in Delhi which cater to health care of population of not only Delhi but also for the entire National Capital Region of Delhi and even far flung areas. Therefore, the ever increasing patient load has put tremendous pressure on the existing infrastructure of these hospitals. However, continuous efforts are made to improve the infrastructure by way of the upgradation of various departments and redevelopment plan of these hospitals. .
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The Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare, Sh J P Nadda stated this in a written reply in the Rajya Sabha here today. .
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The guiding principle for the consolidation process of banking in India was suggested by Narasimham Committee. According to which any initiative with respect to merger of public sector banks has to come from the Boards of the banks concerned, the extant legal framework, keeping in view the synergies and benefits of merger and their commercial judgment. Governments / Reserve Bank of Indias role in the merger of banks would be that of a facilitator. .
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The Cabinet in its meeting on dated 15th June 2016 has approved the proposal of acquisition of assets and liabilities of subsidiary banks i.e.
State Banks of Bikaner & Jaipur, State Bank of Hyderabad, State Bank of Mysore, State Bank of Patiala, State Bank of Travancore and Bhartiya Mahila Bank (BMB). .
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The benefits for attempting the merger of 5 subsidiary banks and BMB with SBI include rationalization of resources, reduction of costs, better profitability, lower cost of funds leading to better rate of interests for public at large, improved productivity and customer services. Merger will also ensure that due to size and scale of economy, SBI will be able to better handle ensuing competition from new Banks. .
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This information was given by Minister of State for Finance Shri. Santosh Kumar Gangwar today in reply to a Rajya Sabha question. .
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The central assistance under the Modernisation of Police Forces scheme is being continuously given since the year 2000-01 and the same has not been discontinued. Therefore, question of decision on continuance of central assistance under the MPF Scheme does not arise. .
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Since Police is a state subject under the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution of India, the Government of India has been only supplementing the efforts and resources of the States by implementing the MPF Scheme. Moreover, funds are provided to the State Governments keeping in view availability of funds, utilization by State Governments and adequacy/requirement of funds. .
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Under the MPF Scheme, the central allocation amongst the States is made on a pro rata basis, factoring in: population (35% weightage), Sanctioned strength of police force (25% weightage), Number of police stations (15% weightage), Incidence of crime per lakh population (25% weightage). However, State Governments demand enhanced allocation of fund under the said assistance over and above their allocation.
Based on availability of funds & utilization by the states, additional funds are allocated to states. Further, under the MPF scheme there is a provision of Contingency Fund of HM to meet additional & contingent requirement of States. However, during year 2015-16 an amount of Rs. 63.90 crore have been released to the State Government of Tamil Nadu under the MPF Scheme and for the current financial year an amount of Rs. 32.31 crores have also been allocated to the Government of Tamil Nadu. .
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This was stated by the Minister of State for Home Affairs, Shri Hansraj Gangaram Ahir in a written reply to question by Smt. K. Maragatham in the Lok Sabha today. .
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NITI Aayog has introduced the Atal Tinkering Laboratories (ATL) initiative as a part of its flagship programme the Atal Innovation Mission (AIM). As part of a crucial effort to efficiently implement the initiative, NITI Aayog today signed a Statement of Intent (SoI) with Intel India. .
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The key objectives of setting up Atal Tinkering Laboratories is to build relevant skill sets among youngsters and to provide access to technology that will enable solutions. Intel will co-lead the creation and management of ten ATLs as State Hubs. These laboratories intend to impact 250,000 youth with innovation skills & skills for the future across 500 communities & schools. .
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Intel will support NITI Aayog in building capacities of mentors and developing linkages with Maker ecosystem for quality improvement of projects made by youth, facilitating ideation, design thinking and prototyping workshops through industry experts and co-lead an innovation festival which reaches out to 500,000 young innovators. .
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The SoI between NITI Aayog and Intel was signed in the presence of NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant, Senior Advisor, NITI Aayog, Dr. C. Muralikrishna Kumar, Vice President - Corporate Affairs at Intel Corporation, Ms. Rosalind Hudnell and Kishore Balaji, Director of Corporate Affairs Group, Intel South Asia. .
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CEO, NITI Aayog Amitabh Kant said that If India needs to grow consistently at 9 to 10 percent over the next three decades, it is absolutely essential that we are able to build innovative solutions to our unique problems. NITI Aayogs Atal Innovation Mission, especially the Atal Tinkering Labs, will enable the creation of millions of child innovators who will bloom into young entrepreneurs, thus enabling Indias unprecedented growth. .
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On this occasion President, Intel Foundation & Vice President, Intel Corporation Ms. Rosalind L. Hudnell said, Intel believes that it is more important than ever to invest in youth and innovation. Thats why we are proud to be a part of the Atal Innovation Mission to launch tinkering labs throughout India, which will ultimately help millions of children across the country develop the skills they need to be competitive as tomorrows workforce. .
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Earlier in the day, NITI Aayog, organised an Expert Consultative Group Meeting to help create and put in place a framework for operationalizing the Atal Tinkering Labs that will be established in schools all across the country. The technical support was provided by Intel Technology India Pvt. Ltd. .
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The maker community deliberated on the type of equipment (must have, good to have) in a lab, success indicators and engagement with the community. It was brought out that the Atal Tinkering Labs in all schools should be entirely student-centric and ought to function with critical involvement of all stakeholders at the school level - teachers, parents, makers and other private organizations to make the initiative a grand success. .
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CEO, NITI Aayog, Amitabh Kant, Secretary, Department of School Education & Literacy, MHRD, Dr. S. C. Khuntia, Senior Advisor, NITI Aayog, Dr. C. Muralikrishna Kumar and Director of Corporate Affairs Group, Intel South Asia Kishore Balaji makers, practitioners, schools and civil society attended the meeting. .
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Nine municipalities in the central Cayuga County area, including Auburn, are part of a zone designated by the state to restrict the transport of certain goods that may be affected by the emerald ash borer.
The restrictions were put in place by the state Department of Agriculture and Markets and the Department of Environmental Conservation to combat the borer, an invasive species with larvae that kill ash trees by feeding off them.
Aurelius, Montezuma, Mentz and Throop have been in a quarantine zone since last year, according to the Cayuga County Department of Planning and Economic Development. A recent update has added Auburn, Brutus, Fleming, Owasco and Sennett to the zone.
The following may not leave the quarantine zone while the restriction is in effect: any wood, logs, untreated firewood and nursery stock that was made from ash trees.
These items, referred to by the state as regulated articles, may still be moved within the restricted zone, according to the planning department.
Online Registration System (ORS) is being implemented in various hospitals in States/UTs to provide online registration, online appointment services to citizens along with online viewing of medical examination report on ORS portal by citizens. So far it has been implemented in 43 hospitals including AIIMS Bhopal. However, the module for online viewing of reports has been started only in four hospitals (viz. AIIMS, New Delhi; RML, New Delhi; NIMHANS, Bengaluru; and PGIMER, Chandigarh) through this Portal (http://ors.gov.in/copp/lab_report_gate.jsp) .
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Financial assistance is being provided for introducing this application in District/Sub-district hospitals & CHCs under National Health Mission (NHM) as per the proposal received from States/ UTs in their Program Implementation Plan (PIP). Since Health is a State subject, implementation of the aforementioned system is to be taken up by the respective States/ UTs. .
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The Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare, Sh J P Nadda stated this in a written reply in the Rajya Sabha here today. .
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Under Universal Immunization Programme of the Government of India, vaccines are given to children against vaccine preventable diseases. These vaccines are against Diphtheria, Pertussis, Tetanus, Poliomyelitis, Tuberculosis, Measles, Hepatitis B, Meningitis and Pneumonia due to Haemophilus Influenzae type B. In addition, vaccination against Japanese Encephalitis is carried out in endemic districts and vaccination against Rotavirus diarrhoea is provided in four states (Odisha, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and Andhara Pradesh). .
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The Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare, Sh J P Nadda stated this in a written reply in the Rajya Sabha here today. .
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Provision of Central Government funds for the State of Uttarakhand .
The Central Government devolves 42% of divisible pool of Central taxes to the States including Uttarakhand as per recommendation of the 14th Finance Commission, which may be used by the States for their various schemes and development.
In addition, funds also flow to the States under Central Assistance for State Plan as per the Scheme Guidelines of the respective Ministries for development of the States, including Uttarakhand. .
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Therefore there is no discrimination towards the people of Uttarakhand by the Central Government .
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This information was given by Minister of State for Finance Shri. Arjun Ram Meghwal today in reply to a Rajya Sabha question. .
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A meeting to review coastal security was held under the Chairmanship of Union Home Minister with Home Ministers, Chief Secretaries and Directors General of Police of all coastal States/Union Territories in Mumbai on 16.06.2016, wherein all stakeholders were requested to take expeditious action for strengthening the coastline of the country. It was also decided to consider the proposal for creation of a Central Marine Police Force (CMPF) for strengthening coastal security. .
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The matter of e-surveillance in major ports is under consideration of the Government. .
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Government of India has taken various measures to safeguard coastal security of the country against terrorist threats from the sea. .
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The important measures are as under: .
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A three-tier Coastal security ring all along our coast is provided by State Coastal Police, Indian Coast Guard (ICG) and Indian Navy. The Indian Navy is patrolling along International Maritime Boundary Line (IMBL), while the ICG is mandated to do patrolling and surveillance up to 200 NM i.e. Exclusive Economic Zone of India (EEZ) and the State Coastal Police performs boat patrolling in shallow coastal area. .
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The Indian Navy has been designated as the Authority responsible for overall Maritime Security. .
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Director General, Coast Guard has been designated as Commander of Coastal Command and made responsible for overall coordination between the State and the Central agencies in all the matters relating to coastal security. .
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Coastal Security Scheme is implemented in phases with the objective of strengthening infrastructure of Coastal Police Force for patrolling and surveillance of coastal areas. .
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The State Coastal Police Forces work closely with ICG under the hub and spoke concept, the hub being ICG station and the spokes being the coastal police stations. .
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Gapless electronic surveillance along the coastline is carried out by using 46 Radar Stations of ICG and 74 Automatic Identification System Receiver Stations of Directorate General, Lighthouses and Lightships. .
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Registration of sea-going vessels and identification of persons on board have been made compulsory. .
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Joint Coastal Security Exercises are conducted by ICG, in coordination with other stakeholders to create synergy between the Central and the State agencies involved in the coastal security and based on intelligence inputs, Coastal Security operations are also being conducted. .
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This was stated by the Minister of State for Home Affairs, Shri Kiren Rijiju in a written reply to question by Kunwar Haribansh Singh, Shri Dhananjay Mahadik, Prof. Saugata Roy, Shri. T. Radhakrishnan, Shri Ashok Shankarrao Chavan, Shri Gajanan Kirtikar, Shri Bidyut Baran Mahato, Shri Satav Rajeev, Dr.
Heena Vijaykumar Gavit, Shri Mohite Patil Vijaysinh Shankarrao, Shri Sudheer Gupta, Smt. Supriya Sule, Shri S. R. Vijayakumar, Dr. Sunil Baliram Gaikwad, Shri P. Kumar and Dr. J. Jayavardhan in the Lok Sabha today. .
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The truck which slammed into revelers is seen near the site of an attack in the French resort city of Nice, southern France.
The truck driver who caused carnage in the French city of Nice showed "recent interest" in jihadist activity, investigators said today, four days after a massacre that sparked fierce criticism of the government's security record.
Emotions are running high in France after the third major attack in 18 months.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls endured a humiliating chorus of boos and heckles at a ceremony of remembrance for the victims during a visit to the Riviera city Monday.
The Islamic State group claimed the attack by 31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who used a truck to mow down people leaving a Bastille Day fireworks display, killing 84 people.
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said there was no evidence of Bouhlel's allegiance to IS but that a search of his computer "showed a clear, recent interest for the radical jihadist movement."
He also confirmed the attack was "premeditated".
In the two weeks prior to the attack Bouhlel carried out near-daily internet searches for IS propaganda videos and readings from the Koran, Molins said.
The father-of-three also searched for information about the terror attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando that left 49 dead, and the Paris suburb of Magnanville where a police couple were killed last month. Both attacks were linked to IS.
His computer contained pictures of corpses and fighters posing with the IS flag.
The revelations came on the third day of mourning over the grisly attack.
A sea of people thronged the seafront in Nice for a solemn minute's silence. Similar ceremonies were held across the country, accompanied by the ringing of church bells.
In a sign of the mounting frustration over a string of attacks that have killed over 230 people since January 2015, Valls and two of his ministers were heckled by mourners who booed and shouted "Murderers" and "Resign"
Valls said the "disgraceful" display reflected the "attitude of a minority" in the city, which is run by the opposition Republicans party.
The Nice attack came eight months after IS jihadists killed 130 people across Paris, and 18 months after three days of terror at the Charlie Hebdo weekly and a Jewish supermarket killed 17.
Unlike the perpetrators of those attacks, Bouhlel, a petty criminal with a history of violence and depression, did not travel to the Middle East for training or jihad.
Molins said acquaintances described the Tunisian as "someone who did not practise the Muslim religion, ate pork, drank alcohol, took drugs and had an unbridled sexual activity".
About eight months ago ago, however, he snapped a picture of a news story headlined: "Man deliberately rams car into cafe terrace."
And earlier this month, he stopped shaving his beard.
On the day of the attack he appeared to have spent much of the national holiday on the promenade, taking selfies.
Azerbaijan today shut down a private television channel over plans to broadcast an interview with Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen, who Ankara accuses of being behind the failed coup in Turkey.
Baku is an ally of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has furiously pointed blame at his arch-enemy Gulen for the weekend's botched military takeover. The US-based preacher denies any involvement.
Azerbaijan's National Television and Radio Council said in a statement that it has "ordered temporary suspension of broadcasting by the ANS TV channel in order to avoid provocations aimed at damaging the strategic partnership between Turkey and Azerbaijan and to prevent obvious promotion of terrorism."
Erdogan wants Washington to extradite Gulen to Turkey, but US Secretary of State John Kerry has said that Ankara must produce evidence to support the extradition request.
The reclusive Muslim cleric lives in self-imposed exile in a mountain town in Pennsylvania. His Hizmet movement has a powerful presence in Turkish society, including the media, police and judiciary.
The former Marine and Iraq war veteran who shot dead three police officers in the southern US city of Baton Rouge at the weekend specifically targeted the cops, a state police official said today.
"He ambushed these police officers," Louisiana State Police Superintendent Colonel Mike Edmonson told CNN. "His prey was those police officers."
Yesterday's shooting, which left three other officers wounded, took place in a city scarred by racial tensions and protests against police brutality since the July 5 death of Alton Sterling, a black man shot at point-blank range by white police.
The gunman, identified as 29-year-old Gavin Long, was killed in a shootout with police.
Another Louisiana state police spokesman, JB Slaton, told The New York Times: "We are still trying to find out what his motive was, and that's going to be part of our investigation. But we believe he was targeting those officers."
The Baton Rouge shooting was reminiscent of the slaying of five police officers in Dallas a week ago, which was carried out by a military veteran seeking revenge for the deaths of black Americans at the hands of police.
Berkshire Hathaway agreed to buy Medical Liability Mutual Insurance, extending Chairman Warren Buffett's leadership in the business of protecting doctors against lawsuits. The target company is the largest underwriter of medical professional liability insurance in New York and will convert from a policyholder-owned to a stock business, Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire's National Indemnity unit said on Monday in a statement that didn't disclose terms. Policyholder surplus, a measure of assets minus liabilities, was $1.8 billion as of December 31, according to the statement. The ...
In a bid to recalibrate its relationship with Myanmar, China has invited the latter's hundreds of opinion-formers to "improve understanding" on their part of China's intentions.
According to the State Council Information Office of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Beijing has invited more than 100 journalists, government officials and members of parliament to visit the country, as well as 100 students to study in China.
China is telling Myanmar that it knows Myanmar has changed, and that China's attitude has changed too, reports Myanmar Times.
The move comes as Myanmar has now become a democratic neighbour that has acquired a global range of other options, unlike during the previous military regime, when an isolated Myanmar became economically dependent on Chinese support as the United States and Europe applied sanctions.
Due to China's extensive investments in Myanmar during the term of the last government and before, many Myanmar citizens do not have a warm opinion of their northern neighbour.
Chinese Public Diplomacy Office Director Wang Xiaofeng said that his country sought peaceful and prosperous relations with its southern neighbour.
"China wants Myanmar to understand that we can make money together," he said, stressing his government's policy of non-intervention in internal affairs.
That was the message given by Foreign Minister Wang Yi to his counterpart, Aung San Suu Kyi, when he visited Nay Pyi Taw last April, he said.
Wang said, "We will not interfere in Myanmar's internal affairs. But we will try to help. Myanmar has water supplies and needs to use them. Together, we can make money.
Describing "Islamic extremist terrorism" as the enemy of the US, former New York Mayor has appealed Americans to vote for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to commit themselves to "unconditional victory" against the menace.
"In the last seven months, there have been five major Islamic extremist terrorists attacks on us and our allies. We must not be afraid to define our enemy. It is Islamic extremist terrorism," Giuliani said in his address to Republican National Convention here.
"I did not say all of Islam. I said Islamic extremist terrorism. Failing to identify them properly maligns decent Muslims around the world. It also sets up a fear of being politically incorrect that can have serious consequences. And it has. This is why our enemies see us as weak and vulnerable," he said.
"Donald Trump has said the first step in defeating our enemies is to identify them properly and see the connections between them. To defeat Islamic extremist terrorism we must put them on defence. If they are at war against us, which they have declared, we must commit ourselves to unconditional victory against them, the former New York Mayor said.
"This includes undoing one of the worst deals America ever made, Obama's Nuclear Agreement with Iran that will eventually let them become a nuclear power and put billions of dollars back into a country that the world's biggest state sponsor of terrorism," he alleged.
"Donald Trump will make sure that any agreement with Iran meets the original goals of the UN and our allies: a non-nuclear Iran. Donald Trump is a leader. He will reassert America's position as the nation with the best values to lead the world," he said asking people to overwhelmingly support Trump in the November elections.
Giuliani said Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, is not good for the country.
"You know Donald Trump will secure our borders. His opponent has had her chance to do this and failed. Hillary Clinton is for open borders. She is in favour of taking in Syrian refugees even though the Islamic state has told us they are going to put their operatives in these groups so they can carry out terrorist acts against us and our allies," he said.
"We can't afford to repeat the mistakes of the past. Hillary CIinton's experience is the basis for her campaign. Well, Hillary Clinton's experience is exactly the reason she should not be our president. There is no more time for us left to revive our great country. No more time to repeat our mistakes of the past," he said.
"Washington needs a complete turnaround and Donald Trump is the agent of change and he will be the leader of the change we need," Giuliani said.
Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions said Trump is the leader that will bring change.
"He has the strength, courage, and will to get it done. He is attracting more and more Independents and Democrats to our movement," he said.
Lieutenant General (retired) Michael Flynn said that because of Obama's ill-advised actions, the world has lost faith in American leadership and the threats are mounting.
"Radical Islam metastasising throughout the world. What keeps me up at night is the sobering realisation that evil exists. The radicalisation of Islam and its barbaric cause that uses modernity to influence potentially millions around the world to join their cause should keep us all upat night," he said.
"We must take seriously the possibility that these enemies have weapons of mass destruction and intend to use them. We must understand and define our enemies if we intend to defeat them," he added.
"America and Americans deserve no less! Because Obama chose to conceal the actions of terrorists like Osama bin Laden and groups like ISIS, and the role of Iran in the rise of radical Islam, Americansare at a loss to fully understand the enormous threat they pose againstus," he said.
Pat Smith, whose son Sean was one of four brave Americans killed during the 2012 terrorist attack at Benghazi, held radical Islam responsible for it.
"And, when it comes to the threat posed by radical Islamic terrorism, he will not hesitate to kill the terrorists who threaten American lives. He will make America stronger, not weaker. This entire campaign comes down toa single question," Smith said.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday spoke again of reinstating death penalty and urged the US to hand over an exiled movement leader, in efforts to fight those accused of attempting a failed military coup.
The Turkish leader did not rule out reintroducing the capital punishment, which was abolished in 2002 as part of the efforts to gain membership of the European Union, Xinhua news agency reported.
"There is a clear crime of treason and your request can never be rejected by our government," Erdogan said in an interview with CNN at his presidential palace in Istanbul, his first with a foreign media outlet since was plunged into a coup attempt on Friday night.
The Turkish government is hitting back by detaining thousands of suspects from the military, the police and the judiciary, heightening a tense atmosphere in Istanbul and Ankara in particular, the two cities which bore the brunt of the coup attempt.
Erdogan said the Turkish Parliament will have to decide on the death penalty issue, but he will sign it in case a decision is made.
Speaking of calls by some Turks for the execution of coup plotters, the President responded by saying, "Why should I keep them and feed them in prisons for years to come? That's what the people say."
"They want a swift end to it, because people lost relatives, lost neighbours, lost children," he added. "They're suffering so the people are very sensitive and we have to act very sensibly and sensitively," Xinhua news agency quoted him as saying.
Erdogan has repeatedly blamed the coup plot on the movement led by Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish Islamic scholar living in the US state of Pennsylvania, and appealed to President Barack Obama for his extradition.
Washington voiced its readiness to discuss the matter on Monday.
Erdogan told CNN that a formal written request will be submitted to Washington within days.
"We have a mutual agreement of extradition of criminals," the President noted, demanding a reciprocity from Washington over extradition as Ankara had done so as a "strategic partner".
SoftBank Group plunged in Tokyo after unveiling its $32-billion takeover of chip designer ARM Holdings, a deal that marks founder Masayoshi Son's biggest gamble so far on the future of technology. The shares dropped 10 per cent to 5,387 yen, their biggest decline since 2012. That followed a 5 per cent fall in shares of SoftBank's US unit Sprint in New York trading on Monday on concerns it would get less support from its parent company. Son forged a career out of betting early on some of the pivotal technology trends of his time. Now he's made the biggest bet of his life on a ...
SoftBank Corp founder Masayoshi Son, who created a $68 billion tech investment behemoth from a $50,000 start-up, has divided investors and analysts with his latest "crazy idea", the $32 billion acquisition of chip designer ARM Holdings.
Visionary, risky, or both, the deal announced on Monday caught them all on the hop.
But in the way it was struck and presented, they all recognised the signature style of the man whose chutzpah led to successes like early investments in Yahoo! and Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, which briefly made him Japan's richest man.
Many investors had been hoping Son would use cash from recent asset sales to buy back shares or pay down its hefty debt, so SoftBank's Tokyo shares were hit by a glut of sell orders on Tuesday morning, trading down almost 11%.
"A fresh acquisition is not what the market wants from SoftBank," said Mitsushige Akino, chief fund manager at Ichiyoshi Asset Management.
"It's Mr Son's style to keep expanding, but isn't he stretching too much?"
Investors fret the purchase of ARM, Japan's largest ever outbound deal, may be too much for SoftBank, still in the throes of turning around US carrier Sprint and tackling a $112 billion debt pile.
Others take the longer view.
"There is little synergy with SoftBank's existing businesses, but it makes sense if we look at ARM's future potential," said Tomoaki Kawasaki, senior analyst at IwaiCosmo Securities Co.
"Mr Son is prioritizing investment for the future over shoring up the balance sheet. It's very Mr Son-like."
A self-made entrepreneur whom one investment banker described as thinking "in decades", Son, of Korean descent, has long been something of an outsider in corporate Japan.
He wears the sombre suits of Japan's salarymen but is an outspoken sometimes outrageous voice, with a celebrity status and 2.5 million followers on Twitter.
Selling his ARM deal to investors and analysts in London on Monday, he quoted Yoda, the diminutive Star Wars Jedi Master, with an urging to "listen to the force", and told them Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, had called immediately to discuss a partnership.
"Crazy ideas"
Until last month, Son, known as "Masa", had been on the way out. Instead, the 58-year-old abruptly scrapped retirement plans and said he would stay on to create "SoftBank 2.0" and work on "a few more crazy ideas".
When presenting the ARM deal, he breezily dismissed his doubters.
"If the investors do not like it, they will sell," he said.
"I am the largest shareholder in SoftBank; I share the same interest as the other shareholders."
Kazuyuki Terao, chief investment officer at Allianz Global Investors Japan, was among the sceptics.
"It's hard to see returns that justify the more than 40% premium, or synergies with its existing business," he said, adding that it could hinder short-term profit growth, though longer-term gains were possible.
Son said he sealed the deal in just two weeks with a handful of advisers. These include Jeffrey Sine, co-founder of niche US merchant bank Raine, who has advised Son for years.
He did not have the input of his once hand-picked heir, the more circumspect former Google executive Nikesh Arora, who stepped down last month after Son decided to stay on. Arora had been credited with streamlining the SoftBank portfolio.
"The deal was done quickly, without debate, but that's how Son-san always does these things," said Masayuki Otani, chief market analyst at Securities Japan Inc.
Son, who holds a 19% stake in the company, said investors should capitalise on what he called a "paradigm shift" in technology. ARM, he argues, will be central as the world moves to connected gadgets.
That struck a chord with some.
"Japanese are often too cautious to take decisive action, but Mr Son is different," said one retail bondholder, a 72-year-old pensioner who declined to give her name.
"That's why I bought the bonds. I want to support his challenging spirit."
Even so, the deal carries significant risks, especially if it distracts Son and top management from resolving the Sprint headache. It has turned in loss after loss since acquisition in 2013, though he told investors on Monday the group would soon break even.
"To us, the ARM acquisition announced yesterday appears largely inconsistent with Softbank's investment strategy," said analyst Atul Goyal at Jefferies, adding it was unclear how ARM, already trading at a premium, would benefit SoftBank investors.
"It does not inspire much confidence and requires deeper review."
Adopting a tough posture against China, the Republican party has said it can't allow Beijing to continue with its policies on several fronts, including currency manipulation, offenses against intellectual property and aggressive behaviour in the South China Sea.
"China's behaviour has negated the optimistic language of our last platform concerning our future relations with the country," the Republican platform expressed yesterday at the Republican national convention.
Notably, in 2012, the platform had welcomed the emergence of a peaceful and prosperous China.
To distract the populace from its increasing economic problems and more importantly, to expand its military might, the Chinese government asserts a preposterous claim to the entire South China Sea, it said.
It also continues to dredge ports and create landing fields in contested waters where nothing has existed before, even nearer to US territories and our allies, while building a navy far out of proportion to defensive purposes, said the party at the Republican convention here, led by its presidential candidate Donald Trump.
"The complacency of the Obama regime has emboldened the Chinese government and military to issue threats of intimidation throughout the South China Sea, not to mention parading their new missile, 'the Guam Killer,' down the main streets of Beijing, a direct shot at Guam as America's first line of defense," the platform said.
"Meanwhile, cultural genocide continues in Tibet and Xinjiang, the promised autonomy of Hong Kong is eroded, the currency is manipulated, our technology is stolen, and intellectual property and copyrights are mocked in an economy based on piracy," it said.
"In business terms, this is not competition; it is a hostile takeover," it said, adding, "For any American company to abet those offenses, especially governmental censorship and tracking of dissenters, is a disgrace."
According to the platform, the return to Maoism by China's current rulers is not a reason to disengage with the Chinese people or their institutions.
"We welcome students, tourists, and investors, who can see for themselves our vibrant American democracy and how real democracy works," the platform said.
However, it warned, "We caution, however, against academic or cultural operations under the control of the Chinese government and call upon American colleges to dissociate themselves from this increasing threat to academic freedom and honest research."
The United States has warned it would raise concerns at the United Nations over the latest North Korean missile tests carried out in violation of Security Council resolutions.
US Strategic Command said it detected and tracked three North Korean missile launches at 2044 GMT, 2058 GMT and 2135 GMT, just over a week after Pyongyang issued threats to respond to the planned deployment of a US anti-missile system in South Korea.
"The near back-to-back launch of two presumed Scud tactical ballistic missiles, followed by the presumed launch of a No Dong intermediate range ballistic missile approximately an hour later, occurred near Hwangju," it said.
The North American Aerospace Defences Command, however, "determined the missile launches from did not pose a threat to North America," the STRATCOM statement added.
The UN Security Council has slapped a series of sanctions against the hermit state that ban the North from conducting ballistic missile tests.
"We strongly condemn this and North Korea's other recent missile tests, which violate UN Security Council Resolutions explicitly prohibiting North Korea's launches using ballistic missile technology," said Commander Gary Ross, a Pentagon spokesman.
"We intend to raise our concerns at the UN to bolster resolve in holding the DPRK accountable for these provocative actions."
STRATCOM said it joined other key US commands in remaining "vigilant in the face of North Korean provocations."
Ross voiced renewed US support in defending its allies in the region against North Korean threats.
"Our commitment to the defense of our allies, including the Republic of Korea and Japan, in the face of these threats, remains ironclad. We remain prepared to defend ourselves and our allies from any attack or provocation," he said.
"We call on to refrain from actions that further raise tensions in the region and focus instead on taking concrete steps toward fulfilling its commitments and obligations."
The sophisticated US anti-missile defense system to counter the growing menace from Pyongyang, known as the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, will be deployed in Seongju county by the end of next year.
Both South Korean and US troops stationed in the South also have Patriot anti-air defence systems that can intercept enemy missiles at low altitudes.
Fruits and vegetables are likely to become cheaper in a few weeks. Delisting of fruits and vegetables from mandis run by the Agricultural Produce Committee could lower the kitchen budget by six per cent. Vegetables and fruits have weights of 1.74 per cent and 2.11 per cent, respectively, in the wholesale price index.
The showcause notice by the Forwards Market Commission (FMC) to promoters of National Spot Exchange Limited (NSEL) on Friday, including Jignesh Shah, is the culmination of a series of steps by the authorities to tighten the noose around Shah.
The 40-page showcause notice sent on Friday, questioned the fit and proper status of Shah, chairman and group CEO of Financial Technologies India Ltd (FTIL), Joseph Massey, managing director and CEO of MCX stock exchange and Shreekant Javalgekar, managing director and CEO of MCX.
All parties have been given two weeks to respond, after which FMC will take a final call on the issue. If their fit and proper status is withdrawn, FTIL will have to sell its 26 per cent stake in commodity futures exchange MCX and give up directorship on any exchange regulated by the FMC. The government, especially the finance ministry, had been setting the stage for Shahs exit from the exchange business long ago.
Shah was in the crosshairs of the government since 2010, when the Securities Exchange Board of India (Sebi), the regulator for the stock market, had issued a notice and passed an order on the same against Shah and his FTIL. The matter had gone to the Supreme Court and Shah had won the case.
Few could have got an inkling that the government was planning to ensnare Shah when on February 9 this year, Finance Minister P Chidambaram inaugurated the equity segment of FTILs stock exchange, the MCX-SX. But the dislike on Chidambarams face was palpable.
Perhaps since then, preparations were on and by that time, the ministry of consumer affairs and the FMC had understood the modus operandi of the NSEL and were finalising the course of action against NSEL.
Simultaneously, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) was preparing to kill overseas ventures of Shah where he had floated five exchanges across the globe. On April 25, RBI issued a circular asking Indian corporates to take permission in case their overseas ventures started under the direct investment route and if they wanted to offer any products related to commodities, currencies, stocks-indices with underlying assets in Indian . This circular, among other implications, also badly impacted the FTIL-promoted Bahrain Financial Exchange, where rupee-dollar futures were traded. Volumes after the RBI circular on that exchange dried out. Shahs other exchanges felt the tremors after NSEL suspended trading on July 31.
In July, the ministry of consumer affairs issued a directive to NSEL not to launch any new contract and to settle existing contracts on maturity. This was asking the FTIL Group to virtually close the exchange. On July 31, NSEL suspended trading on the exchange of its own.
Within a week of the development, the FMC was moved to the ministry of finance, and direct action began. And, after the default by the exchange, multi-agency probe began which included the Sebi, Enforcement Directorate, Income Tax, the economic offences wing of Mumbai Police, the ministry of company affairs (looking into violations of the Company Law by NSEL) and recently, the Central Bureau of Investigation. The key role was supposed to be played by FMC which had already indicated it might take action by declaring Shah and FTIL unfit to run the exchange business and ultimately did so.
Observers say when NSEL, which is facing a default of Rs 5,600 crore, officially defaulted for the first time on August 20, FMC issued a warning that the fit and proper status of the board and promoters of the NSEL was at risk.
Before the showcause notice was issued, the authorities tightened all the loose ends. They ensured operations of stock and commodity exchanges in the group were run by institutions and Shahs options to visit abroad were closed.
On September 15, the MCX SXs licence came up for renewal and Sebi said the exchange should set up a committee comprising two Public Interest Directors and three nominees from institutional investors in MCX-SX to oversee the key functions of the exchange. This is how the promoters role in managing the stock exchange was restricted, and FMC did a similar thing for all commodity exchanges. In case of MCX, the board representation of the FTIL Group fell to just two. More action on this front is expected soon by FMC.
Before issuing the showcause notice on Friday, FMC waited for the police to issue look-out notices for those against whom a FIR had been filed. If proved, it will put a full stop to Shahs dreams of running any exchange in India as well as abroad.
Most Indian stocks advanced in volatile trading amid investor concern that the recent rally may have outpaced the prospects for earnings growth. State-run banks advanced while consumer companies and automakers declined. Canara Bank surged to a seven-month high while State Bank of India erased an intra-day loss after the government said it plans to invest Rs 22,900 crore ($3.4 billion) in banks it owns. Hindustan Unilever Ltd, the biggest home-products maker, fell for a second day after posting profit and revenue that missed estimates. Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd, which makes tractors, and Hero ...
Shree Siddhivinayak Ganapati Temple Trust that manages Mumbai's has opened CDSL account with SBICAP Securities that will accept demat shares of listed entities as donation from devotees.
"Shree Siddhivinayak Ganapati Temple Trust (Prabhadevi) Mumbai has opened a CDSL Demat account with SBICAP Securities Limited to accept donations in the form of shares and securities from Devotees. Details of eligible shares and securities shall be displayed very soon on the Trust's website," said release from CDSL India.
HIT: To the Come Together: We Will Find a Cure weekend in Cayuga County, which raised more than $100,000 in the fight against breast cancer.
This marked the second straight summer that the Auburn area has played host to a star-studded fundraising effort for the Carol M. Baldwin Breast Cancer Research Fund. After a successful event in Hoopes Park last year, the foundation brought celebrities into town for the screening of "The Lennon Report" film and a concert by the famous Mersey Beatles tribute band.
Those events plus some private fundraisers brought in more than $100,000 for the cause.
It's another example of many through the years illustrating the generosity and compassion of Cayuga County and central New York residents.
HIT: To the passage of the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act by the U.S. Congress.
U.S. Rep. John Katko, R-Camillus, held a press conference Friday to mark this legislation's approval last week. One of Katko's bills became part of the final package approved by the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. No one measure will fix the heroin crisis in our county, but this legislation from Congress is still critically important.
From grant programs for treatment programs to expansion of emergency overdose medication access to tougher provisions for going after the drug kingpins who put this poison in the streets, the law helps catch the federal government up to the need for action. We urge President Obama to sign it into law.
MISS: To a motorcycle crash that killed a Cortland resident Friday morning.
The Cayuga County's Sheriff's Office said a 65-year-old woman died after her motorcycle struck a deer in the town of Summerhill.
At least 10 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) commandos were killed and five others injured in an encounter with the Naxals in Sondaha jungles on the Aurangabad-Gaya border yesterday.
Additional Director General (ADG) of Police, Sunil Kumar, said three Naxals were also killed in the encounter that took place after the Aurangabad Police and CRPF's Cobra battalion carried out a joint search operation to nab the ultras.
Briefing the media in detail about the incident, Kumar said there was an IED blast yesterday in the border areas of Gaya and Aurangabad districts post which the local police and CRPF's Cobra battalion carried out a joint search operation.
"The reason for their death is the continuous firing from the side of the militants and the second reason was the explosives placed in the tunnels," Kumar added.
The ADG, however, said the identities of the three Naxals killed in the encounter have yet not been found.
"But some arms and ammunitions were recovered from their possession," he added.
Stating that Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has expressed his grief over the incident, Kumar said that a compensation of Rs. five lakh would be given to the family members of the CRPF soldiers from the Bihar Government's soldier welfare fund.
"Besides, the dependents of the martyred CRPF personnel will also get Rs. 20 lakh as their insurance money," he added.
He also said that the Naxals took advantage of the hilly terrain and darkness to mount attack on the CRPF personnel.
The ADG accepted the fact that the Bihar Police and CRPF is extremely upset post this incident, but said that their morale is not yet down, adding appropriate proceedings would continue against the ultras.
Kumar further said that five CRPF cobra commandos have been injured in the encounter.
"Two jawans are being treated in a hospital in Gaya and the other three injured jawans are being treated at Patna's Ruban hospital," he added.
Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh earlier spoke to Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar regarding the ambush on the CRPF team.
He expressed his heartfelt condolences to the families of the slain CRPF personnel and prayed for the speedy recovery of those injured.
The Home Minister instructed Durga Prasad, the Director General of CRPF, to rush to Aurangabad to assess the situation post the ambush.
Itanagar (Arunachal Pradesh), July 19 (ANI): Speaker of the Arunachal Pradesh State Assembly Nabam Rebia submitted his resignation to Deputy Speaker Tsering Norbu Thongdok on Tuesday to facilitate an impartial conduct of the floor test by Congress Chief Minister Pema Khandu on the floor of the House on Wednesday.
Earlier, AICC general secretary in charge of Arunachal Pradesh, Dr. C P Joshi and his AICC colleague Mukul Wasnik told 45 Congress legislators attending a Congress Legislature Party (CLP) meeting at the Hotel Ashoka here today that Congress Party in Arunachal Pradesh had proved the value of democracy to India and its citizens by defeating a divisive force like the BJP.
Both AICC leaders exhorted state Congress legislators, particularly CLP leader and Chief Minister Pema Khandu to ensure that the party and the government function coherently for the greater welfare of the state and its people.
The BJP has been trying to make a backdoor entry in the north eastern region, as it is aware that it is not possible for it to win electorally, Arunachal Pradesh Congress Committee (APCC) President Padi Richo quoted them, as saying.
"The popular vote was in favour of the Congress. Prove it in all your actions instead of disheartening the Janta Janardan," they said without mincing any words.
Describing former chief minister Nabam Tuki as a cadre-based grassroots-level politician beginning his career as a Students Union of India (NSUI) president and rising to the rank of chief minister, Wasnik said, "He is well aware of the functioning of the party and its responsibility."
Chief Minister Khandu reiterated his commitment to let his government function effectively for the greater welfare of the masses with the help of the party.
Richo said all steps would be ensured to meet the aspirations of the masses.
However, when asked about the purpose of their visit to the state, Dr. Joshi and Wasnik said, "We only came to meet the new chief minister Khandu and are happy to announce that he would fly the Congress flag higher."
The duo had arrived in Itanagar on Monday as AICC observers to join AICC secretary Dr Jaykumar, who had arrived here with Tuki on July 14.
New Delhi, July 19 (ANI): Even as Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is locked in a one-upmanship race with the Army chief Gen Raheel Sharif on cornering India over violence in the Srinagar valley, Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) is getting ready for army - supervised assembly elections under the shadow of violence and arson. The field is open only to parties that have accepted accession of PoK with Pakistan
More than 17,000 army personnel and 15,200 paramilitary personal are already on "election" duty, prompting Pakistan People's Party to cry foul. In fact, the PPP has already hit the streets saying that the Sharifs are rigging the one day- ballot on July 21.
Elections in PoK are generally a mere formality with the King's party in the saddle in Islamabad securing the mandate.
Pakistan Muslim League -N (PML-N) is the front runner this time around though Rawalpindi's Team B (Imran Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, PTI) is giving both PML-N and PTI a run for their money.
Repeated clashes between PML-N and PPP have claimed several lives. Minister for Electricity Faisal Mumtaz Rathore was attacked during a campaign meeting. And at an Eid Milan party, activists of both parties opened indiscriminate fire, and indulged in acts of arson. Scores of people including a former minister were injured.
As many as 427 candidates are in the race for the 41-elected seats in the 49-member PoK assembly, which has very limited powers. Of them, 328 are contesting in the 29 constituencies in PoK and 99 will be competing for 12 Kashmiri refugee constituencies spread across Pakistan. An estimated 21.81 lakh voters will decide their political fortunes.
While the PPP is going alone, the PML-N has entered into an alliance with Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) and Jammu Kashmir People's Party (JKPP). The Sharifs party tried to woo the Muslim conference (MC) chief, Sardar Attique but without success. The big brother wanted the Sardar to vacate his party' strong holds for PML-N. This was not acceptable to the MC supremo, and he closed ranks with Imran Khan's party. The new combine has fielded joint candidates for seven seats.
POLITICS SANS PRINCIPLES
In a bizarre display of politics without principles, the Jamaat has struck a deal with the Muslim Conference for one seat. With N-support, it is trying its luck in two seats. In all, the JI has eight candidates in the fray.
The pro independence parties, the All Parties Alliance (APNA) and Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) have refused to sign the condition of accession of PoK with Pakistan. And have not fielded any candidate.
Kashmir Party (KNP) headed by London -based Dr. Shabir Chaudhary has put up one candidate, Mir Afzal Suleria from Muzaffarabad.
The KNP has a two-point manifesto. One: AJK should get 70% profit out of major projects launched by Pakistan in its territory. Two: 12 seats of Pakistan based refugees should be abolished.
Many local stalwarts are vying to enter the PoK assembly. Prominent amongst them are PoK Prime Minister Abdul Majid, PoK PTI President, Sultan Mahmud Chaudhary, who is also a former PoK premier, and PoK PML-N President Raja Farook Haider.
PPP is seeking a fresh mandate based on its 'stellar' performance. "The outgoing Mehdi Shah Governmentopened three medical colleges while its predecessor had failed to set up even one medical college", the party manifesto says.
But the PPP's Achilles heel is its poor governance record, sayspolitical analyst, ErshadMahmud,who blames PPP's central leadership for the poor show by PoK unit. "PPP government in PoK was not given a free hand by the central party leadership to run the local affairs", he remarks.
PPP dissidents have generally migrated to PTI giving it a leg-up. At least three cabinet ministers joined the PTI along with their supporters after elections were announced. No doubt, PPP is in trouble following this setback, its chairman Bilawal Bhutto had an extensive tour of PoK districts and addressed huge rallies. In these rallies, he accused that Nawaz Sharif is "jeopardizing the issue of Kashmir by building his associations with the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi" and pledged that he would take back the entire Kashmir from India.
PTI its manifesto has vowed to make PoK self-reliant in all respects. Women empowerment is its talking point though it has not fielded a single woman candidate. Special attention to education, health and industry are the other electoral planks of PTI.
The PML- N has pledged the "revival of self-rule in Azad Jammu and Kashmir" if voted to power. It promised a "responsible, authoritative and dignified" government. It has vowed to facilitate intra-Kashmir trade and travel, "as a continuation 1999 Lahore declaration". And has committed to spend an additional Rs 50 billion on roads and other infrastructure.
Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) of London- based Muhajir leader Altaf Hussain is once again trying its luck in two constituencies in Karachi which are reserved for Kashmiri refugees. The party had won these seats in the 2006 and 2011 elections but observers say the wind is no longer favourable to the MQM as the party is at the receiving end of the para-military force, Rangers, which has been asked to 'clean up' Karachi.
PML-N has already established its vote bank in PoK. It has an edge in nine Kashmiri refugee constituencies located in Punjab, ruled by prime minister's younger brother, Shahbaz Sharif, according to political Maqsood Muntazar. Moreover, PML-N is on a strong wicket as it has allied with JI and JKPP.
Party-wise position in the outgoing assembly: PPP -29; PML (N) - 11, MC- 5,MQM-2, JKPNP -1 and PTI- 1. Eight seats in the 49-member assembly are filled through nomination; five of these seats are reserved for women while one seat each is earmarked for religious scholars, professionals and for Kashmiris settled abroad.
The views expressed in the above article are that of Mr.Surinder Kumar Sharma who is associated with the Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis .
Off-spinner Ravichandran Ashwin will be gunning for the number one spot in the ICC Player Rankings for Test Bowlers when India take on West Indies in the four-match series, starting at Sir Vivian Richards Stadium from Thursday.
Ashwin faces an interesting contest with Pakistan leg-spinner Yasir Shah, who wrested the top spot following a 10-wicket haul in the Lord's Test that ended on Sunday.
Yasir is seven points ahead of Ashwin with three more matches to go against England. One will have to wait and see how long the two can continue the rare occurrence of two spinners at the top. The last time slow bowlers took the top two slots was in March 2006 when Sri Lanka off-spinner Muttiah Muralidaran and Australian leg-spinner Shane Warne peaked to number-one and two positions, respectively.
India's left-arm spinner Ravindra Jadeja is the other India bowler inside the top 10 in sixth spot, while fast bowler Ishant Sharma is ranked in 20th place.
For the West Indies and in the absence of an injured 21st-raned Kemar Roach, Jerome Taylor will start the series as his side's top-ranked bowler in 24th place.
India's Ajinkya Rahane will be the top-ranked batsman from either side in 12th spot and hoping to break back into the top 10. India captain Virat Kohli, who has been ranked No.1 in both ODIs and T20s but never higher than eighth in Tests, will also be looking to improve his current ranking of 14th.
For the West Indies, stylish left-hander Darren Bravo is in 23rd spot, while Kraigg Braithwaite is 32nd and the experienced Marlon Samuels 43rd.
As far as ICC Test Team Rankings is concerned, top-ranked Australia and second-ranked India will have to complete comprehensive wins in their upcoming away Test series against Sri Lanka and the West Indies respectively.
India is ahead of eighth-ranked the West Indies by 44 points and Australia leads seventh-ranked Sri Lanka by 33 points, and because the rankings are weighted to reflect this difference, India and Australia's failure to win their series convincingly will mean they will drop points.
India will have to defeat the West Indies by a margin of 3-0 or better to stay at 112 points. Even a 3-1 or 2-0 win for India will see it slip to 110 points. On the other hand, a 3-1 or 2-0 win by the West Indies will see it rise to 79 points with India dropping below the 100-point mark to 98.
Similarly, Australia will have to win 2-0 or better against seventh-ranked Sri Lanka to ensure it does not go below its current 118 points. In contrast, even Sri Lanka's 1-0 win over Australia will earn it seven points and move to 92 while Steve Smith's side will slip to 111 points.
With England and Pakistan already involved in a four-Test series in England, major shake-up on top of the Test table is on the cards depending how the three series pan out.
China continues to resolutely oppose the Permanent Court of Arbitration's (PCA) landmark decision handed down on July 12 against its maritime claims in the South China Sea.
Indeed, Beijing has redoubled its months-long campaign to invalidate the 2013 case that The Philippines brought against it.
The PCA gave a comprehensive verdict in Manila's favour. In its 501-page report the tribunal found Beijing violated no fewer than 14 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) provisions, six international regulations preventing collisions at sea and one general rule of international law.
China's recalcitrance was highly visible during the Public International Law Colloquium on Maritime Disputes Settlement held in Hong Kong on July 15 and 16, jointly organised by the Chinese Society of International Law (CSIL).
Given that the CSIL on July 10 - even before the PCA issued its verdict - issued a statement calling the tribunal "null and void", calls into serious question the colloquium's bias from the outset.
Donald Rothwell, Professor of International Law at the Australian National University, spoke to ANI on the sidelines of the colloquium.
"It's important to appreciate the way the case developed. The tribunal was hamstrung because one side only appeared," he admitted. He added that China has "some strong arguments on jurisdiction".
Tung Chee-hwa, best known as a shipping magnate and Hong Kong's first chief executive - rather than as a legal expert or historian - delivered the colloquium's keynote address. He argued, "The 12 July decision, I think, is not only not right, but it complicates the situation."
He noted, "China's historical relationship with the Spratlys underpin its claims to sovereignty." However, the PCA explicitly denied any such Chinese "historic rights". It said, ".China's claims to historic rights, or other sovereign rights or jurisdiction, with respect to the maritime areas of the South China Sea encompassed by the relevant part of the 'nine-dash line' are contrary to the Convention and without lawful effect to the extent that they exceed the geographic and substantive limits of China's maritime entitlements under the Convention."
The fury of Chinese citizens is understandable, for it is drummed into children from a young age that Chinese territory extends as far south as James Shoal (which is administered by Malaysia, incidentally).
However, Bill Hayton of Chatham House argued, "If we could trust the Chinese leadership to allow the free flow of information and an open debate about history, we could hope for a new understanding to emerge. For the time being, that is about as likely as China dismantling its giant artificial islands."
Despite Tung's assertion that "the Chinese discovered the Spratlys" and "exercised sovereignty over the Spratlys from the Yuan dynasty", there is no legal basis for China's historic claims, especially those encapsulated by its 'nine-dash line'. No matter how strenuously China argues, simply repeating it often enough does not make it true.
Tung further falsely claimed, "I hope.you can appreciate that China's activities in the South China Sea have not been aggressive or assertive, but rather have been restrained. Furthermore, it has indeed adhered to international legal norms." Again, this argument was destroyed by the PCA report's listing of dangerous actions by Chinese law enforcement vessels.
China consistently stated it would not participate in PCA proceedings, nor accept or abide by any decision. China was within its rights to refuse participation, but this does not excuse it, as a voluntary UNCLOS signatory, from being legally bound by the findings. Some see China's refusal to participate as indicative of low confidence in its legal capacities on the international stage. Certainly, if it had participated, perhaps more would have gone its way.
Instead, Beijing chose to launch an acerbic worldwide publicity campaign attacking the validity and impartiality of the PCA. Beijing even pursued a novel form of extrajudicial "non-participation" whereby it individually lobbied judges and used the Chinese ambassador to the Netherlands to make submissions to the PCA.
Chinese reaction to the tribunal's ruling was predictably defiant. On its Weibo account, for example, The People's Daily carried the slogan: "Don't accept, don't participate, don't recognise, don't carry out."
Among its campaign to discredit the tribunal are allegations of backhanded US and Japanese bias. For example, aspersions cast by China's vice foreign minister Liu Zhenmin that the Philippines bought off the judges were alarming. "These judges are paid, so who's really behind this tribunal? Who was paying them? Was it the Philippines or some other country?" he asked.
When China refused to pay half the costs of the tribunal, the Philippines stepped in and paid full costs so the tribunal could continue. Rothwell said the tribunal's "legitimacy cannot be undermined" for this reason, however.
Whilst fanning nationalism flames, China side-lined realist and moderate voices within the country, and all officials were required to toe the party line. Chinese hardliners are now taking the verdict as evidence of a US and international vendetta against China, an extension of its 'century of humiliation'.
Philip Bowring, a Hong Kong commentator, wrote scathingly in the South China Morning Post, "Sometimes humiliation is deserved, as in the case of the arbitration ruling showing the nation as a bully and an environmental despoiler of the very sea which it claims by inventing history and drawing lines on maps."
The Chinese government released a statement asserting "China has territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests in the South China Sea" that are "consistent with relevant international law and practice". China refuses to give up one inch of "territorial sovereignty", even though sovereignty was not addressed in the PCA ruling.
Instead, the tribunal carefully listed what maritime rights the newly classified Spratly rocks (not islands!) provided. Beijing was angered by its lack of maritime rights (merely 12 nautical mile territorial seas) though, interestingly, some assess that it may be backing away slightly from its vague 'nine-dash line' claim.
The USA has refrained from inflammatory actions so far. It said in a statement, "As provided in the convention, the tribunal's decision is final and legally binding on both China and the Philippines. The United States expresses its hope and expectation that both parties will comply with their obligations."
Tung mentioned the USA in his colloquium speech too, "Additionally, they [the Chinese] cannot understand why America goes so far as to frequently carry out military exercises in the South China Sea...This helps to consolidate suspicions of many Chinese people that America's pivot to Asia is to contain China. If this suspicion persists, many of us are afraid that the positive sentiments of the Chinese people towards America will be affected."
However, Tung muddies the waters. The occurrence of US freedom of navigation operations, or indeed military exercises, is not central to the South China Sea issue, for China opposes foreign naval activities anywhere in its exclusive economic zone (EEZ).
China is extremely sensitive right now, already lashing out at the USA, Japan and Australia to stay out of the dispute.
Vice Foreign Minister Liu threatened that China reserves the right to establish an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) over the South China Sea, just as it controversially did over the East China Sea in November 2013. This would be an inflammatory escalation, as well as legally baseless given that it has minimal territorial rights in the South China Sea.
General Herbert Carlisle, head of the US Air Combat Command, said the USA would ignore any such action. "If they declared [an] ADIZ then we would continue, over international airspace, to conduct operations that we feel are within the bounds of legality like we do now."
Meanwhile, Admiral Scott Swift, commander of the US Pacific Fleet, also commented, "I don't really see any changes in what the Pacific Fleet is doing." It currently averages some 700 ship days a year of operations in the South China Sea, and he could not conceive of any reduction in this.
With China rebutting the PCA decision, it is inconceivable Beijing will desist from its claims. Rothwell said the ability to actively enforce the tribunal's verdict is compromised as there is no "international police force" to back it up. "It's quite a benign award," he said. "There's no cease and desist, no damages."
Sebastien Colin, a researcher at the Hong Kong-based French Centre for Research on Contemporary China, told ANI: "The post-arbitration geopolitical situation in the South China Sea will depend mostly on how states, not only China and the Philippines, but also Vietnam, Taiwan and the USA, manage the award."
He warned that China could build new facilities, and greater militarization could occur of the features it already occupies, including multiplied military drills. "Such a development would be likely (and this would be perhaps the major impact), amplifying strategic rivalry between China and the USA amid legal disagreement on the application of certain provisions of UNCLOS."
We may expect continuing Chinese pronouncements, through every avenue open to it, that the PCA decision remains invalid, as well as military demonstrations such as fly-bys and sail-bys of PLA assets. The former has already occurred with an H-6K bomber photographed over Scarborough Shoal.
One area to watch is activities by Chinese maritime militia, essentially fishing fleets in military service to the nation, against foreign fishing fleets and even naval vessels of powers like the USA.
Colin continued, "The affirmation of the Chinese presence in the South China Sea in the last three years is not only a response to the legal initiative of the Philippines but also, above all, a reaction to US policy in Asia and the renegotiation by Washington and Manila of the security agreement facilitating the access of Philippine naval bases to the US Navy."
It is not all doom and gloom, however. Colin added, "Beyond this rivalry and some knee-jerk reactions that could be taken by China - and Taiwan - there is nevertheless room for easing tensions. The key is without doubt very largely in the hands of the new Philippine administration led by Rodrigo Duterte, who has the dual mission of managing the heritage of the outcome of an arbitration procedure launched by his predecessor while redefining a policy vis-a-vis China."
Duterte is not known for tactful diplomacy, so how will he handle this? Duterte has so far vacillated from promising to bravely ride a jet ski to Scarborough Shoal to defend Philippine sovereignty, to acquiescently promoting joint development of resources.
In the wake of the PCA decision, gloating is absolutely the wrong Philippine approach, as is knuckling to Chinese diplomatic pressure. Philippine Solicitor General Jose Calida said "the baseline for any negotiation should be the decision," adding that "we will not concede any awards given to us".
Careful to paint Duterte in a more positive light than his predecessor Benigno Aquino, Beijing asserted, "China stands ready to continue to resolve the relevant disputes peacefully through negotiation and consultation with the states directly concerned on the basis of respecting historical facts and in accordance with international law."
Yet, simultaneously, China is refusing to negotiate on the basis of the PCA ruling. Liu said on 13 July, "China will not allow any negotiation based on the ruling." He added, "China expects the new Filipino government to cooperate and recognize that the ruling is nothing more than a piece of waste paper and cannot be enforced. China hopes that the Filipino side will set aside the award and return to the negotiation table."
Clearly the two countries need to engage in diplomatic talks, but Rothwell said a lot will depend on how innovative both sides are willing to be in their negotiations. Given China's blinkered negotiating approach above, the process will not be easy. Rothwell agreed that "the Philippines now has the high moral ground and the backing of much of the international community, I suspect".
Rothwell said China's current reaction is to be expected and that it will take at least a year to measure its true response. Although the ruling has now been delivered, he likened it to "playing a long game".
Strongly condemning the Gir Somnath Dalit assault incident in which a Dalit family was assaulted for allegedly skinning a dead cow, the Congress on Tuesday called for strict action against all the accused, adding that the neglecting officer should be sent to jail for his lackadaisical attitude on the matter.
"We are monitoring the matter and we have asked to take strong action against all those who can be seen in the video. A case should also be registered against the investigating officer who neglected the matter. He should be sent to jail. We will make sure that action is taken against all the accused and the victim's family gets justice," Congress leader P.L. Punia told ANI.
Dubbing the Dalit assault as a 'major blow to humanity', Punia alleged that the district administration has been irresponsible and tried to hush the matter.
"FIR was registered only against five people. When they were made to see a video footage which shows 30-35 men involved, they arrested three more persons. The way hooliganism is going on in the name of cow protection is strongly condemnable. This kind of atmosphere is being made not only in Gujarat but in the whole nation," he added.
Meanwhile, Gujarat Chief Minister Anandiben Patel has ordered a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe in the matter and also called for a designated court to be set in consultation with the High Court for speedy trial in the matter.
Earlier on July 11, few people were removing the skin from the carcass of a cow at Bediya village of Gir Somnath, when five persons came in a Xylo car and asked them why they were slaughtering the cow.
The people replied that they were removing the skin from the cow's carcass.
Not satisfied with the explanation, the men immediately started abusing and beating them with an iron pipe, lathi's, aluminium strip etc. They also looted three mobile phones.
A case was registered under the Una Police Station on the same day under Sections 307, 323, 324, 395 and 504 of the Indian Penal Code, Gujarat Police Act Section 135, Section 3 (2) (v)-Prevention of Atrocities Act against six persons by Vasarambhai Balubhai Sarvaiya of Mota Samdiyala village of Una taluka of Gir Somnath district.
The district officials including the District Collector had visited the hospital and met the victims and are currently supervising all necessary action.
In view of alleged mishandling, one Police Inspector and two Assistant Sub-Inspectors and one Head Constable were suspended earlier on July 14 and July 17 respectively for dereliction of duty.
A compensation of Rs. one lakh was paid on the basis of registration of offence earlier on July 14.
Taking potshots at the police for attempting to save the Rohtak gang-rape accused, the Congress Party on Tuesday said it is extremely unfortunate that no arrests have been made so far in this case.
Congress spokesperson Shobha Oza said the incident was really unfortunate and should be condemned.
"It has been five to six days that this Dalit girl has been raped for the second time by the same accused goons and the police is somewhere trying to save them," Oza told ANI.
"No protection has been given to the family despite the fact that these goons are trying to threaten the family and the girl to kill her," she added.
Oza further said that the accused committed the heinous crime after the victim refused to withdraw her complaint.
The Congress leader said that the accused even threatened the family members of the victim so that the complaint against them is withdrawn and they get a clean chit in the matter.
"When they failed to do so, they once again raped the girl on the 13th, and today is 19th, no arrest has taken place as yet," she added.
Continuing her tirade against the men in inform, Oza stated it seems the police is trying to save these goons as these are the people, who have muscle power and money-power.
"Yesterday, we visited the victim, the victim was not in the mental condition to speak and on behalf of the victim, the brother spoke to us, the doctors spoke to us, who said that the victim is so traumatized that she is not in a condition to speak," Oza said.
"Despite all these facts, the police have not given any protection to the family. The role of the police in this gruesome gang-rape is not clear, it seems the police is trying to save the goons involved in this crime," she added.
The Haryana Women Commission on Tuesday recorded the statement of Rohtak gang-rape victim and expressed hope that such a heinous crime never takes place again in the society.
Haryana Women Commission vice-chairman Suman Dahiya said the girl, who was now medically fit, has given her statement to them.
"As per the doctors, she is now medically fit to give the statement. It clearly appears from the girl's statement that whatever happened with her was absolutely wrong," Dahiya told ANI.
"We want that such cases never come up in the society again. The culprits need to be given severe punishment and arrested at the earliest," she added.
Dahiya further said that the girl's statement would now be recorded before the police and the Magistrate.
Meanwhile, Delhi Social Welfare Minister Sandip Kumar also met the victim's family.
The 21-year-old Dalit girl, who was gang-raped three years ago in Bhiwani by five men, had alleged that she was kidnapped and raped again by the same men in Rohtak on Wednesday last week when she was returning home from college.
Based on her complaint, the police registered an FIR against Amit, Jagmohan, Mausam, Sandeep and Akash.
While Amit and Jagmohan joined the investigation on Monday, the families of Mausam and Sandeep approached the police with the evidence.
In a possible first, the wife of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's wife Melania Trump is being accused of plagiarising a speech of U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama.
As Melania praised her husband, she went on to borrow some parts of Michelle Obama's convention speech in 2008, reports CNN.
Michelle Obama in her convention speech has said, "Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values, like you work hard for what you want in life. That your word is your bond that you do what you are saying you are going to do. That you treat people with dignity and respect even if you don't know them and even if you don't agree with them. And Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values and pass them on to the next generation, because we want our children and all children in this nation to know that the only limits to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work hard for them."
In her speech Melania said, "My parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life. That your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise, that you treat people with respect. They taught me values and moral in their daily lives. That is a lesson that I continue to pass along to my son and we need to pass these lessons on to the many generations to follow, because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.
Mywish Marketplaces (MMPL) today announced seeking investment of USD 15 million in the company by Franklin Templeton. MMPL Mywish runs some of the largest financial marketplaces in India and is engaged in aggregating, marketing and facilitating the sale of loan products and credit offerings from banks and financial institutions.
MMPL's existing investors include Sherpalo Ventures, a VC fund run by Ram Shriram, who was the seed/early investor in many successful technology companies in the world, including Google. International Advisors was MMPL's advisor for the deal.
MMPL pioneered the loan marketplace in India, and has established trust with Indian customers as a neutral marketplace leveraging its proprietary technology. Its intellectual property includes algorithms for customer acquisition for the participating banks' loan products, and those for matching customers with products.
It also enables sales transactions on the platform itself. With over seven million customers already, MMPL plans to expand by leveraging existing technology to develop an all-encompassing digital ecosystem, providing wealth management and investment products in addition to credit offerings.
The firm will develop the platform for the investment based in part on know-how provided by Franklin Templeton.
"This investment is in line with our continued efforts towards making strategic investments across geographies in companies that align with our global priorities. We are impressed by MMPL's strong domain expertise and see good growth potential going forward, particularly in the planned expansion of MMPL's business to include wealth management and investment product-related services," said Co-President Franklin Resources, Vijay Advani.
"Employing cutting edge technology continues to be a priority for Franklin Templeton, and we are always looking for new and innovative ways to incorporate technologies to advance our business, including making capital investments," said Co-President Franklin Resources, Jenny Johnson.
Rajnath Singh on Tuesday spoke to Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar regarding the ambush on the CRPF team in Aurangabad region, in which at least ten defence personnel were killed and five injured.
Rajnath instructed Director General, CRPF to rush to Aurangabad to assess the situation post the ambush.
The Home Minister also expressed his heartfelt condolences to the families of the slain CRPF personnel and prayed for the speedy recovery of the injured.
At least ten CRPF personnel were killed and five injured in an encounter between the Naxal and the Cobra battalion near the border of Imamganj and Aurangabad police station here.
The bodies of three Naxals were also recovered.
As per reports, the jawans of the COBRA unit were ambushed in an IED blast after which an encounter started between the two.
Bihar Director General of Police P.K. Thakur told ANI that eight jawans died on spot, while two of them died on their way to the hospital.
The encounter started late last night and is continuing.
Meanwhile, combing operations are still going on.
SKANEATELES Sharon OConnell is the Skaneateles Middle School librarian. Through her middle school Multicultural Club, in the summer of 2014, she organized bringing nine middle school-aged students, their English teacher and a mother from Kazakhstan for two weeks.
Their visit included trips to New York City, Niagara Falls, an overnight near the ocean in New Jersey and a trip to the Kazakhstan Embassy in Washington, D.C. Host families from Skaneateles helped provide a life-changing experience for those Kazakhstan visitors and their own children here.
This summer, OConnell has once again organized bringing a group from Kazakhstan for this unique and wonderful opportunity. Ten students, the same teacher, Tatyana Arendenko, and a mother arrived at JFK airport on Wednesday, July 13.
They had traveled two days by train to Moscow and then flown overnight to New York City. A trip to Rockaway Beach to swim in the Atlantic Ocean was followed by two days of sightseeing in New York City before boarding a Greyhound bus to Syracuse.
They were met at the Transportation Center by their host families from Skaneateles. Trips to Washington, D.C. and numerous sites in and around the Finger Lakes promised to keep everyone busy and entertained while providing educational experiences.
The Skaneateles Rotary Club generously provided funds for a trip for them to Niagara Falls. The Skaneateles High School Interact Club raised part of the funds to purchase Kindle Fires for each of the Kazakhstan students to help with translating and to provide English language books for them to read on the long journey home.
Amelia Huba was one of the original members of the middle school Multicultural Club in 2014. That experience inspired her to apply for the Rotary Youth Exchange program this year. After she was accepted, she realized she would miss the Kazakhstani visit this summer.
Before she left, she organized donations of toiletries for the guests. Generous donations from the Sherwood Inn, Skaneateles Smiles and Reflections Dermatology helped to create delightful toiletries bags, which were given to the Kazakhstanis at the airport.
Alexander Menses of Koflach, Austria is Amelias Rotary host father in Austria. A longtime member of Rotary International, he wrote: The more important it is, showing our kids that the world really can be a great place. And one of the most important things for this is giving them the opportunity to learn about others, e.g. by visiting other countries or letting them know about other cultures ... also showing them beautiful and historic places in the world. ... And of course we have to teach them to use their minds, to have own thoughts and to challenge things. One of the most important things for me has always been making friends also across borders.
This ideal is one OConnell wholeheartedly agree with and lives by example. The Skaneateles students and their families and the visiting Kazakhstani students and their teacher are the beneficiaries of her goal of including as many people as possible in her adventures.
In wake of a Dalit family being assaulted for allegedly skinning a dead cow in the Gir Somnath district, Gujarat Chief Minister Anandiben Patel has ordered a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe in the matter.
The Chief Minister called for a designated court to be set in consultation with the High Court for speedy trial in the matter.
She asked for a Special Public Prosecutor to take up the case, adding that the investigating officer has to submit the charge sheet to the court in 60 days.
The Chief Minister said that the state government would bear all the medical expenses of the victims.
Earlier on July 11, few people were removing the skin from the carcass of a cow at Bediya village of Gir Somnath, when five persons came in a Xylo car and asked them why they were slaughtering the cow.
The people replied that they were removing the skin from the cow's carcass.
Not satisfied with the explanation, the menimmediately started abusing and beating them with an iron pipe, lathi's, aluminium strip etc. They also looted three mobile phones.
A case was registered under the Una Police Station on the same day under Sections 307, 323, 324, 395 and 504 of the Indian Penal Code, Gujarat Police Act Section 135, Section 3 (2) (v)-Prevention of Atrocities Act against six persons by Vasarambhai Balubhai Sarvaiya of Mota Samdiyala village of Una taluka of Gir Somnath district.
The district officials including the District Collector had visited the hospital and met the victims and are currently supervising all necessary action.
As many as seven persons were undergoing treatment. Three were undergoing treatment in Junagadh Hospital and four in Una Civil Hospital. Three of the persons admitted to Una Civil Hospital have since been referred from Una to Rajkot Civil Hospital and one patient has been discharged. As of date, two persons are still hospital undergoing treatment.
Parliamentary Secretary Jethabhai Solanki visited the victims earlier on July 12, while former Congress MLA from Somnath Assembly Jashabhai Barad visited the patients and met the family members earlier on July 13.
The investigation handled Deputy Superintendent of Police (SC/ST cell) have arrested as many as eight persons in this regard.
In view of alleged mishandling, one Police Inspector and two Assistant Sub-Inspectors and one Head Constable were suspended earlier on July 14 and July 17 respectively for dereliction of duty.
A compensation of Rs. one lakh was paid on the basis of registration of offence earlier on July 14.
Following reports that the state government had shut down a newspaper publication, a major printing press and raided media houses in regard with the tense situation in the Valley, Minister for Information and broadcasting Venkaiah Naidu spoke to Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti on the issue.
However, Mufti clarified to Naidu that there is no such ban on the publication of news papers.
Earlier, the J&K media reported that the police had raided media houses in what was seen as the most sweeping information blackout in the valley which has been rocked by violence.
Mobile and internet services are already blocked in the valley where curfew was extended to the eight day on Saturday.
Cable TV was also blocked but was restored on Saturday evening.
Mufti's contradiction comes days after government spokesman Nayeem Akhtar reportedly said that "the undesirable step was taken to ensure peace, to save lives and strengthen peace efforts"
According to reports, hawkers in the city's centre alleged that police did not allow them to distribute the newspapers and also seized their copies.
Meanwhile, the curfew imposed in the valley in wake of the protest continued for the elevent consecutive day.
The life in the Valley remained paralysed after Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani's killing, due to strike called by the separatists and curfew-like restrictions imposed by the authorities.
The incidents of violence continue to crop up despite the Centre and Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti urging the people to maintain calm and cooperate with the state government to restore peace in the valley.
After Burhan's death, Kashmir is on boil and about 40 people have been killed and over 3,000 including 1,600 civilians injured in clashes between youth and security men during protests.
Sindh High Court Chief Justice's son Advocate Awais Ali Shah, who was kidnapped earlier in June, has been recovered after intelligence based operation in Tank district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Director General Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR) Lt. General Asim Bajwa disclosed Shah's recovery on Tuesday through a tweet, adding that three terrorists have also been killed during the operation, reports the Dawn.
"Awais Shah, son of Sind Chief Justice recovered through an IBO from custody of terrorists from near Tank, three terrorists killed," tweeted Bajwa.
According to the ISPR, Awais Ali Shah was safe and sound in the possession of security forces and will be soon transported back to his parents.
Bajwa also said that the Chief of Army Staff commended efforts of the Intelligence and security forces for successful operation.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif congratulated Chief Justice Sajjad Ali Shah on the recovery of his son and praised the security forces.
"The Prime Minister lauded the role of intelligence agencies and security forces in recovering Mr. Awais Shah and said that the professional and operational excellence of our security forces has made it possible for which they deserve immense appreciation," a statement issued by his office said.
Shah was abducted by armed men on June 20 from Clifton area of Karachi.
A special investigation team had been constituted on the directives of Sindh Chief Minister Qaim Ali Shah to probe the abduction, while the Rangers had announced a reward of Rs. 2,500,000 for credible information regarding the whereabouts of Shah.
Earlier, the police speculated that Shah could be used as a 'bargaining chip' to ensure release of some captured militants.
The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) on Tuesday hailed Karnataka minister K.J. George's resignation after a Madikeri court ordered registration of case against him in connection with the suicide of Deputy Superintendent of Police M.K. Ganapati.
Asserting that it was George's moral duty to quit, NCP leader Majid Memon said it was a good precedence that others must follow.
"It is a good precedent. Without being sacked and before there is noise, he thought that it is his moral duty to quit so that investigative agencies are under no pressure while collecting evidence. It is a good precedent and others must follow it," he told ANI.
George yesterday said he decided to step down to ensure that the probe in the matter was 'impartial'.
"I have sent my resignation to the Chief Minister. I have complete faith in the judiciary. I request you and the opposition that do not arrive at a conclusion till the truth comes out," George told mediapersons.
"So far no inquiry was ordered against me. Now, based on a complaint, the court has ordered an inquiry. I have voluntarily resigned so that the probe is impartial," he added.
Ganapathy was found hanging from a ceiling fan in a lodge in Madikeri, Kodagu district, on July 9.
In an interview to a local channel before committing suicide, Ganapahthi had alleged he was being harassed by Additional Director General Police (ADGP) (Intelligence) A M Prasad, K J George and Lokayukta (Ombudsman) Deputy Inspector General of Police Pronab Mohanty.
Union Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has asserted that there is no dispute between judiciary and executive and only an impression has been created.
Speaking in an exclusive conversation with ETV News head Jagdeesh Chandra, Prasad said, "If a new law is made, then it is the work of court to decide whether it is in the favour of the country or not."
The Union Minister also clarified that the decision of court is supreme and there is no dispute between government and judiciary.
Speaking on the collegium system formed for appointment of judges and rights of the government, he said the government has full right to give a rethink on the decision taken by collegiums and motive of both is same to bring transparency in appointment of judges.
"Three standards have been set for appointment of Judges eligibility, honesty and transparency," he said.
The memorandum of procedure, which governs appointment of judges of the Supreme Court and high courts, was put in place following two apex court judgments in 1990s that established the collegium and ruled in favour of the primacy of the Chief Justice of India in making such appointments.
The Union Law Minister also called on the Supreme Court to end loopholes in judgements given by them.
"Any person can be wrong whether he is a judge or anyone. But this is the responsibility of Supreme Court to end these loopholes," he said.
He further said that if there is any corruption in judiciary, then there should be a mechanism to solve that also and this mechanism should be made by the apex court.
The Haryana Women Commission on Tuesday recorded the statement of Rohtak gang-rape victim and expressed hope that such a heinous crime never takes place again in the society.
Haryana Women Commission vice-chairman Suman Dahiya said the girl, who was now medically fit, has given her statement to them.
"As per the doctors, she is now medically fit to give the statement. It clearly appears from the girl's statement that whatever happened with her was absolutely wrong," Dahiya told ANI.
"We want that such cases never come up in the society again. The culprits need to be given severe punishment and arrested at the earliest," she added.
Dahiya further said that the girl's statement would now be recorded before the police and the Magistrate.
Meanwhile, Delhi Social Welfare Minister Sandip Kumar also met the victim's family.
The 21-year-old Dalit girl, who was gang-raped three years ago in Bhiwani by five men, had alleged that she was kidnapped and raped again by the same men in Rohtak on Wednesday last week when she was returning home from college.
Based on her complaint, the police registered an FIR against Amit, Jagmohan, Mausam, Sandeep and Akash.
While Amit and Jagmohan joined the investigation on Monday, the families of Mausam and Sandeep approached the police with the evidence.
Criticising Navjot Singh Sidhu over his resignation from the Rajya Sabha, Union Minister of Food Processing, Harsimrat Kaur Badal on Tuesday asked as to how can a person belong to the nation if he cannot belong to his own party.
"He couldn't belong to his party, who made him MP for three terms, or the Prime Minister or the President, how will he belong to the nation? People of Punjab will give an answer to him," Badal said.
"AAP party has no ideology. Earlier Sidhu ji use to call Kejriwal a dramatist. Now I don't know what he likes in Kejriwal," she added.
Sidhu on Monday resigned from the Rajya Sabha, only about three months after his nomination by the government, as speculation raged that he could join Aam Aadmi Party and be its face in the Assembly polls next year.
The resignation of 52-year-old Sidhu, who was nominated on April 22, was accepted by Chairman Hamid Ansari with immediate effect.
In his resignation letter, Sidhu said there was closure of every window. "At behest of PM, I had accepted RS nomination for welfare of Punjab. With closure of every window leading to Punjab the purpose stands defeated, now a mere burden. I prefer not to carry it," he had said.
Navjot Kaur Sidhu however said her husband Navjot Singh Sidhu wanted to serve Punjab alone and confirmed that he resigned from the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Dabur India was down 0.11% to Rs 313 at 9:49 IST on BSE, with the stock sliding amid volatility after the company said its wholly owned subsidiary has acquired a South African cosmetics firm for a purchase consideration of ZAR 1,000.
The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 18 July 2016.
Meanwhile, the S&P BSE Sensex was down 20.16 points or 0.07% at 27,726.85.
On BSE, so far 11,000 shares were traded in the counter as against average daily volume of 1.18 lakh shares in the past one quarter. The stock lost as much as 0.3% at the day's low of Rs 312.40 so far during the day. The stock rose as much as 0.79% at the day's high of Rs 315.85 so far during the day. The stock had hit a record high of Rs 320.30 on 14 July 2016. The stock had hit a 52-week low of Rs 231.30 on 27 January 2016. The stock had underperformed the market over the past one month till 18 July 2016, sliding 0.48% compared with Sensex's 4.21% rise. The scrip had, however, outperformed the market in past one quarter, advancing 14.63% as against Sensex's 7.48% rise.
The large-cap company has equity capital of Rs 176.15 crore. Face value per share is Rs 1.
Dabur India's wholly owned subsidiary Dabur International has acquired 100% share capital of a new company namely Discaria Trading (PTY) LTD (Discaria) in South Africa on 14 July 2016, for a purchase consideration of ZAR 1,000. Accordingly Discaria has become a step down wholly owned subsidiary company of Dabur India.
Discaria is engaged in manufacturing and trading of cosmetics products.
Dabur India will announce Q1 June 2016 results on 27 July 2016. The company's consolidated net profit rose 16.6% to Rs 331.93 crore on 10.9% rise in net sales to Rs 2157.31 crore in Q4 March 2016 over Q4 March 2015.
Dabur India is one of the largest FMCG companies in India. The company operates in key consumer products categories like hair care, oral care, health care, skin care, home care & foods.
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Sales rise 9.81% to Rs 33.01 crore
Net profit of Fortis Malar Hospitals declined 62.73% to Rs 0.60 crore in the quarter ended June 2016 as against Rs 1.61 crore during the previous quarter ended June 2015. Sales rose 9.81% to Rs 33.01 crore in the quarter ended June 2016 as against Rs 30.06 crore during the previous quarter ended June 2015.33.0130.060.454.721.863.240.922.460.601.61
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An earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter scale jolted eastern on Tuesday, the weather agency said.
The 12.57 pm quake registered 4 on the Japanese seismic scale which peaks at 7 in Chiba prefecture, the Meteorological Agency said.
The epicentre of the quake was at a latitude of 35.4 degrees north and a longitude of 140.4 degrees east and occurred at a depth of 30 km, Xinhua news agency reported quoting the agency as saying.
The tremor could be felt in central Tokyo and also shook other eastern Japanese prefectures including Kanagawa and Ibaraki.
So far, no major damage or injuries were reported and no tsunami warning was issued.
PHOENIX -- No, you're not seeing double.
The Arizona Public Health Association has submitted an argument supporting legalizing marijuana for recreational use. It will appear in the ballot brochure being mailed to voters ahead of the November election.
It also submitted one against the measure.
But former state Health Director Will Humble, a member of the association's board, said there's a good reason for that.
He said the group believes there are positive things that could come out of voter approval of the measure in November. Those range from eliminating the possibility of felony convictions for small amounts of marijuana as well as reducing violence from the current illegal marijuana trade.
Humble said, though, there also are risks to the public, including more impaired drivers and easier access to the drug for children.
The bottom line, he said, depends on how a new state regulatory agency the initiative would set up write the rules for the sale and use of the drug. Humble said that could make all the difference on whether legalizing recreational use is a good or bad thing from a public health perspective.
But the Arizona law which lets individuals and groups weigh in on pending ballot measures allows for only "pro'' and "con'' statements. He said that left the group with only one option: Submit identical 300-word arguments on both sides.
"Our goal isn't to persuade voters, it's to inform voters,'' Humble said. And that means reaching as many voters as possible.
"If they're already for it, they're probably just going to read the 'pros,' '' he said.
"Or maybe they'll just read the 'cons,' '' Humble continued. "But we wanted to be in both places.''
Humble said the decision to include the association's position in both the pro and con arguments that will go into the brochures is more than a laundry list of the potential good and bad things that could happen if adults are allowed to buy and use marijuana for recreational purposes. He said it's also a call on Arizonans to take an active role in monitoring the program if it is approved.
More significant, Humble said voters need to keep an eye on -- and pressure if necessary -- the Arizona Department of Marijuana Licenses and Control to enact the proper safeguards. It would be that agency, created if the initiative is approved, which would craft the rules that will govern much of how the drug is pedaled in the state.
"The statute the voters approve is just the skeleton,'' Humble explained.
"It's not the actual organism,'' he continued. "That is what the rule making is for.''
What that means, Humble explained, is a lot of how recreational marijuana unfolds in Arizona depends on "how that agency ... chooses to use its newfound statutory authority.''
For example, he said the initiative states that recreational marijuana is available only to those 21 and older.
But it is up to the commission to adopt rules to ensure that the state-licensed shops live up to that law. That means deciding what forms of identification are acceptable.
And Humble said even if dealers can be prosecuted criminally for selling marijuana to those younger than 21, the new agency could adopt rules creating additional punishments, like the suspension or loss of the license to sell the drug.
"There's things you could do in the administrative code that really matter in terms of how this gets implemented in the long run,'' he said.
Then there's how the product is promoted.
The language in the proposed new law specifically requires the new state agency to enact requirements for the marketing, display and advertising of marijuana and accessories. And it also mandates restrictions on marketing or advertising that appeals to children.
But how far those limits can go remains up for debate.
"They can create restrictions on advertising but they cannot ban it,'' said attorney Ryan Hurley who has been intimately involved with the initiative. He declined to spell out what would be permitted.
"Whether any particular restriction would be valid or not would have to be determined on an individual basis,'' he said.
And there's more.
The initiative requires the new state agency to come up with packaging requirements, including child-resistant containers, as well as a system for dividing a marijuana product into a "standardized serving size.''
Other regulations the new board has to enact include:
- Restrictions on pesticides and additives that would make the marijuana addictive or injurious to health;
- Labels showing the amount of tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive ingredient, in each serving;
- A list of ingredients, allergens and solvents used in the manufacture of the product;
- Requirements for testing to measure potency.
In a first, an international team of researchers has successfully sequenced the genome of 6,000-year-old barley grains retrieved from Yoram Cave in Israel's Judean Desert which was used only for a short time by pre-historic humans probably as an ephemeral refuge.
The team found that genetically, the pre-historic barley was very similar to present day barley grown in the Southern Levant, supporting the existing hypothesis of barley domestication having occurred in the Upper Jordan Valley six millennia ago.
"These archaeological remains provided a unique opportunity for us to finally sequence a Chalcolithic plant genome. The genetic material has been well preserved for several millennia due to the extreme dryness of the region," said Ehud Weiss from Bar-Ilan University in Israel.
In order to determine the age of the ancient seeds, the researchers split the grains and subjected half of them to radiocarbon dating while the other half was used to extract the ancient DNA.
"For us, ancient DNA works like a time capsule that allows us to travel back in history and look into the domestication of crop plants at distinct time points in the past," said Johannes Krause from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.
The genome of Chalcolithic barley grains is the oldest plant genome to have been reconstructed to date.
Wheat and barley were already grown 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, a sickle-shaped region stretching from present day Iraq and Iran through Turkey and Syria into Lebanon, Jordan and Israel.
Till date, the wild forms of these two crops persist in the region. It was from there that grain farming originated and later spread to Europe, Asia and North Africa.
The results of the analysis were published in the journal Nature Genetics.
--IANS
vr/na/bg
The Manipur High Court on Tuesday said it was not satisfied with the government's explanation on declaring activist Khomdram Ratan an absconder.
Ratan, who was the convener of the Joint Committee on Inner Line Permit System, was declared an absconder even though he was reportedly available at his home and office. A reward of Rs 5 lakh has been announced for his arrest.
While Manipur Advocate General T. Ibohal said the police in the past had declared some people absconders, he could not satisfy the bench of Chief Justice R.R. Prasad and Justice S. Serto as to whether all legal formalities were followed in Ratan's case.
The Advocate General sought some more time to supplement his statement. The court then fixed Wednesday for the next hearing, saying that it was a matter of public interest and cannot be delayed.
Senior Advocate Khaidem Mani, who is leading a battery of lawyers defending Ratan, told IANS that the Advocate General could not explain under what rule Ratan was declared an absconder.
Meanwhile, five women continued with their relay hunger strike, demanding that Ratan be exonerated from the charge of being an absconder.
There were clashes between the police and students of TG HIgher Secondary School in Imphal. A police official suffered injuries as he was hit by stones allegedly thrown by the girls.
--IANS
il/bim/bg
A piece of possible aircraft debris suspected to be a part of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight which washed up off the coast of Tanzania, arrived in Australia for examination, officials announced on Tuesday.
According to a joint statement from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) and the Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) Malaysia, the large piece was found by locals on the Pemba island on June 23, and is thought to be from a wing flap, Xinhua news agency reported.
The ATSB released a statement late Monday saying it would be investigated for any signs if it was from the missing Boeing 777 jet.
"Malaysia and Australia have worked with Tanzanian officials to assume responsibility for the wing flap," the statement read.
The ATSB said other pieces of debris previously found in the region were determined to be "almost certainly" from the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, however, the investigation would go ahead before investigators make a statement regarding the origin of the "wing flap."
"To date, the ATSB has examined four pieces of debris on behalf of Malaysia and determined them to be almost certainly from MH370," the statement said.
"Technical specialists from the ATSB are working with Malaysian investigators to determine if it is from the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777, MH370," it added.
Malaysia Airlines flight was a scheduled passenger service bound from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. It disappeared with 239 passengers and crew on board.
Minister of State for Finance Santosh Kumar Gangwar on Tuesday, quoting the Financial Stability Report of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), said bad loans of public sector banks (PSBs) may rise to 10.1 per cent by March 2017.
"As per the Financial Stability Report June 2016 of Reserve Bank of India, the macro stress tests suggest that under the baseline scenario, the gross NPA ratio for PSBs may rise to 10.1 per cent by March 2017," Gangwar said in a written reply in the Rajya Sabha.
The major reasons for increase in NPAs of banks are sluggishness in the domestic growth during the recent past, slowdown in recovery in the global economy and continuing uncertainty in the global markets leading to lower exports of various products like textiles, engineering goods, leather and gems, he said.
External factors, including the ban in mining projects, delay in clearances affecting power, iron and steel sector, volatility in prices of raw material and the shortage in availability of power and aggressive lending by the banks in the past, have also contributed to bank NPAs, he added.
The gross NPAs rose to 9.32 per cent (Rs 4.76 lakh crore) in 2015-16 from 5.43 per cent (Rs 2.67 lakh crore) in 2014-15, the minister said.
--IANS
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US-based global technology company Cisco on Tuesday signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Jharkhand government to enhance the information technology skills of students in engineering colleges and polytechnics across the state.
The MoU was signed by Ajoy Kumar Singh, Secretary in Jharkhand's Department of Higher and Technical Education, and Dinesh Malkani, President, Cisco India and SAARC.
The partnership will focus on developing skills required for the new digital economy by providing them with the required technical knowledge through the Cisco Networking Academy Programme.
Cisco will set up 15 networking academies in the state that will train up to 6,000 students by 2020.
--IANS
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Upset over two CBI raids at their residence within three days, the wife and daughter of arrested Ministry of Corporate Affairs senior official B.K. Bansal allegedly committed suicide here on Tuesday.
Satyabala Bansal, 57, and Neha Bansal, 27, were found hanging from ceiling fans in different rooms of their first-floor flat in Neelkanth Apartments in east Delhi's Madhu Vihar area, police said.
The tragedy came to light when two housemaids came out of the flat and shouted for help. After security guards and the housing society manager rushed to the flat, Satyabala was found hanging from the ceiling fan.
Society manager Raghuvir Singh told IANS: "When we entered the room, we found Satyabala hanging. The other two rooms were locked."
The police said it received a call around 2 p.m. and broke open the door to the second room, where Neha was found hanging from the ceiling fan.
"We have seized two suicide notes stating that no one should be held responsible for their extreme step," Deputy Commissioner of Police (East) Rishi Pal told IANS.
Another senior police officer said: "The daughter, in her suicide note, has written that they were feeling humiliated after the central agency's raids and that's why they are taking this extreme step."
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) had raided their flat on Saturday and Monday morning, a neighbour told IANS.
Raghuvir Singh said B.K. Bansal was mistaken to be a retired chartered accountant. "He was a very nice man and used to help persons around him," Singh added.
He said that documents and papers were found lying scattered in the third room of the flat, which may be due to the CBI raids.
As for the whereabouts of Bansal's property dealer son Yogesh Bansal, 29, Singh said: "We tried to contact him, but his mobile phone number is switched off. We haven't seen him for the past three-four days."
B.K. Bansal, Directgor General in the Corporate Affairs Ministry, was arrested on bribery charge on Monday by the CBI. Bansal was detained on Saturday on charge of receiving Rs 9 lakh from Mumbai-based Elder Pharmaceuticals.
An alleged middleman Vishwadeep Bansal, who worked as the firm's distributor, was also arrested. The CBI had also booked company chief operating officer Anuj Saxena.
During investigation, the CBI is said to have found that the senior officer owned 20 properties in Haryana's Sirsa, Gurgaon and Faridabad as well as Delhi. All the properties were bought in the last two years and most were in the names of Bansal, his wife and son.
--IANS
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Social networking giant Facebook has partnered with the US television network ABC for a non-stop live streaming of both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.
The Republican National Convention started in Cleveland, Ohio on Monday night and will run till Thursday while the Democratic National Convention is set for July 25-28 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Not just livestreaming, Facebook will provide an in-depth coverage of both the events, engadget.com reported on Monday.
Earlier, micro-blogging site Twitter had signed a deal with the US television network CBS to stream both the conventions.
Twitter has permission to broadcast the CBSN feedthe company's 24-hour digital news streaming serviceand anyone online can watch for free even if they do not have a Twitter account.
A former Air Force commander has denied being a ringleader of Friday's attempted military coup in Turkey.
Gen Akin Ozturk and 26 senior officers were charged with treason and remanded in custody by a court on Monday, BBC cited the state-run Anadolu news agency as saying.
But in a statement to prosecutors, the General insisted: "I am not the person who planned or led the coup."
Anadolu had earlier quoted him as telling interrogators that he had "acted with intention to stage a coup".
Officials have blamed the unrest, which killed over 200 people and wounded over a thousand people, on the US-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen and the "parallel structure" they say he has formed to topple the government.
"I don't know who planned or directed it. According to my experiences, I think that the [Gulen movement] attempted this coup," Gen Ozturk was quoted as telling prosecutors by Anadolu before appearing in court in Ankara.
"But I cannot tell who within the armed forces organised and carried it out. I have no information. I have fought against this structure."
In an interview with the BBC on Monday evening, Gulen called the attempted takeover "treason" and urged the government to produce evidence of his alleged involvement, saying Turkey was no longer really a democracy.
Earlier, the interior ministry dismissed almost 9,000 police officers as part of a purge of officials suspected of involvement in the coup attempt.
That followed the arrest of 6,000 military personnel and suspension of almost 3,000 judges over the weekend.
India and Malaysia have agreed to proactively engage to combat the menace of IS activities, an official statement said on Monday.
In his delegation level meeting with the visiting Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister Dato Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, Home Minister Rajnath Singh said: "We are concerned about the danger of enhanced activities of (IS) in democratic countries like India and Malaysia. They have started using our countries as recruiting ground and attract our youngsters with their extremist ideology."
"If we do not address it internally, and if we do not cooperate with each other through strong intelligence sharing, we will find it increasingly difficult to stop this ideology from poisoning the minds of our youngsters," he added.
The Union Home Minister proposed more regular meetings of the Joint Working Group on counter-terrorism and transnational crimes besides regular meetings under the ambit of the MoU on Cyber Security Cooperation signed during the visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Malaysia in November last year.
Singh said the MHA was studying the comments of Malaysia on the draft MoU on Combating Transnational Crime and hoped it would be signed expeditiously. He also hoped that the MoU on Transfer of Sentenced Prisoners would be fast-tracked.
He also lauded the Malaysian government for its cooperation over the last few years in apprehending some of the terrorists who were wanted in India.
"We appreciate the close cooperation between our security agencies, particularly the Malaysian Special Branch on counter-terrorism which has been working closely with the Intelligence Bureau," he added.
The two sides also discussed the issues such as Extradition Treaty and Fake Indian Currency Notes (FICN).
Challenging claims of India being the world's third largest stock-house of technicians and scientists, an expert has urged on the need for incorporating science and technology while drafting policies.
"If some underprivileged person achieves his aspiration by making it to the top position in science and technology, then it is no credit to India's long or short term policy," V. Siddhartha, an eminent policy matter expert, told IANS here on the sidelines of a lecture.
Several global reports have said that India is set to become the world's third largest stock-house of scientists and technicians.
India needs to incorporate science and technology in policy making and make it public centric, Siddhartha said at a lecture held by think-tank Society for Policy Studies (SPS) on Monday evening.
The lecture "Harnessing S&T: The Political-Economies of Technology and the Science in India's Policy making", was part of the "Changing Asia" series. It was hosted by C. Uday Bhaskar, Director, Society for Policy Studies.
"One factoid that gets repeated is that India has the third largest number of the world's scientific and technical personnel. This is a wholly incorrect. The actual rank on this account is in the teens," Siddhartha said.
A former Principal Scientific Advisor to the Union government and Secretary of the Science Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, Siddhartha pointed out that more new S&T institutions have emerged in the private sector but they still lack qualified scientists and engineers.
"Of all the post-colonial countries -- bar none -- India has the largest and densest array of scientific and technological institutions. It is for us to use this asset for purposes we can decide, and in ways that we can fashion; liberties that other post-colonial countries cannot -- and mostly dare not -- contemplate, much less take," he said.
"About 34 percent of doctors in India are not qualified, but they are treating patients," he said citing a report.
Siddhartha pointed out low annual expenditure on research and development for science and technology, that includes strategic mission agencies of atomic energy, space, and defence research, as a setback.
"While the total has never exceeded 0.9 percent of GDP in the last quarter century, the spend has been increasing monotonically -- so the availability of money, per se, has not been a significant constraint on the nation's conduct of scientific and technological activities," Siddhartha said.
"How does one create off-farm jobs for several tens of millions of youths who are unskilled and who are coming off fragmenting farms, particularly in the BIMARU states? The answer has to be a policy-goal in itself," he said.
The answer to that, he claims, comes in form of a Karnataka pilot scheme that tries to communicate essential farming information through language-independent, custom-evolved and field tested applications. He credits such success models to the growth in mobile phone usage which had exploded from below 37 million in 2001 to over one billion in 2015.
"This had helped breaking language barriers, with younger people in even non-Hindi speaking states to know, beside their mother tongue, some Bollywood Hindi," he added.
Siddhartha called for need to learn from other Asian countries, in terms of "market protection" and creation of "productive work places" as urgent goal for public policy.
The expert also pointed out the threats of "commodification" of higher education, quoting the HRD Minister's call that "IITs should be self-financed by 2030".
He argued that if this is the case, then for sure the "Of The Middle Class, By The Middle Class -- export-oriented IITs will not train young people with those needed skills and knowledge".
--IANS
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Sex offender notification
Detectives with the Flagstaff Police Department would like to make the following Level 2 (intermediate risk to the community) sex offender notification:
Martin Manuel Pena Jr., 27 is living at 2650 E. Route 66, No. 224 in Flagstaff. Pena was convicted of child molestation in Maricopa County in 2008. He is not wanted by police at this time.
Notification that Level 2 and Level 3 sex offenders are living in the community is required by Arizona law. Resident abuse of this information to threaten, intimidate or harass sex offenders will not be tolerated by the police department.
If residents have information about current criminal activity by any offender, contact the police department at 774-1414.
For more information on sex offenders in the Flagstaff area, visit the Arizona Department of Public Safety sex offender Web site at www.azsexoffender.com.
City and county residents who want to report a crime but wish to remain anonymous may call Silent Witness at 774-6111 or (877) 29-CRIME, submit a tip online at www.coconinosilentwitness.org, or text the word Flagtip along with your information to 274637 (CRIMES). Rewards of up to $2,000 are given for information that leads to an arrest.
Indian-origin MP Alok Sharma has been appointed Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office with responsibility for Asia and the Pacific in Prime Minister Theresa May's cabinet.
Following his appointment, the MP for Reading West said: "I am honoured to have been appointed by the Prime Minister as Minister for Asia & the Pacific, hugely important parts of the world that are crucial for the UK's prosperity and security.
"Britain is a truly great country and I will work tirelessly to ensure we continue to thrive and prosper on the world stage.
"I look forward to working closely with my new colleagues and my counterparts across Asia & the Pacific, with a particular focus on strengthening commercial ties, increasing investment opportunities in both directions and promoting human rights in the region," he said, according to a British High Commission statement.
Sharma will be reporting to the former Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, now the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs.
--IANS
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The Lok Sabha witnessed uproarious scenes on Tuesday after Congress floor leader Mallikarjun Kharge accused the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance of trying to "destablise" Congress-led governments in Uttarakhand and Arunachal Pradesh.
Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh said the political developments in both states were due to the "internal crisis" within the Congress party, which he likened to a boat with a hole.
Raising the issue during zero hour in the context of judgement from the Supreme Court, Kharge alleged that destabilising non-BJP governments has become "a habit" with the Narendra Modi government and added that the apex court's order should work as a "lesson" for them.
Amid protests from a number of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MPs, including Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar, who said some of the comments made by Kharge should be expunged, the Congress leader also alleged that like in Uttarakhand and Arunachal Pradesh, the Bharatiya Janata Party had tried to topple the Congress governments in Himachal Pradesh and Manipur.
Responding, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh denied that the BJP has been trying to topple the Congress party-run state governments.
"Instead of making allegations against us, they should know, since Independence if any party is singularly responsible for toppling opposition parties in the states, it is the Congress. Since Independence they (Congress party) have toppled state governments and imposed President's Rule as many as 105 times," Rajnath Singh claimed.
Rajnath said "whatever happened in Uttarakhand and Arunachal Prdesh were unfortunate" and that such developments were not good for "healthy democracy".
He, however, asserted that whatever happened in these two states was all due to "internal crisis" within the Congress party.
"We had nothing to do with that," he said and maintained that the crisis in Uttarakhand was sparked off only after nine Congress legislators stood up in the assembly and said they opposed their own government.
Similarly, he said as many as two-thirds of Congress legislators had quit the parent party and formed a separate group to form a new government in Arunachal.
Singh compared the situation of the Congress party with a boat with a hole, and said: "Jis nao mein chched hae...uska dubna taye hae (A boat with a hole is bound to sink)."
The Home Minister said in such a situation "it is pointless to blame the water for the capsizing of the boat."
--IANS
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The Lok Sabha on Tuesday urged the global community to adopt "zero tolerance policy" towards terrorism and eliminate the menace worldwide. The members also mourned the deaths due to recent terror attacks in Bangladesh, France and Saudi Arabia.
Making a detailed reference to the tragic incidents in the country and overseas in the recent past, Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan said: "These terrorist attacks are yet another tragic reminder of the need for concerted action by the international community to fight the scourge of terrorism uncompromisingly."
Referring to terror strike in Jeddah on July 4, Mahajan said: "India remains firmly committed to working closely and actively with Saudi Arabia to combat the menace of terrorism in all its forms and menifestations."
On the terror strike in Dhaka in Bangladesh, she termed it a "cowardly attack" and asserted: "We stand together with the government and people of Bangladesh in the war against terrorism."
Mahajan also referred to tragic incidents in the country, including the killing of CRPF personnel and civilians in Jammu and Kashmir and in Pulgaon in Maharashtra.
She also referred to the deaths of 96 people due to natural calamities across Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Assam, Maharashtra, Arunachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh and Odisha.
The members of the Lower House of Parliament observed silence for a while as a mark of tribute to those killed.
--IANS
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Madagascar police seized 260 baby turtles ready to be sent illicitly to Bangkok at the international airport of Ivato on Monday.
"Madagascar's police of air and borders (PAF) seized 260 radiata baby turtles at Ivato International Airport," the Chief of PAF, Commissaire Rufin Lebiria, told Xinhua by telephone.
"Two suitcases each containing 130 turtles, owned to a 41-year-old Malagasy citizen, were found out at the scanner by our elements this morning, during a normal checking at the airport," Lebiria said.
"The trafficker was a businessman. He planned to take a flight to Bangkok with Turkish Airlines when his illegal act was caught by the police," Lebiria added.
"Two weeks ago, the police already caught 119 other baby turtles at the same airport," Lebiria disclosed.
The sale of Madagascar turtles is strictly forbidden because they are classified in the category of endangered species on the Red List of International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and are listed in Annex of the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES).
--IANS
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Visiting Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Dato Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi on Tuesday called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi here.
"The Prime Minister warmly recalled his successful visit to Malaysia last year for the ASEAN and related Summits, as well as for a bilateral visit," an official statement issued here said.
Hamidi, who is also his country's Home Minister, briefed Modi on the state of bilateral cooperation, especially in the fields of counter-terrorism, cyber security and trans-national crimes, it said.
The Prime Minister reiterated his invitation to his Malaysian counterpart to visit India in the near future.
--IANS
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Malaysian children's wear brand Poney is expanding its presence in India, and has opened its latest store in Noida.
The store, the brand's third in the country, has opened doors at the Mall of India here. It will unveil its 'Poney Enfants' luxury range, a statement said.
"We want to capitalise on the denizens of NCR (national capital region) as we have got a judicious space in the mall. The concept of the store is such that the premium and the luxury range are hosted under one roof hence it is a perfect store for us," said Rajat Kapoor, Managing Director and Partner, Poney India.
Founded by Albert Tan and Madam Sharon, Poney offers supreme quality apparel for infants and children up to twelve years. All pieces are designed exclusively in Spain by Magda Sola, its Spanish Head of Design.
The brand has expanded its international presence in countries like Singapore, China, Indonesia and the UAE, among others.
--IANS
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Theresa May is set to hold her first face-to-face meetings with European leaders as British Prime Minister when she travels to Berlin and Paris later this week.
While it is usual for incoming premiers to make early visits to establish personal links with key European leaders, this week's trip will focus more on the outcome of the European Union (EU) referendum and the need to shape a new relationship between the UK and its neighbours on the continent, the Independent reported on Tuesday.
May will travel to Berlin on Wednesday where she is slated to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel and on Thursday will hold talks with French President Francois Hollande at the Elysee Palace.
This trip comes after May met Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon in Edinburgh last week.
After a 45-minute meeting, May ruled out a second referendum on Scottish independence, which Sturgeon has described as "highly likely" after Scots voted to remain in the EU while the UK as a whole voted for its exit on July 24, the Independent said.
"As far as I'm concerned, the Scottish people have had their vote, they voted in 2014 and a very clear message came through. Both the UK and the Scottish Government said they would abide by that," the daily quoted the Prime Minister as saying.
--IANS
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday condoled the death of CRPF personnel who were killed in an improvised explosive device (IED) blast set off by Maoists.
"Prime Minister Narendra Modi has expressed grief on the loss of lives of CRPF personnel in Bihar. Prime Minister has prayed for the speedy recovery of the injured and extended his condolences to the families of the martyred CRPF personnel in this hour of sadness," said an official statement.
Ten CRPF commandos belonging to its Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (CoBRA) were on Monday killed in an IED blast triggered by Maoists in the forests of Bihar's Aurangabad district.
Four Maoists were also killed in the encounter that lasted for nearly eight hours.
--IANS
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North Korea on Tuesday test-fired three short-range ballistic missiles in a show of force against the decision between South Korea and the US to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) in Seoul.
Yonhap news agency quoted South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) as saying that North Korea fired off three ballistic missiles, which were believed to have been a Scud-C type, from the western region of Hwangju in North Hwanghae province between 5.45 a.m. and 6.05 a.m.
The missiles were directed toward the East Sea, travelling about 500 to 600 km, which are a flight enough to reach the entire South Korean territory, Xinhua news agency reported.
It marked the first time since March that Pyongyang launched Scud-type missiles.
The test-launch came six days after Seoul and Washington agreed to deploy one THAAD battery to the Seongju county by the end of next year.
The North Korean military has threatened to take "physical measures" against THAAD when the deployment site is determined in response to the deployment decision.
THAAD is an advanced US missile defence system designed to shoot down missiles at a relatively high altitude of 40-150 km using a hit-to-kill technology. North Korea's short-range missiles are known to fly at a lower altitude of about 20 km incapable of being intercepted by THAAD missiles.
--IANS
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The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) on Tuesday issued notice to the Centre and the Jammu and government over the incidents of widespread violence in the aftermath of the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani.
Taking cognizance of the issue through media reports, the NHRC said that it was closely monitoring the situation in the valley.
"Expressing its utmost concern over the developments, the Commission has issued notices to the Union Home Secretary and the Chief Secretary, Government of Jammu and Kashmir, calling for reports in the matter. It has given two weeks to respond," said a statement from the commission.
The valley has seen over this month a series of violent clashes between angry protesters and the security forces, resulting in scores losing their lives and hundreds sustaining injuries.
--IANS
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The armed Kaibeto man killed by police following a foot pursuit in west Flagstaff in May was under the influence of drugs.
Verl Bedonie, 26, tested positive for methamphetamine, amphetamine and cannabinoids, according to the toxicology report released by the Coconino County Medical Examiners Office.
Previously released reports from Northern Arizona University and Flagstaff police described Bedonies unusual behavior before officers fatally shot him in the Plaza Vieja neighborhood the morning of May 23.
According to the NAU Police Department report, surveillance video from the Drury Inn, located at 300 S. Milton Road, shows Bedonie entering the hotel and then leaving three times beginning at about 5:35 a.m. One of those times, he asks the front desk clerk if the manager is in. The next time, it sounds like he asks if the front desk clerk knows the hotel owners wife. The clerk tells Bedonie the Drury Inn is owned by an out-of-state company.
It is unclear where Bedonie went for the next 90 minutes after leaving the hotel for the third time.
A university maintenance worker then saw Bedonie holding a gun in a stairwell at the adjacent High Country Conference Center, located at 201 W. Butler Ave., at approximately 7:30 a.m. that day. Investigators later learned Bedonie was suspected of stealing that 9 millimeter handgun and the vehicle he drove to Flagstaff from a family for whom he was working in Kaibeto on the Navajo Nation.
The maintenance worker warned another NAU employee who was changing lightbulbs in the main ballroom. Both men saw Bedonie with a gun in the lobby when they exited the ballroom. When one of the NAU employees said good morning to Bedonie, he responded by mumbling something about Jesus, according to the witness statement. The men said Bedonie was acting strangely and may have been intoxicated or on drugs.
The NAU employees called NAUPD using a blue light emergency phone outside the conference center approximately 7:47 a.m. Flagstaff Police Department and NAUPD officers arrived minutes later. They followed him on foot to the Drury Inn parking lot, where police body camera footage shows him pulling the weapon out of his pocket and pointing it at the officers a few feet away from civilian bystanders.
Two police officers fired their guns a total of five times but did not hit Bedonie. Officers from NAUPD and FPD followed him as he walked across South Milton Road and into the Plaza Vieja neighborhood with the gun still in his hand.
Police said Bedonie then attempted to carjack a victim near the intersection of South Park Street and West Phoenix Avenue. The driver told police Bedonie pointed the gun at him and demanded to be taken to Phoenix. An undercover FPD officer rammed the car with a large truck to stop Bedonie, who exited the car.
Bedonie then pointed the gun at officers a second time. According to information from FPD, he got off one shot before an FPD officer and an NAUPD officer fatally shot him. According to the Coconino County Medical Examiners autopsy report, Bedonie received five gunshot wounds, including two to the head. He was declared dead at the scene.
Bedonies death was the second of three fatal officer-involved shootings in the Flagstaff area this year. According to the Coconino County Sheriffs Office, deputies shot and killed 31-year-old Mark Nelson on May 20 after he pointed a high-powered rifle at them following a standoff at a home on Lumberjack Boulevard in Doney Park. Nelsons mother had called a crisis hotline saying her son was armed and suicidal. The hotline alerted law enforcement.
Donald S. Myers, 32, was shot and killed by a Flagstaff police officer this past Wednesday in front of a home on North Clear View Drive. According to FPD, Myers had pulled out a gun while fleeing from officers minutes earlier. Department officials say the officer did not realize Myers had dropped the gun before shooting him.
Editor's Note: This story has been altered to reflect that Mark Nelson's mother called a suicide crisis hotline, not law enforcement.
Seeking to put at rest certain controversies pertaining to reports that the central government has allowed "killing" of animals to protect agricultural farms, new Environment Minister on Tuesday said "no such orders" have been given by the union government.
"I want to make it clear that neither centre has given any such orders to kill animals nor the states have asked for it," Dave said replying to queries during question hour in the Lok Sabha.
However, he said wild boar, nilgai and monkeys have been placed in Schedule V of the Wildlife Protection Act that allows people to "drive them away" in specific areas.
Dave said Bihar, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh had requested to include "problematic wild animals" in schedule V in accordance with section 62 of the Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972. Accordingly, nilgai has been placed in the category in 31 and wild boar in 10 districts of Bihar.
Wild boars have been placed in Schedule V in 13 districts of Uttarkhand for a year.
The order was issued in December 2015 for Bihar and in February 2016 for Uttarakhand, he said adding a similar order was issued for Shimla in March 2016 for six months where in a species of monkey (Rhesus Maccaque) was placed in the category. Karnataka has also made requests for wild boars, he said.
Raising supplementary questions, Bangalore Rural MP DK Suresh of Congress said: "Crop damage by wild boars is pushing farmers from bad to worst condition."
He said the "menace of wild boars" is very high in the country. "Almost all the states, including Karnataka, are facing this problem," he said.
Dave clarified that with certain animals brought under Schedule V of the Wildlife Act, the states now have the right "to drive the animal (away) with a stick".
Last month, in a rare public spat over the culling of wild animals, Union Minister for Women and Child Development, Maneka Gandhi had accused the then Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar of showing a "lust for killing animals".
She also had charged that the Environment Ministry had allowed the slaughter of peacocks in Goa and elephants in West Bengal.
Javadekar, however, had said that the permissions to take action against animals were granted after requests from the states and were based on existing laws.
The government has not allowed any pharmaceutical company to increase prices of drugs beyond permissible limits, parliament was told on Tuesday.
"Few companies have given representations for increasing prices of medicines beyond permissible limits mentioning various reasons like increase in cost, tax, foreign exchange rates etc. However, no company has been given permission to increase the prices so far," Minister of Chemicals and Fertilisers Ananth Kumar told the Lok Sabha.
He said the government has brought down prices of 404 medicines under the National List of Essential Medicines, 2015 (revised schedule-I) of the Drug Price Control Order (DPOC) 2013.
The government has earlier "reduced the ceiling prices of 530 medicines as on 2/3/2016 under NLEM 2011 of DPCO 2013 (original schedule-I) on the basis of the negative wholesale price index," he said.
Schedule I of DPCO 2013 contains the national list of essential medicines.
Meanwhile, the government said earlier this month that the rapidly growing Indian pharmaceutical market is expected to grow to $55 billion by 2020 and emerge as the sixth largest globally by size.
India is the largest provider of generic drugs globally with the Indian generics accounting for 20 per cent of global exports in terms of volume.
--IANS
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The monsoon session of the Jharkhand assembly, scheduled to commence from Friday, is all set to be stormy with the opposition aiming to corner the government over a host of issues.
The key issues include law and order situation, functioning of the police, sting operation on the Rajya Sabha polls, change in the domicile policy, irregularities in execution of schemes, rights to the panchayats, and changes in the power policy.
The ruling alliance is preparing a strong defence to counter the Opposition.
Assembly Speaker Dinesh Oraon has called for an all-party meeting on Wednesday to seek cooperation of all parties in running the house smoothly.
"We would like to make sure that the session runs smoothly and it is utilised for the welfare of the people," Oraon said.
Ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's Chief Whip Radha Krishna Kishore said the government was satisfied with the performance so far and it was ready to counter all allegations of the opposition.
Leader of Opposition Hemant Soren of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha said the government has failed on every front. He said law and order in Jharkhand has collapsed.
Congress leader Sukhdeo Bhagat said his party would seek answers from the government on various issues, including law and order, domicile policy and alleged horse-trading in the Rajya Sabha polls.
"The law and order situation is pathetic, police is not under control, the power policy has been changed while no rights have been given to the pachayats," said JVM-P leader Pradeep Yadav.
The opposition could also raise the controversy involving state BJP President Tala Marandi as FIRs have been registered against him and his son Munna who allegedly married a minor girl.
--IANS
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The Reserve Bank of India Governor is appointed by the Prime Minister's Office on the Finance Minister's recommendation, parliament was told on Tuesday.
"The appointment of Governor, Reserve Bank of India is approved by Prime Minister's Office on the recommendations of Finance Minister," Minister of State for Finance Santosh Kumar Gangwar told the Rajya Sabha in a written reply.
Deputy Governors are appointed on the basis of Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC) approved guidelines, which provides that Search Committee constituted for the purpose will recommend the person for the post but the composition of the Search Committee has now been changed, he said.
"Now, a Search Committee namely, Financial Sector Regulatory Appointments Search Committee (FSRASC) has been constituted with the approval of ACC. The Committee will recommend names for appointment of Chairperson and Members of Financial Sector Regulatory Bodies including those of Governor and Deputy Governors," he said.
The query came against the backdrop of the government close to announcing a successor to RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan, whose term comes to an end on September 4 and has ruled out another one.
--IANS
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The BJP and the RSS on Tuesday hit out at the Congress after the Supreme Court hinted that Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi will have to face trial in a defamation case for his remark on Mahatma Gandhi's assassination.
The BJP said the court proceedings on Tuesday were a "slap on the Congress face".
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) publicity head Manmohan Vaidya said: "The Congress has been consistently trying to spread lies and baseless allegations against the RSS. Today's Supreme Court proceedings have exposed the Congress."
Rahul Gandhi had moved the Supreme Court for quashing of proceedings against him after RSS activist Rajesh Kunte filed a defamation case in a Maharashtra court over Rahul's accusation that the RSS had assassinated Father of the Nation.
"The Congress has again been exposed for spreading falsehood against the RSS. The court proceedings are a big slap on its face," BJP national secretary Srikant Sharma told IANS.
"If Rahul Gandhi has little bit shame left in him, he should apologise for his remark," Sharma said.
"There has been a trend in the Congress to insult nationalist forces and glorify terrorists. This is the reason they are disappearing from the political map of the country," he said.
Sharma asked Rahul Gandhi to read history to educate himself on the RSS and its activities.
"The RSS was invited to join the Republic Day parade at Rajpath by the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru," the BJP leader said.
The Congress said on Tuesday that Rahul Gandhi will not apologise for his remark against the RSS.
The opposition party said it will prove in court the connection Mahatma Gandhi's assassin Nathuram Godse had with the RSS, saying "history can neither be changed nor rewritten".
--IANS
bns/tsb/vt
The Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) on Tuesday rejected a possible ban on all Russian athletes from the Rio Olympics following a damning report from World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) experts.
WADA's independent commission, led by Richard McLaren, a Canadian law professor, released on Monday a report that said the Russian Ministry of Sport manipulated test results to cover up the use of performance-enhancing drugs by the country's athletes, reports Efe.
The ROC "wholeheartedly" disagreed with McLaren, the committee said in a statement.
McLaren had called a blanket ban on Russian athletes from the Rio Games an "unpleasant consequence" of the charges laid out in his report.
The report said that the Russian Ministry of Sport, in collusion with the Federal Security Service (FSB, former KGB), had enabled its Winter Olympics athletes to cheat anti-doping tests by swapping tainted urine samples with clean ones.
The ROC said that the charges put forward in the McLaren report were "so serious as to require a full investigation with the participation of all parties involved."
The body added that it was "ready to provide full assistance" in the zero-tolerance fight against doping, and "communicate, where appropriate, with any international organisations."
The committee also questioned the fact that the charges had been built solely on the statements of Grigory Rochenkov, the former head of Moscow's anti-doping laboratory who spoke out about the state-dictated plot in an interview with the "New York Times" in May.
The charges, according to the ROC, are "only based on testimony from a person located at the centre of the criminal scheme he created", which "endangers not only the career and the fate of many honest athletes, but also the integrity of the international Olympic movement."
The executive board of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is set to meet on Tuesday via teleconference to study possible sanctions for Russia following the McLaren report's findings.
"Those who throughout their careers, thanks to persistent training, talent and willpower strive to realise their Olympic dream, do not have to depend on unfounded, unsubstantiated accusations and criminal acts of individuals," the ROC's statement said.
The investigation results were a shocking and unprecedented attack on the integrity of sport and on the Olympic Games, IOC president Thomas Bach said on Monday.
"Therefore, the IOC will not hesitate to take the toughest sanctions available against any individual or organisation implicated," Bach added.
--IANS
tri/bg
The Supreme Court on Tuesday issued notice to the central government and the Election Commission on a plea that candidates in the election fray should disclose sources of their income and if they had any stakes in entities having business transactions with the government.
A bench headed by Justice J.Chelameswar issued notice on a plea by a Lucknow-based NGO Lok Prahari seeking inclusion of a column in the nomination form seeking the details of the sources of income on the basis of which they have come to possess their assets.
The court was moved by the NGO's general secretary S.N.Shukla, who is a retired bureaucrat.
While dealing with the PIL by the NGO, the court, in the course of the previous hearing on July 2, had said that it would examine if lawmakers could have stakes in companies having business interest with the government.
Telling Shukla that it was a cause of worry that people in the legislature have contracts in the government, the court had, in an apparent reference to beleaguered liquor baron Vijay Mallya, said: "People borrow crores of rupees, become MPs and then fly away when things go wrong."
Shukla through his PIL has told the court that candidates while filing their nomination papers were disclosing their assets, assets of their spouse, children and other dependents but not the sources of income by which they have come to possess them.
To buttress his point that some of the law makers were thriving on easy money, he said of the 542 Lok Sabha members, 113 have described their profession as housewife, social workers, social service and politics.
These can't be and should not be sources of getting money but in the case of 12 of them, their assets have increased more than fivefold, Shukla told the court.
He said that for such category of lawmakers, membership of legislatures is in not for public service but self-service.
--IANS
pk/vd
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday asked the BJP parliamentarians to take out a 'Tiranga Yatra' in their constituencies to mark the 70th Independence Day and to inform the people about 70 achievements of the government.
Addressing the BJP's parliamentary party meeting on Tuesday, Modi also urged the MPs to "work hard and study" to raise the level of discourse in parliament, according to informed sources.
They said Modi told the MPs to take out a 'Tiranga Yatra' in their constituencies between August 15 and 22 to mark the 70th anniversary of India's Independence.
"The MPs were asked to hold a yatra in their constituencies carrying an eight-foot tall flag. He also told them to convey to the people about 70 achievements of the government," said a source.
Modi described as successful the Vikas Parva programme, which was organised to mark the completion of two years of National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government at the Centre.
The prime minister is reported to have said that due to development-oriented initiatives, people responded enthusiastically to programmes across the country.
"During the meeting, a discussion was held on the 70th Independence Day celebrations," Information and Broadcasting Minister Venkaiah Naidu told reporters.
"The government has worked out the programme scheduled to be organised on the day and it will be finalised only after consultations with BJP President Amit Shah and others," Naidu added.
At the meeting, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj informed the parliamentarians about Prime Minister's recent foreign visits, said the source.
--IANS
bns-sid/kb/vt
Prime Minister on Tuesday asked BJP parliamentarians to take out 'Tiranga Yatras' in their constituencies to mark India's 70th Independence Day and inform people about 70 achievements of his government.
Addressing the Bharatiya Janata Party's parliamentary party meeting, Modi said the 'Tiranga Yatras' (Tricolour Marches) should be held between August 15 and 22, according to informed sources.
"The MPs were asked to hold yatras on bikes while carrying Tricolours hoisted on eight-foot tall masts," said a source.
Modi urged the MPs to "work hard and study" to raise the level of discourse in parliament.
"To revive the feelings of patriotism among the youth and to make them aware of the sacrifices of our heroes, organise various programmes in your constituencies," Modi told the MPs.
Information and Broadcasting Minister M. Venkaiah Naidu told reporters later that during the meeting, a discussion was held on celebrating India's 70th Independence Day.
"The government has worked out a programme schedule for the day. It will be finalised after consultations with Bharatiya Janata Party President Amit Shah and others," Naidu said.
Modi described as successful the 'Vikas Parva' programme, organised to mark the completion of two years of the Democratic Alliance (NDA) government at the Centre.
The Prime Minister is reported to have said that due to development-oriented initiatives, people responded enthusiastically to government programmes across the country.
The BJP has also constituted an eight-member committee of Ministers of State to chalk out programmes to celebrate the 100th birth anniversary of Bharatiya Jana Sangh founder-leader Deen Dayal Upadhyay on September 25. Jana Sangh was the forerunner of the Bharatiya Janata Party.
After finalising the draft of the programmes, the committee will submit it to Naidu and Minister for External Affairs Sushma Swaraj.
At the meeting, Sushma Swaraj told the parliamentarians about the Prime Minister's recent foreign visits, said the sources.
At least half a dozen persons, including three police officials, were injured in here on Tuesday night when an angry mob pelted stones on them, police said.
According to police, the incident took place in Vineet Khand of the posh Gomtinagar area after some people began a protest with regards to holding of a religious programme at a community park.
"There was some tension between two communities over holding of a religious programme at Pragya park on Sunday. Today the anger manifested itself in the stone pelting incident," an official told IANS. Following the violence, a large contingent of police personnel was rushed to the spot.
Circle Officer (CO) Mohanlalganj, CO Gomtinagar, a sub-divisional magistrate (SDM) and the additional city magistrate (ACM) sustained minor injuries in the stone-pelting. District Magistrate Raj Shekhar and SSP Manjil Saini are on the spot to control escalation of violence, a home department official said.
Seven persons, including two women, have been arrested for their role in the violence. The arrested persons include a BJP youth wing leader and a BJP corporator.
"We are maintaining vigil, situation is tense but under control. Tomorrow (Wednesday) a peace committee meeting of locals will be held to normalise things," an official told IANS. Even late at night, tension still prevailed in the area.
--IANS
md/vd
Flagstaffs own Joy Staveley is one of 28 at large delegates from Arizona attending the Republican Convention in Cleveland this week. She joins Andrea and Dwight Kadar from Sedona who are delegates to the convention for Arizonas Firstt Congressional District.
Staveley said this is the first Republican Convention shes attended. She is concerned about some trouble from protesters but is not concerned about her safety.
She said in a text message Monday that she would reluctantly vote for Trump because I cannot support Hillary.
Staveley said she found Clinton untrustworthy and dishonest and felt Clinton would increase the size of government along with government regulations and welfare. She also felt that Clinton was a terrible Secretary of State.
She would rather take my chances with an unknown (Trump) than with Hillary, she said.
Staveley wasnt enamored with Trump, either. She said she didnt like the way he communicated, but could get past that. What she had the most trouble with was the liberal values Trump had in the past and his stance on tariffs.
Her preferred candidate is Marco Rubio, but he did not win the primary in Arizona.
Arizona law requires delegates from both political parties to vote for the candidate who won the state party primary until the candidate is nominated at the national convention, the candidate releases them from their pledge, the candidate withdraws from the race or until one convention nominating ballot has been taken. After that, Arizona delegates are free to vote for whomever they choose. The Arizona Republican Party bylaws also require delegates to vote for the primary winner. Staveley said she would follow both the state and party rules.
Even though there are some things that she doesnt like about Trump, Staveley thought he would be good for business, would reduce government regulation and limit the size of government and would support Second Amendment rights. He would replace the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, with something that worked. She also liked Trumps list of Supreme Court nominees. She felt they strongly supported the U.S. Constitution.
I think he will select highly qualified people to advise him, Staveley said.
Staveley is also working her way through the partys platform for this years election. She said shes only read parts of the platform and couldnt comment on it just yet.
Staveley is also one of two Arizona delegates asked to sit on the conventions Credential Committee. The committee hears appeals from the Contest Committee, a subcommittee to the Credential Committee. She said working on the committee has been very interesting.
The Contest Committee hears appeals from delegates whose credentials have been challenged at the state level. Most of the time, the problem is taken care of at the state level, but sometimes it makes it all the way to the convention level, she said.
Staveley said her committee heard two cases last week, one from a Washington, D.C. and one from Colorado. The D.C. delegate contested being removed from her delegation because she allegedly didnt live within the boundaries of the district. Staveley said her committee found that the woman lived in Virginia and not D.C. and upheld the decision to remove the woman from the delegation.
They also heard a case from Colorado, but the election of delegates there was such a mess that the committee couldnt come up with an equitable solution and let the state decision stand, she said.
The Committee also briefly considered taking but denied an appeal from Lori Hack, a woman who was named as an Arizona delegate and then removed from the delegation.
Hack allegedly posted a comment to Facebook that she would not vote for Trump on the first ballot. Arizona Republican Chairman Robert Graham removed her credentials based on her statements and appointed an alternate.
Hack said she would try to claim her credentials at the national convention anyway. She appealed to Staveleys committee Monday morning, but the committee rejected her request. It found that Hack should have appealed to the Contest Committee a month ago.
The Turkish parliament will launch a comprehensive probe into the July 15 coup attempt, a leader said on Tuesday.
"They attacked so many places but parliament was on the top of their list," Xinhua news agency quoted Naci Bostanci, deputy leader of the parliamentary group of the Justice and Development Party, as saying.
He also said that all the political parties represented in parliament submitted their own motions for establishing an investigation committee.
"We'll make the necessary talks next week and then form the committee," Bostanci said.
--IANS
sm/py/dg
At least two Turkish pilots involved in the downing of a Russian jet in November last year are in custody over the July 15 coup attempt, an official has said.
"Two pilots who were part of the operation to down the Russian Su-24 in November 2015 are in custody," Xinhua news agency quoted a Turkish official as saying on Monday, adding that they were detained for being part of the coup attempt which left at least 232 people dead and over 2,000 injured.
The downing of the fighter jet on the Syrian border sparked an unprecedented diplomatic crisis between Turkey and Russia, which ended last month when the two countries agreed to restore ties.
Russian President Vladimir Putin called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on July 17, condemning the attempted coup and hoping for stability in the country.
The two Presidents are expected to meet in the first week of August, in their first face-to-face meeting since the rapprochement.
Turkey Prime Minister Binali Yildirim on Monday said more than 7,500 people were detained over the coup attempt.
--IANS
sm/py/dg
Veteran Maoist spokesperson Gour Chakraborty, who was behind bars since his arrest in 2009, was on Tuesday acquitted by a city court here.
The septuagenarian Chakraborty was arrested on June 23, 2009, a day after the central government banned the radical left-wing Communist Party of India-Maoist
He was charged with several offences including under section 20 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, which provides punishment for being member of terrorist gang or organisation and carries a maximum punishment of life imprisonment.
"The court of city Sessions Judge Kum Kum Singha acquitted Chakraborty of all the charges. The prosecution could not substantiate the charges brought against Chakraborty, and court acquitted him," said Chakraborty's counsel S. Roy.
The verdict was cheered by Chakraborty's wife Mukta Keshi and several rights activists present at the court premises.
"I always had hoped of his release someday and that today is that day," she said.
Hailing the verdict, Association for Protection of Democratic Rights (APDR), a rights organisation demanded release of several political prisoners including pro-Maoist tribal group Peoples' Committee against Police Atrocities (PCAPA) convener Chhatradhar Mahato who are now in various West Bengal jails.
"The charges under UAPA against people like Mahato and others are false and baseless and someday the courts will declare that. The Mamata Banerjee government had declared releasing all the political prisoners who have been languishing in jails for long. We demand their unconditional release," APDR secretary Ranjit Sur said.
Chakraborty became a spokesperson of the CPI-Maoist in 2008 and was active in the Lalgarh movement. He played a crucial role in uniting urban support bases in favour of the tribal upsurge in Jangalmahal- the three Left Wing Extremism (LWE) hit districts of Bankura, Purulia and West Midnapore.
Lalgarh, 200 km west of Kolkata, in West Midnapore district, was on the boil for over two years since November 2, 2008, when a landmine exploded on the route of the convoy of then state Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and Union Ministers Ram Vilas Paswan and Jitin Prasada.
Complaining of police atrocities after the blast, angry tribals egged on by the Maoists, launched an agitation against the Left Front government of the day, virtually cutting off the area from the rest of the district.
The agitators torched LF spearhead CPI-M offices, drove away its supporters and forced police to leave, thereby establishing a virtual free zone.
In June 2009, joint forces comprising central paramilitary troopers and crack teams of state police reclaimed the areas and conducted intense operations to flush out the left wing ultras.
The movement gradually died down after the widespread arrests and deaths in gunfights.
--IANS
and/vd
The Congress on Tuesday asserted that it will prove in court the connection Mahatma Gandhi's assassin had with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), saying "history can neither be changed nor rewritten".
"If it comes to trial then we are ready to give evidence to the court, as history cannot be changed, cannot be rewritten, and cannot be denied just because it does not suit the current government," Congress spokeswoman Priyanka Chaturvedi told IANS over the phone.
"Why should one apologise? The Supreme Court has made an observation and it is not the final verdict," Chaturvedi said.
"If we have to go to trial to prove Nathu Ram Godse's connection with the RSS, we will do it by providing evidence to the court. There have been been various records that prove he was connected with the RSS," she said.
Godse was tried and convicted for assassinating Mahatma Gandhi on January 30, 1948. He was executed on November 15, 1949.
Chaturvedi said "history has witnessed Godse's connection with the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha".
The Supreme Court on Tuesday indicated that Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi would have to face trial in a defamation case filed by an RSS activist for accusing the organisation of killing Mahatma Gandhi 68 years ago.
According to party sources, Rahul Gandhi is ready to face trial instead of apologising for the remarks in question that he reportedly made while campaigning in Maharashtra for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
Chaturvedi said her party respects the observation made by the apex court.
She said the RSS had no role to play in the struggle to get independence from British rule.
"They had apologised to the British and stayed away from the independence movement."
"Saradar Vallabhbhai Patel had banned the RSS. And it is also known what Patel had to say about Hindu Mahasabha and RSS. The ban was revoked by Patel only after they agreed to remain a cultural organisation instead of becoming a political entity," she said.
Patel was the first home minister of independent India.
--IANS
aks/kb/vm
Why do Russians rarely smile or why lighting agarbattis (incense sticks) is not welcome in hotel rooms in Moscow or St. Petersburg?
Keen on upping tourists footfalls to Russia, a specially published do's and dont's handbook has attempted to decode such socio-cultural mysteries for Indians travelling to Russia.
"Smiling to strangers is not a part of Russian culture. Russians are polite and professional, and they do smile wholeheartedly after they come to know you -- which often takes time," says the booklet which was released last week by the Mumbai-based Russian Information Centre, based on the inputs of the Consulate General of Russian Federation.
"Please do not light up your favourite agarbatti in the hotel room. This is an absolute no-no because of the other International tourists who complain about the fragrances or have allergies to strong fragrances. Do pray, but hold the agarbatti for a few days," the handbook says.
Speaking to IANS, the Centre's head Ekaterina Belyakova said that the list of do's and don'ts were evolved, based on cultural misunderstandings which were logged with the organisation over the last couple of years.
"We've tried to address these in this handbook. We felt warning people about some cultural traditions, social norms and customs, sentiments, even tastes, especially when it comes to food, is very important," Belyakova said.
The handbook also delves deep into the Russian psyche, while it accounts for why Russians overtly dig in their heels and defend beliefs related to Russian history and culture.
"Revolution and two world wars, dramatic political changes of the past century have a clear bearing on every Russian's mind. Hence, Russian people think very deep while they generally look forward to a secure and prosperous future. For the same reasons, Russians can be protective about their culture, language and the country -- sometimes to the point of fiercely defending their beliefs," the advisory says.
Food habits account for a biggish chunk of the handbook. While Russians and Indians love their 'chai' (Russians like it without milk, it says), the handbook advises Indian tourists to keep their spices handy and fret less about availability of Indian food in major Russian cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg.
"Russian food contains almost no tropical spices and is generally prepared with less salt... If you are an Indian spice lover, do carry the needful quantity of Indian pepper or garam masala or whatever that fancies your taste buds. These spices are not easily available (and) can be very costly," it says.
"Many dishes like borsch are quite like Indian soups and can be had with or without meat; other dishes common are cutlets, puffs... Cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg have adequate number of good quality, pure Indian restaurants, with vegetarian food being normally served," the handbook further advises.
The advisory also draws parallels between Russia and other Western European countries vis-a-vis the culture of tipping and pricing of water, which is often more expensive than beer.
"Drinking water is not free anywhere, like in other parts of Europe. You will have to buy small quantities which is expensive or stock up five-litre cans available in product shops or hyper markets," it says, adding that while Russia has a liberal drinking regime, boozing on the country's streets is banned.
The do's and don'ts exercise also advises on how best to deal with Russian immigration officials, most of whom are not well versed in English, a handicap which sometimes leads to unsavoury episodes at immigration check-points.
"They may ask you to wait by using sign language. There is no reason for panicking or having an ego about it... Please do not raise your voice or argue unduly or take any pictures as they are strictly prohibited," the advisory states.
Out of 18 million Indian outbound tourists, nearly 30,000 visit Russia annually and with our outbound tourism growing faster than China, the South Asian giant is an obvious target for Russian tourism promoters, says Paresh Navani, managing partner of the Russian Information Centre.
"Russia has a lot to offer for Indian tourists, and it is not only beautiful nature or cultural heritage, but the warmth of Russian 'chai' and Russian people too," Navani assures.
(Mayabhushan Nagvenkar can be contacted at mayabhushan.n@ians.in)
--IANS
maya/bim/ky
Can a motor car or computer be classified under "furniture and fixtures" and rent under "rates and taxes"? The formats of balance sheet and income and expenditure account, prescribed under Schedules VIII and IX of The Bombay Public Trust Act, say they ought to be classified as such!
These are just two instances. There are more such blunders, which, not only the charity commissioner's office, but also the auditor's insists on following.
In the wake of Pakistan's call to observe 'black day' on July 20 over the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani, the on Tuesday threw light on Islamabad's allegations post the terrorist attack on the Pathankot airbase and advised the BJP-led NDA government to change its foreign policy in dealing with the Asian neighbour.
leader P L Punia asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to recapitulate his assertions during campaigning for the 2014 Lok Sabha polls as to what kind of attitude India should keep towards Pakistan.
"The Pakistan team which came here, on returning back to Pakistan said India didn't give them any evidences and accused India of carrying out the attack. It seems we are bowing down in front of Pakistan and they are giving their replies with terrorism and by observing 'black day'. So, there is need to bring change in our policies with Pakistan," Punia told ANI.
Punia alleged that Pakistan is a hub of terrorism, adding the entire world is aware about it.
"Pakistan itself has suffered for it. It has faced terror activities as well. Regular firing and bomb blasts take place there. In spite of the deaths of so many innocent lives, Pakistan is not budging from carrying out terrorist activities," Punia said.
"Although Prime Minister Narendra Modi visits Lahore to greet Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on his birthday, the reply we get is the attack on Pathankot airbase. Their team is being called here, which includes ISI and the army. When the time came for the NIA team to visit Pakistan then they refused," he added.
Meanwhile, the curfew imposed in the valley in wake of the protest continued for the eleventh consecutive day on Tuesday.
The incidents of violence continue to crop up despite the Centre and Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti urging the people to maintain calm and cooperate with the state government to restore peace in the valley.
Curfew and restrictions continue across Kashmir. Two civilians were killed in retaliatory firing last evening after locals clashed with armed forced in Qazigund area of South Kashmir.
With this, the death toll of civilians has reached around 40.
Parliamentary party meetings a joint meeting of all members of Parliament (MPs) from a party held at the beginning of the session are usually anodyne affairs. When it was in power, the Congress Parliamentary Party (CPP) used to be invariably addressed by Sonia Gandhi, who would read out a prepared speech that would then be dutifully circulated to reporters.
Another round of monsoon storms is forecast to move into northern Arizona today.
The National Weather Service has issued a hazardous weather outlook for much of northern Arizona, including Coconino County. Scattered showers are expected across the region, with a few stronger storms forecast to bring heavy downpours and wind gusts up to 40 miles per hour.
Thunderstorm activity is forecast to continue at about the same level through Thursday. The biggest concern will be localized flooding.
In the Flagstaff area, rain and thunderstorms are likely after 11 a.m. The chance for showers will taper off overnight but is expected to pick back up Wednesday afternoon. Drier weather is forecast for Friday, with only a slight chance of showers through the weekend.
A gang of cheats including two Nigerians has been arrested for allegedly duping a retired bank manager to the tune of Rs 1.89 crore through a social networking site, police said today.
Bharat Bhushan Kaul complained to the police that he paid Rs 1.89 crore in instalments to the accused who had promised him huge profits in a business of seeds that could be used by foreign companies in manufacturing medicines for diseases like AIDS and Parkinson's, said Pushpendra Kumar, DCP (West).
Ikuoma Vitalis and Prince Bin Noka, both natives of Nigeria, were arrested along with their Indian accomplices Rajesh Khanna and Dalip Kumar, said the officer.
Police recovered several ATM cards, laptops, mobile phones and the record of SMSs which they sent to people they had duped earlier, various receipts of ATM transactions and other documents related to money transactions from their possession.
Kaul said in his complaint that he befriended Amy Bell through Facebook who then introduced him to another person claiming himself to be Dr Rachel Green from a pharmaceutical firm based in Portugal. Green offered him business of natural seeds used in manufacturing of AIDS and Parkinson's diseases.
The victim deposited Rs 1.8 crore in the accounts provided by the accused to become a business partner in supplying the seeds to foreign countries, Kumar added.
Taiwanese media reports say 26 people were killed after a tour bus burst into flames on a busy highway.
The official Central News Agency says the accident took place shortly after noon today on the No 2 national highway in Taoyuan county, south of the capital, Taipei.
Media reports said those aboard were tourists from China, but officials have not confirmed that.
CNA and reported that the bus apparently smashed into a roadside barrier and caught fire. Photos from the scene showed flames and thick black smoke pouring from the cab of the bus.
Taoyuan fire department official Zeng Hao said by phone that the total number of dead and injured was still being compiled.
Three persons have been arrested in connection with a case of alleged gangrape of a 21-year-old Dalit woman, Haryana police said today.
The victim, a college student, was allegedly raped by five persons in Rohtak district on July 13. This is said to be a repeat offence on the woman with two of the accused also involved in the first case of gangrape three years ago in Bhiwani, Haryana DGP KP Singh told reporters here today.
In the latest incident, two of the accused in the Bhiwani case, who are out on bail, allegedly raped her again, along with three other men.
"We have arrested three persons. One more who has been named (as an accused) will be arrested soon. As for the fifth accused, his address is not complete. As soon as we ascertain the address, we will apprehend him," said the DGP, adding that stringent action will be taken against the accused as per law.
Singh said doctors of a Rohtak hospital, where the woman is admitted, have not ruled out the possibility of rape.
"We are treating it as a case of gangrape as per the woman's statement. We will arrest all the accused, get her statement recorded under section 164, CrPC and submit the challan before the court," he added.
Asked about some of the accused reportedly producing CCTV footage to show they were not in Rohtak on the day of the incident, the DGP said, "At the moment, we are investigating the case as that of a gangrape."
Singh confirmed that the victim has lodged a police complaint regarding the horrific incident.
"She was found by the police at Sukhpora Chowk in an inebriated state on July 13. In her statement, she said she was gangraped by five persons who have been named in the FIR. Police lodged a case, took her to PGIMS, Rohtak, recorded her statement and got her medically examined," he said, adding that the police had immediately launched raids and inspected the scene of crime.
Talking about the earlier rape case in Bhiwani in 2013, Singh said the victim had first alleged that she was kidnapped by five boys who took her to Chandigarh.
A case was lodged, the accused were taken into custody but at the time of recording her statement under section 164, CrPC, the victim told the magistrate that she had willingly gone to Chandigarh with the boys, he said.
"A few days later, she approached the police saying she wanted to get her statement recorded under section 164, CrPC again," said the DGP, adding that in the second statement before the magistrate, she alleged gangrape by five persons.
The police took cognizance, arrested two persons and submitted challans against them but could not find enough evidence against the rest of the three accused, he said.
Subsequently, the woman's family approached the Sessions
Court under section 319, CrPC and urged it to name the other three as accused in the case and issue summonses to them.
"However, the court rejected the application and the woman's family went to the High Court which is due to hear the petition today itself," said Singh.
"Meanwhile, the Rohtak incident (in Rohtak) has been reported and we are looking into it," he added.
According to the police, the victim was found lying in an inebriated condition near Sukhpura Chowk in Rohtak on July 13.
On July 14, a case was registered at a women's police station under various sections of the IPC and the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act against Amit, Jagmohan, Sandeep, Mausam and Akash for kidnapping and gangrape on the basis of the woman's statement.
Investigations revealed that an FIR for kidnapping of the woman was lodged by her relatives at Bhiwani in October, 2013. In that case, police had challaned Amit and Jagmohan who got bail from the court subsequently.
"In the meantime, the present case was registered by the woman against five persons, including Amit and Jagmohan, which is being investigated by a special team. Three of the five accused -- Amit, Jagmohan and Sandeep -- have been arrested. Police have approached the victim to get her statement recorded under section 164, CrPC before the Judicial Magistrate," said a release.
Earlier, the woman's family had alleged that they were threatened by the accused in the Bhiwani case to withdraw the complaint, and as a result, they were forced to shift to Rohtak.
They had told the police that the victim had gone to college on July 13 but did not return. At night, she was found by the police lying unconscious near Sukhpura Chowk with her clothes torn after which she was rushed to Rohtak Civil Hospital.
The victim had told the police that the accused bundled her into a car, drugged her and took turns to rape while she was unconscious.
(REOPENS DES50)
Asked if the woman was reluctant to give her statement, the DGP said, "Her mother is saying she is unfit to give a statement but the doctor has said she is fit for it. We are trying to get the Duty Magistrate in Rohtak to record the statement in the hospital itself."
He said the number of rape cases registered by Haryana police until June 30, this year was similar to the number during the corresponding period last year.
"The number of rape cases is the same as that of last year which is around 520. In the last 10 years, rape cases have risen by seven per cent every year, but in the last two years, it has been static," said Singh.
As for cases of kidnapping of women, there has been a three-per cent drop. These cases had been growing by 32 per cent every year over the last 10 years, the DGP said, adding that eveteasing cases have also witnessed a drop in numbers.
Three persons were today killed when a truck rammed into a stationary truck in Phoolpur area here, police said.
Bheem (40) and Lallan (60), both fruit traders, died in the mishap near Khanjahanpur, Superintendent of Police Ajay Sahni said.
Raj Kumar Sonker, who sustained serious injuries, succumbed while being taken to Varanasi for treatment, he said.
The SP said bodies have been sent for postmortem.
Five members of a highway-robbers gang were arrested for allegedly looting groceries worth Rs 30 lakh from a truck on the outer ring road in northwest Delhi's Madhuban Chowk area, police said today.
Yadram, Raj Kumar, Gaffar Ali, Brijpal and Gajender were caught from Okhla Industrial Area in Tughlaqabad by a team of Crime Branch while trying to dispose of the looted goods, said Ravindra Yadav, Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime Branch).
They had looted the truck loaded with teabags, fruit jellies and other grocery items worth Rs 30 lakh by blocking it with a car and a delivery van in the wee hours of July 12.
A case was registered under relevant provisions of the IPC in this connection at the Maurya Enclave police station.
The gang was also involved in similar robberies involving goods trucks plying in Ghaziabad and Hapur, the officer added.
Six criminals have been arrested
and 80 live cartridges and Rs 43,000 in cash were seized from them in the district by a joint team of police and anti-terrorist squad, officials said today.
Following a tip-off, the team arrested Islamuddin, Nasruddin, Bhanupratap, Raghuveer, Ramchandra and Ajay Pratap yesterday.
Eighty live cartridges, Rs 43,000 in cash, a motorcycle and an SUV were recovered from their possession, police said.
Various criminal cases, including smuggling of arms, are pending against them at different police stations. The accused are being interrogated, police said.
A total of 69 incidents of Naxal violence and killing of 33 security forces personnel and civilians were reported from the 10 Left wing extremism-hit states of the country in the first six months of this year, Lok Sabha was informed today.
The maximum incidents at 53 and deaths (17 security men and 2 civilians) were reported from Chhattisgarh between January 1 and June 30, Minister of State for Home Hansraj G Ahir said in written reply.
Chhattisgarh, in number of incidents, was followed by Jharkhand (6), Maharashtra (5) and Odisha (2). Bihar, where 10 CRPF commandos were killed yesterday in a similar ambush, accounted for only one incident, death of one security personnel and injuries to two, during the said period.
While only one Naxal was reported to be killed during this period in all the LWE-affected states, a total of 1,006 were arrested.
Sixty security men were injured during the said period in the ten Naxal-violence affected states, the data said.
It data said a total of 118 such incidents were reported last year, slightly less than the corresponding figure of 155 in 2014. A total of 35 security personnel and civilians were killed last year as compared to 96 in 2014.
The Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) today arrested the Additional Chief Engineer of Public Health Engineering Department for allegedly taking a bribe of Rs five lakh here.
Subodh Jain had allegedly demanded the bribe from a company which worked with the government on various projects related to water supply for allowing it to work smoothly, timely clearance of bills, budget allocation without any problem etc., ADG (ACB) Alok Tripathi said.
Two representatives of the company gave Rs five lakh to Jain and Rs 15 lakh to Superintendent Engineer of Sawai Madhopur Udaibhanu Maheshwari last evening under the surveillance of ACB sleuths, he said.
Jain was arrested and the money recovered from him today while Udaibhanu was absconding, he added.
Another Rs 10 lakh was to be given to Chief Engineer (Special Projects) RK Meena who was being questioned, said the ADG.
ACB sleuths have launched a search operation at the residences of all the three accused, he said.
Afghanistan today invited Indian businesses to invest in its agriculture sector, saying it offers great opportunities in the fields of manufacturing, processing, packaging and marketing of farm products.
Addressing a two-day conference and exhibition 'Made in Afghanistan', the country's Deputy Minister for Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock, Abdul Qadeer Jawad said that the country's farm production and exports are rising.
"Rebuilding trade relationships and expanding export markets for Afghan products are critical for Afghanistan job creation, capital flows and overall stability," Jawad said.
Stating that Afghanistan would formally become the 164th member of the WTO on July 29, Jawad said his government is committed to produce agri-products consistent with WTO norms.
Afghanistan is looking for potential investors in the areas of agriculture manufacturing and processing, packaging, trading and marketing, he added.
Jawad said the bilateral trade between India and Afghanistan stood at USD 684 million in 2014-15 and the same is expected to rise with improvement in transit system after the development of Chabahar port.
India's export to Afghanistan stood at USD 422 million while imports were to the tune of USD 262 million in 2014-15.
"We export dry fruits, fresh fruits and carpets among others to India," Jawad said, adding that Afghanistan's agri exports could rise by 10 per cent this year.
Top export destination for Afghanistan are Pakistan and India followed by China, Iran and Turkey, he said.
Speaking at the event, External Affairs Ministry Secretary (Economic Relations) Amar Sinha also asked Indian corporates to invest in Afghanistan despite security issues.
Sinha said there was a need to shift from aid to trade- based development in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan Ambassador to India Shaida Mohammad Abdali talked about strategic partnership between the two countries and help extended by India in rebuilding Afghanistan.
Terming Chabahar agreement as a game changer for the entire region, he asked investors to look for investment in this port project in southern Iran.
After widespread criticism from various quarters, including Congress-led UDF and BJP, eminent lawyer M K Damodaran today decided not to take up the post of Legal Advisor of Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan.
The appointment by the 8-week-old CPI(M)-led LDF government had triggered a row after Damodaran appeared for controversial lottery baron Santiago Martin and some quarry owners in different cases in the High Court recently.
Hitting out at the government, the opposition had also pointed that Damodaran, a former Advocate General, cannot appear for cases which went against the state's interest when he serves as the Legal Advisor of the Chief Minister.
The CPI, the second largest partner in the LDF, had also reportedly expressed reservations over the appointment.
Vijayan had defended Damodaran in the assembly when the issue was raised by the Opposition and said he had been appointed without any remuneration and there was no bar on him to taking up any cases.
In a bid to put a cap on the controversy, Damodaran today informed a division bench headed by Acting Chief Justice of the High Court Thothathil B Radhakrishnan his decision not to accept the post.
The decision was made known while the court was hearing a petition filed by BJP state President, Kummanam Rajasekharan, challenging his appointment.
Reacting to the development, KPCC President V M Sudheeran said it was a setback to the Chief Minister, who had justified the appointment throughout.
The government had to back off from the decision following people's protest, Sudheeran added.
In a statement here, Rajasekharan said government was forced to retract from its decision after government realised that the appointment was 'unconstitutional'.
"It is not enough that Damodaran informs the court that he is not assuming the charge. The government should withdraw the appointment order issued violating rules", Rajasekharan added.
The government had on June 9 appointed Damodaran as the Legal Advisor, with the rank of Principal Secretary.
In his petition, Rajasekharan had alleged that the government had a 'hidden agenda' in the appointment of Damodaran as the Legal Advisor.
The following editorial appeared in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday, July 17:
In tapping Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate, Donald J. Trump has come up with the ultimate balanced ticket. Unfortunately, Pence balances the ticket by having experience in government and an even temperament. That only underlines the fact that Trump spectacularly lacks both qualities.
Before becoming governor in 2013, Pence served more than a decade in the U.S. House, where he compiled a conservative voting record on both fiscal and social issues. He has been comparably conservative as governor though some Christian conservatives were disappointed that, after signing a religious-freedom bill they sought, he later approved an amendment saying that the law couldnt be used to discriminate against gays and lesbians.
Pence has been more supportive of free-trade agreements than Trump. He also is on record as opposing Trumps proposal for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the U.S. an idea Pence rightly called offensive and unconstitutional. But so do many Republicans, including Speaker of the House Paul D. Ryan.
Whatever one thinks of Pences views and we find many of them narrow-minded and troubling, such as his skepticism about climate change and his attacks on abortion rights he possesses the sort of resume that Americans traditionally expect in their presidents and vice presidents
Yet, far from compensating for Trumps deficiencies, Pences credentials bring them into sharper and more frightening relief. Even if Pence were the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln, his presence on the ticket wont alter the fact that the Republican candidate for president is a shallow self-promoter who traffics in bigotry and bluster.
Far from compensating for Trumps deficiencies, Pences credentials bring them into sharper and more frightening relief.
Much as we would like to hope Pence will help Trump mature as a candidate, it seems likely that Trump will have the final and perhaps only say during the campaign and in the unimaginable event that he is elected president.
Even more than in other presidential elections, voters this November will be paying attention to the candidates at the top of the ticket. Thats a problem for Pence, and for the Republican Party.
Pence a principled choice
The following editorial appeared in the Chicago Tribune on Sunday, July 17:
There is no way to redeem a presidential ticket that includes Donald Trump. Republican voters would have done better to elevate any of the other candidates who entered the race last year rather than nominate someone so flagrantly ill-suited to the most powerful job on Earth. But someone has to take the second spot on the worst of tickets, and Mike Pence is about as good a choice as Trump could have been expected to make.
The Indiana governor has a lot to recommend him. Hes a principled conservative who understands and shares his partys ideals. Hes a veteran legislator with a solid grasp of policy, based on 12 years in Congress and a stint as head of a conservative Indiana think tank.
Pence has been governor of Indiana since 2013, acquiring useful experience in the executive branch. Hes a disciplined communicator who used to host a radio talk show. He exhibits a mature temperament fitting his self-description as Rush Limbaugh on decaf.
These attributes add up to the one indispensable qualification in a vice presidential candidate: the capacity to step into the presidency if needed. Paul Ryan, Mitt Romneys 2012 running mate, met that standard. Sarah Palin, chosen by John McCain in 2008, did not. The problem with Pences assets is that they starkly highlight the deep deficiencies of his running mate, who lacks almost everything useful that Pence embodies.
In choosing him, Trump had to overlook some major policy differences. Pence has been a consistent supporter of free trade. During his time in Congress, Pence pushed for a comprehensive immigration reform bill, which unfortunately failed. He repeatedly, though unsuccessfully, sponsored a media shield bill to protect journalists from being forced to identify sources in federal cases.
Pence is hardly beyond criticism. His endorsement of hard-line Texas right-winger Ted Cruz in the presidential primaries was unsurprising, given Pences staunch support for socially conservative causes. He also acquitted himself poorly in the battle over the religious freedom bill he signed last year.
It sparked negative reactions from gay rights groups and corporations that said it would allow businesses to refuse service to people on the basis of their sexual orientation. After first resisting demands to amend the law, Pence signed a bill to forbid such discrimination. That retreat, however, suggests an ability to consider the possibility of his own fallibility an ability Trump evidently doesnt have.
Pences presence on the ticket doesnt come close to making a Trump victory palatable. But should that tribulation come to pass, at least the vice presidency will be in good hands.
New British P.M. faces some sticky wickets
The following editorial appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Wednesday, July 13:
Americans must congratulate the British Conservative Party in its quick choice of Theresa May as prime minister in the wake of the vote June 23 to withdraw the United Kingdom from the European Union.
May, 59, on Wednesday replaced David Cameron as prime minister and head of the Conservative Party. He submitted his resignation in the immediate wake of the momentous choice of British voters, by a relatively close 17 million to 16 million, to leave the EU. Cameron had put the referendum on the table in an effort to remain as prime minister last year. In the event, his action proved unnecessary as the Conservatives won a decisive victory in 2015, probably on other issues.
May served as home secretary in effect, minister of the interior for six years and as a member of Parliament for 19 years. She studied at Oxford University and has a reputation for being serious and even-tempered, if not charismatic. She became the Conservatives first choice to replace Cameron when her final rival for the post, Andrea Leadsom, dropped out of the race for lack of support. Leadsom had blotted her copybook when she made remarks that suggested she thought that she, as a mother, was better qualified to be prime minister than the childless May.
The new British leader has a brutal task ahead of her as she tries to negotiate the United Kingdoms way out of the EU, retaining the advantages of the relationship while respecting the British electorates mandate to leave. She herself had opposed leaving but has pledged to carry out the mandate. Last year, 52.2 percent of the U.K.s imports came from EU countries and the EU bought 43.5 percent of U.K. exports. Sticky business. In addition, two pieces of the United Kingdom, Scotland and Northern Ireland, voted not to leave the EU and are now thinking about succession from the U.K., another problem for May.
The United States, as it tries to cope with its own divisive issues, will find the U.K. under the new prime minister to be a still-interested partner, but one also intensely preoccupied with EU and internal issues.
Congress steps toward helping the mentally ill
The following editorial appeared in The Sacramento Bee on Tuesday, July 12:
In an era when bipartisanship is rare, the U.S. House of Representatives has taken a step toward providing more care and treatment of severely mentally ill people.
The U.S. Senate should take a cue from the House and approve the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act.
The bill, introduced after the slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, passed the House by a vote of 422-2 not a typo. Speaker Paul Ryan and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi agreed, as did the most conservative Republicans and most liberal Democrats.
Hardly an end-all, the bill doesnt help mentally ill people find housing, and it definitely is no substitute for far-reaching gun safety legislation. But by approving the bill, the House showed a commitment to an issue that too often is ignored.
The bill seeks to make clear to mental health care providers that they would not be violating federal privacy law if they share information with family members about mentally ill adult children, siblings or spouses. That one provision makes the bill worthwhile.
The bill could provide more money to states to hospitalize the most severely mentally ill people, require Medicare to pay for anti-psychotic medication, and provide greater parity in care for people with physical and mental illnesses.
The legislation provides some money though not enough for suicide prevention, to train police to handle severely mentally ill people, and to encourage states to undertake more intensive outreach programs to help mentally ill people who resist treatment.
This bill creates the position of assistant secretary for mental health and substance use disorders, offering an important bully pulpit to advocate for the mentally ill.
Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Tim Murphy deserves praise for raising the issue, sticking with it and winning over Democrats.
Michigans Energy and Commerce Committee chair Fred Upton, a Republican, and New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone, the ranking Democrat on the committee, reached the final compromise. Rep. Doris Matsui, D-Calif., initially a skeptic, helped shape the discussion.
In this election year, Democrats and Republicans will seek every advantage as they try to win or maintain control of Congress. But they also must understand that mental illness knows no party, and that they all will come away with victory if they provide some measure of care for people who cannot care for themselves.
An Air India flight from Kolkata to Kathmandu today made an emergency landing here after the pilot informed the authorities that there was a problem with one of the engines of the plane, AI officials said.
The Kathmandu-bound flight took off at around 8.18 AM along with 56 passengers and seven crew members and after the pilot informed about a problem with the right side engine of the plane, the aircraft made an emergency landing at Kolkata at 8.31 AM due to precautionary reasons, an AI official said.
All passengers and crew members were safe and they left for Kathmandu in another flight after sometime, the official said adding, the plane which developed the technical snag has been grounded at Kolkata and was being examined by the engineers.
Most telecom operators except Airtel, Aircel and Tata Teleservices made the grade on the call drop test conducted by sector regulator Trai in Thiruvananthapuram in June.
"All operators have met the call set up success rate whereas 75 per cent of the networks are meeting call drop rate threshold," the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India said in the network drive test report that was released today.
The tolerance limit for call drops is 2 per cent, which means at least 98 per cent of all calls made from a telecom network in a quarter should not get automatically disconnected.
The test was conducted in 12 cities in May-June, including Delhi, Mumbai, Chandigarh and Bhopal. In Kanpur and Lucknow, most telecom operators except BSNL and Reliance Communications have been found compliant.
"Aircel 2G, Airtel 2G, DoCoMo 2G and Aircel 3G are not meeting the call drop rate benchmark of 2 per cent (in Thiruvananthapuram)," the report said.
Besides, Aircel, BSNL, DoCoMo (Tata Teleservices) and Reliance Communications were found using higher value of radio link timeout (RLT) parameter in the city, which is alleged to be a call drop masking technology.
"BSNL fails to meet the call drop rate benchmark of 2 per cent if RLT of more than 40 is considered. Call drop rate for Aircel and DoCoMo also increased," the report said.
Telecom major Bharti Airtel today said that it has used funds realised from sales of its two African subsidiary to Orange for paying bank debt.
"We wish to inform that Orange has completed the acquisition of 100 per cent of the operations of Airtel in Sierra Leone via its subsidiaries, having already closed the transaction for Burkina Faso on June 22, 2016 as intimated in our communication dated the same day. Proceeds from both the transactions have been applied to pay down bank debt," Airtel said in a late night statement.
Airtel, in July last year, had announced that it is entering an agreement with Orange to sell its four subsidiaries in Burkina Faso, Chad, Congo Brazzaville and Sierra Leone in Africa.
The agreements for the remaining two countries have lapsed.
As per the agreement, Orange will acquire 100 per cent of the companies' share capital. The consolidated revenue of the two companies is around 275 million euro.
The net debt of Bharti Airtel at the end of March 31 was USD 12,661 million.
The Republican convention opened to chaotic scenes as Donald Trump's opponents and supporters traded angry shouts, disrupting his plans for a smooth coronation as the party's White House nominee.
Jeers and yells filled the convention floor in Cleveland, Ohio, yesterday as simmering divisions among thousands of Republican delegates spilled out into the open.
Anti-Trump Republicans outraged that their party will be led by a man who described Mexicans as rapists and advocated banning Muslims expressed fury when procedural machinations denied them a chance to register their discontent.
"We deserve to be heard, this is the people's convention!" said Diana Shores, a delegate from Virginia, while pro-Trump delegates tried to drown out the rebels with shouts of "Shame! Shame!"
This was meant to be Trump's moment.
Heading into the four-day political jamboree at the tightly secured arena in Cleveland, he had tried to assuage conservative critics and bring the party together by naming Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate.
Trump was expected later in the day in Cleveland, where his wife Melania Trump, a Slovenian-born former model, has top billing for the first prime-time session and will make the case for her husband's policies and personality.
But yesterday's floor protest raises serious questions about Republican unity heading into the November election.
The tough-talking real estate mogul's rise to the top of the Republican party has been one of the more improbable journeys in American .
Trump's opponents had little chance of stopping his march. But with an eye on history, many wanted a floor vote to record for posterity who backed the 70-year-old Trump and those who did not.
"We're here to be delegates not rubber stamps," said Regina Thomson a delegate from Colorado.
Trump fans argue delegates should heed the will of the grassroots of the party.
The billionaire won a thumping victory in a series of statewide party elections, winning more than 13 million votes the most of any Republican nominee ever.
Hours earlier, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus told thousands of cheering delegates: "This convention will come to order."
A string of speakers then recited familiar conservative credos and lambasted their Democratic nemesis Hillary Clinton.
At least 12 soldiers were killed in central Mali today in an attack on their base by an armed group, the defence ministry told AFP.
"Provisional death toll 11 dead, 34 injured, 24 of them seriously. Serious material damage. Enemy unknown," the ministry said, adding later one of the wounded had died.
The gunmen's descent on the military camp in Nampala was earlier claimed by a group from the ethnic Peul community, calling themselves the National Alliance for the Protection of Peul Identity and Restoration of Justice (ANSIPRJ).
The group said it had killed eight troops and wounded 11 more, as well as making off with two trucks and five pick-up trucks.
"We are still in control of the camp," Sidy Cisse, a senior ANSIPRJ commander, told AFP.
Al-Akhbar, a Mauritanian agency, reported that several soldiers had been taken hostage, and the base set alight.
However, several security sources in the region told AFP they doubted the veracity of the claim of responsibility as the group was only founded last month following inter-communal clashes in the area and lacked the means to mount an attack.
Seventeen soldiers were killed and 35 wounded in central in an assault on their base that authorities called a "coordinated terrorist attack".
"The toll has increased: we have lost 17 men and 35 are wounded," Mali's defence minister Tieman Hubert Coulibaly said on Tuesday. Authorities had earlier announced that 12 soldiers were killed.
Coulibaly called the assault a "coordinated terrorist attack on our positions," but did not say who was responsible.
The gunmen's descent on the military camp in Nampala was earlier claimed by a group from the ethnic Peul community, calling themselves the National Alliance for the Protection of Peul Identity and Restoration of Justice (ANSIPRJ).
The group said it had killed eight troops and wounded 11 more, as well as making off with two trucks and five pick-up trucks.
"It was self-defence," Sidy Cisse, a senior ANSIPRJ commander, told AFP, adding three of his men were wounded.
Earlier Al-Akhbar, a Mauritanian news agency, reported that several soldiers had been taken hostage, and the base was set alight.
Senior figures within ANSIPRJ are also members of a Peul association that decried the murder of what it said were several Peuls falsely accused of supporting jihadists active in the area.
A Peul radical, Amadou Koufa, leads the Macina Liberation Front (FLM), a new group that emerged in 2015 and has claimed responsibility for a number of attacks, some targeting security forces in central .
Several security sources in the region told AFP they doubted the veracity of the claim of responsibility from ANSIPRJ as the group was only founded last month following inter-communal clashes in the area and lacked the means to mount an attack.
Coulibaly said the government was aware "a group had issued a claim. We are being careful."
"One thing is sure, this was a terrorist action that targeted a military objective. So an appropriate military response is forthcoming," he added.
The Malian government said the attackers would be hunted down and punished, and that the military had control of Nampala.
Northern has seen repeated violence since it fell under the control of Tuareg-led rebels who allied with jihadist groups linked to Al-Qaeda in 2012.
But, attacks are now becoming more frequent in the country's centre, close to its borders with Burkina Faso and Niger, both from criminal and jihadist elements.
Although Islamists were largely ousted by an ongoing French-led military operation launched in January 2013, sporadic attacks from desert hideouts are common.
Pro-opposition gunmen are holding four police hostage in the Armenian capital Yerevan, officials said today, two days after they seized a police building, killing one officer and taking several hostages.
"Talks are underway with the hostage-takers. We are doing our best to resolve the situation without bloodshed," Armenia's first deputy police chief Hunan Pogosyan told AFP.
Lines of police in flak jackets and helmets gathered outside the building Tuesday as parked trucks blocked off surrounding streets, an AFP photographer said.
The gunmen, who captured a large arsenal of police weapons, have so far refused to surrender.
They freed four hostages on Sunday and yesterday, but were still holding four hostages as of today morning, Armenia's national security service said.
The hostages include Armenia's deputy police chief General Major Vardan Egiazaryan and Yerevan deputy police chief Colonel Valeri Osipyan.
The attackers have demanded the resignation of President Serzh Sarkisian and the release of detained opposition leader Zhirair Sefilyan.
More than 1,500 anti-government protesters rallied in Yerevan yesterday, calling for a peaceful resolution to the crisis.
Sefilyan - the leader of small opposition group the New Armenia Public Salvation Front - and six of his supporters were arrested in June after authorities said they were preparing to seize government buildings and telecoms facilities in Yerevan.
A fierce critic of the government, he was arrested in 2006 over calls for "a violent overthrow of the government" and jailed for 18 months. He was released in 2008.
Last year, Sefilyan and several of his supporters were arrested again on suspicion of preparing a coup, but released shortly afterwards.
Sarkisian, a former military officer, has been president of the tiny country of 2.9 million people since winning a vote in 2008 that saw bloody clashes between police and supporters of the defeated opposition candidate in which 10 people died.
Army Chief General Dalbir Singh will be on a day-long visit tomorrow to review the security situation in Kashmir valley and along the Line of Control.
"The Chief of Army Staff will review the security situation in Kashmir during meetings with the Corps Commander of China Corp and other officers," a defence source said here.
Gen Singh, who is scheduled to arrive at Army's Badamibagh Cantonment area in the morning, will be briefed about the situation in the valley and the counter-infiltration operations along the LoC.
Gen Singh's visit to the curfew-bound Valley comes in the backdrop of violent mobs attacking army camps and installations in the wake of killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani in an encounter on July 8.
Three persons, including two women, were killed in firing by army personnel yesterday at Qazigund in Anantnag district when their vehicle came under stone pelting.
Army has ordered an inquiry into the incident.
Bahrain has rebuffed its British and US allies over a controversial ban on the kingdom's largest opposition group, insisting it will brook no interference in its internal affairs.
The tiny but strategic Gulf state, a former British protectorate and home base of the US Fifth Fleet, has been racked by persistent unrest since its Sunni rulers bloodily suppressed an uprising by its Shiite majority in 2011.
Western governments have repeatedly appealed publicly for reform and reconciliation but those calls have gone unheeded and in recent months the crackdown on dissent has intensified.
On Sunday, a court dissolved Al-Wefaq, the largest faction in parliament before 2011, accusing it of fanning violence in Shiite areas.
The ruling was condemned around the world, by Iran as well as Western governments and the United Nations.
But Bahrain was unrepentant, issuing a statement late on yesterday hitting back at its Western allies.
"Such statements and positions are unacceptable interference in the internal affairs of the kingdom of Bahrain, and in the decisions of the Bahraini judicial process, which provides all necessary standards of justice, fairness, transparency and independence," the foreign ministry said.
The "statements are unjustified and only give encouragement to groups which support extremism and terrorism," it added.
The ministry said it hoped "friendly and allied countries take into account the interests" of Bahrain, just as it "is keen to take into account the interests of all allies and partners in order to preserve their distinctive historical relations, and to ensure security and stability in the region."
Bahrain received military support from its Gulf Arab allies when it crushed the 2011 protests for a constitutional monarchy and an elected prime minister, but its continuing crackdown has drawn mounting Western criticism.
US Secretary of State John Kerry said the Al-Wefaq ban was the "latest in a series of disconcerting steps in Bahrain."
He called on Bahrain to "reverse these and other recent measures (and) return urgently to the path of reconciliation.
Making it easier to invest in West Bengal through a single window clearance system, the state government today announced the formation of a new industrial development promotional board.
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said they have taken a decision to bring all types of industries under one roof which will address all related issues.
The board will report to the chief minister after its weekly meeting and will have secretaries of finance, commerce and industry, MSME, IT, food processing, fisheries, Tourism, energy, etc as members.
Apart from the state chief secretary, Finance and Industry Minister Amit Mitra will also be a part of the board.
All industrial issues related to land and special exemption will be dealt with by the board through its website, Banerjee said.
The state already has the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation but this new body will be bigger.
Banerjee said this board will help small and medium scale enterprises to invest in the state in different sectors.
The state's annual Global Business Summit will be held from January 19 to 20 next year at the Milan Mela grounds for which they will invite President Pranab Mukherjee.
From 2018 onwards, the summit will be held in Raha that's international convention center which will be ready by then.
Banerjee said they have asked the state IT department to prepare a plan for building a center of excellence in cyber security in the city.
She also said that a port is coming up in Tajpur while another two ports - one for shipbuilding and another as a regular port - are being built in Kulpi.
On the issue of youngsters from West Bengal facing the prospect of losing their jobs if a bill to prevent Indian companies from hiring IT professionals on H-1B and L1 work visas is passed in the American Senate, the CM said they will try to help such youngsters who want to come back to the state.
She said they are preparing a plan of action in this regard and assured all government help to those who might lose jobs.
A bill on compensatory afforestation was today moved in the Rajya Sabha amid stiff resistance by the opposition which wanted a consensus on it before being brought to the House for consideration and passage.
After the passage of the Child Labour Bill, Environment and Forests Minister Anil Madhav Dave moved 'The Compensatory Afforestation Fund Bill, 2016 amidst protests by the Congress members.
The Bill aims at "unlocking" of nearly Rs 41,000 crore earmarked for forest land which is lying unspent for about four years. The passage of the Bill will ensure expeditious utilisation of accumulated unspent amounts available with the ad hoc Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA).
The members of the opposition party, who wanted to move some amendments to the Bill, said there was no consensus on it and the government should achieve that before the Bill is moved in the House.
Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, however, insisted that the Bill was moved as it was in the list of business.
There was a brief war of words between him and Congress leader Anand Sharma.
Leader of opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad then said his party did not want to be the "stumbling block" but the government should aim to create consensus by discussing such issues threadbare before it can be brought to the House for passing.
"We should not fight like this. Let us sit across the table and pass this bill unanimously," he said, adding the consultation process to evolve consensus has not been completed.
Minister M Venkaiah Naidu underlined the importance of the Bill, saying its passage would unlock funds to the tune of Rs 40,000 crore for the states.
Deputy Chairman P J Kurien said the Bill should be considered as "moved".
He said the Bill was in the list of business and no objections had reached him earlier and he took up the matter as he had logically moved on to the next item after the Bill on child labour was passed.
The Bill was passed by Lok Sabha in May.
A significant bill aimed at putting in place a single common examination for medical and dental courses was today passed by the Lok Sabha, with the government saying even private colleges will be under its ambit.
The Indian Medical Council (Amendment) Bill, 2016 and the The Dentists (Amendment) Bill, 2016 provides a Constitutional status to the Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) examination" which is intended to be introduced in the academic session next year.
The Bill seeks to amend the Indian Medical Council Act, 1956 and the Dentists Act, 1948 and replace the Ordinances that were promulgated by the government to circumvent the Supreme Court order for implementation of NEET examination this session itself.
Moving the Bill for consideration and passing, Health Minister J P Nadda said there were three main objectives behind the move -- end the multiplicity of examinations, have fair and transparent examinations and adopt non-exploitative process.
He said earlier students would have to travel long distances to appear for several medical entrance examinations.
Currently students undergo exploitation particularly with regard to the caiptation fees, he said, adding the new legislation will end this.
Responding to apprehensions expressed by members, particularly Tamil Nadu where reservation is upto 85 per cent, he clarified, "We are not going to touch the state quota. Students in Tamil Nadu will be competing in Tamil Nadu only.. We should be very much clear about that."
However, AIADMK members were not satisfied and staged a walkout.
Nadda said the exam will be held on the basis of the syllabus of NCERT and the under-graduate exam will be taken up by CBSE and post-graduation by the board of examination.
"In the syllabus, we will take care of the differences and we will do standardisation of syllabus so that rural students can also taken care of," he added.
Responding to contention by some members that NEET will provide benefits to private institutions, the Health Minister denied that and said their exams will also be conducted under NEET.
On the concerns over fees in the private medical colleges, he said a committee of judges will decide the fees for private colleges while the government will do it for government institutes.
With regard to apprehensions over whether exams will be conducted in regional languages, Nadda said, "we will also arrange test in regional languages and that is not an issue".
The health ministry has written to all the states seeking details about the number of students who appeared in local languages in the last three years so that the Centre can make plans accordingly.
Nadda also responded to concerns over the involvement of Medical Council of India as some members alleged that the body is "corrupt" and does not perform its duties properly.
"A committee has been set up by the Prime Minister and that is at the final stage. Stakeholders have been called. The report is being finalised. We take cognisance of the issue," he said.
RSP member Premachandran, who had moved statutory amendments to the Bill, praised Nadda for addressing all issues in a "clear manner". While not going ahead with moving the amendments, he said, "I am very much impressed" by the minister's response.
As Uttar Pradesh heads for Assembly elections next year, Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav today asked BJP to fight the polls with development issues rather than trying to "breach" the communal harmony of the state.
"BJP should compare and compete with the development work of the state government rather than raising the issues which tear the communal fabric of the state," he said during a public meeting on the occasion of 29th death anniversary of former Deputy Chief Minister of the state Chaudhary Narayan Singh here.
Yadav said BJP's efforts to gain political benefit by creating communal tension among people have fallen flat in the recent past.
"BJP tried to gain political benefits by raising the issues like Kairana migration, Mathura and Biswada incidents but got nothing out of them," he said.
He later announced round-the-clock power supply for the people of Muzaffarnagar.
A self-styled Bollywood film producer of Indian origin accused of multi-million-pound tax fraud is on the UK's most wanted list of fraudsters released today.
Sandeep Arora from Beckton area of east London allegedly claimed 4.5 million pounds in value-added tax (VAT) and film tax rebates for movies that were either never made or with which he had no involvement.
The 42-year-old is now believed to be living in India and known in film circles there as Karan Arora.
His name was published as part of a new list drawn up by City of London Police and the National Crime Agency (NCA) as part of a new crackdown on fraud in the UK.
"The City of London Police has learnt that the key to combating fraud is government, law enforcement and business working together to bring criminals to justice and also design out the opportunities for them to commit crime in the first place," said Ian Dyson, London police commissioner.
The list also includes 39-year-old Pakistani fraudster Faisal Butt, who was convicted in absentia in the UK for stealing hundreds of thousands of pounds from over 100 bank accounts and is believed to have fled to his native Pakistan.
Also on the list is 41-year-old Bayo Lawrence Anoworin, from Nigeria who is wanted by Lincolnshire police for an alleged scam by a gang that stole more than 12 million pounds from NHS trusts in the UK and Guernsey between January 2011 and July 2012.
The compilation of the list is the result of a new task-force, launched in February by then home secretary and now Prime Minister Theresa May in response to the growing problem of fraud and cyber-crime.
The Joint Fraud Taskforce brings together law enforcement agencies, the financial sector and the government.
"The annual losses to the UK from fraud are estimated to be more than 190 billion pounds. Behind this headline figure lie the actions of criminals like the wanted fraudsters highlighted in this appeal, who have caused distress and loss to people and businesses up and down the country," said Donald Toon, director of the NCA's economic crime command.
He added "Law enforcement cannot tackle this problem alone. It is only by working together, individuals, law enforcement, government and the private sector that we can protect the UK against fraud. It is important that anyone able to provide information on the 10 fraudsters we are highlighting today takes the opportunity to pass that information to law enforcement to help bring them to justice".
The list was released in the lead up to the annual Crime Survey of England and Wales, which will be published on Thursday and expected to show that fraud is the most prevalent crime in the UK.
Preliminary figures released in October 2015 found that there had been 5. 1 million incidents of fraud in England and Wales in the previous year, affecting an estimated one in 12 adults and making it the most common form of crime.
Government bonds (G-Secs) staged a smart recovery following fresh demand from corporates and banks. However, the interbank call rates turned lower due to lack of demand from borrowing banks amid comfortable liquidity situation in the banking system.
The 7.59 per cent government security maturing in 2029 spurted to Rs 101.22 as compared to Rs 100.9975 previously, while its yield down to 7.44 per cent from 7.47 per cent.
The 7.88 per cent government security maturing in 2030 went up to Rs 103.6950 from Rs 103.4050, while its yield moved down to 7.44 per cent from 7.48 per cent.
The 7.59 per cent government security maturing in 2026 climbed to Rs 102.09 from Rs 101.9950 while, its yield edged down to 7.28 per cent from 7.29 per cent.
The 7.61 per cent government security maturing in 2030, the 7.68 per cent government security maturing in 2023 and the 7.72 per cent government security maturing in 2025 were also quoted higher at Rs 101.93, Rs 102.3075 and Rs 102.23, respectively.
The overnight call money rates finished lower at 6.40 per cent from Monday's close 6.65 per cent. Its moved in a range of 6.65 per cent and 6.00 per cent.
Meanwhile, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), under the Liquidity Adjustment Facility (LAF), purchased securities worth Rs 91.25 billion in 23-bids at the overnight repo auction at a fixed rate of 6.50 per cent as on today, while it sold securities worth Rs 25.17 billion from 18-bids at the overnight reverse repo auction at a fixed rate of 6.00 per cent as on July 18.
A teenager who was declared brain-dead following a road accident gave life to a 27-year-old woman suffering from a rare disease as his heart was successfully transplanted in her after being transported from Thiruvananthapuram by a Naval Air Ambulance here today.
A team of doctors at the Lisie Hospital here claimed that they have successfully transplanted the heart in Sandhya of Thrissur who was suffering from a rare heart disease.
"Surgery is a success," a hospital spokesperson said after the five-hour-long transplantation surgery.
Vishal, 15, from Mukkola in Thiruvananthapuram, had suffered severe head injury after he was hit by a speeding car on July 16, when he was his way school. He was admitted to Thiruvananthapuram Government Medical College where he was declared brain dead last evening.
When officials in Kerala government's Mrithasanjeevani, Kerala Network of Organ Sharing, contacted members of Vishal's family, they agreed to donate his organs, including heart, liver and kidneys.
While his heart was brought to Kochi hospital, kidneys were donated to two patients at Thiruvananthapuram Medical College.
Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan intervened to arrange the Naval air ambulance to transport the organs to ensure that they reach the recipients in time.
Ernakulam District Collector M G Rajamanickyam yesterday forwarded a request to Headquarters, Southern Naval Command (HQSNC) for transportation of the harvested heart from Thiruvananthapuram to Kochi via air. Accordingly, four doctors of Lisie Hospital were airlifted by an IN Dornier from INS Garuda to Thiruvananthapuram at 6.30 AM today.
The medical team along with the harvested heart returned to INS Garuda, Kochi around 1 PM.
Leader of Opposition and DMK treasurer MK Stalin today urged the ruling AIADMK to bring a resolution in the Assembly over the Palar river issue in view of Andhra Pradesh taking steps to increase the height of a check dam there.
He hit out at AIADMK chief and Chief Minister Jayalalithaa for "just writing a letter" to her Andhra Pradesh counterpart Chandrababu Naidu over the issue and blamed her for "delayed" filing of a case in Supreme Court in this regard.
Presiding over a protest demonstration here, he claimed government hurriedly went to the apex court yesterday after his party announced a protest over the Palar issue.
DMK's stir comes weeks after Andhra Pradesh took up work to increase the height of a checkdam from five to 12 feet at Perumballam village in Chittoor district on the AP-TN border.
Also, Jayalalithaa had written to Chandrababu Naidu on the issue. She had told him that Palar was an inter-state river covered under Madras-Mysore Agreement of 1892.
Hence, Andhra Pradesh could not take any work without the consent of TN and a case was also pending (filed in 2006) in the apex court over Palar, she had said asking him to get the level of the check dam reduced to its original level.
The state government approached the Supreme Court yesterday over Andhra Pradesh's action of raising the height of the check-dam.
"We welcome filing the case. But why delay? Why you did not get an order for maintaining status quo ante?" he asked.
He also wanted to know if Jayalalithaa should not go and meet Chandrababu Naidu and PM Modi on this issue.
Stalin recalled that when DMK was in power, he and another senior minister, Duraimurugan had called on Naidu on the Palar issue.
He slammed Andhra Pradesh for taking up work on the checkdam when a matter related to the same issue (2006 case) was already pending in the Supreme Court.
He also hit out at the neighbouring state for allegedly taking over control of a temple situated at the dam site, hitherto administered by the Tamil Nadu Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Department.
He said the AIADMK government "is in such a situation wherein it could not even question" Andhra Pradesh's action.
Stating that districts of Tamil Nadu, including Vellore, Kanchipuram, Tiruvannamalai, and even parts of Chennai depended on Palar, he said a resolution should be brought in and adopted in the Assembly so as to help find out a solution to the issue.
He said Andhra Pradesh's attitude on this issue should be condemned in the resolution.
A nationwide awareness campaign will be launched to protest against "government apathy" in apprehending the killers of rationalists Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare, besides scholar M M Kalburgi.
The 'Campaign Against Violence, Towards Humanity' by Maharashtra Andhshraddha Nirmulan Samiti (MANS) (the Committee for Eradication of Superstition) founded by Dabholkar will be launched in the national capital tomorrow.
"It has been nearly three years since Dabholkar was brutally murdered. Soon after, Pansare was shot and Kalburgi was also killed. Even after so much time the investigation has not reached a logical conclusion," Avinash Patil, Executive President, MANS said here today.
While Dabholkar was murdered in Pune on August 20, 2013, Pansare was shot at on February 16 last year. He died on February 20. Prof Kalburgi was murdered on August 30 last year.
The killings had sparked outrage in the country with several eminent writers and others returning their state awards over "rising intolerance" in the country.
CBI had last month arrested Hindu Janajagruti Samiti member Virendra Singh Tawde in connection with the murder of Dabholkar. The Samiti is linked to Goa-based radical Hindu group 'Sanatan Sanstha', which had also come under the scanner for the murder of Pansare.
"We condemn Sanatan Sanstha and Hindu Janajagaran Samiti, fundamentalist, right wing Hindu organisations who are spreading hatred and are reportedly engaged in terrorist activities like 2009 Goa blast and murders of progressive thinkers," Patil said.
"Both the Centre and state governments are responsible for the apathy in investigation. There are red corner notices against the suspects but investigative agencies have been unable to find them. It shows a lack of political will in the matter," he said.
The organisers said protests have also been planned across various cities in Maharashtra and other states till August 30, which marks the third death anniversary of Dabholkar. A national-level protest will also take place at his birthplace Pune.
Canada would showcase several horticultural techniques at the 'Agro Tech Fair' here in November which would help farmers of Haryana.
Consul General of Canada Christopher Gibbins today called on Haryana Chief Secretary DS Dhesi here and they discussed the possibilities of mutual cooperation in various fields, including 'Smart City', horticulture, skill development and higher education.
Gibbins also discussed trade possibilities in machinery used in horticulture.
Dhesi also apprised him of the two cities of Haryana -- Karnal and Faridabad -- which have been included in the list of 100 cities to be developed as 'Smart Cities' by the Centre.
Work has already started in Faridabad which has been included in the second phase of the project. The city offers abundant possibilities for trade and industry, he said in an official statement.
Global property consultant CBRE group Inc today announced the appointment of Anshuman Magazine as Chairman of India and South East Asia.
Magazine, who is currently responsible for India region, will now oversee operations for 13 countries, including Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam and Philippines amongst others, CBRE said in a statement.
Magazine, who was earlier Chairman and MD South Asia, would now manage a total of 10,000 employees.
CBRE Asia Pacific CEO Steve Swerdlow said: "CBRE is constantly looking for innovative ways to bring advantage to its clients. Anshuman's appointment is in line with this strategy."
With over two decades in the industry, his leadership and strong client relationships would further strengthen our operations across South East Asia, he added.
"The opportunity to lead CBRE across India and South East Asia is humbling. We have an exceptional team of professionals, a well-established footprint for growth and a strong proposition to help our clients achieve outstanding outcomes for their business. I look forward to continuing to work with my colleagues around the region to build on that success," said Anshuman Magazine.
With over 22 years at CBRE, Magazine pioneered the entry of professional real estate consulting services in India. He grew the India business from a handful of employees to over 5,500 at present, the statement said.
CBRE India is offering real estate solutions like strategic consulting, advisory & transaction services, retail, valuations/appraisals, industrial & logistics, capital markets, Asset Services and Project Management.
Magazine is a part of CBRE's Asia Pacific Strategic Group, for over 15 years.
As the Kashmir simmers, senior Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar today advised the Centre to reach out to the people in the militancy-affected state and start a political process there while tackling the unrest.
"While action is necessary against militancy and terrorism, military and police actions on their own are not the answer (to people's grievances)," he told reporters after releasing a book at a function here.
"It (action by security forces) has to be accompanied by political process which requires the establishment in Delhi to reach out to the unhappy Kashmiris," the former Union Minister said.
"The steps taken under (then PMs) Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Dr Manmohan Singh to have a dialogue with the Hurriyat and other elements and also Pakistan created an atmosphere of considerable peace," the diplomat-turned-politician said.
"(Chief Minister) Mehbooba Mufti was once seen as a ray of hope for the Kashmiris, but she is now working under the shadow of BJP," he said.
"In my personal view (elucidated in a magazine article) this Government (of PDP-BJP) should be dissolved and fresh election be held in Jammu and Kashmir," he said.
At least 42 people have died till today in the latest round of unrest in the Kashmir Valley, where curfew has been imposed.
Clashes between protesters and security forces began soon after the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani in an encounter on July 8.
Chinese doctors have set a new record in a spinal operation to replace five vertebrae with 3D-printed replicas.
The 3D-printed vertebrae measured 19 centimetres, the longest-ever in a successful operation.
A 41-year-old cancer patient, surname Yuan, underwent the surgery at Peking University Third Hospital on June 12, and has been able to walk by himself since the operation, state- run Xinhua agency quoted the doctors as saying.
During the six-hour procedure, the replica, made from titanium powder, was inserted into his spine to fill the void left after five tumour-affected vertebrae were removed.
Without the pioneering operation, he would likely have been paralysed, the doctors said.
In a previous operation on May 6, the tumour was removed, along with the posterior sections of the five vertebrae. The gap was filled with titanium rods and screws - a traditional treatment that ideally allows for patient mobility.
The 3D-printed bone was used to support the spine after removal of the remaining anterior sections in the June operation.
The standard solution of inserting a titanium tube into the missing section would have had major disadvantages.
The hollow titanium tube is straight and does not match human anatomical structure.
The tube could also detach over time since the missing section of vertebrae is large, which would lead to paralysis, according to Liu Zhongjun, chief surgeon.
"The 3D printing technology offers a better option. It enables us to produce a replica resembling Yuan's original bone structures, both in shape and length, and it is firm," Liu said.
The implant also has tiny pores that allow neighbouring bone cells in normal vertebrae to grow. This will help with fusion of the replica and real bones, he said.
Yuan was diagnosed with chordoma, a rare cancer that can occur anywhere in the spine and skull, in December after suffering acute lower back pain. In January, he turned to the Peking University Third Hospital, which has a research team that has studied 3D-printing for orthopaedics since 2009.
"I believe in the new technology. I've prepared myself for risks. My disease can't be treated in the conventional way and it makes no sense for me to wait," said Yuan, who works in the catering industry in Beijing and has a five-year-old daughter.
Yuan said he was able to walk with crutches two weeks after the surgery.
A portion of his medical costs was exempted because of the experimental nature of the treatment, he said.
The team developed the only two 3D-printed body implant products registered by the China Food and Drug Administration, which include a hip joint product and the vertebrae product approved in September 2015 and May respectively, the Xinhua report said.
Clinical research in India has declined over the years due to inadequate grants, the government said today.
"It is a fact that the clinical research has decreased due to inadequate grant available. The number of clinical research projects financially supported by Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has decreased," Health Minister J P Nadda said in a written reply in Rajya Sabha.
In 2015-16, only 26 clinical research projects were supported by ICMR while in 2014-15, there were 71 projects, he said.
In 2011-12, 2012-13 and 2013-14, ICMR had supported 196, 186 and 120 projects of clinical research, Nadda said.
Earlier this year, ICMR had said that a large number of biomedical research projects being undertaken by 32 scientific organisations across the country have been stuck due to resource crunch.
ICMR Director General Soumya Swaminathan had recently said that there have been budget cuts across the board in ICMR and institutions were suffering due to lack of funds for upgrading infrastructure, maintaining equipment, buying consumables and conducting field studies.
Later, Nadda had assured ICMR of providing full funding for research projects, saying that no work will be stopped or hampered for the lack of funds as research will be fully encouraged.
Responding to a mid-sea medical emergency, the Coast Guard Eastern Region has safely evacuated a 31-year-old man, suffering from abdomen pain on-board research vessel R V Sindu Sadhana and shifted to a hospital.
Coast Guard Ship 'Varad', commanded by Commandant Anwar Khan, yesterday undertook medical evacuation of the patient Rajeev Kumar, diagnosed with hernia and intestinal infection on board research vessel Sindu Sadhana of the National Institute of Oceanography, a coast guard release said.
The vessel was undertaking oceanographic studies about 550 nautical miles from the city coast.
The coast guard ship along with a medical team successfully brought the patient safely to Chennai, the release said, adding, he was later admitted to a local hospital.
Buoyed by the Supreme Court verdict on Arunachal Pradesh, Congress today slammed the government in the Lok Sabha, accusing it of "destabilising" its governments in states, a charge rejected by Home Minister Rajnath Singh.
Congress members also staged a walkout even as Singh said "internal crisis" of Congress was responsible for the controversial developments in Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand and that "a boat is bound to sink if it has a hole".
The issue was raised by Leader of Congress in the House Mallikarjun Kharge who said that on the one hand, the Modi government was celebrating the 125th birthday of B R Ambedkar and on the other hand, it was "murdering" democracy by toppling popular governments.
"You have decided to execute your 'Congress-mukt' (Congress-free) slogan by any means. Wherever you get a chance, you destabilise governments and work to replace them with yours. You did so in Uttarakhand and Arunachal and tried in Manipur and Himachal Pradesh too. This is good for niether public nor Constitution," he said.
"We thank the Supreme Court for upholding the Constitution. Its order is historic and will be written in golden letters. You don't have numbers but you want to grab power by the back door. It has become your nature. Democracy is being repressed, murdered," he said during the Zero Hour.
"The Supreme Court has slapped you and, hopefully, you will not do such things again," Kharge said referring to the recent verdict of the apex court to restore the Congress government in Arunachal Pradesh which had been dismissed by the Centre months back.
Earlier, the Supreme Court had restored the Congress government in Uttarakhand also after it was dismissed by the Centre.
Responding to the charge, the Home Minister said the Congress governments in Uttarakhand and Arunachal Pradesh fell due to the opposition by its own MLAs.
He, however, made no mention of the Supreme Court orders which had led to the restoration of Congress dispensations, dealing a blow to the Centre.
BJP had nothing to do with what happened in the two states, Singh said, adding "if any party has this very old habit of toppling popular governments, then it is Congress".
While attacking Congress, he said its governments at the centre had toppled governments in states 105 times.
He said crisis in the two states was "unfortunate" and destabilisation of popularly-elected governments was not good for healthy democracy.
"BJP had nothing to do with it. It was an outcome of your (Congress) internal crisis. Nine Congress MLAs opposed their own government on the floor of the Uttarakhand assembly. In Arunachal, over two/thirds of them defected. If your boat has a hole, then it is bound to sink if you put it in water. Why blame water for it," he said.
A Congress MLA has expressed his wish to work under Mamata Banerjee amidst claims by Trinamool Congress vice-president Mukul Roy that a number of MLAs from other parties are willing to join TMC.
Congress MLA Tushar Kanti Bhattacharya from Bishnupur in Bankura district had contested this year's Assembly poll as a candidate of the CPI(M)-Congress alliance.
"I have never accepted the Congress-CPI-M alliance personally. I contested only after the party told me to do so. I have won because of the votes of the masses. I am inspired by the good work done by TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee. If I get an opportunity I will love to work under Banerjee," Bhattacharya said yesterday in Bankura.
Mukul Roy went on record saying that at least 20 MLAs belonging to different political parties were in touch with the TMC leadership in order to join the party.
"Many MLAs of the Congress and the Left are in touch with us and are willing to join the TMC," Mukul Ray told PTI today.
The Congress, which is the main opposition party in West Bengal, has 44 MLAs. During the last Assembly session the Congress had 42 MLAs but nine of them defected to the TMC between 2011-2016.
Leader of Opposition and senior Congress leader Abdul Mannan refused to comment on the matter.
A plea of 10 senior engineers of Jet Lite alleging discrimination by the airline in selection of candidates for a training programme of Jet Airways has been dismissed by a Delhi court which said both the airlines are "separate entities" and there is "no contractual obligation" to train them.
The court, while dismissing the aircraft maintenance engineers' application seeking direction to the airlines to withdraw the list of selected Jet Airways candidates for the training programme, said, "Prima facie there did not exist any contractual obligation of Jet Lite to necessarily train the plaintiffs for maintaining the aircraft acquired by Jet Airways."
The application had contended that the engineers, who were employed by Sahara Airlines, had joined Jet Lite India Ltd and had been seconded to Jet Airways India Ltd with effect from August 19, 2008.
It had also averred that the conditions of employment which were with Sahara Airlines Ltd were retained without much change after Jet Group of Companies had bought its shares.
The senior engineers had alleged discrimination by Jet Lite as their nominations were not considered for training and their junior counterparts in Jet Airways were selected despite it being on seniority basis.
The court noted that, "In the present case, plaintiffs seek interim injunction of staying the operation of the selection list on the basis that the same is the result of discrimination and favoritism of Jet Airways employees."
"However, it is important to note here that even after the secondment, the plaintiffs still remain to be employees of Jet Lite which admittedly is a separate entity than Jet Airways.
"Prima facie, the new aircraft is acquisition of Jet Airways only. It is not the case where there exists any arrangement between the two airlines to share the aircraft and its know how," it said.
A special court hearing treason charges against former Pakistani dictator General Tuesday ordered the freezing of the 'proclaimed offender's' bank accounts and confiscate his property for not appearing before it despite repeated notices.
A three-member bench of the special court headed by Chief Justice Peshawar High Court Justice Mazhar Alam Miankhel passed the orders over the non-appearance of the former president before the court despite repeated notices.
The court also adjourned the hearing of the case until Musharraf, 72, is arrested or he surrenders.
Justice Miankhel remarked that the court cannot initiate further proceedings in the absence of the accused.
"According to law, the accused cannot be trialed in absentia," Dawn quoted him as saying.
If found guilty in the high treason case, Musharraf could face death sentence.
He said the attitude of the accused left no option for the court, and the special court ordered authorities to freeze Musharraf's bank accounts and confiscate his property.
"A compliance report of the orders must be submitted with the court," the court ordered.
Musharraf this month flew to Dubai for purported medical treatment after the Supreme Court lifted the ban on his foreign trips and it is believed that he may never return to face a slew of several high-profile cases against him.
The Interior Ministry also submitted a report related to the ex-president's assets to the court, Geo TV reported.
Musharraf's counsel said that his client is ailing and currently abroad for treatment.
The counsel's request to record his client's statement via Skype was turned down by the bench.
Musharraf left Pakistan on March 18, soon after the Supreme Court upheld the Sindh High Court directions to remove his name from the exit control list (ECL).
The court in one of its previous rulings had declared ex- president Musharraf a 'proclaimed offender'.
In March 2014, Musharraf was formally indicted over treason charges for imposing emergency and the Provisional Constitutional Order on November 3, 2007.
Earlier, the court also seized the surety bonds submitted by Musharraf's guarantor, Rashid Qureshi, and ordered him to submit a sum of Rs 2.5 million as security deposit to the Registrar of the special court.
Musharraf came to power in a bloodless coup in 1999, deposing then-prime minister Nawaz Sharif. Facing impeachment following elections in 2008, he resigned as president and went into self-imposed exile in Dubai.
He returned in 2013 to contest elections but was implicated in several high-profile cases and was not allowed to leave the country. He is facing trial in illegal detention of judges, also in 2007.
Musharraf has also been charged in connection with the 2007 assassination of prime minister Benazir Bhutto.
The Communist Party of India (CPI) has sought abolition of the post of state governors, calling it an outdated system wherein people holding the position misuse office and overstep their limits.
"Post of Governors should go. Sometimes it (the post of Governors) is for retired officers. Now, all sorts of funny fellows are becoming Governors. The people who should be put in museums by RSS are being put in Raj Bhavans. That's the problem," CPI General Secretary S Sudhakar Reddy said.
"Now, it's high time to think about it. The system itself should be abolished. It's very much misused these days," he told PTI.
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar had also last week pitched for abolition of Governor's post, saying the existing federal democratic structure did not warrant its continuance.
Speaking on the Arunachal Pradesh issue, Reddy said even after the Supreme Court judgement, Governor Tathagata Roy had the "audacity to ask the Chief Minister to prove his majority within 48 hours", and termed his action as "idiotic".
He alleged Governors have become like a "counter-check" on the democratically elected government in various states and most of them do not understand their limitations.
The Governor's office is a "lavish, useless extravaganza" (financial burden) on state governments.
"It is an outdated system which the British had introduced. In some places, they become so controversial that they try to replace elected Chief Ministers," he said.
"In recent period, some of them are talking nonsense also...RSS people. Even during earlier Congress regimes, we were of the opinion the Governor's post was more ornamental," the CPI leader said.
Reddy suggested some mechanism to replace the post of Governor.
"Government should come out with some sort of proposal and we can discuss about it," he said.
Meanwhile, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said, "I am all for having a transparent system of Governors. I am all for having a system of Governors through a broader consultative process, involving may be the Vice-President or the President and Prime Minister, and Leader of Opposition.
Dalit protests in spread to several parts of the state, including Ahmedabad, unleashing violence in which a head constable was killed in stone pelting and state transport buses attacked while three more members of the community allegedly attempted suicide.
The Dalits are protesting against the brutal assault on fellow community members on July 11 for allegedly skinning a cow in Una in Gir-Somnath district.
"Head Constable with local crime branch Pankaj Amreli was injured in stone-pelting in Amreli town. He died during treatment at Rajkot hospital. Ten other persons including protestors and policemen have been injured," police said.
Today, three youths attempted to kill themselves by consuming poison at their residential society in Batwa town in Junagadh district, Police said.
After seven Dalit youths attempted suicide at Gondal and Jamkandorna in Rajkot district against the assault yesterday, several incidents of damage to state transport buses and road blockades were reported from different parts of Saurashtra region across Junagadh, Jamnagar, Rajkot and Amreli districts since late last night. The protests also spread to Ahmedabad, where dozens of Dalits were detained, police said.
While a bus was torched in Dhoraji town of Rajkot district and several others damaged, protestors allegedly vandalised sheds for Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS) in Rajkot late last night, police said.
"Dinesh Parmar (21), Dinesh Vegra (23) and Rasik Vinjura (40) gathered at Ambedkar Nagar society and consumed poison to protest against the beating (of Dalit youths in Una). We rushed them to Junagadh civil hospital for treatment," police said, adding their condition is stable.
Hundreds of protesters gathered at Chital road locality in Amreli town this morning and started hurling stones at police who in turn fired two teargas shells to disperse them.
In Surendranagar, agitators blocked a highway by putting carcass of a cow in the middle of the road, police said.
In the wake of the tense situation, the state road transport department today suspended bus services from Porbandar and other parts as protesters continued to block roads.
Some persons hurled stones at Ahmedabad-Veraval train as it was entering Rajkot, injuring an assistant driver last night, police said.
"There was a report of BRTS buses being ransacked by the community members and several public transport vehicles also being ransacked," DCP, Rajkot, Karanraj Vaghela said.
He said situation is under control and no untoward incident has taken place in Rajkot today.
The opposition Congress demanded a probe by a sitting High Court judge into the Una incident.
Senior Congress leader Ahmed Patel tweeted, "Failure of authorities to protect Dalits in is absolutely shocking. Is it the model? Independent probe is need of the hour".
Nine persons have been arrested so far in connection with the assault on Dalits, while three policemen have been suspended for dereliction of duty.
A Dalit woman allegedly killed her six-year-old ailing son and committed suicide at Talpura village in Budhni tehsil, the constituency of Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, police said.
Durga Bai (25), poured kerosene on her son Devansh and herself and set both of them on fire at her house in Budhni tehsil in Sehore district yesterday, Additional Superintendent of Police A P Singh said.
Other members of the family were not in the house.
Devansh was born with a hole in his heart, and following his birth she suffered from depression, the ASP said.
Meanwhile, a Congress delegation visited Budhni and alleged the mother and son died because the state machinery failed to help them.
"Durga begged for help but did not get any," state Congress's chief spokesperson K K Mishra told PTI after visiting Budhni along with state Congress general secretary P C Sharma and former Bhopal Mayor Vibhay Patel.
The incident belied the Chief Minister's assurance that nobody in the state would die for want of medical care, he said, and sought Chouhan's resignation.
Taking action on complaints, the Delhi government has issued challan orders against National Building Construction Corporation (NBCC) and Delhi Development Authority (DDA) over waterlogging at AIIMS flyover and Sarita Vihar underpass.
The order has been issued under section 133 CrPC by SDMs of concerned areas, a senior government official said.
"It directs these two organisations to ensure removal of debris and other obstructions within 24 hours and submission of progress reports to concerned authorities.
"Section 133 CrPC empowers the magistrate/SDM to take all relevant action for removal of nuisance and order prosecution in case of non-compliance," official said.
The Delhi government has initiated investigation into accounts of private, unaided recognised schools which have submitted proposals to the education department to hike tuition fees.
It said by doing this it was fulfilling its promise of reforming school education in a bid to end arbitrary fee hikes.
The exercise will be conducted by an empanelled chartered accountancy firm, under the Ernst & Young Foundation, and the report will be submitted to the city government in the second week of August. The education department has already received 97 proposals from various such schools for increasing the fee.
Addressing a group of chartered accountants at an interaction today, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said, "Education is a top priority for the Delhi government and our objective is to ensure that education is not commercialised and parents and students are not exploited by a few unscrupulous private managements."
He termed the probe exercise as "an investigation and not an audit". Calling it a "pioneering effort", Kejriwal said, "I hope this exercise will benefit citizens of Delhi and give new direction to the nation."
Deputy Chief Minister and Education Minister Manish Sisodia sought to clarify that the state government did not want to "control" private schools but only wanted the schools to abide by the directives of the department.
Sisodia said schools that were allotted land at concessional rates cannot raise rate of tuition fee without prior sanction of the Director of Education. The Delhi High Court in its order of January 19 had stated that unaided schools cannot flout the law.
"Our government believes that education is a service. It should not be a business activity," he said.
The exercise will include review of financial statements of the unaided schools for the finacial years 2013-2014, 2014-2015 and 2015-2016, identifying cases of "misappropriation or diversion of funds including field visits to the schools".
The Delhi government has decided to launch a 'dengue awareness programme' from tomorrow in association with Delhi Medical Association (DMA) to check the spread of the disease of which at least 50 cases have been reported in the national capital this season.
A senior government official said the initiative will begin in 200 schools tomorrow during which doctors will make students and teachers aware on how to prevent the spread of the vector-borne disease.
"Health and Education departments have tied up with the DMA to ensure that at least one doctor is present in every school mentioned in the first list of 200 schools on Wednesday.
"At a meeting with Health Minister Satyendar Jain, the DMA delegation led by its president Dr Rakesh Kumar Gupta made a presentation about the awareness programme to be conducted in government and private schools," the official said.
The programme is scheduled to continue till October. It will begin with awareness for prevention of mosquito bites which will include encouraging students to persuade their parents and neighbours not to allow accumulation of water at homes and around for at least once a week.
As per the plan, students will also be told to cover three houses near their residences for persuading people not to allow any water accumulation point- either from washing of cars or water dripping from coolers and air conditioners.
Twenty two of the 50 cases of dengue in the national capital have been reported this month, according to a municipal report.
Last year, the city saw a staggering 15,867 dengue cases, the worst in 20 years with the disease claiming 60 lives, as per the report.
The Delhi Police is conducting a preliminary inquiry into a complaint regarding illegal recording of phone calls of several persons during 2001-2005, the government said today.
A complaint regarding illegal and unauthorised interception, tapping and recording of phone calls of several persons during 2001-2005 has been received, Minister of State for Home Affairs Hansraj Gangaram Ahir said in a written reply to Lok Sabha.
"The government has ordered a preliminary inquiry by the Delhi Police," he said.
The lawful interception or phone tapping can be done by law enforcement agencies authorised by the central and state governments in the interest of the country. The Department of Telecom has also issued standard operating procedures for lawful interception of the telecom service providers.
"There is an oversight mechanism to review the orders issued by the competent authority, which is the Union Home Secretary, by a committee under the chairmanship of Cabinet Secretary," the minister said.
Unlawful interception of phone calls is an offence punishable with imprisonment for a term which may extend upto three years or fine or both, he said.
Site clearance has been given on a conditional basis for a greenfield airport near Bhiwadi in Rajasthan and further development will depend on various factors including economic viability, the government said today.
In a written reply to the Rajya Sabha, Minister of State for Civil Aviation Jayant Sinha said site clearance for setting up a greenfield airport near Bhiwadi in Alwar district, Rajasthan, subject to some conditions, was given in November 2015.
Greenfield airports require clearances in two stages -- site approval and then 'in-principle' nod.
"In case of proposed airport at Bhiwadi, the site clearance has been granted and further development would depend on preparation of Detailed Project Report (DPR), its economic viability and financial closure subject to the in-principle approval," Sinha said.
When asked whether existing rules bar having another airport within 150 kilometres of an existing one, the minister replied in the negative.
"As per greenfield airport policy, in case a greenfield airport is proposed to be set up within 150 kilometres of an existing civilian airport, the impact on the existing airport would be examined and such cases would be decided by the government on a case to case basis," he said.
With respect to the Hyderabad international airport, Sinha said no new international airport can be developed within 150 kilometres for a specific period.
Responding to another question, Sinha said the Ministry has not received any proposal for development of new airports in Bihar either from the state government or from any private party as per the greenfield airport policy.
To a separate query, Sinha said ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organisation) had raised observation that all aerodromes serving scheduled air transport operations, including military aerodromes, are required to be certified.
"However, at present defence aerodromes are exempted from licensing by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) up to December 31, 2016," he noted.
A man was arrested today for allegedly carrying illegal drugs at Porvorim in Goa, police said.
Sandesh Shankar Arolkar (31), from Banda area of the neighbouring Sindhudurg district of Maharashtra, was arrested by Porvorim police for possessing marijuana, Inspector Jivba Dalvi told reporters.
The accused had come to Porvorim to deliver the consignment to his perspective customer.
A racket of drug peddlers came to light following the interrogation of two Nigerians, who were arrested by Porvorim police last week.
"A Nigerian Nkeoga Chidi, who was among the two arrested, had revealed the name of Arolkar," he said.
Arolkar is booked under various sections of Narcotics Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act.
Wipro expects improvement in its performance to be reflected "much more strongly" in the later half of 2016-17 even as it issued a muted outlook for the July-September quarter.
The city-based firm, which posted 2.6 per cent sequential rise in IT services revenues at USD 1,930.8 million in the April-June quarter, expects an almost flat growth in the coming quarter.
It has guided for a revenue of USD 1,931 million to USD 1,950 million for the July-September quarter, translating into less than one per cent sequential growth.
"We expect the trajectory of growth to build gradually over the course of the year. We will drive operational improvements in Q2, but we may not see the full benefits because there are two additional months of merit salary increases that will come into effect," Wipro CEO and Member of the Board, Abidali Z Neemuchwala said.
He added that he expects "improvements will be reflected much more strongly in Q3 and beyond".
Wipro's peer Infosys shared a similar sentiment when it lowered its dollar guidance for 2016-17 to 10-11.5 per cent from 11.8-13.8 per cent (projected in April) due to currency volatility and headwinds.
Infosys does not give quarterly guidance.
On the impact of Britain's exit from the European Union, Neemuchwala said while Brexit hasn't had any immediate impact, it is "on the top of the mind".
"Brexit's immediate impact is on the currency. In the medium term, we believe Brexit could delay some of the decision making, but we have not seen any immediate impact of it," he added.
Wipro's peers have also indicated that they are in a "watch mode" even as analysts indicate that technology spending could be impacted, especially in the banking, financial services and insurance segment on account of the UK's exit from the EU.
The Azim Premji-led firm attributed the fall in margins and effectively net profit to wage hikes and headwinds in its India and Middle-East business.
Neemuchwala said the company has given "healthy salary increase" to its employees.
"We are focussed on building a sustainable business model. We have completed the restructuring of our consulting business and we are working on restructuring our India and Middle-East business model," he added.
A man and his 14-year old son were today seriously injured after being shot at by unidentified assailants near Sadpur village here, police said.
Vinod Kumar, a school manager, along with his son Vanu was returning from his school on a scooter when some bike-borne assailants opened fire at them, they said.
Police have initiated a probe into the matter and efforts are on to nab the culprits, they said.
A Kenyan Airways flight from Mumbai carrying nearly 150 passengers besides crew made an emergency landing at Nairobi today following rupture in a tyre in the main landing gear.
The flight KQ 205 had departed from Mumbai at 0635 hours.
After spotting pieces of tyre soon after take off, the Mumbai Air Traffic Control (ATC) centre informed the pilot about it, sources said.
There were around 150 passengers apart from crew members on the Boeing flight KQ 205.
At Nairobi airport, the pilot made an emergency landing, the sources said.
"On arriving in Nairobi, the flight commander first did a low pass to check the status, then landed on second time. It was a fabulous job on his part. All the passengers were safely deplaned," sources said.
One of the tyres of the landing gear, was shredded at the time of landing, they added.
Kenyan Airways could not be immediately contacted.
A ministerial panel headed by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley is expected to meet central trade unions to discuss their 12-point charter of demands in view of their call for a nationwide strike on September 2.
Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya met representatives of a dozen central trade unions yesterday to apprise them about steps being taken regarding their demands.
"Yesterday, the minister himself mentioned about the strike call given by unions on September 2 in his opening remarks during the meeting. The minister and officials gave clear indications that the panel will soon meet us," All India Trade Union Congress Secretary D L Sachdev told PTI.
"Government has to step up its efforts to explain its position to trade unions on the charter as time is running out. The units of unions will have to give notice by August 17 for the September 2 strike," he added.
Ten central trade unions had gone on a nationwide strike over the 12-point charter of demands last year on September 2.
Earlier this year, they decided to go on strike on the same date again in view of government's indifference towards the demands.
"The ministerial panel headed by Jaitley had met unions' representatives to discuss the charter of demands on August 26-27, 2015. The ministerial panel has not met us since then. After a period of over 10 months, Labour Minister called us yesterday to discuss the charter," Sachdev said.
He further said that RSS affiliate Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) had decided to opt out of strike last time but will take a final call on this in its working committee meeting scheduled on August 10, 2016.
Central trade unions have proposed a nationwide strike on September 2 to press for their demands, including minimum monthly wage of Rs 18,000, minimum assured pension of Rs 3,000, no foreign direct investment in sectors like railways, defence and insurance, among others.
The minister, who met union leaders after a gap of 10 months on the issue, has said that the government is working on eight of their demands and there has been progress on seven issues.
"The proposal regarding minimum wages has been sent to Law and Justice Ministry. We will sent this proposal for Cabinet approval to fix a universal minimum wage," the minister had said yesterday.
Sachdev said the government has indicated that it is keen on fixing Rs 12,000 as national minimum wage for Tier-I cities like Delhi and Mumbai, Rs 10,000 for Tier-II and Rs 8,500 for Tier-III cities for unskilled workers.
At present, the National Floor Level Minimum Wage is Rs 160 per day for unskilled workers.
Franklin Templeton International Services (India) will invest USD 15 million (about Rs 101 crore) in Mywish Market Places, engaged in aggregating and facilitating the sale of loan products and credit offerings from banks and financial institutions.
Mywish Market Places Pvt Ltd (MMPL) has plans to expand its business by leveraging its existing technology to develop a digital ecosystem to provide wealth management and investment product-related services.
"The firm will develop the platform for the investment business based in part on know-how provided by Franklin Templeton," a company release said today.
MMPL operates websites including its flagship website www.Deal4loans.Com. It has more than 7 million direct customers and has disbursed more than Rs 10,000 crore in retail loan.
"We see good growth potential going forward, particularly in the planned expansion of MMPL's business to include wealth management and investment product-related services," Vijay Advani, Co-President, Franklin Resources, Inc said.
MMPL's existing investors include Sherpalo Ventures, a VC fund run by Ram Shriram, who was the seed/early investor in many successful global technology companies including Google.
"We also look forward to working with Franklin Templeton on developing a new technology platform for wealth management and investment product-related services," Mywish Market Places Board Director Puru Vashishtha said.
Across this city, shocked residents have gathered in churches and at community vigils to pray for the law enforcement community and the three officers who were slain in an ambush by a gunman.
Families with children, drivers passing through and law enforcement officers from outside the area have been laying flowers and balloons or hanging crosses at a makeshift memorial in front of the B-Quick convenience store near where the officers were killed Sunday.
Funeral arrangements for two of the officers have been made public: Montrell Jackson, a 10-year police force veteran with a newborn at home, will be laid to rest Monday.
Visitation for Matthew Gerald, an Iraq war veteran who became a Baton Rouge police officer less than a year ago, will be held Thursday and Friday. Funeral services will be held Friday.
Arrangements for 45-year-old Brad Garafola, an East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff's deputy and a father of four, have not been made public.
The three are among 10 law enforcement officers killed over a span of 10 turbulent days around the country by attackers - at a protest march in Dallas, a courthouse in Michigan and now a convenience store in Baton Rouge.
The officers lived in the area of Denham Springs, a quiet bedroom community across the Amite River from Baton Rouge, which has been in turmoil for two weeks. Tensions rose sharply after the death of Alton Sterling, 37, a black man killed by white Baton Rouge officers after a scuffle at a convenience store. The killing was captured on cellphone video.
As the nation debates race and policing, this community of about 10,000 is mourning three of its sons all husbands and fathers described by friends as being committed to protecting and serving the public.
Gavin Long, a former Marine from Missouri dressed in black and carrying extra ammunition, opened fire on officers about 8:45 AM Sunday, police said.
Garafola and Gerald were white. Jackson was black, as was the gunman. Three other officers were wounded. One of them, Deputy Nicholas Tullier, was in critical condition. The gunman was killed at the scene.
"The world is crazy right now. It is complete chaos," Jackson's sister-in-law Lauren Rose said. "And it all needs to stop, everything. We all need peace.
Scientists have succeeded for the first time in sequencing the genes in 6,000-year-old barley seeds, making these the oldest plant genome to be reconstructed to date.
The 6,000-year-old Chalcolithic barley grains were retrieved from Yoram Cave in Israel, close to the Dead Sea.
Genetically, the prehistoric barley is very similar to present-day barley grown in the Southern Levant, supporting the existing hypothesis of barley domestication having occurred in the Upper Jordan Valley.
The analysed grains, together with tens of thousands of other plant remains, were retrieved during a systematic archaeological excavation headed by Uri Davidovich, from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Nimrod Marom, from University of Haifa in Israel.
The cave is very difficult to access and was used only for a short time by humans, some 6,000 years ago, probably as ephemeral refuge, researchers said.
Most examination of archaeobotanical findings has been limited to the comparison of ancient and present-day specimens based on their morphology. Up to now, only prehistoric corn has been genetically reconstructed.
In this research, the team succeeded in sequencing the complete genome of the 6,000-year-old barley grains.
"These archaeological remains provided a unique opportunity for us to finally sequence a Chalcolithic plant genome. The genetic material has been well-preserved for several millennia due to the extreme dryness of the region," said Ehud Weiss, of Bar-Ilan University.
In order to determine the age of the ancient seeds, the researchers split the grains and subjected half of them to radiocarbon dating while the other half was used to extract the ancient DNA.
"For us, ancient DNA works like a time capsule that allows us to travel back in history and look into the domestication of crop plants at distinct time points in the past," said Johannes Krause, from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena.
The genome of Chalcolithic barley grains is the oldest plant genome to be reconstructed to date.
Wheat and barley were already grown 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, a sickle-shaped region stretching from present-day Iraq and Iran through Turkey and Syria into Lebanon, Jordan and Israel.
Up to this day, the wild forms of these two crops persist in the region and are among the major model species studied at the Institute of Evolution in the University of Haifa.
"It was from there that grain farming originated and later spread to Europe, Asia and North Africa," said Tzion Fahima, of the University of Haifa.
The findings were published in the journal Nature Genetics.
Describing India as a "geopolitical ally" of the US, the Republican platform has urged New Delhi to protect all its religious communities from violence and discrimination and also called for securing Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.
"India is our geopolitical ally and a strategic trading partner. The dynamism of its people and the endurance of their democratic institutions are earning their country a position of leadership not only in Asia but throughout the world," the Republican platform released by the party after its formal approval stated.
"For all of India's religious communities, we urge protection against violence and discrimination," it said while noting the contributions made by the citizens of Indian ancestry to the US.
The Republican platform, or the party election manifesto, said conflicts in the Middle East have created special political and military challenges for the people of Pakistan.
"Our working relationship is necessary, though sometimes difficult, benefit to both, and we look towards the strengthening of historic ties that have frayed under the weight of conflict," it said.
"This process cannot progress as long as any citizen of Pakistan can be punished for helping the war on terror. Pakistanis, Afghans, and Americans have a common interest in ridding the region of the Taliban and securing Pakistan's nuclear arsenal," said the document.
Calling for mutual trust for progress of the region, it said," A Republican president will work with all regional leaders to restore mutual trust while insisting upon progress against corruption and the narcotic trade that fuels insurgency."
The 2012 Republican platform had welcomed a stronger relationship with the world's largest democracy, both economically and culturally, as well as in matters of national security.
"We hereby affirm and declare that India is our geopolitical ally and a strategic trading partner. We encourage India to permit greater foreign investment and trade. We urge protection for adherents of all India's religions," it said.
In 2012, the Republican platform had also said that it expects the Pakistan government to sever any connection between its security and intelligence forces and the insurgents.
"No Pakistani citizen should be punished for helping the United States against the terrorists," it added.
In a bid to shore up cash- strapped public sector banks, the government today injected Rs 22,915 crore capital in 13 lenders including SBI and Indian Overseas Bank to revive loan growth that has hit a two-decade low.
This is the first tranche of capital infusion for the current fiscal and more funds would be provided in future depending on the performance of PSBs, a Finance Ministry statement said.
In all Rs 70,000 crore in capital is to be invested over four years to contain risks in the banking industry.
Out of the Rs 22,915 crore, State Bank of India (SBI) will get Rs 7,575 crore, followed by Indian Overseas Bank (Rs 3,101 crore) and Punjab National Bank (Rs 2,816 crore).
The other lenders, which have received capital infusion are Bank of India (Rs 1,784 crore), Central Bank of India (Rs 1,729 crore), Syndicate Bank (Rs 1,034 crore), UCO Bank (Rs 1,033 crore), Canara Bank (Rs 997 crore), United Bank of India (Rs 810 crore), Union Bank of India (Rs 721 crore), Corporation Bank (Rs 677 crore), Dena Bank (Rs 594 crore) and Allahabad Bank (Rs 44 crore).
The infusion will boost the government's shareholdings in the banks, which have been under-capitalised compared with their private peers because of restrictions on their ability to sell equity to raise money.
The average Capital Adequacy Ratio (CAR) -- or the ratio of a bank's capital to its risk -- for public sector banks stood at 11.6 per cent as of March 31, lower than 13.2 per cent for banking system as a whole. Basel-III regulations provide for bank to have a minimum capital ratio of 9 per cent by March 31, 2019.
Also, the surging bad loans and weaker profitability had compounded their woes. NPAs of public sector banks stood at 14.5 per cent of their outstanding credit as of March as opposed to 4.5 per cent of private banks.
Rating agency Fitch says the banks need USD 90 billion in new capital to meet Basel III requirements. As much as 80 per cent of this would be need for state-run banks.
The capital infusion exercise for the current fiscal is based on an assessment of need as assessed from the compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of credit growth for the last five years, banks' own projections of credit growth and an objective assessment of the potential for growth of each PSBs, the ministry said.
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Shares of PSU banks jumped after the capital infusion. SBI shares closed 0.48 per cent higher at Rs 229.70 on BSE but PNB closed 0.83 per cent lower at Rs 131.40. Indian Overseas Bank climbed 0.90 to close at Rs 28, while Canara Bank jumped 4.71 per cent to close at Rs 258.75 on the BSE.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in Budget 2016-17 had proposed to allocate Rs 25,000 crore towards recapitalisation of PSU banks. "If additional capital is required by these banks, we will find the resources for doing so. We stand solidly behind these Banks," he had said.
Under Indradhanush roadmap announced by the government last year, government will infuse Rs 70,000 crore in state banks over four years while they will have to raise a further Rs 1.1 lakh crore from the markets to meet their capital requirements in line with global risk norms Basel-III.
In line with the blueprint, PSU banks are to get Rs 25,000 crore each in 2015-16 and 2016-17 fiscal. Besides, Rs 10,000 crore each would be infused in 2017-18 and 2018-19.
Keeping its promise to provide succour to refugees from neighbouring countries, the government Tuesday introduced a in Parliament to amend the Citizenship Act so that Hindus, Sikhs and other minorities of these nations could be granted citizenship even if they do not provide required documents.
Introducing the in the Lok Sabha, Home Minister Rajnath Singh said many persons of Indian origin of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan have applied for citizenship but unable to provide proof of their Indian origin.
Singh said hence they are forced to apply for citizenship by naturalisation under the Citizenship Act which required 12 years of residency as qualifications for naturalisation in terms of the law.
This denies them many opportunities and advantages which are available only to Indian citizens even though they are likely to stay in India permanently, he said.
"It is proposed to amend the Schedule 3 of the Act to make applicants belonging to minority communities from the aforesaid countries eligible for citizenship by naturalisation in 7 years instead of existing 12 years," he said.
There are thousands of Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Christians and Parsis who have entered India after facing religious persecution in countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan without any valid document.
These refugees have been facing difficulty in getting Long Term Visa (LTV) or Citizenship and the existing law does not allow anyone granting Indian nationality if he or she can not show proof of documents on country of birth and therefore they have to stay at least 12 years in India.
In its election manifesto before the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP had declared India as "a natural home for persecuted Hindus" who "shall be welcome to seek refuge". Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during campaigning in 2014 had made a distinction between Hindu and Muslim refugees from Bangladesh and arguing that the former should be accommodated.
"We have a responsibility towards Hindus who are harassed and suffer in other countries. India is the only place for them. We will have to accommodate them here," Modi had said.
Ever since the Modi government came to power, several concessions have been offered to the persecuted Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Christians and Parsis of the neighbouring countries that include issuing LTVs, allowing such people to buy residential properties, procuring PAN cards, Aadhaar card, driving licence, opening bank accounts, lowering of visa fees besides others.
In order to give impetus to startups, the government will hold detailed discussions here with states and other stakeholders on July 23.
The main aim of the day-long function is to share knowledge and best practices being followed by few states on promoting budding entrepreneurs, an official said.
Representatives of five states including Kerala, Telangana, Gujarat and Rajasthan will give presentations on their respective startup policies.
Besides, senior state government officials, incubators, startups and angel investors will also participate in the deliberations.
The Commerce and Industry Ministry is holding this programme to give a further boost to startups in the country, the official added.
The deliberations assumes significance as the budding entrepreneurs are facing certain issues related to taxation in states.
The ministry has already asked all the states and the Union Territories to set up 'Startup Hub' as well as incubators to help these entrepreneurs.
The Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) has already set up the hub. It helps in resolving queries and provides handholding support to startups.
All these steps are part of the Startup Action Plan announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in January.
The government unveiled a slew of incentives to boost startup businesses, offering them a tax holiday and inspector raj-free regime for three years, capital gains tax exemption and Rs 10,000 crore corpus to fund them.
India has the third-largest number of startups globally.
Commerce and Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has asked the finance ministry to consider raising tax holiday for startups to seven years to encourage budding entrepreneurs.
Gujarat's Patidar quota agitation leader Hardik Patel today backed Dalits who have been protesting against the brutal thrashing of youths belonging to the community in Una town of Gir-Somnath district last week.
Patel, who is in Udaipur after his release from jail, said that Dalits have faced exploitation and their demands are justified.
Targeting Gujarat Police, Patel said the police worked at the behest of the state government and had exploited the Patel community earlier.
Patel, who was released from jail in Gujarat after nine months in confinement, has to stay outside Gujarat for six months as per the Gujarat High Court direction and he has been staying at a former Congress MLA's place in Udaipur.
Gujarat has been witnessing widespread protests following the incident at Una where seven Dalit youths were beaten up for allegedly killing a cow.
Haryana Government has decided to implement a scheme to provide loan to the Societies of vegetable and fruit growers so as to increase production, storage, processing and marketing of quality vegetables and fruits.
It has also been decided to implement scheme for provision of loan to Women Cooperative Societies with a twin objective to ensure the welfare of women and generate a feeling of jointly moving ahead, an official spokesman said here today.
He said a proposal to this effect has been approved by Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar.
He said the scheme for provision of loan to vegetable and fruit grower societies has been devised so that the farmers in the State could take benefits of well organised cooperative structure and hence avail various incentives offered by the Government and other related agencies from time to time in the form of subsidies and grants.
The spokesman said that the objective of the scheme is to evolve a system where growers and consumers both are benefited besides financing for value addition activities where the fruits and vegetables are processed that fetches higher remunerative prices of the produce.
The other objectives of the scheme included providing financial assistance for creating infrastructure for marketing, processing and storage of horticulture produce in the cooperative sector and finance for proper post harvest operations of the agriculture produce which add the growers share in the present marketing arrangements.
The spokesman said that the loan under the scheme would be available for all activities involved in production of fruits and vegetables, post harvest management activities, establishment of primary processing unit and technology upgradation and purchase of all types of machinery and equipment involved in crop production.
He said the loan would be medium term for the duration of three to seven years and would be recoverable on half yearly basis.
The state government would contribute a subsidy of Rs one lakh for the purpose for loan amounting to Rs five lakh and above and where loan is sanctioned below Rs five lakh, the eligible amount of subsidy is 20 per cent of the total loan sanctioned after receiving the subsidy claim from bank through Registrar Cooperative Societies.
Loan amount would be disbursed by District Central Co-operative Banks (DCCBs) and subsidy component would be contributed by the State Government, he said.
Members from Kerala today raised in Lok Sabha the issue of 21 people from the state who have gone missing and are suspected to have links with terror group IS while asking the government to confirm whether they have joined any the banned organisation.
"There are some unconfirmed media reports that they have joined some terrorist organisation. It should be confirmed only by the central investigating agency, that is, NIA," K C Venugopal (Cong) said.
He alleged that there is a deliberate attempt to spread out "Islamophobia" among the people and said that all Muslim organisations and influential Islamic scholars in the country have criticised and rejected the radical ideology put forward by the IS.
"The government should come forward and say if they have got any information about it. They should come forward and clear the ambiguity," he said.
P Karunakaran (CPI) said it was a very serious matter and asked the government to take all possible steps to find them and reveal the reasons for their disappearance.
He also said, "Prices of essential goods including drugs are increasing. Price is increasing due to the malpractices of traders who create artificial shortage."
B B Patil (TRS) raised the issue of price rise and sought government's intervention in this regard.
"Prices of essential goods including drugs are increasing. Price is increasing due to the malpractices of traders who create artificial shortage," he said.
Patil said that it is high time that the government should have a control on the prices of essential goods and drugs.
On the killing of 10 CRPF commandos in IED blast in Bihar yesterday, Sushil Kumar Singh (BJP) said that the state government is not being able to handle the situation.
"The state government has no interest in resolving the matter. Poor and innocent are getting killed in these blasts. This is a danger to India's internal security," he said.
He asked the Union government to put pressure on the state to do policing and developmental work.
Ram Prasad Sarmah (BJP) said there was a "tremendous increase" in jihadi activities in Assam.
"Those jihadis, who are intruding from Bangladesh, are also making Assam their playing field. I would request the government to fully seal the border between India and Bangladesh," he said.
Refusing to declare as illegal a search by Income Tax officials on Advantage Strategic Consulting Private Limited, Madras High Court today said if the prayer sought for is to be considered, it would result in interdicting an investigation process.
"What the petitioner seeks to indirectly achieved is to injunct a summon, which cannot be done, that too in exercise of jurisdiction under Article 226 of the Constitution.The plea of malafides has not been specifically pleaded or established, mere use of the expression is not sufficient," Justice T S Sivagnanam said.
Advantage had moved court,seeking to declare the December 1 and 2, 2015 survey by IT officers in their business premises and residences of Directors and consequent proceedings, culminating in visit of top IT officials to their homes on June 15 to issue summons and take evidence was illegal, malafide, abuse of power, ultra vires the Income Tax Act and without jurisdiction or authority of law.
The judge concurred with preliminary objection raised on behalf of Additional Solicitor General of India G Rajagopalan on the petitioner's request for copies of statements, stating that the company director who has sworn to the affidavit in the petition had not given any statement.
"The plea that even if the other persons who have given the statements are not entitled to look into the statements given by others, but the petitioner is entitled to look into those statements is a flawed submission, especially when investigation is going on and each individual has given statements. Therefore, acceding to the prayer sought for by the petitioner would definitely hamper the investigation."
Petitioner said the object of the survey and summons proceedings were not bonafide and the department's refusal to give copies of sworn statements by the directors and company consultant was a violation of principles of natural justice.
There were no assessment proceedings pending before the Joint Director and deputy director of the IT department. So repeated summons as 'assessee' was without jurisdiction and calling the proceedings null and void.
Rajagopalan argued that those who gave statements had not approached the court and therefore the department was not in a position to give the statements recorded from other persons to the petitioner, as investigation is in process.
The AG said if a person who has given the statement comes to the IT deputy director's office and requests a perusal of his statement, it would be readily obliged to.
But the question of providing copies or permitting perusal of statements given by other persons cannot be entertained, as it would hamper the probe.
Concurring with the submissions the Judge dismissed the petition.
The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has taken suo motu cognisance of hooch deaths in Etah and Farrukhabad districts of Uttar Pradesh and issued notices to the Chief Secretary and the Director General of Police, asking them to file a report within four weeks.
An official release issued by the NHRC said it learnt that some Government employees including from the State Excise Department have been suspended following the incident.
Expressing concern over the loss of lives due to the consumption of spurious liquor, the Commission observed that the reported suspension of some public servants in the matter points towards negligence on the part of the official machinery which resulted in the tragedy.
Accordingly, it has issued notices to the Chief Secretary and Director General of Police asking them to file a report in the matter within four weeks, the release said.
Huge quantity of illicit liquor and raw materials have been recovered from various places in Uttar Pradesh including Bareilly, Bijnor, Etah, Kanpur Dehat, Allahabad, Mau, Kushinagar and Sonbhadra districts, the release said.
Over 30 people have lost their lives in the hooch tragedy and over two dozen people were battling for life after consuming spurious liquor in Etah and Farrukhabad districts even as the authorities launched a crackdown on bootlegging, arresting 1,621 people across Uttar Pradesh.
At least 11 government employees of excise and police department have been suspended.
The toll in the spurious liquor tragedy in Uttar Pradesh today climbed to 37 with four more deaths reported even as the NHRC took suo moto cognisance of the matter and issued notices to the state government seeking a reply in four weeks.
Two deaths each were reported in Etah and Farrukhabad, IG, (law and order) Hariom Sharma said here, adding the toll in Etah now has reached 31, while in neighbouring Farrukhabad it is six.
Taking suo motu cognisance of the deaths, the NHRC observed the suspension of public servants pointed towards negligence on the part of the official machinery resulting in the tragedy.
It issued notices to the Chief Secretary and Director General of Police seeking reports in the matter within four weeks.
The main accused Sripal Lodh has already been arrested and 11 officials from excise department and police have been suspended.
The government has announced an ex-gratia of Rs 2 lakh to the families of each deceased.
Over two dozen people were admitted in various hospitals in Etah and Saifai and their condition was stated to be serious.
Meanwhile to check manufacture and sale of illicit liquor, DGP Javeed Ahmed has issued strict directives to the officials in the districts to conduct a drive against the manufacture and sale of illicit liquor.
The authorities have launched a crackdown on bootlegging and arrested 1,621 people across Uttar Pradesh.
Meanwhile, BSP Supremo Mayawati accused the state government of going soft on the officials responsible for the death.
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Meanwhile, BJP MPs Ram Shankar Katheria and Rajvir Singh said they will raise the issue tomorrow in Parliament and stage a dharna there.
"The matter will be raised in Parliament tomorrow. We will also stage a dharna at the Gandhi statue in Parliament," Katheria said.
"People have lost their lives consuming liquor being made illicitly under the patronage of ruling party and the government claims to fulfill its responsibility merely by arresting a salesman and suspending some officials, he said, alleging the real culprits are roaming freely.
A Congress delegation also visited the district and met the victims and their families.
State in-charge of disciplinary committee of the Congress RK Dubey said his party will protest demanding justice and an ex-gratia of Rs 10 lakh for the families of the victims.
Six main power-generating turbines of at Kevadia in Narmada district of Gujarat have become operational since July 12, producing electricity at its full capacity after 65,000 cusec of water was released from the dam in Madhya Pradesh due to heavy rainfall in the catchment areas.
"All the six units of riverbed power house of 200 MW each have been generating power at its installed capacity because of the high flow of water in the river since a week. The totalled installed capacity of the riverbed power house is 1200 MW," an official of Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam Limited (SSNL) said.
The total installed capacity of this hydropower station is 1450 MW (which includes five canal based power house at Sardar Sarovar dam), the official said adding that the level of water in the dam has been improving and has risen to 115.84 meters (as on July 18).
All the turbines of the riverbed and canal based power house came into operation due to early arrival of monsoon in the catchment areas in Madhya Pradesh, the official said.
The decision to operate all these turbines was taken after consultation with the Narmada Control Authority (NCA), he said.
As much as 57% of electricity generated by the dam is supplied to Madhya Pradesh, 27% to Maharashtra and 16% to Gujarat.
In last one week, the dam has produced about 15 crores units of electricity which is being sold to the Gujarat Urja Vikas Nigam Limited (GUVNL).
The Ministry of AYUSH has signed an agreement with World Health Organisation for promotion of traditional Indian systems of medicine, including Yoga and Ayurveda, globally.
In a written reply to Rajya Sabha, Minister of State for AYUSH Shripad Yesso Naik said as per the agreement, India has assigned activities to WHO for developing technical documents under four categories.
The four categories include benchmarks for training in Yoga, Ayurveda, Unani medicine and Panchkarma.
Secretary, Ministry of AYUSH, Ajit M Sharan and Assistant Director General, Health Systems and Innovations, WHO, Marie Kieny, had signed the 'Project Collaboration Agreement' in Geneva on May 13, 2016.
The agreement seeks to achieve cooperation in promoting "quality, safety and effectiveness of service provision in traditional and complementary medicine."
It also aims to support WHO in the development and implementation of 'WHO Traditional and Complementary Medicine Strategy: 2014-2023' and will contribute to the global promotion of traditional Indian systems of medicine.
A 24-year-old software engineer from Kachiguda here was allegedly stabbed to death by his roommate in Austin in the US, his family said here today.
"Today morning we got a call from our relatives and Pranith, one of his friends, that Sankeerth was stabbed by one Sai Sandeep Goud, a roommate, yesterday," Sankeerth's uncle Srinivas said.
Sankeerth died while being shifted to a hospital and the accused had been taken into custody by the local police, Srinivas said.
Amid ongoing unrest in the Valley, the Chamber of Commerce and Industries (CCI) here today batted for an "intra-regional" dialogue among the people of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh regions before any talks with separatists.
"The state comprises three regions of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh and before holding any dialogue with only one region of the state, there should be an intra-regional dialogue among the people of three regions of the state," President of the CCI(J) Rakesh Gupta told reporters.
"Kashmir-based separatists are not the sole representatives of all the three regions of the state," he said.
He said that the all party delegation to Kashmir proposed by the central government would solve no problem unless the internal issues among the regions of the state are resolved.
Independent MLA Sheikh Abdul Rashid, along with nearly two dozen activists, today held an hour-long peaceful sit-in on a deserted road here to protest against civilian killings in the ongoing unrest in the valley.
Carrying black flags and placards, the legislator along with activists of his Awami Itihaad Party (AIP) collected near Press Enclave at the city centre and staged a peaceful sit-in outside the closed shops at Residency Road.
Some of the placards carried by the protestors read "Stop killing Kashmiris", "Plebiscite the only solution of Kashmir issue" and "India largest non-functional democracy".
Rashid was also carrying a placard with a picture of a badly injured victim which read "India is bleeding Kashmir" and "pellets shot at children".
The Legislator from Langate Assembly constituency criticised the Centre and said three more civilians including two women were killed by Army, hours after the Union Home Minister said the security forces have been asked to exercise retraint while dealing with protesting civilians.
"Is this the restraint?" he asked and said he will go further with his proposed indefinite sit-in outside Parliament house in New Delhi from Thursday.
"I will start an indefinite peaceful sit-in in front of the Indian Parliament from July 21 to give a wake-up call to the Parliamentarians of India who claim to be representing world's largest democracy.
I will go there for justice and I will talk to them about Kashmir issue, Rashid had said yesterday.
42 people have been so far killed as Kashmir is on boil since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani in an encounter on July 8.
The activists of right wing party Shiv Sena also held
protest at Bari Brahmana and Sunderbani area against Pakistan.
The Protest was led by state president of the party Dimpy Kohli.
Speaking on the occasion, Kohli targeted Pakistan for its "mischievous designs" in sponsoring militant attacks on Indian defence bases, besides aiding secessionists in Kashmir.
He asked Central government to "act tough and give a befitting reply to Pakistan without wasting time".
National Conference Student Union also held protest demonstration and accused BJP of "just giving statements and not doing enough to stop such attacks".
ABVP organised a 'Tiranga Rally' from the Jammu university up to Vikram chowk and more than 500 students and scholars participated in it.
The students of MAM, SPMC and GGMC colleges carried out separate rallies against Pakistan and burnt Pak flags amid anti-Pakistan slogans.
A small sample surveyed at a July 6 informational community meeting hosted by Beatrice Public Schools showed support of proposed plans to build new elementary facilities and opposition to costly renovations to all four existing elementary schools.
Survey respondents could answer for or against (or not respond) to five options that involve re-purposing the four BPS elementary schools. The options involve renovations, additions, demolitions and new facilities. Most of the options would cost millions of dollars and some would require voter approval this fall.
Previously published survey results incorrectly showed general support of all five options presented by BPS to the public. Here is the updated information:
Option 1: Build a single-site elementary school for all BPS preschoolers through fifth graders with a bond issue. Estimated total project cost is about $36.3 million.
Of 82 respondents, 66 percent were for and 32 percent against (54 people in support).
Option 2: Renovate Cedar Elementary School into a preschool facility, demolish the remaining three elementary schools and build a single-site kindergarten through fifth grade elementary school. Estimated total project cost is about $33.1 million.
Of 64 respondents, 52 percent were for and 47 percent against (33 people in support).
Option 3A: Make Cedar Elementary a preschool building and Paddock Lane Elementary a three-section (three classrooms of each level) kindergarten through fifth grade building as long as no bond issue is required.
Of 68 respondents, 27 percent for and 68 percent against (46 people in opposition).
Option 3B: Renovate Cedar Elementary School into a preschool facility and renovate all three remaining elementary schools, adding two additional portable classrooms at Paddock Lane. Estimated total project cost is about $17.65 million.
Of 65 respondents, 20 percent were for and 75.4 percent against (49 people in opposition).
Option 3C: Renovate Cedar Elementary School into a preschool facility and renovate all three remaining elementary schools, including an addition at Paddock Lane, which would include a new gymnasium. The current gym would be used as a cafeteria and the two current portable classrooms would be removed. Estimated total project cost is about $30 million.
Of 65 respondents, 17 percent for and 80 percent against (52 people in opposition).
About 140 people attended and 92 people filled out the paper survey distributed on site. Attendees included BPS staff, parents and others.
About 95 percent of survey respondents agreed the district needs to do something with the existing elementary facilities. District officials say the four elementary schools, built in the 1950s, are in need of major repairs, more space and better efficiency. Preschoolers are currently taught at three locations.
All of the options except Option 3A would require voter approval through the general election ballot in November. BPS must decide by mid-September if they want to make that move.
BPS officials say they want more public feedback before making a decision. BPS Superintendent Pat Nauroth said Monday he will try to schedule more community meetings -- preferably one at each of the four elementary schools -- in the coming weeks.
BPS taxpayers would pay for the construction through bond payments. The following list shows estimates of the additional annual taxes that owners of a property in the district valued at $100,000 would have to pay for the next 20 years in order to pay off each project.
A $17 million project (Option 3B) would cost an owner of a $100,000 property about $91 annually for 20 years.
A $30 million project (Option 3C) would cost an owner of a $100,000 property about $161 annually for 20 years.
A $36 million project (Option 1) would cost an owner of a $100,000 property about $193 annually for 20 years.
Jaidev Thackeray, the son of the late Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray, today claimed before the Bombay High Court that his father wanted him to be his political heir, but he himself was not keen, while his ex-wife Smita had her own political ambitions.
He also alleged that his brother and the present Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray had his (Jaidev's) name removed from the ration card in the name of the family.
Jaidev, Thackeray's estranged son, has challenged the Sena supremo's will of December 2011 which bequeaths a large chunk of the estate to Uddhav and does not give him anything.
He told the HC that as far back as 1973, during Sena's early years, he used to accompany his father Bal Thackeray to meetings.
"He always nursed a desire that I should be his political heir. But I did not cherish this and wanted to keep away from politics," he said, during the cross-examination by Uddhav's lawyer Rohit Kapadia.
"I was never interested in joining the politics because it is a different ballgame altogether," he said.
To a question, Jaidev said, "My previous wife Smita had political ambitions. I tried to reason with her that we were comfortable in our own way and I had no interest in politics. However, her involvement continued to grow.
"After my mother passed away in 1995, I told Smita we were neglecting our son Rahul...And it was inappropriate for her to meet official visitors at Matoshree (the Thackeray residence)," he said.
However, Smita insisted that she wanted to pursue her career in politics, he said. "I even suggested to her that we should shift to my flat at Kalina so that we can stay as a family," he said.
Ahead of the GST test in Rajya Sabha, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley today met Bihar Chief Minister and JDU leader Nitish Kumar and is likely to court senior leadership of Andhra Pradesh and Telengana parties -- TDP and TRS -- this weekend.
Jaitley, who is counting on support of regional parties for passage for the Constitutional Amendment Bill on Goods and Services Tax (GST), met Kumar in Parliament House here.
GST and support for government stand against Congress demand for a constitutional cap on the tax rate figured in the discussions, official sources said.
Kumar, they said, supported government stand that tax rate should not be mentioned in the Bill and the decision should be left to the GST Council.
Also figured in discussions was Bihar government's demand for release of backward region grant for the state.
The government, which has agreed to a five hour debate on the GST bill in the Rajya Sabha, is keen to get the law passed during the current Monsoon Session of Parliament that ends on August 12.
Jaitley, sources said, will visit Hyderabad this weekend and is likely to meet TDP leaders and Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu and TRS supremo and Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao.
TDP has six members in the 247 member house, while TRS has three. JDU has 10 members in a House where the ruling NDA does not have a majority. Congress with 60 members is the single largest party in Rajya Sabha. BJP has 53 members.
The Congress, which originally mooted the GST in 2009 to replace all indirect taxes, has been demanding that the overall rate be capped at 18 per cent and scrapping of an additional 1 per cent tax designed to compensate manufacturing states that fear losing revenue.
GST Bill, which intends to convert 29 states into a single market through a new indirect tax regime, was earlier planned to be introduced from April 1 this year, but the deadline was missed as the Bill to roll it out remains in a limbo in the Opposition-dominated Rajya Sabha.
After Parliament approves the constitutional amendment to allow GST, it needs to be ratified by more than half of the states. Then, Parliament must pass another Bill to implement GST.
After the Constitution Amendment Bill is passed in Parliament, there are three more legislations - Central GST (CGST), State GST (SGST) and Integrated GST (iGST) - which are required to be passed.
The GST Bill, which will help create a single national sales tax to replace several state and central levies, has already been approved by the Lok Sabha and is pending in the Upper House.
And since there is no scope now for earning any old
currency because all exemptions have been waived, it makes sense to go deposit all the holding in one go, Jaitley said. "This is the objective of the order passed today."
After banning old 500 and 1,000 rupee notes on November 8, the government had allowed all of the cash holdings with any person to be deposited in bank accounts till December 30. There was no limit on the quantity or value of the junked notes that could be deposited.
However, the government on December 17 issued a gazette notification putting restrictions on deposits henceforth.
"The deposits of old notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denominations have been reviewed by the government from time to time. Already more than five weeks have elapsed since the time of the announcement of the cancellation of the legal tender character of these notes. It is expected that, by now, most of the people would have deposited such old notes in their possession," an official statement said.
With a view to "reduce the queues in the banks", the government said it has now been decided that "amounts exceeding Rs 5,000 in old notes can be deposited only once between now and December 30, 2016."
"The banks have been advised to conduct due diligence regarding the reasons for not depositing these notes earlier," the statement said.
Amounts of Rs 5,000 or less may continue to be deposited with banks in the customer's account, as at present.
"However, cumulative deposits exceeding Rs 5,000 between December 19 and December 30, 2016 will be as per the procedures advised by the RBI in respect of deposits exceeding Rs 5,000," it said.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) too came out with deposit guideline stipulating that restrictive conditions will also apply on the cumulative deposit of such notes in a single account when it exceeds Rs 5,000.
However, the defunct currency up to any amount can be deposited under the new black money amnesty scheme, PMGKY.
Bath fittings and sanitary ware major Jaquar Group has acquired a majority stake in the South Korea-based Joeyforlife by investing USD 1.2 million, as part of efforts to expand its global footprint.
Jaquar, which has acquired 51 per cent stake in luxury shower maker Joeyforlife, said the move would help it to expand its business in South Korea and South East Asian countries.
"It would reinforce our technical strength and secondly Joeyforlife, which is working in far east region aggressively...We would get an access to this quite potential market of the South East Asian region," Jaquar Group Director and Promoter Rajesh Mehra told PTI.
On being asked about the synergy, he said: "Joeyforlife is into high-end products as shower and faucet and Jaquar has a complete portfolio of bathing solutions. Now pooling them together, we can enhance our portfolio."
Mehra further said the management of Joeyforlife would continue even after the acquisition of stake and there would be no change. Joeyforlife would remain an independent entity, he added.
"The day-to-day management would be run by Kiho Ha, CEO, Joeyforlife and there would be no change," he added.
Mehra said: "We have been working together for the last four years and have a very strong association. Joeyforlife has strong R&D set up and together we have designed and developed products in four years of journey," he said adding that the products were accepted very well in India.
At present, 70 per cent of Joeyforlife's manufacturing capacity is dedicated to Jaquar only.
On investments, Mehra said: "Initially as a capital, we have invested USD 1.2 million to begin with and then we would see. It was through our internal accruals."
When asked if the company would introduce the brand Joeyforlife to India, Mehra said: "There is no need to present two different identities.... The idea is to continue with the same brands in those respective markets."
Jaquar Group, which is having around 30 per cent year on year growth, is expecting to touch a turnover of Rs 3,000 crore in FY 2016-17.
The company, which has started exports couple of years before, is now scouting for markets in Europe. It has a good presence in the Middle East and African markets.
At present, export contributes around 5 per cent to Jaquar's turnover and it expects it to be doubled in terms of ratio, in the next four years.
"India would continue to be the focus of the company, but we have a vision to make Jaquar a global brand and we are now giving equal amount of focus on the overseas market. So we are expecting that in the next 3-4 years over 10 per cent contribution would come from exports.
A Jharkhand resident was booked by the CBI today for allegedly forging signature of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on a letter which claimed that he had been invited to organise a musical programme for Independence Day celebrations here.
The letter from one Pandit Swaraj Kumar Roy was sent to the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) which was taken aback as no such communication had been issued. The matter was then referred to the CBI for enquiry and the agency registered a case after preliminary investigations.
Roy, who hails from Bokaro, had sent a letter dated May 2015, purportedly issued by Prime Minister's Office, asking him to organise a classical music programme on Independence Day, a CBI Spokesperson said today.
"The allegations pertain to forgery of signatures of Prime Minister of India on a letter purportedly issued by the PMO to the said accused for arranging classical music programme on upcoming Independence Day," she said.
The spokesperson said searches were conducted at Bokaro steel City (Jharkhand) and Bishnupur District Bankra (West Bengal) from the premises of accused which led to the recovery of large number of incriminating forged documents and articles relating to forgery of the signatures of Prime Minister of India. No arrest has yet been made in the case.
In a fresh development involving the students related to the controversial February 9 event on the university campus, the JNU administration has blocked their registration for the next semester.
The list of 21 students includes JNUSU President Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya, who were arrested under sedition charges over the event and later released on bail.
During the event anti-national slogans were allegedly raised by the accused as they gathered to mark the death anniversary of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru.
The circular bearing the names of the students carried a noting by the JNU registrar Pramod Kumar.
"The registration of the following students should be blocked till further notice," it reads.
Although the university authorities were tight-lipped about the development, the affected students protested the move terming it a violation of the court order.
"It's a violation of the High Court order which has prevented university from acting against us," said Ashutosh, who is affected by the decision.
He said although the registrations were blocked by the university the online system which generated their registration folio informed they were blocked as they had not paid fines imposed by the administration.
The Joint Secretary of JNUSU, Saurabh Sharma, whose registration has also been blocked, alleged he was punished for acting against "anti-national" elements.
"The JNU administration has blocked registration of 21 students for the next semester. The charge against me is that I stopped those who raised anti-national slogans on the campus," Sharma, who is from ABVP, the students wing of RSS, said in his statement.
He said the high court had directed for an appellate committee hear the version of the accused students but it has not come out with its report.
An enquiry initiated by the JNU administration had indicted 21 people, including two academics from outside the varsity.
Umar, Anirban, and another student Mujeeb, were rusticated in April, while others were expelled from their hostels or fined.
This was followed by a fortnight -long hunger strike which ended with the Delhi High Court asking the JNU vice-chancellor Jagadesh Kumar to decide on the students' appeals.
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Police have announced a reward of Rs 50,000 for anyone who can provide information about JNU student Najeeb's whereabouts. A public advertisement has also been issued in this regard, police said.
Kerala Union of Working Journalists today organised a march protesting against some advocates who allegedly used abusive words against legal reporters at the Kerala High Court media room here.
KUWJ leader and Ernakulam Press Club president Ravikumar alleged that some advocates today hurled abusive words at legal reporters for covering a case related to an alleged attempt by a government pleader to molest a woman here last week.
A legal reporter has complained to the Acting Chief Justice about the incident in the High Court media room, Ravikumar said, after organising a march of journalists towards the High Court Advocates Association's office here.
He also alleged that some advocates tried to create trouble during the march.
The government pleader was arrested last week on the charge of allegedly attempting to molest the woman on a city lane.
Dhanesh Mathew Manjooran was apprehended on July 15 by locals after the woman raised an alarm. He is currently out on bail.
A group of Kashmiri Pandits today held a protest at Teen Murti Marg here against Pakistan's "interference" in the internal affairs of India and open "support" to terrorists.
They later submitted a memorandum at the Pakistan High Commission.
The protest was led by the All India Kashmiri Samaj (AIKS), which is a central body for several Kashmiri Pandit organisations in India and abroad.
"The protest was organised against Pakistan's gross interference in the internal affairs of our country, as also Pakistan's open support to known terrorists and their sympathizers in Kashmir," AIKS said in a statement.
The demonstration was earlier planned outside the Pakistan High Commission in Chanakyapuri here but police barricaded a certain stretch of Shanti Path, citing security concerns, therefore the protesters later assembled at Teen Murti Marg.
"A memorandum was submitted to Pakistan High Commission by a delegation of AIKS, urging the Pakistan government to desist from inciting trouble and violence in Kashmir, with the objective of keeping the pot boiling in the Valley, at the cost of ordinary people of Kashmir and its youth," a protester said.
AAP National Convener Arvind Kejriwal will visit Gujarat on Friday, his second visit in a fortnight, to meet the members of the Dalit community in the wake of assaults on them after some members allegedly skinned a cow at Una last week.
The decision on Kejriwal's visit to the state comes a day after Gujarat Chief Minister Anandiben Patel ordered a CID probe in the incidents, and also announced setting up of a special court for "speedy" trial.
The incident at Una town in Gir-Somnath district, where Dalit youths were paraded and flogged for allegedly killing a cow, caused nation-wide outrage after its video went viral. The victims' contention was that they were skinning a dead cow and had not killed it.
"Kejriwal will visit Una to meet the dalit victims on July 22," said a party official.
Apart from Rs 1 lakh compensation, Patel had also announced that the state government will bear all the medical expenses of the seven Dalit youths, who were injured in the incident and are undergoing treatment at various government hospitals in Una, Junagadh and Rajkot.
This will be Kejriwal's second visit to the state this month. On July 9, he had visited Somnath temple. AAP has been trying to make inroads in the state, which saw Narendra Modi as the Chief Minister for over 12 years.
The kidnapped son of the Chief Justice of Sindh High Court was rescued from the clutches of Pakistani Taliban by the military in an early morning raid in the restive northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, the third high-profile abduction case to be solved in recent months.
Awais Ali Shah, a lawyer himself, was abducted last month from Karachi. He was found in Tank, which lies close to the tribal region bordering Afghanistan where the military has been battling Taliban.
Three militants were killed during the operation.
"Awais Shah, son of Sindh High Court Chief Justice Sajjad Ali Shah, recovered through an IBO from custody of terrorists from near Tank, three terrorists killed," Director-General of the Inter-Services Public Relations Lieutenant General Asim Bajwa tweeted.
Shah, who is in his late 20s, was reunited with his family around 9:30am. "I got a call from General Raheel Sharif at 3:00am informing me my son has been rescued," Sajjad Ali Shah said while addressing the media after being reunited with his son.
"A Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) splinter group was behind Awais Ali Shah's kidnapping. The group were in touch with us and did communicate with us but cannot say anything further due to security reasons," Bajwa said.
Masked men kidnapped Shah from outside a supermarket in Karachi on June 20. It was feared that he could be used as a bargaining chip in negotiations to free imprisoned militants.
Shah's recovery comes months after sons of two high profile politicians returned home after spending years in captivity.
Shahbaz Taseer, the son of former slain Punjab governor, Salman Taseer was recovered in March from the Balochistan province after spending five years in captivity. He was kidnapped by militants and kept in Afghanistan.
In May, Ali Haider the son of former Prime Minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani who was kidnapped from Multan was recovered from Afghanistan after three years in captivity of militant outfits.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif also congratulated justice Shah on the recovery of his son and praised security forces.
"The prime minister lauded the role of intelligence agencies and security forces in recovering Awais Shah and said that the professional and operational excellence of our security forces has made it possible for which they deserve immense appreciation," a statement issued by PM House said.
Kidnapping by criminal gangs and militants is common in the country. Police did not say why they suspected Shah had been abducted by militants.
Karachi has long been plagued by political, ethnic and religious violence, although crime has dropped sharply since the launch of a paramilitary operation in September 2013.
Kirit Somaiya of BJP was today became a member of Parliament's Joint Committee on the Enforcement of Security Interest and Recovery of Debt Law and Miscellaneous Provisions (Amendment) Bill in place of another party member P P Chaudhary, who resigned following his appointment as a Union minister.
Lok Sabha passed this motion with a voice vote.
The House also asked Rajya Sabha to name replacements for Praful Patel, Satish Mishra and K C Tyagi, who had recently retired.
Speaker Sumitra Mahajan also announced the resignation of three members -- Sarbananda Sonowal (BJP), Mehbooba Mufti (PDP) and Suvendu Adhikari (TMC).
Sonowal and Mufti are now chief ministers of Assam and Jammu and Kashmir respectively and resigned following their election to their state assemblies. Adhikari too was elected as an MLA from West Bengal and made a minister in the Mamata Banerjee government.
Their resignation has been accepted, she informed the House.
Beatrice High School and the American Red Cross are hosting a blood drive at the Beatrice High School auxiliary gym from 11:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Wednesday.
The need for blood is constant and only volunteer donors can fulfill that need for patients in the community. Nationwide, someone needs a unit of blood every 2 to 3 seconds, according to a press release from the Red Cross.
Leader of Opposition in Maharashtra Legislative Council, Dhananjay Munde today accused media of "ignoring" the brutal gangrape-cum-murder of a minor girl in Ahmednagar district even though the 'rape' analogy of Bollywood actor Salman Khan hogged the limelight.
"Media ignored the incident for the first two to three days and gave it no coverage. If Salman Khan says something on rape, it immediately becomes breaking . But, this girl was not as famous as Salman. Which may be (the reason) why the media initially did not give coverage to it (the incident)," he said in the Upper House during a debate on the Kopardi gangrape-cum-murder incident.
A 15-year-old girl was allegedly raped and killed by three men at Kopardi village in Karjat taluka in Ahmednagar district last week. The incident had sparked a massive outrage.
Munde said like the media, none of the elected representatives from the region, including ministers, besides police officers or district collector spoke a word on the incident for the first two days.
BJP minister Ram Shinde represents Karjat-Jamkhed Assembly constituency in Ahmednagar district as an MLA.
Munde also attacked Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis for not visiting the family of the deceased.
"When we mistakenly showed a cabinet minister's photo with a person who we thought was an accused, the CM was quick to rebut us with the correct picture of the accused. If he had shown same swiftness in visiting the family of the victim, he would have been appreciated," the NCP leader said.
Munde challenged the government to complete the trial in the case within four months and to ensure that the accused get capital punishment.
"Only then will we believe that you (the BJP) have the courage to run this government," he said.
Fadnavis had yesterday told the Legislative Assembly that the case will be heard in a fast track court.
Meanwhile, Congress leader Narayan Rane, who also took part in the discussion, said that by showing the pictures of the accused, Fadnavis has violated the provisions of the Evidence Act.
"How can the CM show the photos of the accused in a media
briefing? It can have a disastrous impact on the court case against the accused. Tomorrow they might allege violation of the provisions of Evidence Act to secure bail. The whole case will be dissolved then," he said.
Rane said the CM "did not understand" the Home portfolio as a result of which the "law and order situation remains collapsed in the state."
"Most cases of hooliganism happen in Nagpur (Fadnavis' constituency). If he cannot save Nagpur, how will the CM save Maharashtra? Today, if a survey is done on parties having maximum number of criminals, BJP will top the list," the Congress leader said.
Continuing his diatribe, Rane added, "tomorrow even (underworld don) Dawood Ibrahim may surrender, join BJP and may become a minister. Who knows this might happen anytime because the party has become infamous for taking in criminals," he added.
As his government faced a fierce attack over the brutal gangrape and murder of a girl in Ahmednagar, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis today said death penalty would be sought for the guilty.
"Only after hanging will the right message go in the state," Fadnavis told the state Assembly.
"This is a very serious crime. DNA evidence is scientific evidence and will help in conviction. A five-member team, including forensic experts, will help bring the case to charge sheet level in next 4 to 6 days," he said, replying to a discussion on the issue in the Lower House.
Fadnavis said the state government will ask court to hang the guilty.
"We will also ensure there are no adjournments in the the case," he said.
The brutal gangrape and murder of the girl had rocked both the houses of Maharashtra Legislature yesterday as its monsoon session got underway and a debate on the issue was held today in the Lower House.
The crime had sparked protests across the state, with people taking to the streets demanding action against the accused, while Congress demanded the resignation of the CM on moral grounds.
"I appeal to people in the state to stop venting their ire over the issue," he said.
"It is difficult to believe that someone could indulge in an act which is worse than that of a dog," he said.
Referring to criticism by opposition that police action against the accused came late, Fadnavis said, "It is not factual that there was delay in police action."
"All three accused have been arrested. Action will also be taken against the fourth accused," he said, adding that the CID will probe if Jitendra Shinde, an accused, had a role in an old murder case.
He said Pune Police Commissioner Rashmi Shukla will be directed to meet the victim's kin and talk to villagers.
"Guardian minister and senior police officials visited the village. I could not visit as I was away in Russia," Fadnavis said.
The Chief Minister said the rate of conviction in such crimes, which was 8 per cent, has reached 21 per cent.
Over 90 per cent of crimes against women involve known persons, he noted.
The Kopardi rape has blackened the face of Maharashtra, Fadnavis said.
"We will bring in a legislation providing 10 years jail sentence for those involved in illicit liquor cases. Police officials will be held responsible and action taken against them for illicit liquor in their area," he added.
Earlier, former Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar,
while participating in the debate, said the investigation should be such that those involved should be hanged in six months.
Leader of Opposition in Assembly Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil said action in Kopardi like cases should be on the similar lines as that of atrocity cases.
"Why is there no dedicated Home minister for the state?. Why does Fadnavis want to keep that portfolio with himself?," he said.
Vikhe Patil alleged that minister Ram Shinde, who also hails from Ahmednagar, spared time to inaugurate a hotel instead of going to Kopardi.
However, Shinde denied the charge.
BJP legislator Manisha Chaudhury blamed films like "Sairaat" for rise in crimes against women.
The girl was brutally raped and killed by three men at Kopardi in Ahmednagar last week.
The incident took place on July 13, when the teenage girl was returning after meeting her grandfather.
She was allegedly accosted by three men, who gangraped her before strangling her.
The victim, a student of class IX, had reportedly been mutilated, and local accounts suggest she was found with her hair pulled out, and hands and teeth broken.
She was found with both shoulders dislocated, police said.
(Reopens BOM14)
Meanwhile, protesting over the incident, activists of a social organisation allegedly set on fire a bus near a village in Latur district today.
Several organisations today called for a bandh in Latur district to protest the incidentr.
This afternoon, around 4-5 supporters of Chhava Sangathana waylaid a State Transport bus going towards Kalamb from Latur city near Bhoi Samudraga village and asked the passengers to alight, police said.
"The moment the bus driver, conductor and passengers got down from the bus, these supporters torched the bus from inside in which all the seats were gutted," Sudhakar Bawakar, Assistant Police Inspector, MIDC police station Latur, said.
Three persons have been detained in connection with the incident, they said.
Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi today met Prime Minister Narendra Modi here during which bilateral issues and matters of regional importance were discussed.
The Prime Minister warmly recalled his successful visit to Malaysia last year for the ASEAN and related Summits, as well as for a bilateral visit, a PMO statement said.
Hamidi, who also holds the portfolio of Home Affairs, briefed the Prime Minister on the state of bilateral cooperation, especially in the fields of counter-terrorism, cyber security and trans-national crimes, it said.
Modi reiterated his invitation to the Malaysian Prime Minister to visit India in the near future.
A British man has admitted murdering an Indian-origin single mother he had met on an online dating site.
Miles Donnelly pleaded guilty yesterday to the murder of 44-year-old Usha Patel, whose body was found in her flat in Cricklewood area of north-west London in October last year.
She had been stabbed, beaten across the face and strangled by the 35-year-old who later went on the run before being arrested by Scotland Yard.
He had initially denied charges of murder but on the day his two-week trial was to begin at Old Bailey Court in London he admitted the crime and now faces life in prison for the crime.
"The injuries are such as to suggest to me a terrible ferocity and I have to say possibly sadistic conduct over and above violence used to kill," Judge Rebecca Poulet said as she suspended sentencing till Thursday.
The court heard that Donnelly, aka Miles Ryan, first came into online contact with Patel in April last year and the pair went on to meet in person before continuing to keep in touch.
The murder occurred after Patel invited him over to her home on October 7 with the understanding of having sex. They had both undressed when Donnelly attacked the mother-of-one, stabbing her 16 times and punching her around the head.
Detectives investigating the murder found his set of house keys inside the flat and forensic evidence including samples from a wine glass was also matched to him.
After he killed Patel, Donnelly hid at the home of a 43-year-old woman who lived on the same street as him. He stayed there for 36 hours before attacking her with a stool as well. He was eventually arrested on October 11, 2015.
Patel, who had her five-year-old autistic son in the flat during the murder, was discovered the next day when the boy's grandfather arrived to pick him up and was told his mother was still sleeping.
Detective Inspector James Stevenson, of the Metropolitan Police Homicide and Major Crime Command, said, "Donnelly declined to answer any questions put to him during his police interviews and has never offered any information as to why he assaulted and killed Usha Patel that night. Usha's family are completely devastated. Today, I am pleased that Donnelly now faces a considerable prison term".
Donnelly had a lifestyle of drink and drugs and a long criminal history.
His upcoming movie "M Cream" is touted as India's first 'stoner film' and director Agneya Singh says it is about time the Government decriminalises marijuana.
Singh, making his feature film debut with the movie, says even the US - which once opposed legalising cannabis - is today taking steps to make it legal.
"Marijuana and cannabis have been a part of our culture for nearly 1,000 years. In fact, marijuana was legal in India right up till 1950 before it was made illegal under pressure. Today even US has taken steps to to decriminalise it...
"I feel it is about time our Government, too, lifts these draconian laws. I do think marijuana should be decriminalised. But that is my personal view, not a stand the film takes," Singh told PTI.
"M Cream" chronicles the journey of four rebellious friends who undertake a road trip to Himachal Pradesh in pursuit of a mythical drug called 'M Cream'. It stars actor Naseeruddin Shah's son, Imaad, along with Ira Dubey and Barry John.
Recently, "Udta Punjab" also tackled the issue of drug abuse but the 26-year-old director says his project "neither glorifies" nor is "anti-drugs."
"'Udta Punjab' was anti-drugs and rightly so because the drugs the film was talking about were heroin and cocaine which are dangerous. 'M Cream' neither glorifies drug use nor is ant-drugs. In the film, we are showing things as they are."
Singh feels the aim of "M Cream" is to spark a debate regarding the issue.
"If alcohol and tobacco can be legal in our country, which are medically proven to be harmful, why ban marijuana? If you legalise it there will be at least proper regulation. I have not read a single report about a man dying due to overdose of it."
"M Cream" has travelled to several international film festivals garnering both accolades and critical acclaim. Singh says while the film is about the quest to find the mythical drug, it is also more "poetic" in nature.
"The film is philosophical and quite poetic which raises issues concerning the youth. From LGBT to the anti-national movement, the leaders of all these movements are youth," he said.
"The youth of today has a lot of questions about our country and the way it is headed. The film raises those questions, as unfortunately, at this point of time, we don't have the answers to them," the director added.
"M Cream" releases on July 22.
Melania Trump, the wife of presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump, projected him as a kind and compassionate man as she tried to soften the controversial businessman's hard-edged persona during her speech at the Republican National Convention here.
Making a passionate plea for her husband, Melania said Trump will never ever let Americans down.
"I can tell you with certainty that my husband has been concerned about our country for as long as I have known him. With all of my heart, I know that he will make a great and lasting difference," she said.
"Donald has a great and deep and unbounding determination and a never-give-up attitude. I have seen him fight for years to get a project done or even started, and he does not give up. If you want someone to fight for you and your country, I can assure you he's the guy," she said amidst applause on the first night of the four-day Republican National Convention.
In an unconventional move, Trump himself appeared on the first day of the Convention and made a very brief introductory remarks for his spouse.
"She would be a great First Lady," Trump said.
Melania, a naturalised immigrant who is Trump's third wife, talked about Trump's leadership and his doggedness when facing a challenge.
"He will never ever give up. And most importantly, he will never ever let you down. Donald is and always has been an amazing leader. Now he will go to work for you. His achievements speak for themselves, and his performance throughout the primary campaign proves that he knows how to win. He also knows how to remain focused on improving our country, on keeping it safe and secure," she said.
Trump, she said, "is tough when he has to be, but he's also kind and fair and caring".
"This kindness is not always noted, but it is there for all to see. That is one reason I fell in love with him to begin with," the former fashion model said.
"Donald is intensely loyal to family, friends, employees, country. He has the utmost respect for his parents, Mary and Fred, to his sisters Maryanne and Elizabeth, to his brother, Robert, and to the memory of his late brother, Fred. His children have been cared for and mentored to the extent that even his advisers admit they're an amazing testament to who he is as a man and a father," she said.
Noting that Trump thinks big, which is especially important when considering the presidency of the US, she said there is no room for small thinking, no room for small results.
"Donald gets things done," she said.
"America is underperforming and needs new leadership," she said.
"Leadership is also what the world needs. Donald wants
our country to move forward in the most positive of ways. Everyone wants change. Donald is the only one that can deliver it. We should not be satisfied with stagnation. Donald wants prosperity for all Americans," she argued.
"Trump's experience exemplifies growth and successful passage of opportunity to the next generation. His success indicates inclusion rather than division. My husband offers a new direction, welcoming change, prosperity and greater cooperation among peoples and nations. Donald intends to represent all the people, not just some of the people," she said.
"That includes Christians and Jews and Muslims. It includes Hispanics and African Americans and Asians, and the poor and the middle class," she added.
Born on April 26, 1970 in Slovenia, Melania Knauss began her modeling career at the age of sixteen. At the age of eighteen, she signed with a modeling agency in Milan.
Melania said as first lady she will use that wonderful privilege to try to help people in the country who need it the most.
"One of the many causes dear to my heart is helping children and women. You judge society by how it treats its citizens. We must do our best to ensure that every child can live in comfort and security with the best possible education," she said.
Ministry is working on an action plan to raise the sector's contribution to India's gross domestic product (GDP) from 2.3% to 3.3% by 2019.
Secretary Balvinder Kumar told reporters that ministry is working on action plan as directed by the Minister Piyush Goyal.
He said this on the sidelines on an event by Council of Energy, Environment and Water in New Delhi.
While taking charge of Mines Ministry earlier this month, Goyal had said, "We will work on a growth of 30-35% annually in terms of the volume of minerals mined, which would help us in increasing mining's share in GDP by 1 per cent in 2-3 years."
To achieve this target, the Secretary said that states have initiated the auction process by issuing the notices inviting tenders for 33 blocks containing minerals such as gold, diamond, iron ore, limestone, etc.
"By the end of this financial year, we expect states will be able to auction 70-80 mines," he added.
Besides, there are 70-80 mines, where operations have not started due to environment and forest clearance. The Ministry is in talks with the Environment Ministry to push for their case, Kumar said.
The work on aerial survey of over 8 lakh sq km of obvious geological potential area is in the works.
"We have hired a consultant and we are in the process of preparing the process for hiring a global agency to do the survey. The survey work is expected to start by January 2017," Kumar said.
On offshore mining, he said the ministry has identified 50-60 blocks of 7 minutes each.
"Besides, the offshore mining rules will come out in about 3 months. After this these blocks will be auctioned," he added.
All these efforts will add up to increase India's mining potential and will in turn help the sector increase its contribution in the country's GDP, Kumar noted.
Mizoram Remote Sensing Application Centre (MIRSAC), Directorate of Science and Technology and Geography Association of Mizoram (GAM) today erected a stone at a place where the Tropic of Cancer runs through Mizoram, an official statement said.
The stone was set up and a hoarding put up at Maubuang Lungsai hamlet in Aizawl district on the World Bank-funded road linking Aizawl and south Mizoram's Lunglei town, the statement said.
R K Lallianthanga, Chief Scientific Officer of the Directorate of Science and Technology, said that the Tropic of Cancer runs through 23.5 degree Latitude and the imaginary line was identified with the data of the Survey of India's topographical map and with the help of the Global Positioning System (GPS).
Mizoram government has sent feelers to the Hmar People's Convention (Democratic) militants for initiating peace talks with the outfit having camps in neighbouring Manipur, Inspector General of Police Zorammawia said today.
The state Police Headquarters had instructed the CID (Special Branch) to send formal communication to the HPC(D) leadership on the state government's willingness to hold parleys while the decision was informally conveyed to the outfit through feelers and the local leaders of the outfit's operating areas, he told PTI.
The time and place of the proposed negotiations would be decided after receiving reply from the HPC(D), he said, adding the talks would be initially held at the official-level.
Earlier, state home minister R Lalzirliana announced that the state government was willing to initiate talks with the Hmar outfit after the people of the north eastern part of the state who have been reeling under insurgency for years made appeals to the government to bring peace in the area.
Meanwhile, officials of the state Home Department were tight-lipped on whether the HPC(D)'s self-styled Army Chief Lalropuia Famhoite, now incarcerated at the Central Jail near Aizawl would be released to participate in the talks.
The HPC(D), formed in 1997, had been demanding a separate autonomous district council in the north eastern part of the state and had been indulging in violent activities to press for their demands from across the Manipur border.
Assam government today said it has spent over Rs 216 crore since 2001 to solve the perennial water logging problem in Guwahati.
Replying to a discussion after the issue was raised by AGP MLA Ramendra Narayan Kalita, Guwahati Development Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said Rs 216.30 crore have been spent on various activities to prevent water logging problem in the city.
However, there has been no fruitful result so far despite best efforts by the administration, he added.
Incidentally large areas and almost all the main roads of the city experienced massive water logging today due to heavy rains since morning.
Sarma said the government is working on some measures such as increasing the water bodies' capacities, constructing new drains and proper disposition of waste. "We hope in the next 2-3 years, we will see some good results."
He said the administration has taken steps to install 9,610 street lamps across the city, of which 9,100 have already completed.
The minister also informed the House that the state government has received Rs 366.51 crore under the JNNURM scheme so far.
OMAHA Families of refugees from Syria have begun settling in Nebraska over the past two months.
Nearly 50 Syrian refugees have quietly moved into Nebraska with the help of relief agencies. Just last month more than 2,400 Syrian refugees arrived in the United States.
Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts continues to question whether federal authorities are doing enough to check the backgrounds of refugees and find potential terrorists, but he acknowledges that he has no power to stop their arrival.
"I urge the president to reconsider and to take common-sense steps to protect the security and well-being of the American people and their families," Ricketts said.
Federal officials have defended the security procedures they are using as robust and thorough.
The local agencies helping settle Syrian refugees say they are treating these people just as they have hundreds of other refugees they help each year.
"We're entrusted to protect their privacy and safety and help them get a good start," said Ann Marie Kudlacz of the Refugee Empowerment Center, one of two local agencies settling the Nebraska Syrians. "We didn't want too much attention."
The refugees that arrived recently are still adjusting to Nebraska. Faedah Karbouj said she is grateful for the opportunity her family has now.
"Thank you, America, especially Omaha, Nebraska. They are good, friendly people," Karbouj said.
The long journey for Fatima al-Sebaie and her family began five years ago in Homs, a midsize city in central Syria. She and her husband and three children arrived in Omaha last week with hopes of reclaiming the life they enjoyed before Syria's civil war.
"We have been through tough times, but we are not going to let this affect our lives and our kids," she said through an interpreter.
The agencies helping the refugees have had strong support from faith groups in the community.
"These families are coming from a war-torn country and have been through many difficult situations," said Todd Reckling of Lutheran Family Services. "We are happy to help them with a safe environment and services to help them get settled here."
A 26-year-old tribal woman left her newborn daughter in Nashik Civil Hospital after reportedly presuming that the child had died, but was later united with her baby after being informed by the staff.
Saibai, a resident of Asaberi Satta tribal hamlet under Mokhada taluka in Maharashtra's Palghar district, had given birth to a girl at Nashik Civil Hospital two days back. The baby was kept in the hospital's ICU for treatment.
Unaware of her baby being in ICU, the woman, was under the impression that the child have died, left the hospital and returned home, Nashik's Deputy Commissioner of Police Laxmikant Patil said.
Meanwhile, the hospital staff informed police about the woman having left. Police searched for the woman and traced her in Palghar, he said.
They brought the woman back to Civil Hospital here and handed the child over to her last evening and also gave her some dry fruits, the DCP added.
With an aim to promote 'Make in Madhya Pradesh' as a brand to attract investment, an pact was signed between the state Trade and Investment Facilitation Corporation (MPTRIFAC) and Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) here.
The agreement was inked on Monday by TRIFAC MD D P Ahuja and CII Regional Director (Western Region) Swagata Mukherjee in the presence of Commerce, Industries and Employment Minister Rajendra Shukla, a Public Relation Department official said on Tuesday.
The aim of the MoU is to project the state in a planned manner through its branding in the country and world to attract investment.
Under the pact, CII will be the national partner with MPTRIFAC.
The MOU has the provisions under which CII would collaborate with state government's priority areas which include preparation of a strategy to attract domestic and foreign investment in the state, motivate world's prestigious industrial houses to set up their units in the state and improvement in Ease-of-Doing Business, focus sectors and state's policies.
The CII would undertake investment promotion at national and international level for the state under 'Make in Madhya Pradesh' campaign, the official said.
"It would establish image of as a pioneer business and investment destination at national and international level. Moreover, in tandem with MPTRIFAC, CII would also hold events endorsed by TRIFAC in regard to Global Investors Summit-2016," the official added.
Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd (MRPL) has lined up projects worth up to Rs 15,000 crore in coming years, which include a raw petroleum coke gas complex.
MRPL Managing Director H Kumar said in a release the company intended to produce 'Syngas' (synthetic gas) and subsequently to produce value-added chemicals, such as urea (fertiliser), acetic acid, acryilate among others and production of linear alkyl benzene (LAB) - a feed stock to produce detergents.
Director (Refineries) M Venkatesh said MRPL had to upgrade facilities in the wake of the Centre's autofuel upgradation policy to produce BS VI grade fuel by April 2020.
This would greatly help reduce environment pollution caused by automobile emissions, but additional land would be required to set up the same.
MRPL would also have to enhance refining capacity to 18 to 21 million tonnes per year to meet increasing fuel demand.
Land to be acquired for the purpose was spread across four villages and most of which was being acquired was dry land, including government land and not agriculture land.
The land to rehabilitate displaced persons was being acquired in Mulur and Yekkar as per directions issued by the state government, the release said.
A total of 75.2 per cent of land owners in four villages, owning 80 per cent land, have given their consent to acquire land for Phase IV expansion of the refinery.
The package would also include providing employment to displaced persons, he said, adding that MRPL had provided employment to 538 people so far who had lost land for earlier MRPL projects.
MRPL would also take up afforestation activities both at 27 acres of buffer zone and at Pilikula, the release said.
MRPL has seven percent of India's refining capacity, the main products being LPG, Petrol, Diesel, Kerosene, ATF, Naphtha, Mixed xylene, Propylene, Polypropylene, F.O, Bitumen, Pet coke and sulphur.
Unidentified persons allegedly barged into the house of Manish Sisodia's media advisor and "stole important documents" containing details of the meetings between the Deputy Chief Minister and Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal over the last one year.
Sisodia has written to Police Commissioner Alok Verma alleging "foul play" as "valuable items" including laptop, mobile, music system were not stolen, but certain "important papers" of the briefings were missing from the South Delhi residence of his media advisor Arunodaya Prakash.
Referring to CBI's raid at Kejriwal's former principal secretary Rajendra Kumar's office last December, Sisodia alleged "when they did not find anything in the raid, they are now getting items stolen from the houses".
Based on the complaint, an FIR under sections 457 (lurking house-trespass or house-breaking by night in order to commit offence punishable with imprisonment) and 380 of IPC (theft in dwelling house) has been registered at Malviya Nagar police station against unknown persons.
Additional DCP (South) Nupur Prasad said, "An FIR has been registered and the case is being investigated."
The alleged incident took place on the intervening night of July 17 and 18 when Prakash was not at his home as he was busy with the preparations for TalktoAK programme of Kejriwal at the Delhi Secretariat.
"This is a very serious issue as brief notes of the media advisor to CM and Deputy CM were stolen from his house. No valuable items were missing from the house which indicates foul play. It is a deliberate attempt. Prepared notes of the meetings of CM and Deputy CM over last one year have been stolen," Sisodia told reporters here.
He said he has written to Police Commissioner and asked him to investigate the case from all angles.
Prakash said when he reached his house in the morning of July 18 it was found ransacked.
"All valuable items including laptop, mobile, music system were in place. However, my important notes from the meeting of CM, Deputy CM and others were found missing. A forensic team inspected the house and picked up some finger prints from scene," he said.
Scientists have discovered a treasure trove of over 100 new worlds outside the solar system using data from NASA's Kepler spacecraft, some of which have the possibility of hosting life.
Out of 197 initial planet candidates, scientists have confirmed 104 planets outside our solar system. Among the confirmed is a planetary system comprising four promising planets that could be rocky.
These four planets, all between 20 and 50 per cent larger than Earth by diameter, are orbiting the M dwarf star K2-72, found 181 light-years away in the direction of the Aquarius constellation.
The host star is less than half the size of the Sun and less bright. The planets' orbital periods range from five-and-a-half to 24 days, and two of them may experience irradiation levels from their star comparable to those on Earth.
Despite their tight orbits - closer than Mercury's orbit around our Sun - the possibility that life could arise on a planet around such a star cannot be ruled out, said lead author Ian Crossfield, from the University of Arizona.
The researchers achieved this extraordinary "roundup" of exoplanets by combining data with follow-up observations by Earth-based telescopes including the North Gemini telescope and the W M Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the Automated Planet Finder of the University of California Observatories, and the Large Binocular Telescope operated by the University of Arizona.
Both Kepler and its K2 mission discover new planets by measuring the subtle dip in a star's brightness caused by a planet passing in front of its star.
In its initial mission, Kepler surveyed just one patch of sky in the northern hemisphere, determining the frequency of planets whose size and temperature might be similar to Earth orbiting stars similar to our Sun.
In the spacecraft's extended mission in 2013, it lost its ability to precisely stare at its original target area, but a brilliant fix created a second life for the telescope that is proving scientifically fruitful.
After the fix, Kepler started its K2 mission, which has provided an ecliptic field of view with greater opportunities for Earth-based observatories in both the northern and southern hemispheres.
The K2 mission is entirely community-driven with all targets proposed by the scientific community.
Since it covers more of the sky, the K2 mission is capable of observing a larger fraction of cooler, smaller, red-dwarf type stars, and because such stars are much more common in the Milky Way than sun-like stars, nearby stars will predominantly be red dwarfs.
"An analogy would be to say that Kepler performed a demographic study, while the K2 mission focuses on the bright and nearby stars with different types of planets," said Crossfield.
The findings were published in the Astrophysical Journal.
The Broadcasting Standards Authority (NBSA), a self-regulatory body for TV channels, has imposed a fine of Rs 1 lakh on a private channel for running a programme on vampires which violated its norms related to superstition and occultism.
In an order issued yesterday, the NBSA, headed by former Supreme court judge R V Raveendran, has also asked the channel to display an apology.
According to the order, the channel ETV Chhattisgarh, had run a programme titled 'Vampires' which was found violative of the norms. The I&B ministry had brought the content of the programme to the notice of the NBSA.
In several other orders issued yesterday, the self regulatory body has pulled up news channels over programmes which it felt were not as per the accepted norms.
In one of the orders issued the same day, the NBSA has asked NDTV 24X7 and NDTV India to show an apology over news reports related to lynching of a man in Nahan in Himachal Pradesh.
After examining the matter and hearing various sides, the NBSA felt that the channels had "attributed the lynching to some named religious groups apparently without verification of facts", the order said.
The channels had in their reply said they had used the word "allegedly", but not convinced, the NBSA asked them to display apologies over the news reports.
In another order dated July 18, 2016, the NBSA ordered a Rs 1 lakh fine on ETV Bangla and asked it to display apology after it felt that its coverage of an incident in Jadavpur University flouted the norms related to impartiality and objectivity.
In another order, the NBSA asked a private news channel News24 to submit an expression of regret and assure that it would adhere to the principles of self-regulation after it felt that one of its programmes on allegations against functionaries of a political party did not adhere to the norms related to objectivity.
In yet another order, the NBSA has asked channel ETV UP/Uttarakhand to run an apology and air versions of some persons regarding whom news reports had been telecast.
Britain's newly-appointed Indian- origin junior minister in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), Alok Sharma today vowed to work "tirelessly" as he was given charge of Asia and the Pacific.
The lawmaker for Reading West, who had been named Parliamentary Under Secretary of Statein Theresa May's Cabinet on Sunday, is expected to have India among the countries that fall within his ministerial portfolio in the FCO.
"I am honoured to have been appointed by the Prime Minister as Minister for Asia and the Pacific, hugely important parts of the world that are crucial for the UK's prosperity and security. Britain is a truly great country and I will work tirelessly to ensure we continue to thrive and prosper on the world stage," Sharma said in a statement today.
"I look forward to working closely with my new colleagues and my counterparts across Asia and the Pacific, with a particular focus on strengthening commercial ties, increasing investment opportunities in both directions and promoting human rights in the region," he said.
In his new role in the FCO, Sharma will work closely with newly-appointed foreign secretary Boris Johnson.
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) today filed a charge sheet before a special court here against 16 suspected ISIS operatives, arrested from across the country allegedly on the charges of recruiting and financing people to join the terror group.
According to the sources, the agency filed the charge sheet before District Judge Amar Nath in which it has outlined the role of all the accused in a larger conspiracy of ISIS to further its ideology.
The agency claimed that members of banned terror group -- Islamic State (IS) or Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) -- in connivance with a few resident and non-resident Indians, have been indulging in identification, radicalization, recruitment, training, the source said.
The final report also alleged that some Indian youths were transferred by the accused to countries like Syria, Lybia and Iraq for terror acts.
It also claimed that the accused, who are currently in judicial custody, were using different internet channels/ services, telephone and one-on-one meetings to further outfit's ideology.
The accused persons against whom the agency filed the charge sheet include Mohd Aleem, Mohd Obaidullah Khan, Nafees Khan, Mohd Shareef Moinuddin Khan, Asif Ali, Najmul Huda, Mudabbir Mushtaq Shaikh, Mohd Abdul Ahad, Suhail Ahmed, Syed Mujahid, Mohd Hussain Khan, Mohd Afzal, Imran and Abu Anas.
They were arrested from different parts of the country for allegedly recruiting and financing people to join the terror organisation.
They were arrested under several sections of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and Indian Penal Code (IPC). A case was registered by NIA on December 9, 2015 against unknown and unidentified persons involved in the activities of Islamic State (IS) in India and Asian powers in peace with India.
In this case, the NIA had earlier filed a charge sheet
against 23-year-old accused Naser Packeer, outlining his modus operandi in identifying, radicalising, recruiting and sending Indians to join the terrorists in Syria and Iraq.
On October 5, 2015, Naser was apprehended at Sudan for concealing his identity and trying to join ISIS in Syria. Later, he was deported to India on December 10, 2015.
It has claimed that several incriminating documents and articles like laptop, mobile phones, pen drives and DVDs have been recovered from the possession from the accused.
The agency had filed an FIR in the matter on December 9 last year against unknown persons on inputs received from the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA).
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar today condoled the death of 10 CRPF commandos in an encounter with Naxals on the borders of Gaya and Aurangabad districts in the state and announced compensation to their families.
The commandos of CRPF's COBRA unit were ambushed in the IED blast triggered by Naxals near Chakarbanda-Dumarinala forests after which an encounter started yesterday in which three Naxals were also killed.
While eight CRPF personnel were killed on the spot, two others succumbed to their injuries later.
Kumar instructed top officials of the state, including Chief Secretary Anjani Kumar Singh, state police chief P K Thakur and Principal Secretary Home Amir Subhani, to rush to Gaya to take stock of the situation and ensure that needful action is taken, an official statement said.
He also had a telephonic conversation with Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh over the incident.
The Chief Minister directed the Home department to immediately pay Rs 5 lakh compensation to the next of kin of each deceased as per provisions of the state government, the statement said.
Additionally, he ordered officials to make available to the kin of the jawans killed, insurance of Rs 20 lakh under the provisions of special scheme in the Naxal-hit districts, it said, adding Kumar also ordered to provide all medical assistance to the injured jawans.
The Chief Secretary would lay wreath on bodies of deceased jawans on behalf of the Chief Minister.
(REOPEN CAL 2)
Additional Director General (ADG) of Police
(Headquarters) Sunil Kumar said bodies of three Naxals have been recovered from the spot along with three automatic weapons and ammunition. Search operation is on to nab the other Naxals involved in the encounter.
To a question if there was lack of coordination between the paramilitary forces and state police during the operation, the ADG said its matter of probe, adding, "We generally review the lapses and shortcomings after every such incident to overcome them in future."
The five injured jawans of the Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (COBRA) are under treatment in hospitals of Gaya and Patna and are out of danger, he added.
The Madras High Court today refused to grant relief on a plea seeking a direction to authorities to restrain theater owners from collecting steep rates to screen big budget films and to take action against 'Kabaali' producer S Thanu for allegedly collecting excessive charges from viewers in advance.
"Petitioner has sent a representation only on July 15 and it is not known whether it has reached the hands of the authorities concerned or not. Without giving sufficient time to them, the petitioner has approached court seeking a mandamus and that too an interim relief against Thanu, a private party," Justice N Kiribakaran said while dismissing the petition.
The judge directed the petitioner, one G Devarajan, to approach the court after ascertaining whether his representation has reached the authorities or not.
Devarajan while referring to earlier high court orders which had directed authorities to constitute special teams to prevent selling of tickets at higher rates, contended that he had made representation to the authorities to implement July 15, 2016 order.
He submitted that he filed this petition as the big budget 'Kabaali' is scheduled for release on July 22.
The judge dismissed it on the ground that the petitioner had not given enough time to the authorities concerned to take action.
Beatrice will welcome a new business to the downtown area this week when Tall Tree Tastings opens Thursday.
The new wine tasting venue has set up shop at the intersection of Fifth and Ella streets across from the Beatrice Police Department, and hopes to provide Beatrice residents with a different experience than anything else available downtown.
Owner Denise Pahl said she plans to open for the Third Thursday event on July 21.
Its been months in planning," Pahl said. "A couple of years ago my husband and I started winery hopping in the state of Nebraska. We were really impressed with the laid back atmosphere with people of all ages.
"In October of 2015 we started looking for buildings to lease. In December we met with building owners and we felt that it was a good fit.
Restaurants line the downtown area in Beatrice, but a winery is an addition that offers something a little different.
Weve had several people stop in just to take a peak," Pahl said. "Every time I take a phone call the person on the other end of the line asks about the winery. ... Anytime a specialty store is successful it has to be what people want and has to mirror what they have.
Pahl plans to exclusively sell Nebraska wines to start off. Out of over 30 vineyards in the state, there are only four she hasnt visited.
The older I have gotten, the more Ive acquired the passion for wine, she explained.
Tall Tree Tastings will be open Thursdays and Friday from 5-10 p.m., Saturdays from 1-10 p.m., and Sundays from 1-4 p.m. The winery will feature a main bar area as well as a Vino Room, where private parties will be hosted.
My goal is that whether you are a wine sipper or a Pepsi seeker, youre going to enjoy your time here, Pahl said.
She said the new downtown business will be a beneficial addition not just for residents, but also the many restaurants within walking distance.
I believe in the community and that businesses need to partner together, Pahl explained. Success with one brings success for others. It has to be very community based.
She hopes that the restaurants and wine bar will coexist, and that patrons of one destination may want to stop and visit the others.
I would expect everybody above the age of 21 to come by," she said. "I think it will be another asset for the community to enjoy, by local people, and for people to come back and visit.
Pahl plans to implement and use a computer system to keep track of what each individual gets when come in. When the individual comes a second time Pahl will know what wines they have and havent ordered and their exact wine preferences.
There will also be a phone charging system to encourage patrons keep their cell phones on the ledge rather than in their hands.
I think the business will evolve into what Beatrice wants it to be -- the evolution of the business will be determined by the customers, Pahl said.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's spokesman today hit out at claims that the attempted coup was orchestrated to strengthen his position.
"It is really nonsensical. This is no different really than claiming 9/11 was orchestrated by the United States -- and that the Paris and Nice attacks were orchestrated by the French government," Ibrahim Kalin told foreign reporters.
Turkey has accused Erdogan's archfoe Fethullah Gulen of organising the coup from exile in the United States, but the Islamic cleric retorted the president himself may have staged it.
Ankara said today it was sending files to the United States to back its demand for the extradition of the 75-year-old, who wields great influence in Turkey through supporters in the media and judiciary as well as a private school network.
Turkey has long sought his return from the US to face trial at home over accusations of running a "terrorist organisation" seeking to overthrow Erdogan, his erstwhile ally.
"We'd like to see the US authorities take action on this, we would like to see cooperation," Kalin said.
"If they insist on keeping him there for whatever reasons a lot of people here will think he is protected by the United States."
Asked about an allegation the Americans were behind Friday's events, he said: "One of our ministers made a comment at the heat of the event when the emotions were high... You have to understand the psychology here."
He said coup plotters will be tried "on charges of treason and attempt to change the constitutional order illegally."
Kalin also defended the vast number of detentions after the coup, saying suspects would be tried on charges of "treason and attempting to change the constitutional order illegally".
"It is only natural that the numbers will be high because they were involved in a criminal activity. Some were released after they were cleared of suspicion... The legal process will continue.
Normal life in Central Assam was today affected by a 12-hour bandh called by several organisations to press their demands for setting up AIIMS at Raha and a judicial inquiry into the death of a person in clashes between police and protesters there three days back.
Shops and business establishments, educational institutions, banks and private offices remained closed in Morigaon district and parts of Nagaon and Kamrup (East) districts in response to the bandh from 5 AM called by the All Tiwa Students Union (ATSU) and three other organisations in support of their demands.
National Highway-37 was blocked by protesters at several places, while vehicles remained off the roads in the affected areas, officials said.
Morigaon Superintendent of Police Nilesh Savarkare told PTI that paramilitary forces were deployed in vulnerable places like Jagiroad, Dharamtul and Ahotguri to maintain law and order.
Security was tightened at Jagiroad for the smooth movement of trains, the SP added.
On July 16, one person identified as Mintu Deori was killed during a protest while 20 others, including two Additional SPs, were injured in clashes between police and protesters demanding shifting of proposed AIIMS in Assam from Changsari to Raha.
US President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden today backed California's Indian-American Attorney General Kamala Harris to be the state's next Senator.
Obama praised 51-year-old Harris as a "lifelong courtroom prosecutor" who has fought international gangs, oil companies and the big banks responsible for the mortgage crisis.
"Kamala Harris fights for us. That's why I'm so proud to endorse her for United States Senator," the president said in a statement released by the Harris campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Harris she faces fellow Democrat Loretta Sanchez, a 10- term congresswoman in the November polls.
"And if you send her to the Senate, she'll be a fearless fighter for the people of California - all the people of California - every single day," Obama said.
Vice President Biden said the Senate "needs people like her - leaders who will always fight to make a difference and who never forget where they come from."
For Sanchez, the Orange County congresswoman, the endorsements are a stinging rebuke and another political obstacle to the many she must overcome by the November election, the Los Angles Times reported.
Harris, who was born in Oakland, California, is the daughter of an Indian mother who emigrated from Chennai in 1960 and a Jamaican American father.
The president's nod caps a string of major endorsements for Harris, the candidate of choice among the Democratic Party's power barons and some of the left's most influential interest groups. It also sends a clear signal to Democratic donors, many of whom have stayed on the sidelines this election, the paper said.
Harris already has won the support of California Governor Jerry Brown and the California Democratic Party, along with Senator Elizabeth Warren (Democract from Massachusetts), a favorite of the left.
Harris said she was honoured to receive the support of the president and vice president, calling them "incredible leaders for our nation."
Harris has more than a 3-to-1 edge over Sanchez in fund- raising and easily topped a crowded field of Senate candidates in the June primary. The attorney general also held a 15- percentage-point lead over Sanchez in the latest Field poll, the paper said.
The two Democrats will face off in the November election, setting the stage for the highest-profile contest between two members of the same party since California adopted a top-two primary election system.
Harris' ties to Obama and his administration stretch back more than a decade, even before he burst onto the national political scene. While she was still the San Francisco district attorney, Harris supported and raised money for Obama when he ran for the US Senate in Illinois. She later served as the California co-chair of his upstart 2008 presidential campaign.
Obama reciprocated by helping to launch Harris into the national spotlight when he gave her a speaking role at the 2012 Democratic National Convention in North Carolina.
President Barack Obama says the nation will get through the recent killings of police officers with the "love and empathy of public servants" like the ones who were targeted in recent days.
In an open letter to the nation's law enforcement officers, Obama said overcoming will also require resilience, the grace of loved ones and the good will of activists. The White House released the letter today.
It was dated yesterday, the day after two police officers and a sheriff's deputy were killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, after being ambushed by a lone gunman.
Baton Rouge is where police on July 5 fatally shot Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old black man outside a convenience store. Sterling's death sparked nationwide protests.
Sunday's law enforcement deaths followed the July 7 sniper killings of five Dallas police officers as they guarded a peaceful protest.
Obama has said nothing justifies attacks on law enforcement, a sentiment he reiterated in the two-page letter. The Fraternal Order of Police posted the president's letter on its social media sites.
"Any attack on police is an unjustified attack on all of us," the president wrote.
The letter comes as Obama remains under intense criticism from some police officials and others who accuse him of fostering a climate that has led to the intentional killing of law enforcement officers.
The White House has also been resisting pressure to illuminate the building in blue light in a show of support for law enforcement. Spokesman Josh Earnest has said such a step was unlikely while noting the president's steady outreach to and support for police and other law enforcement over the past couple of weeks.
Obama telephoned the families of the Baton Rouge officers on yesterday to offer his and the first lady's condolences. Last week, he paid tribute to the Dallas officers at a memorial service there. He also met a couple of times with law enforcement officials and others, and fielded questions during a televised town hall on race in America.
He was to be briefed today afternoon by Attorney General Loretta Lynch, FBI Director James Comey and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson. Obama is interested in additional steps that can be taken to protect law enforcement officers, Earnest said today.
In the letter, Obama said "we will get through this difficult time together.
As many as 14,222 NGOs were barred from receiving foreign funds in the past four years for violating norms, the government said today.
Of these, the largest number of 10,020 Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) were barred last year. A total of 4138, 4 and 59 NGOs were restrained from receiving foreign contributions in 2012, 2013 and 2014 respectively, Minister of State for Home Affairs Kiren Rijiju said in a written reply to the Lok Sabha.
Only one NGO has been barred so far this year from receiving overseas funds, he said.
Rijiju said, "the Ministry of External Affairs has communicated a write up containing certain views of United Nations Human Rights experts on provisions of Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA), which regulates foreign grant.
"The government is also aware about the one sided and biased views expressed by certain persons or associations regarding the cancellation of FCRA registration."
Rijiju said the Home Ministry has clarified the position against these one sided views earlier.
The Ministry of Home Affairs is mandated to administer the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010, for regulating the receipt and utilisation of foreign contribution by the associations.
"As and when reports are received against any association for alleged violation of the Act, action is initiated against the alleged violators after following due process as prescribed in the FCRA, 2010 and Foreign Contribution Regulation Rules (FCRR), 2011.
"Reasonable opportunities like furnishing of information to a standard questionnaire, inspection of records, issuing a show-cause notice, personal appearances, if required, are given to the associations before taking a final decision regarding cancellation of FCRA registration. The cancellation order etc. Are also subject to judicial scrutiny," the Minister said.
Further, for maintaining transparency, all orders, notifications etc.,are placed on website www.Fcraonline.Nic.In of the Ministry of Home Affairs, he said.
Government has cancelled the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) registration of NGOs based on the violation of provisions of FCRA 2010, Rijiju added.
Pakistan has violated the ceasefire along the Line of Control and the International Border 16 times since March, the Rajya Sabha was informed today.
As per the details given by Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar in a written reply, the maximum violations was along the LoC which saw 14 such incidents.
Appropriate retaliation to the violations, as required, has been carried out by Indian Army/BSF, he said.
In addition, all violations of ceasefire are taken up with Pakistan authorities at the appropriate level through the established mechanism of hotlines, flag meetings as well as weekly talks between the Directorate Generals of Military Operations of the two countries, he said.
Parrikar said that diplomatically, India has repeatedly emphasised, including at the highest level, the need for Pakistan to uphold the sanctity of the LoC and the International Border in Jammu and Kashmir as its obligations emanating from the Simla Agreement and the Lahore Declaration.
A man was tortured to death in Pakistan for an affair with a married woman, police said today, a rare case of a male falling victim to a so-called "honour killing".
The murder came days after social media starlet Qandeel Baloch was strangled to death by her brother who said he was "not embarrassed" to have killed her, reigniting calls for action against the crime.
Hundreds of women are murdered by relatives in the conservative Muslim nation each year on the pretext of defending what is seen as family honour, but it is unusual for the victim to be a man.
The latest incident happened in the impoverished central district of Dera Ghazi Khan yesterday, police said.
Allah Ditta, 24, was stabbed multiple times by a group of five men after they spotted him in the village of the woman he was allegedly having an affair with.
A local police official said Ditta began the relationship when he was working for the woman's brother-in-law, and that she ran away with him in May but returned home two weeks later after the village council intervened.
Ditta's arms were cut off as were his lips and nose, the official said.
District police chief Ata Muhammad Khan confirmed the incident: "The victim was taken to hospital where he died."
He added it appeared to be an honour killing and that police were now searching for the suspects. The woman was not harmed.
The killing of Baloch has triggered fresh calls for legislation to amend Pakistan's criminal code which allows murderers to avoid jail by seeking forgiveness from a victim's relatives -- a convenient means of escape particularly in honour cases.
The phenomenon of honour killings was examined in an Oscar-winning documentary by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy called "A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness".
The film was hailed by Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who in February vowed to push through anti-honour killing legislation, but no action has been taken since then.
An effigy of Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik was burnt and immediate suspension of IG Southern Range demanded by Students Congress who took out a rally in the city today to protest against the killing of five villagers during anti-Maoist operations in Kandhamal.
A bike rally was taken out by Students Congress activists from Congress Bhawan after which police detained several of them after a scuffle with security personnel.
Students Congress state president Itish Pradhan shouted anti-government slogans and burnt the effigy of the chief minister and demanded immediate suspension and arrest of IG Southern Range Amitabh Thakur in connection with the killing of five innocent villagers in the anti-Maoist operation in the jungles in Kandhamal.
Bhubaneswar Deputy Commissioner of Police Satyabrata Bhoi said over 50 activists were detained after they tried to break the cordon at Sishu Bhawan Square.
Thakur had said that the villagers were killed after being caught in a cross fire on July 8 night.
While the student activists of Congress staged a
demonstration in the state capital, party's senior leaders including OPCC president Prasad Harichandan gheroed Baliguda Police Station in Kandhamal district.
Harichandan demanded a neutral investigation monitored by a sitting High Court judge.
George Tirkey, a prominent Tribal leader of Adima Adivasi Maha Sangathan and Adivasi Darbar along with other six leaders of the organisations today visited the encounter site and demanded apology from Patnaik.
He called for more exgratia to the bereaved families and stringent action against the concerned police officials including the Kandhamal SP and IG.
Peter Mukerjea had along with his wife Indrani Mukerjea conspired to kill her daughter as they were not happy with her relationship with Peter's son Rahul, the CBI told the Bombay High Court Tuesday while opposing the former media baron's bail plea.
The agency also said that probe in the case was still on and it is at a crucial stage, and hence releasing Peter on bail would be "prejudicial" and would hamper the case.
"Peter Mukerjea along with the other accused entered into criminal conspiracy to commit the heinous crime with a cool mind, in a premeditated and planned manner. Both Indrani and Peter were not happy with the love affair of Sheena and Rahul Mukerjea," the agency said in its affidavit.
The agency submitted its affidavit before Justice P N Deshmukh today while opposing Peter's bail plea.
Justice Deshmukh later posted the plea for next hearing on July 27.
Peter, who was arrested by CBI on November 19 last year for his alleged involvement in Sheena's murder, had approached the high court seeking bail after the sessions court rejected his plea.
In his bail plea, he claimed that there is nothing incriminating against him in the CBI charge sheet.
Peter is the fourth accused to be arrested in the murder case, along with wife Indrani, her former husband Sanjeev Khanna, and her former driver Shyamvar Rai.
Striking down Peter's earlier claims that he had no problem with the relationship between Rahul and Sheena, the CBI said, "Peter too was not happy with the love affair. In 2009, both Peter and Indrani with the help of a friend separated Rahul and Sheena."
To corroborate this claim, the CBI is relying on an email sent by Rahul to his father on May 28, 2012, in which Rahul mentions that Peter separated him and Sheena.
The probe agency further relied on an email sent by Peter to Sheena on April 3, 2011, stating that he expected Rahul to start earning independently and make a decent living but instead he got into a relationship.
"Peter Mukerjea had even told his friend that the relation between Rahul and Sheena was not 'correct'. It clearly reflects that both Peter and Indrani were not happy with the relationship and tried to separate them. When their efforts to do so did not work, they (Peter and Indrani) hatched the conspiracy to murder Sheena," the CBI said.
The agency further claimed that Peter was in touch with all the accused prior to the murder, the day on which the murder took place and even after that.
"On April 24, 2012, when Indrani messaged Sheena asking her to meet her, Indrani was in constant touch with Peter. After sending messages to Sheena, Indrani used to call Peter and speak at length. Even on the day when Indrani and Rai went to Raigad to dispose of Sheena's body, Peter and Indrani were in constant touch," the CBI affidavit said.
The agency further said that when Rahul used to ask Peter about Sheena's whereabouts after she disappeared without informing, Peter along with Indrani intentionally started misleading him.
The CBI also claimed that when Indrani sent a mail to Rahul from a fake ID created by her in the name of Sheena, Peter was with her and was aware about the mail.
"Letters Rogatory (LRs) have been sent to three countries - Hong Kong, Singapore and USA - seeking financial information about the Mukerjeas. Replies to the LRs are awaited. Sufficient evidence in the form of oral, documentary and articles have come on record to prove allegations against Peter," the CBI said in the affidavit.
The probing agency said that Peter is an influential person and may tamper with the evidence and influence the witnesses. "There is also serious apprehension that Peter will abscond as he is British national," it said.
According to the prosecution, Sheena was murdered on April 24, 2012, but the crime came to light after the arrest of Rai in another case in August 2015. Following this, Indrani and Sanjeev were also arrested in August last.
According to prosecution, Indrani, Sanjeev and Rai allegedly strangled Sheena (24), Indrani's daughter from an earlier relationship, inside a car in April, 2012.
Sheena's body was found in a forest in Raigad. The crime, which came to light in August last year, is allegedly linked to certain financial dealings.
While Peter and Khanna are lodged in Arthur Road prison, Indrani (43) is in Byculla womens' jail in Mumbai.
Rai was the first accused to be arrested in the case in August 2015, taking the lid off the murder, after he was picked up in connection with an arms case.
The trial court recently allowed Rai to turn approver in the case and become a prosecution witness.
A proposal to change the name of an unfinished road to Dick Tegtmeier Lane fell one vote short of passing at the Beatrice City Council meeting Monday night.
The vote failed 5-1 with Ted Fairbanks voting against and Dwight Parde and Richard Clabaugh absent from the meeting. The ordinance required six votes for approval.
I got some phone calls on this with some people that werent very happy about it, Fairbanks explained to his fellow council members.
The proposed ordinance would have changed the name of Freeman Lane, a road planned to be built as part of future additions to the Gage County Industrial Park.
The Board of Public Works is seeking a new name after discovering there already is a Freeman Lane in the Beatrice postal area near Homestead National Monument. The board recommended changing the name to Dick Tegtmeier Lane at its previous meeting on July 13.
Dick Tegtmeier Lane was chosen as a potential name because of everything Tegtmeier, the former owner of Encore Manufacturing, did for the city and its residents, the board said.
Tegtmeier moved to Beatrice in 1961 and was a successful businessman. He was the co-founder of Exmark Manufacturing and Encore Manufacturing, and was an active member of St. Paul Lutheran Church, Beatrice Optimists, Gage County Economic Development and the Nebraska Diplomats.
Ted Fairbanks made a motion to revisit the name change idea at the City Council's work session on July 25.
I would just like to have an opportunity to talk to the rest of you without making it terribly public, so I would like to have a prospective work session on it, he said.
The City Council approved of the motion 6-0, and the item will be brought back to the councils attention at its next work session.
Pension Fund and Regulatory Authority of India has suggested that the government should release quickly the commission money for bank correspondents endorsing products under Atal Pension Yojana as it will act as an incentive for them.
"The incentive is paid by the government. Only when we get the funds from the government, we can release it further. Currently, the government releases the funds in about 3-4 months. The banks have been requesting that it should be paid every quarter," Pension Fund and Regulatory Authority of India (PFRDA) Chairman Hemant G Contractor said today.
He said PFRDA is even pitching for payment frequency to be as short as one month so that it boosts incentives for the BCs.
Atal Pension Yojana (APY), managed by PFRDA is one of the key projects of the government aimed at covering a large society under the pension net.
The scheme, though meant for all, is especially targetted at the unorganised sector that does not have any formal pension provision. APY encourages workers from the unorganised sector to save voluntarily for their retirement.
The most promising advantage of APY is at the retirement age of 60 years -- it offers a minimum guaranteed monthly pension between Rs 1,000-5,000 to the subscriber and to the spouse after the death of the subscriber.
Speaking on the sidelines of a workshop of APY here, he said PFRDA will organise such kind of workshops at the state as well as district level to motivate people to buy the pension product.
The Philippines' top diplomat said today he had rejected a Chinese offer to hold talks "outside of and in disregard" of an international tribunal's ruling last week that debunked Beijing's claim to ownership of virtually the entire South China Sea.
Foreign Secretary Perfecto Yasay Jr said he told his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, that China's condition "was not consistent with our constitution and our national interest," adding Wang warned that if the Philippines insists on China's compliance to the decision, "we might be headed for a confrontation."
During talks on the sidelines of last weekend's Asia-Europe meeting in Mongolia, Yasay said Wang insisted that the Philippines should not even "make any comments" on the landmark decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.
Wang "asked us also to open ourselves for bilateral negotiations but outside of and in disregard of the arbitral ruling, so this is something that I told him was not consistent with our constitution and our national interest," Yasay told the ABS-CBN network.
"They said that if you will insist on the ruling and discussing it along those lines, then we might be headed for a confrontation," he said.
Despite the seeming impasse, Yasay said he was still hopeful both countries can find a way to resolve the long-seething dispute, suggesting China's publicly issued positions may still change.
Yasay said he asked that Filipinos be allowed to fish in the Scarborough Shoal, where Chinese coast guard ships have blocked and turned away fishing boats since effectively seizing the disputed fishing area after a tense standoff with Philippine government ships in 2012.
Wang responded by saying China was open to discussing that possibility with the Philippines "but not in the context of the arbitral tribunal ruling," Yasay said.
Two days after the tribunal issued its ruling, Chinese coast guard ships again blocked Filipino fishermen from approaching the shoal in scenes documented by an ABS-CBN crew.
The Philippines decided to take its dispute with China to international arbitration in 2013 after China took control of Scarborough Shoal and reneged on a US State Department-brokered deal for both countries to withdraw their ships from the area to ease a dangerous faceoff, according to former President Benigno Aquino III, who brought the case against Beijing.
With the Philippines' anemic military dwarfed by China's forces, Aquino bolstered relations with the United States and other allies to deter China's increasingly assertive actions in the disputed waters and modernise its air force and naval fleets, further straining ties with Beijing.
In an embarrassment to Donald Trump, his wife Melania was today accused of plagiarism in her first address to the Republican National Convention that is set to declare him as the party's presidential candidate, with critics saying parts of her speech were lifted verbatim from remarks First Lady Michelle Obama made in 2008.
Melania's much-applauded debut in front of a Republican crowd also drew negative attention for two passages matching nearly word-for-word with the speech that Michelle delivered at the Democratic National Convention eight years ago.
Ironically, Melania had taken the centre stage to defend her husband, praising him as a "compassionate" man who would "fight for the country".
In her address, the 46-year-old wife of the real estate tycoon said: "From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise, that you treat people with respect. They taught and showed me values and morals in their daily lives. That is a lesson that I continue to pass along to our son.
"And we need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow. Because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them."
On August 25, 2008, Michelle Obama said: "And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you're going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them, and even if you don't agree with them.
"And Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values, and to pass them on to the next generation. Because we want our children - and all children in this nation - to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them."
The issue was first flagged by journalist Harrett Hill.
"Side-by-side comparisons of the transcripts show the text in Trump's address following, nearly to the word, the would-be future first lady's own from the first night of the Democratic convention in Denver nearly eight years ago," CNN reported.
However, the Trump campaign defended Melania, terming the allegations "absurd" and saying her address used "fragments that reflected her own writing".
Moreover, Trump who introduced his wife at the Cleveland Convention said that her speech was absolutely "incredible".
"It was truly an honour to introduce my wife, Melania. Her speech and demeanor were absolutely incredible. Very proud!" Trump tweeted.
Trump Campaign manager Paul Manafort told CNN: "There was no cribbing from Michelle Obama's speech. These were common words and values, that she cares about her family and things like that. She was speaking in front of 35 million people last night. She knew that. To think she would be cribbing Michelle Obama's words is crazy.
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Jason Miller, senior communication advisor to the Trump Campaign, said: "In writing her beautiful speech, Melania's team of writers took notes on her life's inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking.
"Melania's immigrant experience and love for America shone through in her speech, which made it such a success."
In a tweet, US President Barack Obama's former speechwriter Jon Favreau said he was more offended by every other speech than Melania's alleged plagiarised paragraphs.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi today expressed grief over the killing of 10 CRPF commandos in an IED blast carried out by Naxals in Bihar and extended condolences to the families of the martyred personnel.
"The Prime Minister has expressed grief on the loss of lives of CRPF personnel in Bihar. He prays for a speedy recovery of the injured," the PMO said.
"PM @narendramodi extends his condolences to the families of the martyred CRPF personnel in this hour of sadness," the PMO said in a tweet.
Ten commandos belonging to the elite CoBRA battalion of CRPF were killed and five others injured after a group of 200 Naxals ambushed them and blew off 22 IEDs in the jungles of Bihar's Aurangabad district yesterday.
"While eight personnel were killed on the spot, two others succumbed to their injuries when they were being evacuated," a senior official said.
The IED blast was followed by an encounter between security forces and Naxals in which three extremists were killed.
This is one of the biggest casualties of the elite COBRA unit which was raised by the CRPF in 2008 for undertaking special jungle/guerrilla warfare operations.
Beleaguered Nepali Prime Minister K P Oli today asked the Nepali Congress and Maoist leaders to withdraw the no-confidence motion brought against him, warning that it would fuel further "polarisation and confrontation" among major political parties.
Oli has refused to step down, despite the fact that the coalition government led by him is in minority after the Maoists withdrew their support to the coalition government last week.
In his first meeting with Nepali Congress president Sher Bahadur Deuba and CPN-Maoist Centre chairman Prachanda since the Maoists withdrew their support to the government, Oli urged the two leaders to withdraw the no-confidence motion and expressed his readiness to find a solution through consensus and dialogue, according to sources close to the Prime Minister.
Oli is also said to have cautioned the two leaders that their insistence on pushing the no-confidence motion would "further fuel polarisation and confrontation among major parties".
But Prachanda and Deuba, in response, are learnt to have told Oli that he should pave the way for the formation of a new government by stepping down graciously.
Reiterating his position, Prime Minister Oli told the two leaders that there was no provision in the Constitution to elect a new prime minister even as the no-trust motion is passed.
Oli insisted that he would rather face the no-confidence motion as "there is no provision in the constitution to elect a new Prime Minister after his resignation".
Even if the no-confidence motion is endorsed by the House, the incumbent government will continue as a caretaker one, he said.
On budget, both Prachanda and Deuba told Oli that all the remaining bills of the budget "will be endorsed as soon as the primeminister tenders his resignation," according to party sources.
The government is yet to get parliamentary approval for its budget presented last month for the new fiscal year.
Oli became prime minister last October, heading Nepal's eighth government in the past 10 years.
Cracks began to appear in the coalition two months ago when alliance partners threatened to topple Oli. He survived that attempt by drawing up an 11th-hour deal with Prachanda.
Nepali Congress and the Maoists tabled the no-trust motion in parliament last week against Prime Minister Oli, accusing him of not honouring his past commitments.
The motion was registered by Nepali Congress, CPN-Maoist Centre and CPN-United, whose combined strength is 292 seats in the 598-member Parliament.
The Madhesi parties' combined strength comes around 50 seats and their support will be crucial for passing the no-trust motion against the Oli government.
Amid Congress-led UDF Opposition members' walkout, the Kerala Assembly today passed the Legislative Assembly (Removal of Disqualifications) Amendment Bill, paving way for the appointment of CPI-M veteran V S Achuthanandan as Chairman of the proposed Fourth Administrative Reforms Commission.
The bill, moved in line with the CPI-M and LDF's decision to appoint the 92-year-old Left leader to a top government post, was introduced on July 14.
Opposition members used the opportunity to attack LDF and also Achuthanandan, saying the legislation was to quell the internal bickering in CPI-M and to 'silence' the leader by giving him a position.
Referring to Opposition criticism that the new post would result in additional burden on the state's 'Consolidated Fund,' Law Minister A K Balan said people, who had once indulged in spending government funds lavishly, were now expressing concern on additional expense over a new post.
A sum of Rs 450 crore was spent additionally for the 'Mass Contact programme' during the previous UDF rule, Balan said.
S Sharma (CPI-M) said the opposition, by insulting the veteran communist leader, has shown injustice to history.
Former Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala and IUML leader P K Kunhalikutty, in their dissent note, said it was "misuse" of public funds to appoint a legislative member as the ARC Chairman with all facilities and privileges of a minister.
"This particular legislation is with a selfish motive," the note added.
Lambasting LDF for introducing the bill, Chennithala said it was only to silence the veteran. The legislation can be called 'Achuthanandan bill', he said, ridiculing the ruling front.
There is no situation existing in the state that warranted creation of such a new post, that too at a time when the state was facing a financial crisis, he said, asking Achuthanandan to decide whether to accept the post or not.
The opposition members then staged a walkout.
This is the first legislation of the LDF government
headed by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan that assumed office in May.
The first session of the 14th State Assembly was adjourned sine die after passing the bill.
Under sub-clause (a) of clause (1) of Article 191, a member of the Legislative Assembly shall be disqualified if he or she holds any office of profit under the government of India or any of the state governments, other than an office declared by law.
Therefore, the government decided to amend retrospectively the Legislative Assembly (Removal of Disqualification) Act 1951 to remove such disqualification.
Achuthanandan had led the LDF to an impressive victory in the May 16 Assembly polls by vigorously campaigning for the Left front.
The Left party had decided on Pinarayi Vijayan as the Chief Minister, citing Achuthanandan's advanced age and physical limitations.
Later, the party and the Left Front decided to give Achuthanandan a "suitable top position" in the government.
The Assembly session began with the customary address by the Governor P Sathasivam on June 24.
The budget for the year 2016-17 was presented by Finance Minister T M Thomas Issac on July 8.
Oscar-winning actress and AIDS campaigner Charlize Theron says racism is one of the underlying causes of HIV and a reason why the epidemic has not yet been brought to an end.
Theron, one of the speakers at the official opening of the International Aids Conference in Durban on last evening, is South African by birth and started a foundation in 2007 to help prevent adolescents and young people becoming infected with HIV in ever greater numbers.
The 40-year-old actress, in an interview to The Guardian, said increased funding was very important in the effort to end AIDS.
"But at the same time I also think that there are very fundamental issues like stigma, and there's a racial part of it too that I think we haven't really talked about or people are too scared to talk about," she said.
"HIV the virus doesn't know the difference between black skin and white skin and when we look at how it's so disproportionately affected people, we have to look at the racial issue. We have to look at the fact that women are just thought of as less than men globally. There are things that we have been too scared to openly talk about and I'm hoping to start that conversation," she added.
Therons early and teenage years were lived in the shadow of a growing HIV epidemic in South Africa.
"I have very vivid memories [of] being very young and being affected by what was happening. I don't think anyone at that time knew what it was and I think that was what was so incredibly scary. But it left quite an impression on me that stayed with me for the rest of my life," she said.
As she grew older, she learned how disproportionately Africa had been affected, she said.
"As a South African that's very hard to un-know. Once you know that, you want to be a part of the solution somehow. I feel like from the very time I could remember, AIDS and HIV have had an impact on me.
"I'm talking about my early teenage years so this is before I was really travelling. But my parents were avid news-watchers and newspaper readers so that conversation was constantly happening in our house," she said.
The Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Project aims to help children and young people safeguard themselves against HIV.
Theron calls it "investment in African youth... So that they can ultimately make good decisions for themselves and stay HIV free.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday made it clear to that he will have to face trial in a defamation case if he does not express regret over his statement blaming RRS for Mahatma Gandhi's assassination but the Congress remained unfazed ruling out such a possibility.
Without taking the name of RSS, the apex court also observed that Rahul should not have made a collective denunciation of an organisation.
While the Congress party asserted that Rahul would not apologise for the remarks, the RSS accused the Congress of maligning it and consistently spreading lies about it.
"We have held it may be historically correct but the fact or the statement has to meet the test of public good. You can't make collective denunciation," a bench comprising Justices Dipak Misra and R F Nariman said, posting the matter for further hearing on July 27.
The bench was hearing an appeal filed by Rahul seeking quashing of a criminal defamation case ordered by a magisterial court in Bhiwandi in Maharashtra for a public speech in which he had linked the RSS to Gandhiji's killing.
"Freedom is not crippled or curbed. What is curbed is defamatory speech. What the writers, politicians, critics or antagonists say, you must have great magnitude to swallow," it said.
Wondering why he made a speech quoting "wrong historical fact", the court observed, "What we have to see is whether the petitioner's allegations come under Section 499 (defamation) of IPC or not. Judgement is already there. You have to face trial, if you don't express regret."
Rahul had moved the Supreme Court in May last year seeking quashing of the criminal defamation case lodged against him for his comments. The case is pending before a magisterial court in Bhiwandi in Maharashtra's Thane district.
The apex court had granted interim stay on the proceedings of the case before the magisterial court.
Rahul had earlier also refused to accept the apex court's suggestion to express regret over his statement blaming RSS for Mahatma Gandhi's killing to close the defamation case against him but he decided to contest it.
Reacting to the court's observations, the Congress today said that Gandhi will not tender an apology and will instead substantiate them with historical facts and evidence before the court to support his claim.
"On a suggestion of Shri expressing regret or apology, the question does not arise. Such a suggestion has been made in the past and not accepted by .
"Mr Gandhi is a mature politician with intimate knowledge of historical facts. Congress Party and Mr Gandhi will defend these remarks at appropriate forum," Congress' chief spokesman Randeep Surjewala said.
He said since the matter is pending adjudication, "we will not like to comment further on the issue".
In his reaction, RSS' Communications Deprtment Head Manmohan Vaidya said the "Congress had been consistently trying to spread lies and baseless allegations about RSS. Today's Supreme Court ruling has exposed the Congress."
"They (Rahul Gandhi and other Congress leaders) are avoiding the trial and are repeating the same false allegations against RSS. It seems he does not have faith in India's legal system and respect for it," he told PTI.
In a bid to counter the criticism against the army's role in Kashmir, where it is countering terrorists, a rally will be held here on July 24.
'Walk for Indian Armed Forces' will be organised by 'India First' - a platform backed by a section of BJP leaders and Sangh Parivar and people from all walks of life, including former officers and intellectuals will participate in it.
Senior state BJP leader Krishanu Mitra said he will take part in the program. "I will join the program as an individual and citizen of this country. We all should stand in support of our armed forces," he said.
Recently a section of Left wing organizations and APDR had organized a rally in Kolkata condemning the killing of Burhan Wani, the regional commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen, in Kashmir and the protesters who were killed during clashes in that state.
Slogans demanding repeal of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act in Kashmir and the Valley's 'azadi' (freedom) were raised in a protest rally held last week.
Congress leader Narayan Rane today claimed in the Maharashtra Legislative Council he was recently informed by a woman officer that a senior Cabinet minister engaged in "immoral behaviour" towards her.
Rane made the claim while launching a scathing attack on the BJP-led government over the gruesome gang-rape and murder of a teenage girl in Kopardi village of Ahmednagar district last week.
The former chief minister said he was shocked to hear about the "immoral behaviour" of the Minister towards the woman bureaucrat.
He, however, did not name the Minister or the party to which he belongs.
"The Class 1 lady officer later told another Cabinet minister she will never go to meet that particular Cabinet minister again because of his immoral behaviour," Rane said, who was recently elected to the Upper House.
Taking part in a debate over the Kopardi gang-rape and murder incident, the Congress MLC said time has come to deploy policemen inside the Ministers' offices at Mantralaya so as to keep a watch on their conduct.
Reacting to Rane's claim, Neelam Gorhe (Shiv Sena) asked him to disclose the Minister's identity, saying people will otherwise view all Ministers with suspicion.
During his speech, Rane was acerbic in his criticism of the BJP, alleging criminals were joining the party whose character, he claimed, has changed over the years.
"Today's BJP is not the BJP of yesteryears, of the time of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and late Gopinath Munde. Most BJP members in Jalgaon and Nagpur are criminals," the Shiv Sainik-turned-Congressman said.
Most cases of hooliganism take place in Nagpur city, the hometown of Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, he said.
"If the Chief Minister cannot save Nagpur, how will he save Maharashtra?" he said.
The Konkan strongman further remarked if a survey is done on parties having the maximum numbers of criminals in their ranks, the BJP will top the list.
"Tomorrow fugitive underworld don Dawood Ibrahim may surrender, join the BJP and may even become a Minister," he said.
He said the Chief Minister, who also handles the Home portfolio, has "no understanding" of the sensitive department and this has led to the "collapse" of law and order situation in the state.
Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has announced the closure of 6 retail branches, out of 10, in the country from October 1.
The RBS branches in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Gurgaon, Noida and Vadodara will be closed with effect from October 1, the RBS said in a notice to its customers.
"The remaining four RBS branches (namely Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai and New Delhi) will close in due course post intimation," it added.
The British lender, which has been in India since 1921, also asked the customers to close their account(s) and make alternate arrangements for banking, wealth management and demat account(s) on or before August 31.
Further, no new savings/current account(s) or term deposit(s) will be opened effective July 31.
In May, RBS had announced to initiate a phased exit from retail banking and close down branches in India.
The decision to wind up retail banking was in the making ever since the Reserve Bank refused to clear the sale of its branches (then 16) to HSBC India a few years back.
One of the main reasons for the regulatory refusal was HSBC's decision against converting its branch banking route into a fully-owned subsidiary route as it already has nearly 50 branches.
The RBS Group is a large international banking and financial services company. From its headquarters in Edinburgh, the group serves over 30 million customers in the United Kingdom, Europe, the Middle East, the Americas and Asia.
The Republican party has favoured reforming the US' guest workers programmes, which include H-1B visas, and also indicated a drastic reduction in the green cards being issued every year that could have a major implication on Indian IT professionals.
"In light of both current needs and historic practice, we urge the reform of our guest worker programmes to eliminate fraud, improve efficiency and ensure they serve the national interest," said the Republican platform, which was approved by the party leadership yesterday during its ongoing convention here.
"In light of the alarming levels of unemployment and underemployment in this country, it is indefensible to continue offering lawful permanent residence to more than one million foreign nationals every year," the platform said.
Currently, Indians have the longest waiting list for green cards. In case of any reduction in the number of such cards being issued every year, that might further delay the process.
However, the platform, which talks in details about the immigration policy does not specifically mention about the H-1B visa programme but the language on guest workers is seen as a move to reform the H-1B visas system.
Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, has been against increase in H-1B visa and has also called for increasing the salary of those coming to the US on H-1B visas.
The platform said the Supreme Court has correctly recognised that states have the constitutional authority to take steps to reduce illegal immigration.
"We condemn the Obama Administration's lawsuits against states that are seeking to reinforce federal law. We support the right of the states to enact laws deterring illegal aliens from residing within their states," it said.
"From its beginning, our country has been a haven of refuge and asylum. That should continue - but with major changes. Asylum should be limited to cases of political, ethnic or religious persecution. As the Director of the FBI has noted, it is not possible to vet fully all potential refugees.
"To ensure our national security, refugees who cannot be carefully vetted cannot be admitted to the country, especially those whose homelands have been the breeding grounds for terrorism," the platform said.
While the platform calls for deportation of illegal immigrants, it praises the role of legal immigrants.
"The greatest asset of the American economy is the American worker. Our immigration system must protect American working families and their wages, for citizens and legal immigrants alike, in a way that will improve the economy," it said.
"Just as immigrant labour helped build our country in the past, today's legal immigrants are making vital contributions in every aspect of national life. Their industry and commitment to American values strengthens our economy, enriches our culture, and enables us to better understand and more effectively compete with the rest of the world," the platform said.
"In a time of terrorism, drug cartels, human trafficking, and criminal gangs, the presence of millions of unidentified individuals in this country poses grave risks to the safety and sovereignty of the United States. Our highest priority, therefore, must be to secure our borders and all ports of entry and to enforce our immigration laws," it said.
"That is why we support building a wall along our southern border and protecting all ports of entry. The border wall must cover the entirety of the southern border and must be sufficient to stop both vehicular and pedestrian traffic.
"We insist upon workplace enforcement of verification systems so that more jobs can be available to all legal workers," the platform said.
A nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court today commenced hearing to examine the validity of separate entry taxes on goods mandated by various state government statutes, without heeding to the plea of the Centre to wait for the passage of GST Bill in Parliament.
As the Constitution Bench headed by Chief Justice T S Thakur assembled to hear the matter, Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi pleaded that the issue be put on hold till the passage of pending GST (Goods and Services Tax) Bill which would subsume the tax law under challenge.
However, the bench also comprising Justices A K Sikri, S A Bobde, Shiva Kirti Singh, N V Ramana, R Banumathi, A M Khanwilkar, D Y Chandrachud and Ashok Bhushan decided to go ahead with the hearing, saying that "complex tax issues are involved".
It said issues related to past levies by the States will be decided in the matter.
The Attorney General submitted that some arrangement could be made in respect to past demands by the states relating to entry tax after GST Bill, involving a Constitution amendment, was passed by Parliament.
Entry tax is imposed by state governments on movement of goods from one state to another. It is levied by the state that receives goods.
The entry tax provisions of various states has been challenged by some companies on the ground that they are against the concept of free trade and commerce under Article 301 (freedom of trade commerce and intercourse with the territory of India) of the Constitution.
Senior advocate Harish Salve, who has been representing some companies in the matter, is leading the arguments.
The bench would be revisiting two judgements passed by the apex court in 1960 and 1962 on the issue.
The decision to refer the case to the larger bench came during the hearing of matters filed by companies, including Vedanta Aluminium Ltd, Essar Steel Ltd, Tata Steel Ltd, Adani Enterprises Ltd and the Odisha government.
Jindal Stainless Ltd had brought the matter way back in 2002 when the company had challenged the validity of the Haryana Local Area Development Tax Act, 2000.
The company had challenged the validity of the Act
contending that it was violative of Article 301 since it imposed restrictions on trade and is not protected by Article 304.
It has been argued that the enactment of the law that levies sales tax on inter-state sales was beyond competence of the state legislature.
The apex court on September 26, 2003 had referred the matter to a larger bench of five judges which on April 13, 2006, after examining the issues including previous judgments, directed hearing of petitions challenging the constitutional validity of the various state laws on entry tax on goods travelling from one state to another.
Later, the issue was referred to a bench of nine judges by an order of April 16, 2010 and several questions were framed, including the balancing of freedom of trade and commerce in Article 301 vis-a-vis the states' authority to levy taxes under article 245 and Article 246 of the Constitution.
Further, the bench would dwell on the issue whether taxation is justiciable and also on the inter-relationship between Article 19(1)(g) (Right to practice any profession, or to carry on any occupation, trade or business) and Article 301.
The apex court is seized with around 2,000 petitions by goods manufacturers and their associations who have challenged the constitutional validity of entry tax laws enacted by the different states.
Noisy scenes were witnessed in the Chhattisgarh Assembly today as Congress accused the ruling BJP government of irregularities in the purchase of an Augusta Westland helicopter in 2007and demanded a discussion.
As many as 33Congress MLAs weresuspendedafter they trooped into the well. The suspension was revoked later.
Senior Congress legislator Satyanarayan Sharma raised the issue on the last day of Monsoon session today by moving an adjournment motion notice demanding a discussion.
He alleged that the state aviation department violated the rules while buying the helicopter for Rs 26.58 crore.
Citing reports, Leader of Opposition T S Singhdeo said Directorate General of Civil Aviation had imposed ban on long distance flights of Augusta choppers.
Serious technical snag developed in the same chopper during a recent tour of agriculture minister Brijmohan Agrawal, Singhdeo said.
State Congress chief Bhupesh Baghel alleged kickbacks were given which were deposited in a foreign bank.
Shivratan Sharma, who was in the Speaker's chair, rejected the demand for discussion. Congress legislators then started shouting slogans.
BJP MLAs responded with slogans too, causing a ruckus.
When MLAs could not be pacified, Speaker adjournedtheHouse for five minutes.
After the resumption of proceedings, Congress legislators
moved into the well of the House, demanding a discussion, which resulted in their automaticsuspensionas per the Assembly rules.
Higher education minister Premprakash Pandey said senior Congress leaders were facing the heat over the Augustachopperdeal during the UPA regime, and therefore the party was trying to divert the attention.
Subsequently, the Speaker again adjourned the House for five minutes. When the House resumed, suspension of Congresslegislators was revoked.
Speaking to reporters later, Chief Minister Raman Singh maintained that the chopper purchase was "fair and through a global tender". He also denied DGCA or the Centre banning flights of Augusta choppers.
Singapore Prime Minister said he wants to see India involved "vigorously and actively" in the region beyond the Indian Ocean for trade, communications and stability.
"You (India) have an interest in the wider region but you have not pursued it as vigorously as the other powers have," Lee said in his address to delegates at the South Asian Diaspora Convention.
"Your foreign service is perhaps proportionally smaller than it ought to be," he said, adding that India's focus so far has been on the South Asian subcontinent affairs.
"If you pursue your interests more vigorously and actively beyond the subcontinent, in fact, beyond the Indian Ocean, you should be a great trading country," the prime minister said.
Pointing out the stability of the region, he said the lines of communication, the trade routes and the freedom of navigation in the region would become vital concerns of India.
"You (India) can make a contribution by participating in the affairs of the region and developing with it," Lee said.
He said he would like to see India participate in the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership.
"We would like to see these pursued ambitiously," Lee said even as he called on Indian companies based in Singapore to lobby for the New Delhi government.
Stressing on the need to have open skies with India and other South Asian countries, he said," If we can have open skies, ideally, I think all the airlines will scramble to work hard. There business will prosper, tourism and investment will thrive."
Noting that there are some 464 weekly flights between India and Singapore running at full capacity, Lee said increasing connectivity has always been a part of his agenda on his visit to India.
Highlighting India's role in the region, he said,"We have invited and welcomed the Indian companies to come. I think we have 6,500 Indian companies in Singapore, some of which run their Indian operations headquarters out of Singapore."
The prime minister also applauded India's young population and demographic advantage, saying , "If you educate and employ them productively, it is a tremendous plus for the country.
People belonging to Scheduled Caste (SC) under the banner of Ganjam District Dalit Samanwaya Samiti have launched a stir in the Ganjam district, demanding protection from alleged atrocities.
Seeking immediate action against miscreants who attacked at Kamagada village on May 3 last, the samiti members took out a rally in Berhampur on Monday.
At least 16 houses belonging to the SC people were destroyed by the miscreants during a clash at the village. While 11 houses were set afire, five other houses were destroyed, the samiti members alleged.
"We had earlier submitted a memorandum to the revenue divisional commissioner, southern division, demanding rehabilitation of the victims and arrest of the accused. While over two months have passed since the incident, the culprits are yet to be arrested. Similarly the victims are still to be rehabilitated", Rabi Nayak, one of the victim's, said.
"Kamagada is not an isolated case. The atrocities on were reported from different parts of the district. We demand action against the culprits soon," said Anil Kumar Nayak, Convener of the Samiti.
He also opposed the eviction of the slum dwellers in Berhampur by the Berhampur Municipal Corporation without proper rehabilitation.
The samiti leaders submitted a memorandum containing their demands to the revenue divisional commissioner, southern division, after their rally here.
Saudi authorities executed two men today, bringing to 98 the number of executions carried out in the ultra-conservative Muslim kingdom so far this year.
Saudi citizen Ali Assiri, who was found guilty of stabbing a fellow tribesman to death, was executed in the southwestern region of Asir, the interior ministry said.
Pakistani Mohammed Mokhtar, who was convicted of heroin trafficking, was executed in the eastern city of Dammam, the ministry said.
Saudi Arabia imposes the death penalty for offences including murder, drug trafficking, armed robbery, rape and apostasy.
Most people executed are beheaded with a sword.
There were no beheadings during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, which began in the kingdom on June 6.
However, executions resumed on Sunday when authorities put a Saudi murderer to death.
Human rights group Amnesty International says the kingdom carried out at least 158 death sentences last year, making it the third most prolific executioner after Iran and Pakistan.
Amnesty's figures do not include secretive China.
The London-based watchdog says the Saudi rate of executions this year is "higher than at the same point last year".
Murder and drug trafficking cases account for the majority of Saudi executions, although 47 people were put to death for "terrorism" offences on a single day in January.
They included prominent Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr, whose execution prompted Iranian protesters to torch Saudi diplomatic missions, leading Riyadh to sever relations.
The Supreme Court today directed estate major Supertech to deposit Rs five crore in its Registry as a part of refund to homebuyers for the project in which Allahabad High Court had ordered demolition of twin towers of Emerald Court in Noida, adjacent to the national capital.
The apex court said that the amount has to be deposited by July 25 and posted its appeal for hearing on July 27.
A bench of Justices Dipak Misra and R F Nariman said the appeal would be heard only after the amount is deposited.
The Allahabad High Court had on April 11, 2014 ordered demolition of the two 40-storey residential twin towers -- Apex and Ceyane -- in Noida while directing Supertech to refund money to homebuyers with 14 per cent interest in three months.
The two towers have 857 apartments in total. Of these, about 600 flats have already been sold.
The apex court had on February 16 last year directed Supertech to refund money to the flat owners, saying, "Developers can't take investors for a ride."
Earlier, it had directed Supertech to give back money to flat owners who had sought refund of their investments, after the towers were directed to be demolished by the Allahabad High Court.
Holding that flat owners cannot be forced to remain in limbo and wait indefinitely due to litigation, the bench had also directed the company to pay compound interest at the rate of 14 per cent per annum to allottees by end of October 2014.
It had turned down the plea of Supertech which had contended that it was not in a position to pay back the money as the interest part has grown more than the principal. The price of the flats, located in the outskirts of Delhi, ranged from Rs 65-90 lakhs.
The government has asked scientists to work towards developing a system to predict cloudburst, the Rajya Sabha was told today as it discussed the flood situation which has claimed lives of 196 people and caused other damage in various parts of the country.
During the discussion, members from various parties questioned the government preparedness in dealing with natural calamities and pressed for creation of a separate ministry for the purpose.
Several members sought steps for putting in place a warning system for floods and cloudbursts.
Replying to the discussion, Minister of State for Home Affairs Kiren Rijiju said India does not have technology to predict cloudburst which develops over a very short span of time (1-3 hours).
In fact, no country in the world has been able to predict cloudburst, he added.
"So it is difficult to forecast...It happens in a very small locality. The effect is so devastating that there are huge losses," the minister said while replying to the Calling Attention Motion on situation arising due to floods.
The government, he said, has asked the scientists to work towards developing a system to predict cloudbust.
"We are hopeful that in near future, efforts of scientists to forecast the cloudburst will bring result. Efforts are there, not only Indian scientists but scientists from across the globe are making a combined effort," he said.
During the ongoing South West monsoon season, various parts of the country like Assam, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Kerala have been affected by heavy rains/flash floods/and rain oriented calamities of varying degrees.
As per information, 196 people have lost their lives, 2,184 cattle heads have perished, 38,285 houses/huts have been damaged and about 0.357 hecatares of crop area affected, the minister said.
Responding to questions about preparedness, Rijiju said the primary responsibility to deal with natural clamities lies with the state government concerned.
The Central government supplements the efforts of state governments by providing financial and logistic support to effectively deal with such exigent situations, he added.
He said Centre extends assistance through State Disaster Response Fund and National Disaster Response Fund.
"Primary responsibility lies with state governments because we cannot act at our own because we have to work with state governments," the minister said.
Replying to questions and clarifications, he said the Home Ministry has emergency control room which functions 24X7.
Maintaining that the country has been receiving heavy
rainfall from June to September each year during the monsoons, Rijiju said, "the rainfall during this period accounts for about 70-90 per cent of the total rainfall over India. As a consequence of this rainfall, flooding of rivers is a natural phenomenon."
He said the relief given during natural calamities is a temporary one and not enough.
An amount of Rs 8,938 crore has been allocated as central share to all the states in their SDRF accounts for 2016-17. So far, 3,431.02 crore have been released as first instalment of central share of SDRF for the year 2016-17 to 20 states.
During the minister's reply, the House also witnessed a brief argument between Congress member Anand Sharma and Deputy Chairman P J Kurien.
Sharma wanted to ask a question to the minister but Kurien said it could be done only after Rijiju finishes his reply. "You may be senior but I have to run the House," Kurien said and asked Sharma to listen to the Chair.
Sharma agreed and asked his question later.
Earlier, participating in the discussion, several leaders questioned the official data on damages caused in calamities.
Dilip Kumar Tirkey (BJD) sought a separate Ministry to deal with the calamities saying the present system of having the department under the Home Ministry, was not functioning well.
He got support from JD(U) leader Sharad Yadav who questioned the effectiveness of the National Disaster Management Authority and also demanded a separate Ministry to take care of the matter.
Many other leaders questions the effectiveness of the authorities and agencies concerned.
"You talk about steps taken after the flood, but what are the steps being taken for prevention of flood," questioned A U Singh Deo of BJD.
He said there was urban flooding, river side flooding and flooding in the hills due to various reasons, including rampant construction activity.
Deo said it was a national shame that even New Delhi gets flooded after an hour of rain.
Viplove Thakur of the Congress demanded that the Centre be more pro-active and release special funds for maintenance of roads in the hills which are affected by floods.
D Raja (CPI) said while he agreed with Rijiju that the primary responsibility lies with state governments, there was a need for a national level understanding on the subject.
He pointed out that the House, during the last session, discussed drought and this session was discussing floods. "In he next session, we will discuss either flood or drought... The country needs a proper water management policy," he said.
Raja also spoke on the importance of river linking.
Scuffles broke out between opposing protesters in Cleveland on the second day of the Republican National Convention.
A planned demonstration against police shootings of African-Americans devolved into mayhem yesterday, with punches thrown and shouting matches.
Approximately 100 police officers separated the dueling groups and maintained a strict cordon, quickly defusing tensions between rival protesters -- who also numbered around 100.
There were no immediate arrests, according to Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams, who was at the scene.
As the protest was getting under way, witnesses said Alex Jones -- a controversial radio show host who espouses various conspiracy theories -- challenged the assembled crowd and a few protesters punched him.
Police immediately moved in to separate the two sides.
Another group of counter-protesters, with signs including one that said "Every Real Muslim is a Jihadist," needled the crowd.
They were met with a chorus of boos, and comments such as "You're miserable."
Other protesters were yelling: "Indict! Convict! Send the killer cops to jail! The whole damn system, is guilty as hell."
media swarmed the scene -- on alert for trouble between rival protesters since the opening of the party convention, which will see Donald Trump officially anointed as the Republican candidate for president.
Officials have set up tight security zones and remain on heightened alert as groups with various messages plan to protest.
Sebi has expanded its probe into alleged misdoings at Ricoh India with fresh disclosures that its accounts appear to be "falsified" and the company is estimated to see Rs 1,123 crore loss in the last fiscal.
The company, a subsidiary of Japanese imaging and electronic major Ricoh, has been under the scanner of Sebi for sometime and the regulator would now also look at possible fund diversions.
The suspected misdoings at Ricoh India is likely to be the biggest corporate fraud involving a local company after the Satyam scandal came to light in 2009.
Sources said the role of auditors, top executives, their associates and brokers as well as some promoter entities would be looked into in the Ricoh India case.
Crisis-hit Ricoh India today admitted its accounts appear to be have been "falsified" as it estimated to incur a loss of Rs 1,123 crore for the year ended March 2016, even as its promoter entity Ricoh Company Ltd has proposed to recapitalise the firm for the loss.
The alleged misdoings at Ricoh India, during the period starting from 2010-11 when the share price witnessed significant rise, are being looked into by Sebi.
Sources said financial accounts of at least six years are being looked into and certain quarters during this period saw "sharp surge of up to doubling of profits".
Though many financial parameters are suspected to have been weak followed by almost 300 per cent rally in share price in early 2015, they added.
BSE has suspended trading in the shares of Ricoh India "due to to penal reasons".
Tightening the noose, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has stepped up its probe in the matter as it was till now looking mainly at violations of listing and disclosure norms.
So far, sources said the probe was focused on listing agreement violations such as delay in filing returns and shareholding pattern but now more serious violations of corporate governance norms are being looked into.
In addition, suspected diversion of funds and unauthorised insider trading and related party transactions would also be looked at in depth, they added.
The regulator would also be referring the matter to the Corporate Affairs Ministry and possibly seek a probe by the Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO).
Ricoh India's MD and CEO Manoj Kumar had resigned from the board after being asked to go on leave amid an audit in the company by a committee.
Punjab minister and BJP MLA Surjit Jyani today said Navjot Singh Sidhu should be persuaded to stay in the party.
"At home, if such a thing happens with a child, elder or a friend, efforts are made (to persuade) and the party will do so. If there is any misunderstanding and displeasure, there are many ways to pacify (him) and it should be done. I will say that Navjot Singh Sidhu should come back to his own home (party)," said the state Health and Family Welfare Minister.
"Efforts should be made to remove his disaffection and he should be persuaded (to take back his decision). He has been with the party for so many years," he said.
The Fazilka MLA is the first BJP leader who has said Sidhu should be persuaded to re-consider his decision.
Dealing a blow to the BJP ahead of the Assembly elections in Punjab, Sidhu, the Amritsar MP from 2004 to 2014, resigned yesterday from Rajya Sabha three months after his nomination by the Narendra Modi government, fuelling speculations that he, along with his wife Navjot Kaur, a BJP MLA, could join the AAP.
Kaur today told reporters there was no choice before her husband but join the AAP to serve the people of Punjab.
Punjab Congress chief Amarinder Singh today said former BJP MP Navjot Singh Sidhu was welcome to join the party if he so desired.
"Congress party's doors are open for everyone," he told reporters when asked if he would welcome Sidhu to the Congress fold.
He, however, said there was no communication between him and Sidhu so far. Asked if any Congress leader was in touch with Sidhu, he said, "Not to my knowledge".
Amarinder said Sidhu, who hails from Patiala, had a Congress background as his father late Bhagwant Singh Sidhu had been an office bearer of District Congress Committee.
"When my mother was Patiala DCC chief, Sidhu's father was her general secretary," he said, referring to the association the Sidhu family had with Congress.
When asked if he had met Sidhu in the recent past, Amarinder said, "We are both from Patiala and we are both Sidhus. I don't remember having met him for a long time now."
On whether Congress would invite the former Amritsar MP to join the party, the PCC chief said, "He is yet to resign from the BJP".
In a jolt to BJP ahead of Punjab elections, Sidhu had yesterday resigned his Rajya Sabha membership, saying "the burden is over".
He is widely speculated to join AAP and be its face in Punjab, though party chief Arvind Kejriwal indicated projecting him as chief ministerial candidate would be premature.
Sidhu today kept himself away from the media while his wife Navjot Kaur, a BJP MLA, did all the talking, saying his resignation from the Rajya Sabha yesterday meant he has also quit the party and the only option for them now was to join the AAP.
A petition has been filed in the Supreme Court challenging the order of the Bombay High Court upholding the discharge of BJP President Amit Shah in the Sohrabuddin fake encounter case.
The petition filed by social activist Harsh Mander has sought quashing of the December 30, 2014 order of a Mumbai sessions court giving clean chit to Shah in the case.
The petitioner has also questioned the findings of the sessions court which was endorsed by the high court exonerating him in the Tulsiram Prajapati killing case, holding that there existed "no case" against him and that he had been implicated for "political reasons".
Mander had approached the high court against the sessions court order which was dismissed by the Bombay High Court in March this year.
Sohrabuddin, a gangster was killed by Gujarat police along with his wife Kausar Bi in 2005.
Tulsiram, an aide of the gangster and an eyewitness to the encounter, was also killed allegedly by the police in 2006.
Expressing concern over the incident in Raha, Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal today held discussion with the various organisations of AIIMS Demand Committee and decided to write a letter to the Centre highlighting their concerns and proposals.
Chairing a meeting with various organisations of AIIMS Demand Committee here in an atmosphere of cordiality, the Chief Minister expressed his concern and condemned the incident in Raha.
The CM said, "the Government will prepare a draft with full participation of the leaders of the AIIMS Demand Committees highlighting their concerns and proposals and send a letter to the Central government to do the needful".
The decision to write to the Union Health and Family Welfare Ministry was taken considering the deep rooted human interests involved in the issue and it is the prerogative of the Centre to take appropriate decision considering all relevant issues, he said.
After listening to the concerns and grievances of the demand committees, Sonowal said, "state government exhibits fullest sensitivity to the concerns of the people of Central Assam and will do the needful for the interests of the people of state".
He also stated that the people of Assam have given responsibility to the newly elected government and it will do full justice and serve the people of the state with utmost sincerity.
Moreover, Sonowal sought the cooperation from all concerned and called for 'Team Assam' for propelling the 'growth trajectory' of the State.
Condemning the July 15 incident that took place in Raha where one person was killed in clashes between protestors and police, Sonowal said, "state government will show no leniency to anybody found to be guilty in the incident and will take action based on the findings of the one-man inquiry commission headed by the Additional Chief Secretary Rajib Bora".
The Chief Minister also said that his government paid an
ex-gratia of Rs 5 lakh and handed over an appointment letter giving government job to the wife of the deceased within 48 hours.
He also called upon the people of the state to extend all support and cooperation for the government to run the state smoothly.
The decision to set up AIIMS at Jalah on the North Bank of the Brahmaputra was taken by the then Congress government in the state in February 2016 which was given due approval by the then Chief Minister of Assam, a government release said.
Following the decision, the organisations leading the agitations for setting up of AIIMS-like institution in Raha decided to put their agitations on hold, the release said.
Kolkata Police today recorded statement of Trinamool Congress MLA Iqbal Ahmed in connection with its probe into the Narada sting operation.
According to a senior officer, Iqbal during two-hour-long grilling gave name of one Tajdar Mirza, who had introduced him to Narada CEO Mathew Samuel.
"He (Iqbal) even denied knowing Samuel ever. He said that one Tajdar Mirza had brought the Narada CEO to him," the IPS officer said.
Kolkata Police sleuths were trying to establish the identity of Mirza, who the officer said, could be Iqbal's driver.
Iqbal, the younger brother of TMC MP Sultan Ahmed, was purportedly shown accepting money in a controversial Narada sting tapes.
Another top source in Kolkata Police said the third summon to Narada CEO is likely to be sent in another couple of days' time.
"And even after that Samuel fails to turn up there is a big possibility of issuance of arrest warrant against him," the source said.
Kolkata Police sleuths had last week questioned IPS officer S M Hussain Mirza twice in connection with the investigation into the sting operation.
Mirza's statements were recorded and video graphed.
On June 17, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had ordered a probe by police into the sting operation and had claimed her party had not taken "a single penny" from anyone in the Saradha chit fund scam and the Narada sting operation.
A Special Investigation Team under Kolkata Police Commissioner Rajeev Kumar was formed to conduct the probe.
The next day, Kolkata Mayor and Minister Sovan Chattopadhyay's wife Ratna filed a complaint against Narada News CEO Mathew Samuel, who was then booked under IPC sections 469 (forgery for purpose of harming reputation), 500 (defamation), 505 (statements conducing to public mischief), 171 (G) (false statement in connection with an election) and 120(B) (criminal conspiracy).
An investigation into the Narada sting operation is on by the Lok Sabha Ethics Committee, while a case on the issue is pending in the Calcutta High Court.
Captain Rahul Chaudhuri put up a brave front to power Telugu Titans to an overwhelming 36-28 win over Dabang Delhi KC in the Pro Kabaddi League at the Netaji Indoor Stadium, here today.
Going for a hard tackle, Chaudhuri sustained an injury in his forehead but he played on with the bandage that affected his sight and scored 16 points, including one super tackle, to lead Telugu Titans to their sixth win from 11 matches.
Having started off with a hattrick of defeats, Telugu Titans are now unbeaten from six matches to jump to second place ahead of former champions Jaipur Pink Panthers on score difference.
This was Delhi's fifth loss from nine matches as they stay in the seventh place in the eight-team league with their semifinal hopes all but over.
Both the teams were locked eight-all after first quarter but Chaudhuri inflicted an allout on Delhi to give them a handsome 12-8 lead and they were up by six points at the interval.
Their dominance was summed up in the closing minutes when Sandeep Narwal lifted Delhi's Iran raider Meraj Sheykh with both hands and took him past the bonus line en route to their second win against the same opponents.
There was more setback for the Delhi franchise when Sanket Chavan was stretchered off the field after sustaining an injury.
The Titans captain who scored 14 raid points walked away with three awards -- Best Raiders and Best Moment and Man of the Mat, while Jasmer Singh Gulia was adjudged Best Defender for his five tackle points.
Tezpur University in Assam has been accredited "A" Grade with CGPA 3.25 by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) at the end of a week-long thorough assessment exercise conducted during May 16 to 19 last, said a Media Cell official of the Central University.
The 10-member high powered team was led by Professor Anil K Bhatnagar, Former Vice Chancellor of 'Pondicherry' University and presently the CSIR-Chair Professor, School of Physics, University of Hyderabad, Tezpur University Media Cell Chairman Rajiv Doley told PTI.
The result of the assessment was cleared in the 16th meeting of the Standing Committee of NAAC held on July 11 and shall remain valid for the next five years, Doley said.
The university, located in Sonitpur district, was assessed and evaluated on teaching and co-curricular activities, research work and extension & infrastructure facilities by the NAAC Peer Team, he said.
The highest body of evaluation for the Universities and Colleges in the country held series of meetings with the Vice-Chancellor, Heads of the Departments, Deans and other members of the University.
The Peer Team visited all departments, centers, cells and examined the activities, facilities and interacted with the faculty, staff and students, besides examining all records maintained by the University, Doley said.
The University has recorded other two major achievements to its credit this current year - Visitor's Best University Award 2016 and 5th position in MHRD-NIRF India Rankings 2016, he added.
Theresa May today chaired her first Cabinet meeting as British Prime Minister with a call out to her ministers to "make Brexit work for Britain".
She, however, underlined she did not want her government to be "defined by Brexit" as work gets underway for Britain to begin its exit from the European Union following the historic June 23 referendum.
"It will be the responsibility of everyone sitting around the Cabinet table to make Brexit work for Britain," she said.
"We will not allow the country to be defined by Brexit, but instead will build the education, skills and social mobility to allow everyone to prosper from the opportunities of leaving the EU," she added.
The meeting comes days after the 59-year-old Prime Minister set her stamp on the new government by shaking up nearly the entire set of ministerial portfolios.
Of the 22 full members of the Cabinet and five who have the right to attend Cabinet meetings, only five - Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, Defence Secretary Michael Fallon, Welsh Secretary Alun Cairns, Scottish Secretary David Mundell and Attorney General Jeremy Wright - retained the roles they held previously under David Cameron.
Indian-origin minister Priti Patel, who previously had the right to attend Cabinet meetings as a junior minister, today took her position as a full-fledged minister in charge of the Department for International Development (DfID).
Other key appointments included Philip Hammond as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Boris Johnson as foreign secretary, Amber Rudd as Home Secretary and Justine Greening as Education Secretary.
David Davis has been put in charge of a brand new ministry to take the UK out of the EU.
May, who has already held talks with Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones, received a boost yesterday when MPs overwhelmingly voted by a majority of 355 to proceed with the full renewal of the UK's Trident nuclear weapons system.
Shefaces her first Prime Minister's Questions tomorrow, after which she will travel to Germany for talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
On Thursday, she will meet French President Francois Hollande.
May has said she does not expect the UK to officially notify the EU of its intention to leave, which involves triggering Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, before the end of the year.
Thirteen people were killed in a prison riot in Guatemala, among them an ex-soldier imprisoned for killing a Roman Catholic bishop almost two decades ago, authorities said.
"Among the dead is Mr (Byron) Lima," who was convicted for his role in the 1998 murder of Juan Gerardi, and died during a "brawl" among inmates, Interior Minister Francisco Rivas told reporters. A previous toll had just two dead.
The clash took place yesterday inside Pavon prison, just outside the capital, after authorities tossed a grenade at the inmate's "security detail."
Rivas said the deadly uprising was linked to Guatemalan drug lord Marvin Montiel Marin, alias "El Taquero," who has been in the same prison for the 2008 killings of 15 Nicaraguans and a Dutch national.
The bishop had investigated atrocities committed during Guatemala's civil war, documenting more than 50,000 human rights violations -- most attributed to the army -- during the 1960-1996 armed conflict.
Lima was serving a 20-year prison sentence handed down in 2001. Three others, including his father, a former colonel, were convicted over the bishop's murder.
While serving his sentence, Lima was considered one of the most powerful figures inside Guatemala's prison system.
In 2014, a judge charged Lima with leading a criminal network that effectively controlled prison life, including arranging inmate transfers, conjugal visits and access to phones.
A huge protest rally, led by Babasaheb Ambedkar's grandson Prakash Ambedkar, was today taken out in south Mumbai to condemn the demolition of Ambedkar Bhavan.
Leaders cutting across party lines shared the stage and lashed out at the BJP-led Central and Maharashtra governments on the issue.
The protest rally, which started at Byculla, reached the headquarters of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) in south Mumbai in the afternoon.
CPI(M)'s general secretary Sitaram Yechury, Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union (JNUSU) president Kanhaiya Kumar, Shiv Sena leader Neelam Gorhe, Congress MLA Varsha Gaikwad, AIMIM MLA Waris Pathan, among others, addressed the gathering.
The Ambedkar Bhavan and the Buddha Bhushan printing press started by Babasaheb Ambedkar at Dadar in central Mumbai were demolished by Peoples Improvement Trust last month, claiming it was dilapidated and a grand Ambedkar Bhavan would come up in its place.
During the rally, the protesters demanded immediate arrest of retired IAS officer Ratnakar Gaikwad and a trustee of the People's Improvement Trust, in connection with the demolition.
Kanhaiya Kumar attacked the BJP government stating the one who cannot create the history, destroys it.
"Can you demolish and construct new Railway building here? Can you demolish the Taj Mahal and create a new building there?," he said.
"You say it was due to an internal dispute and issues between the groups of Ambedkar's followers. If that is so, there are disputes and issues in Assemblies and Parliament too? Then would you bulldoze these premises as well?," he asked.
Terming Centre's move to observe Dr Ambedkar's 125th birth anniversary as mere "drama", Kumar said if this BJP government had respect for Babasaheb and his principles, then it would not have pulled down the historically important building in the late hours of the night.
Yechury said, "We have raised this issue in Rajya Sabha
and we have got assurance that the government would try to undo the damage done to the Ambedkar Bhavan."
During his address Prakash Ambedkar demanded the Bhavan be reconstructed, "failing which members of the Ambedkarite movement will construct it themselves".
"We want to clarify we are not going to tolerate this demolition and therefore demand to retain it as it was, otherwise we all will assemble at the demolished building's place and reconstruct it on our own.
"From today onwards, another freedom fight that our beloved leader Babasaheb fought to establish egalitarian society, has begun, as this anti-poor and anti-dalit governments at the state and Centre are working as a pawn of industrialists," Ambedkar alleged.
He also expressed fear that although the Ambedkar Bhavan was the first historic monument that has been razed, many more such structures would be pulled down in the future.
"We need to strengthen ourselves to tackle the fascism being propagated by BJP and RSS in the country and state. I want the Fadnavis and Modi governments to take our protest seriously," he said.
Although Mumbai Congress chief Sanjay Nirupam did not share the stage with other leaders, he also supported the protest rally by remaining present on the occasion.
Targeting the ruling BJP on the issue, Nirupam said, "All those having faith in Babasaheb's ideology have come here, except those who discard it.
Three people, including two women, died today in a shooting incident in Lincolnshire in the UK, but police said there was no indication of a terror link.
The suspected gunman was among the dead in the shooting near the Castle Swimming Pool in Spalding in eastern UK.
Lincolnshire Police, who were called to scene said no shots were fired by their officers.
Two women and a man died in the incident, British media reports said.
A spokeswoman for the local ambulance service said paramedics had treated three patients for gunshot wounds but they were pronounced dead at the scene.
Police said they were not looking for anyone else in connection with the incident.
Members of the public were asked to stay away from the area.
A force spokesman said there was no indication it was a "terror-related" incident.
Political parties in Tamil Nadu today expressed concern over a statue of Tamil saint-poet Thiruvalluvar reportedly lying wrapped in a park in Haridwar after efforts by a BJP MP to install it on the banks of river Ganga failed allegedly due to protests from local sadhus.
MDMK, PMK and TMC(M) cited media reports in this regard and urged the Uttarakhand government to take steps for the due installation of the statue.
BJP Rajya Sabha member Tarun Vijay, known for his penchant for the Tamil language, had attempted to install the 12-feet tall statue on the banks of river Ganga but reportedly could not do so following protests from local sadhus.
Pictures purportedly showing the statue being wrapped in a plastic cover and lying in a park there had been published in a section of the media.
"Such an insult to Thiruvalluvar is unpardonable. Respecting the sentiments of Tamils, the Uttarakhand government should take steps for the due installation of the statue on the banks of river Ganga," MDMK founder Vaiko said.
In a statement, he alleged that 'Hindutva' elements were behind the failed installation attempt of the statue.
He also demanded Tamil Nadu government's intervention in the matter.
PMK founder S Ramadoss expressed "shock" over the matter and said such an 'insult' to the poet was "condemnable".
He demanded that the state government bring back the statue, which had travelled from Namakkal recently, to Tamil Nadu and install it in Chennai or Madurai.
TMC (M) leader and former Union Minister GK Vasan sought avoiding "unncessary controversy" on the matter and urged the statue be installed at an appropriate location.
Tarun Vijay had been promoting Tirukkural, a classic Tamil treatise comprising 1,330 couplets or Kurals dealing with various aspects of life and authored by Thiruvalluvar.
Sri Lanka's main Tamil party TNA today condemned the clashes which broke out at a cultural event in the Jaffna University that injured several Sinhala students last week.
"We regret that several students have sustained injuries and that the Sinhala students had to be evacuated from the university and Jaffna as a precautionary measure," a statement from the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) said.
The party said it was important to prevent any recurrence of such incidents or anything that will hinder genuine reconciliation among communities.
The clash which erupted at a cultural event on Saturday to welcome freshers into the science faculty resulted in Tamil students attacking the Sinhala students. Several students were hospitalised.
The TNA has asked the Sinhala students to return and the Tamil students to welcome them and assure them of their safety.
Minister of Higher Education Lakshman Kiriella said there was no racial connection to the clashes.
"This was a clash between two students groups as it happens in any other university," Kiriella said.
He said the university will be re-opened after today's public holiday following talks with all concerned parties.
The Sinhala nationalist political groups, however, have faulted the current government.
They urged stringent action against Tamil students and asked the government to ensure the safety of the Sinhala students in the university.
Tamil demand for a federal solution that dates back to the days when Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, came to be granted independence by the British in 1948.
The campaign was extended to a separate state demand when the LTTE fought a decades-old war with the government to carve out a separate Tamil homeland.
With the defeat of the LTTE in 2009, the Tamil leadership has adopted a softer approach to give up on the separatist demand.
According to the UN figures, at least 40,000 people were killed in the final phase of the conflict.
Turkish authorities today scrapped all TV and radio station licences linked to US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara accuses of being behind Friday's failed coup.
The broadcasting watchdog said it had "cancelled all broadcasting rights and licences for media that had links to FETO/PDY", referring to the "Fethullah Terrorist Organisation", the government's derogatory name for the Gulen movement.
Gulen has strongly denied Turkey's accusations that he masterminded the attempted putsch.
The decision was made during an extraordinary meeting of the watchdog today, it said.
The 24 channels and radio stations affected were named by the state-run agency Anadolu.
The agency also said the prime ministry's press and information office (BYEGM) had revoked press cards for 34 journalists believed to be close to Gulen.
"This action we have taken must not be seen as restricting press freedom," BYEGM Vice President Ekrem Okutan said, Anadolu reported.
Media linked to the preacher have come under recent attack in Turkey.
In March, Zaman, the biggest-selling daily newspaper, and the headquarters of the headquarters China, which belonged to parent company Feza, were raided by police and state administrators were brought in.
Turkey widened its massive post-coup purge to schools and the media today, vowing to root out supporters of an exiled Islamic cleric it accuses of orchestrating the attempted power grab.
Global alarm is mounting over the retaliatory action since Friday's failed putsch, which has already seen a massive crackdown in the military, police and judiciary and thousands detained including top generals.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said Turkey had sent dossiers to the United States to demand for the extradition of reclusive preacher Fethullah Gulen, who has emerged as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's greatest foe.
Today's action largely targeted supporters of Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania but retains vast interests in Turkey ranging from media to finance to schools and wields influence in various apparatus including the judiciary and police.
"We will pull them out by the roots... So that no clandestine terrorist organisation, no separatist organisation, will dare to betray Turkey again," Yildirim warned.
The government suspended 15,200 state education employees allegedly linked to the "Fethullah Terrorist Organisation" -- its name for Gulen's network -- and demanded the resignation of almost 1,600 deans from private and state universities.
The authorities also cancelled licences for radio and television stations said to be linked to the so-called Gulenists.
The state-run Anadolu agency said 24 media outlets were hit, while 34 journalists were stripped of their press cards.
Already, almost 9,000 people including police, judges and government officials had been sacked in the days following Friday's coup.
About 9,300 people have also been detained, including top generals accused of treason for allegedly masterminding the plot as well as soldiers, police and judges.
Yildirim nevertheless warned Turks against exacting "revenge" on backers of the attempted overthrow, after disturbing pictures emerged of rough treatment meted out to suspects.
Erdogan spokesman Ibrahim Kalin defended the mass detentions and called on Washington to cooperate in handing over Gulen.
Ankara has long accused Gulen, once a close Erdogan ally sharing his Islamo-conservative views, of operating a parallel state in Turkey with the aim of toppling the government.
Gulen dismissed the allegations he was involved in what he called "treason, a betrayal of the Turkish nation," and said he was not concerned by the extradition move.
He suggested Erdogan himself may have staged the putsch, an idea dismissed by the presidency as "nonsensical".
Turkey's anxious Western allies have told Ankara to abide by the rule of law amid fears about a worsening state of democracy and human rights in the strategic NATO nation.
UN rights chief Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein urged a fair trial for the suspects and voiced "serious alarm" over the purges.
Turkey's ambassador today urged Greece to swiftly return eight military officers who fled across the border after last week's failed coup, warning the affair could harm bilateral relations.
If the affair "is resolved swiftly and they are returned as swiftly as possible, that could turn into something very positive for our bilateral relations," Turkish ambassador Kerim Uras told reporters in Athens.
"But if that's not the case, I fear it will not help at all, and that the public mood (in Turkey) will be affected," Uras said.
"I hope we will manage to swiftly go through the phases of due process and manage to return these terrorist elements so that they will face justice," he added.
The eight men, who arrived by military helicopter on Saturday after sending a distress signal to authorities at the airport in the northern city of Alexandroupolis, are to face trial for illegal entry on Thursday.
"I think it was a mistake to accept them in the first place," the ambassador said, arguing that Greek authorities could have asked the helicopter to land near a Turkish facility.
According to their lawyer, Ilia Marinaki, the Turkish soldiers -- two commanders, four captains and two sergeants -- fear for their safety and that of their families after the failed coup attempt against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
They claim to have been fled after being fired upon by police.
To block their deportation to Turkey, they have applied for asylum in Greece.
Uras bristled at the suggestion that the officers would not be treated fairly at home.
"We take offence at such reporting because needless to say, they will face a fair trial. It will be totally transparent," he said.
But he added that legal cooperation between both states was good and "we have full confidence in the Greek judicial system."
A mass crackdown by Turkish authorities on instigators of Saturday's attempted coup has fuelled fears Ankara may enact harsh retribution and even reintroduce the death penalty, abolished in 2004.
But Uras said he "personally" believed that would not happen as it is a "fundamental law that the law cannot be applied retrospectively.
Two persons have been arrested on charge of outraging the modesty of a woman in Reasi district of Jammu and Kashmir, police said today.
A complaint was registered at Police Post Kakriyal yesterday against Arshad Ahmed and Ashraf Mohmmad for allegedly outraging the modesty of a woman, they said.
The woman has also alleged that the duo assaulted her, police said adding, a case has been registered against them under relevant sections of the IPC.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today said North Korea's test-firing of three ballistic missiles was deeply troubling and undermined efforts to reduce tension on the Korean peninsula.
North Korea test-fired two SCUD missiles and a Rodong medium-range missile on Tuesday, in further defiance of the international community and in apparent reaction to the planned deployment of a US defense system in South Korea.
"The DPRK's firing of missiles is deeply troubling," said Ban's spokesman Farhan Haq.
"Such actions are not conducive to reducing tensions on the Korean peninsula."
The UN Security Council is discussing a response to North Korea's missile tests, said Japan's ambassador and the council president.
"We are hoping that the Security Council will be able to respond in an appropriate way," Ambassador Koro Bessho told reporters.
"We are talking to several friends," he added.
The US Defense Department said Washington would raise its concerns over the latest launches at the United Nations.
But the US mission said it had not called for consultations at the Security Council on North Korea.
A US-drafted statement condemning an apparent submarine-launched ballistic missile earlier this month was still under discussion with China, Washington's key partner on North Korea, diplomats said.
The council last adopted a statement condemning North UN resolutions prohibit North Korea from developing ballistic North Korea has been hit by five sets of UN sanctions since it first tested an atomic device in 2006.
A head constable was today killed after a mob attacked police with stones, prompting security personnel to lob tear gas shells to disperse them in Amreli town even as protests by Dalits against the brutal assault on fellow community members for allegedly skinning a cow at Una last week spread to several parts of Gujarat.
"Head Constable with local crime branch Pankaj Amreli was injured in stone-pelting in Amreli. He died during treatment at Rajkot hospital. Ten other persons including protesters and policemen have been injured," police said.
Today, three youths attempted to kill themselves by consuming poison at their residential society in Batwa town in Junagadh district.
After seven Dalit youths attempted suicide at Gondal and Jamkandorna in Rajkot district against the assault yesterday, several incidents of damage to state transport buses and of road blockades were reported from different parts of Saurashtra region across Junagadh, Jamnagar, Rajkot and Amreli districts since late last night.
While a bus was torched in Dhoraji town of Rajkot district and several others damaged, protestors allegedly vandalised sheds for Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS) in Rajkot late last night, police said.
"Dinesh Parmar (21), Dinesh Vegra (23) and Rasik Vinjura (40) gathered at Ambedkar Nagar society and consumed poison to protest against the beating (of Dalit youths in Una). We rushed them to Junagadh civil hospital for treatment," police said, adding their condition is stable.
Hundreds of protesters gathered at Chital road locality in Amreli town this morning and started hurling stones at police who in turn fired two teargas shells to disperse them.
In Surendranagar, agitators blocked a highway by putting carcass of a cow in the middle of the road, police said.
In the wake of the tense situation, the state road transport department today suspended bus services from Porbandar and other parts as protesters continued to block roads.
Some persons hurled stones at Ahmedabad-Veraval train as it was entering Rajkot, injuring an assistant driver last night, police said today.
"There was a report of BRTS buses being ransacked by the community members as several public transport vehicles were also ransacked," DCP, Rajkot, Karanraj Vaghela said.
He said that situation is under control and no untoward incident has taken place in Rajkot today.
Chief Minister Anandiben Patel had yesterday ordered a CID probe into the alleged assault on Dalit community members at Una in Gir-Somnath district and also announced setting up a special court for speedy trial of the case.
The incident, wherein Dalit youths were paraded and flogged for allegedly skinning a dead cow, caused nation-wide outrage after its video went viral.
The victims' contention was that they were skinning a dead cow and had not killed it.
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AAP convener and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal would visit Una town of Gir-Somnath district in Gujarat on July 22, where some Dalit youths were brutally thrashed last week for allegedly killing a cow.
AAP's media coordinator Harshil Nayak said Kejriwal would meet the victims.
"The visit is aimed at expressing solidarity with the victims and sharing their pain," he said.
This would be Kejriwal's second visit to Gujarat in less than a fortnight. He had visited the BJP-ruled state on July 9 to kickstart AAP's poll campaign for the 2017 state Assembly elections.
AAP also announced that the party would stage protests over the Una incident across Gujarat tomorrow, including in the cities such as Rajkot, Vadodara, Bhavnagar, Surendranagar, Anand, Junagadh and Bharuch.
Some persons claiming to be "Gau rakshak" (cow protectors) thrashed seven Dalit youths at Una town last week alleging that they had killed a cow which they were skinning. The victims claimed that they were skinning the cow which had died of natural causes.
Video of the incident went viral, sparking protests. A head constable was today killed after a mob attacked police in Amreli town, while some Dalit youths have tried to commit suicide in protest against the incident.
US Secretary of State John Kerry today became the first senior foreign official to meet British Prime Minister Theresa May since she took office after the Brexit referendum.
Kerry visited May at her Downing Street office on the last day of a five-stop tour of European capitals, ahead of talks with the British, German, French and Italian foreign ministers on the conflict on Syria.
Washington was dismayed by last month's British vote to leave the European Union, seeing the June 23 referendum result as a blow to Western unity and to the world economy.
But both Kerry and US President Barack Obama have vowed that the "special relationship" between Britain and the United States will remain strong, and Kerry and May were all smiles as they met.
Kerry banged his head on the famous black door of the British leader's 10 Downing Street residence as he turned to go inside after waving to photographers from the steps.
Indoors, the pair made small talk about the speed with which a British government can change leaders compared to a White House transition, which takes several months.
"I am amazed it happens so fast. How do you have time to pack everything?" Kerry asked, before reporters were ushered out to allow them to speak privately.
Later, Kerry was due to meet Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and hold a joint conference.
Their talks will be followed with a meeting of EU foreign ministers to discuss the fragile cessation of hostilities in Syria, as well as the humanitarian situation and the conditions needed to resume UN-backed talks.
France's Jean-Marc Ayrault will press for the need to step up strikes against the Islamic State jihadist group, after last week's massacre in Nice that left 84 people dead, his office said.
Kerry and Johnson, who is due in Washington later this week, will also meet foreign ministers from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates late today to discuss the conflict in Yemen.
The Turkish army said today that the vast majority of its members had no links with Friday's attempted coup and warned that the putschists would face severe punishment.
"The overwhelming majority of our members who love their people, nation and flag have absolutely nothing to do" with this coup "attempted by traitors," it said in a statement.
The army said the plooters would be punished severely for the "humiliation and disgrace" on the Turkish republic.
"Believers of the rule of law, democracy and the high value of our nation and its noble aims were the victors," it added.
The armed forces blamed the "Fethullah Terrorist Organisation" (FETO) for the failed putsch, referring to Fethullah Gulen, a one-time ally turned foe of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Erdogan has accused Gulen of leading the coup from afar in the United States -- charges which the Islamic preacher strongly denies.
The army said its chief of staff Hulusi Akar had refused at gunpoint to sign a document in support of the attempted overthrow of the government.
"An illegal gang of terrorists in FETO tried to force the Chief of General Staff to sign a document and read a statement live on television by making threats against him," it said.
"The traitors made this request of the chief of General Staff which he strongly refused.
The Delhi High Court today asked the AAP government what would be the mode of determining penalty to be imposed on a private hospital which allegedly refuses to provide free treatment to poor patients as required under its land allotment lease condition.
"Who will determine? What will be mode of determination," Justice Sanjeev Sachdeva asked while hearing a plea of Fortis Escorts Heart Institute here which has been slapped with a fine of over Rs 100 crore for allegedly refusing to provide free treatment to poor patients.
The court raised the query as the Delhi government did not place before it the original records of a meeting held on December 10 last year on the basis of which it had purportedly arrived at the amount.
Besides Fortis, the Delhi government had asked four other Delhi-based private hospitals -- Max Super Specialty Hospital (Saket), Dharamshila Cancer Hospital, Shanti Mukand Hospital and Pushpawati Singhania Research Institute -- to deposit "unwarranted profits" they earned from allegedly refusing free treatment to the poor.
During the hearing, the court directed the government to place before it on August 1, whatever records it has regarding the meeting after its counsel said there was only an attendance sheet of meeting and there was no record of the discussions.
This contention was disputed by Fortis hospital's counsel who said that she had signed the sheet containing a record of what had transpired at the meeting.
Delhi government counsel Peeyoosh Kalra then said the records would be placed before the court on August 1.
The lawyer, during the hearing, also said the additional affidavit filed by the hospital, regarding records provided by it to the government, was vague.
A special committee, appointed to look into the affairs of the hospitals as per a high court order of 2007, had imposed a fine of over Rs 32 crore on Max, Rs 36.30 on Shanti Mukand, Rs 10.6 on Pushpawati Singhania, over Rs 100 crore on Fortis and Rs 17.86 crore on Dharamshila.
During the previous hearing, the court had refused to
grant an interim stay in favour of the hospital, saying that Fortis has to first deposit some money if wants to insist on an interim relief.
The hospital in its plea challenging the fine imposed on it has questioned the basis for arriving at the amount of over Rs 105 crore.
It had said that in two earlier show cause notices issued by the health department, the amounts were Rs 736 crore and Rs 500 crore.
The health department had claimed that the hospitals were provided land at concessional rates between 1960 and 1990on the condition that they will treat the poor free of cost, but they have not abided by it.
As many as 43 private hospitals in Delhi were allotted land at concessional rates on the condition that they will keep 10 per cent of their in-patient department capacity and 25 per cent of out-patient department capacity to treat economically weaker section patients free of cost.
The government today termed as "inappropriate" the recent World Health Organisation (WHO) report which ranked several Indian cities, including Delhi, among top 20 most polluted ones globally, and said the data was based on "extrapolated and estimated values".
"A report was brought out by the WHO in May 2016 ranking some cities of India including Delhi among top 20 most polluted cities of the world with respect to levels of particular matter which is based on extrapolated and estimated values. The said ranking of cities is therefore not appropriate," Union Environment Minister Anil Madhav Dave said in a written reply to the Lok Sabha.
The WHO report, based on 2012-13 data, was prepared taking into consideration particulate matter PM 10 and PM 2.5 and listed Delhi as the 11th most polluted city in the world.
Dave said that taking note of the gravity of air pollution in NCT of Delhi, a series of measures have been taken including regular review meetings at official and ministerial level with NCR states and NCT of Delhi.
Former Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar had also termed the WHO report on pollution, which had also listed over 30 Indian cities among hundred most polluted globally, as "misleading".
Even environmentalists had sounded caution over the report, saying it does not give the right picture.
Noting that the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) had established a control room to receive complaints on burning of dry leaves and trash, Dave said that 141 complaints have been received till date and 31 of them have been resolved.
He said that the Delhi Pollution Control Committee has reported that there is a decrease in the incidents of dry leaves burning.
Dave also admitted that the Municipal Solid Waste management in many cities is "not adequate".
"As per reports of state pollution control boards and pollution control committees, around 1,40,859 tonnes per day of MSW generated in the country.
"Out of which 1,27,531 tonnes per day (91 per cent) is collected and 34,434 tonnes per day (27 per cent) is treated. The data indicates that MSW management systems in many cities and tows are not adequate," Dave said.
According to the WHO report, based on data collected between 2008 and 2013, New Delhi was the 11th most-polluted city while four other Indian cities - Gwalior (2), Allahabad (3), Patna (6) and Raipur (7) - figured in the top seven cities with worst air pollution.
A woman was killed and 12 others were injured today when a bus they were travelling in rammed into a stationary truck here, police said.
The Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation (MSRTC) bus from Amalner in Maharashtra to Indore ran into the stationary truck from the rear side on Agra-Mumbai National Highway, killing the woman and leaving 12 others injured, Badgonda police station Inspector Manoharlal Meena said.
The deceased was yet to be identified.
"Injured have been admitted to a hospital and further investigations are on," he added.
(Reuters) - Corvex Management LP, the activist fund run by former Carl Icahn protege Keith Meister, has amassed small stakes in U.S. seeds company Monsanto Co and its aspiring acquirer, Germany's Bayer AG , people familiar with the matter said on Monday.
Corvex, which also owned Monsanto stock two years ago, would favour a sale to Bayer for a rich enough price, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is not public.
Corvex declined to comment, while Monsanto and Bayer offered no immediate comment.
Activist hedge fund Glenview Capital Management LLC already owns a 2.5 percent stake in Monsanto, making it the company's seventh-largest shareholder, according to regulatory filings.
(Reporting by Michael Flaherty and Greg Roumeliotis in New York; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
IBM also stood by its full-year forecast for adjusted earnings of at least $13.50 per share, dispelling any concerns about the impact from Britain's vote to leave the European Union.
"Investors were a little bit nervous about the guidance, and they'll find a little relief that the company maintained that, despite some headwinds associated with their high sales exposure to Europe," said Edward Jones analyst Bill Kreher.
IBM receives nearly a third of its revenue from Europe, Middle East and Africa.
Chief Executive Ginni Rometty's push towards cloud-based services, security software and data analytics seems to have paid off with a 12 percent rise in revenue from "strategic imperatives" in the second quarter.
Cloud revenue jumped 30 percent, compared with 34 percent in the preceding quarter.
"For us, it's not about being the biggest cloud, that's not our goal, our goal is to have the best hybrid capabilities," Chief Financial Officer Martin Schroeter said in an interview.
Total revenue dropped 2.8 percent to $20.24 billion for the quarter ended June 30 from a year earlier, hurt by a fall in its traditional hardware businesses.
The company's global business services revenue, which includes consulting, fell 2 percent, while its systems unit, which includes systems hardware, dropped 23.2 percent.
However, the company's 17th straight quarterly revenue decline was not as steep as expected. The average analyst estimate was $20.02 billion, according to Thomson I/B/E/S.
Net income fell to $2.50 billion, or $2.61 per share, from $3.45 billion, or $3.50 per share.
Excluding items, IBM earned $2.95 per share, beating average analyst estimate of $2.89.
IBM's shares, which had risen 16 percent this year through Monday, were up 0.7 percent in extended trading.
(Reporting by Anya George Tharakan in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Sai Sachin R and Narottam Medhora; Editing by Don Sebastian)
Yahoo!s quarterly earnings fell short of Wall Street expectations on Monday in what may be the companys last financial report before it sells its core business.
Yahoo! reported adjusted earnings of 9 cents per share, short of the 10 cents that analysts expected. It also announced a $482 million write-down on the value of Tumblr, the social media service that it acquired in 2013 for $1.1 billion.
Yahoo! is in the process of auctioning off its search and advertising business, and is expected to choose a winner this week. The company said its board has made great progress on strategic alternatives but did not comment further on the auction process.
Verizon Communications and AT&T are said to be in the running to acquire the core business, along with private equity firm TPG Capital and a consortium led by Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert and backed by billionaire Warren Buffett.
Yahoo! also owns large stakes in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and Yahoo! Japan, which are worth far more than the companys internet business. Mondays earnings report showed the continued slide in Yahoo!s business during the protracted sale process. After the Tumblr write-down, the company posted a net loss of $439.9 million, or 46 cents per share, compared with a loss of $21.6 million, or 2 cents per share, a year earlier.
Although total revenue rose to $1.31 billion from $1.24 billion a year earlier, the seeming improvement was the result of a change in the way the cost of acquiring traffic is counted. After deducting fees paid to partner websites for traffic, revenue fell to $841.2 million from $1.04 billion.
Estimating that Tumblr is worth nothing at this point, Ross Gerber, co-founder and CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management, said potential buyers were likely bidding lower than Yahoo! believes it is worth.
I cant imagine why the sale process is taking so long, the only thing I can think of is its being overpriced. This report doesnt further create an impression that paying up for these assets has any value, Gerber said.
Revenue in the companys emerging businesses, which Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer calls Mavens mobile, video, native and social advertising showed some life, rising 25.7 per cent to $504 million in the second quarter ended June 30.
But the improvement in Mavens was offset by decreases in gross search revenue that is only expected to get worse, said B Riley & Co analyst Sameet Sinha. Gross search revenue for the quarter was $765 million, down 17 per cent from the same period last year.
This is supposed to be the growth engine of the company, and at best it was up slightly year over year. That shows that even in high-growth categories like mobile and native theyre losing their search impact, he said.
JMP Securities analyst Ronald Josey said search revenues are a significant portion of Yahoo!s overall revenues and their continued decline could definitely be a factor in the sale negotiations.
If search continues to decline as much as it has, thats something thats going to be called into question, he said.
In a conference call, Yahoo! Chief Financial Officer Ken Goldman touted the companys cost-cutting efforts.
Through excellent expenditure management of cost and capital, we achieved above the high-end of our guidance on adjusted EBITDA and significantly increased cash flow, he said, referring to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation.
Yahoo!s shares were little changed at $37.92 in trading after the bell.
Kunal Bahl, the 32-year-old co-founder and chief executive officer of Snapdeal, appears relaxed in a light blue shirt and dark trousers, as he settles down for an interview at the large conference room in the companys Gurgaon headquarters, but he clamps down on issues that he calls conjecture. Bahls firm has been in the middle of some firefighting over reports on how there are efforts to downsize, as cash is depleting and investors are not forthcoming. In conversation with Karan Choudhury & Nivedita Mookerji, Bahl says investors regularly chase Snapdeal and that the views of pink papers must be separated from those of consumers.
Berger, Moore say Roy Cooper "refused to do his job" by failing to file documents naming legislative leaders as parties in appeal
RALEIGH While the Wake County Board of Elections voted along party lines to appeal a 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling throwing out local school board and county commissioner districts, state legislative leaders are fighting to get back in as defendants in the case.On Thursday, Senate leader Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, and House Speaker Tim Moore, R-Cleveland, issued a statement saying they plan to file a motion to intervene in the lawsuit and appeal the ruling by a three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit, saying Attorney General Roy Cooper refused to provide an adequate defense of the maps for the state. The decision by legislative leaders came a day after the Wake board voted to appeal the ruling to the full appeals court.Earlier this week, Rep. Paul "Skip" Stam, R-Wake, said he hoped Berger and Moore would attempt to intervene as defendants and seek an immediate appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. He said that the House speaker and Senate leader had been "involuntarily dismissed" as defendants from the lawsuit challenging the Wake districts, adding that when the case got to the 4th Circuit, no one went to bat for lawmakers who redrew the districts.After Stam's statement was published Tuesday at Carolina Journal Online, Anita Earls, an attorney for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, told the News & Observer that Stam's statement wasBut legislative leaders counter that Cooper's office failed to act in the state's best interests.In an interview on Wednesday, Earls told CJ that plaintiffs had attempted to add legislative leaders as defendants.Earls said.The attorney general's office usually represents the state in court and in lawsuits challenging the constitutionality or legality of state laws.Noelle Talley, a spokeswoman for the Attorney General's office, did not explain why the AG's office didn't want the legislative leaders listed as defendants.Talley said.The General Assembly redrew Wake County's school board districts in 2013. The plan included two "super districts" and seven small districts. In 2015, lawmakers redrew Wake County's county commissioner districts, using identical maps.An original 2013 lawsuit challenging the school board districts was dismissed by U.S. District Court Judge Terrence Boyle in March 2014. Later, other lawsuits were filed, challenging the school board and county commissioner districts. Earlier this year Chief U.S. District Court Judge James Dever ruled that the plaintiffs had failed to prove their case. However, on July 1, the 4th Circuit reversed Dever's ruling in a 2-1 decision.said Amy Auth, a spokeswoman for Berger.Boyle ruled that the legislative leaders had no enforcement power in overseeing elections, since the State Board of Elections is the agency that administers election law.Boyle wrote.GOP leaders ripped the way Cooper's office has handled the case. Cooper is the Democratic nominee for governor. He faces incumbent GOP Gov. Pat McCrory and Libertarian Lon Cecil in the Nov. 8 general election.Stam said.Moore and Berger said in their statement.The primaries for county commissioner were held on March 15. Filing for the school board races ended on July 1, the same day the 4th Circuit's ruling came out.On Wednesday, the Wake County Board of Elections voted to appeal the 4th Circuit panel's decision to the full 15-member Circuit Court. Neither GOP Chairman Brian Ratledge, who supported the appeal, Democratic member Mark Ezzell, who opposed the appeal, nor board attorney Charles Marshall returned phone calls seeking a comment on the action.However, Ezzell posted his reasons for disagreeing "vehemently" with the decision on his Facebook page.Ezzell said he thought the 4th Circuit's decision, penned by Judge James Wynn, was correct.Ezzell said.Appealing the ruling is a waste of taxpayer money and would further bring confusion to the election season, Ezzell said. Also, Ezzell said not appealing would force the General Assembly, who he calledto take responsibility for its actions.Ezzell said.
Continued investor concerns over startup valuations, macroeconomic upheavals, the ramifications of Brexit, and an uncertain exit environment for portfolio companies translated into another down quarter for investment deals in (VC)-backed companies.
At last week's Farnborough Air Show, an Indian carrier placed a $7.7 billion order while an additional $72 billion of contracts are in the offing. The next challenge: Finding landing and parking slots for these planes. As air travel heats up in the world's fastest-growing major aviation market, infrastructure has failed to keep pace with traffic growth fuelled by rising incomes and affordable fares. The average time an aircraft spends circling before it can land in Mumbai during peak hours is about 45 minutes to an hour, versus 25 minutes for Singapore and zero for Qatar, according ...
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Homegrown bath brand Jaquar, with presence in over 30 countries across Europe, Middle East, Asia-Pacific and Africa, has acquired South Korean luxury shower Joeyforlife along with its entire designing and R&D units.
Joeyforlife is a pioneer in conceptualising and designing shower products and Jaquar Group has acquired 51 per cent stake in the South Korean company. The Rs 2,336-crore Jaquar Group has acquired Joeyforlife for under $2 million and also plans to invest Rs 150 crore in setting up a brownfield facility in Korea by next year.
Speak to Business Today post the acquisition, Rajesh Mehra, Director & Promoter, Jaquar Group said that the new acquisition would double its production capacity to over 100,000 faucets per day. "We are keenly looking at expanding the shower market with the Korean acquisition to enhance our position globally. Joeyforlife - our new South Korea luxury shower maker - is way ahead in the R&D of such products that will help us to make Jaquar an evolve brand in global markets as a complete bathing solutions' company."
Set up in 1960, Jaquar is one of the fastest growing bath brands with over 60 per cent market share in faucets in the Indian organised bathroom fittings market. Currently, the Group delivers over 1.5 million bathrooms every year and produces over 22 million bath fittings annually. With a workforce of 6,374 employees across the globe and 770 highly trained technicians for customer care services, the company is aiming for a turnover of Rs 3,000 crore for the current 2016/17 fiscal.
Jaquar plans to foray its mother brand into the South Korea market and work with Joeyforlife to enter regional South-East Asian markets like Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar and Vietnam. "An orientation centre to display our complete range of products will be set up in Seoul for latest product display. We estimate to double the contribution of international business to 10 per cent of our turnover in the next three years," Mehra added.
The company is aiming to use the distinctive R&D technology of Joeyforlife to create unique product portfolios for the consumers who aspire for experiential designs. Their proprietary customised luxury shower head for high end market would be brought to India under the Korea expertise to usher a change in the bathing industry.
For greater ease of doing business in India, the CBDT on Tuesday said it has put in place new protocols which will ensure that corporates are allotted PAN and Tax Deduction Account Number (TAN) within a day.
Interacting with reporters here, Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) Chairman Atulesh Jindal said the Income Tax department had recently introduced the facility for corporates allowing them to apply for TAN using digital signatures, while individuals can now get a new PAN through Aadhaar-based e-signature facility which will reduce the effective time in allotment of the unique I-T department issued number by half.
"CBDT has agreed to seamless exchange of data with Ministry of Corporate Affairs to ensure that upon incorporation of a company by MCA the PAN and TAN number are allotted within a day. The process of getting a PAN or TAN has been fast-tracked for all category of taxpayers," he said.
Jindal said the new measures are specifically aimed to ensure "ease of doing business in the country" and help taxpayers in getting PAN quickly.
"The PAN number has been made the unique business identifier for all different categories of businesses not only for assessees of the Income Tax department but also for other organisations.
"We have taken certain steps for easing the allotment of the PAN number and the process has been made totally digitised. Besides this, the corporate assessees who are filing applications on e-biz platform and the corporate who is coming to us for allotment of PAN, now such a corporate can file such an application online using the digital signature.
No physical document is required to be attached along with the application," he said.
The CBDT boss said for normal taxpayers and those in the non-corporate category, these processes have also been digitised.
"They (taxpayers) can also file the application without any annexure using digital signature. Besides that, we have also introduced another facility, a convenient facility for those who do not have digital signature. They can file using Aadhaar-based e-signature facility," Jindal said while talking about processes that will be available to individuals seeking a PAN.
As many as 20 central government services including industrial licence and employer registration have been integrated with the e-Biz platform, in a move aimed at improving ease of doing business.
The e-biz project has started with the objective of providing government services through a single-window portal.
About a crore Aadhaar numbers have been linked with the I-T department issued Permanent Account Number (PAN) on the e-Biz portal till now.
A senior I-T official said the e-signature needed for obtaining PAN using Aadhaar can be obtained in a one-time fashion by a taxpayer and it will cost around Rs 5-7.
"These measures will simplify things. In this e-biz portal we have prioritised everything. The time that is being cut is with regard to the submission of the physical documents for obtaining PAN or TAN by any category of taxpayer, whether corporate or individual," the official said.
He said the department, over the last few years, has weeded out over 11 lakh duplicate PANs and the possibility of issuing two PANs to one person is remote now.
Talking about direct tax collections, which registered a growth of 24.79 per cent to Rs 1.24 lakh crore during April- June period mainly on account of early advance tax mop-up, Jindal acknowledged that these numbers are "not the actual indicator" of revenue collections.
He said Tax Deducted at Source (TDS) collections is showing a growth of more than 16-17 per cent at present.
"Only concern for us today is the corporate sector collection. That is not up to the mark. Personal income tax has shown a very good growth," he said.
Jindal said the tax department is "very very serious" about increasing the tax base for which it is using non-intrusive methods and technology.
He said with the help of a special electronic project called Non-filers Management System (NMS) to identify non-filers or stop-filers, the I-T department has identified over a crore taxpayers and collected Rs 6,000 crore in taxes last year.
"We get information from various sources and under different heads under the NMS and we are making this system more robust," the CBDT chief added
The applications for the fourth tranche of the Sovereign Gold Bonds (SGB) will be accepted starting today onwards continuing till the end of this week (July 22). This batch of bonds is to be issued on August 5, 2016. The most important point to note is that the issue price stands at Rs 3,119 per gram, which is relatively higher than the last two tranches issued at Rs 2,600 and Rs 2,916 per gram, respectively.
In case you are ready to dismiss this information as just another tranche being issued; it would do good to check the specifications this time around. This is because of the changes brought about since the last issuance in March 2016.
Changes made
Following is a snapshot of the changes brought about in this tranche:
Why consider SGB
Investment ticket size is as low as One gram
Earn a fixed rate of 2.75% per annum, payable semi-annually, on the initial value of investment
Even though it comes with a tenure of eight year, exit options are available after 5,6 and 7th year
Available both in paper and demat form
Tradable on the exchanges
Can be used as a collateral for loans
No risk of theft attached as in the case of holding physical gold
Long term capital gains (LTCG) tax applicable if sold after 3 years. However, the same will be zero if redeemed on maturity
Indexation benefit provided to long term capital gains arising at the time of sale
Individuals exempted from capital gain tax arising on redemption of SGB
No TDS on interest paid on these bonds
Since SGB is backed by the Government, there is no price risk associated
Expert Take
Sanjay Matai of The Wealth Architects is of the view that SGB is the option to go for if one is buying gold for a future event. He adds, "Bonds give you that extra interest income which hoarding jewellery, bars or coins can't deliver. Other than this, one needn't worry of gold impurity and wasteful making charges."
When it comes to taxation aspect, with the latest change made, SGB comes at par with that of physical gold on capital gains. In India, one can hold on to physical gold for as many years as wanted without worrying about capital gain liability as it would arise only at the point of selling. Contrast this with SGB which matures after eight years; the subscriber would end up facing capital gain liability in eight years. This mismatch was seen as one of the points working against SGB.
Now with the latest clarification, Deepesh Raghaw, a Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI)-registered investment advisor, notes that incase if a subscriber decides to redeem the bonds after eight years, then he/she is exempt from capital gains tax. Though this was the case even before, there was no mot clarity on this point. However, the one main point to note here is that this exemption is only in cases of redemption i.e. selling back to Government. However, sale on exchanges may give rise to capital gains tax liability.
Even though being listed on the exchanges mean enhanced liquidity, the experience thus far has been mixed. Raghaw notes that for the first tranche of bonds listed on the exchanges; the average daily volume over the last 30 days was of only 156 bonds which invariably lead to high bid-ask spread. However, going forward the situation may improve as the subscriptions for the second and third tranche of bonds were much higher than the first one, leading to more liquidity.
To sum up, gold is a requirement for a balanced portfolio as it provides the much required hedge in times of turbulence. And for such a function, SGB is a perfect fit. The subscriber will not only accumulate gold but also earn for holding the same, making it a win-win situation, for the investor.
KR Sreenivasan, Founder, Director at Infoholic Research tells Sarika Malhotra about the many daunting problems that have infested Indian agriculture by its root.
How would you compare India's per acre productivity with global standards? Is it one of the lowest in the world?
Indian per acre productivity is not the lowest in the world, but on an average scale, it is below par. The country is known for its agriculture as 60 per cent of the land in India is being used for growing crops. India has around 157.35 million hectares of land; nevertheless still, it produces fewer crops compared to other countries. According to the recent FAO report, the average yield of rice in India is 2.3 tonne/hectare against the global average of 4.4 tonne/hectare. China, being the largest producer of rice, has an output of 197 million tonne and a per-hectare yield of 6.5 tonne; Australia produces 10.1 tonne, the US produces 7.5 tonne and Russia produces 5.2 tonne. Compared to a global standard of 3.0 tonne/hectare of wheat, India recorded an average yield of 2.9 tonne per hectare. Yet, it is not even close to countries such as France with 7-tonne production, the US with 3.11-tonne production and China with 4.8-tonne production. The scarcity of water, lack of high-skilled farmers, use of advanced technology and lack of availability of high-yield varieties of seeds are some of the major causes of the low per acre productivity of crops in the country. The Indian government has started working on areas such as nanotechnology and stem cell, helping in improving the productivity of the crops.
What lessons can India learn for global peers while formulating its agriculture policy?
India's agriculture sector plays a major role in the Indian economy as more than 60 per cent of the population is dependent on the agriculture and the agriculture-related sector in India. India was one of the fastest growing economies in the world in FY 2015/16, but the agriculture sector growth rate was comparatively slow. Although, the recent budget focused on the enlistment of the agriculture sector in the coming years, but still the sector is far behind in terms of technology usage and basic facilities available to the farmers in the other parts of the globe. As published by Infoholic Research in the report titled 'Advanced Farming Market - Global Market Drivers, Opportunities, Trends, and Forecasts, 2016-2022', farmers in the US and Europe are practicing the latest IoT-driven farming techniques that include utilising cloud-based farming analytics tools and adopting drone technology for improving the crop yield and crop production. Similarly, the other Asian countries such as China and Australia have started adopting smart agriculture solutions for weather analysis, crop analysis and soil analysis. Thus, India can adopt smart agriculture techniques in order to increase the crop yield and should also start farmer educating programs.
What impact is climate change having on crop yield?
Climate change has a direct impact on the crop yield. Phalodi city in Rajasthan touched 51 degrees centigrade in May 2016. Such a rise in temperature can damage crops on a large scale. Also calamities such as drought, flood and cyclone have started occurring even frequently. Even though the visible implication is quite less on current crops, but in future it can be disastrous with a rise in the global temperature. There are several models on which production of crop yields can be affected by global warming. For example, Crop Environment Resource Synthesis (CERES), Soil, Water, Atmosphere and Plant (SWAP), Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) and General Large Area Model (GLAM). Increased CO2 and other greenhouse gases along with the scorching heat can directly impact the yield of rice, wheat, pulses and maize across the northern and southern belt of India.
What are the big problems ailing Indian agriculture?
Small, fragmented land holdings of farmer Even though the net sown area in India is 141.2 million hectares and cropped area totals to 195 million hectares, it becomes highly insignificant as it is divided into small scattered holdings. The average of 2.3 hectares in 1970-1971 is reduced to less than 1.5 hectares in the 21st century? The size of these holdings will decrease even further with the increase in the population. Further, unavailability of better quality seeds and depleting soli quality is also a huge problem area. Also, the average yield of almost every crop is quite low. So to boost the productivity, fertilisers and pesticides are used extensively. It is a serious problem as it is increasing the pH level of soil - doing more harm than good. Adding to the stress is the monsoon dependent nature of Indian agriculture with improperly planned irrigation. India is the second largest irrigated country in the world. But only one-third of India's cropped area is under irrigation. The vast majority of crop growers are totally dependent on Monsoon. Farmers suffer miserably every year as Monsoon is highly erratic and unreliable. India, as a matter of fact, cannot realise sustained agricultural progress if half or more than half of the cropped area is taken under assured irrigation. Another big factor is lack of mechanisation. Apart from few regions of rich farmers in Punjab and Haryana, rest of the agriculture in India is still carried out by human hands. Usage of simple and conventional tools such as cattle, wooden plough, sickle, etc. are not only time-consuming but also gives very less yield. Hence, mechanisation of agriculture in India is imperative to take it to the next level of production. It can play a major role during large-scale cultivation and harvesting. Also, rampant soil erosion, scarcity of capital for marketing and agricultural implementation, poor storage and transportation facilities, middlemen are grave road blocks in Indian agricultural scenario.
The quarterly numbers are in from the top three software services exporters TCS, Infosys and Wipro along with some of the mid-sized players like MindTree. Cognizant will declare its numbers on 5 August. While TCS and Wipro barely met topline expectations, Infosys and MindTree disappointed. All of them also did not meet margin expectations of the market.
After a decade and a half of spectacular growth, Indian IT services companies are struggling to adapt to a changing technology landscape. Their earlier model of offering low-cost offshoring services is under increasing pressure due to shift to the cloud, automation of services and other structural shifts taking place in the global IT landscape. Indian IT companies seem to be unabe to capture fully the spending in digital segements what they are losing in traditional IT services. Global competitors like Accenture, IBM and Capgemini today have their own low-cost offshore delivery capabilities. The juice in a model, which worked for nearly two decades, seems to have been squeezed completely.
Indian IT companies have recognised this and are trying to adapt to changed market conditions, albeit each player at a different pace. In the meanwhile, growth projections made by these players for the whole year are barely in double digits. Wipro might even end up growing in single digit this year. Which leads to the question of valuations.
Inspite of a 9 per cent fall on the day when it announced results, Infosys still trades at 17 times earnings. Most of the top players trade anywhere between 15 and 19 times their earnings. Compared to the guidance they have provided, valuations of most IT stocks look on the higher side. In a new normal of slow growth, Indian IT stocks look overvalued.
Full-service airline Vistara on Monday said it will have a fleet of 13 aircraft and fly up to 20 destinations by the end of this year.
The carrier, a joint venture between the Tatas and Singapore Airlines, has now 11 planes.
"Catering to the growing demand, Vistara now serves 18 destinations with 487 weekly frequencies... By the end of this year, Vistara's fleet will grow to 13 aircraft and up to 20 destinations," it said in a release.
Seeking to provide more flexibility to travellers, Vistara would offer them with the option of flying four hours prior to their original scheduled departure on payment of Rs 1,500 per passenger.
The fee would be payable only if the passenger is accommodated on an earlier flight, which would be confirmed one hour before the flight's scheduled departure, the release said.
In light of continued developments, primarily since 2008, there exists in these United States a Legal System which operates on a proved Two Tiered approach to justice rendered, which primarily benefits Democratic Elites and Woke Ideological Virtue Signalers, representing their co-dependent wards, to the expressed exclusion of normal hardworking American citizens: What is your suggestion in remedying this widespread injustice and, if not corrected, its existential outcome for our Constitutional Republic?
Complete overhaul of the Department of Justice and their enforcers - the FBI - to reflect a far more honest justice system to keep patriots remaining calm.
Disband the FBI, and request that congress investigate all unethical and non patriotic practices to partially right the wrongs of a distrusted and politically weaponized "Department of Justice."
Sigmar Recruitment yesterday announced the creation of 150 new jobs to service its new Centre of Excellence.
The announcement was made by the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Mary Mitchell OConnor TD.
These new positions will more than double the workforce by the end of 2018. Sigmar Recruitment is on track to deliver 50 of these new jobs by the end of this year, with another 50 by the end of 2017 and a further 50 by the end of 2018.
The jobs are in recruitment, sales and digital marketing at both experienced and graduate levels with a significant number of positions available in locations outside of the capital to include Cork, Galway and Kerry.
The new positions are announced as part of the companys expansion plan to deliver a wider portfolio of services globally and will bolster the position of the company as Irelands leading independent recruiter.
The establishment of the Centre of Excellence is largely due to an uplift in demand for talent by US companies who are expanding internationally from Ireland.
Successful candidates will be eligible for the companys own Recruitment MBA, which is run in conjunction with Trinity College Dublin and Notre Dame, the first transatlantic executive programme of its type in the country.
According to Sigmar CEO Adie Mc Gennis the net effect of this announcement is far greater than the 150 jobs, he commented, "As recruiters by their very nature have a huge impact on job creation, the end effect of a creation of 150 jobs will have an enormous effect in terms of the actual number of jobs being created in Ireland over the next number of years. Everyone at Sigmar is proud and excited to share our expansion plans. We have experienced very strong growth and this confirms our confidence in the recruitment sector, the Irish economy and most importantly in all of our people to continue Sigmars success."
Minister Mitchell OConnor added, "These new jobs will contribute greatly to the prosperity of communities across the country. Sigmar is a great example of the type of company Enterprise Ireland is working with. I warmly congratulate Adie and his team and wish them continued success for the future."
Source: www.businessworld.ie
About us
Sinn Feins spokesperson for Social Protection, John Brady, welcomed comments made by Minister Varadkar yesterday on the need for real and urgent reform owing to unsustainability of the State pension.
Deputy Brady highlighted that certain issues, such as the inability for many who retire at age 65 to access their pension, could be addressed immediately.
Deputy Brady commented, "This increase in retirement age was brought in quite subtly and it meant that many people were only aware of it on approaching retirement. This of course, was the workings of Fine Gael and the Labour Party. People at the age of 65 should not be forced on to social welfare and they should not have to wait an extra year to access a pension they have been paying into for many years. Under Fine Gaels plans the pension age will increase to 67 years in 2021 and to 68 years in 2028 and further increases after that have not been ruled out."
He added, "The pension system needs a major overhaul however; reforming it should not involve forcing 65 year olds on to social welfare. This does nothing for pension reform."
Source: www.businessworld.ie
New research from independent price comparison and switching website, Switcher.ie, has found that only half (51%) of Irish broadband customers are satisfied with their broadband speed and two in five (42%) do not know what speed they signed up for.
Research was carried out for Switcher.ie by Coyne Research, involving 1,000 online interviews with Irish adults aged 18+years. The total sample is representative of the national population in Ireland.
When asked what speed theyre getting at home, over half (54%) of consumers admitted they had never checked with 41% simply assuming they get the speed they pay for.
Over a third (34%) of people said they have checked and found the speed theyre getting is lower than what theyre paying for at least some of the time.
Speed is an important factor for consumers who are looking to switch broadband provider, coming second only to price in terms of importance with 21% of people saying it affected their decision to switch.
Managing Director at Switcher.ie, Eoin Clarke said, "Given the amount of time we spend online, its pretty amazing to see that over half of people have never carried out a broadband speed test. This is really important, especially when you consider that many of the people who have checked their speed claim to be getting lower speeds than they pay for."
He added, "If people are having issues with broadband speed, wed firstly encourage them to carry out a speed test and see what speed theyre getting. If they are not satisfied that theyre getting the speed they pay for, they should then contact their provider and, if the issue is not resolved, they should shop around and switch if they find a package better suited to their needs."
Source: www.businessworld.ie
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LOGAN Police have released the identity of the suicidal individual, who reportedly shot himself in the head when apprehended by police at a North Logan bus stop, Monday afternoon.
North Park Police detective Ulysses Black said Victor Manuel Mendoza remains in a Salt Lake area hospital. He is receiving treatment for a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
Police located Mendoza at the bus stop after officers from Preston, Idaho, reported that he had walked into a business and threatened suicide by cop. He then boarded a Cache Valley Transit District bus to North Logan.
Logan City Police Chief Gary Jensen said officers used an unmarked vehicle to surprise Mendoza. He explained that their quick actions likely saved any of them from having to shoot Mendoza.
People dont get it, said Jensen. That is a very difficult thing, to take a human life. Even though this guy had every intention of suicide, Im glad he didnt make us do it for him. Im just so glad.
Court records show Mendoza has lived in several locations in Logan. He also has had previous felony charges including multiple counts of interfering with an arresting officer.
Black said no charges have been filled yet but detectives are continuing to investigate the incident.
will@cvradio.com
SHARE Contributed Rendering The proposed Harbor Bridge design.
By Chris Ramirez of the Caller-Times
Corpus Christi's short supply of affordable housing isn't the only thing challenging efforts to relocate hundreds of residents while the Harbor Bridge is being replaced.
So, too, is the lack of appraisers.
Del Richardson, a consultant hired to coordinate a relocation program financed by the Port of Corpus Christi, told the Port Authority on Tuesday more property owners in the Hillcrest neighborhood are willing to sell their homes and land.
The problem, however, is there are too few people to appraise their properties and keep the process moving.
Richardson said her company has hosted several workshops to promote the program and is planning more outreach efforts in coming weeks. Richardson said she also was interested in organizing a "charrette," or networking and planning session, to court more appraisers.
The Texas Department of Transportation plans an Aug. 8 ground breaking for a $898 million project to replace the aging Harbor Bridge, which links North Beach with the city's Northside.
Construction will skirt Hillcrest, a historically black Northside neighborhood, and is expected to last about five years.
The port authorized up to $20 million to buy Hillcrest properties and relocate residents who want to move.
Appraisals factor heavily into not only nailing down the value of a qualified owner's property, but also in sizing up where they can move to once they vacate their home.
A total of 128 property owners have shown interest in selling as of July 11, up from 104 last month, Richardson said. In May, just 48 owners had indicated they wanted to sell.
So far, 21 property appraisals have been requested. None have been completed.
"They're crucial to this process," she said. "We need their participation."
Many of those looking to sell their property 68 of them do not live in Hillcrest. Another three property owners have recently said they were interested in the volunteer restricted covenant/life estate program. That option signals the property owner's intention to keep their home during construction.
Richardson told the commission, as she did last month, that a housing shortage has made relocating Hillcrest residents a complicated task.
According to the Corpus Christi Association of Realtors, 7.5 percent of the 3,593 homes for sale in the Coastal Bend are listed for a price from $60,000 to $125,000. And 154 of them were in the city limits.
Under the relocation plan, homeowners can be moved to a home that is deemed "comparable," based on a variety of factors, such as size and amenities. Renters are eligible to be relocated only if the landlord is eligible and opts to sell their property to the port.
Twitter: @Caller_ChrisRam
In other business
Port of Corpus Christi commissioners:
Approved a consulting agreement with Moffatt & Nichol to conduct a market study of the port's bulk terminal. The global infrastructure advisory firm's bid was the lowest the port received during a bidding period in June, according to port documents. The contract is for $85,934. It was approved on a 7-0 vote.
Voted 7-0 to purchase a 2016 CASE skid steer loader from Nueces Power Equipment to replace an older loader. Such loaders are used to transport large quantities of heavy materials around the port. The port had a 2001 Bobcat skid steer loader that requires frequent maintenance. Repairs on it the last five years totaled $18,094.27, port documents show.
By Beatriz Alvarado of the Caller-Times
Conrado Garcia said he's looking forward to coming home.
Garcia, who has worked for West Oso Independent School District in an administrative capacity in the past, was appointed interim superintendent after trustees voted about 10:30 p.m. Monday to put Elizabeth Saenz on administrative leave.
The board called the special meeting to discuss and consult with legal counsel on Saenz's contract and possible resignation agreement, according to the meeting's agenda.
Trustee Liz Gutierrez made a motion to relieve Saenz of her duties and place her on paid administrative leave. The motion was passed with support from trustee Shirley Jordan and board President Lucas Jasso. Trustees Cella Boyd and JoAnne Canales voted against the measure. Trustee Velma Rodriguez abstained and vice president Martha V. Ruiz was absent.
Boyd made a motion to proceed with an ongoing evaluation of Saenz as superintendent, but the motion failed.
Gutierrez then made a motion to appoint Garcia as interim superintendent.
"For the reason that school is about to start," Gutierrez said. "He's been at West Oso. He understands West Oso."
The votes came after the board spent about four hours in closed session.
Garcia retired in 2012 after 15 years as Moody's principal. He worked as an educator for the Corpus Christi Independent School District 38 years before retiring. Garcia took over in 2013 as West Oso ISD's assistant superintendent and "decided to move on" shortly after, he said. He was appointed to the Corpus Christi Regional Transportation Authority board of directors in March.
"(As interim superintendent) I'm here to help (the board) transition into what they are gong to decide to do," Garcia said. "I don't know what that is yet."
According to the Texas Education Agency, Saenz earns a salary of $169,402 as of October 2015 to lead a district just over 2,000 students strong.
Saenz's three-year contract is set to expire June 30, 2018, said the district's legal counsel Tony Resendez. Saenz was hired on a three-year contract in 2011 at $125,000 per year. Resendez said the board will "in the near future" revisit her employment status.
Saenz declined to comment Tuesday. She said Monday before the meeting the discussions related to her possible resignation were prompted by "a difference in philosophies" with some board members.
"I am ready to (continue to) work for the kids if I am afforded the opportunity," she said.
Saenz's attorney, Tiger Hanner, said Tuesday a fraction of the board wants a change in leadership, but won't say why.
"They gave us no explanation," Hanner said. "A school board has the legal right to put (a superintendent) on administrative leave and for whatever reason that's what they did."
Negotiations to establish a separations agreement were unsuccessful, Hanner said, adding that pursuing a resignation agreement was "what the board was interested in."
Saenz "wants to serve the West Oso community," he said.
"The last thing we want to do is get into legal battles (with the board)," Hanner said. "But she is going to doing anything she can to protect her reputation and career and she will explore all available remedies if necessary."
West Oso parent and former board trustee Jose Lopez said he attended Monday night's meeting to oppose the tax payer-funded expenses of Saenz's resignation. Sacrificing the few resources the district has for a "payout" wouldn't be fair to students and teachers, he said.
He also attended the meeting to for the 2016-17 budget workshop and discussion on the district salary plan, both cited in the agenda. The items were pushed to a July 25 meeting.
"Now we're basically paying for two superintendents. If they have that kind of money they need to give teachers a raise," he said. "That's money that could be used on the kids. This is where it's going to start getting real costly."
Rodriguez, the trustee who abstained from the vote to put Saenz on paid leave, said the turn of events came as a surprise to her. She lamented the possibility of losing Saenz as superintendent and credited her with leading the district out of an academic decline and her role in establishing the district's first early college high school.
Rodriguez referred to the series of events as an injustice. She and ruiz, the board's vice president, submitted a letter titled "West Oso ISD governance complaint" to the Texas Education Agency on Friday asking the agency to intervene in the matter.
TEA Letter by Beatriz Alvarado on Scribd
Twitter: @CallerBetty
#TBT: The Squeeze In Cafe served Corpus Christi diners in tiny space
The Squeeze In was beloved for its hamburgers, red beans and "special sauce," all served from a tiny 160-square-foot building.
Rachel Denny Clow/Caller-Times Katy Erben, 11, pins a bugle on the lapel of her dad, Kenneth Erben, during his promotion ceremony at the Corpus Christi Fire Department Headquarters on Monday. Erben was promoted to assistant chief during the ceremony.
SHARE Rachel Denny Clow/Caller-Times Corpus Christi Fire Chief Robert Rocha (left) speaks about Kenneth Erben, during Erben's promotion ceremony at the department headquarters on Monday. Erben was promoted to assistant chief during the ceremony. Rachel Denny Clow/Caller-Times Erin Erben pins a bugle on the lapel of her husband, Kenneth Erben, during his promotion ceremony at the Corpus Christi Fire Department Headquarters on Monday. Erben was promoted to assistant chief during the ceremony. Rachel Denny Clow/Caller-Times Kenneth Erben (from left) thanks his family, Erin, Katy, 11, and Wyatt, 14 during his promotion ceremony at the Corpus Christi Fire Department Headquarters on Monday. He was promoted to assistant chief during the ceremony. Rachel Denny Clow/Caller-Times Wyatt Erben, 14, pins the badge on his dad's, Kenneth Erben, shirt during his promotion ceremony at the Corpus Christi Fire Department Headquarters on Monday. Erben was promoted to assistant chief during the ceremony.
By Fares Sabawi of the Caller-Times
Kenny Erben is the first to admit he couldn't succeed as a firefighter without the support of his wife and two kids. On Monday, each family member pinned bugles on his collar to celebrate a new chapter of his career.
After hours of studying and nearly 18 years fighting fires, Erben was promoted within the ranks of the Corpus Christi Fire Department. The 39-year-old will no longer be in the field working 24-hour shifts as a battalion chief, but he will now provide leadership for the administrative role of assistant fire chief.
Erben mentioned his family's support in a speech after his promotion.
"It's a long process that required a lot of family support," Erben said. "I thank my wife and kids for allowing me the time to do this. I definitely could not have done it without them."
He also credited the firefighters at Fire Station No. 1 for their support.
"I got a lot of encouragement from the guys here," he said.
Erben was the first assistant chief promotion Fire Chief Robert Rocha has overseen. The retirement of Assistant Fire Chief Andy Cardiel opened the opportunity for a promotion.
"It allows us to bring in some new blood and fresh ideas," Rocha said. "He's got an outstanding dedication to public safety. He has the skill set to be successful."
Erben will became the assistant fire chief in charge of operations. Randy Paige, who previously served in that position, will now be the department's fire marshal.
Erben, who spent months studying multiple textbooks and passing a 100-question test to qualify for the promotion, said he's excited to build on the progress of his predecessor.
"I'm looking forward to making a great department even better," Erben said.
Twitter: @Caller_Fares
SHARE Eligio San Miguel Mendez
By Julie Garcia of the Caller-Times
A Corpus Christi man will be transferred to a federal prison after he was convicted on felony charges of possessing a firearm.
In February 2015, officers executed a search warrant at the residence of Eligio San Miguel Mendez, according to a news release from the U.S. attorney's office Southern District of Texas.
Officers said a stolen Glock 9-mm semi-automatic pistol loaded with a 30-round extended magazine and other ammunition was found in the Corpus Christi residence. Mendez was prohibited from possessing firearms or ammunition because of a previous felony firearms conviction, the release stated.
San Miguel Mendez, 26, was sentenced to seven years in federal prison and three years of supervised release.
Mendez was taken into custody in June 2015 along with six other Corpus Christi men. They were arrested on suspicion of illegal possession of firearms as part of Operation Rusty Hook, a joint effort by ATF, FBI, U.S. Marshals Service, Homeland Security, the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Corpus Christi Police Department.
Twitter: @Caller_Jules
SHARE Joseph Degrange Jr.
By Fares Sabawi of the Caller-Times
Rockport police arrested a man they believe is responsible for fatally stabbing a man who was found dead in June in Cove Harbor.
Cmdr. Jerry Lawing confirmed Monday Rockport police arrested 27-year-old Joseph Degrange Jr. Wednesday at his home and charged him with the murder of Lanny Beckham, a 43-year-old man from Meridian, Mississippi.
Lawing did not describe how investigators tied Degrange to the murder.
Degrange was still in Aransas County Jail, with bail set at $850,000, according to jail records.
The Caller-Times filed an open records request Monday for a copy of the murder warrant in the case.
Twitter: @Caller_Fares
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A special thanks to Harbor Playhouse for doing what we as a community need to do more often. The community theater group closed out its run of "The Little Mermaid" with a special performance Sunday for first responders and their families.
First responders include firefighters, ambulance crews and law enforcement officers. All of them deserve to know that they are appreciated for making the public's safety their calling. But it's especially important at this critical time for the community to communicate that message to law enforcement officers. They need to know from their community that their uniforms don't separate us from them that we see blue beacons, not blue walls.
City police, sheriff's deputies, constables all whose jobs include wearing badges and guns tend to be on the lookout for perceived threats in the best of times. These are not the best of times. The deliberate targeting of police officers by killers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has made policing anywhere in these United States feel more dangerous. It may in actuality not be appreciably more dangerous because of those events. But if we were police officers, we'd be on edge. The least we all can do for them is let them know that they are valued members of the community.
A smile, a nod, a wave, a thank-you these are small contributions we can make to public safety. Being friendly may not come naturally when a police officer pulls us over for traffic infractions. But traffic enforcers have a job to do that is in our best interest. The ones on motorcycles are doing their job in insufferable heat this time of year. Remember whose fault it was that they had to leave their hiding place in the shade. Apologizing for that is not an admission of guilt.
Some readers might consider this message, coming from us, to be contradictory because recently we have examined the police department's performance regarding domestic violence and have pointed out flaws that can be corrected. We also have published two unprecedented front-page columns by Caller-Times President Libby Averyt urging changes that can save victims of domestic violence. Our news reports and commentary are meant to be constructive, to steer our first responders toward solutions to a societal problem we all have an obligation to help solve.
Being supportive of police does not require acceptance of things as they are without complaint. Letting them know that they're valued does not require letting them know that they're perfect. We all are imperfect members of an imperfect community, trying to make the best of it.
Harbor Playhouse's performance Sunday probably wasn't perfect no matter how entertaining it was. But the theater group made this community a better one for first responders. Timing is important to performers. The final performance of "The Little Mermaid" was on the afternoon of the morning of the Baton Rouge attack. Harbor Playhouse's timing was accidental but couldn't have been better.
Benjamin Spock once wrote:Robert Kennedy once wrote: "Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on."Let's look at both these statements.With respect to Dr. Spock, we can say that for the most part, his statement is true. But the reason might be that white middle-class white people obey laws, live in stable families, embrace decent values, and live in communities with others who share similar values. Middle class white people have priorities that include education, employment, and church. They conduct themselves in a civilized manner and are respectful when they are in the presence of a police officer. I have never lived in an inner city, but from what I read and see on TV, and what I've seen in the public school system, it's pretty clear that the people there don't share the same core beliefs or values. Poverty is not an excuse to raise one's children poorly.With respect to Mr. Kennedy, his statement certainly sounds like itbe true.Jay Salien, a police officer who works in Riviera Beach, Florida, assumed as much. But Salien is no ordinary police officer. He is an African-American police officer who patrols a predominantly black part of town. Now, Riviera Beach may sound like a resort area - a place people with money might go to retire or for a vacation. But the reality is something quite different. The town is known for its significant rate of black on black crime.In the wake of the growing Black Lives Matter movement and the countering movement, the Blue Lives Matter movement (which is a result of the intentional, wanton violence against police by BLM supporters), Salien felt he couldn't remain silent. As the BLM, and even our own president, allege that our nation's police forces are filled with trigger-happy racist officers, Salien took to Facebook to post the brutal reality of what a police officer faces each day when he patrols a predominantly black community.His entire post is shared below:"I have come to realize something that is still hard for me to understand to this day. The following may be a shock to some coming from an African American, but the mere fact that it may be shocking to some is prima facie evidence of the sad state of affairs that we are in as Humans.I used to be so torn inside growing up. Here I am, a young African-American born and raised in Brooklyn, NY wanting to be a cop. I watched and lived through the crime that took place in the hood. My own black people killing others over nothing. Crack heads and heroin addicts lined the lobby of my building as I shuffled around them to make my way to our 1-bedroom apartment with 6 of us living inside. I used to be woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of gun fire, only to look outside and see that it was 2 African Americans shooting at each other.It never sat right with me. I wanted to help my community and stop watching the blood of African Americans spilled on the street at the hands of a fellow black man. I became a cop because black lives in my community, along with ALL lives, mattered to me, and wanted to help stop the bloodshed.As time went by in my law enforcement career, I quickly began to realize something. I remember the countless times I stood 2 inches from a young black man, around my age, laying on his back, gasping for air as blood filled his lungs. I remember them bleeding profusely with the unforgettable smell of deoxygenated dark red blood in the air, as it leaked from the bullet holes in his body on to the hot sidewalk on a summer day. I remember the countless family members who attacked me, spit on me, cursed me out, as I put up crime scene tape to cordon off the crime scene, yelling and screaming out of pain and anger at the sight of their loved ones taking their last breath. I never took it personally. I knew they were hurting. I remember the countless times I had to order new uniforms, because the ones I had on, were bloody from the blood of another black victim...of black on black crime. I remember the countless times I got back in my patrol car, distraught after having watched another black male die in front me, having to start my preliminary report something like this:Suspect- Black/ Male, Victim-Black /Male.I remember the countless times I canvassed the area afterwards, and asked everyone "did you see who did it", and the popular response from the very same family members was always, "Fuck the Police, I ain't no snitch, Im gonna take care of this myself". This happened every single time, every single homicide, black on black, and then my realization became clearer.I woke up every morning, put my freshly pressed uniform on, shined my badge, functioned checked my weapon, kissed my wife and kid, and waited for my wife to say the same thing she always does before I leave, "Make sure you come back home to us". I always replied, "I will", but the truth was I was never sure if I would. I almost lost my life on this job, and every call, every stop, every moment that I had this uniform on, was another possibility for me to almost lose my life again. I was a target in the very community I swore to protect, the very community I wanted to help. As a matter of fact, they hated my very presence. They called me "Uncle Tom", and "wanna be white boy", and I couldn't understand why. My own fellow black men and women attacking me, wishing for my death, wishing for the death of my family. I was so confused, so torn, I couldn't understand why my own black people would turn against me, when every time they called ...I was there. Every time someone died....I was there. Every time they were going through one of the worst moments in their lives...I was there. So why was I the enemy? I dove deep into that question...Why was I the enemy? Then my realization became clearer.I spoke to members of the community and listened to some of the complaints as to why they hated cops. I then did research on the facts. I also presented facts to these members of the community, and listened to their complaints in response. This is what I learned:Police always targeting us, they always messing with the black man.FACT: A city where the majority of citizens are black (Baltimore for example) ...will ALWAYS have a higher rate of black people getting arrested, it will ALWAYS have a higher rate of blacks getting stopped, and will ALWAYS have a higher rate of blacks getting killed, and the reason why is because a city with those characteristics will ALWAYS have a higher rate of blacks committing crime. The statistics will follow the same trend for Asians if you go to China, for Hispanics if you go to Puerto Rico, for whites if you go to Russia, and the list goes on. It's called DemographicsCOMPLAINT: More black people get arrested than white boys.Black People commit a grossly disproportionate amount of crime. Data from the FBI shows that Nationwide, Blacks committed 5,173 homicides in 2014, whites committed 4,367. Chicago's death toll is almost equal to that of both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, combined. Chicago's death toll from 2001-November, 26 2015 stands at 7,401. The combined total deaths during Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003-2015: 4,815) and Operation Enduring Freedom/Afghanistan (2001-2015: 3,506), total 8,321.Blacks are the only ones getting killed by police, or they are killed more.As of July 2016, the breakdown of the number of US Citizens killed by Police this year is, 238 White people killed, 123 Black people killed, 79 Hispanics, 69 other/or unknown race.Black people kill more other blacks than Police do, and there are only protest and outrage when a cop kills a black man. University of Toledo criminologist Dr. Richard R. Johnson examined the latest crime data from the FBI's Supplementary Homicide Reports and Centers for Disease Control and found that an average of 4,472 black men were killed by other black men annually between Jan. 1, 2009, and Dec. 31, 2012. Professor Johnson's research further concluded that 112 black men died from both justified and unjustified police-involved killings annually during this same period.Well we already doing a good job of killing ourselves, we don't need the Police to do it. Besides they should know better.The more I listened, the more I realized. The more I researched, the more I realized. I would ask questions, and would only get emotional responses & inferences based on no facts at all. The more killing I saw, the more tragedy, the more savagery, the more violence, the more loss of life of a black man at the hands of another black man....the more I realized.I haven't slept well in the past few nights. Heartbreak weighs me down, rage flows through my veins, and tears fills my eyes. I watched my fellow officers assassinated on live television, and the images of them laying on the ground are seared into my brain forever. I couldn't help but wonder if it had been me, a black man, a black cop, on TV, assassinated, laying on the ground dead,..would my friends and family still think black lives mattered?Would my life have mattered? Would they make t-shirts in remembrance of me? Would they go on tv and protest violence? Would they even make a Facebook post, or share a post in reference to my death?All of my realizations came to this conclusion. Black Lives do not matter to most black people. Only the lives that make the national news matter to them. Only the lives that are taken at the hands of cops or white people, matter. The other thousands of lives lost, the other black souls that I along with every cop, have seen taken at the hands of other blacks, do not matter. Their deaths are unnoticed, accepted as the "norm", and swept underneath the rug by the very people who claim and post "black lives matter". I realized that this country is full of ignorance, where an educated individual will watch the ratings-driven news media, and watch a couple YouTube video clips, and then come to the conclusion that they have all the knowledge they need to have in order to know what it feels like to have a bullet proof vest as part of your office equipment, "Stay Alive" as part of your daily to do list, and having insurance for your health insurance because of the high rate of death in your profession. They watch a couple videos and then they magically know in 2 minutes 35 seconds, how you are supposed to handle a violent encounter, which took you 6 months of Academy training, 2 - 3 months of field training, and countless years of blood, sweat, tears and broken bones experiencing violent encounters and fine tuning your execution of the Use of Force Continuum. I realized that there are even cops, COPS, duly sworn law enforcement officers, who are supposed to be decent investigators, who will publicly go on the media and call other white cops racist and KKK, based on a video clip that they watched thousands of miles away, which was filmed after the fact, based on a case where the details aren't even known yet and the investigation hasn't even begun. I realized that most in the African American community refuse to look at solving the bigger problem that I see and deal with every day, which is black on black crime taking hundreds of innocent black lives each year, and instead focus on the 9 questionable deaths of black men, where some were in the act of committing crimes. I realized that they value the life of a Sex Offender and Convicted Felon, [who was in the act of committing multiple felonies: felon in possession of a firearm-FELONY, brandishing and threatening a homeless man with a gun-Aggravated Assault in Florida: FELONY, who resisted officers who first tried to taze him, and WAS NOT RESTRAINED, who can be clearly seen in one of the videos raising his right shoulder, then shooting it down towards the right side of his body exactly where the firearm was located and recovered] more than the lives of the innocent cops who were assassinated in Dallas protecting the very people that hated them the most. I realized that they refuse to believe that most cops acknowledge that there are Bad cops who should have never been given a badge & gun, who are chicken shit and will shoot a cockroach if it crawls at them too fast, who never worked in the hood and may be intimidated. That most cops dread the thought of having to shoot someone, and never see the turmoil and mental anguish that a cop goes through after having to kill someone to save his own life. Instead they believe that we are all blood thirsty killers, because the media says so, even though the numbers prove otherwise. I realize that they truly feel as if the death of cops will help people realize the false narrative that Black Lives Matter, when all it will do is take their movement two steps backwards and label them domestic terrorist. I realized that some of these people, who say Black Lives Matter, are full of hate and racism. Hate for cops, because of the false narrative that more black people are targeted and killed. Racism against white people, for a tragedy that began 100's of years ago, when most of the white people today weren't even born yet. I realized that some in the African American community's idea of "Justice" is the prosecution of ANY and EVERY cop or white man that kills or is believed to have killed a black man, no matter what the circumstances are. I realized the African American community refuses to look within to solve its major issues, and instead makes excuses and looks outside for solutions. I realized that a lot of people in the African American community lead with hate, instead of love. Division instead of Unity. Turmoil and rioting, instead of Peace. I realized that they have become the very entity that they claim they are fighting against.I realized that the very reasons I became a cop, are the very reasons my own people hate me, and now in this toxic hateful racially charged political climate, I am now more likely to die,... and it is still hard for me to understand.... to this day.The black community is responsible for a hugely disproportionate amount of violent crime in our nation's communities - mostly in their own communities. The senseless violence boggles the mind of men and women in uniform who devote their lives and sacrifice their safety for the protection of others. There has to be some accountability and culpability for the racial divide that is currently plaguing us by the black community instead of the usual blame game - "racism." Government policies MUST encourage a strong sense of family and actually achieve this goal. Right now, its policies encourage the destruction of the family and encourage out-of-wedlock births. Government MUST tear down its "wall of separation" from religion which it keeps "high and impregnable" and embrace policies that encourage and achieve a greater influence of religious teachings in citizen's lives - particularly our youth. They need this guidance so badly. Government policies MUST encourage parents to take responsibility for the upbringing of their children and stop leaving it to schools, the police, prisons, etc. There is nothing more tragic than a mother who cries over the body of her slain son, killed while going for a gun when stopped by police when she herself didn't raise him properly, didn't check on the friends he was hanging out, didn't follow up on what he was doing at night, or know that he even carried a gun."Serious dialogue is needed, and not just the usual allegation of "racism." But while the tension between the Black Lives Matter movement and the police in general seems to be escalating (BLM is now calling for a "Day of Rage" to be celebrated by a wave of protests all over the country), the last thing the BLM seems to be interested in is an honest dialogue or solutions. I read somewhere that one of their so-called solutions is a collection of states just for blacks.Last night, I watched a Bill O'Reilly episode, which I very rarely do. O'Reilly asked democrat commentator, Kirsten Powers, if she believes the Black Lives Matter movement is seriously looking for solutions or just acting out in rage. She responded that she believes they are interested in solutions and are essentially a peaceful group. O'Reilly then showed her a clip of what happened when one of Fox News reporters went into a black community to ask why they hate police. It was not a civilized response. [See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7uc6YznICU. Advance to 19:30 min for the interview segment]I wondered then, where is this Black Lives Matter is headed. What do they want? What can the American reasonably believe might be the outcome. Will our nation's communities be safer and will the rioting and violence stop? Will the random and wanton violence against police officers stop? And then I heard President Obama's remarks at the Dallas Memorial Service yesterday, July 12.As long as our President proclaims to our nation and even to the world that we are a racist nation and that our police forces are populated by officers who can't help but be consumed by racist thoughts, why would the Black Lives Matter ever think it has to make any concessions at all. Obama's remarks give the black community every reason to be absolved of the behavior they exhibit in their communities and in inner cities. It was unfortunate that he publicly justified the slaughter of the five Dallas police officers because of "righteous rage" in the black community that has remained (or more correctly, has escalated) since the days of slavery and Jim Crow. In his remarks, he went out of his way to convince America - and we all know the Black Lives Matter is hanging on his every word - that racism still exists; that for the past 50 years, the country is still the same as it was back in the early 1960's. "If we're honest, perhaps we've heard prejudice in our heads, felt it in our own hearts. We know that. None of us is innocent. No institution is immune. And that includes our police departments." The one thing that is most evident from what he said is that HE, the person who holds the office of President and who represents every single American, is the one who is racist. He admits that he can't help thinking that way. He can't help having "righteous rage" and resentment against white America. And in his remarks at the Memorial Service, he attempted to force his own personal demons on the rest of this country. It's a sad day when a President of the United States reminds his countrymen that they are inherently evil and unjust.What can we expect as an outcome when the President supports a violent movement? What can we expect as an outcome when the President gives legitimacy to a movement which justifies its violence, its rioting, and its civil disobedience on "rage."I know what movement I would suggest for the suckers who are collectively called "US taxpayers" !!
| BY Lynchy |
Federation University Australia, via data-driven marketing agency Publicis CUBED, Melbourne, has launched a communications campaign designed to showcase a new era of tertiary education that prepares students with social as well as education skills for their future.
Designed to run well into 2017, the focus of the campaign is to showcase Federation University Australias strengths in leading change in the effectiveness of tertiary education, pointing to the power of providing community support and real world skills alongside educational standards to succeed in todays world.
Federation University Australia, also known as FedUni, is one of Australias leading regional universities with campuses in Ballarat , Gippsland and the Wimmera.
The new campaign is called Community and will consistently appear in TV, print, digital, cinema, social media and outdoor in the coming 12 months. Its main targets are mature aged students, Year 11 and 12 students as well as their parents, and deferred students.
This new work showcases FedUnis focus on enabling student success, no matter what their background, highlighting more than just their academic offerings and diversity said Mike Chuter, Publicis CUBED Managing Director. It demonstrates that FedUnis unique approach to education produces graduates with the skills and experience to facilitate change in their lives as part of the Federation Generation.
Agency Publicis CUBED
Creative Director Ryan Petie
Art Director Anna Fullerton
Copywriter Chalsie Mew
Account Director Simmone Marchant
Account Manager Lucy Appleyard
Managing Director & Strategy Mike Chuter
National Head of Television Vicki Lee
Producer Danielle Wheelhouse/ Kyla Bridge
Production House Finch
Director Luke Bouchier
Director of Photography Jordan Maddocks
Producer Jackie Adler
Stills Photographer Hugh Peachey
Production Coordinator Annelise Hickey
2nd AC/Data David Guest
Gaffer Richard Turton
Audio Production Gusto Studios
Client Federation University Australia
Director Marketing, Advancement & Community Engagement- Jamie McDonald
Manager, Marketing & Communications Phillip Crone
| BY Lynchy |
IPG Mediabrands specialist search and digital experience agency Reprise is strengthening its national management ranks after experiencing consistent growth to staff numbers exceeding 60 people across its Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth operations.
Reprise managing director Ale Vendramin (left) said the new management developments reflected a need to have the agencys best people in impact positions to help lead clients thinking and the agency teams.
Among the new developments, David Coats (below) has been promoted to General Manager of Reprise Australia and becomes Vendramins second-in-command. Coats is formerly the agencys general manager of digital solutions. David has led our digital solutions products to a level that is class leading globally, said Vendramin. In his new role he will lead our operations, processes, functions and solutions nationally.
Other key positions announced this week include the appointment of Kacie Serls as head of Sydney and Brisbane operations. Vendramin said Serls ability to collaborate across multi-disciplines and to positively impact client outcomes was truly impressive.
Jules Kilmartin has been promoted to head of Reprise in Melbourne and Perth. Vendramin said Kilmartins people skills, knowledge of performance marketing and understanding of the Melbourne market were his core strengths. James Luty has been promoted to head of business growth for Reprise Australia and Stuart MacDougall has been promoted to director of Reprise in Perth.
She wants more community housing, a shared equity scheme for low and moderate income earners, more boarding houses and hostels. She wants rules forcing developers to sell affordable housing. She wants an affordable housing taskforce, a "centre for housing excellence" to focus on innovative design for small homes and blocks, and new financing options for people trying to buy homes. She wants the government to refocus its land rent scheme and a scheme to help low income earners build energy-efficient homes by allowing them to pay off the extra cost over time. She wants the lease variation tax waived for projects aimed at low income earners, and land tax removed for landlords who rent to low income earners.
Given that the tax advantages of gearing are far greater outside super, the latest crackdown on the generosity of the super tax concessions will refocus attention on geared portfolios in personal names. While the ultimate capital gains tax liabilities on assets accumulated outside super may be higher than on super fund assets, the liability can be successfully managed by deferring asset sales.
A man convicted of sexually molesting children in Oregon was charged Monday with committing more sexual assaults while living as an unregistered sex offender in Yellowstone County.
Jerrod Jay Schalk, 32, appeared before Yellowstone County District Court Judge Russell Fagg and was charged with three new felony charges including two counts of sexual assault and one count of attempted sexual intercourse without consent.
Schalk pleaded not guilty to the new charges and to failing to register as a sex offender.
Schalk, convicted in Oregon of sodomy and rape in 2003, was arrested in Wyoming earlier this year after police responded to a report of criminal activity at the residence where he was staying. Schalk was last registered as a sexual offender in 2013 while he was living in Oregon.
This year, a 9-year-old girl told another student at her school that Schalk had molested her while he was staying with her and her mother, according to initial charges filed against Schalk.
After a school counselor heard what the 9-year-old had said, the counselor reported the abuse to Child Protective Services. Schalk was living with the girl from December 2014 until March 2015 and from October 2015 through January of this year, according to Schalk's initial charges.
The 9-year-old told police Schalk had touched her and tried to force her to perform oral sex. Schalk threatened the girl, according to charging documents, and told her if she told anyone what was happening she would be taken away and she would never see her mother again.
Schalk was being held at the Yellowstone County Detention Center Monday, in lieu of a $25,000 bond.
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GREAT FALLS Montana Sen. Steve Daines, who was going to bypass the Republican National Convention, will instead be making a brief stop there Tuesday.
Daines will leave from Bozeman for Cleveland on Tuesday before returning to Montana on Wednesday. Daines and his wife will then head out for a fly fishing trip later in the day.
In Cleveland, Daines will meet with Montana's delegation and join freshman senators to talk about the diversity of the class that includes former military veterans and business leaders.
Daines said the change in plans came about quickly, adding that, "It's tough to trade Montana fly fishing for Cleveland for a day."
Our Promise: Welcome to Care2, the world's largest community for good. Here, you'll find over 45 million like-minded people working towards progress, kindness, and lasting impact.
Care2 Stands Against: bigots, racists, bullies, science deniers, misogynists, gun lobbyists, xenophobes, the willfully ignorant, animal abusers, frackers, and other mean people. If you find yourself aligning with any of those folks, you can move along, nothing to see here.
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Homeowners demanding distance from oil drilling declared victory in Montana in Carbon County, where wells can no longer be closer to homes than 750 feet.
The Carbon County Commission added the distance to its development regulations. Homeowners said the space was needed to protect the water of homeowners living with oil and gas development.
The setbacks were first sought more than two years ago when Energy Corp. of America began drilling along the front range of the Beartooth Mountains. ECA, with offices in Colorado and West Virginia, had promised to bring the Bakken to the Beartooths, which alarmed homeowners into action.
ECA drilled a test well near Belfry, but didnt do much more.
Carbon County has had oil and gas development for some time, since early 1900. Now, theyre using new drilling methods with hydraulic fracturing, said Susann Beug, of the Carbon County Resource Council. An exploratory well by Belfry got people concerned.
Beug said the Carbon County Planning Board spent a lot of time getting the setback right. County Planner Monica Plecker said a homeowner who doesnt mind being closer to an oil and gas well has the right to waive the setback requirement.
There are no wells currently being drilled in Montana, according to state records. Beug expects drilling to pick up in Carbon County whenever oil prices are high enough to support it.
On Saturday, the community is invited to take a first look at a Yellowstone riverfront gift thats been generations in the making.
The John H. Dover Memorial Park will open to the public with a 4-mile bike trail ride and a 3.4-mile run. Along those courses, participants will see the natural area that Dover wanted to spare from urban development when Billings was still a small city. It is a vision shared by his grandson, Jim Sindelar. Although Sindelar suffered a disabling stroke a few years ago, his children have brought his vision to fruition in partnership with the Yellowstone River Parks Association.
Along the way, many volunteers and donors put their sweat, cash and construction materials into creating a nature preserve on the northeast edge of Billings. Volunteers built walking paths of crushed limestone, weeded out invasive non-native plants and assisted with landscaping. Harvest Church volunteers spend two days last fall, giving the project a major boost toward its opening day.
John Henry Dover began farming on an island in the River in 1881 before Billings was a city, before Montana was a state. He homesteaded a small acreage and began expanding his farm. As Billings Heights grew, Dovers grandson, Jim Sindelar, bought more land.
He didnt want it developed, Lisa Sindelar, one of Jim and Virginia Sindelars daughters, told The Gazettes Brett French for a July 17 report.
The Sindelar family has gradually donated tracts of land to YRPA. Eventually, the donated park is expected to stretch across more than 670 acres along 2 miles of Yellowstone River.
Last fall, YRPA President Darryl Wilson told a writer for Magic Magazine that the development of Dover Park had cost about $250,000 plus 2,000 to 3,000 hours of volunteer labor. To secure future funding, the YRPA was creating a foundation in collaboration with the Billings Community Foundation.
The long-range master plan developed by Land Design Inc. includes a large lake where a gravel mine, operated by Knife River Corporation, a construction materials subsidiary of Montana-Dakota Utilities, now exists.
In the past several months, YRPA spent more time and money to finish the trails, build a parking lot, construct toilets and erect signs.
Five Mile Creek winds through the part of the park opening Saturday. The 170-acre park is reached by following Mary Street east to Dover Road. It has been described as a place of serenity and peace. It is a great riverfront addition to lands open to the public near Montanas largest city.
Lisa Sindelar said her father is a steward of the Earth. Thanks to that legacy, the Billings community will have a place to learn about and enjoy the natural beauty of the Yellowstone River. We congratulate YRPA and the Sindelar family for their amazing gifts. We call on all who enter this park to respect this land and the vision John H. Dover had when he started a conserving it two centuries ago.
The Securities and Exchange Commission in the U.S. has announced an investigation into the sales reporting practices of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles.
In the U.S., FCA has reported 75 straight months of increased sales with further bold plans and on the back of investigations, members of the FBI and SEC probed the companys offices and the homes of key staff.
With investigators not revealing any specifics, FCA released a statement saying that they will cooperate fully with them as they look into their reporting of vehicle unit sales to end customers.
Earlier in the year, a dealership group from Illinois suggested that FCA paid dealers to incorrectly inflate sales according to AutoNews. A federal civil lawsuit was launched and in April, FCA began adding an extensive disclaimer in its monthly U.S. sales reports, specifying all the sales which it reports and how figures are calculated.
It isnt known if the federal investigation was prompted by this but results from the investigation should be announced in the coming months.
PHOTO GALLERY
The Red McCombs Ford dealership in San Antonio, Texas has hit out at Saleen and filed a lawsuit alleging both fraud and breach of contract with another dealer also pointing fingers at the tuner.
The dealers lawsuit asserts that it hired Saleen to modify three 2015 Mustangs. The cars arrived some six months late and collectively, were missing more than $22,000 in upgrades and the dealership says it hasnt received a refund for the missing components.
Additionally, the Friendship Ford of Bristol dealer in Tennessee claims it has been waiting for a 2015 S302 Yellow Label Mustang which it ordered a year ago. The car was originally delivered to Saleens facility in California in September 2015 and was scheduled to be returned before the end of 2015 but it is nowhere to been.
Company founder Steve Saleen asserts that the modified Mustang was shipped to the dealer in early June but the general manager at Friendship Ford, Denny Fruth, told Automotive News that hes still waiting for the car.
I dont know where the car is. I dont have a clue. Every month this year, its been another story. I actually thought about jumping on an airplane to L.A. and walking in the shop to see if its in there, he said.
In response, Saleen blamed the delays on unbelievable demand for the firms modified 2015 Mustangs, saying hundreds have already been delivered across the United States.
Despite this, the brand isnt in the best of health. As a matter of fact, filings show that it has lost around $30 million since it was re-formed in 2011.
PHOTO GALLERY
Titled Amazed Again, this all-new C-Class Cabriolet commercial is meant to show customers it has injected emotion into its cars.
Mercedes have been approaching their ads this way for a while now. Last month, they even came up with a quirky and romantic way to announce their emergency number for all of Europe, and before that, they pulled out all the stops in that E-Class spot titled The Journey.
This C-Class Cabrio ad is similar to that one in the sense that it also shows a journey. From childhood to adulthood, it follows a boy who seems fascinated with his surroundings, willing to daydream all the time regardless of how much hes grown.
It starts somewhere in the late 1970s and concludes in the present, where hes seen driving the new Mercedes-Benz C-Class Cabriolet. Oh, and theres also an extremely brief sex scene.
Right now, US customers can look forward to purchasing the new convertible C-Class in either C 300, C 43 or all-out AMG form. The latter is available with two power ratings, 476 PS (469 HP) and 510 PS (503 HP) for the C 63 and C 63 S respectively, while the lesser, AMG-enhanced 3.0-liter V6 biturbo powering the C4 3 produces 367 PS (362 HP), allowing it to reach 100 km/h (62 mph) in just 4.8 seconds.
VIDEO
POPLAR On a reservation ravaged by methamphetamine abuse, the Fort Peck Tribal Council recently took a very unpopular vote.
The council shot down a proposed law that would have created more harsh penalties for possession of meth.
After a 13-month-old girl was found dead in a Dumpster here in April and a few weeks earlier a 4-year-old was abducted in Wolf Point, tribal Chairman Floyd Azure blamed methamphetamine for the incidents. The mood on the reservation at the time was one of hopelessness, with even Azure saying he didn't know how the community could combat the drug that seemed to have a stranglehold on the reservation where the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes live. The tribes declared a war on meth, but some residents and some on the council aren't entirely happy with how it's been waged.
"Many of the council thought it was too harsh," tribal executive board member Roxanne Gourneau said of the proposed law. "But what's harsh, the child dead in the trash can?"
At the Buckhorn restaurant, resident Adriana O'Brien said nothing has changed and she doesn't expect it to. She pointed the finger at what she called lax law enforcement. She moved the area in 1959 and said it's worse than ever.
"They don't make any arrests," she said. "It's a total lack of enforcement, all law enforcement."
Her husband, Patrick, agreed, adding, "Even if they do, it's just a slap on the wrist. Geez, they do nothing."
Adriana O'Brien thinks the problem is that law enforcement practices favoritism. "They need to quit pampering their relations," she said.
Patrick said it's a different place than the Poplar where he grew up. "This town has completely changed from when I was younger," he said.
Unlike off-reservation governments, the tribe has the ability to be flexible with its justice system to change its laws swiftly.
"We have a vast amount of authority," Gourneau said. "What gets in the way is people persuaded to vote based on their situation." She clarified that meant family relationships, such as relatives who use drugs.
Gourneau said the vote was a result of internal fights between the council and the desires of a powerful minority.
"We've got to back our laws and put them on the books," she said.
The problem isn't a bad police force, but a too-small one, said vice chairman Charles Headdress. There are only 13 tribal officers to patrol 2 million acres, he said. The reservation also has officers from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the tribe has agreements that allow the five surrounding counties to have jurisdiction within the reservation, but that's not enough, he said.
"We could use 30 more in order to put a dent in things. We need an army."
The tribe's justice system isn't adequate either, Headdress said, and judges and attorneys can be swayed on decisions by threats, whether made directly or not, of retribution, or what he calls "domestic terrorism."
"Everybody knows everybody here," he said. "You always have to watch your back. There's a lot of domestic terrorism that goes along those lines."
About the only force he sees fixing anything are angry grandmothers.
"What we need is grandma, a grandma-type person, someone who is respected and angry. We still respect our elders."
But it could be tough finding enough elders to enlist.
"Before you could always depend on grandma and grandpa to watch the kids. Now grandma and grandma are hooked (on meth), too."
The tribe has the passion, but not the resources, to deal with the problem. "We're trying, but law enforcement, some days they come in and they're just beat."
Gourneau contends the tribe has made some progress. There have been more community outreach events to increase awareness about the dangers of the drug. Tribal leaders are also attending a series of meth symposiums at reservations across the state.
The tribe has formed an inpatient treatment committee that's looking at ways to bring meth treatment to the reservation. The Spotted Bull Resource Recovery Center has programs like a medicine wheel, but has to send people to Billings or out-of-state for inpatient treatment programs.
The tribe is also looking at opening what Gourneau called a traditional living campus that can house the children of those who are going through addiction to drugs or are in the treatment process. "Then they don't have to do off-reservation child care."
Tribal health director Dennis Four Bear said it will take time to see any improvement. "It's not going to get better overnight," he said. "But I've been hearing at least there's some sort of hope."
Gourneau emphasized tracking results from their efforts. "We have been taking steps. Now we need to measure our impact," she said.
But she also said that all the treatment in the world won't fix the problem. "We can't attack meth without first addressing poverty, jobs, mental health," she said.
While the BMW i3 is becoming more popular with police forces around the world, another green vehicle, the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV, is getting ready to serve and protect Ukraines residents.
Announced by the countrys Minister of Internal Affairs, Arsen Avakov, the 651 units ordered will replace the dated VAV and UAZ Russian-made police vehicles and will arrive with the Natspolitsiya (Ukraine Police) soon.
So, gentlemen, Ukrainian policemen! You will receive 651 new and unique modern powerful eco-friendly hybrid crossover Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV. The people of Ukraine hope that you will be worth of this innovation! Serve with honor!, Avakov said in a statement, cited by InsideEVs.
Mitsubishi readied the Outlander PHEV for the 2017MY, marking its first appearance at the New York Auto Show, prior to it going on sale this fall. It looks identical to the updated European and Japanese variants and features a 2.0-liter petrol engine and two electric motors, mounted on the front and rear axles, providing all-wheel drive performance. The SUV drinks almost 5 lt/100 km (47.04 mpg US) and its 12 kWh lithium-ion battery pack, fitted under the floor, provides an all-electric driving range of 37.7 miles (60.8 km).
651 Mitsubishi Outlander https://t.co/hPdu6FVUDt pic.twitter.com/5eLtluFs1b Arsen Avakov (@AvakovArsen) July 9, 2016
PHOTO GALLERY
Photo: Paul Boyko
UPDATE: 8:50 p.m.
Environment Canada has ended a severe thunderstorm watch for the Okanagan Valley.
UPDATE: 6:55 p.m.
A severe thunderstorm warning for the Central and North Okanagan has now ended, according to Environment Canada.
However a severe thunderstorm watch remains in effect for both areas, as well as the South Okanagan.
Meanwhile, Kelowna fire captain John Kelly says a crew attended one callout connected with the storm a reported lightning strike on a house just before 5 p.m.
However, when crews arrived at the house on Eldorado Court, Kelly said they found that just the clothesline had been hit.
Kelly said the lightning travelled down the clothesline and blew a 15-foot piece of bark off of a tree.
UPDATE: 5:25 p.m.
Environment Canada has upgraded its thunderstorm watch to a severe thunderstorm warning for the Central and North Okanagan.
Meteorologists are tracking a line of severe thunderstorms moving northwestwards towards Vernon and Armstrong.
UPDATE: 5:09 p.m.
Environment Canada's forecasted thunderstorms are travelling across the Okanagan Valley.
Reports of a house struck by lightning in Kelowna's Mission neighbourhood had firefighters rushing to the scene just before 5 p.m. Monday.
The incident occurred on the 4400 block of Lakeland Road. There is no report of a fire at the house.
A severe thunderstorm watch is in effect this afternoon for much of the Okanagan Valley.
Environment Canada warns of the possibility of strong wind gusts, heavy rain and large hail.
The storm watch has been issued for the North, Central and South Okanagan.
Thunderstorms are expected tomorrow as well but the federal agency is forecasting some real summer weather starting on Wednesday, with temperatures in the 30s throughout the Valley by the weekend.
To report severe weather, send an email to [email protected] or tweet reports to #BCStorm.
Photo: Flickr - BC gov't
Premier Christy Clark will be in Kelowna Tuesday to announce money for local transit.
The morning announcement will take place at the Queensway Transit Hub, where Clark will announce funding for BC Transit projects in Kelowna.
The premier made a similar transit announcement Monday in Abbotsford, following a recent agreement in which the federal government, province and municipalities pledged to inject more than $900 million in public transit projects.
Clark announced Monday that funding for the Fraser Valley would pay for buses with closed circuit TV to improve safety, as well as money for an operations and maintenance facility that will support a fleet of compressed natural gas buses.
Kelowna-Lake Country MP Stephen Fuhr is expected to be at the announcement Tuesday.
Photo: Twitter
The coroner's service in British Columbia has identified a 21-year-old Calgary man who died after a fall in Yoho National Park.
It says Ryan James McIntosh was one of a group of four who set up camp on Thursday to hike up the nearby Secretary-Treasurer Peak, about 20 kilometres east of Golden.
The coroner's service says McIntosh and one other person reached the summit, but on the descent at about 4 p.m. he lost his footing and fell more 200 metres down a steep embankment.
A Canadian Forces search and rescue helicopter, which was flying through the area, responded when one of the man's companions activated an emergency locator beacon.
Photo: The Canadian Press
The BC Coroners Service has identified a Kootenay man who died after a motor vehicle accident near Fruitvale, 16 kilometres east of Trail, on July 14.
He is Michael Joseph McIsaac, 26, of Fruitvale.
The coroner says McIsaac was driving his vehicle on Highway 3B just outside the town last Thursday afternoon, when a flat-deck semi travelling in the opposite direction lost its load of crushed cars on a curve.
Some of the debris struck the victim's vehicle, causing it to leave the roadway and roll.
McIsaac was pronounced dead at the scene.
The BC Coroners Service, RCMP Traffic Services and the Commercial Vehicle Safety and Enforcement branch continue to investigate his death.
The semi driver was also seriously injured in last week's crash and was taken to hospital in Trail.
Photo: CTV
UPDATE: 9:24 p.m.
Firefighters in Port Moody spent hours battling a blaze at a sawmill on Monday afternoon.
City spokesman Paul Lockwood said the fire began in the Flavelle Sawmill Co. Ltd.'s conveyor system before spreading to a nearby pile of wood chips.
No injuries had been reported as of Monday evening.
At least three fire trucks were called in to help put out the flames, as well as firefighters from neighbouring Coquitlam.
Firefighters were battling a blaze at a sawmill on Monday afternoon in Port Moody.
The Port Moody Fire Department asked people on Twitter to avoid an area around the Flavelle Sawmill Co. Ltd.
Earlier Monday, RCMP credited the quick action of employees and management at a sawmill in Vanderhoof for quickly extinguishing a small fire.
Mounties say there were no serious injuries at the Canfor Plateau Mill west of Vanderhoof.
Police say the fire was started by a welding torch that was being operated during routine maintenance at the mill.
WorkSafeBC and the Mounties were investigating.
"The fast response of Plateau employees and management resulted in this fire being controlled very quickly," said RCMP Sgt. Svend Nielsen. "Without their action and the swift response of the Vanderhoof fire crews, it could have been a lot worse."
Photo: Getty Images
After a year of public consultation, our political leaders increased the penalties for the use of handheld electronic devices while driving, effective June 1, 2016.
My prediction, in a column published just before the change, was that it would prove to be an impotent political move: one that does not result in a marked decline in crashes.
I taunted the government to collect and publish the data, which should be immediately available.
We get our crash statistics from ICBC. Those statistics are based on what is reported to ICBC, i.e. they dont need to go around collecting data from the police, ambulance or other agencies.
ICBC should already be telling us whether there was a statistical improvement in reported crashes during June, 2016, the first month of the change.
They wont, though.Their February, 2016, statistical reporting has data current only through 2013. How can you drive road safety policy without current statistics?
Road safety is often a topic of this column. I have long advocated that inattentive driving is the problem that needs to be addressed. Inattentive driving is something different from distracted driving.
Focusing our attention on particular distracting behaviours, like handheld electronic devices, diverts our attention from the real problem.
That diversion, in my view, actually makes our roads less instead of more safe.
This whole cell-phone fiasco is a key example. Our government chose to prohibit drivers from having hand held cell-phone discussions. By doing so, they impliedly endorsed drivers having those same discussions hands free.
I pull my hair out with frustration, wondering how could the positioning of your hands possibly have an impact on the distraction of a cell-phone discussion.
Work needs to be put into changing our societal attitudes about driving. We did it with seatbelt use and have come a long way with impaired driving. Even a small increase in our collective level of attentiveness would make a difference.
What is the clearest indication of this? The prevalence of rear-ender crashes. ICBC doesnt publish statistics on this important reality, which, in my view, should be informing and directing road safety policy.
We have to go to the United States based National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) for those statistics.
A report adopted by the NTSB on May 19, 2015, includes this statistic: In 2012, there were 1.7 million rear-end crashes, representing almost half of all two-vehicle crashes.
Almost half! I had a look at the last 30 ICBC claim files Ive opened. Sure enough, 16 of them were rear-enders.
Every rear-ender crash would be avoided if drivers simply paid attention to the road. This attentiveness will not be achieved if we are lulled into believing that safe driving means avoiding specific prohibited driving behaviours.
It is a gross, and dangerous, fallacy to say: Im not impaired, using a handheld electronic device, speeding, or engaging in sexual activity, therefore Im driving safely.
The rear-ender crash has been a statistically significant type of crash since long before cell phones, by the way.
Do rear-ender crashes matter? Do we care? Rear-ender crashes dont cause serious injuries, do they?
Hell, yes they do.
One measure of the level of injuries and other losses arising from rear-ender crashes is the amount paid by ICBC as fair, financial compensation for those injuries and losses. Will ICBC give us that statistic?
For a previous column, I sorted through four years of my own rear-ender settlements. Inclusive of costs, which is what ICBC has to pay in addition to the settlement to compensate for having to bring a lawsuit against them to achieve whats fair, the average was over $135,000.00 per claim.
Claim value statistics are a small part of societal losses arising from crashes. You need to add the losses to the at fault driver, along with emergency services, health care and aspects such as loss of work productivity.
Lets not be distracted by any particular type of crash, though.
The rear-ender is simply an illustration of my point that inattentiveness is the true evil to be dealt with.
Increase attentiveness and the numbers of all other types of crashes will come crashing down as well.
This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.
Photo: BC Hydro Temporary trailers house workers.
There have been protests and court battles but work connected to the Site C dam project in the Peace River region continues.
It was announced Monday that BC Hydro and its contractor had reached a milestone in the construction of the Site C worker accommodation lodge.
The second phase of the lodge, which adds 900 rooms and key amenities, has been completed on time and on budget.
Phase two of the camp brings the total number of rooms to 1,200.
The contractor, ATCO Two Rivers Lodging Group, was awarded the eight-year, $470-million contract to complete the design, construction, partial financing, operation and maintenance of the worker accommodation lodge.
A third phase is expected to be completed later this summer.
Once it's completed, the nearly $9-billion dam project is expected to increase Hydro's energy supply by eight per cent. It will be the third dam on the Peace River.
Photo: PlayNow.com
If you love to debate about the U.S. presidential election, you can now put your money where your mouth is and bet on the winner.
As Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton get set to face off in Novembers election, politics have taken top spot on PlayNow.com as the most popular novelty betting category.
The BC Lottery Corporation was the first jurisdiction in Canada to offer novelty betting on the U.S. election in 2014. Since then, the popularity of the bets have steadily spiked, especially since Trump gained momentum in the Republican primary.
PlayNow.com has 10 types of wagers on the U.S. election, ranging from who will be the Democratic vice-presidential candidates to whether an independent candidate will win the election.
When it comes to the presidential race, Clinton has the edge over Trump with two to five odds. Most bettors in B.C. have their money on Clinton to become president.
Trumps odds of winning the presidency are currently just above two to one.
A $10 wager on Trump would return $31 dollars if Trump gets elected. His current odds vastly improved from his odds of 100 to one in January 2015.
The Republican Party Convention takes place from July 18-21 while the Democratic Convention is set for July 25-28.
The U.S. election is on November 8, 2016.
For Lame Deer resident Bilford J. Curley Sr., sustainability is more about finance than science.
The inefficiency of the home of the Northern Cheyenne elder and disabled Vietnam veteran saddled his family with $500-a-month heating bills through the winter months. A fixed income made necessary repairs out of reach. But a coordinated effort by volunteers, community organizations and federal agencies is putting Curley on the fast track to sustainable living. His home is undergoing a $100,000 renovation including a new heating system, beefed up insulation and a new roof.
"When I get my first light bill I'm going to frame it," Curley said.
Curley has lived in the home for more than 25 years and shares it with four children and a wife who uses a wheelchair. When the monthlong renovation project began on July 11, the house had a bad roof, structural dry rot and a cockroach infestation. Most of the furniture was tossed to ensure the insects wouldnt return. The Northern Cheyenne Tribal Housing Authority placed the family in temporary housing during construction, but the house is unfurnished so the family sleeps on the floor.
I think one of the (hardest) things is the kids miss their home. But I know its going to be a better home, a warm place and a roof over their heads, Curley said.
Despite the challenges, Curley said he prays for the other people in the community facing similar struggles. He knows there are limited resources available, and he is grateful for the help.
Red Feather Development Group, a Bozeman-based nonprofit organization, is leading the project and overseeing the renovation.
Red Feather has built 18 homes on three reservations. Six straw bale houses were built on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, and in the past five years two homes received major renovations, said John Marian, Red Feather education director.
Marian said the project benefited from donated materials, and volunteers have helped cut labor costs, which represent the most expensive part of construction. James Hardie Industries donated siding for Curleys house, and young people from Catholic HEART Workcamp were on hand for the first week of construction.
Marian couldnt rely solely on volunteers to complete the 1,400 hours of planned labor, so he looked locally and hired Lame Deer-based Talon Construction.
We want to make sure we keep as many dollars on this reservation as we can, instead of bringing in white folks from off the reservation, Marian said.
The project wouldnt be possible without a $7,500 grant from the United States Department of Agriculture and $60,000 secured from the Bureau of Indian Affairs Housing Improvement Program.
Michelene Bearcomesout, director of HIP on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, said Curley had been applying for assistance since at least 2007. In that time he was able to get assistance with smaller projects; Bearscomeout personally helped build a deck and paint the home.
We painted his house at least three or four times because it was red and green at one point. It was a Christmas house for a while, she said with a smile.
Jo-Ellen Cree, tribal operations officer for BIA Rocky Mountain Region, said the grant is competitive. More than 780 applications were submitted from different reservations in Montana and Wyoming.
The grant was approved in May, but the project has been about a year in the making.
The house was one of eight on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation that received an energy audit during summer 2015. It was by far the least efficient, and its air quality tested very poorly, said Leo Campbell of Native Energy Auditors.
Campbell helped complete the audits as part of a University of Colorado program to encourage young people on Native American reservations to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math fields. He said Curleys home had many air leaks, used electric baseboards as a primary heat source and an old chimney funneled the heat from the house. The baseboards and chimney have been removed and will be replaced by more modern alternatives.
A wood burning stove will take the place of the fireplace. A solar panel installed on the roof will run a heater donated by Solar Thermix LLC.
Campbell said he wants the Curley home to serve as a pilot for future projects but home improvements are only one part of the solution.
The hardest factor in energy efficiency is getting the clients or homeowners to change their habits, to turn that light off or close that window when the heats on. Simple things, he said.
The construction project still needs volunteers and anybody interested can contact Marian at 223-4750. Donations to help construction costs can be made at https://www.gofundme.com/bilfordcurley.
If you have just started your journey in an online casino or are looking for a new site to play,...
A 47-year-old Yellowstone County man drowned Sunday after the raft he was riding in flipped in the Yellowstone River west of Columbus.
Lorne Speakerworth, of the Worden and Lockwood areas, died Sunday in what was ruled an accidental drowning while floating the river with "a lifelong friend," said a news release from Stillwater County Sheriff Cliff Brophy.
Stillwater County Dispatch received a report of the incident at about 3:45 p.m. after the raft carrying the two men overturned in a section of whitewater. The friend made it to shore and called 911 to report seeing Speakerwoth floating down the river. At about 4:15 p.m. dispatch received another call from a person who found the man about a mile and a half downstream from where the raft overturned.
Columbus Police Department, Columbus Fire and Ambulance, Fish Wildlife and Parks, Stillwater Search and Rescue, and Stillwater County Sheriffs Office responded to the incident. Speakerworth was partially submerged for at least 30 minutes and was not wearing a life vest. He was pronounced dead on scene shortly after emergency medical personnel arrived. The other rafter was taken to the hospital and treated for minor injuries.
The release said the United States Coast Guard requires an investigation into every incident on water that results in a death, injury or loss of property. Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks will compile the report.
In the initial release Sheriff Brophy reminded boaters to wear a personal flotation device while spending time on the water.
United Kingdom: fire at Cemexs South Ferriby plant
ICR Newsroom By 19 July 2016
Cemexs South Ferriby works in Lincolnshire was hit by fire on Sunday, according to reports in the local press.
The fire, which began due to a fuel leak, spread to cables, pipework and a disused control room within the kiln room. In addition to damaging these areas, the remainder of the building suffered smoke damage.
This is not the first disruption suffered by the 0.75Mta plant. In December 2013 the facility was put out of action by flood water from the Humber river.
Published under
CASPER, Wyo. When a federal judge approved Alpha Natural Resources bankruptcy exit plan two weeks ago, regulators, industry leaders and environmentalists breathed a collective sigh of relief. But while the plan will keep two large coal mines operating and set the stage for a stricter approach to self-bonding, the long-term outlook for Alpha is murkier.
Alpha was the first of three large coal companies operating in Wyoming to file for bankruptcy amid one of the most difficult years for coal in three decades. Arch Coal, which operates the Black Thunder Mine, and Peabody Energy, which runs the North Antelope Rochelle Mine, soon followed.
But as the first company to reach a restructuring agreement with regulators and the courts, Alpha is expected to set a precedent for the other companies. Environmentalist hope Alphas plan will change the states approach to environmental bonding. State regulators want pragmatic deals that preserve Wyoming jobs. However, in a bearish market with hesitant lenders and federal oversight, widespread uncertainty remains about the viability of Alphas financial plan post-bankruptcy.
Self-bonding
Days after the bankruptcy plan was approved, the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement decided that Wyoming broke state law in allowing Alpha to self-bond at the Eagle Butte and Belle Ayr mines in a deal made last year with Wyomings Department of Environmental Quality.
Companies are required to set aside money for environmental cleanup after mining or drilling. Rather than obtain a third-party bond, some companies engage in self-bonding, a practice wherein a companys financial assets are held against the cost of eventual reclamation efforts.
Opponents say the practice puts taxpayers at risk when mining companies like Alpha go bust. But the companies maintain they have enough value in their businesses to cover the eventual cost of cleanup.
Wyoming has allowed more than $2 billion in self-bonding, more than any other coal-producing state.
Last weeks decision by federal regulators pleased some of self-bondings biggest opponents in Wyoming.
It sets the standard, said Shannon Anderson, a lawyer for the Powder River Basin Resource Council. Our hope is that Peabody and Arch will be mindful of what OSMRE has said in the case of Alpha.
A state regulator for Wyomings Department of Environmental Quality disagreed. Kyle Wendtland, administrator of the departments Land Quality Division, responded Friday to the federal regulators decision, calling it politically motivated and demanding that it be reconsidered.
At issue is a deal the state department made with Alpha last year. During the bankruptcy, Wyoming and Alpha agreed to make the state a top-priority creditor, if necessary, for $61 million of the companys $411 million in environmental bonding obligations in the state.
Wendtland said Friday that the state agency made the deal in order to keep the mines operating, save jobs and revenue.
Without a compromise made by the DEQ, the two mines would have shut down and the company would have had to go into liquidation, he said.
A better compromise was to help companies develop a timeline for compliance, Anderson said.
Since the beginning weve tried to send a signal that these very basic legal requirements have to be complied with, Anderson said. Bankruptcy cant just be an excuse to avoid the law.
Federal officials declined to comment on the Wyoming letter, saying they needed to review it.
Their finding raises the stakes in Alphas bankruptcy, depending on whether the bankruptcy exit agreement holds. The agreement is expected to go into effect by the end of July.
Emerging from bankruptcy
Lingering disagreements aside, the emerging Alpha has an uphill battle in the current market, with wary investors, low prices and watchful regulators.
Investors are willing to place small bets on coal, but they are being cautious, said Clark Williams-Derry, an analyst at the Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based nonprofit that supports a transition to renewable fuels.
The fact that a mediocre coal company is emerging from bankruptcy in the midst of the worst bear market in generations means one thing: Lenders arent willing to give much money for the new companies emerging from the Alpha bankruptcy, he said. Wall Street mostly has kept its wallets closed to coal. Investors just werent willing to spend a bunch of money to recapitalize the company.
From environmentalists to regulators, coal companies are being watched closely in this time of uncertainty, in a way they werent when business was booming.
A few years ago, no one was paying close attention, said Chiza Vitta, an analyst for S&P. Now we are in a situation when bankruptcies are more likely. There is more scrutiny. Mines are closing down. The rubber is meeting the road. The states and the feds want to make sure that cleanup is going to happen.
According to the bankruptcy agreement, Alpha will emerge as two separate companies. Contura Energy will buy out Alphas most lucrative mines, including those in Wyoming. The other company will take the brunt of the low-performing mines and the large reclamation costs in Appalachia.
The success of this strategy depends on strong coal sales, which analysts say wont happen.
Alpha maintains that Contura, and by extension Wyoming, will be free of the weaker companys risky debt requirements. Thats good for Wyoming, as analysts are reporting a strong possibility that the Appalachian company will fall back into bankruptcy in a few years.
Based on Alphas own projections, available cash for the second company could be as low as $180 million, with only $20 million unencumbered by the end of 2017, according to a report from the investment bank, Cowen and Company.
Investors will likely get their money back after the restructuring, but for both Contura and the new Alpha, projected incomes are too optimistic, according to the Cowen report.
If Alphas agreement holds, Wyoming should have Contura operating and employing hundreds of coal miners this summer, but what that company will do for the states struggling coal sector, and how long it can withstand low coal prices, is yet to be seen.
JACKSON Wildfires continued to burn in western and southern Wyoming on Monday, with one blaze threatening Bondurant and forcing evacuations in the area.
The Cliff Creek Fire in the Bridger-Teton National Forest was spotted about 2:30 p.m. Sunday about 5 miles north of Bondurant, a town of less than 100 people in rural Sublette County, and quickly grew to scorch about 3 square miles. The fire, which was ignited by lightning, destroyed one pole barn.
Authorities evacuated a guest ranch, rural residences and a campground in the area while they attacked the fire with airplanes and helicopters dropping retardant and water. The Teton County Sheriff's Department began mandatory evacuations of Granite Creek Road on Monday afternoon between U.S. Highway 189/191 and Granite Creek Hot Springs.
The Red Cross established an evacuation center at Pinedale High School.
U.S. 191/189 between Daniel Junction and Hoback Junction is closed, with the fire burning on both sides of the highway.
Bondurant is about 25 miles southeast of Jackson.
Cooler temperatures slowed the burning overnight Sunday and crews in the area were working to protect buildings. They were expected to receive help Monday from three firefighting helicopters.
A second, smaller fire is burning about 6 miles north of the fire near Bondurant.
The Lava Mountain Fire, meanwhile, is burning in the neighboring Shoshone National Forest. The fire, which was started by lightning, has so far consumed about 280 acres of thick timber northwest of Dubois.
Near the Wyoming-Colorado border, firefighters continued to work a nearly 25,000-acre blaze that began last month. The Beaver Creek Fire grew about 1,900 acres on Sunday, with most of the increase happening on the southwestern corner of the blaze.
The cause of that fire remains under investigation.
LARAMIE, Wyo. A former prosecuting attorney in Wyoming has requested an appeal after being found guilty of misusing county money.
The Laramie Boomerang reports that an attorney for Richard Bohling, the former Alabany County prosecuting attorney, filed paperwork Friday with the Wyoming Supreme Court requesting a reversal of five criminal convictions.
Prosecutors charged Bohling with using county money to buy cameras and other items for personal use.
Bohling was sentenced to two to four years in prison in February. He was also fined $45,000 and ordered to pay $3,000 in restitution.
Bohling's lawyers had argued he bought the expensive camera gear because photos taken by police often were insufficient to secure convictions.
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Savannah, Georgia is a beautiful city with lots of places to visit, including Forsyth Park, River Street, and the Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace. Another place to visit is the Savannah History Museum, which is jam-packed with interesting exhibits on the history of the city.
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Louisville is in the heart of Kentucky and is known for being the home of the Kentucky Derby. There are a lot of great places to visit in Louisville, including the Louisville Zoo, the Muhammad Ali Center, and the Frazier History Museum. There are also a lot of great restaurants and bars in Louisville, and it's a great place to visit for a weekend getaway.
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The birthplace of Warren Buffett, Omaha, Nebraska, is a great place to visit. There are plenty of things to see and do in Omaha, from touring the Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium to visiting the Durham Western Heritage Museum. Other popular tourist destinations in Omaha include the Joslyn Art Museum, the Ak-Sar-Ben Aquarium, and TD Ameritrade Park.
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Columbus, GA, United States
Columbus is a charming small town in Georgia that is worth a visit. There are several places to visit in Columbus, including the Riverwalk, the Chattahoochee River, the National Infantry Museum, and the Coca-Cola Space Science Center. The Riverwalk is a beautiful walkway along the Chattahoochee River that is perfect for a relaxing stroll or a bike ride. The Chattahoochee River is a great place to go fishing, swimming, or kayaking. The National Infantry Museum is a museum dedicated to the infantry of the United States Army. It is a must-see for history buffs. The Coca-Cola Space Science Center is a museum dedicated to space science. It is perfect for kids and adults alike.
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Portland, OR, United States
Portland is a city that is located in the US state of Oregon and it is known for its art scene, food, and coffee. There are a lot of interesting places to visit in Portland, such as the Portland Art Museum, where you can see a variety of art from all over the world. Another place to visit is the Powell's City of Books, the largest independent bookstore in the world. If you're looking for a place to eat, Portland has no shortage of amazing restaurants, such as Pok Pok, which serves Thai cuisine, and Le Pigeon, which serves French cuisine. And, of course, no trip to Portland would be complete without trying some of the city's famous coffee, such as Stumptown Coffee Roasters.
Portland Luxury Hotels
Florence, Italy
No trip to Italy is complete without a visit to Florence. This historic city is home to some of the country's most famous attractions, including the Duomo, Ponte Vecchio, and Michelangelo's David. There's also plenty to see and do outside of the city center, including the picturesque Tuscan countryside and the vibrant university town of Arezzo.
Florence Luxury Hotels
Florence Luxury Villas
Asheville, NC, United States
Asheville is a city in western North Carolina. It is the largest city in the U.S. state of North Carolina. It is the county seat of Buncombe County. Asheville is home to the Biltmore Estate, the largest private home in the United States. The city of Asheville proper had a population of 84,236 in 2010. The city is known for its art deco architecture, mountain scenery and outdoor activities, and as the birthplace of American novelist Thomas Wolfe. It is also home to the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, the second largest craft brewery in the United States.
Asheville Luxury Hotels
Asheville Luxury Cottages
Long Beach, CA, United States
There's plenty to do in Long Beach, California without ever having to leave the city limits. If you're looking for a little adventure, head to the Aquarium of the Pacific for a glimpse of the ocean's creatures or take a walk on the boardwalk at Rainbow Harbor. If you're more of a history buff, the Queen Mary is a must-see. This retired ocean liner is now a hotel and museum with plenty of stories to tell. And no trip to Long Beach is complete without a visit to the iconic Vincent Thomas Bridge.
Long Beach Luxury Hotels
Long Beach Luxury Villas
Cincinnati, OH, United States
Cincinnati is a city located on the Ohio River in the southwestern corner of the U.S. state of Ohio. The city was founded in 1788 and named after the Society of the Cincinnati, an organization of Revolutionary War officers. Cincinnati is a major U.S. city and the metropolitan area has a population of over 2 million people. The city is well-known for its German heritage, Oktoberfest celebration, and its variety of chili dishes. Cincinnati is home to three major sports teams: the NFL's Cincinnati Bengals, MLB's Cincinnati Reds, and the NBA's Cincinnati Cavaliers. The city is also home to the University of Cincinnati and Xavier University. The city's historic neighborhoods include Over-the-Rhine, Mount Auburn, and Hyde Park. Cincinnati is a popular tourist destination and offers a variety of attractions and places to visit, including the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, the Newport Aquarium, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Cincinnati Luxury Hotels
Laughlin, NV, United States
Laughlin, Nevada is a great place to visit if you're looking for a fun and affordable vacation. There are plenty of casinos and resorts to choose from, as well as plenty of outdoor activities and attractions. Be sure to check out the local nightlife, and don't forget to take a trip down the mighty Colorado River.
Laughlin Luxury Hotels
Laughlin Luxury Resorts
Anaheim, CA, United States
Anaheim, California is home to both Disneyland and California Adventure Park. The parks are just a short walk away from each other, and make for a great day of exploration. Anaheim is also home to the Anaheim Angels and the Anaheim Ducks, so there's always a game to catch. If you're looking for something a little more low-key, Anaheim has a great shopping district and a variety of restaurants to choose from.
Anaheim Luxury Hotels
Santa Cruz, CA, United States
Santa Cruz is a great place to visit! There are so many places to see and things to do. Some of my favorite places to visit are the Boardwalk, the wharf, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. The Boardwalk is a great place to go for a walk, ride on the amusement park rides, and eat some of the delicious food. The wharf is a great place to go for a walk, eat some seafood, and listen to the street performers. The University of California, Santa Cruz is a great place to visit to learn about the history of the area and to see some of the beautiful architecture. I highly recommend visiting Santa Cruz if you are looking for a fun and interesting place to visit!.
Santa Cruz Luxury Hotels
Eugene, OR, United States
Eugene, Oregon is a great city to visit with a lot of places to see and things to do. One of the most popular attractions is the University of Oregon campus, which is home to a number of museums and a large football stadium. The city also has a vibrant arts scene, with a number of theaters and art galleries. Outdoor enthusiasts will enjoy the dozens of parks and hiking trails in the area, and there are also a number of wineries and breweries in the area.
Eugene Luxury Hotels
Branson, MO, United States
There's plenty to see and do in Branson, Missouri, from state parks and amusement parks to theaters and shopping. Here are some of the most popular places to visit: Silver Dollar City is a theme park with rides, shows, and craftsmen demonstrations. is a theme park with rides, shows, and craftsmen demonstrations. The Shepherd of the Hills Outdoor Theatre puts on a variety of shows, including "The Legend of the Shepherd of the Hills" and "The Catfish Fry." puts on a variety of shows, including "The Legend of the Shepherd of the Hills" and "The Catfish Fry." Table Rock State Park has fishing, swimming, and hiking trails, as well as a nature center. has fishing, swimming, and hiking trails, as well as a nature center. The Titanic Museum features a half-sized replica of the ship, along with exhibits about the history of the Titanic. features a half-sized replica of the ship, along with exhibits about the history of the Titanic. Branson Landing is a shopping and entertainment complex on the waterfront. There's something for everyone in Branson, Missouri come visit and see for yourself!.
Branson Luxury Hotels
Panama City Beach, FL, United States
The white sand beaches and emerald waters of Panama City Beach, Florida, are a popular tourist destination. The city is home to numerous hotels, resorts, and restaurants, as well as amusement and water parks. Visitors can also enjoy fishing, kayaking, and surfing.
Panama City Beach Luxury Hotels
Panama City Beach Luxury Resorts
Monterey, CA, United States
Monterey is a coastal city in Monterey County, California, United States. It stands at the southern end of Monterey Bay, on the Pacific coast. The city is also the home of the Naval Postgraduate School. Monterey is the largest city in the Central Coast region of California. The main attractions in Monterey are the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Fisherman's Wharf, Cannery Row, and the downtown area.
Monterey Luxury Hotels
Norfolk, VA, United States
Norfolk, Virginia is a great place to visit for its historical places and military bases. Some places to visit in Norfolk are the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk Botanical Garden, and the Norfolk Naval Station.
Norfolk Luxury Hotels
Palm Springs, CA, United States
Palm Springs is a vibrant city located in the Coachella Valley and is known for its year-round sunshine, resort atmosphere and Mid-Century Modern architecture. Top places to visit include the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, Palm Springs Art Museum, Indian Canyons and Moorten Botanical Garden. For a truly unique experience, be sure to check out the Palm Springs Modernism Show & Sale the worlds largest vintage furniture and design event.
Palm Springs Luxury Hotels
Palm Springs Luxury Resorts
Palm Springs Luxury Villas
Rochester, NY, United States
Rochester is a city in western New York State and is the county seat of Monroe County. Rochester is known for its annual festivals, including the Rochester International Jazz Festival, the Rochester Fringe Festival, and the Holiday Folk Fair International. Places to visit in Rochester include the George Eastman Museum, the Strong National Museum of Play, the Rochester Museum and Science Center, and the Seneca Park Zoo.
Rochester Luxury Hotels
Pigeon Forge, TN, United States
Visit the Titanic Museum in Pigeon Forge for a unique experience. This museum is dedicated to the Titanic, one of the most infamous ships in history. Tour the ship and learn about the passengers and crew who were on board. You can even see the actual artifacts recovered from the shipwreck. If you're looking for a little more excitement, head to Dollywood. This amusement park is home to roller coasters, a water park, and plenty of other rides and attractions. Plus, the park is themed around the life and music of Dolly Parton. No trip to Pigeon Forge is complete without a visit to the Great Smoky Mountains. These mountains offer a variety of activities, including hiking, fishing, and horseback riding. Plus, the natural beauty of the area is simply breathtaking.
Pigeon Forge Luxury Hotels
Jacksonville, FL, United States
Jacksonville is less than an hour's drive from the beaches of Amelia Island and St. Augustine, and a little more than two hours from Orlando. The city has a lot to offer visitors, including a riverwalk, museums, and a vibrant arts scene. Jacksonville is also home to the Jacksonville Jaguars NFL team.
Jacksonville Luxury Hotels
Minsk, Belarus
Minsk, the capital of Belarus, is a city that has something for everyone. If you're looking for a little history, Minsk has plenty of it, with churches and monuments dating back to the 12th century. If you're looking for a lively nightlife, Minsk has that, too, with plenty of bars, clubs, and restaurants. And if you're looking for a little nature, Minsk has parks and gardens to enjoy. Here are just a few of the places you can visit in Minsk: The Holy Spirit Cathedral, one of the oldest churches in Minsk, is a must-visit for history buffs. The National Library of Belarus is a huge library with more than 18 million items in its collection. The Opera and Ballet Theatre is a beautiful building that hosts performances of both opera and ballet. The Victory Park is a large park with a war memorial, a children's playground, and a lake. And for a little bit of nature in the heart of the city, the Botanical Garden is a great place to relax and take a break from the hustle and bustle of Minsk.
Minsk Luxury Hotels
Jaipur, India
Jaipur is one of the most popular tourist destinations in India. It is the capital of the state of Rajasthan and is known for its palaces, forts and temples. Some of the places to visit in Jaipur include the Amber Fort, the City Palace, the Jantar Mantar Observatory and the Hawa Mahal. Jaipur is also a great place to shop for traditional Indian handicrafts.
Jaipur Luxury Hotels
Chicago, IL, United States
Chicago is a city full of culture and history. There are plenty of places to visit, such as the Willis Tower, Buckingham Fountain, and the Lincoln Park Zoo. Chicago is also home to many restaurants and bars, so there is something for everyone.
Chicago Luxury Hotels
Auckland, New Zealand
Auckland is a beautiful city located on the north island of New Zealand. There are many places to visit in Auckland, including the Sky Tower, the Auckland War Memorial Museum, and the Auckland Domain. The beaches in Auckland are also worth visiting, especially Karekare and Piha. Auckland is a great place to visit, and I highly recommend it!.
Auckland Luxury Hotels
Auckland Luxury Villas
Amsterdam, Netherlands
If you're looking for a city that's got it all, Amsterdam should be your go-to destination. From the city's lively and vibrant nightlife to its charming and quiet neighborhoods, Amsterdam has something for everyone. Be sure to check out the Anne Frank Huis, the Rijksmuseum, and the Van Gogh Museum, as these are some of the most popular attractions in the city. And if you're looking for a little bit of nature, be sure to take a walk or bike ride through Amsterdam's many parks.
Amsterdam Luxury Hotels
Berlin, Germany
There are so many great places to visit in Berlin that it can be hard to know where to start. From the iconic Brandenburg Gate to the fascinating Reichstag Building, there's something for everyone in this vibrant city. If you're looking for a bit of history, make sure to check out the Berlin Wall Memorial or the DDR Museum. And for those looking for a bit more fun, there's always the Alexanderplatz Christmas Market or the Zoologischer Garten. No matter what your interests, Berlin is a city you won't want to miss.
Berlin Luxury Hotels
Bangkok, Thailand
Bangkok is a city of contrasts with its gleaming temples and skyscrapers, chaotic markets and tranquil canals. While it's a popular tourist destination, Bangkok is a city that can be enjoyed by visitors of all ages. Some of the top places to visit in Bangkok include the Grand Palace, Wat Arun, the floating markets and the Chatuchak Weekend Market.
Bangkok Luxury Hotels
Bangkok Luxury Resorts
Bangkok Luxury Villas
Bruges, Belgium
Bruges is a city in Belgium that is worth visiting. It is full of medieval charm and there are a lot of things to see and do. Some of the places to visit include the Markt, the Belfry, and the Begijnhof.
Bruges Luxury Hotels
Brussels, Belgium
Brussels is a city in Belgium that is best known for its chocolate, waffles, and beer. But there is much more to see and do in Brussels than just indulge in the local cuisine. There are a number of interesting historical landmarks to visit, such as the Grand Place and the Atomium, as well as a variety of parks and gardens. And, of course, Brussels is also a great city to explore on foot.
Brussels Luxury Hotels
Budapest, Hungary
Budapest, Hungary's capital, is a city of thermal baths and medival, baroque and art nouveau architecture. Crowded with tourists, the city is bisected by the Danube River into the hilly Buda and the more developed and flat Pest. Among the main places of interest are the neo-Gothic Parliament, the Chain Bridge linking Buda and Pest, the Matthias Church and Fisherman's Bastion on the Buda bank, and the State Opera House and Heroes' Square on the Pest side.
Budapest Luxury Hotels
Playa del Carmen, Mexico
Home to some of the best beaches in Mexico, Playa del Carmen is a favorite tourist destination for visitors from all over the world. With its lively nightlife, gorgeous coastline and ample shopping opportunities, there's something for everyone in this tropical paradise. Don't miss the opportunity to visit some of the area's most popular attractions, such as the ancient Mayan ruins of Tulum and Coba, or the eco-friendly Turtle Beach. With its friendly people, delicious food and stunning scenery, Playa del Carmen is a place you'll never want to leave.
Playa del Carmen Luxury Hotels
Playa del Carmen Luxury Resorts
Playa del Carmen Luxury Villas
Denver, CO, United States
Denver is a great city for visitors. There are so many places to see and things to do. Some of the top places to visit include the 16th Street Mall, the Denver Botanic Gardens, the Denver Art Museum, and the Colorado State Capitol. There are also plenty of great restaurants and shops to explore. Denver is definitely a city worth visiting!.
Denver Luxury Hotels
Dublin, Ireland
Dublin is a city located in Ireland. It's a city full of culture, with plenty of places to visit. Some popular tourist spots are the Guinness Storehouse, Trinity College, and the Dublin Castle. There are also plenty of pubs and restaurants to discover.
Dublin Luxury Hotels
Dusseldorf, Germany
Dusseldorf, Germany is a city with many different places to visit. The city has a mix of old and new buildings, and a variety of activities to do. The best places to visit in Dusseldorf are the Konigsallee, the Rhine Tower, and the Oktoberfest. The Konigsallee is an open-air shopping mall that has many high-end stores. The Rhine Tower is the tallest building in the city and offers great views of Dusseldorf. The Oktoberfest is a week-long festival that celebrates German culture and food.
Dusseldorf Luxury Hotels
Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Edinburgh, Scotland is a beautiful city to visit. The architecture is very old and unique, and there are plenty of historical places to visit, like Edinburgh Castle. There are also plenty of parks and gardens, and lots of shops and restaurants.
Edinburgh Luxury Hotels
Rome, Italy
Rome is a city rich in history and filled with beautiful places to visit. Make sure to stop by the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, and the Pantheon. Also be sure to visit St. Peters Basilica and the Sistine Chapel while in Rome. If youre looking for a little more nature in your trip, head to the Villa Borghese gardens or the Janiculum Hill for some wonderful views of the city. And of course, no trip to Rome is complete without a gelato!.
Rome Luxury Hotels
Rome Luxury Villas
New York, NY, United States
There are many amazing places to visit in New York State. Some of my favorites are the Niagara Falls, the Adirondack Mountains, and the Finger Lakes. If you're looking for a city break, New York City is definitely worth a visit. There's endless things to see and do, from touring the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island to visiting world-famous museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History. No matter what your interests are, you'll be able to find something to enjoy in New York State.
New York Luxury Hotels
New York Luxury Villas
London, United Kingdom
London is a city rich in history and full of amazing places to visit. Some of my favorite places are Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, and the Tower of London. There is so much to see and do in London, you could spend weeks here and never run out of things to do. If you're looking for a city full of culture and history, London is the place for you.
London Luxury Hotels
London Luxury Cottages
Madrid, Spain
Madrid is one of the most beautiful and culturally rich cities in the world. From the Royal Palace to the Prado Museum, theres plenty to see and do in Madrid. If youre looking for a little bit of nature, Madrid has plenty of parks, like the Buen Retiro Park, to relax in. And dont forget to try some of the delicious tapas and wine while youre in town.
Madrid Luxury Hotels
Memphis, TN, United States
The birthplace of rock 'n' roll, Memphis is a city rich in history and culture. From Graceland to Beale Street, there are plenty of places to visit in Memphis. Be sure to check out Sun Studio, where rock 'n' roll was born, and the National Civil Rights Museum, which tells the story of the African-American civil rights movement. Memphis is also home to some amazing food, so be sure to try some of the city's famous barbecue and soul food.
Memphis Luxury Hotels
Miami Beach, FL, United States
There is much to explore in Miami Beach, from the famous Art Deco district to the vast beaches and crystal-clear waters. Outdoor enthusiasts will love the opportunities for fishing, kayaking, and paddleboarding, while history buffs can explore the ancient burial mounds at Miami Beach. Shoppers and foodies will find plenty to keep them busy, with vibrant neighborhoods like Lincoln Road and Ocean Drive offering unique boutiques and award-winning restaurants. And of course, no trip to Miami Beach is complete without a visit to world-famous South Beach.
Miami Beach Luxury Hotels
Miami Beach Luxury Resorts
New Orleans, LA, United States
You can't visit New Orleans without trying some of the local food. Beignets, Po' Boys, and gumbo are just a few of the must-try dishes. While you're in town, be sure to check out the French Quarter, Jackson Square, and St. Louis Cathedral. If you're looking for some nightlife, Bourbon Street is the place to be. And, of course, no trip to New Orleans is complete without a visit to Mardi Gras!.
New Orleans Luxury Hotels
Milan, Italy
Milan is a city located in the Lombardy region of Italy. It is a popular tourist destination because of its historical and artistic heritage. Some of the places you should visit while in Milan are the Duomo, La Scala, and Castello Sforzesco.
Milan Luxury Hotels
Naples, Italy
Naples is one of the most beautiful and historic cities in Italy. There are countless places to visit, such as the Royal Palace, the Museum of San Martino, and the Church of Gesu Nuovo. Naples is also home to excellent shopping and dining options. Be sure to enjoy a cup of coffee at one of the city's many cafes and take a stroll through the picturesque streets.
Naples Luxury Hotels
Paris, France
Paris is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world. It's home to iconic landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre Museum, as well as a thriving nightlife and restaurant scene. If you're looking to explore all that Paris has to offer, here are some of the top places to visit: The Eiffel Tower: This iconic landmark is a must-see in Paris. Climb to the top for stunning views of the city, or take a ride on the elevator to the bottom for a closer look at the structure. The Louvre Museum: This world-famous museum is home to some of the most famous works of art in the world, including the Mona Lisa. The Notre Dame Cathedral: This beautiful cathedral is one of the most famous landmarks in Paris. Make sure to climb to the top for some amazing views of the city. The Champs-Elysees: This famous avenue is a popular destination for shopping and dining. Be sure to wander down the street and take in all the sights and sounds. The Arc de Triomphe: This towering arch is another iconic landmark in Paris. Climb to the top for some amazing views of the city.
Paris Luxury Hotels
Paris Luxury Villas
Prague, Czech Republic
Prague is a city rich in history and culture. There are plenty of places to visit, including the Prague Castle, the Charles Bridge, and the Old Town Square. There are also plenty of restaurants and bars to enjoy, and the nightlife is vibrant. Prague is a truly unique city and a must-visit for anyone traveling to the Czech Republic.
Prague Luxury Hotels
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Located on the easternmost tip of the Dominican Republic, Punta Cana is known for its beautiful beaches and turquoise waters. This paradise is a favorite destination for travelers looking for a Caribbean getaway. Punta Cana is home to a wide variety of resorts and activities, from enjoying the sand and surf to golfing, spas, and shopping. Nature lovers can also explore the areas jungles, caves, and waterfalls.
Punta Cana Luxury Hotels
Punta Cana Luxury Resorts
Punta Cana Luxury Villas
Marbella, Spain
If you're looking for an idyllic and luxurious Spanish escape, look no further than Marbella. Located on the country's Costa del Sol, Marbella is home to stunning beaches, top-notch resorts, world-class golfing, and much more. A visit to Marbella is the perfect way to experience all that Spain has to offer.
Marbella Luxury Hotels
Marbella Luxury Villas
Marrakesh, Morocco
Marrakesh is a city in Morocco that is full of culture and history. There are several places to visit in Marrakesh, including the Palace of the Bahia, the Ben Youssef Madrasa, and the Saadian Tombs. The souks (markets) are also a must-see, where you can find everything from souvenirs to spices to traditional clothing. Be sure to enjoy a meal in one of the many restaurants or cafes in Marrakesh; the food is delicious and the atmosphere is always lively. Marrakesh is a wonderful city to explore and definitely worth a visit!.
Marrakesh Luxury Hotels
San Francisco, CA, United States
San Francisco is a popular tourist destination, and for good reason. There are plenty of things to see and do in this vibrant city. Here are some of the top places to visit: 1. Fisherman's Wharf: This neighborhood is home to a variety of shops and restaurants, as well as a popular pier where you can enjoy views of the bay. 2. The Golden Gate Bridge: This iconic bridge is a must-see for any visitor to San Francisco. 3. Alcatraz Island: This former federal prison is now a popular tourist attraction. It's a must-see for fans of history and crime dramas. 4. Chinatown: This colorful neighborhood is home to some of the best food in San Francisco. Be sure to check out the Dragon Gate entrance. 5. The Mission District: This trendy neighborhood is home to hip restaurants, bars, and art galleries.
San Francisco Luxury Hotels
Moscow, Russia
Moscow, Russia is a beautiful city with plenty of places to visit. Some of the most popular tourist attractions are the Kremlin, Red Square, and Saint Basil's Cathedral. Other great places to see include the Bolshoi Theatre, Gorky Park, and the Tretyakov Gallery. There are also many churches and other historical buildings to explore. Moscow is a lively city with a lot of culture and nightlife. There is something for everyone to enjoy in Moscow.
Moscow Luxury Hotels
Venice, Italy
Venice is one of the most beautiful places on earth. The city is built on a lagoon in northeast Italy and is known for its canals and gondolas. There are many places to visit in Venice, including the Grand Canal, St. Marks Square, and the Rialto Bridge. Venice is also home to many museums, including the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
Venice Luxury Hotels
Vienna, Austria
Vienna, Austria is a city with a long and rich history. There are many places to visit in Vienna, including the Hofburg Palace, the Ringstrasse, and St. Stephen's Cathedral. Vienna is also home to some of the world's best shopping, including the Karntner Strasse and the Graben. Finally, no visit to Vienna is complete without experiencing the city's world-famous nightlife.
Vienna Luxury Hotels
Zurich, Switzerland
Zurich is a marvelous city located in the heart of Switzerland. It is a city that has something to offer for everyone. From amazing restaurants and beautiful architecture to exciting nightlife and gorgeous parks, Zurich has something for everyone. Some of the most popular places to visit in Zurich include the Bahnhofstrasse, which is the city's most famous shopping street, the Lindenhof, which is a beautiful park with amazing views of the city, and Grossmunster, which is a stunning Romanesque church. Zurich is also home to some of the best museums in the world, including the famed Museum of Art and the Swiss National Museum. With its mix of old-world charm and modern amenities, Zurich is a city that is definitely worth exploring.
Zurich Luxury Hotels
Acapulco, Mexico
If you're looking for a Mexican vacation spot with plenty of history and culture to explore, Acapulco is a great option. From the archeological wonders of the ancient city to the stunning coastal views, there's something for everyone in Acapulco. Plus, with its temperate climate, it's a great escape from colder winter weather.
Acapulco Luxury Hotels
Acapulco Luxury Resorts
Acapulco Luxury Villas
Nashville, TN, United States
One of the United States' most interesting places to visit is Nashville, Tennessee. There's plenty to see and do there, from the Grand Ole Opry to the Country Music Hall of Fame. Music is a big part of the city's history and culture, so be sure to catch a show while you're in town. Other popular attractions include the Ryman Auditorium, the Parthenon, and the Jack Daniel's Distillery. Nashville is also a great place to eat, with a wide variety of restaurants serving up everything from barbecue to Mexican food. So if you're looking for an exciting and diverse city to visit, be sure to add Nashville to your list.
Nashville Luxury Hotels
Nashville Luxury Villas
Atlanta, GA, United States
What's not to love about Atlanta? From the iconic Georgia Aquarium to the World of Coke, from the Fox Theatre to Centennial Olympic Park, Atlanta offers a wealth of destinations for tourists. Sports fans will want to check out the new Mercedes-Benz Stadium, and history buffs will enjoy the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum. Braves fans can take a tour of SunTrust Park, and shoppers will enjoy the many boutiques and malls in the city. There's also a great restaurant scene in Atlanta, and music lovers will want to check out the many venues offering live music. Whether you're looking for a fun family vacation spot or a place to explore on your own, Atlanta is a great choice!.
Atlanta Luxury Hotels
Miami, FL, United States
The Magic City is a top tourist destination for a reasonthere are endless things to do in Miami! From exploring the trendy neighborhoods and dazzling beaches to soaking up the Latin culture and nightlife, Miami is jam-packed with amazing places to visit. Here are a few of our favorites: 1. Wynwood Walls: This outdoor art exhibit is a must-see for any art lover. The colorful murals are awe-inspiring and definitely Instagram-worthy. 2. Vizcaya Museum and Gardens: This estate is dripping with luxury and opulence, from the grandiose architecture to the expansive gardens. It's the perfect place for a day of relaxation. 3. South Beach: This world-famous beach is a must-visit for any sun-seeker. The crystal-clear water and soft sand make for the perfect day-long beach getaway. 4. Little Havana: Experience Cuban culture at its best in Little Havana. From delicious food to lively music and dance, there's something for everyone in this vibrant district. 5. Art Deco District: This district is home to Miami's most iconic architecture. Take a stroll down the charming streets and admire the colorful buildings that make Miami so unique.
Miami Luxury Hotels
Miami Luxury Villas
Tokyo, Japan
Tokyo is a must-see destination in Japan. There are endless places to explore in this city - temples, shrines, gardens, and more. The Shinjuku district is a great place to start, with its neon-lit streets and myriad shops and restaurants. For a taste of traditional Japan, visit the Sensoji Temple in Asakusa or the Imperial Palace. Nature lovers will enjoy the Hamarikyu Gardens or the Hama-rikyu Teien Garden. And for a unique experience, take a trip to Mount Fuji.
Tokyo Luxury Hotels
Tokyo Luxury Villas
Buenos Aires, Argentina
There are plenty of places to visit in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Some popular tourist destinations include the obelisk, the Casa Rosada, and the Puerto Madero district. Every barrio (neighborhood) has its own unique culture and flavor. San Telmo, La Boca, and Palermo are some of the most popular barrios. There are also many parks and plazas, such as Plaza de Mayo and Plaza de la Republica, that are worth checking out.
Buenos Aires Luxury Hotels
Hamburg, Germany
One of the most popular tourist destinations in Germany is Hamburg. From the lively and colorful harbor district to the grandiose City Hall, there is plenty to see and do in Hamburg. Some of the other popular places to visit include the Reeperbahn district with its pubs and nightlife, the Planten un Blomen botanical gardens, and the architecturally stunning Rathausmarkt square.
Hamburg Luxury Hotels
Lisbon, Portugal
The capital of Portugal, Lisbon is a city of fascinating contrasts. From its coastal location, visitors can enjoy stunning ocean views, while its hilly, narrow streets are home to a maze of charming traditional homes and lively nightlife. A city of 7 hills, Lisbon is a bustling metropolis with something for everyone. Here are some of the top places to visit: The Belem Tower, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is one of Lisbons most iconic landmarks. This 16th-century fortress and lighthouse is a must-see for visitors. The Alfama district, with its winding streets and tile-roofed homes, is the oldest district in Lisbon. This is the perfect place to get lost and explore the citys history. The Lisbon Zoo is a great place to enjoy a day out with the family, with over 2,000 animals from around the world. The Christ the King statue, located atop a hill in the suburb of Almada, offers impressive views of Lisbon and the river Tagus. The Lisbon Oceanarium, located in the Parque das Nacoes district, is home to more than 12,000 marine creatures and is one of the largest aquariums in Europe.
Lisbon Luxury Hotels
Lisbon Luxury Villas
Malaga, Spain
Malaga is an attractive seaside city in southern Spain with a long history. There are many places to visit in Malaga, including the Gibralfaro Castle, the Alcazaba fortress, and the Malaga Cathedral. Malaga is also home to a variety of museums, including the Picasso Museum. The city is well known for its beaches, and there are many delightful places to relax and enjoy the sun and the sea.
Malaga Luxury Hotels
Malaga Luxury Villas
Munich, Germany
When planning a vacation to Munich, Germany, be sure to include these top places to visit: The Marienplatz is a must-see square in the city center, featuring a beautiful Glockenspiel show and the Old and New Town Halls. The Englisher Garten, Europes largest city park, is a great place for a relaxing stroll or a picnic. OlympiaPark is home to the famous 1972 Olympic Stadium as well as a huge amusement park. The Frauenkirche is a stunning church in the old town with a Glockenspiel of its own. Beer lovers will want to visit the Hofbrauhaus, the worlds most famous beer hall. For a bit of history and culture, check out the LudwigMaximilians-University and the Deutsches Museum. There is so much to see and do in Munich these are just a few highlights!.
Munich Luxury Hotels
Granada, Spain
Granada is a city in southern Spain that is known for its Moorish architecture and history. The city is home to the Alhambra, a palace and fortress that was constructed in the late 1300s. Visitors can also enjoy the citys many churches, including the Cathedral of Granada. Granada is also a convenient base for exploring the other cities and towns in Andalusia.
Granada Luxury Hotels
Bucharest, Romania
Bucharest is a city full of history and culture. There are many places to visit, such as the Palace of Parliament, which is the world's largest civilian building. Other places to visit include the old city center, which is full of charming streets and buildings, and the Botanical Garden, which is the largest botanical garden in Romania.
Bucharest Luxury Hotels
Bologna, Italy
Bologna, Italy is a beautiful city with plenty of places to visit. Some popular tourist destinations include the Piazza Maggiore, the Tower of Asinelli, and the Sanctuary of the Madonna di San Luca. There are also plenty of museums and churches to explore, and the city is full of charming restaurants and cafes. Bologna is an excellent destination for a vacation, and there is something for everyone to enjoy in this amazing city.
Bologna Luxury Hotels
Porto, Portugal
Porto is a port city in Portugal that is well known for its wine. It's also a city with a long and rich history. There are many places to visit in Porto, including the old city center, the Dom Luis I Bridge, and the Clerigos Tower. Porto is also home to the famous Port wine caves, which are a must-visit for wine lovers.
Porto Luxury Hotels
Cologne, Germany
Cologne, located on the Rhine River in western Germany, is a city well worth visiting. The city has a long and rich history, dating back to the time of the Roman Empire. Some of the city's most popular tourist attractions include the Cologne Cathedral, Hohenzollern Bridge, and the RheinEnergieStadion. Additionally, Cologne is home to a wide variety of museums, shops, and restaurants. In fact, the city has been ranked as one of the best places to live in Germany. So, if you're looking for a great European city to visit, be sure to add Cologne to your list.
Cologne Luxury Hotels
Istanbul, Turkey
If you're looking for an exotic and affordable vacation destination, look no further than Istanbul, Turkey. Filled with historical places to visit and bargains to be found, Istanbul offers something for everyone. Be sure to visit the Hagia Sophia, Topkapi Palace, and the Blue Mosque while you're there. Don't forget to bargain for the best prices when shopping in the bazaars, and enjoy some delicious Turkish cuisine while you're at it. Istanbul is sure to leave you with a lasting impression.
Istanbul Luxury Hotels
Istanbul Luxury Villas
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Dubai is a fascinating and exotic city that offers visitors a mix of traditional Middle Eastern culture and modern, cosmopolitan life. There are plenty of places to visit in Dubai, from the towering skyscrapers of Downtown Dubai to the luxury shopping malls and luxurious hotels of the Palm Jumeirah. Don't miss a chance to experience an Arabian night out on an epic dhow cruise, or take a trip out into the Arabian Desert to see the stunning sand dunes.
Dubai Luxury Hotels
Dubai Luxury Resorts
Dubai Luxury Villas
Antwerp, Belgium
Antwerp is a city located in the Flemish region of Belgium. It is the capital of the province of Antwerp and has a population of over half a million people. Antwerp is a popular tourist destination due to its many historical buildings, museums, and art galleries. Some of the most popular places to visit in Antwerp are the Cathedral of Our Lady, the City Hall, the Rubenshuis, and the Antwerp Zoo.
Antwerp Luxury Hotels
Lyon, France
Lyon is a beautiful city in the south of France that is full of culture and places to visit. Some of the most popular places to visit in Lyon are the Basilica of Notre Dame de Fourviere, the Place Bellecour, and the Vieux Lyon. The Basilica of Notre Dame de Fourviere is a beautiful cathedral that is a must-see when visiting Lyon. The Place Bellecour is a large square in the heart of Lyon that is full of restaurants and cafes. The Vieux Lyon is a district in Lyon that is full of old buildings and is a great place to wander around and take in the sights.
Lyon Luxury Hotels
Athens, Greece
If you find yourself in Athens, there are definitely some spots you won't want to miss. The Acropolis, Parthenon, and Olympic Stadium are all essential stops, but there are plenty of others, too. If you're looking for a bit of history, the National Archaeological Museum is a must-see, while nature lovers will enjoy a visit to the botanical gardens. If you're looking to relax, take a walk along the beach in Glyfada or head to the Plaka district for a charming and picturesque setting. No matter what you're interested in, Athens has something for you.
Athens Luxury Hotels
Athens Luxury Villas
Helsinki, Finland
While in Helsinki, make sure to visit these popular tourist destinations: The Senate Square and Lutheran Cathedral The Sibelius Monument Ateneum Art Museum Market Square Helsinki Zoo.
Helsinki Luxury Hotels
Vilnius, Lithuania
The capital of Lithuania, Vilnius, is a picturesque city with a rich history. The old town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is full of charming churches, narrow streets, and pretty squares. There are also lots of museums and other places of interest to visit, including the Hill of Crosses, Gediminas Tower, and the Presidential Palace. Vilnius is a great city to explore on foot, and there are plenty of cafes, restaurants, and bars to enjoy in the evening.
Vilnius Luxury Hotels
Reykjavik, Iceland
A city of remote beauty, Reykjavik is teeming with interesting places to visit. One of the worlds most northern capitals, Reykjavik offers stunning landscapes and a wealth of cultural experiences. From the iconic Hallgrimskirkja church to the popular Golden Circle tour, theres plenty to see and do in Reykjavik. Be sure to check out the citys lively nightlife scene, too you wont be disappointed!.
Reykjavik Luxury Hotels
Glasgow, United Kingdom
Some of the most popular places to visit in Glasgow include the Gallery of Modern Art, the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, the Riverside Museum, and the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre. There are also many wonderful parks and gardens to explore, including the Botanic Gardens and Glasgow Green. For those interested in history and architecture, there are many fascinating old buildings to see, such as the Glasgow Cathedral and the University of Glasgow. And for those looking for a lively nightlife, Glasgow has no shortage of pubs, clubs, and restaurants.
Glasgow Luxury Hotels
Los Angeles, CA, United States
As the birthplace of Hollywood and home to some of the world's most recognisable landmarks, there's no shortage of places to visit in Los Angeles. Start by exploring the city's iconic neighbourhoods like Beverly Hills and Hollywood, then venture out to attractions like the Griffith Observatory, Venice Beach and Disneyland. And don't forget to savour the city's world-famous cultural scene, with its abundance of museums, theatres and restaurants.
Los Angeles Luxury Hotels
Los Angeles Luxury Villas
San Diego, CA, United States
San Diego is a city located in California and is a major tourist destination. One of the main reasons people visit the city is for its many beaches. Coronado Beach, Mission Beach, and Pacific Beach are some of the most popular and are all within close proximity to the city center. Other attractions in San Diego include the San Diego Zoo, SeaWorld San Diego, and the USS Midway Museum. Restaurants, bars, and shopping can be found throughout the city, and world-renowned museums, like the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, are also located in San Diego.
San Diego Luxury Hotels
San Diego Luxury Resorts
San Diego Luxury Villas
Washington, DC, United States
Washington, D.C. is a city full of history and places to visit. Some popular places to visit are the Lincoln Memorial, the White House, and the Smithsonian. D.C. is also home to a number of monuments and memorials, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Korean War Veterans Memorial. There are also a number of museums in D.C., like the American History Museum and the National Air and Space Museum.
Washington Luxury Hotels
Cancun, Mexico
Cancun is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Mexico. Aside from its beautiful beaches, there are plenty of places to visit and things to do in Cancun. Some of the most popular attractions include the ancient ruins of Chichen Itza, the eco-park Xcaret, and the nightclubs and bars in the resort district.
Cancun Luxury Hotels
Cancun Luxury Resorts
Cancun Luxury Villas
Virginia Beach, VA, United States
Virginia Beach is one of the top tourist destinations on the East Coast. From the Virginia Beach Boardwalk to the miles of sandy beaches, there's something for everyone to enjoy. There are also plenty of restaurants, shops, and other attractions to keep visitors busy. Some of the most popular places to visit in Virginia Beach include: The Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center : This aquarium is home to more than 20,000 animals, including sharks, dolphins, and rays. : This aquarium is home to more than 20,000 animals, including sharks, dolphins, and rays. The Virginia Beach Boardwalk: This 3.5-mile boardwalk is one of the most popular attractions in Virginia Beach. It features a wide variety of shops, restaurants, and amusements. This 3.5-mile boardwalk is one of the most popular attractions in Virginia Beach. It features a wide variety of shops, restaurants, and amusements. First Landing State Park: This park offers miles of hiking and biking trails, as well as a beachfront area for swimming and sunbathing. This park offers miles of hiking and biking trails, as well as a beachfront area for swimming and sunbathing. Cape Henry Lighthouse: This lighthouse is one of the oldest in the country and offers stunning views of the Chesapeake Bay. There are plenty of other things to do in Virginia Beach, including dolphin and whale watching tours, kayaking, and golfing. Whether you're looking for a fun family vacation or a romantic getaway, Virginia Beach is sure to please.
Virginia Beach Luxury Hotels
Virginia Beach Luxury Resorts
Beijing, China
If you're looking for an amazing cultural experience, be sure to add Beijing, China to your travel bucket list! With beautiful temples, charming hutongs (traditional alleyways), and a lively food scene, there's something for everyone in this bustling city. Plus, Beijing is home to some of the most iconic attractions in China, like the Great Wall of China and the Forbidden City. So if you're looking for an unforgettable East Asian adventure, be sure to add Beijing to your list!.
Beijing Luxury Hotels
Seoul, South Korea
Seoul is a metropolitan city that is home to over 10 million people. It is a city full of culture, history, and a vibrant nightlife. There are plenty of places to visit in Seoul, including the Gyeongbokgung Palace, Changdeokgung Palace, and N Seoul Tower. The Jeongdongne district is a must-see for anyone interested in art and culture, and the Itaewon district is a great place to go for a night on the town.
Seoul Luxury Hotels
South Lake Tahoe, CA, United States
Known for its dramatic lake and mountain scenery, South Lake Tahoe offers visitors plenty of places to visit and things to do. Some of the most popular attractions include floating down the river on a tube, hiking the trails in the summer and skiing or snowboarding the slopes in the winter. The city also has a variety of restaurants and nightlife options, as well as casinos for those looking to try their luck.
South Lake Tahoe Luxury Hotels
South Lake Tahoe Luxury Resorts
Daytona Beach, FL, United States
Daytona Beach is a city in Volusia County, Florida, United States. It is approximately 40 miles northeast of Orlando, and 85 miles southeast of Jacksonville. The city is known as "The World's Most Famous Beach." Daytona Beach is a principal city of the Fun Coast region of Florida. The Daytona Beach area is a popular tourist destination. It is well known for its beaches, sports events, and motorsports. Daytona Beach was the birthplace of NASCAR and home to its first track, Daytona International Speedway. Dayton Beach also features a large number of tourist-oriented businesses, such as motels, restaurants, and bars.
Daytona Beach Luxury Hotels
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
The coastline of Rio de Janeiro is breathtaking, and the views from Christ the Redeemer and Sugar Loaf Mountain are unforgettable. Rio's world-famous beaches are the perfect place to relax and enjoy the sun and the surf. The city's rich culture and history can be experienced in its many museums and in the lively nightlife. Rio is also a great place to shop for souvenirs.
Rio de Janeiro Luxury Hotels
Rio de Janeiro Luxury Villas
Jaco, Costa Rica
Jaco is a town on the Central Pacific Coast of Costa Rica. It's about an hour drive from San Jose and is a popular spot for surfers, sunbathers, and tourists. There are a number of beaches in the area, as well as restaurants, bars, and hotels. If you're looking for a place to relax and enjoy the Costa Rican sun and beaches, Jaco is a great option.
Jaco Luxury Hotels
Oslo, Norway
Oslo, Norway is a city with plenty of places to visit. You can find the peace and tranquility of nature parks and green spaces, experience the city's vibrant nightlife, or take in the historical and cultural sights. Here are a few of the top places to visit in Oslo: The Royal Palace: Oslo's Royal Palace is the official residence of Norway's king and queen. The palace is open to the public year-round, and offers a glimpse into the lives of the royal family. Oslo's Royal Palace is the official residence of Norway's king and queen. The palace is open to the public year-round, and offers a glimpse into the lives of the royal family. Vigeland Park: Considered one of Oslo's most popular tourist destinations, Vigeland Park is home to over 200 sculptures by Gustav Vigeland. The park is a great place to spend a sunny day outdoors. Considered one of Oslo's most popular tourist destinations, Vigeland Park is home to over 200 sculptures by Gustav Vigeland. The park is a great place to spend a sunny day outdoors. The Maritime Museum: This museum is home to a variety of exhibits on Norway's maritime history. Visitors can explore everything from Viking ships to modern submarines. This museum is home to a variety of exhibits on Norway's maritime history. Visitors can explore everything from Viking ships to modern submarines. The National Gallery: The National Gallery is Norway's largest art museum, and home to a vast collection of paintings and sculptures from the country's most famous artists. The National Gallery is Norway's largest art museum, and home to a vast collection of paintings and sculptures from the country's most famous artists. Aker Brygge: Aker Brygge is a popular waterfront district in Oslo, home to a variety of bars, restaurants, and shops. The area is a great place to people watch and enjoy the view of the Oslo Fjord.
Oslo Luxury Hotels
Lima, Peru
If you're looking for a city that's bursting with culture and flavor, Lima, Peru is the place for you! This vibrant destination is home to some of the most amazing places to visit in all of South America. From ancient ruins to lush rainforests, there's something for everyone in Lima. Here are just a few of the must-see attractions in this amazing city: The Larco Museum is one of Lima's top tourist destinations. This incredible museum is home to one of the largest collections of pre-Columbian art in the world. The Historic Center of Lima is a must-see for any history lover. This vibrant area is home to some of the oldest architecture in Lima, including the iconic San Francisco Monastery. If you're looking for a little bit of jungle in the city, head to the Parque de la Reserva. This lush park is home to beautiful gardens, a zoo, and even a butterfly farm! No trip to Lima would be complete without a visit to Machu Picchu. This ancient Inca citadel is one of the most iconic sites in all of South America.
Lima Luxury Hotels
Ankara, Turkey
Ankara is the cultural and political center of Turkey. The city is home to many museums, including the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, and is a popular destination for tourists. The Citadel, the Ataturk Mausoleum, and the War of Independence Museum are all popular tourist destinations in Ankara. The city is also home to a vibrant nightlife and is a popular destination for students.
Ankara Luxury Hotels
Birmingham, United Kingdom
There are plenty of great places to visit in Birmingham, United Kingdom. Some of the most popular places to go include the Birmingham Botanical Gardens, the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, and the Black Country Living Museum. These places are all great for tourists, as they offer a variety of attractions, including beautiful gardens, interesting art, and a recreation of an old-fashioned town. Additionally, there are plenty of other great places to visit in Birmingham, such as the Jewellery Quarter and the German Christmas Market.
Birmingham Luxury Hotels
York, United Kingdom
With a rich history that spans back over 1,000 years, York is a must-visit destination in the United Kingdom. Explore the city's medieval architecture and narrow cobblestone streets, or enjoy a leisurely walk along the River Ouse. Visitors can also enjoy a variety of cultural experiences, such as the York Minster cathedral, the Jorvik Viking Centre, and the National Railway Museum. There are also plenty of shops and restaurants to enjoy in York.
York Luxury Hotels
Inverness, United Kingdom
Inverness, Scotland is a must-see destination on any traveler's list. Filled with rolling green hills, historical sites, and plenty of outdoor activities, there's something for everyone in this charming town. Start by exploring the city center, which is home to a variety of shops and restaurants. Make sure to check out the Inverness Castle, which offers commanding views of the area, and the Inverness Cathedral, a beautiful example of medieval architecture. Outside of the city center, there are plenty of other attractions to explore. The Loch Ness Monster is said to make its home in the loch here, and visitors can take boat tours to hunt for the mythical creature. If you're looking for a more active adventure, take a hike in the hills or go fishing on the loch. No matter what you choose to do, Inverness is a beautiful and welcoming town that is sure to charm you.
Inverness Luxury Hotels
Marseille, France
The Vieux Port (Old Harbor) is the oldest port in France. It is a beautiful place to visit with its sailboats, restaurants, and cafes. The Notre Dame de la Garde Basilica is also worth a visit. It offers stunning views of the city. If you're looking for a more lively atmosphere, head to the La Canebiere. It's a wide avenue with plenty of shops and restaurants.
Marseille Luxury Hotels
Marseille Luxury Villas
Honolulu, HI, United States
Honolulu is a city located on the island of Oahu in Hawaii, United States. It is the most populous city in the state of Hawaii and the county seat of the City and County of Honolulu. Honolulu is the cultural, commercial, and financial center of Hawaii. Waikiki Beach is one of the most famous beaches in the world and is located in Honolulu. Other places to visit in Honolulu include Diamond Head, the USS Arizona Memorial, and Hanauma Bay.
Honolulu Luxury Hotels
Honolulu Luxury Resorts
Honolulu Luxury Villas
Bar Harbor, ME, United States
Famous for lobster and stunning ocean views, Bar Harbor is a popular destination in Maine. There are plenty of things to do in the town and its surroundings, including hiking, biking, whale watching, and exploring Acadia National Park.
Bar Harbor Luxury Hotels
Colorado Springs, CO, United States
There are many places to visit in Colorado Springs. Garden of the Gods is a popular park with beautiful rock formations. Pike's Peak is a 14,115 foot mountain that offers great views and outdoor activities. The Broadmoor is a world-renowned resort with lovely gardens and a championship golf course. Royal Gorge Bridge is the world's highest suspension bridge and a popular tourist spot.
Colorado Springs Luxury Hotels
Fort Myers Beach, FL, United States
Just an hours drive from the Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers, Fort Myers Beach is a popular tourist spot, especially in the winter when the snowbirds migrate down. The seven-mile-long beach is known for its white sand and clear water and is a popular spot for swimming, sunbathing, fishing, and kayaking. There are also a number of restaurants and bars in the area, as well as a few stores.
Fort Myers Beach Luxury Hotels
Biloxi, MS, United States
There are plenty of places to explore in Biloxi, Mississippi from the citys iconic Beaches to the picturesque Bay Saint Louis. Venture into the citys downtown area to check out the many shops and restaurants, or take a walk along the shoreline. No matter what you choose to do, youre sure to have a great time in Biloxi.
Biloxi Luxury Hotels
Palermo, Italy
If you're looking for a city with a rich and diverse history, Palermo is the place for you. This coastal city in Italy is teeming with medieval architecture, churches, and cathedrals. Be sure to check out the Teatro Massimo, the largest opera house in Europe, and the Palazzo dei Normanni, the seat of the Sicilian government. Don't miss out on the city's vibrant nightlife and vast array of restaurants that serve up some of the best food in the country.
Palermo Luxury Hotels
Palermo Luxury Villas
Manila, Philippines
The capital of the Philippines, Manila is a fascinating city with a rich history and a vibrant culture. There are plenty of places to visit in Manila, including the walled city of Intramuros, the Rizal Park, and the Manila Bay. The city is also home to a large number of churches, including the Manila Cathedral and the San Agustin Church. Manila is a great city to explore on foot, and there are plenty of restaurants and shops to enjoy.
Manila Luxury Hotels
Zermatt, Switzerland
Zermatt is an alpine village in the canton of Valais in Switzerland. It is famous for its ski resort, mountaineering and hiking trails. The views of the Matterhorn from Zermatt are iconic. The village is car-free, making it a cyclists' and pedestrians' paradise. There are many places to visit in Zermatt, including the village's beautiful churches, impressive museums, and great restaurants.
Zermatt Luxury Hotels
Basel, Switzerland
Basel is a city located in northwestern Switzerland on the river Rhine. Basel has a population of about 176,000 and is the third most populous city in Switzerland. Basel has many interesting places to visit, including the Basel Munster, the Basel Rathaus (town hall), the Basel Zoo, and the Munsterhof, the old town square. Basel also has a number of art museums, including the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Fondation Beyeler, and the Schaulager. Basel is a great city to visit, and I highly recommend it!.
Basel Luxury Hotels
Copenhagen, Denmark
There are a number of places to visit in Copenhagen, Denmark. Some of the most popular tourist destinations include Tivoli Gardens, Nyhavn, and the Rosenborg Castle Gardens. Tivoli Gardens is a beautiful amusement park that has something for everyone. It is perfect for a day of fun with family or friends. Nyhavn is a charming canal district that is popular for its brightly colored houses and lively atmosphere. Visitors can enjoy a relaxing cruise down the canal or take a seat in one of the many cafes and restaurants. The Rosenborg Castle Gardens are home to a majestic castle as well as beautifully landscaped gardens. There is plenty to see and do in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Copenhagen Luxury Hotels
Steamboat Springs, CO, United States
Steamboat Springs is located in northwestern Colorado. The town is named for the steamboats that traveled up the Yampa River in the 1800s. Today, the town is a popular tourist destination, known for its skiing, snowboarding, hiking, and rafting.
Steamboat Springs Luxury Hotels
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Abu Dhabi is the capital of the United Arab Emirates and is home to many tourist attractions. Some popular places to visit in Abu Dhabi include the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, the Ferrari World Theme Park, and the Yas Island Waterpark. There are also a number of museums and shopping malls in Abu Dhabi, making it a great destination for those looking for a mix of culture and leisure.
Abu Dhabi Luxury Hotels
Abu Dhabi Luxury Resorts
Abu Dhabi Luxury Villas
Bogota, Colombia
There's a lot to see and do in Bogota. Some of the top places to visit include the historical La Candelaria district, the cobblestone streets of Plaza de Bolivar, the Monserrate mountain, the Bogota Botanical Garden, and the Gold Museum. La Candelaria is home to many brightly-colored colonial buildings, churches, and plazas. Plaza de Bolivar is the center of Bogota and is surrounded by important landmarks like the Presidential Palace and the National Capitol. The Monserrate mountain is a popular tourist destination due to its stunning views of Bogota. The Bogota Botanical Garden is the largest in Colombia and features a wide variety of plants and trees. The Gold Museum is home to the largest collection of Pre-Columbian gold artifacts in the world.
Bogota Luxury Hotels
Cebu, Philippines
Due to its location and its rich history, there are plenty of places to visit in Cebu. Some of the most popular tourist destinations include the Cebu Taoist Temple, the Fort San Pedro, the Yap-San Diego Ancestral House, and the Magellan's Cross.
Cebu Luxury Hotels
Cebu Luxury Resorts
Lagos, Portugal
Lagos is a small town in Portugal with a population of around 22,000. It's located in the Algarve region and is a popular tourist destination. Some of the places to visit in Lagos are the beaches, the old town, and the Marina. The beaches are beautiful and there are a lot of them to choose from. The old town is a maze of narrow streets and alleyways with lots of shops and restaurants. The Marina is a great place to walk around and watch the boats.
Lagos Luxury Hotels
Medellin, Colombia
Some places to visit in Medellin, Colombia are: the Botanical Garden, the Ethnographic Museum, the Jardin Botanico, the Metropolitan Cathedral, the Park of Lights, and the San Pedro Claver Church.
Medellin Luxury Hotels
Genoa, Italy
While there are many places to visit in Genoa, one of the must-sees is the city's cathedral. Dedicated to San Lorenzo, the church features an intricate Gothic facade and a Renaissance interior. If you're looking for a place to take in some stunning views, head to the Genoa Aquarium, which is located on the promenade stretching along the city's harbor.
Genoa Luxury Hotels
Hoi An, Vietnam
Hoi An is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Vietnam. Its a bridge town thats best explored on foot. The narrow streets are a mix of Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese architecture. There are tailors, artisans, and lantern shops galore. The food is also some of the best in Vietnam. Be sure to try the local specialties, like Cao Lau and White Rose dumplings.
Hoi An Luxury Hotels
Hoi An Luxury Resorts
Baku, Azerbaijan
Baku, Azerbaijan is a city with a lot of culture and history. There are a lot of places to visit, like the Palace of the Shirvanshahs and the Maiden Tower. There are also a lot of great restaurants, like the Flame Club, which has a great atmosphere and delicious food.
Baku Luxury Hotels
San Luis Obispo, CA, United States
San Luis Obispo is a city located in the central coast of California. It's known for its natural beauty, relaxed vibe, and abundance of things to do. Some of the top places to visit in San Luis Obispo include the Madonna Inn, Hearst Castle, and the Paso Robles wine country. The city is also home to a variety of beaches, parks, and other attractions. In addition, San Luis Obispo is a great place to live, with plenty of restaurants, shops, and other amenities.
San Luis Obispo Luxury Hotels
Colombo, Sri Lanka
Colombo is the largest city and commercial capital of Sri Lanka. The city is located on the west coast of the island and is the administrative, commercial, and industrial center of Sri Lanka. Colombo is also the center of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, with numerous Buddhist temples. There are a number of places to visit in Colombo, including the Galle Face Green, the Dutch fort, the Pettah Bazaar, and the Sri Lankan National Museum.
Colombo Luxury Hotels
Yogyakarta, Indonesia
The city of Yogyakarta in Indonesia is home to some of the most stunning temples and historical landmarks in the country. The city is also a great place to enjoy traditional Javanese culture and cuisine. Some of the must-see places in Yogyakarta include the Borobudur Temple, the Prambanan Temple, and the Sultan's Palace.
Yogyakarta Luxury Hotels
Cefalu, Italy
Looking for a beautiful and historic place to visit in Italy? Look no further than Cefalu. This town is teeming with history and stunning architecture, and its location on the coast makes it the perfect place to relax and take in the stunning scenery. Don't miss the Duomo di Cefalu, a 12th century Norman church that is definitely worth a visit, or the Palazzo dei Normanni, a former royal palace.
Cefalu Luxury Hotels
San Jose, CA, United States
San Jose, California, is home to a variety of tourist destinations. Some popular places to visit include the Winchester Mystery House, the Tech Museum of Innovation, and the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum. There are also a number of lovely parks, such as Kelley Park and Plaza de Cesar Chavez, that are well worth a visit. San Jose is also home to a number of great restaurants, so be sure to check out the local cuisine. Whatever your interests, San Jose has something to offer visitors.
San Jose Luxury Hotels
Hong Kong, China
Hong Kong is one of the most popular destinations for tourists in China. There are many places to visit in Hong Kong, including the Hong Kong Disneyland Resort, Victoria Peak, and the Temple Street Night Market. Hong Kong is also a great place to shop, with many high-end malls and markets.
Hong Kong Luxury Hotels
Hong Kong Luxury Resorts
Orlando, FL, United States
Orlando is a city in the central region of Florida, in the United States. The city is the county seat of Orange County, and the center of the metropolitan area also known as Greater Orlando. Orlando is well known for its theme parks, including Walt Disney World, Universal Orlando Resort, and SeaWorld Orlando. Other tourist destinations in Orlando include the Holy Land Experience, the Orlando Science Center, and the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art. Orlando is also home to the University of Central Florida, one of the largest universities in the United States.
Orlando Luxury Hotels
Orlando Luxury Resorts
Orlando Luxury Villas
Philadelphia, PA, United States
If youre looking for a place thats rich in history and culture, Philadelphia is the place for you. The city is home to numerous iconic landmarks, including the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. Theres also a great variety of museums and other attractions to explore, such as the Philadelphia Zoo and the Please Touch Museum. And, of course, Philly is the birthplace of Americas favorite sandwich, the cheesesteak. So why not visit Americas most historic city and see for yourself what all the fuss is about?.
Philadelphia Luxury Hotels
Nice, France
France is known for its many beautiful places to visit, and Nice is no exception. With its stunning coastline and mild climate, Nice is a popular tourist destination. Some of the most popular places to visit in Nice include the Promenade des Anglais, the Castle Hill, and the Old Town. There is also a wide variety of shops and restaurants to enjoy in Nice. If you're looking for a beautiful and relaxing place to visit in France, Nice is definitely worth considering.
Nice Luxury Hotels
Nice Luxury Villas
Singapore, Singapore
Singapore is a popular tourist destination, brimming with cultural and natural attractions. From award-winning restaurants to serene gardens and pristine beaches, there is much to explore in this diverse city-state. Here are some of the top places to visit in Singapore: 1. Marina Bay: This iconic waterfront district is home to stunning architecture, world-class landmarks, and a vibrant nightlife. 2. Gardens by the Bay: These stunning gardens feature a mix of plants from around the world, as well as towering sculptures and a biodome. 3. Chinatown: This lively district is home to traditional Chinese shops and restaurants, as well as vibrant street markets. 4. Little India: This neighborhood is known for its vibrant culture and colorful temples. 5. Sentosa Island: This resort island is home to sandy beaches, lush rainforests, and a variety of entertainment options.
Singapore Luxury Hotels
Singapore Luxury Resorts
Nottingham, United Kingdom
Nottingham is a city in the East Midlands of England. It is one of the United Kingdom's major cities, with a population of over 321,000. The city is home to two universities, Queen's Medical Centre, and seven football grounds. Nottingham is known for its lace-making and bicycle manufacturing. The city has a rich history, dating back to the Bronze Age. There are plenty of places to visit in Nottingham, including the Nottingham Castle, the Sherwood Forest, and the National Ice Centre. The city also has a lively nightlife, with a variety of pubs and bars.
Nottingham Luxury Hotels
Cannes, France
Cannes is a city located in the south of France. Some of the places to visit in Cannes are the Palais des Festivals et des Congres, the Boulevard de la Croisette, and Le Suquet.
Cannes Luxury Hotels
Cannes Luxury Villas
Park City, UT, United States
Park City, Utah, offers visitors a wealth of places to visit and things to do. Main Street, with its charming shops and restaurants, is a must-see. The Park City Museum tells the town's fascinating history, and the Park City Utah Temple is a beautiful sight. For outdoor enthusiasts, there's plenty of skiing and snowboarding in the winter and hiking and mountain biking in the summer. And don't forget to visit the Olympic Park, where the 2002 Winter Olympics were held.
Park City Luxury Hotels
Park City Luxury Resorts
Port Angeles, WA, United States
If you're looking for a quaint, small town to visit in the US, Port Angeles is worth a stop. Located in the state of Washington, it's right on the Pacific coast with stunning views of the Olympic Mountains. There's plenty of things to do in the area, from hiking and fishing to whale watching and enjoying the local restaurants and breweries.
Port Angeles Luxury Hotels
Fort Lauderdale, FL, United States
If you're looking for a fun-filled Florida getaway, look no further than Fort Lauderdale! With its miles of pristine beaches, world-famous shopping and vibrant nightlife, there's something for everyone in this seaside city. Here are some of the top places to visit in Fort Lauderdale: Las Olas Boulevard: This popular shopping and dining district is home to some of Fort Lauderdale's most upscale boutiques and restaurants. The Beach: With its wide, sandy beaches and crystal-clear waters, Fort Lauderdale's beach is a major draw for visitors. The Everglades: Just a short drive from Fort Lauderdale, the Everglades are home to an abundance of wildlife, including alligators, bald eagles and manatees. The Broward Center for the Performing Arts: This world-class performing arts center is home to a variety of theater, dance and music performances. So what are you waiting for? Book your trip to Fort Lauderdale today!.
Fort Lauderdale Luxury Hotels
Fort Lauderdale Luxury Resorts
Myrtle Beach, SC, United States
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina is a popular tourist destination. There are plenty of places to visit in the area, including amusement parks, beaches, and golf courses. Myrtle Beach also has a lively nightlife, with plenty of bars and restaurants.
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Myrtle Beach Luxury Resorts
Salzburg, Austria
Salzburg is one of the most visited places in Austria. It is a city rich in history and culture. There are many places to visit, such as the Hohensalzburg Fortress, the Mirabell Palace, and the Salzburg Cathedral. There are also many hiking trails and parks to enjoy.
Salzburg Luxury Hotels
Pattaya, Thailand
Pattaya is an amazing city with plenty of places to visit and things to do. One of the most popular tourist destinations in Thailand, Pattaya offers something for everyone. There are lovely beaches, interesting temples, great shopping, and exciting nightlife. With its moderate climate and affordable prices, it's no wonder Pattaya is a favorite destination for tourists from all over the world.
Pattaya Luxury Hotels
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Pattaya Luxury Villas
Dallas, TX, United States
Dallas is a city located in the U.S. state of Texas. It is the ninth most populous city in the United States and the third most populous city in the state of Texas. Dallas is also the main city of the fourth most populous metropolitan area in the United States. The city's prominence arose from its historical importance as a center for the oil and cotton industries, and its position as a major transportation hub for the South. Dallas is home to the Dallas Cowboys of the National Football League and the Dallas Mavericks of the National Basketball Association. The city's economy is primarily based on banking, commerce, telecommunications, technology, energy, healthcare and medical research, and transportation. The city is home to the world's largest airline hub and the third largest cargo airport in the United States.
Dallas Luxury Hotels
Kolkata, India
Kolkata, also known as Calcutta, is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. The city is located on the east bank of the Hooghly River. It is the second most populous city in India, after Mumbai, and the third most populous metropolitan area in India, after Mumbai and Delhi. The city is notable for its colonial architecture, art and culture, and for its overwhelming poverty. Kolkata is home to the Indian Museum, the Calcutta Stock Exchange, the National Library of India, and the Indian Statistical Institute.
Kolkata Luxury Hotels
San Antonio, TX, United States
San Antonio is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Texas. There are plenty of places to visit in this city, from the well-known River Walk to the exquisite Spanish missions. If you're looking for a fun place to spend the day, you can't go wrong with San Antonio.
San Antonio Luxury Hotels
Seattle, WA, United States
There are many wonderful places to visit in Seattle, Washington. Some of the most popular attractions include Pike Place Market, the Seattle Space Needle, and the Museum of Pop Culture. There are also many parks and gardens, such as Volunteer Park and Seattle Chinese Garden, as well as plenty of restaurants and shops. Located on the other side of the world, Western Australia is a great place to visit for those looking for something different. Some of the most popular attractions include Rottnest Island, the Margaret River region, and Monkey Mia. There are also plenty of beautiful parks and gardens, such as Kings Park and Botanic Garden, as well as restaurants and shops.
Seattle Luxury Hotels
Liverpool, United Kingdom
Liverpool is a city located in North West England and is one of the largest metropolitan areas in the United Kingdom. The city is known for its football teams Liverpool and Everton, The Beatles, and its maritime history. Liverpool is a popular tourist destination and is home to various tourist attractions including Mersey Ferry, Liverpool Cathedral, and Albert Dock.
Liverpool Luxury Hotels
Malmo, Sweden
Malmo is Sweden's third largest city with a population of over 310,000. It is located in the province of Scania on the country's southern tip. Malmo is a vibrant city with a strong arts and cultural scene. There are plenty of places to visit in Malmo, including the Malmo Castle, the Botanical Gardens, and the Turning Torso skyscraper. Malmo is also home to a large shopping district and a lively nightlife.
Malmo Luxury Hotels
Gothenburg, Sweden
Goteborg, Sweden's second largest city, is a major port on the country's west coast. It's a popular tourist destination, known for its lively nightlife, beautiful architecture and delicious seafood. Some of the city's highlights include the Liseberg amusement park, the Botanical Garden, and the charming old town district. Goteborg is also home to a large number of museums, including the Volvo Museum, the Maritime Museum and the Universeum science center.
Gothenburg Luxury Hotels
Ljubljana, Slovenia
Ljubljana is the capital city of Slovenia and is a city full of culture and history. There are many places to visit in Ljubljana, such as the castle, the old town, and the cathedral. The city is also home to many museums, art galleries, and parks. Ljubljana is a great city to explore on foot, and there are many restaurants and cafes to enjoy.
Ljubljana Luxury Hotels
Sydney, NSW, Australia
Australia is a vast country with plenty of stunning places to visit, but Sydney is undoubtedly one of the most popular tourist destinations on the continent. From the iconic Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge to the beautiful beaches and lush national parks, there's something for everyone in this lively city. There's also a thriving food and nightlife scene, so you'll never run out of things to do in Sydney.
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Sydney Luxury Villas
Melbourne, VIC, Australia
There's a lot to love about Melbourne its lively arts and culture scene, its parks and gardens, its diverse range of restaurants and cafes, and its stunning architecture. Here are some of the best places to visit in Melbourne: - Federation Square: This iconic square is a great place to people-watch and take in the city's impressive architecture. It's also home to a number of museums and galleries, including the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and the National Gallery of Victoria. - Queen Victoria Market: This vibrant market is a must-visit for foodies and shoppers alike. It's the largest open-air market in the Southern Hemisphere, and offers a vast array of fresh produce, meat, seafood, and souvenirs. - Melbourne Cricket Ground: If you're a sports fan, be sure to check out the Melbourne Cricket Ground, which is the largest cricket stadium in the world. It's also home to the Australian Football League, and has hosted a number of major sporting events, including the Commonwealth Games and the Rugby Union World Cup. - Royal Botanic Gardens: These beautiful gardens are a great place to relax and take in some of Melbourne's natural beauty. They're home to a number of different gardens, including the Australian Garden, the Sculpture Garden, and the Japanese Garden.
Melbourne Luxury Hotels
Melbourne Luxury Villas
Vancouver, BC, Canada
The top places to visit in Vancouver are Stanley Park, Granville Island, Gastown, and Chinatown. These are all must-see attractions that offer an array of activities, scenery, and history. Stanley Park is a world-famous urban park that features greenery, beaches, gardens, and a stunning view of the North Shore Mountains. Granville Island is a vibrant neighbourhood with unique shops, restaurants, and art galleries. Gastown is the city's oldest neighbourhood and is home to charming cobblestone streets and funky boutiques. Chinatown is one of the largest and most vibrant Chinatowns in North America and offers delicious food, interesting history, and vibrant culture.
Vancouver Luxury Hotels
Toronto, ON, Canada
From the CN Tower and Hockey Hall of Fame to the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Distillery District, there are plenty of amazing places to visit in Toronto, Canada. With something for everyone, Toronto is a great city to explore. So what are you waiting for? Start planning your trip today!.
Toronto Luxury Hotels
Montreal, QC, Canada
Montreal is a vibrant city with something for everyone. There are plenty of places to visit, including the Notre Dame Basilica, the Olympic Stadium, and Mount Royal. The city is also home to a lively arts and culture scene, with theatres, art galleries, and music venues. Montreal is a great place to visit year-round, with festivals and events happening throughout the year.
Montreal Luxury Hotels
Seville, Spain
Seville is one of the most visited places in Spain for a plethora of reasons: its stunning architecture, tapas bars, flamenco and great weather. The Giralda Tower is a must-see when in Seville as is the Plaza de Espana. Andalusian culture is heavily present in the city and is best experienced by wandering the narrow streets and alleyways, popping into a lively tapas bar for a drink and some snacks or enjoying a flamenco show.
Seville Luxury Hotels
Seville Luxury Villas
Ocean City, MD, United States
Ocean City is a seaside resort town in Worcester County, Maryland, on the Atlantic coast. It is well known for its long promenade, its fishing, and its crab cuisine. There are plenty of places to visit in Ocean City, including the boardwalk, amusement rides, shopping, and restaurants. You can also visit the Assateague Island National Seashore, which is home to wild horses, or head to the nearby town of Berlin for more shopping and dining options.
Ocean City Luxury Hotels
Cambridge, MA, United States
If you're looking for a quintessential New England town to visit, Cambridge, Massachusetts is the place for you. With its elaborate architecture and Colonial history, Cambridge is a lively town with plenty of things to see and do - perfect for a weekend getaway. Some of the places you won't want to miss include the Harvard University campus, the charming and lively shops and restaurants in Harvard Square, and the leafy paths of the Cambridge Common.
Cambridge Luxury Hotels
Laguna Beach, CA, United States
Laguna Beach, California is a place known for its stunningly beautiful coastline, excellent restaurants, and art galleries. But there's more to Laguna Beach than meets the eye. Here are some of the best places to visit in Laguna Beach: Crystal Cove State Park: This state park is known for its coves, tidepools, and bluffs. It's a great place to go hiking, swimming, and snorkeling. Heisler Park: This park is a great place for a walk or a picnic. It's also home to some of the best views of the Pacific Coast. Downtown Laguna Beach: This charming downtown area is home to art galleries, boutique shops, and excellent restaurants. Aliso Beach: This beach is known for its excellent surfing and swimming conditions. It's also a great place to take a walk or enjoy a picnic.
Laguna Beach Luxury Hotels
Hot Springs, AR, United States
In downtown Hot Springs, Arkansas, you'll find historic buildings, antique shops, and art galleries. For nature lovers, there are also plenty of places to visit, including the Garland County Arboretum, Ouachita National Forest, and Hot Springs National Park. Spa enthusiasts can enjoy a relaxing day in one of the area's hot springs. And no trip to Hot Springs is complete without a visit to the world-famous Bathhouse Row.
Hot Springs Luxury Hotels
Sedona, AZ, United States
There are many places to visit in Sedona, Arizona. Among the most popular are the Chapel of the Holy Cross, Bell Rock, Cathedral Rock, and Boynton Canyon. The town's unique red-rock formations and ancient ruins offer plenty of photo opportunities. Visitors can also enjoy hiking, biking, and horseback riding. Sedona is a great place to relax and take in the natural beauty of the Southwest.
Sedona Luxury Hotels
Sedona Luxury Resorts
Boulder, CO, United States
Boulder, Colorado is a breathtaking city nestled in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. The city is home to stunning views, ample outdoor recreation, and a lively arts scene. Outdoor enthusiasts will love exploring the city's many trails, parks, and open spaces. History buffs will enjoy checking out the city's museums and historic sites. Culture seekers will appreciate the city's many theaters, art galleries, and restaurants. No matter what your interests, you'll find something to love in Boulder.
Boulder Luxury Hotels
Key West, FL, United States
Key West is a small island off the coast of Florida that is filled with history, charm, and fun places to visit. Its lush tropical setting and the laid-back vibe of the island make it a popular destination for those looking for a relaxing getaway. There are plenty of places to explore in Key West, from the charming historic district to the crystal-clear waters of the Florida Keys. Here are some of the top places to visit in Key West: -The Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum: This iconic museum is dedicated to the life and work of Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway, who lived in Key West for over 20 years. -Duval Street: This lively street is the heart of Key West's nightlife and is home to many bars and restaurants. -The Southernmost Point: This landmark is located at the end of Duval Street and is the southernmost point in the continental United States. -The Key West Lighthouse: This picturesque lighthouse is a popular spot for tourists and offers stunning views of the island. -The African American Heritage House: This museum is dedicated to the history and culture of African Americans in Key West. -The Key West Butterfly and Nature Conservatory: This attraction is home to over 2,000 butterflies and a variety of other tropical plants and animals.
Key West Luxury Hotels
Key West Luxury Resorts
Key West Luxury Cottages
Key West Luxury Villas
Stockholm, Sweden
Stockholm, Sweden is a city with many places to visit. One place is the Vasa Museum, which is home to a ship that sunk in 1628 and was raised from the ocean floor 333 years later. The ship is preserved and on display in the museum. Another place to visit is the Royal Palace, the official residence of the Swedish monarch. The palace is open for tours, and visitors can see the royal apartments, the throne room, and the Hall of State.
Stockholm Luxury Hotels
Destin, FL, United States
Looking for a place to visit in Florida? Look no further than Destin! This city is home to beautiful beaches, wonderful restaurants, and plenty of places to shop. No matter what you're looking for, you can find it in Destin. Be sure to check out the Destin Harbor and the fishing pier for amazing views and plenty of things to do. If you're looking for a place to relax, head to the beach and enjoy the sun and sand. There's something for everyone in Destin, so be sure to visit this amazing city!.
Destin Luxury Hotels
Destin Luxury Resorts
Ashland, OR, United States
There are many places to visit in Ashland, Oregon. Some of the most popular places are the Shakespeare Festival, Lithia Park, and Mt. Ashland. The Shakespeare Festival is a great place to see some of the best plays in the world. Lithia Park is a beautiful park with a river running through it. Mt. Ashland is a great place to go skiing in the winter.
Ashland Luxury Hotels
Seaside, OR, United States
One of the most beautiful places on the Oregon Coast is Seaside. With its wide, sandy beach and majestic promenade, Seaside is a popular tourist destination. There are plenty of places to eat and shop, and the Seaside Aquarium is a must-see. Visitors can also enjoy fishing, whale watching, or just taking a leisurely stroll along the beach.
Seaside Luxury Hotels
Newport, RI, United States
Newport is a picturesque town located in southern Rhode Island that is home to some of the most visited tourist destinations in the United States. The city is known for its miles of beaches and historic mansions that line the coast. Some popular places to visit in Newport include the Cliff Walk, the Breakers Mansion, the Museum of Yachting, and the International Tennis Hall of Fame.
Newport Luxury Hotels
Siena, Italy
Siena, Italy is a popular tourist destination, thanks to its well-preserved medieval city center. The city is famous for its art, food, and wine. Siena is located in the heart of Tuscany, making it the perfect base for exploring this beautiful region of Italy. Don't miss the Duomo (cathedral), the Piazza del Campo, and the Torre del Mangia.
Siena Luxury Hotels
Reno, NV, United States
Home to the University of Nevada, Reno and a wide variety of cultural and natural attractions, Reno is a great place to visit. Some of the top places to see in Reno include the Nevada Museum of Art, the Fleischmann Planetarium and Science Center, and the Reno Events Center. Outdoor enthusiasts will enjoy hiking and skiing at Lake Tahoe and biking and kayaking on the Truckee River. In addition, Reno is home to a diverse array of restaurants and nightlife venues.
Reno Luxury Hotels
Atlantic City, NJ, United States
Atlantic City is a popular East Coast tourist destination, known for its boardwalks, beaches and casinos. There are plenty of places to visit in Atlantic City, from the Boardwalk Hall and the Absecon Lighthouse to the Atlantic City Aquarium and Lucy the Elephant. For a more thrilling experience, head to one of the city's casinos, where you can try your hand at blackjack, slots, roulette and more. Atlantic City also offers a wide variety of restaurants, from seafood spots to pizza places, so you're sure to find something to your taste. And if you're looking for some nightlife action, the city has you covered there too. Atlantic City is definitely a place worth visiting!.
Atlantic City Luxury Hotels
Atlantic City Luxury Resorts
Lake George, NY, United States
Looking for a place to visit in upstate New York? Look no further than the stunning Lake George. This picturesque locale is located in the heart of the Adirondacks and is known for its pristine beauty and terrific recreational opportunities. Visitors can enjoy hiking, biking, boating, fishing, and skiing, among other activities. Don't miss the chance to take in the spectacular views from the summit of Prospect Mountain or from the water's edge.
Lake George Luxury Hotels
Buffalo, NY, United States
If you're looking for a city that has it all, Buffalo is the place to be. From its vibrant downtown district to its abundance of parks and nature preserves, there's something for everyone in Buffalo. Here are some of the top places to visit in Buffalo: 1. The Buffalo Zoo - One of the top zoos in the country, the Buffalo Zoo is a must-visit for animal lovers of all ages. 2. The Albright-Knox Art Gallery - Buffalo's answer to the Louvre, the Albright-Knox is home to some of the world's most famous paintings and sculptures. 3. The Buffalo-Niagara Heritage Village - This living history museum offers a glimpse into what life was like in Buffalo in the 1800s. 4. The Buffalo River - Take a walk or bike ride along the Buffalo River, one of the city's most picturesque areas. 5. Delaware Park - This large park is home to a variety of attractions, including a zoo, a golf course, and a nature preserve.
Buffalo Luxury Hotels
Rochester, MN, United States
Rochester, Minnesota is a city with plenty of places to visit. There's the Mayo Clinic, the Apache Mall, and several other shopping areas, as well as a variety of restaurants. There are also a few parks and golf courses. For those who love the outdoors, Rochester is also close to several state parks and the Mississippi River.
Rochester Luxury Hotels
Duluth, MN, United States
If you're looking for an amazing place to visit, Duluth, Minnesota should definitely be at the top of your list. This city is home to some of the most beautiful scenery in the United States, and there are plenty of things to do here that will keep you entertained for days on end. Some of the most popular places to visit in Duluth include the Aerial Lift Bridge, the Glensheen Mansion, and Chester Creek Park. Additionally, there are a number of excellent restaurants and shopping areas in the city, so be sure to explore everything that Duluth has to offer.
Duluth Luxury Hotels
Maputo, Mozambique
Maputo is the capital of Mozambique and a city full of culture and history. There are many places to visit in Maputo, such as the Jose Eduardo dos Santos Museum, the Maputo Cathedral, and the Rua da Independencia. Maputo is also home to the Maputo Bay, which offers beautiful beaches and great seafood.
Maputo Luxury Hotels
Barcelona, Spain
Barcelona, located on the northeast coast of Spain, is a renowned tourist destination and one of the most popular cities in the world. There are plenty of places to visit in Barcelona, such as the Gothic Quarter, the Temple of Olympian Zeus, the Parc Guell, La Sagrada Familia, and more. The city is also home to a lively nightlife and some of the best restaurants in the country.
Barcelona Luxury Hotels
Barcelona Luxury Villas
Split, Croatia
Split is a city on the eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea. It is the second-largest city in Croatia and the largest city in Dalmatia. It has a population of over 200,000 inhabitants. The metropolitan area, which includes the City of Split and the surrounding towns, has a population of over 330,000. Split is a popular tourist destination and is the home of the Diocletian's Palace, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Other popular tourist destinations include the Riva, the Peristyle, the Cathedral of Saint Domnius, and Sustipan.
Split Luxury Hotels
Split Luxury Villas
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Dubrovnik is a city on the Adriatic Sea in Croatia. It is one of the most prominent tourist destinations in the Mediterranean Sea, a seaport and the administrative center of Dubrovnik-Neretva County. Dubrovnik is nicknamed "The Pearl of the Adriatic".
Dubrovnik Luxury Hotels
Dubrovnik Luxury Villas
Byron Bay, NSW, Australia
Byron Bay is a magical place. It's no wonder that it's one of the most popular destinations in Australia. The town is set in a beautiful location, surrounded by rolling green hills and the bright blue ocean. There's plenty to do in Byron Bay, whether you're looking for a relaxing beach holiday or an adventure-filled trip. Some of the top places to visit in Byron Bay include the iconic lighthouse, the stunning beaches, and the lush rainforest. There's also a great nightlife and plenty of restaurants and cafes to enjoy. If you're looking for an amazing Australian getaway, be sure to add Byron Bay to your list!.
Byron Bay Luxury Hotels
Wellington, New Zealand
If you're looking for a little slice of heaven on earth, look no further than Wellington, New Zealand. With its gorgeous landscape and plethora of activities, there's something for everyone here. Whether you're a nature lover or a city slicker, Wellington has something special to offer. Top Wellington attractions include the Zealandia eco-sanctuary, the cable car up to the Botanic Gardens, and the sprawling Te Papa museum. For those who love getting out into the great outdoors, there are plenty of hiking and biking trails, as well as lovely seaside towns and villages to explore. And of course, no trip to Wellington would be complete without trying some of the delicious local cuisine be sure to sample a traditional Maori hangi feast! So what are you waiting for? Book your flight to Wellington today and start planning your perfect holiday!.
Wellington Luxury Hotels
Saint Louis, MO, United States
If you're looking for a fun place to visit with a rich history and plenty of things to see and do, look no further than Saint Louis, Missouri. This vibrant city is home to a variety of interesting attractions, including the Gateway Arch, the Missouri Botanical Garden, and the Anheuser-Busch Brewery. There's also no shortage of restaurants and shopping options in Saint Louis. So, whether you're looking for a place to explore new cultures and cuisines or you're just looking for a place to have some fun, Saint Louis is a great option.
Saint Louis Luxury Hotels
Bloomington, IN, United States
The city of Bloomington, Indiana is home to a variety of attractions and places to visit. The Indiana University campus is a popular destination, as is the city's historic downtown district. Monroe County Courthouse
Nonessential employees and contractors were sent home from Dakota Gasification Co.'s Great Plains Synfuels plant Monday following a naptha leak.
Only a small area within the Synfuels Plant complex was impacted by the naphtha. There were no hazards for surrounding communities or facilities, said Mary Miller, a spokeswoman for DGC's parent company Basin Electric Power Cooperative.
"Some naphtha went into the plant's cooling tower as a result of ongoing activities associated with the facility's planned maintenance turnaround.," Miller said in an email. "As a cautionary measure, all nonessential employees and contractors were sent home yesterday afternoon."
Out of caution, DGC also notified Basin Electric's Antelope Valley Station and North American Coal's Freedom Mine personnel.
Conditions normalized around 5:45 p.m.
Naphtha is a co-product produced as the Great Plains Synfuels Plant as a result of the gasification process and is used as a feedstock in refineries.
An all-clear was given Tuesday after a possible threat involving a suspicious car was resolved on the United Tribes Technical College campus.
The incident began when Burleigh County Sheriff's deputies located a suspicious vehicle, previously pursued by the Bismarck Police, outside a family student housing unit early in the morning, Maj. Kelly Leben said.
Bismarck Police had asked law enforcement to identify the occupants of the vehicle, Bismarck Police Sgt. Mark Buschena said. Police believed they might be suspects in a simple assault.
Bismarck officers had found the car around 12:30 a.m. and tried to pull it over, Buschena said. But the car sped off.
After finding the car on campus around 2 a.m., deputies obtained a warrant and searched the residence where the car was parked, Leben said, but no one was home.
Law enforcement made contact with the resident who gave deputies permission to search the home, Leben said. The shelter-in-place was issued by the university while they did so.
Authorities do not know who was driving the car or where the person is now, Leben said. Bismarck Police will conduct any follow-up.
UTTC spokesman Dennis Neumann said a shelter-in-place order lasted from 9:59 to 10:23 a.m. today.
An earlier version of this article included incorrect information about a connection between the resident and the car's owner.
The Mandan School Board will provide $139,000 in matching funds for a school that's losing federal dollars this year because its percentage of low-income students is trending lower than the district as a whole.
To ensure Fort Lincoln Elementary won't miss out on Title I services that are used for extra math and reading help, school board members approved an identical amount that would come out of the district's pocket.
This is the first year Fort Lincoln Elementary won't receive Title I funds that are provided to schools based upon number of low-income students. The federal money allows for one to two Title I teachers and paraprofessionals to be placed in the schools to help students struggling academically. Five of Mandan's six elementary schools will share $914,000 of Title I money.
While Fort Lincoln Elementary is losing its Title I designation, Lewis and Clark Elementary is gaining Title I status. Last school year, the percentage of low-income students at Lewis and Clark began to increase beyond the district's level, which ranges from 26 percent to 32 percent depending upon the month.
The school board also swore in two new members at its meeting Monday. Ross Munns will serve a three-year term and Kama Hoovestol a one-year term. The board re-elected Tim Rector as president and Sheldon Wolf as vice president.
State Commerce officials said guidelines to extend city Renaissance zones were unclear and unenforceable on Monday, when explaining why Bismarck's incentive program will continue through Aug. 1, 2017 without Burleigh County support.
Bismarck's Renaissance Zone was given a 15-month extension in May after all five Burleigh County commissioners refused to render a letter endorsing the city's incentive be renewed for five more years.
Alan Anderson, commissioner for the North Dakota Department of Commerce said the state Commerce Department gave the extension to allow the Legislature to clarify what warranted community support.
"It did not include all of the letters of support necessary to demonstrate full community support," Anderson said of Bismarck's application, explaining that's why full renewal was denied by the state agency.
When the Renaissance Zone program was moved to the Commerce Department in 2001, administrative rules were not adopted for the Renaissance Zone, said Anderson. "Ours are guidelines and not legally binding. Administrative rules are legally binding. Had that been in there, it would have been an easier decision for us."
He said state Commerce Department guidelines spell out that the county and school district should give letters of support to renew the program. Yet, the definition of community support was unclear because Bismarck's application was the first renewal contested by a county board.
Statewide, 58 cities have been approved for Renaissance zone programs and six have been approved for five-year renewals.
Anderson said the county and Bismarck interpret what is community support differently.
"Even though we say it must include the school district and the county, that isn't in the statute. ... I believe it's appropriate to allow the Legislature the opportunity to clarify their intent of what is evidence of community support," he said.
County commissioners also filed for an Attorney General's opinion in June. The AG's opinion is still pending and the decision could take up to six months, said Liz Brocker, a spokeswoman for the state office.
The Bismarck School Board voted 3-2 to support the renewal and the Bismarck City Commission approved with a 4-1 vote.
The city of Bismarck has used the Renaissance Zone since 2001. The incentive offers local property tax and state income tax breaks on properties and buildings in certain borders not thriving if enough is invested in improvements.
Bismarck has approved 118 Renaissance zone projects, increasing property values in the program from $25.6 million to $65.2 million from ones completed.
Commissioner Jim Peluso asked who made the decision. Anderson said he and Rikki Roehrich, program manager did. "I think the Legislators could have reviewed it regardless. It just felt hollow to us that the county commissioners did that and it didn't matter," Peluso said.
He said the city park district wasn't asked for a letter of support and it should be as a separate taxing entity affected by the zone's tax breaks.
Anderson said the AG was consulted before the shorter extension was approved. "We weren't certain from that 1999 statute what community intent was," he said.
"The way it was worded to us it was clear, if we did not support it, it would not go through," said Commissioner Doug Schonert. "We were totally surprised."
Commission Chairman Brian Bitner said he understood the Commerce Department's legal bind in its decision. "It wasn't enforceable as an administrative rule, which would have the effect of law. They were operating under a policy."
"I still think our vote should have more impact on it," Peluso said. "It didn't convince me it was done properly. It was just two people making a decision."
He and Bitner suspect the AG opinion will support the Commerce Department and the 2017 Legislature will decide what is community support.
Officials representing charities say granting North Dakotas five American Indian tribes exclusive rights to host online gambling could effectively end charitable gambling in the state. The tribes want Gov. Doug Burgum to approve the idea under tribal-state agreements known as compacts. The current compacts expire at the end of this year and only Burgum can approve them. The tribes argue that their casinos have been hurt by the explosion of the charities Las Vegas-style pull tab machines. Burgum heard arguments from the charities and tribes on Friday. He says the terms of the compacts are still being negotiated and should be completed next month.
Cellphone videos are having a profound effect on how many in this nation perceive the actions of police officers.
In the Twin Cities, massive protests erupted after the fiance of a man shot by a police officer live-streamed video on Facebook while he lay dying in their car.
Protesters took to the streets in Baton Rouge, La., after a police officer was videotaped shooting a man during a scuffle in front of a convenience store.
These two shootings, as well as others posted on the Internet, were cited as one of the reasons that fueled the anger of a man who killed five police officers in Dallas who were providing security at a peaceful protest.
In the aftermath of these tragedies, Rapid City, S.D., Police Chief Karl Jegeris told the Rapid City Journal that our officers every day are recorded by people in the community while lamenting the publics desire to videotape his officers.
Its clear in this time of social media and now with the easy availability of live-streaming that those who want to videotape police officers are not going to be deterred. They see it as a way to hold police officers accountable. Those videos, however, also provoke the kind of rage we are now witnessing, as well as putting all officers at risk.
Rapid City police officers are not armed with body cameras. If they were, it would send the message that they and others will be held accountable or, if need be, provide the public with another perspective when confrontations do occur.
Meanwhile, body cameras now adorn officers across South Dakota, including those in Spearfish, Belle Fourche, Deadwood, Sioux Falls, Aberdeen and Mitchell. It also was reported last week that South Dakota Game, Fish & Parks officers soon will be getting body cameras.
In that Journal story, a Game, Fish & Parks board member said the cameras should be a heck of a safety deal for the officers. When the Deadwood Police Department outfitted its officers earlier this year with body cameras, the chief said, it's important to remain progressive and utilize technology when it becomes available."
In announcing in 2015 a $20 million grant program to help police departments acquire body cameras, a Department of Justice official said, body-worn camera technology is a valuable tool for improving police-citizen relationships.
It is time for the Rapid City Police Department to get body cameras for officers who find themselves on the front lines of a national debate that has most everyone on edge. The cameras would give the department another tool to diffuse a situation before anger rises to the level we have seen in other communities.
Rapid City (S.D.) Journal
FARGO The arrest on drug charges of a Florida attorney who was assisting in a wrongful death lawsuit against Richland County, N.D., and a sheriffs deputy in the case of drug informant Andrew Sadek wont prevent the local lawsuit from going forward, a Fargo lawyer said Monday.
Tim OKeeffe said he and his partner, attorney Tatum OBrien, were hired in late April to take the lead in the case, brought by Andrews parents, Tammy and John Sadek of Rogers.
OKeeffe said Lance Blocks personal legal issues wont derail the case.
I dont think it will have any impact, OKeeffe said. Were progressing with that lawsuit.
Block, 61, was arrested June 1 by a Florida State University police officer after trying to purchase 10 grams of cocaine for $800 at the Publix shopping center on Ocala Road in Tallahassee, Fla., according to a report in the Tallahassee Democrat.
He was released from jail the same day on $10,000 bond, according to media reports.
Blocks attorney, Jackie Fulford, filed a not guilty plea on his behalf on June 2, the Democrat reported.
Block was working with the Sadeks. Their sons body was found in the Red River in 2014 at a time he was a drug informant in Richland County.
In the lawsuit filed in late June, the Sadeks seek damages from Richland County and Sheriffs Deputy Jason Weber, the narcotics officer who recruited 20-year-old Andrew Sadek to work as an informant.
Andrew Sadek, then a student at the North Dakota State College of Science in Wahpeton, was found in the river with a gunshot wound to his head and a backpack of rocks tied around his waist.
Autopsy results were inconclusive, but the Sadeks believe their son was murdered, possibly because he was working as a drug informant.
The lawsuit claims wrongful death, fraud and deceit in the case.
Reached Monday, Tammy Sadek referred questions on the status of Block and the lawsuit to OKeeffe and OBrien.
Tammy Sadek said shes heard little from law enforcement in the case.
Its been quiet. Always hopeful theyll find something, but , she said.
She added but one message:
I just want to reiterate to let your children know when they go off to college, Dont let yourself get into that situation that Andrew was in, Sadek said.
Block heads the Lance Block Law Firm in Tallahassee and is best known in recent years for representing police confidential informants and pushing for more safeguards for their use.
He also represented the family of Rachel Hoffman in their case against the city of Tallahassee. Hoffman was killed while serving as an informant for the Tallahassee Police Department.
The case was reportedly settled for $2.6 million in 2012.
Ron Sachs, CEO of Sachs Media Group and a longtime friend of Block, said in a statement that Block is a very good man and a great attorney who has battled the terrible demons of addiction to alcohol and drugs. He has suffered a really tough year marked by divorce, a recent diagnosis of prostate cancer, and, obviously a relapse in his struggles with addiction.
Sachs said Block has helped a lot of people and championed great causes.
Now is a time for him to focus on himself, Sachs said.
OKeeffe said he and the Sadeks knew that Block would be getting treatment for cancer.
OKeeffe said Block was originally brought into the case by the Sadeks because he had a reputation for handling cases involving police informants and had successfully lobbied for changes in Florida law in how police informants are handled.
The Sadeks were looking for help in finding answers to what happened with Andrew, OKeeffe said. Lance was able to guide them through the process.
A second state lawmaker plans to introduce legislation to delay construction of a new North Dakota governors residence, saying his bill has been in the works for weeks and its not the right time for the project with the state facing a major revenue shortfall.
Republican Rep. Jim Kasper of Fargo told Forum News Service late Sunday that his bill would revoke the authority and $4 million appropriation provided by lawmakers in April 2015 to build a new governors residence if $1 million in private funds could be raised.
In essence, its going to stop it in its tracks, he said.
The bill will be introduced when the Legislature convenes Aug. 2 for a three-day special session. Gov. Jack Dalrymple called the session last week to address a revenue shortfall thats projected to balloon to $310 million by end of the 2015-17 biennium next summer, as slumping crude oil and farm commodity prices continue to hurt state tax collections.
Kasper contacted media about his bill after Rep. Jerry Kelsh, D-Fullerton, told reporters Friday about a bill hell introduce that also could delay the residence project. Kelsh said he wants to use money from the Capitol Building Trust Fund, which can be spent only on projects on the Capitol grounds, to supplant general fund dollars earmarked for Capitol projects, thus freeing up those dollars to help cover the shortfall. Facility Management Director John Boyle said last week that out of the $1.28 million in general funds earmarked for Capitol projects this biennium, all but about $430,000 has already been spent or is under contract.
Kasper, who like Kelsh is up for re-election in November, said his bill has been in the works longer, noting he discussed it about two weeks ago with House Majority Leader Al Carlson, R-Fargo, and that he was surprised to learn that Kelsh was proposing similar legislation. Carlson said Friday hes not opposed to delaying the project.
Kasper served on the design committee that selected the one-story design of the new 13,600-square-foot residence, which would be built next to the existing 10,000-square-foot residence in the southwest corner of the Capitol grounds. Lawmakers say the 56-year-old ranch-style residence has security issues, handicapped accessibility problems and other issues and would cost $3 million to repair and remodel.
Kasper originally voted for a more regal two-story design but ultimately was part of the unanimous vote for the final design. He said his bill isnt an attempt to send the design back to the drawing board.
If the economy had continued to be bright and rosy, I wouldnt be taking this step, he said. Hindsight is always 20/20. I dont think anyone thought wed have the adverse economic results that were facing.
Construction is tentatively slated to begin the first week in August, with the project still on track for completion by Thanksgiving 2017, Facility Management Director John Boyle said last week.
A fundraising committee has secured the $500,000 in donations required before construction can begin. Kasper said an amendment to his bill could provide options of returning the money to donors who want it back or leaving donations in the bank for when the project eventually moves forward, which would spare donors who took tax deductions from having to redo their returns.
Using electron microscopes, it is possible to image individual atoms. Scientists at TU Wien have calculated how it is possible to look inside the atom to image individual electron orbitals.
An electron microscope can't just snap a photo like a mobile phone camera can. The ability of an electron microscope to image a structure and how successful this imaging will be depends on how well you understand the structure. Complex physics calculations are often needed to make full use of the potential of electron microscopy. An international research team led by TU Wiens Prof. Peter Schattschneider set out to analyse the opportunities offered by EFTEM, that is energy-filtered transmission electron microscopy. The team demonstrated numerically that under certain conditions, it is possible to obtain clear images of the orbital of each individual electron within an atom. Electron microscopy can therefore be used to penetrate down to the subatomic level experiments in this area are already planned.
In search of the electron orbital
We often think of atomic electrons as little spheres that circle around the nucleus of the atom like tiny planets around a sun. This image is barely reflected in reality, however. The laws of quantum physics state that the position of an electron cannot be clearly defined at any given point in time. The electron is effectively smeared across an area close to the nucleus. The area that could contain the electron is called the orbital. Although it has been possible to calculate the shape of these orbitals for a long time, efforts to image them with electron microscopes have been unsuccessful to date.
We have calculated how we might have a chance of visualising orbitals with an electron microscope, says Stefan Loffler from the University Service Centre for Transmission Electron Microscopy (USTEM) at TU Wien. Graphene, which is made of just one single layer of carbon atoms, is an excellent candidate for this task. The electron ray is able to pass easily through the graphene with hardly any elastic scattering. An image of the graphene structure can be created with these electrons.
Researchers have been aware of the principle of energy-filtered transmission electron microscopy (EFTEM) for some time. EFTEM can be used to create quite specific visualisations of certain kinds of atoms whilst blocking out the others. For this reason, it is often used today to analyse the chemical composition of microscopic samples. The electrons shot through the sample can excite the samples atoms, explains Stefan Loffler. This costs energy, so when the electrons emerging emerge from the sample, they are slower than when they entered it. This velocity and energy change is characteristic for certain excitations of electron orbitals within the sample."
After the electrons have passed through the sample, a magnetic field sorts the electrons by energy. "A filter is used to block out electrons that arent of interest: the recorded image contains only those electrons that carry the desired information.
Defects can be helpful
The team used simulations to investigate how this technique could help reach a turning point in the study of electron orbitals. While doing so, they discovered something that actually facilitated the imaging of individual orbitals: The symmetry of the graphene has to be broken, says Stefan. If, for instance, there is a hole in the graphene structure, the atoms right beside this hole have a slightly different electronic structure, making it possible to image the orbitals of these atoms. The same thing can happen if a nitrogen atom rather than a carbon atom is found somewhere in the graphene. When doing this, its important to focus on the electrons found within a narrow and precise energy window, minimise certain aberrations of the electromagnetic lens and, last but not least, use a first-rate electron microscope." All of these issues can be overcome, however, as the research groups calculations show.
Everybody knows the force that is required to activate a light switch on a wall - a finger is enough. But how much force do you need to apply if the device was dramatically reduced to the "nanoscale world", that is, how much force do you need to operate a "single-molecule switch"? This fundamental question is related not only to basic science but also to potential future applications of molecular devices.
Researchers at Donostia International Physics Center, San Sebastian (Basque Country, Spain), Fritz-Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, Berlin (Germany), University of Liverpool, (UK) and Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw (Poland) have succeeded in activating in a controlled manner a "single-molecule switch" by the force from the atomically-sharp needle of a state-of-the-art scanning probe microscope.
The experimental and theoretical study demonstrates that an intramolecular hydrogen atom transfer can be triggered in a suitable organic molecule adsorbed on a surface by bringing the sharp metallic tip sufficiently close. The reaction, called tautomerization, is important in organic chemistry and molecular biology and also an interesting phenomenon for molecular electronic devices.
The researchers could not only quantify the force needed to operate their tiny switch, a porphycene molecule on a copper surface, but also reveal that the switching can be only induced at a very specific positions of the tip over the molecule, with a spatial resolution of a fraction of a chemical bond length, namely about 0.00000002 millimeter. Furthermore, they demonstrated the significance of the "chemical reactivity" of the tip apex in the force-induced process as the molecule cannot be switched when the apex of the needle is decorated by a single xenon atom - an inert element that lacks the required chemical reactivity.
Takashi Kumagai at FHI-MPG, who conceived this study, constructed the experimental setup in which an oscillating needle of a combined atomic force and scanning tunneling microscope is approached within a few atomic distances to the molecule. The switching showed up as a characteristic feature in the frequency shifts upon approach of the tip and was also confirmed by changes at the atomic-scale images by simultaneously scanning the tip over the molecule. It was measured that the force required was about one nano-Newton, which is a little less than the force needed to break a typical covalent bond between two atoms.
The research team also carried out extensive computer simulations in order to elucidate the atomistic mechanism behind the force-induced switching. The simulations successfully reproduced the experimental results and provided atomistic description on the operation of the single molecule switch. Thomas Frederiksen, Ikerbasque Research Professor at Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) - UPV/EHU explains that "our calculations revealed that the tautomerization, that is the switching, occurs by a reduction of its energy activation barrier upon approach of a metallic tip. However, the behaviour dramatically changes with a xenon-terminated tip and no tautomerization could be induced because of its inertness and softness".
The researchers emphasize that the studied force-induced reaction involving changes in the reaction pathway resembles an elementary step in catalytic processes. Therefore, their results also provide a novel strategy to gain a deeper atomistic insight into catalytic reactions, leading to a new control of chemistry at the atomic level.
In April, SpotHero moved into an office in a loft building at 325 W. Huron St. in River North. (James C. Svehla, Blue Sky / April 28, 2015)
SpotHero, a Chicago-based startup that makes an on-demand parking app, launched in Los Angeles Tuesday, marking the start of a larger West Coast expansion.
"This is a big bet we're making on the West Coast," said Mark Lawrence , CEO and founder. "To date we've been a really Midwest and East Coast-centric company."
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Car-loving Los Angeles marks the 14th city for five-year-old SpotHero and its second in California. It's partnering with more than 150 locations in the city, including near highly traversed areas like the Staples Center and Los Angeles International Airport.
Up next for SpotHero: Seattle, where the company is running in beta, and San Diego.
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Lawrence said New York City and Washington, D.C., are SpotHero's two markets seeing the greatest amount of growth. That should spread west soon, he believes.
"I expect the growth from the West Coast to really hit in the next quarter, because a lot of the stuff we did over the past few quarters is now hitting really nicely in the East Coast," he said. "The West Coast is next."
It launched in San Francisco in December 2014, and recently hired a West Coast general manager based there to head operations from the Pacific Northwest down to Southern California.
Lawrence would not comment on revenue, but said SpotHero receives nearly 250,000 parking reservations each month.
SpotHero received $20 million in Series B funding about a year ago, which has fueled expansion in existing markets and bolstered moves to new ones, Lawrence said. The company now employs 115 people, 104 of whom are in Chicago.
amarotti@tribpub.com
Twitter @allymarotti
A stairway leading up from the economy level of an Airbus A380 at O'Hare International Airport after a flight from Dubai on July 19, 2016. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune)
The first passenger-carrying Chicago flight by the double-decker Airbus A380 the world's largest passenger airplane landed here Tuesday. But it could be a while before the monster jet, which manufacturer Airbus has found a tougher-than-expected sell, starts making regular visits.
Dubai-based airline Emirates flew one of its 81 A380s to O'Hare International Airport to test out improvements designed to let the airport accommodate the 238-foot-long, 79-foot-high jet with a 261-foot wingspan.
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Emirates isn't yet committing to regular A380 flights in Chicago, said Rob Gurney, the airline's senior vice president of the Americas. Now that O'Hare is equipped to handle the plane, the question is whether there are enough travelers to fill its seats.
"We're going to watch it very closely, and it's under evaluation. We don't have a definite date but I'm sure we'll see the aircraft here one day," Gurney said.
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Airbus says the A380 is capable of hauling 853 passengers, though Emirates only packs 489 aboard. Much of that extra space goes to onboard perks for those willing to pay up.
Chicago Tribune reporter Lauren Zumbach walks through Emirates' massive Airbus A380 on July 20, 2016, when it landed at O'Hare International Airport. (Chicago Tribune)
On the upper deck, 76 lie-flat business class seats and 14 first-class private suites are flanked by the onboard lounge and shower spa. Both groups of passengers have access to the lounge, where a bartender mixes drinks from the moment the plane hits cruising altitude to its descent. Only first-class fliers can use the two showers, but even a first-class fare won't get you more than five minutes of shower water during each 30-minute session.
Between the meal service, lounge hors d'oeuvres and in-seat snack selections, food options abound. All passengers get some amenities, including the on-demand entertainment though screen size varies and kids get a free stuffed animal.
The A380 currently flies or has operated international routes out of eight U.S. airports. Emirates says it has regularly scheduled flights on A380s in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.
Although Chicago has had a runway big enough to accommodate the A380 since 2013, it never made the cut as a destination, in part because it lacked a gate that fit the two-level plane. Emirates uses the Boeing 777, which is smaller than the A380 but still has the range for long-haul international trips, on its O'Hare flights.
O'Hare International Airport tested new gates designed for the world's largest passenger jet with the first passenger-carrying Airbus A380 flight to Chicago on Tuesday, July 19, 2016. (Lauren Zumbach / Chicago Tribune) (Chicago Tribune)
Though no airlines have yet committed to bringing A380s to Chicago on a regular basis, three or four have expressed interest in doing so, said City Aviation Commissioner Ginger Evans.
O'Hare already has plans to add a second gate equipped for the larger plane as part of a recently-announced project to expand Terminal 5 and redevelop Terminal 2.
The upgrades will let O'Hare handle scheduled or emergency A380 flights diverted from another airport and keep O'Hare competitive, Evans said.
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The city also is constructing a second 200-foot-wide runway, scheduled to open in 2020, that will accommodate the aircraft, said Gregg Cunningham, special projects coordinator.
Business class seats on the upper level of an Airbus A380 at O'Hare International Airport after an Emirates flight from Dubai on July 19, 2016. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune)
Raymond Weaver, an engineer with Burns McDonnell, the company that handled the renovations to the gate where the Emirates A380 landed Tuesday, said the already-completed upgrades cost nearly $5 million.
Although the Boeing 747 is longer, the A380 is wider and has two decks spanning the length of the plane. Engineers had to shift one gate to give the wider A380 room to maneuver and build another with two jet bridges and fixed walkways, one for each deck. Construction started in mid-March and was done by July, Cunningham said.
Tuesday's Chicago visit wasn't the A380's first. A Lufthansa-operated A380 touched down in 2007 while touring the U.S. and completing FAA-required technical procedures before starting U.S. passenger service.
Emirates, which has been operating daily flights from Chicago to Dubai since 2014, says it has the most A380s of any airline. Gurney called it a "customer magnet" and said Emirates has "overall seen very strong demand."
Despite Emirates' enthusiasm, Airbus hasn't found the aircraft as easy to sell to airlines as it hoped.
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At the Farnborough Airshow in England last week, Airbus CEO Fabrice Bregier said the company would cut back on production of the A380 after getting fewer orders than expected. Although "convinced that this aircraft will find its way," Bregier said some customers see the A380 as "a bit too big to be seen as an upside."
According to Airbus, there are a total of 193 A380s operated by 13 airlines.
United Airlines recently announced plans to upgrade business-class seats and service on international flights while gradually eliminating first class. Chicago-based United executives acknowledged the new business class, called Polaris, lacks some of Emirates' first-class creature comforts but said it would compare favorably to any other airline's business class.
Mark Krolick, United's managing director of marketing and product, said the airline didn't see enough demand for first-class luxury at first-class prices. "We're able to provide a truly amazing international travel experience with a business-class price tag, and that's what the market is now demanding," Krolick said.
lzumbach@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @laurenzumbach
Land of Lincoln Health individual policyholders will have a special enrollment period beginning Aug. 2 that will let them purchase new health insurance, according to the Illinois Department of Insurance. (Andrew Harnik / AP)
Land of Lincoln Health's insurance coverage for its individual enrollees will end Oct. 1, according to the Illinois Department of Insurance.
The agency posted the news on Land of Lincoln's website. A green banner now greets visitors to the website with the headline, "Important notice to all members" with a link taking them to information about the Chicago-based insurer's impending shutdown. The notice comes a week after the agency moved to seize control of the financially troubled Chicago-based insurer.
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The failure of Land of Lincoln has triggered a "special enrollment" period under the federal Affordable Care Act that will allow the insurer's approximately 39,000 individual enrollees to pick a new plan for the last three months of the year on Healthcare.gov, the federal health insurance marketplace. The notice advised employers who purchased group coverage from the company to contact their insurance agent or broker to explore their options. Land of Lincoln has about 10,000 group enrollees.
According to the notice, the special enrollment period will run from Aug. 2 through Sept. 30, for coverage starting on Oct. 1. There will be a second enrollment period from Oct. 1 through Nov. 29, for coverage starting on the first of the following month.
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The notice warns policyholders that if they wait until Oct. 1 to buy a new health plan there will be a gap in their insurance coverage.
The interruption of coverage is causing chaos for Land of Lincoln policyholders. They face the prospect of losing their doctors and higher monthly premiums.
Land of Lincoln is a 3-year-old company that is one of the nonprofit cooperatives created under the federal health law, also known as Obamacare, to inject competition into state insurance marketplaces.
Land of Lincoln was one of three insurers that sold 2016 plans in every county in the state, and it was one of a handful of insurers that still offered a PPO network for Affordable Care Act plans. PPOs, or preferred provider organizations, generally feature the biggest selections of doctors and hospitals. In some counties, Land of Lincoln offered the lowest-cost plans.
In addition, new coverage means Land of Lincoln customers must meet deductibles and out-of-pocket payments all over again. Deductible and coinsurance payments, the share of medical costs a policyholder is responsible for after meeting the deductible, made under a plan with Land of Lincoln will not transfer to the new policy.
Land of Lincoln policyholders in Cook County will have only two choices for broad PPO networks on the Illinois exchange for the remainder of the year, Harken Health and Coventry Health Care of Illinois, according to insurance brokers. In collar counties, Coventry will be the only alternative. Coventry has the most expensive plan on the Silver tier.
After losing money on its Affordable Care Act plans in 2014 and 2015, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois discontinued its broadest PPO plan for individuals on the exchange in 2016 to rein in costs. Blue Cross offered a smaller PPO network that didn't include popular academic medical centers at Northwestern University and University of Chicago, as well as hospital chains like NorthShore University HealthSystem. The decision sent Blue Cross PPO policyholders to plans sold by Land of Lincoln and others.
Land of Lincoln policyholders may have a hard time finding an independent broker to help them select a new plan during the special enrollment period. Several insurance companies in Illinois have stopped paying broker commissions during special enrollment periods, which has led some insurance advisers to exit the individual market.
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Twitter @ameetsachdev
A little piece of the Gulf of Mexico is heading to North Dakota and it could get uncomfortable.
National Weather Service meteorologist Patrick Ayd said air from the Gulf of Mexico will bring temperatures in the 90s and perhaps higher along with oppressive humidity that will make it feel even hotter. A heat advisory has been issued for 1 to 8 p.m. today.
It will make it feel like youre on the beach in the Gulf of Mexico, Ayd said.
Todays high in Bismarck is expected to be around 94 or 95 degrees.
And its going to be pretty darn humid out there, too, Ayd said. So its going to be pretty oppressive humidity-wise.
Wednesday will have similar humidity but will be even hotter. While Bismarcks forecast high is 97, communities near Bismarck are expected to reach 100, Ayd said.
Thursday also will be humid, but the temperature will cool off to 92, Ayd said. Temperatures into the weekend are expected to be in the mid to upper 80s.
The body is not as efficient at cooling itself in high humidity, and those with medical conditions that make them susceptible to heat, as well as the old and the young, are more likely to be overcome by heat if theyre not careful, according to Ayd, who advises people to limit their time in the heat, take frequent breaks, drink sufficient water, use sunscreen and check on those without air conditioning.
Its also important to look before you lock, especially in hot weather, Ayd said. Children and pets should never be left alone in a vehicle, but the danger is heightened in extreme heat. Keys should be kept out of reach of children so they dont accidentally trap themselves in a vehicle.
Because the air aloft also is warm, Ayd said no widespread storms are expected. However, any storms that do crop up could become severe because of the conditions, he said.
Ross Dress for Less has opened a new store on Chicago's Northwest Side. This 2015 photo shows a store in River Grove's Thatcher Woods Shopping Center. (David Pollard / Pioneer Press )
Ross Dress for Less opened another store on Chicago's Northwest side on Saturday.
The 24,000-square-foot store, at 6560 W. Fullerton Ave. in the Montclare neighborhood, is one of 70 the Dublin, Calif.-based discount clothing chain expects to open this year, Ross Stores said in a news release.
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Department stores and traditional apparel chains have struggled with slumping sales, and some are looking to cut unprofitable stores.
But discount and off-price stores have been thriving. Since 2010, the three biggest brands in the roughly $219.3 billion U.S. store-based specialty clothing market have been discounters Ross, T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, according to market research firm Euromonitor International.
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Ross' slice of the market grew from 4.9 percent in 2010 to 5.5 percent last year. Meanwhile Gap the seventh-biggest brand in 2010 slipped to 10th, according to Euromonitor.
As of April 30, Ross had 1,473 stores, 74 more than it had the previous year. Sales at stores open at least 14 months were up 2 percent in the first quarter of 2016 compared with the same period in 2015.
Within the TJX Cos. division that includes T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, same-store sales were up 6 percent in the first quarter compared with the same period last year. The company also gained 37 new T.J. Maxx stores and 23 Marshalls.
lzumbach@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @laurenzumbach
Several school officials across the North Shore were largely supportive of the Illinois Board of Education's decision earlier this month to halt PARCC testing for high school students, and instead give 11th-graders a state-paid SAT college entrance exam next spring.
The PARCC test was administered only twice in 2015 and 2016 resulting in dismal scores, and thousands of students skipping the exam. Many educators at the high school level felt the test took away from instruction time in the classrooms.
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Third- through eighth-graders will continue taking the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers in reading and math. The state tests have drawn opposition from families who questioned the amount of testing at school part of a national movement that has prompted some states to stop using the PARCC exams, which are based on Common Core standards.
Paul Sally, the assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction at New Trier Township High School District 203, said district officials were pleased with the news the district would no longer have to administer PARCC tests.
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During the first year PARCC was administered, for which results were available in December 2015, only 45 percent of New Trier freshmen took the tests, he said. Student participation in the most recent year rose to roughly 90 percent, he said.
"We changed the structure and schedule of the test, which probably turned out to be more disruptive of teaching schedules than the year before, but the result was, I think, that more students participated," Sally said.
Despite the higher participation, Sally said data the school garnered from PARCC have not been particularly meaningful for either students or the district. Both find more useful information in results from college entrance and pre-entrance tests such as PSAT and the PreACT test, he said.
Sally said not having to administer the test effectively restores three full teaching days to the district's school year. Those days are already set in the calendar, he said.
Raymond Lechner, superintendent of Wilmette Public Schools District 39, said the state's decision is good for high schools.
"Now we're hoping that that the state board will allow elementary schools to use a different tool besides PARCC," he said. "We'll see what happens."
Rosanne Williamson, assistant superintendent for educational services at the Glenbrook High Schools District 225, said district officials, teachers, students and parents shared the same concern: that preparing for and taking the PARCC exam took away from learning in the classroom.
"We had families that were concerned, as are we, about the loss of teaching time and instructional time, and that theme is pretty consistent with what we saw across the state of Illinois," Williamson said.
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Students did not see the value of the test, Williamson said, and teachers felt more instruction time would have been better for students than taking the PARCC test, because it doesn't help them get into college.
"We didn't get into encouraging or putting pressure on our students to prepare for PARCC because it was a new exam," Williamson said. "We've never taken an approach to testing where we want to teach to the test, or are focused on a score, because we feel our curriculum is really strong."
Glenbrook North High School Principal John Finan said he looks forward to life without PARCC.
"First and foremost, we're gaining back very valuable instructional time. The number of hours PARCC took was a big negative for us," he said. "The SAT is given during one school day. With PARCC, it's often over several school days -- three different days for math, and three different days for English."
He said juniors who take the SAT in the spring are bound to take it more seriously, since SAT scores, unlike those of the PARCC, are accepted for college entrance.
"An overwhelming number (of students) didn't see any value (in PARCC), as there was no buy-in from the students and families," he said.
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He said if the state misses any continuity of student assessment between the PARCC tests still used in elementary school and the SAT in high school, the state could consider administering the PSAT at the junior high level.
At Glencoe District 35, which oversees students in kindergarten through eighth grade, Superintendent Catherine Wang said in an e-mail that she was pleased about the decision, which she said will allow high schools to dedicate more time to instruction.
Regarding PARCC testing at the elementary school level, she said that "we continue to advocate for a more reduced option for testing requirements. Supt. Tony Smith has asked for input and we will continue to respectfully share our ideas to minimize student testing."
She added that "within District 35, we continue to value day-to-day experiences and district assessments as we plan for instruction. No test in isolation should be used to determine the success of a child, school, or District. We shall reflect on the results from our PARCC experience and thoughtfully incorporate changes to improve instruction if necessary."
District 35 School Board President Gary Ruben said there is still much to be learned about the PARCC exam, since it has only been administered for two years.
"We have limited experience with the PARCC," Ruben said. "We are still studying it."
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Daniel I. Dorfman is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
The battlefield is Fifth Avenue. The upturned faces that launch the competing gunships belong to American women, beholden to the pursuit of beauty yet unsure whether the application of hormones or the perfect shade of pink provides the best defense against the inevitable ravages of time. And the Homeric war lasts for decades. Incredibly, the application of cosmetics to the female visage outlasts a European conflict that demands the same raw materials as makeup and, both improbably and paradoxically, a feminist revolution.
But "War Paint," the intriguingly juicy and glamorous, if overly binary and yet underwritten, new musical at the Goodman Theatre under the fluid direction of Michael Greif, really is all about the major generals. Unveiling a new and stylistically diverse score by composer Scott Frankel and lyricist Michael Korie, the formidably and formatively intimidating Patti LuPone plays Helena Rubinstein while Christine Ebersole, a genteel actress and vocalist of singular elegance, essays Elizabeth Arden.
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Thus the semiotics of a pair of competing divas is playfully exemplified by star-casting of a wattage far outpowering the typical new musical at a nonprofit theater in Chicago.
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In this musical telling, partly based on a dual biography by Lindy Woodhead and a documentary film aptly titled "The Powder & the Glory," Rubinstein is a self-styled, pseudo-scientific Slavic titan from the old world of hocus-pocus. Her determination is relentless, and her withering wit, book writer Doug Wright points out many times over, is as pointed as her nails. Arden, meanwhile, is the child of an Ontario farmer who sells herself as a prototypical Anna Wintour. But she's actually a savvy entrepreneur who realizes that packaging always trumps a nebulous product and whose slavish devotion to the color pink provides a crucial chromatic code to unlocking the door of every woman's childhood, the bourn to which every female traveler wishes to return.
The show which contains so much music it almost feels through-composed is energized by the fervent rivalry of the women. In real life and in the show, each refuses to utter the name of the other, let alone meet in person, until their empires finally begin to crumble, thanks in no small measure to Charles Revson the co-founder of Revlon, the Trojan horse of the cheap corner drugstore. The well-acted subplot involves their mutinous brigadier generals, Tommy Lewis (John Dossett) and Harry Fleming (Douglas Sills), each of whom struggles with working for a woman and each of whom switches sides, as (unbelievably) they did in real life. In the case of Tommy, this is especially complex, as he is also married to Elizabeth Arden. The woman, not the brand.
Since the source is a dual biography, and the musical has twin protagonists of equal weight, this leads the show down a tempting, but ultimately problematic, path of parallelism. Part of a song often features Arden and/or her acolytes complaining about Rubinstein, immediately followed by a reverse moment set in the opposing camp. Certainly, the structure of a musical that is partly about the perils of oligarchy "War Paint" is saying that your chief rival ultimately may not be who you think she is demands some charting of that bifurcated course. This is a show that can stand two 11 o'-clock numbers. Indeed, its public will demand them.
But too much equal time also can become predictable, especially, in this case, since there is a lack of book scenes and the kind of contrasting humor they can bring. Far stronger are the solo musical turns, most especially "Pink," a complex homage to the joys and limitations thereof, as richly colored by Ebersole, and "Now You Know," the moment when Rubinstein finally lets down her guard and thus LuPone does the same. The rivalry in real life was surely jagged and unpredictable; yet it is manifested in this show as overly neat.
Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 20 Patti LuPone as Helena Rubinstein in "War Paint," a world premiere musical that traces the careers of rival cosmetic divas Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden, at the Goodman Theatre, Tues. June 14, 2016. (E. Jason Wambsgans / Chicago Tribune)
In some ways, this is a business musical, in that it is the story of two female CEOs battling for supremacy even as they invented an industry; David Korins' set prominently features the two famous logos, sometimes floating over the characters who encapsulate the brands. That carries the show only so far, though, especially since we don't see that much of the sheer joy of running a powerful business. Nor do we see that much of the all-important consumers of cosmetics, beyond the unfortunate yet pliant souls headed through the Red Door of Arden's Salon, willing to have electric volts applied to their face.
The show has a small, all-female ensemble that is, as yet, underused, although it is beautifully costumed by Catherine Zuber and there is formidable talent therein. The choreography by Christopher Gattelli is appealing, yet limited in scope. There are hints of deeper exploration of the fascinating question of whether or not these two women tried to hold women back even as they blazed a trail as CEOs (one of the best scenes involves Arden mentoring a younger woman in the thrall of Erik Liberman's feisty Revson), but the show keeps returning to the personal vendettas, long after it has been established that neither woman much liked the other. There has to be more reason to go into battle; the personalities of the leaders that are what's most interesting.
For the Goodman audience Saturday night, of course, the pleasures of seeing and hearing Ebersole and LuPone, even with the unstinting latter hidden behind a thick accent, were understandably considerable. Frankel's score and Korie's dry, unstinting lyrics represent an extensive, lush and ambitious composition that embraces melancholy and truly borders on the operatic it's a weighty and complex suite of writing that mostly needs more interwoven scenes, not least to provide some prose to allow its musical highlights to pop, as demanded by a show featuring such bravura stars of the musical stage. The score is especially appealing as it moves into more contemporary idiom, reflecting the turning of the years. But the "Mad Men" era feels reluctantly embraced. It is a score that still needs to make an entrance, fully made up.
One might say the same of a show that never fully explores what life is really like without color and sparkle, or the full complexity of what has caused women to accept the need to paint their faces, the great cost in effort and money notwithstanding.
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Still. Rubinstein and Arden are fascinating trailblazers. Not only is this an inherently interesting story, but the show has some delicious bons mots. Not the least of them is delivered by LuPone's Rubinstein as she contemplates a ruby-red and indisputably phallic piece of lipstick, popping up out of its case: "There are no ugly women," she says, growling slightly to fit the moment, "only lazy ones."
Is that line an expression of egalitarian utopianism or merely an especially authoritarian version of good, old-fashioned objectification? That's the most interesting part of the history of cosmetics and, indeed, of a promising new musical that needs to pay more attention to the millions of foot soldiers looking for foundation amid the shifting sands of time.
cjones5@tribune.com
Twitter @ChrisJonestrib
"War Paint" 3 stars
When: Through Aug. 21
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Where: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.
Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes
Tickets: $44-182 at 312-443-3800 or www.goodmantheatre.org
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Should all the hate, brutality and alienation coursing through the planet not be enough for you, I give you "Wastwater," a dystopian triptych by gifted British playwright Simon Stephens and about as depressing a 100 minutes as you could spend in a Chicago theater this summer.
You also will not see any better acting in a Chicago theater this summer than what the women of Steep Theatre Kendra Thulin, Caroline Neff, Melissa Riemer are doing on Berwyn Avenue under the fearless direction of Robin Witt.
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And the men in the cast Peter Moore, Joel Boyd, Nick Horst and C. Richard Costes are no slouches either. I just saw Boyd in "#Date Me: An OKCupid Experiment" at The Second City. Clearly, he felt a need to try something about as far removed from Second City as humanly possible. That he has achieved.
The title of this drama Steep is producing the U.S. premiere of a work first seen at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2011 is intentionally misleading. Located in Cumbria, Wastwater is the name of the deepest lake in England. But "Wastwater" is no evocation of the bucolic the only palpable reference to depth is that of human melancholy. The setting of the work is the area around London's Heathrow Airport a strange part of that city, given the mix of dismal hotels, neighborhoods abutting runway expansions and vistas best hurried through on the Heathrow Express.
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There are three scenes. The first is between a foster parent, Frieda (Riemer) and her young charge, Harry (Boyd), seemingly headed to Canada, never to return. The second involves a police officer, Lisa (Thulin) with a past in pornography and a taste for violent sex and an art teacher, Mark (Horst), who finds himself holed up with her in a room. The third and most disturbing of all involves a man, Jonathan (Moore), who seems to be procuring a child from the Philippines through the work of an agent, Sian (Neff). Just why this man wants this girl, fresh off the plane, is never made explicitly clear, but it feels mostly sinister.
Each scene is distinct, although the location near the airport is not the only link. There is indication that one of the characters in Scene 3 comes from the same foster home as is in Scene 1, which leads you to wonder more about Riemer's Frieda. There are through-lines of music and loss. But the main takeaway is a trifurcated portrait of the web-fueled depths of human deprivation and loneliness. It's as if the title is missing the letter e in the middle of the word.
The care of children is a recurrent theme in the work of this teacher turned playwright, as is the desperation of the middle-aged and sexually unfulfilled, as is what you might call genteel evil. All of that is spread naked before you in this play, which is uncomfortable to watch in such close quarters, especially when performed at this level of intensity. I found it a deeply sad time in the theater, not out of sync with the moment, certainly, but also not offering anything in the way of catharsis. This sparked in me a lot of internal debate over the legitimacy of bringing up the stuff this play brings up, only to leave it all hanging. It is an observational play, I suppose, and Witt directs it as such, suspending judgment and homing in on the subtexts of its conversations, all barely concealed quests for elusive intimacy. The designer, Joe Schermoly, contributes an ambivalent setting that is itself full of despair.
Thulin, for the record, is simply extraordinary in her scene with Horst. And so is Neff, working with Moore.
"We're nowhere near as atomized as people wish we were, you know?" Neff's Sian observes, even as she participates in what feels like the atomization of an innocent party. "It's like there are synapses. We're connected. All of us. Just when you think we can't possibly be, you realize that we are."
That got me going too it's axiomatic in reviews of plays like this one to define them as portraits of our elaborate searches for connection. "Wastwater" actually makes the case that disconnection might well be better for us all.
"Wastwater" 3 stars
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When: Through Aug. 27
Where: Steep Theatre, 1115 W. Berwyn Ave.
Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes
Tickets: $25-35 at 866-911-4111 or www.steeptheatre.com
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Julius (Stephen Colbert) and his pet weasel Caligula report from the 2016 Republican National Hungry For Power Games at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, where Trump is set to accept the party's nomination. ("The Late Show With Stephen Colbert" / YouTube)
The big comedy news on the first night of the Republican National Convention wasn't Donald Trump taking the stage to Queen in his quest to rekindle American exceptionalism -- "to the music of a bisexual Englishman," as Stephen Colbert put it.
It wasn't Scott Baio, who was in a couple of sitcoms many decades ago, being trotted out as Republican starpower. His appearance at the convention would be "the second time he's watched helplessly as someone jumped the shark," said Samantha Bee, referring to a key moment in one of those sitcoms, "Happy Days." (It's on Wikipedia, if you don't know -- the show, "jumping the shark," all of it.)
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It wasn't even Republican nominee Trump, in his "60 Minutes" interview introducing vice-presidential nominee Mike Pence, bragging about how humble he is, a moment that all the late-night shows seized on as an achievement in ultimate Trump-ness.
No, Monday's comedy blockbuster was Colbert reintroducing "Stephen Colbert," the fake right-wing pundit he played for nine years on "The Colbert Report." (It'll be up to Tuesday night's shows to handle the authorship question in relation to Melania Trump's speech, a controversy that was breaking too late for even the live shows to take on.)
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Colbert, and Trevor Noah on "The Daily Show," have made the deepest commitment to coverage of this year's political conventions, which in their cases means making fun of them thoroughly and quickly.
And Colbert, by a wide margin, won Monday night with the only show that dared to be live and to be almost all RNC; Jimmy Fallon on "The Tonight Show," by contrast, would mark the first night of the Republican convention by having actor Chris Pine join him in a game of "inflatable flip cup," because apparently they don't pay much attention to the news down on fraternity row.
This Colbert -- opening with a song-and-dance number lampooning the GOP's predicament, showcasing a superb taped bit from the floor of the RNC that saw him seize the podium (and get kicked off), and being brave or desperate enough to reawaken the character we thought he had put to bed -- is the guy we thought we were getting when he took over CBS's "Late Show" from David Letterman.
Talk show host Stephen Colbert performs on the floor of the Republican National Convention at Quicken Loans Arena during a taping of his program, Sunday, July 17, 2016, in Cleveland. (Carolyn Kaster / AP)
Instead, Colbert in the new role has been too often a sort of smooth-jazz version of his former self, trying to be likable, trying desperately to wring interest out of transactional chats with celebrities, making us miss the old guy, even if he was a faker.
But this week, he is the only one who stepped up to go live every night of the convention. And faced with the challenge and opportunity of being in the moment and topical, the one-time "Second City" improv star was fantastic. More on "The Late Show" in a moment.
Trevor Noah is reaching for something special, too. As he will do with the Democrats in Philadelphia the following week, Noah will be in Cleveland with the Republicans to record his shows starting Tuesday, and, in a late addition to his schedule, he'll go live on Thursday, the night Trump accepts the nomination and the comics can offer new versions of the apocalypse-is-now jokes they served up Monday night. (As a rule, America's late-night hosts love the Trump candidacy and fear the idea of it going any further.)
But Noah Monday delivered a tepid, "from the vault" clip show, a collection of past bits showcasing how we got to the verge of Trump being a major party nominee. It had some funny moments -- how could THAT campaign not have funny moments, even when we see them for the second time?
But overall there were too many easy, often bawdy lines reacting to various campaign blunders, not enough of the material that has become Noah's strength: his status as a South African, as a bewildered outside observer of all of this.
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Trevor Noah's best political line of the night: It came at the end of the show, when he told his viewers, "I should have asked if you were ready. I'm from a Third World country. It looks like you are headed for one."
James Corden on CBS's "Late Late Show," Fallon on "Tonight" and Jimmy Kimmel on ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live" all treated the convention Monday like it was just another monologue topic, instead of a culmination of more than a year of concerted joke-telling.
Corden's best political line: Speaking of the gold-bedazzled Trump room in which the Trump-Pence "60 Minutes" interview took place, he said, "That room is what a child thinks a rich person's house should look like."
Fallon's best political line: Showing some of the "60 Minutes" appearance, he said, "Turns out that ticking clock wasn't for '60 Minutes,' that was for civilization."
Kimmel's best political line: It was a pretty good one, although I have to point out that he led the show not with the RNC but with Pokemon Go. Because millennial viewers. But he pointed out the Monday RNC speaker schedule included Baio, a "Duck Dynasty" star and a former soap-opera actor, saying, "They were one Dennis Rodman short of being a new season of 'Celebrity Apprentice.'" Bonus points for the implicit Trump reference and for being a better version of Corden's "those wouldn't even be great gets for 'Dancing with the Stars.'"
But while those three hosts treated the convention like a drive-up window, Seth Meyers on NBC's "Late Night" and Samantha Bee on TBS's "Full Frontal" made a sit-down meal out of it.
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Bee, airing in her usual Monday slot, will supplement her schedule with a special Wednesday night show from Cleveland. That's the kind of responsible comedy-making we like to see.
And we will like to see it, based on Monday's effort. Bee's show has been consistently the most blistering of the topical American comedy shows. You feel as if she and her producers are putting on air the material that kills in other shows' writers rooms but that the shows then kill in favor of something a little more moderate.
Monday night, for instance, she said Trump picked Pence as a running mate only because his staff wouldn't let him go with his first choice, the concept of (a vulgarity for female breasts). And then it showed a "Trump (Vulgarity)" poster, and the slogan, "Make America (Vulgarity) Again."
In a taped interview with a Republican kid at another political event, "Full Frontal's" reporter called the boy "Jerry Falwell in blond larval form" and said one of the boy's talking points "will go over great in Slytherin."
Richard Nixon famously said he liked Barbara Bush because "she knows how to hate." "Full Frontal," too, is comfortable with that emotion.
Best Bee political line: Her show was all politics so there was a lot to choose from, but I'll go with her take on the GOP's rabidly right-wing platform: "It's not so much a platform as it is the Republican Party's suicide note."
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Meyers was strong, too, giving the convention and Republican politics his first two segments, the kind of time you might expect from a former "Saturday Night Live" "Weekend Update" anchor.
Best Meyers political line: After showing the "60 Minutes" interviewer trying to highlight differences between Pence and Trump in their stated positions on enhanced interrogation, Meyers said, "And of course Pence is okay with torture. He sat for this entire interview."
But, again, it was Colbert's night. It was a showcase for his talents from fronting the clever opening song ("The party of Lincoln had better start drinkin'") to reacting on the spot in the taped piece on the convention floor ("Chuck Todd!" he yelled up to a network convention booth, "My weasel" -- he was carrying a weasel, as part of his "Hunger Games" character -- "wants to make love to your goatee!")
On the live show, his writers reacted to things that had happened that day and even that night. Best Colbert line, perhaps: He's going live this week because "I want to be the first one to announce the moment America becomes great again."
But the real surprise was when what had been rumored as an appearance by Jon Stewart, Colbert's longtime colleague as Noah's predecessor on "The Daily Show," turned into that, yes, and a fun one. But it was also an elaborate reintroduction of "Stephen Colbert."
To ringing applause, "Colbert" launched into an old favorite segment, "The Word," a kind of comic mini-essay that aims to be more Jonathan Swift than Henny Youngman. It was on that segment on his very first "Colbert Report" that he coined "truthiness," a word that meant trusting what you feel to be true rather than what may, objectively, be so.
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Monday's Word was a clear antecedent, "Trumpiness." "Truthiness has to feel true, but Trumpiness doesn't even have to do that," Colbert said. "Truthiness was from the gut, but Trumpiness comes from much further down in the gastrointestinal tract."
His comic (but also serious) meditation on what Trump's candidacy means led to one of the segments' typically sharp conclusions: "If you don't share their feeling that you don't recognize your country anymore, trust me: If Trump wins, you will."
It was quite a start to what's shaping up to be a good week for both American comedy and for learning new ways to say "apocalypse."
sajohnson@tribpub.com
Twitter: @StevenKJohnson
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Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 122 Sophie Turner as Jean Grey, anger management student, in "Dark Phoenix." The film, the latest in the "X-Men" franchise, costars James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender and Jessica Chastain. Read the review. (Twentieth Century Fox)
Tales from the streets outside the GOP convention, where thousands were holding their own debate over Americas future.
Day 1: Paranoid in Cleveland | Dysfunctional veteran | Demilitarized zone | Day 2: Rock n roll moment | Water guns | Protest bingo | Day 3: The courts | Merchandise | Flag burning | The revolution | Protest? | Vermin Supreme
Love will see us through
Performance artist, activist and perennial political candidate Vermin Supreme, seen earlier in the Republican National Convention (Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA)
Day 4, 11:18 p.m.: The streets outside the Quicken Loans Arena were calm as Trump ascended the stage and accepted the nomination for president. Police officers loitered on Prospect Avenue, waiting for a threat to face as partiers watched Trump's speech from behind the glass windows of Flannery's bar.
Things were nearing an end out on the streets. Sitting on a sidewalk outside the Secret Service security zone, I listened on my phone as Trump promised to end crime when he took office on Jan. 20, 2017, and as he thundered that the country had become weak, disrespected and violent.
Then I heard a voice on a bullhorn.
It was coming up the narrow street where the media outlets had rented out storerooms and where a group of Hare Krishnas was banging a tambourine.
"Love is on our side," the performance artist and political prankster Vermin Supreme sang through his bullhorn, wearing a rain boot on his head, and dragging a retinue of followers, reporters and police with him. "Love will see us through."
Vermin Supreme, one of the Republican National Conventions celebrity street urchins, has served as a kind of left-wing counterweight to the provocations of Alex Jones. Where Jones has sown chaos around the convention, at one point interrupting a filming Thursday of the left-leaning Young Turks show, Vermin Supreme has inserted himself more playfully into the confrontations with protesters and police on the streets. Vermin or does he go by Supreme? looks like a scrawny, anarchist Santa, wearing a black vest that says "RESIST TELEVISION, POLICE ARE YOUR FRIENDS," a fake plastic butt, and a necktie that really couldn't get any looser.
He's teased the fundamentalist preachers who have been howling hellfire at every gathering, and he has pranced in front of the police, just like he was doing now as the crowd sang the national anthem.
"...Oer the land of the free, and the home... of the... brave."
Things in Cleveland were coming to an end.
"Soon you'll be in your living rooms drinking beer," Vermin Supreme told the crowd. "Keep it cool."
He skipped down Prospect Avenue, which was now empty except for a bank of police horses, state troopers, and cameras. The street was filled with people but nearly silent, except for the sound of the Hare Krishnas in the distance, and the quiet drone of a journalist playing video of Trump accepting the nomination for president.
"What's the name of the gentleman with the boot on his head?" an officer asked me.
"Vermin Supreme," I said.
"Vermin Supreme!" the officer said. "I'll have to look him up later."
"Please move along!" Vermin Supreme hollered from down Prospect Avenue, which was lined now by dozens of police. "Please ignore the man with the bullhorn. Thank you. I am Vermin Supreme, and I am running for president."
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What if they gave a protest, and only the reporters came?
The Stand Together Against Trump march across the Hope Memorial Bridge (Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times)
Day 4, 3:31 P.M.: If you hold a protest march on a bridge where nobody except the police and media can see you, are you really marching? Or are we all just slowly descending into madness together?
I've seen a lot of stuff outside the Republican National Convention that I could appropriate for a graphic novel about the end times. Bicycle officers dressed like Robocops. Police horses dressed like Robocops. Bikers chasing Communists. An activist in a diaper. Alex Jones.
But we may have reached the height of absurdity Thursday afternoon when the activist group Stand Together Against Trump held a permitted parade rally on the city-approved parade route outside the RNC.
Before the convention began, activists had complained that the city's protest restrictions violated the 1st Amendment. To hold a parade, you had to have a permit, and you had to follow a route over the Hope Bridge, which isnt particularly close to the convention. Activists called it the "bridge to nowhere."
Most of the organized protesters here this week have ignored the rules and just marched wherever they wanted, or at least wherever the hovering brigades of bicycle police would let them. They made a lot of noise and lots of bystanders saw them, and I can report that things basically ended up fine.
By contrast, Stand Together Against Trump followed the rules, got a permit, gathered at the permitted time, at the permitted place it appeared to be the only significant march held along the official parade route all week.
And it turned out like a zombie movie.
At the front of the march, about nine activists held up a long banner that read, "STAND AGAINST TRUMP: STAND FOR AMERICAN VALUES." Others held signs that said, "HISTORIANS SAY NO TO HATE," "A HATE-FILLED MIND IS A TERRIBLE THING," and "LOVE HAS NO BORDERS."
As about 100 activists began marching across the bridge, it became pretty clear that the only people who could see the messages of love were the bee swarm of journalists and a cluster of religious protesters who had come to tell everybody they were going to hell.
The protesters and the journalists proceeded to march over the river, lots of people chanting and somebody banging a drum. As far as I could tell, nobody back near the convention hall in the distance was even looking at us. When we reached the end of the route, a small army of police was waiting.
The surrounding streets were empty. Nary a delegate nor a casual passerby was to be seen. At one point I counted about seven construction workers watching from an overpass.
The protesters milled around a bit, realizing the route was a dead end. Then parade organizer Brian Hambley took a bullhorn: "Back over the bridge!" he boomed.
They pivoted back toward the action.
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The revolution is coming. Or not.
Carl Dix, a founding member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, says supporters will challenge the arrests of 17 people in Wednesday's flag-burning protest. (Matt Pearce / Los Angeles Times)
Day 4, 10:57 A.M.: I wonder when's the last time American Communists got this much media attention.
It's the final day of the Republican National Convention, and so, of course, I'm at a news conference for Revolutionary Communist Party supporters. To be honest, there's not much else going on. The '60s this is not. Norman Mailer's armies of the night have not materialized on the streets of Cleveland. Which is why I have ended up here with a couple dozen other journalists, clogging the sidewalk in front of the Cleveland Justice Center to hear what supporters of communist revolution had to say.
"America was never great," Sunsara Taylor, a Revolutionary Communist Party supporter, told a bank of television cameras. She ticked through America's sins: slavery, imperialism, capitalism, police killings, and now, the "Nazi rally," otherwise known as the GOP convention, happening inside the nearby Quicken Loans Arena.
------------
FOR THE RECORD
8:18 p.m. July 21: An previous version of this report misspelled Sunsara Taylors first name as Sansara.
------------
RCP supporters were responsible for the most dramatic bit of activism outside the convention thus far: an American flag-burning ceremony Wednesday that ended with 17 arrests, including the flag burner, Gregory Lee Joey Johnson. He was the one who burned the American flag outside the RNC in 1984, and whose arrest led to a Supreme Court ruling that flag burning was constitutional.
The Communists say the arrests were illegal, and have signaled that Wednesday's arrests could lead to another battle in court.
Police claim they moved in not to stop the flag burning, but because the protesters had accidentally set themselves on fire.
I've seen video showing that an official almost instantly tried to douse the burning flag with an extinguisher, and things turned chaotic as Johnson tried to protect the flame."The police have lied," Taylor said this morning.
The RCPs supporters are a pretty common sight out on the activist circuit; if there were a protest Olympics, they might send a delegation. I remember seeing them in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 when the city's black residents began rising up against their Police Department.
Even there, in a scene known for its stridency, they were not exactly popular among other activists, some of whom accused them of instigation. At one point, protesters and St. Louis City Councilman Antonio French shoved one of the groups members, apparently Johnson, to the ground.
Maybe its because they are, as their title suggests, revolutionary. They want to overthrow capitalism because they think nothing good can come from it. And it's probably worth saying that they're probably as far away from the Democratic and Republican nominees as you can get ideologically. They think Donald Trump is a fascist and Hillary Clinton a war criminal.
In other words, you can expect to see them right back outside the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, calling for the same revolution.
But first, there's the matter of Trump's acceptance speech tonight. "Everybody who's in Cleveland or who can get here needs to be a part of these protests," said Carl Dix, a founding member of the RCP, adding that the party was "organizing for an actual revolution at the soonest possible moment."
As they have been for years.
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The Star-Spangled Banner in flames
Police arrest protesters from the Revolutionary Communist Party as they burned an American flag. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
DAY 3, 5:06 P.M.: There is enough international media in Cleveland to cover a nuclear catastrophe, and it's starting to feel like we're all photographing the same 50 protesters antagonizing one another.
Take what happened outside Quicken Loans Arena, headquarters for the Republican National Convention.
For days, the Revolutionary Communist Party an old-school Maoist group led by Bob Avakian had given notice that its members were planning to burn an American flag outside the convention on Wednesday at 4 p.m.
Burning an American flag is constitutional. The Supreme Court said so after a communist burned the flag outside the RNC in 1984. Yet burning the flag remains reliably infuriating, especially for veterans, who have been patrolling the streets outside this year's convention on the lookout for protesters who might be up to no good.
By the time 4 p.m. rolled around, the intersection at 4th Street and Prospect Avenue was clogged with journalists, police, veterans, communists, religious proselytizers, onlookers and a guy in a baseball hat that said Make Serbia Great Again.
Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams stood in the street, trying to personally clear the intersection. TV cameras formed debris clouds around anybody who looked as though he was about to do something.
Finally, the communists burned the flag, photographers bobbed around the action, police officers crashed through the wall of journalists' bodies, and a series of arrests began, for unknown charges. I wasn't close enough to see, but police said that two officers were assaulted and suffered minor injuries, and that officials took the flag after dousing it.
At that point, mounted police began pushing down the street, blowing whistles. Officers marched an older woman in a purplish shirt into the back of a van, with a contingent of communists in pursuit, chanting, "Let her go!" A woman hollered on her bullhorn, "You've got to get with the world-class revolutionary leadership of Bob Avakian!"
By the time it was over, 16 members of the communist group had been arrested, according to supporter Sunsara Taylor. (Police later said 17 were arrested there, while they made an additional arrest elsewhere.) One of them was Gregory Lee Joey Johnson, who burned the flag the same guy who had burned the flag at the RNC in 1984.
His message was that 'America was NEVER great! We need to overthrow the system,' Taylor wrote later in a direct message on Twitter. "The U.S. flag is even more blood-soaked than when he burned it the first time. She proceeded to tick off names of African Americans killed by police, then threw in victims of the Iraq war for good measure.
"Pisses me off," said an Arizona Sons of Liberty member in a leather jacket as it all unfolded. He told me his name was Hoss and said he and some of his fellow Sons of Liberty were keeping a close eye on the communists.
Hoss said he had served in the Army, had family members who had died serving. Hed taken an oath, he said, to protect America from enemies foreign and domestic, and now it was time to make good on it.
He was there to protect the Republican delegates from the kind of violence that broke out outside a Donald Trump rally in San Jose in May, Hoss said. "We didn't want to see a repeat of what happened."
As it was, there wasn't much for him to do. The police presence in Cleveland has been overwhelming, and up until then, things had been pretty mellow.
Tomorrow, Hoss predicted, all that would change. Tomorrow, Trump would accept the Republican nomination. Look out, he said.
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Keep the merchandise coming, please
Shy Drayton of Indiana, a street vendor at the Republican National Convention. (Matt Pearce / Los Angeles Times)
DAY 3, 1:36 P.M.: Once upon a time, there were a bunch of buttons being sold on the streets outside the Republican National Convention, and this would not normally be news, except my mother would disown me if I ever bought some of them.
Euclid Avenue outside the Quicken Loans Arena has the feel of a souk, where protesters bark like street prophets (and are mostly ignored, just like street prophets) and street vendors peddle Trump hats, Trump shirts, Trump magnets, Trump buttons.
And Hillary Clinton buttons.
LIFE'S A BITCH. DON'T VOTE FOR ONE.
VOTE NO TO MONICA'S EX-BOYFRIEND'S WIFE IN 2016.
KFC HILLARY SPECIAL: 2 FAT THIGHS, 2 SMALL BREASTS ... LEFT WING.
I've seen them displayed at the eye level of a child by several street vendors, who are overwhelmingly male.
Except for Shy Drayton.
"Oh my gosh jeez," Drayton said as I showed her photos I'd taken of other vendors' Clinton buttons. "I think that's very rude."
Drayton had a stand of merchandise set up in the shade of the House of Blues, where she was selling buttons (one for $3, four for $10) and shirts ($15 to $20).
"This is how I make my everyday living," said Drayton as she folded a HILLARY FOR PRISON 2016 T-shirt. "I'm not too much into politics."
Drayton, who is from Indiana, has been hawking whatever sells at public events since she was 14, starting with Obama's election "back in the day." Most recently, she has been peddling gear in Atlanta, North Carolina, Iowa, Alabama and now Ohio.
"I've been to 42 states already, and I'm only 21," Drayton said proudly. "I meet people from all over the world."
Her personal philosophy: The president matters less than your personal motivations. "If you want to be rich, you can be rich," Drayton says. "You got to figure out how to do it."
Everybody at the convention has been nice to her, Drayton said. Her perch on Euclid Avenue has given her a front-row seat at the circus.
Recently, she watched as a group of armed men calling themselves defenders of the 2nd Amendment marched down the road with rifles, a brigade of police bringing up the rear.
But nothing much happened. Drayton turned away and kept selling her merch.
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The courts: All dressed up, but nobodys at the party
One of the protesters who appeared in court Wednesday is seen during her arrest the previous day outside the Republican National Convention. (Collin Rees)
DAY 3, 9:56 A.M.: A sign outside Cleveland Municipal Courtroom D says NO LO TERING. The "I" has fallen off, sadly. "Is there anyone here scheduled for a protection order hearing?" a court worker asked the young men and women waiting in the rather Soviet-era hallway.
Nope. This morning, a group of activists sat outside Courtroom D, not loitering, but awaiting judgment.
Municipal court is maybe the closest thing protesters have to a stern church: hard benches, rules that cannot be broken and a rather stiff penalty for skipping attendance. Jails and municipal courts often form the crucial backstage to all the protests you see on Twitter and TV, the place where the system takes in arrested activists, parks them behind bars and then spits them out after a fine or, more rarely, jail time.
For defense attorneys, representing activists can be a little weirder than regular criminal cases. As opposed to 99% of your other clients, your activist client might want to be guilty, want to go to jail for what he or she believes, or at least want to have a bonkers political trial in which a spectacle can be made in court, in front of the public, to draw attention to a cause. Sometimes it works.
There are three people who have been arrested for protesting in the first three days of the Republican National Convention, which was widely expected to be the most chaotic convention since 1968.
Yesterday, Jacqueline Zepeda, 28, and Sharon Spencer, 34, shimmied up two flagpoles outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to hang an anti-Trump banner as Liz Butler, 44, watched out from below. The police, of course, busted them on suspicion of trespassing and generally causing a ruckus. After spending about eight or nine hours behind bars Tuesday, they were released, and this morning they came to cut a deal.
No spectacle here, I can report. It was all very quiet. One by one, the women came in front of Administrative and Presiding Judge Ronald B. Adrine, listened to a series of brief charges from a municipal prosecutor and pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct. They were released with fines as low as $75. It went by so fast that I could barely catch what they were charged with.
It's probably here in municipal court where you can best see how surprisingly calm the Republican National Convention has been. Cleveland's municipal courts had cleared out all their dockets and kept staff and judges on call in preparation for facing as many as 1,000 protester arrests a day. They even set up live streaming in three courtrooms in anticipation of huge dockets and packed galleries. They've needed none of it.
"So far, it's worked out perfectly," Adrine told me after the arraignments, knocking on the wooden walls of the court. "If somebody told me that three days in, we'd have a grand total of three convention-related arrests, I'd probably ask them what they'd been smoking."
Outside the courthouse, Zepeda, Spencer and Butler were ready to talk. They are anti-fracking and pro-immigration activists who said they met through friends. Butler said it was a "small price to pay to lose a day of freedom" to oppose deportations and "climate injustice."
"I'm glad we did it. It's a privilege to stand up for these communities," she said.
Spencer said it was unfortunate that for police and court systems, "their first priority is to protect corporations. I would like to see that changed." Then she had a word about fracking, an oil extraction process that has been blamed for fouled groundwater, earthquakes and other environmental ills.
"I'm just not interested in Ohio being a dumping ground for surrounding states," she said.
Zepeda, of northeast Los Angeles, munching on dry Trix cereal, said it was her first time getting arrested for anything. "It wasn't horrible," she said.
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Im here today to say what I want to say
Alex Jones, center, an American conspiracy theorist and radio show host, is escorted out of a crowd of protesters after a scuffle with some of them. (John Minchillo / Associated Press)
DAY 2, 6:03 P.M.: Remember when I wrote that things were calm, that it almost seemed as if the world outside the Republican National Convention was falling asleep? Ignore that. That was wrong. I was wrong.
The chaos seemed to begin I suppose it's fitting with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, whose airplane banners, truck advertisements and calls for Hillary Clinton's imprisonment have rivaled Donald Trump for setting the dominant tone in downtown Cleveland.
Jones was passing through Public Square when, he says, he was confronted by communist protesters. A scuffle followed. By the time Jones was whisked away in an SUV, the scene had become a psychodrama.
The plaza filled with hundreds of people police, Christian fundamentalists, communists, reporters, curious bystanders and a famous performance artist named Vermin Supreme wearing a boot on his head.
It was like protest bingo.
A group of grizzled men calling themselves the Bible Believers warned of the hell to come, and they stood on a ledge with signs; one said, "Jesus Christ, God manifested in the flesh, crucified, resurrected, and coming again, has a pressure cooker (THE LAKE OF FIRE) for every dead Muslim!"
On a different side of the square, the chronically inflammatory Westboro Baptist Church stood with its batch of fundamentalist signs warning "GOD HATES PROUD SINNERS."
On the opposite end of the square, the signs of the Revolutionary Communist Party could be seen bobbing in the distance over the heads of the police. They were using their bodies to build human picket fences between all the ideological factions in the square, which was starting to bulge like an angry neck vein.
The Bible Believers screamed damnation to the crowd on a megaphone, and Vermin Supreme jovially shouted back on his own megaphone, saying he couldn't understand them.
The Bible Believers then started chanting, "Police lives matter," and a different group with red, white and blue parasols started drowning them out with chants of "All lives matter."
At that point, in an unexpected turn, the Bible Believers started condemning the Westboro Baptist Church, calling them a "hate group." By then, more than 100 police had filled the square, slowly squeezing out lingering civilians like white blood cells trying to purge an infection.
The voice of a boy in a red yarmulke pierced the crowd as he started shouting at the Bible Believer, and as they started marching away, the boy confidently extended a middle finger for all the world to see.
I had to talk to him.
He said his name was Ranan Steiger, of Cleveland, and that he was 16, but he sure looked a lot younger. He had a sign that said, "Just say no to white supremacy."
"I'm here today to say what I want to say," said Ranan, making it clear he was offended to have been told he was going to hell. "Jerks like those, you can't let them do what they want to do."
What did he think about Donald Trump? He's an "idiot," Ranan said.
Was he a Republican or a Democrat?
Ranan shrugged. He didn't know yet.
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The guns come out in Cleveland. But do they squirt?
Stevedore Crawford Jr. of Delaware, Ohio, shouts at a police officer in Cleveland. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
DAY 2, 2:29 P.M.: "They're both carrying AR-15s," the police scanner barked.
I was sitting in the shade at Public Square when I heard the descriptions of two armed men come over an officer's radio not with any seeming urgency. There have been other armed men, 2nd Amendment advocates, wandering around with their weapons outside the Republican National Convention, which is their right in Ohio. Up to now they haven't caused any trouble.
Still, I hopped up to see whether I could find these two who had caught the police's attention, to see what it looks like when you bring weapons to what feels like one of the most heavily guarded places on Earth.
It's probably a sign of how well things are going in Cleveland that I couldn't find anybody with AR-15s, or even any other sign of trouble.
Public Square in downtown Cleveland has become a pulsing jugular of the republic, where pro- and anti-Trump demonstrators mill about with signs and score TV interviews. It's peaceful. There are no brawls between sides. Protester riots have not materialized. Guns haven't been fired or wielded in anger. When I wandered past the square, I saw two groups of performance artists dancing in a grassy lawn, moving in slow motion, figures from a hallucination, as if this weird little world outside the convention had started falling asleep.
"I see people with water guns," one of my photographer co-workers, Marcus Yam, texted me.
AR-15s are legal in the protest zone, but water guns are not. They were temporarily banned by the City Council as a security measure. I decided to check it out.
I found Stevedore Crawford Jr., 53, of Delaware, Ohio, standing in a white T-shirt that said TAMIR RICE ONLY, with what looked to be three technically prohibited lime-green squirt guns on the sidewalk. (Actually, I couldn't tell whether they were squirt guns or regular toy guns.) Rice was the 12-year-old shot and killed by police while playing with a toy gun in a Cleveland park in 2014. The officer who shot him was not charged.
Crawford was there with a woman and two very young girls who appeared to be his daughters. "I find it hard to live my life ... knowing Tamir Rice was shot down where she will be playing," Crawford, who is black, shouted to anyone who would listen, patting one of the girls on the head. "They murdered Tamir Rice in this city!"
A group of police officers walked past, and a white officer hailed Crawford: "Hey, boss." They bumped fists as cameramen circled one of those made-for-media moments when a black American and a white cop come together for something a visual metaphor for the idea that we can bridge our differences, even though the reality tends to be much, much harder.
The fist bump was a little awkward. Crawford began crying and bent over after the officers passed, overcome by emotion.
The officers left the play guns alone. After Crawford collected himself, he wandered down the street in the other direction.
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A rock n roll moment in Cleveland
Activist Jacqui Zepeda of Los Angeles is arrested outside Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (Collin Rees)
DAY 2, 10:25 A.M.: I've never been around so many police in my life.
In downtown Cleveland, there are thousands of them, roving in specially sworn patrols on seemingly every block. They might be from California, Texas or Georgia, and the units all have different uniforms black, blue, tan. It's got a quasi-multicultural flair, kind of like a gathering of Olympic delegations where the pole vaulters from Ukraine have guns and the power to arrest you.
Which is what makes Tuesday morning's first protest so interesting.
Despite the city's enormous police and surveillance presence, about 7:15 a.m., two women began shimmying up the two flagpoles outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which has been hosting Republican National Convention guests. The two had managed to unhook and slip past the least rock n roll thing imaginable: metal barricades around the hall, draped with signs that say "MUSIC DEFIES BARRIERS."
"Slightly ironic in its own right," said activist Collin Rees, who was assisting with the protest from the ground and whose favorite group is the Temptations.
It was immigration and anti-fracking activists who were defying the barriers this time. As police arrived about 15 minutes later and helplessly barked for the two women to stop what they were doing, according to Rees, the activists hung a 25-by-25-foot banner that said, "DON'T TRUMP OUR COMMUNITIES: Ban fracking, tear down the wall, stop climate injustice."
The flag hung slightly above the American, Ohio and Cleveland flags, which had been lowered to half-staff for the recent killings of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, La.
The two women, Jacqui Zepeda of Los Angeles and Sharon Spencer of Akron, Ohio, were arrested as soon as they climbed down, Rees said. A third activist helping from the ground, Liz Butler of Mount Rainier, Md., was also arrested, he said.
"They were doing their job; we were doing our job," Rees said of the officers, adding that the activists were not part of a formal group. "We were sending out the message we set out to send."
By the time I got to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the protest had ended, the women were arrested, the banner was already gone gone, like dust in the wind. Because all we are is dust in the wind.
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The demilitarized zone between left and right
Mildred Lee, 82, was one of a minority of pro-Hillary Clinton Democrats outside the Republican convention (Matt Pearce / Los Angeles Times)
DAY 1, 5:35 P.M.: This afternoon, the eastern and western ends of downtown Cleveland could have been mistaken for two halves of an American brain no longer communicating with each other.
There was the right-wing rally on the waterfront to the west, where InfoWars host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones sort of a human volcano who is always erupting led the crowd in a near-screaming of "HILLARY FOR PRISON! HILLARY FOR PRISON! HILLARY FOR PRISON!"
It was a great show for the conservative-minded crowd gathered on the banks of the Cuyahoga. "Don't tread on me" Gadsden banners flapped in the wind. Vendors outside the event sold Trump swag, including family-unfriendly buttons that said things like "KFC Hillary Special: 2 Fat Thighs, 2 Small Breasts... Left Wing."
Elsewhere at the rally, Mike "H.P." Roberts, 29, of New York proudly wore a button that said "Hillary 4 Prison" (complete with the presumptive nominee in an orange prison jumpsuit). Yes, he's for Trump, and, full disclosure, yes, he's black.
"Not all of us think like a herd of sheep," Roberts said. "There's a lot of black people like us, but they're intimidated, they're scared."
Roberts stopped as he heard a man speaking in the distance. "That's Alex," Roberts said Alex Jones. "I know that voice."
At the worldview to the east, there was the antipoverty rally filled with anarchists, communists, assorted other lefty types and one Sikh cartoonist dressed in a Captain America costume holding a sign that said "LOVE TRUMPS HATE." (His name is Vishajvit Singh.) Muscle-bound men whose haircuts and concealable body armor screamed plainclothes police or paid security strolled through what was clearly not their kind of crowd, trying to keep a low profile. Nor was this a Clinton kind of crowd.
Alex Chabbott, a rangy 35-year-old from Santa Barbara, laid out neat rows of photocopied pamphlets with titles including "Guide to Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) Destruction," "Autonomous Resistance to Slavery and Colonization," and an antifascist tract called "Claim No Easy Victories: A History and Analysis of Anti-Racist Action."
"The real power comes from people grass-roots action," Chabbott said, ticking off historical human-rights victories, like the end of slavery in the United States. Chabbott had been in Michigan for an environmental conference and decided he had to drop by the RNC, to "talk to people, hang out get rid of all of these zines, so I don't have to take them home."
After the protest, music group Prophets of Rage played a short set on the abandoned lot where everyone had gathered and the crowd marched dozens of blocks toward downtown holding signs like "NO WAR BUT CLASS WAR."
At the front of the group, way ahead of the crowd, marched Mildred Lee, 82, dressed in a green and gold embroidered dress, an elegant red hat, and long, white gloves. She called it the outfit of an African Queen.
"I'm walking faster than the people," Lee beamed, as a human fence of bicycle police rolled past her and kept the crowd in the road from spilling onto the sidewalks. "I walk every day, so I'm used to it."
Lee was also probably an anomaly: She was a pro-Clinton Democrat and said she thinks it's time for a woman to be president. Asked if she was worried that the protest might turn violent, she shrugged. "When God gets ready for me, I'm ready."
But after the crowd had walked about two miles in the sun, nearing convention headquarters, its energy dissipated. Participants followed the routes blocked out by police without resisting. And by the time they spilled into a small park less than half a mile from Quicken Loans Arena, they were clearly done.
They flopped onto the cool grass, shaded by high-rises. And the small army of police that formed around them was left with nothing to do.
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Dysfunctional veteran leave me alone
"I don't want terrorism to come to nobody," says Mike Welch, whose brother was killed in a Beirut bombing. "It destroyed my mom. It destroyed our family. For what?" (Matt Pearce / Los Angeles Times)
DAY 1, 12:25 P.M.: At a pro-Trump rally on the Cuyahoga River waterfront, I saw a man in a U.S. Marines vest with a patch that said, "DYSFUNCTIONAL VETERAN LEAVE ME ALONE."
Of course I had to talk to him.
"Los Angeles Times!" Mike Welch barked, immediately fearing a liberal reporter who would twist his words. He took out his phone to take a picture of my ID badge. I promised I would record what he had to say and give him a fair shot, so Welch, still feisty, said he came from Michigan to prevent leftist protesters from shutting down the Republican National Convention.
"Bill Ayers I would like to meet. I come to these to find him," Welch, said, referring to the man who co-founded the Weather Underground during the leftist domestic bombing campaigns of the 1970s. "And when I do you can have that I'm going to kick his ass."
Welch wanted tougher immigration laws, a tougher fight on terrorism. He was sickened by the recent terror in France, sickened by the recent nuclear deal with Iran. Terrorism, in fact, was deeply personal to him. That's why he was for Trump.
"They killed my brother. They killed him," Welch said, projecting disbelief. "Chief Warrant Officer Kenneth Welch. Defense intelligence. The last bombing in Beirut." A suicide car bomber attacked the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon on Sept. 20, 1984, and two Americans were among the dead. "Michael Ray Wagner, of the Navy, and my brother. Nobody gives a damn today because they're too busy running around."
Welch had a photo of his brother and his brother's name and rank sewn onto the front of his vest. On the back of Welch's vest were the names and photos of other fallen service members: Staff Sgt. Gregory McCoy. Sgt. Chad J. Vollmer. Spc. Holly McGeogh. Pfc. Casey Mason.
"I don't want terrorism to come to nobody. It destroyed my mom. It destroyed our family. For what?" For international politics, Welch said.
"Now we go to Arlington to see him, see a name on the wall. George Bush Sr. asked if we were proud of him. You know what? I was proud of him while he was alive. I don't need him blown apart to see his name on the wall, we didn't need that from him. So when families are affected, you see the bitterness that comes back. You think I am, my mother was five times worse. So I'm here for him, and people like him that served."
Welch sounded sad now. "Sorry about the cuss words."
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Hot, sweaty and paranoid in Cleveland
Police officers stand guard as anti-Trump protesters take to the streets on the eve of the Republican National Convention. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
DAY 1, 10:40 A.M.: Cleveland is already hot, sweaty and paranoid, as if a slice of the Rust Belt had been colonized by Washington, D.C., and turned into an outdoor airport security checkpoint.
Men in suits and women in dresses (I suspect this is not how most Clevelanders normally dress) drift past black metal fencing that surrounds the arena, the mayor's office, the city's convention center.
Police officers roam alleyways between the buildings downtown, guarding vulnerabilities unknown to the public. Local activists have been spooked by FBI agents knocking on their doors, looking for information or threats to this week's proceedings.
Through all this, I watch two men rolling a cart of transparent tubs filled with thousands of tortilla chips down the sidewalk, headed to parts unknown.
For the last week, almost everyone who finds out I'm going to be covering the protests outside the Republican National Convention has asked me a version of the same question: How bad do you think it will be? Will there be riots? Will protesters get in fights with Trump supporters? Will a lot of people bring guns (which is allowed under Ohio law)?
My answer each time has been: I really don't know. But like many other journalists, I packed body armor just in case, and would have brought a gas mask if the Cleveland City Council hadn't banned them. Sunday a man was arrested when officials said he tried to rip away the gas mask strapped to a state trooper's side. They think he may have been mentally ill.
"Can you hit ctrl+alt+delete for me?" a security agent asks as I try to enter the fenced-in security zone, where journalists are prompted to open their laptops and power them on. A woman in front of me can't get hers to turn on. Dead battery. She's sent away to plug it in. The security agent sees my password screen, swipes his finger randomly across the keyboard to enter a gibberish password and hits Enter. Incorrect password, but the right answer. It's not a bomb.
I regret to report that my mother isn't pleased that I'm here.
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Follow @mattdpearce on Twitter.
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People visit the National Museum of Western Art at Ueno Park in Tokyo, Japan, on July 17. The UNESCO World Heritage Committee decided to add the museum in to its World Heritage List. The committee added the museum and 16 other buildings designed by Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier in seven countries. (KIMIMASA MAYAMA / EPA)
The Le Corbusier-designed National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo was named a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site on Sunday, following the recommendation in May by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) to list the museum and other buildings designed by Le Corbusier as World Heritage sites.
UNESCO's World Heritage Committee decided Sunday at its meeting in Istanbul to register the National Museum of Western Art and 16 other works by Corbusier in seven countries.
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The museum became Japan's 16th World Cultural Heritage site and the first since the Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution was registered last year.
The museum in the Ueno district was designed by architectural giant Le Corbusier, who designed many buildings from residences and housing complexes to churches and museums. His concept of a "Museum of Unlimited Growth" meant arranging corridors to form a spiral in a quadrangular building and building an exterior extension as if the spiral expands as the number of works collected increases.
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A judge heard arguments Monday in a case filed by two environmental watchdog groups, who allege the Health Council did not give proper notice for a meeting it held about radioactive waste rules and ask that the rules be voided and the meeting be re-held.
South Central District Judge Thomas Schneider said he would issue an opinion on whether to proceed to trial or dismiss the case.
The regulations decided on at the Aug. 11 meeting raised the acceptable levels of radioactivity that can be disposed in state landfills.
At the hearing, an attorney for the Health Council conceded the agency had not given proper notice of the meeting, but argued the meeting doesn't need to be done over. The Health Council already complied with an official opinion from the state attorney general by providing minutes of the meeting after the fact. He noted that five days' notice had been given, and some people had come to speak at the meeting.
"No one was deprived of the ability to attend the meetings. They just weren't noticed correctly," said Jeff Petrie, an assistant attorney general.
Petrie also argued that because it was a meeting not a hearing, people had a right to be present but not necessarily to testify. People had made comments in the past at properly noticed hearings.
"The Health Council wanted to be as transparent as possible," Petrie said of allowing testimony at the contested meeting.
Sarah Vogel, who represents the North Dakota Energy Industry Waste Coalition and the Dakota Resource Council, argued that the Attorney General's opinion was unpersuasive and needed to be reviewed by the court. Vogel said an appropriate remedy would be to re-convene the meeting. Minutes only tell you what happened at a meeting, she argued.
"It defies common sense," Vogel said.
Vogel said people were harmed by the failure to give proper notice.
Several people filed affidavits in the case, saying they would have appeared and spoken about the way the radioactive waste would affect their health and land and property values.
Vogel also said there were factual matters that required a trial to resolve, including when the agenda for the meeting was set and whether people were harmed.
She said the attorney general has allowed a re-do of a meeting in other cases.
Folks typically head to The Resort at Paws Up a luxuriously rustic 37,000-acre ranch near Missoula, Mont. for outdoor adventure in the Blackfoot Valley and glamping under the stars in Big Sky Country.
But for one weekend in the fall, the focus is squarely on the food. Fine food, at that.
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Montana Master Chefs brings James Beard Award winners, finalists and nominees to the Greenough, Mont., resort to cook for and hobnob with about 100 guests, Sept. 29 to Oct. 2.
This year's roster of culinary talent includes Mindy Segal of Mindy's HotChocolate in Chicago; Ashley Christensen of Poole's Downtown Diner, AC Restaurants in Raleigh, N.C.; Matt Jennings of Townsman in Boston; Jamie Malone of Brut in Minneapolis; Steven Satterfield of Miller Union in Atlanta; and Paws Up chef Ben Jones.
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Roughly 100 guests take part in the Montana Master Chefs event at The Resort at Paws Up, a rustic-luxe retreat in western Montana. (The Resort at Paws Up)
All of the chefs and showcased winemakers stay on the property to mix and mingle with the guests throughout the long weekend, which features wine tastings and receptions, multi-course meals, a cook-off challenge, nightly concerts and this is Montana, after all ample opportunity to explore the expansive wilderness.
This gustatory getaway doesn't come cheap: All-inclusive rates start at $979 a person, per night; 866-825-9935, www.pawsup.com.
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Renewed attention to an exiled Turkish Muslim cleric accused of orchestrating a failed coup last week could mean a brighter light on a Chicago group that promotes his brand of social activism.
Fethullah Gulen is the honorary president of the Niagara Foundation, based in Chicago with branches in nine Midwestern states. The organization was founded in 2004 by a group of Turkish businessmen and educators in Mount Prospect to forge interfaith, inter-cultural collaborations and dialogues, in line with Gulen's philosophies.
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Niagara is part of what many call Hizmet, more popularly known as the Gulen Movement, which endorses tenets such as democracy, religious tolerance and free markets.
Once the coup attempt was subdued, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan quickly focused his ire on Gulen, an ally-turned-enemy who now lives in a small town 90 miles north of Philadelphia. The U.S. has resisted calls from Turkish leaders to extradite Gulen to Turkey thus far, but Niagara Foundation leaders feel Erdogan and his administration are gearing up for a widescale censure of Gulen supporters.
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"Erdogan has already won. There won't be any meaningful opposition to his witch hunt against opposition groups from now on," the group wrote on its website Monday. "Having attained complete loyalty from Turkish state and civil society structures, Erdogan's next stop is likely to be the Turkish diaspora overseas."
Board member Scott Alexander said groups like Niagara began emerging particularly after the Sept. 11 attacks when anti-Islam rhetoric was on the rise.
"Fethullah Gulen was teaching not only the value of education but that you have to be engaged in dialogue," said Alexander, who teaches Islamic Studies at the Catholic Theological Union, a graduate school in Hyde Park. "The religion of Islam was being hijacked by these terrorists. Gulen was not a big fan of certain interpretations of Islam, even nonviolent, ultra-conservative interpretations. Gulen's understanding was much broader than that."
Eventually, Niagara began organizing events designed to bring together various faith leaders for discussions, Alexander said. The group also sponsored trips to Turkey. Niagara now coordinates smaller Hizmet movements in the Midwest. Other groups, including the Pacifica Institute and Peace Islands Institute, perform similar organizing roles for other regions throughout the country.
All of them converge under the umbrella group of the Alliance for Shared Values, based in New York. Members of that organization also have the most direct contact with the reclusive Gulen, who rarely does public appearances or interviews.
Among Niagara's board of directors are Bulent Aydogan, a University of Chicago associate professor of radiation and cellular oncology, and Ozgur Berberoglu, a senior engineer at Caterpillar Inc. Niagara's advisory board includes several leaders in local media and higher education, including from Northwestern, DePaul and Loyola universities and ABC 7 Chicago, WTTW and the Daily Herald.
Gulen's sphere of influence has attracted renewed scrutiny as the fallout from the unsuccessful military takeover continues. Thousands of people have been arrested for trying to oust Erdogan, who has long been criticized for using autocratic tactics.
Erdogan's administration alleged that Gulen helped plan the government overthrow and also accused the U.S. itself as being behind the military action. Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters in Luxembourg that the U.S. would consider any extradition request if Turkish leaders presented conclusive evidence of Gulen's involvement in any wrongdoing.
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"(Secretary Kerry) made clear that the United States would be willing to provide assistance to Turkish authorities conducting this investigation, but that public insinuations or claims about any role by the United States in the failed coup attempt are utterly false and harmful to our bilateral relations," State Department spokesman John Kirby said.
Gulen has denied being involved in the failed coup.
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"Government should be won through a process of free and fair elections, not force," Gulen said in a statement issued through the Alliance for Shared Values. "As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt."
"For more than 40 years, Fethullah Gulen and Hizmet participants have advocated for, and demonstrated their commitment to, peace and democracy," Alliance leaders said in a corresponding statement. "We have consistently denounced military interventions in domestic policies. These are core values of Hizmet participants. Comments by pro-Erdogan circles about the movement are highly irresponsible."
Still, Alexander said there may be a silver lining to the most recent controversy surrounding Gulen and Hizmet.
"The Hizmet movement has nothing to hide," Alexander said. "We're hoping people can learn more about it. Since Gulen is being accused of this, there will be greater scrutiny of the Hizmet movement, and we invite that scrutiny."
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The Associated Press contributed.
cdrhodes@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @rhodes_dawn
University at Albany President Robert Jones has been selected as the new chancellor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. If approved by the board of trustees, he will be the campuss first African-American chancellor. (Paul Buckowski / AP)
University of Illinois President Timothy Killeen has chosen a former colleague from New York as the next chancellor of the state's flagship public university in Urbana-Champaign.
Robert Jones, president of the University at Albany, part of the State University of New York system, will start Oct. 3 pending approval by the board of trustees at its meeting this week.
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Jones, 65, would be the campus's first African-American chancellor. He would be paid $649,000 a year, according to a U. of I. spokesman. Killeen's base salary is $600,000, but he is eligible for a $100,000 performance-based bonus this year.
Raised in Georgia as part of a sharecropping family, Jones studied food production and crop science and became a scholar in plant physiology. He began his academic career as a faculty member at the University of Minnesota before going on to work in leadership positions at two public research universities.
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"We need to find ways to make that story possible for everyone, no matter where they start, what their parents do or how fast the technological, economic and political changes come at us," Jones said in a statement. "And we need to find ways to be sure that story is one that isn't limited to four or five years of life, but to the educational needs of a whole lifetime."
Johnson called the U. of I. chancellor position his "dream job." He has worked at the University at Albany since 2013 and previously spent 34 years at the University of Minnesota, where he held various administrative positions, including senior vice president for academic administration for nine years.
Killeen worked with Jones in New York when Killeen was the vice chancellor for research at the SUNY system before taking over as U. of I. president last year.
Killeen called Jones "uniquely qualified" for the job. He cited his experience working with state legislatures and local communities and said it was important that Jones had worked at public research universities that are part of multicampus systems. He said Jones is committed to increasing the diversity of students and faculty members.
"All of those things are directly relevant to our situation," Killeen said. "A lot of the commentary I heard was that Robert checks every box. ... It is hard to find a piece that was missing."
Jones will succeed interim Chancellor Barbara Wilson, who took over last summer after Chancellor Phyllis Wise abruptly resigned over an email scandal that revealed she and several top advisers used personal accounts to avoid public scrutiny concerning controversial decisions.
The U. of I. received more than 100 applications and nominations for the position, and a 13-member advisory committee narrowed the list to about 30 candidates. Killeen then picked four finalists who were interviewed by the president, trustees and campus leaders.
At Albany, Jones has pushed for the university to become more elite, including by adding a College of Engineering and a College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity.
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The university was in the spotlight earlier this year after three African-American female students said that while riding a bus, a group of white people attacked them and used racial slurs. Jones decried the alleged hate crime at the time, saying "there is no place in the SUNY Albany community for violence, no place for racial intolerance and no place for gender violence."
Police, however, determined that the women started the fight and charged them with assault and false reporting. The university expelled two of the women and the third student was suspended for two years.
The University at Albany is significantly smaller than the U. of I., with about 18,000 students compared with 46,000.
Jones earned a bachelor's degree in agronomy from Fort Valley State College, a master's degree in crop physiology from the University of Georgia and a doctorate in crop physiology from the University of Missouri at Columbia, according to the U. of I.
He is married to Dr. Lynn Hassan Jones, a diagnostic radiologist, and has five children and two grandchildren.
jscohen@chicagotribune.com
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Bellwood School District 88 Superintendent Rosemary Hendricks talks to attorney Howard Brookins Jr. during a school board meeting in Bellwood on July 18, 2016. (Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune)
About 30 residents attended a Bellwood District 88 school board meeting Monday for a heated discussion about the district's spending and leadership.
Board members and Superintendent Rosemary Hendricks listened for nearly an hour as about a dozen people spoke during the public comment portion of the meeting. The room was deeply divided with about half of the speakers supporting Hendricks while the others demanded answers about hiring her two daughters and district spending.
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Many cited last week's Chicago Tribune report that detailed perks for the superintendent, thousands of dollars in spending on trips to education conferences, and hiring practices. The district is deep in debt, and basic school supplies in some classrooms remain scarce.
Resident Della Hayes blamed the board for not knowing its role, accusing members of "combative behavior."
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She said the public is being "hoodwinked and bamboozled" by the Tribune report and "nobody's talking about education."
There were several jeers from the audience, including one attendee who shouted "clown show" while the board bickered during the meeting.
Drena LaNier, a former board member, said Hendricks "has done a fantastic job."
She dismissed the district hiring Hendricks' daughters.
"Everyone else does it," LaNier said. "They're qualified."
Hendricks' daughter Brittnay Atkinson was hired last year to fill a new student service coordinator job. At $70,000 a year, her salary was higher than those of 87 percent of teachers in the district. Atkinson has a bachelor's degree in communications disorders from St. Xavier University and one year of experience as a teacher's aide and special education assistant, her job application said.
Hendricks' other daughter, Jocelyn Hendricks, who has an associate degree and is a licensed practical nurse according to her job application, was hired to fill a $78,500-a-year job as a district nurse.
The Tribune previously reported that the district in September paid about $105,000 to replenish a pension account for Hendricks' that she had drained years ago.
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The contribution to the Teachers Retirement System would increase annual pension benefits to $77,000 from an estimated $14,000 under TRS' benefits formula. Hendricks, 66, is now eligible to retire with the pension benefits of someone who has paid into the system for 25 years, though, as of last year, she had paid into it for only 4 1/2 years.
Hendricks has 36 months to repay the district for the $105,000, but there are only 12 months left in her $175,000-a-year contract. As of May, Hendricks had repaid $7,300, records show.
Parent Teacher Association President April Falco said Hendricks owed parents and students an apology for the money she "stole."
"I'd like to see the rest repaid with promptness," Falco said.
"I have paid over $30,000," Hendricks said in an interview after the meeting. "Of course I intend to pay it all."
After a lengthy closed session, the board adjourned the meeting without taking any action.
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Erin Gallagher is a freelance reporter.
William J. Ross, 62, of McHenry County was arrested in Las Vegas and charged with concealment of a homicidal death, authorities said. (Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department)
William Ross was a controlling, alcoholic and abusive boyfriend who shot his girlfriend dead then remained in his home for several months while keeping her body in a bedroom, prosecutors told a McHenry County jury on Tuesday.
"Jacqueline Schaefer, she went into his house but she never left his house," Assistant State's Attorney Dan Wilbrandt said in opening statements at Ross' murder trial.
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Wilbrandt said Schaefer was a renter in Ross' home in the 500 block of Country Club Drive near McHenry before the two became romantically involved.
The prosecutor said Ross, 64, who is charged with first-degree murder, had a history of renting to women and then becoming romantically involved with them.
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Wilbrandt also told jurors Ross had a history of being abusive. Wilbrandt said in 2007 police had gone twice to Ross' two-story, red-framed home that sets back on a heavily wooded lot along the Fox River.
Both times Schaefer had visible signs of abuse including a bloody lip, bruised wrist and abrasions on her neck. Police reported the home was a mess with bottles of alcohol strewn about.
Ross, who had no injuries either time, was arrested and charges were filed but Schaefer eventually moved back in with him.
"She lived with him and he had control of her," Wilbrandt said.
Wilbrandt said sometime in September 2011 Ross killed Schaefer, 49, by shooting her once in the skull and again in her back. He continued to live in the house for some time as the body decomposed in a northwest bedroom of the home where Schaefer had stayed.
He told people she had left him and moved to Missouri.
When the body was discovered, the door to the bedroom was freshly caulked, painted, screwed and nailed tight.
Autopsy results showed Schaefer, whose parents were in the courtroom Tuesday, also had fractures around her eye sockets and jaw.
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Ross sealed up all but one of the windows of the home and all the doors before he fled out West in June 2012, Wilbrandt said.
Wilbrandt detailed the gruesome site discovered on Nov. 6, 2013 by a former girlfriend of Ross and another man. He said Ross told the former girlfriend to watch the home but never to enter. He would call her several times a day to ask about the house, Wilbrandt said.
The woman and her friend broke open the front door, saw Schaefer's bicycle and noticed the oddly sealed bedroom door. They used a crowbar to get inside the room where they discovered Schaefer's remains and more personal belongings.
Shortly after the discovery, Ross was arrested in Las Vegas, where he had been living in a motel.
Prosecutors later showed photographs to jurors taken inside of the filthy house depicting trash, debris, dust and broken drywall that likely dropped from the ceiling after a water pipe had burst.
Police also found receipts from local hardware stores for the items used to seal the room, plus cleaning supplies, which were purchased over a five-day period in June 2012. Prosecutors say he left town shortly after.
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Wilbrandt also said Ross' DNA was found on the caulking used to entomb the body inside the room.
Defense attorney Stephen Richards sought to debunk the prosecution's theory that Ross had killed Schaefer. Richards simply said: "That man right there, William Ross, is innocent of the murder of Jacqueline Schaefer."
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Richards said all the state had is a theory but "no witnesses, no confession, no proof."
He acknowledged Ross had alcohol problems and was a hoarder. But he insisted that Ross last saw Schaefer in the fall of 2011 when she left for Missouri and then he headed out West the following summer.
"He never, ever comes back," Richards said.
He said Schaefer and the woman who discovered the body, who is expected to testify, didn't get along and that the woman did odd things such as entering the house when told not to and burning a mattress from Ross' home. She also said she found a bullet inside the home and threw it in the garbage, but later said she gave it to a friend who lost it.
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He said Ross was eccentric and when he left he sealed up the home because he didn't want anyone to enter it and go through his belongings.
Schaefer's father, John, took the stand Tuesday morning and said the last time he saw his daughter alive was in 2009 as she was walking somewhere along Illinois Route 120 in McHenry County heading toward a grocery store. Her mother, Rose, said she could not recall the last time she saw her daughter.
Amanda Marrazzo is a freelance reporter.
Authorities charged a 29-year-old man with aggravated assault after he was shot by police Saturday evening during a raid in the West Garfield Park neighborhood.
Jessie White, of the 700 block of South Annie Glidden Road in DeKalb, was charged with a felony count of aggravated assault to a peace officer and a felony count of aggravated unlawful use of a loaded weapon without an FOID card, according to a new release from the Chicago Police Department.
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Organized crime units were targeting an unlicensed auto repair and car wash that was a "suspected gun house" in the first block of North Kilpatrick Avenue when the shooting took place around 9 p.m., according to police. Police confiscated five weapons from the business in question, including a TEC-9, Chicago police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said.
Police officers arrived at the business about 9 p.m. Saturday and saw people outside the business, according to a police news release. The officers announced they were police and went into the business. Inside, they saw White, who matched the description they had received of a suspect.
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When he saw them, White allegedly "fled, hid behind a car and subsequently popped up with a handgun, which he pointed at the officers," Chief of Detectives Eugene Roy said. The "officer, in fear of his life, discharged his weapon, striking the offender."
White was shot in the arm and leg taken to Stroger Hospital, where his condition stabilized.
No officers were injured, and the officer or officers involved will be put on routine administrative duties for a period of 30 days, according to a news release.
White is scheduled to appear in Cook County bond court Tuesday.
Rick Pearson and Monique Garcia report on the Melania Trump controversy, Corey Lewandowski's call for accountability and the Trump campaign's response, from day two of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. July 19, 2016. (Chicago Tribune)
CLEVELAND Before speaking to the Illinois Republican delegation on Tuesday, Donald Trump's former campaign manager said someone should be held "accountable" over passages in Melania Trump's speech that appeared to be plagiarized from a Michelle Obama Democratic convention address.
The remarks by Corey Lewandowski, fired by the campaign in June, underscored tensions between Trump supporters still loyal to the ex-campaign manager and those aligned with Paul Manafort, the top aide to the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.
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Manafort downplayed the controversy over Melania Trump's opening night speech, saying the plagiarism allegations were "crazy" and that "they're not words that were unique words."
But Lewandowski, now a paid contributor to CNN, told the cable network that if Manafort signed off on the speech, "he would do the right thing and resign."
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"Whoever was the staff person who wrote this speech, should be held accountable and should be fired," Lewandowski said.
"When you do something that is so egregious that the story today is not how great Melania Trump was and how successful this convention is going to be, but it's because a staff person didn't do their job properly, there absolutely has to be accountability," he said.
Adding to the controversy were comments Melania Trump made to NBC in which she took credit for largely writing the speech. "I read it once over, and that's all because I wrote it with as little help as possible," she said.
Speaking to reporters before addressing the Illinois delegation, Lewandowski said the Trump campaign should resolve the matter as soon as possible.
"If the staff did not do their job properly, and didn't vet the speech properly based on the larger picture and narrative that she put together, then there should be accountability. No question," Lewandowski said.
"I know about accountability in this election," Lewandowski said, a reference to his firing from the Trump campaign.
Melania Trump's speech was meant to introduce her as a potential first lady and to try to help soften the reputation of her husband, who has been a polarizing figure as he prepares to assume the Republican nomination for president on Thursday.
But it turned into a point of embarrassment for the Trump campaign when she delivered passages that nearly matched a speech Michelle Obama gave in 2008 at the Democratic National Convention when then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama was accepting his party's nomination.
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"I think Melania Trump is a very smart, articulate woman. I think her thoughts were her thoughts, and if the campaign staff didn't do their job, then I think there's accountability," Lewandowski said.
"This was a really good night for her. Any distraction from that is unfortunate because it shouldn't have been done," he said.
Republican U.S. Rep. Randy Hultgren of Plano sought to tamp down the plagiarism controversy. "There's not a lot of uniqueness in those speeches. I thought she did a fine job," Hultgren said.
Hultgren's colleague, U.S. Rep. Peter Roskam of Wheaton, said he expected the Trump campaign would not admit to making a mistake. "Are you going to get an apology with anyone whose name rhymes with Trump? Not a chance," he said.
During his appearance before Illinois' delegates, Lewandowski recounted his history with the campaign and depicted Trump as a "blue-collar billionaire" fond of eating fast food on his private plane.
He also touched on the reality television star's own controversial remarks when Trump said U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona was not a war hero because he was captured by the North Vietnamese. After that speech, Lewandowski said they went into a private room to talk about the remarks.
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"He said, 'What do you think? Pretty good, huh?' I said, 'Well, that was something, yeah. Maybe we, you know, maybe we want to rethink this.' And he looked at me like I had five heads and I was green.
"He said, 'What are you talking about? I don't want to rethink it. I know exactly who I am and I know exactly what I said and I mean what I say and I always say what I mean,'" Lewandowski said.
Lewandowski said it was one of the many times the "pundits got it wrong" when it came to whether Trump would become the party's eventual nominee.
"Some people don't want the ball at the end of the game," Lewandowski said. "Donald Trump is a big game player. He wants the ball because he wins."
Asked if Trump could carry Illinois given heavily Democratic Chicago, Lewandowski said he planned the pre-March primary rally at the University of Illinois Chicago Pavilion that was canceled following clashes between Trump supporters and protesters.
"That didn't work out so well," Lewandowski said jokingly. "But look, Illinois is really important, you guys know this. Can you imagine in your wildest dreams any other Republican presidential candidate deciding to try to hold a rally in Chicago at a university?"
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Lewandowski said Trump won't be deterred by a lack of support from Republican leadership in Illinois or elsewhere, saying the candidate plans to return to Chicago, Springfield and the suburbs.
"Change is coming, people, and the Trump train is big and long and it is a freight train and it's going to run over you," Lewandowski said.
mcgarcia@chicagotribune.com
rap30@aol.com
Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson defended Melania Trump during a stop in Chicago Tuesday, saying he could understand how the wife of soon-to-be Republican nominee Donald Trump could have mistakenly plagiarized parts of the speech she delivered to the GOP convention Monday night.
A few sentences of the address Melania Trump delivered in Cleveland were nearly identical to passages of first lady Michelle Obama's speech to the Democratic National Convention in 2008, a revelation that dominated coverage of the presidential race Tuesday.
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And while Johnson has sought to appeal to middle-of-the-road voters fed up with Trump and presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, he did not seek to capitalize on the latest Trump flub following an appearance before the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board.
"Here's what I make of it, and it's a defense of Melania: She's brought into this, make a few comments, Melania, make it from the heart and I don't know what the circumstances are," said Johnson, a former two-term Republican governor of New Mexico. "But maybe she got online and 'what did Michelle do' ... or some staff did for her. Anyway, no stones cast on my part."
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Asked if the mistake reflected poorly on the campaign and Trump's leadership, Johnson punted. "There will be others to do that. I'll refrain. I just can see how it could happen," he said, before starting to laugh. "Whoever did it, should have done a better job of paraphrasing as opposed to (using) just the exact lines."
Johnson was joined by his running mate, former Massachusetts Republican Gov. Bill Weld, as the two tried to make the case for their third-party campaign. They positioned their ticket as the campaign of the center conservative on fiscal matters but liberal on social issues.
"I'm maintaining in this cycle that most people are Libertarian, it's just that they don't know it," said Johnson, who noted he first identified himself philosophically as a Libertarian in 1971, though he later ran for office as a Republican. It was that year when he read a short book on what it meant to be a Libertarian and decided he was one.
The name of the book or author? "I can't even remember."
But Johnson said he did remember voting Libertarian for the first time in 1984, when he said he cast a ballot for David Bergland over Republican President Ronald Reagan, because "Reagan had blown the lid off the deficits."
During the hourlong session with the Tribune Editorial Board, Johnson often took a back seat to Weld, who spoke more and jumped to answer many of the questions as the presidential nominee looked on.
If elected, the two said they'd cut federal spending by 20 percent in their first budget and would eliminate the Department of Education, Department of Commerce and Department of Housing and Urban Development. They said they'd place states in charge of Medicare and Medicaid and allow them the autonomy to determine their own eligibility rules. And they said they'd cut back on unnecessary military spending and try to close unneeded bases.
Johnson said Clinton and Trump had their "heads in the sand" on Social Security and vowed to reform the system by increasing the retirement age and making income a factor in whether individuals qualify for assistance.
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And Johnson said he was the highest-ranking elected official in the country calling for the legalization of marijuana back in 1999, a position he's still pushing today.
As for his opponents, Johnson said the Trump agenda is fascism, calling his vows to round up and deport illegal immigrants "horrible" and "incendiary."
Added Weld: "There has to be a change in tone. Mr. Trump is very much a part of the problem and not part of the solution. I make a point of saying in a Johnson-Weld White House, you're not going to get any bullying and you're not going to get any bluffing, you're not going to get any sanctimonious lectures."
Johnson said Clinton's agenda is one of being beholden, predicting higher taxes and a mantra of "just give us the money, we'll take on more of the problems."
Much of Johnson and Weld's work right now is to convince voters their ticket has legitimacy. There are a lot of what-ifs.
The federal debate commission requires candidates to receive at least 15 percent support in polls to be included in this fall's televised debate, a policy Johnson's campaign has challenged in court. Still, the two projected they'd reach the 15 percent threshold anyway, noting a recent CNN poll that had them receiving 13 percent of the vote. The Real Clear Politics average has Johnson receiving 8.5 percent.
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Weld said "it's possible" former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney will endorse their campaign. He also noted the campaign's fundraising could rise as high as $50 million to $100 million if they get that valuable debate airtime.
"If we get in the presidential debates," Weld said, "we're going to be dangerous to the other two parties."
bruthhart@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @BillRuthhart
CLEVELAND Ohio Gov. John Kasich on Monday told Illinois delegates to the Republican National Convention that the GOP should grow the party by promoting an "inclusive reform agenda" a backhanded shot at the rival who vanquished him for the presidential nomination, Donald Trump.
Kasich also urged Illinois Republicans to stand by Gov. Bruce Rauner in his battles with Democrats who control the state House and Senate, saying Rauner's agenda will eventually leave the state "better off." Rauner is absent from the convention.
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The Ohio governor's appearance came on a tumultuous first day of the convention, which began with Trump's top adviser, Paul Manafort, accusing Kasich of being "petulant" and "embarrassing his party in Ohio" by refusing to endorse the presumptive nominee.
Kasich's visit to the Illinois delegation was the first of several the two-term governor is making to delegates in Cleveland outside the Quicken Loans Arena convention hall, which he has pledged not to set foot in. Later this week, Kasich's plans include a stop with the New Hampshire GOP convention delegation, spurring speculation that the term-limited governor is looking ahead to a presidential bid in 2020.
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Ohio Gov. John Kasich, seen here addressing the National Convention of the NAACP on July 17, 2016, in Cincinnati, told Illinois Republicans a day later to stand by Gov. Bruce Rauner in his battles with Democrats who control the state House and Senate, saying Rauner's agenda will eventually leave the state "better off." (Gary Landers / AP)
But Kasich refused to directly address the controversy with Trump, or even mention the name of the controversial businessman and former reality TV star. Kasich noted that a day earlier he was in the "unusual" position of being a Republican who was the opening speaker at the NAACP's annual convention in Cincinnati, an event Trump opted not to attend.
"Really, an inclusive reform agenda for the Republican Party is where my head is," Kasich told several dozen Illinois delegates at a downtown Cleveland steakhouse.
"You know, we don't want to cut anybody out. We are a big tent, though we have to act like it, and we have to have ideas and policies that allow us to expand who we are as Republicans, while not giving up our principles," he said.
Kasich has criticized Trump for divisive rhetoric involving race, religion and gender to benefit his campaign.
In another shot at the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, though again without mentioning his name, Kasich said he had hopes of a "great convention" with "great success," but did not talk about the presidential contest.
"I think it is so critical that the House and Senate stay Republican, that we continue to pick up seats in the legislature because it's in those places where we're seeing the greatest amount of progress," he said.
Kasich, who finished a distant third behind Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in the March 15 Illinois primary, said he "got a lot of cheers and a lot of applause, but not many votes" in the state.
"What the hell, you know?" he said.
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Kasich noted the lengthy stalemate in Springfield between Rauner and Democratic lawmakers over the governor's push for changes in state laws beneficial to business that also would weaken organized labor.
"I hope he's going to have a breakthrough. We have to stand with him, though. It's easy to give up and to not stand with him," Kasich said.
"I can tell you it's tough when you stand and you have people yelling and screaming at you, but at the end of the day, it's the Land of Lincoln. I mean, you know, you can't have Illinois go down the drain because people can't figure out how to use common sense. And I would hope those Democrats in the legislature would let your governor have some success so the people can have some progress in your great state," he said.
Like Rauner, Kasich has sought to limit public employee union power. In 2011, he signed legislation restricting collective bargaining rights for public employees. But unions orchestrated a million-signature ballot initiative that repealed the law only eight months later.
State Rep. David Harris, of Arlington Heights, one of six elected Kasich delegates from Illinois, said the voters he represents wanted him to back the Ohio governor in Cleveland.
Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 160 With their families behind them, Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump and Vice Presidential nominee Mike Pence are cheered on by delegates at the close of the final day of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
"I feel duty-bound to do that," said Harris, while acknowledging Trump is the presumptive nominee. "I would hope that my fellow delegates, whether they're Trump or Cruz delegates, understand this is a big operation, this is a big party, and some of us don't always agree with everybody else."
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Still, Harris said, "In the end, we've got to win in November."
Kent Gray, of Springfield, who organized the Trump delegates for the primary, acknowledged that the battling between the presumptive nominee and Kasich shows "There's maybe still some hard feelings going on with some of the camps."
But Gray said of Kasich, "He wasn't petulant today in front of the Illinois delegation. He talked about the good things he's been doing in Ohio."
rap30@aol.com
mcgarcia@chicagotribune.com
Welcome to Clout Street: Morning Spin, our weekday feature to catch you up with what's going on in government and politics from Chicago to Springfield.
Topspin
U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk is bypassing the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, but he's still trying to garner attention as he seeks re-election in November. As "Mr. Illinois."
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In a video posted on Twitter, Team Kirk unveiled a feature called "60 seconds with Mr. Illinois" in which he offers his view that Lou Malnati's is his go-to pizza in Chicago and that The Ledge on the Skydeck at Willis Tower is his recommendation as a must-see destination.
Kirk also offers that his favorite new sport is tower climbing, citing his stair climbing at the Willis Tower and John Hancock Center following his stroke.
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He doesn't mention presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump or his Democratic challenger, U.S. Rep. Tammy Duckworth, but does tout his efforts to help protect whistleblowers at the federal Veterans Administration. (Rick Pearson)
What's on tap
*Mayor Rahm Emanuel has no public schedule.
*Gov. Bruce Rauner will tour the SIU Transportation Education Center in Murphysboro.
*The Chicago City Council's Finance Committee meets at 11 a.m. On the agenda is the mayor's property tax rebate proposal.
*Illinois Treasurer Michael Frerichs, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and state lawmakers will hold a Thompson Center news conference to call on the governor to sign a death benefits bill that's on his desk.
*U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin and County Board President Preckwinkle will talk about opioid abuse at a news conference at Stroger Hospital.
What we're writing
*Kasich takes backhanded swipe at Trump in speech to Illinois convention delegates.
*Unity elusive at first Illinois GOP delegation convention breakfast in Cleveland.
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*City, county set aside millions for environmental cleanup to try to spur redevelopment.
*Activists, aldermen want Emanuel to include renters on property tax rebate.
*Big building recycling ordinance advances.
*Meep meep: Chicago alderman says hands off the coyotes.
What we're reading
*Illinois first lady Diana Rauner unveils $15 million executive mansion overhaul.
*NYT profile on Melania Trump, potentially the next first lady.
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*Trump campaign is second chance for failed '96 Dole crew.
From the notebook
*More Illinois GOP congressmen in Cleveland: Despite fears by some of associating with Donald Trump's Republican convention, a few more Illinois GOP congressmen are showing up.
Downstate Republican Reps. John Shimkus of Collinsville and Rodney Davis of Taylorville were with Illinois delegates Monday when Rep. Peter Roskam of Wheaton showed up. Roskam and Rep. Randy Hultgren of Plano are scheduled to speak at the delegation's breakfast on Tuesday morning. (Rick Pearson)
*Voter registration mailing warning: The Chicago elections board is warning residents about mailings being sent out by a private group called the Voter Participation Center.
The group is sending millions of letters to prospective voters throughout the United States, but some recipients are not eligible because they are too young or not yet citizens.
Chicago Board of Election Commissioners Chairman Marisel A. Hernandez said the forms being sent out are useful for people who need to register at new addresses. But she said some residents have called to ask why they received the letters if the law does not allow them to register to vote or if they are already registered. (Rick Pearson)
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*A look at IL-11 fundraising: Republican congressional challenger Toni Khouri's campaign sent out a news release last week announcing new staff hires, including a campaign fundraiser. That person's got their work cut out for them.
The latest federal campaign finance reports show Democratic U.S. Rep. Bill Foster had nearly $2.5 million to start the month after raising $389,000 from April through June. Khouri reported about $173,000 to begin July after raising $68,000 in the second quarter.
Both candidates have done some significant self-financing. Khouri, a DuPage County Board member who owns a landscaping and home services company, lists $215,250 in personal loans from her primary bid, which she narrowly won over two GOP opponents. Foster, a scientist who owned a theatrical lighting company, lists $1.1 million in personal loans from prior runs for Congress.
Khouri is part of the National Republican Congressional Committee's "Young Guns" program, which says "candidates have met a series of rigorous goals and surpassed program benchmarks to establish a clear path to victory."
The oddly shaped 11th Congressional District, drawn by Democrats to elect a Democrat after the 2010 census, includes parts of Aurora, Naperville, Bolingbrook and Joliet.
Follow the money
*Track campaign contribution reports in real time with this Tribune Twitter account: https://twitter.com/ILCampaignCash
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Beyond Chicago
*Trump praised as law and order candidate on Night One of convention.
*Republicans bicker on convention floor on Day One.
*Police: Baton Rouge gunman was definitely seeking out officers to kill.
*Court stops release of GMO mosquitoes as way to fight Zika virus in Cayman Islands.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel's tax rebate program to offset some of the pain of his massive property tax hike is poised for approval after he tweaked the plan to offer a bit more help to low-income homeowners and senior citizens.
The City Council Finance Committee passed the mayor's ordinance Tuesday after his administration announced plans to pay for it using $20 million the city got from a firm's recent sale of the Chicago Skyway.
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It remains to be seen how many people will get their rebate money in a one-time process the mayor's finance director said will move quickly over the next several months and conclude by year's end. Homeowners who qualify will have about 60 days this fall to apply for the rebates, which will top out at $200 for low-income households with big tax increases, Budget Director Alex Holt told aldermen Tuesday.
Holt said the administration will be working quickly to find agencies that deal with housing and financial issues in Chicago neighborhoods to reach out to property owners to let them know about the rebate and try to get them to apply.
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"If we're going to do a rebate program, and try to help, particularly, low-income homeowners, we want people to come in," said Holt, who noted participation was low in a rebate program offered by then-Mayor Richard M. Daley in 2010.
While the biggest rebate listed in the mayor's plan remains $200, the ordinance was amended Tuesday to allow homeowners to claim an "extraordinary hardship" to try to get more money back. They'd need to show the city the tax increase this year was so high that they are in danger of losing their homes without additional help. The city would consider the hardship requests on a case-by-case basis, and the total rebate would not be allowed to exceed the amount their property taxes went up this year, according to Finance Department spokeswoman Molly Poppe.
The senior citizen stipend also was increased, from $100 to $150, because Holt said some aldermen expressed concerns that with properties being reassessed in Chicago this year, the jump in taxes might prove too much for older residents in gentrifying parts of the city.
The full City Council will consider Emanuel's ordinance Wednesday, though aldermen will not vote specifically on the Skyway funding source. The ordinance simply says $20 million in "legally available funds" can be spent on it.
The Skyway was sold this spring by a Spanish company to three Canadian pension funds for $2.8 billion. The city, which owned the Skyway before Daley leased it in 2004, received a $20 million transfer tax payment as part of the sale, which will now be used to bankroll the tax rebate.
Holt justified using a one-time revenue source rather than creating a budget line item for the rebate by saying it isn't clear whether aldermen will want to continue the program beyond this year.
Emanuel also faces pressure from housing activists and aldermen who want him to expand the program to offer protection for renters in buildings facing big jumps in taxes this year. But Holt said only that the administration would continue to work with aldermen to design a way to help renters.
On Monday, the mayor did not answer directly when pressed on whether some kind of relief for rental properties might get added. Instead, he launched into a familiar defense of his property tax increase that prompted the rebate effort, saying he finally took necessary steps to fund police and fire pensions.
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"The city, for decades, had not done their job, and wasn't honest with the public, to the point it became a major financial burden, and a major financial uncertainty," he said. "That uncertainty is now removed. Now, I did raise property taxes. I own that. But to right decades' worth of wrongs."
The higher property taxes this year are largely due to a $318 million increase Emanuel pushed through the City Council to help fund the pensions. Chicago Public Schools also boosted its property taxes by tens of millions of dollars to pay for construction programs and education costs.
Emanuel also noted Springfield did not take his preferred step of raising the homeowner exemption, a change that would have provided much greater property tax relief to many homeowners by shifting the costs onto commercial building owners. That change always seemed like a long shot given the partisan stalemate at the Capitol.
For homeowners, the mayor's plan allows a maximum rebate of up to $200. Only households with adjusted gross incomes of less than $25,000 with a property tax increase of $350 or more would be eligible for that full amount.
The rebates would decline as incomes climb, with a limit of $75,000 in annual earnings per household to be eligible unless they make a successful claim for an "extraordinary hardship." Rebate amounts also would be lower for those who had lesser tax increases.
The city estimates that about 155,000 of the city's 425,000 or so homeowners would qualify for a rebate, with an average check of $150. The City Council would need to pass another rebate program as part of the 2017 budget for the perk to continue past this year.
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When Daley offered rebates six years ago, more than 160,000 eligible homeowners didn't apply. Only 36,621 got rebates at a cost to the city of less than $4.5 million.
jebyrne@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @_johnbyrne
A lawyer for the Turkish government, Robert Amsterdam, said that "there are indications of direct involvement" in the coup attempt by Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric who is living in exile in Pennsylvania. He said he and his firm "have attempted repeatedly to warn the U.S. government of the threat posed" by Gulen and his movement. According to Turkish intelligence sources, he said, "there are signs that Gulen is working closely with certain members of military leadership against the elected civilian government."
The president of a group that promotes Gulen's ideas, the New York-based Alliance for Shared Values, denied the charges. Y. Alp Aslandogan told The Associated Press "we categorically deny such accusations and find them to be highly irresponsible." Earlier in the evening, the alliance said, "we condemn any military intervention in (the) domestic politics of Turkey."
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Some background on Gulen:
WHO IS FETHULLAH GULEN?
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Trained as an imam, or prayer leader, Fethullah Gulen gained notice in Turkey some 50 years ago, promoting a philosophy that blended a mystical form of Islam with staunch advocacy of democracy, education, science and interfaith dialogue. Supporters started 1,000 schools in more than 100 countries, including about 150 taxpayer-funded charter schools throughout the U.S. In Turkey, they have run universities, hospitals, charities, a bank and a large media empire with newspapers and radio and TV stations.
Turkish President Recip Tayyip Erdogan has long accused Gulen of plotting to overthrow the officially secular government from a gated 26-acre compound in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains. Gulen is rarely seen in public and has been put on trial in absentia at least three times.
WHY NOT DEPORT HIM?
The U.S. has shown little inclination to send Gulen back to Turkey. The Justice Department has declined to comment on Gulen's case. In an interview with the AP early this year, Aslandogan, of the Alliance for Shared Values, said: "(Gulen) said that the United States has a long tradition of democracy and rule of law. ... They will see that these are politically oriented charges, and they will not allow Erdogan to spread his ambition into the United States."
WHAT'S THE STATUS OF LEGAL CLAIMS AGAINST GULEN IN THE U.S.?
Last month, a lawyer representing the Turkish government said he would continue exposing Gulen's "unlawful conduct" one day after a federal judge in Scranton, Pennsylvania, dismissed his lawsuit against the cleric. "Despite the outcome of this ruling, a very clear message has been sent to Gulen and his co-conspirators in the Poconos: the days of impunity are numbered, and your unlawful conduct will be brought to light," lawyer Robert Amsterdam said. The suit contended Gulen ordered sympathetic police, prosecutors and judges in Turkey to target members of a rival spiritual movement critical of his teachings. U.S. District Judge Robert Mariani ruled the claims did not belong in U.S. courts.
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WHAT ABOUT THE SCHOOLS?
Some of the U.S. schools have been investigated by the FBI amid allegations of financial mismanagement and visa fraud. One of the most explosive claims is that the schools are importing Turkish teachers to identify impressionable students and indoctrinate them into Gulen's movement, sometimes called Hizmet, Turkish for "service." In May, a complaint filed with Texas education officials accused a network of charter schools associated with the Gulen movement of abusing a visa program to import large numbers of Turkish teachers and violating state and federal laws by paying them more than American teachers.
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The complaint also asserted that the network, Harmony Public Schools, skirts competitive bidding rules to award contracts to Turkish vendors. Harmony has denounced the complaint as politically motivated and without merit.
WHAT'S THE RESPONSE TO THE LATEST ALLEGATIONS?
In a statement Friday, the Alliance for Shared Values said: "For more than 40 years, Fethullah Gulen and Hizmet participants have advocated for, and demonstrated their commitment to, peace and democracy. We have consistently denounced military interventions in domestic politics. These are core values of Hizmet participants. We condemn any military intervention in domestic politics of Turkey. Events on the ground are moving quickly and it would be irresponsible for us to speculate on them. We remain concerned about the safety and security of Turkish citizens and those in Turkey right now. Comments by pro-Erdogan circles about the movement are highly irresponsible."
WHAT ARE GULEN'S DAYS LIKE?
An AP reporter was given a tour of Gulen's Pennsylvania compound this year but was unable to see or interview him. He spends hours a day in prayer and meditation and goes out rarely, mostly to see doctors for ailments that include heart disease and diabetes, according to Aslandogan. Gulen's living quarters are lined with books on shelves that also hold jars filled with soil from various regions of Turkey.
The former girlfriend of a U.S. marshal pretended to be his pregnant wife and placed "rape fantasy" ads on Craigslist, causing the wife to be attacked, prosecutors said Monday.
Michelle Suzanne Hadley, 29, of Ontario, California, has been charged with 10 felonies, including stalking, making threats, assault and attempted forcible rape, according to the Orange County district attorney's office. Prosecutors said she also violated a restraining order and committed a crime while out on bail for another offense.
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Prosecutors said Hadley stalked and threatened the wife of her ex-boyfriend, whom she dated for two years before his marriage.
Posing as the federal agent's pregnant wife, authorities said, Hadley went on Craigslist in June and advertised that she wanted to engage in "rape fantasies." She sent photographs of her former boyfriend's wife to men and gave them details about the victim's daily routine, prosecutors said.
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"Hadley is accused of telling the responders that the victim wanted the responders to have forcible sexual intercourse with her, even if she screamed or resisted," the district attorney's office said.
Then men started showing up at the victim's home, officials said. Prosecutors said they intended to rape her. One of the men allegedly went to the victim's home and attacked her. The man fled before police arrived.
On June 24, Anaheim police arrested Hadley, who was released on $100,000 bail.
But prosecutors said Hadley continued to pose as the victim on Craigslist and sent emails threatening the lives of the victim and her unborn child. She used different computers and servers to send the emails and avoid police detection in an effort to circumvent a restraining order prohibiting her from contacting the victim.
Anaheim police arrested Hadley again on July 14.
If convicted of the charges, Hadley faces up to life in state prison. Her bail was set at $1 million.
BEIRUT Airstrikes on Islamic State-held villages in northern Syria killed at least 56 civilians on Tuesday as intense fighting was underway between the militants and U.S-backed fighters, Syrian opposition activists and the extremist group said.
Residents in the area blamed the U.S.-led coalition for the strikes that targeted two villages, Tokhar and Hoshariyeh, which are controlled by IS, activists said. The villages are near the IS stronghold of Manbij, a town that members of the predominantly Kurdish U.S.-backed Syria Democratic Forces have been trying to capture in a weeks-long offensive.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 56 civilians, including 11 children, were killed in the strikes on the villages, which also wounded dozens. Another activist group, the Local Coordination Committees, said dozens of civilians, mostly families, were killed.
The IS-linked Aamaq news agency claimed 160 civilians mostly women and children were killed in Tokhar alone, in a series of purportedly American airstrikes around dawn Tuesday.
The reports and the disparate casualty tolls could not be independently confirmed because the area is inaccessible to independent media. There was no immediate comment from Washington.
Postings on a Facebook page show images of people, including children, as they were being put in collective grave, purportedly in the village of Tokhar. One photograph shows a man carrying the lifeless body of a child covered with dust while another shows a child, partly covered by a blanket, lying in a grave.
The photographs appeared genuine and corresponded to other AP reporting of the events depicted. Tuesday's casualties come on the heels of similar airstrikes on the IS-held town of Manbij on Monday, when at least 15 civilians were reportedly killed.
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The U.S. Central Command said the coalition conducted 18 strikes on Monday and destroyed 13 IS fighting positions, seven IS vehicles and two car bombs near Manbij.
The Manbij area has seen intense battles between IS extremists and the Kurdish-led fighters who have been advancing under the cover of intense airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition.
If Manbij is captured by the U.S.-backed fighters, it will be the biggest strategic defeat for IS in Syria since July 2015, when the extremist group lost the border town of Tal Abyad. In neighboring Iraq, meanwhile, IS has been beaten back on several fronts, with Iraqi forces, aided by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes, having retaken the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah in western Anbar province.
Associated Press
CLEVELAND
With police on edge in this summer of bloodshed, hundreds of Donald Trump supporters and foes held dueling rallies a half-mile apart Monday in a tense but mostly peaceful start to the four-day Republican National Convention.
About a dozen Trump backers showed up with handguns strapped to their belts as allowed under Ohio law. Blocks away, protesters shouted about police mistreatment.
People along the streets showered police officers with applause, hugs and a few insults.
No major clashes were reported between pro- and anti-Trump forces during the two biggest demonstrations on Monday's schedule or at rallies held in the later afternoon and early evening.
"So far, so good," Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams said at a Monday night press briefing. Williams said there had been no violence and no property damage.
Concrete barricades blocked key streets and intersections downtown, fences surrounded the arena where delegates assembled, and police helicopters flew over the city.
About 600 Cleveland officers were assigned to convention security duty along with thousands of officers from other agencies. Among them: Homeland Security investigators, Customs and Border Protection personnel, Coast Guard members, and the Ohio National Guard.
Among those at the pro-Trump rally was Joel Ameigh, of Hershey, Pennsylvania, who had a Smith & Wesson handgun on his belt.
"We're not here to be dangerous people. We're not here to intimidate anyone. There are laws against that sort of thing," he said.
The president of the police union on Sunday asked Ohio Gov. John Kasich to suspend the law allowing gun owners to carry firearms in plain sight. But the Republican governor said he didn't have the authority.
The request came as the deadly truck attack in France and the ambush killings of five police officers earlier this month in Dallas and three more in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, over the weekend heightened fears of bloodshed in Cleveland.
Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, said disruptions by protesters could work to the candidate's political advantage.
"Frankly, that impact will probably help the campaign because it's going to show again, you know, lawlessness, a lack of respect for political discourse," he said shortly before the convention officially began.
There was at least one dust-up, involving right-wing religious demonstrators who got into a shouting match with some of the anti-Trump protesters.
And police arrested one woman on an outstanding warrant after she jumped on a public stage downtown and grabbed a microphone from a speaker, according to city officials. Williams said the woman was also being charged with resisting arrest and obstructing official business.
On the anti-Trump side, several hundred people chanted "Dump Trump now!" and held signs saying things like "No racism, no fascism, no Trump" as they marched through the streets.
Many were upset with the Republican presidential candidate's stand on immigration, including his proposal to build a wall at the Mexican border and his call for barring Muslims from entering the U.S. The demonstrators also decried what they called racist police practices.
Jezell Gaines, of New York City, marched through the streets with anti-Trump protesters who chanted, "Black lives matter!"
"Trump is bad news," she said. "He's preaching hate. It's not cool, because we're trying to overcome hate."
Officers on bicycles and Indiana state troopers on convention security duty stood off to the side while a black speaker complained about police mistreatment.
Cleveland patrolman Bohdan Roshetsky, an eight-year veteran, said that after the recent shootings, "our awareness is extremely high."
He said he was surprised by an outpouring of support from people on Monday, including hugs and requests for pictures.
"I've been brought to tears numerous times riding around on the bike, seeing them cheering, clapping, thanking us for being there," he said.
Even protesters complaining about police tactics were being respectful, he said. "Nobody's been nasty to us," he said.
Across town, the rap metal supergroup Prophets of Rage played a 30-minute concert for a sparse crowd in Cleveland's Public Square to protest the "racism, sexism and imperialism" in the Rpublican platform.
"Out here, human rights, respect for the planet and resistance to oppression is what we sing about," the group's Tom Morello told an audience of about 200.
Associated Press
For weeks, rumors that rump Republicans dissatisfied with the idea of Donald Trump as the party's presidential nominee would stage a protest vote swirled. On Monday, those disgruntled Republicans made good on their pledge - sort of.
The fight happened just after 4 p.m. eastern - three hours after the convention was gaveled in on its first day. At issue was the approval of the rules package that sets the parameters for the four-day convention. Pro-Trump forces tried to push through the package on a voice vote. Then this happened:
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"Roll call vote" was the chant of the anti-Trump forces, a desire to have each state, one by one, announce their support or opposition not only for the rules package but, more broadly, for Trump.
Arkansas Rep. Steve Womack was - unfortunately for him - tasked with overseeing this chaos. The first time he tried to declare that the "ayes" (pro-Trump) votes had it, he was shouted down and left the stage. Utah Sen. Mike Lee, a leading voice of the anti-Trump movement, called that decision to flee "surreal" and admitted that he had no idea what would come next.
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What came next was a return by Womack to the stage and a repetition of the voice vote. After declaring that the "ayes" had it (again), Womack noted that only six of the nine states demanding a roll call vote had stood firm. Seven states were needed.
And, scene. The Iowa and Colorado delegations walked off the floor. Boos cascaded down. But it was over.
For Republicans desperately hoping that unity would be the word of the day and the week here in Cleveland, however, the damage was done. The images of unhappy Republicans shouting for a chance to show their dissatisfaction with Trump and then walking out makes for just the sort of images out of this week that Republicans were hoping to avoid.
It showed, powerfully and with the eyes of the national media watching, that the idea that the GOP was rapidly uniting behind Trump is a pipe dream. And that divisions - real and serious ones - remain, no matter the rhetorical attempts to paper them over.
Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin, once a potential Trump VP, took the stage soon after the eruption. She spent her time touting the party's unity and the inclusive process of building the party platform. But no one was listening. Everyone was still talking about how the "Never Trump" forces went down in a blaze of glory.
Members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees protest in downtown Chicago in June 2015. (Christian K. Lee / AP)
What does a construction worker employed by a private contractor have in common with an accountant at the Illinois Department of Revenue?
Not much. But because both workers belong to unions, many mistakenly consider them as one and the same.
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In reality, unions that represent people with government jobs are dramatically different from unions in the private sector. This distinction is important to keep in mind over the next few months as the battle between Gov. Bruce Rauner and Illinois' largest public-sector union intensifies.
Let's start with work hours.
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The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME, represents more than 35,000 employees of Illinois government.
The workweek for AFSCME members is 37.5 hours.
But a workweek is 40 hours for private-sector plumbers in Local 130. Same goes for carpenters in Local 13 and electricians in IBEW Local 134.
The AFSCME contract calls for 13 paid holidays for state workers: New Year's Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Lincoln's Birthday, President's Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, the day after Thanksgiving, Christmas and because this is Illinois Election Day.
Unionized workers in the private sector have a lot less to celebrate. The electricians, plumbers and carpenters unions in Chicago all recognize only six holidays and workers are paid only if they work on those days.
For unionized government workers, one of the biggest perks of the contract is the salary schedule.
The state's contracts with AFSCME called for 28 raises for thousands of workers from 2004 to 2014, according to the Illinois Department of Central Management Services. These pay increases weren't tied to performance or promotions; all workers had to do was occupy the same job from year to year.
During that time, salaries for accountants at the Illinois Department of Revenue more than doubled, according to CMS. The base salary for a human services caseworker increased by 111 percent. For a hearings referee, the base salary climbed to $106,476 from $45,864 a 132 percent increase.
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Annual salary increases ranging from 5 percent to 8 percent were the norm in state government over that decade. Keep in mind this was at a time when many private-sector workers union and nonunion either had reductions in their pay or work hours, or lost their jobs altogether due to the Great Recession.
Even when the economy is healthier, such steep pay increases are rare for private-sector workers, including those who belong to unions.
John Goetz is president and CEO of R.D. Lawrence Construction Co., in central Illinois. He's negotiated construction union contracts since the 1970s.
Goetz said in his years of negotiating private-sector union pacts, the typical increase is 2 or 3 percent of overall contract costs not wages.
"Most of the increase has gone into the pension or health and welfare fund," Goetz said. "Very little has gone on the check."
Even better than the hours and wages are AFSCME workers' retirement benefits.
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Unionized state workers receive pensions based on their end-of-career salaries. These pensions increase by a compounded 3 percent annually. State retirees who worked 20 years also receive completely free health care.
While many unionized private-sector workers also will collect pensions, the benefits are much more modest. Pension checks are based on how much workers and their employers put into the retirement fund, not the size of their last paychecks. Annual cost-of-living adjustments are rare, if they occur at all. Same goes for retiree health care.
In recent years, private-sector unions have added defined-contribution plans such as 401(k)s to their benefit packages. Participation in a defined-contribution plan is mandatory for plumbers in Local 130, for example. Chicago Pipefitters Local 597 offers a 401(k)-style plan to workers.
But saying "AFSCME" and "defined contribution" in the same sentence is almost unspeakable.
"Without question, 401(k)s are a failure," AFSCME 31 spokesman Anders Lindall said in a Twitter conversation in April. AFSCME 31's website says 401(k)-style plans would "put public employees' hard-earned contributions in the hands of Wall Street money managers," and are "a bad choice for ensuring retirement security."
This happens instead: Illinois taxpayers, including private-sector union members, must make up the difference between the benefits that are promised and the funds available to pay for them.
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See a trend here?
Public-sector unions enjoy perks and privileges that are foreign to union and nonunion workers in the private sector.
One might argue that private-sector unions that want the same deal as government workers should just bargain for them.
This type of thinking illustrates a fundamental and perhaps the most significant difference between public-sector unions and private-sector unions.
In the real world, employers must balance union requests against what customers are willing to pay.
"If labor costs became excessive, then the corporate entity would go bankrupt or out of business. Or go abroad and outsource," said John Raudabaugh, former member of the National Labor Relations Board.
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To earn premium wages and benefits, private-sector unions must deliver premium value. They must consistently provide quality above and beyond that of their nonunion counterparts.
That's why so many trade unions focus on continuing education and certifications. Being union comes with a particular quality level.
But in government, nobody is really competing against anyone else. Employees do not compete against each other, and a convoluted set of rules and laws ensures that private-sector entities cannot compete for most work or services provided by government.
Also, private-sector unions do not hand-pick their bosses. Public-sector unions essentially choose their own "management" by spending millions of dollars to support politicians favorable to their demands (see earlier mention of Election Day as a paid day off).
When public-sector unions demand excessive salaries and benefits, politicians just say yes and pass on the bill to taxpayers.
This is how Illinois became a place where unionized government workers make up less than 5 percent of the state's population, but their salaries, benefits and pensions consume nearly 25 percent of state spending.
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So when we hear public-sector unions preaching the virtues of "solidarity" or "marching side by side with working people from all different labor groups" to protect their pay or benefits, don't fall for their ploy.
What they really want is for unionized private-sector workers, and the rest of us, to pay for them.
Diana Sroka Rickert is a writer with the Illinois Policy Institute. The opinions in this essay are her own.
The Libertarian Party's candidates for president and vice president, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson and former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, met Tuesday with the Tribune Editorial Board. Eight excerpts from their comments:
1. Johnson: What can government do when it comes to income equality? I'm going to argue, not so much. But what government can do is create opportunity equality. There's so much legislation that passes that advantages those with money and influence as opposed to legislation that actually levels the playing field.
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2. Weld: I also want to be able to speak truth to power. If Donald Trump did half the things he said he wants to do, you know, he could be subject to removal from office on his first day for violation of X, Y, Z obligations as the president.
3. Johnson: (What we stand for suits) the makeup of most people in this country: being fiscally responsible, socially really caring, (and) civil liberties are important. Why hasn't (the Libertarian message) resonated? I just think it's because nobody's really recognized this. I'm maintaining in this cycle that most people are Libertarian; it's just that they don't know it.
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4. Weld: I (ran as a duo) with my lieutenant governor (in Massachusetts), a guy named Paul Cellucci. We were both running. We decided to run together. We had a unified staff. I have personal confidence that Gary and I can have that kind of relationship also. Obviously, if there ever is a disagreement, there's only one president of the United States.
5. Johnson (confirming he labeled Trump's agenda "fascism," describes a Hillary Clinton presidency): Beholden. It's going to be business as usual, and business as usual is that government has the answer.
6/ Johnson: The strategy is to win outright. I mean we wouldn't be doing this if that weren't a possibility, but then you look at throwing this into the House of Representatives. And if it goes to the House of Representatives, where one state gets one vote South Dakota's equal to California if it goes beyond one ballot, I might be the next president of the United States.
7. Weld: It's easier when you have somebody, by definition, covering your back, because official Washington will rise up and have 600 arguments why you can't change a damn thing.
8. Weld: We would propose to hire, ideally, if elected, the very best minds of the Democratic Party, the very best minds of the Republican Party. And we would approach Congress not as partisans, and they would know that half our people were of their party, so they might take it a little better than if we were giving them a sermon that they had to do it this way. They might look and see some familiar faces that they'd known before from their own party. They would not be rigid partisans, though, that would be the difference. So we might get somewhere with Congress by sort of this bipartisan approach that would be easier for us to do than for a partisan administration.
Corey Lewandowski, center, former campaign manager for Donald Trump, speaks with delegates July 18, 2016, at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)
CLEVELAND Before the Republican National Convention kicked off, campaign advisers to presumptive nominee Donald Trump worried that his former campaign manager might screw things up. Trump's advisers told New York Magazine earlier this week they feared Corey Lewandowski would "undermine the campaign leadership by giving Trump bad advice" and "working the convention rivalries into a froth."
Lewandowski, now a CNN political analyst, was fired from the Trump campaign in June. He was divisive and brash. He had been charged with misdemeanor battery the charge got dropped for yanking the arm of a reporter who was trying to get Trump's attention at a rally. He routinely clashed with old-guard political operatives who prefer that campaigns run on silk. All scripts and no surprises. Lewandowski fought to allow Trump to be Trump no scripts and all surprises.
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When Trump fired him, Lewandowski became a bit of a concern. So far, he hasn't tossed any wrenches at the convention. But he did expose a flash of rebellion during a surprise visit to the Illinois delegates' breakfast Tuesday morning at the hotel where they are staying.
Social media lit up to point out that Melania Trump's primetime speech at the Republican National Convention was, at points, a word-for-word duplication of Michelle Obama's 2008 convention speech.
As soon as the press swarmed him, he swiftly and overtly blamed the Trump campaign for the Melania Trump cut-and-paste-gate scandal passages of her convention speech closely mirrored those delivered by Michelle Obama in 2008. Lewandowski said someone in the Trump campaign needed to be held accountable for not vetting her speech.
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"I know about accountability in this election," Lewandowski said.
He could have stepped softly. He could have said the controversy was much ado about nothing. He could have blamed a politically lopsided media. He could have said he empathized with Melania Trump, who has little experience writing or delivering speeches.
No. He took a deliberate swipe at the campaign, which was an indirect swipe at the campaign manager who replaced him, Paul Manafort. Clearly, Lewandowski found satisfaction in the firestorm over the speech and the cleanup required. Manafort was dispatched to media outlets to blame Hillary Clinton for the mess. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said someone should be fired. In the world of campaigns, Melania Trump's misstep was the worst kind because it was easily avoidable.
Corey Lewandowski says someone on Trump campaign should be held "accountable" for Melania speech. #RNCatCLE2016 pic.twitter.com/vKVsyqycUY Kristen McQueary (@StatehouseChick) July 19, 2016
So OK, give Lewandowski his moment of karma. The guys who ousted him from the Trump campaign spent Monday night and most of Tuesday trying to look calm.
Beyond that, Lewandowski so far has been the best spokesman for Trump I've heard. At the Illinois delegates' breakfast, he was gracious. He was engaging. He painted an everyman portrait of Trump and called him a "blue-collar billionaire."
He spoke of his own surprise at how the campaign unfolded. Lewandowski, of course, was first to experience the sheer draw of Trump. When Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was attracting 20 or 30 people to his events, Trump could barely get through the front door of his. Shortly after Trump announced he was running, Lewandowski was with him as they flew to an event at a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall. When they landed, Lewandowski said he had nine voicemail messages on his phone from the same caller.
"Well, this can't be good," he said.
It was the local police chief alerting them they wouldn't be able to make it to the VFW hall without a police escort. The police department had to close roads because so many people showed up, some of whom stood on the roof of the VFW hall just to get a glimpse of Trump.
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By now we've all had our glimpses of Trump. Some are painful. Conventions are about softening up and broadening presidential candidates for a larger audience. Same for Hillary Clinton next week. You can't run a primary campaign twice. Trump needs to pivot and attract independent voters or he won't win.
Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 160 With their families behind them, Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump and Vice Presidential nominee Mike Pence are cheered on by delegates at the close of the final day of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Lewandowski was in pretty tepid company Tuesday morning. Establishment Illinois Republicans endorsed John Kasich and, to some extent, Jeb Bush during the primary campaign. Many elected Republicans have been skipping the daily gathering of delegates, and some aren't in Cleveland at all. They don't want to be forced to publicly cheer on Trump.
But if Illinois is a sign of Trump's momentum, his detractors are starting to loosen up. After listening quietly to Lewandowski's 20-minute sell, rank-and-file delegates, including those here who supported Kasich and Bush, showed a glimmer of enthusiasm: They shoved aside their chairs at their breakfast tables and gave Lewandowski a standing ovation.
Kristen McQueary is a member of the Tribune Editorial Board.
Twitter @StatehouseChick
Join the discussion on Twitter @Trib_Ed_Board and on Facebook.
The Republican Party now convened in Cleveland is in an uncivil war over its identity and direction. A year ago, Jeb Bush was considered the most likely nominee. But a human howitzer named Donald Trump has shaken and overtaken the GOP, making clear that many of the party's battle regiments are no longer attached to its traditional policies.
Should Trump win and possibly even should he lose voters may find that "Republican" will come to mean something very different from what they once assumed. The most recent Republican presidents, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, are just two of the party bigwigs who are staying away in apparent dissent from the direction their party is taking.
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The Chicago Tribune's Rex Huppke takes a look at the protesters and the fear Trump is spreading at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. July 18, 2016. (Rex Huppke / Chicago Tribune) (Chicago Tribune)
Don't look now, but something similar, though less seismic, is taking place in the Democratic Party. Going from nominating Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 to nominating Hillary Clinton in 2016 gives it an appearance of faithful continuity. But the nominee and the party platform have both migrated noticeably to the left this year, pushed by Bernie Sanders.
Sanders won 23 of the Democratic contests, and had he won a few more, some Democrats might now be fretting over whether to endorse him and whether to skip next week's convention in Philadelphia. A general election contest between Sanders and, say, John Kasich or even Jeb Bush might have caused some Democrats to disown their nominee.
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Both parties find themselves being transformed by disruptive outsiders. Trump spent much of this century as a registered Democrat and even gave money to Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign. Sanders was elected to Congress repeatedly as an independent; not until he decided to run for its presidential nomination did he grudgingly declare himself a member of the Democratic Party.
The two have revived powerful sentiments that had been buried or ignored. Hearing Trump demand a border wall, advocate trade wars and treat NATO as obsolete, the ghost of Ronald Reagan might wonder if he had wandered into the wrong convention. But hearing Democrats endorse tighter regulation of banking, renounce the incarceration boom of the 1990s and call for moving to legalize marijuana, Bill Clinton must also feel obsolete.
Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 160 With their families behind them, Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump and Vice Presidential nominee Mike Pence are cheered on by delegates at the close of the final day of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
This campaign has seen in both parties a disenchantment with old leaders that has seldom been so widespread. All the candidates voicing familiar conservative themes in the GOP primaries were crushed by Trump who won by stressing nationalism, contempt for elites and suspicion of such minorities as Muslims and Hispanics. Clinton had all she could do to survive the challenge by a self-proclaimed "democratic socialist" who lambasted her as a soulless servant of the status quo.
Where the parties will go from here depends a lot on the outcome Nov. 8. A Clinton victory would likely arrest the Democrats' leftward drift, because she is not as liberal as Sanders and because she will have to compromise with Republicans to get significant legislation passed.
But after eight years of what many Democrats regard as useless efforts by Barack Obama to find common ground with the opposition, many will expect Clinton to be more combative and progressive. If she loses, Sanders' supporters could move the party their way and even choose the 2020 nominee.
If Trump wins, he will have a nearly free hand to redefine the GOP agenda, since Republicans on Capitol Hill are not likely to relish a showdown with their own president. If he loses, traditional conservatives will be able to say "I told you so" and possibly reassert control. But they will have to contend with Trump's supporters, who are not going away.
Over the past century, each party has changed more than most Americans realize. Democrats used to harbor a powerful segregationist wing and favored muscular foreign policy, robust military deployments often included. Republicans long had a moderate-to-liberal faction personified by the likes of Nelson Rockefeller, and it was Richard Nixon who established the Environmental Protection Agency. But rarely has any party veered so drastically and alarmingly as the GOP has in choosing Trump. And this campaign has yielded what Slate calls "the most liberal Democratic platform in a generation."
This campaign started fierce internal battles over what it means to be a Republican and a Democrat. On Election Day, the race will end. Those fights will not.
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Workers unload signature petitions out of a truck at the Illinois State Board of Election office in Springfield, Ill., on May 6, 2016. (Seth Perlman, AP)
Article XIV, Section 3 the part of the Illinois Constitution that empowers voters to put an amendment on the ballot is a single, straightforward paragraph.
It's there to provide citizens with an end-run around the General Assembly, in limited circumstances. If lawmakers put their own needs first by rigging the legislative maps to secure their own re-election, for example then voters can amend the constitution to check that abuse. Or can they?
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It's clear from the records of the 1970 constitutional convention that the framers of the document counted redistricting reforms among the possibilities when they included a provision for voter-driven amendments. Since then, lawmakers and their proxies have knocked four of five citizen initiatives off the ballot.
They're hoping Cook County Circuit Judge Diane Larsen will toss yet another on Wednesday. The Independent Map Amendment would assign the redistricting job to an 11-member commission instead of the legislature. In poll after poll after poll, Illinois voters have supported such a change, but surprise, they can't get lawmakers to put it on the ballot. Nearly 600,000 people signed petitions calling for a vote this November.
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The authors of the latest amendment had to step carefully around all those previous rulings, which have distorted the words of the constitution like a game of telephone.
In 2014, Judge Mary Mikva noted that the case law was stacked against two other measures a different redistricting amendment and another that would have imposed term limits on lawmakers and removed them from the ballot. The remap amendment died then; the term-limits measure died when the 1st District Appellate Court found itself similarly boxed in by inscrutable precedents. To quote that ruling: "We are bound by our Supreme Court's holding, sparse as its reasoning was "
Of course, term limits and redistricting reforms are the sort of changes the constitution's authors had in mind. (As Mikva herself put it: "What is left? What else is there?") So here we are again.
Independent redistricting would be a game-changer for Illinois. Under the current system, incumbents draw the maps to protect themselves. The majority party does its best to squeeze the minority party into as few districts as possible. The results of the election are so predictable that few races draw more than one candidate. There are 63 contested House and Senate races on the Nov. 8 ballot out of 158 seats up for election.
A nonpartisan map would produce districts in which more than one candidate had a reasonable chance to win. Voters would have choices. Incumbents wouldn't get a free pass. Citizens could hold their representatives' feet to the fire.
But will the constitution allow them to do it? That is, will Judge Larsen agree that the latest amendment satisfies the ever-narrowing interpretation of Article XIV, Section 3? Or will she be swayed by the boundless imagination of Michael Kasper, House Speaker Mike Madigan's go-to lawyer?
If Larsen green-lights this amendment, according to Kasper, there will be no end to the mischief the voters could visit upon the constitution.
Under the Independent Map proposal, for example, the auditor general would help screen candidates for the redistricting commission. Where does that end? "What if the initiative said the auditor general will spend 364 days a year reviewing applications?" Kasper asks. Never mind that it doesn't, Kasper argues. If this amendment is permissible, the next one could. And that's not all.
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If the people of Illinois can assign the auditor general to pull three names out of a hat once every 10 years, what's to stop them from telling the governor not to veto any bills until the new legislative maps are complete?
If it takes two Supreme Court justices, not affiliated with the same party, to name a special master if the mapmakers are deadlocked, does that mean nobody can run for the Supreme Court without declaring a party? What would happen if all seven justices were Republicans? How do we know Justice Charles Freeman is still a Democrat?
There are monsters under the bed, your honor. They will come out and do terrible things if this amendment is allowed on the ballot.
Here's the truth: The Independent Map Amendment does not threaten the integrity of the Illinois Constitution. It threatens speaker Madigan's ability to install and control lawmakers who will answer to him instead of to voters. That is what's at stake here.
Don't be fooled by the endless guessing game over what the framers really meant in Article XIV, Section 3. They meant to give voters the power to make changes that self-interested legislators refuse to make. That's what this amendment would do. Period.
Join the discussion on Twitter @Trib_Ed_Board and on Facebook.
The Chicago Tribune's Rex Huppke takes a look at the protesters and the fear Trump is spreading at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. July 18, 2016. (Rex Huppke / Chicago Tribune) (Chicago Tribune)
CLEVELAND The first day of the Republican National Convention began with a band merrily playing a classic 1960s song by The Turtles: "Happy Together."
Apparently Quicken Loans Arena, along with other security restrictions, has been declared an irony-free zone.
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Happy together? Really?
Not only does that not accurately describe the Republican Party, gathered here to crown a candidate so divisive many of the country's most notable Republicans aren't showing up, it doesn't even come close to describing Donald Trump's view of America.
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The theme of this week's GOP convention, and undoubtedly the theme of Trump's campaign thus far, has been more like: "So not at all happy together, everybody hates each other, the world is burning, run for your lives!!" It's as if The Turtles grew up and became a sullen, death-metal band.
Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 160 With their families behind them, Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump and Vice Presidential nominee Mike Pence are cheered on by delegates at the close of the final day of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Consider the official themes of the convention's four days: Make America Safe Again; Make America Work Again; Make America First Again; and Make America One Again.
Those, along with Trump's "Make America Great Again" campaign slogan, assert that America is not safe, not working, no longer No. 1, not united and not great.
So happy together!
The truth is this: Donald Trump is a fear sprinkler, and America is his lawn.
His approach has been to spray the country with divisive rhetoric Deport! Ban Muslims! Something bad is going on! watch the fear grow and then promise that he and only he can mow that fear down. How? By being strong! By being tough! With law and order!
There are no specifics. Trump doesn't believe in specifics. He figures that when your lawn is knee-high, you don't ask for an explanation of how the lawn mower works.
Fortunately for the country, even with horrific tragedies like the murder of law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge, La., and Dallas and racial tensions stoked by videos of police shooting unarmed black men, not everyone's falling for Trump's "the end is near" pitch.
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Many protesters gathered in Cleveland's Public Square on Monday to chant and wave signs in opposition to Trump refuse to see the country as the divided mess he claims it to be.
"We're not in the best state, but we're not in the worst either," said Hala Sanyurah, communications coordinator for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Columbus. "The way Trump describes things, we're in the purge. It's not every man against himself or groups against minorities. The media can make it seem like the world is a negative place and in a negative state, but in reality, if you look outside the media, we're really not."
Daniel Gutierrez, a 17-year-old from Wisconsin protesting with the immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera, sees Trump stirring up racial animosity and then pointing at it and saying, "See, I told you so!"
"We've been receiving such hatred," Gutierrez said. "And for him to say, 'Our country's on fire.' I say, 'Hey, we're the ones who've been receiving all this hatred from you. That's what we're protesting.'"
President Barack Obama made a reasoned plea to Americans on Sunday, in the wake of the Baton Rouge murders, to "temper our words and open our hearts."
Trump ignored that, said Obama has no idea what he's doing and called America a "divided crime scene."
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Then he lined up speakers for Monday night like former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke and fiercely anti-immigrant Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions who have a history of divisiveness.
I assume Trump watched or was at least told about the chaos that broke out Monday afternoon on the convention floor as Republicans opposed to his nomination chanted disapproval and, in some cases, walked out.
It was a fitting demonstration of what Trump, the fear sprinkler, brings. Division. Outrage, even among members of his own party.
He spent much of his campaign preaching the evils of the Republican establishment, and that won him supporters who feared only he had their best interests at heart.
We'll see how that works out.
But for now, let's go back to The Turtles: "Imagine how the world could be, so very fine, so happy together."
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If you want to believe that's what's happening in Cleveland of what Trump would bring to America you have to imagine awfully hard.
rhuppke@chicagotribune.com
Longtime Arlington Heights School District 25 Board of Education member Charles Williams, left, with District 25 Supt. Lori Bein, right, was honored this month for 25 years of service. (Karen Ann Cullotta / Pioneer Post)
Officials at Arlington Heights School District 25 said a new website, an annual magazine and a greater presence on Facebook and Twitter are aimed at enhancing communication with residents for the 2016-17 school year.
"We'd like to change the conversation between parents and students from, 'what did you do at school today?' to, 'I heard you did this at school today,'" said Adam Harris, District 25's communications coordinator.
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Among the planned upgrades to the district's communication with parents and the community at large is the recent re-design of the district's website, which Harris said will provide users with improved access from their smartphones, a primary way families access district information these days.
"Our goal was to improve the navigation and the mobile experience, for example, where to put the absent hotline, so a parent who is looking at their phone can go right to where they need," Harris said.
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With the new website slated to launch this fall, Harris said all nine of the district's schools will offer guidance for parents in need of technical assistance.
Also new this school year will be the addition of a District 25 magazine which will be delivered throughout Arlington Heights, serving as a type of "annual report," and showing local taxpayers how their dollars are being used, Harris said.
A heightened district presence on social media is also a goal of the new communication plan, said Harris, who credited the recent appearance of Thomas Middle School graduate Jack Aiello on "The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon" with helping catapult District 25's presence on Facebook and Twitter.
District 25 School Board Member Denise Glasgow applauded the updated communication plan, and said it was important to keep local senior citizens up to date on what is happening in their neighborhood schools.
"My mom gets a newsletter from District 59 in the mail, and she always says, 'why am I not getting one from District 25?'" Glasgow said. "I also think we should put these (newsletters) in some of the senior homes, because they all care about the kids, and what's happening in the district."
Meanwhile, officials this month honored longtime District 25 School Board member Charles Williams, who was recognized for his 25 years of service to the board of education.
"A board member doesn't often get the appreciation due," District 25 Supt. Lori Bein said. "There's a lot of behind the scenes work, so we just wanted to put him in front tonight."
Williams, who received a certificate of recognition at a July 14 board of education meeting, brushed off the praise, and credited his family for their patience over the years.
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"I'm only one board member, and part of a team, and we all have to learn to work together," Williams said.
kcullotta@tribpub.com
Twitter @kcullotta
Vox recently published an article claiming that Charles Koch is right and Bernie Sanders is wrong about how the economy is rigged. Both agree that there are laws that unfairly favor some financially over others. Sanders often claimed during his campaign that the rich have used their money to lobby for laws that favor their interests over those of everyone else. Meanwhile, Charles Koch has condemned excessive regulation and restrictions on economic freedom that allow the few to bend laws in their financial favor against the many. In looking at the real problem in the economy, Charles Kochs analysis of the problem comes closer to the truth.
In Kochs analysis, the few does not mean the 1%. In fact, this particular group includes a large portion of the populace from vastly different economic backgrounds. Will Wilkinson, writing for Vox, explains:
The economy is the sum of this incomprehensibly complex ecosystem of human exchange, and is far too variegated and decentralized to rig all at once. So it gets rigged little by little, one market and one jurisdiction at a time. The story of how the economy gets rigged is therefore a bunch of homely little stories of people with nice watches screwing over people with less-nice watches. But its not class war. Its not the mega rich against the rest of us. Its insiders seeking and then protecting special privileges that give them a leg up.
Examples of such rigging include instances where dentists, cosmetologists, cab drivers, and massage therapists have all successfully restricted the market and successfully lobbied for regulations in their favor, often in the name of the common good or public safety. Such regulations may take the form of occupational licensing, environmental protection or consumer protection measures, or any other array of laws or bureaucratic rules. The practice of lobbying for such regulations is called transfer-seeking, and successful endeavors constitute regulatory capture.
These kinds of practices harm the total economy, but may affect the poor the most:
Many of these economic regulations seem trivial in isolation But when you add up all the things you cant do for money without meeting costly, unjustifiable requirements, you get a dense web of restriction that acts as a suffocating structural barrier to economic opportunity, mobility, and equality.
The blame for such a tangled web of unfair regulations falls, says Wilkinson, on the weakness of economic liberty in the United States. Wilkinson claims:
American law does not consider economic liberties to be fundamental so regulations of economic life arent required, as matter of law, to have any practical relationship to the goals they are supposed to achieve.
Wilkinson implores people of all political leanings to come together to find and dissolve unnecessary and unfair laws or regulations that facilitate this rigging. The quote above would suggest strengthening economic liberties under law would also improve the situation. Whatever the solution, the idea that the government should not facilitate economic benefit for a small group at the expense of the general population is one that garners bipartisan support. It might even be the issue that can bring the two parties together in an increasingly partisan country.
Read the entire article here. For a more in-depth analysis, check out journalist Jonathan Rauchs book Governments End: Why Washington Stopped Working, which examines how transfer-seeking and regulatory webs impair our democracy.
Buffalo Grove resident Valerie Koppenhaver's skill is sewing an art that she fears is waning in popularity.
She sees this through her own sewing experiences, something the Buffalo Grove Arts Commission noticed when they granted her an award during its "Sew Beautiful" Textile Arts Contest."
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Koppenhaver captured the usable category after sewing together a tote bag made mostly out of men's neckties. Other award winners included Lynne Schneider, Judy Yublosky and Anne O'Donnell.
Koppenhaver previously has worked for Patricia Rhodes in Rolling Meadows, joining the area designer on trips to the garment district in New York City to find fabrics.
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"Sewing has been a huge part of my life," she said. "That was where I realized that this was something that was just part of me."
Q: Creative people find all kinds of outlets for their energy. What makes sewing speak to you?
A: Sewing is a skill that not many people have. But when you look around in your everyday life, a lot of the things we need are sewn. People don't see that, going through their life. When something needs to be fixed in some way, sewing is often the solution for that. Sewing is a great way to volunteer, and it's a great creative outlet. I can combine fabrics and colors into things you can't find in the stores. It's a way to be useful in the world, but it's a great community of people. The social interaction that comes around sewing is just an amazing thing.
Q: A purse made out of neckties took you a while. What else do you like to work on?
A: I like to sew one-of-a-kind items. I'm not real fond of doing the same thing. I like to learn new techniques. I also enjoy making my own fabric.
Q: You mentioned sewing's usefulness but an iPhone doesn't need any stitches when it breaks. Are there many younger folks who seem interested in repairing the fabrics they own?
A: I don't think they are. It's a slow craft. You can't sit down and complete an outfit in an afternoon. People have less time. Sewing gets held back because it's a slower skill. Harper College and College of DuPage both have fashion programs that are very active. What I have seen, the membership of our American Sewing Guild is older almost post-retirement. You need to have some time to devote to it.
Shout Out is a weekly feature in which we introduce our readers to their fellow community members and local visitors throughout suburban Chicago. Check out more online at ChicagoTribune.com/ShoutOut.
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rwachter@pioneerlocal.com
Twitter @RonnieAtPioneer
A Chicago man attempted to steal a car at gunpoint earlier this month, only to have his effort thwarted by the fact that he did not know how to drive a vehicle with a manual transmission, Oak Lawn police said.
Ladell T. Cox, 23, of the 6500 block of South King Drive, was taken into custody July 8 in the parking lot of Credit Union 1, 5535 W. 95th St., after a witness inside the business called police about the alleged attempt, police said. Cox was charged with aggravated attempted hijacking, according to reports.
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The car's owner, who returned to the scene after making a payment on the vehicle at a nearby dealership, said Cox came up to the car and asked for a dollar, then demanded his keys as he displayed what appeared to be a handgun, police said.
The owner said he turned over his keys to Cox, who was then mystified by the stick shift, reports said. Cox then demanded that the owner drive him to his destination, allowing the owner to get into the vehicle and drive away, leaving Cox standing in the lot, according to police.
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Police said they recovered the weapon used, but said it was just a replica.
Dennis Sullivan is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.
Billy Jo's expects to open this week at 8032 S. Harlem Ave. in Bridgeview. (Bob Bong / Daily Southtown)
A new restaurant with roots that stretch back to Calumet City is getting ready to open in southwest suburban Bridgeview.
Owner Bill Karambenis expects to open Billy Jo's restaurant this week at 8032 S. Harlem Ave.
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"We'll probably have our grand opening at the beginning of August," he said.
Karambenis said Billy Jo's will have a menu similar to the one at Panos Big Boy in Calumet City. He worked for his father-in-law there for 11 years.
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"We would have customers come from as far away as Nashville," he said. "I'll try to stay with that concept. We'll have subs, gyros, Italian beef, hamburgers and hot dogs."
The specialty of the house will be butter garlic fries.
The restaurant is newly constructed.
Karambenis said he had been working on Billy Jo's since November.
Billy Jo's will offer dine-in, carry out and have a drive-thru lane.
Karambenis said the restaurant would open at 10 a.m. daily. He said closing hours haven't been decided yet.
"We'll see how it is going at the beginning," he said.
Karambenis said he would probably have a staff of five or six when fully operational.
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For information and opening status, check out his Facebook page at Billy Jo's - Bridgeview.
Canadian bank buys Private Bank
Toronto-based CIBC has announced a deal to acquire Chicago-based Private Bank for $3.8 billion.
The company has several locations in the south suburbs and Southwest Side of Chicago, including Mount Greenwood in Chicago, Orland Park, Homer Glen, Worth, Oak Lawn, Palos Heights and Tinley Park.
The plan would be for Private Bank to remain headquartered here and retain its Illinois state banking charter with current CEO Larry Richman as its top local executive.
If approved by U.S. regulators and shareholders of both companies, the deal would give CIBC access to U.S. banking services.
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Private Bank has assets of about $17.7 billion, about 1,200 employees and a presence in 11 U.S. markets.
U-Haul closes one store in Oak Lawn and opens another
U-Haul of Oak Lawn announced that its store at 4650 W. 95th St. in Oak Lawn, which had been in operation since 1976, closed its doors for the final time on May 23.
The store was sold to neighboring business Mancari's Chrysler Jeep Dodge Ram dealership, which will expand its lot with the adjoining property.
The company said the need to better serve U-Haul customers and upgrade performance prompted the closing. The closed U-Haul store was initially an adaptive reuse project that served as a car dealership property.
U-Haul Moving & Storage of Oak Lawn at 8900 S. Cicero Ave. opened earlier this year to fill the void left by the closing of the 95th Street location and meet the moving and self-storage needs of southern Cook County.
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The 2.43-acre U-Haul Moving & Storage of Oak Lawn property was acquired on May 12.
"With this store, we will be able to offer self-storage, more trucks and better accessibility to Cicero Avenue, the main thruway in town," Rocc Bolden, U-Haul Company of Chicago South & Southwest Suburbs president, said in a release.
"Pretty much everything is better at this store," Bolden added. "People are excited about the new location. A lot of customers from the closed store have come over to see us, and new customers have come in that didn't know we were there. Once our self-storage project is finished, this is going to be the type of full-service U-Haul facility that this community deserves."
The new location offers truck and trailer rentals, towing equipment and professional hitch installation, U-Box portable moving and self-storage containers, moving supplies, boxes and much more. Propane is expected to be available in the coming months. The lot allows for a significantly larger inventory of rental equipment than the smaller, closed location.
In addition to a 21,438-square-foot building on-site, U-Haul intends to construct a pristine self-storage facility that will hold about 600 indoor climate-controlled units at varying sizes and price points, with all of the latest security features available.
Self-storage units are expected to be available in 2017. In the meantime, customers have access to storage via U-Box containers, which encompass 257 cubic feet and feature one-ton-capacity. U-Haul Moving & Storage of Oak Lawn can store up to 100 U-Box containers.
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For information, call general manager Marc Coffman at 708-422-2332. Hours are 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday-Thursday and Saturday; 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Friday; and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Reserve equipment at uhaul.com or contact Reservations at 1-800-GO-UHAUL.
Daily Southtown Twice-weekly News updates from the south suburbs delivered every Monday and Wednesday >
U-Haul Moving & Storage of Oak Lawn will hire at least two more employees once the storage facility is built, and Bolden said there would be an emphasis on hiring locally.
St. Xavier to close Arizona campus
St. Xavier University will close its campus in Gilbert, Ariz., because of the uncertainty of future state funding.
A spokesman said that the campus in suburban Phoenix would close at the end of fall classes this year.
The university opened the campus in Gilbert in August, 2015. St. Xavier had signed a 15-year lease with Gilbert. The university may have to pay as much as $250,000 in damages and for rent due if the contract is broken.
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The main campus for St. Xavier University is at 3700 W. 103rd St., Chicago, along with a satellite location in Orland Park.
Bob Bong is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.
Sergeant Cindy Guerra talks about saving a young boy's life at Orland Park pool party during a press conference at the CPD headquarters in Chicago on Monday, July 18, 2016. (Zbigniew Bzdak/Chicago Tribune). (Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago Tribune)
Cindy Guerra is a Chicago police sergeant, but it was her training as a lifeguard that helped her save a boy pulled from a pool over the weekend in Orland Park.
"I didn't have time to think," Guerra said Monday. "Instinctively, I just reacted."
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Guerra was at a graduation party at a cousin's house on Steeplechase Parkway in Orland Park around 6 p.m. Saturday when a child ran up to her table and said a boy, 12 or 13, was at the bottom of an in-ground backyard pool.
She dove into the pool and pulled the boy out while another attendee called 911. Then she performed CPR on the boy who was not breathing and did not have a pulse until he began breathing again, she said.
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By the time paramedics arrived about 4 minutes later, the boy had regained consciousness and was breathing on his own, Orland Fire Protection District Battalion Chief Daniel Smith said.
Sergeant Cindy Guerra talks about saving a young boy's life at Orland Park pool party during a press conference at the CPD headquarters in Chicago on Monday, July 18, 2016. (Zbigniew Bzdak/Chicago Tribune). (Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago Tribune)
"Without the actions of Sgt. Guerra that day, our level of treatment, our level of care would definitely have been much more extensive," said Smith, who credited Guerra for "stepping up and taking action and saving this boy's life."
Guerra, a 22-year veteran of the department, had worked in the Police Department's Special Investigations Unit as a sergeant before transferring to the Office of News Affairs a few weeks ago.
The boy she saved was due to be released Monday afternoon from Silver Cross Hospital, fire officials said.
They said they weren't aware of the circumstances that precipitated the frightening incident, but encouraged parents to educate themselves about pool safety at www.poolsafely.gov.
Daily Southtown reporter Zak Koeske contributed to this report
On July 17, 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued a proclamation declaring the third week of July Captive Nations Week for that year and every year until such time as freedom and independence shall have been achieved for all the captive nations of the world. At the time, Eisenhower was condemning the unjust and oppressive Soviet regime and lending a voice to those countries trapped under Soviet rule. The threat of the Soviet Union no longer exists today. Still, we have celebrated Captive Nations Week every year since 1959, and are doing so this year, because, unfortunately, threats to freedom persist today.
President Obama released a beautiful proclamation this week that extols the value of liberty and the power of the American commitment to the ideals of democracy and freedom at home and abroad.
Since our earliest days, the United States has worked to uphold the rights enshrined in our founding documents. The ideals that sparked our revolution find their truest expression in democracy, and our enduring belief in the right to self-govern is not limited to our borders we believe the human impulse toward freedom is universal. During Captive Nations Week, we recognize the inherent dignity of all people, and we renew our support for those struggling under oppressive regimes and striving to secure the blessings of liberty for themselves and their posterity.
Though the President acknowledges the progress the world has made towards peace and freedom since the first Captive Nations Week, he states that the ideal of freedom for all peoples still eludes us. He notes the political oppression of Ukraine, the devastation of war in Syria, the growth of the Islamic State, and the continuing human rights violations in Cuba.
President Obama affirms the commitment of the United States to freedom and justice at home and abroad and calls for Americans to lead by example in the constant fight for a more perfect world.
We will continue to stand for equality and dignity beyond our borders and encourage economic and political reforms that foster democracy. And we remain dedicated to leading and working with others to build security, prosperity, and justice, and to fighting for any person still suffering under the grasp of tyranny.
This week, Americans must stand in solidarity with those who live under the crushing thumb of oppression and speak out against tyranny and despotism wherever it persists. We must constantly remind ourselves that there are those whose hearts still yearn for liberty and continue the long battle for freedom that started in this country more than 200 years ago.
As President Eisenhower said in 1944, Freedom has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men and so it must be daily earned and refreshedelse like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die.
Let us today and everyday seek to earn and refresh freedom everywhere so as to cultivate it for this generation and preserve it for the next.
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Never Hillary,
I hope you're paying attention this week.
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Far be it from me to suggest that the "Never Hillary" movement is made up of men too insecure to follow a woman, and women too angry to support someone who forgives a philandering husband. Just like I would never suggest that nearly half of America has spent the last eight years looking for ways to not say they don't like having a black man in charge.
But, since you've decided to enact a zero-tolerance voting policy, I thought I might trot out a couple of thoughts.
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First: zero-tolerance policies are, generally, bad ideas. They are the refuge of frightened people unwilling to accept the responsibility of making difficult decisions, or incapable of seeing the totality of an issue or finding compromise.
Second: Odds are, if you're taking a voting booth stand against Hillary Clinton, you're going to end up taking a stand for the Republican Party.
Hey, to quote the leader of the great state of Indiana, you've got to stand for something.
(Yes, that's a John Mellencamp lyric. You didn't think I was citing Mr. No Gay Cakes, did you?)
I get it. Clinton's convictions seem a tad malleable. She gives off the appearance of someone who identifies less with the morality of a position than its political opportunity.
And that differentiates her from Donald Trump/Mike Pence (the guy who was a registered Democrat from 2001-2009, and the guy who voted for someone else in the Indiana primary) how?
I would suggest that both Clinton and Trump arrive at their respective positions with an eye for the demographic gains therein. Where I suspect they will differ is in their willingness to see a position result in actual policy.
Trump, to make a dated media reference, wants his name in the papers to build his personal brand. His brand requires nothing more than notoriety. Whatever the outcome of the general election, he has already won by ensuring his logo will continue to move units of that to which it is affixed.
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Clinton, I am convinced, would prefer to appear on the pages of history books. Her legacy requires accomplishment. That means more than simply being the "first woman to"
Barack Obama's legacy is not merely "first black president." His resume also includes the Affordable Care Act, the legalization of same-sex marriage, a reopened embassy in Cuba and the death of Osama bin Laden.
However you feel about those signposts, realize you are voting for someone who will set out his or her own agenda. So judge them for their ability and willingness to accomplish those things, and for the things themselves.
Which brings me back to Mellencamp.
A stand for the Republican candidate means a stand for the Republican Party Platform, which will certainly be articulated in greater detail during the ongoing Republican National Convention. So you should be paying attention starting from Monday's first-billed prime-time speaker, one of the goofs from Duck Dynasty drives home the notion born of your "Never Hillary" stance.
These are your people.
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And this is your platform at least, these are some of the planks of the Republican Party Platform (according to multiple news reports the formal document will be approved during the convention):
A wall between the United States and Mexico. A literal wall, capable of stopping vehicle traffic.
A constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage. Because, you know, it's important to protect the sanctity of the institution into which Trump has entered three times.
Daily Southtown Twice-weekly News updates from the south suburbs delivered every Monday and Wednesday >
An emphasis on appointing judges "who respect traditional family values." Here's a suggestion: How about appointing judges who respect the law enough to not let their personal biases overrule an objective interpretation?
The turning over of federal lands for privately owned ranching, forestry and mining operations. Because why have a national forest when you can have fun with fracking?
A declaration that coal is "an abundant, clean, affordable, reliable domestic energy resource." Ask any chimney sweep.
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My dad always said he voted for building schools, not prisons. That more or less shapes my approach to this day. I try to vote with an eye to the protecting the future.
In this election, that choice might come down to building solar panels or border walls. Or the choice between a living minimum wage or hoping the robber barons running the Old Growth Redwood Saw Mill allow birth control as part of their health plan. Or, "Climate Change: Fact or Fiction?"
You can't just stand against something, because there's always a flip side to that coin. You always end up standing for something. What's it going to be?
Phil Arvia is a freelance writer for the Daily Southtown.
How high do the grasses and weeds on curbs, roadsides and in medians have to get before our towns, counties or state do something about these miserable eyesores? They're worse than ever. Between that and our patched and potholed streets, what are we getting for our outlandish property taxes?
Tinley Park
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I can see the correlation between the rising hate in America and the Trump candidacy. Donald's hat should read "Making America Hate Again." What will happen to this country if he becomes president?
"Liberal left Democrats" (whomever they are supposed to be) do not "slam" Christians. Many Democrats are Christians. What I, and many others dislike, are Christians who want to force Christian-style Sharia law on others. I understand that Christians vary from one end of the political spectrum to the other. What my brand of Christianity accepts may be different from others. I also understand that not everyone in this country is a Christian or even a believer in a god. Laws should never be made that force everyone to live by a particular religion's beliefs. Our Founding Fathers understood this, but somehow this idea has gotten distorted and lost over the last two centuries.
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El, Hegewisch
Just saw on the news that Rauner, Kirk and many delegates aren't going to the Republican convention. Why not? They could let the country know about our great state: $90 billion in debt, no budget, worst schools and don't forget we're the murder capital of America. Stay home, don't embarrass us anymore.
T.L., Chicago
Daily Southtown Twice-weekly News updates from the south suburbs delivered every Monday and Wednesday >
I was at a local grocery store and the deli clerk that cut my lunch meat and cheese had many facial piercings: lip, nose, brow and more. The deli's not like the produce department where you can wash the product before using. It would seem to me that if the store doesn't have the good sense to have rules in effect, that this should be governed by the Board of Health. I'm curious to know if there's any health laws that grocery stores have to follow?
Palos Heights
Regrettably, gun violence in America will never end. Unfortunately, it will probably increase. The NRA has enabled over half our citizens to arm themselves. Many of these armed people have mental problems, and eventually they may act out in a violent manner. Now that nearly everyone has guns, these incidents will continue, unfortunately, routinely. Try to keep your family in areas considered safe, if such areas still exist. Hopefully you won't be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now there will be hundreds of scathing comments from NRA members after they read this. Guns in the hands of unstable people kill people. Only the police should have guns. But it's too late for that now. Thanks NRA.
When I read the police blotter in the newspaper, I can't help but notice that the vast majority of people who steal from Orland Square Mall in Orland Park are people from Chicago. I'm not talking about petty theft, either. These people steal anywhere from $100 to $950 worth of merchandise from the department stores and small shops. These thieves remind me of the invading aliens from the movie "Independence Day." Like the aliens, the thieves move on to new areas because they completely destroyed every available resource in their own community.
Why are we sending more troops to Iraq? The men are running away like cowards. They don't want to fight for their own country, so why should our servicemen go there, fight and get killed and wounded? When they come back wounded, our government doesn't do anything for them. Let them fight their own battles and bring our men back. These Iraqis don't need our help. Let them do it themselves. I'm tired of my tax money going to support these lazy son-of-a-guns.
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What's Speak Out?
Speak Out allows readers to comment on the issues of the day. Email Speak Out at speakout@southtownstar.com or call 312-222-2427. Please limit comments to 30 seconds or about 120 words and give your first name and your hometown.
More from a concerned American citizen about people picking on the police: The reason Chicago's so loaded with such problems is they don't have any fathers or parents that care. They've been on public aid for three decades. They still think they should get everything for nothing. The only people we owe anything to are American Indians. Also, you the press are part of the problem of this country, and you know it. You the press are causing a lot of these problems because you're overplaying it just to sell newspapers. I give up with this whole country of ours. Since World War II we've gone completely down the tube. You the press are prejudiced against the middle-class working people.
This is in regards to Dave from Oak Lawn's comment. All I can say is you are one very, very sick individual and you should have your head examined by a specialist because the remark you made about the Vietnam War lad who lost an arm and then mentioning presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's view of heroes was a dastardly shame. You should have your head examined because you are surely not hitting on all cylinders. I hope you'd have something done with that sick head of yours.
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They're talking about former Gov. Rod Blagojevich getting released early on his 14-year sentence for federal corruption. Tell him to walk the streets, go up to the people, knock on the doors and tell them how he attempted to sell the U.S. Senate seat vacated by then-President-elect Barack Obama. He did the crime. He should pay. That's all there is to it. He's a criminal. He hurt other people. He should serve his time.
I listened to former Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders endorse presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for the presidency. It looked like he convinced her to open her purse and give the house away. Regardless of where immigrants come from, if we think we're overpopulated with those who are here illegally, wait until we double the minimum wage and offer free tuition and medicine. You won't be able to keep people out and I mean illegal entry to our country. As Mr. Sanders spoke on July 12, you could tell Hillary was agreeing with him because she bobbed her head up and down 1,008 times. We would need a second mortgage on the White House. Where is all this money coming from?
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JF, Oak Lawn
I was just thinking. If all the gangs in the city of Chicago organized into one group and they came face to face with the entire Chicago police force, it's my contention that the Chicago police force would be outgunned. Yet, the State of Illinois doesn't want me to own a gun. Why is that?
John, Bridgeport
Daily Southtown Twice-weekly News updates from the south suburbs delivered every Monday and Wednesday >
Regarding common sense: I'm in agreement with letter writer Jo Fajardo of Palos Hills, who received an email from state Rep. Kelly Burke. It makes one wonder why taxpayers aren't protesting en masse in every corner of Illinois. Officials spend with no dollars to back up these programs. With increased taxes on anything reps can squeeze out of taxpayers, where does it end up? It's never enough. Yet, politicians get raises, perks, pensions, medical, dental, you name it. House Speaker Michael Madigan and his cronies including Senate President John Cullerton have been in office for 30-some years. They aren't held accountable. Their answer is always more money. If I ran a business, I'd be out of luck, job and money.
S, Orland Park
To Mike from Crestwood, the 70-year-old about Social Security: Yeah, it's a joke. Over the years I remember my mom getting her raises on her Social Security. They were so low to begin with. On top of that, they gave her what they call the cost-of-living raise. After they taxed her raise she wound up with less than she got the year before. Figure that one out. Thanks, government. Thanks, everybody in control and power who already has money and doesn't have to worry about Social Security and living on it. It's a joke, man. This frickin' government is just robbing us blind. Every time they come out with a new idea, it makes us poorer. Figure that one out.
Again, I see someone in Speak Out about semiautomatic weapons and hunting. Semiautomatic weapons have been used by people for hunting since the early 1900s. Since the end of World War II, the majority of people who've been in military service are used to and comfortable with semiautomatic and full automatic weapons. As far as full automatic weapons, you've broken the law even if you never shoot the thing. There are semiautomatic weapons such as the AR-15 used in hunting, target shooting and many other applications. They're fully legal under law. They're not full automatic weapons. I wish people that don't know what they're talking about would learn something about weaponry before making comments.
Tom, Oak Lawn
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What's Speak Out?
Speak Out allows readers to comment on the issues of the day. Email Speak Out at speakout@southtownstar.com or call 312-222-2427. Please limit comments to 30 seconds or about 120 words and give your first name and your hometown.
To the commenter about the American flag being flown on Flag and Memorial days: Some people don't fly the flag, but some people don't have the flag to fly. I'll never lower my flag to half-staff for some athlete. I remember another athlete in the same position as the late boxer Muhammad Ali. The late boxer Joe Louis served in the military, though not on the fighting line. Why did we lower the flag to half-staff for Ali, someone who was nothing more than a conscientious objector? What has he done for the military or the country? I don't see any gymnasiums in his name. Therefore, my flag stays full staff on any athlete or person who doesn't support the military.
John, Bridgeport
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A vote for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton means a continuance of the death of our economy and our justice system, more unemployment and more of your dignity being stripped away. Perhaps some of the 65,000 Syrians that Hillary wants to let into our country will help you by taking your jobs. Could this be one of the promises she's paying back for the millions and millions that were donated to the Clinton Foundation charity by the countries she visited while she represented our country as U.S. secretary of state?
Orland Park
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Isn't it time that all forms of news media lay off on describing offenses by the color of the doer? We all know actions are more important than color. All the media is doing is feeding into the frenzy of the wrongdoers and activists. Tell us good news, not bad.
Quinn
This is in regards to Sara's recent comments in the newspaper. I guess you personally like the fact that people were being thrown off their insurance back in the good old days when they could set caps or limits, and send the people who had cancer to their deaths because insurance didn't want to pay to process their claims to make these people healthy. Get a grip on yourself, Sara.
I think the newspapers and TV reporters need to back off all these stories. I think if they keep going over and over and over it, that they incite people and encourage them to keep protesting. Another thing is we all need to respect the police. Look at those poor five officers who lost their lives. They got taken from their families and their kids for protecting the citizens of Dallas. Yet, the news media and the newspeople just kind of lightly cover the story. Otherwise, they want to keep covering the protests and everything. Quit covering the protests and people will settle down. Then maybe we can all work together and get some type of peace in this world.
Emily
Daily Southtown Twice-weekly News updates from the south suburbs delivered every Monday and Wednesday >
We had five police officers gunned down by a racist that spouted hateful words against white people and policemen. More attention has been put on the two black men that were shot by police in Louisiana and Minnesota. Both happened to be armed. Alton Sterling was a convicted felon, armed and resisted arrest, and Philando Castile attempted to get a gun before he was shot. No attention by any politician has been toward the criminal to stop resisting arrest and start obeying lawful police orders. It's a sad day in America when criminals are made into heroes.
I personally don't care what they say about former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her private emails. I still feel safer with her running the country than big mouth Donald Trump who makes fun of people's nationalities like a 10-year-old boy. This man is in no way qualified to be president. Hillary's made her mistakes, but I'd be afraid every day if that man was in the presidency. He needs to go away. I'm not the only one that thinks like this. Many people have told me the same thing. Hillary's not their favorite but out of the two they're going to vote for her because they don't want a hotheaded liar like Trump.
Sam
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President Barack Obama, as far as I'm concerned, has been a terrible president for the American people. He added another trillion dollars to our deficit. Now he wants to campaign for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Uh, he isn't in some foreign country donating billions of dollars. Now he wants to campaign. He's got America to take care of, and I'll tell you what. He's done a very poor job as a president, and many, many people that voted for him are disappointed 100 percent. Like he cares? He's ready to go to California to live in this $14 million home. Isn't that wonderful?
RC
What's Speak Out?
Speak Out allows readers to comment on the issues of the day. Email Speak Out at speakout@southtownstar.com or call 312-222-2427. Please limit comments to 30 seconds or about 120 words and give your first name and your hometown.
While an elongated workday is implemented to get the $18.2 million Deerfield Road construction project back on schedule, another $5.3 million worth of road rebuilding is underway in other parts of the village.
The Deerfield Road project came within hours of shutting down because of the state budget impasse. The Illinois General Assembly passed a stop gap measure which Gov. Bruce Rauner signed June 30.
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"We had to plan like we were going to shut down," said David Fitzgerald, Deerfield's management analyst. "The equipment had to be brought back so the work could get going again. We're making up for lost time now."
Fitzgerald said construction crews will start working 10 to 12 hour days and adding an eight-hour shift on Saturdays to assure the work is done as planned by Thanksgiving.
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The longer work days will also play a role in assuring the planned month-long closure of the Deerfield Road rail underpass is done by Labor Day, which falls Sept. 5 this year, according to Fitzgerald. He said the closure will occur the first or second week of August.
"That's all dependent on whether (or not) we have a heavy week of rain," Fitzgerald said.
When the viaduct closure occurs, east bound traffic will be routed off Deerfield Road to Waukegan, then north to Hazel Avenue, west on Hazel to Wilmot Road and south on Wilmot to Deerfield, according to Fitzgerald.
Cars driving east on Deerfield Road will detour south on Wilmot to Central Avenue, drive east on Central to Elm Street, north on Elm to Osterman Avenue, east on Osterman to Waukegan and north on Waukegan to Deerfield, Fitzgerald said.
A $2.4 million Deerfield-Bannockburn joint infrastructure project on North Avenue between Chestnut Street and Wilmot Road started earlier this month and will last until November, according to Fitzgerald. North Avenue marks the village limit between the towns. He said 80 percent of the funding comes from a federal grant and the rest is paid locally.
Along with building a new road, workers will replace the water main, repair the sanitary sewer and install curbs, Fitzgerald said.
On the south side of the village, work started the week of July 5 on a $1.1 million effort to rebuild Deer Lake Road and Estate Drive. Along with the new streets, Fitzgerald said the sidewalks will be replaced and drainage will be improved.
"Parts of the road are literally wavy," Fitzgerald said. "There is a huge drop off with (these roads) now."
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While this work is going on, six other Deerfield streets covering 2.7 lane miles of road will be rebuilt for $1.8 million along with other infrastructure work, according to Fitzgerald. The roadways are Constance Lane from Castlewood Lane to Lisa Marie Court; Christopher Drive from Constance to Castlewood; Lisa Marie Court; Deerpath Drive from Central to Deerfield; Willow Avenue from the south end near Lake Cook Road to Central and Aspen Way from Gordon Terrace to Laurel Avenue.
Fitzgerald said the work on Deerpath, Willow and Aspen is currently underway and the effort on Constance, Christopher and Lisa Marie will start when the others are done. He said all labor will be done in November.
On Constance Lane, Christopher Drive and Lisa Marie Court, the work includes a new road, new curbs and "spot work" on sidewalks.
Aspen Way and Deerpath will get a rebuilt road and curbs while Willow receives minor drainage work along with the other improvements, Fitzgerald said.
Aside from Deerfield Road, the projects are part of the town's annual ongoing local roadwork program, according to a July 11 press release from the village.
Steve Sadin is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
Deerfield Square ownership hopes to replace the existing building housing Biaggis with a structure resembling this rendering. (Vilage of Deerfield)
Owners of The Shops at Deerfield Square got some advice from the Deerfield Plan Commission on their plan to replace the existing Biaggi's Ristorante Italiano building with a new multi-tenant structure.
Representatives of the shopping center publicly disclosed their latest plans to construct a building for as many as five tenants at the southwest corner of Deerfield and Waukegan Roads during a workshop session of the commission July 14.
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The new building will be at the northwest corner of the shopping center in front of the plaza near the corner of Deerfield and Waukegan. Malk said the plaza will remain unchanged.
Chuck Malk, president of CRM Properties Group and principal owner of Deerfield Square, addressed confusion about the future of Biaggi's. When plans to demolish the building were first disclosed on the village's website July 8 indicating Biaggi's would close by the end of the year, company founder and CEO Todd Hovenden told the Deerfield Review that he intended to stay.
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When commissioners asked Malk about the restaurant's future, he said Biaggi's and CRM could agree to renew the lease but at this point he was taking a proactive approach to replace a dated building with one more geared to diners' current desires.
"It was dormant after Stoney River (Steakhouse and Grill) for 15 months," Malk said referring to Biaggi's predecessor in the space. "I understand they're doing fine in Deer Park. It's hard to do $2 million in that space. It's easier for (a tenant) to take 2,500 square feet and do $1 million."
Though Malk said the new building will be designed with eateries in mind, he was open to any kind of retail. The proposal calls for a structure with large glass windows and glassed-in terraces at each end. He said it could accommodate up to five different users.
"Those areas could be for one tenant," Malk said of the glass-enclosed structures. "That's how we get to five. One could be a (small) coffee shop."
He also said a user could have more space utilizing both the terrace and interior space reducing the number of occupants.
Responding to a question about the kind of eateries he envisions for the new space, Malk said he has fast casual restaurants in mind.
Commissioner Bob Benton wanted to know why Malk did not want to continue the tradition of a restaurant where people take their time over a meal.
"Many people here like a very good sit-down restaurant," Benton said. "Stoney River was that. Biaggi's is that. I feel like the community will be losing something."
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Malk said Deerfield and the surrounding communities have not responded as well as other places to restaurants like Biaggi's or Stoney River. He said local dining habits make it harder for a traditional restaurant to be profitable.
"This is not a high alcohol consuming public," Malk said. "Most of these restaurants make their money on sides and cocktails, and this community always wants a deal."
When questioned about the changes, Malk reminded the commission there were people who questioned him about letting Jewel move out and bringing in Whole Foods.
"People loved their Jewel," Malk said. "They couldn't believe we came up with the idea of Whole Foods."
He said it has worked out well for the center, the store and the community.
The new building will continue the tradition of using eclectic architecture throughout, according to Malk. He said that has been a hallmark of the center since he renovated it more than 17 years ago.
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Oppenheim suggested Malk and his team return with a traffic study, details about parking impact and ideas for public art.
"We're always delighted to see downtown revitalization but the village board and the Appearance Review Commission will have questions," Oppenheim said. "What are you going to do about parking? What will be your plan for demolition? We want to make sure that will be a safe situation."
Steve Sadin is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
Evanston officials say a planned residential facility for young adults enrolled in college and in need of mental health services will not be allowed to open per the city's zoning rules. (Yellowbrick / Handout)
Evanston officials say a planned residential facility for young adults enrolled in college and in need of mental health services will not be allowed to open per the city's zoning rules.
Yellowbrick, a mental health facility that works exclusively with young adults, was slated to open the home -- intended to house up to eight students aged 18 to 30 -- located two blocks from Northwestern University's campus, Labor Day weekend in time for the upcoming school year.
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Ald. Judy Fiske, 1st, who lives down the street from the Victorian home located at 2233 Sherman Ave., said neighbors in the area were curious about whom the home had been sold to, but it wasn't until very recently that they discovered the mental health agency's plans for the building. Fiske said the home was previously occupied by a longtime resident of the neighborhood who was also unaware that Yellowbrick had purchased the property.
"I asked (city) staff if they knew anyone who had purchased the house and the use. We looked into it by what was available online," Fiske said. She said the city's community development director, Mark Muenzer, contacted an attorney for Yellowbrick and informed the agency that they would be not be allowed to operate a residential care home in the building due to distance requirements laid out in the city code.
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Muenzer said the city's zoning stipulates that a residential care home cannot operate within 900-feet of another. Boys Hope Girls Hope, a nonprofit providing at-risk children with stable housing, is located at 827 Gaffield Place, which is about 500-feet away from the intended location for Yellowbrick's "Campus Competence" building.
"The only way it could be occupied is by three unrelated individuals that are just residing in the home. It couldn't operate as a residential care home," Muenzer said of the property purchased by Yellowbrick.
Yellowbrick representatives did not return multiple requests for comment on the city's stance that they'll not be allowed to open the residence at that location.
Jesse Viner, CEO and chief medical officer at Yellowbrick, said in an interview earlier this week that the new facility is designed to meet the needs of students who may have dropped out of school because of a severe depressive episode, substance abuse issue or eating disorder and for young adults who may suffer from more long-term developmental difficulties like autism, Viner said. He said the driving force for opening the new residence was to provide an alternative for students who need a sober, structured and supervised living environment while attending college or university.
Yellowbrick representatives said in an earlier interview that students living in the home would receive weekday assistance and counseling from a registered occupational therapist, career and academic counseling, participate in group sessions focusing on interpersonal skills, distress tolerance, mindfulness and meditation, community dinners and regular drug testing with adult staff on site 24 hours a day.
Viner said colleges and universities are generally not equipped to provide the required support for students who need more than a weekly meeting at a campus counselor's office. He said unfortunately those who do need more support often end up leaving school as a result.
The new facility will offer "a safe place for them to live and continue on with their education, hopefully, that is the goal," said Jill Sisler, director of Campus Competence, in an earlier interview.
Both Viner and Sisler lauded the quiet residential area as ideal for the students who would be living at the home.
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Viner said the new facility would not only be unique to Chicago, but also to the rest of the country.
"There are sober supports in various college environments, and while we anticipate over half the young people that live here may have struggles with substances and alcohol, it's really about having the mental health expertise combined with the sober environment that makes this different," he said.
Muenzer said it was "unusual" that representatives from Yellowbrick did not reach out to the city to discuss their plans for the building.
Lee V. Gaines is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
Updated: Is Yohanna Katanacho Telling the Whole Story About West Bank Travel Restrictions? | Main | Report Accuses Huffington Post of Selling Iran Deal Through Lies, Deception and Anti-Semitic Incitement
July 19, 2016
Washington Post Sinks Mavi Marmara Facts
A Washington Post article (6 years after raid, Turkey and Israel to normalize relations,? June 28, 2016) improperly identified the Mavi Marmaraa ship carrying armed individuals who in 2010 attempted to break the Israeli naval blockade of the Hamas-ruled Gaza Stripas an aid ship. Despite being presented by CAMERA with evidence disproving its characterization of the Mavi Marmara, The Postwithout explanationrefused to correct.
In their dispatch, ostensibly about Israel and Turkey normalizing relations, Post reporters Erin Cunningham and Ruth Eglash claimed, Israel and Turkey reached an agreement to repair ties after six years of strained relations over a deadly Israeli raid on a Turkish ship delivering aid to Gaza in 2010. Ten Turkish activists were killed in the assault.?
However, as CAMERA has noted (Radical, Pro-Hamas Flotilla Seeks Media Win,? May 31, 2010), no aid was found aboard the Mavi Marmara, the lead ship in the flotilla which sailed for the Gaza Strip under the guise of bringing humanitarian assistance to Palestinian Arabs. The Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry (MFA) reported that of the seven flotilla ships, only four were freighters. The Challenger 1 (small yacht), the Sfendonh (small passenger boat) and the Mavi Marmara (passenger ship) did not carry any humanitarian aid. The UN Palmer Report appeared to support Israels conclusion, noting that what little aid was on board the Mavi Marmara was likely only "intended for the voyage itself,? that is, for passengers use. Greta Berlin, one of the flotilla organizers, concurred, telling Al Jazeera at the time: "This mission is not about delivering humanitarian supplies..."
Additionally, The Posts characterization of Mavi Marmara activists? could mislead readers. As CAMERA has noted (New York Times Presents Attack on Soldiers by Mavi Marmara Activists as Israel Claim,? Aug. 18, 2011), video footage of the incident clearly shows that Israeli troops boarding the ship were attackedsome while still climbing aboardwith metal bars and knives. Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) later found a variety of weapons, including sharpened stakes and knives, aboard the ship (pictures of which can be found here).
That the Mavi Marmara was a fake aid ship is not surprising considering that terrorist groups were connected to itanother fact that The Post failed to report.
As CAMERA has noted, the two main organizers of the flotilla were the Turkish Insani Yardim Vakfi (IHH), an Islamic charity that has worked closely with terrorist organizations, and the Free Gaza Movement, which is strongly linked to the extremist International Solidarity Movement (ISM).
According to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, the IHH works closely with Hamas, the terrorist group that rules the Gaza Strip. The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center has cited links between the group and al-Qaeda, the U.S. designated-terrorist group responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. The information center also charged IHH with involvement in a failed plot to bomb the Los Angeles International Airport.
As the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a non-profit organization that translates Arab media, has documented, many of the flotilla participants were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and some had declared their desire for martyrdom before trying to run the Israeli blockade.
In addition to omitting important information about the Mavi Marmara, The Post singled out Israel for its naval blockade of Gaza.? The paper failed to mention that Egyptian authorities also maintain a blockade of the Gaza Strip. Both countries do so to curtail jihadist activity and prevent the smuggling of weapons to the terrorist groups that threaten them.
CAMERA twice contacted The Washington Post asking for a correction. Despite being presented with the evidence noted aboveincluding video footage of activists? attacking IDF soldiersThe Post failed to respond.
This is not the first time this year that The Post omitted essential information in its reporting relating to the Mavi Marmara: Twice in February 2016, the paper improperly identified the IHH as a non-governmental Islamic charity group. (Washington Post Fails to Properly I.D. Terrorist Charity,? Feb. 16, 2016).? When it comes to the aid ship? that wasnt, The Post apparently would rather the facts sink than sink in.
Posted by SD at July 19, 2016 09:35 AM
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State Sen. Julie Morrison (D-Deerfield), center, speaks during a press conference about restoring towns' ability to enact assault weapons bans. (Provided by Julie Morrison)
Recent shootings involving high-powered weapons may be lending momentum to a bill that would allow Illinois cities and villages to enact bans on assault weapons.
State Sen. Julie Morrison (D-Deerfield) is pushing Senate Bill 2130, which would restore the ability of cities and villages to adopt ordinances similar to the Highland Park measure that survived a constitutional challenge last year.
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During a press conference Tuesday in Highland Park, Morrison said it was time to push for the measure.
Morrison said that if Illinois and the federal government can't enact stricter gun laws, "Then at the very minimum we need to allow our communities to make that decision for themselves to be safe."
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Municipalities had only a short window in mid-2013 to enact local bans on assault weapons before the state's new concealed carry gun law ordered by a federal appeals court eliminated their ability to do so. Highland Park adopted its ordinance during the allowed time frame.
The news conference Tuesday was scheduled to call attention to an Aug. 23 hearing in Chicago organized by the Senate Subcommittee on Firearms within the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Morrison introduced the measure in May 2015, just days after the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the City of Highland Park's ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. The local ban had been challenged by the Illinois State Rifle Association and a local gun owner.
In December, the U.S. Supreme Court in a 7-2 vote allowed the ruling to stand and declined to consider an appeal on Second Amendment grounds from the National Rifle Association.
The bill was not considered during the spring session of the Illinois General Assembly.
Richard Pearson, executive director of the Illinois State Rifle Association, said his organization opposes creating a hodgepodge of local gun laws.
"We are against a patchwork of laws that would mean gun owners would go from one suburb to another suburb without knowing if they were violating the law or not," Pearson said.
The rifle association also opposes a statewide ban on assault weapons.
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"It would affect most of the rifles that hunters and target shooters use, and would also take away the right to self-defend," Pearson said.
He added that in his view, recent shootings do not have anything to do with gun laws.
"You have a group of terrorists and criminals and they don't follow the laws," Pearson said. "The problem with Senator Morrison and a group of liberals is they think just because they pass a law, that criminals will follow it. The criminals couldn't care less."
Morrison said the hearing Aug. 23 will allow for a robust discussion of the issues.
"I think there are responsible and reasonable people on both sides of this argument," she said.
The north suburban lawmaker voiced hope that the hearing would jump-start a conversation about a statewide ban, but said it's her understanding there are not sufficient votes now in the Illinois General Assembly to enact one.
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State Sen. Terry Link (D-Vernon Hills) said that if Senate Bill 2130 was able to pass, there might be enough votes for a statewide ban.
"We are not saying 'no guns' or taking guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens," Link said. "But there is no need for assault weapons and cop-killer bullets in this atmosphere."
kberkowitz@pioneerlocal.com
@KarenABerkowitz
Waukegan officials preparing to field applications for new police officers and firefighters have sent recruiters to area technical schools and churches, set up booths at community events, and the mayor has spoken on both English- and Spanish-language radio stations in an effort to get more minority applicants.
City officials started planning for this biennial process months ahead of the first applications being made available this month with the hope of addressing the common criticism raised by community activists, pastors and other local leaders that minorities especially blacks and Latinos are underrepresented in the departments.
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Of Waukegan's 150 police officers, 18 percent are Hispanic and 7 percent are black, according to numbers provided by city officials. Only six of the fire department's 120 employees are black and three are Hispanic.
The city overall is 53.4 percent Hispanic and 19.2 percent black, according to 2010 census data.
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Diversifying the departments was one of the commitments Mayor Wayne Motley made when he took office in spring 2013, but he said the need for a targeted effort to address the discrepancy was "made abundantly clear" during the monthslong mediation process the city has been working through with the Department of Justice and groups such as the NAACP and the Latino Advisory Committee.
"The leadership of the minority communities, in particular the black community, has been very vocal," Motley said. "When I meet with the pastors of the churches, (their) big thing is, 'Why aren't there more people like us on the police and fire departments?' And you know what, once you hear that, you start saying, 'Why?'"
Motley, who spent 26 years with the Waukegan Police Department before retiring in 2001 as a sergeant, said the question particularly bothered him because during his time on the force he remembers plenty of black officers.
The answer he's been getting has a lot to do with the negative perception many in Waukegan's black community have of the Waukegan Police Department, he said.
City officials have been working on improving that perception through recommendations made by the Citizens for Progress Committee established by the mayor last fall and those set to be implemented as a result of the Department of Justice mediation.
The city has been "making great strides and making historical and significant changes," Citizens for Progress Committee Chairman Angelo Kyle said. He's already been hearing "dramatically" fewer stories about officers using excessive force.
The hope is that the recruitment efforts will do more than just lead to more diversified police and fire departments, Deputy Police Chief Mark Stevenson said.
Fire Chief George Bridges Jr., who is African-American, said the plan is to build on the conversations that are happening as part of the recruitment process, including through youth programs such as the Waukegan Explorer Post for 15- to 21-year-olds who are interested in pursuing a career as a firefighter and paramedic. Bridges added that the departments have also been focused on reaching out to girls.
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The fire department has five women on staff, three of whom are administrative personnel, Bridges said. The police department has 16 women on staff, and four are Hispanic, three are black and one is Native American, Stevenson said.
"So many of our children don't know what they would like to do when they graduate," Bridges said. "We need to reach out to our kids at 15 years old and tell them, 'You can come in and see what we're trying to do.'"
These efforts will continue past the recruitment process, which takes place every two years when the departments test applicants and prepare their hiring lists, he said.
The actual application process is being tweaked as well to give a greater priority to Waukegan natives, Motley said.
"A policeman will be less prone or less likely to pull a weapon or a billy club or brutalize individuals that they see every day in community," Kyle said.
Much of how police and fire departments choose their new hires is dictated by state law, which sets up a point system that takes into consideration the results of physical ability and written tests as well as whether the applicant is a veteran or meets other criteria. Departments can also adopt their own criteria that can earn applicants additional preference points.
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The city of Waukegan has always given extra points to those that live in the city, but officials are also going to be giving a boost to graduates of Waukegan High School, Motley said. They've also eliminated preference points for college graduates, something that disproportionately helped white applicants even though a college degree is not an entry-level requirement.
"You want your department to be a representation of the community it serves," Stevenson said. "I don't think there's any question that everybody understands when you interact with people from the same area, from the same backgrounds, you see things the same way, and it's much less confrontational."
Whether all these efforts will actually translate into more diverse departments is still unknown, Bridges said.
"The big push this time was to make sure that everybody had an opportunity to know of the test, and then they had to make a decision about whether they want to be part of it," Motley said. "As far as informing the public, we have gone above and beyond."
Applications for the Waukegan Fire Department are available through July 29 and due by 4 p.m. Aug. 5. The Waukegan Police Department will be accepting applications through 4 p.m. Sept. 1. Information about both processes are available on the city's website, waukeganil.gov.
emcoleman@tribpub.com
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Pato Thornycroft of Lake Forest is the manager of Lake Bluff Brewing Company and a photographer of bands.
Q. You were raised in Lake Forest?
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A. I grew up by South Park near Washington Circle. I was in DeKalb where I earned a creative writing degree from Northern Illinois University. I did a lot of bouncing around because my own personal job is touring photographer with musicians. I moved back to Lake Forest about six years ago.
Q. How did you end up at Lake Bluff Brewing?
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A. In college I sporadically bar tended to pay rent. Originally, when I went back home, I was working at the Winter Club. A couple of friends from high school were founding people at the brewery. They started me off as a bartender and cook. Now I manage it and do all the marketing, all the social media stuff.
Q. How much beer does Lake Bluff Brewing produce in a year?
A. Maybe 500 to 600 barrels a year.
Q. I understand you are trying to expand into Chicago. Is that difficult?
A. It's very difficult, considering Chicago is sort of a beer mecca for America. There are a lot of really incredible beers brewed in Chicago. We'd not only be the new kid on the block but being from the suburbs . . . there's a lot of city pride.
Q. Do you use your creating writing degree?
A. For the brewery I write about beer and music pairings. You pair beer with music to get an auditory and beer experience that meshes well. It's not a frequent thing, it's just for a music nerd like myself who also happens to be a beer nerd.
Q. And you also do band photography?
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A. In my sophomore year of college I borrowed a camera and jumped in with a local band that was driving to South by Southwest. I've also been to Minnesota, back to Austin a couple times and once to Japan. Since then I've invested time and money into it. I have a small studio space at Re-invent Gallery in Lake Forest and I'm currently showing my photos in the brewery too.
Q. You sound busy.
A. I don't really have much of a life between taking photos and working in a brewery, but I really enjoy it.
Twitter: @reporterdude
Shout Out is a weekly feature in which we get to know and introduce our readers to their fellow community members and local visitors throughout suburban Chicago. Check out more online at ChicagoTribune.com/ShoutOut.
Bridge Point 94, located along Route 176 east of Milwaukee Avenue, includes one 185,000-square-foot structure and a second 220,000-square-foot building with numerous trucking docks. (Rick Kambic / Pioneer Press)
Homeowners and village trustees appear determined to prevent overnight trucking at a Libertyville warehouse after discussing a variance request from a potential tenant of the recently built complex.
Bridge Point 94, located at 851 and 901 E. Park Ave., was finished last year and includes one 185,000-square-foot structure and a second 220,000-square-foot building with numerous trucking docks. The project was heavily contested in 2013 by nearby residents who worried about disruptive lights, noise and traffic.
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Led by Dale Sherman, who owns a house on nearby Meadow Lane, residents attended a July 12 Village Board meeting where a telecommunications company called Ice Mobility was supposed to explain its request for lifting the overnight trucking ban.
Village documents say Ice Mobility was interested in renting space from Bridge Point 94.
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Mayor Terry Weppler said the company withdrew its request a day before the meeting, and that he immediately notified those residents.
"My neighbors and I chose to still show up tonight because quite honestly we didn't quite trust the petitioners and the way their course of dealing has gone so far," Sherman said. "We feel like we're entitled to repose. This issue has been raised before."
Tensions resurfaced last summer when parent company Bridge Development Partners asked Libertyville to waive the ban on overnight deliveries. The company said it was struggling to attract tenants and the extra hours were vital to one prospective renter.
That request was withdrawn at the last moment but trustees still voted against the application in hopes of enforcing a one-year ban on making another request.
Sherman on July 12 said he wanted Libertyville to do the same thing and unanimously reject the request because it was still formally on the agenda. Trustees did just that, voting 6-0 against a special permit allowing overnight trucking for Ice Mobility.
"I question whether Bridge Development is truly work with us in good faith on this matter," Village Trustee Rich Moras said. "I find this to be very unprofessional and I am very disappointed in their behavior."
Moras also mentioned prior meetings that were postponed and not resumed leading up to an anticlimactic July 12 decision.
Mark Houser, senior director of development and management for Bridge Development Partners, was not at the July 12 meeting, but in a later interview he said his company is not at odds with the limited hours.
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"I can understand how everyone feels, but we're not trying to mislead anyone," Houser said. "We've been pretty straightforward with everyone."
Houser said Ice Mobility made the recent request and Bridge Point 94 was listed on the application because it holds the zoning permit. He said it was the telecommunications company that wanted to revisit the topic.
"Certainly anyone who wants to go into the building has the right to apply for a variance. The village then has the right to say no," Houser said. "We tell our prospects what the situation is and that there are no deliveries allowed between 9 p.m. and 7 a.m., and they can go tell their story if they want."
Ice Mobility reported having only five shipments arrive at their Vernon Hills campus after 9 p.m. in all of 2015, according to meeting minutes from Libertyville's March 28 zoning hearing, where the zoning board voted 6-1 against the permit.
"Those trucks were running late; their docks normally close earlier in the day. I think Ice Mobility likes having a backup plan," Houser said.
Ultimately, Houser said Ice Mobility has chosen to go elsewhere and he is not pressing the issue with Libertyville. He said several other prospective tenants, including online retailer Amazon, have decided against leasing space due to the overnight restriction.
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"We would have had both buildings full if we didn't have the trucking restriction, we know that," Houser said. "We're still getting some interest and activity, which is good. There's demand for the space."
About 260,000 square feet or over half of the more than 400,000-square-foot complex is still vacant, Houser said. Ice Mobility, according to its application, would have leased 118,000 square feet and brought 225 employees.
rkambic@pioneerlocal.com
Twitter @Rick_Kambic
Kevin Myers, superintendent of Mundelein High School District 120, right, talks with a parent about testing during a Dec. 14 public forum. (Rick Kambic / Pioneer Press)
Officials at Mundelein, Vernon Hills and Libertyville high schools say they're pleased with the State Board of Education's decision to ditch the PARCC test for high school students and instead collect data from the College Board's SAT exam.
The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) was only issued to high school students twice spring 2015 and spring 2016 before the board made its July 11 decision to call it quits.
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At the elementary and middle school level, the state will continue to administer the PARCC exams, which were developed by a consortium of 14 states and the District of Columbia to measure students against Common Core Standards.
Kevin Myers, superintendent of Mundelein High School District 120, praised state officials for listening to school experts, and said using the SAT is a much better tool.
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"(PARCC) wasn't giving us the data we needed," Myers said. "It was just us pulling kids out of class for one more test. Our kids value the SAT, just like they did the ACT, because it's a doorway to college. This way, they have something to gain from doing their best."
Mundelein High School's block schedule did not work well with administering the PARCC, Myers said. Because the condensed classes eligible for testing are offered multiple times per year, Myers said the school had to set aside four days for testing twice per year.
"Nobody can cram all that testing into one day, but we also wouldn't get everyone if we only tested once a year," Myers said. "This decision is going to keep our kids in the classroom a lot more and give them more opportunities to learn."
The PARCC test's structure was awkward from the beginning, Myers said.
"In math the assessment was for algebra. Your more advanced students would have taken an algebra class freshman year so they would not be taking that test," Myers said. "At the elementary schools, every student in the same grade level is typically in the same area."
Myers said Mundelein High School will offer students pre-SAT tests in freshman and sophomore years. The plan helps students adjust and prepare themselves for something that's important to them, while also producing long-term measurements, Myers said.
Furthermore, the PARCC test still had some unresolved issues that Myers said won't be a factor with the SAT.
In December, after the 2015 results were released, Myers said students had struggled with questions being unnecessarily wordy. He also said only 60 percent of students who took the test were being graded because those who did not complete every single question were disqualified, as were entire tests that had one erroneous pencil mark.
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"The SAT is pretty streamlined and well established; I don't anticipate having those problems," Myers said.
During the December interview, Myers said PARCC started with 26 states but its support had fallen to just six states and the District of Columbia. At the time, he suggested Illinois figure out why others were backing out and then make sure PARCC was still the right choice.
"I don't think anyone was anticipating (a change) happening this year, so I applaud the state for that," Myers said.
The response was also positive in District 128, which is comprised of Vernon Hills and Libertyville high schools.
"With the move to the SAT we'll have a test that aligns with Illinois learning standards rather than having two state assessments at the high school level," said District 128 Superintendent Prentiss Lea. "Taking the SAT and PARCC are redundant."
Lea echoed the sentiment that adding to the number of tests students were required to take in the spring was not the ideal approach.
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"You have to look at the life of a high school junior in the spring," Lea said. "They took the ACT and PARCC in the same week and came back a few weeks later to take advanced placement testing."
Eliminating PARCC and utilizing the SAT streamlines the college entrance exam process, said Rita Fischer, District 128 assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction.
"It holds much more weight with the students," Fischer said. "Every student receives exam prep unique to the SAT. It helps them do well."
Rick Kambic is a Pioneer Press reporter. Steve Sadin is a freelance reporter.
rkambic@pioneerlocal.com
Twitter @Rick_Kambic
Naperville Police Chief Bob Marshall said he hopes to meet with former Naperville resident Brian Crooks to discuss his encounters with Naperville police in order to better understand what Crooks experienced as black man growing up in the city. (Mike Mantucca / Naperville Sun)
The Naperville Police chief said he hopes the experiences conveyed in Brian Crooks' essay about growing up black in the largely white suburb will help improve his department.
Chief Robert Marshall called the former Naperville resident after the essay appeared in the Naperville Sun to tell him just that.
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"I wanted to hear more about his experience, really learn what it's like to grow up a black person in Naperville," Marshall said. "As soon as he comes to town, we'll go out to coffee. We have to have conversation and dialogue with the minority communities to really understand."
Crooks is a former Naperville resident and Neuqua Valley High graduate whose family moved to Naperville when he was in fifth grade. His parents still live here. His nearly-5,000-word July 9 Facebook post on growing up black in Naperville had been shared more than 28,000 times on Monday afternoon, and many times more via assorted news outlets.
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Crooks now lives in West Des Moines, Iowa. He graduated from University of Iowa in 2007 and works as a graphic designer.
Marshall said he and Crooks talked about the author's experiences in Project Snowball, an annual weekend retreat between local students and law enforcement.
But he's saving the in-depth discussion for their coffee appointment.
"It was a very short conversation as I value in-person conversation the most," Marshall said.
Crooks said Tuesday the chief was "very gracious" to call.
"For him to come out and say, 'Look, what happened to you is not OK,' I think that's tremendous," Crooks said. He plans to take the chief up on his offer to talk in person next time he's in town.
That might not be for some time: Crooks proposed to his girlfriend a little more than a week ago, and all his free time now is spent wedding planning.
"It's been a busy week and a half," Crooks said.
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Reaction to the essay from city leaders were mixed on Monday, as three council members acknowledged Crooks' painful experiences of racism and discrimination while hoping that Naperville has changed for the better.
"At some times, my heart just broke for him, as it would for any kid that is picked on, singled out or left feeling as an outsider. I was struck by the comments about how few black authority figures he had," Councilwoman Rebecca Boyd-Obarski said. "I am hopeful that Naperville has become more diverse since then, more accepting of differences and more open to learning about differences."
Councilwoman Patty Gustin reflected Boyd-Obarski's hope for the future. She recalled 25 years ago when her sister-in-law, who is black and Latino, declined to move to the western suburbs because she didn't see anyone here who looked like her.
As she read Crooks' essay, Gustin said she remembered growing up part-Lithuanian and part-Polish on the South Side of Chicago and the insults hurled toward those who shared her heritage.
"Were they discriminatory? No. But they were hurtful," Gustin said. She called Crooks' essay "a wonderful, wonderful thing."
Naperville Mayor Steve Chirico said his kids attended Neuqua High at the same time as Crooks, and remembered how few black students were enrolled then. He also recalled meeting Crooks' parents when he was knocking on doors, campaigning for mayor.
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"He told me about life in Naperville 15, 20, 25, 30 years ago and the number of times he'd get pulled over driving home late," Chirico said. He hopes the younger Crooks will consider helping Naperville police with sensitivity and other training in interacting with minority groups.
"We're working hard on that, and I think Brian, if he's willing, could really help us," Chirico said.
Crooks said he can offer his anecdotal experiences, but recommended the city look to professionals for long-term advice.
"I'm a graphic designer," Crooks said. "Turning to people who have training in de-escalating violence is the way to go."
Both the mayor and the police chief cited a July 12 Facebook post by a local resident as an example of how the police department is trying to change. The resident detailed his interaction with a Naperville cop who walked into a doughnut shop where he was sitting by himself about 11:30 p.m.
He started packing up his computer, nervous about being confronted, he wrote. Instead, the officer bought the man a caramel iced coffee, sat down and the two talked for an hour and 45 minutes.
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"Topics from Arnold Palmer to Alton Sterling," the man wrote. I bombarded him with questions about things, trying to get a deeper understanding on why a cop might do something the way they do, when they do it. In every case I could understand where he's coming from, and he understood where the difficulty lies in a civilian not being able to comprehend an officer's mentality."
"... If people and police had more random communication throughout the day, then maybe things would go smoother. I don't know. I just know that I'm more comfortable walking around now knowing that there are police officers willing to make an effort to get to know me for the betterment of society."
gbookwalter@tribpub.com
Twitter @GenevieveBook
The Rev. James Miller leads prayer for the family of Sandra Bland, a former resident of Naperville and Aurora, during a service Sunday at DuPage AME Church in Lisle. (Jeff Krage / Naperville Sun)
The life and memory of Sandra Bland was celebrated Sunday with friends and family at DuPage African Methodist Episcopal Church in Lisle through song and prayer.
A year ago the 28-year-old woman, who lived in Naperville and Aurora, died in a Texas jail cell following a traffic stop in which she was pulled over by a Texas state trooper for failure to use a turn signal during a lane change. Escalations between Bland and the officer led to the woman's arrest on suspicion of assaulting a public servant and her eventual death, which was ruled a suicide.
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The church where Bland grew up marked the anniversary of the tragedy with a special candle-lighting ceremony and a message of hope and healing from the Rev. James Miller, pastor of the Lisle church.
What happened to Sandra Bland? Videos trace her path from a Texas traffic stop to a jail cell. (Kasondra Van Treeck/Chicago Tribune) (Chicago Tribune)
During the 11:15 a.m. service, Carolyn Albert Donovan, pastor of Peace Lutheran Church in Austin, Texas, joined in the church's celebration and stood by as Shantee Needham, a sister of Bland, as she lit a candle in her sibling's honor.
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The choir dressed in matching purple T-shirts emblazoned with the words: Freedom is conditional. Remember Sandy Bland.
Park Ridge resident Linda Lucchese, left, a delegate for presidential candidate Donald Trump, stands with Maine Township Supervisor Carol Teschky at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. (Handout / HANDOUT)
Some local Republican leaders are attending this week's Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio.
Republicans of Maine Township and Republican Women of Park Ridge shared photos on their respective Facebook pages of Char Foss-Eggemann, Maine Township Republican committeeman, and Susan Sweeney, president of Republican Women of Park Ridge, standing outside what was identified as the convention hall on Monday.
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A separate photo of Foss-Eggemann with Republicans of Maine Township President Bob Leurck was also posted.
Maine Township spokesman Dick Barton reported that Township Supervisor Carol Teschky and Linda Lucchese, a Park Ridge resident and 9th Congressional District delegate for Donald Trump, were also in attendance at the convention.
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According to the Illinois Republican Party, 69 delegates were sent to the national convention, with 54 of them pledged to presumptive nominee Trump.
Teschky was elected a 9th Congressional District alternate delegate for John Kasich.
jjohnson@pioneerlocal.com
Twitter: @Jen_Pioneer
Drea and Ciara Lazzara of Affresco Pizzeria wait for customers during the Taste of Park Ridge on July 14. (Kevin Tanaka / Pioneer Press)
Another Taste of Park Ridge is in the history books.
The three-day festival again drew hungry crowds to Summit Avenue in Uptown, with 24 food vendors serving up entries ranging from tacos to tandoori chicken and just about every after-dinner dessert.
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The official opening ceremony at 6 p.m. Thursday included the ceremonial ribbon cutting performed by members of the Patras family. Patriarch Dean Patras, a founder and long-time organizer of the Taste of Park Ridge, died June 23 after a battle with cancer.
"There never would have been Taste of Park Ridge without the incomparable Dean Patras," said David Iglow, chairman of the Taste, in his opening remarks.
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Iglow also called Patras an "unsung hero," "one of the most dedicated volunteers in Park Ridge history." A large banner below the stage read, "Dean Patras: The man behind the magic of the Taste."
The Taste featured performances by several live bands, including headliners Boy Band Night, 7th Heaven, and Libido Funk Circus, as well as activities for children and teens.
Deputy Police Chief Duane Mellema said there were "no incidents that required police response" during the festival.
jjohnson@pioneerlocal.com
Twitter: @Jen_Pioneer
A judge has imposed a gag order in the case of a Lake County Sheriff's Department lieutenant accused in a drunken driving hit-and-run crash that injured a pedestrian after the Gary Air Show earlier this month.
The move by Lake Superior Court Judge Samuel Cappas on Tuesday prohibits Lake County police, Indiana State Police, prosecuting attorneys, defense attorneys, and courthouse employees from publicly discussing Guy Mikulich's case outside court. Mikulich's defense attorney Paul Stracci requested the order.
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"In light of the high profile nature of the case, some comments already made lead us to believe that caution is needed," Stracci said
Mikulich, 37, of Merrillville, was charged earlier this month after he was allegedly driving drunk in a July 10 hit-and-run crash in the Miller section Gary. Mikulich had a blood alcohol concentration of .15, nearly twice the legal limit for intoxication of .08, records said
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He's pleaded not guilty to charges that include leaving the scene of an accident resulting in serious bodily injury after committing operating while intoxicated, leaving the scene of an accident resulting in serious bodily injury, and causing serious bodily injury when operating a motor vehicle with an alcohol concentration equivalent of .08 percent or more.
The 16-year veteran had been working security in uniform at the Gary Air Show and was driving an unmarked Ford Crown Victoria when he allegedly struck Derrick Dircks, 34, of Frankfort Square, Ill. Dircks was thrown an estimated 20 feet and suffered injuries to his head, eye and leg, according to court records. At the time of the crash, Dircks had been putting something in his legally parked Toyota Sienna mini-van and getting his wife and four children situated for the ride home.
After the crash, Mikulich was stopped more than 1 1/2 miles away in the 5900 block of Hemlock Street. According to court records, he told a Gary police commander, "I know I'm (expletive) up because I can hear me slurring my own words and I can take a lot. I can drink a lot, but when I can hear me slurring my own words, I know I'm (expletive) up."
On Tuesday, Cappas also withdrew from presiding over the case, which will be reassigned to Judge Clarence Murray, online court records show. Judge Salvador Vasquez, the original presiding judge, previously withdrew from the case.
At a hearing last week, Mikulich was allowed to attend a residential treatment center in North Palm Beach, Fla. He was not present at Tuesday's hearing.
Mikulich's omnibus hearing is Sept. 8.
Ruth Ann Krause is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
Chris Gierymski (left) plays Lee Harvey Oswald and Bob Clark stars as John Wilkes Booth in Assassins from July 22-Aug. 7 at Crown Point Community Theatre in Crown Point. (Crown Point Community Theatre / Handout)
With talk of elections everywhere, the timing was appropriate for a show involving presidents of the United States.
"Assassins" runs from July 22 to Aug. 7 at Crown Point Community Theatre.
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"I'm a big fan of anything that Stephen Sondheim has done. I just really like his body of work and his sound," said Matt Domasica, who makes his Crown Point Community Theatre directing debut with "Assassins."
"Presidential assassinations are not subject matter that you think of in American musical theater. It takes a darker look. It might be interesting subject matter to tackle given the climate of this election season. The show really explores politics and the way extremism and extremists can drive people.
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"It explores the possible motivations that drove these assassins."
Featuring a book by John Weidman and music and lyrics by Sondheim, "Assassins" won a Tony Award for best revival of a musical in 2004.
Characters include John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln; Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated President William McKinley; Charles Guiteau, who assassinated President James Garfield; and Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated President John F. Kennedy.
Those who attempted assassinations include Giuseppe Zangara on President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, Samuel Byck on President Richard Nixon, John Hinckley on President Ronald Reagan and Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme and Sara Jane Moore both on President Gerald Ford.
"As our country is experiencing its own turmoil and many people are asking these questions about 'What about my American Dream?' it's just an interesting way to look at how far people take those ideas and end up doing something horribly wrong," said Domasica, of Merrillville.
"I thought it was an interesting choice to explore this time right before we go in and make a big decision for this country. What's interesting about the show is to look at it from their perspective and try to understand what they did and how they justify it.
"The conclusion we draw at the end is obviously it wasn't right."
With musical direction by David Markley, co-director of Highland Theatre Company at Highland High School, "Assassins" has a cast of 15, including residents of Valparaiso.
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"They're fantastic. It's a really talented group of individuals. They're very dedicated to the production and all very interested in the subject matter," said Domasica, director of Monbeck Auditorium for School Town of Highland and co-director of Highland Theatre Company.
"They're doing a great job. It's been a pleasure to work with Crown Point Community Theatre. The community of Crown Point is very supportive and is really very lucky to have such an organization right there in their backyard.
"They're always improving and trying to take their production values to the next level. I think they have really succeeded in the past few years."
Jessi Virtusio is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
'Assassins'
When: 8 p.m. Friday, July 29-30 and Aug. 5-6; 3 p.m. Sunday and 31 and Aug. 7
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Where: Crown Point Community Theatre, 1125 Merrillville Road, Crown Point
Tickets: $15 adults; $12 ages 60 and older, students under 21
Kevin Campbell, 31, of Hobart has been arrested and charged in the Nov. 18 death of Tiara T. Thomas, 30, at her Portage apartment. (Porter County Sheriff's Dept.)
There will be no bail set for a former Hammond police officer accused of murdering the mother of his three children in Portage on Nov. 18.
On Monday, Porter Superior Judge Roger Bradford denied the bond request for Kevin Alexander Campbell, 32, of the 6100 block of Wisconsin Street in Hobart, despite this being the first case in Porter County to address bond for murder under 2013 Indiana Supreme Court decisions.
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Bradford said that until minutes before the hearing began, he hadn't known that 2013 Court decisions changed legislation that denies bail bond for murder suspects and now puts the burden of proof in bond hearings on the prosecution.
However, in keeping with the new provisions, "I'm not going so far as saying the proof is evident, but it seems the presumption is strong," he said.
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Lisa Mays, the mother of the deceased Tiara Thomas, said "thank God" and began crying loudly when Bradford announced his decision.
She was comforted for the rest of the hearing by family members who also supported her on the way out of court.
Defense attorney Susan Severtson had argued the prosecution had no solid forensic evidence, such as fingerprints, blood or DNA, that Campbell was at the scene of the murder, Thomas' apartment on Old Porter Road.
Evidence presented Monday was "based on hearsay," Severtson said.
Portage Detective Lt. Dennis Meyers testified that Campbell had the three kids on a school night, which was a rarity, and that Campbell had turned the GPS off on his cellphone early in the morning, long before Thomas was found by her fiance about 7 a.m.
Meyers also testified that Campbell was in financial trouble and paid $1,495 a month in child support and that police drove one of the children around Lake Station to identify a park that Campbell allegedly stopped at while driving them to school.
The child said it was to throw away a brown bag that included shoes, Meyers said.
Severtson objected to the police working with the child without parental permission, but Bradford allowed it because, as Porter County Chief Deputy Prosecutor Matt Frost said, the child wasn't a suspect.
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James D. Wolf Jr. is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
Pot charge nets probation for Indy man
An Indianapolis man was sentenced Monday to two years on probation for possession of marijuana.
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Ottie Snipe III, 28, caught the attention of police on Jan. 12 as he was traveling at 76 mph in the southbound lanes of Interstate 65 from U.S. 231 in Crown Point, police said. The speed limit is 70 mph, and the weather included high winds and blizzard-like conditions with heavy snow and ice on the highway, they said. Snipe was pulled over, and the arresting officer could detect a strong odor of marijuana from the car and Snipe, the probable cause affidavit states.
Snipe admitted he had marijuana in the car, according to the affidavit. The officer also saw that panels on the driver side floor board and center console appeared to have been tampered with, the affidavit states. The officer removed the panel and found a package wrapped in a paper towel which contained a brownish-dark green rock-like substance that tested positive for heroin, according to the affidavit.
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In court Monday, Snipe told Lake Superior Court Magistrate Natalie Bokota he does not have a drug addiction. Snipe will be allowed to seek a transfer of his probation to Marion County, officials said.
East Chicago man charged in gunfire incident
Charges of criminal recklessness, residential entry, resisting law enforcement and carrying a handgun without a license have been filed against an East Chicago man.
Darryl Denzel Hampton, 22, has been charged in Lake Superior Court after a man riding his bicycle near Alder and Guthrie streets said Hampton pulled out a handgun and fired two shots at him, police said.
Police were called to the 3500 block of Guthrie Street in East Chicago and found a man who matched the description of the alleged shooter. The man ran into an apartment. As officers walked up to the door, they could hear a woman yelling for someone to "get out." The woman said she didn't know the man, who knocked, then walked into her apartment without her permission and said the police were after him, the probable cause affidavit states.
The woman gave police permission to search her apartment. Officers found a small revolver with five live rounds, including one in the chamber, in plain view in the living room, records state.
"That's his," the woman told police, according to court records.
Hampton told police the woman whose apartment he went inside was his aunt, but the woman denied knowing Hampton, records state.
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Charges for Gary man in domestic incident
A Gary man who police said returned home intoxicated and without food for his children has been charged in Lake Superior Court after he allegedly assaulted the children's mother.
Richard Watts, 44, was charged with battery by means of a deadly weapon, domestic battery resulting in serious bodily injury, two additional felony domestic battery counts and a misdemeanor domestic battery charge.
Police were called about 9 p.m. July 5 to the mother's home in the 3600 block of Washington Street in Gary, where an argument had escalated, the probable cause affidavit states. The woman told police she woke Watts up after he spent the night on July 4 and asked him if he could go to the food pantries or somewhere to get some food for the girls. Three of her four children are Watts', court records state. He returned about 9 p.m. smelling of beer and without any food, the probable cause affidavit states. The woman told Watts to go back to where he'd been drinking since that was more important than his children eating, records state. Watts started to leave, but turned around and threw a plastic garbage can into the living room and then charged at the woman, records state. The woman said she took a swing at Watts, but missed, grabbed his shirt and they both fell. Watts landed on top of her, and then started punching her in the eye and jaw. He flipped a dining room table to the other side of the room, grabbed a wooden chair and struck her in the leg three times with it. He threw the chair across the living room, flipped over the TV and threw a coffee table containing her DVD player and magazines across the room, records state.
The woman went to the bedroom and leaned against the door while her oldest child was on the phone with police, the affidavit stated.
The woman was treated at Methodist Hospitals Northlake Campus in Gary for a concussion, a cut to her left eyebrow which required seven stitches and a cut to her lower right leg that required 11 stitches, police said
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The most serious of the charges is a Level 5 felony, which is punishable by one to six years.
Gary man faces intimidation charges
An intimidation charge has been filed in Lake Superior Court against a Gary man charged with making threats to a retired Indiana State Police civilian employee.
Larry Darnell Buchanan, 33, of the 600 block of Washington Street, is charged with making threatening statements on July 7 in a Facebook Messenger exchange with his ex-wife in Texas. The former wife is a relative of the victim.
In court records, the ex-wife said Buchanan had threatened to kill the retiree and sent photos and texts to that effect.
Buchanan was arrested on July 7 at Majestic Star Casino in Gary after threatening to kill everyone inside, the probable cause affidavit states.
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The charge is a Level 6 felony, which is punishable by a maximum 30 months.
Plea deal in Hammond liquor store robbery case
A man charged with the armed robbery of a Hammond business pleaded guilty to a lesser charge in U.S. District Court Monday.
On Feb. 15, 2015, Stevie Green, 48, of Chicago, allegedly brandished a pistol and robbed Star Liquors, 1201 Chicago St., of $100, several bottles of liquor and $40 from the store clerk, according to the court's probable cause affidavit.
Green pleaded guilty to one count of being a felon in possession of a firearm, while federal prosecutors dropped two other charges, including felony robbery, court documents stated. He faces a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
His suspected getaway driver, Monique Coles, 35, of East Chicago, had her robbery charge dropped in exchange for pleading guilty to a charge of interference with commerce by threat or violence, court records stated. Coles, who crashed the car and was arrested with Green after a brief chase with Hammond police, was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison on June 22.
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Green, who has an Oct. 18 sentencing date, remains incarcerated at Lake County Jail.
Court records noted Green was convicted of armed robbery in Cook County, Ill. in 1999.
Staff reports
The Porter County prosecutor's office must comply with a judge's request for police reports or risk being held in contempt of court, based on a decision by the Indiana Supreme Court.
In an order issued last week, the court ruled against a formal request by Porter County Prosecutor Brian Gensel and the Indiana attorney general's office.
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They asked that Gensel and deputy prosecutors not have to provide copies of police reports in operating while intoxicated cases when Porter Superior Judge David Chidester requests them.
The court ruled 3-2 in favor with Chief Justice Loretta H. Rush and Justice Geoffrey G. Slaughter dissenting.
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The matter began in May 19 and involved three cases where OWI defendants had allegedly refused to take Breathalyzer tests when stopped by police and had their licenses automatically suspended, Chidester's brief states.
Defendants usually ask for reinstatement of driving privileges.
Chidester requested the state provide him with police report copies, which the state does give to the defense, because both sides in evidentiary hearings "regularly misstate the facts in police reports or omit important facts," the brief states.
The reports would go into a sealed envelope in the case file that only court personnel can legally open.
The brief states that Chidester also set a hearing date for why the prosecutor and his deputies shouldn't be held in contempt of court for refusing that May order.
Gensel and the attorney general responded with the writ asking for a quick response on the legality of Chidester's order.
Chidester declined to speculate what could come next, but he suggested the ruling wasn't groundbreaking.
"I think this can be a learning experience for everyone," both prosecutors and defense lawyers, he said. "A court order is a court order, and unless it is an illegal court order, it must be obeyed."
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Gensel issued an email statement Friday that states, "The Supreme Court ruled by a 3-2 vote that it would not prohibit the Court from ordering the State to provide police reports on specific OWI cases where there is a breath test refusal. There was no prior statutory or case law precedent on the issue. The State will comply with the order."
James D. Wolf Jr. is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
Maija Darrol, of Valparaiso, plays with freshly made slime Saturday at Sunset Hill Farm County Park during the United Way of Porter Countys first Field Day. (Amy Lavalley / Post-Tribune)
Maija Darrol, 3, happily busied herself making light blue slime, a mix of Elmers Glue, water and borax, at a booth Saturday during United Way of Porter County's first Family Fun Field Day, held at Sunset Hill Farm County Park.
As Maija's gloppy creation thickened and she could pick it up with her hands, her mom, Alyssa Darrol of Valparaiso, said the family came to the event because she thought Maija would have a good time.
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"She likes the pony rides and puppies and I really wanted to check it out because I like what United Way does," Darrol said.
Young Leaders United, an offshoot of United Way that endeavors to bring together up and coming community leaders for the non-profit agency, put on the field day, which featured more than 20 booths from non-profits and businesses, live music, as well as a wide array of games and activities.
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The event was meant to engage members of Young Leaders United and families in the community, said Mackenna Schon, the United Way's director of volunteer engagement.
The need for low-cost events that would be affordable for low-income families also was a priority that came up during a "community conversation" process sponsored by United Way, she said.
"We tried to think about what could make the day fun and affordable for families who really don't get access," Schon said.
Ahna Dunn, president of Valpo Nannies, which opened two years ago, is involved with Young Leaders United and helped plan the field day. Her booth offered the slime making.
"I wanted to have a booth to have some activities with kids," she said. "I like that (Field Day is) a fun activity with kids to get them outside. It's really great, and we're getting all these organizations together."
Over at the booth for the Boys and Girls Club of Valparaiso, Nico Pappas, 12, and his friend Ian Blevins, 12, both of Valparaiso, took part in hoops shooting game. Nico got eight baskets and Ian had three baskets.
Kristin Pappas, Nico's mom, said she and the boys were there because she was helping staff the Barre and Beyond booth, but she wanted to check out the other activities.
"I think this is nice. There's a lot of stuff to do and the kids are enjoying themselves," she said.
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Learn more
For more on United Way of Porter County, go to www.unitedwaypc.org.
A majority of parents surveyed about their children's experience in Indiana's School Choice Scholarship Program indicated they are satisfied with their new schools and that religious instruction was the No. 1 factor in why they chose a particular school, according to a report released by one of the voucher program's biggest supporters.
The Why Parents Choose report was developed by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, which advocates for charter schools and voucher programs, and sponsored by The Dekko Foundation, which promotes economic freedom.
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The survey reflects the views of more than 2,000 private school parents; a little more than half of them 1,185 have children in Indiana's voucher and tax credit scholarship program.
But public school advocates like Vic Smith of the Indiana Coalition for Public Education argue that tax dollars should not be used to subsidize religious instruction.
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Indiana's voucher program the largest in the United States has grown exponentially since it was established in 2011 with 3,911 students. During the 2015-16 school year, 32,686 students participated in the program, which provides funds for students to use toward tuition at the private school of their choice.
Parents in the survey revealed that they had little problem finding a suitable private school that participates in the program.
More than half 51 percent of voucher participants didn't attend a previous school. About 25 percent of students previously enrolled in traditional public schools with 20 percent at another private school.
Smith, a retired educator, said the program has obscured what was supposed to be its original intent to help kids in failing school districts who couldn't afford to attend public schools.
"In 2013, there was a major expansion to allow a lot of students who had never been in public schools to get a voucher, which really goes against the original intent of the program," Smith said. "Now I'm a strong Christian, but I always thought that schools should be separate from religious instruction."
The main reason that parents decided to leave their previous school was the school lacked religious environment/instruction (31 percent), followed by academic quality (29 percent) and lack of morals/character/values instruction (27 percent), according to the survey.
These same factors were primary concerns for parents when deciding on a private school for their children. The most important quality for parents in choosing their current private school was religious environment and instruction (39 percent), according to the survey. It was followed by better academic environment (20 percent) and a school's morals, values and character instruction (19 percent).
Kemberly Markham, assistant superintendent for Diocese of Gary schools, said the survey results dovetail with recent parent surveys.
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"From our surveys, most parents decide to choose our schools in order for their children to pursue Catholic religious education," she said. "Academics is a strong reason as well."
The number of voucher students attending diocese schools have increased considerably since the first year, Markham said. During the 2015-16 school year, the Diocese of Gary had 1,711 students who receive $7.6 million in vouchers at Lake and Porter County schools, according to data from the Indiana Department of Education.
Hammond's St. Casimir School has the most recipients at 308, while Bishop Noll Institute has 260 students receiving vouchers.
"I would say we have seen a lot of growth through the choice programs because we've been able to help them qualify for the program due to financial reasons, and there are now some additional pathways, such as special education, and if they already have a sibling at the school, that they can take advantage of," Markham said.
The survey, which was released last month, followed up with voucher parents who responded to a Friedman Foundation survey in 2013, as well as expanding the pool of respondents to include all private school parents in Indiana. The survey stressed that the results were not the result of random sampling.
The Indiana State Teachers Association and other groups including current State Superintendent of Public Instruction Glenda Ritz led a legal challenge against the program in 2012, saying that it amounted to public funding of religious schools, but it was rejected by the Indiana Supreme Court.
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Smith said the program is hurting the public schools. Money for school vouchers is diverted from the state's public school funds.
In 2015-16, students residing in Hammond received more than $3.5 million in choice scholarships, followed by Gary with $3.4 million, East Chicago with $1.7 million and Merrillville with $1.25 million, according to data from the Indiana Department of Education.
"It's not surprising that there would be an advocacy group doing a survey that comes out in their favor," Smith said. "They're notorious for that. We're not convinced there's the support out there for the program."
The 2015 Hoosier Survey, a poll conducted by Ball State University, showed that 58 percent of Hoosiers prefer their tax dollars go to public schools with 39 percent supporting vouchers for private schools and charters. In that poll, 68 percent said they were very or somewhat satisfied with public schools.
"The results are clear: Indiana parents the people who actually navigate the system and make choices for their families are overwhelmingly satisfied with the state's programs, and they find them easy to use," said Friedman Foundation president and CEO Robert C. Enlow in a statement. "That's particularly important because critics often allege that parents won't be able to figure out how to choose. We know that's not true, and we know that once they choose, they become more engaged in their schools and their communities."
About 76 percent to 81 percent of children who entered the program in 2011-12 have stayed with the program, according to the Indiana Department of Education.
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Those who left mentioned no longer qualifying, moving out of state or no longer having children in the program, problems with teachers or administrators, or the school not having the next grade that their child was matriculating into, according to the Friedman Foundations survey.
Of those that left the program, a little more than half (54 percent) returned to neighborhood public schools or public charter schools.
cnance@post-trib.com
Steven Isoye attended his first meeting as the new superintendant of Niles Township High School District 219 during the Board of Educations July 12 meeting. The number one priority is looking at the student experience, he said in an interview. (Brian L. Cox / Pioneer Press)
With the first day of the new school year a little more than a month away, incoming Niles Township High School District 219 superintendent, Steven Isoye, said he plans to focus on student achievement and the experiences they have at the district's schools.
Isoye was hired by the district in May and gave his first "superintendent's report" to the School Board during its July 12 meeting.
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"It feels great," Isoye said in an interview. "Everybody has been very welcoming. Now that I'm here in a permanent setting so I can begin to listen and learn about the district."
"I think it was very helpful to have that first board meeting as soon as I did because I was able to interact with the board early on in an official way and was able to bring to them the various topics and looks at how we go about preparing and providing information to the board," he added. "It gave me a nice overview."
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He also said that although he has only been officially on the job for less than two weeks he is already setting priorities.
"The number one priority is looking at the student experience," he said. "It's important for me to learn about the culture of the district and to understand what are the common themes that are coming up, to help prioritize what direction any work needs to go in."
"Certainly one of the things I'm going to be interested in talking about is how our students are doing," he said. "Looking at what we're doing? How we serve students. What the achievement is like also in regards to our entire student experience which includes student behavior those types of things, clubs and activities extracurricular and how students are connected to the district."
Isoye served as superintendent of Oak Park and River Forest High School District 200 since 2010, was principal of Maine East High School in Park Ridge from 2007 to 2010 and was named 2010-2011 Illinois High School Principal of the Year by the Horace Mann/Illinois Principals Association. Since 1998, he has served on the Board of Trustees for the Illinois Math and Science Academy, according to district 219 officials.
Isoye takes over the reins of the north suburban school district following a difficult year in which the last superintendent and another top district official resigned following an internal investigation. Isoye said he is aware of the fact that some on the community may be watching the district more closely due to the events of the past year.
"There's that possibility, yes," he said. "There's that possibility that they may. I'm not really at a point where I'm going to comment much about that because I'm so new here."
Isoye also said that even as he continues unpacking boxes in his new office he is thinking about and looking forward to the new school year ahead.
"I'm going to have to learn more about what the needs are of the community," he said. "I'm looking (forward to) when the students (and) faculty and staff are back in school so we can really get going."
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Brian L. Cox is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
By Stephen ORegan
Associate, International Business Advisory
Dezan Shira & Associates, Guangzhou
While a labor contract is vital in any employer-employee relationship, many employers overlook the importance of a having a staff handbook in China (also called an employee handbook or company rulebook). However, there are some key provisions that are not contained in standard contracts. While an employment contract details important terms such as working hours, salary, main duties and responsibilities, etc., key provisions such as overtime rules, codes of conduct, performance standards, promotion standards, and KPIs are often left out. This is where a staff handbook becomes beneficial, as they go into the finer and more individual rules of the company that all employees should be aware of. A staff handbook is an added layer of protection for the company and, while it is recommended for all foreign companies, it is especially crucial for growing companies with an employee count above ten.
The handbook provides supplemental explanations concerning mandatory terms and makes it easier to demonstrate that an employee has broken a company rule. Staff handbooks are an extra defense for a company in cases where a labor dispute has arisen. The company handbook should be clearly understood by all employees. Having a bilingual handbook, which is comprehensive but not excessively bland, signed by every employee ensures that the handbook can be used as support in a companys defense should a dispute occur. It is also important to have the labor contract make references to the handbook, as this will strengthen the companys case if a breach of rules occur.
RELATED: Payroll and HR Services from Dezan Shira & Associates
Companies cannot simply set anything as a rule in order to fully protect themselves. If a court finds that such is the case, they will more often than not side with the employee. In court, every rule in the handbook needs an explanation to back it up. This is also why it is advisable to keep the length of the handbook to a reasonable size. No court would support a company if their staff handbook was too long and unreasonable to follow. This would also add an extra burden on the HR department of the company to supervise the rules. Additionally, it is important to distinguish between major and minor breaches. Minor breaches, such as showing up late, might be punished by implementing fines or warnings. This must be noted in the handbook so all employees are aware of them. Major breaches, such as passing on confidential information, would result in immediate dismissal. It would also be important to mention how many minor breaches or warnings constitute a major breach.
A recent case can be used as an example. A manager who was dismissed brought arbitration against the employer and claimed severance payment as well as an additional one months salary due to being fired without 30 days written notice. The employer claimed that he was in serious violation of company rules due to signing an agreement with a supplier run by a relative and not informing the company in advance. The arbitration committee ruled in favor of the employer due to a signed staff handbook indicating that the manager in question was aware of this internal policy. Had there been no staff handbook, the dismissal could very well have been deemed unfair and the company could have been liable for severance compensation.
As mentioned above, it is important that all employees sign a copy of the handbook. Further, any changes made to the handbook also should be detailed to every employee and signed.
The contents of the handbook will vary per industry. Manufacturing companies will want to focus on issues relating to promptness, break lengths, safety requirements, etc. Business process outsourcing companies, on the other hand, will be more concerned with confidentiality of their clients information, while the food industry will focus on hygiene. However, regardless of the industry, companies should keep in mind the following considerations when drafting a staff handbook:
Company code of conduct
All internal rules, guidelines and the rights of both parties
Relevant KPI (Key Performance Indicators) and performance standards and assessment information
Nondisclosure agreement
Information about work environment
Work hours, overtime rules
Remuneration rules, social welfare rules, bonuses
Information about paid leaves
Behaviour standards, discipline procedures
Training information
Workplace security rules
Any other special rules relevant to the specific company/industry (i.e.: manufacturing safety standards, hygienic food production standards)
About Us Asia Briefing Ltd. is a subsidiary of Dezan Shira & Associates. Dezan Shira is a specialist foreign direct investment practice, providing corporate establishment, business advisory, tax advisory and compliance, accounting, payroll, due diligence and financial review services to multinationals investing in China, Hong Kong, India, Vietnam, Singapore and the rest of ASEAN. For further information, please email china@dezshira.com or visit www.dezshira.com. Stay up to date with the latest business and investment trends in Asia by subscribing to our complimentary update service featuring news, commentary and regulatory insight.
Human Resources and Payroll in China 2015
This edition of Human Resources and Payroll in China, updated for 2015, provides a firm understanding of Chinas laws and regulations related to human resources and payroll management essential information for foreign investors looking to establish or already running a foreign-invested entity in China, local managers, and HR professionals needing to explain complex points of Chinas labor policies.
How IT is Changing Payroll Processing and HR Admin in China
In this edition of China Briefing magazine, we examine how foreign multinationals can take better advantage of IT in the gathering, storing, and analyzing of HR information in China. We look at how IT can help foreign companies navigate Chinas nuanced payroll processing regulations, explain how software platforms are becoming essential for HR, and finally answer questions on the efficacy of outsourcing payroll and HR in China.
Labor Dispute Management in China
In this issue of China Briefing, we discuss how best to manage HR disputes in China. We begin by highlighting how Chinas labor arbitration process and its legal system in general widely differs from the West, and then detail the labor disputes that foreign entities are likely to encounter when restructuring their China business. We conclude with a special feature from Business Advisory Manager Allan Xu, who explains the risks and procedures for terminating senior management in China.
Sign of Baidu forum seen at a exhibition in Shanghai on May 28, 2015. [Photo/Xinhua]
Chinese online search engine Baidu has responded to recent reports and complaints from netizens regarding its late-night promotion of gambling sites, claiming it is the gambling sites themselves that have broken relevant rules and unilaterally initiated the illegal marketing.
Baidu says it has reported the case to the police and is now collecting evidence for investigation.
The Internet giant published a statement via its official weibo account saying that the gambling sites in question opened their accounts on Baidu's subordinate online marketing service provider e.baidu.com at the end of April.
But they did not launch any promotions until 11 p.m. on June, says the statement.
According to Baidu, their accounts on e.baidu.com had be ceased as of 6 a.m. on June 26.
Baidu says gambling is a serious breach of law, adding that the company has always resolutely banned any marketing campaigns in gambling.
The company says it also welcomes netizens and the media to help identify false and illegal information on its whistleblower website jubao.baidu.com.
However, a report from The Beijing News finds that these gambling sites have been conducting such "promotions" for some two months.
The report says that the gambling sites "stole" several companies' qualifications to secretly come online at midnight labeled with "commercial promotion".
But clicks on those links appearing to be some normal companies' websites would actually lead netizens to the gambling sites.
This problem seem to only occur during late night hours, and in the morning the gambling sites go offline and those companies' links return to what they should have been, directing online users to legitimate company websites.
Conversely, Baidu Promotion's salesmen are just trying to expand the business by promoting some grey or even illegal sites, such as gambling, health products, etc, says The Beijing News.
The promotion fees and expenses of a gambling site allegedly can amount to upward of 300,000 yuan, or around US$4,4769 per night, according to The Beijing News.
It is not the first time for Baidu to suffer from such a scandal. The company was criticized for influencing the treatment choice of a now deceased cancer patient, Wei Zexi who died on April 12, by presenting misguiding medical information.
The news created a great stir in the country.
China's authorities later published a set of regulations on the country's search engines after this scandal, urging search engines to enhance oversight on their advertisers.
An opentable-like application is "in talks" to lure investment from Alibaba Group, which, if successful, will mean that Alibaba joins the other two top Chinese dot-com firms Baidu and Tencent as investors.
The Alibaba's investment deal is expected to close by the end of this year, said Xie Xinfa, chief executive and founder of Meiweibuyongdeng, a Shanghai-based online restaurant reservation and management service provider.
The firm will use the investment to improve the app's features to meet various demands from consumers such as allowing them to book tables in restaurants like "booking seats in cinemas," said Xie.
The app has previously drawn a US$500 million investment from Baidu and Tencent-invested Meituan-Dianping.
By the end of last year, the app has been used in 20,000 restaurants nationwide with about 5 million daily reservations. It cooperates with Meituan-Dianping, Baidu and Alipay for online traffic sharing.
China's television regulator has said it will expedite the integration of TV and radio with new media, setting a target for the country to have a number of competitive multimedia conglomerates by 2020.
The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT) said in a circular on Monday that media organizations should develop multiple integrated and interactive information networks including TV and the Internet, supported by cloud computing and big data.
The SAPPRFT will support the integration through improving laws and regulations and granting preferable market access, according to the circular.
The SAPPRFT said in a separate statement that the current integration of TV, radio and new media is still rudimentary, which falls short of central authorities' requirement and public expectation.
The number of permanent residents in six core districts in Beijing is expected to drop for the first time this year, as the overcrowded capital seeks to control population growth.
Officials of Dongcheng, Xicheng, Chaoyang, Haidian, Fengtai and Shijingshan districts proposed goals and measures to limit population growth at a meeting on the removal of non-essential functions from Beijing, held Thursday.
The measures include crackdowns on subletting of residential and commercial property, illegal use of underground space for residence, illegal transformation of homes into shops, and closure of wholesale markets, among others.
In Dongcheng district,for example, the Donghuamen snacks market has been recently closed. Nanluoguxiang Lane, known for its well-preserved quadrangle courtyards, and Gui Jie, a street of popular restaurants, and areas surrounding the Palace Museum will be among priority areas where measures will be taken to reduce the population density.
The district aims to reduce its permanent resident population by 32,000 this year.
Beijing plans to cap its permanent population at 23 million by 2020, with the population in six core districts 15 percent less than 2014 levels.
Defined as people who have lived in the city for six months or more, the permanent population of Beijing was 21.7 million by the end of 2015.
The Chens have been living together since the 1980s in Meixian county, Shaanxi province. The family, which includes four generations, shares one large compound and eats meals together every day. Their happy life is a point of pride among local people.
The Chen family. (Photo/Baoji Daily)
A reporter from Baoji Daily recently visited the family. As the reporter entered the Chen compound, Chen Zhiping, the oldest member of the family, emerged to offer his greetings.
Chen Kuancang, the oldest son of Chen Zhiping, explained to the reporter that his father, 84-year-old Chen Zhiping, and his mother, 80-year-old Gao Guilang, are the first generation. Chen Kuancang has two younger brothers; together, the three of them are the second generation. The three brothers have altogether seven children, and those seven are the third generation. The seven children have so far brought them seven grandchildren, who comprise the fourth generation. Counting the various in-laws who have married into the Chen clan, the family contains a total of 34 people.
Chen Kuancang showed the reporter around their shared compound. A new story was added on in 2015, bringing the total floor area to over 750 square meters. The new construction was paid for by Chen Kuancang and his two brothers. They spent nearly 1 million yuan on the construction and decorations. There is one big kitchen in the compound, and it is outfitted with a jumbo-sized pan that can accommodate a meal for nearly 40 people. During every important festival, the Chen family plans a big get-together and relishes the happy family time.
The Chinese "mastery approach" to math teaching is set to roll out in more than 8,000 primary schools in the United Kingdom, with funding of up to 41 million pounds ($54.3 million), to bring pupils up to par with their Asian counterparts.
Elizabeth Truss, then British parliamentary undersecretary of state for education and childcare, looks on as two students demonstrate math skills in a primary school in Shanghai during an exchange program in 2014. [Photo/Xinhua]
Children as young as 5 will be required to practice sums and exercises, and they must master each concept before moving on to more difficult material.
The move comes after international tests showed that Shanghai students ranked on top for math in the Program for International Student Assessment in 2012, and 15-year-olds in China are three years ahead of their English counterparts in their ability to solve math problems.
Since then, Britain, whose students ranked 26th that year, has welcomed over 120 teachers from Shanghai to share the secrets of their success in the project, which the British media have dubbed "Shanghai Maths".
Speaking at the Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education last week, Nick Gibb, the UK schools minister, said the Shanghai style of math should become a standard fixture in England.
"We are seeing a renaissance in maths teaching in this country, with good ideas from around the world helping to enliven our classrooms.
"The significant expansion of the south Asian (including Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong) maths mastery approach can only add to the positive momentum, with thousands more young people having access to specialist teachers and quality textbooks," the minister added.
Gibb is confident that the efforts will ensure young people are properly prepared for further study and that the too-often heard phrase "can't do math" is consigned to the past.
Lyu Jiexin from Shanghai Normal University, also a senior coordinator of China-UK math exchange programs, believes the new policy is not a mere copying of Chinese math teaching, but is instead a part of the British government's overhaul to improve the standards of math education.
With the growing influence of the international test, more countries are learning from the top performing nations in a bid to improve the competitiveness of their education systems, Lyu said.
"The plan reflects the government's full commitment to its math reform and demonstrates the important role that education exchange and collaboration play in that regard," he added.
However, some critics were skeptical of the program, worrying that the students will not be able to master fundamental ideas merely through drills and repetition.
Charlie Stripp, director at the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics, said teaching math mastery is not about rote learning and drilling, although it certainly results in pupils knowing and being able to recall multiplication tables and other key number facts. This represents an important foundation for learning and using math, Stripp said.
"Teaching for mastery focuses on deep conceptual learning, developing secure foundations that pupils can build on throughout their education. When a piece of mathematics has been 'mastered', it can be used as a foundation for new mathematical learning. Superficial learning in mathematics produces weak foundations, which can result in insecure learning and confusion," he added.
A tour bus crashes into a guardrail and catches fire near Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, July 19, 2016. [Photo: i.ifeng.com]
Twenty-six people have died after a fire on a tour bus on a highway near Taoyuan Airport in Taiwan on Tuesday.
Twenty-four of the victims were tourists from the Chinese mainland, and the other two were the driver and the tour guide from Taiwan, according to Taiwanese authorities.
There were no survivors from the bus, which had crashed into an outer lane barrier before the fire broke out. An investigation is underway.
Sixteen of the tourists were women and eight were male. Three were children.
Arrangements would be made as soon as possible for the relatives of the victims to go to Taiwan, said Man Hongwei, director of the Taipei office of the Association for Tourism Exchange Across the Taiwan Straits.
The State Council Taiwan Affairs Office has launched emergency response measures, said office spokesperson Ma Xiaoguang.
"We are highly concerned about the safety of our mainland compatriots," Ma said, adding that a work team will be dispatched to Taiwan to help handle the aftermath of the incident.
The tour was organized by Liaoning Overseas Travel Service Company. The Liaoning Provincial tourism bureau said it has set up a team to investigate the incident and is trying to verify the names of all the people who registered with the company for the tour.
The tourist firm is licensed to organize tours in Taiwan, said an official with the provincial tourism bureau.
The Tourism Bureau of Dalian City in Liaoning Province confirmed that 21 of the victims from the mainland were from Dalian, while the other three came from Heilongjiang, Jilin and Hunan provinces.
The Taiwan Affairs Office of Liaoning Province has contacted its counterpart in Taiwan over the tragedy and required its branch in Dalian to connect with the family members of the victims and prepare to send personnel to Taiwan to deal with the aftermath.
A little girl called the police and cried for help in Chongqing last Friday, because of the added pressure of extra classes that her mother forced her into.
A little girl called the police and cried for help last Friday, because of the added pressure of extracurricular classes that her mother forced her into.
At noon on July 15, a local police station received a call from a little girl, who cried, "Mr. Policeman, please help me. She then hung up the phone, the Chongqing Morning Post reported.
A policeman rushed to the site after locating the source of the phone call. He met with an adult woman and her daughter. The daughter had stopped crying and explained that she didn't want to go to extracurricular classes arranged by her mom.
"I have to get up so early to go to the classes; I don't want to go," the girl said.
The 40-year-old mother said the 6-year-old daughter just graduated from kindergarten and will go to elementary school this September. She felt a sense of pressure after she heard other parents said they encouraged their children to learn dance or piano in addition to regular classes.
The mother then put her daughter in three different extracurricular classes before primary school to learn piano, dance and calligraphy. At first the girl was excited, but she soon became exhausted and didn't want to go to classes. On that day, the mother got angry and beat the girl as she refused to go to class and wanted to play with her friends.
The policeman warned the mother after he learned what had happened. The mother said she would respect her daughter in the future and will not pressure her during her childhood.
The 11th ASEM Summit, held in Ulan Bator from July 15 to 16 and attended by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, provided an excellent opportunity to showcase China's policy of inter-regional engagement, one of the central planks of the current Chinese administration.
The ASEM process has been continuing for twenty years now, originating as a forum in which the European Union and ASEAN (plus other important East Asian nations such as China) could meet to discuss matters of common interests; but it has expanded over the years to include 51 European and Asian countries as well as leaders of international organizations. And ASEM is now taking on new significance in light of China's colossal Belt and Road" project linking China with Europe.
The main output of the meeting was the signing of the Ulaanbaatar Declaration, emphasizing "connectivity across diverse domains," a phrase signifying a whole range of mutual exchanges political, commercial, financial, and developmental as well as the mechanisms by which these exchanges can be conducted. The declaration mentioned the growing interdependence between the two regions," something which China has taken a leading role in promoting. The ASEM countries should form a solid partnership to alleviate the world's current uncertainties and volatility by demonstrating the value of effective multilateralism. As China has been particularly anxious to emphasize, insecurities are best addressed by creating a solid foundation of mutually beneficial economic links.
Premier Li was especially keen to ensure that recent developments in the EU do not negatively affect relations between Europe and Asia. One of the most disturbing recent events was the British referendum which led to the UK's departure from the EU. Li was careful to avoid any impression of interference in this matter but emphasised his hope that the transition would be smooth and have no deleterious effect on wider relations.
China's particular concern in dealing with the EU is the latter's handling of anti-dumping measures; Li called on Europe to act strictly in accordance with Article 15 of the Protocol on the Accession of China to the WTO and to abandon the surrogate country approach" that designates China as a non-market economy. He discussed these issues in detail in a bilateral meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, thus acknowledging that Germany now plays an effective leadership role within the EU.
China did not wish to get embroiled in arguments over the situation in the South China Sea Premier Li did not mention the topic in his initial keynote speech but it was inevitable that it would come up, and China thus had no alternative but to respond to the provocation.
On the meeting's second day the Premier strongly restated China's position, which is that the South China Sea arbitration award will have no impact on China's territorial sovereignty and maritime interests. Li told his Vietnamese counterpart Nguyen Xuan Phuc, one of China's main opponents on this issue, that the issue should be solved through bilateral negotiations between the interested parties on the basis of historical realities, international law and the 2012 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC).
Most of the parties present at the meeting acknowledged China's position and China's lack of aggressive intent. Premier Li, indeed, had harsh words for Japan not a party to the South China Sea disputes for ratcheting up tensions on the issue; in a bilateral meeting he told Japanese Premier Shinzo Abe that his country should "exercise caution in its own words and deeds."
The greatest threat to both Europe and Asia, Li pointed out, is terrorism, especially in the wake of the appalling atrocity in Nice on July 14. This should be the main focus of ASEM member states on the security front, as terrorist networks clearly cross both continents and any disputes between nations must not be allowed to disrupt the common anti-terrorist struggle.
But, thanks in part to this welcome call to order, the meeting broadly concentrated on areas of potential common ground and the strenuous detailed work of establishing methods for practical cooperation, which is what diplomacy is really all about. Arriving at common positions within a multilateral organization is extremely hard work, and achieving accord between different multilateral organizations is even harder. But no time spent underpinning the political and economic foundations of global security is wasted. The ASEM process will now move on towards the next summit meeting in Brussels in 2018.
Tim Collard is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:
http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/timcollard.htm
Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
Last week the Chinese Premier Li Keqiang embarked on his tour of Mongolia where the Chinese premier was scheduled to meet with the Mongolian Prime Minister and also to attend the 11th Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) where some 53 members gathered. This year marked the 20th anniversary for the summit and the trip came immediately after the infamous and ridiculous South China Sea Arbitrations, which caused a huge hype as the world and the media alike were anxious to gauge China's reactions and stance after the court rulings. No one in the world would heed to China's reactions over this issue, had the western media not created a ludicrous circus out of the whole affair. The 11th ASEM proved to the world that China is a leader among Asian economies and with the support of the 50 plus members of ASEM it has been established that it is in the interest of global stability to support China's commitment of boosting interconnectivity and bearing additional duties in global governance and security for upholding peace.
Premier Li had been busy over this weekend as he settled various deals with various countries and opened numerous avenues with many countries to expand trade and cooperation. During this trip Li met various leaders on the sidelines of the ASEM. The Bulgarian President Rosen Plevneliev appreciated China's adherence to peaceful development and said, "Generations of Bulgarian leaders have been committed to promoting the development of bilateral ties, with a firm belief that China's development path is conducive to the whole world." Premier Li promised that "China is willing to deepen with Bulgaria the alignment of each other's development plans."
The Premier also met the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte on the sidelines and the two leaders discussed measures for deepening the Sino-Dutch ties further. Rutte said, "China's Belt and Road Initiative and the 13th Five-year Plan (2016-2020) offer many opportunities for bilateral cooperation and the Netherlands is willing to have more cooperation with China on such fields as urbanization, clean energy, environmental protection, medicare, and the tackling of an aging society."
ASEM being a great platform for China and other Asian countries to reach out to their European counterparts and vise-versa to streamline the frictions in trade, as a measure to streamline such frictions; Li met with the German Chancellor Merkel on the sidelines and discussed the issue of Sino-EU trade relations in accordance with Article 15 of the Protocol on the Accession of China to the World Trade Organization (WTO), as the Surrogate Country approach expires on December 11, 2016. Li said, "it is hoped that the German side could help solve the issue in an active manner." Merkel has visited China 9 times during her term in office and she responded by saying that, "her frequent meetings with Li testified to the intimacy in the Germany-China ties. And Germany is willing to keep contact with China over the latest development in Europe," she added that, "China is a trustworthy and reliable partner, and Germany is pleased to see the EU to cooperate with China in a more sensible and practical manner."
Apart from the meetings on the sidelines of the 11th ASEM, the Chinese Premier gave a very important speech which was closely followed by all in attendance.
Li stressed that with the economies of Europe and Asia and especially China are intertwined in complementary manner and "as the ASEM begins its third decade, all members should bear in mind the mission of building a new type of comprehensive partnership" and actively seek new paths to further promote Asia-Europe cooperation.
Europe and Asia comprise of more than 50% of the global population and close to 70% of all trade in the world is based on these statistics, Li emphasized that it is through cooperation that the two continents can "enjoy broad prospects of development and cooperation, given their economic diversity, abundant natural resources and huge market potential."
The world at large is faced with various convoluted problems like terrorism and the issue of refugees which need to be dealt with together if pragmatic solutions are to be achieved and in this regards Li called for a novel measure for Asia-Europe teamwork, he suggested that the countries need to "share the idea of a community of common destiny and conduct dialogue and cooperation, so as to effectively cope with regional challenges, prevent new breeding grounds for turmoil, and safeguard world peace and regional stability." With this new measure Li also gave the example of China by stating; "We have always advocated that all countries, big or small, rich or poor, strong or weak, should conduct themselves in accordance with the laws and rules, follow established regional rules, oppose double standards and reject misinterpretations of international lawwe have insisted on resolving disputes through peaceful ways and political means, rather than inciting conflicts or confrontation and China will unswervingly stick to a path of peaceful development."
The 11th ASEM summit is aimed at endorsing and encouraging "partnership for the future through connectivity." And without the mention of the Chinese vision and endeavors regarding the Belt and Road Initiative would make such an event incomplete and that is the reason why so many leaders expressed their support for China and their willingness to join hands with China in this regards. And Premier Li noted in his speech that, he has received very positive response from an increasing number of countries, proposing the establishment of a connectivity working group under the ASEM.
China certainly has come of age and owing to its massive economy and its further development prospects. A lot of importance is accorded to China at the global front and this is not only because of China's economic offerings but also because of its non-interventionist stance. This is the reason why China's role at ASEM proved to be integral and this is also why in the wake of the South China Sea arbitrations the mudslinging antics of the West have not scathed the Chinese economy or its reputation, as both are not built upon hollow foundations. The Premier didn't raise the South China Sea dispute during his speech because it is not an issue to be discussed on a multilateral platform. On that account, Li talked about the issue before returning to China and said, "Under no circumstance will the arbitration award exert any impact on China's territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests in the South China SeaChina remains committed to settling the South China Sea disputes via dialogue and consultation with countries directly involved on the basis of historical facts and in accordance with international law, so as to safeguard peace and stability in the South China Sea."
Shafei Moiz Hali has a master's degree from George Mason University, Virginia, USA in the field of International Commerce and Public Policy. Mr. Hali has been working as an Assistant Professor at the National Defence University (NDU), Islamabad, Pakistan with the department of Government and Public Policy Since 2009. Currently he is pursuing his PhD from the College of Public Administration at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), China.
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Russia seeks "parity" in arms sales to Armenia and Azerbaijan amid a deteriorating situation in Nagorno-Karabakh region over which the two neighboring countries have been in dispute for decades, a Russian official said on Monday.
"The conflict begins, despite that one side is armed better or worse. It's necessary to seek for parity," said Alexander Fomin, director of the Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation in an interview with Russian newspaper Izvestiya.
The main task of military-technical cooperation is to keep peace and stability in the world, he said, "We believe that conflict situation shouldn't be resolved by arms. There is certain parity."
Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked in a dispute over the mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh since 1988, when the enclave dominated by ethnic Armenians claimed independence from Azerbaijan and declared to join Armenia.
Peace talks have been held since 1994 when a ceasefire agreement was reached, but there have been occasional minor clashes.
New clashes between Azerbaijani and Armenian forces took place in the contact line in Nagorno-Karabakh in early April, which resulted in numerous casualties on both sides.
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Flash
Somali forces and the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) on Monday recaptured a village in Lower Shabellle region in southern Somalia, an official has confirmed.
Ali Hassan, a police chief in Qorlyoley, told reporters that the forces raided the village early Monday after a brief capture by Al-Shabaab.
"Somali and AMISOM forces moved in in the morning and retook the villahe. The militants had captured it for a few hours," said Hassan.
Residents reported heavily armed Al-Shabaab militants in the wee hours of Monday before they attacked and took control.
"We heard massive gunfire and before Al-Shabaab took over the village, but later they pulled out following troop's movement," Mohamed Suleyman, a resident, told Xinhua.
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Commander of the Chinese Navy, Admiral Wu Shengli (L) welcomes Admiral John Richardson, US chief of naval operations during a welcoming ceremony in Beijing on Monday. [mil.gmw.cn/]
The commander of the People's Liberation Army Navy Wu Shengli has stressed that China and the United States have key roles in ensuring peace and stability in the South China Sea, and cooperation between the navies of the two countries is "the only correct option."
Wu made the remarks on Monday while meeting with his U.S. counterpart Admiral John Richardson and his delegation to discuss maritime security.
Describing the current security situation in waters around China as "complicated and sensitive" and noting the escalating South China Sea issue, Wu said Richardson's visit will be beneficial for the two countries to strengthen communication, promote trust, resolve doubts and avoid misjudgments.
"We will never sacrifice our sovereignty and interests in the South China Sea," Wu said, stressing that it is China's "core interest" and concerns the foundation of the Party's governance, the country's security and stability and the Chinese nation's basic interests.
Wu said that China will not recede over territorial sovereignty or fear any military provocation, which the Chinese navy is fully prepared to cope with.
"We will never stop our construction on the Nansha Islands halfway... the Nansha Islands are China's inherent territory, and our necessary construction on the islands is reasonable, justified and lawful," Wu said.
He stressed that "no matter what country or person applies pressure," China will push forward and complete island construction as planned.
According to Wu, China will never be caught off guard, and the number of its defense facilities is completely determined by the number of threats it faces.
Wu vowed that China will never give up its efforts to solve the South China Sea issue peacefully, despite "many negative factors at present," but also warned that "any attempt to force China to give in through flexing military muscles will only have the opposite effect."
Wu expressed his hope that the two countries' air and maritime forces fully follow the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea and the Rules of Behavior for the Safety of Air and Maritime Encounters to avoid strategic misjudgment or exchange of fire, and to jointly ensure the peace and stability of the South China Sea.
Wu called on the two sides to promote strategic mutual trust, seek common ground, expand the scope of cooperation and create new momentum for China and the United States to develop a new type of major-power relations between the two countries.
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The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Tuesday test-fired three short-range ballistic missiles in a show of force against the decision between Seoul and Washington to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) to South Korean soil.
Photo provided by Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on April 24, 2016 shows a scene of an underwater test-fire of submarine ballistic missile in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). [Photo/Xinhua]
Yonhap news agency quoted South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) as saying that the DPRK fired off three ballistic missiles, which are believed to have been a Scud-C type, from the western region of Hwangju in North Hwanghae province between 5:45 a.m. and 6:05 a.m.
The missiles were directed toward the East Sea, traveling about 500 to 600 kilometers, which are a flight enough to reach the entire South Korean territory.
The test-launch came six days after Seoul and Washington agreed to deploy one THAAD battery to the Seongju county, some 250 km southeast of Seoul, by the end of next year.
The DPRK's military threatened to take "physical measures" against THAAD when the deployment site is determined in response to the THAAD deployment decision.
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The African Union (AU) is set to start withdrawing its standby force from Somali in 2018, a senior AU official has said.
Smail Chergui, AU Commissioner for Peace and Security, said on Monday that the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) forces withdrawal will allow Somalia to take charge of their country.
"We are planning to train and equip the Somali forces before pulling out from the country," he said in a press conference during the closing of the 27th AU summit in Kigali, Rwanda.
He said that the AU is also helping Somalia with its Presidential and parliamentary elections that are due later in the year.
"We need a peaceful Somalia and respect for human rights for all citizens," Chergui said.
Chergui noted that the Heads of States set up a special fund to help combat terrorism in the continent.
The fund will be funded by AU governments, the international community and other partners and will take effect once the modeling governing it is unveiled.
"This fund will help African governments respond with speed in taming an upsurge of terrorism activities that is blamed for massive deaths of people," he added.
According to the commissioner, the fund will be operated from a special centre based at the AU with its focal points in all countries.
He revealed that the AU's peace and Security Council were in Burundi last month and finalized humanitarian observer's situation and the possibility of sending military experts in the country.
"We are hopeful that an all inclusive dialogue between the government and the opposition to find a lasting peace will be convened in the next couple of weeks," he revealed.
On South Sudan, Chergui noted that the AU is expected to deploy forces in the country under the umbrella of the United Nations forces that are already on the ground to help improve human rights record in the country.
"The situation in South Sudan is urgent and we are set to meet and discuss with the UN with the aim of deploying the forces," he added.
"Boko Haram militants are another headache for us and we are in the process of sending a technical team to northern Mali soon to help," he added.
He said that the AU will not keep quiet and see civilians butchered by militant terrorism groups.
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South Sudan's health ministry said on Monday that at least 11 people have been killed from cholera outbreak in the country.
Makur Koryom, the undersecretary in the ministry of health, told journalists in Juba that there are more than 100 cholera cases which have been reported as a result of recent renewed fighting.
"Most of these cases are among the men in uniform and their families. This was due to heavy resumption of fighting that contaminated the atmosphere that has exposed health risks to the people," Koryom said.
Last week officials from the ministry of health and other health partners reported outbreak of acute watery diarrhea which equate to cholera symptoms.
The official said about 114 reported cases of cholera symptoms were already suspected with deaths all from Juba, Terekeka and Duk County in far north of Jonglei state.
"In Juba the hotspot areas include Gieda military barrack, Korwiliam and check point as well as Tong ping quarters near united nations mission in South Sudan protection of civilian site," he said.
John Rumunu, the Director General for Preventive Health in the National Ministry of Health advised the general public to observe personal hygiene as primary preventive measures to contain the acute diarrhea disease.
Rumunu advised the public to ensure that they drink clean and chlorinated water or wash hands before and after visiting latrine.
He advised the public to avoid open defecation and make good use of latrine in order to contain the outbreak within the short spell.
"I want to inform our public that as soon as someone experience symptoms pertaining to suspected cholera like diarrhea and vomiting, please, go to the nearest health facility or visit Juba teaching hospital because any delay may cost life," Rumunu said.
Magda Armah, Health cluster coordinator working for the World Health Organization (WHO) said they have also got cases in certain islands that are cut off like in Duk Island of Jonglei state.
"WHO with its strength on surveillance and coordination will bring the cluster partners together to ensure that the vision that is presented in the guideline and the operation plan is recognized," she said.
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British lawmakers on Monday agreed by 472 votes to 117 to replace the country's submarine-based Trident nuclear missile system, a multi-billion pound project to maintain the country's military status, after Britain's vote to leave the European Union.
Theresa May, making her first appearance in parliament as prime minister, led the debate to pave the way for the building of four nuclear ballistic submarines, its Trident system.
The 54-billion-U.S. dollar fleet will be built at a shipyard at Barrow in northern England to replace its aging fleet of nuclear submarines.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn voted against the Trident program, even though many of his lawmakers supported it. There was also opposition from Scottish National Party politicians opposed to the nuclear submarines being based at the Faslane base on the Clyde in Scotland.
May earlier told lawmakers it would be an act of gross irresponsibility for Britain to abandon its nuclear weapons. Pressed during questioning in the chamber May was asked if she would sanction the use of nuclear missiles if it meant the deaths of 100,000 innocent men, women and children. She responded with an emphatic Yes. May told a packed chamber that Britain cannot afford to relax its guard.
She accused critics of the Trident system of being "the first to defend the country's enemies", adding "the nuclear threat had not gone away, if anything it has increased." She described Trident as Britain's "ultimate insurance policy."
Defense Secretary Michael Fallon closed the debate by saying nuclear threats were growing around the world and Trident "puts doubts in the minds of our adversaries".
For almost 50 years a British submarine carrying nuclear weapons has patrolled the oceans to deter a nuclear attack on Britain. The logic was that if Britain's defense capabilities were destroyed, the submarine could launch a catastrophic retaliatory strike on an aggressor.
The Trident program was introduced by then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s to replace the Polaris missile system used since the 1960s. But now a new generation of submarines will continue the program into the second half of the 21st century. The existing Vanguard submarines that carry the Trident nuclear deterrent will be retired when the new submarines are built.
Opponents of Trident accused May of generating the debate so early into her leadership of the country to take advantage of the civil war currently engulfing the main opposition Labour Party. The rift has seen leader Corbyn estranged from the vast majority of his own MPs, with a leadership challenge currently underway. Some Labour lawmakers even heckled their own leader as he spoke out against Trident during the debate.
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The U.S. government said Monday it has not yet received a request from Turkey for extraditing the U.S.-based Turkish cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who was blamed by Ankara for plotting a failed military coup.
Speaking at a daily briefing, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that "we've not yet received an extradition request from the Turkish government as it relates to Mr. Gulen."
Earnest added that if such request is received, the U.S. "will evaluate that request based on the Extradition Treaty that was signed by the United States and Turkey more than 30 years ago."
After receiving the request, the U.S. will take two steps as follows: first, the request would be evaluated to determine whether or not it was related to crimes that are covered by the Extradition Treaty; second, there would be an evaluation made jointly by the State Department and Justice Department to determine whether or not the evidentiary standard in the treaty is met, Earnest elaborated.
At the same time, Earnest said the suggestion that the U.S. is harboring Gulen "is factually incorrect."
He revealed that U.S. President Barack Obama will make a phone call to his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan to discuss the U.S.-Turkey ties in the wake of the failed coup in Turkey.
Obama was expected to "renew his call for restraint and urge everyone in Turkey to respect that country's democratic institutions," Earnest said.
"And that's certainly consistent with our forceful support for the democratically elected civilian government of Turkey," he said.
Commenting on the recent massive arrests of suspected coup plotters made in Turkey, Earnest reiterated that the Turkish government should exercise restraint, demonstrate a commitment to due process and a continued commitment to the values that are enshrined in Turkey's Constitution.
More than 290 people were killed Friday in a failed military coup in Turkey, which has strained Ankara's ties with the U.S. amid Turkey's accusations that the U.S. is harboring Gulen, who is blamed by the Turkish government for plotting the coup attempt.
Turkey and the U.S. are NATO allies in fighting terrorism, but their relations had already become tricky before the coup attempt after Turkey tried to repair its relationship with Russia. U.S. lawmakers also expressed deep concern about Erdogan government's clampdown on the opposition and on free journalism.
Turkey cut the power supply to and closed the airspace of the Incirlik Air Base after the Friday coup attempt, forcing the U.S.-led coalition to temporarily halt its flight missions from the base to launch airstrikes against Islamic State (IS) terrorists in Syria and Iraq.
Although the airspace of the base was reopened for resuming the counter-IS strikes on Sunday, the commercial power supply was still not restored as of Monday, Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook told a press briefing.
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The UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) reported that the situation in Juba remains calm but tense, and the mission also reported instances of sporadic firing in Leer over the weekend, including near UNMISS' temporary operating base, a UN spokesman told reporters Monday.
"Further to previous search operations for weapons at the UN Tomping compound, the mission reports that a similar exercise was conducted in the Protection of Civilians site 1 adjacent to UN House on 16 July," Farhan Haq, the deputy UN spokesman, said at a daily news briefing here.
"The operation resulted in a number of items confiscated, including small arms and ammunition rounds, machetes and military uniforms."
Meanwhile, a total of 140 non-critical UNMISS staff have been temporarily relocated from Juba, Haq said. "The mission continues to carry out all its critical operations."
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) also reported new arrivals into several of the sites for internally displaced people in Juba, including both UN sites (UN House and Tomping), he said.
The number of people displaced following the recent fighting is now estimated to be nearly 15,000, including more than 10,830 at the UNMISS sites and more than 4,100 outside, he said. "Humanitarian organisations continue to respond in several of the affected locations."
"The humanitarian community condemns the recent looting of the World Food Programme (WFP) and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warehouses in Juba, which stored food for at least 220,000 people and livelihood support for thousands of vulnerable families across South Sudan," he said.
"Humanitarians also condemn the looting of humanitarian compounds in Leer during the recent fighting," he said.
"They note that these incidents will have a substantial impact on the humanitarian operations at a time when needs are growing," he said. "They stress that the destruction and damage to humanitarian facilities and violence against aid workers are unacceptable and must stop."
The latest round of violence followed deadly clashes between the rival factions on July 7-8 in the capital city. South Sudan's Health Ministry says at least 271 people were killed in the July 8 clashes.
The world's youngest country again plunged into conflict in December 2013 after President Salva Kiir accused his deputy Riek Machar of plotting a coup, which the latter denied, leading to a cycle of retaliatory killings.
President Kiir and former rebel leader and now First Vice President Machar signed a peace deal in August that paved way for the formation of the transitional unity government to end more than two years of civil conflict.
Flash
The investigation into the truck attack in the southern French city of Nice, showed the attacker's "certain, recent interest in radical jihadist movements," but no evidence have been found on his links with the Islamic State (IS), Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said on Monday.
People gather to mourn the victims on the attack scene at the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France, July 16, 2016.[Photo/Xinhua]
"If there are no elements in the investigation at this stage suggesting an allegiance to Islamic State nor links of individuals with the group ... he (Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel) showed certain recent interest in radical jihadist movements," Molins told reporters.
The investigation also showed that the attack was "premeditated." Bouhlel, who drove a heavy truck into crowd celebrating Bastille Day, had planned his action days before July 14 after surveillance cameras showed him rehearsing the path that he would take, the prosecutor added.
With no apparent interest in religion, the Franco-Tunisian man had been growing his beard and told his entourage that it was for religious reasons and that he could not understand why the Islamic State could not have its own territory, the prosecutor said.
Looking at his phone and computer, investigators found ternet searches for information on the attacks mainly in Orlando and the Paris suburb of Magnanville.
Molins added six people close to the truck driver were placed under custody with one of them having received a text from the attacker which mentioned gun purchase.
The Islamic State (IS)-linked news agency Amaq has claimed responsibility for the attack in Nice.
"The executor of the deadly operation in Nice, France, was a soldier of the IS", said Amaq, cited by several French media.
Last Thursday, Bouhlel drove a heavy truck into crowds celebrating Bastille Day in Nice. His truck careered 2 km through mass of revellers before being stopped by police units.
According to official data, 84 people were killed, including 10 kids, 300 others were wounded with scores remain in serious situations.
Flash
Republican National Convention for the 2016 U.S. election kicked off on Monday with absence of high-profile party leaders as Donald Trump was scrambling to showcase his ability to unify the party.
People protest against Donald Trump on the first day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, the United States, July 18, 2016. [Photo/Xinhua]
Relations between Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, and party leaders were constantly strained during the chaotic primary season where the bombastic and bellicose candidate hurled insults at party establishment and alienated a wide swath of constituencies with controversial remarks.
Long before the GOP convention, lasting from July 18 to 21, four previous GOP presidential nominees, namely George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney had already announced that they would not attend the GOP national convention where Trump would be formally nominated as the party's standard-bearer.
While the two Bushes, the 41st and 43rd former U.S. president, did not attend the 2012 GOP convention in person, they appeared that year in recorded messages in which they showered praise on that year's GOP nominee Romney.
According to an earlier statement by Bush senior who endorsed every Republican presidential nominee for the past five election cycles, for the first time since his own presidency, the 41st U.S. president "is retired from politics," and had no plan to endorse Trump this year.
Bush junior, meanwhile, also had no plan to "participate in or comment on the presidential campaign," according to an earlier remark by his personal aide.
In contrary to the silence from the Bushes, Romney had for long been a vocal critic of Trump and once played a major role in the "Never Trump" movement within the party early on. Romney's absence was also a rare break from the party's tradition of having the last nominee delivering a major speech at the convention.
Meanwhile, Trump's four former rivals in the nomination race, including Ohio Governor John Kasich, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, also did not attend this year's convention.
Compared with others, Kasich's decision to dodge was even more conspicuous since the convention was being held in the state where he was the governor.
The Trump campaign on Monday blasted Kasich and other party leaders who did not appear at the convention for belonging to the past.
"He (Kasich) is making a big mistake," said Trump's campaign Chief Paul Manafort in an interview with MSNBC. "Most of the Republicans who aren't coming are people who have been part of the past."
Trump first drew widespread criticism last June when he said in his presidential announcement speech that Mexico was sending "rapists" and drug dealers to the United States. Since then, he had repeatedly vowed, if elected president, to deport about 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country.
In another outburst of emotional remarks, Trump called for a "total and complete" ban on Muslims entering the United States in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks in November 2015.
Since then, the targets of Trump's insults expanded to include women, African-American protesters, family members of rivals, etc.
His audacious remarks not only caused wide division among the Republicans, but also among the Americans.
Even before the arrival of Trump at the Republican National Convention for the 2016 U.S. election, tumult broke out on the convention floor and delegates erupted in competing chants in a televised dispute Republican leaders had hoped to avoid.
With the theme of the night "Make America Safe Again" against the backdrop of violence and unrest in the United States and throughout the world, whether the four-day GOP convention can achieve party unity remains a question.
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Chinese Vice President Li Yuanchao on Tuesday met with Lao Defense Minister Chansamone Chanyalath, expressing China's appreciation for Laos' support on the South China Sea issue.
"China appreciates Laos' firm support on the South China Sea issue," Li told Chansamone during their meeting in Beijing.
China holds that the issue can only be solved through dialogue and negotiation, said Li, adding that this position was "consistent and unwavering."
Stressing that the two countries share common development opportunities through cooperation, Li said he hoped China and Laos could deepen mutually beneficial cooperation to advance their comprehensive strategic partnership.
Chansamone said Laos greatly valued cooperation with China.
Laos has always understood and supported China's stance on the South China Sea issue, backing the peaceful settlement of disputes through negotiation between the countries directly concerned, he said.
Flash
Malaysia and Singapore signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) Tuesday on the long-anticipated high-speed rail linking the two countries.
The signing was witnessed by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and his Singaporean counterpart Lee Hsien Loong, a significant milestone since the project was first announced in 2013.
"The signing of MoU signifies Malaysia and Singapore's firmest commitment to this iconic project," said Najib during a joint press conference with Lee.
The MoU captures key points of agreement between the two countries on the project such as the details on technical parameter, commercial model as well as custom, immigration, quarantine (CIQ) clearance, safety and security matters, regulatory framework and project management, he said.
The two governments are committed to sign a bilateral agreement that will contain details relating to the project by the end of this year, targeting the commencement of operations by 2026, he added.
For his part, Lee said one or two issues and some details still need to be worked out, "but the main picture is there."
He urged the two countries to work closely together on the many joint decisions and many difficult implementation issues that may arise.
A joint project team would be set up by Malaysia's high-speed rail corporation and Land Transport Authority of Singapore to jointly implement and address integration project, among others. Following the signing of bilateral agreement, it will work on the preparation of a tender for the project, which is expected to be issued next year.
The high-speed rail is expected to enhance people-to-people ties and improve business linkages between the two countries, and both prime ministers said it would change the lifestyles of the people of the two countries.
The proposed high-speed rail is expected to cut the traveling time between the Malaysian capital and the city state to 90 minutes.
Railway companies from China, Japan and Europe have long expressed interests in this project. Singaporean and Malaysian transport authorities said the joint project team will call an international tender in August to appoint a joint development partner to provide technical support.
PASCAGOULA, Miss. - Tensions were high at the Jackson County Board of Supervisors meeting on Monday when Board President Melton Harris Jr. accused Singing River Health System Board of Trustees President Jeffrey Belk of using false claims to have Harris's appointee, Clarence DuBose, removed from the SRHS Board.
Harris took issue with Belk based on statements made to the media that were false regarding DuBose, according to Harris.
Within a memo prepared by the SRHS board, the first sentence of the document states, "Shortly after Clarence Dubose's appointment to the Singing River Health System Board of Trustees, questions arose as to whether his ownership of several local pharmacies and a hospice is a conflict that would prevent him from effectively serving as a Trustee to SRHS and whether that conflict would prevent him from carrying out his fiduciary duties in that role, since those entities are direct competitors of SRHS."
DuBose owns a pharmacy and hospice service in Moss Point. DuBose said he went to the Mississippi Ethics Commission not to see if owning a business and serving on the Board of Trustees would be a conflict of interest, but because of a meeting he had with Belk and two attorneys from the hospital system.
According to DuBose, the state did not find that he was in violation of state ethics laws through his appointment by the Jackson County Board of Supervisors. However, the state did find that issues could arise before the board that would cause conflict, or the public perception of conflict.
Harris exchanged heated words with Belk and said the hospital "wants someone who will go along with their policies and will "drink their Kool-Aid."
According to Belk, his decision was not a personal one. He cited DuBose's businesses within the county as a conflict of interest. DuBose disagreed.
"To vacate my appointment based on the presumption of [issues] the hospital trustees and hospital administration fear may be coming before this hospital system is errant and I would ask that my appointment would not be vacated," Dubose said.
"There are no facts present in the Ethics Commission's findings that have been presented by the hospital that my ownership of a community pharmacy or my hospice, whose business model is totally different from Singing River's, poses significant issues that will come before the Board of Trustees that will impugn their operations or mine," DuBose said.
District 5 Supervisor Randy Bosarge posed a scenario to DuBose regarding ethics. DuBose responded citing state laws that would prevent him from receiving inventory at the same rate the hospital receives its pharmaceuticals.
Bosarge stated that law deals with perception and that he along with DuBose have to be mindful of that outcome. Bosarge also stated he, along with the supervisors, are attempting to right the ship of the hospital and the perception of DuBose serving on the board is not the direction in which the county should go.
DuBose responded saying, "In trying to right the ship, Mr. Bosarge, I think it should be paramount to the decision the board makes. People who profess transparency and those who practice transparency are sometimes not one in the same. I think in the statements I made, people who know me as a professional, my transparency is there for people to judge as they wish. I see myself as a healthcare provider first and a business man second and the fact that we have focused more on the latter says something."
"The field and the world of healthcare is a mystery to many people," DuBose said. "For day-to-day operations and pharmaceuticals, I think my experience would be invaluable."
Harris took exception to his second appointee in a couple of months to have been removed by vote from the SRHS board.
"This is the second minority I appointed to the board who has been picked apart and bashed," Harris said. "Support is gained at the local level because of the type of misleading statements the Board of Trustees placed in the beginning of the memo. Anyone I elect to appoint, they want to run them through the ringer and I take great offense with their actions. If Mr. DuBose prefers to continue to this fight, I will fight along with him."
GAUTIER, Mississippi -- It appears the Gautier City Council may be on the verge of removing the "interim" from Paula Yancey's title.
Yancey was hired in late April as the city's interim city manager, ostensibly to serve 2-3 months while the city council searched for a permanent replacement for Samantha Abell, who resigned earlier that month after the council rejected her plan to stay on while she trained her successor.
Abell, coincidentally, is on the verge of being hired as the city manager for the City of Gulf Breeze, Fla., according to media sources there.
There is no mention of hiring a permanent city manger on the city council's Tuesday night agenda, but Mayor Gordon Gollott confirmed to The Mississippi Press that "discussions are ongoing" relative to Yancey's position, but added the situation was "not finalized" yet.
Yancey, who was given a salary of $7,000 for the three-month interim stint, had previously served as an attorney for the Jackson County Board of Supervisors, but the board declined to renew her contract in December.
She served as the county's in-house counsel for eight years working with county budget, port, annexation and personnel issues and was recognized by Jackson County for "outstanding service" in the construction of the Jackson County Services Complex. In 2011-12, she served as interim county administrator managing more than 700 employees and countywide operations.
In 2010 she was named as one of the top 50 attorneys for "Leadership in Law." She came to the county from private practice in Meridian where she had experience in environmental, state and local government law.
As an adjunct professor at the Mississippi College School of Law and Mississippi College she taught state and local government law.
Marine mammals such as whales, dolphins, seals, and walruses rely on their perceptions of underwater sound for vital functions like catching prey, navigating, communicating, and mating. Photo by iStockphoto
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The HSUS, along with several other animal and environmental protection organizations, has won yet another legal victory for animals this time a challenge to the U.S. Navys use of high-intensity, low-frequency sonar, a practice designed for submarine detection that has devastating impacts on whales and other marine mammals. This lawsuit focused on the fact that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) illegally approved the Navys harmful activities, ignoring safeguards suggested by the governments own scientists to reduce or prevent harm to marine creatures sensitive to persistent and punishing sounds.
As the federal appeals court discussed in its favorable opinion, marine mammals such as whales, dolphins, seals, and walruses rely on their perceptions of underwater sound for vital functions like catching prey, navigating, communicating, and mating. High-intensity, low-frequency sonar can cause these vulnerable animals to stop communicating with one another and cease foraging for food. It can delay reproduction, reduce growth, separate them from their young, and potentially leave them stranded on beaches. Science informs so many aspects of our relationship with animals, and ongoing research is teaching us a great deal about animal intelligence and behavior. Once we learn about the effect of human activities on their very survival, we have a duty to respond and to remediate our actions.
The courtin a decision that will have wide-ranging impacts for marine mammals of all kinds beyond those affected by sonarheld that NMFS shirked its legal duty to properly mitigate these harmful impacts. The ruling emphasized the laws requirement that the government err on the side of overprotection of marine mammals, and do everything practicable to protect these animals from dangerous activities undertaken by people.
While security is and must be a national priority, the federal government cannot look at planning and research from a single angle, and must find ways to advance our national priorities without causing so much collateral harm to animals. We as a nation are making progress in doing away with wounding animals as a means of learning about battlefield treatment of our troops. The HSUS and the federal courts are also asking the Department of Defense to figure out a better way to honor our national security concerns without causing distress and death to whales, dolphins, and so many other sentient creatures.
We are proud of our armed services, and the heroism that our military leaders and troops exhibit. Well continue to honor them, but also to ask that they uphold our values in pursuit of their noble ends and that includes protecting the lives of creatures that have never done us any harm.
Skyscrapers and people reflected in a puddle of water in the early hours of the morning at the Bund in Shanghai, Oct 20, 2015.[Photo/Xinhua]
Shanghai's limited land supply for residential development and the current undersupply of housing stock have fuelled developers' expectations on further rise in housing prices. This has pushed up the prices of land auctioned recently, said Albert Lau, CEO of Savills China.
High land prices in Shanghai are a natural result of the market's development cycle. Developers who have been selling their existing properties need to supplement their land reserves for future development.
Additionally, they have secured enough liquidity from current sales so they are able to afford the high prices, said Lau in an interview with China Daily.
A Shanghai land parcel, which is just 1.5 kilometers from the central ring of the city, has been sold at a price of more than 73,786 yuan ($11,040) per square meter of proposed construction during a land auction, setting a record high. Shanghai-listed Future Land Co Ltd bought the parcel on Thursday for 3.7 billion yuan with a plan to develop residences.
Earlier this month Gree Real Estate Co Ltd bought a land parcel in Shanghai's west suburban Songjiang for 1.965 billion yuan, or 37,674 yuan per square meter, a 109 percent premium over the starting price. Poly Real Estate Group Co Ltd bought a parcel of land in east suburban Shanghai for 5.45 billion yuan, with an average price of 43,607 yuan per square metera 300 percent premium over the starting price.
All these parcels were bought at an average price more than 50 percent higher than already developed properties on sale in the same region, so the estimated price for completed apartments on the purchased land is almost double the current sales price for existing properties.
"Competition for residential supply is quite fierce, which can be reflected in the high premium rate. Every auction attracts more than twenty bidders which means that developers are keen to compete for land. If they do not win in a bid, they may be willing to pay more for the next one," said Lau.
Residential housing prices in Shanghai have surged more than 20 percent in the first quarter of 2016 and authorities have been taking measures to curb speculation. In the second quarter, the average housing price growth in Shanghai was recorded at somewhere between 1 percent and 2 percent, a healthy and stable level, according to market analysts.
Lau said the essential measure for residential market stability and sustainable growth is to provide choices to various segments, from government-sponsored affordable housing for lower-income families to high-end luxury houses for wealthy ones.
More supplies of affordable housing will help meet the demand of average residents, narrowing the gap between supply and demand.
Authorities have also been encouraging developers and real estate owners to transform idle projects into residential projects in order to meet increasing demands for housing in some key cities with fast growing population and high housing prices. More incentives, instead of just encouragement, will be needed because transforming existing buildings into apartments or houses may cost a lot, said Lau.
An ARM and SoftBank Group branded board is displayed at a news conference in London, Britain July 18, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]
SoftBank Group Corp is nearing a deal to buy ARM Holdings Plc for more than $32 billion, people with knowledge of the matter said, securing a slice of virtually every mobile computing gadget on the planet and future connected devices.
The deal discussions started as a result of an approach from SoftBank, and ARM didn't run an auction process, two people said. The deal would be the biggest-ever for SoftBank, which under Chairman Masayoshi Son is one of Japan's most acquisitive companies with stakes in wireless carrier Sprint Corp and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.
A deal would give SoftBank control of a cash-generating mobile chip leader, and a share of revenue in everything from smartphones to connected gadgets in the home. The British semiconductor designer gets royalties when companies from Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co to Qualcomm Inc adopt its designs, which are considered power-saving and efficient.
The Japanese company is also buying into a British currency that's weakened considerably against the yen since the country's decision to depart the European Union. Beyond its sheer scale, the ARM acquisition is unusual for a company that had preferred to take control through hefty stakes in its companies.
"As much as we hated the decision of buying Sprint, we believe if Son wanted to bet on the sterling recovering he picked a great name in the tech sector," said Amir Anvarzadeh, Singapore-based head of Japanese equity sales at BGC Partners Inc.
Bloomberg
Miao Jianmin, president of China Life Insurance (Group) Co. [Photo provided to China Daily]
The financing growth task force of the Business 20 summit will urge G20 leaders to improve supervision of the financial sector, and promote inclusive and green financing to further protect consumers' interests and seek more healthy growth, the task force's chairman said on Monday.
Miao Jianmin, who is also president of China Life Insurance (Group) Co, said his team members are keen to introduce services including mobile banking products and micro insurance, as well as further relaxing financing supply restrictions to encourage financial institutions to provide more support to the real economy.
The B20 is a major supporting facility for the G20. Through task force meetings and summits, the B20 collects the opinions of world business leaders and develops consensus, it then provides policy recommendations to the G20 Summit, contributing to the G20 leaders' decisions.
The financing growth task force has 87 members, including BlackRock Inc, Standard Chartered Bank and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Ltd.
It has drawn up a draft report regarding these issues, which will be approved by the Business 20 summit and submitted to the G20 Summit in Hangzhou in September.
Miao said China Life, one of the country's largest insurance companies by asset volume, has already begun to offer more flexible inclusive financing services such as micro insurance to people who are living under the poverty line in China to gain better assistance when they face health and living difficulties.
Eager to integrate with the government's plan to further cut the number of people who are living in poverty, China Life offers accident, healthcare and disease insurance services to Chinese residents, especially those who are living in rural areas, with a small amount of premium.
China Life's micro insurance now covers more than 34 provinces and major cities, with more than 2.82 million policyholders. It will continue to expand this service during the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20).
"The B20 summit will have six issues on its agenda: financing growth, trade and investment, infrastructure, small and medium-sized enterprise development, employment and anti-corruption," said Yin Zonghua, vice-chairman of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade.
A customer shops near a display of Ferrero Rocher chocolates in a supermarket at the Neglinnaya Plaza shopping center in Moscow, Russia. [Photo/Agencies]
Italian chocolatier Ferrero International SA, the world's third-largest chocolate maker, said it guarantees its products are safe for consumers even though Foodwatch, a private German food watchdog, claimed that Ferrero chocolate bars contain a potentially dangerous chemical.
The Association of the German Confectionary Agency, however, said consumers have no reason to panic and can still purchase the Kinder products, as the chemicals were only found in the packaging, as a result of recycled paper being used.
Foodwatch claimed this month that it has identified the presence of mineral oil aromatic hydrocarbons in Kinder bars, a signature product of Ferrero. The chemical is thought to have cancer-causing effects, The Sun reported.
Ferrero said in its statement that they comply fully with the food safety requirements of all the countries where they are marketed and that all Ferrero packaging fully complies with applicable legislation on materials that contact food.
"Although the recently raised issue of mineral oil traces in food products has been known to the competent authorities and the food industry for several years, there is as yet no specific food safety regulation regarding this matter," the company said in its statement.
Zhou Jie, communication director of Ferrero China, said: "The chemical found on the wrapping comes from the printing on the package and the content is very low. It doesn't have any negative impact on human bodies."
"Actually, minimal traces of mineral oils occur everywhere in the environment. The German government regards the chocolate bar as safe and it didn't require us to pull the products off the shelves. German officials said there is no need to be alarmed," she said.
In fact, discussions about mineral oil in food products have been going on for years. According to research by the European Food Safety Authority in 2012, nearly all food contains some saturated hydrocarbon of mineral oil. Confectionary, canned fish, nuts and ice cream have higher concentrations.
Zhu Yi, a food science professor at China Agricultural University, said: "Currently, we can only say that aromatic hydrocarbon mineral oil may have a potential health harm for people. But, there is no research to prove whether low-content substances have any impact on human bodies."
Ferrero currently claims a commanding 24 percent of the Chinese chocolate confectionery market, according to The Nielsen Co, the global marketing research firm.
In October, the company launched its first East Asian factory in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province, with $300 million, its biggest investment ever.
A bird's-eye view of the world's largest biotech drug production base in Hefei, Anhui province. The facility is shaped in the form of antibody ATCG. [Photo provided to China Daily]
Beijing-based Sinobioway Group Co Ltd, a major biotech company in China, is building the world's largest biotech drug production base at the Bantang township in Hefei, capital of Anhui province in East China.
The facility, shaped in the form of antibody ATCG and to be called the Bantang Bioeconomy Experimental Zone, will have 100 production lines to be completed in 10 to 15 years. The first five lines will be completed by the end of this year.
Work on another 10 will also start later this year, said Cao Wenbo, president of Anhui Sinobioway Bioeconomy Group, a subsidiary of Sinobioway Group.
The zone covers an area of 31 sq km. A 400,000-sq-meter plant is almost ready; the next two phases will take up 600,000 sq m.
Cao said infrastructure excluding the production lines will see an investment of 1.5 billion yuan ($224.3 million), which is being provided by the Hefei government.
Wu Cunrong, Party chief of Hefei city, said: "We believe the biotech drug sector will see enormous growth opportunities in future, so we will surely support such companies."
The company, Cao said, will repay the money in five years "so that we can have more money for mergers and acquisitions. We have enough money to reach the goal."
There are dozens of funds to back the ambitious project, which is expected to cost billions of yuan, he said.
"Instead of starting from the R&D stage, Sinobioway is more interested in buying drug patents and firms at home and abroad. Biotech drug production has been very profitable. But starting everything from R&D will be too time-consuming and risky. You may spend years but get nothing."
He said buying patents and firms will bring the company high profits quickly. During the process, it will also develop its own drugs.
This business model has marked the collaboration between Sinobioway and BioAlta, a San Diego-based company focused on the development of Conditionally Active Biologic antibody therapeutics.
In 2015, the two companies forged a strategic collaboration for the development and commercialization of select CAB antibodies and other CAB-based therapeutics in China. "Production of all the drugs will be based in Hefei," said Cao.
BioAlta would receive more than $70 million in payments and investment from Sinobioway in a year, according to their agreement.
BEIJING - China's television regulator has said it will expedite the integration of TV and radio with new media, setting a target for the country to have a number of competitive multimedia conglomerates by 2020.
The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT) said in a circular on Monday that media organizations should develop multiple integrated and interactive information networks including TV and the Internet, supported by cloud computing and big data.
The SAPPRFT will support the integration through improving laws and regulations and granting preferable market access, according to the circular.
The SAPPRFT said in a separate statement that the current integration of TV, radio and new media is still rudimentary, which falls short of central authorities' requirement and public expectation.
BEIJING - The Ministry of Public Security has promised a series of favorable policies for skilled foreign workers in the pilot free trade zone in South China's Guangdong province.
Among the 16 measures are simplified permanent residence application procedures and fast-track approvals for skilled foreign workers in the zone, support for foreign students' start-ups, accelerated visas and residency application channels for overseas Chinese and lower thresholds for investors in the zone to apply for permanent residency, according to a ministry statement released on Monday.
"These new exit-entry policies and measures are based on the free trade zone's urgent demand for high-caliber foreign talent, overseas Chinese returning to start businesses, young foreign students and investors to realize innovation-driven development of the zone," the ministry said.
Other measures include allowing foreigners who meet salary and taxation standards to apply for permanent residency, a fast track from work permits to permanent residency for high-caliber talent, and visa exemptions for personnel from certain countries within specified times at Guangdong customs.
The measures will take effect on Aug 1, the ministry said.
Wildlife scientists have proved that predators, such as wolves and grizzly bears, enhance the health of ecosystems and prey populations, mainly taking the weak and the sick. Photo by Alamy
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The United States does not have to be party to the anti-predator mania that infects the wildlife management industry in Alaska. The state adopted an Intensive Predator Management program in 1994, and its essentially been treating its moose and caribou like a cattle herd, offering them up to Alaska hunters both resident and non-resident and treating native carnivores such as wolves, bears, and wolverines as game thieves.
This isnt wildlife management its wildlife quackery. Wildlife scientists have proved that predators, such as wolves and grizzly bears, enhance the health of ecosystems and prey populations, mainly taking the weak and the sick. Human hunting and wildlife predation have co-existed for thousands of years. It is not a zero-sum game, where grizzly bears or wolves killing caribou means that hunters do without.
Any decent person should object to Alaskas wildlife management authorities who allow the aerial hunting of grizzly bears, the hunting of wolves and bears during the denning season or during the lactation period, and trapping of grizzly bears and black bears using cruel steel-jawed leghold traps or wire snares. These are all appalling means of killing predators, and they stack the deck even more against animals who are themselves inedible and who enhance the health of the ecosystems they inhabit. Whats more, from an economic perspective, these native carnivores provide a bounty of revenue for the state, drawing millions of tourists for whom the sighting of a bear or wolf is the experience of a lifetime. The states economic analysis on the issue of predator management is upside down, and thats especially obvious now with so much broad public acceptance of predators and our growing fascination with them.
Congressman Don Young, R-Alaska, and some other politicians in the state insist that Alaska can do what it wants under its state constitution, and that somehow the state has primary authority for wildlife management on all federal lands even though Congress enacted the Alaska National Interests Land Conservation Act in 1980 to designate hundreds of millions of acres as protected parks, preserves, and refuges. ANILCA, signed by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, came long before the state-passed Intensive Management Act. This year, the federal government which has unambiguous authority to manage federal lands has proposed two federal rules to stop the worst forms of predator control on 20 million acres of national preserves managed by the National Park Service, and on 76 million acres of national wildlife refuges managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The arguments advanced by Young and the other politicians in the state are without credence, and banging your fist on a lectern in a committee meeting or on the House floor doesnt reshape the legal realities or history.
ANILCA does not grant the State of Alaska any additional authority to manage wildlife on federal lands in Alaska. It expressly provides that Nothing in this Act is intended to enlarge or diminish the responsibility and authority of the State of Alaska for management of fish and wildlife on the public lands 16 U.S.C. 3202(a). After ANILCA, just like before ANILCA, the federal government has the primary and controlling authority for managing wildlife on refuges in Alaska. The legislative history of ANILCA confirms that Congress both intended for USFWS to retain the responsibility for managing wildlife on federal land in Alaska, and that it may do so in order to protect natural diversity.
Both ANILCA and the Improvement Act the 1998 law that reorganized the National Wildlife Refuge System mandate Alaskas federal refuge managers to conserve natural diversity, a value that USFWS and NPS have correctly noted is incompatible with indiscriminate predator culls.
Parts of ANILCA encourage consultation and cooperation between the federal government and local, tribal, and state authorities, but nowhere does it give those other authorities veto power over federal management decisions or require consensus.
Every federal court to consider the question including the Ninth Circuit, which contains Alaska has held that States lack the authority to overrule USFWS management decisions concerning federal refuge management.
If, somehow, the federal agencies are wrong, Alaska can sue to nullify the rules. But I think they know that the case law on the issue gives them virtually no chance of prevailing.
This is just misguided rhetoric about states rights from public officials pandering to a small segment of people who are ruthless toward animals; it is like a state claiming the right to be the last one to allow cockfighting or bullfighting, and to cite culture or state sovereignty as a justification. Aerial hunting, bear snaring, and killing bears and wolves when mothers are nursing their young are all sickening, unfair, unscrupulous, and murderous means of killing predators. They are at odds with any notion of sportsmanship. They are not supported by Alaskans, according to a statewide poll conducted in February and countless prior ones.
The federal government is exercising proper authority, and common decency, in advancing these rules. If the final appropriations legislation for the Interior Department includes the rider that Don Young got into the House bill, President Obama should veto it. The federal government may not be able to stop this kind of unethical and unsustainable behavior on state or private lands. But it has a duty to stop it on two categories of land where wildlife protection has always been a high purpose and a legal responsibility.
Shanghai is planning to upgrade itself comprehensively so as to be competitive globally and on par with New York and London, according to its blueprint for development till 2040.
Shanghai will position itself as a "pioneer" of urban economic powerhouses by developing the Yangtze River Delta as a world-class cluster of cities, according to its development schedule published in June by the National Development and Reform Commission, the country's top economic planner.
The new cluster comprises 26 cities, including Shanghai, and parts of Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui provinces.
The proposed cluster of cities is expected to wield "global influence" by 2030, according to the schedule. Eight cities in Anhui are new members of the cluster.
"The cluster will work together to push forward the integration of the region where capital, talent, technology and innovation can flow freely," said Shanghai Mayor Yang Xiong recently.
To realize this goal, Shanghai will first strengthen coordinated development with its neighboring cities in the fields of economy, infrastructure, environment protection, public services and marketing system.
The three provinces and Shanghai form a region that enjoys the fastest economic growth in the country. With only 16.7 percent of the national population and 3.7 percent of the country's land, the region contributed 21.19 percent of China's GDP, according to the 2016 Shanghai Blue Book released by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.
The GDP per capita in the area surpassed $10,000 in 2014.
Zhou Bo, deputy mayor of Shanghai, said in a group interview in late June that without the cities in the Yangtze River Delta, it would have been impossible for the city to attain its current status as the country's pre-eminent commercial center. Now, Shanghai needs to pay back and provide services to the whole area, he said.
Zhou pointed out that Shanghai is already home to country headquarters of several foreign companies and has attracted huge investments. Through Shanghai, these investments can be channeled to the Yangtze River Delta cluster of cities. "This is a very important function that Shanghai can perform."
Wang Shuwang, deputy general manager of Jee Automation Equipment Co Ltd, a private company based in Hefei, Anhui province, agreed. "Different cities have different functions. Shanghai, for a long time, has been the window on China's internationalization. Many of our clients such as Shanghai Auto Volkswagen are all headquartered in Shanghai."
China National Offshore Oil Corporation's drilling platform in the South China Sea. [Photo/China News Service]
Oil-service and engineering firm sets target of raising 3.1 billion yuan amid sluggish demand
China National Offshore Oil Corporation's oil-service and engineering unit is seeking an initial public offering on the A-share market to pay for its long-term loans amid sluggish oil demand, according to a regulatory filing on the website of the country's securities watchdog.
CNOOC Energy Technology & Services Ltd said it aims to raise about 3.1 billion yuan ($462.8 million), of which 1.5 billion yuan will be used to repay debts from banks as well as its parent company CNOOC, the prospectus on the website of the China Securities Regulatory Commission said.
The Beijing-based company is one of three companies owned by CNOOC in the oilfield service and engineering business sectors. The other two listed companies are China Oilfield Services Ltd and Offshore Oil Engineering Co Ltd.
The business operations of these companies have overlapped, despite the fact that they operate independently, analysts said.
The main activity of Offshore Oil Engineering Co is prospecting and exploration, China Oilfield Services Ltd focuses on oil and gas exploration, while the yet-to-be-listed company engages in oil and gas production with part of its business in exploration.
A senior analyst that China Securities Co Ltd said that overlapping businesses of a listed company under the same parent company would not hinder the listing process, but the downward trend of oil prices as well as the long-term debt of the company would cast a shadow over the potential flotation.
"It is quite common for subsidiaries of large State-owned energy companies to have similar businesses, because it is a monopoly industry," the analyst said. "A possible IPO is not affected by these factors."
An anonymous source said the market potential and the company's profitability are the key elements that will be evaluated by the country's authorities in the process of giving their approval for an IPO.
"It needs at least two years for a final approval, considering the long-waiting list of companies planning IPOs," the source said. "I think there is a good chance that the company will not be able to pass it."
Last year, the firm's debt to equity ratio saw an uptick, taking it to 7 percent higher than the industry average, and the statement said its loan repayment dates were approaching.
The unit needs to pay off a loan of 2.529 billion yuan in 2016, about 859 million yuan in 2017, and 654 million yuan in 2018. Besides it has delayed a debt of 2.937 billion yuan.
The company raked in 3.457 billion yuan in sales last year, a decline of 21.4 percent compared with that of the previous year. Meanwhile, the net income contributed to its parent company was 1.45 billion yuan ($216 million), down 26.9 percent compared with that of the previous year.
Cai Xiao contributed to this story.
A tourist takes photos of the Sangua community. [Photo/VCG]
In a rural area about 70 kilometers from Hefei, capital of Anhui province, lie the villages of Donggua, Nangua and Xigua. Taken literally, their names mean white gourd, pumpkin and watermelon, respectively.
The villages, which neighbor each other, make up the community of Sangua, or three melons, with a registered population of more than 1,400.
"Most of the villagers have left for cities to make a living in the last two decades, but an increasing number of them are returning to their hometowns," said Zhang Yong'an, head of the Sangua community.
"Instead of growing white gourd, pumpkin and watermelon, as many people may suppose, the villagers have mostly been engaged in e-commerce and tourism since last year," said Zhang, adding that the villages have their own strengths.
With a museum and some traditional handicraft workshops, Donggua is a village where tourists can have a better knowledge of the local fork arts. Xigua offers tourists more than 100 restaurants and hotels in slightly renovated farmers' houses.
"The two villages have become popular destinations for the nearby urban residents who want to spend their weekends and holidays in a more relaxed way. Nangua has been visited by even more people online," said Zhang.
Nangua boasts dozens of e-commerce startups. They sell local agricultural products on some national e-commerce platforms, including Taobao.com, Tmall.com, JD.com and WeChat.
Zhang offers an example of how the e-commerce business works in the villages.
The three villages have together 9.3 hectares of peanut fields, with annual output of 35,000 kg. Traditionally, the farmers used to sell the peanuts to crop dealers for 6 yuan ($0.9) to 8 yuan per kg.
Last year, the Sangua community launched a brand of roasted peanuts and made it available on popular online marketplaces.
"We developed the Shanquan Peanuts brand last year by buying the nuts directly from local farmers. We offer them prices 10 to 20 percent higher than that of external dealers," said Chen Pengfei, 33, who leads a team based in the village to develop new agricultural brands and products.
Their peanut products now sell online for nearly 50 yuan for a 300g pack. The products are delivered across China with some major courier firms setting up parcel-collection points in the village.
A train arrives at a station in Sichuan province, December 12, 2014.[Photo/IC]
The Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway, the darling of the country's top operator China Railway Corp, earned 23.4 billion yuan ($3.5 billion) last year, with a net profit of nearly 6.6 billion yuan, the National Business Daily reported on Tuesday.
Net assets of the company's subsidiary that runs the route reached 131.2 billion yuan by the end of 2015, and the debt-to-assets ratio stood at 27.7 percent, the newspaper cited a report released by one of its shareholders.
Although Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway Co Ltd has been vague about its financial performance, industry insiders say it's the only bullet train route in China that made money in the past five years.
The railway carried more than 24 million passengers in just half a year after it started operation in June 2011. In 2015 alone, the number reached nearly 130 million, according to the newspaper citing official statistics.
That means each passenger contributed about 50 yuan to its profit last year, it said.
Analysts said the subsidiary, as the single highest-quality asset of China Railway, is likely to seek initial public offering in the domestic market.
According to media reports, construction of a new high-speed rail connecting Beijing and Shanghai might be in the pipeline in view of the surging number of passengers along the route.
But analysts have dismissed the rumor, saying no exact words related to the plan are seen in the country's 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-30) or the Mid-Term and Long-term Railway Network Development Program during that period.
People visit the stand of Qihoo 360 during the 2015 Appliance and Electronics World Expo in Shanghai, Mar 13, 2015.[Photo/IC]
Norwegian web browser Opera Software ASA said on Monday that it would sell its internet-browser business to a Chinese consortium, Wall Street Journal reported.
The Chinese consortium, led by Kunlun Tech and the Chinese antivirus and search company Qihoo 360, previously had a deal to bid for the entire Norwegian company with a $1.2 billion bid.
However, the bid was terminated Monday after failing to obtain regulatory approvals, according to Opera, declined to specify of which country it lacked governmental approval.
The group will now buy some of the businesses from Opera for $600 million, including its internet browsers, apps such as Performance and Privacy, some technical permissions except Opera TV, and 29.09 percent of the share of a joint venture nHorizon.
The Chinese group is led by Golden Brick Silk Road Fund Management of China, its Yonglian Investment, and Kunlun Tech and Qihoo 360.
Chinese telecommunications company ZTE launched its newest smartphone ZMAX PRO in New York, the United States, July 18, 2016 . [Photo/Xinhua]
NEW YORK - Chinese telecommunications company ZTE launched its newest smartphone ZMAX PRO Monday in New York.
As the latest from its ZMAX lineup, the 6-inch ZMAX PRO features a 13 megapixel camera, a fingerprint sensor, and 3400mAh battery, with a price of $99.
The features have made ZMAX PRO unique for its price range, which has long been the company's goal, combining affordability and technology.
"Our objective is to be able to take feature from our flagship Axon and bring them as quickly as possible to the masses," said Jeff Yee, Vice President of ZTE USA.
Chinese telecommunications company ZTE launched its newest smartphone ZMAX PRO in New York, the United States, July 18, 2016 . [Photo/Xinhua]
The new device can be pre-ordered on MetroPCS starting on Monday.
ZTE, a Chinese multinational telecommunications equipment and systems company headquartered in Shenzhen, Guangdong province in south China, brought its businesses to the US 18 years ago, and has now become the second largest prepaid phone provider, selling 15 million phones in the US in 2015.
Item from July 18, 1984, in China Daily: A medical assistant from Beijing's Hepingli Hospital takes the blood pressure of a stroke victim at his home. In an effort to reduce the pressure on scarce resources, the hospital began a program last April of visiting patients at their homes. ...
The program was originally launched in Beijing in 1982. The Ministry of Public Health is encouraging other regions to follow suit.
China is planning to extend family doctor services nationwide by 2020 to ease the pressure on public hospitals, according to the National Health and Family Planning Commission.
The agency said the service will be available in 200 cities by the end of this year. More than 30 percent of the country's population will be covered by next year.
In addition, dozens of online health services are popping up across China, fueled by strong support from local governments.
A pharmacy model promoted by the US health provider MinuteClinic has been introduced in Jinchang, Gansu province, by the local health authority and AliHealth, a subsidiary of Alibaba.
The program allows doctors to prescribe drugs online that patients can buy at participating drugstores.
One research firm estimates that the online industry will be worth 15.7 billion yuan ($2.35 billion) this year, up from 5 billion yuan in 2011.
The Communist Party of China on Sunday unveiled a full version of an accountability regulation that makes Party officials answerable for poor leadership.
The new regulation introduced an internal Party accountability mechanism to be applied to its members across all levels and divisions.
The regulation holds Party officials responsible for serious consequences caused by negligence or poor work performance. They also are accountable if they make mistakes or lack leadership in dealing with problems or projects, or do not implement the Party's frugality rules.
The rule, approved by the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee on June 28, also makes it clear that leading officials will face punishment according to the severity of their wrongdoing, such as being named and shamed within certain ranks, receiving oral or written warnings, being suspended from their posts, transferred, forced to resign, demoted or dismissed.
The public will be informed of serious cases. Officials will be held responsible for life for serious breaches of duty, even if they have been transferred, promoted or have retired, the regulation says.
Wu Hui, a professor specializing in Party-building at the Party School of the Central Committee of the CPC, spoke highly of the regulation, saying that it is the first time that the Party has created such a rule and specified the conditions for being held accountable.
"It's a further step to strictly govern the Party, followed by revising the Code of Ethics for Party Cadres and the Disciplinary Ordinance last year," he said. "The more specific the rule is, the more effective and practical it will be.
"In the past, we often found problems in the Party, but the responsible officials were seldom blamed," he said. "I believe the situation will be changed under the new rule."
Wu regarded the rule as an external restriction or pressure for Party members, urging them to be strict with themselves.
Xin Ming, another professor with the school, said that the clarification in the rule is timely for the Party, which has a huge number of members.
The latest statistics issued by the central leadership in early July showed that the Party has more than 88 million members.
Xin said the rule has made clear which behaviors will be subject to accountability measures and their corresponding punishments, which is key for its implementation.
Xinhua contributed to this story.
Pilot effort yields positive results; public invited to aid in supervision
The central government has dispatched high-level environmental inspection teams to eight provincial-level regions to scrutinize local authorities' efforts in tackling pollution.
They are the Inner Mongolia, Guangxi Zhuang and Ningxia Hui autonomous regions, and Heilongjiang, Jiangsu, Jiangxi, Henan and Yunnan provinces.
Inspections have already begun in seven of the regions and are expected to start soon in Heilongjiang.
This first batch of inspections follows a pilot that was completed in heavily industrialized Hebei province in February. Inspectors will cover 14 provincial-level regions this year and expand to the whole country within two years.
During the pilot, the inspection team exposed 2,856 instances of problems related to pollution, ranging from ineffective enforcement of laws and regulations to rapid ecological degradation. In total, 200 companies were shut down and 123 people were detained.
Hebei has also released a targeted plan to tackle the problems and sources of pollution exposed by the inspection. It said in an official statement that the inspectors' visit facilitated its environmental improvement efforts.
Wu Xinxiong, who led the inspection team in Yunnan province, said on Friday that the experiences of inspectors in Hebei will help with future inspections.
All teams have been staffed with ministerial leaders, including three deputy environmental protection ministers.
They will focus on pollution problems reported by the public and supervise the provincial and city governments' efforts to control environmental degradation, according to statements made by the team leaders.
Li Jiheng, the top official of Yunnan, promised to fully support the inspectors' work and treat the experience as an opportunity to reexamine the province's pollution-control measures.
Hotlines and mailboxes have been set up to receive reports from the public. The inspection teams will carry out field investigations and talk to concerned individuals and companies.
Their findings will be submitted to the central government, and form a key aspect of senior officials' performance assessments.
Commander of the Chinese Navy, Admiral Wu Shengli (right), points out the layout of the Chinese Navy Headquarters to Admiral John Richardson, US chief of naval operations, during a welcoming ceremony in Beijing on Monday.[Photo/Agencies]
China's naval chief told a visiting US Navy officer on Monday that Beijing "will never give up halfway" the construction of its islands in the South China Sea.
Admiral Wu Shengli, commander of the People's Liberation Army Navy, also told Admiral John Richardson, US chief of naval operations, that the Chinese Navy has made "sufficient preparations" to deal with any sovereignty infringement or provocation.
Despite negative factors, Beijing is still willing to peacefully resolve disputes via negotiations and "manage and control crisis through rules and mechanisms", Wu said.
Washington has militarily pressured Beijing this year by sending military ships and planes to approach or intrude on Chinese territorial space in the South China Sea.
Wu said any attempt to intimidate China by flexing military muscle "will only backfire".
Beijing will "advance and complete island and reef construction as planned", no matter which country or individual pressures China to do otherwise, and "the level of our defense on these islands and reefs depends on the threats facing us", Wu said.
Richardson began his first visit to China on Sunday and will stay until Wednesday.
He told Wu in Beijing on Monday that he is ready to join hands in boosting trust and friendship to achieve lasting development of ties between the two navies, militaries and countries.
Fan Jishe, a US researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the US "has played a negative role in the South China Sea disputes, and its proactive engagement in the Asia-Pacific region has aggravated conflicts".
Zuo Xiying, an international studies specialist at Renmin University of China, said the South China Sea has become the forefront of China-US competition, and "it would be a good thing if they reinforce strategic communication and formulate more rules accepted by both".
Su Ge, president of the China Institute of International Studies, told the World Peace Forum in Beijing over the weekend that "although cooperation between Beijing and Washington cannot end all the issues in the world, not a single major issue could be resolved if the two sides walk into full-scale confrontation".
On Monday, Chinese Air Force spokesman Shen Jinke said the PLA Air Force recently conducted a combat readiness patrol in the South China Sea, including sending its H-6K bombers to patrol around Huangyan Island.
Such combat readiness patrols in the South China Sea "will continue on a regular basis", Shen said.
Meanwhile, a navigation alert issued on Monday at the website of China's Maritime Safety Administration said military activities will be conducted from Tuesday to Thursday in designated waters in the South China Sea.
The alert gave coordinates to define the designated area in which entry by other vessels will be prohibited. The area is southeast of Hainan Island.
BEIJING -- The number of permanent residents in six core districts in Beijing is expected to drop for the first time this year, as the overcrowded capital seeks to control population growth.
Officials of Dongcheng, Xicheng, Chaoyang, Haidian, Fengtai and Shijingshan districts proposed goals and measures to limit population growth at a meeting on the removal of non-essential functions from Beijing, held Thursday.
The measures include crackdowns on subletting of residential and commercial property, illegal use of underground space for residence, illegal transformation of homes into shops, and closure of wholesale markets, among others.
In Dongcheng district,for example, the Donghuamen snacks market has been recently closed. Nanluoguxiang Lane, known for its well-preserved quadrangle courtyards, and Gui Jie, a street of popular restaurants, and areas surrounding the Palace Museum will be among priority areas where measures will be taken to reduce the population density.
The district aims to reduce its permanent resident population by 32,000 this year.
Beijing plans to cap its permanent population at 23 million by 2020, with the population in six core districts 15 percent less than 2014 levels.
Defined as people who have lived in the city for six months or more, the permanent population of Beijing was 21.7 million by the end of 2015.
Elizabeth Truss, then British parliamentary undersecretary of state for education and childcare, looks on as two students demonstrate math skills in a primary school in Shanghai during an exchange program in 2014. [Photo/Xinhua]
The Chinese "mastery approach" to math teaching is set to roll out in more than 8,000 primary schools in the United Kingdom, with funding of up to 41 million pounds ($54.3 million), to bring pupils up to par with their Asian counterparts.
Children as young as 5 will be required to practice sums and exercises, and they must master each concept before moving on to more difficult material.
The move comes after international tests showed that Shanghai students ranked on top for math in the Program for International Student Assessment in 2012, and 15-year-olds in China are three years ahead of their English counterparts in their ability to solve math problems.
Since then, Britain, whose students ranked 26th that year, has welcomed over 120 teachers from Shanghai to share the secrets of their success in the project, which the British media have dubbed "Shanghai Maths".
Speaking at the Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education last week, Nick Gibb, the UK schools minister, said the Shanghai style of math should become a standard fixture in England.
"We are seeing a renaissance in maths teaching in this country, with good ideas from around the world helping to enliven our classrooms.
"The significant expansion of the south Asian (including Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong) maths mastery approach can only add to the positive momentum, with thousands more young people having access to specialist teachers and quality textbooks," the minister added.
Gibb is confident that the efforts will ensure young people are properly prepared for further study and that the too-often heard phrase "can't do math" is consigned to the past.
Lyu Jiexin from Shanghai Normal University, also a senior coordinator of China-UK math exchange programs, believes the new policy is not a mere copying of Chinese math teaching, but is instead a part of the British government's overhaul to improve the standards of math education.
With the growing influence of the international test, more countries are learning from the top performing nations in a bid to improve the competitiveness of their education systems, Lyu said.
"The plan reflects the government's full commitment to its math reform and demonstrates the important role that education exchange and collaboration play in that regard," he added.
However, some critics were skeptical of the program, worrying that the students will not be able to master fundamental ideas merely through drills and repetition.
Charlie Stripp, director at the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics, said teaching math mastery is not about rote learning and drilling, although it certainly results in pupils knowing and being able to recall multiplication tables and other key number facts. This represents an important foundation for learning and using math, Stripp said.
"Teaching for mastery focuses on deep conceptual learning, developing secure foundations that pupils can build on throughout their education. When a piece of mathematics has been 'mastered', it can be used as a foundation for new mathematical learning. Superficial learning in mathematics produces weak foundations, which can result in insecure learning and confusion," he added.
Mao Zedong in Red Army's uniform
BEIJING -- More than 50 rare historic photos were included in the latest Chinese republication of "Red Star over China," American journalist Edgar Snow's book that introduced the Communist Party of China (CPC) to the world in the 1930s.
The book was recently reprinted by the People's Literature Publishing House (PLPH) to commemorate the Long March as this year marks the 80th anniversary of its victory.
The 12,500-km trek, from October 1934 to October 1936, was a military maneuver carried out by the Red Army, the forerunner of the People's Liberation Army, to combat the Kuomintang regime. The forced expedition eventually laid an important foundation for the Communist victory in the civil war.
Edgar Snow and his wife, Helen Snow
Born in 1905, Snow came to China in 1928. He met CPC leaders such as Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai at the CPC revolutionary base in northwest China's Shaanxi in 1936. He was the first western journalist to interview Mao and other CPC leaders.
Residents contend with water in Zhangjiajie, Hunan province, on Monday, after the city was hit by torrential rain.GUO LILIANG/CHINA DAILY
North China will be battered by heavy rainfall until Wednesday, while storms in the Yangtze River Basin continue, according to forecasts.
The heaviest rain will fall from Monday evening until Tuesday in some areas north of the Yangtze River. Some areas will receive up to 200 millimeters of precipitation, according to a forecast of the China Meteorological Administration.
Beijing will experience thunderstorms and heavy rain from Tuesday to Wednesday, the forecast said.
It also said rainstorms in several provinces in the Yangtze River Basin will continue, putting great pressure on flood prevention in trunk streams and branches of the Yangtze.
Starting on Sunday, discharge volume from the Three Gorges Dam was increased gradually, which increases the amount of water flowing into Dongting Lake, which acts as a floodwater reservoir.
On Sunday, a subway line under construction was flooded in Wuhan, Hubei province. The construction site is only 300 meters from the Hanjiang River, the longest branch of the Yangtze.
According to local media, the water level at the construction site was 1 to 1.5 meters, and up to 1,000 workers labored to ensuring the safety of the subway tunnel.
The situation was reported to be almost under control as of Monday morning.
Fujian meteorological authorities issued an alert on Monday as torrential rain is expected in three cities in the province. The authorities also called for precautionary measures against landslides.
houliqiang@chinadaily.com.cn
Several ministries and departments of the State Council, China's Cabinet, have responded to public concerns in the past week over the state of the economy and healthcare reform, among other issues.
Questions for the National Development and Reform Commission, the nation's top economic planner, were focused on balancing economic growth by cutting overcapacity, in light of a better than predicted 6.7 percent growth in GDP for the second quarter of the year, as reported by the National Bureau of Statistics.
Rising coal and steel prices, in particular, have prompted some to fear that coal enterprises might be encouraged to increase production, which is contrary to the ongoing process of cutting overcapacity.
Zhao Chenxin, spokesman for the NDRC, responded that China's steel supply as a whole is in surplus because the economy has entered the "new normal", while demand for coal is limited because of the use of new, clean energy; therefore the market is still in a position to force steel and coal companies to cut over-capacity.
"All departments should look at the bigger picture and be determined to cut over-capacity," he said, adding that the State will further improve market regulation and propel forward the comprehensive cutting of overcapacity.
He also said he was optimistic that the task of cutting raw steel and coal production by 45 million and 250 million tons, respectively, would be completed by the end of the year. He called on local governments to increase efficiency in this regard.
Private investment increased by 3.9 percent in the first six months of the year, 6.2 percentage points lower than the same period last year.
When responding to a question about this drop, Zhao said the State Council had sent nine inspection teams to 18 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, which visited more than 500 non-State enterprises. On July 1, the State Council issued a new notice about encouraging private investment, which will be crucial in the coming months.
The National Health and Family Planning Commission shared information about the progress being made in healthcare reform. Yao Jianhong, a senior official in charge of reform at the commission, said that 11 provinces were pioneering the reform, which was going smoothly so far.
Zhu Shufang, head of the Health and Family Planning Commission in South China's Fujian province, said healthcare reform had been accelerated last year, leading to satisfying results. The average pay of medical staff increased, while the price of medicines has fallen, both of which have been welcomed by local residents.
The Ministry of Environmental Protection responded to a media inquiry about several provinces failing to properly deal with waste disposal in rural regions. There have been reports of garbage piling up without being properly processed in Shandong, Guangdong, Hainan and Shaanxi provinces.
Tian Weiyong, an official in charge of environmental inspection at the ministry, said they had already urged local governments to deal with waste disposal in the correct way. The long-term disposal processing mechanism is also being upgraded in rural areas, so that the problem will not be repeated in the future, Tian said.
zhangzhouxiang@chinadaily.com.cn
Vets feed Lili, a red-crowned crane with broken beak, at an animal hospital in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, on July 5, 2016. The crane had broken its upper beak when it fought with other cranes in early June. [Photo/VCG]
Private and semi-public businesses are being encouraged to invest in the key projects to be launched during China's 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-20), and the interests and legitimate rights of investors should be protected, Premier Li Keqiang has said.
"Conditions permitting, we should innovate methods to attract 'social investment' to these projects," Li told a meeting on Monday in Beijing attended by senior officials of some provinces and State Council departments.
The premier's remarks reflected his solutions to the knotty issue of the slowing growth momentum of investment by private enterprises. Officials have blamed the slowdown on the sluggish world economy, downward domestic pressure and overcapacity in some industries.
Private fixed-asset investment, which accounts for more than 60 percent of the country's total investment, slowed to a record low in the first half of the year, with growth sliding to 2.8 percent from double digits last year.
Li cautioned that a continued slump in private investment growth could spoil the country's efforts to maintain economic growth within the targeted range 6.5 to 7 percent for the year and to optimize the economic structure in coming years.
He called for innovation in investment modes and a ramping up of price reforms.
In particular, he said the Public-Private-Partnership financing mode should be promoted to divert more social funds to education, medical care, elderly care and other service sectors, as well as to infrastructure.
"While making use of the government funds, which are limited in amount, we must enhance the guidance of the flow of social funds," he said, adding that efforts must be made to prevent such funds from going to sectors that are beleaguered by overcapacity and are polluting the environment.
Boosting effective investment will have a wide range of influences, including promoting consumption and creating jobs, the premier said.
Li Jinbin, governor of Anhui province in East China, said at the meeting that many private enterprises had intended to invest in strategic new industries and public services that promise stable or high returns. However, Li said, investor access to these sectors remained difficult.
In response, the premier said market entrance barriers of all forms must be removed, discrimination eliminated, and costs cut for private and semi-public companies to invest. He also asked governments to repay their debts to companies.
In addition, stronger financial support should be given to small and micro enterprises.
The premier also said there is enough space for investment in China, given the enormous domestic demands.
Overall fixed-asset investment, a gauge of infrastructure spending, slowed further in the first half to 9 percent, the lowest growth rate in years.
Contact the writers at zhao-huanxin@chinadaily.com.cn
"If we incite people to do good by issuing decrees and meting out punishment, all we shall do is create those who fear the stick rather than those who revere doing right; but if we lead people on a just path with morality, we will breed a people imbued with an awareness of shame and they will submit themselves to governance."
Although those words were uttered by the Chinese sage Confucius about 2,500 years ago, they still have great resonance today, especially for the inmates of Yunhe prison in Shandong province.
In the past 24 years, more than 3,200 prisoners have "graduated" from the Yunhe Confucius Distance Learning College, which offers courses that expound on the sage's philosophy and are designed to rehabilitate offenders and prepare them for life outside prison. So far, about 1,000 of the graduates have found work in the low-end technology sector.
The college has distilled the basic concepts of the philosophy into 14 classes, one for each of the known works of Confucius, and it takes about two years to complete the entire course of study. The emphasis is placed firmly on restoring the inmates' sense of right and wrong.
Inmates: Philosophy prepares prisoners for freedom
The prison college, established in 1992, was the first of its kind in China. In addition to lectures by prison officers and online classes, Confucian scholars from across the country are invited to visit the prison once a month and teach classes for three days.
"If the prisoners sit around without doing anything, they are likely to get into fights. The idea of providing higher education was the result of a debate about how to make the best use of their time," said Liu Dengcai, the prison's deputy governor.
Although the Confucius teaching project has won plaudits from educationalists and penal experts, when the founders decided to turn their idea into reality, they had a hard time persuading institutions to provide teachers.
"The teachers feared the prisoners would be unwilling to learn anything they taught," said Liu Dengcai, deputy governor of Yunhe prison, Shan-dong province.
Having discussed the idea with a number of colleges and universities in Shandong, Liu and his colleagues eventually decided to work with Qufu Normal University, which provided intellectual support.
Working with university teachers, the prison officers adapted the sage's teachings to produce new textbooks that would make it easier for inmates to grasp the basic concepts of Confucianism.
Liu believes prison mangers need to understand the maxim: "Strict punishment and lenient treatment should be complementary to each other in order to maintain good governance."
For the prisoners, one overarching Confucian concept concerning the production of moral individuals is perfect for educational purposes. It requires people to display benevolence, righteousness and propriety, in addition to trustworthiness, loyalty and filial piety.
"I will never forget a lecture given by Bao Pengshan, a renowned scholar of Confucianism. He told us a great man should be one who is able to rectify his mistakes," said "Hao Xue" (his name has been changed to protect his privacy), an inmate who completed the course in Yunhe in 2010. "Bearing this line in mind, I want to reshape my personality and try to be a man of noble character."
Rehabilitation
According to Liu, the nation has a high number of convicted offenders, which means prisons are crowded and maintaining order can be a challenge. Despite that, the courses in Confucianism remain a cornerstone of the approach to rehabilitation in Yunhe prison.
"Most importantly, our main task is to re-educate the prisoners and place them firmly back on the right track," he said.
In 2008, the college achieved a major breakthrough when it was authorized to act as an exam center for students who are unable to take exams in the normal way. Inmates can take the national "self-taught" exam for those outside the formal education system while in prison, and the credits they gain can be used as evidence of a reformed character when the authorities are considering the reduction of their sentence.
In recent years, the success of the Yunhe project has prompted six other rehabilitation centers to offer similar courses. The latest was established at Luzhong prison, in central Shandong, in May.
One of the essential Confucian concepts emphasizes conscientious ethical behavior to cultivate close, loving relationships, especially between families, friends and neighbors, according to Wang Hanyu, a lecturer who has taught Confucian philosophy at a number of corrective centers and prisons in the province.
The practice of educating inmates through moral teaching rather than punishment accord with a resurgence of Confucian thought in modern society.
Wang, who is also deputy secretary-general of the Research Society on Confucius Business Theory in Shandong, believes the Chinese word xiao, which means "filial piety", is an important component of the concept that underpins family relationships.
"The concept is firmly rooted in the minds of every person in China and has been adopted by most households nowadays. It has a huge bearing on every inmate too. It makes it easier for people to empathize with the prisoners, which in turn helps them to return to their families and reintegrate into society when they are released from prison," she said.
Li Xiang (his name has been changed to protect his privacy), an inmate at Yunhe who completed the two-year course in 2012, said he has benefited from the courses. "I've learned the way a person should behave. As the philosopher said, Do not do to others what you do not want others to do to you'," he said.
"The words of the Master have taught me how to treat other people and how to be tolerant in daily life. I want to make reparation to those I hurt before and try my best to repay those who have helped me to rebuild my life."
Liu Fengguang, professor of Confucianism at Qufu Normal University, gives a lecture on Confucius' teachings in Yunhe prison in 2011. photos provide to China Daily
A mother with her son at Yunhe prison in September 2011 .
Inmates at Yunhe prison leave after a class in the four-story teaching building in the prison compound. In recent years, about 200 inmates have enrolled in the Yunhe Confucius Distance Learning College every year.
Sage words of an ancient master
Lead them by means of regulations and keep order among them through punishments, and the people will evade them and will lack any sense of shame. Lead them through moral force (de) and keep order among them through rites (li), and they will have a sense of shame and will also correct themselves.
Wealth and honor are what people desire, but one should not abide in them if it cannot be done in accordance with the Way. Poverty and lowliness are what people dislike, but one should not avoid them if it cannot be done in accordance with the Way. If the noble person rejects humaneness, how can he fulfill that name? The noble person does not abandon humaneness for so much as the space of a meal. Even when hard-pressed he is bound to it, bound to it even in time of danger.
If the noble person is not serious, he will not inspire awe, nor will his learning be sound. One should abide in loyalty and trustworthiness and should have no friends who are not his equal. If one has faults, one should not be afraid to change.
One who is not humane is able neither to abide for long in hardship nor to abide for long in joy. The humane find peace in humaneness; the knowing derive profit from humaneness.
From: Sources of Chinese Tradition, compiled by Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999)
Who was Confucius? "Confucius" (551-479 BC) is the Latinized version of Kong Fuzi, or "Master Kong". His real name was Kong Qiu, and he lived during the Spring and Autumn Period (770-476 BC) when the Zhou kingdom had disintegrated into many de facto independent feudal states which were subject to the Zhou kings in theory only. Like many other members of the educated elite, Confucius traveled widely among the states, offering his services as a political advisor and official to feudal rulers and teaching to earn a living. Although his career as a petty bureaucrat was unsuccessful, Confucius left his mark as a teacher and philosopher. A few generations after Confucius' death, first- and second-generation students collected accounts of his teachings and philosophical musings to form the basis of his most famous work, which is widely known in English as The Analects. In his work, Confucius argued strongly in favor of family loyalty, that children should respect their elders and wives respect their husbands, and that good people should worship their ancestors. From this base, he further propounded his belief that the family unit was the perfect template for successful government. While many people in China regard Confucianism as a quasi-religion, scholars are divided: some believe that the values he espoused were too secular to allow them to harbor religious undertones, while others argue that the secular nature of his work overshadows the fact that it contains many religious themes. Some academics argue that although Confucius discusses the afterlife and speaks vaguely of a place that could be interpreted as a form of heaven, he rarely talks about spirituality in the accepted modern sense.
Contact the writer at zhang_yi@chinadaily.com.cn
Hu Rujia at the graduation ceremony of Columbia University when she was seven-month pregnant in May 2015. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]
Many overseas returnees come back with knowledge, ambition and a vision. Besides all these, a 24-year-old alumna of Columbia University arrived in Shanghai with another precious thing in life, her three-month-old son.
What's more unusual, at least in Chinese context, is that instead of finding a job in the finance sector like most of her peers, Hu Rujia decided to be stay-at-home mother.
From traditional Chinese perspective, a well-educated woman, especially someone who has graduated from a prestigious university, should not be a full-time housewife.
Even the word "housewife" in Chinese is mostly used in a negative sense.
But Hu views it differently, a change she calls the biggest mental transformation she experienced thanks to her stint abroad.
So why did Hu decided to come back to China? And how did the foreign education change her perspective on life, career and parenting?
Hu shares this and much more in an interview with chinadaily.com.cn.
A stage photo of The Peony Pavilion. [Photo/ chncpa.org]
"The year 2016 marks the 400th anniversary of the deaths of the Chinese playwright Tang Xianzu in the Ming Dynasty and his British counterpart William Shakespeare. In order to better know each other, China and Britain may jointly commemorate the two literary giants," said Chinese President Xi Jinping during his state visit to the UK in 2015.
In response, commemorations for the 400th anniversary since the deaths of the two playwrights were held by the Ministry of Culture to promote Chinese tradition. As part of the commemorations, outstanding theatrical performances opened at the National Centre for the Performing Arts on July 16. Minister of Culture Luo Shugang addressed the opening ceremony, presided over by Vice-Minister Dong Wei. The audience then watched the Kunqu Opera The Handan Dream, presented by the Shanghai Kunqu Opera Troupe.
"Kunqu Opera is one of the Chinese traditional dramas. Given its over 600-year history, it is hailed as the ancestor of all plays. In May, 2001, it was listed among the first world oral and intangible cultural heritages. We Chinese should chew on President Xi's speech at the Forum on Literature and Art and develop our nation's traditional culture. In the world of Chinese opera, more talents and great productions are beneficial to the formation of an opera-friendly society. At the end of the day, everyone is making contribution to the realization of the Chinese Dream with a moderately prosperous society and the rejuvenation of Chinese nation at the core," Luo said.
There will be eleven performances at the National Centre for the Performing Arts. A total of seven dramas will be presented by four Kunqu Opera troupes. Surprisingly, the Shanghai Kunqu Opera Troupe will be the first to stage Tang Xianxu's Four Dreams of Linchuan, including four classic plays The Peony Pavilion, The Southern Tributary State, The Handan Dream and The Purple Hairpin. It is one of the latest achievements in protecting and supporting Kunqu art and the fruit of Kun artists' innovation and creativeness. By September 5, the Northern Kunqu Opera Theatre, Sunzhou Kunqu Opera Theatre and Jiangsu Performing Arts Group will perform Four Dreams of Linchuan, as well.
The commemorations consist of a symposium on Tang Xianzu, a China-UK forum on Tang and Shakespeare and a display of Tang's works under the auspice of the China Cultural Center.
Liars lie all the way ... Either RNC or DNC, big liars lead little liars to lie/twist facts toward/serving their own purpose to make a political point, to score big for getting voters. So misleading!
They thought they can get away with their lying - Yes, they did all the time suitable for some emotion-packed hardcore fans - are you one of those? Never want to know the truth but wanna inteprete your own dream. Cold facts? Like running through the back of a duck - nothing lasts, even though facts lie down on your finger tips, below if you will.
If caught red handed, joke away - Can you take a joke? It's a joke; it doesn't mean anything ! So, never admit any thing wrong !
Issues? yes, both said.
Solutions? Neither said much practical, workable, visionary, appealing enough to voters.
More Stories From NPR
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FACT CHECK: The First Night Of The Republican National Convention
i toggle caption Joe Raedle/Getty Images Joe Raedle/Getty Images National security was front and center during the Republican National Convention's first night of programming. Speaker after speaker bashed President Obama and his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, for the Obama administration's approach to fighting ISIS, immigration policies, and the 2012 attacks on diplomatic compounds in Benghazi, Libya. Here are the facts and context behind several high-profile claims in Monday's speeches. The ISIS Terrorism Threat "According to the FBI, ISIS is present in all 50 states. Think about it for a moment. Terrorists from ISIS are in every one of our 50 states," said Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst. That's not quite what FBI Director James Comey has said. Earlier this year he told law enforcement officials that FBI agents "have investigations of people in various states of radicalizing in all 50 states." Comey has called the threat of domestic terrorism radicalization a "50 state problem," but those investigations are a far cry from ISIS terrorist cells across the country. The Benghazi 'Stand Down' Order Multiple speakers including the mother of a man killed in the incident criticized Clinton for how she handled the 2012 attacks on United States diplomatic compounds in Benghazi, Libya. "Benghazi was about opportunities," said Mark Geist, a member of the security team that tried to fight back against the attacks. "Opportunities taken when we defied the stand-down orders. And opportunities squandered when Hillary failed to protect her people on the ground." There have been numerous government investigations into what went wrong that night in September 2012. It's clear there were multiple failures of intelligence, of logistics, of communication. A 2014 Senate Intelligence Report determined the attacks "were likely preventable." But there's been no evidence uncovered of a direct order to "stand down" from mounting a defense of the facilities. The Washington Post pulled the key passage from the House Intelligence Committee's 2014 report: "The evidence ... provides no support for the allegation that there was any stand-down order. Rather, there were mere tactical disagreements about the speech with which the team should depart prior to securing additional security assets." Clinton And 'Open Borders' "You know Donald Trump will secure our borders," former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said Monday night. "His opponent has had her chance to do that, and she has failed. Hillary Clinton is for open borders." Clinton has supported proposals for tighter border security over the course of her career, but she and Trump do have starkly different views on immigration and immigration reform. Clinton supported the Obama administration's executive actions providing temporary relief for people living in the country illegally with children. (The U.S. Supreme Court blocked the centerpiece of this executive program last month.) PolitiFact took a look at other immigration proposals Clinton has supported or opposed and rates Giuliani's claim as false.
http://www.npr.org/2016/07/19/486599356/fact-check-the-first-night-of-the-republican-national-convention
John McLean works in his studio in London. The British abstract painter's works are now on display in Beijing. Photos provided to China Daily
British curator Philip Dodd brings John McLean's works to Beijing, in ongoing effort to have more Western artists shown in China, Lin Qi reports.
After helping stage Irish-American artist Sean Scully's second China show in April, British curator Philip Dodd is now presenting Scottish abstract painter John McLean's works in Beijing.
Like Singing and Dancing, McLean's retrospective being shown at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, has dozens of his paintings since the 1960srich in colorful shapes and inspired by music.
The artist once said that although abstract, his works are mostly affected by natural light.
McLean couldn't attend the opening ceremony on June 30 due to poor health. But he talked about his artistic concept in an email from London: "When a bird sings, no one asks what it means. In that sense, my paintings have the same meaning as a bird's (song)."
For Dodd, 67, Scully and McLean are Western artists he believes can connect with Chinese artists and viewers as their creations are influenced by Asian cultures. While Scully is a karate black belt, McLean's brushstrokes reflect his understanding of Korean ceramic-making techniques.
Dodd, who has been assisting Sino-European cultural exchanges since the late 1990s, sees the two artists as significant to building ties between China and the West.
He Yunchang in his 72-hour-long performance called Longevity Nut in Beijing. Photos Provided to China Daily
He Yunchang has three obsessions - unusual art, cigarettes and video games.
The first defines his work, while the second and third can be considered his life-style. He has developed varicose veins from playing online games for hours. What's more? He isn't interested in getting treated. "The doctor said I needed 10 injections. It's a headache."
But he embraces pain, both physical and mental, while creating as long as it doesn't kill him, which he says is the "bottom line" of performance art, his field. Agonies of varying degrees are the hallmark of his output.
The 49-year-old Beijing-based artist exhibits a self-tortured style of performance and sells related photos, videos and paintings.
His latest work is a 72-hour-long performance called Longevity Nut staged at a grand retrospective of his art, titled A Chang, currently on at Beijing's Today Art Museum.
At the exhibition's opening on July 8, some 250 kilograms of peanuts that had been soaked in water for days were put in containers on the ground and covered with a sheet of gauze.
In the middle stood a plexiglass table on which he spent the following three days, waiting for the peanuts to sprout - once germinated they are called "longevity nuts" in China because of their health benefits.
He neither ate or drank but survived on a method of qi gong fasting.
Having remained at large in Peru for 18 years, Huang Haiyong, who is suspected of involvement in smuggling and tax evasion, was brought back to China on Sunday, the first case of successful extradition of a criminal suspect from Latin America to China.
In 2001, at the request of Chinese authorities, Interpol issued a global arrest warrant for Huang. He was caught in Peru by Interpol in 2008 and China held negotiations with the Peruvian authorities to repatriate him.
Huang's repatriation once again demonstrates China's law enforcement authorities' firm resolve to track down any fugitives and bring them to justice.
It is the result of coordinated efforts by China's judicial, diplomatic and customs departments in the context of the central authorities' escalated crackdown on corrupt officials, including those who have fled abroad, and will offer precious experience for similar cooperation between China and other countries.
For many years, Huang had convinced Peruvian authorities that he would face the risk of execution or torture if repatriated to China. Peru's final nod to Huang's repatriation indicates that China has reached consensuses on combating cross-border crimes with an increasing number of countries.
Since March last year, when China launched an escalated campaign to pursue fugitive corrupt officials, nearly one-third of the top 100 most-wanted fugitives have already been captured and brought back to China. Such kind of breakthrough progress in its judicial cooperation with foreign countries will be a deterrent to potential corrupt officials who attempt to use certain foreign countries as safe harbors to escape their due punishments in China.
The perseverance the authorities have shown in bringing the suspects back so they can be held accountable for their crimes shows the determination to smash any possible illusion that foreign countries may be viewed as havens by criminals.
The US Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Lassen sails in the Pacific Ocean in a November 2009 photo provided by the US Navy. [Photo/Agencies]
The ongoing three-day visit by US Chief of Naval Operations John Richardson to China, which started on Sunday, comes at a sensitive time, following an arbitral tribunal ruling last week that seeks to invalidate China's historic claims in the South China Sea.
The impulse of the United States and some of its allies, such as Japan, is to insist the ruling is legally binding and to enforce it with patrols in the name of "freedom of navigation".
But using military force to make China succumb to "a scrap of paper" that it neither accepts nor acknowledges will be of no avail. Although China desires peace and is committed to peaceful settlement to the South China Sea disputes, there will be no room for compromise on an issue that concerns its core national interests.
So the Chinese navy must be ready for any military provocations that challenge the country's sovereignty.
The US continues to stir up trouble by pointing accusing fingers at China's reclamation work on its islands and reefs, claiming it is militarizing the region.
Beijing insists the projects are for civilian purposes and the public good, and says it has exercised restraint when the US has repeatedly and provocatively sent its warships near and around its islands in so-called freedom of navigation patrols.
What China's next step will be in regard to its island reclamation work will depend on how serious its interests there are threatened. Saber rattling or use of force will definitely draw tit-for-tat responses.
Yet China has reiterated it safeguards freedom of navigation and overflight in the South China Sea and does not seek to challenge US primacy in the Asia-Pacific.
This is the foundation for both sides to seek a peaceful solution to the South China Sea issue, which can be achieved through face-to-face communications.
Sino-US military interactions have become more mature and professional, especially after the signing of rules of behavior for the safety of air and maritime encounters in 2014.
Undoubtedly, Richardson's sitting down together with his Chinese counterpart, Admiral Wu Shengli, commander of the Chinese navy, and exchanging views even disagreements is conducive to finding out how the two navies can manage the risks that may result from escalated tensions in the region.
This is an issue of increasing urgency. Neither side can afford any miscalculation or misjudgment, for it could pit them against each other militarily.
Hopefully, Richardson will get the message.
Mary Kane (center), president and CEO of Sister Cities International, blows out birthday candles marking the 60th anniversary of her organization at a reception at the Chinese embassy in Washington on July 15. Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser (right) and Minister Li Kexin of the Chinese embassy look on. The reception also featured photo shows and performances. Chen Weihua / China Daily
The relationship between China and the United States could often look depressing if people just read the headlines and listen to the rhetoric by US presidential candidates. But that clearly does not reflect the correct picture at the subnational level.
When Sister Cities International (SCI), a Washington DC-based non-profit organization, celebrated its 60th anniversary in a grand reception at the Chinese embassy on the evening of July 15, it displayed an important dimension of the bilateral relationship that rarely makes for sexy headlines.
Mary Kane, president and CEO of SCI, reminded the more than 400 participants from around the world of the story of one of its famous alumni, President Xi Jinping.
Xi first visited the US in 1985 at the age of 27, going to Muscatine, Iowa, under a sister-city relationship between Iowa and North China's Hebei province. He was then the head of Zhengding county in Hebei and went to Iowa on an agricultural research trip.
"They have been the strongest sister cities ever since," Kane said of the relationship between Hebei and Iowa, set up in 1983.
When Xi visited the US in February 2012 as China's vice-president, he returned to Muscatine to meet his old friends.
In September 2015, when Xi paid a state visit to the US as China's president, he first went to the state of Washington, and made a trip to Tacoma's Lincoln High School to talk to the students.
Tacoma has had a sister-city relationship with Fuzhou, in East China's Fujian province, since 1994. Xi was the Party secretary of Fuzhou in the early 1990s and later became the governor of Fujian province.
"But tonight we are here to sing Happy Birthday to Sister Cities International. It has been six decades, six wonderful decades of peace through people," Kane said.
Her words were followed by song, and a birthday cake soon was cut by her, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser and Minister Li Kexin of the Chinese embassy.
The sister-city relationship has blossomed in the past four decades, with Chinese cities and provinces setting up 2,315 pairs of such relationships in 134 countries. That includes 258 with localities in the US.
Bowser, who took office in January 2015, talked about how her first international trip was leading a DC delegation to Beijing last November. Beijing and Washington established their sister-city tie in 1984.
"And I have to tell you that the mayor of Beijing, the Friendship Association, and all of the people in Beijing rolled out the red carpet for us," she said.
"We are very keen on our relationship, the wonderful relationship with the city of Beijing," she said.
Rescuers gather on a road near railtracks in Wuerzburg southern Germany on July 18, 2016 after a man attacked train passengers with an axe. German police killed the man after he attacked passengers on a train with an axe and a knife, seriously wounding three people. [Photo/VCG]
BERLIN - A 17-year-old Afghan refugee wielding an axe and a knife attacked passengers on a train in southern Germany on Monday evening, severely wounding four, before he was shot dead by police, the interior minister for the state of Bavaria said.
Speaking on German public television, Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said it was too early to speculate about the motives of the attacker, who he said was believed to have been living in a home for unaccompanied minors in Ochsenfurt, near the city of Wuerzburg.
The attack comes just days after a Tunisian delivery man ploughed a 19-tonne truck into crowds of Bastille Day revelers in the southern French city of Nice, killing 84.
It is likely to deepen worries about so-called "lone wolf" attacks in Europe and could put political pressure on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who welcomed hundreds of thousands of migrants to Germany over the past year.
"The attacker appears to have been a 17-year-old Afghan who has been living in Ochsenfurt for some time," Herrmann said. "He suddenly attacked passengers with a knife and an axe, critically injuring several. Some of them may now be fighting for their lives."
Police spokesman Fabian Hench said four people had been severely wounded and a fourth slightly injured. Several others were treated for shock.
The attacker fled the train when it halted at a station on the outskirts of Wuerzburg. Herrmann said the man had tried to attack police when he was confronted and had been shot dead.
"There are witnesses that suggest there may be an Islamic background to this but that is far from clear at this point," Herrmann said.
Unlike neighbours France and Belgium, Germany has not been the victim of a major attack by Islamic militants in recent years, although security officials say they have thwarted a large number of plots.
Germany welcomed roughly 1 million migrants in 2015, including thousands of unaccompanied minors. Many were fleeing war in countries like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The son of Erol Ince, a police officer who was killed during a thwarted coup, stands next to the coffin of his father during a funeral ceremony at the Eyup Sultan Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey, July 18, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]
ANKARA - A total of 103 generals and admirals have been detained in investigations and operations against coup attempt plotters across Turkey, state-run Anadolu Agency reported on Monday.
The highest-ranking officer among the 103 was former Air Force Commander Gen. Akin Ozturk, Anadolu reported, adding that the courts will determine their fates.
More than 6,000 suspects in the military and the judiciary, including top commanders and Supreme Court judges, have been detained in the wake of the failed coup attempt.
The crackdown on alleged coup plotters has spread to the country's police department, with a total of 7,850 police officers on Sunday.
The failed coup attempt, which began last Friday, was crushed the next day; at least 290 people, including more than 100 "coup plotters," were killed, authorities said.
Zhao Qizheng, former minister of China's State Council Information Office, speaks at the Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development on Monday in Singapore. Deng Zhiwei / Xinhua
Zhao Qizheng, former minister of China's State Council Information Office, delivers a keynote speech at the Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development held on Monday in Singapore. His remarks are widely echoed by the participating experts from both China and Southeast Asian nations.
Distinguished experts and scholars, ladies and gentlemen,
Good morning!
I'm quite honored to be here to share with you, experts and scholars, some of my thoughts on the so-called South China Sea arbitration, China's South China Sea policies and China-ASEAN relations, along with the regional cooperation and development. I hope that our exchanges of views and joint wisdom will help cool down the South China Sea issue, putting this region back on track to peace, cooperation and development.
After the so-called award of the South China Sea arbitration was announced, the Chinese government made a solemn statement, expounding China's non-acceptance and non-recognition of the so-called award on the basis of its long-standing position of non-acceptance and non-participation in the Philippines South China Sea arbitration. As everyone may see more clearly now, the arbitration was a downright political farce under the pretext of law. It contained serious errors in issue concerning procedure, application of laws, and admission of evidence. It violated the principle that arbitration shall be based on state consent, China's right to choose on its own will means of dispute settlement, and the bilateral agreement reached between the Philippines and China, and repeatedly reaffirmed over the years, to resolve relevant disputes in the South China Sea through negotiations and consultations, as well as the commitment made by the Philippines, in the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea to resolve the relevant disputes through negotiations and consultations.
The temporary arbitration tribunal set up as per the Philippines' request has no jurisdiction. Its act of self-expansion and abuse of power as well as ultra vires is obvious and serious. The so-called award denies historical facts, and seriously violated international law and the basic spirit and principle of United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Therefore, it is certainly null and void, and has no binding force. Facts have proved and will continue to prove that China's consistent position on this arbitration case is correct and China is safeguarding the justice of international law.
As a matter of fact, the makeshift arbitral tribunal has nothing to do with the United Nations or the International Court of Justice, which have made separate statements earlier last week. The so-called award is also ludicrous as it even denied Taiping Dao (the Taiping Island) as an island. I have no idea how they defined island and reef. The international community has been very cautious when it comes to the identification of islands and reefs, how come the five arbitrators can make the decision in less than one year? It may have something to do with who is paying for the tribunal besides the political calculations. Unlike the International Court of Justice, where the judges' salaries are paid by the UN to ensure its independence and impartiality, those five arbitrators feed on the money from the Philippines - that explains everything. Moreover, according to Philippine media, the Aquino III administration paid $30 million for the eight lawyers and their team it hired for the arbitration. The Philippine taxpayers' money was used to cover such a pile of waste paper, which only brought to light their mean tricks.
On July 12, the award was announced and the tribunal finally finished its ugly function. I'd like to summarize the tribunal as "taking big money to do dirty things", "amateurish and unsightly, null and void".
Some said that the ruling would isolate China, but on the contrary, China's position and opinion have not only won support from its own people but also from more than 70 sovereign states and over 230 political parties and organizations in some 90 countries. Apart from the Philippines, only a very few countries, such as the United States and Japan, considered the arbitration was lawful. The US has kept preaching the upholding of international law, but has not even ratified UNCLOS, not to mention that it refused to implement the 1986 ruling in the Nicaragua vs US by the International Court of Justice, which is a UN affiliate. Obviously, the US has always been practicing double standard when treating international law. Japan tried to use the arbitration to provoke dissension, demonstrating its mean and obvious political intension.
China's position on its territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests in the South China Sea is consistent and clear. I will not go into details here. We've brought the white paper on the South China Sea issued recently by China, please feel free to get one and read. The name of the white paper - China Adheres to the Position of Settling Through Negotiation the Relevant Disputes Between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea - makes our point clear, that is, going back to negotiations is the only way out for the disputes in the South China Sea. China will stick to the "dual-track approach", namely relevant disputes should be settled properly through negotiations and consultations by States directly concerned, and China and the ASEAN countries should work together to uphold peace and stability in the South China Sea.
In the wake of the ruling, we read reports that some Philippine people called for dialogue and economic cooperation with China. Some media in the Philippines ran reports that President Duterte said he would send delegates to China to talk about the South China Sea issue. We sincerely hope that negotiations will be resumed soon, and then China-Philippines relations will be back on track.
China highly values its friendly relations with ASEAN countries, as it is a key geopolitical and economic environment for China's peaceful development. Within ASEAN itself, there are countries which share similar culture and have long-standing friendship with China, as well as countries that have increasingly closer trade ties with China. We are neighbors joined by common mountains and rivers, and cooperation and win-win is the mainstream of our relationship.
Since China and ASEAN established an overall dialogue framework in 1991, the two sides have had ever-deepening cooperation in politics and security, robust cooperation in economy and trade, and significant achievement in people-to-people exchanges.
Politically, China consistently pursues a foreign policy of fostering an amicable, secure and prosperous neighborhood and respects ASEAN member states' independent choices of development path and values. The ASEAN member states have adhered to the one-China policy, supported China's peaceful reunification and accommodated China's concerns on issues of paramount importance. The 2002 DOC is a landmark event as it was the first document addressing the South China Sea issue in this region, contributing greatly to regional peace and stability and to enhancement of mutual trust between China and ASEAN.
Economically, China and ASEAN have increasingly close trade cooperation. In 2009, China became the ASEAN's biggest trade partner. The bilateral trade reached $470 billion last year and two-way investment has added to exceed $150 billion. Since the establishment of the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area in 2010, the cooperation between China and the ASEAN member states has entered a new stage. In 2015, we signed a Protocol to upgrade the CAFTA and identified more than 20 fields to carry out practical cooperation including 11 priority areas of agriculture, information and communication technologies, human resources development, investment, Mekong River area development, transportation, energy, culture, tourism, public health and environment.
Regarding cultural exchanges, China and ASEAN have reached important consensus on enhancing cultural exchanges and cooperation and already launched communication programs in various forms. Over the years, a series of programs such as symposiums, exhibitions and shows have been held and people-to-people interaction have been increased, displaying the unique and diverse cultures in China and the ASEAN Member States.
A great number of influential and wide-reaching culture brands, such as China-ASEAN Cultural Forum, have been forged. In 2015, mutual visits approached 23.67 million, and China and the ASEAN Member States exchanged more than 180,000 students.
China set up a $10-billion China-ASEAN investment cooperation fund, providing financing aids for major projects of cooperation in infrastructure and energy resources. China also has maintained sound interaction and cooperation on the South China Sea with countries concerned. For example, China established the China-ASEAN maritime cooperation fund, which provides vital supports for strengthening maritime cooperation. Moreover, China signed agreements in this regard with Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and Brunei.
The aforementioned facts show clearly that despite the difficulties, such as territorial disputes in the South China Sea, the intervention of countries outside the region and the not well-established cooperation mechanism, the communication and cooperation between China and the ASEAN member states have never ceased and have brought great benefits to all countries.
It is beyond doubt that maintaining regional peace and stability, and keeping the momentum of cooperation and development is in the best interest of all.
In view of the current situation, China and the ASEAN member states must enhance talks and stop quarreling. We should overcome interferences and place our priority on cooperation. Strategically speaking, this is the most realistic solution. The disputes in the South China Sea are only a problem between China and some of the ASEAN Member States, not all of them. The arbitration unilaterally initiated by the Aquino III administration won't undermine the strategic partnership between China and ASEAN. It will not impede the progress of China-ASEAN cooperation either.
In October 2013, President Xi Jinping delivered an important speech entitled "Joining Hands in Building China-ASEAN Community of Shared Future" at the Indonesian parliament. He gave a full account of China's policy toward ASEAN and clarified the long-term objectives of China-ASEAN relationship. For the first time, Xi expressed willingness to cooperate with ASEAN Member States to build the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road.
Today, as much progress has been made in this regard, the potential for China-ASEAN cooperation in the South China Sea will be tapped gradually. Through extensive cooperation, the two sides will achieve mutually beneficial, win-win outcomes, and the South China Sea will become a sea of peace, cooperation and friendship.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the China-ASEAN Dialogue and Relations. In September, a summit will be held in Vientiane in Laos to celebrate this great event, and leaders from China and ASEAN member states will attend. We hope that we can take this opportunity to further promote the China-ASEAN relations.
And finally, I sincerely hope and believe that all of you, with your great wisdom and foresight, continue to make contributions to the bright vision of a future China-ASEAN Community of Common Destiny.
Thank you!
Cleveland
The Republican Party has released its 2016 platform on education , and while much remains unchanged from the 2012 platform, there are a few notable shifts from four years ago on the Common Core State Standards and other issues.
Here are some highlights from the new platform:
Theres a sharp rebuke of the recent guidance on transgender students access to restrooms from the U.S. Department of Education . The platform states that Title IXs protection against discrimination on the basis of sex has been twisted by the Obama administration in an attempt to reshape our schoolsand our entire societyto fit the mold of an ideology alien to Americas history and traditions. It adds that the administrations edict to the States concerning restrooms, locker rooms, and other facilities is at once illegal, dangerous, and ignores privacy issues.
Transgender rights in education werent mentioned in the GOPs 2012 education platform , although it wasnt the hot-button issue in schools it is now.
The platform criticizes the amount of federal spending on K-12 since 1965thats the year the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was passed. Clearly, if money were the solution, our schools would be problem-free. More money alone does not necessarily equal better performance, the draft states. Those two sentences are copied verbatim from the 2012 platform.
The first page of the draft states that we encourage the parents and educators who are implementing alternatives to Common Core, and congratulate the States who have successfully repealed it. This isnt all that surprising, since some Republican activists, as well as GOP members of Congress and presumptive party nominee Donald Trump, have been agitating against the standards, in some cases for years.
However, thats a change from 2012, when the common core wasnt explicitly mentioned. Instead, four years ago, the platform affirmed higher expectations for all students.
The Bible gets mentioned in the 2016 education platform, but not the 2012 education platform.
A good understanding of the Bible being indispensable for the development of an educated citizenry, we encourage state legislatures to offer the Bible in a literature curriculum as an elective in Americas high schools, the 2016 platform states.
Local control over schools is praised, while teaching to the test and excessive testing is rejected. The Democratic platform includes somewhat similar language .
Big data is not cool, according to the platform. The vast collection of student data and information without parental consent or notice is wholly incompatible with the American Experiment and our inalienable rights, the platform says. (This language isnt in the 2012 platform.)
A variety of school choice programs, from education savings accounts to tax-credit scholarships, as well as the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program (which distributes vouchers), get recognition. We support options for learning, including home schooling, career and technical education, magnet schools, charter schools, online learning, and early-college high schools, the platform states.
Read the whole Republican Party platform here:
Follow us on Twitter at @PoliticsK12 .
China's military drill in the South China Sea, starting on Tuesday, is a reaction to the frequent military exercises carried by the US, Japan and the Philippines in the region, said a former senior official.
Zhao Qizheng, former minister of China's State Council Information Office, speaks at the Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development on Monday in Singapore. Deng Zhiwei / Xinhua
The United States has dispatched 10 of the country's total 11 aircraft carriers to Asia to carry out military operations in the past year, which has caused great anxiety to China, said Zhao Qizheng, former minister of the State Council Information Office, the country's top international publicity agency.
Zhao made the remarks at a press conference on Tuesday in Singapore during a think tank seminar over the South China Sea issue. China announced on Monday that it will close off access to part of the South China Sea for military drills from Tuesday to Thursday.
Mentioning that military exercises involve large expenses, Zhao said that China doesn't want to carry out such large-scale military drills, and it has done so only because the US, Japan and the Philippines are provoking China continuously.
"The US, Japan and the Philippines have carried out actions, and we responded with reactions. It's just like the rules of the physics," he said.
Given that Beijing refused to accept the ruling of unilaterally launched arbitration, China and the Philippines should carry out talks in areas such as joint developing fishery, natural resources and maritime rescue, he proposed.
SINGAPORE -- Zhao Qizheng, dean of the school of journalism at the Renmin University of China, said Tuesday that it is hoped that China and the Philippines could restart bilateral negotiations, and the negotiations should move step by step.
Zhao, who is also former minister of China's State Council Information Office, made the remarks at the media briefing after the Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development held here on Monday.
Highlighting that China and the Philippines share lots of common interests, Zhao said that there are also contradictions and conflicts both countries face.
The conflict between China and the Philippines over the South China Sea has been decades, and the problem is difficult to solve in the near future, Zhao said, adding that the best way is to start with problems that are easy to reach agreements, before moving to more complex issues.
"China and Philippines can temporarily put aside differences, and discuss issues of joint exploration first,"Zhao said.
"Joint developments are very broad, including resources, fisheries, maritime rescue, meteorologic data exchange as well as disaster relief at sea. We should move step by step."
Li Guoqiang, deputy director of the Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), said that China's door to dialogue has always been open, and bilateral negotiations and peaceful settlement of disputes are always welcomed.
The government of former Philippine President Benigno S. Aquino III filed the arbitration against China in 2013, despite the agreement his country had reached with China on resolving disputes in the South China Sea through bilateral negotiations. Since then, China-Philippines relations have been severely deteriorated.
TOKYO -- The Japanese government on Tuesday protested against missile launches by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) earlier in the morning, warning further military threats possible.
The Japanese government released a statement on Tuesday morning, saying DPRK's missile launches violate UN Security Council resolutions, which bans DPRK's development of nuclear and missile technologies.
The statement also vowed to step up coordination with South Korea, the United States and other related countries to deal with the matter.
Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Tuesday directed relevant departments to thoroughly gather and analyze information on missile launches by DPRK.
Meanwhile, Japan's Defense Minister Nakatani denounced the launches as provocative act that harm the peace and security of the global community, saying they absolutely cannot be accepted.
Nakatani also gave warning that further military threats are possible.
The DPRK reportedly launched three ballistic missiles Tuesday morning, following the launch of two last month, according to reports.
China will neither recognize nor implement the ruling from unilaterally initiated arbitration by the Philippines on the South China Sea issue as well as further similar arbitration cases, as they are illegal and not based on historic facts, a top Chinese diplomat said.
"I always regard this arbitration as poison as it is a negative example for teaching international law," Chinese Ambassador to the United Kingdom Liu Xiaoming said at a press briefing in London on Tuesday.
He said China has always respected international law; however, the ruling violated the basic purpose of UNCLOS, caused further tensions between countries, and denied the use of diplomatic channels for negotiations.
He hoped no country will take the ruling seriously and make further claims based on the decision because China regards it as illegal.
"If new claims are made based upon this ruling, they will be regarded as new illegal actions that will further endanger regional peace," he said.
The arbitral tribunal, appointed by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, ruled on July 12 that China has no "historic title" over the South China Sea.
Liu reiterated the Chinese government's commitment to resolving disputes through direct negotiations, but said its national sovereignty and maritime interests will not be influenced under any circumstances by The Hague ruling.
He believes the ruling should not be taken as the basis for future negotiation.
He urged the Philippines over the role of the so-called allies as "super powers come and go, but neighbors are more important because you have to live with them in the region."
Nearly 1,000 people from Chinese community in the UK gathered in front of the Philippine Embassy and the US Embassy in London on Saturday to protest against the illegal ruling of the arbitral tribunal and show support to the Chinese Government.
To contact the reporter: liwensha@chinadaily.com.cn
Cleveland
Its a familiar situation in classrooms around the country: A student passes off someone elses work as their own. The teacher figures out what happened. And the student faces the consequences, whether its suspension, a zero on the assignment, or just a talking-to.
That scenario is playing out on a much, much bigger and higher stakes scale here at the Republican National Convention. Late last night, eagle-eyed reporters and viewers noticed that Melania Trump, the wife of presumptive nominee Donald Trump, lifted some lines in her primetime address from the speech that Michelle Obama gave about her husband at the 2008 Democratic convention.
Its not clear which portions of the speech were written by Mrs. Trump, as opposed to a staffer. But, whoever they were, the author, or authors, clearly missed an important grade-school lesson, teachers say.
Margaret Pasquale, a middle school English teacher at Sacred Heart School, a Catholic school in Kingston, Mass., said that if one of her 7th graders had tried something similar, she would have rejected their paper and given the student a talking-to, but allowed them to make up the assignment.
A high school student at her school would have faced more serious repercussions, though, particularly if they were a repeat offender, said Pasquale, who has been teaching for a dozen years and is a political independent.
Students sometimes dont realize that they are plagiarizing when they dont paraphrase appropriately or cite their source, Pasquale said.
Part of writing instruction is making sure students understand when their work crosses the line between being inspired or informed by someones work, and stealing their words or ideas, said Pasquale. They may not understand that its still plagiarism if its accidental, she added.
Whoever wrote the speech may not been held accountable for past plagiarism, she said. And now theyre learning the lesson on the world stage.
The campaign, she said, could have run the speech through a
program or website intended to pick up on plagiarism. After all, Pasquale said, the internet has made it easy for students to crib someone elses work, but its also made catching them easier.
Darren Waddles, an GOP delegate from Arkansas whos also a college student and about to begin work as a student-teacher, doesnt blame Mrs. Trump for the problems with the speechhe suspects a staffer probably lifted the lines.
If the speech had been an assignment for his future social studies class, Waddles said he probably would have sat the student down and had a heart-to-heart. He would have explained that plagiarism can get you expelled from college.
We asked some of our Twitter followers who are teachers what they made of the controversy now surrounding Mrs. Trumps speech. Some said whoever lifted the lines from Obama missed some key lessons in English class.
@PoliticsK12 @EdWeekTeacher How do u tell kids (and parents) its wrong to copy someone elses work when potential world leaders do it? Robin Code McSpadden (@Ms_Mac) July 19, 2016
@PoliticsK12 @educationweek @FLOTUS Yes. There is a great and growing need to teach younger students about writing ethics. ~ A law prof. Rhonda V. Magee (@rvmagee) July 19, 2016
@PoliticsK12 @educationweek @FLOTUS A great lesson for students. No Milania doesnt get a lower grade, but what about her reputation? ClassroomCarryout (@classcarryout) July 19, 2016
And others pointed out that this is hardly the first political speech to face allegations of plagiarismPresident Barack Obama faced similar questions when he ran for office.
You can also share that the #POTUS did the same thing in 07... https://t.co/oxTq2m53JN https://t.co/uqdAzXsxx5 Mark Ousley (@markousley) July 19, 2016
Follow us on Twitter at @PoliticsK12 .
The Institute of Education Sciences announced more than $100 million in research grants for 57 new projects to study topics from preschool math interventions to middle school emotional supports.
In line with the Obama administrations recent focus on college attainment, IES awarded a dozen grants to study adult education and postsecondary outcomes. For example, Bridget Terry Long of the National Bureau for Economic Research and Eric Bettinger of Stanford University will get more than $2.5 million over the next five years to study ways of presenting federal financial aid forms to potential college students to increase their attendance and persistence in higher education.
And at the beginning of childrens academic careers, Alicia Wackerle-Hollman and colleagues at the University of Minnesota and other universities will get $1.4 million to develop new literacy assessments for 4- and 5-year-olds .
You can read the full list of IES new research projects here.
The American Civil Liberties Union and Education Law Center have filed a lawsuit against the Lancaster, Pa., schools, claiming the district barred English-language-learner refugee students from attending traditional high schools because of their age.
Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the suit alleges that the older ELL students were turned away or forced to attend a privately operated alternative school rather than one of the districts regular public high schools, often without explaining their decisions to students or their parents.
The Philadelphia-based law firm of Pepper Hamilton LLP will also represent the plaintiffs in the case six refugee students who hail from Burma, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, and Sudan.
Our clients have already experienced much trauma and loss before arriving in this country. Rather than helping them make the difficult adjustment by providing educational resources required by law, the school district has denied them an education completely or forced them into an alternative school, where they are often bullied and dont learn, Reggie Shuford, executive director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said in a prepared statement.
The Lancaster schools did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Federal law prohibits schools from discouraging or denying enrollment, particularly to older students. An influx of refugee and undocumented students in recent years led the U.S. Department of Education to issue guidance reminding school districts of their legal obligations when it comes to undocumented students . Students are eligible for public school education until age 21.
This is the third federal lawsuit civil rights has filed in the past 15 months on the issue, with previous cases filed against school districts in Utica, N.Y., and Collier County, Fla. The case in Utica has been settled.
On the surface, the Lancaster schools may seems like an unlikely target for the legal action. The district has a significant number of experience educating refugee and English-language-learner students. Almost 17 percent of the districts students are English-learners and roughly 4.5 percent are refugees, according to data from the district .
The district also has a school designed to address the needs of students who are new to the country and speak little, or no, English. But most of the students enrolled there could be Spanish speakers; 60 percent of the districts students are Hispanic, data show.
The Lancaster lawsuit could be an attempt to secure better services for a particular type of refugee English-learner: those who dont speak Spanish.
Khadidja Issa, an 18-year-old refugee from Sudan who speaks Fur and Arabic, is the lead plaintiff in the case. According to the ACLU, neither Issa nor her mother could speak, read, or understand English when they arrived in the United States in fall 2015.
The lawsuit alleges that the Lancaster district refused to enroll her for months before relenting and allowing her to enroll at the Phoenix Academy, where she has no access to interpreters or documents that are translated into a language she and her mother can read.
Heres a look at the legal filing:
ACLU Complaint
(Photo : YouTube) An ongoing Alipay transaction. Alipay is expanding in Singapore.
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Alipay has launched its new program called Alipay+ in Singapore, one of the most popular destinations for Chinese tourists.
Alipay is looking out for international partners as it plans to create a mobile service platform which can be accessed by its users even abroad.
Joining Alipay are South Korean firm KICC, Japan's Orix, and Singapore's Singeat.com. This consolidated effort will cover major markets in Asia, Europe, and North America.
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According to China Tech News, Alipay is still looking for international partners to create a service that will cover online payments, cloud computing, and big data business. Alipay plans to integrate technology with local services to provide a more streamlined one-stop service to serve more Chinese outbound tourists.
Statistics reveal that outbound Chinese tourists tend to spend a lot of their travel time at department stores, restaurants, and airports. By creating a platform based on these locations, Alipay will have a consolidated platform that will allow tourists to easily connect to local services.
Alipay's overseas expansion started in late 2014. Since then, the company set up around 70,000 local services in 70 countries including South Korea, Germany, Singapore, and Japan. In June, ride booking app Grab announced its partnership with Alipay to provide Chinese tourists with an easy to use online payment service in Singapore and Thailand, according to Singapore Business Review.
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(Photo : Facebook) Golden monkeys seen at Hubei province's Shennongjia
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During the 40th World Heritage Committee session held on Sunday, July 17, in Istanbul, UNESCO decided to include Hubei province's nature sanctuary Shennongjia in its list of World Heritage Sites. The diversity found in the area's biological and ecological system prompted the organization to recognize the wildlife zone as a significant site. Shennongjia, to date, is China's 50th site to be included in the world-renowned list.
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Shanghaiist reported that in an application submitted by Shennongjia, it was mentioned that the sanctuary has attracted substantial interest from environmental scientists particularly zoologists and botanists in China. The mountain has become a source of botanical history information for people seeking information on the ecosystems of Hubei and its neighboring provinces.
UNESCO described Shennongjia as an area "located in the Hubei province" which "protects the largest primary forests remaining in Central China and provides habitat for many rare species such as the Chinese Giant Salamander and the Asia Black Bear." UNESCO also stated that Shennongjia is one of the only three places in China which showcases absolute biodiversity, making it a haven for botanical expeditions in both the 19th and 20th centuries.
With the news about Shennongjia coupled with an international airport recently opening in the area, tourists to Hebei have been increasing. However, Shennongjia Forestry District Mayor Li Faping has vowed to do everything in his power to keep the sanctuary protected.
Apart from Shennongjia, the three Tsui ruins were also included in the list of UNESCO's World Heritage. China is next to Italy as the country the most number of World Heritage sites. Italy has a total of 51 - one more than China.
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TagsUNESCO, unesco shennongjia, unesco hubei, shennongjia hubei, shennongjia hubei unesco, world heritage shennongjia hubei, shennongjia hubei unesco world heritage
(Photo : Getty Images) A general view of the skyline of the central business district during sunset in Beijing, China.
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China's air quality continues to improve in the first half of this year, the country's environmental ministry said on Sunday.
China's biggest 338 cities breathed in cleaner air for the first half this year, recording 76.7 percent of clean air between January and June, a four percentage points increase from the same period in 2015.
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Levels of PM2.5, which are tiny hazardous pollutants, in Beijing also plummeted to nearly 18 percent compared with 2015. However, in the first half of the year, Beijing still suffered from an average PM2.5 concentration of 64 micrograms per cubic meter, which is nearly twice the official state standard of 35 micrograms and over six times more than the World Health Organization's annual average of no more than 10 micrograms, according to EWN.
Although the ministry did not explain the reasons for the air quality improvements, it said that it is following stringent measures to curb polluters and deal with overcapacity, particularly in the heavily polluting steel sector. Furthermore, the country's economic slowdown has also likely played a role.
Earlier this month, the ministry revealed that it penalized several state-owned polluters in May for exceeding emission limits. A subsidiary of PetroChina Co Ltd in Dalian was fined 2.9 million yuan (around $433,000).
Meanwhile, of the 10 most polluted cities, six were from the industrial northern province of Hebei, down from seven in 2015. By the end of 2015, China initiated a two-month probe into the province and discovered that companies were into "fraudulent activities" and were disregarding orders not to expand industrial capacity.
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(Photo : YouTube Screenshot) China's automated guided vehicle (AGV) robots would arrive in Nanjing in October.
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China's automated guided vehicle (AGV) robot, which is a valet service robot, will find its way to Nanjing by the end of October, the robot manufacturer announced on Sunday.
The upcoming flat green and purple AGV robot will park a car in just two minutes, saving drivers' time and energy. The robot needs no track and can movie 360 degrees. It works by utilizing lift motors to easily pick up a car after sliding underneath. It uses lasers to line up with an available space and parks cars even in the tightest spots.
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"The robot can go everywhere... and will reform parking in the future," Wu Hao, Yeefung's general manager, said.
With nearly 172 million vehicles running around China plus an added annual increase of 19 million units each year, AGV robots are expected to help maximize the use parking spaces by around 20 to 40 percent.
"The parking robot is designed to increase parking space," he said.
Although using this AGV robot would imply an added 70,000 yuan ($10,468) cost to each carport, Hao said it would help to earn profits by enhancing efficiency.
Pan Guofan, Guangzhou Parking Association's deputy director, said that smart parking technology could be of help by improving parking efficiency. He added that the government should consider parking spaces during urban planning and that more multi-story parking spaces should be constructed in urban places.
According to Wu, each AGV will cost over 1 million yuan ($150,000), and so far, many firms in China, Singapore, London, and the Middle East have shown interest in the technology.
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(Photo : Getty Images) United Airlines planes sit on the tarmac at San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco, California.
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United Airlines launched a three-times-a-week, non-stop service from San Francisco, USA, to the southeast Chinese city of Hangzhou, on Wednesday, July 13, marking the airline's fifth city in mainland China and 14th in the Asia/Pacific region.
Dubbed as "China's Silicon Valley," Hangzhou is the fifth international route United has introduced from San Francisco since May. The four other direct flights were Auckland, New Zealand; Singapore; Tel Aviv, Israel; and Xi'an, China.
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"The Hangzhou service is a great addition to our growing portfolio of mainland China destinations, including three interior cities that no other airline serves from the United States," Marcel Furchs, United VP Atlantic and Pacific sales, said. He added that the new route will give US' passenger a convenient access to China's dynamic hub and at the same time providing Chinese passengers direct access to the San Francisco gateway.
"We are connecting the Silicon Valley (of California) with the Silicon Valley of China. So we know there's going to be strong demand," Fuchs said. "Or you may want to see many of the cultural sites, which is the West Lake or the Great Canal, or many museums."
He noted that this is the best time to start the new service since this year marks the China-U.S. Tourism Year, and the city of Hangzhou has been chosen to be the venue of the G20 summit, which is schedule for September.
Flight UA 982 will depart from San Francisco at 2:20 p.m. (local time) on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays and will arrive in Hangzhou at 6:10 p.m. the following day. The travel time is estimated to be 12 hours and 55 minutes westbound. The return flight US 983 will leave Hangzhou at 10:55 a.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and will arrive at San Francisco at 7:50 a.m. the same day. The flight will be 11 hours and 55 minutes eastbound.
The non-stop flights will be carried out using Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner, which is arguably the most advanced passenger aircraft in the world.
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(Photo : Getty Images) Top Chinese Navy Commander Wu Shengli has said that China is ready to handle any aggression in the South China Sea.
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China is ready to deal with any aggression in the South China Sea, a PLA Navy commander said on Monday as China announced plans to stage military exercises in disputed maritime territory.
Admiral Wu Shengli's remark came during his meeting with US Chief of Naval Operations John Richardson in Beijing on Monday. This is the first high-level military interaction between both countries since the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague invalidated China's claim over almost entire South China Sea last week.
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"The Chinese navy is prepared to react to any infringement of rights or aggression ... Efforts to force us to succumb to pressure will only be counterproductive," Wu said, according to CCTV.
Wu added that China would not make any concession on its sovereignty and will go ahead with construction activities in the Spratly Islands irrespective of pressure from any country. However, amid the tough rhetoric, the senior PLA Navy commander admitted the need to improve communication between both militaries to avoid any miscalculation.
The meeting between Richardson and Wu coincided with China's announcement that it would stage a three-day military exercise off Hainan province, the South China Morning Post reported. The military drill will be conducted from June 19 to June 21, and the entire area will be cordoned off to prevent the entry of vessels, the provincial maritime administration said.
Meanwhile, another top Chinese navy official on Monday warned the US about its freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea. Admiral Sun Jianguo said that military freedom of navigation patrols carried out by foreign navies could spell disaster for the entire maritime region. He added that such operations led by the US are hindering real freedom of navigation in the South China Sea.
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The Republican Party hopes more public schools will have classes that teach the Bible.
A draft GOP platform now includes support for public high schools to incorporate elective Bible classes , the Washington Post reported. The party called a good understanding of the Bible necessary for the development of an educated citizenry, according to the platforms language, which will be introduced to and adopted by delegates at the Republican National Convention this week .
The addition was a hotly debated one, even among party members. Supporters said the goal is merely to encourage teaching students about a historical document that will help provide cultural context for U.S. history and other literature. Other delegates believe the Bible is better left outside the classroomeven if the goal is purely academic. The announcement comes several months after a bill in Idaho that would have allowed schools to use the Bible for academic studies was vetoed by the states Republican governor.
Whether or not to incorporate learning about religion in public schoolsand more importantly, how best to do sois a familiar issue that goes back decades. The Supreme Court decided in 1963 that the Bible has a place in public schools if it is taught objectively, according to the Washington Post. The responsibility of navigating that line between informative teaching about religion and the promotion of a specific faith, which is illegal, largely falls to teachers.
Lots of educators agree that some knowledge of the Bible is valuable for students , but many disagree about how to teach it in a way that doesnt veer into religious promotion or indoctrination. Teachers who incorporate Biblical material into curricula can face fierce backlash . Even with the best of intentions, peoples own biases creep into their presentation of the material, Mark Chancey, a professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University, told the Washington Post.
The fine line between religion and public schools isnt limited to the Bible and Christianity: Some social studies teachers have experienced increased hostility for lessons about Islam, an Education Week opinion blogger wrote, citing a fearful and antagonistic national climate about Muslims. In fact, presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trumps own rhetoric about Muslims has made some students feel unsafe , a Southern Poverty Law Center found. More than one-third of teachers who responded to the survey said theyve observed an increase in anti-Muslim or anti-immigrant sentiment at school.
So how can teachers best navigate religion in the classroom, especially in these tumultuous times?
By teaching a wide variety of religions, according to some sources. The Hartford Teacher Education Project, a program of the Harvard Divinity School, shows teachers a cultural-studies method to improve religious illiteracy among students, which focuses on religious diversity and how religions relate to culture, economics, and society.
Benjamin Pietro Marcus, a research fellow for the Religious Freedom Center at the Newseum Institute, offered some guidelines in an April post for Education Weeks Global Learning blog, including lessons about how behaviors of religious groups might change as individuals live out their faith. Teachers should help students investigate not only what religious communities and individuals believe but also how they act (behaviors) and create community (belonging), he wrote.
And Kimberly Keiserman, an education program associate for the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, suggests a combination of legal guidance and methodological lessons when teaching religion. She wrote in a post for EdWeeks Global Learning blog in February that the importance of teaching Islam and other world religions is critical to preparing students for global citizenship.
Teachers, do you incorporate religion into your classroom lessonsand if so, what is the best way? Share your experience in the comments, and follow the Politics K-12 blog for updates on this weeks Republican National Convention.
Source: Image by Flickr user Sang Valte , licensed under Creative Commons
(Photo : China Daily) Math genius Yu Jianchun
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A 33 year-old parcel delivery worker from the mountains of Henan who describes himself as "slow witted" has formulated a more efficient way of identifying "Carmichael numbers."
Yu Jianchun developed five formulas for the Carmichael numbers, which are pseudo-prime numbers that occur as positive integers some 255 times per 100 million. He's also developed an alternative method to verify Carmichael numbers.
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Carmichael numbers complicate the task of determining true prime numbers, or numbers divisible only by the number one and by itself. They play an important role in computer science and information security.
"I made my discoveries through intuition," said Yu. "I would write down what I thought when inspirations struck about the Carmichael. I have hard work and make a hard living, but I insist on my studies."
Yu sent his solutions to Dr. Cai Tianxin, a math professor at Zhejiang University, along with solutions to four other problems. He later presented his solutions to the public at a graduate student seminar at the invitation of Cai. Yu's solution to complex math problem has also amazed Chinese academics.
Yu said it took over eight years of writing letters to prominent Chinese mathematicians to get any recognition for his talent.
"It was a very imaginative solution," said Cai.
"He has never received any systematic training in number theory nor taken advanced math classes. All he has is an instinct and an extreme sensitivity to numbers."
Yu graduated from a technology training school in Zhengzhou, Henan province and hails from Xinxian county, a mountainous part of Henan. He admitted to having had little higher education but has a lot of interest in mathematics and spends almost all of his spare time studying math.
A migrant worker after graduation, Yu said he's always had a passion for numbers. His goal now is to find a wife.
Incredibly, Yu described himself as "slow witted."
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(Photo : US Congress) Rep. Matt Salmon and Rep. Eliot Engel
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Two congressmen in the United States House of Representatives have filed a bill in the U.S. Congress that will have the United States defend the South China Sea. The bill will also strengthen the military capabilities of U.S. allies in the region such as the Philippines to stand up to China.
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The bill, which was filed less than a week after the United Nations Permanent Court of Arbitration said China has no legal right to claim ownership of the South China Sea on July 12, was authored by Rep. Eliot Engel (Democrat-New York 16th District) and Rep. Matt Salmon (Republican-Arizona 5th District).
China has refused to abide by the arbitration court ruling and has instead intensified its naval exercises in the face of two U.S. Navy nuclear carrier battle groups consisting of two Nimitz-class supercarriers, two cruisers, six destroyers, 140 aircraft and two nuclear attack submarines. The People's Liberation Army Navy, which has no operational aircraft carrier, is not expected to prevail in any naval conflict against the Americans in the South China Sea.
The Engel/Salmon bill officially intends to strengthen international cooperation and support freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. Analysts, however, said the bill also seeks to reassure U.S. treaty allies in Asia such as Japan and the Philippines the U.S. is ready to commit its military power to enforce the arbitration court ruling, which is legally binding on China as a signatory to the U.N. Commission on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) treaty that came into force in 1994.
China has repudiated UNCLOS after disavowing the arbitration tribunal findings that were overwhelmingly in favor of the Philippines and that declared China's claims illegal. China has threatened to withdraw from UNCLOS but hasn't yet done so.
Salmon said that following last week's landmark arbitral tribunal decision on the maritime territorial disputes in the South China Sea, China has already signaled its refusal to comply with the ruling, scorning international law and rejecting binding and peaceful dispute resolution.
"It is paramount, now more than ever, that we work to strengthen the security capabilities of our allies and partners in the South China Sea region," said Salmon.
He said U.S assistance will increase the capacity of its allies to monitor their own maritime territories by improving their military and law enforcement prowess, and by building the bonds between their militaries and the U.S.
As a result, "the maritime nations of Southeast Asia, we will be in a better position to negotiate a peaceful resolution to one of the most dangerous security situations of our times. This legislation builds upon our solid relationships with allies and partners in the region to shore up our response to China's continued belligerence."
Engel noted the United States, as a Pacific power, has an enduring interest in the stability of the Asia-Pacific region. He said the landmark ruling by an international Arbitral Tribunal in the case of the Philippines versus China provides an important opportunity to decide what kind of Asia-Pacific region we will live in.
"Will it be a region that respects the rule of law to enhance the security of all nations? Will it be a region committed to resolving disputes diplomatically and through peaceful means? Will it be a place where all countries have confidence in their freedom to legal passage through waterways and airspace without fear of harassment or intimidation? The United States remains committed to that vision," asked Engel.
He explained this legislation lays out key tenants of U.S. maritime security policy in the region, and if enacted, will increase the maritime law enforcement and security capabilities of our allies and partners, especially those bordering the South China Sea.
"It is important to note that our legislation poses no threat to any particular country in the region. Rather, we seek to promote an enduring legal framework whereby all countries bordering the South China Sea can live in peace and security while sharing in the natural resources of this diverse region."
Salmon is Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific. Engel is the ranking minority member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee as Chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere.
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TagsRep. Eliot Engel, Rep. Matt Salmon, South China Sea, United States House of Representatives, United Nations Permanent Court of Arbitration, Philippines, china
(Photo : Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images) Kashmiri Muslims shout slogans as they protest the death of teenager Zahid Farooq during his funeral procession in the outskirts of Srinagar, Kashmir, India.
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China has commented on the escalating violent clashes in Kashmir, urging residents to resolve their dispute peacefully.
The Economic Times reported that China hopes the situation in Kashmir will be handled properly urging the "relevant parties" to address the issue via dialogue.
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China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said that China has taken note of the incidents in Kashmir and is "concerned about the casualties in the clash, and hope that relevant incident will be handled properly."
Lu said that the Kashmir unrest should be resolved through conversation and not through violent clashes, NDTV reported.
Many were reportedly surprised by the comments of Lu since it is rare for China to comment on the incidents related to Jammu and Kashmir. China has been silent most of the time on incidents related to these two areas, leaving matters to be resolved by India and Pakistan.
The unrest in Kashmir came after the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani. Up to 42 people have died from violent clashes that have left more than 2,000 people injured. Wani and two of his associates were killed in an encounter with security forces.
(Photo : YouTube Screenshot) China Resources is poised to buy GenesisCare.
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Macquarie-backed China Resources is set to purchase cancer and cardiac service provider GenesisCare for $1.7 billion, Street Talk revealed on Monday.
According to Financial Review, Macquarie and China Resources won the preferred bidder status on Sunday for the Kohlberg Kravis Robert's healthcare provider GenesisCare. Now, it depends on the Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB) to permit the transaction.
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The partnership is investing in management and 150 or so doctors for a stake of between 50 and 70 percent, although the deal is still subject to the shareholders' approval.
KKR & Co, which bought a major stake in GenesisCare in August 2012 for an enterprise value of $550 million, is selling its entire 45 percent stake.
If the sale pushes through, founder Dan Collins, who is poised to reap between $50 million and $100 million from the sale, will remain as the managing director of GenesisCare. Also, other executives may gain cash following the deal since the management is understood collectively to own about nine percent of the operation.
Furthermore, the consortium plans to expand the business across Europe and to gain access to the Chinese health market.
Macquarie and China Resources are competing against Citigroup-advised Bain Capital, The Carlyle Group, and China's Ping An. Sources reveal that in case China Resources fails to secure an FIRB approval, the two private equity firms are keen to re-engage.
Meanwhile, the date for submitting the final bids will be on July 25 in a sales process handled by UBS and Credit Suisse. According to The Australian, Macquarie Capital is advising China Resources but refused to comment on the company's status in the contest.
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TagsChina Resources, Macquarie Capital, GenesisCare, Healthcare Industry, KKR
(Photo : Getty Images) China has dismissed Permanent Court of Arbitration's verdict over the South China Sea dispute.
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The Philippines has dismissed China's proposal for dialogue over the South China Sea dispute.
The Philippines Foreign Secretary Perfecto Yasay on Tuesday replied to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi's recent proposal for bilateral talks to resolve the territorial dispute over the South China Sea, saying that the offer was not consistent with country's national interests.
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Yasay said Manila rejected the offer because Beijing had asked to hold talks without any regard for the ruling of an international arbitration tribunal.
"They had insisted for us to not even to make any comments about that... and had asked us also to open ourselves for bilateral negotiations but outside of the arbitral ruling," Yasay said, the Philippines Star reported.
He also revealed that the Chinese Foreign Minister had warned him of a possible confrontation if Manila maintained its support of the tribunal's verdict. "They said that if you insist on the ruling and discussing it along those lines, then we might be headed for a confrontation," he said, the BBC reported.
"China should rethink its position on the nine-dash line claim over the disputed sea following the arbitral tribunal's ruling as they may lose the respect of the international community," Yasay stated.
The Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled last week that Beijing's claims to historical rights in the disputed waters has no legal authority. The Philippines had questioned China's claim to the disputed territories in the South China Sea in its case at the UN-backed tribunal. China, however, dismissed the ruling maintaining that it has ''indisputable sovereignty' over the contested region.
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Tagschina, Philippines, South China Sea, Tribunal
(Photo : Getty Images) Cosmetics are on seen on display at a local market in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
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South Korean OEM facial masks producer JK International is planning to install more 'K-beauty' shops across China starting in Shandong Province's Weihai, according to Pulse.
The company, which is selling $43.9 million worth of facial masks across the world, recently opened "Q Mart," a Korean food chain that sells Korean cosmetics and foods, in Weihai City. It plans to set up more physical stores in six major cities within the year and to expand nationwide in the following year.
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According to Yoon Jin-seok, JK International's chief executive officer, the company will initially focus on retailing food and cosmetics. In the long run, it plans to team up with a Korean fashion retail company to launch a lifestyle namesake in China. Yoon ambitiously aims to set up at least 3,000 outlets by 2020.
Currently, JK International is the largest supplier of Korean cosmetics for Jumei International Holdings, one of the largest Chinese online makeup website, accounting for up to 23.4 percent of its $75.62 million total sales in 2015.
To cope with the increasing demand from Chinese customers, JK International has established a warehouse that could store over 70 containers in Weihai City. This will reportedly be used to make transactions across China including Beijing, Dandong, and Tangsan faster. Furthermore, Yoon also revealed that the company is planning to allocate a 33,000-square meter cosmetics cluster that will be formed in Incheon to facilitate its China shipments.
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TagsJK International, Korean products, Korean cosmetics, Weihai City
(Photo : Getty Images) China Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of GSK's HPV vaccine Cervarix.
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China's Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) Plc's human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine Cervarix to help women in the country fight cervical cancer, the drug maker announced on Monday.
According to GSK's China, Cervarix is the first HPV vaccine licensed for use and is expected to be launched as early as next year.
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China, which accounts for over a quarter (28 percent) of the world's cervical cancer cases, would give both girls and women between 9 and 25 years old access to the anti-cervical cancer vaccine. GSK said the Cervarix has been tested on 6,000 subjects for six years in China.
A representative from China's Food and Drug Administration announced that it has already given GSK's application a go signal for an import registration of the vaccine.
GSK has struggled to rebuild its sales after being penalized by nearly half a billion dollars in 2014 for bribing Chinese doctors. The company has said that it will work with Chinese officials to make sure that all Chinese netizens will have increased access to the vaccines.
"To achieve this we are ready to explore an innovative pricing approach to support the inclusion of Cervarix into public cervical cancer immunisation programmes," Herve Gisserot, senior vice president of pharmaceuticals and vaccines GSK China/Hong Kong, said in a statement. Details of the price of the drug, however, is yet to be announced.
China records about 130,000 new cervical cancer cases each year, according to China's Ministry of Health in 2013, and the World Health Organization has recommended the inclusion of HPV vaccines in all immunization programs.
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TagsFDA, GSK, GlaxoSmithKline Plc, Cervarix vaccine, HPV vaccine, cervical cancer
(Photo : Getty Images) Chinese Admiral Sun Jianguo said the Chinese People's Liberation Army is prepared to thwart any threats that could result from the US' freedom of navigation patrols in the South China Sea
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China warned foreign navies, specifically the United States', on Monday against conducting freedom of navigation operations in the disputed South China Sea saying such patrols could end in "disaster."
The warning comes following the Permanent Court of Arbitration's ruling dismissing China's territorial claims in the disputed sea.
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Admiral Sun Jianguo, deputy chief of general staff of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA), said the US' freedom of navigation concept was fake and has been played up in the media by Washington and other Western countries.
Sun said, strictly speaking, the freedom of navigation principle has not affected any country and has even benefitted China over the years.
Tensions
He said, however, that the military freedom of navigation patrols by the US and other Western countries in the South China Sea has heightened tensions in the region.
"China consistently opposes so-called military freedom of navigation, which brings with it a military threat and which challenges and disrespects the international law of the sea," Sun said.
The admiral said these military freedom of navigation patrols could seriously damage the legitimate freedom of navigation principle, which could end in 'disaster.'
Disaster
"This kind of military freedom of navigation is damaging to freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, and it could even play out in a disastrous way," he stressed without elaborating.
Despite Beijing's protests against the US' freedom of navigation patrols in the South China Sea region, Washington has said that it reserves the right to patrol in the disputed sea.
The United States has been conducting freedom of navigation patrols near islands and reefs controlled by China in the South China Sea.
"When has freedom of navigation in the South China Sea ever been affected? It has not, whether in the past or now, and in the future there won't be a problem as long as nobody plays tricks," he said.
Historic rights
The Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled last week that there is no legal basis for China's claim of historical rights to almost the entirety of the South China Sea.
The court said China's nine-dash line under which it invokes its claims runs counter to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and violates the Philippines' sovereignty.
China has rejected the ruling, dismissing it as "null and void" and a "complete farce."
Military Drills
Meanwhile, China announced on Monday that it would conduct routine military drills in some parts of the South China Sea this week.
Beijing's maritime agency said Chinese military forces would start military exercises in the southeastern portion of Hainan province, far from the disputed islands and reefs in the sea.
The announcement came less than a week after the PCA handed down its territorial ruling on the case filed by the Philippines against China in 2013.
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TagsFreedom of Navigation, Admiral Sun Jianguo, South China Sea, United States, china
(Photo : Getty Images) New Zealand Prime Minister John Key has said China is unlikely to take any retaliatory action after local steel manufacturers lodged a complaint against Chinese steel dumping practices.
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New Zealand Prime Minister John Key has downplayed the possibility of a trade retribution after local steel manufacturers lodged a steel dumping complaint against Chinese imports, news website stuff.co.nz reported.
Speaking to press shortly after reaching Indonesia for a three-day tour, Key said that he cannot confirm whether concerned ministries have received any complaint against Chinese steel import, citing confidentiality.
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"Even if there was a complaint, and even if it was investigated, whether a country like China would take retaliatory action against New Zealand, I don't believe that's the case that they would," Key told reporters in Indonesia. "There'll be lots and lots of ways of them looking to resolve issues if there were any, but it wouldn't be through the sort of things that we've seen reported."
The New Zealand Prime Minister added that he is in contact with China's leadership and has no knowledge about the issue.
However, reports in New Zealand's media suggest that Trade Minister Todd McClay has asked officials from the country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs to seek assurance from the Chinese embassy on the matter. Unconfirmed reports in the local media also indicate that China is already contemplating imposing a non-tariff barrier on New Zealand's agricultural export, including dairy, wool, and kiwifruit.
Prominent New Zealand companies like Zespri and Fonterra are reported to have been heavily taxed by Chinese authorities.
The issue of Chinese steel dumping has become a global issue, with many countries including the US lodging a complaint against China's steel dumping practices. This is a major issue in US presidential election, with both frontrunning candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump promising to take action against China if elected to office.
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Tagsnew zealand, china, Chinese Steel Imports, John Key
(Photo : Getty Images) The Chinese government will temporarily allow foreign firms to wholly-own steel manufacturing plants in four free trade zones (FTZ).
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The Chinese government plans to allow foreign companies to set up wholly-owned steel manufacturing plants in four free trade zones (FTZ), according to a circular issued by the State Council.
Citing the State Council circular, South China Morning Post reported that foreign companies would no longer have to fulfill mandatory requirements like stake control restrictions and other conditions while investing in China's steel industry.
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"The ban on foreign-controlled shareholding and qualification hurdles imposed on foreign investors will be canceled temporarily," the circular said. "The establishment of foreign wholly-owned steel manufacturing firms will be allowed."
These concessions will be implemented in free trade zones of Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangdong and Fujian provinces.
According to China Daily, these relaxations are temporary and are subjected to revision from time-to-time by concerned authorities.
Despite the fact that China is the biggest consumer of steel, only handful of renowned foreign steel companies have been able to make a sizeable investment in the country's steel industry. This includes Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal and Japan's Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp.
Many blame China's strict policies for lack of foreign investment. Just a week ago, many European steel manufacturers pressurized European officials to take a tough stance against China. The manufacturers reportedly pressurized European officials to raise the issues of steel overproduction and a host of restrictive policies followed by the Chinese government.
Most analysts feel that this new temporary relaxation will help in shoring up foreign investment in China steel industry and is expected to make the industry even more competitive. However, concerns remain over how these new concessions will impact China's problem of steel overproduction, which is wrecking havoc in the global steel industry.
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TagsChinese Steel, china, China steel, Chinese economy news
(Photo : YouTube) The Ulefone Metal scored 38,904 points on the Antutu benchmarking test.
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Chinese smartphone manufacturer Ulefone officially unveiled its newest flagship device last week. The company claims that the Ulefone Metal is powerful enough to surpass mobile gaming requirements. Recently, Ulefone backed that claim by releasing the phone's first Antutu test results with an impressive score of 38,904 points.
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Tech analysts have noted that what made the Ulefone Metal get such a remarkable result is its 3GB LPDDR memory. Moreover, the smartphone has a MediaTek MT6753 system-on-chip with an octa-core processor and clocked at 1.3GHz a Mali-T720 graphics processing unit, according to Mobile Scout.
With its latest revelation, Ulefone is simply showing the rest of the smartphone industry that mid-tiered devices like the Ulefone Metal can have the hardware capability to run the latest mobile video game titles. Moreover, the company said that it is working on a video to highlight the results of its hardware tests.
According to Phone Arena, the Ulefone Metal will have a 5-inch display with a 720x1280 resolution and a 290ppi pixel density. It has a 3,050mAh battery pack, which, considering its smaller screen and lower resolution, should give the smartphone an extended battery life.
On the camera aspect, the Ulefone Metal has an 8-megapixel Sony IMX149 rear facing camera and a 2-megapixel front facing camera for snapping selfie shots.
The Ulefone Metal is expected to run on Android 6.0 Marshmallow. Considering the company's previous releases, the Metal will most likely sport a stock Android interface.
The Ulefone Metal is slated to be released at the end of July. It would be available in three colors: Silver White, Space Gray, and Black.
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THROUGH THE BIBLE: Walking in the footsteps of Goliath of Gath 19 July, 2016 by Dr. Eric Mitchell , |
Christian Examiner continues a new series which allows readers to walk with Dr. Eric Mitchell, Associate Professor of Old Testament & Biblical Archaeology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, through some of the most important sites in the Bible. Mitchell directs the archaeological survey at Tel Gezer. Mitchell's journal entries will help readers visualize important sites like Gezer, the places where Jesus walked, and the valley where David killed the Philistine Goliath.
TEL ES-SAFI, Israel (Christian Examiner) Growing up reading the Bible, many of the people and places presented within came across my young mind more like the settings or characters of a novel. They didn't seem directly connected to my reality, my local town, my school, and so on.
But when I was able to first visit the land of Israel, a change took place almost immediately in my mind and heart.
As I visited site after site mentioned in the biblical text, I became more and more excited about the connection between the text and the land before me. I was more interested in standing on a pile of rocks which archaeologists held to be the likely location of a town or event mentioned in the Bible than in visiting modern sites.
Standing on these sites highlighted for me a personal connection to events and people of the biblical text. This connection drew me further into the academic study of the historical geography, archaeology, history, languages and culture of the land.
It was not until my third trip to Israel that I saw, and then visited, Gath for the first time. I remember it well. I was standing on top of Tel Azekah (located on the northern end of the ridge between the region of Gath and the entrance to the Elah Valley).
There it was. Looking west from the heights of Azekah, there was the site of the biblical hometown of Goliath, the famed nemesis of David.
I just stood and stared ... and soaked it in. Gath had become a part of my reality. I would soon visit the site, and academic study would come later, but I was enjoying the connection. This "connection" is likely why St. Jerome called the land of Israel the fifth gospel. It can change one's perceptions when reading the text by solidifying the biblical context.
Why is this place so important for the study of the Bible?
The Bible indicates that the Philistines (peleshet) were from Caphtor (Amos 9:7perhaps Crete) and one of many "sea-peoples" who migrated from the Aegean to the Levant in waves in the Late Bronze age.
They were capable of fighting on sea or on land and were part of an invasion of Egypt in 1188 BC. They were, however, defeated by Ramses III.
The Philistines used chariots, archers, and foot-soldiers (utilizing bronze helmets, mail, greaves, spears, javelins, shields and swords). In Egyptian reliefs, they were each depicted wearing a plumed helmet/headdress.
The Philistines first settled in the southwestern coastal plains of what is today Israel. The region of Philistia was controlled by a pentapolis (a group of five cities), including Gaza, Ashdod, Ashkelon, Ekron, and Gath.
The Philistines began to encroach upon the Israelites, forcing the tribe of Dan to move north (Judges 18). They also subjugated the Israelites during the period of the Judges and early monarchy even controlling Israelite access to metalsmithing (1 Samuel 7; 13:16-22).
The Ark of the Covenant spent some time in Gath after the Philistines captured it in battle (1 Samuel 4-5). In that account God cut of the head and hands of the idol of the Philistine god Dagon at Ashdod, and He brought a plague of tumors upon the Philistines and they eventually sent the Ark of the Covenant back to Israel (1 Samuel 4-5).
In 2005 Aren Maier, directing the Ackerman Family Bar-Ilan University expedition to Tel es-Safi/Gath, discovered a pottery fragment dated to around the 10th or early ninth centuries B.C. This fragment is important because it attests to the usage of names similar to "Goliath" at Gath sometime after the biblical chronology of the David and Goliath account.
Using Semitic letters, the pottery was incised with the words alwt and wlttwo Indo-European names etymologically close to "Goliath."
In 2015, the excavation discovered a monumental gate and massive wall fortifications. This could be the location of the "doors of the gate" where David acted as if he was insane before King Achish of Gath in order to escape from him (1 Samuel 21:13).
The Old Testament text of 1-2 Samuel indicates that David had a complex relationship with the Philistines. He defeated their champion, he fought them as a servant of Saul and, when he fled Saul, he sought help from King Achish of Gath.
David lamented that the people of Gath would hear of Jonathan's death, he defeated them as leader of a band of rebels, and then he pretended to serve Achish of Gath.
David defeated the Philistines as king of Israel and later, as king, he employed them as his most trusted military men, such as Ittai the Gittite [from Gath], and as his personal bodyguard (the Cherethites and Pelethites).
In the ninth century (around 830 B.C.) Hazael, king of Aram, besieged Gath. He built a siege trench around the city and conquered it (2 Kings 12:17).
In the early eighth century BC, King Uzziah of Judah, broke down the wall of Gath and subjugated the Philistines (2 Chronicles 26:6). The Philistine cities became vassals to Assyria in that century and are not mentioned in the Bible after that time, but the site where Gath was built was in continued use until modern times.
The recently announced discovery of a Philistine cemetery by the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon, directed by Larry Stager of Harvard University and Dan Master of Wheaton College, will give new insight to Philistine burial practices.
Perhaps planned DNA analysis (among other studies) will also shed more light on Philistine origins one of history's enduring mysteries.
You can find more information on their work at http://digashkelon.com/expedition/.
Dr. Eric Mitchell covers Bible Backgrounds for Christian Examiner. He is Associate professor of Old Testament & Archaeology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, and directs the Tel Gezer Regional Survey Project in Israel.
VidAngel fights back, countersues Hollywood studios trying to shut it down Guest Reviewer | 19 July, 2016 by Michael Foust
LOS ANGELES (Christian Examiner) One month after being sued by four major Hollywood studios in an attempt to shut it down, the movie streaming and filtering service VidAngel has countersued, arguing that the studios have distorted "relevant facts" and that the service popular among families is perfectly legal.
In fact, VidAngel charges that the four studios -- Disney, Lucasfilm, 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros have violated antitrust laws by limiting online filtering services only to a few companies.
In the 47-page counterclaim, VidAngel argues that its service does not infringe copyright laws and is protected by the Family Movie Act, which was signed into law in 2005 and protected companies (like ClearPlay) that sell DVD players that filter movies. VidAngel asserts that the law also shields companies that stream and filter films online.
The four studios sued VidAngel in June. In its countersuit filed in a district court in California -- VidAngel asks that the studios' suit be dismissed.
VidAngel is a service that allows customers to buy a digital streaming movie for $20, and then sell it back, making the final price either $1 (SD) or $2 (HD) if it is kept for less than 24 hours. Families can filter out language, violence and sexuality, tweaking it to their preference. The company's slogan is: "Watch movies however the bleep you want."
The lawsuit explains VidAngel's legal position in more detail. Specifically, the company says it actually owns a DVD physical copy for each film it streams. When a movie is bought, "that disc is no longer available for sale." The lawsuit even includes a photograph of its more than 2,000 copies of The Renevant.
"Plaintiffs ... suggest they do not derive financial benefit from VidAngel's business," the lawsuit says. "In fact, the opposite is true. VidAngel spends over one-third of its gross revenues to lawfully purchase thousands of DVD and Blu-ray discs, which are then re-sold to VidAngel users."
VidAngel argues it is boosting the studios' revenues because most of its customers would not watch unfiltered movies.
The Family Movie Act, the lawsuit says, protects the company.
"Plaintiffs repeatedly suggest that VidAngel needs their permission to offer a filtering service, despite Congressional law which expressly authorizes VidAngel's service without need for any such consent," the suit says. "In enacting the Family Movie Act ('FMA'), Congress protected the right of families to filter and view content according to their personal preferences."
Services like VidAngel, the lawsuit says, are needed.
"Many Americans, especially parents, struggle to find ways to shield their children and others within their homes from viewing or listening to violence, sex, profanity and other objectionable content in television programs and motion pictures," the lawsuit says. "There is great demand for services that allow them to filter out elements the find objectionable from what they watch in the privacy of their homes. A recent survey conducted for VidAngel found that approximately 47% of parents want online filtering services."
Said Neal Harmon, CEO of VidAngel, in a press release, "We hope that the filing will help these studios to realize that they are asking the court to shut down a service that will allow millions to filter content for themselves and their children."
Yesterday (July 18) marked the first day of the Republican National Convention (RNC). Many notable figures took the stage in Cleveland, including former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Duck Dynasty star Willie Robertson, and Donald Trumps wife, Melania.
There were a few major takeaways from the Conventions first day:
1. Protesters at the convention made headlines as they sought to push through a roll call vote to change Convention rules, giving more power to grassroots Republicans rather than the RNC Chairman. Many in the media alleged that these protesters were part of a anti-Trump effort, but, according to the ConservativeReview.com, leaders of the movement, Utah Sen. Mike Lee and Ken Cuccinelli, said that their effort aims to decentralize power and give it to the people--something that has been a mantra of Trump supporters. These protesters' efforts ultimately failed, however, when the Rules Committee snuffed out the vote.
2. Melania Trump has been fairly inconspicuous during Trumps campaign, seeming content, as USAToday.com notes, to remain in the shadows of Trumps more vocal children. In her RNC speech, the presumptive nominees immigrant wife praised her husbands kindness and ability to lead the country. She also gave more background on her personal life. It seemed her speech was a success, with no controversial points of note--until later when news sources began to point out that portions of it were strikingly similar to a 2008 speech delivered by Michelle Obama, leading to accusations of plagiarism.
3. One of the major themes of the RNCs first day was national security. A number of speakers addressed this issue, the most noteworthy perhaps being former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani. In an impassioned address, Giuliani outlined how Trump is the right man to lead the charge to defeat terrorism and make America safe again.
4. Mark Burns, a televangelist and pastor of South Carolinas Harvest Praise & Worship Center, gave the closing prayer and benediction which was viewed as controversial by some. In his rousing prayer, Burns said Trump is a person who believes in the name of Jesus Christ, and went on to assert that the Republican Party must unite against the enemy-Hillary Clinton.
Father God, in the name of Jesus, Lord were so thankful for the life of Donald Trump. Were thankful that you are guiding him, that you are giving him the words to unite this party, this country, that we together can defeat the liberal Democratic Party, to keep us divided and not united. Because we are the United States of America, and we are the conservative party under God, said Burns, according to RelevantMagazine.com.
Publication date: July 19, 2016
Christians in Egypt gathered together to pray after a Christian man was killed and three others were injured in attacks in southern Egypt.
The man stabbed to death, Fam Khalef, was 27.
The attacks began on Monday over who had right of way in a street. Muslim adults attacked Christian priests and their families with batons and knives, according to ChristianToday.com.
Police say they arrested four people in connection with the attacks.
This week, mourners gathered at a church to pray for Khalef, chanting, With blood and soul, we redeem the cross.
The attack is the latest in a string of violence against Christians. On Saturday a group of Muslims set fire to houses of Christians after a rumor spread that a Christian had planned to turn a kindergarten into a church.
In the week before, another group torched Christian homes over another rumor. In May, a Muslim mob forced an elderly Christian woman to parade naked down the streets of her village over a rumor that her son had an affair with a Muslim woman.
Al-Azhar, the countrys top Sunni Muslim authority, has asked both Christians and Muslims to not succumb to the temptation to sow discord and ignite sectarian strife.
Christians in Egypt make up only 10 percent of the population.
Publication date: July 19, 2016
Photo by SZM Mansome: More than 1,000 protesters held a rally in Lashio town on 16 July 2016 to demand an end to the killing of innocent civilians.
According to Sai Pha Seng, who was present at the event, the demonstration started at 9am, and included participants from Lashio, Kutkhai, Hsenwi, Tangyan, Mongyai, Kyaukme and Hsipaw townships, The peaceful protest was conducted through the streets of Lashio city.
Innocent civilians have been killed arbitrarily, but no group is taking responsibility, he said. The Tatmadaw and ethnic armed groups must work together through the peace process and show respect for human rights.
Led by the Tai Youth Organization, Kachin Youth Organization, Taang Womens Organization and Taang Students and Youth Union, the demonstrators demanded justice for the recently murdered civilians in northern Shan State. Seven persons were shot dead, allegedly by Burmese government troops, in Mong Yaw sub-township in late June, while a man was murdered by an unknown group in Namkham Township last week.
Please stop killing innocent people, said protester Sai Tuen Thor. These human rights abuses must end.
Shan Herald reported on July 6 that civic groups had published a statement urging the National League for Democracy-led government to take the lead in investigating the Mong Yaw case and bring the culprits to justice.
By: Shan Herald Agency for News (SHAN)
Violence in Nigeria has been increasing, and has led to former Congressman Frank Wolf warning that the West needs to step in to do something about the crisis.
Wolf, who is a former Congressman from Virginia and now is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative, recently visited Nigeria and witnessed the conflict and violence there firsthand.
People of faith, Christians, feel very much forgotten, Wolf said of his experience in the country. Nigeria is fractured and is breaking down in so many ways, and it seems that the world has forgotten about it.
They feel abandoned by the West, and by the Church in the West. You are not hearing many in the West advocating (for them). They would expect that the faith community in the West, Europe, would be advocating, speaking out," Wolf told The Christian Post.
Terrorist group Boko Haram has been carrying out attacks in the country, many of which are specifically aimed at Christian communities. Fulani herdsman have also been increasingly posing a threat to Christians.
The Wilberforce Initiative has put together a detailed report on the crisis in Nigeria, and also included recommendations for how the U.S. can help.
To read the report, titled Nigeria-Fractured and Forgotten, click here.
Publication date: July 19, 2016
Three Christians in Kazakhstan have been fined for meeting together to worship, according to ChristianToday.com.
Religious freedom in Kazakhstan has been increasingly coming under attack. In 2012, the government cut the number of officially-recognized faiths from nearly 50 to only 17. There are consequences for practising a faith which is not recognized by the government.
In 2015, the government gave police the power to impose fines without going through due process and holding a trial on those who practice an unauthorized religion.
"Such summary police fines haven't been used against us before," said one Christian who added that, in one instance, the police simply fined a Christian because they could. "No one explained to us why they've suddenly started doing this."
Although the fine of one of the three individuals was waived, concern over religious freedom in Kazakhstan remains high.
In addition to restricting religious freedom, Kazakhstan has seen an increase in Islamic extremist violence. Recently, a gunman killed three policemen and a civilian in the country. Kazakhstan president Nursultan Nazarbayev called the shooting an act of terrorism.
Publication date: July 19, 2016
Charges have been filed against six people at a hospital in Turkish Cyprus for allegedly performing late-term abortions.
According to LifeNews.com, the six people, who include the hospitals owners, head physician, a doctor, an obstetrician, and a nurse, performed abortions on babies who had developed beyond five months old, including at least one full-term fetus, and then secretly buried them.
Turkish Cypriot police officer Namik Kemal Baz said at a court hearing that when arrested, Dr. Fahri Karagozlu of the hospital admitted that one of the fetuses had even been alive and breathing, although Karagozlu later retracted this statement.
Karagozlu also alleged that he did not know he was legally bound to inform the health office with regards to terminations over the 10 weeks--the limit for abortions in the country.
A witness told the court that she had seen one of the nurses come out of the operating room crying. When she asked her what was wrong, the nurse allegedly told her that the baby had been breathing and was a girl. The witness recounted that pregnant women would come to the hospital and leave not looking pregnant any longer and without their babies, according to reporter Funda Gumush.
Yet another witness reported that hospital personnel would leave the hospital with a black plastic bag after an abortion, presumably to dispose of the fetus.
Photo courtesy: Thinkstockphotos.com
Publication date: July 19, 2016
What the New Overtime Rules Mean for Churches
CAROL STREAM, Ill., July 19, 2016 /
Except for those in ministerial positions, employees who make less than $47,476 yearly (or $913 weekly) must receive overtime pay starting December 1, 2016, according to the DOL's new regulations. Currently, those making less than $23,660 yearly (or $445 a week) are entitled to overtime pay. Hourly employees are always eligible for overtime pay, regardless of their compensation level; salaried employees who earn less than the new threshold may be eligible for overtime pay unless certain additional criteria are met.
These changes likely mean many churches will face substantial increases in their overtime costs, unless they make substantial changes, since the number of employees eligible to receive overtime pay will dramatically increase. And costs will rise again in the future: the new rules also require automatic increases to the salary threshold every three years beginning in 2020.
In the August issue of Church Finance Today, Richard Hammar explains the DOL's actions and how the Fair Labor Standards Act relates to this, how this affects churches, and the possible steps churches can take to minimize the effects of these changes on their budgets. A "FLSA Classification Decision Tree for Churches and Other Religious Organizations" is also featured.
to Church Finance Today. This monthly publication keeps church treasurers and bookkeepers informed with timely and practical information on issues all churches face when managing money: internal controls, compensation, reporting, and budgeting. In addition, subscribers receive
is a nonprofit, global media ministry centered on Beautiful Orthodoxystrengthening the church by richly communicating the breadth of the true, good, and beautiful gospel. Reaching over four million people monthly with various digital and print resources, the ministry equips Christians to renew their minds, serve the church, and create culture to the glory of God.
Share Tweet Contact: Sandra Hoekstra-Lower, Christianity Today , 630-260-6200 ext 4224CAROL STREAM, Ill., July 19, 2016 / Christian Newswire / -- The Department of Labor announced in May an update to overtime regulations. The ramifications for employers are significant. Nonprofits, including churches, are not exempt from these rules.Except for those in ministerial positions, employees who make less than $47,476 yearly (or $913 weekly) must receive overtime pay starting December 1, 2016, according to the DOL's new regulations. Currently, those making less than $23,660 yearly (or $445 a week) are entitled to overtime pay. Hourly employees are always eligible for overtime pay, regardless of their compensation level; salaried employees who earn less than the new threshold may be eligible for overtime pay unless certain additional criteria are met.These changes likely mean many churches will face substantial increases in their overtime costs, unless they make substantial changes, since the number of employees eligible to receive overtime pay will dramatically increase. And costs will rise again in the future: the new rules also require automatic increases to the salary threshold every three years beginning in 2020.In the August issue of Church Finance Today, Richard Hammar explains the DOL's actions and how the Fair Labor Standards Act relates to this, how this affects churches, and the possible steps churches can take to minimize the effects of these changes on their budgets. A "FLSA Classification Decision Tree for Churches and Other Religious Organizations" is also featured. Subscribe today to Church Finance Today. This monthly publication keeps church treasurers and bookkeepers informed with timely and practical information on issues all churches face when managing money: internal controls, compensation, reporting, and budgeting. In addition, subscribers receive SkillBuilders , a bi-monthly supplement offering specific steps to improve money management practices. Christianity Today is a nonprofit, global media ministry centered on Beautiful Orthodoxystrengthening the church by richly communicating the breadth of the true, good, and beautiful gospel. Reaching over four million people monthly with various digital and print resources, the ministry equips Christians to renew their minds, serve the church, and create culture to the glory of God.
Study Overshadows AMA Recommitment Opposing Physician-Assisted Suicide
Contact: Margie Shealy, Christian Medical & Dental Association, 888-230-2637, 423-341-4254, margie.shealy@cmda.org
WASHINGTON, July 18, 2016 /Christian Newswire/ -- At the recent American Medical Association (AMA) Convention, the organization reaffirmed their stance opposing physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia which appears in their Code of Medical Ethics. The Code of Medical Ethics offers guidance to help physicians meet the ethical challenges of medical practice. According to their website, this new edition, adopted last month, is the culmination of an eight-year project to comprehensively review, update and re-organize guidance to ensure that the Code remains a timely, easy to use resource.
A Compassion & Choices news release started a frenzy of media reports that the AMA will consider changing their position, when in fact they reaffirmed their position to oppose physician assisted suicide and euthanasia.
Christian Medical & Dental Associations CEO David Stevens, MD, MA (ethics) commends their decision, "I am pleased that the AMA has reaffirmed their strong opposition to physician assisted suicide and euthanasia. They continue to state, that 'PAS is fundamentally inconsistent with the physician's professional role' and that 'Requests to physicians for PAS should signal the M.D. that the patient's needs are unmet and further help is needed.'"
CMDA member Dr. Tom Eppes, a Virginia delegate to the convention and Chair of the Integrated Physician Practice Section of the AMA who was in attendance at the Code of Ethics Decision Reference Committee and speaking for himself says, "You are violating the AMA Code of Ethics when you are in the business of prescribing a deadly drug to your patients. Physicians are healers, not killers.
"At the same time the AMA reaffirmed their decision to oppose physician assisted suicide and euthanasia, a committee agreed to set up a panel that will investigate what is happening throughout the U.S. in regards to end of life care, get input from the AMA members and report back. I expect a small but extremely vocal group of physicians will to try to convince delegates to approve a neutral stance on legalizing PAS. Wherever a state medical organization has done that, legalization has soon followed."
home World China seals the doors, cuts off power & water to persecuted House Church
Chinese authorities placed its official seal on the doors of a persecuted branch of Guangfu Church in southern Guangdong June 23 after forcibly shutting it down.
According to China Aid, authorities from the local Public Security Comprehensive Management Commission sealed and cut off the power and water supply of Taihe Hall, a branch of the persecuted Guangfu Church in Taihe County.
Ma "Mark" Chao, head of Guangfu Church, produced the church building's contract and claimed he already spent about 500,000 Yuan (U.S. $75,000) on renovations. However, authorities succeeded in pressuring the building's landlord to prematurely terminate the contract on charges that the landlord lacked the proper certificates.
"I want to tell them that they have to use their power according to proper procedures, even if we have actually violated laws," Ma told China Aid. "We will not only refuse to follow orders, but also sue officers if they don't do things the right way."
A branch of Guangfu Church in the Baiyun District of Guangzhou also suffered a slew of harassments when a dozen officials raided their house church and declared their gatherings "illegal" in May last year. The officials also cut off the church building's water and electricity supply and forced the landlord to terminate their contract prematurely.
They then forced Ma to sign a written notice agreeing to terminate the house church's religious activities.
Ma refused and told them, "You people, you do things that are illegal and go against the will of the people. I say you should follow your own laws and regulations in enforcing the law, and I'll act according to my own religious beliefs."
Ma lodged an official complaint over the forced closure of the house church in Baiyun after authorities sealed off the church's doors. This, however, only led to clashes between the police and church members who continued to hold services in the building's hallway.
Members of Guangfu Church faced reported continued persecution throughout the years regardless of the location they chose to hold their religious meetings.
home US Donald Trump wins over some skeptical women with strong stance on national security
Donald Trump's tough talk on law and order in a time of growing national insecurity appears to be winning over some of his fiercest skeptics - women initially put off by his swaggering tone, his clashes with female critics and past affairs.
But so far those are mostly conservative women. As Trump hones his message, the challenge is to make it also resonate among independent or undecided female voters who are crucial to his hopes of winning the U.S. presidential election in November.
Turmoil on the streets both abroad and at home could give Trump a new opportunity to do just that.
On Monday, Trump tried to seize it with an evening program at the Republican National Convention with several women speakers, including his wife Melania, focused on security. She told the convention that her husband would offer the country new leadership and keep it "safe and secure."
Americans have been rattled by recent attacks in France and Florida, the murder of police officers in Texas and Louisiana, and widespread protests over the killings of unarmed black men, polls show.
"We're not electing a husband, we're not electing a preacher, we're electing a leader," said Kay White, a Republican delegate to the nominating convention from Tennessee who originally supported U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas in the early nominating contests, or primaries.
For White, it's a one-issue election. "Security," she said. "Nothing else matters."
A year ago, Penny Nance, president of Concerned Women for America, a conservative advocacy group, was a blistering critic of the thrice-married Trump because of comments he made about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly that many felt were sexist.
But Nance now supports Trump and says the candidate can fashion an effective message for women centered on national security, she told Reuters on the sidelines of the convention. "Every day we wake up and get our kids ready for school and the television is on and there is another attack," she said.
"SECURITY MOMS"
For Trump, independents will be a tougher sell. A majority of women who identify as "independent" continue to hold an unfavorable opinion of him.
According to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll from June 1 to July 15, 64 percent of independent women voters expressed a "very unfavorable" or "somewhat unfavorable" view of Trump. That compares with 89 percent of Democratic women voters and 31 percent of Republican women voters who have a similarly unfavorable view of the New York businessman.
Trump isn't the first candidate whose tough talk on security has won over women voters. George W. Bush used the same message in his re-election campaign in 2004, in the midst of his "war on terror," to appeal to so-called security moms who were concerned about terrorism.
Bush garnered 48 percent of the vote of American women in that election. By comparison, Republican candidate Mitt Romney drew 44 percent in 2012, a full 10 points behind President Barack Obama.
Trump has had trouble convincing women nationally to support him ever since he entered the race in the summer of 2015, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling. Among women who are expected to vote on Nov. 8, a majority expressed an unfavorable opinion of him every time they were asked in the polls.
This month, women appeared to have soured even more on the likely Republican nominee: 69 percent of likely women voters expressed an unfavorable opinion of Trump in the latest July 11-15 Reuters/Ipsos polling, up from 63 percent in the five-day poll that ended on July 1.
Jen Lawless, director of the Women and Politics Institute at American University, said she doubted Trump could rehabilitate his image with most women voters, saying his conflict with Kelly, in particular, had lasting damage.
"I think that ship has sailed," Lawless said.
Trump's problems with women were dramatized on Monday when Women for Trump, a voter-support group, held a sparsely attended event in Cleveland.
The moderator, Jennifer Hulsey, appeared to speak for a lot of women who have found a way to support Trump. "He's not perfect, but neither am I," Hulsey said.
Some of the women delegates interviewed by Reuters at the convention on Monday were scornful of the criticism of Trump's attitude toward women, pointing to his daughter Ivanka, who is a top executive in the Trump Organization.
Ivanka and his other daughter Tiffany are due to speak at the convention this week.
"He was not my first choice or even my second choice," said Carol Del Carlo, a Trump supporter. But, "I look at him and I see how he treats his daughters. They're engaged, they look like a real, true family, they work in their father's business, they're advisors."
home Faith Francis Chan: The path to relevance is to become unpopular and rejected like Jesus
Pastor Francis Chan said that the Church became irrelevant and the only way to be relevant again is to be unpopular and rejected just as Jesus suffered in His time.
The popular preacher and New York Times bestselling author spoke in front of thousands of young Millennials, who attended the "Together 2016" event at National Mall in Washington D.C. Saturday, July 16. The event centered on the idea that "Jesus changes everything."
The Church became irrelevant and badly needs some reset, Chan told the crowd. However, employing popular means of trying to fit in would not place the Church back to relevance. Rather, Chan said it's the opposite.
"The path to relevance is not by trying to fit in," said Chan. "It's by standing out. It's not by becoming popular but it is by becoming rejected."
The 48-year-old author of "Crazy Love" then quoted the Scripture of Matthew 10 where Jesus revealed to his followers the struggles they'd have to face.
Chan compared Jesus' revelation to that of the present times where people are too concerned about being popular and "being liked and getting 'Likes.'"
"Jesus says the way to become significant and to have an impact is through rejection. That is what He just said," explained Chan.
He also turned to his Bible again and quoted Hebrews 13:12 to preach that Jesus suffered rejection as people decided to crucify Him on the cross.
Chan also talked about suffering earlier this year when he addressed the students at Liberty University. He said that Jesus came down on earth with the idea that He'll serve and give up His life and not the other way around. So if people adopt this same mentality, Chan taught, then it'll be easier to embrace suffering as a way to defeat sin.
Chan declared that he'll stand alongside Jesus and be "rejected with Him" before he threw his challenge to the crowd.
He said, "We have prayed together today and we have worshiped together today. The question is are we willing to be rejected together?"
home Faith Louie Giglio leads worshippers at Together 2016: 'Jesus changes everything'
Pastor Louie Giglio took the stage and the crowd of "Together 2016" event to where God's mercy is found, "only 20 inches" away.
The pastor of Passion City Church in Atlanta, Georgia appeared before the thousands of young people gathered for "Together 2016" event at National Mall in Washington D.C. Saturday, July 16 to celebrate that "Jesus changes everything."
Instead of just taking the pulpit to preach, Giglio took on a different turn by bringing the crowd to a spiritual high when he led them to prayer and went down on bended knees.
"God's mercy is only 20 inches from us," the 58-year-old pastor said, as reported by The Christian Post.
"We are not too proud to bow down, we are not too confident to bow down," said Giglio as he invoked the Heavenly Father to look down on His humbled people.
"We know that we've walked in our own sight, in our own strength, in our own understanding," he said.
He then enumerated the ways that people turned their backs on God, such as neglecting His Word, hardening their hearts, turning deaf ears on the Holy Spirit's guidance, and exalting every other name but Jesus Christ.
"We are humbled," continued the pastor. "We are bowed low, we are lifting our hearts, our hands, our hope, our voices, our eyes up to you and proclaiming that our God is the great God."
At this point, Giglio led the crowd to declare God as the one true God and went on to proclaim God's nature. They also praised Jesus Christ for dying on the cross and for bringing life, victory, forgiveness and freedom to everyone.
Giglio, the founder of the Passion Movement as well as an author, confessed to have suffered from a nervous breakdown years ago and said it's a story of God's grace.
"You will see us ready and willing to follow you with boldness in whatever way you lead," declared Giglio. "This is our hope and prayer."
The Republican National Convention will have an unwelcome soundtrack this week from activist supergroup Prophets of Rage.
The recently formed band began their Republican convention residency in Cleveland this week by playing a free show Monday at the "End Poverty Now! Rally." A march for economic justice followed, which brought the band to the Cleveland Public Square, where they are playing another show. Other events, both scheduled and unscheduled, will be announced as the week progresses. Their goal is to "represent people who need a cultural voice to express their displeasure with the coronation that's going to be happening in the good working class town of Cleveland."
Prophets Of Rage vs RNC: Public Square Parkhttps://t.co/QzUoUpReM9 Prophets of Rage (@prophetsofrage) July 18, 2016
Cleveland police car & van parked across the street from @prophetsofrage concert which may end & become a march soon pic.twitter.com/U7VfvN9igQ Unicorn Riot (@UR_Ninja) July 18, 2016
The band released their first single just a few hours ago in tandem with their RNC appearance.
The "Prophets of Rage" name comes from a Public Enemy song. The group includes Rage Against the Machine's bassist and backing vocalist Tim Commerford, guitarist Tom Morello, and drummer Brad Wilk, together with Public Enemy's Chuck D and DJ Lord, and B-Real from Cypress Hill.
The band's members have sold more than 20 million albums worldwide in their respective careers. Bloomberg Politics described them as "the most provocative and outspoken acts in the history of hip-hop and heavy metal."
Boing Boing spoke to Tom Morello about the legacy of Rage in the Machine, and why it matters in 2016:
Maureen Herman: As RATM, the band took many stands of action and ruckuses, including shutting down the New York Stock Exchange for two hoursthe only time in historyduring your performance and Michael Moore-directed video shoot for "Sleep Now In The Fire." Of all those times, what is the accomplishment or action you are most proud of, or you feel had the most real impact? Tom Morello: I think the greatest impact that RATM had, was not a specific political action or stunt, but rather the catalog of material that has made its way into the DNA of rebels across the globe.
News of the Prophets of Rage project first surfaced earlier this year, when a mysterious website launched on May 31 with a countdown clock. The site seemed to be officially linked to the band Rage Against the Machine, which has not performed since 2011. On the website, only this statement and nothing more: "Clear the way for the Prophets of Rage: The Party's Over Summer 2016 #takethepowerback"
When the clock ran out, the site announced their first show: a small club gig in Los Angeles later that day which sold out within an hour despite requiring in-person sales. At this same moment, the band also announced a 35+ city tour, kicking off Tuesday, July 19 at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
Ticket price at all shows is $20, and a portion of proceeds benefit homeless-related charities in each city.
Tickets and VIP packages are available here.
Why now?
In an interview with Bloomberg, guitarist Tom Morello said, "The last time RATM played in Los Angeles, we out-drew Trump, Sanders, and Clinton by a margin of 3 to 1, so I think the general electorate is ready for our message."
What is the message? Since their first performance last month, the violence and strained race relations in our country have intensified. Prophets of Rage say their message is the same one that guitarist and Harvard grad Tom Morello has been saying for years.
"Feed the poor. Fight the power. Rock the fuck out."
Prophets of Rage vocalist B Real (formerly Cypress Hill) says, "The message conveys that we're done with the lies that are told to us for our votes. The party's over. We're standing up, we're making our voices known. There's not music that speaks to what's going on right now, nothing with substance."
Chuck D agrees.
"The two-party system has been over for a long time," says the activist and former Public Enemy frontman.
"We have to come up with something that looks forward into the 21st century, that makes sense to these new generations that have come into the voting marketplace," Chuck D says. "What we want to try to represent right with Prophets of Rage is the songs, they're timeless, they're even beyond us as individuals, and there's an atmosphere that we want to confront.
"The songs travel the world. How would you like your country to be looked at from the outside looking in? Because these songs, we're going to be worldwide, we're on a wavelength with the rest of the planet, looking inward. Something's gotta be said, something's gotta be done, what better thing than music?"
In the same interview with Bloomberg last month, Morello spoke about the 2016 political landscape:
"It's an unprecedented moment in history, and one of the things that has irked me greatly is that the media has talked about the Trump campaign and the Sanders campaign as, both of them are 'raging against the machine. We're going to set that record straight once and for all: what it really means to 'rage against the machine.' I think that both those campaigns have tapped into something very, very real. That people right, left, and center believe the system as it currently stands does not serve their needs, but what they're being offered up through the tiny funnel of the electoral process, is a racist demagogue on the one hand, and a great dreamer on the other hand, and in the middle is the lesser of three evils. None of those choices are good enough for us. There needs to be an alternate voice, one that's unfiltered, uncompromising, and stands unapologetically with the people."
Though he's clearly referencing Trump, Sanders, and Clinton, respectively, he says, "The underlying problems are systemic. The songs that we've been writing for decades attack the system, not the individual candidates."
If only more people would heed Prophets of Rage's call to unify, motivate, and activate.
A most un-Civil War has broken out among Democrats and other left-leaning Americans. Social media has largely replaced significant face to face political discussion among friendsthe kind we normally have in an election year, conversations that involve a little civility, listening, facts, and maturity.
Not online, and not this year. I've seen long-term friendships implode in a series of ardent, endless, self-righteous comment threads. I've seen solid professional colleagues reduced to GIF wars. I've seen once-friendly acquaintances block each other over memes.
You can feel the rage on the internet, but internet rage doesn't usually accomplish much. The #ImWithHer devotees and the #FeeltheBern followers have turned their Democratic vitriol away from #DonaldTrump supporters. Bernie and Hillary fans are facing off on Facebook like besties in a catfight, pecking lengthy arguments into their keyboards, desperate to be heard and understood, while Trump supporters giggle in delight at the arms-crossed grudge that could hand Republicans the White House. The bitterness is everywhere. Prophets of Rage have tapped into something real.
The guys in "Prophets" aren't coddled rock stars dabbling in election-year politics for exposure and record sales. They just played three sold-out shows in LA and New York to benefit the homeless, and last week played a free and unannounced show on Skid Row, the vast and seemingly permanent homeless encampment in Downtown LA.
These are longtime activists and artists who built decades-long careers producing masterful bodies of work and taking on challenges others would run from, showing little concern for who might be offended. They have not been writing love songs that make you cry, they've been writing protest songs that make you think, and radical anthems that unify and consolidate a scattered body of the voiceless. Their muse is the world's discontent, and they are masters at crafting it into constructive action.
Delivering the rock
With three big catalogs to draw from, the band unleashed the power of their music in their recent live shows, with a crowd surging palpably with energya rhythmic, visceral whole. A community. People hungry for something to connect to.
Video: Prophets of Rage covering RATM's "Killing in the Name" at the Los Angeles Palladium
I saw their LA show at the Palladium, and the band members looked like they had been dying to play those songs again. I asked bassist Tim Commerford what it felt like.
Maureen Herman: Watching you play the Los Angeles Palladium show, you seemed unleashedas though you'd been dying to play some of these songs again, and the crowd seemed like they were dying to hear themdid it feel like you were "back" or did it feel like a totally different thing? How is the songwriting process different from RATM in this band? Tim Commerford: Prophets is a new musical experience for me. New songs, old songs, new catalogs, covers, mash-ups, there are so many possibilities, it's endless, but really, it's just fun to be together. The feeling I get playing music with my idols and my brothers is something I will never forget. That was the tenth time I've played the Hollywood Palladium and it felt like the first. The thing about it that never changes for me is the enthusiasm of the amazing audience. They went off! That enthusiasm was my fuel, I had to try and keep up with them. In other words they are just as important to me as we are and once again, they didn't let me down. Thank you Los Angeles, you killed it!
I asked Public Enemy's DJ Lord about the intimidating task of being the opening act:
Maureen Herman: You warmed up an enormous and very eager crowd at the Los Angeles Palladium, where the show sold out in an hour. What did you think when you saw the sea of people? How did it feel when the rest of your bandmates took to the stage? DJ Lord: When I saw the sea of people at the palladium I was AMPED! It gave me a huge sense of UNITY that the people would come out and support the message (#RiseUP #TakeThePowerBack). When my bandmates joined in, it felt like we were The Avengers taking on a worldwide attack of Ultronwell in this case let's say "Ignorance & Inequality" are Ultron..heh.
Why isn't Rage frontman Zach de la Rocha in the band?
Chuck D addressed the question on most fans' minds directly at the LA Forum during their second show. Where was RATM frontman Zach de la Rocha? Chuck D praised de la Rocha's "lyrics of revolution" and extended an open invitation to him, with the audience as his witness, that "there's always a seat warm for him. Long live the music of Rage Against the Machine!"
In an interview with Albuquerque radio station 104.1 The Edge, Chuck D elaborated, "We'll always keep the seat warm for Zach de la Rocha, who is a fantastic, rebellious hero of ours. We can't make Rage Against the Machine come back together, but if Zach shows up you've got Rage Against the Machine. And the shows live on, and he's given us the blessings to do it, which is the greatest thing."
The original breakup of Rage ended abruptly with Zack's departure after an incident at the MTV Music Video Awards in New York in 2000. They reformed a few times, notably once for the 2008 Republican convention.
At that time, in an interview with Ann Powers in 2008, Zack said, "So much has changed. When you get older, you look back on tensions and grievances and have another perspective on it. I think our relationship now is better than it's ever been. I would even describe it as great."
The last show RATM played was in 2011 at the LA Coliseum. It was celebratory, triumphant, and united. After the show, Zack seemed happy, content, and whole. They all did. Apparently Zack is sitting this one out, for reasons we don't know.
For Morello, the apple fell to the right of the tree
Morello believes music is a powerful agent of change. "My view is that progressive, radical, or revolutionary change always comes from below, not from above, so even if you've staked all of your hopes for yourself and your family on 'hope,'" Morello said, referencing the Obama campaign's winning slogan.
"Well, sometimes that doesn't work out, you know? If you base them on this sort of xenophobic, fear-based racism, that's not going to work out, either. How people change the worldit starts around people's kitchen tables, it starts in their classrooms, wherever people gather to talk about making the world the one they want to see."
Morello knows ideas that begin at kitchen tables or in classrooms. The son of a white high school history teacher and a Kenyan revolutionary who divorced when he was a child, Morello was raised by his single mother. He studied political science, and graduated from Harvard. Sound familiar? Maybe a little like Obama's own story? That's where the similarities end. Morello has earned Grammys with Rage Against the Machine, and accolades for his activism. He is an Industrial Workers of the World member, and in 2006 received the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award. In 2014, he won the Spirit of Courage Award, which the Courage Campaign presents to someone fighting for a fair and just world.
Morello says the real radical in the family is his mom, Mary Morello. She earned a master's degree in African and Latin American history, and spent many years teaching English in Germany, Spain, and Japan while circling the globe on a freighter. She lived and worked in Kenya in the early 1960s, where she met and married Ngethe Njoroge, a Kenyan revolutionary who eventually became the first Kenyan delegate to the United Nations. He was a guerrilla in the Mau Mau Uprising (19501960) that arguably led to Kenya's independence from British rule. Though his father did not participate in his life until recent years, the revolutionary blood runs deep.
In 1987, Mary Morello quit her teaching job of 22 years and founded the anti-censorship group, "Parents for Rock and Rap" for which she won the 1987 Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award. She has long been an advocate for the innocence of death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is convicted in the 1982 shooting death of a Philadelphia police officer.
Maureen: You have given credit to your mother as being the real radical in the family. Was there a core guiding principle that you were taught early on that drove Mary's activism and world view, or did it seem to evolve over her lifetime? Tom Morello: My mom, Mary Morello, has had an internationalist perspective for much of her 92 years. While hailing from a tiny coal-mining town in central Illinois, she traveled the globe as a single woman in her twenties and thirties and was exposed to ideas, political ideas, and diverse cultures, which certainly have shaped her worldview. At the core of her essence, though, is a relentless belief in standing up for the underdog, whoever the underdog may be. That is what I believe, informs her morals and politics, and was a strong voice in my home growing up, and remains a strong voice around our dinner table. Maureen: How would you describe her core philosophy and do you share it? Tom Morello: My mom fearlessly self-identifies as a socialist/communist and anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-bullshit purveyor. She has both the life experience and the internal moral barometer, which reveal strong opinions on many issues, but the core guiding principles are a love of the poor and downtrodden, and humanisma belief that a more humane decent and equitable planet is possible.
At the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, Rage Against the Machine was scheduled to play a free show in protest of what frontman De La Rocha called "the power abusing party. As told to "Suicide Girls," by Morello:
"They showed up at exactly the time we were scheduled to perform, and as soon as we got out of our vehicle we were immediately surrounded by riot police who told us if we approached the stage we'd be arrested for playing music. They said that we were not on a permit for the day's show. We produced the permit and showed them that none of the artists that had already been playing for the previous four hours, including Anti-Flag and Michael Franti, were listed on the permits. They just tried to use that as an excuse to stop us from playing. We were there right on time to play and they physically barred us from getting onto the stage because they were afraid of the music we were going to play." "Imagine if in Beijing during the Olympics a Chinese band whose songs were critical of the government was told they'd be arrested if they attempted to sing those songs in a public forumthere would have been an international human rights outcry. But that's exactly what happened in Minnesota. But this is a band that has made a living singing a song that goes 'fuck you, I won't do what you tell me,' so we weren't about to go back to the hotel with our tails between our legs. So we out-flanked the police line and went into the middle of the crowd, and played a couple of songs passing a bull horn back and forth, and it seemed to go over pretty well."
The next day, the band surprised the crowd when they silently stood on stage while wearing orange Guantanamo Bay-like prisoner suits with black hoods over their heads. They played "Bombtrack" and soon the crowd protested in the streets. Riot police ended the uprising with the arrests of 102 people.
I hope that this week, whatever happens at the RNC in Cleveland, those who have gathered will be able to exercise their right to freedom of speech without harm. Given the state of the country, it's risky to stand up against the RNC and rock out for the poor and powerless in an open-carry city.
But that's what Prophets of Rage signed up for.
PROPHETS OF RAGE 2016 TOUR DATES
All dates, venues and cities below subject to change.
July 19 Cleveland, OH venue TBD
Aug. 19 Fairfax, VA, EagleBank Arena
Aug. 20, Camden, NJ, BB&T Pavilion
Aug. 21, Mansfield, MA, Xfinity Center
Aug. 23, Hartford, CT, The Xfinity Theatre
Aug. 24, Toronto, ON, Molson Canadian Amphitheatre
Aug. 26, Holmdel, NJ, P.N.C. Bank Arts Center
Aug. 27, Brooklyn, NY, Barclays Center
Aug. 28, Wantagh, NY, Nikon at Jones Beach Theater
Aug. 30, Noblesville, IN, Klipsch Music Center
Aug. 31, Burgettstown, PA, First Niagara Pavilion
Sept. 1, Clarkston, MI, DTE Energy Music Theatre
Sept. 3, Tinley Park, IL, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre
Sept. 4, St. Louis, MO, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre
Sept. 5, Kansas City, MO, Providence Medical Center Amphitheater
Sept. 7, Morrison, CO, Red Rocks Amphitheatre
Sept. 10, Auburn, WA, White River Amphitheatre
Sept. 11, Ridgefield, WA, Sunlight Supply Amphitheatre
Sept. 13, Mountain View, CA, Shoreline Amphitheatre
Sept. 15, Los Angeles, CA, The Forum
Sept. 17, Phoenix, AZ, Ak-Chin Pavilion
Sept. 25, Dallas, TX, Gexa Energy Pavilion
Sept. 27, Nashville, TN, Bridgestone Arena
Sept. 29, VA Beach, VA, Veterans United Home Loans Amphitheater
Oct. 1, Tampa, FL, MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheater at Encore Park
Oct. 2, West Palm Beach, FL, Perfect Vodka Amp
Oct. 4, Alpharetta, GA, Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre
Oct. 5, Cincinnati, OH, Riverbend Music Center
Oct. 7, Tulsa, OK, BOK Center
Oct. 8, Houston, TX, Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion
Oct. 9, San Antonio, TX, AT&T Center
Oct. 11, El Paso, TX, El Paso County Coliseum
Oct. 12, Albuquerque, NM, Isleta Amphitheatre
Oct. 14, Las Vegas, NV, Mandalay Bay Event Center
Oct. 16, Chula Vista, CA, Sleep Train Amphitheatre
LYRICS
"Prophets of Rage"
by Public Enemy
With vice I hold the mike device
With force I keep it away of course
And I'm keepin' you from sleepin'
And on stage I rage
And I'm rollin'
To the poor I pour in on in metaphors
Not bluffin', it's nothin'
That we ain't did before
We played you stayed
The points made
You consider it done
By the prophets of rage
(Power of the people say)
I roll with the punches so I survive
Try to rock 'cause it keeps the crowd alive
I'm not ballin', I'm just callin'
But I'm past the days of yes y'allin'
Wa wiggle round and round
I pump, you jump up
Hear my words my verbs
And get juiced up
I been around a while
You can descibe my sound
Clear the way
For the prophets of rage
(Power of the people say)
I rang ya bell
Can you tell I got feelin'
Just peace at least
Cause I want it
Want it so bad
That I'm starvin'
I'm like Garvey
So you can see be
It's like that, I'm like Nat
Leave me the hell alone
If you don't think I'm a brother
Then check the chromosomes
Then check the stage
I declare it a new age
Get down for the prophets of rage
Keep you from gettin' like this
You back the track
You find we're the quotable
You emulate
Brothers, sisters that's beautiful
Follow a path
Of positivity you go
Some sing it or rap it
Or harmonize it through Go-Go
Little you know but very
Seldom I do party jams
About a plan
I'm considered the man
I'm the recordable
But God made it affordable
I say it, you play it
Back in your car or even portable
Stereo
Describes my scenario
Left or right, Black or White
They tell lies in the books
That you're readin'
It's knowledge of yourself
That you're needin'
Like Vescey or Prosser
We have a reason why
To debate the hate
That's why we're born to die
Mandela, cell dweller, Thatcher
You can tell her clear the way for the prophets of rage
(Power of the people you say)
It's raw and keepin' you on the floor
Its soul and keepin' you in control
It's pt. 2 'cause I'm
Pumpin' what you're used to
Until the whole juice crew
Gets me in my goose down
I do the rebel yell
And I'm the duracell
Call it plain insane
Brothers causein' me pain
When a brothers a victim
And the sellers a dweller in a cage
Yo, run the accapella
(Power of the people say)
home US Melania Trump accused of plagiarizing Michelle Obama: Speech grabs spotlight at Republican convention
Similarities between the speech delivered by Donald Trump's wife, Melania, and remarks by first lady Michelle Obama in 2008 stole the spotlight at the Republican convention on Tuesday, a day Trump's campaign had hoped to devote to the U.S. economy.
House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, the top U.S. elected Republican, was to formally put Trump's name forward later on Tuesday to be the party's presidential nominee for the Nov. 8 election.
On Monday, Trump's backers faced down a revolt from Republican delegates opposed to him. Then the campaign ran into unexpected controversy over what should have been a routinely feel-good part of the first day of the convention in Cleveland - Melania Trump's address in support of her husband.
A Slovenian-born jewelry designer and former model, Melania Trump delivered her testimonial after being introduced by Trump, who made a grand entrance dramatic, silhouetted against a white background.
"I have been with Donald for 18 years and I have been aware of his love for this country since we first met," the aspiring first lady told the convention, reading from a teleprompter. "He's tough when he has to be, but he's also kind and fair and caring."
But a small part of her speech quickly captured all the attention. Referring to the values held by her family, it was strikingly similar to a section of Michelle Obama's speech to the Democratic convention in 2008 in support of then presidential candidate Barack Obama. A Trump campaign official suggested the similarity was the result of an error by her speech writers.
"In writing her beautiful speech, Melania's team of writers took notes on her life's inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking," Jason Miller, Trump's senior communications advisor, said in a statement.
Trump himself made no mention of the issue in a Twitter post early on Tuesday, saying simply: "It was truly an honor to introduce my wife, Melania Trump last night. Her speech and demeanor were absolutely incredible. Very proud!"
Trump, a New York businessman, has never held elective office and has been a controversial candidate, struggling to unite Republicans around his White House bid despite seeing off 16 rivals to win the primary nominating process.
On NBC's Today show, Trump ally Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor, was asked if as a former prosecutor he could make a case for plagiarism from Melania Trump's speech.
"No, not when 93 percent of the speech is completely different from Michelle Obama's speech, and they express common thoughts," Christie replied. "I think after tonight we won't be talking about this, we'll move on to whatever a comes up tonight," he said.
'MAKE AMERICA WORK AGAIN'
The theme of Tuesday's convention event was entitled "Make America Work Again."
Despite his lack of political experience, Trump touts his business record as a real estate developer and - running counter to Republican free trade orthodoxy - has proposed some protectionist trade policies aimed at preventing job outsourcing.
Christie, Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell were part of the lineup of speakers on Tuesday, along with Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., daughter Tiffany and a former Trump rival for the presidency, Ben Carson.
It will be Christie's first major public appearance since Trump chose Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his vice presidential running mate last week, disappointing Christie who had been on the short-list for the job.
Both Ryan and McConnell need Trump to do well in the November election as they seek to preserve Republican majorities in the U.S. House and Senate.
Trump is pitted against Hillary Clinton, who will be formally anointed the Democratic candidate at the party's convention in Philadelphia next week. The former secretary of state leads most opinion polls.
Part of the goal of the Republican convention is to portray Trump in the most favorable light possible, softening the image of a candidate whose anti-immigrant rhetoric has factored heavily in Americans' views of him.
home Faith Thousands of Christians unite in prayer for America at Together 2016
In the midst of the recent issues on racism, abortion, transgender rights and politics, evangelicals gathered in the thousands at the National Mall on Saturday, July 16 for a time of prayer and worship.
Together 2016 was attended by congregations from more than 1,000 churches all over the country. The people prayed for a "reset" of their personal lives, the churches and the U.S.
"We really we just kind of had the feeling that Jesus is often a reset to individuals, to our nation, to each of us," said event organizer Nick Hall, the founder of the student-led prayer and evangelism movement called PULSE, according to USA Today.
At one point, Lou Engle led the crowd to pray against racism, and the people responded by getting down on their knees and imploring God to break racism in the country.
The event also included performances from Christian artists. Lecrae, one of the artists who guested at the event, urged the people to stop being "religious" and to start becoming agents of healing for the nation.
"I see people as far as my eye can see. I see people who should be referred to as brothers and sisters," he said, according to a Facebook post. "Let's not be a religious community that walks by people who are struggling and hurting. If we're not a healing salve, we contribute to the pain."
Together 2016 was scheduled to run from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., but it had to end early because of the heat, as advised by the Park Police.
Hall explained many people had been brought to Emergency Services because of the extreme heat, but added that while ending the event early was a "disappointment," the organizers wanted to "honor the authorities who are trying to keep people safe."
"It was never about coming to the Mall. It was always about being sent from the Mall," The Washington Post quoted him as saying. "This is about sending a generation out from the Mall who are saying, 'God, we wanna go a we wanna give everything for Jesus.'"
home US Transgender woman arrested in Target after taking photos of teenage girl in dressing room
Police have arrested a transgender woman in a Target store in Idaho after she was caught taking photos of a female teenager trying on clothes in a dressing room.
Shauna Patricia Smith, who is also known as Sean P. Smith, reportedly climbed to the top of the partition between the cubicles and took a photo of the teenager in the other cubicle with her cellphone.
The 43-year-old transgender woman was taken into police custody in Bonneville County Jail, registered under the name Sean Smith, according to Post Register.
Reports said that the victim noticed Smith, who was dressed as a woman, taking pictures of her using a cell phone.
She confronted Smith, who quickly left the store. The victim then reported Smith to the authorities.
"The woman was begging for help as she chased the man out the door. She kept saying she wanted those pictures deleted," a witness told East Idaho News.
Smith later confessed to taking similar photos in the past. Police are now investigating if similar instances have happened in the store.
Meanwhile, Target has attempted to re-assure the public that it would do everything it could to create a "safe and secure shopping environment," according to NBC affiliate KPVI.
The store has been overwhelmed by controversy regarding transgender rights since April when it announced it would open the women's bathrooms and dressing rooms to transgender people who were born the opposite sex.
To protect women and children from potential sexual predators, the American Family Association called for a boycott on all Target stores. The campaign has now gathered more than 1.3 million signatures.
In response to the recent voyeurism incident, evangelist Franklin Graham said Target is "putting their customers at risk" by allowing transgender persons to use the women's bathrooms and dressing rooms.
"Target is the one inviting sexual perverts into their stores," he said on a Facebook post. "Shame on Target, and shame on their CEO & Chairman of the Board Brian Cornell!"
He encouraged more people to join the boycott against Target for their transgender bathroom policy.
home Faith United Methodist Church elects first gay bishop, breaching church rules against gay ministers
The United Methodist Church elected its first openly gay bishop during the Western Jurisdiction's quadrennial meeting held in Scottsdale, Arizona on Friday, July 15.
The Rev. Karen Oliveto, pastor of San Francisco-based Glide Memorial Church, was elected bishop with 88 votes despite the church's prohibition against ordaining "self-avowed practicing homosexuals" as ministers. Oliveto is married to Robin Ridenour, a deaconess at the California-Nevada Conference.
"The practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching. Therefore self-avowed practicing homosexuals are not to be certified as candidates, ordained as ministers, or appointed to serve in The United Methodist Church," the church's Book of Discipline states.
Last May, the UMC voted to review church laws regarding homosexuality. Oliveto's election while the review is presently ongoing solicited varied reactions from the church community.
Lonnie Brooks from the Alaska Conference considered Oliveto's election as the Western Jurisdiction's way of becoming independent from the UMC and cautioned that it could case a split.
"What they haven't given much thought to is that this will also cause a split in the West. We have some of the strongest red states here," Brooks said in a statement.
Good News vice president Rev. Thomas Lambrecht said the Western Jurisdiction is in effect renouncing its association with the UMC.
"If our covenant is no longer in force, we will be forced to live into a new reality in our denomination," Brooks said.
Wesley Hingano, son of the Rev. Sisofina Hingano, said the day Oliveto got elected bishop is "a beautiful day." His father had withdrawn from the election to give way to Oliveto because he wanted to see homosexuals in church "walk freely."
Bishop Bruce R. Ough, president of the United Methodist Council of Bishops, said Oliveto's election "raises significant concerns and questions of church polity and unity."
"Being a self-avowed, practicing homosexual is a chargeable offense for any clergyperson in The United Methodist Church, if indeed this is the case," Ough said in a statement, adding that the Council will protect the involved clergy's due process. "Our differences are real and cannot be glossed over, but they are also reconcilable. We are confident God is with us, especially in uncharted times and places."
The newly elected bishop thanked the delegates who voted for her.
"I think at this moment I have a glimpse of the realm of God," Oliveto said. She added that as long as people feel like they don't belong in the church because of their sexuality, race, social standing and other factors, then the church's work is not done.
Atheists demand removal of Christian flag, Latin cross from Georgia state courthouse
An atheist group is demanding the removal of a Christian flag and Latin cross from a Georgia courthouse, saying it violates the U.S. Constitution.
In a letter to Clerk of Courts Rebecca Rowe of Bryant County, the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) said the display of the Latin cross on a flag is contrary to the Establishment Clause, which prohibits government's endorsement of religion.
"A majority of federal courts has held displays of Latin crosses on public property to be an unconstitutional endorsement of religion," it said. "The inherent religious significance of the Christian flag and Latin cross is undeniable and is not disguisable."
The FFRF added that "no secular purpose, no matter how sincere, will detract from the overall message that the flag stands for Christianity and the overall display promotes Christianity."
It claims that the display "confers government of Christianity, a blatant violation of the Establishment Clause."
The flag is positioned next to the judge's bench in a Bryant County courtroom.
The FFRF said the flag is a traditional Christian design that was conceptualised by Protestants in the early 20th century.
"The white in the flag is said to represent the biblical notions of purity, the blue is supposed to stand for baptism in water and the red is meant to symbolise the sacrifice that Jesus made for mankind," it said.
FFRF co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor said "Christianity has no place in our secular courtrooms. The flag needs to be gotten rid of at once."
The flag, it said, is sending a message to the nearly 30 percent of non-Christians that they are not "favoured members of the political community," quoting the U.S. Supreme Court.
It added that the cross creates "an exclusionary effect, making non-Christian and non-believing residents of Bryant County political outsiders."
"It is unconstitutional for a government entity to display a flag with a patently religious symbol and meaning on its grounds. You must take immediate action and remove this flag from the courthouse," FFRF said in the letter.
Bishop of London to step down after more than 20 years at the helm
The Bishop of London Richard Chartres has announced that he is to retire next year, after a long and distinguished career at the heart of the Church of England and the British establishment.
Chartres, who has overseen a remarkable renaissance of the London diocese with flourishing churches across all three main traditions of evangelial, liberal and Anglo-Catholic, has written to clergy and parishes announcing that his last public engagement will be Candlemas at St Paul's Cathedral on 2 February 2017, a few months before his 70th birthday.
Chartres, who is Dean of the Chapel Royal and has become a close friend of all the senior members of the Royal family, has primarily been a figure of unity in a Church divided over the last two decades by women's ordination and the issue of sexuality.
Although a supporter of women's ministry, his dignified restraint from ordaining women priests himself, possibly in aid of preserving that unity, might have cost him translation to the top job at Canterbury during either of the last two vacancies when many senior church people had hoped to witness his elevation.
He was also a dedicated and expert amabassador for the Eastern Orthodox churches in this country and in Eastern Europe. His familiarity with the eastern rite and love of the ornate flourishing of the best in liturgy and ritual could easily at times have led him to being mistaken for one of their number.
His exceptional presence and wonderful preaching, rich in tone and content, won disciples for Christ and his Church throughout the diocese and beyond.
While it was apparent to observers that he did not care much for the machinations of General Synod, his gift for delegating meant that even lovers of arcane ecclesiastical bureaucracy flourished under his watch. And although not an evangelical, it is partly thanks to his thoughtful pastoral oversight that Holy Trinity Brompton in Knightsbridge and its evangelistic child, the Alpha Course, have become the worldwide mission phenomena that they have.
Appointed in 1995, he had previously left his academic career as a divinity professor to serve as Bishop of Stepney for three years.
Chartres said: "It has been a privilege and a delight to serve in the Diocese of London as priest and bishop for well over thirty years. I have seen confidence return and church life revive."
The recent progress report on Capital Vision 2020 is an "eloquent testimony" to a renewed confidence in the gospel, more strenuous compassion and more extensive service of our neighbours in the most diverse city on earth, he added. The diocese is also financially healthy for the 10th year running.
He leaves more than 200 candidates for the priesthood training in the London centre of St Mellitus College alone.
He said he had tried to follow the example of St Augustine who said: "For you I am a bishop but with you I am a Christian". He added: "In this spirit I hope you will forgive my many shortcomings in office."
Brexit leaves UK more divided than before poll
England has become more divided since the vote to leave the European Union, new research has revealed.
The data commissioned by the anti-racism charity HOPE not Hate shows the gap between those in favour of immigration and those opposed has widened since the referendum result.
However the figures also show a trend towards England being more tolerant and welcoming since Brexit. The research suggests that despite a rise in the number of racist incidents immediately after the referendum results, attitudes towards immigrant communities has improved. "While the Referendum result gave encouragement to people who already 'hate' to hate even more, the general attitudes of the English towards immigration, a multicultural society and Muslims, have got slightly more positive," said the report.
The proportion of people comfortable with immigration and multiculturalism has increased from 32 per cent to 38 per cent, when compared to a similar poll before the referendum. Meanwhile 20 per cent are strongly opposed to immigration, down from 24 per cent before the vote on June 23.
But the report warned that those most opposed to immigration, who are now most optimistic about the UK's future out of the EU, may feel let down as the reality of Brexit emerges. "The danger is that sooner or later this optimism will burst and when that happens these voters will be even angrier than they were before and possibly look for more hardline solutions," the report read.
The figures come as ministers and MPs gathered for a community cohesion summit in Parliament on Tuesday. The culture secretary Karen Bradley and former co-chair of the Conservative Party Baroness Warsi spoke on how to tackle a spike in hate crimes and racial tensions since the referendum.
Summit chair Jack Dromey MP said Britain was "scarred by rising racism" since Brexit which was "wrong and quite simply not British". The Bishop of Croyden, the Rt Rev Jonathan Clark and chair of the Churches' Refugee Network and Gillian Merron, MP for Lincoln and vice-president of the Jewish Leadership Council, were among a number of faith leaders and MPs to attend.
HOPE not hate has organised a #MoreInCommon campaign to fight rising tensions including a weekend to promote peace across racial boundaries.
Nick Lowles, chief executive of the charity, said: "Time and again it has been proved that the more we interact the easier it is to breakdown barriers and find common ground. There are many real and serious problems in our local communities and life for many is very tough. However, we can better solve our problems through talking and working together. Our #MoreInCommon weekend is the start of this process."
Case studies: who are the people helping Syrian refugees settle in the UK?
When the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd launched the Full Community Sponsorship scheme at Lambeth Palace with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, today, the Home Office released details of some people already taking part in the project to help resettle Syrian refugees.
Jools Payne, a mother of three from Oswestry, Shropshire felt compelled to help refugees after hearing about a Syrian mother who travelled thousands of miles to Germany. A volunteer with the charity Refugee Action, Payne has been showing refugees around the local community, explaining how the library and fire services work and introducing them to the local butcher, who is now happy to stock halal meat.
"It is such a pleasure to be getting to know the families who have arrived here having fled such desperately dangerous and sad circumstances," Payne said. "I have learnt that it is really important to be mindful of their needs and requirements above anything else. Helping them to settle into our town and understand how things work is a practical thing to be able to do and so many of us want to show that we care and refugees are welcome here."
Meanwhile, in Kensington and Chelsea, a couple have let a two-bedroom flat to a family of Syrian refugees at a reduced rent consistent with the Local Housing Allowance, for a period of three years. The move by husband and wife Simon Winchester and Phillippa Giles comes amid cooperation between the Council and a local Welcome Committee made up of faith and voluntary organisations to resettle the refugees.
Volunteers from the Welcome Committee have furnished the flat with items donated by the local community, and the family will be supported by a local authority caseworker and a team of voluntary mentors.
Winchester said: "We were moved by the plight of the homeless refugees [who are] families like our own, thrown out of their homes, their lives turned upside down. We hope that by letting a family stay in our flat we are helping in a small way and would encourage others who are in a position to help to do so."
Thirdly, the international development agency World Jewish Relief has funded an employment and training programme aimed at helping Syrian refugees get jobs n the UK, launched in February and piloted by Horton Housing Association in Bradford.
The development agency hopes to broaden the programme across the UK and support 1,000 of the 20,000 Syrian refugees arriving under the Vulnerable Persons Resettlement (VPR) scheme announced by the Government last September.
"[We have] received many calls from our community for us to play a key part in a Jewish response [to the VPR scheme]," said the chief executive of World Jewish Relief, Paul Anticoni. "The gap in provision for employment services for refugees, combined with our extensive experience in livelihood development, means that we hope to make a significant contribution to their experience of settling in the UK, after the war and persecution that so many faced in Syria."
A new International Labour Organization report called ASEAN in transformation: How technology is changing jobs and enterprises predicts that "sewbots" sewing robots that can piece together garments with little or no human intervention will replace up to 90% of garment and footwear workers in Cambodia and Vietnam in the years to come.
This isn't an entirely bad news story: the South Asian garment industry is dangerous and underpaid, and replacing humans with robots will reduce the labor inputs (and hence the price) of things that we all need clothes and shoes.
But obviously, that will leave a hell of a lot of people in the region without any jobs. This presents two problems: first, how will they live; and second, who will buy the things that robots make if all the benefits of automation accrue to an ever-dwindling group of people who own robots?
French philosopher Bernard Stiegler has led an effort to create an experimental town called Plaine Commune in Seine-Saint-Denis that seeks to address this question through a "contributory income" that differs from the better-known minimum basic income. Under contributory income schemes, participants receive a minimum income that is topped up by doing creative and cognitive work that is interleaved with continuous, lifelong learning and retraining.
His rallying cry: "The time saved through automation must be granted to the people."
//Bernard Stiegler// Such an income, also called "basic" [income], is a safety net. A contributory income is at the intersection of the models of temporary work in the performing arts [intermittents du spectacle] and the practices of [creating] free software. It covers various levels of compensation that depend upon the periods of employment and the level of salary. The work of tomorrow will be discontinuous [intermittent]. Periods of employment will alternate with periods of acquiring, developing and sharing knowledge. The right to the contributory income will be "rechargeable", based upon the number of hours of employment. In case of problems, the system will be accompanied by a minimum living wage [revenu minimum d'existence] as a social protection system attached. The trial we have led with Plaine Commune includes testing a contributory income to benefit those who are younger, for whom the amounts could increase with age and where the contribution allowance [allocation contributif] outside of the employed period would represent a percentage akin to the model of paying unemployment benefit to those working in the performing arts [les intermittents]. The beneficiaries would be invited to "invest in themselves" [s'encapaciter], that is to say, to increase their knowledge through studies as well as professional experience. They would be invited to share their knowledge [savoirs] with their neighbouring community [communaute territoriale]. All of this calls for a new collective intelligence, capable of mobilising formal and advanced theoretical knowledge, which is why, with doctoral students, the aim is to develop a contributory research involving the young and local residents. The aim is to develop an economy of contribution founded on the production of negentropy. [3]
ASEAN in transformation: How technology is changing jobs and enterprises
[Jae-Hee Chang, Gary Rynhart and Phu Huynh/International Labour Organization]
Robot factories could threaten jobs of millions of garment workers
[Tansy Hoskins/The Guardian]
BERNARD STIEGLER: "THE TIME SAVED THROUGH AUTOMATION MUST BE GRANTED TO THE PEOPLE" [TRANSLATION]
[Sam Kinsley]
(via We Make Money Not Art and Four Short Links)
Catholic faith shows steep decline in Germany, with over 180,000 leaving church in 2015
The numbers are alarming, but the bishops' conference in Germany insists that the Catholic Church in the most populous member of the European Union remains "a strong force, whose message is heard and accepted."
In their report issued last Friday, the bishops admitted that a total of 181,925 German Catholics left the church in 2015, according to the Catholic News Agency.
Nevertheless, Catholicism remains as the largest single religious group in Germany, with more than 23.7 million members comprising 29 percent of the population, the report states.
But for how long those figures will remain is anybody's guess. What is clear is that based on official numbers, average church attendance in Germany is down from 18.6 percent in 1995 to 10.4 percent in 2015.
The number of people leaving the Church also increased within the same period, peaking in recent years at more than 200,000 annually.
The German bishops' conference did point out that 2,685 people became Catholic in 2015 while 6,474 reverted to Catholicism.
The bishops also emphasised that baptisms and marriages showed a slight increase as compared to the year before. However, the official report shows a steep downward trend for the long-term figures. In 1995, 260,000 babies were baptised in Germany. In 2015, just over 167,000 were baptised, the official figures show.
The situation is even worse for marriages. In 1995, 86,456 Catholic couples were married in Church. Last year, the number was down by almost half: In a nation of 80 million people, only 44,298 couples were married in Church in 2015..
But despite these alarming numbers, Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich and Freising, the head of the bishops' conference, issued an upbeat appraisal of the situation, saying, "The statistics show that the Church in Germany continues to be a strong force, whose message is heard and accepted."
Cave art shows how colonisation united Christians and Creoles
On the Spanish mainland in 1550, at Valladolid, King Charles V of Spain famously presided at an inquiry into whether the indigenous people of the New World had souls.
Now archaeologists are uncovering evidence that shows in detail how the native peoples and the European colonisers were engaged in active theological debate and over the nature of God, sin and forgiveness.
British archaeologists have been exploring the large network of caves on Mona in the Caribbean, one of the first places to be influenced by Spanish colonists due to its position on a key Atlantic trade route from Europe to the Americas, not far from Puerto Rica. Christopher Columbus stopped off at Mona on his second voyage in 1494.
In an article titled 'The Mona Chronicle: the archaeology of early religious encounter in the New World', published in the Cambridge academic journal Antiquity, archaeologists show how the indigenous people in Mona adopted clothing styles from Europe.
But it was a two-way exchange, and the churches founded by the Europeans at the same time underwent "creolisation".
Mona is a treasure trove of historical evidence because of the caves were used for making drawings and symbols, in particular one cave, known as Cave 18 where there are 15th century Latin and Spanish inscriptions and Christian imagery on the walls.
One, in Latin, reads Plura fecit Deus, or God makes many things, and another, dios te perdone, or God forgive you.
The article speculates some of the writing illustrates "the theological crisis of the New World discovery." They also say there might have been images, now gone, illustrating "attendant practices" that required forgiveness.
Besides the arguments about the souls of indigenous people, there were also debates between Christians and indigenous peoples about about the compatibility of the Catholic God and ancestral spirits.
The archaeologists say in their paper: "The contrast between the formal, intellectual, metropolitan debate, immortalised in paper archives, and the dialogue between colonial individuals of diverse origins, materialised in stone, could not be greater. Nevertheless, both express the metaphysical schisms, anxieties, social experiments and transformations engendered on all sides by the European-American encounters."
The discoveries provide new insight into the creation of new cultural identities throughout the Americas, they add.
"This is some of the earliest evidence of Christianity in the Americas and how the indigenous Taino population experienced it. It shows that locals and Europeans interacted and communicated about their beliefs. It is also a very good insight into the origins of the identities that were shaped in the Americas after the European arrival, it shows the process by which hybrid identities were being built," one of the authors, Jago Cooper of the British Museum, told IBTimes.
Christian charity funding cut over opposition to homosexual relationships
A Dutch Christian charity had its government funding withdrawn after pressure from MPs over its opposition to active homosexual relationships.
Government minister Jet Bussemaker said Hart van Homo's would not receive further government money after the Netherlands' ruling Party for Freedom and Democracy argued the charity, which encourages celibacy for gay Christians, sent out the wrong message.
Hart van Homo's, which roughly translates as "heart for gays", says gay Christians should "opt for friendship without a sexual relationship". It represents a number of other organisations which aim to create more acceptance of homosexuality within churches.
The government U-turn came after Hart van Homo's was revealed to have received state money through an umbrella foundation, LCC+, which represents a number of organisations that aim to create more acceptance of homosexuality within churches. At first Bussemaker said she was confident the charity would not proscribe how gay Christians should live their lives. But now the minister has stopped funding the LCC+ foundation. She has asked them to submit a new application without Hart van Homo's.
"This is a question of principle, not money," one Labour MP Keklik Yucel said. "Should we be subsidising an organisation which conflicts with emancipation?"
The charity has said it will continue its work, despite the cut in funding.
In the UK a similar charity, Living Out, which supports celibacy for same-sex attracted Christians, caused controvery when it was granted charity status. Conservative MP Mike Freer said he was suprised at the decision and said the group "was gay cure therapy rebranded".
Living Out denied the charge.
Christians fined in Kazakhstan for meeting to worship Christ
Three Christians in the oil-rich country of Kazakhstan have been fined without a court hearing or any chance to defend themselves for meeting to worship Christ. It is thought to be the first case of its kind since the police acquired new powers against unrecognised religions last year.
One of the fines was subsequently revoked but there are growing fears about whether freedom of religion or belief in Kazakhstan is at serious risk.
"Such summary police fines haven't been used against us before," said one Baptist, who told Forum 18 that in one case, the police simply fined the Christian because they could. "No one explained to us why they've suddenly started doing this."
Kazhakstan introduced strict restrictions on practising non-recognised faiths and in 2012 cut the number of recognised faiths from nearly 50 to just 17.
Those most affected are Muslims, Protestant Christians and Jehovah's Witnesses who can be punished for offering religious literature the state has not approved in places the state has not permitted, talking about their beliefs with other people without state permission, or meeting for worship without state permission. The power to impose summary fines without initial due process was first given to police in 2015.
The threats to religious freedom come as tensions escalate in Kazakhstan over proposed land reforms.
Acording to the BBC, a gunman who killed three policemen and a member of the public in the Kazakhstan commercial capital Almaty yesterday may have been an Islamist militant. Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president, said the shootings were a terrorist act. It is thought that a suspect who was detained, Ruslan Kulikbayev, 26, could have been radicalised by Salafist militants while serving a prison sentence.
Church asks U.S. federal court to stop Iowa from enforcing transgender bathroom rules even inside churches
A church in Iowa is asking a federal court to stop the state's civil rights commission from enforcing a law that prohibits bathroom discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) submitted the motion last week on behalf of the Fort Des Moines Church of Christ in Des Moines aimed at stopping the commission "from censoring the church's teaching on biblical sexuality and from forcing the church to open its restrooms and showers to members of the opposite sex."
A brochure issued by the commission states that places of worship like churches and synagogues "are generally exempt from the Iowa law's prohibition of discrimination, unless the place of worship engages in non-religious activities which are open to the public" such as an independent day care centre or polling place that are on the premises.
But the ADF legal counsel Christiana Holcomb said, "Churches should be free to communicate their religious beliefs and operate their houses of worship according to their faith without fearing government punishment, and until the law is changed, every church in Iowa has a right to be concerned."
"No state or local law should threaten the foundational First Amendment protections for free speech and the free exercise of religion," she said.
On the same day the motion was filed, Commissioner Peter Kirsanow of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, sent a letter to Iowa Civil Rights Commission (ICRC) Chairperson Angela Jackson, saying that the "approach taken by the ICRC plainly violates both the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution."
Iowa's law bans places of public accommodation from expressing view on human sexuality if they would "directly or indirectly" make "persons of any particular...gender identity" feel "unwelcome," the ADF said.
The ADF said the speech ban could be used to gag churches from making public comments including from the pulpit that could be interpreted as unwelcome to certain persons.
Under the law, transgenders can use bathrooms, locker rooms and living facilities according to their gender identity.
The ADF argues that all events held at a church on its property have bona fide religious purpose and the commission cannot violate the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of religion and speech.
"The act's coercive demands harm the church's ability to teach its doctrines, to govern itself, and to follow its faith without fear that the government will overstep its bounds and impose illegitimate requirements," said ADF senior counsel Steven O'Ban.
Duggar family update: Jill and Derick Dillard visiting the US in August, plan to take Bible classes
Derick and Jill Dillard, together with their son Israel David, from the TLC show "Jill and Jessa: Counting On" will be returning to the United States from their Central America ministry next month to have a short break and take some Bible lessons to improve their mission.
"We are so excited to share that we will be returning in August for a short stateside term that will extend into the fall," the Christian couple announced on their blog. "We are really looking forward to seeing our families after nearly 10 months on foreign soil."
The couple say their ministry work has been an "amazing experience," not just for them but also for their son Israel, who made lots of new friends in El Salvador.
"We feel like we've made great advancements in just learning the culture and the language as well as building relationships with so many precious people," they say. "Our time here so far has allowed us to see many hearts touched, many souls accept the redeeming love of Christ, and many sweet people helped through humanitarian efforts."
Even though some people are quick to question their ministry work, Derick and Jill are proud of what they have done since they consider their "labors" in Central America right now as the building blocks of a strong foundation "for many years of wonderful ministry."
They assured their fans that they will not let go of their Central America ministry even while they enjoy their short vacation in the United States.
"We will continue to work on behalf of the ministry and the work in Central America will continue. Stay tuned to our website for more updates. Please do continue to pray for us and for the lives of those we've been called to minister to!" they say.
Egypt's Christians protest and pray after Christian murdered and building torched
Christians in Egypt joined in prayers and protests after a Christian man was murdered and three others injured, including one woman.
Mourners met at church to pray for the dead and then marched to the graveyard chanting: "With blood and soul, we redeem the cross."
Muslim adults attacked priests with batons and knives after an argument between Muslim and Christian children in Tahna al-Gabal village over who had right of way in a street.
Bishop Makarios of Minya, a Coptic Orthodox cleric in Egypt's Minya governorate, issued a brief statement on the attack, the latest of several anti-Christian attacks in Egypt's southern province of Minya.
Makarios, who himself survived an assassination attempt in 2013 after Muslims believed he was intending to reopen a church that had been closed, said the families of two priests in the Tahna El-Jabal village were set upon by attackers wielding knives and batons.
The murdered man Fam Khalef was aged just 27.
It is not clear whether he is related to the priests who were the targets of the attack.
Ahram Online reported that Emad Nabil, a local lawyer, was quoted in a Christian forum as saying that police had arrested four people.
In a separate incident, five buildings including a children's nursery were torched by Muslims who feared they were to be used as Christian houses. At least 15 suspects were arrested.
Al-Azhar, the country's top Sunni Muslim authority, called on both sides to resort to remain within the law and not succumb to temptation to "sow discord and ignite sectarian strife." A group of Muslim and Christian leaders from the reconciliation group Family House has been sent to the village to try and restore harmony.
Christians make up about one in ten of Egypt's population of 90 million mainly Sunni Muslims. Attacks on them have been growing in recent years and in May, there was an arson attack on seven Christian homes. A Christian man's elderly mother was forced to parade naked in the streets in the same province.
Federal court stops Alabama laws banning child dismemberment, abortion clinics near schools
A federal court has blocked two Alabama laws that ban dismemberment abortions in the state and abortion clinics within 2,000 feet from schools.
U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson issued a temporary restraining order against SB 363 and SB 205, which were scheduled to take effect on Aug. 1.
The two laws were passed by the Alabama legislature and signed by Gov. Robert Bentley last May, according to LifeSiteNews.
SB 363 prohibits "any individual who performs or attempts to perform a dismemberment abortion unless necessary to prevent serious health risk to the mother of the unborn child."
The law defines dismemberment abortions as extracting a living unborn child "one piece at a time from the uterus through use of clamps, grasping forceps, tongs, scissors, or similar instruments that, through the convergence of two rigid levers, slice, crush, or grasp, or any combination of the foregoing, a portion of the unborn child's body to cut or rip it off."
It excludes abortions which use suction to dismember the body of an unborn child.
Alabama became the fifth state to ban the abortion procedure.
SB 205 bans abortion clinics within 2,000 feet of a public school that serves kindergarten to grade 8.
Earlier this month, the West Alabama Women's Clinic in Tuscaloosa and the Alabama Women's Center in Huntsville filed a lawsuit to block the two laws, according to AL.com, saying the law on distance within schools would force them to close.
The lawsuit claims that dismemberment abortion is the "safest and most common method of second-trimester abortion, and the only method provided in outpatient facilities."
Thompson scheduled a hearing on Oct. 4. He said the temporary restraining order will be in effect three weeks after the hearing.
The Hunstville and Tuscaloosa clinics performed 72 percent of the 8,080 abortions in Alabama in 2014, according to the Alabama Department of Public Health.
Guatemala: Army officer who murdered bishop dies in prison riot
A former army captain convicted of murdering a Guatemalan bishop has been killed in a prison riot in which 13 people died.
The riot that killed Byron Lima Oliva, who was serving 20 years for the murder of Bishop Juan Gerardi in 1998, took place in Pavoncito, a prison 18 miles (30 km) from the capital, Guatemala City.
The killing of the bishop was one of the most notorious crimes in recent Guatemalan history. Gerardi was a human rights campaigner who was active in working for the indigenous Mayan people of his country. Among other achievements, he secured government recognition for indigenous languages and permission for radio stations to broadcast in them. He was appointed to the government's National Reconciliation Commission after the country's long-running civil war, which ended in 1996.
As Bishop of Quiche he was confronted with the deaths of hundreds of Christians, mainly of Mayan origin, at the hands of the army.
Gerardi was murdered two days after he presented testimony about the atrocities to the Recovery of Historical Memory Project, sponsored by the Catholic Church.
Lima, who was jailed for his murder with two other army officers, was infamous for heading a criminal network inside and outside the prison system, running illicit businesses including food stalls and a transportation enterprise for relatives of inmates from his prison cell.
Additional reporting by Reuters.
How Donald Trump weaponised prayer at the Republican National Convention
Donald Trump thinks his "greatest contribution to Christianity" would be the repeal of the Johnson Amendment, that prevents churches and pastors overtly campaigning for political parties. It's easy to see why he wants it: Trump has racked up quite a few not-quite-endorsements from evangelical conservatives who'd love to use their pulpits as campaign platforms for him.
At yesterday's Republican National Convention meeting, marked by rowdiness, desperation and farce as Melania Trump was accused of plagiarising Michelle Obama, one moment stood out as exemplifying the exact reason American lawmakers would be crazy to let Trump make that contribution.
Rev Mark Burns, an African-American pastor, was asked to pray. He reminded the audience that "our enemy is not other Republicans, but is Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party" And he continued by thanking God for Trump, saying: "We're thankful that you are guiding him, that you are giving him the words to unite this party, this country, that we together can defeat the liberal Democratic Party... Because we are the United States of America, and we are the conservative party under God."
Furthermore: "To defeat every attack that comes against us, protect the life of Donald Trump. Give him the words, give him the peace, give him the power and authority to be the next president of the United States of America. In Jesus' name if you believe it, shout 'Amen!'"
And they did.
In 1968 Billy Graham publicly supported Nixon's candidacy, but he prayed appropriate prayers at both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions.
What's so alarming about Burns' prayer and what should absolutely terrify those already alarmed about the prospect of a Trump presidency is the way he enlists God on the side of conservative Republicans.
In fairness, he's not the only one. Conservative evangelicals have routinely painted the Republican agenda as the Christian one and demonised Clinton in this most bitter of contests, bringing back memories of the 2004 Bush-Kerry election. Notoriously, in a message to Liberty University students in the seminary chapel, Jerry Falwell told students then to "vote for the Bush of your choice".
But when a candidate for the highest office in the land seeks to baptise his political crusade and make it a fundamentalist religious one, alarm bells should start ringing. Because with politics, you can disagree. You have to try first to win the argument, then to convince people you've won it. There's room for doubt, and you can concede your opponent has a point while at the same time vigorously defending your position. You can even be friends with her, if not best friends. It's just politics.
But add the language of "enemy" into the mix, try to conscript God on to your side, and make the whole contest not about right and wrong but about good and evil, and you've opened the door to something dark and dangerous. Because the thing about this particular brand of religion is that it's absolute. There's no room for negotiation or reconsideration. At the RNC yesterday Mark Burns tried to weaponise prayer and cast all Trump's opponents as God's enemies.
This ties in with far too much rhetoric from the Republican camp, about Muslims, Democrats and Clinton in particular. And it's rhetoric that should be categorically rejected, not just because of the unpleasant tang of burning heretics it brings with it on the breeze, but because it is fundamentally unbiblical.
Joshua 5:13-15 tells of an encounter between Joshua and (presumably) an angel before the Battle of Jericho. Joshua asks, "Are you for us, or for our enemies?" "Neither," the man replies, "but as commander of the army of the Lord I have now come." In other words, God is on no one's side; it's for us to be on his.
In his prayer, Burns crystallises what's wrong with Christian support for Trump. His campaign has become an ersatz evangelistic campaign, drawing on the same emotions and the same division of the world into the saved and the lost. The devil is Clinton; Trump is the saviour.
And Jesus looks on and weeps.
Follow Mark Woods on Twitter: @RevMarkWoods
Marta sez, "The Modern Poland Foundation is calling for speakers at the 5th International CopyCamp Conference (Warsaw 27-28th October 2016) to discuss the Future of Copyright in Europe. If you'd like to join the debate on the impact copyright has and will have on education, politics, culture and society, send us your proposal and meet with other speakers from all over the world: lawyers, artists, politicians, academics, representatives of NGOS and the media."
It's the fifth time CopyCamp gives floor to all interested parties to talk about copyright in the friendly space of the popular movie theatre in the heart of Warsaw. Thematic tracks of CopyCamp 2016: *
Copyright and Art *
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Copyright Lawmaking Find more information here. If you are interested in presenting your viewpoint during a 10-minute talk, please send us an abstract of not more than 1800 characters by 31 July.
The International CopyCamp Conference 2016
Future of Copyright in Europe
Internet evangelist tells Christians to carry guns 'to protect police officers'
An internet evangelist has urged Christians to carry guns in order to protect police officers.
Joshua Feuerstein brandished a handgun in a two-minute video posted on Facebook where he appeared to blame the movement Black Lives Matter for a recent spate of police shootings.
He compared his own upbringing where he "respected police" and was taught that cops were heroes. He told his two million Facebook followers:
"Today, we've got kids that are growing up in these different homes where the parents are not respecting police or cussing them out and calling them pigs, telling kids not to trust them. That's the problem!
"We're fostering a generation of people who no longer have respect for authority. It's a godless and a disgusting generation. Look, I'm calling on every American citizen, I love Jesus. I love Jesus. I'm a preacher, but you know what?
"I also carry an FN Five-seven filled with 20 rounds of pure brutality right there. Look, I may love Jesus, but if I see you pull a gun on an officer, you want to know whose side I'm on?
"That's right. I'm gonna fill you with 60 rounds of pure lead. And I guarantee you, you're gonna have lead poisoning.
"Look guys, it's time that we as Americans, we as Christians, we gotta start carrying guns because we gotta protect our superheroes, our police officers."
Feuerstein has caused a number of controversies with Facebook videos over the past year. In April 2015 he asked his followers to call Cut the Cake bakery in Florida and harass them after they refused to bake Feuerstein a cake with an anti-gay marriage slogan.
The bakery said it was subject to death threats and lost business as a result of the video.
In November 2015 another Feuerstein video made national headlines in the US after he criticized Starbucks for removing Christmas-related symbols in favour of plain red Christmas cups. "The silent majority is sick and tired of consistently being bullied to be quiet about our beliefs and trying to remove Christ out of Christmas," he told CNN.
Ken Ham offers $1 entrance fee to Ark Encounter for students, in response to atheist group's objection to trips
The atheist group Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) is doing everything it can to keep school children from visiting the Ark Encounter, a new attraction in Kentucky that features the life-sized replica of Noah's Ark.
The FRFF even sent letters to over 1,000 school districts in Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia, telling them that sending students to the Ark Encounter is nothing short of allowing them to be subjected to religious indoctrination, according to the Lexington Herald Leader.
"That would be completely inappropriate," FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor said of the field trips to the Ark. "This is an attempt to proselytise children. The public school is to educate, not indoctrinate."
In response to the FRFF letter, Answers in Genesis founder Ken Ham announced that school children visiting the Ark Encounter need to pay only a $1 entrance fee each for the duration of this year.
Ham writes on his blog that he is not afraid to stand up against "FFRF bullies" who want to keep Americans from enjoying freedom of religion.
"On the basis of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, public schools are absolutely free to take students on field trips (with appropriate parental permissions) to facilities like the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum, provided they are for historical, recreational, or educational purposes," Ham writes.
He adds that FFRF has "no right (and no legal basis whatsoever) to intimidate government-run schools as they are trying to do in this letter sent to more than 1,000 schools."
Donald Ruberg, an attorney for the Grant County Schools, also does not agree with the FRFF's position. "I think they are grossly overstating their case," he says. "That's not a correct interpretation of the law, in my opinion."
Kentucky Education Commissioner Stephen Pruitt agrees with him. He believes field trips should be "a direct extension of classroom learning" at all times, and need not be directly related to the school curriculum.
Labour MP Naz Shah: My comments were antisemitic and offensive
Labour MP Naz Shah has admitted comments which led to her suspension from the party were antisemitic but insisted she was "ignorant" and not an antisemite herself.
The Bradford West MP has now been reinstated by her party after she apologised in April for online posts including one that suggested Israel should be moved to the US. Her comments came days after the Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, said antisemitism had got worse in the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership.
Shah's suspension came after the Guido Fawkes political website revealed she had shared a graphic that showed Israel superimposed onto a map of the US with the title: "Solution for Israel-Palestine conflict - relocate Israel into United States". She added the comment: "problem solved".
Shah told BBC Radio 4's World at One: "I wasn't antisemitic, what I put out was antisemitic." She said the posts were written during the 2014 Gaza war and emotions were running high, although she said that wasn't an excuse.
"The language I used was antisemitic, it was offensive," she said. "What I did was I hurt people and the language that was the clear antisemitic language, which I didn't know at the time, was when I said, 'The Jews are rallying.'" She added she had received "amazing compassion" from the Jewish community in recent months.
"I didn't get antisemitism as racism," said Shah. "I had never come across it. I think what I had was an ignorance."
Mirvis has said the Labour party needs to get back on track over antisemitism.
"Since the leadership of Mr [Jeremy] Corbyn, it has become more acceptable for elements which used to be a fringe group to now appear centre-stage and to express their ideology in a more open and confident manner" he told MPs on the influential home affairs select committee.
Labour has conducted an inquiry into antisemitism led by human rights expert Shami Chakrabarti. But Mirvis questioned why only the recommendations had been published and not the report in full. "One wonders what there is to hide," he said.
He added: "Main reservation is the absence of a definition of antisemitism. You can't deal with a phenomenon if there is no definition of it."
He went to say he thought remarks made by the former Labour Mayor of London Ken Livingstone, which exacerbated the row, were deliberately offensive.
"This is not the first time he's started to talk about the Holocaust when asked about Jewish people and Jewish issues. It has in the past been pointed out to him that this is offensive."
Pakistan: Christian girl kidnapped, raped and forced into Muslim marriage, father murdered
A girl aged 14 has been abducted, raped and forced into an Islamic marriage in Pakistan. Her father was shot dead when he sold his house in an attempt to buy her freedom.
Mehwish Masih, who left school early because her family could no longer afford the fees, was hired as a part-time cleaner at a house in Faisalabad, according to the British Pakistani Christian Association (BPCA).
She was asked to stay late to help at a party in March, and did not return the next day. Her parents soon afterwards received a copy of her Islamic marriage certificate in the post.
Her father Tanveer Masih, a rickshaw driver, sold his home in the Faisalabad slum of Khalid Colony to pay for a lawyer who managed to get the abduction registered as a crime. He was asked by relatives of his daughter's new husband to drop the case and when he attended a rendezvous he was murdered by two unknown gunmen.
Mehwish's mother Najma Bibi said: "The police have not done anything substantial to help my daughter, we now have no money to defend our rights and without my husband we have no voice. We live in a hopeless situation, we need help. I pray that my daughter will continue to place her hope in Jesus Christ."
Kanwal Amar of the BPCA, which is trying to raise awareness of Mehwish and others who share her fate, as well as funds to find a new home for the family, said: "The family are frightened for the future but are choosing to pursue justice whatever the cost. They are hoping that Christians in the west and wider will help support their cause they are frightened about the torture and the rape that their young daughter is undergoing. Nagma the mother of Mehwish has also expressed a desire for a pace of safety for her family [sic]. The shooting incident has caused great anxiety and trauma and they need a place to reassess their future while they recuperate."
Wilson Chowdhry, chairman of the BPCA, said it is estimated that 700 Christian girls are kidnapped raped and forced into Islamic marriage every year in Pakistan.
"That figure is said to be extremely conservative by Christian NGO's and we continue to assert that many cases are unreported. People in the west express great consternation that little is done to seek justice for kidnapped daughters. Well here we see the result of taking action against the perpetrators a father has been murdered.
"So many factors have to be taken into account during such incidents and I commend families who strive for justice, but equally I understand why so many choose to do nothing bearing the pain to save what is left of their families. Usually it will be the sons that are threatened but in this case the absence of sons meant the rapists could kill the father leaving the family without a patriarch and reciprocally without a voice."
Paul Harcourt: It's been a difficult season for New Wine, but we've come out strong
Paul Harcourt is taking on the lead role at New Wine after a turbulent few months for the charismatic evangelical network of churches. Former national leader, Mark Bailey, stepped down in February over an extra-marital affair and was later suspended for two years from church ministry by the Bishop of Gloucester.
Harcourt, a much-loved Essex vicar and regional director for New Wine London and East, is therefore stepping into a difficult season for the organisation. But he's confident that there's a bright future ahead.
"It's been a sad time, but one of the things that happens when you go through a leadership transition, particularly one that's unplanned, is that you take time to draw back and think about who you are, and what's your purpose," he tells Christian Today.
"We even asked the question 'does God still want there to be a New Wine movement?', and what came back resounding across the whole New Wine network, is that this really is a family that people feel they belong to, and that [gave] a real sense of clarity about our purpose.
"We have through this process come out very clear about our commitment to the ministry of the Holy Spirit, the renewal of the local church, the transformation of local communities, and influencing the culture in our nation. So actually, although it's been a hard time, I think we've come out strong, clear, and very focused for the next part of our journey."
Harcourt will continue to lead All Saints' Woodford Wells as he takes up his new role, which he said will mean remaining "rooted in ministry within a local church". All Saints' has been "transformed in all sorts of ways" through being part of New Wine, Harcourt said, particularly with regards to some of its work with children with special needs and outreach to the local community. Moving forward, he hopes to see New Wine place greater emphasis on diversity, and becoming more representative of the wider Church.
"We want to make sure that's clear and seen in our leadership and in the way we work," he says. "We're committed to every part of the country and to all age groups, and for us that's a big challenge. New Wine is uniquely placed as a big network we have 3,500 leaders to be able to get alongside churches and lead in any context and any community. We don't impose a model, what we have is a strong DNA of how the Spirit brings to life churches, and I think that's really exciting so [I want to see an] emphasis on building the networks, and getting alongside churches and leaders in every type of context so nobody stands alone."
Christian Today understands that Harcourt is expected to improve the organisation's male/female leadership ratio, and he praised New Wine leaders, both "men and women, ordained and lay". He also pointed to the organisation's determination to raising up young leaders while valuing the contribution of all generations and the importance of church as a family.
A quick search on Twitter reveals Harcourt's commitment to using unorthodox methods to reach people of all ages with the gospel photos show him delivering a Christmas sermon dressed as a stormtrooper.
So far I've delivered the glorious Christmas message 5 times. Dressed as a stormtrooper. #ReimaginingMinistry pic.twitter.com/VT6KjaxuFD Paul Harcourt (@paulharcourt) December 24, 2015
And it's not just within the four walls of the church that Harcourt is keen for Christians to thrive. He's just released a new book, Growing in circles: Learning the rhythms of discipleship, which he hopes will encourage people to grow in maturity in their faith, and in doing so transform the world and people around them.
"The simple idea behind it is that the way we grow in church and life is not by discovering some secret knowledge or some truth that we've never come across before, but we grow by encountering a number of fairly basic truths more and more profoundly," he says.
Most people, according to Harcourt, recall the sermons which have had the biggest impact as the ones where they understood an old truth in a new light. He wants to help people come back to these, and "continue to grow and become more fruitful".
It's through this, he says, that Christians learn to engage in rhythms of discipleship being intimate with God and then being sent out to transform the world. Under Harcourt's leadership, then, New Wine will seek to continue to work towards the restoration of all things; not just the revival of the church.
"Once we see our lives from God's perspective, the places where we live and work become significant, not incidental... the places where you are and the people you are uniquely able to touch by being there are very much within God's plan, so that, I think, transforms the way that we see our lives and our purpose," he says.
"The Kingdom of God is so much more than church. It's the restoration of everything, the renewal of all things around us the institutions we belong to and the communities in which we dwell. Discipleship is about the whole of our lives."
Scottish priest who embezzled 100,000 wants Pope to release him from priesthood
A Scottish Catholic priest serving a ten month jail sentence for embezzling 100,000 of church money to fund an alleged gambling problem has apparently asked that Pope Francis allow him to quit the clergy.
Fr Graeme Bell was parish priest of Our Lady Star of the Sea church, known locally as St Mary's, in Saltcoats before being convicted of stealing from the Ayrshire parish between March and May 2015 after admitting to an online gambling problem.
Kilmarnock Sheriff Court heard last month how Bell, 41, suffered from anxiety and depression which "reached a stage where he was not behaving as a law abiding individual".
Now, according to The Herald, the local bishop, William Nolan, has visited the congregation and informed parishioners that Bell has asked to leave the priesthood, a process known as laicisation.
The move which would remove the Church's duty of care to Bell and stop any Church investigation must be approved by Pope Francis and could take over a year to conclude.
The Herald reported that Bell will be allowed day release in the near future and is unlikely to serve the full ten months of his sentence.
A source told the newspaper: "Bishop Nolan promised to come to Saltcoats and he did, telling the parish what was happening with Father and that he had asked to be laicised. I think had there been an investigation he would have had to leave but this would suggest he's decided he doesn't want to live in grace and favour. It also saves Bill Nolan a lot of hassle with canon lawyers and a case would could have strung along for years. Graeme Bell has probably realised he has cost the church enough."
The police probe started immediately after Bell admitted his misuse of parish funds, at which point he was also removed from his post.
Initially, the investigation had focused on funds established for pilgrimages to Lourdes and missionary work in Guyana but it was swiftly broadened to look at all parish finances.
Friends and family of the priest have raised 43,000 towards paying the funds back, and Bell has sought counselling and attended meetings of Gamblers' Anonymous.
US archbishops support bill protecting religious freedom of those who disagree with same-sex unions
The call to protect the religious freedom of those who do not agree with same-sex unions in the United States has just become stronger, with two American archbishops lending their voices to those who believe that marriage should only be between a man and a woman.
Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of San Francisco and Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore issued a joint statement last week supporting the First Amendment Defense Act (FADA).
According to the two Roman Catholic Church officials, the proposed law "is a modest but important step in ensuring conscience protection to faith-based organisations and people of all faiths and of no faith who believe that marriage is the union of one man and one woman."
"The increasing intolerance toward religious belief and belief in the conjugal meaning of marriage makes these protections essential for continuing faith-based charitable work, which supports the common good of our society," the bishops' statement read, as quoted by the Catholic News Agency.
Archbishops Cordileone and Lori maintained that Catholic institutions should not be penalised for standing up for their beliefs about marriage.
"Faith-based agencies and schools should not lose their licenses or accreditation simply because they hold reasonable views on marriage that differ from the federal government's view," the Church leaders stated.
The FADA was filed by Republican Rep. Raul Labrador from Idaho and Utah Senator Mike Lee in response to the US Supreme Court legalising homosexual unions across the country. The proposed law seeks to protect individuals and groups from being sanctioned for their views on marriage.
In their statement, the Archbishops also said that the definition of marriage "has nothing to do with disrespect for others, nor does it depend on religious belief." They likewise maintained that marriage between one man and one woman is "foundational to the common good."
"Rather, it is based on truths about the human person that are understandable by reason," the Archbishops wrote in their joint statement.
What would Ronald Reagan say to Donald Trump and the 2016 Republican Convention?
What would Ronald Reagan say to Donald Trump and his convention? We don't have to guess.
A few weeks ago I was flicking through some old CDs while driving to a concert. It was a few days after the furore created by Donald Trump's plans to stop Muslims from entering the USA and his incendiary comments about Mexicans.
Being the political geek that I am, I bypassed Sarah McLachlan, and Jars of Clay, and went straight to a CD called 'Great Speeches'. So for the next 45 minutes I was inspired by Martin Luther King, JFK, and Winston Churchill. But I wasn't prepared for what happened next. It felt like a holy moment, and I had to pull over in the darkness to make sure I heard every word. A prophet was speaking from beyond the grave. And his name was Ronald Reagan. I have spent many years decrying the inequality that his economic policies produced in the USA and the rest of the world. On that my opinion hasn't changed. But my pulse quickened as I listened to what he had to say in 1983, and how surgically important it is for now.
I didn't do anything with those words for two weeks. And then yesterday Trump's convention was a roll-call of dear folks who had lost loved ones to terrorism or attacks by illegal immigrants to the USA. Their very real pain was being used and choreographed into an altogether darker dance. The branding master was again branding the "alien" in a toxic way. I feel it's now time to let the 'Gipper' speak to us.
I have also now made the fairly obvious calculation that Trump followers are unlikely to listen to me, but that they may just listen to their hero Ronald Reagan. After all, Trump has co-opted Reagan's 1980 campaign slogan "Let's Make America Great Again" for his own campaign. The attempted resonance with that era is I am sure intentional, so perhaps these words can also find some purchase. They were spoken to the National Prayer Breakfast in 1983. I pray we listen.
"We know that living in this world means dealing with what philosophers would call the phenomenology of evil or as theologians would put it, the doctrine of sin. There is sin and evil in the world and we're enjoined by scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might. Our nation too has a legacy of evil with which it must deal. The glory of this land has been its capacity for transcending the moral evils of our past, for example the long struggle of minority citizens for equal rights. What was once a source of disunity and civil war is now a point of pride for all Americans. We must never go back. There is no room for racism, anti-semitism, or other forms of ethnic or racial hatred in this country. (LONG APPLAUSE)
"I know that you've been horrified, as have I, by the resurgence of some hate groups preaching bigotry and prejudice. Use the mighty voice of your pulpits and the powerful standing of your churches to denounce and isolate these hate groups in our midst. The commandment given us is clear and simple, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." (LONG APPLAUSE)"
Humility. Dignity. Love of neighbour.
I don't think I need to say anything else.
Andy Flannagan is director of Christians on the Left and one of the directors of Christians in Politics. Follow him on Twitter @andyflannagan
Baton Rouge: sheriff says God is helping them get through it after murder of 3 police officers
As difficult as it might be to face the Sunday morning attack in Baton Rouge, Louisiana that claimed the lives of three police officers, East Baton Rouge Sheriff Sid Gautreaux is trying his best to maintain an optimistic outlook and encourage people to do the same.
"With God's help, we will get through this. To me this is not so much about gun control as it is about what's in men's hearts. And until we come together as a nation, as a people, to heal as a people, if we don't do that and this madness continues, we will surely perish as a people," he told The Guardian.
Police officers Montrell Jackson, Brad Garafola and Matthew Gerald were murdered by former U.S. Marine Gavin Long of Kansas City, who went on a shooting rampage during his 29th birthday.
Before he was killed, Jackson even wrote a heartfelt post on his Facebook page regarding the controversial fatal shooting of two black menAlton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on July 5 and Philando Castile in St. Paul, Minnesota on July 6by police officers.
"I've experienced so much in my short life and the past three days have tested me to the core," he wrote. "I swear to God I love this city but I wonder if this city loves me. In uniform, I get nasty hateful looks and out of uniform some consider me a threat."
"Please don't let hate infect your heart," he continued. "This city MUST and WILL get better. I'm working in these streets so any protesters, officers, friends, family, or whoever, if you see me and need a hug or want to say a prayer I got you."
Sadly, Jackson never got to receive that hug after he was gunned down by Long who was subsequently killed by a SWAT sniper.
Meanwhile, Rev. Franklin Graham agrees with the sentiment shared by Gautreaux. "The Bible says that men's hearts are evil and desperately wicked (Jeremiah 17:9) and the only answer is the Lord Jesus Christ. Only He can heal our hearts and our land. The fabric of our nation is being pulled apart by this senseless violence. Many officials and the governor of Louisiana also asked for the country's prayers," he wrote on his Facebook page.
Lower gas prices in 2016 are motivating more Americans to hit the road for a vacation. In fact, 69 percent of American families who are planning a vacation this year are taking a road trip, reported AAA.
If you're planning to take one of the best summer road trips in the country, be careful not to offset those gas savings. Do a little trip planning, and make sure your chosen form of transportation won't end up being a major travel expense. Here are five common road trip mistakes to avoid this travel season.
LETTING YOUR GAS TANK DROP BELOW HALF-FULL
As you go about your busy week, you might have a routine of filling up when your car's low gas light goes on. However, when you're en route to that vacation destination, you'll want to keep your gas tank at least half-full, said Erin Gifford, family travel blogger for Kidventurous.com.
She also recommended stocking up on snacks and water bottles in the car, since you might not know how far the next gas station or convenience store will be.
"When you're in West Texas and you see a gas station, you stop and fill up," she said. "You may not see another gas station for 200 miles."
RELYING ON GPS NAVIGATION
Not taking the time to map out your route before you hit the road is a major road trip mistake, said Gary Flom, a car and driving expert, and president and CEO of automotive retailer BNF Partners. Even if you have a GPS system, there's a chance it might not work when you need it most - or give you bad directions.
"Always bring along printouts of the necessary maps to have for references throughout the trip," he said. "You never know when you will need to take an alternative route because of unforeseen road construction or an accident. It can be very expensive to get lost."
DRIVING WITH UNDERINFLATED OR OVERINFLATED TIRES
Neglecting to properly inflate the tires can affect your vehicle's maneuverability and put you at a higher risk of an accident. Also, the summer heat can make your tires expand, so it's important to avoid overinflating, according to CAA South Central Ontario, a Canadian auto club. Overinflated tires can wear out your tire tread and might increase your chances of getting a flat. Periodically check the air levels in your tires, and be sure to follow the manufacturer's specifications.
TAKING YOUR OWN CAR
If you're taking a particularly long road trip, you might want to look into renting a car.
"Everyone loves a road trip - except your trusty family vehicle, which bears the brunt of all that extra mileage," said Jonathan Weinberg, CEO of car rental comparison site, AutoSlash. "Consider renting instead, and save the depreciation."
FORGETTING TO SERVICE YOUR VEHICLE
If you decide renting a car is not for you, and you do end up taking your own car - or a family member's or friend's car - take it to the dealership or mechanic for basic service well ahead of time. A quick vehicle inspection, inflating the tires and checking the breaks and car fluids is enough to determine whether you're fit for the road. Then, you can reduce the chances of breakdowns en route, according to Samarins.com, a car advice website.
Charges were dismissed for the Madison, Alabama police officer who body slammed a 58-year-old man from India walking on the sidewalk last year. Sureshbhai Patel, who does not understand English, was seriously injured and needed an operation to fuse two vertebrae.
From NBC News:
Hank Sherrod, Patel's attorney, told NBC News in an email that the state's decision to drop the assault charge is deeply troubling, though not entirely surprising.
"This decision illustrates how difficult it is to hold law enforcement officers accountable under the criminal laws for brutal acts that would send an ordinary citizen to jail," he said.
[Former Madison, Ala. police officer Eric Sloan] Parker, 27, still faces a civil lawsuit in connection with the incident. Parker encountered Patel last Feb. 6 while responding to a call of a suspicious black man looking at garages and walking near houses. Patel, in from India to visit his son and grandson, testified that he did not understand English or the officers who confronted him while he was out for a walk.
SAN ANTONIO New renderings of the proposed Frost Bank headquarters show a vibrant, transformed area of downtown San Antonio as the city gears up to begin its review process of the design Wednesday.
Released over the weekend by the Historic and Design Review Commission, the renderings lay out where the 23-story glass skyscraper would lie amid a sea of concrete and stone buildings.
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Long-term care is a major concern for many Americans, especially the 70 million baby boomers who are:
- Preparing for retirement
- Already retired or retiring
- Approaching their 80s and beyond, when extra care becomes more likely
About 70 percent of people 65 and older will require some type of long-term care, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Long-term care services encompass both medical and nonmedical forms of assistance, including helping people with activities of daily living, or ADL. Examples of ADLs include everyday tasks such as getting dressed or using the bathroom.
Senior citizens in this group of 70 percent need to find health care options suitable for them, as well as the means to fund this care. Because health care needs vary from person to person, care options abound. Family and friends can provide a lot of long-term care at home. Such care can keep out-of-pocket expenses to a minimum.
However, some people require more comprehensive care. Nursing homes, assisted-living facilities and adult day care centers might better serve the needs of such people. Here are some options for long-term care during retirement that won't require spending all your savings.
AT-HOME CARE
Several types of in-home caregivers offer services to people who want to remain at home and live independently. In-home caregivers include medical professionals, home health aides and home care aides.
Medical professionals include doctors, nurses and physical therapists. Home health aides are more basic health providers such as certified nursing assistants, who can administer prescribed medicine, change bandages or check a person's pulse. Home care aides do not perform any medical services, but instead help with daily chores, such as cleaning or personal care matters.
The cost of a home health aide or home care aide is about $20 an hour, according to figures from the annual Cost of Care survey by Genworth Financial.
Meal-delivery providers offer another type of at-home care service. The nonprofit organization Meals on Wheels is one such provider that offers seniors free meals. Meals on Wheels has more than 5,000 independently run local operations across the nation.
RESIDENTIAL FACILITIES
For those considering moving into a facility, there are several choices. Each type of facility provides its own individual level of care.
The three basic types of facilities are:
PUBLIC HOUSING
Federal and state programs offer public housing for the low- to moderate-income elderly population. To be eligible, you must make less than $46,000 if single, or $53,000 if married. Some public housing programs include meals, housekeeping, shopping and laundry services.
The Section 202 program is a federally funded housing program focused exclusively on those who are 62 or older. To qualify, you must have a household income that is no more than 50 percent of the area median.
The Section 202 program not only helps with housing but might also include housekeeping, transportation to health care and home-delivered meals.
ASSISTED LIVING
Assisted living facilities offer a group living environment with amenities such as social and recreational daily activities and events.They can also help with personal care.
However, residents must pay for any medical or nursing requirements separately. In these facilities, residents generally have their own rooms and bathrooms, and free use of common rooms.
Assisted-living facilities typically cost around $3,628 per month, according to Genworth.
CONTINUING CARE RETIREMENT COMMUNITIES
Continuing care retirement communities are single campuses or locations that offer a wide range of living options that correspond to the level of care required.
Arrangements can range from independent-living units to assisted living and nursing homes.
A CCRC can be an attractive long-term health care option for people who want a seamless transition, as they can change levels of care as their personal situation changes.
Residents of these communities typically pay a one-time entrance fee, which can be expensive.
Then, depending on the facility, the fee might not be refundable.
In addition to the entrance fee, most CCRC also charge an ongoing monthly fee.
A NEW INITIATIVE IN RESIDENTIAL LONG-TERM CARE
The Green House project is a new initiative aimed at making residents feel like they are living in their own home. Green House homes are generally smaller and are situated in residential neighborhoods. They are also unmarked, so they look like any other house on the street.
For example, there could be 10 or so residents per home, with residents occupying their own bedrooms and bathrooms, but sharing a kitchen and other living spaces.
Smaller residential facilities like this give residents the option to make their own medical arrangements, which incur additional and separate charges.
PAYING FOR LONG-TERM CARE
Paying for long-term care might involve tapping several sources of funding, from Medicare and Medicaid to medical insurance and retirement funds.
People often use their savings or pension to cover expenses. Depending on how much care you need, tapping into your Social Security benefits might be another way to make your monthly health care payments.
Both private health insurance and Medicare typically will only cover medically necessary long-term care for a short period of time. Private insurance will not pay for custodial or personal care services at all, but it might help cover Medicare-imposed co-payments or deductibles.
Disability policies are unlikely to provide any long-term care coverage. Health care costs associated with assisted living facilities, CCRCs and adult day services are not covered by either Medicare or private health insurance.
WHAT IS LONG-TERM CARE INSURANCE?
Long-term care insurance was created to cover comprehensive long-term care costs that traditional insurance usually does not cover. The policy covers various types of care inside your home, including:
- Skilled nursing
- Various types of therapy
- Personal care such as bathing
In addition, long-term care insurance typically covers:
- A nursing home
- An Alzheimer's disease special care facility
- Assisted-living facilities
- Adult day care centers
- Hospice care facilities
The cost of this insurance depends on a number of factors, including your age and the optional benefits you choose. People who already have a poor health status or are receiving long-term health care might not qualify for this kind of insurance, as most of these policies are subject to medical underwriting.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommends a few ways to pay for long-term care insurance, including:
REVERSE MORTGAGE
A reverse mortgage is a type of home equity loan that allows you to receive cash against the value of your home while you still own the home and retain the title.
Reverse mortgages are only available to homeowners who are at least 62 years old. The home must also be the primary residence of the loan recipient.
ANNUITY
An annuity is another out-of-pocket option. Basically, annuities are sold by insurance companies, and offer you a specified monthly income after you make a single premium payment. The two different types are:
Immediate annuity: With this type of annuity, you make a single premium payment and the insurance company sends you a monthly check. You are eligible regardless of health status.
Deferred long-term care annuity: A deferred long-term care annuity is similar to the immediate annuity, except it splits up the payments into two separate funds: one specifically for long-term care and one to be used however the recipient wants. The long-term care portion is available immediately, but the other funds are not available until a specified future date. Deferred long-term care annuities are available to people 85 or younger who meet specific health criteria.
Why does Houston flood? Or rather, who can be blamed?
Is it the new projects popping up all over the region? Free-wheeling development policies? Lack of federal funding for bayou projects? Tough luck?
In light of the flood events of the last two years, these questions have been circulating, particularly among neighborhoods that faced some of the greatest damage from the 2015 Memorial Day flood and the Tax Day flood this year.
While these issues persist, the issue in aggregate, is that the region needs a comprehensive plan and oversight to help prevent catastrophic flooding damage in the future, according to a panel of experts who spoke at an event sponsored by the Center for Houston's Future.
Local Realtor Ed Wolff's house has flooded twice in the last two years. His is a common story for residents like himself who live in Meyerland. Before May 2015, his home had never flooded. There were 800 homes that flooded last year, compared to 167 during Tropical Storm Allison in 2001.
Yet, he said memories have historically been short. Property values continue to increase post-flood within nine months to a year after the storms. He said so many homes are remodeled after they are destroyed that in aggregate the prices go up. With the second flood, however, he said there will be a psychological effect and it's not clear if the neighborhood will bounce back as quickly or as well.
"When you look at all the entities, the end result is that we need an overarching authority above the city and county level, on a regional basis," Wolff said. "We need to require developers to keep their detention appropriately managed."
He said that the drainage was improved in Meyerland, streets were improved, but because the bayou wasn't fixed, the neighborhood flooded.
"It's great that they repaired drainage, but without the improvement to the bayou the floods were devastating. Even with good intentions, without working together, we potentially create a larger problem," he said. "We have to come together and not simply say 'It's the developers' fault.'"
The new Houston flood czar Stephen Costello agreed that the development community or new projects are the first places people tend to point fingers.
"It's always the developers. People see change and that's the first thing they point to. Since that's been built, we are now flooding," Costello said.
He said rather it's the responsibility of the regulatory agencies to keep the development community in line. He said there are problematic flooding areas all over the city that are not because of bayou overflow but because of older infrastructure. He said that pipes built underground vary wildly and in some areas there is "no rhyme of reason how we develop."
Costello said that he is working to encourage low-impact development criteria. He said the flood district does not manage all detention ponds, particularly in the outlying areas. Many homeowners' associations manage this instead and may not be as educated or informed.
"The problem we have is that we are always reacting rather than being proactive," he said. "We need to do these investments now to prevent flooding from happening in the future. It's a mindset that everyone has to change."
Costello also added there is a cash flow burden with federal projects, such as the project that has been delayed near Meyerland along Brays Bayou that many say could have prevented the devastating flooding there over the last two years.
Mary Anne Piacentini with the Katy Prairie Conservancy said a lot of the water that came from the head water of Cypress Creek came from impervious cover. She said maintaining green space could help prevent future flooding.
"The prairie in Houston was Houston's sponge," Piacentini said. " The more you build there, the more you will likely flood."
She said land could have been purchased by the flood control district of the government and a comprehensive plan needs to be looked at, taking out the various departments and governmental bodies that work on these issues separately.
"We don't have zoning. Those kinds of regulations could create special rules for flood plains," she said."...The Harris County Flood Control District will tell you reduction is flooding our street. The problem becomes with the drains that aren't able to flow fast enough through the trapezoidal channels. We need all the tools in the toolbox."
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The Houston-area, like many metropolitan areas, has been swept by the craze of Pokemon Go.
You've likely seen more kids out on the streets of your neighborhood because of it, but there have also been troubling reports of children getting hit by cars, walking off cliffs and finding dead bodies because they've been too distracted by the application.
FAIR WARNING: 2 'Pokemon Go' players plunge off cliff
But regardless of the negative reports, users continue to flock to the streets to hunt for the rarest Pokemon.
Thankfully, users don't have to wander the streets aimlessly, because a map-sharing program has been established by pokecrew.
The map includes cities from all over the world and shows players where in their cities they can find certain types of Pokemon. The map is compiled by users marking their personal sightings of particular Pokemon. Through sharing information, players are able to geolocate where they should focus their search in their own city in hopes of becoming a Pokemon master.
For Houston, focus your search in the Energy Corridor and downtown. Suburbs like The Woodlands and Tomball also show some promise.
Another site, Poke Radar offers the same service, but due to its huge popularity, it's rarely is available to access.
SKYROCKETING WORTH: 'Pokemon Go' more than doubles Nintendo's stock price
The rarest catches, like Mew or Mewtwo and legendary Pokemond, have yet to be spotted, but some theorize that Niantic will hold specific "live events" that will host these rare finds. This will likely result in massive amounts of players flocking to these cities from around the world to battle it out for the rarest of them all.
Pokemon Go is getting more and more intense as time goes on!
Best of luck in catching them all!
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More than six months after bringing actor Sean Penn to Mexico to meet with Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, actress Kate del Castillo is quashing rumors about any type of relationship she had with the drug lord.
Del Castillo told media that she didn't commit any crimes and never received money from Guzman, according to the Narco Blog.
SEE ALSO: El Chapo's attorney: Drug lord is going 'crazy,' bald from 'torture' in maximum security prison
Connections between del Castillo and Guzman stem from a meetup she orchestrated between Penn and Guzman in October. Penn wrote about the lengths it took to meet up with Guzman in an article for Rolling Stone, published in January.
Penn has admitted having mixed feelings on how people reacted to the article.
Guzman was apprehended in January. He is in prison in Ciudad Jaurez, which borders El Paso.
RELATED: One year later: The rise and fall of 'El Chapo' Guzman, the world's most ambitious drug lord
Del Castillo said she has never had an affair with Guzman, according to the Narco Blog. She said that her only interest in meeting with Guzman was to obtain the rights to make a movie about Guzman's life. Del Castillo also said she no longer has contact with Guzman.
The actress lost some work because of the meeting, the Narco Blog reports, but she does have a new Netflix series in the works, which the Narco Blog said is called "Ungovernable."
Variety reports the Netfilx series will be about Irene Urzua, a fictional First Lady of Mexico. The current First Lady of Mexico is Angelica Rivera, who is married to Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto.
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Denton, Texas isn't in the news only for that unfortunate mug gaffe. This time, the KKK is to blame. Sort of.
Ghost hunter Becky Vickers took to Twitter Monday to stress it was only actors on Old Alton Bridge filming a reenactment for an episode of the Travel Channel's "Ghost Adventures" - not the actual KKK.
It's an incredible ghost story - one that got the attention of Zak Bagans and the gang. The crew was reportedly in Denton over the weekend and Monday filming the reenactment at the bridge, which must have shocked people driving past.
The sheriff's office didn't receive any calls, but we're still waiting to hear back from the police department.
So the legend goes, the iron through-truss bridge was built in 1884. Around 1900, an African American farmer and his family moved to town. Oscar Washburn was reportedly a good man - and a successful goat farmer. The idea of a successful black man didn't sit well with local Klansmen, as one might imagine.
Things came to a tipping point when Washburn posted a sign on the bridge which read "this way to the goat man's."
In August 1938, Klansmen drove across the bridge with their headlights off, ripped Washburn from his home, and lynched him over the side of the bridge. Looking down at the water, the Klansmen only found their rope - no body. Panicked, they raced over to Washburn's home and killed his family.
SEE ALSO: Haunted destinations in Louisiana you can see for yourself
Legend had it that if you crossed the bridge without headlights on, the Goat Man would be waiting for you on the other side. And after several reports of abandoned cars and missing people near the crossing, the city opted to build a new bridge downstream. The historic structure is still open for foot traffic.
Look for the episode this Halloween as part of a two-hour special.
You don't need Zak Bagans in order to have a scary good time in Texas. Take a look at the gallery above for other haunted locations around the Lone Star State.
NEW YORK - Maybe it's time to forgive Trevor Noah for not being Jon Stewart.
The new "Daily Show" host is finding his footing after a rough start replacing the man who made the broadcast essential. His comedy has grown sharper, he's becoming more comfortable with his adopted country, and he's finding an audience of his own, even if smaller than his predecessor's.
"Some people are still going, 'You're not Jon Stewart,' " Noah said. "Some people are still grading me accordingly They're doing the wrong thing. They're grading me on something I'm not trying to do. Many of them have caught on, some faster than others. All I can do is make the show for the people who wish to watch it."
In recent weeks, Noah mixed comedy and forceful opinion by advocating for restrictions on gun access following the Orlando massacre and said it's possible to both support police and activists fighting against institutional racism. Praising House Democrats who used C-SPAN and the internet to spread news about their sit-in to support gun legislation, he said, "I haven't seen the young and old work that well together since the first 'Karate Kid.' "
More Information 'The Daily Show' When: 10 p.m. weeknights Network: Comedy Central See More Collapse
Following a story about criticism directed at Justin Timberlake for appropriating black culture, correspondent Roy Wood Jr. tried to "outblack" Noah by noting he'd been born in Alabama, attended a black university and worked in urban radio.
"I'm from South Africa," Noah replied, ending the argument.
A "black Trump" rap video used the candidate's own words for comedy. That and last fall's comparison of Donald Trump to African dictators, probably his first breakthrough segment, are examples of humor you couldn't imagine in Stewart's hands.
Comedy Central had installed Noah last September only five weeks after Stewart left, giving him a show with Stewart's writers, staff and format.
"You almost got the sense he was mouthing Jon Stewart's words," said Robert Thompson, head of Syracuse University's Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture. "And, actually, he was."
That invited comparisons and, inevitably, Noah was found wanting. In Slate, critic Willa Paskin wrote of a "Daily Show"-shaped hole in culture, despite a lesser version airing each weeknight. She wrote that Noah was too cautious, backing away from tough issues. "You may still laugh, but an inessential 'Daily Show' is a real loss," Paskin wrote.
Noah couldn't ignore the criticism, or the tweets urging him to shut up about Africa and wondering about his funny accent.
Sometimes he'd disarm the haters by tweeting back but, yes, there were adjustment issues.
"I was deferring to the old style of show because you're so afraid to tarnish an institution," he said. "You're afraid to be the person who destroyed the 'Daily Show.' Once you get that monkey off your back - you realize the 'Daily Show' with Jon Stewart is over. As Jon said to me, the show died when he left. The slot exists, the name exists, but the show has to start anew."
Besides incorporating new forms of comedy into the mix, Noah said he's making the show less about media coverage of events than the events themselves. He can't match Stewart's passion for politics, so he's tried to broaden the subject matter. The political conventions - Noah will be in both Cleveland and Philadelphia this month - will give viewers a new chance to see how he's adapted.
Comedy Central had no choice but to give Noah the existing show since there wasn't enough time to create something from scratch, said Kent Alterman, network president.
"We didn't hire him for his experience," Alterman said. "We hired him for his talent. We always knew it would be a long game, and it would take him awhile to find his way, find his voice, find his rhythm. If we take a step back and look at how he's growing, we're very happy."
Alterman points out that it took time for Stewart to mold the show in his image after replacing Craig Kilborn and said it's unfair to compare Noah to Stewart in his 16th year.
The Emmy Awards nominations last week spoke to the show's diminished presence. "The Daily Show" wasn't nominated for best variety show, a category that Stewart had dominated. The show was nominated every year from 2002-15, winning 11 times. The recently announced departure of Jessica Williams, who predated Noah and was the show's best-known correspondent, leaves a significant hole.
Stewart took a good chunk of the audience with him; "Daily Show" nightly viewership is down 35 percent since Noah took over, according to the Nielsen company.
Comedy Central says measuring Noah's show strictly on how many people watch each night is outdated. It claims Noah has increased the show's visibility online among coveted younger male viewers and internationally. The network said the show reaches 7.9 million people each week through multiple platforms, though it didn't have a figure for Stewart's last year.
"It's hard to change a rocket ship while you're flying it," Alterman said.
Paskin said she hasn't seen enough of the show to update her assessment on Slate. Syracuse's Thompson said time has helped Noah. Memories of Stewart's "Daily Show" are fading, the comparison less relevant.
"In the past couple of weeks, he seems to really have begun to do what I hoped and expected he would - and that is to find his own voice while still relying on the behemoth that is the 'Daily Show's' system."
On a Saturday, a 3.7 magnitude "earthquake" was detected about 168 miles off Florida's Daytona Beach Shores. It now appears that the quake was actually a "shock trial," an explosive test conducted by the US Navy to test the fortitude of the USS Jackson, a new combat ship. From the Daytona Beach News-Journal:
Asked about the reported earthquake on Monday, Dale Eng, a public information officer for the Navy's Sea Systems Command in Washington, said the Navy is working on a statement it expects to release this week.
Seismographs as far away as Minnesota, Texas and Oklahoma, as well as along the coast of Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, registered the event on Saturday, said Bruce Presgrave, a geophysicist and shift supervisor at the Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center in California.
(After being shown the above photo of a shock trial conducted last month) Presgrave said, "That's a smoking gun, isn't it?"
Presgrave planned to contact the Navy to learn more about the charges used in the shock trials as part of the agency's ongoing investigation.
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Residents scrambled to safety early Tuesday morning as fire ripped through multi-unit housing in northeast Houston.
The 1-alarm fire broke out about 5:30 a.m. in the 3500 block of Brewster near Crane, said District Chief David Elliott of the Houston Fire Department.
Elliott said residents in two of the units got out safely when the fire started. The other burned units were vacant.
When firefighters arrived they saw heavy flames engulfing four units, Elliott said. The fire raced through the units' common attic and flames shot through the roof. The roof over the two vacant units collapsed.
Firefighters quickly gained an upper hand on the blaze and extinguished the flames.
All four units had smoke and fire damage. The vacant units were gutted and likely will have to be demolished.
Cynthia Keller was among those residents who escaped the flames.
"If my son wouldn't have woke me up, I would have choked in my sleep," Keller said. "There was so much smoke."
Investigators are trying to determine what sparked the blaze.
The family of a Good Samaritan hospitalized after helping someone who broke down at a gas station is hoping to raise enough funds to cover his medical bills.
According to a GoFundMe page started on Monday, Jesse Bautista gave a ride to a man whose car had broken down on Uvalde. As Bautista was driving, the man attacked him with a screwdriver from the backseat.
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A man has been arrested for theft after surveillance cameras recorded his image as he allegedly snatched packages in recent months from the porches of two homes in upscale Houston neighborhoods.
The first heist occurred about 4 p.m. May 23 in the 1500 block of Vermont in the Montrose area while the second theft happened about 11 a.m. June 28 in the 1500 block of West 25th Street in the Heights area, according to the Houston Police Department.
The homeowner in the second theft gave police surveillance video of the incident. Investigators later identified David Brown, 44, as the suspect in case. He was arrested July 7 for felony heft.
Later, the homeowner in the first case also gave police surveillance video of the heist and again investigators identified Brown as the suspect in the case. While free on bond after his first arrest, he was arrested again July 15 and charged with a second case of felony theft.
According to online court records, Brown was also released on bond after the second arrest. He is scheduled to appear Aug. 12 in the 230th State District Court on both charges.
Chris McAndrew, the Heights-area resident, said earlier he is amazed that anyone would be brazen enough to steal a package off his porch. But such thefts appear to be common.
"Other people have reported their packages stolen," McAndrew said. "There was a lady down the street from me who said about six weeks ago someone took her mail out of her mailbox. There's different people here stealing different things."
UPS spokesman Dan McMackin said residents should consider having things shipped "to where they are, not where they're not."
"It might sound simplistic, but if a resident is not home during the day because they work, they should consider having packages shipped to their place of work," McMackin said. "Our goal is to leaves packages out of sight and out of weather, and at my house that isn't always possible. So I have my shipments delivered to where I work."
Anyone with additional information about Brown's possible involvement in similar thefts is urged to contact the HPD Burglary and Theft Division at 713-308-0900.
Chronicle reporter William Axford contributed this article
City officials are considering two test projects to help people find parking and take some of the pressure off landing spots to park in downtown and Midtown.
The projects, discussed Monday at City Council's transportation, technology and infrastructure committee meeting, would need the green light from the full council to go forward. Neither one is expected to start until early next year.
In the case of popular downtown destinations, officials want to help direct drivers get to the best place to park. A $4.1 million test would provide information of how well the city can leverage private spaces by steering visitors where parking is available. Seven parking garages in downtown are being considered to participate. The city would oversee a company that will track the number of spaces available, then broadcast that information via online, mobile apps and message signs located around the downtown area.
"We want to take the thinking out of parking," said Maria Irshad, deputy director of the city's administration and regulatory affairs department in charge of ParkHouston.
Someone could drive into downtown knowing they are headed to the theater district, for example, and by looking at a sign know there are a certain number of parking spaces available currently in a garage, rather than circling the block or heading from block-to-block looking for an on-street spot. Irshad compared the signs to those on local freeways which alert people of vehicle wrecks and traffic delays, or those common at airport parking lots that show how many spaces are available on each parking level.
Meanwhile in Midtown, ParkHouston wants to try another tactic to decrease parking demand by expanding car-sharing to on-street spots. Currently, companies such as ZipCar offer vehicles that someone can reserve and then claim from specific locations. In Houston, those spots are now in private lots and on university campuses.
The 18-month test will start by dedicating four spots in Midtown two along Bagby near Gray and two on McGowen near Main as car-share only. People can then check out the vehicles as opposed to driving and then return them when they complete their trip.
The company offering the cars has not been chosen yet, Irshad said, and will compensate the city for use of the spaces. The benefit, city officials hope, is fewer residents and visitors will need to bring a car back and forth into Midtown if they have an alternative.
The idea was popular with some City Council members, who encouraged ParkHouston to track the progress and see if it could be expanded.
Larry Green, chairman of the transportation, technology and infrastructure committee that discussed the matter, said libraries would be another beneficial location in some spots where people who don't own a car can access one.
Police have arrested one suspect and are searching for two others in the fatal stabbing of a 54-year-old man last month outside a convenience store in southwest Houston.
Jason Lee Vallier, 44, is charged with murder in the death of Gregory Alan Williams about 11:40 p.m. June 25 at 5300 Caversham near Chimney Rock, according to the Houston Police Department.
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"It's a public place where private things can happen, and there's a lot of potential there," "Mad Men" creator Matthew Weiner once said, explaining the numerous elevator scenes on the now defunct show.
Renee Edd might agree with that sentiment.
Edd, an event coordinator at Houston-based dating agency Rose Matchmaking, is staging a speed dating event Thursday that involves complete strangers riding up and down on an elevator.
Singles who attend Love In An Elevator will spend one minute ascending and descending before having a three-minute sit-down chat.
More Information Love In An Elevator Where: Omni Houston Hotel at Westside When: Thursday, July 21; 6 to 8 p.m. Price: $20 More info: rosematchmaking.com See More Collapse
While attendees will be pre-matched to someone based on photos and self-submitted short bios, they won't know who until the actual event.
"I think there's just a stigma around singles events... So if we try to make the events wacky and goofy, or just edgy and interesting, then people are going to automatically be more comfortable or not feel that stigma," Edd told the "Houston Press."
Rose Matchmaking's past speed dating mixers were just as offbeat. One involved guests bringing in previously worn shirts to see who they liked based on scent, the idea being that pheromones determine attraction. Another required guests to take rides in luxury cars.
Compared with those parties, this one seems relatively tame. The organizers have even taken the precaution of seeking out a locale with glass elevators.
No word yet on what happens if the elevator gets stuck, an attendee is susceptible to motion sickness or how hotel guests can avoid being a third wheel.
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More than half a decade into the Brony phenomenon, the grown men who love "My Little Pony" understand that the world remains curious about them. So they kicked off their recent Bronycon gathering in Baltimore with a crash course on dealing with the media, from which a couple helpful pointers emerged:
- Don't use jargon like "OC" or even "original character." Simply explain that the Pony-inspired name you go by in Brony circles is, for example, "Champ Romanhoof," the persona claimed by Chaim Freedman, a 17-year-old Brony from New Jersey.
- Do ask for their credentials. Certain publications of a conservative bent have been quick to smear Bronies. You'll never be able to convince these kind of journalists that Bronyism is an not a weird sex fetish, nor a sad childhood hang-up, but just another earnest, all-American fan community.
- Do talk up the narratives you'd like reporters to work into their stories, such as the money Bronies raise for charity. "The media," emphasizes Jake, the leader of this seminar, "is not the enemy."
Jake is a communications specialist for the Army with a stuffed Pinkie Pie toy perched on his shoulder, which perfectly complements his camo-toned biker vest. Like many people in this room, Jake has gotten his fair share of flak for loving a kids' cartoon inspired by a cheesy plastic toy marketed to little girls during the Reagan administration. (Once, he says, he was quoted in a story that complained of Bronies' body odor.)
But no one's in a defensive crouch here. A Bronycon is the ultimate safe space: When you're in a rainbow wonderland of fellow travelers wearing unicorn horns and technicolor manes, randomly hollering catchphrases like "Fun! Fun! Fun!" and singing fan-written songs with titles like "Mane Squeeze," you can stop worrying about what's normal and what's weird or where you fit in.
Unless it's a point of pride.
"We are the weird kids!" one audience member shouted out during Jake's seminar.
"It's our job to tell the Brony story," says Jake, "and I think the Brony story is worth telling."
---
There are a couple Brony stories, actually.
Forget your 1980s flashbacks. Yes, it's true that indirectly, this all started when the U.S. toy behemoth Hasbro birthed a new trinket - a hard-plastic equine with doe eyes and brushable nylon mane and tail - that became a birthday party sensation and inspired a saccharine Saturday morning cartoon.
Bronyism is not about that "My Little Pony."
Bronyism is specifically about "My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic," a cartoon reboot that emerged in 2010, with vague similarities to the classic but an entirely new sensibility. It was launched by Lauren Faust, an animator with solid feminist-hipster credentials, who had grown up loving the original, but clearly wanted to propel it into the new century.
She introduced new characters like Rarity, a prima-donna unicorn with busybody tendencies; wry story lines, such as the one in which a male pony dresses as a female to get more attention; and celebrity cameos ("Weird Al" Yankovic voiced a character named Cheese Sandwich). Even outside the fandom, grown-up critics warmed to the show. Writing for the A.V. Club in 2011, Todd VanDerWerff called it "legitimately entertaining and lots of fun," citing the stylish animation, fresh humor, surprisingly complex story lines and relentlessly cheery vibe.
Still, it was solidly marketed as a kid's cartoon, even if one peppered with more than a few gags for mom, dad and the older siblings.
We may never know who, exactly, was the first Bro to discover the Pony. But early in the show's run, pictures of the show's star, Twilight Sparkle, with her squad, the Mane Sis, started materializing on the message board 4chan. Soon, the images became so plentiful that a separate message board was created for them, according to Jose Castillo, Bronycon's head of social media and press.
Nathan Hall, a 29-year-old Brony from Rockville, Maryland, saw these posts and didn't know what to make of them. But one night, he gave it a shot.
By the early morning, he had galloped through all 10 episodes that had aired thus far.
Later, he forced a friend to watch one episode. As the credits rolled, "the man turns to me and asks, 'Where's the next episode?' " Hall recalls.
It's pretty much the archetypal Brony origin story, which consists of five steps:
Skepticism: When a Brony-to-be first hears of the show, he can't comprehend how it could possibly be worth his time. Still, he's curious to know what the fuss is about.
Exposure: Boredom, drunkenness, a dare or the loss of a bet spurs the pre-Brony to watch an episode or two.
Addiction: Before he knows it, he has watched the entire series. It's something about the writing, the humor, the sophisticated themes. He can't get enough.
Evangelism: He tells his incredulous friends, who pass through the first three stages.
Bronyhood: Next thing he knows, he's calling himself "Boogie Hooves" and wearing fake ears or hooves or a pony onesie (or all of the above) at Brony gatherings all over the world.
---
To the uninitiated, sure, Bronies can seem a little out there. But ultimately, they're a subculture like any other - no weirder than your average Trekkie. Bronycon, with its costumes and games and meet-and-greets with MLP luminaries, simply fills a tighter niche than Comic Con, the San Diego geek gathering that long ago went mainstream.
And yes, Bronies are a bit nerdier. And perhaps a little sweeter.
"These pony characters are more like real people than some real people I know," says Bret Mix.
He's a 45-year-old man who has come to Bronycon with his 39-year-old wife, Amy, a first-timer, and their 11-year-old daughter, Autumn, who is dressed as Luna, the dark-blue reformed antagonist of Season 1. Autumn says watching "My Little Pony" and attending Bronycons have taught her to embrace diversity and make friends with all kinds of people.
In fact, the fratty overtones of the "bro" prefix are misleading. Roughly 20 percent of Bronycon attendees identify as women - they're often called "Pegasisters." The founder of Bronycon is a transwoman, Jessica Blank, who goes by "Purple Tinker" in these circles; the convention offered all-gender restrooms.
And most attendees seemed sincerely devoted to a very deep reading of the conflicts and dynamics lurking within these two-dimensional horses. Ask a fan what "My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic" is really about, and you'll get a slew of theories - gender identity, social norms, queerness, mental illness.
Ask Cadejo Jones about the character of Luna. He'll tell you that she is an all-too-compelling metaphor for addiction.
And she saved his life.
It was an episode from Season 5, "Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep?" A giant smoke monster called the Tantabus has invaded the ponies' dreams, merging them into one mass nightmare. But as the Tantabus prepares to breach the waking world, a teary-eyed Luna confesses to the Mane Six that she herself created this monster to punish herself for all the harm she previously inflicted upon the land of Equestria. Twilight Sparkle tells Luna to forgive herself - and when she does, the Tantabus disintegrates.
Jones needs a moment to compose himself after showing this clip to a solemn and respectful Bronycon audience. He explains that the episode crystallized everything he needed to realize about getting sober; it pulled him back from the brink of suicide.
But it wasn't just the show that pulled him out of darkness. His fellow Bronies did, too.
"Bronies care," he says.
In another session, sociologist Brian Newby listened with interest as one Brony after another lined up to explain how "My Little Pony" has helped them express their own identities. One says it helped her come to terms with her gender fluidity; another says it helped her accept her own disability.
"How many people feel that in this fandom, you've found your people?" Newby asks. Almost everyone in the room raises their hands.
To wrap up, panelist and blogger Taylor Ramage asks if it's okay to lead the group in song. Music is omnipresent at Bronycon, with songs from the show plus fan-made music playing around every corner.
This song is a little different. She asks the audience if they know the song "This Little Light of Mine." They nod enthusiastically. Ramage explains that their song simply replaces "little light" with the words "cutie mark." In MLP, the ponies receive cutie marks - symbolic representations of the pony's personality - on their flanks in adolescence.
They sing:
This cutie mark of mine, I'm gonna let it shine.
This cutie mark of mine, I'm gonna let it shine.
This cutie mark of mine, I'm gonna let it shine.
Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.
Dear Abby:
My wife and I have been together for eight years. When we met, I was in the military and she was a bartender. Needless to say, she made far more money than I did at the time. Six months into our relationship, she got pregnant and quit her job. For the next seven years, she raised our children and went to school while I did whatever I had to do to make enough to pay the bills.
I am now out of the military, and we are finally reaching a point where we don't worry about money as much. She will graduate from school soon and hopefully start working right after. She now says that when she starts working, she wants to keep separate bank accounts and split the bills evenly based on pay.
Until now, I haven't resented her for not working because she has been caring for our children, but the thought of her wanting to keep her money to herself is weird and hurtful. How can I bring this up with her without making it seem like I think she owes me something?
Separate Accounts in Texas
Dear Separate:
Ask your wife why she wants to separate your finances because marriage is supposed to be a partnership. She does "owe you something" - an explanation.
Dear Abby:
I am a 65-year-old cross-dresser who has a deep, burning desire to be a woman. I guess you could call me gender dysphoric. I will never realize this dream of mine, though, and I have accepted myself as I am and have learned to live with it. I am not depressed.
My situation is difficult because my wife does not approve, so I try to be discreet. Sometimes I underdress and finish my hair and makeup in the car in a park. Then I'll walk or go shopping. I like people to see me like this. However, I am always alone in my altered state, and all the groups meet at night. I'm a daytime person, and it's much easier to get out as "Sheila" in the late mornings and early afternoons. Is there some way for me to find some groups that meet in the afternoon? Is there someone I can contact?
Just a Dream
Dear Just a Dream:
An organization that may be helpful for you is the Society for the Second Self (Tri-Ess International), and it offers not only support for heterosexual cross-dressers but their spouses, partners and families.
It's the oldest and largest support organization for cross-dressers and the people who love them. It promotes cross-dressing with dignity and decency, and treats spouses on an equal basis with their cross-dressers. To learn more about it, contact Tri-Ess at tri-ess.org.
DearAbby.comDear AbbyP.O. Box 69440Los Angeles, CA 90069Universal Press Syndicate
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The high price of textbooks is often the bane of an undergraduate's college finances, but for some San Jacinto College students, educational materials are about to get a whole lot cheaper - as in free.
The college will pilot use of free digital course materials during the spring 2017 semester before rolling out a full general studies associate degree program the following fall that will make exclusive use of the resources.
The materials the college will offer are called open educational resources, or OER. They are Internet accessible, openly licensed documents and media for teaching, learning and research and they are expected to save students hundreds of dollars.
Although the use of the digital materials will be tested next year, some San Jacinto faculty have already been using them.
Open educational resources are used in all of the community college system's Introduction to the Humanities courses at its south, central and north campuses. Most of faculty members teaching those programs have been using the resources for two to three years.
This month, Yvonne Frear finished teaching her History 1301 class at the central campus with free digital materials. Priscilla Castillo was among students glad not to have to purchase a textbook for the course.
"Not having a steady income while in school, paying in advance for the class and other necessities can really take a toll on me as a student," she wrote her teacher in an email after finishing the course. "Having a textbook and complimentary reader included allowed me to focus more on my studies and worry less about finances."
Nationally, students spend an average of $323, or $77 per course, on educational materials, per semester, according to the 2015 report Student Watch: Attitudes and Behaviors Toward Course Materials, which was funded by The National Association of College Stores. Student spending varies by whether schools are four-year institutions or two-year colleges such as San Jac. Spending also varies based on a student's full-time or part-time enrollment status.
According to San Jac, its full-time students pay approximately $700 per semester for printed textbooks. That is nearly one-third of what is spent on tuition, fees and books per term.
San Jacinto College Professor Oommen George is department chair of life sciences at the college's central campus. He has been using the digital materials from OpenStax, which is based out of Rice University, in his physics class at San Jacinto Central since 2013.
With some college textbooks costing as much as $250, George said the savings OER materials provide could prevent some students from withdrawing from classes or dropping out of college entirely. Students using the digital resources are able to access them from Internet-connected computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones. The materials also allow students to add lecture notes, highlight information and watch animated examples.
"I think more colleges and universities will be switching to these kinds of open educational resources," he said. "Last time I was reading, I think one month back, about 500 colleges have already adopted OpenStax materials."
Textbooks updatedannually to keep up
To keep up with the growth of on-demand free digital educational materials, educational publishing firms are coming out with new editions of hardcopy textbooks every year instead of every four years, which once was the standard time frame, George said.
"The textbook publishers are trying to be in the race, you know," he said.
Susana Davila, 20, is a University of Houston student taking summer courses at San Jacinto College Central. She recently completed George's physics class. Davila is not traditionally a fan of online books. However, she liked that her online homework would automatically lead her to the section of her physics materials that helped her figure out questions.
Davila said the digital materials saved time and money and served as her personal tutor. She would like to see more classes offer digital course materials.
The use of free, open source materials is growing in the United States. It is the leading trend in distance education, but faculty at colleges and universities around the country have been using free, open resource materials for some time.
"OER degrees have been started at colleges in Virginia and New York and provided dramatic savings for students," said Mark Johnson, English and modern languages department chair at San Jacinto North Campus, which is at 5800 Uvalde Road in Houston. "For example, students at Virginia's Tidewater College saved over $60,000 in textbook costs during the first semester of it OER degree launch."
Research related to Tidewater indicates that students using the free digital materials are faring as well or better than those using traditional textbooks. Tidewater College, Johnson said, "also had a significant increase in student completion rates in its OER courses."
He is organizing the fall 2017 launch of San Jac's open educational resources general studies associate degree program. To prepare, he recently attended a national conference in San Francisco where he learned that OER classes have other benefits in addition to reducing costs.
"With OER materials, instructors actually have more higher-quality materials than ever before," he said. "With OER, rather than textbook publishers determining course content, faculty share their expertise and take the lead role as subject matter experts who choose, review and create free and sharable course texts."
Laurel Williamson, San Jacinto College's deputy chancellor and president, said many classes will still use commercial textbooks.
"We do not want people to have an expectation that suddenly there will be no course material costs at San Jacinto College," Williamson said.
Piloting the use of OER materials for the general studies associate degree program will allow faculty to see how the new materials work and will give the college time to work out any glitches.
OER backers include the Gates Foundation
San Jacinto College's OER general studies associate degree program is being supported by a $74,676 grant from Achieving the Dream, a nonprofit that is managing a new OER Degree initiative on behalf of a consortium of investors including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The college is one of four in Texas participating in the project, including Austin Community College, El Paso Community College and Alamo Community College. Money from the grant will pay for faculty to develop courses and help fund faculty training.
A company called Lumen Learning is helping instruct the faculty at San Jacinto in using open educational resources materials. Its chief academic officer, David Wiley, said OER allow college professors to take each learning goal they have for their students and individually select the best resources and aggregate those in a cohesive way.
"It is just not an experience many faculty have had before," he said. "So, there is some instructional design support that's provided as part of that."
Wiley said the idea of open educational resources is still frequently misunderstood. Open educational resources can be accessed without needing to create an account or pay a licensing fee. To qualify as open, a resource has to be licensed under a copyright license that gives users what is known as the "Five R Permissions," based on the terms retainable, reusable, revisable, remixable and redistributable.
The materials have to be retainable for a user to download and own forever, unlike a streaming situation like with Netflix or Spotify where a user can watch or listen but can never own a copy. Users must be able to reuse the materials. The open materials also must be revisable and remixable, meaning the user has permission to edit the materials as necessary or remove any portion that may not apply to a course. And, OER users must be able to redistribute edited copies and share them with the world for free.
In addition to working with Lumen Learning, Wiley spent 15 years as a tenured faculty member at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, where he was part of a research group studying the effectiveness of open educational resources in higher education.
"If you can get the same or better outcomes for 100 percent less or 95 percent less than what you are paying before, it is very hard to justify requiring students to spend $150 or $200 per course when research is showing time and again that using OER produces the same or better learning outcomes for less money," he said.
A 15-year-old boy is dead and another teen is in custody after a shooting early Tuesday at a home in Alvin.
The shooting happened about 5:30 a.m. in the 3400 block of Oxford, according to the Alvin Police Department.
Police identified the victim as Emilio Flores.
The suspected gunman, identified as 18-year-old Logan Anderson, was taken into custody later Tuesday in Manvel.
Police said officers were sent to the home after the shooting was reported. When they arrived they found Flores on the back patio. He had been shot one time in the chest and died at the scene.
Anderson left after the gunfire. Investigators are trying to piece together what sparked the gunfire. Police said they weren't aware of any pre-existing conflicts between them.
Police are searching for another 18-year-old, Christian Gudino, and an unidentified woman who both left with the suspect after the shooting. They are considered "persons of interest" in the case.
Anyone with information about the whereabouts of Gudino or the whereabouts and identity of the woman is urged to contact the Alvin Police Department at 281-388-4370.
In Botswana, conservation scientists from the University of New South Wales are painting eyes on the rear ends of cattle in an effort to deter lions from eating them. As the lions' protected habitats shrink, they move closer to human settlements. In Botswana, the lions attack the livestock that the subsistence farmers count on. That leads the farmers to kill the African lions, further endangering the species.
(UNSW conservation biologist Neil Jordan's idea of painting eyes onto cattle rumps came about after two lionesses were killed near the village in Botswana where he was based. While watching a lion hunt an impala, he noticed something interesting: "Lions are ambush hunters, so they creep up on their prey, get close and jump on them unseen. But in this case, the impala noticed the lion. And when the lion realised it had been spotted, it gave up on the hunt," he says.
In nature, being 'seen' can deter predation. For example, patterns resembling eyes on butterfly wings are known to deter birds. In India, woodcutters in the forest have long worn masks on the back of their heads to ward-off man-eating tigers.
Jordan's idea was to "hijack this mechanism" of psychological trickery. Last year, he collaborated with the BPCT and a local farmer to trial the innovative strategy, which he's dubbed "iCow".
Characters in the Mel Brooks musical "The Producers" range from strangely dressed Broadway showgirls to flamboyant artists in Greenwich Village; so outfitting more than 180 costume changes for 27 actors at Art Park Players took teamwork, says director David Eck.
The Deer Park group collected pieces from storage warehouses, costume shops, even the closets of cast members.
"You'd be surprised how many people own their own lederhosen," said Eck, 41.
Lederhosen are leather shorts, such as the ones Nazi loyalist Franz Leibkind (played by Deer Park's Rusty Groos) "wears as everyday wear," Eck said. "The song he wears them in is 'Der Guten Tag Hop-Clop."
More Information Want to go? What: "The Producers" Where: Art Park Player Theatre, 1302 Center St., Deer Park When: 8 p.m. July 22-23 Cost: $15 cash at the door Information: 281-794-2448, artparkplayers.com See More Collapse
Another Deer Park resident, David Heyen, wears lederhosen as a Bavarian peasant.
The musical opened July 8 and will continue through July 23 at the Deer Park Municipal Court and Theater building, 1302 Center St., Deer Park.
"This production is one of the most complex efforts ever taken on by the Art Park Players," said technical director Joe Piper of Deer Park.
"The Producers" is based on a 1968 film about a washed-up theatrical producer who teams with a meek accountant in a scheme to bilk investors by mounting a surefire Broadway flop.
They find the worst play ever written ("Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden"), hire the worst director in New York City (the crossdressing Roger DeBris, who's assisted by his jealous paramour, Carmen Ghia) and collect $2 million for the show by seducing frisky old ladies. They plan to abscond to South America with the money when the show closes on opening night.
In 2001, the bawdy musical won 12 Tony Awards, setting the record for most wins for any show in Broadway history.
"Mel Brooks has such an unapologetic, hilarious style, and everyone who comes to see the show is going to have a great time," said Eck, who was aided by Piper and choreographer Holt Kirkindoll, stage manager Margo Staley and vocal directors Eduardo Guzman and Eva Piper.
But for the show's costume coordinator, the director turned to his mother, Gail Eck of Pearland.
"No matter what I threw at her throughout the process, she was always able to make it happen, and this show could not have been done without her," he said.
The musical is headlined by Chad McCallon as Max Bialystok and Chad Fontenot as Leo Bloom. Rounding out the cast are Cassidy Gibson as Ulla Inga Hansen Benson Yonsen Tallen-Hallen Svaden-Svanson, Micheal Ervin as Roger DeBris and Holt Kirkindoll as Carmen Ghia.
On Sept. 1, Eck will celebrate his first year as the theater specialist at Art Parks Players.
The Baltimore, Maryland native grew up in Florida, where he began performing onstage.
He spent 17 years working in Broadway theater.
In 2014, Eck moved to Houston from New York City when his wife, Jeanmarie Eck, accepted the position of an associate pastor at Unity of Houston.
The couple live in the Bellaire area with their 6-month-old daughter, Felicity Iris Rose Eck.
For ticket information, call 281-794-2448 or visit www.artparkplayers.com.
Productions on Friday and Saturday begin at 8 p.m. with dinner served at 7 p.m. Dinner with show tickets are $30 while show-only tickets are available for $15.
A dust-up between the Fort Bend County Sheriff's Office and two deputy constables over election-year social media posts has been resolved.
Lt. Frank Cempa Jr. and Deputy Bruce Denney of the Fort Bend County Precinct 3 Constable's Office, who'd been barred from using the sheriff's computer system and facilities for several months, were allowed to resume their use last week. Constables operate independently of the sheriff's office.
The sanctions against Cempa Jr. and Denney began March 3, according to a letter sent a day earlier from sheriff's Chief Deputy David Marcaurele to Precinct 3 Constable Rob Cook.
In the letter, Marcaurele accused both Denney and Cempa Jr. of inappropriately sharing information on Facebook regarding sheriff's office staffing.
Marcaurele described the posts as "connected to a political agenda."
Cempa Jr.'s father, Frank Cempa, Sr., lost a bid to unseat Sheriff Troy Nehls in the March 1 Republican primary. In his campaign, Cempa Sr. had sharply criticized Nehls and called for beefing up patrols.
Learning of the sanctions, Cook -- who was also up for re-election -- said it would be harder for those in his office to do their jobs. Cook later lost by a slim margin in a primary runoff to a candidate endorsed by Nehls.
The sanctions lasted until last Tuesday, when Cempa Jr. and Denney signed and returned a user agreement, specifying that they would only make internal information public if acquired through requests under the state's Public Information Act, Marcaurele said.
"We wanted them to sign a deal certifying they would not repeat those actions," he said, "and they did that."
As such, attorney Bob Thomas of Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas (CLEAT) on Friday filed to dismiss a civil suit that had been filed on behalf of Cempa Jr. and Denney against Sheriff Troy Nehls in connection with the matter.
"I thought the sheriff exceeded his authority," Thomas said. "We were compelled to file litigation and then we reached an equitable settlement."
Their suit was originally filed June 23.
The opening of the Grand Parkway has sparked a land grab as developers work to keep pace with a population and business boom in northwest Houston.
A new shopping center called the Grand Parkway Marketplace broke ground in April at the corner of Kuykendahl Road and Spring Stuebner Road in Spring.
The 450,000-square-foot center, to be anchored by Target Corp., is expected to open in a year.
The opening of the Tomball Tollway and the Grand Parkway have sparked business growth in the area, from hotels to hospitals to single and multi-family housing communities to large companies such as Noble Energy and Exxon Mobil.
The Houston Northwest Chamber of Commerce has received an increase in interest from companies looking to relocate to the region, said Barbara Thomason, president of the chamber.
"The Grand Parkway is huge for this area," Thomason said. "Development is going to go crazy - new home developments, offices, apartments, everything you can think of along that corridor. It's going to go gangbusters."
The Grand Parkway Marketplace project is being developed by Kimco Realty Corp., based in New Hyde Park, New York.
The new open-air shopping center is 75 percent preleased, according to Rob Nadler, President of Kimco's Central Region.
Kimco has had strong interest from retailers, Nadler said. Eight junior anchors have agreed to open in the center, including Petsmart and Ulta cosmetics.
The new center will include a restaurant village with four to five restaurants around a lake feature with an interactive fountain and public boardwalk. "The architecture, landscaping and amenities package will be exceptional and transform this intersection, Nadler said.
The center will include a mix of national, regional and local retailers, Nadler said. "Houston is a core market; the retail has held up nicely despite the set back in energy," Nadler said. "On the ground leasing has been very, very strong; above expectations."
Activity has been so bullish at Grand Parkway Marketplace, that Kimco Realty bought 35 acres of land across the street to build Grand Parkway Marketplace II, Nadler said.
That shopping center, which will be 350,000-square-feet and have three anchor stores, will break ground this summer and is expected to open in the fall of 2017.
More retail is being added throughout the region to keep pace with demand.
Houston-based NewQuest Properties is expanding its 46-acre Spring Town Center at the intersection of the Grand Parkway and Kuykendahl, adding additional retail space. The expansion comes as segments of the nearby Grand Parkway recently opened.
The shopping center, which already includes a Wal-Mart, a 12-screen Cinemark, Lowe's Home Improvement Center and Sprouts Farmers Market, will be adding an 11,550-square-foot freestanding building on the southeastern corner. The expansion is expected to be complete by the fall.
A new mixed-use shopping center is under construction in northwest Houston, called Northwest Park Crossing, located off Texas 249 near Northwest Park Drive.
The 4-acre center, being developed by Houston-based NewQuest Crosswell, includes two fast food restaurants, a freestanding ER facility and Hotel Bella, a two-story hotel expected to open in May.
Business / Companies
by Wynne Zanamwe
LISTED retail giant OK Zimbabwe has opened its fifth one-stop hybrid mega store, OK Mart, in Gweru. The new outlet is situated at former Jaggers along Gweru-Mvuma Road.OK has other one-stop hybrid mega stores in Harare, Bulawayo, Mutare and Kwekwe and are looking forward to opening another one in Victoria Falls in August.Speaking at the official opening in Gweru, OK Zimbabwe chief operations officer Mr Albert Katsande said the hybrid model was there to cater for domestic customers as well as bulk customers.He said the new entity would add convenience for both domestic and bulk customers through a diversified range of products on offer. "The OK Mart concept is not exactly the same as the supermarket concept."It is a much bigger retail offering."It does not only cater for domestic customers but also services institutions - the catering industry, schools, traders and basically we can provide a higher and a broader offering to the community," he said.Mr Katsande said OK Zimbabwe would expand to Victoria Falls next month and spread to other cities as well."We started with two outlets in Harare and Bulawayo after we felt that we must extend the service outside those two big cities to the rest of the country," he said."Gweru was lagging behind because we would have been here two years ago."This is now the fifth OK Mart store in our stable and we are opening more. We decided to come to Gweru because the city needed something for its size."TM Pick n Pay has also opened its Meikles Mega Market in Gweru's Central Business District (CBD).
In a courtroom packed with supporters, a Houston family practice doctor was sentenced to federal prison Tuesday for bilking Medicare of more than $900,000 for home health care referrals for services that were not needed or provided.
U.S. District Judge David Hittner sentenced Warren Dailey, 69, to five years and three months in federal prison.
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An East Texas sheriff is making sure that the citizens in his community know where the alleged bad guys are by posting signs in the front yards of homes raided for drug offenses.
Henderson County Sheriff Botie Hillhouse started the program last week, according to KLTV-TV in Tyler.
RELATED: Tyler man says he's found fossils from biblical flood in front yard
Hillhouse plans on putting the signs in the front yards of homes that are the site of drug raids and drug arrests. The first one was installed last Thursday in front of a home that was visited by deputies who found methamphetamine inside. They made two arrests.
"Once drugs are located inside that residence, then what I do is, I've got yard signs and I take those yard signs out in the yard and I post those signs out by the roadway," Hillhouse told KLTV-TV.
The signs stay up for only a few hours while a narcotics search warrant is being carried out and the investigators are at the scene. They aren't permanent.
RELATED: East Texas man told to get married or go to jail
While some might say that what Hillhouse is doing could shame people with an addiction, he says that the community has been supportive so far. Hillhouse sees it more as a deterrent than anything else.
"It's not for embarrassment purposes, it's not for anything other than letting the community know what we're doing, letting the offenders know we're working hard," Hillhouse told KLTV.
After all, most neighbors get a bit curious when they see a number of deputies arrive at a home and conduct a raid.
Henderson County is just southeast of Dallas and west of Tyler. Hillhouse was elected sheriff in March. He got his start with the Henderson County Sheriff's Office in 1998 as a detention officer and moved up the ranks.
Entertainment / Celebrity
by Bongani Ndlovu
UNDER fire Zimdancehall musician Lady Squanda has come out begging for forgiveness from fans after she recently beat-up and humiliated comedian Skimbo (real name Tatenda Albert Matika) by making him lick her foot.The comedian had released a comical video where he poked fun at her after it was reported that she stole underwear and towels from a Kwekwe lodge after a show, something which clearly did not go down well with the artiste. She retaliated by abducting Skimbo and assaulting him in a vehicle while recording the act.The recorded clips which were meant to disgrace Skimbo soon made their way onto social media sites, exposing Lady Squanda instead.Now, after a backlash from fans, Squanda has apologised to fans, most of whom had called for her arrest. A #squandamustfall hash tag which was created at the weekend is generating a lot of interest on Twitter as many people want her arrested for her uncouth behaviour.In a statement released on her Lady Squanda Fire Facebook page just before midnight on Sunday, the artiste wrote: "First, I'm sorry that I've to greet you all for (sic) this sort of scandalous incident and I'm sincerely sorry that I've to caused this much drama to my fans. However, I only have myself to blame with all of my carelessness (sic), causing this scandal as I've been carried away with emotions (sic), which led me to a bad decision with my fellows."I can't dare to say anything but apologise for this incident. In the future, I'll avoid this kind of situation. I'll work harder and harder to become a better person," said Lady Squanda."Because of my actions, I've hurt many fans and want to apologise. I hope you'll believe in me and my efforts once again. I'm sincerely sorry."Yesterday, fans pointed out that though Lady Squanda had apologised to them, it was Skimbo who deserved the apology.In response to Squanda's apology, Yoz Truly wrote: "That's not good enough. I don't see where you are apologising to that young man. It shows you feel you were justified to do such a brainless childish act. Apologising to your fans means nothing if you haven't apologised to that boy."Many hurled insults at the artiste while some reminded her that Zimbabwe was a peace loving nation which does not condone such behaviour."You call yourself lady. Do you even know the meaning of that term? Go and Google. Problem is you watch too many movies and take drugs and want to live like a gangster. Now, Zimbabwe is a country with moral values, there's no space for such behaviour," wrote Zvinah Ndoma.Ndoma further highlighted that Squanda had put Skimbo in the limelight, something that would catapult his career."For your own information, you've just put Skimbo in the spotlight and you've relegated yourself to the backyard."Some demanded that the artiste apologises to Skimbo through a video recording, the same way she made him apologise to her."Just like you made a video humiliating that comedian, you should also make a video apologising directly to him to show your serious apology."After the attack video went viral, memes started doing the rounds with Kung Fu Squanda being the most popular. Comedians such as Carl Joshua Ncube and Q the Boss were among those who in apparent solidarity with Skimbo shared pictures of grubby feet saying they belonged to Lady Squanda while others called her feet nzondora (chicken feet).As a result of her uncouth behaviour, top Zimdancehall promoters, Bodyslam Records, subsequently dropped her from their UK tour in September as fans there openly declared that they would not attend any of the shows if Lady Squanda is part of the line-up. As if to put salt on the wound, Lady Squanda has since been replaced by Skimbo and Darula.On the video, Squanda is seen beating up Skimbo telling him to tell people that he messed with the wrong people.
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SAN ANTONIO The San Antonio Police Department and the Bexar County Sheriffs Office are two of several local law enforcement agencies coming together as part of a new initiative to combat gang violence and activities in the Alamo City.
The new anti-gang unit will potentially include officers from the Texas Department of Safety, the U.S. Marshals Service, FBI and other agencies, said BCSO spokesman James Keith.
A lot of the violent crime we see in Bexar County is gang-related, Keith said in an interview with mySA.com. That gang activity doesnt just stay within the gang.
RELATED: More than 600 arrested in lengthy SA anti-gang operation
Keith said innocent people are continually getting caught in the middle of gang activity on the East Side and in nearby unincorporated parts of Bexar County. He said residents are being terrorized, and that this type of activity needs to come to an end. Keith anticipated this program will be up and running by the end of the year.
These gang members are running wild, he said. Weve got to take them on.
Sgt. Jesse Salame, SAPD spokesman, told mySA.com there are currently 10 agencies committing up to 84 personnel currently for the program. He said its not the formation of a new unit, but rather a centralization of forces in one facility in order to coordinate investigations and other activities.
The program has received a nearly $2 million grant from the Governors Offices Criminal Justice Division, Salame said.
The agencies involved will be conducting their regular anti-gang operations, investigations and activities, Salame said, but with a bit more unity between the various agencies.
It will help coordinate all Federal, State and local law enforcement agencies anti-gang investigation allowing them to share intelligence and de-conflict operations, Salame said in a statement Friday.
RELATED: Barrio Azteca gang member pleads guilty in Texas to racketeering, drug trafficking
Keith said the new program will eliminate barriers and obstacles that have previously gotten in the way in terms of coordinating activities against gangs.
One agency cannot take on gangs and stop them by themselves, Keith said. We have to work together. We have to make sure that we are targeting the gangs that are causing the biggest problems.
Program based on other successful units
Keith said the program was designed off of a previous Texas Anti-Gang (TAG) unit in Houston and Dallas.
Cpt. Matthew May, who works in that TAG unit in Houston, said it started as a three-year program and currently has about 120 investigators, analysts and support staffers. Those involved have come from the Houston Police Department, the Harris County Sheriffs Office and several federal agencies.
May said one of the problems the law enforcement agencies in Houston encountered was a duplication of efforts regarding anti-gang activities. The TAG unit allowed for those agencies to all get on the same page, and resulted in better cohesion in executing anti-gang activities, such as arrests, warrants and more.
Houston has more than 300 criminal street gangs, May said, and the time and labor needed to understand the culture and numbers of those gangs is intense. Some of those gangs include the MS-13 and the Tango Blast prison gang.
Those gangs are involved in drug activity, burglaries, robberies, human trafficking and other crimes, May said.
He said the TAG unit has made a significant positive impact in terms of executing anti-gang initiatives. Theyve made numerous arrests as a result, and made the streets of Houston much safer for residents.
RELATED: Whites-only Oregon gang members suspected in brutal murder of 'brother' who broke club rules
The various agencies are able to share databases and other resources that other agencies may not have access to, allowing everyone involved to bring their best assets forward, May said.
In order for officers to participate in the Houston TAG unit, the officers must go through an internal background check and a set of interviews. May calls the unit a prized position, that officers really have to want to be a part of in order to be successful.
twhite@mysa.com
Twitter: @tylerlwhite
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Melania Trump's speech at the Republican National Convention on Monday night was supposed to be her biggest moment since her husband, Donald J. Trump, started his campaign last year.
Yet, somehow, Trump was able to steal the show from her.
We begin with simply his entrance. Notice the backlighting, the strong stance and the pause right before walking forward into the light:
Twitter quickly chimed in with its classic reactions:
SEE INSIDE: At home with Donald and Melania Trump
After Melania was finally introduced by her husband, the stream on social media continued to flow of humor aimed at Trump's entrance.
But the potential first lady glided through her speech, talking about Trump's kind heart, willingness to fight for the country, his need to help the poor, among others.
"If you want someone to fight for you and your country, I can assure you, he is the guy," Melania said.
During her speech, many users took to Twitter to express their opinions on Melania. While many pointed out Trump's nasty past with criticizing immigrants while actually being married to one, others stood by the woman and her American story.
Click through the gallery above to see the multitude of reactions Twitter had during Melania's speech Monday night.
One thing we would like to be answered in the near future, though, is what is up with Trump's questionable pointing after his wife's speech?
We aren't sure if he is specifically pointing in support or pointing to a certain part of Melania's body.
Whatever the case may be, it's a bit awkward to behold.
CLEVELAND Melania Trump's primetime speech at the Republican National Convention Monday night was supposed to provide a portrait of her husband far removed from the bombastic, shoot-from-the-lip TV personality that vanquished 16 other GOP presidential hopefuls. Instead, her remarks have been all but lost in a media frenzy over accusations she plagiarized some lines from a 2008 Democratic National Convention speech by Michelle Obama.
Critics from all sides have suggested the incident could harm nominee Donald Trump, or at the very least further expose his campaign's lack of discipline.
News / National
by Staff reporter
FRESH from his controversial move to force police to release detained top Zimbabwe National Roads Administration (Zinara) executives last week and his continued stay in a plush hotel, Vice-President Phelekezela Mphoko is at the centre of another storm.Mphoko has been sucked into a nasty Macheke farm wrangle, where he is accused of shielding a white commercial farmer, John Osborne, from vacating his gazetted farm to pave way for a senior Zanu-PF provincial official identified as Herbert Shumbamhini.Shumbamhini was recently pushed out of Divonia Farm in Goromonzi by President Robert Mugabe's in-laws, including son-in-law Simba Chikore, the husband of Mugabe's daughter Bona.Currently on suspension as Zanu-PF Mashonaland East political commissar, Shumbamhini, according to documents in our possession, has an offer letter dated January 22, 2016 and signed by Lands and Rural Resettlement minister Douglas Mombeshora (REF:LLRR704), for the 337-hectare Lot 1 of Maryland Farm in Macheke.But Osborne is refusing to leave the land with backing from Mphoko following the VP's visit to the property on June 29 this year.Mphoko, on July 12 this year, wrote to Mashonaland East Provincial Affairs minister Ambrose Mutinhiri, ordering that Osborne should remain at Maryland and that the province should look for alternative land to give to Shumbamhini."During a consultative stakeholders' meeting with yourself, the Deputy Minister of Agriculture (Livestock) (Paddy Zhanda), the local chief, Chief Mangwende, and service chiefs, it became apparent that the community felt that Mr Shumbamhini had previously benefited from the land reform programme elsewhere, but failed to co-exist with the local community," Mphoko said."It was also clear that the current farmer, Mr John Osborne, was rearing an impressive pedigree herd of the indigenous Mashona cattle (one of only three breeders countrywide), and it would be a great loss to the nation if he were to leave."Mphoko said after consultations with Mugabe, a decision had been reached that Osborne continues "uninterrupted".As if to confirm government policy discord, Land permanent secretary Grace Mutandiro filed an affidavit in support of Shumbamhini's takeover of the property, indicating government would engage Osborne.Both Mphoko and Minister of State in his office, Tabetha Kanengoni-Malinga, were unavailable for comment yesterday.Contacted for comment, Mutinhiri said: "I am aware the VP visited the farm and indicated he would consult. I have not received his letter because I am on leave."Osborne early this year approached the High Court to stop the expropriation of his farm after a December 2015 letter cancelled out an earlier offer by government.Shumbamhini yesterday confirmed receiving Mphoko's letter and said he was now failing to service his debts."I have three wives and 15 children. How do I take care of them? I have loans amounting to more than $100 000 I had secured from a local bank and I cannot pay back because I am not operating," he said, adding he had now applied for an eviction order against Osborne.
The summers final Live on the Waterfront concert was held Wednesday evening at Prince Arthurs Landing. The popular series in Thunder Bay has completed nine weekly shows that began on July 13. Wednesdays concert was unique as it was held one hour later in the evening to mesh with the 10 p.
News / National
by Thobekile Zhou
After weeks of watching protests by pro-democracy groups and opposition parties, Zanu PF youths are plotting counter demonstrations.A meeting in Harare tomorrow to strategies has been set, reports indicate.According to reports, Pastor Evan Mawarire's #Thisflag movement and Tajamuka/Sesijikile would be the prime targets."They (pro-democracy protesters) can ignore our warning at their own peril," a top Zanu PF youth league official is quoted saying."Those that may choose to go ahead with their protests will have themselves to blame. Zanu PF is the only party that has a history of defending the country and, as youths, we don't hesitate to defend our President."Zanu PF Harare provincial youth chairman Edson Takataka confirmed tomorrow's meeting."Yes, we are meeting as normal on Wednesday (tomorrow) and deputy youth secretary Chipanga will address us at the headquarters. We cannot mobilise to deal with those two people"It's just Mawarire and that other group Tajamuka/Sesijikile. Obviously, we cannot be worried about them and our programme will go ahead as planned," he said.Mawarire was arrested last week Tuesday and released on Wednesday.The 39-year old Harare-based pastor started the social movement after spontaneously posting a video of himself expressing his frustration with the socio-economic situation in Zimbabwe, and the government's inability to remedy the situation.His act inspired other movements such as #tajamuka which means "we have rebelled" and #shutdownzimbabwe2016 , a protest against Mugabe's economic policies
Opinion / Columnist
The recent statement attributed to South Africa's Julius Malema purporting to express solidarity with "the people of Zimbabwe" exposes the sheer duplicity of this young and impressionable politician, who has turned himself into a veritable blunt weapon for bludgeoning liberation movements on behalf of imperialism.His laughable attempt at turning himself into a trans-border politician on behalf of reactionary forces in the region and beyond, exposes his agenda as falsely radical and uninformed by facts on the ground, or by interests of the racially oppressed peoples of Southern Africa.Zimbabweans cannot understand how a politician who purports to support land restitution in his own country, South Africa, and in other countries in the region affected by settler colonialism, can suddenly turn around to support and celebrate politics and political activities which white activists of erstwhile settler landowners in Zimbabwe represented by Ben Freeth find hospitable.Zimbabweans, too, cannot understand how a politician pretending to be on the side of the still disinherited Southern African peoples can be at one with politics that win the active support of ambassadors of countries whose role in the history of colonisation and raping of the continent of Africa is a matter of poignant, painful record.Much worse, Zimbabweans, who cherish peace and reject politics of violent and destructive demonstrations as shown by their rejection of the failed lockdown called for this (last) week, cannot understand, let alone appreciate, how a politician masquerading as an economic freedom fighter sides with fringe political upstarts bent on reversing the gains of the liberation struggle.Julius Malema should be reminded that the 1980 victory he alludes to in adulatory terms on his Twitter did not just happen; it came about as a result of purposeful leadership of the Patriotic Front, whose present day name is the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (zanu-pf).zanu-pf's status as the people's vanguard party, and its unwavering stance against imperialism and in defence of the broad masses of Zimbabwe, as well as in solidarity with the African peoples and liberation movements of Southern Africa, including the governing African National Congress of South Africa, cannot be gainsaid, challenged or impugned by storm-in-tea-cup politicians of Malema's ilk, who now delight and revel in the company of apartheid political bed-mates.The people of Zimbabwe, themselves moulded by a protracted armed struggle, cannot be taken in by protestations of cheap solidarity from such pseudo-revolutionaries, whose organisations daily attract support and sponsorship of oppressive racial capital, while falsely dressing themselves in the garb of exploited workers.Quite to the contrary, Zimbabwean people know who their real enemies are, and who their real friends are and will be in their continuing struggle to complete the liberation project now in the middle of its economic phase on national empowerment. They fully comprehend and are able to interpret the wiles and subterfuges of imperialism at every stage in history.A politician who cannot appreciate that Zimbabwe has been under crippling illegal Western sanctions for more than a decade and half, simply for recovering stolen land from its people, cannot be expected to be an ally of the Zimbabwean people.Nor can he be expected to understand the dynamics that shape the politics of our country, let alone to be counted upon as a useful voice in the continuing struggle we are bound to win.Let it be very clear to Malema and the neo-colonial forces he masks that zanu-pf is a solid liberation party capable of defending the Zimbabwean revolution and sure to outlive the machinations of imperialism.It has seen a lot and survived bigger adversities. Equally, let Malema know that the Southern African tradition founded on successful liberation struggles is well entrenched and too mature to succumb to, or be outmanoeuvred by formations spouting and repeating slogans of liberation in order to hide their imperialist provenance.Zimbabwe will survive and prosper through her own efforts, and with the support of genuine allies and friends.Hon. Dr C.C. Mushohwe is Minister of Information, Media and Broadcasting Services in the Government of Zimbabwe
BURBANK, Calif.Look no further than the StorErotica Awards ceremony for an exemplar of efficiency and organization. Under the wing of hostess Kelly Shibari and Kristofer Kay, PR director at ED Publications, a grand total of 20 StorErotica Awards were bestowed tonight in a ceremony that clocked in at in under an hour.
Joked Shibari, who was serving as the event hostess for the third year in a row, the goal was to get all the winners announced while free drinks were still being served. And indeed, guests had plenty of time left for cocktails after the last trophy was handed out.
The ceremony took place at the ANME Founders Show, drawing a crowd of leading manufacturers, distributors and retailers to find out the winners and enjoy the full dinner and open bar. The show continues through July 19 at the Burbank Airport Marriott.
But though the acceptance speeches were short, the sentiment among the winners was sweet. One highlight was the annual StorErotica Hall of Fame induction. Kay prefaced the announcement by relating a story that took place back when he was a newbie at StorErotica and working on a story. As Kay recalled, he met a man who was exceptionally gracious and helpful, and it wasnt until later that he realized hed been talking to the CEO of the company. That man, Kay revealed, was Doc Johnson founder Ron Braverman, who came up to accept a trophywell timed to mark his companys 40th anniversary mark.
The StorErotica Awards were presented in the following order:
Boutique Brand of the YearVibratex
Marketing Campaign of the YearLelos Beyond the Wave
Sexual Enhancement Company of the YearScreaming O for Dynamo Delay Spray
Body Care Line/Range of the YearKama Sutra (Massage Body Lotion)
Male Pleasure Product of the YearEverlaster Series by Sportsheets
Adult Game/Gag Gift Manufacturer of the YearKheper Games
BDSM Product of the YearFifty Shades of Grey Keep Still Over the Bed Cross Restraint by Lovehoney
Fetish Company of the YearXR Brands
Lubricant Company of the YearSwiss Navy
LGBT Company of the YearPHS International
StorErotica Hall of FameRon Braverman
Luxury Line/Range of the YearOhMiBod (Lovelife)
New Product of the Year (International)Xpander by JoyDivision
Foreign Manufacturer of the YearShots
Brand Ambassador of the YearMargaux ODonoghue, Swiss Army/MD Science Lab
New Product of the YearWomanizer Pro
Distributor of the YearEldorado Trading Company
Retailer Favorite of the YearCalExotics
Independent Retailer of the YearChi Chi La Rues, West Hollywood
Retailer of the YearAdam & Eve
Pleasure Product Company of the YearPipedream Products
For the final award, Pipedream Products chief Nick Orlandino took the stage, promising, Were gonna beat the pirates, were gonna beat the internet, were gonna win forever. It was a sentiment that many in the crowded room were be more than happy to cheer.
To see a full list of the nominees, click here.
CARTAGENA, ColombiaModelCentro, the platform that enables models to run their own websites, was just named Best CMS Platform at the LAL Expo Awards. The awards were held in Cartagena, Colombia, in the midst of the Latin America Adult Business Expo. The ModelCentro team expresses gratitude at the recognition for their achievements.
Over the past several years, ModelCentro has become a household name as thousands of models take advantage of the tools we provide, said Stan DAman, founder of ModelCentro. Thank you to everyone who voted for us at the LAL Expo Awards for your support of our efforts to develop a great CMS!
The ModelCentro team congratulates Little Red Bunny for winning Best Cam or Solo Model Personal Site via her ModelCentro-based paysite, LittleRedBunny.xxx. Congratulations are also in order for Devious Angell for her award as Best Female Webcam Model. Her ModelCentro-based website is at DeviousAngel.net/home.
The ModelCentro platform allows models like Little Red Bunny and Devious Angell to build their brands with a variety of tools ranging from fan interactivity to various integrations. ModelCentro provides hosting, billing and the domain for the first year, all free with sign-up. And with the ModelCentro iPhone app, models can grow their business on the go.
Visit ModelCentro.com for more.
Last time the Republican and Democratic National Conventions rolled around in 2012, live video coverage was almost exclusively the domain of news organizations. YouTube was the official digital live-streaming partner of the 2012 conventions, but neither Facebook nor Snapchat were doing video and Periscope didnt even exist. The big innovation of the year was how digital and print outlets were using live streaming tools on their websites.
Four years later, the social media landscape has changed exponentially thanks to an explosion in social video on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat. Now social platforms have set their sights on live streaming, and the 2016 conventions are shaping up to become a frenzied microcosm of the next era of live event coverage.
Facebook users are watching more than 8 billion videos a day on the service, according to numbers released in November. Snapchat surpassed that figure with a reported 10 billion daily video views in April. YouTube, for its part, claims to reach more 18- to 49-year-olds than any cable network in the US. Having conquered video, social platforms are partnering up with news organizations to deliver live streams from the conventions directly to users social feeds. As Crystal Patterson, Facebooks head of government and politics outreach, told Politico last week, This is the most engaged weve been at the convention, and its highly correlated to the fact [that] we have a lot of tools to offer.
Until now, live event coverage on TV has been relatively immune to digital encroachment, but new tools mean networks can now expect to be challenged on that front, too, with some commentators suggesting they could spell the demise of cable news.
The advent of live social streaming comes at a time when TV audiences are shrinking and, as a recent report from the Pew Research Center suggests, the downturn could be set to increase in coming years as TVs older audiences are replaced with younger viewers who prefer to get their news digitally. Until now, live event coverage on TV has been relatively immune to digital encroachment, but new tools mean networks can now expect to be challenged on that front, too, with some commentators suggesting they could spell the demise of cable news.
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This week, social media users can expect a mix of both original content produced with social streaming tools and live streams of existing TV coverage. In a futuristic example of the former, Twitter users were treated to The Washington Posts robot reporter rolling around the convention hall Monday at lunchtime, streaming its encounters live via Periscope. On Monday night, The New York Times had a feed from the convention embedded into a Web page, accompanied by running commentary from four of its reporters. Although YouTube has been live streaming on desktop since 2011, the company only launched mobile live streaming on June 23. Its partnering with a host of YouTube personalities to stream convention coverage created with the new tools. But the major push in the arena of original content creation comes from Facebook with its Facebook Live lounge. Facebooks 22 media partners will be live streaming from the lounge in scheduled slots throughout the day, using cameras connected to Facebook Lives API on a set reminiscent of a TV talk show. Non-partners will have access during dedicated walk-up periods.
LIVE on #Periscope: Robot reporter rolls around the convention hall | Come #RNCinCLE https://t.co/t7RsZXLlh9 Ryan Y. Kellett (@rkellett) July 18, 2016
CNN and The New York Times both plan to use the space. We actually have a very, very extensive social, digital, off-platform play at these conventions, says Samantha Barry, senior director of social news at CNN. Facebook Live will be key to that play due to the platforms potential for real-time interaction with the audience, she says. For example, Christiane Amanpour, who will be dedicating herself to explaining the US elections to a global audience, will take questions from viewers around the world in real time on the CNN International Facebook page. Everything were doing across all of these platforms is to meet the audiences where they are, says Barry.
Interaction is also cited by the Times as a key part of its live-streaming strategy. The Times alone has created more than 400 Facebook Live streams since April; its most popular streams range in coverage from breaking news to nature scenes and cooking with celebrities. What they have in common is the priority we place on involving our audience in the content, says Louise Story, the Times executive producer of live interactive journalism. A video published last week showcases the magic that can happen when publishers get creative with audience engagement in live streams. Fragments of a Life: A Curbside Mystery is an oddly compelling 10-minute documentary showing what happened when Times reporter Deborah Acosta came across a bag of old, abandoned slides in the street and live streamed her search for the photographer, using the live audience to aid her investigations.
During the conventions, the Times will be live streaming a morning briefing from around the convention and a lunch program in the Facebook Lounge at specific times each day. Were really excited about these, says Story. Theyll be regular things the audience can expect, but like we do in any big story, well be nimble.
The format is clearly popular with viewers, who watch live video on Facebook three times longer than other kinds of video on the platform. But regardless of how audiences engage with digital live streaming, the long-term question for news organizations is whether these new tools will help bring money into newsrooms. Right now Facebook allows monetization of Facebook Live videos through branded content, but the tool is still too new to gauge how lucrative it may ultimately become.
Some organizations are live streaming their existing TV coverage straight to social media. This approach provides networks with exposure to a larger audience and adds another dimension to the conversation that already takes place on social networks. A spokesperson for CBS says thats part of the thinking behind a deal with Twitter to live stream the networks TV coverage on the site, alongside a curated feed of tweets. The partnership is similar to live streaming deals Twitter has made recently with the NFL, Wimbledon, and Pac-12 Plus to live stream sporting matches, and with Bloomberg to stream several of its TV programs. The financial details of the Twitter deal with CBS were not disclosed, but the deal with Bloomberg involves a revenue-sharing agreement between the two parties.
YouTube and Facebook will also be live streaming TV content. HBOs Real Time with Bill Maher, a show thats usually hidden behind HBOs paywall, will stream free convention specials to viewers on the programs YouTube page. Meanwhile, PBS NewsHour and C-SPAN will stream their TV coverage via Facebook Live. In contrast to Twitters offering, in which streams disappear once they are complete, anything live streamed on Facebook automatically becomes a video-on-demand on the organizations page. Facebook says about two-thirds of video views occur after the live broadcast has ended.
When asked if digital will soon compete with TV for audiences, CNNs Barry is optimistic about TVs staying power. Honestly, I think theyre different audiences and theyre different experiences, she says. She could be right. At least one viewer of Twitters Wimbledon live streamVarietys New York Digital Editor Todd Spanglerdescribed the user experience as a distracting mess and suggested that live video coupled with a stream of unfiltered Wimbledon-related tweets simply doesnt add up to more than the sum of its parts.
The upside of live streaming is the amount of choice available to viewers, who can watch the conventions in the formats they prefer. The downside is the potential for audience fragmentation, which could adversely impact advertising revenue. Considering how rapidly journalistic tools have evolved in four short years, its hard to imagine what the media landscape will look like by 2020. For news organizations, the only strategy is to adapt as audiences adapt. Wherever those audiences are, we will be, says Barry, adding, If youre doing the same things on social platforms that you were doing six months ago, youre probably doing a bad job.
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Shelley Hepworth , formerly a CJR Delacorte Fellow, is Technology Editor at The Conversation in Australia. Follow her on Twitter @shelleymiranda.
As the 2016 Republican presidential primary draws to a close, it is worth noting that part of Donald Trumps popularity can be attributed to his use of social media. From his late night Twitter rants to the official announcement Friday of his vice-presidential running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, Trump has done a superb job of using social media to garner both mainstream media attention and the publics eye. But just how important has social media strategy become in campaigning? One way to answer that question is to look at the social media strategies of two of Trumps failed competitors: Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina.
A project supported by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and Syracuse Universitys Center for Computational and Data Sciences tracks the Twitter and Facebook feeds of active presidential campaigns. The project, Illuminating 2016, looks at the number of messages each candidate sends, and also codes by message type. By doing so, this tool is able to provide details about candidate social-media usage that typically do not register on the mainstream medias radar.
There are a few strong similarities between the trajectories of the Fiorina and Carson campaigns. Both proudly touted their status as outsiders to politicsBen Carson as a well-known neurosurgeon and Carly Fiorina as first female CEO of a top-20 US corporation, Hewlett Packard. Both enjoyed a brief period of popularity followed by a precipitous drop in poll numbers. However, the momentum that Carson and Fiorina experienced was short lived. And after each languished in the polls for four months, both candidates suspended their campaigns.
Both candidates, as shown by the Illuminating 2016 site, likely under-utilized social media when they probably should have used it most. There is no evidence that either candidates social media utilization patterns influenced his or her performance in the polls. Comparing their social media behaviors to their performance on the campaign trail, however, does reveal a disparity between social media strategies and what each candidate faced offline.
One might have expected, for instance, that Fiorina and Carson would use social media to leverage favorable polling numbers. But neither campaign showed a significant increase in the total messages following his or her peak in the polls.
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One might have expected, for instance, that Fiorina and Carson would use social media to leverage favorable polling numbers. But neither campaign showed a significant increase in the total number of messages posted on social media in the month following his or her peak in the polls. After strong performances in the Republican Partys first two debates, Fiorina found herself in second place behind Trump in a national CNN poll conducted September 1719. The Fiorina campaign posted 63 Facebook and Twitter messages in September, the same month the Voter Gravity and CNN polls were released. In October, the total increased by only six posts. By comparison, Trump posted 60 total messages in September and 466 in October. Fiorinas poll numbers dropped to single-digits in November and never rebounded.
Total message activity for Carly Fiorinas Twitter and Facebook accounts, broken down by message type. Source: Illumination 2016.
Carsons peak in the polls came in late October, when a CBS/New York Times poll gave him a 26 percent to 22 percent advantage over Trump. Although Carsons lead in this poll was within the margin of errorand Trump had a consistent lead in most polls both before and after the CBS/NYT October anomalyit is interesting to note that his short lead followed significant media coverage of controversial statements he made about Muslims, Obamacare, guns, and several other topics. The Carson campaign sent 422 Facebook and Twitter messages in October, the same month the CBS/New York Times poll was released. During November, the campaign posted only 32 more messages than it did in October. Trumps message count, on the other hand, increased 49.6 percent to 697 in November. November, coincidentally, was the beginning of Carsons decline in the polls.
Total message activity for Ben Carsons Twitter and Facebook accounts, broken down by message type. Source: Illumination 2016.
The Illuminating 2016 website also categorizes and codes candidate social media posts by message type. The kind of comments candidates post online, and the frequency of these messages, suggests a lot about the connection between social media strategy and ground game. For instance, what Illuminating 2016 calls advocacy-image messages convey positive information about the candidates character, personality, or ability to lead. Advocacy-issue messages, on the other hand, talk about the candidates policy positions. When a candidate does well in the polls, these messages can be used to highlight those poll numbers and the candidates strengths.
Fiorina had two stellar debate performances during the first half of her campaign, which contributed toadv her quick but short-lived rise in popularity. But instead of capitalizing on her early success by immediately leveraging social media to talk about her strengths as a candidate and create discussion about her policy positions, it was almost an entire month before Fiorinas team increased the number of advocacy posts. The campaign posted fewer than 20 advocacy messages in September and October combined. By this time, she had already lost much of the support that followed her early debate performances.
One example of a call-to-action Facebook post from Carly Fiorina. Source: Illumination 2016.
Instead, Fiorina mostly used social media to ask people to take action before and immediately after her campaign reached its peak. Sixty-five percent of camp Fiorinas 63 messages posted in September, and 77 percent of the 69 posted in October were calls to actionwhich direct people to engage in activities offline (e.g., volunteering, attending an event, etc.) or online (e.g., visiting a website, retweeting something, watching a video, donating money, buying campaign merchandise, voting, etc.).
Carsons campaign, on the other hand, more than doubled the number of advocacy messages in the same month as the CBS/NYT poll. Of 106 messages posted in October, 25 were posted a couple days after the poll was conducted. The team maintained this level, posting another 105 advocacy-related messages in November. So, Carsons strategy did seem to change in the same month as the poll that suggested he was the front-runner. However, nearly half of the updates the Carson campaign posted on social media in October and November were informative in nature, meaning the messages consisted of neutral information about the campaign or an eventwithout making any explicit appeal to followers.
One example of an advocacy post on Facebook from Ben Carson.
Informative and call-to-action messages made up 63.1 percent of all posts from the Carson campaign between November and February and 62.1 percent of all posts from Fiorina campaign between October and February. By contrast, 42.9 percent of Trump campaign social media posts between October and February were informative and call to action messages. The high percentage of these messages suggests both campaigns made distributing information and getting people to participate in the political process a higher priority than advocating for the candidate and his or her policy positions. However, this strategy did not fit the realities they faced. By the time Fiorina and Carson made significant adjustments to their social media strategies, their campaigns were already on life support.
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Jerry Robinson is a Ph.D. candidate at Syracuse University and a summer research assistant on the Illuminating 2016 project.
In the one-woman newsroom of Chalkbeat Detroit, Erin Einhorn spends her time making calls, reaching out to principals, attending parent meet-ups, and arranging classroom visits, documenting the efforts to respond to the decades-long deterioration of the citys school system.
Public schools in Detroit are among the most troubled in the country: Schools are bleeding enrollment, frequent closures mean some students transfer multiple times a year, and chronic absenteeism is worse than in any other city. Now, the district is undergoing a sweeping and politically divisive transformation. State legislators voted last month on a $617 million rescue deal, part of a controversial plan that left local lawmakers fuming.
Its a whirlwind of a story for Einhorn, who moved to Detroit from New York with her two young children less than two years ago, and began launching Chalkbeat Detroit in March of this year. Its also a story with personal significance.
I am a Detroit parent, she said. Its hard to predict the future of Detroit schools, which seem to be perpetually in a state of upheaval. And I figured that if it was this difficult for mean education reporterit must be much more difficult for families that dont have my resources. Parents and educators need new ways to get information about whats working, whats not, and what solutions may be available.
Thats an attitude that fits in well with Chalkbeats broader approach: local journalists, in cities around the country, reporting on strategies to improve schools and address inequity in education. Over the past few years, the nonprofit news outlet has won admirers and awards while attracting a solid base of financial support. Along the way, it has had to navigate the ethics of nonprofit funding, grapple with how to measure the impact of its reporting, and respond to critics.
Now, as the outlet looks to expand, it faces the challenge of extending its reach beyond ed-world insiderswhile also serving a niche community that can be sharply divided over the very issues Chalkbeat covers.
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Chalkbeat grew out of a partnership between two local education sites, EdNews Colorado and the New York-based Gotham Schools, which each were founded in 2008. In 2013, the sites officially joined forces to launch a new digital network; later that year, local sites were launched in Memphis and Indianapolis. Einhorns Detroit bureau, still technically in the pilot phase, will likely be Chalkbeats fifth local site.
The founderseditor-in-chief and CEO Elizabeth Green, managing editor Philissa Cramer, board chair Sue Lehmann, and former editor-at-large Alan Gottlieb*wanted their network to be a place for stories that might have fallen to the wayside in other newsrooms. The vision was heavy on policy shifts and broader trends, but with a grounding in local knowledge and relationships formed through beat coverage.
At Chalkbeat New York, for instance, reporter Patrick Wall last year used his classroom sources to cover the citys school renewal program, which pumped nearly $400 million into struggling schools. In a multi-part series, Wall followed twin sisters at one of the renewal schools to track how the changes played out in their lives. Its an example of the textured local reporting that has won praise for the outlet.
Theyre not just telling a series of anecdotes, or stories that fit into this larger negative narrative, said Cornelia Grumman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who is now director of education at the Robert R. McCormick Foundation. I hear all these conversations where people say, Oh these schools are such a disaster, and theyre not all disasters actually. There is still some really good teaching going on. I think in some ways [Chalkbeat] humanizes schools.
The goal now is to bring that reporting to a bigger audience. Chalkbeat has about a quarter of a million unique visitors per month, according to Green, and most readers are education insiders of one sort or another. Nearly one-quarter of readers work for education nonprofits; another 25 percent are teachers. About as many are researchers or policymakers (11 percent) as are parents (10 percent).
That breakdown reflects Chalkbeats policy-heavy approach. But while insiders will always be part of the core audience, they arent the only target. Chalkbeat also wants to reach curious citizenspeople who care about educational equity but dont work on it professionally, Green said.
Late last year, the network hired Ryan Sholin as its new director of product and growth. The quest for curious citizen readers happens at both a national and a local level, Sholin said. Locally, it means helping people who are looking for answers but dont know where to startlike when the Chalkbeat Tennessee team used publicly available criteria to identify the Memphis schools most likely to be slated for closure by the local district. The highly-read story was shared by teachers, parents, and others, with nearly all of the readership coming from people who were new to Chalkbeat.
Nationally, it could mean more stories about students or teachers succeeding against the odds. But Chalkbeat is also doing more to try to synthesize what its reporters see in different cities, looking for common threads to contextualize the issues. Earlier this year, the network launched a new national homepage and named a national editor, Sarah Darville.
Its a story thats playing out differently in different places, but one story that is of vital importance to the future of the country.
The efforts to expand the audience could bolster the impact of Chalkbeats reporting and also, the sites leaders hope, its bottom line. The more people we reach, the more weve informed, and also the easier it will be to sustain diverse revenue over time, said Green.
About 10 percent of the $3.1 million operating budget for the 2016 fiscal year is covered by sponsorships, a paid jobs board, and some advertisements. But most of Chalkbeats revenue comes from foundation support and major individual donations. National foundations alone accounted for 30 percent of Chalkbeats revenuethe Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation each gave between $200,000 and $400,000 annually. Another large chunk comes from local foundations based in the states and cities where Chalkbeat has sites.
Thats not uncommon in nonprofit media, but it underscores a recurring tension: The institutions that are interested in supporting coverage of a niche topic are often also trying to influence policy about that topic. In fact, says Green, when she and Cramer started Gotham Schools, the prospect of taking money from foundations was initially irksome. The [Bill and Melinda] Gates Foundation, Walton, Fordthose are institutions that have shaped education policy, and I was wary of creating that relationship with them. I kind of resisted.
Today, Chalkbeat addresses those concerns with a public code of ethics, which states that the outlet wont accept funding for specific stories, nor will funders obtain any editorial privileges. In a show of transparency, Chalkbeat also posts all its major foundation and individual supporters online. For the 2015-2016 fiscal year, nearly 40 donors gave $1,000 or more, and the sites leaders continue to work on diversifying the funding base. If any one person walks away, we can still do our jobs, Green said.
Still, in the polarized world of education policy, Chalkbeats list of supporters has drawn notice from critics. Many of the outlets major funders have advocated for school reform measures, such as linking test scores to teacher evaluations or swift implementation of the Common Core curriculum standards, and some skeptics argue that Chalkbeat is too oriented toward a reform-minded policy community.
One of the weaknesses that Ive seen and that other people have seen is that there are certain sources that they go to repeatedly, and others that they leave out, said Leonie Haimson, a parent advocate and executive director of Class Size Matters, a nonprofit group that advocates for smaller class sizes in NYC schools. Theyre less good at searching out grassroots groups and parents.
Chalkbeats staff, which is keenly aware of criticism about the funding model, is adamant that the sites maintain editorial independence. And they note that while they often cover policy changes that are linked to reform efforts, coverage isnt always positive. One of Einhorns stories in Detroit, for example, highlighted the daily odysseys some families make to get to quality schools under the citys school choice program, and the extreme sacrifices that can entail.
Cramer, the managing editor, said the sites do have to fight the tendency to wonk out or use too many expert voices. One tool that could help in that effort is MORI (Measures of Our Reportings Influence), an impact tracker that Chalkbeat launched in 2014. The tool offers ways to catalogue the impact each story has had, from links in other coverage to lawmakers enacting legislation. In the nonprofit journalism world, its a way to demonstrate return on investment.
But MORI also shapes coverage at the front end: Reporters must identify what kind of a story theyre writing, who theyre writing it for, and what the storyline is. Scott Elliott, who worked in newspapers before helping launch Chalkbeat Indiana, said that simply thinking about audience and impact that way was an incredible moment aside from being a selling point for potential funders.
As a reporter, you probably ought to have in mind who you have in mind and who youre writing it for, Elliott, now Indianas bureau chief said. But never did once in my career did I think about that till I came here.
With this kind of impact in mind, as well as a new national focus, Chalkbeats founders are hoping to spark an ongoing conversation about equity for the countrys youngest generation.
Were reporters in all of these places, but were all covering one story, Cramer said. Its a story thats playing out differently in different places, but one story that is of vital importance to the future of the country.
*Correction: An earlier version of this story did not list Sue Lehmann as a Chalkbeat co-founder and incorrectly described Alan Gottlieb as an editor-at-large. CJR regrets the errors.
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Lauren Steussy is a reporter based in New York City. She was previously an education reporter at the Orange County Register and her work has appeared in San Diego Magazine, Marie Claire, and Columbia College Today.
Another chairlift has failed at a ski resort in Maine the third time in six years but no one was hurt because it happened in the summer when the lift was not in operation, officials said Wednesday.
The top unloading terminal of Sunday Rivers Spruce Peak Triple lift toppled when the foundation separated from the mountaintop, causing the structure to break apart and the cable and chairs to drop to the ground.
It couldve been a catastrophe had it happened during the winter with skiers onboard.
Thank God it happened in the summer when it was not in use, said Mark Di Nola, a ski safety consultant in New Hampshire.
Sunday Rivers lift manager noticed the structural failure Sunday evening, and engineers have been on the scene this week in the town of Newry to determine what happened, Sunday River spokeswoman Darcy Lambert said.
No one witnessed the structures failure, she said. And ski industry officials said that type of failure was unusual.
The National Ski Areas Association could point to only one other similar failure, at New Hampshires Gunstock Mountain Resort in 1990, when the foundation of a newly installed lift separated, causing the terminal to fall over.
After that incident, workers installed additional rock anchors to ensure the concrete foundations of other lifts didnt detach from the mountainside, said Greg Goddard, general manager in Gilford, New Hampshire.
In Maine, its too early to say what happened, but the Maine Board of Elevator and Tramway Safety is alerting other ski areas in the state to ensure that the lifts are properly anchored, spokesman Doug Dunbar said.
At Sunday River, there had been rain before the lift failure.
It appears the foundation separated from the soil, then the weight of the cable and chairs pulled it down the mountain, Lambert said. The structure fell to the ground in a jumbled heap.
The Spruce Peak lift is 30 years old and is part of the early development of the ski mountain. It had passed its annual inspection, which included an examination of the foundation, last fall, Dunbar said.
A decision on whether to repair or replace the lift wont be made until engineers from the resort, MountainGuard insurance and the Maine Board of Elevator and Tramway Safety complete their investigation.
The incident follows a pair of chairlift failures at Sugarloaf, which, like Sunday River, is operated by Michigan-based Boyne Resorts.
Last year, a mechanical failure allowed a lift to move backward, and in 2010 a cable slipped out of its grooved wheel, allowing chairs to drop. Fifteen skiers were hurt in the two incidents, which were mechanical in nature.
Nationwide, chairlift accidents are rare. There have been only seven causing injury since 2000, the NSAA said.
Di Nola said hed like to think all three events in Maine were outliers but he has concerns about aging lifts.
My gut reaction is that lifts are getting older, he said. Im not sure that their useful life is infinite.
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A federal appeals court ruling that General Motors cant use its 2009 bankruptcy to fend off lawsuits over faulty and dangerous ignition switches exposes the automaker to billions in additional liabilities, according to legal experts.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan on Wednesday ruled that GM knew about the defective switches when it entered bankruptcy seven years ago but kept them secret from the bankruptcy court. By failing to disclose the problems, GM prevented crash victims from making claims or contesting the bankruptcy provisions, robbing them of due process, the court ruled.
In a 74-page opinion, a three-judge panel said that GM essentially asked the court to reward it for concealing claims. We decline to do so, the court said.
Under terms of the government-funded bankruptcy, the company that emerged, referred to as New GM, was indemnified against most claims against the pre-bankruptcy company, or Old GM. Retired U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Gerber ruled in April 2015 that most ignition-switch claimants could not sue New GM for damages because the company should emerge from bankruptcy free of claims against Old GM.
But the appeals court overturned most of that decision and allowed hundreds of pre-bankruptcy claims to proceed, including some lawsuits alleging that GMs actions caused the value of its cars to drop.
I think GM now has to think about its potential exposure as being in the billions, said Erik Gordon, a lawyer and professor at the University of Michigans Ross School of Business.
When Gerbers ruling came out, plaintiffs lawyers said it blocked $7 billion to $10 billion in potential legal liabilities.
Steve Berman, a lead attorney in the loss-of-value cases, said the appeals court ruled the bankruptcy order doesnt protect New GM from claims that it misrepresented the safety of cars made by pre-bankruptcy GM. The appeals judges, he said, determined that Old GM knew that the cars could stall and air bags wouldnt work but didnt reveal those facts during the bankruptcy.
At minimum, Old GM knew about moving stalls and airbag non-deployments in certain models and should have revealed those facts in bankruptcy, the court said. If a debtor does not reveal claims that it is aware of, then bankruptcy law cannot protect it.
Gerbers ruling took away legal rights of crash victims because they never got a chance to contest the bankruptcy seven years ago, yet they were barred from suing New GM after the defective switches were disclosed, said William Weintraub, an attorney representing ignition switch accident plaintiffs. The only person who could effectively make an argument in 2009 is somebody who bought a time machine, Weintraub said.
About 1,000 death and injury lawsuits were put on hold waiting for the appeals court to rule, said Robert Hilliard, another attorney in the case. General Motors filings with securities regulators say there are another 101 U.S. lawsuits pending that allege that GMs actions caused vehicle values to decline.
Gordon said the loss-of-value cases will be difficult to prove, but the death and injury cases are problematic for GM.
General Motors Co. said Wednesday it is weighing options, including an appeal. The company said the appeals court did not decide whether claims against GM are valid. Many of the claims we face have been brought on behalf of car owners who want to be compensated even though they have not suffered any loss, a company statement said.
The ignition switches, which were put in small cars like the Chevrolet Cobalt, can slip out of the run position and cause cars to stall unexpectedly. They are linked to at least 124 deaths and 275 injuries.
In its ruling, the appeals court said that the desire to move GM through bankruptcy quickly to avoid its collapse was laudable, but it doesnt do away with basic constitutional principles. It took only 40 days for the bankruptcy to end, an unprecedented period at the time.
Due process applies even in a companys moment of crisis, the court wrote.
The ruling also could affect 399 injury and death cases settled for GM by compensation expert Kenneth Feinberg for a total of $594.5 million. GM says those who settled gave up their legal rights to sue the company, but Hilliard said he will look into whether some of those claims could be reopened in light of the courts ruling.
(Auto Writer Dee-Ann Durbin contributed.)
Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Oil giant BP PLC has put a final price tag on what its catastrophic Gulf of Mexico oil spill cost the company, and its a hefty sum: $61.6 billion.
The company issued the estimate Thursday, the first time it has put a total cost on the catastrophe.
BP said it expects to spend a total of $44 billion after tax deductions are factored in. The new estimate included $5.2 billion in new pre-tax costs.
In 2010, one of the companys deep-sea wells blew out off the coast of Louisiana, leading to the sinking of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. Eleven rig workers were killed in the explosions and millions of gallons of oil spewed into the Gulf for 87 days.
BP said the cost estimate included all remaining material liabilities.
The company has settled the majority of the claims filed against it by companies, local, state and federal governments and individuals, such as scores of fishermen.
It said its new pre-tax $5.2 billion cost estimate covers all outstanding business and economic loss claims stemming from litigation filed by individuals and companies.
In April, a federal judge approved a $20 billion settlement over economic and environmental damage between BP and state and federal governments, one of the largest corporate penalties in U.S. history.
Importantly, we have a clear plan for managing these costs and it provides our investors with certainty going forward, Brian Gilvary, BPs chief financial officer, said in a news release.
The cost estimate was not far from what was expected, analysts said.
Its important to put a figure on it and move on, said Eric Smith with the Energy Institute at Tulane University in New Orleans. They are trying to put a cap on it and reassure that there is an end to this and that they are now confident enough to say what the end is.
CHAGRIN FALLS, Ohio - The impact of technology and the increased use and expectations of social media will be explored in the 6:30 p.m. July 28 Chagrin Arts Chautauqua program to be held at the Federated Church, 76 Bell St.
An artist's photo of the abandoned Geauga Lake coaster is on display at the Black House Gallery.
Several questions will be explored in the discussion. Will the younger generation be empowered or at a disadvantage? How will communication through technology impact our species over time? How can we use social media as a way to become a better person, citizen or parent?
Christian Hunter, senior content strategist at RDL Architects, Inc. will moderate the discussion. The featured speaker is Scott Klososky, is the principal at consulting firm Future Point of View and author of the book, Did God Create the Internet? Klososky is also the former chief officer of three startup tech companies.
Adult tickets are $21 for general seating and $28 for preferred seating. Tickets for students up to age 25 are $5.
Chautauqua for Children: Can a Chautauqua become child's play? Children in kindergarten through fifth grade are invited to a free Young Explorers program 4 p.m. July 28 as a part of the Chagrin Arts Chautauqua.
Children and their parents or guardians will learn and experience the world of geocaching using a free GPS app on their smart phone or digital device.at the Chagrin Falls Branch library. They will meet at the library to receive a quick tutorial and then try their hand at finding goodies hidden on the library grounds. Weather permitting, the teams will then head down the hill to Riverside Park for an even bigger hunt. Registration is required. Call 440-247-3556.
Looking for Geauga's Big Tree: The Geauga Soil and Water Conservation District wants to send you into the woods this summer with its contest to find the biggest tree in the county. Staying true to its roots as a maple sugar capital, participants can nominate a sugar maple tree, acer saccharum, anywhere in the county that they believe is the largest.
Using the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources Division of Forestry procedures, qualified experts will verify the measurements of nominated trees. Scores will be based on tr;unk circumference, crown spread and total height to determine the winner. GSWCD will also consider each tree's ability to capture storm water along with other economical benefits.
Did you know that one 15-inch diameter sugar maple tree can absorb as much as 1,400 gallons of storm-water runoff each year?
Only one tree nomination per person will be accepted. The tree does not have to be on your property, however, you should ask permission from the landowner.
The deadline to submit your nomination is 3:30 p.m. Sept. 23. Entries can be emailed to gprunty@geaugaswcd.com or sent through regular mail to the Geauga Soil and Water Conservation District, PO Box 410, 14269 Claridon-Troy Rd., Burton, OH 44021.
The winner will be recognized at GSWCD's annual fall meeting. Prizes include, a plaque, bragging rights and a $20 gift certificate for the group's annual tree sale. Contact geaugaswcd.com or call 440-834-1122.
Geauga County's BIG TREE will be recognized at the District's Annual Meeting in the fall. Prizes will include a $20 gift certificate to the District's Tree Sale and a plaque.
Geauga Lake Coaster is Still Scary: Eight photographers are exhibiting their 2,000 photographs of abandoned buildings, home and locations, including the iconic roller coaster on the Geauga Lake property in Bainbridge. The show opens 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. July 30 at The Black House Gallery, 3402 E. 119th St. in Cleveland.
The show called, Abandoned...An Art Experience, features the work of eight urban photographers, including Andy Laudato, Jacob Kniola, Andrea Palumbo, Zac Alberty, Jacob Joseph, Frank Miklaucic, Victoria Bailor and Hunter Snyder. The artists live in Amherst, Parma, Cleveland Heights, North Olmsted, Parma,Wickliffe and Erie, Penna.
Because the Geauga Lake property is off limits to spectators and is patrolled by security guards, this may be your best bet to see the ruins. Otherwise, you could face criminal trespassing charges.
Fittingly, the show, itself, is housed in an abandoned home that is being converted to an art gallery, according to gallery founder Althea Jones.
"These haunting and evocative photos capture the beauty of buildings and locations log ago orphaned by society, Jones said. "The show will be an overwhelming experience for viewers."
Contact the blackhousegallery@gmail.com or 216-894-1905.
To post your news and events, contact Rusek at jcooperrusek@gmail.com.
Newly renovated ticket wing at Akron-Canton airport
Vehicles drop-off passengers at the renovated ticket wing at Akron-Canton airport, Thursday, June 2, 2016. (Marvin Fong / The Plain Dealer)
NORTH CANTON, Ohio - A senior vice president at Akron-Canton Airport is leaving for Raleigh, N.C.
Kristie Van Auken, senior vice president and chief marketing and communications officer at CAK, has accepted a position as the vice president of communications and community affairs for the Raleigh-Durham Airport Authority, which operates the Raleigh-Dunham International Airport. Her last day at CAK is Thursday, and she assumes her new role in early August.
"I've had 20 wonderful years at Akron-Canton Airport," Van Auken said. "We at the Akron-Canton Airport have enjoyed unbelievable community support over a long period of time. I've enjoyed great support from dynamic leadership as well."
Rick McQueen, president & CEO at CAK, said the airport was fortunate to have Van Auken for two decades.
"She's one of the best people in the airport business at what she does," McQueen said. "She came to work every day with a sense of vitality and a great attitude."
McQueen said Van Auken has helped the airport become more customer centric.
"When I started at the airport, there was this sense that we were small, and we didn't really go anywhere," Van Auken said. "Our team has built this airport to be a powerhouse in Northeast Ohio, a true alternative. Our brand strength is so strong now that travelers will check both airports first."
Van Auken said her decision was not influenced by any recent troubles at the airport. Southwest last fall announced that it was severely cutting its service at CAK.
"I would not leave CAK unless I felt perfectly comfortable that they have a secure future," Van Auken said. "I am not running away from a thing. I'm actually really excited and more confident than ever in the future of Akron-Canton Airport."
Four of the five airlines at CAK are growing and adding more service, she said.
"To me, this is a speed bump. We've recovered well already, and I know there is more to come," Van Auken said.
However, the airport will reanalyze its organizational structure with Van Auken's departure, McQueen said. The last time it did so was eight years ago when McQueen assumed the helm of CAK and Van Auken was promoted to her current role.
"I think this is a great opportunity for us," McQueen said. "I think it's important we don't just jump to fill the void, so to speak."
With the consolidation of the industry, namely AirTran's purchase of Southwest, it's "healthy to take a look at ourselves," he said.
Van Auken, who was born in Lansing, Mich., has spent her entire adult life in Northeast Ohio but is excited for the change.
"I like to go big, just in life generally," Van Auken said. "I'm really attracted to this big, new adventure. I feel like it will be great for our family and great for myself professionally."
Van Auken is going to an international airport and, in her new role, will be more involved in advocacy about airport funding structures.
"They are smart and savvy, and I think we're going to have a lot of fun together," she said.
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Cleveland City Councilman Jeffrey Johnson is canceling Glenville's longstanding parade and festival on account of a surge of gun violence on the city's East Side.
(Cory Shaffer, cleveland.com)
CLEVELAND, Ohio - Cleveland City Councilman Jeffrey Johnson announced Monday that he is canceling the long-running Glenville Festival and Parade next month, out of concern for the safety of residents and police officers after a surge of gun violence here and nationwide.
The cancellation will mark only the second time in the festival's 39-year history that the event did not take place. (It was rained out once in the mid-1990s.) Johnson said he is returning money to sponsors and vendors.
In a letter to Ward 10 residents, Johnson wrote that the risk to public safety is too great, given the recent rash of shootings on the city's East Side and the deadly ambushes of police in Dallas and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
"For the first time in the seven years I have been Councilman, [I] have doubts about our ability to prevent the violence from coming into the two events this year," Johnson wrote. "I feel that the boldness and randomness of gun violence occurring weekly in Cleveland, including our area, creates too much uncertainty for the safety of citizens and for law enforcement officers and others working to protect us."
The city has seen 57 homicides so far this year. Thirteen people were shot, one killed, in Cleveland neighborhoods over the weekend. The youngest of the victims, 2-year-old Alaya Brown, was shot in the head and arm during a drive-by Friday on the East Side.
On July 7, in the deadliest incident for law enforcement since Sept. 11, 2001, a dozen Dallas officers were shot, five fatally, by a sniper, who opened fire during a police brutality protest. And on Sunday, in Baton Rouge, three officers were killed and three others were wounded during an ambush in a commercial district.
Johnson said that he planned on hiring 22 off-duty law enforcement officers to work security for the festival, and that the vast majority of them would have been Cleveland cops.
"I am very concerned also with their safety as they watch over ours," he wrote in his letter to residents.
Case Western Reserve University
Police found one bullet fired into a charter bus early Tuesday morning parked near Case Western Reserve University's main campus.
(Plain Dealer file photo)
CLEVELAND, Ohio - No one was injured after an unknown gunman fired one round early Tuesday into a charter bus parked about one-half mile from the Case Western Reserve University campus, police said.
The shooting occurred about 1 a.m., according to a security alert email from the university. A campus officer heard "loud noises that might have been gunshots" near Lot 82, where the Maltz Performing Arts Center is located.
Police went to investigate the source of the noise and after a long search, they found a bullet hole in one of the charter buses parked on campus, the alert states. A spent bullet was found inside the bus.
No one was on the bus at the time, and no injuries from the shooting have been reported.
Later in the morning, a witness told police that someone fired shots from inside a white sedan travelling north on East 105th Street, the alert says. The shooter has not been identified.
The spent bullet was turned over to Cleveland police, and the shooting remains under investigation. Anyone with any additional information about the shooting should call Case Western Reserve University Police at 216-368-3333.
The university's campus is currently housing hundreds of out-of-town police officers in Cleveland for the Republican National Convention.
It's not known if the shooting is in connection with the police's presence at the university.
If you'd like to comment on this post, please visit the cleveland.com crime and courts comments section.
police memorial.jpg
Five red roses, one for each of the five Dallas law enforcement officers, decorate the bronze medallion at the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington.
(Alex Brandon, AP)
Let's Make America Safe Again
That's was the sobering theme for Monday's opening day of the Republican National Convention. The sentiment is appropriate and timely, regardless of one's party affiliation. The theme could be sharpened a bit with a subtitle.
How about this:
Don't Let Hate Win
America now feels as if it's under domestic attack. Not a week seems to go by when we are not forced to absorb another punishing wave of violence against police or citizens. It's become increasingly difficult to wake up without a sense of dread of what may have happened while we slept.
How do we start the urgent work of making America safer?
In the midst of mounting carnage, exactly where do we start a campaign to save lives?
We must start by making America a safer place for police officers. We must do a better job of protecting these public servants who knowingly assume one of the most dangerous professions on the planet.
We really don't have a choice.
What chance do we have of keeping our cities safe, if we can't do a better job of keeping our officers as safe as possible?
We all have a role to play.
It's time for people of good will to reject and confront the divisive and incendiary rhetoric that has created dangerous rifts in far too many American communities. These polarizing fractures contribute directly to the severe threats now facing officers.
The nation continues to reel from the ambush shootings of multiple law enforcement officers this month. Five policemen were slain in Dallas by a black gunman who reportedly stated before his death that he wanted to kill white police officers.
Then, another hate-filled vigilante killer struck Sunday in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The out-of-state gunman, who flirted online with one or more black extremist groups, ambushed several of that city's officers, killing three and wounding three others.
One of the murdered officers was Montrell Jackson, 31, an African-American officer, who posted a powerful message on Facebook shortly after the Dallas attack, a message that all Americans should heed.
Here's that quote with a few fixes -- taken from a screenshot online: "I swear to God I love this city [Baton Rouge] but I wonder if this city loves me. ... When people you know begin to question your integrity you realize they don't really know you at all. ... These are trying times. Please don't let hate infect your heart. This city MUST and WILL get better. I'm working in these streets so any protesters, officers, friends, family, or whoever, if you see me and need a hug or want to say a prayer. I got you."
Officer Jackson got to the root of the matter when he wrote, "Please don't let hate infect your heart." Now, he's gone, leaving behind a wife, a young daughter and a less safe city. If you're human, that breaks your heart.
His death epitomizes the random and omnipresent nature of the violence confronting police officers and citizens alike -- especially African-American citizens.
Cleveland, unfortunately, understands this senseless violence as well as any American city. The past few days, however, have been particularly violent.
A two-year-old Cleveland girl was shot in the head Friday while being held in her mother's arms outside their East Side home. It was a drive-by shooting that may or may not have deliberately targeted the pair. The toddler is clinging to life in critical condition.
Two young women were found shot dead hours later, in a car not too far from where the baby girl was shot. It's not clear why the women were shot or who shot them.
The same morning, five people were shot outside the Agora Theater and Ballroom, a facility not too far from downtown.
Then, Sunday night, at an impromptu "Stop the violence" beach party in Euclid attended by more than 200 people, unknown suspects suddenly began firing into the crowd. A 19-year-old man was fatally struck in the head, and a 12-year-old boy was hit in the back but is expected to recover.
Where does it end?
Yes, GOP, let's make America safe again -- for everyone.
Lately, hate has been on a terrifying winning streak.
RNC 2016
Officers from different states get their photo with Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams on Public Square, July 18, 2016. (Joshua Gunter, cleveland.com)
(Joshua Gunter)
CLEVELAND, Ohio - Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin said at forum on justice reform Tuesday that the media has contributed to the tension between citizens and police.
Responding to a question from a reporter about police relations, Bevin, a conservative Republican, blamed the media.
"I challenge you in the media to cut it out because really and truly so much of this has been fomented by the ridiculous amount of coverage," he said, winning loud applause from the partisan audience.
Bevin did not identify the specific issues that he believes receive too much attention.
He also said that citizens have an obligation "to respect and protect those who respect and protect us" and he suggested that disrespect for the "rule of law" has been fostered by President Obama, though he didn't mention him by name.
"There is an old saying that the fish rots from the head down and that is the truth," he said. "We have seen a degradation from the highest levels of authority politically in this nation, including through the department of justice, for the rule of law."
He was one of three Republican governors who participated in an hour-long forum sponsored by U.S. Justice Action Network, a coalition of groups from across the political spectrum that advocate for justice reforms. Ohio Senate President Keith Faber moderated the forum, which was held at the Great Lakes Science Center and included Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin and Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal. The forum was co-sponsored by GOPAC, a Republican political action committee.
Fallin also responded to the question about police relations.
"The big thing is to make sure peoples' rights are given and they get their chance and be processed -- and we also put back a spirit of respecting law enforcement," she said.
Deal suggested that the loss of police foot patrols has contributed to poor police relations. He emphasized that "we have to be sensitive to officers" who risk their lives.
During the forum, the governors all said they support more vocational and educational opportunities for inmates and for supporting making it easier for convicts to find jobs by supporting legislation such as "ban the box" laws, which eliminates questions about criminal histories from job applications. They did not address issues of racial bias in policing or police shootings, which have occurred.
CLEVELAND, Ohio--Cleveland Heights Pastor Darrell Scott has been one of Donald Trump's most vocal supporters on the campaign trail. And on Wednesday night, he'll have a big stage to speak from: the floor of the Republican National Convention.
Speaking with cleveland.com Monday, Scott said his convention speech is "probably going to utilize different components from different speeches" he's made in the past.
"I'll be giving my thoughts and my recommendations for him as a candidate, and then I'll also be sharing for a little bit about America's position on the world stage," he said.
Scott said he hopes that by the end of his speech, "there will be more people convinced of Donald Trump's qualifications for president."
Scott continued: "I've known him for quite some time. I know he's not a racist. I know he's not a xenophobe. I know he's not a misogynist. And I just would love to be able to convince everyone of that."
Trump, he said, "is very image-conscious. He's very concerned about his brand and about his appearance. He has a great deal of self-esteem - some might call it pride, I call it self-esteem. The last thing he wants to be is a failure as a president."
Scott said many Republicans oppose Trump because they don't know enough about him. And, he said, many supporters of Trump's vanquished primary rivals still have "sour grapes."
While primary candidates such as Ben Carson and Chris Christie understand politics and don't take Trump's attacks against them to heart, he said, a number of their supporters do take it personally.
"The public doesn't understand that in politics, rocks are thrown, arrows are shot, knives are brandished. But once that contest is over, these two antagonists can become friends," Scott said.
CLEVELAND, Ohio--Ohio Senate President Pro Tempore Larry Obhof supported Ohio Gov. John Kasich in the Republican presidential primary over the eventual presumptive nominee, Donald Trump.
But Obhof, in an interview Monday with cleveland.com, said he believes Trump's selection of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence "reassures a lot of people."
"I think that he has a good track record," said the Republican from Medina. "It's good to see somebody from the Midwest who's got some conservative principles and who's actually shown leadership throughout his tenure be able to be part of the ticket."
Obhof said he and other Republican state lawmakers are now focused on boosting voter turnout for U.S. Sen. Rob Portman and other down-ticket GOP candidates.
Asked whether Trump would help or hurt other Republican candidates on the ballot in Ohio, Obhof said that remains to be seen.
"Donald Trump will get his opportunity this week to put forward his arguments and his vision for the future of the country. ...We'll see what resonates and what doesn't," he said.
It's that time again! Jim Cramer rang the lightning round bell, which means he gave his take on caller favorite stocks at rapid speed:
Stamps.com : "My whole group, we took a look at this thing. This is the biggest battleground. We cannot figure out why it went up or why it went down. It defies current wisdom."
Danaher Corp : "You've got to hold on to Danaher. That is just a terrific life sciences company. These guys are so smart. They don't seek publicity but I'm going to give it to them. These guys are among the best business people in America."
Teva Pharmaceuticals : "No, I want to be in Allergan because that is who they are paying to get the big generic business. I think that deal uis going to happen any day now."
Ship Finance International : "That is a tough one because they are in some difficult businesses ... but I think the Baltic Freight index is coming back, I think that the oil rig business is coming back. I say you have to hold on to it from this point."
Cracker Barrel : "I thought that downgrade was ridiculous. A lot of that just happens to be because gasoline went up in price. I'd stick with Cracker Barrel. I listened to that call and I liked it."
This undated picture released from North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on June 23, 2016 shows a test launch of the surface-to-surface medium long-range strategic ballistic missile Hwasong-10 at an undisclosed location in North Korea.
North Korea fired three ballistic missiles early on Tuesday into the sea off its east coast that had a range of between 500 and 600 kilometers (300 and 360 miles), South Korea's military said.
The missiles were launched towards east from an area in the North's western region called Hwangju from 5:45 a.m. local time to 6:40 a.m., the South's military said.
"The ballistic missiles flight went from 500 kilometers to 600 kilometers, which is a distance far enough to strike all of South Korea including Busan," the South's military said in a statement.
Busan is a South Korean port city in the south.
North Korea has test-fired a series of ballistic missiles in recent months including an intermediate-range missile in June and a submarine-launched missile this month.
Tuesday's launch came days after South Korea and the United States announced a final decision this month to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) anti-missile system in the South to counter threats from the North.
North Korea's military has threatened to retaliate against the deployment of the system with a "physical response" once its location and time of installation were decided.
China has also sharply criticized the decision as a move that will destabilize the security balance in the region.
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Mining giant Rio Tinto said it was on course to meet its full-year iron ore shipment guidance from its Australian mines, underscoring robust Chinese demand despite concerns about steel overcapacity.
Rio expects to ship 330 million metric tons of the steel-making ingredient in the 2016 financial year, the miner said on Tuesday.
"Demand for these raw materials is still very strong," Martin Place Securities executive chairman Barry Dawes told CNBC's "The Rundown."
"Imports into China are still at record levels; they haven't fallen away and consequently companies are able to deliver everything they can produce,"
In second-quarter production results released on Tuesday, Rio Tinto said its 80.9 million-ton Australian production total for Q2 was 8 percent higher than the same period a year ago and 1 percent up on the previous quarter.
According to Thomson Reuters Commodity Research and Forecasts, about 92 million tons of iron ore will arrive at ports in China in July, the highest monthly level so far this year.
The world's second largest economy accounts for some two-thirds of the world's purchases of seaborne iron ore, but China has admitted that there is massive overcapacity in its steel industry and has put in place targets for production capacity cuts over the coming five years, which would have been expected to hit demand for iron ore.
CLEVELAND The United States has become an unsafe nation and it's time for Donald Trump to change that, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said Monday night.
"It's time to make America safe again. It's time to make America one again," Giuliani said in prepared remarks at the Republican National Convention. He also said Trump would be successful at bringing safety back to the U.S.
"What I did for New York City, Donald Trump will do for America," Giuliani said.
Giuliani made his speech on the heels of a shooting that left three police officers dead in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on Sunday.
n. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) stands on stage before the start of the first day of the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2016 at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio.
CLEVELAND Hillary Clinton cannot be the next U.S. president if Americans don't want the calamitous Obama economy to carry on, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Alabama, said Monday night.
"Our middle class is steadily declining, with our African American and Hispanic communities being hurt the most. But, the Washington establishment, the media, and big corporations have been in denial," he said at the Republican National Convention. "This is an economic disaster. We are on the wrong track and the people know it."
"Yet, Hillary Clinton's plan is more of the same: more government, more taxes, more regulation, and more debt," he said. "She has been a champion of globalist trade agreements. But the facts are in. They have not worked for our people."
Sessions cited the ballooning trade deficit between the U.S. and China. Since 1993 when Bill Clinton was president through 2015, the U.S.-China trade deficit has risen 1,512 percent, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Sessions also criticized the Obama administration for "pushing" the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the president's immigration policies.
"Bad trade deals close factories, and end high paying jobs. Excess immigration floods the labor market reducing jobs and wages," he said. "Americans want help now. This election will make it happen."
"That is why we need Donald Trump."
Before Indiana Gov. Mike Pence was named Trump's running mate, Sessions' name was among those considered for the GOP vice-presidential candidate. Sessions was also one of the first prominent GOP members to endorse Trump.
Sessions took office in 1997 and has been a heavy opponent of comprehensive immigration reform.
"We increasingly face the same problems in the United States. In seven years, we will reach the highest level of foreign born in our history. While limited, carefully vetted immigration is in our national interest, the push for open borders and ever higher levels of immigration increasingly isolates new immigrants and threatens our security," he said in a Friday statement, following the terrorist attack in Nice, France.
A hand-drawn Islamic State flag was found in the room of the 17-year-old Afghan refugee who attacked passengers on a train in southern Germany before being shot dead by police, the interior minister for the state of Bavaria said on Tuesday.
Speaking on German public television, Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said it was too early to speculate about the motives of the attacker, who had wielded an ax and knife, and whether he was a member of an Islamist group or had become self-radicalised in recent times.
Herrmann said two of those injured in the attacks were in a critical condition. Several of the injured included members of a Chinese family, he said, without giving any further details.
The 17-year-old Afghan refugee wielded an ax and a knife to attack passengers on a train in southern Germany on Monday evening, severely wounding four, before he was shot dead by police, the interior minister for the state of Bavaria said.
Speaking on German public television, Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said it was too early to speculate about the motives of the attacker, who he said was believed to have been living in a home for unaccompanied minors in Ochsenfurt, near the city of Wuerzburg.
The attack comes just days after a Tunisian delivery man plowed a 19-tonne truck into crowds of Bastille Day revelers in the southern French city of Nice, killing 84.
The "Fast Money" traders debated which semiconductor stocks might be poised for a breakout ahead of Qualcomm's earnings report on Wednesday.
Besides its good balance sheet, Qualcomm has a nice dividend yield like IBM , according to trader Guy Adami.
"I think the market is sufficiently short enough in this name that when they report on July 20, you could see a rally into earnings," he said.
Trader Dan Nathan thinks that if Qualcomm made a strategic acquisition, that could lead to a breakout.
Trader Tim Seymour said that the company's positioning in China has improved.
"They signed up a ton of new Chinese vendors, that to me was really one of the key headwinds into the stock and I think it's something that's actually a very major tailwind for them now," Seymour said.
For investors who aren't chasing a dividend yield, trader Steve Grasso said Nvidia might be an interesting trade for a "growth chase." Grasso pointed out that the stock is up more than 60 percent year to date, whereas Qualcomm is up more than 10 percent.
CLEVELAND Donald Trump addressed John Kasich's absence from the Republican National Convention on Monday, saying he "probably wouldn't show up either" if he were the Ohio governor.
Kasich, who lost in the Republican primary to Trump, is not expected to attend the GOP convention in Cleveland. He has not endorsed Trump, the party's presumptive nominee.
Calling into "The O'Reilly Factor" as the first night of the convention kicked off, Trump said he did not consider Kasich a sore loser.
"He lost very very badly and maybe if I were in his position I wouldn't show up either," Trump said of Kasich, noting that he signed a pledge to support the eventual nominee.
Kasich, who is still popular in Ohio, is considered a more mainstream Republican than Trump and struck a more optimistic tone in the primaries. In the GOP primary, Kasich won only Ohio, a key swing state in the general election.
He spoke at the NAACP convention in Cincinnati on Sunday, which Trump declined to attend, and will appear at other events this week. Trump contended Kasich should "at least show up and say hello" at the GOP convention.
Strategists have been hoping this GOP convention would help clarify some of Trump's policy positions, which have been murky so far.
More surprises could be ahead at the convention, which runs through Thursday in Cleveland. In the meantime, Wall Street is bracing for dozens of earnings reports Tuesday, including Goldman Sachs, which investors hope to see beat profit expectations just like major banks JPMorgan Chase , Citigroup and Bank of America have done in the last several days.
The Republican convention kicked off with its first big market surprise Donald Trump wants to break up the big banks.
The bombshell from the Republican platform is a proposal to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, the banking separation rule that was dropped during the Clinton administration after a bipartisan effort to overturn it. Trump's campaign manager told reporters Monday that the rule's reinstatement would be part of the party's platform, and that it would create barriers between the big banks' businesses and "try and avoid some of the crisis that led to 2008," according to reports.
"That would mean breaking away commercial and investment banking and that could have larger implications for the large banks and investment banks," said Dan Clifton, head of policy research at Strategas. "It doesn't mean it's going to go through but it's where Donald Trump wants to lead the party should he win election."
Clifton said the platform otherwise represents more traditional Republican positions, such as promoting fossil fuels and drilling and getting tough on national security and defense. It also includes stimulative tax proposals.
"The platform is very much traditional Republican sectors, outside the banking stuff. It's tough on the Federal Reserve, too," said Clifton. He said in contrast to the surprise on banking, Democrat Hillary Clinton so far proposes a transaction tax on Wall Street.
"The markets have two minds. We have been rallying post-Brexit because it is clear global policymakers are going to go for fiscal policy no matter who gets elected. But you also have this popularism," said Clifton.
Republican conventions are usually positive times for stocks, according to S&P data going back to 1948. "I think there could be a reaction," said Sam Stovall, chief equity strategist at S&P Global Market Intelligence.
"The was up nearly two-thirds of the time during Republican conventions and then up 53 percent of the time in the week after," he said
Two of the three worst stock market performances during Republican conventions were the last two, according to the data. The worst was the 3.6 percent decline during the convention of Sen. John McCain and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, when the financial crisis was in full swing. The 0.8 percent S&P decline during the 2012 convention of Mitt Romney and Rep. Paul Ryan was the third worst during a GOP convention. The second worst was the 1 percent decline during the convention of Gerald Ford in 1976.
Stocks don't fare as well during Democratic conventions, according to the S&P data. "The market was down 53 percent of the time during Democratic conventions, and then down 57 percent of the time five days later," he said. Democrats meet in Philadelphia next week for their convention.
The market performance during the last two conventions of President Barack Obama was the best for all Democratic conventions going back to 1948. The S&P was up 2.7 percent during the week of the 2008 convention, and it rose 1.8 percent during the 2012 convention.
Stocks were higher on the first day of the GOP convention Monday, with the Dow and both hitting new highs. The Dow was up 16 at 18,533, and the S&P 500 rose 5 to 2,166. After the bell, earnings put a big dent in Netflix shares as subscriber numbers disappointed. IBM rose more than 2.5 percent in extended-hours trading on its earnings beat.
Besides Goldman Sachs , earnings are also expected Tuesday from Microsoft , Johnson & Johnson, UnitedHealth, Lockheed Martin and United Continental, among others. There are also housing starts at 8:30 a.m. EDT.
Bank stocks have been winners lately on positive earnings news. earnings helped drive its stock up 3.3 percent Monday, and Citigroup also gained, but JPMorgan closed slightly lower on the day. All three banks would look far different if Glass-Steagall were in place.
When the Depression-era rules were dropped in 1999, it cleared the way for banks like Citigroup and JPMorgan to expand into capital markets businesses they were barred from as banks. Trump has said he opposed Dodd-Frank, the bank rules adopted after the financial crisis, and some analysts had expected him to push to eliminate them and make life easier for the big banks.
But the surprise effort to bring back Glass-Steagall was instead seen as a populist move, aimed at the supporters of Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
"We are supporting the small banks and Main Street. We talk about legislation that affects, you know, some of the mistakes made in repealing Glass-Steagall and some of the mistakes made in imposing Dodd-Frank. The platform reflects those things," Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort told reporters Monday.
But there's little chance, there would be a reinstatement, analysts said. "The Republican in Congress seem to be going in one direction to solve what they perceive to be a major problem Dodd-Frank. And the Republicans on the National Committee seem to be going in a different direction which is a direction the Democrats agree with," said Rafferty Capital bank analyst Dick Bove.
Bove said despite the disdain toward big banks, consumers have shown they want to keep their money in large institutions in bad times. "They like them because on a relative basis the cost of doing banking with a big bank is less than doing business with a small bank. We know the business models have not worked for what I'll call monoline businesses for small banks, but we do know the big bank model does work," he said.
He said the opposition to the big banks is misguided.
"What is important is the core concept that big banking is not good for the United States, and ... 'small banking is good for the United States.' That's the core issue here. The problem with that core issue is it tends to ignore reality. From 1987, when the number of banks in the United States was the highest since the Depression we've lost one bank every business day. That's about 9,000 banks. The answer is because the business model doesn't work. Community banks tend to be one-trick ponies," he said.
"Outside the United States, there's no country which basically has made it illegal for a bank not to be involved in a capital markets capacity, and it would kind of make the United States unique in that regard, and it would drive up the cost of the banking in the United States," said Bove.
With tension rising in recent years over territory in the South China Sea, analysts have explained to CNBC what conflict in the region could mean for global trade. "Should conflict arise the consequences for global trade would be gigantic," Francois Godement, director of the Asia and China program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told CNBC via telephone.
Kevin Phillips | Getty Images
Ratings agency Fitch supported the claim by warning in a report Wednesday that, "The potential economic implications (of geopolitical risks in Asia) could be severe in the event of a sudden escalation." The report came after a ruling by the Hague on Tuesday which rejected China's claims to almost all of the South China Sea, in a case raised by the Philippines. The present situation in the area is being watched closely by stakeholders in the region's annual $5 trillion shipping industry.
Vital trading passage
The South China Sea is a vital trading passage for China, Japan and Korea, as well as other nations on the western rim of the Pacific, serving as their only bulk trading route with key markets in the Americas and Europe, amongst others. Over $5 trillion of annual shipping trade passes through the region, and, according to the Wall Street Journal, U.S.-only imports and exports make up $1.2 trillion of this. The waters allow domestic goods, oil and raw materials to transit to destinations around the world.
Circumnavigating the South China Sea to avoid conflict would be more expensive for shipping firms as the waters serve as part of the most direct sea route between the Asian and European continents. The extra distance would involve massive extra fuel costs. Simon Lockwood, deputy managing director, marine at Willis Towers Watson believes that a shift in the balance of power in a region like this is unlikely to have an adverse effect on trading vessels, but added this was providing the power shift "does not coincide with open hostilities."
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According to the Financial Times Monday, China's Maritime Safety Agency has announced that it will carry out military exercises in the South China Sea this week, though these are expected to be within its internationally recognized waters. The drills are third event of this kind announced by the Hainan MSA this year. Industry voices say that shipping remains currently unaffected by the build-up of military equipment in the region. Andrew Brooker, a founding partner at shipping insurance firm Latitude Brokers explained that "trade routes are not affected, therefore costs are not increased and there is very little discussion amongst operators in the region (of disruption)." Commodity markets responded apprehensively to Tuesday's ruling last week, with Brent crude futures rising $1 per barrel on the news according to Reuters. But, Maersk Line, the largest container shipping company in the world, told CNBC that their current operations in the area are normal with no change to existing procedures.
China rhetoric
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
About 10 years ago, in room H33 of Harvard University's Kirkland House, one 19-year-old launched "thefacebook.com." Today that 19-year-old is 32 years old and sits at the helm of a $340 billion social networking empire. Facebook's ability to give every private citizen a public identity revolutionized the way we share our lives and raise awareness about our ideas. It created a breeding ground for entrepreneurs like Evan Spiegel, the Snapchat founder and CEO, who is worth upward of $2.1 billion at the young age of 26. From Zuckerberg we learned that goals deemed unachievable like bringing back the nostalgia of Pokemon in an app that shattered the social sphere thrive within the tech ecosystem. Today the Apple App Store, home to many of these popular platforms, grows by more than 1,000 apps every day, according to the International Business Times.
So what's the by-product of all this noise? A community of new age entrepreneurs who are rapidly swiping left or right and filtering photos to grow their business. But before they began hashtagging, many of these self-made social media mogul's were just trying to learn the tools of the trade from leaders like Zuckerberg, who turned Silicon Valley and everything that came out of it on its head. Here are three relevant tips he gives to all new age entrepreneurs looking to disturb this racket even further:
1. Explore before you commit
In a 2012 talk at Y Combinator Startup School, Zuckerberg stressed to founder Paul Graham that entrepreneurs need to give themselves more flexibility in each pursuit. "You can definitely do that in the framework of a company, but you have to be weary of working at a company and getting locked in," he said. In his first letter to shareholders, Zuckerberg explained that Facebook was never meant to be a company and that at first it was just a hobby of his. Over time it grew into a business. If you want to be an entrepreneur, it's fine to have ideas that will resolve small problems, but Zuckerberg believes that if you have an idea, it should marry big social impact. He told the group of young guns that in order to have big impact, "you're going to change what you do," encouraging them to explore and determine what they don't enjoy so that they can commit to what they do enjoy when they find it. Moral: Open yourself up to learning new things, and follow only what you love.
2. Don't try to be superhuman
Mistakes are a good, very necessary part of being an entrepreneur. During a live Q&A, a shy eighth-grader once asked Zuckerberg how he overcame challenges, such as finding lead investors and creating hype among users, during the early days of Facebook. "No person knows how to deal with everything. But if you can find a team of people, or friends, or family then that's what's really going to get you through," he answered. Many want-to-be entrepreneurs are afraid to take risk and make mistakes, but Zuckerberg believes that having a strong support system and a team that shares your vision allows for room to appreciate mistakes for what they're worth. "You don't have to be superhuman; you have to just kind of keep on going." Moral: It's a long journey, but you don't have to go alone. Find people who share your passion.
3. Done is better than perfect
Tom Steyer Anne Cusack | Los Angeles Times | Getty Images
San Francisco billionaire hedge fund manager Tom Steyer has been among the biggest financiers of the anti-Trump movement through his California-based political action committee. Now, with the presidential election tightening, he's ramping up spending nationally by funding ad campaigns in five swing states. NextGen Climate Action, an environmental advocacy group founded by Steyer in 2013, has spent $300,000 since July 8, running digital ads that target 18- to 35- year-olds in Nevada, Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. That accounts for almost half of the 11 battleground states that could go to either Democratic presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump on the Republican side in November, according to YouGov. Steyer, founder of Farallon Capital, has been active in California politics for well over a decade, serving as a delegate to the Democratic National Conventions in 2004 and 2008. He left Farallon in 2012 and is president of NextGen Climate. Steyer's philanthropic work has focused largely on environmental protection, and in 2010 he and his wife signed onto Warren Buffett's "Giving Pledge," committing to give the majority of their wealth to charity. Four years later, Steyer was the single largest donor to outside organizations in the midterm elections, giving $73.7 million to liberals, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Steyer's groups NextGen California and NextGen Climate have spent $5.1 million opposing Trump in this cycle, fourth highest among organizations, based on data from CRP. Almost half of that money has been spent in the past 11 days.
In total, outside groups have spent $71 million opposing Trump, compared with the $57 million in favor of the New York real estate magnate. By contrast, outside organizations have spent $10 million against Clinton and $17 million supporting the former first lady. Headed into this week's Republican National Convention, Clinton led 46 percent to 41 percent over Trump, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. For the next two weeks, NextGen Climate will be putting money to work, targeting relevant potential voters on Facebook, Instagram and in display ads across the web, said Ben Wessel, the group's millennial vote director. NextGen Climate produced four 15-second video ads, two that are blatantly anti-Trump and the other two that Wessel calls more "aspirational."
One of the videos says Trump is supported by white supremacists and that he "wants to ban Muslims from entering America," and another calls his energy plan, which includes dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency, reckless and dangerous. The slightly more subtle ads promote the idea of voting for "love and respect" and for candidates who support clean energy. The goal, Wessel said, is to get people to watch the videos and respond by signing up and providing an email address or mobile phone number. From there, the campaign can send more personalized messages based on how people engage. The next ad may be an invitation to a local fundraiser or volunteer event. "It's a fun opportunity for us to explore a bunch of different ways to talk to people," Wessel said. "We're saying, `Hey let's have a real frank conversation about where candidates stand on these issues.'"
A Trump spokesperson didn't respond to a request for comment.
Top individuals funding outside spending groups Donor Organization Total (mlns) Liberals / Conservatives Tom Steyer NextGen $24.04 liberals Robert Mercer Renaissance Tech $17.17 conservatives Richard Uihlein Uline $12.66 conservatives George Soros Soros Fund $12.03 liberals Paul Singer Elliott Mgmt $11.97 conservatives Haim & Cheryl Saban Saban Capital $11.10 liberals Fred Eychaner Newsweb $11.05 liberals Donald Sussman Paloma Partners $10.70 liberals Farris & Jo Ann Wilks Wilks Brothers $10.13 conservatives James & Marilyn Simons Renaissance / Simons $10.13 liberals
Source: Source: Center for Responsive Politics
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The Republican Party's call for the restoration of Glass-Steagall is a "desperate lurch" that won't win over Bernie Sanders' supporters, a former deputy press secretary under President George W. Bush said Tuesday. The Depression-era legislation, which was designed to prevent big bank "supermarkets," would essentially break up many of the large institutions. It was repealed in 1999, and its reinstatement is part of the 2016 GOP platform.
Tony Fratto, founding partner of consulting firm Hamilton Place Strategies, said the Trump campaign always had a belief it could absorb Sanders' voters. However, Fratto believes it is "pure fantasy" that Donald Trump will be able to capture those voters, even if he goes after Wall Street. "They are not going to be there and so it's a silly distraction from what has become a silly distraction of a campaign," Fratto told "Power Lunch."
Donald Trump Getty Images
That's because Sanders' supporters don't just have a problem with Wall Street, they "hate" Trump because of what he's said about women and immigrants as well as his tax policy, Fratto said. He doesn't believe they will overlook those things just because they may agree on breaking up the big banks. "They know enough about Donald Trump not to trust him," he said. For Terry Haines, managing director and head of political analysis at Evercore ISI, this is a "purely political" position for Trump, rather than a serious one. "Anybody that thinks that Glass-Steagall is coming back that's a fantasy," he said in an interview with "Closing Bell."
That's because there is no support in Washington to reinstate the law, Haines explained. However, he thinks it does do two good things for Trump politically. First, it solidifies his talking points about Hillary Clinton being in the pockets of Wall Street. It is also an outreach to Main Street America to show that he is serious about protecting American's savings and investments.
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Strong girls' toy sales for Hasbro will offset slowing demand from boys enough to justify buying the shares at these levels, Piper Jaffray said in upgrading the company's stock to overweight from neutral. "The pullback post-Q2 [has] reset the stock to a level we see as favorable to establish positions for holiday 2016 and full year 2017 drivers. We think momentum returns to the business, led by girls and games in the 2H, and balances into 2017 across both owned and partner brands," Piper Jaffray's Stephanie Wissink wrote in a note to clients Tuesday. Hasbro beat earnings expectations on Monday when its second-quarter revenue soared to $878.9 million from $797.7 million last year. However, investors were disappointed that the revenue of boys' toys only rose 4 percent versus its first quarter 24 percent growth, and as a result the company's shares traded down 6.6 percent Monday. Here's where Wissink believes the stock is headed over the next 12 months. Despite headwinds like the firm's recent loss of a "Jurassic Park" license and decline in "My Little Pony" sales, Wissink is bullish that strength in products like Disney Princess and "Frozen" dolls, Nerf, Play-Doh and MAGIC will offset this loss for the rest of this year and 2017. The analyst reiterated a price target of $88, representing 10 percent upside from the Monday close. The stock is up by 18 percent this year. The firm reported a 42 percent second quarter inventory increase, but the analyst wasn't concerned for a few reasons: The inventory is supported by physical in-store purchases, and international stores are expanding shelf space for Disney Princess toys. "We estimate that the majority of the dollar increase is linked to Disney Princess international, an area of significant incremental volume opportunity per our retailer checks. On balance, we expect this same dynamic to play out exiting the Q3 period, as Hasbro holds inventory for international retailers that will receive product in October and early November in time for holiday floorsets," the note said. Also Hasbro's competition with Mattel is dying down as the latter is focusing more now on preschool, vehicle and construction toys, she said. "The backdrop for toy sales remains robust and based on our checks and industry data services, the category continues to outperform the broader CPG [consumer packaged goods] index," the firm said. CNBC's Michael Bloom contributed to this story
Oli Scarff | AFP | Getty Images
Air quality in China's largest cities continued to improve during the first six months of 2016, the country's environment ministry said on Sunday.
China's largest 338 cities enjoyed more clean air days in the first half compared with the same period of 2015, the ministry said on its website. It said 76.7 percent of January-June days had clean air, an increase of four percentage points from a year earlier.
In the capital Beijing, levels of PM 2.5 - dangerous tiny pollutants - fell 17.9 percent from a year earlier, the ministry said.
In Beijing, concentrations of PM 2.5 averaged 64 micrograms per cubic meter in the first half, significantly higher than the official state standard of 35 micrograms, and the World Health Organisation's guideline of an annual average of no more than 10 micrograms.
The ministry did not provide reasons for the improvement in air quality, but it follows increased measures to crack down on polluters and coal use, as well as efforts to tackle overcapacity in the heavily polluting steel sector. A slowdown in economic growth has also likely contributed.
Of the country's 10 most polluted cities in the first half, six were in the industrial northern province of Hebei, down from seven at the end of 2015. At the end of last year, the government launched a two-month probe of the province, one of the country's most polluted regions, and found that firms had engaged in "fraudulent activities" and were flouting orders not to expand industrial capacity.
On July 8, the environment ministry said it had fined several state-owned polluters in May for exceeding emission limits. A subsidiary of oil giant PetroChina Co Ltd in the northeastern city of Dalian was fined 2.9 million yuan ($433,710) it said
Former President George W. Bush told aides he's worried he may be the last Republican to live in the White House, according to Politico.
He made remarks at an April reunion for staff of his administration that included former Vice President Dick Cheney, Politico reported.
"I'm worried," Bush told the group, according to Politico, "that I will be the last Republican president."
The remarks illustrate a divide between Donald Trump the party's presumptive presidential nominee and establishment figures like Bush nervous that Trump's brash talk will alienate future voters and preclude political victories.
Read the full Politico story
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When the El Nino rains fell last winter in California, thick and tall grass grew in the once-parched land, but now that those rains have passed, the grass turned into dry fuel for what could be the start of another tough fire season. While the late summer and early fall is typically the period with the highest risk for wildfires, the California Department of Forestry and Fire reports the number of acres of scorched land on the properties under its jurisdiction is already up 60 percent from a year ago.
To lessen the threat posed by the brittle underbrush and those thick clumps of grass, landowners and the state are literally removing it bite by bite. Hungry animals are increasingly replacing hand crews, tractors and mechanized weed mowers. "They just do such a great job," said Cal Fire Capt. Lucas Spelman. "It's a more eco-friendly kind of way to clean up vegetation, a lot less noise and those goats allow you to get into areas where mechanized equipment has a hard time getting in there." The targeted grazing also is seen as safer, particularly in the hot and dry summer months.
"In the dry grass, tractors and mowers with metal can hit a rock and spark wildfires or tractor-trailer vehicle exhausts can emit dangerous sparks that ignite," Spelman said.
A good portion of California remains in a drought, and the contract grazing companies are busier this year due to the increased fire risk. The U.S. Drought Monitor last Thursday showed more than 83 percent of the Golden State remains in drought and almost 60 percent is rated in a "severe drought."
Goats save rancher's home from fire
"We're doing almost triple the numbers of last year," said goat rancher Tony Gonzalez, owner of Gonzalez Brush Busters in Lower Lake, California. "Every single person that calls me is afraid of fires."
Gonzalez said about three-fourths of the jobs he's getting are "close to where a fire happened within the past two years." The rancher, who has about 300 goats, credits them for saving his house during a major wildfire last year. "Thanks to the goats, we cleaned up our place at the beginning of the year and our house didn't burn down," he said. "The Valley Fire came within 150 feet of my house when it was in Lower Lake."
This year is quite a bit busier and I think it's because of the wildfires that have happened. Andree Soares president, Star Creek Land Stewards
The two most destructive wildfires in California last year the Valley and Butte fires burned in excess of 145,000 acres, claimed six lives and destroyed more than 2,800 homes and other structures in Northern California. The Valley Fire, among the costliest ever wildfire in the state's history, was 100 miles north of San Francisco in Lake, Sonoma and Napa counties. So far in 2016, more than 3,100 fires have burned around 120,400 acres of combined state and federal lands in California as of July 9, according to Cal Fire. On state lands alone, the agency reported 30,368 acres burned in the year-to-date period compared with 18,555 acres in the period last year.
In late June, a fire that started in the town of Lake Isabella burned around 45,000 acres, destroyed more than 250 homes and killed at least two people. Known as the Erskine Fire, the deadly blaze about 40 miles northeast of Bakersfield wasn't fully contained until July 11. "This year is quite a bit busier and I think it's because of the wildfires that have happened," said Andree Soares, owner and president of Los Banos, California-based Star Creek Land Stewards, a contract-grazing services company with goats and sheep.
Livestock help Reagan Library
Planned grazing "sort of went away and now people are coming back to it and really loving the benefit of it," Soares said. "People are more eco-conscious, and grazing, simply stated, is nature's way of improving the land." Soares, who has about 3,600 goats and sheep, said "animals have been doing this (natural grazing) for thousands and thousands of years. It's as old as fire." Some of the major industries using the contract grazing today include real estate developers clearing land, wine growers looking to reduce brush surrounding vineyards and solar power/energy companies looking to eliminate overgrown brush and fire fuels.
"A lot of the public agencies will contract with sheep or goat ranchers," said Dave Kranz, a spokesman for the California Farm Bureau Federation. "It's a very cost-effective way for public agencies. Private landowners are showing more interest in it as well just because of the various benefits of using sheep and goats to keep some of the brush under control." Recent public projects using targeted grazing include the Ventura County Fire Department using around 460 goats in May to remove grass below the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Also, a herd of sheep and goats were used for vegetation removal at a number of sites around the San Francisco Bay area.
Source: Ching Lee, California Farm Bureau Federation
Alphabet's Google could face a raft of separate antitrust cases from the European Union after the search giant has been accused of abusing its dominant position in areas from Android to advertising, the bloc's competition chief told CNBC on Tuesday.
Last week, the European Commission, the EU's executive arm brought a third antitrust charge against Google.
So far, the EU has accused Google of the following:
Restricting third-party websites from displaying search advertisements from Google's competitors through its "AdSense for Search" platform. Google places ads on third party websites such as online retailers, through AdSense. The Commission says that Google is signing deals that require third parties not to source ads from Google's competitors, reserve the most prominent space on customers' websites for Google ads, and requiring third parties to obtain Google's approval before making any change to display of competing ads.
Favoring its own comparison shopping service in its general search result.
Abusing the dominance of its Android mobile operating system by requiring manufacturers of devices to pre-install Google's services such as the Chrome internet browser and Maps, preventing manufacturers from selling mobile devices running on competing operating systems, and offering financial incentives to manufacturers to exclusively pre-install Google search.
So far the Commission has sent so-called "statements of objection" to Google but has not yet charged the company. If Google is found guilty, it could face fines of up to 10 percent of its global turnover per case.
And Margrethe Vestager, the EU commissioner for competition said that the separate charges are unlikely to be combined into one case, so Google could face numerous challenges.
"I think it's hard to say if this will end with one case or the second or the third, because what we see is a quite common pattern between them, quite different Google cases, that they seem to pursue a strategy of remaining dominant in search," Vestager told CNBC in a TV interview.
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CLEVELAND Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, a prime time speaker at the Republican National Convention, brings political experience that stretches back to her childhood. Her late father, Arch, served as West Virginia's governor. Her topic is the economy, and the Republican promise to protect "flyover" country like her coal mining state from Democratic policies she believes cost jobs. This will be far different from her first GOP convention speech, as a House candidate in 2000. That one lasted 45 seconds.
Tuesday night, she has 17 minutes to make her case to an audience of tens of millions. The Trump campaign vetted her speech, the senator says, but the only changes requested were cuts to prevent it from going too long. Capito sat down over meatballs and salad with me to discuss her speech and the 2016 campaign. What follows is a condensed, edited transcript of our conversation.
HARWOOD: The governor of Ohio is not attending the convention.
CAPITO: Quite frankly, I think this is a great day for Ohio that we're here, and I would have preferred obviously, as the governor of the state, to sort of suck it up and come on in and welcome so many people into his beautiful state. I didn't run for president against Donald Trump, either, so I don't have those tender feelings.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito speaks with CNBC's John Harwood. Mary Stevens | CNBC
HARWOOD: A lot of your colleagues in the Senate are concerned about Donald Trump. Some of them are not here, some have not endorsed him. Tell me about your concern for your party this year and in the future, on the grounds that they cite. CAPITO: Well, I'm worried for our party. Not so much because of Donald Trump, it's just that I think parties are changing. The independent party is the one, or the nonaffiliated, is what you see growing. So I think that's a challenge for Republicans to adjust to that, and I think we have some growing pains with that. HARWOOD: You're not concerned as some members of your party are that by accepting him now, long-term damage to the Republican brand is being done?
CAPITO: I think that we had 17 candidates in a primary. I think the voters spoke in larger numbers than ever in the Republican primaries. Is Donald Trump the first choice of many of those voters? No. That's obvious. HARWOOD: He wasn't your first choice.
CAPITO: No, I mean, you know, I didn't endorse until after the primary. I wanted to see what my state was going to do. He's very popular in West Virginia. But I think that, you know, we are a party, we should be bigger than this. This is a bigger concept, you know, sometimes you have to be gracious and say, "I didn't get everything I wanted, but for the greater good, and we have to believe that where we're going to take this country is for the greater good, "we'll support the candidate." HARWOOD: One particular problem Donald Trump has had is with college-educated white women.
CAPITO: Well, I've had the opportunity to talk with Donald Trump about this. My very first time I ever met him face-to-face I came right out and said, "I'm concerned about where you are with women in general." HARWOOD: In what way were you concerned about him with respect to women.
CAPITO: I just think the tone of some of the things that he's said about well, you know, the scuffle he got into with some members of the, women members of the press
HARWOOD: Megyn Kelly.
CAPITO: And things like that. That's so useless. He knows this, I've told him this, and he seemed to understand what I was saying, he listened very well. HARWOOD: You've worked with Hillary Clinton. Do you personally consider her untrustworthy?
CAPITO: I definitely have questions about her trustworthiness, absolutely. the whole thing about the email scandal, the fact that she was so careless with our nation's secrets. What that signals to me is an untrustworthiness, but also a bit of an arrogance that, "I'm going to play by my rules and do it the way I wan to do it." HARWOOD: You served with Mike Pence in the House. Tell me about Mike Pence. CAPITO: We had our differences and I can you know, think of a couple. But he led our conference, he helped us with communications.
Sen. Shelley Moore speaks with CNBC's John Harwood on July 18, 2016. Mary Stevens | CNBC
The hedge fund trader who was fired after hosting a big party in the Hamptons says the event was "good clean" fun that raised $100,000 for charity.
Brett Barna, a former trader at Moore Capital Management, told CNBC that while he regrets "certain aspects" of the July Fourth party in Bridgehampton, New York, the media coverage overlooked the fact that it was a peaceful, legal fundraiser for Last Chance Animal Rescue.
"I regret certain aspects of the party," Barna told CNBC. "But ... this was about charity and we raised $100,000 for animal rescue and that's a result I can be proud of."
"The event itself was nothing like what you read about. Were there people drinking alcohol? Sure. Were there people in their bathing suits at a pool party? Yes. But it was good clean fun."
Barna was fired from Moore Capital on July 7 after the New York Post reported that the anonymous owner of the mansion rented for the event was suing Barna for allegedly having 1,000 guests who trashed the yard and pool, wrecked furniture and stole art from the house.
(L-R) Hyperloop One Co-Founder & Executive Chairman Shervin Pishevar, Hyperloop One Chief Executive Officer Rob Lloyd and Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer Brogan BamBrogan speak during the first test of the propulsion system at the Hyperloop One Test and Safety site on May 11, 2016 in North Las Vegas, Nevada. Getty Images
Hyperloop One, the futuristic ultra high-speed transport system that was sued by a co-founder, is fighting back against the ex-employee Brogan BamBrogan, claiming he was part of a "gang of four" that was engaged in misconduct and abusive behavior. The company filed a countersuit on Tuesday in the Superior Court of California, Los Angeles County, seeking money and punitive damages of at least $250 million. A week ago, BamBrogan sued Hyperloop One, claiming the company's top leaders misused funds, breached their fiduciary duties and conspired "to augment their personal brands, enhance their romantic lives, and line their pockets (and those of family members)." BamBrogan was forced to resign last month. It's the latest explosive lawsuit to come out of Silicon Valley, and the defendants portray it as a spectacle designed to capture maximum media attention against a group of visionaries. The suit, they say, followed a plot by BamBrogan and others to take over the company by manipulating a group of employees. When that failed, the countersuit says, the plaintiffs attempted to create a separate entity "Hyperloop Two" and then finally launched a smear campaign. "Today's lawsuit demonstrates that these four men staged a failed coup to try to take over Hyperloop One and then conspired to start their own competing company," said Orin Snyder, Hyperloop's attorney and a partner at Gibson Dunn, in an e-mailed statement. "Hyperloop One's board and management are unified in standing up to this illicit attack on the company, and today the company is stronger than ever in its mission to bring the Hyperloop to the world." Hyperloop One, based in Los Angeles, has set out to create a transportation network that will move passengers at a faster pace than air travel using electric propulsion through a low-pressure tube with little environmental impact. The idea of the Hyperloop was conceived by Elon Musk and Hyperloop one was established in 2014 by Shervin Pishevar, a venture capitalist, and BamBrogan, a former SpaceX engineer. The company has raised over $100 million.
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BamBrogan's complaint centered around nepotism and abuse of funds. He claimed that Pishevar started dating the outside public relations representative and raised her pay from $15,000 a month to $40,000 a month, more than any employee. Vice chairman Joe Lonsdale allegedly hired his brother's small advisory shop as its exclusive investment bank. And after BamBrogan voiced his issues with outside investors, Pishevar's brother Afshin (the company's former general counsel) put a hangman's noose on BamBrogan's chair, an act that was caught on Hyperloop's security camera, according to the complaint. On top of seeking money, Hyperloop is suing BamBrogan and plaintiffs for breaking confidentiality and non-disparagement agreements and violating their fiduciary obligations.
The countersuit attempts to refute each claim against Hyperloop One point-by-point. The payment to the PR person was actually related to the company's hiring of the agency Pramana Collective. The initial $15,000 a month was below the firm's price, and Hyperloop One later raised it to the normal rate. As for Pishevar's relationship with the representative, the filing says it began after Pramana was hired and was disclosed to both companies. When the couple became engaged, the Pramana employee handed over control of the account, according to the filing. Lonsdale's brother, Jonathan, runs an investment bank called Fideras LLC. The hiring of the firm was approved by independent members of the board and Joe Lonsdale recused himself from the vote. By the time it was brought on, Fideras "had advised several mutli-billion dollar technology companies and helped raised hundreds of millions of dollars." In raising money for Hyperloop One, Fideras has done "an exceptional job, to the full satisfaction of the board," the suit said. The noose, according to the filing, was actually a lasso indicating BamBrogan was "acting like a cowboy" and had been caught. On July 14, a judged concluded that there was no threat to BamBrogan, and dismissed his attempt at a restraining order against Afshin. More than 100 times in the 46-page document does the phrase "gang of four" appear. In addition to BamBrogan, the group consists of BamBrogan, David Pendergast, former assistant general counsel; William Mulholland, ex-vice president of finance; and Knut Sauer, ex-vice president of business development.
What are the odds that the appearance of identical passages two political speeches eight years apart are entirely coincidental?
In the case of Melania Trump's GOP convention keynote Monday night, it turns out they're pretty long: at least 1 in 4,835,703,278,458,516,698,824,704, according to one expert in text analysis.
The potential first lady's high-profile convention debut was the most talked-about event so far at the GOP gathering in Cleveland. But not for the reasons the Trump campaign had hoped. Though well-received by delegates, it has been marred by remarkable similarities in two passages that echoed a similar address by Michelle Obama in 2008.
The Trump campaign dismissed charges of plagiarism, saying the words were "not unique."
"In writing her beautiful speech, Melania's team of writers took notes on her life's inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking," Trump spokesman Jason Miller told The Associated Press.
To be sure, the matching passages aren't exact; a comparison of the two speeches shows that Melania Trump's version substituted or dropped a few words from the extended passages in question.
Technology companies are always looking for bright, young talent to fill entry-level positions, but as of late it's become more competitive to land a gig in Silicon Valley, with tech job postings in a slump, according to a report by Cameron Moll, CEO of tech job board site Authentic Jobs.
Forty percent fewer tech jobs were posted to his site in January 2016, compared to average postings during every January since 2012, Moll said. Further, he found job volume during April of this year to be half the volume of the same month last year, something Moll calls "bonkers."
While tech jobs might be harder to come by, the supply of young talent looking to work in Silicon Valley is greater than ever before. More than 5,000 college-aged students and interns registered for San Francisco's annual Internapalooza, which was held this year at AT&T Park due to record-breaking interest, the event's founder, Cory Levy, said.
"This is a positive sign for Silicon Valley, and it's awesome to see so much excitement," Levy said in an interview. "Silicon Valley is becoming a stronger, more diverse community, and the more smart people we can get in a room together, the more problems we can solve."
Levy, who also co-founded After School, a private social network for high school students, started Internapalooza six years ago after having a few positive internship experiences of his own. Levy developed relationships with the likes of Microsoft, BlackRock, eBay and Dropbox, all of which were present at Internapalooza last Monday night and are looking to fill positions in software engineering, business development, product management and design.
A General Mills Inc. manufacturing plant stands past the Erie Basin in Buffalo, New York Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Buffalo, New York, is on the verge of becoming famous for more than wicked winters, spicy chicken wings and its Rust Belt legacy. The Queen City is the crown jewel in Gov. Andrew Cuomo's multibillion-dollar business-development strategy to revitalize economically depressed Upstate New York by turning it into a 21st-century manufacturing powerhouse. His Buffalo Billion (as in dollars invested) project although the subject of federal and state bid-rigging probes is highlighted by a 1.2-million-square-foot "gigafactory" that will be run by Elon Musk's SolarCity and fabricate up to 10,000 solar panels per day. In late May, New York's Public Authorities Control Board unanimously approved a $485.5 million grant, part of the total $750 million the state will spend to construct and equip the humongous facility. New York will retain ownership and lease it to SolarCity in a deal negotiated by Albany-based SUNY Polytechnic Institute, the state university known as SUNY Poly.
The SolarCity Gigafactory in Buffalo, New York Source: SolarCity
On June 21, Musk made headlines, and raised investors' eyebrows, by announcing plans for his Tesla electric-car company to acquire SolarCity. The all-stock deal could value debt-ridden SolarCity whose shares have dropped 63 percent over the last 12 months, partly due to changes in regulations on the solar-energy industry at as much as $2.8 billion. Tesla is valued at nearly $33 billion. "We would be the world's only vertically integrated energy company offering end-to-end clean energy products to our customers," Tesla said of the deal on its company blog. "This would start with the car that you drive and the energy that you use to charge it, and would extend to how everything else in your home or business is powered." Coincidentally, Tesla is constructing a battery-production gigafactory in Reno, Nevada. While the acquisition awaits approval from the companies' respective boards and shareholders, SolarCity co-founder and CEO Lyndon Rive who will recuse himself from the decision-making process told CNBC.com, "We don't expect the offer to impact our plans in Buffalo." The company has said it will spend $5 billion on capital, operations and supply-chain support over the next decade at the facility. SolarCity officials recently reported that the gigafactory is nearly 90 percent complete and that it hopes to start installing equipment this summer. "Manufacturing is scheduled to begin in 2017," Rive said. "SolarCity has committed to employ at least 1,460 people in the city of Buffalo, with 500 jobs at the manufacturing facility. We will employ a total of 5,000 people in New York state by the 10th anniversary of the completion of the facility."
Revitalizing the Rust Belt
New York state boasts a long and illustrious history as a manufacturing empire. As did other Rust Belt states, however, it suffered a devastating decline beginning in the 1970s, when manufacturers moved to the U.S. South, Mexico and other foreign countries to take advantage of cheaper labor, lower taxes and fewer regulations. Globalization and the Great Recession forced further factory closings. Manufacturing jobs statewide, numbering more than 2 million in the mid-1940s, plummeted to less than 500,000 in 2009, according to the state's Manufacturing Research Institute. Despite current political rhetoric to the contrary, the majority of those factories and jobs aren't coming back. In 2000, New York's Department of Labor identified 23,814 manufacturing establishments, employing 745,585 workers. By the third quarter of 2015, preliminary reports counted 17,103 manufacturers and 454,636 employees. Nonetheless, over the past decade or so, New York has made strategic and gigantic investments and implemented enticing economic development programs, including tax subsidies, grants, loans and other attractive lures. Indeed, New York beat out other states vying for the SolarCity gigafactory. Rive declined to comment on the particulars, stating only that "the scope of New York's offer was instrumental in making our decision."
The technology behind the next-generation solar panels SolarCity will produce in Buffalo developed by Silevo, a start-up it acquired in 2014 incorporates advances in nanoscience, a burgeoning field that New York has zeroed in on as a source for its manufacturing revival. Its economic development unit, Empire State Development, has established a long-term, multibillion-dollar game plan to attract nanotechnology manufacturers to make not only solar panels but also semiconductors, pharmaceuticals and other products from very small materials (there are 25,400,000 nanometers in an inch). Buffalo Billion is one of three initiatives under way upstate the others are in Albany and Utica all being managed by SUNY Poly.
A nanoscience hub
Former Gov. Mario Cuomo first championed nanoscience, and in 1997 the Albany NanoTech Complex opened "as a combined vision of government, academia and industry," said Jerry Gretzinger, a spokesman for SUNY Poly. "The site has grown from one building to a fully integrated research, development, prototyping and educational complex spanning 1.3 million square feet and boasting more than $20 billion in high-tech investments and over 300 corporate partners on site," including IBM, Intel, GlobalFoundries, Samsung, TSMC, Toshiba, Applied Materials, Tokyo Electron, ASML and Lam Research. More than 4,000 scientists, researchers, engineers, students, faculty and staff currently work at the complex.
To replicate that success, in 2013 the state launched Nano Utica, a public-private partnership in which six initial private manufacturers Advanced Nanotechnology Solutions, Sematech, Atotech, IBM, Lam Research and Tokyo Electron have invested $1.5 billion. The state put up $200 million to purchase equipment over 10 years. "The initiative is projected to create at least 4,000 jobs over the next decade," Gretzinger reported.
We created what amounts to a cooperative, where we invest millions in equipment and bring in expertise and cutting-edge technologies to help companies innovate. Howard Zemsky CEO, Empire State Development
The first phase of Nano Utica is the Computer Chip Commercialization Center, or Quad-C, a 253,000-square-foot $125 million facility currently being outfitted with tools and other equipment for corporate partners, including GE. Last April groundbreaking commenced on SUNY Poly's 360,000-square-foot computer-chip fab at the nearby Marcy Nanocenter, which will be home to Austria-based ams AG's advanced sensor manufacturing and more than $2 billion in initial private investment. "Ams has committed to create more than 1,000 new jobs there," said Howard Zemsky, president and CEO of Empire State Development and formerly co-chair of the Western New York Regional Economic Development Council in Buffalo. Last year ESD was among the state's agencies that launched Buffalo Billion to promote advanced manufacturing, health and life sciences and tourism in western New York, creating an estimated 12,000 new jobs. Besides SolarCity, another cornerstone is Buffalo Manufacturing Works, which is operated by EWI, a nonprofit engineering services R&D company based in Columbus, Ohio. The center is located in a building purchased by the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus with an $8 million Buffalo Billion grant from ESD, which also provided $800,000 in start-up funding support for EWI. "We created what amounts to a cooperative, where we invest millions in equipment and bring in expertise and cutting-edge technologies to help companies innovate without having to lay out a ton of money and then have redundant investments in the community," Zemsky explained.
Another growth industry
At the same time New York is nurturing nanotechnology upstate, it's also cultivating a thriving yogurt industry. It began in 2007, when Chobani opened a factory in South Edmeston, south of Utica, to produce Greek yogurt, a variety made thicker by straining it to remove whey. Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya took out a $1 million federal Small Business Administration loan in 2005 to purchase a shuttered Kraft facility and has since invested about $100 million to retrofit and expand the factory, which now employs around 1,000 people.
The U.S. market for that then-unfamiliar style was 1 percent of total yogurt sales, according to research firm Technavio. By 2010 that share exploded to 10 percent. Today Greek yogurt sales, at nearly $3.8 billion, constitute more than 48 percent of the total $7.7 billion yogurt market, according to Nielsen.
Recognizing the consumer craving for Greek yogurt, as well as its plethora of dairy farms upstate, New York has made a concerted effort to broaden the industry.
Several major competitors to Chobani have expanded or opened Greek yogurt plants in Upstate New York, including Fage in Johnstown, Alpina Foods in Batavia, Upstate Farms in Buffalo and Byrne Dairy in Cortlandville. In total "we have 31 yogurt manufacturers in New York state," said a spokeswoman for its agriculture and markets division.
That doesn't include the ancillary businesses that supply goods and services to the industry, such as Agrana Fruit, which opened a $50 million plant in Lysander in 2014 and sources crops from local fruit farmers.
Refugees work at the Chobani yogurt factory, located near Utica in New Berlin. Brady Dillsworth | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Hillary Clinton has claimed that Donald Trump's trade policies will start a "trade war" but what she fails to recognize is that we are already in one. Trump clearly sees it and he will work to put an end to it.
With some nations exercising mercantilism predatory export pricing and massive protectionism at home and not following the rules of trade agreements in place, we are essentially already in a trade war and have been for two decades. And, as far as I'm concerned, the U.S. has yet to show up to fight in this war.
This very mercantilism has not only undermined the concept of free trade but destroyed it. And China is the 8,000-pound gorilla when it comes to such self-interested and trade-distorting tactics.
Tactics such as currency manipulation, massive subsidies to export-related industries, the use of a "border-adjustable" tax system that works both as a tariff barrier for inbound goods and a subsidy mechanism for targeted export products and the state-owned nature of many of the companies involved have acted to promote this mercantilist trading behavior.
The countless free-trade agreements the U.S. has put in place have failed America, its economy, and its workers. The three worst agreements were giving China "favored nation trading status," allowing China's entry into the World Trade Organization, and the North American Free Trade Agreement. What makes them so damaging is the rules of these agreements have been ignored and not enforced or they have been outright circumvented.
And it's not just the U.S. that is fed up. In a recent Wall Street Journal article titled, "China's One-Way Deals Grate on Germany," reporter Andrew Browne explains that German Chancellor Angela Merkel is losing patience with China buying western technology and brands, but then keeping its own markets closed.
Trump gets it. He knows that it is past time to put an end to this attack on the U.S. and other economies, on job creation, on manufacturing, on national security and on the future of the middle class.
Trump would do this by negotiating from a position of strength, not condescending weakness. China respects strength but takes full advantage of weakness. In the end it will be in China's best interest to stop its questionable trade tactics.
Trump's trade policies will include legal tariffs (if necessary), renegotiation, declaring China a currency manipulator which will allow us to bring action against them, proactive filing of trade cases with the International Trade Commission and World Trade Organization and more. Success in these areas will put an end to this trade war and restore a level playing field. It will give free trade the opportunity to succeed.
Trump gets what Clinton doesn't: You don't win a trade war with appeasement or more free-trade agreements. In particular, you can't win one if you refuse to acknowledge it even exists!
Donald Trump has been running for president on building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico to better secure the border, but during Ronald Reagan's presidency, another approach was pondered, former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating said Tuesday.
"In my past, I've supervised a big chunk of the federal law enforcement establishment. The Immigration Services [and] Border Patrol reported to me during the late Reagan period. And we were even contemplating [at the time] a ditch, not a wall ... because we have to take control of our borders," Keating told CNBC's "Squawk Box."
In the late 1980s, Keating served as assistant secretary of the Treasury, where he presided over agencies including what were then called the Customs Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Like Trump, Reagan also waded into immigration, signing the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which aimed to tighten border security and crack down on companies that knowingly hire illegal immigrants. But the 1986 law also provided amnesty for 2.7 million undocumented immigrants.
Keating said Tuesday that securing the U.S. borders is especially important considering the threat of terrorism, and an open border policy is not sound policy. "We've been debating this since the 1986 Immigration Reform Act. We really haven't done anything about it."
CLEVELAND Donald Trump did not get what he needed from the first day of his convention. He has three more tries.
Trailing presidential candidates need their nominating conventions to delivering broadly appealing messages with a minimum of static interference. This one opened with lots of static.
The first bit of interference came from Trump's own campaign chairman. In a breakfast with reporters, Paul Manafort accused Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who has declined to endorse Trump or attend the convention, of "embarrassing" his state.
That note of unprompted discord was followed by a boisterous protest on the convention floor. Anti-Trump forces, having failed to "unbind" delegates in a long-shot bid to dislodge the nomination from the New York billionaire's hands, sought a roll-call vote on convention rules to register their displeasure.
When the Trump campaign and Republican National Committee steamrolled their plan, the dissenters unleashed a torrent of boos that undermined the candidate's attempt to demonstrate party unity.
Convention planners had more control over the evening program, the theme of which was to "Make America Safe Again." A series of speakers ripped President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for weakness at home and abroad including the mother of a Benghazi victim who said she blamed Clinton personally for her son's death.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has quickly rounded on his political rivals following Friday's failed coup attempt with nearly 20,000 members of the police, civil service, judiciary and army detained or suspended from duty, Reuters reported.
Millions of Turks might be celebrating the failure of an attempted coup but experts are warning that the thousands of arrests of alleged government opponents could herald a more "radical and authoritarian" regime.
Crowds of pro-government supporters have called for the reinstatement of the death penalty to deal with the "plotters" and Erdogan said that "those who launch a coup will have to pay the price for it." He has accused political opponent Fethullah Gulen who is in self-imposed exile in the U.S. of being behind the plot, and has demanded his extradition.
The large number of people accused of being part of the plot to overthrow Erdogan has prompted international concern with world leaders warning Turkey to respect the "rule of law" and to not to use the coup as an excuse to get rid of any political opposition.
However the coup attempt highlighted popular support for the leader and for Turkey's democracy among a people who are fed up with political instability - there have been four coups of varying degrees since 1960.
On Friday, more than 200 people were killed as factions of the military tried to seize power in Turkish capital Ankara and major city Istanbul but the plot failed largely because of a lack of public support, organization and international backing.
Erdogan has called on Turks to show support for democracy - and, by default, his leadership and his AKP party - by taking to the streets to celebrate the coup's failure. Even though thousands have done so, bringing a carnival atmosphere to Turkish cities, analysts warn that the party could soon be over and Erdogan's regime could become increasingly authoritarian from now on.
Attila Yesilada, partner at analysis firm GlobalSource Partners in Istanbul, told CNBC on Tuesday that more arrests were likely and that these could exacerbate simmering tensions in Turkey between pro-Erdogan religious conservatives and secularists who fear that Turkey is drifting away from its founding, secular principles.
"This is just starting. In addition to the army, more than 8,000 people in the interior ministry have been sent to passive duty and are being detained as we speak," he said.
"More than 1,500 people in the ministry of finance, two members of the constitutional court and 200 members of other high courts- it is really unfeasible to imagine that evidence has been gathered about their contribution to the coup in such a short time so there is some amount of extra-judicial activity going on here, this is reminding me of a witch hunt and the justice ministry is promising the people that more with come," Yesilada said.
"I am afraid that this opportunity will be grasped by hard-liners in the AKP to eliminate the Kemalists (supporters of the secular principles implemented by 20th century Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk) secularists and anybody they consider as enemies which would simply further increase rifts in society and have a chilling impact on the business climate."
Britain will not begin its formal divorce from the European Union by invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty this year, a government lawyer told the High Court on Tuesday.
Lawyer Jason Coppell indicated however that the government's current position could change.
"The current position is that notification will not occur before the end of 2016," Coppell said.
Prime Minister Theresa May has said article 50, which starts a two-year countdown to exit, should not be triggered this year.
Coppell was speaking at the start of the first of a series of lawsuits brought by individuals to demand that the British government win legislative approval from parliament before triggering Article 50.
For most people, getting a $3.6 million bonus would be a day to celebrate and high five a bunch of people. For Sam Polk, it made him mad.
Why?
Because it wasn't enough.
"I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted," Polk wrote in a 2014 New York Times op-ed that went viral.
Polk turned that op-ed into a book of the same title, "For the Love of Money," that just came out today.
The memoir is about Polk's meteoric rise on Wall Street during the go-go years of the new millennium. He climbed the ladder from summer intern at Credit Suisse to bond and credit-default-swap trader at Bank of America and then to the top rung of a behemoth hedge fund. He was a young, well-intentioned rising star on the Street, but a Boy Scout he was not.
From a very early age, Polk believed that being rich was the most important thing in the world a lesson learned from his father, a man Polk describes as a "modern-day Willy Loman" type. He struggled with overeating/bulimia, alcoholism and drug addiction almost instantaneously as he first stepped foot onto Columbia University's campus. He was arrested twice and suspended before completing his sophomore year. In short, he was an addict in every sense of the word, so naturally he gravitated toward a career on Wall Street.
Although there was some luck involved in finding his fortuitous path to finance, he was aggressive, sharp and wouldn't quit. After a summer internship at Credit Suisse he didn't receive an offer for the following year. So he hit the phones in desperation to find a new lead. He called and left a message for one managing director every day for three weeks before getting a call back, which eventually resulted in his first job.
During his second year on the Bank of America bond desk, he got his first big trading idea. He bought Western Mining bonds. In his opinion, they were priced at a discount due to an imminent takeover. When a company gets acquired, the debt of that company becomes the debt of the acquiring company. That usually is positive for the price of the bonds, but one of the suitors was a debt-laden company. So, if that company won the bidding war, the price would plummet.
Convinced the debt-laden company wouldn't win the bidding war, Polk put on a $20 million position; which is a big deal for a rookie trader. But then a client came in as a seller and his position grew to $60 million and eventually $100 million. Now, it wasn't just his reputation at stake his job was, too. Soon, fear kicked in, but it was mixed with a shot of adrenaline. He likened it to the feeling you get right before you get into a fist fight or scoring a giant bag of cocaine. He loved the rush.
Days passed without a headline scrolling across the tape which created sleepless nights. If Polk was wrong, he potentially could lose $5 million or $10 million. Finally, a week later, he saw the news: The debt-laden company hadn't won the bidding war. Polk just bagged his first seven-figure profit. And his image skyrocketed in the eyes of his peers. He went on to reach higher highs all the way until he walked away from it all.
July 19, 2016
When NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew by the dwarf planet Pluto one year ago this month, the mission set a number of records. The probe was the first to encounter the small world at the edge of our classical solar system, sending back images that revealed Pluto's surface for the first time.
But beyond its own mission of exploration, New Horizons also served as the delivery vehicle for a 1.5-inch by 1-inch (3.8 by 2.5 cm) relic that set a record of its own.
"The official record for the farthest distance traveled by a postage stamp is 3.26 billion miles [5.25 billion km]," said Jimmy Coggins, an official adjudicator for Guinness World Records, at a ceremony held Tuesday morning (July 19) at the United States Postal Service's (USPS) headquarters in Washington, D.C.
"In 2006, NASA placed a 29-cent "Pluto: Not Yet Explored" stamp on board the New Horizons spacecraft on its way to Pluto and beyond," explained Jim Cochrane, USPS chief marketing and sales officer and executive vice president, in a statement. "That historic flyby with Pluto took place last summer July 14, 2015, to be precise after New Horizons travelled more than three billion miles in its nine and a half year journey."
New Horizons mission leaders hold up an enlargement of a 1991 U.S. stamp with their suggested update after the probe "explored" the dwarf planet Pluto on July 14, 2015. (NASA/Bill Ingalls)
The newly-affirmed record will extend for at least another 1 billion miles (1.6 billion km), as NASA recently announced that the New Horizons mission is journeying beyond Pluto to visit a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) known as 2014 MU69 considered to be one of the early building blocks of the solar system.
"The New Horizons project is honored to be recognized by Guinness World Records for its achievements," said Alan Stern, the mission's principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "Among my personal favorites are being the fastest spacecraft ever launched, the first mission to explore the Pluto system, the mission that explored the farthest worlds ever visited and now sending a U.S. postage stamp farthest from Earth!"
The 29-cent stamp was issued by the U.S. Postal Service on Oct. 1, 1991 as part of a set of stamps celebrating the robotic exploration of the solar system. Designed by artist Ron Miller, the stamp's artwork was based on the very little information known about Pluto at the time and included the caption, "Not Yet Explored."
"You know it says 'Not Yet Explored,' and I have to say, it was a beautiful stamp. It really inspired us when we were building New Horizons to explore this last of the classical planets," said Stern at Tuesday's record ceremony. "Well, we canceled that stamp last July when we flew by Pluto."
To mark the mission's accomplishment, the USPS issued a new set of stamps, appropriately titled "PlutoExplored!" on May 31. The two stamps feature an artist's rendering of the spacecraft and an image of the dwarf planet as taken by New Horizons.
USPS and NASA officials join Guinness World Records adjudicator Jimmy Coggins (right) at the U.S. Postal Service's headquarters in Washington, D.C. on July 19, 2016. (USPS/Daniel Afzal)
This is at least the second Guinness World Record set by the New Horizons mission. In 2006, the robotic probe was recognized for achieving the fastest speed at which a craft has departed from Earth, 36,250 mph (58,338 kp/h).
To put that into some perspective, it took three days for the Apollo 11 spacecraft to reach the moon 47 years ago this week. New Horizons flew past the moon's orbit in just nine hours.
"When I started to look at the record, over 3 billion miles, I started thinking about the history of the Postal Service," said Coggins. "At one point in the early 1800s, to deliver a letter from the east coast to the west coast of the United States, it took four to seven weeks. In the mid-1850s, with the Pony Express, they found a more direct route and it still took 10 days to get from St. Louis to San Francisco. That is about 190 miles [306 km] a day."
"To think about this distance, three billion miles that is about 131 [thousand] times around the circumference of the Earth and it was delivered in less than 10 years," said Coggins. "If the Pony Express was trying to deliver that far, they would be swapping ponies out for the next 47,000 years before it got there."
In a July 15 letter addressed to Mayor Brian Treece , lawyers representing Columbia Police Chief Ken Burton said Burton would consider monetary offers from the city to resign. The letter also accused Treece of violating Article II of the City of Columbia Charter by not notifying Burton that his job was at stake.
The Missourians Opinion section is a public forum for the discussion of ideas. The views presented in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Missourian or the University of Missouri. If you would like to contribute to the Opinion page with a response or an original topic of your own, visit our submission form
Missouri's Abrams-Draine draws NFL Draft hype at cornerback
Missouri's Kris Abrams-Draine is only in his second season as a full-time defensive back, but the junior is drawing NFL Draft hype.
Gov. Mike Pence, R-Ind., speaks during a campaign event to announce Pence as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's vice presidential running mate on, Saturday, July 16, 2016, in New York. Pence, standing alone in front of American flags, hewed closely to the populist themes that Trump has voiced on the campaign trail, describing himself as "really just a small-town boy." He praised Trump effusively as "a good man," a fighter, a legendary businessman and a patriotic American. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)
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By Dave Boucher, USA Today Network Tennessee
CLEVELAND When it comes to Republican vice presidential nominee and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, what you see is what you get. And that's a plus for the GOP presidential ticket, Gov. Bill Haslam said.
"Mike is what he appears to be: he is a solid, Midwestern conservative guy. Some people might say he's a little boring, and maybe he is. But he is what he appears to be," Haslam said Monday after an event for the Tennessee delegation at the Republican National Convention.
"If you go to dinner with Mike, after you hear him speak, it's going to be integration, you're not going to hear two different people."
That hasn't necessarily been the reception Pence has received nationally since joining the campaign: some have accused Pence of flipping several policy positions after taking the second spot on the GOP ticket. Most notably Pence now says he is "very supportive" of Trump's proposed ban on Muslims entering the U.S., according to USA TODAY and other media outlets. Last year he called the proposal "offensive and unconstitutional," in a tweet, reports the Indianapolis Star.
Haslam said he and Pence are good friends. The same year Haslam led the Republican Governor's Association, Pence pulled his name from consideration for the post amid rumors of a possible presidential run.
"I have an advantage where I really do know Mike, we're friends, and had the chance to be governor together. Of the governors, he's probably one of the two or three I'm the closest to," Haslam said.
Pence has been welcomed as a vice presidential pick by many in the party, including among Tennessee Republicans. U.S. Reps John Duncan and Philip Roe recently said they were pleased by the pick, as did Tennessee Republican Party Chairman Ryan Haynes.
Pence, who sat with former GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole and drew plenty of applause at the convention Monday, is set to address the delegates Wednesday evening.
Donald and Melania Trump (Associated Press)
By Thomas Novelly, USA TODAY NETWORK Tennessee
CLEVELAND Women members of Tennessee's delegation to the Republican National Convention said they were not fazed by allegations that Donald Trump's wife Melania plagiarized parts of her speech from first lady Michelle Obama.
Some even said they are now more behind the presumptive Republican presidential nominee as a result.
"It doesn't even matter if she plagiarized her speech," said Doris Arnold, a Trump delegate from Madison County. "I thought it was wonderful. She probably didn't write it, someone wrote it for her, but that doesn't matter. The delivery was great. She's the First Lady we need."
Immediately after Melania Trump's speech aimed at supporting children, women, and families an observer on Twitter noted almost identical language to a speech from Michelle Obama's at the Democratic National Convention in 2008. The Trump campaign has denied Melania Trump intentionally plagiarized the speech.
For many women of the Tennessee's delegation, that doesn't change what they took away from the speech.
The campaign hoped Monday night's speech would broaden Trump's appeal among women voters. Despite Trump's offensive comments in the past, many of Tennessee's delegates said they not only liked Melania Trump but were also willing to forgive her husband.
"I'm familiar with the comments he has said in the past, and it doesn't matter," delegate-at-large Betty Cannon said. "We have to unite behind the party. He often speaks off the cuff, but he married a strong woman. And according to Melania, he's a family man."
In Tennessee, 24 of the 58 the state's delegates are women. More than half of those women are Trump delegates. But even those slated to vote for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio or Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said they felt like they came away with a different understanding of Trump after his wife's speech.
"Melania's message resonated with parents," delegate-at-large Debbie Deaver said. "She is a strong, forceful woman. And she made it clear that his family loves him. I think he has been very fair with women in the past. Especially in the way that he has included his daughters in his corporation."
Many of Tennessee's female delegates said Melania Trump would make a classy, elegant first lady.
"She is what everyone wants to be," Arnold said. "She will be a gorgeous first lady. Those Fox News ladies complaining about her husband must be jealous."
Cannon cited Melania Trump's business experience in modeling and thinks she has the poise to be a historic first lady.
"She is so professional," Cannon said. "She can bring back an era like Jacqueline Kennedy."
Several delegates said they think the allegations of plagiarism is just a way for people to write off her well-received speech, and paint her as unintelligent.
"I think a lot of people will overlook her cause she's so pretty," Sumner County delegate Melissa Clark-Gay said. "If all the media can take away from last night's convention is some similar words she said, then that is sad. She is so young and enthusiastic. That'll bring a whole new group to our party."
Delegates react as some call for a roll call vote on the adoption of the rules during first day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/John Locher)
By Dave Boucher, USA TODAY NETWORK - Tennessee
Although 33 of Tennessees 58 delegates are with Donald Trump, not everyone in the delegation supports the presumptive nominee.
Mick Wright, 38, is a digital communications coordinator at Youth Villages in Bartlett, Tenn. and a Cruz delegate. He said a third of the state delegation joined the Never Trump movement; Wright himself helped track down the signatures Sunday night that the movement needed in order to try and call for a roll call vote on the convention rules package.
All we wanted, what we simply wanted was to have our vote counted. And we were denied, Wright said.
Well I certainly share the view of many who feel that Donald Trump is not suitable to be president of the United States, in any shape, form or fashion. And so yes, there were those of us who wanted to reject the rules to free up those delegates who wanted to exercise their rights of conscience.
Wright was furious that the Republican National Committee leaders did not allow for a roll call vote Monday afternoon on a rules package, a vote that Never Trump supporters believed could open the door to unbinding delegates. The move would allow those at the convention as Trump delegates to officially vote for a different candidate.
Very disappointed with what just happened. It came down to our request to have our votes counted on the rules. We think that the party has adopted a terrible set of rules, not only for this convention but for the next convention, said Wright, a 38-year-old Cruz delegate.
All that remains is the formal nomination process. And Wright isnt happy.
Everything else at this point is window dressing. Everything else at this point is everything weve expected, which is this is the Trump show. So welcome to the Trump show, its the greatest reality show theres ever beengood luck to the Republican Party.
State Sen. Mae Beavers, head of the Tennessee delegation and a Trump delegate, downplayed any Never Trump sentiment in the Volunteer State delegation.
Chris Devaney, a Cruz delegate and former chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party, agrees with Beavers. Devaney said he thought the delegation would be more fragmented, but today believes it's largely ready to unite behind Trump.
Tennessee state Senator Stacey Campfield speaks to the League of Women Voters of Knoxville/Knox County during the 2nd annual senate breakfast on Saturday, January 7, 2012 at the Blount Mansion Visitor Center.
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By Joel Ebert, USA Today Network Tennesse.
A Tennessee delegate known for making controversial remarks is concerned about Gov. Bill Haslams lack of support for presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump.
A lot of (delegates) have said that they are let down with Bill Haslam by him not helping out Donald Trump hes practically supporting Hillary Clinton, former state Sen. Stacey Campfield told The Tennessean on Monday.
Haslam has on occasion been critical of Trump. In June, the Knoxville Republican called recent attacks by Trump on GOP governors not helpful."
The governor has also said Trump's comments about federal judge Gonzalo Curiel, which many have said are racist remarks, were "indefensible."
Although Campfields said he is concerned about Haslams support of Trump, at least two other Trump delegates disagreed with such criticism.
Robert Duvall, former Metro councilman and Trump delegate, said hes heard some people ask about why Haslam hasnt been more vocal in his support for the real estate mogul, especially after the governor met with the presumptive nominee.
However, Duvall believes the governor is ready to support Trump.
I was with Bill earlier today, and he seemed to be OK. And if you listened to what he had to say, while he didnt sit here and (say) Trump by name, I felt like he was saying its time to get behind our candidate. Whether its half-hearted or not, I dont know how gung-ho youre going to be.
James Eaton, a Trump delegate from Williamson County, said he believes that Haslam is simply waiting until the presidential candidate officially becomes the Republican nominee.
Theres a lot of people in the Republican Party that will not say Im supporting Trump but once hes nominated theyll support him, he said.
Duvall said he expects Haslam to eventually donate to Trump. If he doesnt, and Trump wins Tennessee as expected, Duvall believes it could make any future political ambitions of the term-limited governor much more difficult.
It could be Haslam stays out of the race, but I think that could be political suicide in Tennessee if he wanted to run for any office, Duvall said.
That would make it hard for him to build the coalition he needs to even win a primary. I think Bills smarter than that.
Campfield, who served in the Tennessee General Assembly from 2011 to 2014, has frequently made headlines in the past, for saying controversial remarks.
In 2012, he made national news by blaming AIDS on a gay airline pilot having sex with monkeys and saying the disease is "virtually impossible" to contract during heterosexual intercourse, according to Tennessean archives. Days later, after a Knoxville restaurant owner ordered him out of her establishment, Campfield responded by writing a blog in which he compared himself to Jesus Christ and to the civil-rights movement demonstrators.
Dave Boucher contributed to this report.
Police officers enter the Armed Forces Career Center through a bullet-riddled door after a gunman opened fire on the building Thursday, July 16, 2015, in Chattanooga, Tenn. Authorities say there were multiple casualties including the gunman. (AP Photo/John Bazemore)
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By Dave Boucher, USA Today Network Tennessee
CLEVELAND One year after a gunman shot and killed five U.S. military members in Chattanooga, three police officers were shot and killed by someone in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
In between, attacks in Europe and throughout the U.S. have Americans concerned about their security, said Gov. Bill Haslam and other members of Tennessee's congressional delegation said Monday during events at the Republican National Convention.
Haslam, who has been hesitant to voice support for presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, said the election could come down to the candidate's plans to make the American people safer.
"The world's a world where we're not fighting mass armies that you know where they are, we're fighting individuals who say 'I'm okay with dying, I just want to take out as many other people as I can.' And that's not a situation that anybody really has dealt with, where they have that many people who said: 'As long as I take out a lot of people, I'm OK giving up my life'," Haslam said.
"The prescription for that is not an easy one, but I think that's what I'd love to hear him talk about while we're here."
The focus for speeches Monday night at the convention was "Make America Safe Again," a theme that included speeches from Marcus Luttrell a retired Navy Seal who was the subject of the movie "Lone Survivor" and House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Mike McCaul, R-Texas. McCaul referenced the attack in Chattanooga as an argument the threat of terrorism is growing, saying "our own city streets have become the battleground."
The speakers laid the blame of the Benghazi attack, and many general national security concerns, at the feet of former U.S. Sec. of State and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Saying Clinton can't be trusted to keep American military personnel safe, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani described the initial actions Trump would take to address international terrorism.
"Donald Trump has said the first step in defeating our enemies is to identify them properly and see the connections between them," Giuliani said.
"To defeat Islamic extremist terrorism we must put them on the defense so we can find them and catch them. If they are at war against us which they have declared we must commit ourselves to unconditional victory against them."
Trump needs to work with Congress to address "our entire domestic security," said U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann. The East Tennessee Republican says after Trump's recent visit to Capitol Hill the presumptive GOP nominee is ready and able to address security with lawmakers. U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, who like Haslam has been slow to voice support for Trump, gave him credit Monday morning for understanding the fears of everyday Americans.
"He's tuned into the fact that people don't feel safe because of the terrorism. People are really reeling from the changes in this country over the last 20 years...When I ran for president 20 years ago people were still shopping downtown in small towns in Tennessee. Amazon was just 1 year old. Terrorism wasn't an issue," Alexander said.
Typically Republicans do better in election years where national security is a driving force of the campaign. Trump needs to show voters that he understands the best way to address their safety concerns with specific strategies, Haslam said.
"I think for Republicans to have a win here that outlasts the Democrats in Philadelphia and really puts us on a path to winning in November is to say we understand this is an incredibly challenging world we live in, and here are some specific things that we can do about everything from the economy domestically to an international situation where you do have Islamic terrorism that is rampant and here are some specific things we can do, and here's why we believe America can make a difference," Haslam said.
Donald and Melania Trump (Associated Press)
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By USA TODAY NETWORK Tennessee
Dispatches from the Republican National Convention in Cleveland:
Live Blog Republican National Convention
11:45 a.m. Nashville's Ayla Brown is set to perform the national anthem on Thursday before Donald Trump's nomination and speech. She is a based in Music City and is the daughter of former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown.
Ive sung the anthem thousands of times in my singing career, she said in an interview. Mostly for sports, a lot of them have been for political events, but this will be one of the biggest stages of my performing career. Its a surreal moment.
8:00 a.m. Arkansas Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin spoke to the Tennessee delegation this morning over breakfast, which featured a spread that includes scrambled eggs, potatoes, sausage, bacon, biscuits and gravy and grits.
Griffin, who talked about his Tennessee connections, discussed presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, Benghazi and her emails.
At the end of the day, despite not being indicted or not being charged, almost everything she said about the email server was a lie, he said. When caught, she just lied.
Before Griffin taking the microphone, Tennessee GOP chairman Ryan Haynes kick-started the day before turning it over to state Sen. Bill Ketron for a prayer. Beth Campbell, the new national committeewoman, led the pledge of allegiance. After that, U.S. Sen. Bob Corker took over, who said he liked Melania Trumps speech she and Donald Trump were hit with criticism and accusations of plagiarism due to similarities with Michelle Obama's convention speech in 2008. You can see Corkers speech in the video below.
Todays agenda for the Tennessee delegation includes a charter boat cruise on Lake Erie. The convention does not officially convene until 5:30 p.m. but we will have more updates throughout the day.
7:39 a.m.: Sen. Bob Corker told a crowd at the Tennessee delegation breakfast that he thought Melania Trump's keynote speech Monday was great. Shortly after her speech accusations of plagiarism emerged after comparisons noted a similarity between Melania's speech and Michelle Obama's address in 2008.
Photo courtesy Ruth Marie Kish Thompson Ruth Marie Kish, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Zaven Kish of 2336 Vollintine, accepts a War Bond from Doddridge Nichols, chairman of the Memphis and Shelby County War Finance Committee, on behalf of her father, who personally sold $31,785 in E bonds, highest in Goldsmith's bond selling contest. The presentation was made on July 19, 1945, in the office of General Manager Joesph A. Gronauer (right).
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July 19
25 years ago: 1991
Memphis State University is making plans for its largest fund-raising drive ever, President Lane Rawlins told local businessmen Thursday. At a luncheon at the Bank of Bartlett, Rawlins said he hoped in the next 12 to 18 months to start a capital funding drive to raise at least $50 million for major campus improvements that were announced in March.
50 years ago: 1966
Racial violence in Cleveland, Ohio; Jacksonville; New York; and South Bend, Ind., left a mark of broken windows, looted stores, injuries and fires last night. But in Chicago, the scene of mob violence recently, the National Guard reported relative calm. In Cleveland three policemen were hit by rocks, at least eight fires were set some by fire bombs and a sniper fired shots in the Negro slum Hough area. More than 300 policemen moved into the area, and Police Chief Richard Wagner went to the scene at midnight to direct his forces. An eight-block area was sealed off by police.
75 years ago: 1941
LONDON Adolf Hitler was reported Friday to have appealed urgently to Japan to attack Russia immediately but some British quarters contended that the Japanese are veering away from Nazi influence.
100 years ago: 1916
The laws of Tennessee are so antiquated they hinder the state's growth by preventing new capital and labor from coming into the state, Judge James H. Malone declared at the weekly luncheon of the Rotary Club at Hotel Chisca yesterday.
125 years ago: 1891
The report of R.D. Jordan, president of the Memphis Board of Education, shows the public schools to be in a healthy condition, improving and advancing in the general standard of discipline and scholarship, and entirely out of debt.
Former Southaven Mayor Greg Davis
By Ronald Maxey, maxey@desotoappeal.com
The Mississippi Court of Appeals has reversed former Southaven Mayor Greg Davis' criminal conviction for defrauding the city, saying he should have been granted a change of venue because of intense publicity locally.
A DeSoto County Circuit Court jury in 2014 found Davis guilty of embezzling from the city by illegally purchasing a city-owned vehicle, and of improper mileage reimbursement. The case is separate from a civil action in which Davis was ordered by state Auditor Stacey Pickering to repay Southaven more than $70,000, in addition to about $96,000 he had repaid already.
"I'm pleased and a great burden has been lifted," Davis said through attorney Steve Farese regarding Tuesday's appeals ruling.
The decision means the case will return to the trial court for consideration of a new location to retry the two felony counts, for which Davis was set to serve 2 years of a 15-year sentence had the appeals court upheld the decision.
District Attorney John Champion said the case will definitely be retried.
"We'll find another county and try it again," Champion said Tuesday from Boston, where he is attending meetings.
Farese said the appeals court decided, in essence, that publicity surrounding Davis was so intense that there was no way he could get a fair trial in DeSoto County.
The criminal case, together with the civil case over money Pickering said Davis should repay for improper expenses billed to the city, combined for a saga that kept Davis in the headlines for several years. First elected mayor in 1997, Davis, a Republican, served several terms before losing to Darren Musselwhite in 2013 amid the negative publicity.
Davis also waged an unsuccessful run for Mississippi's First District U.S. House seat in 2008.
In its decision, the appeals court said:
"When the jury was empaneled, nine of the 12 jurors plus the two alternates were persons who had stated ... that they had read, seen, or heard something about the case," the court wrote. "With these numbers, the trial court should have granted, and the state should have conceded as it suggested it would, the change-of-venue motion."
Farese said it's unclear how long it will be before the case returns to Circuit Court for more action.
An apparent clerical error by the appeals court raised expectations a week ago that an appeals decision was imminent. The court issued notice July 12 for Davis to be prepared to surrender to authorities on July 19, but the notice was quickly recalled.
Farese said at the time the notice didn't necessarily indicate the court was upholding the appeal, however. He said such notices are sent to everyone free on bond pending appeal when a decision is near, regardless of the ruling.
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We are glad to see that Memphis Wrecking Co. has retreated from its second attempt to expand a landfill near a Frayser elementary school.
We are not happy nor are Frayser residents that the company plans to resubmit what they say will be a better plan.
But is there a better way to expand a landfill in a neighborhood and near a school? Neighborhood residents do not think so, and neither do we.
The company announced recently that it has pulled its application to expand next to Whitney Achievement Elementary School one day before the proposal was scheduled to go before the Shelby County Land Use Control Board. The decision came after several months of discussions with local residents, said company planner Brenda Solomito Basar.
This is the second time the company has backed away from plans to expand the landfill. Last June, the company pulled its application following media reports about the company's desire to expand its landfill for demolition material on 34 acres adjacent to the school, with a buffer of about 25 acres.
As they did last year, company representatives argued that the debris has to go somewhere and that this landfill would not hold household materials or hazardous waste. And, as they did last year, school and community advocates argued that an elementary school where children study and play is not an appropriate neighbor for a landfill.
We said as much in this space last year, maintaining that it is hard to perceive such a proposal being proffered for the heart of Cordova, or Germantown or East Memphis, much less near a school.
We are not unsympathetic to Memphis Wrecking Co. wanting to expand their business, but what they want to do with that landfill is emblematic of what environmentalists and neighborhood activists in poor or predominantly black or Hispanic neighborhoods have been fighting for years.
Since the 1970s, studies have shown a persistent pattern of poor people and people of color living near toxic waste sites, landfills, congested highways and other entities that normally are not proposed for newer, affluent areas.
It is commonly known as "environmental racism," a widely held belief that minority communities are subjected to a disproportionate number of the nation's incinerators, landfills and hazardous-waste treatment plants. It is a phenomenon normally aided by outdated zoning laws.
Company representatives maintain that it is important to have a safe place for this debris to go. We do not disagree with that, but does it have to go into a community that is having enough trouble maintaining stability while fighting crime, pockets of poverty, foreclosures, blight and dropping property values?
Studies have showed these urban maladies expose children to adverse childhood experiences that negatively impact their brain development, resulting in a host of developmental problems that impact them through school and into adulthood.
They do not need to see trucks dumping mountains of debris in their neighborhood.
As the first wave of hands-on reactions to Motorola's new Moto Z flagship start to surface, I can't help but think: Man, this sure is a different company than the Motorola we knew a few short years ago.
It quite literally is, of course: As we all recall, Google sold Motorola to Lenovo in early 2014 -- a mere 20 months after it took the company's reins and transformed it into an idealistic model of what an Android manufacturer could and should be.
But this saga goes much deeper than that. When the sale was announced, Lenovo insisted it intended to "keep Motorolas distinct brand identity" -- a promise many of us approached with skepticism but cautiously hoped would hold true.
Now, just days from that proclamation's two-and-a-half-year anniversary, it's looking more and more like the skepticism may have been warranted. With each passing month, we're seeing more evidence that what's left of Motorola is mostly a name -- a thin shell of the company we once knew and loved, with a whole new creature living inside.
Signs of change
Signs of the old Motorola evaporating have been showing up for quite a while now. After establishing and outwardly marketing itself as the Android manufacturer that delivers quick and reliable operating system upgrades, Motorola faltered with its first post-acquisition rollouts -- the Android 5.0 and 5.1 Lollipop updates. The company plunged from a shining A+ in my previous year's Android upgrade report card to an embarrassing last-place D score in my 2015 analysis.
Then came the now-infamous Marshmallow meltdown, when Lenovo's Motorola outright broke its promise of ongoing support for some of its most prominent and recent Android devices. Worse yet, it left loyal customers in the dark -- without so much as an explanation for its about-face or any attempt to make things right with those it had pledged to support and then unceremoniously abandoned.
Factor in the reports of also-deteriorating support on the hardware warranty side of things -- an area where Motorola had once excelled -- along with factors like the quiet phasing out of subtle post-sale extras that had once made the company seem special, and it became increasingly clear that things were starting to change.
From a sprinkle to a downpour
As it turns out, all of that was just the tip of the iceberg -- a scattering of signs representing more significant shifts deep within the company. Earlier this year, Lenovo announced it would de-emphasize the Motorola brand and instead work to make "Moto" a product line within Lenovo -- a considerable pivot from the originally stated plan of "keep[ing] Motorolas distinct brand identity" and allowing it to thrive with the support of Lenovo's manufacturing and distribution resources.
Then Moto CEO Rick Osterloh -- who himself had taken up the post after the original Google-era CEO, Dennis Woodside, stepped down at the start of the Lenovo transition -- left the company as part of what was called a "broad reorganization." With Osterloh out, Motorola effectively became an element of Lenovo's broader "mobile business unit," led by an existing Lenovo exec who reports directly to Lenovo's CEO.
Osterloh wasn't the only one headed out the door -- far from it. Long-standing Motorola design chief Jim Wicks announced his departure from the company last month. Lior Ron, who served as the product lead on key Moto devices like the original Moto X phones and the Moto 360 smartwatch, revealed his resignation earlier this year.
Numerous other high-profile Motorolans from the Google-owned era, like VP of Product Management (and frequent public face of the company) Punit Soni, Senior Director of Product Management Mark Rose (also once an active company presence on social media), and many others responsible for much of Motorola's former identity have also said so long in the time since Lenovo's takeover -- some seemingly by choice and others as a result of overt cutbacks and "restructuring."
(Amidst that exodus of existing talent, Motorola did gain the expertise of Lenovo "product engineer" Ashton Kutcher. So, yeah. There's that.)
Change begets change
All of that brings us to this year's new devices -- and with the hand-in-hand evolutions of staff and philosophy within the new Motorola, it should probably come as no surprise that the company's latest products are a far cry from the phones that once made us all sit up and take notice.
Seeing 'Moto' on a phone made by Lenovo isn't much different than seeing 'Polaroid' on a camera made by C&A Marketing
Early reviews of the latest Moto G paint a troubling picture of that once-groundbreaking budget phone line's apparent progression. As for the higher-end Moto Z -- the sort-of successor (for now, at least) to the flagship Moto X -- it's safe to say the phone bears little resemblance to the design language the previous incarnation of Motorola built its brand around. Whether that ultimately ends up being a good thing or a bad thing is something I'll leave up to reviewers to decide, but either way, there's clearly a new sheriff in town.
For better or for worse, Motorola has effectively become another Polaroid -- a once-influential brand that's now a hollow name stamped on a surface. The products themselves have little to do with the company we remember; for all practical purposes, seeing "Moto" on a phone made by Lenovo isn't much different than seeing "Polaroid" on a camera made by C&A Marketing.
Just like with a Polaroid, though -- both the company itself and the photos its cameras created -- the memories of yesteryear are bound to fade before long. If Lenovo wants the Moto name to continue presenting positive associations for consumers, it's going to have to produce products that actually carry on the company's legacy. Either that, or it has to build upon that history to create a new legacy that's equally impressive and consumer-centric.
A familiar logo only gets you so far. Motorola is a whole new beast yet again, and it's up to Lenovo to prove that that big bold "M" still means something that matters.
One of my guiding principles is that compliance does not equal security. Compliance isnt a true representation of how well companies use security to protect themselves. It can be little more than checking all the boxes and telling the auditors what they want to hear. After all, many compromised banks were PCI-compliant, and several breached healthcare organizations were compliant with HIPAA.
Trouble Ticket At issue: It can be difficult to effect needed changes in security practices. Action plan: Take advantage of senior managements great interest in compliance to push through changes that would otherwise languish.
I am no fan of compliance for its own sake. The problem with it is that too many companies and auditors dont dig deeper and think about what, beyond compliance, would really make the company more secure.
Of course, at my company, we often find ourselves needing to come into compliance with various regulations theres no avoiding that. Customers expect us to maintain certain levels of compliance, and our bank requires us to be PCI-compliant, since we store and process credit cards. Reaching compliance can be arduous, and even exhausting, but it does have at least one great benefit: Its a highly useful tool for leveraging change that I, as the security manager, fully endorse but havent been able to effect otherwise. In the name of compliance, you often find you can create new policies, implement new processes and deploy new technologies without a fight.
Just recently, months of nagging our IT guys to make sure that all end users PCs have up-to-date antivirus software finally came to a happy end when the matter became a compliance issue.
We have been pushing antivirus patches via a management server that monitors the patch status of all clients. The problem was that remote employees could work for long stretches without ever allowing that server to check their antivirus status. Because all of the applications that they use to get their work done are available as software as a service, they never feel a need to establish a secure VPN connection to our network.
The IT guys and I went back and forth on this for months, and wed probably still be doing so months from now if not for the auditors listing this situation as an exception in their findings document for our SSAE 16 Service Organization Control report a report that is shared with our customers. Thats when several executives got very interested in our VPN requirements. I was able to show them the long string of emails that had passed between me and the IT department on this very subject and what do you know? the result was immediate change. We have modified the architecture and securely exposed the management server to the internet so that remote employees are now able to effortlessly communicate with the management server to report status.
Since I had the ear of upper management, I thought it would be a good time to address some other things that I would classify under general hygiene. Too often, I have come across PCs and servers with outdated patches for operating systems and things such as Adobe, Flash and Java. Now, the IT department has been given a mandate from on high to get things in order.
Using compliance shortfalls to upgrade our security practices isnt unusual. Last year, I was able to use compliance to justify several initiatives, including signing up for a service and buying associated tools that will allow us to establish baseline security configurations for technology assets such as Linux, Windows, Apache, Oracle and firewalls. And relying on findings from our PCI audit related to encryption, I was able to deploy Bitlocker for Windows PCs and File Vault for Apple Macs. PCI regulations state that all credit card information that is stored must be encrypted, and such information can show up anywhere in our company, since many of our employees assist customers, who often provide credit card and other sensitive data even though we advise against it. So now were enforcing encryption for 100% of our company-owned PCs. Such widespread use of encryption has a beneficial side effect, since many states now provide a safe harbor, meaning that a company that has been breached might not have to notify customers and provide breach remediation services if all the data involved was encrypted.
I have even used compliance to improve our security badges. When I was hired a few years ago, the company used plain white proximity badges. Our badges now include a picture, name and other features that identify the user as an employee or contractor.
I expect more compliance-driven security improvements in the future, since we are seriously considering becoming HIPAA-compliant.
This week's journal is written by a real security manager, "Mathias Thurman," whose name and employer have been disguised for obvious reasons. Contact him at mathias_thurman@yahoo.com.
Click here for more security articles.
Well, this is exciting. It seems like just last month (or was it the beginning of this month -- who can keep track anymore?) there was an Android announcement, and now here is another.
Android has released its fifth and final developer preview for Android 7.0 Nougat. So what can we expect in this version? And how much longer until we see the final Nougat release?
In IT Blogwatch, we wait for some cats (you'll get it by the end).
A developer preview? What do we know about it so far? Kellex gives us some background:
Android N Developer Preview 5 just got posted...it looks like all supported devices are getting Android build NPD90G. Note...this is the final developer preview before the stable version rolls out later this summer.
Great, so what is such a big deal about the final developer preview? Liam Tung answers the big questions:
This release...offer[s] developers and beta testers the "near final system images" for supported...devices.
...
The update gives developers the final user interface and APIs to test their apps against, and ensure they're ready for Android [behavior] changes, such as the battery and memory [optimizations] with Doze on the Go, Google's Project Svelte background...and security related permission changes.
Great, great. But what should developers do with the final preview? Google gives some instructions:
Developers...can take advantage of new...features in Android N such as Multi-window support, Direct Reply and other notifications enhancements, Direct boot, new emojis and more.
...
After testing your apps...you should publish the updates to Google Play soon. We recommend compiling against, and optionally targeting, API 24 and then publishing to your alpha, beta, or production channels in the Google Play Developer Console.
So that's it? We're just one version closer to the final release of Android Nougat? Well, there is something else (here is where that cat reference comes into play). Ryan Whitwam explains:
The fifth and final Android Nougat developer preview has arrived, and with it...the new Android Easter Egg...this time we get a built-in version of Neko Atsume -- a kitty collector. Can you entice all the cats to visit your phone?
...
You'll just see an empty dish icon. Tap...to add something...a cat might like, for example a whole fish or chicken. Then you...wait, and eventually a cat will appear...You can rename and share the cats, if you so choose...That's the gist of it. You have to admit, it's a little more abstract than past Easter Eggs.
The TV you watch may have an ARM processor chip in it. So does the Amazon Echo that helps switch on the light and air conditioner through voice commands.
That's just a microcosm of how deeply ARM goes in our daily lives. ARM's low-power chip designs have revolutionized mobile devices and are now powering smart home devices, smart meters, weather sensors, medical devices and industrial equipment.
ARM chips also are inside many sensor devices used in the fast-growing internet of things market. The company set itself up for growth in IoT with its dogged focus on low-power chips since the 1990s, and that vision has paid off with SoftBank's announcing plans this week to buy ARM for a stunning $32 billion.
Some analysts believe SoftBank is overpaying, but the investment could eventually pay off. Some estimate 20 billion to 50 billion connected devices will be online by 2020, and those numbers represent a big growth opportunity for ARM.
"ARM will be an excellent strategic fit within the SoftBank group as we invest to capture the very significant opportunities provided by the internet of things," Masayoshi Son, CEO and chairman of SoftBank, said in a statement.
SoftBank's offer was compelling for shareholders and offers the chip company the opportunity to grow, Simon Segars, CEO of ARM, said in a video explaining the sale.
ARM designs chips it licenses to manufacturers, which can tweak them to meet the needs of their devices. Apple uses ARM architecture in its iPhone and iPad. Other licensees include Samsung, Microsoft, Nvidia and AMD. ARM generates revenue through licensing and royalties, unlike rival Intel, which designs and manufactures its own chips.
From its earliest days, ARM's focus on power efficiency over performance hasn't wavered, setting up the company for success in mobile devices, and now IoT, analysts said. An early ARM chip was used in Apple's Newton handheld, which shipped in 1993 but wasn't a commercial success.
"The only other guys that had a shot at [the mobile and IoT markets] were MIPS, which is now a part of Imagination Technologies," said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64. "But MIPS fell off the horse."
In IoT, a range of devices are powered by external power sources, but a larger number rely on batteries and energy harvesting. ARM processors like Cortex-M0 are targeted at the IoT, but many older microcontrollers are still being used because of their power efficiency features.
ARM started in 1990 as a spinoff from a collaboration between Apple and Acorn Computer Group. Acorn was the brains behind the first ARM RISC chips, which appeared in a personal computer called Archimedes in 1987.
ARM's early years were mixed, but the company started gaining attention as shipments of devices like the BlackBerry started picking up in the late 1990s. Revenues started exploding in 2005, and that year, ARM shipped 1.4 billion chips for mobile devices, crossing the 1 billion threshold for the first time.
The iPhone, which launched in 2007, added to ARM's fortunes, and more than 90 billion ARM-based chips have shipped so far. In 2015 alone, 15 billion ARM chips shipped.
ARM maintained its heritage of developing low-power processors at a time when Intel and AMD cranked up clock speeds and power draw in their PC chips. The iPhone was a big breakthrough, and the mobile explosion caught rivals like Intel off-guard. Intel then took the ARM route and started focusing on power efficiency.
IoT is again changing the shape of the chip industry. Intel in April laid off 12,000 people as it redirected focus from PCs to IoT, data center products and memory.
Over the decades, ARM microcontrollers were easily available from companies like Marvell and Texas Instruments to build and test devices, and that strategy helped build a large ecosystem, Brookwood said. By comparison, Intel chips weren't as easily available, and that's another reason ARM is built into more devices.
While ARM is growing in the IoT, it has weaknesses. ARM-based chips may not be able to handle demanding tasks in medical devices, digital advertising screens, or gambling machines, where graphics and processing are key. Those devices will better run on x86 chips, said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research.
Mobile and low-power IoT devices are tailor-made for ARM, and they are markets the company should continue chasing, McGregor said. For SoftBank, those markets are low-hanging fruit that will generate instant revenue.
ARM chips could also find their way into storage and networking devices, which are growing more important to the IoT, McGregor said.
The company plans to speed up processor development and double its headcount over the next five years with SoftBank's backing. But questions remain about what ARM will do with the extra resources.
ARM has processor designs and programs in place for a range of chips, from IoT microcontrollers all the way up to beefy servers, for the next couple of years, and most semiconductor companies already have ARM licenses. So there are limited opportunities for the company to expand with its IP licensing business model, Brookwood said.
ARM's price was depressed, and SoftBank may have felt it was a good time to acquire the company, said Richard Fichera, vice president at Forrester Research.
But ARM is still a small company, and its unique business model won't change the way chipmakers like Intel, Nvidia, or AMD do business.
"There's nothing [SoftBank] can do to make ARM five times their size," Fichera said. "I don't think it'll transform the industry in any way."
Though SoftBank may have overpaid, ARM is well positioned to make money with its intellectual property business, and the IoT segment is a big opportunity, Fichera said.
"ARM is well-positioned to make money hand-over-fist with their IP business," Fichera said.
After the headlines always follows the small print. So it is with the Governments restructuring of Whitehall particularly in the creation of two new departments, the Department for International Trade and the Department for Exiting the European Union. The announcement was the big moment, but it was also the easy bit. Now we are only starting to see the complex process of hammering out who does what, and how.
Both DIT and DEEU (Or Department X, as David Davis likes to call it) are formed at least in part from the powers and body of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The symbol of that carving up can be seen in the fact that Johnson, Fox and Davis are to share Chevening, the grace and favour home traditionally reserved for the Foreign Secretary. The three men will be sharing the grounds and the 115 rooms because they are also sharing what were formerly the FCOs powers.
Quite how those powers are to be divided in practice is yet to be seen. Crucially, who will be in ultimate charge of the Brexit negotiations? The Mail on Sunday reported that Davis is adamant he can pull rank on both [Fox and Johnson] on the topic, but that notably hasnt been said by the Prime Minister, conceded by the other two or, of course, tested in practice.
In a negotiation in which everything will be on the table, it isnt hard to imagine a circumstance in which the Foreign Secretary might argue the Brexit discussions are extending into his wider responsibility for foreign policy and international relations. Or, for that matter, a circumstance in which the Brexit Secretary feels the FCO is impinging on finely-balanced discussions around leave the EU for example when Johnson attends the EUs Foreign Affairs Council. At the same time, the success of Brexit is bound up not just in negotiations with the EU but in Foxs success in lining up trade deals for when we leave (Daviss comment to Sky News that Im not going to set Liam targets rather implies that he believes he has the right to do so if he wished).
It isnt only powers being divided various parts of the Foreign Office are already being moved to work for Davis, including UKREP in Brussels, while UKTI and UK Export Finance have been put under Fox. The fact that various anonymous officials have briefed The Times about a tug of war being fought over Whitehall staff is a sure sign that last week was the beginning, not the end, of this restructuring.
By and large, the Eurosceptic right of the Party is happy with Theresa Mays first Cabinet appointments, since she has placed Brexit in the hands of big hitters who campaigned for it: David Davis, Liam Fox and Boris Johnson. But on the whole, it doesnt much like the sound of the proper industrial strategy which she promised at the launch of her campaign at its aborted membership stage. In her speech, May lamented the sale of Cadburys to Kraft and lambasted the near-sale of AstraZeneca to Pfizer, arguing that transient shareholders who are mostly companies investing other peoples money are not the only people with an interest when firms are sold or close. Workers have a stake, local communities have a stake, and often the whole country has a stakeA proper industrial strategy wouldnt automatically stop the sale of British firms to foreign ones, but it should be capable of stepping in to defend a sector that is as important as pharmaceuticals is to Britain.
The new strategy has just taken its first test within the first few days of Mays premiership, and either passed or failed it, depending on ones point of view. Over the weekend, according to todays Times (), she personally approved the sale of ARM Holdings, a microchip design company based in Cambridge that supplies technology to Apple, to Softbank, the Japanese multinational. Three previous bids by the latter were rejected. The new Prime Minister consulted with Philip Hammond over the weekend. Softbank has now promised that it will retain the headquarters in Cambridge, double the British workforce within five years, keep the brand and maintain ARM as an independent subsidiary. The paper reports concerns about the deal, including possible brain drain and ARM business moving from the UK. But whether one likes it or not, there is no doubt about the outcome. Although May was involved in the deal, it shows policy proceeding more or less as usual in other words, demonstrating the openness of Britain to the ownership of big firms from abroad.
The Prime Minister insists that all foreign takeovers of British companies will be reviewed by the Government which brings us to the man at the head of the new Department for Business, Energy and, yes, Industrial Strategy: Greg Clark. It wasnt easy to see, before the reshuffle, which Minister would take charge of the latter. Sajid Javid is by inclination a Thatcherite, for all his energetic intervention over Tata Steel. The older Cabinet members, Remainer and Leaver alike, are also children of the 1980s, in political terms anyway: Hammond, Davis, Fox, Michael Fallon. Clark is different. He first made his way in the Party as Iain Duncan Smiths Director of Policy, helping to implement the Renewing One Nation programme. It was a pioneer of the social justice thinking in todays conservatism that grows more mainstream as time passes: all five of the candidates in the recent leadership contest are signed up to it. The former columnist for this site is a highly intelligent pragmatist. And he will bring with him from CLG the biggest interventionist of all: Michael Heseltine.
To Clark falls the task of putting flesh on the bones of the nascent strategy seeing through the mapping-out of the established and developing industries that are of strategic value to our economy; the identification of training and skills capabilities, and action to follow, such as more technical schools and discounts in tuition fees for students who want to study such degrees as engineering; the development of clusters of industry; buying British more often, and breaking down the artificial divide between private and public sectors. All these ideas, and more, were first floated by May in her seminal speech to ConservativeHome in 2013 the first occasion on which she made a big speech outside her brief, thereby signalling her ambition to be Party leader and Prime Minister. It would be a mistake to believe that Mays thinking simply replicates that of another of our former columnists, Nick Timothy now her co-Chief of Staff and the speechs author. But one of his columns for us used almost identical language about the proposed AstraZeneca sale as that of his boss.
Government will always intervene in the economy. As May pointed out in that 2013 speech, it does so over immigration and migrants, for example placing some in categories based on the countrys economic needs. New safeguards were put in place after the Pfizer bid to ensure that companies keep their words on safeguarding jobs. But there are new reasons to be wary of too restrictive a policy on takeovers. Britain needs new investment for the economics of Brexit to work. These are early days, but signs are encouraging: this morning, Allister Heath cites the relocation of Ineos to Britain, the acquisition of Poundland by Steinhoff and Wells Fargos 300 million new HQ in the City. An openness to the ownership of companies that work here by others that are based abroad is a necessary part of the package. Meanwhile, the other side of new trade deals will be an openness to goods from abroad that mirrors an opennes to our goods there. These may bring hard news in their wake for some of the people and communities that voted so fervently for Brexit.
Against a backdrop of world unrest, how our new Government will handle the challenges and opportunities arising from the recent referendums result remains undetermined. Some of the most pressing questions relate to what Brexit means for British trade. Should we find a way to stay in the Single Market? How could we best profit from the advantages of going it alone? To which non-EU countries should we be looking for inspiration? Who should be our closest partners? How could we guarantee their interest? With a nascent international trade ministry, and an urgent need to ensure economic stability through a new generation of commerce arrangements, many have been wondering: how should Britain negotiate trade deals post-Brexit?
Policy Exchanges seminar yesterday How should Britain negotiate trade deals post Brexit? starring a panel composed of three leading Commonwealth experts on trade was quick off the mark in answering the relevant questions. At a lunchtime event tasked with addressing this, Australians and New Zealanders not only confirmed that countries such as theirs were eager to forge trade alliances, but also argued persuasively that there were blueprints ready for adaption, and that the adoption of those could place Britain in a stronger position than ever.
The economist, trade negotiator, and former Australian Ambassador to China and the World Trade Organisation, Dr Geoff Raby, admitted that the UK faced the unknown unknowns of an immensely complicated task. But our trading dance card was likely to fill quickly, and as we know from this weekends news Australia has already offered its hand. Although being well prepared to establish bilateral deals is essential, however, he reminded us that it is legally unclear when Britain (while it remains a member of the EU) can enter official negotiations with individual countries. Schedules must be settled with the EU and the WTO before we can embark on these unchartered waters. Moreover, Brussels has led European trade policy for the past half century, and as Raby emphasised Britain will have to invest in even more highly-skilled negotiators and experts than we might think, not least because the trade deals we will be seeking will be both new and simultaneous.
Some have called for Britain to pursue a delete and replace conglomerate arrangement with the WTO, but Raby pointed out that = with almost 200 countries agreement required, some of whom might see the EU as a bigger prize than the UK the necessary broad support might be hard to attain. Bi- and plurilateral deals seem vital to Britains success, therefore. And clarity of purpose and Government cohesion are key here, Raby asserted, together with a need to begin with top quality agreements to set the bar high. While attaining an accord with US must be a priority, that will expend a vast amount of resources, he suggested; deals with medium-sized countries that have prior experience of FTAs (such as Canada, South Korea and Australia) should resolutely be sought, therefore alongside those with smaller, but similarly-experienced, countries (such as New Zealand, Chile, and Singapore). It will also be important to take countries geopolitical goals into account, as well as their track records in negotiation: India can be difficult; Japan will be keen.
Alexander Downer, the Australian High Commissioner and former Australian foreign minister, concurred on a preference for high-quality alliances over symbolic or quick dirty deals, and stressed that the UK should enter the field as an open and liberal economy. Both men contended that EU-style protectionism and a desire for political bolt-ons demands regarding human rights standards, for instance would be unhelpful, and were typical decelerators of trade negotiations. The template wasnt the problem, Raby added rather, the devil is always in the detail. For historic reasons, and the benefit of similar outlooks, therefore, Commonwealth countries would make excellent trading partners for Britain; developing countries, which were less like-minded, might prove more tricky.
Sir Lockwood Smith, the New Zealand High Commissioner and a former international trade minister himself, concluded the event by reiterating Rabys point about purpose. Agreements that lack clarity, or were insufficiently comprehensive, would be worse than none at all; good agreements offered building blocks to a wider strategic approach. This was Britains opportunity to position itself globally: we should get out there to run the race and win it.
A useful discussion: more of them are needed in due course to allay risk-ridden uncertainty, and to propose advantageous solutions to our new Government.
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JASON CLARK / COURIER & PRESS Jacey Stewart plays Kim and Austin Marchino plays Chris during a rehearsal Wednesday. The Warrick County Summer Musical is celebrating its 20th anniversary this summer with "Miss Saigon: School Edition" at Castle High School Auditorium July 21-24.
SHARE JASON CLARK / COURIER & PRESS The Warrick County Summer Musical cast runs through a rehearsal Wednesday. The Warrick County Summer Musical is celebrating its 20th anniversary this summer with "Miss Saigon: School Edition" at Castle High School Auditorium July 21-24. JASON CLARK / COURIER & PRESS Tyler McDonough plays The Engineer and Emma Vassy plays Gigi Van Tranh during a rehearsal Wednesday. The Warrick County Summer Musical is celebrating its 20th anniversary this summer with "Miss Saigon: School Edition" at Castle High School Auditorium July 21-24. JASON CLARK / COURIER & PRESS Warrick County Summer Musical director Eric Antey speaks to his cast during a rehearsal Wednesday. The Warrick County Summer Musical is celebrating its 20th anniversary this summer with "Miss Saigon: School Edition" at Castle High School Auditorium July 21-24.
By Kelly Gifford of the Courier and Press
During a rehearsal for "Miss Saigon," the Warrick County Musical cast sat so silent you could hear a pin drop.
They were going over the opening scene of Act 2 featuring the song "Bui-Doi" the name for children born of American soldiers and Vietnamese women. Pictures of real bui-doi children were held up to show the students who they were and discuss the realities these children faced because of the Vietnam War.
Choreographer Amanda Antey was in near tears recalling that rehearsal.
"These students were completely silent, many with tears in their eyes, when they realized the impact of what being bui-doi meant," she said. "(The director) told them how glad he was to see how meaningful the moment was. It was like light bulbs went off for the whole cast."
The process of preparing for "Miss Saigon," the program's 20th anniversary, created several of these learning experiences through the musical's historical, cultural and theatrical contexts a primary reason for its selection in January. The musical is having its regional debut at 7 p.m. Thursday at Castle High School Auditorium with performances through the weekend.
"Miss Saigon" tells the story of American soldier Chris and Vietnamese girl Kim who fall in love and try to find each other after the city of Saigon falls during the Vietnam War. The production is completely sung through and is based on Puccini's "Madame Butterfly."
Eric Antey, director of the musical, has dreamed of putting on "Miss Saigon" for nearly 25 years. It is his favorite musical, not just because of the powerful songs and theatrical prowess, but also because of its deep message and topical themes that still apply today.
"The musical was inspired by a photograph of a Vietnamese mother sending her daughter off to the United States to be with her American father," he said. "That part of the story is infinitely important to what we are trying to teach through the program. These kids are portraying the experiences so many people went through and connecting those experience to what they are seeing on the news."
Before starting rehearsals, the musical coordinators gave history lessons and brought in guest speakers to talk about the Vietnam War and how it affected those in Vietnam and here in the U.S. The students also discussed how many of the same struggles that existed during the Vietnam War are still present today with refugees from Syria and Iraq fleeing their home countries because of turmoil and violence.
Austin Marchino, a graduated Castle senior portraying American soldier Chris, said getting to meet soldiers from Vietnam helped give more context to his character and also is something he remembers when trying to stay in character. He added that the research and discussions the cast and crew had with those soldiers made the message of the musical more impactful for him as well and hopes his performance can do the same for audience members.
"Theater is a way for each person, in the audience and on stage, to feel connected for even just a moment," he said. "The way theater connects the stories of people and cultures we don't know is amazing. If we can harness that energy and those feelings and share them with other people, then maybe they will share those same thoughts and ideas too. It could spread like wildfire."
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By Sarah Loesch of the Courier and Press
Polly Grudzinski's interest in the Holocaust and World War II peaked during college, but it was biographies from her eighth grade students that brought it back into her life.
Every year, about 120 students read Anne Frank's "The Diary of a Young Girl" as a part of Grudzinski's English class at Plaza Park International Prep Academy and research and write biographies for other individuals connected to World War II.
"I want my students to have examples of courageous individuals," Grudzinski said. "World War II provides a lot of great stories of survivors and helpers."
Grudzinski was able to attend this year's Belfer National Conference for Educators, which shows educators different approaches for teaching about the Holocaust, in Washington D.C.
The conference takes place at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum over the course of three days.
Grudzinski was one of three local teachers who attended this year's conference, along with sixth-grade Castle North Middle School language-arts teacher Darlene Short and Todd Schroer from the University of Southern Indiana.
Short found out about the conference after attending an Echos and Reflections Workshop sponsored by the Communities to Promote Respect in Schools that focused on Holocaust curriculum.
She said as a sixth-grade teacher she does not get to focus much on Holocaust-related topics because it is covered once the students reach eighth grade, but she found a lot of ideas during the conference.
"I could teach a year on the Holocaust and not scratch the surface," Short said.
During the conference attendees were able to hear stories from Holocaust survivors. Short said the stories were "riveting" and the time allotted to the speakers flew by.
She said it was inspirational to see people doing whatever they could to not only save their lives, but often the lives of people around them.
"It was repeated multiple times (during the conference), 'please don't let our stories die,'" Short said.
She said the opportunity to tell some of those stories makes her definitely see the Holocaust as part of her curriculum now, whether it be in introductory activities, study hall readings or classroom units.
Both Short and Grudzinski found one lesson particularly useful. Presenters showed the idea of a large timeline that connects people, places and events throughout the period of the Holocaust.
Grudzinski said she plans to use it during her classes reading of Anne Frank's diary.
"Now I can have students plot her life on a giant timeline that goes across the classroom," she said.
Grudzinski said the Holocaust can be a difficult subject to teach because it is so vast and requires a lot of background.
There are no easy answers to (students') big questions," she said.
Anne Frank is relatable to students when they read her diary, and she adds a real face to the facts and information, Grudzinski said.
"When I bring stories into the classroom, they aren't just numbers," Grudzinski said. "They are people."
She said it's important to discuss and ask why and how. The faces and the people are important, and it's especially important for students to be able to find role models and courageous people, she said.
"In today's world we especially need that, and young people especially need that," Grudzinski said.
The students who enter her classroom now were born around 9/11, she said, and all they've known has been war and a lot of negativity.
"I think every generation thinks they are living through the worst period of time," Grudzinski said. "But when we get a chance to look back at what people have gone through, we can glean an awful lot of inspiration from the helpers and the survivors of World War II."
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By Zach Osowski, zach.osowski@courierpress.com
INDIANAPOLIS Phone calls, emails and overwhelming support at the Posey County fair all played a role in state Sen. Jim Tomes running for governor, he explained.
Tomes, a six-year state senator from Wadesville, submitted his name for consideration to the Republican State Committee Monday evening. The 22-member committee will be choose someone to replace Gov. Mike Pence on November's ballot after Pence chose to accept Donald Trump's running mate offer.
The addition of Tomes makes it a four-way race, with U.S. Reps Susan Brooks and Todd Rokita and current Lt. Gov. Eric Holcomb already in the running. With those big names in the race, Tomes said he realizes his chances are slim.
"I know the odds are staggering," Tomes said. "But I do believe if I win the nomination I can win the state."
Tomes said for the past few years when he's been out in communities people have asked him to consider running for higher office, be it a seat in Congress or governor of Indiana. Those calls have increased since Friday when Pence removed himself from the ballot.
After talking it over with his wife, Tomes said he decided to go ahead and submit his name to the state committee for consideration.
"It's in my heart to run," Tomes said. "This has been something that's been going around and around in my head for a couple days now."
Tomes said in an email sent out to committee members that as a member of the Indiana General Assembly he has a unique knowledge of the inner workings of the state's legislative and executive branches.
He also believes, if it came down to a race with Democratic candidate John Gregg, his relationship with Hoosier teachers and union voters could help sway some Democratic voters to his side.
Tomes promised, if elected, his servant-leadership approach to elected office wouldn't change.
"I try to make myself as available as possible to everyone," Tomes said. "That would increase if I'm governor. In that office, you've got 6.5 million employers."
Tomes will make his candidacy official on Thursday when he will go to Indianapolis to sign the necessary paperwork.
Others interested in running for governor have until Friday to submit their name for consideration.
A sign reading "Love, Respect, Support Law Enforcement" appeared on this electronic billboard along Wheeling Avenue on Monday, two days after an earlier one reading "Hate cops? The next time you need help call a crackhead" prompted controversy.
(Photo: Robin Gibson/The Star Press)
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By Robin Gibson / USA Today Network / The Star Press
MUNCIE Amid a tense atmosphere nationwide over report after report of police-action shootings and police officers being shot, it only took a billboard to set off an online controversy in Muncie.
A billboard reading "Hate cops? The next time you need help call a crackhead" was visible for at least a few hours on Saturday on an electronic billboard near the Wheeling and Riverside intersection in Muncie. Megan Thomas said she noticed it around 1 p.m. Saturday while walking with her niece along the Riverwalk. She was offended not just by what she called a message that was "vulgar, discriminatory to many different classes of people in our city," but also by the fact that it appeared to have gone up right before the start of a planned demonstration against police brutality, starting just a few blocks away.
"I was very ashamed that something so dividing was present in Muncie," Thomas said on Sunday.
Her Facebook post of a photo of the billboard, along with a question about whether tax dollars had paid for the sign and contact information for the billboard company, prompted a flurry of responses, positive and negative, and as of Monday afternoon more than 1,000 shares. Thomas said she drove past the sign around 5 p.m. Saturday, and saw by that time the "Hate cops?..." one was no longer in the rotation appearing on the electronic billboard.
As of Sunday morning, the billboard featured just a series of ads for car dealerships, a local restaurant, the city bus system and Hometown Outdoor Advertising, the company that owns the electronic billboard.
By Monday afternoon, another couple of notices had joined the rotation, one reading "Love, Respect, Support Law Enforcement," and the other "Love, Support, Support Law Enforcement."
Public awareness of the earlier sign remained high, however; while The Star Press was waiting to take a picture of the new sign on Monday afternoon, a passenger in a car stopped at the Wheeling traffic light called out "Is that sign still up?"
Chris Johnson, general manager of Muncie Liquors, said he heard about the original sign on Saturday when a clerk at the Wheeling store phoned him about a person coming in to complain about the sign. Noting that Muncie Liquors doesn't own or operate the billboard, just rents space for it in its parking lot, Johnson said they'd called the billboard company to say they were hearing complaints about the sign, and were told it would be taken down immediately and reworded.
Johnson said he was concerned about online criticism unfairly aimed at Muncie Liquors by people who mistakenly believed the sign belonged to the store, but said he believed by Monday word was out that the liquor store was not connected to the controversial sign. This is not us, this is not our mentality, this is not how we feel," he said. Expecting to be deluged with calls or complaints on Monday, instead he had heard from no one about the sign before being contacted by The Star Press.
Thomas questioned who had paid for the original sign, particularly whether it might have been funded with tax dollars.
The Muncie police chief's office and Hometown Outdoor Advertising did not respond on Monday to messages left by The Star Press.
Muncie Police Sgt. Chris Kirby on Saturday night posted on Facebook a defense of Muncie Liquors, noting the business "had absolutely nothing to do" with the sign. He also wrote that the city, the police department and the Fraternal Order of Police weren't connected to the sign either.
An online search shows the "Hate cops?..." slogan is widely available on T-shirts.
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By Zach Osowski, zach.osowski@courierpress.com
INDIANAPOLIS A committee tasked with reducing incidents of sexual misconduct in Hoosier schools spent its first meeting wondering if new laws need to be implemented or if the current laws just aren't being followed.
A rash of Indiana educators arrested or accused of inappropriate relationships with students prompted action from the Indiana General Assembly during the 2016 session. Lawmakers addressed background checks and mandated school officials file reports with law enforcement or the Department of Child Services immediately after receiving a report of child abuse or neglect.
That provision was contained inside the mega-education House Bill 1005. Also included: A mandate for lawmakers to look at ways to prevent more sexual misconduct incidents.
"We need to know how large of a problem this is," Committee member Sen. Jim Merritt, R-Indianapolis, said. "We need data."
Discussion during Monday's meeting ranged from the effectiveness of school employee background checks to consistency in reporting incidents.
In 2009, state lawmakers passed a bill requiring school employees pass a national background check before starting a job. Prior to that, the background check was just for incidents in Indiana. Anyone hired before 2009, however, might still be working for a school without a national background check on their record.
Committee members debated mandating new background checks for all school employees in the state but wondered how much something like that would costs schools. Mike McCarty, CEO of Safe Hiring Solutions, a company that provides background checks to about 250 school corporations in Indiana, said even national background checks wouldn't solve everything.
McCarty said in his experience most of the offenders who "cross the line" don't have a criminal history.
"I would say 60 to 70 percent of offenders are first-time offenders," McCarty said.
Parvonay Lynn Stover, spokeswoman for the Department of Child Services, said the biggest problem in her mind is a lack of reporting.
"We can't do anything if we don't hear about it," Stover said. "You need to call us, I can't stress that enough."
The committee will meet again in August.
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She also considers it a valuable goal to teach people how to say, and hear, "no." "We practice rejection so people can get used to hearing 'no' ... we do a very simple exercise: We put people in pairs where one person asks for a hug and the next person says 'No thank you.' If someone says 'No thank you' ... you say, 'Thanks for taking care of yourself' or 'Thanks for knowing your boundary.' There are so many reasons a person might say no to touch ... but maybe all they're saying is no thank you. And what a shame it would be for someone to walk away from that situation feeling rejected."
Tom mainly does private sessions, but he still considers a big part of his job to be instructional. "They leave these kind of practices realizing they have a lot more personal agency then they had before. When people learn they can just ask ... 'May I sit next to you?' 'Would you hold me?' These are things we think of as weird to ask ... but learning how to ask for things you need, and learning how to say no to yourself ... these stories of personal agency are revolutionary for some people."
Scott Varley / Daily Breeze
But be careful not to end up in an endless cycle of celebratory group hugs because someone learned how to ask for a group hug.
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The client base for this isn't just a bunch of oddly sweaty tech nerds or something. It's quite varied: "My most unique was a woman intending to be a nun, wanting to get cuddles in a way she knew would be nonsexual. So she had a cuddler with me, and with another female cuddler. One client is a widower -- out of a relationship, clearly. Grieving and in need of healthy human touch and connection. One person is a woman with disabilities which keep her housebound at least some of the time."
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EMC Shareholders Decisively Approve Dell Merger With 98 Percent In Favor
Matt Brown
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EMC shareholders voted in favor of the companys acquisition by Dell Inc., with 98 percent of votes representing about 74 percent of outstanding shares cast in favor of the $62.3 billion deal, according to preliminary results.
During a special meeting that lasted slightly more than 10 minutes Tuesday morning, shareholders approved the monster merger, as well as golden parachute payments that would be due to several top EMC execs should they be terminated the day after the deal closes.
Shareholders had the opportunity to discuss each vote, but none did so. EMC is expected to file a final vote tally with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission later Tuesday.
Related: Michael Dell On Driving Channel Growth, Dell-EMC's $4.5B R&D Investment And Naming A New Global Channel Chief
EMC Chairman and CEO Joe Tucci ran the meeting and assured shareholders that the whole board worked diligently to make sure the transaction with Dell is fair and provides the best value for your investment. He called the process focused, robust and rigorous, adding that the board had evaluated numerous alternatives to enhance shareholder value and concluded that the merger with Dell is by far the best outcome.
It has been a tremendous honor for me personally to lead this company, Tucci said after preliminary results were announced, praising EMC employees for their passion, dedication and hard work.
The only hurdle left for the merger, the largest in the history of the IT industry, is approval by Chinese anti-trust authorities. Dell Chairman and CEO Michael Dell told CRN recently that the deal is on track to close before the end of October and will probably close before then.
Solution providers said the vote makes the deal seem like more of a reality, and allows them to begin thinking about business strategy.
Weve been talking about it for so long, to see it come together now we can start to see what the landscape is going to look like, said Paul Neyman, president of Waypoint Solutions, a Houston-based Dell solution provider that recently started working with EMC. Weve been in the sit-and-wait state for so long, to have some real announcements is going to be huge for us. Having an answer means we can make some decisions, we can form a business strategy around EMC data protection, and bringing that on board, as well as Data Domain and Isilon. I think we can position those and some of the newer technologies.
EMC shareholders receive $24.05 plus 0.111 share of tracking stock issued by Dells parent company, Denali Holding. The value of the tracking stock is tied to VMwares performance. As originally proposed, the deal totaled about $67 billion, but VMwares fluctuating stock price has brought the value of the deal down to about $62.3 billion.
The merger will create a more-than-$70-billion, global IT industry powerhouse with strong positions in markets from PCs to high-end data centers and cloud computing.
EMC, Hopkinton, Mass., had been under considerable pressure from activist investor Elliott Management to boost shareholder value by breaking up the companys so-called federation of companies. No investors publicly opposed the merger with Dell.
EMC Monday filed what may be its last quarterly earnings, which showed second-quarter revenue flat with the same period a year prior, and a 19 percent jump in quarterly profit to $581 million on the strength of the companys all-flash and hyper-convergence product lines.
VMware, which is 80 percent owned by EMC, reported second-quarter revenue of $1.7 billion, an 11 percent year-over-year increase, as well as a 54 percent profit increase to $265 million.
How Much Do Your VPs and C-Suite Execs Make?
The 40 highest-paid vice presidents and c-suite executives (other than CEOs) from publicly traded distributors and channel partners in the top 100 of CRN's 2016 Solution Provider 500 rankings raked in nearly $149 million of compensation last year. But only 17 percent or $25.3 million of that came in the form of salary.
Nearly 46 percent, or $68.1 million, of the lieutenants' total compensation came from stock awards, while an additional 12 percent, or $18.2 million, came from option awards. Bonuses made up an additional 19 percent, or $28.4 million, of the compensation package.
Publicly-traded companies based in the United States are required to disclose the compensation of all named executive officers to the Securities and Exchange Commission before the annual shareholder meeting.
Pullmantur Cruises today announced that the 1990-built Horizon will sail a Canary Islands program embarking passengers in the Port of Santa Cruz de Tenerife this winter.
The week-long program has 16 scheduled departures, starting on November 26.
Guests will visit Santa Cruz de Tenerife, La Palma, Agadir, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. The Horizon is 46,811 tons and takes 1,828 passengers.
Pullmantur said capacity is expected to be around 25,000 passengers for a total economic impact of more than 12 million euro for the region.
Last season, the Horizon sailed a Caribbean program, and has also been deployed to South America in prior years. Pullmantur has traditionally not had a winter program in Europe.
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BRIDGEPORT After more than a year of backbreaking planning, social media director John Grasso will lead 232 pilgrims aged 16 to 35 from the Bridgeport Diocese on the trip of lifetime across the Atlantic Ocean and onto Polish soil.
The delegation has never sent more than 30 travelers to World Youth Day, and anything over 200 representatives is no longer a far-fetched ambition, but a realized accomplishment. The diocese has 82 parishes situated throughout Fairfield County.
Once we arrive, I want the pilgrims to embrace not just their faith, but also to light a fire surrounding the more than one million Catholics their age, said Grasso. I would like them to see both the welcoming and struggling faces of those around them and know that they are never alone, whether there are internal or external challenges. Solidarity permeates throughout young people.
Grasso made sure to acknowledge those vital to the trips planning, most notably Bishop Frank J. Caggiano.
I am inevitably grateful to the Bishop Caggiano for his drive and zeal that put all of this together, Grasso said. When he came here from Brooklyn, this was one of the first projects that he enacted because the trip is in line with the values used in the church. He believed that travel allowed the church to come together in solidarity with a common mission, not to mention the importance of going into the world and meeting others who share a similar faith.
Caggiano is one of 13 American bishops going to Poland to teach on WYD, where the United States will be sending 85 bishops and 40,000 pilgrims to the festivities.
I have had the privilege of attending three other World Youth Day events, and I hope that this will energize and give hope to our pilgrims while allowing them to love the church, said Caggiano. This is a tremendous experience where young people can live as they are living, not alone. WYD encourages friendship and enthusiasm, so that these pilgrims can continue their journey of faith.
Administrative Assistant Janet Davis will be a prominent member of the trip. Grasso thanked her for her contributions to the preparation, saying Janet is the right hand of Youth Day, and without her and all of her hard work, this would not have happened.
The 12-day pilgrimage commences on July 22. Prior to teaming up with the rest of the attendees and welcoming Pope Francis in Krakow on July 27, the group will make its way to Auschwitz, the German concentration camp that took millions of lives, such as saints Edith Stein and Maximilian Kobe. The delegation will also visit Czestochowa, where Jasna Gora is located, the monastery that is home to the Black Madonna icon.
Im still trying to figure out my faith and what it means in everyday life, said Katrina Pesta, a 25-year old member of the St. Matthew Parish in Norwalk. I am really excited to attend the huge Mass at the end with the pope, where one million will be celebrating with a wide variety of cultures and identities.
In order for many to reach the estimated $3,750 needed for the trip, there has been many outlets for fundraising.
Everyone should have a fair chance to attend and money should not be an impediment, Caggaino said. Each of the past two years, the church has put aside $250,000, and over 100 scholarships have been awarded because many families dont have the financial means to pay for a trip that costs roughly $4,000.
Grasso explained one of the portions of the pilgrimage he has marked on his calendar as a very exciting opportunity.
I am looking forward to the Stations of the Cross with the Holy Father, he said. The pope is dynamic, engaging and passionate in participation, and this is the essence of our faith.
With Poland selected as the site for the 2016 event, Grasso believes there could not have been a better place nominated.
As members of the church, we are supposed to be a loving, open, forgiving body of people, he said. Poland, the land of the divine and the home of St. John Paul II, has a rich faith that embraces mercifulness, and there is no better destination chosen by Pope Francis.
Leaders, chaperones and pilgrims from the Bridgeport Diocese have put in hours of industrious work, and soon it will be time for them to reap the benefits.
We are all really thrilled to enter this uncharted territory, with most of our pilgrims having never traveled internationally before, Grasso said. I want all of the pilgrims to understand that faith is much bigger than themselves, and that the world is so awesome, and by extension, so is our Catholic faith.
CLEVELAND Donald Trumps campaign manager brushed aside charges of plagiarism Tuesday in the opening night GOP convention speech of Melania Trump, who, he said, is the victim of a smear by Hillary Clinton.
Speaking to a GOP contingent from his native Connecticut, Paul Manafort downplayed the unfolding controversy over the primetime debut of Trumps spouse.
Trumps campaign is under scrutiny after a passage of Melania Trumps speech was nearly verbatim of a 2008 speech by Michelle Obama at the Democratic National Convention.
This is once again Hillary feeling threatened by a woman and going after her, Manafort told about 100 members of the state GOP during a breakfast for the delegation.
A request for comment was left Tuesday with Clintons campaign.
Manafort rejected that Trump, a Slovenian-born former model and businesswoman, cribbed off parts of Obamas speech.
Last night, what she spoke about was how proud she was to become an American, Manafort said. Michelle Obama has no connection with that. Listen, the fact that both women love their family love their children and have compassion, theres no ownership of those feelings or those words.
More News Conn. GOP gets front row seat for Trump convention
This is what Trump said Monday:
From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise, that you treat people with respect. They taught and showed me values and morals in their daily lives. That is a lesson that I continue to pass along to our son
And we need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow. Because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.
Here is the excerpt from Obamas 2008 speech:
"And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you're going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them, and even if you don't agree with them.
And Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values, and to pass them on to the next generation. Because we want our children -- and all children in this nation -- to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.
Manafort characterized the controversy as a non-issue.
Thats what its come to, Manafort said. Theres nothing that is going to stop the fact that Melania Trump gave a very poignant speech last night and it moved America. That feeling is going to maintain itself regardless of how much they try to disparage it today. Were, in Trump fashion, not backing down on that or anything that they may throw at us.
neil.vigdor@scni.com; 203-625-4436; http://twitter.com/gettinviggy
STAMFORD The citys downtown is about to get a little hipper following a newly-approved University of Connecticut student housing proposal.
A new group of younger residents will bring vibrancy and a more dynamic atmosphere to the city, said Jackie Lightfield, executive director of the Stamford Partnership. Were going to have a much more urban college campus feel.
The long-awaited UConn dormitory project received its final city approval Monday night when the Zoning Board voted unanimously to move the project forward.
The selected site, a mixed-use development at 900 Washington Blvd., is about a block from the universitys Stamford campus at Broad and Franklin streets.
This is a good thing for our small businesses especially those that sell pizza and beer, Lightfield said. They get a new pool of customers and a new pool of young workers.
Developer Randy Salvatore, president of RMS, requested the Zoning Board change the residential component of his previously approved development to dormitories from high-end rental apartments.
We are very pleased that the Zoning Board approved this project, Salvatore said. Now it can finally become a reality.
The building under construction adjacent to the Government Center is expected to be completed by the end of the year.
Were grateful that the citys leadership, business community and residents have been so supportive of this proposal to bring UConn students downtown to live near the campus, UConn spokeswoman Stephanie Reitz said. Stamford has such vibrancy, and UConn is excited that our students will get a chance to add to that and benefit from it.
Salvatores housing development was chosen by UConn out of a pool of 11 applicants around the city. The university, which first sought proposals for campus housing in Stamford in 2014, was looking for plans that could house between 200 and 400 students.
This was an easy decision ... absolutely nothing wrong with this choice, Zoning Board Chairman Thomas Mills said. We love to see more expansion.
The UConn Board of Trustees was expected to conduct a final review of the project on Wednesday, but Reitz said a technical issue with the agreement will delay the boards vote on the proposal.
I am optimistic that the Board of Trustees will want to move forward with this, Salvatore said. Its great for both the university and the city.
Salvatore previously said UConn had already signed a letter of intent to lease the residential portion of the mixed-use development.
The amendment application before the Zoning Board Monday included a request to reduce the number of units that were originally planned to 116 from 122 to accommodate UConns need for more two-bedroom dorms.
The board requested to be notified if either residential or retail space cannot be filled.
Were hoping within three years, the building will be fully occupied, Mills said.
The target occupancy for the building is 290 students, with a maximum capacity of 350. About a quarter of the bedrooms would be single occupancy, while the rest would house two students. Students could move into the dorms as soon as the fall 2017 semester.
With approval from the Zoning Board, UConn can now take over as the buildings primary operator.
nora.naughton@scni.com; twitter.com/noranaughton
Network 7 Media Center announced the promotion of Jordan Wagner, former production manager. Mr. Wagner is named director of production services and responsible for the oversight of production operations for live, pre-production and studio services. He will also oversee the hiring of production personnel and the supervision of more than 20 staff partners who provide contract services on multiple live media events supported by Network 7 each year. He will report directly to Network 7s Executive Director Christopher Beason.Mr.Beason made the announcement on May 2 saying, Jordan has been an invaluable asset to our team for nearly 10 years, beginning as a part-time intern while he completed his degree at Southern Adventist University in nearby Collegedale. He was promoted to full-time production assistant, and then quickly transitioned to production manager. We anticipate that he will continue to advance with the ever-expanding needs of a global media ministry like Network 7.
Windber-Portage renew rivalry in Week 10 Heritage-WestPAC crossover
Check out what to watch on Friday night in Somerset County as the high school football regular season comes to a close in Week 10.
Faculty Senate approves no-confidence vote on Sasse as UF president
The UF Faculty Senate held an emergency meeting about the choice of Senator Ben Sasse from Nebraska as the sole finalist for university president.
During the third annual American Heroes Dinner, Bill and Linda Hullander were presented with the 2016 American Patriot Award by the Honoring the Sacrifice Foundation.
The American Patriot Award was established by the foundation to honor those individuals who demonstrate dedication, achievement, integrity, and a commitment to service in support of our severely-wounded service men and women.
Founded by local wounded warrior SGT Andrew Smith and his wife Tori, the Honoring the Sacrifice Foundation provides assistance, both financial and material, to meet the unique needs of post 9/11 severely-wounded men and women who fought for the freedoms that we enjoy.
The award is a custom-designed glass sculpture created by local glass blower and artist Chris Mosey at Ignis Glass Studio and Gallery.
Charles Duhigg has identified the power of keystone habits which could be summarized as small changes or habits that people introduce into their routines that unintentionally carry over into other aspects of their lives.
Working with God to Form the Future
Prayer is one such keystone habit that carries over into other aspects of your life, but also, stunningly and inexplicably sometimes, cascades solid and lovely alteration into the lives of the beneficiaries of your prayer.
It is of course the mechanism that God has invented, utilizing the simple power of request, to permit us to collaborate with him in determining the future. Your plea
on Monday
morning, may just alter the life, perceptions, and occurrences of folks
next Thursday
.
Do you ever think of it that way? Determining the future? Really? But how else would you describe it, if of course, you think that prayer is anything. You are asking in your prayers, as CS Lewis has sagely identified, God to bring about a state of affairs that does not presently exist. In other words, God has, according to Blaise Pascal, given you the dignity of causality with the petitions you bring to his notice.Your pleas to Christ cause alterations in history to be. You ask Him for things, and he says, yes, or no, or hold on a minute, or wait for a while. But you are helping to pray tomorrow and all the tomorrows afterward into existence.Epaphras, the ancient MMA-Fighter with the Divine, had a vocation to wrestle with God. Its hard to imagine garnering such a reputation without some strain, ardor, and intensity. And of course the persistence and fire for God-wrestling spring, largely, from believing that what you are doing, well, matters. Maybe even a lot.The congregation I am privileged to serve has entered into our own ring with the Almighty to engage in a daily keystone habit on behalf of students in our community.Its an inter-generational initiative called the Pray for Me campaign , home-grown here in Chattanooga by Tony Souder at the Chattanooga Youth Network. It aspires to help churches all over to pray with ardent affection and nurturing connection for the students and little ones entrusted to our care.Students who are being educated every minute internally and by many confused cultural teachers that their every desire is to be obeyed; students who are coming to think it normal to sext with one another, cavalierly begging for and swapping nude photos of themselves.And if not to that extreme, students who are in a restless pursuit of self-branding through social media, hankering for approvals, likes, and social applause that proves flimsy in the creation and sustenance of worth and affection they were made to crave.Students who are surrounded by intelligent voices and powerful personalities that make the life of faith seem anemic and irrelevant for them.Students swirling in a haze of confusion, despair, crumbling foundations for religious belief, and a widespread clamoring that what God calls evil is actually good, and that Gods good is decisively restrictive, and most likely, evil.Students who are distracted, over-booked, over-scheduled, under-equipped in the ways of apprenticing with Jesus.But these students are in our community. Entrusted to us. Some have been baptized into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Breathing deeply mercy air. Dwelling in a congregation, like yours, that aspires to be a circulatory system of nourishing grace. They are the recipients of promises. They have had oaths pledged to them by Him who put the blue in their eyes, the soft in their skin, and the curls in their hair. And He has given them us! To plead for them, as if it mattered. Because it does.Ill venture a wager that most of us who endeavor to make some serious praying part of our daily regimen, will find a number of spill-over features in in the moments and movements of our days too. Few things will heighten your expectancy than beginning to pray for the Saviors movement in the moments ahead of you.Pleading for Gods intervention tends to make you start looking for it, just as not pleading tends to make you look for little. And because it isnt merely a psychological exercise, a wrestling sort of prayer, will undoubtedly yield tremors, energies, and movements. You might actually start to believe God exists.No, I mean, really believe it.And more than that, that he does things. Particular things. Stunning things. Everywhere things.Perhaps your congregation would like to give it a whirl? Everything you need to find out more is here . And I should I say, the folks at Pray for Me dont even know I am writing this! I am doing so only because I have found it an invaluable goal and precious aspiration in my life to be able to wrestle for the teenagers that have been assigned to me for prayer. And I know that many adults and adolescents alike could repeat the sentiment in our midst.Whether you participate formally or not, lets break out our Pray for Me prayerbook, and/or our Bibles and ask our patient Lord to teach us how to honor the baptismal commitments we made to our congregations young when we stood to flank parents holding these cooing beauties and promised wed not leave them to parent by their sole lonesomes.Lets ask him to teach us how wrestle with him in prayer for teenagers, both in and outside of the church, and their formation, and for others that they may be mature and fully assured, standing firm in all the will of God. Lets ask that hed nourish our own confidence in this keystone habit and that hed creatively use our consistent and fervent prayers as a way to stand with him in opposition to the ruin of the world!
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Eric Youngblood is the senior pastor at Rock Creek Fellowship (PCA) on Lookout Mountain. Please feel free to contact him at eric@rockcreekfellowship.org or follow him on Twitter @GEricYoungblood.
Opinion Psychology
Its not enough for us to survive terrible experiences. Now were supposed to thrive because of them. Nonsense. Victims of trauma dont need to add a sense of failure to their burden.
At last, Britain has made a decision on renewing our nuclear defence system.
For nine years since Labour first took the decision in principle to replace Trident successive governments have done nothing but procrastinate, exasperating military top brass and strategic allies. So full marks to Theresa May for finally getting something done.
Maintaining a nuclear deterrent is more than mere symbolism.
It shows Nato we are committed to playing our full part in defending the West and reinforces the warning to other nuclear powers that if they use their weapons, they risk obliteration.
Nucelear defence system: Trident nuclear submarine, HMS Victorious, on patrol off the west coast of Scotland
This principle of Mutually Assured Destruction has ensured there hasnt been an atomic weapon detonated in war since 1945, despite some narrow escapes.
But there is more to the defence of the realm than renewing Trident. Campaigns from Kosovo to Iraq and Afghanistan have shown that having properly manned, highly-trained, well-equipped conventional forces are as important as a nuclear deterrent arguably more so.
For years, politicians have run down the armed forces they have been so ready to send into battle. So it was welcome when last year David Cameron agreed albeit reluctantly to spend two per cent of GDP on defence. That, however, is the minimum recommended by Nato and in these dangerous times may need to rise.
As the Chilcot report showed, underfunding and lamentable logistical failures meant that British soldiers were sent into Iraq with wholly inadequate kit, from deficient armoured vehicles to a shortage of boots. Such a betrayal must never happen again.
Selling off success
To most of us, ARM Holdings is not a household name. Yet this cutting-edge British technology company plays a part in the daily lives of hundreds of millions of people around the globe.
Based at Cambridge, it designs the microchips used in Apple and Samsung smartphones and is pioneering the so-called internet of things, by which household appliances are controlled directly from your mobile phone.
So the fact its about to be sold to a Japanese company Softbank and become the latest important British enterprise to be snapped up by foreign buyers, is a cause for profound concern.
SoftBank of Japan has struck a 24billion deal to purchase ARM, which designs microchips used in Apple smartphones
The 24.3billion price tag seems an excellent deal for shareholders and Softbank says it will stay in Cambridge and expand the workforce.
Chancellor Philip Hammond hailed the bid as proof that Britain has lost none of its allure to international investors since the Brexit vote.
That may indeed be good news but isnt this the sort of deal Theresa May was talking about just a week ago, when she promised radical Government action to defend important UK firms against foreign takeover?
ARM may not be vital to national security but it is a brilliant example of world-beating British innovation that we cannot afford to see fall into foreign hands.
For all the Japanese promises, shouldnt cast-iron guarantees be sought about the companys long-term future in Britain and the security of its 3,000 employees? Too much is at stake for a hasty waving-through of this sale.
With the pound having fallen sharply, there will soon be more raids on British firms. We need a strategy to ensure they dont harm the economy and cost jobs.
The first test for Theresa Mays patriotic and clearly stated policy of opposing overseas take-overs has come much sooner than the new Prime Minister could ever have imagined.
As a result of the fall in the value of the pound against the yen, Britains leading tech outfit has become subject to an audacious 24 billion bid by a giant Japanese corporation.
Based in Silicon Fen the Cambridge incubator for Britains thriving high-tech industries ARM Holdings designs the vast majority of silicon chips used in mobile phones across the world.
Based in Silicon Fen the Cambridge incubator for Britains thriving high-tech industries ARM Holdings designs the vast majority of silicon chips used in mobile phones across the world
It is a pioneer of research and development, building the smart components behind what economists call the internet of things.
These are the chips that connect iPhones and PCs to fridges and smart energy meters in the home, as well as technologies that are the brains behind computer apps used by Uber and Airbnb.
Confidence
Just a week ago, Mrs May said the Government should be capable of stepping in when a predator foreign firm tries to buy any business that is important to British communities.
Mindful of the long line of firms to have fallen prey to foreign takeovers, including Cadbury and Boots, Mrs May said that what she called transient shareholders who are mostly companies investing other peoples money are not the only people with an interest when firms are sold or close.
But there are worrying signs she has performed a U-turn, congratulating the Japanese boss and trusting in his promise of investment, doubling the number of jobs and keeping the company in Cambridge.
Of course, the takeover bid of ARM by SoftBank is a huge sign of confidence in British business and is proof that despite the doom-mongering of Project Fear Brexit offers the UK a golden opportunity to punch harder on the global stage.
ARM is a brilliant product of Cambridge University, which, along with Oxford, UCL, Imperial and other research centres such as Southampton and Warwick, shine brightly in disciplines (such as technology, life sciences and engineering) vital to the UKs high-tech future. These are a priceless resource the Government must nurture through investment if a vital area of our global competitiveness is not to be damaged.
The first test for Theresa Mays patriotic and clearly stated policy of opposing overseas take-overs has come much sooner than she could have imagined
ARM grew to its present scale under the tutelage of Warren East a man respected for his innovative management skills, who was drafted into Rolls-Royce to help it recover from a temporary loss of momentum.
Of course, the Japanese realise that bidding for a jewel in the crown of British technology is controversial. They seek to appease opposition by making a series of promises about the companys future.
For example, they pledge to maintain Cambridge as the headquarters and to invest heavily doubling the number of engineers it employs within five years.
But can British taxpayers whose millions help to fund the research-based education that fostered ARMs growth trust a firm such as SoftBank?
As someone who has watched the cavalier way in which UK governments have allowed some of our most precious technology companies be sold to foreign firms, only to see them stripped of value to this country, I have severe doubts.
For example, we witnessed how the 7.4 billion takeover of software firm Autonomy by U.S. giant Hewlett-Packard in 2011 led to dozens of the UK firms patents a critical measure in the tech world being moved from Cambridge to California... never to return.
Tragically, that proved to be a catastrophic loss of high-tech British skills and leadership.
This episode was just another grim example of the way governments Labour and Tory have stood idly by while valuable intellectual property has been lost overseas.
This has been a shabby betrayal and is the background to Mrs Mays noble intent of standing up against foreign takeovers of British businesses.
For its part, SoftBank has earned a rapacious reputation under the leadership of Masayoshi Son of being a buyer and seller of firms rather than as a nurturer of new technologies. Among its trophy purchases was Vodafone Japan, an offshoot of Britains mobile telephone giant.
We know from experience that promises made in the excitement of takeover bids by foreign vultures are rarely worth the paper they are written on.
A most egregious example was the fate of Britains world-famous chocolate company Cadbury. After it was bought by Kraft in 2010 and the U.S. conglomerate quickly broke its pledges, ministers ought to be very wary about any future foreign takeover bids.
For Cadbury, its workforce, and local communities, the result was devastating.
A promise to keep open the Wispa bar factory in Somerset was abandoned in days and the jobs moved to Poland.
Kraft also changed the ingredients of Dairy Milk to make it more suitable to international tastes.
The Exchequer lost hundreds of millions in corporation tax when Cadbury was re-domiciled in Switzerland.
Toothless
These broken promises exposed the toothlessness of the Takeover Panel, which is meant to police such deals.
This self-regulatory body has a habit of making tough rulings, but lacks stringent powers to enforce them.
Of course, politicians have always tried to protect British firms but, Im afraid to say, to little effect.
No 10 meeting: Chancellor Philip Hammond and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son yesterday
In his major report for the Coalition government in 2012, Tory grandee Lord Heseltine warned that Britain was in danger of losing its status as a great technological nation unless it scrutinised takeovers where cutting-edge science and engineering are at stake.
It is a warning Mrs Mays Government should take to heart including Chancellor Philip Hammond, who seems to have approved the ARM deal after meeting its Japanese suitor in Downing Street this week.
If pioneering companies such as ARM are allowed to be bought by overseas predators, the prospects for UK plc will be greatly damaged. The fact is that technology is an area where Britain has a much-envied reputation for creativity and excellence.
It is the centre for the video games industry, a champion of mobile telephony and is world-renowned for advanced silicon chips that power electronic devices.
And, recently, it has established a bridgehead in FinTech using modern technology to conduct financial transactions without having to go through the traditional, but cumbersome, system of banking.
The truth is that successive governments have been reluctant to stop overseas takeovers wishing the free market to operate naturally.
Predators
However, on occasions, it is vital that ministers intervene.
Thanks to campaigns by the Mail against several proposed takeovers by foreign firms such as BAE Systems being bought by rival Airbus Group and U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizers attempts to swallow AstraZeneca predators have been seen off.
In both these cases, the bids were dropped when the buyers recognised the formidable political obstacles.
Of course, the temptation for ARM shareholders to accept the 24 billion offer will be immense. If they agree, they would be in line for a 43 per cent premium to the value of ARMs shares before the offer a formidable gain.
As important as it may be to allow the free market to operate, our Government must not put the UKs greatest technological companies at risk.
Urgently, ministers should order an inquiry into the impact of such a deal on Britains ability to be a leader in silicon chip production.
Anyone with any sense must realise the importance of ARM to Britains future.
The Japanese clearly recognise its value as does one of its creators, Hermann Hauser, who says: It is the proudest achievement of my life. The proposed sale to SoftBank is a sad day for me and for technology in Britain.
Fellow Tory MP Sir Nicholas Soames refers to Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson on BBC2s Daily Politics as a Rhododendron ponticum an invasive plant species from the southern shores of the Black Sea.
Why so?
Boriss great-grand-father, journalist Ali Kemal, was a staunch opponent of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, a source reminds me.
Fellow Tory MP Sir Nicholas Soames refers to Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson on BBC2s Daily Politics as a Rhododendron ponticum
Star Wars actress Carrie Fisher, 59, who plays Princess Leia, has been advising the franchises new star, striking British actress Daisy Ridley, 24, confiding: Ive told Daisy not to go through the crew like wildfire Not that I went through the crew like wildfire. Of course not!
Rupert Murdochs fourth wife, Jerry Hall, 60, enjoys a cordial encounter with the media tycoons third wife, Chinese woman of mystery Wendi Deng, 47. Murdoch, 85, accompanied by Miss Hall, attended his daughter (by Miss Deng) Chloes 13th birthday party on the French Riviera.
The third and fourth Mrs Murdoch were pictured separately with the birthday girl in the resulting happy snaps. So civilised!
Rupert Murdoch (right) and Wendi Deng (left) celebrate daughter Chloe's (centre) birthday
Sacked Justice Secretary Michael Gove had to hand back the Great Seal of the Realm to the Queen personally. HM will have been acquainted by news reports with the theory that Gove was a suspected source of a Queen supports Brexit story. So I am sure she will have enjoyed their final encounter, says my royal source.
Re HM and outgoing politicos, Liberal Democrats Nick Clegg, Vince Cable and Ed Davey waited nearly two months before creeping into Buckingham Palace via a side door for their final meetings with the monarch after the 2015 election. With the royals on the balcony for an RAF flypast, they hoped their visit might go unnoticed by the world at large. Alas their visit got star billing in the Court Circular.
Prime Minister Theresa May does have a sense of humour. The proof: sending Priti Patel to International Development.
Prime Minister Theresa May does have a sense of humour. The proof: sending Priti Patel to International Development
Mrs Patel has demanded the abolition of the department. Appointing Sir Alan Duncan to work under Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson is amusing, too. Sir Alan disparages Johnson, referring to him once as Silvio Borisconi during PMQs, a reference to Italys libidinous ex-PM.
Chattanooga State Community College has been selected to participate in Achieving the Dream, the nations most comprehensive, non-governmental reform network for student success in higher education history, according to officials. Chattanooga State joins a network of more than 200 community colleges in 34 states across the U.S.
"Being selected as an Achieving the Dream institution is a great opportunity for Chattanooga State and our community," said President Flora Tydings. "According to the Chattanooga 2.0 Report, only 38% of Hamilton County residents have some type of postsecondary credential. Far too many Chattanooga State students arrive unprepared or leave before they finish. Achieving the Dream is a data-informed program designed to accelerate success among diverse student populations which will help us to drive better graduation results."
A leadership team from Chattanooga State joined 11 other colleges in Scottsdale, Az. now joining ATD to launch their work. This group of colleges will be the first group to use the capacity building framework from the start of their ATD work.
"Achieving the Dream acts as a catalyst to help colleges strengthen and build their capacity to ensure that more students complete post-secondary education and have greater opportunity for economic success," officials said.
The Lumina Foundation conceived Achieving the Dream as a national initiative in 2004 with the goal of success for more of the eight million community college students nationwide, especially students of color and low-income students. Success is defined by 1) the rates that students enroll in and successfully complete the initial college-level or gateway courses in subjects such as math and English, 2) successfully completing remedial or developmental instruction and advancing to credit-bearing courses, 3) completing the courses taken with a C grade or better, 4) persisting from one term to the next, and 5) earning a certificate or associate degree.
Chattanooga State is the third community college in Tennessee to be selected for Achieving the Dream.
She credits Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner as close friends.
And now Hailey Baldwin will use her star power to shine light on a luxury Australian brand.
The 19-year-old has been confirmed as the latest face of The Daily Edited and will collaborate with the brand on a capsule collection called #theHAILEYedited.
Scroll down for video
New face: Hailey Baldwin, 19, has been confirmed as the new face for luxury Australian label The Daily Edited
Practical: Hailey has worked with the brand to design a capsule collection that includes a backpack, clutch and passport holder
The collaboration will see the blonde beauty, who is the niece of actor Alec Baldwin, release a personalised leather backpack, clutch and passport holder through the label.
This is the first time Hailey has released a design collection, and she was involved in the process from sketch to realisation.
Her involvement in the design process saw her select components for the designs including leather, finish, colour-palette and hardware.
In discussion with The Daily Edited founders Alyce Tran and Tania Liu, Hailey described her personal style as simple and practical.
Practicality: Hailey described her personal style as simple and practical, and said the backpack she designed needed to be large enough to carry a 13-inch MacBook
Chic: The Daily Edited was founded by Alyce Tran and Tania Liu and is known for it's luxury leather and monogrammed designs
Her passion for practicality can be seen in the backpack which she insisted was large enough to hold a 13-inch MacBook.
The colour palette for #theHAILEYedited collection is neutral mist grey with pale pink trim detail with the passport holder will feature a perforated leather treatment.
'I am excited as this is the first time I am ever designing my own capsule collection, something I have always wanted to do,' she said.
Hailey's collaboration with TDE comes after she was announced as one of the faces of Guess' new autumn campaign.
Rising star: Hailey's collaboration the The Daily Edited comes after she was announced as one of the faces of Guess' new autumn campaign
Design focused: 'I am excited as this is the first time I am ever designing my own capsule collection, something I have always wanted to do,' Hailey said
Famous friends: Hailey, who is close pals with Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid, said her life is not as simple as it once was
The rising star, who previously dated popstar Justin Bieber, said she likes to think she is a 'normal girl', with an abnormal job.
'My life definitely isn't as simple as it used to be - the attention on me personally is a lot more,' she said.
'Things are a lot less simple, I used to live at home with my parents and wake up and go to school and then go to dance class and dance ballet seven days a week.
'Now I have to be very responsible, I have a job, I have to travel and I have to take care of myself.'
Her schedule will see her spend no more than one or two weeks at home in the space of five months.
Former face: Lara Worthington, nee Bingle, was previously the face of The Daily Edited
Personal touch: She modeled for the brand last year in a Christmas campaign with a clutch that was embossed with her initials
Luxe: Lara posed with a chic monogrammed clutch
Hailey is not the first celebrity to front a campaign for the luxury leather goods label.
The most recent ambassador for The Daily Edited was Lara Worthington, nee Bingle.
Lara, who is currently pregnant with her second child, modeled for the brand last year in a Christmas campaign with a clutch that was embossed with her initials, LW.
With a packed social calendar of weddings, beach days and Instagram-worthy vacations, its during the summer season, perhaps more than any other, when you need your nails to look on point at all times. Plus, there are so many fun colors to try.
While keeping a standing gel manicure appointment at your local nail salon seems like a no-brainer, its no longer the only long-lasting option.
A handful of nail polish brands have recently debuted lines of gel-manicure-inspired formulas that promise longevity without the UV light and the time-consuming removal process.
To find out whether these innovative, at-home gel-like lacquers live up to their claims, I put polishes from Essie, Nails Inc, Formula X, Revlon and Londontown to the test against a salon gel manicure for two weeks.
Read on below to see how they fared.
Changing the game: Brands like Essie and Nails Inc (above) have debuted stronger, gel-inspired formulas this summer
The ultimate test: To see how the at-home options stack up to the real thing, one FEMAIL reporter put them up against a salon gel manicure (above)
To kick off the Fourth of July weekend, I paid a visit to my neighborhood nail salon for a classic gel manicure...on just one hand.
After explaining the little experiment to my very confused and slightly horrified manicurist, I settled on a bright red color to be painted and cured on my right hand: OPI Gelcolor in Big Apple Red in the spirit of the holiday.
Still skeptical about sending me off with a half-done manicure, the technician insisted on grooming my left hand and giving each nail a layer of shiny base coat.
Waiting for me at my New York apartment were five bottles of at-home gel polishes and their corresponding top coats (while you can use regular top coat, for best results, using the specially formulated, complementary top coat is key) in white and blue hues to keep with the patriotic theme.
As I painted my fingers with my dominant hand, I was impressed at how smoothly and evenly each of the polishes went on. With the exception of the white polish from Londontown (which by the nature of the light color always requires an extra coat), none required more than two coats of lacquer.
Shop Essie's new Gel Couture line: Essie Gel Couture in Find Me a Man-Nequin ($11.50, ulta.com) and Essie Gel Couture Top Coat ($11.50, ulta.com)
Shop Londontown's two-step Gel Genius system: Londontown Lakur Enhanced Colour in Duchess ($16, londontownusa.com) and Londontown Kur Gel Genius Top Coat ($20, londontownusa.com)
Shop Nails Inc's coconut water-infused line: Nail's Inc Gel Effect Coconut Brights Collection in Portobello Terrace ($15, nailsinc.com) and Nails Inc Gel Effect Top Coat with Kensington Caviar ($15, nailsinc.com)
The very next day, both manicures were put to the ultimate test: The beach.
The salon gel manicure went unscathed, while the at-home mani suffered just a few minor chips at the tips. Looking back, this could have been avoided by painting a thin layer of polish across the top edge of each nail as a barrier of sorts.
To challenge both of the manicures' strength, I made sure to wash my dishes each night in hot, soapy water, without my trusty, manicure-protecting kitchen gloves.
At the seven day mark, the gel manicure on my right hand was still looking fresh. On my left hand, tiny air bubbles had appeared on the three nails painted with lighter colors from Nails Inc, Londontown and Revlon.
Still, it looked remarkably good for an at-home job. 'Wait, that's the same manicure from last week?' one friend commented a week after the paint had been applied.
Shop Formula X's new chip-resistant line: Formula X Full Strength Nail Polish in Game Changer ($12.50, sephora.com) and Formula X Shine Strength Nail Strengthening Top Coat ($16, sephora.com)
Shop Revlon's salon-quality, two-step system: Revlon ColorStay Gel Envy Nail Enamel in Lovestruck ($8, ulta.com) and Revlon ColorStay Gel Envy Diamond Top Coat ($8, ulta.com)
During week two, I went to the beach again, washed more soapy dishes and went on a grueling hike in the woods.
It was at this point that both manicures began to show their age. Spaces had developed between my cuticles and polish on every nail.
The gel manicure had accrued some slight dings and chips around the edges and had lost some of its shine. Though I decided to get the manicure soaked off on day 14, I could have gotten another five days out of it.
The self-painted manicure was also chipped along the edges, but more so. The air bubbles were more prominent and the bright sky blue hue from Nails inc on my pointer finger was riddled with cracks. After some consideration, I realized that the damage was likely due to the fact that when I type on my work computer, I employ that finger the most.
The results: After two weeks, the gel-inspired polishes were chipped around the edges and had suffered some cracks and air bubbles
Not bad! Also after two weeks, the salon gel manicure was just beginning to peel and lose its luster
I expected that the gel manicure would win out in the end, but still, the at-home options exceeded my expectations - especially those from Essie and Formula X, which fared the best of the bunch.
I also relished in how easy it was to take off the non-UV polishes. Simple acetone nail polish remover did the trick, and unlike the gel polish - which I got removed by a professional - the regular polishes didn't make my bare nails underneath feel weak or damaged.
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Miami Swim Week, one of the hottest fashion shows in the world for swimwear and beachwear, has wrapped up for 2016 and it was the Aussies who really made an impression this year.
Swimwear labels Robb and Lulu, Sirens Swimwear and Myra Swim all had runway shows at the fashion week, an impressive showing.
Model Robyn Lawley not only walked for swimwear brand Hammock, but also debuted her latest collection for her own swimwear range.
Feeling hot hot hot: Miami Swim Week has just wrapped up in Floria, with Australian brands and models like Robyn Lawley (above) making a splash
Work it: Model Natalie Roser (left) walked the runway in a number of shows whilst Instagram star Nadia Fairfax (right) enjoyed some time in the sun
Sun, sand, smile: Both the women posted snaps to Instagram showing how they were enjoying themselves in Miami
It wasn't just brands representing in Miami either, with Insta-stars Nadia Fairfax and Natalie Roser in attendance.
Fairfax has been uploading pictures to Instagram of her enjoying the sun in Miami, happily in bikinis for most of her trip.
Meanwhile Roser has been busy, walking in four shows during the week, showing off her modeling skills for brands Kaohs, Frankie's Bikinis, Issa De Mar and San Lorenzo Bikinis.
Neutrals: Australian brand Myra Swimwear showed off a their muted and classic designs in their runway show on Sunday
All in the detail: There was a range of interesting details on the one pieces, like one shoulder straps and corset-type ties
Cheeky: The brand's collection featured their usual high cut bottoms and low cut tops
When it came to shows, there was a variety of looks and feels from the Australian brands showing their collections.
Myra Swim's designs featured their usual classic styles with a cheeky twist. One pieces featured high cut bottoms and low cut necklines, with the bikinis a mixture of tiny triangles and blocked out bandeaus.
The colours were muted and simple, opting for a neutral palette of black, beige, green, taupe and maroon.
Queen of curves: Robyn Lawley (above) debuted her new collection for her swimwear range at poolside party on Sunday
Statement: The swimsuits featured plum tones and leather look black when it came to colours
Diversity: Keeping with the ethos of the brand, all of the models were plus size and wearing a range of styles of swimsuits
Standing out: Lawley wore a plum one piece with a scuplted neckline and a white crocheted skirt
The Robyn Lawley Swimwear x Bond Eye show wasn't a typical runway, but more of a beach party that showed off the designs.
Robyn herself looked stunning in a plum-coloured one piece with a sculpted neckline and a white crocheted skirt.The collection overall featured mostly plum and back leather-look swimsuits, with some white and grey-green pieces thrown in and one striking printed piece.
Keeping with the ethos of her brand, the models were all plus sized and wearing a range of different designs that are flattering on a range of shapes.
Party time: Robb and Lulu's show on Friday was a change from the other Aussie designers featuring, featuring bright colours
Tropical: Colourful patterns were also popular in the collection, for kaftans, jumpsuits and swimsuits
Accessorise: The look was completed with large, brightly coloured earrings and neon orange nail polish
In a change of pace from both Myra and Robyn Lawley, the Robb and Lulu show on Friday was bright, tropical and fun.
Hot pink and turquoise bikinis gave a definite summer holiday vibe, as did the patterned kaftans, jumpsuits and dresses.
On the runway the pieces were paired with large, brightly coloured earrings and bright nail polish, completely the look.
With fashion and style trends spreading faster and wider than ever before, people are searching for ways to express their individuality.
And with this has come a sharp rise in the demand (and supply) for fun, unique and stylish ways to personalise items - from fashion staples and accessories to homewares and make up.
Here, FEMAIL looks at the most stylish and quirky custom products on offer and the celebrities and key social influencers who love them.
Custom made: With style trends spreading faster and wider than ever, people are searching for fun, unique and stylish ways to personalise items (pictured are Bridget Malcolm and Kellie Hush with TDE phone cases)
Bold: Here, FEMAIL looks at the most stylish and quirky customisable products on offer and the celebrities and key social influencers who love them (pictured is Gigi Hadid with make up artist Pat McGrath's phone)
PERSONALISED FASHION
SHOES OF PREY
Started in Sydney in 2009 by Michael Fox, Mike Knapp and Jodie Fox, Shoes of Prey allows shoppers to design their own shoes online.
From flats, heels and wedges to sandals and boots, the Shoes of Prey 3D Design technology allows people to choose the shape, colour and height of their shoes.
As a result, people are able to adapt trends to suit their needs and rock the perfect heel, embellishment and material for them.
Custom shoes: From flat, heels and wedges to sandals and boots, the Shoes of Prey 3D Designer technology allows people to choose the shape, colour and height of their shoes
Pretty: As a result, people are able to adapt trends to suit their needs and rock the perfect heel, embellishment and material for them
The company has also collaborated with Australian designer, Carla Zampatti.
Women are invited to customise their very own Carla Zampatti heel, including the size and style of the toe strap, the type of heel, the heel height, the colour and the material.
The stores can be found in David Jones in Sydney and in Nordstrom stores across the Unites States and since the company launched, they have had over six million custom pairs of shoes designed.
Stunning: The stores can be found in David Jones in Sydney and in Nordstrom stores across the Unites States and since the company launched, they have had over six million custom pairs of shoes designed
Chic: Women are invited to customise their very own heel, including the size and style of the toe strap, the type of heel, the heel height, the colour and the material
PINS TO KILL
Melbourne-based business, Pins To Kill, allows women to design their own leggings.
Started by Lindra Vydra in early 2016, Pins to Kill offers women the opportunity to stamp their leggings with personal photos, custom patterns and bold block colours.
Women are also able to include a personal message on the inside bands of the leggings.
The leggings cost between $75 and $89 depending on whether they are custom made.
Fit and fashionable: Melbourne-based business, Pins To Kill, allows women to design their own leggings
Unique: Started by Lindra Vydra in early 2016, Pins to Kill offers women the opportunity to stamp their leggings with personal photos, custom patterns and bold block colours
PERSONALISED ACCESSORIES
THE DAILY EDITED
The Daily Edited was launched by Australian lawyers Tania Liu and Alyce Tran in 2014 and it has since grown into a successful business empire.
The stylish company is known for their chic monogrammed products - from phone cases and laptop covers to clutches, key rings and overnight bags.
The feminine leather products are designed to take customers from day to night and can be monogrammed with full names, initials or messages in gold, silver and blind (indented into the leather) emboss.
Customers can also stamp their items with a monogram of their signature or a word in their own handwriting.
Celeb favourite: TDE is known for their chic monogrammed products - from phone cases and laptop covers to clutches, key rings and overnight bags (pictured is Bridget Malcolm with her TDE clutch)
Day to night: The feminine leather products are designed to take customers from day to night and can be monogrammed with full names, initials or messages in gold, silver and blind (indented into the leather) emboss
MON PURSE
Much like TDE, Australian company Mon Purse is known for their monogrammed items - especially their handbags and leather goods.
Started by Lana Hopkins, the company allows women to own a handbag they 'really love' rather than buying a pre-made item from a store.
Those who wish to design their own handbag can choose from a range of styles including shoppers, totes, pouches and classic clutches.
They then choose their preferred leather, the texture, a colour, a suede lining colour, a metal detail colour and a personalised monogram.
A personal touch: Much like TDE, Australian company Mon Purse is known for their monogrammed items - especially their handbags and leather goods (pictured is Jodi Anasta with a Mon Purse clutch)
Glam: Those who wish to design their own handbag can choose from a range of styles including shoppers, totes, pouches and classic clutches
Down to the details: Started by Lana Hopkins, the company allows women to own a handbag they 'really love' rather than buying a pre-made item from a store
RAY BAN
While Ray Ban is known for their range of sunglasses, few are aware that they are able to go online and design their very own custom pair.
On their website, Ray Ban invites customers to design their perfect pair of sunglasses - from bold aviators to Original Wayfarers.
Included in their personalisation options are the type of lens, the colour and style of the frames, the temple tip colour, the size and an engraving.
Customers are given a live visual of what their sunglasses will look like, the price and the opportunity to choose their very own case to complete their order.
The perfect pair: While Ray Ban is known for their range of sunglasses, few are aware that they are able to go online and design their very own custom pair
A pair for everyone: Included in their personalisation options are the type of lens, the colour and style of the frames, the temple tip colour, the size and an engraving
KEEP IT PERSONAL
Keep It Personal, an Australian company launched in 2014, offers a wide range of personalised products.
Their most popular items include custom denim shirts and winter capes where women are able to have their names or a message embroidered on the front or the back.
They can also do the same thing with glitter and have t-shirts, caps, jackets and shoes personalised to their own tastes.
Keep It Personal: The Australian company launched in 2014, offers a wide range of personalised products (pictured is Delta Goodrem in her personalised Keep It Personal denim shirt)
A simple addition: Their most popular items include personalised denim shirts and winter capes where women are able to have their names or a message embroidered on the front or the back
Adding some sparkle: They can also do the same thing with glitter and have t-shirts, caps, jackets and shoes personalised to their own tastes
HAUS OF DIZZY
Started by Kristy Dickinson, Sydney-based Haus of Dizzy is known for their quirky and bold homemade jewellery.
The eye-popping pieces can also be personalised, with customers able to purchase large earrings and necklaces with their names or a custom message on them.
The personalised name necklaces cost between $59 and $79 (depending on the size) and for an extra fee, the colours can also be customised.
The earrings cost $59 and the colours can also be customised for an extra fee.
Bold: Started by Kristy Dickinson, Sydney-based Haus of Dizzy is known for their quirky and bold homemade jewellery
Unique: The eye-popping pieces can also be personalised, with customers able to purchase large earrings and necklaces with their names or a custom message on them
PERSONALISED COSMETICS
THE LIP LAB
The Lip Lab is the first company of its kind in Australia.
It allows women to meet with a professional lip colour consultant to choose, mix and apply their own shades of lipstick suited to them.
Customers are invited to attend their store in Paddington, New South Wales, and choose from a range of micas and pigments, before the experts mix them and make it for the customer on the spot.
Within 15 minutes, customers are able to walk away with their own custom blended lipstick removing the need to search for the perfect shade at cosmetics stores.
Make your own lipstick: The Lip Lab is the first company of its kind in Australia (pictured is blogger Chloe Morello visiting the Lip Lab)
Creative: It allows women to meet with a professional lip colour consultant to choose, mix and apply their own shades of lipstick suited to them
Happy customer! Femail reporter Lauren Ingram tried out The Lip Lab's services, and was pleased with the colour matched to her skin tone
JO MALONE
While London-based company Jo Malone is known for their fragrances, candles and skincare, they also offer customers the opportunity to customise their own perfume.
Known as 'fragrance combining' customers can visit the company's website and tailor their own scent and decide whether they want something citrus, fruity, floral, spicy or woody based.
They are then given two fragrances to combine - from lime basil and mandarin combined with pomegranate to blackberry combined with orange.
Customers can also visit stores to experience a personalised fragrance combining consultation.
Your choice: While London-based company Jo Malone is known for their fragrances, candles and skincare, they also offer customers the opportunity to customise their own perfume
Tailored to you: Known as 'fragrance combining' customers can visit the company's website and tailor their own scent and decide whether they want something citrus, fruity, floral, spicy or woody based
PERSONALISED HOMEWARES
WEST ELM
West Elm, a New York-based homewares company, offers customers the opportunity to personalise their bedroom with style.
For $12 AUD, customers can monogram their favourite linen pieces with icons, initials or both.
Included in the pieces able to be monogrammed are cotton and satin sheets, pillowcases, duvet covers and cushions.
Monogram it all: West Elm, a New York-based homewares company, offers customers the opportunity to personalise their bedroom with style
Simple touch: For $12 AUD, customers can monogram their favourite linen pieces with icons, initials or both
ANYA HINDMARCH
London-based company Anya Hindmarch, allows customers to have drawings or messages in their own handwriting embossed on a range of items including weekend bags, phone cases, wallets and stationery.
On top of accessories, they also offer bespoke leather keepsake boxes to have around the house - each of them able to be personalised with an embossed message and a photo inside the lid.
They also offer bespoke wash/cosmetics bags where customers can have their favourite photos printed onto the outside.
Homey: On top of accessories, Anya Hindmarch offers bespoke leather keepsake boxes to have around the house - each of them able to be personalised with an embossed message and a photo inside the lid
Favourite memories: They also offer bespoke wash/cosmetics bags where customers can have their favourite photos printed onto the outside
At present, Mr Erras's Instagram account has more than 91,000 followers
The projects allow Mr Erras to go off the beaten track when in cities
The photographer uploads these photos to his Instagram, Parisian Floors
Marrakesh. Paris. Venice. London.
Some of the world's most beautiful cities invite you to look up and around you. From palaces to churches, architecture and scenery, most places are filled with things to engage with.
But one German photographer, Sebastian Erras, is advising people to look down instead.
Via his much-followed Instagram account, @parisianfloors, Mr Erras documents beautiful floors from the cities he has visited.
Works of art: German photographer, Sebastian Erras, captures some of the world's most beautiful floors (pictured) and shares his photos on his Instagram account, Parisian Floors
Sumptuous: Though his account is called Parisian Floors, Mr Erras has visited the likes of Marrakesh, Barcelona, Antwerp and London to capture their floors on camera
So far, the talented photographer has shot the likes of Marrakesh, Barcelona, Paris, London, Venice and Antwerp on his camera, uploading various series of beautiful, mosaic and patterned floors to his account.
At present, Parisian Floors has more than 91,000 followers on Instagram, and they visit the page for a different flavour from the many history-laden cities.
'This colourful floor can be found at the Bloomsbury Coffee House just next to the one I already posted a few days ago,' one caption to a recent photo from a collaboration with PixartPrinting reads.
'I hope you enjoyed the London floors and that I inspired you a little to go discover these floors yourself. Remember to check out the map we made for London!'.
Look down: His popular Instagram account has 91,000 followers based around the world - and shows off countless picturesque floors
History laden: Mr Erras provides the details of every floor he posts in the captions section of Instagram - this floor, for instance, can be found at the Bloomsbury Coffee House in London
Look around: Mr Erras often encourages his followers on his page to notice the ground beneath their feet whenever they are out and about
Mr Erras includes the full details for each floor he captures on camera, and encourages his followers each time he posts to notice the ground beneath their feet whenever they are out and about.
The photographer started shooting floors and posting them on Instagram just over a year ago, when, after visiting Marrakesh in May, he was captivated by the country and its vibrant, detailed tile floors.
The idea is kind of that the viewer walks through my feet over all these beautiful floors in the city
'The idea of photographing floors came when I visited the Bahia Palace in Marrakesh,' Mr Erras tells Daily Mail Australia.
'While there, I found some beautiful mosaic floors which I started taking pictures of. I included my feet to reference the fact that they were actually floors.'
After his first series of snaps from Marrakesh proved popular, Mr Erras travelled to several other cities with his camera lens, each time uploading the beautiful floors he found alongside different pairs of brogues standing on them.
'The feet and shoes represent me,' Mr Erras tells Daily Mail Australia, when asked about why he always includes them in his pictures.
'By including them in the picture, I not only give a measure of scale but also include a personal element.
'The idea is kind of that the viewer walks through my feet over all these beautiful floors in the city.'
Labour of love: The photographer started shooting floors and posting them on Instagram just over a year ago, when, after visiting Marrakesh in May, he was captivated by the country and its vibrant, detailed tile floors
Countless places: He has now visited cities including Antwerp, Barcelona, London and more looking for beautiful floors
Unusual: The good thing about the Instagram account, many commenters have said, is that it showcases a different side to cities filled with landmarks that are frequently posted on Instagram
Not always seen: Instead of sticking to the tourist-y parts of places, Mr Erras travels far and wide, to distinctively-floored bakeries, art galleries and more, all in search of the perfect floor
The good thing about the Instagram account, many commenters have said, is that it showcases a different side to cities filled with landmarks that are frequently posted by people on Instagram.
Instead of sticking to the tourist-y places, Mr Erras travels far and wide, to distinctively-floored bakeries, art galleries and more, all in search of the perfect tapestry.
'This project is definitely great if you want to discover a city through a new perspective,' Mr Erras says to Daily Mail Australia.
'You start to discover a different side of the city and you get to visit areas where as a tourist you wouldnt necessarily go.'
Samantha Cameron and the Duchess of Cambridge are widely regarded as two of the UK's most stylish women so it's hardly surprising that Melania Trump appeared to take sartorial tips from the stylish duo.
Donald Trump's 46-year-old wife was a vision wearing an off-white Roksanda dress as she spoke to the Republican Nation Convention on Monday night in Cleveland, Ohio.
The Slovenian immigrant, who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2006, wowed in the dress described as a 'beautiful option for the modern bride' by the e-commerce site Net-a-Porter.
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Melania Trump took to the stage to deliver remarks on the first day of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland and stunned in a 1,668 Roksanda dress just days after Samantha Cameron and the Duchess of Cambridge wore theirs
The 1,668 dress by Ilinicic promptly sold out following the model's appearance on the RNC stage.
The knee-length garment is a conservative piece, 'designed with a nipped-in waist and dramatic bell sleeves in a contrasting basketweave', according to its description.
Melania hand-picked the dress cotton silk off-white Roksanda 'Margot' dress because she 'liked it', a spokeswoman said.
'Melania will be recast as the next Jackie O. She speaks four languages, ' a Trump adviser told the New York Post.
The dress by Ilinicic retails at $2,190 and promptly sold out following the model's appearance on the RNC stage
Melania hand-picked the dress cotton silk off-white Roksanda 'Margot' dress because she 'liked it', a spokeswoman said
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, right, greets his wife Melania after introducing her during the Republican National Convention
London-based designer Roksanda has risen swiftly and steeply through fashion's ranks since settling in the capital in 1999.
And her ascent has been assisted by some extremely important women, all of whom have been busy filling their wardrobes with her vibrant colours and statement dresses.
Indeed, Samantha Cameron claims the title of Ilincic's staunchest fan and is often seen wearing her idiosyncratic and ever-elegant creations.
For her last appearance outside Downing Street as the wife of the Prime Minister last week, the ever immaculate and stylish Samantha no doubt wanted to leave a lasting impression.
So it's no surprise she opted for a 1,490 graphic print dress by Roksanda. Mrs Cameron wore the elegant dress with a zip front from the designer's 10 year anniversary capsule collection, to accompany her husband to Buckingham Palace as he officially tendered his resignation.
And the 45-year-old pulled off the bold print with aplomb, pairing it with black suede pointed court shoes and a patent black belt.
For her last appearance outside Downing Street as the wife of the Prime Minister, the ever immaculate and stylish Samantha Cameron no doubt wanted to leave a lasting impression
Roksanda's colourful designs are also a favourite of the Duchess of Cambridge who only last week recycled a yellow and white dress to ensure she stood out from the crowds at Wimbledon.
She first sported the frock on a visit to the Sydney Opera House on the official royal tour of Australia and New Zealand in 2014.
On the same trip, she chose one of the designer's more understated creations - a dove grey dress with an asymmetric neckline as she arrived at Ayers Rock airport.
Michelle Obama is also a fan of the Central St Martin graduate's outfits, choosing a striking geometric print dress for her final farewell to Cambodia after a five-day visit last year.
The Duchess of Cambridge only last week recycled a yellow and white dress to ensure she stood out from the crowds at Wimbledon
She also opted to wear the designer on a visit to an indigenous Training Academy in Ayers Rock, Australia, in 2014, left, and to the Patron's Lunch, an event to mark Queen Elizabeth's 90th birthday in 2016
U.S. First lady Michelle Obama wearing a dress by Roksanda at Westminster Abbey in 2011
Caroline Rush, Natalie Massenet and Samantha Cameron at the Roksanda show during London Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2016
On a tour of Westminster Abbey in 2011, the First Lady wore a purple wool cowl neck dress with a jewelled belt by Roksanda.
The Serbian-born, London-based clothes-maker, whose celebrity fans also include Princess Beatrice, Keira Knightley and Gwyneth Paltrow, serves up culottes, cocktail party dresses and colourful block heels season after season.
The designer studied architecture at Belgrade University and fashion design at the Faculty of Applied Arts before coming to London to study at Central Saint Martins.
Emma Stone, Laura Carmichael and Tilda Swinton are among the other sartorially clued-up women who appreciate her bold colour-blocking and clean, unfussy lines.
Parenting bloggers are normally admired for their idyllic representations of childhood posted on social media.
But one mother-of-two has earned praise for doing the opposite of that - after sharing a picture of the aftermath of her two-year-old daughter's 'diaper blow out'.
The unashamedly real image, posted on Facebook, shows Esther Anderson, 31, from Rochester, New York, holding Ellia with a huge brown stain on the back of her baby-grow and on her mother's shorts.
Messy: Esther Anderson, from Rochester, New York, shared a picture on Facebook of herself and her daughter Ellia after her diaper leaked
Too much information? The mother-of-two and parenting blogger said it was the 'second blow out of the day'
Popular: The photo of Esther, pictured with her daughters Ellia and Tessa and husband Thad, has been liked by more than 13,000 people
The mother-of-two writes a blog Story of This Life which also features her husband Thad, 32, who works in construction, and their other daughter Tessa, three months,
She wrote alongside the picture: 'Second blow out of the day, and let me tell you...this one wasn't nearly as bad as this morning's.
'Let's just say Ellia might go back into her pull-ups for tonight,' read the caption accompanying the image.'
She added: 'This was that "aw man I don't even know where to start to clean her" moment'.
The photo has been liked by more than 13,000 people and shared by hundreds.
Esther said she shared the picture because it was 'just another day in our life'.
She told Daily Mail Online they 'never know' what will get a big reaction online, adding: 'Some things really resonate with other parents, apparently blowouts are one of them.
'Every parents experienced the joys of a blowout at some point in their life...It's real life.'
She said their 'motto' is 'Parenting: raising tiny humans and not pretending like you have it all figured out' so they try to show their experiences from every angle.
Happy family: The mother-of-two writes a blog Story of This Life, which also features her husband Thad and their other daughter Tessa, pictured with Ellia and Esther
Stumped: Esther said it was an 'aw man I don't even know where to start to clean her' moment
Famous: Hundreds of people have shared the photo of Ellia, pictured left with Tessa, right
'Our culture in this day and age tends to portray parenting as this sweet, functional, seamless operation, when in reality theres a lot of mess involved that no one likes to share in the fear that itll make them look like bad parents,' said Esther.
'We decided from the beginning that we wanted to be transparent and real with our audience, showing both sides of the parenting story. Both the tremendous joys and the fun blowouts.'
She said although she happily shares pictures of her children now while they are babies, as they grow older she will be 'much more conscious.'
Fellow parents commented on the picture sharing tips and reminiscing about their own experiences of 'poonamis'.
SimonChrissie Hall wrote: 'Blowouts (or poonami's to us) happen during winding sat on the lap. She leans forwards so it all shoots up the back!
'Don't think a bigger nappy (diaper) will change that for us...I just whip the clothes off and hope for the best when she starts.'
Razanne SabelAish Farshoukh said: 'Time to for a bigger size diaper. That usually fixes such blow outs. Even if the size she has now is just right but the poop is bigger than her size!'
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She may be the ripe old age of 90 - but that hasn't made the Queen's calendar any less hectic.
Today, the royal hosted a private party for friends and family at Drapers' Hall in central London.
The drinks reception was intended to be a final get-together for the monarch before she heads to Balmoral in Scotland for her summer break.
Today the royal hosted a private party for friends and family at Drapers' Hall in central London
Lady Marina and sister Lady Amelia Windsor attended the Queen's final 90th birthday party this evening
Donning a mid-length, long-sleeved summer dress and short black heels, the Queen looked cheerful and she was photographed outside the venue.
The monarch has had a busy 2016 so far - celebrating both her actual and official 90th birthdays, and joked at the Patron's Lunch: 'How I will feel if people are still singing Happy Birthday to me in December remains to be seen'.
Also in attendance at the intimate event were Prince Philip, Princess Eugenie, Princess Anne, her husband Sir Tim Lawrence and Lord Freddie and Lady Gabriella Windsor.
The Queen's cousin Lady Elizabeth Anson and family friend Sir Nicholas Soames MP were also present.
Lord Freddie Windsor and a grinning Lady Gabriella Windsor arrived at the private party together
A stylish-looking Eugenie wore a stunning white dress embellished with blue and yellow flowers, which she accompanied with a pair of baby pink heels to match her small clutch bag
Also in attendance at the intimate event were Prince Philip (pictured), Princes Ann, Lady Elizabeth Anson and Tim Lawrence
The monarch has had a busy 2016 so far - celebrating both her actual and official 90th birthdays, and joked at the Patron's Lunch: 'How I will feel if people are still singing Happy Birthday to me in December remains to be seen'
A stylish-looking Eugenie wore a stunning white dress embellished with blue and yellow flowers, which she accompanied with a pair of baby pink heels to match her small clutch bag.
The venue Drapers' Hall is described on The Drapers' Company website as a 'magnificent setting' which offers 'unrivalled grandeur and opulence'.
Founded over 600 years ago, The Drapers' Company is incorporated by Royal Charter and is one of the Twelve Great Livery Companies in the City of London.
Lady Elizabeth Anson, a first cousin of the Queen, arrives at Draper's Hall wearing a floral skirt and white top and jacket
Sir Nicholas Soames MP, pictured arriving at Draper's Hall, was one of the few non-royal guests at the party
Queen Elizabeth's second cousin twice removed, Flora Ogilvy, attended the party.
She played an extra in season four of Downton Abbey - the first genuine royal cast member.
The 22-year-old wore a flattering low-neck mid-length dress adorned with flowers.
Queen Elizabeth's second cousin twice removed, Flora Ogilvy, attended the party
She played an extra in season four of Downton Abbey - the first genuine royal cast member
Lady Helen Taylor (right), a first cousin once removed of the Queen and a great-granddaughter of King George V, arrives at the event
More guests arrive at the event at Draper's Hall - described on The Drapers' Company website as a 'magnificent setting' which offers 'unrivalled grandeur and opulence'
Founded over 600 years ago, The Drapers' Company is incorporated by Royal Charter and is one of the Twelve Great Livery Companies in the City of London
Lady Amelia Windsor, 36th in line to the throne, also attended.
She wore a stylish blue and white dress with large sleeves, grey heels and carried an eye-catching clutch bag.
It's been a busy week for Eugenie, who yesterday mingled with a host of fellow A-listers at the Frost Summer Fundraiser.
The Princess of York, 26, looked stunning in a red floral print 200 Alice + Olivia cocktail dress that she paired with elegant black heels.
Buckingham Palace is preparing to welcome tourists through its doors from July 23 for the annual opening of the state rooms, with the exhibition this year focusing on the Queen's outfits, from childhood to the present day.
It's been a busy week for Eugenie, who yesterday mingled with a host of fellow A-listers at the Frost Summer Fundraiser
Not present at the Queen's event were her son Charles, 67, and his wife Camilla, 69. who were visiting Port St Isaac.
As well as enjoying a savoury treat from Nicki B's Pasty Shop during the visit, the royals also met with cast members from ITV's Doc Martin during a visit to the picturesque Cornish fishing port where
Tiffany has made few appearances on the campaign trail so far
The 22-year-old was also at the convention on Monday, sitting with her boyfriend Ross Mechanic, 21, who is a registered Democrat
She was seen smiling during a sound check earlier today
Unlike big sister Ivanka, Tiffany Trump has remained relatively low-key in her father's campaign so far but it looks like the 22-year-old is finally ready to step into the spotlight.
The recent University of Pennsylvania graduate is scheduled to take the stage at the Republican National Convention on Tuesday night, joining a line-up that includes her big half-brother Donald Jr.
And she's not taking the responsibility lightly. Tiffany was seen today getting ready during sound check, smiling in front of the empty arena in the hours before the seats fill with some of the most influential people in the country.
Ready or not, here she comes: Tiffany Trump was seen rehearsing during a sound check for the Republican National Convention tonight
Big names to follow: The 22-year-old is scheduled to take the stage on the same night a her brother, Donald Jr.
Thigh-skimming: Tiffany dressed in a summery ensemble, showing off her legs in a very short dress
Gifts from daddy? She seemed in good spirits as she readied for the big event, flashing a set of pricey Cartier bracelets on her left wrist
Tiffany went for a natural make-up look and kept her blonde hair down and wavy
The youngest Trump daughter chose a neutral little white dress for the occasion, looking confident in the figure-hugging fit-and-flare number in a way that would make her dad proud.
It's unclear whether the dress which also showed a hint of skin and Tiffany's bra thanks to laser-cut detailing around the chest is the same one she will wear when she gives her speech tonight.
Her make-up was natural, but she accessorized with two pricey Cartier bracelets on her left wrist.
Tiffany seems to be sticking to understated looks for the convention, as she picked a simple little black dress to wear to the event on Monday night, where she sat beside her 21-year-old boyfriend Ross Mechanic, a registered Democrat.
A little something for the cameras: Surprisingly, her white fit-and-flare dress has laser-cut detailing at the chest which seemed to reveal her bra
Her big moment: Tiffany has mostly remained away from the cameras during her father's campaign
Stay tuned: Details have yet to be released about the speech she plans to give and who wrote it
On Monday, she brought her Democrat boyfriend Ross Mechanic (right) to the Republican National Convention
Ross has been a registered Democrat since 2012 according to public records. He sat next to Tiffany in the bleachers of the Quicken Loans arena in Cleveland, Ohio Monday (pictured)
Both Tiffany and Ross were students at the University Of Pennsylvania, where he studied software engineering while she double majored in sociology and urban studies
Tiffany shared a photo of herself with Ross at the Winter Wonderland Ball in New York back in December last year, and the pair appeared to have been dating for a few weeks at the time.
Both were students at the University Of Pennsylvania, where Ross is studying software engineering while Tiffany double majored in sociology and urban studies and graduated in May.
Ross has been a registered Democrat since 2012 according to public records.
He sat next to Tiffany in the bleachers of the Quicken Loans arena in Cleveland, Ohio Monday as speakers including Governor Rick Perry, Rudy Giuliani, and Melania Trump took the floor.
The young couple are connected by their roles as heirs to ultra-wealthy New York real estate dynasties, and their fathers have known each other in the business world for at least a decade.
Glamour: Ross and Tiffany met while attending the University of Pennsylvania
Family ties: Tiffany graduated in May of this year and is seen (top left) with Ross and with her half-sister Ivanka, father Donald, half brother Baron (top right), her step-mother Melania, (bottom left) and with her mother Marla Maples (bottom right)
Indeed, Mechanic is spending this summer as an intern at Cadre, a real estate startup founded by Jared Kushner, husband of Ivanka Trump.
Billionaire Trump even once signed a copy of his book, The Art of the Deal, for Ross's father, real estate lawyer Jonathan Mechanic, with the inscription: 'To the greatest real estate lawyer in the world, best wishes, Donald.'
The Mechanic family Jonathan, 63, his wife Wendy Sue Levine, 59, and sons Marc, 25, and Ross, 21 are all registered, active Democrats, according to public records. Both Jonathan and Wendy Sue have been registered Democrats since 1988.
When Ross and Tiffany began dating, Hillary Clinton was among his Facebook likes and he also appeared to support such liberal causes as Naral Pro-Choice NYC (a non-profit aiding safe and legal abortions for women from all backgrounds)and the Penn Green Campus Partnership for environmental sustainability and policy development.
But while Ross perhaps does not align with his girlfriend and her father politically, the 21-year-old does appear to have a head for business.
He is due to graduate in 2017 from Penn with a BSE in Computer Science, according to his LinkedIn profile, and has a 'limited working proficiency' of Arabic.
Tight: Despite his family's strong ties to the Democrat Party, Ross and Tiffany have been dating since last year
Trump's youngest daughter (pictured Monday), whom he had with his second wife Marla Maples, has made few appearances on the campaign trail so far compared to her siblings Ivanka, Donald Jr., and Eric
Tiffany (pictured Monday), who wore all black with a necklace to accent her look, graduated this May in a ceremony attended by both of her parents
He spent the summer in the tech hub of San Francisco interning at Idibon a company which provides state-of-the-art language processing services.
Like his new girlfriend Tiffany, who was first seen in 2014 amid the Rich Kids Of Instagram, Ross also appears to have a penchant for the party circuit.
In 2014, he had a four-month summer internship with the AIM Hospitality Group, supervising a promotions team for events in New York City and the Hamptons. AIM is behind glitzy events at some of Manhattan's most exclusive clubs including Up & Down, the High Line Ballroom, Lavo and the Dream Hotel.
Like Tiffany, his social media accounts portray an elite world filled with white-tablecloth brunches, glitzy nights out on the New York club scene, tickets to the U.S. Open, and pool parties.
Trump notably failed to mention Tiffany while thanking each of his children in a victory speech in March.
'I want to thank my family my boy Eric and Don, they've been working so hard,' Trump said before mentioning his other daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared.
He even thanked Barron and reminded the crowd his youngest son was about to celebrate his birthday back then.
Trump appeared to notice his omission and gave Tiffany a shout-out on Twitter afterwards.
'I only wish my wonderful daughter Tiffany could have been with us at Mar-a-Lago for our great election victory,' he wrote after the speech at his Florida club. 'She is a winner!'
Donald Trump Jr. will also be taking the stage at the RNC on Tuesday night
Some couples find that sharing a workplace places a strain on their relationship.
But for pilots Quinn, 31, and Megan Hutchinson, 27, from Johannesburg, things couldn't be better.
Quinn and Megan Hutchinson regularly share the cockpit for flights with regional airline, Airlink, and say their mutual love for flying and the decision making involved has only strengthened their relationship.
Couples who fly together, stay together: Quinn, 31, and Megan Hutchinson, 27, from Johannesburg, have been flying planes together since 2014 and share the cockpit for flights with regional airline, Airlink
Love is in the air: They say their mutual love for flying and the decision making involved has only strengthened their relationship
'We both met each other at a flight school called 43 Advanced Training College at Lanseria International Airport,' Mr Hutchinson told Daily Mail.
'Megan had left the airforce and was working as a course coordinator behind the front desk while she was studying for her Commercial Pilots Licence, and I was working at a local charter company.
'I had finally gotten a loan from the bank to finish the last part of my CPL and we basically just starting talking from there as friends. I was not interested in any relationships because all I wanted to do was finish my licence and find work so I could fly.'
Pilot pair: Initially, the pair didn't see each other much as Mrs Hutchinson was in Yemen for two years on contract and Mr Hutchinson was in either in Zambia, Zimbabwe or Malawi on contract
Not a bad office: The first time the couple flew together was to the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2014
Mr Hutchinson said they kept in contact roughly once a year to wish each other a happy birthday but they ended up catching up again when Mrs Hutchinson was on contract in Ghana and he, in Zambia.
Flying with someone you care about, and doing something you both love with each other is a feeling that's difficult to describe.
'She messaged me to tell she was bringing coffee to my house because I loved different coffees. We then met for lunch at a restaurant in Johannesburg and that's basically where it all started,' he said.
'So you can say that coffee and red wine brought us together and the rest is history.'
Initially, the pair didn't see each other much as Mrs Hutchinson was in Yemen for two years on contract and Mr Hutchinson was in either in Zambia, Zimbabwe or Malawi on contract - the couple only seeing each other for 84 days out of the year.
'Blessed': 'Flying with someone you care about, and doing something you both love with each other is a feeling that's difficult to describe,' Mr Hutchinson said
'The most precious moment of my career': Mr Hutchinson recently shared wrote about what it was like to join his wife in the flight deck for his first command flight
But when a truck bomb went off near Mrs Hutchinson's compound in Afghanistan in 2013, she decided it wasn't worth the salary anymore and moved back to South Africa where she started working at the same airline as her beau.
'We ended up starting on the same day and even on the same aircraft and course together, so we sat next to each other in the classroom. Again, it was just excellent experiencing all of that airline training together,' Mr Hutchinson said.
The first time the couple flew together was to the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2014.
'It was unreal. Flying with someone you care about, and doing something you both love with each other is a feeling that's difficult to describe,' Mr Hutchinson said, who married Mrs Hutchinson in 2015.
The office: 'It's only you two up front making decisions and planning your routes, fuel and weather planning. Since then we have come a long way and finally got to fly together for a great regional airline on a jet,' he said
Come a long way: Mr Hutchinson said the best part of flying with his wife is that each of them 'understand the complexity involved' in the industry
'It's only you two up front making decisions and planning your routes, fuel and weather planning. Since then we have come a long way and finally got to fly together for a great regional airline on a jet.'
We completely understand each other and what had to be done to get to where we both are.
Mr Hutchinson recently shared wrote about what it was like to join his wife in the flight deck for his first command flight.
'What most people see are two pilots in a flight deck, but today it is more than that. Today is a very special day,' he wrote on social media.
'Yes, I've just received my command at the airline I work for, but I also got to fly with my wife on my first command flight too, who is a senior first officer and an unbelievable pilot. I am so blessed to share the most precious moment of my career with the most precious and special woman in my life.'
Mr Hutchinson said the best part of flying with his wife is that each of them 'understand the complexity involved' in the industry.
All smiles: 'Because it's such a diverse industry it's tough for relationships to survive as you are either away from each other a lot or a partner could have trust issues,' Mr Hutchinson said
'Because it's such a diverse industry it's tough for relationships to survive as you are either away from each other a lot or a partner could have trust issues,' Mr Hutchinson said.
'It's easier for a person to be with someone when they are in an airline, especially when you are with that person from the beginning.'
Mr Hutchinson and his wife know what it's like to have to gain experience, get jobs to 'make ends meet' and finally, catch a break years later and get a good job.
'It's stressful and I think that's where myself and Megan know each other very well,' Mr Hutchinson said.
'Because we completely understand each other and what had to be done to get to where we both are it's very special. We not only know each other personally but we also know each other on a professional base. And it's a very solid base.'
'It's brilliant': 'Because we completely understand each other and what had to be done to get to where we both are it's very special,' Mr Hutchinson said, adding that they are expecting their first baby
The longest flight the pair have done together is six hours, and while both of them have flown overseas, they don't plan on doing long haul flying together anytime soon.
'For both of us I don't think long haul flying would work as we are actually expecting our first baby. So with a family now being on the way it'll be very difficult to do and be away from home - sometimes at the same time,' Mr Hutchinson said.
'Our regional airline works out perfectly for our lifestyle at the moment, and when things change we will just adjust our job accordingly.
La Paz Chattanooga is now accepting nominations for its 5th Annual Latino Leadership Awards. Nominations are due by 5 p.m. on Aug. 5 and winners will be honored during the Latino Leadership Awards Luncheon on September 19 at the Chattanooga Convention and Trade Center.
The Latino Leadership Awards recognizes Latino and Hispanic leaders that inspire change and are making meaningful contributions in their workplace and also in the Greater Chattanooga community. Award categories include:
Latino Leader of the Year Award This award recognizes one local Latino's individual career achievement and community impact over the course of their lifetime. The Latino Leadership Awards selection committee will consider all individuals nominated during the process. The committee will determine which nominees will be honored at the banquet, who will receive the Latino Leader of the Year Award, and who will be eligible for the Chattanooga's Choice Award vote. The Latino Leadership Awards selection committee will consider all individuals nominated during the process. The committee will determine which nominees will be honored at the banquet, who will receive the Latino Leader of the Year Award, and who will be eligible for the Chattanooga's Choice Award vote.
Chattanoogas Choice Award - The general Chattanooga community will have the opportunity to vote for one of the selected honorees from the Latino Leader of the Year selection process. This public voting process will take place in late August prior to the awards banquet.
Latino Community Champion Award This award recognizes those who have championed services for and/or made a significant impact on Chattanooga's Latino population over a series of years. This recipient does not have to be Latino in heritage.
Emerging Latino Leader Award - This award honors the influence and accomplishments of a local Latino young adult under the age of 25.
When a Michigan man married his soulmate last year, he had no idea that he had also found the person that would save the life of his stepmother.
Neil Sladick of Norton Shores recently celebrated his one year wedding anniversary with his wife Abbey, whom he had only been dating for a year when his stepmom, Cheryl Sladick became ill with Goodpasture Syndrome, an autoimmune disease that has ultimately robbed her of proper kidney function.
Eventually, she was told that she would need a kidney transplant, or be on dialysis for the rest of her life.
Happy couple: Abbey and Neil Sladick of Norton Shores, Michigan, were married last year, and now Abbey is donating a kidney to Neil's stepmother
Thankful: Cheryl Sladick suffers from Goodpasture Syndrome, an autoimmune disease that has ultimately robbed her of proper kidney function, leaving her needing a transplant
That's when Abbey stood up. She insisted on being tested right away after hearing the news. And, to the surprise of the whole family, she was a match.
'It turns out we're a five out of six antigen match, which is basically one of the best matches you can get,' Abbey told FOX 17 News.
'The doctors actually thought we were biological mother and daughter... All the pieces just kept falling into place, and so I knew it was just meant to be.'
The news was made even more baffling by the fact that not Cheryl's daughter nor any over her grandchildren were a match for the donation.
Quite a gesture: Upon hearing the news, Abbey didn't hesitate to have herself tested for the surgery
Lots of love: Abbey became emotional describing how she was going to 'share her spare' with her mother-in-law
Loved up: Abbey has been blogging about her experience, and hopes her gesture will encourage others to think about donating
'I was so thrilled, and I started crying,' Cheryl said. 'It's just a wonderful thing. And really, until it's given to you, you have no idea, what a gift of life it is... Abbey's giving me my life back.'
Abbey was due to have surgery on Monday at Mercy Health Saint Mary's in Grand Rapids, and has been keeping people updated online through her blog and on Twitter.
In her most recent post, she revealed that she was ready to give a kidney whether or not she was a match - assuming that if she found someone else who needed a kidney and giving could help move Cheryl up the list.
'I figured if I wasnt a match for Cheryl, I could offer up my kidney to a stranger, then she would get pushed up to the top of the list to receive a donor and when a match came about for me, the stranger would receive my kidney,' she wrote.
A miracle: The news was all the more miraculous given that none of not Cheryl's daughter nor any over her grandchildren were a match
Going in: Abbey was due to go under the knife on Monday at Mercy Health Saint Mary's in Grand Rapids
Looking ahead: Cheryl plans to go on a road trip down Route 66 and spend more time with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren
But that was not necessary as Cheryl and Abbey were miraculously a match - and Abbey couldn't be more excited to help her mother-in-law live a happier life.
'It's just surreal, I guess, to be able to give to someone. It just doesn't seem real,' she said. 'But she would do the same thing for me. There's no question that it's supposed to happen.'
Abbey also hopes that her gesture and talking about it online will encourage others to consider becoming a living donor.
As for Cheryl, she is already making plans for her post-transplant dialysis-free life. They include plenty of quality time with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren and a road trip down Route 66.
Experts say excessive use may cause a red, dry scalp, and even hair loss
For busy people who need to get ready in a hurry and for those who just cant face getting their hair wet, dry shampoo seems nothing short of a godsend.
All it takes is a few spritzes from a can aimed at your scalp. The superfine powder suspended in the spray helps to absorb oil and refreshes the hair.
Its little wonder that more and more of us are using dry shampoo indeed, the UK is among the worlds biggest consumers of the product.
Almost a quarter of us use it, compared with about 16 per cent in the U.S. and European countries on the Continent.
But could there be a downside to this marvellous convenience?
In April this year, Nicole Baxter from Belfast warned her friends in a post on Facebook that using a popular brand of dry shampoo had caused her to develop a bald patch, as well as giving her a sore, itchy, flaky scalp.
The message went viral and has subsequently been shared more than 30,000 times.
Experts say excessive use of dry shampoo may cause a red, itchy, scalp, which in turn could cause hair loss
Nicole said that a doctor had suggested dry shampoo was to blame, and claimed her symptoms almost cleared up when she stopped using it, although her bald patch remains.
Using powder to clean the hair isnt exactly a new idea.
The Victorians used to sprinkle arrowroot powder on their hair to help absorb grease, and other similar powders, including corn starch and even oatmeal, have been used in the past.
These days dry shampoos use ingredients such as powdered rice protein, tapioca starch and even clay, delivered in aerosol form. However, the problem is that dry shampoo isnt actually a shampoo at all.
Trichologist Iain Sallis, of the Hairmedic group of hair loss clinics, explains: The word shampoo in this case is a misnomer.
A conventional shampoo cleans the scalp and hair using a combination of detergent-type ingredients which help to break down and remove dirt.
Dry shampoo doesnt work like that. All its doing is absorbing the oil so hair no longer looks or feels greasy.
Dr Greg Williams, a consultant hair transplant surgeon of the Farjo Hair Institute, a hair loss clinic based in Manchester and London, agrees: Dry shampoo is a cosmetic product it has its place but it shouldnt be abused.
Trichologist Iain Sallis, of the Hairmedic group of hair loss clinics, says dry shampoo does not do anything to clean the hair, but instead absorbs the oil so that it no longer looks or feels greasy
'It doesnt clean the hair and scalp and so, like any other cosmetic product, it needs to be washed out regularly.
And if it isnt, this can cause problems.
If you put make-up on every day but never washed your face, your skin would soon start to suffer, says Iain Sallis.
It would feel dry and irritated, and look horrible. The same is true of using dry shampoo on your scalp and hair.
Overuse of dry shampoo can lead to it building up on the scalp which in turn leads to a deterioration of the health of the scalp, adds Dr Williams.
It can block pores and cause irritation and scaling. This is usually minor but if it continues, it can lead to seborrheic dermatitis.
This is a condition characterised by red, itchy, flaky and inflamed skin.
And as he explains, theoretically almost any condition that affects the scalp has the potential to cause hair loss.
Overuse of dry shampoo can lead to it building up on the scalp, which in turn can lead to a dry and itchy scalp, says consultant hair transplant surgeon Greg Williams
This may be because, as with psoriasis of the scalp, if the scales become very tight they can compress the follicles, leading to a change in hair diameter, and an increased tendency to breakage.
Or the follicle becomes inflamed, resulting in the hair being shed prematurely.
According to Iain Sallis, its not just the build-up of dry shampoo that causes the problem.
If youre not washing your scalp and rely solely on dry shampoo for several days, microbes build up and this can lead to inflammation, itchiness and flaking.
A build-up of the product can also exacerbate any pre-existing scalp condition be that dandruff or simple irritation.
WHAT THE MANUFACTURERS SAY Following Ms Baxter's claim, a spokesperson for Batiste said: As the UKs number one dry shampoo brand for over 30 years, Batiste is committed to producing quality products which are used every day by our millions of happy customers. We would like to assure our customers that all our products are analytically tested for compliance to European Regulations. 'Independent laboratories conduct in-depth safety assessments and clinical patch tests for all products prior to launch. All our products have been certified as safe. As with any beauty product whether it be on the hair, body or face we recommend that you follow the usage guidelines and stop using it if sensitivity occurs. Advertisement
And if you are sensitive to any of the ingredients in a dry shampoo, because they remain in contact with the skin rather than being washed off, you are more likely to have a reaction, says Iain Sallis.
But does this mean, as some have claimed, that dry shampoo use can lead to hair loss?
In theory dry shampoo can cause hair loss if the inflammation gets really severe.
However, Dr Williams says women are often unaware of how prone they are to hair loss and so may wrongly attribute excess shedding to dry shampoo.
For Dr Andy Goren, a professor of dermatology at the University of Rome, the real problem may be something else. I suspect that many women use dry shampoos due to excessive hair shedding they experience while washing their hair with wet shampoos, he says.
This can mask the extent of hair shedding, leading potentially to irreversible alopecia.
It is important to see a dermatologist if you are losing excessive amounts of hair, to get the right treatment.
For six years I have had several basal cell carcinomas (BCCs) on my face and neck.
Efudix cream doesnt work so I have had them surgically removed. Another has now appeared on my cheek. I have terrible anxiety when I have these procedures.
Is an alternative treatment available, such as laser therapy?
S Jones, Manchester.
One of many treatment options is cryosurgery, which involves freezing the damaged tissue with liquid nitrogen
How distressing for you. As medical students we are taught that basal cell carcinomas the most common form of skin cancer are easy to treat and not much of a worry because they rarely spread.
However, the picture is more complex because they can burrow deep into the skin.
Furthermore, those with a history of BCC are at increased risk of more: 40 per cent of people with a BCC will have another within five years.
Most occur on the face although some are found on the trunk and elsewhere on the body. There are three types: most (60 per cent) are what we call nodular these resemble a pink pearly pimple, sometimes with an ulcerated centre.
Thirty per cent are superficial they form a pinkish, scaly patch with a defined border, sometimes with pearly lumps around the edge.
The third type, morpheaform or sclerosing, are usually reddish, with poorly defined edges and feel thickened to the touch.
Diagnosis is confirmed with a biopsy, and decisions about treatment are based on size, location, type, and whether the risk of it recurring.
A BCC is considered low risk if its nodular or superficial, less than 6mm in diameter and on areas considered high-risk for a BCC the centre of the face, the nose and eyelids, the eyebrows, the chin, the temples, and the hands and feet.
Woman after skin cancer removal surgery (stock image)
It is also considered low risk if its less than 10mm on other areas of the head, neck or body.
These low-risk BCCs can be removed under local anaesthetic or treated with curettage and cautery that is, scraping them off and then using an electric needle to kill residual tissue.
Another option is cryosurgery (freezing with liquid nitrogen), or 5-fluorouracil (Efudix), a cream containing a chemotherapy agent applied over several weeks to kill the cancer cells.
The BCCs defined as high-risk are nodular or superficial, over 6mm in size and found in the high risk areas, or more than 10mm in other parts of the head and neck, or over 20mm anywhere else.
Morpheaform BCCS are always considered high risk, as are cases where the patient has had a BCC before.
In these situations the treatment usually involves surgery, typically Mohs micrographic surgery, a specialised technique where the cancer is removed bit by bit, as well as a small area of skin surrounding it; each piece is then checked under a microscope to be certain all cancer cells have been removed.
It is more precise than simple excision vital if the site is an eyelid, or nostril, or the edge of the lip. Sometimes radiotherapy is used instead.
Another option is photodynamic therapy, where the BCC is coated in a drug thats activated by light and which destroys the abnormal tissue.
This is sometimes available on the NHS and is usually successful, with a good cosmetic outcome.
Laser surgery is not in widespread use and doesnt seem to hold any advantages over these other treatments.
Working out the best treatment for you involves the expert guidance of a dermatologist.
IM 66 and have just been diagnosed with IBS. I have read its rare for anyone over 50 to be diagnosed for the first time.
When I was 21 I had terrible Crohns disease. Could this scarring in my bowel have caused SIBO, which mimics irritable bowel?
I dont have cramps or diarrhoea, but do have bloating and gas.
Name and address withheld.
Most patients with SIBO experience bloating, flatulence, or abdominal pain; many have diarrhoea, but its not a condition you can detect with a blood test
SIBO, or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, is a condition where the bacteria that normally inhabit the large intestine, the colon, are also found in excess amounts higher up in the digestive tract, in the small intestine.
Usually the small intestine is protected against any bacterial invasion by several lines of defence: gastric acid and bile destroy bacteria in what we eat, while enzymes further down the intestine usually kill off bacteria that have escaped.
Write to Dr Scurr To contact Dr Scurr with a health query, write to him at Good Health Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT or email drmartin@dailymail.co.uk - including contact details. Dr Scurr cannot enter into personal correspondence. His replies cannot apply to individual cases and should be taken in a general context. Always consult your own GP with any health worries. Advertisement
Then there is the ileo-caecal valve where the small intestine joins the large intestine, preventing the contents of the colon passing back into the small intestine.
Finally, there is immunoglobulin IgA a protective immune protein secreted from all the wet surfaces of the body. However, several conditions can damage these protective mechanisms, including irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), which is why SIBO is a hot topic in current IBS research.
SIBO is also linked to damage to the ileo-caecal valve and the intestine from previous illness and surgery appendicitis for example, or Crohns disease.
Most patients with SIBO experience bloating, flatulence, or abdominal pain; many have diarrhoea, but its not a condition you can detect with a blood test although in rare cases, some might show signs of a vitamin deficiency due to poor absorption of vital nutrients, for instance a vitamin B12 deficiency, which leads to anaemia.
Given your history of Crohns disease, its important that your vitamin B12 level is checked as low levels can cause both depression and peripheral neuropathy damaged nerves, which you also have.
SIBO, or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, is a condition where the bacteria that normally inhabit the large intestine, the colon, are also found in excess amounts higher up in the digestive tract, in the small intestine
One way of diagnosing SIBO is with breath tests these check for hydrogen or methane, gases produced in the small intestine when contaminating bacteria come into contact with carbohydrates. But these tests are controversial.
Another test involves drawing off fluid from the small intestine using a fine tube to obtain a sample. But this is invasive and potentially unreliable.
Most specialists rely on the patients symptoms once other conditions have been excluded; if they believe a patient has SIBO they will prescribe antibiotics.
Here is my thought: could it be that your previous Crohns disease damaged the ileo-caecal valve so that for years bacteria from the large intestine have refluxed into the small intestine, eventually causing SIBO, which itself is now causing IBS?
The NHS is under huge financial pressure.
If anyone needed confirmation of just how bad things are, NHS trusts recorded the largest ever deficit in the history of the health service according to figures published in May.
The crisis has been blamed on a host of factors, from the demands of an ageing population to the increased cost of drugs and medical breakthroughs.
But another problem is the amount of money the NHS spends on agency staff to plug gaps in rotas, according to a recent survey of NHS finance directors.
This Good Health investigation reveals the extent to which nursing agencies benefit from a lack of NHS staff cover.
For despite a cap on the amount that can be spent on rip-off agency fees, weve found that the agencies continue to rake in tens of millions from hospitals struggling to cope with staff shortages.
Despite a cap on the amount that can be spent on rip-off agency fees, we have found that nursing agencies continue to rake in tens of millions from hospitals struggling to cope with staff shortages
One agency alone charged the NHS nearly 40 million for temporary nursing staff last year. Taxpayers paid five of the major nursing agencies an eye-watering 97 million and some agencies are earning even more than we discovered they did in a similar investigation last year.
And these figures could be just the tip of the iceberg, as about a third of trusts refused to divulge what they spent.
NOT JUST COSTLY, IT HARMS PATIENT CARE
Its easy to see how agency fees can quickly add up. We found that hospitals are continuing to be charged astonishing rates for some nursing shifts.
Wye Valley NHS Trust and Colchester Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust paid more than 2,000 for a single nursing shift. Other hospitals told us they had paid similar amounts.
It is not just the cost to the NHS thats a concern patients can be directly affected by the use of temporary staff as the standard of care can suffer through lack of continuity.
The increased reliance on agency nurses and the shortage of nursing staff is an issue that has generated more and more concern among people who contact us, says Joyce Robins, of campaign group Patient Concern.
You may never see the same face the situation can be especially bad at weekends when the majority of the nursing staff seem to be from an agency.
Its not that they dont care, but if they just come in for one or two shifts or the odd day here and there, can they really deliver the same standard of care?
Not only that, but agency nurses arent allowed to carry out the same duties as staff nurses: some trusts wont let them take blood for example, or give intravenous drugs or even administer food by a tube.
ONE FIRM RAKED IN 39M LAST YEAR
Our findings are based on Freedom Of Information requests we sent to trusts up and down the country asking how much they had paid for nursing cover from some of the major agencies (108 trusts replied, but some didnt identify individual nursing agencies, suggesting the real cost to the taxpayer is much higher than our figures show).
For instance, Mayday Healthcare PLC charged the NHS 31.3 million for temporary nurses (across 54 hospital trusts). This is nearly 5 million more than the NHS paid it last year.
Another company, Medacs Healthcare plc, charged 11.4 million (for supplying 43 hospital trusts), up from 9.2 million last year (for 38 trusts).
One of the agencies in the study, Mayday Healthcare PLC, charged the NHS 31.3 million for temporary nurses (across 54 hospital trusts). This is nearly 5 million more than the NHS paid it last year
But they pale into insignificance compared to Thornbury Nursing Services, which charged nearly 39 million for supplying temp nursing cover to 47 trusts the same company was paid 43.9 million last year across 53 trusts.
Its a huge amount of money, but its easy to see how it could soon add up when you look at the highest fees that some hospitals paid for a single nursing shift. Twenty-seven of the trusts named Thornbury as charging the highest single day rate.
Worcester Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, for example, paid Thornbury 1,500 to cover a 12-hour shift on Good Friday. They say this was an exceptional payment.
A spokesperson said: The cover was needed at extremely short notice. Since then the trust has put in place controls to ensure that this type of payment cant happen again.
While the trust says its not used Thornbury since April, this exceptional payment was considerably more than the highest day rate the hospital paid to Thornbury the year before back then they were charged a mere 952 for a shift.
Yet some hospitals paid even more. Last year, Thornbury charged Wye Valley NHS Trust 2,016 for one 14-hour shift.
13 TRUSTS PAID MORE THAN 1,000 A SHIFT
Other trusts willing to reveal what theyd actually paid for a shift (many trusts refused to answer the question) included Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust which paid Thornbury 1,858 (for an 11-hour shift).
Derby Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust paid the same agency 1,794.
In fact, 13 trusts from as far apart as Scotland and Taunton revealed that they had paid more than 1,000 for a single shift.
A spokesman for Colchester Hospitals, which paid more than 2,000 for one shift, said the payment related to a nurse working on a bank holiday, but could not confirm which agency it was paid to.
At that time, we were critically short of staff nurses and, in order to ensure patient safety, we needed to source a nurse from an agency, he said.
Wye Valleys payment of more than 2,000 was also for a bank holiday in this case to look after a child who required a specialist nurse.
The 2,000 fee is 200 more than the most paid for a single shift last year, according to a previous Good Health investigation.
Its an 11 per cent rise considerably more than the 1 per cent pay rise offered to nurses in full-time NHS roles, whose starting salary is just 21,000 a year.
And it helps explain why three quarters of trusts are in the red, according to new figures published last week by the health charity, the Kings Fund.
TRUSTS FAILING TO GET A GRIP ON COSTS
But what about the caps introduced last November? These were meant to stop hospitals paying nurses, junior doctors and other clinical staff any more than 100 per cent above the pay levels of permanent staff.
This was meant to taper off, to 75 per cent in February and 55 per cent in April.
But as Jim Mackey, chief executive of the regulatory body, NHS Improvement, warned in May: Some trusts simply arent doing enough to reduce their agency costs.
And our results back up his concerns. Some trusts have been particularly big spenders. For instance, Barts Health NHS Trust in London, tops the board, with a bill of 37.7 million.
The trust told us it that in the past year it had reduced its reliance on expensive agencies by recruiting over 800 more permanent staff but admitted there is a shortage of specialist staff.
The next biggest spender was another London trust, Guys and St Thomas NHS Foundation Trust which spent more than 17 million, slightly less than a year ago (when it was more than 18 million).
A spokesperson said that although the figure may appear large it represents just 7 per cent of the total 257 million it spent on nursing.
Yet its not just trusts based in the capital that are spending these large sums.
Abertawe Bro Morgannwg University Health Board in Wales spent 12.8 million the year before it spent 10.1 million.
From this April each trust has been given its own limit on the total it can spend per year on agency staff. Barts cap is 62.2 million on all agency staff, including nurses (last year their spend on all agency staff was 89.9 million).
A spokesperson for Guys and St Thomas said they had been set a ceiling of 33.2 million on total agency costs for 2016-17.
Meeting it will be a challenge, they admitted.
There must be serious concerns that these two trusts at least will really struggle to remain within their caps.
SPENDING CAPS BEING IGNORED
What may shock many is that the agency nurses themselves while better paid than their NHS equivalents are certainly not seeing as much of the fees charged to the NHS as you might think.
According to figures on Thornburys website, for instance, a trained nurse is paid 31 an hour for a basic Monday to Friday shift.
The most they pay is 99 per hour to a specialist nurse in charge of a unit on a Bank Holiday. The good news is that some hospitals are bringing their nursing agency bills down.
For example, Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust spent 10.7 million last year, significantly down on the 12.4 million it spent the year before.
However, many are flouting the caps which were meant only to be overridden in the interests of patient safety, according to the guidelines. But the number of times that the caps have been overridden has been rising.
When the first cap was introduced in November the override clause was used more than 35,000 times in a week by 228 trusts.
By April this had risen to more than 53,000 times a week over 210 trusts, according to Freedom Of Information figures released in May.
And one trust, Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust, Kent revealed it spent five times MORE on agency nurses last year compared with the year before (from 2 million to 10.7 million).
THERE JUST ARENT ENOUGH NURSES...
The root of the problem is a shortage of nurses. According to the Institute for Employment studies, already one in ten nursing posts is unfilled and as almost a third of nurses are aged 50 or over, and are due to retire soon, the situation is set to get worse.
Although some nurses are quitting the NHS for better pay and working conditions, there arent enough of them to begin with.
Josie Irwin, head of employment relations at the Royal College of Nursing, said the Good Health investigation shows just how much trusts around the country are struggling to find enough staff to provide safe patient care.
According to the Institute for Employment studies, already one in ten nursing posts is unfilled and as almost a third of nurses are aged 50 or over
The problem she says is that the UK has not been training enough nurses and therefore has to use agencies to ensure patient safety.
Trusts are absolutely right to prioritise safe staffing levels and patient safety over sticking to the cap, she says. Unfortunately, they are often forced to use expensive agency staff to do this because of short-sighted decisions taken at a national level.
Agency nurses are doing an important job but if a trust is over-reliant on temporary staff it can impact on continuity of care.
Two of the trusts most reliant on nursing agency staff were also in the highest spenders: Barts Health and Guys and St Thomas needed nursing cover for 104,223 and 60,433 shifts respectively.
Some trusts are far less dependent. Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust for example only needed to cover 1,886 shifts and spent about 700,000 on agency staff.
The Patients Association believes there is a simple solution to the staff shortages that allow the agencies to profit so much.
Josie Irwin, head of employment relations at the Royal College of Nursing, says that part of the NHS's problem is that the UK has not been training enough nurses and therefore has to use agencies to ensure patient safety
If a fraction of the money thats wasted on nursing agencies was invested in recruiting, retaining and training more nurses giving them better terms and conditions we would have a more caring compassionate NHS, says chief executive Katherine Murphy.
Instead, universities are training fewer nurses and the NHS continues to waste vast amounts of money on agency staff.
We must remember that the NHS is paid for by the tax-payer, and it belongs to patients and the public.
A spokesperson for Thornbury said: We provide a valuable service that helps trusts to guarantee safe staffing levels in the NHS.
Thornbury ensures that the right nurses, with the right skills, are available to deliver care to patients whenever trusts need us round the clock, even at incredibly short notice.
Some rates for agency nurses are higher than the NHS rates reflecting the nature of last-minute requests, out of hours, for flexible workers with highly specialist skills.
Commenting on the high sums charged for single shifts, Thornbury said: They are likely to have been last-minute requests for a highly experienced, specialist nurse who receives none of the benefits that a full-time, permanent worker would, but is available at short notice and prepared to travel a long distance to keep patients safe.
Already released in the US, the devices could solve this common problem
A set of plastic earplugs may be the new way to treat chronic teeth grinding
Wiggling the tubes of my new ear inserts until they fitted snugly, I felt bemused.
They were so comfortable I could hardly tell I was wearing them, yet they were supposed to stop me clenching my jaw and grinding my teeth.
Given that all the awkward tooth guards and bite splints I had tried had failed to accomplish this feat, I was sceptical.
Along with six million other people in Britain, I have bruxism, otherwise known as teeth grinding or clenching.
Bruxism, also known as teeth grinding or clenching, can cause pain and discomfort and wear down your teeth
I had no idea that I did this, nor the impact it could have, until I began visiting an osteopath 20 years ago for the persistent pain in my neck, shoulders and back.
After a quick look in my mouth, he pointed out that unless I began using a tooth guard or splint (the technical term dentists use), his efforts at unlocking my back would last only a day or two.
Apparently, the tension I generated by clamping my back teeth together was causing my back and neck muscles to tighten up and spasm.
I mostly did this jaw-clenching while asleep, but began to realise it also happened when I was stressed during the day.
So a dentist measured me up for a U-shaped device that slotted over my upper teeth, which would stop me exerting pressure through my back teeth at night.
It did ease my back and neck ache at first, but after a few months I would wake at night to find I was biting the splint for all I was worth. And the pain crept back.
Since then Ive used a variety of splints, with varying degrees of success. They usually make a huge difference to begin with, then I find a way to tense up around them and give up.
Mostly, I try to ignore the perennial stiffness and do Pilates, physiotherapy and yoga to stay supple.
Along with six million other people in Britain, Alice Hart-Davis has bruxism, otherwise known as teeth grinding or clenching
I even tried Botox injections in my jaw muscles ten years ago. This works by immobilising the masseter muscles, the chewing muscles which power the grinding and clenching.
This did help, but I didnt fancy having to repeat it every three months. And now that studies have shown this treatment reduces bone density in the jaw, Im glad I didnt.
So Im always on the lookout for something that might help. And when I heard that Dr Joanna Christou, a London-based dentist and cosmetic doctor, was conducting a clinical review of a new device called Cerezen, I applied like a shot.
She wanted people with a history of tooth-grinding and associated problems with their temporomanibular joint (TMJ) the big hinge joint at the corner of the jaw.
At my appointment, I filled in a questionnaire, and immediately felt a bit of a fraud. It was clear from the options that some sufferers found their jaws frequently locked shut, had constant ringing in their ears and tension headaches, or could hardly eat because of the pain caused by their jaw.
But while my problems were not this severe, Dr Christou said I was a good candidate as I couldnt open my jaw fully (on reflection I realised that Im always being asked to open my mouth wider at the dentist) and she could feel the tension in my neck muscles.
Next she showed me the Cerezen devices two hollow, hard plastic tubes, 6mm long, which are slightly twisted to follow the contours of the ear canal.
Each has a tiny blob protruding from it, to make it easier to hoick it out of your ear.
The idea behind the inserts is to do with the ear canal lying right behind the TMJ.
When you grind or clench your back teeth, it exerts pressure on this joint, causing the ear canal to contract slightly (which might explain why some people have earache as a result).
This in turn is meant to put pressure on the ear inserts not enough to cause discomfort, but to encourage the jaw to relax, by a process that the Cerezen website describes, rather bafflingly, as para-cognitive awareness.
Its the physical stimulus of having the device in the ear canal so close to the jaw joint, which breaks the tension cycle of clenching, says Dr Christou.
The Cerezen devices are two hollow, hard plastic tubes of 6mm in size, which are inserted into the ear canal
Launched in the U.S. in 2012, Cerezen has now come to Britain.
So far, there has been one randomised controlled clinical trial, which showed a statistically significant reduction in pain among patients who used it, as good as that given by a stabilisation splint used by other patients in the trial.
Whats more, people found them easy to wear as part of their normal lives, says Saife Aziz, the UK health manager of Renew Health, which brought the device to Britain.
HOW CEREZEN WORKS Next she showed me the Cerezen devices two hollow, hard plastic tubes, 6mm long, which are slightly twisted to follow the contours of the ear canal. Each has a tiny blob protruding from it, to make it easier to hoick it out of your ear. The idea behind the inserts is to do with the ear canal lying right behind the TMJ. When you grind or clench your back teeth, it exerts pressure on this joint, causing the ear canal to contract slightly (which might explain why some people have earache as a result). This in turn is meant to put pressure on the ear inserts not enough to cause discomfort, but to encourage the jaw to relax, by a process that the Cerezen website describes, rather bafflingly, as para-cognitive awareness. Its the physical stimulus of having the device in the ear canal so close to the jaw joint, which breaks the tension cycle of clenching, says Dr Christou. Advertisement
He added that the devices were comfortable enough to wear for longer at a time than a splint and, unlike a splint, people could wear them during the day as well.
The trial didnt show whether patients would continue to wear the splint after the trial finished, but we do know they continue to use Cerezen, he says.
Of course I was mad keen to try it, so I had moulds made of my ear canals by an audiologist. Two weeks later, I wiggled my custom-made devices into my ears and got on with life.
Cerezen recommends you wear them for 16 hours a day, but take them out when showering, so I got into the habit of having them in overnight, but taking them out for a time during the day.
I could tolerate sleeping in them, as long as I didnt press the side of my head too firmly into the pillow. If I did, the prong pressed uncomfortably into my outer ear, so I learned to sleep on my back.
As the inserts are hollow, I could hear well enough in quiet surroundings. But they did dull my hearing when there was background noise or when I was in a group, so I started to take them out for meetings or parties.
And they were a bit of a nuisance. They stayed put when I walked the dog or cycled, but would wiggle loose in the gym or yoga studio, so I took them out for exercising or to wear headphones.
I also removed them when brushing my teeth I couldnt stand how they buzzed as the vibrations from my sonic toothbrush travelled up my jaw and into my ears.
To my surprise, no one spotted them all you can see is the tiny blob that helps you pull them out.
Wearing them soon became a way of life and four months rolled by.
But were they doing any good?
A recemt trial showed a statistically significant reduction in pain among patients who used the devices, as good as that given by a stabilisation splint used by other patients in the trial
Certainly, the tension in my neck and shoulders seemed better than usual, and Anna the physio seemed to be spending less time massaging my knotted muscles.
When I returned for my follow-up assessment, it was positive.
The big change is that you can open your mouth 10 per cent more than before, says Dr Christou.
Also, you really dont have much muscular tension in your neck any more, and your jaw opens more smoothly. These are all positive signs.
WHAT ARE THE ALTERNATIVES? Although there have been many other treatments proposed over the years to decrease the level of bruxism, the only proven treatments for bruxism are mandibular advancement devices, hypnosis and occlusal splints. Occlusal splints are small plastic mouth-guards that can be used immediately without specialist fitting Occlusal splints have been found to be the most successful as they protect the teeth from premature wear, reduce jaw muscle activity and the noise of teeth grinding. This means that the user need not worry about ruining their teeth (or any dental work they may have) and their bed partner will not be disturbed by the noise. Source: The Bruxism Association Advertisement
Overall, everyone in Dr Christous review had positive results. But there were only ten of us. And I still wasnt completely convinced. So when Saife Aziz asked if Id let him take them back, I happily stopped wearing them then and there.
Aziz looked surprised as no one else who has tried the devices has been prepared to relinquish them.
But a week later, the familiar stiffness started creeping up my back, shoulders and neck, and I dug them out again. For now, Im wearing them only overnight.
Whether the inserts could be a solution to a common problem, its too early to say.
Ideally, in order for the jaw to be comfortable, there are three things that need to work in harmony: the temporomandibular joints, the muscles that move the lower jaw and the teeth, says Andrew Eder, a professor and honorary consultant in restorative dentistry at the UCL Eastman Dental Institute.
He adds: If any of these is out of alignment or not working properly, you can end up with problems such as tooth grinding or TMJ pain.
I usually manage these problems in my patients with a Michigan splint, a type of mouth guard normally worn over the upper teeth at night, for which there is a lot of long-term evidence.
I might add support from a physiotherapist or osteopath to help with the muscles, and possibly an anti-inflammatory medication in the short term.
I watch any of these novel approaches with interest, particularly when there are appropriate research studies that support the treatment being recommended.
But he points out that it is early days for Cerezen.
Until we have confirmation of positive long-term outcomes, I would feel uncomfortable offering this to my patients. However, I am keenly watching this space.
Cheating among nursing students is rife and putting patients' lives at risk, an alarming investigation has revealed.
In the past three years, universities have punished 1,706 nursing undergraduates for plagiarism, collusion and impersonating other students, an investigation by The Times revealed.
And the figure may be even higher as more students are buying bespoke essays from specialist websites which are harder for plagiarism detectors to weed out.
Experts warned this cheating could put patients in danger if nurses leave university without being able to read doctors' notes or dispense prescriptions correctly.
Thousands of student nurses have been disciplined for cheating, an investigation by the Times revealed. It found a company called Nexus which runs websites selling essays and coursework to British nursing students
Dr Thomas Lancaster, a plagiarism expert and senior lecturer in computing at Birmingham City University, told the The Times that high hundreds or low thousands of nursing essays are bought every year in the UK.
He said this could be putting patients lives at risk and warned of potentially dangerous and fatal consequences if nurses cannot understand how to take notes correctly or read doctors notes.
He added: 'We expect nurses to have our health in mind, to be able to correctly dispense the right amount of drugs, to know what to do in different situations.
SCANDAL OF THE AGENCY NURSES WHO EARN 2,000 SHIFT Hospital trusts are still paying millions to 'rip off' agencies for nurses in a desperate bid to plug gaps in rotas, an investigation has revealed. One agency alone charged the NHS nearly 40 million for temporary nursing staff last year. And some agency nurses are earning 2,000 a shift, Daily Mail Good Health found. Despite a recent cap on how much hospitals can spend on 'rip off agencies', taxpayers paid five of the major ones an eye-watering 97 million this year. Some paid more to the companies than they did last year. Data from 108 hospital trusts was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The figures could be just the tip of the iceberg, as about a third of trusts refused to divulge what they spent. Campaigners warned patients can be directly affected by the use of temporary staff as the standard of care can suffer through lack of continuity. The increased reliance on agency nurses and the shortage of nursing staff is an issue that has generated more and more concern among people who contact us, says Joyce Robins, of campaign group Patient Concern. You may never see the same face the situation can be especially bad at weekends when the majority of the nursing staff seem to be from an agency. Its not that they dont care, but if they just come in for one or two shifts or the odd day here and there, can they really deliver the same standard of care? Additionally, agency workers are often not allowed to carry out the same duties as staff nurses: some trusts wont let them take blood for example, or give intravenous drugs or even administer food by a tube. Advertisement
The Times uncovered a company called Nexus based in Pakistan which runs websites selling websites to students including nurses.
One of its websites, which charges 195 for an essay told an undercover reporter the companys writers included retired professors from UK colleges.
In fact, journalists Alexi Mostrous and Billy Kenber discovered the site is based in Karachi and relies on 40 young writers working around the clock.
One of the websites, nursingessay.co.uk offers a range of services including essays and dissertations.
Describing its services on its site, it ironically managed to misspell coursework as 'courswork'.
The website claims to help students who might be good at practical work, but struggle to write essays.
It said: 'Nursing assignments, nursing essays, nursing dissertations, and other nursing tasks fill up nursing students academic years to the brim.
They have to take classes, prepare for exams, and attend practical cases; to top it all completing nursing assignments is mandatory as well.
Completing nursing essays and other projects on time becomes tedious for nursing students.
Using questionable English, it continues: Critical thinking, analytical expertise, and sharp writing skills are pre-requisites to come up with a scholarly written piece in nursing academic career.
Most of the nursing students join this field as a passion. They might be excellent in theoretical learning and practical work, but it does not mean that they are good enough in crafting an academically sound paper.
Such students may lag behind their peers just because they are not able to excel their grades when it comes to writing a nursing essay.
The Times obtained data from 61 British universities under the Freedom of Information Act.
It found almost 300 nursing students were caught cheating between 2010 and 2013 at Edinburgh Napier University.
And at the University of Dundee, some 155 nursing students were caught cheating in the same period almost half of all students facing action.
And 126 nursing students were caught at the University of Brighton.
The Nursing and Midwifery Council who regulated nurses do not investigate students.
Instead, the watchdog says academic institutions are responsible for ensuring nurses-to-be have passed all parts of their course and been awarded a qualification.
A daily dose of anti-HIV medication almost eradicates the risk of infection for people in a relationship with an HIV positive partner, new research claims.
The breakthrough raises hopes of reducing HIV rates among one of Africa's highest risk groups.
The HIV positive partner in the couple - two-thirds of whom were women - took antiretroviral therapy (ARV), which suppress the HIV virus and stop the progression the disease.
Meanwhile, the HIV negative one took pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), a daily pill which prevents HIV infection.
'HIV was virtually eliminated in this population,' the lead researcher, Dr Jared Baeten of the University of Washington, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Taking a daily anti-HIV pill nearlty eradicates the risk of infection for people in a relationship where one partner is HIV positive, a study has revealed
He added: 'More than 95 per cent of the HIV infections that we expected to see, we did not see.'
More than 1,000 Kenyan and Ugandan couples took part in the two-year project.
The results were announced on today at the Durban International AIDS Conference in South Africa.
There, delegates are discussing the UN target of ending AIDS as a global health crisis by 2030.
South Africa has the world's largest population of people living with HIV, accounting for 6.8 million of the 36.7 million infected globally.
Dr Jared Baeten said the study was good news for serodiscordant couples - where one partner is HIV positive and the other HIV negative - who want to have children.
Public health facilities can offer cheaper, non-branded versions of PrEP for $100 (76) a year or less, he said.
In the study, the HIV negative person was offered a daily PrEP pill until their partner had taken ARVs for six months.
The ARVs would reduce the viral load and the risk of transmission.
'Couples really value something like this because it's important for maintaining their relationship, for maintaining their family,' Dr Baeten said.
'PrEP offers a really potent, usable, deliverable HIV prevention strategy ... PrEP has to be part of the puzzle for ending HIV.'
FREE MEDICATION
The breakthrough raises hopes of reducing HIV rates among one of Africa's highest risk groups. Pictured is a red ribbon, which is sold to raise money for HIV charities
The use of PrEP among high risk groups, like gay men, is increasing in the US, leading to a fall in HIV rates in San Francisco, which has a large gay population, Dr Baeten said.
Kenya and South Africa are among seven countries globally to have approved PrEP, Chris Beyrer, president of the International AIDS Society, said in a pre-conference briefing.
'(We are) really going to focus on the affordability and access to PrEP and, we hope, really begin a PrEP access era globally,' he said.
Kenya announced on Friday that it will offer free PrEP to high risk groups, such as couples where one partner is infected.
It will also offer ARVs to everyone who is diagnosed positive.
Married couples account for 44 per cent of new infections in Kenya, which has 1.5 million people living with HIV, government data shows.
The UN is trying to increase the number of people who are tested, diagnosed and treated with ARVs to reverse the HIV pandemic.
Less than half of people with HIV globally are on treatment, it says. Alarmingly, many do not know they are infected.
Although the World Health Organization recommends everyone with HIV should be given ARVs as soon as possible after diagnosis, many are reluctant to start medication.
'People want to delay the process,' said Elizabeth Bukusi, chief research officer at the Kenya Medical Research Institute's Center for Microbiology Research, which was involved in the study.
'For someone who has no symptoms, there is nothing they are responding to.'
The following three statements are all true: Eating cookie dough can be dangerous, even after we've dealt with any raw eggs.
I am a public health faculty member and an expert in health risk communication. My family and I eat raw cookie dough regularly.
If it seems implausible that all three of those statements can be simultaneously true, let me explain.
To start, when most people think about health risks and cookie dough, they think about raw egg.
Eggs can be contaminated with salmonella bacteria, and food safety recommendations encourage people to cook eggs until the white and yolk are firm in order to kill any bacteria.
Could it be ok? A public health official says he regularly lets his children eat raw cookie dough
Because of this concern, when my kids and I make cookie dough, we never use regular eggs.
Instead, we use eggs that have been pasteurized to kill any harmful bacteria without actually cooking the egg itself. (A great public health innovation, if you ask me!)
So, I wasn't worried about the eggs in the cookie dough.
Now, there is another risk to consider in relation to raw cookie dough: the risk of the flour itself.
Over the past two months, General Mills, Inc. first initiated and then expanded a voluntary recall of flour found to be contaminated with E. coli bacteria.
While contamination of raw flour is rare, it can happen. Wheat grows in fields close to animals.
When they 'heed the call of nature,' as the FDA put it, wheat can become contaminated. In this recent outbreak, 38 people have been sickened since December 2015 and some have been hospitalized because they ate the recalled flour raw, often in the form of cookie dough.
One went into kidney failure.
An important safety message or a half-baked idea?
Such recall notices are extremely important. When we know that a product is contaminated, we can and should make absolutely sure to get rid of it.
As soon as I read the recall notice, I checked whether my extra flour was recalled.
It wasn't.
If it had been, or even if I hadn't been sure, I would have thrown it out, no questions.
However, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration later also published a notice for consumers warning the public about eating cookie dough.
Specific statements included: 'the bottom line for you and your kids is don't eat raw dough,' 'don't give your kids raw dough or baking mixes that contain flour to play with' and 'don't make homemade cookie dough ice cream.'
Not surprisingly, this story got picked up by many news outlets. What was interesting about these stories, however, was not their content but their negative tone.
For example, The New York Times stated 'F.D.A. Ruins Raw Cookie Dough for Everybody.'
Another example: InStyle's article was titled, 'Buzzkill Alert: Don't Eat Raw Cookie Dough.' The first line of the article reads, 'Don't shoot the messenger.'
Here's the question: Is it appropriate for public health officials to imply that no one should eat cookie dough (something that I, and apparently many others, enjoy) because of this risk?
A right to choose?
The FDA warned people to avoid the gooey mix because of the risk of salmonella from raw eggs
I'm the last person to say that communications about public health risks are unimportant. Public health officials have a duty to warn people about the health risks associated with raw egg and even raw flour.
When we have evidence that specific people are at risk, public health officials need to actively promote the actions that those people can take to minimize the identified risk.
Doing so supports both public health objectives and individual decision-making.
By contrast, when a public health agency unequivocally states 'don't eat raw dough' (regardless of whether flour or other ingredients were affected by a recall or not), it is implying (falsely) that no one could rationally disagree.
Well, I'm a public health faculty member, and I disagree.
I know that some public health officials will be horrified by my statement. They will believe that I am undermining their message and giving people permission to put themselves at risk unnecessarily.
But the key word of the previous sentence is 'unnecessarily.'
Whether something is necessary or not is not a scientific judgment. It is a value judgment.
Over the past two months, General Mills, Inc. first initiated and then expanded a voluntary recall of flour found to be contaminated with E. coli bacteria
An FDA official may personally believe that eating raw cookie dough isn't important and choose to never eat it. That is their choice.
At the same time, I can believe that eating cookie dough (made from flour known to be not part of the recall and pasteurized eggs) is something that I enjoy enough that I'm willing to put myself and my children at (a very small) risk to do.
Of life and risk
As public health experts, we don't want people to treat food recalls like math problems and estimate their likelihood of getting sick. If you have affected food, you need to act. Period.
But if I know that my flour is not recalled, then there is no specific reason to believe that the flour is not OK to eat raw.
The only risk is the very small, baseline risk for example, that the flour has been contaminated by a different and as-of-yet unknown source.
We can't pretend that we live our lives without risk.
I put myself and my children at risk every time we get into our car.
Every time we eat sushi or rare hamburgers.
Every time one of us takes medications.
Every time we ride a bike or play soccer.
Yet, many of us choose to do those things anyway, while minimizing risk when we can (for example, by wearing seat belts and bike helmets).
We choose life and risk over safety and a life a little less enjoyable. It is not irrational to treat cookie dough the same way.
So, to my fellow public health practitioners: Let's keep working on informing the public about health risks that they may not anticipate or appreciate.
Motivating people to take immediate action about specific food recalls. Encouraging people to minimize risks.
At the same time, let's all please remind ourselves that our goal is not to minimize all risk, no matter the cost. Our goal is to maximize life.
Sometimes maximizing life means warning people that their flour is contaminated and making sure they throw it out.
The first vaccine to protect against the sexually transmitted disease chlamydia has shown promising results, experts have revealed.
The infection, which is often devoid of any obvious symptoms, impacts around 113 million people across the world each year and can render sufferers infertile.
Currently there are no direct preventative methods, other than advising people have safe, protected sex.
But now, a team of scientists at McMaster University, have developed what is believed to be the first widely protective vaccine against chlamydia.
Scientists at McMaster University have developed what is believed to be the first effective vaccine to protect against chlamydia - which often presents no obvious signs, but can result in infertility and impacts on 113 million people globally every year
Their tests reveal the antigen, known as BD584 is a potential vaccine candidate for the most common species of chlamydia - Chlamydia trachomatis.
Dr David Bulir, co-author of the study, said the vaccine to prevent the STD would 'extremely beneficial', because of the various side effects.
As most C.trachomatis infections are asymptomatic, chlamydia can often go untreated and lead to upper genital tract infections, pelvic inflammatory disease, and in severe cases, infertility.
Dr Bulir said: 'Vaccine development efforts in the past three decades have been unproductive and there is no vaccine approved for use in humans.
'Vaccination would be the best way to prevent a chlamydia infection, and this study has identified important new antigens which could be used as part of a vaccine to prevent or eliminate the damaging reproductive consequences of untreated infections.'
The potential vaccine under development would be administered via a nasal spray.
The researchers found that the antigen, BD584 was able to reduce chlamydial shedding - a symptom of C.trachomatis - by 95 per cent.
The vaccine was also found to reduce another symptom, which involves Fallopian tubes becoming blocked with fluid, by 87.5 per cent.
The vaccine, which was administered via a nasal spray, was able to reduce chlamydial shedding - a symptom of C.trachomatis - by 95 per cent. It also found to reduced another symptom, which involves fallopian tubes becoming blocked with fluid, by 87.5 per cent
Senior author, Professor James Mahony, from McMaster's Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine hailed the results are promising.
Co-author and PhD student, Steven Liang, explained: 'Not only is the vaccine effective, it also has the potential to be widely protective against all C.trachomatis strains, including those that cause trachoma.'
Trachoma is an eye infection caused by chlamydia and is the leading cause of preventable blindness affecting millions of people in may resource-poor regions of the world.
Mr Liang added: 'The vaccine would be administered through the nose.
'This is easy and painless and does not require highly-trained health professionals to administer, and that makes it an inexpensive solution for developing nations.'
The next step is for further tests of the vaccine's effectiveness against different strains of chlamydia, and in different fomulations.
Fleeting mini-strokes suffered by 50,000 Britons a year may have a long-lasting impact, experts warn.
Mini-strokes, also called transient ischemic attacks or TIAs, are usually considered a short-term issue and are often dismissed as exhaustion, a migraine or a funny turn.
When they are taken seriously at all, it is usually because they can be a warning sign that a major stroke is on the way.
But research by the University of Birmingham suggests that mini-strokes are problematic in themselves, causing lasting cognitive impairment, depression and fatigue.
Experts warn that mini-strokes suffered by 50,000 Britons a year may have a long-lasting impact (file photo)
A mini-stroke occurs when blood flow to the brain is momentarily disrupted, causing numbness in the face, arms and legs which usually resolves within a few minutes. Most patients dismiss the episodes because they feel they have recovered soon afterwards.
But the latest findings, published in the European Journal of Neurology, reveal that 45 per cent of patients who suffer a mini-stroke experience lasting cognitive impairment.
Some 43 per cent complain of fatigue, while 26 per cent have a psychological impairment such as anxiety or depression. About one in seven major strokes are preceded by a TIA, with many coming within a week of the other.
BBC broadcaster Andrew Marr, 56, who had a near-fatal stroke in 2013, realised afterwards that he had suffered two TIAs in the preceding months, dismissing them both as funny turns.
His wife Jackie Ashley said later that the most obvious of these occurred when he was filming in Greece, and had an overwhelming sensation of tiredness. She said: He was helped into the crew car and left to sleep for the afternoon in a local village, after which he felt better and was able to complete filming. At the time he put it down to jet lag.
A few months later he went on to have a major, life-changing stroke, which resulted in four months in hospital, eight months off work and permanent disability.
The University of Birmingham researchers compared GP surgery records of 9,500 patients who had suffered a mini-stroke with a control group of 46,500 people from the same age range.
TIA patients were far more likely to complain of psychological impairment, cognitive difficulties and fatigue, the study found. Some had symptoms so extreme that they were unable to work or socialise.
Research by the University of Birmingham suggests that mini-strokes are problematic in themselves, causing lasting cognitive impairment, depression and fatigue (file photo)
Researcher Dr Grace Turner said: There have been a number of small studies which suggest long term impacts of TIA, but nothing on this scale, and nothing that included a control group for comparison.
These findings present an urgent need to revisit clinical guidelines for TIA. They can no longer be considered transient or temporary, there is a potential long-term impact. In some cases people may not be able to return to work, or participate in social activities, and there is a very real impact on their quality of life.
Richard Francis, of the Stroke Association charity, said: We know that theres nothing small about mini-stroke, and these results indicate that although the symptoms of mini-stroke may be fleeting, the condition could have a long-term effect on peoples health.
This latest study suggests that, following a mini-stroke, people are more likely to consult their doctor for long-term health conditions.
Two months ago, research from Oxford University found that taking an aspirin immediately after a TIA slashed the risk of a subsequent full-blown stroke by up to 80 per cent.
If patients report to hospital after a TIA they are always given aspirin.
But the study, published in the Lancet journal, found that if they took aspirin themselves as soon as they felt unwell it was far more effective.
Because of the delay, taking aspirin in hospital slashes the stroke risk by only 15 per cent. But taken immediately, the impact was 80 per cent.
The ongoing debate over proposed introduction of genetically modified (GM) mustard in India has become highly polarised.
On the one hand, we have developers of GM crops, scientists and pro-GM lobbies funded by deep pockets of seed companies, while on the other are anti-GM groups, farmers organisations and people ideologically opposed to foreign businesses.
Since the moratorium on genetically modified brinjal was imposed in 2010, both the sides have indulged in exchange of accusations of fraud, bribery, corruption and conflict of interest.
The science of biotechnology is the casualty in ongoing debate on GM foods
Clearly, the war is between strong corporate interests and ideological opposition to GM food. Casualty of this unseemly conflict is the science of biotechnology.
The use of hybrids to enhance yield of different crops is well established and some experts feel that it may have reached its threshold.
Scientists, therefore, resorted to genetic modification - introducing genes that can make crops resistant to insects and pests, or genes which could help enhance yield directly.
In GM mustard, gene from a commonly occurring bacterium was introduced to make the plant male sterile so that such lines could then be used as one of the parental lines for developing a hybrid variety.
This technology has not been developed in Delhi University now, but was developed in the University of California LA (UCLA) some 30 years back.
Our scientists adapted the technique to Indian mustard. Logically, when two sides are so deeply divided, an impartial regulator can play a key role. But, India does not have a full-fledged regulatory body for GM crops.
The so-called regulator - Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC) - is actually only a committee in the Ministry of Environment and Forests constituted under the Environment Protection Act, 1986.
Like most such panels, it is headed by an IAS officer, though the environment ministry is supposed to be a scientific ministry.
If GEAC claims to be a regulator like the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) or the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI), it should have a full-time head.
Its present chairperson was until a month ago a joint secretary in the Ministry of Water Resources and does not know how long she will chair GEAC.
Second, the functioning of this regulator is opaque. There is no record of decisions taken by GEAC after April 25, 2014 on the environment ministrys website which is otherwise updated on a daily basis.
No information is available on the status of pending projects after March 3, 2007.
Biosafety data of GM mustard was shared only after strictures from the Central Information Commission.
It was through another set of RTI applications it came to light that the Directorate of Rapeseed and Mustard Research (DRMR) did not conduct trials of the GM mustard in question as claimed, but only passed on to GEAC data, which was received from the developer- Delhi University.
These documents also put under cloud, claims being made about yield of the GM variety compared to existing hybrids like Varuna.
It is time that GEAC comes clean on all these issues.
Solving the wild problem
The incidents of human wildlife conflicts are reported from many parts of the country.
In many cases, wild animals are poisoned by villagers who suffer crop loss as well as damage to their property.
People are injured in attacks. Krithi K Karanth of Wildlife Conservation Society, who has been working on this issue in Karnataka for some years, noticed that very few people affected by such conflicts get compensation as mandated in the government rules.
A hut in Indian village damaged by elephants
To address this problem, she launched WildSeve project in 284 villages surrounding Bandipura and Nagarahole National Parks in 2015.
Farmers can just call a toll free number from their mobile phones to report a wildlife conflict incident.
Motorcycle- borne, trained volunteers - strategically located in attack prone areas - rush and assist families in filing compensation claims, completing formalities including an assessment of the damage.
They act as intermediaries between people and the forest department. In the past one year, the project could help file claims in 3261 incidents of crop and property damage by elephants, cattle predation by big cats as well as cases of injuries and deaths.
Some 1000 families have been helped this way. In addition, information from the helpline is helping in identification of high conflict regions, villages and vulnerable families.
In one year, it has identified 787 families, who experienced multiple incidents of crop raiding and 18 families who lost livestock repeatedly.
Concern over HIV epidemic rebound
After the rapid progress made in halting and reversing HIV epidemic in the past 15 years as envisaged in the Millennium Development Goals, signs of discomfort are visible.
It appears that the progress on HIV prevention globally has slowed.
In 2015, there were 2.1 million new HIV infections, which is just marginally less than 2.2 million reported in 2010.
Queen Latifah and others participated at HIV march in Durban
New infections are rising in some regions and among some vulnerable groups. The epidemic is also re-emerging in key population groups, in which it had been controlled previously.
In 2014, 35 per cent of new HIV infections worldwide occurred among men who have sex with men; sex workers and their clients; transgender people; people who inject drugs and people in prisons.
Though the treatment in the form of anti-retroviral therapy is available, not everyone who needs treatment is getting it.
About 40 per cent of people living with HIV do not even know about their HIV status. In addition, the threat of drug resistance is rising and funding gap is increasing.
After the global financial crisis of 2008-09, the decisive and coordinated actions of the G20 forum did much to boost consumer and business confidence during the first stages of economic recovery.
This year, China holds the Presidency of the G20 forum attended by central bank governors and governments of the world's 20 major economies, and the event will be held on 4 September in Hangzhou, China.
The agenda of the summit is generally set by the country holding the chair.
Chinas presidency of the G20 is greatly anticipated, as it is both the world's second-largest economy and also the largest trading partner of several significant members.
As the widely anticipated G20 summit approaches, questions remain about how Chinese President Xi Jinping plans to use his presidency to shape the agenda of economic progress
Influence
But it is unfair to expect too much from China as it faces huge domestic challenges in sustaining growth and maintaining competitive advantages in manufacturing.
China will have to use all its skills to implement the G20's past commitments and push forward on unsolved issues on the core economic agenda.
China is expected to work with other members to consolidate and strengthen the partnership within the G20, and will need to fully implement the commitments the group made at Antalya and the previous summits.
This year the G20 will be held on 4 September in Hangzhou, China. The agenda of the summit is generally set by the country hosting the event
The economic backdrop underpinning the Chinese G20 Presidency is not much different from other G20 presidencies.
The global economy continues to face significant short and long-term challenges associated with the sluggish recovery from the global financial crisis, and 2016 is likely to be characterised by disappointing growth and persistently high unemployment.
Expectations
The world economy is facing several risks, including the slowdown in the Chinese economy, slow and negative growth in emerging markets such as Brazil and Russia, debt concerns in several G20 nations, and ongoing EU problems related to migration flows, Greek debt, and Brexit.
As such, economic policymakers and multilateral institutions like the G20 need to be alert to evolving economic conditions and be ready to respond to contagious potential events.
It will be imperative for China to manage expectations about what the G20 can accomplish.
Minister Narendra Modi (left) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (right) will be in attendance at the G20 summit
The agenda of all the G20 meetings in the run-up to the G20 summit in September will revolve around this years summit theme, which is Towards an Innovative, Invigorated, Interconnected and Inclusive World Economy.
This ambitious theme not only continues and expands on the three Is of the 2015 Turkish Presidency - inclusiveness, implementation and investment - but also incorporates Chinese policy preferences and development concepts.
China has added an extra I - innovation.
Under this framework, G20 members can discuss how to formulate a G20 blueprint for innovation-led growth and deepen international cooperation in the areas of innovation and the digital economy.
Inequalities
Many countries are suffering from a series of unfavourable factors, including anemic global growth, high levels of unemployment and inequalities.
The potential of the G20 to help India in its developmental efforts is immense.
Some of the issues which it hopes to see addressed include how the G20 can unite to fulfill its core objectives, like eradicating poverty and achieving strong, inclusive, sustainable and balanced growth?.
Indian leaders will also be wondering how the country can boost the value of its regional supply chains in the global context, and how the G20 could help with this.
Further, how does the G20 intend to boost the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) mandate, sustaining global efforts to combat money laundering, and terror financing, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction?
As chair of the 2016 G20 summit, China has the opportunity to dictate the agenda for the year ahead
Further, India expects the G20 to promote BRICS (the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) as a leading global platform influencing global economic issues.
India believes the time is right for the BRICS to increase their influence and make a unified call for more representation in international institutions.
China being the Chair of the G20 is expected to attach great importance to suggestions from non-G20 members as well.
However, it is important to remain realistic in the expectations from the G20 Presidency. It is best to focus on what can be achieved in a single year.
The lawyer for the Nice attacks terrorist Mohamed Boulhlel has admitted he has dual feelings about getting Bouhlels prison sentence suspended - a move which led to his early, conditional release from prison.
Bouhlel, 31, would have been behind bars until the end of July - and thus unable to execute the killing spree that occurred on Frances National Day in the southern city of Nice.
Corentin Delobel, 34, who has been a lawyer for three years in Nice, said he first met Bouhlel when the latter was arrested.
Corentin Delobel (pictured) the lawyer of the Nice terrorist Mohamed Boulhlel has spoken about his dual feelings in getting Bouhlels prison sentence suspended leading to his early release from prison
Delobel said: It was a crime concerning the use of a weapon in a correctional court, one more in a series of crimes to his name. Back then I found out how he was known for violence against his wife and children, he added.
As I saw it, there was nothing remarkable about that man. Whenever I met him over discussion of his case - and I met him three times for nearly thirty minutes each - he spoke very little, and nothing to suggest he held radical views.
"In fact, to my surprise he was a pork-eating, wine-drinking, womaniser who acted more like religion held little meaning, said Delobel.
At no point did I think I was talking to a radicalist. I must say that if in recent times he took to it, then I cant possibly comment, he added.
Mohamed Lahouij Bouhlel, 31, killed 84 people when he deliberately drove into the crowd on the famous Promenade des Anglais during Bastille Day celebrations in Nice
The French prosecutor Francois Molins was quoted as saying Bouhlel was not on the national or regional lists of people being watched for radical tendencies.
He was unknown to the French intelligence set-up tasked with monitoring possible suspects.
Later, it was stated that Bouhlel had undergone rapid radicalisation with no concrete political or religious reason to explain why he did what he did.
Delobel added: Crazy act maybe. I do not blame the French government for knowing so little about him. There was no reason for any surveillance to be launched on him. Nothing he did qualified for him to be under watch, he said.
The truck driven by Mohamed Lahouij Bouhlel, covered in bullet holes from police gunfire
Looking back, Delobel said he did his best, as he would for any criminal assigned to him for defence.
He said he wished his efforts had failed as that would have ensured Bouhlel had not got out of prison until the end of the month.
This man had no charisma, no intelligence that made him stand out in any way, he stated.
All through his trial and incarceration, Bouhlel never had anyone whod come to stand with him. Delobel said he always saw and met him alone.
Some time at the end of March, when Delobel successfully got the judge to suspend Bouhlels sentence, the latter walked up and said a short thank-you to him. And then he left, rues Delobel.
When Rashtriya Janata Dal president Lalu Prasad chose his youngest son Tejashwi Prasad Yadav to be the deputy chief minister in the Nitish Kumar government last year - ahead of the elder Tej Pratap Yadav - an intense sibling rivalry was expected to be played out beyond their 10, Circular Road bungalow in Patna.
Eight months on, there seems to be no sign of any competition between the Yadav brothers, who have inherited the same political legacy in the state.
While Tejashwi (right) has made his presence felt as the second man in the government, his brother Tej Pratap appears to be weighed down by the burden of his responsibilities. Clearly, the two brothers are quite different in their attitudes and temperament.
While Tejashwi has made his presence felt as the second man in the government, his brother appears to be weighed down by the burden of his responsibilities.
Tejashwi has not only discharged his duties well in the government, but has also led the RJD from the front to push the partys agenda set by his father.
Even though he made his debut in the Grand Alliance ministry as a first-term legislator at the age of 26, he has been quick on the uptake, imbibing the intricacies of coalition politics and learning the nitty-gritty of governance.
Tejashwi has impressed the political pundits the most with the way he has handled criticism of the Opposition over the rising crime graph in the state in the past six months.
The BJP has often equated the current law and order scenario with that of the previous RJD rule, which had earned the moniker of jungle raj (a lawless regime) between 1990 and 2005.
Armed with statistics, he has taken on the detractors of the state government to emphasise that Bihars crime graph is still better than those of many BJP-ruled states.
Meanwhile his brother presents a diametrically opposite image.
Lalu had sought to strike a balance between his sons by getting three important ministries allocated to each of them, but Tej Pratap has failed to jettison his image of a reluctant entrant into politics. More often than not, he has given the impression his heart is not fully in his job.
His seemingly indifferent approach and politically incorrect off-the-cuff remarks have invariably caused embarrassment to his party in recent times.
Lalu fielded Tej Pratap in the assembly election from the Yadav-dominated Mahua constituency in Vaishali district last year. He won it with a margin bigger than Tejashwi, who contested from the Raghopur seat. But there is no denying that the two brothers are quite different in their attitudes and temperament.
It is not as if Lalu has not been aware of the differences. He had declared Tejashwi to be his heir-apparent during the 2010 assembly polls.
In recent times, the RJD president has sought to push Tej Pratap to the forefront to help him get over his inhibitions in the rough and tumble of Bihars politics.
Earlier this month, he chose to organise a high-profile Iftar party ahead of the Eid festival at Tej Prataps new bungalow, and let him play host to the teeming guests in an apparent bid to make him connect with people.
In 2013, when Lalu was debarred from contesting elections after being convicted in the fodder scam, his political fate looked bleak - but the victory of the Grand Alliance in the state assembly polls brought him back into power last year.
Since then, he has been able to make both his sons ministers in the state government and send his eldest daughter Misa Bharti to the Rajya Sabha.
It is Tejashwi who has emerged as his natural political successor among his children.
The jury is still out on whether Tej Pratap will be able to leave his mark on politics in future, but he definitely needs more time to get used to his new roles and responsibilities.
It would be harsh to write him off so early in his career, but he needs to learn a lesson or two in politics and governance - not only from his father, but also from his kid brother.
The nightmare homes
The Supreme Court had ordered the demolition of the illegal top three floors of a high-rise building in Patna
After a protracted legal battle, 21 flats at the Santosha Complex, a multi-storey apartment in the commercial district of Patna, will finally be demolished.
All the flats, built illegally on the top three floors of the high-rise building, will be razed in keeping with the directive of the Supreme Court.
The apartment was built way back in 2000, but the builders were found to have constructed three floors without obtaining the approval of the erstwhile Patna Regional Development Authority.
The flats were subsequently sold to unsuspecting customers.
Two years later, a case of illegal construction was lodged against the builders, which eventually culminated in the demolition order by the Supreme Court more than a decade later.
The apex court, however, asked the builders to deposit Rs 25 crore, which would now be distributed as compensation for the flats owners.
The upcoming demolition has instilled a sense of fear among the residents living on the other five floors of the building.
They are apprehensive that the demolition of the three floors would weaken the structure even though the Patna administration has chalked out a fool-proof plan to complete the onerous task.
The recent arrest of a young IAS officer on corruption charges has jolted the bureaucracy in Bihar.
Dr Jitendra Gupta, a 2013-batch officer posted as sub-divisional officer at Mohania in Kaimur district, was taken into custody by the state vigilance bureau sleuths, charged with taking a bribe from a truck driver.
The officer has since been sent to jail, but he has found tremendous support from fellow officers.
The IAS officers Association has condemned his arrest, asserting that there is no conclusive proof against Gupta.
Protest gets an arty edge
The prestigious College of Arts and Crafts under Patna University, alma mater of many great artists from eastern India, including Subodh Gupta, has been witnessing a prolonged agitation by the students.
Everything has come to a standstill on the campus for the past two-and-a-half months, due to pupils demanding the principal's resignation.
Students at the College of Arts and Crafts under Patna University have found creative ways to protest
The protests have led to the expulsion of eight students and the imprisonment of six others.
The university recently removed its principal and appointed eminent litterateur Prof Arun Kamal as Principal in-charge to restore normalcy - but to no avail. The students want a full-time principal to take care of their institution.
The agitation has found support from activists such as Medha Patkar. Jawaharlal Nehru Students Union president Kanhaiya Kumar has also supported it, and held the Nitish Kumar government responsible for the mess in the education system in Bihar.
Ten members of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) have died in Bihar in a Maoist ambush.
Their escape route was heavily mined with explosives to ensure that the injured could not be rushed for medical aide, resulting in heavier casualties.
The rebels had planted Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) all along the route out of the encounter site, which delayed the evacuation of injured troops as the rebels triggered over a dozen blasts, sources said.
An injured CRPF jawan is taken to hospital after a Maoist attack in Bihars Aurangabad district
The encounter in Bihars Aurangabad district started in the afternoon, but the troops could not be evacuated until 8pm.
Even a rescue chopper had to turn back as the troops were stuck inside the forests where the encounter took place.
While 10 commandos were killed, the force managed to gun down three Maoists.
Officials said five other personnel were critically injured in the fierce gun battle that followed the IED (Improvised Explosive Device) blast.
While eight personnel were killed on the spot, two others succumbed to their injuries when they were being evacuated, a senior official said.
The incident happened in the Chakarbanda-Dumarinala forests, bordering Gaya. Some arms and ammunition, including an AK-47 rifle, INSAS rifle, and under barrel grenade launcher were also seized from the site.
The jawans belonged to the 205th COBRA battalion and were deployed in the state to conduct anti-naxal operations. This is one of the biggest casualties counts the elite COBRA unit has suffered. The unit was raised by the CRPF to undertake special jungle warfare operations.
Additional reinforcements of the state police and CRPF have reached the spot and a search operation has been launched.
The Home Minister asked Director General of the CRPF K Durga Prasad to visit Gaya-Aurangabad to assess the situation.
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar briefed the Home Minister on the steps taken to nab those involved in the attack on the team of COBRA commandos, sources said.
The Home Minister assured the Chief Minister of all possible help to deal with the situation arising out of the attack, they added.
Singh expressed his heartfelt condolences to the families of the bereaved martyrs and wished a speedy recovery to the injured personnel.
The Jammu and Kashmir government has described the recent media ban there as a mistake.
However, newspaper editors and owners insisted on Tuesday that they will not print their publications till the government admits to carrying out raids on newspaper offices and seizing thousands of newspaper copies.
They called the government's present position a press emergency, after a senior Minister in the Mehbooba Mufti-led government described the ban as temporary measure in response to extraordinary situation.
Fighting the media blackout: Kashmiri journalists hold placards during a protest in Srinagar
Amitabh Mattoo approached newspapers to apologise, and described the raids and seizing of newspapers as a mistake.
However, the owners and editors of Kashmir newspapers met on Tuesday for more than two hours to review what they described as the press emergency imposed by the government on the printing and distribution of newspapers.
ARM Holdings registered a patent for a new invention every other day last year, the Mail can reveal.
The takeover target filed 185 patents in 2015, the fourth highest in the UK, and around four times more than firms such as BT, GlaxoSmithkline, and UCL.
The tech giant also registered more ideas than firms traditionally recognised as the most prolific inventors such as BAE Systems, GE, Dyson and Airbus.
The figures from the Patent Office show just how prolific ARM is in churning out ideas, and will give further support to those who want the firm to stay under UK ownership following a proposed 24billion takeover by Softbank of Japan.
Cutting edge: ARM Holdings filed 185 patents in 2015, the fourth highest in the UK, and around four times more than firms such as BT, GlaxoSmithkline, and UCL
Opponents of the deal say it is vital that the intellectual property for ideas stays in the UK as the income from these would remain on these shores, boosting the economy and balance of payments.
They claim that the UK and ARM could lose the patents for its future inventions as these would all be registered in Japan by Softbank.
On Monday Softbank, led by billionaire inventor Masayoshi Son, made a 24billion all-cash bid for ARM.
Although ARM is a FTSE 100 giant, it has been relatively unknown to many UK consumers. However, its chips, which are in Apple iPhones and Samsung mobiles, are credited with changing the way the world works.
Tech takeover: Softbank, led by billionaire inventor Masayoshi Son, made a 24bn all-cash bid for ARM
Softbank has swooped because ARM is considered to be at the forefront of the next big idea, the so-called internet of things, where all devices are connected by mobile phone chips.
Laith Khalaf, analyst from investment firm Hargreaves Lansdown, said: It is the intellectual property and the ideas that it produces that make ARM so valuable. This is where Softbank sees the potential in the firm.
Data from the Patent Office shows that in terms of the number of patents registered in 2015, ARM was only behind Rolls-Royce, Jaguar Land Rover and Ford.
While the mobile phone made ARM a global technology player, it is the ideas for future business which Softbank is hoping to cash in on.
Its chips are already in almost every smartphone, and the next big idea is that they will soon be in your washing machine, thermostat, security camera and car.
ARM (down 0.7 per cent or 12p to 1662p) has already had some early successes in the internet of things. In 2005 it shipped 1.6billion chips but last year this had grown to 15billion.
Shares in Softbank fell 10.3 per cent in Tokyo following the announcement of the ARM takeover.
Investors worry a previous acquisition by Softbank, the US mobile firm Sprint, has yet to make a large contribution to the firms profits.
Makoto Kikuchi, chief executive of Japanese fund Myojo Asset Management, said: SoftBank has taken on another big risk for its balance sheet before it becomes clear when Sprint will start making a clear contribution to profits.
A landmark ruling by a European Union watchdog has given British hedge funds a major boost following the Brexit vote.
The European Securities and Markets Authority has ruled that hedge funds in America, Singapore and Hong Kong can market themselves within the trading bloc without opening an office on the Continent.
Clarifying a new EU law, ESMA experts said that rules governing the funds in their home states were just as strict as those on the Continent.
This so-called equivalence means they will not face barriers to operating.
The European Securities and Markets Authority has ruled that hedge funds in America, Singapore and Hong Kong can market themselves within the trading bloc without opening an office on the Continent
Hedge funds in Canada, Guernsey, Japan, the Cayman Islands, Jersey, Australia and Switzerland also got the green light, although with provisos in some cases.
The decision has been seized on by Brexit campaigners as evidence the City can get a good deal after Britain leaves the EU.
They believe equivalence would almost certainly be granted for UK firms because London is already fully compliant with all of the unions regulations.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, a Conservative MP on the Treasury Select Committee, said: The equivalence regime is an important part of the European structure which allows non-EU funds to be marketed in the EU.
Its very encouraging that the EU has accepted the US and others as having equivalence. This bodes very well for our future negotiations.
Chancellor Philip Hammond has called for Britain to retain its access to the EUs single market meaning it would be able to rely on existing passporting rights which allow finance firms anywhere in Europe to sell services anywhere else in the region.
Germany has suggested it would support access to the market anyway, with finance minister Wolfgang Schauble saying this was a very reasonable position to take.
City watchdog boss Andrew Bailey yesterday said single market access should be Britains goal.
But France and Italy are seeking to cut Britain out and steal its business.
ARM is the nearest we have in the UK to an Apple, an Intel, a Microsoft or a Facebook. Indeed, it is the only company we have that is in that great global premier league.
And now, it is to be sold.
The new owner will probably be Japans Softbank. It has made what it intends to be a shut-out bid, but maybe some other foreign buyer will be prepared to pay more.
Foreign buyer? Almost certainly. That raises the huge issue of whether it is really wise to have a system that allows key British companies to be sold abroad.
Theresa May voiced her concerns about foreign ownership in her leadership speech, though this particular bid has been welcomed by both her Chancellor Philip Hammond and by Matt Hancock, the minister of state for digital policy.
Sold: ARM's new owner will probably be Japans Softbank. It has made what it intends to be shut-out bid, but maybe some other foreign buyer will be prepared to pay more
The investment highlights Britains capability to grow and build world-beating tech companies, Hancock tweeted.
There, surely, is the rub. ARM goes back to the beginning of the 1990s, the most successful of the rather wonderful clutch of companies that have flourished in Cambridges high-tech enterprise community.
Whatever view you take about foreigners buying up Britain, the future must lie in our ability to grow the next generation of ARMs.
Here, we seem to be doing all right, but only all right. To over-simplify, we are doing better than the Europeans but not as well as the Americans.
We have nothing like Silicon Valley Cambridges Silicon Fen and Londons Silicon Roundabout are pale shadows of that.
But if you look at the Fintech 40, Financial News list of the 40 most influential people in Europe in the burgeoning field of financial technology, almost all are based in London.
London is a world leader in a sector that has gone from offbeat to mainstream in a couple of years. Those 40 are among our best shots at creating the ARMs of the next generation.
There are, however, risks. There is the specific risk that the UK will not be the best place to develop the new technologies because the UK may no longer have access to the European single market in services.
We cannot know what will happen there and simply have to wait and see how that whole rigmarole plays out.
Meanwhile there is a more general challenge. How do we remain a magnet for talent? This is partly a European issue because the great honeypot of the London job market has attracted high-tech talent from across Europe, many of whom feature in that list.
But this is bigger than our relationship with the EU. We have become a magnet for young, talented people from all over the globe, many of them in the high-tech sectors.
It is the place where they can shine. Im not sure to what extent the Government realises this. Ministers talk of Britain being open for business, with the ARM bid being cited as evidence of the continuing attractions of UK plc.
But the future depends on being open not only for investment but also for talent: for human capital as much as financial capital.
That means keeping the door open for foreign students and foreign professors in our universities. Both have become more difficult to attract following Brexit.
Yes, lets celebrate ARM, but also remember that the whole Cambridge enterprise culture was built on the back of the university.
Exit strategy
Martin Weale, who steps down as a member of the Bank of Englands monetary policy committee next month, put a rather more positive gloss on Britains ability to cover its account deficit than the view taken by the Governor, Mark Carney.
You may recall that in his support for Remain, the governor observed that Britain was depending on the kindness of strangers to pay for the excess of imports over exports.
The phrase comes from Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire and is Blanche DuBois exit line before she is taken to a mental hospital.
Well, Martin Weales exit line is to observe in a speech yesterday that the foreigners who finance our external deficit either by lending us money or buying up British businesses are not doing so out of their kindness but because of the return that they expect to get.
Actually he also notes that at the exchange rate just before the Brexit vote, it would have been hard to cover the external deficit indefinitely, and that since our surplus on financial services exported to the EU was 18.5billion last year, there might be some further impact on the current account that would have to be offset. So all is not rosy.
He wisely did not go into quite how he would vote in his final meeting next month he said he did not yet know but his view that the recent devaluation was needed puts a rather different spin on it from the negative pound plunges headlines.
In any case, the fall in the pound may have the effect of putting the UK back into a surplus on the stock of assets owned abroad vis-a-vis the stock foreigners own here.
That is a comfort, isnt it? We think of ourselves as a country that sells everything we have to foreigners, yet actually we may own more stuff abroad than they own here.
Eton mess: LowCostHolidays boss Paul Evans
Online travel firm LostCostHolidays cropped-haired chief executive Paul Evans has gone to ground since his firm went into administration last Friday, leaving 130,000 customers in limbo.
A former elephant keeper, Evans, 56, is not hitherto one of lifes shrinking violets. Cocksure and boastful, he often brags of going to Eton.
Strangely, hes not in the Old Etonian Association directory. Which may mean he departed before graduating.
Rogue trader Nick Leeson, who brought down Barings bank in 1994 after racking up 827million in losses, is offering his own online trading course for aspiring stock pickers.
Plasterers son Leeson, 49, promises, sans irony, that customers will receive an excellent insight into how to trade like the truly successful traders.
Can it only be a matter of time before ex-RBS chief Fred Goodwin is conducting seminars on modern business management?
A partner at City-based law form Linklaters has been given a seven-month suspended prison sentence for brawling at Munichs boozy Oktoberfest celebrations.
Cerebral-looking Laurenz Schmitt, 55, who has since resigned from the firm, was also given 150 hours community service for punching a colleague three times in the face following a row over a female intern.
If only opposing lawyers could settle costly disputes in this fashion.
Online fashion retailer Net-a-Porters ex-CEO Mark Sebba was buttonholed at a recent party by gnomish historian Andrew Roberts, who was complaining of his wife, perky Brunswick boss Susan Gilchrists devotion to the site.
Somewhat disloyally, Sebba, 67, replied: You have my permission to stop using it. FarFetch is a good alternative, or Matches Fashion. It used to be that Net-a-Porter was crushing its competitors, now everybodys crushing it.
Chancellor Philip Hammond has postponed the Treasurys summer drinks party, which was due to be held in Whitehall this evening.
Navy Pier Is Getting Its Own Outdoor Rock Climbing Wall
By Mae Rice in Arts & Entertainment on Jul 18, 2016 9:09PM
Photo via wavebreakmedia on Shutterstock
Navy Pier is turning 100 this year, and as part of its anniversary facelift, it's getting not only a new Ferris wheel but also its very own climbing wall. Construction has already begun on the roughly 24-foot-tall wall, which is slated to open at the end of July, Navy Pier spokesperson Lucy Emery told Chicagoist.
Once it opens, the outdoor wallwhich will have 312 total square feet of climbing spacewill offer top-rope climbing, supported by an auto-belay safety system, according to Emery. (That means you won't need a partner to stand at the foot of the wall while you climb, holding the rope that keeps you from falling.) Tickets will be $8 for a three-minute climb, the Tribune reports, and the wall will be able to accommodate three climbers at a time. The only climbing restriction is that climbers must weigh between 40 and 250 pounds, Emery said.
This wall won't be quite as elaborate as the Maggie Daley Park climbing wall, which is 40 feet tall in some areas and offers a variety of climbing styles. Still, between this and the giant forthcoming Planet Granite climbing gym, rock climbing is getting increasingly ubiquitous in Chicago. You could get home tonight and discover a new rock climbing wall in your house.
Reshuffle: New Pensions minister Richard Harrington MP
Unless you're from Watford, the name Richard Harrington probably means very little to you.
Born in Yorkshire in 1957, former property developer and hotelier Mr Harrington was elected to Parliament in the Hertfordshire constituency six years ago.
Since then, by all accounts he has carried out sterling work in the community, including running jobs fairs for local businesses. But his only role in Government has been a minor one in the Home Office.
In fact, he's not even the most famous Richard Harrington. That honour goes to the Welsh actor who played Captain Andrew Blamey in BBC's Poldark and let's face it, he's not a household name either.
But that is about to change.
After a week of frantic reshuffling, Richard Harrington MP is the man Theresa May has put in charge of shoring up the retirements of millions of British workers.
As our new Pensions Minister, he replaces Baroness (Ros) Altmann, who quit last Friday. Sadly, the contrast between the two could not be greater.
Before her appointment 14 months ago, Baroness Altmann had earned her stripes as a campaigner who fought for decades for a better deal for savers.
She helped rescue the pensions of 150,000 workers whose company plans collapsed in the Nineties.
And she was a strong ally in Money Mail's campaign to stop savers being ripped off when they bought annuities which led to George Osborne's brilliant pensions freedom reforms last year.
By contrast, Mr Harrington's voting record shows just a passing acquaintance with retirement matters.
For example, he has 'consistently voted for encouraging occupational pensions', according to They Work ForYou, a website that tracks MP activity in the Commons, but does not appear to have made a single comment during debates on the topic.
So while Baroness Altmann can still influence pension policy from the Lords, I fear that her resignation could be a devastating loss to savers. Her successor takes office with a host of tricky issues in his inbox.
First is the furore surrounding women's state pension age. One reason Baroness Altmann gave for quitting was an inability to help 500,000 women born in the Fifties who were told, with very little notice, they'd have to retire age 66, rather than between the ages of 60 and 65.
Mr Harrington voted in favour of this policy in 2011. So even if he could persuade Chancellor Philip Hammond to part with some of the 11 billion needed to help these women, he seems unlikely to have the appetite.
Our pensions chief also has a mountain to climb in getting workers to save more for old age. The Government has pinned its hopes on automatically enrolling every worker into a company pension.
But under current plans, the minimum going into their pots will only ever hit 8 per cent of their salary for most that will be insufficient to fund a decent retirement.
How will Mr Harrington persuade the under-40s to lock away even more cash for decades when they have so many pressing priorities, such as climbing onto the housing ladder and raising a family?
Worryingly, TheyWorkForYou says there isn't 'enough information' available to guess Richard Harrington's views on the policy.
In her short time as minister, Baroness Altmann also played a vital role in safeguarding pensions tax relief. You currently get a full tax rebate on cash stored in a pension, with tax owed only on withdrawal.
My Westminster sources say she helped prevent former Chancellor George Osborne from raiding the pensions piggy bank by turning pensions into Isas. We campaigned hard to keep the tax breaks does Mr Harrington have the ability to guide the Treasury towards a fair deal for all?
He also faces propping up final salary pensions amid warnings from regulators that 1,000 schemes are nearing collapse.
And is Mr Harrington ready to fight tooth and nail to safeguard the state pension's value?
Before the EU vote, David Cameron said Brexit would mean the end of the triple lock that ensures pensioner incomes grow with the cost of living.
There have been 13 ministers responsible for pensions in the 18 years since the post was created. That uncertainty has played havoc with savers' retirement plans.
My fear is MPs will once again treat this post as a stepping stone. Mr Harrington's title has also been downgraded from Minister of State to Under-Secretary of State, which is perhaps the clearest sign the Government has lost interest in pensions.
So good luck, Richard. I sincerely hope you prove me wrong.
Travel aid
I'm sure, like me, you've found it painful and shocking to read about events in Turkey and the South of France this past week.
In an ideal world, holiday firms would offer all travellers alternative trips to other sunspots. The trouble is that hotels in Spain and Greece are more expensive and fully booked this year due to troubles elsewhere than those in Turkey.
So it's tricky for the likes of Thomas Cook or Thomson to offer families a direct replacement.
But I'd like to see holiday firms at least try to help families who want to change their booking, rather than hiding behind Government travel advice even if customers have to pay a bit more. It would be great to hear about companies that have gone the extra mile.
Four-day fix
More tales of top service, this week from J. H: 'I bought a Braun electric toothbrush with a two-year guarantee. It stopped working and I contacted customer service.
'Within 48 hours I had an email and a prepaid postal label and the address of a service centre.
'I returned the toothbrush on the Monday, had a text on Tuesday to say the brush had arrived, another on Wednesday saying it had been repaired and then it arrived back to me the next day. I think a four-day turnaround is excellent.'
EURO MILLIONS
Broadband company Hyperoptic has won 21million in backing from the European Investment Bank.
The funding will see the internet provider roll out broadband to more than 500,000 homes.
The EIB backing follows a 50million boost from Soros Fund Management two years ago and brings the total investment in Hyperoptic to 75million.
The London-based firm operates in 13 UK cities and has announced plans to expand to 20.
MAGAZINE HIRE
Website and digital magazine owner The LAD Bible Group has hired its first chief financial officer.
Pete Wade, a former eBay and Trainline executive, will join the firm founded four years ago by two friends. It produces news and stories, and focuses on humorous pictures and videos.
OIL STRIKE
Oil workers in the North Sea are preparing to strike over pay.
Unions Unite and RMT said 400 members working for services firm Wood Group across eight Royal Dutch Shell oil and gas platforms have voted to strike for the first time in a generation over pay cuts and changes to allowances.
PROPERTY DEAL
FTSE 250 property firm Hansteen has bought a property fund that owns industrial warehouses.
Hansteen has paid 120,000 for the remaining 66.7 per cent share capital of the Ashtenne Industrial Fund (General Partner) from Norwich Union, taking its holding to 100 per cent. Hansteens shares rose 0.19 per cent, or 0.2p to 103p.
WATER WORKS
Perthshire-based Castle Water will take over the billing and services of Thames Waters business customers in April next year.
It will provide cash collection and associated services for all business customers as well as charity and public sector organisations.
Thames said it would continue to supply water and waste water services to residential customers.
TURNOVER TUMBLES
Turnover and profits at US lender Bank of America dropped in the three months to June.
Revenue fell 1.3billion to 15.4billion compared to a year earlier, as investment banks suffered from turmoil on the markets.
Profits dropped 18 per cent to 3.2billion. And job cuts saw staff numbers fall by 2.8 per cent to 210,500.
FINTECH BOOST
Santander is pumping an extra 74.4million into financial technology start-ups.
Angry traders are plotting to break away from the worlds largest metals market in a row over fees.
The 139-year-old London Metal Exchange was bought by foreign owners four years ago and prices have since been pushed up.
It has led a group of disgruntled brokers to start pondering a split with the LME a move that could threaten Londons dominance in a market where it is the undisputed ruler.
And in a new development last night, it emerged that the LME had been forced to move its trading hub out of London to a business park in Chelmsford.
Fees row: A trader at the London Metal Exchange (file picture). A group of disgruntled brokers there is pondering a split a move that could threaten Londons dominance in a market where it is the undisputed ruler
The FT reported the move was caused by a structural fault at the companys new headquarters in Finsbury Square, London. It means worldwide metal prices are temporarily being set in Essex.
Martin Abbott, who was the exchanges boss before its 1.4billion takeover by Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing, is leading the breakaway bid. Weve come to the point where there is no point sitting around, he said.
Before the buy-out the exchange offered traders the chance to pay as little as 5p per transaction. But prices were increased by nearly a third last January just as the value of metals and other commodities fell off a cliff.
At the same time, there was a drive to open up electronic access which encouraged high-speed dealers such as Chicago firm Jump Trading.
The owner is looking to Asia for growth and is opening an exchange in the Chinese city of Qianhai next year.
The speed of change has unnerved many of the City traders who rely on LME. Abbott last month said there was a high level of interest in breaking free, driven partly by a feeling that the owners were looking to put the past behind them.
The conversations have all been about the potential for creating a new market for trading of metals, which would be more efficient, he said.
Thats in part been driven by the LMEs new fee structure but its also to do with what they perceive as a direction of travel away from traditional metal trading.
However, the exchanges owners have hit back at claims that its users are being ripped off.
Charles Li, boss of its parent group, said that there had been no attempt to make life more difficult for users.
We paid $2.2billion and we made $180million last year, he said in a Hong Kong speech.
People can look at that and see whether or not we have ripped off the industry. Im open to discussion as to where is the charge that is excessive.
The LME takeover is part of a wider trend in the City as foreign buyers eye opportunities to get into Londons lucrative trading scene.
The Baltic Exchange a centre for bulk cargo trading since the days of the British Empire is in takeover talks with the Singapore Exchange.
On a bigger scale, German giant Deutsche Boerse is trying to seize control of the London Stock Exchange in a 21bn deal.
Tech star: Softbank boss Masayoshi Son
On the day he started his tech firm, Masayoshi Son stood on two apple crates to give an inspirational talk hed been up all night thinking through.
It seemed a grand gesture, particularly given he had just two members of staff at the time. But Son wanted to emphasise his excitement and the ambition of the firm despite the fact it hadnt sold anything.
The normally softly spoken technology nerd cleared his throat and said: You guys have to listen to me because I am the president of the company.
'In five years we will have 60million in sales, and well be supplying 1,000 outlets and be the number one company for computer software distribution.
The two workers stood silent, their mouths open. And then they both quit. It was an inauspicious start. But bold as those plans seemed, they proved to be far from unrealistic.
Since that day in 1981, Sons company Softbank has become one of the worlds largest firms, and he one of the worlds richest men with an eye-watering 9.8billion fortune.
This came despite losing 55billion practically overnight when the dotcom crash came at the turn of the century.
And yesterday he arrived in London to woo MPs and investors in a bid to take over Britains technology leader ARM Holdings in a 24.3billion deal.
It has landed Son in a row about whether the UK should give up one its technological stars to an overseas owner.
The 58-year-old has been quick to make promises. He has pledged to create 1,500 jobs, and to keep the management in the UK.
But ARM co-founder Hermann Hauser said: ARM has been the proudest achievement in my life, so its a very sad day for me personally and for technology in Britain.
ARM, which rose to prominence by designing micro-processor chips for iPhones and other smart phones, is considered one of the world leaders for the fast-growing so-called internet of things.
This is where all devices in a home are connected together over the internet, meaning consumers can control their car, heating, TV or oven from their handset, wherever they are. Its the reason why Son is targeting ARM.
Technology is his passion and he has become renowned as one of the worlds savviest dealmakers, building a 28 per cent stake in Chinese online marketplace Alibaba from a 15million initial investment in 2000. The holding is worth around 40billion.
Son's 90m mansion in California. He has become renowned as one of the worlds savviest dealmakers, building a 28 per cent stake in Chinese online marketplace Alibaba from a 15million initial investment in 2000
Son confesses to having a love of crazy ideas and was described by one Japanese analyst as having a tendency to bet the farm on his investments. He has said he gets a big idea every two to three years.
His string of deals include buying the Japanese arm of Vodafone, and mobile phone firms in the US including Sprint. And if he faces a battle for ARM, Son is well used to winning over critics.
He has managed to shine in the fiercely regimented and rule-driven world of Japanese business, despite being of Korean descent.
Growing up he was encouraged to hide his ancestry and to use a Japanese name instead of the Korean-sounding Son.
But his brilliance and obsession with business and technology have won over sceptics time and time again. As a teenager he wrote to the head of McDonalds in Japan to ask how to get ahead.
He was told to learn English and study computers. He took the advice and at 16 went to the US to live with relatives.
Within two years he had flown through high school and went to the University of California. While he was studying he came up with 250 inventions, and wrote them down in a book he called Invention Idea Notes.
He picked the best one an electronic translator developed a prototype and, almost just like that, made close to $1million selling the patent to Sharp.
He met his Japanese wife Masami Ohno at university and in 1980 headed back to Japan. At the time his wife was pregnant with their first child (they have two daughters), and they had no income. But Son decided to start his own firm the company that would become Softbank.
After the initial setback of losing his two employees he was forced to ask delivery drivers to help with sales.
Quickly, though, things improved, and by 1994 he was a billionaire. His empire steadily grew as he snapped up rival firms but then when the dotcom crash came many of his shareholdings were wiped out. He had to start again.
Target: ARM, which rose to success by designing micro-processor chips for iPhones and other smart phones, is considered one of the world leaders for the fast-growing so-called internet of things
In 2000, he made the first of a number of bets on the future of technology, investing 15million in Chinese firm Alibaba, a mix of eBay and Amazon. The firm today is worth 154billion.
And Sons judgement in technology has become renowned. He predicted the iPhone would outsell rivals and offered it through his Softbank Mobile division, at a time when the consensus in Japan was that it would never catch on because women would not be able to attach charms and key rings to their handsets.
It saw Softbanks market share soar to 26 per cent.
He is famed for thinking ahead writing a 50-year business plan when he was 19. He also has a 300-year business plan, which many investors believe is an utterly unrealistic proposition
Last year it launched Pepper, billed as the first robot that has emotions, with sales reaching 7,000 so far.
Hes also known for his philanthropy. Following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami he donated his 90million salary and his basic pay until retirement to victims of the disasters.
But he can also spend. In 2012, he reportedly paid 90million for a nine-acre mansion in Silicon Valley, California, shortly before Softbank bought US mobile firm Sprint.
To outsiders he can seem deadpan and aloof. He speaks English with a straight-to-the-point pragmatism. But those who know him call him charismatic and always enthusiastic particularly when it comes to technology.
He is famed for thinking ahead writing a 50-year business plan when he was 19. He also has a 300-year business plan, which many investors believe is an utterly unrealistic proposition. But his challenge is to find an heir. It will be vital for his legacy in Japan.
It is one thing after another for airlines and tour operators at the moment.
Hit last week by the devastating terror attack in Nice, on Friday came the news that holiday booking website LowCostHolidays had gone into administration.
Then over the weekend came a failed coup in Turkey, which has shaken tourists yet again.
As firms rush to get their stranded holidaymakers home and re-organise bookings for the coming weeks, shares are sliding.
Take off: Shares in BA-owner International Consolidated Airlines climbed 1.9%, or 8.2p, to 430.3p yesterday
Add into the mix a fourth computer glitch for British Airways in the space of just a few weeks which left customers queuing around UK airport terminals and its a tricky time to be a tour operator.
Yet shares in BA owner International Consolidated Airlines were undeterred, climbing 1.9 per cent, or 8.2p to 430.3p yesterday. Tui fell 2 per cent, or 19p, to 942.5p and Thomas Cook fell 0.9 per cent, or 0.55p to 63.25p.
On the Beach Group drew back 2.7 per cent, or 6p to 219p and Wizz Air slipped 2.5 per cent, or 40p to 1576p despite celebrating the news it has now carried 45million passengers.
FlyBe flew as it provided an update on an aircraft purchase. The airline has cancelled its obligations to lease nine used planes while taking full ownership of 10 others which it had been under contract to lease. It advanced 3.9 per cent, or 1.5p to 40p.
The biggest mover for the day on the FTSE 100 (up 0.39 per cent, or 26.2 points to 6695.42) was UK tech firm ARM Holdings as it confirmed a deal to be acquired by Japanese telecoms giant SoftBank for 24billion.
The deal valued the business at 1700p a share, a premium of 43 per cent from the stocks closing price last Friday. Shares rocketed 41 per cent, or 486p to 1675p as a result.
And with British businesses looking cheaper on the back of a weaker pound, experts are predicting this wont be the last company to be snapped up by an overseas firm.
STOCK WATCH - YU GROUP Independent gas and electricity provider Yu Group supplies utilities to small and-medium-sized UK companies. The business floated on the stock exchange in March. In its first trading update it said bookings in the first half of the year were running 60 per cent ahead of budget at 13.4million. Yu said it should meet its full-year revenue target of 14.5million. Shore Capital said it expected the firm to pay a final dividend of 1.35p per share for the current financial year, which it believes will double to 2.7p next year. Shares rose 3.4 per cent, or 7.5p to 230p.
Tech business Imagination Technologies followed on the news, climbing 10 per cent, or 18.75p to 205p.
Slightly less high profile was Plastics Capitals acquisition of Synpac, a manufacturer of vacuum bags and pouches for the food processing industry.
Plastics, a niche products group, bought the Yorkshire-based business for 3.1million. It says the merger will bring cross-selling opportunities and cost savings.
It will fund the purchase by increasing its debt facilities with Barclays.
Plastics directors said Synpac had a loyal customer base with high levels of recurring business.
Synpac generated revenues of 4.4million in the year to May 31, with a pre-tax profit of 0.8million. Plastics shares rose 3.5 per cent, or 3.5p to 104.5p.
More acquisition news, this time from Tiziana Life Sciences which yesterday announced its purchase of Shardna, one of the worlds largest and oldest biorepositories.
Tiziana acquired the firm for around 215,000. Tiziana is a clinical stage biotech firm which focuses on drugs to treat diseases in oncology and immunology.
Shardna is of particular interest because it holds 230,000 biological samples from some 13,000 Sardinians. The Italian island is known as one of only three regions in the world with an exceptionally high proportion of centenarians.
It has almost 50 times more people aged 100 or over than the US or UK. It is hoped studying the samples could enhance understanding of ageing. Tiziana shares climbed 11.9 per cent, or 17.5p to 165p.
AIM-listed Trafalgar New Homes yesterday gave an update on its loan from the firms chief executive Chris Johnson.
Trafalgar operates through its subsidiary Combe Bank Homes, which is a property developer focused on Kent, Surrey and Sussex. Yesterday it announced the 2million loan from Johnson to the business would be extended until March 31, 2017.
Johnson, who is entitled to 5 per cent interest a year, waived his interest for the year to March 31, 2016. He has also agreed to support the firms working capital needs as required.
Bankers are set to pocket more than 90million of fees from the sale of ARM.
The 24.3billion takeover by Softbank will trigger massive pay-outs for advisors, according to Reuters and Freeman Consulting Services. Seven firms will divide the spoils, with each side expected to hand out between 38million and 45million.
Goldman Sachs and Lazard were ARMs main supporters and will pocket the lions share of the cash. UBS and Barclays also helped the British firm.
Fees frenzy: A 24.3bn takeover by Japanese business Softbank will trigger massive pay-outs for advisors on both sides, according to research by Reuters and Freeman Consulting Services
Meanwhile, Softbank has been advised by US company The Raine Group, along with British business Robey Warshaw and Japanese bank Mizuho Securities.
Bridging loans arranged for the deal are expected to generate another 34million of fees. The sums involved are not unusual in an industry known for multi-million-pound pay-outs.
Earlier this year it was revealed lawyers, bankers and spin doctors advising on Deutsche Boerses takeover of the London Stock Exchange would split up to 235million between them.
The LSE is being targeted by Frankfurts DB in a 21billion deal which its claimed is a merger of equals.
Goldman Sachs has posted a 74% surge in earnings
BREXIT BOOST
Goldman Sachs brushed aside the impact of Brexit and uncertainty in financial markets to post a 74 per cent surge in earnings.
The US investment bank which has 6,500 staff in the UK reported net earnings of 1.4billion for the second quarter to the end of June, up from 801million a year earlier.
It set aside 13 per cent less year-on-year in pay and bonuses for its 34,800 staff, at 2.5billion in the second quarter, reflecting the fall in revenues.
PAY ROW
Vodafone shareholders should oppose the 5.3million pay of chief executive Vittorio Colao, an advisory group has urged.
PIRC described 54-year-old Colaos earnings as excessive and advised investors to reject the payout at the telecoms firms AGM later this month.
His pay for the year soared by 88 per cent from 2.8million a year earlier, despite the firm topping complaints tables for mobile customers.
TUMBLING TUMBLR
Yahoo has written off the value of Tumblr, the social media service that the internet giant bought in 2013 for 840million, by as much as 370million pushing it into a net loss for the quarter of 336million.
BIG CHEESE
Dairy Crest said its first-quarter trading was on track after it relaunched Cathedral City cheese. The company also said its butters, spreads and oils business was progressing well.
SHOPPING SPREE
John Lewis said sales stepped up 3.8 per cent last week compared to the same period in 2015.
Sales at the retailer hit 83.1million in the week to July 16. The results provide the most up-to-date insight into shoppers behaviour following Brexit.
BUILDER BLOW
Scottish construction firm Dunne Group has gone into administration with the loss of 524 jobs. The business faced substantial trading losses on some contracts that led to severe cash flow pressures.
CENTRE SOLD
Landlord Hammerson has sold the Manor Walks Shopping Centre in Cramlington, Northumberland for 78million. It also sold a property in Folkestone for 7million.
PROFITS SURGE
Profits soared at finance firms IG Group and Arbuthnot. IG posted a 23 per cent profit rise to 207.9million in the year to June.
Arbuthnot sold its sub-prime loans arm meaning half-year profits rocketed from 12.7million to 225million.
OIL BOOST
UK Oil & Gas said a report into the Gatwick Gusher oil find near Gatwick airport revealed the oil in the area could be three times more than previously thought 22.9million barrels up from 7.7million barrels.
OFFICE DEALS
To the rescue: ARM's Chairman Stuart Chambers
ARM Holdings's courtly chairman Stuart Chambers says he was first approached about Softbank's 24.3billion takeover a fortnight ago, while holidaying on his luxury yacht.
His vessel is no vulgar, jet-ski laden monstrosity a la Sir Philip Green.
It's an elegant 55-foot sailing boat which he's previously navigated across the Atlantic.
While steering it through the Ionian sea's choppy waters in 2011, father-of-three Chambers, 60, and his blonde wife Nicolette, valiantly hauled aboard 11 Libyan refugees from their sinking raft.
Re Chambers, he's well-versed in foreign takeovers. He was in charge of Pilkington Glass when it was sold to Japanese firm NSG in 2006.
He and ARM are currently receiving public relations instructions from (who else?) City schmoozer Roland Rudd's outfit Finsbury.
Rudd also advised on the Pilkington deal. Surely knighthoods await both for their efforts in flogging British business to the world.
With ARM shareholders set to net 1700p per share from the deal, pity the poor beleaguered brokers at Liberum who last week urged investors to sell their stock with a target price of just 650p.
The firm's technology analyst Janardan Menon remarks sheepishly: 'We did not expect ARM to be acquired, least of all by Softbank.'
The Financial Conduct Authority's magisterial chairman John Griffith-Jones delivered the regulator's annual report in Westminster yesterday, which contained a glaring howler.
Contrary to the whopping 199million it claimed to have spent on auditors, the real figure was a (mildly) more fiscally palatable 199,000.
'Does the report contain any more errors?' asked an audience member. Griffith-Jones chuckled: 'That's an unreasonable question to ask the chairman.'
Many think it unreasonable Griffith-Jones, 62, is in the 192,000 a-year post at all.
He was chairman of KPMG when the accountancy firm gave a clean bill of health to HBOS just before the bank's near collapse in 2008.
Some rare good news for struggling spread-betting firm London Capital Group, which reports a positive trading performance following the referendum.
Are the firm's new(ish) boss Charles Henri-Sabet's self-trumpeted talents finally bearing fruition?
Your Baby Club signs up the vast majority of pregnant women and new mums in the UK to its website, which gives away freebies for their newborns.
The online marketing business has become a parenting forum, attracted 240,000 Facebook likes, expects to turnover 2million in the 2016/17 financial year and is now heading to the US.
Here we meet Alec Dobbie to find out what led him to set up stall in the baby business and how he and his two other male co-founders have built their fast-growing business out of an initial investment of just 1,500.
Nick Hadfield, Raph Marsh and Alec Dobbie set up YourBabyClub to market products to new parents
Thanks to the arrival of his first child Jack in November 2008, Alec spotted a gap in the online marketing business.
When Jack was on the way, Alec and his wife found themselves signed up to Bounty - the UK's first parenting club and prolific marketing company. The 55-year-old company partners with the NHS and its reps can - controversially - be found in maternity wards offering to sell parents photos with their new arrivals.
Keen to get their hands on the Bounty Pack - full of free samples, money-off vouchers and information leaflets - the couple handed over their contact details via their local hospital. But soon after they picked up their pack and their details were passed on to Bounty's suppliers, Alec says a multitude of marketing post and emails then started to arrive.
'There was some useful information in the pack but I didn't like the blanket spam and thought there must be a better way of marketing to new parents. And as far as I could see, no-one was doing it online.'
So he decided to put his years of web experience to the test and after a few years of researching the baby business, alongside his day job as a software designer for the likes of clients including Shell and Halifax, he launched YourBabyClub.co.uk in 2013, which describes itself a site dedicated to finding the best free mother and baby offers.
Each month, the club gives away 5,000 free Baby Boxes worth approximately 15 that can include supplies such as bottles, baby food and swaddle cloths as well as toiletries. The site regularly surveys members and Alec says they generate a 30 to 40 per cent response rate and 98 per cent of feedback about the boxes is positive.
While not every member receives a box of goodies, everyone can sign up to discounts and competitions
Only around 10 per cent of members win a free box in any month but all members get access to a range of other freebies and discounts by opting in to deals featured on the website. Recent giveaways have included items from the upmarket Clarins skincare range. Other partners include Sleepyhead, Ella's Kitchen, Cow & Gate, Aptamil and Mothercare. And one of the more niche discounts to feature on the site recently is a 250 saving on 'umbilical cord stem cell banking'.
While they won't appeal to all members, the site also makes money by linking to competitions where recent prizes have included 1,000 cash, vacuum cleaners and holidays.
To take up a deal, members have to agree to Your Baby Club sharing their contact details - usually just their name, address and an email address - with the product provider.
Alec, Raph and Nick have grown up to entrepreneurs in the UK baby business - now they're heading to the US
The business makes money depending on how many potential clients it's able to refer to a supplier, or how many sales it helps generate.
Your Baby Club's business model differs to Bounty's because it doesn't ask its members to consent to having their contact information passed on to all 'carefully selected partners' in order to participate in deals.
Instead, when parents sign up to the YourBabyClub site, they are then given the choice to opt in to receive individual samples and offers, which require them to agree to to the sharing of their contact details with the provider of that product or service only. And the suppliers are banned from re-selling this information.
Alec, 38 and from Bradford, didn't set up the business alone - he has two co-founders. The first is Raphael 'Raph' Marsh, 39, a graphic designer from Grimsby, who has worked on projects for the UN and Hewlett Packard - as well as recently winning a trophy at Center Parcs for beating other dads in a shooting competition.
Raph and Alec have put their experience of being dads to good use in selecting YourBabyClub brand partners
The second is Nick Hadfield, 37, a successful entrepreneur from Birmingham who set up airport transfer company Ski-Lifts in the Alps.
The three founders put just 1,500 into the business to get it up and running - 'along with and a lot of blood sweat and tears', says Alec. It now has 11 employees and is profitable, according to Alec, and gives away 5,000 baby boxes a month to some of the 54,000 new mums who sign up to the club. With the Office for National Statistics reporting around 700,000 babies born in the UK each year, or 58,300 a month on average, the proportion of new mums signing up to YourBabyClub is equivalent to almost 93 per cent.
The site that offers freebies and discounts has also become a popular parent forum, with 240,000 Facebook likes
'Of course, we'd like to be able to send a box to everyone who signs up, but 54,000 would cost a lot in postage and getting hold of enough free samples would be a big ask for our suppliers,' says Alec.
Over the next three years, they hope to have rolled out YourBabyClub across the US - a country that sees nearly 4 million babies born a year, according to the latest official data.
The co-founders soft-launched across the pond a few months ago and are currently talking to brands to form new partnerships. An American version of its Facebook page has been set up, which so far has around 30,000 likes.
Two lifelong friends from Melbourne who had their car-sharing business idea rejected on Channel Ten's Shark Tank eight months ago because 'it was too scary for them' have now turned it into a multi-million dollar business.
Steven Johnson, 26, and Christian Schaefer, 27, came up with a plan to have travellers leave their cars with them when they fly out of their home city and have them rented out, rather than pay 'exorbitant parking costs' at airports.
Eight months ago they took their car sharing plan onto Shark Tank, a reality TV competition show, asking panel members for a cash injection of $300,000, but they said no. The business is now worth $4 million.
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Steven Johnson (left) and Christian Schaefer try their best to sell their big idea to the Shark Tank panel in 2015
Not interested: The Shark Tank team had some reservations about the idea and chose not to invest
Winners are grinners: Steven Johnson (pictured) and friend Christian Schaefer will today announce a partnership deal with Ford Australia less than a year after their car sharing idea was rejected on national tv
'They (Shark Tank panel) wanted to put the money in and exit in a couple of years,' Mr Johnson told Daily Mail Australia.
'Some had no idea what we wanted to do and couldn't get their heads around how the model was going to work, which is a bit strange.
'It just seemed too scary for them.'
Cars are rented out, mostly to people arriving from interstate, for between $30-$40 a day and the owner gets 25 per cent of the fee, about $10.
The average listing period is 10 days and they boast that each car comes back 'in better shape' because of the detailing service they offer.
'There have been incidents and it is going to happen, but 99 per cent of the time the car does come back better,' Mr Johnson added.
'Yes little scratches are typically the most common damage but we have affiliations with repair shops to get them fixed.
How it all started: The Melbourne businessmen were struck by how many cars 'just lay idle' in car parks at the major airports. free airport parking and a cut of the proceeds from renting out their vehicle, fully insured, to other approved members. The service also provides members kerb-side chauffeur service and a car wash
The Carhood idea originated on a trip from Melbourne to Sydney when the friends parked at Melbourne Airport and rented a car on the other end at Sydney Airport. 'When we left Melbourne and arrived into Sydney we noticed how many cars were parked idle at each of the airports, thousands upon thousands,' said Mr Johnson
All part of the service: Carhood provides members with kerb-side chauffeur service and the partnership allows people to earn money (25 per cent of the fee) to share their vehicles with other members instead of paying airport parking costs
Steven Johnson pictured in the driver's seat: 'We rented the nearest house to Melbourne Airport and opened up our doors for business, running the operation out of our front yard and using a spreadsheet to take bookings - very raw indeed.'
'There is plenty of supply, we know that people are willing to share their cars and make money and get free parking.'
And now they are celebrating a deal struck with Ford in Australia where the motor company will provide vehicles for hire to boost the available Carhood fleet.
'Our unique partnership with Carhood combines both, allowing customers to experience our world-class vehicles while making their lives better through easier, more affordable airport parking,' said said Graeme Whickman, CEO and President, Ford Australia.
The idea was born out a birthday trip to Sydney two years ago.
'We parked at Melbourne Airport and saw thousands of cars just parked there at the airport, and then in Sydney we saw the exact same thing and heaps of people renting fleet cars, we thought "what a waste",' Mr Johnson said.
'What's worse, when we came home we had a $240 parking ticket, which cost more than the flight.
'So we got a bit of money we saved from previous jobs, hired the nearest house possible to the airport and were running a very raw version of it out of our front yard.'
Part of the expansion plans: Carhood already has two warehouse sites near Brisbane Airport and the company owners are set to provide the service for Gold Coast Airport travellers in Coolangatta (pictured)
Mr Johnson's experience in fleet management and rental businesses played its part, as did knowing the size of the rental car market.
'It is worth $2.2 billion so we were basically testing it and just had to get the insurance,' he said.
'We did and we knew we were getting ripped off at the start because no one really wanted to insure us.
'I lived and breathed fleet and have always been a big supporter of share economy, I've let my house out on Airbnb, I was an Uber driver on weekends and I use BitCoin.
'Melbourne and Sydney airports have the most expensive car parks in the world, only behind Heathrow, so this will just keep growing.'
They are also in Brisbane and he estimated the growth will be 600 per cent by 2020.
'We are looking at rolling it out nationally, we are looking at Perth and the Gold Coast next,' Mr Johnson added.
And they are also expanding the service to include car tracking kits in the vehicles.
Gun Owners, Polar Bears And Preachers Descend On Cleveland For RNC
By aaroncynic in News on Jul 18, 2016 8:50PM
A pedestrian with a rifle, a man who loves capitalism, and an activist in a polar bear suit are just some of the people you'll meet on the streets of Cleveland as the 2016 Republican National Convention kicks off.
Protesters, supporters and people with plenty of different and diverse agendas gathered on the streets of Cleveland Monday as morning broke on the first day of the RNC. Small groups of demonstrators dotted in and out of Public Square, which sits about half a mile of the Quicken Loans Arena, where for the next four days the GOP will convene and ultimately, crown Donald Trump their nominee for president.
The polarizing effect of Trump, whose campaign is mostly built of a never-ending stream of racist, bigoted, sexist and generally inflammatory remarks, could be seen everywhere on the streets of Cleveland, as groups supporting and detracting him began to assemble in various locations.
Donald Trumps poisonous rhetoric and proposals are a human rights catastrophe for immigrants,said Brad Sigal of the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee, who organized about 50 people from the state to protest Trump at the RNC. Youve heard him say hes going to build a wall. This is insanity. The U.S. Mexico border is already one of the most militarized borders on the planet. Thousands of people die already trying to cross that border, fleeing war, violence and extreme poverty imposed by U.S. free trade policies, corrupt militaries and dictatorships.
Police presence was heavy, with officers from multiple states on nearly every block of the city. Despite this and the recent horrific shooting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, that didnt stop some from openly carrying weapons on the street. One pedestrian, Jesse Gonzalez of Lakewood, Ohio, strapped a rifle to his back, because I can, he said.
Thats the long and short of it, said Gonzalez. I heard the black panthers are gonna be here and carrying guns. I think [carrying a gun is] an important right we abandoned socially. Specifically firearms ownership for expediency. Guns are bad is the new normal.
Gonzalez said he supported Trump for his economic and immigration policies. Having things like tariffs again would have no other outcome than rejuvenating a great deal of economies throughout the country, he said.
As a Muslim woman who traveled from Buffalo, New York spoke in the Square, a small group of militant right-wing men gathered at the edge of the street behind the square with large signs bearing Islamaphobic, anti-gay and anti-choice slogans. After being confronted by several people of color, the argument turned to abortion, with one of them repeatedly saying close your legs, whores to several people of color.
Right wing bigots yelling "close your legs whores" #RNCinCLE pic.twitter.com/bhkmQ5h9M5 Aaron Cynic (@aaroncynic) July 18, 2016
Others roaming the streets near the convention had a more moderate tone, instead focusing on their particular issues, rather than whether or not they support the immigrant-bashing Trump.
Holding a large cross on his shoulder that read vote for Jesus, Garry Mathis said he was just trying to make a statement. Mathis, who traveled to Cleveland from Anchorage, Alaska, said that while he couldnt figure out if Hillary or Trump was better, he hoped others in his position would consider Jesus. I want to tell people...BOOM...Jesus loves them and vote for him if you cant figure out who to vote for.
Earlier in the morning, an already very overheated person in a polar bear costume bearing a sign that read what will you do to save me said he was bring a message of positive change. Bears cant vote, so theyre dependent on the whole human species to help out, he said.
While the mood everywhere was tense, the early morning speeches in the square and afternoon demonstrations in the street were mostly peaceful. Hundreds marched through the streets near the Quicken Loans Arena chanting dump Trump now and Donald Trump go away, racist sexist anti-gay. A few counter demonstrators positioned themselves at various corners as the march passed by, but we observed no major incidents, outside of one arrest.
Bike police violently push press away from pro-Trump Bible speakers yelling at those here to #ResistRNC #organizeCLE pic.twitter.com/KR10Vnvro7 Unicorn Riot (@UR_Ninja) July 18, 2016
One scuffle occurred later when police shoved several members of the media with their bikes.
Relaxing on a terrace of a private villa overlooking the sparkling waters of the Marmaris Sea, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had little idea he would be facing the most momentous 12 hours of his life.
But as darkness fell over the luxury home in the popular tourist resort of Marmaris he received a telephone call telling him he his life was in peril as well as the future of Turkey.
On the other end of the line was a military commander warning him three Blackhawk helicopters carrying rebel soldiers were on their way to kill or capture him.
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Retreat: President Recep Erdogan was staying in a luxury holiday villa in Marmaris when a general phoned to tell him of the bloody coup - and he fled in his private jet
Raid: Just fifteen minutes later special forces arrived in three Blackhawk helicopters... but went to the hotel next door to the villa to assassinate him
Target: They fired bullets all over the Grand Yazici hotel thinking that Erdogan was staying there, but 62-year-old President had been holidaying next door
In a panic the 62-year-old Turkish president was whisked under armed guard to a private jet waiting at a nearby airfield as the three choppers swooped on the resort where he had been staying.
But even aboard the presidential jet the terror for the Turkish leader was not over as he was told two rogue F-16 fighter jets were scouring the skies to shoot down his jet.
Only the quick thinking of his pilots averted disaster as they were able to mask the identity of the Gulfstream presidential jet and trick the rebel pilots into thinking they were a passenger jet.
Two hours later Mr Erdogan was safely in Istanbul and having rallied those loyal to him put down the coup.
The thought of being killed or even taken prisoner was most likely furthest from Mr Erdogan's mind when he arrived at the private villa owned by former rally driver Serkan Yazici.
His father Ibrahim, who died of a heart attack in 2012, was a close friend of the president thanks to his own political career.
Ibrahim was a member of the Turkish Parliament for two terms from 1996 to 2002, as a deputy for the centre-right Motherland Party (ANAP) and the True Path Party (DYP).
His family own the Yazici Mares hotel as well as an adjoining hotel, The Grand Yazici Club Turban, where British tourists were woken by the sound of gunfire as rebel troops attempted to seek out and kill the president.
Gunfire: Troops opened fire at the hotel before they realised the President was nowhere to be seen and had not been staying at the holiday destination
Horror: Terrified tourists were forced to shelter in their bedrooms as bullets ricocheted off the walls of the hotel and military Blackhawk helicopters hovered overhead
Shelter: British holidaymakers Mike Dignan and his wife Sarah huddled together with their children on the bedroom floor as gunfire rang out. Mike, from Rosyth, Scotland, told how it was the 'scariest night of his life'.
Beauty: President Erdogan was warned by First Army Commander Umit Dundar that the coup had launched and he was a target, allowing him to escape from the villa before the rebels came looking
Mr Erdogan admitted later he cheated possible death by just 15 minutes and credited a telephone call from First Army Commander Umit Dundar an hour before the coup began with saving his life.
According to reports in the Turkish media Commander Dundar told him rebel troops were heading for his villa in the Marmaris resort to either kill him or take him prisoner.
The commander assured him of his support telling him 'You are our legitimate president.
'I am at your side, there is a huge coup and the situation is out of control in Ankara. Come to Istanbul and I will secure your access to the roads and accommodations there.'
You are our legitimate president. I am at your side, there is a huge coup and the situation is out of control in Ankara. First Army Commander Unit Dundar
As the president's guards sealed off the villa, Mr Erdogan was rushed by car to the nearest airport at Dalaman where his Gulfstream IV jet had been refueled and was ready for takeoff.
By the time the 30m jet was airborne three Blackhawk attack helicopters carrying special forces were approaching the holiday villa.
The soldiers stormed the hotel looking for Mr Erdogan to either capture or kill him - but were 15 minutes too late.
Soldiers loyal to the president engaged in a fierce gun battle with rebels.
Tourist staying in the hotel were woken by the sound of low flying helicopters and then gunfire as the battle raged.
Among those left terrified by the gun battle were the Dignan family who were forced to take cover on the bedroom floor.
Mike and his wife Sarah lay huddled together with their children as gunfire rang out.
Mr Dignan, from Rosyth, Scotland, told the Sunday Post newspaper it was the 'scariest night of his life.'
He told the paper: 'I was woken up by an almighty rumble. I thought there were tanks.
Carnage: Photographs of the Grand Yazici hotel after it was raided by rebels show bullet holes in the walls and great chunks taken out of the furniture
Fear: Shards of glass from the hotel windows covered the floor and holes showed where bullets had embedded themselves in the furniture
Devastated: Just hours before the rebel soldiers came to find and kill President Erdogan, both the Turkish leader and holidaymakers had been relaxing in the resort of Marmaris
Scarred: Although the coup was quashed after just five hours and President Erdogan was able to escape, the devastation at the hotel in the resort of Marmaris remained
'It turned out it was military helicopters. They are black so we could barely see them in the darkness.
'They were shining a light into the hotel next door. We started hearing small gunfire. It was the odd shot and then it became more fierce.
'Police started firing at the helicopters. Then the helicopters started firing back. We shut ourselves in the bedroom.
'We heard shouting and people running around outside our complex, some past our door. Soldiers were trying to get in the hotel next door to get Erdogan and the police were fighting back.'
My mind is haunted though. What if the military come back? This resort is still connected somehow to Erdogan. Holidaymaker Gertjan de Graaf
IT worker Mike, 40, and bakery worker Sarah, 39, were almost two weeks into their holiday when the coup was launched on Friday night.
Another hotel guest, Gertjan de Graaf, from the Netherlands, said: 'We did not sleep a wink of course, but I'm still not tired.
'I doubt I'll sleep well tonight. A Turk this morning told us we should go back to the Netherlands.
'We don't want to, but now it looks like we will be sent to another hotel. My mind is haunted though. What if the military come back? This resort is still connected somehow to Erdogan.'
Mr de Graaf and his family arrived back at their hotel around 11.30pm on the night of the coup, turned on the TV and saw the news about the chaos in the country.
'I thought it was bad for those people, but Istanbul and Ankara are far away, so I didn't worry and went to sleep.'
But they were woken at 3.30am by the popping of guns which they thought at first were fireworks and his wife Theresa went to the door to see what was going on.
She was met by the sight of military rebels running around the hotel armed with machine guns.
'You want to see what is going on, but she found herself face to face with a soldier with a machine gun in his hands,' continued Mr de Graaf.
The soldiers were shouting in broken English: 'Where Erdogan stay? Erdogan stay?'
Getaway: President Erdogan was able to escape from the resort of Marmaris and return to Istanbul during the coup, on a Gulfstream IV (pictured) belonging to the Turkish government
Information: It was while on board the plane - one of four available to the president - that he was fully briefed on the coup attempt and how best to stop it. Pictured, inside the presidential jet, an Airbus a330-200 Prestige
Vital: As President Erdogan's plane returned to Istanbul, the 40 soldiers who had been sent to find him and kill him fled into the surrounding mountains. Pictured, inside the presidential jet, an Airbus a330-200 Prestige
Danger: The president didn't know but, as the plane took him back to Istanbul, two F-16s took off from an airport outside Ankara on the hunt for his plane as they flew through the night. Pictured, the presidential jet
Close call: Had they found the plane, the fighter jets would have shot it down or escorted it to an airfield controlled by the coup plotters. Pictured, inside the presidential jet, an Airbus a330-200 Prestige
Quick thinking: According to Cenciotti, the pilots altered their transponder signal so that it made the Gulfstream look like a civilian Turkish airline jet. Pictured, layout of the presidential Airbus a330-200 Prestige
Survival: The quick thinking by the Gulfstream pilots undoubtedly saved Erdogan's life as the presidential jet assumed the 'identity' THY 8456 and that of a Turkish airlines flight
Mr de Graaf woke up their children and the family hid in the bathroom, his daughter was crying.
The police then arrived at about 5am and there was more gunfire, explosions and helicopters overhead.
'It went on and on. Occasionally we heard loud explosions,' said Mr de Graaf, who didn't leave the bathroom until 6am when the carnage had died down.
Two bullets had shattered the glass in the bedroom window. The towel that was hanging outside on the balcony was riddled with seven bullets.
Two of my guards were killed. Had I stayed there 10 or 15 minutes longer, I would have been killed or captured. President Erdogan
The family weren't allowed to leave their room until 9am.
The Turkish daily newspaper Hurriyet reported that during the mission to kill or capture the President one of the helicopters suffered a malfunction and was forced to make an emergency landing.
Outnumbered, the 40 special forces sent to find Mr Erdogan fled into the surrounding mountains.
On board his private Gulfstream jet - one of four presidential plans Mr Erdogan was being fully briefed on the coup attempt.
He later told CNN: 'An operation was carried out in Marmaris, directed against me. Two of my guards were killed. Had I stayed there 10 or 15 minutes longer, I would have been killed or captured.'
The tyrannical leader has amassed a vast 139million fortune, with at least three palaces across Turkey.
The latest addition to his collection, the sprawling White Palace on the outskirts of the capital city of Ankara, cost an astronomical 500million to build - more than twice the original estimates.
The palatial home is decorated with silk wallpaper costing as much as 2,000 a roll, while the carpet bill alone came to more than 7million.
Decor: President Erdogan was with his wife Ermine at the retreat, which is next door to Grand Yazici, where gun-toting special forces raided in a hail of bullets trying to assassinate the President in the coup
Expensive: Critics of the president's palace (pictured) have said it is so extravagant that it would have made Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, known for his love of gold and jewel encrusted fittings, blush
Home: President Erdogan and his wife Emine live in the luxurious White Palace, on the outskirts of Ankara
Overblown: Parts of the White Palace are decorated with wallpaper that cost 2,000 a roll, and the building's carpet bill alone came to more than 7million
High society: Mrs Erdogan and her husband like to entertain at their 500m palace in the foothills of the capital Ankara to build with no expense spared on its fixture and fittings
Collector: While accompanying her husband on an official visit to Warsaw in Poland, Emine Erdogan blew through more than 37,000 while browsing an antiques bazaar
Shopping: Emine Erdogan's jet-set lifestyle is a whirlwind of one shopping trip after another, with her particular passions being designer clothes and expensive antiques
Critics have described the building as so extravagant that it would have made Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, known for his love of gold and jewel encrusted fittings, blush.
According to the president, however, the expense was worth it as it puts Turkey on the global map.
Meanwhile his 'shopaholic' wife tours the world at his side and spending as she goes.
Despite claiming she leads a humble lifestyle even fermenting apples to make her own vinegar Emine has a passion for designer clothes and expensive antiques, blowing more than 37,000 in just one shopping trip to a bazaar in Warsaw.
But while tanks rolled across the two main bridges in Istanbul and gunfire and explosions echoed round the city, Erdogan was mid-way through the 400 mile flight.
He was unaware that at 10pm two F-16 fighter jets took off from Akinci airbase just north of Ankara on a seek and destroy mission.
According to aviation expert David Cenciotti the jet fighters searched the skies with their nose-mounted radar.
The pilots of the twin engine Gulfstream would have been made aware that the F-16s were looking for them to shoot down or escort to an airfield controlled by the coup plotters.
According to Mr Cenciotti the pilots altered their transponder signal so that it made the Gulfstream look like a civilian Turkish airline jet.
The transponder is an electronic signal that reveals the plane's identity and used by air traffic controllers to keep track of planes in the air.
The quick thinking by the Gulfstream pilots undoubtedly saved Mr Erdogan's life as the presidential jet assumed the 'identity' THY 8456 - that of a Turkish airlines flight.
It is thought the rebel pilots were unsure of the identity of the jet above the darkened skies of Istanbul and didn't want to take the risk shooting down a passenger jet.
'The risk of shooting down another plane, and losing credibility too, could be a factor affecting the coup's F-16s [ability] to shoot down his plane and kill Erdogan,' Mr Cenciotti wrote on his blog The Aviationist.
Mr Erdogan's plane circled above Istanbul airport for 30 minutes before troops were finally able to confirm it was secure to land.
Once on the ground, Mr Erdogan called a Turkish TV station through Face time and urged the people to take to the streets and rise up against the coup.
They have been labelled the Three Brexiteers. And when it comes to official residences Boris Johnson, David Davis and Liam Fox are about to find out it is definitely one for all.
For they will have to share use of the grace-and-favour mansion normally put at the sole disposal of the foreign secretary, Theresa May announced yesterday.
As a result, the historic Grade I-listed Chevening House is already being dubbed Brexit Towers.
Grace and Favour: Chevening House is the Foreign Secretary's official country residence but will be home to three cabinet ministers under new PM Theresa May
Beautiful home: Chevening House has 115-rooms and is surrounded by a 3,500-acre estate, complete with a maze and a lake
Downing Street says that to reflect their status in Cabinet, Brexit Secretary Mr Davis and International Trade Secretary Mr Fox will have the same rights of access to the 115-room mansion near Sevenoaks in Kent as Foreign Secretary Mr Johnson.
All three will be able to use it to wine and dine guests while negotiating Britains exit from the EU.
Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron likened the situation to the sitcom Fawlty Towers, saying: The three Brexiteers sharing Chevening is a bit like Brexit Towers.
The next question is which of the trio is going to mention the war and will they get away with it and is David Davis going to make Manuel get a visa.
Built in the 1620s, reputedly to a design by Inigo Jones, Chevening is surrounded by a 3,500-acre estate with lake and maze. It was bequeathed to the nation on the death of Lord Stanhope in 1967, as a residence for a senior government minister or a royal.
Prince Charles had use of Chevening for six years in the 1970s but did not live there. Since 1980, it has been the home of foreign secretaries.
Three Brexiteers: Britain's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson will share Chevening House with fellow cabinet ministers Liam Fox and David Davis
Roommates: Brexit Secretary Mr Davis (left) and Secretary of State for International Trade Mr Fox (right)
However, during the Coalition government both William Hague and his successor Philip Hammond had to share it with Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.
Although Mr Johnson will also have use of a second grace and favour home in Whitehall, his shock promotion has hit him in the pocket. It has led to him giving up the newspaper column that was earning him around 275,000 a year and has forced the delay of a book he was writing on Shakespeare.
While there has been speculation over who is the most senior of the Three Brexiteers, who all report directly to Mrs May, an official list published yesterday ranks Mr Johnson fourth in seniority behind the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and the Home Secretary, with Mr Davis in eighth and Mr Fox ninth.
Indonesia's most wanted extremist has been killed in a gunbattle with security forces.
Santoso, who was at the 'symbolic heart' of the Indonesian jihadi movement, was shot dead alongside another militant, the government said.
The death of IS supporter Santoso, who was slapped by the United States with an official terrorist designation, is a victory for President Joko Widodo, who made capturing him a top security priority.
Presidential spokesman Johan Budi said on Monday that Santoso was believed to be one of two militants killed in an exchange of fire with police on Sulawesi island, where he was thought to be hiding.
One of the world's most wanted IS terrorists, Santoso, has been killed in a gun battle with security forces in Indonesia, police have said
'One of the people killed bore resemblance to Santoso, and the body is being transported for identification by the family,' Budi said via telephone. Santoso's age was not known.
He had been hunted by Indonesian security forces for several years and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group.
His armed faction has attracted militants from other parts of Indonesia and several from the Uighur minority group in China's restive Xinjiang province.
Indonesia deployed thousands of police and military officials to scour the jungles of Sulawesi where Santoso and dozens of associates were believed to be holed up.
Police carry a body bag at a local hospital in Palu, Indonesia's Sulawesi province, on July 19, 2016, after a firefight between suspected Muslim extremists
Santoso was from the most populous Indonesian island, Java.
In March, the United States imposed a special terrorist designation on Santoso, blocking any U.S. assets he might have, banning dealings with him by Americans and opening the way for U.S. law-enforcement action against him.
The U.S. State Department said Santoso led the Mujahidin Indonesia Timur (MIT) that had carried out numerous killings and kidnappings in Indonesia over the past few years.
Police guard a local hospital in Palu, Indonesia's Central Sulawesi province, on July 19, 2016, after a firefight with suspected Muslim extremists in the nearby village of Tambarana
A 30-foot sinkhole has opened up beneath a home in Florida forcing neighboring homes to evacuate, fearing more could appear.
The homeowners of the Holiday, Florida, residence are currently in upstate New York and were not in the home when the sinkhole opened.
Director of Emergency Services Kevin Guthrie is calling the sinkhole a 'depression', according to the Tampa Bay Times.
A 30-foot sinkhole (pictured, right) has opened up beneath a home in Florida forcing neighboring homes to evacuate
Director of Emergency Services Kevin Guthrie is calling the sinkhole a 'depression', according to the Tampa Bay Times
Thunderstorms and incoming inclement weather could exacerbate the width of the sinkhole
The hole is 30 feet across and 15 feet deep, according to Pasco County Fire Rescue Chief Shawn Whited.
It is still expanding, Whited said.
Sand could be seen falling into the hole as the ends continued to collapse.
The homeowners of the Holiday, Florida, residence are currently in upstate New York and were not in the home when the sinkhole opened
The hole is still expanding and four homes in the surrounding area have been evacuated as well as the residence above the sinkhole
Thunderstorms and incoming inclement weather could exacerbate the width of the sinkhole.
Four homes in the surrounding area have been evacuated as well as the residence above the sinkhole, which is a winter home for the owners,
No one has been injured as a result of the sink hole.
Whited says the houses must remain empty until an engineer can inspect the hole either later Monday or Tuesday.
Whited says the sinkholes can usually be stabilized and filled in.
British astronaut Tim Peake has met Theresa May after being invited to a reception at 10 Downing Street.
The 44-year-old was introduced to the new Prime Minister on Monday just over four weeks after returning from his six-month mission to the International Space Station.
Major Peake was pictured talking to Mrs May after arriving hand-in-hand with his wife Rebecca. School children were also invited to the event.
British astronaut Tim Peake has met Theresa May after being invited to a reception at 10 Downing Street
Major Peake was pictured talking to Mrs May and a number of school children who had also been invited to the event
The 44-year-old father-of-two had earlier been pictured arriving hand-in-hand with his wife Rebecca
Last week, the father-of-two said he was feeling 'great' a month after returning from his mission.
Getting back his sense of balance had been the most difficult part of readjusting to gravity on Earth, she said.
During his intensive rehabilitation programme, Major Peake has undergone brain and bone scans, donated muscle tissue, and had numerous blood tests as doctors investigate how his body is coping.
Speaking at the Farnborough International Airshow, he said: 'I feel in great physical condition.'
The 44-year-old was introduced to the new Prime Minister on Monday - just over four weeks after returning from his six-month mission to the International Space Station
Major Peake spoke to the Prime Minister and took time to talk to some of the school children who had been invited along
Before entering Number 10, Major Peake and his wife Rebecca posed for pictures outside the famous black door
The astronaut was making his first public appearance in the UK since landing on the steppes of Kazakhstan in a Soyuz space capsule on June 18.
He said: 'It still seems fairly surreal that less than four weeks ago I was on board the International Space Station travelling at 25 times the speed of sound and looking down on planet Earth.'
Describing what it was like to readjust to Earth gravity after 186 days in orbit, Major Peake admitted that the first three days were 'fairly uncomfortable' because of vertigo.
He added: 'Once that disappears it's really a case of the body learning to balance again. That's what takes the longest, because your body has shut down the vestibular system for the six months in space. That actually takes a long time, to learn the finesse of balance.'
Major Peake said he still had a 'bit of work to do in the gym' but had experienced no physical problems.
Radio broadcaster Ray Hadley says most of the local radical Muslims currently serving time in jail were born in Australia as he responded to Sonia Kruger's call to stop Islamic immigration.
The 2GB host also hit out at Australia's Grand Mufti for 'not speaking English' and called him out for not showing leadership by denouncing the radicalised Muslims in jail.
His comments on Nine's Today show on Tuesday were in response to Kruger's call for Australia to close its borders to Muslims because she wants to 'feel safe'.
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Shock jock Ray Hadley says most of the local radical Muslims currently serving time in jail were born in Australia as he responded to Sonia Kruger's call to stop Islamic immigration
While he agreed that Kruger should be allowed to say how she feels, he said her argument on stopping immigration was flawed.
'Most of the men who are in jails across Australia - radicalised Muslims - were born here. We didn't import them from anywhere. Their parents may well have come here but they were born here, they are our problem,' he said.
'In relation to (Kruger's) comments, I fear that the many hard-working decent Muslims in the Australian community get tainted. There is an Imam in western Sydney who has embraced Australia and there are many more Imams who do the same thing.
'Then of course, the reason we're talking about this thanks to Sonia, the Grand Mufti of Australia can't speak English.
'He has been here for almost two decades. He shows no leadership. He doesn't denounce the radicalised Muslims in jail and those facing court. He doesn't do anything.
'So if this prompts a conversation about immigration, that is good.'
The 2GB radio broadcaster also hit out at Australia's Grand Mufti Dr Ibrahim Abu Mohammed for not speaking English and called him out for not showing leadership by denouncing the radicalised Muslims in jail
Sonia Kruger made headlines after she argued during a fiery Today Show panel discussion on Monday that there was a correlation between the number of Muslims in a country and the number of terrorist attacks
Hadley told Today host Pete Stefanovic on Monday that while he agreed that Sonia Kruger should be allowed to say how she feels, he said her argument on stopping immigration was flawed
A representative of the Mufti Dr Ibrahim Abu Mohammed's office told Daily Mail Australia last year that he spoke fluent conversational English but preferred to speak Arabic when discussing intense matters in public.
Kruger made headlines after she argued during a fiery Today Show panel discussion on Monday that there was a correlation between the number of Muslims in a country and the number of terrorist attacks.
'Personally, I would like to see it stop now for Australia because I want to feel safe as all of our citizens do when we go out to celebrate Australia Day,' the media personality said.
The television host said she had 'a lot of very good friends' who were Muslims and peace-loving, beautiful people. 'But there are fanatics.'
The remarks sparked a social media firestorm but in response Kruger said 'it was vital to discuss these issues without automatically being labelled racist'.
Kruger's Today Extra co-host David Campbell objected to her remarks - saying freedom of religion was important
She told the panel Japan has a population of 174 million people and 100,000 Muslims and the country never suffers terrorist attacks.
WHAT SONIA KRUGER SAID: TV HOST'S KEY QUOTES 'Personally I think Andrew Bolt has a point here that there is a correlation between the number of people who are Muslim in a country and the number of terrorist attacks. 'I have a lot of very good friends who are Muslim who are peace-loving, who are beautiful people. But there are fanatics...' 'Personally, I would like to see it stop now for Australia because I want to feel safe as all of our citizens do when we go out to celebrate Australia Day' Advertisement
Her remarks drew a passionate response from the morning program's co-host David Campbell, who interrupted her as she began to talk about journalists being 'threatened' and freedom of speech.
Hands waving, Campbell replied: 'I'd like to see freedom of religion as well! As well as freedom of speech! They both go hand and hand!'
'We're talking about immigration, David,' Kruger replied. She then asked if people were allowed to talk about the issue.
Campbell said the article they were talking about - written by conservative columnist Andrew Bolt in News Corp newspapers - 'breeds hate'.
'So you're not allowed to talk about it?' Kruger replied. 'You're not allowed to discuss it?'
'I would venture that if you spoke to the parents of those children killed in Nice then they would be of the same opinion.'
When host Lisa Wilkinson pointed out Kruger's views were similar to the 'Donald Trump approach', she replied: 'Well perhaps it is. 'For the safety of the citizens here I think it's important'
Kruger is the host of Today Extra and is the face of music program The Voice
She argued 'good Muslim people' were dying as a result of terrorist acts, pointing out the first person to die in the Nice terror attacks last week was a Muslim woman.
When host Lisa Wilkinson asked her directly whether she wanted the borders totally closed to Muslim migrants, Kruger said: 'Yes, yes I would'.
Wilkinson pointed out closing the borders to Muslims was the 'Donald Trump approach'. 'Well, perhaps it is,' Kruger said. 'For the safety of our citizens here I think it's important'.
The US presidential candidate has called for a 'complete shutdown' on Muslims entering the United States 'until our country's representatives can figure out what's going on'.
Iran will be able to more easily make a nuclear bomb years before the end of a key pact with six foreign powers which had imposed restrictions on Tehran's nuclear program, according to a secret document about the deal.
The document is the only text linked to last year's deal between Iran and six foreign powers - the US, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany - that hasn't been made public.
However, US officials say members of Congress have been able to see it.
The revelations have prompted one Washington D.C. group - a US government go-to resource on Iran's nuclear program - to warn the plan outlined in the document 'will create a great deal of instability and possibly even lead to war, if regional tensions have not subsided'.
US President Barack Obama praised the Iran nuclear deal last week before the new document surfaced
US President Barack Obama had marked the anniversary of the deal on Thursday, saying it had succeeded in rolling back Iran's nuclear program, 'avoiding further conflict and making us safer'.
The document has been obtained news agency AP from a diplomat whose work has focused on Iran's nuclear program for more than a decade. Its authenticity was confirmed by another diplomat who possesses the same document.
The diplomat who shared the document described it as an add-on agreement to the nuclear deal.
But while formally separate from that accord, he said that it was in effect an integral part of the deal and had been approved by the six nations that negotiated the deal with Tehran.
Details published earlier outline most restraints on Iran's nuclear program meant to reduce the threat that Tehran will turn nuclear activities it says are peaceful to making weapons.
But while some of the constraints extend for 15 years, documents in the public domain are short on details of what happens with Iran's most proliferation-prone nuclear activity its uranium enrichment beyond the first 10 years of the agreement.
The document obtained by the AP fills in the gap. It says that as of January 2027 11 years after the deal was implemented Iran can start replacing its mainstay centrifuges with thousands of advanced machines.
The uranium enrichment complex in the Iranian town of Isfahan.
Centrifuges churn out uranium to levels that can range from use as reactor fuel and for medical and research purposes to much higher levels for the core of a nuclear warhead.
From year 11 to 13, says the document, Iran can install centrifuges up to five times as efficient as the 5,060 machines it is now restricted to using.
Those new models will number less than those being used now, ranging between 2,500 and 3,500, depending on their efficiency, according to the document.
But because they are more effective, they will allow Iran to enrich at more than twice the rate it is doing now.
The US says the Iran nuclear agreement is tailored to ensure that Iran would need at least 12 months to 'break out' and make enough weapons grade uranium for at least one weapon.
But based on a comparison of outputs between the old and newer machines, if the enrichment rate doubles, that breakout time would be reduced to six months, or even less if the efficiency is more than double, a possibility the document allows for.
The document also allows Iran to greatly expand its work with centrifuges that are even more advanced, including large-scale testing in preparation for the deal's expiry 15 years after its implementation on Jan. 18.
A senior U.S. official noted, however, that the limit on the amount of enriched uranium Iran will be allowed to store will remain at 300 kilograms (660 pounds) for the full 15 years, significantly below the amount needed for a bomb.
Iran's President Hassan Rouhani, right, shakes hands with the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, Yukiya Amano. Iran insists it is not interested in nuclear weapons. The pact is being closely monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency
As well, it will remain restricted to a level used for reactor fuel that is well below weapons grade. Like the diplomats, the official demanded anonymity in exchange for discussing the document.
'We have ensured that Iran's breakout time comes down gradually after year 10 in large part because of restrictions on its uranium stockpile until year 15,' the official said.
'As for breakout times after the initial 10 years of the deal, the breakout time does not go off a cliff nor do we believe that it would be immediately cut in half, to six months.'
The official said the document wasn't made public because it was part of Iran's long-term enrichment plan submitted to the IAEA. Such submissions are confidential, but the text was 'closely reviewed' by Washington and the other five powers that negotiated the nuclear deal, said the official.
Still the easing of restrictions on the number and kind of centrifuges means that once the deal expires, Tehran will be positioned to quickly make enough highly enriched uranium to bring up its stockpile to a level that would allow it to make a bomb in half a year, should it choose to do so.
The document doesn't say what happens with enrichment past year 13. That indicates a possible end to all restrictions on the number and kind of centrifuges even while constraints on other, less-proliferation prone nuclear activities remain until year 15.
Iran insists it is not interested in nuclear weapons, and the pact is being closely monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The IAEA says Tehran has essentially kept to its commitments since the agreement was implemented, a little more than six months after Iran and the six powers finalized it on July 14, 2015.
Marking the agreement's anniversary Thursday, President Barack Obama said it has succeeded in rolling back Iran's nuclear program, 'avoiding further conflict and making us safer.'
But opposition from US Republicans could increase with the revelation that Iran's potential breakout time would be more than halved over the last few years of the pact.
Also opposed is Israel, which in the past has threatened to strike Iran if it deems that Tehran is close to making a nuclear weapon.
Alluding to that possibility, David Albright, whose Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security is a U.S. government go-to resource on Iran's nuclear program, said the plan outlined in the document "will create a great deal of instability and possibly even lead to war, if regional tensions have not subsided."
The deal provides Iran with sanctions relief in exchange for its nuclear constraints.
Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant. The document shows that as of January 2027 11 years after the deal was implemented Iran can start replacing its mainstay centrifuges with thousands of advanced machines
But before going into recess, US Congress last week approved a bill to impose new sanctions for Tehran's continuing development and testing of ballistic missiles, a program the White House says is meant to carry atomic warheads even if it is not part of the nuclear agreement.
It also approved a measure that calls for prohibiting the Obama administration from buying more of Iran's heavy water, a key component in certain nuclear reactors.
The White House has said removing the country's surplus heavy water denies Tehran access to a material that may be stored for potential nuclear weapons production.
The relieved family of an Australian tourist seriously injured in the Bastille Day massacre in Nice have praised the 'wonderful' stranger who took her to hospital after the attack.
Adelaide Stratton, 22, was walking on the Promenade de Anglais with travel companions Chiara Ronzel, Bridget De Jong, 22, and Marcus Anderson, 23, on Thursday when they became separated as the 19-tonne truck plowed through the crowd.
Family friend Debbie Cook told reporters outside the Hospital Pasteur the young Sydney woman cannot remember anything about the incident, but was left seriously injured.
'I believe a complete stranger stayed with her in the initial stages after she was injured and then went in the ambulance and, bless him, he has been at the hospital most days since,' Ms Cook said.
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Adelaide Stratton, 22, (pictured centre) was walking on the Promenade de Anglais with friends Chiara Ronzel (right) and Bridget De Jong, 22, (left) and became separated as the 19-tonne truck plowed through the crowd
A family friend of Ms Stratton (pictured) said the Sydney woman cannot remember much about the incident, but has suffered serious injuries
Ms Cook said Ms Stratton's injuries have left her unable to speak, but she is 'getting better' each day thanks to hospital staff.
Ms Stratton's family have praised a 'wonderful' stranger for saving her life after he took her to the hospital following the terror attack
'At this time, our focus is on Adelaide's recovery,' she said.
'Like any family, we want our vibrant 22-year-old to bounce back from this awful experience and continue on with the wonderful life she has ahead of her.'
Ms Cook said the family had asked for privacy as Ms Stratton continued her recovery.
Ms Stratton's travel companion Marcus Anderson was also injured in Thursday's attack, which killed 84 people, including 10 children.
The 23-year-old, also from Sydney, was mowed down by the truck and shot by the driver as he fell to the ground.
He is recovering from a punctured lung, broken ribs, damaged feet and a gunshot wound to his arm in Urgences, Hopital De Cannes.
'I'm so glad all my friends are safe and I feel so bad for the others,' he told The Today Show on Sunday.
His girlfriend Ms De Jong - who was also travelling with Ms Stratton - shared a touching photo to social media on Saturday of the pair reuniting in hospital and praised her 'tough cookie' for pulling through.
'Like any family, we want our vibrant 22-year-old to bounce back from this awful experience and continue on with the wonderful life she has ahead of her,' family friend Debbie Cook told reporters
Ms Stratton's travel companion Marcus Anderson (pictured with his girlfriend Bridget De Jong) was also injured in Thursday's attack
Mr Anderson's girlfriend Ms De Jong (pictured) - who was also travelling with Ms Stratton - shared a touching photo to social media on Saturday of the pair reuniting in hospital
'Back with this tough cookie - he asked me to check the NRL score so I think he's alright,' Ms De Jong wrote alongside the photograph.
The Sydneysider also asked friends and family to send 'good vibes, thoughts, prayers and wishes' to Ms Stratton as she recovers in hospital.
The group had been enjoying a European holiday, which also included travelling to Britain and Portugal as well as France.
On Thursday Foreign Minister Julie Bishop confirmed three Australians had been injured in the terror attack.
'They have suffered minor injuries, seeking to flee the scene, to get away from the scene. We are working to provide consular assistance to all three,' she said.
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop confirmed three Australians were injured in the Bastille Day terrorist attack (pictured) in Nice
North Korea says its latest ballistic missile tests were personally ordered and monitored by supreme leader Kim Jong-un and simulated nuclear strikes on US targets in South Korea.
Tuesdays test firing of three missiles in violation of existing United Nations resolutions was seen as an angry reaction to the planned deployment of a US missile defence system in the South.
The launch of the two Scud missiles and one intermediate-range Rodong was condemned by the United States, Japan and South Korea, who vowed a collective diplomatic response.
North Korea says its latest ballistic missile tests (pictured is a missile fired back in April) were personally ordered by supreme leader Kim Jong-un and simulated nuclear strikes on US targets in South Korea
The tests were monitored by Mr Jong-un and the range of the missiles was limited to simulate pre-emptive attacks on South Korean ports and airfields hosting US military 'hardware', the North's official KCNA news agency said.
The tests 'examined the operational features of the detonating devices of nuclear warheads mounted on the ballistic rockets at the designated altitude over the target area', it said.
According to the South Korean military, the two Scuds flew between 500 and 600 kilometres (310-370 miles) into the Sea of Japan, while the Rodong was fired about an hour later.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday said the tests were 'deeply troubling' and undermined efforts to reduce tension on the Korean peninsula.
UN resolutions prohibit North Korea from developing ballistic missile technology.
Following the missile tests, Melissa Hanham, a senior research associate at the US-based Middlebury Institute of International Studies, said the move smelt 'political rather than technical to me'.
'I think the number and distance of the missiles lets them remind the ROK (Republic of Korea) of what they are up against,' she said, referring to South Korea by its official name.
The launches came days after South Korea and the United States announced a final decision to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) anti-missile system in the South to counter threats from the North, which had prompted Pyongyang to threaten a 'physical response.'
'Our assessment is that it was done as a show of force,' a South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff official said at a briefing.
The missiles were launched from an area in the North's western region called Hwangju between 5.45am South Korea time and 6.40am, the South's military said, an indication that the North was confident they would not crash on its own territory.
The launch of the two Scud missiles and one intermediate-range Rodong was condemned by the United States, Japan and South Korea, who vowed a collective diplomatic response. Pictured are replicas of Scud missiles
'The ballistic missiles flight went from 500 km to 600 km, which is a distance far enough to strike all of South Korea, including Busan,' the South's military said in a statement.
Busan is a South Korean port city in the south.
North Korea has test-fired a series of ballistic missiles in recent months, including intermediate-range missiles in June and a submarine-launched missile this month.
'In addition to the basic goal of enhancing missile units' readiness to fight, it might be a way of reminding their southern neighbors that the site chosen for a THAAD battery in South Korea is within reach,' Joshua Pollack, editor of the U.S.-based Nonproliferation Review, said of Tuesday's launches.
South Korea announced last week the THAAD system would be deployed in the south-eastern county of Seongju.
In addition to the decision to base a THAAD system in South Korea, the United States recently angered North Korea by blacklisting Mr Jong-Un for human rights abuses.
'The threat to our national security is growing very quickly in a short period of time,' South Korean Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn told parliament on Tuesday.
North Korea conducted its fourth test of a nuclear device in January, and activity at its nuclear test site has increased recently, according to media reports in South Korea and Japan citing government officials, as well as a report by Washington-based North Korea monitoring project 38 North.
Following the latest nuclear test and a February space rocket launch that was widely viewed as a missile test in disguise, the U.N. Security Council imposed tough new resolutions that further isolate North Korea.
While China supported tougher sanctions against its neighbour and ally North Korea, it has sharply criticized the decision to base a THAAD battery in South Korea, saying the move will destabilize the security balance in the region.
China's foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday's missile launches.
Japan denounced the launches.
Father is a former UPS vice-president on the board of several corporations
A man who impersonated his successful father in a multi-million bid to buy Maxim magazine was sentenced Monday to a year in prison.
Calvin Darden Jr, the son of a former UPS executive, has great intelligence and abilities but 'has spent too much of his life engaged in fraud or other wrongdoing,' US District Judge Jed Rakoff said at the sentencing in New York.
'I'm sorry, embarrassed, ashamed,' Darden told the judge. He said the crime tore his family apart as he stained a name that his father had spent his life building up.
Darden tricked two lenders in late 2013 into providing more than $8 million in financing for the potential acquisition of Maxim magazine and tried to defraud another victim of $20 million, authorities say.
Calvin Darden Jr (left) tricked two lenders in late 2013 into providing more than $8 million in financing for the potential acquisition of Maxim magazine and tried to defraud another victim of $20 million. He pleaded guilty after authorities said he impersonated his prominent father (right), a former senior vice president at UPS
The conspiracy stretched from August 2013 through February 2014 according to the government.
Rakoff said he could understand optimism that Darden was turning his life around but 'the past is not a pretty picture'.
The judge ordered more than $4 million in restitution. He said he might have required Darden spend as much as five years in prison were it not for Darden's substantial cooperation.
Darden pleaded guilty in November 2014 after authorities said he impersonated his prominent father, a former senior vice president for operations at UPS who also sits on the board of several major corporations.
The younger Darden also pleaded guilty almost ten years ago in a scam that cost investors millions of dollars and was sentenced to four to 12 years in prison and ordered to repay nearly $6 million.
Lawyer Harvey Newkirk was sentenced to six months in prison in April for assisting Darden in his ruse.
'I should not have been so trustful of Calvin Jr,' Newkirk said at the time. 'I'll be sure I'm never in this situation again.'
6-Year-Old Girl Seriously Wounded In Mid-Day Englewood Shooting
By Stephen Gossett in News on Jul 19, 2016 8:34PM
A 6-year-old girl was shot in the stomach on Tuesday afternoon in West Englewood, according to police.
She was shot at approximately 1 p.m. in the 6000 block of South Paulina Street. She was taken to Comer Childrens Hospital and listed in serious condition. First Deputy Supt. John Escalante responded to the scene, and he is expected to hold a media briefing shortly.
Dep. Superintendent Escalante, Chief of Patrol & Chief of Detectives responding to scene of child shot at 60th & Paulina. Briefing to follow Anthony Guglielmi (@AJGuglielmi) July 19, 2016
Update, 4:45 p.m.:
The family has identified the victim as Tacarra Morgan, according to reports. The girl was on the porch with family members enjoying, as any other child should, a warm summer day on their block, Escalante said at the news conference.
Multiple vehicles stopped on South Paulina, then someone from the group fired shots into a crowd. Morgan was not an intended target, according to police.
No one is in custody, but police said they are searching for a white SUV.
The girl is in critical but stable condition, according to CPD Communications Director Anthony Guglielmi.
6 year old girl just came out of surgery in critical but stable condition. We are monitoring her progress very closely. Anthony Guglielmi (@AJGuglielmi) July 19, 2016
Description of vehicle is a white SUV, additional detectives being sent to retrieve POD camera footage Anthony Guglielmi (@AJGuglielmi) July 19, 2016
A mother-of-three with a drug addiction who allegedly led police on a high-speed chase before threatening a service station attendant with a knife will stay behind bars until her case is heard.
Brittany Elizabeth Mackie from Kingscliff, Queensland allegedly went on a 13-hour crime spree in northern NSW on Saturday leading police on two separate high speed chases.
The mother, 26, allegedly exceeded the speed limit by 45km/h in separate chases in Murwillumbah and West Tweed Heads the Gold Coast Bulletin reports.
Brittany Elizabeth Mackie from Kingscliff, Queensland has been charged with a string of offenses following an alleged 13-hour crime spree
According to police Ms Mackie then tried to pay for petrol in Moobal at 2.30pm with a bad cheque.
She allegedly threatened a woman working at the service station with a knife before escaping on foot.
Police caught up with her and she then allegedly resisted arrest. Ms Mackie appeared before Tweed Heads Local Court and plead not guilty to seven charges.
These included two counts of fail to stop police pursuit, known as Skye's Law, two counts of driving while disqualified and driving a stolen motor vehicle and resist arrest.
The mother-of-three will remain behind bars as jail following a conviction is likely - the magistrate said
Ms Mackie, who was represented by the Aboriginal Legal Service, mouthed the word 'bail' to her mother as she sat in the dock.
The court was told she was a drug user and needed rehabilitation.
However her solicitor Dannielle Stubbs was unable to convince the magistrate to let her client out of jail.
The alleged crime spree took place in northern NSW and ended after Ms Mackie allegedly threatened staff at a service station with a knife
'There is a strong case against her. Upon conviction, a custodial sentence is likely,' Magistrate Michael Dakin said.
She will return to Tweed Heads Local Court on August 29.
Ms Stubbs said if her client could view CCTV footage she may change her plea and noted Ms Mackie thought she was allowed to drive despite her licence disqualification from March 2011 March 2017.
A man hunt is on for a middle-aged man who masturbated in front of a teenage girl on a Melbourne tram.
Police are looking for a man in his mid-50s who touched himself inappropriately in front of 15-year-old girl on a tram bound for St Kilda, in Melbourne's south.
The girl had got on a tram at Clarendon Street in inner-city Southbank about 7.15pm on June 19.
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Police are looking for a man in his mid-50s who touched himself inappropriately in front of 15-year-old girl on a tram bound for St Kilda, in Melbourne's south
Shortly after, a man sat about a metre away from the teenage girl and started touching himself as he stared her.
The victim got uncomfortable and moved to the other end of the tram.
Police say the man continued to watch the girl, who got off the tram on Acland Street in St Kilda, and reported the incident.
Investigators have released CCTV and an image of a man who they think can assist them with their enquiries.
The man is described as being aged in his mid-50s, about 182cm tall, with olive skin, a solid build and was unshaven.
At the time of the incident, he was wearing a distinctive blue and orange beanie, a black coat, a tan and black striped hooded jumper, track pants and carrying a tan enviro-bag.
Delivering a near-faultless address from autocue, she praise Trump's compassion as a father, determination as a businessman and love for his country as an America before declaring 'he is ready to lead'
Then wife Melania delivered the keynote speech of the evening, praising him as both a father and a husband
Choosing Queen is a slap in the face to guitarist Brian May, who asked Trump not to use their music at his rallies
silhouetted against a white background as Queen's We Are The Champions played
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Donald Trump made a rockstar entrance into the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this evening, his instantly recognizable silhouette picked out against dramatic backlighting as Queen's We Are The Champions played.
The billionaire businessman paused, illuminated, for what seemed an age as the applause roared loud and long, turning once to flash a profile image of his signature hairdo before walking forward to the microphone.
There he introduced the evening's keynote speaker, wife Melania, who delivered a near faultless speech on Trump's compassion as a father, determination as a businessmen, and love for his country as an American.
In the crowd, daughter Tiffany Trump looked on dressed in a demure dark dress alongside Democrat boyfriend Ross Mechanic, while Donald Trump Jr also took his seat alongside former Republican presidential hopeful Bob Dole.
Donald Trump made a typically show-stopping entrance into the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this evening as he waits to be crowned the Republican presidential nominee
Trump broke with tradition by appearing on the first day of the convention, while nominees don't typically appear until they are nominated at the conclusion the final day
While Trump's choice of entrance music certainly provided dramatic effect, it will come as a slap in the face to Queen guitarist Brian May who had asked the Republican to stop using the band's music at rallies
The thousands gathered inside the Quicken Loans Arena applauded long and loud when Donald Trump took to the stage to introduce the evening's main speaker, wife Melania
Despite his grand entrance, Trump shared barely a dozen words with the audience on Monday night, simply introducing wife Melania
Despite earlier protests from anti-Trump delegates at the convention, the presumptive nominee received a standing ovation as he entered
Trump will be named the Republican presidential nominee as the convention closes on Thursday, despite earlier fears of a brokered event as he struggled to pull ahead of Ted Cruz in the delegate count
Reading without fault from an autocue, Melania delivered a rousing speech on her husband's desire to win, love for his country, and compassion for his family and children
While Melania has often joined Trump on the campaign trail and delivered short addresses to the crowds, tonight she spoke for over half an hour, and showed herself a force to be reckoned with come November
Melania delivered a confident address to the thousands gathered inside the Quicken Loans Arena, receiving a standing ovation at the end
The former glamour model appeared elegant and professional as she took to the stage on Monday night to address the convention
As always Melania exuded high-fashion glamour with her outfit choice, which included a $675 pair of Christian Louboutain heels
Trump and Melania were watched by son Donald Jr (bottom right), daughter Tiffany (top center), her boyfriend Ross Mechanic (top right), former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani (bottom center) and his wife Judith (bottom right)
Tiffany Trump opted for a demure dark colored dress as she arrived at the convention alongside Democrat boyfriend Ross Mechanic (left)
The pair were pictured whispering to one another as Melania Trump wowed the crowds with her headline speech on Monday night
Donald Trump Jr was also seen making his way into the convention having traveled alongside his father on his private jet
Donald Trump Jr shakes hands with a female guest as he sits alongside Bob Dole at the Republican Nation Convention in Cleveland
Trump's choice of music will come as a slap in the face to Queen guitarist Brian May who had requested that Trump stop using his band's music at rallies and had vowed to stop him doing so.
Following the barnstorming Rudy Giuliani was no easy task for Melania, especially for someone unused to public speaking and with a sometimes shaky grasp of English, but she appeared composed and assured as she delivered her remarks with easy emphasis.
On an evening that had threatened to turn chaotic after early protests from the so-called Never Trump delegates, and banner waving from anti-Donald demonstrators who made it inside, Melania was cool, calm and collected.
While she has often joined Trump on the campaign trail, delivering short addresses to the crowds at his rallies across the country, she has never spoken at such length, or in such depth, about herself or her husband.
And yet she addressed the crowd in Cleveland for over half an hour with barely a stutter or misstep, waxing lyrical about her childhood in Slovenia, her journey to America, and her experience with the Donald, both as a wife and as a mother.
After the speech Donald joined her on stage where the two shared and embrace and a kiss on the cheek before making their way back to the waiting motorcade outside, their task - for the time being at least - accomplished.
Earlier in the day Trump and his wife touched down in Cleveland amidst tight security as the first day of the Republican National Convention got off to a tense start with armed activists outside and noisy clashes between politicians gathered inside.
The pair arrived at the venue several hours after touching down in Cleveland in Trump's $100million private 757 jet
Melania Trump looked typically glamorous as she made her way into the Quicken Loans Arena for her speech, while husband Donald appeared to be feeling the pressure as he awaits being crowned the Republican presidential nominee
Donald Trump Jr uploaded this image to his Instagram as the plane touched down showing his father speaking with reporters as wife Melania waited by his side wearing a pair of Louboutin heels
Earlier in the evening Trump Jr uploaded an image of the aircraft's wing with the caption 'next stop Cleveland'. Trump has now touched down amid tight security as heavily armed activists arrived outside the Quicken Loans Arena
Chris Christie, who was disappointed after narrowly missing out on Trump's running mate pick, is also in attendance in Cleveland
Chris Christie appeared pensive as he watched Melania take to the stage on Monday, having narrowly missed out on the running mate spot
Former New York governor Rudy Giuliani, a vocal supporter of Donald Trump, speaks with a member of the police department ahead of Trump's arrival at the convention
Newt Gingrich, Speaker of the House and leading pick for Trump's running mate before Mike Pence was selected, speaks with former Republican Presidential nominee Bob Dole inside the Quicken Loans Arena
The billionaire businessman arrived safely in Cleveland aboard his $100milllion private 757 jet on Monday evening despite one of his motorcade being involved in a crash as he made his way to New York's La Guardia airport.
Trump is attending the conference along with wife Melania where he will eventually be crowned the Republican party presidential nominee, tweeting earlier: 'Looking forward to being at the convention tonight to watch all of the wonderful speakers including my wife, Melania. Place looks beautiful!'
However a loud contingent of so-called Never Trump delegates have already sought to derail proceedings by forcing a roll call that would have allowed them to air their grievances, a hammer-blow to party officials hoping to present a united front.
Those opposed to Trump's nomination sought to insert a measure in the rules allowing individual delegates to vote 'their conscience' instead of supporting the candidate their states' voters preferred.
But a last-gasp maneuver failed, leaving his intra-party enemies with no other procedural options to oppose him.
Opposition to Trump was also felt in the absence of many Republican dignitaries including Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, the GOP's 2008 and 2012 nominees, John McCain and Mitt Romney, and Jeb Bush and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, Trump's primary rivals.
Willie Robertson, star of reality show Duck Dynasty and another vocal supporter of Trump, delivered one of the opening speeches in which he promised: 'Donald Trump has got your back'
Indiana delegate William Springer shows his allegiance as he moves through the crowd ahead of Donald Trump's arrival
While some delegates had protested Trump's nomination early at the convention, others were firmly in favor of the billionaire businessman
Members of the Parma, Ohio Fire Department, presented the color at the start of the convention as Republican delegates paid tribute to officers killed in Dallas and Baton Rouge
However, Ivanka Trump shot down critics in an interview with GMA due to be broadcast on Tuesday, saying: 'That's their choice if they don't want to be part of the narrative, if they don't want to be part of the future.
'But this really is about a forward-looking moment. My father is an outsider and we went through a very tough primary. And he emerged from that the winner, but there were certainly ruffled feathers along the way.'
There was also trouble in New York as Trump made his way to Cleveland when one car in his motorcade, filled with staffers,
Trump's Press Secretary Hope Hicks told Daily Mail Online: 'Everyone is okay. it was a staff car accident, totally separate from Mr. Trump's motorcade. We're all just fine.'
Those opposed to Trump's nomination tried to force a roll call on the floor that would have allowed them to voice their concerns over his leadership, but after they were denied the chance they became vocal
The demonstrations will come as a blow to party officials who were hoping to present a united front after a bitter primary season
Steve Womack was briefly led from the stage as demonstrations erupted in the crowd, but later return to continue proceedings with the news that the revolt had been unsuccessful
While hundreds of Republican delegates have gathered in Cleveland for the convention there are many notable absences, including both former Presidents George H.W. and George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney, and Jeb Bush and Ohio Gov. John Kasich
Armed Trump supporters ignored police pleas to leave their weapons at home and turned up outside the convention heavily armed
The year is 1990, and an entrepreneur called Robin Saxby is trying to furnish his start-up technology firms first office, a converted 18th-century barn in the Cambridgeshire village of Swaffham Bulbeck.
Having splashed out on a (then) state-of-the-art voice-answering telephone, along with desks and chairs for all 12 of his employees, theres no money left for a boardroom table.
Fortunately, however, the local office supply companys travelling salesman is a friendly sort, who likes a gamble.
In 1990, entrepreneur Robin Saxby (pictured) was trying to furnish his start-up technology firms first office, a converted barn in a Cambridgeshire village..but it is a very different story today
Because wed already bought quite a lot of stuff off him, he very kindly agreed to toss a coin over the cost of the boardroom table, Saxby told me yesterday.
The deal was that if I called it right, then hed let us have it for free. And luckily, I did.
It wasnt all plain sailing, though. Having won the free boardroom table, Saxby then lost a follow-up bet (decided by a game of pool at a local pub) that would have resulted in free sets of shelves.
For a time, we had to keep our books in piles on the floor, added Saxby, 69, a computer buff from Derbyshire who got his first electronics kit aged eight. But we coped.
Indeed they did. For that tiny start-up was called ARM, and it went on to become one of the biggest and most profitable technology companies in Britain.
Yesterday, the firm, which now designs semiconductors and microchips used in 95 per cent of the worlds mobile phones, found itself on the verge of being taken over by Japans SoftBank Group Corp, in a deal that values it at a staggering 24billion.
No 10 meeting: Chancellor Philip Hammond and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son yesterday
Long gone from the cramped rural barn, ARM boasts 3,975 employees in 35 offices, from Silicon Valley to Shenzhen in China, including a vast global HQ across a campus that spans several large buildings just outside the centre of Cambridge.
Its 13 founders, who were all engineers, became wealthy men after the firm floated on the stock exchange in the late 1990s (they were among a total of 200 ARM employees who became overnight millionaires thanks to share options).
And they are now even wealthier: the value of their remaining stakes increased by 40 per cent yesterday.
One of them was Mike Muller, who at ARMs first staff meeting (again held in a local pub) was appointed marketing director on account of what Saxby claimed yesterday was the fact that he wore a purple tie so clearly had some style about him.
Now chief operating officer of the multinational giant, Muller earned more than 1.2 million last year. After news of the takeover bid broke, his personal shareholding in the firm increased in value to around 20 million.
Such startling tales are of course relatively commonplace in the tech industry, where the likes of Google and Facebook (which started life in a garage and a Harvard dorm respectively) have become billion-dollar behemoths in a few short years.
Yet unlike the Mark Zuckerbergs of this world, Saxby, Muller and their peers have remained determinedly low profile.
And while their Silicon Valley rivals are household names, ARM is relatively unknown outside the tech world.
Perhaps the firm wears its achievements too lightly, or perhaps its line of business is a touch technical. But either way, it represents a very British success story.
While American tech firms fill their offices with bean-bags and ping pong tables, the atmosphere at ARMs glass and concrete headquarters is refined and corporate.
Rather than free soya lattes and organic yoghurt, ARMs engineers can start the day with a full English breakfast. They are, if you like, concerned with substance rather than style.
ARMs business, in laymans terms, involves designing highly complex microchips, and the parts that go into them.
In the early days, these products were largely used in mobile phones and computers.
From humble beginnings: SoftBank of Japan has struck a 24billion deal to purchase ARM, which designs microchips used in Apple smartphones
Much of their early success was built on the Nokia 6110, one of the first blockbuster handsets of the 1990s, which relied on an ARM microprocessor that was far more energy efficient than rival products, and therefore extended its battery life.
Later years saw the unglamorous company cash in on the revolutionary iPhone, which also relied on ARM processors.
Unlike many rivals, ARM doesnt actually make the products it creates. Indeed, it has never made anything.
Instead, the firms customers buy a licence that allows access to a catalogue of its designs (for this, large firms such as Samsung are thought to pay about 7 million a year).
'They also pay a royalty of a few pence each time a device containing an ARM product is sold.
When we started out, I used to tell people well make chips over my dead body, says Saxby, who retired in 2007.
Well, I am still alive and ARM still hasnt made any chips.
The clever business model has for years helped the firm eliminate expensive overheads (factories are tricky and costly to run), and focus on developing new technologies and making sure that its existing designs not only work, but are better than those designed by rivals.
It has also placed them at the forefront of a exponentially-growing market.
Recent years have seen relatively complex circuit boards appear in an ever-wider array of devices, from cars and washing machines to TVs, coffee machines, and even electric toothbrushes.
As a result, ARM profits from almost every electronic consumer product money can buy.
In future years that market will only get wider: the so-called internet of things, which is bringing connected technology into ever more corners of our life, will only increase demand for microchips and their components.
Jewellery worth more than $1 million has been stolen from a lavish nine bedroom, eight bathroom mansion in an exclusive suburb belonging to former Liberal Party powerbroker Andrew Abercrombie.
Three thieves are believed to have broken into Mr Abercrombie's St Georges Road home in Toorak, Melbourne on Saturday June 25 about 8-8.30pm, making off with a 'large amount' of jewellery - while an elderly relative was inside.
The thieves found a safe in the master bedroom of the home, which the businessman purchased for $14m in 2007, hauled it out in a wheelie bin, and loaded it into a blue Holden station wagon and fled, The Age reported.
Andrew Abercrombie's lavish Toorak, Melbourne mansion which he paid $14 million for in 2007
The three suspects made off with a large amount of jewellery worth more than $1 million on Saturday June 25
This stunning ring was among the haul of jewellery stolen when the thieves lugged a safe out of the house and made off with it
At least four watches, many encrusted with diamonds or precious stones were taken in the heist
Among the stolen items were watches, rings, earrings and a distinctive aqua marine bangle of 'significant' sentimental value to Mr Abercrombie.
Earlier that day, Mr Abercrombie, who's estimated to be worth $610m, and his wife Shadda had left for a holiday in Greece.
When the theft took place, the alarm system hadn't been activated and an elderly relative was believed to be in the residence.
There were no signs of forced entry, it was reported.
Mr Abercrombie pictured in April 2016 after he withdrew for a ballot for the position of Victorian Liberal Party treasurer, which he held at the time
Police released images of the jewellery taken as well as the car the suspects fled the scene in
Less than a week after the Toorak raid, thieves are thought to have gained access to another of the millionaire businessman's residences, located on a clifftop in Portsea, across Port Phillip from Melbourne, according to The Age.
It's not yet known if the two heists are connected.
Stonnington Crime Investigation Unit detectives have released images of the stolen items and the vehicle the suspects fled in.
The vehicle left the scene in a southerly direction, and then travelled along Tahara Road towards Lansell Road.
The vehicle is described as blue coloured Holden VT (1997-99) station wagon which was fitted with roof racks.
Mr Abercrombie, one of the country's wealthiest businessmen, is the founder, chairman and majority shareholder of Flexigroup, which provides financial solutions, The Age reported.
He resigned as treasurer of the Victorian Liberal Party in April amid the fallout after former state director Daniel Mantach's took $1.5 million from party coffers.
Mr Abercrombie's lavish mansion in St Georges Road, Toorak. It has nine bedrooms, eight bathrooms and seven parking spaces, as well as a stunning swimming pool
This blue Holden VT (1997-99) station wagon was captured on camera leaving the scene of the crime
Compton has been transferred to a maximum security prison in the state, although authorities did not name which one
Robertson Unit in Abilene, Texas, is all-male facility of about 3,000 inmates
Her death is investigated as a homicide, no additional details are available
The seven-year veteran of state prison was pronounced dead at hospital
A 21-year-old man is accused of killing a female corrections officer in Texas early Saturday, while serving a 25-year sentence for sexually assaulting a child, authorities said.
Inmate Dillion Gage Compton attacked Mari Johnson, 55, when she went into the storage area near the kitchen where he was assigned to work, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said Monday.
Johnson, a seven-year veteran of the state prison agency, was found unresponsive around 3am on Saturday at the French M Robertson Unit in Abilene, Texas, and was pronounced dead at the hospital.
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Dillion Gage Compton, 21 (left) allegedly attacked Mari Johnson, 55, (right) when she went into the storage area near the kitchen where he was assigned to work, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said Monday
Compton was serving a 25-year sentence at the Robertson Unit in Abilene, Texas, after he was convicted in 2011 of the aggravated sexual assault of a child. He has already been transferred to a maximum security prison, although authorities refrained from naming which one
Mari Johnson, 55, (pictured left and right) was found unresponsive at around 3am near the kitchen area of the French M Robertson Unit in Abilene, Texas, Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jason Clark said
Compton was serving a 25-year sentence after he was convicted in 2011 of the aggravated sexual assault of a child under the age of 14.
He allegedly attacked Johnson near the kitchen, where he was assigned to work.
Life-saving measures were initiated after Johnson was found unresponsive at 3am on Saturday.
She was taken to Hendricks Medical Center where she was pronounced dead, the Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jason Clark said.
The Robertson Unit, about 140 miles west of Fort Worth, is an all-male facility that has a capacity of nearly 3,000 inmates and about 500 corrections officers.
Compton has been transferred to an 'undisclosed maximum-security TDCJ unit', the Dallas News reported.
An investigation is ongoing and the evidence will be presented to the Jones County district attorney.
In 2012 article in the New Statesman, Compton learned that fighting would land him in solitary confinement at a youth offender program at the Clemens Unit in Brazoria County.
He vowed never to receive the punishment again, and finished his GED with hopes to join the tech industry upon his release.
'Correctional officers have one of the most difficult jobs in all of state government protecting the public from dangerous individuals,' Brad Livingston, the department's executive director, said.
'This is a tragic reminder that carrying out that mission can lead to the ultimate sacrifice.
'Ms. Johnson made the ultimate sacrifice to keep this state safe.
'She will never be forgotten. We will see that the offender who committed this cowardly act is held accountable.'
Johnson had been with the prison system since August 2009.
Dale Wainwright, chairman of the Texas Board of Criminal Justice, said the loss of a corrections officer's life was 'difficult to put into words.'
'I ask the public to remember their acts of unselfishness, remember their many acts of courage, and remember the dedication and commitment demonstrated every day by correctional officers,' he said.
'Please pray for this officers friends, family, and the department during this time.'
Governor Greg Abbott called the slaying senseless and an 'unfathomably tragic event.'
Dale Wainwright, chairman of the Texas Board of Criminal Justice, said the loss of a corrections officer's life was 'difficult to put into words.' (pictured, Johnson)
'The State of Texas mourns for Mari Johnson, a correctional officer who was senselessly murdered last night by an inmate at the Robertson Unit in Abilene, Texas,' he said.
'Like all those who faithfully serve, Mari was dedicated to protecting others, and her service will not be forgotten.
'Cecilia and I ask that all Texans keep the Johnson family in their thoughts and prayers in the aftermath of this unfathomably tragic event.
'Texas will ensure the perpetrator receives swift justice, and TDCJ has been instructed to take all necessary measures to enhance the safety of their staff to prevent such tragedies.'
Johnson's death comes a year after the last on-duty slaying of a Texas corrections officer.
Timothy Davison, 38, was attacked by an inmate in July 2015 at the Telford Unit near Texarkana in far northeast Texas.
The inmate, Billy Joel Tracy, 38, already was serving a life prison term and now is awaiting trial for capital murder.
Bastille Day terrorist Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel had a 73-year-old male lover, it emerged yesterday.
Reports say the supposedly religious father of three was a sex addict who trawled dating sites for casual partners of both sexes.
Police identified a main lover after examining the lorry killers mobile phone.
Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel had a 73-year-old male lover and trawled websites looking for sex
An unnamed male pensioner has been interviewed by detectives as they try to unravel the seedy personal life of the man who massacred 84 people following last Thursdays fireworks display in Nice.
In defiance of Islamic teachings, 31-year-old Bouhlel downloaded extreme porn, drank alcohol and took illegal drugs, according to French media.
NICE CROWD BOOS FRENCH PM Angry mourners hurled abuse at French Prime Minister Manuel Valls in Nice yesterday after he told them to get used to terrorism. Around 42,000 took part in a minutes silence to remember the 84 people killed by Mohamed Bouhlel in his Bastille Day lorry rampage. But Mr Valls faced a chorus of boos over the comment, and an enraged minority tried to rip down fences to get at him. Visitor Marc Mettard, 29, from Grenoble, said: France has lost control. We need a tougher government and more action to prosecute radicals or there will be more attacks, more deaths. Locals have built a grisly shrine of rocks, rubbish and hate messages at the spot where the killer was shot. People stopped to spit and stamp and one woman even emptied a bottle of urine. Advertisement
He also liked to show off his muscular figure and one unconfirmed theory is that he had worked as a prostitute.
Islamic State may have claimed him as one of its devout soldiers, but French investigators have failed to find any direct link between Bouhlel and any terror group. However, his phone and computer records revealed that he had looked at Islamist propaganda sites as well as some showing decapitations.
Two hundred police officers are now working exclusively on inquiries related to data on his phone, which was full of messages, videos and photos, including images of men and women he had recently slept with.
Yesterday it emerged that Bouhlels ex-wife and his three children could have become the victims of his massacre. Hajer Khalfallah had planned to take her family to the firework display from her home on a run-down estate in northern Nice but changed her mind.
Her lawyer Jean-Yves Garino told Le Parisien newspaper: Yes, she was due to be at the scene of this odious crime. She did not go for personal reasons.
She now feels concerned in an extremely powerful way for the victims and the pain of those victims and those close to them.
People gather at a makeshift memorial yesterday to observe a minute of silence to honour the victims of an attack near the area where a truck mowed through revellers last week
Miss Khalfallah was freed without charge on Sunday after two days in police custody. Two of three new suspects arrested that day are an Albanian couple and the husband, aged 38, is suspected of giving Bouhlel logistical support, including the automatic 7.65mm pistol he used to shoot at police.
Meanwhile, only 35 of Thursdays dead have so far been formally identified, in some cases because bodies are too badly mutilated.
Donald Trump said 'you're hired' to Apprentice alumna Omarosa, recruiting her as his director of African-American outreach, she revealed during an interview on MSNBC today.
'It happened this week,' she said. 'It's really an extension of the work that the [National Diversity Coalition for Trump] has already been doing and so I'm very happy to take up that cause for Donald Trump.'
The reality TV personality had previously been active in the campaign and is easily the most identifiable supporter from Trump's hit television show.
Apprentice alumna Omarosa (left) stepped into a bigger role in Donald Trump's (right) campaign as the presumptive Republican nominee's director of African-American
Donald Trump and Omarosa have stayed close over the years and she's played a part in his campaign from day one as one of the most recognizable showbiz faces
Officially the reality starlet, and 'villain' of the popular franchise, had the title of vice-chairman for the National Diversity Coalition for Trump.
On MSNBC, host Craig Melvin pointed out that Trump, so far, has performed abysmally with black voters.
Last week a poll showed Trump receiving 0 percent of the black vote in Ohio, the state where this week's Republican National Convention is being held.
It also happens to be Omarosa's home state.
The Apprentice star said she questioned the legitimacy of those polls, because she's seen with her own eyes African-Americans who plan to vote for the Republican.
'I wonder who they polled,' she mused.
'I just spent an amazing weekend with African-Americans for Trump, about 300 of them,' she continued.
'Those numbers would be flawed according to the people who came out to support,' she added.
The poll also showed Trump having zero support among black voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio's next door neighbor, and another state that The Donald will have to pick up if he plans to beat Democrat Hillary Clinton in the fall.
In Ohio, 88 percent of black voters said they supported Clinton, while in Pennsylvania 91 percent said she had their vote.
Omarosa said she was aware that her job would be an uphill climb, but she didn't believe it was nearly that steep.
'So I look at the data, but my reality is that I'm surrounded by people who want to see Donald Trump as the next president of the United States, who are African-American,' she said.
The family of a woman who died shortly after being arrested for refusing to leave a hospital when they denied her further treatment, have filed a lawsuit.
Barbara Dawson, 57, was rushed to Liberty Calhoun Hospital, in Blountstown in Florida, complaining of stomach pains and breathing difficulties last December.
She was treated but discharged within a few hours - despite her insistence that she still needed treatment, her family say.
When she refused to leave without further treatment, she was arrested, handcuffed and forcibly removed from the hospital. Police confirm she died less than two hours later.
Now her family has filed a lawsuit against Calhoun Liberty Hospital - including two of its former employees - as well as the City of Blountstown and former police officer John Tadlock.
Barbara Dawson, 57, (left and right) collapsed and died last December while being escorted in handcuffs from the Liberty Calhoun Hospital
The suit, which was filed in Tallahassee on Saturday, alleges four counts - false imprisonment, lack of emergency care, battery and a civil rights claim.
Tallahassee law firm Parks & Crump, which has handled cases including the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, is representing the Dawson family.
'Up until this point neither one (the hospital and city) has been willing to talk. That left us with no choice but to file against both of them,' attorney Daryl Parks said on Monday.
Dawson was admitted to Liberty Calhoun Hospital on December 21, 2015, where she was treated and swiftly discharged.
But when Dawson insisted that she was 'still was not feeling well' and needed further treatment, hospital staff refused and she was ordered to leave the hospital, her family claim.
When the 57-year-old refused, staff called the police at 4.45am who arrested Dawson for disorderly conduct and trespassing.
She was handcuffed, forcibly removed from the hospital and put in the back of the officer's car while her distraught family who say they 'pleaded for her to have oxygen' as she was having breathing difficulties.
They say a nurse refused to give them Dawson's oxygen tank because they had found she was breathing fine.
Now her family has filed a lawsuit against Calhoun Liberty Hospital - including two of its former employees - as well as the City of Blountstown and former police officer John Tadlock (pictured)
When the officer opened the door to his patrol car, the 57-year-old collapsed to the ground - still wearing handcuffs.
Drew Peacock, an emergency medical technician, and Jennifer Waldorff, a nurse, assisted Officer Tadlock in trying to get Dawson into the car after she collapsed.
Around 20 minutes later, she was finally taken back to the emergency room where she was reassessed by a doctor.
Less than two hours later, at 6.24am, she was pronounced dead.
'While doctors initially thought Dawson was stable and should be released, she felt like she was still having breathing issues and wanted to stay,' attorney Parks said at the time.
PULMONARY EMBOLISM: A BLOOD CLOT IN THE LUNG A pulmonary embolism is when a blood from anther part of the body, typically the legs, travels to the lungs when it blocks the blood vessels. Large clots can prevent the lungs being able to oxygenate the blood which can result in shortness of breath, chest pain and even death. A third of all pulmonary embolisms result in death. Those most at risk are the elderly, overweight and anyone recovering from surgery that may have been sitting or lying down for long periods. Source: PDR Health Advertisement
'The most reasonable thing to do is to let her sit there and be able to settle down until she felt well. Instead, she is forcibly removed and put in cuffs, he added. 'The early facts of this case should cause a great concern for everyone.'
Mallory said that the medical examiner's office in Panama City found that Dawson died from blood clots on her lungs due to being excessively overweight.
Ruth Attaway, administrator and CEO of the hospital, initially told The Tallahassee Democrat that staff did everything they could to save Dawson.
Waldorff and Taylor have since been fired by the hospital.
A search of Florida Department of Health records shows that Waldorff has an administrative complaints filed against her that could include the revocation of her nursing license.
Mallory said that Tadlock had resigned from the police department on March 11.
Last month, Glenn Hess, a state attorney for Florida's 14th Judicial Circuit, concluded his investigation of a Florida Department of Law Enforcement summary into the case and said that Tadlock's actions were 'appropriate under the circumstances and there was no criminal law violation.'
Calhoun Liberty Hospital was fined $45,000 by Florida's Agency for Health Care Administration for deficiencies in care that AHCA Secretary Elizabeth Dudek called egregious.
Hospital spokeswoman Sandi Poreda said they are reviewing the lawsuit and look forward to having the opportunity to respond to the allegations.
The suit, which was filed in Tallahassee on Saturday, alleges four counts - false imprisonment, lack of emergency care, battery and a civil rights claim (pictured is Calhoun Liberty Hospital)
'In the wake of the incident with Ms. Dawson, our hospital has made substantial improvements in staff training as well as policies and procedures,' Poreda said.
'We have also worked hard to regain the trust of our community, working hand in hand with our hospital task force to identify ways we can address community concerns.'
The local NAACP chapter held a meeting on the matter shortly after Dawson's death.
Dale R. Landry, who is the regional vice president for the Florida State chapter of the NAACP, met with local leaders and the family.
Manager told her not to 'waste my time' if she
A Muslim woman seeking work at a jewellery store was told not to bother applying for the position because of her headscarf.
Mona Alfadli, 25, originally from Kuwait but now living in Auckland, New Zealand, was turned away from the Stewart Dawsons store in New Lynn last week.
Ms Alfadli claims the store manager told 'don't waste your time and don't waste my time' after she said she would not remove her hijab, and told the NZ Herald she 'felt embarrassed' about the ordeal.
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Jobseeker Mona Alfadli, 25, was turned away from Stewart Dawsons jewellery store in Auckland, New Zealand for wearing a hijab
'I felt embarrassed as it took a lot of courage to walk into the shop and speak to the manager regarding a job, especially since I was afraid of the rejection,' she said.
The 25-year-old's family fled to New Zealand from Kuwait in 2008, and she has been seeking work sending out up to five applications a day since she finished her diploma last November.
'I can do any job, I don't mind, but I will keep my hijab, I will keep my identity, and respect my culture and my religion,' Ms Alfadli told the publication.
The jeweller has responded to the accusations in a statement posted online, saying they were 'extremely disappointed' with the 'discrimination against a potential employee'.
'We are extremely disappointed about the way Ms Mona Alfadli was treated and this by no means is reflective of the company's policy,' Stewart Dawsons said.
'Stewart Dawsons is an equal opportunity employer and we do not discriminate on any grounds.
'I can do any job, I don't mind, but I will keep my hijab,' the 25-year-old, originally from Kuwait, said
The jeweller has responded to the accusations in a statement posted online, saying they were 'extremely disappointed' with the 'discrimination against a potential employee'
'We apologise sincerely to Ms Alfadli and have invited her back for a second interview,' the statement read.
This is the second similar incident in recent months, after a woman was turned away from another branch of the jewellry store last October for wearing a headscarf.
Former Kelston Girls College deputy head girl Fatima Mohammadi applied for a summer position at the St Luke's franchise, also in Auckland, in order to help out her family financially.
Someone Has Been Shooting Cars In Ravenswood, Police Warn
By Stephen Gossett in News on Jul 19, 2016 8:25PM
Crime scene tape (Photo by LukaTDB via Shutterstock)
Residents and visitors to the North Side are advised to beware of a rash of criminal damage being done to vehicles, according to a police alert released on Tuesday. An unknown person has been firing shots into the vehicles, causing broken windows and other damage.
A total of at least seven incidents have occurred, according to police:
Four incidents took place in the 2500 block of W. Wilson Ave. on July 10, between 2 a.m. and 8 a.m.
One incident occurred in the 2600 block of W. Sunnyside Ave. on July 13, sometime between 1:06 a.m. and 5:45 a.m.
Two more incidents happened in the 2600 block of W. Eastwood Ave. on July 18, at 3:03 a.m.
All of the crimes took place in Chicago Police Department Beat 1911, which includes parts of Ravenswood/Ravenswood Manor.
Police do not have a description of the offender(s). They urge the public to call 911 to report any suspicious people or activity in the area and provide descriptions and vehicle information if possible.
Theresa May, on her first Commons outing as Prime Minister, was asked the most daunting question any premier privately must contemplate.
Is she prepared to authorise a nuclear strike that could kill hundreds of thousands of men, women and children?
With barely a pause, Mrs May said: Yes.
One might have expected perhaps a moments more hesitation.
Demonstrators hold placards as they attend an anti-war and anti-trident demonstration near the Houses of Parliament in central London yesterday
The reply came out neither quite matter-of-fact nor with a melodramatic tone. She just uttered it, rather as you imagine a submarine commander giving the order to fire a Trident missile. The vicars daughter was prepared to kill.
Mrs May, who was answering an intervention from George Kerevan (SNP, E Lothian), added: The whole point of a deterrent is that our enemies need to know we would be prepared to use it. One suspects this moment will be freeze-framed and replayed a few times in central Moscow and elsewhere. Not so much Mrs May as Mrs Will.
The Commons was discussing nuclear weapons. This topic is an old stand-by of university debating society motions but what made it striking yesterday was that Mrs May chose it for her first prime ministerial sally in the Chamber. A statement of intent? Or an attempt to make life difficult for the official Opposition?
It certainly caused grief and rancour on the Labour benches. Though we heard about alleged peace-keeping benefits of nuclear warheads, there was plainly no such peace on the Labour benches. Jeremy Corbyn was subjected to angry attacks by his partys own backbenchers.
Mrs May entered at 4.10pm, Juno in an above-the-knee red dress with matching talons.
Before long, David Cameron (Con, Witney) took his place on the backbenches.
He chose a seat three benches behind the new Chief Whip, Gavin Williamson (who looks about 14).
Mr Cameron was not the only new departee spotted. Michael Gove (Con, Surrey Heath) spoke impressively during a Statement on the Nice terrorist attack.
Former Chief Whip Mark Harper (Con, Forest of Dean) fiercely defended Mrs May from Scots Nat criticism.
The SNP, even by their own standards, made a lot of noise, clapping and whooping after a contribution from their Westminster leader, Angus Robertson. Deputy Speaker Natascha Engel scolded them like a jolly cross pheasant.
Differing opinions about nukes were heard within both the Tory and Labour parties but the SNP were throbbingly unanimous in opposing Trident.
British astronaut Tim Peake at Downing St to meet British Prime Minister Theresa May and students for a reception in London, Britain, yesterday
That may be a sign of remarkable philosophical purity or it may show that the Nats were playing politics appealing to Leftwing voters in Scotland. Mrs May uttered a Thatcherish we will never be cowed by terror but much of her pitch was about the job-creation potential of Trident.
She would not give a figure for how much the terrible thing was going to cost.
Mr Corbyn felt we had a duty to set an international example in rejecting nuclear warheads. He came under prolonged bombardment as Labour MPs threw their hands high in disagreement. Some Tories worried about giving a blank cheque for Trident.
Crispin Blunt (Con, Reigate), who chairs the foreign affairs select committee, said it was not cost-effective, skewed defence spending, and was surplus to Natos needs.
John Nicolson (SNP, E Dunbartonshire) felt nukes were so out of date that we were investing in cavalry after the invention of the machine gun.
Tom Tugendhat (Con, Tonbridge) spoke firmly about the immorality of those who would crumble in the face of foreign tyranny.
John Woodcock (Lab), whose Barrow constituency has an employment interest in Trident, accused Mr Corbyn of showing contempt for the public, contempt for party members and often for the Truth.
Amid pointed references to Mr Corbyn and to Diane Abbott, he added: How far this great party has fallen.
Former Victorian Liberal state director Damien Mantach has been sentenced to five years jail after stealing more than $1.5 million from his party.
Mantach pleaded guilty to 15 charges of dishonestly obtaining a financial advantage after it was discovered he had diverted $1.55 million from Liberal Party coffers using fake invoices.
Mantach used $611,000 of the stolen money to buy a cafe in Queenscliff, southern Victoria, with his wife Jodie in a failed bid to stop her leaving him after he admitted the the fraud to Liberal party investigators in August last year.
Former Victorian Liberal state director Damien Mantach (pictured) has been sentenced to five years jail after stealing more than $1.5 million from his party
He has been behind bars since November 18.
On Tuesday, Victorian County Court judge Liz Gaynor sentenced Mantach to five years in jail, with a non-parole period of two years and eight months.
He pleaded guilty to 15 charges of dishonestly obtaining financial advantage after it was discovered he had diverted $1.55 million using fake invoices
Mantach used fake invoices for work that was never done to take money from the Victorian Liberal Party between 2010 and 2015.
He gave full details of his crimes to the Liberal Party and police once his deception was discovered.
Judge Gaynor says Mantach told a psychologist he took the money because he was under personal financial pressure.
'You told him 'it was never actually about greed ... I had a number of personal issues that I was not dealing with',' the judge told the court.
He was also under a lot of pressure in his role as the Liberal Party's Victorian director.
'You found your position combative and nasty, but felt an obligation to stay because politics was all you knew,' Judge Gaynor said.
The thefts started in June 2010, continued until January 2015 and were discovered in August last year.
Mantach's wife Jodie did not know about his offending and divorce proceedings are underway.
'You believed it was only a matter of time before the offending came to light,' Judge Gaynor said.
She said Mantach's full co-operation with authorities was 'exceptional' and had saved police months of investigative work.
Mantach (pictured) gave full details of his crimes to the Liberal Party and police once his deception was discovered
Mantach used $611,000 of the stolen money to buy Gusto cafe (pictured) in Queenscliff, southern Victoria, with his wife Jodie
Judge Gaynor says Mantach told a psychologist he took the money because he was under personal financial pressure
In August of last year, Mantach's name was reportedly found on a leaked list of cheating website Ashley Madison members.
There was no evidence the former Victorian Liberal state director was the one who signed himself up.
After Mantach was accused of stealing a large sum of money from his party, his wife said she did not want 'anything to do with him,' adding she and her two girls could soon be homeless if they had to give up their house.
'I had absolutely no involvement in it and no knowledge of it, and I believed him when he said everything was above board,' Ms Mantach said.
'I don't want anything to do with him. My plan is to protect my girls.'
After Mantach was accused of stealing a large sum of money from his party, his wife said she did not want 'anything to do with him'
A young brother and sister have disappeared from their isolated rural home in the middle of the night with only the clothes they were wearing and a suitcase.
Te Morehu McLean, 15, and his seven-year-old sister Anahera left a property on Potter Road in Tuakau, south of Auckland, New Zealand, about 10pm on Monday night, causing concerns for their safety and a large-scale search.
On Tuesday searchers on foot and in a helicopter scoured nearby properties, farm buildings and outhouses for the siblings, the New Zealand Herald reported.
Te Morehu McLean, 15, and his seven-year-old sister Anahera (left) have been missing since they left their caregiver's house late on Monday, causing police concerns for their safety
The pair had left their caregiver's home without disturbing or taking anything, it was reported.
Police Inspector Kay Lane told Stuff.co.nz: 'While the pair left on foot we are looking into the possibility they may have been picked up in a vehicle by someone known to them.
'We believe they may be heading north towards Auckland where they have extended family and would like to hear from anyone who has information about their whereabouts that may help us find them.'
She also asked people living in the area to check any buildings on their property for the pair.
The house from which the young brother and sister disappeared with only a suitcase
A neighbour, Bert Schreurs, told the NZ Herald he'd seen tyre tracks on a driveway at his nearby, unoccupied rental home, but wasn't sure if they were from searchers or related to the missing siblings.
Morehu, described as about 170cm, solidly built with short dark hair, was last seen wearing Nike shoes, light-brown pants and a Kathmandu puffer jacket.
Anahera, who is of 'average height and small build', was last seen wearing a 'Frozen' branded onesie.
Happy Days and Charles in Charge actor Scott Baio warmed up Donald Trump's supporters at tonight's Republican National Convention in Cleveland by tossing the crowd some favorite GOP red meat.
Democratic rival Hillary Clinton is 'a woman who somehow feels entitled to the presidency,' the actor said. 'That she is somehow owed it.'
He presented his own version of Trump's favorite tagline, suggesting that the presumptive nominee, who just touched down in Ohio to introduce wife Melania Trump at tonight's festivities, would 'make America America again.'
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Actor and Donald Trump supporter Scott Baio, of Happy Days and Charles in Charge fame, gave one of the earliest addresses of the first night of the Republican National Convention
Happy Days actor Scott Baio used some standard Republican red meat in his speech to convention delegates, where he whacked Hillary Clinton for feeling 'entitled' to the presidency
He also whacked the broader Democratic Party.
'For you first time voters it's important to know what it means to be an American. It doesn't mean getting free stuff,' Baio added.
Baio was one of three showbiz types to hit the convention stage on night No. 1., coming onstage immediately following Duck Dynasty reality star Willie Robertson.
'I want to thank Mr. Trump for asking me to be here tonight,' Baio said.
'I can't tell you how much of an honor it is to talk about a man I trust with the lives of my family and the health of our country ... America ... the greatest country God created.'
Baio spoke briefly about what it means to be an Americans.
'It means sacrificing, winning, losing, failing, succeeding. Sometimes doing things you don't want to do, including the hard work ... in order to get where you want to be,' Baio said.
The actor, who originally had been behind Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, but in recent months has been vocally behind Trump said he believed that the country is in a 'bad spot' right now.
'You can feel it,' he noted. 'And you can see it everywhere.'
'There's no stability, nothing seems right,' he continued.
He called on Trump to fix things.
'Is he a messiah? No, he's just a man,' Baio said, delivering the most theatrical line of his address.
'A man who wants to give back to his country America,' he continued.
'The country that has given him everything. A country that has given all of us so much,' Baio added. 'Now it's time to give back to her.'
In November, Baio explained, America could go for Clinton and 'continue the same policies that are wrecking this country.'
'Hillary Clinton wants to be president for Hillary Clinton,' Baio pointed out.
'Donald Trump wants to be president for all of us,' he said.
Losing her daughter in a car crash at the age of seven was unbearable for her mother.
Yet Debbie Stoner found a way for her little girl Jade to live on after taking the courageous decision to donate her organs to save the lives of others.
Now, for the first time, her mother has met Nellie-Mai, the new-born girl who received it, and listened to her daughters heart beating in her body.
Life-changing: After her beloved daughter Jade passed away aged seven, Debbie Stoner (pictured, with her daughter) decided to donate her heart to Nellie-Mai Evans and years later she met the youngster and listened to it beat
The first time Id heard Jades heart beating was when I was pregnant with her at my ultrasound scan and it sounded just as strong, she said.
I knew her heart was no longer Jades because shes no longer with us but it was a part of her.
Although I lost the most precious thing in my life, she is continuing to live on, in a way.
Nellie-Mai Evans was born with cardiomyopathy and doctors feared she wouldnt pull through after she had a series of heart attacks.
Abandoned by her parents and struggling for life, doctors asked volunteer foster parents Jeff and Sarah Evans to sit with her so she wouldnt die alone.
Mr Evans, 53, and his 42-year-old wife, from Cumbria, overheard doctors saying that without a family Nellie-Mai couldnt be put on the transplant list so they immediately decided to foster her.
The Evans have now adopted Nellie-Mai, who has learning difficulties and severe epilepsy.
At the same time, almost 300 miles away in Dorset, seven-year-old Jade died after being knocked off her bike by a car.
Her mother and father John, from Christchurch, Dorset, decided to donate her daughters organs in the hope that they might give life to others.
Four people two adults and two babies received Jades organs.
Nellie-Mai, 11, received Jades heart in 2006 and immediately started to thrive.
Although the involved families are not supposed to have contact, Nellie-Mais foster father, a retired police detective, managed to track Jades parents down after reading about Jades death in a newspaper.
Family embrace: Debbie Stoner sleeps with her daughter Jade as she receives treatment in hospital
Tender moment: Jade's parents Debbie and John Stoner gently stroke her hair as she receives treatment in hospital
Ten years on, the families met.
At the meeting, the Evans offered Mrs Spooner the chance to hear her daughters heartbeat.
It was something I assumed shed want to do but maybe she didnt want to ask, Mrs Evans said.
I didnt want her to leave and not hear it. When I asked her, she put her hands to her face, started crying and said: Are you sure?
I was pleased we could do it because thank you will never be enough.
Talking about the Mrs Stoner, 45, said: Its the worst time of your life when a family member dies, and even worse when its your own child - its heart-breaking and unbearable.
But I get a lot of positivity from knowing that thanks to Jade, other children have been given a life. I miss Jade every day, but I know I made the right decision.
Thanks to Jade, two babies have grown up with a life, so her death wasnt in vain. Through Nellie, Jade is still living.
Mrs Stoner said it was fate that Nellie-Mai had received her daughters heart as they share many qualities.
Beautiful gift: The Stoner family (left, Debbie holds up a photo of her daughter) decided to donate Jade's heart to Nellie-Mai (right, with Debbie) because their daughter was such a 'giving' child
Nellie was just so caring and loving, just like Jade was, her mother, who has a daughter Amy, 14, and son Ben, six, added.
Id do anything to have Jade back, but there was nothing that could be done to save her seeing Nellie in the flesh and seeing how thriving she is helped so much.
As sad and painful as it was losing Jade, it was fate and it was meant to be.
Nellie is still poorly, but whatever happens with her in the future Im so pleased she had a chance to live and that Jade gave her the chance.
Mrs Stoner added that it was difficult to make the decision to donate Jades organs.
Initially Jades dad said he didnt want to donate her heart, because she was all heart and he didnt want people pulling her apart and taking parts of her body - he wanted her kept whole, she said.
But I said she was seven years old - she was healthy and there was nothing wrong with her, so maybe we should think about it.
In the end we both came to the same conclusion - she was so giving and loved helping people, so I like to think she wouldve wanted us to do it.
Emotional meeting: Debbie Stoner meets Nellie-Mai for the first time, the youngster's foster father Jeff Evans said the pair hit-it off immediately
Pictured: Nellie-Mai Evans, 11, Jeff Evans, 53, Eloise Evans, 17, Sarah Evans, 42, Barbara Heffernan, Debbie Stoner, 45
Nellie-Mais father Jeff recalled the moment he saw his daughter after she received Jades heart.
We watched the harvesting team carrying Jades heart into the hospital, he said.
It was all very surreal, and we were both scared. Nel was so horrendously ill, and we couldnt fathom how such a complex medical procedure was ever going to succeed.
When it was over and we were allowed in to see her I got a shock prior to the transplant Id only seen this grey, lifeless child, she was very pale, pallid and cold.
But when I walked in I saw a pink, healthy baby staring back at me she was grabbing at the tubes and so full of life, the transformation was just unbelievable.
He said his daughter had immediately bonded with Mrs Stoner after he tracked the family down after reading about Jades death at the time.
Loving kiss: Debbie Stoner shares a tender moment with Nellie-Mai Evans as they get to know each other for the first time
When Nellie and Debbie met, they threw their arms around each other and were totally at ease with each other straight away, which was lovely, he said.
Weve always known it was Jades heart and who Debbie was but we were prevented from making contact.
Nellie is only with us because of organ donation because Jades family took that massive, brave step at what mustve been the worst time of their life.
Shes had her problems, but she wouldnt be here now without Jades heart. Any problems shes experienced, shes only been able to get over them because shes got such a strong heart.
Jades heart has pulled Nellie through everything shes like her guardian angel.
Hard-living: The Earl of Germans, with wife Cathy
On the surface, at least, all was fun. There was the quad-bike on which the bohemian figure was still dashing about his estate in his 70s.
His hobbies, as well, which he pointedly listed as muckin about in the wild; the drug-fuelled hedonistic parties and New Age fayres he used to have at his 1,000-year-old Cornish seat, Port Eliot, the oldest lived-in house in Britain; and the day he went out for a walk and, on a whim, continued all the way to London.
But, in fact, there was scarcely a period in the Earl of St Germans 75 years when crisis or tragedy werent driving the old Etonians eccentricities.
Known to everyone as Perry, even his death on Friday doesnt offer a traditional or happy succession to the 201-year-old Earldom and the cavernous Port Eliot with its 124 rooms, 13 staircases, and walls hung with masterpieces including the works of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Van Dyck.
This time last year this home of the thrice-wed Earl was on the brink of being acquired by Prince Charles through his Princes Foundation charity.
But in the end the charity decided against the 10 million purchase, and it now passes to a boy of 11, described as a bit of a Cornish scamp Perrys tousle-haired grandson Albert Eliot, known in the family as Albie, who is now the 11th Earl.
He has inherited because Albies father, the Earls late son and heir Jago, drowned in his bath having an epileptic fit in 2006, when he was 40. Jago left a beautiful widow, the half-Italian former waitress and model Bianca, with twin daughters as well as Albie, who was just over a year old.
An inquest found Jago had traces of cocaine and cannabis in his blood.
The royal takeover would have put much-needed cash into the family coffers, but the proposed deal had generated considerable bitterness in the family. They held a meeting to discuss the implications for Albie.
The very idea that Albie could be deprived of continuing the tradition of living at Port Eliot, going back many centuries, doesnt seem right, explained one senior family member.
For her part, Albies grandmother Jacquetta, Countess of St Germans, and the first of the Earls three wives, who divorced him in 1990, talked of Albies rightful inheritance and past generations turning in their graves.
Jacquetta, a sometime muse of the late, lascivious painter Lucian Freud and daughter of Lord Killearn, a former ambassador to Egypt, would also harrumph pointedly to friends about third wives with no children.
This was a pointed reference to her successor but one as Perrys wife, the third and present Countess, the former Cathy Wilson, a voluptuous ex-Telegraph magazine journalist.
Cathy, almost 30 years Perrys junior, was heard to announce: Im in love with the Earl of St Germans, as she arrived as his guest at a party in Port Eliot in 2002. Three years later they were married. Now 46, the Countess, daughter of a holistic doctor from Worcester, had been hugely enthusiastic about the potential sale of the great house, of which she has been chatelaine for 11 years since marrying the Earl and giving up her rented London flat.
It will mean the estate maintains its income and is relieved of the huge burden of running the house, she declared, adding: Considering the alternatives, i.e. the National Trust, an oligarch or the house and contents being broken up, this is a sensational deal and a terrific turn-up for the estate.
Even the Earl of Germans' death on Friday doesnt offer a traditional or happy succession to the 201-year-old Earldom and the cavernous Port Eliot with its 124 rooms in St Germans, Cornwall
But the turn-up ultimately ended in a turn-down. The Princes advisers, having carried out a detailed feasibility study, decided it couldnt be successfully turned into the kind of cultural hub and social centre similar to the one they had created at Dumfries House in Ayrshire.
This is the Palladian mansion Charles saved for the nation after buying it from the Marquess of Bute together with its Chippendale furniture through a consortium which involved a loan of 20 million secured by one of his charitable foundations.
But around Port Eliot whispers of another reason for the Prince not going ahead have persisted. It concerns the current Countesss reference to preventing the house going to an oligarch.
As one prominent local figure puts it: Many of us believe that was a factor which made it difficult for the Prince to go ahead, as some might have felt he was buying the place simply to keep it out of an oligarchs clutches.
Either way, with the death of the 10th Earl, Cathy will have to leave the great house, as is the tradition, to make way for the schoolboy 11th Earl.
In many cases the widows departure quickly follows the funeral. But after Perrys next week, his widow has been given a gentle six months in which to move out.
Perry was desperately disappointed that the Prince didnt go ahead with the purchase, says one local friend. He wanted the readies. He especially wanted to make sure Cathy would be OK.
It would certainly have been novel for a member of the aristocracy to raise money by moving out of his ancestral seat. Usually they sell the Old Masters off the walls to enable them to continue living in the way to which they have become accustomed.
Perry St Germans had already sold a Rembrandt the last one in private hands to the Gerry Museum in California for 8 million. Two years ago he sold 800 acres of the estate near Saltash, the Gateway to Cornwall, for 4.7 million.
The buyer, possibly as a precursor to obtaining the house itself, was Prince Charless Duchy of Cornwall.
When the sale of Port Eliot seemed to be on, there was talk of a new house being built for the family in the grounds of the estate. No such house is likely to be built for Cathy now. She may move into one of the cottages on the estate, though she is said to be more likely to move back to London into a townhouse that the Earl acquired for her in Chelsea about two years ago.
Albie has known the big house all his life, though his mother worried that he was not as close to his grandfather as he should have been. According to a family friend, Perry had recently been making an effort to get to know his heir and his other grandchildren rather better.
This time last year this home of the thrice-wed Earl was on the brink of being acquired by Prince Charles through his Princes Foundation charity. But in the end the charity decided against the 10 million purchase
Perhaps he knew he didnt have much time, says the friend. I often wondered if he felt any guilt about the way he talked about Jago, who was always wanting and needy of affection from his father, but didnt really get it. Perry used to refer to his late son as the village Eliot a play on words that wasnt very nice. Jago was always hoping to impress his father, but without success.
In fact Jago had a BSc degree from Plymouth University and was studying for an MA.
The tragedies in Perrys life went back to his own childhood. At six, his parents were divorced his father was a notorious gambler who married three times. At ten his mother died and, with his father spending most of his time in Tangiers, he and his sister were brought up mainly by their grandparents and a strict nanny.
His grandmother, to whom he was very close, committed suicide at around the time his father made over the 6,000-acre Port Eliot estate to Perry, probably to keep it safe from voracious bookmakers.
This might have been the worst thing his father could have done, as LSD-taking Perry turned it into the decadent party centre of the West of England, attracting drug-taking music lovers who camped in the pristine grounds and were entertained by sword-swallowers, jugglers and other side-shows.
He was 23 when he married Jacquetta in 1964, and 50 when he wed photographer Liz Williams, 20 years his junior, in 1992. It was in 2005 that he married Cathy, a very capable woman who helped establish the Port Eliots annual literary festival. It starts in nine days time and is going ahead as usual.
As for Albie and his twin sisters Ruby and Violet, 12, they have been living with their mother Bianca in a house on the estate which is described as manorial but delapidated.
How different things might have been had Bianca married the man to whom she was engaged to four years after Jagos death Princess Dianas brother Earl Spencer. Theyd met at the Groucho Club in Soho.
If the engagement hadnt been broken off, Albie could have been living at Althorp while being the master of Port Eliot.
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Theresa May has warned her Cabinet that the country must not be 'defined by Brexit' amid signs of a turf war between minister.
Holding the first meeting of her top team, the new Prime Minister urged them to remember that politics is 'not a game' and work collectively to ensure quitting the EU is a success.
She argued that the opportunities offered by leaving the Brussels club could give the country better education and skills, and improve social mobility.
But there are already rumours of clashes between senior figures, with Boris Johnson's Foreign Office said to be resisting efforts by David Davis's newly-created Brexit department to poach high-flying staff.
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This is the seating plan from Theresa May's first Cabinet meeting today. Alongside ministers, the Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood and the PM's joint chiefs of staff Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill were also present. The two people at the front of the shot are officials.
Mrs May told her ministers that politics was 'not a game' and their decisions affected the everyday lives of Britons
Mrs May was flanked by Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood (pictured on her right) and Mr Johnson as she delivered the message to her senior team
Addressing her Cabinet in Number 10 today, with Mr Johnson seated by her side, Mrs May said she wanted them to 'forge a new role for the UK in the world'.
But she added: 'Politics is not a game. The decisions that we are taking around this table affect people's every day lives.
'And we have the challenge of Brexit, and Brexit does mean that, by forging a new role for the United Kingdom in the world.
'But we wont be a government that is defined just by Brexit. We will also be a government defined by the social reform that we undertake.'
The Cabinet session lasted for around 90 minutes, with contributions from all the major players and discussion of the economy, Brexit, and the terrorism threat.
The Prime Minister's spokeswoman said Mrs May would be chairing subcommittees on the economy, leaving the EU and social reform, as well as the National Security Committee (NSC).
Mr Davis claimed over the weekend that his new Department for Exiting the EU would have nearly 200 civil servants including the pick of 'the most brilliant people' from across Whitehall.
But a Cabinet 'ranking' list published yesterday suggested he was below the Foreign Office, Ministry of Defence and Ministry of Justice in the pecking order.
'The idea that Davis has complete freedom to hire whoever he wants is nonsense as anyone who knows anything about the civil service knows,' a source told The Times.
Downing Street has also poured cold water on the idea that Mr Davis, who has been on the backbenches for a decade, would be overseeing the work of International Trade Secretary Dr Fox.
In a move that raised eyebrows in Westminster, Mrs May yesterday declared that Mr Johnson, Mr Davis and Dr Fox would be sharing the Chevening grace-and-favour residence.
New Prime Minister Theresa May told her first Cabinet meeting that the government could not be 'defined' by Brexit
Theresa May, who has yet to move in to her Downing Street residence, arrives for her first Cabinet meeting as PM today. She warned ministers that Britain must not be 'defined by Brexit'
New International Development Secretary Priti Patel, left, and Justice Secretary Elizabeth Truss arrive for the Cabinet meeting today
Asked whether her decision to chair the three Cabinet committees was an effort to stop Brexiteers squabbling, the PM's spokeswoman said: 'The idea that it is in some way to manage relations between cabinet ministers, that is not what it was about.
'Actually at cabinet this morning you saw the prime minister really encouraging a collective government approach, a lengthy discussion on the economy, with different ministers contributing their views on the issues ahead.
'It went over 90 minutes because that reflected her wanting to take contributions from around the table.'
Mrs May flies to Berlin tomorrow for talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel, as she looks to build momentum for favourable terms during Brexit negotiations.
She will then meet French president Francois Hollande in Paris on Thursday, despite EU leaders saying Brexit talks will not take place until Article 50 is triggered.
Mrs May has also dismissed claims that Scotland's First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, could 'block' Brexit.
No 10 said yesterday that Mrs May will discuss the process with the devolved powers, but she has the final say on when Britain leaves.
Theresa May has told ministers including Environment Secretary Andrea Leadsom (pictured right today) and Education Secretary Justine Greening that leaving the Brussels club could give the country better education and skills
Chief Secretary David Gauke is among those who have been promoted by Mrs May in her first government
International Trade Secretary Liam Fox and Brexit Secretary David Davis also attended the meeting
Meanwhile, Boris Johnson attended a meeting with other European foreign ministers in Brussels.
He was seated opposite French foreign minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, who last week accused the former London mayor of telling 'lies to the British people' during the referendum campaign.
But the French politician admitted Mr Johnson showed 'humility' at the summit yesterday as he pledged Britain would not abandon its relationships with Europe.
Luxembourg's foreign minister Jean Asselborn last night even described Mr Johnson as fantastic, saying: 'Il est formidable.'
Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson returned from his first trip to Brussels to join his colleagues at 10 Downing Street
He then shot dead the sheriff's deputy who was running to help his dying colleague during the attack
Long is believed to have continued pumping bullets into one of the officers as he lay writhing on the ground
Cops have since released new, horrifying information about attack, which they say was a 'targeted
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Wearing a black balaclava and carrying a high-powered rifle, former US Marine Gavin Long cut a chilling figure as he calmly walked around Baton Rouge.
He is seen strolling alongside cars and through streets in newly-released surveillance footage, taken during the his horrific attack that left three police officers dead and another three wounded.
The cameras then recorded him as he took up his shooting stance and fired at patrol cars from a long distance.
During Sunday's brutal ambush, the 29-year-old from Kansas City, Missouri, kept shooting one of the slain cops as he lay dying on the ground.
Long then fired at another sheriff's deputy, who was running over to help his stricken colleague.
His murderous rampage, that has been described as 'sheer brutality' by senior cops in Louisiana, was finally put to an end when a SWAT officer shot and killed him from 100 yards away.
Surveillance images show Baton Rouge gunman Gavin Lomg calmly walking around with his high-powered rifle shortly before he executed three police officers in a horrifying ambush
He was captured on camera taking up position and aiming at a patrol car from long rage during Sunday's attack. Police have since revealed that he kept pumping bullets into one of the officers as he lay dying on the floor
Wearing a black balaclava and holding his gun, he cut a chilling figure in the moments before he opened fire
Authorities also believe he may have spent days stalking cops in the city and staking out the gas station where the shooting unfolded.
Long knew that officers frequented the gas station where he opened fire, Fox News reports. One of the cops shot by Long was vacuuming his car at the time of the shooting.
One of the victims, father-of-four Brad Garafola, 45, 'went down fighting' and returned fire to the 'very end' East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff Sid Gautreaux said on Monday.
He was killed along with Baton Rouge police officers Montrell Jackson, 32, and Matthew Gerald, 41, by former Marine Gavin Eugene Long, 29, at the B-Quik gas station on Sunday morning.
Long got a rental car in Kansas City after the Dallas shootings on July 7 and drove it more than 700 miles to Baton Rouge, law enforcement sources told CNN.
But he appears to have spent some time in Texas first.
He posted a video on his YouTube channel on July 10 claiming to be speaking from Dallas, where Army veteran Micah Johnson killed five police officers during a Black Lives Matter protest.
Long, 29, is then seen taking position to keep firing. Authorities also believe he may have spent days stalking cops in the city and staking out the gas station where the shooting unfolded
He is seen strolling next to one of the patrol cars near the scene where the shooting unfolded
One camera picked up Long as he walked along the side of a building. Police say he spent days in Baton Rouge staking out cops who and figuring out where they would be
Louisiana State Police released an image of the IWI Tavor, SAR, the former Marine used in the shooting
A pistol recovered as evidence after Long shot the three policemen in the brazen attack that has shocked the nation
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said during an emotional press conference: 'This was a diabolical attack on the very fabric of society, and that is not hyperbole.
'That is not an overstatement.'
Louisiana State Police Col. Mike Edmonson said of the attack: 'It is chilling in the sheer brutality.'
The heroic Baton Rouge sheriff's deputy killed by a gunman died trying to save a colleague from the cop killer who 'targeted and assassinated' the, authorities revealed on Monday.
Heroic Baton Rouge sheriff's deputy Brad Garafola (right) died as he tried to save a colleague from the cop killer (left) who 'targeted and assassinated' the, authorities revealed on Monday
Father-of-four Brad Garafola, 45, 'went down fighting,' East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff Sid Gautreaux told a news conference. 'He returned fire to the very end.'
He was killed along with Baton Rouge police officers Montrell Jackson, 32, and Matthew Gerald, 41, by former Marine Gavin Eugene Long, 29, at the B-Quik gas station on Sunday morning.
Long ambushed officers, killing three and wounding a further three before a SWAT team shot him dead from a 100 yards away before he tried to attack the police headquarters less than a mile away from the scene.
Gautreaux said surveillance video showed Garafola returning fire from a prone position as bullets hit the concrete around him. Only after the deputy died did the shooter return to the wounded officer and kill him with two more bullets, at close range.
'Deputy Garafola died attempting to get a fallen Baton Rouge officer and render aid,' he said. 'Deputy Garafola died as a hero protecting and serving. So did the other officers. They are gone but they are not forgotten. We will be forever grateful for their service.'
Baton Rouge police chief Carl Dabadie added that he has no doubts that the gunman would have gone next to police headquarters to take more lives if it weren't for the long-distance shot that killed him.
'That shot that our SWAT team made was a helluva shot but it had to be made,' he said.
Dabadie says police have been questioned about militarized tactics, but says these killings show that 'we are up against a force that is not playing by the rules.
'They did not play by the rules in Dallas and they did not play by the rules here,' he added.
Meanwhile, a terrifying video shows the chaos of the shooting - captured by a witness who found himself trapped in his truck and right in the line of fire, Inside Edition reports.
The driver, who asked not to be named, was getting his car washed when gunfire erupted around him and police raced to get the gunman.
'The first thing I saw was the actual gunman walking behind my truck,' he told Inside Edition. 'He had on a ski mask, black clothes all the way down, and was holding a beige-colored gun.'
The shaky cell phone video shows police move in as shots rings out, while another civilian caught in the crossfire speeds away from the scene in his SUV.
Deputy Garafola died as he tried to render aid to a fallen office, East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff Sid Gautreaux said. Baton Rouge police officers Matthew Gerald (left) and Montrell Jackson (right) were both killed
Cops have said that Long, of Kansas City, Missouri, targeted and assassinated police officers, authorities said
Blood stains are seen at the crime scene where three cops were killed behind Hair Crown Beauty Supply (left) in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on Sunday. The store sits next to a gas station (center) and car wash (right) frequented by police officers
Blood stains in the parking lot lined the back wall, with markings near the parking lot's side road entrance (pictured) and others closer to the dumpster
The angle of the bullet holes appear to show that the bullets came from the direction of the parking lot's side road toward the dumpster
HOW GAVIN LONG AMBUSHED COPS IN A PARKING LOT BEFORE BEING SHOT DEAD BY A SWAT OFFICER According to the police officials at the press conference, Long arrived at the Crown Hair Beauty Supply around 8.30am on Sunday and parked his car down the side of the building to hide it. He moved tactically and stayed close to the wall on the buildings front, ignoring members of the public as he headed to a parked police car with his assault rifle drawn. He pointed the gun at the windows and looked inside, but soon realized the car was empty and returned to his own vehicle and goes for a drive. He parked his car further away and walked back towards Crown Hair Beauty Supply around the back of the car wash and B-Quik gas station. Members of the public called 911 to report a dude with a rifle and three officers responded. They were East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Deputy Brad Garafola, who was working at B-Quick, and Baton Rouge Police officers Montrell Jackson and Matthew Gerald, who drove to the scene. The officers walked around the front of Crown Hair and went down the side road leading to the shops parking lot. Long came around the corner by taking a wide angle so that he could see more - a tactic he learned in the Marines. He immediately saw one Baton Rouge police officer who he shot dead. The officials did not say whether this was officer Jackson or officer Gerald. Long also shot and wounded the second Baton Rouge Police officer. The officials did not say who this was either. As this was happening Long also shot and injured a Baton Rouge police officer who had responded to the scene and was engaging him from the road. Amid the gunfire, Officer Garafola ran back into the parking lot and took cover behind a dumpster. As he did so the wounded Baton Rouge police officer crawled along the road and round the corner and sat against the wall. Hearing the wounded cop's cries for help, officer Garafola came out from hiding with his gun drawn and moved along the rear of Crown Hair to try and come to his aide. But Long shot Garafola who 'went down fighting' and carried on firing his gun even while he was on the pavement, said East Baton Rouge Sheriff Sid Gautreaux. Long then turned to the wounded cop and mercilessly executed him. He then appears to have scaled a fence in the parking lot, making his way back to the nearby Fitness Expo car park, where he encountered East Baton Rouge Sheriffs Deputy Nicholas Tullier, who was sitting in his police car checking the number place on Longs vehicle, which was parked in the lot. Long shot him in the head and stomach, leaving him in a critical condition. Officer Tullier is in hospital and a machine is helping him breathe, police said. Long then walked across the parking lot towards Airline Boulevard and shot East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Deputy Bruce Simmons, who has undergone two surgeries already as a result of his injuries. The officials said that the bone from his elbow to shoulder was completely shattered and he now has a titanium rod in his arm. Long was shot dead by a Baton Rouge Police SWAT officer from the other side of the car wash car park. The shot was from 100 yards away and was through a number of obstructions. Had Long not been stopped the officials said they were convinced he was heading for the Baton Rouge police Headquarters, a mile away to kill more officers. Advertisement
At least eight bullet holes lined the back wall of the shop, creating three-inch holes in the warehouse-like building's wall
Bullet holes - difficult to make out in this view - some three inches long - had torn through the back of the Hair Crown Beauty Supply in the Louisiana city
Hair Crown Beauty Supply (front pictured) was next to the B-Quik convenience, where officers first observed Long, wearing all black and standing near the beauty store holding a rifle
The moment Emma Greens patience finally snapped is seared into her memory - three weeks ago, as her 90-minute commute home entered its fourth hour
The moment Emma Greens patience finally snapped is seared into her memory. Three weeks ago, as her 90-minute commute home entered its fourth hour, the 36-year-old picked up her mobile phone and rang Harry, her seven-year-old son.
He had been upset that I was working in London and said to me, Make sure you are here on time, I want to give you a kiss before I go to bed, she recalls.
But because of the delays I was late. It was after 8.30pm so I had no choice but to ring him up and tell him that I couldnt be there for him.
He was in tears, saying, Why cant you, why cant you? All I could do was sit there crying, and tell him that I was sorry but that the train was late. It was awful and it made me realise that I just couldnt take it any more.
The following day, Emma, who only earlier this summer had begun a job as a lawyer with a technology firm in central London, handed in her notice.
She did not want to quit her job. While she fully expected the 500-a-month commute to London from her home in Littlehampton, West Sussex, to be long and tiring, she enjoyed the job and needed the money.
But what neither she nor tens of thousands of other rail users knew was that their journeys would turn into a nightmare that would blight their lives.
In recent days the catastrophic failings of Southern Rail have been brought loudly to the wider publics attention. The problems stem from a bitter dispute between Southerns operator Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR) and union bosses over the diminished role of conductors and fear of driver-only trains.
It has contributed to chaos on one of the countries busiest rail networks, used daily by more than 120,000 commuters across London, Kent and Sussex.
Earlier this month, one rail users association took out an advert in a national newspaper. Inspired by the 1979 Saatchi & Saatchi campaign for the Conservative Party featuring a long dole queue under the headline Labour isnt working, the ad depicted a long queue under the slogan Southern Rail isnt working.
Although the ongoing misery is confined to beleaguered commuters in the South-East, reverberations of this dispute which union bosses say has been caused by attempts at cost-cutting are felt around the country, as businesses are hit and people are forced to look for work outside the capital.
Last Monday, hundreds of passengers staged a protest at Londons Victoria Station. Emma was among them, brandishing a placard that read: Ive just quit my new job because of Southern.
The following day, many more gathered at Seaford, a town on the South Coast which has seen 80 per cent of its services axed by the company in a bid to get a grip on the spiralling chaos.
Last Thursday, Rail Minister Claire Perry, who had been the public face of the Government during the Southern Rail outcry, resigned after a week in which she admitted she was often ashamed to be the Rail Minister.
While the issues are complex, the pain that the poor service has inflicted on members of the public is clear.
This week I have spoken to people like Emma who have been forced to quit their jobs because they could no longer endure the stress inflicted on them and their families by daily delays.
One commuter said that since January he has racked up 45 hours waiting for trains or being stuck on them.
Then theres the disabled man unable to get to work because his electric wheelchair would not fit on a replacement bus, and the cancer sufferer who cannot get to hospital for treatment.
In recent days the catastrophic failings of Southern Rail have been brought loudly to the wider publics attention. The problems stem from a bitter dispute between Southerns operator Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR) and union bosses over the diminished role of conductors and fear of driver-only trains
No wonder they all feel pushed to their limits. And no wonder they all agree that something must be done urgently, a point being pushed by Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London.
He has called on the Government to strip Southern Rail of its franchise, saying he is appalled at the unceasing misery being inflicted on users.
Passengers are paying thousands of pounds for a service that, rather than being turn up and go, has become turn up and hope, he said.
Even before the recent dispute, Southern Rail had a poor reputation among its customers. On one journey last year passengers unable to get into standard-class carriages because of severe over-crowding were fined for being in first class.
In the year to May 2015, Southern had the second-worst punctuality record among rail companies. Perhaps more than elsewhere, rail users in this overcrowded corner of England are used to dealing with delays and diversions, an attitude summed up in a recent letter to a national newspaper.
I thought it was remarkable that it only took Major Tim Peake around three hours to return to Earth from the International Space Station, it began.
Passengers are paying thousands of pounds for a service that, rather than being turn up and go, has become turn up and hope Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London
Especially considering that, over the past week, it took us the same length of time to travel from London Victoria to Eastbourne due to the miserable train service currently offered by Southern Railway. But recently the situation has become downright unbearable as the dispute between an intransigent trade union and a seemingly hopeless company rumbles on and on.
The stand-off concerns Southerns plans to change the role of conductors so drivers assume responsibility for opening and closing train doors.
It says this will free up conductors to concentrate on serving passengers. But transport union the RMT claims it will jeopardise passenger safety.
Four 24-hour walkouts since April have caused major disruption, but there have been general ongoing delays and cancellations which Southern has partly blamed on a dramatic surge in conductors calling in sick.
The RMT has been accused of orchestrating so-called sickie strikes as part of a campaign of unofficial industrial action. The union denies any involvement.
W hatever the cause, the result was that last month almost a quarter of Southern trains outside London, including Gatwick Express trains, were cancelled or significantly late.
With no breakthrough in sight, last Monday parent company GTR introduced an emergency timetable. This resulted in 341 trains a day, 15 per cent of services, being axed to give passengers a more predictable service they can plan around.
The early signs have not been promising, with continued problems being reported across the network. And for many it is a case of too little too late.
It has contributed to chaos on one of the countries busiest rail networks, used daily by more than 120,000 commuters across London, Kent and Sussex
Take the experience of 49-year-old Matt Steel from Horsham, West Sussex. In April last year he took a job as a customer services manager with a London-based firm. This week, he left it. The reason? A journey in and out of work that has been so terrible it has all but obliterated his family life.
Its been virtually impossible, he says. On average I am travelling to and from work for about five hours a day that is a huge chunk out of my day.
This is despite the fact that the journey, which costs him almost 4,000 a year, is just 40 miles long and should take less than an hour each way.
A log of his journeys, kept since the beginning of the year, shows he has endured delays in excess of 45 hours over that period. A quarter of those delays have been recorded in the past six weeks.
While the journey into work tends to be relatively reliable, coming home is a nightly battle.
It can be complete mayhem, he says. You get to London Bridge and everyone is just trying to get on any train out going in roughly the right direction. The other day it involved three trains. From March onwards the service started to really deteriorate and then the last couple of months it has been complete chaos.
Instead of getting home at 6.45pm, Matt now gets back at 7.30pm on a good day. I have four children, he says. There are days I dont see the youngest. It is nice to be able to sit down and talk to them. Instead, you walk in the door and pack them off to bed I dont feel like Im being a dad to them.
Earlier this month, one rail users association took out an advert in a national newspaper infuriated by the cancellations
Eventually he decided enough was enough. Having found a new job in Crawley, eight miles from his home, he handed in his notice.
His wife, Heidi, is ecstatic at the prospect of seeing more of her husband, but he is angry that his hand has been forced in this way. Im lucky that another job came up that I wanted to do, he says. A lot of other people are stuck. Many will be contractors. If they are deemed unreliable because they are late, then the work will dry up.
Who does he think is at fault?
I feel it is the company, he says. They have let the relationship with the union deteriorate to such a degree. There is a lot of anger with the company that they have not sorted it out. The Government is also being far too quiet. They should be sitting the sides down with one another, knocking heads together and saying that this cannot be allowed to continue.
Of course, for some trains are a vital link to essential services.
Consider the experience of 23-year-old Bonnie Ward. She lives in Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, and suffers from borderline personality disorder, depression and severe anxiety.
As part of her ongoing treatment she needs to see a counsellor in Eastbourne several times a week, as well as taking part in group activities in Hastings. Both involve a short train journey. But because of the unpredictability of the service she has missed some of these vital sessions.
It is making it really difficult. Sometimes I cannot go because I am delayed for an hour or more, she says.
When if the train does turn up it may just have two carriages and everyone is packed on board. Its terrible. I have to psych myself up to go in the first place. I find it very difficult to deal with the delays and cancellations it is really affecting my health.
Along the coast at Seaford, a quiet seaside town, there are similar tales of woe. The number of trains serving the station has been cut by 81 per cent. Again, it isnt just commuters who have been hit.
Portia Durnford is a 45-year-old nurse who lives in the town. Last year she was diagnosed with malignant melanoma. She is taking part in a clinical trial of immunotherapy drugs which require her to travel regularly to the Royal Marsden in London.
Ideally, she would take the train. But because the service is so unreliable and limited she has to make complicated arrangements.
This involves finding someone to look after her two teenage sons and then, the night before any appointment, driving to Haywards Heath, 25 miles away, to stay with her brother. From there she gets the train, unfortunately still with Southern, but at least directly into the capital.
It should take me a couple of hours to get to London from Seaford, she says. But you just cannot rely on the service. You dont know which trains will come and which will be cancelled. It is hopeless.
Meanwhile, as wheelchair-user Sam Taylor found to his cost, the bus service put in place by Southern is little better. The 28-year-old, who has cerebral palsy, relies on the train to travel from Seaford to his job in Brighton 14 miles away as a graphic designer.
Although the ongoing misery is confined to beleaguered commuters in the South-East, reverberations of this dispute which union bosses say has been caused by attempts at cost-cutting are felt around the country, as businesses are hit and people are forced to look for work outside the capital
But on the first day of the reduced service he was stranded after his train was cancelled. When he tried to catch the replacement bus service he was told he could not board because his wheelchair was too big.
I was late for my appointment in Brighton, but I suppose that is how it is going to be for hundreds of Seaford residents from now on, he says. If they take away the service, they take away my independence. Users like me will have more difficulty getting around and it will impact on so many lives.
Responding to Sams complaints, Southern said: We are very sorry for what happened to Mr Taylor.
We pride ourselves on offering people of all abilities access to our services and if we cannot, then we will arrange a free alternative.
And in a general statement the company said: We understand how frustrated our passengers are and we apologise sincerely.
Such words cut little ice with Sam, who describes the company as inept and useless.
As for Emma Green, who had to leave her job as a lawyer in Central London, she is taking up a new position in Portsmouth. But it will mean a 7,000 a year hit to her salary a sacrifice she feels she has been forced into making.
She says: I was so happy with my job. It was more money, I had better prospects and the hustle and bustle of London, which I loved. She does not, of course, miss the chaos of the journey to and from the capital.
Its a dilemma which tens of thousands of weary travellers face on a daily basis. And as they battle their way to and from work and other appointments, they will no doubt also agree with the sentiments contained in the following ditty, composed by one of their fed-up number and posted online.
Called The Ballad of Southern Rail, it begins: This is the tale of Southern Rail, and the trains that failed and failed and failed.
She lost her life after a long battle with depression in May.
Now much respected former magazine editor Sally Brampton, who died aged 60 after a suspected suicide, is to be commemorated in an unusual and somewhat macabre way with a death mask of her face that will feature in a new exhibition.
The plaster death mask, cast with permission of Sallys only child Molly, has been commissioned by Debbi Mason, former fashion editor of U.S. Vogue.
With her partner, David Freud, son of artist Lucian, Debbi is behind the exhibition Our Nature, Poetic To Grotesque, at Worthing Museum and Art Gallery, West Sussex, in September.
Journalist Sally Brampton at home is to be commemorated in an unusual and somewhat macabre way with a death mask of her face that will feature in a new exhibition
Debbi, who worked with Sally, pictured below, on the launch of Elle magazine, says : Sallys was a life of contrasts, from the huge success as a fashion magazine editor and her razor-sharp sense of humour, to her very public struggle with depression.
I was creating a new show about life, death and beauty when Sally died and it felt appropriate to include her in some way.
But it couldnt be in an ordinary way that is why I decided to create the death mask.
Brampton, who wrote a memoir about depression entitled Shoot The Damn Dog, died after she reportedly walked into the sea near her home in St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex.
I asked her daughter Molly for her permission and it was a difficult conversation to have, says Debbi. She said she needed time to digest the idea, but then came back to me and gave the OK and was, in fact, very encouraging.
The mask was made by sculptor Andy Askem, who has worked at Madame Tussauds.
A triptych of waxed plaster versions will go on display at the museum, displayed on a bed of sea coral as a reference to Sally as she walked into the sea on her final journey.
Debbi feels Sally would have approved of literally becoming a work of art. She was a wonderful artist, creating paintings and drawings.
I think there is a tendency in modern life not to want to talk about death, but that is one of the themes we are confronting in the exhibition.
Death masks are rare in modern times, but were common in previous centuries, with the likes of John Keats, John Milton and Napoleon being commemorated.
Sallys daughter, Molly, plans not to see the masks until the exhibition opens.
Making TV: It's a dirty job but...
Which attention-seeking TV presenter could this be? Hiding behind a thick layer of mud is the intrepid explorer Ben Fogle.
As my picture shows, the 42-year-old has been making an exhibition of himself in Ibiza as part of his new documentary series for Channel 5, New Lives In The Wild, which includes trying to live in a cave.
Apparently, it also requires him to cake himself head to toe in earth, but at least he made an effort to stay stylish with his Mohican hairstyle and tinted sunglasses.
Ben Fogle in Ibiza as part of his new documentary series for Channel 5, New Lives In The Wild
Now that's a REALLY wild hen party!
He never married socialite Donna Air, the mother of his 12-year-old daughter, but conservationist Damian Aspinall will soon be taking the plunge with his glamorous young girlfriend, Victoria Fisher.
And what better way to celebrate her impending nuptials to the zoo owner than with an animal-themed hen party?
This weekend, the 29-year-old Burberry executive shared pictures of her feral festivities at 56-year-old Aspinalls Howletts Wild Animal Park near Canterbury.
The Oxford graduate bride-to-be swapped her designer wardrobe for a tiger suit with a pink rosette and a white veil, while her girlfriends dressed up as an elephant, giraffe, lemur and bear.
Best weekend ever, she wrote online, captioning her pictures with the tag #MrsAToBe.
My 13 years of deep-frozen vol-au-vents, by maverick MP
Labour MP Graham Allen
Labour MP Graham Allen has been eating his way through a deep-freeze full of vol-au-vents for the past 13 years.
In a Commons debate on the Iraq War, Allen disclosed that in 2003, when it looked as if the conflict might begin without parliamentary assent, he started organising an alternative parliament meeting.
He hired Church House and bought 200 bottles of wine and 1,000 vol-au-vents to fuel the politicians who agreed to take part. Only after all that had been done did the Blair government agree to recall the real Parliament making Allens event unnecessary. But that left him with the unconsumed victuals.
I am still working my way through the vol-au-vents from my deep freeze, says a rather mournful Allen.
How good to see an MP sensibly ignoring best before dates.
Joan dismisses Beatty
She was engaged to Hollywood lothario Warren Beatty in the early Sixties, but Dame Joan Collins doesnt have fond memories of her passionate affair with the youthful future Oscar winner.
He wasnt that beautiful he had spots, she recalls in a forthcoming Radio 2 documentary, Joan Collins A Life In Lipstick.
Lets hope she is more charitable about her current (fifth) husband Percy behind his back.
Siri doesn't understand Bonneville
Hugh Bonneville might be very well-spoken, but even he has trouble being understood by Siri the voice recognition software on his smartphone.
The actor says he tried to ask: In which episode of Downton Abbey does Sybil die?
But his phone couldnt understand the question, leading Hugh, who played the morally upright Earl of Grantham in the ITV costume drama, to joke: I need elocution lessons.
Amber's beastly brooches
Bumble & Earwig brooches bought by Amber Rudd at the Hastings Art Fair
Theresa May has her leopard print kitten heels, but new Home Secretary Amber Rudd could become known for her exotic brooches.
The former wife of acerbic restaurant critic A. A. Gill bought a pair of handmade big cat paw brooches for 40 at the Vauxhall Art Car Boot Fair in her Hastings constituency at the weekend.
The faux taxidermy was created by husband-and-wife team Bumble & Earwig using the laborious process of needle felting.
Amber, 52, is known as one of the Cabinets most outspoken members. Now shell really have her claws out.
Amber Rudd, the new Home Secretary, could be known for her exotic brooches
Could you answer the phone for the Queen?
The Royal Household is advertising for a telephone operator at Buckingham Palace who will have to help deal with up to 7,000 calls a week.
For a starting salary of 23,000 a year, the successful candidate will be answering and processing calls for a number of royal residences.
Chicago Is Way, Way More Violent Than New York. Why?
By Mae Rice in News on Jul 19, 2016 6:10PM
Photo via Tony Webster on Flickr
New York had 435 shootings in 2016 as of last week. For Chicago, as of Tuesday, that figure was 1,813. Chicago had almost New York's year-to-date number of shootings355in June alone. The discrepancy is sort of freakish, especially when you factor in population. Chicago has about 67 shootings per 100,000 people, and New York has... five. Five.
Why the staggering difference? The short answer: No one knows, really. But here's a longer answer with some plausible reasons.
Poverty is more concentrated in Chicago
Chicago is a super-segregated city. It's incredibly, visibly segregated by race, and it's also segregated by wealthwhich, a new story on New York Magazine's The Science of Us blog argues, is the crux of the problem. A whopping 35 precent of black Chicagoans live in areas where more than 40 percent of people lived in poverty, a 2015 Rutgers study found, and Brooklyn College sociologist Alex Vitale tells NYMag that this is the root of Chicago's higher crime rates:
As Vitale explains, when poverty is concentrated, it creates a culture on the street where violence becomes endemic. If youre a teen or a 20-something in those environments, Vitale says, you have to show the capability of violence so that youre not constantly victimized not because you want to be a predator, but as a form of self-defense. In New York, the neighborhood-level effect is isolated to a few places, Vitale says, with pockets of concentrated poverty like public housing serving as a huge source of gun violence. But in Chicago, a third of the city is caught up in this dynamic.
How does this culture get created? Yale sociologist Andrew Papachristos argues, in the same NYMag story, that violence in high-poverty neighborhoods passes from person to person like a virus (a theory also put forward in the 2011 documentary The Interrupters, about CeaseFire Illinois). Dense poverty helps the virus of violence spread.
Photo via Grisha Levit on Flickr
New York is crazy rich
On the other side of the same coin: As a city, New York is wildly wealthy. It's way more expensive than Chicago, as roughly one million people who made the Chicago-to-New-York move told usand pretty much every neighborhood has gentrified or plans to gentrify shortly. As we discussed in a recent feature on Pilsen, gentrification can displace long-time residents and erase local culture. In many cases, though, the influx of money also reduces violent crime, the Tribune argued in a 2015 feature:
New York's gentrification has spread to historically African-American neighborhoods, including Harlem, another neighborhood in Upper Manhattan that also had massive drops in violence over the last 20 years. Most of Chicago's historically African-American neighborhoods, however, have seen limited economic improvement, and unabated violence.
Basically, the richer an area, the safer it is. Rich people will pay extra to be safe, and city governments also go to greater lengths to keep rich people happy. Just look at the years of loving attention Rahm gave to George Lucas's purely theoretical museum.
So... what Chicago needs... is a universal basic income? Dumb luck? Papachristos previously told NYMag that you "can't arrest your way out" of a gun violence epidemic. He, for one, recommends preventative interventions in the most violent neighborhoods instead.
Today host Sylvia Jeffreys has jumped to Sonia Kruger's defence, telling viewers: 'Sonia is not racist. She is a compassionate, intelligent and thoughtful person.'
Kruger sparked a social media firestorm this week when she called for Australia to close its borders to Muslim immigration.
Jeffreys told viewers like many people, she doesn't agree with her Nine Network colleague's views.
But she said Kruger was speaking with 'brutal honesty' as a mother and she respected her right to voice an opinion.
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Sylvia Jeffreys defended Sonia Kruger - although said she didn't agree with her opinions
Jeffreys' fiance, the former Middle Eastern correspondent Peter Stefanovic, said ISIS wanted Kruger to make these kind of remarks.
'Sonia is not racist, she is a nice person, I have known her for a little while...
'I don't agree with her opinions because most people know I come from a family of immigrants and that's how I got here.
'I have had a lot to do with Muslims over the years and the vast majority of them are peace-loving people and unfortunately it's that small majority that has given them all a rather nasty, nasty name.'
'I think Sonia's comments come from the fact that... there will be an attack in Australia at some point down the track, there's no doubt about that.
'Police are doing a terrific job to stop it but as you mentioned there, ISIS is creating fear and that is exactly what they want.
'They want Sonia to say those kinds of things, you know?'
Peter Stefanovic said 'ISIS is creating fear... they want Sonia to say those kind of things'
The Nine Network has defended Kruger, saying their 'Mixed Grill' morning segment was all about 'freedom of speech'.
Following her friends' words on Tuesday morning, Kruger tearfully explained what prompted her controversial call.
Voice quavering, she explained she was 'rocked to the core' after seeing a photograph of a child's dead body in Nice.
'I saw the image of a baby covered in a plastic sheet with a doll lying beside her and it rocked me to the very core,' she said.
Televised statement: Sonia Kruger's voice quavered as she addressed her controversial remarks
'I imagined what that must have been like for the people of Nice, for the friends and families of the lost and the thought that it could happen here terrifies me.'
She appeared to be referring to a Reuters picture shot in the hours following truck terrorist Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel's killing spree last week.
Kruger admitted her views - calling for the country to close its borders to Muslims - 'may have been extreme'.
But she struck a defiant note saying people should be able to discuss the 'hugely complex' issue.
The clip appeared on social media and has been viewed over 337,000 times
The home owner quickly pulled out her camera and filmed the encounter
The marsupial was seen shimmying up and down a pole set up in the home
A koala has been caught on film shimmying up and down the beam in a pole dancer's home.
Nikki Erickson was delighted to come home after a terrible day at work to find a 'beautiful' koala practising her moves on the pole she had installed in her Woolgoolga home, north of Coffs Harbour.
The pole dancer quickly pulled out a camera and started recording the little marsupial as it struggled to claw its way up the chrome pole before repeatedly sliding back down to the floor.
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A koala has been caught on film shimmying up and down a silver pole inside a pole dancer's home
'So I made a new friend today.. seems as though we share the same interests,' Ms Erickson wrote.
'I've named her Larrisa the pole dancing koala bear,' she added.
The encounter took place last August but Ms Erickson recently posted the video to social media where it has been viewed more than 337,000 times.
Ms Erickson said the placid koala did not seem to mind her filming and taking photos, but she gave the wild animal a wide birth just in case.
'I've named her Larrisa the pole dancing koala bear,' home owner Nikki Erickson said
Ms Erickson said the placid koala did not seem to mind her filming and taking photos, but she gave the wild animal a wide birth just in case
The koala broke into the house through a door normally left open for Ms Erickson's dog
'She sat there while I talked to her and took photos and did not growl once,' she wrote.
The koala broke into the house through a door normally left open for Ms Erickson's dog, Nitro, and appears to have approached the pole hoping to find refuge somewhere a little further from the ground.
'It was pretty shocking walking into my house and seeing this beautiful creature... Apparently it's breeding season for them but not very common for them to wander into a house.'
Ms Erickson said the koala continued trying to climb the pole with tenacity but was unable to get a good grip on the metal bar.
The pole dancer, who recently competed in her first competition, contacted wildlife handlers from Daisy Hill Koala Centre who picked the koala up and returned her to the wild
'She wasn't so impressed with my shiny slippery chrome tree. She struggled the poor thing. I told her don't worry we all have slippery days,' Ms Erickson wrote
'She wasn't so impressed with my shiny slippery chrome tree. She struggled the poor thing. I told her don't worry we all have slippery days,' Ms Erickson wrote.
The pole dancer, who recently competed in her first competition, contacted wildlife handlers from Daisy Hill Koala Centre who picked the koala up and returned her to the wild.
Ms Erickson said the magical encounter completely turned her week around and left her feeling quite blessed to have witnessed the unusual dance routine.
In an unusual move, Donald Trump competed with his own party's convention programming tonight as he called into Fox News to give O'Reilly Factor host Bill O'Reilly a ten-minute interview.
Most of the time that Trump was talking to O'Reilly convention-goers were watching a video on the Benghazi terrorist attack.
Still, the call from the GOP presidential candidate, who announced earlier today in a separate call to Fox that he'd also be on hand for his wife's speech tonight, even though he wasn't scheduled to speak to delegates until Thursday, was out of the ordinary.
Among the topics Trump discussed with O'Reilly was the Black Lives Matter movement, which the GOP candidate claimed was 'essentially calling death to police' at some of its marches.
'That's not acceptable,' he said.
In an unusual move, Donald Trump competed with his own party's convention programming tonight as he called into Fox News to give O'Reilly Factor host Bill O'Reilly a ten-minute interview
The call from the GOP presidential candidate, who announced earlier today in a separate call to Fox that he'd also be on hand for his wife's speech tonight, even though he wasn't scheduled to speak to delegates until Thursday, was out of the ordinary
Among the topics Trump discussed with O'Reilly was the Black Lives Matter movement, which the GOP candidate claimed was 'essentially calling death to police' at some of its marches. Trump is seen here later in the evening introducing Melania
He also blasted Ohio Gov. John Kasich for refusing to speak at the convention, even though it's being held in his home state.
'If I were him and gotten beaten that badly, I probably wouldn't show up either,' Trump said, touting his wins over Kasich in 38 states. 'He has a problem, though. He signed the pledge. And from a standpoint of honor, I think he should show up.'
Trump said he'd say the same thing if the Democratic National Convention were held in Ohio because large-scale events like these are good for a state's economy.
'People fought very hard that it be in Ohio,' he said. 'I wanted it to be here. The Republicans wanted it to be here. But honestly, even if this were for the Democrats he should at least show up and say hello and say how are you doing?'
Hammering Kasich, Trump said his primary rival 'got beaten very, very badly' and should have left the race 'many weeks earlier than he did but he just hung around.'
The presumptive GOP nominee wouldn't say that Kasich is being a 'sore loser' while suggesting what his campaign chair said earlier in the day - that the failed White House candidate is 'embarrassing' his state.
Also in the interview Trump defended his running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, once again, telling O'Reilly, 'He has gotten a tremendous response.
'I don't think I could have picked anybody that, frankly, would have gotten as good as response.'
The party 'loves' him, he said. 'They really like the choice. And it was my number one choice. It was really terrific,' he again insisted, saying reports that he nearly bailed on Pence are 'pure fiction.'
'I'm very happy with Mike. I cannot believe how well received he is. In fact, much better than I even thought,' he said.
O'Reilly began the exclusive primetime interview by bring up to the police assassinations in Louisiana and Texas this month.
Five police officers were shot and killed in Dallas while protesting a Black Lives Matter protest. Three more were murdered in Baton Rouge on Sunday at a gas station.
'It's a horrible issue. And it's going to be a very important one. It's called law and order,' Trump told the Fox host. 'We want law and order. And that's going to be one of my big issues and always has been.'
Trump blasted BLM and Ohio Gov. John Kasich in the interview with O'Reilly before taking the stage to introduce Melania
O'Reilly asked Trump if the Black Lives Matter protesters were 'provocateurs' of the violence against police.
The GOP White House hopeful told him, 'Well, you see them marching and you see them on occasion, at least, I have seen it, where they are essentially calling death to the police. And that's not acceptable whether you like them or don't like them. That, Bill, is not acceptable.'
Trump said 'inn certain instances' protesters 'have ignited people and you see that.'
'You see that all over. And I think it's a...very, very serious situation and we just can't let it happen,' he said.
He added, 'Now, everybody is free to say what you want to say up to a point. But when you are calling death to police and to kill the police, essentially, which is what they said, that's a real problem, Bill. That's a real big problem.'
The Republican said he'd 'look into it' into their behavior as president. 'Especially in light of what is happening with these maniacs going and shooting our police.'
That he told O'Reilly could entail surveillance and a Justice Department investigation.
'When you see something like that taking place, that's really a threat....we are going to have to, perhaps, talk with the Attorney General about it or do something,' he said. 'But, at a minimum, we're going to have to be watching because that's really bad stuff and it's happened more than once.'
O'Reilly informed him that comments like that would have the 'far left media' calling him a 'racist' again, prompting Trump to declare, 'I'm probably the least racist person there is.'
Senator is a known campaigner of halal certification and Muslim rights
Mr Dastyari responded by saying: 'Yeah, and I have never hidden it away'
Sam Dastyari has been called out for telling a shocked Pauline Hanson he was a Muslim - even though he describes himself as 'non-practising'.
The NSW Labor Senator has been widely praised after he confirmed he was a Muslim during a fiery debate with Ms Hanson on ABC's Q&A program on Monday night.
'Are you a Muslim? Really?' Ms Hanson asked him on the panel.
Mr Dastyari responded saying: 'Yeah, and I have never hidden it away.'
But after the show, Mr Dastyari told Buzzfeed News that he considers himself a 'non-practising' Muslim and that he was born to Muslim parents in the 'Islamic nation' of Iran.
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Senator Sam Dastyari - who has been pictured drinking beer in the past, which is forbidden in Islam - has previously said he considers himself a 'non-practising' Muslim and an atheist on another occasion
Senator Sam Dastyari, who is a known campaigner of Muslim rights, has been called out by angry social media users who claim he 'dishonestly' told Pauline Hanson he was a Muslim even though he is 'non-practising'
Mr Dastyari - who has been pictured drinking beer in the past, which is forbidden in Islam according to Muslim advocates - has also said in a previous interview with satirist John Safran that he was an atheist.
He tweeted a photo on Tuesday of himself as a five-year-old saying: 'Never been religious (born Muslim). Under the Hanson ban I would never have been able to come to Australia.'
His religion was challenged by Ms Hanson during a panel discussion when the One Nation leader was asked if she would have let a five-year-old Mr Dastyari into Australia - like he did when he immigrated from Iran 28 years ago.
When Ms Hanson continued to ask details about his religious beliefs and asked if he was 'sworn in under the Koran', Mr Dastyari said he was born in an Islamic nation.
'So you're a Muslim,' Ms Hanson interrupted.
Mr Dastyari said: 'By being born in an Islamic nation and under Iranian law, under Islamic law and in places like Iran and my parents fled to be able to come to this country'
Ms Hanson: 'You're a practising Muslim? This is quite interesting.'
Mr Dastyari said: 'No, Ms Hanson I think you're trying to make a joke of what is a serious...'
'No, I'm surprised. I did not know that about you,' Ms Hanson added.
Ms Hanson then went on to applaud Channel Nine TV host Sonia Kruger and her comments earlier about wanting to ban Islamic immigration to Australia.
Mr Dastyari, who is a known campaigner of halal certification, Muslim rights and same-sex marriage, has been criticised by some on social media following the Q&A exchange.
He tweeted a photo on Tuesday of himself as a five-year-old saying: 'Never been religious (born Muslim). Under the Hanson ban I would never have been able to come to Australia.'
The NSW Labor Senator, pictured drinking beer, has been widely praised after he confirmed he was a Muslim during a fiery debate with Ms Hanson on ABC's Q&A program on Monday night
The NSW Labor Senator has been widely praised after he confirmed he was a Muslim during a fiery debate with Ms Hanson on ABC's Q&A program on Monday night
This is the moment Pauline Hanson was left stunned when Labor Senator Sam Dastyari told her he was a Muslim during a fiery exchange on ABC's Q&A program
'Sam Dastyar was on Q&A last night and Pauline Hanson asked if he was a Muslim, the audience laughed because they apparently thought he was. The truth is Sam Dastyari is NOT a Muslim,' Aaron Ponton wrote on Facebook.
'I was in Young Labor 10 years ago with Sam and he told me back then that he was 'non practising'. He is also married to a non Muslim Australian woman. I am very disappointed that he acted a bit dishonestly last night and gave the impression he is a Muslim when he is not.'
Another Facebook user, Kerrie Loxley, wrote: 'I am wondering why Sam Dastyari shook Pauline Hansons hand last night on Q&A. Is it not forbidden to male Muslims to shake a females hand other than wife/relative???'
'No Pauline, champagne loving Sam Dastyari is no more a practising Muslim that I am a Christian and that is why he was very careful in his language, 'born in an Islamic nation',' Cath Miller said.
Mr Dastyari spoke to Ms Hanson during Seven's live election coverage and asked her if she would consider eating a halal snack pack with him
The exchange between Ms Hanson and Mr Dastyari started after the Labor Senator pushed her to clarify if she would have liked him to have been banned from entering Australia as a boy when his family fled from northern Iran in 1988.
PAULINE HANSON ASKS SAM DASTYARI IF HE'S MUSLIM Hanson: 'Are you a Muslim? Really?' Dastyari: 'Yeah and I have never hidden it away.' Hanson: 'Were you sworn in under the Koran?' Dastyari: 'I was born in an Islamic nation and by being born Hanson: 'So you're a Muslim.' Dastyari: 'By being born in an Islamic nation and under Iranian law, under Islamic law and in places like Iran and my parents fled to be able to come to this country' Hanson: 'You're a practising Muslim? This is quite interesting.' Dastyari: 'Ms Hanson: 'I think you're trying to make a joke of what is a serious' Hanson: 'I'm surprised. I did not know that about you.' Dastyari: 'Would you have allowed five-year-old Sam Dastyari into this country? He came to this country on 16 January, 1988, two weeks before the Bicentenary celebrations and my family has done nothing but contribute to this country since they've been here.' Hanson: 'Muslims have been a part of Australia for a long, long time, many, many years. You go back to the Gold Rush days and they were in Australia but it is only in the last 10, 20 years that we have seen a rise of terrorism on the streets.' Advertisement
During the program, Mr Dastyari explained how comments made that day by Channel Nine TV host Sonia Kruger on banning Muslim immigration effected his family given their situation.
'When I look at Ms Hanson's policy document that turns around and says we should be banning Muslims from country to this country, I have to ask - does that mean that a five-year-old Sam Dastyari should never have been able to set foot in Australia because somewhere in Tehran there's a document that says beside my name the word 'Muslim' because of where I was born?'
Eventually after their exchange, Ms Hanson thanked him and said she was 'happy' he came to Australia.
They butted heads over Muslim immigration and the radicalisation of young Australians on several occasions during the program.
Ms Hanson was grilled by panel members and those in the audience during her appearance on Q&A but the fiery politician hit back defiantly at her critics.
She was repeatedly questioned by Islamic members of the audience about the cause of her Islamophobia and whether she would join an Islamic family for dinner.
It came as about 200 protesters gathered outside the ABC headquarters - including her supporters and anti-racism activists.
One audience member, Cindy Rahal, said Ms Hanson was pushing an agenda of fear 'and making people like myself and my friend here worried to come into the studio because of protesters outside'.
But Ms Hanson rejected any responsibility for the clash.
'The protesters are nothing to do with me,' Ms Hanson said. 'Protesters were against me because I choose to speak up against this matter so I have protesters which are trying to shut down freedom of speech.'
The One Nation leader was sitting beside Mr Dastyari during Monday night's Q&A panel discussion as they butted heads over Muslim immigration and the radicalisation of young Australians
Ms Hanson is pictured next to ABC's Q&A host Tony Jones on Monday night
Ms Hanson also defended Sonia Kruger when Mr Dastyari said the pair were playing 'the politics of fear and division' for wanting to ban Muslims from entering Australia.
Ms Hanson said of Nine Network's Today Extra host: 'Go Sonia.'
'I think it's great that someone is standing up, because she's expressed her feeling about it,' Ms Hanson told the audience on Monday night.
'She's referred to Japan, for a population of 127 million people, they don't have terrorism on their streets
'You've got Brussels now the biggest Muslim state there with 300,000 in there, you've got 10 per cent in France, you have the problems on the streets of France,' Ms Hanson said.
Brussels is a city of Belgium, not a state.
Ms Kruger caused controversy earlier on Monday for saying she 'would like to see it [Muslim immigration] stop now for Australia'.
Mr Dastyari had pushed Ms Hanson to clarify whether she would have liked him to have been banned from entering Australia as a five-year-old boy who moved with his family from northern Iran
Mr Dastyari, who is a known campaigner of halal certification and Muslim rights, has been criticised by some on social media following the Q&A exchange
Pat Smith, whose son Sean Smith was the State Department information officer killed in the 2012 Benghazi attack, delivered an emotional speech at the Republican convention where she said Hillary Clinton should go to jail.
Smith delivered a lengthy indictment of the U.S. government's conduct during the hours while the attack was unfolding, then went right after Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump's opponent, for her conduct during and after the attack.
After a member of the crowd yelled out that Clinton had lied, Smith said: 'She lied to me and then called me a liar,' mentioning the solemn arrival ceremony when her son's coffin was returned to the U.S.
Pat Smith (pictured) said she blames Hillary Clinton for the death of her son Sean in the Benghazi attacks
Pat Smith's son Sean (pictured) was the State Department information officer killed in the 2012 Benghazi attack
'She looked me squarely in the eye and told me a video was responsible,' Smith said, repeating her charge that Clinton told her at the ceremony that an anti-American video motivated the attack.
Subsequent investigations found it was a terror attack on the compound rather than a spontaneous response to the video.
'How could she do this to me? How could she do this to any American family? Donald Trump is everything Hillary Clinton is not,' Smith said.
As she concluded her emotional remarks, Smith looked down on a printed sign held up by a member of the crowd that said 'HILLARY FOR PRISON!'
'That's right. Hillary for Prison. She deserves to be in stripes,' Smith said with emotion in her voice.
Smith has gone after Clinton in a series of TV interviews, including one in March after Clinton said in a Democratic debate that Smith was 'absolutely wrong' to say she lied.
A convention attendee held up a 'Hillary for Prison' sign, prompting Smith to call for Clinton to be 'in stripes'
Four Americans including Sean Smith died in the Benghazi attacks (pictured, the US consulate in flames in 2012)
'We were nose-to-nose at the coffin ceremony. She lied to me,' Smith told the Fox Business Network. 'She told me it was the fault of the video. I said 'are you sure?' She says, 'Yes, that's what it was. It was the video.'
Clinton has denied Smith's claim.
She has said there is a 'special place in hell' for people like Clinton.
During her remarks before the convention crowd Smith spoke about her son as a 'wonderful son and father to my two amazing grandchildren, Samantha and Nathan, now 10 and 11.'
The crowd grew silent as she told her story. 'The last time I talked to Sean, the night before the terrorist attack, he told me, 'Mom, I am going to die,' Smith said.
'For all of this loss, for all of this grief, for all of the cynicism the tragedy in Benghazi has wrought upon America, I blame Hillary Clinton,' Smith said, as the crowd erupted into cheers.
Smith has blasted Clinton in a series of TV interviews, and stayed true to form before a national TV audience and gathered delegates in Cleveland
Smith 'In an email to her daughter shortly after the attack, Hillary Clinton blamed it on terrorism. But when I saw Hillary Clinton at Sean's coffin ceremony, just days later, she looked me squarely in the eye and told me a video was responsible,' she said.
Then she hailed Donald Trump as someone who 'speaks his mind, and his heart.'
Former AFL player Nick Stevens will plead guilty to two charges of causing injury to his former partner.
The former Carlton midfielder fronted the Victorian County Court on Tuesday for what was to be a five-day appeal hearing against an eight-month jail term for abusing his ex Laima McKenna.
But he abandoned the appeal, with his barrister Sarah Keating telling Judge Damien Murphy the matter had been resolved and Stevens would instead now plead guilty to two counts of intentionally causing injury.
Former AFL player Nick Stevens will plead guilty to two charges of causing injury to his former partner after fronting the Victorian County Court on Tuesday
Stevens was convicted and sentenced by a magistrate in March last year for 12 charges of abusing his former partner, including inflicting serious injury, making threats to kill and five counts of assault.
Along with a jail term, he was ordered to complete a 12-month community corrections order that included 90 hours of community service. He was also fined $400.
But after the sentence, Stevens immediately filed an appeal and was freed on bail pending the appeal.
Stevens leaves court with his new girlfriend after saying he will plead guilty to intentionally injuring his former partner
Stevens played 231 AFL games for Port Adelaide and Carlton from 1998 to 2009
Stevens retired from football in 2009 after suffering a reccurrence of a neck injury
Stevens was convicted and sentenced by a magistrate in March last year for 12 charges of abusing his former partner, including inflicting serious injury, making threats to kill and five counts of assault
Judge Murphy rejected the defence's request for more time to prepare the matter and set down a plea hearing for Thursday.
'It's been hanging around for 14 months,' he said.
Stevens will be dealt with on two counts of intentionally causing injury at a date to be fixed.
has been arrested by police on suspicion of murder
Orefice's girlfriend admitted to shooting him while in an
The body was that of former resident 84-year-old Salvatore Orefice
, while moving in, she found the body of a dead man inside
Mary Karacas (pictured), 75, was arrested after a woman who purchased her old home found the body of a dead man inside the residence
A woman who shelled out nearly half a million dollars for a home got the shock of a lifetime when she found a dead body in her brand new residence.
The unidentified buyer spent $430,000 on June 22 for a house in Simi Valley, California, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Eager to move in, the buyer began moving in on Sunday only to discover the body of Salvatore Orefice, 84, covered in a bed.
Investigators are unsure how long the body of Orefice had been in the home, but the discovery led police to Mary Karacas, Orefice's 75-year-old girlfriend.
Simi Valley police Commander Roy Jones called Karacas and asked her to meet police at the home.
There she told officers she and Orefice had gotten into an altercationn and at some point during the fight she shot him, the LA Times reported.
She was arrested by police on suspicion of murder, according to authorities.
After Orefice and Karacas sold the home, they were given 30 days to leave the premises.
The 1,389-square-foot single family home has three bedrooms and two bathrooms and was built in 1977, according to Zillow.
It is believed the couple bought the home in June 2007 for $520,000.
The unidentified buyer bought the house (pictured) in Simi Valley for $430,000 and began moving in on Sunday
A car linked to the stabbing murder of a man in 2012 is buried five metres under a shed in the outback.
Police say they are now trying to work out how to safely unearth the black 2008 FG Ford Falcon XR6 that Adelaide man Jayson Doelz, 27, was kidnapped in.
Mr Doelz was abducted from a Pooraka, Adelaide house before being driven in the car to Kersbrook, in the Adelaide Hills in January 2012, where he was stabbed and his body found two days later.
The car used in Jayson Doelz's murder is buried beneath this shed in Innamincka, in South Australia's north east
Mr Doelz was abducted in Pooraka, Adelaide and killed in nearby Kersbrook in 2012, but the car he was kidnapped in has been located, buried beneath a shed in Innamincka, almost 1000km from Adelaide
Mr Doelz, 27, was abducted in the Adelaide suburb of Pooraka January 2012 before being killed
Adelaide man Jayson Doelz
The car is under a shed at Innamincka, far north east South Australia, more than 900km north of Adelaide.
It was taken to several addresses in Adelaide's north after the murder, before being put in a shipping container and taken to its current location where it was buried under a large shed, police say.
'We know that the companies involved in that transportation and burial have nothing to do with this crime,' Major Crime Detective Inspector Greg Hutchins said.
'The owners of the shed (now on top of the burial site) also have absolutely nothing to do with the murder and are not associated in any way with this offence.'
He said the investigation was now progressing 'very fast' and now was the time for anyone with information to come forward.
Several people are suspected of involvement in the murder, including two with links to outlaw motorcycle gangs.
One is a former Comancheros outlaw motorcycle gang member and the other is an associate of the Rebels, police say.
Det Insp Hutchins said it is not believed Mr Doelz's death is related to the bikie connections, but was an opportunistic crime motivated by a 'very, very minor matter'.
There's a $200,000 reward in place for information that leads to a conviction for Mr Doelz's murder.
Registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein could face new criminal charges more than a decade after a 14-year-old's parents went to the police alleging the girl was paid to give the billionaire a massage.
The 2005 investigation then led to accusations that he had abused as many as 40 young women, according to sealed documents from his plea deal in 2008 that were released seven years later.
Epstein pleaded guilty to a state charge - soliciting prostitution from a minor - in exchange for a guarantee not to prosecute him in federal court. He served 13 months of an 18-month sentence.
Two of Epstein's alleged victims are now seeking to have the plea overturned in a 'groundbreaking' lawsuit in Florida.
Registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein could face new criminal charges more than a decade after a 14-year-old's parents went to the police alleging the girl was paid to give the billionaire a massage
'This is absolutely a groundbreaking case,' Meg Garvin, the Oregon-based National Crime Victim Law Institute told FOX.
'The victims are fighting to truly make victims' rights meaningful to ensure that victims are informed and have a voice at every critical decision point,'
The civil case was filed by attorney Brad Edwards and retired federal judge Paul Cassel against the Department of Justice, claiming prosecutors offered Epstein a secret plea bargain that violated the Crime Victims' Rights Act.
The motion also referred to the plea deal as 'one of the most extraordinarily lenient plea arrangements in American history,' the Palm Beach Daily Express reported.
According to released court documents, Epstein's lawyers offered him a secret plea bargain.
A 2007 email from Assistant US Attorney Marie Vaillafana to Epstein's lawyer Jay Lefkowitz, acknowledged three of the women were notified after the Non-Prosecution Agreement was signed, before adding: 'You raised objections to any victim notification, and no further notifications were done.'
Under the Crime Victims' Rights Act, victims have 'the right to reasonable, accurate, and timely notice of any public court proceeding, or any parole proceeding, involving the crime or of any release or escape of the accused.'
Victims are also entitled to be 'reasonably heard at any public proceeding in the district court involving release, plea, sentencing, or any parole proceeding.'
Edwards claims victims did not attend hearings regarding the secret plea deal, and key evidence is still sealed, FOX reported.
Esptein pleaded guilty to state charge of soliciting prostitution from a minor and served 13 months of his 18-month sentence
A judge released a cache of sealed documents from his plea deal in 2008 that included emails from prosecutors to his lawyers that fueled suspicions they worked together to ensure he did not face the most serious charges.
In 2007, Assistant U.S. Attorney Marie Villafana sent an email to his lawyer Jay Lefkowitz stating: 'I wanted to tell you that I have compiled a list of 34 confirmed minors.
'There are six others, whose names we already have, who need to be interviewed by the FBI to confirm whether they were 17 or 18 at the time of their activity with Mr. Epstein.'
The emails also suggest that prosecutors failed to highlight Epstein's alleged crimes to the judges.
Villafana wrote to Lefkowitz in a September 19, 2007 email: 'I will include our standard language regarding resolving all criminal liability and I will mention "co-conspirators," but I would prefer not to highlight for the judge all of the other crimes and all of the other persons that we could charge.'
After the court documents were released in 2015, lawyers for the two women who launched the lawsuit claim that the exchanges 'demonstrate that the victims' allegations of a conspiracy between the Government and Epstein's attorneys to conceal the existence of a broad, non-prosecution agreement are not mere speculation, but appear to be well supported.'
Politico reported that the lawyers for the two women claim the exchanges show both parties 'negotiating to keep the judge in the dark about the full nature of the plea arrangement, as well as keeping the victims (i.e. "the girls") in the dark about the plea agreement until after Epstein's plea.'
The women, who cannot receive restitution from the government, are instead hoping for 'fundamental changes' to the justice system, according to attorney Edwards, FOX reported.
In addition to an apology from prosecutors or fines against the US Justice Department that would go towards a crime victims' group, the suit could also fight to strike down the part of the plea deal that guaranteed he would not be prosecuted in federal court.
A civil case was filed claiming prosecutors in the case offered Epstein a secret plea bargain that violated the Crime Victims' Rights Act. Pictured, a file photo of a Boeing 727. Epstein allegedly had a bed inside his that was used for sex in what became known as 'Lolita Express'
The Palm Beach, Florida police and the FBI both investigated charges that Epstein consorted with underage girls used for prostitution.
Court documents show that police found a 'clear indication that Epstein's staff was frequently working to schedule multiple young girls between the ages of 12 and 16 years old literally every day, often two or three times per day.'
One victim said under oath that Epstein molested her at least 50 times, beginning when she was 13.
She said she and other girls were lured to Epstein's home with promises of hundreds of dollars for modeling or for massaging him.
Linda called the cops while her husband changed into
A retired NYPD lieutenant has been shot and killed by a SWAT team after his wife said he was acting strangely.
Patrick Fennell, 57, was gunned down by officers in Little Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey, after a night of drinking on Saturday.
His wife, Linda, who has been married to him for 33 years, said she found him in a basement filling up a revolver with bullets when she tried to confront him.
But when she tried to take the gun away from the former cop - who retired after 20 years in the force in 2001 - he pushed her away.
Retired NYPD lieutenant Patrick Fennell, 57, (right) was shot and killed by a SWAT team outside his home in New Jersey after his wife Linds (left) said he was acting strangely
A shocked Linda called the police, saying his behavior was out of character. As she spoke a dispatcher, she heard two gunshots from below.
She told the New York Daily News: 'I was extremely erratic. (The dispatcher) asked if anyone else was in the house. I said 'my dog' They said: 'Take the dog and get out of the house.'
She added that before cops showed up, her husband changed into camouflage clothes.
He then walked into the woods at the back of his house.
When the SWAT team arrived, they had a standoff. But when officers saw he had a revolver, they shot him dead.
Acting New Jersey Attorney General Christopher Porrino said in a statement: 'Fennell came out of the residence and fled into a wooded area.
'Police officers reported that they saw Fennell holding a handgun when he left the residence. Township police called for assistance from the Ocean County Regional SWAT Team.
'The SWAT team arrived and officers spread out to contain Fennell in a wooded area.
Fennell has returned home from a night of drinking when he went into his basement and started loading his revolver with bullets. When his wife tried to take the gun away from the former cop - who retired after 20 years in the force in 2001 - he pushed her away
'At approximately 10:30 p.m., officers confronted Fennell, who allegedly was armed with a handgun. A member of the SWAT team fired multiple rounds, striking Fennell.
'Police recovered a handgun at the scene of the shooting. Fennell was pronounced dead at the scene.'
Mrs Fennell said two officers then came over and said they were sorry.
It was not clear what happened before the shooting, but she insisted her husband would not point a weapon at a cop.
The former senior officer walked into woods behind his house in camouflage gear and waited for police to show up. He was then shot dead after a standoff with a SWAT team
Mrs Fennell said two officers then came over and said they were sorry. It was not clear what happened before the shooting, but she insisted her husband would not point a weapon at a cop
She admitted, though, that as the hours passed, she began to imagine a grim ending.
'I really couldn't believe he was doing what he was doing... After hours I thought, 'Oh, my God, maybe it's too far for him to turn back,' she said.
She also told the Daily News: 'He was an all-around good guy. He was a great cop. He retired as a detective lieutenant and anybody who knew him fell in love with him,' she said.
'He helped everybody. He liked to teach people how to fish and how to hunt. Nobody ever had a negative thing to say about him.'
Fennell had recently survived a battle with lung cancer, but doctors said that he could make a full recovery.
Field Museum Will Show Some Skin With Tattoo Exhibit This Fall
By Gwendolyn Purdom in Arts & Entertainment on Jul 19, 2016 9:00PM
Photo: Thomas Duval musee du quai Branly
Your fruitless attempts to convince your parents that your body ink should be considered art will finally get some validation this fall when The Field Museum unveils its latest special exhibition, appropriately titled Tattoo. The exhibit will explore tattooing as an art form and its remarkable spread around the world.
Through historic artifacts and modern designs tattooed on silicone models of the human body, Tattoo traces human body marking from the ancient Egyptians' interest in ink to Thomas Edison's patent on a nineteenth-century "puncturing pen," to a 98-year-old modern-day tattoo artist who still practices traditional Filipino methods. It will be the first time the exhibit, initially produced by the musee du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris, is displayed in the United States. In addition to a global perspective of tattooing, museum officials say the exhibit will also feature some elements that examine the tattoo artistic community in Chicago.
Tattoos are a way to make whats inside of you, your experience and your beliefs, manifest on your skin," exhibition project manager Janet Wong said in a press release. "Its powerful to encounter that.
Tattoo opens at the Field Museum on Oct. 21 and runs through April 30, 2017.
They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but the guy who trains grown men dressed in rubber puppy suits would probably beg to differ.
Members of Australia's underground puppy play community have lifted the veil on their secretive movement, which has 10,000 human pups across Europe, Asia, Australia and the US.
This week's episode of The Feed introduces Trainer PupBoss, also known as Jyan, who is a 'handler' for the doctors, public servants, mechanics and rail workers who lead double lives as dogs.
The men on the programme insist their desire to dress up as dogs is not sexual, but the movement has been banded by others as a BDSM fetish.
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Australia's puppy play community have offered a rare insight into their underground community
'It seems really simple because you're just getting on all fours and waddling around and going woof woof. But really it's so much more complicated,' said Trainer PupBoss.
He manages gatherings which involve locking the human pups in a cage and teaching them tricks on as they crawl around on all fours such as posture and presenting.
Human pups eat from doggy bowls and communicate exclusively through their own canine language during the gatherings.
GPup Alpha, who works as a doctor, explained has been involved in the human pup play community for over five years and defended accusations it is merely a fetish.
'Having the outlet of pup play gives me a recreation. We all have animalistic passions. As humans, we are sexual animals, and my animal just happens to be more German Shepard,' he explains
'For some people there's sexy time involved, but that's not the whole essence of it'
Human pup trainer PupBoss (left) manages gatherings which involve locking the human pups in a cage and teaching them tricks
Members of the Australian pup play community work as doctors, public servants, mechanics and rail workers
The pup play community pose ahead of the 2016 Sydney Mardi Gra Pradae: There is believed to be 10,000 human pups across Europe, Asia and the US
'It seems really simple because you're just getting on all fours and waddling around and going woof woof. But really it's so much more complicated,' said Trainer PupBoss
Seca, who spends his days working as a mechanic, said puppy play has become an addiction.
'I feel there is a hidden dog in me,' he said. 'I feel I have to live two lives in some ways.'
The Australian community is believed to include members from a mix of genders, sexualities, occupations and ethnicities.
He said changes to two-minute pizza policy spelled 'beginning of the end'
Former majority owner Tom Potter spoke about NBC's changes since 2007
It insists it's 'business as usual' at 120 franchisees until outcome of review
Corporate documents show the company has struggled to pay its debts
Australia's third largest pizza chain Eagle Boys has gone into voluntary administration after struggling to pay its debts.
Majority stake owner NBC Capital called in administrators on Thursday to conduct a review, but insist it is 'business as usual' until the outcome with its 120 franchisees continuing to trade as normal.
Tom Potter, who spent more than 20 years building the pizza empire, and sold his majority share in 2007, said NBC's changes over the past decade has 'spelled the beginning of the end' to the chain.
Australia's third largest pizza chain Eagle Boys has collapsed into voluntary administration after struggling to pay debts
'When a company is losing thousands of customers, and does not recognise this as a problem, the business is doomed,' he told the Courier Mail.
Mr Potter slammed NBC Capital's decision to stop its guaranteed two-minute pizza pick-up policy, saying it left customers turning to rival Dominoes instead.
He said he offered to help NBC in the early stages of the transfer, but within two years was approached by lawyers warning him of legal action if he continued to contact the directors.
In November, it was revealed the chain was trying to raise $20 million in capital to pay a 'significant' amount of debt, The Sydney Morning Herald reported.
Dominoes has a staggering 25 per cent share across Australia's pizza market, swamping Eagle Boys on 4.6 per cent and Pizza Hut on 10.7.
In a statement to Daily Mail Australia, an Eagle Boys media representative said administrators SV Partners would assume control of the head office's 'day-to-day operations'.
'The Administrators are in the process of identifying restructuring measures,' the statement read.
'Eagle Boys stores across Australia will continue to trade during this process.
Tom Potter (pictured), who spent more than 20 years building the pizza empire, and sold his majority share in 2007, said NBC's changes over the past decade has 'spelled the beginning of the end'
'For Eagle Boys customers, franchisees, employees and suppliers its "business as usual" while the Administrators review is underway.
'The Eagle Boys national franchise remains on the market for sale.'
Last November, allegations were made that Eagle Boys grossly underpaid workers as well as delivery drivers.
Voluntary administration occurs when the directors of a financially troubled company appoints an external administrator to investigate the company, according to the ASIC website.
They advise whether the company should go into liquidation or be returned to the control of the directors.
A voluntary administrator is usually appointed when a company is deemed insolvent.
Eagle Boys launched as a single pizza store in Albury, New South Wales, in 1987 and has since spread to Queensland, Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, the ACT and Northern Territory.
At its peak, Eagle Boys had 340 chain stores across the country, but had now dropped to just 120.
Mr Potter slammed NBC Capital's decision to stop its guaranteed two-minute pizza pick-up policy, saying it left customers turning to rival Dominoes instead
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Melania Trump made a dramatic entrance at the Republican National Convention on Monday night, saying her husband is 'ready to lead this great nation. He's ready to fight every day to give our children the better future they deserve.'
The Slovenian immigrant who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2006 which she called 'the greatest privilege on Planet Earth' was the second Trump to appear on stage.
Her husband made a surprise appearance at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio, as Queen's rock anthem 'We Are the Champions' blared through loudspeakers accustomed to pounding arena jams for LeBron James.
'We're gonna win. We're gonna win so big. Thank you very much,' he said, before introducing his wife of 11 years.
'Ladies and gentlemen,' Trump declared, 'it is my honor to present the next first lady of the United States, my wife an amazing mother and an incredible woman, Melania Trump.'
Highlighting the presumptive GOP nominee's history of 'inclusion, not division,' Mrs. Trump insisted that despite attacks from Democrats and journalists, he 'intends to represent all the people, not just some of the people.'
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Melania Trump was greeted by cheers as she paid tribute to US veterans and talked about her upbringing in Slovenia during her speech at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland
She smiled and waved to the GOP supporters as she discussed initiatives for America - including better education for children
The former model spoke about her career in the fashion industry before she met and fell in love with The Donald. The couple shared a kiss before she stood at the lectern
The Donald reaches in for a kiss as the crowd waits for his wife to start speaking
The presumptive Republican nominee showed off his wife to the crowd before she spoke, and insisted her husband is the right man to be in the White House
Her husband made a dramatic entrance. He walked out onto the stage with Queen's We Are the Champions playing in the background
He gave his signature thumbs-up as he made his rock star entrance to the Republican convention on Monday night
'That includes Christians and Jews and Muslims,' she said.
'It includes Hispanics and African-Americans and Asians, and the poor and the middle class.'
He's prepared, she said, to be a powerful president for every American.
'He will do this better than anyone else can, and it won't even be close,' she said with the signature Trump bravado, to warm applause.
Melania didn't promise a smooth path to the White House, saying that there will be bumps in the road: 'It would not be a Trump contest without excitement and drama.'
'But throughout it all, my husband will remain focused on only one thing: his beautiful country that he loves so much.'
'I AM SO PROUD OF YOUR CHOICE FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES': HIGHLIGHTS OF MELANIA'S SPEECH On Donald's patriotism: 'I have been with Donald for 18 years and I have been aware of his love for this country since we first met. He never had a hidden agenda when it comes to his patriotism, because, like me, he loves this country so much'
On her parents and her country: My elegant and hard-working mother Amalia introduced me to fashion and beauty. My father Viktor instilled in me a passion for business and travel. Their integrity, compassion and intelligence reflect to this day on me and for my love of family and America.
On his determination: 'If you want someone to fight for you and your country, I can assure you, he is the 'guy'. He will never, ever, give up. And, most importantly, he will never, ever, let you down'
On winning: 'His achievements speak for themselves, and his performance throughout the primary campaign proved that he knows how to win'
On Trump's best qualities: 'He is tough when he has to be but he is also kind and fair and caring. This kindness is not always noted, but it is there for all to see. That is one reason I fell in love with him to begin with'
On his political ambitions: 'Donald intends to represent all the people, not just some of the people. That includes Christians and Jews and Muslims, it includes Hispanics and African-Americans and Asians, and the poor and the middle class'
On her own ambitions: 'If I am honored to serve as first lady, I will use that wonderful privilege to try to help people in our country who need it the most. One of the many causes dear to my heart is helping children and women'
On being ready: 'My husband is ready to lead this great nation. He is ready to fight, every day, to give our children the better future they deserve. Ladies and gentlemen, Donald J. Trump is ready to serve and lead this country as the next president of the United States' Advertisement
She hinted at an issue portfolio that she might embrace in the East Wing of the White House, saying she intended to 'help people in our country who need it the most ... children and women.'
Her time as first lady, she said, would be filled 'ensuring that every child can live in comfort and security with the best possible education.'
Donald Trump came back on stage as the Queen music swelled again when she delivered her final line, walking his wife off stage right to wild cheers.
She wore a $1,500 dress by London-based designer Roksanda Ilincic.
Lieutenant General Mike Flynn, a one-time possible running mate, had the unenviable duty of speaking next.
'I don't know how you follow that!' he exclaimed.
The Trumps' entrance was preceded by an onstage event unique during the night: The platform on which the convention podium sat was lowered more than eight feet so a blue notebook containing Melania's speech could be placed on it.
Mrs Trump delivered an almost flawless speech, despite her sometimes shaky English
Her time as first lady, she said, would be filled 'ensuring that every child can live in comfort and security with the best possible education'
Melania insisted that she only read through the speech once before heading onto the stage
Trump thanked the crowd, and then introduced his wife Melania for the main speech of the evening
During her speech, Melania said her billionaire husband would 'never give up' and 'fight every day' if he made it into office
Mr. Trump's entrance, accompanied by swirling spotlights and screaming supporters, provided all the distraction the stagehands needed.
His wife shared the spotlight momentarily a second time.
America's freedoms, she said, 'have come with a price so many times. The sacrifices made by our veterans are reminders of this.'
Pointing to the VIP box where other Trump family members including Tiffany and Donald Jr. were seated, she singled out another special guest Sen. Bob Dole, a decorated World War II U.S. Army veteran.
Dole is also the elder statesmen among former Republican presidential nominees, and the only one living who has endorsed her husband.
He acknowledged the roar of applause with a wave and a smile.
Mrs. Trump's remarks steered clear of policy proposals, only touching vaguely on the need for change in Washington.
'We should not be satisfied with stagnation,' she said. 'Donald wants prosperity for all Americans.'
'We need new programs to help the poor and opportunities to challenge the young. There has to be a plan for growth. Only then will fairness result.'
Melania didn't promise a smooth path to the White House, saying that there will be bumps in the road: 'It would not be a Trump contest without excitement and drama'
She stunned the crowd in a $1,500 white dress by London-based designer Roksanda Ilincic.
The Donald embraces his wife and puts his hand on her back as she wishes her luck before her remarks
Trump is seen on the big screen at the Quicken Loans Arena ahead of his wife's speech
She was longer on symbolism, talking about leadership and the value of hard work.
'Donald has a great and deep and unbound determination,' said Mrs. Trump.
'I have seen him fight for years to get a project done, or even started, and he does not give up. If you want someone to fight for you and your country, I can assure you he's the guy.'
'He will never ever give up,' she insisted, 'and most importantly, he will never ever let you down.'
Mrs. Trump told NBC News in an interview to be broadcast Tuesday morning that her words Monday night would be her own.
'I wrote it, with as little help as possible,' she said aboard the Boeing 757 jet that reporters and Secret Service Agents already call 'Trump Force One.'
She told NBC News co-anchor Matt Lauer that she wasn't nervous about delivering a speech in her most public moment to date.
'I read once over it, and that's all,' she said.
She hinted at an issue portfolio that she might embrace in the East Wing of the White House, saying she intended to 'help people in our country who need it the most ... children and women'
Donald Trump came back on stage as the Queen music swelled again when she delivered her final line, walking his wife off stage right to wild cheers
Mrs. Trump's remarks steered clear of policy proposals, only touching vaguely on the need for change in Washington. She did share two touching moments with her husband, as she kissed him before and after the speech
At the end of her speech, she was given a standing ovation as she walked off hand-in-hand with the real estate mogul
Earlier in the evening, Pat Smith, whose son Sean Smith was the State Department information officer killed in the 2012 Benghazi attack, delivered an emotional speech where she said Hillary Clinton should go to jail.
Smith delivered a lengthy indictment of the U.S. government's conduct during the hours while the attack was unfolding, then went right after Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump's opponent, for her conduct during and after the attack.
After a member of the crowd yelled out that Clinton had lied, Smith said: 'She lied to me and then called me a liar,' mentioning the solemn arrival ceremony when her son's coffin was returned to the U.S.
'She looked me squarely in the eye and told me a video was responsible,' Smith said, repeating her charge that Clinton told her at the ceremony that an anti-American video motivated the attack.
Subsequent investigations found it was a terror attack on the compound rather than a spontaneous response to the video.
'How could she do this to me? How could she do this to any American family? Donald Trump is everything Hillary Clinton is not,' Smith said.
As she concluded her emotional remarks, Smith looked down on a printed sign held up by a member of the crowd that said 'HILLARY FOR PRISON!'
Donald Trump's daughter Tiffany arrives during the second session on the first day of the 2016 GOP convention
She applauds while listening to speeches at the Quicken Loans Arena during the highly-charged event
She watched the speakers with her college boyfriend, 21-year-old Ross Mechanic, who is a Democrat
They shared a touching moment during the afternoon session when Mr Mechanic whispered something in Tiffany's ear
'That's right. Hillary for Prison. She deserves to be in stripes,' Smith said with emotion in her voice.
During her remarks before the convention crowd Smith spoke about her son as a 'wonderful son and father to my two amazing grandchildren, Samantha and Nathan, now 10 and 11.'
The crowd grew silent as she told her story. 'The last time I talked to Sean, the night before the terrorist attack, he told me, 'Mom, I am going to die,' Smith said.
'For all of this loss, for all of this grief, for all of the cynicism the tragedy in Benghazi has wrought upon America, I blame Hillary Clinton,' Smith said, as the crowd erupted into cheers.
Happy Days and Charles in Charge actor Scott Baio warmed up Donald Trump's supporters at tonight's Republican National Convention in Cleveland by tossing the crowd some favorite GOP red meat.
Democratic rival Hillary Clinton is 'a woman who somehow feels entitled to the presidency,' the actor said. 'That she is somehow owed it.'
'Duck Dynasty' star Willie Robertson made the case that the billionaire politician can be trusted to protect the American public.
'America is in a bad spot, and we need a president who will have our back,' he said.
'If you're looking for a job, or trying to grow a business like I am, Donald Trump will have your back,' Robertson's prepared remarks continue, with that tag line as a recurring refrain.
'If you're a serviceman fighting overseas, or a cop who is risking their lives to help keep us safe at home, Donald Trump will have your back.'
Donald Trump Jr. speaks to the media during the evening session of the first day of the convention. He will watch as his father will officially be crowned the Republican nominee for president
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie arrives on the floor of the Republican National Convention
Second World War veteran and former Sen. Bob Dole (center) along with Donald Trump Jr. (left) shake hands with a guest (right)
Indiana Governor and Donald Trump's Vice Presidential selection Mike Pence talks to people in the crowd
Earlier in the evening, Pat Smith (left), whose son Sean Smith (right) was the State Department information officer killed in the 2012 Benghazi attack, delivered an emotional speech where she said Hillary Clinton should go to jail
'Duck Dynasty' star Willie Robertson made the case that the billionaire politician can be trusted to protect the American public
Happy Days and Charles in Charge actor Scott Baio warmed up Donald Trump's supporters at tonight's Republican National Convention in Cleveland by tossing the crowd some favorite GOP red meat. Democratic rival Hillary Clinton is 'a woman who somehow feels entitled to the presidency,' the actor said
Former New York Maypr Rudy Giuliani also gave an impassioned speech as he warmed up the crowd for Mrs Trump
The politician laughed as he listened to the speakers with Donald Trump Jr during the Ohio event
Senator Joni Ernst, previously touted as a potential vice-presidential pick, also addressed the crowd at the convention
A 17-year-old boy out for a drive with a group of friends was killed on Sunday when the car he was in smashed into a power pole.
Jackson Williams died after the Subaru Forester he was travelling in as a passenger ploughed into the pole in Wamberal on New South Wales' Central Coast about 9.30pm on Sunday.
Police have not ruled out pressing charges against the car's 17-year-old driver, who walked away from the crash with relatively minor injuries.
A scene from the crash in Wamberal, on New South Wales' Central Coast late on Sunday evening
Jackson Williams, 17, was killed in the crash when the Subaru Forester he was in with his friends hit a power pole
One of the other passengers, aged 16, was flown to the Royal North Shore Hospital in a serious condition, The Daily Telegraph reported.
Three other teens, two males and a female, were treated at the scene.
Friends in disbelief paid tribute to him on Facebook and remembered him as a youth who was 'easy-going' and 'loved by everyone'.
Images from the scene of the crash show the mangled vehicle with crumpled and roof.
Jackson was one of six people who died on the state's roads over the weekend.
The state's road toll now sits at 221, which is 44 more deaths than the same time last year.
'Those on our roads need to start to accept that personal responsibility is the key to keeping us all safe on our roads,' traffic and highway patrol Acting Assistant Commissioner Stuart Smith said on Monday.
A 16-year-old who was in the car was taken to the Royal North Shore Hospital in a serious condition
Two drivers and a pedestrian were killed in separate incidents on Sunday, while a driver and a motorcyclist lost their lives in two accidents less than 10 minutes apart on Friday.
A 67-year-old Jilliby man died in hospital after crashing into roadside trees on Sunday morning at Alison on the Central Coast.
A 74-year-old Sydney woman lost her life when she was hit by a car as she walked along a Brighton-Le-Sands footpath on Sunday afternoon while a man, 41, died after crashing into a tree north of Newcastle about 4.40am on Sunday.
Early on Friday, an 18-year-old motorcyclist died after colliding with a truck in the Sydney suburb of Sylvania, shortly followed by the death of a 45-year-old man who struck a power pole near Raymond Terrace.
'Sadly, 109 drivers, 30 passengers, two cyclists, 46 pedestrians, 32 motorcycle riders and two pillion passengers have all lost their lives on our roads so far this year,' Act Asst Comm Smith said.
The aftermath of the crash showed the extensively damaged Subaru Forester next to a power pole
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani drew some of the loudest applause during the first night of the Republican National Convention, practically screaming his judgments about law enforcement, Hillary Clinton, Islamic terrorism and misinformation about Donald Trump.
Giuliani strayed from his prepared remarks more than a dozen times, typically veering into a crescendo and an applause line.
Defending police officers, he boomed that cops across America devote their lives to 'protecting us black, white, Latino, of every race, every color, every creed, every sexual orientation.'
'When they come to save your life, they don't ask if you're black or white! They just come to save you!'
GOP delegates gathered in Cleveland's Quicken Loans Arena ate it up from 'America's mayor,' best known for steering New York through the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001.
MAKE AMERICA SCREAM AGAIN: Rudy Giuliani yelled and boomed and blared his applause lines Monday night at the Republican National Convention, drawing wild applause but overloading his microphone
'AMERICA'S MAYOR': Giuliani is best known for piloting New York City through the aftermath of 9/11
'It's time to make America one again. One America!' he said, mocking President Barack Obama for a now-famous campaign speech about racial unity.
'What happened to "There's no black America, there's no white America, there is just America"? What happened to it? Where did it go? How was it flown away?'
Each successive exclamation seemed louder than the last as he spent 15 minutes on stage making the case that Trump, who will be nominated for the White House later this week, is a generous, warm-hearted man who has been misjudged.
'Every time New York City suffered a tragedy, Donald Trump was there to help,' he said. 'He's not gonna like my telling you this, but he did it anonymously. When police officers were shot, when firefighters were hurt, when people were in trouble, he came forward and he helped, and he asked not to be mentioned.'
'Well, I am going to break my promise to him. I'm going to mention it! This is a man with a big heart who loves people! All people! From the top to the bottom! From the middle to the side!'
Giuliain's wild gesticulations included the visual equivalent of a typo, stretching his arm downward for the word 'top' and upward when he said 'bottom.'
But his transmission had not yet reached its top gear.
THE IN CROWD: Giuliani and his wife Judith (right) were seated in the VIP box next to Donald Trump Jr. and in front of Tiffany Trump
'I am telling you this because I am sick and tired of the defamation of Donald Trump by the media and by the Clinton campaign! I am sick and tired of it!' he howled as thousands rose to their feet.
'This is a good man! And America should be sick and tired of their vicious nasty campaign.'
Giuliani, at his most credible when talking about al Qaida and the ISIS terror army, risked running off the rails when he defined America's enemy as 'Islamic extremist terrorism.'
'For the purposes of the media, I did not say all of Islam. I did not say most of Islam. I said Islamic extremist terrorism!' he reiterated.
And then, finger pointed, he blared into the arena: 'You know who you are! And we're coming to get you!'
Shouts of 'Rudy! Rudy! Rudy!' shook the rafters.
Some of Giuliani's rhetorical high points were prescribed in his prepared remarks, like the bolded and underlined words that led him to shriek that America 'must commit ourselves to unconditional victory' against Middle Eastern jihadis.
Other moments were entirely ad-libbed.
CALM BEFORE THE STORM: Giuliani recited a portion of the Gettysburg Address during his afternoon rehearsal at the convention podium
'ARE WE CRAZY?' Giuliani railed against the Obama administration's unfreezing of $150 billion as part of its nuclear deal with Iran
On the Obama administration's landmark nuclear deal with Iran, he vented about 'billions of dollars' being sent 'back into a country that's the world's largest supporter of terrorism.'
'We are actually giving them the money to fund the terrorists who are killing us and our allies!' Giuliani yelled, going off script.
'We are giving them the money! Are we crazy?'
Another high-decibel moment was a brief hit on the Benghazi terror attacks describing 'Hillary Clinton lying directly to the families of the people who were killed. Right! To! Their! Face!'
Even a protester who unfurled a 'REFUGEES WELCOME' banner couldn't slow him down.
'It means we're getting to them!' Giuliani bayed, before repeating himself twice.
'It means we're getting to them! It means we're getting to them!
Giuliani appeared on stage briefly during an afternoon rehearsal, leaving no hints at all of what would come later.
During his brief visit to the podium, he calmly recited half of Abraham Lincoln's famed Gettysburg Address.
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Melania Trump was a vision wearing an off-white Roksanda Ilinicic dress as she spoke to the Republican Nation Convention on Monday night in Cleveland, Ohio.
The Slovenian immigrant, who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2006, wowed in the dress described as a 'beautiful option for the modern bride' by the e-commerce site Net-a-Porter.
The dress by the London-based Serbian designer Ilinicic retails at $2,190 and promptly sold out following the model's appearance on the RNC stage.
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Slovenian beauty Melania Trump wore a stunning Roksanda Ilinicic dress as she spoke to the Republican Nation Convention on Monday night in Cleveland, Ohio
Melania bought the dress from Net-a-porter for $2,190 and the former model and designer's choice caused the garment to sell out in minutes
The knee-length garment is a conservative piece, 'designed with a nipped-in waist and dramatic bell sleeves in a contrasting basketweave', according to its description
Melania was greeted by cheers as she paid tribute to US veterans and talked about her upbringing in Slovenia during her speech at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland
The knee-length garment is a conservative piece, 'designed with a nipped-in waist and dramatic bell sleeves in a contrasting basketweave', according to its description.
Melania hand-picked the dress cotton silk off-white Roksanda 'Margot' dress because she 'liked it', a spokeswoman said.
'Melania will be recast as the next Jackie O. She speaks four languages, ' a Trump adviser told the New York Post.
Mrs Trump made a dramatic entrance in the beautiful off-white garment, saying her husband is 'ready to lead this great nation. He's ready to fight every day to give our children the better future they deserve.'
Roksanda Ilincic, who created the jaw-dropping dress, is from Serbia, which is separated from Melania's native Slovenia by Croatia, and is based in London
Melania hand-picked the dress cotton silk off-white Roksanda 'Margot' dress because she 'liked it' and will be a Jackie O.-type style icon, according to a spokeswoman
Then she called her U.S. citizenship 'the greatest privilege on Planet Earth' Monday night.
Her husband made a surprise appearance at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio, as Queen's rock anthem 'We Are the Champions' blared through loudspeakers accustomed to pounding arena jams for LeBron James.
'We're gonna win. We're gonna win so big. Thank you very much,' he said, before introducing his wife of 11 years.
'Ladies and gentlemen,' Trump declared, 'it is my honor to present the next first lady of the United States, my wife an amazing mother and an incredible woman, Melania Trump.'
Highlighting the presumptive GOP nominee's history of 'inclusion, not division,' Mrs. Trump insisted that despite attacks from Democrats and journalists, he 'intends to represent all the people, not just some of the people.'
The former model spoke about her career in the fashion industry before she met and fell in love with The Donald. The couple shared a kiss before she stood at the lectern
The Donald reaches in for a kiss as the crowd waits for his wife to start speaking
He beamed at her while she waved to the crowd
The presumptive Republican nominee showed off his wife to the crowd before she spoke, and insisted her husband is the right man to be in the White House
Kate loves it too! The Duchess of Cambridge only last week recycled a yellow and white dress by the designer at Wimbledon
She also opted to wear the designer on a visit to an indigenous Training Academy in Ayers Rock, Australia, in 2014, left, and to the Patron's Lunch, an event to mark Queen Elizabeth's 90th birthday in 2016
Her husband made a dramatic entrance. He walked out onto the stage with Queen's We Are the Champions playing in the background
He gave his signature thumbs-up as he made his rock star entrance to the Republican convention on Monday night
'That includes Christians and Jews and Muslims,' she said.
'It includes Hispanics and African-Americans and Asians, and the poor and the middle class.'
He's prepared, she said, to be a powerful president for every American.
'He will do this better than anyone else can, and it won't even be close,' she said with the signature Trump bravado, to warm applause.
Melania didn't promise a smooth path to the White House, saying that there will be bumps in the road: 'It would not be a Trump contest without excitement and drama.'
'But throughout it all, my husband will remain focused on only one thing: his beautiful country that he loves so much.'
She hinted at an issue portfolio that she might embrace in the East Wing of the White House, saying she intended to 'help people in our country who need it the most ... children and women.'
Her time as first lady, she said, would be filled 'ensuring that every child can live in comfort and security with the best possible education.'
Donald Trump came back on stage as the Queen music swelled again when she delivered her final line, walking his wife off stage right to wild cheers.
Lieutenant General Mike Flynn, a one-time possible running mate, had the unenviable duty of speaking next.
'I don't know how you follow that!' he exclaimed.
The Trumps' entrance was preceded by an onstage event unique during the night: The platform on which the convention podium sat was lowered more than eight feet so a blue notebook containing Melania's speech could be placed on it.
She stunned the crowd in a $2, white dress by London-based designer Roksanda Ilincic.
The Donald embraces his wife and puts his hand on her back as she wishes her luck before her remarks
Travellers can now earn money instead of paying high parking costs at Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane airports simply by leaving their car behind to be driven by someone else.
A new car-sharing business called Carhood is taking on the $2.2 billion car rental market at its own game with 8000 members now signed up for the deal which pays $10 a day.
It begins by listing a car for hire on their website in the days before flying out - you receive an email confirmation and the drive to a depot near the airport 20 minutes before you are due at the terminal.
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Carhood is a car-share business which pays commuters travelling interstate up to $10 a day to hire out their car when they are not using it
An average rental period for Carhood vehicles is 10 days, which brings in $100 income for travellers while they are away from home compared to paying parking fees of up to $300 in some capital cities for the same period
Carhood is an Australian start-up company which offers members free airport parking and a cut of the proceeds from renting out their vehicle - Steven Johnson (pictured above) is a part-owner
A roadworthy check is done at the Carhood depot, including 20 photos 'for extra security' and you are then chauffeur-driven to the airport terminal in your own vehicle.
The average time for hire is 10 days, which earns owners $100 ($10 a day) plus it is washed and cleaned before being returned.
A similar time-period parked at Melbourne's T1, T2 or T3 terminals would cost $259 while the long term car park cost is $119.
At Sydney, parking close to the domestic terminals in P1 or P2 would set you back $294 and $185 for the long term Blue Emu car park.
The international car park charges almost $60 a day.
In Brisbane, a 10-day period at the domestic terminal would cost $202.
Passengers arriving in another city are greeted outside the terminal by a Carhood employee in the car they have booked online ahead of their travel
Co-owner Steven Johnson said that, on average, 70 per cent of cars offered for rent are hired by members.
'You sign up, it doesn't cost you anything, and you can share a car or hire a car, or both, all through the website when you travel,' he told Daily Mail Australia.
'Even if you don't have your car rented out, you get free parking all the time you are away.'
After members are dropped off for their flight, the car is returned to the Carhood depot before the hirer is picked up.
He estimated that 70 per cent of their customers are domestic travellers, and the rest international.
'Every time the car comes in we go through a check process at our depot,' said co-owner Steven Johnson.
He said the Sydney premises are 'about 150 metres from the domestic terminal', while Melbourne is four minutes away and Brisbane seven minutes from the airport.
Carhood has just 12 employees and has been in operation less than 18 months after beginning in the front yard of a rented home outside of Melbourne's Tullamarine Airport.
Steven Johnson, part-owner of Carhood, expects that 30,000 members will have joined by the next six months
The car-share business which originated in the front yard of a rented property near Tullamarine Airport in Melbourne is set to expand into Perth and the Gold Coast
Ford Australia signed an exclusive deal with Mr Johnson and partner Christian Schaefer on Tuesday.
'We think the Ford deal will get us to 30,000 members across Australian in the next six months,' Mr Johnson added, with the business expanding into Perth and the Gold Coast.
Ford will provide Carhood with 30 new cars across the three current airport locations.
'They supply us with a fleet of vehicles to rent out and just like other people they are on a revenue share model - they get money when their car gets rented out,' he added.
Carhood provides its rental service for travellers through Sydney Airport (pictured), Melbourne and Brisbane currently but is looking to expand
'We have got people who own three or four cars and some people give us their car permanently because they are not using it.
'That's what makes us different to rental car companies, we don't own any of the cars.'
As part of the deal, Carhood will offer Ford owners increased benefits of a 35 per cent revenue share (up from 25 per cent) and a 10 per cent rental discount .
But the new business has met some resistance, according to Mr Johnson.
A woman who tried to stop her car from rolling down a hill by jumping through the open driver's side window had to be rescued by emergency services after becoming trapped yesterday.
The woman, aged in her 50s, arrived home to her property on Wattle Tree Road in Holgate on the state's central coast on Monday afternoon just before 5pm, police told Daily Mail Australia.
'She was driving up her driveway, which is on an incline, when she got out to speak to a neighbour or friend,' Chief Inspector George Bradbury from Gosford police said.
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A woman became stuck in her car after jumping through the driver's side window to stop it from rolling down a hill on Monday afternoon
The woman in her 50s was stuck in the car for an hour as emergency services crews worked to free her
She suffered pelvic injuries as a result of the accident and was flown to Westmead Hospital but has now been released
'When she got out of her vehicle it began to roll down the driveway.
'She then tried to jump through the vehicle's window to stop the car.
'At that point it appeared to keep rolling into the fence.'
Initial investigations suggest the woman did not pull the handbrake on before she got out of the car.
'Cars don't just roll down hills,' Chief Inspector Bradbury said.
The accident happened just before 5pm on Monday when the woman stopped her car on her driveway
She left the car to speak with a neighbour but as it started to roll away she jumped into the window
A picture of the accident shows the woman's legs hanging from the driver's side window as the car is surrounded by emergency services personnel.
The woman was in the car for an hour and was stabilised by paramedics before being flown to Westmead hospital with pelvic injuries.
She has since been released from hospital, police say as the incident happened on private property they will not be pursuing it further.
The car came to rest on a fence near the woman's property but she was stuck inside
Hillary Clinton took her criticisms of Donald Trump a step further today as Republicans began their convention in Cleveland.
Clinton regularly calls her opponent 'dangerous' in speeches. Today she told PBS and CBS' Charlie Rose she believes Trump is the 'most dangerous' person to ever run for president.
'No self-discipline, no self-control, no sense of history, no understanding of the limits of the kind of power that any President should impose upon himself. He has shown none of that,' she said.
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Hillary Clinton told CBS' Charlie Rose she believes Donald Trump is the 'most dangerous' person to ever run for president
Trump wants to bring back torture, she said, and would 'order the American military to commit war crimes.'
'What he has laid out is the most dangerous, reckless approach to being President than I think we've ever seen.'
A slightly taken about Rose asked the presumptive Democratic nominee if she really meant to say Trump is the 'most dangerous man ever to run for President of the United States?'
Clinton told him, 'I believe that.'
The former secretary of state was also in Ohio today, speaking at the NAACP convention that Trump skipped and at an organizing event of her own.
She's barely up over Trump in the polls in the Buckeye State despite having made four separate visits over the last month.
How is it that Trump - 'a man you just described in such harsh terms' - is running so close to you in the polls, Rose asked her.
'Well, our presidential elections are close and the campaign is really just starting,' she first said.
Clinton added, 'There is a lot of fear in our country. And when Americans are worried they're looking for answers. He's providing simplistic, easy answers.'
'No self-discipline, no self-control, no sense of history, no understanding of the limits of the kind of power that any President should impose upon himself. He has shown none of that,' she said
Perhaps, Rose suggested, she's struggling in the polls because Americans do not trust her. A majority of voters say in almost ever poll that's taken that they are not convinced of her honesty.
'It is something that clearly I don't like to hear,' the former secretary of state who was just cleared by the Justice Department in her email scandal told him. 'Nobody would.'
She likewise noted that the perception those Americans have of her now 'is at such variance with the way I am perceived when I'm doing a job' like when she was in the Obama administration and high approval ratings.
'Part of it is seeking this job at this time of fear, anxiety, discouragement, rejectionism, that is, unfortunately, part of our political environment right now,' she said.
Clinton told him in the clip that aired Monday night on CBS, 'I understand people who are asking these questions.
The portfolio manager for Moore Capital Management, who was fired after he hosted a party in the Hamptons, has spoken out about the event for the first time, claiming he was blackmailed by the homeowner who wanted more money.
Brett Barna, who worked at the company run by billionaire Louis Bacon for six years, hosted the all-day event, dubbed #Sprayathon, over the Fourth of July weekend.
'We did a good clean event. Nothing illegal happened. We had it run by the former police chief and a security team of eight people.
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Brett Barna (pictured), a former portfolio manager at billionaire Louis Bacon's Moore Capital Management was fired after he hosted a party in the Hamptons over the Fourth of July weekend. He spoke exclusively to CNBC saying the house's owner blackmailed him and that the party was more tame than the media claims
'We did a good clean event. Nothing illegal happened. We had it run by the former police chief and a security team of eight people,' Barna (pictured, second from the left) said
'There was no damage to the house. We weren't even allowed inside the house. We were supposed to get five days and nights in the house. The owner asked us for cash, up front, which we declined.
'We paid him over AirBnB. We had problems with him from the beginning,' Barna said.
The owner of the $20 million mansion in The Hamptons, Omar Amanat, according to CNBC, said it was trashed after the hedge fund manager threw a wild pool party straight out of The Wolf of Wall Street.
Amanat is now facing security fraud charges in a separate incident and could face up to 50 years in prison if found guilty, CNBC reported.
He allegedly does not have the money to post his own bail.
'After the event he wanted (more money) from the charity's profit,' Barna said.
The party, which saw 500 people partying at the $20 million home, raised $100,000 for Last Chance Animal Rescue, according to Barna.
'I regret certain aspects of the party, but really this was supposed to be about charity.
'(The money) saves 400 animals. That's something I can be proud of,' Barna told CNBC in an interview on Monday.
The 31-year-old had worked for the company run by billionaire Louis Bacon for six years and hosted the all-day event, dubbed #Sprayathon. The furious owner of the $20million mansion in The Hamptons says it was trashed after the wild pool party
Barna had rented the eight acre estate in Sag Harbor, Long Island, on Airbnb and reportedly told the owners that he was throwing a fundraiser for an animal charity for just 50 guests. 'Mr. Barna's personal judgment was inconsistent with the firm's values,' the firm said in an e-mailed statement to Bloomberg
Amanat allegedly demanded more money from Barna than what was agreed upon, Barna claimed, and threatened consequences if he didn't pay up.
The consequence was the Amanat went to the New York Post with the story that eventually got Barna fired, Barna claimed.
'The event was nothing like what you read about. Were people drinking? Sure. Were they in their swimsuits at a pool party. Sure.
'Mr. Amanat is trying to create the most outrageous story he can to pressure me into giving him more money,' Barna said.
The 31-year-old rented the eight acre estate in Sag Harbor, Long Island, on Airbnb and reportedly told the owners that he was throwing a fundraiser for an animal charity for just 50 guests.
'Mr. Barna's personal judgment was inconsistent with the firm's values,' the firm said in an e-mailed statement to Bloomberg.
'He is no longer employed by Moore Capital Management.'
More than 1,000 people gathered for the party, a spectacle of bikini-clad women and gun-toting dwarfs in patriotic costumes, according to Page Six.
Guests danced and doused each other in Champagne as rapper Ace Hood performed from a balcony - and posted all the debauchery on social media.
They left behind broken furniture and used condoms, according to Amanat.
Barna said this claim is bogus and no damages were done to the residence.
The owner says he is planning to sue Barna for $1million and also says Barna is disputing the $27,000 cost of the Airbnb rental and refusing to pay it, Page Six reported.
The property is listed on Airbnb for $5,000 per night and requiring a minimum five night stay.
'It was like 'Jersey Shore' meets a frat party,' the owner told the website.
He claimed Barna was last seen 'chugging Champagne with two midgets' on Sunday.
He added: 'Brett came to me dropping Louis Bacon's name and saying he was a big deal with the Robin Hood Foundation.'
The owner says dwarfs in patriotic costumes (pictured in posts from social media) also attended
There were so many people at the party that the concrete around the pool crumbled and fell into the water
The owner of the nine-bedroom mansion said revelers left behind broken furniture and used condoms
'He said there would be 50 people at the event and it was for animal rescue.
'But the only animals there were the people, a thousand of them.
'They drowned themselves in Champagne, they had midgets they threw in the pool, they broke into the house, trashed the furniture, art was stolen, we found used condoms.'
The owner added that the sheer amount of people at the party meant the concrete surrounding the pool crumbled and fell into the water.
However, a source claims cleaners had been hired and the house was left in a good condition, according to Page Six.
The source also said the event raised $100,000 for Last Chance Animal Rescue. Daily Mail Online has contacted the Southampton-based charity for comment.
And it's not the first time the #Sprayathon bash has caused trouble.
Revelers at last year's party, held at a house in The Hamptons owned by Hercules actor Kevin Sorbo started a brush fire.
Guests danced and doused each other in Champagne as rapper Ace Hood performed from a balcony - and posted all the debauchery on social media
The owner says he is planning to sue Barna for $1million and also says Barna is disputing the $27,000 cost of the Airbnb rental and refusing to pay it
'He said there would be 50 people at the event and it was for animal rescue,' the owner said. 'But the only animals there were the people, a thousand of them'
But a source claims cleaners had been hired and the house was left in a good condition. Pictured are revelers from Barna's pool party
The property (pictured) is listed on Airbnb for $5,000 per night and requires a minimum five-night stay
Garfield Ridge's Blue Porch Lights Show Support For Police After Shootings
By Mae Rice in News on Jul 19, 2016 6:04PM
Throughout Garfield Ridge on the Southwest Side, residents are installing blue lightbulbs on their porches to show their support of police officers in the wake of shootings in Dallas and Baton Rouge that killed a total of eight police officers.
There's a "huge, huge population of Chicago police officers that live in our area," Al Cacciottolo, president of the Garfield Ridge Neighborhood Watch, told Chicagoist. His organization is giving away the blue-tinted light bulbs, donated by Bridegport's Midwest Lighting, in exchange for $1 donations to police departments affected by the shootings (though most people give more than that).
The first $2,500 in donations went to the Dallas police department, Cacciottolo said. The next chunk of donations will go to the Baton Rouge police, and it will likely be more than $1,000. (So far, Cacciottolo said the Neighborhood Watch has raised $700 of that, but they have another fundraising event scheduled for Friday.)
Midwest Lighting donated the first batch of lightbulbsabout 1,200 of themon July 11, and another 300 on Tuesday, the company's head, Michael Noonan, told Chicagoist.
"We were really looking to purchase them," Cacciottolo said, but when Noonan heard about their project, he donated them for free.
"I had 'em in stock, and they asked for them... I have a son-in-law who's a Chicago copper, so I was glad to help," Noonan said. He added that he also has a lot of red lightbulbs in stock he'd be happy to donate, if anyone needs them.
"We really wanted to show these guys and girls [in the police force] that we have their back and we support you," Cacciottolo said, of why his organization is giving out the bulbs. Even Garfield Ridge residents like himself, who aren't cops, "all of us either have friends or relatives who are in the police," he said.
Local support for the bulb project has been strong, Cacciottolo said, as has local support for Chicago police in general. The Garfield Ridge Neighborhood Watch held a meeting on Monday night, termed a "Pro Police Rally" on Facebook, that attracted more than 200 people, Cacciottolo said. "It was amazing."
The ring of steel surrounding the Republican National Convention was breached minutes before Donald Trump's first appearance - by a young woman who admits her father is a GOP supporter.
Alli McCracken, 27, decided to unfurl a banner slamming Donald Trump after she sneaked into the Quicken Loans Arena where a massive security operation was in action to protect the presumptive candidate and his wife making their first appearance.
McCracken is part of Code Pink, a group of female protesters who have interrupted public hearings on Capitol Hill.
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Alli McCracken, 27, breached convention security and unfurled a banner which read: 'Yes we can end war'
McCracken (pictured) is part of Code Pink, a group of female protesters who have interrupted public hearings on Capitol Hill
Before she was apprehended, McCracken reached the empty seats close to the podium in the first breach in convention security, which had been supposed to be impenetrable
Her presence in empty seats close to the podium is the first breach in convention security, which had been supposed to be impenetrable.
She was apprehended by police officers after a woman tussled with her for around a minute to try and confiscate her anti Trump banner.
Republicans vented their anger at the 27-year-old whose father is an engineer and her mother works for an eye surgeon.
The Republican delegates turned their own blue banners in her direction as police moved in.
McCracken was questioned by police who checked her identity and was then thrown out of the arena and warned not to re-enter.
McCracken of Washington DC, had managed to get close to close to Trump's running mate Mike Pence who was waiting with his wife to see Melania Trump speak.
McCracken was ejected from the conference after a woman tussled with her for around a minute to try and confiscate her anti Trump banner
McCracken was questioned by police who checked her identity and was then thrown out of the arena
McCracken of Washington DC had also managed to get close to close to Trump's running mate Mike Pence
A defiant McCracken, wearing a pink dress and off white blazer, gave two peace signs as she was led out of the arena
In an exclusive interview she told Daily Mail Online: 'My dad is a Republican, but I'm winning him around. He is beginning to listen to me.
'They won't be disappointed with what happened tonight. It won't have surprised them. They would have expected something like this.'
The protester is administrative and communications director at the campaign group Code Pink.
It calls itself a' feminist anti-war non-profit organization' but is best known for demonstrating at hearings on Capital Hill.
She graduated from Hobart and William Smith Colleges with a BA in political science and government, religious studies in 2010.
She was once arrested at a congressional hearing accused of assaulting Leon Panetta in 2011, when he was defense secretary.
The charges were later dropped.
McCracken said Code Pink does not believe Donald Trump (left, with his wife Melania) or Hillary Clinton 'would make suitable presidents'
'Trump's (pictured) hateful rhetoric is the kind that leads to war,' McCracken said in an exclusive interview with Daily Mail Online
McCracken said she had eluded security because she wanted to make a stand against Trump, who will be confirmed at the convention on Thursday.
She said many of the Republicans she had spoken to did not favor Trump and that being arrested and risking being charged was 'a small price to pay.'
'Trump's hateful rhetoric is the kind that leads to war,' she told Daily Mail Online.
'As a young person I have grown up in a time of endless war and that is what making us unsafe.
'Spending trillions on further war instead of investing in our communities is what Trump will do and I wanted to make my point that it is so wrong.
'I was waiting for Trump but when I saw Mike Pence walk in I was overcome with strong feelings against him because he has waged war on women.
'We need peace and I'm here with the peace group Code Pink. We need black lives to matter and we want a President for peace.
'We don't think that Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton would make suitable presidents.'
Protesters from Code Pink took to the streets to make fun of Trump as they rallied in downtown Cleveland
Code Pink activists displayed anti-Trump signs which read 'No future in war' and 'Stop hatred against immigrants'
Asked why she felt it necessary to interrupt a meeting being held for supporters, she said: 'We are in an extremely critical moment in American political history where we are faced with the next leader of our country being somebody who has said racist, Islamaphobic and xenophobic things shamelessly.
Cosby, in his 2015 mugshot, appears to have a 'cloudy' right eye which one optometrist said was a sign of keratoconus
Bill Cosby may have scored a victory today after a judge declared he would be allowed to sue a woman who accused him of rape, but troubles still lie ahead.
Cosby is 'in his own personal hell' because he has a degenerative eye condition keratoconus that has left him completely blind, a source told the New York Post.
The anonymous source said: 'He is confined to his house in Pennsylvania, and the only person on his side is his wife, Camille, who is masterminding his defense.'
The comedian, who just celebrated his 79th birthday last week, is often pictured flanked by his lawyers on both sides.
In 2015, his attorney Monique Pressley explained: 'He's 78 years old, and blind, so he does use a cane so that he can know whats coming in front of him and he does require assistance.'
Keratoconus, which researchers believe is caused by a combination of genetics, environmental factors and the endocrine system, can lead to a thinning cornea that bulges in a conical shape.
Fluids can enter the eye and cloud the surface, and optometrist Dr. Jacob Nachum said the right eye in Cosby's December 30, 2015 mugshot shows he's suffering from keratoconus, Inside Edition reported.
Those who live with the condition usually experience blurred vision that can be treated with special corrective contact lenses in the early stages, although serious cases may call for a cornea transplant.
On Monday, a judge allowed Cosby to sue former Temple University employee Andrea Constand, because she breached the terms of a confidentiality agreement in a 2006 settlement.
Constand was allegedly drugged and raped by the 79-year-old disgraced comedian in 2004, but after police said in 2005 there wasn't enough evidence to press charges, she sued him instead.
He settled out of court in 2006, with one of the conditions being an agreement not to speak publicly about her claims - an agreement that he says she broke,The Hollywood Reporter said.
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Cosby is 'in his own personal hell' because he has a degenerative eye condition keratoconus that has left him completely blind, a source told the New York Post. Only his wife Camille stands by his side, the source said
An anonymous source told the NY Post: 'He is confined to his house in Pennsylvania, and the only person on his side is his wife, Camille, who is masterminding his defense.' (pictured Camille and Cosby in 2009)
Cosby says in the suit that in 2015, Constand and her lawyers helped leak a deposition in which Cosby admitted to giving Quaaludes to young women with the intent of having sex with them.
That deposition, along with claims being made by other women, led to police reopening her case - at which point she and her mom spoke to officers, allegedly in breach of the agreement.
A judge declared Cosby would be allowed to sue Andrea Constand (pictured) for breaching a confidentiality agreement in a 2006 settlement
He also accused her of talking to a number of media companies.
Constand said that Cosby had breached the agreement himself due to the deluge of claims that emerged against him in 2014 and 2015.
However, that argument failed to pass muster, according to US District Judge Eduardo Robreno.
Constand may have to return the money that she received during the 2006 settlement if she loses.
Constand's lawyers, Delores Troiani and Bebe Kivitz, are also named in the suit as he accuses them of releasing the decade-old deposition.
But Troiani and Kivitz say they should be excluded from that decision, arguing that they were not involved in the release of the deposition transcript nor with the court-reporting service that leaked it.
But Robreno said that would have to be established at trial.
Cosby had denied all of the rape and sexual assault allegations made against him.
Thousands of Republican Nation Convention delegates have been warned to wash their hands before eating after party staff were hit by norovirus.
Officials said 11 members of the planning team for the California delegation to the Republican convention were recovering from a bout of norovirus, or what's commonly known as stomach flu, health officials said. No delegates appeared to be affected.
The symptoms, which can include vomiting and diarrhea, were first reported Thursday as logistics members arrived at a hotel about an hour west of Cleveland ahead of the Republican National Convention, said Pete Schade, Erie County health commissioner.
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How to keep safe: Delegates at the RNC have been told to avoid shaking hands and sharing food while nominating Donald Trump because of a norovirus outbreak
Security tight: The threat to the delegates may not be the anti-Trump protesters outside - who were contained by Akron Police called in to back up Cleveland officers - but norovirus
Threat: Alex Jones, center, a conspiracy theorist and radio show host, is escorted out of a crowd of protesters after he said he was attacked in Public Square in Cleveland during the second day of the RNC
Protests: Anti-Trump protesters yell as police look on at Public Square Tuesday, July 19, 2016, in Cleveland, during the second day of the Republican convention.
Those who got sick are keeping themselves isolated in their rooms, Schade said, and the Ohio Health Department is trying to identify the source.
Norovirus can be contracted from an infected person, from contaminated food or water, or by touching contaminated surfaces.
Ohio Health Department spokesman Russ Kennedy confirmed there was at least one suspected norovirus case and said the victim was apparently infected before arriving in Ohio, based on when the person fell ill.
Cynthia Bryant, executive director of the California GOP, told delegation members to wash their hands frequently, avoid shaking hands and not to share food.
The warning not to shake hands at a gathering where thousands of delegates, lobbyists and journalists are mixing means that norovirus is now a bigger threat than disorder.
There were the first signs of violence outside the venue on Tuesday, when police broke up scuffles between groups of demonstrators a few blocks from the Convention as crowds in the hundreds gathered.
There was no immediate word on any arrests or injuries.A skirmish broke out when right-wing conspiracy theorist and radio show host Alex Jones started speaking in downtown's Public Square through a bullhorn. Police on bicycles pushed back a surging crowd, and Jones was whisked away.
Minutes later, more officers on bicycles formed a line between a conservative religious group and a communist-leaning organization carrying a sign that read, 'America Was Never Great.'
The demonstrators appeared outnumbered by police and members of the media. Police on bike and on foot formed lines to keep pockets of protesters separated.
Both sides: Protesters clash over the American flag in Public Square , in Cleveland
Making their case: Anti-Trump protesters were active in downtown Cleveland on Tuesday. A total of more than 5,000 police and other law enforcement personnel have been deployed
Second day: A Black Lives Matter protest banner was brought out on Tuesday for a repeat performance
It's our flag too: Another clash in Public Square, Cleveland, over the flag was watched by officers
Demonstrators soon spilled into the streets, and some appeared to be making their way toward the arena where the convention is being held.
The crowds and the police presence were some of the largest and most raucous gatherings in downtown Cleveland since the convention got underway Monday.
Cleveland's police chief was talking to the crowd before one of the skirmishes broke out.
As the second day of the convention got underway, three people were arrested and charged with criminal mischief for climbing flagpoles outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum early in the morning and hanging an anti-Donald Trump banner. Firefighters took it down.
The museum said in statement that while the rock hall is an 'icon of free speech,' officials discourage 'illegal actions that stress our first responders.'
Also Tuesday, Cleveland's police chief said 300 officers from more than a dozen law enforcement agencies are patrolling on bicycles in downtown Cleveland during the convention. Supporters of bike patrols say they make officers more maneuverable and less threatening-looking.
Outspoken independent senator Jacqui Lambie is calling for a royal commission into Islam in Australia.
Senator Lambie's office on Tuesday released a graphic comparing a 'big problem' with Islamic radicalisation to child molestation in the Australian Catholic church.
The graphic asks if a royal commission is uncovering paedophilia in the church, why couldn't one be held to 'discover the truth' about 'hate preachers, radicalisation and terrorism'.
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Independent Senator Jacqui Lambie has called for a Royal Commission into Islam
Her office released the above graphic on Tuesday comparing radical Islam to paedophilia in the Catholic church
'The Australian Catholic Church for years has had a big problem with child molesters... and now we have a Royal Commission to discover the truth', the text above a graphic of the cross reads.
'Australian Islam for years has had a big problem with hate preachers, radicalisation and terrorism... Why can't we discover the truth with a Royal Commission?' the other half of the graphic reads.
The writing is placed above a crescent moon and star - a symbol associated with the Muslim faith.
It comes after One Nation leader Pauline Hanson called for a similar commission into whether Islam is a religion or an ideology.
She said a commission would help uncover 'the truth' about extremists and radicalisation
It comes after One Nation leader Pauline Hanson called for a similar commission
Her controversial policies include a ban on building new mosques until the commission is held, and installing CCTV cameras in all existing mosques.
Hanson said Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull this week called to congratulate her on winning a Queensland seat in the upper house.
She told the prime minister, who before the election said she was unwelcome in Australian politics, that she wanted to work with the government to 'get good legislation for the people'.
'But I also told him I will not back down on my issues to do with Islam,' she said.
Wisconsin Sheriff David Clarke received a standing ovation at the Republican National Convention tonight after speaking barely more than five words to the delegates.
Taking to the stage, Clarke told the thousands gathered in the Quicken Loans Arena: 'Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to make something very clear, blue lives matter in America.'
That statement had delegates immediately on their feet with a long peal of applause punctuated with shouts of 'we love you sheriff' and 'police lives matter'.
Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke drew a standing ovation with his opening statement to the RNC, saying: 'Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to make something very clear, blue lives matter in America'
Clarke then went on to celebrate the acquittal of Lt. Brian Rice who was the latest officer to be charged over the death of Freddie Grey, who died in police custody in Baltimore.
He then accused attorney Marilyn Mosby, who prosecuted the case, an 'activist state's attorney' and described her actions as malicious.
Clarke then went on to speak about the convention's theme, make America safe again, saying it is a 'prerequisite' to making America great again, which has been Donald Trump's cornerstone pledge.
He said: 'We simply cannot be great if we do not feel safe in our homes, on our streets, in our schools.
'I see this every day at street level where many Americans increasingly have an uneasiness about the ability of their families to live safely in these troubling times.
'This transcends race, religion, ethnicity, gender, age and lifestyle.'
He also spoke of security being a 'shared endeavor' which required 'trust' in both citizens and police officers who are tasked with enforcing the peace.
Addressing the recent unrest and demonstrations against law enforcement across America, he described the situation as 'anarchy'.
Sheriff Clarke also attacked the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements, saying their actions 'transcend peaceful protest and violate the code of conduct we rely on'
Clark tuned into the theme of the conference, make America safe again, saying safety is a 'prerequisite' to delivering on Trump's campaign pledge of making America great again
Powerful: Wisconsin Sheriff David Clarke received a standing ovation at the Republican National Convention tonight after speaking barely more than five words to the delegates.
Taking to the stage, Clarke told the thousands gathered in the Quicken Loans Arena: 'Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to make something very clear, blue lives matter in America.'
That statement had delegates immediately on their feet with a long peal of applause punctuated with shouts of 'we love you sheriff' and 'police lives matter'.
He said: 'What we witnessed in Baltimore and Ferguson and Baton Rouge was a collapse of the social order.
'So many of the actions of the Occupy movement and Black Lives Matter transcend peaceful protest and violates the code of conduct we rely on. I call it anarchy.'
Clarke also spoke about the need for police to be transparent and steadfast in their investigations, before turning to Trump saying 'these are the truths he understands and supports'.
Clarke concluded: 'Donald Trump understands the only way that we can make our nation safe again is to recommit to a system of justice in which no government official, not even those who have fought their way to the marble and granite halls of Washington; no private citizen, no elected official, even Hillary Clinton; no group of people, despite the fervor with which they put forward their argument; can claim privilege above the law.
'It cannot happen in the United States of America.'
Clarke, the Sheriff for Milwaukee County in Wisconsin, has become a conservative icon for his passionate defense of police amidst allegations of abuse of minorities across America.
Indeed, earlier on Monday Clarke had a heated exchange with CNN's Don Lemon in which he claimed to have 'predicted' the recent spate of deadly attacks on law enforcement.
'I've been watching this for two years. I've predicted this,' said Clarke on CNN. 'This anti-police rhetoric sweeping the country has turned out some hateful things inside of people that are now playing themselves out on the American police officer.'
The interview, which followed the deaths of three Baton Rouge officers at the hands of a lone cop-killer on Sunday, got off to a prickly start.
Anger: Clarke, the Sheriff for Milwaukee County in Wisconsin, has become a conservative icon for his passionate defense of police amidst allegations of abuse of minorities across America
Lemon said that police in Louisiana wanted to preach peace and togetherness after the shootings.
Clarke replied that he didn't believe that and said that Black Lives Matter are fueling hate against law enforcement.
Lemon objected to Clarke calling Black Lives Matter a 'hate ideology' and asked the Sheriff to 'keep the vibe down here'.
This infuriated Clarke who said, 'I'm looking at three dead cops this week and I am looking at five last week. You're trying to tell me to keep it down?!'.
The feisty interview essentially broke down by the end, with Clarke and Lemon at loggerheads over their definitions of Black Lives Matter.
Melania Trump's opening night speech at the Republican National Convention was heralded as a success Monday night until critics pointed out multiple passages that appeared to be lifted nearly word-for-word from Michelle Obama's address to the Democratic National Convention eight years ago.
After the similarities were pointed out, the Trump campaign admitted that the aspiring first lady's talk 'included fragments that reflected her own thinking' but came from somewhere else.
By the time the seemingly-plagiarized portions of the speech became headline news Tuesday morning, Trump's campaign chairman furiously denied that any of the remarks were intentionally lifted from the now-first lady's speech turning the focus instead on Hillary Clinton.
'There's no cribbing of Michelle Obama's speech,' Paul Manafort told CNN. 'These were common words and values that she cares about her family, and things like that.'
'I mean, she was speaking in front of 35 million people last night, she knew that. To think that she would be cribbing Michelle Obama's words is crazy. ... This is, once again, an example of when a woman threatens Hillary Clinton, how she seeks out to demean her and take her down. It's not going to work.'
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Melania Trump has been accused of stealing remarks made by Michelle Obama for her own speech at the Republican National Convention
The wife of the GOP Presidential candidate used two passages that match nearly word-for-word the speech that first lady delivered in 2008 at the Democratic National Convention
MELANIA TRUMP'S SPEECH (2016) 'My parents impressed on me the value of that you work hard for what you want in life. 'That your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise. 'That you treat people with respect. Show the values and morals in in the daily life. 'That is the lesson that we continue to pass on to our son. 'We need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow. [Cheering] Because we want our children in these nations to know that the only limit to your achievement is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.' Advertisement
MICHELLE OBAMA'S SPEECH (2008) 'And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you're going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them, and even if you don't agree with them. 'And Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values, and pass them on to the next generation. 'Because we want our children and all children in this nation to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.' Advertisement
Manafort was even more dismissive on CBS, saying that 'there are not that many similarities' between the two speeches. 'There are a couple of phrases.'
'It's basically three places in the speech, and there are fragments of words,' he insisted. 'She spoke in front of 35 million people yesterday. She knew what she was doing. And she would never crib from another speech without acknowledging she was quoting somebody else.'
Asked if heads would roll over the embarrassing result, Manafort indicated no one would be sacked.
'I don't think Donald Trump feels that there is anything to fire about,' he said.
The campaign doesn't appear to be leaning in the direction of naming the aide responsible for putting words in Melania's speech that originated with a Michelle Obama speechwriter.
'It was a collaboration,' he said. 'The wordsmith I'm not sure.'
On NBC's 'Today' show, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie defended Team Trump.
Asked if he could make a courtroom case for plagiarism, the former federal prosecutor shot back: 'Not when 93 per cent of the speech is completely different than Michelle Obama's speech. And they expressed some common thoughts.'
Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort (right) insisted there was no intentional plagiarism
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie seemed not to know how plagiarism works, defending Melania Trump by telling NBC viewers that 93 per cent of her speech wasn't lifted from Michelle Obama
Christie brushed off the controversy, saying that 'the worst day of a convention is the first day because everyone's building up to it and everybody gets breathless, both the delegates and the media, about something to cover, a controversy to talk about.'
'I think after tonight we won't be talking about this. We'll move on to ... whatever comes up tonight.'
The identical passages from the two women's speeches focus on lessons Mrs. Trump said she learned from her parents. The remarks also touched on the relevance of those lessons and their experience as mothers.
They came near the beginning of her roughly 10-minute speech, which was otherwise distinct from the address that Mrs. Obama gave when her husband, Barack Obama, was being named the Democratic nominee for president.
In Mrs. Trump's speech in Cleveland, she said: 'From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise, that you treat people with respect.'
'They taught and showed me values and morals in their daily life.'
In Mrs. Obama's 2008 speech in Denver, she said: 'And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: like, you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond, that you do what you say you're going to do, that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them and even if you don't agree with them.'
Another passage with notable similarities that follows two sentences later in Mrs. Trump's speech addresses her attempts to instill those values in her son.
'We need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow,' Mrs. Trump said. 'Because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.'
Melania has insisted that she wrote the speech with only a 'little help', but only read it through once
'I AM SO PROUD OF YOUR CHOICE FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES': HIGHLIGHTS OF MELANIA'S SPEECH On Donald's patriotism: 'I have been with Donald for 18 years and I have been aware of his love for this country since we first met. He never had a hidden agenda when it comes to his patriotism, because, like me, he loves this country so much'
On her parents and her country: My elegant and hard-working mother Amalia introduced me to fashion and beauty. My father Viktor instilled in me a passion for business and travel. Their integrity, compassion and intelligence reflect to this day on me and for my love of family and America.
On his determination: 'If you want someone to fight for you and your country, I can assure you, he is the 'guy'. He will never, ever, give up. And, most importantly, he will never, ever, let you down'
On winning: 'His achievements speak for themselves, and his performance throughout the primary campaign proved that he knows how to win'
On Trump's best qualities: 'He is tough when he has to be but he is also kind and fair and caring. This kindness is not always noted, but it is there for all to see. That is one reason I fell in love with him to begin with'
On his political ambitions: 'Donald intends to represent all the people, not just some of the people. That includes Christians and Jews and Muslims, it includes Hispanics and African-Americans and Asians, and the poor and the middle class'
On her own ambitions: 'If I am honored to serve as first lady, I will use that wonderful privilege to try to help people in our country who need it the most. One of the many causes dear to my heart is helping children and women'
On being ready: 'My husband is ready to lead this great nation. He is ready to fight, every day, to give our children the better future they deserve. Ladies and gentlemen, Donald J. Trump is ready to serve and lead this country as the next president of the United States' Advertisement
In the first lady's 2008 speech, she said, 'Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values and to pass them onto the next generation, because we want our children and all children in this nation to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work hard for them.'
Jon Favreau, President Obama's former speechwriter, tweeted after the event that Mrs Obama's speech in 2008 was written by Sarah Hurwitz - a former Hillary Clinton speechwriter.
'So the Trump campaign plagiarized from a Hillary speechwriter,' Favreau added.
In response to the nearly-identical passages, the Trump camp at first ignored questions about the similarities before outright denying them.
Jason Miller, the senior communications adviser, said: 'In writing her beautiful speech, Melania's team of writers took notes on her life's inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking.
'Melania's immigrant experience and love for America shone through in her speech, which made it such a success.'
Later, Manafort said Mrs. Trump's speech was 'of course not' plagiarized and that the similar passages are composed of 'common words and values.'
But he provided no insight into how the words were lifted in the first place.
'You know, there was certainly a collaboration,' he said. 'Certainly there's no feeling on her part that she did it, you know. What she did was use words that are common words and just expect her to to think that she would do something like that, knowing how scrutinized her speech was going to be last night, is just really absurd.'
NBC political commentator Nicole Wallace hinted Tuesday morning at possible backstabbing on the part of the speechwriter.
'There is no doubt in my mind that whoever put those words on a piece of paper was very aware of what Michelle Obama said,' Wallace said on the Today show.
The first lady made the remarks while her husband was being confirmed as the Democratic nominee
Trump's campaign had no immediate reaction when asked about the similarities in the two speeches. But The Donald did congratulate his wife on Twitter later that evening
White House officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment late Monday evening.
In an interview with NBC News taped ahead of her convention appearance and posted online early Tuesday, Mrs. Trump said of her speech, 'I wrote it.' She added that she had 'a little help.'
She added that she had read through it only one last time before arriving in Cleveland.
After her speech in Cleveland on Monday, her husband tweeted: 'It was truly an honor to introduce my wife, Melania. Her speech and demeanor were absolutely incredible. Very proud!'
Jeffrey Lord, a Trump supporter, told CNN that whoever was responsible for the suspected plagiarism should be fired.
Politico also questioned information about Melania in the convention's official program, which states that she earned a degree in architecture and design.
But she actually dropped out after a year.
Despite the allegations, The Donald congratulated his wife after the speech
Lara Trump, wife of Donald's son Eric, posted a positive message for her stepmother-in-law hours after the scandal hit Tuesday morning
Melania's remarks had been well-received, until the similarities between the speeches were revealed
She walked onto the stage in Cleveland with a huge smile on her face ahead of the speech
The pair shared a kiss before she spoke ahead of the historic speech
Trump's campaign released a statement after the similarities were uncovered, but did not mention plagiarism
VIDEO: Melania Trump told NBC's Matt Lauer before the speech: "I wrote it...with a little help as possible." https://t.co/MZraa04Goj Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) July 19, 2016
Rugby league personality Matty Johns has condemned Sonia Kruger's call to ban Muslim immigration to Australia.
Speaking on The Triple M Grill Team on Tuesday morning, Johns said Kruger's rhetoric fed into the narrative of 'destructive individuals who are radicalising young Australians.'
Johns said radical Islamic extremists would have 'rejoiced' after hearing her comments.
'What is that saying to a young Sydney boy who's parents came here from Afghanistan after the invasion?,' Johns asked.
'It's saying, "you might be born here mate, but you're not one of us''. It's saying to all the practising Muslims, "you're Australian, but we don't really want you here".'
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Rugby league personality Matty Johns has condemned Sonia Kruger's call to ban Muslim immigration to Australia
Johns said Kruger's rhetoric fed into the narrative of 'destructive individuals who are radicalising young Australians'
During a fiery Today Show panel discussion on Monday, Kruger argued there is a correlation between the number of Muslims in a country and the number of terrorist attacks.
The former Strictly Ballroom star said she shouldn't automatically be labelled racist after calling for Australia to stop Muslim immigration.
The remarks sparked a social media firestorm - the Today Extra host's comments were branded 'horrid and racist' - and after going to ground briefly she released a combative statement.
The mother of baby girl Maggie McPherson referred the terrorist slaughter of 84 people in Nice last week to argue people should be able to talk about 'these issues' in a democracy.
'Following the atrocities last week in Nice where 10 children lost their lives, as a mother, I believe it's vital in a democratic society to be able to discuss these issues without automatically being labelled racist,' Kruger said.
'What is that saying to a young Sydney boy who's parents came here from Afghanistan after the invasion?' Johns defended Krugers right to free speech, but said her remarks were divisive
The Nine Network has defended Kruger, saying their 'Mixed Grill' morning segment was all about 'freedom of speech'.
Following her friends' words on Tuesday morning, Kruger tearfully explained what prompted her controversial call.
Voice quavering, she explained she was 'rocked to the core' after seeing a photograph of a child's dead body in Nice.
'I saw the image of a baby covered in a plastic sheet with a doll lying beside her and it rocked me to the very core,' she said.
'I imagined what that must have been like for the people of Nice, for the friends and families of the lost and the thought that it could happen here terrifies me.'
Kruger has stood by her comments, stressing the importance of being able to have important discussions in the public sphere without being labelled racist
Ms Chamberlain and Michael divorced in 1991 after her four-year jail stint
Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton has revealed she can never forgive her ex-husband, more than three decades after their newborn baby was snatched by a dingo in a murder mystery that made world headlines.
The 68-year-old spoke at the National Christian Family Conference in Sydney on Monday and said does not hold any anger, but when pressed on why she could not forgive Michael Chamberlain, said it was 'private'.
In August 1980, the couple were camping at the base of Uluru in the Northern Territory when their youngest child, nine-week-old Azaria, was taken from the family tent.
Although she was wrongfully jailed over Azaria's murder, Ms Chamberlain-Creighton told the crowd she is trying to not be 'stuck on resentment' as it 'sleeps with you at night', the Courier Mail reported.
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Lindy Chamberlain (pictured with ex-husband Michael) has revealed the one person she cannot forgive
Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton (pictured right in 2012) has revealed she can never forgive her ex-husband and pastor Michael (left), more than three decades after their newborn baby was snatched by a dingo
In August 1980, the couple were camping at the base of Uluru in the Northern Territory when their youngest child, nine-week-old Azaria (pictured with Ms Chamberlain) was taken from the family tent
THE LINDY CHAMBERLAIN CASE: OVER THE YEARS August 17, 1980 Lindy Chamberlain discovered her daughter Azaria missing from their family tent during a camping trip at Uluru in the Northern Territory. December 1980 An initial inquest supported Lindy and Michael Chamberlains claims their daughter was taken by a dingo. December 1981 A second inquest was ordered after the Supreme Court quashed the initial inquests findings. September 1982 Lindy was charged with Azarias murder and Michael was charged with being an accessory after the fact. October 29, 1982 The couple was found guilty of their respective charges. Lindy was sentenced to life in prison and Michael received a suspended sentence. Early 1986 The jacket Azaria was wearing when she was killed was found by authorities in a dingo lair after a British tourist fell to his death in the same area. 1986 The Northern Territory government ordered Lindy to be released from prison. 1988 Lindy and Michael were acquitted of Azarias death by the Supreme Court and their convictions were overturned. The couple received a $1.3 million pay-out for their wrongful imprisonment. 1991 Lindy and Michael divorced. 1995 A third inquest into the infants death was held and returned an open verdict. 2012 A fourth inquest was held and the coroner ruled that a dingo did in fact take Azaria from the familys campsite. Michael said that he and his ex-wife had no contact. Advertisement
'If you're holding the anger you're not hurting them at all. They're succeeding well beyond their wildest dreams. It's you that's dying,' she said.
Ms Chamberlain-Creighton said it was the Australian public's 'responsibility' to 'carry the pain' after many wrongly believed she had murdered her daughter.
She told the crowd she knew the truth would come out eventually as 'God would make sure it all came out right'.
The New-Zealand born woman praised one reporter who publicly apologised for believing the couple were guilty.
She said the scars from her past are slowly healing after spending 32 years fighting for justice.
On the evening of August 17 in 1980, Ms Chamberlain-Creighton went to check on Azaria, and found her gone, she called out either, 'that dogs got my baby or 'my God, my God, a dingo has got my baby'
Once happily married, Lindy and Michael Chamberlain (pictured) went from being the loving parents of three young children to being accused in the disappearance of their baby
On the evening of August 17 in 1980, Ms Chamberlain-Creighton went to check on Azaria, and found her gone
Officers could not find any dingo saliva on the baby's jumpsuit and Ms Chamberlain-Creighton claimed Azaria was wearing a black matinee jacket over the top
Ms Chamberlain-Creighton spoke at a conference in Sydney on Monday and said she is trying not to hold on to anger, but when pressed on why she could not forgive Michael Chamberlain (pictured), said it was 'private'
Ms Chamberlain-Creighton said it was the Australian public's 'responsibility' to 'carry the pain' after many wrongly believed she had murdered her daughter
A seven-week hearing concluded on October 29, 1982 with Lindy Chamberlain being sentenced to life for murder and Michael Chamberlain receiving a suspended sentence for being an accessory after the fact.
Ms Chamberlain-Creighton gave birth to her fourth child Kahlia while behind bars and was exonerated four years later when police discovered a vital piece of evidence.
Officers could not find any dingo saliva on the baby's jumpsuit and Ms Chamberlain-Creighton claimed Azaria was wearing a black matinee jacket over the top.
The jacket was found in 1986 when English tourist David Brett fell to his death from Uluru during an evening climb. His body was recovered from an area full of dingo lairs and police discovered the jacket nearby.
Ms Chamberlain and her ex-husband divorced in 1991 and she remarried husband Rick.
In 2012, the former pastor said he and his ex-wife have no contact and the pair were 'both changed' after the accusations.
A seven-week hearing concluded on October 29, 1982 with Lindy Chamberlain being sentenced to life for murder and Michael Chamberlain (both pictured) receiving a suspended sentence
Ms Chamberlain-Creighton (pictured in 2012) gave birth to her fourth child Kahlia while behind bars and was exonerated four years later when police discovered a vital piece of evidence
Police calculate her pay at about $1.80 an hour, but she
Lili Huang (pictured), 35, of Minnesota is charged in with five felony counts, including labor trafficking, false imprisonment and assault
A Chinese nanny escaped from a Minnesota home where she was being kept in a 'state of slavery', which included beatings and working 18 hours a day, after being brought to the U.S. in March, according to a criminal complaint.
Lili Huang, 35, of Woodbury is accused of malicious acts such as breaking the ribs of an unidentified woman and allegedly ripping out her hair so frequently, the nanny had to hide it or be forced by Hunag to 'eat it', a criminal report said.
Huang's has been charged with five felony counts, including labor trafficking, false imprisonment, assault and unlawfully taking another person's passport.
The 58-year-old nanny, who is not named in the complaint, arrived in the U.S. on a visa and was kept at a house in the 9700 block of Wellington Lane, a prosecutor said.
The woman, using a Chinese language interpreter, told police she had worked for Huang's wealthy family in Shanghai, noting she was treated well there, the Star Tribune reported.
She was then asked to provide services for the family in Minnesota with the family agreeing to deposit $890 a month into the woman's bank account in China, according to the complaint.
Once in the U.S., the woman was forced to work up to 18 hours a day doing child care, cooking and cleaning, the complaint said.
Police calculate her pay at about $1.80 an hour, but she apparently did not receive any of it.
Washington County prosecutor Pete Orput said the nanny was held in appalling conditions, the St Paul Pioneer Press reported.
Shortly after arriving, Huang started assaulting the woman 'on a regular basis, sometimes in front of the family's children, according to the complaint.
She was rationed crackers for meals and her weight had dropped from 120 pounds when she arrived in the country to 88 pounds, the complaint said.
A Chinese nanny escaped from this Minnesota home (pictured) where she was allegedly being kept in a 'state of slavery' by Huang
Once in the U.S., the woman was forced to work up to 18 hours a day doing child care, cooking and cleaning, the complaint said (the neighborhood pictured above)
When she asked Huang's husband to assist her in buying an airline ticket, he allegedly took her passport from her and said 'she was not going anywhere.'
As the assaults continued, the nanny feared for her life because she did not speak English and was never allowed to leave the home, the complaint said.
During one incident, Huang allegedly grabbed the woman by the hair and then slammed her head into tables before punching and kicking her while she was on the floor, according to the complaint.
At one point, the woman was beaten relentlessly until she could not stand up, the complaint said.
The nanny was then allegedly forced to walk through the house on her hands and knees 'like a dog for about four hours' on these hardwood floors, the complaint said (inside of the house pictured)
While the woman was never allowed to leave the house, she told a police investigator she had fled the home when Huang threatened to kill her with a knife (home interior pictured)
The nanny was then allegedly forced to walk through the house on her hands and knees 'like a dog for about four hours,' the complaint said.
While the woman was never allowed to leave the house, she told a police investigator she had fled the home when Huang threatened to kill her with a knife, according to the complaint.
The nanny was found wandering in the street on Wednesday night with her eyes blackened, and an exam at the United Hospital in St Paul later found she had many broken bones, the complaint said.
The woman later told officers that at the time she was looking for the airport so she could go home to China, according to the complaint.
The nanny was found wandering in the street on Wednesday night with her eyes blackened, and an exam at the United Hospital in St Paul (pictured) later found she had many broken bones, a criminal complaint said
Police from four cities and agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security searched Huang's home and arrested her, the complaint said.
A bag hidden under the nanny's mattress was found containing a large amount of her hair, which Huang allegedly ripped from the woman's head.
The nanny had been hiding it so Huang would not find it 'and force her to eat it,' the complaint said.
The woman's passport was also found in Huang's purse, according to the complaint.
Huang remains jailed in lieu of $350,000 bail after making her initial court appearance on Friday.
A heartfelt vigil has been held for the University of California, Berkeley student who was killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack.
Nicolas Leslie, 20, was remembered as a charismatic and engaged member of the campus community who would not want his death to inspire revenge.
Several hundred people, including the university's chancellor and the French consul general, attended a ceremony to honor the Berkeley junior who was one of 84 killed in the Nice terror attack.
A heartfelt vigil (pictured) has been held for the University of California, Berkeley student who was killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack
Nicolas Leslie (pictured), 20, was remembered as a charismatic and engaged member of the campus
'We feel, I think I can say for all of us, overwhelmed by the unspeakable horror and tragedy that took place in Nice,' Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks told the crowd consisting primarily of students.
'Yet this evening we are united as one, for we all have all come here together to mourn the loss and celebrate and honor the life of Nicolas Leslie.'
Childhood friends, Phi Gamma Delta fraternity brothers and classmates described the environmental science major and avid surfer from the San Diego area as a happy and generous young man who lived life to the fullest and lit up rooms with a radiant smile.
'Nick was just an incredible human being. If you had a chance to even meet him for a second, know how lucky you are,' said Natasha Nicholson, a family friend from Del Mar, California.
Leslie was one of 85 California college students attending a month-long entrepreneurship class and competition in Nice, hosted by the European Innovation Academy and organized by Berkeley's Study Abroad program, Berkeley officials said.
He had been missing since a Tunisian man rammed a truck through crowds watching a fireworks display on a seafront promenade.
Video courtesy of KRON4
Several hundred people, including the university's chancellor and the French consul general, attended a ceremony to honor the Berkeley junior
Childhood friends described Leslie, an environmental science major, as an avid surfer who lived life to the fullest
Leslie was one of 85 California college students attending a month-long entrepreneurship class and competition in Nice (pictured, his peers mourning him)
'Nick was just an incredible human being. If you had a chance to even meet him for a second, know how lucky you are,' said Natasha Nicholson, a family friend
Leslie (right) had been missing since a Tunisian man rammed a truck through crowds watching a fireworks display on a seafront promenade
Friends, relatives and university officials had been searching hospitals in Nice and plastering the city with flyers before the FBI informed university officials Leslie was among the dead.
Three other Berkeley students were injured in the attack, while one other program participant still was unaccounted for as of Monday: 21-year-old Estonian Rickard Kruusberg.
The Ukrainian embassy in Ottawa confirmed the death of a citizen on Monday but declined to release his name. A spokesman said only one Ukrainian citizen, 22-year-old Canada-based Ukrainian national Misha Bazelevskyy, who also was studying with the European Innovation Academy, was reported missing in the Nice attack.
Another Berkeley student, 18-year-old sophomore Tarishi Jain, was among the 20 hostages killed by militants in Dhaka, Bangladesh, earlier this month.
With the Berkeley campus quiet for the summer, school officials and friends gathered in front of a poster-sized photograph of Leslie, white flowers and a roll of paper on which mourners were asked to write remembrances. Behind them stood the American, French and Italian flags Leslie's mother is Italian and he was born in Milan.
Leslie's uncle, Alberto Leslie, told the San Diego Union Tribune that his brother and sister-in-law were in France on Monday to claim their only child's body.
'We all love and miss you so so much' read one message left for Leslie at his vigil in California
'We feel, I think I can say for all of us, overwhelmed by the unspeakable horror and tragedy that took place in Nice,' Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks (pictured) told the crowd
Three other Berkeley students were injured in the attack, while one other program participant still was unaccounted for as of Monday (right, Leslie on holiday)
'I ask that people send light and love to them, because they're in a very dark place. I just want them to know that people are thinking of him,' Alberto Leslie said.
At Berkeley, Leslie hoped to acquire the skills and contacts to parlay his love of oceans into a job protecting them. He had planned to study at the university's business school at the fall and was a member of a student-run consulting group that provides marketing, research and social responsibility advice.
The Obscure History Of How Chicago's Favorite Bars Got Their Names
By Chicagoist_Guest in Food on Jul 19, 2016 3:57PM
One half of the famous Delilah's sign. Photo via Instagram.
By Madeline Hester
Chicago has plenty of bars named after people, and I bet you never really think, when you're referring to them (Lets go to Norms! Meet me at Marias! Hey, I lost my virginity at Dennis Place!) that their might be an actual person involved. When a bar is actually named after someone, all formalities seem immediately erased. These places become friends. Its as if the namesake is inviting me into their home, pouring me a drink, letting me use their toilet (and also letting me give them money).
But who is this host? The answer is often more than simply the bartender or owneralthough if it is, they too have a story to tell. If the walls could talk, what would they say? I set out to knock on the walls of Chicagos most personable bars and give them the mic.
Delilahs Chicago
I wanted the bar to have a literary connection. Delilah is the first femme fatale in Western literature, Mike Miller, owner of Delilah's (and English major), told Chicagoist. According to the Book of Judges, Delilah, a prostitute, convinced Samson to tell her the secret of his God-given strength (spoiler: his golden locks). She then betrayed him by selling his weakness to the Philistines which led to Samsons capture and downfall.
However, Miller believes she is more than just a temptress, Delilah has an air of mystery. She is a Power Woman. Take the double-sided sign outside the bar: on one side, a blonde beauty with closed eyes, the other side a face suspiciously close to the Evil Queen from Snow White. Are they both Delilah? They were painted by a local artist. An air of mystery indeed! Miller notes that its Samson himself who is responsible for his undoing; she was the temptation, yes, but he willingly fell on his sword. A dark analogy for bar culture itself? Lets say Delilah will put the beer in front of you but she wont make you drink it (just pay for it). I asked if Delilah were real, where would she sit, what would she order? Probably at the end of the bar, drinking an old-fashioned. An old-fashioned at Delilahs costs around $6.
Delilah's is located at 2771 N. Lincoln Ave.
The exterior of Guthrie's. Photo via Facebook.
Guthries Tavern
The name "Guthrie" belongs to J. B. Guthrie, a real estate developer in Lakeview from the late 1800s. Did he own the bar? No. Did he develop the bar? Nope. Did he ever drink at the bar? He was dead long before it opened. Is he, in any way shape or form related to the bar? A fictional depiction of him is painted on the sign outdoors.
Steve Leith, owner, recalls When I bought the bar I went down to the Lake View Historical Society and just picked out a name I liked. I asked Leith for further facts about J. B. but, according to him, Ive never thought about it this much. After some prompting, he used his imagination to paint a day in the life of the namesake: after a day of developing, J.B. Guthrie comes into his local tavern. Its been a long day and air conditioning doesnt exist. He eats pickled hard boiled eggs from a jar and a roast beef sandwich. The kind of stuff they had back then. Guthrie drinks a draft beer. Where does he sit? At the bar.
Alright, maybe I was making Leith think too hard about someone hes never met. But it wasnt like hes never thought about him at all. That sign outside of fictional J. B. Guthrie? Painted by Leith himself. I was taking a painting class and was thinking of Guthrie when I painted it. Its not the real one but its the Guthrie I think of. Its a beautiful painting. The only thing missing is those pickled hardboiled eggs.
Guthrie's is located at 1300 W. Addison St.
Simons Tavern
Simon Lundberg was an immigrant from Sweden who came to America after WWI. He moved to Colorado, got married, and built railroads. In 1922, he came to Chicago because there was a rumor running through the Rockies that Swedes were flocking to Chicago.
Simon first opened the Burwood Food Shop in Andersonville, a neighborhood ripe with Swedes at the time. One day some shady guys came in, closed the door, and ordered coffee. They then took out a bottle filled with whiskey! (But whiskey was illegal back then!) Simon enjoyed it. The shady men (rhymes with shmafia) proposed to supply him with whiskey if he let them drink there. Sounds like a good dealwhat could go wrong? Apparently, nothing!
In 1926, Simon bought a grocery store at the current address of the bar. He opened a bar in the basement called the NN Club (No Name Club). And when Prohibition was repealed in 1933, Simon conveniently had a full bar ready to go for public use. He called it Simons and poured glasses of Akvavit for over 60 years with his son, until current owner Scott Martin took over.
Its easy to see the passion Scott has for carrying on the legacy of Simon. And there's more: In 1933, the biggest passenger ship in France was built: the S. S. Normandie. Since many customers couldnt afford tickets, Simon designed his bar to make people feel like they were on an expensive ship, without the hefty price tag, by etching the SS Norm on the mirror, below the flags, and on the bar itself.
Simon's is located at 5210 N. Clark St.
Martin's Tavern, via Facebook.
Martins Corner
The history of Martins is pretty straightforward, much like owner Robert Martin, who gave me a brief timeline of the bar.
Martins is a family-owned business and Martin is the last name of the family. The bar was started in 1951 by Richard and Robert Martin (Robert Jr.s grandfather and father). They also tended bar. In 1985, Robert took over and expanded the bar to a full dining menu. He also works alongside his two sisters Cynthia and Karen.
So is there an heir to the Martin kingdom? Perhaps even a jaded sibling who will do whatever it takeseven kill his own brother and nephewto be king, but unbeknownst to him, his nephew survives and is raised by a hedgehog and meerkat?
We are just planning on keeping it all within the family, Robert told us. Alright, fine, no Disney drama here. But thats fair. Martins is a family and community bar. Located by St. Pauls Church in Pilsen, Martins has been a fixture for the neighborhood for over 65 years and if the Martins keep populating, why not 65 more?
Martin's is located at 2058 W. 22nd Pl.
We've got the hidden history of more Chicago bar names coming soon, including Moes Tavern, Matildas and Emmits Irish Pub. Have any bars you'd like to know more about? Let us know in the comments.
An Australian teenager who narrowly escaped the deadly Bastille Day terror attack in Nice has resumed her European holiday with friends following her release from hospital.
Bronte Stuntz, 18, from Sydney, posed for photos with her friends as they toured Monte Carlo, Monaco just days after the devastating terror attack left her hospitalised.
Ms Stuntz was one of three Australians injured in the attack - and suffered deep grazes over her body as she attempted to escape the terrorist.
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Bronte Stuntz, right, pictured in Monte Carlo, Monaco, days after she was injured in the terror attack in nearby Nice
The young woman appeared care free as she posed for a photo with her friends after her release from hospital
The young woman appeared care-free as she posed with friends and smiled for selfies after she was released from hospital.
Ms Stuntz told Channel Nine she was still reeling from the attack, which left her with raw grazes covering her shoulders and back.
On Thursday Foreign Minister Julie Bishop confirmed three Australians had been injured in the atrocity.
Bronte, far right, suffered deep grazes as a result of the terror attack at Bastille Day celebrations
Australian teenager Bronte Stuntz, 18, has been released from hospital with raw wounds to her torso and back
Ms Stuntz suffered the injuries as she fled the attack in Nice, France, on Thursday
Ms Bishop said: 'They have suffered minor injuries, seeking to flee the scene, to get away from the scene. We are working to provide consular assistance to all three.'
One of the Australians is understood to have been injured while holidaying on a Topdeck party tour, The Daily Telegraph reported.
Australian tourists have described the horrific scenes they encountered as they fled the scene.
Callum Ramstadius, 20, told Daily Mail Australia he saw a large truck ploughing through revellers on the beach.
Ms Stuntz, from Sydney, thanked everyone who had helped her following the attack in a post on Facebook
Ms Stuntz posted this note on Facebook after she narrowly escaped the Bastille Day massacre
He said: 'We were heading back across the road to the beach we heard screaming and a massive crowd of people running towards us, so we had to jump down stairs over people onto the beach.
'That's when we saw the truck fly past honestly running down so many people.
'Originally while we were standing on the beach we thought it was an accident but then there was five minutes of constant gunshots.
'People were running in every direction on to the beach including swimming away.'
Following the publication of an article headlined Exclusive: inside the bromance of Tom Cruise and Scientology founder David Miscavige, published on 2 December 2015, David Miscavige complained to the Independent Press Standards Organisation that Mail Online breached Clause 1 (Accuracy).
IPSOs Complaints Committee upheld the complaint, and has required Mail Online to publish this adjudication.
The article reported details of exclusive interviews with former members of the Church of Scientology, which concerned Tom Cruise and his relationship with the complainant, the leader of the Church of Scientology. It gave details of the special treatment Mr Cruise received at Gold Base, the Scientology headquarters; reported claims that some Church members were poorly treated; and said that the complainant had arranged for cameras to be installed to secretly film members of the Church, including Mr Cruise.
The complainant said the claims made in the article had already been disproved or denied. Further, several of the allegations had been put to his representatives in advance, and the publication had been informed that that they were completely untrue and should not be published.
The publication said that the complaint fell outside IPSOs remit: the individuals mentioned in the article were American; the events had taken place in the United States; and the piece was commissioned, written and edited by journalists working for its US division.
The story had therefore been written to comply with American law and journalistic conventions, not the British Editors Code of Practice. In light of this, it declined to defend its story in response to IPSOs investigation.
IPSOs Complaints Committee found that Mail Online had failed to demonstrate that it had complied with its obligations under Clause 1 of the Code.
The Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), which is chaired by Sir Alan Moses, pictured, has announced it will launch a review of the way its regulations should apply to global digital publishers
The Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) has announced it will launch a review of the way its regulations should apply to global digital publishers.
IPSO is the regulator for the vast majority of the newspaper and magazine industry in the UK.
However US companies with sizeable UK news operations like The Huffington Post, Buzzfeed and The New York Times are not regulated by IPSO, nor is Britain's Guardian newspaper and its website, which has a substantial worldwide presence.
IPSO's initiative recognises that it needs to adapt its rules if more global media players are to become members.
The announcement came after MailOnline declined to defend a complaint to IPSO by Scientology leader David Miscavige on the grounds that the regulator had no power of jurisdiction to rule on web stories concerning US news events, written by its US team of journalists for a US audience, or on content relating to news events outside the UK generally.
This general principal was a condition MailOnline had made of joining IPSO from its outset.
However IPSO has in the event not accepted MailOnline's position and today announced it had ruled against MailOnline because of its failure to defend the story.
The regulator investigates complaints about printed and online material that may breach its Editors Code of Practice and can make newspapers, magazines and websites who sign up to its Code publish corrections or adjudications.
Announcing its review of its regulations today, IPSO Chief Executive, Matt Tee said: 'When the current regulations were drafted nearly four years ago, it was difficult to imagine the developments that would take place in digital publishing, with some publishers having numerous editorial bureaux across the world focussed on different audiences in different time zones.
'This is already an issue for some IPSO members and is bound to affect others in future. It may also be a disincentive to other global digital publishers joining IPSO. We want a solution that enables IPSO to be an effective regulator for relevant consumers and provides a definition that is intuitive and workable for publishers'.
A 36-year-old woman who was detained by police after she was found drunk and stumbling along a dark country road has been found dead in her cell after spending the night in custody.
Police located the woman at about 12.45am on Tuesday morning, walking along Wollumbi Road, Cessnock, in an apparent intoxicated state.
She was picked up by police and taken to Maitland Police Station and placed in a holding cell.
At 6am the next morning she was found dead in the cell.
A woman, 36, has been found dead in a cell after night in police custody. She had been detained the night before after police found her wandering along Wollombi Road at Cessnock (pictured) about 12.45am
A statement from NSW Police confirmed that a critical incident team from Newcastle has been called in to investigate 'all circumstances surrounding the incident.'
That investigation will be subject to independent review.
'The welfare of the police officers has been addressed and they are being supported,' NSW Police said in a statement.
'The woman's family has been notified and our thoughts and condolences go out to the family.'
She was picked up by police and taken to Maitland Police Station and placed in a holding cell (stock photo)
After five years in hospital detention over a $7.8million plunder case, Philippines' former President has been freed after charges were dropped.
The Philippine Supreme Court today dismissed the plunder charge against former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and ordered her freed immediately.
The justices voted 11-4 to grant Arroyo's petition seeking to dismiss the plunder case before the special anti-graft Sandiganbayan court because of a lack of evidence, Supreme Court spokesman Theodore Te said.
The case involved the alleged misuse of 366 million pesos ($7.8 million) from the state lottery agency, the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office.
The Philippine Supreme Court on Tuesday dismissed the plunder charge against former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and ordered her freed immediately.
'I rejoice over this decision that has already given her what she rightly deserves which is justice,' said Jesus Dureza, who had been Arroyo's adviser on peace talks with communist and Muslim rebels.
Dureza said he congratulated Arroyo in a phone call and heard many supporters in the background as she spoke.
Dureza was reappointed as peace talks adviser under the current president, Rodrigo Duterte, who added a number of Arroyo allies to his Cabinet.
Arroyo, 69, finished her tumultuous nine-year term in 2010 but was arrested the following year on an election fraud charge, for which she was allowed to post bail.
She was later charged with plunder.
Arroyo, 69, finished her tumultuous nine-year term in 2010 but was arrested the following year on an election fraud charge, for which she was allowed to post bail
Despite her detention and her neck ailment that prompted her to use a wheelchair, she was re-elected to Congress in May.
Arroyo was detained under former President Benigno Aquino III, who accused her of corruption and misrule.
Aquino's successor, Duterte, however, has said the plunder case against her was weak and offered to grant her a pardon to allow her release.
Arroyo rejected his offer, saying she had to be convicted first of a crime to be eligible for a pardon, and that she preferred to fight the allegation.
A daughter of a former Philippine president and a classmate of former U.S. President Bill Clinton at Georgetown University, Arroyo had been a senator and vice president before suddenly rising to the presidency in 2001 after then President Joseph Estrada was ousted in a 'people power' revolt that she helped lead. Estrada was accused then of largescale corruption, which he denied.
She won the presidency in regular elections in 2004 but her presidency was rocked the following year by a series of corruption and vote-rigging scandals, including wiretapped conversations with an election official where some alleged she discussed ensuring her vote lead.
Arroyo admitted talking to an election official and apologized for her 'lapse in judgment' in making such a call but said the conversation occurred after the votes had been counted.
Raul Lambino, one of Arroyo's lawyers, said the mood turned jubilant in Arroyo's hospital room when word leaked that the country's highest court was set to strike down the only criminal case keeping her detained.
Arroyo was smiling in the picture he took with her.
Another Arroyo lawyer, Ferdinand Topacio, said the Supreme Court 'has once again proven itself to be the final bastion of justice and the rule of law.'
The ruling, he said, validated the position of the Arroyo camp that the charges against her were 'nothing more than disingenuous attempts at political persecution.'
'We are reminding the Supreme Court that the Arroyo government left behind 1,206 victims of political killings and 206 victims of enforced disappearances among activists, peasants, and human rights workers,' said Cristina Palabay, secretary general of the human rights group Karapatan.
She said the 2009 massacre of 58 people, including 32 journalists, in the world's worst single killing of media workers, also happened during Arroyo's term.
The bodies of two college students who were swept into Lake Michigan from a pier in eastern Wisconsin have been recovered.
A dive team found the bodies of 21-year-old Kurt Ahonen, of Suamico, and 22-year-old Adam LaLuzerne, of Sheboygan, in the lake late Monday, the Sheboygan County Sheriff's Office said.
The two St. Norbert College students and three other friends were in Sheboygan Sunday afternoon when four of them walked onto the pier to talk to some fishermen, authorities said.
High waves washed Ahonen, LaLuzerne and a third friend into the water.
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A dive team found the bodies of 21-year-old Kurt Ahonen (left), of Suamico, and 22-year-old Adam LaLuzerne (right), of Sheboygan, in the lake late Monday, the Sheboygan County Sheriff's Office said
The US Coast Guard rescued 22-year-old Dylan Abeyta (pictured), but the other two couldn't immediately be found
The US Coast Guard rescued 22-year-old Dylan Abeyta, but the other two couldn't immediately be found.
Abeyta described the scary incident that also involved Jeremy David Wheat on Facebook Sunday.
He wrote: 'Today at around 3:00 this afternoon while myself, Adam, Jeremy, and Kurt were walking down a treacherous pier in Sheboygan, on our way back to safety, a massive wave swept us from behind, forcing three of us, including Kurt, Adam, and myself to be swept into Lake Michigan.
US Coast Guard used a helicopter and a Milwaukee rescue boat to search for the men
The Sheboygan County dive team suspended operations Sunday evening because of the rough water. Fire officials said the search resumed Monday morning
Abeyta said on Facebook Jeremy David Wheat 'was able to quickly get help out there to retrieve us, while us three were trying to not drown in the current'
'The last one, Jeremy, was able to quickly get help out there to retrieve us, while us three were trying to not drown in the current.'
Abeyta continued: 'I was separated from the other to getting swept by the current in the lake, and barely keeping my head above water not knowing where I was or how long I would last.
'Just as I was losing hope, a coast guard boat pulled me from the water and I was transported there and I'm still here as I write.
'While I'm lucky to be alive, there is no word on the whereabouts of both Adam and Kurt, and as the chances for their survival get slimmer, I ask that you send your prayers and thoughts to them, whether they are dead or alive.'
US Coast Guard used a helicopter and a Milwaukee rescue boat to search for the men.
The Sheboygan County dive team suspended operations Sunday evening because of the rough water.
Fire officials said the search resumed Monday morning.
Abeyta told Fox 11: 'We're not meant to survive some things, you know?
'And I don't know how I survived, it's kind of a survivor's guilt thing that I'm going through, because in my mind it should either be we all go down together or we all get rescued together. It's just not fair.'
He told the TV station: 'There are consequences to choices you make and your life could be taken away from you when you least expect it.'
A prayer service was held Monday afternoon at St. Norbert College in De Pere.
A vigil for LaLuzerne and Ahonen also took place Monday evening in Sturgeon Bay at Corpus Christi Catholic Church.
A vigil for LaLuzerne and Ahonen took place Monday evening in Sturgeon Bay at Corpus Christi Catholic Church (pictured)
The first legal challenge to stop Brexit will be heard at the High Court in October - but several campaigners have stopped legal action amid 'threatening' racist abuse.
Investment fund manager Gina Miller, 51, from London, is arguing that the Prime Minister should not be allowed to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty - the clause which starts the formal process for Britain leaving the EU - without Parliament's consent.
She is backed by Deir Dos Santos, a 'ordinary' hairdresser from west London, who wanted things done in a 'legal and proper manner'.
The 'highly political' claim has been described by lawyers involved as 'the most important constitutional law case in living memory'. If successful, the bid could hand MPs - three quarters of whom supported Remain - the power to delay Britain's departure and control the terms.
The first legal challenge over Brexit is due to be heard at the High Court (pictured) as an 'ordinary' British citizen argues that MPs must vote before the UK quits the EU
But it emerged today that several other potential claimants have pulled out of the fight after apparently suffering racist, anti Semitic and objectionable abuse.
During a hearing at the High Court today, senior judge Sir Brian Leveson - who delivered a report in 2012 on the culture, practices and ethics of the UK press - warned that anyone committing criminal acts or interfering with litigation would be 'dealt with severely'.
He advised abusers that the 'aggressive and threatening abuse' could amount to a criminal offence and would be dealt with 'very seriously'.
It came after Lord David Pannick QC wrote a letter to the court, explaining that some prospective clients of solicitors Mishcon de Reya had decided to withdraw because of the 'large quantity of abuse.'
He agreed the names of those who had withdrawn should remain confidential.
The first hearing was heard today at the High Court in which government lawyers told the court in London that Theresa May would not trigger the article before the end of 2016.
That would give the High Court time to make a ruling, and for the Supreme Court to hear any subsequent appeal before the start of the formal process.
The judges were assured that if the Government position changed the parties bringing the legal challenge would be warned.
Deir Dos Santos, a hairdresser based in London, is arguing that the Prime Minister (pictured) should not be allowed to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty
As well as Sir Brian Leveson, the case will be heard in front of Mr Justice Cranston, formerly an MP and solicitor general during Tony Blairs government.
The Dos Santos case is being led by international law expert Dominic Chambers QC, instructed by law firm Edwin Coe, which says the challenge concerns the sovereignty of Parliament.
Mr Chambers said Mr Dos Santos is 'just an ordinary guy', telling Bloomberg. 'If his rights are going to be taken away, he wants it done in a proper and lawful manner.'
He added: 'The purpose of a judicial review is to correct the executive when they have gone wrong. We say the executive will be abusing their powers if they give an Article 50 notification without the approval of Parliament.'
Mr Dos Santos lives in a humble 300,000 flat above a French restaurant in Maida Hill, west London.
The flat is in one of the less desirable parts of Westminster home to diverse cultures, shops and residents.
Meanwhile, speaking as she left court, Miss Miller said she voted Remain and that is was 'an important issue we have to have argument and debate about this.
'I believe in a true and fair society,' he said.
Last week, Brexit supporters staged a demonstration outside the firms office in London, waving banners and placards which read: 'Uphold the Brexit vote'.
Among the key issues judges will have to analyse is the true extent of the Prime Minister's executive powers. The Government is expected to assert that the royal prerogative can be used to trigger Article 50.
David Greene, senior partner and head of group action litigation at Edwin Coe, said: 'Whilst Brexit is highly political, the issue before the court tomorrow is a basic question of the rule of law.
'The claimant submits that the course proposed by the Government is unlawful because only Parliament is empowered to authorise service of the Article 50 notice and consequent withdrawal from the EU.
'The Government asserts that the executive may use the royal prerogative to serve the notice. The court is asked to determine that issue in isolation from the politics that surround the whole question of Brexit.'
Meanwhile, Cabinet Office minister Oliver Letwin, tasked with setting up the Government's Brexit unit, said yesterday that the Prime Minister will be able to trigger Article 50 - the legal process for leaving the EU - without first securing parliamentary approval.
But he acknowledged there were 'conflicting views' over whether Article 50 can be invoked under prerogative powers or required parliamentary approval and predicted it would end up in court.
Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones has quit Twitter 'with tears and a very sad heart' after weeks of vile racist abuse and she has fired a parting shot at social media.
Jones, a stand-up comedian who is currently starring as New York subway worker Patty Tolan in the remake of the classic movie, called for Twitter to crack down on hate speech and introduce stronger guidelines.
At one point someone posted a tweet under a fake account making it look as if Jones had hurled homophobic abuse at right-wing journalist Milo Yiannopoulis, who had written a bad review of the film.
Leslie Jones (second left) has hit the big time with her part in the remake of the movie Ghostbusters but she says she has received vile abuse and hundreds of 'evil' comments on Twitter
Leslie Jones posted this tweet last night after receiving a series of vile messages in the weeks since the new Ghostbusters film came out
Star Wars actor John Boyega responded to her final tweet with a message of support
Jones described some of the abuse she had received in the week after the Ghostbusters premiere.
She said she had been called an 'ape' and other racist abuse and 'even got a pic with semen on my face'.
Jones, 48, said she received 'evil' comments every few minutes and blocked numerous trolls.
She tweeted: 'I feel like I'm in a personal hell. I didn't do anything to deserve this. It's just too much. It shouldn't be like this. So hurt right now.'
The actress also wrote: 'I use(d) to wonder why some celebs don't have Twitter accts now I know. You can't be nice and communicate with fans cause people crazy.'
Jones tweeted: 'Twitter I understand you got free speech I get it. But there has to be some guidelines when you let spread like that. You can see on the...Profiles that some of these people are crazy sick. It's not enough to freeze Acct. They should be reported.'
This is just one of the many vile racist tweets which Leslie Jones received. She has now quit Twitter and called on the social media company to impose stronger guidelines. The person who posted this tweet has not yet had their account suspended
Eventually she signed off late last night: 'I leave Twitter tonight with tears and a very sad heart.All this cause I did a movie.You can hate the movie but the s*** I got today...wrong.'
But Yiannopoulis - who was briefly suspended from Twitter last month - tweeted: 'If at first you don't succeed (because your work is terrible), play the victim.
'It's not racist to point out that a movie f***ing sucks.'
Yiannopoulis was asked by Breitbart why he had been blocked by Jones and replied: 'She must have read my review. Honestly, this is why I say feminism is cancer.
'She used to be funny but being involved in a social justice dumpster fire like Ghostbusters has reduced her to the status of just another frothing loon on Twitter.'
British journalist Milo Yiannoupoulos (pictured), who works for Breitbart, claimed Jones was just 'playing the victim' and added: 'It's not racist to point out that a movie f***ing sucks'
Leslie Jones reacted angrily, with the occasional expletive, after receiving abuse on Twitter
Who you gonna call?: Leslie stars in the all-female Ghostbusters reboot alongside (L-R) Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig and Kate McKinnon but the film has got mixed reviews
The hashtag LoveForLeslieJ began trending on Twitter after Jones highlighted the abuse she was suffering online.
Ghostbusters director Paul Feig tweeted: 'Leslie Jones is one of the greatest people I know. Any personal attacks against her are attacks against us all. #LoveForLeslieJ.'
A Twitter spokesman said: 'This type of abusive behaviour is not permitted on Twitter, and we've taken action on many of the accounts reported to us by both Leslie and others.
'We rely on people to report this type of behaviour to us but we are continuing to invest heavily in improving our tools and enforcement systems to prevent this kind of abuse.
'We realise we still have a lot of work in front of us before Twitter is where it should be on how we handle these issues.'
This astonishing clip shows identical twins speaking in unison for an entire four-minute interview.
Bridgette and Paula Powers from Queensland, Australia, have barely spent a moment apart since they were born.
The pair, who run Twinnies Pelican and Seabird Rescue together, appeared on Good Morning Britain today in a live interview - and amazingly answered all of the questions in unison.
The pair (pictured) - who are both vegetarians - insist they have no distinguishing features and still sleep in twin beds
TV hosts Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid look shocked as the 42-year-olds together explained how they devote all their time to rescuing seabirds off the Australian coast.
When questioned by Piers Morgan over their love lives, the pair say they are 'very, very busy' - and claim they have no time for men.
They add: 'If he hasn't got feathers then he's got no hope.'
The sisters say they are not sure why they both speak the same words at the same time but insist it happens 'automatically' - shooting down claims that they rehearse conversations.
'We don't know how it happens,' they say.
'Some people go "do you rehearse a conversation?" but it's like no, how can you rehearse a conversation, it'd be stupid.'
Paula (left) and Bridgette Powers from Queensland, Australia, spoke in unison for their entire Good Morning Britain interview
Piers Morgan could not help but laugh as the pair answered his questions in complete unison throughout the interview
Posted on the Facebook page of the rescue centre, the twins helped to remove a hook from this bird's neck
Although believing they are individuals, the twins admit they do sometimes feel like one person - even wearing identical outfits and sharing a mobile phone.
'All our time is spent together because we have the same interests and we go shopping together, we go and rescue together, we work as a great team together,' they say in sync.
'We know what each other's thinking and we know what to do together when we rescue a big bird as the pelican.'
In the middle of the interview, Piers sits forward and says: 'This is one of the greatest interviews I have ever conducted in my life.'
Bridgette and Paula Powers say they are devoted to helping Australian seabirds - meaning they have 'no time' for men
Twinnies Pelican and Seabird Rescue is a 24/7 rescue and rehabilitation service for seabirds which was set up by the twins 12 years ago
The animal-loving pair can be seen helping a huge bird - just one of many at their Australian rescue centre
According to the The Sydney Morning Herald, the pair - who are both vegetarians - insist they have no distinguishing features and still sleep in twin beds.
They were also both born with heart and blood-pressure conditions, as well as bone deficiencies.
Speaking to the Herald, their mother, Helen, said the longest the women have been apart was three days while in their teens.
Paula was hospitalised for an appendectomy and although their mother explained the issue was likely to affect Bridgette soon afterwards, they refused to remove her appendix at the same time.
The 42-year-old identical twins have never spent more than three days apart since they were born
When questioned about their love lives, the twins replied: 'If he hasn't got feathers then he's got no hope'
And, as predicted, Bridgette was hospitalised and had it removed just weeks later.
Twinnies Pelican and Seabird Rescue is a 24/7 rescue and rehabilitation service for seabirds which was set up by the twins 12 years ago.
And although their website says they specialise in seabirds, they insist 'we never turn away any injured animal'.
Government officials have been sharing footage, citing it as evidence
265 people were killed in the coup attempt, 145 of them civilians
and people run for their lives in the video
Shocking video has emerged of the moment an airstrike rained down on civilians near President Tayyip Erdogan's presidential palace during the failed Turkish coup.
The disturbing CCTV footage shows a helicopter gunship, reportedly manned by rebel soldiers, fire on people dashing desperately across a highway near the palace in the capital Ankara.
After the huge blast, a thick plume of black smoke billows up into the sky and frightened civilians run in all directions across the highway.
The video also captures a laser sight dancing just in front of the person filming.
The location near the palace was one of the deadliest places for civilians during the coup attempt.
The brutality of the hours when rebel soldiers commandeered fighter jets, military helicopters and tanks in a bid to seize power has gradually been emerging in video and pictures captured on mobile phones during the chaos.
Blast: The disturbing video shows the moment cars and civilians were hit with an airstrike
Explosion: The airstrike was captured by CCTV cameras near President Tayyip Erdogan's presidential palace
Throughout the night of July 15, terrified Turks in Istanbul and Ankara listened to sporadic gunfire, explosions and the sonic booms of low-flying jets over their apartment blocks, rattling buildings and blowing out windows.
In a country whose last violent military coup was more than three decades ago, few could believe what was happening, let alone how high the death toll would reach.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said 265 people were killed, 145 of them civilians.
Blurred photos and shaky videos posted on Twitter and YouTube, increasingly circulated in the days after the attempted coup, hint at how so many died so quickly.
Government officials have also been sharing the phone footage, citing it as evidence of the brutality of a coup bid they blame on Erdogan's arch-rival Fethullah Gulen, a U.S.-based cleric they accuse of trying to establish a 'parallel state' with his followers in the judiciary and security forces.
Terrified: Civilians are show running for their lives on the highway before the helicopter airstrike struck
Before: People are seen walking along the street before the horrific explosion
After: The cars were blown to pieces and left in flames after the strike on July 15
'When Fethullah Gulen said, 'May fire rain down', it turns out he was talking about Cobra helicopters firing on civilians!' tweeted a user under the handle @BorsaStrateji.
Gulen has denied involvement in the plot and suggested it may have been staged in order to justify a crackdown by Erdogan on members of his religious movement, who define themselves as conservative Muslims who believe in the importance of education and charity. They deny charges of acting against the state.
A Twitter account that opened within hours of the bungled intervention, called Failed Coup Facts, posted a security video that depicts a helicopter gunship strafing a road with electric-blue cannon fire near the headquarters of the national intelligence agency, narrowly missing moving cars.
Devastation: Throughout the night of July 15, terrified Turks in Istanbul and Ankara listened to sporadic gunfire, explosions and the sonic booms of low-flying jets over their apartment blocks
Fire: A huge flash of flames is shown in the video as an airstrike lands on civilians in Turkey's capital Ankara
Agents fruitlessly shoot back with rifles and handguns.
The account posted another video showing a tank in Ankara running over protesters who were initially trying to block its path but then attempted to escape to the side of the road. At least three people are killed in the footage, including one man who is eviscerated.
Other users posted footage of a tank rushing towards the entry of the Bosphorus Bridge that connects Istanbul's European and Asian districts and was seized during the coup attempt. It crushes at least two cars and knocks more out of the way.
Rebel soldiers on the bridge open fire when protesters gather, including those trying to help the wounded, a separate YouTube clip shows. In another video, which a Turkish official shared with reporters, soldiers shoot a man approaching them with raised arms.
Acts of retribution against soldiers involved in the coup plot who surrendered or were captured have also circulated on social media. Some showed protesters whipping detainees in military uniforms rounded up on the bridge.
But one video retweeted thousands of times showed an act of kindness. A pro-government police officer pushes away men who appear determined to lynch a soldier trapped in his tank.
The officer pulls him out, sees his tears and embraces him.
Destruction: The bomb rained down near President Tayyip Erdogan's presidential palace during the failed Turkish coup
Three New Restaurants You Won't Want To Miss This Month
By Anthony Todd in Food on Jul 19, 2016 2:28PM
Pleasant House Pub's famous English pies. Photo via Pleasant House Bakery website.
July has been an incredible month for bar and restaurant openings. Here are three of our favorites that you'll want to hit up right now.
Pleasant House Pub
Pleasant House Bakery has been a darling of the Chicago food scene for years, and their english-style meat pies, high teas, fresh baked goods and mushy peas have made for many a great meal, especially when paired with a beer at neighboring Maria's. But after years of residing in Bridgeport, Pleasant House has moved on, opening their new location in Pilsen in the old Nightwood space.
They've been open for almost two weeks, and regulars at their old location should look forward to a larger menu, much more seating (their former location was tiny) and regular brunch service, including a full English breakfast complete with homemade pastries. Let's be real for a second: Pleasant House isn't just a restaurant, it's a Chicago institution, a farm, a retailer, a local food promoter and a source of great comfort for many locals, and it's awesome to see their continued success. Plus, the gap they left behind at Maria's will be nicely filled by Kimski, the new Korean-Polish fusion spot.
Giant
In an interesting conceptual game of musical chairs, while Pleasant House takes over the old Nightwood space, the former chef of Nighwood, Jason Vincent, finally opens a new spot after a couple of years off. Giant, a tiny new restaurant in Logan Square, has been getting social media raves since it opened at the beginning of July.
The menu, which includes fried uni shooters, thai chili carrots and tagliatelle with "giant meat sauce" looks eclectic and wonderful, and you can bet that we'll be visiting to bring you more information first-hand very soon.
Estereo
Heisler Hospitality, the team behind Sportsman's Club, Lone Wolf, Revel Room, Pub Royale and Queen Mary, is on a roll. They've opened yet another spot, this time a coffee and liquor bar in Logan Square. Eater Chicago reports that they opened the doors yesterday.
The restaurant is an all-day spot that serves coffee by day (look for Dark Matter) and cocktails by Big Star and Violet Hour vets at night. They've also got a Pisco list, which is unusual for a Chicago bar (Pisco is a Peruvian brandy) and a large selection of cachaca, tequila and mezcal, because apparently Logan Square is becoming the place to drink fancy spirits from Latin America.
David Cameron quietly slipped on to the backbenches to watch Theresa May win the crucial Trident vote last night.
But the former PM seemed to be struggling without the retinue that accompanied him when he was leading the country - having to be directed how to get into parliament on foot.
Sitting four rows back in the Commons chamber as his successor urged MPs not to 'gamble' by unilaterally giving up nuclear weapons, Mr Cameron was seen fiddling with his iPhone.
He slipped out shortly afterwards without speaking.
David Cameron sat four rows back in the Commons chamber as he listened to the Trident debate
The sight of the ex-premier taking to the backbenches, less than a week after leaving office, emphasised the speed of his downfall.
Mr Cameron won an overall Tory majority at the general election barely a year ago - and until Andrea Leadsom's dramatic withdrawal from the leadership battle had been due to stay on in Downing Street until September.
Arriving at parliament on foot for the six hour debate last night, Mr Cameron had to be guided to the entrance by a journalist.
'Oh, is this the way in these days?' he is said to have asked.
Once inside he apparently consulted his close protection officer on whether they should go up or down the stairs.
MPs backed renewing Trident by 472 to 117 - a huge majority of 355. Some 140 Labour MPs supported the government motion despite pleas from Jeremy Corbyn, who voted against.
Making her first appearance at the despatch box as Prime MInister, Mrs May warned that the threat to Britain from states such as North Korea and terrorist groups had increased rather than receded. She urged MPs not to 'gamble' by giving up the weapons.
Challenged on whether she would kill 'a hundred thousand innocent men, women and children' by launching the devastating weapons, Mrs May replied bluntly: 'Yes. And I have to say to you, the whole point of a deterrent is that our enemies need to know that we would be prepared to.'
The new Prime Minister used her first speech at the despatch box to say it would be a 'gross irresponsibility' to abandon the ultimate insurance of the UK's nuclear deterrent
A BBC journalist helped Mr Cameron find the entrance to parliament before the Trident debate
The vote was not technically necessary for the government to go ahead with its policy of renewing the existing continuous at-sea deterrent, which is operated by four Vanguard class submarines.
But the size of the majority emphasised the deep rifts in Labour on the issue, with CND activist leader Jeremy Corbyn forced to defy his party's own policy and vote against renewal.
During extraordinary scenes in parliament, senior MPs queued up to slam Mr Corbyn for failing to understand the principle of deterrence as they prepared to join Tories in the 'aye' lobbies.
Backbencher Neil Coyle accused him of reneging on a promise to read out the party's official policy from the despatch box.
Copeland MP Jamie Reed lashed out at the leader's 'reckless, juvenile, narcissistic irresponsibility' in opposing the 'settled will of the country'.
Former frontbencher Toby Perkins said Mr Corbyn was spouting arguments he would have regarded as credible when he was 13 years old.
Mrs May told the Commons it would be a 'dereliction of duty' if the UK was to give up its nuclear deterrent
Ilford's Mike Gapes compared the veteran left-winger unfavourably to Michael Foot, who led Labour to disaster in the 1980s.
Less than a quarter of the parliamentary party opposed renewal, and dozens more - including shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry and shadow defence secretary Clive Lewis - abstained.
Mr Corbyn - who had been forced to offer his MPs a free vote in order to avoid becoming the first leader in history to rebel against his own party whip - said the costs of replacing Trident were huge and it was 'morally' wrong.
He repeated that he would not be prepared to press the nuclear button if he was in Number 10, arguing that threatening 'mass murder' was not the way to handle international relations.
'I make it clear today that I would not take a decision that kills millions of innocent people. I do not believe the threat of mass murder is a legitimate way to go about dealing with international relations.'
He told MPs 'we are not debating a nuclear deterrent but our continued possession of weapons of mass destruction', which are capable of killing one million people per warhead.
He added: 'What is the threat that we are facing that over a million people's deaths actually deters?'
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has ignored a request by Queen guitarist Brian May to stop using the band's song We Are the Champions at his rallies.
The billionaire businessman entered the auditorium of the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland with the 1977 anthem blasting out in the background.
After receiving previous reports that Trump was using the classic hit, May wrote: 'This is not an official Queen statement, but I can confirm that permission to use the track was neither sought nor given.'
Donald Trump arrived on stage last night in Cleveland to Queen's 1977 classic track We Are the Champions
Queen reacted angrily to Donald Trump's unauthorized use of their music despite being warned
Trump entered the Quicken Loans arena in Cleveland, Ohio, like a visiting rock superstar
Queen guitarist Brian May has written an open letter asking the Trump campaign to stop using their music
He added: 'We are taking advice on what steps we can take to ensure this use does not continue. Regardless of our views on Mr Trump's platform, it has always been against our policy to allow Queen music to be used as a political campaigning tool.
'Our music embodies our own dreams and beliefs, but it is for all who care to listen and enjoy.'
A tweet on Queen's official feed said: 'An unauthorised use at the Republican Convention against our wishes - Queen.'
The Queen guitarist's letter has no legal power and Trump is free to continue using the track.
Trump walked onto the stage last night in a rock star-style entrance where he introduced his wife, Melania, who made an impassioned speech on her husband's behalf.
Unfortunately for the former Slovakian model, some of the content was lifted from a 2008 speech made by Michelle Obama during the Democratic National Convention which nominated her husband to the White House.
Trump appeared on stage to introduce his 46-year-old wife Melania, right, for her first major speech
While Mrs Trump has often joined Donald on the campaign trail, delivering short addresses to the crowds at his rallies across the country, she has never spoken at such length, or in such depth, about herself or her husband.
And yet she addressed the crowd in Cleveland for over half an hour with barely a stutter or misstep, waxing lyrical about her childhood in Slovenia, her journey to America, and her experience with the Donald, both as a wife and as a mother.
After the speech Donald joined her on stage where the two shared and embrace and a kiss on the cheek before making their way back to the waiting motorcade outside, their task - for the time being at least - accomplished.
No sooner had the poised, 46-year-old former model delivered her speech to cheering delegates at the Republican National Convention than the unmistakeable similarities to a passage from Mrs Obama's speech to the 2008 Democratic convention came to light.
In both passages, the women are introducing themselves to the American public by speaking of the values that have shaped their lives.
Mrs Trump, pictured, gave her speech which was remarkably similar to one delivered by Michelle Obama
Trump received the celebrity endorsement of Duck Dynasty's 'Duck Commander' Willie Robertson, pictured
Last night, Mrs Trump said: 'My parents impressed on me the values: that you work hard for what you want in life. That your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise. That you treat people with respect. They taught me to show the values and morals in my daily life. That is the lesson that I continue to pass along to our son.
'And we need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow. Because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.'
In her speech, Michelle Obama said: 'And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you're going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them, and even if you don't agree with them.
'And Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values, and pass them on to the next generation. Because we want our children - and all children in this nation - to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.'
In an effort to diffuse the controversy, Jason Miller, Trump's senior communications adviser said: 'In writing her beautiful speech, Melania's team of writers took notes on her life's inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking.
ITV's Love Island is to be investigated by the television watchdog over complaints about a sex scene involving two contestants which was broadcast just 10 minutes after the watershed.
Ofcom has launched an investigation after eight viewers complained that the dalliance between contestants Emma-Jane Woodham and Terry Walsh was broadcast too soon after the 9pm watershed on June 30.
A spokesman said: 'This programme included sexual material shortly after the watershed. We're investigating whether the transition to more adult content was unduly abrupt.'
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Ofcom has launched an investigation after eight viewers complained that the dalliance between contestants Emma-Jane Woodham and Terry Walsh was broadcast too soon after the 9pm watershed on June 30
And it is not the first time a sex scene involving Mr Walsh has prompted complaints,
Earlier in the series Malin Andersson and Mr Walsh could not be bothered to wait until the lights were off and decided to get intimate with an audience.
Love Islanders Adam Maxted, Cara De La Hoyle and Nathan Massey were just a couple of feet away from Malin and Terry as they romped under the duvet on the ITV2 show.
Rather than leave the make-up artist, 23, and carpenter, 28, to it, the housemates decide to stay in the bedroom and give a running commentary of the lovemaking.
Other Love Island castmates Malin Andersson and Terry Walsh could not be bothered to wait until the lights were off and decided to get intimate with an audience (pictured)
Rather than leave the make-up artist, 23, and carpenter, 28, to it, the housemates decide to stay in the bedroom and give a running commentary of the lovemaking
When they appeared to have finished their brief session, the Love Islanders gave them a round of applause.
Watching at home, viewers couldn't hide their disgust at the public sex antics on the ITV2 show.
One tweeted: 'Love island legit makes me feel sick..how you gunna be having sex with people watching and saying stuff about sexual positions. wtaf.'
Another asked: 'How can Malin & Terry have sex while knowing everyone's watching #loveisland.'
The show often caused controversy. Another contestant, former Miss Great Britain Zara Holland, 20, was stripped of her title after romping with castmate Alex Bowen on the show.
She had her crown revoked by organisers for her 'disappointing' behaviour - leading to her eventual departure from the house to be at her sick mother's bedside.
Zara Holland was stripped of her title after romping with castmate Alex Bowen (in this scene, pictured) on the show
Founder of a homeless charity Street Swags has been arrested and will be charged with fraud.
Former Queensland Australian of the Year, Jean Madden has been charged with one count of fraud for 'dishonestly causing detriment' to the charity.
The 36-year-old was arrested on Tuesday afternoon and has been granted bail to appear in court on August 4, the Courier Mail reports.
She was sacked from the charity earlier this year, following allegations she gave her partner a half-a-million dollar contract and spent $170,000 of the charity's money.
Street Swags charity founder Jean Madden, 36, has been arrested and charged with fraud
Police said she arrived at a Brisbane police station at 1pm on Tuesday and was charged with the fraud offence 90 minutes later.
She had been granted bail to appear in court on August 4.
Authorities have confirmed they were provided with the forensic audit of the charity's finances and said a '36 year old woman from Upper Brookfield' had been charged with fraud.
The charge relates to her 'dishonestly causing the inability to operate and manage an organisation'.
Ms Madden was sacked as chief executive in May after allegedly racking up more than $440,000 in unauthorised expenses and had earlier resigned as a director.
She has denied the claims and posted a video to the Street Swags website defending herself.
The five-minute video includes accusations against other directors of the charity, which provides bags that convert into bedding to the homeless.
'To have misappropriated $441,000, which is what I'm being accused of, is physically impossible,' she says.
Alongside the video, a message was posted claiming Street Swags was closed.
'Street Swags is closed for business until the management issues can be resolved and a full audit of the company finances can be undertaken.'
She posted a video to the Street Swags website defending herself against the claims. The five minute video includes accusations against other directors of the charity
The 36-year-old was arrested on Tuesday afternoon and was granted bail to appear in court on August 4
Ms Madden was sacked from the charity earlier this year, following allegations she gave her partner a half-a-million dollar contract and spent $170,000 of the charity's money
The statement contradicts reports made on the Street Swag Facebook which says they were not closed for business.
'We are operating as we always have, providing Street Swags to those that are in need. Our website and e-mail systems have been hacked over the weekend,' the post claims.
'We are working to resolve this immediately. Our bank accounts are secure. In the meantime, there are legal proceedings in process and for this reason, we cannot comment any further.'
'Please continue to be patient and understanding with us. Your support is important at this difficult time.'
The Street Swags website is displaying a temporary closure notice, while posts on its Facebook page insist the charity is still open
Ms Madden has denied claims that she racked up more than $440,000 in unauthorised expenses
A father was caught by his partner allegedly stuffing a burping cloth into his five-month-old sons mouth while he was in his care.
The 22-year-old man is accused of pushing the piece of cloth into his sons mouth at his Shoal Bay home in the Hunter Region of New South South Wales on July 11.
The infant was later treated for lacerations inside his mouth at Tomaree Medical Centre, reported Newcastle Herald.
A father was caught stuffing a burping rag into his five-month-old sons mouth at his Shoal Bay home while he was in his care (stock photo)
The father was charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm after he was arrested while facing the magistrate at Raymond Terrace Local Court on Tuesday.
The 22-year-old was fronting the court because of the apprehended violence order taken out against him by police on behalf of his son.
The accused was admitted to a psychiatric facility for inflicting self-harm after his partner confronted him over the alleged abuse.
He has received conditional bail, is not allowed to be alone with his son and will face court again on August 2.
Theresa May should reassure every foreign worker in the NHS they are 'welcome in this country' following last month's Brexit vote, the head of England's NHS said today.
Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, said the NHS was reliant on the 130,000 nurses, doctors and other staff from EU countries - around a tenth of the workforce.
There are fears among EU nationals that the Brexit vote could threaten their right to remain in the UK once Britain officially cuts ties with Brussels in around two years' time.
But today Mr Stevens insisted it would be 'completely uncontroversial to provide early reassurance to international NHS employees about their continued welcome in this country'.
NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens (pictured) said Theresa May should reassure every foreign worker in the NHS they are 'welcome in this country' following last month's Brexit vote
Tgeresa May (pictured arriving at No 10 today) has so far refused to give a guarantee to the three million EU nationals over their right to stay in the UK after Britain officially leaves the EU. Their status could be a key leverage when it comes to negotiating the rights of 1.2million British expats living in other EU member states
He also criticised both the Remain and Leave campaigns for using the NHS to help their campaigns.
He said the Leave campaign, which emblazoned its battlebus with the controversial claim that Brexit could free up 350 million a week to spend on the NHS, was 'curious' because 'on the NHS there is no overriding need to "take back control".
The NHS chief, who was in favour of Britain staying in the EU, urged Mrs May to use the EU referendum result to deliver 'radical change' in the NHS.
So far the Government has refused to give a guarantee to the three million EU nationals over their right to stay in the UK after Britain officially leaves the EU.
Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, said the Leave campaign, which emblazoned its battlebus (pictured) with the controversial claim that Brexit could free up 350 million a week to spend on the NHS, was 'curious' because 'on the NHS there is no overriding need to "take back control"
Ministers see their status as a key leverage when it comes to negotiating the rights of 1.2million British expats living in other EU member states.
But Mrs May has been accused of using EU nationals as 'bargaining chips' for refusing to offer guarantees.
Writing in today's Daily Telegraph, Mr Stevens said Britain would always need 'committed professionals from abroad'.
He added: 'Australian-style immigration points systems all admit nurses, doctors and other skilled experts. It should be completely uncontroversial to provide early reassurance to international NHS employees about their continued welcome in this country.'
Criticising both the Remain and Vote Leave campaigns for dragging the NHS into the EU referendum debate, Mr Stevens wrote: 'The NHS wasnt on the Brexit ballot. But it often felt as if it was. Emblazoned on the Battlebus, both Leave and Remain wrapped themselves in the mantle of a strong and better funded health service.
Locals urinate on hate memorial for the killer set up in spot he was slain
He had started growing beard telling people it was for religious reasons
The Bastille Day truck killer searched past attacks in France as well as the gay nightclub attack in Orlando and the Dallas shootings.
Probes of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel's computer and phone in the wake of his massacre in Nice on Thursday which killed 84 people have unveiled searches relating to ISIS and other jihadi groups.
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins, who oversees terrorism investigations, said the murderer had recent interest in radical jihadism and that he had recently grown a beard telling people it was for religious reasons.
The killer's uncle, Sadok Bouhlel, said his nephew had been indoctrinated by an Algerian ISIS recruiter two weeks ago.
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The Bastille Day truck killer Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel (pictured) searched past attacks in France as well as the gay nightclub attack in Orlando and the Dallas shootings
Internet searches on Bouhlel's computer included Islamic propaganda chants, the terms 'horrible deadly accidents,' and the recent attacks against the gay nightclub in Orlando, police officers in Dallas, and the killing of two police officials in Magnanville, outside of Paris.
Mr Molins said Bouhlel drank, ate pork and had an 'unbridled sex life', but his computer and phone showed online searches relating to ISIS and other jihadi groups.
Bouhlel, 31, carried out a 'premeditated crime' that saw 84 people, including 10 children, run down and killed by a 19-tonne lorry hired for the equivalent of just over 1,330 pounds.
ISIS has claimed Bouhlel was as one of their 'soldiers', but Mr Molins said there was no evidence whatsoever of him having any links with the terrorist group.
'A search of his computer illustrates a clear ... and recent interest in radical jihadism,' Molins said.
While officials have said the attack was obviously premeditated, they have not found any evidence that Bouhlel had coordinated with an extremist network.
One witness told authorities that Bouhlel seemed accustomed to looking at decapitation videos, Molins said.
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins, who oversees terrorism investigations, said the murderer had recent interest in radical jihadism and that he had recently grown a beard telling people it was for religious reasons
As investigators continue to look into the attacker's motives, his uncle in Tunisia, Sadok Bouhlel, said his nephew had been indoctrinated about two weeks ago by an Algerian member of the Islamic State group in Nice.
He said Bouhlel's family problems - he was estranged from his wife and three children - made him easy prey for the Algerian recruiter.
'Mohamed didn't pray, didn't go to the mosque and ate pork,' said the uncle, a 69-year-old retired teacher, in the driver's hometown of Msaken, Tunisia.
The uncle said he learned about the Algerian recruiter from extended family members who live in Nice.
French officials couldn't confirm Monday that Bouhlel had been approached by an Algerian recruiter, saying that the investigation is ongoing.
Authorities investigating the truck driver who killed 84 people in a Bastille Day attack painted a complex picture Monday of a man who did not seem devout but had recently become interested in jihadi violence and researched past attacks in France and the United States, including one on a gay nightclub in Orlando
Many decided to spit on the pile of garbage where Bouhlel was shot dead by police, which is emblazoned with the words 'coward' and 'assassin', while one man urinated on the pile to general applause
On the city's famed Promenade des Anglais, passers-by piled garbage on the bloodstained spot where Bouhlel was killed in a hate memorial
The July 14 carnage in the southern city of Nice has shaken and angered a country still reeling from the November 13 attacks in Paris, which killed 130 people at a concert hall, restaurants and cafes, and the national stadium, and a separate January 2015 Paris attack that targeted journalists at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and Jews at a kosher supermarket.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls was loudly booed as he came and went from a memorial ceremony on the Nice shore, amid widespread criticism of security failures.
Valls said later that the boos 'do not touch me,' but he called them undignified and divisive.
Many of the dead and injured were children watching a fireworks display with their families, and a sign posted around town demonstrates a strong feeling of solidarity, calling for blood donations and stuffed animals for injured children.
But on the city's famed Promenade des Anglais, passers-by piled garbage on the bloodstained spot where Bouhlel was killed in a hate memorial.
Many decided to spit on the pile, which is emblazoned with the words 'coward' and 'assassin', while one man urinated on the pile to general applause.
A huge number of people gathered on Monday on the Promenade des Anglais to observe a minute of silence on the third day of national mourning
At the Pasteur hospital, where many injured are being treated, emergency responders and other medical personnel gathered in the courtyard for the countrywide moment of silence, standing still in a row and clapping when it was over.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said 59 people were still hospitalized after Thursday's attack, 29 of them in intensive care, out of 308 people injured overall.
Officials have begun returning remains to the families, though 13 of the 84 who died have yet to be identified, the prosecutor said.
Six people are in custody in the probe into the attack, including one who Bouhlel sent a text message to minutes before the attack, asking for more weapons, Molins said.
He also took selfies in his truck in the hours before he plowed through the festive crowd.
Three of the six suspects were brought to French intelligence headquarters in Paris on Monday to face eventual terrorism charges, according to a security official.
Investigators found 11 telephones, cocaine and 2,600 euros ($2,900) in cash at the home of one of the suspects, an Albanian national, according to a security official and the Paris prosecutor's office.
Meanwhile, Italy is investigating whether Bouhlel recently had contacts with Tunisians living in the southeastern Puglia region, according to news agency ANSA.
Officials in Italy didn't immediately respond to requests for confirmation.
Italian state TV, reporting from France, said Monday evening that one of the seven detained in Nice had at one point been hosted by two Tunisians living in the town of Gravina in Puglia.
Commenting on Bouhlel's apparent motives, Mr Molins said: 'Radicalisation can take place rapidly when people are disturbed and fascinated by violence.'
Before the Paris press conference, where Mr Molins spoke, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve had described Bouhlel as 'an unbalanced and very violent individual' who was on a social services watch list.
Both Mr Cazeneuve and Mr Molins said six people currently in custody in relation to the case have no links with ISIS either.
Two a man and a woman are an Albanian couple said to have provided a 7.65mm pistol to Bouhlel, while the rest were connected to the killer simply because their numbers appeared on his mobile phone.
A view of the famed Promenade des Anglais, scene of the Thursday's attack in Nice
Passers-by gather on the famed Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, three days Bouhlel drove a truck through revelers
A view of the famed Promenade des Anglais, scene of the Thursday's attack in Nice
There were also revelations about how concerned neighbours had reported Bouhlel for attacking his own children, aged five, three and 18 months.
'Social services were concerned about what he was doing to the youngsters, and wanted to keep him away from them,' said another investigating source.
Two particularly unpleasant incidents saw Bouhlel defecate on his daughter's bed, and also rip open another child's favourite cuddly toy with a knife.
The source added: 'Evidence of these attacks was provided in the form of photographs, and the suspect soon moved out of the family home.'
Bouhlel, a Tunisian national, was originally given a 10-year residency permit in France in 2009 after marrying his cousin, Hajer Khalfallah, in Nice.
She was arrested and questioned by antiterrorism judges after her former husband's death, but has now been released without charge.
Bouhlel regularly beat up his estranged wife, and she too had applied for protection from the authorities.
It also emerged yesterday that only 35 of the dead have been formally identified, because of reasons including bodies being mutilated out of all recognition.
A French flag is seen as people gather to observe a minute's silence at the Jardin Albert 1er on the Promenade des Anglais
Solemn: People gather at a makeshift memorial during the minute of silence in Nice
Mr Cazeneuve told RTL radio today that Bouhlel's alleged links with radical Islam currently relied solely on ISIS's claims of responsibility for the Nice carnage, which they released on a website at the weekend.
'We can not ignore the fact that he was an unbalanced and very violent individual, and it seems that his psychology demonstrates these traits,' said Mr Cazeneuve.
If Bouhlel had indeed become an Islamist in the last days of his life, then it was due to 'rapid radicalisation', said Mr Cazeneuve.
A spokesman for Paris prosecutors, who are leading the investigation into the Nice slaughter, said yesterday 49 victims remained critical in Nice, with 18 of them still fighting for their lives.
The total number of injured was 249, and they included 35 children.
Only 35 of the 84 dead have been formally identified, the spokesman added.
Cazeneuve said 59 people are still hospitalized after the attack Thursday, 29 of them in intensive care, out of 308 people injured overall.
A heroic police officer smashed his way into a car to rescue a hot hound who had been left locked inside in stifling Spanish temperatures.
The dramatic clip shows the Spanish civil guardsman swiftly breaking the vehicle's window before helping the desperate pitbull down to the ground.
The boiling dog can be heard panting and wheezing before crawling into the shade and collapsing to the floor in the city of Alicante.
The car's window is swiftly smashed by the police officer after he spots the dog cooped up inside
The dog desperately starts to clamber out of the car as the police officer helps it clamber down safely
The hot animal is guided out of the car by the officer before a colleague helps him clip the dog onto a lead
It then begins to wag its tail as it desperately laps up water from a bowl fetched by the police and sprawls out on the floor.
Officers can be seen sponging down the huge animal as it continues to pant heavily.
In July, temperatures regularly soar above 30C along the southern coast of Spain where the dog was discovered cooped up.
After climbing down from the car, the wheezing hound collapses in a small shady area on the pavement and drops his head to the floor
The dog desperately laps up water from a bowl as it sprawls out on the pavement to escape the sweltering heat
The video - which has been watched by more than 1.1 million people - was posted on the Facebook page of the Spanish Guardia Civil.
They warned: 'We don't get tired of repeating it, if you come out of your car and you take your pet never leave her locked inside and less in the summer and in full sun.'
Mzee Mohammed, 18, died in hospital on Wednesday evening after he was held by officers at Liverpool One shopping centre
The Mayor of Liverpool has promised a transparent inquiry into the death of a black teenager as a new video emerges of him being detained by police.
Mzee Mohammed, 18, died in hospital on Wednesday evening after he was held by officers at Liverpool One shopping centre.
Police were called to reports of a man behaving erratically with a knife in the area and detained him before establishing he was suffering from a medical episode.
They called an ambulance but he died in Royal Liverpool University Hospital.
A video shows Mohammed, lying on his front without shoes while surrounded by paramedics and police. He appears to be unconscious with his hands cuffed behind his back.
Mr Mohammed's death has caused tension between the city's authorities and the black community.
His mother Karla and sister Melissa attended a Black Lives matter march on Saturday.
Mayor Joe Anderson has promised that nothing will be covered up in the inquiry.
'The bottom line for me is that I will ensure and [the police and crime commissioner] Jane Kennedy and the chief constable will also ensure that there will be transparency around the [Independent Police Complaints Commission] investigation,' he told The Guardian.
A video shows Mohammed, lying on his front without shoes while surrounded by paramedics and police. He appears to be unconscious with his hands cuffed behind his back
'There will be nothing that is left out. The family will get to know first, rightly, what is there and there will be no attempt by anybody, as far as I'm concerned, to cover up.'
Speaking at the protest on Saturday Mohammed's mother said: 'Anyone who had a hand in my boy's death will be brought to justice. My son will not be a number or a statistic. His death will not be in vain.'
The police received a call just after 6pm on Wednesday about a man running into a house in the Toxteth area in a distressed state but left the address when he was seen by the occupier.
Mr Mohammed's mother Karla (pictured) and sister Melissa on attended a Black Lives matter march on Saturday
Mr Mohammed's death has caused tension between the the city's authorities and the black community
They received further calls from the public describing a man with a knife behaving erratically at a number of locations throughout the city centre, including Liverpool One.
There were also reports that he had been acting in an 'aggressive and erratic' manner but the officers were concerned for his own well-being.
Aaron Stalberg, who was walking through Liverpool One at the time, said he had heard that a man had tried to dive through the window of the Chips a Gogo kiosk.
The mayor of Liverpool, Joe Anderson, has promised that nothing will be covered up in the inquiry
He said: 'There were lots of police officers, some with dogs. The man was on the ground and police were standing around him.'
Police said the man had been detained by security staff following an incident at the shopping centre and it was established that he appeared to be suffering from a medical episode.
The 18-year-old was in the custody of police officers when he became unwell at about 6.30pm.
It has been reported that he was seen lying face down, barefoot, surrounded by paramedics and a large number of police officers. He appeared unconscious and has his hands cuffed behind his back.
An ambulance was called and it is understood Mr Mohammed was taken to the Royal Liverpool University Hospital by paramedics, where he was pronounced dead by doctors.
Mr Mohammed's family described him as a 'determined and ambitious' teenager who loved cooking and wanted to become a chef.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission is carrying out an independent investigation following the 18-year-old's death due to the fact that police officers had involvement with him during his detention by security staff at Liverpool One
He went back to school last year to get his maths and English GCSEs and was planning on going to college after the summer. His long-term hopes lay in moving to Jamaica, where he has family.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission is carrying out an independent investigation following the 18-year-old's death due to the fact that police officers had involvement with him during his detention by security staff at Liverpool One.
The IPCC investigation will review all the actions taken on the night of his death.
A spokesperson for Merseyside Police said after the death: 'We are co-operating with their investigation and, whilst we are committed to being open and transparent, the nature of the IPCC investigation does limit the amount of information we can provide as we cannot be seen to influence or compromise it.
The police received a call just after 6pm about a man running into a house in Toxteth in a distressed state but left the address when he was seen by the occupier. They received further calls describing a man with a knife behaving erratically at a number of locations throughout the city centre, including Liverpool One (above)
'However we can say that just after 6pm Merseyside Police received [information] about a man having run into a house in the Toxteth area in a distressed state. The man then left the address when seen by the occupier.
'The force then received further calls from the public describing a man with a knife behaving erratically at a number of locations throughout the city centre, including Liverpool One.
In the dock: Mikaela Haze, 70, pictured outside court, shouted Saudi Arabia go home and ripped the veil off the 6,300 artwork before knocking it over at the exhibition on June 29
A drunk Brexit supporter screamed 'we voted to take our country back' as she destroyed a hijab sculpture at The Royal College of Art days after the EU referendum.
Mikaela Haze, 70, shouted 'Saudi Arabia go home' and ripped the veil off the 6,300 artwork before knocking it over at the exhibition on June 29.
The sculpture, which consisted of a hijab over a metal frame, was created by masters student Yasmeen Sabri to 'promote tolerance and understanding'.
Miss Sabri was perfecting her work at the university in South Kensington, south London, when Haze launched her attack at 7.40pm.
Prosecutor Rahab Njoroge said: 'The defendant Miss Mikaela Haze was drunk when she entered the Royal Art College where the victim Miss Sabri was putting finishing touches to a sculpture of a hijab.
'The defendant had taken the hijab from the statue, her demeanour at this time had changed and she had started shouting: "Saudi Arabia go home".
'She then said "we voted to take our country back again" as she pushed the sculpture, destroying it, and the value of the sculpture is 6,300.
The next day, June 30, Miss Sabri tweeted: "Walk a Mile in her Veil" is the work that provoked the abuse, ironically it (is) promoting Tolerance and understanding.'
Westminster Magistrates Court heard it took her six months to complete the sculpture.
Haze appeared at the court dressed all in black to face one count of religiously aggravated criminal damage.
Asked for her plea she replied: I plead guilty but I dont consider it racist because... it wasnt at her, I promise you.
She later added: Im very sorry to the lady who I offended.
Work of art: The sculpture, which consisted of a hijab over a metal frame, was created by masters student Yasmeen Sabri, pictured with the artwork, to promote tolerance and understanding
Reaction: On the day after the criminal damage Miss Sabri tweeted: "Walk a Mile in her Veil" is the work that provoked the abuse, ironically it (is) promoting Tolerance and understanding.'
Miss Njoroge said: Miss Sabri says the incident left her sad and frustrated by the defendants actions, but whether it was due to the recent news of the Brexit she isnt sure.
All shes asking is that this woman doesnt repeat this incident to others again.
She added: We would say that this is a hate crime.
Claire Kelly, defending, said: Miss Haze was drunk at the time of the incident, there are some alcohol issues, particularly around certain times of the year, including her birthday.
She continued: Shes extremely embarrassed by the situation, shes not someone that has been before the courts on multiple occasions.
Chair of the bench Paul Brooks said: We are not going to sentence you today, we are going to ask the probation service to prepare a report which will assist you and it will assist the court in deciding what the appropriate sentence is.
Haze, of Bayswater, west London, has been barred from entering the Royal College of Art while she remains on conditional bail before her sentencing at Westminster Magistrates Court on 26 July.
SoftBank Group Corp is nearing a deal to buy ARM Holdings Plc for more than $32 billion, people with knowledge of the matter said, securing a slice of virtually every mobile computing gadget on the planet and future connected devices.
The deal discussions started as a result of an approach from SoftBank, and ARM didn't run an auction process, two people said. The deal would be the biggest-ever for SoftBank, which under Chairman Masayoshi Son is one of Japan's most acquisitive companies with stakes in wireless carrier Sprint Corp and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.
A deal would give SoftBank control of a cash-generating mobile chip leader, and a share of revenue in everything from smartphones to connected gadgets in the home. The British semiconductor designer gets royalties when companies from Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co to Qualcomm Inc adopt its designs, which are considered power-saving and efficient.
The Japanese company is also buying into a British currency that's weakened considerably against the yen since the country's decision to depart the European Union. Beyond its sheer scale, the ARM acquisition is unusual for a company that had preferred to take control through hefty stakes in its companies.
"As much as we hated the decision of buying Sprint, we believe if Son wanted to bet on the sterling recovering he picked a great name in the tech sector," said Amir Anvarzadeh, Singapore-based head of Japanese equity sales at BGC Partners Inc.
A 'beautiful' student killed alongside her boyfriend in a head-on crash may have fallen asleep at the wheel after a night out, an inquest heard.
'Inseparable' couple Sarah Delf and Oliver Appleby, both 24, died instantly after she veered into the opposite lane and they crashed into a lorry last November.
But there were no skid marks or avoidance manoeuvres and witnesses behind Miss Delf's car said the lorry driver tried to avoid hitting the Mazda.
'Inseparable' couple Sarah Delf and Oliver Appleby, both 24, died instantly after she veered into the opposite lane and they were hit by a lorry last November
Sarah, due to complete her PhD this year, had been out the night before and did not get back until 4am, the inquest heard yesterday.
Forensic collision investigator PC Andy Fossey said: 'In my opinion there are factors that relate to the incident that Miss Delf fell asleep at the wheel. Or it could have been an unknown distraction.
'There are a number of possible reasons why the Mazda drifted into the path of the other vehicle but the actual cause of the collision cannot be ascertained.'
PC Fossey said there were no defects found with the car or lorry and neither driver had been drinking.
The couple had left Margate, Kent, where Oliver's family lives, at about 5.15pm to head home to Norwich before the devastating smash three hours later.
A horrified eye-witness driving behind her said the truck driver had desperately tried to avoid smashing into her Mazda 2 at Brome, Suffolk, last November.
At an inquest into their deaths, the coroner heard that Sarah had probably fallen asleep at the wheel as there were no skid mars on the road, indicating she hadn't reacted when she saw the lorry
TOUCHING TRIBUTE TO SOMEONE WHO 'REVELLED IN THE BEAUTY OF THE WORLD' BEFORE TRAGEDY A heartbreaking tribute paid by Sarah's family hailed her as a 'much-loved daughter, sister, adored member of the family, devoted girlfriend and dedicated friend to many. The tribute, from parents, Heather and William, and brother Jonathan, said: 'She was a kind, popular and sociable girl, and a senior prefect at school. 'Her older brother remained close to her throughout university life where he studied pharmacy. 'He was honoured to have his little sister close by at all times to cherish. 'An avid animal lover, Sarah always aspired to study veterinary medicine, and selflessly spent her free time caring for animals and supporting a local farmer. 'Last year she travelled to a Zambian wildlife reserve, where she vaccinated cape buffalos and worked with rare white lions. 'Sarah was beautiful in every sense of the word. She loved life, and lived hers to the full. 'She had a close, loving family and network of friends and she always made the time to keep in touch with everyone. 'We will always treasure the amazing and thoughtful letters she wrote to us. 'She travelled the world and attracted friends on every continent with her infectious laugh, kind-hearted smile and witty personality. 'Her zest for life and sense of adventure made her at one with nature and she revelled in the beauty of the world around her, bringing out the best in everyone she met. 'Sarah was a free spirit, a pillar of strength for her family and friends, and a shoulder for others to cry on. 'Her loving nature made her a great listener and role model to others. It was a privilege and a pleasure to have Sarah in our lives and to see her blossom into the beautiful flower she became. 'Our hearts feel empty because she has gone but resonate with the love we shared for her and the lasting memories she has left behind. 'We will remember you always Sarah - eternally in our thoughts, forever in our words and in the lives we will carry on living for you. 'You will never be forgotten and will always be a part of our lives. We love you.' Advertisement
Assistant Suffolk Coroner Dr Dan Sharpstone said Miss Delf and Mr Appleby died as a result of a road traffic collision in the inquest at Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk.
Sarah and Oliver lived together in Norwich after meeting at the University of East Anglia in 2010.
Miss Delf grew up in Norfolk, attending school in Martham and sixth form at Gorleston College, near Great Yarmouth.
She was an animal lover and set to complete a PhD in chemistry at the UEA earlier this year.
She had secured a place to become a vet in Bulgaria and was due to fulfil her dream next year.
Oliver was brought up in Croydon, south London, and Margate and attended Ursuline College in Westgate-on-Sea, Kent.
He studied American History and Politics at UEA where he met Sarah, described by Oliver's family as 'the love of his life'.
A heartbreaking tribute paid by Sarah's family hailed her as a 'much-loved daughter, sister, adored member of the family, devoted girlfriend and dedicated friend to many.
The tribute, from parents, Heather and William, and brother Jonathan, said: 'She was a kind, popular and sociable girl, and a senior prefect at school.
'Sarah was beautiful in every sense of the word. She loved life, and lived hers to the full.
'Her zest for life and sense of adventure made her at one with nature and she revelled in the beauty of the world around her, bringing out the best in everyone she met.
'We will remember you always Sarah - eternally in our thoughts, forever in our words and in the lives we will carry on living for you.
'You will never be forgotten and will always be a part of our lives. We love you.'
Oliver's family said he was a 'bright, enthusiastic young man with a heart of gold.
They said: 'He always put others first and doted on his beautiful girlfriend Sarah.
'Spending five happy years together they were inseparable.
'He wasn't a judgemental, over-opinionated person, he just wished for peace and was so humble.
'Oliver loved to travel and was a very outdoors person. He met many friends along the way. He was very popular and was loved by many for his witty sense of humour, charm and kindness.
President Tayyip Erdogan has refused to rule out the execution of coup plotters and said the Turkish people want the death penalty - abolished more than a decade ago - for those involved in last weekend's failed military coup.
'The people on the streets have made that request,' Erdogan said in a CNN interview on Monday.
'The people have the opinion that these terrorists should be killed ... Why should I keep them and feed them in prisons for years to come, that's what the people say.'
CNN also quoted Erdogan as saying official papers would be filed within days to request the extradition of cleric Fethullah Gulen from the United States.
Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has refused to rule out bringing back the death penalty
Turkey says Gulen masterminded the coup attempt but the 75-year-old denies any involvement.
On Tuesday, Turkish state media has reported that President Erdogan's Air Force advisor Erkan Kivrak has become one of the 6,000 people to be detained so far in a crackdown after the coup attempt.
Erdogan's defiant comments come after Turkey was warned by Germany that it will kill its chances of joining the European Union if it reinstates the death penalty.
World leaders have also threatened the country with expulsion from Nato.
More than 6,000 people, mainly military personnel and workers in the interior ministry have been arrested since the coup plotters sent warplanes firing on key government installations and tanks rolling into major cities on Friday night.
Soldiers accused of being part of the attempted coup were rounded up and beaten on Saturday morning
Soldiers push each other to board a bus to escape the mob after troops involved in the coup surrendered on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul
Soldiers were stripped of their uniforms and made to lie next to each other after being arrested
But the rebellion wasn't supported by the military's top brass and was quashed by loyal government forces and masses of civilians who took to the streets. At least 294 people were killed and more than 1,400 wounded.
After the Turkish government said they had took back control of the country, they pledged to severely punish those responsible for the uprising.
However in Berlin on Monday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman said Turkey's bid on joining the EU would end if Ankara restored the death penalty.
Steffen Seibert told reporters that the EU is a 'community of values, therefore the institution of the death penalty can only mean that such a country could not be a member.'
Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan has been warned by German Chancellor Angela Merkel that if he reinstates the death penalty in the wake of the military coup, it will kill Turkey's chances of joining the EU
After the Turkish government said they had took back control of the country, it pledged to severely punish those responsible for the uprising. Pictured are military commanders accused of being the coup masterminds
For the moment, he says that Germany and other EU countries are watching the internal Turkish debate on whether to institute the death penalty, but that the EU's position is clear.
'In the first hours after the failed coup, we witnessed revolting scenes of caprice and revenge against soldiers on the streets. That cannot be accepted.
'We categorically reject the death penalty and an institution of the death penalty would mean an end to the negotiations to join the EU,' he added.
His comments follow those of the head of EU foreign affairs Federica Mogeherini, who also said Turkey would be barred from joining the block if they reinstated capital punishment.
Supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wave flags as they gather in Istanbul's main Taksim Square on July 17
While responding to crowds of supporters calling for the death penalty for the plotters on Sunday, President Erdogan said such demands could not be ignored.
US Secretary of State John Kerry called on Turkey to uphold democracy and human rights as it pursues the military officers and anyone else involved in the plot
'Let me be very clear... no country can become an EU state if it introduces the death penalty,' Mogherini said when asked about the possible impact on long-stalled accession talks with Ankara.
While US Secretary of State John Kerry called on Turkey to uphold democracy and human rights as it pursues the military officers and anyone else involved in the plot.
The top American diplomat said Turkey must 'uphold the highest standards for the country's democratic institutions and the rule of law.'
While he recognized the need to apprehend the coup plotters, Kerry said: 'We caution against a reach that goes beyond that.'
But both Mogherini and Kerry reiterated the trans-Atlantic support for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's democratically elected government.
Both the EU and the U.S. need a stable Turkey right and Washington is working with its NATO partner to fight the ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
Gay: Terrorist Mohamed Lahouaiej used dating sites to pick up numerous male and female lovers
French detectives investigating the Bastille Day massacre have interviewed the truck killer's 73-year-old lover amid revelations he was a 'sex maniac' and an 'ultra-violent bisexual sadist'.
As Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel's male and female lovers were interviewed in the wake of the massacre which killed 84 people in Nice, it emerged he was sex-obsessed before his rapid decision to convert to Islam.
The killer had told a friend he had regularly watched videos of hostages being decapitated by ISIS online, and detectives described finding 'very violent' pictures of corpses on his computer, according to Breitbart.
Bouhlel's favourite lover was a 73-year-old male pensioner, but others described him as a 'sex maniac' and an 'ultra-violent bisexual sadist' when interviewed, according to The Times.
The 'sexually obsessed' 31-year-old had numerous male and female conquests that he found on dating sites.
But the pensioner was described as his 'principal' lover by detectives who have unearthed details of his personal life by examining his mobile phone.
The father-of-three also regularly viewed sites showing violent sex as well as propaganda and graphic scenes of torture and beheadings.
As well as being a practising homosexual, Bouhlel drank alcohol and smoked drugs, despite claims he had been recently radicalised into a strict Muslim.
Officers discovered the phone inside the cab of the lorry he used to massacre 85 people on the Promenade des Anglais on Thursday.
Police were only able to stop Bouhlel's murderous rampage by shooting him dead.
But the phone is proving more vital to the investigation than the seven suspects currently being questioned over links to Bouhlel.
These include two Albanians suspected of supplying a pistol to Bouhlel, and others whose phone numbers appeared on the phone.
The device itself is full of messages, videos and photographs, including ones of men and women Boulel had recently slept with.
He took frequent selfies and would record all of his relationships with other people, however brief.
He even took a selfie of himself inside the truck just moments before heading off on his killing spree, sending it to family members in his native Tunisia.
'The testimony which investigators are relying on most is that of the mobile phone,' reported the BFM TV news channel, basing their report on evidence leaked to them.
Some 200 officers are now working exclusively on enquiries related to data found on the phone.
It has also emerged his estranged wife was planning on heading to the fireworks display but pulled out at the last minute citing 'personal reasons', according to local media.
Both his wife and her mother had been the victims of his domestic abuse, according to French detectives.
Bouhlel visited gyms and salsa bars regularly, and would also visit website 'showing pictures of executions', said BFM TV.
'The busy sex life of a man who had recently discovered a religious faith is shown by the data on the device,' BFM added.
The phone has also revealed chilling details of how the divorced father-of-three prepared his attack - revealing his delight in obtaining a 7.65 pistol and his hope for getting other weapons.
'Bring more weapons. Bringing in 5,' read one text, according to judicial sources.
An earlier text said: 'It's good. I have the equipment.'
Practising homosexual: Despite claims that he had recently been radicalised into a strict Islamist - Mohamed was a practising homosexual
Boulel loved sending selfie photos to people, and would record all of his relationships with other people, however brief. Picture right shows tourists on the beach in Nice just three days after the attack
The last text was sent at 10.27pm to one of the men now in custody following police raids over the weekend. It ended 'Bringing in five to C'.
Most of those arrested had been in contact with Bouhlel on a number of occasions, added the judicial source.
I was completely sure what was happening. I saw a shadow emerge from the driver's side. He had a weapon. I aimed for the head that's all I could see. Unnamed officer who shot Bouhlel
One theory being looked at was that Bouhlel was 'intent on committing suicide' and had designed his death 'in the style of a terrorist attack'.
This theory is supported by information gleaned from those in custody, according to the source.
These included Ramzie Arifa, 22, who 'spent time talking with Bouhlel before the attack'.
One of the police officers who shot Bouhlel dead has also spoken about the ordeal for the first time.
'He had stopped. The front of the vehicle was completely torn to pieces. The motor was off,' the unnamed officer revealed.
'I was completely sure what was happening. I saw a shadow emerge from the driver's side. He had a weapon.
'I aimed for the head that's all I could see. He disappeared in the cabin and then reemerged.
'I shot twice more. His head fell back.
'Without knowing whether he was dead, I heard the order "stop shooting".'
Three of the six still in custody have been transferred to Levallois-Peret near Paris for further questioning by the Directorate of Internal Security (RPS).
Bouhlel also talked of his delight in obtaining a 7.65 pistol and his hope for getting other weapons. Pictured his family home in Tunisia
His phone was picked up by police officers after they shot him dead last Thursday in a lorry that he had used to kill 85 people on the Promenade des Anglais, in the French city of Nice
Hundreds of people pay their respects to the 85 people killed by Mohamed on his rampage in the port city
But France's Minister of the Interior, Bernard Cazeneuve, said today that the links between the killer and 'terrorist networks' had not yet been established.
However, he said: 'The MO is borrowed completely from that of Daesh [ISIS].'
Speaking on RTL he added: 'We cannot exclude that an unbalanced and very violent individual, as his psychology shows he was, in one moment, rapidly radicalised and then committed this absolutely appalling crime.'
But he said it was clear from the first moment it had all the elements of a suicide attack and initial inquiries seem to show premeditation.
'There are people who are in custody, in the entourage or among those who at some point were in contact to supply him with arms.'
I clung to the handle. I tried three or four times to open the door. I could see he was looking for something as the truck slowed down. Alexandre Migues
Meanwhile a modest hero has come forward to tell how he tried to stop killer Bouhlel's rampage.
Alexandre Migues said he saw the truck as it neared the end of the promenade.
Throwing his bike to one side he ran for 20 metres to catch up with Bouhlel, who had now slowed the truck to between five and 10km.
'I clung to the handle,' he told MBF TV. 'I tried three or four times to open the door. I could see he was looking for something as the truck slowed down.
'He pulled up a weapon. He waved it at me looking me straight in the eyes. I let go of the door handle.
'He was in command of that truck, that wheel. He was the master of the vehicle.'
He continued: 'I'd seen a person get crushed in front of me so my reaction was to follow and run.
'I tried to do my best to slow it down. But when he threatened me with his pistol, I let go of the handle.'
He said that he had also seen the motorcyclist caught on camera trying to stop the vehicle, but didn't know what had happened to him.
Carnage: Bouhlel's attack left a trail of devastation, killing at least 84 people including 10 children, on the Promenade des Anglais before he was shot dead by anti-terror police in France
Horror: The Nice terrorist parked on the promenade for nearly nine hours yesterday before launching his horrific attack, but was allowed to stay because he told police he was delivering ice cream
Massacre: Bodies were left scattered over the road in the wake of the attack, after the lorry ploughed through crowds celebrating Bastille Day on the promenade
The man has never come forward or been found.
He added: 'You can see on video we managed to slow the truck. I wish i could have clung on longer to force him into the central reservation or at least to slow him down enough so that people could flee.
'From where we started to slow down the truck for 150 metres there were no victims. I was so relieved.'
In addition, a leading Nicois politician has lashed out at being treated like a 'nobody' in his own city by President Hollande in the wake of the attack.
Christian Esoril, president of the Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur region, launched his tirade as Mr Hollande, Prime Minister Manuel Valls and other politicians and dignitaries arrived for the memorial.
'I was treated like a subordinate. A nobody,' said the flamboyant right-winger.
'I had become invisible when everything that was happening in my city concerned the people of Nice.
Angela Eagle tonight quit the contest to topple Jeremy Corbyn, leaving Owen Smith as the 'unity candidate' to take on the beleaguered Labour leader in a summer-long battle.
Ms Eagle started the leadership contest last week but has fallen short among MPs as Mr Smith pulled ahead since nominations officially opened last night.
Despite the developments, polls suggest Jeremy Corbyn will trounce Mr Smith by 22 points in the contest, which is due to run until September 24.
Speaking in Parliament tonight after Mr Smith secured 88 nominations in 24 hours, Ms Eagle said: 'It's in the best interests of the Labour Party that we now come together so we can have one candidate.
'I would like to congratulate Owen on coming top in this race and then going on I think to take on Jeremy Corbyn.'
Mr Smith tonight described Ms Eagle as a 'star' who will be at his 'right hand' throughout the contest to oust Mr Corbyn..
Angela Eagle, pictured tonight in the Central Lobby of Parliament, quit the race to be Labour leader to ensure only one candidate takes on Jeremy Corbyn
Owen Smith, who set out his stall as a future Labour leader on Sunday, pictured, now has the task of overhauling Mr Corbyn's lead among party supporters over the summer
Ms Eagle said she would put all of her energies and enthusiasm into supporting Mr Smith's campaign to defeat Mr Corbyn.
She said: 'We have a Labour Party at the moment that is not working, We have a leader that does not have the confidence of MPs and is not reaching out to the country.
'We need to have a strong and united Labour Party so we can be a good opposition, take the fight to the Conservative government and heal our country.'
Ms Eagle appealed to Labour supporters who want to oust Mr Corbyn to pay 25 to register as a supporter who can vote in the leadership election before 5pm tomorrow.
CORBYN VS SMITH: WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith will now go head to head in a battle over the future of the Labour Party. What happens next? At 5pm tomorrow, the deadline for people to sign up as a 'registered supporter' and get a vote is reached.
Anyone who was a Labour member, or registered to an affiliate, before January 12, can also take part
The two candidates will embark upon their campaigns around the country. Much like last year, there are expected to be many hustings and rallies - but regular constituency Labour Party meetings are banned.
On Monday August 22, ballot papers will be issued to all eligible voters. The election is a one member, one vote poll. With with only two candidates is a simple race for votes.
On September 21, the deadline for returning votes is reached.
Labour will hold a special conference on Saturday, September 24, the eve of its main party conference, to announce the winner. Advertisement
Mr Smith said: 'I am just as radical as Jeremy Corbyn. What Labour members want is yes a principled leadership but they want someone who can put those principles into practice by winning power.
'It's time to move on from Jeremy. It's time to move on to a new generation.'
He added: 'I think Jeremy is owed a debt of gratitude for helping Labour rediscover its radical roots, but we do need a new generation of Labour men and women to take this party forward, to get us ready for government once more.'
Mr Smith vowed to win over members 'street by street, town by town, meeting by meeting' to convince them he could lead a 'credible, radical government-in-waiting'.
'I'm going to take the fight out on to the streets and make sure that I can persuade them that I can be not just the next Labour leader, but a Labour prime minister-in-waiting,' he said.
Earlier, new research by YouGov for The Times found that if all three candidates stood, Mr Corbyn would secure 54 per cent of the votes with Ms Eagle on 21 per cent and Owen Smith on 15 per cent.
In spite of being condemned as incompetent by his parliamentary colleagues the veteran left-winger still appears to be far more popular among party members than either of his opponents.
Jeremy Corbyn would easily defeat ex-work and pensions spokesman Owen Smith, the a new poll from YouGov for The Times revealed today
OWEN SMITH: A JOURNALIST TURNED POLITICIAN CHALLENGING FOR THE LABOUR CROWN A former journalist turned politician, Owen Smith first entered Parliament in 2010. The 46-year-old father of three rose swiftly up the ranks and joined the front bench under Ed Miliband in 2012. Mr Smith started his career at the BBC, working as a radio producer in Wales and London on shows including the flagship Radio 4 Today programme. After a decade in news, Mr Smith got his first taste of Westminster politics working as a special advisor to Paul Murphy, first at the Wales Office and later in the Northern Ireland Office. Mr Smith briefly entered pharmaceuticals, becoming and 80,000 a year lobbyist for Pfizer and then joining Amgen. His 2010 election to the safe Labour seat of Pontypridd started a rapid rise in Westminster. He was shadow Welsh secretary under Mr Miliband before joining Mr Corbyn's shadow cabinet covering the work and pensions brief in September 2015. Last month, he joined the revolt against the ailing Labour leader, walking out of shadow cabinet alongside most of his colleagues. He declared his candidacy for the Labour leadership last week. Advertisement
If Mr Corbyn was opposed by just Ms Eagle, some 58 per cent would vote for the current leader and just 34 per cent for the challenger.
The poll indicated that Mr Corbyn's margin of victory may be slightly narrower if just Mr Smith stood against him - 56 per cent for Mr Corbyn and 34 per cent for Mr Smith - but the result would still be a convincing victory for the incumbent.
Despite the chaos in the Labour ranks, the poll of more than 1,000 party members suggested that 55 per cent of members thought Mr Corbyn was doing well - up from 51 per cent at the end of June.
The BBC's Newsnight said Mr Smith was once asked to get a police response to an unfolding crime story, and telephoned 999, prompting an official complaint from Scotland Yard.
At a hustings in Parliament last night Ms Eagle dodged calls by MPs to stand aside if she fails to secure the most nominations - something Mr Smith has promised to do.
Sources said 'productive discussions' had been held between the two contenders.
Former Labour leader Ed Miliband has joined calls for a single challenger to take on Mr Corbyn.
He said both Angela Eagle and Owen Smith would be excellent candidates.
'So I hope that the process is found to pick one candidate.'
During extraordinary scenes in parliament last night, senior MPs queued up to slam CND activist Mr Corbyn as they backed the government in a vote on whether to renew the Trident nuclear deterrent.
Senior Labour MPs queued up to slam Mr Corbyn during a debate on renewing the Trident nuclear deterrent last night
Long-term CND activist Mr Corbyn had been forced to give Labour MPs a free vote to avoid rebelling against his own party policy
Backbencher Neil Coyle accused him of reneging on a promise to read out the party's official policy from the despatch box.
Copeland MP Jamie Reed lashed out at the leader's 'reckless, juvenile, narcissistic irresponsibility' in opposing the 'settled will of the country'.
Barrow MP John Woodcock said: 'For the official opposition to have a free vote on a matter of such strategic national importance is a terrible indictment of how far this once great party has fallen.'
Former frontbencher Toby Perkins said Mr Corbyn was spouting arguments he would have regarded as credible when he was 13 years old.
Ilford's Mike Gapes compared the veteran left-winger unfavourably to Michael Foot, who led Labour to disaster in the 1980s.
In the event some 140 sided with the government, with fewer than 50 voting to scrap the weapons.
Another 45 - including shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry and shadow defence secretary Clive Lewis - abstained.
Mr Corbyn - who had been forced to offer his MPs a free vote in order to avoid becoming the first leader in history to rebel against his own party whip - said the costs of replacing Trident were huge and it was 'morally' wrong.
:: YouGov polled 1,019 Labour members between Friday and Monday. All those polled had joined Labour before the start of 2016.
Mr O'Neill, from York, has lost touch with his children following the order
Police will tell any new partner he sees that he is 'potentially dangerous'
The 45 year old was given the SRO despite being cleared of rape at court
A father-of-two who was cleared of rape but has to tell police 24 hours before he has sex today revealed that officers will visit any new partner to tell her he is 'potentially dangerous'.
John O'Neill, 45, has even lost touch with his children who have 'deleted him on Facebook' despite being unanimously cleared after a retrial at Teesside Crown Court in November.
But North Yorkshire Police then controversially applied for a Sexual Risk Order (SRO), with a condition that he inform them a day before he has sex with a new partner.
Speaking today to Victoria Derbyshire on her BBC Two show, Mr O'Neill, from York, said the police applied for the order because of 'sour grapes' after they were 'humiliated' in court.
John O'Neill (pictured) has lost touch with his children following the Sexual Risk Order - despite being cleared of rape
He believes the police are responsible for his 'living hell' and also outlined the process officers will take to inform a potential partner about the order, a revelation which will leave them 'horrified', according to Mr O'Neill.
The IT consultant said 'convicted criminals don't get these kind of orders - it's obscene' and revealed that his children no longer speak to him.
He said that he has to inform police when he meets someone new and plans to start a sexual relationship - which includes 'sexual conversation' and 'kissing'.
Officers will then visit the woman with a disclosure document and ask them to sign a form before leaving.
Mr O'Neill, a former English literature student, said: 'I have to give a name, address and date of birth of any woman I intend to have any sexual contact with.
'It's broader than just having sex, it's ridiculous. It's sexual conservation, kissing is included, it's so sweeping - it's ridiculous. I could breach this order by accident'.
Mr O'Neill added: 'In theory, there is a disclosure document and what they (the police) will do is they will go around and say Mr O'Neill is subject to something called a Sexual Risk Order.
'He is considered to be potentially dangerous and then they ask that woman to sign a form and leave. And that's it.
John O'Neill - who was cleared of rape - has to tell police 24 hours before he has sex
'So can you imagine the horror of that? You've just met someone, and you're at the point where you're deciding whether to date and then that happens.'
He added: 'This has been devastating for people around me. The first thing that happened was my children won't speak to me now. They've deleted me from Facebook.
'One of my friends has been threatened with being fired just because she knows me. On a personal level it has been devastating.
'I spoke to their mother and we think the best thing to do is just to let the shock die down for a while.
'How horrific must be, seeing your father and his sex predilections spread across the internet.'
He added: 'We were amazed that the police had made the application after a unanimous acquittal of the only crime that I've ever been accused of.
'We think it's sour grapes. They lost in court, they didn't just lose, they were humiliated in court for having utterly failed to do any detective work apparently.
'They have their reasons, the reasons are, to get an SRO you need an act of an sexual nature which necessitates the risk order.
'The act on which they are relying is scratching and biting during sex. Now if that necessitates a Sexual Risk Order they're going to have to be writing an awful lot Sexual Risk Orders. I would suspect the majority of the population is going to be subject to a Sexual Risk Order.
'But the real reason is they lost a trial and they are using, misusing, this new set of laws to effectively put me on retrial for rape after an acquittal.'
He revealed that he hasn't had sex with anyone since the order was put in place.
If he breaches any part of the order he will potentially go to prison for 'potentially five years' and become a 'convicted sex offender'.
His history of S and M sex was brought up at the trial, including evidence from a doctor with whom he had discussed his past.
He has previously claimed the doctor misunderstood what he was discussing, saying she was confused about what was just fantasy.
Police thought what he told the doctor was a confession, he said at a previous hearing.
Mr O'Neill, 45, was tried for rape and unanimously cleared after a retrial at Teesside Crown Court in November
He said: 'Thank God Fifty Shades of Grey came out when it did, it helped my barrister normalise that.
The woman who accused him of rape said she was bitten and scratched, but Mr O'Neill denied the bite and said the scratch came during a massage after consensual sex.
At a previous hearing, he said there was 'no prospect' of a relationship at the moment because of the rules he has been forced to live by.
He gave the example of chatting to a woman and saying: 'There's a nice French restaurant I'd like to take you to, but first the police are just going to come around for a little chat.'
Other conditions of the order include him having to hand over the pin for his mobile phone to police, and not to use internet-connected devices which cannot be later checked by officers.
He decided, having taken legal advice, not to give them the pin code as a point of principle, because he said the conditions of SROs were supposed to be prohibitive, not obligatory.
The verdict on this breach will be decided on August 19 and if found guilty he will be classed as a sex offender.
He was arrested for breaching his SRO and was held in police custody overnight.
Mr O'Neill's identity was made public last week after an order protecting his anonymity was lifted at York Magistrates Court.
But she said 'at the very least we need to be able to discuss it'
An Islamic family has hit out at Sonia Kruger for calling on Australia to close its borders to Muslims in a Facebook post that has since gone viral.
Chris Cuevas began his message addressing the TV host directly, explaining his family loves to take part in the classic Australian activities before noting his family was also Muslim.
Mr Cuevas also explained that instead of heaping hate towards Kruger, his family will dedicate their five daily prayers in hopes her heart will be opened to see the goodness in Muslims.
'Hi Sonia. This is my family. My wife Stef, my sons Mikhail, Mirza and baby Mason,' he wrote.
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Chris Cuevas pictured with his wife Stef and sons Mikhail, Mirza and baby Mason, directed a Facebook message at Sonia Kruger asking her why she wanted to ban his family from Australia
'We love the footy, enjoy a bbq and spend our summers down at the beach,' the Cuevas family wrote in their Facebook post to Kruger before pointing out: 'We are also Muslims.'
The Cuevas family also referenced Australia's history - the arrival of Captain James Cook and the British.
'I'm sure the indigenous Australians would have loved to have done the same for people who looked like you when Capt Cook and his mates came to shore all those years ago and declared this land not belonging to anyone.
'Rather than heap hate towards you, as we complete our 5 daily prayers, we will pray that your heart be opened and see the good in all of us. To be inclusive and welcoming rather than the opposite.'
The message which was posted on Tuesday afternoon has since been liked by 21 thousand social media users and shared over 1,500 times.
Live TV statement: Sonia Kruger's voice quavered as she revealed what prompted her call to ban Muslim immigration Tuesday - admitting her views 'may have been extreme'
Mr Cuevas said his family loves football, enjoying a day at the beach and having a barbecue before noting they are Muslims
'ROCKED TO MY CORE': SONIA KRUGER'S LIVE STATEMENT IN FULL I would like to say a few things about what happened yesterday on the Today Show. The discussion we had was centred around a newspaper article which measured the correlation of Muslim population in certain countries and the number of certain terrorist attacks. I thought the article made relevant points. We witnessed too many atrocities in the name of terrorism. Last week's attack on men, women and children in Nice left me in utter disbelief. I saw the image of a baby covered in a plastic sheet with a doll lying beside her and it rocked me to the very core. I imagined what that must have been like for the people of Nice, for the friends and families of the lost and the thought that it could happen here terrifies me. This type of attack affects people from all walks of life and I want to make it very clear that I have complete respect for people of all races, and religions. I acknowledge my views yesterday may have been extreme. The reaction overnight in the papers, online and via social media demonstrates that there are a myriad of opinions in Australia which I actually appreciate. It is a hugely complex and sensitive issue. It's an issue with no simple answer. And it's an issue that cannot be fully discussed in a short televised segment. Is there a solution? I don't know. We elect politicians to make those calls. They analyse and then they decide and we hope they get it right. It's a privilege to live in a country such as Australia which embraces a multicultural society. But there is no simple answer here and if we are to find a solution to the situation at the very least we need to be able to discuss it. Advertisement
Kruger set off a social media firestorm earlier this week when she argued there is a correlation between the number of Muslims in a country and the number of terrorist attacks.
The former Strictly Ballroom star said she had 'a lot of very good friends' who were Muslims and peace-loving, beautiful people.
'But there are fanatics,' she said.
'Personally, I would like to see it stop now for Australia because I want to feel safe as all of our citizens do when we go out to celebrate Australia Day.
She told the panel Japan has a population of 174 million people and 100,000 Muslims and the country never suffers terrorist attacks.
Her remarks drew a passionate response from the morning program's co-host David Campbell, who interrupted her as she began to talk about journalists being 'threatened' and freedom of speech.
Hands waving, Campbell replied: 'I'd like to see freedom of religion as well! As well as freedom of speech! They both go hand and hand!'
'We're talking about immigration, David,' Kruger replied. She then asked if people were allowed to talk about the issue.
Campbell said the article they were talking about - written by conservative columnist Andrew Bolt in News Corp newspapers - 'breeds hate'.
'So you're not allowed to talk about it?' Kruger replied. 'You're not allowed to discuss it?'
'I would venture that if you spoke to the parents of those children killed in Nice then they would be of the same opinion.'
She argued 'good Muslim people' were dying as a result of terrorist acts, pointing out the first person to die in the Nice terror attacks last week was a Muslim woman.
When host Lisa Wilkinson asked her directly whether she wanted the borders totally closed to Muslim migrants, Kruger said: 'Yes, yes I would'.
Wilkinson pointed out closing the borders to Muslims was the 'Donald Trump approach'. 'Well, perhaps it is,' Kruger said. 'For the safety of our citizens here I think it's important'.
The US presidential candidate has called for a 'complete shutdown' on Muslims entering the United States 'until our country's representatives can figure out what's going on'.
The message which was posted on Tuesday afternoon has since been liked by 21 thousand social media users and shared over 1,500 times
The family will dedicate their five daily prayers in hopes her heart will be opened to see the goodness in Muslims
But on Tuesday morning Kruger admitted her views - calling for the country to close its borders to Muslims - 'may have been extreme'.
But she struck a defiant note saying people should be able to discuss the 'hugely complex' issue.
A tearful Sonia Kruger has explained what led her to call for a ban on Muslim immigration: she was 'rocked to the core' after seeing a photograph of a child's dead body in Nice last week.
The Nine Network host's voice quavered as she stared down the barrel of the camera and delivered a live statement at the beginning of her Today Extra program on Tuesday morning.
'I saw the image of a baby covered in a plastic sheet with a doll lying beside her and it rocked me to the very core,' she said.
'I imagined what that must have been like for the people of Nice, for the friends and families of the lost and the thought that it could happen here terrifies me.'
The photo that shook Sonia Kruger: This Reuters picture of a child's body covered in a plastic sheet - with a doll beside her - prompted her Muslim immigration ban call, she said
'It's a privilege to live in a country such as Australia which embraces a multicultural society.
'But there is no simple answer here and if we are to find a solution to the situation at the very least we need to be able to discuss it.'
Today host Sylvia Jeffreys leaped to her colleague's defence moments before, telling viewers: 'Sonia is not a racist.
'She is a compassionate, intelligent and thoughtful person.'
Jeffreys told a panel discussion she didn't agree with her Nine Network colleague's views.
But she said Kruger was speaking with 'brutal honesty' as a mother and had a right to voice her opinion.
Sylvia Jeffreys jumped to the defence of Sonia Kruger, saying: 'Sonia is not a racist. She is a compassionate, intelligent and thoughtful person'
Kruger called for Australia to close its borders to Muslims in a TV panel discussion (pictured on Monday)
Her fiance, the former Middle Eastern correspondent Peter Stefanovic, said ISIS wanted Kruger to make these kind of remarks.
'Sonia is not a racist, she is a nice person, I have known her for a little while...
'I don't agree with her opinions because most people know I come from a family of immigrants and that is how I got here.
'I have had a lot to do with Muslims over the years and the vast majority of them are peace-loving people and unfortunately it is that small majority that has given them a rather nasty name.'
'I think Sonia's comments come from the fact that there will be an attack in Australia at some point down the track, police are doing a terrific job to stop it but as you mentioned there,
'ISIS is creating fear and that is exactly what they want.
Extraordinary footage has shown a man speeding through rush-hour traffic in his wheelchair.
The man forced cars to brake behind him as he changed lanes before gathering speed and overtaking other vehicles on the busy Barcelona road.
A motorcyclist behind him filmed the shocking video on a mobile phone as he raced down Muntaner Street, one of the Catalan capital's main arteries.
Extraordinary footage has shown a man speeding through rush-hour traffic in his wheelchair on a busy Barcelona road
He has jokingly been dubbed Rapido y Furioso, Spanish for 'Fast & Furious' after the American franchise which centres on illegal street racing and heists, on social media.
The mystery man appeared to be wearing no helmet or protective clothing despite reaching breakneck speeds.
The video had already been viewed more than 65,000 times on Tuesday, four days after it was posted.
The man forced cars to brake behind him as he changed lanes before gathering speed and overtaking other vehicles
A motorcyclist behind him filmed the shocking video on a mobile phone as he raced down Muntaner Street, one of the Catalan capital's main arteries
The Guardia Urbana, Barcelona's local police force, are understood to be investigating but have yet to identify the offender.
A police spokesman said it was 'definitely illegal' to ride a wheelchair in this way.
In February a man in a wheelchair was pictured racing along a busy road in Colombia while holding onto the back of a motorcyclist who appeared to be delivering pizzas.
Last November a wheelchair-bound man was filmed in Salvador, Brazil, getting a lift up a hill near his home from a taxi driver.
He was described at the time as someone who regularly hitched lifts with drivers, sparking the suggestion he was a victim of the poor public transport service on offer in Salvador for people with physical disabilities.
A mug shot of Pauline Hanson has surfaced more than a decade after she was jailed and acquitted of electoral fraud, as she blames Tony Abbott and John Howard for the 'witch-hunt' against her.
Ms Hanson spoken about her 11-week prison stint in 2003 through tears in a documentary directed by Anna Broinowski, which explores the impact of her One Nation party on multiculturalism.
Speaking from her Ipswich home, south-west of Brisbane, Ms Hanson said the court case was a 'sham' led by the then-Liberal government's Mr Abbott with Mr Howard's support.
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A mug shot of Pauline Hanson has surfaced more than a decade after she was jailed and acquitted of electoral fraud
A documentary to air on SBS on July 31 explores the impact Pauline Hanson's One Nation had on multiculturalism (Ms Hanson pictured in parliament during her last stint in politics)
On Tuesday night, Pauline Hanson told Sky News anchor Paul Murray she believes prison made her 'the person I am'.
She told Murray she helped others during her 11-weeks at Queensland's Wacol women's prison.
'I was able to be there to help a woman who was up for murder,' Ms Hanson told Murray. 'I was able to assist in her retrial, and she was found not guilty.
Ms Hanson said she'd also helped an Aboriginal girl at the prison.
'So there's a couple instances and I take that to heart.
'If I wasn't there at the time I think maybe I was supposed to be there.
'This is what's made me the person I am,' Ms Hanson said.
'I blame Tony Abbott [and] John Howard for my imprisonment and no one will ever change my opinion about that,' Ms Hanson said in the documentary (Mr Abbott and Mr Howard pictured during initial controversy)
She said she 'wasn't feeling sorry for myself', but also hit out at former Queensland Premier Peter Beattie who increased the maximum sentenced for electoral fraud ahead of her trial.
Mr Beattie responded the reform was not 'target at Pauline at all' and was in fact in response to the electoral fraud of his own Labor MPs, who he forced to quit parliament.
Hanson was jailed in August 2003 after she and her adviser at the time, David Ettridge, were found guilty of fraudulently registering One Nation.
The former fish and chip shop owner was also convicted of fraudulently obtaining electoral funding to the tune of about half-a-million.
Ms Hanson was sentenced to three-years in prison, but was released after serving 11-weeks on appeal.
The pair were acquitted and their convictions overturned.
In an interview for the documentary, Ms Hanson said the case was a 'sham'.
'They just threw one court case at me after another.
'It was a sham. The whole thing was an absolute political witch-hunt to destroy me.
'I blame Tony Abbott [and] John Howard for my imprisonment and no one will ever change my opinion about that,' she said in the interview.
'This is what's made me the person I am,' Ms Hanson said on Tuesday night about her 11-weeks in prison
In her 1996 maiden speech, Ms Hanson said Australia was 'in danger of being swamped by Asians' (Ms Hanson pictured outside Parliament House in Canberra)
Ms Hanson claimed Mr Abbott, who was then-minister for employment and workplace relations, was supported by then-prime minister John Howard.
'He couldn't leave it up to the Australian people to determine at the ballot box whether they wanted me, One Nation, or my policies,' she said.
Mr Howard said it was 'a ludicrous conspiracy theory'.
'Tony Abbott was acting off his own bat,' he said. 'Certainly he had no encouragement or inspiration from me.'
Mr Abbott's former staffer David Oldfield had defected to One Nation.
Mr Abbott did not appear in the documentary, which has been in the works since 2014.
Ms Hanson fought back tears as she described the impact the case and her imprisonment had on her children.
She said she was placed on suicide watch on her first night at Queensland's Wacol women's prison.
The documentary features interviews with those closest to the drama and from commentators who discuss her impact on Australia today.
In her 1996 maiden speech, Ms Hanson said Australia was 'in danger of being swamped by Asians'.
She has made a return to politics, winning a spot on the Senate at the July 2 election, and has turned her attention to Islam.
Pauline Hanson: Please Explain! will premiere on Sunday, July 31 at 8.35pm on SBS.
The convictions against her were dropped on appeal when she was acquitted (Ms Hanson pictured during interview)
'Tony Abbott was acting off his own bat,' Mr Howard said. 'Certainly he had no encouragement or inspiration from me.' (Mr Howard pictured during documentary interview)
Ms Hanson was sentenced to three-years in prison, but was released after serving 11-weeks on appeal (pictured on Election Day at a One Nation function)
Turkey tyrant Recep Erdogan today denied claims he staged Friday's coup to tighten his grip on power and claimed: 'I could have died.'
The dictator was holidaying in Marmaris soldiers in tanks, helicopters and F16s stormed the capital Ankara and Istanbul.
Two of my personal body guards were martyred [in Marmaris], Mr Erdogan said, describing the dramatic moment he fled the beach front holiday home.
If I had stayed an extra ten or 15 minutes more I would have been killed or taken hostage, he added.
Denial: Turkey tyrant Recep Erdogan today denied claims he staged Friday's coup to tighten his grip on power and claimed: 'I could have died.'
Rejected: Of claims he staged Friday's coup, Erdogan said: How can you plan for so many civilians to lose their lives 208 civilians dying, 1,500 people lying on the ground trying to block tanks how can you do that?'
The President narrowly missed the attack on a seaside villa where he was staying with his wife and grandchildren.
In a revealing interview he flatly denied claims the coup was not genuine, orchestrated by Erdogan to give him the opportunity to purge his armed forces of opponent and cement his rule.
Thats misinformation. How can you plan such a thing?
How can you plan for so many civilians to lose their lives 208 civilians dying, 1,500 people lying on the ground trying to block tanks how can you do that?
No its not possible. Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his colleagues will be the first to be checked. We risk our lives for the people thats how we do politics, he told CNN.
Fetullah Gulen the Muslim cleric in self-imposed exile in the US and man Erdogan says orchestrated the coup said the violence could have been staged.
Arrests: 7,500 judges, soldiers and police behind coup have been rounded up across Turkey as Erdogan tightens his grip on power
Anger: Erdogan added: No its not possible. Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his colleagues will be the first to be checked. We risk our lives for the people thats how we do politics.
Captive: Eight soldiers - including a major - fled to Greece on a Blackhawk helicopter and claimed asylum but were quickly detained and appeared in court
Broken: Senior military officers across the country - including former air force commander General Akin Ozturk (front centre) - have begun appearing in court facing charges of establishing an armed terrorist group
I dont believe that the world believes the accusations made by President Erdogan, Gulen told reporters from his compound in Pennsylvania.
There is a possibility that it could be a staged coup and it could be meant for further accusations, he said, indicating the accusations would provide cover for Mr Erdogans government to crack down on suspected Gulenists in Turkey.
Since the coup nearly 20,000 people have been detained, or suspended from government or military positions in a nationwide purge.
Last night at a rally of support for Mr Erdogan in Istanbuls Taksim Square, crowds hanged and burned an effigy of the ageing cleric Gulen amid a party atmosphere that lasted until 3am.
Addressing popular calls for the death penalty to be reinstated to punish the plotters, Mr Erdogan told CNN that a clear crime of treason had been committed and that the calls could not be ignored.
Seized: A total of 7,543 people have been arrested over alleged ties to the failed putsch while trouble bubbled over further south.
Retribution: One hundred high-rank officers have been charged with high-treason and are currently testifying to prosecutors for what might become a trial for their lives
Enemy: Fetullah Gulen a Muslim cleric in self-imposed exile in the US and man Erdogan says orchestrated the coup said the violence could have been staged
Turkey abolished the death penalty as a concession in talks to join the EU, but popular support is rallying to bring it back in the wake of the violence that saw tanks mow down civilians in the streets.
Yesterday German Chancellor Angela Merkel said EU talks with Turkey would stop immediately if corporal punishment was reinstated.
Undeterred, Mr Erdogan said the decision would be taken by Parliament, but acknowledged the public demands.
We can always go back and reintroduce it, he said.
Customers who booked with Lowcostholidays are set to lose thousands of pounds after the firm went bust, with the administrator warning they will receive just 7.50 in compensation.
Lowcostholidays currently has 27,000 customers overseas on holidays, and a further 110,000 who have booked trips. Many now face uncertainty over whether they will get some or any of their money back.
In 2013 the company's boss, Paul Evans, controversially decided to move the firm's offices from the UK to Spain, where it is no longer became part of an industry safety-net run by travel body Atol, which protects travellers if the firm they booked with folds.
The company, run by controversial business tycoon Paul Evans (pictured), prolonged a summer sale promising up to 60 per cent off trips last Thursday
Now, the company has placed a 'very limited' bond of 1.09 million with the Spanish travel agency regulator - despite the fact compensation claims are expected to be 50 times that amount.
British airlines regulator the Civil Aviation Authority tried to block Lowcostholidays from leaving the Atol scheme, but failed.
Back in 2013 Evans reassured customers, saying: 'What we have done is completely legal. We have the maximum bonding available under Spanish law.'
But now the administrator, accountancy firm Smith & Williamson. has revealed that decision will now hit customers hard.
More than 110,000 travellers will not be going anywhere fast after the firm's collapse
Finbarr O'Connell, of Smith Williamson, told The Times: 'There is a bond in place but for the very limited sum of 1.3 million. The potential claims from customers are expected to be very substantial and could be more than 50 million.
'There are about 140,000 customers we believe have lost out. Sadly this means there will be very little back for any claim.
'The compensation will be paid to claimants on a pooled basis so everyone would get back the negligible sum of about 1 or 2 per cent.'
It emerged yesterday that the failed online travel firm lured in customers with a cut-price sale just hours before it collapsed into administration.
The company, run by controversial business tycoon Paul Evans, prolonged a summer sale promising up to 60 per cent off trips last Thursday.
It posted an advertisement online boasting: 'Our holiday sale has been extended for a limited time only. Grab your lilo and go.'
But more than 110,000 travellers will not be going anywhere fast after their summer holidays were thrown into chaos by the firm's collapse.
Less than 24 hours later, the firm posted a message on Facebook on Friday, saying: 'We deeply regret to announce that the lowcosttravelgroup (LCTG) ceased to trade on July 15, 2016.'
It added: 'The directors wish to profusely apologise for the inconvenience and distress that this will cause to our customers.'
Lowcostholidays is one of Britain's biggest online booking firms, with sales of 500m that helped fund a 1.9million, four-bedroom, three-bathroom property in Fulham, West London, for Mr Evans.
Lowcostholidays is one of Britain's biggest online booking firms, with sales of 500m that helped fund a 1.9million, four-bedroom, three-bathroom property in Fulham, West London, for Mr Evans (pictured)
Many of its customers were furious that it enticed them to pay for cut price breaks just hours before the firm collapsed.
Some took to Facebook to vent their fury. Morgan Bayfield wrote: '60% off Sale the DAY before you disappear off the face of the earth with everyone's hard earned money. Absolutely disgusting...'
Glynis Stuart added: 'You still tried to fleece the public with this sale page, if someone had booked on Thursday you'd have kept their money cause individuals have little or no chance of reclaiming once you go into administration, despicable practice.'
Mr O'Connell claimed the collapse was due to Brexit.
He said: 'The group experienced significant headwinds in the run up to the EU referendum as holidaymakers delayed decisions.
'This was compounded by the Leave vote itself and the subsequent fall in value of the pound. Regrettably, in these extraordinary conditions, the directors had no option but to place LowCostTravelGroup Limited into administration.'
A $1.24 billion agreed takeover of Norwegian online browser and advertising company Opera Software by a Chinese consortium of internet firms has failed, Opera said on Monday, after warning last week the deal had yet to win regulatory approval.
As an alternative, the consortium, which includes search and security business Qihoo 360 Technology Co and Beijing Kunlun Tech Co, a distributor of online and mobile games, will take over certain parts of Opera's consumer business for $600 million, Opera said in a statement.
The Norwegian firm did not specify the reasons on Monday for the scuttling of the deal other than to say that conditions to close the public offer were not met.
The deal had needed the approval of Chinese and US authorities, but last week Opera warned that regulatory approval had yet to be received, without specifying whether approval from China, the United States, or both, was lacking.
Police stopped a helpless Yorkshire Terrier from roasting to death after it was left in a hot car by smashing the drivers window.
PCSOs Bethany DeAth and James Lievesley spotted the dog desperately trying to crouch in the footwell of the car in Bulwell near Nottingham yesterday on one of the hottest days of the year.
The officers from Nottinghamshire Police were forced to smash the drivers window of the car to rescue the 12-year-old dog, who looked terrified while desperately panting before it was saved.
Smashed glass: PCSOs Bethany DeAth and James Lievesley spotted the dog desperately trying to crouch in the footwell of the car in Bulwell near Nottingham yesterday on one of the hottest days of the year
Sad sight: The officers from Nottinghamshire Police were forced to smash the drivers window of the car to rescue the 12-year-old dog, who looking terrified while desperately panting before it was saved
It was spotted alone in a car park at 10am when temperatures were 20C, before they rose to 24C.
Ms DeAth said: The windows were up, apart from one which was open an inch. There was no fresh air getting in. We put our fingers in the car and it was like a sauna in there.
We tried to contact the owner. (The dog) looked agitated and was hot and bothered. When we tried knocking on the window he got more agitated and was clearly extremely distressed.
The terrier was given water and checked over by the dog warden before going home with its owner, who was given a verbal warning about leaving animals in hot cars.
Police and vets are warning people of the dangers of leaving their pets in cars during heatwaves.
Helped to safety: The terrier was given water and checked over by the dog warden before going home with its owner, who was given a verbal warning about leaving animals in hot cars
Vet Graham Oliver, principal at Hucknall-based Buckley House and East Midlands Referrals, said: Its quite shocking how rapidly temperatures in a car can go up.
You only have to cast your mind back to the days of vinyl seats, when you couldnt get in your car. It can soar well above 100C in ten or 15 minutes if a cars in direct sunlight.
'Its basically a greenhouse. A human being in the same circumstances would probably expire. If you left a baby in a car it would suffer the same fate, but people dont do that.
A terrifying torture chamber where Syrians were detained and punished by Islamic State fighters has been revealed.
Many local people were held inside the ISIS prison building and tortured before being executed in Manbij, a city in northern Syria, a BBC report has found.
Inside the prison, forms questioning local people's knowledge of Islamic rules were left littered on the floor.
The people were graded from 0-100, with a mark of 0-50 classed as 'weak', the BBC's Jiyar Gol reported.
Each tiny cockroach-infested cell reportedly held up to 10-15 people. Cruel isolation chambers that barely contained enough room to stand in were also discovered.
Forms questioning Syrians knowledge of Islamic rules were left littered on the floor. The people were graded from 0-100, with a mark of 0-50 classed as 'weak'
A Kurdish fighter illustrates how small the isolation chambers inside the ISIS prison are
The BBC reporter was shown around the ISIS prison by a Kurdish fighter.
'Their goal was to torture prisoners and break their will,' the fighter explained.
The video report from Manbij comes as at least 20 civilians were killed on Monday in air strikes by U.S.-led coalition planes on the Islamic State-held city.
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the raids hit the northern Hazawneh quarter of the besieged city where U.S.-backed Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), an alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters, are engaged in street fighting with the militants.
The abandoned building was found in Manbij, a city in northern Syria, where 50,000 locals were held captive by ISIS
The monitor said more than 100 civilians had now been killed in U.S.-led raids on the city and its outskirts since the SDF launched a major offensive at the end of May to seize the last territory held by Islamic State on the frontier with Turkey.
Progress into the city has been slow with the militants deploying snipers, planting mines and preventing civilians from leaving, hampering efforts to bomb the city without causing large casualties, Kurdish sources said.
The sources say Islamic State has prevented thousands of the city's more than 50,000 population from leaving, effectively holding them hostage to slow the advance of the SDF fighters.
Rebels and many residents say Russia's bombing campaign has been even more indiscriminate and accuse the Russians of deliberately hitting hospitals, schools and infrastructure in opposition-held areas, something Moscow denies.
A tiny hole in the ground was all the people had for a toilet inside the torture chambers
A Swiss jewelry manufacturer is suing a courier company it hired to deliver $15million worth of gems to February's Grammys after the firm's driver parked his van containing the valuables outside his home - and it was stolen overnight.
Chopard handed over the 53 pieces of jewelry to Ferrari Express in New York to be delivered to Los Angeles where they was going to be handed to a celebrity to wear at the Grammys.
However, after successfully delivering the jewels to LA, Chopard wanted Ferrari Express to hold the valuables overnight in a secure location.
Luxury jewelers Chopard entrusted $15 million worth of gems from their shop in New York to be delivered to Los Angels for February's Grammy Awards to be worn by an un-named celebrity, court documents show
Chopard wanted the gems in LA to lend to an un-named celebrity appearing in February's Grammy Awards, pictured here
According to documents filed with New York Supreme Court: 'After receiving Chopard's jewelry, Ferrari did not transport the jewelry to its office, did not store it in a secure vault, and did not in any way safeguard the valuable merchandise.
'Instead, Ferrari treated Chopard's valuables carelessly and put them in jeopardy of theft and loss.
'In particular, the Ferrari employee assigned by Ferrari to ensure the safe return of the jewelry to Chopard placed the jewelry in the back of a Ferrari van, drove to his home in a neighborhood in which vehicle thefts are common, parked the Ferrari van on a street near his house, left the jewelry in the van, and then went into his house leaving the van and the jewelry unattended, unprotected and unreasonably susceptible to theft or other loss.
'By morning, the Ferrari van and Chopard's jewelry were gone.'
Chopard accuses Ferrari of acting negligibly in training and supervising its employees or implementing a reasonable plan to ensure the safety of the valuable goods.
Chopard has sued Ferrari Express for $15 million in New York Supreme Court, court documents have shown
The court documents show that all but one of the jewels were designed by Chopard and many featured one-of-a-kind gems.
The company said: 'One of the ways Chopard markets and promotes its products is to sponsor and display Chopard products at high profile events, such as the Cannes Film Festival, The Academy Awards ceremony, the Grammy Awards ceremony, the Golden Globe Awards ceremony and the Grand Prix of Monaco.
'At these events, Chopard lends watches and jewelry to luminaries taking part in the events, who wear the accessories on the red carpet, at the ceremonies, and at related parties and events.'
According to the company, journalists and bloggers then report on the jewels which increases brand awareness and leads to high sales prices.
The firm claimed when looking after its own jewels they hire armed guards to protect them and use specialist couriers to transport the items.
The court documents show Chopard had used Ferrari - which has no connection to the luxury high performance car manufacturer - to transport and store jewels for the Golden Globes, Grammy Awards and the Academy Awards in Los Angeles.
Ferrari Express accepted the parcel containing jewelry was of 'high value' when it agreed to ship it
According to the contract between Chopard and Ferrari, the courier would deliver the jewels from New York to the Montage Hotel in Los Angeles, where they would be fitted to celebrities.
Ferrari were due to store the jewels overnight on February 13, 14, and 15, 2016
On the morning of February 13, Ferrari delivered the jewels to the Montage Hotel 'for a viewing and a fitting with a celebrity or the celebrity's staff'.
The package containing the jewelry was marked 'HIGH VALUE'.
The jewels were returned to the Montage Hotel on February 14 for another fitting with the un-named celebrity.
However, when the jewels were due to be delivered to the hotel for a third time, the van and the jewels were missing.
The court documents said: 'By the time the Ferrari guard personally assigned by Ferrari with responsibility for the safekeeping of the jewelry awoke at approximately 6.30am local time on February 15, 2016, the Ferrari van, with Chopard's $15million dollars worth of jewelry inside of it, was gone.
'When Ferrari called the police to report the stolen van, it falsely reported by Ferrari that there was nothing of value in the vehicle.
'This compromised the ability of the police to recover the jewelry Ferrari lost. Ferrari also waited a number of hours before informing Chopard that the jewelry had been stolen.'
LAPD recovered the van on February 17, but the 53 pieces of jewelry were missing.
A staggering 15,200 education staff have been suspended by the Turkish government for alleged ties to exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen.
The Ministry of Education made the announcement after President Erdogan demanded that the United States arrest the Pennsylvania-based Islamic cleric, who he believes was the mastermind behind an attempted military coup.
More than 1,500 university deans have also been ordered to resign by Turkey's High Education board, state media reports.
The justice minister Bekir Bozdag has demanded that Gulen be extradited saying that all evidence points to him planning the uprising.
Turkey has demanded that the United States arrest and extradite a US-based cleric they believe was the mastermind behind an attempted military coup
Flags hang outside a religious school in the area of Istanbul where President Erdogan grew up
Bozdag told reporters outside the Turkish parliament building: 'We have more than enough evidence, more than you could ask for, on Gulen.
'There is no need to prove the coup attempt, all evidence shows that the coup attempt was organised on his will and orders.'
Meanwhile Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim accused Washington, which has said it will only consider an extradition request if clear evidence is provided, of double standards in its fight against terrorism.
In a defiant parliament speech, Yildirim said the fact civilians had been targeted in the attempted power grab by a faction in the military made it unprecedented in the history of Turkey, which last saw a violent coup more than 30 years ago.
In Taksim Square in Istanbul last night, crowds burned effigies of Gulen during a protest in support of the government
The Turkish government say that they have overwhelming evidence that Gulen was the mastermind behind the coup
Yildrim said: 'I'm sorry but this parallel terrorist organisation will no longer be an effective pawn for any country.
'We will dig them up by their roots so that no clandestine terrorist organisation will have the nerve to betray our blessed people again.'
He also warned against revenge in the aftermath of a failed coup targeting his government.
'Nobody can have a feeling of revenge. This is unacceptable in a state governed by rule of law,' Yildirim said, referring to images purportedly showing government supporters physically attacking alleged coup backers.
He vowed however that whoever had acted against the law would be punished. 'Today we need unity,' he said.
Around 1,400 people were wounded as soldiers commandeered tanks, attack helicopters and warplanes in their bid to seize power, strafing parliament and the intelligence headquarters and trying to seize the main airport and bridges in Istanbul.
Authorities have suspended or detained close to 20,000 soldiers, police, judges and civil servants in the days since the coup bid.
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim accused Washington, which has said it will only consider an extradition request if clear evidence is provided, of double standards in its fight against terrorism
Gulen has insisted he has had nothing to do with the military coup and even suggested President Erdogan, pictured, staged it himself to justify a major clampdown on opposition forces
However, Gulen has insisted he has had nothing to do with the military coup and even suggested Erdogan staged it himself to justify a major clampdown on opposition forces.
Speaking to Daily Mail Online from his remote Pennsylvania compound, he said: 'I have clearly expressed my stance against military coups and interventions. I have stated this 50 times - I cannot change course after reaching the age of 77 years of age.
'I believe in God and I do not bow before an oppressor,' he added, through a translator.
'If an international committee produces evidence I will accept it and gladly go to the execution chamber without blinking my eye.'
Soft-spoken Gulen also launched a scathing broadside against Erdogan, accusing the hard-line leader of going 'soft' on ISIS terrorists returning from Iraq and Syria.
'There are reports of members of ISIS being treated in hospitals and being released without investigation,' Gulen said. 'Other citizens do not receive the same compassionate and soft treatment.'
A sheriff Ohio is encouraging civilians on his staff with licenses to carry guns to bring their weapons to work after recent attacks against police officers in other parts of the country.
Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones also urged civilian employees to carry their weapons while operating any department vehicle away from headquarters, the Hamilton-Middletown Journal-News reported.
'We encourage our people to really rethink having any markings on their car that states you're a police officer. It could be your spouse, it could be your kids driving the car.' Jones told WXIX.
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Sheriff Richard Jones is urging his civilian staff to carry their weapons while operating any department vehicle
'Every day I fear for their lives every day, every minute, every second. When my phone rings I fear for that,' Jones added.
The sheriff made the suggestion to employees in a memo on Friday.
He urged them to carry their weapons discreetly when in public.
The sheriff also reminded staffers to adhere to state guidelines for carrying concealed weapons when off department premises.
'You have to pay attention now more so than ever,' said Chief Deputy Anthony Dwyer, a 32-year veteran in law enforcement, to the Journal-News.
Jones, of Ohio's Butler County, says he fears for his staff's lives 'every day, every minute, every second'
Sheriff Jones urged his staff to carry their weapons discreetly when in public
Dwyer added officers are supposed to 'take an account of what's around' but after a few years, the training 'does fade.'
The recent massacre of five cops in Dallas and three in Baton Rouge brought that awareness 'back to the forefront,' Dwyer told the Journal-News.
'You always have to be observant,' Middletown Police Chief Rodney Muterspaw told the newspaper.
'Look and see what's around that car. You just never know. You have no way of knowing who you are stopping.'
Some of Muterspaw's officers are now riding two to a cruiser during certain shifts so they can look out for each other.
In these troubled times, no call is routine.
'We have to do a better job and if every cop doesn't believe that, they shouldn't be in the business,' Muterspaw said.
Miley Byrne, 28, (pictured) tried to lure Laura Gee, now 16, to London after promising the harpist she would play in front of MPs
A serial fantasist who pretended to be Boris Johnson's bodyguard in order to lure a 15-year-old harpist to a hotel has been jailed for 16 months.
Miley Byrne, 28, spent weeks contacting talented teenage musician Laura Gee on her Facebook page with the offer of performing for MPs at a posh London hotel in December 2014, a court heard.
He pretended to be a music impresario and used a false name Adam Wyles to contact the girl - and even pretended to be the former London mayor's bodyguard to win over her trust.
But he was eventually rumbled when the youngster became suspicious after he sent a message from an email account in his real name, despite claiming he was called Adam.
Byrne, who was described by the judge as a 'Walter Mitty' fantasist, said he would book travel and accommodation for Laura and her mother Dawn, 50.
He then promised he would chaperone them to a lavish hotel for the Christmas concert where the teenager would entertain guests.
But after receiving the suspicious email, the pair decided not to board the train to the capital from their home in Derby.
They were later horrified to learn Byrne was a fantasist who had been previously sentenced for posing as a police officer and offering a hotel receptionist cash to take off her underwear.
And on Monday, Byrne was jailed for 16 months for stealing thousands of pounds from bosses while yet again posing as somebody else.
Mrs Gee, of Littleover, Derby, said: 'The guy is a menace to society and I am really pleased he is behind bars.
'I was horrified that I had been taken in by this man and felt we had built up a good rapport.
'I am 50 and quite a strong, streetwise person. I consider if I can be taken in, then young girls who do not have their mothers overseeing their messages just wouldn't stand a chance.'
Mrs Gee said her daughter thought the opportunity to play for dignitaries in London was 'an absolute dream'.
Dawn Gee (left) said her daughter Laura (right) thought the opportunity to play for MPs in London was 'an absolute dream'
She added: 'He talked me through what Laura would have to do. She would have to play from 2pm as guests arrive for an hour. He said she would have to play later when they had dinner.
'I reminded him that Laura would not be on her own due to her age. I said I would always need to be close by. I was told this could only happen if I joined the meet and greet team.'
He told Mrs Gee arrangements were made for a harp to be used at the event and he offered to pick the instrument up from the family home.
Mrs Gee, who works in social research, added: 'He warned me that we must not visit the hotel until we had met him at the train station to take our pictures and sort out identification.
'When I sent him an email to say we were on our way, his response said Miley Byrne at the top.
Byrne even told the family he was the bodyguard of Boris Johnson (pictured) so they would trust him
'I texted him to ask why it said Miley Byrne on his email and he told me it was his partner.
'He then sent me a message saying he hoped there were no problems. Clearly he knew we were onto him.'
She added: 'After putting his name into Google, it came up with stories about him terrorising hotel staff.
'I was absolutely horrified, stunned and appalled. I then phoned the police and phoned the hotel which Laura was due to play at.
'I was very thorough and did as much as I could. We were so lucky that we uncovered him. I felt physically sick and numb at the same time.'
After revealing Byrne's true nature, Dawn said the family went through 'hell'.
Mrs Gee and her husband Gary, 54, were petrified he would visit their home and began taking Laura, now 16, with her everywhere and would not let her leave the home alone.
She said: 'The whole family lost sleep. It was a very traumatic and stressful time for us all. He even told us he was Boris Johnson's bodyguard.
'Without wanting to scare Laura, I feel sick when I think what might have been if we had agreed to be collected by this man. He has slipped through the net for years. It is shocking and scary.
'Not all parents like me monitor Facebook and this was Laura's music page, not a personal one, so it should have been more secure.'
Byrne, who was spared jail twice after impersonating police - on one occasion he claimed to be guarding the daughter of the US Ambassador - has now finally been put behind bars.
Chelmsford Crown Court was told that yet again Byrne, of Braintree, Essex, had been posing as somebody else.
And this time, masquerading under his false identity, he stole thousands of pounds from his bosses.
Recorder Maryam Syed told him there were 'aggravating features', including his previous convictions over the past seven years, for which he had only served a short time behind bars after breaching earlier court orders.
Mrs Gee and her husband Gary, 54, were petrified he would visit their home and began taking Laura, now 16, with her everywhere and would not let her leave the home alone
In April 2009, he was caught with a hoard of police equipment in his car including handcuffs and an extendable baton.
It was searched when police investigated reports of a vehicle driving with blue flashing lights.
And in May 2013, he burst into a hotel posing as a policeman, handcuffed a guest to the inside of a lift, then offered the receptionist 50 to take off her underwear.
Dressed in uniform and carrying handcuffs he carried out the fantasy in a Travelodge in Essex for six hours.
Now Byrne has admitted stealing 5,290 while working as a bookkeeper for Chelmsford-based Ancient Purety nutritional specialists between July 1 and August 15, last year.
He transferred 11 amounts to his account in the name of Adam Wild.
He had given this name, said the judge, to prevent revealing his true identity which would have revealed his criminal record.
An apparent 3.7 magnitude 'earthquake' off the coast of Florida was really a US Navy test, it's been revealed.
The Navy used 'a 10,000-pound explosive charge' as part of its shock trial for the USS Jackson, according to Dale Eng, a spokesman for the Navy's Sea System Command.
Seismographs had detected the 'earthquake' Saturday afternoon about 168 nautical miles northeast of Daytona Beach Shores, the Daytona Beach News-Journal reported.
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An apparent 3.7 magnitude 'earthquake' off the coast of Florida was really a US Navy test, it's been revealed. On its website, the United States Geological Survey describes the blast as an 'Experimental explosion by US Navy'
Seismographs had detected the 'earthquake' Saturday afternoon about 168 nautical miles northeast of Daytona Beach Shores. This is an intensity map, according to the USGS
Back on June 10, a 3.7 magnitude 'earthquake' off of Ormond-by-the-Sea happened about the time the Navy reported conducting a shock trial on the USS Jackson, the newspaper said.
The Facebook page for the US Navy said in June: 'The shock trials are designed to demonstrate the ship's ability to withstand the effects of nearby underwater explosion and retain required capability.'
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Marine Fisheries Service was told by the Navy that another shock trial would be conducted between July 16 and July 20, the Daytona Beach News-Journal reported.
Eng told Action News Jax in a statement: 'In June the Navy began conducting Full Ship Shock Trials (FSST) for Littoral Combat Ship USS Jackson (LCS 6) off the coast of Florida.
'The purpose of FSST is to validate the operational survivability of new construction ships after exposure to underwater shock.
'Three tests were scheduled for the ship and each test was conducted with a 10,000-pound explosive charge.'
Back on June 10, a similar 3.7 magnitude 'earthquake' off of Ormond-by-the-Sea happened about the same time the Navy reported conducting a shock trial on the USS Jackson for testing (June 10 photo)
Eng added: 'On Saturday July 16, USS Jackson (LCS 6) was subjected to the third and most forceful underwater explosion of her planned shock trials.
'The ship performed exceptionally well, sustaining minimal damage and returned to port on her own power the following day to complete assessments.
'This Live Fire test and Evaluation event is conducted as a way to validate the shock hardness of the integrated ship system design, assess performance, and identify areas for improvement.'
On its website, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) describes the blast as an 'Experimental explosion by US Navy'.
Earthquakes in Florida are rare and those that cause damage are almost nonexistent.
According to the USGS, two earthquakes that struck 10 minutes apart in January 1879 knocked plaster from walls in St. Augustine and were felt as far away as Tampa on the Gulf coast.
Earthquakes of less than magnitude 5.4 rarely cause damage.
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Dechia Gerald, the wife of slain police officer and Marine veteran Matthew Gerald, was inconsolable as she hugged their children and led mourners at a candlelight vigil in his honor on Monday night.
Fynleigh and Dawclyn Gerald clutched teddy bears, unable to hide their pain, as hundreds of mourners, including the officer's parents, gathered to pay their respects to the 41-year-old at the campus of Healing Place Church in Baton Rouge, where he had been a member.
His community of Denham Springs is a tight-knit one, of just 10,000 people, and the mayor spoke of how it had been left in a state of despair by the murder.
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Dechia Gerald, wife of slain Baton Rouge police officer Matthew Gerald, cries while holding their children Fynleigh, left, and Dawclyn, right, during a candlelight vigil at the Healing Place Church in Baton Rouge
Gerald's children hold teddy bears as they are joined by mourners at Healing Place Church
The parents (pictured) of slain police officer and Marine veteran Matthew Gerald attended a candlelight vigil in his honor on Monday night
Mourners gather round in the darkness at the vigil, all of them holding candles and raising their arms
Gerald was a Baton Rouge rookie police officer who had just begun his new career after stints in the military
Hundreds gathered on the campus of Healing Place church in Baton Rouge to pay their respects to Gerald
Gerald was a Baton Rouge rookie police officer who had just begun his new career after stints in the military.
He died in a firefight on Sunday night along with another Baton Rouge officer and an East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff's deputy. Another deputy was in critical condition.
Prayer services and vigils are being held around the Baton Rouge area this week.
The officers had been ambushed by 29-year-old Gavin Long of Kansas City, Missouri, who was shot dead by a SWAT officer.
The shooting in Baton Rouge traumatized a nation already on edge.
In the span of 10 turbulent days, 10 law enforcement officers have been killed by attackers - at a protest march in Dallas, a courthouse in Michigan and now a convenience store in Baton Rouge.
Some of the mourners at Healing Place Church were overcome with emotion. The officers were from a tight-knit community
Policeman Leonard Lyons holds a candle at Healing Place Church. All the officers from Baton Rouge that were killed were husbands and fathers
The shooting in Baton Rouge traumatized a nation that was already on edge. Pictured is a man kneeling, deep in thought, at the vigil for Gerald
Mourners hold candles at the vigil for Gerald. He was ambushed by 29-year-old Gavin Long of Kansas City, Missouri
The officers who died Sunday all lived just outside Denham Springs, a quiet bedroom community across the Amite River from Baton Rouge, which has been in turmoil for two weeks.
Tensions rose sharply after the death of Alton Sterling, a black man killed by white Baton Rouge officers after a scuffle at a convenience store. The killing was captured on cellphone video.
As the nation debates race and policing, this community is mourning three of its sons - all husbands and fathers described by friends as being committed to protecting and serving the public.
'You hear about these things happening across the country to officers just trying to defend us, but this brings it right here, to our home,' Livingston Parish President Layton Ricks said.
'These are our families. These are good men. They're the only line of defense between good and evil. We say we don't want to let this evil affect how we live our daily lives. But it does.'
The sister-in-law of murdered black policeman Montrell Jackson said 'the world is crazy... it is complete chaos... and it needs to stop'
'You hear about these things happening across the country to officers just trying to defend us, but this brings it right here, to our home,' Livingston Parish President Layton Ricks said
Gavin Long, a former Marine from Missouri dressed in black and carrying extra ammunition, opened fire on officers around 8.45am on Sunday.
The gunfire also killed 45-year-old Brad Garafola, an East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff's deputy and a father of four, and 32-year-old Montrell Jackson, a 10-year veteran of the Baton Rouge Police Department with a newborn baby at home.
Garafola and Gerald were white. Jackson was black, as was the gunman.
'The world is crazy right now. It is complete chaos,' Jackson's sister-in-law Lauren Rose said. 'And it all needs to stop, everything. We all need peace.'
As evidence of Long's single-minded intent to level his violent rage exclusively at police, authorities on Monday cited video footage of the shooting that they said showed him hunting down officers while bypassing civilians in his path.
'There is no doubt whatsoever that these officers were intentionally targeted and assassinated,' Louisiana State Police Superintendent Colonel Mike Edmonson told a news conference. 'It was a calculated act against those who work to protect this community every single day.'
Police said they believed that Long, armed with two rifles and a pistol, had intended to make his way to the headquarters of the Baton Rouge Police Department a short distance away to take more lives.
Visitors will have panoramic view of ship for the first time without the obstruction of glass or
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The Mary Rose has been publicly unveiled in its entirety for the first time, nearly 500 years after the warship sank in battle.
The vessel, Henry VIII's flagship, has gone on display in the newly-revamped Mary Rose museum exactly 471 years after it perished in the Solent, just outside Portsmouth Harbour, on July 19, 1545.
The unveiling - which gives visitors a panoramic view of the ship without the obstruction of glass or conservation jets - heralds the end of the 34-year project which saw the ship painstakingly restored after it was raised from the bottom of the seabed on live television in 1982.
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The Mary Rose has been publicly unveiled in its entirety for the first time (pictured), nearly 500 years after the warship sank in battle
The vessel, Henry VIII's flagship, has gone on display in the newly-revamped Mary Rose museum exactly 471 years after it perished in the Solent on July 19, 1545
The unveiling (pictured) heralds the end of the 34-year project which saw the ship painstakingly restored after it was raised from the bottom of the seabed in 1982
From tomorrow, visitors will be able to see a full uninterrupted view of the hull - along with thousands of artefacts salvaged from the wreckage - following a 5.4m revamp at the museum.
Historian David Starkey said: 'For the first time we can actually see the Mary Rose. Up to this point from the moment it was brought up in the 1980s, it has been in a state of both being preserved and conserved and to do that it had to be covered by sprays, it had to be put in a huge bag like a condom and then it had to be dried.
'And while of all that went on, there were obstacles between you, the visitor, and the ship. Now all of that has been taken away and you can see the thing, it's there, it's a three-dimensional object.'
Helen Bonser-Wilton, chief executive of the Mary Rose Trust, said it had been a 'very exciting close to the latest chapter in her history'.
'Visitors will have stunning panoramic views of the ship from all nine galleries,' she said.
From tomorrow, visitors will be able to see a full uninterrupted view of the hull (pictured) - along with thousands of artefacts salvaged from the wreckage - following a 5.4m revamp at the museum
Helen Bonser-Wilton, chief executive of the Mary Rose Trust, said it had been a 'very exciting close to the latest chapter in her history'. The display - which gives visitors a panoramic view of the ship without the obstruction of glass or conservation jets - is pictured above
Since being raised in 1982 - an event watched by 60 million viewers worldwide - the hull has been kept in highly protective surroundings. This is the first time that visitors will have a full uninterrupted view of the historic ship
THE HISTORY OF THE MARY ROSE When Henry VIII ascended the throne in 1509, he had just a small fleet of warships. But with threats from both the Scottish and the French, the monarch recognised he needed to build up his Navy. The project started with two ships, the Peter Pomegranate and her larger sister ship, the Mary Rose. Some suggest the ship was named after Henry's sister, Mary Tudor, however it is more likely it was named after the Virgin Mary. After 34 years at sea and three wars, the Mary Rose had been regarded by many as invincible. Then, as she defended England from a French invasion force, she sank taking with her 500 men and a treasure trove of Tudor history with her to the seafloor on July 19, 1545. The ship was rediscovered by divers in 1971 and between 1979 and 1982 the entire contents of the ship were excavated resulting in the recovery of around 20,000 objects. Advertisement
'This is the culmination of decades of hard work by the Mary Rose team and we can't wait to share this stunning new experience with everyone.'
The Mary Rose, a 16th Century warship, sank in battle with the French, killing more than 500 men.
Incredibly, the starboard hull remained intact by being embedded in mud on the seabed, which prevented it from being eroded by tides and bacteria. In total, 19,000 items were carefully retrieved, including the bones of sailors, a dog called Hatch and other artefacts from the wreckage.
Since being raised in 1982 - an event watched by 60 million viewers worldwide - the hull has been kept in highly protective surroundings.
For decades, it was constantly coated with millions of litres of finely-sprayed, fresh water at a temperature of less than 5C (41F). That process, along with a series of wax chemicals, were used to stop the wood drying out and to inhibit bacterial activity.
Alex Hildred, Maritime Archaeologist, pictured with the Tudor Rose emblem which was discovered on the wreck of Henry VIII's flagship, the Mary Rose. It has now been preserved and will be unveiled to the public
Experts used several processes, including laser scanning, computer modelling and 3D rendering, to produce a digital image of the rose, depicting how it could have looked at the time the ship sunk
The conserved artefact (pictured) has been officially identified as the flower which was fixed to the bow of the Mary Rose
Then, in 1985, the ship was turned upright and titanium props were installed to support the internal structure and work was undertaken to remove as much sediment as possible.
From 1994, active conservation commenced with the spraying of Polyethylene Glycol (Peg), a water-soluble polymer which can penetrate deep into the wood and support the cell walls.
Then, in April 2013, the Peg sprays were turned off and the hull was kept in a state of controlled air-drying phase 100 tonnes of water during the next four to five years.
Once drying was complete, the internal walls surrounding the hull were removed so visitors would be able to see a completely unobstructed view of the hull - a phase that was seen as the culmination of the project.
Small viewing panels have now been replaced with floor-to-ceiling windows and a balcony entered through an airlock so the ship can be seen in all its glory.
Sir Peter Luff, chairman of the Heritage Lottery Fund which granted 26 million towards the project, said: 'Quite simply, the Mary Rose is awe-inspiring.
'After decades of hard work, this final part of the conservation jigsaw brings the Mary Rose back in to clear focus and spectacular context.'
Also included in the display is the red rose figurehead which adorned the famous ship.
The carved Tudor rose - the earliest English figurehead representing the ship's name - was retrieved from the bottom of the Solent more than a decade ago as a small piece of wood.
The conserved artefact - which still has its carvings despite years of erosion while languishing in the silt of the sea - has now been officially identified as the flower which was fixed to the bow of the Mary Rose.
The rose was found in 2003, after a group of divers working on a Ministry of Defence excavation made what would transpire to be a hugely historic discovery.
The divers had been searching the area for the ship's bowcastle and were trying to raise the Tudor ship's stem and anchor after the government applied to widen and straighten the channel.
As these pieces were being prepared for lifting, the divers came across a carved wooden artefact, which was about four feet long and shaped like a lollipop.
Unsure what it was, the wood was raised and put into a water tank at the Mary Rose Museum where it was kept without investigation.
But, more than a decade on, it has now been properly identified as the ship's emblem. This year, the Mary Rose Trust asked the University of Portsmouth for help to enhance the carvings to see what was there.
An illustration of the Mary Rose from the Anthony Roll which shows the red emblem mounted on the forecastle (circled above)
From tomorrow, a full uninterrupted view of the boat - along with thousands of artefacts salvaged from the wreckage - will be on show at the Mary Rose museum following a 5.4m revamp
Experts then used a series of techniques - including laser scanning, computer modelling and 3D rendering - to produce a digital image of the rose, depicting how it could have looked.
Another impression of how it might have looked is from the Anthony Roll, the only detailed surviving depiction of the ship, which shows the Tudor rose mounted on the forecastle.
The museum said: 'The combination of its size, its form and the position where it was found leaves very little doubt that this is the Tudor rose emblem shown in the Anthony Roll and therefore the first English warship 'figurehead' that was carved to represent the name of the ship.'
This picture shows the Mary Rose being raised from the bottom of the Solent, near Portsmouth Dockyard, Hampshire, in 1982. The historic event was watched by 60million people worldwide
The raising sparked a 34-year restoration project which involved more than 19,000 artefacts being recovered and preserved for public display. The wreckage is shown after its recoery in 1982
A conservative Congressman from Iowa caused a storm of controversy when he said non-whites have contributed nothing to civilization at the Republican National Convention in Ohio yesterday.
Representative Steve King was on an MSNBC panel with writer Charlie Pierce, when Pierce said the days of 'old white people' running the GOP were over. That remark sparked King's bizarre rant.
'I would ask you to go back through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you are talking about,' King said. 'Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?'
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Controversy: Iowa Representative Steve King (pictured) responded to a claim that the GOP is too white by asking 'Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?'
Confusion: Host Chris Hayes (second from left) asked for clarification and King said he meant 'Western civilization' - but many have interpreted his remarks to mean that he was arguing white supremacy
Shut down: Hayes shut down the argument before it could continue. Although he was at the end of the segment, he later told media bureau chief April Ryan (second from right) that doing so was a mistake
'Than white people?' moderator Chris Hayes asked him to clarify.
'Than Western civilization itself, that's rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America, and every place where Christianity settled the world,' King replied.
'What about Asia? What about Africa?' said April Ryan, the only black member of the panel.
Hayes cut off the discussion, but not before mentioning that Europe had also produced Hitler and Stalin.
'On cable news we're not going to resolve the relative strengths of various strands of civilizational prowess,' summed up Hayes, diplomatically.
But he later admitted in a Periscope conversation with Ryan, the White House bureau chief for American Urban Radio Networks, that he 'probably made the wrong call' in not allowing the debate to continue.
'My thinking in the moment was: this is a preposterous debate to introduce, and an odious one,' he said. 'Like - "What's the best race?" ... To me it's self-refuting.'
'But there are crazy people out there who perpetuate this kind of stuff,' Ryan responded, arguing that King's views should have been confronted.
She and a friend then listed a number of black contributions to US culture, including the work of botanist and inventor George Washington Carver.
KING'S REMARKS IN FULL King's remarks came during an MSNBC interview Monday that was hosted by Chris Hayes and also featured April Ryan, the White House bureau chief for American Urban Radio Networks, and writer Charles Pierce of Esquire magazine. Pierce: If you're really optimistic, you can say that this is the last time that old white people will command the Republican Party's attention, its platform, its public face. Of course, I thought that was going to happen after 2012, and I was - thanks to the good work of Congressman King, I was severely disappointed. King: I think we'll still be around, though. (laughs) Pierce: You'll still be around, but I'll tell you what: That hall today? That hall is wired by loud, unhappy, dissatisfied white people. Ryan: Very white, yes, a very white crowd. Pierce: And any sign of rebellion is going to get shouted down, or-- shouted down, either kindly or roughly, but that's what's going to happen. King: This 'old white people' business does get a little tired, Charlie. I mean, I'd ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you're talking about, where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization? Hayes: Than white people? King: Than, than Western civilization itself. It's rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world. That's all of Western civilization. Ryan: What about Africa? What about Asia? (everyone shouts over each other) Hayes: We are not going to argue the history of Western civilization. Ryan: Let's argue the history of this country, okay--! Hayes: Let me note for the record that if you're looking at the ledger of Western civilization, for every flourishing democracy, you have, you know, Hitler and Stalin as well. King: You can't blame that on-- They weren't based on Christianity. They were based on atheism and agnosticism. (everyone shouts over each other again) Hayes: In cable news, we are not gonna resolve the relative strengths of civilizational prowess, and so what I will do is thank Congressman Steve King for coming, come back any time, April Ryan and Steve Pierce. Advertisement
Backlash: Ryan called King's remarks 'in-your-face racism,' while Twitter exploded in outrage
The Conversation with Chris Hayes about thr Steve King Segment. https://t.co/2rQCeYE5ej AprilDRyan (@AprilDRyan) July 18, 2016
Hayes may have been correct in saying he should have allowed the remarks to continue, as the backlash from the truncated argument was immediate.
Perhaps the strongest initial remarks came from Ryan herself, who later described the remarks as 'in-my-face racism.'
She also tweeted: 'I thought my earpiece was not right. (King) is racist,' and 'Steve King is mentally stunted I think. He has unmasked himself according to @amjoyshow.'
That was a reference to the official account of Joy Reid, host of MSNBC's AM Joy, although at the time of writing there were no comments on her timeline about King being unmasked.
Ryan also defended Hayes, saying that 'time ran out' before a real debate with King could begin.
'Racist': Ryan remarked after the interview that she was shocked by King's comments, and said that he is 'racist'
'Stunted': Ryan referenced Joy Reid, host of MSNBC's AM Joy, in this tweet, in which she said King was 'stunted'. Reid's Twitter account didn't have any remarks about King being 'unmasked,' however
State Rep. Ako Abdul-Samad, who is black and a Muslim, told King's local paper, the Des Moines Register the congressman's remarks were 'asinine' and displayed an ignorance of history.
Mr Abdul-Samad, who represents Des Moines, said: 'Let's talk about the contributions of Africa that actually brought Europe out of the Dark Ages.'
But it was Twitter where King's remarks really caused a furor.
Hip-hop artist Talib Kwali said: 'I cannot believe a sitting GOP congressman (@SteveKingIA) said these words. Pure racism.'
Fantasy author NK Jemisin wrote: 'The prob w/Steve King's racist BS is not ignorance. The facts exist. He's *chosen* lies. This is white supremacy in a nutshell.'
'Pure racism': Rapper Talib Kweli was horrified at King's language
'White supremacist': Shaun King - no relation - said that King had gone 'full white supremacist'
'Wilful ignorance': Author NK Jemisin said King had chosen to believe that non-whites had not contributed anything to civilization. Non-whites are responsible for mathematics, gunpowder and numerals, among others
Shaun King (no relation), a writer for the NY Daily News, remarked: 'That exact moment where Congressman Steve King goes full white supremacist. An ahistorical mess. Textbook racism.'
The remarks were also fuel for rival politicians, such as the Green Party's Dr Jill Stein, who remarked: 'GOP's Steve King says whites do more for civilization than others. Textbook racism. People of conscience, leave this shameful party.'
The remarks brought out funny responses too. Sportswriter Curtis Harris quipped: 'Steve King on civilization: "Iowa's top agricultural crop is corn, bred into existence by white people in Mesoamerica 5,000 years ago."'
Harris was pointing out that today's edible corn was bred from inedible plants by indigenous South Americans.
And Smooth Kobra referenced Ivanka Trump's RNC speech and its uncanny similarity to a Michelle Obama speech: 'Remember earlier today when @SteveKingIA said Blacks didn't contribute to society? If we don't contribute then why steal our speeches?'
Joker: Curtis Harris pointed out that Iowa is indebted to the indigenous South American people who created what we know today as corn from previous inedible plants.
Theft: Smooth Kobra referenced the similarity between Ivanka Trump's RNC speech and one previously given by Michelle Obama
Boycott: King chose to boycott President Obama's State of the Union speech in January in protest of what he said was his efforts to undermine the U.S. Constitution and his disregard for 'aborted babies'
And in response to King's remarks, yhe website Quartz flagged up a long list of things non-white people had invented, including mathematics, irrigation, paper, ink, gunpowder, novels, the compass, yoga, martial arts, tea, noodles and Pokemon.
The congressman, a tea party supporter from western Iowa, has courted a lot of controversy recently.
Last month he said putting Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill was racist, and last week the Des Moines Register showed a Confederate flag on his desk, despite Iowa being on the side of the Union during the Civil War.
In January King walked out on President Barack Obama's final State of the Union address, saying he could not stand 'being lectured one last time.'
He said he would leave his chair in the House gallery empty 'to commemorate the lives of more than 55million aborted babies.'
STEVE KING'S GAFFES Throughout his political career, Steve King - who was a senator from 1997-2003, and has been representative of Iowa's 4th congressional district from 2003 onwards - has repeatedly courted controversy with bold and questionable statements. On the possibility of a US-Mexico border wall 'We could also electrify (a wire on top of the proposed border wall) with the kind of current that would not kill somebody, but it would simply be a discouragement for them to be fooling around with it. We do that with livestock all the time.'-July 2006 (ThinkProgress)
On his best best vote '...probably the singular vote that stands out that went against the grain, and it turns out to be the best vote that I cast, was my "no" vote to the $51.5billion to [Hurricane] Katrina. That probably was my best vote.' -September 2009 (Political Correction) On why people shouldn't try to legislate against dog fighting 'When the legislation that passed in the farm bill that says that its a federal crime to watch animals fight or to induce someone else to watch an animal fight but its not a federal crime to induce somebody to watch people fighting, theres something wrong with the priorities of people that think like that. There is something wrong with Wayne Pacelle and The Humane Society of the United States' way of thinking like that.' -July 2012 (YouTube) On what is and is not legal in the USA 'if there is a sexual predator out there who has impregnated a young girl, say a 13-year-old girl - and it happens more times in America than you or I would like to think - that sexual predator could pick that girl up off the playground at the middle school and haul her across the state line and force her to get an abortion across the state line to eradicate the evidence of his crime, and bring her back and drop her off at the swing set, and that's not against the law in the United States of America' -August 2012 (YouTube) On the existence of child pregnancy caused by rape 'Well I just havent heard of that being a circumstance thats been brought to me in any personal way.' -August 2012 (KMEG 14) On immigrants and dog-breeding 'You put out a beacon like the Statue of Liberty, and who comes here? The most vigorous from every country that has donated legal immigrants to America. The cream of the crop. Weve always had bird dogs around our place. In our family theres a black lab and white lab, a yellow lab, and my brother has a chocolate lab. Well, you go in and you look at a litter of pups, and you watch them. You watch how they play - they run around a little bit - and what do you want? You want a good bird dog, and you want one thats gonna be aggressive? Pick the one thats the friskiest, the one thats in games the most - not the one thats over there sleeping in the corner. You want a pet to sit on the couch, pick the one thats sleeping in the corner. Thats - so, you get the pick of the litter, you got yourself a pretty good bird dog. We got the pick of every donor civilization on the planet because its hard to get here; you had to be inspired to come. We got the vigor from the planet to come to America. Whichever generation it was, and then we taught our children that same thing.' -May 2012 (YouTube) Advertisement
Flash
The United States should stop meddling in the South China Sea issue to keep its relations with China on the right track, experts have said.
Widely deemed as one of the most important relationships in the world, the China-U.S. ties have recently been overshadowed by the South China Sea issue, in which the United States is not a direct party, experts said here during a two-day international security forum that ended Sunday.
The World Peace Forum, an annual event that groups hundreds of political figures, scholars, experts and journalists from across the world to discuss major security issues, was co-organized by Tsinghua University and the Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs.
"The U.S. flexing of military muscles in the South China Sea has deeply hurt the Chinese people," said Chen Xiaogong, member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National People's Congress, China's top legislature.
Last month, the United States deployed two aircraft carriers in seas east of the Philippines and started monitoring the South China Sea with guided-missile destroyers, a few days before a law-abusing ad hoc tribunal issued an ill-founded award on the South China Sea arbitration case, unilaterally initiated by the former Philippine government.
U.S. officials have repeatedly pressed China to accept the award sweepingly siding with the Philippines and denying China's long-standing historic rights in the South China Sea.
The award was excessive in its vitriol towards China's presence in the South China Sea, said Chen, who just concluded a tour to the United States, adding that it seems as if Washington had already known the results of the arbitration before the award was issued on July 12.
Meanwhile, he said, although quite a hotspot in recent media coverage, the South China Sea issue simply cannot represent the overall relationship between China and the United States, whose significance has stretched out the realm of bilateral ties.
With critical issues on the agenda such as global economic growth and climate change, it is a collective responsibility for both China and the United States to properly manage their relations, he noted.
Yuan Peng, vice president of China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said that despite the two countries' continued cooperation in such areas as economy and diplomacy, the South China Sea issue has garnered most attention of the public and media.
Echoing Chen, Yuan called on China and the United States to properly handle the issue.
"The ball is not in our court," he said, adding that the United States should "show sincerity" by not sitting behind the absurd arbitral farce of the South China Sea.
Foreign experts attending the the forum, themed "the Order of Common Security: Cooperation, Inclusiveness, and Open-access," also agreed on the urgency and significance of properly managing the China-U.S. ties.
Former Australian Foreign Minister Robert Carr, who is now leading an Australian thinktank, said at a panel dedicated to the South China Sea issue that the United States should not view the topic as a matter of competition for leadership, dominance and primacy against China.
Even if the United States tries to maintain its allies within the region, he said, defining the South China Sea issue as a matter of competition would generate more conflicts with China.
A horrified mother described the 'terrifying' moment she saw her car being driven off by thieves - with her two young children in the back.
Kavipriya Paladhanushan, 36, had got out of the Audi Q7 4x4 briefly to pick up her eldest son when the thieves jumped in and drove off with her eight-year-old daughter and son, 5, inside.
She ran alongside the car but couldn't keep up and spent four minutes on the phone to police in a state of panic before hearing children crying and realising they had been let out nearby.
Mrs Paladhanushan had also left her iPhone in car, which enable police to track down the abandoned luxury 4x4 seven-seater to a car park a few miles away.
Kavipriya Paladhanushan, 36, had got out of the Audi Q7 4x4 briefly to pick up her eldest son when the thieves jumped in and drove off with her eight-year-old daughter and son, 5, inside
She ran alongside the car (pictured, with husband Dhanushan) but couldn't keep up and spent four minutes on the phone to police in a state of panic before hearing children crying and realising they had been let out nearby
She said: 'I was just so scared. I don't have any words for how it was. I just wanted my children, that was the main thing for me.
'It was a terrifying experience, if something had happened to my children I do not know what I would have done.
'It was like a movie and you never think it will happen to you. I will never leave my children in the car alone again. That is never going to happen.'
Mrs Paladhanushan described how she was only out of the car for a few seconds when two men in their twenties jumped and used her keys to start engine inside.
An eyewitness described how Mrs Paladhanushan was 'screaming' that her kids were in the car when the thieves made off with the vehicle on Sunday afternoon.
The children said that the two men let them out of the car after picking someone else up.
Mrs Paladhanushan had left her iPhone in car, which enable police to track down the abandoned luxury 4x4 seven-seater to a car park a few miles away
Mrs Paladhanushan added: 'It was a matter of seconds. I had just parked my car while my two young children were in the back and I went to the other side to call for my other son.
'I do not know where this guy came from and how he took the car and drove off it happened so quickly.
'When I first realised it was my car that had gone I just thought "oh no, my children are inside". I tried to run after the car, but I could not keep up.
'My phone was inside the car and I got my son to call the police and when I was talking with the police I heard some children crying and I suddenly saw my children running and crying.
'At that moment, I relaxed because I knew that my children were back and safe.
'That was my main priority: I just wanted my children back to me. I didn't care about the car.
'My daughter told me that they drove off and past two roads and then another guy jumped in and the driver told them to get out.
'My son was sitting all the way in the back seat of my seven-seater so he had to put the seat down to get out.
'I don't know why they did this. They did not take my handbag or my phone, but it was lucky my phone was in there because the police used it to track the car.'
Mrs Paladhanushan (pictured with husband Dhanushan) described how she was only out of the car for a few seconds when two men in their twenties jumped and used her keys to start engine inside
The mother, who works part time in her husband's off licence in Ilford, east London, added: 'My children were crying a lot and I did not know how to talk to the police.
'I just wanted to hug them and tell them everything was going to be okay. It was a very difficult time.'
An eye-witness, who asked not to be named, said: 'She had parked outside my house and was calling her boy to get into the car.
The mother said that she had no concern for the car but immediately thought 'my kids'
'There were two guys, one walking towards her and another coming up from behind.
'There was one man walking towards her and another behind her.
'The one who was walking towards her got into the car and drove off.
'The mum was screaming, she had suddenly realised someone had taken her car and she was screaming "the kids are in the car". Someone has taken the car'.
'She had only walked a few metres away from the car, the kids were inside they were crying and screaming.
'The driver took a left turn and then let the kids out and the second guy got in and they drove off.'
He added: 'She was crying and was very upset.
'After the kids had been let out they were very upset. They were crying and they would not calm down.
'The two men were mixed race and in their twenties. They both had short curly beards as well.'
A Scotland Yard spokesman said: 'The offence happened at about 4.30pm on Sunday on Roman Road, Ilford.
An eyewitness described how Mrs Paladhanushan ran alongside the car screaming 'my kids are inside'
'A mother had parked the car containing her two children, aged eight and five, and gone to collect a third child.
'She was only a few metres away from the car - a grey Audi Q7 - when she heard the engine start and saw the car drive off.
'The car made off at speed toward Uphall Road and then entered Fairfield Road, where, near to the scene of the theft, the children were let out of the car and reunited with their mother. Neither was hurt, but both were very distressed.
'Police were called and, at 5.13pm, officers located the vehicle abandoned in a car park in Barking.'
He added: 'There have been no arrests at this time and inquiries continue.'
John Kerry pledged to help Britain 'maximise the economic opportunities' of Brexit as he flew in to meet Theresa May less than a week after she was appointed Prime Minister.
The US Secretary of State's comments come less than three months after President Barack Obama warned Britain not to leave the EU because it would be at the 'back of the queue' for a trade deal with the US.
But his first meeting with Mrs May as PM got off to a bumpy start as he walked straight into the door of 10 Downing Street.
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John Kerry (pictured left) pledged to help Britain 'maximise the economic opportunities' of Brexit as he flew in to meet Theresa May (right) in Downing Street less than a week after she was appointed Prime Minister
He stopped on the steps of No 10 to pose for pictures but as he turned to enter the Prime Minister's residence, he hadn't noticed the door had shut.
Mr Kerry ended up banging his head on the door knocker as he turned to walk through what he thought was an open door.
He is visiting London for brief talks with Mrs May, who was appointed Britain's second female Prime Minister last week and her new Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson.
After their brief meeting in No 10 Mr Kerry praised Mrs May for her 'calm, thoughtful, reasonable' approach to dealing with Brexit.
'The Prime Minister and I had an excellent discussion and I'm very grateful to her for her restatement of the commitment to the very strong transatlantic partnership,' he told reporters outside.
'We talked particularly about efforts to try to deal with counter-terrorism, the importance of our co-operation continuing.
'We also talked about Ukraine and Syria in particular.
The US Secretary of State John Kerry stopped on the steps of No 10 to pose for pictures but hadn't noticed the door behind him had shut, hitting his head on the door knocker as he turned around
The US Secretary of State John Kerry (pictured) stopped on the steps of No 10 to pose for pictures
But as he turned to enter the Prime Minister's residence, Kerry hadn't noticed the door had shut
Kerry ended up hitting his head on the door knocker as he turned to walk through what he thought was an open door
'Most importantly we affirmed the imperative for the United States, Great Britain and the European community to work together to maximise the economic opportunity, minimise the disruption, deal with this in a way that has the wellbeing of the citizens of all of our countries and regions in mind in order to move our economies as fast as possible.'
Mr Kerry added: 'I think the Prime Minister is very much committed to finding a calm, thoughtful, reasonable way forward that meets those needs.
'So I was encouraged by it and I look forward to conveying her very best wishes to the American people and President Obama.'
Mr Johnson hopes the meeting will demonstrate that Washington still values the 'special relationship' between the two countries after Britain defied its warnings about leaving the EU.
The new Foreign Secretary, who was the public face of the Brexit campaign and angered many in Europe after comparing the EU to Hitler during the referendum, is hosting talks on Syria with his counterparts from Germany, France and Italy, along with Mr Kerry and the EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini.
Mr Johnson is also attending meetings with foreign ministers from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) today to discuss the conflict in Yemen.
After holding talks with Theresa May in No 10 (pictured today), the US Secretary of State told reporters the Prime Minister was committed to a 'calm, thoughtful, reasonable' way to dealing with Brexit
Speaking ahead of the meetings, Mr Johnson said: 'We must be more active, more engaged and more outward-looking, so I am delighted to have this early opportunity to welcome my international counterparts to London for important meetings on the conflicts in Syria and Yemen.
'I will be making clear my view that the suffering of the Syrian people will not end while Assad remains in power. The international community, including Russia, must be united on this.'
Mr Johnson was urged to use his meeting with Saudi officials to express concern at the country's intervention in Yemen.
Amnesty's UK arms programme director Oliver Sprague said: 'As the new Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson has a chance to show that he intends to bring a fresh approach which puts people before profit in British foreign policy.
'Mr Johnson should immediately stop the appalling sale of British-made weapons to Saudi Arabia - which are being used to commit atrocities in Yemen, in violation of international law.
'This is a chance to reflect on the morality of the hard-sell strategy the UK has been pursuing.'
Mr Johnson will travel to Washington DC on Thursday for talks on combating Islamic State.
He and Mr Kerry met during a meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels over the weekend to discuss the fight against terrorism following the horrifying attack in Nice last week and the developing events in Turkey after the attempted military coup.
In a boost for Brexit, Mr Kerry echoed Mr Johnson's comments saying Britain will remain a 'vital component of Europe' even after it officially cuts ties with the EU.
But amid tense meetings between EU ministers and Mr Johnson - who had compared the EU with Hitler during the referendum campaign - Mr Kerry insisted the EU was a force for good as he pointed out that America and Europe together had defeated fascism.
During a working breakfast Mr Kerry urged Europe to stop Turkey 'backsliding' on democracy in the country after President Erdogan responded to the failed coup by detaining more than 6,000 military figures and judges and promising draconian reforms to crack down on dissent.
She returns with 'the most powerful story of the year', about a Sydney fire
It is her first appearance since botched child snatching attempt in April
Australian television journalist Tara Brown returns to 60 Minutes in their latest promo after the botched kidnapping of Sally Faulkner's two young children in Lebanon.
The bungled child 'recovery' saw Brown and three members of the 60 minutes crew imprisoned in a Beirut jail for almost two weeks.
She returns to the network in an episode to air on Sunday with 'the most powerful story of the year', investigating a fatal Sydney fire.
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Australian TV journalist Tara Brown (pictured) features in new 60 Minutes promo, her first appearance since botched child snatching attempt
Australian television journalist Tara Brown returns to 60 Minutes with 'the most powerful story of the year'
Brown took stress leave until Nine released the findings of their independent review into the case on May 27.
The reporter has been back at the network's head office in Willoughby, Sydney since early June.
Brown escaped serious charges for her part in the April 6 'recovery' of Sally Faulkners two children, Lahela, 6, and Noah, 3, from their Lebanese father, Eli Alamine.
Brown, Ms Faulkner and the 60 Minutes crew were jailed after the bungled operation but were able to return to Australia in April after Nine reached a plea bargain to secure the release of its staff.
The man who allegedly organised the kidnapping, Australian-born recovery agent Adam Whittington and three of his staffers were also jailed in Lebanon and are set to be released on bail later this week after spending almost five months behind bars.
Ms Faulkner's claims her children Noah and Lahela (pictured) were taken to Lebanon by her estranged husband Ali Elamine in 2015 and he refused to bring them back
Ms Faulkner (centre right) and the 60 Minutes crew, including Brown (centre left), were jailed after the bungled operation but were able to return to Australia in April after Nine reached a plea bargain to secure the release of its staff
Brown's last appearance on 60 Minutes was an interview with fellow reporter Michael Usher and followed the crew's return to Australia after their release from jail in Lebanon (pictured)
TV Insider spied on Brown during a recent visit to the Sydney office and spotted her in full hair and makeup, chatting with co-workers, reportedly before recording new footage for 60 Minutes' opening and closing credits, The Daily Telegraph reported.
Brown's last appearance on the program was an interview with fellow reporter Michael Usher and followed the crew's return to Australia after their release from jail in Lebanon.
'I thought when we presented ourselves (in court) and were being questioned, I really thought: 'We're journalists, we're doing our jobs', they will see reason, they'll understand that, you know, that we are here just to do a story on a very, very desperate mother. And I just thought that reason would prevail, and it didn't,' she said during the interview.
The family of a woman who was murdered with an axe by her ex-boyfriend have wailed in court as the triple-0 call her sister made was played.
Tara Costigan, 28, was killed in February last year by Marcus Rappel a day after she sought an interim domestic violence order against him and just one week after she gave birth to their daughter - Ms Costigan's third child.
The harrowing triple-0 call her sister Rikki Schmidt made was played in the ACT Supreme Court on Tuesday as the family cried, Canberra Times reported.
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Tara Costigan, 28, was killed in February last year by Marcus Rappel at her Canberra home in February last year (Ms Costigan and Rappel pictured together)
Her sister Rikki Schmidt (pictured) made the triple-0 call when Rappel murdered Ms Costigan
Rappel has pleaded guilty to murder, breaching a protection order, assault occasioning grievous bodily harm and assault occasioning actual bodily harm.
But his case has returned for a disputed facts hearing over the details the defence and prosecution disagree on.
Ms Schmidt was also injured in the February 28 attack last year at Ms Costigan's Calwell home in south Canberra.
In the triple-0 call, Ms Schmidt can be heard pleading the operator to hurry up when he asked what had happened.
'My sister's ex-boyfriend came into the house with an axe.'
Ms Costigan had given birth to her and Rappel's daughter just a week before she was murdered (Ms Costigan pictured with their baby daughter and her two older sons)
Rappel has pleaded guilty to the violence death of Ms Costigan and will return to court for a sentencing hearing in August
When the operator asked for more details about her injuries, Ms Schmidt frantically screamed: 'She's got an axe wound on her neck.'
He again asked for more details, to which she said: 'No I don't she's hardly breathing,' audio played by ABC revealed.
'She's going to die, can you please hurry up.'
Family at the home at the time of the attack held a towel to her neck in an attempt to stem the bleeding.
Ms Costigan's aunt, Maria Costigan, cried as the audio recording played in court on Tuesday, while Rappel appeared to cry with his head between his knees.
'He's not crying, he's not crying,' one of Ms Costigan's friends said as she cried.
'You don't get to cry,' she then shouted.
Rappel will return to court for a sentencing hearing in August.
Ms Costigan is pictured with her two young sons while she was pregnant with her third child - whom she gave birth to just a week before she was murdered
A huge forest fire has broken out near a French chateau owned by Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.
The fire began on Monday lunchtime near the town of Correns, in southern France.
More than 500 firefighters deployed from three different districts to tackle the huge blaze which had covered 350 hectares (865 acres) by 7pm.
Local fire services confirmed that the massive blaze was still not under control, and was heading south west towards the nearby town of Montfort-sur-Argens.
A forest fire broke out near Chateau Miraval (pictured), the luxury home owned by Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in the south of France
Angelina and Brad's chateau, to the north east of Correns, sits just five kilometres (3.1 miles) from the devastating blaze, which had destroyed at least one home by the early evening - heading in the opposite direction to the celebrity home.
Two fire engines were also reported to have been caught up in the inferno, although fortunately there were no reports of any casualties.
A spokesman for the local emergency service said: 'In total more than 500 firefighters are fighting the fire which has spread over an estimated 350 hectares.'
He added: 'The electricity network has been cut to allow aircraft to drop water.'
Local residents were warned on Twitter to avoid the area to allow emergency services easy access.
Residents were also told to shut their doors and windows and block vents with damp cloths.
An emergency shelter was set up in Correns for those forced to flee their homes.
A firefighter sprays water after a fire burned out 560 hectares in a forest between Correns and Montfort sur Agens, southern France
Two fire engines were also reported to have been caught up in the inferno, although fortunately there were no reports of any casualties
The blaze comes just a day after the fire risk locally was warned to be 'very severe', with a combination of dry weather and high temperatures making for a high risk situation.
Hollywood royalty Brad and Angelina have owned the luxurious 35-bedroom spread for several years.
Not only does it boast its own chapel, where the couple married in 2014, it also has a moat, a vineyard and rolling woodlands.
Previous owner, jazz pianist Jacques Loussier installed a recording studio in the castle, with Sting, the Cranberries and Pink Floyd all recording tracks there.
The estate is also known for producing a variety of wines - including an outstanding rose named Pink Floyd.
A group of 300 young migrants have reportedly 'barricaded' themselves inside a building in southern Italy to demand better living conditions.
The migrants piled up furniture and stopped people entering the refugee welcome building in Reggio Calabria for eight hours, according to local reports.
Police in riot gear are said to have attended the scene as well as officials from the Immigration Bureau in a bid to stem rising tensions.
The young migrants reportedly made a list of demands concerning their living conditions and some asked to be moved elsewhere, including the north of Italy and Germany.
In May, the Italian Navy ship 'Vega' arrived with more than 600 migrants and refugees on in the port of Reggio Calabria, southern Italy (file photo)
The refugee welcome centre inside the former Law School of the University of Mediterranean Studies currently houses 340 young people.
Reggio Calabria is an area where many migrants arrive in Italy by boat.
However, the number of people arriving in the country has changed in recent years.
According to the International Organisation for Migration, from 2014 to 2015, a major and sudden shift in routes of irregular migration by sea to Europe occurred.
About 853,000 migrants arrived in Greece in 2015, compared to 34,400 in 2014.
Almost 154,000 arrived in Italy in 2015, compared to 170,100 in 2014.
Women rescued at sea arrive aboard the Italian Navy ship 'Vega' on May 29 in the port of Reggio Calabria (file photo)
In May, the treacherous Mediterranean Sea crossing from Libya to Italy claimed the lives of at least 1,083 migrants in one week mostly because barely seaworthy smuggling boats foundered and sank despite calm seas and sunny skies.
The staggering death toll foreshadowed more disasters as the region geared up for the traditional summer-fall spike in human trafficking as the weather improves and seas grow warmer.
Aid officials say it also suggests that Libyan smuggling gangs are using even riskier tactics to profit from the torrent of people desperate to reach the safety and economic promise of Europe.
Making matters worse, the tally is only from the capsizings or shipwrecks known to authorities, who acknowledge they don't have precise information on how many people are being jammed into unsuitable vessels and swallowed up by the vast waters of the southern Mediterranean.
A mother-of-three whose 'dominating' older partner refused to marry her 'in case someone better came along' has been awarded the profits from the sale of his 1million house.
A court heard Kirsty Cahill, 33, was still at school when she met property developer, Stephen George Farrer, 53, and was 'besotted by, wholly dependent on and trusting of him'.
Mr Farrer put almost 140,000 into buying the Colliers Wood house in 2007, which cost nearly 500,000, and the judge said there was 'no doubt' it was an investment property.
She had three of his children but he 'publicly humiliated' her by getting down on bended knee in front of the whole family - before whispering in her ear that he wouldn't marry her.
A court heard Kirsty Cahill, 33, (pictured left, outside court) was still at school when she met property developer, Stephen George Farrer, 53, (right) and was both 'besotted by' and wholly dependent on him
And now a judge has ruled that giving her the four-bedroom house in Colliers Wood, South London, was the price he paid for denying her the financial security of a wife.
He insisted he had only put the house in her name to make it easier to get a mortgage - but Judge Nigel Gerald ruled it was all hers.
'Shameless' Mr Farrer, of Harbledown, Canterbury, is now also facing legal costs that could reach 150,000.
Ms Cahill was in her teens when she met Mr Farrer but he refused to tie the knot because he had been 'stung' by a previous divorce.
'Also, perhaps unattractively, he said to her that he would not marry her in case somebody else better came along,' said the judge.
'That sort of comment...gives an indication of a tendency to dominate and humiliate', he added.
Mr Farrer told the court he had considered getting married to Ms Cahill after the birth of their third child but soon changed his mind.
A judge has now ruled that giving her the four-bedroom house in Colliers Wood, South London, was the price he paid for denying Ms Cahill the financial security of a wife
The couple separated in 2012 when she moved out of the family home in Canterbury, the court heard.
It was a 'rather old-fashioned traditional married relationship, albeit they were not married', said the judge.
She looked after the children and home while he was the breadwinner and paid her an allowance.
'Financially naive' Ms Cahill had no A-levels and, throughout the relationship, he made it clear that 'he had no intention of ever marrying her'.
The judge added: 'On Christmas Day 2009, Mr Farrer went down on bended knee in front of the whole family and opened a little box containing his grandmother's engagement ring.
'He gave it to Ms Cahill - before later telling her not to get her hopes up because he would not be marrying her.
'That sort of public humiliation - raising false expectations only to be diminished at a time not two months after the birth of their third child - gives an insight into the nature of the relationship between these two people, separated by 20 years.'
Ms Cahill said the Colliers Wood house was put in her sole name to give her financial security as he was 'not prepared to marry her'.
'If something happened to Stephen, for example death or becoming very ill, or if he decided to leave me, or I decided I would like to leave him, I would be left in a very financially precarious situation,' she told the judge.
'We had discussed marriage. I felt that would be a good solution to the problem of my financial security. However Stephen did not want to get married.
'Within the relationship, I did not feel very safe because of comments Stephen would make to me.
'On several occasions he said to me, 'I am not sure I want to marry you in case someone better comes along', which is not particularly reassuring.'
Her barrister, Elissa Da Costa-Waldman, said that after the bogus Christmas Day proposal, he had whispered to her, 'don't think I am going to marry you because I am not'.
Mr Farrer insisted that he had never agreed to give the property to Ms Cahill and that she 'knew and understood he was the sole absolute owner'.
Ms Cahill (pictured with her new partner Neil Munro) was in her teens when she met Mr Farrer (right) but he refused to tie the knot because he had been 'stung' by a previous divorce
But Judge Gerald said Ms Cahill's account of the agreement was 'preferable' to her ex-partner's.
The businessman, he added, was 'relatively shameless in the approach which he adopted towards Ms Cahill'.
'She was, I accept, concerned by her financial security and that is something which she raised with him,' said the judge.
He had 'made it absolutely clear they were not getting married' and she had read in newspapers about the risks of unmarried partners being left 'up the swanny'.
Mr Farrer was 'the breadwinner', 'the much older and experienced person' and the 'man of the world', the judge added.
And the cash he put into buying the house was a trade-off 'for no marital security' and the 'price of not marrying her'.
'In my judgment it is clear that the property is absolutely owned by Ms Cahill and Mr Farrer has no beneficial or other interest in that property,' concluded Judge Gerald.
Mr Farrer was ordered to pay the legal costs of the case. He will have to come up with 40,000 within a month with more bills to follow.
The house, now valued at over 1million, was sold for 810,000 last year, after the couple split.
The IMF has slashed growth forecasts in the wake of the historic Brexit vote and urged Brussels to strike a fair deal to avoid more economic pain.
The international body cut predictions for UK growth by 0.2 per cent this year and 0.9 per cent next year - saying the outcome of the referendum had 'thrown a spanner in the works' globally.
The new figures of 1.7 per cent of 2016 and 1.3 per cent for 2017 still make the UK the second fastest growing in the G7.
But it means the eurozone will be growing faster next year, despite estimates being reduced by 0.2 per cent.
Prime Minister Theresa May is pressing ahead with the government's plans for Brexit following the historic EU referendum vote
The forecasts come as Theresa May kicks off the government's push towards Brexit, gathering her Cabinet in Downing Street for the first time.
The Prime Minister will visit Germany to hold talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel tomorrow, before heading to France on Thursday for discussions with President Francois Hollande.
According to the World Economic Outlook (WEO) report, although growth in the first part of 2016 in the UK had been 'slightly stronger' than expected in April at the time of the previous forecast, 'the increase in uncertainty following the referendum is projected to significantly weaken domestic demand relative to previous forecasts'.
In a sign of the wider impact of Brexit, the IMF has downgraded its global growth forecasts by 0.1 percentage points for 2016 and 2017 to 3.1 per cent and 3.4 per cent.
Those forecasts are based on a 'benign' assumption of a gradual reduction in uncertainty with the prospect of a deal between the UK and EU avoiding a large increase in economic barriers, no major financial market disruption and limited political fallout.
But the IMF warned that 'more negative outcomes are a distinct possibility' - and presented two possible scenarios for the aftermath of Brexit.
In the 'downside' scenario, financial conditions would be tighter and business and consumer confidence would be lower, with the UK also suffering from the loss of some of its financial services sector to the euro area.
That would result in global growth of 2.9 per cent in 2016 and 3.1 per cent in 2017.
The 'severe' scenario was 'less probable' and envisages that negotiations between the UK and Brussels 'do not proceed smoothly', trade arrangements eventually revert to World Trade Organisation rules and more of the City relocates to the euro area.
'This would reduce consumption and investment more markedly relative to the baseline and lead to a recession in the United Kingdom', the IMF report warned.
Under this scenario global growth would fall to 2.8 per cent in 2016 and remain at that level in 2017 - a 0.6 percentage point fall.
Mrs May will meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande for crucial talks later this week
IMF chief economist Maury Obstfeld said the organisation had been prepared to upgrade global growth projections slightly but 'Brexit has thrown a spanner in the works'.
He added: 'Naturally, the direct effects specifically due to Brexit are greatest in Europe, especially the United Kingdom.'
'Our projections for other areas are little changed by Brexit.
'Despite an uneven distribution across regions of the world, the overall growth downgrade in our baseline global projection is moderate, reflecting among other things a relatively benign assessment of Brexit's negative impact.'
But he said information in the short period following the Brexit vote was so far 'very limited' and the effects will emerge over time 'adding elements of economic and political uncertainty that could be resolved only after many months'.
A Treasury spokeswoman said: 'The decision to leave the European Union marks a new phase for the British economy, but the message we take to the world is this: our country remains open for business.
'We are the same outward-looking, globally-minded, big-thinking country we have always been.
'As the Chancellor has said, our absolute priority is to send a clear signal to businesses both here and across the world, that we are open for business and determined to keep Britain an attractive destination for investors from overseas.
'We are stronger than we were in 2010 and well-placed to rise to the challenges ahead.'
Pauline Hanson has claimed a former Queensland Premier changed legislation to ensure she would be jailed for more than 12-months so she could never run for office again.
The controversial One Nation Senator-elect made the allegations on Tuesday night to Sky News anchor Paul Murray, after it a documentary revealed she continues to lay blame on Tony Abbott and John Howard.
'I blame Tony Abbott and I blame John Howard and I blame Peter Beattie,' Ms Hanson told Murray.
'This was purely to get rid of me off the political scene.'
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A mug shot of Pauline Hanson has surfaced more than a decade after she was jailed and acquitted of electoral fraud
Peter Beattie was set to join the live program shortly after Ms Hanson's appearance, and so Ms Hanson asked on the live television program:
'Why did he change the legislation prior to my trial - from a six-month jail term or a fine under the Electoral Act, and made it seven-years, retrospective?' Ms Hanson said.
People who have been jailed for more than 12-months would be in breach of the Electoral Act if they attempted to run for parliament.
Mr Beattie's Queensland reform meant that anyone convicted of electoral fraud could be jailed beyond the cut-off to run for parliament.
'They were not targeted at Pauline at all,' Mr Beattie told Murray in response. 'She will believe that until the day I die, or until the day she dies, and good luck to her with that.
'Why did he change the legislation prior to my trial - from a six-month jail term or a fine under the Electoral Act, and made it seven-years, retrospective?' Ms Hanson asked on Tuesday night
'They were not targeted at Pauline at all,' Peter Beattie (pictured) told Sky News anchor Paul Murray in response
'She went through the courts and the courts made a decision. The judges sent her to prison, I didn't.'
Mr Beattie, a former Labor Premier of Queensland, forced his own MPs to quit after it was revealed in 2001 they'd falsely enrolled people.
Mr Beattie also forced Jim Elder to resign as Deputy Premier.
'You might recall, Paul, that prior to Pauline going to jail, the Labor Party had a number of electoral rorters,' Mr Beattie told Murray on Tuesday night.
'We brought in a whole lot of laws that were very tough, and they were designed to stop electoral rorting by anybody.'
Mr Beattie said he agreed Ms Hanson was wrongly jailed.
It comes after a mug shot of Ms Hanson has surfaced more than a decade after she was jailed and acquitted of electoral fraud.
She has spoken about her 11-week prison stint in 2003 through tears in a documentary directed by Anna Broinowski.
Speaking from her Ipswich home, south-west of Brisbane, Ms Hanson said the court case was a 'sham' led by the then-Liberal government's Mr Abbott with Mr Howard's support.
Ms Hanson was sentenced to three-years in prison, but was released after serving 11-weeks on appeal (Ms Hanson pictured in parliament during her last stint in politics)
'I blame Tony Abbott [and] John Howard for my imprisonment and no one will ever change my opinion about that,' Ms Hanson said in the documentary (Mr Abbott and Mr Howard pictured during initial controversy)
She and her adviser at the time, David Ettridge, had been found guilty in August 2003 of fraudulently registering One Nation.
The former fish and chip shop owner was also convicted of fraudulently obtaining electoral funding to the tune of about half-a-million.
Ms Hanson was sentenced to three-years in prison, but was released after serving 11-weeks on appeal.
The pair were acquitted and their convictions overturned.
In an interview for the documentary, Ms Hanson said the case was a 'sham'.
'I blame Tony Abbott [and] John Howard for my imprisonment and no one will ever change my opinion about that,' she said in the interview.
Mr Howard said it was 'a ludicrous conspiracy theory'.
She has made a return to politics, winning a spot on the Senate at the July 2 election.
Pauline Hanson: Please Explain! will premiere on Sunday, July 31 at 8.35pm on SBS.
Ms Hanson claimed former Queensland Premier Peter Beattie changed legislation to ensure she would be jailed for more than 12-months to never run for office again (she is pictured outside Parliament House)
A tortured street dog whose nose was brutally cut off has found a loving home with a woman who adopted him in Texas.
Anubis, the Egyptian Baladi, was hiding under a car in Cairo, when rescuers found him, according to the New York Daily News.
Kelly Hutson, 48, from Spring, Texas, read about Anubis online and knew she wanted to adopt him.
Anubis (pictured), the Egyptian Baladi, whose nose was brutally cut off has been adopted by a woman in Texas. He had been hiding under a car in Cairo when rescuers found him
The tortured dog's muzzle had been cut off with some sort of blade and he had been roaming the streets of Cairo before the Animal Protection Foundation found him and took him in. He's pictured in Cairo hiding under a car
Kelly Hutson (left), 48, from Spring, Texas, read about Anubis online and knew she wanted to give him a forever home. Volunteers coordinated Anubis' journey, which consisted of a 10-hour car trip from El Paso to Spring, Texas on Sunday
Hutson (right) said she talked to her husband and before they knew it, they put in an adoption application for Anubis and kept following up. Anubis had already arrived in El Paso when he was put up for adoption
'You see all the stories of the ones that are abused and because I'm an animal lover. I just want to take them all, but Anubis really stuck with me.'
Hutson said she talked to her husband and before they knew it, they put in an adoption application and kept following up.
Anubis' muzzle had been cut off with some sort of blade and he was roaming the streets of Cairo for an unknown period of time before being rescued by the Animal Protection Foundation in Egypt.
In January, he got his second chance to be unconditionally loved when the US-based Special Needs Animal Rescue and Rehabilitation (SNARR) group raised the funds and coordinated volunteers to bring him to the US.
Hutson told the Daily News: 'He's a people dog, which is incredible after a human brutalized him in such a manner.'
Anubis arrived at the JFK airport in New York City and from there he was handed off to another volunteer who made sure he safely arrived at his new home in Texas.
When he arrived in El Paso, Texas, Anubis was staying in a foster home with other rescued dogs until he was adopted.
And after a 10-hour car trip from El Paso to Spring, Anubis finally met Hutson on Sunday.
When he arrived in El Paso, Anubis was staying in a foster home with other rescued dogs
Anubis is still being kept separate from Hutson's three other dogs, who were all adopted or given to her, but she said he's adjusting really well. And like many dogs, Anubis loves to cuddle
When Anubis arrived Hutson said he was a bit confused, exhausted and a little car sick.
But Hutson, who runs her own pet-sitting business, said Anubis 'doesn't really have any major health problems we're aware of'.
'He breathes fine, he eats fine, it's amazing. This is the sweetest, most loving creature you'll ever meet.'
It's believed Anubis is between five and nine years old.
He's still being kept separate from Hutson's three other dogs, who were all adopted or given to her, but she said he's adjusting really well.
Hutson said: 'He's doing fantastic! But we are giving him a couple of days to settle in before letting him meet our other dogs.'
Chris Christie offered Tuesday morning's most unconventional and daring defense of Melania Trump after Internet sleuths discovered passages from her Monday night Republican convention speech were nearly identical to a similar address Michelle Obama gave eight years ago.
The former federal prosecutor told NBC's 'Today' show that he couldn't make a case for plagiarism because '93 per cent of the speech is completely different than Michelle Obama's.'
'They expressed some common thoughts,' Christie said.
Plagiarism, the unauthorized and uncredited theft of words from a writer, can be established with as little as a paragraph or even a single sentence.
But Christie seemed confident the overnight outrage would quickly be eclipsed by whatever happens on the second day of the Cleveland, Ohio convention.
'The worst day of a convention is the first day because everyone's building up to it and everybody gets breathless, both the delegates and the media, about something to cover, a controversy to talk about,' he said.
'I think after tonight we won't be talking about this. We'll move on to ... whatever comes up tonight.'
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New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie seemed not to know how plagiarism works, defending Melania Trump on Tuesday by telling NBC viewers that '93 per cent of the speech' wasn't lifted from Michelle Obama
Christie's unusual defense came as he predicted the speech scandal would be a one-day story
MELANIA TRUMP'S SPEECH (2016) 'My parents impressed on me the value of that you work hard for what you want in life. 'That your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise. 'That you treat people with respect. Show the values and morals in in the daily life. 'That is the lesson that we continue to pass on to our son. 'We need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow. [Cheering] Because we want our children in these nations to know that the only limit to your achievement is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.' Advertisement
MICHELLE OBAMA'S SPEECH (2008) 'And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you're going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them, and even if you don't agree with them. 'And Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values, and pass them on to the next generation. 'Because we want our children and all children in this nation to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.' Advertisement
Christie said he thought Mrs. Trump had 'worked very hard on that speech,' coming up with an authentic-sounding script.
'A lot of what I heard last night, sitting on the [convention] floor, sounded very much like her and the way she speaks about Donald all the time,' he said.
'And having been friends with them for 14 years, that sounded like her to me last night. And I think what's most important is the America people get a picture of how she feels about her husband and what their relationship is like.'
Mrs. Trump had told NBC News Monday afternoon that she wrote the speech largely on her own, a position that quickly became its own quagmire when the Trump campaign ended up playing defense.
'There's no cribbing of Michelle Obama's speech,' campaign chairman Paul Manafort told CNN. 'These were common words and values that she cares about her family, and things like that.'
'I mean, she was speaking in front of 35 million people last night, she knew that. To think that she would be cribbing Michelle Obama's words is crazy.'
Melania Trump was accused of stealing remarks made by Michelle Obama for her own speech at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland
The wife of the GOP Presidential candidate used two passages that match nearly word-for-word the speech that the current first lady delivered in 2008 at the Democratic National Convention
Manafort was even more dismissive on CBS, saying that 'there are not that many similarities' between the two speeches. 'There are a couple of phrases.'
'It's basically three places in the speech, and there are fragments of words,' he insisted. 'She spoke in front of 35 million people yesterday. She knew what she was doing. And she would never crib from another speech without acknowledging she was quoting somebody else.'
Asked if heads would roll over the embarrassing result, Manafort indicated no one would be sacked.
'I don't think Donald Trump feels that there is anything to fire about,' he said.
The campaign doesn't appear to be leaning in the direction of naming the aide responsible for putting words in Melania's speech that originated with a Michelle Obama speechwriter.
'It was a collaboration,' he said. 'The wordsmith I'm not sure.'
The identical passages from the two women's speeches focus on lessons Mrs. Trump said she learned from her parents. The remarks also touched on the relevance of those lessons and their experience as mothers.
They came near the beginning of her roughly 10-minute speech, which was otherwise distinct from the address that Mrs. Obama gave when her husband, Barack Obama, was being named the Democratic nominee for president.
Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort (right) insisted there was no intentional plagiarism
In Mrs. Trump's speech in Cleveland, she said: 'From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise, that you treat people with respect.'
'They taught and showed me values and morals in their daily life.'
In Mrs. Obama's 2008 speech in Denver, she said: 'And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: like, you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond, that you do what you say you're going to do, that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them and even if you don't agree with them.'
Another passage with notable similarities that follows two sentences later in Mrs. Trump's speech addresses her attempts to instill those values in her son.
'We need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow,' Mrs. Trump said. 'Because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.'
In the first lady's 2008 speech, she said, 'Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values and to pass them onto the next generation, because we want our children and all children in this nation to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work hard for them.'
A pregnant Orange County woman was attacked in her own home after her husband's ex-girlfriend put her home address in a fake Craigslist ad requesting a 'rape fantasy,' police said Monday.
Michelle Suzanne Hadley, 29, of Ontario, had already been breaking a protective order by stalking and threatening the pregnant woman, identified only as Jane Doe, when she made the ads, authorities say.
As a result, several of men turned up at Doe's door looking to fulfill that 'fantasy' - and one of them managed to attack the pregnant woman before she could call for help, the OC Weekly reported.
Charged: Michelle Hadley has been charged with 11 counts, including six of attempted rape, after pretending to be her ex-boyfriend's pregnant wife on Craigslist and posting ads asking for a 'rape fantasy'
'Hadley is accused of telling the responders that the victim wanted the responders to have forcible sexual intercourse with her, even if she screamed or resisted,' the Orange County DA said in a statement.
'Several of the responders showed up at Jane Doe's residence with the intention of raping the victim but did not succeed.
'One responder arrived at Jane Doe's residence and physically attacked the victim before she was able to call for help and the man fled the scene.'
Authorities did not say whether Doe was hurt during the attack.
Hadley had been in a relationship with Jane Doe's husband - described only as a US Marshals Service Agent - from 2013-2015. The couple had split up and he began dating Jane Doe.
Authorities say Hadley already had a protection order out against her after previously stalking Doe and threatening her child when the campaign of terror began on June 6.
The ads continued up until last Wednesday, police said.
The accused woman had allegedly been replying to responders pretending to be Jane Doe, giving them the woman's daily routine, sending them photos and helping to arrange the planned rape.
In fact, OCDA said, she was arrested for posting the ads on June 24, and was released on $100,000 bail, but had continued to post them while on bail. She is now being held on $1million bail.
She has been charged with 11 counts. She received one felony count of stalking with a restraining order, one felony count of stalking, one felony count of criminal threats and six felony counts of attempted forcible rape.
She also received one felony count of assault with the intent to commit a sexual offense during the commission of first degree burglary, and one misdemeanor count of violation of a protective order with a sentencing enhancement allegation for crime-bail-crime.
If convicted on all counts she could face life in prison.
The last spine-chilling moments of a 15-year-old girl were caught on camera before she was murdered at a deserted railway station.
Yekaterina was on her way home from a disco at a summer camp when she was attacked at Margi station in the city of Sochi in southern Russia.
The CCTV footage shows the teenager being ambushed by a middle-aged man who drags her away from the platform, where she is waiting for her older brother.
She tries to resist but the burly man overpowers her and throws her onto the tracks.
He bashes her head in countless times with a heavy object before dragging her lifeless body off the tracks and into some bushes where he held her down and sexually assaulted her.
Her body was eventually found by police under a bridge.
The terrified girl had been returning from a summer camp disco
The girl, who was waiting for her brother to return, is then dragged onto the railway tracks
The victim was waiting for her brother, who had gone down to the sea to enjoy the view of the water for a few minutes.
A police officer said: 'When the girl's brother got back, he saw a man leaving the station. He asked him whether he had seen his sister. The man shook his head.'
This man is the main suspect for the girl's murder.
Yekaterina's best friend Samira wrote on social media: 'I had seen you seconds before your death. I managed to see you for the last time and give you a kiss. We were laughing so much. I don't know what should I do. Why is this world so cruel?'
But others weighed in with various comments, some of which were extremely insensitive.
Elena wrote: 'What a horrible story. Authorities should harshen the laws and make court hearings public. Poor parents, my condolences. Hope that they will manage to catch him.'
Wayne Brownsey, 44, attacked his victim over nearly two years at the Alderwood Care Home in Salford, which was run by his girlfriend Stephanie Boulton, pictured together outside court
An odd job man who exploited his unsuspecting partner's position as the boss of a nursing home was jailed today for abusing a 73-year-old woman with Alzheimer's.
Wayne Brownsey, 44, groomed and later attacked his victim over nearly two years at the Alderwood Care Home in Salford, Greater Manchester.
Staff feared were too frightened to report him as his 47-year old long time girlfriend Stephanie Boulton was manageress of the home, the court heard.
He was caught after carers walked in on the 73-year old victim to find Brownsey molesting her under her clothing.
They had also kept a diary of a string of previous incidents between March 2012 and February 2014 in which they said Brownsey would be loitering in the woman's room when no maintenance jobs were required.
Police began investigating but the victim died in July 2015 without giving a statement.
At Manchester Crown Court, Brownsey was jailed for three years and nine months after he was convicted of sexual assault.
He denied any wrongdoing and during the trial Miss Boulton testifed on his behalf claiming her boyfriend was 'caring, thoughtful and would do anything for anybody - all of the time.'
The trial was told Brownsey, from Worsley, has worked at the home as a maintenance man for eight years whilst Miss Boulton was the most senior member of staff.
But he would secretly drink alcohol at work and staff became suspicious after he was spotted kneeling by the toilet where the victim was sat fully clothed.
When he realised he had spotted he began banging on panels, and one of the carers Amanda Jones said she got a 'gut feeling' about him.
She later contact Crimestoppers anonymously asking for advice and staff began logging incidents. Miss Jones filed a complaint to the regional manager, and Brownsey was subsequently suspended.
Scene of crimes: Wayne Brownsey, 44, groomed and later attacked his victim over nearly two years at the Alderwood Care Home in Salford, Greater Manchester, pictured
Prosecuting Michael Maher said: 'The carers who suspected wrongdoing on the part of the defendant did not bring it to the attention of their boss, Stephanie Boulton, because she was in a relationship with the defendant.
TWO YEARS OF TERROR: HOW HANDY MAN ABUSED WOMAN, 73 March 12 2012: Brownsey was seen kneeling by the toilet where the victim was sat fully clothed. September 2012: Pippa Head reported that Margaret was in her room, and that she saw Brownsey coming down the stairs from her room shortly before that. Early 2013: A third carer saw Brownsey leading Margaret down a corridor. Then she found Margaret alone in a room 15-20 minutes later with the room smelling of aftershave. January 23 2014: Victim was in her room at a time when Brownsey was loitering near to the lifts 'messing' with his belt. February 20 2014 Brownsey was found in a rarely used room by Amanda Jones and Pippa Head with his hand in Margaret's trousers, and when asked what he was doing he responded: 'Nothing, I'm just tucking her top in.' Advertisement
'His relationship with the manager may well explain his cavalier attitude to being in drink at work - or at least having the smell of alcohol on his breath. He took advantage of a damaged and vulnerable elderly lady for your own sexual gratification but in February 2014 he was caught red handed.
'The staff had safeguarding training, there were protocols and protections in place. All the stars align as chance would have it, and there is Mr Brownsey again and again and again. If maybe he is telling the truth then he is one one nature's unluckiest human beings. '
Brownsey claimed there was nothing sexual in his conduct adding: 'I wanted to help Margaret.'
In her evidence Miss Boulton said Brownsey 'could be loud and a nuisance' at the care home but was well liked by the residents. She said she was unaware her boyfriend was drinking alcohol at lunchtimes whilst at work.
But in a statement, the victim's family said: 'I feel I can't trust the care system. It makes me fearful for elderly people and for myself when I grow old. My mum had a very unfortunate life from being a little girl and I believed I was rescuing her by placing her in the care home. However, this was not the case.'
Salim Mehajers older sister Zenah Mehajer gave birth to the familys latest royal on Tuesday.
The controversial former deputy mayor of Auburn announced the birth of his niece Maria Isabel Osman on social media on Tuesday night, congratulating his sister and her husband Dr Khaled Osman, calling the newborn girl a princess.
Zenah, a lawyer who tends to shy from the spotlight cast on her lavish family, gave birth at Westmead Private Hospital in western Sydney at 12.05pm by caesarean.
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Salim Mehajers older sister Zenah Mehajer, a lawyer who tends to avoid the spotlight cast on her lavish family, gave birth to the familys latest royal on Tuesday - Maria Isabel Osman (pictured)
The controversial former deputy mayor of Auburn announced the birth of his niece Maria on social media on Tuesday night (pictured)
Salim congratulating his sister Zenah (left) and her husband Dr Khaled Osman (right)
Zenah and her husband already have twin boys Mohamad and Yousef, who were born prematurely at just 34 weeks.
Its been a massive journey raising twins. So blessed to finally have a girl, Zenah told Daily Mail Australia.
Dr Osman thanked his brother-in-law Salim for his wishes on Facebook.
Cannot wait for your babies, he said.
Zenah has often represented her property developer brother in court over his run-ins with the law, including during recent police allegations that demerit points incurred by his Ferrari and his wife Aysha's BMW were placed on the record of an international student.
Earlier this year Zenah also represented Salim, 30, when he was accused of refusing to pay $1 million in taxes to the Australian Tax Office for his first business, SM Projects Developments, according to The Australian.
The company folded in 2013.
Zenah (left) and her husband already have twin boys Mohamad and Yousef (pictured), who were born prematurely at just 34 weeks
Zenah (right) has often represents her property developer brother (left) in court over his run-ins with the law
Salim's post announcing the new addition to his family comes amid a series of bizarre social media photos just days after an AVO banned him from contacting his wife Aysha for 28 days.
The order prevents the couple from celebrating their first wedding anniversary on August 15 together.
He launched an Instagram account this week, after the account that he shared with his wife was taken down in the recent months.
Salim posted a photo of himself sitting on a Rolls Royce with a caption reading 'expect nothing from no one' on Sunday.
He has also posted photos of his expensive watch and car collection and two pictures of Aysha.
The latest was a selfie of the newlywed couple captioned 'real love' and came just hours before he announced the birth of his niece.
Unlike her siblings, Zenah tends to avoid the spotlight (pictured with her sister Aisha)
The youngest of the Mehajer siblings Mary (centre) wont the title of Miss Lebanon Australia earlier this year (pictured with Zenah and her husband Dr Osman)
The pair were married less than a year ago when their self-proclaimed 'wedding of the century' shut down a Lidcombe street in western Sydney.
Despite rumours the pair had split, Mr Mehajer has continued to share images of them together on Facebook.
The Downing Centre Local Court on Wednesday extended an urgent 28-day Apprehended Violence Order from police against Mr Mehajer on behalf of his wife.
Mr Mehajer, 30, has been prevented from approaching or contacting his wife, also 30, who reverted to using her maiden name Aysha Amelia Learmonth in court proceedings.
Salim is the third eldest child of eight children born to Mohamad and Amal Mehajer, who immigrated from Lebanon, according to The Australian.
Mohamad started his own company Sydney Building Constructions Pty Ltd, which developed apartments.
Salim's post announcing the new addition to his family comes amid a series of bizarre social media posts just days after an AVO banned him from contacting his wife Aysha (pictured together) for 28 days
People in Denver are being warned that they may have been exposed to measles after a sick baby visited numerous locations in the south metro area including a Target and a Panda Express.
The baby visited three pediatric units in Denver, Parker and Lone Tree as well as spots in Littleton and Highlands Ranch, health officials said.
The respiratory illness is spread by coughing and sneezing and can be dangerous for infants too young to be vaccinated and people with compromised immunity.
The Tri-County Health Department is urging anyone who visited the locations the sick baby was at to get vaccinated if not already and watch out for symptoms which include high fever, runny rose, cough and a red rash that starts on the face.
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People in Denver are being warned that they may have been exposed to measles after a sick baby visited numerous locations in the south metro area including a Target and a Panda Express
Health officials are urging anyone who visited the locations the sick baby was at to get vaccinated if not already and watch out for symptoms
'Measles is rare and its highly contagious and it can be, in particular with people whose immune systems don't work very well, really serious, Dr John Douglas, the departments executive director, told KDVR.
However, Douglas also stressed that the alert has been issued out of an abundance of caution and the risk is extremely low.
In a statement issued by the department, he said: As of Sunday evening, July 17, every person known to have been in contact with the baby or in close proximity at the locations listed has been identified and/or personally contacted by the health department, and provided the appropriate preventative measures.
This notice to the public is out of an abundance of caution, and any remaining risk is extremely low.
But he warns that measles is the most infectious of infectious diseases.
The baby in question had traveled to a country where measles can be transmitted, Douglas told CBS4. The bay had not yet been vaccinated.
LOCATIONS VISITED BY THE SICK BABY Kumon Math and Reading Center of Highlands Ranch - East 9362 S. Colorado Blvd. #D-08, Highlands Ranch, CO 80126 July 8, 3.30pm - 6.40pm and July 11, 3:30 p.m.-6:40 p.m.
King Soopers 9551 S. University Blvd, Littleton, CO 80126 July 11, 4:30 p.m.-7:45 p.m.
Panda Express 9563 S. University Blvd., Highlands Ranch, CO 80126 July 11, 5:45 p.m.-8:00 p.m.
Southeast Denver Pediatrics 11960 Lioness Way #200, Parker, CO 80134 July 12, 9:50 a.m.-12:15 p.m.; July 13, 9:50 a.m.-12:35 p.m.; and July 14, 11:35 a.m.1:45 p.m.
Target 10001 Commons St., Lone Tree, CO 80124 July 12, 11:00 a.m.-2:00 p.m.
Sky Ridge Pediatric Emergency Department (Evergreen Building) 10107 Ridge Gate Pkwy, Lone Tree, CO 80124 July 14, 12:30 p.m.-9:45 p.m.
Pediatric Unit at Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children at Presbyterian St. Lukes 2001 High Street., Denver, CO 80205 July 14, 8.30pm to July 15, 3.30am Advertisement
MMR vaccinations are usually given at 12 to 15 months and a second dose at four to six years old.
Douglas urged anyone who had not yet been immunized to get vaccinated.
The health department has contacted 120 people known to have had contact with the baby at medical facilities, but its not possible to determine who the child was near at the grocery store and other businesses.
The good news is that those are big, open spaces, he told the station. The baby was not there long.
Lindsey Wahl., who takes her six-month-old daughter to Southeast Denver Pediatrics told CBS4: Its kind of the risk you take, I guess, these days. It makes me nervous.
Her child is safe, however, after visiting well after the exposure period.
Dr John Douglas, the Tri-County health departments executive director, says measles is especially serious for people whose immune systems don't work well
MEASLES: WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR Measles is highly contagious and preventable through vaccines. Symptoms of measles typically begin seven to 14 days after exposure, and include a fever of 101 degrees or higher, a runny nose, red eyes that are sensitive to light, and coughing. Two to four days after the first symptoms, a red rash starts on the face and spreads to the rest of the body. A person can be contagious for four days before the rash appears and for up to four days after the rash appears. People with measles symptoms should NOT go to childcare, school, work, or out in public, since they may spread the disease to others. The disease was eradicated in the US in 2000, but the past couple of years have seen new cases in large part because of unfounded fears that the vaccination causes autism in children. The symptoms are usually mild but can be deadly in babies, who cannot be immunized until they're a year old. Officials last year said that a massive measles outbreak that sprouted at Disneyland in California and spread to several other states was largely fueled by parents refusing to vaccinate children. Earlier this month, health officials in Arizona say the largest current measles outbreak in the United States is in part because some workers at a federal immigration detention center refuse to get vaccinated. Authorities have confirmed at least 22 measles cases in Arizona since late May. They all stem from the Eloy Detention Center, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility managed by the private Corrections Corporation of America. Advertisement
According to the alert, complications from measles include ear infections, pneumonia and swelling of the brain.
The health department is also warning those who suspect they have measles and need to see the doctor to call the office first to discuss the symptoms and not go into the office and risk spreading measles further.
Do not go inside the doctors office or hospital since measles is highly contagious, and the doctor might meet you outside of the medical office in order to protect other patients and visitors, the warning adds.
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Half a dozen African elephants lay strewn on a riverside plain in Malawi, immobilised by darts fired from a helicopter in a massive project to move 500 elephants, by truck and crane, to a sanctuary for the threatened species.
As development squeezes Africa's wildlife areas, this kind of man-made animal migration is increasingly seen as a conservation strategy in Malawi, one of the continent's most densely populated countries, and beyond.
Conservationists flipped the prostrate elephants' large ears over their eyes to block out light, and propped open the tips of their trunks with twigs to ensure unimpeded breathing.
Then the multi-ton elephants, hanging upside down from ankle straps, were loaded by crane onto trucks for a road trip of about 185 miles to a safer, more spacious area.
An elephant is lifted by a crane in an upside down position in Malawi, in the first step of an assisted migration of 500 of the threatened species. The animal is unconscious and will wake up unharmed
An elephant is measured after being shot by a dart in Liwonde National Park, Malawi, in the first step of an assisted migration. African Parks, which manages three Malawian reserves is moving the 500 elephants to a safer and more spacious area
An elephant is shot with a dart from a helicopter in Liwonde National Park. The tranquiliser dart is harmless but it will knock the animal out for several hours
African elephants are in particular peril from human encroachment, while poachers have slaughtered them in the tens of thousands to meet demand for ivory, mostly in Asia.
The Malawi elephant project differs from other wildlife relocations because of its large scale.
'This is very much the way that we'll have to manage things in the future,' said Craig Reid, manager of Malawi's Liwonde National Park, which is run by African Parks, a non-profit group based in Johannesburg.
Reid described Liwonde as 'an ecological island in a sea of humanity.'
African Parks is relocating hundreds of what it calls 'surplus' elephants from Liwonde and Majete, another park, to Nkhotakota, a third reserve where poachers have virtually wiped out the elephant population.
African Parks, which manages all three Malawian reserves, is moving the 500 elephants this month and next, and again next year when vehicles can maneuver on the rugged terrain during southern Africa's dry winter.
An elephant is lifted by a crane in an upside down position during the relocation. It is winter now in Southern Africa and the roads are dry enough to transport the animals
An elephant is lifted onto a flatbed lorry, ready for the journey to its new home. Twigs will be placed in their trunks to ensure they can breath properly
An elephant is tied up ready for transportation. Each elephant weighs several tons and if one wakes up on the lorry and starts thrashing about it could be disastrous
The Dutch PostCode Lottery and the Washington-based Wyss Foundation are key funders of the 1.2million relocation.
On the day the Associated Press team spent with the team Dr Andre Uys, a wildlife veterinarian, rode in a helicopter that flushed elephant families from woods onto a floodplain, where he darted them in their hindquarters.
Then capture teams in vehicles raced across the rutted earth toward the prone elephants' dark silhouettes.
The immediate priority was to check the health of the elephants before they were hoisted, trunks dangling, onto flatbed trucks. Monitoring included the intimate act of placing a hand over an elephant's trunk to feel the hot blast of exhaled air every few seconds.
Teams rounded up 24 elephants, including a gargantuan bull, in a day's haul that they described as a record. In one case, an immobilised calf struggled to breathe, and conservationists funneled oxygen up a tube in its trunk and measured vital signs.
Dr Uys speculated that the calf had river water in its sinuses.
'Those little guys actually can't walk along the bottom, they have to swim across the channels when we push them out into ground where we can catch them,' he said.
The immediate priority was to check the health of the elephants before they were hoisted, trunks dangling, onto flatbed trucks
Monitoring included the intimate act of placing a hand over an elephant's trunk to feel the hot blast of exhaled air every few seconds
Teams rounded up 24 elephants, including a gargantuan bull, in a day's haul that they described as a record. In one case, an immobilised calf struggled to breathe, and conservationists funneled oxygen up a tube in its trunk and measured vital signs
'In that process, with all the splashing from the mothers and everything, they get a lot of water up the nasal cavity,' he added.
The elephants were revived with injections in 'wake-up' crates, and cattle prods were used to maneuver the animals onto vehicles bound for their new home.
There is some risk and stress in drugging and moving the animals, though South African conservationists and the commercial wildlife industry have refined and shortened the process over the years. Many animals can adapt to a new habitat if it is roughly the same as the old one.
The Malawi relocation is 'a win-win for elephants and people' and an example of wildlife management that 'will likely become the new norm in many places in Africa,' said Bas Huijbregts, African species expert for the WWF conservation group.
While disease transfer is a concern, species restocking in Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park and South Africa's Addo Elephant National Park has been successful, said George Wittemyer, an African elephant expert and associate professor at Colorado State University.
The Malawi relocation is 'a win-win for elephants and people' and an example of wildlife management that 'will likely become the new norm in many places in Africa,' said Bas Huijbregts, African species expert for the WWF conservation group
While disease transfer is a concern, species restocking in Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park and South Africa's Addo Elephant National Park has been successful, said George Wittemyer, an African elephant expert and associate professor at Colorado State University
Kester Vickery, from Conservation Solutions, said the key to successful relocations of what he called a 'higher-thinking kind of animal' is to keep tightly knit elephant families together
An elephant is lifted by a crane in an upside down position in Lilongwe, Malawi, in the first step of an assisted migration of 500 of the threatened species
'I see it as something that's here to stay, for better or worse,' Wittemyer said.
African Parks hopes elephants in Malawi can eventually serve as a reservoir to restore other African elephant populations.
One estimate says Africa has fewer than 500,000 elephants, down from several million a century ago.
A South Africa-based company, Conservation Solutions, is contributing to the Malawi relocation project.
Kester Vickery, from Conservation Solutions, said the key to successful relocations of what he called a 'higher-thinking kind of animal' is to keep tightly knit elephant families together.
Angela Merkel is facing a fresh barrage of criticism in Germany over her immigration policy after a teenage Afghan refugee went on an axe rampage.
The self-radicalised ISIS fighter, understood to be Muhammad Riyad, shouted 'Allahu Akbar' as he injured 15 people with weapons on a train in Wurzburg last night before he was shot dead by police.
The attack has added fuel to the heated debate Europe-wide on immigration, Islam and asylum seekers from across the Middle East and Africa after Germany opened its doors to more than a million migrants last year alone.
German chancellor is facing increasing anger in the country over her policies with some newspapers reporting that the attack will boost support for far-right groups.
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German chancellor Angela Merkel is facing fresh criticism from her peers for her immigration policy after a teenage Afghan refugee - Muhammad Riyad - went on an axe rampage
A headline on Germany's Die Welt website said the incident has been 'an accelerant' for the anti-immigrant Alternative For Germany party and the Pegida movement.
The case is likely to deepen worries about so-called 'lone wolf' attacks in Europe and will put political pressure on Merkel.
'In the minds of many people, his arrival is directly linked to Merkel and her liberal refugee policies,' said Frank Decker, political scientist at Bonn University.
Public support for Merkel has risen since Britain voted on June 23 to leave the European Union, helping reverse a fall in her popularity caused by the refugee crisis. But Decker said a Nice-style attack in Germany could quickly end those gains.
'It would boost those who have called Merkel's policies a mistake,' he said. 'Merkel would be blamed.'
Among Merkel's critics is Bavarian Premier Horst Seehofer, who says the influx is more than the country can cope with, according to Bloomberg.
GERMANY'S MIGRANT CRISIS German chancellor Angela Merkel's open-door immigration policy invited more than 1.1million refugees into the country last year. The figure was more than any other EU nation and the majority of migrants were from Syria, followed by Afghanistan, looking to flee poverty and conflict. Bavaria saw a flood of refugees pour over the border from Austria and on New Year's Eve more than 1,200 sexual assaults were reported with gangs of marauding migrant men targeting girls and young women as they celebrated in the streets. The number of refugees arriving in Germany has fallen sharply as a result of the closure of the Balkans migration route and an EU deal with Turkey to stem the flow. In April, May and June, the number was around 16,000 each month, less than a fifth of the tally seen at the start of the year, according to official figures. Critics say Islamic terror groups could have smuggled in fighters with the mass crowds last year. Advertisement
A leader of Alternative for Germany (AfD) said Merkel and her supporters were to blame for the dangerous security situation because their 'welcoming policies had brought too many young, uneducated and radical Muslim men to Germany'.
One man claiming to be a member of the far-right NPD party said: 'Well done Mrs Merkel - how many more of these do we have to have to get you to change your mind about unregulated immigration?'
Bavaria saw a flood of refugees enter Germany through Austria and Eastern European countries.
Merkel's critics believe she underplayed the risks of inviting so many migrants into the country to flee from poverty and conflict.
Bavaria is governed by the Christian Social Union (CSU), sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats, which has been loudly critical of Merkel's welcoming stance toward asylum seekers.
The split threatened the unity of the ruling coalition in Berlin and sent the government's approval ratings plunging.
Although Merkel's popularity has rebounded recently the Bavaria attack is likely to stoke political tensions.
But Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann however warned against tarring all asylum-seekers with the same brush.
'It is undisputed that he was a refugee and if he hadn't been there he wouldn't have committed this act,' he said.
'But I don't think that we should make blanket judgements in any way about refugees.'
German police carry the body of the Afghan train attacker is carried from carriage and into a hearse after he was shot dead by police
It is feared Islamic extremist groups could smuggle in fighters into Germany with genuine asylum seekers, says the Wall Street Journal.
Germany let in a record nearly 1.1 million asylum seekers last year - more than any other EU nation - with Syrians the largest group followed by Afghans fleeing ongoing turmoil and poverty in their country.
The number of refugees arriving in Germany has fallen sharply as a result of the closure of the Balkans migration route and an EU deal with Turkey to stem the flow.
In April, May and June, the number was around 16,000 each month, less than a fifth of the tally seen at the start of the year, according to official figures.
Bavaria is governed by the Christian Social Union (CSU), sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats.
The CSU has been loudly critical of Merkel's welcoming stance toward asylum seekers, a split that threatened the unity of the ruling coalition in Berlin and sent the government's approval ratings plunging.
It has also lent support to a right-wing populist party, Alternative for Germany, which was founded as a Eurosceptic protest party in 2013 but now mainly rails against Islam and Germany's refugee influx.
It currently polls at more than 10 percent and is represented in half of Germany's 16 states as well as the European Parliament.
The issuewas heightened on New Year's Eve when 1,200 sexual assaults were reported across Germany as marauding gangs of migrant men targeted girls and young women during celebrations.
A stain of blood and the remains of a bandage lie on the pavement close to where the axe attack happened in Germany
Investigation: Police stand by the regional train on which a teenager wielding an axe attacked passengers
The Afghan refugee who went on an axe rampage on a German train had only been living with his foster family for two weeks and may have been self radicalised after he was found to have made an ISIS flag.
ISIS has released a chilling video of him where he says he will attack the country in revenge for airstrikes against the terror group.
The attacker, who is named in the video as Muhammad Riyad, was gunned down by armed police after fleeing the scene near the city of Wurzburg, 70 miles north of Nuremberg last night.
He is believed to be 17 years old although in the video, he appears he could be much older.
He shouted 'Allahu Akbar' during the incident and the terror group have claimed that he was an 'Islamic State fighter', making it the first ISIS attack in Germany.
As many as 19 passengers needed hospital treatment while two victims are fighting for their lives after being attacked with 'cutting and stabbing weapons'.
An eyewitness said the train, which had been carrying around 25 people, looked 'like a slaughterhouse' after the attack, with blood covering the floor.
Now it has been revealed that police searching the home where he had been living had found an home-made ISIS flag and a note indicating that he had become self-radicalised.
The flag and the note are believed to have been discovered in the house he was living in with a foster family. He had only been staying there a fortnight.
Bavarian interior minister Joachim Hermann said that the teenager came to Germany two years ago as an unaccompanied minor, and applied for asylum in March.
He lived in a home for teenage refugees until he was placed with the foster family.
A 17-year-old Afghan refugee went on the rampage with an axe and a knife on a train in Germany. He was later shot dead by police
The case is likely to deepen worries about so-called 'lone wolf' attacks in Europe and could put political pressure on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has welcomed hundreds of thousands of migrants to Germany over the past year.
Meanwhile, the Amaq news agency linked to ISIS released a statement saying the Germany attacker was an 'Islamic State fighter.'
It said: 'The perpetrator of the stabbing attack in Germany was one of the fighters of the Islamic State and carried out the operation in answer to the calls to target the countries of the coalition fighting the Islamic State.'
It was also confirmed that two of those caught up in the attack were in a critical condition and that a Chinese family were among the injured.
Meanwhile an eyewitness, who declined to give his name, said he saw people crawl from the carriage and ask for a first-aid kit as other victims lay on the floor inside.
The onslaught started on the train from Treuchtlingen to Wurzburg as the service stopped at Wurzburg-Heidingsfeld.
As well as the two critically injured victims, one other passenger is believed to have non life-threatening injuries while 14 others suffered minor injuries or shock.
This morning police officers search for evidence in a field near to the railway station close to Nuremburg
Germany had thus far escaped the kind of large-scale jihadist attacks seen in the southern French city of Nice last week
The attacker was eventually shot dead by police after running from the train.
Mr Herrmann earlier said the perpetrator was a 17-year-old Afghan who had lived in nearby Ochsenfurt. He has not yet been named.
'It is quite probable that this was an Islamist attack,' said a ministry spokesman, adding that the attacker had shouted 'Allahu akbar' (God is greatest).
A police spokesman added: 'Shortly after arriving at Wuerzburg, a man attacked passengers with an axe and a knife.
'Three people have been seriously injured and several others lightly injured.'
The rampage onslaught started on the 9pm train from Treuchtlingen to Wurzburg as it stopped at Wurzburg-Heidingsfeld
As well as the three critically injured victims, one other passenger is believed to have non life-threatening injuries while 14 others suffered minor injuries or shock
The Bavarian interior ministry confirmed that police had shot and killed the attacker and a special task force has been dispatched from Wurzburg
He added: 'The perpetrator was able to leave the train, police left in pursuit and as part of this pursuit, they shot the attacker and killed him.'
There were no further details on the circumstances of the teenager's death, and police declined to suggest what the motive was for the attack.
'At this time everything is possible,' the spokesman said.
Train services had come to a halt between Wurzburg-Heidingsfeld and Ochsenfurt and a police helicopter circled the area.
The Bavarian interior ministry confirmed that police had shot and killed the attacker and a special task force has been dispatched from Wurzburg. Police believe the attacker worked alone.
The train line near the city of Wurzburg in southern Germany has been closed and police have descended on the scene
The teenager was eventually shot dead by police after he tried to attack them with a 'knife or hatchet'
Joachim Herrmann, the interior minister of Bavaria state, said the attacker was a 17-year-old Afghan who had lived in nearby Ochsenfurt
Germany had thus far escaped the kind of large-scale jihadist attacks seen in the southern French city of Nice last week, in which 31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel used a truck to mow down people leaving a Bastille Day fireworks display, killing 84 people in an attack claimed by ISIS.
In May, a mentally-unstable 27-year-old man carried out a similar knife attack on a regional train in the south, killing one person and injuring three others.
Early reports suggested he had yelled 'Allahu Akbar' but police later said there was no evidence pointing to a religious motive. He is being held in a psychiatric hospital.
Germany let in a record nearly 1.1 million asylum seekers last year, with Syrians the largest group followed by Afghans fleeing ongoing turmoil and poverty in their country.
The number of refugees arriving in Germany has fallen sharply as a result of the closure of the Balkans migration route and an EU deal with Turkey to stem the flow.
Police, fire and ambulance crews were all dispatched to the scene of the axe attack this evening
Comes in the wake of high profile attacks on officers around the country
Officer wasn't injured but police are warning to all cops to check their cars
Boston cop was driving away from the station when his wheel fell off
Boston police are being warned to check their cars before driving off after a cop's vehicle was tampered with.
The officer, whose name is not being released, was driving away from the police department's District 1 station, in central Boston, yesterday when his rear wheel came off.
He was not injured in the incident but when the cop took the car to the shop for repairs, a mechanic found the car had been tampered with. Someone had loosened or removed the lug nuts holding the wheel in place before he drove away.
Boston police are being warned to check their cars before driving off after a cop's vehicle was tampered with (pictured is the internal memo to officers)
Police are investigating and issued an internal memo warning officers about the danger, in the wake of the recent attacks against police officers over the past two weeks.
A Boston Police Department spokeswoman told DailyMail.com that they were urging officers to 'remain vigilant and cautious, and be aware of what's going on, given the environment we work in these days.'
But she insisted that the investigation was still in its early stages.
'We don't want to make a national incident out of it,' she told us. 'We don't know yet if it was an attempt to injure the office or if it was someone vandalizing the car.
'We don't even know where it was parked when it was tampered with,' she said, adding that it may have been driven for some time before the loose lug nuts finally fell off.
The July 18 memo, seen by the DailyMail.com, stated: 'Be advised that a personal vehicle belonging to an A-1 police officer was damaged while it was parked in the read of District 1.
'The lug nuts on a rear tire were removed/ loosened and the tire came off after driving away. There were no injuries. Please pay close attention to vehicle around the station and the garage next door.'
Law enforcement all over the country are on edge after the high profile shootings of police officers in recent weeks.
The Boston police officer, whose name is not being released, was driving away from the police department's District 1 station, in central Boston, when his wheel came off (file picture)
On Sunday, former Marine Gavin Long, of Kansas City, opened fire in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, killing three officers.
Less than two weeks prior to that attack, five cops were killed at a Dallas Black Lives Matter protest over the police shootings of two black men.
In the wake of the shootings, a sheriff in southwest Ohio is encouraging civilians on his staff with licenses to carry guns to bring their weapons to work.
Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones also urged civilian employees to carry their weapons while operating any department vehicle away from headquarters.
'You have to pay attention now more so than ever,' he said, referring to the Dallas and Baton Rouge mass shootings.
Jones made the suggestion to employees in a memo on Friday, seen by the Hamilton-Middletown Journal-News. He urged them to carry their weapons discreetly when in public.
A Cincinnati veteran's yearning for snacks saved his life Monday night when he stepped out to buy chips and soft drinks just before his house exploded.
'I figured I'd go down to Kroger to get pop and chips and I come to this,' Tim Skinner told Cincinnati.com outside the ruins of his rented home.
Skinner's whole life - and two of his three dogs - were lost in the explosion, he said: 'Everything I own is either on my body or in my truck, and that's it. Not the way I planned on starting retirement, that's for sure.'
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Explosion: Tim Skinner, a veteran from Cincinnati, went out to get soda and chips Monday - and returned to discover his house had blown up, destroying almost everything he had and killing two of his three dogs
Rubble: The house burned for about an hour, neighbors said, and the rubble was still smoking six hours on. Skinner had left the armed forces two weeks ago, and was looking forward to retirment
Lucky: Skinner (pictured) says he's very lucky to have stepped out at just the right time. 'Somebody was watching out for me and made me decide to go,' he said. 'That's the reason you go to church.'
(Video courtesy of WCPO)
Fire services were called to Skinner's home on the 1900 block of Bising Avenue, North College Hill, at around 10pm Monday, a a two-minute drive to the nearest Kroger supermarket.
The explosion ripped apart the home of the veteran, who retired two weeks ago, killing two of his dogs, aged 12 and 15 years old.
'They're gone, but Buddy's okay,' Skinner said, tearing up. 'Evidently, he got blown out. He's scared.'
He added: 'I guess I'm lucky, I could have been in the middle of all that. Somebody was watching out for me and made me decide to go. That's the reason you go to church.'
Skinner said that he hadn't smelled any gas or anything unusual prior to the explosion, WCPO reported.
He excused himself from the Cincinnati.com reporter to go comfort Buddy, his 'little dog' who was staying at a neighbor's home.
Thomas Whitehead, 77, is a veteran and one of Skinner's neighbors. He said heard 'a Vietnam explosion' that blew out his van's windows and dented its doors.
By the time he made it outside, the house was already in flames. It burned for around an hour and was still smoking a few hours later.
In a statement, Duke Energy spokeswoman Sally Thelan said: 'We are just beginning our investigation and have no information whether or not any Duke Energy infrastructure was involved or cause of the explosion.
'We are working closely with local authorities to determine the cause of the incident.'
According WCPO fire crews believe the explosion was caused by a gas leak.
Peter Scotter, 55, was charged with racially aggravated common assault on the woman who was standing next to her nine-year-old son
A man appeared in court today accused of ripping a veil from a Muslim woman's face before throwing it on the floor of a busy shopping centre in an allegedly racist attack.
Peter Scotter, 55, is charged with racially aggravated common assault after allegedly attacking the woman who was waiting for her husband outside a shop with her nine-year-old son.
Scotter is accused of walking purposefully up to the woman and grabbing her niqab - leaving her face exposed to the public, Sunderland Magistrates' Court heard.
The alleged assault left her with neck pain and caused her to almost fall forward as she waited inside The Bridges shopping centre in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, on July 3.
Scotter will now have his case heard before a crown court judge because the allegations are 'so serious'.
Laura Lax, prosecuting, said the defendant is accused of shouting racist abuse during the incident which occurred at 3.30pm.
Police attended the scene and Scotter, of Sunderland, is also accused of causing PC Deborah Chayton alarm, harassment or distress, which was racially or religiously aggravated.
He did not enter pleas to the two charges he faced.
Chairman of the Bench Robert Dash said the magistrates declined jurisdiction.
He said: 'We consider that the allegations are so serious we cannot deal with them.
'We are going to therefore refer you to Newcastle Crown Court.'
Scotter, who was wearing jeans and a black polo shirt, had his left arm in a sling and will appear at Newcastle Crown Court at 10am on August 16.
He made a rude gesture to photographers when he arrived and left court and shouted at the media.
The alleged assault happened at a time when reports of racial abuse were on the rise following Britain's exit from the European Union.
Sunderland voted to leave the EU by 61% last month with 82,394 voting for Leave and 51,930 for Remain.
Scotter is accused of walking purposefully up the woman and grabbing her niqab (stock photograph)
The controversial book, pictured, has been ridiculed for its racist attitudes and factual inaccuracies
A new text book on Mexican-American heritage has been branded racist due to the way Hispanic people are depicted in the text.
Critics claim the book, Mexican American Heritage, is 'poorly researched' and offensive.
The majority of public school students in Texas are Hispanic.
A battle over the high school text is shaping up to become the latest ideological clash for the Republican-controlled Texas Board of Education.
Its members have long waged high-profile debates over the teaching of evolution, climate change and Christianity's influence on America's Founding Fathers to more than 5.2million public school students statewide.
Democrats, who are outnumbered 10-5 on the board, pushed unsuccessfully two years ago to create a full Mexican-American studies program. Instead, publishers were asked to submit textbooks on a variety of ethnic studies topics that the board could consider for use beginning in the 2017-2018 academic year.
Texas got one submission: Virginia-based publisher Momentum Instruction offered a textbook titled Mexican American Heritage.
But the book is now being decried as racist and inaccurate by many of the same advocates who had wanted a broader Mexican-American studies course.
Celina Moreno, an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said: 'What we have now is a deeply flawed and a deeply offensive textbook'.
Moreno and other activists are part of the new Responsible Ethnic Studies Text Coalition, which scrutinized the proposed textbooks and detailed what it described as 'multiple factual errors.'
The coalition said those included suggesting that Mexican culture promotes laziness, linking Mexican-Americans to immigrants who are not in the country legally, and characterizing leaders of the Chicano movement that advanced Mexican-American civil rights in the 1960s and 70s as adopting 'a revolutionary narrative that opposed Western civilization and wanted to destroy this society.'
'Industrialists were very driven, competitive men,' the textbook says, according to excerpts. 'In contrast, Mexican laborers were not reared to put in a full day's work so vigorously. There was a cultural attitude of "manana", or "tomorrow".'
The Texas Board of Education will consider whether to recommend the book on its next curriculum
Hispanics now make up 52 percent of Texas public school students, with most being Mexican-Americans.
The education board plans to vote in November on whether to approve the Mexican American Heritage textbook. Texas' more than 1,000 school districts don't have to use board-sanctioned classroom materials, but most do.
As a result, Texas has an outsized influence on school textbooks nationally. Its market is so large that changes made by publishers to meet the state's curriculum standards can wind up altering content in textbooks sold elsewhere.
David Bradley, a social conservative and veteran Board of Education member, said yesterday that activists who forced Texas to solicit proposed ethnic studies textbooks are now angry with the results.
He added that Texas should focus on basics like reading, writing and math before worrying about more specialized courses.
A former Facebook employee has been officially charged with raping a female friend, who says he held her at knifepoint after a night out with friends.
Yue Zhou, 27, was charged this week on felony rape and battery charges in connection to the June 24 attack. He is due in court for an arraignment on September 6.
According to the San Jose Mercury News, the charges include three counts of rape by force, violence, duress, menace or fear; one count of sexual battery of a victim; one count of assault with a deadly weapon and one count of false imprisonment.
Before the attack, Zhou's Facebook profile said he was business analyst for the company. However, a source close to Facebook says he is no longer employed there anymore. It's unclear whether he lost his position due to the criminal case.
Former Facebook employee Yue Zhou, 27, was arrested on Tuesday at his home in Palo Alto, California, on charges of raping a friend
The former Facebook business analyst was arrested at his home in Palo Alto, California, on July 5.
The alleged victim, a woman in her 20s who is not being identified, came forward to police about the rape on June 25 - the day after the attack.
She told police that she went out to dinner with Zhou and other friends the night of Friday, June 24, and that she dropped Zhou off at his home after the meal.
When she complained about being tired, Zhou invited her in to rest and have a glass of water.
Once inside the residence though, Zhou 'raped her (and) prevented her from leaving by holding a knife,' Palo Alto police said in a statement.
Several hours later, she was able to escape the house on the 4200 block of Wilkie Way and drive away.
'She essentially distracted him momentarily, and she was able to get out the front door to her car,' said Palo Alto Sgt. James Reifschneider.
The female friend told police that Zhou invited her into his home after dinner and then held her at knifepoint and raped her. Zhou pictured above in photos posted to Facebook (left and right)
The following evening, around 7.30pm, the victim informed Palo Alto Police of the alleged crime and they started their investigation.
Police found enough evidence to arrest Zhou on Tuesday at his home. He was taken into custody around 7.50am without incident.
According to his Facebook profile, Zhou had worked as a business analyst at Facebook since April. The Beijing, China native graduated from Peking University before pursuing a master's degree in management science and engineering from Columbia University in New York.
of the vicitm say the couple had been having troubles recently
The baby is currently being cared for by family members of Jensen
was found unharmed still sitting in the backseat
their bodies in a parked car in Virginia on Saturday
A former Marine shot his girlfriend before turning the gun on himself, while their baby was sat in the car with them, according to police.
Corrections officer Jonan Fabricio Gonzales-Funes and Elizabeth Madison Jensen were found dead from gunshot wounds inside their vehicle, parked just off Pierce Taylor Road in Hallwood, Virginia, on Saturday morning.
Police also discovered their infant daughter, covered in mosquito bites, but otherwise unharmed in the backseat of the car.
Corrections officer Jonan Fabricio Gonzales-Funes, 27, (right) and his partner Elizabeth Madison Jensen (left) were found dead from gunshot wounds inside their vehicle on Saturday morning
Investigators believe that Gonzales-Funes, who had worked for Accomack County Sheriff's Office since last September, shot Jensen before shooting himself dead
Investigators believe that Gonzales-Funes, 27, who had worked for Accomack County Sheriff's Office since last September, shot his girlfriend Jensen before shooting himself dead.
'At this time, it appears that this incident was the result of a murder-suicide, and that Gonzales-Funes is the suspect; however the investigation is ongoing and laboratory and autopsy results are pending,' the local Sheriff's Office stated.
Their baby is currently being cared for by family members.
The couple had been together for more than three years with Jensen previously referring to Gonzales-Funes as 'this gorgeous perfect boyfriend of mine.'
But those close to her, told DailyMail.com that the couple had been having troubles recently.
Those close to Jensen (left), told DailyMail.com that the couple had been having troubles recently. And on Saturday, her boyfriend (right, in the Marines) is believed to have shot her dead - in front of their infant daughter- before tuning the gun on himself
Pops Williams, worked alongside the mother-of-one at the Drive Thru Vape and Smoke Outlet in Virginia.
'Of course we were shocked (by her death),' he told us. 'We knew she had some personal problems with her boyfriend but nothing this extreme.'
He added that Jensen had been suffering through some 'domestic issues' but said that he had seen Gonzales-Funes come to her work to bring her lunch on a couple of occasions and thought they were 'making back up.'
'There was no quarreling. The gentleman had manners when coming round to people's palce of employment.
'I didn't see anything wrong with him.'
He said that Jensen, who only began working part-time at the Drive Thru a month ago, had been well liked by her colleagues.
'She was a great person,' he said. 'She was real nice, friendly.'
Gonzales-Funes' cousin, Jaime Meza, was shocked by the allegations, describing him as a 'good' man who he'd never known be violent.
The couple had been together for more than three years with Jensen previously referring to Gonzales-Funes as 'this gorgeous perfect boyfriend of mine' while he posted 'I love you' on a picture of them together
'He was a guard, I never knew he would do something like that,' Chrissy Padgett, who knew Gonzales-Funes, told 10 On Your Side.
'He was just really quiet. It petrifies me.'
She added that it must also be an incredibly difficult time for the family of Jensen.
'I can just imagine what they're going through. They didn't just lose her, they have to explain to their baby when it grows up what happened.'
Alyssa Behr, a friend of Jensen who went by her middle name Madison, said: 'She always had a smile on her face, always laughing and having a good time.
On Facebook, friends and family also paid tribute to the victim, of Sanford, Virginia, describing somewhat of a class joker during high school.
Autopsy results for Gonzales-Funes and Jensen have not yet been released.
Classified Nato intelligence has been handed to the Russians within half an hour of being shared within the alliance, a former Army Colonel turned Tory MP claimed today.
Bob Stewart said 'secret' was the last thing intelligence documents marked as such were while he served in Nato forces during the 1990s.
And the veteran of the Bosnia war even claimed he still had concerns about fellow parliamentarians who take part in Nato proceedings today - insisting he had to be 'robust' in resisting demands from other nations politicians for universal sharing of intelligence.
Tory MP Bob Stewart, pictured at today's defence committee, claimed 'secret' Nato intelligence was shared with Russia in just 30 minutes while he served with the British Army
Speaking at a meeting of the Commons defence committee, Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said it was a real problem but that there was a new 'initiative' to try and resolve it.
Mr Fallon was giving evidence to the committee, of which Mr Stewart is a member, on the recent Nato summit in Warsaw.
Mr Fallon told the committee there was a 'tension' between the 'Five Eyes' intelligence alliance of Britain, US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, and other Nato members.
And he told the committee: 'I am happy to report to you that at the Warsaw summit, the summit did adopt what it called the Joint Intelligence and Surveillance Initiative which will I hope maximise the resources the individual members of Nato have.
Defence Secretary Michael Fallon, pictured in Downing Street today, said measures were in place to improve intelligence security
'It will enhance the interconnectivity between the different intelligence systems that will help improve the training and expertise of the intelligence functions in each of the different member states.
'And I hope it will lead to better procedures for information handling and information sharing - there is quite a way to go to that but we did make some progress at Warsaw.'
But in response Colonel Stewart said: 'As a member of the Nato parliamentary assembly I had to resist quite strongly as did other British members the demand by some other parliamentarians in Nato states to insist all intelligence should be shared equally among Nato members.
'This particularly came from countries like Belgium. I and others were quite robust in saying ''you must be joking''.
'There is a dilemma here - when I served in Nato we reckoned with anything Nato: Secret Classified on it took half an hour before the Russians had it.
'There was huge leakage there so it's a big problem. I know you understand that.
'There is a real dilemma that when someone says Nato: Secret that's the last bloody thing it is.'
Mr Fallon replied: 'There is a tension there and as the alliance expands there are more and more members to consider.
'What I want to assure you of is everybody recognises the problems not least because of the terrorism members are facing in western Europe and need to share intelligence more swiftly.
'The problem is recognised and we have this initiative now to try and improve this position.'
President Barack Obama has penned an open letter to law enforcement officials thanking them for their 'courageous service' following the killings of eight officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge.
Obama said Americans recognize, respect and depend upon the difficult and dangerous work they do.
Three police officers were gunned down in Louisiana's state capital on Sunday by a U.S. Marine Corps veteran with ties to an African-American anti-government group, authorities said.
On July 7, another former U.S. serviceman espousing militant black nationalist views killed five Dallas officers.
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President Barack Obama speaks to members of the media following his meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch and FBI Director James Comey in the Oval Office
President Barack Obama, center, with Attorney General Loretta Lynch, left, and FBI Director James Comey, right, sit during their meeting in the Oval Office
'Just as your tight-knit law enforcement family feels the recent losses to your core, our nation grieves alongside you,' Obama said in the letter dated July 18 that was published by the White House on Tuesday.
'Thank you for your courageous service. We have your backs,' the president wrote.
Authorities identified the Baton Rouge gunman as former Sergeant Gavin Long of Kansas City, Missouri, an Iraq war veteran, and said he seemed determined to slay as many police officers as possible before a SWAT team marksman cut short his attack.
The single gunshot that killed Long, 29, was fired by an officer from about 100 yards away, police said as they deepened their investigation into the second racially charged armed assault on U.S. law enforcement this month.
The Dallas shooting happened at the end of an otherwise peaceful protest denouncing the fatal police shootings of two black men days earlier, one of them in Baton Rouge.
Obama said nothing could be more patriotic and professional than police officers protecting demonstrators who were protesting against them, and he said that was a proud example of the country's most basic freedoms.
'This is a time to reaffirm that what makes us special is that we are not only a country, but also a community,' he wrote. 'That is true whether you are black or white, whether you are rich or poor, whether you are a police officer or someone they protect and serve.'
Police have declined to say what role race might have played in Sunday's rampage, which killed two white officers and one black officer. Three more officers were wounded, one of them critically.
But Long, who was black, said in a series of social media messages posted in recent days, some from Dallas, that he was fed up with the mistreatment of African-Americans at the hands of law enforcement, and praised the attack on Dallas police.
Legal papers filed in his home state of Missouri showed he was affiliated with Washitaw Nation, a black offshoot of the Sovereign Citizen movement, which challenges the legitimacy of the federal government.
Baton Rouge police said they believed that Long, armed with two rifles and a pistol, intended to go to their department's headquarters a short distance away to take more lives.
Louisiana State Police Superintendent Colonel Mike Edmonson said there was no doubt that the dead and wounded officers were intentionally targeted and assassinated.
'It was a calculated act against those who work to protect this community every single day,' Edmonson told reporters.
The carnage in Baton Rouge rocked a city still shaken by protests over the fatal police shooting on July 5 of 37-year-old black man, Alton Sterling, who was confronted by officers while selling CDs outside a convenience store. Sterling was buried just last Friday.
A day after his killing, another black man, Philando Castile, 32, was fatally shot by a policeman during a traffic stop near St. Paul, Minnesota.
The dead officers in Baton Rouge were named as Matthew Gerald, 41, also an Iraq war veteran and father of two; Montrell Jackson, 32, who was black and had served as a Baton Rouge police officer for a decade; and sheriff's deputy Brad Garafola, 45, a father of four.
Three officers were confirmed dead after a shooting in Baton Rouge on Sunday morning. They were gunned down by a U.S. Marine Corps veteran with ties to an African-American anti-government group, authorities said
Police have declined to say what role race might have played in Sunday's rampage, which killed two white officers and one black officer
Hundreds of mourners held a candlelight vigil on Monday evening at a church in south Baton Rouge in memory of Gerald, a rookie on the police force who had served in both the U.S. Army and the Marines.
On Tuesday, President Obama said the the loss of three more police officers in Baton Rouge over the weekend demonstrates the importance of the federal government doing everything it can to help police officers go home at night and be safe.
After meeting with key leaders of his domestic security team, Obama said there is great interest among police departments nationwide in receiving additional training to deal with active-shooter events and to decrease tensions before violence occurs, but that more resources will be necessary.
He said many police departments could also use more help purchasing bullet-proof vests. He did not discuss specific amounts that he would like to see Congress make available.
Obama met with Attorney General Loretta Lynch, FBI Director James Comey and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson in the Oval Office.
He said the federal government has many of the tools necessary to help local departments, but the effort to improve policing will also have to be driven within those departments.
'Unfortunately, not all the departments that want to train their officers have the resources to do it,' Obama said.
Obama said his intention over his remaining months in office is to continue to look at best practices and listen to departments and build up trust with local communities.
He said there is no contradiction between making sure police have all the tools they need to do their job safely and in building trust between police and the communities they serve.
Suit claims the district 'ignored or diminished' the abuse Seehus suffered
Now, Seehus' father is suing school district for its '
The father of a 13-year-old boy who committed suicide last year after he was heavily bullied by classmates 'for being gay' is suing the school which his late son attended.
Tristan Seehus took his own life in February 2015 after children at Lincoln Park Middle School in Duluth, Minnesota, made his life misery because of his perceived sexual orientation, reports the Star Tribune.
Distraught father Todd Seehus has claimed in the suit that the district, school board, and former and current administrators at Lincoln Park failed to address the bullying of his son.
Tristan Seehus (left and right) took his own life in February 2015 after children at Lincoln Park Middle School in Duluth made his life misery because of his perceived sexual orientation
Distraught father Todd Seehus (left) has claimed in a lawsuit that the district, school board, and former and current administrators at Lincoln Park failed to address the bullying of his son
The lack of response by the district amounted to discrimination against the young boy 'because of his perceived sexual orientation or gender expression', claims the suit.
Tristan Seehus, who attended the school from September 2012 to his suicide, was frequently called names including 'freak', was told he 'looks like a girl', pushed into the lockers and had books knocked out of his hands.
While Seehus didn't identify as gay, he didn't 'conform to traditional stereotypes of masculinity', says the suit.
The district is accused of dealing with Tristan differently 'than other similarly situated students on the basis of actual or perceived sexual orientation,' despite complaints about bullying.
Tristan Seehus (left) who attended the school from September 2012 to his suicide, was frequently called names including 'freak', was told he 'looks like a girl'. Right: Seehus' parents
The school district 'ignored and diminished the abuse' and failed to adequately carry out its own policies designed to ban harassment relating to sexual orientation. Pictured: Lincoln Park Middle School in Duluth
It also 'ignored and diminished the abuse' and failed to adequately carry out its own policies designed to ban harassment relating to sexual orientation, claims the suit.
Seehus, pictured, was a member of The Boy Scouts of America Troops 29 and 7 and involved in Robotics, according to his obituary
The thirteen-year-old was not given a 'safe learning environment' and the district's 'unacceptable response' failed to prevent the young boy's ultimate suicide, says the complaint.
Damages are being sought as well as an order for the district to improve its response to such incidents, which may include 'training programs on homophobia and diversity'.
Lori Peterson, attorney for Todd Seehus told the Tribune in an email: 'This should never happen, let alone to kids who are forced to interact with their tormentors in school every day.
'We hope we'll be able to make a difference for other kids through bringing this action.'
Seehus was a member of The Boy Scouts of America Troops 29 and 7 and involved in Robotics, according to his obituary.
He loved 'going to the Proctor races, NASCAR, playing chess, music and movies' as well as being outdoors, fishing and hunting'.
A man armed with a knife and possible explosives is engaged in a stand off with police after locking himself inside a hotel in southern France.
Police have set up a perimeter around the Formule 1 hotel in Bollene, Vaucluse.
The assailant entered the hotel at around 1:45pm and it was immediately evacuated.
Police said the man's motives were not immediately known.
'The man is thought to have had a row with the manager,' a local officer told Reuters. 'We are waiting for negotiators.'
A knife-wielding man reportedly entered the Formule 1 hotel in Bollene, Vaucluse, in southern France (file photo)
The budget hotel is located near the A7 motorway about 130 kilometres (81 miles) north of Marseille.
The Marseille bomb squad was on its way, he said.
The attack comes just hours after a mother and her three daughters were reportedly stabbed 100km away in France because they were 'scantily dressed'.
The family were attacked while eating breakfast on holiday in the village of Garda-Colombe near Laragne-Monteglin in the Hautes Alpes near Montpellier in the south of France.
Clinton could name her running mate on Friday in Florida; she's also looking at Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine and Labor Secretary Thomas Perez
up his attacks on Donald Trump and defended his foreign policy experience, suggesting he's being vetted
ran for president in the 2008 race, then endorsed Clinton
Hillary Clinton may have also settled on Midwestern running mate. The Democratic presidential candidate is reportedly considering former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack to join her ticket.
Vilsack, who spent the last seven years in President Barack Obama's cabinet as agriculture secretary, has been here before. He was also on John Kerry's shortlist in 2004.
He briefly ran for president himself in the 2008 race, then endorsed Clinton in the primary, and Obama in the general, earning the high-level appointment that allowed him to stay in public service in a background role.
Hillary Clinton may have also settled on Midwestern running mate. The Democratic presidential candidate is reportedly considering former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack to join her ticket
He briefly ran for president himself in 2008, then endorsed Clinton in the primary. They're seen here the day of the endorsement rally in Iowa in 2007
Clinton cooks pork with Vilsack (C) and his wife Christie at the Iowa State Fair in August of 2007. He became acquainted with Hillary Clinton in 1972 when she worked with his brother-in-law in Washington. They've been friends ever since
The long-serving administration official came out of the woodwork last weekend to criticize presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump as a Bernie Madoff-like fraudster, adding to speculation that he's being considered by Clinton.
'Donald Trump is sort of to politics what Bernie Madoff was to investment,' Vilsack told NBC News. 'He is selling something that people don't fully understand and appreciate what it actually means.'
Madoff is serving life in prison for running a $65 billion ponzi scheme through his investment firm.
Vilsack echoed attacks on Trump's positions that are being pushed by Clinton.
'I don't trust someone who says to me we're going to be a safer nation by bringing torture back,' he said. 'I certainly don't think it's going to make us a safer nation by suggesting that more countries need nuclear weapons.'
The cabinet member said the GOP standard bearer's position on this issues made him concerned for the 'safety' of his family. 'And I think Americans will feel that way,' he said.
Trump last week asked Indiana Gov. Mike Pence to come on board his campaign. Politico reports that Clinton is considering following in her opponents' footsteps and picking someone from America's heartland.
Reportedly topping Clinton's veepstakes list Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, a former governor of the state who sits on the Senate's Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees. Clinton campaigned with Kaine in Virginia Thursday
Orphaned as a small child and adopted by an opiod addict, Vilsack has a compelling personal story that would appeal to the working class Americans Clinton struggled to win over in the Democratic primary.
His first job in politics was as mayor of the small Iowa town he lived in after its previous chief executive was murdered at a city council meeting in 1986 by a deranged resident.
He went on to serve in the Iowa state senate and won two terms as governor.
The 65-year-old politician's upbringing in Pennsylvania and storied career in government that began in Iowa - both of which are battleground states - also makes him an attractive pick.
His thin foreign policy experience is perhaps the only red flag on his resume, though, with a former secretary of state on the ticket, the credential is not nearly as important as in years past - particularly against Trump.
The billionaire neither served in the military or in any official role in which he was tasked with handling state secrets.
Pence served on the House's foreign affairs committee during his decade of service, rising to the rank of vice chair of the legislative body.
Vilsack argued to NBC that his role in the Obama administration has taken him to foreign countries to meet world leaders.
'So I'm happy to talk about foreign policy. I'm happy to talk about America's relationship in the world. I'm happy to talk about the intricacies of the economics and the military aspects of all of this,' he told the news network in the Saturday interview. 'Bring it on.'
Kaine, left, said Monday that he and Clinton did not talk about the vice presidency when she campaigned in his state on last week. She's also said to be seriously considering Labor Secretary Thomas Perez for the position, right
Reportedly topping Clinton's veepstakes list Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, a former governor of the state who sits on the Senate's Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees.
Clinton campaigned with Kaine in Virginia Thursday before meeting at her home Friday with other Democrats on her vetting list such as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Kaine said Monday in an interview that he and Clinton did not talk about the vice presidency when she campaigned in his state on last week. He also wasn't asked to come to her Washington home for a lengthier chat.
The former Democratic National Committee chairman is a longtime ally of the Clintons and better known to them than almost anyone else on the list, aside for Vilsack. He became acquainted with Hillary Clinton in 1972 when she worked with his brother-in-law in Washington.
She's also said to be seriously considering Labor Secretary Thomas Perez for the position. The Obama administration official doesn't bring along a swing state like Iowa or Virginia, but he would add diversity to the ticket that it would be otherwise lacking.
His work in the Justice Department's civil rights division before he moved over to labor would also shore up Clinton's standing with minority communities.
The Clinton campaign has been tight-lipped about who the former first lady, U.S. senator and Obama administration official will choose.
She may make an announcement and appear with her No. 2 as soon as Friday in Florida, where she has three events in two days immediately proceeding her party's nominating convention.
A thief who was caught on camera stealing nearly $20,000 worth of valuables from an Indiana home tried to destroy the footage after realizing he was being recorded.
Police believe the same thief has been stealing from several homes in the area, according to WTTV.
The man reportedly busted through the glass on the front door.
A thief who was caught on camera stealing nearly $20,000 worth of valuables from an Indiana home tried to destroy the footage after realizing he was being recorded. The man is pictured attempting to remove a pillowcase from a pillow
Police believe the same thief has been stealing from several homes in the area. The suspect reportedly busted through the glass on the front door
The man used the pillowcase to stuff the homeowner's belongings and valuables inside
Once in the home, surveillance footage showed the man in a bedroom taking a pillowcase off of a pillow before walking over to a drawer and stuffing the homeowner's belongings inside.
'Several items had been taken out of the master bedroom, a lot of jewelry and some cash, totaling close to $20,000,' Officer Jim Gillespie, with the Indiana Metropolitan Police Department told WTTV.
The thief, who was dressed in a white long sleeved shirt with a black vest, walked over to a desk and realized he was being recorded.
He then went over to a drawer beside the bed and rummaged through it before stuffing more items in the pillowcase
Detectives believe the man is linked to five other break-ins in the area. The man continued to take things from the home before he realized he was being recorded
He then grabbed the camera and attempted to destroy it.
Detectives told the station that they have linked the man to at least five home break-ins within the past few weeks.
Gillespie said they have made connections to the other burglaries through specific details, 'using pillowcases off of beds and getting specifics items such as jewelry and cash'.
Detectives also recovered the suspect's fingerprints from the scene.
Gillespie added that because of the good quality of footage detectives should be able to identify the suspects 'pretty clearly'.
Landon Lewis, the homeowners' neighbor told WTTV that the man was 'really bold to break into someone's front door'.
He added that the incident is a wake-up call for their neighborhood and residents 'need to keep their eyes out'.
The investigation is ongoing.
Because of the good quality video, detectives believe they should be able to identify him
Police also recovered the man's fingerprints at the scene
A woman was left fearing for her life after a silverback gorilla ran at her and knocked her over while she was on her honeymoon in Rwanda.
Gemma Cosgriff, 29, was observing gorillas in their natural habitat with her husband Damian, when he captured the gorilla pushing her over on video.
The Melbourne local had been advised to act submissive and avoid eye contact with the massive animal.
'I was like "don't look at him, don't look at him",' Ms Cosgriff told 9News.
Gemma Cosgriff, 29, was observing gorillas in their natural habitat in Rwanda with her husband Damian, when he captured the gorilla pushing her over on video
The Melbourne local had been advised act submissive and avoid eye contact with the massive animal
The video shows the tour group observing the group of gorillas when a 300kg silverback gorilla suddenly moves and begins thumping his chest.
The animal rushes towards Ms Cosgriff and reaches his arm out, pushing her over into the long grass.
Fortunately, the gorilla then walks away, followed by a smaller gorilla, as a tour guide helps her to her feet.
Ms Cosgriff was wearing a bright pink shirt which she believes may have made her stand out to the gorilla.
The theory could be correct according to Melbourne University anatomy and neuroscience lecturer Varsha Pilbrow.
'There is someone who looks slightly different, she's got a different coloured shirt it could well be that the gorilla had been noticing her before that,' she told 9News.
Dr Pilbrow added that there didn't appear to be any signs of aggression from the gorilla towards Ms Cosgriff in the video clip.
Ms Cosgriff was wearing a bright pink shirt during the encounter which she believes may have made her stand out to the gorilla
The 29-year-old was on her honeymoon with her husband Damian, but was left fearing for her life after a silverback gorilla ran at her and knocked her over
The 29-year-old was shaken, but not seriously injured from her close encounter, which she says might have been thanks to the gorilla's soft hands.
'Even though it's really big, it's quite cushiony like a pillow, so that didn't hurt at all,' she said.
There are only 800 mountain gorillas left in the world and are found in Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The 29-year-old was shaken, but not seriously injured from her close encounter, which she says might have been thanks to the gorilla's soft hands
Pauline Hanson has taken a thinly-veiled swipe at Tony Jones and the Q&A panel that saw her the focus of criticism on Monday night while debating Muslim immigration and radicalisation.
The One Nation leader and Senator-elect took to Twitter on Tuesday evening to promote her interview with Sky News anchor Paul Murray.
'At least Paul lets me speak without rudely interrupting,' Ms Hanson tweeted, appearing to slam ABC's Q&A host Tony Jones and her fellow panellists on the live television program.
Pauline Hanson has made a thinly-veiled swipe at Tony Jones and the Q&A panel that saw her the focus of criticism on Monday night
'At least Paul lets me speak without rudely interrupting,' Ms Hanson tweeted on Tuesday night
Many of her supporters agreed she was 'constantly' interrupted by Jones.
'Absolutely disgraceful behaviour by Tony Jones on #qanda to constantly interrupt you, but you did bloody well,' one wrote on Twitter.
Jones had sought clarification from Ms Hanson throughout the evening, and pulled her up on statements which were 'simply not the case'.
ABC's Q&A host Tony Jones and the One Nation leader and Senator-elect are pictured on Monday night
Ms Hanson was criticised for much of the evening on Monday by her fellow panellists as well as the audience
Ms Hanson stood her ground against fellow panellists, including Labor's Sam Dastyari, Greens' Larissa Waters, the Coalition's Simon Birmingham and Nick Xenophon.
Each panellist made clear they did not buy into her 'politics of hate'.
Much of the audience questions to Ms Hanson on Monday night came from Muslim Australians who criticised the divisiveness of her rhetoric.
Ms Hanson had a much smoother television appearance on Tuesday night with Sky's Paul Murray, facing questions from just one person rather than a raft of her critics.
The pair discussed her brief time in prison in 2003.
Much of the audience questions to Ms Hanson on Monday night came from Muslim Australians who criticised the divisiveness of her rhetoric
Jones had sought clarification from Ms Hanson throughout the evening, and pulled her up on statements which were 'simply not the case'
Fighters from a US-backed Syrian militant group have been filmed brutally beheading a child as young as 11.
The video captures Nour al-Din al-Zenki fighters in the back of a truck with a child they claim is an al-Quds soldier supporting Assad's Syrian forces.
One of the fighters shouts 'Allahu Akbar' meaning 'God is great' after taking a small knife to the boy's throat and cutting off his head in the Palesinian refugee Handarat Camp in Northern Aleppo.
The video captures Nour al-Din al-Zenki fighters in the back of a truck with a child they claim is an al-Quds soldier on the Handarat front
Sickening footage shows the young boy - under the age of 12 - being killed in the back of a pick-up truck
The child, who is clearly under the age of 12, was arrested by the Islamist militants for allegedly being Palestinian Liwaa Al Quds, al-Quds Brigade fighter, according to Russia News Now.
Sickening footage shot immediately before the boy is slaughtered shows him in ragged clothes surrounded by bearded militants in the back of a pick-up truck.
One of them holds him by the hair and slaps him in the face.
Judging by his ragged clothes and the marks on his arms, it appears the boy was impoverished and may have been tortured before he was murdered in the video, seen by MailOnline.
The boy is placed face-down in the back of the truck with his arms tied behind his back when the executioner is handed a small knife by a fellow fighter.
He then cuts the boy's throat before shouting 'Allahu Akbar' and holds his head aloft.
Before the video ends, he places the head on the boy's back before jumping down from the SUV.
Liwaa Al Quds is a pro-Syrian government Palestinian paramilitary faction made up of the Palestinians who have been driven out of their homes in the Handarat Camp once Islamist militants took over the neighbourhood.
Today, the group is fighting alongside the Syrian Army to retake the camp.
Nour al-Din al-Zenki is part of the Levant Front, and its allies the Islamic Front and the Free Syrian Army are fighting to overthrow the Assad regime.
It is also battling ISIS and the U.S government supplied the group with money and anti-tank missiles.
New Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson appeared to make the first of his trademark gaffes in his new job yesterday - by referring to the 'crisis in Egypt' when he was believed to be referring to last week's attempted coup in Turkey.
In an intense press conference alongside US Secretary of State John Kerry, he was also forced to defend himself against what reporters termed 'outright lies' told about US politicians during the Brexit campaign and in his previous role as a journalist.
Attempting to deflect the line of questioning, Mr Johnson replied that there were bigger issues at hand.
'We have real problems in Yemen, which are currently intractable, and we have a burgeoning crisis in Egypt,' he said. He repeated the line moments later.
Last night the Foreign Office insisted Mr Johnson had indeed meant to say Egypt.
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As he was showered with praise by John Kerry, Boris Johnson responded in typical bashful British fashion by telling him to 'stop there'. The US Secretary of State drew laughter as he left his podium to nudge Mr Johnson (pictured) and told him: 'It's called diplomacy'
Mr Johnson was speaking during an often awkward press conference at the Foreign Office with US secretary of state John Kerry.
The Tory cabinet minister was forced to defend himself over previous comments about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Mr Johnson said there was a 'rich thesaurus' of comments he had made in his journalistic career and joked that it would take 'too long' to issue an apology for all the things he had written which had been 'misconstrued'.
He added: 'We can all spend an awfully long time going over lots of stuff I have written over the last 30 years ... all of which, in my view, has been taken out of context, but never mind - but there are some serious issues before us today.' It was then he referred to Egypt.
Mr Johnson faced tough questions about comments he made about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and in his reply appeared to confuse Turkey with Egypt
He was asked about his reference to Mr Obama's 'part-Kenyan' ancestry during the EU referendum campaign, and his comparison of presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to a 'sadistic nurse in a mental hospital' or Lady Macbeth.
Mr Johnson said: 'I'm afraid there is such a rich thesaurus now of things that I have said that have been - one way or another, through what alchemy I do not know - somehow misconstrued that it would really take me too long to engage in a full global itinerary of apology to all concerned.
'Most people who read these things in their proper context can see exactly what was intended and indeed I find that virtually everybody I have met so far in this job understands that very well, particularly on the international scene.'
He said it was 'far more important' to focus on the challenges facing the world.
'We have some very serious issues before us today. We have an unfolding humanitarian crisis in Syria, which is getting worse and worse, we have to come up with some answers there.'
During the meeting, Mr Kerry praised Mr Johnson, having flown to London to 'reaffirm' the 'special and unbreakable' relationship between the US and the UK despite last month's Brexit vote.
Stressing the importance of the ties between the two countries, the US Secretary of State insisted the 'special relationship' was 'not just the words of diplomacy' but a 'genuine expression of a feeling of friendship'.
He hailed Mr Johnson as a 'very smart and capable man' and said he intends to 'make good things happen together' as the pair started their own 'special relationship'.
Mr Kerry also sought to reassure Britain over fears that Donald Trump could put this alliance in jeopardy by saying 'no shift in administrations' either side of the pond would undermine it.
Stressing the importance of the ties between the two countries, the US Secretary of State John Kerry (pictured meeting Boris Johnson at the Foreign Office in central London today) insisted the 'special relationship' was 'not just the words of diplomacy' but a 'genuine expression of a feeling of friendship'
Mr Kerry sent a reassuring message to those doubting Mr Johnson's credibility as Foreign Secretary - following criticism of his appointment from some of his European counterparts.
He said his British counterpart was 'fully prepared to and ready to jump into' his new brief as Foreign Secretary.
As they delivered a joint press conference at the Foreign Office in Whitehall, central London, the pair joshed with each other and referred to each other by first names to demonstrate the strength of their personal relationships.
Mr Kerry brushed aside Mr Johnson's controversial previous remarks, telling the press conference: 'This man is a very smart and capable man, this is the Boris Johnson I have met and that's the Boris Johnson that I intend to work with and we intend to make good things happen together.'
But he was interrupted by Mr Johnson, who responded in typically bashful British fashion by telling Mr Kerry to 'stop there, that's fine'.
The US Secretary of State drew laughter as he left his podium to nudge Mr Johnson and told him: 'It's called diplomacy'.
John Kerry praised Britain's new Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson (pictured giving a joint press conference in London today) as he flew in to 'reaffirm' the 'special and unbreakable' relationship between the US and the UK despite last month's Brexit vote
John Kerry (pictured) also sought to reassure Britain over fears that Donald Trump could put this alliance in jeopardy by saying 'no shift in administrations' either side of the pond would undermine it
Explaining his reasons for visiting the UK Mr Kerry said: 'I've returned to London today to reaffirm ourselves the special and unbreakable ties between the United States and the United Kingdom and these are more than words, folk.
'I don't want to just say them they're not just the words of diplomacy, they really aren't.
'This is a genuine expression of a feeling of friendship and it is built up over years and years of commons sacrifice, common endeavor, common interests, common values that have been shared consistently between us.'
And offering reassurance over the prospect of Mr Trump becoming US President, Mr Kerry added: 'I think that it is clear that no shift in administrations and I'm speaking for us either in either of our countries is going to alter or undermine the bonds that we have and the reason for that is very basic our alliance is rooted in the ties, family, language, culture, commerce,' he said this afternoon.
Mr Johnson took the opportunity to reiterate that the vote to leave the EU did not mean that Britain would step back from the world stage.
'I want us to re-shape Britain's profile as an even greater global nation - a Britain that is more active, more outward-facing, more energetic on the world stage than ever before,' he said.
Mr Kerry, who earlier held talks with Theresa May in Downing Street, welcomed the Prime Minister's 'very pronounced commitment' to the special relationship.
John Kerry (pictured) sent a reassuring message to those doubting Boris Johnson's credibility as Foreign Secretary - following criticism of his appointment from some of his European counterparts
John Kerry (right) hailed Boris Johnson (left) as a 'very smart and capable man' and said he intends to 'make good things happen together' as the pair started their own 'special relationship'.
After the press conference Mr Kerry and Mr Johnson held meetings with their German, Italian and French counterparts - as well as the EU's foreign affairs chief - to discuss the ongoing civil war in Syria, the refugee crisis, the Nice attacks and the attempted military coup in Turkey.
Turning to the conflict in Syria, Mr Johnson appealed to Vladimir Putin to use his influence with Syrian President Bashar Assad to end the 'carnage' which has torn his country apart.
He warned that the 'dire' situation on the ground in Syria looked set to spark a new exodus of refugees fleeing the conflict.
'Russia in particular has a unique ability to persuade the Assad regime to end the carnage and return to the negotiating table,' he said.
'We seek those with influence over the Assad regime - including Russia and Iran - to ensure humanitarian access to the besieged areas in line with UN Security Council resolutions.'
Mr Kerry said his private meeting with Mr Johnson had shown him 'Boris is fully prepared to and ready to jump into this agenda'.
He added: 'I appreciate the commitments he has made and his readiness to see to it that this steady relationship of ours continues with the same sense of purpose and the same commitment to the values that we share.'
John Kerry (pictured left) pledged to help Britain 'maximise the economic opportunities' of Brexit as he flew in to meet Theresa May (right) in Downing Street less than a week after she was appointed Prime Minister
Earlier Mr Kerry met Theresa May for the first time since she was appointed Prime Minister last week.
He pledged to help Britain 'maximise the economic opportunities' of Brexit as he flew in to meet Theresa May less than a week after she was appointed Prime Minister.
The US Secretary of State's comments come less than three months after President Barack Obama warned Britain not to leave the EU because it would be at the 'back of the queue' for a trade deal with the US.
But his first meeting with Mrs May as PM got off to a bumpy start as he walked straight into the door of 10 Downing Street.
He stopped on the steps of No 10 to pose for pictures but as he turned to enter the Prime Minister's residence, he hadn't noticed the door had shut.
Mr Kerry ended up banging his head on the door knocker as he turned to walk through what he thought was an open door.
He is visiting London for brief talks with Mrs May, who was appointed Britain's second female Prime Minister last week and her new Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson.
After their brief meeting in No 10 Mr Kerry praised Mrs May for her 'calm, thoughtful, reasonable' approach to dealing with Brexit.
'The Prime Minister and I had an excellent discussion and I'm very grateful to her for her restatement of the commitment to the very strong transatlantic partnership,' he told reporters outside.
'We talked particularly about efforts to try to deal with counter-terrorism, the importance of our co-operation continuing.
'We also talked about Ukraine and Syria in particular.
The US Secretary of State John Kerry stopped on the steps of No 10 to pose for pictures but hadn't noticed the door behind him had shut, hitting his head on the door knocker as he turned around
The US Secretary of State John Kerry (pictured) stopped on the steps of No 10 to pose for pictures
But as he turned to enter the Prime Minister's residence, Kerry hadn't noticed the door had shut
Kerry ended up hitting his head on the door knocker as he turned to walk through what he thought was an open door
'Most importantly we affirmed the imperative for the United States, Great Britain and the European community to work together to maximise the economic opportunity, minimise the disruption, deal with this in a way that has the wellbeing of the citizens of all of our countries and regions in mind in order to move our economies as fast as possible.'
Mr Kerry added: 'I think the Prime Minister is very much committed to finding a calm, thoughtful, reasonable way forward that meets those needs.
'So I was encouraged by it and I look forward to conveying her very best wishes to the American people and President Obama.'
Mr Johnson hopes the meeting will demonstrate that Washington still values the 'special relationship' between the two countries after Britain defied its warnings about leaving the EU.
The new Foreign Secretary, who was the public face of the Brexit campaign and angered many in Europe after comparing the EU to Hitler during the referendum, is hosting talks on Syria with his counterparts from Germany, France and Italy, along with Mr Kerry and the EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini.
Mr Johnson is also attending meetings with foreign ministers from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) today to discuss the conflict in Yemen.
After holding talks with Theresa May in No 10 (pictured today), the US Secretary of State told reporters the Prime Minister was committed to a 'calm, thoughtful, reasonable' way to dealing with Brexit
Speaking ahead of the meetings, Mr Johnson said: 'We must be more active, more engaged and more outward-looking, so I am delighted to have this early opportunity to welcome my international counterparts to London for important meetings on the conflicts in Syria and Yemen.
'I will be making clear my view that the suffering of the Syrian people will not end while Assad remains in power. The international community, including Russia, must be united on this.'
Mr Johnson was urged to use his meeting with Saudi officials to express concern at the country's intervention in Yemen.
Amnesty's UK arms programme director Oliver Sprague said: 'As the new Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson has a chance to show that he intends to bring a fresh approach which puts people before profit in British foreign policy.
'Mr Johnson should immediately stop the appalling sale of British-made weapons to Saudi Arabia - which are being used to commit atrocities in Yemen, in violation of international law.
'This is a chance to reflect on the morality of the hard-sell strategy the UK has been pursuing.'
Mr Johnson will travel to Washington DC on Thursday for talks on combating Islamic State.
He and Mr Kerry met during a meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels over the weekend to discuss the fight against terrorism following the horrifying attack in Nice last week and the developing events in Turkey after the attempted military coup.
In a boost for Brexit, Mr Kerry echoed Mr Johnson's comments saying Britain will remain a 'vital component of Europe' even after it officially cuts ties with the EU.
But amid tense meetings between EU ministers and Mr Johnson - who had compared the EU with Hitler during the referendum campaign - Mr Kerry insisted the EU was a force for good as he pointed out that America and Europe together had defeated fascism.
During a working breakfast Mr Kerry urged Europe to stop Turkey 'backsliding' on democracy in the country after President Erdogan responded to the failed coup by detaining more than 6,000 military figures and judges and promising draconian reforms to crack down on dissent.
Three women performed a strip tease on a bus filled with children - so they could continue to fund their boozy night out.
The women hopped on board the bus in Tizayuca, Mexico, and began to strip off into their underwear for passengers in exchange for cash so they could 'carry on the party.'
Shocked onlookers watched on as the trio, who were reportedly drunk, danced suggestively to Sean Paul's hit Im Still In Love With You.
One of the women involved asked passengers not to record the strip tease on their phones - and instead requested that they clap.
But the scene was recorded anyway by a stunned female spectator who shared it online to slam their behaviour.
One of the women involved asked passengers not to record the strip tease (pictured) on their phones - and instead requested that they clap
According to the Mirror, local reports said the women requested ten Mexican pesos from onlookers - around 40p - after their performance.
The images, which have been seen over 200,000 times, show a woman stripped down to a top and pants.
One man even reaches out to touch her as she dances back towards her friends.
One of the women involved can be seen dropping to the floor as she dances suggestively for passengers
According to witnesses there were children present on the bus at the time.
Teachers are no longer able to use the words 'girls, 'ladies' or 'women' at an all-girls school to avoid discrimination and support LGBTI students.
Teachers at the exclusive public school, Cheltenham Girls High School in north-west Sydney, are now asked to refer to their pupils with gender-neutral language such as 'students'.
Teachers at the school were also informed to comply with the change in language which was introduced under the Safe Schools anti-bullying program or leave as they were homophobic and breaking the law, reported The Daily Telegraph.
Teachers are no longer able to use the words 'girls, 'ladies' or 'women' at the leading all-girls public school, Cheltenham Girls High School in north-west Sydney
The move has angered some parents who believe their children are now being forced to feel extradited if they don't take part in LGBTI activities and have since complained to their local Liberal MP Damien Tudehope.
Cheltenham Girls High School recently removed their Aboriginal flag to raise the rainbow flag at half-mast in commemoration of the US attack at a night club in Orlando.
The school also includes a 'Queer-straight alliance' club and features gender equality events such as Wear it Purple Day.
'[Some] parents are saying that at [LGBTI] events like Rainbow Day and Purple Day that if their daughter doesn't comply with what they perceive as the school directions their daughter is ostracised,' Mr Tudehope said.
Teachers are now asked to refer to their pupils with gender-neutral language such as 'students'
A mother who met the school's principal, Susan Bridge, to address the issue reportedly left the meeting without a solution and instead received the NSW Department of Education's stance on homophobia.
Education Minister Adrian Piccoli is also investigating the complaints following a petition being signed by the parents.
'All schools are required to conform with federal government guidelines. I am advised all schools are following these guidelines. I have asked the secretary to confirm this is the case at all schools, including Cheltenham Girls High School,' Mr Piccoli said
A slew of nurses have been arrested across Wisconsin for allegedly taking invasive photos and videos of elderly patients inside assisted living homes and posted them to social.
In one case, at Brookview Meadows in Green Bay, two young nurses - Michelle Bulger, 22, and Ashley Schumberg, 19 - were helping an elderly woman with an obstructed bowel.
The 84-year-old patient was naked from the waist down, and the women - laughing and covering their mouths - recorded what was happening on their phone.
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Abuse: In one case in Wisconsin, two young nurses filmed a half-naked elderly patient who they were meant to be helping with a bowel obstruction (left). In another, a man in a wheelchair was kicked and called a 'jerk' (right)
Charged: Ashley Schumberg, 19, and Michelle Bulger, 22, were arrested and charged with felonies. However they accepted a plea deal and pleaded guilty to misdemeanors
The patient's daughter said she was left in complete shock after learning what happened.
'My mom took good care of me all my life,' the daughter, identified only as Mary, told Fox 59.
'To think that somebody would not treat her in a respectable manner was beyond words. I lost it.'
Bulger and Schaumberg were arrested and charged with felonies.
However they accepted a plea deal and pleaded guilty to misdemeanors.
The two can no longer work as caregivers in state-regulated facilities.
Mary and her family are now suing the nursing home for invasion of privacy.
'It's total disrespect and total violation of somebody's privacy,' she told the network.
Scene: Villa Pines nursing home in Friendship is where patient John Milkavicic was kicked in his wheelchair
Fired: Allexys Meyers, 23, allegedly kicked a patient in a wheelchair and called him a jerk
Mary's attorneys, Ann Jacobs and Jackie Chada Nuckels, are confident in their case against Brookview Meadows and the two nurses.
'Cases like these, we need to shine light on them so they don't happen again,' Jacobs said.
Nuckels added: 'Somebody's dignity and privacy is grossly violated.'
In another case, at Villa Pines in Friendship, a female employee filmed herself kicking the wheelchair of elderly patient John Miklavicic and laughing.
The video was then posted to Snapchat by the worker, Allexys Meyers, 23, with the caption: 'Jerk!'
Meyers was fired from the nursing home after another worker reported the video to state inspectors.
Wanting answers: John M. Miklavicic says his dad was abused at the Villa Pines nursing home
However, police did not seek any charges against Meyers, according to the patient's son, John M. Miklavicic.
'One of the employees was kicking his wheelchair and the Snapchat showed him trying to kick back and other employees laughing in the background,' Miklavicic recalled.
'They're in the last years of their life. They deserve respect.
'I never got any kind of an apology, sympathy, we're so sorry what happened.'
A non-profit news team called ProPublica last year detailed 37 cases across the country of inappropriate social media posts at elder care facilities, Fox reported.
'Hillary Clinton will say anything, do anything, and be anything she needs to get elected president'
Each have criticized Trump policies during the campaign but are calling for his reelection now
He joked about the idea of Trump's Mexico on Monday
House Speaker Paul Ryan held out on endorsing Trump until he was 'ready'
Party heads urging reelection of their own members to keep Republican majority
Two Republican party leaders who had their doubts about Donald Trump during the primaries will make their case for his election by tearing into Hillary Clinton.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, who held out on endorsing after Trump nailed down the GOP nomination because he was 'not ready' at first, gives a prime time address from Cleveland that is expected to run up to 30 minutes making the case for Trump.
Ryan plans to bash President Obama and make the case that the party is better off with 'Republican majorities in Congress and Donald Trump in the White House,' an aide told Politico.
An important part of the pitch will be a call for 'unity' after #NeverTrump forces walked out of the convention hall Monday after the party-run chair ruled not to let a rules package get a roll call vote on the floor, therefore cutting off an avenue for dissent.
'Speaker Ryan will talk about the sense of urgency that our party should feel in such a consequential election. He will offer a sharp contrast with the failed progressivism of the last eight years,' according to the aide.
House speaker Paul Ryan will call for 'unity' in his convention speech, a day after saying Trump was 'not my kind of conservative'
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell plans to focus on the Supreme Court and hammer his former Senate colleague Hillary Clinton
Donald Trump has gotten about a third of his primary rivals to endorse him, though many Senators and members of Congress are skipping the convention
Republican leaders aren't ready to throw in the towel despite some misgivings about Trump, with their House and Senate majorities on the line
'The Speaker will call for a contest of ideas this fall and talk about the better way that Republicans are offering the country. He will also argue that we can make the changes we need only with Republican majorities in Congress and Donald Trump in the White House.
'And finally, the speaker will make a call for unity, not just as Republicans but as a country as well,' said the aide.
Ryan on Monday called Trump 'not my kind of conservative' in an interview with the Wall Street Journal where he nevertheless called for unity.
'What I do know for sure is if we disunify, then we hand the left the country by default for another four years, he said. I just dont want to be a party to that. I dont want to be complicit to that,' Ryan said.
Asked whether he would appropriate funds to actually build the wall, Ryan joked about Trump, 'I think hes going to go to Mexico.'
Senate Majority Mitch McConnell - a party institutionalist who once took heat for calling the defeat of President Obama his top priority - will 'hammer Hillary Clinton's record of failed policies and a willingness to do anything to get elected,' a campaign aide said.
A top issue for McConnell, as well as many elected conservatives who might take issue with Trump's proposed Muslim ban and plan to build a wall on the Mexican border, is the Supreme Court, with several vacancies possible in the next term.
'He'll lay out the choice for the White House as an easy one, emphasize the importance of the Supreme Court to conservative values, and lay out how productive the Senate's been even as it continues to challenge President Obama,' according to the aide.
'I am here to tell you that Hillary Clinton will say anything, do anything, and be anything she needs to get elected president,' McConnell will tell the convention hall. 'And we cannot allow it.'
Both men, despite their misgivings, need Trump to perform at at least a respectable level to keep their majorities.
Democrats need to pick up five seats, four if Hillary Clinton wins the election, to recapture the Senate.
The Channel 4 News presenter who wore a hijab the day after the Nice truck attack has hit back at Sun columnist Kelvin MacKenzie who criticised the TV station.
Fatima Manji presented coverage of the Bastille Day massacre from the studio in London as scheduled.
But MacKenzie questioned whether it was appropriate for her to appear after 'yet another shocking slaughter by a Muslim.'
Manji has now hit back saying Mackenzie has 'ambitions to force anyone who looks different off our screens.'
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Journalist Fatima Manji, who has been with the programme for four years, presented the Channel 4 News coverage of the Bastille Day massacre in Nice on Friday night from the studio in London
Writing for the Liverpool Echo, she said: 'It's dangerous to regard Mr MacKenzie and those who echo his Islamophobic sentiments as mere pantomime villains. Their soapbox allows them to spread their ill-informed, irresponsible and malevolent invective to millions of readers.
'Racist and Islamophobic rhetoric has real consequences lives have been lost and shattered in our own country.'
She added that she was not expecting an apology from Mackenzie and that she was totally grief-sticken after the Nice attack, while also warning that MacKenzie's column will deter some from seeking a career in journalism.
In a reference to the infamous 1989 Sun Hillsborough front page, which was assembled by Mackenzie, she wrote: 'THE TRUTH? I confess. I pi**ed on Kelvin MacKenzie's apparent ambitions to force anyone who looks a little different off our screens, and I'll keep doing it.'
MacKenzie questioned whether it was appropriate for her to appear after 'yet another shocking slaughter by a Muslim.' He is pictured leaving the High Court after giving evidence to the Leveson enquiry
In his column, Mackenzie wrote: 'Was it appropriate for her to be on camera when there had been yet another shocking slaughter by a Muslim?'
'Was it done to stick one in the eye of the ordinary viewer who looks at the hijab as a sign of the slavery of Muslim women by a male-dominated and clearly violent religion?'
The press regulator has received more than 800 complaints about Kelvin MacKenzie's piece relating to accuracy, harassment and discrimination.
Channel 4 has said that it will complain to the Independent Press Standards Organisation about the completely unacceptable' remarks.
In a statement Channel 4 News said: 'The comments published in The Sun today by Mr MacKenzie are offensive, completely unacceptable, and arguably tantamount to inciting religious and even racial hatred.
'It is wrong to suggest that a qualified journalist should be barred from reporting on a particular story or present on a specific day because of their faith.
'Fatima Manji is an award-winning journalist. We are proud that she is part of our team and will receive, as ever, our full support in the wake of his comments.'
WHO IS JOURNALIST FATIMA MANJI? She joined Channel 4 News in January 2012 and has worked on a number of stories including NatWest banking problems, Apple unwittingly encouraging phone theft and returning to her own school to look at job prospects for school leavers. She previously worked as a reporter, presenter and video journalist for the BBC in the East of England. Advertisement
Former Conservative Party chairman and foreign minister Baroness Warsi wrote to The Sun's editor in chief Tony Gallagher, branding it a 'divisive column'.
In the letter, which she shared on Twitter, Baroness Warsi wrote: 'Just as politicians should carry the responsibility for xenophobic and toxic campaigning that divides communities so journalists should be held accountable for 'shock jock' writing which simply perpetuates stereotypes, demonises and attempts to hold a whole community accountable for the actions of an individual.'
A spokesman for The Sun said it was making 'no comment' on the issue.
The newspaper published an online article by Muslim writer Anila Baig. She reflected on Mr MacKenzie's article which suggested the broadcaster had been deliberately provocative in putting Ms Manji in front of the camera on the day of the Nice attack.
Ms Baig described Ms Manji as 'a professional who has been working for the programme for four years, not someone dragged in off the street just because she's wearing a scarf on her head'.
Her article states: 'The fact that Fatima can present a news bulletin and also wears a headscarf shows how great Britain is.'
Twitter users leaped to the reporter's defence after social media users criticised the decision of the TV station.
Myriam Francois wrote: 'Shocked by this blatant bigotry directed [at Manji] - Muslim journos apparently not objective - only older white males are.'
Pam Smith said: 'Fatima Manji is very good at presenting the news. What have her clothes got to do with it?'
Manji (pictured presenting Channel 4 news on Friday) faced some criticism online - but also a lot of support
But many more Twitter users leaped to the reporter's defence, accusing those who criticised her role as presenter as 'Islamophobic'
Hifzha Shaheen added: 'So, basically Muslim communities are to blame for the Nice attack? Much love to @FatimaManji. Keep doing your thing x.'
WHO IS JOURNALIST FATIMA MANJI? She joined Channel 4 News in January 2012 and has worked on a number of stories including NatWest banking problems, Apple unwittingly encouraging phone theft and returning to her own school to look at job prospects for school leavers. She previously worked as a reporter, presenter and video journalist for the BBC in the East of England. Advertisement
Shalini Austin said: 'Fatima Manji is very good at her job, that is all I care about. Her religion & what she wears is none of my business.'
Frances Ryan added: 'So bloody sorry to see what you're having to deal with today. You are brilliant x.'
Manji wrote on Twitter following the show: 'To those asking, yes my presenting tonight was long planned - had thought it might be a quiet Friday, instead very tragic.'
A spokeswoman for Channel 4 News said: 'It is wrong to suggest that a qualified journalist should be barred from reporting on a particular story or present on a specific day because of their faith.
'Fatima Manji is an award-winning journalist. We are proud that she is part of our team and will receive, as ever, our full support in the wake of [the] comments.'
Manji wrote on Twitter following the show: 'To those asking, yes my presenting tonight was long planned - had thought it might be a quiet Friday, instead very tragic'
A 26-year-old woman was electrocuted when power lines fell on her car while she was driving in New Jersey during a severe thunderstorm.
The woman, who has not been identified, was traveling down Midway Avenue in Fanwood on Monday afternoon when she swerved to miss a tree that had fallen, according to CBS New York.
Wires then fell on the woman's car and she was electrocuted as she was getting out of the vehicle.
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A 26-year-old woman was electrocuted when power lines fell on her car (pictured) while she was driving in New Jersey during a severe thunderstorm
The woman, who has not been identified, was traveling down Midway Avenue in Fanwood on Monday afternoon when she swerved to miss a tree that had fallen
Wires then fell on the woman's car (pictured) and she was electrocuted as she was getting out of the vehicle. One witness the wires were hanging in a puddle on the driver's side of the car and as soon as she stepped out the car she was electrocuted
Authorities said the woman was pronounced dead at the scene.
Then incident occurred around 4.30pm and one witness was coming out of his home when he saw the woman lying next to the car.
'I saw this car, this white car, and the body next to the car,' said Gary Gurzo told CBS.
He added that the power line was hanging on the driver's side and 'as soon as she stepped out of the car she was electrocuted because the wire was hanging in the puddle next to the car'.
Elberia Delgadillo, who also witnessed the tragedy, said she was 'sorry' that she couldn't help the young woman.
Delgadillo and her 12-year-old daughter were driving behind the woman when they saw the tree fall.
'We saw that the terrible storm was hitting and then we saw that the tree fell... there was a wire that fell from the top, and it fell on top of her car,' Delgalillo's daughter, Camila Chacha told CBS.
The electricity had to be shut off before rescue units could get to the woman, witnesses said.
The electricity had to be shut off before rescue units could get to the woman, witnesses said. Authorities said the woman was pronounced dead at the scene
Witnesses Elberia Delgadillo and her 12-year-old daughter Camila Chacha brought flowers and a candle (pictured) and placed them near the area where she died
'They were trying everything for long, long minutes but they were not able to do anything,' Gurzo said.
Delgadillo and her daughter brought flowers and a candle and placed them near the area where she died.
'We felt really bad, and we just saw everything, so we felt like she was part of our family,' Camila said.
The severe thunderstorm that hit the tri-state area on Monday downed several trees and power lines.
There were also reports of 65mph winds at Newark Liberty International Airport.
He's been suspended by Uber while company carries out an investigation
A hairdresser required stitches after an angry Uber driver alleged dragged her down the road.
Sabrina Benltaief, 20, of Bromley, South East London, claimed the motorist drove off while she was leaning into the car and left her unconscious in the street before she later woke up in hospital.
She had earlier left her phone in the passenger seat of the same drivers car after leaving it to charge, but upon returning an hour later he allegedly demanded payment in return for the phone.
Injured: Sabrina Benltaief, 20, of Bromley, South East London, claimed an Uber motorist drove off while she was leaning into the car and left her unconscious in the street before she later woke up in hospital
Unhappy: Miss Benltaief had earlier left her phone in the passenger seat of the same drivers car after leaving it to charge, but upon returning an hour later he allegedly demanded payment in return for the phone
Miss Benltaief claimed she put her head through the passenger window of the car to pay him in Elephant and Castle, South London, but he then drove off while she was still leaning in.
Speaking to the London Evening Standard, she said: I went to the window and said thanks for doing that and I appreciated it but then he started looking at me funny.
He said he'd call the police and started shouting that he wanted 20. So I got out my bag and he started driving really quickly.
Then I fell out and hit my head. I can't remember much after being dragged down the road by him.
Ms Benltaief said she has been left with chronic neck pain following the incident outside the Ministry of Sound. Uber meanwhile has suspended the driver while it carries out an investigation.
Stitches required: Miss Benltaief claimed she put her head through the passenger window of the car to pay him in Elephant and Castle, South London, but he then drove off while she was still leaning in.
Injury: Miss Benltaief said she has been left with chronic neck pain following the incident in South London
Uber passenger: Miss Benltaief said she 'can't remember much after being dragged down the road'
An Uber spokesman said: This behaviour is unacceptable from any licensed driver who partners with Uber.
When we are informed of serious incidents like this, it is our policy to immediately block the driver from using the app while we investigate exactly what happened.
Safety of both riders and drivers who use the app is our priority and we always work with the police to support any investigation.
Distressed refugee parents have been sending their young children back to their war torn African home countries in hopes of keeping them away from a life of crime.
Melbourne parents have sent their troubled teens back to dangerous countries including Somalia and Sudan after they were charged with a number of offences, reported Herald Sun.
This comes amid a wave of violent crimes in the city linked to the notorious Apex gang.
Some of the families are understood to feel they cant properly discipline their children, and fear Australian child protection officers will take the young people away.
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Distressed refugee parents in Melbourne have been sending their young children back to their war torn countries. Pictured: a violent youth brawl took place between gangs in Melbourne's Federation Square
Upon their return, children are forced to attend boarding schools or stay with relatives, police say.
'I understand where they're coming from but, you know, you're sending your kid to the second-most dangerous country on the planet [South Sudan], behind Syria. That's a real worry,' Leading Sen-Constable Tony Brewin said.
One Melbourne mother who sent her 15-year-old son to Africa has requested the government aid parents by using a 'three strikes and you're out' policy.
The desperate actions by parents follow a spade of violent and criminal activities by Melbourne's youth.
In recent months, the Apex gang, made up predominantly of boys and men of Sudanese and Somali, are believed to have been behind a number of violent carjackings and other thefts across the city.
The gang was also behind a brutal riot at the Moomba celebrations in the Melbourne city centre in March which led to 34 people being charged by police.
A heartwarming video has emerged of the moment that an abandoned dog was comforted by an animal shelter worker who didnt want her to wake up alone.
Footage shows the staffer curled up with Prissy, a four-year-old hound mix, who was abandoned in hot weather in a junkyard in Tennessee with her three puppies.
Prissy was taken in by Conway Area Humane Society in New Hampshire and spayed and the clip reveals how, touchingly, kennel supervisor Chrissy Ireland was determined to help her recover.
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A heartwarming video has emerged of the moment that an abandoned dog was comforted by an animal shelter worker (pictured) in New Hampshire who didnt want her to wake up alone after being spayed
Virginia Moore, the executive director of the shelter, told MailOnline that being spayed can be traumatic and disorientating for dogs and that Ireland felt compelled to comfort Prissy. She didnt want her to wake up alone, she added.
The video, which was shot by co-worker Debra Cameron and posted to the shelters Facebook page on July 16, has been viewed over 80,000 times and shows Ireland stroking Prissy tenderly as she stirs from her sleep.
Moore said that Ireland, along with the rest of the staff, is prone to laying down with the animals, and that the video was posted to Facebook to show that shelters are great places for dogs to be.
Footage shows Conway Area Humane Society kennel supervisor Chrissy Ireland curled up with Prissy, a four-year-old hound mix, who was abandoned in hot weather in a junkyard in Tennessee with her three puppies
Conway Area Humane Society said that being spayed can be traumatic for a dog
She said: We get a lot of people saying that the worst thing to happen to a dog is to go to the pound but were not a pound.
We put the video on Facebook to educate people about shelters, to show that theyre wonderful places.
Moore explained that they hope to re-home Prissy soon and that someone is coming to see her on Wednesday.
In April, when President George W. Bush gathered together in Texas swaths of his former aides, the ex-president made a doomsday prediction about the future of the Republican Party.
'I'm worried,' Bush said to a small circle of former advisers, according to Politico. 'That I will be the last Republican president.'
The comments were made as nearly 1,000 Bush alumni had gathered in Texas to toast the former administration, with former first lady Laura Bush and former vice president Dick Cheney on hand.
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Former President George W. Bush addressed former aides in April at an alumni picnic in Texas and told a small group of advisers he worried that he'd be 'the last Republican president'
Former President George W. Bush - along with all the other prominent members of the Bush political clan - aren't in Cleveland at the Republican National Convention, where a shadow convention is taking place
Now, with thousands more Republicans gathered in Cleveland for the Republican National Convention, officially nominating a man who the Bush family refuses to support, Politico reports that a shadow convention has taken hold.
While the official Trump-approved programming is going on onstage, at 'delegation breakfasts, private hotel suites and steakhouses; across the city a different course is being charted, under The Donald's nose.
Many that the web publication interviewed feared that Trump's 'embrace of white resentment politics,' which includes his two most prominent policies building a Mexican border wall and keeping non-American Muslims out are alienating the country's future electorate and badly damaging the GOP brand.
So Republicans in Cleveland are looking to save the majorities in the House and Senate in the fall and then figuring out a way to salvage the party itself.
None of the Bushes are on hand with Jeb, George W., George H.W., Barbara and Laura all missing out.
Several of Trump's frenemies are here, including House Speaker Paul Ryan who will address the convention hall tonight.
Dick Cheney also gathered at the Bushes alumni picnic in April when the former president uttered that he might be the last Republican president
Ryan tepidly endorsed Trump after dragging his feet and has still never appeared in public with his party's nominee.
Politico pointed out that there are no pictures of the two men standing next to each other.
When the party lost in 2012, the Republican National Committee commissioned an autopsy, which outlined ways to get more Latinos, more women, on board with the GOP.
Trump hasn't played by that playbook, not in the slightest, but Ryan has and plans to continue to do so.
He's spent time talking poverty and tried reaching out to African-Americans.
He's given a speech to congressional interns about making politics more polite.
After the election, which many Republicans suggest Trump won't win, there's already talk of an organization akin to the Democratic Leadership Council, which sprouted in the 1980s at the height of Reaganism to save the struggling Democratic Party, and with it sprouted the presidency of Bill Clinton.
Another individual guiding this shadow convention is Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who will also address the convention hall, but without officially rubber-stamping Trump.
After losing to Trump, Cruz kept most of his senior campaign staff in his employ to study what exactly went wrong in the campaign.
Additionally, he invited 100 top bundlers to a retreat in La Jolla, California, Politico reported, keeping the people who funded his campaign, which had the most successful fundraising operation of any of the Republicans', in his web.
So while Trump officially becomes the 2016 GOP nominee, with the delegates casting their votes for the billionaire tonight, many in the party are looking forward to 2020 instead.
'The day after the election we'll get back to being the anti-Clinton party,' Alex Conant, a Rubio adviser, told Politico.
'Well have a really good midterm,' he added, predicting plenty of better presidential hopefuls in 2020.
Shadowy: Ex-lobbyist Rick Gates, 44, of Richmond Virginia, is being named as the man at the center of the plagiarism row
Sources inside the Donald Trump campaign and the Republican Party are pointing fingers at an aide they say is responsible for the Melania Trump plagiarism storm a man who was the campaign chairman's lobbying partner before he came aboard the Trump train.
Rick Gates was named to DailyMail.com by several sources with knowledge of the steps that led to Melania Trump delivering a partly plagiarized speech Monday night.
Gates is a former long-time lobbying partner of Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and now faces demands that his head should roll.
The campaign has shown no sign of moving in that direction, however.
Two plugged-in Trump aides and three Republican National Convention officials confirmed that Gates, the deputy convention manager in charge of putting down a 'NeverTrump' rebellion on Monday, also had final authority to sign off on Mrs. Trump's remarks and those of many other speakers.
Gates sought to distance himself from the controversy on Tuesday, telling CNN it was 'absolutely not' true that he oversaw the process.
But DailyMail.com's sources all agreed that with the contentious wrangling over the anti-Trump faction's last stand eating up all his time and attention, Gates bypassed a typical step in the process of finalizing a speech by a political spouse failing to vet the content of Mrs. Trump's remarks through convention staff who are adept at looking for political landmines.
Melania Trump was accused of stealing remarks made by Michelle Obama for her own speech at the Republican National Convention, and fingers of blame are pointing to a behind-the-scenes political fixer named Rick Gates who sources say bore responsibility for approving the remarks
MELANIA TRUMP'S SPEECH (2016) 'My parents impressed on me the value of that you work hard for what you want in life. 'That your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise. 'That you treat people with respect. Show the values and morals in in the daily life. That is the lesson that we continue to pass on to our son.'We need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow. 'Because we want our children in these nations to know that the only limit to your achievement is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.' Advertisement
MICHELLE OBAMA'S SPEECH (2008) 'And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you're going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them, and even if you don't agree with them. 'And Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values, and pass them on to the next generation. 'Because we want our children and all children in this nation to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.' Advertisement
Ousted Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, now a CNN analyst, said he would expect his successor Paul Manafort would resign 'if he was the last person who saw this, and saw this happen, and has brought this on the candidate's wife'
DISCREET LOBBYIST WHO IS IN THE SPOTLIGHT FOR FIRST TIME Rick Gates had until now risen in the Republican lobbying world without emerging from the shadows. Little photographed, he is deputy to Paul Manafort, and has been deeply involved with the Trump campaign chair for the last two decades. Gates, 44, a married father of three, lives in Richmond, Virginia, with his wife Brooke, and coaches a local children's soccer team. But with Manafort he has been involved in dealings in the Ukraine where the company Manafort employed him - DMP International - came under scruity for working for Viktor Yaukovych, Russian president Vladimir Putin's ousted ally, the Washington Post reported. He says he grew up overseas because of a military family - his father, Richard Gates Jnr, was a lieutenant colonel in the Quartermasters Regiment with 26 years service - then studied at the College of William and Mary, graduating in 1994, and George Washington University. Public records suggest he has lobbied for Microsoft and Home Depot, and now lives in a five-bedroom, 5,200 square feet Georgian home in Richmond. The neighboring property, of similar size, was last on the market in 2011 for $2,475,000. Advertisement
Trump senior communications adviser Jason Miller told DailyMail.com after publication that Gates didn't have a role in the writing of the speech, but he did not dispute the sources who said he was responsible for shepherding Mrs. Trump's speech through the pre-convention process.
'Rick's not a speechwriter and he doesn't have a role in the campaign's speechwriting process - we have other people for that,' Miller said in an email.
'Anybody saying differently is being intentionally misleading.'
Among the automatic tasks of the convention staff, made up of dozens of operatives, is searching for typos and grammatical errors at the last minute, and making sure teleprompters operate properly.
They can also be called on earlier in the process to help with the content of speeches, but no one asked them for that kind of help with Melania Trump's speech, two sources said.
'Rick didn't avail himself of that process, and all those people, to make sure the speech was right,' one Republican communications operative said Tuesday morning. 'So he just read it through. The buck does stop with him.'
'Send it to them!' he urged, looking back in time. 'Any of those folks would have spotted it.'
It's unknown exactly who adapted a half-dozen lines from Michelle Obama's 2008 Democratic National Convention speech and inserted them into Melania Trump's.
But conversations with insiders produced a picture of speechwriters sitting with the billionaire's wife to hear her tell her own story in the hope of channeling how she thinks and talks.
From there, they would research other similar speeches by presidential candidate spouses for a frame of reference.
'They looked at: "What did Michelle Obama say? What did Laura Bush say?" one veteran political speechwriter in Cleveland explained on Tuesday.
'It probably wasn't a cut and paste job,' he added, 'but I think in their mind they're writing the speech and reading all these other speeches, and they all tend to sound the same anyway, and it's easy to be careless.'
Another aide said there was 'zero chance' Mrs. Trump recognized the offending passages when a draft of her speech was presented to her later
Trump's campaign has shown no indication that it might fire Gates or otherwise discipline anyone involved in the embarrassing episode
First lady Michelle Obama delivered a 2008 Democratic National Convention speech that appears to have been the basis for small portions of Melania Trump's on Monday
'She probably thought, "This is all me. I told the ghostwriter how I feel and where I've come from, and they captured me so well".'
'Somebody failed her and no one is defending her now,' he explained.
Mrs. Trump told NBC News before her speech: 'I read it once over, and that's all because I wrote it with as little help as possible.'
The insiders who spoke with DailyMail.com all insisted on anonymity to speak freely because he was not authorized to comment about the inner workings of the largest political spectacle in recent American history.
Another party official close to the nerve center inside Cleveland's Quicken Loans Arena said Gates 'was overloaded' on Monday 'and got sloppy at the worst possible moment.'
That source emphasized that behind the scenes, many GOP officials are frustrated with Manafort for protecting his business partner, Gates, instead of the party's presidential candidate and his wife.
A campaign operative in Trump's circle of senior advisers said in the wee hours of Tuesday that Manafort 'wants to blame Mrs. Trump' instead of throwing Gates to the wolves.
But it was Gates, he disclosed, who 'signed off on all the speeches tonight' including remarks delivered by retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Manafort 'delegated it to Gates,' he added. And in Melania Trump's case, she provided only 'the broad strokes.'
REPUBLICAN OFFICIAL: SOME LINES WERE LIKE 'MY LITTLE PONY' OR AKON They said it too! Republican National Committee communications director Sean Spicer (top right) claimed parts of Melania Trump's speech could be matched on Google to (clockwise from bottom right) John Legend, the singer; Akon, the rapper; and Twilight Sparkles, a unicorn from My Little Pony Republican officials tried to ridicule the plagiarism row by claiming it was possible to find similarities to lots of other published material. Republican National Committee communications director Sean Spicer told MSNBC that only 50 words were being discussed - then said other sections seemed similar to songs by the rapper Akon, the singer John Legend, and Twilight Sparkle, from My Little Pony. 'A simple Google search of three phrases comes up with everything from Sparkle pony [sic] to John Legend to Akon, to Notorious B.I.G.,' he claimed. 'And those are the same word order. I can go through and Google those phrases and come up with them and they've been said thousands of times. 'Your word is your bond, Craig, I've said that a million times,' he told MSNBC's Craig Melvin. Spicer said: 'Melania Trump said "you work hard for what you get in life". Akon said "work hard for what you get in life'. John Legend said "work hard..". 'Melania Trump said "the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them". Twlight Sparkle from My Little Pony said "this is your dream, anything you can do in your dreams you can do now".' It is unclear how accurate the reference to Twilight Sparkle is. The animated unicorn is the main character in the animated series My Little Pony Friendship is Magic. Advertisement
Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort (right) insisted there was no intentional plagiarism but later told the Associated Press that he would fire the person responsible if he knew who it was
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie seemed not to know how plagiarism works, defending Melania Trump on Tuesday by telling NBC viewers that 93 per cent of her speech wasn't lifted from Michelle Obama
Mrs. Trump 'is embarrassed and unhappy' about the fallout, one campaign aide said Tuesday morning. 'Mr. Trump is really upset.'
'And Rick [Gates] and Paul [Manafort] are not owning this.'
Neither Manafort, Gates, nor a Trump campaign spokeswoman responded on Tuesday to requests for comment.
Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus said during a breakfast event on Tuesday that he would 'probably' fire his own speechwriters if they plagiarized someone else's work.
Manafort told the Associated Press that he would certainly fire someone who plagiarized from a speech.
'Frankly if I knew somebody did it, I would fire them too,' he said, adding that 'nobody believes' Melania Trump herself lifted Mrs. Obama's words.
Former Trump campaign chairman Corey Lewandowski a rival to Manafort when the two were both jockeying for control of the campaign told CNN Tuesday morning: 'I think if it was Paul Manafort, he'd do the right thing and resign.'
'If he was the last person who saw this, and saw this happen, and has brought this on the candidate's wife, I think he'd resign because that's the type of person he would be,' Lewandowski said.
Trump in March hired Manafort, whose experience with presidential contests stretches back to the Gerald Ford era, to supervise what was expected to be a bloody fight over a thin margin of delegates needed to capture the GOP presidential nomination.
Manafort brought in Gates and other longtime associates to work under him, professionalizing the campaign but also introducing the uncertainty that comes with new blood.
'The result,' a Trump insider said, 'is that Trump is subject to the same problems as every other campaign. People are looking out for themselves and not the candidate. Until a few months ago his operation was different.'
A white supremacist smiled for the cameras during his first court appearance for triple murder as it emerged that a fourth victim he allegedly shot in the face crawled down the road and got help from police despite not being able to speak.
Brent Luyster, 35, was taken into custody and held without bail on suspicion of a triple murder in Woodland, Washington, on Saturday.
Luyster, who has a lengthy and violent criminal record in Clark County appeared in court on Monday charged with three counts of first-degree murder, one count of attempted first-degree murder and one count of unlawful possession of a firearm.
He was escorted into the courtroom wearing handcuffs, leg shackles and a 'suicide smock' (a garment designed to prevent prisoners harming themselves), The Columbian reports.
Almost a dozen officers provided security in the crowded courtroom, according to the newspaper.
He was arrested after Breanne Leigh drove to a convenience store in Woodland on Friday night after suffering a gunshot wound to the face, alerting police that three others had also been shot.
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Brent Luyster (left) smiled for the cameras during his first court appearance for triple murder on Monday as it emerged that a fourth victim, Breanne Leigh (right) crawled to safety and got help from police despite not being able to speak
Luyster (pictured with Skinhead, Hitler and Nazi tattoos) was taken into custody on Saturday afternoon
Responding officers found the father of Leigh's children Zachary David Thompson, 36, and Joseph Mark Lamar, 38, dead in a driveway at a residence on NW 417th Street in Woodland shortly before 11pm, a probable cause affidavit says.
Janell Renee Knight, 43, was found dead inside the house, where she lived with Lamar. All three had suffered gunshot wounds.
SWAT team descended on the home just before 11 p.m. and found Thompson, 36, and Joseph Mark Lamar, 38, lying dead in the driveway. The victims had gunshot wounds to their heads at close range, the affidavit states.
The body of a third victim, 43-year-old Janell Renee Knight, was discovered inside the residence, where she lived with Lamar.
Leigh, 31, had a gunshot wound to her face but was able to communicate by writing on papers and on a tissue box, Deputy Bryce Smith said in the probable cause affidavit, obtained by KOIN6.
When asked who shot her, she wrote 'pretty sure Brent Lyster Luyster. He's in big trouble Fed.'
Luyster allegedly executed his own friends because he was angry that federal authorities were investigating a case against him, the Daily Beast reports.
After the hearing on Tuesday, Deputy Prosecutor James Smith said the motive for the murders remains unclear.
Brent Luyster, 35, was taken into custody and held without bail on suspicion of a triple murder
Police released decades-old mugshots of Luyster when he was heavier-set as they launched a manhunt warning he was 'armed and extremely dangerous'
Leigh also said that she 'passed out' after being shot then demonstrated that she 'army crawled' away from the house, then flagged down a vehicle and got a ride to the AM/PM convenience store in Woodland for help.
She is still in the hospital although her condition is unclear.
Police released a photo of Luyster and his tattoos in an appeal to the public when they launched a manhunt to catch him, warning he was 'armed and extremely dangerous'.
The tattoos include the word 'skinhead' scrawled over his abdomen. Adolf Hitler and other Nazi Germany symbols are tattooed on his back.
Luyster was arrested without incident on Saturday ending a day-long manhunt.
Police received a tip and arrested Luyster at 4.15pm on Saturday while he was in his gold Ford Explorer (pictured, with sheriff's vehicle in foreground) on the Ocean Beach Highway
Police received a tip and arrested Luyster at 4.15pm on Saturday while he was in his gold Ford Explorer on the Ocean Beach Highway.
The Cowlitz County Sheriff's Office issued a tweet announcing Luyster's arrest, adding that he was taken into custody 'peacefully by his choice'.
An investigation is ongoing, but police said the shooting was not racially motivated. All the victims are white.
Police spokesman Fred Neiman said: 'We are very pleased that Mr. Luyster was taken into custody without incident.
'We were fearful that, given what we know of him, it might have been a different story.'
Luyster pleaded not guilty to assault, harassment and illegal firearm possession in the face of allegations that he pistol whipped his ex-girlfriend on May 16.
None of the victims' names have been released, but Sergeant Tony Barnes told the New York Daily News they were all white
Luyster pleaded not guilty to assault, harassment and illegal firearm possession in the face of allegations that he pistol whipped his ex-girlfriend on May 16
He has a lengthy criminal history stretching back to 1988 when he was just seven.
The Anti-Defamation League has described him as a white supremacist along with his brother Robert Luyster in 2013.
The 35-year-old pleaded guilty and served 90 days in jail for rioting with a weapon after he was accused of pointing a loaded gun at a black man in a Vancouver, Washington, tavern because he became angered by an interracial couple.
He used a racial slur and when another black customer intervened, Luyster started threatening to kill the couple, according to court documents cited by KPTV.
Luyster was involved in a drive-by shooting, taking a motor vehicle without permission, rioting while armed, malicious mischief and theft, among many others, The Columbian reported.
Syrian refugees are being housed by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the grounds of his Lambeth Palace home.
The family are living in a cottage at Justin Welby's official London residence after the Church agreed to house them and fund some of the initial costs of their new life in Britain.
The Archbishop and his staff will help the refugees learn English, teach them about the area, and offer advice on how to use public transport and register at a Job Centre.
Syrian refugees are being housed by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the grounds of Lambeth Palace, pictured
Lending a helping hand: The family are living in a cottage at the official London residence of Justin Welby (pictured left). It is part of a new scheme launched today by new Home Secretary Amber Rudd (right)
It is the first sponsor approved under a new scheme announced today which will see churches, charities, faith groups and businesses provide housing and support for those brought to Britain from Syria and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa under resettlement programmes.
Organisations will provide housing for refugees and help them integrate into life in the UK, gain access to medical and social services and arrange English language lessons.
Launching the Full Community Sponsorship scheme at Lambeth Palace, Home Secretary Amber Rudd said she had the met the family - which includes children aged four to 10.
The youngsters told her they all wanted to be doctors when they grow up.
Ms Rudd said: 'The response of the British public to the refugee crisis has been one of overwhelming generosity and many have been moved to make kind offers of assistance.
'This is a ground-breaking new development for resettlement in the UK and I wholeheartedly encourage organisations that can help to offer their support.
Launching the Full Community Sponsorship scheme at Lambeth Palace, Home Secretary Amber Rudd said she had the met the family - which includes children aged four to 10. She is pictured meeting the Archbishop
'I hope that this new approach will help bring communities together and support these often traumatised and vulnerable families as they rebuild their lives, and contribute to and thrive in our country.'
The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby said: 'Refugees, like all people, are treasured human beings, made in the image of God, who deserve safety, freedom and the opportunity to flourish.
'It is an enormous privilege to welcome a family to live in a cottage in the grounds of Lambeth Palace.'
It is an enormous privilege to welcome a family to live in a cottage in the grounds of Lambeth Palace The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby
The scheme is based on a successful Canadian model which reportedly has more communities offering to sponsor refugees than actual refugees.
Individuals and groups take responsibility for families for a year, finding them a home and education.
The Home Office said sponsoring organisations wishing to apply must have status as either a registered charity or 'community interest company', the consent of the local authority in which they wish to operate and a 'comprehensive plan' for resettlement.
All resettled refugees will have been through a thorough security vetting process.
In September 2015 the Government pledged to resettle 20,000 Syrian refugees. The latest published statistics show that more than 1,800 Syrians have so far been provided with refuge in the UK.
More than 160 local authorities have signed up to accept refugees via the scheme, on a voluntary basis.
He was beary close!
A black bear was filmed swimming in an upstate New York lake - and a few feet from a nearby kayaker in the water.
The video showing the bear at Hemlock Lake was published to Facebook by Matthew Garrity.
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A black bear was filmed swimming in an upstate New York lake - only a few feet from a nearby kayaker in the water
The video showing the bear at Hemlock Lake was published to Facebook by Matthew Garrity
'Kayaking next to a swimming black bear on Hemlock lake 7-16-2016,' he wrote.
Garrity wrote in the comments section: 'That was a BIG black bear.
'Didn't want to get any closer than that.'
Garrity had been with friends the day of the close encounter, according to Mashable.
He told the website: 'I was with two friends who decided to stay on shore.
'I was the curious one who absolutely needed to know what I was looking at moving across the lake so quickly.'
Garrity wrote in the comments section: 'That was a BIG black bear. Didn't want to get any closer than that'
Garrity told WHAM: 'I got a little nervous, so the video is pretty short because as soon as I saw the front of my kayak come into focus I said OK, that's enough.'
He also revealed to the website that: 'The bear definitely noticed me.
'At one point, not captured on video (because I was paddling at the time rather than holding my phone) he did turn his head and look directly at me for a split second, but he never stopped swimming towards the shore.'
The video was taken approximately 15 feet from the animal, WHAM reported.
Garrity told the TV station: 'Might have been a little too close.
There has been a lot of talk around the country about how the Trans-Pacific Partnership is good for our agricultural economy. Im not buying it.
Over the last several decades, the story of trade agreements ratified by Congress has been one of broken promises. Backers of trade agreements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Korea Free Trade Agreement, promised U.S. farmers increases in farm income and more rural economic activity. These promises largely remain unfulfilled. In fact, agricultural imports have surged while exports have lagged behind under recent free trade agreements, hurting U.S. farmers.
Wisconsin Farmers Union believes that the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a global trade agreement among 11 Pacific Rim countries, poses a serious threat to dairy farmers. Among other concerns, the agreement could lead to greater imports of milk protein concentrates, which displace demand for milk produced on U.S. farms. New Zealand, the leading exporter of concentrates, is a member of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Exchange rates are especially important when it comes to trade in agricultural commodities. When the value of the U.S. dollar is high, U.S. commodities are relatively more expensive to international traders, and traders will opt to buy commodities from other countries instead. Since U.S. negotiators failed to secure binding prohibitions on currency manipulation in the agreement, all of the supposed gains to agricultural exports under the deal easily could be wiped out by currency manipulation.
Another possible detriment to the agreement is that Canadas milk quota system is supposed to be phased out over the next decade. Will it still have the ability to protect its farm structure? And how will that impact our fragile U.S. dairy market?
Meanwhile, the U.S. trade deficit continues to rise. Without some safeguards in place and a provision to address currency manipulation, the Trans-Pacific Partnership is not going to be good for American agriculture.
Under the agreement, dairy prices will struggle; the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that imports will rise by close to 5 billion pounds by 2025. This is in comparison to less than 4 billion under current trade agreements.
But think of the exports, they say!
Were told exports will save us, but look at what has happened over the last 18 months exports have fallen by nearly 13 percent in volume and 33 percent in value. That means there is less money returning to the local economy and more money leaving the U.S. to buy imports.
Additionally, dairy farm numbers in the U.S. have been declining for several decades now. In 1970, there were around 648,000 farms. In 2006, there were 75,000. We have fewer than 58,000 dairy farms across the country today. Wisconsin is losing one farm a day on average and California is losing up to two per week as a result of low milk prices.
With falling exports and rising imports, there will be pressure for prices to remain below farmers production costs. We cant risk another economic downturn like those weve experienced under previous trade deals. Wisconsin Farmers Union opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership and has urged our representatives to reject the agreement.
Where do our candidates and elected officials stand? President Barack Obama supports the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In contrast, presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have voiced opposition to it. U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson says that he is undecided, even though the proposal was released in November of last year. Johnson did vote to authorize the president to fast-track the agreement. Johnsons Democratic challenger, Russ Feingold, opposes the deal.
While many in our agricultural community would have you believe that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is all sunshine and roses, past trade deals should give us serious pause. Dont believe the hype. Standing up for Wisconsin farmers means standing against the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
She is behind bars and is set to resign as a delegate this week
During interviews with police she said her husband had been abusive
She initially told police it was an accident, but later changed her story
claims his wife fired when she walked past him
When they got home the pair had a row, before Vincent fell asleep in a chair
Mother-of-two, 47, told police the pair had been drinking on Sunday
A Democratic delegate has been accused of trying to kill her husband, a week before she was set to back Hillary Clinton for president at the party's National Convention.
Mother-of two Denna Vicites, 47, was arrested and charged with attempted murder after she allegedly shot her other half, Vincent, in the neck during a drunken argument in their Uniontown, Pennsylvania, home on Sunday.
When she was interviewed by police, she told officers it was an accident.
But she later changed her story and said she fired at her Fayette County commissioner husband when he was choking her, claiming he had been abusive for a long time.
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Denna Vicites, 47, (left) a Democratic delegate who was set to back Hillary Clinton at the party's National Convention next week, has been charged with attempted murder after she allegedly shot her husband, Vincent (right), in the neck during a drunken argument
Video courtesy of WPXI
But then she insisted she was trying to kill herself, and then accidentally shot him when he tried to take the weapon from her, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.
Democratic Party officials say they expect to get Ms Vicites' resignation Tuesday. They say Hillary Clinton's campaign will choose a replacement.
Her husband is recovering at a West Virginia hospital.
According to a criminal complaint, the couple told officers the shooting was an accident, but investigators say they determined that Deanna Vicites tried to kill her husband.
Fayette County District Attorney Richard Bower said on Monday that the shooting was deliberate.
'This is absolutely not an accident. This is an intentional, reckless act,' he said.
State troopers said they went to the home early on Sunday when Mr Vicites called 911 to say he'd been shot.
The mother-of-two (mugshot left told police the pair had been drinking all day and initially claimed the shooting had been an accident, but she later accused her husband of being abusive
When police arrived at their home (pictured) they found Mrs Vicites curled up on the front lawn with the gun beside her. Her husband was inside with a gunshot below the chin
A man who lives in the basement of the couple's home also called 911 after he said Mr Vicites pounded on his door and asked for help.
Mr Vicites apparently had returned upstairs, after which the young man said he called Mr. Vicites' cell phone and heard him yelling 'Call 911!' The witness then said he heard a shot.
His wife lying outside the front door, curled up, according to reports.
They then discovered the gun on the front lawn.
When Mr Vicites was interviewed at the hospital, troopers said he couldn't talk.
However he was reportedly able to answer questions by moving his head or writing notes.
He said the couple had argued that day and drank.
Then, he fell asleep in his chair.
The first presidential general election debate is moving to New York after an Ohio college withdrew as host, citing rising security concerns and costs.
It means Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will clash in their home state when they first
Wright State University's president David Hopkins said Tuesday that the school in Dayton has a large, open campus and there has been growing concern about what it would take to 'guarantee the safety and security' of the school and surrounding community for the September 26 debate.
Wright State University President David Hopkins said the Dayton-area school has a large, open campus and questions about the ability to protect the campus and suburban community during the September 26 debate led to a decision that had 'weighed heavily' on him.
Home clash: Trump and Clinton will face off at New York's Hofstra University instead of Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, because of security costs being too much for the mid-West venue
Recent days have seen the mass killings in Nice, France, and police shootings and other violence in this nation and elsewhere.
'Over the last few weeks, we have had a growing concern about what it would take to guarantee the safety and security ... of those on and around our campus,' Hopkins said. He called the expense to do so 'daunting.'
The school had earlier said it was spending $5 million to $6 million to put on the debate. Hopkins said the costs with added security could have gotten up to $8 million.
Wright State has some 18,000 students.
The Commission on Presidential Debates announced quickly that Hofstra University would take over.
The Long Island-based school had agreed last year to serve as an alternate site. Hofstra hosted a debate in 2012.
A message for comment was left Tuesday at Hofstra, where a spokeswoman said recently that hosting debates brings strong global exposure for schools.
Expensive security: More than 5,000 officers and other agents are on duty to keep order and security in Cleveland for the Republican National Convention
Hopkins had called landing the debate for its Nutter Center 'a huge win' when the commission announced its choices last year.
Ohio politicians also hailed it as underscoring the importance of the swing state in the presidential race.
'It's the responsible thing to do,' Michael Bridges, chairman of the Ohio school's board of trustees, said in a statement about Wright State University withdrawing as a debate location.
He said the community has been 'overwhelmingly supportive' of hosting the debate, but safety and security took precedence.
The Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, has been surrounded by massive security, with 5,000 law enforcement personnel deployed to keep order.
The other presidential debates are scheduled to be Washington University in St. Louis on Oct. 9 followed by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, on October 19. A vice presidential debate will be held at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia, on October 4
Five people were injured after a giant construction crane toppled off the new Tappan Zee Bridge being constructed north of New York City and collapsed across both lanes on the busy span it's replacing.
The incident happened Tuesday just before noon, halting traffic in both directions. No cars were hit by the crane's arm as it crashed onto the bridge, which authorities said will be closed indefinitely as crews work to clean up the wreckage.
Rockland County Executive Ed Day wrote on Twitter that three people suffered minor injuries when vehicles swerved and stopped to avoid the wreckage.
A giant construction crane (pictured) toppled off the new Tappan Zee Bridge being constructed north of New York City and collapsed across the busy span it is replacing and injured five people
Three people suffered minor injuries when vehicles swerved and stopped to avoid the wreckage. Two workers were also injured, but none of their injuries were believed to be serious. Authorities said the span will be closed indefinitely as crews work to clean up the wreckage
Two workers were also injured, but none of their injuries were believed to be serious, according to NBC New York.
The Coast Guard said the crane operator was rescued from the Hudson River after the construction equipment collapsed.
The operator was shaken but he wasn't injured.
Barricades will be lifted so drivers can do U-turns and drive to the nearest exits, according to police.
Video from an ABC news helicopter showed at least one person being removed from a car and loaded into an ambulance.
The base and treads of the huge, movable crane sat on the unfinished new bridge across the Hudson River between Westchester and Rockland counties.
Part of the toppled crane lay across the lanes of the old bridge. Another section lay across a construction platform in the water between the two spans.
Several boats carrying emergency workers were maneuvering in the river around the collapsed crane arm, while other workers appeared to be scanning the water around the wreck.
Rockland County had a helicopter and marine unit at the scene, according to Day.
The incident happened Tuesday just before noon, halting traffic in both directions. No cars were hit by the crane's arm as it crashed onto the bridge
Several boats carrying emergency workers were maneuvering in the river around the collapsed crane arm, while other workers appeared to be scanning the water around the wreck
The new Tappan Zee Bridge has been under construction for three years and is expected to be completed by 2018 at an expected cost of $3.9 billion.
Once completed, the new bridge will feature eight wide lanes and a bike and pedestrian path.
It is being built alongside the original, seven-lane Tappan Zee span, which dates to 1955 and the three-mile-long cantilever bridge is the longest in New York State.
The original bridge was built to last 50 years and cost $81 million.
On a daily basis about 138,000 cars cross the bridge, which runs between between Rockland County and Westchester in the Lower Hudson Valley.
In March, a 90-foot tugboat sank after it hit a construction barge near the bridge site, killing three crew members.
In 2013, a powerboat plowed into a construction barge at the bridge, killing a bride-to-be and her fiance's best man.
The boat's driver, who had nearly twice the legal limit of alcohol in his system, pleaded guilty to vehicular manslaughter and was sentenced to two years behind bars.
Police were today forced to free a child from a sweltering car on the hottest day of the year - after a woman left the youngster for 40 minutes while she went shopping.
Panicked shoppers called officers after loudspeaker calls for the woman to return to her vehicle, which was left in a disabled bay outside a Next branch in Watford, went unanswered.
One onlooker told how passersby were 'screaming' at security guards to do something to release the child as the temperatures outside the vehicle soared to above 30C.
A woman allegedly spent 40 minutes looking around a Next store in Watford and was called several times to return to her car and child
The woman allegedly looked around the shop at Waterfields Shopping Centre and was asked to return to her car (left)
Police arrived and got the young child out of the Nissan vehicle, which was parked in a disabled bay at Waterfields Shopping Centre
The onlooker told MailOnline: 'An elderly woman was on the scene and screaming at a security guard to do something and let the child out.
'There were quite a few people looking on as the police arrived.'
Officers called to the scene eventually freed the child from the white Nissan Qashqai - one onlooker said it appeared the door was able to be opened from the outside without damage.
And after the child was released, the driver returned to her car having apparently been shopping the whole time at the store at the Waterfields Shopping Centre.
The onlooker added: 'All the woman got was a ticking off - it must have been unbearable for the child.'
A Hertfordshire Police spokesman said: 'Police were called at 12.40pm on Monday to Waterfields Retail Park in Watford to reports of concerns for the welfare of children that had been left in a car. Officers attended and the mother was located. Strong words of advice were given to the woman.'
The incident came as the UK had its hottest day of the year so far, with temperatures reaching 33.4 degrees.
The RSPCA has also seen a spike in calls from members of the public concerned about dogs left in hot cars, conservatories, sheds and caravans.
ClientEarth said air pollution is also set to reach dangerous levels, and the hottest parts of England are expected to be the North West and South East.
And forecasters have also predicted torrential downpours in parts of the country tonight, with up to two inches of rain expected in some areas.
This will bring a risk of flash flooding, with the Met Office also warning of frequent lightning, large hail and strong winds as additional hazards.
The heat has been caused by a warm plume of air from Spain and will bring temperatures close to the July record of 36.7C set only last year.
The Turkish man who lay in front of a tank to stop soldiers from taking the nations busiest airport has described the incredible moment he braced for death and inspired a nation.
Metin Dogan, 40, didnt think twice before he put himself in front of a tank and between armed soldiers attempting to take over the country on Friday - and told them to 'go over me or go away'.
When I lay down, I aligned my whole body, because I wanted my heart, my brain, and all my organs all to be crushed at once.
Turkish man Metin Dogan who lay in front of a tank to stop soldiers from taking the nations busiest airport has described the incredible moment he braced for death and inspired a nation
Metin Dogan, 40, didnt think twice before he put himself in front of a tank and between armed soldiers attempting to take over the country on Friday
Im waiting to see how that one second is going to feel. I didnt want to miss that one second, If I miss that one second I would have felt like I missed something huge, so Im waiting there, concentrating, waiting to see how that second is going to feel because thats death.'
Metin, who served in the Turkish army himself when he was 30-years-old, said he had no doubt what he was doing was right and his actions have been praised all over the world with #tankman trending on Twitter.
As soon as the medical student saw tanks on television on Friday night he wasted no time in running to the streets to face off with Turkish soldiers and was thoroughly prepared to die for his country.
I immediately turned to my brother and said you have kids and a family but Im going. And I just left without letting them say anything or think about it, he told MailOnline.
Speaking to MailOnline days after the failed power grab that left 290 people dead, Metin is happy to be alive but its a reality he didnt expect
I have never voted before in my life I dont care which political party of the president, but he is my president and the leader of my country. I wont allow bullies to take over by force, he said, his passion palpable.
He was prepared to run the six kilometres to the airport, but managed to flag down a youngster on a motorbike and convince him to give him a lift.
He was just 22 or 23, I stopped the motorbike and said for the love of god please take me to the airport quickly, said Metin, who describes the journey to the airport with the young man as if it was from a movie.
Racing towards the tanks, Metin, who is planning to become a psychologist, said he tried to distract his driver with questions in case he lost his nerve.
The pair were among the first to arrive at the scene after the media, whose coverage of the coup had encouraged him to come out into the streets.
In front of him was a line of armed soldiers, behind them three tanks back-to-back and next to them was an army truck packed with young men.
The soldiers started shooting in the air - no one was protesting but they were shooting - it was just for the cameras.
I just started running and ran between the soldiers to a tank. It was time to fight.
I started yelling; Im a Turkish soldier, Im a soldier of this nation, whose soldier are you?, he told MailOnline.
They were yelling at me "were going to shoot, were going to shoot, move away", and the tank was going forward so I lay in front of the right wheel thinking if I die it might stop them, he said.
It was then Metin tensed his body and waited to be crushed by tons of metal.
The photo of him lying in front of a tank at the entrance to Ataturk Airport quickly became an iconic image of the sheer force of civilians that took to the streets to stop a military coup.
Dogan said that when he lay down, he wanted his 'heart, brain, and all my organs all to be crushed at once'
He told MailOnline: I started yelling; Im a Turkish soldier, Im a soldier of this nation, whose soldier are you?'
Speaking to MailOnline days after the failed power grab that left 290 people dead, Metin is happy to be alive but its a reality he didnt expect.
On realising the tank had stopped he jumped to his feet frustrated his plan hadnt worked.
I saw a soldier with his head looking out of the tank.
He said, "I beg you, I promise we will go if you just move from in front of the tank".
I gave them the option of going over me or going away and they chose to go away, he said.
By the time he had agreed to let them go, a crowd had broken through the road blocks and ran towards the soldiers throwing bottles.
Thats how it ended, said Metin humbly.
By this time President Erdogan had managed to broadcast his message to the nation via smartphone on CNN Turk and encouraged people to take to the streets to challenge the putschists.
The scenes contrast starkly with images from the Bosphorous Bridge where civilians were seen beating young soldiers with belts after tanks opened fire on the crowds who had come to oppose them.
As soon as the medical student saw tanks on television on Friday night he wasted no time in running to the streets to face off with Turkish soldiers and was thoroughly prepared to die for his country
As soon as the medical student saw tanks on television on Friday night he wasted no time in running to the streets to face off with Turkish soldiers and was thoroughly prepared to die for his country
In the wake of the coup the role of civilians in challenging soldiers united the country with people usually polarised - of all parties standing against another military takeover of what is a criticised, but democratically elected government.
International concern is growing however as the response to attempted coup is being touted as little more than an excuse to purge the country of people who challenge President Erdogans power.
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These images show life on the streets of Harlem in 1943 captured by a man who broke the barrier of color to become the first African American photojournalist for LIFE magazine.
Gordon Parks was one of the most iconic photographers of the 20th century and was known for his remarkable body work that explored the social and economic impact of racism in America.
Born in segregation and poverty in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912, Parks was a self-taught photographer who landed a job with the Farm Security Administrations documentary photography program which captured life during the Depression in the United States.
When the FSA disbanded in 1943, Parks became a freelance photographer and balanced making a living taking pictures for fashion magazine with his passion for documenting urban life.,
A few years after taking these pictures for the Office of War Information, Parks moved into Harlem and his 1948 photo essay about Harlem gang leader Red Jackson landed him a staff job with LIFE magazine.
His work for the acclaimed magazine over two decades covered everything from race and poverty to celebrity and politics.
Park's photographs include iconic images such as American Gothic (1942) and striking portraits of Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X.
They also rallied support for the Civil Rights Movement which he documented as well as fervently advocated.
But as well as being one of the most celebrated photographers of his generation, Parks was also a composer, author and filmmaker.
A young newsboy is captured in this photograph by celebrated photojournalist Gordon Parks for the Office of War Information in 1943
Gordon Parks was a self-taught photographer who landed a job with the Farm Security Administration's documentary photography program. Above, a woman is seen leaning out of her window along with her dog in Harlem, New York, in 1943
A young newsboy in Harlem is pictured in front of a poster that features a slogan saying 'The Negro on the Home Front'
A street peddler weights out string beans at his stall on the streets of Harlem, New York, in 1943
In another picture, Parks captured the street peddler weighing the bag of string beans at his street stall
A picture taken from further away shows the street peddler displays his string beans and other goods in a wagon on a street corner
School children are seen running unescorted along a busy intersection while signs urge motorists to drive slowly
Three young boys pose for a picture for Gordon Parks, who captured the grittiness of life in America for the FSA in the 1940s
A Harlem resident is seen standing outside a sign that advertises a property that is for sale by Mrs W Hyatt, of Pinehurst, North Carolina
A smartly dressed newsboy is pictured standing outside signs advertising the New York Journal and American
A stunning shot captures two young children from behind as they walk down a busy street together
A police in uniform stands outside a typical tenement building in the city in another shot from Parks' series from New York
A man in a bowler hat is seen standing in the doorwat of a 'Bartenders & waiter's Straightway Club' in Harlem
A photograph of Jamaican political leader Marcus Garvey, signs and articles are seen in the window of a club in Harlem
Signs are seen for various businesses, including a ice cream store and a shoe shine shop, on a street in the New York neighborhood
A woman is seen walking along the street outside what appears to be a church with a cross hanging outside in 1943's Harlem
A sign seeking female gospel singers - described as a 'good opportunity' - is seen tacked to the door of a Harlem building
It took 12 hours to finally sink, 55 miles north of Kaui
Thach was hit with over 5,000 pounds of high explosives July 14
First launched in 1982, Thach was retired in 2013
Decomissioned ships are stripped of their weapons and fuel and used for target practice by the US, Canada, Australia, and the Republic of Korea
The exercise, known as SINKEX,
It was a retired war ship hit with over 5,000 pounds of high explosives.
However the USS Thach, which was bombarded from the air, sea, and even underwater last Thursday during a missile-testing exercise, did not go down without a fight, taking 12 hours to finally sink to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
The Rim of the Pacific Exercise, also known as SINKEX or the sinking exercise, takes place every two years, and involves stripping an old frigate of its weapons, ammunitions and fuel.
It is then used for Navy target practice, with ships, submarines and aircraft from the US, Canada, Australia, and the Republic of Korea all taking aim.
Boom: Video taken of the exercise shows the moment ship was first hit with a harpoon missile from a South Korean submarine
Resilent: The USS Thach, which launched in 1982 and was retired in 2013, turned out to be quite hardy
After being blasted with over five thousand pounds of high explosives, the ship took 12 hours to finally sink
But the latest, the USS Thach, which was retired in 2013, turned out to be quite hardy.
The ship was towed to an area 55 miles north off the coast of Kaui and then bombarded.
According to Popular Mechanics, the ship was first hit with a harpoon missile from a South Korean submarine.
Next, the Australian frigate HMAS Ballarat launched another Harpoon, and an Australian SH-60S helicopter shot it with a Hellfire missile.
The US maritime patrol aircraft then hit it with Harpoon and Maverick missiles.
However that was merely the beginning.
The cruiser USS Princeton then hit it with yet another Harpoon missile, while an American SH-60S Navy chopper hit it with more Hellfires.
US Navy F/A-18 Hornets also dropped a 2,000 pound Mk. 84 bomb and a US Air Force B-52 bomber dropped a GBU-12 Paveway laser guided 500 pound bomb.
A US Navy submarine got into the action, striking it with a Mk. 48 torpedo.
The ship was used for target practice, with ships, submarines and aircraft from the US, Canada, Australia, and the Republic of Korea all taking aim
The SINKEX, or sinking exercise, takes place every two years, and involves stripping an old frigate of its weapons, ammunitions and fuel, and then sinking it during target practice
Video taken by a helicopter shows the varying hits the ship put up with, as well as the damage afterwards.
WHAT IS A SINKEX? A SINKEX, or sink exercise, is a multinational maritime exercise that takes place in and around the Hawaiian Islands and off the coast of southern California every two years. This year's RIMPAC exercise, the 25th in the series that began in 1971, started with the sinking of the USS Thach on July 14, featuring hips, submarines and aircraft from the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the Republic of Korea. The exercise will continue this week. Advertisement
The USS Thach finally sank at 7:25 p.m. on July 14 in waters 15,000 feet deep.
As per SINKEX procedures, each ship must go down in at least 6,000 feet of water and at least 50 nautical miles from land.
'This SINKEX was a tremendous event for all the units who participated. As you can imagine, the opportunity to fire live ordnances at a real target is incredibly rare and I know that these men and women learned so much today,' Royal Canadian Navy Rear Adm. Scott Bishop, deputy commander of the RIMPAC Combined Task Force, said.
'This kind of training is vital to strengthening our interoperability and increasing our readiness for operations in the future.'
Damage: This shot from the scene video shows the damage done to the ship during the bombardments
Explosive: The ship withstood a huge amount of damage, as seen here at the helicopter pad at the back
The decommissioned USS Thach was the 34th ship of the Oliver Hazard Perry-class guided missile frigates.
The ship was named for Naval aviator Adm. John S. Thatch, the developer of the 'Thach Weave', a dogfighting tactic in World War II and former Commander, U.S.
The shop was built by the Todd Pacific Shipyards in San Pedro, California and launched in December 1982.
In late 2006 while deployed to the Southern Pacific, Thach caught fire as she attempted to put out a fire on a drug smuggling ship.
It was then decommissioned in San Diego on November 1, 2013
Unclear why it was on the roads when it's clearly badly damaged
The car has a dented in roof and side door with airbags hanging out
For many drivers, the most minor of car crashes is enough to take them off the roads.
But one driver in Pakistan wasn't going to let a few bumps get in the way of his driving, shocking footage has shown.
The car can be seen driving down a busy dual carriageway in the Asian country.
Battered: Shocking footage shows a car in a terrible condition making its way down a road in Pakistan
Crashed out: The car has a door bashed in with airbags falling out of the boot
Bashed: It is unclear why the driver felt the need to take the completely unroadworthy vehicle out for a drive
But shockingly, its door is completely bashed in and its bumper has nearly fallen off.
Its back tyre is also almost completely deflated, and airbags have burst out of the roof and boot.
Several fellow road users, including cyclists, slow down to look at the mangled car.
It is unclear why the driver felt the need to take such a un-roadworthy vehicle out for a drive.
An emotional Candy Carson surprised an audience at the National Republican Convention today when she began crying over the 2012 Benghazi terror attack.
'How many of us are mothers or sisters or wives?' said Carson, the wife of retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, an ex-presidential contender who now supports Donald Trump.
Her voice than started cracking up.
'When I heard, "What difference does it make?" That did it for me,' she said, quoting Democrat Hillary Clinton's congressional testimony.
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Candy Carson (right) the wife of former presidential candidate Ben Carson (left) got emotional today at an event in Cleveland when talking about Benghazi
She got more emotional as she continued.
'I couldn't believe one of our own,' she said, again aiming her ire at Clinton and suggesting the former secretary of state acted both carelessly and callously with American lives.
'That's what Americans do. Americans, we always help each other,' she stated, pointing out that Clinton did the opposite.
The outburst came amid a panel discussion on 'what women want' when it comes to politics.
Groups of conservative women have been gathering in Cleveland to dispel the notion that women don't support Trump, who liberals have characterized as being misogynist and anti-choice.
Carson told Dailymail.com that the reason why she and her husband decided to support Trump was because he was bringing new people to the party.
'Because, see, all along [Texas Sen. Ted] Cruz was the one who kind of alienated some of the new people. Trump was bringing people in I don't know if you noticed that,' she said.
Cruz was still in the race when Dr. Carson decided to endorse Trump.
'But the main thing was, Trump was unifying. Cruz could get the conservative vote, but Trump was even reaching some of the liberals,' Carson explained.
To the wider audience at today's event she explained precisely how Trump's business savvy could come in handy.
'We have to get the right person in there,' she said. 'We need to get a businessperson in there to utilize the resources.'
Carson cited the number of buildings that the government owns 900,000 or so and how many are either under utilized or empty 77,000 she said.
'Come on! Let's rent the space!' Carson said.
'That's seems to be something missing in Washington, D.C. logic,' she harrumphed.
Carson also talked about being extremely concerned about the national debt, saying the country can no longer afford to kick the can down the road as she reminisced about her husband's bid for the White House, saying it was their grandchildren that inspired him not to retire and jump into politics instead.
'I had just gotten my husband back,' Carson sighed.
'Man, we can go see a movie together.'
A Berkeley father described by family as an 'avid surfer' died Saturday morning while trying to save his young daughter after she was swept away by waves on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, police said.
Mark Hornor, 46, was walking with daughter Mina along the rocky edge of the Makapuu Tide Pools at around 11:20am when witnesses say a wave knocked her into the roiling surf. Hornor leaped in to rescue her but both were lost to the current.
'His body was lifeless just like the little girl,' Jamie DeMatoff, who saw lifeguards futilely giving CPR to the pair, told Hawaii News Now. 'My heart just sank just watching this happen.'
Tragic: Mark Hornor (left), 46, drowned while saving daughter Mina (left), 6, after she was swept into water off the coast of the Hawaiian island of Oahu Saturday morning. A second wave carried them both out to sea
Tide Pools: The Makapuu Tide Pools (pictured) have powerful waves, particularly when windy - and though Hornor was a surfing fan, even he wasn't strong enough to resist their force
Warnings: Officials are now warning the popular area's visitors not to go there when it's windy and the tides are strong. Mina's two sisters were also knocked in, but a passer-by was able to pull them back
Video courtesy of Hawaii News Now
Although the father was a physically fit surf fanatic, he was unable to stop a second wave carrying both him and his daughter out to sea.
'There was a huge wave that just swept everybody, all the tide pools and it pulled those two people out and kept taking them further out and further out,' witness Jamie Ngo told Khon 2.
'They were conscious at first, but I think the longer that they were out there, the waves were pretty brutal.'
Mina's two sisters were also knocked into the water, but were rescued by a passer-by, Scott Kaito of Kailua, who pulled them to safety.
'It was just an instinct,' Kato told Khon 2. 'Im a father. I have sons, and I mean I kind of knew they were in there because at that point there was another couple groups that were there.
'But some people just got out so I just kind of knew that it was a family in there. So I just kind of jumped in.'
He added that the sea looked calm until the wave struck.
Hornor's brother, Matthew, told Hawaii News Now that Mark Hornor didn't think twice about trying to rescue his girl.
'He was just a fantastic human being, he jumped in tried to save her,' he said. 'And I don't think he wanted to come back empty handed.'
Lifeguards raced to the pair on jet skis and took them to a nearby beach to perform CPR, but it was no use - they were both declared dead at a hospital some time later.
Mark Hornor's wife, Jessamy, is from Hawaii.
Dangerous: A spokeswoman for the city Emergency Services Department said 'Conditions were not favorable. It's too windy, there's a High Surf Advisory. It's extremely dangerous'
In the wake of the tragic deaths, officials warned visitors to be careful while visiting the tide pools, which are a popular spot for visitors.
'On a day like today, it wasn't for families down there,' Shayne Enright a spokeswoman for the city Emergency Services Department, said.
'Conditions were not favorable. It's too windy, there's a High Surf Advisory. It's extremely dangerous.'
Accidents at the tide pools are not uncommon.
In 2011 another father and daughter drowned in the tide pools, last month a teen was seriously injured when a wave knocked her over, and in 2015 a 12-year-old was seriously injured.
The bodies of both father and daughter are now being examined to confirm the cause of death.
CLEVELAND Donald Trump's selection of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate has given Wisconsin Republicans a reason to get excited about the top of their ticket.
"Republicans are unified," Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch told the Wisconsin delegation at its Tuesday morning breakfast. "Were unified all across the bottom of the ticket and this week, I think we will prove not only to this country, but the world, and ourselves, that were unified all across the top, too."
Kleefisch, much like House Speaker Paul Ryan in his Monday speech to the delegation, did not mention Trump by name in her address.
The focus on Pence from Kleefisch and other party leaders allows them to take a careful approach with a controversial candidate, said University of Wisconsin-Madison political science and journalism professor Mike Wagner.
"It lets them be good Republican party team members without having to drink Trump Kool-Aid," Wagner said. "They want their party to be successful, they dont like Hillary Clinton, they want to maintain the Republican Partys strength in governorships, the state legislative majority, the House and Senate majority but they dont trust Trump as a true conservative. Mike Pence is a true conservative."
Pence's legislative and gubernatorial records offer bona fides that will appeal to both economic and social conservatives a record Trump doesn't have, Wagner said.
But Kleefisch said the absence of Trump's name from her speech was nothing to read into.
"I dont think so, no, because the entire week is going to be about the Trump-Pence ticket," Kleefisch told reporters when asked whether the dearth of Trump mentions bore significance. "I think in this room in particular you had a lot of excitement about Pence on the ticket."
Pence spoke at the state GOP convention a few years ago, she said, adding that Wisconsin Republicans are excited to see a Midwesterner on the ballot.
"When you look at Mike Pence and his leadership, you see a lot of similarities between Indiana and Wisconsin," Kleefisch said, noting that the two states are in frequent competition to outpace each other in the rate of manufacturing jobs per capita. "But one of the reasons we do that is because Indiana has been an economic development machine. We want America to be an economic development machine, and I think from both a business and policy perspective its kind of what this ticket represents."
In her remarks to delegates, Kleefisch zeroed in on state legislative races, reminding the party faithful there are races beyond the presidential and federal level that require work and focus.
The lieutenant governor, serving her second term with Gov. Scott Walker, applauded individual lawmakers for their work in their districts and on the campaign trail.
While Republican candidates try to assess and manage the potential effects of a Trump candidacy on their races, Kleefisch suggested down-ticket races could be the ones to influence the top of the ballot instead.
"These are the men and women who I honestly believe will help the top of the ticket," she said. "Now, normally, we talk about the top of the ticket having these gigantic coattails and its always one way. I think were going to have a strong ticket all the way up and all the way down because these people care so deeply. They pour their hearts and they pour their souls into service of their state."
Different party leaders have different takes on what Trump's candidacy means for down-ballot races.
Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, first encouraged Republicans to back Trump earlier this summer, arguing "the same mechanism" works to get presidential, federal and state-level candidates elected.
Meanwhile, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, said Monday he's seen some voters start to draw a line between Trump and the Republican Party, and he's confident about the prospects of Republican candidates in some of the state's most competitive districts.
Typically, the candidate at the top of the ticket has the strongest effect on other races, Wagner said. However, he said, there's a good chance this election will see more instances of people voting in races lower on the ballot while leaving the top field blank than most.
However, Wagner said, Trump's candidacy makes it more difficult for down-ballot candidates to get their message out because one of the first questions they're likely to face from voters is where they stand on their presidential nominee.
"It's just the kind of thing where he is so good at owning the media cycle that hes knocking Republicans who could use a cycle out of a chance to communicate to voters," Wagner said.
Both Vos and Fitzgerald are delegates at the convention. Kleefisch was initially slated to be a delegate, but later withdrew, citing a scheduling conflict.
She said Tuesday that decision had nothing to do with Trump. She is scheduled to attend a breakfast at the Beloit Chamber of Commerce on Thursday, and said she doesn't think "there's any shame" in returning from Cleveland to spend time with constituents in Wisconsin.
Kleefisch hedged when asked whether Trump is her kind of conservative a nod to Ryan, who said Monday that while the presumptive nominee is not his kind of conservative, the party must back him.
Trump might not be as conservative as some Wisconsin Republicans would like on fiscal policy, Kleefisch said, but she added she thinks Pence can play an effective "COO" to Trump's "chairman of the board."
Democratic Party of Wisconsin spokesman Brandon Weathersby quipped that RNC has come to stand for "Republicans 'n' Chaos" this week, referring to a brief procedural disruption on the floor Monday night.
"Republicans are so desperate for party unity that they're willing to hold their nose while their party nominates the most extreme ticket in a generation," Weathersby said. "Wisconsin deserves better than the divisive policies and 'me-first' economic proposals of the Trump and Pence ticket."
Kleefisch, when asked if she's excited about Trump, said she is "excited about winning the White House back."
"And I think regardless of who came out of the convention, we were going to end up supporting that person whether it was a man or a woman, whether it was a businessman or a politician," she said. "Were excited about the Trump-Pence ticket because the Trump-Pence ticket is going to beat the Clinton and whoever else ticket."
Half of veterans under 65 are not in work, major new research shows
A generation of 'forgotten' young veterans are being left to suffer in silence as they battle serious ill health while surviving on a pittance, major new research claims.
Many former soldiers under retirement age are living in fear of debt as they struggle to cope with depression and other long-term mental and physical health problems on an average annual household income of just 13,800.
A report published by SSAFA, the Armed Forces charity, shines a rare light on the plight as many ex-servicemen and women struggle to return to civilian life.
Suffering in silence: Many former soldiers under retirement age are living in fear of debt as they struggle to cope with depression and other long-term mental and physical health problems (file image)
Some rely on food banks while others have ended up homeless, in prison or have contemplated taking their own life.
Among its shocking findings, it found:
Three-quarters suffer from long-term physical or mental health conditions, illnesses or disabilities;
Nearly two-thirds have been clinically diagnosed with mental health issues;
Two-fifths say they cannot afford daily living expenses, while half do not have enough money to buy essential items;
Half are not in work, while many of those interviewed are not well enough to seek employment;
Four in ten believe they have been disadvantaged by their military service when they try to gain housing and employment.
The report, called 'The New Frontline', which surveyed nearly 1,000 veterans aged between 16 and 65 who have been helped by the charity, also found that the overwhelming majority feel poorly treated by the authorities after leaving the Forces.
More than two-fifths of veterans who fought in Afghanistan and half of all those who fought in the Gulf War - reported being formally diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Yet, 85 per cent of veterans believe the UK does not offer enough support to its former soldiers, while 78 per cent think the US is more generous than the UK to its veterans.
Air Vice-Marshal David Murray said veterans were 'living in pretty desperate circumstances'
Air Vice-Marshal David Murray, chief executive, SSAFA, said: 'Our research has identified a cohort of veterans living in pretty desperate circumstances, often through no fault of their own. These men and women are not fulfilling their potential in civilian life; their plight is too easily ignored.
'Disappointingly, something that comes across loud and clear from our report is that many of the veterans helped by SSAFA do not feel valued. They have served our country sometimes suffered for our country and yet they feel forgotten.
'SSAFA knows that the transition period is a pivotal time for those taking their first steps back into wider society. We must identify vulnerable service leavers before they walk out of the barracks for the last time.'
One of those interviewed is David Swift, who joined the Army aged 17, but found it nearly impossible to adjust to civilian life when he left and ended up living on the streets.
He said: 'In the space of a year I went from being a healthy young man in a great regiment to someone sitting in a park wondering what the point of my life was. You need help, but your pride is too important to you. Sometimes you think your family would be better off without you. You feel worthless.'
To improve the situation, the SSAFA is calling for welfare screening for vulnerable servicemen and women before they leave the Forces and a new government-funded mentoring scheme to support vulnerable veterans for at least their first year as a civilian.
It also wants the Ministry of Defence to improve its discharge processes to ensure that the service records of veterans are shared with the appropriate health and welfare professionals.
In his foreword to SSAFA's report, former Chief of the Defence Staff, Field Marshal the Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank, writes: 'This report from SSAFA makes for sober reading. It identifies a group of veterans who feel undervalued and under-appreciated, who are slipping through the net when we, as a society, could prevent that happening.
'We simply must do better for those who have served our nation.'
His Royal Highness Prince Michael of Kent, the SSAFA's National President, adds: 'This very timely report reminds us that we do not always see the human cost of the sacrifices made by our veterans. Some are suffering in silence, living in financial hardship or coping with ill-health. Not used to asking for help, they can too easily be forgotten.'
A MOD spokesperson said: 'We are absolutely focused on supporting working age veterans. That is why we've developed specific schemes to deliver career guidance, and to help find housing and expert healthcare.
Deputy Nicholas Tullier, 41, was shot in the head and stomach in the Baton Rouge massacre
A Louisiana deputy who was shot twice by the Baton Rouge gunman is 'fighting for his life,' authorities said.
Nicholas Tullier, 41, was gunned down inside his squad car Sunday after cold-blooded shooter Gavin Long had already killed three Baton Rouge police officers.
'He is currently in ICU and there is a machine helping him breathe,' Sheriff Sid Gautreaux, of East Baton Rouge Parish, told reporters.
'He is in a very critical condition. We ask for your continued prayers for his healing and for his family.'
Tullier had just returned to his police car after writing down the license plate for Long's rental vehicle when the shooter advanced on him, firing into the cruiser.
The deputy, an 18-year law enforcement veteran, was shot in the head and stomach.
'Their biggest concern is the head trauma,' Gautreaux said. 'He's been in and out, so to speak. His vitals have gone up and down.'
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Tullier is an an 18-year veteran of the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office. He is in critical condition
'We're just praying for him. It's in God's hands, and we have to see what happens,' Gautreaux said.
'But he's not in good shape at all.'
Tullier was one of three deputies injured in the Baton Rouge massacre. Three others were killed.
The horrific scene unfolded in a matter of minutes, a black-clad man with military training stalking law enforcement officers and ignoring horrified onlookers as he shot anyone he could find wearing a badge.
Police say Long, 29, of Kansas City, Missouri, brazenly prowled a crime scene of hundreds of yards around a cluster of nondescript buildings along a busy highway, rifle pointed straight ahead as he sought targets.
And they say he shot to kill.
'It is chilling in the sheer brutality,' Louisiana State Police Col. Mike Edmonson said Monday, describing surveillance videos that recorded Long as he gunned down three law enforcement officers Sunday and wounded three more before he was shot and killed.
'These officers were intentionally targeted and assassinated. It was a calculated act.'
Two of the slain officers were from the Baton Rouge Police Department: 32-year-old Montrell Jackson and 41-year-old Matthew Gerald. The third was a deputy with the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office, 45-year-old Brad Garafola.
Officials provided the first detailed accounts of the shooting scene Monday, using a map to describe the chaotic shootout with Long.
Baton Rouge Police Chief Carl Dabadie wouldn't say who was shot at which location, and he hasn't named his wounded officer.
Fellow deputies are asking for prayers as Tullier (right) fights for his life in intensive care, where he needs a machine to help him breathe
Carrying two rifles and a pistol, Long parked his car near a beauty supply store mid-morning. Gun raised and faced partially covered with a ski mask, he approached a parked police car at the gas station and convenience store next door only to find the unit empty.
Authorities believe the first 911 call came in, reporting a 'dude with a rifle,' as he returned to his car.
Undeterred, Long located another possible target at a nearby car wash. But again he was thwarted. Edmonson said by the time the former Marine parked his car, the officer there had driven away.
Tullier's vitals have gone up and down as he fights through head trauma
He wasn't interested in anyone without a badge, officials said.
'Other people, he totally ignored them. He acted like they weren't even there,' Gautreaux said.
Long stalked the area, searching, as more 911 calls poured in and officers arrived.
Turning the front corner of the beauty supply store, the gunman spotted his first marks: two Baton Rouge police officers. Without hesitation, Long shot both, Gautreaux said, leaving one dead and the second crawling toward the back of store.
Garafola, taking cover behind a dumpster at the store with his gun drawn, tried to rescue his wounded fellow officer only to run face-to-face into Long. The shooter took aim at Garafola, killing him in a hail of gunfire. Video shows bullets hitting the concrete around him, Gautreaux said.
'My deputy went down fighting. He returned fire until the very end,' the sheriff said.
Long then noticed the wounded city police officer on the ground and took two close-range shots, Gautreaux said.
With three officers dead, another city police officer caught Long's attention as he rounded his way back behind the beauty supply store. Long stopped, turned and shot, wounding the officer before heading around back, jumping a wall and running past the convenience store and the car wash.
Long found Tullier there, firing into the deputy's car before before exchanging gunfire with Deputy Bruce Simmons, 57.
Simmons went down with a shot to the shoulder that required a titanium rod to replace an arm bone shattered by the gunman's bullet.
Before Long could get any nearer, a shot rang out from over a hundred years away, as an officer with the city police SWAT unit took down the gunman with the sort of textbook maneuver officers learn in their tactical training. Dabadie called it 'a helluva shot.'
Authorities say without that shot, they believe Long would have continued the killing spree, possibly driving a short distance down the highway to the Baton Rouge police headquarters.
'This guy was going to another location. He was not going to stop here,' Dabadie said pointing to a map laying out the scene of the carnage.
'After he was finished here, I have no doubt he was heading to our headquarters and he was going to take more lives.'
For the first time in 60 years a World War II-era bomber took a brief flight in Wichita, Kansas.
The Boeing B-29 Superfortress 'Doc' eased into the air Sunday morning while hundreds of restoration volunteers and public officials cheered from the ground.
Volunteers spent 16 years restoring the Wichita-built aircraft and put in more than 350,000 hours, according to The Wichita Eagle.
For the first time in 60 years a World War II-era bomber aircraft (pictured) took a brief flight over Wichita, Kansas. The Boeing B-29 Superfortress, called Doc, eased into the air Sunday morning while hundreds of restoration volunteers and public officials cheered from the ground
Volunteers spent 16 years restoring the Wichita-built aircraft and put in more than 350,000 hours. Some volunteers were people who worked on the original B-29 production line in Wichita or were B-29 crew members
Doc served in a squadron named Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs from 1945 until 1956. The bomber lifted off from a McConnell Air Force Base runway around 9am on Sunday and stayed airborne for about seven minutes before safely landing
Some volunteers were people who worked on the original B-29 production line in Wichita or were B-29 crew members.
The bomber lifted off from the McConnell Air Force Base around 9am on Sunday and stayed in the air for about seven minutes before crews were forced to land.
An engine information sensor turned on mid-flight and the flight crew had to cut the historic flight short, according the Eagle.
Jim Murphy, restoration program manager for Doc's Friends, the nonprofit group that owns the bomber told the Eagle that they were 'real pleased with the flight' and consider it a 'big success'.
Murphy and T J Norman, a volunteer and flight crew member, said the sensor that turned on is likely not a setback to future flights.
'We're 99 per cent sure it's a very simple fix,' said Norman.
He said the crew found that a couple of times 'it was just a tiny piece of fuzz' that caused the sensor light to go off.
Murphy said he expects Doc's next flight to occur after the Experimental Aircraft Association's AirVenture show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, which takes place the last week of July.
And though Doc's flight was brief, that didn't stop a crowd of several hundred people from cheering.
Onlookers included public officials Mayor Jeff Longwell and US Rep Mike Pompeo
The aircraft's next flight is expected to occur after the Experimental Aircraft Association's AirVenture show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, which takes place the last week of July
Connie Palacioz (left) , who was part of the restoration project, said she worked on the B-29 production line in 1943. She said she 'never thought I could see it like this'. When volunteers received the aircraft it was in pieces after being used as a bombing target in California. Flight engineer, John Schauer is pictured right
The B-29 is known as the bomber type that dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ended World War II in the Pacific
Charlie Tilghman, Doc's pilot in command, told the Eagle that the plane 'flew like a good B-29'.
'The airplane is going to be great,' he said in a later interview. 'The engines are strong and smooth. Just the darn warning light.'
Connie Palacioz , who was part of the restoration project, told the newspaper that she worked on the B-29 production line in 1943.
'I never thought I could see it like this, you know. It was just pieces, but lucky that we could do it. We did it.'
During World War II the Boeing Wichita plant manufactured 1,644 of the bombers.
And the B-29 is known as the bomber type that dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ended World War II in the Pacific.
Doc served in a squadron named Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs from 1945 until 1956.
Tony Mazzolini, a former flight engineer who had been searching for a World War II plane to restore, discovered Doc in 1987.
He got the airplane from the Navy and brought it to Wichita for restoration.
Mazzolini was aboard the warbird during the flight. He said the crew told him not to worry 'we'll make sure it flies before you reach the end of the runway'.
A hospital registrar wrote trust me, Im a doctor as he trawled internet chatrooms to groom underage girls for sex, it was claimed yesterday.
NHS stomach specialist Dr Khaled Zachariah, 41, of Cheltenham, called himself TummyDoctor on social media, it was alleged.
He told one girl: I would love to get you on the right path, the one that leads to my bed.
Self-described 'TummyDoctor' Dr Khaled Zachariah, 41, allegedly targeted teenage girls in online chatrooms
Dr Zachariah posted a string of messages referring to slow lovemaking all weekend. He added: It is a turn-on to teach you everything; trust me, Im a doctor.
Police trapped him after officers posed online as a 13-year-old girl as he tried to fix up an illicit rendezvous at a luxury hotel, a medical tribunal was told.
The father-of-two also promised the girl he would be gentle, the panel was told.
In one of his exchanges in online chatrooms, Dr Zachariah referred to jailed teacher Jeremy Forrest who eloped to France with a 15-year-old girl.
Gloucester Royal Hospital said it no longer employed Dr Zachariah
He said: I am three times your age lol [laugh out loud]. Society makes it illegal but nature takes its course. I wont joke about this to anyone. I could go to jail.
You seen what that teacher done with the 15 yr old and took her to France. And where is he now. Another post read: You are single, cute and inexperienced. I would love to get you on the right path, the one that leads to my bed. Your first time is better with an expert.
Dr Zachariah, who has a son, 12, and a younger daughter, was arrested in 2013 but he was not charged, although police told his bosses at Gloucester Royal Hospital.
Dr Zachariah posted a string of messages referring to slow lovemaking all weekend with one girl
An inquiry was held by the General Medical Council and details of the messages emerged at a disciplinary tribunal.
It heard that detectives from Greater Manchester Police came across the name TummyDoctor in 2012 while investigating the online grooming of children.
They created the persona SweetSam13, a 13-year-old living in Bolton. During their first conversation, Dr Zachariah said: I usually dont chat up underage girls, so you are 13? When the reply was yes, he added: I am a doctor, I wont try to seduce you but if you are ready then I might.
Rachel Smith, for the GMC, said Dr Zachariah asked for confirmation that she was 13 and told her he was 35. The doctor and the girl exchanged contact details and he communicated as Medic69 on nine occasions.
Dr Zachariah, who has a son, 12, and a younger daughter, was arrested in 2013 but he was not charged, although police told his bosses at Gloucester Royal Hospital
He asked her to send him a photograph of herself and said he would drive fast to meet her, said Miss Smith.
She said Dr Zachariah referred to wanting to be her first sexual partner. Dr Zachariah offered to come to Manc, book a nice luxury hotel if we agree that we both fancy meeting up and exploring with slow lovemaking all weekend.
He also told her I want to sleep with you, the panel was told.
Dr Zachariah spoke by phone to an officer posing as the girl, arranging to meet at a pub and then go to a hotel, said Miss Smith.
But the hearing was told the conversations later appeared to get shorter and Dr Zachariah said he would not be able to meet up, adding that they wouldnt be able to be together properly for another three years.
In a statement, Dr Zachariah claimed he had been engaging in online sexual fantasies. He admits posting the messages but denies engaging in online chats with an individual he believed was a 13-year-old girl.
Gloucestershire Police said a file was given to the CPS but no action was taken against the doctor.
Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said it no longer employed Dr Zachariah.
Veterans' Affairs Minister Dan Tehan said it was a battle of mass slaughter
It resulted in more than 5500 Australian
More than 2000 Australians have gathered in a small French village on a hot summer's day to mark the centenary of the worst day in Australian military history.
They joined French locals and dignitaries at the Pheasant Wood War Cemetery at Fromelles on Tuesday to commemorate the 14-hour battle on July 19-20, 1916.
In the first major engagement by Australians on the Western Front, the 5th Division was torn apart by German shelling and machine-gun fire in a disastrous assault on well-prepared German lines.
More than 2000 Australians gathered at the Pheasant Wood War Cemetery in Fromelles in France on Tuesday to mark the centenary of the worst day in Australian military history
The Battle of Fromelles resulted in more than 5500 Australian casualties, including more than 1900 dead
Thousands of embroidered remembrance poppies were placed at the Cobber's statue near Fromelles
The 2000 Australians joined French locals and dignitaries at the Pheasant Wood War Cemetery at Fromelles on Tuesday to commemorate the 14-hour battle on July 19-20, 1916
More than 1900 diggers were killed and another 3000 injured during the Battle of Fromelles as the Australians were repulsed in action meant to draw German reserves away from the Somme where the British had launched a major offensive.
Tight security was in place at Fromelles on Tuesday, with more than 100 gendarmes on guard and airport-style security in place in the wake of the Paris and Nice terror attacks.
Veterans' Affairs Minister Dan Tehan told the service that Fromelles was a battle of 'mass slaughter and mass grief'.
'The industrial scale of the killing, the machines and weapons that swept away life created limited time for recognition, recovery or even burial.
Tight security was in place at Fromelles on Tuesday, with more than 100 gendarmes on guard and airport-style security in place in the wake of the Paris and Nice terror attacks
An Australian army bugler played the Last Post - an army call that gave notice of the hour of retiring at night
A French flag was flown at half-mast, a symbol of respect for the fallen soldiers from Fromelles - a battle described as 'mass slaughter and mass grief'
'Fromelles became the place where Australia first realised the full force and horror of industrialised warfare,' Mr Tehan said.
'The grief and uncertainty of families with no plots for their loved ones was immense, pieces of their lives could never be fully recovered.'
Mr Tehan said 16,900 Australians remain unaccounted for from the fighting on the Western Front.
'It is our duty to honour their duty... they are unknown but not remembered any less.'
Corporal David Frederick Livingston from 29th Battalion (left) and Private Glynn Rupert Hitzeroth of Melbourne (right) were two of the Australian soldiers buried in mass graves at Fromelles in 1916
Private Alfred John McEwan of North Gippsland in Victoria was killed in action on July 19, 1916 during the battle at Fromelles, France, while serving with the 60th Battalion
The bodies of Private Percy Baker of Colac in Victoria (left) and Private John Thomas Borneman of Mincha East in Victoria (right) were among those exhumed and given proper burials
About 16,900 Australians remain unaccounted for from the fighting on the Western Front
BATTLE OF FROMELLES The battle of Fromelles, a small village in northern France, lasted just 14 hours on July 19-20, 1916. It was the first major engagement by Australians on the Western Front They were tasked with distracting the German forces, who were battling the French and the British in the country's south But they were vastly outpowered by a well-prepared German frontline One commander described the action a 'tactical abortion', which made no gain 1900 diggers were torn apart by German shelling and machine-gun fire, while a further 3000 were injured Advertisement
Mr Tehan thanked the French people and particularly the people of Fromelles for the respect they continued to show to the Australian fallen.
The temperature during the midday service was well into the 30s Celsius and several people overcome by the heat as they sat on the temporary stands required assistance from paramedics.
At the end of the service, six new headstones were unveiled on the graves of previously unnamed Australian soldiers who were killed at Fromelles and whose remains have recently been identified.
They included a linesman and father of two from Bundaberg, a quarryman from Sydney, a bread carter from Geelong, a Queensland miner, a Sydney barman and a South Australian labourer.
At the end of the service, six new headstones were unveiled on the graves of previously unnamed Australian soldiers who were killed at Fromelles and whose remains have recently been identified
New headstones included a linesman and father of two from Bundaberg, a quarryman from Sydney, a bread carter from Geelong, a Queensland miner, a Sydney barman and a South Australian labourer
Ronda McMorrow from Winmalee, Blue Mountains receives the cover off the newly unveiled headstone of her uncle, Private William Burke
Gravy train: George Osborne's name has popped up on the All American Speakers agency roster
George Osborne was the biggest casualty of last weeks Cabinet reshuffle. The former Chancellor was hoping for, if not expecting, the consolation prize of Foreign Secretary.
But after six years presiding over the Exchequer, he was brutally sacked by Theresa May and consigned to the backbenches, where his salary was reduced overnight from 134,500 per annum to 74,962.
So its perhaps no surprise to learn that he has wasted no time in getting on the lucrative speakers circuit his name has just popped up on the roster of luminaries at the All American Speakers agency. It seems the architect of Project Fear wont fare too badly in this post-Brexit world despite all his doom-mongering.
His fellow speakers at the agency include Larry Page, CEO of Google, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, American Vogue editor Anna Wintour and actor Stephen Fry, who all command top fees of at least 76,000 ($100,000).
Former Chancellors of the Exchequer vary in price on the open market depending on their perceived success, so George, 45, might have to be content to bracket himself with recently ennobled Tory peer and lingerie queen Michelle Mone aka Baroness Bra who offers her services for a lesser fee of 38,000 ($50,000).
The agency says it has still to determine his fee. He is not listed [at a set price], as it is done on a case-by-case basis, says Sydney Marshall, account co-ordinator for All American Speakers.
Will there be great demand for the Chancellor across the pond? Im not sure, she says. This is the first time Ive received an inquiry.
Osborne has an estimated personal fortune of 4 million, as the beneficiary of a trust fund that owns a stake in Osborne & Little, the wallpaper and fabrics company co-founded by his father, Sir Peter Osborne.
He released a summary of his tax return for last year in April showing he earned almost 200,000 by topping up his Chancellors salary with 33,000 from renting out his family home in Notting Hill and 45,000 in dividends from his familys wallpaper firm.
Mrs May's new chief shares her taste in heels
Theresa Mays taste for fancy footwear is no secret, but is her new joint chief of staff already giving her a run for her money?
The fiercely loyal Fiona Hill, who was appointed to the role alongside Nick Timothy last week, arrived at No 10 two days in a row wearing shoes that would no doubt impress the Prime Minister.
On Monday, Fiona Hill turned up in a pair of J Crew navy-and-white polka dot heels worth 278 (right), before upping the style stakes yesterday in a flashy pair of navy patent block heels (left), which cost 195
Flash: Fiona Hill in patent Russell & Bromley heels yesterday (left) and navy polka dots on Monday (right)
On Monday, Fiona turned up in a pair of J Crew navy-and-white polka dot heels worth 278, before upping the style stakes yesterday by arriving in a flashy pair of navy patent block heels from Theresas favourite, Russell & Bromley, which cost 195.
Mays own career picked up in 2002 when she terrorised delegates at that years Tory conference by addressing them in Russell & Bromley leopard-print kitten heels.
Perhaps Fiona could borrow one of Theresas many discount cards when she buys her next pair of shoes from the High Street store.
BBC bosses' 1m car perk
BBC News boss James Harding said last week he would have to make significant budget cuts, but Corporation chiefs continue to enjoy enviable perks.
TAMZIN OUTHWAITE'S NUDE SCENE New Tricks star Tamzin Outhwaite has performed a most embarrassing nude scene. Recently in my dressing room I was completely naked with the curtains open, she reveals. Id forgotten it was the middle of the day and looked across to see people in their offices looking at me. Advertisement
I hear that bosses are still receiving more than 1 million a year in car allowances, despite a pledge to axe the perk several years ago.
The Beeb pays the allowance to 216 senior employees, working out as an average 5,425 per head each year.
Bosses say they ended the perk for new senior managers in 2012 and have slashed the amount paid out from a high of almost 3 million five years ago.
A BBC spokesman said: During the financial year to March 31, 1.17 million was paid in car allowances to 216 individuals. The total reduced by 30 per cent from the previous year.
Going Underground: 3bn Sheikh takes Tube
Hes worth 3 billion, but His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, vice-president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and ruler of Dubai, shows he can rub shoulders with lesser mortals.
Slumming it: His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum (pictured left), vice-president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and ruler of Dubai, took the London Underground (far right)
The Sheikh, who was dressed casually, took the London Underground with his son Sheikh Hamdan Bin Mohammed, the Crown Prince of Dubai (far left).
It was clearly a novel experience as during the ride, the prince took a selfie with his father and uploaded it to social media. Perhaps the pair were amazed they managed to get a seat.
Showing off again, Lady Weymouth?
Starring in a BBC series about the running of Longleat has clearly turned the head of Viscountess Weymouth.
It seems she cant get enough of herself and now regularly posts pictures of her escapades.
Starring in a BBC series about the running of Longleat has clearly turned the head of Viscountess Weymouth. She shared this photo, posing in a white bikini on a yacht alongside Made In Chelsea star Mark Francis Vandelli
The 30-year-old, whose husband Ceawlin Thynn took over the running of the safari park and the house from his father, Lord Bath, shared this photo, posing in a white bikini on a yacht off the south coast of France alongside Made In Chelsea star Mark Francis Vandelli, who only has eyes for the horizon.
While her husband was on board, there was no sign of their 21-month-old son, John. Presumably he needed a holiday from his publicity-seeking parents.
Lady Stowell, sacked as Leader of the Lords in Theresa Mays reshuffle, has left a cherished gift for her successor, Baroness Evans.
Shadow Leader Angela Smith recalled how Lady Stowell once explained a change to marriage laws to peers using the Hollywood heart-throb George Clooney as an illustrative guide.
The wit and careful thought she brought to that debate helped us all better appreciate the details, Baroness Smith said in tribute.
George Clooney has since married, but I am told the life-size cut-out that once graced her office is still around.
Stowells explication remains unsurpassable: If the noble lord, Lord Alli, was to marry Mr Clooney, and Mr Clooney was to have an affair with me and who would blame him in those circumstances? that would be adultery and the noble lord would be able to divorce Mr Clooney on those grounds.
Potential suitors of Carol Vorderman should be warned shes a fan of the finer things in life apart from original chat-up lines, that is.
The currently single presenter trills that her favourite naughty treat is a third bottle of champagne and its always Bollinger!
But the former Countdown presenter, 55, is not so fussy about the opening gambits men use to try to win her heart. There are so many, she laughs.
A street drag race between a man and a woman has ended in a horrific crash after their cars collided while travelling at 100km/h.
Police say the pair are lucky to be alive after the 26-year-old man's white Chrysler sedan hit the back of the 25-year-old woman's white Toyota sedan in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
Her car fishtailed before smashing into a tree and power pole about 3.10am on Plumpton Avenue in Glenroy, in Melbourne's north.
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A street drag race between a man and a woman has ended in a horrific crash after their cars collided while travelling at 100km/h. Pictured is the woman's car
Police are investigating if speed was the cause of the crash.
Paramedics were called to the scene and the New South Wales woman was treated for minor injuries before she was taken to The Royal Melbourne Hospital.
She is in a stable condition, a Victoria Ambulance spokesman told Daily Mail Australia.
A police officer at the scene told 9News the pair were travelling at least 100km/h as they were travelling down the suburban street.
'It's inexcusable the behaviour of the people driving tonight,' the officer said.
'This could have ended very differently if had been a different kind of day or night.'
The man, from Greenvale, was questioned by police at the scene but was released pending further investigation.
Both parties were known to each other and may be charged with traffic-related offences.
Police say the pair are lucky to be alive after the 26-year-old man's white Chrysler sedan hit the back of the 25-year-old woman's white Toyota sedan (pictured) in the early hours of Wednesday morning
A porn star has died after she was allegedly pushed to her death from a first-floor flat.
Aimee Spencer, who also appeared on an episode of reality show Geordie Shore, suffered fatal injuries when she fell from the window of an apartment in Brighton on July 10.
The 27-year-old, who was known by her stage name Carla Mai, was at a drug-fuelled party in the hours before she fell, according to the Sun.
Tragic: Porn star Aimee Spencer (pictured left and right) suffered fatal injuries when she fell from the window of a Brighton apartment
Star: The model (left) appeared on an episode of Geordie Shore climbing into bed with Vicky Pattison (right)
A 28-year-old man from Brighton was arrested on suspicion of murder following the incident. A woman, also 28, was arrested on suspicion of possession with intent to supply a Class A drug.
Both have been released on bail until September 5.
Police were called to the Brighton address at around 9am on July 11 following reports that a woman had fallen from a first-floor flat.
Miss Spencer, who lived in Brentwood, Essex, was taken to Royal Sussex County Hospital but died on Monday.
In a statement posted on Twitter, Miss Spencer's family paid tribute to a 'beautiful, quirky, one-off daughter, sister and friend'.
It read: 'If Facebook and Twitter comments are anything to go by her legacy she leaves behind are memories for friends and family alike that were lucky enough to share in her fun and enthusiasm for life and the loyalty shown to those she cared about.
Ambitious: The 27-year-old was also proud of her culinary achievements, sharing her dishes on social media
Night out: Miss Spencer, who was known by her stage name Carla Mai, was reportedly at a drug-fuelled party at a seafront flat in Brighton (pictured). A 28-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of murder
'The family thank you for your sympathy and condolences as it gives a little comfort at this hard time.'
Fellow British porn star Rebecca More tweeted: 'I don't know anyone that didn't get on with Aimee, she was a very well liked young lady and really funny with it.'
On Twitter, Daria Spencer wrote: 'I can't believe that my sister has left us. She put up a fantastic fight and I will love her forever. Rip.'
Another tweeter wrote: 'No no no no nooooo. This can't be true surely. I wasn't only talking to her like a week and a half ago. Wow heartbroken.'
Miss Spencer started her porn career in 2010 and had dozens of credits to her name. She also appeared on Babestation TV and worked as a glamour model.
Tribute: Fellow British porn star Rebecca More posted this message on Twitter
But it appeared that a career in cooking might have been in her sights. She spoke proudly on social media about her Level 3 National Diploma qualification.
The model also made an appearance on an episode of Geordie Shore, climbing into bed with Vicky Pattison after being invited back to the cast's villa in Magaluf.
A Sussex Police spokesman said: 'The 27-year-old woman who fell from a window of a Brighton flat has sadly died from her injuries at the Royal Sussex County Hospital on Monday July 18.
'The woman had been in a critical condition since she was discovered having fallen from the first-floor flat window in Chichester Terrace on Monday July 11 at 9.08am.
'His family doesn't like Trump. His wife in particular,' said Republican who knows him well
The possible 2020 presidential candidate lasted longer than any of Trump's other challengers but unlike Ted Cruz hasn't endorsed him
Kasich is delivering a snub, some say revenge, in his own way by skirting around the convention
Kasich isn't setting foot inside the huge arena where Trump is being nominated as the head of the GOP - which is just a mile away
Ohio delegates and backers of John Kasich packed the Rock and Roll Hall of fame to celebrate the Ohio governor in the midst of Trump's coronation
It was the the party that Donald Trump was branded too uncool to be invited to be to even at his own political convention.
About two thousand powerful Ohio Republicans gathered at Cleveland's storied Rock and Roll Hall of fame and delivered the ultimate snub to the man widely seen as persona non grata.
The most powerful Republican in the state, Governor John Kasich, threw the bash for a group he called 'friends': fellow party elder statesman, delegates, party workers and the future stars of the Grand Old Party.
One senior Republican said there was an obvious reason why Trump wasn't at the Kasich party, which was less than a mile from the convention venue.
'His family doesn't like Trump and his wife in particular, and John is very stubborn,' said one longtime Republican who knows Kasich well.
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Pointed snub: John Kasich and his wife Karen as the couple arrived at the The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland for a party which was a pointed public snub to Donald Trump
'Friends': Kasich delivered a speech without mentioning Donald Trump's name but spoke to people he called his 'friends'. The Quicken Loans Arena is a mile away but he shows no signs of going near it
Ohio Governor John Kasich hosted a big party for his faithful just steps from Trump's convention
WHAT A WEINER: Attendees of Kasich's celebratory party blasted Trump for his 'amateur' campaign
Kasich, the Ohio governor, rode up an escalator at the rock museum to live music, waving, smiling and clapping in return at his party faithful a visual reminder of the Trump Tower escalator that Trump himself rode down when making his announcement to seek the presidency.
If Donald Trump coldly challenges the heart of the GOP, this was the moment that Kasich, who was defeated by Trump for the presidential nomination got even.
It was an oblique snub to The Donald, and some delegates openly declared that they would rather see Democrat Hillary Clinton waving from the White House as she entered as President next January over the billionaire businessman.
'We hear a lot about negative and division and polarization,' Kasich said. 'Let me tell you. Ive never been more satisfied professionally.
'We left the race abruptly. And the reason why we did is that I became convinced, that in one way or another, to go forward I would have to tell people things that I didnt think were true.'
What was most significant about the speech was the lack of any mention of Trump.
The Rock and Roll party took place a mile from the Quicken Loans Arena, and drew party big shots including Senator Rob Portman - whose seat many attendees fretted was endangered by Trump's candidacy.
One lifelong Republican, lawyer Victoria Ferrise, 32, said: 'Donald Trump has said so many offensive things like things about Muslims and has even spoken about his anatomy on the stage and that has all been too much.
'He doesn't have the moral fiber to represent the Republican party and I would rather see Hillary Clinton as President than him.
'It is difficult to say that, but that is how I feel. She is safe pair of hands and has been First Lady with lots of experience. She will see things through and I cannot trust Trump after all he has said and done.
'Nobody here is for Trump. In this room right now, nobody is for Trump,' said Andy Bowers, an Ohio lawyer and lobbyist who described himself as an 'honorary delegate' and joked that he 'paid a bunch of money for the privilege of coming to the convention.'
'I wouldn't be surprised if half the people here write [Kasich's name] in in November.
VOODOO POLITICS: Andy Bowers said 'nobody here is for Trump'
UP ESCALATOR: Kasich rode up the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's escalator along with his wife Karen to get a rousing welcome from his own supporters in a bit of stagecraft that mimicked Trump's own downward escalator launch of his political campaign
Discontent: Lifelong Republican lawyer, Victoria Ferrise, 32, said: 'Donald Trump has said so many offensive things like things about Muslims and has even spoken about his anatomy on the stage and that has all been too much.'
Nothing Make America Great Again: Partygoers got a gift bag without anything associated with Donald Trump
Asked about any Trump outreach to try to woo Kasich and his more centrist Republicans, Bowers replied, 'What outreach? His campaign is absolutely amateur hour.
He mentioned charges that Melania Trump's speech contained material lifted from Michelle Obama's 2008 speech.
'That is the kind of thing that a state representative does - it isn't the kind of thing -- you're running for president!' he said. With Trump, it's 'one thing after another,' he said. 'He contradicts himself sometimes in the same sentence.'
Not all of Kasich's backers backed his posture which some called an obvious move to position his campaign for president in 2020.
'I'm sort of disappointed in him actually,' said Sally Florkiewicz, whose mom is a delegate from powerful Cuyahoga County in Ohio and who teaches school in Chagrin Falls. 'I think he's posturing for the next election,' chimed in her brother-in-law, Jay Dickinson.
Mark Sanford, former South Carolina Governor, made apologies for his former House colleague as he walked into his hotel.
He told Mail Online: 'He's busy. He is a sitting Governor.'
If it's true that Karen Kasich doesn't like Trump, the family strife may be mutual. Ivanka Trump said Monday, regarding people like Kasich and the Bushes who are skipping the convention, 'That's their choice if they don't want to be part of the narrative, if they don't want to be part of the future,' she told ABC.
Kasich later tweeted, 'Great event.'
Sensitivity was such that Kasich invited reporters to watch him speak, but staff kicked them out afterwards although Daily Mail Online managed to dodge the curfew.
LUCKY STAR: Teacher Sally Florkiewicz is 'disappointed' that Kasich won't show his face at the Trump convention
PARTY GUEST: Mark Sandford, the former South Carolina governor, told Daily Mail Online that Kasich was a 'busy governor' as he tried to explain why he wasn't at the RNC
Those who did get an invite were treated to endless drinks, music by a live band and snacks including cheese on sticks and grilled tuna on bread.
Kasich's name was on the walls, but there were none mentioning Trump at the venue on the shores of Lake Erie.
Kasich was the last candidate standing after a brutal primary where Trump bowed through 16 other Republicans.
Although they clashed at times, there was talk that Trump might want Kasich as his running mate, in part as a way to carry Ohio, a state Republicans have great difficulty winning the presidency without.
But any chance of reconciliation died after Kasich withdrew from the race but bashed Trump in interviews and refused to give an endorsement.
As the convention grew closer, Kasich made clear he would attend events on the periphery of the convention - but had no intention of participating or serve any kind of a formal role.
Earlier Tuesday, Kasich was just a few blocks away from from the convention participating in a forum on globalism. 'The easiest thing to say is shut down the trade,' Kasich said in a slap at Trump's trade agenda.
Millions of patients face being dropped by their GP for being too healthy.
They will be axed if they have not seen a doctor in five years and fail to respond to two written warnings.
The measure is aimed at freeing up space on surgery lists as well as saving public money.
In some areas patients are being written off after just a year.
NHS bosses say cash is being wasted paying GPs for ghost patients who have either died or moved away.
But MPs and campaigners say the crackdown will penalise patients who avoid making a fuss, especially middle-aged men and the elderly.
Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, whose department has defended the moves because cash is being wasted paying GPs for ghost patients who have either died or moved away
Those who have been removed will have to visit their surgery to re-register providing proof of address and identity.
On top of the hassle, they face waits of up to three weeks for an appointment.
This is an outrageous practice which undermines the principle that people have a right to be registered with a GP, said Norman Lamb, the LibDem health spokesman.
It will hit some of the most vulnerable people in our communities, including many who suffer from mental ill health. It should be abandoned forthwith.
Katherine Murphy of the Patients Association said the scheme took NHS rights away from people who are fit, healthy and have not needed to seek medical advice for a while.
She added: Some patients might struggle to understand or get confused as to why they are being asked to confirm their details and others could simply overlook it.
She also warned patients would be removed in error and find they couldnt make an appointment when they urgently needed one.
Caroline Abrahams, Age UKs charity director, said: Every precaution must be taken to ensure that vulnerable older people are not removed from lists inappropriately, especially as we know that there are older people who will struggle to answer a written request.
Uncovered by Pulse magazine, the list-cleansing drive is being spearheaded by NHS England rather than GPs.
AXED BY SURGERY AFTER 95 YEARS AS A PATIENT Lily Dove, 95, who has been asked to leave her doctor surgery in Watton, Norfolk to make way for the new influx of people to the area A woman of 95 was among hundreds of patients dropped from a GP practices register when it became overwhelmed by people moving into the area. Great-grandmother Lily Dove had used the surgery in Watton, near Norwich, for so long that she could remember when the doctor would visit on a horse and trap. But she was one of 1,500 people removed from the practices list in 2014 as it struggled to recruit enough GPs to cope with the towns growing population, many of them from Eastern Europe. Mrs Dove, now 97, spoke at the time of her shock at being told she would be deregistered within a fortnight and would have to move to a different clinic. Ive been with the Watton surgery all my life, as were my parents before me. This letter from the surgery just came out of the blue, she said. There was no question of discussing it with you. The Watton practices decision to strike off some patients was taken by local managers in response to the huge pressures on the service in the area. Advertisement
The agency has hired a private firm, Capita, to oversee the project. All surgeries will have to produce a list of patients who have not made contact for five years.
They will all be sent a maximum of two warning notices asking them to confirm they want to remain on the register.
Experts questioned how the NHS would save money by spending millions of pounds hiring a private firm.
The project is part of a 400million contract for Capita to oversee GP administration.
Health officials are worried that up to 160million a year goes to doctors for ghost patients.
Surgeries receive an average of 136 a year for each patient regardless of how often they make an appointment or need routine screening.
Norman Lamb, a Liberal Democrat MP, has described the scheme as 'outrageous' and breaches the right to be registered with a GP
The de-listing scheme started in East Anglia in March and it is now being rolled out nationally after proving highly effective at saving money. NHS managers elsewhere in the country have already begun striking patients off lists under their own initiatives.
A scheme in Devon last year saw about 1 per cent of patients around 11,000 removed.
Meanwhile, in North and West London NHS managers have begun removing patients if they have not made contact in the past year, including women who failed to attend a smear test.
Robert Morley, of the British Medical Associations GP committee, said: Patients have a right to be registered unless they move or register elsewhere, even if they dont need to or choose not to access services.
NHS England should abandon this exercise, which will have the inevitable consequences of disruption for patients and a reduction of core funding, disproportionately impacting the most vulnerable practices.
David Wrigley, a Lancashire GP and member of the campaign group Keep Our NHS Public, said: This is a cynical attempt to reduce funding to general practice at a time when GPs have already suffered huge budget cuts.
Surgeries are struggling to cope with the rising levels of immigration, an ageing population and a professional recruitment crisis.
Growing numbers of family doctors are retiring and not being replaced by younger trainees who instead choose to work in hospitals.
An NHS England spokesman said: The National Audit Office and House of Commons public accounts committee have all drawn attention to the need to ensure accurate patient lists, and for proper stewardship of public funds.
Fresh fears surfaced over the 24billion takeover of tech giant ARM as it emerged its boss oversaw the sale of another British firm to the Japanese.
Stuart Chambers, chairman of ARM Holdings, was chief executive of UK glassmaker Pilkington when it was bought by a Japanese rival a decade ago.
He announced on Monday that ARM is in talks to be taken over by conglomerate SoftBank, owned by Japans second richest man, Masayoshi Son.
Masayoshi Son, chief executive of Japanese mobile giant SoftBank, and Stuart Chambers, Chairman of British chip designer company ARM Holdings, leave 11 Downing Street in central London yesterday after a meeting with Chancellor Philip Hammond
If successful, the deal will see the board members of ARM, including Mr Chambers, share in a 35million payday.
Mr Chambers, 60, who lives in a five-bedroom 1.2million house near Macclesfield with his wife Nicolette, is set to make 680,000. ARM chief executive Simon Segars will get 11.4million and co-founder Mike Muller, who is in charge of the firms technology, will make 22.7million.
The proposed takeover has sparked heated debate over whether a foreign firm should be allowed to buy a British technology giant.
While largely unknown to consumers, ARM is a shining light in the industry, supplying billions of micro-chips for iPhones and Samsung mobile devices.
NO WONDER THEY BACK THE TAKEOVER! Stuart Chambers Stuart Chambers, chairman, will make 680,000 Mr Chambers, 60, was sailing close to Turkey on his 500,000 yacht with his wife Nicolette, 56, and their family when the call came from Japan to strike a deal for ARM. The same eight-berth, three-cabin 65ft vessel hit the news five years ago when Mr and Mrs Chambers saved the lives of 11 Pakistani refugees fleeing Libya, after coming across them on a sinking boat. The couple, who have three children, live in a five-bedroom, three-bathroom 1.2million property in the Cheshire village of Chelford. Simon Segars Simon Segars, Chief executive, 11million ARMs 48-year-old chief executive lives with his wife Rachel in the village of Fulbourn, near Cambridge, where the company has its global headquarters. The couple bought their detached home for just 125,000 more than 15 years ago. Today they have no mortgage on the property, which is worth 1.25million. Mr Segars studied electronic engineering at Sussex University before completing an MSc at Manchester University. He joined ARM in 1991 and became CEO in 2013. Mike Muller Mike Muller, Chief technology officer, 22.7million Mr Muller, 57, is set to gain the most from the sale of ARM with a multimillion-pound windfall. A co-founder of ARM Holdings, he has been the firms chief technology officer since October 2000 and joined the board of directors in 2001. Mr Muller also lives in Cambridge in a property he co-owns with the historian and lecturer Tamsin Wimhurst, 50. The couple bought their four-bedroom home in 1997. The property has no mortgage and is currently worth in excess of 1.25million. Chris Kennedy Chris Kennedy, Chief financial officer 344,352 Mr Kennedy, 52, joined ARM only in January 2015, having previously worked for high profile budget airline easyJet as their chief financial officer since 2010. He owns an imposing five-bedroom townhouse in Chiswick, in west London, which he bought ten years ago for a little over 2million. He jointly owns the property, now thought to be worth around 4.5million, with his 48-year-old wife Anne. Advertisement
The deal was struck while father-of-three Mr Chambers was on a sailing holiday with his family in Turkey.
Billionaire Mr Son phoned him and persuaded him to meet at the marina resort of Marmaris.
Mr Son jetted in from Japan and Mr Segars flew in from California. As the row over the ARM takeover grew:
Chancellor Philip Hammond promised the Government had hard guarantees about the future of jobs at the company;
ARM was revealed to be one of Britains top five inventors, filing more patents than defence giant BAE or Dyson;
SoftBank shares in Japan fell 10 per cent over fears it has 76billion of debt;
More critics warned the takeover could be harmful to the British economy.
Mr Chambers was chief of UK glassmaker Pilkington when it was bought by a Japanese rival a decade ago
The takeover has been viewed in some quarters as a post-Brexit boost showing that overseas firms are willing to bet on the UK economy.
To win over sceptics both firms have agreed ARMs headquarters will stay in Cambridge, nicknamed Silicon Fen for its cluster of tech firms. SoftBank has also vowed to create 1,500 jobs.
But similar reassurances about job safety were made when Mr Chambers agreed the sale of 180-year-old Pilkington Glass in 2006.
The glassmaker had a proud history in St Helens, Merseyside, until it was bought by Nippon Sheet Glass in a deal worth 2billion with the promise of no job losses.
But within 15 months of the deal going through, Mr Chambers had quit as chief executive because he could not cope with the Japanese working culture.
A year later, 300 jobs at Pilkington were slashed and hundreds more pencilled in as part of a 150million cost-cutting plan.
In 2012, a further 150 employees were axed, with 140 more jobs lost the following year when a factory in St Helens was shut down.
The fate of Pilkington has led to fears that the takeover of ARM could lead to a similar result. There is no legal obligation to stick to promises made during takeover deals.
David Green, of think-tank Civitas, said: The Pilkington case is a warning. It was one of our leading companies and had been for years.
If its easy to extract the knowhow from a company within a couple of years its potentially harmful for the British economy. Companies shouldnt be able to give assurances of these kind that they can abandon when the going gets tough.
The commitments that have been made should be as binding as possible and I would like to see the Government try to do that using its limited powers, and look to strengthen those powers going forward.
British Finance Minister Philip Hammond greets Stuart Chambers, Chairman of British chip designer company ARM Holdings, outside 11 Downing street yesterday
Mr Hammond yesterday denied acting hastily in backing the Japanese takeover.
He met Mr Son on Monday and trumpeted the deal, saying it proved Britain has lost none of its allure to international investors since last months referendum.
The Chancellor insisted he and Prime Minister Theresa May had achieved very hard guarantees from SoftBank, including a pledge to double the number of UK staff over the next five years.
He also suggested Britain could not afford to refuse investments on this scale, given the economys large trade deficit with the rest of the world.
We need to remind ourselves that we are running a 6.9 per cent of GDP external account deficit, and that has to be funded somehow, he told MPs.
It has been funded by an extraordinarily successful run of foreign direct investment into the UK more than into any other country in the European Union.
That has slowed as uncertainty around the referendum has been created. We now need to generate the confidence to allow it to resume.
Meanwhile, an investigation by the Mail has discovered that ARM filed a patent on average every other day last year making it one of the top five creative firms in Britain.
It lodged 185, lagging behind only Rolls-Royce, Jaguar Land Rover and Ford, putting it ahead of high-profile investors such as BAE, Dyson and drugs giant GlaxoSmithKline. Critics of the SoftBank deal have said that Britain would lose the income from these patents if ARM was taken over.
David Buik, a City commentator and analyst at Panmure Gordon, said: Im all for big deals ordinarily but this makes me a little bit sad.
We have no real stocks in the FTSE 100 that are for the future. ARM is potentially a massive international company and they have yet to scratch the surface.
Now that the Japanese have bought the rights to the knowhow behind ARMs ideas it doesnt matter whether they operate in Yokohama or in Cambridge.
Were losing the property of that company. If SoftBank owns the knowledge that comes with ARM they can say whatever they want to Theresa May.
ARM shares were at 1663p last night, after closing on Friday at 1189p.
The failed Tory pledge to cut net migration to the tens of thousands is on the verge of being scrapped, two senior Cabinet ministers suggested yesterday.
New Home Secretary Amber Rudd, who is in charge of Britains borders, twice refused to back the controversial policy.
She said only that the Government was committed to reducing immigration to sustainable levels.
New Home Secretary Amber Rudd, who is in charge of Britains borders, twice refused to back the controversial policy to cut net migration
And Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said he did not believe the Government should have a numerical target at all.
He said it would only lead to ministers disappointing the public when they fail to deliver.
Government insiders insist no decision has been taken on whether to abolish David Camerons target, which has featured in the past two Conservative manifestos.
And, amid confusion in Whitehall, the Prime Ministers official spokesman insisted the commitment remains in place.
Migration Watch chairman Lord Green said: The history of recent years proves that a target is invaluable to achieve the policy focus which the public certainly most want to see.
To abandon it, if that is what is suggested, would be a very serious mistake.
Miss Rudd just six days into her new job was asked by the BBC whether the target to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands still existed. Mr Cameron had staked his reputation on slashing the number people moving to Britain minus those leaving to under 100,000 by the end of the decade. Yet it currently stands at a near-record 333,000.
Miss Rudd told the BBC: What the Prime Minister has said is that we must bring migration down to sustainable levels so thats what is going to be my aim at the moment. Pressed on whether the target had changed, she said: Im going to stick to my comment which is about bringing it down to sustainable levels. That has to be the most important thing for the country.
Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said he did not believe the Government should have a numerical target for migration at all
Mr Johnson, who was a leading Brexit campaigner, responded later: I think the Home Secretary is entirely right to be careful about committing to numbers because one doesnt want to be in a position where you are disappointing people again.
What is certainly possible, post leaving the EU and once we end our obligations under uncontrolled free movement it will be possible to have a system of control.
This is what we were talking about in the referendum campaign. You cant do that immediately, clearly, because we are still in the EU and subject to uncontrolled free movement.
Last night, a No 10 source said: All Boris said was that people have been disappointed by failure to meet numbers. Thats a fact.
And for as long as were a member of the EU, and subject to free movement rules, it will remain a challenge to reduce numbers. Earlier, the PMs official spokesman had insisted that Mrs May remains committed to the manifesto target, although she declined to say whether it would be achieved by 2020.
Today, PM May will fly to Berlin to see Chancellor Angela Merkel with the issue of EU migration and free movement certain to dominate
She said: In the Prime Ministers view sustainable levels does mean the tens of thousands but we should also recognise the work that will be needed to do that.
Today, Mrs May will fly to Berlin to see Chancellor Angela Merkel with the issue of EU migration and free movement certain to dominate.
During the leadership contest, she said she hoped to bring down net migration to sustainable levels, but added that it was impossible to put a timescale on it.
Overall net migration was 333,000 in the year to December, the second highest annual level on record.
Net EU migration taking into account the number of European Union citizens who left the UK was 184,000. This compared with a figure from the rest of the world of 188,000.
Official figures also showed the total number of jobless EU nationals moving to Britain to look for work hit 77,000 last year, another all-time high.
Meanwhile, nearly two million migrants from the EU settled in Britain in just ten years.
Figures from the UK Statistics Authority show 1.95 million EU citizens set up home in Britain between 2004 when Poland and seven other former Soviet Bloc states joined the EU and 2014.
A court in Beijing has sentenced a couple to 15 days in detention after they abandoned their son at a hospital there for three years without paying his medical bills or returning to see him.
The couple claimed they were unable to pay the bills and they were worried about his health, reports the People's Daily Online.
The parents from Inner Mongolia, northern China, took their son who was suffering from congenital heart disease to the hospital for treatment in March 2012.
The parents have been sentenced to 15 days in detention after failing to pick up their son from hospital
The child was left at the hospital in Beijing when he was just 11 months old (File photo)
According to the report, the 11-month-old boy was diagnosed with a congenital heart disease in March 2012 and taken to Fuwai hospital in Beijing for treatment.
He had been relying on breathing machines and after treatment suggested by an expert, he began to breathe on his own.
However when the hospital said he was ready to be discharged, the parents left their boy and returned home to Inner Mongolia.
The boy was left in the hospital.
In June 2015, Beijing Fuwai Hospital took the parents to court to require the couple to go ahead with discharge formalities and pay medical expenses.
The couple appealed however it was dismissed and upheld in November 2015.
The court repeatedly sent the verdict and enforcement notice to the couple but they still haven't been to the hospital to pick up their son.
The judge told the couple in court: 'We are all parents with the obligation to raise their children.
'You left the child in the hospital and did not even see it once.
Now the baby calls hospital nurses 'mother' which causes great harm to the child's frame of mind.
How can you bear to watch your child grow up in a hospital?'
The wife sat in the court apparently hysterical shouting 'Son I am sorry.'
She later told reporters that they were afraid their son would die and they hoped the hospital would guarantee his life.'
The couple said that they had spent all of their savings and returned home in order to make more money for their son's treatment.
The wife said she had only saved 30,000 yuan which is not enough to pay for the cost of his treatment.
Eventually the couple continued to fulfill their obligations and the court detained the couple for 15 days.
Two fishermen from central China are shocked after they reportedly netted a bizarre-looking fish that is described as vicious and carnivorous.
The mysterious creature was caught on July 16 in Wuhan, Hubei Province, and measured seven feet in length and 220 pounds in weight, reported People's Daily Online.
Pictures of the river fish have been widely shared online in China while media are claiming that the species might date back to the age of dinosaurs.
What is it? Zhang Chuanzhou and Zhang Xiaogang caught the fish in Wuhan, China's Hubei Province
Mysterious species: Chinese media are claiming that the species might date back to the age of dinosaurs
According to the report, the fish was caught by two fishermen in part of the Yangtze River at around 8am last Saturday.
The two man have been named Zhang Chuanzhou and Zhang Xiaogang and are father and son.
At first, they thought it was a normal Chinese sturgeon, a critically endangered species native to the area.
It's understood that they soon realised it looked too odd and contacted a local reporter.
An unnamed marine expert told Chinese media that the creature is a hybrid of a Kaluga fish and another unidentified species.
The expert added that the bizarre fish is not native to the area and could have been released to the waters by someone who had purchased it.
The fish has been sent to the local wildlife rehabilitation centre.
Shocked: Pictures of the animal, which is described as vicious and carnivorous, have been widely shared
Hybrid: An expert told reporters that the fish could be a cross between a Kaluga and another unidentified species
Kaluga, which are unique to the Heilongjian Basin in north-east China, are thought to have been around for 130 million years and are among the largest freshwater fish in the world.
An adult Kaluga can weigh more than 1,100 pounds.
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No this isn't a scene from a movie, this is finished version of a Chinese artist's utopia that he spent 20 years creating.
Song Peilun, a former professor turned artist has finally finished his vision of paradise based on colourful minority cultures based in south-west China's Guizhou province, reports the People's Daily Online.
The 76-year-old quit his teaching job in 1996 and used his life savings to buy a 20-hectare plot of land in a mountainous area in Huaxi.
Now that's a homage to culture and history! View of the stone castles built by Song Peilun, a former Chinese professor
Dream come true: Song Peilun spent 20 years building his version of a Chinese utopia after he purchased 200,000 sqaure metres of land
Castles and exotic statues: Song bought the plot of land in 1996 and has since built a community bringing the locals together
Bringing a community together: Many locals worked on the project and were trained into landscape architects by Song
Song Peilun has been studying minority cultures in Guizhou province for years.
He then visited the United States and says he was particularly touched by the paralells between the ethinic minorities in Guizhou and Native Americans.
He decided he wanted to restore that heritage in Huaxi with the aim of creating a community.
So in 1996, he quit his teaching position and spent his lifelong investment to buy a 20-hectare area of land in an isolated mountainous forest area of Huaxi, south west China's Guizhou province.
The artist says he was inspired by the Crazy Horse, a monument dedicated to a Native American warrior in the US state of South Dakota. He realised that he wanted to create something similar in Guizhou.
He approached local villagers selling stones in the area.
Amazing sight in China: Standing tall among the mountains, the statues pay homage to the region's culture and history
Home: Lots of people who worked on the project have houses in wooden cabins situated in trees creating a tight-knit community
Song, 76 is a former professor at a Chinese university with a passion for history and culture along with bringing people together
No this isn't from a movie, this is one man's dream: Song managed to pull a community together and live by old standards
The villagers agreed to help him make blocks.
Song used his expertise and research to train them into landscape architects.
The man had tried building an artist community in another area however it failed. But this time he was determined to succeed.
Even when Song ran out of money for his project, the villagers believed in him so much that they volunteered to contribute.
After two decades, many of the locals now live in wooden houses situated in trees and have become a real community.
Song says many people come to visit their village and see it for themselves.
With expanding growth from nearby cities, the village at one point will be under threat but the man says he would recreate another community for his little utopia to live in.
A view of the castles of stone statues built by the professor and local brick sellers who he trained up to become landscape architects
Amazing feat: The exotic statues can be seen standing on the mountainside built to reflect the area's cultural past and history
His own slice of history: Song says his inspiration came from the Crazy Horse monument in the US state of South Dakota
A man in China has escaped being killed after a passerby pushed him into the path of an oncoming train by a stranger for spitting in the waiting room.
The passerby had apparently become enraged when the victim spat next to him, reports the People's Daily Online.
The incident occurred on July 17th at Xintan station in China's Hunan province.
A lucky escape: The man managed to get out of the way of the train just as it approached the platform
The man surnamed Tan was waiting for the Nanning bound train at 4pm on July 17th when he was shoved from behind.
The 48-year-old fell around three feet onto the tracks just as the train was approaching.
The quick-thinking man managed to jump back away from the path of the train before it arrived at the station.
Police quickly arrived at the scene and helped to control the situation.
Horrifying incident: The incident took place at Xintan station in China's Hunan province
Tan was on his way to work when he was pushed off the platform and says he felt the train brush past him as he managed to jump back onto the platform.
He was pushed by 34-year-old Li who was holding his tickets waiting for the train to arrive at the time.
Li saw Tan spitting and could not help but feel enraged by the man.
He told police that he feels that spitting is insulting.
Police say that the man was brought up by his aunt and has had trouble when 'looking back at his upbringing.'
He was also hot and frustrated at the time.
Tan later said that he did not mean to disrespect other people by spitting but now understood that other people could take it personally.
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Cave drawings discovered on a remote Caribbean island reveal how some of the earliest Europeans talked with indigenous people about religion.
A large collection of early colonial inscriptions written within a cave system in Mona Island have been found by archaeologists from the British Museum and the University of Leicester.
They include more than 30 historic inscriptions, including phrases in Latin and Spanish such as 'God forgive you', as well as dates and Christian symbols.
Indigenous iconography, such as depictions of ancestral figures (pictured), covers the walls, ceilings, and alcoves in 10 chambers and interconnecting tunnels over some 6500 square metres
WHAT THE CAVE PAINTINGS SHOW Three major phrases are found in the caves. They include the phrases 'God forgive you' and 'God made many things', written in Latin. The third Latin inscription, Verbum caro factum est, is a direct quotation from the Vulgate version of the bible, the Gospel of John 1:14 and translates to 'And the Word was made flesh [and dwelt among us]'. As well as the phrases, crosses are found throughout the cave system. They appear alone and also in direct association with names and phrases, and most often in association with indigenous iconography. The cave walls also bear a series of dated and named individuals. These include Myguel Rypoll 1550, Alonso Perez Roldan el Mozo 1550 August, and Alonso de Contreras 1554. Other sixteenth century visitors include an individual named Bernardo, who wrote his name after the inscription 'verbum caro factum est', and an anonymous visitor in February 1554. Advertisement
The findings provide dramatic new insights into some of the earliest interactions between these two very different cultures.
'They have provided new understandings of colonial processes that are more nuanced than mere oppression, domination and, in the case of the Caribbean, indigenous extinction,' the researchers write.
The inscriptions were written by named individuals within the cave system.
Three major phrases are found in the caves. As well as 'God forgive you', they include Plura fecit deus or 'God made many things'.
'There is no obvious contemporary textual source for this phrase, and the commentary appears to be a spontaneous response to whatever the visitor experienced in the cave,' the researchers write.
'The phrase may express the theological crisis of the New World discovery, which throws the personalised human experience and reaction into sharp relief.'
The third Latin inscription, Verbum caro factum est, is a direct quotation from the Vulgate version of the bible, the Gospel of John 1:14 and translates to 'And the Word was made flesh [and dwelt among us]'.
The biblical passage follows a description of the creation of the world, and is the first announcement of Jesus (the Word) in the Gospel, followed by his baptism.
This is one of the best known of all chapters of the Bible, and would have been familiar even to Christians without any formal Latin education.
The researchers say that the nature of these drawings gives us an idea of the tone and personal context of this first encounter.
The results have been published in a paper, in Antiquity.
The findings are on the island of Mona, which lies on the Atlantic route from Europe to the Americas, and was recorded by Christopher Columbus on his second voyage in AD 1494.
The inscriptions were made by people dragging their fingernails through the soft surface of the walls and ceilings. One of the inscriptions was an IHS Christogram that uses the first three letters of Jesus in the Greek alphabet to reference Jesus Christ
A map of the cave shows the locations and spatial relationships between the indigenous iconography and post-contact inscriptions
Despite its small size (50 square kilometres), and seemingly isolated position halfway between the newly named islands of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, Mona Island plays a crucial role in the establishment of the first European towns and the globalisation of the Caribbean
These indigenous iconographies from Cave 18 show depictions of ancestral beings and anthrozoomorphic (animal-like) figures
MONA ISLAND Christopher Columbus stopped at Mona Island on his second voyage in AD 1494. Despite its small size (50 square kilometres), and seemingly isolated position halfway between the newly named islands of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, Mona Island plays a crucial role in the establishment of the first European towns and the globalisation of the Caribbean. In AD 1494 one or more indigenous communities lived on Monas coast, a days canoe journey from the neighbouring larger islands, tending agricultural plots, and taking advantage of the abundant resources. Stone-lined plazas in the centre of the island and a long history of use of the islands many caves, indicate these communities were tied into inter-regional networks. Advertisement
The researchers say the drawings provided new understandings about the formation of emergent cultural identities in the Caribbean that challenge historic accounts of indigenous extinction.
Dr Alice Samson from the University of Leicester, who co-led the study, said: 'This not only provides a counterpoint to official metropolitan histories, but also tracks the beginnings of new religious engagements and transforming cultural identities in the Americas.'
Communities on the island of Mona were exposed to the earliest waves of European impact during a critical period of transformation and the forging of new identities.
Since 2013, the researchers have been exploring around 70 cave systems on the island, where they have found thousands of motifs recorded deep within the caves.
As well as the phrases, cross are found throughout the cave system.
They appear alone and also in direct association with names and phrases, and most often in association with indigenous iconography.
A study of the stroke sequences has found that the vertical line is drawn first and the horizontal line afterwards, from left to right, in the gesture of a right-handed blessing.
The crosses are usually placed in dominant positions over cave entrances or on high walls.
In addition to the Christian symbolism and religious phrases, the cave walls also bear a series of dated and named individuals.
These include Myguel Rypoll 1550, Alonso Perez Roldan el Mozo 1550 August, and Alonso de Contreras 1554.
Other sixteenth century visitors include an individual named Bernardo, who wrote his name after the inscription 'verbum caro factum est', and an anonymous visitor in February 1554.
Other indigenous carvings found within the caves including zig-zag like patterns such as those pictured
The findings are on the island of Mona, which lies on the Atlantic route from Europe to the Americas, and was recorded by Christopher Columbus on his second voyage in AD 1494
The particular cave in this study is home to more than 30 inscriptions, including named individuals, phrases in Latin and Spanish and dates. This inscription reads 'Plura fecit deus or 'God made many things'
A Captain Francisco Alegre also wrote his name prominently in one of the cave chambers.
Similarities between his signature and the cave inscription suggest that Alegre himself visited this cave.
The researchers say that the designs were made by dragging fingernails through the soft surface of the walls and ceilings.
Dr Jago Cooper from the British Museum, who co-led the study, said: 'This research reveals a new perspective on the personal encounter between indigenous populations and the first generations of Europeans in the Americas.
'This is a unique site that helps us to understand the origins of cultural identity in the Americas, the start of a process that continues right up to the modern day.'
As well as the cave inscriptions, an early colonial Nueva Cadiz bead was also discovered at Playa Sardinera on Mona Island
As well as the phrases, crosses are found throughout the cave system. The crosses are usually placed in dominant positions over cave entrances or on high walls
Several names were found to be inscribed in the caves, including a 'Captain Francisco Alegre' who wrote his name prominently in one of the chambers
Since 2013, the researchers have been exploring around 70 cave systems on the island, where they have found thousands of motifs recorded deep within the caves
This account of spiritual encounters provides a rare, personalised insight into intercultural religious dynamics in the early Americas
One of the inscriptions the researchers found within the cave reads 'Dios te perdone', which is the Spanish for 'God forgive you'
It is an elaborate belt any modern fashionista would be proud of.
Engraved with dolphins and dogs, in fact it belonged to a middle aged later Roman soldier.
Archaeologists found the rare evidence near an important Roman road in Leicester.
The bronze belt plate is cast in the so-called 'chip-carved' style and would have been riveted to a wide leather belt or girdle with a thinner securing strap running through the buckle and ending with the strap end.
While it gave up 83 skeletons, the University of Leicester team were stunned to find one wearing the elaborate belt around his waist, in rare evidence of Late Roman official buried in the city.
Archaeologists from University of Leicester Archaeological Services made the find at Western Road in Leicester's West End.
Amongst the 83 skeletons recorded by the team, one burial is proving to be very exciting.
The simple grave in question had been dug into mudstone on the west bank of the River Soar, to the south-west of the Roman town close to the important road known as the Fosse Way.
Buried in the grave was the remains of a middle-aged man wearing an elaborately decorated belt in a style that would have been worn by a Late Roman soldier or civil servant during the second half of the 4th century or the early 5th century AD.
The find, which is rare in Britain, was positioned at the waist of the skeleton and comprises a belt buckle, belt plate and strap end.
Nick Cooper, Post-Excavation Manager at ULAS, said: 'The survival of the delicate thin sheet bronze belt plate is remarkable.
WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE BELT'S OWNER The grave of Skeleton 23, thought to be a Late Roman soldier or civil servant. The belt buckle was found next to the right hip (circled). Buried in grave 23was the remains of a middle-aged man wearing an elaborately decorated belt in a style that would have been worn by a Late Roman soldier or civil servant during the second half of the 4th century or the early 5th century AD. The find, which is rare in Britain, was positioned at the waist of the skeleton and comprises a belt buckle, belt plate and strap end. The belt's owner was aged between 36 and 45 when he died, the researchers said. He had survived poor health in childhood to lead a comparatively fit adult life but at some point he had fractured his left forearm; an injury that had healed well but left his wrist weakened. This type of injury is known as a 'parry fracture' and is typically caused by raising the arm to ward off a blow or a falling object. The man had also damaged muscles in his upper right arm and shoulder. Archaeologists from University of Leicester Archaeological Services made the find at Western Road in Leicester's West End. Amongst the 83 skeletons recorded by the team, one burial is proving to be very exciting. Such injuries could possibly be caused by over-use, overextending the muscles with movements such as throwing and lifting. Whilst it is difficult to identify exactly what caused these injuries, they are consistent with those a soldier might suffer and reinforce the theory that this man was either a member of the late Roman army or, perhaps following retirement, became an important local civil servant. Parallels for this belt set have been found in other Late Roman cemeteries, for example in London, Dorchester on Thames and Winchester, and at the shore fort on the opposite side of the English Channel at Oudenburg in Belgium. Research shows that these belts were worn across north-eastern France, Belgium, and along the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire, running along the Rivers Rhine and Danube, where soldiers were stationed. There is some contemporary pictorial evidence to suggest that this type, specifically, was worn by members of the Late Roman military and civilian elite and that the belts were important symbols of authority. Advertisement
'It is cast in the so-called 'chip-carved' style decorated with interlocking spirals and would have been riveted to a wide leather belt or girdle with a thinner securing strap running through the buckle and ending with the strap end.'
The buckle is decorated with dolphin heads and the strap end is decorated with crouching dogs on either side of its tapered end.
Parallels for this belt set have been found in other Late Roman cemeteries, for example in London, Dorchester on Thames and Winchester, and at the shore fort on the opposite side of the English Channel at Oudenburg in Belgium.
Research shows that these belts were worn across north-eastern France, Belgium, and along the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire, running along the Rivers Rhine and Danube, where soldiers were stationed.
The belt buckle is decorated with dolphin heads.
The strap end is decorated with crouching dogs on either side of its tapered end.
There is some contemporary pictorial evidence to suggest that this type, specifically, was worn by members of the Late Roman military and civilian elite and that the belts were important symbols of authority.
The recent discovery at Western Road is the first occurrence of such a complex belt set in Roman Leicester.
The belt's owner was aged between 36 and 45 when he died.
He had survived poor health in childhood to lead a comparatively fit adult life but at some point he had fractured his left forearm; an injury that had healed well but left his wrist weakened.
The find, which is rare in Britain, was positioned at the waist of the skeleton and comprises a belt buckle, belt plate and strap end.
This type of injury is known as a 'parry fracture' and is typically caused by raising the arm to ward off a blow or a falling object.
The man had also damaged muscles in his upper right arm and shoulder.
Such injuries could possibly be caused by over-use, overextending the muscles with movements such as throwing and lifting.
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It is Tesla Motors' biggest bet yet: a massive, $5 billion factory in the Nevada desert that could nearly double the world's production of lithium-ion batteries.
Tesla has officially opened its Gigafactory, a little more than two years after construction began.
The factory is about 14 percent complete, but when it's finished, it will be about 10 million square feet, or about the size of 262 NFL football fields.
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An overall view of the new Tesla Gigafactory: It will have the largest footprint of any building in the world. The $5 billion structure will produce 500,000 lithium ion batteries each year to meet demand.
GIGAFACTORY FACTS The factory's name stems from 'giga,' a unit of measurement that represents billions. One gigawatt hour is the equivalent of generating one billion watts for one hour one million times that of one kilowatt hour. Tesla says the factory will be producing 35 gigawatt hours of batteries by 2018. That's the equivalent to the entire world's production in 2014. New York City uses around 52 gigawatt hours of energy per year. Advertisement
That will make it one of the largest buildings in the world.
The factory is key to the future of Palo Alto, California-based Tesla.
The 13-year-old electric car company, which has never made a full-year profit, wants to transition from a niche maker of luxury vehicles to a full-line maker of affordable cars, pickups and even semi-trucks.
It also runs Tesla Powerwall, a solar energy storage business for homes and businesses.
The company says making its own lithium-ion batteries at the scale the Gigafactory will allow will reduce its battery costs by more than a third by 2018.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the factory could easily employ 10,000 people in the next three to four years.
'The factory is the machine that builds the machine,' Musk told Wired.
Most immediately, Tesla needs the batteries for its fourth car, the Model 3 sedan, which is scheduled to go on sale at the end of next year.
A Tesla battery pack is displayed during a media tour of the new Tesla Gigafactory (left) alongside a robot that helps put the battery packs together (right).
At a starting price of around $35,000, the Model 3 will be Tesla's least expensive vehicle, partly because of battery cost reductions. The batteries for Tesla's current vehicles, the Model S sedan and Model X SUV, are made in Japan.
Tesla unveiled the Model 3 at the end of March. Within a week, more than 325,000 people had put down a $1,000 deposit to reserve the car.
After seeing that level of demand, Tesla moved its production plans forward.
The company now says it will make 500,000 vehicles per year by 2018, two years earlier than scheduled.
Construction continues on the new Tesla Gigafactory during a media tour Tuesday, July 26, 2016, in Sparks, Nev. Its Tesla Motors biggest bet yet: A massive, $5 billion factory in the Nevada desert that could almost double the worlds production of lithium-ion batteries by 2018. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
Construction continues on the new Tesla Gigafactory during a media tour Tuesday, July 26, 2016, in Sparks, Nev. Its Tesla Motors biggest bet yet: A massive, $5 billion factory in the Nevada desert that could almost double the worlds production of lithium-ion batteries by 2018. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
To meet that goal, Gigafactory construction is proceeding at a furious pace. Inside the factory, Tesla's partner, Panasonic Corp. which has invested $1.6 billion into the factory is installing machines in sealed, humidity-controlled rooms that will start making battery cells before the end of this year.
Panasonic is also shipping cells from Japan to the Powerwall business, which is operating in another section of the factory.
Robots are used to place battery packs into home and office units, which store energy from solar panels and allow users to tap it during peak periods.
Musk said the Powerwall business will initially make up about one-third of the Gigafactory's output, but eventually could expand to around half.
Outside, nearly 1,000 workers are laying the groundwork for the factory's expansion, digging trenches and erecting steel supports in the hot, dusty valley.
By the second quarter of 2017, 31 percent of the factory will be completed. Eventually, the roof will be covered in solar panels.
Robots named Thundebird and Cyclops work together to lower a Tesla vehicle on to the assembly line at Tesla Motors Inc factory in Fremont, California, U.S. The gigafactory will suply the batteries for the cars
Musk noted that some of the area's 10,000 wild horses often drink from the ponds at the construction site.
Nevada won the factory thanks in part to $1.3 billion in tax incentives, which will benefit Tesla over a 20-year period.
'I find this to be quite romantic,' he said. 'It feels like the wild West.'
The factory's name stems from 'giga,' a unit of measurement that represents billions.
'The factory is the machine that builds the machine,' Musk told Wired at the launch of the Gigafactory.
One gigawatt hour is the equivalent of generating one billion watts for one hour one million times that of one kilowatt hour.
Tesla says the factory will be producing 35 gigawatt hours of batteries by 2018.
That's the equivalent to the entire world's production in 2014.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said the factory has the capacity to produce 150 gigawatt hours if it needs to.
To put that in context, New York City uses around 52 gigawatt hours of energy per year.
Analysts say bringing battery production in-house, instead of buying batteries like General Motors Co. and other major automakers do, can help bring down costs, but also leaves Tesla exposed.
When it's complete, Tesla's Gigafactory in the Nevada Desert will have the largest footprint of any building in the world. At the Model 3 launch yesterday, founder Elon Musk said the $5 billion structure will produce 500,000 lithium ion batteries annually to meet demand. Now, new drone footage has revealed progress on construction of the Gigafactory in stunning high-definition
If the Model 3 is delayed, for example, or customers' deposits don't turn into actual sales, Tesla will have extra batteries on its hands and no way to recoup its costs.
'They could be left with a lot of excess capacity in the near term,' said Sam Abuelsamid, an analyst with Navigant Research.
Abuelsamid says there's also the possibility that advances in battery technology in the longer term could force Tesla to make expensive new investments.
There are also competitors who could derail Tesla's dreams. Chinese automaker BYD Co., which is backed by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Corp., also makes batteries and energy storage systems and is already building battery-powered buses in the U.S.
The company hopes to bring low-cost electric cars to the U.S. in a few years.
Musk says there are still plenty of ways for Tesla to reduce costs, including making its factories more efficient and eventually building more battery factories in Europe, China and other regions where its cars are sold.
The company also is using a different type of battery cell in the Model 3 than it did in the Model S and Model X in an effort to reduce costs.
The official invitation sent by Tesla via email went out to existing Tesla owners that participated in the company's fourth referral program by referring 4 or more qualifying sales.
Lucky owners will be given a tour of the new facility, and are expected the be shown the latest progress of the firm's Model 3 car.
Guests will be allowed test drives and factory tours before and after the 'remarks' at 9 PM.
However, Tesla has not mentioned the test-drive vehicles.
Recent drone footage gave a glimpse of the vast structure.
The 4k footage shows little progress on the exterior of the building, but Tesla appears to have been working on the area around the plant.
Filmed using a DJI Phantom 4 drone, it reveals more building sections covered in white reflective roofing, as well as a paved parking lot.
Musk said the Gigafactory and its Fremont facility would produce more lithium ion batteries in a year than were produced in the entire world in 2013.
In terms of sheer size, the Gigafactory is second in volume only to Boeing's airplane factory in Washington.
But when it comes to how much ground it covers, Tesla's upcoming factory is the largest in the world.
'This is a vital element,' Musk said in his presentation of the Model 3. 'To give you a sense of scale, the Gigafactory will have the largest footprint of any building of any kind.'
The 4k footage shows little progress on the exterior of the building, but Tesla appears to have been working on the area around the plant
The pressure is on, with over 400,000 people pre-ordering the Model 3 in less than 24 hours since launch. Demand is expected to remain high
Filmed using a DJI Phantom 4 drone, it reveals more building sections covered in white reflective roofing, as well as a paved parking lot
TESLA UNVEILS THE MODEL 3 Last night, Tesla finally unveiled the highly anticipated Model 3, hours after fans around the globe already began lining up at its stores to order the luxury brand's new affordable vehicle. The Model 3 starts at $35,000 in the US - half the baseline price of the 2015 Model S. Boss Elon Musk dramatically revealed a red, silver and matte black model of the electric car after a lengthy talk that covered the company's dedication to the environment and journey to affordability. He also revealed the Model 3 will be able to go zero to 60mph in less than six seconds, saying: 'At Tesla, we don't make slow cars'. The billionaire founder noted that the car will be able to travel a distance of 215 miles per charge, at minimum, and will fit five adults comfortably. The slick design features a roof made of one continuous pane of glass, which Musk said will give passengers amazing headroom and a 'feeling of openness'. It is also 20 percent smaller than the Model S and will be fitted with autopilot features. Like the Model S that came before it, Model 3 will feature front and rear trunks and boasts more cargo capacity than any gasoline car of the same external dimensions. And Musk promises that a 7-foot surfboard will be able to fit inside. Advertisement
'Our Fremont factory in the past has actually made 500,000 cars a year, so we're confident Tesla can achieve that in the future in terms of vehicle production,' he said.
'I think that's going to be, I wouldn't say straight forward, but very doable.
'But what about batteries? In order to produce half a million cars a year, we basically need to absorb the entire world's lithium production 'That's the entire reason we're building the Gigafactory.
'It will produce more lithium ion batteries than all other factories in the world combined...We will also be producing the most advanced cell in the world.'
The Gigafactory is now producing battery packs but not yet creating the cells inside, Musk revealed.
The huge project is part of the billionaire's plan to drive down the cost of electric cars and create home battery packs to provide cheaper electricity.
The Model 3 costs $35,000 in the US - half the baseline price of the 2015 Model S. Its lower price tag is thanks largely to cheaper battery packs that can be created by the Gigafactory.
Tesla previously assembled its battery packs with cells made in Japan by Panasonic. But now the companies have teamed up on creating the factory in Nevada.
The latest video follows footage, uncovered by Bloomberg last year, which showed how construction work was progressing.
Musk tweeted at the time that what the drone footage shows is 'not the full Gigafactory, it is just the pilot plant (1/4 size).'
Site preparation began in July at an industrial park along U.S. Interstate 80 15 miles east of Sparks, a Reno suburb.
The aim is to produce enough batteries to power 500,000 vehicles a year when it is fully completed and produce a power source that can also be installed in gadgets such as toys and drones.
Production is currently based in Freemont, California, but the plant does not have the capacity to serve the company's future production needs.
The site will also help produce a 'revolutionary' $3,000 (1,980) battery which Musk claims can run an entire home for eight hours.
Musk introduced the Powerwall device at a press conference in California last year and said the technology could 'change the world'.
Since it unveiled its home battery plans, Tesla says it has been so overwhelmed by initial demand that it is now exploring whether it can expand production at the battery Gigafactory.
The Gigafactory is now producing battery packs but not yet creating the cells inside, Elon Musk revealed. The huge project is part of the billionaire's plan to drive down the cost of electric cars and create home battery packs to provide cheaper electricity
Tesla previously assembled its battery packs with cells made in Japan by Panasonic. But now the companies have teamed up on creating the factory in Nevada
Queues for the Model 3 were forming all over the world ahead of its launch yesterday (left). Elon Musk is pictured right during the unveiling in which he spoke about the Gigafactory's important to the Model 3 roll out
The Gigafactory will have the largest footprint of any building of any kind
Last week, Tesla said that it is ahead of its production and construction schedule for the Gigafactory in Reno, Nevada.
Even though Reno has attracted big businesses such as Apple and Amazon, there is concern the city's infrastructure will not be able to cope with the increase in demand.
But it recently emerged that the Nevada battery plant is creating jobs more slowly than first projected, although state officials say it's still making satisfactory progress.
A progress report issued last week by the Nevada Governor's Office of Economic Development said there were 272 people working at the Tesla and Panasonic factories at the end of the year.
That's lower than the 700 jobs initially projected for the end of 2015, according to a September 2014 report available to state lawmakers when they were deciding whether to approve a $1.3 billion tax incentive package for Tesla.
HOW DOES TESLA'S NEW AFFORDABLE CAR COMPARE TO THE MODEL S? MODEL S Price: From 47,600 ($68,350) Safety features: Autopilot 060mph: 2.8 seconds Power source: 70kWh / 90kWh battery Range: 340 miles (547km) Capacity: 5 adults (2 additional children's seats) Charge time: 56 hours (full charge) / 20 mins (half charge on supercharger) Source: Tesla MODEL 3 Price: From $35,000 (24,375) Safety features: Autopilot 060mph: Less than 6 seconds Power source: To be confirmed Range: 215 miles (346km) Capacity: 5 adults Charge time:To be confirmed Source: Tesla Advertisement
'In its application to the state for abatements, the company refined its annual job creation projections to more accurately reflect that the construction of the gigafactory would be completed in phases instead of all at once as the state's economic impact report initially projected,' economic development office spokeswoman Jennifer Cooper said in a statement.
'While this will be reflected in the quarterly reports that the company submits to GOED, it does not alter the anticipated investment of at least $3.5 billion or the employment of 6,500 once the factory reaches full production.'
Nevada landed the factory after an intense competition between several states.
Economic development officials said the Gigafactory has started shipping out battery packs and powerwalls.
Tesla reported it had invested $374 million in capital in Nevada so far, below the early prediction of $1 billion by the end of 2015.
During the last three months of 2015, there were an average of 894 construction workers at the site each week 74 percent of whom were Nevada residents
anticipated Model 3, hours after fans around the globe already began lining up at its stores to order the luxury brand's new affordable vehicle. The Model 3 starts at $35,000 in the US - half the baseline price of the 2015 Model S
Boss Elon Musk dramatically revealed a red, silver and matte black model of the electric car after a lengthy talk that covered the company's dedication to the environment and journey to affordability
The $5 billion Tesla structure is hoping to produce 500,000 lithium ion batteries annually, making it the biggest battery factory in the world. Pictured is drone footage from last year, showing the early stages of construction
The Gigafactory is being built at the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center in Storey County, Nevada. On the right is an image taken from the hills surrounding the complex reveal its isolation and scale
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT TESLA'S MODEL 3 UNVEILING When will it go on sale? Tesla has said it expects to start Model 3 production at its Fremont, California, factory at the end of 2017. But the company has a history of delays. The Model X, which went on sale last fall, was initially due to go on sale in early 2014. Musk said last month that the Model 3, unlike the Model X, is designed for 'ease of manufacturing.' Still, some analysts are doubtful. Morgan Stanley auto analyst Adam Jonas thinks Tesla won't start building the Model 3 until the end of 2018. At the end of his speech Musk revealed that the Model 3, the fourth by the brand, was an instant success - with a total number of orders surpassing 115,000 in 24 hours Who are its competitors? General Motors is set to start selling the Chevrolet Bolt electric car at the end of this year, a full year before the Model 3. The Bolt will have a similar price tag and a 200-mile range. Hyundai's Ioniq, which has a 110-mile electric range and could match Tesla on price, goes on sale this fall. Audi will follow with an electric SUV in 2018. Musk said last month he's not worried. He thinks the Model 3 will compete most directly with small luxury cars like the Audi A4 and the BMW 3 Series. How did Tesla make the Model 3 less expensive? Cheaper batteries. Tesla previously assembled its battery packs with battery cells made in Japan by Panasonic Corp. But Tesla and Panasonic are building a massive, $5 billion factory in Nevada which will supply batteries for the Model 3. Tesla says the scale of the factory will lower the cost of its battery packs by 30 per cent. Advertisement
An artist's impression shows what the site could look like when it is finished. Nevada will also benefit from an investment in roads leading to the facility and potential to surround it with other ventures
The company recently released a video showing the Model X 'getting its wings', with a series of robots attaching its doors. Both the Model S and Model X are currently being made the Fremont factory on two separate production lines
Your mood may be more closely linked to your DNA than you think.
A new study has found that the same genes that make us prone to depression could also make us prone to positivity.
Psychologists in the UK and US say that the combination of tiny changes in our genes can make people more sensitive to their environment, which can change their mental outlook and affect their emotional wellbeing.
What's more, they believe the findings could lead to more personalised approaches for treating psychological conditions.
Researchers have found that the same genes that make us prone to depression could also make us prone to positivity (stock image)
SENSITIVE GENES Psychologists believe that a combination of a person's genetics makes them more sensitive to their environment, which can make them more emotionally affected by it. In the study, researchers describe how building profiles of genetic risk factors could be used to work out how a person's environment might affect them, based on their baseline genetic risk. A person with a greater number of risk these genetic factors would be more likely to be highly sensitive to the effect of their environment than someone with fewer risk factors. This information could be used to highlight who is more likely to develop a negative cognitive bias, which could lead them to depression. Advertisement
Professors Elaine Fox, from Oxford University, and Chris Beevers from the University of Texas at Austin reviewed a range of research looking at genetic influence and emotional states.
They found that, overall, genetic and environmental factors have a substantial impact on a person's emotional wellbeing.
Previous research has identified a number of genetic markers often single letter differences in the DNA of a gene which may be associated with someone being more or less at risk of developing a psychological condition.
But while these studies combine genetics and mental state, they typically only focus on a small number of genes and mental health conditions, explain the researchers.
The psychologists say there is a need to better combine studies in mental health genetics with a person's own mental filters, the default way of interpreting what's going on around them.
'Cognitive biases are when people consistently interpret situations though particular mental 'filters'when people have a cognitive bias that emphasises negative aspects or thoughts, they are more at risk of mental health disorders,' explained Professor Beevers.
'There is a lot of research about these biases and a lot of research about genes that may make people susceptible to mental ill health.
'However, we suggest that it could make more sense to bring together these two areas of research.'
In their paper, published today in the journal Molecular Psychology, the pair describe how building larger profiles of genetic risk factors could be used to work out how a person's environment might affect them, based on their baseline genetic risk.
The researchers say there is a need to combine studies in mental health genetics with those that look at cognitive biases (stock image)
NATURE OR NURTURE? The debate over whether mental health conditions are more likely to be caused by genetics or environment has thrown up some contradictory findings. While researchers have singled out key genes as happy genes, it is clear that traumatic events and stressful environments can have an impact on mental health. One school of thought is that the two may be distinct, and that differentiating hardwired depression from that caused by environmental factors could lead to more precise treatments. But increasingly, a more holistic approach looks at the interaction between environmental factors and a persons genetics, where certain risk factors giving an indication of how well they might be able to cope with stresses. Advertisement
For instance, a person with a greater number of risk these genetic factors would be more likely to be highly sensitive to the effect of their environment than someone with fewer risk factors.
This information could be used to highlight who is more likely to develop a negative cognitive bias, which could lead them to depression.
'If you take a gene that is linked to mental illness, and compare people who have the same genetic variant, it becomes clear that what happens to their mental health is based on their environment,' said Professor Fox.
'We suggest that while no gene 'causes' mental ill health, some genes can make people more sensitive to the effects of their environment - for better and for worse.
'If you have those genes and are in a negative environment, you are likely to develop the negative cognitive biases that lead to mental disorders.
'If you have those genes but are in a supportive environment, you are likely to develop positive cognitive biases that increase your mental resilience.'
The ancient tombs of the Pharaohs in the Egyptian desert are legendary for hiding intricate booby traps and curses to protect the treasures within from grave robbers.
But while many of these stories have become part of the mythology of Egypt's pyramids, it seems their builders really did employ intricate defences to keep away thieves.
A leading Egyptologist claims to have found evidence for a 'primitive machine' that was installed at the Great Pyramid of Giza to protect the chamber of King Khufu, or Cheops as he is also known.
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Experts claim that grooves left in the walls of a room outside the King's Chamber that were used to drop large granite blocks into place to block access to the tomb once the Pharaoh's body was inside. A digital reconstruction of the defences were created on an episode of Unearthed on the Science Channel (pictured)
SCANS DELVE INTO SECRETS OF EGYPT'S GREAT PYRAMID OF GIZA For more than 4,500 years, Egypt's pyramids have kept their secrets hidden deep within the labyrinth of passages and chambers that lie inside their towering stone structures. But the long-running row over whether the Great Pyramid of Giza is hiding a network of previously undiscovered tunnels behind its stone walls could soon finally be answered. A group of researchers who have been using cosmic particles known as muons to scan the Great Pyramid of Giza have said they expect to finish their work later this month. They are using the scans to create maps to reveal the internal structure of the 479 feet (146m) high pyramid and say they could help to unlock ancient secrets that have been buried beneath the stone. Last year thermal scanning identified a major anomaly in the Great Pyramid, the largest and oldest of the pyramids at Giza and one of the seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Those scans identified three adjacent stones at its base which registered higher temperatures than others. This led to theories that they may be hiding a secret chamber that has yet to be discovered. Advertisement
Dr Mark Lehner, director of the Giza Plateau Mapping Project and an archaeologist at the University of Chicago, said it was designed to stop anyone from gaining access to the King's chamber.
The defensive system is described in a new episode of Unearthed shown on the Science Channel last week. The news was reported initially by Live Science.
It explains how the builders built grooves into a small room outside the chamber where the King's body would be placed.
Granite slabs would have then been dropped down into these when the work finished to block off access to the chamber.
Three other giant granite blocks were slid down a ramp to the passage way below to cut off access to the inner sanctum.
Dr Lehner points to grooves cut into the walls in a room outside the passageway to the King's Chamber that could have held the granite blocks.
He said: 'Here Khufu's builders designed a line of defence against anyone who would enter the King's chamber had they got this far.
'These grooves and protrusions are not decorative. They are part of a very primitive machine.'
However, it appears that despite these defences, they were not able to defend the Khufu's tomb from looters.
Archaeologists found it almost empty apart from the fractured mass of red stone that had been the Pharaohs sarcophagus. It is thought to have been plundered shortly after it was completed.
Khufu, who rule Egypt between 2589BC and 2566BC, is widely regarded to have been one of the most powerful Pharaohs of the Old Kingdom in Ancient Egypt.
Dr Mark Lehner points to grooves and protrusions cut into the wall (pictured) of a small room outside the King's Chamber that he believes held granite blocks to prevent access to the inner sanctum of the tomb
Three granite blocks were also dropped down a passageway to block access to the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid (digital reconstruction pictured), according to Dr Lehner
The great pyramid that contained him is built from around 2.3 million stone blocks each weighing more than two tons.
It is one of the most intricate of the yramids to have been built, featuring tunnels and chambers above ground levels, unlike others which had chambers either at ground level or underground.
Dr Lehner believes Khufu's tomb was looted sometime around the collapse of the Old Kingdom in Egypt in around 2134BC.
But there are some experts who believe Khufu's tomb may still remain undiscovered in the heart of the great stone structure.
The Great Pyramid of Giza is thought to contain more than 2.3 million stone blocks but despite its formidable defences against looters, it appears the tomb of King Khufu had been raided shortly after building was complete nearly 4,150 years ago
The Great Pyramid of Giza (shown on the map above along with other pryamids in the area) is one of the largest and most complex pryamids to have been built in the Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt
The pyramid contains four small shafts two leading from the King's chamber and two leading from the Queen's chamber.
Exploration of these with robots has revealed what may be three doorways with copper handles.
Zahi Hawass, Egypt's former antiquities minister and a leading Egyptologist, has claimed these shafts may lead to another hidden burial chamber where Khufu may still remain.
If this is the case it would mean the sarcophagus in the King's Chamber was a decoy designed to fool looters.
Some designers might say their collections contain a little piece of each artist who has influenced them in their work.
But none can mean this as literally as Tina Gorjanc, a fashion student from Central Saint Martins college in London.
Ms Gorjanc has designed a collection of handbags and jackets, which she wants to make using leather cultivated from Alexander McQueen's own DNA.
Tina Gorjanc, a fashion student from Central Saint Martins college in London, has designed a collection of handbags and jackets, which she wants to make using leather cultivated from Alexander McQueen's own DNA
HOW WOULD IT WORK? The 'Pure Human' project envisions using DNA from McQueen's graduation collection from the same college, called 'Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims'. The cells would be taken from the hair and placed in a culture. From this, skin tissue would be harvested, which would be processed into leather. Advertisement
The 'Pure Human' project envisions using DNA from McQueen's graduation collection, called 'Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims'.
The collection, which was about Victorian prostitutes who sold their own hair, contained locks of the designer's hair enclosed in perspex.
This provided a source of McQueen's own preserved DNA.
'The final outcome consists of a range of commercial leather products cultivated from extracted human biological material,' Ms Gorjanc said on her project page.
The student designed the concepts as part of her Material Futures MA, and showed what the designs might look like, using pig skin offcuts at the art school's end-of-year show.
She chose pig skin because it resembles humans most closely, and adapted the colour of the leather while adding silicon to make it more similar.
The student has produced patents to go along with her conceptual designs.
'I based the procedure on a process called de-extinction, where you can extract the genetic informations from a source, usually preserved hair, skin or bone, and use these information to biologically program an already existing skin draft,' Ms Gorjanc told MailOnline.
'As the human species is pretty similar in its biological characteristics the draft is easier to find as it is for some of the other extinct species.'
The 'Pure Human' project envisions using DNA from McQueen's graduation collection from the same college, called 'Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims'. This contained locks of the designer's hair enclosed in perspex (pictured)
Alexander McQueen (pictured), at the British Fashion Awards in 2005. The designer died in 2010 at the age of 40
She chose pig skin because it resembles humans most closely, and adapted the colour of the leather while adding silicon to make it more similar. She also added 'freckles' to the collection
'After that the skins grows using the mentioned genetic information, which means that the growing tissue than mimics the tissue of the original source. The accuracy of it is dependent on how much genetic info you can extract.'
'I am not growing Alexander McQueens skin,' she added.
'The tests that were made in the laboratory were purely intended to for me to understand the technology and see how far I can exploit them. This technology still has a long way to go and big corporations with better equipped laboratory have a better chance of developing it further.
The student designed the concepts as part of her Material Futures MA, and showed what the designs might look like, using pig skin offcuts at the art school's end-of-year show
Tina Gorjanc has said the owner of McQueen's Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims collection has agreed to potentially contribute a hair from a design once the process has been perfected
The leather was also decorated to mimic tattoos the designer had on his body.
Tina Gorjanc (pictured), the artist who designed the collection
Ms Gorjanc filed a patent application in May 2016, which would cover the material made from McQueen's genetic information using this particular chain of processes.
But some have said gaining ethical approval for the biological procedure could be more difficult.
The cells would be taken from the hair and placed in a culture.
From this, skin tissue would be harvested, which would be processed into leather.
Ms Gorjanc decorated her speculative pieces to mimic artwork on Alexander McQueen's body.
The jacket includes a quote from Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream which reads 'Love looks not with the eye but with the mind,' which McQueen had as a tattoo on his arm.
The student has produced patents to go along with her conceptual designs. Ms Gorjanc filed a patent application in May 2016, which would cover the material made from McQueen's genetic information using this particular chain of processes
'The Pure Human project was designed as a critical design project that aims to address shortcomings concerning the protection of biological information and move the debate forward using current legal structure,' Ms Gorjanc said
'The Pure Human project was designed as a critical design project that aims to address shortcomings concerning the protection of biological information and move the debate forward using current legal structure,' Ms Gorjanc said.
'The project itself is critical and speculative in its nature,' Ms Gorjanc told MailOnline.
'Its end goal was never and is not to make a collection from the de-extinct skin of the dead designer for commercial purposes.
'The mock-up products that were made during the project aim to showcase one of the possible applications that this technology can have in the future, when biological materials are regarded as a source of luxury.'
A representative from Alexander McQueen said 'contrary to some press reports the company wasn't approached about this project nor have we ever endorsed it'.
TEN ALEXANDER MCQUEEN FACTS Despite his wacky designs, McQueen was trained as a Savile Row tailor. Celebrity clients include Meg Mathews, David Furnish, Fran Cutler and David Bowie. McQueen left school at 16 with one O-level, and went on to study A-level art at an East Ham evening class. She may be the most celebrated Brazilian of the moment but supermodel Gisele Bundchen got her big break on Alexander McQueen's runway two and a half years ago. McQueen made headline news in 1998 when he used American model Aimee Mullins, who had her lower legs amputated, to strut the catwalk with prosthetic legs (which cost 4,400 to make). McQueen designed Kate Winslet's lush green gown she wore to the 1997 Oscars, when Titanic swept the board. He may be based in Paris but McQueen refuses to learn French and communicates with his Givenchy seamstresses in a series of grunts. One of his most unlikely fans is Pauline Prescott, wife of the Deputy Prime Minister John, 'He's an absolute genius,' she said after attending one of his shows. McQueen once held a catwalk show in a Victoria bus depot. It cost a reputed 70,000 and saw Kate Moss, Jodie Kidd and Stella Tennant getting drenched by an in-built sprinkler system. In 1997, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) pressure group members dumped animal guts on Givenchy's Paris boutique doorstep after the fashion house's designer, Alexander McQueen, used animal and bird heads in his catwalk show. Advertisement
The cells would be taken from the hair and placed in a culture. From this, skin tissue would be harvested, which would be processed into leather
'Furthermore, the project explores the ability of the technology to shift the perception of the production system for luxury goods as we know it and project its implementation in our current commercial system,' Ms Gorjanc said
Scientists observed the states of neutrinos at two locations 450 miles apart
The mind-bending world of quantum physics has been shown to have effects which stretch far beyond the small scale.
Researchers in the US have found that subatomic particles can exist in a strange state of superposition a point at which the indecisive particles are in all states at once even when they are travelling over hundreds of miles.
The team claims the experiments are the longest range tests of the effect ever recorded, and take us a step closer to unlocking the potential of quantum mechanics.
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A team of physicists in the US claims to have observed the longest range tests of a strange quantum effect ever recorded, which take us a step closer to unlocking the potential of quantum mechanics (stock image)
WHICH FLAVOUR OF NEUTRINO? Neutrinos are largely inert, passing straight through matter and rarely interacting with it and require extremely sensitive equipment to be picked up. They also exist in a number of states, called flavours. As the tiny particles travel from one destination to another, they can switch states, effectively leaving in one flavour but arriving in a different one. A team at MIT found the neutrinos were most likely to be in all states at once, or in superposition, while they travelled a distance of hundreds of miles. The physicists claim the experiments are the longest range tests of the effect ever recorded, and take us a step closer to unlocking the potential of quantum mechanics. Advertisement
Working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technologys (MIT) Fermilab physics laboratory in Illinois, a team of physicists studied the states of neutrinos, among the smallest components of an atom.
Neutrinos are pretty inert, passing straight through matter and rarely interacting with it and require extremely sensitive equipment to be picked up.
But in addition to this, they have another strange property: they exist in a number of states, called flavours.
The team studied neutrinos at Fermilab and compared them to those at an a highly sensitive underground detector in Soudan, Minnesota more than 450 miles (730 km) away.
When the tiny particles travel from one destination to the other, they can switch states, effectively leaving in one flavour but arriving in a different one.
But while they travelled the hundreds of miles from Illinois to Minnesota, the team found the neutrinos were most likely to be in all states at once, or in superposition.
What's fascinating is many of us tend to think of quantum mechanics applying on small scales, says Professor David Kaiser, a physicist at MIT.
But it turns out that we can't escape quantum mechanics, even when we describe processes that happen over large distances.
We can't stop our quantum mechanical description even when these things leave one state and enter another, traveling hundreds of miles.
Physicists studied the states of neutrinos, among the smallest components of an atom (illustrated). By tweaking existing models of theoretical physics, they were able predict the 'flavours' of neutrino arriving hundreds of miles away at the detector in Minnesota
I think that's breathtaking.
The concept of superposition is most famously illustrated by Schrodingers cat, a thought experiment dreamt up by physicist Erwin Schrodinger, in which a theoretical cat locked inside a box with poison can be both alive and dead at the same time.
But as soon as the box is opened and the inside is observed, it falls into one or the other, and its fate (or state) becomes fixed.
The MIT researchers studied neutrinos at Fermilab and compared them to those at an a highly sensitive underground detector in Soudan, Minnesota more than 450 miles (730 km) away (labelled on map)
According to Professor Joseph Formaggio, another MIT physicist who worked on the project, neutrinos which switch flavour en route to the detector should appear different to those which didnt switch.
The team say that by tweaking existing models of theoretical physics, they were able predict the flavours of neutrino arriving hundreds of miles away at the detector whether they were behaving according to either of the two branches of physics: classical or quantum.
In a small area around Nairobi, one species of butterfly is slowly transitioning into two species.
This fact alone would be interesting, but it is the way this transition is happening that is most fascinating - and it is all thanks to a specific microbe.
Researchers have found a microbe that, when it infects two sub-species of the butterfly, causes male offspring produced to never hatch, which leads to hungry sisters eating their unborn brothers.
This stops the butterflies from reproducing in the area the two sub species overlap, which the scientists think is the first step towards the two turning into separate species.
The African Queen is a large butterfly, identifiable by its bright orange body and black outlines. In a small area around Nairobi, two sub species of this butterfly are slowly transitioning into two completely separata species
DON'T EAT YOUR SIBLINGS In most parts of Africa this microbe, called Spiroplasma, infects African Queen butterflies but has no effect on their offspring. But for two sub species, the microbe causes all the infected butterflies sons to die before they hatch. The tiny male caterpillars are formed but cant hatch from the egg, they seem to be too weak. The by-product of this is that the hatching females, their sisters, eat their brothers when the female caterpillars hatch Advertisement
The African Queen is a large butterfly, identifiable by its bright orange body and black outlines.
In most parts of Africa this microbe, called Spiroplasma, infects African Queen butterflies but has no effect on their offspring.
But for two sub species, the microbe causes all the infected butterflies sons to die before they hatch.
'The microbe, the male-killing Spiroplasma, causes the male eggs not to hatch,' Professor Richard ffrench-Constant, from Exeter University, one of the paper's authors, told MailOnline.
'The tiny male caterpillars are formed but can't hatch from the egg, they seem to be too weak.
'The by-product of this is that the hatching females, their sisters, eat their brothers when the female caterpillars hatch.'
Researchers from the University of Exeter along with a team of British, Kenyan and German scientists studied the butterflies for 13 years to observe the phenomenon.
The two sub species overlap in a narrow zone around Nairobi in Kenya.
The two sub species overlap in a narrow zone around Nairobi in Kenya. Map of East Africa showing the hybrid zone and the location of the different Danaus subspecies studied, shown. The approximate location of the zone is shown on point (b), and the area samples were taken from is highlighted
In most parts of Africa this microbe, called Spiroplasma, infects African Queen butterflies (pictured) but has no effect on their offspring. But for two sub species, the microbe causes all the infected butterflies sons to die before they hatch
FORMING NEW SPECIES A species isthe largest group within which interbreeding produces viable offspring. A sub species is a subgroup below the level of a species. One definition of a sub species is a group which can interbreed successfully with other sub species When a group of individuals is separated from the rest of their species for a long time, the individuals can evolve different traits. The longer the group is isolated from the rest of the species, the more likely it will evolve into a new species. Advertisement
They found those infected with the microbe have dramatically changed chromosomes.
A non-sex chromosome fused with a sex chromosome, to form a new chromosome called neo W.
The researchers think this phenomenon, which takes place where the two sub species meet, is the first step in the transition from the two sub-species into two non-interbreeding species.
'The neo-W effectively acts as a genetic sink for all males, and butterfly populations around Nairobi are nearly all female, said Dr David Smith, first author on the paper.
Our results demonstrate how a complex interplay between sex, colour pattern, male-killing and chromosomes has set up a genetic sink that keeps two subspecies apart.
We tend to think of new species coming about due to environmental changes but here its clearly the microbe that is driving these two sub species apart, said Professor Richard ffrench-Constant, from Exeter University.
Researchers from the University of Exeter along with a team of British, Kenyan and German scientists studied the butterflies for 13 years to observe the phenomenon. They found those infected with the microbe have dramatically changed chromosomes
The researchers found a non sex chromosome fused with a sex chromosome, to form a new chromosome called neo W' (shown in pink in the diagram above)
Whilst we don't understand the precise molecular mechanisms behind this chromosomal merger, this means that no males are made in the hybrid zone, and that mating success in the zone is effectively zero, thereby creating a barrier with a new species on either side.
This is like a smoking gun for the way in which species become distinct. It is rare that we can find the molecular basis for how species develop, said Professor Walther Traut, from the University of Lubbek.
It appears that the butterfly's susceptibility to the male-killing microbe is driving the separation of the two butterflies into two true species, said Professor ffrench-Constant.
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Deep in the depths of the ocean, hidden unique bell-shaped stalactites have been revealed in stunning new images.
The creepy phenomenon lurking under the water in Yucatan, Mexico, was caught on camera by underwater photographer Rino Sgorbani.
The deep limestone sinkhole, known as a cenote, is peppered with the massive collection of strangely beautiful bells.
Unique bell-shaped stalactites hidden deep in the depths of the ocean have been revealed in stunning new images. The creepy phenomenon lurking under the water in Yucatan, Mexico, was caught on camera by underwater photographer Rino Sgorbani
THE HELL'S BELLS STALACTITES The bells - often described as hell's bells, elephant feet, shower heads and trumpets - range in size from tiny to as big as a person. The stalactites were created by the precipitation of minerals from water dripping through the cave ceiling. While most common stalactites have pointed tips, these have formed a bell shape. Some suggest the bell shape might form because of wind blowing in the caves, but exactly what causes the shape remains a mystery. Advertisement
The bells - often described as hell's bells, elephant feet, shower heads and trumpets - range in size from tiny to as big as a person.
'I was curious to go and photograph these strange forms of stalactites,' said Mr Sgorbani.
'They are unique - I immersed myself many times to get these beautiful pictures.
'It was a one-of-a-kind experience, and I experienced many great emotions.'
The discovery was made in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, which is low and relatively flat with no surface rivers or streams.
But beneath the surface is a different story with huge cenotes dominating the landscape.
These cenotes are naturally formed pits or sinkholes made of limestone and some were used as a source of fresh water for Mayans with their entire towns built around them.
Cenotes are commonly found in low latitude regions, including coastlines, islands and areas like young post-Paleozoic limestones that have little soil development.
The bells - often described as hell's bells, elephant feet, shower heads and trumpets - range in size from tiny to as big as a person
The deep limestone sinkhole is peppered with the massive collection of strangely beautiful bells
The stalactites were created by the precipitation of minerals from water dripping through the cave ceiling. Why exactly they are a trumpet-shape has baffled scientists
Unique bell-shaped stalactites hidden deep in the depths of the ocean have stunned scientists. The creepy phenomenon lurking under the water in Yucatan, Mexico, was caught on camera by underwater photographer Rino Sgorbani
There are an estimated 6,000 cenotes in Mexico, but less than half have been explored.
The stalactites in this cenote were created by the precipitation of minerals from water dripping through the cave ceiling.
While most common stalactites have pointed tips, these have formed a bell shape.
The shape a stalactite forms can vary greatly depending on the conditions under which they form. A typical stalactite can take 100 years to grow one inch (2.54cm) so these structures must have formed over thousands of years.
Some suggest the bell shape might form because of wind blowing in the caves, but exactly what causes the shape remains a mystery.
Some cenotes (pictured) were used as a source of fresh water for Mayans, with their entire towns built around them
The discovery was made in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, which is low and relatively flat with no surface rivers or streams
Cenotes are commonly found in low latitude regions, including coastlines, islands and areas like young post-Paleozoic limestones that have little soil development
The deep limestone sinkhole, known as a cenote, is peppered with the massive collection of strangely beautiful bells
While most common stalactites have pointed tips, the ones found in this mysterious cave have formed a bell or a cone shape
The shape a stalactite forms can vary greatly depending on the conditions under which they form
Some suggest the bell shape might form because of wind blowing in the caves, but exactly what causes the shape remains a mystery
'I was curious to go and photograph these strange forms of stalactites,' said Mr Sgorbani (pictured)
'They are unique,' Mr Sgorbani said. 'I immersed myself many times to get these beautiful pictures. 'It was a one-of-a-kind experience, and I experienced many great emotions'
A typical stalactite can take 100 years to grow one inch (2.54cm) so these structures must have formed over thousands of years
Scientists studied the ground underneath the volcano to see how it works
In Indonesia 74,000 years ago a supervolcano erupted, killing 60 per cent of Earths inhabitants at the time.
Supervolcanoes like this still have the potential to cause dramatic eruptions with global consequences, but exactly why these volcanoes are associated with such large eruptions is not fully understood.
Now scientists have used the remnants of the ancient eruption to learn more about these natural disasters.
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Supervolcanoestill have the potential to cause dramatic eruptions with global consequences, but exactly why these volcanoes are associated with such large eruptions is not fully understood
THE TOBA SUPERVOLCANO The Toba eruption occurred at about the time that modern humans may have been starting to move out of Africa and the Middle East into other parts of the world. Estimates suggest it killed 60 per cent of Earths inhabitants at the time. This eruption ejected an enormous volume of material, with the dense rock equivalent estimated between 2,800 and 5,300 km cubed. Advertisement
Ivan Koulakov and colleagues from the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences looked underneath what is now Lake Toba, where the ancient supervolcano existed, using seismic data.
'The most recent Toba supereruption, 74,000 years ago, is considered to be the largest terrestrial volcanic eruption of the Pleistocene,' the researchers said.
'This eruption ejected an enormous volume of material, with the dense rock equivalent estimated between 2,800 and 5,300 km cubed.'
The group wanted to find out why such large volumes of magma are generated by supervolcanoes, and why there is such a long time gap between their eruptions.
To study the workings of this volcano, the group developed a model based on seismic data.
Using their model, they found supervolcanoes may be controlled by large, dense magma reservoirs.
These reservoirs keep the magma stored away beneath a thick crust until enough pressure builds up so that an eruption takes place.
The researchers found supervolcanoes may be controlled by large, dense magma reservoirs. These reservoirs keep the magma stored away beneath a thick overlying crust until an eruption takes place
Ivan Koulakov and colleagues from the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences looked underneath what is now Lake Toba (shown on map) where the ancient supervolcano existed, using seismic data
Lake Toba in Indonesia, pictured. Scientists have used the remnants of the ancient eruption there, 74,000 years ago, to learn more about these natural disasters
The new model revealed a system of complex, multilevel tunnels of magma reaching down to depths of over 93 miles (150km). At a depth of around 93 miles (150km), gases and 'basic melts' - melted rock low in silicon dioxide - are generated
WHAT'S IN THE SUPERVOLCANO? Supervolcanoes may be controlled by large, dense magma reservoirs. These reservoirs keep the magma stored away beneath a thick overlying crust until an eruption takes place. The model revealed a system of complex, multi-level tunnels of magma reaching down to depths of over 93 miles (150km). At a depth of around 93 miles (150km), gases and 'basic melts' - melted rock low in silicon dioxide - are generated. Only when the magma reservoir reaches a critical level of overpressure due to the trapped gas and melts, the reservoir empties and the large amount of magma begins to rise through the crust. Advertisement
The new model revealed a system of complex, multi-level tunnels of magma reaching down to depths of over 93 miles (150km). At a depth of around 93 miles (150km), gases and 'basic melts' - melted rock low in silicon dioxide - are generated. These melts then rise to a depth of around 75 km creating a large basic magma reservoir.
Toba is not the only supervolcano where a reservoir of magma has been found underneath.
The same structure exists underneath Yellowstone, in the heart of America's northwest.
In April 2015, by tracking seismic waves, geophysicists discovered a huge secondary chamber deeper underground that's so large its partly-molten rock could fill the Grand Canyon 11 times over.
If it were to erupt, the Yellowstone supervolcano would be one thousand times as powerful as the 1980 Mount St Helens eruption, experts claim.
While it has lain dormant for more than 70,000 years, scientists say that we can't rule out the possibility eruption this may some day take place - although they say the chances are extremely slim.
The new findings show the stalling of dense magma in these reservoirs beneath the overlying crust could be a key reason why very long periods of time pass between eruptions at supervolcanoes around the world.
Only when the magma reservoir reaches a critical level of overpressure due to the trapped gas and melts, the reservoir empties and the large amount of magma begins to rise through the crust.
The Grand Prismatic hot spring in Yellowstone National Park is among the park's many hydrothermal features created by the Yellowstone supervolcano. Experts say there is a one in 700,000 annual chance of a volcanic eruption at the site
Increasing international cooperation to regulate the spread of 3D printing technology could combat the threats of homemade nuclear weapons
Following the recent mass shooting in Orlando, and the shootings in Minnesota and Dallas, the sharp political divisions over gun control within the U.S. are once again on display.
In June, House Democrats even staged a sit-in to advocate for stronger laws.
There is some evidence that more restrictions can reduce gun violence, but another recent shooting highlighted some limitations of regulation.
British Member of Parliament Jo Cox was murdered with a 'makeshift gun' despite the United Kingdom's restrictive gun-control laws.
The threat of self-manufactured firearms is not new, but a critical barrier is collapsing.
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Until recently, most people didn't have the skills to make a weapon as capable as commercially available ones. However, recent developments in the field of additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, have made home manufacturing simpler than ever before and plans for basic handguns are available to consumers
WHAT DO THE EXPERTS PROPOSE TO COUNTER 3D PRINTED WEAPONS? The U.S. State Department feels sharing plans to make a 3D-printed single-shot handgun online violates federal laws barring exports of military technology. The city of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania has already taken steps to outlaw the possession of 3D-printed guns or their components in 2013. Other experts believe more rigorous intellectual property laws, to counter the evolving threat of unregulated 3D-printed weapons. However, for the greater threat if nuclear weapons, they say countries seeking to develop nuclear weapons could use additive manufacturing to evade international safeguards against nuclear proliferation. Research into this threat recommend that governments enact export restrictions on certain types of 3D printers. Nuclear policy experts propose other approaches to limit additive manufacturing's dangers to nuclear security. They say it is necessary not to just regulate hardware, but also secure the files needed to build components for weapons of mass destruction. Advertisement
Until recently, most people didn't have the skills to make a weapon as capable as commercially available ones.
However, recent developments in the field of additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, have made home manufacturing simpler than ever before.
The prospect of more stringent legislation is also fueling interest in at-home production.
Plans for basic handguns that can be created on consumer-grade 3D printers are readily available online.
With more advanced 3D printers and other at-home technologies such as the Ghost Gunner computer-controlled mill, people can even make more complex weapons, including metal handguns and components for semi-automatic rifles.
These technologies pose challenges not only for gun regulation but also for efforts to protect humanity from more powerful weapons.
In the words of Bruce Goodwin, associate director at large for national security policy and research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 'All by itself, additive manufacturing changes everything, including defense matters.'
Government officials have recently begun to react to this emerging threat.
The U.S. State Department argued that posting online instructions to make a 3D-printed single-shot handgun violated federal laws barring exports of military technology.
At the local level, the city of Philadelphia outlawed the possession of 3D-printed guns or their components in 2013.
Nevertheless, participants recommended a number of policies, such as more rigorous intellectual property laws, to counter the evolving threat of unregulated 3D-printed weapons.
These types of policies will become increasingly important as at-home manufacturing of firearms weakens traditional gun control regulations such as those focusing on the buying and selling of weapons.
THE DANGERS OF 3D-PRINTED GUNS There are a number of 3D-printed gun designs now freely available on the web. The first fully 3D-printed gun (save for the ammo), the Liberator, is capable of killing someone. Before the Liberator initial efforts to make guns from plastic usually exploded when attempts were made to fire bullets. This proof of concept gun, however, showed that making a lethal weapon out of plastic is entirely possible. Since then a number of other guns have sprung up on the web. In late 2013 a gun enthusiast in Wisconsin showed off a working firearm called the Lulz Liberator, made from less than 15 ($25) worth of plastic, that could fire .38 calibre bullets without being damaged. In July, meanwhile, a Youtube user showed off The Grizzly, a 3D-printed rifle capable of firing .22-calibre bullets. These guns were one-shot only the barrel had to be removed after each shot but in August another gun enthusiast unveiled the Reprringer, capable of holding and firing five bullets. The alarming speed at which the technology has progressed shows how close these guns are to accurately mimicking real-life weapons. Even as users of Fosscod play down the danger of them, the sight of guns made from plastic being created is unnerving. And the fact they are made of plastic and not metal means they can be taken through metal detectors without being picked up. For the moment, though, ammo and firing pins must still be metal. But there is a possibility that in future entire guns could be 3D-printed - including the ammo. Advertisement
The danger goes well beyond firearms.
Countries seeking to develop nuclear weapons could use additive manufacturing to evade international safeguards against nuclear proliferation.
Traditional nuclear weapon control efforts include watching international markets for sales of components needed for manufacturing a nuclear device.
Government officials have recently begun to react to this emerging threat. The U.S. State Department argued that posting online instructions to make a 3D-printed single-shot handgun violated federal laws barring exports of military technology
Additional measures place restrictions on the types of technology nuclear capable states can export.
Additive manufacturing could avoid these efforts by letting countries make the equipment themselves, instead of buying it abroad.
Research into this threat led nonproliferation scholar Grant Christopher to recommend that governments enact export restrictions on certain types of 3D printers.
Nuclear policy experts Matthew Kroenig and Tristan Volpe proposed other approaches to limit additive manufacturing's dangers to nuclear security.
THE TERRIFYING REALITY OF 3D PRINTED GUNS In May 2013, the worlds first gun made with a 3D printer was unveiled. At the time it sparked major controversy some derided it as nothing more than a toy, others warned it was a serious security risk that was undetectable by metal detectors. One year on, the chilling reality of 3D-printed guns has been revealed as enthusiasts across the world show off their toys. A multitude of videos on YouTube show just how 3D-printed guns began to show up over the past few years The first was unveiled by Cody Wilson, a 25-year-old law student at the University of Texas. His primitive design was the Liberator but that proof of concept has been vastly improved since May 2013. 3D-printing gun enthusiasts now gather at a website called Fosscad (Free Open Source Software & Computer Aided Designs). Here, users share their designs for 3D-printed guns, which can be downloaded by anyone. With a 3D printer, technically anyone can then download one of the designs and print their own gun. MailOnline spoke to some of the users on Fosscad about how it has changed over the last year. Some were keen to stress that these guns are not always that easy to make. They require a decent knowledge of 3D printing and assembly. And, it was pointed out that while most of the gun can be printed there are some things that cannot, such as ammo - although not for lack of trying. But they did agree that these guns would be use to seriously harm and even kill people, just like regular guns - with the difference being the designs for 3D-printed guns can be downloaded from the internet. For countries like the UK, where firearms are much harder to come by than in the US, the availability of these designs does prove a considerable danger. In one Youtube video a Japanese 'Zig Zag' revolver, named by its maker, can be seen in action. Yoshitomo Imura, the man behind the video, was arrested in Japan for owning 3D-printed firearm components. A big misconception is that 3D printing and making guns using 3D printers are easy to make, said one user, Duce, who goes as 'ma deuce' on Youtube. We have been doing this for years and I can say its not easy. Duce points out that the group has been working on making 3D components for guns for about two years its only in the past year almost entirely printed guns have been conceived. In the UK you cant buy gun parts easily, Duce says, So you would be limited to the liberator type guns. For a complete novice who had no knowledge of 3D printers or guns it would take probably a few months to do it well, to print it and then assemble the design into a weapon. Advertisement
One way could be increasing international cooperation to regulate the spread of 3D printing technology.
Beyond regulating the hardware, governments and industry professionals can also work to more effectively secure the files needed to build components for weapons of mass destruction.
Arms control analyst Amy Nelson points out that the risk this kind of data will spread increases as it becomes increasingly digital.
Terrorist groups and other nongovernment forces could also find ways to use 3D printing to make more destructive weapons.
Beyond regulating the hardware, governments and industry professionals can also work to more effectively secure the files needed to build components for weapons of mass destruction. Pictures is the Liberator pistol, which fires a single shot and is made from plastic that was cut from a 3D printer
We argue that despite these groups' interest in using weapons of mass destruction, they don't use them regularly because their homemade devices are inherently unreliable.
Additive manufacturing could help these groups produce more effective canisters or other delivery mechanisms, or improve the potency of their chemical and biological ingredients.
Such developments would make these weapons more attractive and increase the likelihood of their use in a terror attack.
The worst threats 3D printing poses to human life and safety are likely some distance in the future.
However, the harder policymakers and others work to restrict access to handguns or unconventional weapons, the more attractive 3D printing becomes to those who want to do harm.
Additive manufacturing holds great promise for improvements across many different areas of people's lives.
It is a radical plan to spread the genetic blueprint for human life and the sum of our knowledge.
Researchers have unveiled a radical plan to use lasers to send information into the 'cosmic cloud' -just in case something terrible happens to the Earth and its inhabitants.
Called 'Voices of Humanity,' the plan is designed to 'back up humanity' according to the team of leading scientists behind it.
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Called 'Voices of Humanity,' the plan is designed to 'back up humanity' according to the team of leading scientists behind it.
'Our long term goal is to send humanity to the stars first with laser transmitted data and then with directed energy propelled spacecraft that will carry your data as an emissaries from Earth,' the team behind the project say.
'In a sense we will 'back up humanity' and use the universe as our 'cloud'.'
Backers will be able to use Kickstarter to send their own messages and even DNA into space.
'The Voices of Humanity campaign's purpose is to give a voice to all of humanity and to immortalize those voices.
'In this way your voice will literally live forever.'
The researchers hope to use the Kickstarter campaign to fund their work into laser propelled spacecraft.
'We want to push towards relativistic flight using directed energy that will enable the first interstellar missions and revolutionize access to space by miniaturizing spacecraft to the Wafer-Scale,' they say.
'We sometimes use the phrase, 'we want to back up humanity,' which is not a joke we want to do this,' project co-founder Philip Lubin, at the University of California told Space.com.
Lubin's is also involved in Breakthrough Starshot, a $100 million initiative that aims to develop the ability to laser-launch tiny, sail-equipped 'wafercraft' to Alpha Centauri and other extrasolar systems.
The researchers hope to use the Kickstarter campaign to fund their work into laser propelled spacecraft.
Lubin has also received two rounds of funding from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program to develop this laser propulsion technology.
With co-founder Travis Brashears (a physics undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley) and their colleagues, the team launched a Kickstarter campaign.
The Voices of Humanity team initially hopes to raise $30,000.
This money will be used to launch a 'humanity chip' full of images and other data provided by Kickstarter contributors to low-Earth orbit, likely in mid-2017, project team members said.
'With our basic funding goal of $30,000, we will put your data on a custom spacecraft that will be launched in 2017 initially into Low Earth Orbit (LEO), then to more distant missions to the moon, Mars, etc in subsequent missions.
'In the future, we intend to offer the Humanity Chip to all spacecraft being launched.
'Once we reach our stretch goal of $100,000, we will be able to build a sophisticated ground-based laser and robotic telescope that allows your data to be optionally transmitted via laser to the target of your choice in space.
'We will then be able to 'beam you up' by encoding and sending your data to the stars so you will travel at the speed of light into the universe.
'In both cases, we will be able to 'back up humanity', using the universe as our 'cloud' with your images, pictures, text, tweets, video, and DNA! Your data will live forever in the universe. You will be immortalized.'
THE HUMANITY CHIP THAT COULD MEAN YOU LIVE FOREVER (SORT OF) The humanity chips will weigh just one gram each, and the team aims to boost their capacity each year as technology advances. Such chips could carry the entire contents of the Library of Congress, a video message from everyone on Earth or virtually any other type of data. The first chips are set to be produced this year if the project is funded. The Voices of Humanity team initially hopes to raise $30,000. This money will be used to launch a 'humanity chip' full of images and other data provided by Kickstarter contributors to low-Earth orbit, likely in mid-2017, project team members said. Data options will include tweets, stories, documents, poems, pictures, movies, DNA sequencing etc. 'Please join us for the maiden voyage of Humanity Chip in 2016,' it says. 'The first Humanity Chip will definitely be a collectors item and we will be offering flight spares for sale in the future. 'Once we reach our stretch goal this will enable the 'Beam Me Up' mode to send your data via laser to the star, exoplanet, solar system object (planet, moon or asteroid), galaxy or black hole of your choice.' Data options will include tweets, stories, documents, poems, pictures, movies, DNA sequencing etc. 'Personally, I would like to send out a blueprint for life on Earth and how to reconstruct us, how to make us,' said Lubin, who has also formed a company called Directed Energy to help pursue such goals. 'Everything required to have a do-it-yourself 'build humanity' project.' Advertisement
If the Kickstarter campaign hits its $100,000 'stretch goal,' the researchers will build a ground-based laser system that will beam digitally encoded information directly to the objects of campaign contributors' choice stars or exoplanets, for example, or even (for particularly dark thoughts) the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way's core.
The laser-beaming system could be built within 12 months if the team reaches the $100,000 stretch funding goal, Brashears told Space.com.
'The Voices of Humanity campaign's purpose is to give a voice to all of humanity and to immortalize those voices. In this way, your voice will literally live forever,' the project's Kickstarter site reads.
The humanity chips will weigh just 1 gram (0.04 ounces).
Such chips could carry the entire contents of the Library of Congress, a video message from everyone on Earth or virtually any other type of data.
'Personally, I would like to send out a blueprint for life on Earth and how to reconstruct us, how to make us,' Lubin told space.com
HOW TO SEARCH FOR ALIEN LIFE In a new paper, Philip Lubin and colleagues propose new ways to look for alien life, which could be easier than it's been thought. They suggest that intelligent civilisations may be using technologies like the ones humans are developing, including 'directed energy.' These could be used by extraterrestrial life for the purpose of propulsion, defense, scanning, and communications, as humans plan to. Evidence of this could be found in nearby star or planetary systems if it's being used, the researchers explain. Surveys for these types of technology might be able to detect flashes of energy in a 'spill over,' or even a beacon. Advertisement
As revolutionary concepts like Breakthrough Starshot plan to launch 'directed energy' lasers missions, a scientists says it's possible that other species in the universe could be using similar technology and this would make them easier to detect.
Earlier this year, the radical project called Breakthrough Starshot revealed its plans to send tiny nanocraft to Alpha Centauri, flying on sails pushed by laser beams through the universe.
According to Philip Lubin, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who is involved with Starshot, these efforts might allow humans to broadcast our presence to other intelligent lifeforms, Universe Today explains.
Lubin details these ideas in a recent paper.
Along with Starshot, Lubin discusses Nasa's DE-STAR project the Directed Energy System for Targeting of Asteroids and exploration.
This will use lasers to target and deflect near-earth objects.
And, the researcher says other species in the universe may be creating similar lasers systems that can send signals to Earth.
This is based on the assumption that humans are not that technologically advanced and that other habitable worlds have evolved in the same way as ours.
For instance, using directed energy laser systems, aliens harness the power of a star like our sun and convert it into energy to send signals.
If aliens are using similar technology, then current explorations in nearby star and planetary systems might be able to detect flashes of energy in a 'spill over,' or even a beacon.
'There are a number of reasons a civilisation would use directed energy systems of the type discussed here,' the authors write.
'If other civilisations have an environment like we do they might use DE system for applications such as propulsion or scanning systems to survey their local environment, power beaming across large distances among many others.
Directed-energy moves at the speed of light, so it would take a message more than four years to reach Earth's nearest star, 1000 years to reach the Kepler planets, and 2 million years to get to Andromeda, the nearest galaxy. Andromeda is pictured above
'Surveys that are sensitive to these 'utilitarian' applications are a natural by-product of the 'spill over' of these issues, through a systematic beacon would be much easier to detect.'
These techniques would be very different from what SETI and other researchers have been doing, Lubin explains.
Earlier technologies limited this type of research to 'passive' efforts.
The proposed methods, however, would not be without their challenges.
Directed-energy moves at the speed of light, Universe Today explains, so it would take a message more than four years to reach Earth's nearest star, 1000 years to reach the Kepler planets, and 2 million years to get to Andromeda, the nearest galaxy.
By then, there would be better ways to communicate, they explain.
And, there's also the possibility that extraterrestrials might not actually be using these systems, the researcher acknowledges.
'What is an assumption, of course, is that electromagnetic communications has any relevance on times scales that are millions of year and in particular that electromagnetic communications (which includes beacons) should have anything to do with wavelengths near human vision,' the authors write.
An explosion on a cruise ship docked in the Peruvian city of Iquitos left several people dead and others wounded or still missing.
According to reports, the incident occurred around noon on Saturday when a gas container aboard the Aqua Expeditions cruise ship exploded while it was in port taking on fuel.
The cruise company confirmed that five of its staff were still missing but there were no passengers on board.
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According to reports, the incident occurred around noon on Saturday when a gas container aboard the Aqua Amazon (pictured before the accident) exploded while it was in port taking on fuel
Footage from the scene showed the vessel on its side as rescuers tried to put out the flames with water
Later, the cruise ship sank further into the waters as the rescue efforts continued from the sideline
Even as the ship sank, fires could still be seen and dense, black smoke was billowing into the air (as pictured)
The Aqua Amazon ferried tourists to the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, a vast protected area in the Amazon known for its ecological diversity.
State-run National Port Company (Enapu) reported the explosion on board caused a fire in the port terminal, which was extinguished by the company's personnel and firefighters.
The wounded were treated in an Iquitos hospital, while divers and navy personnel were searching nearby waters for the missing, according to the police and local media reports.
One cruise-ship employee reported that the explosion may have been sparked by crews doing welding work according to AFP.
A report by Peru this week on Monday said police suspect a short circuit was the cause of the explosion.
The publication also reported that seven crew died and 13 others were injured as a result of the incident.
According to AFP, the first body was found Saturday and officials said the second body was found on Monday by Peruvian navy divers.
Divers are still looking for the bodies of several people missing since Saturday's blast.
Oscar Garrido-Lecca Hoyle, director of the Iquitos port, said they had to work carefully because of risks of another explosion.
He added the rest of the missing bodies are believed to be trapped on the starboard side of the ship, which is now under water.
Distraught family members were also filmed at the scene, visibly upset by the incident. Many are still missing
At least one person has died and several were injured by the explosion. They are said to be receiving treatment at the local hospital
In a statement published on the company's website, Aqua Expedition confirmed the tragedy.
It said: 'It is with much regret and sadness that Francesco Galli Zugaro, Founder and CEO of Aqua Expeditions, confirms a serious incident occurred on 16th July on board one of their vessels, the Aqua Amazon.
'During the regular Saturday supplying and turn-around hours for re-stocking of the vessel, an accident resulted in an explosion which sank the ship.
'Some of the crew were injured and tragically five crew are currently missing. Focus at this time is completely concentrated on the status of the missing crew.
'The entire operations team is on the ground providing logistical support with local emergency services.'
The statement added that the investigation is ongoing but there were no passengers on board.
Passengers who were scheduled to depart on Saturday on the Aqua Amazon were reassigned to the Aria Amazon and other river cruise ships.
MailOnline Travel has contacted Aqua Expeditions for additional comment.
This is the moment debris flew over the runway as a passenger plane landed with two flat tyres.
The Southwest Airlines aircraft had set out for Fort Lauderdale in Florida, but returned back to Baltimore after less than 90 minutes in the air.
A spokesperson for the airline has said there was a problem with the main landing gear during take-off.
As the Southwest Airlines plane touched down, debris can be seen falling away from one of the tyres
The tyre can be seen in this video still buckling somewhat as the aircraft touched down
A film has captured the landing as the plane touches down on the runway with fragments clearly seen flying off.
The footage hones in on the tyre which can be seen buckling somewhat.
Speaking to MailOnline Travel, the spokesperson for the airline said: 'Southwest Airlines Flight 528 landed safely at Baltimore/Washington (BWI) Monday after experiencing a tyre issue in the main landing gear during takeoff.
SouthWest Airlines have re-affirmed that their pilots are 'trained to deal with these type of landings'
After the unscheduled return to Baltimore, the passengers were put on a new aircraft and arrived in Florida four hours behind schedule
'To further ensure the safety of all onboard and to protect the aircraft, the Boeing 737-700 was towed into a gate, allowing our customers to access the terminal.
'Each component of the landing gear is designed with redundant, multiple tyres and our pilots are trained to deal with these types of landings.
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It's several days into shooting at the former Callan Park Lunatic Asylum for the Mentally and Criminally Insane in Sydney's inner west, and as experts on the paranormal would tell you, it's a breeding ground for ghost sightings.
So chatting with comedian Nick Boshier, known for being one half of the hilarious duo Bondi Hipsters, about the supernatural is rather fitting.
'[This place is] spooky as sh*t,' he tells Daily Mail Australia on set while filming the highly anticipated second season of ABC's Soul Mates.
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EXCLUSIVE: Behind-the-scenes at the 'spooky as sh*t' set of Soul Mates' highly-anticipated season two with stars Nick Boshier (left) and Christiaan Van Vuuren (right)
'I [went for a run] through the bushes at about 5 this morning... and I can't help but feel like I need to communicate with the dead.'
Opened in 1878, the grounds are a little eerie and quiet, even on a blissfully warm autumn afternoon in March.
With the knowledge the hospital staff often chained residents up and even housed nurses who physically tortured patients, its very real and sinister history is the stuff of nightmares.
Admitting he 'loves getting swept up' in folklore, Nick talks of wanting to purchase a small house and former jail in the bush where he'd stayed with his girlfriend several months prior.
On location: Daily Mail Australia visited the location of Soul Mates II back in March at Callan Park, a former mental asylum
'[This place is] spooky as sh*t': Hospital staff often chained residents up and even housed nurses who had been physically torturing the patients
'We went to bed and thought "How dark is it? We can't even see our hands!"... I closed my eyes, fell asleep for a few hours, woke up and the lights were on. True story,' he says grinning.
It's lunchtime, and Nick is driving the few minutes from set to where the cast and crew will take an hour or so to recharge the batteries and feast on a truly impressive spread.
The underground tunnels at Callan Park make it the perfect spot to replicate Egyptian tombs, but under hot studio lights in small, pokey spaces with many people also makes it rather taxing.
Taxing: The underground tunnels at Callan Park make it the perfect spot to replicate Egyptian tomb
'If we don't have some airborne illness': Nick jokes, while his co-star Christiaan Van Vuuren and members of the crew mention they've been 'coughing up a bit'
Those not in front of the camera wear disposable face masks to prevent them from inhaling the thick, old dust that cakes the air.
'If we don't have some airborne illness,' Nick jokes, while his co-star Christiaan Van Vuuren and members of the crew mention they've been 'coughing up a bit'.
But filming has been going well, and the boys, whose acclaimed series is set for its first-ever airing in the United States, are in good spirits.
They weigh in on shows like The Bachelor: 'As someone who works on TV, you know when someone has been fed a line,' to Nine's controversial sitcom Here Come The Habibs: 'Good is good, and ethnic bents are f***ing brilliant,' with the obvious caveat: 'if it's done well'.
'There's an anything goes-ness about our approach': Nick and Christiaan have never shied away from being controversial
Inspiration: Much like their comedic idols Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of South Park, they don't single anyone out
Nick and Christiaan have never shied away from being controversial, and much like their comedic idols Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of South Park, they don't single anyone out.
'There's an anything goes-ness about our approach, but I think the thing that makes it palatable is that it's steeped in an "intelligent" idea,' says Nick, making inverted double commas with his hands.
'We're not trying to offend people,' adds Christiaan.
Nick chimes in: 'But I want to,' before explaining that while offensiveness is 'never the intention', it's just where their humour tends to lead them.
'It's so different at what you'll laugh at yourself and what you'll laugh at in front of other people,' Christiaan observes, to which everyone unanimously agrees.
New ground: Executive producer Greg Waters said there are some 'touchy' areas they 'didn't think to' explore in season one
Where the 'bravery' of the comedic pair comes in, according to executive producer Greg Waters, is asking viewers to do that sort of laughing in front of others.
'It's [also] our responsibility with the characters we create, [Adrian and Dom], to make sure we're pushing them as far as they can go in terms of what they're willing to do to be cool,' says Christiaan.
Enthusiastically looking ahead, Greg believes they have 'broken new ground' with potential offensiveness this coming season.
He added there are some 'touchy' areas they just 'didn't think to' explore in season one that fans should get excited about for season two.
Like what?
Nick replies: 'In season one there was definitely less bestiality,' before bursting into giggles.
Soul Mates season two commences on Wednesday the 3rd August at 9.30pm and SeeSo in the US on September 1.
Now that Patrick Dempsey and his wife of 17 years Jillian Fink have decided to remain together, they are making real estate moves to better reunite their family-of-five.
According to Variety, Jillian bought a five-bedroom home in the Pacific Palisades for $6.1M just six months after she filed for divorce from the 50-year-old actor in January of last year.
And now the 41-year-old make-up artist has put her 6,135-square-foot divorcee pad, featuring a poolside guest house, on the market for $8M.
United front: Now that Patrick Dempsey and his wife of 17 years Jillian Fink have decided to remain together, they are making real estate moves to better reunite their family-of-five (pictured in 2014)
The $2M price hike is reportedly due to the property - which was built in the early 1950s - being 'redesigned with a warm modern influence.'
The longtime showbiz couple - who reconciled in February - are parents to daughter Talula, 14, and fraternal twin sons Darby & Sullivan, 9.
'You have to work at everything. And you cannot do everything,' Dempsey told ES Magazine in May about repairing his marriage.
'Something has to be sacrificed.'
On her own: According to Variety, Jillian bought a five-bedroom home in the Pacific Palisades for $6.1M just six months after she filed for divorce from the 50-year-old actor in January of last year
Not bad: And now the 41-year-old make-up artist has put her 6,135-square-foot divorcee pad, featuring a poolside guest house, on the market for $8M
Neutral tones: The $2M price hike is reportedly due to the property - which was built in the early 1950s - being 'redesigned with a warm modern influence'
According to Radar Online, their marriage suffered due to an alleged 'inappropriate relationship' Patrick had on set as well as his time-consuming passion for race car driving.
The Grey's Anatomy alum and his family have also been spending increasingly more time in his Lewiston, Maine hometown where he owns The Patrick Dempsey Center for Cancer Hope & Healing.
The TAG Heuer spokesmodel and his ladylove - who still work steadily in Hollywood - also own a $1.9M Venice Beach micro-compound.
'You have to work at everything. And you cannot do everything': The longtime showbiz couple - who reconciled in February - are parents to daughter Talula, 14, and fraternal twin sons Darby & Sullivan, 9
'Something has to be sacrificed': According to Radar Online, their marriage suffered due to an alleged 'inappropriate relationship' Patrick had on set as well as his time-consuming passion for race car driving
Dempsey Challenge on October 1-2: The Grey's Anatomy alum and his family have also been spending increasingly more time in his Lewiston, Maine hometown where he owns his Center for Cancer Hope & Healing
'Gorgeous room with a view #maine': The TAG Heuer spokesmodel and his ladylove - who still work steadily in Hollywood - also own a $1.9M Venice Beach micro-compound
The Dempsey's home for sale is also a brief walk to the beach within the Huntington Palisades neighborhood.
The master bedroom on the main floor boasts a marble fireplace and French doors that open to the tree-shaded backyard pool.
The home's eat-in kitchen features a large center island topped with marble, a butler's pantry, and a long dining table.
Fine dining: The Dempsey's home for sale is also a brief walk to the beach within the Huntington Palisades neighborhood
Lots of light: The master bedroom on the main floor boasts a marble fireplace and French doors that open to the tree-shaded backyard pool
Hungry? The home's eat-in kitchen features a large center island topped with marble, a butler's pantry, and a long dining table
Complete with mini-fridge: Their three children could chill out in the playroom/den on the upper level
Divorce is stressful: And curiously, the home features a zen-style, relaxing spa room with a massage table
Their three children could chill out in the playroom/den on the upper level.
And curiously, the home features a zen-style, relaxing spa room with a massage table.
The artist formerly known as 'McDreamy' will next play Jack Qwant in the who's-my-babydaddy threequel Bridget Jones's Baby - hitting UK/US theaters September 16 - alongside Renee Zellweger, Colin Firth, and Emma Thompson.
And Jillian continues to be an in-demand hairstylist and make-up artist for celebrities like Kristen Stewart, Jennifer Lawrence, and Kate Winslet.
Hhitting UK/US theaters on September 16! 'McDreamy' will next play Jack Qwant in the who's-my-babydaddy threequel Bridget Jones's Baby alongside Colin Firth (L), Renee Zellweger (M), and Emma Thompson
She's been busy working on the latest 50 Shades Of Grey with her co-star Jamie Dornan in the south of France.
But Dakota Johnson appeared radiant as ever as she left her hotel after filming moved to Paris on Monday.
The 26-year-old acting superstar and Jamie were mobbed by fans wanting selfies and autographs as they left the exclusive Grand-Hotel.
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All smiles: Dakota Johnson appeared radiant as ever as she left her Paris hotel to film scenes with co-star Jamie Dornan in the French capital on Monday
Once in character, the pair looked completely at ease as the cameras began to roll and they went over lines while standing on an impressive balcony.
Dakota was chic in an intricate burgundy dress that fell just above the knee teamed with a pair of brown block heel sandals.
Conscious of the bright weather, she wore trendy oversized round black sunglasses to keep out the glare.
Dapper Jamie, 34, rocked a smart navy suit with a crisp white shirt and a matching blue tie and also completed his outfit with a pair of sunglasses.
In demand: The 26-year-old acting superstar and Jamie were mobbed by fans wanting selfies and autographs as they left the exclusive Grand-Hotel
Chic: Dakota wore an intricate burgundy dress that fell just above the knee teamed with a pair of brown block heel sandals
Say cheese! Jamie could barely move as fans crowded round him in the City of Love for a picture
Selfie time! Conscious of the bright weather, Dakota wore trendy oversized round black sunglasses to keep out the glare
Earlier in the day Dakota looked incredibly elegant as she sidled along in a stylish floral dress with a belted waist which she toughened up with chunky flatforms.
Dakota, who plays meek Anastasia Steele in the erotic trilogy, looked tremendously chic in her white gown which was adorned with a patchwork floral print in a host of pastel hues.
Boosting her already long legs, the brunette beauty sported chic double strap flatforms which added inches to her height.
Impressive: Once in character, the pair looked completely at ease as the cameras began to roll and they went over lines on a balcony with stone balustrade
Having fun! The acting duo appeared to be on top form as they laughed and chatted together happily
On trend: The star was surrounded by her capable security team before she made her way through the mass of fans
Downtime! Dakota and Jamie had a moment to compose themselves and check on their phones before the cameras began rolling again
Dapper: Jamie rocked a smart navy suit with a crisp white shirt and a matching blue tie and also completed his outfit with a pair of sunglasses
Injecting a superstar touch into the ensemble, Dakota clutched an envy-inducing Hermes Birkin handbag, complete with gold fastenings and a detachable long strap.
Coordinating again with the black accents in her ensemble was her over-sized sunglasses which shielded the majority of her face.
Initially wearing her hair pulled back in a low-key ponytail, Dakota, who stars opposite Jamie playing Christian Grey in the movie, later allowed loose locks to cascade over her shoulders.
Beaming: The actress was in high spirits and seemed more than happy to pose for photographs with fans
Frenzied: Jamie was waylaid by a number of excitable well wishers before he could make his way to the set
Relocation: Dakota Johnson had moved away from the horrors of the south of France as she headed to Paris to continue filming the second film in the franchise on Monday
Her trademark long-length fringe was tickling her lashes as she appeared to sport minimal make-up from beneath her glamorous eyewear.
The cast arrived in Paris after a stint of filming in south of France, where they were seen taking a dip in the shores before terror struck nearby.
A short way from the set, the tragic Bastille Day terror attack in Nice took place, which saw the death of 84 people including 10 children.
Stylish: The 26-year-old superstar looked incredibly elegant as she sidled along in a stylish floral dress with a belted waist which she toughened up with chunky flatforms
Floral fancy: Dakota, who plays meek Anastasia Steele in the erotic trilogy, looked tremendously chic in her white gown which was adorned with a patchwork floral print in a host of pastel hues
Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, drove a white lorry drove into the heavily populated Promenade des Anglais crushing people before exiting the vehicle and spraying crowds with bullets.
Horrifying footage of the moment the truck turned into a deadly juggernaut were uploaded online within minutes, showing a trail of dead bodies left in its path.
The devastating events saw the film's producer Dana Brunetti move to reassure fans that everyone involved with the project was safe.
Passing on the message from the whole production team, he wrote on Twitter: 'From production: 'Production has confirmed that everyone working on location in the south of France is okay.
''Everyone has been accounted for and is safe and sound. Thanks for everyone's messages and concerns. Another sad day for France and the world.'
Officials have warned festivalgoers to behave over the upcoming weekend as thousands prepare to attend the annual Splendour In The Grass in Byron Bay on the New South Wales north coast.
Ahead of the three-day event, local police have issued a warning to those planning on smuggling illegal substances or jumping gates to gain entry into the venue.
Tweed-Byron local area command crime manager, Detective Inspector Brendon Cullen told the Gold Coast Bulletin extra officers will be on the ground, both in and out of the location, and are prepared to escort participants out of the event if necessary.
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Firm warning: Officials have warned festivalgoers to behave over the upcoming weekend as they prepare to attend the annual Splendour In The Grass in Byron Bay on the New South Wales north coast
'Police are warning festivalgoers that those who turn up with illicit drugs will be palmed from the venue,' he said, adding that their operation at the function is to enhance safety amongst partygoers.
'Were not there as killjoys but we also have a role to play in law enforcement especially anti-social or violent behaviour will not be tolerated,' Det. Insp. Cullen continued.
'If people come in thinking theyre going to be supplying drugs or having a free run with making it a drug festival, they should be concerned that they are likely to be detected and removed from the festival.'
Ready to go: Detective Inspector Brendon Cullen told extra officers will be on the ground and are prepared to escort participants out of the event for jumping fences or smuggling drugs into the venue (Stock picture used)
Event organisers for Splendour In The Grass echoed the comments of the authority, publishing on their official website: Possession, sale or use of illegal drugs or illicit substances is strictly prohibited.
'Any persons found with them in their possession will be removed from the site and subject to police action.'
The point - located under their terms of conditions - continued: 'The Organiser reserves the right to refuse a ticketholder admission to the event or to evict that person from the event if they are affected by alcohol or drugs, or act in contravention of any of these Terms and Conditions.'
Safety first: He said, 'Police are warning festivalgoers that those who turn up with illicit drugs will be palmed from the venue,' while adding that their operation at the function is to enhance safety amongst partygoers
Upon purchasing a ticket to the festival - $375 for a three day pass - attendees agree to undergo a bag check when entering the venue.
The firm warning from local police and festival organisers comes after 92 people were arrested and 468 grams of illicit substances were seized during last year's weekend event.
At the time a 19-year-old man allegedly had possession of 92 MDMA tablets, 26 LSD tabs and 35 grams of cannabis, while two 18-year-olds allegedly had possession of 398 tabs of LSD.
Play it safe: Event organisers for Splendour In The Grass echoed the comments by the authority, publishing on their official website: Possession, sale or use of illegal drugs or illicit substances is strictly prohibited'
A 21-year-old woman was also taken into custody last year after police allegedly found 123 tablets of MDMA and cocaine in a re-sealable bag.
Splendour In The Grass kicks off on Friday, July 22 and will wrap up on Sunday, July 24.
For more information on terms and conditions of entry into the three-day festival, visit: splendourinthegrass.com.
Their romance has not run a smooth course.
Yet Love Island stars Kady McDermott and Scott Thomas seem to have come out on top as they opened up about their fiery union in this week's OK! magazine.
The 20-year-old make-up artist became enamoured with the club promoter, 28, during the six week ITV2 show, so much so they have already said the L word.
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Found love: Love Island stars Kady McDermott and Scott Thomas seem to have come out on top as they opened up about their fiery union in this week's OK! magazine
The good-looking duo, who finished the show in third place, looked overjoyed as they posed on the front of the celebrity tome, both beaming as they sported swimwear and held each other close.
Kady allowed her brunette tresses to cascade over her shoulder while sporting a gold swimsuit, while Scott showed off his hunky physique and dazzling smile.
While Scott entered the show it its inauguration last month, Kady was a late arrival who soon caught his attention, leading to him dumping his then-partner Zara Holland.
As the weeks played out the couple had some of the show's most explosive arguments although their love triumphed and they are now gushing about their romance.
Together forever? The 20-year-old make-up artist became enamoured with the club promoter, 28, during the six week ITV2 show, so much so they have already said the L word
Romantic: Discussing their fiery love, Scott said: 'Ive always been romantic but I havent had the chance to be in so long. It took Kady to bring that side out'
Pushing each other: We dont take s**t and we really push each others buttons, in a good and a bad way. Ive one million per cent fallen for Kady'
Discussing their fiery love, Scott said: 'Ive always been romantic but I havent had the chance to be in so long. It took Kady to bring that side out.
We dont take s**t and we really push each others buttons, in a good and a bad way. Ive one million per cent fallen for Kady.'
Scott, whose twin brother is Emmerdale actor Adam and older brother former Coronation Street star Ryan, has clearly fallen hard for his stunning girlfriend.
He revealed: 'Yes (we've said I love you), but because people dont understand our situation it feels cringe saying it to other people. Six weeks in there is like six months in reality.'
The real deal: Scott, whose twin brother is Emmerdale actor Adam and older brother former Coronation Street star Ryan, has clearly fallen hard for his stunning girlfriend
Growing stronger: With their romance going from strength to strength, Kady swapped her Kent home for Scott's native Manchester on Monday to pay her beau a visit
With their romance going from strength to strength, Kady swapped her Kent home for Scott's native Manchester on Monday to pay her beau a visit.
After being seen getting intimate a number of times on screen it came as little surprise when the duo headed to raunchy lingerie store Agent Provocateur to no doubt stock up on saucy surprises.
Kady looked totally comfortable in a grey tracksuit with flip flops - looking worlds away from the skin-tight dresses she has been sporting at numeorus club appearances since their departure.
The latest issue of OK! is on news stands now
Onscreen to offscreen: After being seen getting intimate a number of times on screen it came as little surprise when the duo headed to raunchy lingerie store Agent Provocateur to no doubt stock up on saucy surprises
She's one of Hollywood's biggest names with an accolade of prestigious awards under her belt.
And this week, Australian actress Nicole Kidman channelled classic Hollywood glamour as she smouldered while applying makeup.
The 49-year-old showed off her porcelain skin in a bathrobe as she smeared on a slick of rouge entitle Kidman's kiss.
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Stunning: Nicole Kidman channelled old Hollywood glamour as she applied a namesake lipstick
Wearing a white robe around her shoulders, she puckers up with a full face of makeup on, including blush, foundation and eyeliner.
She has her strawberry blonde locks tied up off her face in tousled curls and flashes a diamond ring on her wedding finger.
Nicole shared the shot on Facebook, with the lipstick being created by celebrity makeup artist Charlotte Tilbury as part of her Hot Lips Lipsticks.
Red carpet glamour: Nicole is seen here in China at a Swisse event on Friday
The lipsticks according to the website, were 'inspired by and in collaboration' with some of the biggest names, including Miranda Kerr, Victoria Beckham and Kim Kardashian-West.
She captioned her Facebook post: 'One of my darling friends Charlotte Tilbury has created the Hot Lips lipstick collection to help raise funds and awareness for Women for Women UK.
'She did Kidmans Kiss for me I love it.'
Going strong: Nicole - who has recently been in Australia filming the TV drama series Top Of The Lake, in June celebrated her ten year wedding anniversary with rocker husband Keith Urban, 48 (pictured in 2013)
Nicole - who has recently been in Australia filming the TV drama series Top Of The Lake, in June celebrated her ten-year wedding anniversary with rocker husband Keith Urban, 48.
The pair share two daughters, Sunday Rose, eight and Faith Margaret, five.
Keith shared to Instagram a sweet message for Sunday Rose to mark her eight birthday earlier this month, underneath a shot of himself holding her as a baby.
Flashback - 8 years ago- "a little ray of sunshine in the shape of a girl Happy 8th birthday Sunny!!!! We love you. mum and dad.
Nicole also wrote on Facebook: Happy Birthday to our sweet Sunday Rose. You bring so much sunshine to our lives. Love Mommy/ Mummy & Daddy xx.
She had jaws dropping last month when she showed up to Sydney's Pinky Promise Gala in a plunging gown that left little to the imagination.
And on Monday night, Francesca Packer was back at it again as she flaunted her ample curves in a provocative swimsuit whilst partying in Ibiza with a group of her privileged pals.
The confident casino heiress is currently enjoying a 'gap year' as she figures out what the next step in her career will be.
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'Date night with my darling!' Francesca Packer showed off her curves in a racy swimsuit as she partied in Ibiza with a bunch of friends
In the busty image posted to Instagram, the 21-year-old was seen cuddling up to friend Ian Stewart.
'Date night with my darling!' wrote the glamorous granddaughter of late media tycoon Kerry Packer.
Earlier that day, the brunette enjoyed a champagne-soaked lunch with her jet-setting squad.
Confident: The 21-year-old heiress had jaws dropping last month after wearing a plunging gown to a charity event in Sydney
Also in Ibiza with Francesca is BJ Keebaugh, son of former Real Housewives of Melbourne star Chyka.
BJ has showed up in a number of fun-filled snaps on Francesca's account, including one in which the group spontaneously bought a Jeep to ride around Ibiza in.
'We bought a JEEP!!' wrote the voluptuous heiress as she drove around in the vehicle with BJ, Ian, and some others.
Fran's squad! The busty brunette's friends include BJ Keebaugh, son of former Real Housewives of Melbourne star Chyka Keebaugh
'We bought a JEEP!!' At one point the squad bought a Jeep to drive around Ibiza
While Chyka's away, BJ will play! Chyka and husband Bruce are currently holidaying in Mykonos while BJ enjoys Ibiza with his privileged pals
The friends also partied on a luxury boat, which had been christened 'Gold Digger.'
Despite her opulent lifestyle now, Francesca predicts that she'll have settled down within a decade.
'I'll probably be married with kids and a house in Bellevue Hill in 10 years' time,' the racy heiress told Sunday Life magazine last month.
They have spent the last three weeks posting about their romantic European vacation, which included sailing, beach outings, romantic candlelit dinners and most importantly an engagement.
And the gushing continued for Sylvia Jeffreys and her new fiance Peter Stefanovic on Tuesdays episode of the Today show, alongside Lisa Wilkinson and her husband Peter FitzSimons.
Taking to Instagram to mark the occasion of Petes on the popular morning news program, the two couples posed lovingly on a couch together all beaming brightly for the camera.
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'Bring your Pete to work day': Sylvia Jeffreys and her fiance Peter Stefanovic join co-host Lisa Wilkinson and her husband Peter FitzSimon for an endearing snap on the couch
Did you know it's International Bring Your Pete To Work Day? LOL!,a Today show spokesperson jokingly captioned the cringeworthy snap of the four journalists posing together on a red sofa.
Sylvia also made sure to show off her big sparkly engagement ring, which was purchased by Peter from high-end Sydney retailer Nader Jewellers, in the social media snap.
The author, who returned home after several years as a foreign correspondent, filled in for his brother and anchorman of the Channel Nine breakfast show Karl Stefanovic, while Lisas husband popped in for a chat.
So much gushing: Sylvia talked about Pete's vegetable eating habits, saying: 'Last night he went around the broccoli and straight for the sweet potato fries'
But the cringeworthy display didn't stop at the social media upload.
Sylvia then went onto admit that Peter needed encouragement when it came to eating his vegetables.
'Last night he went around the broccoli and straight for the sweet potato fries,' the 30-year-old TV journalist said.
Peter quickly responded: 'A vegetable is very much a mood thing for me. If I feel like it I will have them. If I don't, I won't have them.'
Sparkly stunner: Sylvia made sure to show off her enormous diamond engagement which was purchased by Peter from Sydney's Nader Jewellers
Lisa then questioned the TV personality on his vegetable cravings, asking: 'So, are you ever in the mood for a broccoli?'
Sylvia then quipped in: 'As long as it's hidden inside some kind of cheese baked dish.'
Meanwhile, the upload comes just days after the smitten couple announced their engagement with a sweet Instagram post more than a week ago while on a romantic European holiday.
The handsome journalist got down on one knee and proposed to the blonde beauty two weeks ago.
'It was completely by surprise!' Last week, Sylvia revealed that she and Peter (right) got engaged in France
Peter, 33, shared a snap of the pair standing in a vineyard in France, with Sylvia showing off her ring.
Asked my missus to be my wife and she said yes, he gushed in the caption.
Meanwhile, Sylvia wrote: 'How's this for a framer?! A couple of weeks ago Pete popped the question, and I said yes, OF COURSE!!!
True love: Peter and Sylvia began dating in late 2013 after co-hosting the weekend edition of Today together
We've had the most wonderful time celebrating with great mates. We couldn't be happier (check the grins) and so excited to share the news with everyone.
Peter and Sylvia began dating at the end of 2013 after co-hosting the weekend edition of the Today show, when they stepped in for the regular hosts over the summer.
They spent the beginning of their union in a long distance relationship with Peter heading overseas as a foreign correspondent for the Nine Network.
She is usually flaunting her super toned figure in bikini-clad pictures on social media.
But on Monday, model Isabelle Cornish left very little to the imagination as she posed naked in a bathtub in a throwback picture shared on Instagram.
In the black and white frame, the 21-year-old stretched her bare slender body across the outdoors tub while crossing her left leg over her right.
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Revealing all: Model Isabelle Cornish left very little to the imagination on Monday as she shared a flashback image of herself posing naked in an outdoors bathtub to Instagram
She angled her head down towards the crystal clear water while she sipped a beverage from a small mug.
The makeup free Puberty Blues actress showed off her blemish-free complexion as slicked her wet locks back, allowing them to fall down her back.
Alongside the flawless photo, she captioned 'would like to go back here'.
Wishful thinking: Alongside the flawless photo, she captioned 'would like to go back here'
Last month the beauty shared a bikini-clad picture of herself posing on the beach along with a touching caption which called out body shamers.
'Warning. This is 2016, as women we have recognized and started the movement of #selflove and treating others how we would like to be treated,' she began her post.
'Social media is no place to put people down and make assumptions. Everybody is different some of us have skinny legs and some have beautiful curvy figures.
Shutting down the haters: Last month the beauty shared a bikini-clad picture of herself posing on the beach along with a touching caption which called out body shamers
'There is no PERFECT, embrace each other. My social media is to share my love of health and life. I use it to share with my community content I hope to inspire you with.'
She concluded: 'Where is the love for others? We are women we are strong. Join my tribe @teamlifeiz were we don't judge.'
Isabelle's post came days after she faced backlash for sharing a picture of herself where her long slim legs were highlighted.
Followers were quick to comment their concern for her health, with one posting: 'Sorry but that's not slim. I'm slim, that's underweight. That's almost 100 % clinically anorexic.'
Touching: She posted: 'Social media is no place to put people down and make assumptions. Everybody is different some of us have skinny legs and some have beautiful curvy figures. There is no PERFECT'
Another wrote: 'Way too thin. Not legs; health and lean muscle is vital for young women's health. What about this photo made her post this?'
But while Isabelle kept mum on the situation at the time, many of her fans were quick to defend her lifestyle and fitness.
'She is perfect. Those legs are pure lean muscle and she works hard for it. Don't body shame,' one wrote.
Another responded: 'I love following your journey of health and fitness, it inspires me to be the best earthling I can be! You're an amazing woman miss.'
Patsy Stone and Edina Monsoon are two of the most iconic characters in British comedy.
So the actresses behind the icons, Joanna Lumley and Jennifer Saunders ensured they lived up to their legend as the arrived at the New York premiere of Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie on Monday.
Staying partially in character for their sashay along the red carpet, Joanna, 70, went for an outrageous ensemble while Jennifer, 58, went for more muted glamour.
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Glamorous looks: Joanna Lumley and Jennifer Saunders ensured they lived up to their legend as the arrived at the New York premiere of Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie on Monday
Jennifer and Joanna have reprised their roles as ageing party girls Eddy and Patsy in the first big-screen adaptation, which has already boasted the biggest opening since Spectre in the UK, of the classic Nineties TV series.
Joanna was quick to ham up her red carpet appearance as she sported a floor-sweeping checked duster coat in a bold magenta hue.
While the front of the piece was loud, as the stunning blonde displayed the rear it became apparent a host of garish corsages littered the entirety of the back.
Beneath the coat, Jennifer went for a comparatively muted ensemble as she showed off her incredibly age-defying figure in a black ensemble.
Outrageous: Staying partially in character for their sashay along the red carpet, Joanna, 70, went for an outrageous ensemble while Jennifer, 58, went for more muted glamour
Absolutely darling! Sporting high-waisted black jeans cinched in at her diminutive waist, she also pulled on suede knee-high boots - creating a look a woman half her age would envy
Sporting high-waisted black jeans cinched in at her diminutive waist, she also pulled on suede knee-high boots - creating a look a woman half her age would no doubt envy.
Her famed peroxide blonde beehive was in place, with an eyelash tickling fringe and face framing tendrils making for the perfect Ab Fab look.
Completing her ensemble was her flawlessly applied make-up, with jet black kohl expertly smudged around her eyes and a slick of red lipstick coating her famous grin.
Blonde beauty: Her famed peroxide blonde beehive was in place, with an eyelash tickling fringe and face framing tendrils making for the perfect Ab Fab look
Dolled up: Completing her ensemble was her flawlessly applied make-up, with jet black kohl expertly smudged around her eyes and a slick of red lipstick coating her famous grin
Chic: Jennifer meanwhile went for more muted glamour as she too sported a black ensemble yet went for a more subtle statement piece in a blue cape
Jennifer meanwhile went for more muted glamour as she too sported a black ensemble yet went for a more subtle statement piece in a blue caped blazer.
It was only upon closer inspection, the detail showed an intricately drawn skyline adorned atop the fabric - yet her look was incredibly overshadowed by her peer.
She styled her hair into a shaggy blonde crop while keeping her make-up muted yet age-appropriate.
Joining the duo on the red carpet was Glee star Chris Colfer who looked sharp in a suit while seemingly overjoyed to meet a pair of comedy greats.
Following the red carpet the whole glamorous gang headed to the Gramercy Park Hotel for the after-party.
Say sweetie! Joining the duo on the red carpet was Glee star Chris Colfer who looked sharp in a suit while seemingly overjoyed to meet a pair of comedy greats
Gorgeous girls: She styled her hair into a shaggy blonde crop while keeping her make-up muted yet age appropriate
They're back! The new movie sees Eddy and Patsy back to their old tricks, shopping, drinking and partying their way around London
Glam: However, life as they know it comes to a halt when they accidentally push supermodel Kate Moss to her death in the River Thames during a launch
The new movie sees Eddy and Patsy back to their old tricks, shopping, drinking and partying their way around London.
However, life as they know it comes to a halt when they accidentally push supermodel Kate Moss to her death in the River Thames during a launch.
After being engulfed by a media storm, the pair flee to the French Riviera as they make plan to salvage their fabulous life.
Following the wild success of the flick Cameron Saunders, UK Managing Director, Twentieth Century Fox, said: 'We are thrilled that audiences have embraced Edina and Patsys big screen debut - it is a testament to Jennifer, Joanna and the talented team behind the film who really are absolutely fabulous.'
Meanwhile, Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie is due for release in the US on 22 July and Australia on 4 August.
Two of a kind: Joanna and Jennifer seemed in high spirits as they cuddled up for snaps at the premiere
Shameless! The pair indulged in some self promotion as they hilariously posed alongside copies of the soundtrack and a mask of Edina
Strike a pose: The ladies cuddled up to Jon Hamm who seemed in excellent spirits
Chirpy: The trio happily posed for snaps at the star-studded premiere
Glee-ful: The pair cuddled up to Chris Colfer who looked dapper in a fitted suit and tie
Blonde ambition: The ladies were joined by Phillipe and David Blond at the bash
Selfie time: The pair happily posed for snaps with their friends and guests
Crowd pleaser: (L-R) Chris Colfer, Mandie Fletcher (Director), Joanna, Jennifer, Steve Gilula, Jon Hamm and Nancy Utley cosied up for a group snap together
As a former Victoria's Secret Angel she is no stranger to posing in skimpy swimsuits.
And Miranda Kerr proved her beach babe credentials once again on Monday as she frolicked in the waves while taking part in a photoshoot in Malibu.
While it was certainly hot and sunny along the Californian coastline the 33-year-old model raised temperatures even more as she showed off her stunning physique in a flattering black bikini.
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Looking swell! Miranda Kerr showed off her model physique in Malibu on Monday as she took part in a beach photoshoot
Taking a dip: The 33-year-old beauty sported a stylish black two-piece as she clutched some swimming goggles
She wore her brunette locks loose and accessorised with a shell pendant necklace and some bracelets.
The Australian-born star ran along the water's edge while clutching some swimming goggles.
Her makeup was perfectly applied with shimmery blusher creating a glowing sunkissed look.
Getting it right: The mother-of-one was surrounded by crew members as they tried to capture the perfect images
Natural beauty: The Victoria's Secret star accessorised with a shell pendant necklace and a couple of bracelets
Beach babe: The former Victoria's Secret Angel perched the goggles on her head as she took a dip for cameras
Glowing: Miranda's makeup was perfectly applied with blusher highlighting her cheeks
In-between takes Miranda was spotted wrapping up in a white robe as she made wardrobe changes.
Later she switched into a floral print two-piece as she ran along the beach with some handsome male models.
During the shoot she was also spotted in a cropped swim top and black briefs as she posed in the sand with the waves lapping at her legs.
Wrapping up: The Aussie beauty put on a white robe inbetween takes
She's a pro! The ex of actor Orlando Bloom fussed with her brunette locks in-between takes
Blooming lovely: The model later switched into a floral bikini as she paraded her stunning figure
She also sported silver reflective sunglasses as she gazed at the camera.
For added affect a member of the crew threw water on the mother-of-one as she knelt in the sand.
Miranda has been dating Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel for almost a year and the couple were spotted enjoying a dinner out in Nobu Malibu on Friday.
Her gang: The brunette beauty was joined by some buff male models
Not a bad day job! Miranda couldn't stop smiling during the shoot
Surf's up! Some of Miranda's hunky companions carried surfboards
Next up! Miranda changed into a cropped swim top and black briefs as she posed kneeling in the sand
The model, who shares son Flynn with ex Orlando Bloom's recently explained how she met the businessman, who she's been linked to since September 2015.
'We met at a dinner in LA for Louis Vuitton and became friends,' she told the Sydney Morning Herald. 'We were really good friends for a long time before we started dating.'
She added: 'We've just been having fun together and sharing our time amongst friends and family.'
Wet and wild! As she posed in some silver sunglasses a member of the crew splashed water on the model
Fun and games: The star fell about in a fit of giggles
Former Olympian Lisa Curry has been vocal about her romance with Elvis impersonator Mark Andrew Tabone.
And during a recent trip to Canada, the 54-year-old looked every bit the proud partner as she watched her boyfriend perform shows in Ontario.
The former swimming champion was seen snapping away on her camera as she stood on the side of the stage, while the entertainer performed in front of a group of senior citizens.
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Proud girlfriend! Lisa Curry snaps away on her camera as she watches boyfriend Mark Andrew Tabone on stage in Canada
The professional impersonator took his show to the Malta Band Club in Mississauga and the Legionis Club in Collingwood over a weekend in June.
The couple, who went public with their relationship last year, also enjoyed some time off in between Mark's shows.
Lisa confirmed she was dating Elvis impersonator Mark Andrew back in December, just weeks after splitting with boyfriend of five years Joel Walkenhorst, 33.
Professional: Mark's website describes him as 'Australia's ultimate tribute entertainer'
Meanwhile, Joel announced his engagement to blonde Russian Ekaterina Oleynik just seven months after his split from Lisa.
New Idea magazine reported at the time that the news 'devastated' Lisa, only to have their report slammed by the former Olympian.
She took aim at the publication, saying: 'Shame on you for continually misleading the Australian public.'
Impressed: Professional entertainer Mark was a hit with the older crowd while his girlfriend watches adoringly
He's a character! The professional Elvis impersonator performed The King's greatest hits as he took the stage in Ontario
Devoted girlfriend: The fitness fanatic wore her hair in a high ponytail and kept her gaze shielded from the glare of the sun in dark shades as she accompanied her beau on a work trip
She also posted a loved-up snap with boyfriend Mark and joked: 'See how devastated I am?'
Lisa was previously married to Olympian and surf lifesaver Grant Kenny for 23 years before announcing their separation in May 2009.
The couple said in a statement at the time: 'This has been difficult for both of us and the children and we ask that people respect our privacy at this time.'
New flame: Mark and Lisa went public with their romance in December last year after meeting at a charity event in July
Out and about: The couple colour-coordinated their outfits as they stepped out together during the trip
But it would seem the breakdown of their marriage has not compromised Lisa and Grant's strong and supportive friendship.
They often appear on Instagram together alongside their grown-up kids - daughters Jaimi, 28, and Morgan, 26, and son Jett, 21 - and seem enjoy a healthy bond since their break-up.
Meanwhile, it was confirmed in April that Grant had fathered a child with radio personality Fifi Box, 39, after several years of speculation.
Just a few days ago, media personality Emma Freedman was lapping up the European sun as she holidayed overseas.
But it was back to reality for the star on Tuesday, with Emma going for a walk in Sydney's Paddington, dressed in gym gear and wearing some loud leggings.
Makeup free, the 27-year-old cut a casual figure in paisley print three-quarter bottoms and a striped jumper.
Making a colourful appearance: Media personality Emma Freedman went for a walk in Sydney's Paddington dressed in gym gear and wearing very loud leggings on Tuesday
She completed the outfit with Nike trainers and a New York Yankees cap.
The blonde had her long locks out and over her shoulders in loose tousled curls and covered her face with a pair of dark tinted sunglasses.
A black bag swung over her shoulder completed her ensemble.
Covering up! The star went makeup free and wore a cap and sunglasses
Stripes and paisley: The 27-year-old cut a casual figure in paisley print three-quarter bottoms and a striped jumper.
Emma - who won the Australian version of Dancing With The Stars last year - played with her phone as she walked about, with her phone case having her name on it.
She had earphones in and presumably listened to music.
It comes after Emma enjoyed a trip to Europe with friends and her boyfriend of over a year, Charlie Rundle.
Back in town: Her outing comes after Emma enjoyed a trip to Europe with friends and her boyfriend of over a year, Charlie Rundle
The daughter of racing identity Lee Freedman enjoyed holidaying in the UK, where they took in Wimbledon.
They then traveled to Italy and stopped at Rome and Sicily.
One week ago, the Channel Nine personality shared a snap of herself on a boat with her man in the Mediterranean Sea.
She captioned it: 'Molto Bene. Perfecto. Sums up the holiday accurately! The Med really does cure all!'
High-flyer: The daughter of racing identity Lee Freedman enjoyed holidaying in the UK, where they took in Wimbledon, before heading to Italy
Global adventures: One week ago, the Channel Nine personality shared a snap of herself on a boat with her man on the Mediterranean Sea
Ciao bella! She is seen here with Charlie and their friends and family in Rome
She defended Chloe Moretz on Twitter after Khloe Kardashian posted alleged X-rated photos of the 19-year-old actress to her social media on Monday.
And hours after the daring tweet, Ruby Rose moved away from being the voice of justice to promoter when she shared the trailer for her new movie, xXx: The Return of Xander Cage.
Posted on Instagram, the clip starts off with the 30-year-old holding a sniper gun to her face, while she stretches out her long and lean limbs into an attack-ready position.
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Movie promotion: Ruby Rose uploaded the trailer for her new movie, xXx: The Return of Xander Cage, to Instagram on Monday evening
'Are you ready for this?' the former MTV VJ says in the sneak peek trailer.
The scene then flicks to the Australian native holding two handguns in either hand as she backs up against fellow actress Deepika Padukone, who is also armed with weapons.
Next Vin Diesel appears on screen wearing a faux fur jacket and showing off his muscular frame in all its glory.
Action ready: Ruby is seen with her dyed green hair while pointing her fake pistol
Anticipated movie: The Australian native was seen brandishing two handguns as she backs up against fellow actress Deepika Padukone who is also armed with weapons
'Damn it feels good to be back,' the 49-year-old actor, who plays the lead role of Xander Cage, says in the short 20-second flick.
Ruby simply captioned her latest post: 'xXx trailer out tomorrow !!!!!! Omg I'm so excited for this!!!!'
This comes after the Orange Is The New Black actress took to Twitter to defend the 5th Wave star who had become embroiled in a social media fight with the Keeping Up With The Kardashians star.
She wrote: 'Yo Khloe I thought you were rad when I met you but this is awful and this is a 19-year-old girl.'
Ruby continued: 'Nobody likes being bullied or made to feel worthless.. Yet so many people will go above and beyond to make others feel that way.'
Called out: Ruby called Khloe Kardashian out for being 'awful' to a 19-year-old
Coming to her defence: The Orange Is The New Black actress wrote: 'Yo Khloe I thought you were rad when I met you but this is awful and this is a 19-year-old girl
Wrong girl: Khloe uploaded a screenshot on Twitter of Chloe in a bikini filming Neighbours 2 last October, alongside another image of an unwitting mystery woman with her bare bottom exposed
The tweet was posted after Khloe had uploaded a screenshot on Twitter of Chloe in a bikini filming Neighbours 2 last October, alongside another image of an unwitting mystery woman with her bare bottom exposed.
Khloe took the feud to a new low with the explicit image after Chloe complained on the social media site about people focusing on the ongoing row between the reality star's sister Kim, Kanye West and Taylor Swift.
Presumably referring to the recent deaths and turmoil in Nice, Turkey and Louisiana of the past few days, Chloe wrote: 'Everyone in this industry needs to get their heads out of a hole and look around to realize what's ACTUALLY happening in the REAL world.
'Stop wasting your voice on something so petulant and unimportant.'
Taking a stand: Ruby has spoken out against online bullying after trolls told her girlfriend Harley Gusman's (right) mother that she should have had an abortion
Speaking out: The Orange Is the New Black star made an impassioned plea on her social media accounts after Harley Gusman's family were targeted by trolls
Staying strong: Ruby highlighted the fact that the internet has the ability to bring people closer together - but it is often misused
The actress then went on to share other images of herself in a red bikini top and blue bottoms, as proof she was on location for the movie in the photos and not the other woman pictured.
Chloe's feud with the Kardashian's kicked off back in March after the young star expressed disdain of Kim's naked selfie taken in the bathroom to show off her slimmed down post-baby body.
Meanwhile, Ruby took to her social media to make an impassioned plea after media accounts reported Harley Gusman's family were targeted by trolls .
'Trolls.. TROLL ME. Do not troll family members of my friends it's so sad and disgraceful. There is enough hate in the world. Stop.'
The Melbourne-born native elaborated on Monday, saying: 'I posted this yesterday after someone told my partner's mum she should have aborted her... Hence my post today.'
Antonio Banderas will reunite with his The House of the Spirits director Bille August to star in a biopic on the late Gianni Versace.
Women's Wear Daily reported Friday that the three-time Golden Globe nominee - who turns 56 next month - will begin filming the 'fictional' flick this December in Milan.
The Italian fashion label - now headed up by Versace's sister Donatella - indicated that it 'has neither authorized nor had any involvement whatsoever in the forthcoming movie.'
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Spaniard plays Italian: Antonio Banderas will reunite with his The House of the Spirits director Bille August to star in a biopic on the late Gianni Versace
In demand: Women's Wear Daily reported Friday that the three-time Golden Globe nominee - who turns 56 next month - will begin filming the 'fictional' flick this December in Milan (pictured June 5)
The openly gay designer was 50 when he was murdered on the front steps of his South Beach home, The Villa Casa Casuarina, in 1997.
Serial killer Andrew Cunanan, 27, shot the famed fashion icon twice in the head before turning the same gun on himself eight days later.
Banderas has experience designing menswear following his two-week bespoke course in February at London's prestigious Central Saint Martins School of Art.
Legacy: The Italian fashion label - now headed up by Versace's sister Donatella - indicated that it 'has neither authorized nor had any involvement whatsoever in the forthcoming movie' (pictured in 1996)
Tragedy: The openly gay designer was 50 when he was murdered on the front steps of his South Beach home, The Villa Casa Casuarina, in 1997
Motive still unclear: Serial killer Andrew Cunanan (L), 27, shot the famed fashion icon (R) twice in the head before turning the same gun on himself eight days later (pictured in 1987 and 1996)
The Spanish heartthrob will officially launch his first-ever collection with Scandinavian high-street label SELECTED HOMME next month.
On Friday, Antonio - born Jose - was spotted on the set of Simon West's 2017 action flick Salty outside the Hostal Cerro Alegre Valparaiso in Chile.
In the movie, the twice-divorced father-of-one gets glam as Turk Henry, an aging rock star who gets kidnapped while vacationing in Thailand.
'What do you think of my new laptop?' Banderas has experience designing menswear following his two-week bespoke course in February at London's prestigious Central Saint Martins School of Art
'Very excited to visit my collection's showroom!' The Spanish heartthrob will officially launch his first-ever collection with Scandinavian high-street label SELECTED HOMME next month
'Welcome you all, sons of Rock & Roll': On Friday, Antonio - born Jose - was spotted on the set of Simon West's 2017 action flick Salty outside the Hostal Cerro Alegre Valparaiso in Chile
'Larga vida al rock!' In the movie, the twice-divorced father-of-one gets glam as Turk Henry, an aging rock star who gets kidnapped while vacationing in Thailand
'With my shooting pals': Salty will also feature former Bond Girl Olga Kurylenko and The Royals' Ben Cura
Salty will also feature former Bond Girl Olga Kurylenko and The Royals' Ben Cura.
The 33 actor will next play archaeologist Marcelino Sautuola opposite Rupert Everett in the 1879-set Spanish drama Finding Altamira, which has a limited release in US theaters beginning September 16.
He's set to hit the big screens as Jason Bourne for the fourth time.
And Matt Damon looked ready for action as he arrived to the premiere of his film Jason Bourne in Las Vegas on Monday with his gorgeous wife Luciana Barroso.
The 45-year-old looked dapper in a black suit with a white button up shirt while his glamorous wife wowed in a skintight patterned frock.
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What a good looking couple: Matt Damon arrived at the premiere of Jason Bourne in Las Vegas on Monday with his stunning wife Luciana
Matt looked handsome in his black and white look for the premiere, which took place at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace.
The spy thriller is set to hit US theaters on July 29.
The Oscar winner suited up in a black blazer with matching trousers, a waistcoat, tie and dress shoes.
The movie star sported a touch of scruff as he stayed close to his wife of 10 years.
Fancy: Matt looked handsome in his black and white look for the premiere, which took place at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace
Luciana, 40, sizzled in a lilac and silver floor-length gown featuring flowers and an elaborate pattern.
The mother of four showed off her svelte physique and toned arms in the shimmering look, which had a high neckline.
The brunette beauty complimented her incredible dress with pink lip gloss, rosy blush and brown hued eye makeup.
Power couple: The 45-year-old looked dapper in a black suit with a white button up shirt while his glamorous wife wowed in a skintight patterned frock
Wow: Luciana, 40, sizzled in a lilac and silver floor-length gown featuring flowers and an elaborate pattern
Luciana wore her ombre tresses loose with curls, opting to pull her fringe to one side.
Last week the couple attended the Paris premiere of the film; Matt wore a navy suit with a black button up while Luciana rocked a patterned frock.
Matt and Luciana met in April 2003; the lovebirds wed two years later.
They are parents to three daughters together: Isabella, 10; Gia, seven; and Stella, five; he is also step-dad to Luciana's daughter from a previous marriage - 17-year-old Alexia.
In his first major interview in a decade, former child star Macaulay Culkin vehemently denied allegations he had a drug relapse.
'No, I was not pounding six grand of heroin every month or whatever,' the Golden Globe nominee - who turns 36 next month - told The Guardian on Monday.
'The thing that bugged me was tabloids wrapping it all in this weird guise of concern. No, you're trying to shift papers.'
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'No': In his first major interview in a decade, former child star Macaulay Culkin vehemently denied allegations he had a drug relapse (pictured in October 9)
Macaulay did appear emaciated in pictures from February of 2012 - and he reportedly received three one-year suspended prison sentences back in 2004 for the illegal possession of marijuana, Xanax, and clonazepam.
The National Enquirer had claimed the native New Yorker had 'nothing to live for' and was 'close to death' in articles dated from March and 2012.
'Actually, I'm very much at peace lately,' Culkin - who mostly lives in France - noted.
'I don't just turn my back [on fame], I actively don't want it. The paps go after me because I don't whore myself out...It's allowed me to become the person I am, and I like me, so I wouldn't change a thing.'
The Golden Globe nominee - who turns 36 next month - did appear emaciated in pictures from February of 2012 - and he reportedly received three one-year suspended prison sentences back in 2004 for drug possession
'Actually, I'm very much at peace lately': The National Enquirer had claimed Macaulay had 'nothing to live for' and was 'close to death' in articles dated from March and 2012 (pictured in October 9)
The native New Yorker - who mostly lives in France - noted: 'I don't just turn my back [on fame], I actively don't want it. The paps go after me because I don't whore myself out...It's allowed me to become the person I am, and I like me, so I wouldn't change a thing' (pictured March 31)
Macaulay - who boasts a $15M fortune - continued: 'Not having to do anything for my dinner, financially, lets me treat every gig like it's the last. If it is, I'd think, "Culkin, you had a good run."'
Thanks to roles in Uncle Buck, Home Alone, and My Girl - the Adam Green's Aladdin actor made enough money by the time he was 12 to never have to work again.
And though Culkin admitted he'd be 'game for' a serious acting role, this month he had fun playing a hitchhiker in adverts for price comparison website, Compare the Meerkat.
The Junior author will next play a version of himself in the July 31 episode - titled 'He Said, She Said' - of TV Land's sitcom The Jim Gaffigan Show.
'[Financial security] lets me treat every gig like it's the last': Thanks to roles in Uncle Buck, Home Alone, and My Girl - Culkin made enough money by the time he was 12 to never have to work again
Comeback: And though the Adam Green's Aladdin actor admitted he'd be 'game for' a serious acting role, this month he had fun playing a hitchhiker in adverts for price comparison website, Compare the Meerkat
His seventh appearance! The Junior author will next play a version of himself in the July 31 episode - titled 'He Said, She Said' - of TV Land's sitcom The Jim Gaffigan Show
As for Macaulay's long-dormant Velvet Underground tribute band, The Pizza Underground, it turns out they have one more album coming out.
'It's one of those good ideas you have when you're drunk, and you wake up and forget about it,' the long-haired hipster laughed.
'But we're taking it to the end of the joke. We have an album coming out, a vinyl pressing with a children's choir, a symphony orchestra. We're giving it away, our gift to the world.'
'It's one of those good ideas you have when you're drunk': As for Macaulay's long-dormant Velvet Underground tribute band, The Pizza Underground, it turns out they have one more album coming out
He was in southern France reporting from the location of the massacre in Nice, which claimed the lives of 84 people and injured 202 others.
And just hours following the attacks, Karl Stefanovic dined with James Packer on his luxury yacht, the Arctic P.
The Nine Network have confirmed the 41-year-old did have lunch with the casino mogul on his lavish liner, but firmly deny he was 'living it up'.
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Lunch: Karl Stefanovic dined with casino mogul James Packer hours after reporting on the massacre in Nice but the Nine network deny the Today host was 'living it up'
'After reporting for 36 hours straight, he [Karl] did have lunch with James but was only there for an hour,' a spokesperson for the network told News.com.au.
Daily Mail Australia has reached out to Nine for comment.
James, who is the son of the late media mogul and former owner of the Nine Network, Kerry Packer, and Karl are very close.
'Karl did have lunch with James': A spokesperson for Nine confirmed the 41-year-old had lunch with the casino mogul on his luxury liner
'One of my best friends in the world': James (second from right), who is the son of media mogul and former owner of the Nine Network, Kerry Packer, and Karl are very close
In 2014 in an interview with The Courier Mail, James, now 48, described the breakfast show host as 'one of my best friends in the world.'
Karl caught up with Australians who had been on the French Riviera at the time of the attacks, which took place on July 14.
'To see that sort of thing happen to little kids... It's just mutilation,' one Australian man told the reporter.
Gifts to children, from children: Karl said the hardest thing about the story was the gifts from young ones to honour the memory of other children who had died
'The hardest thing about this story is seeing the messages, the colouring-in drawings and the teddy bears other children have brought the kids who died in this horrible atrocity,' he said in a piece-to-camera.
Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, was shot dead by police after he ploughed a truck into crowds of people who had gathered on the city's Promenade des Anglais to watch Bastille Day fireworks.
The attack left 202 people injured, including 50 who are 'between life and death', according to President Francois Hollande.
Authorities are investigating whether the he acted alone or with accomplices, and if his motives were connected to radical Islam.
Briana Culberson was raced to hospital fighting for breath on Monday's episode of The Real Housewives Of Orange County as a scary medical emergency was caught on camera.
As the reality TV cameras rolled, a panicked Vicki Gunvalson, 54, was seen racing home to get her daughter who called in tears fearing she was about to die in front of her kids.
Briana was shown sobbing as her mother helped her to the car, wheezing loudly and saying: 'I feel like I can't breathe.'
Medical scare: Vicki Gunvalson rushed her daughter Briana Culberson to hospital on Monday's episode of The Real Housewives Of Orange County
'Briana! Hang on!' cried Vicki, whose near-breakdown after her elderly mother died was a key plot line previously on the Bravo show.
'Briana's gasping for air - and she says she's not gonna make it. She is, like, passing out in front of me,' Vicki recalled later, explaining that it was so bad she pulled over to instead call 911.
As the ambulance arrived to race her away, Vicki sobbed with her head in her hands, asking: 'Why is she so sick? I'm just tired of her feeling so sick. Goddammit I can't get her healthy.'
But she was blessed by an unlikely coincidence as Tamra Judge's son's estranged fiancee Sarah Rodriguez was in the same gas station she pulled over to, leaving her volunteering to look after Briana's young sons so Vicki could be with her in hospital.
On a stretcher: Briana was placed into an ambulance and rushed to hospital
Breathing problems: Vicki's daughter was having trouble breathing
Scary situation: Briana suffered from enlarged lymph nodes that were compressing her lungs
'It's like a godsend. It's like, ''Thank you Jesus,'' Vicki insisted, with Tamra, a born again Christian, later also insisting: 'Jesus did that! He did that.
'He put Sarah right there at the right moment so she could help. It's not a coincidence.'
Tamra had been on the phone to Vicki during the emergency and had to fight to hold back her tears as she recalled hearing Briana in the background.
Health issue: Vicki lamented being unable to get her daughter healhty
'Those are the sounds that you never erase from your head. That gasping for breath,' she said, adding that at the time Briana feared she had a blood clot in her lungs.
By the end of the episode, Briana was home and revealed that her 'lymph nodes are so enlarged in my chest that they're compressing my lungs, so that's why I couldn't breathe.'
'We're still trying to get to the root of the issue so testing and the surgeries aren't over,' she complained, soon sobbing on the bed.
Mother of two: Briana was afraid of dying in front of her two young sons
As she was earlier shown looking after her grandsons Troy and Owen, Vicki said that she brought her daughter home to the OC - despite husband Ryan based in Oklahoma with the Marine Corps - just 'to get better healthcare.'
'I never envisioned her being into her hospital and me 100 percent taking care of the babies,' she said.
'I feel like I'm failing because her health is not improving. Did I do the right thing by taking her out of Oklahoma? I don't know. I feel like I'm failing as a mom,' Vicki said.
Having doubts: Vicki wondered if she was failing as a mother
She would certainly get no support from former best friend Shannon Beador, who asked of Briana: 'Why is she here? Because her mom bought her a house? Strange that she would leave her husband.'
She then asked whether Vicki had made it a 'condition' of the move to stop her from being lonely, saying: 'I'll buy you a house but you've gotta come now.'
Earlier, Vicki had tried to make peace with Shannon, apologizing for how she alienated her friends while standing by former lover Brooks Ayers despite everyone's concerns that he was lying about having cancer.
No support: Shannon Beador wondered why Briana left her husband
But Shannon made her feelings known from the second Vicki hugged her at Kelly Dodd's party, with Vicki admitting later: 'Hugging Shannon is like hugging a corpse - cold as ice.'
Apologizing for 'getting anyone involved in this whole hoopla' over Brooks, she told Shannon: 'I did a lot of things wrong because I wanted people to like him. You guys were right, and I was wrong. I don't have any excuses for him. All I know is that I really want to put this behind us and I'm sorry.'
Shannon however insisted: 'Vicki, you're too astute a woman to not know what was going on. This is a year and a half of lies that you can't just squish under the rug.'
Small hug: Vicki reached out to Shannon at Kelly Dodd's party and got a weak hug in reply
'There's no rug. I didn't lie he lied to me,' Vicki insisted in her defense. 'I'll never know the truth. We're done, we're finished he's moved on to the next girl.'
'I don't believe that,' Shannon insisted. 'I don't believe that you weren't involved in it.'
When she complained about her former friend calling her 'disgusting and vile' at the time, Vicki admitted: 'I did think you were disgusting and vile because you would not move past this.'
Not believing: Shannon did not believe Vicki's claim that she didn't know her ex was faking cancer
'So which is it Vicki? Are you sorry for it are you not?' Shannon asked.
Near tears, Vicki finally told her: 'I'm asking for forgiveness. I want our friendship back.'
But Shannon insisted: 'I don't know if I can have our friendship back.'
It's over: Shannon was not ready to resume her friendship with Vicki
When Vicki said didn't know if there was 'anything else I can do or say,' Shannon cold snapped: 'There isn't. So thank you.'
'Vicki Gunvalson is not my friend anymore,' she said in an interview later. 'Done.'
There was a glimmer of hope at the end of the episode when Shannon emailed Vicki inviting her to a 1970s' themed party she was planning - despite starting the message by reminding her that she 'made it clear I'm not interested in pursuing the friendship we once had.'
Nice gesture: Vicki did however receive an invite to Shannon's upcoming party
Not a coincidence: Tamra Judge talked to her son's estranged fiancee Sarah who happened to come across Vicki and Briana in the middle of the medical crisis
'This is a very passive-aggressive, go f*** yourself invite,' Tamra said later to camera.
'Not so nice.'
Vicki had similar luck when she told the group of friend's at Kelly's party that 'I love all you guys and I really want to be friends again' - with Meghan King Edmonds snapping: 'Well, we weren't ever friends ever, Vicki.'
Nice try: Vicki squeezed next to newbie Kelly Dodd and told the others she wanted to be friends again
News flash: Meghan reminded Vicki that they were never friends ever in a well timed retort
'F*** her. The Mean Girls thing, I can't do anymore,' Vicki sobbed as she left the party.
Meghan had been injecting herself with IVF while the other women watched on, and later went with husband Jimmy Edmonds to collect sperm he had frozen seven years ago, joking: 'Jimmy's sperm is coming out of retirement!'
The drama continues next week on Bravo.
Fertility clinic: Meghan and husband Jim Edmonds retrieved his frozen sperm
It's been a turbulent few weeks for Roxy Jacenko and her family.
But the 36-year-old's children Pixie, four, and Hunter, two, appeared carefree as they enjoyed a day out with their mother at the aquarium on Tuesday.
Joking that the adorable siblings were playing truant, the PR maven wrote on Instagram: '@pixiecurtis @huntercurtis14 wagging 'school' to learn about things under the sea!!!!'
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Under the sea! Roxy Jacenko's children, Pixie and Hunter Curtis, joined the PR maven for an excursion to the aquarium on Tuesday
The tiny social media stars went with the ocean theme for their excursion, looking colour-coordinated in blue outfits.
Pixie wore navy blue tights and jumper with a blue hair bow and silver flats, while her baby brother sported some zigzag-patterned pants and a puffer vest.
The family outing comes just days after Roxy announced her breast cancer diagnosis.
Business as usual: Roxy has put on a brave face and went back to work at the headquarters of her Sweaty Betty business since her breast cancer diagnosis
Away from home: Oliver Curtis, currently in jail, is said to be 'concerned' he could not be there to support Roxy and their two children through the ordeal
Last Tuesday, Roxy revealed that she found a lump on her left breast while she was having a shower.
She is understood to have had two biopsies on the lump - but it is not known whether she has received the results yet.
After going public with the news of her diagnosis last week, Roxy has put on a brave face and went back to work at the headquarters of her Sweaty Betty business.
She told Daily Mail Australia that having her mother by her side during this difficult time made it easier for her to stay optimistic.
Meanwhile, the PR boss is adjusting to life as a single mother while her husband Oliver Curtis serves out his jail sentence for insider trading.
The stockbroker is said to be 'concerned' he could not be there to support Roxy and their two children through the ordeal.
'He is naturally very concerned and more so due to the fact he is unable to assist with the children and be there as a support,' Roxy said.
'Being so removed from your family is challenging at the best of times, throw in a health matter and it becomes a whole new ball game. My last visit was Monday, I am unsure when ill be able to go next.'
Roxy is believed to have visited Parklea Correctional Centre in Sydney twice so far and she reportedly told friends she will never allow her children to see Oliver in prison.
She broke the news to him in a call to his jail which lasted six minutes, the longest he's allowed to spend on the phone at the prison.
She starred in the off-Broadway hit Dry Powder this past March.
And Claire Danes showed her support for the arts as she attended the opening night of Privacy at New York City's Public Theater on Monday evening.
The 37-year-old actress looked chic in a black minidress with side cutouts as she posed with her husband, Hugh Dancy, 41.
Date night: Claire Danes attended the opening night of the off-Broadway play Privacy at the Public Theater in New York City on Monday with her husband, Hugh Dancy, 41
The Homeland star - who received an Emmy nod this week for her hit Showtime series - showcased her toned pins in the short frock.
She added a pop of colour to her wardrobe with bright tangerine strappy stilettos which gave extra height to her petite frame.
Her silky golden tresses were swept back into a chic 'do, with a few wisps escaped to frame her face.
Fierce fashionista: The Homeland star donned a chic black minidress with side cutouts and strappy tangerine stilettos
Hunky hubby! The Hannibal actor looked polished to perfection in a fitted grey suit jacket and crisp white dress shirt
The four-time Golden Globe winner's hunky hubby looked polished to perfection in a fitted grey suit jacket and crisp white dress shirt.
The Hannibal actor donned black trousers and completed his dapper ensemble with brown leather brogues.
Claire and Hugh wed in 2009 before she gave birth to the couple's son, Cyrus, aged three, in December 2012.
Polished to perfection: Daniel Radcliffe, 26, looked dapper handsome in a midnight blue suit
The pair appeared enthusiastic to attend the opening night of the play starring Daniel Radcliffe, 26.
The Harry Potter actor stars in the show which, according to Broadway.com, is 'inspired by the revelations of Edward Snowden.'
'It explores our complicated relationship with technology and data through the funny and heart-breaking travails of a lonely guy, who arrives in the city to figure out how to like, tag, and share his life without giving it all away.'
All-star lineup! The Harry Potter actor posed with his cast members (L-R) De'Adre Aziza, Michael Countryman, co-creators James Graham and Josie Rourke, Daniel Radcliffe, Reg Rogers, Rachel Dratch and Raffi Barsoumian
The English actor looked handsome in a midnight blue suit as he posed with hist castmates and co-creators.
SNL alum Rachel Dratch, 50, is one of the fellow cast members in the off-Broadway play and she looked youthful in a knee-length navy cocktail dress with keyhole cutout along the neckline.
Privacy runs at the Public Theater in New York City from July 18 through August 7.
She usually shares photos of her picture-perfect lifestyle in Byron Bay on the New South Wales north coast after moving there last year with her family of five.
And on Tuesday, Elsa Pataky gave fans a glimpse into her life behind-the-scenes as she took over the La Mer Instagram page.
While managing the photo-sharing application, the 40-year-old shared an image herself as she doted over her two-year-old twin sons, Tristan and Sasha, along the quiet beachside.
Stopping time: Elsa Pataky shared a bikini-clad image of herself on Tuesday as she fussed over her two-year-old twin sons, Tristan and Sasha, along the quiet beachside
In the dark filtered photo, the wife of actor Chris Hemsworth, lifted one of her children high into the air while the other sat in the sand alongside her.
The emotions of the three were eliminated from the pictured as a dark shadow filter was dimmed over their figures.
Alongside the adorable photo, the mother-of-three wrote: 'As I am always travelling, I love when I get the chance to explore my own backyard
Adopted Aussie: Alongside the adorable photo, the mother-of-three wrote: 'As I am always travelling, I love when I get the chance to explore my own backyard. The beauty of Byron Bay never fails to surprise me'
'The beauty of Byron Bay never fails to surprise me. - @elsapatakyconfidential #LaMerEditorInChic.'
Earlier Elsa took to her personal Instagram account to post a makeup free image of herself with the never-ending forest as her backdrop.
With the sun setting in the background, the actress looked into the far distance while she tied her blonde hair back into a bun as she wore of printed T-shirt that draped over her shoulder.
The day beforehand, she celebrated her 40th birthday with hubby Chris as they enjoyed some downtime in Melbourne, Victoria.
Flawless: Earlier Elsa took to her personal Instagram account to post a makeup free image of herself with the never-ending forest as her backdrop
The Thor actor and Australian hunk shared a photo on his social media of the pair blowing out birthday candles together
'Happy birthday to the worlds best wife, greatest mum and all round stunning human!! Love you loads and thanks for letting me help blow out the candles @elsapatakyconfidential,' he captioned the adorable black and white photo.
Elsa soon after reposted the image while writing: 'Thanks for make me laugh every day, I had the best day! Love you for ever!'
She has been soaking up the natural beauty of Lady Elliot island over the past week.
And on Tuesday, Bindi Irwin, 17, gave her wildlife-loving fans a treat as she shared footage of herself exploring the underwater majesty that is the Great Barrier Reef.
Taking to Instagram with a clip of herself snorkelling through a sprawling coral structure, Bindi wrote: 'Coral archways, fish everywhere and escaping from the world beneath the surface, with people I love. Perfection'.
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'Coral archways, fish everywhere': Bindi Irwin, 17, gave her wildlife-loving fans a treat on Tuesday when she shared footage of herself exploring the underwater majesty that is the Great Barrier Reef
Days earlier, Bindi shared a photo of herself posing in a bright green and black wet-suit and snorkel during another day of sea-exploration.
In the caption, she wrote: 'Super excited to be back @ladyelliotislandecoresort soaking up the sunlight and swimming with turtles and manta rays. Doesn't get much better than this. #AustralianWinterDoneRight'
'Soaking up the sunlight and swimming with turtles and manta rays': Days earlier, Bindi shared a photo of herself posing in a bright green and black wet-suit and snorkel during another day of sea-exploration
Bindi will likely jet back to her home on the Sunshine Coast in the next few days as she gears up for her 18th birthday bash.
Her boyfriend Chandler Powell, 18, is thought to be flying in from his native USA for the celebratory occasion.
Last week, Bindi hit back at New Idea magazine after it reported that she is engaged to Chandler and that they are set to tie the knot on the 10th anniversary of Steve Irwin's death.
Bindi will likely jet back to her home on the Sunshine Coast in the next few days as she gears up for her 18th birthday bash.
According to the magazine, a close friend of the young couple had spilled the news that Chandler proposed to Bindi in Australia recently.
However, a representative for Bindi has since slammed the reports in an interview with Mamamia, saying that they are 'void of any truth' and that 'Bindi and Chandler are not engaged'.
Bindi opened up about some of the pressures in their romance in December, saying that maintaining a long distance relationship can be tough but that it is entirely worth the struggle.
'Long distance is challenging every now and then but it's wonderful to have someone so brilliant in your life,' she told Daily Mail Australia.
'Chandler's so supportive throughout it all.'
'Bindi and Chandler are not engaged': Last week, Bindi hit back at New Idea magazine after it reported that she is engaged to Chandler and that they are set to tie the knot on the 10th anniversary of Steve Irwin's death
They've been near inseparable since their romance took off in 2013.
So it was little surprise to see that Simon Cowell's plus one to his own party on Monday night was his stunning partner Lauren Silverman.
Arriving at the SYCO Summer Party in London at Lancaster House, St. James's, the 56-year-old music mogul and the American socialite, 38, looked the picture of loved-up as they packed on the PDA.
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Perfect pairing: Simon Cowell arrived at his record label's party on Monday night alongside his stunning partner Lauren Silverman
Turning up at the star-studded event, the enigmatic X Factor boss arrived in a familiar eye-grabbing way, pulling up to the party in the back of luxurious and opulent silver Rolls Royce Phantom.
Flashing a huge grin as he and his lady love arrived at the bash in the back of the 347,256 car, Simon looked to be in extremely high spirits.
With the music label boss flashing peace signs as they pulled to a stop, Lauren couldn't help but laugh and smirked as Simon played to the crowd.
However, there was only one attraction for Simon at the bash - his partner and the mother of his son, Eric.
Packing on the PDA: Arriving at the SYCO Summer Party in London at Lancaster House, the 56-year-old music mogul and the American socialite, 38, looked the picture of loved-up as they packed on the PDA
As it would seem that the honeymoon period is far from over for them, as the couple shared a tender kiss on their way into the bash.
And both Lauren and Simon appeared to be firmly in-sync, as they coordinated their outfits for the bash perfectly.
Lauren opted for a chic but demure take on summer style, with the brunette beauty slipping her slender curves into a white fitted midi dress, which featured a slightly dipping neckline.
Arriving in style: Turning up at the star-studded event, the enigmatic X Factor boss arrived in a familiar eye-grabbing way, pulling up to the party in the back of luxurious and opulent silver Rolls Royce Phantom
Here comes the boss: With the music label boss flashing peace signs as they pulled to a stop, Lauren couldn't help but laugh and smirked as Simon played to the crowd
In-sync with Simon: Both Lauren and Simon appeared to be firmly in-sync, as they coordinated their outfits for the bash perfectly
She teamed the dress with a pair of strappy silver stilettos, which served to subtly showcase her lithe legs; while she accessorised her look with a complementary clutch.
Wearing her dark locks in a stylish up do, the mother-of-two let her striking looks shine through.
Simon meanwhile opted for his usual casual office look, but wore a matching white linen shirt - open to the sternum - teamed with a pair of denim jeans and black leather shoes.
And while Simon and Lauren were most definitely the stars of the show, the party attracted a hsot of famous faces including: Cheryl, last year's X Factor winner Louisa Johnson and Capital FM beauty Lilah Parsons.
Standing out: Pop star Cheryl swamped her slim frame in a multi-coloured co-ordinated Missoni trousers and tunic as she arrived at the party
Healthy: Cheryl kept her accessories simple, with just a ring on her right hand and her long brunette locks styled in loose waves
Pretty in pink: X Factor 2015 winner Louisa Johnson looked amazing in a pink sheer lace dress and strappy sandals
Lacy lady: Capital FM breakfast show presenter Lilah Parson looked pretty in a navy lace dress
A regular: Simon's BFF Sinitta arrived with her boyfriend Jason Gale
J.J. Abrams' Episode VII: The Force Awakens introduced a new era of conflict to the Star Wars saga.
And while Rian Johnson is set to continue the dramatic interstellar tale of galactic blood, guts and grit in 2017's Episode VIII, it seems he's been finding inspiration in Hollywood's far-flung past.
Speaking over the weekend in London at the Star Wars Celebration Europe, the 42-year-old Looper director revealed he'd been drawing ideas for the film from classic films, such as, The Bridge On The River Kwai.
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Looking back to go frowards: Rian Johnson is set to continue Star Wars' dramatic interstellar tale of galactic blood, guts and grit in 2017's Episode VIII, it seems he's been finding inspiration in Hollywood's far-flung past
Sitting down for a Q&A session at the event in British capital, the American director revealed that he'd looked to the golden age of Hollywood when it came to ideas for the plot of Episode VIII, reports The Guardian.
He named David Lean's beloved 1957 classic war flick and Henry King's Twelve O'Clock High (1949) as two particular titles he'd required his crew to watch ahead of production.
And Bridge On The River Kwai has its own links to Star Wars in the form of leading man Sir Alec Guinness, who went on to play Obi Wan Kenobi in George Lucas' original trilogy.
However, it would seem that the spirit of the two films have been more of an influence for Johnson, as they both spin a tale of hope, determination and sheer power of will to battle against the odds.
Some fine inspiration: Speaking over the weekend in London at the Star Wars Celebration Europe, the 42-year-old revealed he'd been drawing ideas for the film from classic films, such as, The Bridge On The River Kwai
The conflict continues: It seems Rian is keen to pick-up on the theme's seen in J.J. Abrams' Episode VII: The Force Awakens, which introduced the resistance as the definitive underdog
They both focus on a plucky group of individuals who find themselves down-on-their-luck, who are then united and galvanized by a charismatic leader in a time of need.
Bridge On The River Kwai saw a part of a group of British and American POWs working to build the titular structure for their Japanese captors and plotting to destroy it, while Twelve O'Clock High centered around a pragmatic fighter pilot (Gregory Peck) who assumes command of a ragtag crew and attempts to whip them into fighting shape.
And it would certainly seem there's a parallel to be drawn with the latest installment of The Force Awakens.
Not only has the Starkiller destroyed the leaders of the New Republic by obliterating Hosnian Prime, but the talisman-like smuggler Han Solo also met his end - leaving the Resistance in a hard spot.
Some details: Sitting down for a Q&A session at the event in British capital, the American director revealed that he'd looked to the golden age of Hollywood when it came to ideas for the plot of Episode VIII
Some research material: He named David Lean's beloved 1957 classic war flick and Henry King's Twelve O'Clock High (1949) as two particular titles he'd required his crew to watch ahead of production
Some proud links: And Bridge On The River Kwai has its own links to Star Wars in the form of leading man Sir Alec Guinness, who went on to play Obi Wan Kenobi in George Lucas' original trilogy (pictured in a New Hope)
With the First Order on the march, and Kylo Ren alive and having completely offered himself to the Dark Side, it would seem that the Resistance has been left in tatters.
However, with Daisy Ridley's Rey tracking down the sole surviving Jedi Master, Luke Skywalker, it would seem both Abrams and Johnson are preparing to push Luke back into the spotlight.
At the same event Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia) let slip that the plot of the film will include a moving goodbye to Han (played by Harrison Ford).
Who will save the Galaxy? With the First Order on the march, and Kylo Ren alive and having completely offered himself to the Dark Side, it would seem that the Resistance has been left in tatters
Their only hope? With Daisy Ridley's Rey tracking down the sole surviving Jedi Master, Luke Skywalker, it would seem both Abrams and Johnson are preparing to push Luke back into the spotlight
Letting slip the crew and cast had been filming Han's funeral, the 59-year-old actress revealed that cast of the untitled follow-up to Force Awakens were filming Han's final scenes.
Asked during the panel discussion what they were filming at the moment, she simply stated: 'Han's funeral.'
And following up on the theme of Han, she revealed she was pleased that one of the original trilogy's key plot lines has returned to form a lynch-pin in the new First Order-Resistance conflict era.
Gone but not forgotten: At the same event Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia) let slip that the plot of the film will include a moving goodbye to Han (played by Harrison Ford)
Dropping some hints: The 59-year-old star let-slip during the panel discussion what they were filming at the moment, with the actress simply stating: 'Han's funeral'
Speaking of it's integral role in teeing up Kylo's - Han and Leia's estranged son Ben played by Adma Driver - quest for power and vengeance, she said: 'We had a very volatile relationship, which leads to space divorce as you know. Or space estrangement, at least.
Joking about Kylo's turn to the dark side, Carrie added: 'We had a child who turned out to be Hitler, and you'd feel bad too if your son had done all that.'
But looking back on her big break alongside Harrison, she said: 'It was fun to go back to the old days [the original trilogy] when I treated him badly. My favourite part of 'Star Wars' has always been treating Harrison badly.'
She's one of Holylwood's rising screen sirens, thanks in no small part to her time on The Vampire Diaries.
But it seems Nina Dorbev isn't a massive fan of the wardrobe for her latest project, Flatliners, as the star appeared keen to get out of her scrubs following a day filming in Toronto, on Monday.
Stepping out of her trailer on the film's set, the 27-year-old had done away with her trousers, leaving her modesty covered only by her baggy top and a pair of handily placed trainers.
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No srubbing needed: It seems Nina Dorbev isn't a massive fan of the wardrobe for her latest project, Flatliners, as the star appeared keen to get out of her scrubs following a day filming on-location in Toronto
Cast in the role of Marla, the raven haired beauty is set to star in the remake of the cult Sci-Fi flick, which originally starred a young Kiefer Sutherland and Julia Roberts back in 1990.
And while Hollywood icon Julia sent pulses racing in the original, it seems Nina is set to do the same in her role.
Clearly in the midst of filming some medical scenes, the stunning actress stepped out of her trailer to catch-up with events.
Padding down the steps, Nina walked onto the tarmac in barefeet, wearing very little, save for a short-sleeved doctor's smock.
Covering up... just: Stepping out of her trailer on the film's set, the 27-year-old had done away with her trousers, leaving her modesty covered only by her baggy top and a pair of handily placed trainers
Pinning the top to her thighs with one of her arms, the Let's Be Cops star ensured she wouldn't suffer any unwanted wardrobe malfunctions.
And having discarded her bottoms, the rising silver screen siren flaunted her toned and lithe pins for all to see.
Carrying a pair of bright blue New Balance trainers, Nina ensured she didn't flash her pert posterior as she made her way back up the steps into the trailer.
No moon tonight: Clearly in the midst of filming some medical scenes, the stunning actress stepped out of her trailer to catch-up with events before ducking back inside to keep her modesty firmly intact
Bringing it back to life: Nina is currently on-set in Canada filming scenes alongside the likes Diego Luna, filming the reboot of the 1990 paranormal thriller, which starred Kiefer Sutherland and Julia Robert (pictured)
The Bulgaria-born beauty wore her long dark tresses wet and in lank strands which hung around her shoulders, inadvertently highlighting her striking features to the max.
Nina is currently on-set in Canada filming scenes alongside the likes Diego Luna, filming the reboot of the 1990 paranormal thriller.
The plot centers on five medical students who conduct illegal experiments on themselves to prove conclusively if there's life after death.
Also starring in the movie are Ellen Page and British hunk James Norton, while original cast-member Kiefer - who played the chain-smoking leader Nelson Wright in the original - has committed to playing 'a seasoned doctor' in the remake.
While she may have become known to the masses for reportedly having a fling with Tyga during his brief break from Kylie Jenner, it appears that Demi Rose Mawby's own star is on the rise.
On Monday night, the 21-year-old British beauty sent her 2.7 million-strong army of Instagram followers in a like-clicking frenzy as she posted a snap of herself posing in a skimpy black bikini.
And while her taut abs were on display in the shot, which showed her sitting at the edge of an infinity pool in a tropical setting, she also gave fans a peep at her assets thanks to the underboob on show.
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Chest amazing! Tyga's rumoured ex Demi Rose Mawby shared a racy shot of herself on Instagram on Monday
Despite posting such a racy shot, Demi Rose opted to reference the current gaming craze Pokemon Go in the accompanying caption, writing: 'I traveled to a Pokemon location.'
Her post attracted almost 52,000 likes in just 14 hours, as well as a stream of admiring comments, including one which read: 'If you look closely, there's a lake in the background.'
Staying with the theme of her caption, another follower gushed: 'This woman can lure the mighty gerados out of the water and can slay the beast with her beauty.'
Buxom beauty: Demi Rose treated her social media followers to a series of rather racy snaps a few days ago
Added another: 'The only reason I'd play Pokemon [is] if [Demi] was as the end of the trail!'
A few days ago, as Tyga undertook the European leg of his tour, his rumoured ex Demi treated her social media followers to a series of rather racy snaps.
She posed up a storm in an array of revealing swimwear, tantalising her Instagram fans with several busty selfies.
Sexy selfie: Demi kept her followers entertained by showcasing her curves in a red string bikini
Leaving little to the imagination, Demi wore a plunging suede tan bodysuit, covering her impressive curves with a barely there lace-up front.
Completing the racy ensemble with tiny white hotpants, the Instagram model showed off a hint of toned thigh.
Not content with sending her followers' hearts racing, she put on an eye-popping display in a red string bikini, showcasing the curves that perhaps caught Tyga's attention.
White hot! Demi also put on a busty display in a white string bikini, showing off her ample cleavage and tiny waist
Demi also put on a busty display in a white string bikini, showing off her ample cleavage and tiny waist.
The stunning brunette, who hails from Sutton Coldfield in the West Midlands, modelled a revealing black number with extra straps drawing attention to her curves.
The social media favourite became the talk of the globe this summer after being pictured with Tyga on several occasions, including during a trip to the Cannes Film Festival.
Dinner date: The Instagram star showcased her voluptuous curves in a plunging red bodycon dress as she headed out for a bite to eat
Let me take a selfie: Demi Rose offered a generous glimpse of her cleavage and pert posterior as she posed for a selection of sexy selfies
Social media sensation: The stunning brunette, who hails from Sutton Coldfield in the West Midlands, also models a revealing black number with extra strap detailing drawing attention to her curves
Despite seeming inseparable from Demi, Tyga took to Twitter at the time to insist he wasn't dating anyone new, telling his followers: 'Single. Focused. Blessed. Living Life (sic).'
But things have been moving at a whirlwind pace since the Ayo hitmaker got back together with Kylie, with the pair even sparkling engagement rumours after she showcased a giant diamond on her ring finger on social media.
However, on Saturday, E! reported that the couple were not engaged.
Glamorous: The social media sensation can also be seen flaunting her enviable figure in a barely-there bodysuit with a lace-up front
Summer fling: The Instagram favourite, who has more than 2.7million followers, became the talk of the globe this summer after being pictured with Tyga on several occasions, including a trip to the Cannes Film Festival
'Kylie has brought up marriage with Tyga to her friends lately, both jokingly and seriously,' a source told the website.
The insider added that the couple have also spoken of the subject.
'It wouldn't happen now but she's been thinking about it more and wants a future with him,' said the insider.
'Bye bye': On Thursday Kylie left her beau in Germany to return to LA, sharing a snap of the duo hugging at the airport
True love: Tyga shared a black and white photo to Snapchat on Tuesday of girlfriend Kylie Jenner cuddling him as the 18-year-old supported him on his European tour
The couple have been jetting across Europe as of late, with Tyga busy performing at various concerts in Hungary, Finland, and Germany.
Kylie has also shared various snaps of herself during her travels, including one a bikini-clad mirror selfie.
'Missing home', the edgy, black-and-white image was captioned.
On Thursday Kylie left her beau in Germany to return to LA, sharing a snap of the duo hugging at the airport, with the caption 'Bye, bye'.
'Bae spoils': Kylie continued to keep rumours that she was engaged to boyfriend Tyga alive as she paraded the enormous accessory on her Snapchat account on Monday
Their daughter Kelly recently hinted that they were trying to put their marriage back on track following the reports he'd been having an affair.
And it seems that Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne are back on track, as the couple were seen putting on a united front in Los Angeles over the weekend.
Heading out for a quiet stroll in the sunshine on Saturday, the Black Sabbath rocker, 67, and his 63-year-old wife and manager appeared to be in high spirits - despite their recent relationship woes.
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Happy and back on track: It seems that Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne are back on track, as the couple were seen putting on a united front in Los Angeles over the weekend
Heading out for a stroll with one of the couple's many dogs, Sharon appeared pleased to be in the company of her husband ,and sported a smile on her face.
And it seems that Ozzy was keen to have a chat with his wife, and was seen having an animated chat with her as they pounded the pavement.
Sticking close to each other as they enjoyed the balmy climate, Ozzy and Sharon looked relaxed and happy as they enjoyed some quality time together - appearing keen to get their relationship back on track.
A spokesperson for the couple told MailOnline: 'They're happy.'
Making it right? Heading out for a quiet stroll in the sunshine on Saturday, the Black Sabbath rocker, 67, and his 63-year-old wife and manager appeared to be in high spirits - despite their recent relationship woes
Clearly keen to relax and enjoy their time together, Sharon eschewed her glamorous red carpet wardrobe she's been sporting at the X Factor live auditions for something more comfortable.
Pairing a white linen shirt with a some baggy denim jeans, the fiery X Factor judge and matriarch finished her look off with a pair of white slip-ons and a blue scarf.
Adding a sunhat to the mix, Sharon ensured she was covered up in the sun,
Smiling again: Heading out for a stroll with one of the couple's many dogs, Sharon appeared pleased to be in the company of her husband ,and sported a smile on her face
Ozzy meanwhile stuck to his usual wardrobe of all-black, teaming a long pinstriped jacket with a tee-shirt and trousers; topped off with a pair of midnight blue loafers.
With his long, shaggy mane blowing about in the breeze, the metal legend was instantly recognizable thanks to his pair of trademark shades.
The couple appeared to be enjoying some quiet time together before their hectic schedules resume.
They're together: In June their daughter Kelly confirmed to The Insider that her parents were back together, saying: 'My mom and dad are together right now'
Ready to rock: The couple appeared to be enjoying some quiet time together before their hectic schedules resume, with Ozzy heading back out on tour with Black Sabbath in August
In June their daughter Kelly confirmed to The Insider that her parents were back together, saying: 'My mom and dad are together right now.'
Sharon split from her husband after 34 years of marriage in May amid claims he had been unfaithful with hair stylist Michelle Pugh, however, they appear to be back on track after weeks of speculation surrounding the state of their relationship.
The couple, who marked their 34th wedding anniversary on July 4, are also parents to daughter Aimee, 32, and 30-year-old Jack.
Ozzy and Black Sabbath are resuming their current tour in North America on August 17, while Sharon will be returning to the UK in Autumn to film the 13th series of The X Factor.
A fair few Hollywood stars have relocated to the Gold Coast to film the latest installment of the highly successful Thor franchise.
But for actress Cate Blanchett it is more of a homecoming as she returned to Australia to join the cast on Tuesday.
The 47-year-old jetted in with her family in tow, showing off her effortless style in a casual all-black ensemble as she stepped off the plane.
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Star power: Cate Blanchett jetted into the Gold Coast on Tuesday with her family in tow as she prepares to join the cast of Thor: Ragnarok for filming
The mother-of-four wore a casual black sweatshirt that was embellished with a bright embroidered pattern across the chest.
Adding to her look, she wore a pair of matching black trousers and appeared relaxed after the long haul flight home.
The beauty shielded her eyes behind a pair of oversize black sunglasses and finished her look with a pair of plain sneakers.
Low-key: The 47-year-old jetted in with her family in tow and showed off her effortless style in a casual all black ensemble as she stepped off the plane
Stylish: The mother-of-four wore a casual black sweatshirt by Alexander McQueen that was embellished with a bright embroidered pattern across the chest
Shady lady: The beauty shielded her eyes behind a pair of oversize black sunglasses and finished her look with a pair of chic sneakers
She wore her blonde locks pulled back into a stylish little ponytail and held on tight to her daughter Edith as they made their way onto the tarmac.
The star and her husband Andrew Upton adopted their daughter in March, a sister for their three biological sons Dashiell, 13, Roman, 10, and Ignatius, six.
Andrew lead the way off the plane wearing a burgundy coloured T-shirt layered under a brown jacket paired with beige trousers.
Following behind was the couple's six-year-old son, Ignatius, who was dressed in a striped shirt as he clung tight to the straps of his backpack while walking down the ramp.
Going first: Andrew Upton lead the way off the plane wearing a burgundy coloured T-shirt layered under a brown jacket paired with beige trousers
Doting display: She wore her blonde locks pulled back into a stylish little ponytail and held on tight to her daughter Edith as they made their way onto the tarmac
The family were greeted by a bevy of staff who helped them off the plane and onto the tarmac after the jet landed away from the terminal.
In May it was announced that Cate would be joining the cast for Thor: Ragnarok as the first main female villain.
The Hollywood starlet is set to play the mystical villianess Hela, who is the daughter of the God of Mischief Loki.
Thor: Ragnarok is believed to draw some of its inspiration from the Planet Hulk comic book storyline, where the infuriated green anti-hero takes over a planet after being beamed into space.
Heading the cast of the new film is Chris Hemsworth as Thor with Mark Ruffalo reprising his role as The Hulk.
Friendly help: The family were greeted by a bevy of staff who helped them off the plane and onto the tarmac after the jet landed away from the terminal
Lead role: Cate is in Queensland to join the rest of the Thor crew after it was announced in May that she would play the first main female villain
Jeff Goldblum stars as Grandmaster while Tessa Thompson is to play Valkyrie, and Tom Hiddleston will reprise his role as Thor's evil adopted brother, Loki.
The whole cast are on location on the Gold Coast for filming, with a multi-storey complex set up at Warner Bros. Movie World.
According to Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and Marvel Studios executive David Maise, Thor will spend $100 million in Queensland and create hundreds of local jobs during production.
Thor: Ragnarok is slated for release in November 2017
New character: The beauty is set to play the mystical villianess Hela, who is the daughter of the God of Mischief Loki
He's best known for his role as the world's smoothest and most suave spy, James Bond.
But Pierce Brosnan, 63, proved to be just as dapper off-screen as he cut a stylish figure to attend the after party for Sting's concert at Craig's Restaurant in West Hollywood on Tuesday.
Joined by his wife Keely, the pair made for a handsome couple as they headed out of the star-studded bash.
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License to thrill! Pierce Brosnan and his wife Keely made for a handsome couple at the after party for Sting's concert at Craig's Restaurant in West Hollywood on Tuesday
Pierce looked effortlessly stylish for the outing in a black suede bomber jacket and T-shirt that he teamed with grey chinos, whilst his trademark salt and pepper locks were casually coiffed.
Meanwhile, Keely, 52, dazzled in a white lace dress that complemented her tanned complexion.
Opting for a pair of practical yet stylish flat sandals, the journalist added some extra glamour to her ensemble with the addition of an ornate jade necklace and matching chandelier earrings.
What a gent! He's best known for his role as the world's smoothest and most suave spy, James Bond, and Pierce, 63, proved to be just as dapper off-screen as he headed out with his wife
Dashing and dapper: Pierce looked effortlessly stylish for the outing in a black suede bomber jacket and T-shirt that he teamed with grey chinos, whilst his trademark salt and pepper locks were casually coiffed
Bit of all white! Keely, 52, dazzled in a white lace dress that complemented her tanned complexion
Pierce and Keely - who have been married for 15 years - were no doubt enjoying a night out in each other's company.
The pair have two teenage sons together, Dylan, 19, and Paris, 15. Whilst Pierce also a son and two adopted children with his late wife, Cassandra Harris.
Despite being married for 15 years, Pierce recently revealed Keely still had the power to make him go weak at the knees, and told The Independent: 'I love her vitality, her passion.
'She has this strength that I wouldn't be able to live without. When Keely looks at me, I go weak.'
All about the glamour: Opting for a pair of practical yet stylish flat sandals, the journalist added some extra glamour to her ensemble with the addition of an ornate jade necklace and matching chandelier earrings
Two of a kind: The pair seemed chirpy as they headed home following the afterparty
Moving on: As speculation runs rife over who will star as the next James Bond, it's been announced that Pierce will be joining forces with GoldenEye director Martin Campbell for his new project
Meanwhile, as speculation runs rife over who will star as the next James Bond, it's been announced that Pierce will be joining forces with GoldenEye director for his new project, an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's novel Across the River and Into the Trees.
The Die Another Day actor has joined forces with Martin Campbell to bring the American author's best-selling 1950 book to the big screen.
The story tells the tale of Colonel Richard Cantwell who serves in Italy after World War II and is dying of heart disease. Filming is due to start in October.
Fields of Gold...finger: Sting was undoubtedly the guest of honour as he attracted a star-studded crowd to his California concert and then to the after party held at Craig's restaurant
Glamorous guests: Sting looked stylish in a pair of leather trousers and a grey jacket, whilst Alice Eve also opted for a muted colour scheme for the evening, turning heads in a black dress with a zip up collar
Here come the girls! Courteney Cox flaunted her tanned and toned pins in a liittle black dress as she joined a friend for the glamorous after party following the star-studded concert
They've been married for more than a decade.
And Jackie O Henderson and her husband Lee are still going strong, as the couple were pictured enjoying a low-key stroll around Sydney on Tuesday.
Just days after returning home from their tropical Fijian getaway, the pair looked relaxed while adjusting back into their daily routines.
Relaxed stroll: Jackie O and Lee Henderson were pictured enjoying a low-key stroll in Sydney on Tuesday
The 41-year-old breakfast radio host sported black skinny jeans and a black and white striped jumper underneath a fitted purple jacket.
Her chic black boots and her neatly styled blonde locks added a touch of glamour to the casual ensemble.
The mother-of-one looked every inch the stylish celebrity as she hit the pavement sporting dark shades and clutching her cell phone.
Back to reality: Just days after returning home from their tropical Fijian getaway, the pair looked relaxed while adjusting back into their daily routine
To her left was UK native Lee, who appeared relaxed but focused while clad in jeans and a T-shirt.
The couple, who share a five-year-old daughter Kitty, wed in a private ceremony back in 2003 and Jackie once described their marriage as 'strong.'
'I think we have got a really strong marriage - we might have a day or two that's off kilter, but it's about not expecting that everything's going to be rosy every day,' she told Mamamia in October.
Happy family: The couple, who share a five-year-old daughter Kitty, wed in a private ceremony back in 2003 and Jackie once described their marriage as 'strong'
'There are going to be those ups and downs; no one has a perfect relationship. We have had great times and of course we've had bad patches, but it gets easier to understand the other person over time.'
Last week, the couple enjoyed a luxurious holiday in Fiji with their daughter and they shared a series of breathtaking snaps on Instagram.
'... Wish I could extend this holiday even more,' she captioned a picturesque beach photo.
'Stunning part of the world it is and the Fijian people make it all the more special. Wish all of us had their happy spirit.'
She recently confirmed her split from actor Andrew Steel following nine months together.
But Heather Maltman looked as though she did not have a care in the world when she was spotted walking to her car in Sydney on Tuesday.
The former Bachelor contestant, who failed to find love with Sam Wood last year, showed off a hint of her toned stomach in a Pocahontas-inspired suede fringed top.
Fringe benefits: Heather Maltman showed off a hint of her toned stomach in a Pocahontas-inspired suede fringed top when she was seen walking around Sydney in Tuesday
She layered a cropped denim jacket over the top and accessorised with a statement beaded necklace.
With her dark locks pulled back in a low ponytail, Heather cut a casual figure in tight blue jeans, black riding boots and aviator-style rose lens sunglasses.
She was seen chatting on her phone as she walked towards her car with her keys at the ready in her other hand.
On the fringe: She layered a cropped denim jacket over the top and accessorised with a statement beaded necklace
Relaxed: With her dark locks pulled back in a low ponytail, Heather cut a casual figure in tight blue jeans, black riding boots and aviator-style rose lens sunglasses
The 29-year-old confirmed the news of her split to the Daily Telegraph, but failed to divulge any specific details about the split.
Heather met Andrew at a festival last year after she was dumped by fitness entrepreneur Sam Wood.
After revealing that their relationship had ended, she took to Instagram to share a picture of herself getting her motorbike licence, laced with suggestive language.
Striking resemblance: Heather's fringed top and boots combination was reminiscent of Pocahontas in the Disney film
Split: Heather met Andrew Steel at a festival last year after she was dumped by fitness entrepreneur Sam Wood
'Sometimes you just know when it's time to get back on the bike... (Oh yeah, take that double meaning!),' she wrote.
Heather's return to single life comes at a bad time now that Channel Ten has already cast ambitious newswoman Georgia Love to front season two of The Bachelorette.
She was a fan favourite during her stint on The Bachelor, and many hoped to see her follow in Sam Frost's footsteps as the next Bachelorette until she started dating Andrew.
The brunette beauty, who co-hosted this year's I'm A Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Here! NOW, is now working on launching a career as an actress or director.
The last few days have seen her brutal split with Love Island beau Adam Maxted go from bad to worse.
But Katie Salmon showed her ex-flame just what he was missing, as she put on an incredibly leggy display in her stomping ground of Liverpool on Tuesday.
The Scouse model, 20, looked seriously sexy in a zip-up mini dress as she headed to the elegant Ex Directory cocktail bar with a male friend.
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Take that Adam: Katie Salmon showed her ex-flame just what he was missing, as she put on an incredibly leggy display in a micro-mini dress as she headed for a drink in Liverpool with a male friend on Tuesday
Happier times: the last few days have seen Katie's brutal split with Love Island beau Adam Maxted go from bad to worse, as they indirectly Tweeted each other in anger
The Love Island finalist flashed her lengthy, tanned pins for all to see in a burgundy ribbed micro-mini dress with a raunchy silver zip down the front.
Katie matched her ensemble with some burgundy heeled sandals and brightened the look with by layering it with a sleeveless tan trench coat over the top, adding a touch of class to the flirty dress.
She slicked her hair back into a formal and sleek up do, in keeping with the sophisticated blazer and enhancing the model's defined facial features.
Rounding the outfit off with a patent nude bag and just a gold watch for jewellery, the reality star looked glamorous and confident as she headed to the secret underground bar, which you can only enter through an old-fashioned telephone box.
Who's that girl: The Love Island finalist, 20, flashed her lengthy, tanned pins for all to see in a burgundy ribbed micro-mini dress with a raunchy silver zip down the front
Model material: Katie matched her ensemble with some burgundy heeled sandals and a sleeveless tan trench coat over the top, adding a touch of class to the flirty dress
Model Katie, who has never been one to shy away from the camera, stopped outside the telephone box entrance to pose vivaciously and glamorously for a few photos, before retiring away to the bar for a few drinks.
Accompanied by an equally as put-together male friend in white jeans and formal blazer of mottled blue, Katie was presumably heading for a relaxing evening with close company to take her mind off the drama and heartache of the breakup from wrestler Adam.
Following a brief fling on ITV's Love Island, the pair parted ways just days after leaving the show villa in Mallorca last week.
But it seems that the separation has been far from smooth, with Adam taking to Twitter to not so subtly disclose the split to his followers on Friday.
Single and ready to mingle: Katie stopped outside the telephone box entrance to pose vivaciously and glamorously for a few photos, looking confident in light of split from Love Island beau Adam Maxted, 24
'Speaking of hashtags.. #100%Single', he announced on the social media site.
And if that wasn't bad enough, the wrestler, 24, went on to Tweet: 'It's like when you're eating a kebab after a night out & the first few bites taste good but then u realise that it really isn't nice at all!'.
Speaking to OK! at the second wrap party, to which the pair arrived separately, he reportedly explained: 'Basically [I] had a bit of an argument with Katie cause she said I didn't stick up for her when she was arguing with Tom and Sophie about the Sophie situation on camera last night.'
It's all over: Following a brief fling on ITV's Love Island, Katie and Adam parted ways just days after leaving the show villa in Mallorca last week
After initially not replying to his Twitter rant, Katie hit back at her former fling, indirectly responding: Its like getting socks at Christmas. Practical but no fun.
Katie and Adam's pairing began when her rendezvous with fellow contestant Sophie Gradon ended in a disastrous love triangle with her second love interest, Tom Powell.
But the wrestler failed to make a move on her when they were given a romantic night in the Hideaway together, claiming that it may hurt his career.
Keeping busy: Katie headed to the bar to take her mind off the split in which Adam said she was like a 'kebab after a night out, the first few bites taste good but then u realise that it really isn't nice at all!'
The ex files: Adam revealed of the dramatic split that he 'had a bit of an argument with Katie cause she said I didn't stick up for her when she was arguing with Tom and Sophie'
Former MasterChef Australia contestant Trent Harvey has revealed that he is planning to tie the knot with his long-term partner Kristen in December.
The aspiring chef was sent home from the competition on Monday night after struggling to replicate acclaimed chef Christy Tania's 65-step Mistique chocolate dessert.
And when he appeared on The Project on Tuesday, Trent joked that he would definitely not be serving up the devilishly difficult 65-step dish at his wedding reception.
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Wedding bells! Former MasterChef Australia contestant Trent Harvey has revealed that he is planning to tie the knot with his long-term partner Kristen in December
'I definitely won't be making it. If someone wants to make it and sends it down, I'll serve it up but I won't be making it again,' he said.
He also spoke about how he was proud to have made it to Finals Week of the high-pressured competition.
'I'm happy with how far I went. I can't complain too much. Finals week is pretty good,' he said.
Dapper: The aspiring chef appeared on The Project on Tuesday night after being sent home from the competition
'To be honest it is better to go out on something that was really technical and hard as opposed to something that would be a lot easier.'
Trent proposed to his girlfriend of eight years in July last year with a rough diamond ring he designed himself.
The former electrician previously revealed that he is planning to get married on his family's apple orchard in Batlow, south-east of Canberra in NSW.
'I can't wait to get married,' he told Woman's Day. 'We are going to have it there with a big dance floor and food truck and a drinks van.'
'It will be very casual like a festival wedding. It's going to be awesome.'
He went head-to-head with Matt Sinclair and Mimi Baines in the pressure test on Monday night's show.
Eliminated: Trent Harvey was sent home when he failed to replicate a tricky dessert on Monday night
Fail: The electrician, 29, was sent home on Monday night after his cake failed to set because his brownie mixture was three times thicker than it should have been
The dish: All three contestants struggled to replicate Christy Tania's 65-step Mistique dish (pictured)
When Trent was told to leave the competition, he bid an emotional farewell to the judges and other finalists.
He said: 'It's definitely sad to be leaving the competition, but where I am with my cooking now to where I was at the start is just, it's so far separated.
'I'm walking away with so much knowledge. It's just been one of the best experiences of my life for sure. Before entering the competition, I didn't believe that I could actually make food my career.'
After he was eliminated, his fiancee shared an emotional post on Instagram.
'No words can really describe how proud I am of you @trent.harvey,' she said.
'You are so amazing, humble, genuine and so bloody good at EVERYTHING. I absolutely adore you! Onwards and upwards with a wedding somewhere in between - I love you.'
Cute couple: Trent proposed to his girlfriend of eight years in July last year with a rough diamond ring he designed himself
She's used to covering red carpets with the hottest stars in Hollywood.
But on Monday, Renee Bargh stole the spotlight while attending the Jason Bourne movie premiere in Las Vegas.
The Extra TV host dazzled in a strapless gold-print gown complete with an open back and fitted style.
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Wow: Renee Bargh stole the spotlight while attending the Jason Bourne movie premiere in Las Vegas on Monday
The elegant dress sat above her ankles and showcased her slender frame while her nude open toe heels added a touch of glamour to the overall look.
Her bronzed glow did not go unnoticed as the 29-year-old Queensland native looked radiant while posing for snaps.
With both hands on her hips and her leg crossed over in a standing position, Renee oozed confidence while flashing her pearly whites.
Effortlessly chic: The 29-year-old Extra host looked radiant on the red carpet
Poser: Renee oozed confidence while posing for snaps at the event
Her sandy blonde mane was pulled back and worn loosely with styling gel holding each strand in place.
The stunner wore minimal makeup consisting of bronzer, mascara and a dash of lipstick.
Also that day, the petite model got in on some Vegas action while enjoying a round of Blackjack with Jason Bourne star Matt Damon.
Famous faces: Also that day, the petite model got in on some Vegas action while enjoying a round of Blackjack with Jason Bourne star Matt Damon
Stunning: The model dazzled in a strapless gold-print gown complete with an open back and fitted design
'That moment you realize you just beat Jason Bourne at Blackjack. @extratv #MattDamon #jasonbourne,' she captioned alongside a photo of the pair.
Renee moved to Los Angeles in 2010 to pursue her media career and over the years she has interviewed some of the biggest names in Hollywood.
Last year she shared that while Australia will always be home, she is no rush to move back after adjusting to the LA lifestyle.
'I just signed another three-year contract with Extra,' she told The Daily Telegraph.
'So I'm really excited about that and really happy. Obviously, you know, I still love home ... but I love life over here, it's so fun.'
Girls just wanna have fun: Renee is often pictured enjoying time with her best friend Ashley Hart
Her intentions may have been heartfelt but Lindsay Lohan has drawn criticism over her decision to make an appeal for a better world while posing in a babydoll nightie.
The Mean Girls star shared a photo on her Instagram on Monday in which she sits provocatively on a bed wearing a low-cut and short blue and white patterned nightdress.
Alongside it she wrote: 'If history were to be folded ...Where would we put the crease? Pray for the ones we lose everyday and appreciate every breathe you we all take #nice #turkey #turnup and do something (goodnight and sleep with an idea for the future).
Thought provoking: Lindsay Lohan urged her social media followers to appreciate life in the wake of the recent tragic events in Nice and Turkey, while posing on a bed in a flimsy low-cut nightie
'Pray': The actress, 30, pondered the meaning of life in the caption she wrote alongside the bedroom photo she shared on her Instagram on Monday
Either side of the snap, Lindsay posted photos showing her frolicking in the ocean with her Russian beau Egor Tarabasov and brother Michael Lohan Jr. and his girlfriend during her recent Greek vacation.
She's wearing a blackless red swimsuit and in one shot is tightly hugging onto her younger boyfriend while in the water.
And after exhorting her followers to 'do something' and 'sleep with an idea for the future,' the next day she shared a picture of an artichoke dish she was enjoying at the MIchelin starred restaurant Story in London.
After urging her followers to 'do something' and 'sleep with an idea for the future,' the next day Lindsay shared a pic of one of the gourmet dishes she was enjoying at the pricey Michelin starred restaurant Story in London
Lindsay's post immediately drew comparisons to one earlier this month by Mischa Barton.
The former star of The OC shared a photo, since deleted, showing her in a bikini and holding a wine glass on a yacht while expressing her sorrow at the shooting death of Alton Sterling by police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Mischa, 30, was widely ridiculed on social media with people posting comments deriding her for calling cops 'pigs' and for proclaiming solidarity with Sterling while baring her skin and sipping wine on a yacht.
Tone deaf: Earlier this month, Mischa Barton raised similar eyebrows after posting a picture of herself wearing a bikini and sipping wine on a yacht while expressing solidarity with Alton Sterling who was shot and killed by police officers in Louisiana
Lindsay has returned to London after a brief trip to Southern California.
She and Egor went on a camping trip to the Big Bear mountain resort outside LA, where they rented a cabin for the night, and which she documented on her Snapchat.
Before that, the loved up couple were on the Greek island of Mykonoz where they celebrated the actress' 30th birthday on July 2.
Personal happiness: Lindsay posted a photo of herself hugging Russian boyfriend Egor Tarabasov while frolicking in the ocean wearing a backless red swimsuit
She finally moved into her new family home with her fiance Sam Wood earlier this month.
And Snezana Markoski seems to be settling nicely as she was pictured snuggling up to the former Bachelor on the sofa in their Melbourne pad.
Wearing a black long-sleeved top and grey jeans, the brunette beauty could be seen nestling in Sam's lap as the fitness instructor cradled her head and played with her hair.
Cuddle time: Snezana Markoski was seen nestling on Sam Wood's lap as they relaxed on the sofa at their new Melbourne home
Sam shared the picture on Instagram on Tuesday, saying: 'It's the little things. @plush_think_sofas time with this one. Finally together in our home. #loveher #home #plushcomfort'
He also opted for a casual look in blue jeans and a fitted white T-shirt that drew attention to his ripped muscles.
The loved-up pair have posted a number of social media snaps showing their new life together in the luxury three-bedroom home with Snezana's 10-year-old daughter Eve.
Wasting no time! Sam Wood has quickly jumped into stepdad mode and successfully braided Snezana's daughter's hair
Stepdad duty: Sam Wood was seen doing the school run with his fiancee Snezana Markoski on her 11-year-old daughter's first day in Melbourne
Sam seems to be relishing in his step-father duties and was even seen braiding Eve's hair before bedtime on her first night in the house.
In a social media post Snezana praised her fiance for mastering the hair style, saying: 'Perfect Sunday night! @samjameswood on hair duty and killing it!'
He was also seen doing the school run with Snezana and Eve on the 10-year-old's first day.
Sam shared a family selfie of the trio sitting in the car before setting off for the new school.
Happy family: She finally moved into her new family home with her fiance Sam Wood and her daughter Eve earlier this month
'And we're off to school! #firstday #melbourne #nervousmiles,' Sam captioned the image.
Sam and Snezana purchased their new Melbourne home in January for a whopping $1.4million.
The 35-year-old personal trainer announced the news that Snezana and Eve were moving to the house at the start of this month.
He posted on Facebook: 'When you've spent all night cleaning the house as your fiance and her beautiful little girl are finally coming to live and you know it still isn't clean enough (sic)'.
Making the move: The personal trainer announced the news that Snezana and Eve were moving to Melbourne earlier this month
Excited: Sam wrote on Facebook: 'When you've spent all night cleaning the house as your fiance and her beautiful little girl are finally coming to live and you know it still isn't clean enough'
It was previously cancelled, but Offspring is back and fans will finally see the return of Mick Holland, played by Eddie Perfect.
The 38-year-old Melbourne actor, who plays the estranged husband to Billie Proudman (Kat Stewart), returns to TV screens on Wednesday following his character's jaunt in London.
He said that watching the first three episodes of season six, which returned more than one year after season five last month, with his character Mick absent, was a strange experience.
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Back in town: Eddie Perfect's character, Mick Holland, returns to Offspring on Wednesday following a three episode hiatus
'When my character is out of town, watching I feel like I'm eavesdropping on characters' stories I shouldn't know about,' he told The Daily Telegraph.
The father-of-two, who is married to Lucy Cochran, believes that renewing the hit Channel Ten show was the right decision.
'What everyone was waiting around to see from the first episode was whether or not there was juice in the story, was it the right decision to come back for season six?' he said.
Candid: He said watching the first three episodes of season six with his character Mick absent was a strange experience
Happy to be back! Eddie Perfect said he's happy to be back on Offspring with the original cast, while at the Little Shop of Horrors opening night in Melbourne back in May (Pictured with wife Lucy Cochran)
'I think the episodes have been really strong, the actors are amazing and the storylines surprising.'
In May, Eddie shared his delight in returning to the set with the original cast.
'It was like kind of a family reunion,' he told AAP. It was my first day of school yesterday,' he joked, adding: 'I just turned up and it was beautiful. I haven't done that much hugging in about three years.'
Prior to the show return, the actor was completely in the dark about how season six unfolds.
'It was like kind of a family reunion': The actor and singer described the first day as a reunion and joked about never having hugged so much in the past three years
'I'm almost completely ignorant,' he said. 'I don't know any of the storylines.'
What is known is the cast including Kat, Asher Keddie, and Ido Drent, have been settling back into their characters well.
'As soon as we all got our heads back into the scripts, it was just like revisiting old friends, it was so familiar,' Perfect said.
The multi-talented theatre star added that Kat thought it took some time to get back into the swing of things, but that it was 'just like old times now'.
'All the old crew are there, all the old cast are there,' he said. 'We're in the same production building. It's really exciting.'
Back together again! Perfect, pictured with (L-R) Asher Keddie, John Waters (centre), Ido Drent and Kat Stewart
They're celebrating a major milestone in their relationship.
And Nick Lachey shared a heart-melting tribute to his 'world', his wife Vanessa Lachey, as they celebrated their five year wedding anniversary.
The 42-year-old pop star posted to Twitter on Friday, 'Happy Anniversary to the most amazing wife, mother, and woman I know. I am so thankful for you and US. You're my world. @VanessaLachey.'
So in love: In honour of their five year wedding anniversary on Friday, Vanessa Lachey shared a romantic photo of husband Nick Lachey cradling her in his arms at sunset
His everything: Nick posted a heart-melting tribute to his 'world', wife Vanessa, as they celebrated five years of marriage this weekend
Vanessa did not hold back in expressing her adoration for her husband either, sharing a photo of her with her husband as well.
The image was of Nick cradling Vanessa in his arms as they walked into the ocean at sunset.
'10 years of Lovin' 5 years of Marriage 2 Beautiful Babies 1 Crazy Love Happy Anniversary, Baby!,' Vanessa wrote in the caption.
The former Total Request Live host and Nick began dating in 2006 and married in a televised wedding on Necker Island on July 15, 2011.
Love story: The former Total Request Live host and Nick, pictured in New York in March, began dating in 2006 and married in a televised wedding on Necker Island on July 15, 2011
They have a three-year-old son Camden and one-year-old daughter Brooklyn together.
The couple's five year wedding anniversary occurred the same day Nick performed with 98 Degrees in Tampa, Florida as part of the My2K Tour.
The tour sees the band tour practically non-stop for the next month with O-Town, Ryan Cabrera, and Dream.
'I hope @nicklachey brings home this outfit!' Proud wife Vanessa shared a photo of Nick alongside his 98 Degree band mates on Friday
Proud wife Vanessa shared a photo of Nick alongside his 98 Degree band mates, which she captioned, 'A #Throwback Summer Tour! Yaaasssss gurl! The fellas still got it! They kicked off their @My2KTour last week!
'All your FAVORITE songs and then some #Throwback surprises! I hope @nicklachey brings home this outfit!'
Vanessa, meanwhile, is poised to become a whole lot busier, with her latest project now in pre-production.
Mr. and Mrs. Lachey! The newlyweds walked arm-in-arm on the day of their wedding in July 2011
Variety reported that Vanessa has been chosen to star alongside Alyson Hannigan and Megan Hilty in TV Land's upcoming series The First Wives Club.
The romantic comedy series will be based on the 1996 feature film of the same name.
Vanessa is set to play Sasha, a successful chef with a girlfriend she intends to marry.
Back at it: Vanessa, pictured with Lachey in February in Los Angeles, is poised to become a whole lot busier, with her latest project now in pre-production
They've been plagued with rumours that their marriage is on the rocks.
And whilst Mark Wright and Michelle Keegan have hit out claims that they are currently experiencing anything but wedded bliss, a family member has revealed that he hasn't seen the pair together in a year.
Speaking exclusively to MailOnline, Mark's cousin, Elliott Wright, revealed: 'I last saw Mark and Michelle when they came out to Marbella for my opening party for Olivias.'
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Hard to pin down: Mark Wright and Michelle Keegan have hit out claims that they are currently experiencing marital problems as a family member has revealed that he hasn't seen the pair together in a year
The launch night for his Spanish restaurant may have been 11 months ago, but the TOWIE star insisted the pair seemed comfortable in each other's company.
'They were happy and had a great time, he explained.
MailOnline have contacted representatives for Mark and Michelle for comment
Speaking ahead of the launch of his new ITVBe show Playa in Marbella, Elliott added that he also found it difficult to stay in contact with the rest of his big brood, which includes Mark's sister Jessica Wright.
Confession: Speaking exclusively to MailOnline, Mark's cousin, Elliott Wright revealed it was hard to see the pair together, but insisted the last time he was in their company they had a great time together
Family man: Elliott (second left) pictured with Mark and Michelle revealed he plans to spend Christmas with his famous family members, but has struggled to see them all due to work commitments
He explained: We're close as a family, but we're all really busy to be honest so we don't really get to see each other as much. When it's Christmas time we all try and get together and see each other.
Mark is so busy I haven't seen him, the last time I've seen him is when I go through the MailOnline on my phone.
However, the star added he had high hopes he could get Mark to appear on his new show.
Hopefully!' he explained: 'Hes so busy but you never know. My cousin Jess has been in this series though. She flew out and she brought Ferne which was nice.
Hard at work: Elliott - who has been hard at work on his new ITVBe show Playa in Marbella - revealed he hopes to get Mark to appear on the show and has managed to convince cousin Jess to appear
Mark and Michelle reportedly haven't spent much time together in recent months due to conflicting schedules.
The former Coronation Street star spent six months filming Our Girl in South Africa before returning to the UK, while Mark has been kept busy with his TV and radio presenting commitments.
Last month, Michelle took to Twitter to blast rumours after a string of speculation over the state of their marriage, compounded by the absence of her wedding ring.
Kept apart: Mark and Michelle reportedly haven't spent much time together in recent months due to conflicting schedules. She spent six months filming Our Girl in South Africa while Mark has also been kept busy with work
She wrote: '"No wedding ring, no wedding ring," blah blah blah sooooo boring!!! Not that I have to explain but I'm SO sick of these stories...
'I work on camera so I take it off and put it somewhere safe... SIMPLE. Last night I went straight out after work... Hence the NO ring!!!
'That's the only comment I'm making!!!'
A simple case of twerking left her ample posterior exposed for the world to see after an awkward twerking episode on live TV.
But it was back to everyday business for Big Brother star Lateysha Grace as she was on mum duties with her adorable daughter Wynter.
Former The Valleys Lateysha star stepped out in London on Tuesday as she held her cute tot in her arms alongside her boyfriend Ben Charles.
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Hot mama! It was back to everyday business for Big Brother star Lateysha Grace as she was on mum duties with her adorable daughter Wynter
Of course, despite carrying her small child in her arms, that didn't mean Lateysha didn't take the opportunity to dress to impress.
The sexy reality star showed off her curves in a killer khaki dress, reminiscent of Kim Kardashian.
She added a pair of seriously high strappy heels to proceedings to add an extra oomph to her ensemble.
She had been at the MTV studios, fuelling rumours she's set to land her own reality show.
Lateysha has been making the most of the London showbiz circuit since she was evicted from the Big Brother house earlier this month.
Work it! Of course, despite carrying her small child in her arms, that didn't mean Lateysha didn't take the opportunity to dress to impress in a killer khaki dress, reminiscent of Kim Kardashian
Family affair: The former Valleys star stepped out in London on Tuesday as she held her cute tot in her arms alongside her boyfriend Ben Charles as they left the MTV studios
Over the weekend, she hit Cafe De Paris with her Big Brother co-star Georgina Leigh Cantwell.
But even that unfortunate situation didn't keep Lateysha Grace from highlighting her curvaceous figure as she partied the night away at London's Cafe De Paris with her Big Brother co-star Georgina Leigh Cantwell.
The 23-year-old oozed sex appeal in an extremely tight mini-dress which featured corset detailing down the side.
With the party atmosphere in full swing and drinks flowing, Lateysha flaunted her impossibly pert derriere in the bodycon number.
And knowing full well it was her best angle, the mother-of-one kept to her signature side pose which captured her buxom figure in all its glory.
She opted for an extensive lashings of mascara as she smouldered into the camera while her long brunette locks were styled in immaculate waves.
Posing alongside her, Georgina looked sensational in a navy number as she puckered up for an air smooch with her pal.
Affectionate: The reality star looked sensational as she puckered up for an air smooch with her pal
Attention grabbing: Lateysha flaunted her impossibly pert derriere in the bodycon number
All eyes were on Lateysha following her shock eviction last week as she spoke to Rylan Clarke on Big Brother's Bit On The Side.
After challenging her to show off her sexiest dance moves, Lateysha bravely stood up to put on her flirty display.
Unfortunately -mid-twerk, her denim minidress ripped clean up the back, exposing her ample derriere and bright pink thong.
The mortified TV personality collapsed on the sofa, screaming in embarrassment as she descended into complete hysterics alongside stunned Rylan.
However it could have been even more mortifying, as Lateysha has now revealed she almost ditched her underwear before her live appearance.
'About 30 seconds before I was due to enter the BB BOTS studio I had a little pose in a full length mirror in the disabled toilets, the lighting in there was awful so I decided against a selfie, but I could see a big panty line from my thong,' she said.
'I hate VPL and so I was about to whip my knickers off and go without, because it was a really long skirt, so no one would know any different, or so I thought.
Glam: Knowing full well it was her best angle, the mother-of-one kept to her signature side pose which captured her buxom figure in all its glory
'Imagine how 'shamed' I'd be if my actual whole bum was out, I think I would have died in Rylan's arms, she said before adding: 'Also, thank god I shaved those legs'.
The single mother previously spoke of her medical woes after getting illegal bum fillers in Los Angeles in a bid to boost her buttocks.
Revealing her complex about the size of her bottom, Lateysha told the Daily Star: 'My bum wasn't small, it was average-sized.
'When I went to Miami, I seen all these girls with massive bums and I was thinking, 'How the hell do these girls have massive bums and small waists?''
However, Lateysha - who calls herself the Welsh Beyonce - called upon the services of a dodgy nurse, who didn't speak English and didn't brief her on the procedure.
She recalled: 'I don't even know what it was, it was some sort of filler but I don't know what it was called. I had about five in each cheek. The needle was massive.'
The butt of the joke: Lateysha was left red-faced when her dress split open on live TV during Big Brother's Bit On The Side on Wednesday night
Mortifying moment: Certainly not the shy and retiring type, the starlet eagerly began flaunting her posterior for the camera when there was an almighty ripping sound
Tom Sizemore was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of domestic violence.
The Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down star is being held on $50,000 bail, the Los Angeles Police Department said.
It comes just two weeks after the actor, 54, ran over a stuntman in an on set accident during location filming for his new TV series Shooter.
And one day after USA network pushed his new show about a former Marine sniper back to the fall in the wake of the shootings of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge.
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Behind bars: Tom Sizemore, pictured at LAX on June 16, was arrested Tuesday in Los Angeles on suspicion of domestic violence. He is currently being held on $50,000 bail
While the LAPD would not identify the alleged victim of Tuesday's assault nor reveal the extent of the injuries sustained, TMZ reported police responded to the scene following several 911 calls reporting a woman screaming.
The website claims the victim is the actor's girlfriend and that he hit her around the head and face after an argument turned physical.
Sizemore has a well-documented history of drug abuse and has previously served jail time for drugs-related offenses.
In 2003, he was convicted of assault and battery on his ex-girlfriend, former Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss. He subsequently served six months in prison.
Troubled: The actor has a history of arrests for drug-related offenses and in 2003, he was convicted of assaulting his former girlfriend Heidi Fleiss and served six months in prison. He's pictured in August 2014
Recounted her assault: The former Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss testified against him at trial, at the end of which the jury found him guilty of domestic violence and making criminal threats
Fleiss, who dated Sizemore on and off for about a year, testified at trial in August 2003 that the actor, then 41, had stubbed a cigarette out on her and once knocked her to the ground outside his home.
He later terrified her by making more than than 70 obscenity-laced phone calls, CNN reported at the time.
A jury convicted him of hitting Fleiss in the jaw at a Beverly Hills Hotel.
Sizemore, who had admitted to an addiction to methamphetamine, was ordered by a judge to complete a residential drug rehab program before serving a six-month jail sentence.
Booked: In 2007, Sizemore, seen in his mug shot, was charged with violating probation after being arrested on suspicion of seven drug-related offenses including possession of methamphetamine. He was sentenced to 16 months in prison
In a letter released post-sentencing in the Fleiss case, Sizemore stated he was 'very chastened by the trial and my convictions.'
He blamed his violent behavior on his drug use that had allowed his 'personal demons' to take over.
In 2007, Sizemore spent time behind bars again after being arrested in May that year on suspicion of seven drug-related charges, including methamphetamine possession.
People reported that he was sentenced to 16 months in prison for violating the terms of his probation for another drug-related offense.
His addictions and violent behavior marred what was once a promising Hollywood career.
Success: Sizemore was among several 'go-to' actors in the 1990s and starred with Val Kilmer in Michael Mann's 1995 film Heat, alongside Al Pacino and Robert De Niro
Sizemore had won respect for his small roles in the 1989 films Blue Steel and Born On The Fourth Of July and was cast in several high profile projects in the ensuing years, including Passenger 57, Natural Born Killers and Wyatt Earp.
In 1995 he starred in Michael Mann's Heat alongside Val Kilmer, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro.
That was followed by a leading role in Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan with Tom Hanks in 1998 and a high profile part in Ridley Scott's star-studded Black Hawk Down in 2001.
Respected for his work: The actor also starred with Tom Hanks in Steven Spielberg's Oscar-nominated World War Two movie Saving Private Ryan
Despite his brushes with the law and substance abuse issues, he has continued to work in smaller TV and film projects.
This past July 6, the actor 'seriously injured' a stuntman on the set of USA's Shooter while filming late at night on location at Agua Dulce Airpark, near Los Angeles.
The scene was to end with Sizemore and co-star Omar Epps sitting in a SUV, but Sizemore put the car in reverse and pulled out, unaware that the stuntman was behind him, TMZ reported.
A rep for the actor later stated that he had followed the stunt coordinator's instructions to 'pull out' and drove off without seeing the stuntman before hearing a 'thump.'
The new show, based on the 2007 film Shooter starring Mark Wahlberg, was scheduled to premiere on the USA network Tuesday.
However, on Monday, Variety reported that the network announced it was pushing back the series that stars Ryan Philippe as a former Marine Marksman brought out of retirement to help stop a potential Presidential assassination.
60 Minutes producer Rebecca Le Tourneau failed to appear in court on Tuesday after she was arrested for drink-driving in an unregistered car whilst in Sydney's Glebe.
The 52-year-old former presenter was pulled over in her Toyota Aurion by police and charged on June 9 at around 2.35pm after she was seen driving along Hereford Street.
A lawyer represented the mother-of-two at Downing Centre Court and pleaded guilty on her behalf.
No show: 60 Minutes producer Rebecca Le Tourneau failed to appear at Downing Centre Court in Sydney on Tuesday after she was arrested for drink-driving in an unregistered car in Glebe. Pictured in 2004
She had tested positive for alcohol at the scene with a 0.059 reading.
Registration for her car had reportedly expired three days earlier but she told police she had no idea it needed to be renewed.
Weeks earlier the Walkley Award winner allegedly exposed herself to passengers on a flight from Sydney to New York whilst in first class class as her 60 Minutes colleagues looked on.
Weeks earlier: Rebecca had allegedly exposed herself to passengers on a flight from Sydney to New York angering fellow first class class travellers
60 Minutes crew: Rebecca (left) is pictured left with Channel Nine colleagues Laura Sparks (second left), presenter Allison Langdon (centre) and Kristy Thomson (right)
Veteran investigative reporter Ross Coulthart raced to calm the situation and encouraged her to return to her seat.
It was believed Rebecca indulged in one of the airlines extensive first-class menus after being upgraded from business class when she became excited.
Ross stepped in as her behaviour became erratic, while Qantas flight attendants ordered her to return to her seat,The Australian reports.
Fun and games: She is pictured here in 2003 at a public event
Red carpet glamour: The TV presenter is seen with and her husband Neil at the Channel Seven's TV Turns 50, The Event That Stopped a Nation, in 2006 in Sydney
The publication suggests sleeping tablets played a role in the incident.
The outburst took place six days before a crew from 60 Minutes, including reporter Tara Brown, were detained shooting a story in Lebanon after a botched child kidnapping attempt.
Rebecca began her career as a cadet journalist with the Daily News in Perth and two years later travelled to Sydney to join Channel Seven as a news reporter covering everything from Royal scandals to consumer rip-offs and political brawls.
She is also widely travelled following her role as a travel reporter for Holiday.
Rebecca lives with her partner of 17 years Neil in Sydney.
Colleague: Veteran investigative reporter Ross Coulthart attempted to calm down Rebecca when her behaviour reportedly became erratic while she was on board a flight from Sydney to New York
She's demonstrated her keen eye for style everywhere from music festivals to the red carpet.
And Thursday was more of the same for the perennially stylish Ashley Benson, who headed out for a spot of shopping with a male pal at Melrose Place on Tuesday.
Injecting some cowgirl flair into her casual cool outfit, the 26-year-old cinched up her ripped jeans using a thick black leather belt with a gold buckle.
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Super stylish: Ashley Benson injected cowgirl flair into her casual cool outfit for a day of shopping in trendy Melrose Place on Tuesday
The Pretty Little Liars actress had a smile on her face as she kept herself cool and hydrated with a large iced coffee.
She draped on a ripped jean jacket over her shoulders and flashed some flesh with her extra low-cut black tank top.
Midas touch: The 26-year-old wore a thick black leather belt with a gold buckle over her ripped jeans and leather ankle boots
She has great jeans: She draped on a ripped jean jacket over her shoulders and flashed some flesh with her extra low-cut black tank top
Protecting her eyesight behind a pair of large and circular frames, Ashley looked relaxed and radiant as she headed outdoors with her hair pulled back into a ponytail.
She injected some glamour with her gold choker necklace and topped the look off with her black purse.
After completing a bit of retail therapy, the actress had a shopping bag from Marc Jacobs slung a over her elbow.
Keeping her cool: The actress had a smile on her face as she kept herself hydrated with a large iced coffee
Keeping company: The starlet was joined by a male pal for her shopping trip
Ashley stars on the wildly popular Pretty Little Liars, which returned for it's seventh in June.
The show also stars Troian Bellisario, Lucy Hale, Shay Mitchell, and Sasha Pieterse.
Ashley was bound to send the Pretty Little Liars fanbase into a frenzy when she shared an image of herself with co-star Tyler Blackburn, who stars as Caleb Rivers, her character Hanna Marin's on-screen love interest.
The actress captioned the image, 'Who gets the proposal? #Haleb #spaleb #Ezria #emmison #pll'.
The mysterious caption included the nicknames of couples on the show, suggesting one of the pairings may be getting a proposal.
Pretty Little Liars airs every Tuesday on Freeform.
Meanwhile: Benson stars on the wildly popular Pretty Little Liars, which returned for it's seventh in June
Her movie has been a soaring success back home.
And after premiering Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie in New York on Monday night, Joanna Lumley looked in great spirits as she stepped out in the Big Apple on Tuesday.
The Brit icon dressed to impress in a star-print ensemble for another cheerful day promoting her new film.
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What a trip! After premiering Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie in New York on Monday night, Joanna Lumley looked in great spirits as she stepped out in the Big Apple on Tuesday
Joanna, 70, showed off her svelte figure and keen sense of fashion in a white star-print shirt teamed with a tie in contrasting black.
She highlighted her trim waist with a chain-detail black belt, while adding to the monochrome vibe with a pair of cropped white trousers teamed with comfy sneakers.
The acting legend's metallic shoulder bag added a touch more glam to the quirky ensemble.
Good to see you! The Brit icon dressed to impress in a star-print ensemble for another cheerful day promoting her new film
Stars in her eyes: Joanna, 70, showed off her svelte figure and keen sense of fashion in a quirky white star-print shirt teamed with a tie in contrasting black
Finishing touches: A slick of bold lipstick, starry earrings and a glam metallic bag finished off the ensemble
As ever Joanna was looking impeccable down to the last detail, finishing her look off with star earrings to continue the celestial theme, a slick of lippie and sunglasses perched on top of her perfectly blow-dried locks.
The actress stopped to sign autographs, beaming happily as she greeted fans at her NYC destination.
Meanwhile, the night before Joanna and Jennifer Saunders ensured they lived up to their legend as they arrived at the New York premiere of Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie..
Staying partially in character for their sashay along the red carpet, Joanna went for an outrageous ensemble while Jennifer, 58, went for more muted glamour.
In demand: The actress stopped to sign autographs, beaming happily as she greeted fans at her NYC destination
Glamorous looks: On Monday Joanna joined Jennifer Saunders for the New York premiere of Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie
Jennifer and Joanna have reprised their roles as ageing party girls Eddy and Patsy in the first big-screen adaptation, which has already boasted the biggest opening since Spectre in the UK, of the classic Nineties TV series.
Joanna was quick to ham up her red carpet appearance as she sported a floor-sweeping checked duster coat in a bold magenta hue.
While the front of the piece was loud, as the stunning blonde displayed the rear it became apparent a host of garish corsages littered the entirety of the back.
Beneath the coat, Jennifer went for a comparatively muted ensemble as she showed off her incredibly age-defying figure in a black ensemble.
Outrageous: Staying partially in character for their sashay along the red carpet, Joanna, 70, went for an outrageous ensemble while Jennifer, 58, went for more muted glamour
Absolutely darling! Sporting high-waisted black jeans cinched in at her diminutive waist, she also pulled on suede knee-high boots - creating a look a woman half her age would envy
Sporting high-waisted black jeans cinched in at her diminutive waist, she also pulled on suede knee-high boots - creating a look a woman half her age would no doubt envy.
Her famed peroxide blonde beehive was in place, with an eyelash tickling fringe and face framing tendrils making for the perfect Ab Fab look.
Completing her ensemble was her flawlessly applied make-up, with jet black kohl expertly smudged around her eyes and a slick of red lipstick coating her famous grin.
Blonde beauty: Her famed peroxide blonde beehive was in place, with an eyelash tickling fringe and face framing tendrils making for the perfect Ab Fab look
Dolled up: Completing her ensemble was her flawlessly applied make-up, with jet black kohl expertly smudged around her eyes and a slick of red lipstick coating her famous grin
Chic: Jennifer meanwhile went for more muted glamour as she too sported a black ensemble yet went for a more subtle statement piece in a blue cape
Jennifer meanwhile went for more muted glamour as she too sported a black ensemble yet went for a more subtle statement piece in a blue caped blazer.
It was only upon closer inspection, the detail showed an intricately drawn skyline adorned atop the fabric - yet her look was incredibly overshadowed by her peer.
She styled her hair into a shaggy blonde crop while keeping her make-up muted yet age-appropriate.
Joining the duo on the red carpet was Glee star Chris Colfer who looked sharp in a suit while seemingly overjoyed to meet a pair of comedy greats.
Following the red carpet the whole glamorous gang headed to the Gramercy Park Hotel for the after-party.
Say sweetie! Joining the duo on the red carpet was Glee star Chris Colfer who looked sharp in a suit while seemingly overjoyed to meet a pair of comedy greats
Gorgeous girls: She styled her hair into a shaggy blonde crop while keeping her make-up muted yet age appropriate
They're back! The new movie sees Eddy and Patsy back to their old tricks, shopping, drinking and partying their way around London
Glam: However, life as they know it comes to a halt when they accidentally push supermodel Kate Moss to her death in the River Thames during a launch
The new movie sees Eddy and Patsy back to their old tricks, shopping, drinking and partying their way around London.
However, life as they know it comes to a halt when they accidentally push supermodel Kate Moss to her death in the River Thames during a launch.
After being engulfed by a media storm, the pair flee to the French Riviera as they make plan to salvage their fabulous life.
Following the wild success of the flick Cameron Saunders, UK Managing Director, Twentieth Century Fox, said: 'We are thrilled that audiences have embraced Edina and Patsys big screen debut - it is a testament to Jennifer, Joanna and the talented team behind the film who really are absolutely fabulous.'
Meanwhile, Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie is due for release in the US on 22 July and Australia on 4 August.
Two of a kind: Joanna and Jennifer seemed in high spirits as they cuddled up for snaps at the premiere
Shameless! The pair indulged in some self promotion as they hilariously posed alongside copies of the soundtrack and a mask of Edina
Strike a pose: The ladies cuddled up to Jon Hamm who seemed in excellent spirits
Chirpy: The trio happily posed for snaps at the star-studded premiere
Glee-ful: The pair cuddled up to Chris Colfer who looked dapper in a fitted suit and tie
Blonde ambition: The ladies were joined by Phillipe and David Blond at the bash
Selfie time: The pair happily posed for snaps with their friends and guests
Crowd pleaser: (L-R) Chris Colfer, Mandie Fletcher (Director), Joanna, Jennifer, Steve Gilula, Jon Hamm and Nancy Utley cosied up for a group snap together
Last week she was sunning on the beaches of France with her Made In Chelsea cast mates.
And on Tuesday evening reality star Georgia Toffolo still looked radiant and sun-kissed as she stepped into a private gin tasting bash put on by Givinity at Rolls Royce Berkeley Square in London.
Looking serene and angelic, the 21-year-old stunner flaunted her perfect pins in a white crochet Bardot dress from online retailer Miss Pap.
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Cheers! On Tuesday evening reality star Georgia Toffolo attended a private gin tasting bash put on by Givinity at Rolls Royce Berkeley Square in London
The white garment clung to her shapely hips and its colour brought her bronze complexion into sharper focus.
The neckline of the dress cut across her stunning decolletage, and an extra layer of crochet work hung over her assets.
Her white bodice hugged her body tightly and skimmed her thighs, but the dress's overlay fell to her knees, helping to protect her modesty and in the chicest possible way.
Post-holiday chic: The 21-year-old still looked radiant and sun-kissed following her holiday in southern France
She's got it: Looking serene and angelic, the blonde stunner flaunted her perfect pins in a white crochet Bardot dress from online retailer Miss Pap
Wearing her blonde locks scraped back from her face, the politics graduate accentuated her pretty features with low-key make-up that included a few lashing of mascara and the lightest smear of pink lippie.
Adding to the cool summer vibe, she pushed her tortoise shell sunglasses to the top of her head, turning the stylish shades into a glorious decorative piece for her hair.
She completed her ensemble with pointy beige heels and a quilted beige purse, which dangled off her shoulder via a gold strap.
Flaunt it! The white garment clung to her shapely hips and its colour brought her bronze complexion into sharper focus
Low-key: Wearing her blonde locks scraped back from her face, the politics graduate accentuated her pretty features with low-key make-up that included a few lashing of mascara and the lightest of pink lippie
Georgia wasn't the only star to raise a glass at the tasting.
Guernsey-raised TV presenter Dawn O'Porter attended in a green polka dot dress that fell past her ankles.
Playing to her quirky fashion credentials, she carried a bright blue rucksack and wore a pair of silver loafers.
Boxer Audley Harrison also turned up, opting for an all-white, laidback ensemble consisting of a tank top, knee-length shorts and slip-ons.
He accessorized with a silver chain and a series of dog tags.
Colourful: Guernsey-raised TV presenter Dawn O'Porter attended in a green polka dot dress that fell past her ankles
One of a kind: Playing to her quirky fashion credentials, she carried a bright blue rucksack and wore a pair of silver loafers
Casual: Boxer Audley Harrison also turned up, opting for an all-white, laid-back ensemble consisting of a tank top, knee-length shorts and comfortable slip-ons
He will forever be remembered as the boy wizard in Harry Potter.
But Daniel Radcliffe cut an altogether suaver figure as he attended an event in New York City on Tuesday.
The 26-year-old actor, who recently revealed his desire to start a family, strode with purpose along the street in a dapper grey suit.
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Dapper: Daniel Radcliffe cut an altogether suaver figure than his Harry Potter character as he attended an event in New York City on Tuesday
Under the immaculately tailored jacket he wore a dark teal printed shirt to add interest to his look.
And the star opted for a pair of minimalist black leather slip on trainers, as a fashionable twist to his outfit.
He appeared in high spirits and despite being in a rush found time to smile at the waiting photographers.
Sporting on trend facial hair and stylish quiffed locks, Daniel looked every inch the handsome Hollywood star.
Stylish: The 26-year-old actor, who recently revealed his desire to start a family, strode with purpose along the street in a dapper grey suit
Always keen to keep his romance with actress Erin Darke - whom he met on the set of the 2013 film Kill Your Darlings - private, the British-born actor was alone in the Big Apple.
He said earlier this month that he fell in love while they were filming. Theres a moment when she makes me laugh, he admitted, in a rare unguarded comment about the film, and Im laughing as me, and not as my character. She was incredibly funny and incredibly smart. I knew I was in trouble.
He also revealed he would love to start a family one day. Its a little way away, but thats something I would like. Ive always liked kids, and I think Im good with them.
Upbeat: He appeared in high spirits and despite appearing in a rush found time to smile at the waiting photographers
Annie Penn, the continuity supervisor on the first four Potter films, had a daughter and Id hang out with her because she was really funny.
She came up to me once and was looking at my face, going, One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .
I said, What are you doing? and she replied, Be quiet, Im counting the spots on your face!
I said, Thank you very much, you sweet child!
Daniel's latest film outing sees him play an FBI agent who goes undercover in a white supremacist terrorist cell in hotly-anticipated Imperium.
Even though it's a front, fans of the actor's will no doubt find the sight of the Potter star shaving his head and taking up ranks among the Klu Klux Klan unsettling.
The crime drama, which also features Toni Collette and Sam Trammell, is set to hit cinemas in August.
Miranda Kerr showed off her sensational figure on the set of a swimsuit photo shoot in Malibu.
The former Victoria's Secret Angel showed why she's one of the world's top models as she posed for a sporty photo shoot for Australian clothing line Bond's on Monday.
The 33-year-old wore a black bikini and held a colorful pink surfboard as worked with photographers in the surf.
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Beach babe: Miranda Kerr showed off her figure on a swimwear photo shoot for Australian brand Bond's in Malibu on Monday
Miranda wore her brunette hair in waves to the side, and added blue mirrored sunglasses.
The Australian beauty later donned a green and blue floral bikini under a black rasher guard as she frolicked in the waves on Monday.
While it was certainly hot and sunny along the Californian coastline the 33-year-old model raised temperatures even more as she showed off her stunning physique in the swimwear looks.
Miranda later changed into a bright pink one-piece with black straps and the Bonds logo, flashing a smile as she was surrounded by lighting and crew.
Think pink: The 33-year-old flashed a smile in a bright pink one-piece
Fun in the sun: The mother-of-one looked gorgeous as she ran through the waves
Surf's up: Miranda flashed some cleavage in a black and green floral bikini top and rash guard while holding a pink surfboard
She accessorized with a blue, shell pendant necklace and some bracelets.
The Sydney-born star's makeup was perfectly applied with shimmery blusher creating a glowing, sun-kissed look.
The model raced along in the waves while holding a bright pink surfboard.
Later, she relaxed in a chaise at the water's edge as crew members positioned kayaks behind her for the sporty shoot.
Beach babe: The former Victoria's Secret Angel showed off her amazing figure in the swimwear looks
Like a pro: Miranda frolicked in a black and green bikini as the photographer snapped away
Strike a pose: The model relaxed on a chaise as crew members positioned a kayak on the set of the sporty shoot
Later, she switched into a black and green floral print two-piece as she ran along the beach with some handsome male models.
She added a matching, cropped rash guard over her top.
Miranda was also spotted in a black top and black briefs as she held a pair of goggles.
For added affect a member of the crew threw water on the mother-of-one as she knelt in the sand.
Natural beauty: Miranda accessorised with a shell pendant necklace and a couple of bracelets
Looking swell! Miranda showed off her model physique in Malibu on Monday as she took part in a beach photoshoot
Miranda and her boyfriend of one year, Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel, were spotted enjoying a dinner out in Nobu Malibu on Friday.
The model, who shares five-year-old son Flynn with ex-husband Orlando Bloom, recently explained how she met the businessman.
'We met at a dinner in LA for Louis Vuitton and became friends,' she told the Sydney Morning Herald. 'We were really good friends for a long time before we started dating.'
She added: 'We've just been having fun together and sharing our time amongst friends and family.'
She's a pro! The ex-wife of actor Orlando Bloom fussed with her brunette locks in-between takes
Turnbull sworn in as Australia's PM
Malcolm Turnbull was sworn in for another term as Australia's prime minister Tuesday after a narrow election victory with budget repair and a public vote on same sex marriage among his top priorities.
The multi-millionaire former banker's Liberal/National coalition clung to power in closely-fought July 2 polls, with the party holding 76 seats, and potentially one more with counting still underway, in the 150-seat House of Representatives.
While enough to retain office, it was a far from convincing win for the tech-savvy grandfather, as the conservative coalition lost its comfortable majority.
Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull declares victory for the ruling conservatives at a press conference in Sydney on July 10, 2016 Peter Parks (AFP/File)
It has raised questions over whether he can govern successfully, with the Labor opposition increasing its lower house seats and a higher number of minor party and independent senators to contend with in the upper house.
Turnbull was sworn in at Government House in Canberra by Governor General Peter Cosgrove, Queen Elizabeth II's representative in Australia, and has broadly stuck with the same team of ministers he took to the election.
That means no front bench role for Tony Abbott, the man he ousted in a party coup last September.
Notable changes see former Innovation, Science and Industry Minister Christopher Pyne become defence industry minister, giving him oversight of the nation's naval ship building, including its Aus$50 billion future submarine program, which France will help build.
His old portfolio is taken by former environment minister Greg Hunt, who makes way for Josh Frydenberg in a move broadly welcomed by environmentalists.
"Budget repair is absolutely critical," Turnbull said in laying out his top priority.
Standard & Poor's revised Australia's triple-A rating outlook to negative following the vote, concerned the tight result and more crossbench politicians in the Senate could hamper a return to surplus.
Millions of Australians cast their ballots for independents and minor parties, resulting in them winning five seats in the lower house.
It is a similar story in the Senate, with anti-immigration firebrand Pauline Hanson making a return to Canberra after an absence of nearly 20 years.
Turnbull campaigned on his economic credentials as the country transitions from a mining investment boom and focuses on job creation and diversifying the economy, as well as his tough asylum-seeker policies and a plan to hold a referendum on gay marriage.
He told broadcaster ABC on Monday evening he planned to hold the gay marriage vote "as soon as practicable".
UN fears IS in Libya could relocate from Sirte
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned that Islamic State fighters could set up new cells across Libya and north Africa as they are driven from their stronghold of Sirte.
Ban on Monday outlined the threat from foreign terrorist fighters (FTF) in Libya in a confidential report to the Security Council, obtained by AFP.
"The recent pressure against ISIL in Libya could lead its members, including FTFs, to relocate and regroup in smaller and geographically dispersed cells throughout Libya and in neighboring countries," Ban said in the report.
Fighters from the pro-government forces loyal to Libya's Government of National Unity (GNA) hold a position in Sirte during an operation to recapture the costal city from Islamic State group jihadists, in June 2016 Mahmud Turkia (AFP/File)
The defeat of IS fighters in Sirte "appears to be a distinct possibility", leading many to flee south as well as west, to Tunisia.
"The future impact of scattered ISIL combatants on southern local armed groups may become an issue of concern," he said.
Libyan forces allied with the UN-backed government in Tripoli have been battling to take Sirte from IS fighters for the past two months.
The coastal city is considered one of IS's most important rear bases outside of Syria and Iraq.
There are between 2,000 and 5,000 IS fighters from Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Mali, Morocco and Mauritania deployed in Sirte, Tripoli and Derna, according to the report.
Dozens of foreign fighters from Tunisia have returned home from Libya "with the intent to conduct attacks," it added.
The ties extend further afield, with funds from Libya sent to Ansar Bait al-Maqdis, a jihadist group that operates in Egypt's Sinai peninsula, the report said.
Ban said Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which is active in Mali and across the Sahel region, continues to use Libya as a sanctuary and a base to buy arms and ammunition.
Mokhtar Belmokhtar, leader of the Al-Mourabitoun group active in the Sahel, is able to travel throughout Libya with relative ease while the head of Ansar Dine in northern Mali, Iyad Ag Ghaly, maintains a foothold in southern Libya, the report said.
German police shot dead a 17-year-old Afghan refugee after he attacked train passengers with an axe and a knife, seriously wounding four in what one official said was a "probable" Islamist attack.
Several other people were also injured in the assault on a regional train near the southern city of Wuerzburg, police said, adding that the teenager was killed as he tried to flee.
Joachim Herrmann, the interior minister of Bavaria state, said the assailant had arrived as an unaccompanied minor in Germany and had lived at first in a shelter and then more recently with a foster family in nearby Ochsenfurt.
A rescuer at the scene of an axe and knife attack by a 17-year-old Afghan refugee on a regional train in Wuerzburg Karl-Josef Hildenbrand (DPA/AFP)
"It is quite probable that this was an Islamist attack," said a ministry spokesman, adding that the assailant had shouted "Allahu akbar" (God is greatest).
However he stressed that the investigation was ongoing and that the teenager appeared to have acted alone.
The attack happened around 9:15 pm (1915 GMT) on the train, which runs between Treuchlingen and Wuerzburg in Bavaria.
An eyewitness who lives next to the railway station told DPA news agency that the train, which had been carrying around 25 people, looked "like a slaughterhouse" with blood covering the floor.
The man, who declined to give his name, said he saw people crawl from the carriage and ask for a first-aid kit as other victims lay on the floor inside.
"The perpetrator was able to leave the train, police left in pursuit and as part of this pursuit, they shot the attacker and killed him," a police spokesman said.
Herrmann later said that the teenager was shot when he attacked police while trying to escape the scene.
A special police force unit happened to be nearby and was able to mobilise quickly, Hermann added.
Four of those injured are members of a family from Hong Kong, authorities in the southern Chinese city said Tuesday, adding the immigration department was providing them with assistance.
- Political tensions -
Germany has thus far escaped the kind of large-scale jihadist attacks seen in the southern French city of Nice last week, in which 31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel used a truck to mow down people leaving a Bastille Day fireworks display, killing 84 people. The attack was claimed by the Islamic State group.
In May in Germany, a mentally unstable 27-year-old man carried out a knife attack on a regional train in the south, killing one person and injuring three others.
Early reports had suggested he had yelled "Allahu akbar" but police later said there was no evidence pointing to a religious motive. He is being held in a psychiatric hospital.
Germany let in a record nearly 1.1 million asylum seekers last year, with Syrians the largest group followed by Afghans fleeing ongoing turmoil and poverty in their country.
However the number of refugees arriving in Germany has fallen sharply as a result of the closure of the Balkans migration route and an EU deal with Turkey to stem the flow.
In April, May and June, the number was around 16,000 each month, less than a fifth of the tally seen at the start of the year, according to official figures.
Bavaria is governed by the Christian Social Union (CSU), sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats.
The CSU has been loudly critical of Merkel's welcoming stance toward asylum seekers, a split that threatened the unity of the ruling coalition in Berlin and sent the government's approval ratings plunging.
It has also lent support to a right-wing populist party, Alternative for Germany, which was founded as a eurosceptic protest outfit in 2013 but now mainly rails against Islam and Germany's refugee influx.
It currently polls at around 10 percent and is represented in half of Germany's 16 states as well as the European Parliament.
Merkel's popularity has rebounded recently but the attack in Bavaria is likely to revive political tensions.
Rescuers at the scene of an axe and knife attack by a 17-year-old Afghan refugee on a regional train in Wuerzburg Karl-Josef Hildenbrand (DPA/AFP)
In May, a mentally unstable 27-year-old man carried out a knife attack on a regional train in southern Germany, killing one person and injuring three others Andreas Gebert (DPA/AFP/File)
NASA's Kepler discovers more than 104 new exoplanets
An international team of researchers announced the discovery of 104 new planets outside our solar system, including four that could have Earth-like, rocky surfaces.
Scientists discovered the exoplanets using the Kepler space telescope as well as ground observations by Earth-based telescopes, including four on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
The $600 million Kepler mission has allowed scientists to discover more than 4,600 planets -- 2,326 of them confirmed -- since it launched in 2009.
An artist's impression of the Kepler spacecraft NASA (NASA/AFP/File)
"The diversity of planets is astounding," Evan Sinukoff, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii who contributed to the research, said on Monday.
"We discovered many planets about twice the size of the Earth orbiting so close to their host stars that they are hotter than 1000 degrees."
The latest trove includes 21 situated within their sun's habitable zone -- the distance from a star that could permit liquid water to exist and support life.
The four potentially rocky planets -- ranging from 20 to 50 percent larger than Earth -- orbit tightly around the same star in a planetary system about 400 light-years from Earth.
Though the planets rotate around their star even closer than Mercury orbits the sun, two of the planets may have surface temperatures similar to Earth's, as their star is cooler than our sun, astronomers said.
The unmanned Kepler mission has been scanning 150,000 stars in the Cygnus constellation for signs of orbiting bodies, particularly those that might be able to support life.
It works by observing a dimming in the light of a star, known as a transit, each time an orbiting planet passes in front of it.
In 2013, the space telescope suffered a problem with the reaction wheels that typically keep the spacecraft steady.
NASA subsequently set the spacecraft on a new mission called K2, to study supernovas, star clusters and far-off galaxies.
Scientists verified the latest exoplanets as part of the K2 mission.
Erdogan foe Gulen dismisses Turkey extradition bid
Fethullah Gulen, the Muslim cleric and bitter foe of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, dismissed as doomed to fail Ankara's bid to extradite him from the United States over a failed coup attempt.
Gulen, the spiritual leader of the Hizmet movement -- which promotes moderate Islam across dozens of countries and is dubbed a terrorist group by Erdogan -- firmly denies Ankara's charge he was behind the coup bid.
"I have no concerns personally," Gulen said on Monday, in an interview with several media outlets including AFP at his compound in the Pennsylvania town of Saylorsburg he has called home since 1999 under self-imposed exile.
Exiled Turkish Muslim preacher Fethullah Gulen, pictured at his residence in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, in 2013 Selahattin Sevi (Zaman Daily/AFP/File)
The United States "is a country of law," added the cleric.
"The rule of law reigns supreme here. I don't believe this government will pay attention to anything that is not legally sound.
"As a side note, I will die one day. Whether I die in my bed or in prison, I don't care," said Gulen.
Erdogan told CNN a formal request for the extradition of the 75-year-old Gulen would be submitted in the coming days.
But US Secretary of State John Kerry said Ankara would need to provide "evidence, not allegations" against Gulen.
The Turkish government previously sought -- unsuccessfully -- to extradite Gulen after the corruption scandal that shook the country in 2013 and triggered the resignation of three ministers.
"Because those were not legal demands, the US government did not pay attention, did not take them seriously," Gulen said.
"They were not acceptable, reasonable and legal requests... Now through this attempted coup, it looks like they have strengthened their hands. They will attempt to do the same thing."
-'Betrayal of the Turkish nation'-
In addition to denying his own involvement, Gulen "condemned" the coup attempt that left at least 300 dead.
"I have always been against military interventions in domestic politics," Gulen said.
He called the putsch attempt "treason, a betrayal of the Turkish nation."
The spiritual leader said if he had prior knowledge of the plans to attempt overthrowing the government he would have urged plotters to reconsider.
"I would call out and say if you are a nationalist by virtue of your values, please don't attempt such a thing," Gulen said.
He did voice concern that Turkey's government is moving away from democratic principles.
"In such a horrible picture, it's not possible to talk about democracy anymore," Gulen said.
"This kind of regime resembles more like a clan or a tribal administration."
- Turkey needs US more -
Gulen -- who members of his circle say suffers from diabetes and cardiovascular disease -- was visibly tired, noting that he has barely left home for two years.
While he may not be concerned about his own fate, the opposition leader said he was very worried about worsening relations between the United States and key NATO ally Turkey.
He recalled that Turkish troops fought alongside their American counterparts during the Korean War, and that the two nations have been close allies for decades at the trans-Atlantic military alliance that Turkey joined in 1952.
"If it is separated from NATO, Turkey would go into a chaos of problems. It would evaporate itself. It would really finish itself," Gulen said.
"The United States could find other options, but I think Turkey needs the United States' partnership more than the US needs Turkish partnership."
Turkey has sacked almost 9,000 officials in its relentless crackdown against suspected plotters of the coup attempt.
Turkish cleric and opponent to the Erdogan regime, Fethullah Gulen, meets members of the media at his residence in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, on July 18, 2016 Thomas Urbain (AFP)
Myanmar's Suu Kyi honours hero father
Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi paid tribute to her independence hero father on Tuesday at a memorial attended for the first time by the army chief, a rare show of unity in the former junta-run country.
The 71-year-old, now steering Myanmar's first civilian government in decades, laid a wreath at the mausoleum dedicated to her father and eight others assassinated in 1947 during their struggle to win independence from Britain.
A heavy security presence surrounded the memorial in Yangon, as huge crowds gathered outside the gates to celebrate the fallen leaders.
Myanmar State Counsellor and Foreign Minister Aung San Suu Kyi pays her respects to her late father, Myanmar independence hero General Aung San, during a ceremony in Yangon, on July 19, 2016 Ye Aung Thu (AFP)
"We came here to pay respect to our late martyrs who sacrified for us. We will never forget the 19th of July. We will also support Mother Suu," Tun Tun, a 21-year-old university student, told AFP outside the memorial.
Suu Kyi's father, General Aung San, never lived to see the independence he fought for but remains a deeply revered figure and a core factor behind his daughter's enduring popularity.
Suu Kyi, who was barred from commemorating the anniversary during her years as a political prisoner under the former junta, was joined Tuesday by the country's still-powerful army chief, Min Aung Hlaing.
It is the first time an army chief has attended the event in years, affirming a new turn in the relationship between the military and the former activist, who was long viewed as their nemesis.
After her party swept landmark elections last November, Suu Kyi now faces the tough task of reversing the widespread poverty and repression that became the hallmarks of junta rule.
The Nobel laureate has already drawn on her father's haloed legacy as she organises upcoming peace talks with ethnic rebels who have been battling the state for decades.
The talks have been dubbed the 21st century Panglong conference after the 1947 meeting in which her father granted political autonomy to ethnic groups in Myanmar's frontier states.
The agreement was never honoured by the junta that staged a coup several years after Aung San's assassination and held onto power for nearly five decades.
Suu Kyi has vowed to overturn that painful legacy and reach a national ceasefire.
But the army is still locked in warfare with various ethnic militias and Suu Kyi's ability to rein in the military is limited.
The army continues to control key parts of the economy and government -- including a quarter of parliamentary seats and crucial ministries that will give the generals huge sway over whether the peace process is a success.
South Korean gets 4 years for Tokyo shrine blast
A South Korean man was sentenced to four years in prison Tuesday for detonating a homemade pipe bomb at a controversial Tokyo war shrine.
During the trial Jeon Chang-Han, 28, reportedly admitted illegally entering the shrine and detonating the bomb in a case that highlighted lingering tensions over Japan's harsh colonial rule of the Korean peninsula from 1910-45.
"The court handed down a four-year prison sentence with no suspended term," a Tokyo District Court spokesman told AFP, without elaborating.
During the trial Jeon Chang-Han, 28, reportedly admitted to illegally entering the Yasukuni shrine and detonating the bomb
Prosecutors had demanded a five-year sentence, claiming the explosion was an act of terrorism, according to Jiji Press.
Yasukuni Shrine, which honours millions of Japan's war dead including several senior military and political figures convicted of war crimes, has been targeted in the past by activists.
Visits by senior Japanese politicians to the shrine routinely draw an angry reaction from China and South Korea, which view them as an insult and painful reminder of Japan's militarist history.
Presiding judge Kazunori Karei said the explosion was "highly dangerous and malicious", Jiji reported.
Jeon left Japan after the blast, in which no one was hurt, but was arrested when he returned in early December -- reportedly carrying two kilogrammes (4.4 pounds) of gunpowder.
Judge Karei said that having failed to achieve the desired attention from the blast, Jeon plotted another one and had a large amount of gunpowder when he returned to Japan.
"It could have developed into a serious incident," he said.
South Korea's Yonhap news agency quoted Jeon's mother as saying an appeal was likely.
"The sentence is tougher than we expected," she said in an interview with Yonhap, which did not provide her name.
"It is a preposterous ruling and we are hopeful because it's not over yet," she added. "We heard we can appeal the decision by August 2."
South Korea's foreign ministry declined to comment on an ongoing court case but said it was providing consular assistance for Jeon.
Philippines rejects China conditions for sea row talks
Manila has rejected Beijing's demand that it "disregard" an international ruling that invalidated the Asian giant's claims to much of the South China Sea before negotiating on the issue, the Philippines' foreign secretary said Tuesday.
China last week denounced a UN-backed tribunal's finding that there was no legal basis for its claims to most of the strategic, resource-rich waters, provoking stern warnings from leaders from Japan to the EU that it must respect the rule-based global order.
Following the decision, Beijing asked Manila, which brought the case, "to open ourselves for bilateral negotiations but outside of and in disregard of the arbitral ruling", foreign minister Perfecto Yasay told broadcaster ABS-CBN.
Vessels from China's South Sea Fleet take part in a drill in the Xisha Islands -- or Paracel Islands -- in the South China Sea on May 5, 2016
"This is something that I told him was not consistent with our constitution and our national interest," he said.
The Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) ruled that Beijing had violated the Philippines' sovereign rights to exploit resources in waters up to 340 kilometres (230 miles) beyond its coast, called its exclusive economic zone.
It said there was no legal basis to China's claims to much of the sea, embodied in a "nine-dash line" dating from 1940s maps.
Yasay's comments were more forceful than previous Philippine reactions, with Manila's new President Rodrigo Duterte keen to restore relations with Beijing and promising not to "taunt or flaunt" the verdict.
Many other countries have been more outspoken.
At an Asia-Europe summit in Mongolia at the weekend, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and European Union President Donald Tusk took China to task for its refusal to respect the decision.
China has long denied the tribunal's authority to rule on the case, calling it a "fraud" and accusing its members of accepting money from Manila.
Yasay and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi discussed the possibility of talks on the sidelines of the Ulan Bator summit but made no headway, he said, quoting Wang as telling him: "If you will insist on the ruling, discussing along those lines, then we might be headed for a confrontation."
Direct talks were unlikely soon in the light of Beijing's refusal to accept the ruling, Yasay said.
- 'Let the dust settle' -
On Tuesday, China launched war games in waters some distance north of the contested area.
Beijing has built a series of artificial islands in the sea capable of supporting military operations, and a top Chinese military official told a visiting US admiral this week that it would "never stop our construction" prematurely.
The project has raised concerns that Beijing may seek to hamper the free movement of ships and aircraft through the region, and may even create an air defence identification zone over the sea, which would seek to put restrictions on foreign planes.
A combat air patrol was mounted over the sea recently and they will become a regular practise in future, an air force spokesman said separately according to the official news agency Xinhua.
China seized Scarborough Shoal -- known as Huangyan Dao in Chinese -- in 2012 after a brief stand-off with the Philippine navy. Manila lodged suit at the tribunal the following year.
Beijing, which justifies its extensive claims by saying it was the first to have discovered, named and exploited the sea, has said the tribunal ruling cannot be the basis of any discussions.
Duterte's "first and foremost" priority was to regain access to Scarborough Shoal for Filipino fishermen, Yasay said.
The new president said last week that he would send former president Fidel Ramos to China to start talks on the ruling, but Yasay did not know if Ramos would accept and did not know when that mission could be dispatched.
"Let the dust settle some more and let's see how we can open up the road for this kind of negotiation," Yasay added.
In the long term, he said, Manila had not ruled out the possibility of giving China a role as a contractor when the government moves to exploit the resources, including natural gas, in its exclusive economic zone.
China's capabilities in the South China Sea
Philippine foreign minister Perfecto Yasay delivers a statement following a ruling by a UN-backed tribunal on the South China Sea, in Manila, on July 12, 2016 Noel Celis (AFP/File)
Taiwan bus inferno kills 26, mainly China tourists
A fire ripped through a bus carrying tourists from China in Taiwan Tuesday, killing all 26 on board in the worst road accident to hit mainland visitors since a holiday boom to the island.
The disaster, which occurred as the tourists were heading to the airport for their flight home, was the latest in a series that have called into question Taiwan's safety record.
Media footage showed the bus, with flames shooting from the front, rammed into an expressway barrier near Taipei.
A bus carrying mainland Chinese tourists caught fire and crashed in Taiwan on July 19, 2016, killing everybody on board
The images showed thick plumes of smoke and burned-out wreckage at the roadside.
A police spokesman said the bus had caught fire before it crashed into the barrier but gave no reason.
"All the people on the bus died," Lin Kuan-cheng, spokesman for the National Fire Agency, told AFP.
"At this stage it is still not clear why no passengers escaped from the bus."
The Liberty Times newspaper quoted an unnamed eyewitness as saying passengers were pounding on the bus windows for help as the driver swerved sharply before the crash.
One image in Hong Kong's South China Morning Post newspaper showed two men trying to smash the windows of the burning bus with fire extinguishers as the doors of the vehicle remained shut.
A firefighter at the scene said there were no survivors still calling for help when they arrived.
The bodies were being retrieved from the vehicle Tuesday evening after police and prosecutors examined the site, said an AFP photographer at the scene.
The tour group of 24 people -- three children, 15 women and six men -- was from China's northeastern city of Dalian, Taiwan's interior ministry said.
A Taiwanese driver and Taiwanese tour guide were also killed, the National Fire Agency confirmed.
The group were on their way to Taipei's main Taoyuan airport for a 4:30 pm flight back to Dalian after an eight-day tour of the island. The accident happened shortly before 1:00 pm.
- String of accidents -
Chinese tour groups have increasingly visited Taiwan in recent years after a boom in mainland tourism.
That was fostered by a rapprochement between the rivals under former Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou, who came to power in 2008 and left office in May.
However, there are fears the industry may be hit after Beijing-sceptic Tsai Ing-wen won the presidency in January, amid reports that tourist numbers have dropped.
China's Taiwan Affairs Office said it had launched "emergency response measures" after the accident, and would send a team to the island to help handle the aftermath.
"We are highly concerned about the safety of our mainland compatriots," said spokesman Ma Xiaoguang, quoted by state news agency Xinhua.
Several recent fatal accidents in Taiwan have led to safety probes.
In February 2015 a TransAsia plane crashed into a river in Taipei, killing 43 on board -- including 28 mainland Chinese tourists. A recent report by investigators confirmed the pilot had shut down the wrong engine after the other one failed. The airline was instructed to overhaul safety procedures and training.
In June 2015 coloured corn starch sprayed over crowds at a water park party near Taipei ignited due to the heat of stage lights, killing 15 and injuring more than 500 -- many of them young people who sustained horrific burns. The organiser of the event was jailed for negligence.
The collapse of a residential block during an earthquake in the southern city of Tainan in February this year, which left 115 dead, led to an investigation which showed builders had cut corners.
The previous worst road accident to kill Chinese tourists was in 2010 when a tour bus was hit by a landslide following a typhoon on a coastal road in the east of the island, leaving 20 dead.
Taiwan bus crash
A Taiwan bus carrying tourists from mainland China is engulfed in flames on July 19, 2016
Pakistan army rescues kidnapped son of top judge
Pakistani security forces have rescued the kidnapped son of a top judge in a raid in the country's restive northwest, the military said Tuesday.
Awais Ali Shah, a lawyer himself, was abducted last month from the southern port city of Karachi.
Shah was found in Tank, which lies close to Pakistan's lawless tribal region bordering Afghanistan where the military has been battling Taliban militants.
Sindh High Court Chief Justice Sajjad Ali Shah and his son Awais Ali Shah speak to media in Karachi after Awais was rescued from kidnappers
"Awais Shah son of Sindh Chief Justice recovered through an IBO (intelligence based operation) from custody of terrorists from near Tank, 3 terrorists killed," Pakistan army spokesman Lieutenant General Asim Bajwa said on Twitter.
Bajwa added that Shah would be reunited with his family later in the day.
Shah was last seen in CCTV footage on June 21 shopping at a supermarket in Karachi's Defence Housing Society, an upscale neighbourhood.
The country's powerful and highly popular army chief General Raheel Sharif "commended" intelligence and security forces for the "successful operation".
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif also congratulated the Sindh High Court chief justice Sajjad Ali Shah on the recovery of his son and praised security forces.
Malaysia, Singapore team up on bullet-train project
Malaysia and Singapore signed an agreement Tuesday to build an ambitious high-speed rail link touted as a first for Southeast Asia that will knit the historically fractious neighbours more closely together.
The 350-kilometre (217-mile) bullet-train line from the regional financial hub of Singapore to Malaysia's capital Kuala Lumpur is expected to slash travel times to 90 minutes from the five or more hours by road today.
Authorities have yet to provide cost projections, but analyst estimates have been as high as $15 billion, a potential bonanza for foreign railway contractors as well as other businesses expected to feed off ancillary developments related to the project.
The signing was overseen by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak (L) and his Singapore counterpart Lee Hsien Loong, who proposed the idea together in 2013 Roslan Rahman (AFP/File)
At a meeting in Malaysia's administrative capital Putrajaya, officials from each side signed a memorandum to pursue the project, which is expected to pave the way for detailed talks and a call for international tenders.
Authorities hope to get trains rolling by 2026.
The signing was overseen by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and his Singapore counterpart Lee Hsien Loong, who proposed the idea together in 2013.
"One can have breakfast in Kuala Lumpur, lunch in Singapore, and be back in time for dinner in Kuala Lumpur," Najib said in a joint news appearance.
Singapore was booted from the Malaysian Federation in 1965 over ethnic issues, and relations in subsequent decades were punctuated by occasional bickering.
But they have remained important economic partners and relations have warmed significantly in recent years under Najib and Lee.
The rail proposal already has sparked interest among major Chinese, Japanese, and Korean rail firms, who have sought to tout their credentials.
But speculation has mounted that Chinese national rail operator China Railway Corp has the inside track, which would be the latest sign of rapidly growing economic and trade ties between China and Malaysia.
China's chances of landing a chunk of the high-speed rail project are widely seen as having been boosted after its largest nuclear energy producer last year came to the rescue of a scandal-tainted Malaysian state fund.
The fund, 1Malaysia Development Berhad, or 1MDB -- which was launched by Najib -- faces allegations that billions were pilfered from it by politically connected Malaysian and Middle Eastern figures. Multiple investigations are under way overseas.
But last year 1MDB sold its power assets to China General Nuclear Power Corporation for $2.3 billion.
That gave 1MDB a lifeline in its struggle to stay solvent after running up debts of nearly $12 billion and missing previous debt repayment deadlines.
Philippine top court dismisses graft case against ex-leader Arroyo
The Philippine Supreme Court on Tuesday threw out a long-running corruption case against jailed former president Gloria Arroyo and ordered her immediate release after almost five years in detention.
The 69-year-old, who was in office from 2001-2010, could be freed later Tuesday from the Manila government hospital where she has been held since her November 2011 arrest, her lawyers said.
The case against Arroyo and a co-defendant was dismissed "for insufficiency of evidence", Supreme Court spokesman Theodore Te told reporters.
Former Philippine president Gloria Arroyo, pictured in 2012, was accused of stealing $8.8 mn in state lottery funds meant for charity programmes while she was in office Ted Aljibe (AFP/File)
Arroyo was accused of stealing 366 million pesos ($8.8 million) in state lottery funds meant for charity programmes while she was in office.
"The court... orders the immediate release from detention of said prisoners," Te said, reading from the court ruling.
Arroyo had refused to submit evidence during the trial, which was held at a special anti-graft court, claiming the charges against her were weak.
She later requested the Supreme Court dismiss the entire case.
Arroyo was initially arrested on charges of electoral sabotage for allegedly conspiring with election officials to rig 2007 senatorial elections.
She was granted bail for that case in July 2012 after the court -- while not dismissing the charge -- ruled the evidence against her was weak.
But the corruption case against her was lodged the same year, keeping her in detention.
Despite being detained, Arroyo has won a seat in the House of Representatives in the past two elections.
However, she has appeared to be in poor health, wearing a neck brace in court appearances for what her doctors describe as a spinal disease.
Arroyo was elected vice president in 1998 and became president after a bloodless popular revolt cut short the term of the elected president, Joseph Estrada.
In 2004 she won a controversial presidential election, but was forced to deny widespread allegations that she had stolen her victory at the ballot box.
IS releases video of Germany train attacker making threats
The Islamic State group Tuesday released a video purportedly showing the Afghan refugee who slashed people on a German train saying he would carry out the attack and threatening "infidel" countries.
The video released by IS's affiliated Amaq news agency, subtitled in Arabic, shows teenager "Mohammed Riyadh" -- knife in hand -- announcing in Pashto he would carry out an "operation" in Germany, and presenting himself as a "soldier of the caliphate".
Amaq had earlier said the assailant who seriously wounded four tourists from Hong Kong wielding an axe and a knife on Monday "was one of the fighters of the Islamic State".
Police officers stand near a train in Wuerzburg, southern Germany, on July 18, 2016 after a man attacked train passengers with an axe Karl-Josef Hildenbrand (DPA/AFP)
In the video that lasts two minutes 20 seconds, the 17-year-old says "soldiers of the caliphate" will attack "infidels" everywhere.
On Monday at 1915 GMT he seriously injured the four passengers on a local train between the town of Treuchtlingen and Wuerzburg in Bavaria, southern Germany.
The rampage appeared to be the first time the jihadist IS has claimed an attack in Germany.
Activists say Trump imperils 'critical' race relations
US race relations are at a critical juncture and threaten to spiral out of control if Donald Trump is elected president, say members of America's largest civil rights organization.
"There are people out here who want to create a racial war and if we're not careful we're going to fall into that," said Moneuc Conners, 50, a former local NAACP chapter president working two jobs in Indiana.
On Sunday, a black Iraq veteran, seemingly incensed by racial bias towards African Americans, shot dead three police officers, one of them black, in the Louisiana city of Baton Rouge.
Presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 18, 2016 Robyn Beck (AFP)
Just over 10 days ago, five police officers were shot dead in Dallas by a black sniper bent on killing whites following two high-profile fatal shootings of black men at the hands of police.
From the white man who killed black worshippers in Charleston to the gunman who killed 49 people in a gay Orlando nightclub in June, the past year has seen a torrent of slaughter motivated by hate.
Conners says she is "praying" that presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton wins the November 8 election.
"I do feel if Trump the Chump do get it, it's going to take our world back," she told AFP on the sidelines of the conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Cincinnati, Ohio.
The New York billionaire, who will be nominated Republican candidate for president on Tuesday, has been widely condemned for running a divisive campaign and is one of the rare US presidential candidates to decline an invitation to address the NAACP annual convention.
- 'Getting worse' -
He spearheaded the movement that questioned whether America's first black president, Barack Obama, was born in the United States and has been accused by Clinton of playing coy with white supremacists.
"Caucasian people aren't shot dead like we are," says Oscar Arrington, a retired New York police officer attending the NAACP convention and angling to get onto one of the committees.
"It seems to be getting worse instead of better because we keep saying no more, we're tired, it's enough and right after that some other unarmed person of color is shot and killed by the police."
"It needs to be dealt with," Arrington told AFP.
The vast majority of Americans agree. More than 80 percent think the country's next president should place a major focus on improving race relations, which 63 percent say are "generally bad" according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll.
NAACP president Cornell William Brooks, who has compared police shootings to lynchings, used his keynote address to urge the next president to commit to a five-point pledge to preserve black lives.
"If you want our vote, if you want our support, you've got to honor our pledge within the first 100 days and commit before you take office," he said.
He demanded an end to federal money for agencies that discriminate, the forced handover of internal documents, data on deaths, a federal code of conduct and an independent board to investigate shootings.
NAACP delegates welcomed the proposal and warmly applauded Clinton's call at their convention for criminal justice reform, data about deaths in custody and tighter gun control.
- 'More racially divided' -
"We're at a critical juncture," said Terry Pruitt, a retired lobbyist attending the conference from Michigan.
"I think we're either at a point where we can unite this country and move forward, or continue to take steps back," he told AFP.
Neither was it just a question of law enforcement. He blames Republicans for not doing enough during the Obama administration to create unity and help solve some of the problems.
"From day one when you make a commitment to not support the agenda of the president and to do everything you can to dismantle some of his vision and some of his desire, then you set up the stage for war and conflict," he said.
"I hope with the right leadership we can tone down some of the rhetoric and that's why I have a big struggle with Donald Trump.
"Because how do you take back some of the statements that he's made? How do you begin to accept that he's got the common will of all the people and is a champion of equality?"
Arrington said he was concerned by the scale of support for Trump and predicted that a Trump presidency would sow discord.
"He'll probably fragment the country more," he said. "It'll be more racially divided."
Anti-Donald Trump protesters march through the streets in Cleveland, Ohio, near the Republican National Convention site July 18, 2016 Jim Watson (AFP)
On Sunday, a black Iraq veteran, seemingly incensed by racial bias towards African Americans, shot dead three police officers, one of them black, in the Louisiana city of Baton Rouge Jim Watson (AFP)
Indonesia's most wanted Islamist militant killed
Indonesia's most wanted Muslim extremist has been killed in a firefight with troops, authorities said Tuesday, ending a years-long hunt for the Islamic State (IS) group supporter.
Santoso, the leader of the Eastern Indonesia Mujahideen, was shot dead on Monday on mountainous Sulawesi island, where he had been hiding out in the jungle with a small band of followers.
His death is a major victory for authorities in the world's most populous Muslim-majority country who had pursued the extremist for five years, sending thousands of security forces to hunt for him.
Police carry a body bag at a local hospital in Palu, Indonesia's Sulawesi province, on July 19, 2016, after a firefight between suspected Muslim extremists and security forces in the village of Tambarana Olagondronk (AFP)
His group carried out a string of deadly attacks on domestic security forces and was known for training militants from around the archipelago. In 2014 he pledged allegiance to IS and earlier this year was placed by the United States on a list of global terrorists.
"The group is obviously weakened now that we have got the leader," national police chief Tito Karnavian told reporters, as he confirmed the militant's death.
He said the country's extremists had wanted to transform Sulawesi's Poso district, where Santoso and his followers were based, into a "safe haven" and a regional power base.
"With this group broken, their hope for a base there is gone," he added.
After Indonesia suffered a string of Islamic extremist attacks in the early 2000s, including the 2002 Bali bombings which killed more than 200, authorities launched a crackdown that weakened the most dangerous networks.
But Santoso's group remained a thorn in the side of the government, with the long-haired, gun-toting militant regularly appearing in videos urging extremists to launch attacks on the security forces.
- Significant blow -
The picture has changed recently, with other cells now considered a greater threat -- Santoso was not believed to have played role in an IS-claimed attack in Jakarta in January that left four attackers and four civilians dead.
But his death will still be seen as a significant blow to Islamic militancy in Indonesia.
The extremist, known by several aliases including Abu Wardah, was killed alongside one other militant in Tambarana village in Poso.
Police said the pair were killed beside a river and a rifle was recovered. Two women, one of whom was suspected to be Santosos wife, and another man, escaped from the gunfight.
Following a sustained campaign by security forces, authorities believe just 19 members of Santoso's group now remain on Sulawesi waging a guerrilla campaign against the government.
Santoso also attracted militants from abroad, with several members of China's mostly Muslim Uighur ethnic minority travelling to Indonesia to join his group.
Several were killed fighting with the Eastern Indonesia Mujahideen, and in July last year four Uighurs were jailed after being caught on Sulawesi attempting to join the group.
Santoso became involved in Islamic extremism during bloody fighting between Muslims and Christians around Poso from the late 1990s to the early 2000s which left hundreds dead.
He went on to form the Eastern Indonesia Mujahideen and quickly jumped to the top of the most wanted list after his men began killing police officers.
Bahrain rebuffs British, US allies over opposition ban
Bahrain has rebuffed its British and US allies over a controversial ban on the kingdom's largest opposition group, insisting it will brook no interference in its internal affairs.
The tiny but strategic Gulf state, a former British protectorate and home base of the US Fifth Fleet, has been racked by persistent unrest since its Sunni rulers bloodily suppressed an uprising by its Shiite majority in 2011.
Western governments have repeatedly appealed publicly for reform and reconciliation but those calls have gone unheeded and in recent months the crackdown on dissent has intensified.
A Bahraini man holds a placard bearing the portrait of Sheikh Ali Salman, head of the Shiite opposition movement Al-Wefaq, during a protest against his arrest, on May 29, 2016 Mohammed al-Shaikh (AFP/File)
On Sunday, a court dissolved Al-Wefaq, the largest faction in parliament before 2011, accusing it of fanning violence in Shiite areas.
The ruling was condemned around the world, by Iran as well as Western governments and the United Nations.
But Bahrain was unrepentant, issuing a statement late on Monday hitting back at its Western allies.
"Such statements and positions are unacceptable interference in the internal affairs of the kingdom of Bahrain, and in the decisions of the Bahraini judicial process, which provides all necessary standards of justice, fairness, transparency and independence," the foreign ministry said.
The "statements are unjustified and only give encouragement to groups which support extremism and terrorism," it added.
The ministry said it hoped "friendly and allied countries take into account the interests" of Bahrain, just as it "is keen to take into account the interests of all allies and partners in order to preserve their distinctive historical relations, and to ensure security and stability in the region."
Bahrain received military support from its Gulf Arab allies when it crushed the 2011 protests for a constitutional monarchy and an elected prime minister, but its continuing crackdown has drawn mounting Western criticism.
US Secretary of State John Kerry said the Al-Wefaq ban was the "latest in a series of disconcerting steps in Bahrain."
He called on Bahrain to "reverse these and other recent measures (and) return urgently to the path of reconciliation."
British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson urged Bahrain "to guarantee and protect political freedoms for all its citizens."
Rights group Amnesty International called the ban "a flagrant attack on freedom of expression and association aimed at silencing opponents and critics".
"The Bahraini authorities presented no credible evidence to show that Al-Wefaq is anything but a peaceful opposition movement," it said in a statement.
Al-Wefaq's chief, Shiite cleric Ali Salman, is serving a nine-year jail term on charges of inciting violence after a court in May more than doubled his sentence.
Authorities have also stripped at least 261 people of their citizenship since 2012, according to the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, including the country's Shiite spiritual leader Sheikh Isa Qassem.
Last October, Britain began building a naval base at Mina Salman, outside Manama, its first new permanent base in the Middle East in four decades.
Republicans attending -- and avoiding -- Trump convention
Donald Trump's elevation to Republican presidential nominee is not to everyone's taste in a party struggling to accept the controversial outsider as the list of those attending, and avoiding, the national convention makes clear.
The fragile unity of the GOP is on display in Cleveland, where observers are reading the tea leaves in the choices Trump and the Republican leadership made in determining who addresses the party faithful.
The event is hardly the glittery showbiz spectacular of A-listers that Trump had repeatedly hinted at, after the former reality television star derided previous conventions as "boring" and stiff.
Presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump introduces his wife Melania Trump to delegates on the first day of the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2016 at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio Robyn Beck (AFP/File)
Some big Republican names are off the marquee, and their absence may impact the future direction of the party -- whose divisions were in the spotlight Monday as anti-Trump delegates launched a revolt on the convention floor.
Of the major figures coming to Cleveland for the confab, the billionaire's wife Melania Trump drew most attention as she spoke Monday night -- in the longstanding tradition of potential first ladies taking the stage in efforts to humanize their husbands.
But Trump is pushing the boundaries somewhat by adding his children to the schedule as well. Daughter Tiffany and sons Eric and Donald Trump Jr. have speaking roles, as does daughter Ivanka Trump, who has emerged as a star in her own right and has a slot on the convention's final night.
- Rivals-turned-allies -
Retired general Michael Flynn on Monday backed up Trump's call for law and order in a country reeling from race-related violence.
Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani also bolstered Trump's anti-terror credentials.
And three speakers focused on the deadly 2012 assault on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya that left four Americans dead, and how they felt then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton failed to do enough to prevent the killings.
The speakers included John Tiegen, a veteran who fought in Benghazi, and Pat Smith, mother of Sean Smith who died during the attack on the US consulate.
Politically, the Monday highlights included former Texas governor Rick Perry, himself a onetime 2016 presidential candidate who had assailed Trump's campaign as "a toxic mix of demagoguery and nonsense."
But he has since made peace with the presumptive nominee, as many former rivals do before they speak at the conventions.
Neurosurgeon Ben Carson, another 2016 presidential hopeful, speaks Tuesday, as does New Jersey governor and former candidate Chris Christie, who was on Trump's vice president short list.
The two Cuban-American US Senators who ran for president this year, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, address the convention late Wednesday.
Several lawmakers will take the stage, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, whose open hesitation about endorsing Trump earlier this year sparked consternation among the party faithful.
Trump's running mate Mike Pence, the governor of Indiana and a conservative evangelical Christian, has a prime spot Wednesday night, and former House speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump friend who was considered for the VP position, also has a speaking slot.
- Conspicuous absences -
But the political no-shows are even more prominent.
Former Republican presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush are skipping the gathering.
Romney is steering clear as expected, after harshly criticizing Trump during the primaries. The 2008 nominee John McCain is also staying away.
That leaves Bob Dole, 92, as the only former nominee at the convention.
Several lawmakers are avoiding Cleveland, including Senator Rob Portman of host state Ohio, and Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. Both are locked in tough re-election battles in battleground states.
Among the most conspicuous absences is John Kasich, who battled bitterly with Trump for the nomination. Although he did appear briefly by video, Kasich's absence is particularly awkward given that he is governor of the convention's host state Ohio.
People who know Trump through his company dealings will address the confab in order to shed light on the tycoon's business acumen, including Kerry Woolard, the general manager of Trump Winery in central Virginia.
Trump will touch on some cultural sensitivities Thursday when venture capitalist Peter Thiel, the cofounder of PayPal, becomes the first openly gay delegate to address the convention.
But while 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney brought Hollywood megastar Clint Eastwood to his convention, Trump fails to match the wattage.
His celebrities include former "Happy Days" actor Scott Baio, "Duck Dynasty" hero Willie Robertson, and soap opera star Antonio Sabato, Jr.
The US Republican National Convention held in Cleveland is hardly the glittery showbiz spectacular of A-listers that Trump had repeatedly hinted at Robyn Beck (AFP)
Several lawmakers are avoiding the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, including Senator Rob Portman of host state Ohio, and Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania Nova Safo (AFP)
Santoso 'symbolic heart' of Indonesian jihadi movement
Indonesian Islamist extremist leader Santoso, killed in a shootout with security forces, was a potent jihadi symbol who kept up a violent struggle in the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation that inspired legions of other militants.
But while the killing of the Islamic State (IS) group supporter is a major victory for authorities, analysts caution that other extremist cells now pose a greater threat. A deadly, IS-claimed attack on Jakarta in January was carried out by Java-based militants, and Santoso is not believed to have played a role.
Santoso and his ragtag bunch of poorly armed fighters, called the Eastern Indonesia Mujahideen, had been hiding out in the jungles and mountains around Poso on the central island of Sulawesi for several years, with the area gaining a reputation as a militant hotbed.
Police guard a local hospital in Palu, Indonesia's Central Sulawesi province, on July 19, 2016, after a firefight with suspected Muslim extremists in the nearby village of Tambarana
His group rose to prominence after carrying out deadly assaults on security forces and by training militants from across the archipelago. In recent times Chinese Uighur radicals joined the militants, and Santoso developed links with Indonesians fighting with IS, who are believed to have sent him substantial funds.
The United States in March put Santoso, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, on a list of global terrorists.
"There have been well over 100 people who have gone through his training network, and therefore developed some kind of ties with him, so that he has become the symbolic heart of the jihadi movement," Sidney Jones, director of Jakarta think-tank the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, told AFP.
"The combination of his attacks on police, plus his training, contacts with Syria, and his symbolic importance, make him an important catch."
The security forces' sustained campaign to pin Santoso down finally paid off Monday, when he was killed in a shootout in Tambarana village in Poso.
- Thorn in the side -
The group's attacks were mostly low-level and targeted domestic security forces -- a far cry from the bloody Islamist militant assaults of the early 2000s that killed many foreigners -- but he remained a thorn in the side of authorities.
Santoso and his group of fighters -- which have dwindled to around 20 following the authorities' campaign -- were among the few in Indonesia that remained a real threat, after a years-long, largely successful crackdown severely weakened other militant groups.
Indonesia launched the clampdown after the extremist attacks of the early 2000s, including the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people.
Santoso, known by several aliases including Abu Wardah, became involved in Islamist extremism during bloody fighting between Muslims and Christians around his home district of Poso from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, that left hundreds dead.
After a peace deal to end the Poso conflict, he joined a local affiliate of Jemaah Islamiyah, the group blamed for the Bali bombings.
He later formed the Eastern Indonesia Mujahideen, and the group came to the attention of authorities when his men killed two police officers in 2011, propelling Santoso to the top of the most wanted list.
His men engaged in more deadly attacks against security forces in the years that followed and, as his reputation grew in jihadi circles, militants flocked to his training camps.
"He earned respect from other militant groups because he actually went out and took action," said Taufik Andrie, an expert in Islamist militancy.
Still, analysts say he has posed little real threat recently as authorities had him cornered in the jungle during their long quest to catch him.
Police carry a body bag at a local hospital in Palu, Indonesia's Sulawesi province, on July 19, 2016, after a firefight between suspected Muslim extremists
S. African twins remanded over US embassy plot
Two South African brothers were remanded in custody Tuesday over allegations they plotted to attack the US embassy and Jewish institutions, as well as planning to join the Islamic State group.
The arrests of 23-year-old twins Brandon-Lee and Tony-Lee Thulsie earlier this month were the first in South Africa relating to alleged IS membership.
"Both the defence and the state were not ready to proceed, hence the trial was postponed until July 25," National Prosecuting Authority spokeswoman Phindi Louw told reporters outside Johannesburg magistrates' court.
South Africa, which has a Muslim minority of around 1.5 percent in a population of some 53 million, has so far escaped the jihadist attacks seen in several other African countries Gianluigi Guercia (AFP/File)
"We have reasonable and probable cause to believe that an offence was committed."
Police last week said the pair were suspected of planning to bomb the US embassy in Pretoria as well as unspecified Jewish facilities.
They are also alleged to have attempted to travel to Syria to join IS.
The brothers waved to family members in court after the short hearing.
The United States and Britain warned last month of the possibility of imminent attacks by jihadist extremists in South Africa's major cities.
Chinese liberal magazine in limbo after forced reshuffle
An influential Chinese magazine that challenged official accounts of Communist history has suspended publication after its chief editor was purged in a battle for control, staff confirmed Tuesday.
The forced reshuffle at "Annals of the Yellow Emperor" has been seen as the latest tightening of controls over media under the leadership of President Xi Jinping.
Tensions came to a head when the National Academy of Arts, which is linked to the culture ministry and sponsors the magazine, said 93-year-old publisher and co-founder Du Daozheng had been removed and installed its own replacements.
China ranks 176th out of 180 countries in press freedom rankings compiled by Paris-based campaign group Reporters Without Borders Greg Baker (AFP/File)
"We are suspending publication," Du said in a message Sunday on behalf of the magazine's editorial staff, confirmed as genuine by their lawyer Mo Shaoping.
The monthly publication -- said to have a circulation of more than 150,000 -- is popular among retired Communist party cadres.
It contains dense accounts of party history, but its elderly intellectual publishers are seen as pushing the boundaries as part of a more liberal wing of the ruling party which favours political reform.
Li Nanyang, the daughter of one of the magazine's advisers Li Rui -- a former secretary to Communist founding father Mao Zedong -- said in a statement sent to AFP that she "firmly supports" the editor's decision to suspend publication.
"This is a day which should be remembered by history," she added.
At the magazine's offices in Beijing on Tuesday the few remaining original staff members, from the circulation department, confirmed that none of the previous editors or writers were working.
One, a woman named Kong, said that newly installed staff from the National Academy of Arts had brought camp-beds to sleep inside the offices and described the move as "an occupation".
She added: "There is no way the August edition will be published."
Like other media the magazine, known as Yanhuang Chunqiu in Chinese, has found its freedoms curtailed in recent years, staff say.
Former chief editor Yang Jisheng lashed out at censorship officials last year while quitting his job, accusing them of demanding that articles be submitted and approved before publication. Du then took over Yang's responsibilities.
The magazine muted its coverage this year, greeting the 50th anniversary in May of the destructive decade known as the Cultural Revolution with a reprint of sections of the party's official verdict on the period.
Lawyer Mo said the original editors would attempt to take the National Academy of Arts to court to try to regain control of the publication and its website.
The new editors could go on publishing in the meantime, he added, and the situation "doesn't mean that Yanhuang Chunqiu will cease to exist".
China ranks 176th out of 180 countries in press freedom rankings compiled by Paris-based campaign group Reporters Without Borders.
Netanyahu warns of 'iron fist' 10 years after Lebanon war
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday that Israel would respond with an "iron fist" if attacked, in a speech marking 10 years since a devastating conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Netanyahu described the war as "a clash between an extremist terror organisation with an Islamist ideology and a free democratic Israel".
"We are in a global battle. We are aware of the nature of the threats we face, and are preparing for any scenario," he said at a ceremony at the Mount Herzl military cemetery.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivers a speech during a ceremony to mark the 10th anniversary of the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah movement, in Jerusalem on July 19, 2016 Thomas Coex (AFP)
"If the quiet is kept, those facing us will enjoy quiet. But if the need arises, we will respond to aggression -- and the response will be powerful. Whoever thinks they will find 'spider webs' here will get... an iron fist."
The Israeli premier was alluding to a 2000 speech by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, in which he called the Jewish state "feebler than a spider's web".
The 2006 conflict erupted when Israel retaliated for a cross-border raid in which Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers and killed three, and quickly spiralled into a fully fledged war.
Hezbollah fired thousands of rockets into northern Israel, which carried out devastating strikes across Lebanon.
Many people in Israel considered the massive ground and air war on Lebanon to be a failure because it did not halt Hezbollah rocket fire or recover the two captured soldiers.
Indian Kashmir residents under curfew face medicine shortage
Indian Kashmir residents said Tuesday they are facing shortages of prescription drugs, as parts of the region remained under curfew for an 11th day following deadly clashes between protesters and security forces.
As the overall death toll from days of violence rose to 45, shopkeepers warned supplies were running low because trucks were unable to reach them, while residents complained of being "caged" in their homes.
"People are suffering without medicines. A lot of people are struggling for medicines for diabetes, hypertension and anti-depressants," said Nazir Ahmed who owns a pharmacy in the old part of the main city of Srinagar.
Kashmir has been divided between rivals India and Pakistan since independence in 1947, but both claim the Himalayan territory in full Tauseef Mustafa (AFP/File)
With most vehicles ordered off the roads under the curfew, Ahmed said he walked five kilometres (three miles) to a warehouse to buy medicines.
"No fresh supplies are coming from outside. This will last two to three days for my neighbourhood," Ahmed said, carrying plastic bags full of drugs.
Shops and other businesses have been shuttered under the curfew which the government says is needed to curb the street clashes that erupted after the death of a popular rebel leader on July 8.
Burhan Wani, killed during a gunbattle with government forces, was commander of the region's biggest separatist group Hizbul Mujahideen, one of several fighting for decades against Indian troops deployed in the territory.
The clashes are the deadliest in Muslim-majority Kashmir since 2010 when massive demonstrations were held against Indian rule.
Kashmir has been divided between rivals India and Pakistan since independence in 1947, but both claim the Himalayan territory in full.
In the latest violence two protesters were killed late Monday when soldiers opened fire on stone-throwing demonstrators in the south.
The army said in a statement troops were forced to shoot when a "large mob turned violent" and "attempted to snatch weapons from the soldiers", adding that the deaths were regretted.
In parts of Srinagar Tuesday, residents kept watch for volunteers from local charities delivering supplies including food on foot.
An elderly woman suffering from hypertension and a heart condition said she hoped they would bring medicines soon.
"I don't have my medicines. Some volunteers came but they did not have the medicines I need," Noora, 80, who uses one name, said from her doorstep.
"We are just caged inside our home," her son, Ghulam Nabi Ahangar, added.
Ahangar said security forces were firing tear gas and pepper spray at night to deter people from venturing outside.
"The poisonous gases stay inside our home and lungs the whole night. Our children are falling sick and cannot sleep," Ahangar told AFP.
Some pharmacies outside hospitals are open but few residents can reach them, while internet and phone services remain patchy.
Iraq officers say soldiers tortured by Kurdish forces
Iraqi officers said Tuesday that Kurdish security forces detained and tortured several soldiers, an event that would likely undermine trust between the two sides when cooperation against jihadists is needed.
But a Kurdish security spokesman denied that the incident took place, and other Kurdish officials did not respond to requests for comment.
Iraqi forces are carrying out operations in Nineveh province to set the stage for a final assault on its capital Mosul, the country's second city that has been held by the Islamic State jihadist group since 2014.
Both Iraqi troops and Kurdish forces will have important roles to play in battle for Mosul, but there are significant tensions between the two sides Ahmad Al-Rubaye (AFP/File)
Both Iraqi federal troops and forces from the country's autonomous Kurdish region will have important roles to play in battle for the city, but there are significant tensions between the two sides over financial and political issues.
Kurdish "asayesh forces beat eight of our soldiers during their return from the battlefield for a holiday" on Monday, a senior officer in the 9th Division told AFP.
Three soldiers "were tortured using electricity, and they beat an officer of the rank of lieutenant colonel and another captain, and fired at them, and held them for hours before their release," the officer said.
He said the incident took place in the Makhmur area southeast of Mosul, where both Iraqi soldiers and Kurdish forces are deployed.
An officer in Iraq's Joint Operations Command gave a similar account.
"A group of soldiers from the 9th Armoured Division were beaten and humiliated by the asayesh in Makhmur," the JOC officer said.
"Three soldiers were tortured using electric batons, and five others... were beaten by asayesh forces," the officer said.
The officer later acknowledged that the soldiers' accounts differed from that of the asayesh but did not provide details on how, and said the incident would be investigated.
Iraqi lawmakers distributed images of heavily bruised men said to be the soldiers who had been attacked, but the authenticity of the pictures could not be independently confirmed.
Ahmed al-Jaff, the spokesman for Kurdish peshmerga forces in the Makhmur area, denied that Iraqi soldiers had been beaten or tortured, while a number of asayesh officials did not respond to requests for comment.
IS overran large areas north and west of Baghdad in 2014, and while both federal and Kurdish forces have battled the jihadists, they have fought largely independent wars.
But that will need to change for Mosul, with Kurdish forces deployed north, west and east of the city, federal soldiers pushing up from the south, and both expected to play significant roles in the campaign.
Mugabe denounces Zimbabwean 'ThisFlag' protest leader
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe on Tuesday used a funeral address to angrily denounce popular pastor Evan Mawarire, who has become the figurehead of recent anti-government protests.
"I don't even know him... I don't know if he is a man of religion. A man of religion, we would hope, would preach biblical peace," Mugabe told mourners at the funeral of a senior government official.
The public rebuke was Mugabe's first reaction to the "ThisFlag" protest movement that was started by Mawarire and has fuelled a series of rare demonstrations.
Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe has been in power since 1980 Jekesai Njikizana (AFP/File)
Earlier this month, many offices, shops and some government department were closed for a one-day national strike against the country's worsening economic crisis.
Last week hundreds of Mawarire supporters rallied outside a Harare court until he was released when a case of attempting to overthrow the government was dismissed.
Mawarire, who is currently visiting South Africa, has avoided criticising Mugabe directly and has repeatedly appealed for Zimbabweans to protest peacefully.
"You can't urge people to adopt violence... as a way of solving grievances," said Mugabe, 92, who also accused unnamed foreign countries of "sponsoring" Mawarire.
Mugabe, who has previously used his ruthless security forces to crack down on any public show of dissent, warned people to be aware of some preachers
"I don't know whether they are serving God. We spell God G-O-D. They spell GOD in reverse," he told the crowd.
Pakistan court orders freezing of Musharraf's property
A special court trying former Pakistani military ruler Pervez Musharraf for treason passed an order Tuesday freezing his bank accounts and confiscating his property, his lawyer said.
The head of a three-judge panel, Mazhar Alam Miankhel, made the order in the absence of the former president, who left for Dubai in March for what was described as urgent medical treatment.
The order came after authorities gave the court documentation on Musharraf's property. He faces multiple charges including treason and murder over the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in 2007.
Pakistan's former military ruler Pervez Musharraf faces multiple charges including treason and murder over the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in 2007 Farooq Naeem (AFP/File)
"The court ordered freezing of the former president's bank accounts and attachment of his property to the respective session courts all over the country," Musharraf's lead counsel Ahmad Raza Kasuri told AFP.
The court adjourned indefinitely after passing the order, which means the case is closed unless the former president returns to Pakistan.
Musharraf ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in a bloodless coup in 1999. He resigned in 2008 to avoid possible impeachment and went into exile overseas.
He returned in 2013 in an attempt to contest elections but was barred from taking part in the polls and from leaving the country while facing a barrage of legal cases.
The travel ban was lifted in March.
In January this year Musharraf was acquitted over the 2006 killing of a Baloch rebel leader, Nawab Akbar Bugti.
Early HIV vaccine results lead to major trial: researchers
Promising results from an early safety trial with a potential HIV vaccine have paved the way for a major new study, researchers announced at the International AIDS Conference in Durban on Tuesday.
An 18-month trial with a candidate vaccine dubbed HVTN100 drew on 252 participants at six sites in South Africa, one of the countries hardest-hit by an epidemic that has claimed more than 30 million lives worldwide since the 1980s.
The participants fell within a low-risk category for contracting the sexually-transmitted virus, the researchers said.
New HIV infections have plateaued for the past 10 years after a steep dip from a peak rate of 3.3 million in 1997, said the authors of a comprehensive analysis in The Lancet HIV journal Alexander Joe (AFP/File)
The trial cleared a key hurdle in the long, three-phase process to test new drugs. In this early phase, the main point is to assess safety, not efficacy.
"We wanted to see if this vaccine candidate is safe in a South African population and if it is tolerable," Kathy Mngadi, principal investigator at one of the research sites, explained to AFP.
The team also looked for antibodies signalling that the body's immune system was responding to the vaccine.
The trial built on the foundations laid by a groundbreaking trial conducted in Thailand in 2009, which yielded the world's first partially effective vaccine, dubbed RV144.
While hailed as a breakthrough, the effect of the Thai course decreased with time, dropping from 60 percent after one year to 31.2 percent after three-and-a-half years.
"RV144 set us on this journey of hope, but also showed us what we still need to learn and accomplish in this field," said Fatima Laher, co-chair of the HVTN100 trial.
- Next step -
All the study criteria "were met unequivocally and, in many instances, the HVTN100 outcomes exceeded both our own criteria," added trial protocol chair Linda-Gail Bekker.
The next phase of the trial, dubbed HVTN702, will kick off in November with the recruitment of 5,400 South African men and women aged between 18 to 25 at high risk of contracting HIV.
People are divided into risk categories through criteria that includes their sexual activity.
"We hope to have results in five years, and it is going to be a very exciting five years for all of us because it is the result of many, many years of hard work," said Glenda Gray, HVTN Africa programme director.
A fully effective vaccine is still a long way off, she cautioned.
But recent studies have shown that even a partially effective blocker could have a huge impact if rolled out on a large scale.
Some two-and-a-half million people are still becoming infected with HIV every year, according to a new study published on Tuesday, even as drugs have slashed the death rate and virus-carriers live ever longer on anti-retroviral treatment.
While the quest for a cure continues, many view a vaccine as the best hope for stemming new infections.
Larry Corey, principal investigator for the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, a publicly-funded international project, said vaccines were barely mentioned the last time the conference was held in Durban some 16 years ago.
"It's really gratifying now to see how far we've come scientifically," he said.
Last year, billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates, who spends millions of dollars on AIDS drug development, said he hoped for an HIV vaccine within a decade, as a cure seems less likely.
Graphic showing new HIV cases in the world, between 2005 and 2015 Sophie Ramis, Simon Malfatto (AFP)
Netflix plan to conquer world stumbles, for now
The plan by Netflix to conquer the world with its streaming video service is moving slower than expected.
Netflix shares skidded 14 percent to $85.02 in midday trade Tuesday, a day after reporting weaker-than-expected growth in its subscriber base.
The company said it ended the second quarter with 83 million subscribers, adding 1.7 million. That was well below Netflix's own forecast of 2.5 million additions and lower than many analyst forecasts.
Analysts said Netflix is still showing growth, but not at the breakneck pace expected when the company announced it had expanded its global footprint to 190 countries, making its streaming service available in 130 new markets Jonathan Nackstrand (AFP/File)
Netflix said growth was hurt, especially in the United States, when it raised rates on many long-time subscribers who had been "grandfathered" in when it hiked most prices.
Analysts said Netflix is still showing growth, but not at the breakneck pace expected when the company announced it had expanded its global footprint to 190 countries, making its streaming service available in 130 new markets.
The company effectively raised its price for many customers, which provided a boost to revenue but hurt new subscriptions and may have caused some customers to turn to rivals such as Hulu or Amazon.
"These price hikes now place Netflix into a similar price category as it competitors," said Jonathan Broughton at IHS Technology in a note to clients.
Broughton said growth in new markets was disappointing, adding that Netflix may need to do more to connect with viewers around the world.
"Netflix has been slow to invest in international content, even in larger countries, and this has stalled growth," he said.
"Local content has been cited as key to expansion in international markets and pulling back from this may be detrimental to the company outlook outside the US and UK."
Daniel Salmon at BMO Capital Markets said Netflix faces "a period of challenging visibility" as it seeks to expand globally.
"While Netflix notes that local language content 'constitutes a small minority of viewing' we believe it has a higher likelihood than traditional, Western/Hollywood content to generate the positive word-of-mouth/local news coverage that could accelerate subscriber growth in a given country," Salmon said in a research note.
Michael Graham at Canaccord Genuity said Netflix may be seeing only a temporary pause in its growth spurt, and views the drop in Netflix as "a good long-term buying opportunity."
Graham said that he believes "that the full benefits from Netflix's international launch and content investments have yet to be realized."
Neil Saunders of the research firm Conlumino, said the troubling news from Netflix is in the United States, where it raised most subscribers to $10 per month from $8 after a period of "grandfathering."
"Inevitably, this change brought with it a great deal of churn, with some subscribers cancelling memberships," he said.
Armed group kills 12 soldiers at Mali base: ministry
At least 12 soldiers were killed in central Mali on Tuesday in an attack on their base claimed by gunmen from the Peul ethnic group.
"Provisional death toll 11 dead, 34 injured, 24 of them seriously. Serious material damage. Enemy unknown," the defence ministry told AFP, adding later one of the wounded had died
The gunmen's descent on the military camp in Nampala was earlier claimed by a group calling themselves the National Alliance for the Protection of Peul Identity and Restoration of Justice (ANSIPRJ).
Soldiers in the back of a pickup truck drive down a street during a demonstration in Gao on July 12, 2016 Souleymane Ag Anara (AFP/File)
The group said it had killed eight troops and wounded 11 more, as well as making off with two trucks and five pick-up trucks.
"It was legitimate defence," Sidy Cisse, a senior ANSIPRJ commander, told AFP, adding three of his men were wounded.
Earlier Al-Akhbar, a Mauritanian news agency, reported that several soldiers had been taken hostage, and the base was set alight.
Senior figures within ANSIPRJ are also members of a Peul association that decried the murder of what it said were several Peuls falsely accused of supporting jihadists active in the area.
A Peul radical, Amadou Koufa, leads the Macina Liberation Front (FLM), a new group that emerged in 2015 and has claimed responsibility for a number of attacks, some targeting security forces in central Mali.
Several security sources in the region told AFP they doubted the veracity of the claim of responsibility from ANSIPRJ as the group was only founded last month following inter-communal clashes in the area and lacked the means to mount an attack.
The Malian government said in a statement published online the attackers would be hunted down and punished, and that the military had been ordered to secure Nampala.
The town was no longer under jihadist control, a government spokesman said.
Northern Mali has seen repeated violence since it fell under the control of Tuareg-led rebels who allied with jihadist groups linked to Al-Qaeda in 2012.
But attacks are now becoming more frequent in the country's centre, close to its borders with Burkina Faso and Niger, both from criminal and jihadist elements.
21 dead in probable Russia strikes in Syria: monitor
Air strikes probably carried out by Russia killed 21 civilians on Tuesday in a rebel-held Syrian town in the northern province of Aleppo, a monitoring group said.
"Twenty-one civilians, including six children, were killed presumably in Russian raids that targeted the industrial zone of the town of Atareb," said Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The head of the Britain-based monitor, which previously put the toll at 12 dead, said it could now rise even further.
Volkswagen execs named in new emissions lawsuits
New York and Massachusetts filed lawsuits Tuesday against Volkswagen that suggested that senior executives were aware early on of efforts to hide high emissions levels in the company's diesel cars.
As early as July 2006, the German automaker's inability to comply with US emissions standards allegedly "reached the attention" of Matthias Mueller, the current Volkswagen CEO, and his predecessor Martin Winterkorn, according to complaints lodged Tuesday by both states' attorneys general.
But the company nevertheless used "defeat device" software designed to reduce nitrous oxide emissions during laboratory testing while allowing up to 40 times the legal limit during real driving conditions. Neither complaint explicitly states that either man knew or authorized the use of the deceptive software.
Matthias Mueller was a project manager at Audi in 2006 when word allegedly reached him that engineers were having difficulty meeting US emissions standards, according to new lawsuits John MacDougall (AFP/File)
A Volkswagen spokesman told AFP there was "no credible evidence" to support the allegations against Mueller and called into question whether New York and Massachusetts authorities had identified the right person.
The allegations were "based on an ambiguous reference in an email to a certain H. Mueller and on which Matthias Mueller was not even copied," said Jeannine Ginivan.
Contact information for Winterkorn to obtain comment on the allegations was not immediately available.
The two states' complaints cite testimony according to which the individual cited is indeed Matthias Mueller.
Mueller was a project manager at Audi in 2006 when word allegedly reached him and Winterkorn -- then CEO of Audi and later VW chief executive -- that engineers were having difficulty meeting US emissions standards, according to the complaints. Mueller replaced Winterkorn as CEO when the latter resigned last year as a result of the scandal.
Late last month Volkswagen, which also owns the luxury automakers Audi and Porsche, settled civil charges over the use of the cheat devices on 2.0 liter engines with US and Californian authorities in a $14.7 billion agreement that will see car owners compensated.
At the same time, it reach a settlement on consumer protection issues worth $600 million with 44 other states.
The company still needs to address the same issue on 3.0 liter engines with cheat devices in Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche models cars.
And it also still faces a criminal investigation in the case.
Israeli soldiers shoot dead Palestinian boy: ministry
A Palestinian boy was killed by Israeli soldiers who fired rubber-coated bullets near Jerusalem on Tuesday, said the Palestinian health ministry.
"Mohiyeh al-Tabakhi, 12, was killed by shots fired by occupation soldiers in the Al-Ram area near Jerusalem," the ministry said in a statement.
The Palestinian suburb in the occupied West Bank near Jerusalem is cut off from the Holy City by the "separation wall" built by Israel.
An Israeli police car patrols along a section of Israel's controversial separation barrier that separates the West Bank city of al-Ram (L) from east Jerusalem (R) on February 24, 2016 Thomas Coex (AFP/File)
The boy was hit in the chest by a rubber-coated bullet which caused cardiac arrest, medical sources were quoted by the Palestinian news agency WAFA as saying.
Israeli police said tear gas grenades and sound bombs had been used against demonstrators in the area.
"After being pelted with Molotov cocktails, police used tear gas and stun grenades to disperse the protesters," police spokeswoman Luba Samri told AFP.
"There was no live fire," she added.
Earlier on Tuesday, a Palestinian shot after stabbing two Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank died of his wounds, a hospital spokeswoman said.
Mustafa Baradeah, 51, lightly wounded the soldiers with a screwdriver before being shot, the army said. He also had a knife in his possession.
Monday's attack took place near Al-Arroub, north of the flashpoint West Bank city of Hebron.
Baradeah was taken in critical condition to Shaare Zedek hospital in Jerusalem where he died later, a spokeswoman there said.
His brother Ibrahim was killed in April after carrying out an attack with an axe that left a soldier lightly wounded.
Baradeah was from Al-Arroub refugee camp, located about half way between Bethlehem and Hebron, where many of the attackers in a recent wave of violence have come from.
The violence in the Palestinian territories and Israel since last October has killed at least 217 Palestinians, 34 Israelis, two Americans, an Eritrean and a Sudanese, according to an AFP count.
Most of the Palestinians killed were carrying out knife, gun or car-ramming attacks, according to Israeli authorities.
Others were shot dead during protests and clashes, while some were killed by Israeli air strikes on the Islamist-controlled Gaza Strip.
Baton Rouge, scene of latest US shooting, a city divided
The black-white divide in this city scarred by the latest racially charged killing in America is easy to see: just take a walk.
The streets in the mainly white south of Baton Rouge are clean, with carefully tended parks and lawns, modern buildings and good hospitals.
But the black part of town in the north looks like something out of the developing world. It is decaying, with lots of offices for ambulance-chasing lawyers, pawn shops and stores selling second-hand goods.
Baton Rouge Police officers patrol Airline Hwy on July 17, 2016 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana Sean Gardner (Getty/AFP/File)
There are also plenty of businesses that, for a fee, will lend money to post bond for someone in jail.
It was in Baton Rouge that Gavin Long, a black former Marine and Iraq war veteran, shot and killed three law enforcement officers on Sunday before being killed himself.
His motive remains unclear, but the violence immediately recalled the July 7 ambush in Dallas. There, a black gunman furious over the recent deaths of two black men at the hands of police killed five officers.
One of those black men was shot dead in Baton Rouge.
If America was on edge after Dallas, it is positively beside itself after the latest Baton Rouge violence, which also prompted much soul searching on race relations in the capital of Louisiana.
As is almost certainly the case in many other US cities, blacks here feel they live under de facto segregation while whites say racism is a thing of the past.
- 'A heart problem' -
"Despite the calls for greater equity in the criminal justice system, educational system, economic development, etc., some people are under the illusion that there are no racial problems in the city," said Lori Martin, a sociologist specializing in African-American relations at Louisiana State University.
"For people who recognize that racial inequalities exist in Baton Rouge, many tend to blame individuals and not institutions," she added.
That kind of belief -- that racial violence is committed by individuals and does not stem from systemic factors like racism -- underlies some people's attempts to explain Long's attack.
To wit: he acted alone, not in conjunction with any group or other people. And he was not even from Baton Rouge, but rather traveled here from Kansas City, Missouri.
At a makeshift memorial at the gas station where the police shootout with Long unfolded, a white woman who did not want to give her name said this of African-Americans: "They believe the police are killing them on purpose. I do not believe that."
Pastor Johnny Green of the Healing Place Church in the white part of town insists that talk of a racial divide is just wrong.
"Our community is very tightened. What you see in the media is not the truth as far as race relations," he said.
Some 200 white people attended a memorial service Monday evening at his church. They murmured amen when the pastor urged them to love their neighbor.
One of those in attendance, 66-year-old Linda Furr, said: "I really believe it's not a racial problem. It's a heart problem."
"I do not believe we have a racial problem here," she added.
Blacks say that kind of comment shows that whites in Baton Rouge are living in denial.
It was in the dilapidated north of the city that Alton Sterling, a black man, was shot and killed by police outside a convenience store two weeks ago.
Bouquets of flowers left at the entrance are still there. A picture of Sterling's face, rendered in spray paint, decorates a wall.
While Long's motivation remains unknown for now, police have said he was in town looking for places to target police.
In 2015, Long legally changed his name to Cosmo Ausar Setepenra, claiming to be a member of the Washitaw Nation, a group of African-Americans claiming to be a Native American nation in the United States.
- 'In denial' -
Many blacks here seem convinced that he acted to avenge the death of Sterling, in effect mimicking the Dallas ambush.
"I think people are in denial in Baton Rouge about the racial issues that we have and I think that people after this tragedy, the narrative that the shooter was from outside of Baton Rouge, ignores the racial issues," said Anthony Nelson, 26, a black community activist.
"Our experiences every day are completely different" from those of people living in the white part of town, he said.
In Louisiana in 2015, the jobless rate among blacks was twice that of whites -- 10 percent compared to 5.2 percent. The proportion is similar in most American states.
The school drop-out rate in Louisiana makes it 43rd out of the 50 states, according to the Schott Foundation for Public Education.
Baton Rouge is the second most segregated city in the American South after Atlanta, and the eighth nationwide according to data from the FiveThirtyEight statistics blog analyzed by the Institute for Southern Studies.
Martin, the university professor, said Black Lives Matter -- which arose in recent years in response to police killings of blacks -- is not a fad but rather part of an evolution that has included the work of Martin Luther King Jr.
"People have been responding for many years and many generations. Many people understand the movement did not finish with MLK, but is an ongoing movement," Martin said.
A police chaplain stands near a makeshift memorial for three slain police officers on July 19, 2016 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana Joshua Lott (Getty/AFP)
Mourners attend a candlelight vigil for Baton Rouge Police Officer Matthew Gerald at Healing Place Church on July 18, 2016 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana Joshua Lott (Getty/AFP)
Republican platform upends some traditional party tenets
US Republicans have adopted their party's platform, a conservative policy guide for the coming years that tilts some traditional positions like free trade toward White House hopeful Donald Trump's vision for America.
The 2016 Republican platform was ratified by delegates at the Republican National Convention, where Trump is expected to accept his party's nomination for president on Thursday.
The nonbinding, 58-page document enshrined traditional Republican values like limited constitutional government and strong national defense, and highlighted stark differences between the party's policy positions and those of President Barack Obama's administration and presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
The formal printed 2016 Republican platform is pictured on July 18, 2016 in Cleveland, Ohio Jeff Swensen (Getty/AFP)
"This is the most conservative platform in modern history," religious right activist David Barton said Monday on conservative radio.
But language in the text, while meant to reflect the balance of party ideology, signaled its adherence to previous orthodoxy rather than a forward-looking embrace of globalization.
It also reprized key talking points of Trump's inflammatory campaign.
Here are a few highlights:
Trade:
The ability to sell and purchase goods around the world unencumbered by high tariffs and restrictions has been a Republican gold standard, but Trump's protectionism, including his opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, upended that bedrock principle.
"We need better negotiated trade agreements that put America first," the platform states. "When those agreements do not adequately protect US interests, US sovereignty or when they are violated with impunity, they must be rejected.
Immigration, national security:
"We're going to build a wall," Trump says at virtually ever campaign rally. His call to boost security along the southern US border with Mexico resonates with Americans fearful that undocumented workers will take US jobs.
The platform supports Trump's position, saying "the border wall must cover the entirety of the southern border and must be sufficient to stop both vehicular and pedestrian traffic."
It also seeks to impose "special scrutiny" on foreigners seeking to enter the US from "terror-sponsoring" countries -- an echo of Trump's campaign call to bar Muslims from entering the United States.
LGBT rights, family values:
After June's attack on a gay nightclub in Florida, Trump cast himself as a defender of the community, but the Republican Party as a whole remains uneasy on questions of LGBT rights and continues to oppose same-sex marriage.
The platform enshrined its support for the "natural" family unit and opposition to abortion rights, pushing further to the right than Trump.
It also expressed backing for allowing parents to "determine the proper medical treatment and therapy for their minor children," which some interpret as conversion therapy for gay youths.
And it pushed back strongly against administration policy that upholds transgender people's rights to use the bathroom of the gender which with they identify.
"Their edict to the states concerning restrooms, locker rooms, and other facilities is at once illegal, dangerous, and ignores privacy issues," the platform states.
The platform also branded pornography "a public health crisis that is destroying the lives of millions."
In 2012, the platform committee only denounced child pornography.
Energy:
Many Republicans dispute the existence of climate change and President Barack Obama's environmental policies, which toughened rules on power-plant emissions.
The platform denounced his focus on climate change, declaring it "far from this nation's most pressing national security issue."
It also decried what they called Obama's "war on coal," stating that the Democratic Party "does not understand that coal is an abundant, clean" and affordable energy resource.
In 2012, the platform only declared coal to be "low-cost and abundant."
It expressed support for hydraulic fracking and said it backs all forms of domestic energy "without subsidies."
The Republican platform supports presidential candidate Donald Trump's views on immigration from Mexico, saying "the border wall must cover the entirety of the southern border and must be sufficient to stop both vehicular and pedestrian traffic" John Sommers II (Getty/AFP/File)
Bangladesh says 260 missing amid hunt for extremists
Doctors, engineers and university students are among 261 people officially missing in Bangladesh, with some feared recruited by Islamic militant groups, as the country reels from a wave of deadly attacks.
More than two weeks after Islamists killed 20 foreign hostages in a siege at a cafe in Dhaka, police published a list overnight Tuesday of those missing and urged information on their whereabouts.
"We have to find them," elite Rapid Action Battalion spokesman Mufti Mahmud Khan told AFP, without saying how many were suspected to have joined extremist groups at home and abroad.
A Bangladeshi policeman stands guard as Muslims offer Eid al-Fitr prayers in Dhaka on July 7, 2016 Str (APF/AFP/File)
Bangladesh was spurred into launching a nationwide hunt for people reported missing by their families in recent times, following the July 1 siege claimed by Islamic State group.
Police and parents said the five who stormed the Western-style cafe and hacked the hostages to death had gone missing months earlier. At least two gunmen who carried out a deadly attack days later at a massive Eid prayer service had also previously disappeared.
As the list was published on Facebook, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina reiterated her secular government's determination to "root out the scourge of militancy".
Hasina, who has long denied IS and Al-Qaeda have a foothold in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, urged villages to form committees to gather information on those missing.
"We will find out everything -- who are patronising them (the militants), who are providing them with arms, money and other support. We will find out who are misguiding young students," she told parliament.
The list shows a diverse range of mainly young people who have fallen off the radar including some from wealthy families and with good jobs, and others at university, long thought by experts to be a recruiting ground for radicals. Local media reported on Wednesday dozens have travelled to the Middle East to join IS.
It includes Tahmid Rahman, son of a former home secretary and election commissioner, who was seen in a video, thought to have been shot overseas, and released by IS immediately after the siege praising the attackers.
"Back in 2003-4, Tahmid used to be the lead singer of an underground rock band. Then he became one of the top contestants of the (talent) reality show 'Close Up One'," said a friend who did not want to be named.
"After seeing him in the video I felt a shiver down my spine thinking of him holding a machete instead of a microphone. Before he disappeared from his home, he used to tell his fellow musicians to leave music as it is forbidden in Islam," he told AFP.
"He had a good job at a telecommunications company," he said of Rahman, whose friends think he went missing about a year ago.
- Missing ignored -
Security analyst Abdur Rob said authorities have until now ignored the issue of Bangladesh's missing, adding some may have already joined IS and other groups.
"Had the authorities taken the issue of missing young men seriously, the terror attacks in Gulshan cafe and in the Eid congregation could have been avoided," said Rob, a professor at private North South University in Dhaka.
"Still it is not too late. Authorities should scrutinise the list, take help from universities to learn who are missing for what reasons and act accordingly," he told AFP.
"It may go a long way to preventing the next attack."
Hasina's government has blamed a string of recent murders of secular bloggers and religious minorities on local not overseas militant groups, along with the opposition whom it accuses of trying to destabilise the country.
But since the siege, it has launched a crackdown on social media sites, saying they are being used to recruit young men to jihadist groups.
Police said a family of five comprising a doctor, his college professor wife, their two daughters and son in-law have been missing since October.
"We're probing where they've gone," local police station chief Rafiqul Islam told AFP, while another officer told local media the family was suspected to have flown to Syria.
Another on the list, marine engineer Najibullah Ansari, had been missing for over a year when his parents contacted police after this month's national manhunt.
According to his family, Ansari was last in touch with his brother in January 2015 on Facebook, saying that he was in Iraq fighting with jihadists.
"I have come to Iraq. Tell father and mother not to worry for me. I have come here for jihad," read the message according to a screen shot seen by local daily Dhaka Tribune.
"I will never return home," he said.
Bangladesh Gal ROMA, Martin MEGINO (AFP)
Relatives and friends of two victims of a bloody attack on an upscale restaurant in Dhaka on July 4, 2016 - (AFP/File)
Pictures released by the Islamic State group of five men who allegedly carried out an attack in the capital Dhaka on July 1, 2016 during which 20 hostages were killed at an upscale restaurant - (AFP/File)
Egypt nominates ex-minister for top UNESCO job
Egypt announced Tuesday it is nominating former minister and ambassador Moushira Khattab for the post of UNESCO director general.
A former ambassador to South Africa, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Khattab was family and population minister between 2009 and 2011 under now-deposed president Hosni Mubarak.
She also served as secretary general of the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood in Egypt.
The mandate of UNESCO's current director general, Irina Bokova of Bulgaria, expires in 2017 Mal Langsdon (Pool/AFP/File)
"Egypt will nominate ambassador Moushira Khattab for director general of UNESCO," said a statement from the office of Prime Minister Sherif Ismail.
The mandate of UNESCO's current director general, Irina Bokova of Bulgaria, expires in 2017.
Bokova is among the candidates to succeed UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, whose mandate runs out this year.
She was elected head of the Paris-based UNESCO in 2009, becoming the first woman to lead the UN agency. She was re-elected in 2013 for a second four-year term
Scuffles erupt among Cleveland protesters
Scuffles broke out between opposing protesters in Cleveland Tuesday on the second day of the Republican National Convention.
A planned demonstration against police shootings of African-Americans devolved into mayhem, with punches thrown and shouting matches.
Approximately 100 police officers separated the dueling groups and maintained a strict cordon, quickly defusing tensions between rival protesters -- who also numbered around 100.
Police officers seperate protesters on the second day of the Republican National Convention on July 19, 2016 in Cleveland, Ohio Brendan Smialowski (AFP)
There were no immediate arrests, according to Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams, who was at the scene.
With calm restored, some of the protesters marched through one of downtown's busy thoroughfares, with police and media in tow.
They carried a large banner with faces of African-Americans under the title "Stop Murder by Police."
"Look at these faces, all of them people whose lives were stolen by law enforcement," said one protester over a loudspeaker.
Joining the march mid-way was actor William Baldwin, who said fully supported the work of police, but also shared the mounting concerns about fatal shootings of black Americans.
"The vast majority of the cops are good and are well trained," Baldwin told AFP during the march, "But I think police practices and procedures have to change. Have to. It doesn't work."
As the protest was getting under way, witnesses said Alex Jones -- a controversial radio show host who espouses various conspiracy theories -- challenged the assembled crowd. A few protesters began shouting "Nazi scum" and at least one of them attacked Jones.
The ensuing scuffle happened in front of Chief Williams, and police immediately moved in to separate the two sides.
Another group of counter-protesters, with signs including one that said "Every Real Muslim is a Jihadist," needled the crowd.
They were met with a chorus of boos, and comments such as "You're miserable."
Other protesters were yelling: "Indict! Convict! Send the killer cops to jail! The whole damn system is guilty as hell!"
The refrain has been a common one in various protests since Sunday.
News media swarmed the scene -- on alert for trouble between rival protesters since the opening of the party convention, which Tuesday saw Donald Trump officially nominated as the Republican candidate for president.
Officials have set up tight security zones and remain on heightened alert as groups with various messages plan protests.
Armed group kills 17 soldiers at Mali base: ministry
Seventeen soldiers were killed and 35 wounded in central Mali in an assault on their base that authorities called a "coordinated terrorist attack".
"The toll has increased: we have lost 17 men and 35 are wounded," Mali's defence minister Tieman Hubert Coulibaly said. Authorities had earlier announced that 12 soldiers were killed.
Coulibaly called the assault a "coordinated terrorist attack on our positions," but did not say who was responsible.
Soldiers in the back of a pickup truck drive down a street during a demonstration in Gao on July 12, 2016 Souleymane Ag Anara (AFP/File)
In the hours after the assaults two groups -- one jihadist, the other ethnic -- both claimed to have carried out the raid on the military camp in Nampala.
Islamist group Ansar Dine said in a message that it carried out a "huge attack" that had killed "dozens of soldiers and wound(ed) large numbers," according to the US-based group SITE that monitors jihadist communications.
Ansar Dine, which is one of several active jihadist groups roaming Mali's north, also claimed to have taken control of the army barracks and carried off a large quantity of "spoils".
Earlier on Tuesday, a group from the ethnic Peul community, calling themselves the National Alliance for the Protection of Peul Identity and Restoration of Justice (ANSIPRJ), said they had killed eight troops in the attack.
- 'We are being careful' -
"It was self-defence," Sidy Cisse, a senior ANSIPRJ commander, told AFP, adding three of his men were hurt.
The group also claimed to have wounded 11 soldiers, as well as making off with two trucks and five pick-up trucks.
Senior figures within ANSIPRJ are also members of a Peul association that decried the murder of what it said were several Peuls falsely accused of supporting jihadists active in the area.
Several security sources in the region told AFP they doubted the veracity of the claim of responsibility from ANSIPRJ as the group was only founded last month following inter-communal clashes in the area and lacked the means to mount an attack.
Coulibaly said the government was aware "a group had issued a claim. We are being careful."
"One thing is sure, this was a terrorist action that targeted a military objective. So an appropriate military response is forthcoming," he added.
The Malian government said the attackers would be hunted down and punished, and that the military had control of Nampala.
Northern Mali has seen repeated violence since it fell under the control of Tuareg-led rebels who allied with jihadist groups linked to Al-Qaeda in 2012.
But attacks are now becoming more frequent in the country's centre, close to its borders with Burkina Faso and Niger, both from criminal and jihadist elements.
Massive sewage spill forces closure of Los Angeles beaches
Several beaches in the Los Angeles area were shut down after nearly 2.5 million gallons (9.5 million liters) of sewage spilled out from a ruptured line, officials said.
The spill -- described as one of the biggest in recent memory -- began Monday afternoon, when the top of a sewer pipe collapsed, sending debris into the pipe and causing overflow.
Repair crews managed to stop the leak by evening but the pipe split again on Tuesday, sending sewage into the Los Angeles River which carried it into the Pacific.
Long Beach is home to the United States' second-busiest port after Los Angeles Frederic J Brown (AFP/File)
Officials ordered all beaches in the Long Beach area and a portion of Seal Beach shut down pending testing of the waters.
Nelson Kerr, of the Long Beach city health department, told AFP that swimming in those areas was expected to be off-limits until at least Thursday.
Long Beach is home to the second-busiest port in the US after Los Angeles.
"This is the biggest spill we've had in recent memory," Kerr said, adding that the pipe that broke is thought to have been damaged during construction in the area.
Tonya Durrell, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles public works department, said the spill was stopped by Tuesday afternoon.
"This is an isolated event tied to an aging sewer built in the 1920s," Durrell said. "The sewer was scheduled for repair and failed before we could do the repairs."
Kerr said the rupture led to 3,000 gallons gallons of sewage flowing out per minute.
Fox News boss Ailes looking at exit: media
Roger Ailes, the politically connected chief of Fox News, is negotiating his exit from the media group amid a lawsuit alleging he sexually harassed a star host, reports said Tuesday.
Ailes, a longtime ally of founder Rupert Murdoch who is chairman and chief executive at Fox News, is discussing terms of his departure, according to The Wall Street Journal, owned by a separate business unit controlled by Murdoch.
The Journal and The New York Times both quoted sources close to the situation on the exit talks as speculation swirled on Ailes's future.
Security stands in front of Fox News chairman Roger Ailes as he leaves the News Corp building, July 19, 2016 in New York City Drew Angerer (Getty/AFP)
The Daily Beast reported that Fox had initially confirmed Ailes had negotiated a deal to leave, but "subsequently walked back that confirmation."
The online Drudge Report posted a tweet about an exit package worth $40 million for Ailes, but moments later deleted the tweet.
Fox News declined to comment on the reports.
"Roger is at work. The review is ongoing. The only agreement that is in place is his existing employment agreement," said parent company 21st Century Fox.
Earlier this month, the cable news giant said it had launched an internal review of allegations in a lawsuit by Fox News host and former Miss America Gretchen Carlson, who claimed she was fired for rejecting Ailes's sexual advances.
Fox stated at the time it had "full confidence" in Ailes but added that it was reviewing the matter.
"We take these matters seriously," Fox said in the July 6 statement.
New York Magazine reported Monday that Rupert Murdoch and his sons Lachlan and James had decided that Ailes would soon be out.
The report, citing sources close to the situation, said Ailes was given the option of resigning or being fired this week.
Ailes, a former consultant to Republican presidents, is a key figure in the media empire.
North Korea says missile tests simulated nuclear strike on South
North Korea said on Wednesday its latest ballistic missile tests trialled detonation devices for possible nuclear strikes on US targets in South Korea and were personally monitored by supreme leader Kim Jong-Un.
Tuesday's test firing of three missiles in violation of existing UN resolutions was seen as an angry reaction to the planned deployment of a US missile defence system in the South.
The launch of the two Scud missiles and one intermediate-range Rodong was condemned by the United States, Japan and South Korea, who vowed a collective diplomatic response.
Performers greet North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un after performances by the amateur art groups of the Korean People's Army (KPA) units, in Pyongyang KCNA (KCNA via KNS/AFP/File)
The tests were ordered and monitored by Kim Jong-Un and the range of the missiles was limited to simulate pre-emptive attacks on South Korean ports and airfields hosting US military "hardware", the North's official KCNA news agency said.
The tests "examined the operational features of the detonating devices of nuclear warheads mounted on the ballistic rockets at the designated altitude over the target area," it said.
According to the South Korean military, the two Scuds flew between 500 and 600 kilometres (310-370 miles) into the Sea of Japan, while the Rodong was fired about an hour later.
A photo from the test, published on the front page of the North Korean ruling party's Rodong Sinmun newspaper, showed Kim sitting at a desk covered by a large map of the Korean peninsula.
The map was clearly marked with a possible missile flight path from the North to South's southern coast, around the major ports of Ulsan and Busan.
- 'Deeply troubling' -
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday said the tests were "deeply troubling" and undermined efforts to reduce tension on the Korean peninsula.
UN resolutions prohibit North Korea from developing ballistic missile technology.
Pyongyang has repeatedly warned of pre-emptive nuclear strikes against the South and US targets there and elsewhere, although the main focus of its nuclear weapons programme is to develop a credible strike threat against the US mainland.
A series of missile tests this year aimed at backing up that threat led to the recent agreement between Seoul and Washington to deploy the sophisticated US Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, in South Korea.
Last week, Pyongyang responded to the announcement by threatening to take "physical action".
There are nearly 30,00 US troops permanently stationed in South Korea.
North Korea-US tensions had already been stoked by Pyongyang's fury at Washington's decision to personally target leader Kim with sanctions related to human rights abuses.
The North test-fired a submarine-launched ballistic missile on July 9, following back-to-back tests of a powerful new medium-range missile on June 22.
Those two missiles achieved a significant increase in flight distance over previous failed launches and were believed to be of a much-hyped, intermediate-range "Musudan" -- theoretically capable of reaching US bases as far away as Guam.
- Technical breakthroughs -
Since carrying out a fourth nuclear test in January, which prompted a significant tightening of UN sanctions, North Korea has claimed a series of technical breakthroughs for its weapons programme.
It said it had miniaturised a nuclear warhead to fit on a missile and successfully tested an engine designed for an inter-continental ballistic missile that could reach the US mainland.
While some experts say the claims are exaggerated, most acknowledge that the North's nuclear and ballistic missile programmes have made significant strides.
In a separate dispatch on Wednesday, KCNA quoted a spokesman for the Korean People's Army (KPA) unit based in the border truce village of Panmunjom calling for all US troops to leave the South immediately.
"The KPA already solemnly declared that the US imperialist aggression forces in South Korea are its first strike target," the spokesman said.
"The US should go back home, abandoning its wicked intention for a permanent stay in South Korea," he added.
North Korea's latest missile test -, - (AFP Graphic)
South Korean activists hold placards during a protest against the planned deployment of the US-built Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, THAAD, near the US embassy in Seoul on July 19, 2016 Jung Yeon-Je (AFP)
Republicans begin roll call vote to nominate Trump
The Republican National Convention began the state-by-state roll call vote on Tuesday that will culminate in delegates formally nominating billionaire Donald Trump for president.
The real estate magnate was expected to cruise past the 1,237 delegates needed to seal the deal on the first ballot and, if he follows tradition, Trump will officially accept the nomination Thursday during his acceptance speech.
But it was not expected to be the smoothest of votes.
About 50,000 people are expected in Cleveland this week for the Republican National Convention, at which Donald Trump is expected to be formally nominated to run for the US presidency in November Robyn Beck (AFP)
"The great state of Alabama... is proud to cast its votes: one vote for Marco Rubio, 13 for Ted Cruz, and 36 votes for the next president of the United States, Donald J. Trump!" US Senator Jeff Sessions said as he launched the process.
Minutes after the voting began, Colorado's delegation chairman announced four votes for Trump, 31 for Senator Ted Cruz and two abstentions, a result which drew murmurs from the assembled delegates.
Anti-Trump forces on the floor were holding out for a final miracle Tuesday, after seeking to convince delegates that their votes were not bound and that they could vote their conscience.
"Maintaining order for the roll call is extremely important," House Speaker Paul Ryan, the convention chair, told the delegates before the vote.
The Republican convention got off to a rocky start Monday, when chaos broke out on the floor as anti-Trump delegates launched a short-lived revolt.
The candidate's glamorous wife Melania Trump brought some pizzazz to the proceedings on the opening night as the Trump team sought to get the event back on track.
But an embarrassing plagiarism scandal tarnished her prime-time speech -- and brought her husband's presidential campaign under withering scrutiny.
- 'Who cares?' -
With millions watching on television, the Slovenia-born former model delivered a seemingly heartfelt defense of her husband.
"Donald is, and always has been, an amazing leader," said the 46-year-old. "Now, he will go to work for you."
But there were unmistakable similarities between her remarks and a speech given by Michelle Obama at the 2008 Democratic convention.
While the controversy burned and social media erupted with mocking commentary, the Trump team appeared paralyzed.
Denials of wrongdoing, followed by tacit admissions, followed by attempts to insulate Melania only added to the picture of a campaign in chaos.
Campaign chair Paul Manafort dismissed the whole kerfuffle as "absurd." Trump's supporters seemed equally unperturbed.
"There's just a passion for Donald, and his wife knocked it out of the park," said Robert Antonacci of the New York delegation.
"Who cares? It was her speech. I don't believe for a minute that Melania and Donald were sitting around going, 'Hey, let's plagiarize Michelle Obama's speech'."
Republican establishment figures -- whose party was once respected for its discipline and public unity -- both suggested Melania's speechwriter be fired and defended Trump as a candidate.
"The distraction gets you off message a little," said Republican party boss Reince Priebus, though he added that he expected the flap to fade quickly.
- Old hands -
The conventions are designed to champion the party candidate, rally the grassroots and propel the party toward November's election.
As the convention resumed Tuesday, Republican leaders in the Senate and the House of Representatives looked to stop the bleeding -- led by keynote speakers Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
More than most, the pair have been responsible for holding the Republican Party together as populist Tea Party conservatives gained clout.
They were due to stick to issues that most Republicans can agree on -- opposition to Hillary Clinton, a tough line on anti-terrorism and supporting the military and police.
But they now find themselves atop a party that has shifted to the right and with a candidate who many party members strongly oppose.
"This is just a scripted television show and we are all props," said Virginia delegate Beau Correll, angered that party leaders ignored the movement to free delegates to vote their conscience.
Trump fans insist delegates must heed the will of the grassroots of the party and make him the Republican nominee without equivocation.
The real estate mogul won a thumping victory in a series of statewide party elections, garnering more than 13 million votes -- the most of any Republican nominee ever.
Tuesday's speakers also include two of Trump's children, including his daughter Tiffany, who has until now been rarely seen on the campaign trail.
Trump himself is due to address the convention on Thursday, at which time he will formally accept the party's nomination.
Delegates attend the roll call of states on the second day of the Republican National Convention on July 19, 2016 at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio Robyn Beck (AFP)
GOP leaders approve convention rules, block insurgents
CLEVELAND (AP) Over angry and prolonged objections from anti-Donald Trump forces, Republican Party leaders approved rules for their national convention on Monday and rejected demands for a state-by-state roll call vote, a discordant start to a gathering designed to project unity.
Hundreds of socially conservative delegates opposed to nominating Trump bellowed in outrage after the convention's presiding officer, Arkansas GOP Rep. Steve Womack, abruptly put the rules to a vote and declared them approved by voice, not an individual tally of each state's delegation.
Though likely to lose, the dissidents had demanded a roll call, a slow-moving vote that they hoped would underscore their claims that party leaders were unfairly railroading through rules that give too much clout to the GOP hierarchy. Top Republicans and Trump campaign officials wanted to avoid such a scenario, and ended up contending with a shorter but more raucous display of fury.
Delegates react as some delegates call for a roll call vote on the adoption of the rules during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
"Call the roll, call the roll," opponents shouted. Practically drowning them out were chants of "USA, USA" by Trump supporters and party loyalists.
Minutes later, Womack had the convention vote by voice again, with both sides again shouting their votes lustily. Once again, he said, the rules' supporters had prevailed.
The defeated mavericks reacted angrily, with some delegates leaving the convention floor and others vowing to not help Trump. Gary Emineth, a North Dakota delegate and GOP donor who was part of the insurgency, said he would resign from a fundraising operation.
"You don't do this in America," he said.
Ken Cuccinelli, a leader of the conservative rebellion and former Virginia attorney general, ripped off his delegate credentials in protest.
Carol Hanson, an Iowa delegate, said some members of the state delegation left just before the vote and others walked out as soon as the roll call was denied.
Anti-Trump delegates were said to be considering mounting another long-shot challenge at the convention on Tuesday, perhaps by trying to force a vote on letting delegates back any candidate they choose during the nominating roll call.
Steve Toth, a delegate from Texas, said he's been contacted about a push to force such a vote, but the Ted Cruz supporter said he's all but given up hope for the "Never Trump" movement.
"I'm going to vote for Trump. He's got my vote, but not my heart," he said. "And I'll vote for someone else in 2020."
The voice votes occurred even though dissident delegates submitted petitions from a majority of delegates from what they said were at least nine states seemingly sufficient to force a roll call vote under party rules.
Womack said some delegates had withdrawn their signatures and that petitions from three of those states no longer qualified. That left the insurgents short of the seven states needed by GOP rule to force a roll call.
"The chair has found insufficient support for the request for a record vote," Womack said as booming objections got ever louder.
The reversal by some delegates came after heavy lobbying by the Trump campaign and top officials of the Republican National Committee.
Leaders of those groups have been allied in recent weeks as Trump's path to the GOP nomination became assured. Despite wary and even hostile relations early on, the two forces have a mutual interest in healing party divisions and making Trump as competitive as possible for his expected fall matchup against the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton.
"This is the best possible outcome for us," said Ron Kaufman, a GOP leader from Massachusetts who has been in the middle of the rules fight. "The never Trump movement never was."
Republican aides said delegates from Maine, Minnesota and the District of Columbia had removed their names from petitions demanding a roll call a practice that was eased by a rules change when the committee met last week.
"I have never in all my life, in six years in the Senate, seen anything like this," said Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, a delegate. "There's no precedent for this in parliamentary procedure. Somebody owes us an explanation."
Leading up to Monday, anti-Trump forces repeatedly voiced suspicions that party leaders and the campaign would do whatever possible to subvert their effort. Required to submit their petitions quickly to convention secretary Susie Hudson, they frantically searched for her on the crowded convention floor Monday afternoon, suspicious that she was hiding.
They finally found a GOP official who said he would deliver the petitions.
One of the leaders of the rebellion, former Sen. Gordon Humphrey, R-N.H., said he opposed Trump because, "he's a dangerous sociopath, totally unfit for public office."
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Associated Press reporters Steve Peoples, Tom Beaumont, Josh Lederman, Stephen Ohlemacher, Jonathan Lemire in Cleveland, William Draper in Kansas City, Missouri, and Kyle Potter in St. Paul, Minnesota, contributed to this report.
Rep. Steve Womack, R-Ark., tests out the gavel during a sound check before the opening session of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Delegates react as some delegates call for a roll call vote on the adoption of the rules during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
Delegates react as some delegates call for a roll call vote on the adoption of the rules during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
A delegate shouts as a call for a roll call vote on the rules goes out during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
Protestors yell during a rally against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, July 18, 2016, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
New Hampshire delegate Gordon Humphrey, right, submits a petition to Council on Accreditation volunteer Eric Ueland during first day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
Keshawn Maddock signs her name on the Michigan post during first day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Protestors march during a rally against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday, July 18, 2016, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Delegates put their hands on their chests as they sing the national anthem during first day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/John Locher)
Lawyer: Hospital shooter is incompetent to stand trial
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) An attorney for a Florida man charged with fatally shooting a patient and employee at a hospital in an apparent random attack says his client is severely mentally ill.
Harley Gutin is an attorney for 29-year-old David Owens. He said Monday that his client is incompetent to stand trial.
Titusville, Florida, police say Owens entered Parrish Medical Center early Sunday and fatally shot 88-year-old patient Cynthia Zingsheim and employee Carrie Rouzer, who was sitting in Zingsheim's room. Owens has been charged with two counts of murder and is being held at the county jail.
Gutin says Owen's family had been trying desperately in recent weeks to get him long-term mental health care.
Former Atlanta officer charged in shooting appears in court
ATLANTA (AP) A former Atlanta police officer charged in the fatal shooting of an unarmed man made his first appearance in court.
James Burns faces charges of murder, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and violation of his oath of office in connection with the June 22 shooting of 22-year-old Deravis Caine Rogers as he drove away.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports (http://on-ajc.com/2a3QKXx) Burns appeared before a judge Monday for a formal reading of the charges. He turned himself in Saturday, a day after prosecutors announced arrest warrants had been issued.
The newspaper reports that Burns will remain in jail at least until a preliminary hearing on Aug. 1.
Police: Runaways used tractor to break into school building
FRESNO, Calif. (AP) Authorities say three runaways used a large tractor to smash through the wall of a California school building, then went inside and stole sodas and portable radios.
KFSN reports (http://abc30.tv/2ank4Hy ) the incident happened at about 10:30 p.m. Sunday at a Central Unified School District building in Fresno County.
Officers responding to the scene say they saw three juveniles running from the area, and quickly detained them. All three were runaways from a nearby group home.
This Sunday, July 17, 2016 photo provided by the Fresno, Calif., Police Department shows a tractor that had been stolen by three juvenile runaways and crashed into a school building in Fresno on Sunday. Officers responding to the scene say they saw the three juveniles running from the area when they arrived and quickly detained them. All were runaways from a nearby group home. (Fresno Police Department via AP)
Police found a tractor from a construction site in the area was used to drive through the side of one of the buildings. The station reports the suspects then stole sodas and radios that belonged to the school district.
The boys were taken to Fresno County Juvenile Hall on various charges, including commercial burglary and felony vandalism.
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Information from: KFSN-TV.
This Sunday, July 17, 2016 photo provided by the Fresno, Calif., Police Department shows a tractor that had been stolen by three juvenile runaways and crashed into a school building in Fresno on Sunday. Officers responding to the scene say they saw the three juveniles running from the area when they arrived and quickly detained them. All were runaways from a nearby group home. (Fresno Police Department via AP)
Seoul says North Korea has fired 3 missiles into sea
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) North Korea on Tuesday fired three ballistic missiles into its eastern sea in an apparent protest of South Korea's decision to allow the deployment of an advanced U.S. missile defense system in the country, Seoul officials said.
The missiles launched from a western North Korea town flew across the country before crashing into the waters off its east coast, Seoul's Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement.
Two of them flew about 500 to 600 kilometers (310 to 375 miles), displaying a sufficient range to reach entire South Korea, JCS spokesman Jeon Ha Gyu said. He said South Korea's military was analyzing how far the third missile flew. An earlier JCS statement said all three flew about 500 to 600 kilometers.
South Korean protesters hold signs during a rally denouncing a plan to deploy an advanced U.S. missile defense system called Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, near U.S. Embassy in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. North Korea on Tuesday fired three ballistic missiles into its eastern sea in an apparent protest of South Korea's decision to allow the deployment of an advanced U.S. missile defense system in the country, Seoul officials said. The letters read "Stop, to deploy the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD." (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)
A statement from the Pentagon said that U.S. Strategic Command systems tracked "what we assess were three North Korean missile launches." It said two were presumed to be Scud tactical ballistic missiles, followed by the presumed launch of a Rodong intermediate range ballistic missile.
It said the missile launches did not pose a threat to North America.
North Korea routinely tests short-range missiles and artillery systems but the latest launches came days after the country warned of unspecified "physical counter-action" over the deployment of the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, system in the southern town of Seongju.
Jeon said South Korea "strongly condemns" the launches that he described as an "armed protest" against the THAAD deployment.
In Tokyo, Defense Minister Gen Nakatani said the launches were "an act of provocation that undermines regional and international security. ... We absolutely cannot accept it."
North Korea has already deployed a variety of missiles that can reach most of South Korea and Japan, including American military bases in those countries. The country is also pushing to develop a long-range nuclear-tipped missile that can strike the mainland U.S., but South Korean defense officials believe the North does not possess such a weapon.
Analyst Kim Dong-yub at Seoul's Institute for Far East Studies said the North appears to have demonstrated its ability to strike southern South Korean targets including an area where a THAAD battery is to be placed by the end of next year.
A Rodong missile is known to have a maximum range of 1,300 kilometers (800 miles). One of the missiles launched in March flew about 800 kilometers (500 miles), according to Seoul's Defense Ministry.
Seoul and Washington say they need the THAAD system to better deal with what they call increasing North Korean threats in the aftermath of its fourth nuclear test and long-range rocket launch earlier this year.
The Korean Peninsula remains in a technical state of war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. About 28,500 U.S. soldiers are stationed in South Korea to deter possible aggression from North Korea; tens of thousands more are stationed in Japan.
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AP writer Satoshi Sugiyama contributed in Tokyo.
South Korean protesters hold signs during a rally denouncing a plan to deploy an advanced U.S. missile defense system called Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, near U.S. Embassy in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. North Korea on Tuesday fired three ballistic missiles into its eastern sea in an apparent protest of South Korea's decision to allow the deployment of an advanced U.S. missile defense system in the country, Seoul officials said. The letters read "Stop, to deploy the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD." (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)
GOP turns to security, divisions on convention's first night
A rough-and-tumble first day of the Republican National Convention ended on a softer note Monday, as Donald Trump's wife, Melania, offered a loving defense of her husband.
It was a rare warm moment on a day when Republicans were focusing on what they see as threats to America under a Democratic White House and when the party's infighting was on display in a clash between Trump's supporters and opponents at the Cleveland convention.
The evening, themed "Make America Safe Again," opened with a series of speeches from family members of people killed while serving in the military or at the hands of people in the United States illegally. But that was briefly interrupted by Trump, in an unusual appearance by a presumptive nominee, and his wife, who promised her husband would be inclusive. "If you want someone to fight for you and your country, I can assure you, he is the guy," she said.
Illinois delegate Christian Gramm, left, and other delegates react as some call for a roll call vote on the adoption of the rules during first day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/John Locher)
What to know about the first day of the convention:
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BOISTEROUS SPEECHES
In the main event of the evening, Mrs. Trump gave a personal speech that detailed her growing up in Slovenia and praised her husband.
"He is tough when he has to be, but he is also kind and fair and caring," she said.
Donald Trump had promised a "monumentally magnificent" display at the convention, and he didn't disappoint as he emerged, Hollywood-style, through a fog to introduce his wife. "We're going to win, we're going to win so big," he said.
In more somber speeches, Republicans highlighted at length the deadly 2012 attacks on Americans in Benghazi, Libya, while Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, was serving as secretary of state.
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani drew cheers from the crowd as he bemoaned racial divisions, in an impassioned speech.
"What happened to 'there's no black America, there's no white America, there is just America?'" he said, alluding to comments once made by President Barack Obama.
Entertainers who took the stage included actor Scott Baio and Willie Robertson, star of Duck Dynasty.
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TROUBLE ON THE FLOOR
Earlier in the day, party divisions were exposed when delegates opposing Trump demanded a roll call vote to approve convention rules. Some delegates left the convention floor after the convention's presiding officer, Arkansas Rep. Steve Womack, shut down the opponents by saying the rules had been approved by a voice vote.
The opponents shouted "Call the roll, call the roll," as Trump supporters and party loyalists chanted back "USA! USA!"
The dissident delegates had earlier collected enough signatures on petitions to force a roll-call vote, but Trump supporters persuaded some delegates to remove their names.
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ATTEMPTS AT UNITY
Uniting the crowd was scorn for Clinton. Convention speakers relentlessly painted her as entrenched in a system that fails to keep Americans safe.
Trump's team insists that the party will end the week united in their mission to defeat Clinton. But Trump and his campaign officials undermined their own effort Monday by picking a fight with Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who is not attending the convention and has yet to endorse Trump. Campaign manager Paul Manafort called Kasich "petulant" and said the governor was "embarrassing" his party in his home state.
In an interview on Fox's "The O'Reilly Factor" Monday evening, Trump said Kasich should have attended "from the standpoint of honor."
House Speaker Paul Ryan continued to take shots, as well: "He's not my kind of conservative," he said of Trump at one convention event.
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RALLIES OUTSIDE
Trump's supporters and his opponents held rallies outside the convention hall in a mostly peaceful start to the convention week. No major clashes were reported between pro- and anti-Trump forces during the two biggest demonstrations on Monday's schedule or at rallies held in the later afternoon and early evening.
"So far, so good," Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams said at a Monday night press briefing. Williams said there had been no violence and no property damage.
About a dozen Trump backers showed up with handguns strapped to their belts as allowed under Ohio law. Blocks away, protesters shouted about police mistreatment.
The deadly truck attack in France and the ambush killings of five police officers this month in Dallas and three more in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, over the weekend heightened fears of bloodshed. About 600 Cleveland officers were assigned to convention security duty along with thousands of officers from other agencies.
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THE PLATFORM
The party also adopted a platform that Christian conservatives are cheering as the most conservative statement of party policy principles in recent memory. It reaffirms the party's opposition to gay marriage and bathroom choice for transgender people.
And there's new language condemning same-sex parenting: "Children raised in a traditional two-parent household tend to be physically and emotionally healthier, less likely to use drugs and alcohol, engage in crime or become pregnant outside of marriage."
The party's platform represents the GOP's formal policy positions for the next four years. The document serves as guidance for Republican leaders across the nation, but is not binding.
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THE REST OF THE WEEK
The roll call vote on the nomination is expected Tuesday, with Trump scheduled to close the convention with an acceptance speech Thursday night. Vice presidential pick Mike Pence, the Indiana governor who left Indianapolis for Cleveland on Monday, is to speak Wednesday.
The focus shifts Tuesday to jobs. Trump children Tiffany and Donald Jr. plan to speak, as does Ryan and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who Trump passed over as a choice for running mate. Pence will headline the Wednesday session that focuses on how to "Make America First Again."
Daughter Ivanka Trump will introduce her father on Thursday, the convention's final day.
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What political news is the world searching for on Google and talking about on Twitter? Find out via AP's Election Buzz interactive. http://elections.ap.org/buzz
Oklahoma City police chief changes mind, OKs personal rifles
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) Oklahoma City Police Chief Bill Citty reconsidered his previous position, he said Monday, and will allow officers to carry their personal rifles while on duty until the department buys additional weapons.
Citty said he changed his mind after three officers were shot and killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, this weekend.
"Right now with everything going on, I want the officers to feel better," Citty said. "I want them to feel safer."
John George, president of the Oklahoma City Fraternal Order of Police, answers a question following a news conference in Oklahoma City, Monday, July 18, 2016. Oklahoma City Police Chief Bill Citty says he's reconsidered his previous position and now will allow officers to carry their personal rifles while on duty until the department buys additional weapons. Last week, Citty rejected the city's Fraternal Order of Police request to allow officers to carry personal rifles following the shooting deaths of five Dallas officers. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)
Last week, Citty rejected a police union request to allow officers to carry personal rifles following the shooting deaths of five Dallas officers. He had called the proposal from the city's Fraternal Order of Police "alarmist" and said the policy would present problems for the department ensuring the quality of the equipment.
The department's about-face on the issue signaled that officers' concerns were heard, according to Master Sgt. John George, the president of Oklahoma City's Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 123.
"We hope and pray the events in Dallas and Baton Rouge don't reach us here in Oklahoma City," George said. "But with these changes, we are confident officers will be better prepared to deal with the types of violence recently experienced around the country."
The department last week approved issuing about 85 new rifles for its supervisors, which will result in a total of nearly 300 department-issued rifles for about 500 officers patrolling the streets, according to police spokesman Capt. Paco Balderrama.
The department has a list of personally owned weapons including handguns that proficient officers are allowed to use while on duty, Balderrama said. Until Citty's announcement, AR-15 rifles like the department issues were not on the list, he said.
The union has requested the personal-rifle policy previously in contract negotiations but failed to sway department representatives, George said. The recent shooting in Dallas brought the issue once again to the forefront of union priorities, he said.
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Associated Press writer Ken Miller in Oklahoma City contributed to this report.
The Latest: Vigil honors Berkeley student slain in France
BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) The Latest on a vigil held for a University of California, Berkeley student who was among 84 people killed in a terror attack in Nice, France (all times local):
6:25 p.m.
A University of California, Berkeley student killed last week in a truck rampage in France is being remembered as a charismatic and inspirational part of the campus community.
Students leave condolences on a banner for Nicolas Leslie, who was killed in France last week, during a vigil at the University of California, Berkeley Monday, July 18, 2016 in Berkeley, Calif. Leslie, 20, a Berkeley student who was killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack in France was remembered Monday as an energetic and engaged member of the campus community. Leslie was an aspiring entrepreneur and environmentalist who participated in fraternity life and a student-run consulting group that provides marketing, research and social responsibility advice to businesses, student body President William Morrow said. (AP Photo/Lisa Leff)
Several hundred people attended a vigil held Monday in honor of 20-year-old Nicolas Leslie, the Berkeley junior who was one of 84 people killed in the Nice terror attack.
Childhood friends and classmates described the environmental science major as a happy and generous young man who lived life to the fullest and lit up rooms with a radiant smile.
Campus Dean of Students Joseph Greenwell says Leslie's parents hope other Berkeley students will follow his example by working for positive change in the world.
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8:54 p.m.
A vigil is planned Monday afternoon for a University of California, Berkeley who was killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack in the French city of Nice.
The university said the FBI informed school officials that the body of 20-year-old Nicolas Leslie of Del Mar in the San Diego area had been identified. Leslie was a junior at Berkeley's College of Natural Resources.
The vigil is at 4:30 p.m. in Sproul plaza on the university campus and is open to the public.
Leslie was among three foreign students studying technology entrepreneurship at the European Innovation Academy who were among those missing after the attack.
Philippines rejects China talks not based on sea feud ruling
MANILA, Philippines (AP) The Philippines' top diplomat said Tuesday he had rejected a Chinese offer to hold talks "outside of and in disregard" of an international tribunal's ruling last week that debunked Beijing's claim to ownership of virtually the entire South China Sea.
Foreign Secretary Perfecto Yasay Jr. said he told his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, that China's condition "was not consistent with our constitution and our national interest," adding Wang warned that if the Philippines insists on China's compliance to the decision, "we might be headed for a confrontation."
During talks on the sidelines of last weekend's Asia-Europe meeting in Mongolia, Yasay said Wang insisted that the Philippines should not even "make any comments" on the landmark decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.
Wang "asked us also to open ourselves for bilateral negotiations but outside of and in disregard of the arbitral ruling, so this is something that I told him was not consistent with our constitution and our national interest," Yasay told the ABS-CBN network.
"They said that if you will insist on the ruling and discussing it along those lines, then we might be headed for a confrontation," he said.
Despite the seeming impasse, Yasay said he was still hopeful both countries can find a way to resolve the long-seething dispute, suggesting China's publicly issued positions may still change.
Yasay said he asked that Filipinos be allowed to fish in the Scarborough Shoal, where Chinese coast guard ships have blocked and turned away fishing boats since effectively seizing the disputed fishing area after a tense standoff with Philippine government ships in 2012.
Wang responded by saying China was open to discussing that possibility with the Philippines "but not in the context of the arbitral tribunal ruling," Yasay said.
Two days after the tribunal issued its ruling, Chinese coast guard ships again blocked Filipino fishermen from approaching the shoal in scenes documented by an ABS-CBN news crew.
The Philippines decided to take its dispute with China to international arbitration in 2013 after China took control of Scarborough Shoal and reneged on a U.S. State Department-brokered deal for both countries to withdraw their ships from the area to ease a dangerous faceoff, according to former President Benigno Aquino III, who brought the case against Beijing.
With the Philippines' anemic military dwarfed by China's forces, Aquino bolstered relations with the United States and other allies to deter China's increasingly assertive actions in the disputed waters and modernize its air force and naval fleets, further straining ties with Beijing.
Rodrigo Duterte, who took over as president last month, has been seen as more conciliatory toward China and critical of U.S. security policies, saying during an election campaign that he would be willing to "shut up" on the disputes if China would finance railway projects in his impoverished country.
When the tribunal issued its decision, Duterte's government purposely avoided any high-profile celebration to avoid antagonizing China, which refused to take part in the process and declared the tribunal's ruling "null and void."
The ruling, which was welcomed by the U.S. and other countries, invalidated China's sprawling territorial claims under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas, regarded as the constitution governing the use of the world's oceans. It said that China violated the 1982 maritime treaty by building up artificial islands in the South China Sea that destroyed coral reefs and by disrupting Philippine fishing and oil exploration.
Yasay took an assertive tone Tuesday.
Colombia high court approves plans for peace plebiscite
BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) Colombia's top court has approved the government's plans to hold a plebiscite on a peace deal with leftist rebels.
The ruling Monday by the Constitutional Court hands a victory to President Juan Manuel Santos, who has vowed to put to a popular vote any accord reached with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia to end a half-century of fighting.
That could be a political gamble, given Santos' sagging approval ratings and Colombians' mistrust of the rebels. But the court approved the government's move to lower the turnout threshold to 13 percent of the electorate for results to be valid, which the opposition criticized.
Biden reasserts US as a 'Pacific power' in trip to Australia
SYDNEY (AP) Vice President Joe Biden met with Australia's prime minister and other leaders on Tuesday, as he reasserted America's push to boost its presence in the Asia-Pacific region and maintain its status as a "Pacific power."
Biden, who is in Australia as part of a tour of the Pacific, also met with troops aboard an Australian navy ship, where he shook hands with veterans of Middle East conflicts and thanked Australia for being a close military ally.
Biden's visit comes five years after President Barack Obama announced that U.S. Marines would begin rotating through the Australian port city of Darwin as part of the U.S. military pivot to Asia.
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, center, meets with Australian Defense Force personnel on board the HMAS Adelaide, in Sydney, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Biden is visiting Australia during a tour of the Pacific. (Jessica Hromas /Pool Photo via AP)
"Thank you for having America's back and we will always have your back," Biden told the troops gathered on the flight deck of the HMAS Adelaide. "We are a Pacific power, we are here to stay, and thank God we have you to lead us and to be with us."
Biden and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced that Australia's military would expand its training mission in Iraq to include the nation's police.
"One of the most important objectives now in Iraq is to ensure that the Iraqi police forces ... are able to maintain the peace in areas that have been liberated from Daesh, or ISIL, as the Iraqi security forces and counterterrorism forces progress," Turnbull said, referring to other names used to describe the Islamic State group.
Both leaders also spoke of the need to ratify the Trans-Pacific Partnership, with Turnbull saying he had no doubt the "Biden touch" would help get the pact through Congress.
The vice president repeatedly mentioned the importance of the U.S. maintaining its presence in the Pacific, saying he believed the U.S., along with Australia, had provided stability throughout the region that has allowed countries such as China, South Korea and Japan to grow.
"The United States is here in the Pacific to stay," Biden told reporters. "We are a Pacific nation, we are a Pacific power, and we will do our part to maintain peace and stability in our region."
Later, Biden took a sunset cruise along Sydney's famed harbor, chatting with Foreign Minister Julie Bishop as their boat glided past the Sydney Opera House. He then visited Taronga Zoo with three of his granddaughters, where they were greeted by the mournful sounds of a didgeridoo and patted a koala.
Biden said bringing his granddaughters on the trip Down Under was not initially part of the plan until he remembered that one of the teens had long dreamed of visiting Australia.
"She said to me four years ago when she was 14, 'You know, Pop, going to Australia's on my bucket list.' Fourteen years old bucket list?" Biden said during his meeting with Turnbull. "So I said, 'Honey, I'm going to Australia, want to come?' She said, 'Yes!'"
Biden flies to New Zealand on Wednesday.
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, left, and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull shake hands during a joint press conference in Sydney, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Biden is visiting Australia as part of a tour of the Pacific. (AP Photo/Rick Rycroft)
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden meets with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and members of his cabinet in Sydney, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Biden is visiting Australia as part of a tour of the Pacific. (Jessica Hromas/Pool Photo via AP)
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden addresses Australian Defense Force personnel on board the HMAS Adelaide, in Sydney, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Biden is visiting Australia during a tour of the Pacific. (Jessica Hromas /Pool Photo via AP)
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, center, addresses Australian Defense Force personnel on board the HMAS Adelaide, in Sydney, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Biden is visiting Australia during a tour of the Pacific. (Jessica Hromas /Pool Photo via AP)
German train attacker vowed 'revenge on the infidels'
WUERZBURG, Germany (AP) A 17-year-old Afghan asylum-seeker vowing "revenge on these infidels" went on an ax-and-knife rampage on a train in southern Germany, wounding five people before being shot and killed by police an attack that German authorities conceded Tuesday was almost impossible to prevent.
German officials didn't identify the attacker or the victims, but Hong Kong's immigration department said among those wounded were four members of a family of five from the southern Chinese city.
The dpa news agency reported the attacker wounded the 62-year-old father, the 58-year-old mother, their adult daughter and her boyfriend. The teenage son was not hurt. The father and the boyfriend had tried to defend the other family members, dpa said.
In this image taken from video police officer look on as the body of a 17-years-old attacker is carried to a hearse in Wuerzburg, southern Germany, Tuesday morning, July 19, 2016. The asylum seeker who shouted "Allahu akbar" ("God is great") during an ax and knife attack on a train, injuring at least five people, had a hand-painted flag of the Islamic State group in his room, a senior German security official said Tuesday. (News5 via AP) GERMANY OUT
At least one member of the Chinese family and another woman attacked outside the train were in life-threatening condition, according to Bamberg prosecutor Erik Ohlenschlager.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the Monday night train attack, which came less than a week after the Bastille Day truck attack in Nice, France, also claimed by IS, in which 84 people were killed.
Bavaria's top security official Joachim Herrmann said, while the Nice attack was "clearly another dimension," in both cases the choices of weapons and targets made them "extremely difficult to prevent in any fashion."
"In one case a truck, in another an ax and knife those are the weapons that society cannot logically eliminate, with which any person could equip themselves, which they could put to use at virtually any location at any time of night or day," he said.
Nevertheless, he urged an increased visible police presence across the country.
Germany has not experienced the large, deadly attacks that France and Belgium have, although a string of sexual assaults and robberies on New Year's Eve in Cologne that prosecutors say were committed largely by foreigners gave rise to fears of whether the country could cope with the 1 million migrants it registered in 2015.
As the flow of migrants has slowed this year, the anti-immigrant protests have faded, but the train attack seemed likely to raise concerns again.
In a video posted by the Islamic State that purports to show the attacker, the young man calls on others to "kill these infidels in the countries that you live in."
"You can see I have lived in your own home and have planned to behead you in your own territory," the young man says in Pashto while brandishing a knife.
Herrmann's office told the dpa news agency that investigators had determined that the video was authentic.
Despite the IS claim of responsibility and a hand-painted IS flag found in the suspect's apartment, authorities said so far they have found no direct links between the suspect and IS and believe that he self-radicalized.
Investigator Lothar Koehler said the teenager's motivation appeared to be Islamic extremism based upon a passage, found among notes in his apartment, which read: "Pray for me that I can take revenge on these infidels and pray for me that I will go to heaven."
In the premeditated attack, the attacker boarded the regional train after 9 p.m. near the Bavarian city of Wuerzburg with an ax and knife concealed in a bag, according to Ohlenschlager. He said the suspect had learned Saturday that a friend had died in Afghanistan.
On the train, the suspect encountered an employee from the asylum shelter where he had lived until two weeks ago when he moved in with a foster family. He didn't respond to her comments but left for another train car, hid in a bathroom and armed himself, Ohlenschlager said.
"Then, without warning, he attacked the passengers using great force on their bodies and their heads," Ohlenschlager said, adding he shouted "Allahu akbar," Arabic for "God is great."
Witnesses said the interior of the train was covered with blood and looked "like a slaughterhouse," the German news agency dpa reported. About 30 passengers were on the train and more than a dozen were treated for shock.
After the train made an emergency stop, the suspect fled and ran into two women walking a dog. He attacked one from behind, saying "I'll finish you!" and yelling a vulgar term for a woman in German, as he hit her at least twice in the face with the ax.
Shortly after, he encountered a police SWAT team, jumping out at them from bushes brandishing his ax. He was shot and killed.
Ohlenschlager said at least two victims were suffering from "acute life-threatening" wounds, including the woman attacked outside the train.
In the video posted by the Islamic State's Aamaq news agency, the man claimed he was a soldier "of the Islamic State and will be carrying out an attack in Germany today."
Herrmann said people close to the attacker told investigators he had seemed to be a calm person, not overtly religious or an extremist. He said investigators were still looking into the evidence found in the teenager's room, including a possible farewell letter to his father.
Koehler said the suspect had registered as a refugee in June 2015, when he crossed into the country from Austria. German authorities sent him to an asylum home for unaccompanied minors in Ochsenfurt. He received asylum in March and had a residency permit.
He was a Sunni Muslim who didn't go to the mosque regularly, but prayed regularly at home, and had not committed any previous crimes in Germany Koehler said.
"He was active on social media, had his page there, but there were no hints of any extremist Islamist thought," Koehler said. "However, 24 hours ago he posted a cryptic message about the enemies of Islam."
Hong Kong's top official, Chief Executive Leung Chun-Ying, condemned the attack and extended his sympathies to the victims and their families.
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David Rising and Kirsten Grieshaber reported from Berlin.
Blood stains and a rescue blanket are seen through the windows of a train in Wuerzburg, southern Germany, Monday evening, July 18, 2016, after a 17-year-old Afghan armed with an ax and a knife attacked passengers aboard a regional train in southern Germany on Monday night, injuring four people before he was shot and killed by police as he fled. (Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/dpa via AP)
Firetrucks and ambulances stand at a road block in Wuerzburg, southern Germany, Monday evening July 18, 2016. A man attacked people in a train and injured more than a dozen. (Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/dpa via AP)
A firetruck blocks a road in Wuerzburg, southern Germany, Monday evening, July 18, 2016. A man attacked people in a train and injured more than a dozen. (Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/dpa via AP)
An ambulance stands at a road block in Wuerzburg, southern Germany, Monday evening July 18, 2016. A man attacked people in a train and injured several of them. (Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/dpa via AP)
A firefighter stands at a road block in Wuerzburg, southern Germany, Monday evening July 18, 2016. A man attacked people in a train and injured more than a dozen. (Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/dpa via AP)
South Korean man gets 4-year sentence in Tokyo shrine blast
TOKYO (AP) A South Korean man who detonated a homemade device in a public restroom at a controversial shrine in Tokyo was sentenced Tuesday to four years in prison.
Jeon Chang-han had been arrested in December and charged with trespassing, property damage and violation of the explosives control law. No one was hurt in the explosion at Yasukuni Shrine on Nov. 23.
Tokyo District Court Judge Kazunori Karei said in his ruling that Jeon learned how to make gunpowder on the internet and tested detonating it repeatedly in metal pipes, Japan's Kyodo News service reported.
In this Dec. 9, 2015 photo, South Korean Jeon Chang-han is transferred to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department headquarters from a police station in Tokyo. Jeon who detonated a homemade device in a public restroom at Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo was sentenced to four years in prison on Tuesday, July 19, 2016 in Tokyo District Court. He was arrested in December and charged with trespassing, property damage and violation of the explosives control law. (Kyodo News via AP)
Jeon is 28 years old, Japanese media reported.
Yasukuni Shrine has been criticized by South Korea and China, both of which suffered from Japan's colonial actions during World War II, for enshrining war criminals among the 2.5 million war-dead the shrine honors.
South Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman Cho June-hyuk said in Seoul that consular representatives in Japan have provided assistance to Jeon, but that it would be inappropriate for the government to comment on the case.
Police across US patrolling in pairs after ambush attacks
DENVER (AP) Police departments across the country are ordering officers to pair up after ambush attacks left eight officers dead in Texas and Louisiana, a precaution that could slow response times to low-level crimes and drive up overtime for already exhausted police.
Los Angeles police assigned members of specialized crime-fighting units to back up officers responding to routine calls. Baltimore police began sending two squad cars to every call received. Dispatchers in Denver urged officers to travel in pairs indefinitely and "keep their head on a swivel" to protect themselves against potential threats. Police in Fort Worth extended the order beyond their uniformed officers to plainclothes detectives and high-ranking supervisors.
The new safety measures are some of the most intense since the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, said Darrel Stephens, executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs of Police Association. Los Angeles also ordered more of its helicopters to patrol the skies. Officers elsewhere were told to keep their guard up, especially around police stations. It was unclear when operations would return to normal.
In this Monday, July 18, 2016, photograph taken with a fisheye lens, Denver Police Department officers head out in their patrol car after role call for the swing shift in District 6 in downtown Denver. After more than two decades of making officers patrol on their own, the city of Denver has revived two-officer patrols following the killings of officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, La. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
"You're on the street eight, 10, 12 hours. Remaining with that heightened sense of alertness for that entire time is a pretty big challenge," Stephens said. "Doubling up those officers helps them keep track of each other and helps them feel a sense of safety."
It was unclear whether the buddy system might have prevented Sunday's targeted killings of three law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, or the July 7 killings of five officers during a Dallas protest march with a heavy police presence.
In some cities, doubling up means less police visibility and geographic coverage on the streets because putting two officers in one car means other vehicles stay parked. Some departments have compensated by asking officers to extend their shifts, further straining those already on overtime from long nights of protests.
In Denver, two officers already respond to most calls, either together or in separate cars. But response times could slow for lower-priority cases, like thefts, that typically require just one officer.
Two-person patrols are the safest approach, but "what we're seeing is the two-officer cars are responding to everything, so there are fewer cars to handle the calls," said Denver police Sgt. Bryan O'Neill, vice president of the city's Police Protective Association. "Our two-man cars are going out and working as quickly and effectively as they can, knowing that the calls are going to stack up. They don't want to see the citizens suffer because we have fewer cars out there."
Two-officer patrols are not a fool-proof solution, and studies are mixed about their effectiveness. Seven of the 51 officers killed in 2014 were in a two-officer vehicle, according to FBI statistics.
But if an officer is shot, a two-person patrol usually ensures the second officer can radio and get help, said Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore officer who teaches law and police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
But two-officer patrols are difficult to sustain for departments short on money and manpower, said Officer Robert Swartzwelder, president of the police union in Pittsburgh, where the chief called for fewer single-officer cars patrolling neighborhoods.
Most police departments will continue to focus resources on high-crime neighborhoods, in spite of manpower constraints, Stephens said.
Some officers said a strain on resources is worth it to improve officer safety during dangerous times. The shooting of an officer in Milwaukee on Sunday as he sat alone in his police cruiser should be seen as proof of the buddy system's value, said Mike Crivello, who heads the Milwaukee's Police Association union.
"When there are two officers, obviously it's double protection for both of them," he said.
The Milwaukee officer was wounded and undergoing surgery Monday. "Had he had a partner, the other one would be watching out," Crivello said.
In this Monday, July 18, 2016, photograph taken with a fisheye lens, Denver Police Department officers head out to their patrol car after role call for the swing shift in District 6 in downtown Denver. After more than two decades of making officers patrol on their own, the city of Denver has revived two-officer patrols following the killings of officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, La. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
In this Monday, July 18, 2016, photograph, Denver Police Department officers head out to their patrol car after role call for the swing shift in District 6 in downtown Denver. After more than two decades of making officers patrol on their own, the city of Denver has revived two-officer patrols following the killings of officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, La. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
In this Monday, July 18, 2016, photograph, Denver Police Department officers head out to their patrol car after role call for the swing shift in District 6 in downtown Denver. After more than two decades of making officers patrol on their own, the city of Denver has revived two-officer patrols following the killings of officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, La. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
In this Monday, July 18, 2016, photograph, Denver Police Department officers head out to their patrol car after role call for the swing shift in District 6 in downtown Denver. After more than two decades of making officers patrol on their own, the city of Denver has revived two-officer patrols following the killings of officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, La. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
In this Monday, July 18, 2016, photograph, Denver Police Department officers head out to their patrol car after role call for the swing shift in District 6 in downtown Denver. After more than two decades of making officers patrol on their own, the city of Denver has revived two-officer patrols following the killings of officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, La. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
In this Monday, July 18, 2016, photograph, the flag flies at half staff above a line of Denver Police Department patrol cars in District 6 in downtown Denver. After more than two decades of making officers patrol on their own, the city of Denver has revived two-officer patrols following the killings of officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, La. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
Turkey ambassador: Greece must return 8 military personnel
ATHENS, Greece (AP) Turkey's ambassador to Greece said Tuesday that Turkish public opinion is closely watching the case of eight Turkish military personnel who flew to Greece aboard a helicopter during last Friday's attempted coup in their country, and that failure for them to be returned to Turkey could harm bilateral relations.
The eight identified as two majors, four captains and two master sergeants landed in the airport of the northeastern city of Alexandroupolis after issuing a distress signal and requesting permission for an emergency landing, which was granted by Greek authorities. They say they weren't involved in the attempted coup, but had been tasked with transporting wounded and had come under fire from the police.
The eight have applied for asylum in Greece, and appeared before immigration officials Tuesday for the start of the asylum procedure. They will re-appear on July 26 for further interviews, and will stand trial Thursday on charges of illegal entry into Greece.
Turkish military personnel who were aboard a Blackhawk military helicopter are transferred to a prosecutor's office in the city of Alexandroupolis, northern Greece, Sunday July 17, 2016. A Blackhawk military helicopter with seven Turkish military personnel and one civilian landed in the Greek city, where the passengers requested asylum. While Turkey demanded their extradition, Greece said it would hand back the helicopter and consider the men's asylum requests. (Giannis Mosiadis/InTime News via AP) GREECE OUT
The Greek government has said their asylum applications will be examined under international law, but that the fact that they are accused in their country of participating in a coup will be taken into account.
Turkish Ambassador Kerim Uras said the court case was being closely followed by public opinion in Turkey, with several Turkish television channels covering the developments live.
"So emotions are running very high. ... There's great interest in this," the ambassador said, adding that a swift return to Turkey "can really turn into a great positive thing for bilateral relations."
However, he added, "if it's not, I would be quite concerned as an ambassador, and I must say this, that it would not help at all, and that public opinion's sentiments might be ... reactionary, let's say."
Uras cast doubt on the claims by the military personnel that they weren't involved in the attempted coup, and said that as a helicopter didn't necessarily need an airport to land even in an emergency, they shouldn't have been granted permission to land in Greece.
"I think it was a mistake to accept these people in the first place, because it was a military helicopter," he said.
"Secondly, everyone knew what was going on in Turkey, there was a coup, a coup attempt, and it's very obvious these are people escaping the law," he said. "So there's a very high probability that these are terrorists. They are people who are fleeing justice." The Turkish government has described those involved in the attempted coup as terrorists.
After landing in Alexandroupolis, the Turkish government would have preferred "not to go through a painful, lengthy process but for them to be deported. This is again a missed chance," the ambassador said, noting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erogdan had spoken with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.
"I hope we will manage to swiftly fulfil the phases of the due process and Greece will manage to return these terrorist elements so that they will face justice in Turkey, of course in line with international norms and respecting their human rights," Uras said. "But they have to be returned."
Turkish military personnel who were aboard a Blackhawk military helicopter are transferred to a prosecutor's office in the city of Alexandroupolis, northern Greece, Sunday July 17, 2016. A Blackhawk military helicopter with seven Turkish military personnel and one civilian landed in the Greek city, where the passengers requested asylum. While Turkey demanded their extradition, Greece said it would hand back the helicopter and consider the men's asylum requests. (Giannis Mosiadis/InTime News via AP) GREECE OUT
A Turkish Blackhawk helicopter takes off from the airport of Alexandroupolis, northern Greece, Sunday, July 17, 2016. A Blackhawk military helicopter with seven Turkish military personnel and one civilian landed in the Greek city of Alexandroupolis, where the passengers requested asylum. While Turkey demanded their extradition, Greece said it would hand back the helicopter and consider the men's asylum requests. (Giannis Mosiadis/InTime News via AP)
Turkey fires tens of thousands in coup plotters hunt
ISTANBUL (AP) Asserting that "all the evidence" points to a U.S.-based Muslim cleric as the mastermind of last week's failed coup, Turkey's government on Tuesday fired tens of thousands of teachers, university deans and others accused of ties to the plot and demanded the cleric's extradition.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan raised the issue in a phone call with U.S. President Barack Obama, and his spokesman said the government was preparing a formal extradition request for the cleric, Fethullah Gulen. But he also suggested that the U.S. government shouldn't require the facts before extraditing him.
"A person of this kind can easily be extradited on grounds of suspicion," said the spokesman, Ibrahim Kalin. "And there is very strong suspicion for his involvement, for Gulen's involvement, in this coup attempt. So this is sufficient ground."
Pro-government wave Turkish flags as they protest against the attempted coup, in Istanbul, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. The Turkish government accelerated its crackdown on alleged plotters of the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. T (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)
Later, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that Turkey had submitted materials related to Gulen and the administration was reviewing whether they amounted to a formal extradition request. Earnest added that a decision on whether to extradite would be made under a longstanding treaty between the two countries, and wouldn't be made by Obama.
The extradition demand is likely to strain U.S.-Turkey ties as the Obama administration refers the matter to the Justice Department, which will determine whether the Turkish government has established probable cause that a crime was committed.
Gulen has strongly denied the government's charges, suggesting that Friday's attempted coup could have been staged as a pretext for the Erdogan government to seize even more power.
"It is ridiculous, irresponsible and false to suggest I had anything to do with the horrific failed coup," the cleric said in a statement on Tuesday, accusing Erdogan of going to "any length necessary to solidify his power and persecute his critics.
"I urge the U.S. government to reject any effort to abuse the extradition process to carry out political vendettas," the statement said.
The latest purges were intended to blunt the influence of Gulen, an Erodgan rival who has been in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania since the late 1990s and who the government has long accused of being behind a "parallel terrorist organization." They follow earlier aggressive moves by Erdogan's administration against Gulen loyalists in the government, police and judiciary following corruption probes targeting Erdogan associates and family members in late 2013 prosecutions the government says were orchestrated by Gulen.
The crackdown was escalated Tuesday, as the government announced the firing of nearly 24,000 teachers and Interior Ministry employees and demanded the resignations of another 1,577 university deans as well as hundreds of other government employees.
Tuesday's dismissals touched every aspect of government life.
Turkish media, in rapid-fire reports, said the Education Ministry had fired 15,200 educators, while the Interior Ministry dismissed 8,777 employees and Turkey's Board of Higher Education called for the deans' resignations. In addition, 1,500 finance ministry employees were fired, 257 people working at the prime minister's office were sacked and 492 staffers at the Directorate of Religious Affairs were dismissed, including clerics, preachers and religious teachers.
Tuesday's firings come on top of roughly 9,000 people who have been detained by the government, including security personnel, judges, prosecutors, religious figures and others. Turkey's state-run Anadolu news agency says courts have ordered 85 generals and admirals jailed pending trial over their roles in the coup attempt. Dozens of others were still being questioned.
Asked about the scale of the purges, U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner cautioned Turkish authorities not to overreach.
"The types of arrests and roundups that you cite have not gone unnoticed by us," he said.
Erdogan, meanwhile, indicated the government was considering reinstating the death penalty, a practice abolished in 2004 as part of Turkey's bid to join the European Union. Several European officials have said such a move would be the end of Turkey's attempts to join.
Addressing hundreds of supporters outside his Istanbul residence early Tuesday, Erdogan responded to calls for the reintroduction of the death penalty with the simple statement: "You cannot put aside the people's demands."
"In a country where our youths are killed with tanks and bombs, if we stay silent, as political people we will be held responsible in the afterlife," Erdogan said, pointing out that capital punishment exists around the world, including in the United States and China.
The violence surrounding the Friday night coup attempt claimed the lives of 210 government supporters and 24 coup plotters, according to the government.
On Tuesday, foreign media were taken on a tour of government buildings that were targeted by F-16 air strikes, including the headquarters of the Turkish special forces police where 47 officers were killed. The explosions damaged the roof of one of the buildings and tore down its front wall, exposing dust-covered bunk beds. A second building was riddled with bullet fire from helicopters, while a charred X-ray machine could be seen inside the wrecked security clearing area at the entrance of the complex.
Esra Kokcu, accompanied by relatives, was visiting the site where her cousin, Selmani Terzi, was severely wounded and lost a leg in the attack. She took out her smartphone to show reporters pictures of Terzi in his hospital bed.
"These people are not human," she said of the coup-plotters.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, meanwhile, lashed out at Europe, whose leaders have expressed concerns over the purges underway across Turkey's key state institutions.
"We thank our European friends for their support against the coup, however their sentences starting with 'but' did not please us at all," he said.
Regarding Turkey's demand that Gulen be extradited, Yildirim compared the situation to the U.S. hunt for Osama bin Laden after the Sept. 11 attacks.
"We will present them more proof than they'll know what to do with," he said. "I want to ask our friends in the U.S., did you ask for proof when you demanded the terrorists after the Twin Towers fell on Sept. 11? When you didn't bother looking for proof for bin Laden, why are you demanding evidence for Fetullah Gulen when the evidence is clear as day? You should give up defending that terrorist leader."
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Fraser reported from Ankara. Associated Press writers Sarah El Deeb and Cinar Kiper in Istanbul and Desmond Butler and Eric Tucker in Washington contributed to this report.
Supporters listen to Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as he addresses them in front of his residence in Istanbul, early Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Turkey's Interior Ministry has fired nearly 9,000 police officers, bureaucrats and others and detained thousands of suspected plotters following a foiled coup against the government, Turkey's state-run news agency reported Monday. (Kayhan Ozer/Pool Photo via AP)
Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses his supporters gathered in front of his residence in Istanbul, early Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Turkey's Interior Ministry has fired nearly 9,000 police officers, bureaucrats and others and detained thousands of suspected plotters following a foiled coup against the government, Turkey's state-run news agency reported Monday. (Kayhan Ozer/Pool Photo via AP)
A woman poses for a photo next to a huge Turkish flag at Taksim Square in central Istanbul, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Turkey's state-run news agency says courts have ordered 85 generals and admirals jailed pending trial over their roles in a botched coup attempt. Dozens of others were still being questioned. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
Pro-government wave Turkish flags as they protest against the attempted coup, in Istanbul, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. The Turkish government accelerated its crackdown on alleged plotters of the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)
Pro-government supporters chant slogans and wave Turkish flags as they protest against the attempted coup, in Istanbul, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. The Turkish government accelerated its crackdown on alleged plotters of the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)
Pro-government supporters pose for pictures during a protest against the attempted coup, in Istanbul, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. The Turkish government accelerated its crackdown on alleged plotters of the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The rebellion, which saw warplanes firing on key government installations and tanks rolling into major cities, was quashed by loyal government forces and masses of civilians who took to the streets. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)
A child stands as pro-government supporters chant slogans and wave Turkish flags during a protest against the attempted coup, in Istanbul, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. The Turkish government accelerated its crackdown on alleged plotters of the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)
Pro-government supporters wave Turkish flags as they protest against the attempted coup, in Istanbul, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. The Turkish government accelerated its crackdown on alleged plotters of the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)
Pro-government supporters chant slogans and wave Turkish flags as they protest against the attempted coup, in Istanbul, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. The Turkish government accelerated its crackdown on alleged plotters of the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)
A pro-government supporter waves a Turkish flags during a protest against the attempted coup, in Istanbul, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. The Turkish government accelerated its crackdown on alleged plotters of the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)
Pro-government supporters chant slogans and wave Turkish flags as they protest against the attempted coup, in Istanbul, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. The Turkish government accelerated its crackdown on alleged plotters of the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)
Pro-government supporters chant slogans and wave Turkish flags as they protest against the attempted coup, in Istanbul, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. The Turkish government accelerated its crackdown on alleged plotters of the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)
Group: Half of Syrian refugee kids in Lebanon not in school
SAADNAYEL, Lebanon (AP) Syrian refugee Saddam al-Khleif hates going to school and spends most of his days either watching TV or playing outside the tent in the eastern Lebanese town of Saadnayel where he has lived with his family since fleeing civil war in his country five years ago.
Al-Khleif's two older brothers also don't go to school and instead work to support their family because their father, Hussein, has been suffering from permanent head and stomach aches that prevent him from work.
"I love to play and prefer to go to work rather than going to school," said al-Khleif, 11, who around noon on Tuesday was still wearing his pajamas as he sat on a plastic chair watching cartoons on TV inside his tent. "I went to school for six months in Lebanon then stopped," he added, without giving a reason. He said he would look for work to support his family.
Syrian refugee Mouhannad al-Jassem, 11, who fled with his family from the city of Idlib, Syria, plays soccer at a Syrian refugee camp in the eastern Lebanese town of Saadnayel, in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Human Rights Watch, a leading international human rights group, said in a report released Tuesday, that more than half of the nearly 500,000 school-age Syrian children registered in Lebanon do not go to school and receive no formal education. Since Syria's conflict began in March 2011, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have fled to Lebanon, which is now home to some 1.1 million registered refugees. AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)
Al-Khleif is among tens of thousands of school-age Syrian children registered in Lebanon who do not go to school. A report issued Tuesday by Human Rights Watch warned that more than half of the nearly 500,000 school-age Syrian children registered in Lebanon do not receive any formal education.
The findings by the New York-based group underline concerns about an entire generation of Syrian children who are growing up without education.
Like al-Khleif, 10-year-old Loay Mohammed does not attend school, saying that he went once and the students did not study but played all day. He added that it's better for him to stay in the makeshift tent settlement rather than walk to school every day and face the danger of being hit by a car.
The two children did not want to give further information to journalists.
Human Rights Watch said that although Lebanon has allowed Syrian refugee children to enroll for free in public schools, limited resources and residency issues as well as work restrictions on their parents, are keeping the kids away from education.
HRW said residency issues restrict free movement in Lebanon for refugees and exacerbate poverty, limiting parents' ability to send their children to school and contributing to child labor. Syrians moving without residency permits could face trouble from authorities, including arrest.
According to the report, there are nearly half a million Syrian children between the age of three and 18 in Lebanon. Only 158,000 non-Lebanese children, mostly Syrians, are enrolled in public schools and about 87,000 are enrolled in private or semiprivate schools, HRW said.
Since Syria's conflict began in March 2011, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have fled to Lebanon, which is now home to some 1.1 million registered refugees.
"Despite Lebanon's progress in enrolling Syrian children, the huge number of children still out of school is an immediate crisis, requiring bold reforms," said Bassam Khawaja, a Sandler fellow in the children's rights division at Human Rights Watch.
"Children should not have to sacrifice their education to seek safety from the horrors of war in Syria," Khawaja said.
In addition to letting Syrian refugee children enroll in public schools even if they don't have residency permits, Lebanon has also increased school capacity by opening an afternoon shift in 238 schools in the 2015-16 schoolyear.
The Education Ministry announced plans to enroll 200,000 Syrian refugees in formal public education, with international support, as part of the Reaching All Children with Education policy adopted in June 2014, HRW said.
Though during the 2011-2015 period the number of classroom spaces for Syrian children in Lebanese public schools increased every year, HRW said that in 2015-16, schools were still turning away Syrian children. This was due to the fact that the available space was not necessarily located in areas of need, or because children faced other barriers.
Of the 200,000 school spaces that donors committed to funding for Syrian children, almost 50,000 ultimately went unused, the report said.
Al-Khleif's mother said the reason her children don't go to school is because their father is sick and they need to help the family. She said her elder sons Ayad and Ayman are workers who make about $10 each a day.
She said Ayman was a very intelligent student who finished grade seven before dropping out.
"When Ayman was asked by his father to choose between work or education he chose education," said the woman. "But things changed because of the harsh life conditions."
Syrian refugee Saddam al-Khleif, 10, who fled with his family from the city of Idlib, Syria, speaks during an interview with The Associated Press inside his family tent, at a Syrian refugee campin the eastern Lebanese town of Saadnayel, in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Human Rights Watch, a leading international human rights group, said in a report released Tuesday, that more than half of the nearly 500,000 school-age Syrian children registered in Lebanon do not go to school and receive no formal education. Since Syria's conflict began in March 2011, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have fled to Lebanon, which is now home to some 1.1 million registered refugees. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)
Syrian refugee Saddam al-Khleif, 10, who fled with his family from the city of Idlib, Syria, fixes his bicycle in front of his family tent, at a Syrian refugee camp in the eastern Lebanese town of Saadnayel, in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Human Rights Watch, a leading international human rights group, said in a report released Tuesday, that more than half of the nearly 500,000 school-age Syrian children registered in Lebanon do not go to school and receive no formal education. Since Syria's conflict began in March 2011, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have fled to Lebanon, which is now home to some 1.1 million registered refugees. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)
Looking at own prospects, some Republicans avoid Cleveland
CLAREMONT, N.H. (AP) As her fellow Republicans gathered in Cleveland, New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte was back home touting her work on a bipartisan bill intended to address opioid abuse.
There was no mention of Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton or the presidential campaign fracas that began with the opening gavel of the Republican National Convention Monday and will continue through next week when Democrats gather for their convention in Philadelphia.
"I do have a re-election in November," Ayotte told reporters. "As far as I can tell, the voters are here, not in Ohio."
Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., speaks Monday, July 18, 2016 at the opening of the HOPE for NH Recovery Center, which opened to help fight New Hampshire's opiate crisis in Claremont, N.H. Ayotte is one of many prominent Republicans skipping the convention. (AP Photo/Jim Cole)
The first-term senator, who faces a re-election battle against Democratic Gov. Maggie Hassan, is backing Trump but is careful to define her position as "support but not endorse." She maintains that her absence from the Republican National Convention has nothing to do with her party's presumptive nominee, but she's not alone in avoiding any association with Trump's coronation and fraying Republican Party on display in the convention's opening session Monday afternoon.
The list of noteworthy Republicans not venturing into Quicken Loans Arena is long, starting with two living former presidents, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush; former GOP presidential nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney; vanquished Trump primary rivals, including the host-state governor, John Kasich, and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush; senators like Ayotte; and governors and congressmen who have found other things to occupy their time.
Several elected delegates have bailed out on the convention, as well, a preview of the scene Monday when loud dissension besmirched the convention's opening session as anti-Trump delegates demanded a floor vote on the nominating rules only to be quashed by Trump campaign officials and Republican National Committee authorities.
Among the sitting elected officials, the list of prominent Republican absentees seems to correspond with GOP elected officials who represent Democratic-leaning constituencies most likely to reject Trump.
Republican Govs. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts and Larry Hogan of Maryland won surprise victories in Democratic-controlled states in 2014. Neither is in Cleveland. Baker has even publicly declared he won't vote for Trump.
"There's a convention?" Hogan joked with reporters recently. "I'm focused on Maryland." He said he's been to five conventions, "I'm just not going to this one." Just to underscore his point, he added, "No second thoughts."
Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who defeated Trump in his state's presidential primary, is the first host governor in recent memory to skip convention floor proceedings. Kasich is keeping a busy schedule this week in Cleveland, greeting delegations and attending various events, but he's avoiding the floor at Quicken Loans Arena. He told NBC News that Trump would "have to change everything that he says" before he would endorse the celebrity businessman.
Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort on Monday called Kasich "petulant" and "embarrassing."
Republican Sen. Rob Portman, who also faces a tough re-election bid against former Gov. Ted Strickland, says he will appear on the convention floor this week, but will not be speaking from the podium another notable departure from custom for any host-state senator.
It's not uncommon for elected officials from one party to walk a fine line when they represent a constituency that generally leans to the other major party. Several former Democratic senators and governors tried to distance themselves from President Barack Obama heading into the 2014 elections and they lost anyway.
And Trump certainly has high-profile Republican supporters, even from some battleground states. The speaker's lineup Monday included Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, whose state opted twice for Obama.
But the absentee list nonetheless underscores a GOP identity crisis, and even some of those Republican officials who are attending are finding ways to express their skepticism about the presumptive nominee. Utah Sen. Mike Lee, among the most conservative figures on Capitol Hill, was on the floor Monday leading the group of delegates demanding a floor vote on rules, in a last-ditch effort to allow bound delegates to vote for a nominee other than Trump, regardless of how their states had voted in primaries or caucuses.
Jeb Bush, once considered the favorite for the nomination by party insiders and national media, explained in a Washington Post op-ed last week his continued opposition to Trump's candidacy. "I do not believe Donald Trump reflects the principles or inclusive legacy of the Republican Party," Bush wrote. "And I sincerely hope he doesn't represent its future."
Democrats certainly relish the discord. The Clinton campaign on Sunday sent reporters a mock GOP schedule of speakers, listing time slots and several names of elected Republicans only the names, all of officials who are skipping the convention, are crossed out. Still, Democratic strategists say privately that they do not know just how Trump will affect down-ballot races.
Meanwhile, Ayotte used her Monday outing to continue her work fighting drug abuse. At a recovery center, she took notes and asked questions of law enforcement officers, health care professionals and people in recovery.
"I'm glad to be here because this is, number 1, where I need to be listening," Ayotte said after the event.
Asked by reporters about Trump, she said, "I think that voters will judge each person individually, and I have great confidence in that."
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Barrow reported from Atlanta. Follow Ronayne and Barrow on Twitter at https://twitter.com/kronayne and https://twitter.com/BillBarrowAP.
Despite 3rd acquittal, Baltimore prosecutors push on
BALTIMORE (AP) A Baltimore judge dealt the state yet another blow in the protracted and unsuccessful prosecution of six police officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray, a young black man who was injured in police custody.
Even though it was the judge's third consecutive acquittal in the case, prosecutors seem to be willing to try the remaining three cases amid mounting pressure to call it quits.
Baltimore Circuit Judge Barry Williams found Lt. Brian Rice, who faced manslaughter, misconduct in office and reckless endangerment charges, not guilty Monday, telling prosecutors they failed to establish that Rice was aware of his duty to buckle Gray into a seat belt, and more importantly, that he deliberately breached his duty in order to put Gray in danger.
Baltimore Police Lt. Brian Rice, right, is escorted to a waiting car after being found not guilty on all charges related to the death of Freddy Gray, Monday, July 18, 2016, in Baltimore. (Jerry Jackson/Baltimore Sun via AP)
"There are a number of possibilities this court could entertain, some that are innocent and some that are not," Williams said. "However, the burden of proof rests with the state, and the court's imaginings do not serve as a substitute for evidence."
Gray was arrested in April 2015 when he ran from police in a high-crime area. He was handcuffed and shackled but left unbuckled in the back of a police van and suffered a critical neck injury. Gray's name became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement, fueling outrage nationwide over the treatment of black people by the criminal justice system and prompting the worst rioting in the city in decades.
The U.S. Justice Department launched a patterns and practice investigation into allegations of widespread abuse and unlawful arrests by the Baltimore Police Department.
Rice's acquittal is the fourth consecutive blow to the state's case, but the next officer remains scheduled to stand trial next week. Prosecutors have given no indication that they plan to change course.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys are barred from commenting due to a gag order.
Earlier this year, officers Edward Nero and Caesar Goodson, the van driver who was facing a murder charge, were also found not guilty. Officer William Porter's trial ended in a hung jury in December and his retrial is scheduled for September. The last two officers have trials this month and in October.
At a news conference, Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3 President Gene Ryan called for the remaining cases to be dismissed, calling it "malicious prosecution against the remaining three officers."
Even Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, chimed in.
"My personal thinking is they should not go further" with the rest of the trials, he said after Rice's acquittal. "It's a waste of time and money. But that's up to the court system to decide."
Gray died April 19, 2015, a week after he suffered a critical spinal injury in the back of Goodson's police wagon. Prosecutors say the officers were criminally negligent when they failed to buckle Gray into a seat belt or provide medical attention after he indicated that he wanted to go to a hospital.
With no courtroom victories, activists are focusing on protests and police department reforms. A protest Saturday that blocked the interstate through downtown resulted in more than 60 arrests. Activists said they were demonstrating in support of having civilians sit on boards that review police misconduct cases, and spending more public money on community programs instead of policing.
"I'm disgusted, as usual, and they're sending a daily message all across the world that our lives don't matter, and that's sad," said Tawanda Jones outside the courthouse Monday. She was there marking the third anniversary of her brother's death in a separate case involving Baltimore police.
"We're more than hashtags and body bags," she added.
During the trial, prosecutors had said Rice was most responsible of the six officers charged for following police procedures to fasten a prisoner in a seat belt, citing his 18 years of experience on the force.
The officer's attorney said police could use discretion, if they believe their safety is at risk. Rice attorney Michael Belsky said officers had concerns because Gray was not cooperative and they weren't sure what onlookers would do if extra time was taken to fasten Gray in the van.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys gave different characterizations of the onlookers. Prosecutors described them as concerned observers, while Belsky said officers heard threatening comments during the arrest.
Baltimore Police Lt. Brian Rice, center, is escorted from the courthouse to a waiting car after being found not guilty on all charges related to the death of Freddy Gray, Monday, July 18, 2016, in Baltimore. (Jerry Jackson/Baltimore Sun via AP)
Tawanda Jones, center, speaks after hearing of a judge's decision of acquittal on all charges for Lt. Brian Rice, not pictured, one of the six members of the Baltimore Police Department charged in connection to the death of Freddie Gray, outside a courthouse in Baltimore, Monday, July 18, 2016. Jones' brother, Tyrone West, pictured on poster, died under murky circumstances in July 2013 after an encounter with Baltimore police. (AP Photo/Steve Ruark)
As Nice tries to return to normal, families demand answers
NICE, France (AP) Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers were back on Nice's famed Riviera coast Tuesday as signs of normal life return to the city's famous Promenade des Anglais, where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack.
Under a blazing sun, there were few visible reminders of the July 14 carnage, save for a handful of flags flying at half-staff and a number of armed soldiers patrolling the promenade.
Some of Nice's beachside restaurants reopened for business, and the final section of the road was set to reopen to traffic following three days of official mourning.
A man reacts as he looks flowers placed at a new memorial in a gazebo in a seaside park of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers are back on Nice's famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
Yet elsewhere in the city the grief was still raw as families said farewell to their loved ones and some demanded to know from the authorities how security measures had failed to prevent a man from driving a truck through crowds of revelers in an apparent planned attack that resulted in the worst mass carnage in Nice's recent history.
At the ar-Rahma mosque in the eastern Nice suburb of Ariane, worshippers held prayers for three of those killed in Thursday's attack, including 4-year-old Kylan Mejri and his mother Olfa Kalfallah, 31.
"What happened mustn't tear society apart," said Abdelkader Sadouni, a Muslim imam from Nice, his voice faltering as he called for unity in the face of an attack that indiscriminately hit men, women and children, Christian and Muslims, residents and foreign tourists enjoying France's national day fireworks together.
Mourners rallied around Kylan's father, Tahar Mejri, who carried the plain white coffin of his son out to a waiting hearse.
Holding photos of his son, Mejri spoke of his grief and described the moment that he arrived on the promenade to find his wife dead and Kylan's scooter lying on the floor. He spent all night going from one hospital to another before learning that his son hadn't survived.
Mejri said he plans to sue the authorities over what happened.
"A festival like that with nearly 33,000 and the promenade was open," he said. "There was no security."
The attack has sparked a national debate about whether security officials did all they could to prevent the attack the third mass slaughter in France over the past 18 months. French lawmakers were expected to debate whether the country's state of emergency imposed after the attack on a concert hall and other venues in Paris should be extended for another three months. Witnesses said little effort appeared to have been made to prevent a truck from driving onto the promenade Thursday.
Reflecting the widespread criticism of the government's security measures, Prime Minister Manuel Valls was loudly booed Monday as he came to a memorial ceremony on the Nice shore.
Eighty-four people were killed in the attack. Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Monday that 59 people were still hospitalized, 29 of them in intensive care.
Late Monday evening, mourners formed a human chain to remove candles, flowers and other mementos honoring the victims of the attack, in which Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove a truck through crowds watching fireworks. Volunteers moved the tributes from the spots where victims fell to a gazebo in a seaside park.
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins, who oversees terrorism investigations, said a search of Bouhlel's computer had found a clear, recent interest in "radical jihadism," adding that the attack was obviously premeditated though there was no proof that Bouhlel was directed by an extremist network.
Internet searches on his computer included Islamic propaganda chants, the term "horrible deadly accidents," and stories on the recent attacks against a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, on police officers in Dallas, and the killing of two police officials in Magnanville, outside of Paris.
Nice resident Clare Spencer was determined to reclaim the city for its residents and tourists and rejected the attempt of terrorists to instill fear.
"They will not take the promenade away from us," she said. "They will not win, the evil ones...The people are back, they are in the restaurants and on the beach."
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Adam Pemble contributed to this report.
Community members gather in Sproul Plaza on the UC Berkeley campus to take part in a vigil for student Nicolas Leslie on Monday, July 18, 2016 in Berkeley, Calif. Leslie was killed in last week's truck attack in Nice, France. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group via AP)
Volunteers install items at a new memorial in a gazebo in a seaside park on the famed Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Monday, July 18, 2016. Mourners formed a human chain to remove flowers, candles and other mementos placed along the Promenade des Anglais as spontaneous memorials to the victims of the Bastille Day attack in preparation to open the westbound lane.(AP Photo/Claude Paris)
People sunbath in the beach of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers are back on Nice's famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
Soldiers patrols on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers are back on Nice's famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
A man looks at flowers placed in a memorial near the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers are back on Nice's famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
People look at flowers and messages placed along the beach of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers are back on Nice's famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
Two women place flowers along the beach of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers are back on Nice's famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
A man looks at flowers and messages placed along the beach of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers are back on Nice's famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
A woman places flowers along the beach of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers are back on Nice's famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
People look flowers and messages placed along the beach of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers are back on Nice's famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
A man reacts as he looks flowers placed at a new memorial in a gazebo in a seaside park of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers are back on Nice's famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
Soldiers patrols on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers are back on Nice's famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
People place flowers and messages along the beach of the famed Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers are back on Nice's famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack. A placard reads" I am Nice". (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
People look at flowers and messages placed along the beach of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers are back on Nice's famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
People look at flowers and messages placed along the beach of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers are back on Nice's famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
Flowers and messages are placed along the beach of the famed Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers are back on Nice's famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
Bus with Chinese tourists catches fire in Taiwan, killing 26
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) A tour bus carrying visitors from China burst into flames on a highway near Taiwan's capital on Tuesday, killing all 26 people on board, officials said, in the deadliest incident involving Chinese tourism to the island.
The accident took place on the No. 2 national highway in Taoyuan county, south of Taipei, where Taiwan's international airport is located, the county's fire and rescue service said in a statement.
It said 24 of those on board were visitors from northeast China's Liaoning province who had been scheduled to fly home on Tuesday afternoon. The others killed were the driver and a tour guide, both Taiwanese.
In this photo provided by Yan Cheng, a policeman and another man try to break the windows of a burning tour bus on the side of a highway in Taoyuan, Taiwan, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. The tour bus carrying visitors from China burst into flames on a busy highway near Taiwan's capital on Tuesday, burning to death over 20 people on board, officials said .(Yan Cheng/Scoop Commune via AP)
Taoyuan fire chief Lai Chi-chong said all of the victims died inside the bus. "There was not enough time for them to escape," he told reporters.
Video from the scene showed both of the bus's doors pressed up against the highway's guard rail, making them impossible to open. Photos showed flames and thick black smoke pouring from the front of the bus.
Many of the bodies were badly charred, some of them piled in front of the unopened emergency exit, Taiwan's official Central News Agency and other media reported.
There was no official word on the cause of the fire, although CNA and others said that the bus apparently burst into flames after spinning out of control and smashing into the guard rail.
CNA cited eyewitnesses as saying the bus had been giving off smoke and swerving from lane to lane prior to crashing and bursting into flames.
The drivers of other vehicles pulled over and attempted to put out the flames with fire extinguishers, but the fire had grown too large for them to put out, the news agency said.
Thirteen firefighting vehicles and 30 firefighters were sent to the scene, but the fire apparently spread too rapidly. By the time the flames were extinguished, the vehicle had been heavily blackened from one end to the other.
Three of the victims were children two 13-year-olds and a 12-year-old, according to a passenger manifest distributed to media by the Taiwanese travel agency that organized the trip.
The accident was the deadliest involving Chinese visitors to Taiwan since the island opened up to Chinese tourism in 2008, according to Taiwanese government records and reports of previous incidents.
Since then, 83 Chinese have died while on trips to Taiwan, including Tuesday's victims. Several of those deaths involved bus crashes, including a 2010 crash that killed 19, and the latest accident is likely to revive safety concerns surrounding the treatment of Chinese tourists, most of whom come on cheap group tours.
China's Taiwan Affairs Office said it would send representatives to help deal with legal issues surrounding the crash. China claims Taiwan as its own territory and the sides have no formal ties, although contacts have been growing in recent years to handle trade, travel and other practical, nonpolitical matters.
However, relations have deteriorated since the January election of independence-leaning Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, and Chinese tourist numbers have declined steadily in recent months, dealing a major blow to the island's travel industry.
Netanyahu: Hezbollah will face 'iron fist' if it attacks
JERUSALEM (AP) Israel's prime minister says the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah will face an "iron fist" if it attacks Israel again.
Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel's monthlong 2006 summer war with Hezbollah was justified to protect Israel from a radical Islamic threat on its doorstep. He spoke at a ceremony on Tuesday marking 10 years since the war with the Iran-backed group.
He says anyone who dares attack Israel again would face a "forceful response."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends the weekly cabinet meeting at his office in Jerusalem, Israel, Sunday, July 17, 2016. (Abir Sultan, Pool via AP)
The 2006 conflict killed about 1,200 Lebanese, including hundreds of civilians, and about 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers. Israeli airstrikes heavily damaged Lebanon's infrastructure, while Hezbollah fired several thousand rockets into Israel.
North Korea's state radio has recently broadcast strings of indecipherable numbers in a possible move echoing a Cold War-era method of sending coded messages to spies operating in South Korea.
A female announcer at the radio station read numbers for two minutes on June 24 and 14 minutes on Friday, according to Seoul's Unification Ministry and National Intelligence Service, including phrases such as 'turn to page 459, question 35' in what she described as a mathematics assignment.
During the Cold War, Pyongyang sent such numbers via shortwave radio to give missions to agents dispatched to South Korea, according to captured North Korean spies.
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North Korea's state radio has recently broadcast strings of indecipherable numbers in a possible move echoing a Cold War-era method of sending coded messages to spies operating in South Korea
'Now we'll begin a mathematics review assignment for members of the 27th expeditionary unit of the distance learning university,' the woman's voice crackled over the radio.
'Turn to page 459, question 35, 913, question 55; 135, question 86.'
The messages, a recording of which was broadcast by South Korean TV channel KBS, were disguised as a mathematics lesson for distance learners and reappeared on North Korean radio station Voice of Korea in the early hours of Friday.
The radio messages, also known as numbers stations, work by broadcasting strings of seemingly random numbers over shortwave signals to an agent in the field.
The technique, a method of sending one-way secret messages, dates to the French Resistance in World War Two and is still in use by some governments today.
South Korea jams most North Korean radio frequencies but Pyongyang-based Voice of Korea broadcasts on shortwave signals which can be picked up far beyond the Korean peninsula, and are difficult to jam.
The receiving agent, armed with a radio and a pen, uses an easily concealed pad with corresponding letters on it to listen to and decrypt the secret message.
A female announcer at the radio station read numbers for two minutes on June 24 and 14 minutes on Friday including phrases such as 'Number 35 on Page 459' and 'Number 55 on Page 913', in a mimic of Cold War-era tactics in which shortwave radios like this were used
'(North Korean) numbers broadcasts have been on hold for quite some time but have recently resumed, something we think is very regrettable,' Jeong Joon-hee, a spokesman for South Korea's unification ministry, told a media briefing on Wednesday.
It was not clear whether the signals were meant to deceive or deliver genuine instructions.
'I can't speak to their intentions, but we hope that the North will refrain from an old practice like this and behave in a manner that's conducive to improving South-North ties,' Jeong said.
Neither the Unification Ministry nor the NIS elaborated on whether South Korea believes the North's recent broadcasts were meant to send information to agents in the field.
The North reportedly stopped such broadcasts once it could communicate with its spies overseas via the internet, and as animosities with South Korea eased following a historic inter-Korean summit meeting in 2000.
Relations have deteriorated greatly since then as North Korea has pursued the development of nuclear weapons despite international sanctions.
Some experts in Seoul view the messages as a North Korean attempt to wage psychological warfare.
Yoo Dongryul, head of the Seoul-based Korea Institute of Liberal Democracy, said the North may be trying to deceive South Korean intelligence officials into believing it's moving to increase its espionage operations.
He said it's unlikely the North would rely on old-fashioned 'number stations' broadcasts, whose hard-to-reset coding patterns had already been exposed to South Korean intelligence officers.
He said North Korea currently uses a more sophisticated espionage communication method known as steganography, in which secret messages are hidden within audio and video files.
On Tuesday, North Korea fired three ballistic missiles into the sea, according to Seoul defense officials
For decades after the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, the rival Koreas sent agents across their heavily fortified border to infiltrate to each other's territory.
But in recent years, both sides are believed to be focusing on less risky intelligence-gathering activities, such as information from the internet and satellite photos.
Seoul accuses Pyongyang of sending spies disguised as ordinary refugees seeking to resettle in South Korea or nurturing pro-North figures in the South.
News of the North Korean broadcast came as North Korea is angrily reacting to the planned deployment of an advanced U.S. missile defence system in South Korea.
Pilots held for suspected drinking before UK-Canada flight
LONDON (AP) Authorities say two commercial airline pilots have been arrested at Glasgow Airport on suspicion of being under the influence of alcohol, shortly before they were due to take off on a trans-Atlantic flight.
Canadian airline Air Transat says the two crew members were arrested before a Glasgow to Toronto flight on Monday.
Police Scotland says the men, aged 37 and 39, are due to appear in court Tuesday, charged with being "impaired through alcohol."
The airline says passengers have been put up in hotels and will be flown to Toronto on Tuesday.
Activists: Airstrikes on IS-held villages in Syria kill 56
BEIRUT (AP) Airstrikes on Islamic State-held villages in northern Syria killed at least 56 civilians on Tuesday as intense fighting was underway between the militants and U.S-backed fighters, Syrian opposition activists and the extremist group said.
Residents in the area blamed the U.S.-led coalition for the strikes that targeted two villages, Tokhar and Hoshariyeh, which are controlled by IS, activists said. The villages are near the IS stronghold of Manbij, a town that members of the predominantly Kurdish U.S.-backed Syria Democratic Forces have been trying to capture in a weeks-long offensive.
The death toll from the airstrikes, which coincided with a wide ground offensive by the extremists against SDF fighters, ranged between 56 and 200. If it is confirmed that 200 people were killed, it would be the deadliest strike by the U.S.-led coalition since it began its military campaign against IS in Syria almost two years ago.
Conflicting numbers in the aftermath of attacks are not uncommon in Syria. There were also conflicting reports on where the civilians were killed, with some groups reporting that a school housing refugees was hit and others saying that people were struck as they fled the violence.
An international human rights group said the U.S.-led coalition, which has been carrying out airstrikes against IS in Syria since September 2014, must increase its efforts to prevent civilian deaths and investigate possible violations of international humanitarian law.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 56 civilians, including 11 children, were killed in the strikes on the villages, which also wounded dozens. Another activist group, the Local Coordination Committees, said 90 people, mostly families, were killed.
In a statement, the Syrian Foreign Ministry said that 120 civilians, mostly women, children and old people, had been killed in the airstrike on Tokhar village. It said the strike was conducted by French warplanes.
The IS-linked Aamaq news agency said that 160 civilians mostly women and children were killed in Tokhar alone, in a series of purportedly American airstrikes around dawn Tuesday, while a Facebook page for activists in the area put the death toll at more than 200.
The reports and the disparate casualty tolls could not be independently confirmed because the area is inaccessible to independent media. There was no immediate comment from Washington.
A spokesman for the U.S.-backed SDF, Sherfan Darwish, said the numbers are exaggerated, adding that the coalition targeted gatherings of the Islamic State group who were in the village, killing large numbers of militants. He added that the extremist group quickly buried its dead and claimed many civilians were killed.
Postings on a Facebook page show images of bodies, including those of children, being placed in a collective grave, purportedly in the village of Tokhar. One photograph shows a man carrying the lifeless body of a child covered with dust while another shows a child, partly covered by a blanket, lying in a grave.
The photographs appeared genuine and corresponded to other Associated Press reporting of the events depicted. Tuesday's casualties follow similar airstrikes on the IS-held town of Manbij on Monday, when at least 15 civilians were reportedly killed.
The London-based rights group, Amnesty International, said in a statement Tuesday that since June, more than 100 civilians have been reportedly killed in suspected attacks by the U.S.-led coalition in the Manbij area.
"There must be a prompt, independent and transparent investigation to determine what happened, who was responsible, and how to avoid further needless loss of civilian life," said Magdalena Mughrabi, interim Deputy Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Amnesty, following the airstrikes on Tokhar.
"Anyone responsible for violations of international humanitarian law must be brought to justice and victims and their families should receive full reparation," Mughrabi said.
The statement said Amnesty International has reviewed available information on dozens of suspected coalition airstrikes and found that in the majority of cases in which civilian casualties have been credibly reported, the coalition has dismissed the claims.
It added that Amnesty International will be seeking clarification from the U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, about a series of other airstrikes causing civilian casualties which appear to have violated international humanitarian law.
CENTCOM said the coalition conducted 18 strikes on Monday and destroyed 13 IS fighting positions, seven IS vehicles and two car bombs near Manbij.
The Manbij area has seen intense battles between IS extremists and the Kurdish-led fighters, who have been advancing under the cover of intense airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition.
10 Things to Know for Wednesday - 20 July 2016
Your daily look at late-breaking news, upcoming events and the stories that will be talked about Wednesday:
1. TRUMP SECURES GOP NOMINATION FOR PRESIDENT
A roll call vote at the party convention makes official something the political establishment once deemed impossible.
A woman cries as she takes part in a pro-government rally in Taksim Square, Istanbul, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. The Turkish government accelerated its crackdown on alleged plotters of the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The rebellion, which saw warplanes firing on key government installations and tanks rolling into major cities, was quashed by loyal government forces and masses of civilians who took to the streets. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)
2. MELANIA'S MOMENT MARRED BY PLAGIARISM CLAIM
A defiant Trump campaign slaps away criticism as questions swirl about how part of his wife's speech happened to mirror nearly word-for-word Michelle Obama's in 2008.
3. TURMOIL UNSETTLES TOP RANKS AT FOX
Roger Ailes' attorney denies allegations that the Fox News Network chief sexually harassed star anchor Megyn Kelly.
4. ERDOGAN GOVERNMENT ESCALATES CRACKDOWN
Tens of thousands of public employees across Turkey are fired in a purge of people the government claims have ties to plotters of last week's attempted coup.
5. WHAT'S RESULT OF BLOODY ATTACK IN FRANCE
Fears of copycat assaults are gripping many in Europe after the truck rampage that killed dozens on a Nice beachfront.
6. TICKET SALES LAG AS OLYMPICS APPROACH
In an effort to boost sales, fans outside Brazil are being offered tickets at local rates in Brazilian reals meaning bargains can be had.
7. WHY GERMAN AUTHORITIES FEEL INHIBITED IN WAKE OF SLASHINGS ON TRAIN
While calling for increased security measures, they concede that preventing attacks from lone-wolf suspects is next to impossible.
8. HOW SHOOTINGS HAVE REMADE BATON ROUGE'S CITYSCAPE
The Louisiana capital is now a town marked by memorials flowers, balloons and stuffed animals with notes of condolences.
9. WOMEN ACROSS RUSSIA, UKRAINE FIND COMMON GROUND
A Ukrainian journalist's Facebook post prompts hundreds of women in Ukraine and Russia to put aside their fears and share stories of sexual violence and harassment.
10. TIGER WOODS WITHDRAWS FROM PGA CHAMPIONSHIP
It's the first time in his career that Woods, who's rehabbing from back surgery, will miss all four majors in a year.
In this May 20, 2016 file photo, Olympic tickets are displayed during an event at the Rio 2016 headquarters in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Non-Brazilians who bought Olympic tickets early may be regretting it, having paid higher prices and add-on fees. In a last-minute push to boost slow ticket sales, Rio organizers recently opened up their local ticket website to the entire world. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana, File)
The Latest: Romanian dies from wounds in Nice truck attack
NICE, France (AP) The Latest on the Bastille Day truck attack in Nice, France, that killed 84 people (all times local):
6:05 p.m.
French President Francois Hollande is defending his government's military actions against Islamic extremists even while acknowledging they are part of the reason extremists have repeatedly attacked his country.
Soldiers patrols on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers are back on Nice's famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
Seeking to explain why France is so often targeted, most recently with a truck rampage in Nice last week claimed by the Islamic State group, Hollande cited the country's traditions of liberty and human rights.
But he said it's also "because France is fighting against terrorism, against fundamentalism, against fanaticism."
He said France will continue its military operations abroad, which include airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, anti-terrorism operations in Africa and special forces in Libya. Hollande said "it is our honor and our duty."
He also urged lawmakers to approve an extension of the state of emergency in place since deadly attacks in Paris on Nov. 13.
Hollande was speaking Tuesday during a visit to Portugal.
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2:20 p.m.
Romania's foreign ministry says a Romanian man has died of wounds sustained in the Bastille Day truck attack in Nice.
The ministry said French authorities on Tuesday confirmed the man's death. He had previously been declared missing. No further details were provided.
The ministry said the man's wife and seven-year-old boy who were also wounded in the July 14 attack were doing well at a hospital in Nice and receiving help from the Romanian consulate in Marseille.
Romanian President Klaus Iohannis sent his condolences and said the country would remain "together with our European and international partners in the fight against terrorism."
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12:40 p.m.
Two more suspects in the Bastille Day truck attack that killed 84 people have been transferred to French intelligence headquarters in Paris to face likely terrorism charges.
The July 14 attack occurred when Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel plowed through crowds watching fireworks on Nice's famed Promenade des Anglais on the French Riviera before he was shot by police.
The two are among the six people remain in custody in the probe into the attack, according to an official with the Paris prosecutor's office, which oversees national terrorism investigations. Three of the six already had been transferred to the intelligence headquarters on Monday.
Prosecutor Francois Molins has said the suspects include one who Bouhlel sent a text message to minutes before the attack, asking for more weapons.
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12:15 p.m.
Germany's foreign minister says two students and a teacher from a school in Berlin died in the Bastille Day attacks on the French Riviera.
Another student was injured and continues to receive treatment.
Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier says "This terrible attack shows that terror is directed against everyone without distinction."
Eighty-four people were killed when Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove through crowds watching fireworks on Nice's famed Promenade del Anglais.
Fifty-nine people are still hospitalized, 29 of them in intensive care.
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12:05 p.m.
The Estonian Foreign Ministry says that two of the 84 people killed in the Nice truck attack were Estonians.
The ministry said it had received confirmation of their deaths late Monday from French officials but it did not identify them or provide any details.
Earlier, the ministry had said that three Estonians were among those injured in the attack.
The Baltic News Agency identified one of the victims as Rickard Kruusberg, age 21, who attended an innovation academy program in Nice. The other victim was a woman who had been on holiday with her husband, daughter and grandchildren, BNS said.
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11:25 a.m.
Italy says five of the 84 dead in the Nice truck attack were Italians, including two couples celebrating a recent retirement.
The Foreign Ministry identified the dead as Maria Grazia Ascoli, 77, and Mario Casati, 90, of Milan; Angelo D'Agostino, 71, and his wife Gianna Muset, 68, both of Voghera; and Carla Gaveglio, 48, of Piasco, in the Piedmont region.
Italian news reports said Ascoli and Casati, along with D'Agostino and Muset, had traveled to Nice together to celebrate D'Agostino's retirement.
In a statement Tuesday, the Foreign Ministry said French authorities had formalized the identification overnight. It said the families had been notified and that the ministry expressed its solidarity "to the family and friends of the victims of the barbarous attack."
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10:05 a.m.
Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers are back on Nice's famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack.
Under a blazing sun, there were few visible reminders of the carnage, save for a handful of flags flying at half-staff and a number of armed soldiers patrolling the promenade.
Some of Nice's beachside restaurants were reopening for business on Tuesday, and the final section of the Promenade des Anglais was set to reopen to traffic following three days of official mourning.
Late Monday evening, mourners formed a human chain to remove candles, flowers and other mementos honoring the victims of the attack, when Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiyej Bouhlel drove through crowds watching fireworks.
People gather in a new memorial in a gazebo in a seaside park on the famed Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Monday, July 18, 2016. Mourners formed a human chain to remove flowers, candles and other mementos placed along the Promenade des Anglais as spontaneous memorials to the victims of the Bastille Day attack in preparation to open the westbound lane.(AP Photo/Claude Paris)
Volunteers install items at a new memorial in a gazebo in a seaside park on the famed Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Monday, July 18, 2016. Mourners formed a human chain to remove flowers, candles and other mementos placed along the Promenade des Anglais as spontaneous memorials to the victims of the Bastille Day attack in preparation to open the westbound lane.(AP Photo/Claude Paris)
Community members sign messages on a banner in Sproul Plaza on the UC Berkeley campus after a vigil for student Nicolas Leslie on Monday, July 18, 2016 in Berkeley, Calif. Leslie was killed in last week's truck attack in Nice, France. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group via AP)
People sunbath in the beach of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers are back on Nice's famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
A man reacts as he looks flowers placed at a new memorial in a gazebo in a seaside park of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers are back on Nice's famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
A man looks at flowers placed in a memorial near the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers are back on Nice's famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
India court warns Rahul Gandhi could face defamation trial
NEW DELHI (AP) India's top court on Tuesday ordered a scion of India's Nehru-Gandhi family to express regret or face defamation charges for blaming the country's top Hindu nationalist organization for the 1948 assassination of independence leader Mohandas Gandhi.
The Supreme Court did not accept Rahul Gandhi's plea that what he said in 2014 was based on government records and a court ruling and that he didn't directly refer to Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, or RSS.
Gandhi, vice president of the opposition Congress Party, was not present in court and was represented by his attorney Harin Raval. He had made the remarks while campaigning for the Congress Party before 2014 national elections.
FILE - In this May 28, 2016, file photo, India's opposition Congress party vice-president Rahul Gandhi, greets his supporters during a protest rally against the Aam Aadmi Party or Common Man's Party led Delhi government and India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party government over power cuts and water shortage in New Delhi, India. India's top court on Tuesday, July 19, 2016, has ordered a scion of India's Nehru-Gandhi family to express regret or face defamation charges for blaming the country's top Hindu nationalist organization for the 1948 assassination of independence leader Mohandas Gandhi. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri, File)
The court scheduled the next hearing for July 27, rejecting Gandhi's plea to dismiss the lawsuit against him, according to the Press Trust of India news agency.
The court said that Gandhi would be charged and face trial if he does not express regret for his comments during the upcoming hearing.
The case stems from a defamation lawsuit filed against Gandhi by an activist of RSS, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's ideological mentor, for accusing the organization of assassinating Mohandas Gandhi.
The lawsuit was filed in western Maharashtra state. If charged and convicted, Gandhi, who has so far refused to apologize and settle the case, could face up to two years in prison.
The Supreme Court judges said Tuesday that the government and court records say that Mohandas Gandhi's assassin, Nathuram Godse, was an RSS worker.
Plagiarism charges mar Melania Trump's moment
CLEVELAND (AP) This was to have been Melania Trump's moment, her first real introduction to American voters who'd seen her by her husband's side for months but had barely heard her speak.
But within moments of Mrs. Trump's triumphant appearance on the Republican National Convention stage, accusations of plagiarism surfaced, eclipsing her achievement in the latest stumble by the Trump campaign.
Trump's advisers defiantly denied the charge Tuesday, though the word-for-word overlap was obvious between Mrs. Trump's remarks the night before and two passages in Michelle Obama's 2008 speech to the Democratic convention in Denver. How that had come about remained unclear.
In this combination of photos, Melania Trump, left, wife of Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump, speaks during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016, and Michelle Obama, wife of Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., speaks at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Monday, Aug. 25, 2008. Melania Trump's well-received speech Monday to the Republican National Convention contained passages that match nearly word-for-word the speech that first lady Michelle Obama delivered in 2008 at the Democratic National Convention. (AP Photos)
Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort called the criticism "just absurd" and said the issue had been "totally blown out of proportion."
"There were a few words on it, but they're not words that were unique words," he told The Associated Press. "Ninety-nine percent of that speech talked about her being an immigrant and love of country and love of family and everything else."
Manafort also tried to blame Hillary Clinton, saying on CNN, "This is, once again, an example of when a woman threatens Hillary Clinton, how she seeks out to demean her and take her down."
The passages in question came near the beginning of Mrs. Trump's nearly 15-minute speech.
In one example, Mrs. Trump said: "From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise, that you treat people with respect."
Eight years ago, Mrs. Obama said: "And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: like, you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond, that you do what you say you're going to do, that you treat people with dignity and respect."
There were similar overlaps in a passage dealing with conveying to children that there is no limit to what they can achieve. Mrs. Trump's address was otherwise distinct from the speech that Mrs. Obama gave when her husband was being nominated for president.
The White House declined to wade into the controversy Tuesday.
Nobody from the campaign is expected to be fired over the incident, according to a person familiar with campaign deliberations who demanded anonymity to discuss internal matters.
Trump's son, Donald Jr., faulted outside speechwriters: "Those are the people that did this, not Paul (Manafort)," he said in an interview with CBS News and other reporters.
Yet for Mrs. Trump, 46, a Slovenian-born former model who is Donald Trump's third wife and 24 years his junior, the controversy marred a moment in the spotlight that had been months in the making. It required her to overcome her wariness about public speaking and the traditional role of the politician's wife, as well as her heavily accented English, to present herself to the public as her husband's partner, a poised mother and wife passionate about issues impacting women and children.
Trump's oldest daughter, Ivanka, has taken up much of the role of the typical political spouse. She was the one who introduced her father at his official campaign announcement and appears often by his side. Melania has sat for a handful of interviews, in which she's described herself as a private person, focused on raising the couple's 10-year-old son, Barron.
But on Monday she delivered her speech with deliberation and poise, and it was rapturously received by convention delegates. Listeners compared her to Jackie Kennedy and said she'd won hearts from the GOP crowd.
Many delegates were eager to defend her, convinced that whatever had happened, Mrs. Trump herself was not to blame. And they were sympathetic that her moment in the sun had turned into the latest black eye for her husband's rocky campaign.
Nebraska delegate J.L. Spray, a member of the Republican National Committee, said the part of the speech that matched Mrs. Obama's "was such non-substantive stuff. The media and the Democrats needed something to focus on, so they came up with this. If you say 'God bless America' at the end of your speech, are you plagiarizing Ronald Reagan?"
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Associated Press writers Stephen Ohlemacher in Cleveland and Grant Schulte in Lincoln, Nebraska, contributed to this report.
Melania Trump, wife of Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump waves as she speaks during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Afghan officials report Taliban attacks, uptick in violence
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) The Taliban launched multiple attacks in Afghanistan on Tuesday, including on a strategic tunnel in the Hindu Kush mountains that links the capital, Kabul, with the country's north and south, officials said.
The attacks marked what may be the first uptick in violence since the Muslim holy month of Ramadan ended in early July. Violence typically takes a downturn during Ramadan's dawn-to-dusk fasting. The Taliban are widely expected to launch a ferocious fight during the height of summer, though Afghan and U.S. military officials have noted that campaign has been slow to start.
In the northern province of Kunduz, local police commander Nabi Ghichi said that hundreds of Taliban gunmen have been attacking the Qalay-i-Zal district since before dawn on Monday and have not yet been completely pushed back. The assaults have been coming in waves, he said, adding that he has only 85 men and little logistical support.
FILE - In this April 16, 2016 file photo, an Afghan National Army soldier, left, shouts against the Taliban, after firing a rocket towards Taliban positions, on the outskirts of Kunduz, northern Afghanistan. The Taliban launched multiple attacks in Afghanistan, on Tuesday, July 19, 2016, including on a strategic tunnel in the Hindu Kush mountains that links the capital, Kabul, with the country's north and south, officials said. (AP Photo/Najim Rahim, File)
Kunduz has been a particular target of the Taliban for the past year. Last September, they took the provincial capital, also called Kunduz, and held it for three days the first time the insurgents succeeded in taking control of a major city since their regime was toppled in 2001.
Kunduz was threatened again in April, when the attacks were repelled by Afghan troops working with U.S. forces under new guidelines issued by President Barack Obama, allowing them to work more closely with Afghan offensive operations and utilize more air power.
"Right now, the Taliban insurgents have control of 50 percent of Qalay-i-Zal's territory," said Ghichi. It's one of the six districts of Kunduz province, which borders Tajikistan to the north.
In southern Helmand province, Maiwand Zazay, spokesman for Afghanistan's 215 Army Corps, said the Taliban attacked Sangin district but were pushed back with the help of Afghan airstrikes.
Sangin has been attacked repeatedly by Taliban militants in the past six months, but they have been unable to take control of the entire district. Helmand grows most of the world's opium, the raw material of heroin, which helps fund the Taliban insurgency. Much of the fighting in the province is believed aimed at protecting the smuggling routes.
In Parwan province, near Kabul, police commander Mohammad Ayaz said that the Salang Pass tunnel in the Hindu Kush mountains was attacked on Tuesday.
The Soviet-era 2.6 kilometers (1.6 miles) -long tunnel, between Parwan and Baghlan provinces, links the country's north and south and its closures, sometimes caused by snow avalanches, cause transport chaos.
Ayaz told The Associated Press that intelligence received Monday indicated that the Taliban planned to attack the highway. He said they came up to the tunnel at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, armed with automatic rifles, rocket launchers and machine guns.
After a three-hour battle, the insurgents were pushed back, Ayaz said.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told the AP over the phone from an undisclosed location that the attacks are part of the insurgents' latest offensive, launched in April, and would continue for the next 12 months. Fighting had slowed during Ramadan, he said, because of the heat.
"Now our mujahedeen (holy warriors) are equipped and routine operations have resumed," he said.
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Associated Press writer Karim Sharifi in Kabul, Afghanistan, contributed to this report.
The Latest: Trump son says nothing's impossible for his dad
CLEVELAND (AP) The Latest on the Republican National Convention (all times EDT):
10:15 p.m.
Donald Trump's son Donald Jr. is citing his father's business acumen and says that for his father, "impossible is just the starting point."
Donald Trump, Jr., son of Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump, speaks during the second day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
The younger Trump tells the delegates at the Republican National Convention that his father approaches business projects the same way he has approached his campaign and life in general.
Donald Jr. says that's why his father was able to defeat 16 other Republicans in the primary campaign, despite never having run for office.
He says the question in this election is who has the judgment to lead. He says Democrat Hilary Clinton is a risk the country can't afford to take.
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10 p.m.
Tiffany Trump says her father, Donald Trump, is a "natural-born encourager" who's motivated her to work her hardest.
The 22-year-old is telling the Republican National Convention about her father's character, and recalling how he'd notes on her report cards. She says she still has them.
Tiffany Trump says the Trump way is to hold nothing back and never let fear get in the way. She says he's the last person who'd ever tell someone to lower their sights or give up on their dream.
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9:50 p.m.
Republicans are breaking out into chants of "lock her up" as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie tries to impugn Hillary Clinton's character in his speech to the Republican National Convention.
Christie says as a former federal prosecutor, he wants to hold Clinton accountable for her actions. He says he's laying out what he says are facts about her to "a jury of her peers."
Guilty or not guilty that's what Christie is asking his audience for a verdict about Clinton on her leadership on the Islamic State group, China, and an al-Qaida-linked group in Nigeria.
Each time, delegates are responding with boisterous chants of "guilty."
Republican activists repeatedly interrupted Christie with shouts of "Lock her up."
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9:42 p.m.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie says Hillary Clinton lied to the nation about "her selfish, awful judgment." Christie who fell short in his GOP presidential bid says voters shouldn't elect Clinton as president and reward what he calls her incompetence.
Christie is firmly behind Republican nominee Donald Trump and says he's been friends with Trump for 14 years.
Christie tells the Republican National Convention that Clinton's performance as secretary of state was dismal. He says voters should hold her accountable for failures in Libya, Syria and elsewhere.
Christie says Clinton also is responsible for a bad nuclear deal with Iran.
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9:42 p.m.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says scandal follows Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton "like flies."
McConnell is using his speech to the Republican National Convention to rip into the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
The Kentucky senator says he's spent more time around the Clintons than anyone should ever have to spend.
McConnell says he's disagreed with President Barack Obama, but that at least Obama was upfront about his intentions "to move America to the left."
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9:40 p.m.
Former Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson says Hillary Clinton is promoting a "new world order" that would allow the government in Washington to trample Americans' freedoms.
The retired neurosurgeon is set to tell delegates at the Republican National Committee that Clinton will push what he's calling "cancerous policies" that perpetuate poverty.
Carson says Clinton would appoint liberal Supreme Court justices who would cement those policies.
Carson in excerpts of his prepared remarks says Donald Trump would preserve the "ideals upon which this country was founded."
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9:25 p.m.
House Speaker Paul Ryan says he'll be sharing the rostrum with "President Donald Trump" the next time there's a State of the Union address on Capitol Hill.
Ryan hesitated for a while before finally endorsing the businessman last month. The Wisconsin lawmaker tells the Republican National Convention that only by electing Trump and running mate Mike Pence does the country "have a chance at a better way."
He says Hillary Clinton represents a third term of what he's calling President Barack Obama's failed presidency.
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9:20 p.m.
Republican congressional leaders are assuring party delegates that having Donald Trump in the White House will help achieve key GOP legislative objectives.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says Trump will sign bills to repeal President Barack Obama's health care law, build the Keystone pipeline and deny Planned Parenthood any federal money.
McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan also are delivering broadsides against Hillary Clinton and her fellow Democrats.
McConnell says Clinton has "a tortured relationship to the truth."
Ryan says Clinton represents a third term of Obama's presidency instead of the "clean break from a failed system" that many Americans want.
The Wisconsin Republican says next week's Democratic convention will be a "four-day infomercial of politically correct moralizing."
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9:05 p.m.
Donald Trump says he's proud to be the Republican presidential nominee.
Trump is offering his first words to the party convention after being declared the nominee. He says in a video played in the convention hall that he's honored to have Mike Pence as his running mate and that the Indiana governor will make a "great, great vice president."
Trump says he'll appear with Pence in Cleveland on both Wednesday and Thursday. He says they'll win Ohio and the presidency.
Trump is promising to bring "real change and leadership" to Washington.
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8:20 p.m.
Mystery solved at the GOP convention.
The question is why all 19 delegates from the District of Columbia were awarded to Donald Trump.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio won the district's convention during the primary season and Ohio Gov. John Kasich came in second. Trump didn't win any delegates back in March.
But party rules in the district say that if only one candidate's name is placed into nomination at the national convention, then all 19 delegates go to that candidate.
Trump was the only candidate to be nominated at the convention.
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8:15 p.m.
Mike Pence has been nominated as the Republican vice presidential candidate and Donald Trump's running mate.
The Indiana governor was declared the nominee by acclimation meaning no formal roll call vote is needed. That ruling came from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as he presided over the party's convention.
McConnell says Pence has the "overwhelming support of this convention" to be the next vice president.
Indiana Lt. Gov. Eric Holcomb who put Pence's name in nomination says Pence has overseen record investments in education and eliminated red tape for businesses. He says under Pence's leadership, more Indiana residents are working and the tech sector is experiencing "explosive" growth.
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8:10 p.m.
House Speaker Paul Ryan has formally declared Donald Trump the winner of the Republican presidential nomination.
Ryan says Trump received 1,725 delegates in the state-by-state roll call. Ryan says Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was the runner-up with 475 delegates. Ohio Gov. John Kasich came in third with 120 votes, followed by 113 for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
Fifth-place went to physician Ben Carson with seven delegates, followed by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush with three delegates and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul with two delegates.
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8:05 p.m.
Donald Trump is celebrating his big achievement Tuesday night: officially becoming the Republican nominee for president.
Trump has posted a tweet that it was "such a great honor" after the roll call of the states at the Republican National Convention gave him the number of delegates needed to become the GOP's nominee.
He added: "I will work hard and never let you down! AMERICA FIRST!"
Trump is set to formally accept the nomination during a Thursday night speech at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland.
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8 p.m.
Donald Trump may officially be the Republican nominee, but that didn't stop at least one state from taking exception to the way its votes were counted during Tuesday night's presidential roll call at the GOP convention.
The Alaska delegation is disputing how its votes were recorded and requesting a formal poll of its delegates. But House Speaker Paul Ryan has declared that Alaska's 28 votes are going to Trump who already had more delegates than he needed to win.
The dispute appeared to be over Alaska state party rules that say a candidate loses his or her delegates if the candidate's campaign is no longer active.
All of Trump's challengers suspended their campaigns when it became clear the New Yorker would win the nomination.
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7:55 p.m.
Not every Republican activist is so excited now that Donald Trump has clinched the party's presidential nomination.
Colorado delegate Kendal Unruh says it's time to "cancel the convention, stop the sham." She says Trump has worked to coronate himself king.
Unruh is warning there could be drama and a "show of displeasure" coming on Thursday when Trump is set to speak at the convention.
Colorado cast most of its votes for Cruz.
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7:45 p.m.
Even as they're casting votes for John Kasich (KAY'-sihk) during the roll call of the states, numerous delegates are the Republican National Convention are still getting the Ohio governor's last name wrong.
It rhymes with "basic."
But at least three delegates announcing their state's votes for the nomination pronounced the second syllable like the word "itch."
The frequent stumbling over Kasich's last name was something of a running joke while Kasich was competing for the Republican presidential nomination.
He dropped out in May, but still was awarded delegates at the convention because of votes he won in the primary contests.
Kasich wasn't present for Tuesday night's proceedings, despite the fact that the convention is taking place in his home state.
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7:35 p.m.
New Mexico's governor refused to endorse Donald Trump after he chastised her for not doing her job when it comes to unemployment and other issues.
But there was Susana Martinez on the floor of the Republican National Convention and introducing the young delegate who announced New Mexico's tally during the roll call of states.
Trump won the nomination Tuesday night, and New York put him over the top.
Some prominent Republicans have stayed away from the convention, but Martinez has been a visible presence in Cleveland.
Trump criticized Martinez in May at a campaign appearance in New Mexico, but later said he wanted her support. Martinez is the nation's first female Hispanic governor.
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7:25 p.m.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is blaming what he calls are "Clinton Democrats" for a Senate standoff that's blocked President Barack Obama's request for money to fight the Zika virus.
Congress is now on a seven-week recess, and left Washington without acting on the Zika money. Democrats objected to a GOP proposal that would block Planned Parenthood clinics in Puerto Rico from getting money to fight the virus.
McConnell is blaming the impasses on Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
The Kentucky lawmaker is speaking later Tuesday night at the convention but some of his remarks are being released beforehand.
McConnell says he wonders what Democrats "think public service is about." He says the presidential election will answer this basic question: "Who is looking out for us?"
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7:15 p.m.
Donald Trump's son Donald Jr. cast the final votes his father needed to become the Republican presidential nominee.
The younger Trump was on the floor of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland and told the excited activists in the auditorium that New York was casting 89 votes for Trump and six for Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
He then shouted out: "Congratulations, Dad, we love you."
Donald Jr. says he's watched as his father has built a movement and he says that movement has given Americans a voice again.
Also on the convention floor are some of Donald Trump's other children, including Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump.
Delegates on the floor broke into cheers and waved signs as the song "New York, New York" played at the Quicken Loans Arena.
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7:10 p.m.
Make it official: The Republican Party has nominated Donald Trump for president.
And now the New York billionaire has completed a remarkable rise from political outsider to major party nominee for the White House.
New York put him over the top in the delegate count Tuesday night at the Republican National Convention.
There was a disruptive fight on Monday night over the party's rules, but a day later that was history.
There was little drama as party delegates united behind the real estate mogul and reality TV star.
Tiffany Trump, daughter of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, speaks on the second day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie speaks during the second day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, speaks during the second day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, speaks during the second day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Delegates cheer on the convention floor during the second day session of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Philippine court clears Arroyo of plunder, orders her freed
MANILA, Philippines (AP) The Philippine Supreme Court on Tuesday dismissed a plunder case against former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and ordered her freed immediately after nearly five years of hospital detention a decision the grateful ex-leader indicated can help her deal with those who "through self-serving interpretation and implementation of the law" made her suffer.
The 15 justices voted 11-4 to grant Arroyo's petition seeking to dismiss the case before the special anti-graft Sandiganbayan court because of insufficient evidence, Supreme Court spokesman Theodore Te said. The case involved the alleged misuse of 366 million pesos ($7.8 million) from the state lottery agency, the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office.
Arroyo thanked the court "for finally stopping the persecution I had unjustly gone through the last five years" and President Rodrigo Duterte "for allowing due process to take its course."
FILE - In this Feb. 23, 2012 file photo, former Philippine President and now Congresswoman Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, center, arrives at a Pasay City Court for her arraignment on electoral fraud charges in Manila. The Philippine Supreme Court has dismissed the plunder charge against former PresidentArroyo, ordering her immediate release from nearly five years of hospital detention. Supreme Court spokesman Theodore Te said Tuesday, July 19, 2016, the 15 justices voted 11-4 granting Arroyos petition seeking the dismissal of the remaining plunder case against her before an anti-graft court for lack of evidence. The case is about the alleged misuse of 366 million pesos ($7.8 million) of Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office fund. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez, File)
She released a statement while still detained in the hospital, with the serving of the court's order for an immediate release apparently delayed by paperwork.
"It is my fervent hope that nobody else will suffer the persecution that had been levied on me through self-serving interpretation and implementation of the law," she said. "And that the disregard for truth for which I was made to suffer be dealt with accordingly at the soonest possible time."
Arroyo was detained under former President Benigno Aquino III, who accused her of corruption and misrule. Aquino's successor, Duterte, however, has said the plunder case against her was weak. She rejected his offer of a pardon because it would require that she be first convicted, preferring to fight the allegation.
Aquino has not commented on the court decision. But his former justice secretary and now Senator Leila de Lima said the Supreme Court seems to have assumed a role as a "trier of facts" in the case, supplanting the anti-graft court's assessment when it declared there was insufficient evidence of guilt.
"It's disappointing," she told reporters. "Why did they have to wait for the change in administration to issue that ruling?"
Jesus Dureza, who had been Arroyo's adviser on peace talks with communist and Muslim rebels told reporters: "I rejoice over this decision that has already given her what she rightly deserves which is justice."
Dureza said he congratulated Arroyo in a phone call and heard many supporters in the background as she spoke. Dureza was reappointed as peace talks adviser under Duterte, who added a number of Arroyo allies to his Cabinet.
Arroyo, 69, finished her tumultuous nine-year term in 2010 but was arrested the following year on an election fraud charge, for which she was allowed to post bail. She was later charged with plunder. Despite her detention, she was re-elected to Congress in May. She stayed in a hospital rather than a prison because of her degenerative lumbar spine disease and neck ailment that prompted her to use a wheelchair and brace in public.
A daughter of a former Philippine president and a classmate of former U.S. President Bill Clinton at Georgetown University, Arroyo had been a senator and vice president before suddenly rising to the presidency in 2001 after then-President Joseph Estrada was ousted in a revolt she helped lead.
She won regular elections in 2004 but her presidency was rocked by a series of corruption and vote-rigging scandals, including wiretapped conversations with an election official where some alleged she discussed ensuring her vote lead. Arroyo admitted talking to an election official and apologized for her "lapse in judgment" in making such a call but said the conversation occurred after the votes had been counted.
Raul Lambino, one of Arroyo's lawyers, said the mood turned jubilant in Arroyo's hospital room when word leaked that the country's highest court was set to strike down the only criminal case keeping her detained. Arroyo was smiling in the picture he took with her.
Another Arroyo lawyer, Ferdinand Topacio, said the Supreme Court "has once again proven itself to be the final bastion of justice and the rule of law."
The ruling, he said, validated the position of the Arroyo camp that the charges against her were "nothing more than disingenuous attempts at political persecution."
"We are reminding the Supreme Court that the Arroyo government left behind 1,206 victims of political killings and 206 victims of enforced disappearances among activists, peasants, and human rights workers," said Cristina Palabay, secretary general of the human rights group Karapatan. She said the 2009 massacre of 58 people, including 32 journalists, in the world's worst single killing of media workers, also happened during Arroyo's term.
Karapatan said "while plunderers and murderers like Arroyo are set free from prison, more than 500 political prisoners remain in jail, many of them arrested during the Arroyo regime."
As of late Tuesday, Arroyo was still detained. Her lawyers waited for a copy of the court order but left the Supreme Court without one at the end of office hours, saying they will just return on Wednesday.
Under the court's procedure, Lambino said, the Supreme Court sheriff has to give a copy of the order to the anti-graft court Sandiganbayan, whose sheriff would provide a copy to the police security office in charge of Arroyo's detention. The police security would then release her.
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AP writer Jim Gomez contributed to this report.
Police come under gunfire at gun shop near Atlanta
ATLANTA (AP) A gunman inside a gun shop near Atlanta began shooting at police officers, who returned fire after responding to reports of a break-in at the business shortly before dawn Tuesday, Marietta police said.
No injuries were reported and four suspects have been apprehended at the Deercreek Gunshop in Marietta, northwest of Atlanta, Marietta police Officer Brittany Wallace told The Associated Press.
Officers responding to a report of a burglary noticed movement on top of and inside the building, and soon apprehended two suspects, Wallace said. A third suspect inside the business fired on the officers, and one of the lawmen returned fire, but no one was hit, police said. A fourth suspect came out of the business with his hands up, Wallace said.
Police used an armored police vehicle to make entry into the gun store because they didn't know if anyone else was inside the store, Wallace said in an interview shortly before 8 a.m.
By 10 a.m., police had determined that no other suspects were inside, she later told reporters at the scene.
Wallace said she didn't know exactly how the burglary report was received by police, but she said there were no signs of any type of ambush or attempt to lure officers to the store. Police nationwide have been on high alert in the wake of recent killings of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Video from a television news helicopter showed officers taking cover behind police cars outside the gun store.
"There are several officers, and our response to anything here lately has been that way," Wallace said. "We want to make sure the business is secure, but also the surroundings are secure for our safety."
Man accused of killing 5-year-old gets mental evaluation
GULFPORT, Miss. (AP) A psychiatric evaluation is underway pending trial for the man accused in the kidnapping, sexual assault and killing of a 5-year-old girl in Mississippi.
The Sun Herald reports (http://bit.ly/2a8ntui ) 31-year-old Alberto Julio Garcia is set for trial Oct. 10 on a capital murder charge.
Ja'Naya (juh-NAY'-uh) Thompson was reported missing from The Palms apartment complex in Gulfport the night of July 16, 2014. She was found dead the next morning, hanging by two socks in the bathroom of a vacant mobile home.
Authorities said an autopsy showed she was sexually assaulted and died of asphyxiation by strangulation the night she went missing.
In a status hearing Monday in Harrison County Circuit Court, a public defender told Judge Lisa Dodson that Garcia's psychiatric evaluation has not yet been completed.
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Judge sets March trial in police barracks ambush shooting
MILFORD, Pa. (AP) A judge has set a March trial for a man charged with fatally ambushing a state police trooper near a rural barracks in eastern Pennsylvania.
The order by Pike County Judge Gregory Chelak also says an out-of-county jury will be picked to hear the case of 33-year-old Eric Frein (freen).
Frein is charged with fatally shooting Cpl. Bryon Dickson II and wounding another trooper outside the Blooming Grove barracks in September 2014.
He led police on a tense 48-day manhunt before U.S. marshals caught him about 30 miles from the shooting scene. Frein has pleaded not guilty.
Rock climber sentenced to 10 years for killing mentor
GREENBELT, Md. (AP) A Virginia man has been sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for the voluntary manslaughter of his rock climbing mentor.
News outlets report that 31-year-old David DiPaolo of Bristow pleaded guilty in February to killing 69-year-old Geoffery Farrar at the Carderock Recreation Area in Bethesda, Maryland. He was sentenced Monday.
Investigators say that in 2013, DiPaolo and Farrar began arguing in Carderock's parking lot. The argument escalated and DiPaolo hit Farrar multiple times in the head with a claw hammer.
Farrar was taken to a hospital where he later died of his injuries.
DiPaolo's attorney, Michael Citara Manis, argued mental illness was a significant factor in the deadly confrontation. DiPaolo asked for the forgiveness of Farrar's family.
Govt lawyer: UK won't trigger EU exit talks before year end
LONDON (AP) A lawyer for the British government has confirmed that the country will not begin exit talks with the European Union this year.
Several British citizens are asking the High Court to rule that the government can't start the negotiations without approval from Parliament. A majority of lawmakers support remaining in the EU.
Prime Minister Theresa May has promised to uphold the decision of voters, who backed leaving the 28-nation bloc in a June 23 referendum.
Government lawyer Jason Coppel says May does not intend to trigger the EU treaty's Article 50 starting a two-year countdown to exit before the end of 2016.
He says that will allow time for the courts to consider the legal challenges.
GOP Rep. Steve King asks how minorities gave to civilization
CLEVELAND (AP) Iowa Republican U.S. Rep. Steve King, one of the most conservative members of Congress and a harsh critic of immigration, has questioned the contributions to civilization of groups of people who aren't white.
During an appearance Monday on MSNBC from the site of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, King responded to comments on the racial makeup of the convention crowd, which is largely white.
"This whole old white people business does get a little tired," he said. "I'd ask you to go back through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you're talking about? Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?"
FILE - In this Jan. 23, 2014, file photo, Republican U.S. Rep. Steve King of Iowa speaks in Des Moines. King questioned during a segment on MSNBC July 18, 2016, what groups of people have contributed more to civilization than whites. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, File)
When asked by host Chris Hayes whether he meant contributions by "white people," King made a more general statement. King said he was referring to "Western civilization itself, that's rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America, and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world. That's all of Western civilization," he said.
The comments sparked a heated response from Urban Radio Networks reporter April Ryan and Esquire writer Charles Pierce, who were also on the panel. Hayes quickly moved on with the segment after noting that, "If you're looking at the ledger of Western civilization, for every flourishing democracy, you have Hitler and Stalin as well."
In a later conversation between Ryan and Hayes on Periscope , Ryan said she was "kind of shaken" by what she described as King's "in my face racism." Hayes said he thought during the segment that a debate on "what's the best race" would be "preposterous."
Man stabs woman, her 3 daughters in French Alps resort
PARIS (AP) Authorities in southern France have detained a Moroccan man they said stabbed a woman and her three daughters Tuesday at an Alps resort, briefly sparking some panic in a nation reeling from its third major attack in 18 months.
Jean-Marc Duprat, a deputy mayor for the town of Laragne-Monteglin in the Hautes-Alpes region, says the mother and her girls, aged 8, 12 and 14, were vacationing at a nearby resort when a man from a neighboring apartment attacked them Tuesday morning as they ate their breakfast.
All four were expected to recover, the deputy mayor said.
Duprat initially said the man was upset that the girls were wearing shorts and T-shirts. He later said that did not appear to be the case and that the attacker's motive was not known.
"At this time, we don't have a firm answer," Raphael Balland, prosecutor for the region, told reporters.
Balland said the attacker, who was on vacation with his wife and children, was brandishing an 8-centimeter (3-inch), folding knife.
The youngest girl, who was the most gravely wounded, was out of danger following surgery at the hospital in Grenoble, Duprat said. Her mother and her two sisters were recovering at the hospital in Gap, a town closer to where the violence occurred.
Laragne-Monteglin is 180 kilometers (110 miles) northwest of Nice, where a Tunisian man killed 84 people on July 14 by driving a truck through a holiday crowd on Bastille Day.
The July 14 carnage has deeply upset a country still reeling from the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, which killed 130 people and a separate January 2015 Paris attack that targeted journalists at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and Jews at a kosher supermarket.
Friends recall slain officers as residents gather to mourn
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) Across this city, shocked residents gathered Tuesday in churches, at community vigils and a motorcycle rally to offer support for the law enforcement community and the three officers who were slain in an ambush by a gunman.
Families with children, drivers passing through and law enforcement officers from outside the area have been laying flowers and balloons or hanging crosses at a makeshift memorial in front of the B-Quick convenience store near where the officers were killed Sunday.
Tuesday evening a procession of a few hundred motorcyclists roared down Airline Highway and gathered at police headquarters to show their respects.
People hold hands in prayer at a candlelight vigil for Baton Rouge police officer Montrell Jackson, outside Istrouma High School, where he graduated in 2001, in Baton Rouge, La., Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Multiple police officers were killed and wounded Sunday in a shooting near a gas station in Baton Rouge, less than two weeks after a black man was shot and killed by police here, sparking nightly protests across the city. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Funeral arrangements for two of the officers have been made public: Montrell Jackson, a 10-year police force veteran with a newborn at home, will be laid to rest Monday. Visitation for Matthew Gerald, an Iraq war veteran who became a Baton Rouge police officer less than a year ago, will be held Thursday and Friday. Funeral services will be held Friday.
Arrangements for 45-year-old Brad Garafola, an East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff's deputy and a father of four, have not been made public.
The three are among 10 law enforcement officers killed over a span of 10 turbulent days around the country by attackers at a protest march in Dallas, a courthouse in Michigan and now a convenience store in Baton Rouge.
Even as Baton Rouge was mourning the three officers, news came Tuesday that a police in Kansas City was shot and killed while sitting in his patrol car.
In Sunday's Baton Rouge shooting, Gavin Long, a former Marine from Missouri dressed in black and carrying extra ammunition, opened fire on officers about 8:45 a.m., police said.
The officers lived in the area of Denham Springs, a quiet bedroom community across the Amite River from Baton Rouge, which has been in turmoil for two weeks. Tensions rose sharply after the death of Alton Sterling, 37, a black man killed by white Baton Rouge officers after a scuffle at a convenience store. The killing was captured on cellphone video, sparking widespread protests against police treatment of the African-American community.
Faith and community leaders, black and white, gathered at a Baton Rouge church Tuesday to discuss ways to improve police relations with local black residents.
More than 100 people with Together Baton Rouge held signs bearing the words "We refuse to be divided."
The group condemned recent violence but also called for more community policing tactics.
"Unless relationships are established, there will be no changes. Police officers need to get out of their cars and have one-on-one conversations with people in their community," said the Rev. Lee Wesley, who is black.
Wesley said the city needs to look at how potential law officers are vetted. People need to show more respect for police officers, but police officers need to show more respect for residents, he said.
One of the people paying his respects Tuesday to law enforcement officers was LSU football coach Les Miles, a prominent figure in a city where the Tigers' purple and gold colors can be seen flying everywhere.
Miles met privately in unannounced meetings with the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office and Baton Rouge Police.
LSU spokesman Michael Bonnette confirmed the visits with authorities after the coach was seen entering police headquarters, where he spent more than an hour, by The Associated Press.
Bonnette says Miles wanted to express his support and discuss his appreciation for the courage police show in putting their lives on the line to protect their communities.
In Washington, President Barack Obama met with Attorney General Loretta Lynch, FBI Director James Comey and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson. He said after the meeting that what happened in Baton Rouge is a reminder of the extraordinary risks and dangers that law enforcement officers take every day "to protect us and our way of life."
The president said he'll use his remaining months as president to figure out which practices work best, and how to help rebuild trust between police and the communities they serve.
A makeshift memorial sits in front of the B-Quick convenience store in Baton Rouge, La., Tuesday, July 19, 2016, after law enforcement officers were killed on Sunday. (AP Photo/Max Becherer)
People attend a candlelight vigil for Baton Rouge police officer Montrell Jackson, outside Istrouma High School, where he graduated in 2001, in Baton Rouge, La., Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Multiple police officers were killed and wounded Sunday morning in a shooting near a gas station in Baton Rouge, less than two weeks after a black man was shot and killed by police here, sparking nightly protests across the city. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
A Baton Rouge police officer gets a thumbs-up as a convoy of about 300 motorcycle riders turn into the Baton Rouge Police headquarters from Airline Highway during a "Law Enforcement Support" ride in Baton Rouge, La., Tuesday, July 19, 2016 . After the ride the bikers gathered in front of the headquarters to praise the law enforcement officers and pray. (AP Photo/Max Becherer)
A convoy of about 300 motorcycle riders collect in front of the Baton Rouge Police headquarters and pray with law enforcement officers after a "Law Enforcement Support" ride in Baton Rouge, La., Tuesday, July 19, 2016 . (AP Photo/Max Becherer)
A makeshift memorial sits in front of the B-Quick convenience store Tuesday, July 19, 2016, in Baton Rouge, La., after law enforcement officers were killed on Sunday. A former Marine set out to ambush police in Baton Rouge, authorities said Monday. (AP Photo/Max Becherer)
Jacob Rogers and Whitney Welch listen during a candlelight vigil for Baton Rouge police officer Montrell Jackson, outside Istrouma High School, where he graduated in 2001, in Baton Rouge, La., Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Multiple police officers were killed and wounded Sunday morning in a shooting near a gas station in Baton Rouge, less than two weeks after a black man was shot and killed by police here, sparking nightly protests across the city. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
This undated photo made available by the Baton Rouge Police Dept. shows police officer Matthew Gerald. Gerald, 41, was killed by a gunman in Baton Rouge, LA., Sunday, July 17, 2016. (Baton Rouge Police Dept. via AP)
This undated photo made available by the Baton Rouge Police Dept. shows officer Montrell Jackson. Jackson, 32, has been identified as one of the police officers killed in a shooting early Sunday, July 17, 2016, in Baton Rouge, La. (Baton Rouge Police Dept. via AP)
This undated photo made available by the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office shows deputy Brad Garafola. Garafola and at least two other Baton Rouge law enforcement officers investigating a report of a man with an assault rifle were killed Sunday, July 17, 2016, less than two weeks after a black man was fatally shot by police here in a confrontation that sparked nightly protests that reverberated nationwide. (East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office via AP)
This frame grab made from a video posted on YouTube on July 10, 2016, shows Gavin Eugene Long speaking as his online persona Cosmo Setepenra. Long killed law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge, La., on Sunday, July 17, 2016. (YouTube via AP)
Pastor Fredrick Sweetwyne of Jordan United Methodist Church, center, and other members of Together Baton Rouge, a faith and community organization of leaders from 100 congregations and organizations, stand together at St. Paul Lutheran Church during a press conference in Baton Rouge, La. Tuesday, July 19, 2016 . Leaders of the organization addressed the shooting of law enforcement officers on Sunday. (AP Photo/Max Becherer)
Trumpeter Craig Michelet, left, plays following a "Law Enforcement Support" ride in front of the Baton Rouge Police headquarters in Baton Rouge, La., Tuesday, July 19, 2016 . A convoy of about 300 motorcycle riders attended the event. (AP Photo/Max Becherer)
People hold hands at a candlelight vigil for Baton Rouge police officer Montrell Jackson, outside Istrouma High School, where he graduated in 2001, in Baton Rouge, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Multiple police officers were killed and wounded Sunday morning in a shooting near a gas station in Baton Rouge, less than two weeks after a black man was shot and killed by police here, sparking nightly protests across the city. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
The Latest: Police: No arrests after afternoon of protests
CLEVELAND (AP) The Latest on demonstrations and gatherings outside the Republican National Convention (all times local):
7:30 p.m.
Cleveland police say no one has been arrested after an afternoon of large protests in and around downtown.
Law enforcement on bikes patrol downtown Cleveland, Tuesday, July 19, 2016, during the second day of the Republican convention. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Spokeswoman Sgt. Jennifer Ciaccia (chahch) says police are trying to work with protesters. She said that has been the department's posture all along.
She said Tuesday evening that five people have been arrested in total, including one person on an outstanding warrant, one person for trying to steal a state trooper's gas mask and three people who allegedly climbed flag poles at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on Tuesday morning.
Some marches continued Tuesday night, and Cleveland police chief Calvin Williams was one of several officers who helped disperse what he called an unlawful gathering blocking a city street.
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6:15 p.m.
Police officers in downtown Cleveland are working to contain several groups of protesters marching in the streets near the Republican National Convention.
Officers lined up in a wall of rolling bicycles and kept demonstrators from moving forward just blocks from the convention arena.
Another line of police officers forced a different group of protesters to turn toward Lake Erie and away from the arena.
Earlier Tuesday, a few brief skirmishes began in downtown's Public Square. It wasn't immediately known if there have been any arrests.
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5:20 p.m.
Protesters have spilled into the streets in downtown Cleveland after a few brief skirmishes broke out just blocks from Republican National Convention.
Some of the protesters appeared to be marching toward the arena where the convention is being held, while others split off in different directions.
Earlier Tuesday, police surrounded downtown's Public Square to keep protesters away from each other.
Cleveland's police chief told officers to stop anyone from entering the area. But officers now are allowing people to come and go.
The police presence has ramped up considerably since the scuffles began.
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5 p.m.
Lines of police officers on bike and foot in Cleveland are keeping pockets of protesters separated after brief scuffles broke out.
Cleveland's police chief was talking to the crowd before one skirmish started in downtown's Public Square.
The scene settled down quickly, and after order was restored the protesters outside the Republican National Convention were being kept apart.
The hundreds of officers and media members are outnumbering the protesters from anti-government, anti-Muslim and conservative religious groups.
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4:30 p.m.
Police in Cleveland have broken up a couple of skirmishes between demonstrators outside the Republican National Convention.
A scuffle broke out Tuesday afternoon when conspiracy theorist and radio show host Alex Jones started speaking in downtown's Public Square.
Police with bicycles pushed back a surging crowd, and Jones was quickly whisked away.
Minutes later, more officers on bicycles formed a line between a group supporting the Communist Party and a conservative religious group.
There was no immediate word on arrests or injuries.
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1:45 p.m.
Members of the support team for the California delegation to the Republican National Convention have been hit with a norovirus outbreak.
Health officials say about a dozen people are affected by the virus, with symptoms including vomiting and diarrhea.
Pete Schade (shade), health commissioner for Ohio's Erie County, says the individuals are members of the logistics team for the convention delegates.
Schade says none of the delegates appear to have been affected. He says the symptoms were first reported Thursday as logistics members arrived at a hotel about an hour west of Cleveland.
Cynthia Bryant, executive director of the California GOP, told delegation members to wash their hands frequently, avoid shaking hands and not to share food.
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11:30 a.m.
The Cleveland police chief says 300 officers from more than a dozen law enforcement agencies are being deployed on bicycles in downtown Cleveland during the Republican National Convention.
Chief Calvin Williams said at a Tuesday morning news briefing that the decision to use such a large number of bicycles this week was based on a recommendation from police officials in Charlotte, North Carolina, which hosted the 2012 Democratic National Convention. Williams says the 300 bicycle officers are divided into two shifts.
Williams also says three people were arrested and charged with criminal mischief Tuesday morning for climbing flagpoles outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, where they hung an anti-Donald Trump banner.
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10:10 a.m.
Media outlets are reporting that four people have been arrested in Cleveland after climbing 60-foot flagpoles outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum to hang a large banner that says, "Don't 'Trump' Our Communities."
The arrests were made Tuesday morning on the second day of the Republican National Convention.
The Rock Hall issued a statement Tuesday that says although the Rock Hall is an "icon of free speech," officials discourage "illegal actions that stress our first responders."
The banner also included "Ban Fracking" and "Tear Down The Wall," a reference to presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's call to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico to stop illegal immigration.
Cleveland firefighters removed the banner Tuesday morning.
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9:25 a.m.
A group of doctors and nurses plans to march in Cleveland in protest of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Stand Together Against Trump will march Thursday on the final day of the four-day Republican National Convention.
Fears about violent clashes between groups supporting and opposing Trump's nomination didn't materialize on the first day of the convention. The one reported arrest as Cleveland police and law enforcement officers from across the U.S. maintained a visible presence downtown.
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This story has been corrected to show that the Stand Together Against Trump group will march Thursday, not Tuesday.
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12:30 a.m.
The first day of rallies outside the Republican National Convention featured angry rhetoric, armed attendees and an arrest, but authorities avoided the sort of violence they fear could still flare up.
Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams told reporters Monday evening, "So far, so good."
Hundreds of Donald Trump supporters and foes had held dueling rallies a half-mile apart.
Williams says bicycle officers moved in several times to keep sniping between groups from becoming violent.
The one arrest involved a person on the city's Public Square who had a felony warrant and also is being charged with resisting arrest and obstructing official business.
The riverside pro-Trump rally attracted about a dozen attendees who showed up with handguns strapped to their belts as allowed under Ohio law. Blocks away, protesters shouted about police mistreatment.
A person walks past a security fence in downtown on Tuesday, July 19, 2016, in Cleveland, during the second day of the Republican convention. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
Law enforcement patrol downtown Cleveland, as people look on, Tuesday, July 19, 2016, during the second day of the Republican convention. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
US rights envoy urges Cambodian political talks
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) The top U.S. diplomat handling human rights issues called Tuesday for Cambodia's government to release its political prisoners and resume talks with the opposition in order to ease political tensions.
Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Tom Malinowski told reporters that he also has urged the government to thoroughly carry out a promised investigation of the killing of prominent political commentator Kem Ley, who was shot dead earlier this month.
Cambodian officials say the killer confessed to murdering Kem Ley over a debt, but there is a widespread belief he was killed because of his criticism of Prime Minister Hun Sen's government. Malinowski, who is on a two-day visit to the country, paid his respects to the slain commentator at the Buddhist temple where his body is being held pending a funeral.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of Sates Tom Malinowski smiles during a press conference at U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Malinowski wrapped up his two-day official visit to Cambodia. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)
Referring to the detentions of opposition members and workers for non-government organizations, he said the United States encourages the Cambodian government "to release and drop charges against people who were defending the rights and freedom of the Cambodian people."
For the government to shore up it legitimacy, he said, it must take such concrete steps before local elections next year and a general election in 2018.
Hun Sen's government last year began cracking down on the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party through the court system, which is considered a tool of the ruling Cambodian People's Party.
The opposition party's top two leaders face charges they allege are specious and politically motivated. Other party members and NGO workers also have come under legal and even physical attack.
Foreign Ministry Secretary of State Ouch Borith said he told Malinowski the legal charges were not politically motivated and that the opposition was responsible for the political tension because it broke a 2014 truce with the government by making provocative political statements.
Malinowski told the journalists that the U.S. believes it is important to return to the "culture of dialogue" that was embodied in the 2014 agreement.
"In our view it is very much in the interest of Cambodian people for political dialogue to resume," he said. "I think it is interest of the government for political dialogue to resume. I don't think anyone would benefit from continued confrontation."
He added that both sides would have to work hard and be willing to compromise to make a dialogue work.
Malinowski stressed at a forum with journalists that the United States does not support or oppose any Cambodian political party or movement.
It supports everyone having a fair and equal chance "to express their views, to advance their interests and to compete in the political arena," he said.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of Sates Tom Malinowski speaks during a press conference at U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Malinowski wrapped up his two-day official visit to Cambodia. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)
UK police warn caller who reports 'Pokemon' stolen
LONDON (AP) British police have released an audio recording of a call to the emergency 999 line in which a youth reported his Pokemon had been stolen.
Police were not amused.
The caller was chewed out from tying up the line, intended for people in life or death situations. He also received a text message that misusing the 999 system is a criminal offense.
The recording, made Friday by Gloucestershire police, was released to urge people not to call 999 unless it is a genuine emergency.
There have been many incidents linked to the game.
Serbian police arrest 6 people smuggling 78 migrants
BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) Serbian police said Tuesday they have detained six people for smuggling 78 migrants trying to reach the European Union.
Police said they discovered the migrants in two separate incidents near the Bulgarian border 37 migrants from Afghanistan and Pakistan were hidden in a van intercepted on a regional road, while another 41 people from Syria have been caught crossing illegally from Bulgaria.
Serbia has announced stepping up efforts to stop the migrant influx, including forming joint police and army teams that will patrol the borders with Bulgaria and Macedonia. The country wants to avoid a migrant pileup after EU member Hungary recently introduced tough anti-migrant measures.
The Serbian army commander, Gen. Ljubisa Dikovic, and senior police official Vladimir Rebic jointly toured the border area with Bulgaria on Tuesday, a statement from the Defense Ministry said.
The statement said the joint forces are "currently being formed," but didn't specify when they will take up positions. An army general will be in charge, the statement added.
The Balkan route was closed in March, but the flow of migrants has persisted, with several hundred people entering Serbia from Bulgaria and Macedonia. Hundreds have been trapped in makeshift camps along the Serbia-Hungary border with no facilities.
Migrants fleeing war and poverty in their countries want to reach wealthy EU nations such as Germany or Sweden. But the EU countries also have been eager to stem the flow after more than 1 million people arrived in 2015.
Galleries to gelato: Best of Florence
FLORENCE, Italy (AP) The skies were clouding over as I strode briskly across that famous bridge, the Ponte Vecchio, ready for a productive day checking off Florentine must-sees.
Slight problem: The first museum on my list was open, but the ticket office was closed.
OK, then, on to the Uffizi Gallery. Except this time both ticket office and museum were closed; I had forgotten it was Monday.
In this April 22, 2016 photo, visitors to the Accademia Gallery in Florence, Italy, pause to admire and take photos of Michelangelo's David. The 17-foot-high marble statue is a Renaissance masterpiece and a must-see in Florence. (Michelle Locke via AP)
A fine rain began to fall as I wandered listlessly past the open arches of the building next door, the statue-studded Loggia dei Lanzi. This wasn't going at all as planned.
And then it hit me. Wait. This was the Piazza della Signoria, where novelist E.M. Forster's adorable Lucy Honeychurch witnessed a stabbing moments after complaining about the dullness of life in "A Room With a View." And those had to be THE steps where the brooding George Emerson carried Lucy's fainting form.
Sunshine filtered through. I had found Florence. Or rather, it had found me.
If you're planning a trip here, you could do worse than wander until you find what you didn't know you were looking for. Here are a few starting points.
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WHAT'S NEW
The Opera Duomo Museum, devoted to art created for the famous Florence duomo (cathedral), has been given a major makeover and expansion. A highlight is the exhibition hall featuring a replica of the former facade of the cathedral. A 15-euro pass (about $17) will get you access to the museum as well as the cathedral dome and bell tower, both with steps to the top. Open daily except the first Tuesday of the month, but check website for unexpected closures. Piazza del Duomo 9, http://www.museumflorence.com/museum .
The Central Market (Piazza del Mercato Centrale on Via dell'Ariento) has a bright and bustling remodeled second floor, home to food stands, a restaurant, pizzeria, wine academy, cooking school and more. Open daily, 10 a.m.-midnight.
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CLASSIC ATTRACTIONS
If there is one must-see in Florence it's Michelangelo's David. Yes, there are lines, crowds and a forest of smartphones waving in front of you, but all that falls away as you round the corner to the long gallery and confront 17 feet of cool, concentrated, confident youth. Galleria del'Accademia, Via Ricasoli 58/60. Open Tuesday-Sunday, 8:15 a.m.-6:50 p.m., about $14.
The Uffizi Gallery, set in an imposing 16th-century building, is home to outstanding art, including Giotto's altarpiece, the Ognissanti Madonna, which revolutionized painting by portraying the human figure in perspective, not just two dimensions. Piazzale degli Uffizi 6. Tuesday-Sunday, 8:15 a.m.-6:50 p.m., around $10.
You can't miss the Duomo, the Gothic cathedral encrusted in pink, green and white marble that is a striking feature of the city. The inside is less impressive but is open most days 10 a.m.-5 p.m. and free.
The Ponte Vecchio isn't the most beautiful bridge in the world, but it is interesting, with its lineup of stores, mostly jewelers and souvenir sellers. It was big news in May when a sinkhole opened up, swallowing a score of cars on a stretch of road between Ponte Vecchio and the bridge immediately east, Ponte Grazie. The mayor of Florence vows to repairs completed by November.
Around sunset, head to the Piazzale Michelangelo, on a hill on the south side of the Arno, for terrific views of the city. You can get here by taxi, the No. 12 bus or by walking about 20 minutes from the Uffizi Gallery.
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GETTING AROUND
Florence is a walking city; bring comfy shoes. If you have a car or hire a driver, consider emulating Miss Honeychurch and cousin Charlotte and head for the hills. You're in the middle of Chianti wine country with several estates to visit, including Poggio Casciano, a 14th-century villa that is part of the Ruffino wine company and about a 30-minute drive from the city. The estate produces Modus, a "super Tuscan" red blend of sangiovese, merlot and cabernet sauvignon. By appointment only; reserve tastings and tours, http://www.ruffino.com.
Farther afield is the Romitorio di Serelle, about 24 miles from Florence, where you can rent apartments by the week or have lunch on the property's wide terrace perched above rolling vineyards. http://www.romitoriodiserelle.it/
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TIPS
If you're planning on visiting museums, consider buying tickets online; book entrance times to skip long lines.
More into shopping than sculpture? Check out the Santa Maria Novella, an apothecary that traces its history back 600 years. Don't miss the displays of antique remedies such as anti-hysteria pills as well as the beautifully packaged perfumes and other products available for modern consumers. Via della Scala 16.
For a touch of local night life, the Piazza Santo Spirito on the south side of the Arno is lined with cafes and bars.
A hot spot for gelato is La Carraia, Piazza Nazario Sauro 25R. Work up a literary appetite and order something in honor of Miss Honeychurch, who "loved iced coffee and meringues." Enjoy your treats on the nearby Ponte alla Carraia where you'll have more room, and, naturally, a view.
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Online:
http://www.firenzeturismo.it/en/
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Michelle Locke tweets at https://twitter.com/Locke_Michelle
This April 19, 2016 photo shows antique pills that promised to cure hysteria-related complaints, at the Santa Maria Novella pharmacy in Florence, Italy, that was founded by Dominican friars in the 13th century. You can't buy anti-hysterical pills today, but you can find a wide variety of perfumes and other products. (Michelle Locke via AP)
In this April 22, 2016 photo, visitors peek through a doorway at the Tribuna of the Uffizi, a domed octagonal room displaying paintings and statues in Florence, Italy. (Michelle Locke via AP)
This April 19, 2016 photo shows a lineup of scent bottles siting on a horseshoe shaped counter in the Santa Maria Novella pharmacy in Florence, Italy. At times an apothecary and herbalist shop, this is one of the oldest pharmacies in the world, tracing its roots back to 1221. (Michelle Locke via AP)
This photo taken April 18, 2016, shows the old city of Florence, Italy, flanking the River Arno as viewed from the Piazzale Michelangelo. The piazzale, a square in the hills above the city, is a great place to take in the views, especially at sunset. (Michelle Locke via AP)
This photo taken April 18, 2016, shows the old city of Florence, Italy, flanking the River Arno as viewed from the Piazzale Michelangelo. The piazzale, a square in the hills above the city, is a great place to take in the views, especially at sunset. (Michelle Locke via AP)
This April 19, 2016 photo shows a view of the Ponte Vecchio from the banks of the River Arno in Florence, Italy. The bridge is home to several jewelry and souvenir shops and is an instantly recognizable landmark of Florence. (Michelle Locke via AP)
In this April 20, 2016 photo, a glass of wine sits on a table on the terrace of the Romitorio di Serelle, a property in the wine country surrounding Florence, Italy, where you can rent apartments or stop for lunch. (Michelle Locke via AP)
The Latest: Maryland joins 2 other states in suing VW
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) The Latest on lawsuits filed against Volkswagen over vehicles equipped with software that cheated on emissions tests (all times local):
1 p.m.
Maryland is joining New York and Massachusetts in a legal action against Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche over diesel emissions cheating.
The lawsuits, announced Tuesday, allege the German automaker and its affiliates broke state environmental laws by selling vehicles equipped with software that concealed true emissions in order to pass government tests.
The suits seek "substantial penalties" based partially on a calculation of the duration of the alleged violations.
VW agreed last month to spend up to $15.3 billion to settle other consumer and government claims. The attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts say that did not resolve claims regarding state environmental laws.
In a statement Volkswagen says it is "regrettable" that states are suing while it is in talks with authorities about a national resolution over the emissions scandal.
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11:45 a.m.
Volkswagen says it's "regrettable" that states are filing lawsuits over diesel emissions cheating while it is still in discussion with U.S. federal and state authorities.
New York state and Massachusetts announced lawsuits Tuesday. They allege that Volkswagen and its affiliates defrauded buyers by selling more than 40,000 vehicles in the two states that were equipped with software that concealed the true level of emissions in order to pass government tests.
Maryland's attorney general is also expected to file suit.
VW says in a statement that the allegations are "essentially not new." It says it has been addressing them in discussions with the U.S. Department of Justice, the Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board. The company says it hopes for a comprehensive national resolution of all remaining issues.
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11:10 a.m.
A Volkswagen spokesman is declining to comment on lawsuits being brought by New York state and Massachusetts over diesel emissions cheating.
The lawsuits, announced Tuesday, allege that Volkswagen and its affiliates defrauded buyers by selling more than 40,000 vehicles that were equipped with software that concealed the true level of emissions in order to pass government tests.
The legal action seeks "substantial penalties" that would be based on a calculation of the duration of the alleged violations.
The lawsuits come after the German automaker agreed to spend up to $15.3 billion to settle other consumer and government claims. The attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts argue that did not resolve claims regarding violating state environmental laws and did not cover all the affected vehicles.
Maryland's attorney general is also expected to file suit.
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10:25 a.m.
New York state and Massachusetts are suing Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche over diesel emissions cheating.
The lawsuits, announced Tuesday, allege that Volkswagen and its affiliates defrauded buyers by selling more than 40,000 vehicles that were equipped with software that concealed the true level of emissions in order to pass government tests.
Further, the suit says the German automaker submitted false documents to the two states as part of an effort to conceal the cheating.
The legal action comes after the German automaker agreed to spend up to $15.3 billion to other settle consumer and government lawsuits
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says the lawsuits expose "a culture of deeply rooted arrogance" and should serve as a warning to other companies that illegality will not be tolerated.
Brazil's top judge overrules suspension of WhatsApp service
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) The chief justice of Brazil's Supreme Court quickly struck down a lower court decision that had blocked the WhatsApp messaging service nationwide for several hours Tuesday, affecting almost 100 million users.
Chief Justice Ricardo Lewandowski ruled on a motion filed by a political party seeking to have the Rio de Janeiro judge's order thrown out.
Early in the day, Judge Daniela Barbosa ordered the suspension because Facebook, WhatsApp's parent company, would not help a police investigation. The app was suspended at 2 p.m. local time.
A man checks his cell phone outside a shopping mall in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. A Brazilian judge has ordered the nationwide suspension of the instant messaging application WhatsApp because it won't help out in a police investigation. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)
Lewandowski ruled after the service had been blacked out almost four hours. Telecom operators said they were waiting to be notified formally so they could put the messaging system online in Brazil.
In her decision, Barbosa said Facebook showed "total disrespect for Brazilian laws." She argued that the company was repeatedly asked to intercept messages sent through the service to help in a criminal investigation in the city of Caxias, outside Rio.
WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum had said the company was working to get the app running again. "It's shocking that less than two months after Brazilian people and lawmakers loudly rejected blocks of services like WhatsApp, history is repeating itself," Koum said on his Facebook page.
Justice Minister Alexandre de Moraes also said he wanted a solution that would prevent decisions like Barbosa's.
It was at least the third such ruling against WhatsApp this year in Brazil. A judge in the northeastern state of Alagoas blocked the app over a separate investigation in February, and WhatsApp was blocked in Sao Paulo for 12 hours in December by a judge in that region.
Hundreds in Michigan mourn officer killed in Dallas shooting
REDFORD TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP) Hundreds of officers from Texas and across Michigan gathered in suburban Detroit for a funeral for Michael Krol (KROLE), who was among five officers killed this month in Dallas.
A large U.S. flag hung from fire trucks in Wayne County's Redford Township as mourners arrived Tuesday at St. Robert Bellarmine Catholic Church.
The Michigan native moved to Dallas to become an officer. Another funeral was held for the 40-year-old officer in Texas on Friday.
Pallbearers from various law enforcement departments carry the casket of Dallas Police officer Michael Krol into the church into St. Robert Bellarmine Catholic Church before his funeral mass, Tuesday morning, July 19, 2016 in Redford, Township, Mich. Hundreds of officers from Texas and across Michigan gathered in suburban Detroit for a funeral for Krol, who was among five officers killed this month in Dallas. Krol, a, Michigan native, moved to Dallas to become an officer. (Todd McInturf/Detroit News via AP)
Detroit Officer Derrick Knox tells The Detroit News that Krol "died doing what he loved to do and what was on his heart, which was to protect and serve others."
Krol was among five officers killed by a gunman during a march to protest recent fatal police shootings of black men in Minnesota and Louisiana.
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This story has been corrected to show that Redford Township is in Wayne County, not Macomb County.
A woman pins a blue police ribbon on the lapel of a police officer outside St. Robert Bellarmine Catholic Church before the funeral for Dallas Police officer Michael Krol, Tuesday morning, July 19, 2016 in Redford Township, Mich. Hundreds of officers from Texas and across Michigan gathered in suburban Detroit for a funeral for Krol, who was among five officers killed this month in Dallas. Krol, a Michigan native, moved to Dallas to become an officer. (Todd McInturf/Detroit News via AP)
Complaint filed against 2 prosecutors in police death case
WASHINGTON (AP) A George Washington University law professor is filing complaints against two Baltimore prosecutors over the investigation and prosecution of six police officers in the death of a black man injured in a police van.
John Banzhaf III said Tuesday he is filing complaints seeking the disbarment of Chief Deputy State's Attorney Michael Schatzow and Deputy State's Attorney Janice Bledsoe with Maryland's Attorney Grievance Commission. He filed a similar complaint against State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby.
Banzhaf says prosecutors violated officers' constitutional rights by not turning over exculpatory evidence and professional conduct rules requiring prosecutors to refrain from prosecuting a charge unless it is supported by probable cause.
Poland backs lower retirement age: 60 for women, 65 for men
WARSAW, Poland (AP) The Polish government is backing a plan to lower the retirement age to 60 for women and 65 for men, from the current level of 67 for all.
Lowering the retirement age was among key promises that the Law and Justice party and the party's candidate for president, Andrzej Duda, made during their successful campaigns last year.
Prime Minister Beata Szydlo's Cabinet on Tuesday backed a retirement proposal drafted by Duda. It still needs approval by the Parliament, but that seems almost certain, given the ruling party's control of both Parliament chambers.
Government spokesman Rafal Bochenek said the new law could take effect Oct.1, 2017 and would be financed from a more efficient collection of the VAT tax.
Finance Minister Pawel Szalamacha has estimated that letting people retire earlier will cost the state budget 8 billion zlotys (1.8 billion euros, nearly $2 billion) a year.
He refused to comment Monday on a report in Gazeta Wyborcza daily that said he and two other ministers in charge of the economy found the proposal too costly and wanted the early retirement available only after a woman has worked for at least 35 years and a man for at least 40 years. The government did not make such a condition.
The proposal reverses the previous government's decision to increase the retirement age to 67 for all, arguing that was needed to adapt to an aging society.
The government recently introduced another costly social program paying families 500 zlotys (114 euros) a month for every second and every next child, in a move intended to prod Poles into having more children.
A young mother has been charged with murdering her six-week-old son, who was found drowned in a pond at a North Carolina shopping mall.
Jameisha Alexander, 24, was arrested on Monday after a security guard found her baby, King Khalil Jair Alexander, face down in the water at the Tanger Outlets near Myrtle Beach.
Her mother, Sandra Jones, had claimed the baby's father was abusive and did not support Alexander.
She said her daughter was being treated for depression before and after her son's birth.
Ms Jones, from Carrboro, said: 'She loved that baby with everything she had in her. I think she felt like she just couldn't do it herself,'
A mugshot of Alexander, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, was released by Horry County Sheriff's Office. She has been charged with murdering her six-week-old baby King
Family members said Alexander was overwhelmed by the challenges of being a mother, returning to work and dealing with an abusive boyfriend.
Alexander was seen holding her son near the pond Saturday night by someone who called security.
When security guards arrived Alexander had gone and the baby was in the water.
Paramedics tried CPR but the boy died a short time later.
The child was found face down in a pond at the Tanger Outlets (pictured) near Myrtle Beach, North Carolina
Alexander was arrested two hours later after her car crashed about 20 miles away, according to a police report.
Ms Jones said her daughter had taken maternity leave from her job at McDonald's to recover from a cesarean section, and was nervous about returning to work.
She said her daughter was intensely private and proud, pushed away offers to watch the baby or to get help.
Jameisha Alexander (pictured) had been struggling with depression but her mother said she was a very proud and private person who did not seek out help
King's grandmother said she only discovered about her daughter's depression problems after she was arrested.
Ms Jones said Alexander had hoped her boyfriend would be more supportive after she got pregnant but he moved her into a filthy home 20 miles from her family and dabbled in drugs.
Alexander's grandmother, Melba Jones, broke down in tears as she told reporters: 'All she had to do was talk to me. I always take in whoever needs help.
'Star Trek Beyond' gracefully finds orbit amid tragedy
LOS ANGELES (AP) When the "Star Trek Beyond" cast and filmmakers gathered in Los Angeles last month for Anton Yelchin's funeral, they had a decision to make. Their film, the third in the rebooted series, was coming out in less than a month and a rigorous press tour was imminent. They could either put themselves out there to promote the film in the raw and devastating weeks following the death of their beloved co-star, or they could withdraw.
"We came to the conclusion in the end (that) if we withdraw, we're going to risk not helping a film that should be seen, not least because it stars Anton Yelchin," said Simon Pegg. "That's how we found the strength to be here ... It's hard to talk about, but we don't want to not talk about it. If we don't talk about it, it's like we're ignoring it."
But persevering in the face of hardship and loss is in the fabric of "Star Trek," which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year with this new tale of hope and unity in the federation.
In this image released by Paramount Pictures, from left, Anton Yelchin, Chris Pine and John Cho appear in a scene from, "Star Trek Beyond." (Kimberley French/Paramount Pictures via AP)
"Star Trek Beyond" was supposed to be business as usual, with a few tweaks behind the scenes. J.J. Abrams, who re-launched the series in 2009 with a new cast and directed the 2013 sequel, had his hands full with "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," and would cede directing responsibilities to Justin Lin the man who turned the lagging "Fast & Furious" series into an international phenomenon.
Gone, too, were screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. Instead, Pegg, who plays Scotty in the films, was tasked with taking on the additional responsibility of writing the screenplay with Doug Jung. It wasn't going to be easy. No blockbuster ever is. But the "Beyond" crew had an insanely short window to work with. By the time Pegg, Jung and Lin started on the story, it was the end of January 2015. They had to start filming in June.
"Justin was in a situation that no director should ever be in: Prepping a movie that wasn't written yet," Pegg said.
There was already a crew in Vancouver waiting for directions on what to build for the set.
"I equate it to us driving a car and building a road at the same time," Lin said.
In front of the camera, things mostly looked the same. Chris Pine was back as Captain James Kirk, as was Karl Urban (Bones), Zoe Saldana (Uhura), Zachary Quinto (Spock), Yelchin (Chekov) and John Cho (Sulu), who is revealed to be gay in the latest film. There were a few additions, too, in Idris Elba as the terrifying villain Krall and Sofia Boutella as the scrappy loner Jaylah, who early on in the story process was referred to by the cast as "Hannah Solo."
And then, in late February 2015, Leonard Nimoy the man who originated Mr. Spock died of end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at age 83. While Quinto had taken over his character officially, Nimoy had appeared in both new films as Spock Prime and the door was left open for his return.
"We knew we were going to make a tribute to Leonard when it happened, but we thought let's make him part of the DNA of the story too," Pegg said.
So Pegg and Jung wrote Ambassador Spock's off-screen death into the film, using it to affect Quinto's arc, and also serve as an elegy to the actor.
Of course, no one could have foreseen that they would lose another before the film came out, and one of their youngest, in Yelchin who was only 27 when he died after being struck by his own car last month.
When the accident happened, Yelchin's work on the film was finished, but Lin was still a few weeks away from completion, and so part of his and his post-production crew's mourning involved revisiting all of Yelchin's takes something Lin was all too familiar with. Paul Walker died while "Furious 7" was still in production.
The close-knit cast and crew of "Star Trek" were also able to say goodbye together at the funeral.
"It was this incredible bond from the very beginning with all of them. And the reality is that this experience, to be at the funeral with all of them, it was really the only kind of salvation for us," Abrams said. "We all had each other."
The series will live on, of course. On Monday, Paramount Pictures announced that there will be a fourth film, which will see the return of Kirk's deceased father (Chris Hemsworth). As for Chekov, Abrams said they've started thinking about how to deal with his absence in the continuing story, but that it's also "too early to talk about."
"There is no recasting," Abrams said. "I know he literally was a re-cast of a prior thing, but ... we have some other thoughts."
Everyone is still processing the loss the best they can.
"It will never stop being terrible," Pegg said.
But he did find some grace and solace in seeing his friend up on the big screen again.
"I thought it was going to be really sad. At times it was. But for the most part, it was like 'there he is, he's right there,' " Pegg said. "He's alive and he's happy and he will be there forever."
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Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr
In this Thursday, July 14, 2016 photo, Simon Pegg poses for a portrait while promoting "Star Trek Beyond" at The Four Seasons in Los Angeles. The new movie releases in the U.S. July 22, 2016. (Photo by Casey Curry/Invision/AP)
In this Thursday, July 14, 2016 photo, Simon Pegg poses for a portrait while promoting "Star Trek Beyond" at The Four Seasons in Los Angeles. The new movie releases in the U.S. July 22, 2016. (Photo by Casey Curry/Invision/AP)
In this Thursday, July 14, 2016 photo, Justin Lin, left, and Simpn Pegg pose for a portrait while promoting "Star Trek Beyond" at The Four Seasons in Los Angeles. The new movie releases in the U.S. July 22, 2016. (Photo by Casey Curry/Invision/AP)
8 shot dead or decapitated in eastern Congo, group says
KINSHASA, Congo (AP) A Congo human rights group says eight people have been shot dead or decapitated by machetes in an attack by an armed group in the eastern part of the country.
The director of the Center for Studies of Peace and Defense of Human Rights, Omar Kavota, told The Associated Press that the attack occurred overnight Monday in Kibirizi in North Kivu province.
Kavota said Tuesday that the victims included a 1-year-old child.
His organization said the attack was thought to be carried out by a local militia called the Mai-Mai Nyatura.
He said the army later arrived to try to dislodge the militia from the village and that many residents have fled.
Time's up! Republicans decide to go home early
A look at the 2016 Republican National Convention through a media lens:
Who's watching the clock?
With ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News Channel, NBC, MSNBC and PBS offering a prime-time platform on the night Donald Trump was nominated as their presidential candidate Tuesday, the Republicans essentially packed up early and went home.
Donald Trump, Jr., son of Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump, speaks during the second day session of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
As CBS' Gayle King interviewed a delegate from the convention's floor at 10:45 p.m. ET, cameras from above caught rows and rows of empty seats with people headed for the exits. A speaker droned on, but the networks weren't paying attention. They were vamping for time.
"You would want Donald Trump Jr. to be hitting his crescendo right now," said MSNBC's Rachel Maddow.
The missed opportunity seemed all the more strange because Trump Jr., the night's featured speaker, stepped to the podium with precise timing right after the three big broadcast networks began their hour of coverage, and they showed all of his speech. The momentum then screeched to a halt.
By 10:55 p.m., CNN was left covering the night's benediction.
RECYCLED SPEECH: The controversy over similarities between Melania Trump's Monday night speech and the one given by Michelle Obama at the Democratic convention in 2008 "hung over this place like a cloud all day," said NBC News anchor Lester Holt. It was a full-fledged cable news conflagration, not really tamped down until the roll call gave Donald Trump the nomination.
Fox's Megyn Kelly moderated what may have been the best discussion of the issue, framed by a thorough side-by-side video of the offending passages. Former speechwriter Marc Thiessen was indignant. "What does it say that they didn't catch it?" he said. "(Trump campaign manager) Paul Manafort got up and said nothing was cribbed. Of course it was."
Lawyer David Wohl dismissed it, saying there are often similarities in political speech. "I don't think people gave a flip about it in the end," he said. Fox veteran Brit Hume said the apparent plagiarism left a stain that diminished the event.
LEWANDOWSKI'S SHOT: Before he was fired as Donald Trump's campaign manager, there was little secret that Corey Lewandowski and Manafort didn't get along. And while Manafort minimized the controversy over Melania Trump's speech, Lewandowski used his new perch as a CNN commentator to deliver a much different message. Lewandowski said whoever wrote the speech should be fired. When CNN's Kate Bolduan asked whether Manafort should be held accountable, Lewandowski said: "I can tell you, when I was the campaign manager, the buck stopped with me and I'm sitting here with CNN now. What I think is, at the end of the day, if you're the convention manager, you're in charge of the convention. There is no detail too small."
ON THE FLOOR: Credit CNN's Dana Bash for hustle, maneuvering into position to interview Trump's children shortly after the New York delegates' vote officially gave their father the nomination for president. While the interview didn't reveal much, being there was more important than commenting on the moment from above.
SURPRISE!: "Donald Trump Jr. just got a standing ovation from his siblings." Peter Alexander, NBC News.
NO SPIN ZONE: Fox's Bill O'Reilly must have thought there wasn't much to talk about at the convention. While rival networks were focused on Cleveland, "The O'Reilly Factor" played an interview with Ice Cube conducted at an airport baggage carousel about a 28-year-old rap song. O'Reilly criticized Ice Cube for not denouncing his song with N.W.A., "F--- The Police," and hosted a discussion with two other white men about it.
RATINGS: Even when they compete on an equal footing, viewers were more interested in following the convention Monday night on the cable news networks than on broadcast. Fox News Channel dominated, averaging 6.35 million viewers during the 10 p.m. hour when all of the networks competed, the Nielsen company said. CNN had 3.94 million viewers, the first time it has ever beaten all three major broadcast network on a convention night. NBC topped the broadcast networks at 3.91 million, ABC had 3.64 million, CBS had 2.69 million, MSNBC had 2 million and PBS had 1.75 million.
LATE NEWS: CBS' decision to go live with Stephen Colbert's "Late Show" during convention week appears to have paid off, at least initially. The Nielsen company said Colbert beat rivals Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel in preliminary overnight ratings for the first time since February, the day after the Grammys. Colbert's show Monday featured an appearance by former Comedy Central mate Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert that's Colbert, the character, from "The Colbert Report," who came out of mothballs to define a new word: "Trumpiness."
Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump's children Donald Trump, Jr., Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump and Tiffany Trump celebrate on the convention floor during the second day session of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
Black Lives Matters protest changed to cookout with police
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) Residents and police in Wichita, Kansas, broke bread together after a planned Black Lives Matter protest was turned into to a free community cookout amid racial tensions across the country.
After a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest last week, Police Chief Gordon Ramsay met with local activist leaders to discuss replacing another planned protest with the Sunday cookout.
The cookout's goal was to open a dialogue and build trust between police and citizens.
Lt. Travis Rakestraw shared a table with three men, where they discussed police violence and racial disparity. The officer said he was particularly impressed by the opinions of Ivan Ray, a Hispanic student at the University of Kansas, and how he framed the issue of police violence from the perspective of other social issues like poverty and education.
"The community needs more people like you who can see the problems in wide open eyes," Rakestraw told Ray at the cookout. "What should we do about it?"
The men told the Wichita Eagle (http://bit.ly/29Okple ) they were surprised that Rakestraw seemed to care about what they had to say, and that he had contemplated the same issues. All three men said they still planned on marching in protest.
From a police perspective, Rakestraw said a conversation like the one he had with the residents felt more productive than many of the protests he had seen recently, but he had no complaints about the earlier peaceful protest in Wichita.
"I don't think it's a conscious effort," Rakestraw told them men when discussing why racial biases sometimes persist. "I don't think anybody does it intentionally but we fill in the gaps with life experiences, what we read in the paper, and we start to view people as a generalization instead of understanding people as individuals."
Smaller conversations between community members and police turned into a public forum later that evening when residents were able to ask Ramsay questions.
One woman told Ramsay about an experience with police where she said she'd been physically mistreated.
"If you feel mistreated, I want to know about it," Ramsay said. "If they feel they are being mistreated, at the scene is not the time to argue about it, wait until it's over."
Another resident asked the police chief about weeding out bad police officers.
Angela Eagle drops out of race to topple UK Labour leader
LONDON (AP) One of the two lawmakers vying to replace British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has dropped out of the leadership race.
Angela Eagle says she's putting her support behind Owen Smith because he has more backing from Labour legislators.
She said Tuesday that "we need to have a strong and united Labour Party so we can be a good opposition, take the fight to the Conservative government and heal our country."
Corbyn is a veteran left-wing lawmaker who was elected leader by the party's members last year.
He has lost the support of most Labour legislators, who accuse him of being unelectable and of showing half-hearted support for European Union membership during Britain's referendum campaign.
Monsanto rejects Bayer buyout, again
NEW YORK (AP) Monsanto on Tuesday rejected a second and richer takeover bid from Bayer.
The German drug and chemicals company last week boosted its offer from $62 billion, to about $65 billion, or $125 per share.
Monsanto Co., a seed company, called the revised offer inadequate, as it did the initial bid.
FILE - This Monday, May 23, 2016, file photo, shows the Bayer AG corporate logo displayed on a building of the German drug and chemicals company in Berlin. Monsanto said Tuesday, July 19, 2016, that the company is rejecting a revised takeover bid from German drug and chemicals company Bayer. The St. Louis-based company said that it remains open to continued talks with Bayer and other parties about a possible transaction. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, File)
The St. Louis company said that it remains open to talks with Bayer and others about a deal.
Bayer on Tuesday said that it was disappointed with the second rejection, and took a shot at the company in a written statement.
"The revised all-cash offer is a compelling opportunity and represents immediate and certain value for Monsanto shareholders amid recent weak business performance and Monsanto's reduced mid-term outlook," Bayer said.
It said it looked forward to further negotiations.
Shares of Monsanto shed 11 cents to $106.20 in afternoon trading.
Christie: Pal's plea in airline shakedown 'made me very sad'
NEWARK, N.J. (AP) New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said he was "sad" his friend and confidant admitted shaking down United Airlines to reinstate a flight to make it easier for him to reach his vacation home in South Carolina.
David Samson is "my friend and it made me very sad," the Republican told NJ.com (http://bit.ly/29XIwky ) on Monday. But Christie would not say whether Samson has tarnished the governor's legacy, which included serving as New Jersey's attorney general.
"That's all I have to say. That's all I have to say," Christie said as he left the arena in Cleveland where the Republican National Convention is being held.
Samson is the former chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and was a mentor to Christie. He admitted he pressured United to reinstate the flight after he removed from a board agenda discussion of a hangar United wanted at Newark Liberty International Airport.
The money-losing flight was ended three days after Samson resigned. United's CEO resigned after an investigation into that service.
Jamie Fox, a former lobbyist for United who Christie later named the state's transportation commissioner, was charged by federal prosecutors with soliciting the bribe. Fox's attorney said he will fight the charge.
United agreed to pay a $2.25 million penalty for its role in the scheme.
Samson was head of the Port Authority when two former allies of the governor were accused of shutting down lanes to the George Washington Bridge as part of a political retribution scheme. Neither Samson nor Christie was charged in that case. A third Christie appointee has pleaded guilty in that case, which is expected to go to trial in September.
Christie denied any wrongdoing and was cleared by a taxpayer-funded legal inquiry. U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman said there's no evidence the governor had anything to do with the bribery scheme Samson pleaded to.
But the bridge scandal in particular put a cloud over Christie's political future. Democrats then and now have seized on both cases to criticize Christie, who ended his bid for the Republican presidential nomination and began backing presumptive nominee Donald Trump.
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This story has been corrected to show in the second paragraph that the last name of the former Port Authority chairman is Samson, not Sampson.
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Federal effort launched to expand solar power in communities
LOS ANGELES (AP) The Obama administration unveiled a plan Tuesday aimed at helping middle-class and low-income communities put solar panels on their roofs.
Homeowners could choose to harness electricity from the sun, buy energy-efficient water pumps and make other energy-saving upgrades at no cost upfront, eventually paying it back through their property tax bills.
While this type of clean-energy financing has existed for years, officials said backing by the federal Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Veterans Affairs should expand access to families who may not afford it otherwise.
FILE - In this March 23, 2010, file photo, installers from California Green Design install solar electrical panels on the roof of a home in Glendale, Calif. The Obama administration announced a plan Tuesday, July 19, 2016, to help middle-class and low-income communities put solar panels on their roofs. White House officials said energy upgrades can be made with no upfront costs, but homeowners will gradually pay back the cost through their property tax bills. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon, File)
The White House estimated the effort would bring solar power to about 250,000 middle-class and low-income homes by 2020.
"Solar panels are no longer for wealthy folks who live where the sun shines every day," President Barack Obama said in a video message accompanying the announcement.
In recent years, technological advances have made it cheaper to install rooftop solar panels, Obama senior adviser Brian Deese said in a telephone briefing with reporters.
California Gov. Jerry Brown praised the effort, saying it would lead to more solar installations and energy-saving retrofits around the country.
"It is another important government effort to accelerate the movement to renewable energy and efficient housing so we're not wasting water, we're not wasting gas and electricity, and we're using the sun as much as we can," Brown said.
Under the plan, if a solar-powered home is sold through a regular sale or foreclosure, the responsibility of paying for the upgrade is passed on to the next owner.
Not every lender is on board.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-backed mortgage giants that guarantee most mortgages, said that while it supports increasing solar access, it "continues to have serious concerns" with how the clean-energy program is structured.
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Follow the reporter on Twitter: @SciWriAlicia
FILE - In this March 23, 2010, file photo, installers from California Green Design install solar electrical panels on the roof of a home in Glendale, Calif. The Obama administration announced a plan Tuesday, July 19, 2016, to help middle-class and low-income communities put solar panels on their roofs. White House officials said energy upgrades can be made with no upfront costs, but homeowners will gradually pay back the cost through their property tax bills. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon, File)
El Nino is gone, but Earth's record heat is sticking around
WASHINGTON (AP) Earth's persistent record 2016 heat is now dancing near levels that a world agreement is trying to avoid, federal scientists said.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Tuesday that globally , June was the 14th straight record hot month, with Earth averaging 61.52 degrees (16.4 degrees Celsius). That is 1.62 degrees (0.9 degrees Celsius) warmer than average and a shade above the record set in 2015. The last month Earth wasn't record hot was April 2015.
NOAA Tuesday also warned about excessive heat for much of the United States this week, especially at the end of the week, when parts of the East could be flirting with triple digit temperatures.
FILE - In this June 8, 2016, file photo, children cool off under water fountains on a sunny day, in Pamplona northern Spain. Federal scientists say Earth's record 2016 heat is now dancing near levels that a world agreement is trying to avoid. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says globally, June was the 14th straight record hot month, with earth averaging 61.52 degrees (16.4 degrees Celsius). That is 1.62 degrees (0.9 degrees Celsius) warmer than average. (AP Photo/Alvaro Barrientos, File)
Scientists said records keep falling because of a combination of man-made global warming and the natural El Nino, a periodic warming of the Pacific that changes weather worldwide and heats the globe. But El Nino ended a couple months ago and the record heat and record melting of Arctic sea ice has stuck around.
What's really got federal scientists' attention is the record warm first half of 2016, which comes after two record hot years.
NOAA said the first half of 2016 was 0.36 degrees (0.2 degrees Celsius) warmer than last year's record.
NASA chief climate scientist Gavin Schmidt said the first six months of the year were not just the warmest on record, by far, but 2.3 degrees warmer (1.3 degrees Celsius) than the last two decades of the 19th century. But more importantly, he said 2016 so far is about 2.7 degrees warmer (1.5 degrees Celsius) than pre-industrial times.
That 1.5 degrees Celsius mark is key. A December 2015 international pact to control global warming set a goal of avoiding 1.5 degrees Celsius warming above pre-industrial levels. And the agreement says if Earth can't limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, at least it should limit it to 2 degrees (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.
Because El Nino is a factor Schmidt figured about 40 percent of the reason 2016 is hotter than 2015 is due to El Nino 2017 will likely be a bit cooler than 2016. When scientists look at long-term warming since pre-industrial times they don't look at one year, but it's still a pretty noticeable threshold, Schmidt said.
"It's fair to say we are dancing with those lower targets," Schmidt said.
Schmidt and NOAA climate scientist Jake Crouch said 2016 will likely be the hottest year on record for a third consecutive year. Schmidt said his statistical calculations put the chance of 2016 being record hot at 99 percent.
Temperature records go back to 1880.
NASA scientists said the warming has caused an extreme melting of Arctic sea ice for the beginning of 2016. Usually Arctic sea ice peaks in the winter and reaches its lowest point in September.
But so far five of the first six months of 2016 set record low averages, said NASA sea ice scientist Walt Meier. Sea ice measurements go back to 1979.
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Pence seeks to reassure conservatives about Trump
CLEVELAND (AP) Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, making his first appearance in Cleveland since being named Donald Trump's running mate, tried to reassure Republicans nervous about the celebrity businessman's conservative credentials by vouching for his character and comparing him to Ronald Reagan.
Pence, long a conservative darling, made a surprise appearance Tuesday in front of a powerful conservative lobbying group to vow "that Donald Trump will be a great president of the United States of America because his heart beats with the heart of the American people."
"He's a builder. He's a fighter. He's a father and a patriot," Pence said of Trump in what may be a preview of his vice presidential acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday. "Trust me when I say this. When we come together as a party, we'll re-elect strong conservative majorities in the House and the Senate and elect this good man as the 45th president of the United States, and I know in my heart that we will make America great again."
Republican vice presidential candidate Gov. Mike Pence, R-Ind., speaks during a luncheon sponsored by the American Conservative Union Foundation, Tuesday, July 19, 2016, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)
Trump picked Pence as his running mate last week after days of unusual and very public deliberations. Those in Trump's camp who advocated for Pence framed his selection as a step toward party unity, touting his popularity among conservatives, including those who were skeptical of Trump and supported other candidates during the bruising Republican primary battle.
Pence seized the task of selling Trump to the conservatives gathered for a luncheon hosted by The American Conservative Union Foundation. He immediately compared Trump to the former president whose has been deified by many conservatives.
"I have a sense of this man, I have sense of his heart. I have a sense of his hands-on leadership, and for all the world he reminds me of Ronald Reagan," Pence said, adding that like Reagan "he had achieved great heights in his career but never lost touch with everyday Americans."
"The primaries are over. It's time for us to come together around this good man," Pence said.
Pence was warmly received by the audience and some in crowd said they believed the governor could act as a strong character witness for Trump, whose grandiose lifestyle, two divorces and formerly liberal policy positions left some conservatives uneasy.
"To hear Mike Pence say he is a good man, that helps those of us who still doubt that when we go in the ballot box we'll be able to vote for Trump," said Charles Meyer, a delegate from Texas. "Mike Pence's word means something."
The roster of attendees at the panels organized by the ACU it hosts the major Conservative Political Action Conference every year prior to Pence's arrival underscored the division Trump still faces among Republicans. One speaker, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, is among Trump's closest allies. Another, Utah Sen. Mike Lee, has been a fierce Trump critic.
And not every conservative at Tuesday's gathering was sold by Pence.
"I think some people feel (Pence) has the conservative credentials that people are looking for on a ticket," said Diana Shores a delegate from Virginia. "But not me."
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Follow Lemire on Twitter at http://twitter.com/@JonLemire
Republican vice presidential candidate Gov. Mike Pence, R-Ind., speaks during a luncheon sponsored by the American Conservative Union Foundation, Tuesday, July 19, 2016, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)
The Latest: Hundreds attend rally for slain officers
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) The Latest on shootings of six Baton Rouge police officers (all times local):
8 p.m.
Hundreds of people, white and black, attended a rally supporting law-enforcement officers at Baton Rouge police headquarters, about a mile from where three officers were shot to death Sunday morning.
Stacey Dykes, left, comforts Whitney Welch at a candlelight vigil for Baton Rouge police officer Montrell Jackson, outside Istrouma High School, where he graduated in 2001, in Baton Rouge, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Multiple police officers were killed and wounded Sunday morning in a shooting near a gas station in Baton Rouge, less than two weeks after a black man was shot and killed by police here, sparking nightly protests across the city. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Many in the crowd Tuesday night were bikers, who rumbled past the shooting scene in a long line of motorcycles before the gathering.
Police Lt. Robert McGarner struggled to keep his emotions in check as he stepped up to the microphone to address the crowd.
"Y'all realize what this means to us?" McGarner said. Later, officers bowed their heads as a bugler played taps.
Just down the street, on a corner across from the police station, black activist Redell Norman and a handful of supporters who have protested the police shooting of Alton Sterling held a smaller demonstration that included Black Lives Matters signs and forms for anyone who wanted to register to vote.
"It's protest with a purpose," Norman said.
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6:30 p.m.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards is hosting a blood donation drive in honor of the three Baton Rouge law enforcement officers shot and killed and three others who were injured in shootings over the weekend.
Edwards, in a news release, said the drive will be held Thursday in conjunction with LifeShare Blood Centers and is open to all state employees and members of the public.
Edwards says he plans to participate.
A LifeShare Blood Centers donation bus will be parked in the state Capitol parking lot near the southwest entrance gate from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.
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6 p.m.
Faith and community leaders, black and white, gathered at a Baton Rouge church to discuss ways to improve police relations with local black residents after two weeks of violence in the city.
More than 100 people with Together Baton Rouge held signs Tuesday bearing the words "We refuse to be divided."
The group condemned recent violence and called for more community policing tactics.
Rev. Lee Wesley says the city needs to look at how potential law officers are vetted. He says people need to show more respect for police officers, but police officers need to show more respect for residents.
Together Baton Rouge's event came after Alton Sterling, a black man, was shot and killed by white police officers on July 5, followed by the shooting deaths of three law enforcement officers Sunday by a black gunman who appeared to target them.
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5:30 p.m.
LSU football coach Les Miles has been visiting with law enforcement in Baton Rouge after an ambush by a lone gunman took the lives of three officers Sunday and wounded three others.
Miles had unannounced, private meetings Tuesday with the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office, which lost a deputy in the fatal shootings, and Baton Rouge Police, which lost two officers.
LSU spokesman Michael Bonnette confirmed the visits with authorities after the coach was seen entering police headquarters, where he spent more than an hour, by The Associated Press.
Bonnette says Miles only wanted to express his support and discuss his appreciation for the courage police show in putting their lives on the line to protect their communities.
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4 p.m.
President Barack Obama says Sunday's killing of three Louisiana law enforcement officers underscores the degree to which Washington must do everything possible to help police officers return home safe at night.
Obama spoke Tuesday after meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch, FBI Director James Comey and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson.
He says what happened in Baton Rouge is a reminder of the extraordinary risks and dangers that law enforcement officers take every day "to protect us and our way of life."
Two police officers and a sheriff's deputy were killed Sunday after they were ambushed by a lone gunman.
Obama says he'll use his remaining months as president to figure out which practices work best, and how to help rebuild trust between police and the communities they serve.
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1:45 p.m.
Funeral arrangements have been set for two of the three officers killed in Baton Rouge in what police called an ambush by a lone gunman.
Viewings are scheduled Thursday and Friday for Baton Rouge Police Officer Matthew Gerald.
Services will follow the Friday viewing, with burial to occur at Louisiana National Cemetery.
Arrangements also have been made for Baton Rouge Police Cpl. Montrell Jackson. Visitation for Jackson is scheduled Monday, with funeral services to follow.
Services are pending for East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff's Deputy Brad Garafola.
Police say Gavin Long, a former Marine from Missouri, dressed in black and opened fire on officers Sunday.
People attend a candlelight vigil for Baton Rouge police officer Montrell Jackson, outside Istrouma High School, where he graduated in 2001, in Baton Rouge, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Multiple police officers were killed and wounded Sunday morning in a shooting near a gas station in Baton Rouge, less than two weeks after a black man was shot and killed by police here, sparking nightly protests across the city. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Millville, N.J., Police Chaplain Bob Ossler prays and weeps with a local resident as she places flowers on a memorial at the B-Quik gas station on Monday, July 18, 2016, in Baton Rouge, La. A former Marine set out to ambush police in Baton Rouge, authorities said Monday, a day after law enforcement officers were killed in the attack. (Curtis Compton/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)
Millville, N.J. police chaplain Robert Ossler prays Monday, July 18, 2016, at a makeshift memorial at the fatal shooting scene in Baton Rouge, La., where several law enforcement officers were killed on Sunday. A former Marine set out to ambush police in Baton Rouge, authorities said Monday. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
This undated photo made available by the Baton Rouge Police Dept. shows police officer Matthew Gerald. Gerald, 41, was killed by a gunman in Baton Rouge, LA., Sunday, July 17, 2016. (Baton Rouge Police Dept. via AP)
This undated photo made available by the Baton Rouge Police Dept. shows officer Montrell Jackson. Jackson, 32, has been identified as one of the police officers killed in a shooting early Sunday, July 17, 2016, in Baton Rouge, La. (Baton Rouge Police Dept. via AP)
This undated photo made available by the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office shows deputy Brad Garafola. Garafola and at least two other Baton Rouge law enforcement officers investigating a report of a man with an assault rifle were killed Sunday, July 17, 2016, less than two weeks after a black man was fatally shot by police here in a confrontation that sparked nightly protests that reverberated nationwide. (East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office via AP)
Mother, Crystal Rende, center, and her family, including from left to right, Lara Rende, 15, Aydin Rende, 4, Noah Rende, 6, and Hannah Enamorado, 13, pray in front of a memorial of flowers and mementos in front of the B-Quick convenience store where Baton Rouge law enforcement officers where engaged by a gunman and three were killed on Sunday in Baton Rouge, La., Monday, July 18, 2016. Rende's daughters attend Denham Springs Jr. High School, a school in the community where two of the officers who were killed lived. (AP Photo/Max Becherer)
A memorial at the location where Baton Rouge police officers were killed and wounded continues to grow, Monday, July 18, 2016, in Baton Rouge, La. (Scott Clause/The Daily Advertiser via AP)
A memorial at the location where Baton Rouge police officers were killed and wounded continues to grow, Monday, July 18, 2016, in Baton Rouge, La. (Scott Clause/The Daily Advertiser via AP)
Who is funding group challenging redistricting?
CHICAGO (AP) A group waging an aggressive legal battle to keep a redistricting question off November's Illinois ballot hasn't reported a single donation or expense since it became a political committee last summer, adding to the mystery of who is funding the effort and paying its legal bills.
The People's Map, comprised of business and community leaders who say they represent the interests of minority voters, filed a lawsuit in May against a proposed voter referendum that seeks an independent commission to take over drawing Illinois' political lines instead of the party in power. Arguing on their behalf was a top Chicago elections lawyer who has long represented the leader of the Democratic Party of Illinois, House Speaker Michael Madigan.
But every line of quarterly disclosures The People's Map filed with the Illinois State Board of Elections shows as zero. The People's Map also doesn't disclose any pro bono work or $12,000 in union donations that emerge in state filings by the unions from July to October of last year, saying they never cashed the checks.
FILE - In this Dec. 14, 2010 file photo attorney Michael Kasper listens during a Chicago Board of Election Commissioners meeting in Chicago. Kasper is the attorney for The People's Map, a political committee fighting to keep a redistricting measure off the November ballot. The People's Map hasn't reported any expenses or donations to the State Board of Elections, including at least $12,000 in political donations from unions. (AP Photo/Paul Beaty)
The lack of disclosures, or any monetary details, raises questions about how the group is functioning and who is covering legal fees, scrutiny that comes as a judge is expected to decide this week whether the remap question is constitutional for the ballot.
At issue is a petition-driven referendum brought by a group called the Independent Map Amendment. The proposal threatens to diminish the power of Democratic leaders who have controlled political mapmaking in Illinois. The coalition wants an 11-member commission to draw legislative boundaries, claiming the current process is partisan and the lawsuit is an effort by "entrenched interests." Several other states have passed similar measures to take redistricting out of the hands of partisan politicians and hand it to an independent commission.
Madigan's spokesman, Steve Brown, has said neither Madigan nor the Democratic party is involved. But he has criticized the business backgrounds of the Independent Maps group and questioned their intentions. The coalition for the independent commission includes former Tribune Co. Chairman Dennis FitzSimons, Republican former Gov. Jim Edgar and Democratic former White House chief of staff Bill Daley.
People's Map chairman John Hooker declined an interview through a spokesman and said questions about legal fees should posed to Michael Kasper, the lead attorney of five listed in the lawsuit. Kasper, who's also represented Senate President John Cullerton and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, has repeatedly declined comment. He didn't respond to questions Tuesday.
"The reports filed by the People's Map are accurate," Hooker said in a statement. "The committee has neither accepted nor deposited any contributions."
The union donations which emerge in the election board's database when expenditures involving The People's Map are searched are from six groups including Illinois PAC for Education, Laborers' Political Action and Education League, and Service Employees International Union Local 73 Bi-Partisan PAC.
Representatives from the unions either didn't return messages or immediately have explanations. . At least one PAC representing the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers voided its July 22, 2015, check.
The Board of Elections' director of campaign disclosure, Tom Newman, said The People's Map should offer an explanation. Newman, who was made aware of the discrepancy by The Associated Press, said elections officials would seek clarification.
The Independent Maps coalition which brought the new remap proposal after Kasper successfully fought a similar one in 2014 also called for more answers.
"Illinois citizens deserve to know whose money is behind the People's Map, the group that through costly litigation is trying to deny voters the chance to change a deeply flawed system," FitzSimons said.
What has emerged publicly about the group is sparse and contradictory. In August, The People's Map circulated letters blasting the intent of the redistricting proposal, saying Republicans wanted it because it would diminish the number of Democratic districts.
"While proponents of these 'reforms' talk about fairness, we believe the results of allowing an independent commission to draw the map will be anything but fair to minorities, and will prevent minorities from electing the candidates of their choice," reads an August 14 letter signed by Hooker, a former ComEd executive appointed to the Chicago Housing Authority board by Emanuel. Other members of The People's Map and union officials also signed it.
Yet, in a Dec. 2 letter to election officials, Kasper said The People's Map was formed in anticipation of the redistricting question and was yet to take a position.
"The committee cannot, at this time, identify whether it will support or oppose such question because, as of today's date, no such propositions have been presented for consideration," he wrote in the letter.
None of the group's arguments about an adverse impact on minorities were ever raised in court.
Campaign finance and good government experts said the lack of group's disclosures deserves more scrutiny.
"It definitely raises questions that they're not there," Sarah Brune, executive director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, said of the union donations.
Kent Redfield, a political scientist at the University of Illinois at Springfield, said the intent of campaign finance law is clear: "If you get money of $1,000 or more then that needs to be disclosed in a timely manner."
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Follow Sophia Tareen at http://twitter.com/sophiatareen.
FILE - In this April 28, 2015 file photo, former Tribune Company CEO Dennis FitzSimons who is part of the group, Independent Maps speaks at a news conference in Chicago. FitzSimons has been critical of a political committee called The People's Map that is fighting to keep a redistricting measure off the November ballot and hasn't reported any expenses or donations to the State Board of Elections, including at least $12,000 in political donations from unions. (AP Photo/Sophia Tareen, File)
500 elephants find new home in massive African relocation
LIWONDE NATIONAL PARK, Malawi (AP) Half a dozen African elephants lay strewn on a riverside plain in Malawi, immobilized by darts fired from a helicopter in a massive project to move 500 elephants, by truck and crane, to a sanctuary for the threatened species.
As development squeezes Africa's wildlife areas, this kind of man-made animal migration is increasingly seen as a conservation strategy in Malawi, one of the continent's most densely populated countries, and beyond.
Conservationists flipped the prostrate elephants' large ears over their eyes to block out light, and propped open the tips of their trunks with twigs to ensure unimpeded breathing. Then the multi-ton elephants, hanging upside down from ankle straps, were loaded by crane onto trucks for a road trip of about 185 miles (300 kilometers) to a safer, more spacious area.
In this Tuesday July 12, 2016 photo, an elephant is lifted by a crane in an upside down position in Lilongwe, Malawi, in the first step of an assisted migration of 500 of the threatened species. African Parks, which manages three Malawian reserves is moving the 500 elephants from Liwonde National Park, this month and next, and again next year when vehicles can maneuver on the rugged terrain during Southern Africa's dry winter. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi)
African elephants are in particular peril from human encroachment, while poachers have slaughtered them in the tens of thousands to meet demand for ivory, mostly in Asia.
The Malawi elephant project differs from other wildlife relocations because of its large scale.
"This is very much the way that we'll have to manage things in the future," said Craig Reid, manager of Malawi's Liwonde National Park, which is run by African Parks, a non-profit group based in Johannesburg. Reid described Liwonde as "an ecological island in a sea of humanity."
African Parks is relocating hundreds of what it calls "surplus" elephants from Liwonde and Majete, another park, to Nkhotakota, a third reserve where poachers have virtually wiped out the elephant population.
African Parks, which manages all three Malawian reserves, is moving the 500 elephants this month and next, and again next year when vehicles can maneuver on the rugged terrain during southern Africa's dry winter. The Dutch PostCode Lottery and the Washington-based Wyss Foundation are key funders of the $1.6 million relocation.
An Associated Press team witnessed a day of catching elephants in Liwonde. Dr. Andre Uys, a wildlife veterinarian, rode in a helicopter that flushed elephant families from woods onto a floodplain, where he darted them in their hindquarters. Then capture teams in vehicles raced across the rutted earth toward the prone elephants' dark silhouettes.
The immediate priority was to check the health of the elephants before they were hoisted, trunks dangling, onto flatbed trucks. Monitoring included the intimate act of placing a hand over an elephant's trunk to feel the hot blast of exhaled air every few seconds.
Teams rounded up 24 elephants, including a gargantuan bull, in a day's haul that they described as a record. In one case, an immobilized calf struggled to breathe, and conservationists funneled oxygen up a tube in its trunk and measured vital signs. Uys speculated that the calf had river water in its sinuses.
"Those little guys actually can't walk along the bottom, they have to swim across the channels when we push them out into ground where we can catch them," he said. "In that process, with all the splashing from the mothers and everything, they get a lot of water up the nasal cavity."
The elephants were revived with injections in "wake-up" crates, and cattle prods were used to maneuver the animals onto vehicles bound for their new home.
There is some risk and stress in drugging and moving the animals, though South African conservationists and the commercial wildlife industry have refined and shortened the process over the years. Many animals can adapt to a new habitat if it is roughly the same as the old one.
The Malawi relocation is "a win-win for elephants and people" and an example of wildlife management that "will likely become the new norm in many places in Africa," said Bas Huijbregts, African species expert for the WWF conservation group.
While disease transfer is a concern, species restocking in Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park and South Africa's Addo Elephant National Park has been successful, said George Wittemyer, an African elephant expert and associate professor at Colorado State University.
"I see it as something that's here to stay, for better or worse," Wittemyer said.
African Parks hopes elephants in Malawi can eventually serve as a reservoir to restore other African elephant populations. One estimate says Africa has fewer than 500,000 elephants, down from several million a century ago.
A South Africa-based company, Conservation Solutions, is contributing to the Malawi relocation project. Its leader, Kester Vickery, said the key to successful relocations of what he called a "higher-thinking kind of animal" is to keep tightly knit elephant families together.
Unlike many other species, Vickery said, the first thing that a darted mother elephant does on recovering is look for her calf.
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Follow Christopher Torchia on Twitter at www.twitter.com/torchiachris
In this Tuesday July 12, 2016 photo, an elephant is lifted by a crane in an upside down position in Lilongwe, Malawi, in the first step of an assisted migration of 500 of the threatened species. African Parks, which manages three Malawian reserves is moving the 500 elephants from Liwonde National Park, this month and next, and again next year when vehicles can maneuver on the rugged terrain during Southern Africa's dry winter. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi)
In this Tuesday July 12, 2016 photo, elephants lay on a riverside plain in Lilongwe, Malawi, after being immobilized by darts fired from a helicopter, in the first step of an assisted migration of 500 of the threatened species. African Parks, which manages three Malawian reserves is moving the 500 elephants from Liwonde National Park, this month and next, and again next year when vehicles can maneuver on the rugged terrain during Southern Africa's dry winter. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi)
In this Tuesday July 12, 2016 photo, an elephant is measured after being shot by a dart in Lilongwe, Malawi, in the first step of an assisted migration of 500 of the threatened species. African Parks, which manages three Malawian reserves is moving the 500 elephants from Liwonde National Park, this month and next, and again next year when vehicles can maneuver on the rugged terrain during Southern Africa's dry winter. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi)
In this Tuesday July 12, 2016 photo, African elephants lay on a riverside plain in Lilongwe, Malawi, after being immobilized by darts fired from a helicopter in the first step of an assisted migration of 500 of the threatened species. African Parks, which manages three Malawian reserves is moving the 500 elephants from Liwonde National Park, this month and next, and again next year when vehicles can maneuver on the rugged terrain during Southern Africa's dry winter. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi)
In this Tuesday July 12, 2016 photo, an elephant is lifted by a crane in an upside down position in Lilongwe, Malawi, in the first step of an assisted migration of 500 of the threatened species. African Parks, which manages three Malawian reserves is moving the 500 elephants from Liwonde National Park, this month and next, and again next year when vehicles can maneuver on the rugged terrain during Southern Africa's dry winter. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi)
In this Tuesday July 12, 2016 photo, a team pull a rope attached to a flatbed truck in Lilongwe, Malawi, in the first step of an assisted migration of 500 of the threatened species. African Parks, which manages three Malawian reserves is moving the 500 elephants from Liwonde National Park, this month and next, and again next year when vehicles can maneuver on the rugged terrain during Southern Africa's dry winter. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi)
In this Tuesday July 12, 2016 photo, an elephant is lifted by a crane in an upside down position in Lilongwe, Malawi, in the first step of an assisted migration of 500 of the threatened species. African Parks, which manages three Malawian reserves is moving the 500 elephants from Liwonde National Park, this month and next, and again next year when vehicles can maneuver on the rugged terrain during Southern Africa's dry winter. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi)
In this Tuesday July 12, 2016 photo, a veterinarian checks the health of a baby elephant in Lilongwe, Malawi, after being immobilized by darts fired from a helicopter, in the first step of an assisted migration of 500 of the threatened species. African Parks, which manages three Malawian reserves is moving the 500 elephants from Liwonde National Park, this month and next, and again next year when vehicles can maneuver on the rugged terrain during Southern Africa's dry winter. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi)
In this Tuesday July 12, 2016 photo, elephants lay immobilzed in a truck in Lilongwe, Malawi, in the first step of an assisted migration of 500 of the threatened species. African Parks, which manages three Malawian reserves is moving the 500 elephants from Liwonde National Park, this month and next, and again next year when vehicles can maneuver on the rugged terrain during Southern Africa's dry winter. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi)
In this Tuesday July 12, 2016 photo, an elephant is shot with a dart from a helicopter in Lilongwe, Malawi, in the first step of an assisted migration of 500 of the threatened species. African Parks, which manages three Malawian reserves is moving the 500 elephants from Liwonde National Park, this month and next, and again next year when vehicles can maneuver on the rugged terrain during Southern Africa's dry winter. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi)
A truck transports immobilized elephants in Lilongwe, Malawi, in the first step of an assisted migration of 500 of the threatened species. African Parks, which manages three Malawian reserves is moving the 500 elephants from Liwonde National Park, this month and next, and again next year when vehicles can maneuver on the rugged terrain during Southern Africa's dry winter. (AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi)
The Latest: Utah man caring for father contracts Zika
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) The Latest on a strange new case of Zika discovered in Utah (all times local):
1:25 p.m.
A source has told The Associated Press that a Utah man caring for his father contracted Zika virus in a case that has baffled health officials.
The virus is typically spread by mosquitoes and also has been transmitted sexually. The case is unusual because the son didn't travel to an area where mosquitoes are known to spread Zika or have sex with anyone who did, so it's unclear how he got sick. He has recovered.
His father caught Zika overseas and died after returning home with an unusually high level of the virus in his system. His was the first death of a Zika-infected person in the continental U.S.
The person who confirmed the relationship between the two is familiar with the case and spoke Tuesday on the condition of anonymity because the person isn't authorized to discuss the case by name.
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Jitters amid fear of new attacks after Nice bloodshed
NICE, France (AP) An axe attack on a German train. Four people stabbed in the French Alps. A shooting in Britain.
Scattered violence across Europe is sparking fears that copycats may be striking out after the truck rampage that killed dozens on a Nice beachfront, prompting panicked police deployment and leading to a likely extension of France's 8-month-old state of emergency.
The incidents are drawing greater attention than usual from police and on social media after last week's Bastille Day attack on Nice fiercely interrupted the European vacation season, killing at least 84 people.
Tahar, center, the father of Kylan Mejri, is comforted by relatives after carrying the coffin of his 4-year-old son at the ar-Rahma mosque in the eastern Nice suburb of Ariane, Tuesday, July 19, 2016, killed in Thursday's truck attack. Tahar's wife Olfa Kalfallah, 31, was also killed. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)
On Tuesday, a Moroccan man stabbed a woman and three girls in the French Alps. In southern France, jittery authorities evacuated a hotel after a man refusing to pay his bill barricaded himself in his room. A shooting in Britain prompted concern that it was more than an isolated incident.
It's just the kind of fear that extremist groups like Islamic State want to sow. The group is boasting about the Nice violence in statements, videos and graphics and about a stabbing in Bavaria by an angry 17-year-old Afghan asylum-seeker, the first IS-claimed violence in Germany.
That fear drove French President Francois Hollande to push for an extension of a state of emergency that's been in place since deadly attacks on Paris in November.
"We could have thought that we didn't need it anymore. But after the Nice attack ... as long as we don't know if it could prompt imitations, as long as we don't know all the exact reasons, my responsibility is to extend the state of emergency," he said Tuesday, urging lawmakers to approve the extension as they debate it this week.
While critics note that the state of emergency didn't prevent the Nice attack, the French Parliament is expected to prolong it for three or six months. It allows greater police powers to search homes and hold people under house arrest.
Six people are currently in custody in the Nice attack investigation, and five are undergoing questioning in the French anti-terrorism agency headquarters near Paris and face likely charges of complicity in the violence, authorities said Tuesday.
Driver Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel rammed his truck through revelers watching fireworks after praising IS, researching attacks against a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and on police officers in Dallas and plotting out his own attack route, according to the Paris prosecutor.
French authorities have been on extra-high alert since the attack, and a mystery stabbing in the Alps on Tuesday set many on edge.
Authorities say police detained a Moroccan man who attacked a woman and her three daughters 8, 12 and 14 at a resort as they ate their breakfast.
All four were expected to recover, said Jean-Marc Duprat, a deputy mayor for the town of Laragne-Monteglin. Duprat initially said the man was upset that the girls were wearing shorts and T-shirts, but later said that didn't appear to be the case and that the attacker's motive wasn't known.
In the southern French town of Bollene, authorities evacuated a hotel Tuesday after a man with a knife barricaded himself in his room. There were unconfirmed reports the man had been seen with a suspicious parcel with wires showing.
In the eastern English town of Spalding, British police say three people were shot dead near a swimming pool, but said it's not thought to be terrorism-related.
Back in the Nice region, fear gave way to mourning, as a mosque in the eastern suburb of Ariane held prayers Tuesday for three of those killed in the truck attack, including 4-year-old Kylan Mejri and his mother, Olfa Kalfallah, 31.
Mourners rallied around Kylan's father, Tahar Mejri, who carried the plain white coffin of his son out to a waiting hearse.
Holding photos of his son, Mejri spoke of his grief and described the moment that he arrived on the promenade to find his wife dead and Kylan's scooter lying on the floor. He spent all night going from one hospital to another before learning that his son hadn't survived.
Mejri said he plans to sue the authorities over what happened.
"A festival like that with nearly 33,000 and the promenade was open," he said. "There was no security."
The attack has sparked a national debate about whether security officials did all they could to prevent the attack the third mass slaughter in France over the past 18 months.
Elsewhere in Nice were signs that the city is coming back to life. Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers were back on the Riviera coast under a blazing sun. On the famed Promenade des Anglais, there were few visible reminders Tuesday of the July 14 carnage, save for a handful of flags flying at half-staff and armed soldiers patrolling. Some beachside restaurants reopened for business, and the final section of the road reopened to traffic following three days of official mourning.
Resident Clare Spencer was determined to reclaim the city for its residents and tourists and rejected the attempt of extremists to instill fear.
"They will not take the promenade away from us," she said. "They will not win, the evil ones ...The people are back."
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Maria Sanminiatelli reported from Paris. Adam Pemble in Nice and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed to this report.
Relatives of 4 year old Kylan Mejri who was killed in Thursday's truck attack, cry at the ar-Rahma mosque in the eastern Nice suburb of Ariane, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Kylan's mother Olfa Kalfallah, 31, was also killed. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)
Soldiers patrols on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers are back on Nice's famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
Two women place flowers along the beach of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers are back on Nice's famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
Tahar, center, the father of Kylan Mejri, is comforted by relatives after carrying the coffin of his 4-year-old son at the ar-Rahma mosque in the eastern Nice suburb of Ariane, Tuesday, July 19, 2016, killed in Thursday's truck attack. Tahar's wife Olfa Kalfallah, 31, was also killed. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)
A man reacts as he looks flowers placed at a new memorial in a gazebo in a seaside park of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers are back on Nice's famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
A man looks at flowers and messages placed along the beach of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers are back on Nice's famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
People look at flowers and messages placed along the beach of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers are back on Nice's famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
Flowers and messages are placed along the beach of the famed Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers are back on Nice's famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
People ride their bicycles in front of the Negresko Hotel, on the famed Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Joggers, cyclists and sun-seekers are back on Nice's famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week's Bastille Day truck attack. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
Imams held prayers for three of those killed in Thursday's attack, including 4-year-old Kylan Mejri and his mother Olfa Kalfallah, 31, at the ar-Rahma mosque in the eastern suburb of Ariane in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Mourners rallied around Kylan's father, Tahar, who spoke of his grief at losing his son and wife in the attack. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)
Tahar holds photographs of his 4 year old son Kylan at the ar-Rahma mosque in the eastern Nice suburb of Ariane, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Kylan Mejri and his mother Olfa Kalfallah, 31, were killed in Thursday's truck attack. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)
Relatives of Kylan's father, Tahar, react during funeral ceremony at the ar-Rahma mosque in the eastern Nice suburb of Ariane, as worshippers held prayers for three of those killed in Thursday's attack, including 4years-old Kylan Mejri and his mother Olfa Kalfallah, 31, in Nice, southern France, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Mourners rallied around Kylan's father, Tahar, who spoke of his grief at losing his son and wife in the attack. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)
Tahar, left, the father of Kylan Mejri, with relatives carries the coffin of his 4-year-old son at the ar-Rahma mosque in the eastern Nice suburb of Ariane, Tuesday, July 19, 2016, killed in Thursday's truck attack. His mother Olfa Kalfallah, 31, was also killed. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)
Trump chief stars in campaign controversy
CLEVELAND (AP) Even more than the candidate himself, Donald Trump's campaign chief has emerged as the early star of the Republican National Convention.
Paul Manafort is the force behind the fight to stop a delegate uprising, a leading attack dog against the New York billionaire's Republican critics former presidents among them and a public defender of Melania Trump's convention speech, which may have been plagiarized under his watch.
Manafort answered with a simple, "No," when asked Tuesday whether the campaign made a mistake with Mrs. Trump's primetime address, which used remarkably similar language at times to Michelle Obama's convention speech eight years earlier.
Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort walks around the convention floor before the opening session of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
"Nobody believes she did it," Manafort said of the theft charge during a brief interview with The Associated Press. "This is totally blown out of proportion."
It is not Manafort's first brush with plagiarism. And it is certainly not his first bout with drama inside the Trump campaign, an organization dominated by infighting and dysfunction since before he joined the team in March.
Yet rarely has Manafort played a more public role on Trump's behalf than he has this week in Cleveland, where he is a fixture inside the city's convention halls and makeshift television studios.
The 67-year-old campaign chairman caused a stir on the opening day of the convention by criticizing the Bush family, considered political royalty among many Republicans, as "part of the past" even as he called for party unity. And he raised eyebrows on the next by deflecting responsibility on the speech fallout to Melania Trump herself.
Frustrated Republicans cheered his management of a possible delegate rebellion on the first day, but also worried that his recent performance could jeopardize his leadership position within the Trump campaign.
Yet Manafort remained squarely atop Trump Tower's internal power structure on Tuesday afternoon, his power limited only by Trump himself and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. There is no area in Trump's political organization that he does not control directly or indirectly.
An organization chart obtained by the AP late last month listed his responsibilities as strategy, polling, political operations, media, communications strategies, budgeting, scheduling, vice presidential vetting and debate negotiations.
Manafort favored Indiana Gov. Mike Pence to serve as Trump's running mate, a suggestion that put him at odds with some in Trump's family.
Yet Trump's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., lavished Manafort with praise on Tuesday. The family "couldn't be more happy with the work that he's doing, the way he's tackling these things, the way he's handling the organization of everything going forward," Trump Jr. said. "He's done a phenomenal job. I wish we had him on earlier."
With campaign finance reports suggesting Manafort works for no salary, the relative newcomer to the Trump campaign has recently been willing to walk away if necessary. He issued Trump an ultimatum last month, saying he would not stay on the campaign if former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski remained.
"He is not afraid to play hardball," said Barry Bennett, a Trump adviser who was forced out of the campaign soon after Lewandowski's departure.
Indeed, Manafort is no stranger to power politics.
He has worked in national and international politics for nearly four decades, a run that began on former President Gerald Ford's convention team and includes runs with an African military leader, an ousted Ukrainian president, and a dictator from the Philippines.
Reed described Manafort's management style as "all about execution." ''He does not suffer fools well," he added.
This is not his first plagiarism controversy, either.
In 2011, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, whom Manafort advised, was accused of plagiarizing entire passages in an English-language book on reforming his country that he authored. One passage in "Opportunity Ukraine" bore a striking resemblance to an article in a top Ukrainian magazine; another borrowed heavily from a speech by a Communist lawmaker, yet another section was similar to a college paper posted on a Russian essay-sharing web site.
While it's unlikely that Manafort played a direct role with the book, the scandal further bolstered Yanukovych's image as a deeply corrupt and unprincipled politician.
Donald Trump Jr. said he was pleased that his father ultimately picked Manafort to lead the campaign over Lewandowski.
"There's a reason Paul's in the position that he is today and Corey's not. And it's not because Paul's amateur hour," Trump Jr. said.
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Associated Press writers Jill Colvin in Cleveland and Maria Danilova In Washington contributed to this report.
Kansas officer killed while looking for drive-by suspect
KANSAS CITY, Kan. (AP) A Kansas City, Kansas, police officer was shot and killed on Tuesday while searching for a suspect in a drive-by shooting, police said.
Capt. Robert Melton was searching for the suspect when he drove up to someone who matched that person's description just before 2 p.m., police spokesman Tom Tomasic said. Before Melton could get out of his vehicle, the person opened fire, hitting the officer multiple times, Tomasic said. The alleged shooter was caught five minutes later about a block away, he said.
A police spokeswoman said the suspect was being questioned Tuesday evening along with another person suspected in the initial drive-by shooting. Police weren't releasing the suspects' names because charges hadn't been filed. A third person who had been taken into custody was determined not to have been involved and was released, police said.
Kansas City, Kan., police officer Brad Lightfoot, left, consuls Susan Goble at the shooting scene of a police officer in Kansas City, Kan., Tuesday, July 19, 2016. Goble knows the family of the fallen officer and hoped to place a wreath near the site of the shooting. A suspect in a drive-by shooting fatally shot Capt. Robert Melton, a 17-year veteran of the Kansas City, Kan., Police Department, on Tuesday as the officer was sitting in his patrol car, police said. (AP Photo/Orlin Wagner)
It's the second time a Kansas City, Kansas, police officer has been shot and killed this year. In early May, detective Brad Lancaster was fatally shot near the Kansas Speedway, and Melton had served in the police honor guard at Lancaster's funeral. The shooting also comes as police departments across the country are on edge after ambush attacks left eight officers dead in Texas and Louisiana.
"There's a lot of pain and brokenness in our community and our nation right now, and we just want to ask everyone to be prayerful and thoughtful right now," Mayor Mark Holland of the Unified Government of Wyandotte County said.
Ida Ford, 87, was watching television in her two-story brick home when gunfire erupted just outside. Ford said she thought someone was knocking on her air conditioner until her son rushed downstairs and told her the three loud noises she had heard were gunshots. Ford said she looked through her window and saw the officer sprawled and unresponsive on the asphalt road in front of her home. She watched for a few minutes as paramedics worked on the officer.
"I'm just so sorry for his family," she said.
Melton was brought to the University of Kansas Hospital just before 2:30 p.m., but resuscitation efforts did not work, trauma surgeon James Howard said at a news conference.
The shooting happened after police responded to a report around 1:30 p.m. from a person who said several people in a car were firing shots. The suspect vehicle took off as police arrived, but it crashed into a fence and the occupants bailed out at 1:36 p.m., Tomasic, the police spokesman, said. Two people were taken into custody within three minutes of the wreck, he said.
Melton, 46, was driving around looking for a third person when he came upon someone who matched the suspect's description, Tomasic said.
Melton was a 17-year veteran of the Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department. According to his LinkedIn profile, he had also served in the Kansas Army National Guard and was deployed to Afghanistan from September 2010 to March 2012.
Outside the hospital where Melton died, local Baptist preacher Jimmie Banks a friend of the city's mayor sat dejected on a bench, head lowered, after attending the news conference announcing the officer's passing. He said it was painful to sit in that room and see the grief-stricken faces.
"The contributions that peace officers make to protect and serve they deserve better," said Banks. "When they leave home, the family expects them to return. It's shameful this has happened."
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Draper reported from Kansas City, Missouri.
Kansas City, Kan., and Shawnee police officers work part of the shooting scene of a police officer in Kansas City, Kan., Tuesday, July 19, 2016. A suspect in a drive-by shooting fatally shot Capt. Robert Melton, a 17-year veteran of the Kansas City, Kan., Police Department, on Tuesday as the officer was sitting in his patrol car, police said. (AP Photo/Orlin Wagner)
Washington tribe joins legal challenge over modified salmon
SEATTLE (AP) A Native American tribe in Washington state has joined a lawsuit challenging the federal government's approval of an Atlantic salmon genetically modified to grow faster.
The Quinault Indian Nation on Friday joined the lawsuit that 11 other fishing and environmental groups filed against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and others in late March.
The lawsuit alleges the FDA didn't fully analyze potential environmental effects before approving the faster-growing salmon for human consumption in November.
The tribe says it is worried the genetically modified salmon can escape and harm wild salmon runs, despite assurances from the company, AquaBounty Technologies.
"Although there are obvious risks to our salmon, the Food and Drug Administration surged forward with its approval," tribal chairwoman Fawn Sharp said in a statement. Other plaintiffs include the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, Center for Biological Diversity, Food and Water Watch and Center for Food Safety.
The FDA said Tuesday it does not comment on pending litigation.
Dave Conley, a spokesman with AquaBounty, said in an email: "We don't comment on pending legal issues, but believe FDA's decision will be upheld."
In May, Canadian regulators approved the AquAdvantage salmon "as safe and nutritious for humans and livestock as conventional salmon."
This month, the Massachusetts-based company announced it had acquired a second facility on Prince Edward Island in eastern Canada where it would raise conventional Atlantic salmon to provide eggs that would be transferred to its existing facility. The company plans to ship those eggs to Panama, where they will grow in land-based tanks and be processed into filets and shipped to the U.S. for sale. The FDA says no live fish are permitted to be imported or marketed in the U.S.
"This is the first step in a much larger business plan to expand this product and this biotechnology to a bunch of other places," said Steve Mashuda with Earthjustice in Seattle, one of the attorneys representing the groups. "They (the FDA) say we should look at that later. We're saying now is the time to look at that."
Mashuda said that the FDA's review did not analyze the full impacts of what would happen if the genetically modified salmon did escape. He also said the groups want a more thorough review not only of what has been approved but the company's expansion plans as well.
Gay Ecuadorian author overcomes barriers and publishes novel
NEW YORK (AP) As a deaf and gay student in Ecuador, Cesar Baquerizo was bullied and a victim of societal prejudice.
Now, after five years of writing, Pen Name Publishing has released his first novel in English, "A Safe Place With You."
The book talks about homosexuality in Ecuador in the '80s, when it was illegal.
In this July 12, 2016 photo, Ecuadorian writer Cesar Baquerizo is interviewed in New York. Baquerizo who suffered prejudice in Ecuador for being gay, is having his first novel, A Safe Place With You, published by Pen Name Publishing. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
"I want to move readers through my words, so they can put themselves in LGBT people's shoes and feel like they are there, in the novel, with my characters," Baquerizo, 30, told the AP in a recent interview.
The book follows a young man named Tomas Diaz and his newly found friends at a conversion therapy clinic in Ecuador, where their families have sent them to "treat" their homosexuality. There, patients are given pills and suffer psychological abuse.
"A Safe Place With You," published in Spanish in Ecuador in 2013, was inspired by true events though it is not a memoir. Baquerizo researched victims of conversion therapy clinics in his native country, and, after self-publishing the novel in Spanish, he met with some of the victims.
"I felt empathy, but it was a heartbreaking experience," he said. "Listening to them made me realize the cruel reality that we still face in Ecuador."
The author was born in Guayaquil with a serious respiratory problem and three days after his birth he underwent emergency surgery in Pennsylvania. As a baby, a treatment of antibiotics probably claimed most of his hearing, he said, so when he was 4 he moved with his family to Argentina to take language classes. There, he received his first set of hearing aids and received speech therapy.
Now, in Quito, he lives in a society that decriminalized homosexuality in 1997. But prejudice remains an issue.
"I want people to face reality and to see that we live in a world full of diversity," Baquerizo said. "We are all equal because we are all different."
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New Mexico spaceport authority director resigns
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) The head of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority said Tuesday she will resign, saying she still believes in the commercial space industry and that Spaceport America has a role to play despite criticism that flights filled with paying passengers have not yet lifted off from the remote desert site.
Christine Anderson announced her resignation in a memo to the authority's board and Gov. Susana Martinez obtained by The Associated Press. She said it was a difficult decision but wants to pursue "other life adventures" without offering specifics.
Anderson took over as executive director five years ago as the spaceport was just getting started.
FILE - In this Dec. 9, 2014, file photo, Christine Anderson, executive director of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, poses for a photo at the end of the taxiway at Spaceport America in Upham, N.M. Anderson is resigning, saying she still believes in the commercial space industry and that Spaceport America has a role to play. Anderson announced her resignation in a memo sent Tuesday, July 19, 2016, to the authority's board of directors and New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan, File)
She has been praised for overseeing construction of the futuristic launch site and bringing new infrastructure to a lonely stretch of southern New Mexico.
But delays by anchor tenant Virgin Galactic left the spaceport scrambling for revenue in recent years and fueled lawmakers' skepticism about the venture.
Anderson has repeatedly countered the criticisms.
"Spaceport America is finally reaching its prime and the momentum must continue," she wrote, pointing to more than two dozen vertical rocket launches, agreements with new tenants and a more diverse spaceport business plan. "It's important to ensure all the progress we have made will continue and thrive under new leadership."
Anderson's last day will be Aug. 19, and the board plans to cast a wide net in search of her successor.
Spaceport board chairman Rick Holdridge praised Anderson for her accomplishments.
"She took a bunch of contracts that were barely in place, some of them had problems, and now we have a beautiful spaceport, fully operational," he said. "We're gathering more customers and we're attracting movies and advertising that we never thought of."
Taxpayers paid for the state-of-the-art hangar and runway as part of a plan by British billionaire Richard Branson and former Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat.
The spaceport was publicized as the world's first purpose-built facility for launching paying customers, satellites and other cargo into space as well as a place for aerospace company operations.
While there's no firm date for Virgin Galactic to begin commercial flights, Anderson said earlier this year that the company's first passenger flight could lift off in late 2017 or 2018.
Virgin Galactic executives were in New Mexico in April for a series of ground and air exercises in preparation for future flights. Chief executive George Whitesides said then that his team was making progress testing its new spaceship.
After years of development, Virgin Galactic three years ago appeared to be nearing the goal of turning ordinary civilians into astronauts when its first craft, named "SpaceShipTwo," broke apart on Oct. 31, 2014 during a rocket-powered flight over the Mojave Desert. The pilot died.
Anderson and other spaceport officials have consistently defended the program despite its setbacks, saying the effort to turn commercial space flights into realty is challenging and holds promise for the state.
"Eventually technology catches up with the vision and that's what has happened with the spaceport," Holdridge said. "The idea of launching into space off of an airplane was kind of fantasy, science fiction. Now it's the real thing. Virgin has done it and now they're just getting it ready to go commercial."
Before leading the spaceport agency, Anderson served for three decades as a civilian in the U.S. Air Force.
Clinton: First day of Republican convention 'surreal'
LAS VEGAS (AP) Hillary Clinton dismissed the first day of the Republican National Convention as a "surreal" experience on Tuesday, comparing the gathering led by Republican Donald Trump to the classic fantasy film "The Wizard of Oz."
"There were similarities that appeared to me. Lots of sound and fury even a fog machine," Clinton told 6,000 people at the convention of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in Las Vegas. "But when you pull back the curtain, it was just Donald Trump with nothing to offer to the American people."
Clinton rallied labor allies in Nevada as Republicans met in Cleveland for the second day of the national convention where delegates are expected to officially select Trump as their party's nominee. Speaking to longstanding Democratic allies, Clinton noted Trump's shadowy appearance before he introduced his wife, Melania Trump, but made no mention of allegations that she lifted passages of her speech from first lady Michelle Obama's 2008 address.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton arrives to speaks at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees 42nd International Convention at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Las Vegas, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
Bracketing Trump, the presumptive Democratic nominee said "last night in Cleveland was surreal," prompting a chorus of boos at the mention of her Republican rival's name. She added that viewers heard a lot about her and Trump but "not a single solution" that would help workers and their families.
The former secretary of state addressed 6,000 members of AFSCME, a labor union representing 1.6 million public sector workers. The union endorsed Clinton in October.
She pointed to ongoing struggles with Republican governors in the Midwest, accusing Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a former GOP presidential hopeful, of ripping "the heart out of public sector workers' right to bargain."
In Illinois, she accused Gov. Bruce Rauner, a Republican elected in 2014, of "holding the budget hostage for months," hurting families and demanding "outrageous concessions" to fix a multibillion dollar deficit.
She also warned that Trump would undercut the Dodd-Frank Act passed six years ago this week by Congress in response to the financial crisis. Trump, Clinton said, wanted to "tear up Dodd-Frank and let Wall Street run wild again."
Clinton later rallied supporters in North Las Vegas, where she picked up the endorsement of the 270,000-member UNITE HERE union that represents workers in the hotel, gaming and food service industries. The union's largest affiliate is the local Culinary Workers Union, a powerhouse in Nevada politics that declined to endorse during the primaries.
Nevada is among the top battleground states in the fall election and Clinton used the events to point to a new voter mobilization push under way by the campaign aiming to register more than 3 million voters and have them commit to vote in the election.
"We're not leaving anything to chance," she said.
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On Twitter follow Ken Thomas at: twitter.com/KThomasDC
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees 42nd International Convention at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Las Vegas, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, center, greets a supporter on stage with AFT President Randi Weingarten, right, after speaking at the American Federation of Teachers convention at the Minneapolis Convention Center in Minneapolis, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
Former priest who served third of abuse sentence gets parole
CORNER BROOK, Newfoundland (AP) A retired Roman Catholic priest who was sentenced to 11 years in prison for sex offences involving young boys in eastern Canada has been granted full parole after serving a third of his sentence.
George Ansel Smith was sentenced in March 2013 after he pleaded guilty to more than three dozen charges, including sexual assault, indecent assault and assault with intent. The offences occurred from 1969 to 1989 in several Newfoundland communities.
Smith was sentenced to 11 years. The term was reduced to nine years and 11 months for time already served in pre-trial custody.
Former Marine sentenced to 25 years for oil fraud scheme
LAS VEGAS (AP) Federal authorities say a former Marine has been sentenced to 25 years in jail for a multimillion dollar Nigerian oil fraud scheme.
The Justice Department said Tuesday that 65-year-old Anton Paul Drago was convicted in March of wire fraud, failing to file a federal income tax return, lying to federal agents, theft of government funds and falsely submitting claims to Veterans Affairs.
The Las Vegas man had been accused of setting up a Nigerian oil investment scheme between 2004 and 2012, telling investors their money would go toward a crude oil operation.
Drago, who also known as Evan Fogarty, had served in the Marine Corps and for decades falsely claimed a disability to receive thousands of dollars in monthly VA benefits.
Melania Trump opts for Serbian designer for her big moment
Her husband's campaign slogan is "Make America Great Again." But when it came to her big moment in the spotlight, Melania Trump chose a dress not by an American designer, but by a Serbian-born designer based in London.
The Slovenian-born Trump wore an off-white dress with three-quarter length, bell-shaped sleeves and a long zipper down the back to address the Republican National Convention on Monday night. The dress was by Roksanda Illincic, whose designs are very popular in London and among celebrities, among them Gwyneth Paltrow, Keira Knightley and Daisy Ridley, to name just a few.
Samantha Cameron, wife of the former British prime minister, wore a colorful, flared Roksanda dress to leave Downing Street last week. But the designer's most prominent fan is probably the Duchess of Cambridge. The former Kate Middleton has worn her designs to at least three events this summer, including a brilliant yellow dress with blocks of white to Wimbledon.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump applauses after with his wife Melania addresses the delegates during the Republican National Convention, Monday, July 18, 2016, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/John Locher)
And then there's Michelle Obama, who wore Roksanda's beaded wool satin dress and wool coat to meet the Chinese president in 2011, among other occasions. Though the first lady has chosen designers from across the globe during her years in the White House, she wore American designers to address both Democratic conventions at which her husband was nominated: Maria Pinto in 2008 and Tracy Reese in 2012.
Women's Wear Daily reported that Trump bought Illincic's "Margot" dress online from the Net-a-Porter fashion site.
Aid group blasts inaction vs. HIV in Central, West Africa
DURBAN, South Africa (AP) Doctors Without Borders' HIV policy adviser says the global aid group has "zero tolerance" for inaction on fighting the virus in Central and West Africa.
The organization says 4.5 million of the 6.5 million people living with HIV in those regions don't get treatment.
Sharonann Lynch spoke to reporters Tuesday during the international AIDS conference in South Africa.
Graca Machel, right, wife of former president Nelson Mandela makes a point about the rights of young adolescent women as actress Charlize Theron looks at the 2016 AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. The two were part of a panel that discussed the rights and difficulties faced by adolescents in the HIV/Aids epidemic. (AP Photo)
She said Doctors Without Borders has no tolerance for "essentially what will be bold-faced lies" to meet the goal of getting 30 million people on HIV treatment by 2020 if more funding and political will isn't applied.
The goal was announced last month at a U.N. conference on AIDS.
A doctor with the aid group, Eric Goemaere, said almost half of the children born with HIV come from Central and West Africa.
Graca Machel, right, wife of former South African president Nelson Mandela makes a point about the rights of young adolescent women as actress Charlize Theron, 2nd from right, explains at the 2016 AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. The two were part of a panel that discussed the rights and difficulties faced by adolescents in the HIV/Aids epidemic. (AP Photo)
FILE - In this file photo taken Friday July 15, 2016, persons stand at an ATM-style dispensing machine at the Helen Joseph Hospital in Johannesburg. The South African Ministry of Health announced, Tuesday July 19, 2016, at the International AIDS Conference in Durban South Africa, that such machines will be supplied as a self-service machine where patients can obtain their medication in the same way people can withdraw cash at an ATM, which is familiar to most South Africans. (AP Photo/Denis Farrell)
The Latest: Protesters target Rubio in Pulse neighborhood
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) The Latest on the investigation into the mass shooting at a gay Florida nightclub that left 49 people dead (all times local):
5:15 p.m.
More than two dozen protesters shouted chants against U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio as he toured businesses that were forced to close for several days because of an investigation into the shooting deaths of 49 people at a nearby gay nightclub.
The protesters on Tuesday criticized Rubio's past stances against gun control and gay rights as he met with business owners about small-business loans that may be available to them because of lost revenue.
Rubio told reporters that he understood why the protesters were there. The Florida Republican made an unsuccessful bid earlier this year for the GOP presidential nomination.
Advocates of gun control measures and gay rights have targeted Rubio in the month since Omar Mateen opened fire at the Pulse nightclub, leaving 49 patrons dead and 53 people wounded.
Protesters held a sit-in last week in the lobby of the Orlando building where he has an office.
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4:45 p.m.
The U.S. Department of Justice argues that audio recordings of the Florida nightclub shooter talking to Orlando police dispatchers and 911 calls pertaining to the massacre are federal records and not subject to Florida's public records law.
The Justice Department said in a federal court filing Monday that the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force is still investigating the Pulse nightclub shooting; therefore, the audio recordings can only be disclosed with FBI permission.
About two dozen new media organizations including The Associated Press are fighting to have the audio recordings released.
The news outlets argue that the release of the recordings will help the public understand the motive of gunman Omar Mateen, as well as help evaluate how the Orlando Police responded to the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
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11:45 a.m.
Officers describe hysterical patrons, bodies on the floor and victims' blood seeping into their uniforms as they pulled them out of a gay Florida nightclub where a shooter opened fire.
New police reports released Tuesday give greater detail about the Orlando police response to the June massacre of 49 patrons at the Pulse nightclub, the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
The officers who recount their role in the reports were the initial responders to a call from a fellow officer who was working security as gunman Omar Mateen began firing in the club. Some of those officers entered the club and were later relieved by SWAT team members.
Mateen died in a hail of gunfire after the SWAT team breached a wall in the club.
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3:15 a.m.
Newly released records show the gunman who opened fire at a Florida gay nightclub told his bosses he lied about having terrorist ties to get co-workers off his back about being Muslim.
In records released by the St. Lucie County Sheriff's Office on Monday, Omar Mateen tells his employers he was repeatedly taunted for his religion in his job as a security guard at the county courthouse.
His remarks prompted an FBI investigation in 2013 and caused enough concern that officials asked employer G4S Secure Solutions to have him reassigned, away from the courthouse.
But the documents show the FBI didn't believe he was a terrorist and an agent told a sheriff's office major he didn't think Mateen "would go postal or anything like that."
Uruguay marijuana growers compete in Cannabis Cup
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay (AP) Uruguay is home to the world's first government-regulated national marketplace for pot, so it's not surprising that growers have a competition for best marijuana.
At the Cannabis Cup over the weekend, a panel of regional experts judged entries for aroma, flavor, effects and strength before picking the winners of the best indoor and outdoor crops.
Silver cups were awarded to the winners, such as Guillermo Amandola, who won in the self-grown outdoor crop category, and Eduardo Bandera, for self-grown indoor pot.
In this July 16, 2016 photo, a competitor looks at a marijuana bud through a magnifying glass at the fifth annual Cannabis Cup, a competition for best marijuana, in Montevideo, Uruguay. Over the weekend, a panel of regional experts judged entries for aroma, flavor, effects and strength before picking the winners of the best indoor and outdoor crops. The South American country is home to the world's first government-regulated national marketplace for pot. (AP Photo/Matilde Campodonico)
All the competitors received a jar with samples from others in the tournament and were allowed to taste some of the finest pot in the South American country.
The contest was held in Montevideo at a private building where bands played rock music while competitors smoked joints and vendors sold food and marijuana paraphernalia. Alcohol was banned.
Uruguay legalized the cultivation and sale of marijuana in 2013 in an effort to fight rising homicide and crime rates associated with drug trafficking. The law allows the growing of pot by licensed individuals, the formation of growers and users clubs, and the sale by pharmacies of 40 grams of marijuana a month to registered users.
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In this July 16, 2016 photo, a competitor smokes a joint during the fifth annual Cannabis Cup, a competition for best marijuana, in Montevideo, Uruguay. At the tournament over the weekend, a panel of regional experts judged entries for aroma, flavor, effects and strength before picking the winners of the best indoor and outdoor crops. (AP Photo/Matilde Campodonico)
In this July 16, 2016 photo, trophy cups are displayed on a fireplace mantel during the fifth annual Cannabis Cup, a competition for best marijuana, in Montevideo, Uruguay. All the competitors received a jar with samples from others in the best marijuana tournament and were allowed to taste some of the finest pot in the South American country. (AP Photo/Matilde Campodonico)
In this July 17, 2016 photo, a man rolls a joint during the fifth annual Cannabis Cup, a competition for best marijuana, in Montevideo, Uruguay. All the competitors received a jar with samples from others in the tournament and were allowed to taste some of the finest pot in the South American country. (AP Photo/Matilde Campodonico)
In this July 16, 2016 photo, competitors evaluate marijuana samples during the fifth annual Cannabis Cup, a competition for best marijuana, in Montevideo, Uruguay. The contest was held in Montevideo at a private building where bands played rock music while competitors smoked joints and vendors sold food and marijuana paraphernalia. Alcohol was banned. (AP Photo/Matilde Campodonico)
In this July 17, 2016 photo, a man examines a marijuana bud during the fifth annual Cannabis Cup, a competition for best marijuana, in Montevideo, Uruguay. The South American country is home to the world's first government-regulated national marketplace for pot. (AP Photo/Matilde Campodonico)
In this July 16, 2016 photo, Laura Blanco, from the Asociacion de Estudios del Cannabis del Uruguay, displays trophy cups on a fireplace mantel, at the Cannabis Cup, a competition for best marijuana, in Montevideo, Uruguay. All the competitors received a jar with samples from others in the best marijuana tournament and were allowed to taste some of the finest pot in the South American country. (AP Photo/Matilde Campodonico)
In this July 16, 2016 photo, competitors listen to a band performance while smoking marijuana samples during the fifth annual Cannabis Cup, a competition for best marijuana, in Montevideo, Uruguay. The contest was held in Montevideo at a private building where bands played rock music while competitors smoked joints and vendors sold food and marijuana paraphernalia. Alcohol was banned. (AP Photo/Matilde Campodonico)
In this July 17, 2016 photo, Juan Vaz, left, stands next to Guillermo Amandola, first place winner of the outdoors crops category in the fifth annual Cannabis Cup, a competition for best marijuana, in Montevideo, Uruguay. The South American country legalized the cultivation and sale of marijuana in 2013 in an effort to fight rising homicide and crime rates associated with drug trafficking. (AP Photo/Matilde Campodonico)
Prince bought Minneapolis house featured in 'Purple Rain'
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) A real estate agent says Prince last year bought a Minneapolis "fixer-upper" featured in his 1984 hit movie "Purple Rain," though the megastar never lived in the home.
Deborah Larsen of Coldwell Banker Burnet in Minneapolis said Tuesday that Prince's company, NPG Music Publishing, bought the 1913 house for $117,000. The asking price was $110,000.
The house was used for exterior shots in "Purple Rain," which starred Prince as an aspiring musician known as "The Kid."
Larsen says a woman in California called last July wanting to pay cash for the house. It had been on the market for about a week. Larsen doesn't know why Prince wanted the house. She says it needed "a lot of repairs."
California couple claims prize in record Powerball jackpot
CHINO HILLS, Calif. (AP) While Californians have mused for months about the mystery buyer of a Powerball ticket worth $528.8 million, the couple holding the lucky numbers was busy lining up lawyers and financial advisers to help them handle their enormous winnings.
Flanked by security, Marvin and Mae Acosta went to a state lottery office in Van Nuys on Friday to claim their share of a record $1.6 billion Powerball drawing in January, Alex Traverso, a California lottery spokesman, disclosed on Tuesday.
In a statement, the Acostas said they are dedicating nearly all of the prize money to a trust and charities. "We are thankful and blessed for the rare gift that has been placed in our care," they said.
FILE -This Jan. 13, 2016 file photo shows 7-Eleven store clerk M. Faroqui celebrates with customers after learning the store sold a winning Powerball ticket in Chino Hills, Calif. The California lottery said Tuesday, July 19, 2016, a couple, Marvin and Mae Acosta, have claimed a $528.8 million share of a record record $1.6 billion Powerball jackpot in January. (Will Lester/The Sun via AP, File) MANDATORY CREDIT
Their names are public record under state law, but Traverso requested that other personal information remain private.
Property records show a couple with the same names purchased a 5-bedroom home for $475,000 last fall in Eastvale, a Southern California community about 10 miles from the 7-Eleven where the winning ticket was purchased. A neighbor said the couple who lived there had two children and moved out last Thursday, a day before the prize was claimed.
Public records showed that Marvin Acosta is 39 years old and Mae Acosta is 40.
Many Californians might have difficulty understanding why the couple would sit on such a mega-prize for so long. But that kind of studied preparation is exactly what state lottery officials recommend for winners to avoid falling prey to scams or mismanagement.
"We couldn't be happier for them and are thrilled they took the time to assemble the right team before coming in to claim," California Lottery Director Hugo Lopez said in a statement.
The Acostas will take their winnings in a cash option totaling $327.8 million before federal taxes, lottery officials said.
The Acostas bought their ticket six months ago at the convenience store in Chino Hills, California, a quiet community about 35 miles east of Los Angeles. It was one of three winning tickets sold for the Jan. 13 drawing. Winners in Florida and Tennessee came forward within days to claim their prize money.
Word that one of the winning tickets was sold in California brought excited crowds in January to the 7-Eleven. Gawkers crowded the store and parking lot, mugging for TV cameras and chanting the city's name in celebration of its sudden celebrity.
Store owner Balbir Atwal said Tuesday he doesn't know the Acostas by name. However, their good fortune has been a boon for him as well. He collected $1 million from the state lottery for selling the winning ticket and his lottery sales are up 80 percent at the 7-Eleven.
"Everybody is like, this is a lucky place so everybody comes here to play," he said.
Renie Alano, a 65-year-old retiree, is one of them. He made a special stop Tuesday to pick up lottery tickets.
"The lucky store is always favorable, you know?" he said. "Everybody goes to where it's hitting. I think that's the best way to do it."
The Tennessee winners were a small-town couple, John and Lisa Robinson of Munford, who also took the lump sum payment. They said they didn't intend to stop working John as a warehouse supervisor and Lisa at a dermatologist's office and would stay in their one-story house. They planned to pay off their mortgage and their daughter's student loans.
The Florida winners, David Kaltschmidt and Maureen Smith of Melbourne Beach, took the lump sum as well. Kaltschmidt said he would retire from his job as a manufacturing engineer but wouldn't otherwise change his day-to-day life.
Smith, who identified herself as a homemaker, said she was concerned that winning might make her less friendly because of all the worrying.
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AP EXPLAINS: Why do Republicans say sky is falling? Is it?
The United States depicted at the Republican National Convention is a scary place. It is wrenched by economic uncertainty, social upheaval, political dysfunction, runaway immigration, violent streets and existential threats from abroad. Republicans want voters to see the need for drastic change. The nation's only choice, they say, is Donald Trump.
Why Republicans would paint such a bleak portrait and whether things really are as they say:
WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?
A Code Pink activist is covered by American flags during the second day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Tuesday, July 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
GOP Chairman Reince Priebus opened the convention acknowledging "troubling times." Others used less measured terms. Americans live in fear, they said. The country is disrespected by the world, its military is gutted, its police are shamed. Borders are porous. Terrorism is a constant threat.
Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions said the U.S. suffers from "an economic disaster ... and the American people know it." Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst said "our allies see us shrinking from our place as a leader in the world."
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani pointed to "the terrorists who are killing us and our allies." He concluded: "There is no next election. ... There's no more time for us left to revive our great country."
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WHAT'S THE REALITY?
The United States has seen some tough times, but it is in better shape than most of the world.
Americans are still much less likely to become victims of domestic or international terrorism than most Europeans and citizens of Middle East nations. Violent crime in the United States has dropped steadily since 1992, according to FBI statistics.
In May, unemployment dipped to its lowest rate since November 2007, a year before President Barack Obama's election. The economy has grown for much of Obama's tenure. But the middle class has taken a hit. Average household incomes are rising, but that's largely due to higher pay for the richest 10 percent of American households.
Still, the United States is outperforming most of the world's advanced economies. Last year, the U.S. economy grew 2.4 percent, compared to 0.5 percent in Japan, 2.2 percent in Britain and 1.7 percent in the 19 countries that share the euro currency. China, which Trump often says has out-maneuvered the U.S. on economic matters, is growing faster than the United States. But the U.S. is far richer: Economic output per person last year was $56,000 in the U.S. and $7,900 in China.
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HOW DO AMERICANS SEE IT?
It's a mixed answer. Though Obama's job approval ratings have been positive for much of 2016, Americans are anxious. A recent Associated Press GfK-Poll found almost 4 out of 5 American voters believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. And there's a seemingly never-ending cycle of bad news: a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida; assassinations of police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Dallas; and high-profile killings of black men by police.
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THE POLITICS
Tapping into Americans' anxiety and deepening it may be a logical strategy for Trump to win over moderate Democratic and independent voters. He entered the convention trailing presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in most polls. His favorability ratings are extremely low, even worse than Clinton's dismal numbers.
Conventions normally offer candidates an opportunity to introduce themselves to Americans who don't follow politics too closely. Trump is already extremely well-known and will have a hard time changing voters' opinions about him. However, no one can deny that Trump is the candidate of change. Clinton has been running as the candidate who will build on Obama's legacy. If voters agree that things are truly awful and the country needs a dramatic change, the only candidate who fits the bill is the brash, tough-talking billionaire developer and reality star.
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THERE'S A HISTORY
A party out of the White House for two terms tends to frame the current leadership as a failure. Accepting his nomination in 2008, Obama declared: "We are here because we love this country too much to let the next four years look just like the last eight." Ronald Reagan ousted Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1980 amid economic and international turmoil. Yet Reagan and Obama wove an intrinsic optimism into their arguments. Obama's slogan was "Hope and Change." Reagan summoned biblical imagery to describe the United States as a "shining city on a hill."
Trump's pitch is perhaps most comparable to Richard Nixon's law-and-order campaign in 1968, another turbulent year at home and abroad. Nixon told Republicans in his acceptance speech that "America is trouble today," mired in war "with no end in sight" and unable "to manage its own economy." Trump insists his motto "Make America Great Again" is optimistic. But the subtext is his indictment of a nation that "never wins anymore." He suggests stability and greatness will re-emerge because of his touch, rather than something inherent in the American people.
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AP Economics Writer Paul Wiseman contributed to this report.
Kasich comes to Cleveland, but not to go to the convention
CLEVELAND (AP) Ohio Gov. John Kasich once envisioned a scenario where he would swoop into the party's convention and seize the Republican presidential nomination from Donald Trump.
On Tuesday, Kasich came to Cleveland but stayed away from the convention.
Two months after dropping out of the GOP race, the governor is openly boycotting the Trump coronation in his home state.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich, left, arrives with his wife Karen at the The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum on Tuesday, July 19, 2016, in Cleveland, during the second day of the Republican convention. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
As the convention rolled on, Kasich met privately with state delegations and headlined a state party reception at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, about a mile from the convention site at Quicken Loans Arena.
Kasich avoided mentioning Trump at the event, instead using his brief remarks to contrast Trump's blunt, populist views with the theme of his own campaign: unity and uplift.
"The message for me was never about rhetoric," Kasich told a crowd of about 2,000. "There's no way I would enter a race for president just to win an election."
Kasich's distance and his refusal to endorse Trump didn't sit well with some of the party faithful in attendance.
"I'm pretty upset with John Kasich," said Gene DiFabio. "If Kasich is a Republican, his goal should be to get a Republican in the White House, and he's not doing anything to help that goal."
Ohio is one of the biggest prizes in the presidential election and almost certainly a must-win for Trump. Ohio, worth 18 electoral votes, has been carried by every winning candidate for president since 1964.
In another veiled reference to Trump, Kasich told the Hall of Fame crowd that he dropped out of the race when he thought his only path to victory would be telling people "things that I didn't think were true."
It's rare for a governor to skip his party's convention when it's in his home state, but Kasich said earlier this week that he wouldn't show up unless Trump "changes everything that he says."
"We can't be attacking Muslims and Hispanics, and trying to shut down trade, and not caring about the debt," Kasich told NBC. "Those are all problems for me."
Ohio Gov. John Kasich, left, waves to supporters as his wife Karen listens at the The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum on Tuesday, July 19, 2016, in Cleveland, during the second day of the Republican convention. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
UN: Islamic State fighters face possible defeat in Libya
UNITED NATIONS (AP) Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says Islamic State fighters in Libya are facing the "distinct possibility" of defeat in their last stronghold and are likely to scatter elsewhere in the North African country and the region.
The U.N. chief said in a new report to the U.N. Security Council that member states' estimates of the number of IS fighters range between 2,000 and 7,000 from Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Mali, Morocco and Mauritania.
Ban said one member state recently reported between 3,000 and 4,000 IS fighters in Sirte, the extremist group's last bastion along Libya's northern coast which he called "the most active war front" in the country.
But he said as a result of the recent offensive against IS, by forces aligned with the U.N.-brokered government and others, "the current number of those in Sirte is now likely well under 1,000," with large numbers of those who have recently fled the city likely relocating and regrouping "in smaller and geographically dispersed cells throughout Libya and in neighboring countries."
According to one unnamed U.N. member state, Ban said dozens of Tunisians fighting for IS have already returned home "with the intent to conduct attacks."
The secretary-general said in the report on the threat posed to Libya and neighboring countries by foreign fighters, obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press, that the current political divide in Libya continues to make the country attractive for foreign fighters who are actively recruited by IS and al-Qaida-linked groups to boost their military capabilities.
Libya slid into chaos after the uprising that led to the ouster and killing of longtime autocrat Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. The power and security vacuum left the country a breeding ground for militias and militants including the IS group and al-Qaida affiliates.
Since 2014, Libya has been split between rival governments and parliaments based in the western and eastern regions, each backed by different militias and tribes. A U.N.-brokered deal in December to create a unity government has reached a deadlock, due to political jockeying and the new government's inability to put together an action plan to provide basic services.
Ban said IS propaganda in March 2015 and again in April 2016 called for supporters to travel to Libya instead of Iraq or Syria. He said the largest group of foreign fighters currently operating in Libya are individuals linked to IS, and they dominate the extremist group's top leadership.
Foreign fighters have also joined Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb which periodically infiltrates Libya and uses the country as a rest stop and for training and buying arms, he said.
Osborne urges Theresa May to seek 'close new ties with European neighbours'
Former chancellor George Osborne has called on Theresa May to seek "the closest possible new ties" with European states as she negotiates Britain's exit from the EU.
And he urged the new Prime Minister to stick to commitments entered into by David Cameron to spend 2% of national income on defence and 0.7% on international aid, and to press ahead with his own Northern Powerhouse project to promote economic growth in the north of England.
Mr Osborne, who was sacked from the Cabinet when Mrs May took office last Wednesday, admitted he had "put everything on the line" by backing Remain so strongly in the EU referendum.
George Osborne delivers the 2016 Margaret Thatcher Lecture at the Guildhall in London during an event organised by the Centre for Policy Studies
But he insisted that he did not regret his stance on the EU and would not back away from any of the dire warnings he made about the damage Brexit would do to the UK's prospects.
Delivering the annual Margaret Thatcher Lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies at London's Guildhall, Mr Osborne said: "As you all know, I fought hard - as hard as I could - for a different outcome to the referendum we have just held on our membership of the EU.
"I didn't do it by half-measures; I couldn't on an issue like that. I put everything on the line, and don't regret for a moment that I did.
"But while I don't resile from any of the concerns that I expressed in advance of that vote, nor do I intend to re-run the arguments now the vote has passed."
And he added: "Tonight, and in the future, Theresa May and the new team she has assembled will have my support.
"She has the strength and the integrity to do the job, as she faces up to the great challenge that lies ahead."
Mr Osborne said there was no-one he would rather see succeed him at the Treasury than the new Chancellor Philip Hammond, and offered him his "full backing".
But he set out the priorities which he believed the new Government should follow as it negotiates its new relationship with Europe. The former Chancellor said: "As we negotiate our exit from the EU, I hope we seek the closest possible new ties with our European neighbours.
"They are, on the economy and on security, our friends, not our foes.
"I hope we reach out to build stronger economic and trading ties now with our old allies like the United States, and our new partners like China.
"I hope we maintain the 2% of national income I committed us to spend on defence; and the 0.7% we were able to spend on international development - it makes us unique among the major nations, with world-besting hard power and world-changing soft power, too.
"A Britain strong at home, but also strong in the world."
Mr Osborne welcomed the "One Nation" message delivered by Mrs May in her speech on the doorstep of 10 Downing Street last week, and said that this should involve continued backing for the Northern Powerhouse.
"As Home Secretary, Theresa May has often spoken out against discrimination and I was hugely encouraged to hear her on the steps of Downing Street last week speaking about her One Nation vision for her government," he said.
"She understands that One Nation isn't possible if parts of our country feel disconnected from its economic success and disenfranchised from a stake in our society.
"The regional variation in the referendum result revealed how much more work we have to do, especially in the North and Midlands.
Police release details of country's 10 most wanted alleged con-artists
A rogues' gallery of 10 wanted alleged con-artists has been released, ahead of new crime figures that are expected to reveal the huge scale of fraud in the UK.
Details of the alleged criminals, published on Tuesday by City of London Police and the National Crime Agency, include Alex McKenzie, 33, from London, who is accused of targeting victims using the gay social networking app Scruff, gaining their trust by claiming to work for MI6.
It is claimed he conned two former lovers and one of their parents by taking out credit cards, bank accounts and loans worth a total of 300,000 in their names.
Photos of wanted alleged con-artists have been released (London Police)
Another is Bollywood film producer Sandeep Arora, 42, from Beckton, east London, who allegedly claimed 4.5 million in VAT and Film Tax rebates for movies that either did not exist or with which he had no involvement.
There is also Bayo Lawrence Anoworin, 41, from Lagos, Nigeria, who is wanted by Lincolnshire Police over an alleged scam by a gang that stole more than 12 million from NHS Trusts in the UK and Guernsey between January 2011 and July 2012.
This comes ahead of annual crime figures due for release by the Office for National Statistics on Thursday, that will include a full year of fraud and cybercrime for the first time.
Preliminary figures released in October 2015 found that there had been 5.1 million incidents of fraud in England and Wales in the previous year, affecting an estimated one in 12 adults and making it the most common form of crime.
Donald Toon, director of the NCA's Economic Crime Command, said: "The annual losses to the UK from fraud are estimated to be more than 190 billion. Behind this headline figure lie the actions of criminals like the wanted fraudsters highlighted in this appeal, who have caused distress and loss to people and businesses up and down the country.
"Law enforcement cannot tackle this problem alone. It is only by working together, individuals, law enforcement, Government and the private sector that we can protect the UK against fraud.
Government's Trident renewal motion backed by 140 Labour MPs
Britain's Trident nuclear weapons system has been given a strong vote of confidence by MPs - including 140 Labour MPs who backed renewing the deterrent.
The decisive result was returned in support of a Government motion which also included supporting the plan to replace the existing submarine fleet carrying the missiles with four new Successor submarines.
Jeremy Corbyn was among the 47 Labour MPs who objected to the motion.
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They were joined by Conservative former minister Crispin Blunt, 52 SNP MPs, seven Liberal Democrats, three Plaid Cymru, three SDLP, two independents and Green Party MP Caroline Lucas.
For the ayes, there were 322 Tory MPs, 140 Labour, five Democratic Unionist Party, two Ulster Unionist Party, Ukip MP Douglas Carswell and independent Simon Danczuk.
Labour MP Rupa Huq voted in both the ayes and noes, signalling an abstention - and meaning the final result was 471 ayes to 116, majority 355.
The result was announced in the chamber as 472 votes to 117.
Renewal of the continuous-at-sea deterrent is predicted to cost 31 billion, with a 10 billion contingency fund also set aside.
Labour MPs were subject to a free vote, with leader Mr Corbyn declaring he would oppose the motion - a stance which led to strong criticism from some of his backbenchers.
Just three members of Mr Corbyn's shadow cabinet voted in favour of renewing Trident.
They were deputy leader Tom Watson, shadow home secretary Andy Burnham and chief whip Rosie Winterton.
Meanwhile, 11 members of the shadow cabinet voted against renewing Trident.
They were: Mr Corbyn, shadow chancellor John McDonnell, shadow culture secretary Kelvin Hopkins, shadow environment secretary Rachael Maskell, shadow business secretary Jon Trickett, shadow education secretary Angela Rayner, shadow health secretary Diane Abbott, shadow justice secretary Richard Burgon, shadow Treasury minister Rebecca Long-Bailey, shadow Commons leader Paul Flynn and shadow international development secretary Kate Osamor.
Nine members of the shadow cabinet either chose to abstain or did not attend the vote.
They were: shadow defence secretary Clive Lewis, shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry, shadow youth affairs minister Cat Smith, shadow Northern Ireland secretary Dave Anderson, shadow energy secretary Barry Gardiner, shadow work and pensions secretary Debbie Abrahams, shadow transport secretary Andy McDonald, shadow minister without portfolio Jonathan Ashworth and shadow communities secretary Grahame Morris.
The vote came after a debate lasting almost six hours in which Theresa May, in her first despatch box appearance as Prime Minister, warned it would be a "reckless gamble" for the UK to rely on other nations for its nuclear deterrent.
She insisted it would be an "act of gross irresponsibility" should the Government discard the Trident weapons system, as she led calls to replace the submarine fleet which carries the missiles.
Mrs May also launched an attack on Mr Corbyn by claiming some Opposition frontbenchers appeared to be the first to "defend the country's enemies" and the last to accept what the UK needs to protect itself.
In his remarks, Mr Corbyn questioned if the "weapons of mass destruction" act as a credible deterrent to the threats faced by the UK.
He also warned the costs of renewal were "ballooning ever upwards" and noted that each warhead has the capacity to kill one million people.
Mr Corbyn added he would not take a decision that "kills millions of innocent people" - a nod to his stance that he would not authorise the use of nuclear weapons.
But Labour MP Toby Perkins, who last month resigned as shadow armed forces minister, compared Labour frontbench opposition to Trident with the arguments "of a 13-year-old".
Jamie Reed, Labour MP for Copeland branded Mr Corbyn's opposition "juvenile" and "narcissistic" and said shadow cabinet members who voted against Trident should resign and return to the backbenches because they would be voting against Labour Party policy.
Angus Robertson, the SNP's Westminster leader, warned that renewing Trident would speed up independence for Scotland.
He said: "If Scotland is a nation, and Scotland is a nation, it is not a normal situation for the state to totally disregard the wishes of the people, and this Government has a democratic deficit in Scotland, and with today's vote on Trident it's going to get worse, not better.
Bumpy start to US visit as John Kerry bangs head on door of Number 10
Theresa May's efforts to forge a close relationship with Washington got off to a bumpy start as US secretary of state John Kerry appeared to bang his head on the door of Number 10.
Mr Kerry, visiting the new Prime Minister in Downing Street, posed for photographers before turning to enter the famous black door - unaware it had been partially shut behind him.
But there was no sign of discomfort inside Number 10 as Mr Kerry and Mrs May chatted ahead of their meeting.
Prime Minister Theresa May holds talks with US secretary of state John Kerry in Downing Street
Mr Kerry will also hold talks with his counterpart Boris Johnson during the visit to London as the Government attempts to shore up its global status following the Brexit vote.
It hopes the meeting will demonstrate that Washington still values the "special relationship" between the two countries after the European Union referendum result.
After that engagement, Mr Johnson is hosting talks on Syria with his counterparts from the US, Germany, France and Italy, along with EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini.
Mr Johnson will also attend a meeting with foreign ministers from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to discuss the conflict in Yemen.
Speaking ahead of the meetings, Mr Johnson said: "We must be more active, more engaged and more outward-looking, so I am delighted to have this early opportunity to welcome my international counterparts to London for important meetings on the conflicts in Syria and Yemen.
"I will be making clear my view that the suffering of the Syrian people will not end while Assad remains in power. The international community, including Russia, must be united on this."
Mr Johnson will travel to Washington DC on Thursday for talks on combating Islamic State.
Following the talks in Number 10, Mr Kerry said the Prime Minister was committed to a "calm, thoughtful, reasonable" way to deal with Brexit.
He said: "The Prime Minister and I had an excellent discussion and I'm very grateful to her for her restatement of the commitment to the very strong transatlantic partnership.
"We talked particularly about efforts to try to deal with counter-terrorism, the importance of our co-operation continuing.
"We also talked about Ukraine and Syria in particular.
"Most importantly we affirmed the imperative for the United States, Great Britain and the European community to work together to maximise the economic opportunity, minimise the disruption, deal with this in a way that has the wellbeing of the citizens of all of our countries and regions in mind in order to move our economies as fast as possible.
"I think the Prime Minister is very much committed to finding a calm, thoughtful, reasonable way forward that meets those needs.
"So I was encouraged by it and I look forward to conveying her very best wishes to the American people and President Obama."
Mr Johnson was urged to use his meeting with Saudi officials to express concern at the country's intervention in Yemen.
Amnesty's UK arms programme director Oliver Sprague said: "As the new Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson has a chance to show that he intends to bring a fresh approach which puts people before profit in British foreign policy.
"Mr Johnson should immediately stop the appalling sale of British-made weapons to Saudi Arabia - which are being used to commit atrocities in Yemen, in violation of international law.
"This is a chance to reflect on the morality of the hard-sell strategy the UK has been pursuing."
UK wants close Canada trade links after Brexit, Theresa May tells Justin Trudeau
Prime Minister Theresa May has told Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau the UK wants a close trading relationship with his country after Brexit.
A trade deal between Canada and the European Union has been concluded but is yet to come into force and Mrs May said the UK would remain a strong supporter of the agreement while it remains part of the bloc.
She added that the UK would want a close relationship to continue after leaving the EU.
Downing Street said the Canadian PM offered his "firm support" during a phone call to Mrs May
Downing Street said the Canadian PM offered his "firm support" during a phone call to congratulate Mrs May on entering Number 10.
A Downing Street spokeswoman said: "Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada called the Prime Minister this evening to congratulate her on her appointment.
"The Prime Minister set out her vision for an engaged, outward-looking UK and made clear that Britain remains fully open for business.
"They agreed that Britain and Canada share an especially close relationship and they committed to working together to sustain this as the UK leaves the European Union.
"They discussed the importance of trade between our countries, noting their shared view that more needs to be done to spread the benefits of trade to everyone and to address the concerns of some about the impact of globalisation.
"In this context, the Prime Minister underlined that the UK would continue to be a strong supporter of the trade agreement between the EU and Canada while we remain a member of the EU and that we would want a close trading relationship with Canada outside the EU. Prime Minister Trudeau offered Canada's firm support as we set out on the path forwards.
Augsburg defender Ragnar Klavan undergoing medical at Liverpool
Defender Ragnar Klavan's medical at Liverpool is under way ahead of his 4.2million move from Augsburg.
The vastly-experienced Estonia international has been brought in as cover at centre-back as Mamadou Sakho and Joe Gomez both currently have injuries and Tiago Ilori, who could have been a fall-back option, is heading to the Olympics with Portugal.
Klavan has over 100 caps for his country and has had four seasons in the Bundesliga and manager Jurgen Klopp sees him as the ideal man to offer back-up and leadership in much the same way as Kolo Toure did before his departure this summer.
Ragnar Klavan has over 100 caps for Estonia
Press Association Sport understands a deal for Klavan is likely to be concluded on Wednesday.
Klopp's new first-choice centre-back for the coming season Joel Matip escaped serious injury to his ankle in Sunday's friendly win at Wigan.
The Cameroon international, a free transfer signing from Schalke, sustained bruising to the joint and while he is unlikely to play in Wednesday's friendly at Huddersfield he will be on the flight to the United States the following morning as the club's tour of America begins.
Goalkeeper Adam Bogdan is also unlikely to play against Huddersfield as he is set to complete a loan move to Wigan.
Klopp will come up against his long-time friend - and best man at his wedding - David Wagner at the John Smith's Stadium in the club's penultimate domestic friendly (they will play Barcelona at Wembley on their return from the States).
"We worked for a few years together," the German told liverpoolfc.com.
"He was my coach of our Under-23 side with Borussia Dortmund. He is an experienced manager and has done a really good job up until now.
"He made a big impact, I heard, when he went to Huddersfield. It changed a lot and that's really good.
"I know a few (Huddersfield) players because they have brought in a few German players and I managed two of them in the past. They are a really good team, for sure, and it's a good challenge for us.
"Playing against a Championship team in a pre-season game is really difficult because they are really hot.
"They are greedy, they are ambitious and sometimes, maybe sometimes, it's one of the best games in their whole year - so no big pressure and only opportunity.
"We have a long day on Wednesday because we fly to the USA after the game for our tour.
Refugee family moves into archbishop's London palace
A refugee family is living in a cottage in the grounds of Lambeth Palace.
The historic London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury is the first sponsor approved under a new scheme announced on Tuesday.
It will see churches, charities, faith groups and businesses provide housing and support for those brought to Britain from Syria and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa under resettlement programmes.
The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby greets Home Secretary Amber Rudd at Lambeth Palace
Organisations will provide housing for refugees and help them integrate into life in the UK, gain access to medical and social services and arrange English language lessons.
Launching the Full Community Sponsorship scheme at Lambeth Palace, Home Secretary Amber Rudd said she had the met the family - which includes children aged four to 10.
The youngsters told her they all wanted to be doctors when they grow up.
Ms Rudd said: "The response of the British public to the refugee crisis has been one of overwhelming generosity and many have been moved to make kind offers of assistance.
"This is a ground-breaking new development for resettlement in the UK and I wholeheartedly encourage organisations that can help to offer their support.
"I hope that this new approach will help bring communities together and support these often traumatised and vulnerable families as they rebuild their lives, and contribute to and thrive in our country."
The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby said: "Refugees, like all people, are treasured human beings, made in the image of God, who deserve safety, freedom and the opportunity to flourish.
"It is an enormous privilege to welcome a family to live in a cottage in the grounds of Lambeth Palace."
The scheme is based on a successful Canadian model which reportedly has more communities offering to sponsor refugees than actual refugees.
Individuals and groups take responsibility for families for a year, finding them a home and education.
The Home Office said sponsoring organisations wishing to apply must have status as either a registered charity or "community interest company", the consent of the local authority in which they wish to operate and a "comprehensive plan" for resettlement.
All resettled refugees will have been through a thorough security vetting process.
In September 2015 the Government pledged to resettle 20,000 Syrian refugees. The latest published statistics show that more than 1,800 Syrians have so far been provided with refuge in the UK.
More than 160 local authorities have signed up to accept refugees via the scheme, on a voluntary basis.
Government condemns Turkey over death penalty reintroduction comments
Foreign Office minister Sir Alan Duncan has pledged to get tough and not be "mealy-mouthed" with Turkey, which has threatened to bring back the death penalty for plotters behind the failed coup.
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has ordered the arrest of 6,000 members of the judicial and military, while 8,000 police officers have been suspended following the failed putsch.
British MPs raised concerns that president Erdogan is using the failed coup as a "blank cheque" to round up his opponents, and urged the Government to get tough with the ruler.
Sir Alan Duncan said bringing back executions 'would cause incalculable damage to the standing of Turkey'
Responding to questions following an urgent statement on the issue to the Commons, Sir Alan said he would make it clear to officials when he flies out to Ankara on Wednesday that human rights and the rule of law must be upheld.
Sir Alan, who was standing in for Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, told MPs: "When I am in Ankara tomorrow I will not be mealy-mouthed in saying what we think needs to happen, and human rights, not reintroducing the death penalty, and the proper due process of law, will of course from a very large part of what we would urge upon the Government of Turkey."
He strongly condemned any proposed moves to reintroduce the death penalty in Turkey and echoed remarks made by the German government that Turkey would not be able to join in the EU if it did readopt executions.
Sir Alan said: "It is very strongly the view of Her Majesty's Government that we oppose the death penalty. It is also the view of all like-minded governments.
"It would be a deeply retrograde step, which I think would cause incalculable damage to the standing of Turkey just at time when it is important to embrace them within the world community and not see them become more isolated form it."
He added: "I believe I'm right in saying that if Turkey were to reintroduce the death penalty it would be disqualifying itself from membership, or future membership, of the EU.
"So in that sense it would be a self-defeating act, and against the objective of potentially them joining the EU."
Members of Turkey's military attempted to stage a coup on Friday night, but they were repelled after President Erdogan appealed to his supporters to take to the streets to save the regime in a Facetime interview with a television network.
Some believe he is using the plot as an excuse to round up his opponents and stamp out dissent among the military and civil service.
Under President Erdogan the Turkish government has been accused of being increasingly authoritarian - cracking down on Kurds and undermining press freedom by seizing control of newspapers and press agencies.
SNP MP Alex Salmond said: "While no responsible government can support a military coup against a democratic government, no responsible democratic government engages in the suppression of civil liberties, the persecution of minority communities like the Kurds, the imprisonment of thousands of people, the suspension of Parliamentary rights, the reintroduction of the death penalty."
He urged the minister to "make it clear to President Erdogan, it is not just European Union membership that's at risk from that course of action, but Nato membership as well".
Former justice secretary Michael Gove also urged Sir Alan to highlight the importance of democratic and human rights.
He said: "Will you take this opportunity to ensure that president Erdogan and his allies appreciate that press freedom and freedom of speech is one of the values that those behind this coup want to crush, and which he should seek to uphold?"
Sir Alan replied: "He is absolutely right that freedom of speech, freedom of the media are absolutely essential to the proper working of any democracy and indeed any country."
But he stressed that he hopes Turkey will "remain a full and compliant member of Nato".
The minister said he is not aware of any UK citizens arrested during Friday's clashes, which MPs heard has killed more than 200 people with some 1,400 injured.
New Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson was not in the Commons chamber for the urgent question about the failed coup in Turkey.
Some Labour MPs shouted "Where is he?" as Sir Alan replied to shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry on behalf of the Government.
Tory frontbencher Sir Alan said of the deaths and injuries caused by the military uprising: "I'm sure the whole House will join me in expressing our sympathies and condolences to the people of Turkey on this tragic loss of life."
Sir Alan also shed further light on Prime Minister Theresa May's conversation with president Erdogan, which took place on Monday night.
He said Mrs May "commended the bravery" of the Turkish people, adding: "The Prime Minister underlined our support for Turkey's government and democratic institutions, stressing there was no place for the military in politics.
"The Prime Minister underlined the importance of our cooperation on counter-terrorism, migration, regional security and defence."
Sir Alan turned to the response of Mr Johnson, including taking part in the EU Foreign Affairs Council, and said : "There's a strong sense of common purpose between us and our European partners.
"The Foreign Affairs Council has issued conclusions strongly condemning the coup attempt, welcoming the common position of the political parties in support of Turkey's democracy and stressing the importance for the rule of law prevailing and its rejection of the death penalty.
"The Turkish government now has the opportunity to build on the strong domestic support they gathered in response to the coup attempt.
"A measured and careful response will sustain the unity of purpose which we've seen so far and which was so clearly evident on the streets of Istanbul and Ankara."
Sir Alan said the UK "stands ready" to assist Turkey with its reforms and help the democratically-elected government "restore order in a way that reflects and supports the rule of law".
Ms Thornberry questioned if UK officials were surprised by the coup, also telling MPs that 500,000 people of Turkish and Kurdish descent live in the UK and are "desperately worried" about their families.
She added: "With two million visitors a year, Turkey is greatly loved in this country and the interests of our two countries can't be separated."
Ms Thornberry questioned how many Britons were arrested as a result of the coup and asked for advice for travellers heading to Turkey.
She said the early signs of whether president Erdogan will undermine or strengthen democracy were "deeply worrying".
Ms Thornberry later asked: "Was the Foreign Office taken by surprise by this attempted coup?"
She also questioned what will happen to the UK's "vital ally".
Sir Alan replied: "I'm not aware of any UK citizens who have been arrested but that is a very serious consular objective and for us to pursue and find out and make sure that that remains the case."
He said the due process of law should be upheld, any trials should be "fair", and the "highest principles of democratic standards" should be upheld.
Sir Alan also said to Ms Thornberry: "I very much hope in the reaction they display to this coup attempt that Turkey will be able to remain a very important member of Nato and a partner to other countries within Europe.
"In answer to your very straightforward question about whether we were taken by surprise - yes. I'm not sure there was anybody who wasn't."
Theresa May spoke to President Erdogan yesterday evening, No 10 said.
The PM's official spokeswoman said Mrs May had condemned the attempted coup and stressed the UK's "support for democratically elected institutions".
"She remarked on the bravery of so many Turkish people who had come out to stand up for democracy on Friday," she added.
Corbyn launches bid to stay Labour leader with workplace discrimination vow
Jeremy Corbyn will launch his fight to hold on to the Labour leadership with a vow to tackle discrimination in the workplace by forcing firms to publish details of the pay and conditions of workers.
The Labour leader, who is facing a challenge from former shadow cabinet minister Owen Smith after a revolt by his MPs, will warn companies with more than 21 staff they could be fined unless they publish equality pay audits.
Mr Corbyn will use the leadership contest to set out how a Labour government will tackle the "five ills" of 21st century Britain - inequality, neglect, insecurity, prejudice and discrimination.
The veteran left-winger will face Owen Smith in the battle for the Labour leadership
In a speech in London he will say a Labour administration would require firms to publish the new equality pay audits " detailing pay, grade and hours of every job ... alongside data on recognised equality characteristics".
"Because it is not only women who face workplace discrimination but disabled workers, the youngest and oldest workers, black and ethnic minority workers.
"Young workers are institutionally discriminated against, not entitled to the full minimum wage, not entitled to equal rates of housing benefit and so many are now saddled with huge student debts."
Vowing that "we are calling time on discrimination" he will commit to fund the Equality and Human Rights Commission to enforce the policy.
The organisation would be responsible for monitoring the policy, taking action to eradicate discrimination and fining employers which do not provide audits.
"If our economy is to thrive it needs to harness the talents of everyone," Mr Corbyn will say. "So this is about making our economy stronger, the workplace fairer, reducing the discrimination that holds people back."
In an echo of the five "giant evils" identified by William Beveridge in the 1940s, Mr Corbyn will say: "Today what is holding people back above all are inequality, neglect, insecurity, prejudice and discrimination.
"In my campaign I want to confront all five of those ills head on, setting out not only how Labour will campaign against these injustices in opposition but also spelling out some of the measures the next Labour government will take to overcome them."
Mr Corbyn's allies believe his victory chances have been boosted by a surge of new supporters able to vote in the leadership contest.
Labour received more than 180,000 applications to sign up as registered supporters, each paying 25 to get their vote - a total of more than 4.5 million for the party coffers.
A spokesman for Mr Corbyn said earlier it was "reasonable to assume" that the majority of the new registrations come from supporters of the veteran left-winger.
But i n an indication of the scale of division within the Labour ranks, a total of 162 of the party's MPs - some 70% of its representation in the Commons - nominated Mr Smith for the leadership, along with half of Labour's MEPs.
Theresa May mocks 'unscrupulous' Jeremy Corbyn in first clash at PMQs
Theresa May has mocked Jeremy Corbyn as an "unscrupulous boss" who exploited Labour Party rules to further his own career as the two clashed for the first time at Prime Minister's Questions.
Mrs May won loud cheers from the Conservative benches as she sought to twist the knife in the Labour leader over the turmoil in his party's ranks.
"I am interested that he refers to the situation of some workers who might have some job insecurity and potentially unscrupulous bosses," she told Mr Corbyn.
Theresa May speaks during Prime Minister's Questions
"I suspect that there are many members on the Opposition benches who might be familiar with an unscrupulous boss.
"A boss who doesn't listen to his workers, a boss who requires some of his workers to double their workload and maybe a boss who exploits the rules to further his own career. Remind him of anybody?"
As Mr Corbyn - who is facing a leadership challenge from Owen Smith - complained that there were "many people in this country struggling with insecure jobs", he was met with raucous laughter from Tory MPs.
The Labour angrily hit back, saying: "I know this is very funny for Conservative members but I do not suppose (there are) too many Conservative MPs who have to go to a food bank in order to supplement their family table."
Mrs May said: "Labour may be about to have several months of fighting and tearing itself apart. The Conservative Party will be spending those months bring this country back together."
In an combative performance, she also sought to highlight Labour differences over Trident, pointedly praising the 141 Labour MPs who "put the national interest first" and voted in favour of renewing the nuclear deterrent in Monday's Commons vote.
There were echoes of Margaret Thatcher, as Mrs May took Mr Corbyn to task after he said that "six years of Government austerity" had failed.
"He talks about austerity, I call it living within our means," she replied. "He talks about austerity, but actually it is about not saddling our children and grandchildren with significant debts to come."
However, she sidestepped a question from the Labour leader when he sought to challenge her about comments by new Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson calling black people "piccaninnies" and questioning the motives of President Barack Obama because of his "part-Kenyan" heritage.
Scientists hail Jamie Oliver's cookery courses for boosting healthy eating
Cookery courses launched by TV chef Jamie Oliver have been praised by scientists for helping people to improve their eating habits.
An independent report has discovered that people who took part in Oliver's Ministry of Food courses increased the amount of fruit and vegetables they ate, halved the number of snacks and became more confident about cooking.
Oliver said the study showed that teaching people to cook "really works and really does make a huge difference".
Scientists hailed Jamie Oliver's cookery courses which were found to have improved participants' eating habits
Nutritionists said the findings, which were published in the Public Health Nutrition journal, showed that people will make healthier food choices if they are helped to improve their cooking skills with a back-to-basics approach.
Oliver launched his Ministry of Food courses in 2008, saying he wanted to help people learn to prepare tasty, nutritious food, whatever their budget, and now has four UK centres.
Nearly 800 people who took part in the eight-week courses at the centre in Leeds Kirkgate Market between 2010 and 2014 were surveyed before and immediately after the course.
Researchers, from the University of Leeds spoke to around 500 of those participants again six months later.
They found that the average number of fruit and vegetable portions eaten daily by the participants increased from 2.7 before the programme to 3.4 immediately afterwards and to 4.1 after six months.
The amount of snacks eaten per day dropped from two before the course to 1.7 immediately afterwards and to 1.1 six months later.
The participants also reported significant gains in their levels of cooking confidence, with m en reporting a greater growth in confidence than the women who took part, the researchers said.
Oliver said: " Ministry of Food, for me, has always been about empowering people and giving them the knowledge and the confidence to feed themselves and their families better.
'The beauty of it is that it's all about local people helping other local people to create delicious, fresh, nutritious food that doesn't cost a fortune.
"This important study shows that teaching people to cook really works and really does make a huge difference.
"If only more towns and cities had Ministry of Food Centres."
Janet Cade, professor of nutritional epidemiology at the University of Leeds' School of Food Science and Nutrition, said the study suggested that the Ministry of Food courses encouraged short-term changes in eating habits that could be maintained and improved over a longer period.
She added: "In the UK there has been a decline in cooking skills since the 1950s.
"Home-made meals have been replaced with ready meals and convenience foods.
"This lack of cooking ability, coupled with ready access to high-energy convenience foods, has contributed to an increase in the number of people who are now overweight.
Turkish security, coup plotters clash at Istanbul's second airport -official
ANKARA, July 17 (Reuters) - Turkish security forces clashed with coup plotters resisting arrest at Istanbul's second airport, and at an air base in central Turkey, an official said on Sunday.
Security forces fired warning shots near the Sabiha Gokcen airport on the Asian side of the city and the coup plotters did not return fire, the official said, adding arrests were being made. There were also clashes at an air base in Konya in central Turkey, the official said.
0-Gunman said to have targeted Baton Rouge police for assassination
By Andy Sullivan
BATON ROUGE, La., July 18 (Reuters) - An Iraq war veteran who gunned down six policemen in Baton Rouge targeted the officers in a brutally calculated ambush, officials said on Monday, deepening their investigation into the second racially charged armed assault on U.S. law enforcement this month.
Three officers were killed and three were wounded, one critically, when Gavin Eugene Long, a former U.S. Marine Corps sergeant, opened fire on police responding to a report of a gunman dressed all in black walking down a street in Louisiana's capital on Sunday morning.
Updating reporters on their investigation a day after the deadly rampage, police described how video footage showed the 29-year-old suspect hunting down police officers and sheriff's deputies, while bypassing civilians he encountered.
The carnage came to an abrupt end less than 10 minutes after it began when Long, affiliated with an African-American branch of the anti-government Sovereign Citizen movement, was shot dead by a police SWAT team marksman, firing from a position about 100 yards away.
Police said they believe that Long, armed with two rifles and a pistol, had intended to make his way to the headquarters of the Baton Rouge Police Department a short distance away to carry on with his assault.
"There is no doubt whatsoever that these officers were intentionally targeted and assassinated," Louisiana State Police Superintendent Colonel Mike Edmonson said during a news conference. "It was a calculated act against those who work to protect this community every single day."
Added Baton Rouge Police Chief Cal Dabadie, "I have no doubt he was headed to our headquarters, and he was going to take more lives."
The ambush rocked a city still shaken from days of angry protests and tension over the fatal police shooting on July 5 of a 37-year-old black man, Alton Sterling, who was confronted by officers while selling CDs outside a Baton Rouge convenience store. Sterling was buried just last Friday.
A day after his slaying, another black man, Philando Castile, 32, was shot to death by a policeman during a traffic stop near St. Paul, Minnesota.
The back-to-back killings reignited nationwide protests over the use of force by police against minorities, including a fateful rally in Dallas on July 7 that ended up shattered with the deadly ambush of five police officers by a gunman apparently out to avenge the deaths of Sterling and Castile.
Police declined on Monday to say whether the attack by Long, who was black, was racially motivated. Two of the lawmen killed on Sunday were white, and a third, Montrell Jackson, 32, himself was black.
PRAISE FOR DALLAS AMBUSH
But an imprint from the gunman left behind on social media included videos in which he decried mistreatment of African-Americans by law enforcement and praised the attack on Dallas police, perpetrated by another black U.S. military veteran.
Edmonson said Long, a resident of Kansas City, Missouri, was had been in the Baton Rouge area for several days before the shooting, and while he acted alone in the ambush itself, police had yet to rule out his having assistance in planning the attack.
Legal papers filed in his home state of Missouri showed he identified himself as a member of a group called the Washitaw Nation, a black offshoot of the Sovereign Citizen movement, which challenges the legitimacy of the federal government.
Military records released by the Pentagon showed Long, listed as a data network specialist, served five years in the Marine Corps until his discharge in August 2010, including a six-month deployment to Iraq.
Police in Baton Rouge, a city with a long history of distrust and tension between its African-American residents and law enforcement, sought to deflect criticism from civil rights activists that the police force there had become over-militarized.
"Our militarized tactics, as they're being called, saved lives," Chief Dabadie said.
The two other dead lawmen in Baton Rouge were identified as sheriff's deputy Brad Garafola, 45, a father of four; and police officer Matthew Gerald, 41, also an Iraq war veteran and father of two.
TENSIONS AND CONDOLENCES
President Barack Obama offered his condolences for the fallen officers and their families in telephone calls on Monday to the victims' loved ones as well as top law enforcement officials in the city.
Hundreds of mourners held a candlelight vigil on Monday evening at a church in south Baton Rouge in memory of Gerald, a rookie on the police force who served in both the U.S. Army and the Marines.
"It does set us back," a sheriff's deputy from neighboring Livingston Parish, said of Sunday's tragedy. "But we bounce back with everything."
Earlier in the day at the B Quick gas station where the shootings occurred, people left flowers and balloons in memory of the slain officers.
"I just want us to have peace and drive down the road and not feel like we have to duck our heads and look around and see if someone's going to be on top of a roof," said Pam Collins, a resident of a Baton Rouge suburb who brought three shiny balloons to honor the officers.
The violence has heightened security concerns at the Republican National Convention, which opened on Monday in Cleveland, and for next week's Democratic convention in Philadelphia.
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, in a speech to the NAACP civil rights group in Cincinnati, said she would bring the "full weight of the law to bear" against cop killers but added there is "another hard truth at the heart of this complex matter: Many African-Americans fear the police."
Her rival, Donald Trump, on the brink of his formal nomination at the convention in Cleveland, tweeted that "our country is a divided crime scene" and called for stronger leadership on law and order issues.
Keen to avoid sanctions, Portugal unveils backstop for fiscal goal
By Andrei Khalip
LISBON, July 18 (Reuters) - Portugal has a budget cushion worth 0.3 percent of GDP to guarantee that this year's fiscal commitments are met, the government told the European Commission on Monday as it seeks to convince Brussels not to impose sanctions over its 2015 deficit.
"Sanctioning the past doesn't make political and economic sense for countries that are already taking effective action, as in the case of Portugal," Finance Minister Mario Centeno wrote in a letter to the commission on Monday.
He said Portugal was on course for a 2016 deficit "clearly below 3 percent", which is the European Union's limit, but that sanctions could jeopardise that goal.
Last week, EU finance ministers backed a sanctions procedure for Portugal and Spain after the European Commission said both countries had failed to do enough to correct excessive budget deficits for 2014 and 2015.
The commission has indicated that sanctions could be purely symbolic if the countries show sufficient commitment to further deficit cuts. A decision is expected on July 27.
"The Portuguese government is ready to adopt fiscal measures to correct any eventual deviations on the budgetary execution," the letter said, explaining that the budget had "an additional buffer of expenditure cuts" worth 0.2 percent of GDP, which are kept in reserve in case they are needed to meet the target.
These appropriations were applied to public institutions that had projected spending increases compared with 2015.
In addition, a report accompanying the letter cited further unspecified reserves worth another 0.1 percent of GDP that "can be used in case of larger deviations".
"Overall, the 2016 budget has contingency measures amounting to 542.8 million euros, or 0.3 percentage points of GDP," the report said, adding that so far the government's monthly monitoring process had not revealed any significant deviation.
Portugal has vowed to cut the budget deficit to 2.2 percent of GDP this year from last year's 4.4 percent, which occurred on the previous administration's watch.
Brussels and the IMF doubt that Portugal's growth this year will be enough to halve the deficit, and expect an economic slowdown after a 1.5 percent expansion in 2015.
Baton Rouge shooter said he was member of anti-government group -documents
By Ned Parker and Mark Hosenball
July 18 (Reuters) - The gunman who killed three Baton Rouge police officers identified himself as a member of an African-American offshoot of the anti-government Sovereign Citizen Movement last year, documents showed.
Gavin Long, a former U.S. Marine sergeant who was shot dead by police on Sunday, affiliated himself with the Washitaw Nation, an African-American group whose members view the federal government as illegitimate, in legal papers filed in a Missouri county. In an interview on Monday, a senior member of the Washitaw Nation denied that Long was a member of the group.
In papers he filed in May 2015, Long also said he wanted to change his name from Gavin Eugene Long to Cosmo Ausar Setepenra as part of reclaiming what he described as his indigenous identity, according to Jackson County, Missouri, public records. But court officials said Long never completed the process of legally changing his name.
Filing such papers is a common practice among members of the Sovereign Citizens Movement, according to Ryan Lenz, an expert from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit organization that tracks extremist groups. The center estimates there are 300,000 followers of Sovereign Citizens in the United States.
"He is definitely a Sovereign," said Lenz. "That process is a Sovereign Citizen tactic dating back for years. There is no other ideology that such a process falls under except Sovereign Citizens."
Frederix Joe Washington, the senior member of the Washitaw Nation, said he did not know Long. He also said that people often use the group's name without its permission.
"We know nothing about this man," Washington said. "We don't give cards out, IDs out, licenses or passports. None of this has been given out by us."
A U.S. counter-terrorism official said investigators were examining Long's relationship with the Washitaw group. The official said U.S. agencies can only monitor such groups to a limited extent due to constitutional free speech guarantees and usually only do so when violence is threatened or committed.
The Sovereign Citizen movement is largely made up of right-wing anti-government white Americans, who say the federal government has been corrupted since the 19th century, according to researchers. Since the 1990s, some black separatists have adopted the Sovereign Citizen ideology as well.
GROUP REJECTS FEDERAL AUTHORITY
Sovereign Citizens say they are allowed to ignore the federal government and often believe they can issue their own identification cards because they refuse to recognize federal law. The movement, which is more of an ideology than an organization, is highly decentralized and has little in the way of formal structure, researchers said.
There were 24 cases of violence or threats committed by Sovereign Citizen followers from 2010 to 2014, and all but five occurred at government offices, during routine traffic stops or at adherents' homes, according to a Department of Homeland Security intelligence assessment leaked to the news media in 2015.
Those episodes included people affiliated with the movement being charged with the 2012 killing of two policemen in Louisiana, convicted of the 2010 shootings of two policemen in Texas and the 2014 shootings of two law enforcement officers in California. A self-professed member of the movement was also convicted of plotting to kill a federal judge and an IRS official in Alaska in 2011.
All told, federal and state prosecutors have brought over 100 cases against self-described Sovereign Citizens since 2000, according to J. J. MacNab, a fellow at George Washington University's Program on Extremism.
Experts say that U.S. officials in both the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama put less emphasis on domestic terror threats in the aftermath of the 2001 al Qaeda attacks on the United States.
During the Bush administration, the Department of Justice deactivated in 2001 its internal domestic terrorism task force, created after the 1995 Oklahoma City courthouse bombing. The Obama administration only reconstituted the task force in 2014.
In 2009, the Homeland Security Department team that analyzed domestic terror threats issued a report predicting that anti-government attacks would rise. The report was criticized by members of Congress and the secretary of Homeland Security, who renounced its findings.
But over the last decade and a half the number of extremist and armed anti-government groups in the United States has steadily grown, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The number of anti-government "patriot groups" grew from 217 in 1999 to 998 last year.
One of the Washitaw Nation's principal doctrines is a claim that the purchase of Louisiana by the United States was illegitimate, experts said. Instead, they maintain that Washitaw Nation members are descendants of tribes in Missouri, and that they are therefore the real owners of Louisiana.
Please join us as Shelley presents her soundscape--The Perth Kilt Run. We will have a wee bit of Scottish music along with a tune from Chris Binkowski (A.K.A. Bucko) as recorded at this year's Ottawa Grassroots Festival. You may comment along while we are on the air, but it will take me some time to find my way around the new website--please bear with me!
What You Do With What You've Got
Susie Burke and David Surette - Sometimes In The Evening - Sometimes In The Evening Stronger Beer
Tim Hicks - Throw Down 500 Miles
The Proclaimers - Sunshine On Leith An improvised piece of music
Chris Binkowski (a.k.a. Bucko) - Live at the Ottawa Grassroots Festival April 2016 - Live at the Ottawa Grassroots Festival April 2016 ?
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U.S., Russia criticize U.N. chief over Iran nuclear deal report
By Michelle Nichols
UNITED NATIONS, July 18 (Reuters) - The United States and Russia both criticized United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Monday for overstepping his mandate in a report on the implementation of a Security Council resolution backing a nuclear deal between Iran and world powers.
Most U.N. sanctions on Iran were lifted in January when the U.N. nuclear watchdog confirmed that Tehran fulfilled commitments under its nuclear deal with Britain, France, Germany, China, Russia and the United States. But Iran is still subject to a U.N. arms embargo and other restrictions.
U.N. political affairs chief Jeffrey Feltman briefed the 15-member Security Council on Monday on Ban's first bi-annual report on the implementation of the remaining sanctions and restrictions on Iran.
"The United States disagrees strongly with elements of this report, including that its content goes beyond the appropriate scope. We understand that Iran also disagrees strongly with parts of the report," U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, told the council.
Power said "while some have argued that to be balanced, the report should give Iran a chance to express complaints about sanctions relief under the deal," the Security Council did not mandate Ban to report on such issues.
Ban's report said Iran complained that it had yet to fully benefit from the lifting of sanctions, raising concerns about U.S. travel restrictions and the confiscation of Iranian Central Bank assets under a U.S. court order.
Russian U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said the report contained factual errors and headings in the report referring to 'restrictions' on Iranian ballistic missile activities "simply don't coincide with the subject of the report."
"Some of the provisions of the Secretary-General's report have no relation to his mandate, nor to the terms of reference of (the U.N.) resolution or the (nuclear deal)," Churkin said.
Under the U.N. resolution, Iran is "called upon" to refrain from work on ballistic missiles designed to deliver nuclear weapons for up to eight years. Key powers agree that request is not legally binding, but Western nations view the language as a ban and say there is a political obligation on Iran to comply.
Iraq war vet, new father among Baton Rouge gunman's targets
July 18 (Reuters) - One of the three police officers killed by a gunman in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was a military veteran who served three tours in Iraq. Another had a son who turned four months old on Monday.
Law enforcement officials provided new details on Monday about the six officers who were slain or wounded during an ambush a day earlier, including a sheriff's deputy fighting for his life after being shot in the head and stomach.
Following are updates on the officers who Louisiana State Police Superintendent Colonel Mike Edmonson said were "intentionally targeted" by the gunman. A 41-year-old Baton Rouge police officer who has been on the force for nine years and suffered non-life-threatening injuries has not been named.
MATTHEW GERALD
Baton Rouge Police Officer Matthew Gerald, 41, was a veteran of both the U.S. Marines and the U.S. Army, serving as a member of a Black Hawk helicopter crew and doing three tours in Iraq, Police Chief Carl Dabadie told a news conference.
He had been on the local police force for less than a year, but "he spent his whole life serving this country," Dabadie said.
"He's a hero for everything he's done," he added.
Gerald was a married father of two children.
MONTRELL JACKSON
Montrell Jackson, 32, served as a Baton Rouge police officer for a decade. Dabadie was his instructor at the police academy.
"Montrell stood tall every day," the chief said. "He never wavered. He never quit. His heart was in service for this community."
A few days before the Sunday shooting, the police chief said he visited some officers to lift their spirits after many days of protests in the city. Jackson "ended up giving me a pep talk," the chief said.
An emotional Dabadie read a statement from the officer's wife, with whom Jackson had an infant son who turned four months old on Monday.
"Montrell was my everything," she said. "He loved his family and he loved his fellow officers. I know without a shadow of a doubt he loved his job, and he loved his city. Knowing this gives me a little peace and comfort."
BRAD GARAFOLA
East Baton Rouge Sheriff Sid Gautreaux said Deputy Brad Garafola, 45, died after leaving his cover during the attack to give a wounded police officer aid.
"My deputy went down fighting," the sheriff said. "He returned fire until the very end."
Garafola, who had been employed by the sheriff's office for 24 years, left behind a wife and four children.
"I know they are hurting, but I want them to know that we are here for them now and forever," Gautreaux said. "They are our family."
NICHOLAS TULLIER
Sheriff's Deputy Nicholas Tullier, 41, is in "very critical condition" and is on a ventilator after suffering extensive damage from gunshot wounds to his head and stomach, Gautreaux said.
Tullier has served with the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office for 18 years.
"We're just praying for him," the sheriff said. "He's not in good shape at all."
BRUCE SIMMONS
Deputy Bruce Simmons, 57, suffered non-life threatening injuries but still faces a long recovery, the sheriff said.
Simmons was headed on Monday night for his second surgery since the attack, Gautreaux said. He has already had a titanium rod inserted into his shattered arm and faces several more reconstructive surgeries.
Guatemalan army captain convicted of killing bishop dies in prison riot
GUATEMALA CITY, July 18 (Reuters) - A former army captain convicted of murdering a Guatemalan bishop was killed on Monday in a prison riot in which 13 people died, the National Institute of Forensic Sciences said.
A spokesman for the institute said the death of Byron Lima Oliva, who was serving 20 years for the murder of Bishop Juan Gerardi in 1998, took place in Pavoncito, a prison 18 miles (30 km) from the capital, Guatemala City.
Twelve other inmates were killed in the riot, said spokesman Roberto Garza. A defense attorney for Lima, Moises Galindo, said he did not know the motive for the attack.
The killing of the bishop was one of the most notorious crimes in recent Guatemalan history.
Gerardi was killed on April 26, 1998, two days after presenting testimony about atrocities committed by the military in Guatemala's civil war, mainly against indigenous populations.
About 250,000 people were killed in the civil war, which ran from 1960 to 1996.
In recent years, Lima became infamous for heading a criminal network inside and outside the prison system, running illicit businesses including food stalls and a transportation enterprise for relatives of inmates from his prison cell.
Philippines remains committed to the United Nations - foreign minister
MANILA, Aug 22 (Reuters) - The Philippines is not leaving the United Nations, the foreign minister said on Monday, a day after President Rodrigo Duterte threatened to quit the body after it called for an end to the wave of killings unleashed by his war on drugs.
Foreign Affairs Secretary Perfecto Yasay said Duterte's statement "is a statement expressing profound disappointment and frustration".
Philippines says it rejected China offer of talks on South China Sea
By Karen Lema and Martin Petty
MANILA, July 19 (Reuters) - The Philippines has turned down a Chinese proposal to start bilateral talks on their South China Sea dispute, its foreign minister said on Tuesday, because of Beijing's pre-condition of not discussing a court ruling that nullified most of its claims.
China claims most of the South China Sea, through which more than $5 trillion of trade moves annually. Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam have rival claims.
Perfecto Yasay said he had met his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on the sidelines of a meeting of Asian and European leaders in Mongolia at the weekend and after raising the topic of last week's ruling, it became clear that was a no-go area.
China's foreign ministry said in a statement Tuesday night that the two ministers had "informal contact" in Mongolia.
Wang said if the Philippines was willing to resume talks, manage divisions and improve relations, China would meet it halfway, according to the statement.
China has angrily rejected the verdict by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague and the initial case as illegal and farcical. It has repeatedly said it will not change its approach or its sovereignty claims in the South China Sea.
"They said if you will insist on the ruling, discussing it along those lines, then we might be headed for a confrontation," Yasay said during an interview with the news channel of broadcaster ABS-CBN.
"But I really honestly feel that this is something they have to make on a public basis but I also sensed there was room for us to talk very quietly using backdoor channelling."
Yasay said Wang had proposed bilateral talks but only on issues "outside, or (in) disregard of, the arbitral ruling", which he declined because it was not in the Philippines' national interests.
The Chinese foreign ministry's account of Wang's remarks struck a more conciliatory tone and did not mention pre-conditions.
"Promoting a return to dialogue in China-Philippine relations is in the fundamental interests of the two countries and their people," the statement said Wang emphasized.
Yasay's account of the meeting highlights the challenge ahead for the Philippines, a U.S. ally, in getting China to comply with the decision which has ramped up tensions in the vital trade route.
The ruling laid out what maritime rights Manila had and where Beijing had violated its rights under international law, including its massive construction works on Mischief Reef.
Manila wanted to enforce the points of the complex ruling step-by-step but as a priority had asked China to let its fishermen go to the contested Scarborough Shoal without being harassed by its coastguard, Yasay said.
China's coastguard was preventing Filipino boats from fishing around Scarborough Shoal, fishermen and officials said on Friday, and China's air force has released pictures showing bombers recently flying over the area.
Oil down, glut eyed as markets await U.S. govt inventory report
By Barani Krishnan
NEW YORK, July 19 (Reuters) - Oil prices fell as much 1 percent for a second day in a row on Tuesday as a rallying dollar and a global fuel glut offset forecasts for lower U.S. crude stockpiles that typically would have been bullish for the market.
U.S. crude stockpiles fell by 2.3 million barrels last week, trade group American Petroleum Institute (API) reported. That was just above a 2.1 million-barrels draw forecast in a Reuters poll. The U.S. government's Energy Information Administration (EIA) will issue inventory data on Wednesday.
If the EIA confirms a drawdown, it will be the ninth straight week that U.S. crude stockpiles have fallen.
Even so, the market's attention has been on an unexpected oversupply in fuels during the U.S. peak summer driving season. As storage on land tightened in recent weeks, fuel prices weakened, prompting traders to store diesel on tankers at sea for later delivery. Even if crude output tapers, some say the glut may continue to pressure prices.
"Unless crude imports fall totally out of bed, there's ample oil in the tanks, and the headline numbers for crude won't be as bearish as the total numbers," said Kyle Cooper, oil markets consultant for New York-based broker ION Energy.
For distillate inventories including diesel, API reported a surprise draw of 484,000 barrels. It also said there was an unexpected gasoline build of 805,000 barrels.
"We expect fresh lows by tomorrow that should force out some recently acquired speculative longs that have been entering the market amidst the price consolidation of the past eight to nine sessions," said Jim Ritterbusch of Chicago-based oil markets consultancy Ritterbusch & Associates.
Brent crude settled down 30 cents, or 0.6 percent, at $46.66 barrel. It fell 1.4 percent on Monday.
U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude fell 59 cents, or 1.3 percent, to settle at $44.65. WTI lost 1.6 percent in the previous session.
Brent's premium to WTI reached its highest since the end of April, raising the export potential for U.S. crude.
Both benchmarks were little changed after the API data.
Also weighing on oil was the dollar's rally to a four-month high, making greenback-denominated oil less affordable for holders of the euro and other currencies.
China brushes off calls for Philippines boycott after S.China Sea ruling
BEIJING, July 19 (Reuters) - A senior Chinese official on Tuesday brushed off calls for a boycott of the Philippines after an international arbitration court found for Manila in its dispute with Beijing over the South China Sea.
China angrily rejected the verdict last week by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, describing the case as illegal and farcical. It has repeatedly said it will not change its approach or its sovereignty claims in the South China Sea.
Some Chinese have reacted by calling for boycotts on products from the Philippines and the United States, which many in China blame for pushing the case. So far, there has been only sporadic evidence of these calls being heeded.
Asked if China would take retaliatory trade measures against the Philippines because of the ruling, China's vice minister of commerce Gao Yan told reporters that trade relations with Manila were developing smoothly.
"In recent years, the development of China's trade relations with the Philippines overall has been smooth and stable. China is willing to develop mutually beneficial and diverse trade relations with the Philippines," she said.
"I should say that though some internet users have called for boycotts on products from the Philippines, in actuality this situation has not occurred."
Total two-way trade between China and the Philippines rose 5.7 percent in the first six months of the year to $22.3 billion, according to Chinese customs figures.
Calls for boycotts of countries deemed to have offended China are not uncommon.
Disputes with Japan over the country's painful shared history and contested ownership of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea have in recent years bubbled over into anti-Japanese violence, and destruction of Japanese goods and restaurants.
There has been no evidence of such widespread anger in China this time, though some reports have surfaced of people in generally third tier cities holding up banners in front of U.S. fast food restaurants including Yum! Brands Inc-owned KFC asking people not to eat there.
State media has called on people to oppose "irrational patriotism" over the case.
"Other net users have levelled false accusations against public figures and have started to mislead people into blindly boycotting foreign products and brands such as Philippine bananas, iPhones and KFC," the influential tabloid the Global Times said on Tuesday.
The government also appears to have no intention of allowing protests, as it has done in the past against Japan.
On Monday, police in Siyang in the eastern province of Jiangsu said on their microblog it was aware of calls for protests against KFC but said protests needed approval, and suggested they would be a waste of time.
Romania - Factors to watch on July 19
Here are news stories, press reports and events to watch which may affect Romanian financial markets on Tuesday.
DEBT TENDER
Romania sold a planned 500 million lei ($123.70 million) worth of six-month treasury bills on Monday, with the average accepted yield at 0.49 percent, central bank data showed.
CEE MARKETS
Central European assets mostly firmed on Monday after Fitch reaffirmed Poland's rating and its outlook on Friday rather than lowering it as some investors had feared.
CORRUPTION
Romania's government holds a public debate on a national anti-corruption strategy.
For the long-term Romanian diary, click on
For emerging markets economic events, click on
For an index of all diaries, click on
After Nice attack, French Muslims feel fear and alienation
By Richard Lough and Sophie Sassard
NICE, France, July 18 (Reuters) - In the poor Nice suburb of Ariane, many Muslims feel their community is being unfairly blamed for the Bastille Day attack that killed 84 people, and fear discrimination and social divisions will grow in its wake.
Islamic State claimed the attack and hailed Tunisian-born Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who drove a truck through a crowd of revellers on the French city's sea-front promenade last Thursday, as one if its soldiers.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls said at the weekend that the 31-year-old attacker had been "radicalised very quickly". The Paris prosecutor said on Monday that, while there was no evidence that he had direct links to Islamic State, he had recently developed an interest in radical Islam.
In Ariane, a district with a big Muslim population a few kilometres from the Abbatoirs neighbourhood where Bouhlel lived, the imam of the local Al Fourkane mosque said radical groups preyed on the weak, and cautioned against focusing on the killer's faith.
"Because the weak are being exploited doesn't mean that we should come down hard on their religion. Quite the opposite. We should be uniting together and defending the country," said Boubekeur Bekri, adding that "a crime is a crime" regardless of faith.
Bouhlel left Tunisia in 2005. His family have painted a picture of a man who suffered "psychiatric troubles" and was prone to depression and violent outbursts. He had several run-ins with the law, including a conviction in March this year for hurling a wooden pallet in a road rage incident.
Relatives and friends of Bouhlel also described a man who at least until recently drank heavily, smoked marijuana and womanised - behaviour at odds with a devout Muslim life.
Elabed Lofti, the imam for Antibes and Juan-Les-Pins, is among Muslim leaders in southeastern France who have distanced their community from the attacker.
"The guy didn't observe Ramadan, the minimum to be considered a good Muslim," he said, referring to the Muslim fasting month that ended late June.
France is home to Europe's largest Muslim minority. In a sign of the growing feeling of alienation among many Muslims in Ariane and elsewhere, Younis, a roof-builder born to Moroccan immigrants, said the whole community was blamed "every time something happens in France, in Europe".
"Once the problem was racial discrimination, now it's religious discrimination," said Younis, who declined to give his surname, sitting at the entrance to a dreary eight-storey block of flats opposite the suburb's small mosque.
RECRUITS
For decades Nice, better known for the super-yachts that anchor in its cobalt blue waters and palm-fringed boulevards, has been a gateway for waves of immigrants arriving from France's former colonies such as Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria.
It has also produced the largest contingent of French militants waging jihad in Syria, with about one in 10 originating from the Mediterranean city.
Islamic State has lost much territory in Iraq and Syria this year and some officials fear it may be calling on adherents to conduct high-visibility attacks.
Regardless of whether Bouhlel is proven to have direct links to Islamic State, his profile chimes with the findings of a recent Europol study of foreign militant recruits.
The study showed that about four in every five Islamic State recruits have criminal records, while some 20 percent were diagnosed with mental health issues.
Psychologist Brigitte Juy counsels Muslim youths who feel marginalised and angry at French society and may be vulnerable to militant recruiters and others who have been exposed to hardline Islamic ideology, including some who have returned from Syria.
Juy said accounts of Bouhlel's character by relatives and neighbours reported in the media appeared to portray an unstable character who felt isolated and was susceptible to violent outbursts. In this sense, she said, Bouhlel, was not necessarily an isolated case.
Nebraska 15 is a critical artery for David City, carrying students to school, workers to their jobs and travelers who are on their way through town.
For decades the highway has been four lanes from the entrance of Aquinas in the south to O Street, where the four lanes turn into two without much warning to the driver who hasnt been on that stretch before.
The majority of the four-lane through town will become three lanes, perhaps as soon as 2017.
At its July 13 meeting, the City Council voted 5-0, with one member absent, to approve Resolution 8-2016 to make the highway a three lane road from Kansas Street to O Street.
The change came as a result of the Nebraska Department of Roads plan to pay for the majority of the resurfacing and storm drainage work of the highway up to the Nebraska Central Railroad tracks that are between E and G streets. The center lane of the three-lane plan would be a left hand turn lane.
Currently, there are no turn lanes on the highway.
The states urban design (for highways) is three lanes, said Al Hottovy, the designer working with Leo A Daly on David Citys downtown renovation plan.
The City Council didnt have much debate on the topic, since NDORs funds are tied to the three-lane configuration.
We dont have much choice, Mayor Alan Zavodny said.
Hottovy said that he is meeting with NDOR officials in August to learn more about the highway project through David City.
In regard to other Downtown Improvement progress, Hottovy said that surveyors had been working in town. He said that the final design options for the City Council to decide would be available in October or November.
Mayor Alan Zavodny restated his thoughts on considering a design that included some bricks. The brick pavers also could include a system of drainage that is being used by cities in northern states that receive heavier snowfall.
I dont want us to vote on a final design until at least giving that consideration, Zavodny said.
Fireworks donation approved
The City Council voted 5-0 to provide $1,500 in keno proceeds to the Butler County Chamber for the fireworks show, but the contribution came with a caveat that next year it may not be available.
City Clerk Joan Kovar noted that the city has not taken steps to replace a shelter in the park, and it also hasnt replaced outdated restrooms. The $1,500 was already slated for contribution to the fireworks this year because it was in the budget, Kovar explained.
However, next year may be different.
For next years budget I didnt put it in, Kovar said. We have already blown up $11,000. We keep saying that we need a new restroom in the park.
Rehmer said he understood the citys budgeting process, but added that he would be back next year asking for some more support. Putting on the fireworks display costs $8,500 and is done by volunteers. Local businesses and individuals contribute to the fireworks show.
"A lot of people get a lot of fun out of it, Rehmer said. Its a good gesture.
Philippines' top court frees ex-president Arroyo after 5 years
MANILA, July 19 (Reuters) - The Philippines' Supreme Court on Tuesday dismissed a plunder case against influential former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and ordered her immediate release after five years under hospital arrest.
The diminutive Arroyo, 69, was leader of the archipelago nation from 2001 to 2010 but her presidency was plagued by allegations of corruption and vested interests.
Judges voted 11-4 in her favour to throw out the plunder case due to a lack of evidence, court spokesman Theodore Te told a televised news conference.
She was initially detained for alleged electoral fraud but was later charged with plunder in connection with 366 million pesos ($7.82 million) in state lottery funds, some of which had been allocated for intelligence gathering.
Despite her detention, a spinal condition and legal cases against her, Arroyo remains an influential figure in national politics. She was re-elected to congress in May for a third successive term, despite not attending any house sessions.
The court decision is almost certain to be welcomed by new President Rodrigo Duterte, who had said he would seek her release.
John Menzies bows to investor demands by appointing new chairman
LONDON, July 19 (Reuters) - Britain's John Menzies said on Tuesday it had appointed paper industry executive Dermot F Smurfit as independent chairman, answering a key demand from new activist investor Shareholder Value Management (SVM).
SVM, which holds more than 7 percent of the distribution and airport services firm, demanded more independence on the board of the company earlier this month when it also joined calls for the business to be broken up.
The German activist investor complained that current interim chairman Dermot Jeckinson had connections through his wife to the Menzies family, which control about 19 percent of the company through various holdings.
Investor bail-in not precondition for bank rescues- top EU court
LUXEMBOURG, July 19 (Reuters) - European Union member states are not obliged to make shareholders and junior creditors pay before intervening to rescue a bank, the EU top court said on Tuesday.
EU rules imposing losses on bank creditors before a bank bailout were considered legal by the Luxembourg-based European Court of Justice in its ruling over a Slovenian banking rescue.
However, the rules are not binding on member states, the court said in its ruling that slightly limits the European Commission's antitrust powers amid talks for an Italian banking bailout. The court said that burden-sharing by shareholders and subordinated debt holders was not a precondition for granting state aid to a troubled lender.
Indonesia "99 percent" sure most-wanted militant killed in clash
JAKARTA, July 19 (Reuters) - Indonesia is "99 percent" sure its most-wanted militant, a supporter of Islamic State known as Santoso, has been killed in a clash with security forces, a senior government official said on Tuesday.
"It's confirmed that Santoso ... is dead," the official, who declined to be identified, told Reuters by text message.
"This is 99 percent and was reported to the president."
Santoso, who has been operating in the jungles of Sulawesi island, has been designated a special "terrorist" by the United States. He pledged allegiance to Islamic State in 2014.
PRESS DIGEST - RUSSIA - July 19
MOSCOW, July 19 (Reuters) - The following are some stories in Russia's newspapers on Tuesday. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy.
VEDOMOSTI
www.vedomosti.ru
Pavel Grachyov, director general of the Polyus gold mining company, explained in an interview why the firm has cut its extraction plans by one and a half and which deposits it is now targeting.
T2 RTC Holding (The Tele2 brand) has estimated it can sell off its cell phone towers for 20-25 billion roubles ($715.02 million). That is significantly less than the price which VimpelCom put on its own cell phone towers, the daily says.
Russia's Ministry of Communications is ready to consider a proposal to store data about people's phone calls and emails on public servers following a controversial new law, the daily writes.
KOMMERSANT
www.kommersant.ru
Gas supply prices in the United Kingdom this winter may allow U.S. exporters of liquefied natural gas to compete with Russian giant Gazprom on the European market for the first time, the daily reports. Prices are such that U.S. exporters may be able to sell LNG with a small profit, it said.
IZVESTIA
www.izvestia.ru
Russia is using talks with Egypt to try to persuade Cairo of the need for separate terminals in Egyptian airports dedicated to Russian tourists and aircraft.
SoftBank's Son challenges investors to 'feel the force' of his $32 bln ARM gamble
By Makiko Yamazaki
TOKYO, July 19 (Reuters) - SoftBank Corp founder Masayoshi Son, who created a $68 billion tech investment behemoth from a $50,000 start-up, has divided investors and analysts with his latest "crazy idea", the $32 billion acquisition of chip designer ARM Holdings.
Visionary, risky, or both, the deal announced on Monday caught them all on the hop.
But in the way it was struck and presented, they all recognised the signature style of the man whose chutzpah led to successes like early investments in Yahoo! and Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, which briefly made him Japan's richest man.
Many investors had been hoping Son would use cash from recent asset sales to buy back shares or pay down its hefty debt, so SoftBank's Tokyo shares were hit by a glut of sell orders on Tuesday morning, trading down almost 11 percent.
"A fresh acquisition is not what the market wants from SoftBank," said Mitsushige Akino, chief fund manager at Ichiyoshi Asset Management.
"It's Mr. Son's style to keep expanding, but isn't he stretching too much?"
Investors fret the purchase of ARM, Japan's largest ever outbound deal, may be too much for SoftBank, still in the throes of turning around U.S. carrier Sprint and tackling a $112 billion debt pile.
Others take the longer view.
"There is little synergy with SoftBank's existing businesses, but it makes sense if we look at ARM's future potential," said Tomoaki Kawasaki, senior analyst at IwaiCosmo Securities Co.
"Mr. Son is prioritizing investment for the future over shoring up the balance sheet. It's very Mr. Son-like."
A self-made entrepreneur whom one investment banker described as thinking "in decades", Son, of Korean descent, has long been something of an outsider in corporate Japan.
He wears the sombre suits of Japan's salarymen but is an outspoken sometimes outrageous voice, with a celebrity status and 2.5 million followers on Twitter.
Selling his ARM deal to investors and analysts in London on Monday, he quoted Yoda, the diminutive Star Wars Jedi Master, with an urging to "listen to the force", and told them Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, had called immediately to discuss a partnership.
"CRAZY IDEAS"
Until last month, Son, known as "Masa", had been on the way out. Instead, the 58-year-old abruptly scrapped retirement plans and said he would stay on to create "SoftBank 2.0" and work on "a few more crazy ideas".
When presenting the ARM deal, he breezily dismissed his doubters.
"If the investors do not like it, they will sell," he said.
"I am the largest shareholder in SoftBank; I share the same interest as the other shareholders."
Kazuyuki Terao, chief investment officer at Allianz Global Investors Japan, was among the sceptics.
"It's hard to see returns that justify the more than 40 percent premium, or synergies with its existing business," he said, adding that it could hinder short-term profit growth, though longer-term gains were possible.
Son said he sealed the deal in just two weeks with a handful of advisers. These include Jeffrey Sine, co-founder of niche U.S. merchant bank Raine, who has advised Son for years.
He did not have the input of his once hand-picked heir, the more circumspect former Google executive Nikesh Arora, who stepped down last month after Son decided to stay on. Arora had been credited with streamlining the SoftBank portfolio.
"The deal was done quickly, without debate, but that's how Son-san always does these things," said Masayuki Otani, chief market analyst at Securities Japan Inc.
Son, who holds a 19 percent stake in the company, said investors should capitalise on what he called a "paradigm shift" in technology. ARM, he argues, will be central as the world moves to connected gadgets.
That struck a chord with some.
"Japanese companies are often too cautious to take decisive action, but Mr. Son is different," said one retail bondholder, a 72-year-old pensioner who declined to give her name.
"That's why I bought the bonds. I want to support his challenging spirit."
Even so, the deal carries significant risks, especially if it distracts Son and top management from resolving the Sprint headache. It has turned in loss after loss since acquisition in 2013, though he told investors on Monday the group would soon break even.
"To us, the ARM acquisition announced yesterday appears largely inconsistent with Softbank's investment strategy," said analyst Atul Goyal at Jefferies, adding it was unclear how ARM, already trading at a premium, would benefit SoftBank investors.
"It does not inspire much confidence and requires deeper review." ($1 = 105.9300 yen)
Indonesia "99 percent" sure most-wanted militant killed in clash
By Kanupriya Kapoor
JAKARTA, July 19 (Reuters) - Indonesia is "99 percent" sure its most-wanted militant, a supporter of Islamic State known as Santoso, has been killed in a clash with security forces, a senior government official said on Tuesday.
Santoso, who had been designated a "terrorist" by the United States, was believed to have been killed in a gunbattle with the security forces on the island of Sulawesi on Monday, officials said.
"It's confirmed that Santoso ... is dead," the official, who declined to be identified, told Reuters by text message.
"This is 99 percent and was reported to the president."
National police chief Tito Karnavian said earlier he was "90 percent" confident Santoso had been killed. Another militant was also killed in the clash.
Police are collecting DNA samples from Santoso's family in Sulawesi to confirm the identity of the dead militant suspected to be him, Karnavian said.
Santoso, one of the first Indonesian militants do declare allegiance to Islamic State, has been a target of government forces for several years.
His small group, Mujahidin Indonesia Timur, has attracted militants from other parts of Indonesia and several ethnic Uighur Muslims from western China's Xinjiang region.
"This could de-moralise Islamic State supporters in Indonesia because Santoso was the symbol of open resistance against the government," Karnavian told reporters at the presidential palace in Jakarta.
President Joko Widodo last year stepped up efforts to capture or kill Santoso, ordering the military to support thousands of police scouring the jungles of Sulawesi. The effort included fighter jets and warships.
Senior police officials said the second militant killed on Monday was believed to be Santoso's right-hand man.
Only about 20 members of Mujahidin Indonesia Timur are believed left in Sulawesi's Poso region, officials say.
Despite his support for Islamic State, officials do not believe Santoso played a role in an attack in Jakarta in January, in which killed eight people including the four attackers, were killed.
That attack in a city-centre commercial district was the first in Indonesia claimed by Islamic State.
Security experts believe Santoso's death would not undermine support for Islamic State in the world's largest Muslim-majority nation.
"It doesn't affect the level of threat in Indonesia, and we may see an intensified effort by Santoso's friends and alumni in Syria to urge followers to take revenge," said Sidney Jones, a Jakarta-based security analyst.
"His death will not affect support for Islamic State or its influence."
South Africa's MTN flags lower H1 profit, shares slide
JOHANNESBURG, July 19 (Reuters) - Africa's biggest mobile phone operator MTN Group flagged lower first-half profit on Tuesday, blaming a hefty fine in Nigeria and sending its shares sliding nearly 4 percent.
After months of talks, MTN said on June 10 it had agreed to pay a heavily reduced fine of 330 billion naira ($1.2 billion), or a third of the initial penalty, in a settlement with Nigeria for missing a deadline to deactivate more than 5 million unregistered SIM cards.
The Johannesburg-based company, whose headline earnings per share (EPS) came in at 654 cents in the first half of 2015, did not give a forecast range for this year's figure. But it said the penalty was likely to wipe 474 cents off total headline EPS this year, the primary measure of profit in South Africa.
Shares in MTN dropped as much as 3.8 percent shortly after the trading update, before recouping some of the losses to trade 2.5 percent lower at 138.20 rand by 0753 GMT.
MTN has said its Nigerian business will pay the fine in local currency. The penalty was worth $1.7 billion when it was announced, but the naira has fallen sharply since then, cutting the equivalent dollar value by about $500 million.
The company also said its results were affected by underperformance in its home market and in Nigeria, where it had to cut off another 4.5 million SIM cards to comply with the local regulator's user registration requirement.
In a bid to offset slowing profits from basic telecoms services, MTN is expanding into mobile banking and e-commerce.
But that will throw it into an unfamiliar world of finance with increasing regulatory risks as authorities step up efforts to combat illicit money transfers.
Britain's FTSE pulls back from 11-month closing high
LONDON, July 19 (Reuters) - Britain's top share index fell on Tuesday, easing back from an 11-month closing high, with miners dropping after a production update from Rio Tinto.
Britain's FTSE 100 was down 31.51 points, or 0.5 percent at 6,663.91, having ended on Monday with its highest close since August last year.
Rio Tinto fell 3.9 percent after its latest update.
Traders said that Rio Tinto's second quarter figures were a little disappointing, even as it reiterated its 2017 outlook.
"Growth in iron ore output decelerated from 13 percent year-on-year in Q1 to 8 percent in Q2 but production growth accelerated in bauxite, aluminium and also copper, which will do little to ease the market's fears that key commodities could remain glutted for some time to come," said Russ Mould, Investment Director at AJ Bell, in a note.
In all, FTSE 350 mining stocks dropped 2.8 percent.
Among other firms with corporate updates, Royal Mail Group was roughly flat after it said that first quarter trading had met its expectations.
Top riser on the FTSE 100 was Coca-Cola HBC, up more than 2 percent after the bottling company was upgraded to "overweight" from neutral by JP Morgan Cazenove.
"The soft drinks category is very resilient to macroeconomic volatility, which bodes well for CCH given current uncertainty in Europe," analysts at JP Morgan said in a note.
"We believe CCH is well placed to take on additional bottling assets in key territories."
Reflecting that uncertainty in Europe, the latest German ZEW showed a big fall in economic sentiment since Britain voted to leave the European Union nearly a month ago.
Malaysia and Singapore to build high-speed rail link by 2026
KUALA LUMPUR, July 19 (Reuters) - Singapore and Malaysia are to build a high-speed rail link that will cut the travel time between the city-state and Kuala Lumpur to 90 minutes by 2026, their prime ministers said on Tuesday.
The rail link, announced in February 2013, was initially expected to be operational by 2020 but the neighbours have cited complexities for the delay.
"One can have breakfast in Kuala Lumpur, lunch in Singapore and be back in time for dinner in Kuala Lumpur. This is the shape of things to come," Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak told reporters after the signing ceremony, also attended by his Singapore counterpart, Lee Hsien Loong.
The two countries signed a memorandum of understanding for the link with a bilateral agreement to be finalised by the end of the year, both sides said.
It takes about four hours to drive the more than 300 km (190 miles) from Singapore to the Malaysian capital.
The announcement reflected a recent improvement in ties between the neighbours.
Singapore was part of Malaysia after the end of British colonial rule but they separated acrimoniously in 1965, clouding diplomatic and economic dealings for decades.
Relations have grown stronger in recent years despite an investigation by Singapore's financial authorities into a multi-billion dollar scandal involving Malaysian state fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB).
The rail link would have six stations in addition to its terminals in Singapore and Bandar Malaysia, about 7 km (4.5 miles) from Kuala Lumpur city centre, the two countries' transport authorities said in a statement.
Work on tenders for the project will start next year, Najib said. No estimate has been given for the cost but Malaysian media has reported that it could be more than $10 billion.
Rail companies from China, Japan, South Korea and Europe have expressed interest in the project.
But China is expected to have an edge after a generous winning bid from a state-owned Chinese firm for 1MDB's power assets, which was seen helping Beijing find favour in Malaysia.
Arbuthnot, Secure Trust see bright spots after Brexit turmoil
By Mamidipudi Soumithri
July 19 (Reuters) - Britain's Arbuthnot Banking Group and its minority-owned Secure Trust Bank Plc expect the market turmoil after the UK's vote to leave the EU to create investment opportunities for their companies, top company executives said.
The investment community has been concerned that Brexit could result in an economic downturn in Britain, which could hurt European financial services companies' profits.
However, Arbuthnot and Secure Trust, which are flush with cash after selling some assets earlier this year, are optimistic about the potential impact of the vote, and said their capital positions would allow them to go for deals.
"What we learnt in the 2008 banking crisis is that turmoil can create opportunities," Arbuthnot Chief Operating Officer Andrew Salmon told Reuters on Tuesday, but said it was too early to identify the nature of the opportunities.
Secure Trust Chief Executive Paul Lynam said the company was looking to make "meaningful to transformational" deals.
"We see Brexit as having more long-term benefit than threats," Lynam told Reuters.
Asset sales helped Arbuthnot and Secure Trust to report huge jump in first-half profit on Tuesday.
Arbuthnot's profit soared nearly 18-fold to 225 million pounds ($296 million), while Secure Trust's profit rose 10-fold to 129.1 million pounds.
Arbuthnot earned about 100 million pounds through the sale of a 33 percent stake in the challenger bank.
The companies benefited from the sale of Secure Trust's Everyday Loans Group unit, resulting in a gain of about 117 million pounds.
Erdogan targets more than 50,000 in purge after failed Turkish coup
By Humeyra Pamuk and Ercan Gurses
ISTANBUL/ANKARA, July 19 (Reuters) - Turkey vowed to root out allies of the U.S.-based cleric it blames for an abortive coup last week, widening a purge of the army, police and judiciary on Tuesday to universities and schools, the intelligence agency and religious authorities.
Around 50,000 soldiers, police, judges, civil servants and teachers have been suspended or detained since the coup attempt, stirring tensions across the country of 80 million which borders Syria's chaos and is a Western ally against Islamic State.
"This parallel terrorist organisation will no longer be an effective pawn for any country," Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said, referring to what the government has long alleged is a state within a state controlled by followers of Fethullah Gulen.
"We will dig them up by their roots," he told parliament.
A spokesman for President Tayyip Erdogan said the government was preparing a formal request to the United States for the extradition of Gulen, who Turkey says orchestrated the failed military takeover on Friday in which at least 232 people were killed.
U.S. President Barack Obama discussed the status of Gulen in a telephone call with Erdogan on Tuesday, the White House said, urging Ankara to show restraint as it pursues those responsible for the coup attempt.
In parallel talks, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter and his Turkish counterpart discussed the importance of Turkey's Incirlik Air Base in the campaign against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the Pentagon said.
The base, which is used by Turkish and U.S. forces in the air campaign against Islamic State, has been without power in the days since the failed coup.
Seventy-five-year-old Gulen, who lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania but has a network of supporters within Turkey, has condemned the abortive coup and denied any role in it.
A former ally-turned critic of Erdogan, he suggested the president staged it as an excuse for a crackdown after a steady accumulation of control during 14 years in power.
On Tuesday, authorities shut down media outlets deemed to be supportive of the cleric and said 15,000 people had been suspended from the education ministry along with 100 intelligence officials. A further 492 people were removed from duty at the Religious Affairs Directorate, 257 at the prime minister's office and 300 at the energy ministry.
The lira weakened to beyond 3 to the dollar after state broadcaster TRT said all university deans had been ordered to resign, recalling the sorts of broad purges seen in the wake of successful military coups of the past.
In a sign of international concern, a German official said a serious fissure had opened in Turkey and he feared fighting would break out within Germany's large Turkish community.
"A deep split is emerging in Turkish society," Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper. "The danger of an escalation in violence between Erdogan supporters and opponents has also risen in Germany."
"DOUBLE STANDARDS"
Turkey's Western allies have expressed solidarity with the government over the coup attempt but also alarm at the scale and swiftness of the response, urging it to adhere to democratic values.
Prime Minister Yildirim accused Washington, which has said it will consider Gulen's extradition only if clear evidence is provided, of double standards in its fight against terrorism.
Yildirim said the justice ministry had sent a dossier to U.S. authorities on Gulen, whose religious movement blends conservative Islamic values with a pro-Western outlook and who has a network of supporters within Turkey.
"We have more than enough evidence, more than you could ask for, on Gulen," Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag told reporters outside parliament. "There is no need to prove the coup attempt, all evidence shows that the coup attempt was organised on his will and orders."
White House spokesman Josh Earnest confirmed Ankara had filed materials in electronic form with the U.S. government, which officials were reviewing. Any extradition request from Turkey, once submitted, would be evaluated under the terms of a treaty between the two countries, he added.
This treaty excludes offences "of a political character" although it does cover those "committed or attempted against a head of state or a head of government".
Any extradition request would face legal and political hurdles in the United States. Even if approved by a judge, it would still have to go to Secretary of State John Kerry, who can consider non-legal factors, such as humanitarian arguments.
"I urge the U.S. government to reject any effort to abuse the extradition process to carry out political vendettas," Gulen said on Tuesday in a statement issued by the Alliance for Shared Values, a group associated with the cleric.
Turkey's Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus told reporters that 9,322 people were under legal proceedings in relation to the attempted coup.
Eight soldiers have sought asylum in neighbouring Greece and Turkey says they must be handed back or it will not help relations between the neighbours, which have long been uneasy.
Around 1,400 people were wounded as soldiers commandeered tanks, attack helicopters and warplanes, strafing parliament and the intelligence headquarters and trying to seize the main airport and bridges in Istanbul.
The army general staff said it would punish "in the most severe way" any members of the armed forces responsible for what it called "this disgrace", adding that most had nothing to do with the coup.
DEATH PENALTY CENTRE STAGE
Some Western leaders expressed concern that Erdogan, who said he was almost killed or captured by the mutineers, was using the opportunity to consolidate power and further a process of stifling dissent.
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, voiced "serious alarm" on Tuesday at the mass suspension of judges and prosecutors and urged Turkey to allow independent monitors to visit those who have been detained.
The foreign ministry has said criticism of the government's response amounts to backing the coup.
Turkey scrapped capital punishment in 2004 as part of its push to join the European Union, and European leaders have warned Ankara that restoring it would derail its EU aspirations.
But in the aftermath of the coup, Erdogan has repeatedly called for parliament to consider his supporters' demands to apply the death penalty for the plotters.
Yildirim said Turkey would respect the rule of law and not be driven by revenge in prosecuting suspected coup plotters. Speaking alongside the leader of the main secularist opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), he said the country must avoid the risk that some people try to exploit the current situation.
"We need unity ... and brotherhood now," he said.
The Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), a right-wing grouping and the smallest of the three opposition parties represented in parliament, said it would back the government if it decides to restore the death penalty.
More than 6,000 soldiers and around 1,500 others have been detained since the abortive coup. About 8,000 police officers, including in the capital Ankara and the biggest city Istanbul, have been removed on suspicion of links to the plot.
Some 1,500 finance ministry officials have also been removed from their posts. Annual leave has been suspended for more than three million civil servants, while close to 3,000 judges and prosecutors have also been purged. A court remanded 26 generals and admirals in custody on Monday, Turkish media said.
EX-AIR FORCE CHIEF ACCUSED
Officials in Ankara say former air force chief Akin Ozturk, who has appeared in detention with his face and arms bruised and one ear bandaged, was a co-leader of the coup. Turkish media said on Monday he had denied this to prosecutors, saying he had tried to prevent the attempted putsch.
The coup crumbled after Erdogan, on holiday with his family at the coastal resort of Marmaris, phoned in to a television news programme and called for his followers to take to the streets. He was able to fly into Istanbul in the early hours of Saturday, after the rebel pilots had his plane in their sights but did not shoot it down.
He said on Monday he might have died if he had left Marmaris any later and that two of his bodyguards had been killed.
The bloodshed shocked the nation, where the army last used force to stage a successful coup more than 30 years ago, and shattered fragile confidence in the stability of a NATO member state already rocked by Islamic State suicide bombings and an insurgency by Kurdish militants.
Drugs almost eliminate risk of sex with HIV positive partner, African study shows
By Katy Migiro
NAIROBI, July 19 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A daily dose of anti-HIV medication almost eradicates the risk of infection for people in a relationship with an HIV positive partner, a study showed on Tuesday, raising hopes of reducing HIV rates among one of Africa's highest risk groups.
More than 1,000 Kenyan and Ugandan couples took part in the two-year project where the HIV positive partner, two-thirds of whom were women, took antiretroviral therapy (ARV) and the HIV negative one took pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP).
"HIV was virtually eliminated in this population," the lead researcher, Jared Baeten of the University of Washington, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.
"More than 95 percent of the HIV infections that we expected to see, we did not see."
The results were announced on Tuesday at the Durban International AIDS Conference in South Africa, where delegates are discussing the U.N. target of ending AIDS as a global health crisis by 2030.
South Africa has the world's largest population of people living with HIV, accounting for 6.8 million of the 36.7 million infected globally.
Baeten said the study was good news for serodiscordant couples - where one partner is HIV positive and the other HIV negative - who want to have children.
Public health facilities can offer generic versions of PrEP for $100 a year or less, he said.
In the study, the HIV negative person was offered PrEP, a once-a-day pill that works to stop HIV reproducing in the body, until their partner had taken ARVs for six months to reduce their viral load and the risk of transmission.
"Couples really value something like this because it's important for maintaining their relationship, for maintaining their family," Baeten said.
"PrEP offers a really potent, usable, deliverable HIV prevention strategy ... PrEP has to be part of the puzzle for ending HIV."
FREE MEDICATION
The use of PrEP among high risk groups, like gay men, is increasing in the United States, leading to a fall in HIV rates in San Francisco, which has a large gay population, Baeten said.
Kenya and South Africa are among seven countries globally to have approved PrEP, Chris Beyrer, president of the International AIDS Society, said in a pre-conference briefing.
"(We are) really going to focus on the affordability and access to PrEP and, we hope, really begin a PrEP access era globally," he said.
Kenya announced on Friday that it will offer free PrEP to high risk groups, such as serodiscordant couples, as well as ARVs to everyone who is diagnosed positive.
Married couples account for 44 percent of new infections in Kenya, which has 1.5 million people living with HIV, government data shows.
The United Nations is trying to increase the number of people who are tested, diagnosed and treated with ARVs to reverse the pandemic.
Less than half of people with HIV globally are on treatment, it says. Many do not know they are infected.
Although the World Health Organization recommends everyone with HIV should be given ARVs as soon as possible after diagnosis, many are reluctant to start medication.
"People want to delay the process," said Elizabeth Bukusi, chief research officer at the Kenya Medical Research Institute's Centre for Microbiology Research, which was involved in the study.
"For someone who has no symptoms, there is nothing they are responding to."
Suspected U.S. coalition strikes kill 56 civilians in IS-held Syrian city - monitor
BEIRUT, July 19 (Reuters) - At least 56 civilians were killed on Tuesday in air strikes north of the besieged Islamic State-held city of Manbij in northern Syria, near the border with Turkey, a monitoring group said.
Residents believed the strikes were carried out by U.S.-led coalition planes, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. It said the dead included 11 children, and dozens more people were wounded.
On Monday 21 people were killed in raids also believed to be by U.S.-led coalition planes on Manbij's northern Hazawneh quarter.
The U.S.-backed Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), an alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters, launched an offensive at the end of May to seize the last territory held by Islamic State on the frontier with Turkey.
Islamist militants kill 17 soldiers in attack on Mali army base
By Adama Diarra and Tiamoko Dialo
BAMAKO, July 19 (Reuters) - Islamist militants killed 17 Malian soldiers and wounded 35 when they attacked an army base in the centre of the country, firing on troop positions, burning buildings and pillaging shops, the government said.
The attack is the biggest for months on the army in Mali, a country that faces a growing threat from Islamist groups based in the desert north.
"We lost 17 men and unfortunately 35 were also wounded and these have all been transported for medical care in the region of Segou," Defence Minister Tieman Hubert Coulibaly said on state television.
"We will make sure that this coordinated terrorist attack ... is met with an appropriate response," he said, adding that the army controls the town and is hunting the militants.
Army spokesman Souleymane Maiga told Reuters the raiders briefly took control of the base in Nampala, which is set in semi-desert scrubland close to the Mauritanian border. He said Malian troops retreated to nearby Diabaly to regroup.
Maiga said three groups staged the raid: Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb attacked from the north, the Macina Liberation Front linked to Ansar Dine waited outside the town to ambush military reinforcements and an ethnic Peul group attacked from the southeast.
His comments tie in with a claim of responsibility by Ansar Dine, which said its Macina Battalion staged the raid. A Malian intelligence source told Reuters the militants took seized weapons and vehicles to a forest.
Mali is awash with guns and is home to rival armed groups nursing local grievances. The country has seen a surge in violence since a 2015 peace agreement, which has failed to prevent violence between different ethnic factions.
French forces intervened in 2013 to drive back Islamist fighters who had hijacked a Tuareg uprising in 2012 to take over the desert north. Despite 11,000 U.N. peacekeepers deployed since, militants launch attacks across Mali and its neighbours.
Militants also killed 20 people last November in a high-profile attack on a hotel in the capital.
Earlier, a donor-funded national radio station, Studio Tamani, said it had received a phone call from a new militia defending the ethnic Peul.
The station said the call came from The National Alliance for the Safeguarding of Peul Identity and the Restoration of Justice (ANSIPRJ), headed by Oumar Aldjana.
Dodging costs and power cuts, Tanzanian firms profit from solar drive
By Jackline Nzula
ARUSHA, Tanzania, July 19 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - M karima Tarimo, managing director of Tarimo Industries, a Tanzanian company producing ice cream, yoghurt and fruit juice for export to Europe, is a happy man.
Since January, the firm, based in the northern town of Arusha, has relied purely on solar power to drive its machines.
The result is a healthier profit margin due to savings on electricity bills, and an unbroken source of power in a country where frequent blackouts are a menace to manufacturing, schools, hospitals and homes.
"Solar is very reliable, considering consistent power blackouts," Tarimo told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in his factory where solar panels line the roof.
"It has reduced electricity costs by a considerable amount. We are making more profits from returns as we have an alternative to conventional electricity."
For example, last month's electricity bill was about $1,000, almost a third of what it was in the previous month when Tarimo still relied partly on the national grid for power, he said.
"We also use solar in water heating and boiling during the food processing stages. Everything is solar here, including the refrigeration of our final food products. So use of solar is endless", Tarimo said.
Through tax cuts and other support, Tanzania is trying to drive businesses - not just households - to take up solar power, with the aim of both improving energy access and cutting climate-changing emissions.
Only around a quarter of Tanzanians have access to electricity, a problem the government is seeking to address through a push to exploit solar energy.
It aims to increase the East African country's overall electricity connectivity to 50 percent by 2025 and to at least 75 percent by 2033, according to the World Bank.
INCENTIVES
In January, Tanzania launched a joint initiative with the World Bank to curb carbon emissions by encouraging the increased use of solar power, especially among manufacturing companies, the country's biggest carbon emitters.
Under the initiative, manufacturers can benefit from a 38 percent reduction in value added tax (VAT) on solar panels.
"The initiative is a good idea and time will tell (if it is successful). It all depends on the consistency of solar use among the companies," said Germano Mwabu, a World Bank consultant economist.
He said 33 out of the 344 manufacturing companies targeted by the initiative had switched to solar power.
"We negotiated with the Tanzania government to also provide loan installment services where one can pay monthly for solar panels," Mwabu said, adding that solar panels can cost up to $10,000, including for installation.
He said the government, the World Bank and several companies were discussing the possibility of lowering VAT on solar panels even further in the coming months.
"If there is a way we can work out a solution with solar companies to have assembly plants locally, it can further reduce prices," Mwabu added.
GREEN POLICIES
In its national climate plan submitted last September, Tanzania, whose economy is heavily dependent on agriculture, said it had negligible emissions of greenhouse gases - total and per capita.
According to data on the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center website, Tanzania is ranked 98 globally in terms of total carbon emissions - behind Sudan, Ghana, Kenya and Zimbabwe.
A market researcher, who has closely studied the Tanzanian market, said 18 companies had expressed an interest in going 100 percent solar.
"Many countries are looking to go the solar way as part of corporate responsibility," said Musa Mkapa, a consultant with Syagga Consultants with offices in Tanzania and Kenya.
Court ruling on bail in has no impact on Italy talks - EU Commission
BRUSSELS, July 19 (Reuters) - The European Union's Competition Commissioner said a ruling by the EU's highest court on Tuesday has no impact on ongoing talks with Italy on a bank rescue plan.
The European Court of Justice ruled on Tuesday that junior creditors and investors need not necessarily suffer losses before a bank is rescued, a judgment that may work in Italy's favour as it seeks to bail out its banks without affecting investors.
Indonesia moratorium on new palm planting to include existing plantations
By Bernadette Christina Munthe
JAKARTA, July 19 (Reuters) - Indonesia plans to issue in August a five-year moratorium on new palm plantations that will include a halt to approvals to extend planting into forested areas inside existing concessions, threatening output growth and palm oil investment.
The moratorium will cover around 3.5 million hectares, according to the Environment and Forestry Ministry, starting with 950,000 hectares that are being proposed by plantation companies for expansions.
Indonesia, the world's top producer of palm oil, currently has about 11.4 million hectares devoted to palm plantations.
Plantation areas that not used according to what is stipulated on their concession permits, and those indicated to have been transferred to new owners may be subjected to the moratorium, San Afri Awang, director general of forestry spatial planning at Environment Ministry told reporters.
"Existing palm plantation concessions which have productive forested areas will also be subjected to the moratorium," Awang said.
Indonesia's palm association said the move is inconsistent with a strong commitment to investors and introduces uncertainty into the regulations governing plantations.
"If plantations that already have a decree to clear forested areas are included in the moratorium, it shows that legal certainty in Indonesia is not good, and this is a bad image," Eddy Martono, an executive at Indonesian Palm Oil Association (GAPKI), told Reuters on Tuesday.
In April, Indonesian President Joko Widodo said the areas already issued to palm oil growers could be more than twice as productive "provided they use the right seeds".
Gamal Nasir, director general at Agriculture Ministry told Reuters on Tuesday that no decision has been made yet on including forested areas inside palm concessions in the moratorium plan.
GAPKI's Martono said instead of a moratorium the government should help farmers increase productivity.
Syrian rebels capture Islamic State headquarters in Manbij -U.S. military
WASHINGTON, July 19 (Reuters) - U.S.-backed rebels fighting Islamic State militants in Syria captured a headquarters operation as they pushed into the western part of the town of Manbij over the weekend, the U.S. military said in a statement on Tuesday.
The Islamic State headquarters, which was located in a hospital, was being used as a command center and logistics hub. The U.S.-backed Syrian rebels also took control of part of the town, enabling civilians in the area to flee the fighting, the statement said.
The Syrian rebels were continuing to battle Islamic State on four fronts for control of Manbij, clearing territory as they pushed toward the center of the city, the statement said.
Islamic State militants have staged counterattacks, but the Syrian rebels have maintained momentum with the help of air strikes by the U.S.-led coalition, the statement said. It said the coalition has carried out more than 450 air strikes around Manbij since the operation to take the town began.
Mumbai police suspect poor targeted for organs in kidney transplant racket
By Rina Chandran
MUMBAI, July 19 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Police in Mumbai said they suspect a criminal gang which preys on poor people for their organs is behind a kidney transplant racket at a top hospital, the latest such case in India where a shortage of organs is fuelling a black-market trade.
A kidney transplant at the Hiranandani Hospital in a suburb of India's financial capital, was stopped last week after the hospital was tipped off that the donor's documents were fake.
"We have been the subject of a massive fraud," Sujit Chatterjee, chief executive of Hiranandani Hospital, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
One hospital employee and six other people have been arrested in connection to the case, which has prompted the police to look into past transplants at the hospital.
"We are looking into the involvement of a criminal gang that finds poor people and makes false documents for them and takes them to hospitals posing as relatives," a police spokesman said.
Commercial trade in organs is illegal in India, and only close relatives are allowed to donate to someone in need. Donations must be approved by a special committee at each hospital, that includes social workers and a state official.
More than 200,000 people in India need a new kidney every year and about 100,000 need a new liver, according to MOHAN Foundation, a non-governmental group focusing on organ donation.
But only 2 percent to 3 percent of this demand is met, as legal organ donations are rare largely because of ignorance and a cultural reticence.
The chronic shortage has fuelled a thriving black-market trade of illegal transplants and trafficking in organs as desperately ill people often turn to middlemen, agreeing to pay sums of 1 million rupees ($14,900) or more for a kidney.
These middlemen often scout villages and small towns for potential donors, who they sometimes lure with false promises of a job in the city.
Many people who give up a kidney are poor and illiterate, and get only a fraction of the money with the middleman pocketing the rest.
"We are doctors. We lack the ability to detect forged documents and elaborate ruses," said Hiranandani Hospital's Chatterjee, adding that the hospital was cooperating with the police and reviewing its processes for transplants.
Last month a hospital in New Delhi said it was duped by traffickers into removing the kidneys of victims believing they were relatives of needy patients.
Other cases in recent years have involved foreigners coming to India for illegal transplants, and men being trafficked from Nepal to be donors.
"It is an unfortunate situation, and it won't go away until we address the massive organ shortage," said Sunil Shroff, founder and managing trustee of MOHAN Foundation.
COLUMBUS It was like a clip from the daytime talk show Oprah -- the one where she gives out all those cars to her audience members -- except these werent cars.
They were roles that director Haley Schroeck was handing out for the upcoming play The Frog Prince.
"You get a part. You get a part. Everyone gets a part," Schroeck said Monday during auditions for the Missoula Children's Theater production.
A group of 60 young, aspiring actors had found out they all made the cut to be part of the play after a two-hour audition held in the gymnasium at Federated Church.
Missoula is a traveling playhouse based out of Montana that comes to Columbus each year to teach children how to get outside their comfort zone and to grow as an actor. It is sponsored by the Columbus Art Gallery.
The only catch is this production must be cast, practiced and performed in only five short days.
I always think its going to be harder than it is, but kids are such sponges. They pick up on everything really fast, said 24-year-old Schroeck.
This is one of the biggest attendances the directors have seen, making it a little tough to find spots for everyone. But Schroeck and her co-director, Shelby Coleman, were up for the challenge.
Usually we have a hard time trying to fill spots, but we didnt have that problem this time, said 22-year-old Coleman.
Heather Buttaro was one of the spectators that lined the walls Monday morning watching her granddaughter Journey Pritchard-Buttaro, 9, try out.
She was even having me test her on the way here, giving her instructions to follow to make sure she was ready to listen, Buttaro said.
Just like Buttaro, there were plenty of parents and grandparents observing, but what made Buttaro different is her granddaughter is the third generation of Buttaros to participate in the traveling theater camp.
Buttaro, 46, along with her siblings participated with the group for years, starting when she was only 8.
By the time Buttaro had children of her own, it was a tradition. Now Journey is carrying on the Missoula legacy.
Shes a very strong-willed child, and this has taught her to listen, and I can really tell shes improved with following directions, Buttaro said of Journey, who first took part in Missoula in kindergarten.
Journeys mouth dropped open as she got one of the leading parts, playing a knight. As she thumbed through the script, her eyes got bigger and bigger as she saw how many lines were highlighted.
It is exactly what she was hoping for.
Im so excited, she said.
She said the key to being a good actor is "you just have to be confident and speak loudly and clearly.
She enjoys playing a role and the social aspect of taking part in Missoula.
I like getting to express my feelings through acting, Journey said. Plus its just fun, and I get to meet new people.
Coleman said children like Journey are exactly who they are looking for when casting the play.
They have to want to be here and be excited about it; otherwise, its not going to be a fun week for anyone, she said. After that, its all about how confident they are because thats what makes an actor. Its all about being confident on stage.
Performances of "The Frog Prince" are scheduled for 3 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. Saturday at the Central Community College-Columbus Fine Arts Theater. Tickets are $8 for adults, $4 for children and free for children ages 5 and under.
John Menzies bows to investor demands for new chairman
LONDON, July 19 (Reuters) - UK airport services and logistics group John Menzies has appointed Irish paper and packaging industry tycoon Dermot Smurfit as its new chairman, answering a key demand from new activist investor Shareholder Value Management (SVM).
SVM, which holds more than 7 percent of the firm, called for more independence on the company's board earlier this month when it also joined calls from other institutional investors to separate its aviation services and printed media distribution businesses.
The German activist investor complained that current interim chairman Dermot Jenkinson had connections through his wife to the Menzies family, which control about 19 percent of the company through various holdings.
Smurfit, a former deputy chairman of the family firm Jefferson Smurfit and currently chairman of Finnish-based paper and packaging group Powerflute, will join John Menzies on July 25, the company said on Tuesday.
Jenkinson, who was appointed in May, had originally agreed to be chairman for 12 months and lead the process to appoint a successor.
Menzies has seen a high turnover among executives, with CEO Jeremy Stafford quitting in January for personal reasons and Chief Financial Officer Paula Bell resigning in April.
A John Menzies spokesman said that Dermot's appointment had been "supported by major shareholders".
Smurfit, 71, has spent over 40 years in the paper and packaging industry in which time the family business underwent a a series of changes in ownership.
Pointing to Smurfit's strong experience in merger deals, SVM analyst Gianluca Ferrari showed support for Dermot's appointment.
"We believe that Dr Smurfit brings a wealth of expertise to Menzies and are confident that he is the right person for the job ... his M&A experience will serve shareholders extremely well," Ferrari said.
South Sudan editor detained for criticising leaders
NAIROBI, July 19 (Reuters) - A South Sudanese newspaper editor has been arrested for writing articles that criticised the country's leaders over a flare-up in violence earlier this month, a colleague said on Tuesday after meeting security officials.
Alfred Taban, founder and editor of the privately run Juba Monitor, was detained on Saturday, drawing calls from journalists' and rights groups for his release.
"They arrested Alfred because of the two articles of 15th and 16th July in his column," Oliver Modi, South Sudan Chairperson of the Union of Journalists, told Reuters.
He quoted security officials as saying that "Alfred will be taken to the court, and let the court at the end of the day tell us who is guilty or who is not guilty". He said it was not clear when the court hearing would take place.
In the articles, Taban said President Salva Kiir and his deputy Riek Machar had been unable or unwilling to control their troops in the latest spasm of violence, in which at least 272 people were killed.
The fighting erupted on July 7 in the capital Juba between followers of Kiir and Machar, a former rebel leader who became vice president under a deal to end a two-year civil war.
Journalist rights groups Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and the Committee to Protect Journalists, as well as Amnesty International, have called for Taban's release.
"We urge the South Sudanese authorities to free Alfred Taban without delay and to ensure that his rights are respected and that he has access to a doctor," RSF said in a statement.
"This leading journalist's arrest constitutes yet another violation of media freedom in a country that has endured extensive violations of civil liberties since the start of the civil war."
It said another Juba Monitor editor, Anna Nimiriano, had been released after questioning on Saturday.
Journalists often complain of persecution by the security services of the African state, which seceded from Sudan in 2011. In 2015, at last seven journalists were killed in South Sudan. In the latest flare-up of fighting, another was killed in Juba.
Failed Turkish coup piles pressure on travel companies
By Ceyda Caglayan and Victoria Bryan
ISTANBUL/BERLIN, July 19 (Reuters) - The attempted coup in Turkey last week has dealt another blow to the country's already weakened tourism industry and will weigh on profits of the nation's airlines and airports as well as tour operators serving the country, industry experts said.
Turkey's tourism sector has taken a battering this year after a wave of suicide bombings. Even ahead of the attack at Istanbul's Ataturk airport at the end of last month economists forecast that tourism revenue would drop by about $8 billion this year, equivalent to 1 percent of GDP.
Holiday rentals website Tripping.com said that searches for accommodation in Turkey dropped 37 percent last weekend compared with the previous weekend.
Market research company Euromonitor predicts that international arrivals to Turkey will drop to 32.9 million this year, from 34.7 million in 2015 and a peak of more than 35 million in 2014.
"The recent political events in Turkey will be catastrophic for its travel industry," Euromonitor's Nadejda Popova said.
In June alone, international air passenger arrivals dropped by 29 percent, bringing the decline for the first half of 2016 to 12 percent.
STAY-AWAY PASSENGERS
The declining tourist numbers are likely to be most painful for Turkish Airlines and budget carrier Pegasus , as well as airport operator TAV and airport service company Celebi.
Shares in those companies have fallen by between 25 percent and 35 percent already this year.
Efe Kalkandelen, airlines analyst at IS Investment, said he now expects total air passenger numbers to Turkey to drop by 4-5 percent this year, against his previous estimate of a 5.2 percent increase.
The drop in international passengers is of particular concern because they typically generate greater profit than domestic passengers, he said.
International passengers accounted for 87 percent of Turkish Airlines' 2015 passenger revenue and 61 percent at Pegasus.
Turkish Airlines' greater proportion of transit passengers could provide some support, Kalkandelen said, but neither of the two carriers are likely to hit year-end targets.
Turkish Airlines, which was downgraded by ratings agency Standard & Poor's this month, aims to carry 72.4 million passengers this year, up from 61.2 million in 2015, and achieve a margin of 20-22 percent on earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and rentals (EBITDAR).
Pegasus is targeting passenger growth of 13-15 percent from a 2015 level of 22.3 million people and an EBITDAR margin of 19-21 percent.
PRICE CUTS?
The turmoil has already led to the insolvency of Anatolian Sky, which specialised in holidays to Northern Cyprus and Turkey. Shares in London-listed TUI and Thomas Cook , two of Europe's largest tour operators, have come under pressure from events in Turkey as well as attacks in France and Britain's vote to leave the European Union.
Some operators may now find themselves having to cut prices for late summer holidays, Numis analyst Wyn Ellis said.
Thomas Cook has cut capacity to Turkey by about a third this year, but Ellis said its exposure is still likely to be "uncomfortable".
TUI had moved to focus more on exclusive hotels, which tend to be booked earlier, so its late summer bookings could be better, Ellis added.
Thomas Cook said that cancellations after the failed coup had been minimal, though large numbers of customers had called to seek reassurance.
A spokesman for TUI said that Turkey may yet prove to be a popular last-minute destination because prices were good and many other places are fully booked.
MIDEAST STOCKS-Qatar outperforms again in sluggish region
By Andrew Torchia
DUBAI, July 19 (Reuters) - Qatar's stock market rose on Tuesday after breaking major technical resistance, but other markets in the region were sluggish, held back by soft oil prices and mixed corporate earnings.
The Qatari index climbed 0.6 percent to 10,649 points in a broad-based rise, with nine of the ten most heavily traded stocks gaining. Trading volume fell from Monday's high level but remained active.
On Monday the index had broken above its December and March peaks at 10,490 and 10,502 points, triggering a "reverse head and shoulders" pattern formed by the highs and lows since December and pointing up in the long term to around 12,600 points.
Qatar Islamic Bank surged 3.9 percent after reporting a second-quarter net profit of 562.6 million riyals ($154.5 million); the 13.7 percent year-on-year advance beat the 524.3 million riyals average forecast of analysts polled by Reuters.
Commercial Bank of Qatar (CBQ) initially fell after Turkish conglomerate Anadolu Industry Holding decided to exercise a put option to sell CBQ the 25 percent of Turkey's Alternatifbank that it does not already own. But the bank, which was due to report quarterly earnings after the close, rose in late trade to end up 1.4 percent.
Qatar International Islamic Bank rose 2.0 percent after it said profit in the first half of this year edged up to 443 million riyals from 438 million riyals a year earlier.
However, United Development fell 1.8 percent after it said first-half profit dropped to 332 million riyals from 557 million riyals.
Saudi Arabia's stock market was dampened by some weak earnings. The Saudi stock index <_.TASI posted="posted" sales="sales" was="was" revenues="revenues" hit="hit" _0.5="_0.5" maaden="maaden" lost="lost" _3.9="_3.9" as="as" profit="profit" net="net" drop="drop" the="the" commodity="commodity" font="font" estimates.="estimates." high="high" it="it" co="co" arabian="arabian" prices="prices" _51="_51" mining="mining" although="although" at="at" year-on-year="year-on-year" low="low" analysts="analysts" by="by" percent="percent" saudi="saudi" end="end" percent.="percent." of="of" were="were" quarterly="quarterly" slid="slid" a="a" in="in">
Saudi Airlines Catering fell 1.6 percent after announcing a 17 percent decline in quarterly profit.
Al Rajhi Bank, the kingdom's second-largest lender by assets, reported a 5.7 percent rise in second-quarter net profit that was broadly in line with analysts' forecasts. Its shares fell 0.4 percent.
Dubai's index fell 0.3 percent in a broad-based decline, although Emaar Properties added 0.7 percent. The shares began rising on Monday after a local consultancy report suggested the emirate's real estate market might recover in the second half of this year.
The Abu Dhabi index edged down 0.1 percent, butAbu Dhabi Commercial Bank gained 1.5 percent after slightly exceeding analysts' forecasts with a 12.3 percent drop in second-quarter net profit. It earned 1.13 billion dirhams ($307.7 million); analysts had forecast 1.07 billion dirhams.
Egypt's index slipped 0.4 percent. Sentiment remains depressed by slow economic growth and the country's hard currency shortage. The Egyptian arm of Emirates NBD said it was suspending use of debit and credit cards abroad to keep hard currency inside the bank.
TUESDAY'S HIGHLIGHTS
SAUDI
* The index dropped 0.5 percent to 6,647 points.
EGYPT
* The index slipped 0.4 percent to points.
DUBAI
* The index fell 0.3 percent to 3,526 points
ABU DHABI
* The index edged down 0.1 percent to 4,583 points.
QATAR
* The index climbed 0.6 percent to 10,649 points.
KUWAIT
* The index fell 0.2 percent to 5,371 points.
OMAN
* The index edged down 0.1 percent to 5,839 points.
BAHRAIN
* The index edged down 0.1 percent to 1,163 points
Ireland aims to end housing shortage by doubling output by 2019
By Padraic Halpin
DUBLIN, July 19 (Reuters) - Ireland will aim to at least double its housing output by 2019, the government said on Tuesday, announcing a raft of measures to tackle a chronic shortage that is raising living costs and homelessness.
Ireland was left with a surplus of houses after a 2008 property crash that cut values in half but while some out-of-town housing estates lie empty, property has become scarce in cities like Dublin where the population is growing rapidly.
The government will speed up the planning process, assist first-time buyers and boost social housing to address the failure for the last six years to build half the 25,000 homes analysts say are needed nationwide each year to meet demand.
"We want to get to 25,000 by 2019, and I agree with many that we need to go well beyond 25,000 in terms of making up for the deficit that has been there now for a decade. In many ways, we need to get to between 30,000 to 35,000," Irish housing minister Simon Coveney told a news conference.
While property prices are recovering and are now a third below peak, the cost of a building a new house exceeds the sale price in many instances and Coveney said government would help cut the cost by funding infrastructure projects on key sites and by freeing up state-owned land for residential development.
A Help to Buy scheme similar to the British government's mortgage guarantee programme will be introduced in October's budget to help boost demand among first-time buyers, alongside supply side measure to try to stop the scheme just resulting in higher house prices.
Coveney said the government would discuss the scheme with Ireland's Central Bank which introduced strict new deposit rules to curb excessive mortgage lending last year. The scheme will be back-dated to ensure activity does not stall in the meantime.
The National Asset Management Agency (NAMA), the 'bad bank' set up in 2009 to mop up toxic assets in the financial system, will also be put under pressure to see if it can deliver more than the 20,000 new homes it has promised to build by 2020, Coveney said.
Militant attack on Mali army base kills at least 12 soldiers - officials
BAMAKO, July 19 (Reuters) - At least 12 soldiers died in an attack on Tuesday on an army base in central Mali, a deputy mayor and a security source told Reuters.
The answer to this question is a simple "no", if we look at all the smoke and thunder generated by Pakistan at home and abroad and even in the UN Security Council after the Kashmiri militant leader Burhan Wani was killed in an encounter.
There are many reasons Pakistan chose to react so strongly with a grim-faced prime minister Nawaz Sharif describing Burhan as martyr of the Kashmiri independence movement at a special cabinet meeting.
He termed the movement of the Kashmiris as a movement of freedom and said Pakistan would continue to extend moral, political and diplomatic support to the Kashmiris in their just struggle for the right to self determination.
And the Pakistan cabinet decided to observe July 19 as Black Day to register its concern.
Civilians clash with the security forces in Kashmir.
Even the hanging of Indian Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru, decidedly a more prominent Kashmiri personality, evoked less strident comments from then Pakistan president Asif Zardari. He said "The abuse of the judicial process has further aggravated and angered the people of Kashmir."
The protest against Gurus death sentence saw communists coming out in support. The Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami (HuJI) even exploded a bomb on 7 September, 2011 outside the Delhi High Court killing 17 people.
Then why did Pakistan decide to raise all the heat and dust over Burhan's killing?
The major internal factor encouraging Pakistan is Jammu and Kashmir's unnatural ruling coalition of PDP and BJP formed to keep out Omar Abdullah's National Conference and Congress from power.
With vague cliches for goals it has been meandering from crisis to crisis, small and big.
Chief minister Mehbooba Mufti never seemed comfortable with the alliance. This was visible after her father Mufti Mohammed Sayeed died.
She took too long to cogitate before deciding to continue with the alliance, showing a lack of confidence in her own political skills. Her father a past master in politics had deftly cobbled up the alliance with BJP.
Perhaps the dissonance between the partners is showing up in their inability to take decisive action when separatist elements egged on by Pakistan take advantage of popular protests to escalate them into crisis situations.
The chief minister faced the first major crisis at the National Institute of Technology (NIT) at Srinagar when non-Kashmiri students objected to Kashmiris pitching for West Indies and applauding India's defeat in the semi-final of the World T20 in April 2016.
The non-locals wanted the NIT to be relocated when Kashmiris objected to the hoisting of the national flag. It became a confrontation with the waving of the Pakistani flag and calls of "Bharat Mata Ki Jai" versus "Hum kya chahte, azadi" renting the air. Police were called in and they lathi-charged the non-Kashmiri group.
The state government looked on helplessly as a local incident was blown up into a national and international one, till New Delhi intervened.
Two weeks later, rumours of an army man molesting a school girl provoked a mob of 500 protestors to surround the army post at Handwara Chowk threatening to burn it down.
Though the girl denied such an incident took place and video coverage confirmed it, the state government meekly gave in to the mobs demand and asked the army to shift the post. The girl later gave a statement before the DM that it was local youth who molested her.
And an army post that denied free passage to infiltrators from Pakistan for decades was given up.
And now the handling of the Burhan episode by the Mehbooba government has provided the meat for Pakistan to appear as the saviour of the Kashmiris.
Omar Abdullah, Mehbooba's predecessor, perhaps in a moment of contrition over a similar but bigger crisis he faced in 2010, gave some advice to the chief minister.
When he was the chief minister, 116 young protestors were shot dead in the summer of 2010 that caused his defeat in 2014.
He said, "Mehbooba Mufti has made the same mistake as me. I went into a shell and she has also withdrawn into a shell. The first 24-48 hours are crucial. That is when people need see and hear you.
"She should have at least come on television and appealed for calm but she seems to have retreated into a shell when she was needed to be seen and heard."
It seems Pakistan is preparing to go for the jugular as weak governance and political indecisiveness seem to prevail in Jammu and Kashmir.
We can expect more crisis situations in the coming days in the state. I am not too confident the mismatched pair ruling the state will do any better as the Centre also seems to be equally inept in handling crises.
But there should be no illusions about Pakistans interest in the Kashmir issue.
For India, the only outstanding issue is to reunite the two halves of Kashmir severed by Pakistan.
But not for Pakistan; there it's different strokes for different folks.
All the Black Day shindig in Pakistan and Nawaz Sahib sporting a long face over the "martyrdom" of Kashmiris should not obfuscate the question: does Pakistan really want freedom for Kashmir?
Pakistan regularly talks about implementing the UN resolution on Kashmir and carrying out a plebiscite. But it is only for the people of the state to choose between India and Pakistan. It is not for the "freedom" of Kashmir. There is no third choice.
In spite of this, "azadi" (freedom) is the chant of Pakistan flag-waving mobs. Can there be greater dishonesty in protest?
Forget about India, will Pakistan ever concede freedom for the part of Kashmir it controls?
Never; not even as a ploy to gain moral authority to force India to follow suit for creating a unified, independent Kashmir State. Because it is not in its agenda.
Pakistan's problems with Kashmir are much more than its heart bleeding for Kashmiris.
For the Pakistan army, it is a war of thousand cuts to bleed India - it doesn't matter if Kashmiris also bleed in the process - to avenge its decisive defeat in the 1971 war against the Indian army.
For Pakistan politicians, Kashmir is a rallying call to enrich their vote banks.
For elected governments, it is an opioid to distract the masses from the myriad problems of Pakistan.
For the masses who dreamt of Pakistan as a pan-Islamic nation carved out of South Asia, Kashmir is a reminder of the failed dream. This is more so after the East Pakistan cut loose to become Bangladesh, aided by Indians.
So why would Pakistan ever want "aman" (peace) in Kashmir?
Even if you give Kashmir on a platter to Pakistan, it will continue with its unfinished agenda, at least till the army calls the shots on how the country deals with India.
But whatever be the situation or conflict, ultimately it is the Kashmiri people who bear the brunt.
As a nation we simply cannot afford such a state of affairs.
Finding an acceptable solution is going to be difficult in Kashmir; perhaps the time has come now for Prime Minister Modi to get into the act.
Having had his turn at handling the troubled Jammu & Kashmir as chief minister, an articulate and passionate Omar Abdullah spoke to me in an exclusive interview about how Mufti cannot be a reluctant head of government, behave like a child and set fire to the Valley, and run away from crisis.
Abdullah also spoke about the role of some news channels fanning TRPs by stoking passions, the use of pellet guns by security forces - which is blinding hundreds of Kashmiris - and the growing Islamisation in the Valley.
'Standard Operating Procedure had been put in place, which the government is not following. Photo credit: Kashmir Observer
The former J&K CM stands firm in the belief that a political solution alone will work for Kashmir, and that the Centre cannot buy peace:
Kashmir is on fire again. Why? Post the Burhan Wani encounter, should the Valley have been allowed to burn like this?
First and foremost, the state government seems completely confused as to who is in charge. There seems to be a concerted attempt to built a cocoon of deniability around Mehbooba Mufti. The state government, on the other hand, is unsure who has the reins. It leads one to draw the conclusion that she is not in charge of her own state.
We were told by a senior police officer that Mehbooba knew about the Burhan cordon and the succeeding encounter. The story changed in a few hours. Judging from experience, I refuse to believe that the CM was not kept informed. I simply do not buy it.
If Mehbooba indeed did not know, it's even worse. The CM has no business not knowing because this has wider implications.
Nearly 100 Kashmiris have lost their vision in the pellet firing. PDP and BJP say you introduced them in 2010.
That's bizarre logic! I want to ask the state, who is using the pellet gun now? Please don't use them; you are the CM, not Omar Abdullah. I handled a far more sensitive situation in the aftermath of the execution of Afzal Guru without using them and blinding people; we did not watch thousands of people being put in hospitals and the whole state go up in flames.
Standard Operating Procedure(SOP) and protocols had been put in place, which the government is not following. Pellet guns were never to be deployed in this manner.
As CM, you faced the critical 2010 stone pelting unrest. Did you then use excessive force to end the protests as Mehbooba is doing now?
We need to get a handle on the use of force. I am not lobbying against the government or seeking to replace Mehbooba Mufti. This is in contrast to what she and her father did when they told Kashmiris that get rid of Omar Abdullah and 80 percent of your problems will end.
The daily dose of violence has to end. She will learn her own lessons which is unfortunate because she could have learnt a lot from what went wrong for me.
Shah Faesal's post "The studios are competing with the street" explained he was facing a mob because of the role of certain channels in the portrayal of the post-encounter violence. What do you think?
All Kashmiris share a revulsion for the current level of suffering. The portrayal and projection of Kashmir is not new. Whether we like it or not, the news channels are a business and they fan nationalistic passions.
They are not helping the situation, but making things worse for Kashmir. They have very little understanding of the nuances of the situation in the Valley. They have a pulpit and they put it to good use to drum up TRPs.
Is the clampdown on the local media and printing of newspapers unprecedented?
The Centre has not done it. We know that the Mufti government ordered the clampdown and there is an effort to fudge the facts. It took you 72 hours to react. The editors are not fools and they did not stop the press on their own. PDP is now trying to drown the chorus because Parliament is in session. It has made the situation worse as rumours are the only information. In the absence of credible news, this fans passions even further.
Only BSNL postpaid connections are active in the Valley; there is no other internet or cell phone access. Why doesn't Mehbooba admit that she ordered it? The state government never put it in writing, but they directed the police to stop the press.
Mehbooba seems to have cordoned herself off. Do you think she wants to break her party's unpopular alliance with the BJP?
I am sure that thought has crossed her mind, but she cannot set the state on fire and run away. The CM can't leave it to somebody else to clean the mess. They did it earlier with Ghulam Nabi Azad on the Amarnath land row in 2008.
They can't make a habit of setting J&K on fire.
I am sorry you are sitting on the CM chair, nobody has tied you to the chair. Now you give the impression that you are a reluctant CM. You are not serving your father's memory by setting the state on fire. You are no little girl. You are obliged to put the state on tracks. You have enjoyed the trappings of office and chose to become CM when things were peaceful. We will not allow you to escape your responsibility.
I can only take the Union home minister at his word. He said in Parliament that he was ready to help defuse the situation, but was told by Mehbooba not to come. I can't hold the Centre responsible if the CM tells him not to come to Kashmir's aid. If she and her associates are saying she is not taking the decisions, who is?
Are the PDP and the NC doing nothing about the growing Islamisation in the Valley?
This is a convenient stick to beat both of us with and I have raised it with the Centre. Why don't they act? I have asked where the money is coming from. You have all the resources and the intelligence as the government of India. Currently, it's only mishandling.
What are the political solutions for Jammu and Kashmir's future?
Militancy did not start because of the lack of economic opportunity. Packages are not the answer. You cannot buy peace; you need to arrive at a political solution. Rs 80,000-crore packages post floods don't work.
You only look at Kashmir when it's burning. Kashmiris are not ungrateful. I had once said this in the presence of former PM, Dr Manmohan Singh, but solutions cannot be bought. Successive governments only wake up when there is trouble - don't incentivise it.
What does Omar Abdullah feel about the mess in the Valley as a Kashmiri?
It appears that the Congress government in Karnataka led by Siddaramaiah has declared an all-out war against departments of his own government's administration. His special targets seem to be the IAS and the police departments.
The latest victim is Deputy SP MK Ganapathy who committed suicide on July 8 after blaming former home minister KJ George and senior police officers on live TV. This was followed by a statewide uproar with people taking to the streets in protest and the Opposition sitting in the Vidhana Soudha on an overnight dharna. The BJP has also threatened to raise the issue in Parliament.
But first, consider these issues:
1. Sub Inspector Mallikarjun Bande, based out of Gulbarga, was gunned down by contract killer Munna Darbadar under suspicious circumstances. The needle of suspicion pointed towards an IGP named Wazir Ahmed.
2. Kallappa Handibag, Deputy SP of Chickmagalur committed suicide when he was accused of kidnap. His family accused some senior police officials of harassing him.
3. Anupama Shenoy, Deputy SP of Kudligi subdivision in Ballari district was victimised by district in-charge, minister Parameshwar Naik, for "putting his call on hold". Facing continual harassment as she claims, from the liquor lobby, she eventually resigned and took to social media to detail out her grievances.
MK Ganapathy had named former state home minister KJ George and three senior IPS officers as responsible in retrospect, for his suicide.
4. DK Ravi, an IAS officer, committed suicide under mysterious circumstances in his Bangalore apartment which evoked nationwide outrage. It eventually led to KJ George being axed as home minister and moved to the Bangalore development ministry.
5. Rashmi Mahesh, an IAS officer, who headed the Administrative Training Institute in Mysore, was the victim of a politically motivated assault by goons because she exposed a Rs 100 crore scam at the ATI. As a reward, the government slapped a notice against her just five days after the incident.
6. C Shikha, the DC of Mysore was the target of intimidation and harassment from Marigowda, former zila panchyat president and reportedly close to the chief minister. This resulted in the citizenry taking to the streets in protest.
And now it was MK Ganapathy's turn.
If this is the plight of officers in the government, there's more that happened outside it.
Kuttappa who took part in a peaceful protest against Siddaramaiah's decision to celebrate Tipu Jayanti in Kodagu was brutally hacked to death by a horde of Muslim miscreants, according to a ground report by Samvada. However, the chief minister said Kuttappa died because "he slipped and fell down".
Then there's the Bajrang Dal activist, Prashant Poojary, who was murdered for taking on the cattle-smuggling mafia.
There's still more. VHP member K Raju from Mysore was killed in broad daylight by a Muslim biker gang. He was instrumental in helping build a temple in Kyatamaranahalli.
All these in a space of just two years: from 2014-2016.
Indeed, this laundry list of what is by Karnataka's scale, rampant murders, was essential to underscore the hell hole that Karnataka has become ever since Siddaramaiah took over as the chief minister.
Generally reputed as one of the most peaceful, progressive and prosperous states even during pre-independence days, Siddaramaiah has in a brief period achieved infamy for trying to systematically destroy each one of these distinctions.
The other name that figures in at least two of these high-profile deaths of government officers is that of former home minister KJ George.
In the case of DK Ravi, it was alleged that he was constantly under pressure for investigating the various real estate deals of various Congressmen including George.
Indeed, as journalist DP Satish shows in this report, George's forays into real estate dates back to the 1990s when as the urban development minister in S Bangarappa's cabinet, "he was accused of large scale land-grabbing", and "between 1999 and 2013, George was forced to keep a low profile because of many reasons. When the Congress returned to power in 2013, George surprised everybody by bagging the home portfolio... His rivals in the party point fingers at his connections in Delhi".
But more damaging is the interview that the now-dead Deputy SP Ganapathy has given to a Kannada news channel in which he names George and three senior IPS officers as responsible in retrospect, for his suicide.
The complete video (in Kannada) is really chilling. The allegations blow the lid wide open on the exact nature and extent of mafiadom in the government and administrative circles.
Indeed, if there's one minister that Siddaramaiah has steadfastly defended in both the Ganapathy and DK Ravi deaths, it is George.
In an op-ed written in the Kannada daily Vishwa Vani, Mysore-Kodagu MP Pratap Simha traces the rise of a powerful Karnataka politician - originally from Kerala - to his links with the timber mafia and now, the real estate mafia. For those in the state, it's not hard to decipher the name of this politician.
If this was not enough, the current home minister, G Parameshwara on July 11 shamelessly claimed on the floor of the Assembly that Ganapathy committed suicide because he "did not find satisfaction in his marital life" and that ill-treatment by Ganapathy's wife led to his death.
This truly disgusting statement was the latest in his flip flops that included claiming that Ganapathy's interview was itself fake.
Not too long ago, Karnataka police was ranked among the best.
It is to the credit of this force that the growth of the underworld in Bangalore to Mumbai-like proportions was ruthlessly and effectively checked in the 1990s.
Equally, it was this force that apprehended Rajiv Gandhi's murder-mastermind Sivarasan on the outskirts of Bangalore. Its role in the protracted Veerappan saga too deserves our grateful recognition.
One can list several such accomplishments but the point here is this effective force has now been mostly denuded of morale and increasingly, the department seems to have become a hotbed of corruption, intrigue, politicking and worse.
Consider the fact that early last month, there was a call for an open revolt of sorts when 50,000 police personnel applied for "harassment leave" en masse. The Deccan Chronicle's report on the incident reads thus:
"... more than 50,000 policemen across the state have already applied for 'harassment leave' on June 4... The police personnel are protesting against harassment by senior officers in the name of discipline."
It's a different matter that the revolt was crushed swiftly but the undeniable fact is that things shouldn't have been allowed to reach this stage in the first place. Indeed, it appears that politics in the police department has replaced the discharge of the duty of maintaining law and order.
The latest update on the Ganapathy suicide saga is that earlier on July 18, a local court ordered charges to be filed against George, AM Prasad (IG-Intelligence) and Pranab Mohanty (IGP-Lokayukta). This is the same George who flagrantly played the fake minority victimhood card claiming that he was being targeted because he is a Christian.
Two months ago, I wrote on this website that public perception across Karnataka is that Siddaramiah is the worst ever chief minister, and that his regime so far has been a "directionless mix of disastrous far-Left economic policies, wanton communal and caste divisiveness, unrestrained anti-Hinduism, sclerotic governance, rampant corruption, and near lawlessness".
Islamic televangelist Zakir Naik has become a headache for the investigating agencies. Because the police simply don't know how to pin him down.
It has been a week and the Mumbai Police is yet to submit its report on the investigation ordered by Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis after the media went all-out against Naik for his allegedly inspiring the terrorists who attacked a Dhaka cafe earlier this month.
Naik is not unfamiliar to the people of Mumbai, who have been seeing full-page ads of his peace conferences in Mumbai newspapers since many years.
The 50-year-old Naik is an Islamic orator and founder of the Mumbai-based Islamic Research Foundation. He runs a channel for Islamic teachings called Peace TV which is banned in India as it doesn't have down linking licence from the ministry of information and broadcasting.
He is a qualified medical practitioner whose studies include the Shrutis and Smritis, Bible and Quran.
Sources in the ATS say that they couldn't get any evidence or clues which could prove Naik's role in tutoring terrorists.
He speaks English fluently and dresses in a three-piece suit with a tie. He had shot to fame with his videos of debates with Hindu spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and with talks on the similarities between Hinduism and Islam. Naik courted controversy when he reportedly said that every Muslim should be a terrorist.
He had also argued that any religion other than Islam was not worth practising. Some of these extremely offensive quotes can be found on the Peace TV website. Naik is banned from the UK and Canada for his hate speeches against religions other than Islam.
When cornered by the media, Naik said that he was quoted out of context. However, his statements have landed him in trouble earlier and Mumbai Police had booked him for hurting the public sentiment.
What's worse, his statements have not only earned him the wrath of people from religions other than Islam, but those from various sects of Islam have also been annoyed by his views, especially those on Karbala.
But all said and done, the police and investigating agencies haven't been able to find a terror angle in his speeches, nor have they been able to establish that Naik has links with terrorist organisations.
Only twice have the investigating agencies raised eyebrows on him on the terror front - first when one of the men working for the Islamic Research Foundation was arrested in the 2006 Aurangabad arms haul case but then later let off by the ATS, and then when Feroz Abdul Latif Ghaswala, arrested by the Delhi special cell in April 2006 with RDX, told the Mumbai Police that he had attended Naik's programme at Srinagar and then searched for militant contacts which would help him in joining militancy.
But sources in the ATS say that they couldn't get any evidence or clues which could prove Naik's role in tutoring terrorists.
"There are three stages through which fresh terror recruits goes through," said a senior ATS officer, "first he meets radical preachers who makes the young man sensitive towards religion, then the peers make the youngster an extremist and when he gets in touch with crime he becomes a terrorist or joins a terrorist organisation."
The officer felt that Naik's speeches had the potential to radicalise young minds but for any agency it's very difficult to pinpoint how his speeches or preaching can turn the person into a terrorist.
Naik himself in his press conference has tried to challenge the media on this front saying, "I challenge the media to give me proof that I am supporting violence. The Quran says if you kill one man you kill the world."
His action-packed press conference last week suits his style of presenting himself. Rather than coming to Mumbai amidst the controversy he chose to speak via Skype from Medina. He wanted to play a victim of media campaign against him as he knew that this would earn him a few thousand more followers.
He bashed the media saying that it is making a terrorist out of him. It has been a few days now but investigating agencies are yet to find anything against him which will link him to terrorism.
The Mumbai Police have been studying his speeches and some officers have also questioned the funding of Peace TV and the Union home ministry has already begun an investigation into this.
Former Mumbai Police commissioner Satyapal Singh has alleged that he had submitted his report on Naik to the then Congress-NCP government but it didn't act on the report.
However, he is silent on no action being taken by the new government against Naik even after ten days and on why despite his old report, chief minister Fadnavis has had to come up with new investigation orders.
Those sects among the Muslims who oppose Naik and his preaching think that this controversy will find him new followers.
Despite so many allegations in the media, Naik has clearly said that he had no plans to come to India at least for the next one year as he was an NRI and operated from the Middle East.
But his last statement before ending the five-hour-long press conference has a direct question for the Mumbai Police and those who want him to be pinned down as a preacher of terrorism.
"I am proud to be an Indian Muslim... I believe in the Indian Constitution. If the agencies are saying I am a terrorist, then why are they not arresting me?"
Lucy Berry | lberry@al.com
I write about business in the greater Huntsville area. If you have a story idea, question or comment, please email me at lberry@al.com.
Indebted companies, especially in the power and infrastructure sectors in India such as Jaiprakash, have been trying to offload assets to pay down debt that has been holding them back from investing in new projects.
Jaiprakash Power Ventures Ltd plans to sell a 500 megawatt thermal power plant in central India to JSW Energy Ltd for 27 billion rupees ($402 million) including debt, both companies said on Monday.
The companies signed a memorandum of understanding for the deal in September.
Indebted companies, especially in the power and infrastructure sectors in India such as Jaiprakash, have been trying to offload assets to pay down debt that has been holding them back from investing in new projects.
NTPC is fulfilling power needs of the country through 18 coal-based, seven gas-based, one hydro-based, nine renewable energy projects and nine JVs/subsidiaries.
New Delhi: State-owned NTPC on July 19 said it will strive to generate 248 billion units during the current fiscal.
"NTPC...signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Govt of India for the year 2016-17...As per the signed MoU, NTPC shall strive to generate 248 billion units during the year under "Excellent" category," the company said in a statement.
Further, NTPC has a CAPEX target of Rs 30,000 crore under Excellent category, the statement said. Moreover, parameters related to operational efficiency, projects monitoring and financial performance are also part of signed pact in line with MoU guidelines of Department of Public Enterprises, it said.
The MoU was signed by Power Secretary Pradeep Kumar Pujari and NTPC CMD Gurdeep Singh.
NTPC is fulfilling power needs of the country through 18 coal-based, seven gas-based, one hydro-based, nine renewable energy projects and nine JVs/subsidiaries. The company has a total installed capacity of 47,178 MW at present.
Infosys feeble performance during the first quarter this year came as a shock. The company which fascinated investors and analysts in the past witnessed a decline in the stocks. Companys year on year growth dropped down to 10.5-12%, from the 11.5-13.5% it gave in April.
CEO Vishal Sikka, believes execution failure in few areas of the business as the reason for the decline. He says the company is taking measures to fix those issues.
In an email to the Infosys employees, the CEO admits to be disappointed with companys performance. Heres the letter Vishal Sikka conveyed to the workers of the company.
Friends,
The first quarter of our new financial year was a revelation in many ways. I view the reaction by the markets and the media as a clear sign of the high standards our company is held to, the expectations we carry, even though everyone understands that a 90 day cycle means little on a long journey. I am disappointed. Disappointed that our revenue performance was not what we could have delivered, but even more so, that this overshadowed the many strong strides we made on executing our strategy.
Our revenue growth of 2.2% to $2501M, included a shortfall in consulting revenue, some declines in package implementations, and small declines in our India business and Finacle. But at the same time, we made great progress in both, renewing our core, AND in the new areas of our business, as well as in our culture of enabling this continual renew-new improvement. Our core business, delivery, under Ravi's great leadership, grew by 3.4%, improved its utilization, lowered its dependence on subcontractors, delivered ever higher benefits from automation, and derived tangible gains from both Zero Distance and Zero Bench.
Equally importantly, if not even more so, our New business grew extremely well, under Sandeep's stewardship. Gains in our newly introduced Mana, as well as in Skava, EDGE, design services and other new areas, accounted for more than a fifth of our growth! On Mohit's watch, large deal wins crossed the $800M mark in TCV, our top 5, top 10 and top 25 clients, all grew faster than the company, the number of our $100M clients grew by 3 to 17, and we added 95 new clients.
Ranga and his amazing finance team, helped improve the overall health of our company's profitability and financials. We are close to 100k Infoscions having been exposed to design-thinking, the number of ZD ideas crossed 11k, and more than 5k of these have been discussed with clients, and the first ones already monetized, thanks to a simple new process Ravi and Ranga have enabled, and ZB now has more than 20k jobs, and, in a year since its launch, this initiative got us to the point that more than 99.5% of the bench colleagues have been engaged, thus helping them deliver value and break the cycle of being on the bench not helping them get the experience they need to get off the bench. And there were many others.
Reflecting on this on my trip back home, mainly I learnt this: those areas which receive "the flame of our attention" in Jiddu Krishnamurti's words, show progress. And when running an operation as large and complex as ours, we must attend to each cog, every piece of our spectrum, to prevent a few negatives from overshadowing the many great positives. We cannot take our eyes off any important aspect of our business, each area of our large and diverse portfolio of services, products and platforms. In Q2, and beyond, we must accelerate our work in all the key strategic aspects of our work, AND we must address the weaknesses of Q1.
Our stock incentive rewards program, back after 13 years, is a great celebration of our people, our potential, and our commitment to recognize performance, and to have us participate in our collective work, and its outcomes, for Infosys is no more and no less than us, each one of us, and all of us. To help us lead from the front, Pravin and I are making some changes to the team. In Consulting, we had already announced that Rajesh Murthy would take over going forward.
Reporting to Rajesh, Michael Pesch will continue to run Europe, LATAM and APAC, and Kenneth Toombs, who recently joined Infosys, will run North America and India. Sanjay Purohit will join Pravin to work on strategic initiatives in bringing Design Thinking to our clients at scale. Ritika Suri will take over our large deals work, including SGS, from Anup Uppadhayay. Anup has decided to leave Infosys, and I would like to thank him for his tremendous loyalty and service to Infosys over the last 23 years. I have been privileged to work with Anup since I started my journey almost two years ago, and we wish him all the best.
Ritika brings a strong background in sales, particularly in driving large deals for products and platforms, and this is exactly the kind of experience we need to help transform our large client engagements with a focus in our renew-new strategy. M&A will move to Deepak Padaki, while Ritika continues to lead the Innovation Fund and our work with startups. She will continue to report to Ranga and Mohit will continue to sponsor our large deals work. In CIS, we will focus on renewing the existing business and bringing Mana to every aspect of it.
This will be led by Narry (Narsimha Rao) who will take over from Samson David. Narry has been with Infosys for 15 years, and has been running IVS for the last 1.3 years with great success and excellence. Narry and the entire delivery team under Ravi's leadership, will work closely with Navin Budhiraja on the Mana platform. I am very happy that Sudhir Jha has joined us from Google to help with product management and product marketing for Mana and for bringing a product discipline to all our work.
We thank Sam for his great work in growing the infrastructure business over the last few quarters, and his great contributions to Infosys for more than two decades, and wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors. Our success will be the result of our endeavor. The work of our people. The amazing individuals I meet every single day. I learnt that a million folks wanted to join the Infosys family last year! Our people focus will continue, and will be at the core of all that we do.
My belief in each one of us was redoubled last week, when I spoke to a few PMs at Bangalore. One Infoscion from Chandigarh, with her zeal and her team's proactive ZD ideas for banking, represented the vision of unleashing the innovator within each of us, more than any words can express. But it will take the very best of the very best in us. At a time when the world around us seems ever more influenced by the baser instincts and tendencies, we must bring the best of our intentions, and the best of our imagination, our knowledge and our conviction, to all that we do.
When Krishnamurti spoke of the flame of attention, he spoke of a compassionate attention, to what matters, to the long-term, purposeful, vision, to a fun, rewarding journey along the way. Over the weekend, a friend of mine wrote to me, asking me to "stay healthy, stay in the moment, focused on your actions, even as you work hard to let your achievements outshine your aspirations...".
Here's to a strong Q2, and a strong remainder of the year, one that not only exceeds the high standards we are held to, but does so purposefully, in moving forward on the long haul, one that shows what we as Infoscions are capable of. Here's to our actions, our flames of attention, outshining our aspirations and others' expectations. Let's do it!
The references have been sent from among those who failed to admit that they have offshore entities linked to them.
New Delhi: The Ministry of Finance has sent 91 references to 12 countries seeking financial and investment details of individuals named in the Panama Papers.
The 12 countries are the British Virgin Islands, Bahamas, United Arab Emirates, Luxembourg, United Kingdom, Gibraltar, Jersey, Singapore, Seychelles, United States, Switzerland and Cyprus.
According to a report in The Indian Express, the Foreign Tax and Tax Research (FTTR) division of the Ministry of Finance has sent these references over three months, and more will be dispatched soon.
The Multi-Agency Group, constituted the very day the first list of The Panama Papers was published, picked these 91 references from a masterlist of 297 Indians.
120 of the 297 Indians have admitted to income tax authorities that they had incorporated the offshore entities which figured in the data.
The references have been sent from among those who failed to admit that they have offshore entities linked to them, and have been categorised as high risk individuals.
The largest number of references have been dispatched via the FTTR division by Income Tax (Investigation) units in Delhi (25), followed by Mumbai (22) and Hyderabad(16).
Four status reports have been submitted to the PMO by the Multi-Agency Group on this issue so far.
Officials will now be handing in a monthly report on the progress of the probe into The Panama Papers and follow-up action. The Special Investigation Team (SIT) on black money is also being regularly briefed on the progress.
Also, 360 summons have been issued by the Income Tax authorities in connection with The Panama Papers. Apart from the 297 names, several more individuals have been named as being either shareholders or beneficiary owners of a offshore entity.
The department wants to use this information effectively by developing a comprehensive platform.
New Delhi: Income tax department on Tuesday signed a contract with L&T Infotech to implement its Project Insight for data mining to track tax evaders. The first phase of the project is expected to go live in May 2017.
Income tax has a voluminous database of IT returns, IT forms, TDS or TCS statements, and Annual Information Return (AIR). The department wants to use this information effectively by developing a comprehensive platform.
Thus, the department initiated Project Insight to strengthen the non-intrusive information driven approach for improving tax compliance and effective utilisation of information in tax administration.
Under the contract, the Project will be rolled out in three phases. This integrated platform would play a key role in widening of tax-base and data mining to track tax evaders. The new technical infrastructure will also be leveraged for implementation of Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act Inter Governmental Agreement (FATCA IGA) and Common Reporting Standard (CRS).
Implementation of reporting compliance management system will ensure that the third party reporting by reporting entities is timely and accurate. A streamlined data exchange mechanism will also be set up with other Government Departments and exchange partners. A new CMCPC will also be setup as part of the Project for handling preliminary verification.
Mumbai: Several companies in Bangalore and Chennai have declared Friday (July 22), the day Rajinikanth starrer Kabali is set to release, a holiday so the employees could enjoy the frenzy and watch the film on the first day.
This action was taken after the news about employees from different companies planning on taking a mass sick leave to catch their favourite superstars films first day first show broke out. The company authorities decided to simply declare Friday as a holiday.
As reported by Hindustan Times, Bangalore based Opus Waterproofing and Chennai based Fyndus India Pvt Ltd among others took the big step. Not only that, some of these companies also volunteered to giveaway free tickets in order to evade piracy.
On Tuesday, Manoj Pushparaj of Opus Waterproofing said, This was an internal company circulation which was sent out on Sunday. I could feel the eagerness in my employees, so instead of dealing with mass bunks and mobile switch offs, I came up with the idea of declaring a holiday on July 22 and be a part of the celebration. It would also serve as a motivation to my employees. Like Diwali bonus, we treated them to Kabali bonus.
The same day it was reported that Rajinikanths Kabali found its way online. According to reports, there are several links available to view the film in the Dark Web (overlay networks that use the public internet but require specific software, configurations or authorisation to access), ahead of its release on July 22.
The makers are trying to keep the matter as hushed as possible and are contacting the concerned authorities to pull down all these unauthorised links to the film.
Rajinikanths Kabali is already making the whole world hyperventilate with its release just a day away, and yet another controversy has erupted.
With the whole world in the grip of Kabali mania, Tollywood has seen it touch a high point where top producers like Suresh Babu, Dil Raju, Abhisekh Pictures and Sudhakar Reddy were vying hard to get its Telugu distribution rights.
Finally, when two young men Krishna Prasad and Praveen Kumar secured the rights for a whopping Rs 30 crore, everything was calm again. But after they signed an agreement with producer Kalaipuli Thanu, their trouble began.
The Telugu Distribution Council raked up an old tussle with Lakshmi Ganapathi Films over the huge loss suffered on Vikramasimha, the dubbed version of Kochadiyaan, and asked the duo to pay the compensation.
From the last few days, people from the distribution council have been harassing us demanding compensation to the loss some producers suffered with some other film. They say both are Rajinikanth films, and so we have to pay them. They should ask about it to Rajini sir or the producer of that movie. Why us?, Krishna Prasad asks.
They even took up the matter with producer Thanu. He told us that no one could stop the release of the film as he was not concerned with Lakshmi Ganapathi Films, Thanu replied.
Interestingly, when Rajinikanths Lingaa was released in Telugu, no such issues cropped up because its producer Rockline Venkatesh is very powerful. Now, the council is taking advantage of these two young men who are relatively new to the film industry and have no much backup to boast of.
Producer Allu Aravind, who brought the rights of Krishna district, though, has not faced such issues. However, with Kabali releasing this Friday, the duo has completed business in all areas.
These cheap tactics, prior to the release of the movie, is very unbecoming of the Telugu Distribution Council, which is expected to extend a helping hand to upcoming distributors.
Rajinikanths Kabali was leaked online
Piracy organisations have allegedly leaked the most awaited movie of the year, Rajinikanth starrer Kabali. The leak comes after producer S. Thanu obtained an injunction order from the Madras High Court restraining more than 169 websites from indulging in online piracy and infringement of copyright.
According to reports, there are several links available to view the film in the Dark Web (overlay networks that use the public internet but require specific software, configurations or authorisation to access), ahead of its release on July 22.
The makers are trying to keep the matter as hushed as possible and are contacting the concerned authorities to pull down all these unauthorised links. When quizzed about the leaks, Censor Board chief Pahlaj Nihalani expressed grave concern over big films being leaked online.
In an online interview, he said, They have not spared Rajinikanth either. Kabali was censored in Chennai, so it has nothing to do with our office in Mumbai. Earlier there was Salman Khans Sultan. I dont think collections of films with iconic stars will get affected by the leakage. It is the smaller films featuring non-A-listers which get hit by the leakage. Great Grand Masti is a case in point.
Hyderabad: Another case of sporadic cholera was recently detected in the city when a 24-year-old pregnant woman from Aziz Bagh in Tolichowki had to be rushed in a critical condition to Century Hospital.
The nine-month pregnant woman had complained of severe diarrhoea. Dr Sunil T. Pandya, medical director and director of anesthesia in the hospital, said, The woman was badly dehydrated and suffered from shock and kidney malfunction.
Had the family brought her even two hours later, it would have been difficult to save her. An emergency C-section was performed and the baby too had suffered from fetal distress because of the mothers condition. The child had to be kept in neo-natal care for three days.
The baby still has low blood pressure but doctors say that it will be stabilised in a week or two. According to doctors, after the surgery too, the womans extreme diarrhoea continued and she had to be given 15 litres of fluid per day to stabilize her. It took three days to stabilise the young woman.
Given her watery stools, the hospital tested her for cholera and the results came back positive. The family members of the woman said that a day before the incident they had attended a wedding.
Pregnant woman vulnerable
One of the family members of the woman said, No one else was affected. The doctors have advised us to get the drinking water tested.
The woman was admitted on July 15 and the hospital stated that they informed the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation health department on July 17 once the tests confirmed cholera.
Dr Pandya said, Pregnant women are immune compromised, hence it is very important for them to ensure that they carry their own water bottles, especially in the rainy season. We suspect water contamination led to this severe condition.
Deputy general manager of Water Board Mr Khaja Johar of Toli Chowki said, There is no problem with the water in Toli Chowki. It is being chlorinated. We will still collect samples as the case has come to our notice now.
District medical and health officials of Hyderabad division were not notified by the GHMC but when Deccan Chronicle called them they said that water samples would be collected and tested.
The Indian Coast Guard has been maintaining constant vigil in maritime zones of India by deploying ships and aircraft regularly to monitor suspicious activities in Indian waters. (Photo: PTI)
Port Blair: The Indian Coast Guard (ICG) while patrolling near the Narcondum Island in the Andamans, seized a suspicious Myanmarese boat along with 11 crew members in a late night operation.
On Monday night, the Coast Guard ships were on a routine patrol when they sighted the boat.
When asked to stop and identify themselves, the boat reportedly did not respond and increased the speed to run away.
According to reports, the crew members of the boat were also seen throwing some items overboard into the sea, causing more suspicion, thereafter the Coast Guard ships fired warning shots across the bow of the boat to forcefully stop them.
Finally, the boat stopped and surrendered after approximately two hours of chase.
The vessel is suspected to be involved in human trafficking, as large number of used clothes of men and women have been found onboard.
The Indian Coast Guard has been maintaining constant vigil in maritime zones of India by deploying ships and aircraft regularly to monitor suspicious activities in Indian waters.
She was on her way from college when she was forcefully taken away by the men, gangraped by them and left to die in bushes. (Representational photo: file)
New Delhi: Rohtak Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) and supervising officer in the second gang-rape case, Pushpa Khatri, on Tuesday said the case is being investigated under various sections of IPC and SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) act. Khatri said out of the five accused three are being interrogated and the contradictory facts being verified.
"Out of five accused we are interrogating three of them. Family members of the accused have given some CCTV footage. So, some contradictions are coming up and we are verifying them. The case was first registered in Bhiwani before and now that it is under our jurisdiction and we are taking it very seriously. We also saw the old files. Two of them were earlier arrested with the previous gang rape case," she said.
"We tried to talk to victim but she is not in the state to give statement. In first statement we didn't come to know about the castes of the accused. This case is being investigated under various sections of IPC and SC/ST act," she added.
"We don't think police would be able to get us justice. We want a fair probe by SIT/CBI," said the victim's brother.
The Dalit girl, who was gang-raped three years ago in Bhiwani by five men, had alleged that she was kidnapped and raped again by the same men in Rohtak on Wednesday last week when she was returning home from college.
Based on her complaint, police registered an FIR against Amit, Jagmohan, Mausam, Sandeep and Akash. While Amit and Jagmohan joined the investigation on Monday, families of Mausam and Sandeep approached the police with the evidence.
Srinagar: A mob tried to storm an army camp on Sunday in Bandipora district, shattering the day-long fragile peace in curfew-bound Kashmir even as the Centre rushed about 2,000 additional CRPF personnel to shore up security in the Valley where violence since July 9 has claimed 39 lives.
Protesters attacked the army camp at Ajas in Bandipora district, forcing the security forces to open fire. Three persons were injured in the incident, police said.
Curfew remained in force for the third consecutive day while normal life remained paralysed in the wake of deadly clashes that have rocked the Valley following the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani nine days ago leaving 41 dead and over 3,160 injured.
Two persons were also injured in security forces action when a mob pelted stones in Eidgah area of the city. The fresh violence came even as the situation in curfew-bound Kashmir was by and large peaceful during the day. After restricting mobile telephone services, authorities have now snapped the landline connections to curb the violent protests.
All 10 districts of Kashmir Valley continue to remain under curfew today as a precautionary measure for maintaining law and order, a police official said. He said the decision to continue the curfew was taken to maintain law and order as one person was killed in fresh violence in Kupwara district on Saturday.
Journalist body protests media clampdown in J&K
Calling it an attack on the freedom of the press, Indian Journalists Union (IJU) has protested the alleged clampdown on the media in Kashmir Valley and demanded that it be allowed to function unhindered.
In a statement issued here on Sunday, IJU president S.N. Sinha, its Secretary-General Amar Devulapalli, International Federation of Journalists Vice-President Sabina Inderjit and Press Council of India members K. Amarnath and Prabhat Dash, said that prohibiting publication of newspapers and confiscation of printed copies was illegal and unconstitutional, as the Supreme Court had ruled that prevention of printing and distribution of newspapers amounted to pre-censorship.
Local newspapers failed to hit the stands for the second consecutive day on Sunday in curfew-bound Kashmir. No dailies English, Urdu and Kashmiri were available as the newspaper - owners decided not to publish them after authorities yesterday allegedly raided some media houses and seized their printed copies.
The J&K Police action in name of volatile situation in the Valley is an attack on the freedom of the media and unacceptable in a democracy..., The IJU demands that the police should desist from such illegal and unconstitutional actions immediately, the IJU statement said.
DG CRPF visit Gaya (Bihar) later on Tuesday to assess the situation. (Photo: Twitter)
Patna: At least ten CRPF (Central ReservePolice Force) commandos belonging to its elite COBRA battalion were killed and five others injured in a Naxal IED blast in the jungles of Bihar's Aurangabad district, officials said.
The jawans of the COBRA unit were ambushed in the IED blast after which an encounter started yesterday afternoon between the two resulting in the killing of three naxals by late night, they said.
"While eight personnel were killed on the spot, two others succumbed to their injuries when they were being evacuated," a senior official said.
Read: Bihar CRPF encounter: Rajnath Singh assures help to state govt
The incident was reported from Chakarbanda-Dumarinala forests of the said district, bordering Gaya.
Some arms and ammunition, including an AK-47 rifle, INSAS rifle and under barrel grenade launcher were also recovered from the site.
Officials said five other personnel were critically injured in the fierce gun battle that ensued after the IED (Improvised Explosive Device) blast.
The jawans belonged to the 205th COBRA battalion and were deployed in the state for conducting anti-naxal operations.
This is one of the biggest casualties of the elite COBRA unit which has been raised by the CRPF for undertaking special jungle warfare operations.
Addition reinforcements of the state police and CRPF have reached the spot and a search operation has been launched.
Hyderabad: Days after two groups of students clashed on the campus of Hyderabad University here following a meeting on "Kashmir situation", ABVP leader N Susheel Kumar and others have been booked for allegedly assaulting an M Phil student.
The M Phil student, Amol Singh, claimed that the attackers mistook him for a Kashmiri.
Police also booked Singh after Kumar, accused of abetting the suicide of dalit scholar Rohith Vemula on the campus in January, alleged in his cross complaint that Singh had attacked them.
Gachibowli police have booked Kumar and 30 others under sections 324 (voluntarily causing hurt by dangerous weapons or means), 341 (wrongful restraint) and 506 (criminal intimidation) of IPC after Singh alleged that some ABVP students "brutally" attacked him on Saturday evening, a senior police officer told said.
Similarly, based on a complaint lodged by Kumar, a counter case has been registered against Singh with Miyapur Police under sections 323 (voluntarily causing hurt) and other relevant sections of IPC, he said, adding that both the cases are under investigation.
On July 16 evening, a scuffle had broken out between two groups of students after a meeting was conducted to "condemn" the police action against protesters in Jammu and Kashmir, at the shopping complex on the varsity campus.
In his complaint, Singh alleged that Kumar and others rained punches and kicks on him on the campus after mistaking him for a Kashmiri student while he was returning after attending the meeting. Singh had claimed that he was attacked again near a hospital.
In a counter complaint, Kumar accused Singh and his friends of assaulting him and other ABVP members.
Kumar alleged that the group of students raised separatists slogans after the meeting on "Kashmir issue" following which they objected to it.
"The university has received complaints from students groups and (that) laid down procedures will be followed in dealing with the same," University Pro Vice-Chancellor 1 and official spokesperson Professor Vipin Srivastava said.
Meanwhile, in a related development, the Joint Action Committee for Social Justice (UoH), which is spearheading the protests over Vemula's death, condemned the "assault" on Singh.
"In this incident, the nexus of ABVP with (Vice Chancellor) Appa Rao Podile-led HCU administration is clearly visible. N Susheel Kumar and Podile Appa Rao are amongst the prime accused in the SC&ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act and
abetment to suicide of Rohith Vemula and harassment of four other dalit research scholars," the JAC stated in a release.
Mumbai: Social activist Anna Hazare on Tuesday sought death penalty for those accused of brutally raping and killing a 15-year-old girl at a village in Maharashtra's Ahmednagar district.
"The case should be tried in a fast track court and the guilty be hanged," Hazare said in a statement issued here. The girl was raped last week allegedly by three men who inflicted injuries all over her body and broke her limbs before strangulating her at Kopardi village.
The incident sparked outrage as well as political slugfest, with the Congress demanding Fadnavis' resignation on moral grounds.
Making a statement after ruckus by the opposition in the Assembly yesterday, the Chief Minister had said the accused in the heinous crime have been arrested and the case will be heard in a fast-track court.
Noted lawyer Ujjwal Nikam has been appointed as the public prosecutor in the case and the government has given Rs 5 lakh solatium to the victim's family, he said.
New Delhi: Ahead of the GST test in Rajya Sabha, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley today met Bihar Chief Minister and JDU leader Nitish Kumar and is likely to court senior leadership of Andhra Pradesh and Telengana parties -- TDP and TRS -- this weekend.
Jaitley, who is counting on support of regional parties for passage for the Constitutional Amendment Bill on Goods and Services Tax (GST), met Kumar in Parliament House here.
GST and support for government stand against Congress demand for a constitutional cap on the tax rate figured in the discussions, official sources said.
Kumar, they said, supported government stand that tax rate should not be mentioned in the Bill and the decision should be left to the GST Council.
Also figured in discussions was Bihar government's demand for release of backward region grant for the state. The government, which has agreed to a five hour debate on the GST bill in the Rajya Sabha, is keen to get the law passed during the current Monsoon Session of Parliament that ends on August 12.
Jaitley, sources said, will visit Hyderabad this weekend and is likely to meet TDP leaders and Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu and TRS supremo and Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao.
TDP has six members in the 247 member house, while TRS has three. JDU has 10 members in a House where the ruling NDA does not have a majority. Congress with 60 members is the single largest party in Rajya Sabha. BJP has 53 members.
The Congress, which originally mooted the GST in 2009 to replace all indirect taxes, has been demanding that the overall rate be capped at 18 per cent and scrapping of an additional 1 per cent tax designed to compensate manufacturing states that fear losing revenue.
GST Bill, which intends to convert 29 states into a single market through a new indirect tax regime, was earlier planned to be introduced from April 1 this year, but the deadline was missed as the Bill to roll it out remains in a limbo in the Opposition-dominated Rajya Sabha.
After Parliament approves the constitutional amendment to allow GST, it needs to be ratified by more than half of the states. Then, Parliament must pass another Bill to implement GST.
After the Constitution Amendment Bill is passed in Parliament, there are three more legislations - Central GST (CGST), State GST (SGST) and Integrated GST (iGST) - which are required to be passed.
The GST Bill, which will help create a single national sales tax to replace several state and central levies, has already been approved by the Lok Sabha and is pending in the Upper House.
BJP is bracing for the Opposition assault over its alleged attempts to destabilise governments in states ruled by non-NDA parties. (Photo: ANI Twitter)
New Delhi: The BJP Parliamentary Partys executive meet has begun in New Delhi on Tuesday.
The party is meeting to firm up its strategy for the Monsoon Session of Parliament with the Opposition set to attack the government over a number of issues, including the developments in Arunachal Pradesh.
Meanwhile, the Congress has decided to give an adjournment notice in Lok Sabha over the Arunachal Pradesh issue.
The NDA constituents will also meet after the BJP Parliamentary Party executive meeting in the evening. BJP is bracing for the Opposition assault over its alleged attempts to destabilise governments in states ruled by non-NDA parties.
The recent Supreme Court verdicts on Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand have come as a shot in arm for Congress and other Opposition parties.
The Opposition has said it will also raise the developments in Kashmir, floods in parts of the country and India's unsuccessful NSG bid among others issues in the Parliament. BJP, on its part, has hinted at raising the issue of alleged corruption in Congress-ruled states and law and order problems in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to hit back.
The 'Campaign Against Violence, Towards Humanity' by Maharashtra Andhshraddha Nirmulan Samiti (MANS) (the Committee for Eradication of Superstition) founded by Dabholkar will be launched in the national capital on Wednesday. (Photo: PTI)
New Delhi: A nationwide awareness campaign will be launched to protest against "government apathy" in apprehending the killers of rationalists Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare, besides scholar M M Kalburgi.
The 'Campaign Against Violence, Towards Humanity' by Maharashtra Andhshraddha Nirmulan Samiti (MANS) (the Committee for Eradication of Superstition) founded by Dabholkar will be launched in the national capital on Wednesday.
"It has been nearly three years since Dabholkar was brutally murdered. Soon after, Pansare was shot and Kalburgi was also killed. Even after so much time the investigation has not reached a logical conclusion," Avinash Patil, Executive President, MANS said here on Tuesday.
While Dabholkar was murdered in Pune on August 20, 2013, Pansare was shot at on February 16 last year. He died on February 20. Prof Kalburgi was murdered on August 30 last year.
The killings had sparked outrage in the country with several eminent writers and others returning their state awards over "rising intolerance" in the country.
CBI had last month arrested Hindu Janajagruti Samiti member Virendra Singh Tawde in connection with the murder ofDabholkar. The Samiti is linked to Goa-based radical Hindu group 'Sanatan Sanstha', which had also come under the scannerfor the murder of Pansare.
"We condemn Sanatan Sanstha and Hindu JanajagaranSamiti, fundamentalist, right wing Hindu organisations who are spreading hatred and are reportedly engaged in terrorist activities like 2009 Goa blast and murders of progressive thinkers," Patil said.
"Both the Centre and state governments are responsible for the apathy in investigation. There are red corner notices against the suspects but investigative agencies have been unable to find them. It shows a lack of political will in the matter," he said.
The organisers said protests have also been planned across various cities in Maharashtra and other states till August 30, which marks the third death anniversary of Dabholkar. A national-level protest will also take place at his birthplace Pune.
New Delhi: Seeking to rename Bombay, Madras and Calcutta high courts to reflect the change in the names of cities they are located in, government on Tuesday moved a bill in the Lok Sabha, a day after Calcutta High Court judges unanimously rejected such a proposal.
Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad introduced the High Courts (Alteration of Names) Bill which, once passed by Parliament, will replace Bombay, Madras and Calcutta with Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata respectively in the names of corresponding high courts.
"The high courts were named after the cities in which they were located. Consequence to the changes in the names of these cities, there has been demands for change in the names. It is appropriate and logical that the names of these high courts are also changed as per the request of the state governments," the bill says.
"It will also fulfill the aspirations of the people of the states concerned," it says.
Earlier, judges of Calcutta High Court had unanimously declined to accept the Centre's proposal for renaming it as Kolkata High Court and communicated the view of the full court to the Union Law Ministry.
When the Cabinet had approved the bill earlier this month, it had proposed changes in the names of Bombay and Chennai high courts only.
The Calcutta High Court has the distinction of being the first high court and one of the three chartered high courts to be set up in India, along with the high courts of Bombay, Madras. It was formally opened on July 1, 1862.
Earlier, the government had planned to vest the President with powers to rename a high court in consultation with the Governor, the Chief Minister and the Chief Justice of that state. But the idea had been shelved. The government now plans to consider such demands of change in name on a case-by-case basis, sources said.
New Delhi: Government has cracked down on a number of websites for spreading hatred and communal tension after the Dadri incident, resulting a rise in the number of cyber crime cases registered, Lok Sabha was informed on Tuesday.
Terrorist organisations like al-Qaeeda, Hizbul Mujahdeen, ISIS and Boko Haram have been making use of the social media for recruitment, and to deal with the problem, the government will treat the issue effectively, Kiren Rijiju, Minister of State for Home Affairs, said during Question Hour.
"We have figures for the last three years. I agree and admit to the fact that there are many campaigns (on social media) to fan communal tensions and various other issues. The figure has rose in 2015, primarily because there were incident in which we could act. There was the Dadri incident, which happened. This was used to create hatred and divide. We cracked down on many portals. That is why the figure jumped," Rijiju said in response to a question.
The Dadri incident involved the lynching of man over alleged rumours of beef-eating in Uttar Pradesh last year. The meat found at his home turned out to be mutton, as per forensic lab reports.
"Government is sensitive about the whole social media that is being used. Cyber crime is a bigger threat and we are ready to face it," Rijiju said.
Admitting that the government is suffering from several challenges including lack of adequate trained manpower to deal with cyber security, the minister said it has taken several steps to deal with the problem. The government has a crisis management plan to deal with any kind of emergency, he added.
In a statement that was laid on the table of the House, Minister of State for Home Hansraj Ahir said 5693 cyber security-related cases were registered across the country in 2013, 9622 in 2014 and 11,592 cases in 2015.
"Besides this, to sensitise the system we conduct cyber mock drills as well. There are various mechanisms in place. We have the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) which looks into the matter," Rijiju said.
Home Minister Rajnath Singh also said that the NDA government has taken prompt steps in dealing with the cyber security issue.
Singh said the government has received the Gulshan Rai committee report on cyber security and is taking steps the strengthen the system. The panel was constituted in December 2014.
In response to a question on why the conviction rate was low in cyber security cases, Singh said the government was working towards and it will take some time.
Rijiju said, "We have challenges and we admit that there is a shortage of trained manpower to deal with this menace. However, we have been taking several steps to counter it."
"To strengthen the enforcement agencies, we have made provision to train 90,000 police personnel and 15,000 judicial in cyber security across the country," he said, adding that there were 36 cyber crime centres to deal with the problem.
Besides, a six-month certificate programme for 2000 officers, one-year diploma course for 500 officials and a very highly specialised MTech programme for 100 officials have also been started, Rijiju added.
New Delhi: Six ISIS men charge sheeted by NIA on Monday were working on a terror plot targeting the Ardh Kumbh Mela at Haridwar earlier this year, reports say.
The National Investigation Agency on Monday filed a chargesheet against ISIS India chief Shafi Armar alias Yousuf-Al-Hindi along with five others for conspiring to carry out attacks in Delhi and Uttarakhand.
The charge sheet has been filed against Akhlakur Rehman, Mohammed Azeem-ushan, Mohammad Osama and Mohammad Meraj, all residents of Roorkee in the Haridwar district of Uttarkhand, Mohsin Ibrahim Sayyed, a resident of Malad West in Mumbai and Yusuf-Al-Hindi alias Shafi Armar.
The charge sheet has confirmed that Shafi Armar, who was suspected to be the handler of the recent busted ISIS Hyderabad module, is alive in Syria.
The six men were also tutored by Shafi over social media platforms on how to make IEDs out of extracts from matchsticks.
This gang purchased matchboxes in bulk and extracted the matchstick heads. It was recovered from accused Azeemushan, NIA alleged.
The investigation has established that the six accused set up a terrorist gang owing allegiance to the ISIS and as per the direction of their handler Shafi Armar conspired to carry out terrorist acts by assembling and planting IEDs to terrorise the people, the NIA chargesheet added.
"Incriminating pictures of slain ISIS terrorists...and videos of bomb making...explaining the method of preparing IED with the help of matchsticks and firecrackers...were retrieved from the accused..." it said.
The chargesheet also said that Azeem-ushan and Osama conducted a recce of the Har ki Pauri in Haridwar on Shafi Armars instructions.
A book was also retrieved from the mobile phone of accused Akhalqu titled Bomb Banane Ke Asan Tariqa which instructs how to assemble IEDs using explosive material extracted from matchsticks.
Shafi Armar was a resident of Bhatkal in Karnataka and is at present working for ISIS in Syria. He has been charge sheeted for criminal conspiracy, unlawful activities and under the Explosive Substances Act. The case was initially registered by the Special Cell of New Delhi on January 18, 2016 and was transferred to National Investigation Agency.
The terrorists were also plotting terror attacks at strategic locations in Delhi, reports said, and a huge cache of inflammatory literature and videos containing hate speeches by Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Maulana Masood Azhar and other controversial clerics were also recovered from the operatives, the chagesheet revealed.
Mumbai: Intermittent heavy rains on Tuesday lashed the city and Konkan region of Maharashtra, affecting normal life as suburban trains were running late and traffic snarls were reported on some roads in Mumbai.
According to the disaster management control room of Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), the BEST buses were running smoothly while suburban trains on the Central, Harbour and Western lines were running late by 10 to 15 minutes.
The good rainfall in catchment areas has led to a considerable rise in levels of water reservoirs, though BMC said the stock was "satisfactory", but not "sufficient". The reservoirs supplying water to Mumbai have got filled upto 55 per cent of the annual requirement, BMC's deputy municipal commissioner (general administration) Sudhir Naik told PTI.
"Till today morning, we have water stock of 7,52,445 million litres, which is almost 55 per cent of our yearly requirement of 14 lakh million litres, which can be called satisfactory but not enough," Naik said.
Following the heavy rains, the Tulsi lake in suburban Powai started overflowing this morning, he said. The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD), meanwhile, has forecast heavy rains at some places in Konkan region.
"In the next 24 hours, intermittent as well as heavy rainfall is likely in the Konkan region, especially in south Konkan region. We are contemplating to issue an advisory to fishermen in those areas," IMD Mumbai's forecast director Shubhangi Bhute said.
During the last 24 hours, the central Maharashtra and Marathwada regions witnessed mild rainfall, while Konkan region got good downpour she said.
The rainfall recorded at some prominent places in Mumbai and Konkan region during last 24 hours is as follows: Colaba - 55.8 mm, Santacruz - 58.3 mm, Harnail - 110.9 mm, Ratnagiri - 67.7 mm, Alibaug - 89.4 mm, Bhira - 83 mm and Mahabaleshwar - 49.9 mm rain.
Expressing concern over the loss of lives due to the consumption of spurious liquor, the Commission observed that the reported suspension of some public servants in the matter points towards negligence on the part of the official machinery which resulted in the tragedy. (Photo: Representational Image)
Lucknow: The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has taken suo motu cognisance of hooch deaths in Etah and Farrukhabad districts of Uttar Pradesh and issued notices to the Chief Secretary and the Director General of Police, asking them to file a report within four weeks.
An official release issued by the NHRC said it learnt that some Government employees including from the State Excise Department have been suspended following the incident.
Expressing concern over the loss of lives due to the consumption of spurious liquor, the Commission observed that the reported suspension of some public servants in the matter points towards negligence on the part of the official machinery which resulted in the tragedy.
Accordingly, it has issued notices to the Chief Secretary and Director General of Police asking them to file a report in the matter within four weeks, the release said.
Huge quantity of illicit liquor and raw materials have been recovered from various places in Uttar Pradesh including Bareilly, Bijnor, Etah, Kanpur Dehat, Allahabad, Mau, Kushinagar and Sonbhadra districts, the release said.
Over 30 people have lost their lives in the hooch tragedy and over two dozen people were battling for life after consuming spurious liquor in Etah and Farrukhabad districts even as the authorities launched a crackdown on bootlegging, arresting 1,621 people across Uttar Pradesh. At least 11 government employees of excise and police department have been suspended.
14-year-old Insha Malik being treated at Srinaga's SMHS hospital. Ophthalmologists say she is among the eleven young boys and girls who have lost vision in both eyes. (Photo: H.U.Naqash/Deccan Chronicle)
Srinagar: Danish Ahmed Jhat, a 22-year-old youth from Srinagars Rainawani locality, was brought to the Citys government-run Sri Maharaj Hari Singh (SMHS) hospital on Sunday evening after a cartridge full of high velocity ball bearings made of lead fired from a police pellet gun pierced his eye.
He had suffered grievous injury and all the effort put in by Ophthalmologist surgeons to save his vision failed. His one eye was already gone and the cartridge had pierced it in such a way that his second eye had also been badly affected. He has lost vision in both the eyes forever, said a senior Ophthalmologist at the SMHS who has preserved the cartridge for any future scrutiny.
Danish who can barely talk due to pain and discomfort said, The CRPF had just been withdrawn from the area and I like others getting very bored and frustrated after remaining indoors for days of curfew decided to go out for a quick evening walk, he said.
Before returning home, he and some of his mohalla friends sat on the pavement of a closed shop for a chat. Suddenly we saw a security force vehicle moving fast towards us. Some boys fled and disappeared in the alleyways. I heard a group of youth standing at a distance jeering at the security personnel. One of them took out his gun and opened fire. I was hit with something very hot and hard in the eye and when I regained consciousness I was laying here (on hospital bed), he recalled. .
Pellet guns were first introduced to Kashmir by duck-hunting British expeditions and would often be referred to as chara bandook in local jargon. In 2010, the Jammu and Kashmir police came up with a contemporary version of the weapon, presenting it as non lethal to quell the protesters who often take to the streets in Srinagar and elsewhere to vent their political feelings and frustration and habitually engage the men in khaki in stone-pelting.
The other non lethal weapons the J&K police and other central security forces already stationed in the Valley or moved in, in large numbers to contain widespread disturbances in the aftermath of the killing of Burhan Muzaffar Wani, the new-age poster boy of militancy, by security forces on July 8, are pepper sprays and taser guns.
As many as 44 protesters have been killed in the tough campaign being spearheaded by security forces to quell the unrest, most of them in firings. About 2,200 others have been injured and the doctors have termed the damage colossal.
Dr. Khurshid Aalam Wani, senior-most surgeon specialist and head of Department of Surgeries at Srinagars Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (SKIMS) said, We couldnt help much in the cases which came to us very late. But overall what we have seen is; people are being targeted to kill them. Most people had been hit either in their head or abdomen. They are not shooting them in their legs.
He also said, The damage is enormous. People have been inflicted by lethal weapons. Someone had lost his eyesight, someone his brain metaphorwe couldnt help them. They died at the hospital casualty itself and some were brought dead. We also have a number of cases in which people have been absolutely incapacitated as they have suffered serious gunshot wounds to their internal organs and some of the penetrating injuries of the colon have been managed by us after diverting colostomy.
But it is mainly the security forces using the pellet guns to maim and blind them that has come under severe criticism at home and abroad with human rights groups making fervent appeals for discontinue the use of this so-called non-legal weapon.
Srinagars SMHS hospital alone received 167 patients with eye injuries caused due to the use of pellet guns during past 11 days. Ophthalmologists have, so far, conducted 140 surgeries for such patients and 80 of them have been sent home.
However, among the remaining badly injured patients are 13 of those who have lost their vision in one or both eyes. Unfortunately, were not any hopeful about some other cases as well, said a senior Ophthalmologist at the SMHS who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Dr. Sudharshan Khokhar who was heading a 3-member team of Ophthalmologists and surgeon specialists rushed in from Delhi following a request was made to the Central government by Chief Minister, Mehbooba Mufti, last week had earlier said, It is a war like situation here. We have never seen injuries on this scale.
Pellets are made of metal and may or may not be covered by a 1 or 2 mm rubber coating to minimize impact. Both can maim and even kill if shot from close range and aimed at any vital organ or the skull.
Doctors who are attending on those hit in pellet firing across the Valley have said that both J&K police and the CRPF are using bare-metal pellets. Police sources said they are shot from a 12 bore gun armed with a cartridge that can carry as many as 600 pellets, slightly larger than a grain of sand in size, and sprayed out in every direction at high speeds of over 1,000 feet per second. Usually when fired it sprays and does not shoot pellets but in rare cases, such as Danishs, a cartridge full of pellets pierced the bodies of the intended target or whoever came in the way.
Experts say that the pellet gun should be fired from, at least, a distance of 500 feet and aimed to shoot below the waist. Most patients admitted to SMHS and other Valley hospitals were shot both in rifle and pellet gun firings above their waist line; hence the increasing incidence of fatal injuries, say the doctors and local human rights groups.
There are scores of patients who lay on hospital beds with swollen and disfigured faces and other parts of body. Many have the tiny pieces of metal shrapnel the pellets- pieced in head, chest and other parts of their bodies as can be seen in their X-ray images. Police officials insist that the rubber pellets are not fatal when fired by hydraulic pump action guns but do admit privately that they also have come across the cases wherein these caused blindness, disfigurement and damage to organs.
New Delhi: The BJP-led Centre wants to"control" everything due to its "extreme dictatorial" tendencies, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Tuesday said wondering whether he can at least have the food of his own choice.
"Can i have food of my choice? Extreme dictatorial tendencies. They want to control everythng," Kejriwal tweeted.
He was referring to reports that the Ministry of Home Affairs, in a letter to him, has stated that the Chief Minister does not have the powers to issue suspension orders on his own.
Read: Navjot Sidhu's wife says he has quit BJP, set to join AAP
The Chief Minister had recently issued an order suspending his principal secretary Rajendra Kumar, who has been arrested by the CBI over charges of corruption.
As per government rules, an IAS officer who remains in police custody for more than 48 hours is "deemed to have been suspended" automatically.
Read: BJP MP Navjot Sidhu resigns from Rajya Sabha, Kejriwal 'salutes' him
Alluding to Navjot Singh Sidhu's resignation from Rajya Sabha, Kejriwal tweeted that honest people are feeling "suffocated" within BJP due to "dictatorial attitude" of its top leadership.
"Honest n gud people are feeling extremely suffocated within BJP due to dictatorial attitude of its top leadership," he said in another tweet. On Monday, he had "saluted" Sidhu's decision to relinquish his membership of the Upper House.
New Delhi: Lok Sabha on Tuesday urged the global community to act in a concerted manner and adopt "zero tolerance" against terrorism, as the House condoled death of people in terror attacks in different parts of the world.
The House also condemned the death of at least ten CRPF commandos in an IED blast, allegedly engineered by naxalites, in the jungles of Bihar's Aurangabad district on Monday.
The House also expressed grief over the killing of eight CRPF personnel when their bus was ambushed by terrorists in Srinagar last month as well as the death of people due to natural calamities across the country.
"We reiterate our call to the global community to adopt a zero tolerance policy and combat and eliminate the menace of terrorism worldwide," Speaker Sumitra Mahajan said.
Referring to various terror attacks including those that happened recently in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, France and Saudi Arabia, Ms Mahajan said these incidents are tragic reminders of the "need for a concerted action by the international community to fight the scourge of terrorism uncompromisingly".
The House also condoled death of people in the terrorist attack at Istanbul airport in Turkey this month.
More than 84 people were killed and many injured in a terror attack at Nice in France on July 14. "We share the pain of the people of France in this hour of tragedy and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them...," she said.
Condemning the recent terror attack in Dhaka where one Indian national was also killed, Ms Mahajan said, "we stand together with the government and people of Bangladesh in the war against terrorism".
She also mentioned the death of 17 people in a fire that broke out in the central ammunition depot of Army at Pulgaon, Maharashtra on May 31.
In incidents of natural calamities, 96 persons are reported to have been killed and a large number of people affected in Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Assam, Maharashtra, Arunachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh and Odisha, Mahajan said.
As a mark of respect for the departed, the members stood in silence for a brief while.
An injured CRPF jawan taken to hospital after a naxal attack took place near the border of Gaya and Aurangabad district, in Gaya. (Photo: PTI)
New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday expressed grief over the killing of 10 CRPF commandos in an IED blast carried out by Naxals in Bihar and extended condolences to the families of the martyred personnel.
"The Prime Minister has expressed grief on the loss of lives of CRPF personnel in Bihar. He prays for a speedy recovery of the injured," the PMO said.
The Prime Minister has expressed grief on the loss of lives of CRPF personnel in Bihar. He prays for a speedy recovery of the injured. PMO India (@PMOIndia) July 19, 2016
"PM @narendramodi extends his condolences to the families of the martyred CRPF personnel in this hour of sadness," the PMO said in a tweet.
PM @narendramodi extends his condolences to the families of the martyred CRPF personnel in this hour of sadness. PMO India (@PMOIndia) July 19, 2016
Ten commandos belonging to the elite CoBRA battalion of CRPF were killed and five others injured after a group of 200 Naxals ambushed them and blew off 22 IEDs in the jungles of Bihar's Aurangabad district on Monday.
Read: Maoist ambush leaves 10 CRPF commandos dead in Bihar jungles
"While eight personnel were killed on the spot, two others succumbed to their injuries when they were being evacuated," a senior official said.
The IED blast was followed by an encounter between security forces and Naxals in which three extremists were killed.
Read: Bihar CRPF encounter: Rajnath Singh assures help to state govt
This is one of the biggest casualties of the elite COBRA unit which was raised by the CRPF in 2008 for undertaking special jungle/guerrilla warfare operations.
The Andhra Pradesh government had requested that the area covered by the temple of Lord Sri Venkateswara in the Tirumala hills be declared a no fly zone. (Photo: Representational Image)
New Delhi: Civil Aviation Ministry on Tuesday said it is not possible to declare 'no fly zone' over Tirumala hills in Andhra Pradesh as it would further reduce the accessibility to Tirupati airport.
The Andhra Pradesh government had requested that the area covered by the temple of Lord Sri Venkateswara in the Tirumala hills be declared a no fly zone, according to a written reply given by Minister of State for Civil Aviation Jayant Sinha in the Rajya Sabha.
"Due to terrain constraints around the Tirupati airport, the airport is already restricted to single runway operations and any additional restrictions in the form of no fly zone over Tirumala hills will further reduce the accessibility to such an important airport. Hence, it is not possible to declare the Tirupati airport as no fly zone," Sinha said.
No fly zone refers to an area where planes are not allowed to fly. The Venkateswara temple at Tirupati is one of the richest temples in the world. Meanwhile, the ministry has given in-principle approval for a new airport at Karaikal in Puducherry.
According to the minister, out of the total 360 acres of land required for the project, 237 acres have been acquired by the developer. With regard to the remaining 123 acres, the matter is sub-judice in respect of 110 acres for the last eight years, he added.
"The reason for delay in starting of the work of airport as cited by the developer is because of pending court case relating to the land and difficulties in raising finances for the project. On account of the same, the private developer is not forthcoming with the estimated cost and a firm date for completion of the project," Sinha said.
The incident took place at Gir Somnath district, following which three persons were arrested on Tuesday last. (Photo: Video grab)
Ahmedabad: Angry protestors took to the streets in Guajarats Saurashtra region on Monday after a video showing four Dalits being stripped and beaten with iron rods by a vigilante group for allegedly skinning a dead cow went viral in social media last week.
Reports said that protestors pelted stones, torched buses and held rallies across the region and the police had to resort to lathicharge to disperse the demonstrators.
The victims, belonging to a Dalit community at Mota Samadiyara village of Una taluka in Gir Somnath, claimed that they were skinning an already dead cow, while the six accused claimed that the animal was killed before being skinned, police said.
A purported video showing the persons being beaten with iron rods and sticks went viral on social media platforms like Whatsapp. In the video, some people are seen chained to a car, while the accused are seen thrashing them mercilessly.
At least two persons sustained severe head injuries and were referred to Junagadh civil hospital for treatment, he said.
The incident took place at Gir Somnath district, following which three persons were arrested on Tuesday last.
A case was lodged under IPC sections 307 (attempt to murder), 395 (dacoity), 324 (causing hurt by dangerous means or weapons), 323 (causing hurt), and 504 (intentional insult to provoke breach of peace), and relevant sections of the SC and ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, and further probe was on, police added.
The High Court at Calcutta, formerly known as the High Court of Judicature at Fort William, was brought into existence by the Letters Patent dated May 14, 1862, issued under the High Court's Act, 1861. (Photo: Video grab)
Kolkata: The Calcutta High Court has unanimously snubbed the Centre's proposal to rename its as Kolkata and the decision has been communicated to the state law ministry.
"The Full Court of High Court at Calcutta in a meeting held on July 11 unanimously declined to accept the proposal of the Government of India for changing the name of 'High Court of Judicature at Calcutta' to 'High Court of Judicature at Kolkata' in view of long history and tradition associated with the existing name of the High Court at Calcutta," High Court Registrar General Sugato Majumdar said in a communication to the Incorporated Law Society (ILS) as per direction of the Chief Justice of the high court.
In the communication to the ILS president, in reply to his letter to the Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court Justice Manjula Chellur protesting the Centre's decision, the registrar general said "the view of the Full Court has been communicated to the Ministry of Law and Justice, Government of India."
"The name Calcutta has its own grandeur and tradition, dignity and heritage and it should not be lost in oblivion," R K Khanna, president of ILS of Calcutta High Court said, adding "same would apply to Bombay and Madras."
"If necessary, we will make an appeal to the President of India to maintain the tradition," Khanna said.
He said that he hoped that as President Pranab Mukherjee hails from West Bengal, he would appreciate the sentiment.
"We totally support the resolution of the Full Court in this regard," Calcutta High Court Bar Association general secretary Suranjan Dasgupta said.
West Bengal Law Minister Moloy Ghatak could not be reached over phone despite several attempts for the state government's views in this regard.
The Calcutta High Court has the distinction of being the first High Court and one of the three Chartered High Courts to be set up in India, along with the High Courts of Bombay and Madras.
The High Court at Calcutta, formerly known as the High Court of Judicature at Fort William, was brought into existence by the Letters Patent dated May 14, 1862, issued under the High Court's Act, 1861.
Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had on July 5 said that the name of Calcutta High Court would be changed to Kolkata High Court alongwith Madras and Bombay high courts.
"The Ministry has not yet reverted back on the issue," a senior high court official said.
Sources in the AAP said Sidhu would join the party soon and may be made the party's face in the assembly elections next year. (Photo: PTI)
New Delhi: Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Tuesday appeared to suggest that Navjot Singh Sidhu becoming the face of AAP in Punjab would be premature even as he admired the "courage" of the BJP leader for quitting from the Rajya Sabha.
On the possibility of Sidhu being projected as the AAP's Chief Ministerial candidate in the Punjab polls next year, Kejriwal commented, "Aisa kuch nahi hai." (There's nothing of that sort yet.)
"He has just resigned from the Rajya Sabha seat and I think all good people should resign from the BJP. I admire his courage," the Delhi Chief Minister said.
Read: Navjot Sidhu's wife says he has quit BJP, set to join AAP
When reminded about Sidhu's criticism of him in the past, Kejriwal said, "That's not an issue. But whoever joins the AAP has to become a common man first."
The Delhi Chief Minister was speaking at the launch of 'Arvind Kejriwal and the Aam Aadmi Party', authored by Pran Kurup, his IIT Kharagpur batchmate, at the Constitution Club here.
Asked what if Sidhu wants to join AAP. Kejriwal called him a "nice" man, adding "definitely the party (AAP) should give it a thought."
Sidhu had on Monday resigned from Rajya Sabha just three months after his nomination to the Upper House by the Modi government. Sources in the AAP said he would join the party soon and may be made the party's face in the assembly elections next year.
The Chief Minister said that Delhi's governance "suffers" because those who did not get votes, got three seats, are trying to interfere in Delhi's affairs from the "backdoor".
"It does not suffer because of me going to Goa or Punjab. They say Kejriwal does not have right to suspend officers. Now if an officer is taking a bribe I would not be able to suspend him or send him to jail. Delhi suffers because they stop all small and big initiatives taken by us," he said.
Kejriwal wondered in jest as to whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi will let him work if "I take back my psychopath comment".
The Clover Leaf flyover and Trumpet flyover derive their names from their design, which allows free movement of traffic in different directions in an orderly fashion and at high speed.
If the city planners do not understand what brings traffic to a complete standstill at peak hours, lets deconstruct it for them - no more highways and elevated corridors that run straight down to the narrow, congested roads at ground level. Surely, it doesnt need much imagination for any urban planner to know that the need of the hour is seamless traffic on roads that have properly managed exit and entry points - and clover leaf junctions and trumpet flyovers, so that the gridlock and mayhem at critical points where the highway meets the road, ends.
When talking of congestion the reference is nearly always to traffic on roads within the city and hardly anyone cares to mention the chaos on the highway entry points into Bengaluru where vehicles compete to make their way into it in the absence of infrastructure to head them off into the directions of their choice.
Take the traffic heading for the city from Hosur Road. Not all of it comes straight in as some vehicles move east , some west and so on. Similarly some of the incoming traffic on Mysore Road turns towards Kanakapura Road, some towards Bannerghatta Road or Hosur Road and some towards Magadi or Tumakuru Roads. Currently, the distribution happens in a disorganized, haphazard manner, observed traffic experts.
Read | Guest column: NHAI help will decongest traffic
The problem is that city planners have not understood that regional arterial pathways have to be designed differently from city flyovers, according to urban expert, Ashwin Mahesh.The Silk Board, Nayandahalli, Old Madras Road - Hoskote junctions and Tumakuru-Yeshwanthpura junctions are huge entry points into the city and cannot be treated like any other city junction, he underlined.
Other experts too agree that such junctions are not just traffic flow points, but traffic distribution points. They are distributors of regional traffic , sending vehicles straight on, to the left, right and so on. We need to make these junctions arterial distributors of traffic, they emphasised, adding that the solution was to build interchanges, which were a part of inter-city mobility , but not a part of mobility inside Bengaluru.
Traffic jam at Hebbagodi
The authorities only think about building flyovers, which are not designed for multidirectional distribution of traffic when in fact these are required at all entry points to the city to scatter traffic flow, urban experts regretted, noting that city planners had, in fact, done the opposite.
Trumpet & Clover Leaf flyovers a solution for city entry point traffic congestion
The Clover Leaf flyover and Trumpet flyover derive their names from their design, which allows free movement of traffic in different directions in an orderly fashion and at high speed. It's important for major entry points into the city to have distributors like these flyovers that allow traffic to flow smoothly in different directions. These have to be high-speed distributors, allowing vehicles to take even the turns without restriction. All this should be accomplished without impacting pedestrian movement, explained urban expert, Ashwin Mahesh.
The funny thing is we have done it the other way. The Domlur flyover on the intermediate ring road is built like a distributor although it is inside the city, while the same kind of distributor does not exist outside it. The only flyover that resembles a distributor and serves its purpose is the Hebbal flyover. That kind of distributor should be built at all entry points to the city, they suggested. Trumpet or Clover Leaf flyovers with their large area separators to allow the traffic to flow in different directions, that are a part and parcel of cities in the developed world, seem to be the favoured solution to the congestion at the many entry points to the city as well.
Traffic at Yeswanthpur Deenadayala Upadhyaya over bridge junction connecting Peenya, Malleshwaram, Mekri Circle, Vijaynagar and Rajajinagar (Photo: R. Samuel)
But has Bengaluru left it too late to build them? Some experts believe it may have and argue they are no longer feasible unless they are located some distance from the city where land is still available for such massive infrastructure.
BIEC: Perfect apot for Trumpet flyover
The junction of the Bangalore International Exhibition Centre (BIEC) on Tumakuru Road, which is an entry point into Bengaluru, deserves to have a Trumpet/Clover Leaf flyover with large area separators to allow the traffic to flow in all directions, according to traffic expert, M N Srihari. These massive multidirectional flyovers should be at a distance from the city so that the traffic is re-directed without touching the roads inside, he explains, noting that such flyovers cannot be constructed on its immediate outskirts given the land constraints.
The problem in Bengaluru is we allow all the traffic to touch the Outer Ring Road which is already congested before it enters the city. If we increase the number of ring roads instead, it may be possible to deal more efficiently with the traffic
MN Srihari, Traffic expert
Concentric circle of roads will ease traffic
Besides the Trumpet and Clove Leaf flyovers, experts suggest the creation of more concentric circles of outer ring roads, peripheral ring roads and intermediate ring roads to disperse the incoming traffic on the citys outskirts without allowing it to enter it directly.
This has been done successfully in Delhi and Hyderabad. Over 174 km of ring roads have been laid 30 km outside Hyderabad city to disperse regional traffic that does not require to enter it. There is, however, no such system growing in Bengaluru, noted traffic expert, MN Srihari, traffic, adding, The problem here is we allow all the traffic to touch the Outer Ring Road which is already congested before it enters the city. If we increase the number of ring roads instead, it may be possible to deal more efficiently with the traffic.
Pointing out that entry and exit points are crucial for regular flyovers in the city as well, Mr Srihari says they too ideally need to have a large area for separators for orderly traffic move in different directions. This would be very similar to what we call a traffic plaza or clover leaf patterned flyover. But building such massive flyovers will require an enormous amount of land acquisition by the government, which is not easy as the areas in question are filled with built-up property and realty, he explained.
Pedestrians, who are often ignored, must be given their due as well when building such infrastructure, stress experts, pointing out that Domlur with its never ending traffic, is a nightmare for people on foot, as is Hosur Road near Narayana Health, where many have had fatal accidents. Several have also lost their lives at the infamous Nayandahalli junction on Mysore Road and the Kempapura junction near Esteem Mall on International Airport Road, they note, suggesting that its important for large flyovers to take pedestrian movement into account in the interest of people's safety. These distributors will have to be built in a comprehensive way , allowing vehicle movement in different directions and also facilitating pedestrian movement and walkability, said urban expert, Ashwin Mahesh.
Prime Minster Narendra Modi with Home Minister Rajnath Singh at the BJP Parliamentary Party meeting during the monsoon session at Parliament House in New Delhi on Tuesday. (Photo: PTI)
New Delhi: With the Congress launching a scathing attack on the ruling NDA at the Centre for destabilising popular state governments, Union home minister Rajnath Singh likened the main Opposition party to a boat full of holes, which is destined to sink when put in waters.
While replying to a brief intervention of the Congress leader in the Lok Sabha Mr Mallikarjuna Kharge, Mr Singh said: The Constitutional crisis in Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand was on account of internal problems in the party. The Congress is like that boat which has many holes which, whenever put in waters, would be destined to sink.
Earlier, Mr Kharge charged that the ruling NDA was attempting a back-door entry in states ruled by the Opposition parties. Their (BJP) game slogan is a Congress mukt Bharat (a country free of the Congress). And to implement the slogan, they have resorted to engineer crises in states. They did it in Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, but failed to destabilise the Congress governments in Manipur and Himachal Pradesh. Now the Supreme Court has given a resounding answer to such tactics of the Centre, said Mr Kharge.
Meanwhile, with newspapers failing to hit the stands in Kashmir, Union Information and Broadcasting Minister Venkaiah Naidu spoke to Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti and sought details of the matter.
The Minister spoke to Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister on Monday night on the reported clampdown on newspapers in the state. Mehbooba said there was no such ban on the publication of newspapers.
SRINAGAR: No newspapers were published from Srinagar on the fourth consecutive day on Tuesday and the publishers and editors have decided not to come out with their publications on Wednesday also. They have alleged that the PDP-BJP government is not speaking in one voice and not owning up the press emergency imposed by it.
The police had on Saturday confiscated the copies of all leading Srinagar newspapers during pre-dawn raids at their press offices in an undeclared information gag which has also shut down the Internet, cellular phone services and Cable TV network partially. Though no formal gag order was issued, the authorities had privately justified the curbs saying these were unavoidable.
On 11th day, Relative calm in J&K
Relative calm prevailed in Kashmir Valley on Tuesday even as curfew continued to be in force in the summer capital and other cities and towns with thousands of police and paramilitary troopers in riot gear out on the streets on the 11th consecutive day.
Police said only a few stray and intermittent stone-pelting incidents were reported from Tahab in Pulwama, Sangam Chowk (Bijbehara) in Anantnag, Fatehpora and Ahan in Ganderbal and Bagyas and Recka Chowk (Batamallo) in Srinagar districts.
The Army has regretted the human loss in the firing, saying the troops were forced to open fire on the violent crowd at Churhat Qazigund on the peripheries of the highway town.
However, residents have questioned J&K police and the Army on their claim that the protesters had tried to snatch the soldiers weapons. Meanwhile, Army Chief General Dalbir Singh will arriving here on Wednesday on a day-long visit of the Valley to review the security situations in the hinterland and along the LoC.
GAP A pair of grandmothers teamed up as flower girls at a wedding in Lancaster County, and now the pictures are going viral.
Photographer Ashley Gillman said her photos have turned up on newspaper websites across the country, even in the United Kingdom and Denmark.
When Josh and Maggie Wakefield were married June 11 at White Chimneys in Gap, they decided to honor their grandmothers at the wedding by having them be their flower girls.
Maggie said her father died from colon cancer in 2013, so she wanted his parents in the wedding. Her grandfather, Ronald Sr., walked her down the aisle and her grandmother, Joyce, was one of the flower girls.
She said shes always had a very special connection to her grandparents because they helped raise her.
Maggie said her husbands grandmother, Drue, has been a huge influence in his life, as well. She said Drue is one of the most caring, gentle and thoughtful women that she know.
Having our grandmothers as the flower girls meant the world to us, she said.
Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi at Parliament house on the second day of the monsoon session in New Delhi on Tuesday. (Photo: PTI)
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday slammed Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi for his election speech in March 2014 alleging that the RSS was responsible for the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and indicated that he may have to face trial in the defamation complaint filed against him by an RSS activist.
A bench of Justices Dipak Misra and Rohinton Nariman told senior counsel Harin Raval, appearing for Mr Gandhi who has challenged the defamation proceedings, There is a difference between Nathuram Godse killing Mahatma Gandhi and the RSS killing him. You cant make a collective denunciation of an organisation. It must stand the test of public good. Otherwise it has to go for trial.
During an election speech in March 2014 in Bhiwandi, Maharashtra, Mr Gandhi is alleged to have said that Gandhiji was shot dead by RSS people and yet their people talk of Gandhiji. The comment led to a criminal complaint being filed by RSS activist Rajesh Kunte against Mr Gandhi and the case is pending.
Mr Kunte termed Mr Gandhis comment false, frivolous, baseless and wanton allegations, imputations against the RSS and its people with mala fide motive to harm the reputation of the RSS, its followers, people, swayamsevaks. The Bombay HC had dismissed his plea for quashing the case, following which he had filed another plea.
In the last hearing in November 2015, the Supreme Court had offered Mr Gandhi an opportunity to express regret over the remarks and give the issue a decent burial. But his senior counsel Kapil Sibal had said that Mr Gandhi would not offer an apology and was ready to argue the matter.
Balala Hakkula Sangam leader Mr. Achyutha Rao said that they are demanding the government to close wines and bars during day and shift wines on the highways as per the directions of Supreme Court. (Representational Image)
Hyderabad: Round table meeting on banning liquor sales in day times organised on Tuesday by Balala Hakkula Sangam with various NGOs and educational institutions has decided to submit memorandums to the Chief Minister, Excise Minister and Excise commissioner on a strict implementation of rules and Acts.
Balala Hakkula Sangam leader Mr. Achyutha Rao said that the Sangam would issue notices to the excise department on the matter. It has proved many times that liquor sales during day time lead to accidents. We are demanding the government to close wines and bars during day and shift wines on the highways as per the directions of Supreme Court, he said.
Slate-the-school head Mr. Vasireddy Amarnath expressed concern that the younger generation was getting addicted to these things. School managements should hold campaigns. The awareness measures should be part of academic syllabus, he said.
An NGO Mr. Srinivas Reddy said that the excise department was felicitating wine shops owners who exceeded the target.
An injured CRPF jawan taken to a hospital after the naxal attack which took place near the border of Gaya and Aurangabad district, in Gaya on Monday. (Photo: PTI)
New Delhi: In one of the biggest attacks by Naxals on security forces in the last few years, 10 commandos of the elite CoBRA battalion of the CRPF were killed by a group of 200 heavily-armed Maoists in the forests of Aurangabad district in Bihar in a fierce encounter that lasted several hours on Monday.
Five commandos were injured while three Naxals were killed in the operation which led to recovery of sophisticated weapons like under barrel grenade launchers, as also AK and INSAS assault rifles from the Maoists.
Both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Rajnath Singh expressed grief over the incident. The Home Minister also spoke to Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar in wake of the incident and assured him of all possible assistance from the Centre.
Mr Singh also directed CRPF DG K. Durga Prasad and senior officers to rush to Aurangabad. Additional security forces have already been rushed to the area for search and combing operations.
This is one of the biggest attacks on the CoBRA unit, a specialised force raised in 2008 for undertaking guerrilla operations against Naxals in forest areas. What is surprising is that the incident happened in Bihar this time as most of the big Naxal attacks have taken place in Chhattisgarh or Jharkhand. This is a worrying trend and needs to be investigated thoroughly, a senior home ministry official said.
Security experts agreed that the recent incident is an indication of the ease with which Naxals are moving across States borders and this may force the security forces to review their strategy of hot pursuit.
Chennai: The State government has filed an appeal in the Madras high court against an order of a lower court acquitting on April 29 the head of the Kanchi mutt, Jayendra Saraswathi and 8 others in the auditor Radhakrishnan assault case.
Justice R.Subbiah, before whom the appeal filed by the state government represented by the Public Prosecutor came up for hearing on Monday, ordered notice returnable in two weeks to Jayendra Saraswathi and others.
Radhakrishnan was assaulted on September 20, 2002 due to previous enmity relating to mutt activities allegedly between Jayendra Saraswathi and Radhakrishnan at his residence in Mylapore.
The Foreshore Estate police registered a case on the same day and later it was transferred to the special investigation team in Kancheepuram. After a prolonged trial for nearly 13 years, the I Additional Sessions judge in Chennai had on April 29 acquitted all the accused including Jayendra Saraswathi in the case.
Aggrieved, the state government has preferred the present appeal in which the government contended that the judgment of the trial court in acquitting the accused for the charges framed against them was contrary to law, weight of evidence and probabilities of the case.
The trial court ignored all those points pointed out by the prosecution side by way of many incriminating evidences available against the accused persons.
The trial court committed grave error in not appreciating the detailed and elaborate written arguments filed by the prosecution.
It also committed grave error in not considering the evidence of three injured eyewitnesses before the trial court, the government added and sought to set aside the order of the lower court and convict the accused in the case.
KOCHI: The Kochi Metro Rail Limited board of directors meeting has approved a proposal for improving traffic flow at junctions and Metro station areas in the city at a total cost of Rs 100 crore. The 24th meeting of the KMRL board held in New Delhi on Tuesday chaired by Rajiv Gauba, Union Urban Development secretary and chairman of Kochi Metro Rail Ltd, discussed the project to improve traffic conditions. French funding agency Agence Francaise de Developpement (AFD) has agreed in-principle to provide loan for the project.
The proposal includes improvement of areas around 20 metro stations, provision of footpaths and drains, covered walkways, bus-bays, parking areas, pedestrian crossing, providing landscaping and greenery, improvement of major junctions like Edapally, Vyttila and Aluva apart from development of a few walkways in the city.
The board has also approved the Metro City realty development project proposed by KMRL at Kakkanad. The project aims at developing 17.32 acres of land with residential apartments and commercial complexes. The project is expected to considerably improve the revenues of KMRL. Non-traffic earning will be a major component of the Metro revenue as it is difficult to make the project profitable only through the ticket collections.
Earlier, Knight Frank, the transaction advisor agency selected by KMRL submitted a proposal for the Metro City project with plans of residential, commercial and recreational facilities. The board meeting has also agreed to constitute sub-committees for selecting a woman director, an independent director and a chief vigilance officer for KMRL.
The board approved a proposal for the procurement of an integrated Asset Management System for managing the network of assets of the Metro project. The board also reviewed the project progress and the schedule of progress for the next few months.
Vijayawada: Stating that the Congress is not a sanyasis party but an open-mined political entity, APCC president N. Raghuveera Reddy on Monday hinted that the party is open to coalition politics in the state.
Answering a question during his Meet the Press programme in Vijayawada, Mr Reddy said that the Congress is working to re-establish itself in residuary AP.
Though the APCC chief did not directly say that the party was looking at coalition partners, the signals were clear that the Congress is preparing the ground for coalition politics in AP, like in Tamil Nadu, economics professor and political analyst Dr L.S.N. Prasad observed. Dr Prasad opines that Mr Reddys words were a feeler to other political parties in the state.
The PCC Chief said that though the Congress wishes to grow on its own it is open to sharing of seats with the like-minded secular parties and Communists in 2019.
While evading a direct reply to a question on as to whether the party will go it alone, Mr Reddy said that party will rise from the ashes like a phoenix.
Taking a cue from the words of AICC general secretary Janardhan Dwivedi, the APCC chief reiterated that the party was strong enough to face any challenges in the days to come.
When asked if the 2019 general elections was the immediate challenge before the Congress, Mr Reddy said that the polls were not on the partys agenda as of now.
Praising the late Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy as a committed Congress worker, he said that YSR waited till 2004 to become the Chief Minister and was patient despite not making it to the past thrice earlier.
Unfortunately, Jagan Mohan Reddy has no such patience, he observed, adding that the YSRC chief crossed the lakshman rekha of the Congress and went on to draw his own lines.
When asked if the Congress was open to any alliance with the YSRC in 2019, the APCC chief skilfully dodged the question.
Amritsar: An Amritsar court on Tuesday issued summons to AAP national convenor and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and two others of his party asking them to appear before it on July 29 in a defamation case.
Besides Kejriwal, summons were issued to journalist-turned-politician Ashish Khetan and AAP's Punjab affairs in-charge Sanjay Singh by Chief Judicial Magistrate Gurpartap Singh in a case filed by Punjab Revenue Minister Bikram Singh Majithia.
The development came on a day when Mr Kejriwal visited Golden Temple to perform volunteer service.
On May 20, Mr Majithia had filed a criminal defamation case against the three in a court here alleging that AAP was bent upon tarnishing his and his family's image by levelling baseless allegations.
This is the second case he has filed against AAP leaders. On January 12, 2015, he had filed a case in a Ludhiana court against some of its leaders for accusing him of patronising the drug mafia and for threatening to put him in jail if the party was voted to power in Punjab in 2017.
Those named as accused in the case are out on bail.
New Delhi: Furious Congress leaders walked out of the Lok Sabha Tuesday after Union Home Minister jibed that the UPA had an old habit of destabilising state governments.
Singh was speaking on the recent political crisis in Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand.
Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge and Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Monday locked horns over the political developments in Arunachal Pradesh.
Follow live updates here:
12:47 pm: Congress stages walk out from Lok Sabha following Rajnath Singh's statement on Congress's allegations.
12: 43 pm: Responding to the Congress allegations that the BJP lead central government was destabilising state governments, Home Minister Rajnath Singh said that the Congress has levelled serious allegations against Government of India.
BJP has nothing to do with crisis in Arunachal and Uttarakhand. In the history of independent India if there is anyone who has old habit of destabilizing popular Govts, it is Congress. He said that this Government has habit of destabilizing popular Governments. If you will put your boat which has a hole in it, in water, it is likely to drown. You can't blame the water for it.
12:34 pm: Leading the Opposition charge in the Lok Sabha, Congress leader Mallikarjuna Kharge said that the BJP government was destabilising state government and that the SC's reply to BJP in Arunachal Pradesh was an apt reply to the former's attempt to malign the grand old party.
BJP lacks numbers but they are still trying to play with numbers and malign democracy and the constitution, he said.
12:23 pm: Congress raises the Arunachal Pradesh crisis in Rajya Sabha.
12:05pm: Speaking in the Lok Sabha regarding the online security, Home Minister Rajnath Singh said, We are all working on how to deal with cyber crime, and we know that it needs to be strengthened. Technology and research needs to be updated as well, and all these steps are being decided.
10.07 am: The Prime Minister arrived at the Parliament to take part at the BJP parliamentary party meet. Prime Minister arrives at the Parliament (Photo: Twitter)
On the first functional day of the Monsoon Session, the Opposition sought to grill the government on a range of issues including the Arunachal Pradesh crisis, Kashmir violence and India's failed NSG bid among others, even as the NDA government seeks to pass the long awaited GST bill in this session.
Visakhapatnam: YSR Congress president and Opposition leader Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy said Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu has miserably failed in fulfilling his promises made before coming to power. Mr. Reddy was in Visakhapatnam district on Monday to participate in a series of programmes.
Launching a scathing attack on the TD government at a public meeting held at Munagapaka in the district, Mr. Reddy said the government failed in keeping its promises in every aspect, from waiving loans of the farmers and Dwcra groups to providing employment opportunities and doling out unemployment allowance. None knows when the government would release a notification for vacant posts. The TDs governance in the last two years had been an utter failure, he said.
Mr. Reddy called upon the people to challenge Mr Chandrababu Naidu in terms of implementation of his poll promises. People should question Mr. Naidu as to why he did not fulfill the promises made during the hustings. The YSR Congress leaders will support the public and fight till Mr. Naidu delivers his poll promises, he added.
Mr Reddy visited Paalmanpeta and went to the houses of fishermen, who were allegedly injured by TD supporters. He described the attacks on the fishermen as a heinous act of the ruling TD government.
We would support the victims and fight against the government on behalf of them. A group of TD supporters attacked the innocent fishermen, including women, and looted their houses. The policemen didnt register a case against the TD men even after the victims complained against finance minister Yanamala Ramakrish-nudus brother Krishnudu. Adding insult to the injury, the police booked cases on the victims. We would drag the government to the court against these clashes. The government announced ex-gratia to all the victims but gave it it to only 2-3 persons, Mr Reddy added.
Jodhpur: The Rajasthan High Court on Monday rejected the interim bail plea of self-styled godman Asaram, facing rape charge, on health ground, saying he did not have any serious ailment.
The 74-year-old had moved the bail application last month citing a medical report by an ayurvedic doctor mentioning 12 different types of disease and had sought the permission to go to Kerala for proper treatment.
In her order, Justice Nirmal Jeet Kaur observed that he did not have any serious health problem citing a medical report prepared by a medical board, said PC Solanki, counsel for the victim girl.
"The high court had asked for a detailed medical report by a medical board. Based on the report, which did not mention Asaram to be afflicted with any serious disease, the high court rejected his bail plea," he said.
Solanki said that the court decided to issue a guideline to the state government for the treatment of Asaram so that all the recommended diagnostic tests are done and medication ensured.
The court also sought a progress report on the trial in the case for the past two-and-a-half years, while listing for hearing a regular bail application of Asaram on July 26. He was sent to jail in August 2013 for allegedly sexually assaulting a 16-year-old schoolgirl.
LEBANON Todd Breiner sees his new job as a great opportunity.
Following 21 years of service with the Lebanon City Police Department, Breiner was sworn in Monday as the citys new police chief.
After the celebration was over, Breiner addressed recent tension regarding police across the country. He said its his job to make sure his department works on relationships in the community in order to keep his officers safe.
Now, as the chief, there is no one else for me to lean on, Breiner said. Its my responsibility to make sure the guys go home safe every night to their families. It will be a little more nerve racking, Im sure of it.
Mayor Sherry Capello revealed that during her search, she never considered another candidate for the job. She said she spoke with officers in the department and they have confidence that Breiner is a man to lead.
With everything, the atmosphere going on, its really important they have people they trust, Capello said.
As chief, Breiner will have 40 officers below him. One is Daniel Gingrich, who was named the citys new police captain on Monday.
Breiner said recent acts of violence shouldnt stop police from doing their jobs.
Anything can happen anywhere at any time, he said. Were well aware of that as police officers. Thats why we stay vigilant and safe as possible.
Breiner had been acting chief since Daniel Wright retired from the police department in April.
Hyderabad: Rahul Gandhi on Saturday went on a day-long fast at Hyderabad Central University backing protesting students on the Dalit scholar suicide issue and accusing Prime Minister Narendra Modi and RSS of trying to crush the spirit of students by imposing "one idea from the top".
"My main opposition to Mr.Narendra Modi and RSS is that they are trying to crush the spirit of Indian students and youngsters by imposing one idea from the top," the Congress Vice President said.
Read: HCU suicide: Congress accuses BJP of inaction
Drawing parallel between Rohith's suicide and Mahatma Gandhi's assasination, he said "what has happened here is exactly what was done to Gandhiji".
"Gandhiji was killed by the same forces which did not allow him to speak the truth he wanted to say. It is exactly the same thing that has happened to Rohith...they did not want him to speak the truth that he saw in this institution," he said.
Read: Rahul Gandhi joins HCU protesters on hunger strike for Rohith Vemula
Insisting that the incident is not related to one individual or any one particular community, Rahul told the students,"You will find one day that the same people who crushed Rohith will be blocking your path to freedom and progress".
"My message to every single student of this country is- when you let what happened to Rohith happen, it will happen to you one day," he said.
Read: HCU suicide: ABVP calls for shut down of colleges in Telangana
Rahul first joined agitating students in a candle light vigil past midnight to mark the birthday of Rohith, who would have turned 27 today, and later went on a nearly nine-hour fast with them.
"Do not force your idea on these students. Give them their dignity and respect. I want to say without any animosity & with respect- Modiji, if you want India to progress, you have to unleash the power of these students. If they are feeling discriminated in their universities and their colleges, you will not be able to unleash the power of these students," he said.
Read: Classic politics of vulturisation: BJP on Rahul Gandhi's visit to HCU
Rahul also advocated that a law be enacted to end massive discrimination in our universities.
"It is time for India to have a law that targets such discrimination in all universities and institutions," he said asking the PM to look into the possibility of passing such a law.
Read: ABVP slams Rahul's 'caste politics', calls for nationwide stir
Rahul, who is visiting the campus for the second time in as many weeks, tweeted, "I am here today at the request of Rohith's friends and family, to stand with them in their fight for justice.
Read: Rohith's suicide not linked to hostel expulsion: Kailash Vijayvargiya
"A young life full of dreams and aspirations was cut short. We owe it to him, to the memory of (Mahatma) Gandhiji and to every single Indian student who dreams of an India free from prejudice and injustice," he said in another tweet.
Read: HCU suicide: Cong shedding crocodile tears over suicide of Dalit, says BJP
Rohith's mother Radhika and brother Raju were also present at the protest site.
In Delhi, three Union Ministers accused Congress of shedding "crocodile tears" over the suicide issue and attacked Rahul for using students as a "political tool".
The more things change, the more they remain the same. Or, in some cases, they get worse! This truism applies to the current worrisome situation in Jammu and Kashmir that is, once again, on the boil only this time with an intensity not seen in the Valley in the past few years. That this rage is primarily propelled by external machinations and, equally, self-inflicted, shouldnt surprise anyone. Armed with a massive mandate in the 2014 elections, the Narendra Modi government was all primed, by its own pre-election promises, to provide strong and efficient governance within the country and inject much-needed oxygen to the so-called sluggish foreign policy of the fatigued UPA government. Over two years is a reasonable time period to gauge ones achievements and do course correction in matters affecting the nations well-being, particularly in security, before things get out of hand.
Despite some well-thought-out foreign policy initiatives and energetic forays in nations impinging our strategic interests, both in our neighbourhood and beyond, New Delhis policies towards Pakistan have bordered on inconsistency and lack firmness. The problems in Kashmir, to a large extent, are due to Pakistans mischief, stemming from its well-known strategy of bleeding India by a thousand cuts. As is widely accepted, Pakistan, the fountainhead of global terror, has been fuelling insurgency in Kashmir for 25 years through its agents and zealously pumping in infiltrators to carry out terrorist attacks. The killing of Burhan Wani, the young poster boy of militancy in the Valley, was just the trigger that Pakistans Inter-Services Intelligence was waiting for. It had liberally funded the separatist conglomerate for years, and unsurprisingly the Valley is witnessing an extraordinarily adverse law and order situation not seen since at least 2010.
Before matters go totally out of hand, the Centre and the state government must synergise all actions and resources swiftly, and cool down raging tempers in the Valley. It can be done if India sheds the action-reaction routine, heavy-handedness by some badly-trained paramilitaries and Central forces, a recourse to pious statements and offers of increased economic assistance which, in reality, mostly never reach citizens anyway. Today Pakistan has a fertile environment in the Valley to sow mischief; and while we should definitely warn that country to keep its hands off and stop meddling in our internal affairs, we have to do much more diplomatically and otherwise to sort out the current Kashmir conundrum.
First and foremost, India must convey unequivocally to Pakistan that if it persists in its evil machinations, we will downgrade its diplomatic representation with immediate effect. In addition, let Islamabad be reminded of its many faultlines, which India, owing to its peaceful orientation and civilised values, has not exploited so far. Further, the Indian government should actively discourage all contacts with Pakistan in business and sports, as well as in literary and cultural activities. Our firm resolve to nip such Pakistani mischief in the bud will find resonance even in the saner elements of Pakistani civil society. Back home, we also need to set our house in order before the Kashmir issue becomes too precarious to handle. It must be accepted that despite huge sums being spent to boost economic and social growth since Independence, we havent succeeded in emotionally integrating a large number of Kashmiris with the nation.
Nevertheless, all is still not lost most Kashmiris are fully aware that the rights, privileges and freedom they enjoy in a democratic India are in stark contrast to the barbaric repression that the Pakistani state inflicts on its citizens. This aspect must be drummed into Kashmiris our official information and propaganda organs often appear to be slumbering, and they need to wake up! Mehbooba Muftis government must be fully supported by all parties in India, and emphatically by the Centre. A stern warning should be personally sent to all Pakistani henchmen, such as the separatist leaders in the Valley, that their days of spreading discontent and indulging in anti-India activities are over, and they should fall in line.
Their passports and those of their children, many of them employed or studying abroad, should be cancelled if they persist in further seditious activities. The J&K police, the CRPF and other Central forces deployed on security tasks in the Valley must be counselled restraint while dealing with stone-pelters and other misguided Kashmiri youth. It will be advisable for the Centre to dispatch an all-party delegation with a liberal sprinkling of Muslim clerics to travel around the affected parts of the Valley and instil some sense into the agitated Kashmiri youth. The Indian Army will have anyway reinforced the existing counter-infiltration and counter-insurgency grid and would be ready to thwart any Pakistani mischief.
When matters somewhat cool down, it would be a good idea for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to take the top leadership of all parties to Srinagar and issue a clarion call to Kashmiris that their future lies in a secular India and not a failing, extremist state like Pakistan. The world must also be firmly told that J&K is not only the symbol of our inclusive nationhood, but also its guarantee. India would also do well to bring Pakistans record in fostering terror, its barbaric persecution of the people of Balochistan and Occupied Kashmir, and the extermination of Shias in the Gilgit-Baltistan region to the notice of the international community. Pakistans support to various terror groups within its own territory and in neighbouring Afghanistan makes it a suitable candidate for global ostracism. It is high time Pakistan is administered a dose of the medicine that it so freely dispenses to others.
Nothing about Kashmir is monochromatic. Some months ago, around 200 former Israeli generals and Mossad and Shin Beth heavy hitters, under the collective called Commanders for Israels Security, delivered a composite Security First Plan, which prescribes a combination of security, civil and economic measures aimed at keeping the promise of a two-state solution alive and encouraging Israels integration into a regional system with pragmatic Sunni Arab states. In real terms, managing the conflict in Gaza and West Bank has become more and more difficult. Grappling with waves of intifada has proved cumbersome and left its security apparatus unimaginably fatigued. Detect, deny and defend has been at the very kernel of the stratagem used by the Israeli Defence Forces in Gaza and the West Bank. In India, the Central government too must realise while Jammu and Kashmir is unalterably a part of sovereign India with legal and constitutional sanctity, new tactics need new responses.
Self-preservation was paramount for the paramilitary forces as they tried to cope with the latest round of intifada strikes and stone-pelting incidents. And rightly so! But the general impression in the Valley is that excessive force was used by the forces as they tried to quell protesters. Hamara khoon pani aur unka khoon, khoon is the refrain from both sides. Though in the rough and tumble of a battle-like situation, nobody really cares. Perhaps it is time to re-examine the concept of the Kashmir Valleys Unified Command structure, in which the civil-military administration coalesces. Over time Kashmir has seen fidayeen and lone-wolf attacks, but the security grid has been uncompromising and impenetrable in its approach to terror. While the Unified Command was created as far back as 1993, its efficacy was truly visible in early 2001 when it dealt with the force multiplier of the jihad factory through its counter-insurgency units.
Lt. Gen. Moham-med Ahmed Zaki was in many ways the Unified Commands architect. In 1986-87, he commanded the 19 Infantry Division in the Valley, and having performed admirably, he returned in October 1989 as GOC, 15 Corps, till June 1991. In October 1991, he returned as adviser to the J&K governor till January 1993, and was recalled once again in May that year as adviser for his knowledge and expertise (till June 1995). A master handler in counter-insurgency operations, his role was crucial in those trying days. In the ping-pong that followed in Kashmir with spells of Presidents Rule and elected governments, in 1996 Farooq Abdullah became chief minister, taking over as boss of the Unified Command, replacing Gen. K.V. Krishna Rao. With the GOCs of 15 Corps and 16 Corps as security advisers, some element of order was restored. But then, as often with such structures, the meetings tapered off till the next big blow.
Then came Kargil. A 1999 assessment of the Unified Commands functioning says several disparate security agencies operated under differing rules of engagement and legislated authority without the means to induce coherence. This is still its biggest bugbear. Let us see why. The Unified Command Headquarters in Kashmir comprises the Army, BSF, CRPF, intelligence agencies and the J&K state police. There are just too many contrasting elements. But such was the suffocation on the Kashmir border that since last year, the Pakistan-backed insurgents, facing stringent policing on the J&K border, tried different tactics, and went for the soft underbelly of northern Punjab. Gurdaspur and Pathankot followed. The J&K counter-terrorism model is robust where the Army is given primacy in the war on terror. Former Northern Army commander and Kashmir veteran Lt. Gen. Syed Ata Hasnain, now retired, can explain things better: Top functionaries of all security forces and intelligence agencies are part of the Unified Command. Interestingly, under the corps commanders, with the co-chairmanship of the DGP, top functionaries of their zones and formation commanders of the Army, there exist core groups which meet at least once a month and more often during crisis situations (as in 2010) to take stock of intelligence and future events.
There are similar sub-core groups down the chain right up to brigade level where intelligence (officers) form a very important element. With experience, the intelligence-sharing system is now robust, with everyone picking up the phone to speak to each other. Operations in Srinagar and Jammu city remain the purview of the DGP, who can request assistance from the Army. However, all other operations in the countryside and LoCs vicinity are either conducted by the Army alone (counter-infiltration) or jointly by the Army and J&K police, with command in the hands of the Army. The AFSPA plays an important role in this. The CRPF plays a vital role in control of civil strife and in counter-terror operations assists in sealing and responding to protests.
This is perhaps is where the problem of handling the intifada manifests itself strongly. The visible presence of the Army means everything in fatigues is considered fauji which isnt the case. A distinction must be made the Army deals with counter-insurgency while the paramilitary and J&K police handles civil strife, crowd control and riot management. Civil strife is where a new paradigm must be evolved. Pellet guns have taken a rather heavy toll. Perhaps, on the lines of the Israeli model, top Army, paramilitary, intelligence and civil officials with Kashmir expertise must sit down and brainstorm to come up with new responses.
Another major issue is that of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, and persistent demands for its revocation, or at least dilution. Successive governments have called for changes, but we have also seen that Kashmir is secure because of the Indian Armys outstanding contribution. The PDP-BJP alliance has promised the people that it will examine the need for denotifying disturbed areas, which will enable the Union government to take a final view on the continuation of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act in these areas. The whole of J&K, barring Leh and Kargil districts, are disturbed, notified as such under Section 3 of the Armed Forces (J&K) Special Powers Act 1990, as well as provisions of the Jammu and Kashmir Disturbed Areas Act 1992.
The most draconian law in the eyes of most people is the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act 1978, that empowers the administration to detain without trial a person for up to two years. It is easy to say that Kashmir needs a healing touch. The reality is that Burhan Wani was a terrorist who was killed during ongoing operations. He chose the gun, and decided to wage war against the State, which is unacceptable. The people of Kashmir and sections of the Indian media have tried to project him as a martyr, which he definitely wasnt, for he was nothing other than a misguided youth. Nevertheless, the Unified Command has to come up with a better model to contain civil strife in the state so that casualties are minimised.
Eight Malian soldiers were killed in the attack Tuesday and several trucks and stocks of ammunition were seized. (Photo: Representational Image/AFP)
Dakar: Gunmen killed at least 10 soldiers and wounded 38 in an attack early Tuesday on an army camp in central Mali, authorities said, and a movement within the Peul ethnic group claimed responsibility.
An official with the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali said the attackers arrived in Nampala on dozens of pickup trucks and motorcycles and took control of the city before leaving.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly about issues regarding Mali's army. A Malian soldier confirmed the deaths but called the toll provisional because not all soldiers had been accounted for.
Hours later, a group called the National Alliance for the Protection of the Peul Identity and the Restoration of Justice told The Associated Press it had carried out the attack.
This was the first time the group, formed in recent months, had attacked a Malian army position.
"We attacked Nampala this morning to respond to the deadly attacks by the Malian army against our Peul population," said Oumar Aldjana, the group's secretary-general.
He said eight Malian soldiers were killed in the attack Tuesday and several trucks and stocks of ammunition were seized. He said three of his group were wounded.
Aldjana said his group is not an extremist one. "We used the slogan 'Allahu Akbar' during the attack, but that has nothing to do with jihadism," he said.
More than 2,500 security personnel, including elite army troops, intensified their operations this year in Poso, a mountainous district of Central Sulawesi province considered an extremist hotbed. (Photo: AP)
Jakarta: Indonesia's most wanted Islamic militant was killed in a gunbattle with security forces, a top minister said Tuesday, in a victory for the government's counterterrorism campaign that further tightens the vice on a dwindling band of extremists in the jungles of Sulawesi island.
Abu Wardah Santoso was one of two militants killed in the shootout Monday, Coordinating Minister for Security, Political and Legal Affairs Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan told reporters. The other was an extremist known as Mochtar, not Santoso's deputy Basri, as police had initially thought.
Santoso, who headed the East Indonesia Mujahideen militant group that claims allegiance to the Islamic State group, had eluded capture for more than five years.
"The strength of this extremist group will definitely weaken after the death of Santoso," Pandjaitan said. "We will increase our forces to pressure the rest of the members."
More than 2,500 security personnel, including elite army troops, intensified their operations this year in Poso, a mountainous district of Central Sulawesi province considered an extremist hotbed, to try to capture Santoso and his followers. The bodies were identified at a police hospital in the capital of Central Sulawesi.
North Korea has test-fired a series of ballistic missiles in recent months, in defiance of United Nations Security Council resolutions, including intermediate-range missiles in June and a submarine-launched missile this month. (Photo: Representational Image/AFP)
Seoul: North Korea fired three ballistic missiles early on Tuesday which flew between 500 and 600 kms (300 and 360 miles) into the sea off its east coast, South Korea's military said, the latest in a series of provocative moves by the isolated country.
The US military said it detected launches of what it believed were two Scud missiles and one Rodong, a home-grown missile based on Soviet-era Scud technology.
North Korea has fired both types numerous times in recent years, an indication that unlike recent launches that were seen as efforts by the North to improve its missile capability, Tuesday's were meant as a show of force.
"This smells political rather than technical to me," said Melissa Hanham, a senior research associate at the U.S.-based Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, California.
"I think the number and distance of the missiles lets them remind the ROK (Republic of Korea) of what they are up against," she said, referring to South Korea by its official name.
The launches came days after South Korea and the United States announced a final decision to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) anti-missile system in the South to counter threats from the North, which had prompted Pyongyang to threaten a "physical response."
"Our assessment is that it was done as a show of force," a South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff official said at a briefing.
The missiles were launched from an area in the North's western region called Hwangju between 5:45 am South Korea time (2045 GMT Monday) and 6:40 a.m., the South's military said, an indication that the North was confident they would not crash on its own territory.
"The ballistic missiles flight went from 500 km to 600 km, which is a distance far enough to strike all of South Korea, including Busan," the South's military said in a statement.
Busan is a South Korean port city in the south. North Korea has test-fired a series of ballistic missiles in recent months, in defiance of United Nations Security Council resolutions, including intermediate-range missiles in June and a submarine-launched missile this month.
"In addition to the basic goal of enhancing missile units' readiness to fight, it might be a way of reminding their southern neighbors that the site chosen for a THAAD battery in South Korea is within reach," Joshua Pollack, editor of the US based Non-proliferation Review, said of Tuesday's launches.
South Korea announced last week the THAAD system would be deployed in the southeastern county of Seongju.
In addition to the decision to base a THAAD system in South Korea, the United States recently angered North Korea by blacklisting its leader Kim Jong Un for human rights abuses.
"The threat to our national security is growing very quickly in a short period of time," South Korean Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn told parliament on Tuesday.
Bombs, missiles and sanctions
North Korea conducted its fourth test of a nuclear device in January, and activity at its nuclear test site has increased recently, according to media reports in South Korea and Japan citing government officials, as well as a report by Washington-based North Korea monitoring project 38 North.
Following the latest nuclear test and a February space rocket launch that was widely viewed as a missile test in disguise, the U.N. Security Council imposed tough new resolutions that further isolate North Korea.
While China supported tougher sanctions against its neighbour and ally North Korea, it has sharply criticized the decision to base a THAAD battery in South Korea, saying the move will destabilize the security balance in the region.
China's foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday's missile launches. Japan denounced the launches.
"The latest launch is a breach of the UN Security Council resolution and is extremely hazardous to shipping and aircraft and we have strongly protested," the Japanese government said in a statement.
France has been on high alert for security threats ever since gunmen and suicide bombers killed 130 people in a series of attacks. (Representational Photo: AP)
Paris: An armed man was holed up in a hotel in the southern French town of Bollene on Tuesday afternoon, a spokeswoman for the local police prefecture said.
"A deranged man is holed up in the Formule 1 hotel," the spokeswoman told Reuters, referring to a cheap motel chain.
The man's motives were not immediately known and police were at the scene, about 130 kilometres north of Marseille, she added.
The hotel near the A7 motorway was evacuated and the man was thought to be armed with a knife and may have an explosive device, a local gendarme officer said separately.
"The man is thought to have had a row with the manager," a local officer added. "We are waiting for negotiators."
The hotel has been cordoned off and the Marseille bomb squad was on its way, he said.
France has been on high alert for security threats ever since gunmen and suicide bombers killed 130 people in a series of attacks last November claimed by Islamic State.
Theresa May was officially appointed as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on July 14, 2016, becoming the second woman Prime Minister of Britain, after Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher. (Photo: AP)
London: In her first ever parliamentary debate since becoming Britain's new Prime Minister, Theresa May on Monday declared that she would not hesitate to authorise a deadly nuclear strike that has the capacity to kill hundreds of thousands of people, including children.
In a House of Commons vote on Sunday, May replied with a 'Yes' when she was asked if she would approve a nuke strike. Are you personally prepared to authorise a nuclear strike that can kill a hundred thousand innocent men, women and children?" questioned Scottish National Partys (SNP) George Kerevan.
I have to say to the honourable gentleman the whole point of a deterrent is that our enemies need to know that we would be prepared to use it, unlike some suggestions that we could have a deterrent but not actually be willing to use it, which seem to come from the Labour party frontbench, May was quoted as saying.
Although previous prime ministers have maintained a distance from answering any questions related to nuclear strike, May, without hesitation, said that she would not mind pressing the nuclear button.
According to reports, May's blunt reply comes in the wake of the vote by lawmakers on replacing the ageing submarines that carry Britain's nuclear weapons.
In the House of Common, lawmakers approved the construction of four new submarines to carry the existing Trident missile system and their nuclear warheads, at a cost of 41 billion (49 billion euros, $54 billion).
Theresa May was officially appointed as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on July 14, 2016, becoming the second woman Prime Minister of Britain, after Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher.
Three weeks after Britain voted to leave the European Union, May also came under fire from EU leaders, who pressed her to trigger a Brexit as quickly as possible.
There were no beheadings during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, which began in the kingdom on June 6. (Representational image)
Riyadh: Saudi authorities executed two men on Tuesday, bringing to 98 the number of executions carried out in the ultra-conservative Muslim kingdom so far this year.
Saudi citizen Ali Assiri, who was found guilty of stabbing a fellow tribesman to death, was executed in the southwestern region of Asir, the interior ministry said.
Pakistani Mohammed Mokhtar, who was convicted of heroin trafficking, was executed in the eastern city of Dammam, the ministry said.
Saudi Arabia imposes the death penalty for offences including murder, drug trafficking, armed robbery, rape and apostasy.
Most people executed are beheaded with a sword.
There were no beheadings during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, which began in the kingdom on June 6.
However, executions resumed on Sunday when authorities put a Saudi murderer to death.
Human rights group Amnesty International says the kingdom carried out at least 158 death sentences last year, making it the third most prolific executioner after Iran and Pakistan.
Amnesty's figures do not include secretive China.
The London-based watchdog says the Saudi rate of executions this year is "higher than at the same point last year".
Murder and drug trafficking cases account for the majority of Saudi executions, although 47 people were put to death for "terrorism" offences on a single day in January.
They included prominent Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr, whose execution prompted Iranian protesters to torch Saudi diplomatic missions, leading Riyadh to sever relations.
The Islamic State headquarters, which was located in a hospital, was being used as a command center and logistics hub. (Photo: Representational Image)
Damascus: U.S.-backed rebels fighting Islamic State militants in Syria captured a headquarters operation as they pushed into the western part of the town of Manbij over the weekend, the U.S. military said in a statement on Tuesday.
The Islamic State headquarters, which was located in a hospital, was being used as a command center and logistics hub. The U.S.-backed Syrian rebels also took control of part of the town, enabling civilians in the area to flee the fighting, the statement said.
The Syrian rebels were continuing to battle Islamic State on four fronts for control of Manbij, clearing territory as they pushed toward the center of the city, the statement said.
Islamic State militants have staged counterattacks, but the Syrian rebels have maintained momentum with the help of air strikes by the U.S.-led coalition, the statement said. It said the coalition has carried out more than 450 air strikes around Manbij since the operation to take the town began.
HARRISBURG Pat Ford stopped by the Third Street Cafe on Monday afternoon like she typically does.
I stopped in to get beer, she said. I dont have a problem with any of the individuals.
Its been her routine for nearly 30 years.
Ive been here since 86, so this is the only bar Im familiar with, she said.
Fords routine will continue after Dauphin County Judge Andrew Dowling ruled the Third Street Cafe can remain open despite the citys attempts to shut it down.
Ford said its not just a win for the bar owners, but also the people in the neighborhood.
Its the only black bar thats in the area, she said.
Ford, like other patrons, pointed out over that the past 16 months, Midtown is rapidly changing and attracting higher income clientele. Many argue the Third Street Cafe is one of a few bars in the area that still cater to working folk with affordable options.
Dowling also ruled the city did not have legal grounds to revoke the bars business license or label it a nuisance bar without properly going through the channels at the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board.
Mayor Eric Papenfuse has maintained that the police department selected three bars to close; Royal Pub, Taproom and Third Street Cafe. Two of the three shut their doors last year, but the Third Street Cafe decided to fight city hall.
City officials cited examples of drug dealing, prostitution and other incidents they believe acted as a magnet for crime. Dowling ruled the city did not provide enough evidence.
Its a nuisance in that you cant control whats going on in the street, Ford said. You can only control whats going on in the bar, so its a bad rap.
In June, police released video of a fight inside the bar that may have led to a shooting in Uptown. Third Street Cafe representatives argued the bar quickly handed over the video and cooperated with investigators.
Ford said, like with any other bar, you must be careful of your surroundings.
I dont come out at night, she said, but you have safeguards. Its a good bar.
The move comes after international tests showed that Shanghai students ranked on top for maths in the Program for International Student Assessment in 2012, and 15-year-olds in China are three years ahead of their English counterparts in their ability to solve maths problems, state-run China Daily reported. (Representational Image)
Beijing: About 8,000 primary schools in the UK aided by USD 54.3 million funding will adopt Chinese method of teaching maths for their students, official media reported on Tuesday.
The move comes after international tests showed that Shanghai students ranked on top for maths in the Program for International Student Assessment in 2012, and 15-year-olds in China are three years ahead of their English counterparts in their ability to solve maths problems, state-run China Daily reported.
Since then, Britain, whose students ranked 26th that year, has welcomed over 120 teachers from Shanghai to share the secrets of their success in the project, which the British media have dubbed "Shanghai Maths".
Speaking at the Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education last week, Nick Gibb, the UK schools minister, said the Shanghai style of maths should become a standard fixture in England.
"We are seeing a renaissance in maths teaching in this country, with good ideas from around the world helping to enliven our classrooms" he was quoted as saying at a meeting in Glasgow by the newspaper.
Lyu Jiexin from Shanghai Normal University, also a senior coordinator of China-UK math exchange programs, believes the new policy is not a mere copying of Chinese math teaching, but is instead a part of the British government's overhaul to improve the standards of math education.
With the growing influence of the international test, more countries are learning from the top performing nations in a bid to improve the competitiveness of their education systems, Lyu said.
However, some critics were skeptical of the program, worrying that the students will not be able to master fundamental ideas merely through drills and repetition, it said.
Charlie Stripp, director at the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics, said teaching math mastery is not about rote learning and drilling, although it certainly results in pupils knowing and being able to recall multiplication tables and other key number facts.
This represents an important foundation for learning and using math, the daily quoted Stripp as saying. "Teaching for mastery focuses on deep conceptual learning, developing secure foundations that pupils can build on throughout their education. When a piece of mathematics has been 'mastered', it can be used as a foundation for new mathematical learning, "he said.
"Superficial learning in mathematics produces weak foundations, which can result in insecure learning and confusion," he added.
The standard line followed by China in recent years on issues relating to Kashmir was that it is an issue between India and Pakistan and should be properly handled by the two sides through dialogue and consultation. (Photo: H U Naqash)
Beijing: Commenting on the unrest in Kashmir, China today said it hoped that the situation will be "handled properly" and "relevant parties" will address the issue peacefully through dialogue.
"China has taken note of relevant reports. We are equally concerned about the casualties in the clash, and hope that relevant incident will be handled properly," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said in his remarks posted on the Foreign Ministry website.
"The Kashmir issue is left over from history. China holds a consistent stance and hopes relevant parties will address the issue peacefully through dialogue," he said in response to a question on the recent Kashmir unrest.
Lu's comments come as a surprise to observers in Beijing as it is rare for China to comment on the developments relating to Jammu and Kashmir.
The standard line followed by China in recent years on issues relating to Kashmir was that it is an issue between India and Pakistan and should be properly handled by the two sides through dialogue and consultation.
The rare comments on the situation in Kashmir came in the wake of the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani. Kashmir has seen violent protests since Wani's killing; 42 people have died and over 2000 have been injured.
The 26-year-old Qandeel Baloch was killed at her home in central district of Multan. Her brother Muhammad Wasim had fled soon after the incident. (Photo: AFP/ Instagram)
Islamabad: Pakistani authorities have barred the family of a murdered social media celebrity from legally "forgiving" their son for strangling her, sources said, in a rare stand against the so-called practice of "honour killings".
Muhammad Waseem drugged and strangled Qandeel Baloch on Friday in a murder that has shocked Pakistan, a deeply conservative Muslim nation where the 26-year-old both titillated and outraged with her risque; social media photos and videos.
Waseem told media he had "no regrets" about killing his sister as she violated the family's honour by her social media pictures, including "selfie" photographs with prominent Muslim cleric Abdul Qavi. In a video post with Qavi, she appears to sit on his lap.
Read: Pakistani 'selfie' cleric investigated over Qandeel Baloch's murder
A police source said the government of Punjab, the country's largest province, has made it impossible for the family to forgive the son who murdered her - a common legal loophole that sees many honour killings go unpunished in Pakistan.
"It was done on the instructions of the government. But it happens rarely," said the Punjab police official.
A senior government official in Islamabad confirmed the order came from the Punjab government.
More than 500 people, almost all of them women, die in honour killings in Pakistan every year, usually at the hands of relatives acting over a perception shame has been brought on the family.
It was not immediately clear if the Punjab government's decision would lead to any meaningful reforms. An anti-honour killings bill that aims to close the family forgiveness loophole has been bogged down in parliament.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in February promised to speed up the passage of the proposed law but right groups say there has been no progress.
"There is no honour in killing in the name of honour," Sharif said about Baloch's murder, according to his daughter, Maryam.
Baloch's father, Muhammad Azeem, has filed a police complaint against Waseem and another one of his sons for their role in Baloch's murder.
Police on Monday also said they were widening their investigations to include Qavi, the Muslim cleric who was removed from a prominent Muslim committee after the selfie photos were published. He has denied any wrongdoing.
Baloch built a modelling career on the back of her social media fame and was the family breadwinner. Media often described her as Pakistan's Kim Kardashian and she called herself a modern-day feminist.
But her pictures and videos outraged religious conservatives who viewed her as a disgrace to the cultural values of Islam and Pakistan. She often received death threats.
Kathmandu: Beleaguered Nepali Prime Minister K P Oli on Tuesday asked the Nepali Congress and Maoist leaders to withdraw the no-confidence motion brought against him, warning that it would fuel further "polarisation and confrontation" among major political parties.
Oli has refused to step down, despite the fact that the coalition government led by him is in minority after the Maoists withdrew their support to the coalition government last week.
In his first meeting with Nepali Congress president Sher Bahadur Deuba and CPN-Maoist Centre chairman Prachanda since the Maoists withdrew their support to the government, Oli urged the two leaders to withdraw the no-confidence motion and expressed his readiness to find a solution through consensus and dialogue, according to sources close to the Prime Minister.
Oli is also said to have cautioned the two leaders that their insistence on pushing the no-confidence motion would "further fuel polarisation and confrontation among major parties".
But Prachanda and Deuba, in response, are learnt to have told Oli that he should pave the way for the formation of a new government by stepping down graciously.
Reiterating his position, Prime Minister Oli told the two leaders that there was no provision in the Constitution to elect a new prime minister even as the no-trust motion is passed.
Oli insisted that he would rather face the no-confidence motion as "there is no provision in the constitution to elect a new Prime Minister after his resignation".
Even if the no-confidence motion is endorsed by the House, the incumbent government will continue as a caretaker one, he said.
On budget, both Prachanda and Deuba told Oli that all the remaining bills of the budget "will be endorsed as soon as the prime minister tenders his resignation," according to party sources.
The government is yet to get parliamentary approval for its budget presented last month for the new fiscal year. Oli became prime minister last October, heading Nepal's eighth government in the past 10 years.
Cracks began to appear in the coalition two months ago when alliance partners threatened to topple Oli. He survived that attempt by drawing up an 11th-hour deal with Prachanda.
Nepali Congress and the Maoists tabled the no-trust motion in parliament last week against Prime Minister Oli, accusing him of not honouring his past commitments.
The motion was registered by Nepali Congress, CPN-Maoist Centre and CPN-United, whose combined strength is 292 seats in the 598-member Parliament.
The Madhesi parties' combined strength comes around 50 seats and their support will be crucial for passing the no-trust motion against the Oli government.
Protest in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir against the killings in J&K. Pakistan is observing Black Day tomorrow and more anti-India protests are likely. (Photo: AFP)
Islamabad: Weeks after Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) militants were caught on camera soliciting funds outside Karachi mosques to send jihadists to India to carry out terror attacks in the country, it has emerged that nearly 40 Pakistani political parties and religious groups have planned to stage a rally in solidarity with Kashmir victims.
Titled 'Caravan for Kashmir', the march will start from Shuhada mosque in Lahore to Islamabad. It aims to pledge support for 'liberation of Kashmir' from India, according to a report in dna.
Read: Burhan Wani was J&K leader, says Pakistan
Organised by Tehreek e Azaadi Jammu Kashmir (TAJK) and Jamaat-ud-Dawah (JuD), the rally will be attended not just by political parties but also by militant groups.
The rally will witness the participation of several groups including Sipah e Sahiba, JuD, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, Difa e Pakistan Council, United Jihad Council, Awami Muslim League among others.
CRPF Jawans stand guard near razor wires during curfew and strike in Srinagar. (Photo: PTI)
"The road show will bring national and international attention to the dreadful situation in Kashmir. It will also let our brothers and sisters in Kashmir know they are not alone. Kashmiris are a part of Pakistani blood,'' media coordinator TAJK, Nadeem Awan was quoted as saying by the DNA.
Taking a dig at India over the unrest in Kashmir, Nawaz Sharif had announced that Pakistan would observe July 19 as Black Day to mourn killings' in Kashmir, referring to those who died during protests after the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani in J&K.
Sharif had termed the "movement of Kashmiris as a movement of freedom".
Read: Pak needles India, to observe July 19 as Black Day over Kashmir deaths
Reacting to Pakistan's declaration of July 19 as Black Day over Kashmir unrest, India asked it to desist from further interfering in its internal affairs and destabilising the situation in the region through support to terrorism and other subversive acts.
Awais Shah with his father Justice Sajjad Ali Shah after being recovered by Pakistan army. (Photo: Assem Bajwa/Pakistan army)
Karachi: The kidnapped son of the Chief Justice of Sindh High Court was rescued from the clutches of Pakistani Taliban by the military in an early morning raid in the restive northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, the third high-profile abduction case to be solved in recent months.
Awais Ali Shah, a lawyer himself, was abducted last month from Karachi. He was found in Tank, which lies close to the tribal region bordering Afghanistan where the military has been battling Taliban. Three militants were killed during the operation.
"Awais Shah, son of Sindh High Court Chief Justice Sajjad Ali Shah, recovered through an IBO from custody of terrorists near Tank, three terrorists killed," Director-General of the Inter-Services Public Relations Lieutenant General Asim Bajwa tweeted.
Awais Shah son of Sind Chief Justice recovered through an IBO from custody of terrorists from near Tank,3 terrorists killed.-1/2 Gen Asim Bajwa (@AsimBajwaISPR) July 18, 2016
Shah, who is in his late 20s, was reunited with his family around 9:30am. "I got a call from General Raheel Sharif at 3:00 am informing me my son has been rescued," Sajjad Ali Shah said while addressing the media after being reunited with his son.
"A Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) splinter group was behind Awais Ali Shah's kidnapping. The group were in touch with us and did communicate with us but cannot say anything further due to security reasons," Bajwa said.
Awais Shah safe with security forces,will be transported back to his parents during the day. Details to follow. 2/3 Gen Asim Bajwa (@AsimBajwaISPR) July 18, 2016
#COAS commended efforts of Int &security forces for successful op.COAS also called &congratulated CJ Sind on recovery of his son-3/3 Gen Asim Bajwa (@AsimBajwaISPR) July 18, 2016
Masked men kidnapped Shah from outside a supermarket in Karachi on June 20. It was feared that he could be used as a bargaining chip in negotiations to free imprisoned militants.
Shah's recovery comes months after sons of two high profile politicians returned home after spending years in captivity.
Shahbaz Taseer, the son of former slain Punjab governor, Salman Taseer was recovered in March from the Balochistan province after spending five years in captivity. He was kidnapped by militants and kept in Afghanistan.
In May, Ali Haider the son of former Prime Minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani who was kidnapped from Multan was recovered from Afghanistan after three years in captivity of militant outfits.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif also congratulated justice Shah on the recovery of his son and praised security forces.
"The prime minister lauded the role of intelligence agencies and security forces in recovering Awais Shah and said that the professional and operational excellence of our security forces has made it possible for which they deserve immense appreciation," a statement issued by PM House said.
Kidnapping by criminal gangs and militants is common in the country. Police did not say why they suspected Shah had been abducted by militants.
Karachi has long been plagued by political, ethnic and religious violence, although crime has dropped sharply since the launch of a paramilitary operation in September 2013.
14-year-old Zahra was brutally set on fire by her in-laws when she was heavily pregnant. (Photo: AP)
Ghor, Afghanistan: In yet another case of honour killing, a pregnant teen was brutally burnt to death by her in-laws in Afghanistan in revenge for her father who had eloped with the cousin of the victim's husband.
According to a report in The Sun, the victim, Zarha Azam's father claimed that his daughter was set ablaze by her in-laws.
The honour killing incident took place in Ghor province of Afghanistan. Zahra succumbed to her injuries in a hospital in Kabul on Saturday.
The murdered teen's in-laws had struck a deal with the victim's father allowing him to marry her husband's cousin as payment for a construction work that he had done.
Zahra's father Mohammad said that he wanted justice for his daughter. (Photo: AP)
However, the victim's in-laws later backed out as they promised to sell the cousin to a different man who offered them more money.
Although the practice of 'baad', selling women in exchange of debts is illegal in Afghanistan, it has been prominent in several parts.
Zahra's father said that he hopes to return to Kabul and seek justice for his innocent daughter who was burnt alive by her husband and in-laws.
Despite the practice being illegal, hundreds of women are hacked to death, stoned, burnt alive by their family members in the name of honour killing every year.
Zahra's murder comes barely days after Pakistan's internet sensation and model Qandeel Baloch was choked to death by her brother in yet another honour killing incident, accusing her of bringing disrepute to the family.
The state legislature on Monday passed a bill that seeks to reduce the area to be reserved for parks and open spaces in residential layouts to be developed by urban development authorities.
The Karnataka Urban Development Authorities (Amendment) Bill, 2016, seeks to reduce the area to be reserved for public parks and playgrounds in layouts from the present 15% of the total area to 10%. It also seeks to reduce the area to be reserved for civic amenities from the present 10% of the total area to 5%.
The bill, piloted by City Corporations Minister R Roshan Baig, was adopted without any discussion amid protests by the Opposition members, who were demanding the resignation of minister K J George in connection with the suicide of DySP M K Ganapathi.
The bill also provides for including legislators of the jurisdictional area concerned, a representative of the electricity supply company from the area, Karnataka State Pollution Control Board, chief executive officer of the zilla panchayat and deputy registrar of the cooperative societies as members of the urban development authorities.
Ten commandos belonging to the elite CoBRA battalion of CRPF were killed and five others injured after a group of 200 Naxals surrounded troops and blew off 22 IEDs in the jungles of Bihar's Aurangabad district.
This is one of the biggest casualties of the elite COBRA unit which has been raised by the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) in 2008 for undertaking special jungle/guerrilla warfare operations.
Officials said the encounter started yesterday afternoon in Dumari Nala area, under Madanpur police station area of the said district, in the Maoist hotbed of the Chakarbanda forests when the CoBRA team assisted by other forces launched a special operation in the hunt for some "top Naxal leaders" suspected to be in the jungles.
They said after the CoBRA made the fire assault and killed three Naxalites, they were trapped in a "heavily mined" area where a squad of over 200 Maoists surrounded the troops and blew off 22 Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) amidst firing which led to fatal injuries to the commandos, specially trained in jungle warfare operations by the CRPF.
"A chopper was sent around 3:25 PM to fetch the injured but as the area was heavily mined, the troops could be evacuated only by 8:00 PM yesterday," they said.
While eight commandos were killed on the spot, two others succumbed to their injuries later, the official said, adding the bodies of the three Naxals have been "recovered".
"Few more Naxals are suspected to have been killed and the search is still on," they said.
Some arms and ammunition, including sophisticated ones like two AK-47 rifles, INSAS rifle and under barrel grenade launcher were also recovered from the site by the CoBRA unit in an indication that senior Maoist leaders were present in the area.
Officials said five other personnel were critically injured in the fierce gun battle that ensued after the IED (Improvised Explosive Device) blast and they have now been admitted to various hospitals.
CRPF Director General K Durga Prasad, Inspector General (Operations) Zulfiquar Hasan and other senior officers of the force have rushed to Bihar from Delhi.
In the wake of the incident, Home Minister Rajnath Singh spoke to Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and assured him of all possible help to tackle the Maoists.
Expressing grief over the incident, Kumar ordered Home department officials to immediately pay Rs 5 lakh compensation to the next of kin of each deceased as per provisions of the state government.
Additional reinforcements of the state police and CRPF have reached the spot and a search operation has been launched, officials said.
All the slain commandos belonged to the 205th COBRA battalion which is deployed in the state for conducting anti-Naxal operations.
The martyred CoBRA men have been identified as Head Constables Anil Kumar Singh, a resident of Buxar in Bihar and K Opendra Singh of Thoubal, Manipur, Constables Sinod Kumar of Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh, Ramesh Kumar from Hoshiarpur in Punjab, Diwakar Kumar from Khagariya in Bihar, Polash Mondal from South Denajpur in West Bengal, Deepak Ghosh of Nadia in West Bengal, Manoj Kumar of Betul in Madhya Pradesh, Harvender Panwar of Muzaffarnagar in UP and Ravi Kumar from Siwan in Bihar.
Describing India as a "geopolitical ally" of the US, the Republican platform has urged New Delhi to protect all its religious communities from violence and discrimination and also called for securing nuclear arsenal of Pakistan.
"India is our geopolitical ally and a strategic trading partner. The dynamism of its people and the endurance of their democratic institutions are earning their country a position of leadership not only in Asia but throughout the world," the Republican platform released by the party after its formal approval stated.
"For all of India's religious communities, we urge protection against violence and discrimination," it said while noting the contributions made by the citizens of Indian ancestry to the US.
The Republican platform or the party election manifesto said conflicts in the Middle East have created special political and military challenges for the people of Pakistan.
"Our working relationship is necessary, though sometimes difficult, benefit to both, and we look towards the strengthening of historic ties that have frayed under the weight of international conflict," it said.
"This process cannot progress as long as any citizen of Pakistan can be punished for helping the war on terror. Pakistanis, Afghans, and Americans have a common interest in ridding the region of the Taliban and securing Pakistan's nuclear arsenal," said the document.
Calling for mutual trust for progress of the region, it said," A Republican president will work with all regional leaders to restore mutual trust while insisting upon progress against corruption and the narcotic trade that fuels insurgency".
The 2012 Republican platform had welcomed a stronger relationship with the world's largest democracy both economically and culturally, as well as in matters of national security.
"We hereby affirm and declare that India is our geopolitical ally and a strategic trading partner. We encourage India to permit greater foreign investment and trade. We urge protection for adherents of all India's religions," it said.
In 2012, the Republican platform had also said that it expects the Pakistan government to sever any connection between its security and intelligence forces and the insurgents.
"No Pakistani citizen should be punished for helping the United States against the terrorists," it added.
People spend a lot of money each year on home improvements and repairs, but a simple project can become quite costly if an underground utility line is hit while the work is being done.
According to Patrick Lester, spokesman for PPL Electric Utilities, people can be injured or killed if they accidentally dig into underground lines that carry utilities like electric, gas, oil or steam. In addition, the cost escalates as utility companies work to restore services.
But one phone call to 811, the states dig notification hotline, is all it takes to locate underground lines and prevent accidents from happening.
Lester said state law requires that all work involving the use of power equipment be reported to Pennsylvania One Call System Inc., which is open 24-7, before digging begins. Calls may be placed by homeowners who are working on their own properties, or by excavators they have hired.
Utility companies will then visit reported properties and mark the locations of their lines.
Its a toll-free call, Lester said. They (the call center) act as a clearinghouse for this information.
The law requires that you contact them three business days before work begins. That gives them time to go there and check the area for electric, water, sewer multiple kinds of utilities.
Job sites are outlined with white marks, and utilities are marked in other various colors, such as red for electric, yellow for gas, and green for sewer.
Typically when they do one of these visits, theyll spray different paint for each utility, maybe on the lawn or road, to show where the utility is, Lester said. When youre digging, you can see a line where that utility is running.
Lester said the greatest danger comes from power equipment like front-end loaders, post-hole diggers and rototillers.
The law revolves around power equipment ... but the danger is always there, Lester said. If theres any uncertainty, you should make the call and be safe.
He said individuals should also call 811 if they see work being done on unmarked properties in their neighborhoods.
If theres any question as to whether that site has been looked at, you might want to make that 811 call, Lester said.
PPL says some 200 accidents involving its underground system occur annually, and while no one has been seriously injured in those incidents, accidents elsewhere have ended tragically.
I think weve been fortunate ... but we want to be proactive and send the message to remind people so we dont have to deal with a serious incident, Lester said.
I just want to be sure that people realize that there is a safety hazard associated with this. To be safe, and confident that youre going to remain safe, call 811 and make sure nothing is below that is going to cause harm.
For more information, visit Pa1call.org.
The Philippines' top diplomat said today he had rejected a Chinese offer to hold talks "outside of and in disregard" of an international tribunal's ruling last week that debunked Beijing's claim to ownership of virtually the entire South China Sea.
Foreign Secretary Perfecto Yasay Jr said he told his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, that China's condition "was not consistent with our constitution and our national interest," adding Wang warned that if the Philippines insists on China's compliance to the decision, "we might be headed for a confrontation."
During talks on the sidelines of last weekend's Asia-Europe meeting in Mongolia, Yasay said Wang insisted that the Philippines should not even "make any comments" on the landmark decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.
Wang "asked us also to open ourselves for bilateral negotiations but outside of and in disregard of the arbitral ruling, so this is something that I told him was not consistent with our constitution and our national interest," Yasay told the ABS-CBN network.
"They said that if you will insist on the ruling and discussing it along those lines, then we might be headed for a confrontation," he said.
Despite the seeming impasse, Yasay said he was still hopeful both countries can find a way to resolve the long-seething dispute, suggesting China's publicly issued positions may still change.
Yasay said he asked that Filipinos be allowed to fish in the Scarborough Shoal, where Chinese coast guard ships have blocked and turned away fishing boats since effectively seizing the disputed fishing area after a tense standoff with Philippine government ships in 2012.
Wang responded by saying China was open to discussing that possibility with the Philippines "but not in the context of the arbitral tribunal ruling," Yasay said.
Two days after the tribunal issued its ruling, Chinese coast guard ships again blocked Filipino fishermen from approaching the shoal in scenes documented by an ABS-CBN news crew.
The Philippines decided to take its dispute with China to international arbitration in 2013 after China took control of Scarborough Shoal and reneged on a US State Department-brokered deal for both countries to withdraw their ships from the area to ease a dangerous faceoff, according to former President Benigno Aquino III, who brought the case against Beijing.
With the Philippines' anemic military dwarfed by China's forces, Aquino bolstered relations with the United States and other allies to deter China's increasingly assertive actions in the disputed waters and modernise its air force and naval fleets, further straining ties with Beijing.
The kidnapped son of the Chief Justice of Sindh High Court was rescued from the clutches of Pakistani Taliban by the military in an early morning raid in the restive northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, the third high-profile abduction case to be solved in recent months.
Awais Ali Shah, a lawyer himself, was abducted last month from Karachi. He was found in Tank, which lies close to the tribal region bordering Afghanistan where the military has been battling Taliban.
Three militants were killed during the operation.
"Awais Shah, son of Sindh High Court Chief Justice Sajjad Ali Shah, recovered through an IBO from custody of terrorists from near Tank, three terrorists killed," Director-General of the Inter-Services Public Relations Lieutenant General Asim Bajwa tweeted.
Shah, who is in his late 20s, was reunited with his family around 9:30am. "I got a call from General Raheel Sharif at 3:00am informing me my son has been rescued," Sajjad Ali Shah said while addressing the media after being reunited with his son.
"A Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) splinter group was behind Awais Ali Shah's kidnapping. The group were in touch with us and did communicate with us but cannot say anything further due to security reasons," Bajwa said.
Masked men kidnapped Shah from outside a supermarket in Karachi on June 20. It was feared that he could be used as a bargaining chip in negotiations to free imprisoned militants.
Shah's recovery comes months after sons of two high profile politicians returned home after spending years in captivity.
Shahbaz Taseer, the son of former slain Punjab governor, Salman Taseer was recovered in March from the Balochistan province after spending five years in captivity. He was kidnapped by militants and kept in Afghanistan.
In May, Ali Haider the son of former Prime Minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani who was kidnapped from Multan was recovered from Afghanistan after three years in captivity of militant outfits.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif also congratulated justice Shah on the recovery of his son and praised security forces.
"The prime minister lauded the role of intelligence agencies and security forces in recovering Awais Shah and said that the professional and operational excellence of our security forces has made it possible for which they deserve immense appreciation," a statement issued by PM House said.
Kidnapping by criminal gangs and militants is common in the country. Police did not say why they suspected Shah had been abducted by militants.
Karachi has long been plagued by political, ethnic and religious violence, although crime has dropped sharply since the launch of a paramilitary operation in September 2013.
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar today condoled the death of 10 CRPF commandos in an encounter with Naxals on the borders of Gaya and Aurangabad districts in the state and announced compensation to their families.
The commandos of CRPF's COBRA unit were ambushed in the IED blast triggered by Naxals near Chakarbanda-Dumarinala forests after which an encounter started yesterday in which three Naxals were also killed.
While eight CRPF personnel were killed on the spot, two others succumbed to their injuries later.
Kumar instructed top officials of the state, including Chief Secretary Anjani Kumar Singh, state police chief P K Thakur and Principal Secretary Home Amir Subhani, to rush to Gaya to take stock of the situation and ensure that needful action is taken, an official statement said. He also had a telephonic conversation with Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh over the incident.
The Chief Minister directed the Home department to immediately pay Rs 5 lakh compensation to the next of kin of each deceased as per provisions of the state government, the statement said.
Additionally, he ordered officials to make available to the kin of the jawans killed, insurance of Rs 20 lakh under the provisions of special scheme in the Naxal-hit districts, it said, adding Kumar also ordered to provide all medical assistance to the injured jawans. The Chief Secretary would lay wreath on bodies of deceased jawans on behalf of the Chief Minister.
Additional Director General (ADG) of Police (Headquarters) Sunil Kumar said bodies of three Naxals have been recovered from the spot along with three automatic weapons and ammunition. Search operation is on to nab the other Naxals involved in the encounter.
To a question if there was lack of coordination between the paramilitary forces and state police during the operation, the ADG said its matter of probe, adding, "We generally review the lapses and shortcomings after every such incident to overcome them in future."
The five injured jawans of the Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (COBRA) are under treatment in hospitals of Gaya and Patna and are out of danger, he added.
Buoyed by the Supreme Court verdict on Arunachal Pradesh, Congress today slammed the government in the Lok Sabha, accusing it of "destabilising" its governments in states, a charge rejected by Home Minister Rajnath Singh.
Congress members also staged a walkout even as Singh said "internal crisis" of Congress was responsible for the controversial developments in Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand and that "a boat is bound to sink if it has a hole".
The issue was raised by Leader of Congress in the House Mallikarjun Kharge who said that on the one hand, the Modi government was celebrating the 125th birthday of B R Ambedkar and on the other hand, it was "murdering" democracy by toppling popular governments.
"You have decided to execute your 'Congress-mukt' (Congress-free) slogan by any means. Wherever you get a chance, you destabilise governments and work to replace them with yours. You did so in Uttarakhand and Arunachal and tried in Manipur and Himachal Pradesh too. This is good for niether public nor Constitution," he said.
"We thank the Supreme Court for upholding the Constitution. Its order is historic and will be written in golden letters. You don't have numbers but you want to grab power by the back door. It has become your nature. Democracy is being repressed, murdered," he said during the Zero Hour.
"The Supreme Court has slapped you and, hopefully, you will not do such things again," Kharge said referring to the recent verdict of the apex court to restore the Congress government in Arunachal Pradesh which had been dismissed by the Centre months back.
Earlier, the Supreme Court had restored the Congress government in Uttarakhand also after it was dismissed by the Centre.
Responding to the charge, the Home Minister said the Congress governments in Uttarakhand and Arunachal Pradesh fell due to the opposition by its own MLAs.
He, however, made no mention of the Supreme Court orders which had led to the restoration of Congress dispensations, dealing a blow to the Centre.
BJP had nothing to do with what happened in the two states, Singh said, adding "if any party has this very old habit of toppling popular governments, then it is Congress".
While attacking Congress, he said its governments at the centre had toppled governments in states 105 times.
He said crisis in the two states was "unfortunate" and destabilisation of popularly-elected governments was not good for healthy democracy.
"BJP had nothing to do with it. It was an outcome of your (Congress) internal crisis. Nine Congress MLAs opposed their own government on the floor of the Uttarakhand assembly. In Arunachal, over two/thirds of them defected. If your boat has a hole, then it is bound to sink if you put it in water. Why blame water for it," he said.
The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) conferring the world heritage status on Le Corbusier designed Capitol Complex in Chandigarh on Sunday comes as major boost towards preserving Corbusiers prime architectural designs.
Capital city Chandigarh also stands to gain from an increased number of tourist footfalls now that the attraction comes with a world heritage status. Sunday's announcement at the 40th session of the World Heritage Committee of UNESCO at Istanbul however will not attract any funds from the agency. But, the vital part of preservation of the monumental structures will now be under expert guidance of the UNESCO.
Officials of the Union Territory of Chandigarh are meeting shortly to decide upon the ways and means to make best of the priced announcement. The Capitol complex is spread over 100 acres and essentially comprises of the Open Hand monument, Punjab and Haryana High Court, the Punjab and Haryana legislative assembly and the secretariat. Until last year, the open hand in the Capitol Complex had been essentially out of bound for visitors owing to security concerns. Corbusier began work on the Capitol Complex in 1952 and all the structures were completed by 1962.
The Chandigarh administration has been vying for the UNESCO heritage status since the last 9-years since 2007. It then succeeded in getting the name of the city included in the tentative list. Twin attempts were made in 2009 and 2011 to get the heritage status, but in vain. Nominations from seven countries, including France, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Argentina, Japan and India, were included in the list works of French designer Le Corbusier on Sunday. The UNESCO will assist in providing technical expertise to the monumental architecture designs in the Capitol Complex for preservation of the structures.
The Capitol complex was in news when French President Francois Hollande visited the venue. This place was also the central venue for the second international Yoga Day in June this year which saw Prime Minister Modi performing yoga asanas along with thousands of volunteers and trainers.
A day after calling Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal a dictator, the Delhi BJP said the AAP leaders repentance service at Golden temple in Amritsar was a drama.
If Kejriwal really repents party colleague Ashish Khetans misdeed of comparing his partys youth manifesto to the religious scriptures like Gita, Bible, Quran and Guru Granth Sahib, he should have expelled Khetan from the party for his misdemeanour of insulting the religious scriptures, said Delhi BJP chief Satish Upadhyay.
Kejriwal washed utensils in the Golden Temples community kitchen on Monday to seek apology over the youth manifesto controversy.
Upadhyay said today's drama in Amritsar was to befool Punjab voters the way he fooled the people of Delhi before Assembly election in 2015.
The city BJP chief said instead of taking a bold decision to expel Khetan, Kejriwal took a political root of appeasing Sikhs before Punjab elections by going to Shri Harmandir Sahib to apologise.
We wish to ask Kejriwal did Khetan insult only Guru Granth Sahib? What about the other religions whose scriptures too were insulted by Khetan? Would CM Kejriwal now apoligise to other religions also? asked Upadhyay.
BJP National Secretary Sardar R P Singh said the self-styled repentance service by Kejriwal at Shri Harmandir Sahib complex at Amritsar was nothing but another melodrama of the Kejriwal Gang.
He said it is a matter of shame that just for cheap publicity Kejriwal went to the Guru Ghar and washed already clean utensils and swept clean floor.
With his misdeed Kejriwal has hurt the sentiments of crores of Sikhs who take this service as the most pious act of Guru Sewa, he said.
He said if Kejriwal was really repentant then he should have known that under the Sikh tenets the punishment for disrespect towards Guru Granth Sahib and Guru Sahibs is decided at Shri Akal Takht Sahib and he should have presented himself before the highest temporal authority of Sikhs.
On Sunday, the BJP said Kejriwals Talk to AK event was more or less like a haughty Tughlaq forcing people to listen to his views.
Politics of fraud
Union minister Harsimrat Kaur on Monday accused Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal of indulging in politics of fraud and not politics of penance after he washed utensils at the Golden Temple to seek apology over the youth manifesto controversy, reports PTI from New Delhi.
Kejriwal washed dishes in the Golden Temples community kitchen as an apology after his Aam Aadmi Party drew flak for depicting the image of the Sikh shrine with the party symbol broom in its youth manifesto.
But people of Punjab will teach him (a lesson). People of Delhi are also realising what a big mistake they have made. He made promises to people of Delhi and has not been able to fulfil them, Kaur, also a SAD MP, said outside Parliament.
Terming Kejriwals regime as a failure, she said He is a totally failure in Delhi. I have never seen CM of a state going to another state to make a government over there and not serving the people of his state.
Asked whether SAD was feeling jittery because of the presence of Kejriwal in Punjab, she said, It is not so. Kejriwal cannot make any dent in SADs support base. A man who does not know the culture of Punjab, language of Punjab, will be wiped off badly...He does not know how to respect the people of Punjab. He is doing politics of fraud in Delhi.
Asked if Kejriwals presence in Punjab was a challenge for SAD-BJP alliance, she said the alliance will score a hattrick in the Assembly elections thanks to AAP and Congress.
I watched Paul Ryans town hall on CNN this week for a number of reasons, not the least of which is my slight crush on the House Speaker.
Beyond that admittedly shallow fact, he is the most important Republican in the country, not simply because of his political clout, but also because of his mission: save the party of Lincoln from both the rogues attacking the establishment and the progressives who want to go all nuclear on the principles of personal responsibility, limited government and sobriety.
Listening to Ryan respond to questions from the audience, I had immense admiration for his ability to embody all that I wish the GOP still was, and all that I know the Democrats will never be again. Those things, in no particular order, are: earnest, accountable, visionary, critical-thinking, cognizant of history, respectful of tradition, compassionate, individualistic, unabashedly patriotic. His answers to questions about immigration, religious freedom, civil liberties, poverty and Donald Trump were masterful, particularly the response to a young Republican who criticized the speaker for endorsing the bigoted presumptive nominee.
Ryan said what I have been reduced to saying, namely that Trump will not harm the country as much as Hillary Clinton. He didnt exactly say it in those terms, but his meaning was more than clear. Trump will not elevate us, but he will not destroy the foundations of the society we hope to salvage from the ruins of the Obama years. Clinton will continue the transformation, until conservatives no longer recognize the country, its institutions or our fellow citizens.
As we await the circus in Cleveland, replete with political strippers and con men and glittery prime-time shell games, filled with a Frankenstein platform that will please no one as it tries to appease pro-lifers and gay capitalists, I wonder what will happen to me if Trump is elected or, worse horror, Clinton ekes out a victory.
As a person who finds the rhetoric of the left repellent when it feeds me such things as a woman should have the choice to control her own body, the one that sometimes happens to have an extra set of DNAnot to mention legs and armsfloating around in it, I will never again be able to call myself a Democrat. Contrary to popular belief, I have officially have been a member of the GOP only since March 26 of this year, hoping to put John Kasich over the top in Pennsylvania (yeah, that worked). At 18, I registered in the party of Kennedy, and voted for . . . Carter.
But I have never been fully accepted by the Democrats, who not only embrace abortion as a right, but who also take our racial and cultural differences and use them to divide us for political gain. Believe me, they dont want your election-year sympathy, you in the party of the president whose great failure is not presiding over immigration reform.
Yet its conservatives who dont know a damn thing about immigration that are shamelessly exploiting the death of Kate Steinle, who was killed by an illegal immigrant in the sanctuary city of San Francisco.
Listening to Paul Ryan this week and recognizing the agony he is going through in having to support Trump and walk the fine line between the rhetoric of both parties, I had the crazy thought that maybe one day, I will be able to vote for him at the top of the ticket.
That is the party I could truly embrace, one that sees poverty as neither a badge of honor nor a sin, one that respects both unborn life and the lives of kindergartners staring down the barrel of unnecessary guns, one that doesnt look at regulation as a blessing, or a curse, but a useful tool in moderation.
That is a dream worth clinging to, as the nightmares unfold this month, in Cleveland and in my own hometown of Philadelphia.
Standing atop a bus outside his mansion in Istanbul Saturday night, President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, victorious after putting down a coup attempt by renegade factions of the military, told his followers, We only bow to God.
The symbolism was stark. The informal rally harked back to his days as an up-by-the-bootstraps populist and Islamist leader who often spoke from the tops of buses. And his message, cloaked in the language of Islam, underscored how much Turkey has changed in recent decades. Members of the military, once the guardians of the countrys secular traditions who successfully pulled off three coups last century, were being rounded up and tossed in jail, and other perceived enemies were being purged from the state bureaucracy.
The Islamists, meanwhile, were dancing in the streets. That is where, Erdogan said Sunday, they would remain. This week is important, he told a crowd gathered at Istanbuls Fatih Mosque for a funeral for a person killed in the violence over the weekend. We will not leave the public squares. This is not a 12-hour affair.
The coup attempt seems to have been decisively quashed, with nearly 6,000 military personnel in custody. Funerals for many of the at least 265 people who died in clashes were taking place across Turkey on Sunday. Now the country is left to consider what the lasting consequences of the uprising will be. While Erdogan has clearly fended off a coup, the most urgent question is this: Has he emerged even more powerful, or is he now a weakened leader who must accommodate his opponents?
That much of the country, including those who have bitterly opposed his government, stood against a military coup as a violation of democracy has raised hopes that Erdogan will seize the moment to reach across Turkeys many political divides and unite the country. Yet as the weekend progressed, it was becoming clearer that the moment was for Erdogan and his religiously conservative followers, a triumph of political Islam more than anything else.
While secular and liberal Turks generally opposed the coup, it was Erdogans supporters who flooded the streets and gathered at Istanbuls airport Saturday morning to push out the occupying army, mostly yelling religious slogans and chants in support of Erdogan, not democracy itself. The mosques role in mobilising citizens to gather in the streets as the coup was unfolding was decisive, but it nonetheless unsettled many secular Turks, who called it a historic sidestep of Turkeys secular principles, in which religion is meant to be separate from politics.
On Sunday, Turkeys nearly 85,000 mosques, in unison, blared from their loudspeakers a prayer traditionally recited for martyrs who have died in war and called for people to continue to rally against the plotters of the coup. Most of the people who went out in the streets to oppose the coup d'etat did not use democratic language, said Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, director of the Ankara office of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a research organisation. There are people for whom Islam plays a big role in their lives in Turkey, he added. And there are people for whom Islam plays no role.
As Turks waited to see in which direction their mercurial and powerful leader would steer the country in the wake of the coup attempt, Erdogan on Sunday struck some conciliatory notes. Yet he has also, in the aftermath of the plot, raised the possibility that Turkey would reinstate the death penalty, which it had abolished as a part of its pursuit to join the European Union.
If they have guns and tanks, we have faith, said Erdogan, who also attended a funeral of a friend who was killed, and was seen crying. We are not after revenge. So let us think before taking each step. We will act with reason and experience. Nigar Goksel, a senior Turkey analyst for the International Crisis Group, said there were two possible scenarios going forward.
Either Erdogan utilises this incident to redesign institutions in Ankara to his own benefit, she said, or he takes the opportunity with the solidarity that was extended to him by the opposition and different segments of society to reciprocate by investing more genuinely in rule of law and legitimate forms of dissent.
Erdogans own history suggests the latter possibility is unlikely. Each time he has faced a challenge to his power, from street protests three years ago to a corruption investigation that went after his inner circle, he has sidelined his enemies and become more autocratic.
Already, even as the government has arrested thousands of soldiers and officers who allegedly took part in the failed coup, there were signs that it was using the moment to widen a crackdown on perceived enemies. Alongside the military, the government also dismissed thousands of judges, who seemingly had no role to play in a military revolt.
Now the government has a free hand to design the bureaucracy as they like, and they will, Unluhisarcikli said. All in all, Turkey will become a country where power is more consolidated and dissent will be more difficult.
Asylum seekers
As the purge of the military continued Sunday, one of those arrested was Gen Bekir Ercan Van, the chief of the Incirlik Air Base, from which the US military flies missions over Iraq and Syria against the Islamic State.
Over the weekend, Van approached US officials seeking asylum but was refused, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who spoke anonymously because of the sensitive nature of the subject.
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras told Erdogan that the government would swiftly examine asylum claims by eight Turkish officers who fled to northern Greece in a helicopter and were detained on charges of illegal entry. Turkey has demanded their extradition.
As the drama of the coup attempt played out Friday and into Saturday morning, it looked for a moment as if Erdogan was on the verge of being toppled from power. The president spoke to the nation via the FaceTime app on his iPhone, just after he narrowly escaped being captured by mutinous soldiers, who arrived in a helicopter at a seaside hotel where he was vacationing just after he had departed.
Then, around 3.30 am, he landed in Istanbul, after a dangerous flight undertaken while the plotters still had fighter jets in the air the surest sign that the revolt was failing. But more so than his dramatic arrival at the Istanbul airport, his confident speech Saturday on top of the bus seemed to emphatically declare that he was back in charge.
Celebrations by his supporters continued Sunday, with jubilant crowds marching through the streets of Istanbul. Look around you, one of them, Eytan Karatas, 37, a mechanic, said. Look at these people. We are the real soldiers of this country, and we have a chief.
Prime Minister Narendra Modis recent visit to four African countries Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania and Kenya was aimed to accelerate bilateral ties with these countries in a wide range of areas including, food, energy, maritime security and other important issues.
Historically, the India-Africa relationship has been intense and compact and it has assumed an added importance in the post-1990s era. This became evident only in 2008 when India-Africa Forum Summit was established during the UPA-II. When the Modi government came to power, it continued his predecessors policy towards this continent. This became evident from the participation of 41 African countries in the third Summit, held in Delhi last year.
In June this year, President Pranab Mukherjees visit to Gh-ana, Ivory Coast and Namibia and Vice President Hamid Ansa-ris visit to Morocco and Tunisia further underscored the importance India accords to Africa.
Built on these developments, Modis visit to the East African coast countries was viewed to mark a defining movement in India-Africa ties. While it is true that Prime Minister Modis visit has infused abundant energy into relations between India and these African countries, sadly the visit did not see much progress on any issues of critical importance for New Delhi.
For instance, New Delhi sees Africas East Coast countries to play a crucial role in Indias maritime security, as these countries are connected to the Indian Ocean and are also members of the Indian Ocean Rim. Close cooperation of these countries in the Indian Ocean are also view-ed to help India limit growing influence of China there.
The active participation of the African continent is required to realise Modis Sagar-Mala initiative. This was one of the reasons that he deliberately planned to visit these four coastal countries. However, except for the fact that India and these African countries expressed their shared concerns over growing drug-trafficking, piracy and other illegal activities in the Indian Ocean, no agreement was signed in this regard.
Both India and these four cou-ntries have been victims of terrorism and they indeed agreed to forge close cooperation in the counter-terrorism area. But it is highly unlikely that they can make much headway in the absence of a solid mechanism for counter-terrorism cooperation.
It is indeed a welcoming development that during Modis visit, India signed an MoU with Kenya on defence cooperation which will entail staff exchanges, expertise sharing, and training, cooperation in hydrography and equipment supply. Energy shor-tage is an important reason for India to aggressively pursue its foreign policy towards Africa. This continent has huge energy reserves. Kenya has one of the largest crude oil refineries. South Africa comprises 3% of African coal reserves. Mozambique has one of the worlds richest off-shore natural gas reser-ves and massive deposits of coal.
On the other hand, India is an energy deficient country, importing 70% of its oil needs. It is also one of the largest consumers and importers of hydrocarbons. Thus, India sees African countries to pay a crucial role in increasing its economic development. Despite all this, Modis visit did not facilitate Indias interest in this regard.
Economic ties
Economic ties have been a strong part of India-Africa relations with bilateral trade reaching $70 billion and has assumed added significance for India and Africa for various reasons.
At a time when African continent is going through the process of industrialisation and urbanisation at the fastest speed, New Delhi sees this continent as a big market for Indian investment, goods, expertise, technology and services. Given low labour costs in Africa, Indian public and private companies have shown their interest to invest in different spheres there.
At a time when China has made huge investments in Africa and is trying to engage this continent in its One Belt One Road, India feels that expanding economic ties with African countries would enable it to contain the growing clout of China there.
In the light of these objectives, the signing of a revised pact on avoidance of double taxation between India and Kenya as well as Modis announcement regar-ding the extension of concessional Line of Credit of $44.95 million to Nairobi would indeed help India achieve its economic interests in this region.
Modis visit witnessed expansion of cooperation in areas including agriculture, health care, tourism and others. He signed a long-term agreement under which it will buy pulses from Mozambique to effectively deal with the shortage of pulses in India. On the other hand, this agreement would enable Moza-mbique to get access to farm technologies to improve its agricultural productivity. India also provided a LoC of $92 million to Tanzania in the water resources sector. India and South Africa signed three agreements.
This also assumes huge significance in the backdrop of the fact that in the recent past in Delhi and Bengaluru people of the African continent have been attacked. India has also agreed to invest in the health sector to provide better healthcare to the people of Africa.
Indeed, the visit and Indias willingness to help people of th-ese and other countries of Africa in their endeavour to lead a dec-ent live has left a profound mark in the India-Africa relationship. It still needs calibrated political directions before the relationship can realise its full potential.
(The writer is ICSSR Doctoral Fell-ow, UGC Centre for Southern Asia Studies, Pondicherry University)
The recent video clippings of former Mandya District in-charge Minister M H Ambareesh in stylish outfit, enjoying horse race, that is being circulated in Whatsapp and Facebook has drawn flak from the farming community and the residents of the district.
The people of the district, who had voted him to Assembly twice and Parliament thrice with lots of hope, have been left disappointed as Ambareesh neither attended the Assembly session nor visited Mandya Assembly constituency, but was spotted at the Derby race held at Bangalore Race Course, recently.
The actor-politician Ambareesh turned rebel against Chief Minister Siddaramaiah after being dropped from the ministry. The MLA had sent his resignation to the Deputy Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, mentioning that if he was not capable of managing ministers post, how can he continue as a member.
However, his resignation was not accepted as he did not personally handover the letter as per the norms. Later, at a press meet in Mandya, Ambareesh informed that he would personally submit his resignation, which caught the Congress leaders unawares.
But, after a while he softened his stand over the issue and said that he made a mistake by tendering his resignation in a hurry, without consulting with the people of Mandya. Ambi stated that he would take a decision in this regard after meeting his supporters and well-wishers. Ironically, he has not visited the district since the announcement.
The former Housing minister has skipped the Assembly session and was also not spotted attending any meeting or function related to the Congress party. Meanwhile, attired in western outfit, was spotted in the Derby held in Bengaluru recently. He was also seen posing with other dignitaries during the race.
It may be mentioned that he was pulled up by the then Speaker Kagodu Thimmappa for attending horse races, when he was serving as minister. After which, he was not spotted at the races. Now, Ambareesh was seen at Derby after the resignation drama.
Ambareesh did not even attend the quarterly progress review meeting of the Karnataka Development Programme, convened by the district in-charge Minister D K Shivakumar in Mandya, recently. He was also not seen at the Cauvery Irrigation Consultative Committee meeting held at Vidhana Soudha, recently. At a time when the farmers of the district are under anxiety due to deficient rainfall and insufficient water in KRS dam, closure of MySugar factory and other problems, Ambareesh has not shown any concern towards them, the leaders of farmer organisations complain.
The people of the district are eager to know the future course of action of Ambareesh. Farmer leader Konasale Narasaraju said, Ambareesh was irresponsible during his tenure as a minister. What can one expect from him now?
With India recording 72 tiger deaths in the past six months, Project Tiger directors should take necessary steps to strengthen conservation measures, said Vaibhav C Mathur, Assistant Inspector General of Forests (AIGF) of National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA).
Speaking at a meeting of conservators of forests and directors of 14 tiger reserves in South India at K Gudi camp, under Biligiri Ranganatha Swamy Tiger Reserve limits, in the district, the NTCA official said, Only 20% of the tigers have died of natural death. The number of tigers being killed by poachers for illegal business is alarmingly high. I will discuss with the governments to fill vacant posts in the lower grades to guard the forests properly and prevent poaching activities, Mathur said.
The officials of both states (Karnataka and Tamil Nadu) should operate in tandem so that the borders are secured and do not permit illegal activities from both sides. Camera trappings is a must in forests to collect data, which might be useful, he said.
Debate
The tiger deaths is debated seriously and is also raised in the Parliament. The officers should be able to provide exact details to the questions of the Members of the Parliament. Hence, it is important to provide autopsy reports of tigers, photographs and lab reports. Only then it is possible for the NTCA and directors to gain the trust of the people, he added.
P S Somashekar, Inspector General of Forests (IGF), National Tiger Conservation Authority (South division), said, The meeting was being held to discuss tiger deaths that were reported in 14 tiger reserves in South India between 2012 and 2016.
Tribal hamlets
Pointing out that there are tribal hamlets in the tiger reserve, Somashekar said, the authority has released funds for relocation of the hamlets at Nagarahole and Mudumalai Tiger Reserves.
While rehabilitation is complete at Mudumalai, it is yet to be taken up at Nagarahole, he added. State Chief Conservator of Forests (Wildlife) B J Hosmath, CCF (Chamarajanagar Circle) B P Ravi and Project Tiger Director S S Lingaraju among others were present.
Kaushal Kendra or the skill development centre, introduced by the Union government, is likely to be established at Mangalore University and a proposal has been submitted in this regard, said Mangalore University Registrar (Evaluation) Prof A M Khan.
Prof Khan was speaking as the chief guest at the Open House programme at University College in Mangaluru on Monday.
Karnataka Bank General Manager B Chandrashekhar Rao inaugurated the programme. He said that the Open House serves as a career guidance programme, by providing information to students on career prospects in the respective fields. There are a lot of opportunities in banking sector with 25,000 to 30,000 vacancies created every year, Rao said.
He added that students must choose a career in which they are interested since it not only the pay scale but the work satisfaction also which counts. He also stated that there are opportunities in the banking sector even for the students from arts and science background.
University College Principal Uday Kumar Irvattur, in his keynote address, said Open House is the best way to project the resources of the institution.
He said that apart from undergraduation programmes BA, BSc, BCom, BBA, the college in Hampankatta is offering M Com, M Sc (Chemistry), MA in Hindi, Konkani, Sanskrit and Economics.
He also stated that there are PG diploma and certificate courses in Yogic Sciences. The University Evening College is offering MBA (IB), M Com, MA (Konkani) along with BA, BCom and BCA courses. There are also diploma and certificate courses in German and French, Irvattur said. He also added that the University College will start a BA programme in Bhara -tanatyam.
Mangalore University syndicate member Mohan Chandra Nambiar said that students from economically less privileged class must also be able to get access to higher education.
With a pay package of Rs 14.04 lakh per annum, many job goers will be having grandiose plans with first months salary. In a rare gesture, an MBA holder from Sahyadri College of Engineering and Management here on Tuesday announced to donate his maiden salary towards the corpus fund of his alma mater.
Rajesha T Mathew, who has landed a job at Kingdom University, Bahrain, will be pocketing Rs 1.17 lakh (after converting it to Indian currency) per month. He has been recruited for the position of specialist in accreditation and quality assurance office. He will be working closely with the vice-president of the university for accreditation. The university offers bachelor and masters programs in law, business administration, literature, architecture engineering and design.
What went in favour of Rajesha was his internship project during MBA (2014-16 batch) Application of Lev and Schwartz Compensation Model on the Human Resource Accounting Practices of MCF Limited.
Interacting with mediapersons, Rajesha said, It was like Alice in Wonderland feeling the moment I came to know I have been selected.
Reacting to a particular query on taking job abroad when there is a debate on checking brain drain, Rajesha quipped: Anyway, I will be sending my salary backhome in India, while I will be showcasing the talent abroad.
Not many know that Rajesha quit the job with Larsen and Toubro (L&T) in Mysuru, as he wanted to study further. A BSc graduate, he had been recruited at L&T and also worked for a salary of Rs 16,000 per month for one year.
It was indeed a proud moment for his parents T Mathew and Traciamma, from Kainkanje in Dharmasthala. Mathew who works in Dharmasthala Manjunatha Construction Company at Ujire had the satisfaction of helping his son make a career.
Rajeshas project guide and Director, Business Administration, Vishal Samartha recalled the moment when Rajesha was interviewed on skype and did exceptionally well. What more could I have expected on this Guru Poornima Day. It was a true honour for a guru, she added.
The previous highest pay package was Rs 9 lakh per annum two years ago, recalled Samartha.
Chairman of the college Manjunath Bhandary said, It is only the students who can take an institution to a higher level. And, this can be achieved by converting projects into products, rather than making projects for academic requirements.
Principal Umesh M Bhushi said, In another five years, the college will become autonomous and structure based education will be the foreword.
Indias second largest IT company Infosys has announced management changes, which gain significance as they come at a time when the company reported a less-than-expected rise in net profit for the June 2016 quarter.
Anup Uppadhayay, a senior Infosys executive who was appointed a few months ago to work on large deals, has quit the company.
Uppadhayay, who joined Infosys in 1993, was EVP and global head of strategic sales programmes at the company.
Vishal Sikka has appointed Deepak Padaki to handle mergers and acquisitions, while former SAP executive Ritika Suri has been given additional responsibility to manage large deals in addition to her current role as head of the $500-million Infosys Innovation Fund.
The company has also appointed Narasimha Rao Manepalli to head artificial intelligence platform Mana, in place of Samson David, who quit days before Infosys announced its Q1 results.
Last Friday, Infosys announced a rise of 13% in net profit, which was below estimates.
On Tuesday, Infosys shares closed at Rs 1,086.30, up 0.43% on the BSE.
Aircraft manufacturing giant Boeing has said that India will now require 1,850 new aircraft valued at $265 billion over the next 20 years.
The company had said last year that India will need 1,740 new aircraft valued at $240 billion over the next 20 years.
India continues to have a strong commercial aerospace market, and the highest domestic traffic growth in the world, Boeing Commercial Airplanes Senior Vice President (Asia Pacific and India Sales) Dinesh Keskar said.
With the new aviation policies in place, we see even greater opportunities and remain confident in the market, and the airlines in India, Keskar added.
Boeing has revised its aircraft projections for the next 20 years upwards by over 6%. According to Boeing, single-aisle airliners, such as the next-generation 737 and 737 MAX, will continue to account for the largest share of new deliveries, with airlines in India needing approximately 1,560 aircraft.
These new aircraft will continue to support the growth of low-cost carriers and replace older, less-efficient planes. Boeing projects a worldwide demand for 39,620 new planes over the next 20 years, with Indian carriers needing more than 4.6% of the total global demand.
Keskar was also hopeful of getting orders for wide-bodied planes from Indian carriers. I am hopeful that Indian carriers will start ordering wide-bodied planes in the future. Vistara is certainly a candidate for it, he said.
Attributing the bullish outlook to the new aviation policy, favourable demographics and low fuel prices, Keskar said, India continues to have a strong commercial aerospace market and the highest domestic traffic growth in the world.
Keskar also commented on the governments regional connectivity push, saying even as it has capped prices, the promise of refunding 80% of losses, if any, will help the airlines drive the business.
The Jharkhand government on Tuesday signed an MoU with Cisco to impart networking training to students of engineering colleges, polytechnics and degree level institutions in Jharkhand.
Students will be trained through the Cisco Networking Academy Programme to increase the availability of skilled networking resources from within the state.
Jharkhand Chief Minister M Raghubar Das kick-started the maiden investment promotion campaign and formally launched its investment promotion campaign Momentum Jharkhand in the city.
The state is ranked among the best performing states in business reforms, based on an evaluation by the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP).
Citing the latest initiative of the central government in developing the Amritsar-Kolkata corridor, the chief minister said that it will give momentum to the economic development of eastern India as well as Jharkhand.
Jharkhand, in a sense, is the backbone of the Make in India mission, since it holds 40% of Indias natural mineral wealth and on track to become the countrys power hub by 2019, Das said, adding that they have a land bank of 1.75 lakh acres at disposal, besides earmarking 200 acres for the IT sector.
We can allocate land to a potential investor in one weeks time, he said.
The maiden Jharkhand Global Investor Summit will be held on February 1516, 2017, in Ranchi.
As the much expected Rajinikanths movie Kabali is getting released across the globe on July 22, excited fans in Tamil Nadu, urged the state government to declare official holiday on the day of the movie release.
Using the social media, many of the actors die-hard fans have also drafted out a model leave letter to help their friends to seek leave on the day of Kabali release. In addition, they also posted an online petition seeking chief minister to declare a holiday on the day of release.
Petition to Jaya
In their petition, they requested Chief Minister Jayalalithaa to declare Friday as a public holiday so that people can watch the movie in comfort, without the hassle of taking off from work. Eager to watch the movie on the first day of its release, Rajinikanths fans said, Since it is a working day for colleges and offices, we will not be able to watch Kabali if the government does not announce public holiday.
Draft leave letter
The online draft leave letter too says Please excuse us from work on Friday, July 22. We understand that this absence may reduce the productivity of your workplace, but we assure you that it is for a good reason.
Kabali is releasing on July 22 and we want to enjoy the film on the first day. We thank you for your consideration and urge you to follow suit, take a day off, and watch the film along with the rest of the world. Sincerely, Rajini fans, the letter said.
A company called Fyndus in Chennai has declared a holiday for its employees on July 22 in view of the movie release.
On account of the release of actor Rajinis movie Kabali we have decided to declare a holiday on July 22 in an effort to avoid piled up leave requests to the HR department. We also take the privilege of going the extra mile to support anti-piracy by providing free tickets for the former Fyndus employees, Fyndus company, in its release, said.
Meanwhile, an undated video showing a blindfolded, bearded man being roughed up started doing the rounds on social media with the title Video of Fr Tom being beaten up. The video appears to have been uploaded from a Twitter handle. While veracity of the photograph and the video is yet to be ascertained, a member of the priests family said they looked real.
The priests friends and family members have responded to the photograph and video with prayers.
More than four months after Catholic priest Fr Tom Uzhunnalil was abducted by unidentified gunmen in the Republic of Yemen, a message was posted from his Facebook handle along with a photograph of the priest.The photograph of what appears to be a bearded, visibly harried Fr Tom was posted on Tuesday along with a message Fr Toms entreaty will be uploaded soon !
A city youth, Guda Sankeerth (25) employed in Austin, Texas in the USA, was stabbed to death by his room-mate K Sai Sandeep Goud (27) on Monday.
The victims parents G Vijay Kumar and Ramadevi reside in Kachiguda here. Sankeerth, who completed MS in the USA, later found a job there. The incident occurred on the intervening night of Monday and Tuesday.
The police took accused Goud into custody. According to the Austin Police, Goud, also a native of Hyderabad, had joined Sankeerth as a roommate a fortnight ago. One of their common friends, Praneeth, told Telugu TV channels here that there was a minor tiff between the duo following which he found Sankeerth profusely bleeding from stab wounds.
Acting on a phone call, the Austin Police went to Colonial Village at Quarry Oaks apartment complex, located at 6263 McNeil Drive around 3.30 am.
A rape victim in Kanpur, about 90 kilometres from here, chose a novel way to expose the culprits, who ironically were her own family members, including husband. The victim, Sapna (name changed) used donkeys for this purpose.
She held a demonstration before her husbands shop with donkeys besides distributing pamphlets among passersby explaining them her plight.
Tied to the neck of the donkeys were pieces of paper with names of the culprits who had raped her. They included her father-in-law and the elder brother of her husband.
Sapna, who was married a year ago, charged that her husband, who ran a shop in the town, had forced her to sleep with her father-in-law and her jeth (elder brother of the husband) a few months after the marriage.
She had lodged a complaint with the police following which the two were arrested and sent to jail. They have recently been released on bail and are threatening me..my husband is also with them, she charged.
Sapna said that she had apprised senior police officials about the threats but no action had been taken.
Such people must be exposed in public....they should be punished by the law as well as boycotted by the society..only then others like him will be scared, Sapna said. Sapnas protest drew curious passersby, who also joined her and raised slogans. The police said they would investigate the matter and take action against the culprits.
Amid severe criticism of the ruling BJP-Shiv Sena dispensation over the gang-rape and murder of a 14-year-old year girl in Ahmednagar district, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on Tuesday said that the government and the police would seek death penalty for the killers.
The right message would go only when death penalty is given, Fadnavis told the Assembly on Tuesday, after a debate on the issue.
On Monday, he had announced setting up of a fast-track court and appointment of special public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam, to lead the prosecution team in the court. Nikam, a veteran, had represented the government in several cases like the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai, 1993 serial blasts case and the Khairlanji killings.
This is a very serious crime. DNA evidence is scientific evidence and will help in conviction, he said. A five-member team, including forensic experts, will help bring the case to charge sheet level in the next four to six days, he said.
Pune police chief Rashmi Shukla, a woman officer of the rank of Additional Director General of Police, would also be visiting Kopardi in Karjat town of Ahmednagar district and speak to the family members. She would be speaking to family members and people of the locality, he said. All three accused have been arrested. Action will also be taken against the fourth accused, he said.
A youth was hacked to death on Monday night at Nidigere village in Sakleshpur taluk for informing police about illegal sand mining in Hemavathi waters.
Police have arrested four persons in connection with the murder and registered cases against 15 people, including former zilla panchayat member D C Sannaswamy.
The victim, identified as Ajay Sakbal (27), a resident of the village, had informed the police control room about illegal sand mining and the presence of excavators and lorries on the river basin.
Arun Sakbal, the victims elder brother in a complaint to the police, has stated that a 15-member gang intercepted Ajays vehicle and attacked him with lethal weapons, killing him on the spot.
Members of various dalit organisations blocked the Bengaluru-Mangaluru highway demanding CID probe into the murder.
They also sought a CBI probe into illegal sand mining in the taluk.
The Revenue department has set itself a six-month deadline for issuing possession certificates to those who have applied for regularisation of houses built on government land in rural as well as urban areas.
Speaking to reporters in Bengaluru, Revenue Minister Kagodu Thimmappa (in pic) said circulars have been issued to officials concerned that applications received under the regularisation scheme as per section 94 C of the Karnataka Land Revenue Act (for rural areas) and section 94 CC (urban areas) should be processed and possession certificates issued within six months.
Thimmappa said that around 15 lakh families, especially in rural areas, are likely to benefit from the scheme. The minister said the government is also thinking of slashing the regularisation fee that needs to be paid by the applicant.
At present, the regularisation fee (in rural areas) for houses constructed on 20x30 feet site is Rs 2,000, for houses constructed on sites up to a dimension of 40x60 feet it is Rs 4,000 and for sites of dimension up to 80x50 feet it is Rs 6,000.
Thimmappa said directions have also been issued to dispose off three lakh applications across the state for regularisation of Bagair Hukum land by March 2017. The same deadline has been set for applications received for regularisation of privileged lands such as Jamma Bane and Kumki land.
The minister said he will soon start touring districts to monitor the progress of the regularisation schemes.
The process of recruiting 1,300 surveyors would be taken up soon. The government was also thinking of direct recruitment of tahsildars, he said.
SpaceX successfully launches Dragon Cargo capsule using Falcon 9 rocket
Published: July 18, 2016
SpaceX successfully launched its Dragon Cargo capsule filled with supplies for astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
The Dragon Cargo capsule was launched using SpaceXs workhorse Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
After successful take off, the Falcon 9 rocket separated from cargo after sending in into orbit. Then the first stage of the rocket successfully landed back on the solid ground in Cape Canaveral at the NASA facility.
Key Facts
This is SpaceXs second attempt at delivering the docking port after Falcon 9 rocket exploded two minutes after liftoff in 2015.
The launch was resupply mission for NASA and the capsule was carrying equipments that were lost in 2015 explosion.
The capsule is carrying about 23000 kilograms of cargo, including ferrying instruments to perform the first-ever DNA sequencing in space.
It was also carrying a critical space station docking adapter for commercial spacecraft. The Dragon capsule will reach the ISS on 20 July 2016.
It will leave the space station on August 29, 2016 and shall bring 3,300 pounds of hardware, science, crew supplies and spacewalk tools back to Earth.
Dragon Cargo capsule: It is a SpaceXs free-flying spacecraft. It is designed to deliver both people and cargo to orbiting destinations. In 2012, the capsule had created history by becoming the first commercial spacecraft in space history to deliver cargo to the ISS and safely return cargo to Earth. Earlier all space deliveries were done by government space agencies. Currently Dragon Cargo capsule is only spacecraft in operation capable of returning significant amounts of cargo to Earth
Falcon 9 rocket: It is SpaceXs two-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle designed and manufactured by Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX), a private space transportation company based in Hawthorne, California.
Month: Current Affairs - July, 2016
Topics: Dragon Cargo capsule Falcon 9 rocket International International Space Station NASA Science and Technology Space technology SpaceX
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Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Tuesday denied he withheld details of cases pending against him in the affidavit filed by him during the 2013 Assembly elections.
Charges made by JD(S) leader H D Kumaraswamy that 10 cases were pending against me in Mysuru are false. All the cases were closed way back in 2008... He (Kumaraswamy) is a big liar, the chief minister told reporters.
The police had filed petty cases such as unlawful assembly for staging protests in Mysuru, he said.
Many of these cases were filed in 2007. The CID subsequently submitted a C report and it was accepted in 2008, Siddaramaiah added. But Kumaraswamy has tried to mislead people by claiming that the cases were not disclosed during the 2013 elections, he said.
He, however, admitted that Congress worker Marigowda had staged protests with him and that cases were also filed against him.
Mysuru Deputy Commissioner C Shikha recently filed a case against Marigowda for abusing her. Marigowda is said to be a close aide of Siddaramaiah.
The Lok Sabha on Tuesday witnessed Union Minister for Home Affairs Rajnath Singh countering the Congress on the Supreme Court decision to restore the grand old partys government in Arunachal Pradesh.
As Senior Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge said in the Lower House that the apex courts verdict on the restoration of Congress government in the state was a slap on the face of the BJP, Singh hit back, maintaining that the political crisis in the state was the result of the division within the ranks and files of the Congress. A boat is bound to sink if it has a hole, he added. The home minister also countered Kharges charge that the BJP government was in the habit of destabilising the popular governments, saying the Congress had a history of indulging in such activities.
I want to tell Kharge that it has been the habit of the Congress government to destabilise popular governments. They have done this as many as 105 times. They are into the habit of toppling governments, not us, Singh charged.
Kharge raising the matter in the Lok Sabha during the zero hour and hailed the Supreme Court for its decision on Arunachal Pradesh, saying the verdict of the apex court was historic and it will be written in golden letters. The Supreme Court has given such a slap on their face today that, I think, whatever they (Central government) did in Arunachal Pradesh to destabilise our (Congress) government they will never do such things ever in future. We thank the Supreme Court for upholding the Constitution, he said.
Without taking any name, Kharge underlined that many of those in the government criticise the Supreme Court, but apex court had to interfere when the government was indulging in unconstitutional activities. You have decided to execute your Congress-mukt (Congress-free) slogan by any means. Wherever you get a chance, you destabilise governments and work to replace them with yours. You did so in Uttarakhand and Arunachal and tried in Manipur and Himachal Pradesh too. This is good for neither public nor Constitution, he said.
A woman police sub-inspector attempted suicide by consuming paracetamol and painkiller tablets at her Rajajinagar police quarters flat on Tuesday afternoon. Roopa Tambad, 34, attached to the Vijayanagar police station, was rushed to Suguna Hospital on Dr Rajkumar Road and her condition is stated to be stable. She is being treated at the ICU, said the police.
Preliminary investigation indicated that she took the extreme step after a heated argument with Vijayanagar police station inspector Sanjeev Gowda over an old case on Monday night.
Roopa was upset after she learnt about the adverse remarks entered by the inspector against her in the official diary. The inspector had objected to Roopas style of functioning and had stated that she did not follow senior officers instructions. She told her colleagues that Gowda was targeting her without any reason. Roopa had stated in her diary that she was leaving for the City Police Commissioners office and left the station, said the police.
Additional Commissioner of Police (West) Charan Reddy, who visited the hospital, said Roopa went straight to her flat and consumed the tablets. She was not in a position to talk when her husband Nataraj returned home at about 4 pm. He rushed her to the hospital, Reddy added.
Roopa and Gowda had an argument over a recovered cellphone that was misplaced. She was upset as Gowda claimed that she was in possession of the phone.
He also entered adverse remarks against her in the diary. The police will go through the content of the diary and conduct an enquiry. We will also take a statement from her after she recovers, Reddy said.
Roopa had recovered a cellphone from a man involved in a Pocso case about a month ago. He was arrested and sent to jail. He obtained bail and approached her on Monday seeking his cellphone. She told him that she had handed over the phone to Gowda.
The inspector summoned her and scolded her for cooking up a story. Roopa claimed that she had handed over the phone to the then ACP S K Umesh, one of her colleagues told DH. She did not meet Gowda though he summoned her four times. Gowda lost cool and entered adverse remarks against her, he added. She had moved a requisition two weeks ago seeking transfer to Basaveshwarnagar police station.
Suguna Hospitals Dr Ravindra said that Roopa would be normal in the next 48 hours. She consumed about 25 tablets. The doctors will send her blood sample to Mumbai for paracetamol detoxification test on Wednesday, he said.
Roopa hails from Davanagere and had joined the police service in 2009. She was transferred to the Vijaynagar police station two years ago from the City Police Commissioners office. She is married to Nataraj, an advocate, and the couple have a three-year-old daughter.
A 28-year-old software engineer committed suicide by jumping from the ninth floor of his office building in Bellandur on Monday night. Gulshan Chopra, a native of Jalandhar in Punjab, was working for Genpact, a software company located in Ecospace in Bellandur. Around 10 pm, he went to a toilet on the ninth floor of his office and jumped through a window, the police said.
The security guards, who were on the ground floor, heard a noise. When they went there to check, they found Chopra lying in a pool of blood. They alerted his colleagues, who shifted him to a nearby private hospital. He was declared brought dead, the police said.
A senior police officer said that Chopra came to work on Monday after returning from his native place. He had got engaged a month ago and the wedding was scheduled to take place in November. He was living alone here.
His colleagues have told us that he was a normal person and was focused. He did not discuss any issues with them, the officer said.
The body has been kept at the Victoria Hospital mortuary. The police are waiting for his parents to arrive. We will speak to his parents to ascertain the reason for the suicide. We are trying to access his laptop and mobile phones to see if we can get any clues. All angles are being probed, including any harassment by his colleagues or senior executives in the company or friends. For now, nothing can be concluded, added the officer. The HSR Layout police have registered a case.
Chopras parents, who were contacted by Deccan Herald, refused to comment. Reacting to Chopras death, Genpact said: We are deeply shocked and saddened by Gulshan Chopras death. He was a good employee and performing well at work. Our heart reaches out to his family and we are supporting them in this hour of sorrow. We are working with the police to complete the investigation and are extending our full support to the authorities.
Ola driver ends life
A 23-year-old Ola driver was found dead in his car near a park in Azad Nagar in Chamarajpet, west Bengaluru, on Tuesday morning. The police suspect that Rangaswamy, a resident of Azad Nagar, committed suicide by consuming poison in the car.
He had attached his fathers car to cab aggregator Ola and was working as a driver. Rangaswamy left home after dinner on Monday, saying that he will come back after some time.
Depression
He went straight near the park and consumed poison in the car. The police found the poison bottle inside the car.
On Tuesday morning, public noticed him lying in the car and called the jurisdictional Chamarajpet police, who arrived at the spot and identified him with a cab driver identity card. Rangaswamys parents told the police that he had been depressed.
A private firm has not only declared a special holiday on Friday for its staff to watch Rajinikanth starrer Kabali, but has also booked tickets for the employees and their families.
Manoj Pushparaj, Head-Operations of Opus Waterpoofing, a private firm in Mangamammanapalya near Electronics City, told Deccan Herald that he had heard his employees talking about the movie release and about their plans to seek leave. Before they could approach me for leave with lame excuses, I decided to declare a special holiday, he said.
On Sunday, an internal notice was sent to all employees. Initially, they thought it was a work-related notice, but they were in for a surprise after they went through it. Several of them approached me to confirm the holiday, Pushparaj, said and added that the holiday was also meant to give a break from the rigorous work this monsoon.
The company has contacted PVR, Cinemax and Inox multiplexes for the show. We still dont know if we will get all the tickets for one single show or for different shows, added Pushparaj.
Pushparaj feels it will motivate employees to build a healthy relationship with the management besides making them work with more dedication. We usually organise lunches or one-day trips. This time, I thought providing tickets for the movie and declaring a holiday was more appropriate, he said.
Kollappan, site-cum-project engineer, said all his colleagues were excited at the companys surprise gesture. As soon as I heard about the special holiday, I called my friend in Coimbatore and asked him to book tickets for the movie. But when the company informed us that it would also provide the tickets, I cancelled my trip. For the first time, I will be watching the movie with all my colleagues and I am eagerly waiting for it.
: ; - CM ?; -
Junko Yoshida, EETimes
7/19/2016 00:01 AM EDT
MADISON, Wis.For proof that SoftBank is no ordinary Japanese conglomerate, look no further than its just-announced acquisition of ARM. Masayoshi Son, the smart, opinionated and hands-on CEO of SoftBank Group has constantly surprised the financial market with audacious bets like this.
Yes, SoftBank is Japanese, but its a company that defies the stuffy stereotype. It doesnt subscribe to such Japanese traditions as snaild-pace decision-making, bureaucratic quagmires, endless internal discussions, insular thinking and the ultimate paralysis of indecision.
To outsiders, though, the most vexing question about SoftBanks deal with ARM is SoftBank itself.
Who are these guys and whats in it for them? Put more bluntly, why does plunking down $32 billion for ARM really make sense for SoftBank?
Click here to read more ...
Telenor has ruled out its participation in Indias mammoth upcoming spectrum auction, prompting speculation that it may be planning to leave the market.
The Norwegian firmed revealed its intention during its second quarter results statement, noting that it had decided not to participate in the upcoming spectrum auction, as we believe the proposed spectrum prices do not give an acceptable level of return.
Currently expected to be held in September, the auction will be Indias largest ever. The premium 700MHz band will be available for bidding, and in anticipation of high bids, reports are indicating that the auction could raise as much as INR5.6 trillion ($85 billion).
One of the markets largest operators, Vodafone India, has reportedly been considering an acquisition of Telenors Indian operators. The Norwegian firm abstaining from the auction will certainly add weight to this rumour. Telenor has 54 million mobile connections but no mobile internet coverage for either 3G or 4G.
Telenor CEO Sigve Brekke has noted that the firm is looking to secure the long-term future of its Indian unit as soon as possible, noting that we will be disciplined on capex. He stated: We need more spectrum in India to be able to compete in the data segment and that solution we dont have. That is why I am saying we need to consider all different options. What those options may be in a very dynamic market, I dont want to speculate on what.
Telenors financial report saw its net income plummet by almost two thirds to NOK1.11 billion ($130 million), compared to NOK3.5 billion a year ago. While falling device sales were a significant factor, the firm also faced an impairment charge over VimpelComs involvement in a bribery scandal in Uzbekistan.
The Norwegian operator is looking to shift its 33% stake in the Russian firm, but notes that VimpelCom will continue to be classified as an associated company, until it is highly probable that a sale within 12 months will occur.
Despite the fall in income, Telenors Q2 revenue was up year-on-year from NOK31.4 billion to NOK32.5 billion, with Brekke placing greater emphasis on increasing the companys data capabilities across its operations, noting that Telenor had seen encouraging signs of data monetisation in several of our markets. Digitising our core business, combined with efficiency measures, will be key to drive value creation going forward.
In India, Telenors Q2 revenue grew 23% compared to last year, with Bangladesh and Pakistan where it offers 3G services - showing a similar gain.
The Redmi Note 4 from Xiaomi is likely to be a mid range phone and will feature a large battery like the Redmi Note 3
Earlier today, alleged images of a retail box of the Redmi Note 4 surfaced online. According to the leaked image, the upcoming Redmi Note 4 will be powered by a MediaTek Helio X20 SoC. This is a new deca-core SoC from MediaTek, which is an upgrade over the last generation Helio X10. Till now only a few phones use this SoC. Yesterday, we also heard news about Xiaomi hosting an event on July 27, where the company might announce the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 along with the a new laptop.
Alongside the MediaTek Helio X20 SoC, the leaked image reveals that the phone will have a 5.5-inch display. The device will have 3GB of RAM and 64GB of on-board storage. On the camera front, the leaked image suggest that the phone will have a 13MP rear camera and a 5MP front facing camera. It will be sporting a 4100mAh battery, which is 100mAh larger than the 4000mAh battery, the Redmi Note 3 employs. According to previous rumors, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 will sport an all metal build and could feature a dual camera setup.
Details about the pricing and availability are still under wraps as the device is yet to go official. However, even if this phone come to India, it wont be the first device to be powered by a Helio X20 SoC. Zopo, which is another China based phone maker will be launching its MediaTek Helio X20 powered Speed 8 on July 20. The Zopo Speed 8 was earlier showcased at MWC Barcelona.
Turkey sacked 15,200 staff at the ministry of education on Tuesday in the latest purge of anyone thought to be affiliated with the coup attempt.
The staff were sacked due to alleged ties to the exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom the Turkish government blamed for the coup. Gulen denied any involvement. Turkey had demanded that Gulen, who was living in the US state of Pennsylvania, be extradited.
The BBC reported that the Turkeys high education board ordered the resignation of over 1,500 university deans.
On Tuesday, Turkish news agency Anatolia reported that the EPDK, the country's energy market regulator, also suspended 25 officials for alleged links to the coup.
Since Fridays attempted coup, military, judiciary, police and other officials had been detained, suspended or sacked.
So far 7,543 people including 6,038 soldiers were detained, 50 civil servants had been dismissed, while 8,000 police officers had been sacked.
During the previous weekend's failed coup 232 people were killed, of which 208 were civilians.
On the evening of 15 July the military attempted to seize power from president Recep Tayyip Erdogan by taking over the state media. The coup was wholly unsuccessful with Erdogan not only holding on to power but, according to some observers, also provided with an opportunity to in fact tighten his grip on power.
As of 16:38 BST the US dollar was 1.69% higher versus the Turkish lira at 3.0275, while the Borsa Istanbul 100 equity index had closed 1.01% to 76,177.81 after a large slide in the last hour of trading.
British employers are failing to train their staff up to the level of digital skills they require to do their jobs, according to a poll by Barclays .
The shortage of digital skills is costing the UK around 63bn a year in lost economic activity. The online poll of 10,000 people indicated that for vocational skills Britain came seventh out of 10 countries. There were 38% of UK workers who said their employer offered training compared to 48% in the US and 67% in India.
Barclays chief executive Ashok Vaswani, self-taught in coding, said the UK was fourth out of 10 countries for its support of digital knowledge.
Clearly the government has done a lot to put the basic building blocks in place, he said, but added that more could be done.
As the UK considers its future outside the European Union, we have to remember that the race to become the most digitally savvy economy is global and not confined to Europe."
According to a report by the science and technology committee, an estimate of 5.8m people in Britain have never used the internet. The 16% of the poll's UK respondents felt very comfortable building a website whereas in Brazil the figure was at 39%. According to researchers the greater confidence came from the younger workforce.
Barclays are pushing to provide more digital services through offering help to customers struggling to use their tablets and are launching 12 pilot Eagle labs this year to allow businesses access to 3D printers and other technologies.
Vaswani declined to say whether this focus on online traffic would lead to the closure of some of their traditional branches on the high street. The bank has however found new roles for the branches to keep them in operation. Barclays run eight small sites in Asda supermarkets and have initiated a click and collect pilot with Amazon to enable customers to pick up their purchases from lockers in six of their branches.
If you think about the bankers of old, they were at the centre of the community, and they were respected. [These pilots] are about creating that in the digital world, said Vaswani.
Enda Kenny cites Britain's decision to leave the bloc as reason to open dialogue on the controversial issue
Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny has opened the debate for a unity poll on the country's border with Northern Ireland, after Britain's decision to leave the European Union last month.
Kenny called on EU leaders to prepare for the prospect of a vote on the constitutional question of the North, comparing it to the situation of West and East Germany after the Berlin Wall's collapse.
Speaking at a summer school in Glenties, Donegal, close to the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, the Taoiseach referred to a clause in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement hat allows for a poll if there is significant support for the idea.
"The discussion and negotiations that take place over the next period should take into account the possibility, however far out it might be, that the clause in the Good Friday Agreement might be triggered," he said, "in that if there is a clear evidence of a majority of people wishing to leave the United Kingdom and join the Republic, that should be catered for in the discussions.
Kenny called on EU leaders to prepare for the prospect of a vote on the constitutional question
"Because if that possibility were to happen, you would have Northern Ireland wishing to leave the United Kingdom, not being a member of the European Union, and joining the Republic, which will be a member of the EU."
Britain decided to leave the European bloc at the end of last month, triggering vast political uncertainty in the British Isles, from the leadership of the main political parties to questions regarding Scotland and Northern Ireland's positions in the UK, after both voted to remain in the EU.
The Taoiseach told an audience that the North-South trade links were more important in terms of volume to the North, which would suggest an appetite for such a vote there.
"So in the same way as East Germany was dealt with when the wall came down, was able to be absorbed into West Germany and not to have to have to go through a torturous and long process of applying for membership of the European Union," the Taoiseach said.
"So when Northern Ireland voted to stay (in the EU), who knows what might happen in the time ahead? I am just making the point that these are the kinds of things that should be looked at in the broadest of ways in discussions that take place.
Recently appointed Secretary of State for Northern Ireland James Brokenshire has ruled out the possibility of any type of border poll, backing the stance of current First Minister Arlene Foster.
Republican Party Sinn Fein have called for a discussion about the constitutional question ever since the result of Britain's referendum.
The UK parliament has voted to renew the Trident nuclear weapons system by 472 to 117.
The vote effectively approves the manufacture of four replacement submarines at an estimated 31bn.
The controversial subject divides many MPs, most notably Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn who wants to see the system scrapped.
However he was defied by many in his own party who are in favour of the nuclear deterrent. The BBC reported that 60% of Labour MPs sided with the government.
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3D NAND die with M.2 SSD
Intel and Micron have jointly announced the availability of their 3D NAND technology. This new 3D NAND technology, jointly developed by the companies, stacks layers of data storage cells vertically to create storage devices with three times higher capacity than competing NAND technologies, according to the companies. Intel and Micron chose to use a floating gate cell. This is the first use of a floating gate cell in 3D NAND, which was a key design choice to enable greater performance and increase quality and reliability. The new 3D NAND technology stacks flash cells vertically in 32 layers to achieve 256Gb multilevel cell (MLC) and 384Gb triple-level cell (TLC) die that fit within a standard package. These capacities can enable gum stick-sized SSDs with more than 3.5TB of storage and standard 2.5-inch SSDs with greater than 10TB. Because capacity is achieved by stacking cells vertically, the individual cell dimensions can be considerably larger, the companies indicated. The 256Gb MLC version of 3D NAND is sampling with select partners, and the 384Gb TLC design will be sampling later in spring 2015. The fab production line has already begun initial runs, and both devices will be in full production by the fourth quarter of 2015.
How Ohio anti-abortion activists shaped post-Roe America
Ohio led a slow, determined push to steadily weaken and then nearly eliminate abortion rights. It's indicative of what has happened around the U.S.
Idaho may try subscriptions to fund a solar power plant
This would be Idaho's first utility-owned solar power production facility.
By KEITH RIDLER
Associated Press
BOISE, Idaho (AP) The Idaho Power electrical utility is proposing the construction of a solar power project that would be funded by customers who take out subscriptions to guarantee it gets built, the company said Monday.
The company recently filed an application with the Idaho Public Utilities Commission to launch the project on land southeast of Boise, which would be the state's first utility-owned solar power production facility.
The 500-kilowatt solar project would involve the installation of solar panels on an area the size of two football fields and power about 730 homes, said company spokesman Brad Bowlin.
It would be a so-called community solar project aimed at attracting customers who can't install solar panels on their homes because they rent, live in communities with rules prohibiting solar panels or have houses shaded by trees.
Most of the project's $1.2 million construction cost would be paid by customers who take out subscriptions, said Bowlin.
If approved by the commission, Idaho Power would offer about 1,500 subscriptions costing $740 per 320-watt solar panel. Buyers would receive credit for their portion of the solar array's output on their monthly bill over the 25-year life of the project.
There are a lot of folks who are interested in solar power, and especially locally generated solar power, Bowlin said.
Bowlin said the subscription-based business model is aimed at assessing whether there's enough interest in building the solar project.
The utility has 516,000 customers in Idaho and eastern Oregon. Those who don't want to participate will not face any charges for the project, Bowlin said.
The amount of energy that would be generated by the solar project is a tiny fraction of the 3,200 megawatts the company is occasionally called on to supply on a hot summer day. Much of that is supplied by the company's 17 hydroelectric projects on the Snake River and its tributaries, as well as coal and gas plants, which can produce less expensive power than solar energy.
Bowlin warned that participants won't save money on their monthly energy bills except for a tiny monthly deduction over 25 years that pays back the initial $740 solar project construction subscription cost.
This is intended for folks who want to support the development of solar energy, he said.
Meanwhile, the company will learn more about solar energy as costs to produce it decline and regulations come into force requiring reductions in carbon emissions.
The commission will decide whether the project's business model is good for the state and consumers, commission spokesman Gene Fadness said via email.
It wants to make sure customers will feel their investment makes sense from both an economic and an environmental perspective, he said.
A decision is likely in the fall.
If the project is approved, Idaho Power will advertise the program.
It would be built by June unless customers take out less than about 1,200 subscriptions, meaning the project would probably not go forward, Bowlin said.
Australias fun police are reeling over the Ford Motor Companys latest hot hatch which comes standard with a Drift Mode.
The driver setting is designed to allow the car to go sideways in a controlled manner much easier.
The local authorities and safety lobby groups however arent having a bar of it. As the first car manufacturer to ever feature this mode in a production car, Australian police are convinced that the new 2016 Ford Focus RS will encourage hoons to try this feature on public roads whilst endangering other motorists.
The rally-inspired technology in Fords new car works by modifying the torque distribution in the all-wheel-drive system to send more power to the rear wheels. More specifically, extra torque is sent to the outer-rear wheel to cause the car to lose traction and slide.
The Focus RS is currently on sale in Australia and comes with a driver warning that such a feat should only be tried on the race track. A further statement from Ford reiterated that: Drift mode is targeted for track use only a disclaimer appears on (the instrument) cluster when switching modes. We believe the drift and track modes are appropriate for racetracks, and that typical Focus RS customers will understand the need to deploy these features under controlled and safe conditions such as during a track day.
Harold Scruby who is a road safety campaigner for the Pedestrian Council of Australia disagrees. He told news.com that he was absolutely stunned that the technology was approved for use in Australia.
A disclaimer is not going to stop an idiot from trying this on public roads, said Scruby. We urge Ford to reconsider its decision, recall these vehicles and disable this driving mode. Ford cannot absolve itself from its duty of care to road users and its customers with a disclaimer in the dashboard.
Australia currently boasts some of the worlds strictest road rules and speed limits are heavily governed by massive fines and loss of license. Those caught drifting in most states can have their cars confiscated along with a 12-month ban for drivers.
Regardless it doesnt look like theyll be able to stop the popularity of the Ford Focus RS amongst local enthusiasts.
If your Instagram game has been pretty average lately, it might be time for a trip to where to grass is a little greener, or at least worthy of more followers and likes.
If youre looking for a spot to get your Instagram on that doesnt require a million filters but will guarantee you adoring Insta-fans, then look no further than below.
Sydney-based photographer Mitch Green recently revealed to Mashable his favourite spots around Australia to get the perfect Instagram photo, and heres his top 9 picks.
#1 Centre Place, Melbourne
Lined with graffiti and bustling with hipsters and tourists alike, Melbournes Centre Place is the perfect laneway to appear #cultured.
#2 Allora, Queensland
Flowers are a magnet for likes on Instagram and the sunflower fields of Queenslands Allora are no exception. Green described Allora as one of those scenes where its actually impossible to take a bad photo.
#3 Lucky Bay, Western Australia
If youve always wanted to get up-close-and-personal with a kangaroo, or at least let your followers know you have, then Lucky Bay in Western Australia is the Instagram worthy spot for you.
#4 Mrs Macquaries Point, Sydney
Okay, okay, so its a bit of a cliche cheesy wedding photo spot, but theres no denying the views from Mrs Macquaries Point in Sydney. You can Instagram the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Opera House and the entire city skyline in one fell swoop.
#5 Liffey Point, Tasmania
Dont go chasing waterfalls, or maybe do if youre keen on growing your Insta-fan base. Nestled in Tasmanias extensive rainforest, Liffey Point is an idyllic natural reserve which is also home to the stunning Liffey Falls.
#6 Honour Avenue, Macedon
Like a scene out of a Hollywood film, Macedons Honour Avenue is a breathtaking tree-lined street west of Melbourne that makes for some pretty incredible Instagram photos.
#7 Cape du Couedic Lighthouse, Kangaroo Island
Lighthouses always look good in a photo and the Cape du Couedic Lighthouse on Kangaroo Island is the perfect rugged, yet natural landmark to add to your Instagram newsfeed.
#8 Sugar Pine Forest, Laurel Hill, NSW
If you get up early enough for your next Instagram adventure, the sunrise that peers through Laurel Hills Sugar Pine Forest is pretty darn spectacular, and its only a 2.5 drive from Canberra.
#9 Mount Gillen, Alice Springs
The outback is another Aussie gem when it comes to taking an Instagram photo that turns heads. Thats why Mount Gillen in Alice Springs makes Mitch Greens list of Instagram worthy spots. Just remember to pack your hiking boots.
[via Mashable
The Bonne Terre City Council met in regular session Monday evening to discuss several topics including work at the Bonne Terre Airport, road improvements and where they are at with the city administrator position.
Bonne Terre Airport Manager Steve Vogt said they had applied for a grant over the winter to clean and refill cracks, fix a couple of areas on the runway and reseal the runway entirely.
They will also repaint everything, the numbers and stripes and it is $150,000 that is what they budgeted, said Vogt. They are looking at doing it late September, early October and the runway will be closed for about a week when that happens.
Vogt said it is a 90/10 match and he is responsible for that, not the city. He added he has been looking into a grant to cover the 10 percent.
MoDOT is requiring an ordinance from the city to move forward with the project and if the city is OK with this, it is pretty much a done deal, said Vogt. Concurrent with that, we also applied for a grant for new runway lights for next year. Tentatively they have projected $125,000 for that and that will make the airport a 24-hour operation.
Vogt said that grant is also a 90/10 match and he plans to cover the 10 percent as well, not the city.
You can take off at night, but you just cant land at night because you cant see it from the air, said Vogt. Once the runway lights are in place, then you will be able to find the airport and land. We are trying to make some big improvements.
Vogt said the lights are what they call a pilot-controlled lighting system, they dont stay on all the time.
When you get in about 10 miles or so, you click your mic five times until all the lights turn on and then they will stay on about 20 minutes, said Vogt. Its a good system and that way the lights arent on all the time. It saves money.
He added he needs the council to pass the ordinance as soon as they reasonably can because that is the next step in the project.
There is sort of a time crunch if we are looking to getting it done this year, said Vogt. Id like to see it passed this month, but its up to the council on when they can get it approved.
The council plans to move forward with having the city attorney write an ordinance and approve it by next months meeting.
In other matters, Bonne Terre City Administrator Jim Eaton said they have an agreement with MoDOT to pave Route E up to what used to be the city limits.
This is an extension for some reason. The city had matched Route E out past the Pines, said Eaton. That is a good distance of road length and with this agreement, it will pave that. In other words, had we not reached this agreement there would be an area that wouldnt be improved, because MoDOT is paving from our city limits to De Soto.
Eaton added the city is working on Norwine Street. He said its going to include digging out some of the clay/mud that is coming through the street and they will put compacted gravel back in there.
Then it will be overlaid and built up followed by a top coat, said Eaton. Also there are two culverts on Norwine Street that will be replaced. There has been discussion that we should go with the plastic culverts, but it will all depend on the price.
The council heard an update on the citys budget from John Shinn, a manager with Thurman, Shinn & Company.
The budget seems to be OK and there will be some budget adjustments which can be expected, said Eaton. The revenues and the expense are in general line. The city has excess funds in sewer and water reserve accounts.
Also during the meeting, Eaton said the process for a new city administrator is ongoing, but there has not been a final group or decision at this time.
The city council is going to have to give it some long thought and that was one reason for the report from the accountant, said Eaton. We needed to see where our funds were and how much we can afford to pay a new city administrator eventually. I think the council wants to move on with it, but when we entered into this it was specifically said we are not going to jump into this.
Mayor Brandon Hubbard said they don't want to rush into anything and he wants to find the best person for the job.
A team of renal nurses flew more than 3,450 miles to become the first graduates of a course revolutionising the treatment of kidney disease in the UAE.
The nurses collected their MSc in Renal Nursing to cheers and applause on the first day of De Montfort University Leicester (DMU)s summer graduations.
Mohammad Alghraiybah, Eva Calimlim, Manal Hamoudeh, Jent Lee, Dexie Josefa Mariano, Allam Rezqallah and Faduma Sharif said they were thrilled to collect their degrees.
It has been hard work but collecting our degree is a very special day for us, said Faduma.
Eva said: People have been so friendly, everyone is smiling and wishing us well.
The ceremony was really nice, we really liked it. The Vice-Chancellor having close contact with the graduates was much appreciated.
There is a huge need for quality renal nursing in Abu Dhabi, with more than 1,000 people per million of the population requiring dialysis, one of the highest rates in the world.
The Renal Nursing programme is helping fill this gap by ensuring patients receive the highest possible standards of care, while also helping to raise the profile of this type of nursing in the region.
The nurses are already implementing findings from their studies and making a difference to the kidney service a vital part in the treatment of this incurable disease.
Jent Lee, who also graduated on Saturday, said: A masters in Renal Nursing is one of the rare, if not the best, opportunities a practicing kidney nurse could be offered to take.
With the latest trend in nursing practice, evidenced based nursing taking its lead, it is a privilege to study a course offered in learning and developing such skills.
The programme is a partnership between DMUs School of Nursing and Midwifery, Abu Dhabis local provider of kidney services, the SEHA Dialysis Services (a partnership between SEHA and Fresenius Medical Care) and Fatima College of Health Sciences providing a direct approach to improving management of kidney disease.
Recommendations made by the nurses in their final projects, as part of the programme are already being used by the dialysis service to improve outcomes for patients.
The new MSc was accredited as highly commended by the European Dialysis and Transplant Nurses Association (EDTNA), their highest category of award.
EDTNA is a multidisciplinary international renal association representing more than 74 countries.
Students work full-time in a range of clinical settings, including dialysis, transplantation and intensive care, while completing the MSc in only 18 months.
Dexie said: The programme challenged us as senior nurses. We got to work in different areas of renal nursing to develop our skills and see the different options available to patients.
Many of the new graduates are already set to have papers included in specialist journals. They will all present their work at the international EDTNA conference in Spain in September.
The European Union reminded Turkey on Monday that it is bound by its commitments under the European Convention on Human Rights and as a member of the Council of Europe not to reintroduce the death penalty. "No country can become an EU member state if it introduces the death penalty," EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini told reporters in Brussels when asked about suggestions that EU accession candidate Turkey might execute leaders of the failed coup. She also noted that Turkey was a member of the Council of Europe and a signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights, which bans capital punishment across the continent: "Turkey is an important part of the Council of Europe and is bound by the European Convention on Human Rights, which is very clear on the death penalty," she said. Meanwhile, Germany separately warned Turkey that it cannot join the European Union if it reinstates the death penalty, sending a clear message to President Tayyip Erdogan who has raised the possibility after a failed military coup. The government also urged Turkey to maintain the rule of law in investigating and bringing those behind the weekend coup attempt to justice, and raised questions about Turkey's decision to round up thousands of judges. "Germany and the member states of the EU have a clear position on that: We categorically reject the death penalty," government spokesman Steffen Seibert told a news conference. "A country that has the death penalty can't be a member of the European Union and the introduction of the death penalty in Turkey would therefore mean the end of accession negotiations." Turkey abolished capital punishment in 2004, allowing it to open EU accession talks the following year, but the negotiations have made scant progress since then. With pro-government protestors demanding that the coup leaders be executed, Erdogan said on Sunday that the government would discuss the measure with opposition parties. Even before the coup attempt, many EU states were not eager to see such a large, mostly Muslim country as a member, and were concerned that Ankara's record on basic freedoms had gone into reverse in recent years. Turkey widened the crackdown on suspected supporters of the coup on Sunday, taking the number of people rounded up in the armed forces and judiciary to 6,000 (See: Turkey holds thousands in relentless post-coup crackdown). German officials said they had seen no evidence of any conspiracy in the events beyond an effort by parts of the Turkish military to seize control of the government. Erdogan and the Turkish government have accused the US-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, a former ally of Erdogan, of orchestrating the coup. Seibert said German and EU officials would emphasise the need to maintain the rule of law in all their conversations with Turkey. He said he expected EU foreign ministers to address their concerns about the revival of the death penalty and disproportionate punishment in a joint statement about the situation after a meeting in Brussels later on Monday. "Everyone understands that the Turkish government and the Turkish justice system must bring those responsible for the coup to justice, but they must maintain the rule of law, and that always means maintaining proportionality ... and transparency." German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke to his counterpart early on Sunday, but Chancellor Angela Merkel has not spoken to Erdogan since the attempted coup, government spokesmen said.
The Northern Ireland economy would grow only 0.2 per cent in 2017, according to the projection of the consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).
It added the result of last month's referendum, in which the UK voted to leave the EU would lead to a slowdown in the UK economy.
The firm had also forecast a gradual recovery later in 2017 with the post-Brexit shock starting to fade.
According to PwC's Esmond Birnie, the main reason for the slowdown was a projected decline in business investment.
According to Birnie, the firm's chief economist in Northern Ireland, investment from overseas would be particularly affected.
He added that it was not certain that a recession would be avoided.
According to PwC, UK growth had already eased from about 3 per cent in 2014 to about 2 per cent before the EU referendum, due primarily to slower global growth.
However, it added that the vote to leave the EU would likely lead to a "significant further slowdown" with UK GDP growth forecast to fall to about 1.6 per cent in 2016 and 0.6 per cent in 2017.
For Northern Ireland growth was projected about 1 per cent for 2016, falling to 0.2 per cent in 2017, making it the poorest-performing of the 12 UK regions.
"Quarter-on-quarter GDP growth could fall to close to zero in late 2016 and early 2017 in this main scenario, but is then projected to recover gradually later in 2017 as the immediate post-referendum shock starts to fade," PwC said. In an alternative scenario, UK economic growth could come in anywhere between +1.5 per cent and -1 per cent next year, it added.
"But even this latter relatively pessimistic scenario would not be a severe recession of the kind seen in the early 1980s or in 2008-9," the firm said.
A huge earthquake may be building beneath Bangladesh, the most densely populated nation on earth. Scientists say they have new evidence of increasing strain there, where two tectonic plates underlie the world's largest river delta. They estimate that at least 140 million people in the region could be affected if the boundary ruptures; the destruction could come not only from the direct results of shaking, but changes in the courses of great rivers, and in the level of land already perilously close to sea level. The region is built on the world's largest river delta, and water is everywhere. Widespread poverty, soft sediments and rapidly multiplying infrastructure including bridges like this one near the southern city of Khulna make the region exquisitely vulnerable to earthquakes. (Kevin Krajick/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory) The newly identified threat is a subduction zone, where one section of earth's crust, or tectonic plate, is slowly thrusting under another. All of earth's biggest known earthquakes occur along such zones; these include the Indian Ocean quake and tsunami that killed some 230,000 people in 2004, and the 2011 Tohoku quake and tsunami off Japan, which swept away more than 20,000 and caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The findings appear in this week's issue of Nature Geoscience. Subduction-zone quakes generally occur where plates of heavy ocean crust slowly dive offshore beneath the lighter rocks of adjoining continents, or under other parts of the seafloor. Sometimes sections get stuck against each other over years or centuries, and then finally slip, moving the earth. Scientists knew of the plate boundary in and around Bangladesh, but many assumed it to be sliding only horizontally near the surface, where it sometimes causes fairly large, but less damaging earthquakes in areas that are not as densely populated. However, the authors of the new research say movements on the surface over the past decade show that subduction is taking place below, and that part of the plate juncture is locked and loading up with stress. They are not forecasting an imminent great earthquake, but say it is an ''underappreciated hazard.'' ''Some of us have long suspected this hazard, but we didn't have the data and a model,'' said lead author Michael Steckler, a geophysicist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. ''Now we have the data and a model, and we can estimate the size.'' He said strain between the plates has been building for at least 400 years -- the span of reliable historical records, which lack reports of any mega-quake. When an inevitable release comes, the shaking is likely to be larger than 8.2, and could reach a magnitude of 9, similar to the largest known modern quakes, said Steckler. ''We don't know how long it will take to build up steam, because we don't know how long it was since the last one,'' he said. We can't say it's imminent or another 500 years. But we can definitely see it building.'' The newly identified zone is an extension of the same tectonic boundary that caused the 2004 Indian Ocean undersea quake, some 1,300 miles south. As the boundary reaches southeast Asia, the complexity of the motions along it multiply, and scientists do not completely understand all of them. But basically, they say, a giant plate comprising India and much of the Indian Ocean has been thrusting northeasterly into Asia for tens of millions of years. Bangladesh, Myanmar and eastern India (all near top) are bisected by an extension of the tectonic boundary that ruptured under the Indian Ocean in 2004, killing some 230,000 people. Known quakes along the boundary's southern end are shown in different colors; the black sections nearer the top have not ruptured in historic times, but new research suggests they could. (Michael Steckler/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory) This collision has caused the Himalayas to rise to the north, bringing events like the 2015 Nepal quake that killed 8,000 people. Bangladesh, India's neighbor, lies on the far eastern edge of this plate, but pressure from the collision seems to be warping Asia clockwise around the top of Bangladesh, ending up largely in the next country over, Myanmar. This wraparound arrangement has resulted in a crazy quilt of faults and quakes in and around Bangladesh. Among the largest, a 1762 subduction-zone quake near the southern coast killed at least 700 people. This January, a magnitude 6.7 event in adjoining eastern India killed more than 20. There have been dozens of large quakes in between, but the assumption was that no actual subduction was taking place under Bangladesh itself, seeming to insulate the region from a truly gigantic one. The new study undercuts this idea. Starting in 2003, US and Bangladeshi researchers set up about two dozen ground-positioning (GPS) instruments linked to satellites, capable of tracking tiny ground motions. Ten years of data now show that eastern Bangladesh and a bit of eastern India are pushing diagonally into western Myanmar at a rapid clip - 46 millimeters per year, or about 1.8 inches. Combined with existing GPS data from India and Myanmar, the measurements show that much of the resulting strain has been taken up by several known, slowly moving surface faults in Myanmar and India. But the rest of the movement - about 17 millimeters, or two-thirds of an inch per year - is shortening the distance from Myanmar to Bangladesh. This has been going on for a long time, and the results are clearly visible: neatly parallel north-south ranges of mountains draping the landscape, like a carpet being shoved against a wall. Potential quake zone. Solid red line indicates an area of about 24,000 square miles that could move during a subduction-zone earthquake, affecting 140 million people or more. The dashed line represents a scenario in which the slip might take place along a separate fault. (Chris Small/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory) The researchers interpret the shortening pattern to mean that subduction is taking place below, and that a huge zone - about 250 kilometers by 250 kilometers, more than 24,000 square miles -- is locked and building pressure, just a few miles below the surface. The zone includes Bangladesh's densely packed capital of Dhaka, a megalopolis of more than 15 million. Steckler says that, assuming fairly steady motion over the last 400 years, enough strain has built for the zone to jump horizontally by about 5.5 meters, or 18 feet, if the stress is released all at once. If strain has been building longer, it could be up to 30 meters, or almost 100 feet. The land would also move vertically, to a lesser extent. This is the worst-case scenario; in the best case, only part would slip, and the quake would be smaller and farther from Dhaka, said Steckler. In any case, Bangladesh and eastern India sit atop a landscape vulnerable even to moderate earthquakes: the vast delta of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers. This is basically a pile of mud as deep as 12 miles, washed from the Himalayas to the coast, covering the subduction zone. In a quake, this low-lying substrate would magnify the shaking like gelatin, and liquefy in many places, sucking in buildings, roads and people, said study coauthor Syed Humayun Akhter, a geologist at Dhaka University. The great rivers-10 miles across in places--could jump their banks and switch course, drowning everything in the way; there is in fact evidence that such switches have happened in previous centuries. Akhter says that fast-growing, poor Bangladesh is unprepared; no building codes existed before 1993, and even now, shoddy new construction flouts regulations. Past quake damages and deaths are no indicator of what could happen now, he said; population and infrastructure have grown so fast that even fairly moderate events like those of past centuries could be mega-disasters. ''Bangladesh is overpopulated everywhere,'' he said. ''All the natural gas fields, heavy industries and electric power plants are located close to potential earthquakes, and they are likely to be destroyed. In Dhaka, the catastrophic picture will be beyond our imagination, and could even lead to abandonment of the city.'' Roger Bilham, a geophysicist at the University of Colorado who has studied the region but was not involved in the new paper, said its ''data are unassailable, the interpretation is sound.'' Bilham said the research ''ties an enormous amount of structural interaction together. We have seen in recent history only modest seismicity responding to those interactions. The Indian subcontinent is effectively being pushed into a tight corner.'' Bangladesh, the most crowded nation on earth, sits atop what may be one of the planet's most powerful seismic zones. Here, children north of the capital city of Dhaka greet earthquake researchers. (Kevin Krajick/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory) Susan Hough, a U.S. Geological Survey seismologist who also studies the region and was not involved in the study, said that in recent years, ''we've been surprised by big earthquakes that have not been witnessed during historical times, or witnessed so long ago, they were forgotten. Studies like this are critical for identifying those zones.'' Scientists in Bangladesh and neighboring countries continue to assess the hazards. James Ni, a seismologist at New Mexico State University, said he and colleagues hope to deploy 70 seismometers across Myanmar in 2017, to get a better image of the apparently subducting slab. ''We don't have a good idea of its geometry, we don't know how far it goes down,'' said Ni. He said that if the study authors are right, and the slab is building strain, a quake would probably turn urban areas in eastern India ''into ruins,'' and effects likely would extend into Myanmar and beyond. ''We need more data,'' he said. The other authors of the study are Dhiman Ranjan Mondal of the City University of New York; Leonardo Seeber, Jonathan Gale and Michael Howe of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory; and Lujia Feng and Emma Hill of Singapore's Nanyang Technological University. The research was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation.
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As many area communities will be observing Trick-or-Treating this weekend and Monday, the Wisconsin Department of Corrections advises you and your family to keep your children safer this Halloween by discussing ahead of time what to do if you are ever separated. A list of safety tips from state agencies is below to help ensure a safer Halloween weekend for everyone. You can also find the hours for trick-or-treating in Door and Kewaunee counties by clicking here.
-A parent or trusted adult should always accompany children
-Stay on well-lit streets and stick to neighborhoods you know
-Only stop at homes where the porch light is on
-Never enter a home or car for a treat
-Trick-or-treaters should carry a cell phone to allow for quick communication
-If the child carries a cell phone, activate location services prior to trick-or-treating
-Call 911 if you see any suspicious or illegal activity
Children should yell No! and run from any stranger who tries to take them somewhere
-Have a responsible adult check treats at the end of the night
Similarly, the Wisconsin Department of Health also suggests some tips for families with trick-or-treaters and families who are giving out candy.
Costume Tips
-Choose costumes that are light-colored and more visible to motorists.
-Use reflective tape to decorate costumes and candy bags to increase the visibility of children to drivers. Reflective tape may be purchased at hardware, bicycle, or sporting goods stores.
-Use make-up rather than a mask; if your childs costume does include a mask, make sure it fits snugly and that the eyeholes are large enough to allow full vision.
-Children should wear well-fitting, sturdy shoes.
-Costumes should be short enough that a child will not trip and fall.
-Choose costume accessories such as swords or knives that are made of soft and flexible material.
-Do not use novelty contacts such as cat eyes or snake eyes.
Pedestrian Safety
-Engage in Halloween activities during the daylight hours, if possible.
-Do not enter homes or apartments without adult supervision.
-Remind children to walk, not run, and to only cross streets at crosswalks.
-Be sure your children are accompanied by a responsible adult who has a flashlight. -----
-Flashlights or chemical light sticks should be used so that children can see and be seen by motorists.
Halloween Home Safety
-Remove obstacles from your lawn, porch, or steps if you are expecting trick-or-treaters.
-Make sure your front porch is well-lit.
-Avoid using candle-lit jack-o-lanterns if possible. If you do use candles, dont place them near curtains, furnishings, or decorations. Move them off porches where childrens costumes may ignite.
-Keep your pets in another room when you are expecting trick-or-treaters.
-Small children should not carve pumpkins; instead, allow them to draw the designs on the pumpkin and adults may carve.
-Turn on an outside light if welcoming trick-or-treaters.
A Bonne Terre man lost his life in a crash Monday afternoon on the Interstate 55 exit ramp to U.S. 67 in Jefferson County. The accident shut down the highway for some time while investigators recreated the accident scene.
According to the Missouri State Highway Patrol, Shawn Myers, 26, was driving southbound on Interstate 55 at 1:20 p.m. in his 1997 Honda Prelude when he made a right turn onto U.S. 67. Myers car began to skid and traveled off the right side of the roadway. The front and rear of the car hit the rock embankment before returning to the road on its roof.
Myers was not wearing a seat belt and was pronounced dead at the scene by Joachim-Plattin Ambulance District personnel at 1:41 p.m.
Three Cadet residents and a woman from Imperial were injured Thursday morning in an accident in Washington County.
The two-vehicle crash occurred at 8:55 a.m. on Missouri Highway 21 south of the north Highway 47 junction.
The Missouri State Highway Patrol reports the accident occurred when Wanda L. Willard, 83, of Imperial, driving a 2000 Pontiac Grand Prix, attempted to make a left turn into a commuter parking lot and traveled into the path of a 2016 Dodge 4500 driven by Zachary D. Lessley, 22, of Bixby.
Although Lessley was not injured, Willard and the three occupants in the Grand Prix were all injured. Bryan Stidem, 40, of Cadet, received serious injuries and was taken by Air Evac to Mercy Hospital in St. Louis for treatment.
Alex Stidem, 20, of Cadet; Kyle Stidem, 15, of Cadet; and Willard all reportedly received minor injuries and were taken by Washington County Ambulance to Washington County Memorial Hospital for treatment.
According to the patrol report, both drivers and all passengers were wearing seat belts at the time of the accident.
148 Brownies, including Knockbridge Brownies, had the time of their lives recently when they made the trek to Lorne House and estate in Co. Down for their very first experience of an international Girl Guide camp.
The girls, aged 9 and 10, had an opportunity to camp out under canvass and learn camping skills whilst making new friends.
Friday night started with a barbecue followed by a large campfire with excitement mounting as the majority of the girls had never slept in a tent before. There was much chatter and excitement into the early hours of the morning.
The weekend was full of activity. The theme of the camp was Carnival of Cultural Unity with the five World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts world centres being represented at five different stations for the day.
'We were so excited to have Brownies and their leaders from five of IGGs seven regions come and join the whirlwind Breakout weekend trip around the five countries of WAGGGS World Centres, said Emer Maher, who is one of IGGs Eastern Region Regional Development Officers and one of the Breakout organisers.
Brownie passports were stamped as they entered each country's activity and new skills were learned. The addition of outdoor activities challenged both IGG and Ulster Brownies to 'leaps of faith' at the high ropes course, grass sledding (as close to tobogganing in Switzerland as we could get!) and being William Tell at the Archery range.
New friends made and new skills learnt mixed with lots of fun and laughter saw Brownies and leaders go home on Sunday tired but happy after their first international camp.
The girls started their day by visiting Kusafiri (Africa) where they were treated to an incredible African drumming session, which included learning drumming skills and new songs. This was followed by a visit to Sangam World Centre (India) where one of the Cork Leaders, Aisha, and her team skilfully entertained the girls with henna tattoos on their hands and were each taught how to correctly put on a sari.
The girls then travelled over to Our Cabana (Mexico) where they all tested their craft-making skills, making maracas, carnival masks and button bracelets to represent Pax Lodge (London).
To finish a fantastic day they visited Our Chalet (Switzerland) where the Senior Branch team had beautiful Swiss hot chocolate waiting for everyone and there was also an opportunity to plant some edelweiss to take home. A fantastic day was made even better by having several Brownie units from Ulster join them for the activities, which also included archery, grass-sledding, high ropes and a talent show.
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The dashing young man in the photo above is Lieutenant Colonel (Ret.) Charles S. Kettles. LTC Kettles, who lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan, was awarded the Medal of Honor yesterday at a White House ceremony. His story is extraordinary. Heres an excerpt from President Obamas remarks:
May 15, 1967, started as a hot Monday morning. Soldiers from the 101st Airborne were battling hundreds of heavily armed North Vietnamese in a rural riverbed. Our men were outnumbered. They needed support fast - helicopters to get the wounded out and bring more soldiers into the fight. Chuck Kettles was a helo pilot. And just as hed volunteered for active duty, on this morning he volunteered his Hueys - even though he knew the danger. They called this place Chump Valley for a reason: Above the riverbed rose a 1,500-foot-tall hill, and the enemy was dug into an extensive series of tunnels and bunkers the ideal spot for an ambush. But Chuck jumped into the cockpit and took off. Around 9 a.m., his company of Hueys approached the landing zone and looked down. They should have seen a stand of green trees; instead, they saw a solid wall of green enemy tracers coming right at them. None of them had ever seen fire that intense. Soldiers in the helos were hit and killed before they could even leap off. But under withering fire, Chuck landed his chopper and kept it there, exposed, so the wounded could get on and so that he could fly them back to base. A second time, Chuck went back into the valley. He dropped off more soldiers and supplies, picked up more wounded. Once more, machine-gun bullets and mortar rounds came screaming after them. As he took off a second time, rounds pierced the arm and leg of Chucks door gunner, Roland Scheck. Chucks Huey was hit. Fuel was pouring out as he flew away. But Chuck had wounded men aboard and decided to take his chances. He landed, found another helicopter, and flew Roland to the field hospital. By now it was near evening. Back in the riverbed, 44 American soldiers were still pinned down. The air was thick with gunpowder; it smelled of burning metal. And then they heard a faint sound, and as the sun started to set, they saw something rise over the horizon: six American helicopters as one of them said, as beautiful as could be. For a third time, Chuck and his unit headed into that hell on Earth. Death or injury was all but certain, a fellow pilot said later, and a lesser person would not return. Once again, the enemy unloaded everything they had on Chuck as he landed - small arms, automatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenades. Soldiers ran to the helicopters. When Chuck was told all were accounted for, he took off. And then, midair, his radio told him something else: eight men had not made it aboard. They had been providing cover for the others. Those eight soldiers had run for the choppers, but could only watch as they floated away. We all figured we were done for, they said. Chuck came to the same conclusion. If we left them for 10 minutes, he said, theyd be POWs or dead. A soldier who was there said that day, Major Kettles became our John Wayne. With all due respect to John Wayne, he couldnt do what Chuck Kettles did. He broke off from formation, took a steep, sharp, descending turn back toward the valley - this time with no aerial or artillery support a lone helicopter heading back in. Chucks Huey was the only target for the enemy to attack - and they did. Tracers lit up the sky once more. Chuck became Chuck came in so hot that his chopper bounced for several hundred feet before coming to a stop. As soon as he landed, a mortar round shattered his windshield. Another hit the main rotor blade. Shrapnel tore through the cockpit and Chucks chair. And still, those eight soldiers started to sprint to the Huey, running through the firestorm, chased by bullets. Chucks helo, now badly damaged, was carrying 13 souls and was 600 pounds over limit. It felt, he said, like flying a two-and-a-half-ton truck. (Laughter.) He couldnt hover long enough to take off. But cool customer that he is, he says he saw his shattered windshield and thought, thats pretty good air conditioning. (Laughter.) The cabin filled with black smoke as Chuck hopped and skipped the helo across the ground to pick up enough speed for takeoff - like a jackrabbit, he said, bouncing across the riverbed. The instant he got airborne, another mortar ripped into the tail, the Huey fishtailed violently, and a soldier was thrown out of the helicopter, hanging onto a skid as Chuck flew them to safety. I couldnt make this up. (Laughter.) This is like a bad Rambo movie. (Laughter.) Right? Youre listening to this, you cant believe it. So the Armys warrior ethos is based on a simple principle: A soldier never leaves his comrades behind. Chuck Kettles honored that creed - not with a single act of heroism, but over and over and over. And because of that heroism, 44 American soldiers made it out that day 44.
Congresswoman Debbie Dingell released this statement honoring LTC Kettles:
Almost five decades ago, the brave actions of LTC Charles Kettles saved the lives of 44 of his own in the jungles of Vietnam. Today, after years of hard work from his friends and family, his local community, those he served with, and the Veterans History Project, he will finally receive the recognition he deservesthe Medal of Honor from the President of the United States. LTC Kettles actions above and beyond the call of duty and his commitment to his fellow servicemembers represent the highest values of the United States military. It was a true honor to help ensure LTC Kettles is properly honored as one of our nations bravest heroes.
Here is the ceremony itself:
And here are President Obamas comments in full:
THE PRESIDENT: Good morning, everybody. Please have a seat. Welcome to the White House. Of all the privileges of this office, none is greater than serving as the Commander-in-Chief of the finest military that the world has ever known. And of all the military decorations that our nation can bestow, we have none higher than the Medal of Honor.
As many who know him have said, nobody deserves it more than Charles Kettles of Ypsilanti, Michigan. Many believe that - except for Chuck. (Laughter.) As he says, this seems like a hell of a fuss over something that happened 50 years ago. (Laughter.)
Even now, all these years later, Chuck is still defined by the humility that shaped him as a soldier. At 86 years old, he still looks sharp as a tack in that uniform. I pointed out he obviously has not gained any weight. (Laughter.) And his life is as American as they come. Hes the son of an immigrant. His father signed up to fly for the United States the day after Pearl Harbor and filled his five boys with a deep sense of duty to their country. For a time, he even served in the Army Reserve for a time, even as he served in the Army Reserve, Chuck ran a Ford dealership with his brother. And to families who drove a new car off that lot, hes the salesman who helped put an American icon in their driveway.
To the aviation students at Eastern Michigan University, Chuck is the professor who taught them about the wonder of flight in the country that invented it. To the constituents he served as a rare Republican in his hometowns mostly Democratic city council, Chuck is the public servant who made sure that their voices were heard. And to Ann, his beautiful bride, who grew up literally as the girl next door, Chuck is a devoted husband. Next March they will celebrate their 40th anniversary. So happy early anniversary. (Applause.)
So in a lot of ways, Chuck Kettles is America. And to the dozens of American soldiers that he saved in Vietnam half a century ago, Chuck is the reason they lived and came home and had children and grandchildren - entire family trees made possible by the actions of this one man.
We are honored to be joined not only by Ann, but also eight of Chuck and Anns 10 children, and three of their grandchildren. Its the Kettles family reunion here in the White House. (Laughter.) Were also honored to be joined by Chucks brothers-in-arms from Vietnam and some of Chucks newest comrades, members of the Medal of Honor Society.
May 15, 1967, started as a hot Monday morning. Soldiers from the 101st Airborne were battling hundreds of heavily armed North Vietnamese in a rural riverbed. Our men were outnumbered. They needed support fast - helicopters to get the wounded out and bring more soldiers into the fight. Chuck Kettles was a helo pilot. And just as hed volunteered for active duty, on this morning he volunteered his Hueys - even though he knew the danger. They called this place Chump Valley for a reason: Above the riverbed rose a 1,500-foot-tall hill, and the enemy was dug into an extensive series of tunnels and bunkers the ideal spot for an ambush.
But Chuck jumped into the cockpit and took off. Around 9 a.m., his company of Hueys approached the landing zone and looked down. They should have seen a stand of green trees; instead, they saw a solid wall of green enemy tracers coming right at them. None of them had ever seen fire that intense. Soldiers in the helos were hit and killed before they could even leap off. But under withering fire, Chuck landed his chopper and kept it there, exposed, so the wounded could get on and so that he could fly them back to base.
A second time, Chuck went back into the valley. He dropped off more soldiers and supplies, picked up more wounded. Once more, machine-gun bullets and mortar rounds came screaming after them. As he took off a second time, rounds pierced the arm and leg of Chucks door gunner, Roland Scheck. Chucks Huey was hit. Fuel was pouring out as he flew away. But Chuck had wounded men aboard and decided to take his chances. He landed, found another helicopter, and flew Roland to the field hospital.
By now it was near evening. Back in the riverbed, 44 American soldiers were still pinned down. The air was thick with gunpowder; it smelled of burning metal. And then they heard a faint sound, and as the sun started to set, they saw something rise over the horizon: six American helicopters as one of them said, as beautiful as could be. For a third time, Chuck and his unit headed into that hell on Earth. Death or injury was all but certain, a fellow pilot said later, and a lesser person would not return. Once again, the enemy unloaded everything they had on Chuck as he landed - small arms, automatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenades.
Soldiers ran to the helicopters. When Chuck was told all were accounted for, he took off. And then, midair, his radio told him something else: eight men had not made it aboard. They had been providing cover for the others. Those eight soldiers had run for the choppers, but could only watch as they floated away. We all figured we were done for, they said. Chuck came to the same conclusion. If we left them for 10 minutes, he said, theyd be POWs or dead.
A soldier who was there said that day, Major Kettles became our John Wayne. With all due respect to John Wayne, he couldnt do what Chuck Kettles did. He broke off from formation, took a steep, sharp, descending turn back toward the valley - this time with no aerial or artillery support a lone helicopter heading back in. Chucks Huey was the only target for the enemy to attack - and they did. Tracers lit up the sky once more. Chuck became Chuck came in so hot that his chopper bounced for several hundred feet before coming to a stop. As soon as he landed, a mortar round shattered his windshield. Another hit the main rotor blade. Shrapnel tore through the cockpit and Chucks chair. And still, those eight soldiers started to sprint to the Huey, running through the firestorm, chased by bullets.
Chucks helo, now badly damaged, was carrying 13 souls and was 600 pounds over limit. It felt, he said, like flying a two-and-a-half-ton truck. (Laughter.) He couldnt hover long enough to take off. But cool customer that he is, he says he saw his shattered windshield and thought, thats pretty good air conditioning. (Laughter.) The cabin filled with black smoke as Chuck hopped and skipped the helo across the ground to pick up enough speed for takeoff - like a jackrabbit, he said, bouncing across the riverbed.
The instant he got airborne, another mortar ripped into the tail, the Huey fishtailed violently, and a soldier was thrown out of the helicopter, hanging onto a skid as Chuck flew them to safety. I couldnt make this up. (Laughter.) This is like a bad Rambo movie. (Laughter.) Right? Youre listening to this, you cant believe it.
So the Armys warrior ethos is based on a simple principle: A soldier never leaves his comrades behind. Chuck Kettles honored that creed - not with a single act of heroism, but over and over and over. And because of that heroism, 44 American soldiers made it out that day 44. We are honored today to be joined by some of them: Chucks door gunner who was hit, Roland Scheck; the last soldier Chuck rescued that day, the one who figured he was done for, Dewey Smith; and a number of soldiers, our Vietnam veterans, who fought in that battle. Gentlemen, I would ask you to either stand if you can, or wave, so that we can thank you for your service. (Applause.)
Now, Chucks heroism was recognized at the time by the Armys second-highest award for gallantry - the Distinguished Service Cross. But Bill Vollano decided Chuck deserved an upgrade. Bill is a retired social worker who went to Chucks house to interview him for a veterans history project sponsored by the local Rotary Club. Ann overheard the interview from the other room and reminded Chuck to tell Bill the story Ive just told all of you. This is something Chuck and I have in common - we do what our wives tell us to do. (Laughter.) Chuck told the story, and with his trademark humility, finished it by saying it was a piece of cake. (Laughter.)
Bill, hearing the story, knew it was something more, and he started a five-year mission, along with Chucks son Mike, a retired Navy pilot, to award Chuck the Medal of Honor. Bill and Mike are here, as is Congresswoman Debbie Dingell who, along with her legendary husband, John Dingell, went above and beyond to pass a law to make sure that even all these years later, we could fully recognize Chuck Kettles heroism, as we do today. So we thank them for their outstanding efforts.
And thats one more reason this story is quintessentially American: Looking out for one another; the belief that nobody should be left behind. This shouldnt just be a creed for our soldiers - it should be a creed for all of us. This is a country thats never finished in its mission to improve, to do better, to learn from our history, to work to form a more perfect union. And at a time when, lets face it, weve had a couple of tough weeks, for us to remember the goodness and decency of the American people, and the way that we can all look out for each other, even when times are tough, even when the odds are against us what a wonderful inspiration. What a great gift for us to be able to celebrate something like this.
It might take time, but having failed to give our veterans who fought in Vietnam the full measure of thanks and respect that they had earned, we acknowledged that our failure to do so was a shame. We resolve that it will never happen again. It can take time, but old adversaries can find peace. Thanks to the leadership of so many Vietnam vets who had the courage to rebuild ties, I was able to go to Vietnam recently and see a people as enthusiastic about America as probably any place in the world - crowds lining the streets. And we were able to say that, on a whole lot of issues, Vietnam and the United States are now partners. Here at home, it might take time, but we have to remember everyone on our team - just like Chuck Kettles. Sometimes we have to turn around, and head back, and help those who need a lift.
Chuck says the most gratifying part of this whole story is that Deweys name, and Rolands name, and the names of the 42 other Americans he saved are not etched in the solemn, granite wall not far from here that memorializes the fallen in the Vietnam War. Instead, it will be Chuck Kettles name forever etched on the walls that communities have built from Southern California to South Carolina in honor of those who have earned the Medal of Honor.
Of course, Chuck says all this attention is a lot of hubbub, but Ill survive. (Laughter.) Chuck, youve survived much worse than this ceremony. (Laughter.) And on behalf of the American people, let me say that this hubbub is richly and roundly deserved. As the military aide prepares to read the citation, please join me in saluting this proud American soldier and veteran who reminds us all of the true meaning of service - Lieutenant Colonel Chuck Kettles. (Applause.)
Flints water, Detroits schools and the assault on democracy
Elected officials can:
a) call a meeting to order;
b) approve the minutes;
c) and adjourn the meeting.
Thats democracy under Michigans Emergency Manager Law.
Watch out. It could be coming to your state.
At this years Netroots Nation, Eclectablogs Chris Savage hosted a panel on Flint and Detroit Public Schools: Disasters for Democracy and Public Health, which explored the consequences of Michigans draconian Emergency Manager laws Public Act 4 and Public Act 436.
The poisoned water of Flint and the disgraceful conditions of Detroits public schools have become the two most galling examples of the costs of conservative indifference to rights and needs of poor Michiganders. These examples are so galling that youd assume that they became national news stories on their own, especially with MSNBCs Rachel Maddow keeping her keen eye on the story.
But panelists Emily Figdor, Bishop Brenadel Jefferson, Terrence Martin and Vien Truong explained how kids drinking lead-laden water and attending mold-crusted schools dont automatically command and sustain the national spotlight.
Frustrated Detroit teachers risked their jobs to document the filth in their schools over social media.
And media-savvy activists had to bring celebrities to Flint to keep the pressure on Governor Snyder after his administration did everything they could to avoid accountability.
Moderating this panel created a bit of an existential crisis for Chris, who has devoted so much of his life to trying to reveal these and related injustices in our state.
Its soul crushing to compress five years of writing about this issue into 75 minutes of content, he told me.
Its a story Chris has been attempted to document since 2011 when after the Tea Party wave of 2010, the state of Michigan became a testing ground for Shock Doctrine politics, which exploited a severe economic crisis exacerbated by chronic cuts to cities and towns justified by tax cuts for corporations. And its been a difficult story to tell for years because the policies were so extreme and antithetical to the local control ethos conservatives claim to swear by.
At one point, more than half of all African-Americans were living under Emergency Management, as the graphic below created by the Rachel Maddow Show explains. For a while, residents of Detroit had no elected officials representing their interests whatsoever.
The story is pretty simple: Building off of Michigans Emergency Financial Manager law, Emergency Managers were granted new, broad powers that allowed them to assume control of a locality where they had unchecked power to cancel contracts, sell off resources and privatize public goods all of which happen to be goals of the conservative five-decade long plot to destroy the institutional power of the left.
Okay, maybe it isnt. Add into the mix the fact that Michigan voters overturned the law by ballot referendum in 2012 only to have Republicans pass a new democracy-proof version, as Chris calls it, which was signed into law 37 days later.
I hope the session wasnt too heavily this is why it sucks in Michigan and had at least some lessons to be learned about things that we can do that are effective in fighting the things that suck, Chris said.
Watch the event, and youll see definitive tactics for battling the outrage fatigue that plagues anyone opposing conservative policies in a purple state. And youll also see a fierce peek into the dark heart of the true Republican agenda. Emergency Manager laws are popping up in other Republican-led purple states, most tellingly in Atlantic City, where Donald Trump walked away with millions, leaving the city starved for jobs and democracy.
By now youve probably read about Donald Trumps wife Melania and the speech she gave at the National Republican Convention last night. Her plagiarism of Michelle Obamas 2008 speech was first noticed by journalist Jarrett Hill whose tweet blew up the internet:
The Trump campaign is denying its plagiarism but nobody with two brain cells to knock together can deny that it was, in fact, just that. Here, watch for yourself:
Any rational campaign would have quickly blamed it on a low level staffer, fired them, and moved on. But not the Trump campaign. In their typical narcissistic, bullying fashion, they blamed Hillary Clinton because of course they did (even though she hasnt said a word about it):
Theres no cribbing of Michelle Obamas speech, top aide Paul Manafort said Tuesday on CNN. These are common words and values that she cares about her family, things like that. She was speaking in front of 35 million people last night; she knew that. To think that she would be cribbing Michelle Obamas words is crazy. He added on CBS that the words in question are not unique. Rather than specify whether a Trump staffer was responsible for the similar text, Manafort pinned the blame on the presumptive Democratic nominee. This is once again an example of when a woman threatens Hillary Clinton, how [Clinton] seeks to demean her and take her down, Manafort said on CNN. Its not going to work. Manafort said that in writing Melanias speech, There was a process, certainly, of collaboration. Certainly, theres no feeling on her part that she did it. What she did was use words that are common words.
Manafort later told ABC News Good Morning America that In writing her beautiful speech, Melanias team of writers took notes on her lifes inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking.
Someone here is lying because Ms. Trump told TODAYs Matt Lauer that she wrote the speech herself with as little help as possible. And perhaps she did. But whether she had a team of writers or wrote the speech herself, there is no way that speech wasnt vetted first, proving that Trumps staff is as incompetent as we all believe them to be.
While Republicans scramble to defend Melania Trumps prime time gaffe, its hard to imagine the sort of frothy lather they would have worked themselves into had the situation been reversed and it was Michelle Obama who had done the plagiarizing.
White privilege is plagiarizing from a black woman and everyone goes that's so awful that your speechwriters set you up like that Sanjay Srivastava (@hardsci) July 19, 2016
But thats not the biggest hypocrisy in this story. The fact that the most xenophobic, bigoted, anti-immigrant presidential candidate in recent years is married to an immigrant is pretty big but thats not the biggest hypocrisy, either. Neither is the fact that Ms. Trump talked about honesty and integrity at the very moment she was uttering words stolen from someone else.
No, the biggest hypocrisy is that the Trumps, according to Ms. Trump, share the exact same values as the Obamas do. Nearly word for word, as it turns out. And that word, shell have us believe, is her bond.
So, the day after her husband told the press that Barack Obamas body language shows that he doesnt respect law enforcement officials, his wife tried to convince the country that she and her husband have the same values as the president and his wife. That we should work hard, dream big, and, most importantly, treat each other with respect.
The fact is that the Trump campaign is built on a bedrock value of disrespecting anyone he doesnt agree with. People of color. People from other countries. People with disabilities. Women. Gays and lesbians. President Obama and Secretary Clinton. His primary opponents. Protesters. Literally anyone who is not white, male, and wealthy has been disrespected by Donald Trump and even some who ARE white, male, and wealthy.
THAT is the biggest hypocrisy here. And Melania Trump exposed it for the entire world to see.
UPDATE: Mitt Romneys niece Ronna Romney McDaniel, the self-described Chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, is blaming the liberal media in a fundraising email this afternoon:
What an exciting way to open Convention! It was so incredible to hear from one of the great Republicans leading Michigans Comeback, Attorney General Bill Schuette. Also, how awesome was that entrance by Donald Trump to introduce his elegant wife, Melania? However, if youve seen anything from the liberal media this morning, I hope youre as disgusted as I am. Melanias speech was about how proud she is to be an American. Her speech was about education, and her love of this amazing country. Instead of talking about the powerful words and moments from yesterday, theres non-stop coverage about how similar Melanias speech was to a speech Michelle Obama delivered in 2008. This is liberal media bias at its worst. Blah, blah, blah, send us all your money.
Her definition of similar must be different than the one Ive always thought it had. Her version sounds much closer to identical if were talking about the same part of the speech that the liberal media that has given Donald Trump $2 billion worth of free media coverage is talking about.
Volkswagen on Tuesday announced that it has reached an agreement to settle claims arising from the emissions scandal that has plagued the company since its discovery two years ago.
The company has agreed to set up a US$10 billion funding pool to buy back or terminate leases of diesel vehicles sold in the United States. Volkswagen had used software to cheat on emissions tests in labs for its turbocharged direct injection diesel engines.
Planned Pollution
The vehicles emitted up to 40 times more nitrogen oxides in real-world driving than the company registered in lab tests using the deceptive software. Volkswagen had put the software in about 11 million cars worldwide, of which about 500,000 were in the United States.
The vehicles in question were from the model years 2009 through 2015.
Volkswagen also agreed to establish a $2.7 billion environmental remediation fund, and to invest $2 billion to promote adoption of zero-emissions cars in the U.S.
The Department of Justice, the State of California, the Federal Trade Commission and certain private plaintiffs have agreed to the deal, which also must be approved by Judge Charles Breyer of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
Actions Against VW
The DoJ early this year filed suit against Volkswagen and associated companies over the emissions scandal, and the FTC in March filed its complaint in federal court.
German prosecutors earlier this month began investigating former VW employees, including former CEO Martin Winterkorn, over allegations of fraud and market manipulation in relation to the emissions scandal.
Other countries regulators also are examining VW closely.
The companys next course of action is to tackle the international problem, said Praveen Chandrasekar, a research manager at Frost & Sullivan.
VW is rumored to have set aside almost 16 billion euros (US$18.2) for the scandal at the worldwide level, he told the E-Commerce Times.
Crime and Punishment
A penalty should be large enough so that not only doesnt the offending firm repeat its crime, but also no other firm even thinks of doing something like this, commented Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.
The emissions scandal was brought to light by pure chance, which means the government wants to use fear as its primary method for compliance, he told the E-Commerce Times.
The scandal showcases the importance of governance and internal audit to catch things like this, Enderle suggested. This is a huge reminder that strong compliance and internal audit programs can literally save companies billions.
Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Partys presumptive presidential candidate, this week unveiled a technology and innovation agenda that calls for a broader commitment to improving computer science and STEM education, expansion of broadband Internet to the entire United States, and deployment of 5G wireless networks.
Clintons plan calls for advancing high-tech training in American schools through collaboration with nonprofits and the private sector to train up to 50,000 computer science teachers in the next decade. It would double the investment in federal training grants to provide computer science education for students. It would provide access to capital for entrepreneurs, and institute measures to promote diversification of the tech workforce.
Clinton called for changes to the immigration system to remove barriers to high-skilled workers and entrepreneurs who want to come to the U.S., where technology companies are in dire need of talented engineers and other staff. The plan would create start-up visas for entrepreneurs, and attach green cards to STEM masters and PhDs from accredited colleges and universities.
Wider Access
Clinton said the digital divide, which has left low income and rural communities without affordable high-speed Internet, should be closed by 2020, and that 5G wireless should be made available to support the Internet of Things, smart factories, autonomous vehicles and other innovative technologies.
She also came out in support of Net neutrality, and called for greater competition, backed up by enforcement from government agencies. She said states and localities should reduce barriers to entry.
Clintons technology agenda, including her support for STEM education and her plans to expand the new technology workforce, maintain a free and open Internet, and increase emphasis on cybersecurity training, drew praise from Todd Thibodeaux, CEO of the Computing Technology Industry Association.
CTIA, which includes more than 2,000 member companies in the information security sector, is based in Washington.
The need for high-speed, reliable digital infrastructure is critical to the expansion of innovation and commerce, Thibodeaux added.
Strong encryption, favorable trade deals to allow U.S. companies to remain competitive, and high-skilled immigration reform must be part of the conversation, he said.
CompTIA is one of more than a dozen technology associations that released a technology sector presidential platform in May.
Another is the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, which likewise applauded the Clinton plan, noting its emphasis on cybersecurity, digital infrastructure, diversifying the STEM pipeline and increasing fundamental research funding.
Clintons proposal conveys a vested interest in the digital economy and understands the importance of open access to information and a fast Internet, as well as how the issues bolster the growth of our economy and quality of life for consumers and businesses in the Bay area, said Peter Luroe-Munoz, the groups vice president of technology and innovation policy.
Staying on Course
The Clinton proposals appear to be an extension of existing federal policies, said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.
Its easy to see why some have suggested that Clintons technology-related policies would qualify as an extension of Barack Obamas strategy, he told the E-Commerce Times. Her support for Net neutrality is particularly clear in that respect, and also sets her apart from the presumptive GOP candidate, Donald Trump, who steadfastly opposes it.
Clintons likely appointments of pro Net neutrality commissioners to the FCC and other agencies could have a lasting impact even if she were to serve only one term, King suggested.
The goal of expanding high-speed broadband to the entire population is praiseworthy, according to broadband technology analyst Craig Settles, but without a commitment to increase the speed and lower the cost, the impact would be limited.
If she does not address the issue of lack of competition, its hard to see the U.S. getting an increase in coverage speeds, let alone affordability, he told the E-Commerce Times.
The U.S. is woefully unprepared for expanding broadband access, Settles said, because building the infrastructure required to make those services available, including the installation of poles, laying fiber-optic cables, etc., would require thousands of trained workers.
Most politicians and most technology executives, for that matter lack a full understanding of these issues, technology analyst Jeff Kagan told the E-Commerce Times. They decide which way will give the government the kind of power it needs, without much concern for marketplace realities.
I have never been so excited about an email subscription before.
Zak S.
What is fracking?
Fracking is a process of blasting water, chemicals and frac sand deep into the earth to break up sedimentary rock and access natural gas and crude oil deposits. The fracking industry, which has sought to promote the practice as safe and controlled, has preferred the term hydraulic fracturing.
Fracking emerged as an unconventional, relatively new and extremely popular technique only about 20 years ago in the U.S., after advances in technology gave it an unprecedented ability to identify and extract massive amounts of resources efficiently.
Fracking is one of the most important environmental issues today, and its a prime example of how a new technology that offers immediate economic and political benefits can outpace (often less obvious) environmental and health concerns.
Why is fracking so controversial?
Modern fracking emerged so quickly, faster than its impacts were understood. Just as importantly, once scientists, health experts and the public started to object with evidence of harm it was causing, business and government succeeded in perpetuating a message of uncertainty, that more research was necessary, further enabling the full speed ahead fracking juggernaut.
How does fracking impact the environment?
Frackings supporters have pushed an environmental angle, insisting that natural gas can be a bridge fuel, a cheaper, cleaner option than coal before we have a large-scale transition to renewable energy. This claim has some merit, as natural gas does emit much less carbon dioxide than coal or oil. However, it is still a fossil fuel, adding harmful emissions while the climate crisis worsens. Moreover, fracking wells leak methane, a greenhouse gas more than 25 times more potent than CO2.
Water
In order to break up rock formations one to two miles deep, a fracking operation requires millions of gallons amount of water. After its used, the resulting wastewater, which contains chemicals is pumped back into injection wells, sent to treatment plants, or can be dangerously dumped or spilled.
In 2016 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a report skewed friendly to industry in its language: Hydraulic Fracturing for Oil and Gas: Impacts from the Hydraulic Fracturing Water Cycle on Drinking Water Resources in the United States. The EPA acknowledged that drinking water contamination was possible, but ultimately came to this conclusion: Data gaps and uncertainties limited EPAs ability to fully assess the potential impacts on drinking water resources locally and nationally.
Earthquakes
According to the U.S. Geologic Survey, disposal of wastewater has caused an increase in earthquakes in the central U.S. Seismologists have reported that frackings initial blasting process can trigger earthquakes.
Air Pollution
In addition to methane, fracking releases many toxic contaminants into the air. EPA has acknowledged the public health threat, but a lack of urgent political pressure has sidelined the agency into advising on ways to control and reduce, rather than eliminate, the danger.
Toxic Chemicals
Fracking fluids contain unknown chemicals and known carcinogens such as benzene. Fracking companies havent been required to disclose their proprietary formulas, however. This is yet another example of how uncertainty serves as an enabling force. The EPA has identified more than 1,000 different chemicals used in fracking fluid.
Wildlife
Fracking can destroy wildlife habitats, pollute rivers and fisheries, poison birds, and use up water supplies that animals need to survive.
How does fracking affect the economy?
The fracking boom made the U.S. the worlds largest producer of oil and gas, reducing its energy imports from 26% to less than 4%. It has lowered oil and gas prices and created thousands of industry jobs. While fracking companies profited greatly at first, as prices dropped their margins collapsed. Many are now going bankrupt.
How is fracking regulated?
Congress has enabled the oil and gas industry to be exempt from such regulations as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Safe Drinking Water Act.
Fracking surged during the Obama administration, which moved to protect water from fracking on federal lands in 2015. Subsequently, the Trump administration sought to roll back protections and expand fracking on federal lands.
Key Examples of Fracking in the United States
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvanias Marcellus Shale is the source for about 40% of shale gas production in the U.S.
New York
While the Marcellus Shale also runs through New York, the state has banned fracking.
Texas
Texas produces more crude oil than any other state.
North Dakota
The Bakken Shale in North Dakota has been one of the main sites for the fracking boom and subsequent bust, leaving behind extensive environmental damage.
A recent report found that all 50 states could provide 100% (or even greater) in-state renewable energy.
Other Countries
Outside the U.S., only Canada, China and Argentina have commercial fracking operations. A UN report in 2018 said that other countries were highly unlikely to produce at such a large scale as the U.S., due to political and cultural factors, and existing infrastructure.
The Future of Fracking
While renewables were considered a solution for peak oil only a decade ago, fracking changed the terms of the debate, with a new focus from environmentalists to keep it in the ground starting in 2015.
The Biden administration now stands at a pivotal moment in the climate crisis. Bidens stance on fracking is not yet entirely clear, but he has rejoined the Paris agreement and appears to take climate seriously. At the same time, he is sympathetic to workers in fossil fuel industries, was vice president during the fracking boom years under Obama, and may be more inclined to seek a gradual transition than one fast enough to help solve the crisis.
By James Hoggan
In my last blog I reported some dire warnings from several of the worlds top scientists, experts who are able to present facts about species extinction and climate change in ways we can all absorb. I have never been a pessimist, but we cannot ignore these alarm bells or allow ourselves to get bogged down in denial and acrid debate. These problems are serious and they wont go away on their own.
As I explain in my new book, Im Right and Youre an Idiot, the driving mechanism behind significant social change is an urgent sense of the moral challenge combined with a credible path forward. Social justice advocate Marshall Ganz stresses that both dissonance and hope must be present if we are to spark change. MIT Sloan School of Managements Otto Scharmer adds the success of any intervention depends less upon the specific actions taken, and more upon the inner condition of the intervener.
So clearly, if we want to solve these global environmental problems we need to change the way we see the world and the way we interact with nature. And we also need to shift not only our attention but also our intention.
In this blog I highlight the insights of three experts who urge us to do this by tapping into mankinds extraordinary gift of foresight, the lessons of history and the wisdom of indigenous cultures.
David Suzuki, Wade Davis and Ronald Wright
Ronald Wright, Canadian author of the bestseller, A Short History of Progress, who studied archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge, sees a pattern in our refusal to take our collective foot off the accelerator and slow the greedy advance of civilization. He said we North Americans are heavily invested in selling hydrocarbons but are in denial about it because of, controversies stirred up by massive funding from big oil companies that create bogus scientific institutes.
Civilizations rise and fall, prosper then collapse when the very technologies that created prosperity and success in the first place become liabilities, said the scholar who described this in his Massey Lectures. He calls this downfall of societies the progress trap and refers to examples in Easter Island, ancient Rome, Sumer and more, where innovations created new problems of their own, conditions that were worse than those that existed before the innovation.
It can start with something as seemingly simple as irrigation. People run canals into the desert to grow more food, but that leads to more people, more houses and other concerns. After many centuries, the ancient Sumerians found their fields were turning white because salts were building up when water evaporated. They didnt deal with the problem because they had expanded to a point where it was beyond their ability to change. They were locked into the system and ignored the warnings. In a matter of 1,000 years, start to finish, they ended up producing only a quarter of the food that the fields had produced in the beginning and of course large parts of southern Iraq had to be abandoned. The land hasnt recovered even after thousands of years, he said.
Discoveries and technologies that start out being beneficial can end up being detrimental. For instance, when you move from a spear to a rifle youve made real progress in your ability to kill animals and other people, but when you move from a rifle to the hydrogen bomb youve made too much progress. Youve built a weapon you cannot use without destroying most of the higher life on Earth.
He explains how the Mayans fell into a similar progress trap when their rulers followed a similarly self-serving and shortsighted path. The Maya built bigger and bigger temples at the end, just as our civilization is creating taller and taller skyscrapers. Evidence from Maya skeletons shows that while members of the ruling class became fatter and taller, peasants became shorter and thinner. There was a transfer of resources upwards over time, as we see in our society today, along with a great reluctance to face up to the fact that the party was over. He sees similar cynical manipulations of tax structures today by those who are absurdly wealthy and reluctant to share any of that wealth.
The historian said we only have to look back 30 years to see staggering changes in the ratio of income between the CEO of a major American corporation and a shop floor worker in the same corporation. Three decades ago it was about 40 to 1; today its more than 1,000 to 1. We see fabulous amounts of wealth in a few hands and almost a third of the human race living in dire poverty, he explained. This pattern of the super rich avoiding taxes was seen towards the end of the Roman Empire too, when great landowners received huge tax exemptions. The tax burden was moved down the social pyramid and the state had to debase the coinage to meet its financial obligations. Meanwhile, there was increasing social unrest and Rome was rapidly turning into a city of slums.
Civilizations that have prospered and achieved brilliance in the past got into trouble because they were unable to change their ways of thinking and operating, and the very things that created their initial prosperity and success became liabilities. Wright sees the same happening now and his dystopian vision of the future leads to his warning that this will threaten not only our civilization but also the natural world on which it depends.
Theres an absolute inability to face up to the fact that there are limits It goes against the cultural grain of North Americans who are used to having endless plenty, used to the idea that the future will always be bigger and better, Wright said. This is the thinking of a plunderer, not a wise steward. He explained, One of the absolutely clear essences of history and archeology is that a healthy economy depends on a healthy environment and once you start eating into the environment to grow your so-called economy you are on a path to ruin.
He said our rapid technological advances have made it possible to suck more and more out of the environment and have made it seem as though human prosperity is detached from natural systems. Of course the reverse is true. What weve been doing by these very sophisticated means of extracting things is actually taking out stuff that can never be replaced, he said.
Canadian geneticist, science broadcaster and environmental activist David Suzuki couldnt agree more and said the problems we face regarding energy and environmental issues are not technological, political or economic. They are psychological, and the path forward lies in learning to see the world differently.
The environmental movement has failed, he said, because although we now have laws that protect clean air, clean water, endangered species and millions of hectares of landwe have not changed the way people think. The failure was, in winning these battles, we didnt change the way we see the world We didnt get across the idea that the reason we wanted to stop logging here, or this dam, or this offshore drilling is were a part of the biosphere and weve got to begin to behave in a way that protects the most fundamental things in our livesair, water, soil and other species. Thats the lesson of environmentalism and we failed to inculcate that in society, he said.
Suzuki explains that for most of human existence we knew we were part of nature and understood we had to be careful not to jeopardize our place in the natural world. Back in 1900 there were only 1.5 billion human beings on the planet and just 14 cities with populations of more than a million. Most lived in rural communities and were involved in farming.
Today, just more than a century later, we have more than seven billion people on Earth and hundreds of gigantic cities, dozen with populations of more than 20 million. In cities we create our own habitat and as long as we have a park somewhere to go to camp and play in, who needs nature? The important thing in the city is your job and making money, Suzuki said. We have seen a fundamental shift from an understanding that we are part of and dependent on nature, to becoming urban dwellers whose priorities are economic.
Humanity has grown so powerfully that weve become a geological force, he said. There have never been so many people with the ability to affect the chemistry, the physics and the biology of the planet. A crunch is coming, because the biosphere has been so altered that there are going to be collapses and an inability to sustain the number of people on the planet.
Human beings are now co-opting 40 percent of whats called the net primary productivity of the planet. All of the energy captured by plants through photosynthesis is what powers life on Earth, he explains. We are in a species extinction crisis, because were co-opting all the land for ourselves. Environmentalists used to demonstrate for things like clean rivers and pristine forests, but now were fighting for the future of the biosphereall of the globes ecosystems, he explained.
We keep hearing about the bottom line and the economy, but the bottom line is actually the air that keeps us alive, that gives us our climate and weather. And its the same with water. If we see the world through economic eyes, the things that matter most to us are worthless.
Suzuki moved into television in 1962his program The Nature of Things has aired in nearly 50 countriesbecause he believed people needed more information. I thought, the more information, the better information they have, the better decisions people will make, he said. However, he no longer believes that.
People today have unprecedented access to information, he said, but were going backwards and science itself is being discredited. There has been a huge investment in neo-conservative, right wing think tanks that claim a lot of environmental concerns are part of the left-wing movement toward socialism. Scientific integrity and credibility have been undermined, and that is the greatest disappointment to me, said the former professor who has received 25 honorary degrees for his efforts to save the environment.
When 15,000 people died in Chicago one summer because of a heat wave; when 33,000 people died in Europe as a result of a heat wave; when New Orleans was devastated by Hurricane Katrinaeach time he thought, This has got to be it. I mean, people cant deny the fact that billions of dollars worth of pine trees have been destroyed in British Columbia because of the mountain pine beetle. The best sequester of carbon is our forests and we have the largest, last, intact forest on the planet in the boreal forest of Canada. What does it take for us to accept that something is going on?
Suzuki notes that 150,000 years ago when we emerged as a species, our one brilliant advantage was a brain that invented the concept of a future. Based on our knowledge and experience, we could look ahead and anticipate threats. It is this ability to avoid danger and exploit opportunity that has been at the heart of our success, that led us to take over every continent of the planet and become the dominant species, he said.
We have a huge population of scientists, and super-computers to aid them, who have spent the last four decades acting in the best tradition of our species, looking ahead, seeing where the dangers are and telling us weve got to change. And now, we are being deliberately stalled thats the tragedy, he said. The success of our species is based on foresight, and now, we are turning our backs on that survival strategy.
Modern cultures are famously myopic when it comes to their world view, concurs Canadian anthropologist and ethno botanist Wade Davis, a National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence whose work has taken him from Peru to Polynesia, from the Amazon rainforest to the Mali desert. That kind of cultural myopia has been the curse of humanity, and today it is evident in the way we think about the natural world, Davis said.
Most traditional cultures and indigenous people have a reciprocal relationship with the world. They dont see it as just a stage upon which the human drama unfolds, he said. They see it literally as a series of reciprocal exchanges in which the Earth has absolute obligations to humanity, and humanity has obligations to the Earth.
We in the western world were raised to believe the mountains are there to be mined, which is completely different from a child of the Andes raised to believe that that mountain above his community was an Apu spirit, a deity, that would direct his destiny for the rest of his life. Here on the west coast of British Columbia, Davis said, we grow up believing forests exist to be cut. That makes us very different from a First Nations elder raised to believe those forests are the domain of spirits.
The interesting thing isnt whos right or wrong, he stresses, its how the belief system mediates human interaction with the environment. It reveals two profoundly different belief systems: One with a relatively benign ecological footprint for thousands of years, another which has razed the forests in three generations, Davis explained.
When the British first arrived in Australia, they saw people who looked strange, and had a very primitive technology. But what really offended the British was that the aboriginal people had no interest in self-improvement, in progress, in changing their life, he said. That was the fundamental ethos of 18th and 19th century Europe. As recently as 1902, it was debated in parliament in Australia as to whether aboriginal people were human or not. As recently as the 1960s, a school book called A Treasury of Fauna of Australia, included the aboriginal people amongst the interesting wildlife of the country. The entire purpose of life in Australia, for the civilization of the aboriginal people, was the antithesis of progress, said Davis. The whole purpose in life was to not change anything.
What I find so moving when I go around the world is seeing the way indigenous people are dealing with the demonstrable evidence of climate change, whether in the Amazon or in the Andes, the Himalayas or the Arctic, he said. In Southern Peru there is a legendary pilgrimage called the Qoyllur RitI that involves tens of thousands of Indians from all over the Southern Andes converging on a sacred valley dominated by a glacier called the Colquepunku. The ritual involves, among other things, crawling up to the ice and chipping off small blocks, which are then carried back to elders who are incapable of making the pilgrimage.
Watching the degree of recession of those glaciers, the people have unilaterally decided its their fault, and this is a key thing, Davis said. We think of climate change as a technical problem, a scientific problem, perhaps a controversial, political issue. They see it as their fault. So, these people, in this poignant act, have ceased chipping trivial blocks of ice from the glacier, breaking the sacred cycle of the ritual that goes back at least 2,000 years.
This is not their problem. This is a problem created by a narrow subset of humanity with a specific ideology and a specific attitude toward the world, Davis said. He does not suggest we return to a pre-industrial past, but that we recognize the existence of different ways of being alive on the planet and change the fundamental way we interact with it.
In our lifetimes, weve seen Black people go from the woodshed to the White House; women go from the kitchen to the board room; gay people from the closet to the altar. Through space exploration weve reconfigured our entire notion of what the world is, and now we are being asked to re-think our integration into the natural world, Davis explained.
The scholars I interviewed here have elegantly revealed the story of our counter-evolutionary behavior, and they have offered a more enlightened and ethical way of looking at our natural world and interacting with it. As Otto Scharmer explained at the beginning of this blog, we have to change the inner condition of the intervener if we are to affect change and deal with the problems we face.
James Hoggan is president of the Vancouver PR firm Hoggan & Associates, chair of the David Suzuki Foundation and founder of the influential website DeSmogBlog. He is also the author Climate Cover-Up, Do the Right Thing and the recently released Im Right and Youre an Idiot.
A federal jury awarded two Dimock Township couples $4.24 million today after finding Cabot Oil & Gas responsible for contaminating their well water.
A state investigation found that Cabot Oil & Gas had allowed gas to escape into the regions groundwater supplies, contaminating at least 18 residential water wells.
The federal lawsuitScott Ely, et al. v Cabot Oil & Gas Corporation et al.involved, Scott Ely and Monica Marta-Ely, and Ray and Victoria Hubert, who claimed that Cabot Oil & Gas Corp contaminated their water supply during fracking operations near their homes.
The decision, following the 14-day trial and 8.5 hours of deliberation over two days, is a huge victory for the families.
Congratulations to the Ely and Hubert families for winning in federal court today against Cabot Oil & Gas for poisoning their water from drilling and fracking operations, Mark Ruffalo, on behalf of Americans Against Fracking, said.
Drilling and fracking are contaminating water throughout Pennsylvania and across the United States and its now time for Governor Wolf to recognize the damage that is being inflicted on Pennsylvanians water and health. It is also time for President Obama to let the the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency do its job and investigate thousands of complaints across the country of drilling and fracking polluting drinking water supplies and harming the American people. This jury trial reflects that drilling and fracking caused groundwater contamination, and this is only the beginning.
The Dimock case dates back to 2009 when 44 plaintiffs brought a lawsuit against the company. In the five years since initiating litigation, the Elys and Huberts were the only plaintiffs remaining on the case as the vast majority had settled with the company.
The Elys were awarded $2.6 million and their three children $50,000 each. The Huberts were awarded $1.4 million, with another family member awarded $50,000.
$4.2 million will not bring back drinkable well water to the long-suffering families of Dimock, Pennsylvania, Sandra Steingraber, PhD, science advisor for Americans Against Fracking, told EcoWatch.
No amount of money can do that. Once groundwater is polluted, its polluted forevermore. But what this important jury decision does do is strip away the mirage of omnipotence that Cabot and other gas companies operate behind. Fracking poisons water. Thats what the science shows. The frackers will be held responsible. Thats what this court decision shows.
A NPR StateImpact report, prior to the trial, said that Cabot Oil & Gas had already accumulated more than 130 drilling violations at its Dimock wells, yet insisted that methane migration in Dimocks water is naturally occurring. The company is currently banned from drilling in a 9-mile area of Dimock but is trying to lift the ban.
A state investigation, according to the AP, found that Cabot had allowed gas to escape into the regions groundwater supplies, contaminating at least 18 residential water wells.
Cabot had no immediate comment Thursday but planned to release a statement on the verdict, the AP reported.
Its very important that when a company like Cabot harms Pennsylvania families that the courts are a sanctuary for people to seek justice, the families attorney, Leslie Lewis, said in closing arguments Wednesday, according to The Times-Tribune of Scranton.
Watch this personal reaction to todays jury verdict from Josh Fox:
[vimeo https://vimeo.com/158547559 expand=1]
Not long into the New Year and already a new warning about climate change and rising sea levels.
A new scientific study, published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, is warning that climate change may be affecting the vast Greenland ice sheet more seriously than previously thought.
New research has found that the ice sheet could be losing this ability to act as a sponge.
Photo credit: Shutterstock
Traditionally the huge Greenland ice sheet, which NASA estimates is losing an estimated 287 billion tons of ice every year, has also been seen by scientists as a sponge for glacier meltwater.
But new research has found that the ice sheet could be losing this ability to act as a sponge.
An international team of scientists have been spent the last few years examining firn, the porous snow cover which overlays dense glacier ice near the surface. Firn is seen as crucial is capturing melt-water runoff before it enters the ocean adding to sea-level rise. The scientists wanted to see how climate change was affecting the firn layers ability to hold water.
As this layer is porous and the pores are connected, theoretically all the pore space in this firn layer can be used to store meltwater percolating into the firn whenever melt occurs at the surface, the new papers Lead Author, Horst Machguth of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, told The Washington Post.
Over time, meltwater percolates down through the firn and freezes into the ice layer. This is good news for sea level rise as the fern stops meltwater reaching the sea. But for how much longer?
Another of the scientists, York University Professor William Colgan, said: The study looked at very recent climate change on the ice sheet, how the last couple of years of melt have really altered the structure of the ice sheet firn and made it behave differently to future melt.
The scientists were shocked by what they found. They discovered that an extreme melt which occurred in 2012 caused a thick layer of ice to form on top of the firn layer. In subsequent years, meltwater couldnt penetrate vertically through the solid ice layer and instead drained along the ice sheet surface toward the ocean, Colgan said.
This phenomenon had never been seen before.
Because the research overturned the idea that firn can behave as a nearly bottomless sponge to absorb meltwater, this means that Greenlands projected sea level rise due to meltwater runoff is likely higher than previously predicted.
I think the most notable result of our study is showing that the firn reacts faster to an atmospheric warming than expected, Machguth added.
What is deeply concerning is that other ice-sheets are also covered in firn too, which also may react adversely to climate change. Evidence is emerging to show Canadian Arctic firn is also capping off, Colgan said.
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As an 8th grade American history teacher, I should be excited about the opportunity to use this falls election as a way to bring history to life for my students. Instead, I find myself deeply frustrated at having to explain to my students that somehow the nation that they live in has not fully internalized the basic lessons of American democracy they are learning in class.
As our election draws ever closer, I see three areas in which our body politic could benefit from mastering the wisdom and civic maturity of my 8th graders. My students understand just how prophetic George Washington was when he warned against the dangers of political parties; they appreciate that American democracy is complicated and does not lend itself to simple answers; and they recognize that our democracy cannot function without strict protection of the freedom of speech.
As he was completing his second term, Washington issued a farewell address full of sage advice to the young nation. Some of his strongest words were reserved for a pointed warning of the baneful effects of political parties.
My 8th graders can explain the connection between the failure to heed Washingtons advice and the political rancor that would eventually lead to a civil war. Some of them can also connect Washingtons advice to the current lack of civility between our two major political parties. While it is highly unlikely that we are heading toward another civil war, a case can be made that the level of discord between the parties may be the 21st-century equivalent.
George Washington was far too wise to believe that the country could exist for a day, let alone 240 years, without disagreement. In fact, he was so committed to the power of vigorous debate that he regularly asked Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton to sit in a room together and argue over national policies until they had both depleted their vast vocabularies. The difference between then and now is that they were both equally focusing on the needs of the country rather than those of a political party.
See Also To read more opinion on what this election means for K-12 schools, please visit:
My most recent class of 8th graders spent a year learning just how complicated it is to be a citizen of this great country. Our Constitution has been a model for every democracy that has emerged over the past two centuries. It is also a document that condoned slavery. In 1776, our founding Declaration presented the history-shattering idea that all men are created equal. That same nation did not extend the right to vote to women until 1920. It did not extend the right to nonwhite male citizens until 1870 or American Indians until 1924. It did not fully enforce those rights until 1965, with the Voting Rights Act.
My students also understand the challenging reality that our country occupies land that was occupied by hundreds of native civilizations prior to the first Europeans arrival on this continent. There are Americans who look at our country and see a history of evil actions taken to steal a continent, while using slaves to build an economy. They reach the far-too-easy conclusion that we are an evil nation. There are other Americans who reach the equally simple conclusion that our past is a series of justifiable steps on the path to creating a great nation.
My students understand just how prophetic George Washington was when he warned against the dangers of political parties."
Both perspectives are equally flawed. These points of view both take our nations complicated history and reduce it to oversimplified ideas. My 8th graders understand that there is no wisdom in trying to find simple answers to the complicated issues surrounding an equally complicated nation. Our nations leaders, and those who desperately desire to be our leaders, would do well to understand this.
My 8th graders also understand that the key to our complex democracy is the right to free speech guaranteed in the First Amendment. They understand that what makes free speech complicated is the simple fact that it is granted to all.
Many in politics and academia are trying to adapt the freedom of speech to somehow include a freedom from offense. If one Americans freedom of speech can be limited because another American feels offended by his words, then freedom of speech no longer exists.
Our nations language has certainly become riddled with words and phrases that are intended to incite anger and violence. Such words should not be tolerated. However, we cannot allow this small segment of speech to expand and challenge the foundation of democracy. The more I learn, the more I understand that the greatest benefit of democracy is not that we get to collectively choose our leaders, it is the fact that every day we get to decide which ideas carry the greatest value. Great Americans have secured their places in history by trusting their ideas and submitting those ideas to the thoughts and free-speech rights of others. My 8th graders understand that this ongoing debate of ideas is what made our country great.
We live in the greatest nation on earth. That privilege comes at a price. Our nation faces serious and complex issues that can only be addressed by those who recognize the complexity of what it means to be an American. In the face of these monumental issues, I hope we will embrace the challenges and join my students in striving to gain the wisdom needed to be Americans.
States scrambling to come up with more nuanced ways to measure school quality under the new federal K-12 law are running smack into an old problem: how to make sure they have the right data.
The Every Student Succeeds Act requires that statesin addition to using English-language proficiency, graduation rates, and scores on statewide achievement testsadd at least one new indicator of school quality or student success, such as school climate, chronic absenteeism, discipline, or college and career readiness.
For many states, adding that new indicator may mean spending more on data systems and collection, avoiding approaches that might demand too much of a data lift, or picking something off the shelf rather than crafting a more challenging indicator, because the information isnt easily available.
Complicating the matter, the law requires that the data for the new school-quality indicator must be valid, reliable, and comparable across districts, and that officials be able to break out the information by student demographics.
That presents a challenge for state education agencies that want to pick indicators that use classroom observations or teacher and parent surveys to measure schoolwide indicators. Those might include whether parents feel engaged or if teachers are participating in effective peer-mentor programs, for example.
Heres a great opportunity for departments to innovate, and theyre being placed right back in a box, said Mark Elgart, the president and chief executive officer of AdvancEd, a group thats consulted with education departments to help them create new accountability systems.
But many consultants working with state departments are advising that they not let data-collection issues impede innovation.
If somethings not feasible to collect, you have to treat it as an implementation issue, said Joanne Weiss, who was a chief of staff to former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and who currently consults with state education departments. That doesnt mean its not an important indicator that shouldnt be included in the system.
Tough Choices
The U.S. Department of Education in June issued its proposed regulations for states putting together new accountability systems under ESSA, which is due to go fully into effect in fall 2017. The draft repeats the laws requirements for four mandated academic indicators, as well as for the new fifth indicator of school quality or student success.
Heavy Lift As states revamp their accountability systems under the Every Student Succeeds Act, some are wrestling with what it will take to collect the data needed to incorporate new indicators into those systems. CALIFORNIA
Indicators: Considering indicators in four areas: chronic absenteeism; suspension rates; college and career readiness; school climate.
Time Frame: Data collection starts in September; system rolls out fall of 2017.
Data Specifics: Work needed to collect clear, consistent, up-to-date data across districts in certain areas. CONNECTICUT
Indicators: Adopted five indicators: attendance/chronic absence; college and career readiness; postsecondary entrance; physical fitness; arts access.
Time Frame: The state plans to submit new accountability system to U.S. Department of Education after making minor tweaks to comply with the recently released regulations.
Data Specifics: State for several years has collected all the data required to measure the indicators picked for the accountability system. SOUTH CAROLINA
Indicators: Refining indicators in four areas: elementary school readiness; middle school readiness; high school readiness; college and career readiness.
Time Frame: End of summer to refine indicators, accountability system to roll out at the start of the 2017-18 school year.
Data Specifics: New, centralized data-management system estimated to cost more than $1 million. The system will flag course work schools offer and how students perform in those courses. Sources: California, Connecticut, South Carolina Departments of Education
In the meantime, many states already are wrestling with whether to pick a school quality indicator that is ideal and ambitious, versus one that is practical and safe, with data collection and analysis a major factor.
Californias education department has pushed back against aggressive efforts by parent and advocates to measure school climate, an indicator that officials say they dont yet have enough reliable information to measure.
Connecticuts education department rejected proposals to add civic engagement to that states accountability systeman indicator that would require collecting new data.
And South Carolina officials, not wanting to trample on the states accountability task forces imagination, will spend more than $1 million to measure school and career readiness as part of its new accountability system. We know were going to be collecting significantly more data with this new system, said Sheila Quinn, South Carolinas deputy schools superintendent.
One big issue: whether states and districts are able to retrofit their data-collection systems to answer new and increasingly difficult questions, a potentially arduous and expensive task.
For many measures, state officials say they lack the infrastructure to collect enough reliable information to attach high stakes. Many districts data-collection sytems are scattershot and outdated. Scores of technicians responsible for processing data have been laid off in recent years amid budget cuts. And local superintendents have complained that theyre already required by states to collect an inordinate amount of data.
The details are daunting. Scott Norton, the Council of Chief State School Officers strategic-initiative director for standards, assessment, and accountability, said pulling all the right data together requires syncing districts systems, then coding those systems to collect the right information.
Some data points, such as whether a student is a foster child or part of a military family, are pretty straightforward. But otherssuch as how students feel about a schools climate or whether teachers are receiving a certain amount of professional developmentmay require a bevy of surveys that then must be manually entered into the database.
As a result, many education departments, depending on their capacity, will consider outsourcing the work or paying millions of dollars to purchase entire new systems, consultants say.
Student-Level Information
Theres also the sheer volume of information. School districts today collect hundreds of thousands of data points about children that are often stored in large data warehouses. Students track their academic progress in data binders, teachers tweak their curriculum based on rapid-fire online quizzes, and principals tally office referrals to craft new discipline procedures.
Against that backdrop, Brennan McMahon Parton, the Data Quality Campaigns associate director for state policy and advocacy, has traversed the country in recent months urging state education departments and lawmakers to evaluate data they already collect before deciding to collect more as they weigh new school quality indicators.
Many states have meaningful and useful data in their system already, she said. Thats not to say with a push of a button, you get what you need.
In Connecticut, more than two-thirds of local superintendents said in a 2012 survey that the amount of data the state requires them to collect was duplicative, burdensome, and costly. That year, Democratic Gov. Dannel Malloy signed an education bill that tasked the state department to reduce by a third the number of data forms districts annually fill out.
So when the education department formed a task force two years ago to construct a new accountability system, superintendents and the agency pledged that any new indicators would have to be based on information the department already collected.
Oftentimes, when the state asks for new data, we tell them we already have it or weve been giving it to you in other ways, said Joseph J. Cirasuolo, the executive director of Connecticuts superintendents association. Usually, its not where it has to be.
In the end, Connecticut decided to add access to arts courses, chronic absenteeism, career readiness (based on students performance on the states achievement test, SAT, ACT, Advanced Placement, or International Baccalaureate tests), schools college-entrance rates, and three new ways to measure graduation rates to its accountability system.
Big Price Tag
In South Carolina, the task force designated to come up with a new accountability system decided to collect information on elementary, middle and high school readiness and career readiness. That states districts all collect data using separate systems, many with different contractors. Definitions of indicators such as chronic absenteeism or what qualifies as a suspension vary widely.
In order for South Carolina to measure the new indicators, the department will spend more than $1 million to buy a new collection system that pulls data points from each districts systems.
We collect attendance, but the question is: What is the quality of the attendance data that we receive? asked Daniel Ralyea, the director of the state education departments office of research and data analysis. I can aggregate it at the state level, but what happens is, in practice, elementary schools may not be as concerned with recording attendance as high schools are.
And in California, the debate over whether to use school climate as an indicator involves such factors as classroom observations and a host of student, parent, and teacher surveys.
We think (those surveys) are used best at the local level, said Keric Ashley, the deputy superintendent of Californias education department, pointing out that the data are prone to errors.
States and districts that want to test-drive the next generation of assessments will have the chance, thanks to one of the most buzzed-about pieces of the Every Student Succeeds Act.
But as the state officials who have crammed conference rooms to hear about ESSAs Innovative Assessment pilot are learning, trying out a new testing system in a handful of districts isnt for the faint of heart.
The law allows a small handful of states to accept local tests in lieu of the state exam, as long as the districts using them are trying out a system that will eventually go statewide.
And ESSA places a number of stringent conditions on the pilot, what the laws architects like to call guardrails. These guardrails are aimed at making sure such new tests are of high quality, and that all kinds of studentsincluding English-language learners and students in special educationhave access to them.
Pointing the Way
Those conditions can challenge everything from a states technical know-how to its approach to professional developmentall without additional federal funding, at least for now. The U.S. Department of Education released its proposed regulations on the pilot program July 6, and is taking public comments for 60 days.
Experts say the pilot has the potential to help point the way to brand-new methods of measuring student learning, both for the states and districts that decide to give it a shot, and those that dont.
New Approaches The U.S. Department of Education has proposed rules for states hoping to snare one of seven spots in its new Innovative Assessment pilot program, which would let them design their testing programs under the Every Student Succeeds Act. Among the highlights: States that want in on the pilot dont have to come up with a new testing system for every subject and every gradethey could try a more innovative format just for 3rd grade science tests, for instance.
The goal is one system eventually; the draft regulations make it clear that states are supposed to come up with one system that can eventually be scaled statewide.
Districts could try a handful of schools at first, rather than districtwide, or all at once.
The department would offer states four options to show that these new systems produce results comparable to those of their states test. Among them: giving the state test once in each grade where there is an innovative test, and giving the state test to a representative sample of students in certain grades.
States hoping to be selected for the pilot will have to lay out in detail what they intend to do, show their plans have support from the field, describe their budget, timeline, and evaluation plans, and how they intend to support teachers and students in using these new tests. Source: U.S. Department of Education
We see this as a bridge, said Lillian Pace, the senior director of national policy at KnowledgeWorks, a nonprofit that works to better personalize learning for students. Pace has studied the pilot and its implications closely.
When lawmakers sat down to write ESSA, the field wasnt ready, she said, to paint the picture of the next generation of assessments"the kinds of tests that can give teachers a fuller, real-time picture of what their students know while still helping states and districts improve schools.
While states may not be successful on the first try, we expect this to be a learning process for all, Pace said. The goal is for participating states to build and refine a system over time that really transforms student learning.
Whats more, the pilot also presents challenges for the Education Department, which will have to strike a balance between ensuring that the necessary quality and equity measures are in place, while giving states and districts room to experiment.
High Hurdles
The pilot was inspired, in large part, by New Hampshire, which got permission under the No Child Left Behind Act to begin experimenting with locally developed performance assessments in a handful of districts, with the idea of eventually taking the system statewide.
States and districts can try out performance tasks, like the Granite State is doing, or experiment with competency-based tests, which measure students mastery of particular skills, or other new types of assessments.
Initially, the pilot participation will be limited to seven states, either working alone, or as a consortium. (In this case, a consortium can only have up to four members). After three years, the education secretary could open it up to more stateseven all states.
States that want to participate in the pilot would have to clear some high hurdles. For instance, theyd have to make sure that their tests are valid and reliable for all students and for particular subgroups of students, including English-language learners and students in special education, two populations that arent always easy to test.
And theyd have to check to make sure the results are comparable across districts, so that a particular score or outcome means the same thing from one district to the next. New Hampshire does this by having students take the state assessment in certain grades. In proposed regulations for the pilot, the department listed other options for clearing this bar.
By the end of the demonstration period, the districts would need to include a representative sample of students from around the state. For instance, a state with a large ELL populationsuch as Californiawould need to ensure that there were plenty of ELLs taking the tests in the trial districts. These new systems would have to be able to be scaled statewide by the end of the pilot period.
That last requirement might be the toughest, said Scott Marion, the executive director of the Center for Assessment, a nonprofit organization that is working with New Hampshire on its performance tasks.
The thing that scares ... everybody is scaling statewide, he said. They want you to have these guardrails, so its not like any district could just waltz in [to the pilot]. You have to earn your way in.
Weighing the Challenges
But Donna Harris-Aikens, the ESSA implementation lead for the National Education Association, thinks those challenges are surmountable.
I think it will be challenging to scale up statewide, she said. But I dont think it will be impossible. There are states that are looking for a different way to demonstrate [student] progress. We are hoping and encouraging people to spend some time trying to figure out if they can do this.
One reality that has states that might otherwise be excited about jumping into the pilot worried: Theres no federal money tied to it.
That gives Amy Fowler, the deputy secretary of education in Vermont, some pauseespecially given all the tricky technical work the pilot requires.
Many folks in my state are saying it would be so great if we could take our own test. It would be so great. But do we want to give up other things that money could be used for? Right now, were feeling like its not the most efficient way to go, even though its attractive to educators.
Still, the program is generating plenty of interest. A big group of statesincluding Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, New Hampshire, Ohio, Tennessee, and Vermont, along with the District of Columbia and moreparticipated in a webinar that the Council of Chief State School Officers held earlier this year to talk about the pilots potential.
Meanwhile, the CCSSO is advising states to examine the testing flexibility already in place in ESSA, to see if they can accomplish what they want on assessments without having to join the pilot.
Under the new law, states can try out computer-adaptive assessments or use a series of short-term or interim assessments instead of one big summative testall without having to participate in the pilot.
Fowler, for instance, thinks Vermont may be able to do some of what it wants to dosuch as possibly moving toward a science test that incorporates at least some performance elementsusing that flexibility.
But Paul Leather, the deputy commissioner in New Hampshire, is urging his colleagues to give the innovative assessment pilot a go, despite the many challenges.
Its really been very rewarding work, he said. Schools and districts have gained a lot. Its a little higher bar than what were used to but I think everyone would say that its been worth it.
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Ireland United States Minor Outlying Islands United States of America Uruguay, Eastern Republic of Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela, Bolivarian Republic of Viet Nam, Socialist Republic of Wallis and Futuna Islands Western Sahara Yemen Zambia, Republic of Zimbabwe
To build the largest and most complete Amateur Radio community site on the Internet - a "portal" that hams think of as the first place to go for information, to exchange ideas, and be part of whats happening with ham radio on the Internet. eHam.net provides recognition and enjoyment to the people who use, contribute, and build the site. This project involves a management team of volunteers who each take a topic of interest and manage it with passion. The site will stand above all other ham radio sites by employing the latest technology and professional design/programming standards, developed by a team of community programmers who contribute their skills to the effort. The site will be something of which everyone involved can be proud to say they were a part. We welcome your comments. The eHam.net Team, Revision 07/2020.
Ely, Cambridgeshire is best known for its majestic cathedral dubbed the 'Ship of the Fens' because it dominates the flat landscape. The city, which is the second smallest in England, is about 14 miles north-northeast of Cambridge and about 80 miles by road from London.
13:33, 25 OCT 2022
Prior to her speech on Monday, Melania Trump has never really taken much of the spotlight from her husband, Republican front-runner Donald Trump. Sadly, for the presumptive First Lady, her primetime address at the Republican National Convention will forever go down in history, as a speech that is practically plagiarized word-for-word from a 2008 address by First Lady Michelle Obama.
A simple comparison of the two speeches would show a very notable similarity between the two addresses.
"From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise, that you treat people with respect. They taught and showed me values and morals in their daily lives. That is a lesson that I continue to pass along to our son," Melania Trump said during her speech on Monday.
"And we need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow. Because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them," she added.
Meanwhile, here is an excerpt from Michelle Obama's speech back in 2008.
"And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you're going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them, and even if you don't agree with them," Michelle Obama said.
"And Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values, and to pass them on to the next generation. Because we want our children -- and all children in this nation -- to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them."
What is particularly interesting is that, despite the almost word-for-word similarity between the two speeches, Trump's camp has so far been adamant that no plagiarism took place. In fact, Trump's campaign chairman Paul Manafort even stated on CNN that the plagiarism allegations were absurd.
"To think that she would do something like that knowing how scrutinized her speech was going to be last night is just really absurd," he said, further stating that the words used by Trump's wife were common words.
"There's no cribbing of Michelle Obama's speech. These were common words and values. She cares about her family. To think that she'd be cribbing Michelle Obama's words is crazy," he added.
In true Trump fashion, his campaign simply stated that the negative reactions to Melania's speech are due to the dropping ratings of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
"This is once again an example of when a woman threatens Hillary Clinton, she seeks out to demean her and take her down. It's not going to work," Manafort said. GOP
Quotes from a co-author:
While it may be beautiful in a home aquarium, the aggressive and fast-reproducing lionfish is wreaking havoc in the ocean ecosystem and endangering reef habitats.
But there might be a way to keep the lionfish in check: by eating it.
Researchers and restaurateurs in Northwest Florida are looking at ways to price and prepare lionfish dishes. In fact, the fish is already on the menu at some Pensacola restaurants.
This is a question of biology versus economics and how they affect one another, said Dr. William Huth, professor of economics at the University of West Florida.
Huth and a team of researchers from Appalachian State University are surveying consumers to find out how much theyd be willing to pay for lionfish and whether the knowledge that their meal is environmentally virtuous would get them to pony up a little more dough.
We knew a market for lionfish existed, but would consumers pay more? he said. Would they put a premium on the price of the product if they knew they were doing good for the environment?
Meanwhile, local restaurants, such as Hopjacks Pizza Kitchen & Taproom, are already selling a lionfish dip as an appetizer, thanks in part to new appliances and techniques that enable chefs to debone even the smallest catches. ...
Native to Indo-Pacific waters, the lionfish is a reef dweller with venomous spines that feeds primarily on other fish. It is believed to have been introduced into U.S. waters in the 1980s and has now grown to a very large problem along the southeast Atlantic coast, throughout the Gulf of Mexico and into the Carribean. ...
To try to find how much diners would be willing to pay for lionfish, Huth spent over $6,000 to conduct an experimental economic market at the annual Pensacola Seafood Festival in September.
We set up a booth, like any other vendor. But we offered lionfish on a bid to consume basis, Huth said. It was an auction system from which we could get statistically valid results.
Visitors to the booth willing to participate in the experiment were each given a $10 endowment for use in purchasing cooked lionfish, and Huth used three different types of information treatments to inform consumers about the lionfish threat. One group was given no information (the control); another was given information about how consuming lionfish could help the local economy; and the final group was given information about the possible detrimental effects of lionfish predation and the possible extinction risk to popular seafood species, such as grouper and snapper.
We made it clear to them that this was their $10 to keep, Huth said. They could use it however they liked and one option was to purchase a 3 ounce filet of lionfish.
The three groups were then invited to bid on how much they were willing to pay for the lionfish filets the research team had prepared using a sous vide cooking method. If their bid was equal to or above a randomly selected price, they received the fish and paid their bid price pocketing any difference and if their bid was less than the random price they did not get the fish but kept the money. .
Preliminary results, which Huth hopes to publish next year, confirmed that lionfish could be sold at a higher price than other seafood products.
We found significant evidence that people would be willing to pay in excess of $30 a pound for lionfish, Huth said. It appears that they felt that the premium price was worth it knowing that they had done something good for the environment.
New York state has field suit against Volkswagen claiming that not only did someone at Volkswagen designed a system to bypass emissions tests (for which VW has already agreed to pay over $15 billion), but that upper management actually performed a benefit cost analysis on what would happen if they got caught:
Executives even carefully evaluated what the cost would be to the company if they were caught. Reviewing previous cases of violations of environmental regulations by auto manufacturers in the U.S. they predicted that the likely fines posed only a moderate cost risk. They cited the highest fine, imposed against Hyundai/Kia as amounting to barely $91 per vehicle and added fines in this amount are not even remotely capable of influencing the share price of a globally operative company such as Volkswagen.
Oops...and then they apparently tried to cover it up:
The most senior VW officer listed in the indictment is Martin Winterkorn who was CEO of Audi from 2002 to 2007, when the original defeat device was developed, and CEO of VW from 2007 until resigning on September 23, 2015. The day before he resigned, Winterkorn made a video statement that referred to irregularities in the diesel engines and said the company would act with the greatest possible openness and transparency. A few weeks earlier, according to the complaint, a senior VW attorney advised multiple employees that a litigation hold was about to be issued, making it impossible to destroy or delete documents. A team of at least eight employees, all in the departments involved in designing the defeat devices, then deleted or removed data from the company records. Some, but not all, of the data has been recovered, the lawsuit said. At the same time VWs Management Board, the nine men who had presided over the perpetration of fraud, the cover-up and then a public relations debacle that followed its exposure, were awarded $70 million in executive compensation for 2015 alone.
Oops.
One of the most significant aspects of the 7 June 2016 Joint Statement: The United States and IndiaEnduring Global Partners in the 21st Century is Washingtons recognition of New Delhi as Major Defence Partner. This is supposed to facilitate the United States (US) technology sharing with India to a level commensurate with that of its closest allies and partners, including licence-free access to a wide range of dual-use technologies, support of Indias Make in India initiative, and to support the development of robust defence industries and their integration into the global supply chain...
Pray what does this imply and what are the strings attached? The key words over here, if we have got it right, are the transfer of technology at a level commensurate with that of its [the USs] closest allies and partners. A senior Obama administration
officialpresumably he did not want to be identified by his namehas clarified that Major Defence Partner implies access to [defence] technologies that are on par with [US] treaty allies, presumably referring to the member countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). And he added: That is a very unique status. India is the only other country that enjoys that status outside [US] formal treaty allies. But Richard M Rossow, Wadhwani Chair of USIndia Policy Studies at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, let the cat out of the bag when he said that access to advanced defence technology will depend on the specific operations India may be willing to undertake in the future to contribute to regional security.
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Special Issue on Intervention published: Cardiovascular Innovations and Applications
Cardiovascular Innovations and Applications (CVIA) has just published its third issue which is available online now. http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/cscript/cvia/2016/00000001/00000003
This new issue has a special focus on Intervention and was guest edited by R. David Anderson of the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Florida Medical School. This CVIA special issue brings together contributions from leading cardiologists from Europe, the United States and China.
CVIA is the official journal of the Great Wall International Congress of Cardiology (GW-ICC) and its first issue was published in October 2015 to coincide with the GW-ICC meeting in Beijing, China.
Featured papers in this issue include:
Reports of a possible causal link between brain, head, and neck tumors and radiation exposure during coronary interventional procedures: a sobering look at the data by Ryan Reeves and Ehtisham Mahmud (DOI 10.15212/CVIA.2016.0014.
This paper explores the hazard posed by radiation exposure for both patients and physicians during fluoroscopically-guided procedures. Drs. Ryan and Mahmud write '' Invasive cardiologists are exposed to high levels of scatter radiation and both increasing procedural complexity and higher operator volumes contribute to exposure above recommended thresholds. Standard shielding does not offer sufficient protection to the head and neck region and the potential for negative biological, subclinical, and clinical effects exists. Large population studies suggest that cranial exposure to low dose radiation increases the risks of tumor development. In addition, modest doses of therapeutic cranial radiation have been linked with the development of brain cancer. Although a causal association between scatter radiation in the cath lab and brain cancer does not currently exist, given the known detrimental effects of radiation exposure to the head and neck region, support a focus on potential methods of protection for both the patient and the operator.''
Renal Denervation: Past, Present, and Future by Negiin Pourafshar, Ashkan Karimi, R David Anderson, Seyed Hossein Alaei-Andabili and David E Kandzari (DOI 10.15212/CVIA.2016.0016)
Over the past decade, percutaneous renal denervation has been vigorously investigated as a treatment for resistant hypertension. The SYMPLICITY radiofrequency catheter system (Medtronic CardioVascular Inc., Santa Rosa, CA, USA) is the most tested device in clinical trials. After the positive results of small phase I and II clinical trials, SYMPLICITY HTN-3 (a phase III, multi-center, blinded, sham-controlled randomized clinical trial) was completed in 2014, but did not show significant blood pressure lowering effect with renal denervation (RDN) compared to medical therapy and caused the investigators and industry to revisit both the basic science elements of RDN as well as the design of related clinical trials. This review summarizes the SYMPLICITY trials, analyzes the SYMPLICITY HTN-3 data, and provides insights gained from this trial in the design of the most recent clinical trial, the SPYRAL HTN Global clinical trial. Other than hypertension, the role of RDN in the management of other disease processes such as systolic and diastolic heart failure, metabolic syndrome, arrhythmia, and obstructive sleep apnea with the common pathophysiologic pathway of sympathetic overactivity is also discussed. The authors conclude that ''In the past decade there has been a significant increase in renal denervation (RDN) devices with proprietary design using various energy sources, and as investigators strive to discover the role of RDN in the management of hypertension, there is a future need for direct comparative study between these technologies to identify the safest and most effective device.''
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COMMENTARY
NSTEMI or STEMI: A Myocardial Infarction is an Infarction regardless of the ECG Changes at Presentation by C. Richard Conti (DOI 10.15212/CVIA.2016.0006)
In this Commentary, Dr Conti considers ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) and non-ST segment elevation myocardial infarction (NSTEMI). He concludes '' Some have the impression that NSTEMI is benign compared to STEMI and thus need not be considered for urgent revascularization. The message I am getting from the literature is that there is insufficient evidence to accept or reject the emergent use of coronary angiography and subsequent PCI/Stent in the NSTEMI patient. I guess my message is that if we do no harm, (with urgent coronary angiography) why not find out what is going on in the coronary circulation? We might be surprised in patients in whom the diagnosis of vessel occlusion was missed.''
Other papers in this issue include:
Fractional Flow Reserve-guided Percutaneous Coronary Intervention: Standing the Test of Timeby Frederik M. Zimmermann, Lokien X. van Nunen (DOI 10.15212/CVIA.2016.0011)
What is the Optimal Duration of Dual Antiplatelet Therapy After Stenting? by Udaya S. Tantry, Eliano P. Navarese and Paul A. Gurbel (DOI 10.15212/CVIA.2016.0022)
Current Considerations of Thrombectomy for Acute Myocardial Infarction by Ahmed N. Mahmoud, Islam Y. Elgendy and Anthony A. Bavry (DOI 10.15212/CVIA.2016.0021)
Will transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) be the primary therapy for aortic stenosis? by Jose F. Condado and Peter C. Block (DOI 10.15212/CVIA.2016.0012)
The future of transcatheter therapy for mitral valve disease by Ted Feldman and Mayra Guerrero (DOI 10.15212/CVIA.2016.0017)
The Transradial Approach for Cardiac Catheterization and Percutaneous Coronary Intervention: A Review by Dhaval Pau, Nileshkumar J Patel, Nish Patel and Mauricio G. Cohen (DOI 10.15212/CVIA.2016.0013)
Carotid Artery Stenting: 2016 and Beyond by Christopher Bajzer (DOI 10.15212/CVIA.2016.0015)
Coronary Artery Chronic Total Occlusion by Calvin Choi, Nayan Agarwal, Ki Park and R. David Anderson (DOI 10.15212/CVIA.2016.0023)
Cardiovascular Abnormalities Among Patients with Spontaneous Subarachnoid Hemorrhage. A Single Center Experience by Akram Y. Elgendy, Ahmed Mahmoud, Islam Y. Elgendy, Hend Mansoor and C. Richard Conti (DOI 10.15212/CVIA.2016.0024)
Identification and Management of Iatrogenic Aortocoronary Dissection by Shao-Ping Nie and Xiao Wang (DOI 10.15212/CVIA.2016.0018)
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Transient Pulmonary Atelectasis after Ketamine Sedation during Cardiac Catheterization in Spontaneously Breathing Children with Congenital Heart Disease by Yan Chaowu, Xu Zhiongying, Zhang Gejun, Zheng Hong, Jin Jinglin, Li Shiguo, Lv Jianhua, Hu Haibo, Song Huijun, Zhao Shihua (DOI 10.15212/CVIA.2016.0019)
COMMENTARY
Should Patients with Acute Myocardial Infarction Have Complete Revascularization at the Time of PCI of the Culprit Vessel? ) by C. Richard Conti (DOI 10.15212/CVIA.2016.0008)
CLINICAL HISTORICAL COMMENTARY
Biodegradable Stents by C. Richard Conti (DOI 10.15212/CVIA.2016.0010)
CVIA is an open access journal with no author submission or article processing fees during its launch phase. C. Richard Conti acts as Editor-in-chief and all articles are subject to full and transparent peer review. CVIA is available on the IngentaConnect platform and at http://cvia-journal.org/. Submissions may be made using ScholarOne Manuscripts (https://mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/cvia-journal).
There are no author submission or article processing fees.
Philadelphia, PA, July 19, 2016 - A new report in Biological Psychiatry reports that brain alterations in infants at risk for autism may be widespread and affect multiple systems, in contrast to the widely held assumption of impairment specifically in social brain networks.
Autism is diagnosed based on impairments in social and communication behaviors. These symptoms tend to emerge in the second year of life, but identifying abnormalities in early infancy could help researchers understand how autism develops and potentially allow clinicians to predict the disorder before it emerges.
Attempts to identify precursors have primarily focused on social behaviors, based on the assumption that abnormalities in social brain networks arise early in life and compound throughout development. But Dr. Mayada Elsabbagh from McGill University in Canada, and Dr. Mark Johnson, from Birkbeck, University of London, suggest that recent studies do not support the idea of a singular pathway in the development of autism.
In their synthesis of studies examining infants at risk for autism, Elsabbagh and Johnson highlight behavioral research providing evidence for general abnormalities during the first year of life. These include delayed motor maturation, higher level of perceptual sensitivity, and poor attention flexibility. The authors also highlight brain imaging studies that provide evidence for widespread alterations throughout brain networks, rather than focal deficits in social networks.
The behavioral and imaging studies challenge the assumption of early social network abnormalities that persist throughout development and lead to emergence of the disorder.
"Our review reveals little support for localized deficits in social brain network systems within the first year of life," said Elsabbagh. "It instead favors the view that atypical development involving perceptual, attentional, motor, and social systems precede emerging autism and lead to overt behavioral symptoms by the second year."
The review suggests that focusing on a single deficit may not be sufficient to identify early warning signs and will likely adjust how researchers conceptualize the disorder.
"There has been a concerted effort to identify the final common neural pathways underlying symptoms and deficits for psychiatric disorders," said Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry. "Yet the perspective shared by Elsabbagh and Johnson suggests that there are widespread disturbances in brain development in autism spectrum disorder and that the prominent social deficits either reflect the fact that circuits underlying social behaviors are among the many circuits affected or that some functional deficits are emergent properties of multiple affected circuits."
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Notes for editors
The article is "Autism and the Social Brain: The First-Year Puzzle," by Mayada Elsabbagh and Mark H. Johnson (doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2016.02.019). It appears in Biological Psychiatry, volume 80, issue 2 (2016), published by Elsevier.
Copies of this paper are available to credentialed journalists upon request; please contact Rhiannon Bugno at 1-214-648-0880 or biol.psych@utsouthwestern.edu. Journalists wishing to interview the authors may contact Mayada Elsabbagh at mayada.elsabbagh@mcgill.ca.
The authors' affiliations, and disclosures of financial and conflicts of interests are available in the article.
John H. Krystal, M.D., is Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine, Chief of Psychiatry at Yale-New Haven Hospital, and a research psychiatrist at the VA Connecticut Healthcare System. His disclosures of financial and conflicts of interests are available here.
About Biological Psychiatry
Biological Psychiatry is the official journal of the Society of Biological Psychiatry, whose purpose is to promote excellence in scientific research and education in fields that investigate the nature, causes, mechanisms and treatments of disorders of thought, emotion, or behavior. In accord with this mission, this peer-reviewed, rapid-publication, international journal publishes both basic and clinical contributions from all disciplines and research areas relevant to the pathophysiology and treatment of major psychiatric disorders.
The journal publishes novel results of original research which represent an important new lead or significant impact on the field, particularly those addressing genetic and environmental risk factors, neural circuitry and neurochemistry, and important new therapeutic approaches. Reviews and commentaries that focus on topics of current research and interest are also encouraged.
Biological Psychiatry is one of the most selective and highly cited journals in the field of psychiatric neuroscience. It is ranked 5th out of 140 Psychiatry titles and 11th out of 256 Neurosciences titles in the Journal Citations Reports published by Thomson Reuters. The 2015 Impact Factor score for Biological Psychiatry is 11.212.
About Elsevier
Elsevier is a world-leading provider of information solutions that enhance the performance of science, health, and technology professionals, empowering them to make better decisions, deliver better care, and sometimes make groundbreaking discoveries that advance the boundaries of knowledge and human progress. Elsevier provides web-based, digital solutions -- among them ScienceDirect, Scopus, Elsevier Research Intelligence and ClinicalKey -- and publishes over 2,500 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, and more than 35,000 book titles, including a number of iconic reference works. Elsevier is part of RELX Group, a world-leading provider of information and analytics for professional and business customers across industries. http://www.elsevier.com
Media contact
Rhiannon Bugno
Editorial Office, Biological Psychiatry
1-214-648-0880
biol.psych@utsouthwestern.edu
Chimpanzees who travel are more frequent tool users, according to new findings to be published in eLife
Chimpanzees who travel are more frequent tool users, according to new findings from the University of Neuchatel and the University of Geneva, Switzerland, to be published in eLife.
Hawa is a wild chimpanzee from the Budongo Forest in Uganda who burns up a lot of energy travelling, which he has learnt to replenish with a dose of honey. His friend Squibs makes less of an effort to roam and has not acquired the skills needed to enjoy this high-energy treat. This pattern was repeated in other members of the study group over seven years of observation.
A low quantity of ripe fruit also increases chimpanzees' motivation to acquire new foraging skills, but the effect is less pronounced than travel.
"Our results show that travel fosters tool use in wild chimpanzees and it may also have been a driving force in early technological evolution by humans," says Dr Thibaud Gruber from the University of Geneva.
The team reviewed data from nine other chimpanzee communities to confirm the pattern. Chimpanzees' closest relative, the Bonobo, travels around the same average distance as the Sonso and other Ugandan chimpanzees and uses a similar set of tools. Gorillas and most orangutans show limited or no feeding-related tool use and spend significantly less time travelling per day on the ground compared to chimpanzees. In contrast, modern human hunter-gatherers walk on average 11.4-14.1 km per day and use many more tools than any of the great apes.
Gruber studied 70 individuals of the Sonso community of chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii, known for its limited tool use behaviour. This made them ideal subjects to study how tool use emerges. The only feeding-related tools they use are folded leaves, usually to collect water, and moss to soak up mineral deposits from a clay pit. 52 of them engaged with the experiment.
"After seven years of field work, I had a massive amount of data and there was clear variation in how chimpanzees engaged with the experiment. I thought it would be interesting to analyse why," says Gruber.
He deployed the "honey trap experiment". The Sonso chimpanzees already used their fingers to take honey from bees' nests, with limited success. In the "honey trap" experiment, a hole is drilled into a log and partially filled with this tempting prize so it can only be accessed with an implement. Most of the individuals who successfully extracted honey employed the community's habitual tool, a folded leaf sponge, while two used a stick. A total of 21 instances of tool use were observed in 11 individuals.
The team reviewed the data against a whole range of variables including the quantity of ripe fruits eaten and the average daily distance the chimpanzees travelled.
"We didn't expect travel to be that important, and were surprised that it had an even greater influence than if they fed less on their preferred food of ripe fruits," says Gruber.
The team conclude that travel created an extra need for high-energy food while the challenge of inaccessible honey created an opportunity for innovation. The team did not analyse the potential influence of social learning to influence it. In 2011, Gruber and a colleague Catherine Hobaiter from the University of St Andrews discovered that the community's use of moss as a sponge emerged from one individual named Nick, whose behavior was copied by a dominant female and quickly spread.
The study also reveals the influence of local ecology in the development of tool use. The Budongo Forest has provided a rich environment for chimpanzees, which could explain the previous lack of tool use in the Sonso community. However, in the last few decades, the food supply has steadily decreased.
It has been suggested that the development of tool use and sociality in early humans could likewise have been adaptive responses to heightened habitat instability caused by climate change.
"When times are changing, you have to adapt your behavior and our data illustrate that chimps will pay more attention to the possibilities offered by their environment in more demanding periods," says Gruber.
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Reference
The paper 'Travel fosters tool use in wild chimpanzees' can be freely accessed online at http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.16371. Contents, including text, figures, and data, are free to reuse under a CC BY 4.0 license.
DURBAN (July 19) - AIDS deaths are falling in most countries worldwide, but the rate of new infections increased in several countries over the past decade, threatening to undermine efforts to end the AIDS epidemic by 2030, a new scientific paper shows.
The study from the Global Burden of Disease collaborative network, published today in The Lancet HIV, found that 74 countries saw increases in age-standardized rates of new infections between 2005 and 2015, including Egypt, Pakistan, Kenya, the Philippines, Cambodia, Mexico, and Russia.
The new research, released at the International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, also found that while the global number of new cases continues to decline, the pace has greatly slowed. New infections of HIV fell by an average of only 0.7% per year between 2005 and 2015, compared to the 2.7% drop per year between 1997 and 2005.
The study is based on findings from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) coordinated by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in Seattle. With more than 1,700 collaborators in 124 countries, the GBD is the largest and most comprehensive effort measuring epidemiological levels and trends worldwide.
"If this trend of stubbornly high new infections continues, there will be significant challenges in meeting the UN's Sustainable Development Goal for the world to witness the end of AIDS in less than 15 years," said IHME Director Dr. Christopher Murray. "Everyone in population health - researchers, policymakers, practitioners, pharmaceutical companies, advocates, and others - needs to understand that even if more people are living with HIV, we cannot end AIDS without stopping new infections."
Professor Peter Piot, who is the director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and was the founding executive director of UNAIDS, also remarked on the paper's findings.
"This study shows that the AIDS epidemic is not over by any means and that HIV/AIDS remains one of the biggest public health threats of our time," Professor Piot said. "The continuing high rate of over 2 million new HIV infections represents a collective failure which must be addressed through intensified prevention efforts and continued investment in HIV vaccine research."
The study examines HIV mortality, prevalence, and incidence between 1980 and 2015, and is part of the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015, which provides comprehensive population health estimates on disease, injuries, and related risk factors.
In contrast to the overall slow decline in new infections, the number of people living with HIV has significantly increased globally, largely due to the expansion of antiretroviral therapy (ART). IHME estimates there were about 39 million people globally living with HIV in 2015, as compared to 28 million in 2000.
In 2015, 41% of the people living with HIV were using ART, as compared to less than 2% in 2000.
"We're keeping people alive longer, and these numbers should give those using antiretroviral therapies considerable hope," said IHME Associate Professor Dr. Haidong Wang, the lead author on the study. Such improvement, however, is still far away from the ambitious 90-90-90 goals set by the global community for the year 2020. Those goals aim for 90% of people living with HIV knowing their HIV status, 90% of people diagnosed with HIV receiving antiretroviral therapy, and 90% of people receiving antiretroviral therapy experiencing viral suppression.
Interestingly, use of ART is different between men and women. On average, global ART use is 10% higher among women living with HIV, and in some sub-Saharan nations in 2015, it is 50% higher. However, in some Eastern European and South Asian nations, the percentage of men using ART is as much as 50% higher than women.
"The Global Burden of Disease HIV study provides critical health information to help shape and support national and global decision-making," said Peter Hayward, editor of The Lancet HIV. "The estimates are also key to strengthening accountability to ensure that promises made by politicians and policymakers with regard to specific HIV targets are being delivered."
In regard to mortality, women tend to die at younger ages from HIV than men, likely due to age-disparate relationships in which men have sex with younger women. In total, approximately 1.2 million people died from HIV in 2015, down from a peak of 1.8 million in 2005.
The results of IHME's study underscore the need for more effective efforts to prevent new infections, as well as additional funding for these efforts. This analysis shows that development assistance for health (DAH) dedicated to HIV/AIDS grew fastest between 2000 and 2009, yet such funding has stagnated since 2010. According to Financing Global Health 2015, a report published in April by IHME, annual funding globally for HIV/AIDS peaked at US$11.2 billion in 2013, but dropped to US$10.8 billion in 2015. With slowdown in the decline of new infections and in funding for HIV/AIDS, it will be challenging to achieve the goal set by the global community to end AIDS by 2030.
The entire HIV report, "Estimates of global, regional, and national incidence, prevalence, and mortality of HIV, 1980-2015: The Global Burden of Disease Study 2015," is available at http://www.healthdata.org.
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Media Contacts:
Kayla Albrecht, MPH, +1-206-897-3792 (office); +1-203-335-2669 (cell); albrek7@uw.edu
Dean R. Owen, in Durban, +1-206-434-5630 (cell); dean1227@uw.edu
Established in 2007, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) is an independent global health research center at the University of Washington in Seattle that provides rigorous and comparable measurement of the world's most important health problems and evaluates strategies to address them. IHME makes this information available so that policymakers, donors, practitioners, researchers, and local and global decision-makers have the evidence they need to make informed decisions about how to allocate resources to best improve population health. For more information, visit: http://www.healthdata.org
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- In the world of quantum, infinitesimally small particles, weird and often logic-defying behaviors abound. Perhaps the strangest of these is the idea of superposition, in which objects can exist simultaneously in two or more seemingly counterintuitive states. For example, according to the laws of quantum mechanics, electrons may spin both clockwise and counter-clockwise, or be both at rest and excited, at the same time.
The physicist Erwin Schrodinger highlighted some strange consequences of the idea of superposition more than 80 years ago, with a thought experiment that posed that a cat trapped in a box with a radioactive source could be in a superposition state, considered both alive and dead, according to the laws of quantum mechanics. Since then, scientists have proven that particles can indeed be in superposition, at quantum, subatomic scales. But whether such weird phenomena can be observed in our larger, everyday world is an open, actively pursued question.
Now, MIT physicists have found that subatomic particles called neutrinos can be in superposition, without individual identities, when traveling hundreds of miles. Their results, to be published later this month in Physical Review Letters, represent the longest distance over which quantum mechanics has been tested to date.
A subatomic journey across state lines
The team analyzed data on the oscillations of neutrinos -- subatomic particles that interact extremely weakly with matter, passing through our bodies by the billions per second without any effect. Neutrinos can oscillate, or change between several distinct "flavors," as they travel through the universe at close to the speed of light.
The researchers obtained data from Fermilab's Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search, or MINOS, an experiment in which neutrinos are produced from the scattering of other accelerated, high-energy particles in a facility near Chicago and beamed to a detector in Soudan, Minnesota, 735 kilometers (456 miles) away. Although the neutrinos leave Illinois as one flavor, they may oscillate along their journey, arriving in Minnesota as a completely different flavor.
The MIT team studied the distribution of neutrino flavors generated in Illinois, versus those detected in Minnesota, and found that these distributions can be explained most readily by quantum phenomena: As neutrinos sped between the reactor and detector, they were statistically most likely to be in a state of superposition, with no definite flavor or identity.
What's more, the researchers found that the data was "in high tension" with more classical descriptions of how matter should behave. In particular, it was statistically unlikely that the data could be explained by any model of the sort that Einstein sought, in which objects would always embody definite properties rather than exist in superpositions.
"What's fascinating is, many of us tend to think of quantum mechanics applying on small scales," says David Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of physics at MIT. "But it turns out that we can't escape quantum mechanics, even when we describe processes that happen over large distances. We can't stop our quantum mechanical description even when these things leave one state and enter another, traveling hundreds of miles. I think that's breathtaking."
Kaiser is a co-author on the paper, which includes MIT physics professor Joseph Formaggio, junior Talia Weiss, and former graduate student Mykola Murskyj.
A flipped inequality
The team analyzed the MINOS data by applying a slightly altered version of the Leggett-Garg inequality, a mathematical expression named after physicists Anthony Leggett and Anupam Garg, who derived the expression to test whether a system with two or more distinct states acts in a quantum or classical fashion.
Leggett and Garg realized that the measurements of such a system, and the statistical correlations between those measurements, should be different if the system behaves according to classical versus quantum mechanical laws.
"They realized you get different predictions for correlations of measurements of a single system over time, if you assume superposition versus realism," Kaiser explains, where "realism" refers to models of the Einstein type, in which particles should always exist in some definite state.
Formaggio had the idea to flip the expression slightly, to apply not to repeated measurements over time but to measurements at a range of neutrino energies. In the MINOS experiment, huge numbers of neutrinos are created at various energies, where Kaiser says they then "careen through the Earth, through solid rock, and a tiny drizzle of them will be detected" 735 kilometers away.
According to Formaggio's reworking of the Leggett-Garg inequality, the distribution of neutrino flavors -- the type of neutrino that finally arrives at the detector -- should depend on the energies at which the neutrinos were created. Furthermore, those flavor distributions should look very different if the neutrinos assumed a definite identity throughout their journey, versus if they were in superposition, with no distinct flavor.
"The big world we live in"
Applying their modified version of the Leggett-Garg expression to neutrino oscillations, the group predicted the distribution of neutrino flavors arriving at the detector, both if the neutrinos were behaving classically, according to an Einstein-like theory, and if they were acting in a quantum state, in superposition. When they compared both predicted distributions, they found there was virtually no overlap.
More importantly, when they compared these predictions with the actual distribution of neutrino flavors observed from the MINOS experiment, they found that the data fit squarely within the predicted distribution for a quantum system, meaning that the neutrinos very likely did not have individual identities while traveling over hundreds of miles between detectors.
But what if these particles truly embodied distinct flavors at each moment in time, rather than being some ghostly, neither-here-nor-there phantoms of quantum physics? What if these neutrinos behaved according to Einstein's realism-based view of the world? After all, there could be statistical flukes due to defects in instrumentation, that might still generate a distribution of neutrinos that the researchers observed. Kaiser says if that were the case and "the world truly obeyed Einstein's intuitions," the chances of such a model accounting for the observed data would be "something like one in a billion."
"What gives people pause is, quantum mechanics is quantitatively precise and yet it comes with all this conceptual baggage," Kaiser says. "That's why I like tests like this: Let's let these things travel further than most people will drive on a family road trip, and watch them zoom through the big world we live in, not just the strange world of quantum mechanics, for hundreds of miles. And even then, we can't stop using quantum mechanics. We really see quantum effects persist across macroscopic distances."
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This research was funded, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy.
ADDITIONAL BACKGROUND:
ARCHIVE: On the hunt for neutrinos
ARCHIVE: 3Q: The massive impact of neutrino research
Infrared data from the Suomi NPP satellite showed that Tropical Cyclone Abela continues to weaken in the Western Pacific Ocean.
On Tuesday, July 19, 2016 at 0900 UTC (5 a.m. EDT), Tropical Cyclone Abela was centered near 14.7 degrees south latitude and 54.7 degrees east longitude. That's about 540 nautical miles east-northeast of Antananarivo, Madagascar. Abela was a minimal tropical storm with maximum sustained winds near 35 knots (40 mph/62 kph). Abela was moving to the west at 17 knots (19.5 mph/31.4 kph).
On July 19 at 0915 UTC (4:15 a.m. EDT) the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument aboard the Suomi NPP satellite captured an image of Tropical Cyclone Abela The VIIRS infrared image showed only two areas of strong convection remaining in Tropical Cyclone Abela. The area of strongest storms were west of the center where cloud top temperatures were near minus 70 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 56.6 degrees Celsius).
The Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) said that the low level circulation center of Abela has become exposed as the weakening central convection is displaced southeastward. That's where the other area of strong storms was seen on the VIIRS image. Cloud top temperatures between minus 65 and 69 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 53.8 and 56.1 degrees Celsius). Those storms were less powerful that the storms west of the center.
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The Suomi NPP satellite is managed by NASA and NOAA with support from the U.S. Department of Defense.
The JTWC forecast calls for Abela to dissipate sometime tomorrow, July 20 as it tracks toward northeastern Madagascar.
Dr Arnab Basu MBE has today received an Honorary Degree from Northumbria University, Newcastle, for his contribution to engineering and business.
Dr Basu was born in 1973 in Calcutta, India, and in 1994 graduated with a degree in Natural Sciences before embarking on the beginning of his career in his family electronic materials and soldering fluxes business.
Arriving in the UK in 1996, Dr Basu studied at Northumbria University, where he graduated with a first class honours degree in Engineering. He then went on to complete a PhD in Physics at Durham University, receiving the Russell Grant prize for the best thesis in solid state physics.
Dr Basu is the founding CEO of Kromek Group plc, a leading developer of high performance radiation detection technologies, headquartered at NETPark in Sedgefield, with operations in the UK, and the USA. He has raised multiple rounds of financing from private equity and public markets and led the acquisition of the US businesses and UK expansion, growing the company from just two employees in 2003 to over 110 in 2016.
A prominent figure within the business community, he has also been awarded Ernst and Young UK Entrepreneur of the Year (2009) and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Fellow of the Institute of Physics, Fellow of the Institute of Directors and Member of the Institute of Engineering Technology. In January 2014, he received an MBE in the New Year's Honours for services to regional development and international trade and is Patron of St Margaret's Centre, Durham.
Speaking of his Honorary Degree, Dr Basu said: "It is a privilege and honour to receive this Honorary Degree of Doctor of Science from Northumbria University; one which I'm delighted to accept, with great pride. I spent three very enjoyable and inspirational years in this university, which helped shape my career. "
Dr Basu is currently the chair of the Academic Health Science Network for the North East and North Cumbria (AHSN), Business Durham and the International Advisory Board of Newcastle University Business School. He has maintained his connection with Northumbria University since graduating, speaking at events, contributing to the University's webpages, prospectuses and congregation booklets.
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Although mitochondria, the tiny capsules that produce energy for the cell, are known to play some role in neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders, the contribution of mitochondrial dynamics (mitochondrial trafficking, the regulated fusion and fission, and destruction of mitochondria) has been less clear. A new study now highlights a previously unappreciated causal role for the regulation of mitochondrial turnover in the defects of neuronal development that underlie the human genetic disease Wolfram syndrome.
Wolfram syndrome is caused by a mutation in the gene encoding a protein called wolframin, which resides in the membrane of the endoplasmic reticulum - another cellular compartment that functions as a manufacturing and packaging system and also acts as a reservoir for calcium ions. However, the clinical symptoms of Wolfram syndrome, which include deafness, optic atrophy and psychiatric disorders, resemble those of mitochondrial diseases, suggesting a strong mitochondrial involvement. The new study by Michal Cagalinec, Mailis Liiv and colleagues at the University of Tartu, published in PLOS Biology on July 19th, now clarifies the nature of the link between mitochondria and Wolfram syndrome.
Prof. Allen Kaasik, the leading investigator of the study, explains why it was necessary to explore the role of mitochondria in Wolfram syndrome: "The majority of previous research has focused on the endoplasmic reticulum and ignores the fact that most of the manifestations of Wolfram syndrome resemble those of mitochondrial diseases".
The study mostly makes use of cultured cortical neurons from rats, exploiting a wide array of molecular and imaging techniques to probe the mitochondrial function and well-being of neurons manipulated to model Wolfram syndrome. The findings reveal a causal chain of events whereby the decreased levels of wolframin protein destabilize the endoplasmic reticulum (causing endoplasmic reticulum stress), thereby reducing calcium release. The resulting impairment in calcium management leads in turn to abnormal mitochondrial turnover and impaired mitochondrial energy production, which delays neuronal development.
Interestingly, these changes are related to the so-called PINK1-Parkin pathway that is responsible for the mitochondrial quality control system and implicated in Parkinson's disease. The results suggest that excessive and unwanted mitochondrial clearance would lead to bioenergetic deficits that are harmful to neurons.
This mechanism sheds new light on neuronal abnormalities during development in Wolfram syndrome and points out potential therapeutic targets. Moreover, the results unravel two rather unexpected links that have an impact beyond the relatively rare Wolfram syndrome. First, mild endoplasmic reticulum stress and impaired calcium release seriously disturbed mitochondrial dynamics, thus providing an explanation as to why alterations in the endoplasmic reticulum could lead to impaired mitochondrial dynamics. Second, impaired mitochondrial dynamics can affect neuronal development, suggesting that proper mitochondrial dynamics are crucial for neuronal development. As alterations in wolframin function appear to occur in different psychiatric disorders, this new study may also have rather broad implications for understanding the role of mitochondrial dynamics in neuropsychiatric diseases.
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In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS Biology: http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002511
Citation: Cagalinec M, Liiv M, Hodurova Z, Hickey MA, Vaarmann A, Mandel M, et al. (2016) Role of Mitochondrial Dynamics in Neuronal Development: Mechanism for Wolfram Syndrome. PLoS Biol 14(7): e1002511. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002511
Funding: This work was supported by grants from the Estonian Research Council to AK (IUT2-5), EV (IUT20-41), MC (MJD35 and PUT771), and VC (PUT513); from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020) to AK (692202); from the European Regional Development Fund to AK and EV (Project No. 2014-2020.4.01.15-0012); from the Slovak Academy of Sciences to MC (SASPRO 0063/01/02) and by the Estonian-French research program Parrot. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
New research from QUT shows preventable hospitalisation from diabetic foot disease is costing Australia hundreds of millions of dollars each year
New research from QUT shows preventable hospitalisation from diabetic foot disease is costing Australia hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
Senior Research Fellow at the Queensland University of Technology and co-chair of Diabetic Foot Australia, Peter Lazzarini, said the importance of early prevention of diabetic foot disease was never more important.
Mr Lazzarini led the Australian-first study published in BMJ Open finding one in every 22 patients in our hospitals have active diabetic foot disease.
"Our study, which investigated a representative sample of hospitalised patients in five hospitals across metropolitan and regional Queensland, found 4.6% of all patients had active diabetic foot disease and nearly half of those were in hospital because of their diabetic foot disease.
"This equates to 27,600 hospitalisations each year caused by diabetic foot disease in Australia, which puts diabetic foot disease easily in the top 20 causes of hospitalisation in Australia."
He said this amounted to an annual direct cost to Australia for hospitalisation alone of $350 million.
"This figure is much higher than we previously thought and is still very much a conservative estimate, because this cost only relates to patients admitted because of their diabetic foot disease in public hospitals," he said.
Mr Lazzarini said diabetic foot disease didn't stop with hospitalisation and that it also causes 4,400 amputations and nearly 1,700 deaths in Australia each year.
"If diabetic foot disease is left untreated it can quite easily result in hospitalisation, amputation and even death," he said.
"Unfortunately, we also found that people hospitalised because of diabetic foot disease had rarely received the recommended multi-disciplinary foot care needed to properly treat their disease in the year prior to their hospitalisation. This seems to confirm our thoughts that people with diabetic foot disease that do not see a multi-disciplinary foot disease team are more likely to end up in hospital."
However, Mr Lazzarini offers a message of hope: early prevention.
"We know from our previous research in Australia that when people with diabetic foot disease receive this recommended multi-disciplinary foot care we can prevent around half of the hospitalisations, amputations and costs that would have occurred without this care. Diabetic foot disease is a readily preventable disease if diagnosed and treated early."
Mr Lazzarini, and a national expert team from Diabetic Foot Australia, are advocating for a national multi-disciplinary approach this National Diabetes Week to help end avoidable hospitalisation and amputation from diabetic foot disease.
"Our study, and similar research from Europe and the US, firstly recommends everyone with diabetes presenting to a hospital needs to have their feet screened for diabetic foot disease. This would help identify nearly everyone who presents to an Australian hospital that needs treatment for this disease but doesn't necessarily know it.
"Secondly, everyone who is found to have diabetic foot disease needs to be seen by a multi-disciplinary foot disease team both in and out of hospital. In the UK they are up in arms that 20% of their hospitals do not have these teams. We estimate only 20% of our hospitals in Australia actually have these teams and this needs to significantly improve.
"Thirdly, people with diabetes need to see their GP or podiatrist at least every year for a foot screen. Unfortunately, people with diabetes can lose feeling in their feet and left unchecked diabetic foot disease can develop in the form of sores, infections and poor circulation. We know that about 50 per cent of the over one million Australians with diabetes have a foot screen each year. This means we don't know if diabetic foot disease has affected the other 50 per cent and sometimes it's too late when we do. If we can pick up diabetic foot disease early and refer people to these multi-disciplinary foot teams we can prevent thousands of hospitalisations, amputations and even deaths.
"We know these simple preventative measures can save our hospital system millions and millions of dollars each year, but most importantly, change the lives of thousands of Australians with diabetes by empowering them to keep both their feet firmly on the ground and out of hospital."
Diabetic Glenn Wilson from Albany Creek knows only too well the value of early intervention.
Having lost every toe on his left foot and one on his right some years ago, Mr Wilson is keen to raise awareness of the need for diabetics to keep their diabetes under control.
"You have to be on your toes to keep your toes," he said.
"You can only keep your diabetes under control if you are having regular check-ups with your GP and your podiatrist, self-check for any injuries or abnormalities, a feeling of heat in the foot which can indicate infection even though you might not be able to see it, and check your blood sugar levels daily.
"All this information wasn't available when I first had diabetes but people now have the knowledge and knowledge is power."
Mr Wilson said people needed to be aware of the need to act quickly when they spotted a problem.
"When I saw an infection on my foot a while ago and couldn't get an appointment with my GP I came to the QUT Podiatry Clinic and was able to have a script prepared so I could receive the antibiotics I needed," he said.
Mr Wilson said the cost to the health system was really just a fraction of the overall cost to society.
"There are so many things that people take for granted that I can no longer do. For example, walking on the beach and being able to feel sand between your toes, hiking in nature, riding a bike. I can't even ride an exercise bike because I have no feeling in either foot," he said.
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Mr Wilson attends QUT's Specialty Diabetes Clinic within QUT Health Clinics which can be contacted on 07 3138 9777 http://www.healthclinics.qut.edu.au/
For more information on Diabetic Foot Australia: http://www.diabeticfrootaustralia.org
Media contact: Rose Trapnell, QUT media team leader, 07 3138 2361 or 0407 585 901 rose.trapnell@qut.edu.au
Assembled by UNU, 6 papers underline the value of applying science, technology to reduce disaster-related health risks; productivity in many jobs seen falling by up to 40 percent by 2050 due to heat stress; experts convene at UN forum in Malaysia
The rising price -- in both money and health -- of extreme weather events amid rapid urbanisation, and the corresponding value of applying science and technology to reduce the risks, is underscored in six new research papers formally launched at a UN event today.
Assembled by UN University's Malaysia-based International Institute for Global Health (UNU-IIGH), the papers are published in a special issue of the Asia Pacific Journal of Public Health.
And they help inform a special Forum on Advancing Science and Technology in the Implementation of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, hosted in Kuala Lumpur July 19 by UNU-IIGH and the UN Development Programme.
The papers include a warning about large productivity losses due to heat stress, estimating that in South-East Asia alone "as much as 15% to 20% of annual work hours may already be lost in heat-exposed jobs," a figure that may double by 2050 as the planet continues warming.
According to author Tord Kjellstrom of the Health and Environment International Trust, New Zealand: "Current climate conditions in tropical and subtropical parts of the world are already so hot during the hot seasons that occupational health effects occur and work capacity for many people is affected."
Dr. Kjellstrom's paper cites estimated GDP losses due to heat stress for 43 countries: Australia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Costa Rica, Denmark, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Fiji, France, Germany, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Malaysia, Maldives, Mexico, Myanmar, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Qatar, Russia, Saint Lucia, Samoa, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Tanzania, Thailand, Tuvalu, United Kingdom, United States, Vanuatu and Vietnam (see tables at http://bit.ly/29BL0Dn).
The situation in Malaysia is typical of the South-East Asian countries: As work slows or stops to avoid dangerous heat stress, the country's Gross Domestic Product will decline by an estimated 5.9% (value: US $95 billion) by 2030, more than double the estimated 2.8% GDP lost to heat stress in 2010.
According to latest estimates, the global economic cost of reduced productivity may be more than US $2 trillion by 2030. The most susceptible jobs include the lowest paid -- heavy labour and low-skill agricultural and manufacturing.
In 2030, in both India and China, the GDP losses could total $450 billion, although mitigation may be made possible by a major shift in working hours, among other measures employers will need to take to reduce losses.
This problem is already placing major strain on, for example, electricity infrastructure, Dr. Kiellstrom notes. The additional energy needed for a single city the size of Bangkok for each 1C increase of average ambient temperature can be as much as 2000 MW, roughly the output of a major power plant.
"It is very important to develop and apply adaptation measures now to protect people from the disasters that current climate and slowing changing climate brings," says Dr. Kjellstrom. "However, adaptation is only half an answer -- we must also take decisive action now to mitigate emissions of greenhouse gases. Failure will cause the frequency and intensity of disasters to worsen dramatically beyond 2050, and the situation at the end of this century will be especially alarming for the world's poorest people."
Heat stress is one of several direct and growing impacts on human health due to a warming planet, understanding all of which "is critical in planning for mitigation and adaptation plans," the authors say.
According to the papers:
Disastrously heavy rains can expand insect breeding sites, drive rodents from their burrows, and contaminate freshwater resources, leading to the spread of disease and compromising safe drinking water supplies.
Warmer temperatures often promote the spread of mosquito-borne parasitic and viral diseases by shifting the vectors' geographic range and shortening the pathogen incubation period.
Climate change can worsen air quality by triggering fires and dust storms and promoting certain chemical reactions causing respiratory illness and other health problems.
In extreme disasters, harm is often amplified by the destruction of medical facilities and disruption of health services
Central and south China can anticipate the greatest number of casualties and highest economic losses from extreme weather events in the Asia Pacific region -- the world's most disaster-prone region -- and a more integrated, multidisciplinary approach is needed to upgrade the nation's emergency response system for natural disasters.
From 1980 to 2012, roughly 2.1 million people worldwide died as a direct result of nearly 21,000 natural catastrophes such as floods, mudslides, extreme heat, drought, high winds or fires. The cost of those disasters exceeded $4 trillion (US) -- a loss comparable to the current annual GDP of Germany.
In Asia Pacific 1.2 billion people have been affected by 1,215 disasters since the millennium. Some 92% of human exposure to floods occurs in Asia Pacific, along with 91% of exposure to cyclones and two-thirds of all exposure to landslides. Between 1970 and 2011, two million people in the region -- 75% of the world total -- were killed by disasters.
From 1993 to 2012, the Philippines experienced the highest number of extreme weather events (311), Thailand experienced the greatest financial loss (US$ 5.4 billion) and Myanmar experienced the highest death rate (13.5 deaths per 100,000 people).
In just 40 years, from 1970 to 2010, the regional population exposed to flooding risk more than doubled from about 30 million to 64 million while those in cyclone-prone areas rose from roughly 72 to 121 million.
Cities cover 2% of world land cover, generate 60 to 80% of greenhouse gas emissions and half of all waste, and are expanding at a rate of 1 million people per week. In a single generation -- from 2000 to 2030 --urban land extents are expected to have tripled.
The authors underline that fast-rising numbers of people are being exposed to the impacts of climate change, with much of the increase occurring in cities in flood-prone coastal areas or on hills susceptible to mudslides or landslides. Especially vulnerable are people living in poverty, including about one billion in slums.
Cities -- concentrated sources of energy consumption, heat and pollution, covered in surfaces that absorb warmth -- create local heat islands and impair air quality, both threats to health.
And rising demand for cooling contributes to warming the world. Air conditioners not only pump heat out directly, the electricity required is typically produced by burning fossil fuels, adding to atmospheric greenhouse gases. As well, people acclimatized to air conditioning become less heat tolerant, further increasing demand for cooling.
On the other hand, better urban planning presents "tremendous opportunity" to mitigate the health impacts of more extreme weather events.
Urban planners, the authors say, can help by designing cities "in ways that enhance health, sustainability, and resilience all at once," incorporating better building design, facilitating a shift to renewable energy, and fostering the protection and expansion of tree cover, wetlands and other carbon sinks, for example.
To mitigate the health impacts of longer, more severe extreme weather events, the authors stress the need to replace piecemeal reactive responses with integrated, multi-disciplinary planning approaches.
Beyond better preparation and warning systems to improve disaster response, recommended steps include enhancing drainage to reduce flood risks and strengthening health care, especially in poor areas.
In an introduction to the six paper collection, UNU-IIGH Research Fellows Jamal Hisham Hashim and Jose Siri write that humanity faces "substantial health risks from the degradation of the natural life support systems which are critical for human survival. It has become increasingly apparent that actions to mitigate environmental change have powerful co-benefits for health."
Comments:
"It is not clear yet whether considerations of health and sustainability will overrule the press of economic progress in coming decades, and ethical considerations surrounding the right to development are thorny indeed. What is clear is that tremendous opportunities exist to design cities in ways that enhance health, sustainability, and resilience all at once. Decisions made today will have a profound impact on health around the world for many decades to come. We hope these papers help improve understanding of the complex relationship between global environmental change and health, of the threat climate change poses to hard-won advances in human health worldwide, and of policy options available to mitigate these risks."
Anthony Capon, Director, UNU-IIGH
"The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR) underlines the increasing importance of science-based decision-making. Public health and disaster risk reduction needs the concerted approach of scientists, policy makers, civil society, the private sector, media and other stakeholders. It is now time to develop "Words into Action" for implementation of the SFDRR."
Michelle Gyles-McDonnough, UN Resident Coordinator and UNDP Resident Representative, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei Darussalam
Disasters have killed more than 1.3 million people and cost over US$2 trillion during the last two decades. The only way to protect development gains from disasters and to eradicate poverty is to integrate disaster risk reduction into development and to make all development risk-informed. UNDP will continue to provide support for getting DRR on the political agenda as a cross-cutting development priority, and facilitating the translation of DRR policy frameworks into action at the local level for empowered lives and resilient nations.
Rajib Shaw, Executive Director, Integrated Research on Disaster Risk Programme, China
"This excellent series of peer review papers help to focus attention on the impact of disasters and their health consequences, particularly in South East Asia. The papers summarise the need for emphasis on public health impact measurements as well as stressing the importance of enhanced scientific and technical work on disaster risk reduction. This very welcome series demonstrates that only by documenting the effects of disasters can evidence be provided to support the availability and application of science and technology to inform decision-making during difficult times."
Virginia Murray, Global Disaster Risk Reduction Expert, Public Health England, and vice-chair, Scientific and Technical Advisory Group, United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR)
"People know intuitively that "react and cure" is a far more expensive strategy than "anticipate and prevent." The experts behind these insightful papers, by detailing the high price of inaction in terms of both our finances and our health, greatly strengthen the case for taking defensive steps against disaster risks -- and the sooner the better."
Zakri Abdul Hamid, Science Advisor to the Prime Minister, Malaysia
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The six papers, published by the Asia Pacific Journal of Public Health
Background
The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 was agreed at the Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Sendai, Japan in March 2015 and endorsed by the UN General Assembly in June 2015.
The goal of the Sendai Framework is to prevent new and reduce existing disaster risk through the implementation of integrated and inclusive economic, structural, legal, social, health, cultural, educational, environmental, technological, political and institutional measures that prevent and reduce hazard exposure and vulnerability to disaster, increase preparedness for response and recovery, and thus strengthen resilience.
The outcome expected by 2030 is a substantial reduction in disaster risk and losses in lives, livelihoods and health in the economic, physical, social, cultural and environmental aspects of persons, private sector, communities and countries.
A key feature of the Sendai Framework is the shift of focus from managing 'disasters' to managing 'risks'. Such a shift requires a better understanding of risk in all its dimensions of hazards, exposure and vulnerability.
The role of science and technology in providing the evidence and knowledge on risk features heavily in the Sendai Framework.
The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) Science and Technology Conference, held 27-29 January 2016 in Geneva, produced the Science and Technology Roadmap to Support the Implementation of the Sendai Framework.
The UNU and UNDP Joint Public Forum and High Level Roundtable on Advancing Science and Technology in the Implementation of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 has the following goals:
Raise awareness of the value of science, technology and innovation (STI) for disaster risk reduction
Engage key stakeholders in options to build STI capacity in this field, and
Identify strategic next steps.
It takes place in Kuala Lumpur Tuesday, 19 July, 9 a.m. to noon (full details: http://bit.ly/29BK7dW).
About UN University
Established in 1973, United Nations University (UNU) is a global think tank and postgraduate teaching organization headquartered in Japan. The mission of the UN University is to contribute, through collaborative research and education, to efforts to resolve the pressing global problems of human development, welfare and survival that are the concern of the United Nations, its Peoples and Member States.
In carrying out this mission, UN University works with leading universities and research institutes in UN Member States, functioning as a bridge between the international academic community and the United Nations system. Through postgraduate teaching activities, UNU contributes to capacity building, particularly in developing countries.
About UNU-IIGH
The UNU International Institute for Global Health was founded in 2007 with a US$ 40 million endowment from the Malaysian Government. Based in Kuala Lumpur, the mission of UNU-IIGH is to build knowledge and capacity for decision-making by the UN system about global health issues.
As part of the International Council for Science (ICSU), UNU-IIGH is a co-sponsor of a 10-year global interdisciplinary science program on Health and Wellbeing in the Changing Urban Environment - A Systems Analysis Approaches.
UNU-IIGH contributions include capacity building in systems methods for population health research; development and evaluation of metrics for healthy urban development, particularly those relevant to low and middle income countries; and leadership training for city planners, elected officials, public health workers and others.
About UNDP
UNDP partners with people at all levels of society to help build nations that can withstand crisis, and drive and sustain the kind of growth that improves the quality of life for everyone. On the ground in more than 170 countries and territories, we offer global perspective and local insight to help empower lives and build resilient nations.
Dublin, Ireland, Tuesday July 19, 2016 - An international consensus demands human impacts on the environment "sustain", "maintain", "conserve", "protect", "safeguard", and "secure" it, keeping it within "safe ecological limits". But, a new Trinity College Dublin-led study that assembled an international team of environmental scientists shows that policy makers have little idea what these terms mean or how to connect them to a wealth of ecological data and ideas.
Progress on protecting our planet requires us to dispel this confusion, and the researchers have produced a framework to do just that.
Ian Donohue, assistant professor at Trinity, and leader of this study, said: "Human actions challenge nature in many ways. We lump these into a grab-bag of ideas we call ecological stability. We want nature to be stable in some sense of that word. But what do we know about stability from our theories and experiments? And how can that knowledge help policy makers? We offer some solutions to these important questions."
In the paper published today in the journal Ecology Letters, Donohue and an international team of colleagues outline exactly what policy makers, ecological experimenters, and theoreticians all think about this term "stability."
The answer is very different things -- and there's a real problem with this lack of agreement. Professor Donohue said: "We need to be talking about the same things, using the same language, so that what ecologists know can sensibly inform the choices of policy makers."
"Consider this example" says Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke Chair of Conservation at Duke University, in the USA, and one of the paper's co-authors. "There's a lot of discussion about "tipping points" -- the idea that there are boundaries beyond which, if we push nature it will collapse. There may be places where this happens, but while nature may work this way sometimes, there is no compelling argument that it must always."
Why should this matter? Pimm responds: "if politicians think there are tipping points and the world hasn't collapsed thus far, then it encourages policies that continue to degrade our world. If there isn't a catastrophe so far, why worry? The more likely alternative is not a sudden change, but a progressive loss of fisheries, croplands, damage to all our natural worlds. A wrong view of nature can have disastrous consequences."
So what can we do? Professor Donohue and his colleagues believe that the solution is to recognise that nature responds to human pressures in complex ways, even as policy makers often demand simple solutions. Acknowledging the need for better communication on the science-policy interface is essential.
Policy makers sometimes have designed crisp, clearly defined targets, such as several of those for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services -- a body broadly based on the more familiar IPCC that deals with climate change. "That's good. The issue is when they have not. Our work identifies those discrepancies," argues Donohue. "And we suggest solutions."
Unfortunately, most of the policies examined by Professor Donohue and his colleagues contain terms that are ambiguous, or have multiple definitions that mean different things to different people. The recently announced United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are no exception.
Professor Donohue added: "This ambiguity is a huge problem as it means that we cannot measure progress, or indeed a lack of progress, towards achieving policy goals. This paralyses policy. Ecologists, policymakers and practitioners urgently need to develop a shared language in order to be more effective in managing the world's ecosystems -- our life-support system."
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In a study appearing in the July 19 issue of JAMA, Andy Menke, Ph.D., of Social & Scientific Systems, Silver Spring, Md., and colleagues estimated the prevalence of diabetes among U.S. adolescents, the percentage of those who were unaware of their diabetes, and the prevalence of prediabetes using nationally representative data.
The researchers used 2005-2014 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data (in which all relevant glucose data were available) from adolescents age 12 to 19 years who were randomly selected for a morning examination session after fasting.
Of 2,606 adolescents included, 62 had diabetes, 20 were undiagnosed, and 512 had prediabetes. The weighted prevalence of diabetes was 0.8 percent, of which 29 percent was undiagnosed, and the prevalence of prediabetes was 18 percent. Prediabetes was more common in males (22 percent) than females (13 percent). Compared with non-Hispanic white participants, the percentage of adolescents with diabetes who were undiagnosed (4.6 percent) and the prediabetes prevalence (15 percent) were higher in non-Hispanic black participants (50 percent and 21 percent, respectively) and Hispanic participants (40 percent and 23 percent, respectively). Diabetes and prediabetes prevalences did not change over time.
"To our knowledge, these are the first estimates of diabetes in a nationally representative sample of U.S. adolescents using all 3 American Diabetes Association recommended biomarkers. The estimates are higher than previously reported; 1 study found diagnosed diabetes in 0.34 percent of participants aged 10 to 19 years. A relatively large proportion was unaware of the condition, particularly among non-Hispanic black participants and Hispanic participants, indicating a need for improved diabetes screening among adolescents. These findings may have important public health implications because diabetes in youth is associated with early onset of risk factors and complications," the authors write.
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(doi:10.1001/jama.2016.8544; the study is available pre-embargo at the For the Media website)
Editor's Note: This work was supported by a contract from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. All authors have completed and submitted the ICMJE Form for Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest and none were reported.
Media Advisory: To contact Andy Menke, Ph.D., email Mona Feldman at MFeldman@s-3.com.
To place an electronic embedded link to this study in your story This link will be live at the embargo time: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi=10.1001/jama.2016.8544
In a study appearing in the July 19 issue of JAMA, Richard N. Rosenthal, M.D., of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, and colleagues examined if 6-month subdermal buprenorphine implants maintained low to no illicit opioid use relative to daily sublingual (beneath the tongue) buprenorphine among currently stable opioid-dependent patients receiving buprenorphine maintenance treatment.
Opioid dependence is a growing public health concern in the United States, associated with spread of human immunodeficiency virus and hepatitis C and fatal over dose when left untreated. The effectiveness of treatment with the medication buprenorphine is limited by suboptimal adherence. In this study, 177 opioid-dependent patients with stable abstinence were randomly assigned to sublingual buprenorphine with placebo implants (n = 90) or buprenorphine implants with sublingual placebo (n = 87); 165 of 177 patients (93 percent) completed the trial.
Eighty-one of 84 (96 percent) receiving buprenorphine implants and 78 of 89 (88 percent) receiving sublingual buprenorphine were responders (? 4 of 6 months without opioid-positive urine test result [monthly and 4 times randomly] and self-report). Over 6 months, 72 of 84 (86 percent) receiving buprenorphine implants and 64 of 89 (72 percent) receiving sublingual buprenorphine maintained opioid abstinence. Non-implant-related and implant-related adverse events occurred in 48 percent and 23 percent of the buprenorphine implant group and in 53 percent and 13.5 percent of participants in the sublingual buprenorphine group, respectively.
"Buprenorphine is an effective treatment for opioid dependence; however, adherence to daily dosing for management of chronic disorders is challenging. An implantable buprenorphine delivery system reduces adherence issues and may improve efficacy," the authors write.
"Among adults with opioid dependence maintaining abstinence with a stable dose of sublingual buprenorphine, the use of buprenorphine implants compared with continued sublingual buprenorphine did not result in an inferior likelihood of remaining a responder. However, the study population had an exceptionally high response rate in the control group, and further studies are needed in broader populations to assess the efficacy in other settings."
(doi:10.1001/jama.2016.9382; the study is available pre-embargo at the For the Media website)
Editor's Note: This study was funded by Braeburn Pharmaceuticals. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, financial disclosures, etc.
Editorial: Improving Outcomes for Persons With Opioid Use Disorders
"This novel implant system may help buttress patients' decision-making deficits that are a core component of the addiction by making these lifesaving medication adherence decisions far more infrequent," write Wilson M. Compton, M.D., M.P.E., and Nora D. Volkow, M.D., of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Bethesda, Md., in an accompanying editorial.
"However, buprenorphine implants are currently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for only up to 1 year of treatment for a subgroup of patients who have already achieved and sustained prolonged clinical stability while receiving low to moderate doses of oral transmucosal buprenorphine, a caveat clearly stated in the product label. Even so, this novel approach to delivering care may open up treatment for new, previously difficult-to-reach populations or for those in the criminal justice system. Although further research is needed to determine which populations would benefit the most from these new formulations, the potential of these agents to have a positive role in the current opioid crisis is undeniable."
(doi:10.1001/jama.2016.8897; the editorial is available pre-embargo at the For the Media website)
Editor's Note: The authors have completed and submitted the ICMJE Form for Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest. Dr. Compton reports stock ownership in Pfizer, General Electric, and 3M. No other disclosures were reported.
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Media Advisory: To contact Richard N. Rosenthal, M.D., email Sasha Walek at sasha.walek@mountsinai.org. To contact editorial co-author Wilson M. Compton, M.D., M.P.E., email media@nida.nih.gov.
To place an electronic embedded link to this study and editorial in your story These links will be live at the embargo time: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi=10.1001/jama.2016.9382 http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi=10.1001/jama.2016.8897
Among nearly 120,000 adults with type 2 diabetes, there were no significant differences in the associations between any of 9 available classes of glucose-lowering drugs (alone or in combination) and the risk of cardiovascular or all-cause mortality, according to a study appearing in the July 19 issue of JAMA.
Diabetes was estimated to account for approximately 1.5 million deaths in 2012, and disability (blindness, limb amputation, kidney failure, cardiovascular events) among 47 million people in 2010. Lifestyle modification and glucose-lowering drug treatment are the mainstay of therapy to prevent and delay diabetes-related complications. A large number of glucose-lowering drug classes are approved for type 2 diabetes. Randomized clinical trials of diabetes medications have been generally insufficiently powered to establish the role of drug treatment for preventing cardiovascular death.
Giovanni F.M. Strippoli, Ph.D., of the University of Bari, Italy, and Diaverum, Lund, Sweden, and colleagues conducted a systematic review with network meta-analysis to estimate the relative efficacy and safety associated with glucose-lowering drugs including insulin. The researchers identified 301 clinical trials that met criteria for inclusion in the study.
Of the trials included in the study, 177 (56,598 patients) were of drugs given as monotherapy; 109 trials (53,030 patients) of drugs added to metformin (dual therapy); and 29 trials (10,598 patients) of drugs added to metformin and sulfonylurea (triple therapy). The researchers found no significant differences in associations between any drug class as monotherapy, dual therapy, or triple therapy with odds of cardiovascular, all-cause mortality, serious adverse events, heart attack or stroke. Considerable uncertainty about the association of drug treatment with cardiovascular mortality existed within trial evidence, largely because of few events in most available studies.
The authors note that a central finding in this meta-analysis was that despite more than 300 available clinical trials involving nearly 120,000 adults, there was limited evidence that any glucose-lowering drug stratified by coexisting treatment prolonged life expectancy or prevented cardiovascular disease.
"Metformin was associated with lower or no significant difference in HbAlC levels compared with any other drug classes. All drugs were estimated to be effective when added to metformin. These findings are consistent with American Diabetes Association recommendations for using metformin monotherapy as initial treatment for patients with type 2 diabetes and selection of additional therapies based on patient-specific considerations," the researchers write.
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(doi:10.1001/jama.2016.9400; the study is available pre-embargo at the For the Media website)
Editor's Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, financial disclosures, funding and support, etc.
Media Advisory: To contact Giovanni F.M. Strippoli, Ph.D., email gfmstrippoli@gmail.com.
To place an electronic embedded link to this study in your story This link will be live at the embargo time: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi=10.1001/jama.2016.9400
A major new analysis from the Global Burden of Disease 2015 (GBD 2015) study, published today in The Lancet HIV journal, reveals that although deaths from HIV/AIDS have been steadily declining from a peak in 2005, 2.5 million people worldwide became newly infected with HIV in 2015, a number that hasn't changed substantially in the past 10 years.
The new GBD estimates show a slow pace of decline in new HIV infections worldwide, with a drop of just 0.7% a year between 2005 and 2015 compared to the fall of 2.7% a year between 1997 and 2005. The study is being launched at the International AIDS meeting in Durban, South Africa on Tuesday 19 July.
Improvements and updates in GBD's data sources and methodology indicate that the number of people living with HIV has been increasing steadily from 27.96 million in 2000 to 38.8 million in 2015. Annual deaths from HIV/AIDS have been declining at a steady pace from a peak of 1.8 million in 2005, to 1.2 million in 2015, partly due to the scale-up of antiretroviral therapy (ART). Furthermore, the proportion of people living with HIV on ART increased rapidly between 2005 and 2015, from 6.4% to 38.6% for men, and from 3.3% to 42.4% for women (figure 1D). Yet, most countries are still far from achieving the UNAIDS 90-90-90 target of 81% by 2020.
While the annual number of new infections has decreased since its peak at 3.3 million per year in 1997, it has stayed relatively constant at around an estimated 2.5 million a year worldwide for the past decade.
"Although scale-up of antiretroviral therapy and measures to prevent mother-to-child transmission have had a huge impact on saving lives, our new findings present a worrying picture of slow progress in reducing new HIV infections over the past 10 years", says lead author Dr Haidong Wang from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA.[1]
"Development assistance for HIV/AIDS is stagnating and health resources in many low-income countries are expected to plateau over the next 15 years. Therefore, a massive scale-up of efforts from governments and international agencies will be required to meet the estimated $36 billion needed every year to realise the goal of ending AIDS by 2030, along with better detection and treatment programmes and improving the affordability of antiretroviral drugs", says the Director of IHME, Professor Christopher Murray.[1]
The findings come from a comprehensive new analysis of HIV incidence, prevalence, deaths and coverage of antiretroviral therapy (ART) at the global, regional, and national level for 195 countries between 1980 and 2015 (see table 1 for country-by-country data).
Despite years of strong progress in reducing HIV at the global level, success in different countries and regions varies as the HIV epidemic has peaked and declined at different times, and depending on access to, and quality of ART, and other care.
Key regional and country GBD 2015 findings include:
In 2015, three-quarters of new infections (1.8 million) were in sub-Saharan Africa. Outside of Africa, south Asia accounted for 8.5% (212500), southeast Asia for 4.7% (117500), and east Asia for 2.3% (57500; figure 2A).
Within Europe, the highest number of new infections in 2015 were in Russia (57340), Ukraine (13490), Spain (2350), Portugal (2220), UK (2060), Italy (1960), and Germany (1760; table).
Between 2005 and 2015, 74 countries experienced a rise in age-standardised incidence rates, notably in Indonesia and the Philippines, north Africa and the Middle East, and eastern Europe, but also in some countries in western Europe (Spain and Greece; table).
In 2015, especially high rates of incidence (new infections in 2015 divided by the total population) were recorded in southern Africa, with more than 1% of the population becoming infected with HIV in Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland, compared with around 39 per 100000 in Ethiopia and 42 per 100000 in Congo (figure 2B).
In 2015, the highest incidence rates in Europe were in Russia (exceeding 20 per 100000), while Cambodia (above 46 per 100000) had the highest rates in Asia. In parts of Latin America and the Caribbean (Belize, Guyana, and Haiti), rates exceed 50 per 100000 people (figure 2B).
No country has achieved the UNAIDS 90-90-90 target that 81% of people living with HIV should be receiving ART by 2020 yet, Sweden (76%), the USA, Netherlands, and Argentina (all at about 70%) are close.
ART coverage is highly variable and massive scale-up of treatment is needed in the Middle East, north Africa, eastern Europe, and east Asia where only around a fifth of people living with HIV receive ART, and in central Asia where treatment reaches less than a third of people with HIV (figure 3).
Although global HIV mortality has been declining at 5.5% a year since the mid-2000s, progress has been mixed between regions and countries (figure 1C). In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, mass scale-up of ART and interventions to prevent mother-to-child transmission have led to huge declines in HIV death rates over the past decade, while in many countries in north Africa and the Middle East like Morocco, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Tunisia, progress has been nonexistent (table and figure 4).
In a linked Comment, Dr Virginie Supervie and Dr Dominique Costagliola from the Pierre Louis Institute of Epidemiology and Public Health, Sorbonne Universites, Inserm/UPMC, Paris, France discuss the reliability of current approaches to estimate trends in HIV incidence and say that even the most recent estimates of the worldwide HIV burden may still underestimate the scale of the problem. They say, "The GBD estimates of HIV incidence are significantly lower (two to ten times) than the reported number of newly diagnosed HIV cases for most countries in North America, Europe, central Asia, and Australia (table). The study reveals that there are still large uncertainties and gaps in knowledge about the HIV incidence in many settings. Without timely and reliable assessment of HIV incidence it will be impossible to end the HIV epidemic."[1]
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NOTES TO EDITORS:
This study was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and National Institute of Mental Health and National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health, USA.
[1] Quotes direct from authors and cannot be found in text of Article or Comment.
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(NEW YORK -- July 19, 2016) While buprenorphine has long been used to treat adults with opioid dependence, its efficacy can be hindered by lack of adherence to daily, sublingual (beneath the tongue) doses of the medication. New research led by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai published online today in The Journal of the American Medicine Association (JAMA) showed that a higher percentage of stable, opioid-dependent patients given six-month buprenorphine implants remained abstinent compared to patients given the medication sublingually.
The study is the first head-to-head safety and efficacy trial of buprenorphine implants and daily sublingual buprenorphine on long-term remission of opioid use disorder in patients who were previously stabilized on 8mg or less of sublingual buprenorphine. Findings indicate that the implants are non-inferior to sublingual buprenorphine in the main outcome measure, which was maintaining abstinence from illicit opioids in at least four of the six study months.
"There are some individual and public health risks with daily dosing of sublingual buprenorphine, such as missed doses and accidental pediatric exposure, as well as the risk of theft or intentional diversion," said Richard N. Rosenthal, MD, Professor of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Medical Director of Addiction Psychiatry, Mount Sinai Behavioral Health System. "Given that transitioning to implants did not lead to increased craving or withdrawal symptoms and that the implants remain in place over the active treatment period, buprenorphine implants are an opportunity to reduce adherence issues and may improve efficacy in stable patients with opioid dependence."
Opioids are a class of medications that relieve pain and include oxycodone, hydrocodone, codeine, morphine, fentanyl and others. They reduce the intensity of pain signals reaching the brain and affect those brain areas controlling emotion, which diminishes the effects of a painful stimulus. As people use opioids repeatedly, their tolerance increases and they may not be able to maintain the source for the drugs. This can cause them to turn to seeing multiple physicians for prescriptions or to the black market for these drugs and even switch from prescription drugs to cheaper and more risky substitutes like heroin. Opioid dependence is a growing public health problem in the United States and globally, associated with the spread of viruses such as HIV and hepatitis C, as well as fatal overdose when left untreated.
In this study, 177 opioid-dependent participants with stable abstinence were randomly assigned to sublingual buprenorphine with placebo implants or buprenorphine implants with sublingual placebo. Over six months, 86 percent of participants receiving implants and 72 percent receiving sublingual buprenorphine maintained abstinence from opioids.
"What we would like to address in future studies is the rate and predictors of relapse after implant discontinuation," said Dr. Rosenthal. "Our population in this trial also had a high response rate in the control group, so further studies are needed in broader populations to assess the efficacy of buprenorphine implants versus sublingual buprenorphine in other settings."
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Collaborators of Dr. Rosenthal's study include researchers from University of Kentucky College of Medicine, Braeburn Pharmaceuticals, TCM Groups Inc., Titan Pharmaceuticals, and Friends Research Institute.
Conflict of Interest Disclosures:
All authors have completed and submitted the ICMJE Form for Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest. Dr. Rosenthal reports grants and nonfinancial support from Braeburn Pharmaceutical during the conduct of the study.
Funding/Support:
This study was funded by Braeburn Pharmaceuticals.
About the Mount Sinai Health System
The Mount Sinai Health System is an integrated health system committed to providing distinguished care, conducting transformative research, and advancing biomedical education. Structured around seven hospital campuses and a single medical school, the Health System has an extensive ambulatory network and a range of inpatient and outpatient services--from community-based facilities to tertiary and quaternary care.
The System includes approximately 7,100 primary and specialty care physicians; 12 joint-venture ambulatory surgery centers; more than 140 ambulatory practices throughout the five boroughs of New York City, Westchester, Long Island, and Florida; and 31 affiliated community health centers. Physicians are affiliated with the renowned Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, which is ranked among the highest in the nation in National Institutes of Health funding per investigator. The Mount Sinai Hospital is ranked as one of the nation's top 10 hospitals in Geriatrics, Cardiology/Heart Surgery, and Gastroenterology, and is in the top 25 in five other specialties in the 2015-2016 "Best Hospitals" issue of U.S. News & World Report. Mount Sinai's Kravis Children's Hospital also is ranked in seven out of ten pediatric specialties by U.S. News & World Report. The New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai is ranked 11th nationally for Ophthalmology, while Mount Sinai Beth Israel is ranked regionally.
For more information, visit http://www.mountsinai.org or find Mount Sinai on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Vision-based face detection and recognition is one of the most rapidly growing research areas in computer vision and robotics and is widely used in several human related applications. However, vision-based face detection and recognition has been shown to be effective only under normal illumination conditions. In developing an algorithm for face detection and recognition, it is crucial to consider both normal and severe illumination conditions. One approach is to convert face images under various illumination conditions into ones with invariant face appearance while preserving the face-specific characteristics such as texture and facial features.
Now, researchers at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Toyohashi University of Technology have developed a novel technique to adaptively adjust the effect of lighting on human faces by employing an extended reflectance model. The model has one variable (illumination ratio), which is controlled by Fuzzy Inference System (FIS). To cope with a vast variety of illumination conditions, the FIS rule was optimized using Genetic Algorithm (GA).
The first author PhD candidate, Bima Sena Bayu Dewantara, explained, "To eliminate the effects of light, image contrast should be adjusted adaptively. To produce an invariant face appearance under backlighting, for example, cheeks need to be brightened, while the eyeballs must be kept dark. Such an adaptive contrast adjustment can be performed using the developed reflectance model, and we show that a combination of Fuzzy Inference System (FIS) and Genetic Algorithm (GA) is very effective for implementing the model."
Professor Jun Miura said, "By just adding this contrast adjustment to present face recognition systems, we can largely improve the accuracy and performance of face detection and recognition. Moreover, this adjustment runs in real-time, and therefore, it is appropriate for real-time applications such as robot and human-interaction systems."
A face not only provides a person's identity but also provides other information such as a person's focus of attention and the degree of tiredness. Obtaining such information is useful for a comfortable human-machine interaction, and researchers expect that the proposed contrast adjustment method will also be useful in various situations, especially under severe illumination conditions.
The above research results were reported in the Machine Vision and Applications on July 15, 2016.
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[Funding Agency]
This study was partly supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research No. 25280093 by JSPS, Japan.
[Reference]
Bima Sena Bayu Dewantara and Jun Miura (2016). OptiFuzz: A robust illumination invariant face recognition and its implementation, Machine Vision and Applications, DOI: 10.1007/s00138-016-0790-6.
Quebec City, July 19, 2016 - Universite Laval's Infectious Disease Research Centre (IDRC) and Centre de recherche du CHU de Quebec-Universite Laval (CHU) are proud to announce that the first clinical study for a Zika vaccine in Canada is set to begin in Quebec City.
"We're very proud to be part of the first international team in the world to complete all of the steps in the regulatory process and to be authorized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Health Canada to develop a Zika vaccine," said Gary Kobinger, doctor of microbiology, professor in Universite Laval's Faculty of Medicine, researcher with Centre de recherche du CHU, director of IDRC, and a global authority on vaccine research.
The Zika virus is transmitted primarily by mosquitoes. Although most cases are relatively mild, women who are infected while pregnant are at risk of miscarrying or giving birth to children with abnormally small heads -- a condition known as microcephaly.
"There is no existing treatment or vaccine for Zika. The vaccine currently being developed will be administered to humans for the first time as part of the clinical study. CHU de Quebec-Universite Laval is one of the three leading research centres involved in the vaccine study and we're very proud of that," said Gertrude Bourdon, president and CEO of CHU.
"This study under Professor Gary Kobinger's supervision is further proof of our institution's global leadership in the field of infectious disease research," said Renald Bergeron, dean of Universite Laval's Faculty of Medicine.
Universite Laval's Infectious Disease Research Center (IDRC) is the only Canadian centre involved in the study, which is being conducted in close collaboration with two other centres in the United States. In the coming days, under the guidance of Gary Kobinger, Dr. Sylvie Trottier and her team will begin an extensive clinical study to test a new Zika vaccine at the Canadian site in Quebec City. IDRC is currently looking for adult volunteers who are in good health and would like to participate in the study. Patient recruitment has already started and will continue in the coming days. Anyone interested can contact a member of the infectious disease clinical research team at 418-654-2796.
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About CHU de Quebec-Universite Laval
Comprising CHUL, L'Hotel-Dieu de Quebec, Hopital de l'Enfant-Jesus, Hopital Saint-Sacrement, and Hopital Saint-Francois d'Assise, CHU de Quebec-Universite Laval (CHU) is the largest university-affiliated hospital center in Quebec and one of the largest in Canada. CHU de Quebec-Universite Laval offers general and specialized, but especially subspecialized care to all of Eastern Quebec, a region of about two million people. As a progressive organization closely affiliated with Universite Laval, the CHU also has a teaching and research mission in numerous areas of excellence and a lead role in assessing healthcare technologies and treatment methods. It has more than 13,000 employees; 1,500 doctors, dentists, and pharmacists; 317 regular and associate researchers, 192 partner researchers; and 680 volunteers. http://www.chudequebec.ca
About Universite Laval
Universite Laval, located in the world heritage city of Quebec, is the first French-language university in North America. It is one of Canada's top research universities, ranking 6th among the country's institutions of higher learning with a research budget of $325 million last year. Universite Laval boasts more than 9,370 employees, including 3,685 professors, lecturers, and other teaching and research staff who share their know-how with more than 42,500 students, more than a quarter of whom are enrolled in graduate studies. Universite Laval obtained STARS accreditation in 2014, ranking first in Canada and ninth worldwide for sustainable development. In 2015 it became Canada's first voluntarily carbon neutral university. The university currently has more than 277,000 alumni.
About the Infectious Disease Research Center
The Infectious Disease Research Center (IDRC) is an academic research centre sanctioned by Laval University. Its primary mission is to train new researchers and doctors who are passionate about the study of human infectious diseases. IDRC's research fields cover a wide range of infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections (herpes, chlamydia, syphilis), hepatitis C, and CMV, as well as respiratory (influenza, RSV, MPV, streptococcal pneumonia), enteric (C.difficile, salmonella), parasitic (Leishmaniasis, malaria) and fungal (Candidasis) infections.
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - The University of Alabama at Birmingham is the only university to be awarded grants in all three perinatal networks from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to improve maternal and infant health.
UAB is a member of the NICHD Maternal-Fetal Medicine Units Network, NICHD Neonatal Research Network, and the NICHD Global Network for Women's and Children's Health Research.
Over more than two decades, these networks have brought to UAB more than $20 million to fund research for pregnant women and babies, and the new awards total a $1.1 million base per year for the next five years.
"It has been a great honor and privilege to participate in these perinatal networks for the past 25 years," said Joseph Biggio, M.D., vice chair for Research in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and director of the UAB Division of Maternal-Fetal Medicine. "Being a member of these networks has allowed us to advance the care of pregnant women and babies, especially those who are born premature."
NICHD Maternal-Fetal Medicine Units (MFMU) Network
UAB's Division of Maternal-Fetal Medicine was awarded $200,000 per year in base funds for the next five years. UAB has participated in the cooperative agreement for 25 years as one of 14 university-based clinical centers in the MFMU Network.
The MFMU Network focuses on answering clinical questions in maternal-fetal medicine and obstetrics in regard to the continuing problem of preterm birth through translational research, the use of genetics, and the evaluation of new technologies in the promotion of maternal-child health and prevention of disease. This award also brings UAB an additional $500,000 to $1 million each year as a result of UAB's participation in several ongoing research projects through the Center for Women's Reproductive Health.
UAB's Division of Maternal-Fetal Medicine, in conjunction with other members of the MFMU Network, has published multiple studies identifying new practice procedures and treatments under the leadership of Alan Tita, M.D., Ph.D., professor in UAB's MFM division and principal investigator of the MFMU Network.
In April 2016, a network study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine describing the need for administering betamethasone, a steroid medication, to women at risk for late preterm delivery to reduce the risk of neonatal respiratory and other complications.
NICHD Neonatal Research Network (NRN)
For 25 years, UAB's Division of Neonatology has participated in the NICHD NRN and was recently awarded $200,000 in base funds per year, with an additional $500,000 to $1 million per year to conduct additional research in the network.
The NRN was established in conjunction with the MFM Units Network to do similar research in pediatric neonatology. Areas addressed by the NRN include trials of therapies for sepsis, intraventricular hemorrhage, chronic lung disease and pulmonary hypertension, as well as the impact of drug exposure on child and family outcomes. Principal investigators for the network, Wally Carlo, M.D., Edwin M. Dixon Endowed Chair in Neonatology, and Namasivayam Ambalavananan, M.D., co-director of the Division of Neonatology, have led nationwide studies on ventilator care, antenatal steroids, chronic lung disease and neurodevelopmental outcomes.
A study in the NICHD NRN published in the NEJM reported that neonatal mortality has been decreased over the last 10 years, including decreases in almost all specific causes of neonatal mortality, because of improvements in care implemented in the NRN centers. A second paper showed that improvements in perinatal care, including obstetrical and neonatal interventions, are increasing survival rates substantially in the most premature babies. Survival rates are substantially increasing among those delivered at a gestational age of 20 weeks to 25 weeks and six days.
NICHD Global Network (GN) for Women's and Children's Health Research
UAB has participated in the NICHD GN for more than 13 years. The most recent research grant exceeding $700,000 per year renews a partnership to help improve maternal and infant health outcomes and build health research capacity in resource-poor settings for testing cost-effective, sustainable interventions.
UAB investigators developed and led the testing of innovative interventions that reduced childhood mortality and neurodevelopmental disabilities through grants received from the NICHD GN. The resuscitation program developed and found effective by UAB investigators has been introduced in more than 75 countries to save babies' lives at birth, with the potential to reduce infant deaths soon after birth by 1 million.
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Researchers at the University of Bonn and the Technical University of Munich discover the cause of infections in patients with cirrhosis of the liver
Patients suffering from liver cirrhosis often die of life-threatening bacterial infections. In these patients the immune cells are unable to eliminate the bacterial infections. Scientist at the University of Bonn and TU Munich have now discovered that type I IFN released by immune cells due to increased migration of gut bacteria into the cirrhotic liver incapacitate the immune system. Based on their findings, such life-threatening infections can be contained by strengthening the immune response alone -- without antibiotics. The results have now appeared in the journal Gut.
Each year, about 170,000 people die of complications of hepatic cirrhosis in Europe. Frequent causes of the widespread disease include alcohol abuse, fatty liver hepatitis, and chronic viral hepatitis. Liver cirrhosis develops gradually over a period of years and decades. Liver cells die and get replaced by connective tissue. The scar tissue blocks the flow of blood through the liver leading to increased pressure in the blood vessels in the intestine and thus to the leakage of intestinal bacteria, which reach the liver via the blood.
"About one-third of the fatal cases of hepatic cirrhosis are attributable to bacterial infections", says Prof. Dr. Jonel Trebicka, from the Department of Internal Medicine in the University Hospital Bonn, who is participating in the study and has been studying liver cirrhosis for many years. It has long been known that patients with hepatic cirrhosis have impaired immunity. The exact causes were largely unknown. The team of Dr. Zeinab Abdullah at the Institute for Experimental Immunology in the University Hospital Bonn and Prof. Dr. Percy Knolle from the Institute of Molecular Immunology in the Technical University Munich, together with colleagues from the Department of Internal Medicine, LIMES-Institute in the University of Bonn and the RWTH University Hospital Aachen has now discovered the processes behind the attenuation of the immune system.
Collapse of the immune function of the macrophages
In mice suffering from liver cirrhosis, the scientist observed a sustained production of Type-1 interferon in response to the intestinal bacteria by immune cells responsible for defense against infection, namely macrophages and monocytes in the liver. When these immune cells were then infected by a small number of the pathogenic bacteria, Listeria, the production of Type-1 interferon massively increased. As a consequence, the immune-regulatory factor interleukin-10 was release, which led to a defect in the anti-bacterial functions of the macrophages and thus to a fatal course of infections.
The scientists also performed these studies on human monocytes from the blood of cirrhosis patients. Dr. Zeinab Abdullah, a group leader at the Institute for Experimental Immunology in the University hospital Bonn said: "Following infection with pathogenic bacteria, we also observed highly elevated production of Type-1 interferon and interleukin-10 by monocytes from cirrhosis patients". "Our results identify the blind spot of the immune system that is responsible for the failure of the immune response to bacterial infections".
Approaches for new diagnoses and therapies
Further experiments identified new therapeutic options: Mice that are unable to produce Type-1 interferon were protected against Listeria infection despite the migration of the gut bacteria into the liver, because their immune cells didn't produce high levels of Type-1 interferon and IL-10 after Listeria infection. "The groundbreaking finding of our study is that we might be now able to treat a life-threatening bacterial infection without antibiotics, simply by strengthening the immune response", says Prof. Dr. Percy Knolle of TU Munich. According to the researchers, this give rise to hope for new therapeutic options. "When the formation of Type-1 interferon in the liver cells is blocked by suitable substances, there is a prospect of reinvigorating the immune system", adds Professor Knolle. However, this very promising approach must first be confirmed in clinical studies.
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Publication: Gut microbial translocation corrupts myeloid cell function to control bacterial infection during liver cirrhosis, Gut, DOI: 10.1136/gutjnl-2015-311224
Contact for the media:
Dr. Zeinab Abdullah
Institute for Experimental Immunology
Bonn University Medical Center
Tel. 0228/28711038
E-Mail: Zeinab.Abdullah@ukb.uni-bonn.de
Prof. Dr. Percy A. Knolle
Institute of Molecular Immunology / Experimental Oncology
Technical University of Munich
Tel. 089/41406920
E-mail: percy.knolle@tum.de
Irvine, Calif., July 19, 2016 -- People who selectively recalled positive information over neutral and negative information performed worse on memory tests conducted by University of California, Irvine neurobiologists, who said the results suggest that this discriminating remembrance may be a marker for early stages of memory loss in the elderly.
For a study appearing in the August edition of Learning & Memory, Michael Yassa, associate professor of neurobiology & behavior and neurology, and colleagues designed and employed a test that uses participants' recall of stories with differing emotional content to identify memory deficits and decline, particularly in the context of aging and Alzheimer's disease.
Thirty-two older adults (21 females and 11 males with a mean age of 74.8) took part in the study. After each story was read aloud, they were asked to recite all the details they could remember. The task was repeated after 20 minutes and one week later. This allowed the neurobiologists to observe how story recall varied as time passed.
The study team included Stephanie Leal, who recently earned a doctorate at UCI, and Jessica Noche, a clinical research specialist in the Yassa lab.
"We were interested in seeing how emotional memory changes over time, so we developed a test to detect the subtle changes that occur with different types of emotional memory in older adults," Noche said. "We specifically compared responses to positive, negative and neutral stories to learn whether emotional valence had a role in the way stories were remembered over time."
Study subjects also took a verbal learning exam to gauge general memory performance. This served to distinguish between individuals who were high performers and those who were low performers (i.e., showing subtle memory deficits). Importantly, none of them suffered from overt memory problems severe enough for a clinical diagnosis.
Analyzing the results, researchers found that low-performing older adults exhibited a large "positivity effect," or propensity to remember positive information. However, this came at the expense of retaining neutral material. On the other hand, high-performing older adults could recall more from neutral stories at the expense of retaining positive details.
"We suggest that this bias toward positive retention may be a compensatory mechanism that masks the effects of memory loss in the elderly, although this remains speculative," Yassa said. "It's possible that selectively remembering positive information may be related to changes in the brain networks supporting memory, emotional valence and reward value. Future studies using brain imaging techniques will be essential in understanding the mechanisms underlying this effect."
Since all study participants at the time of testing had no memory complaints, researchers believe that the exam they created, called the Emotional Logical Memory Test, may tap into subtle changes in emotional memory abilities prior to obvious symptoms of cognitive decline. Further work will be necessary to establish whether subjects expressing the positivity effect are more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease. If so, the test could prove to be a valuable tool in the early detection of Alzheimer's susceptibility.
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Elizabeth Murray, a research specialist in Yassa's lab at UCI, also contributed to the study, which received support from the National Institutes of Health (grants R01 MH102392, R21 AG049220 and P50 AG 16573). UCI's Center for the Neurobiology of Learning & Memory and Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders also provided support.
About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UCI is the youngest member of the prestigious Association of American Universities. The campus has produced three Nobel laureates and is known for its academic achievement, premier research, innovation and anteater mascot. Led by Chancellor Howard Gillman, UCI has more than 30,000 students and offers 192 degree programs. It's located in one of the world's safest and most economically vibrant communities and is Orange County's second-largest employer, contributing $5 billion annually to the local economy. For more on UCI, visit http://www.uci.edu.
Media access: Radio programs/stations may, for a fee, use an on-campus ISDN line to interview UCI faculty and experts, subject to availability and university approval. For more UCI news, visit news.uci.edu. Additional resources for journalists may be found at communications.uci.edu/for-journalists.
The results of a study conducted by Dr. Anick Berard, Professor and Fonds de recherche du Quebec - Sante Research Chair on Medications and Pregnancy, at the University of Montreal's Faculty of Pharmacy and the Ste-Justine University Hospital demonstrate that the use of nicotine patches or the drug Zyban has positive effects for the unborn child and allows pregnant women to stop smoking during and after pregnancy.
The results of the study, published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, indicate that in 80% of cases, women who used nicotine patches or the drug Zyban successively quit smoking. Even after stopping the use of these products, 60% of Zyban users and 68% of women using nicotine patches did not restart smoking during or after pregnancy.
"In public health terms, these results are significant because one in five pregnant women smokes. We already know that smoking during pregnancy increases the chances of miscarriage as well as low birth weight, premature birth, and birth defects - events that are linked to health problems in children. The results we are publishing today will give pregnant women evidence-based options to quit smoking, but will also give data to health care professionals for them to prescribe the right treatment while evaluating the risks and benefits associated with each pharmacological method," said Dr. Berard, principal investigator of the study.
Furthermore, the results indicate that the use of nicotine patches reduces the risk of premature birth and low birth weight.
"We already knew that quitting smoking during pregnancy was beneficial for mothers and children in the short and long term, but, to our knowledge, this study is one of a few to compare the effects of using nicotine patches and the drug Zyban during pregnancy on smoking cessation and the risks to the fetus. Our results are directly in-line with smoking cessation programs implemented in the general population," said Berard.
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The study was funded by the Fonds de recherche du Quebec - Sante (FRQS) and the Canadian Cancer Society.
Article reference:
Berard, A., Zhao, J. P., and Sheehy, O. "Success of smoking cessation interventions during pregnancy," American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, July 8, 2016.
About the University of Montreal
Deeply rooted in Montreal and dedicated to its international mission, the University of Montreal (UdeM) is one of the top 100 universities in the world. It was found in 1878, and together with its two affiliated schools, HEC Montreal and Polytechnique Montreal, constitutes the largest centre of higher education and research in Quebec and one of the major centres in North America. The University of Montreal brings together 2,600 professors and researchers and welcomes more than 66,000 students. umontreal.ca
A research team led by Dr. Sonoko Ogawa at the University of Tsukuba showed that activation of an estrogen receptor in a region of the limbic system during the pubertal period is needed for adult mice to express typical male social behaviors.
Tsukuba, Japan - Testosterone plays a major role in controlling behavior associated with masculinity in many mammals. In early development, testosterone is involved in the formation and organization of "male" neural pathways, on which it then acts to regulate various behaviors in adulthood. Testosterone binds and activates estrogen receptor alpha (ER) after it is converted into estradiol by a process known as aromatization. ER is known to function differently in different parts of the adult mouse brain. Inhibition of ER in the medial preoptic area (MPOA) of the adult hypothalamus reduces sexual behavior but has no effect on aggressive behavior, while neither behavior is affected by ER inhibition in the medial amygdala (MeA) of the adult animal. However, until now it was unclear whether ER is involved in the organizational action of testosterone on the formation of neuronal circuitry for male social behavior during puberty. Researchers at the University of Tsukuba have shown that inhibiting ER in the MeA before puberty in male mice reduces both sexual and aggressive behavior in adults. In contrast, the effects of ER knockdown in the MPOA before puberty did not differ from knockdown effects in adulthood. The study was reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
Behavioral responses to sexually receptive females such as mounting, and toward intruder males such as biting and attacks, were recorded in adult mice. The reduction of both sexual and aggressive behavior by ER silencing in the MeA before puberty but not in adults suggests the importance of the receptor in this location during puberty. "ER knockdown in the MeA may even have affected the onset of puberty itself", first author Dr. Kazuhiro Sano says. "This contrasts with the silencing of ER in the MPOA, which reduced sexual but not aggressive behavior in mice, regardless of the time of knockdown treatment." These findings suggest that ER gene expression in the MPOA does not control male aggression through either the organizational role of testosterone at puberty, or its regulatory role in adulthood.
To understand why ER silencing in different areas of the brain had varying effects, the team examined MeA cells. They found that neuronal cells were greatly reduced in MeA in which ER expression had been inhibited before puberty. "ER in the MeA seems to be necessary for testosterone to masculinize the neural circuitry for social behavior during puberty", corresponding author Dr. Sonoko Ogawa explains. "If this masculinization is incomplete, social signals that enable adults to express male social behavior may not function correctly."
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The article, "Pubertal activation of estrogen receptor in the medial amygdala is essential for the full expression of male social behavior in mice" was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (DOI:10.1073/pnas.1524907113).
Researchers from The University of Texas at Arlington have demonstrated that electrical conductivity can be an effective means to precisely measure the amount of blood present in dry blood spot analysis, providing a new alternative to the current preferred approach of measuring sodium levels.
Dry blood spots are a pinprick of blood blotted on filter paper and allowed to air dry, which is then sent to a laboratory for analysis. Simple and inexpensive, dry blood spot analysis is routinely used to screen newborns for metabolic disorders and has also proven effective in diagnosing infant HIV infection, especially in developing countries where health budgets are limited.
"Our new method, which involves using an electrode probe to measure electrical conductivity, has proven accurate to within one percent," said Purnendu Dasgupta, Hamish Small Chair in Ion Analysis and James Garrett Professor in UTA's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. "It also has the considerable advantage of using up none of the sample where the currently preferred approach uses around half the sample."
Dasgupta and his co-author Jordan Berg, professor of mechanical engineering at Texas Tech University and co-director of the Nano Tech Center, published their findings, "Evaluation of the amount of blood in dry blood spots: ring-disk electrode conductometry," in Analytical Chemistry. Akinde Kadjo, Brian Stamos, Phillip Shelor, all of UTA, and Benjamin Blount of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's Division of Laboratory Sciences, also participated in the study, with Kadjo doing most of the work.
Dasgupta and his co-researchers used 12 volunteers aged 20 to 66, taking pinpricks of blood and letting the dry blood spot samples dry. They then took a 3 millimeter punch out of each dry blood spot, dissolved the punch in methanol and water mixtures and used a dip-type small diameter ring-disk electrode to measure the conductance of the samples, determining the minimum immersion depth that proved accurate in measuring the amount of blood to within one percent.
"As analytical instrumentation has improved, dry blood spot analysis is becoming increasingly popular for clinical trials to monitor the effects of therapeutic drugs and for large-scale epidemiology and genetic studies, where it is vital to know the exact amount of blood in the sample," Dasgupta said. "Our new dip probe method offers clear advantages, but it does have the same problem as measuring sodium in that it does not function if the subject has abnormal electrolyte levels, which happens in some diseases."
The researchers plan to continue their line of research with new funding provided recently by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The initial research was supported partially by the National Science Foundation, ThermoFisher/Dionex, the CDC Foundation and the Hamish Small Chair endowment at UTA.
Frederick MacDonnell, chair of UTA's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, said, "In line with UTA's focus on health and the human condition within the Strategic Plan 2020: Bold Solutions | Global Impact, Dr. Dasgupta and his colleagues have made an important contribution around the increasingly popular blood testing method of dry blood spot analysis.
"While more research needs to be done, they have demonstrated that measuring conductivity is a viable alternative to measuring sodium and has some specific advantages over the current approach."
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Dasgupta has won numerous awards in his field, including the American Chemical Society National Award in Chromatography in 2011 and the Stephen Dal Nogare Award in Chromatography in 2012. In February 2015, he was honored with the American Chemical Society Division of Analytical Chemistry J. Calvin Giddings Award for Excellence in Education. He is slated to receive the prestigious Eastern Analytical Symposium "Fields" Award, which honors scientists who have not focused on just one but contributed to the many sub-disciplines within analytical chemistry.
Dasgupta's active research areas include methods for environmentally-friendly analysis of arsenic in drinking water; rapid analysis of trace heavy metals in the atmosphere; iodine nutrition in women and infants and the role of the chemical perchlorate; and the development of a NASA-funded ion chromatograph for testing extraterrestrial soil, such as that found on Mars. In 2015, he was ranked among the Top 100 most influential people in the world of analytical science by the monthly journal The Analytical Scientist.
About The University of Texas at Arlington
The University of Texas at Arlington is a Carnegie Research-1 "highest research activity" institution of about 55,000 students in campus-based and online degree programs and is the second-largest institution in The University of Texas System. U.S. News & World Report ranks UTA fifth in the nation for undergraduate diversity. The University is a Hispanic-Serving Institution and is ranked as the top four-year college in Texas for veterans on Military Times' 2016 Best for Vets list. Visit http://www.uta.edu to learn more, and find UTA rankings and recognition at http://www.uta.edu/uta/about/rankings.php.
A national research collaboration funded by the National Institutes of Health has found significant racial and ethnic disparities in breastfeeding outcomes, according to a study published online this week in Pediatrics.
"We found that higher rates of poverty and lower levels of education helped explain breastfeeding gaps between black and white women, especially in determining whether mothers started breastfeeding in the first place," said Sharon Landesman Ramey, a professor and distinguished research scholar at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute and an author of the paper. "But those factors weren't the only ones responsible for mediating these relationships."
The researchers focused on understanding nondemographic factors that might help explain the differences in breastfeeding among black, white, and Hispanic mothers in the United States.
They found a surprising discrepancy in the mothers' initial decision to breastfeed -- black mothers were nine times more likely to be given formula for their babies than white mothers in the hospital.
"Our results suggest that hospitals and policy makers should limit in-hospital formula introduction and consider family history and demographics to reduce racial and ethnic breastfeeding disparities," said Madeleine Shalowitz, a director at the NorthShore University Health System Research Institute and co-investigator on the study.
The scientists have issued a call for change with their study.
"Hospitals and policy makers should consider nondemographic factors to help reduce racial and ethnic breastfeeding disparities," Ramey said. "Change is possible, and it's necessary."
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends children should be exclusively breastfed for the first six months of life, with continued breastfeeding and complementary foods until the child's first birthday at a minimum.
Even with this recommendation, about half of children in the United States are weaned from breastfeeding by the time they are six months old.
"Substantial research shows that breastfeeding benefits the neurologic, immunologic, digestive, and physical development of children," said Ramey, who is also a research professor in Virginia Tech's department of psychology. "These are lifelong benefits, yet some women choose not to do so. We investigated why that is."
The results not only explained some of the breastfeeding gap between black and white mothers, but they also elucidated why Hispanic mothers have the highest breastfeeding rate.
"It's family history," Ramey said. "Hispanic women are far more likely to have a family member who breastfed than white or black mothers."
The finding is important because Hispanic women tend to have similar economic standing and education levels as black women.
"This study finds a relationship between family experience with breastfeeding and Hispanic mothers' success at maternal nursing, and also finds that in-hospital provision of free infant formula is related to black mothers' poorer breastfeeding outcomes," said Bernice Hausman, the Edward S. Diggs Professor in the Humanities at Virginia Tech's College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. Hausman, an expert on the cultural aspects of breastfeeding, is also a professor at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine. She was not involved in this study.
Researchers collected data on attitudes toward breastfeeding, family history, introduction to formula while still in the hospital, and participation in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children. Commonly known as WIC, the program offers assistance to low-income women and their children.
All told, data was obtained from 1,636 mothers who delivered babies in Los Angeles, California, Baltimore, Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Lake Country, Illinois. The scientists assessed the mother's immediate intent regarding breastfeeding, and they followed-up one month and again six months after birth.
"Future studies might be able to clarify clear causative relationships between mediating factors and outcomes, but at least we can begin to move beyond broad cultural generalizations that are often unhelpful in changing the specific practices that negatively influence breastfeeding outcomes," Hausman said.
Hausman also noted the detailed level of information collected for the study.
"Hopefully breastfeeding promotion programs can use this kind of research to move beyond a model of educating mothers toward one that looks to the structural impediments to optimal breastfeeding outcomes," she said.
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The study was supported by grants to the Community and Child Health Network through cooperative agreements with the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Institute for Nursing Research. Funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Count on Marvin Olasky at World Magazine not to miss something like this. In The Language of God, theistic evolutionary icon Francis Collins used so-called Junk DNA as homerun evidence against intelligent design. He has since backed down on that, honorably, admitting hubris in the process. Olasky:
Collins claimed on page 136 that huge chunks of our genome are littered with ancient repetitive elements (AREs), so that roughly 45 percent of the human genome [is] made up of such genetic flotsam and jetsam. In his talk he claimed the existence of junk DNA was proof that man and mice had a common ancestor, because God would not have created man with useless genes.
Last year, though, speaking at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, Collins threw in the towel: In terms of junk DNA, we dont use that term anymore because I think it was pretty much a case of hubris to imagine that we could dispense with any part of the genome, as if we knew enough to say it wasnt functional. Most of the genome that we used to think was there for spacer turns out to be doing stuff.
Good for Collins and maybe hell go on to deal with other times scientists feel sorry for God as they look at His purportedly poor design. For example, evolutionists use the retina of the eye as evidence against creation, because nerve endings are at the front rather than at the back, which at first glance seems better placement. Yet, as Lee Spetner explains in The Evolution Revolution (Judaica Press, 2014), physicists now see front placement as the best one for ingeniously designed light collectors.
The list of needed retractions should include what you probably learned in high school about apparently purposeless human vestigial organs. Robert Wiedersheims 1895 list of 86 has shrunk, as almost all of them have proved to have functions. For example, the most famous vestigial organ the vermiform appendix is a crucial storage place for benign bacteria that repopulate the gut when diarrhea strikes. The appendix can be a life-saver.
In an article at Slate referring to Neil deGrasse Tysons now famous #Rationalia tweet, sociologist Jeffery Guhin argues that A rational nation ruled by science would be a terrible idea.
What? This, from popular media? Guhin makes his case against scientism, noting:
First, experts usually dont know nearly as much as they think they do.[T]he real problem is when we forget that scientists and experts are human too, and approach evidence and reasoned deliberation with the same prior commitments and unspoken assumptions as anyone else. Scientists: theyre just like us.
Yes science, like any other human enterprise, is flawed.
And second, science has no business telling people how to live, Guhin continues. Decrying scientific racism, he recalls that Eugenics was science, as was social Darwinism and the worst justifications of the Soviet and Nazi regimes. Kudos to Guhin for recognizing that a point that many other commentators avoid facing squarely.
In fact, that sounds remarkably like what Discovery Institutes John G. West says in Darwin Day in America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science. As Dr. West summarizes in the Preface:
At the dawn of the last century, leading scientists and politicians giddily predicted that modern science especially Darwinian biology would supply solutions to all the intractable problems of American society, from crime to poverty to sexual maladjustment. Instead, politics and culture were dehumanized as a new generation of scientific experts began treating human beings as little more than animals or machines: In criminal justice, these experts denied the existence of free will and proposed replacing punishment with invasive cures such as the lobotomy. In welfare, they proposed eliminating the poor by sterilizing those deemed biologically unfit. In business, they urged the selection of workers based on racist theories of human evolution and the development of advertising methods to more effectively manipulate consumer behavior. In sex education, they advocated creating a new sexual morality based on normal mammalian behavior, without regard to longstanding ethical or religious imperatives.
But here Guhin abruptly changes direction with a weird foray into bashing creationism. He says that creationism has a lot more in common with scientism than people such as Tyson or Richard Dawkins would ever admit. Where did that come from? My guess is its tactical. At Slate, to get away with saying anything that could be seen as critical of materialism, you need to demonstrate your credibility by attacking the creationists.
He has no strong conclusion to his article; rather Guhins last section is entitled The elusive truth. Once creationism and scientism are gone, it turns out, whats left is relativism. He says, Science may give us data, but it doesnt mean that data points to truth its just what we currently understand as truth.
True, theres no science without faith, as Douglas Axe notes in Undeniable:
Science cant even conceivably give us anything more certain than the faith we place in the essential propositions undergirding science, which means science will never be the primary path to knowing, much less the only path to knowing.
But is there a third way? Can we reject the confines of pure materialism without rejecting the information-value of data? Can there be science without scientism?
Historically, science existed in a non-materialist framework. Intelligent design, unlike Darwinian evolution, provides a basis for believing that we are able to ascertain truth about the world while recognizing that some things may be beyond sciences reach. ID aligns wells with a view affirming that humans are unique and it is consonant with the existence of ultimate meaning. At the same time, it affirms the importance of rationality and science which can help us to improve our quality of life through healthcare, technology, and more.
Accepting reality does not mean throwing away rationality just #Rationalia.
Photo credit: rolffimages stock.adobe.com.
Damp market sentiment and positive US ecostats caused the EUR to USD exchange rate to decline on Wednesday.
The euro vs dollar exchange rate has been given a small boost after the ECB opted to leave interest rates on hold in spite of the negative pressures facing the Eurozone at present.
However, there is still room for the EUR exchange rates to weaken more substantially if President Mario Draghi takes a particularly dovish tone later this afternoon.
At present, forecasts are for a rate freeze at 0%; this would likely be of more benefit to the Euro than a panic-inducing rate cut.
"We are dropping the neutral aspect of our technical assessment of EURUSD (though we recognize that intraday price action suggests some risk of a short-term snap back in the EUR today) because price has made enough progress to the downside this week (and trend momentum signals are aligning negatively across a range of timeframes) to suggest that the risk of a push lower in the EUR is building. New lows (below the late June low of 1.06915) would be more compelling for the bear argument but the market has broken out on the downside of its post June 23 consolidation which suggests another leg lower should develop shortly. We look for firm resistance on short-term gains towards." Scotiabank
Current account figures for the Eurozone and Italy have shown a weakening of surpluses, keeping the Euro weak against the US Dollar.
The Eurozone current account surplus weakened from 36.4 billion to 30.8 billion on a seasonally-adjusted basis, while the Italian current account surplus fell from 4655 million to 3189 million in May.
After European stocks tumbled and crude oil prices extended losses, market sentiment dampened considerably.
This caused heightened demand for the safe-haven US Dollar despite concerns of overvaluation.
Meanwhile, the Euro declined versus most of its major peers thanks to rising bond prices and disappointing domestic data.
Latest EUR Exchange Rates Today
On Friday the Pound to British Pound exchange rate (GBP/GBP) converts at 1
At time of writing the pound to pound exchange rate is quoted at 1.
Today finds the pound to us dollar spot exchange rate priced at 1.157.
The pound conversion rate (against australian dollar) is quoted at 1.793 AUD/GBP.
NB: the forex rates mentioned above, revised as of 28th Oct 2022, are inter-bank prices that will require a margin from your bank. Foreign exchange brokers can save up to 5% on international payments in comparison to the banks.
Euro (EUR) Exchange Rates Struggle after Eurozone Economic Sentiment Struck a 4-Year Low
With damp market sentiment causing bond prices to rise and yields to fall, demand for the Euro declined amid concerns that the European Central Banks (ECB) asset purchase programme will have a muted impact.
Also weighing on demand for the single currency was disappointing ZEW surveys.
Both the Eurozone and German economic sentient surveys hit a four-year low; reflecting the anxiety Brexit has caused for European businesses.
The Brexit vote has surprised the majority of financial-market experts, ZEW President Achim Wambach said in a statement. Uncertainty about the votes consequences for the German economy is largely responsible for the substantial decline in economic sentiment.
US Dollar (USD) Exchange Rates Advance after Housing Starts Data Eclipsed Expectations
Demand for safe-haven assets caused the US Dollar to advance as traders flocked from risk-correlated currencies.
Additional US Dollar gains can be linked to better-than-expected domestic data. Junes Housing Starts was forecast to show 0.2% growth, but the result actually reached 4.8%.
The housing market continues to chug along quite nicely, said Thomas Costerg of Standard Chartered Bank in New York. With mortgage rates so low, that provided an additional boost to the market, but at the same time were close to reaching cruise speed so I dont think were expecting stellar performance going forward.
Hi,
We are an Aussie family (with 3 young kids - 6yo and 3yo twins) that are in discussions for a job for my husband in Grand Forks.
I have a few questions for anyone living (or has lived) in the area.
The financial offer is substantially lower than our current salary in Australia. The only reason we are considering it is because the US is a great stepping stone for my husbands career and we realise we'll likely have to take a step backwards before being able to move forwards in the near future.
1. Is $45,000 an acceptable salary to live in this town? We would also get family health insurance, car and cell phone.
I would class ourselves as an average family. We don't eat out a lot, or drink a lot of alcohol. We would want our kids to do swimming lessons and sport. We'd be interested in the typical outdoor family activities.
My son has ADHD so would require good healthcare, Doctors, pharmacy, etc.
2. What are the schools like there?
3. How manageable is the climate? Being Aussie, anything below 15 seems cold ;-) but we are currently living in Canberra which gets down to -4C overnight and 7C during the day, with beautiful winter sunshine and I have been enjoying that. But I guess North Dakota is a whole other ball game.
4. Does anyone know the cost of child care? Do people use day care centers or have nannies/au pairs? Do you pay the full cost of day care, or are there government rebates like in Australia?
5. What are the best real estate websites to view rental properties?
Thanks.
I don't know if anyone knows the answer to this. Basically i'm supporting my friend (emotional mainly) due to his situation.
He applied for a spouse visa in May (priority), he got refused on the 7th of June. The ECO missed the fact that he gets paid in arrears and they thought that the payslips did not match despite the obvious. He sent off the admin review the following day. He got the letter from the tribunal last week saying that a decision will be made in the last week of October. Is this when he will find out if the visa is granted?
Also as a result of this mess, my friend has now left work due to his health deteriorating and has been left depressed. His solicitor has been very difficult to deal with and now is avoiding contact, which i presume is that he wants more money. I am worried for him that because he is not working now, they may reject the appeal. Is this the case of do they only do enquiry calls when the application was first put in?
Any answers will be appreciated.
hi all,
i've just submitted our fiance application - just wondering if i should include our engagment party photos with the application?
Anybody suggesting citizenship based taxation is a good idea is an imbecile. To see the mess and damage it causes, look to the USA. Culhane is woefully ignorant of the problems caused by citizenship based taxation.
""Of course there are double taxation treatments in most countries, so a citizen who is resident outside the US doesnt pay twice, Culhane pointed out.""
He's wrong. Americans frequently do get double taxed because the tax treaties with other countries, without exception, have gaps through which tax money flows to the USA. For instance, did a tax treaty stop Boris Johnson from having to pay capitol gains tax to the USA on the sale of his London home, tax that is not due to the UK? NO! Do tax treaties stop the USA taxing the Canadian disability savings plan of a Canadian born Canadian child because his mother is an American so making the son a dual if he likes it or not? NO! Tax treaties with other countries, at best, give the American the worst of both tax systems. It punishes people who leave.
US renunciations are at record levels and are climbing every year. Why? Citizenship based taxation is now being enforced by FATCA and their lives are being made impossible. TWO countries in the world use citizenship based taxation. One is a filthy African dictatorship of Eritrea, the other is the USA.
I cannot believe that anybody with even a spark of intelligence could be suggesting citizenship based taxation. Why, because America does it? The USA has got this wrong and it's subsequent efforts to enforce it's tax system at our expense via FATCA will ultimately cost the USA dearly. No country can survive in a global economy when you effectively make it impossible for your people to lead normal lives overseas.
Citizenship based taxation is riddled with problems from top to bottom, starting with human rights issues when a country starts to claim people as tax generating property. I have spent years watching the carnage unfold as the USA now tries to enforce it's long ignored demands on it's overseas people since Obama signed the HIRE act and FATCA contained within, and it's seriously ugly.
The only possible light at the end of this tunnel is it is perfectly true that one way to get rid of very bad law is to rigorously enforce it, which is exactly what the USA is now doing. I would encourage any reader to go to youtube and use FATCA as a search term.
And a question for Mr Culhane.....If every country in the world follows suite and copies the USA, I would have THREE citizenships whether I liked it or not. A tax professional and a specialist at that is usually required to file US taxes. I got a quote of $1800. All three? $5000? Just to file? Oh, and there is the third party country where I am currently working, too. Then there is the surety that I will receive the worst of every one of those systems plus have all three hanging the financial equivalent of a financial death sentence over my head for as much as a simple mistake with no tax evaded.
There is good reason for the 2000 percent increase(!!) in US renunciations since 2010. You, Mr Culhane, need to look a little closer at the unintended consequences for making such an atrocious suggestion. It's very easy. Just google FATCA.
Tuesday, July 19, 2016
Starting in-home care for your loved one is a big decision. It requires careful planning, a close look at the budget, and significant research on what agencies and caretakers are available. Selecting the type of agency thats right for you and your loved one is one of the biggest choices you will make and it can be overwhelming at first. Here are some helpful tips that can help make things a little bit easier.
Tip #1: Do your research on each agency in great detail.
Investigating each agency in detail is incredibly important. Find out as much information as you can about each agency and dont be afraid to ask a lot of questions. For example, be sure to find out if the agencys caregivers are their employees. If they are not, then you will be considered the employer and you will be responsible for paying all employee-related taxes including Medicare, social security, federal and state payroll tax, etc.
Tip #2: Find out of the caregivers are bonded and insured.
When doing your research, be sure that the caregivers are bonded and insured all of them. Insured means that the agency has a liability policy that offers protection to the caregivers if theyre accused of wrongdoing and are sued. Bonded means you are protected against theft.
Tip #3: Make sure that the caregivers are actual employees of the company.
Some agencies choose to use caregivers that they label "independent contractors." Oftentimes, the brochures will advertise caregivers are part of their staff, when in fact, they are not direct employees of the company. It has been common practice for some agencies to deliberately cloud this issue, which means they have a financial advantage over agencies that have caregivers on the payroll. This leaves out pertinent information for families that are looking for quality caregivers. As "independent contractors," the agency cannot control their work, including hours or how they do their job. In fact, because YOUR family is typically paying the caregiver (either directly or through the agency's trust account), YOU are likely the caregiver's employer, liable for all payroll tax filings and workers compensation insurance!
Recently, the Homecare Association of America endorsed two federal bills that would help address how independent contractors are being misclassified. One law will require an agency to advise the patient, the patients family or person acting on behalf of the patient, at the time of signing a services contract that the caregiver referred by the agency is not the caregivers employer and not under any obligations through the agency.
Tip #4: Ask the right questions.
When it comes to choosing an in-home employee or agency, dont be afraid to bring a list of questions with you. This is a big decision! Ask direct questions such as does my caregiver have workmans compensation insurance and if so, can I see the policy? Or, ask the company if they pay the caregivers payroll taxes. In addition, do your research regarding positive and negative reviews about the agency and the caregivers associated with it. Nowadays, reviews are often left online and are easily accessible if you sit down and do some research. If you are having a hard time finding reviews online, ask the agency directly for information on this.
You have a lot of choices when it comes to choosing your in-home care. Take your time and focus on finding out as much information as you can about each agency before you decide which one is right for you and your family.
Other Resources
The Accidental Employer
Managing Trustee Risks with a Private Caregiver
Consumer and Worker Risks from the Use of Nurse Registries and Independent Contractor Companies
Monday, July 18, 2016
I confess that I started to watch the Leslie Stahl 60 Minutes interview with Donald Trump and his newly-named running mate Mike Pence, but I abandoned ship almost immediately. It was too horrible. Watching Trump (I have a similar reaction to watching Hillary) just makes me depressed, furious, and confused. As John Adams sings at the musical climax of 1776, does anybody see what I see?
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Well, I know millions do, but not nearly enough, soon enough. This Republican National Convention is a part of a national tragedy. The only question is how great the tragedy will be.
Now that I have read the transcript, I realize that I bailed shortly before the smokiest smoking gun of the many in the whole interview. This exchange, more than any other in the segment, compels the question to any Trump supporter: How can you possibly want to hire a guy like this to be your leader? Perhaps it is more appropriate to pose a different question, to pose it to the staggering party gathering in Cleveland to nominate this fool: How could you allow this to happen?
I wouldnt hire someone who speaks and reasons like this to work for me in any capacity, however lowly, requiring trust, judgment or intelligence. It is signature significance as a whole, and in its parts. An intelligent, trustworthy, ethical person could never give such an interview, not in private, not in public, certainly not on national TV.
Here is the jaw-dropping exchange; Ill mark the important sections A-K for exposition:
Donald Trump: Now look, we are going to get rid of ISIS, big league. And were going to get rid of em fast. And were going to use surrounding states. Were going to use NATO, probably. And were going to declare war. It is war. When the World Trade Center comes tumbling down, with thousands of people being killed, people are still I have friends that are still(A) Lesley Stahl: But we did go to war, if you remember. We went to Iraq. (B) Donald Trump: Yeah, you went to Iraq, but that was handled so badly. And that was a war by the way, that was a war that we shouldnt have entered because Iraq did not knock downexcuse me (C) Lesley Stahl: Your running mate Donald Trump: Iraq did not Lesley Stahl: voted for it. Donald Trump: I dont care. (D)
Lesley Stahl: What do you mean you dont care that he voted for? Donald Trump: Its a long time ago. (E) And he voted that way and they were also misled. A lot of information was given to people. (F) Lesley Stahl: But youve harped on this. Donald Trump: But I was against the war in Iraq from the beginning. (G) Lesley Stahl: Yeah, but youve used that vote of Hillarys that was the same as Governor Pence as the example of her bad judgment. (H) Donald Trump: Many people have, and frankly, Im one of the few that was right on Iraq. (I) Lesley Stahl: Yeah, but what about he Donald Trump: Hes entitled to make a mistake every once in a while. (J) Lesley Stahl: But shes not? OK, come on Donald Trump: But shes not Lesley Stahl: Shes not? Donald Trump: No. Shes not. (K) Lesley Stahl: Got it. (L)
Okay, I just threw up a little in my mouth re-reading that, and now Im ready.
A. I recently read an essay about how Trump never provides any details at all. It is true that he has been rewarded for this by both his GOP opponents and the news media, who have let him get away with it. Nonetheless, this is con-man-speak. Actually, that is too kind. It is blatantly faking it. It reminds me of the incompetent college choreographer at MIT who unwittingly convinced me to start doing my own choreography as a student performer. He was supposed to stage a number I was in, and he kept saying, Well, you should do a little dance! I asked, What little dance? and he answered, You know. A little dance. Only a fake and an idiot assumes responsibility for a job and relies on such useless vagaries. It is signature significance. Doing this says
I am lazy, and didnt prepare.
I am faking.
I dont appreciate the difficulty or importance of the job I am seeking, and
I dont have any respect for those listening to me or relying on me.
B. Just an aside here: Stahls question is shameless partisan hackery. There was a war as a result of the Twin Towers and Pentagon attacks, and it was against Afghanistan and Al Qida. The canard that President Bush had the United States invade Iraq in response to 9/11 is a direct and intentional lie perpetuated by Democrats for political gain. The news medias job is to deny and reject such lies, not to endorse them.
Here is the official U.S. rational for the Iraq War, delivered to the United Nations on February 5, 2003. There is but one mention of the attacks of 9/11, and it is the most tangential imaginable: once, Powell refers to a post-Sepember 11 world. There is no hint that retribution for the terror attack has any relevance to the rational for the Iraq War.
This is also signature significance. An ethical journalist wouldnt raise Iraq in this context, and an ethical news department wouldnt allow it to air if she did. My best possible excuse for Stahl: she was eager to hit Trump with the ensuing Iraq contradiction, and used a cheap and false segue to get there.
C. Here is another example of Trump speaking like a dementia patient.a devious dementia patient. He starts with a deflectionhow the war was executed has nothing to do with the decision to start it, then he cuts himself off, and doesnt have the wit or knowledge to correct Stahls false characterization. High school debaters have to be quicker than this, and often are.
D. I dont care. In other words, Nyah, nyah, nyah! This is the response of a child when caught red-handed with no defense. Have you ever heard a mature public figure respond I dont care! when confronted with his own wrongdoing, lies or inconsistencies? Its a purely emotional deflection: intelligent, rational grown-ups simply dont say that, except under great emotional stress.
E. Its a long time ago, interestingly, is another phrasing of the rationalization named after sociopath/ narcissist/ triple murderer Frank Underwood, the schieming President at the center of House of Cards: #50 A, The Underwood Maneuver, or Thats in the past.
As I have noted here before, Trump is incapable of making an ethical argument. He always, always defaults to one or more rationalization. Trump thinks rationalizations are ethics: Everybody does it, tit-for-tat, they had it coming, its not the worst thing, these are not ordinary timeshes got an extensive supply of them that he relies on again and again.
Incidentally, based on the show, I would vote for Frank Underwood over Donald Trump in a heartbeat. (Id vote for Frank over Hillary, too.)
F. More vague, detail-free, inarticulate blather.
G. It has been shown, via audiotape, that Trumps first public statement on the war was to support it. Is he lying, or has he forgotten? When the contradiction of his from the beginning assertion was brought up to him a few moths ago, his reaction was Whatever.
H. Gotcha!, from Stahl. Is it possible that Trump and Pence never discussed this? No. Did they not expect this to come up? If not, they are idiots, and that itself is troubling. No, they had to know this was going to be raised by Stahl, and Trump, one has to assume from what comes next, said, Dont worry, Ill handle it. He then assumed he could fake and bluff and double-talk his way out of it. This is signature significance of narcissism and delusion. Trump really does think hes smart. He thinks hes smart despite hundreds and thousands of episodes in his life when hes made an ass of himself, like he does here, because hes not smart. Yet he still hasnt learned.
I. TWO rationalizations, and self-contradictory ones, a neat trick. Many people have is a variation of Everybody does it, and claiming that he was right is Rationalization #3. Consequentialism. Trump is only right because the WMDs werent found, the war was mismanaged, Iraqis proved corrupt and inept at governing, and Obama withdrew the troops before the country was stabilized, none of which Trump knew would happen when he says he opposed the war. People who reason like this, retroactively judging whether decisions were right or wrong, good or bad, based on how they turn out rather than how they were made are ignorant people, and also people who believe that the ends can justify the means.
Meanwhile, how can many Iraq war critics blame Hillary for supporting the war, and Trump still claim that he was one of the few to say the war was a mistake from the start? Such obvious contradictions dont faze him, because consistency and logic dont matter to Trump. Hes just talking. He doesnt know what hes thinking until he hears what comes out of his mouth.
J. This is another another rationalization: 19. The Perfection Diversion: Nobodys Perfect! or Everybody makes mistakes!
K. Trump is saying that Pence, who he has asserted is qualified to be President by choosing him as his understudy, should have his vote forgiven, but Hillary should not, without stating any reason for the distinctionbecause he cant come up with one. His answer, therefore, is essentially, So there!
Again, this is a child talking, and a witless one at that. Even engaged in a hypocritical argument like this, an intelligent, quick-witted individual could come up with some distinction, some way to justify this impossible position. I would have said,
No, because since that vote, Mike has been a state governor, and a fine one. He has learned from his mistakes, and honed his judgment. Not only has Hillary shown that she hasnt improved in her judgment since 2003, she botched her responsibilities as Secretary of State so badly that the head of the FBI said she would have been fired if she hadnt quit first. Mike wouldnt make that mistake now. I see no indication that Hillarys judgment isnt as bad as ever.
L. Stahls response shows that her assignment was to make Trump look bad, not that its a difficult one. If Clinton or Obama tangled themselves up like that, Stahl would have made every effort to help them extricate themselves.
There you have it. In one exchange lasting just a few minutes, Donald Trump showed himself to be lazy, inarticulate, dishonest, slow on his feet, illogical, irrational, juvenile and unethical, and there is no other way to assess his performance. No competent, trustworthy individual would be capable of giving such an interview, even once. It is res ipsa loquitur, definitive proof, signature significance, of a candidate who is unfit to lead in not just one respect, but many.
_____________________
Pointer: Ann Althouse
Monday, July 18, 2016
D.G. Yuengling and Son Inc. settled with the EPA relating to 141 alleged Clean Water Act (CWA) violations where it will pay $2.8 million in fines. The Pennsylvania brewery will pay $2.8 million penalty, plus approximately $7 million in promised wastewater system improvements. The company operates two brewery facilities and both failed to comply with industrial user permit limits on wastewater discharges that went to the local municipal wastewater collection and treatment system. More specifically, the charges state that the brewery wastewater exceeded the discharge limits for biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), phosphorous, zinc and pH. This could negatively impact the entire public municipal wastewater system. The wastewater streams must be pretreated by the brewery before being discharged into the local municipal system.
To avoid future violations, the brewery agreed to wastewater system updates including designing and implementing an environmental management system (EMS) focused on CWA compliance, improving and installing a comprehensive pretreatment system, hiring two certified wastewater treatment operators and implementing a process to identify, investigate and respond to future CWA violations.
The average water use ratio for a brewery is about 7:1, that is, seven gallons of water are consumed for each gallon of beer produced. (The other six gallons are primarily going down the drain.) While brewery wastewater is not generally toxic or hazardous, it can contain low levels of biocides and metals, and higher levels of biodegradable materials, that can be problematic for municipal wastewater treatment plants. Without pretreatment, brewery wastewater may exceed regulatory discharge limits for some parameters such as pH, metals and phosphorus. As a result, brewery wastewater can be more costly for the municipality to treat and can increase the quantity of sludge needing disposal.
What does this mean for your microbrewery?
Evaluate what is going down the drain and where it goes. If the discharge is into the local municipal sewer system, then determine if you must obtain an industrial user wastewater permit. If you are put under formal permit or contract with the EPA or DEC, then evaluate whether your untreated wastewater can consistently comply with those requirements or if onsite pretreatment is required.
Making beer is fun but you must keep in mind you are in an industrial food production business and there are environmental regulations to comply with. Failure to do so can lead to very significant fines and penalties. Working with an environmental engineer or experienced craft beverage or environmental attorney can help you navigate the regulations and ensure your operations are in compliance.
Tracy Jong has been an attorney for more than 20 years, representing restaurants, bars, and craft beverage manufacturers in a wide array of legal matters. She is also a licensed intellectual property and patent attorney.
Her book Everything You Need To Know About Obtaining and Maintaining a New York Retail Liquor License: The Definitive Guide to Navigating the State Liquor Authority will be available next month on Amazon.com as a softcover and Kindle e-book.
Her legal column is available in The Equipped Brewer, a monthly publication giving business advice, trends, and vendor reviews to help craft breweries, cideries, distilleries and wineries build brands and succeed financially.
She also maintains a website and blog with practical information on legal and business issues affecting the industry. Follow her, sign up for her free firm app or monthly newsletter. www.TracyJongLawFirm.com/Facebook: Tracy Jong Law Firm/ Twitter: @TJLawFirm/ LinkedIn: Tracy Jong.
Monday, July 18, 2016
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Ethics Alarms Rationalization 36 B, The Patsys Rebuke, or Its not my fault that youre stupid!closes a yawning loophole in the Victim Blindness rationalization set on the Ethics Alarms list.
Rationalization #36, Victim Blindness, holds that a purveyor of unethical conduct should be exonerated if his victim asked for mistreatment or should have taken affirmative steps to avoid it, and #36 A, The Extortionists Absolution, holds that when there were sufficient warnings that a victim was at risk, that victim cant complain about results he could have and should have avoided. The newly minted rationalization, the 69th on the list overall, covers the related but distinct situation where deception, fraud or misrepresentation would be obvious to a perceptive, intelligent, educated individual, so nobody but the victim of that deception is blameworthy.
This was brought to my attention by a reader who raised the situation where statistics that may be technically accurate are used by activists to confuse, deceive, or mislead people who are either not sufficiently well-trained in math and statistics, or not adept at critical thinking. In this, The Patsys Rebuke has a kinship with #29 (a), The Gruber Variation, or They are too stupid to know whats good for them.
Politicians, policy advocates, scientists, academics, lawyers and doctors, among others, all are prone to using 36 B to justify their adoption of deceit and obfuscation to accomplish their ends. Lawyers use jargon to sound authoritative and obscure meaning from laymen. Policy advocates quote statistics to prove what the numbers really dont prove, counting on the inability of the trusting, inattentive, ignorant and gullible to see the flaws as insulation against rebuttal. By the lights of The Patsys Rebuke, for example, making the false assertion that Hillary Clinton is the most experienced Presidential candidate ever can be rationalized by arguing, Hey, thats my opinion. I personally think being First Lady counts more than any other experience, and was counting it double. Its not my fault that you are ignorant of Presidential history and too dumb to know how to google the experience of other candidates. Im not trying to deceive anyone; I assume my readers are educated and informed.
Thats a lie, of course. Advocates use statistics, falsity, jargon and ambiguity with the assumption, sadly justified, that most listeners and readers are both overly trusting and lacking in the training and acumen to know when they are being manipulated. If anyone is misledand the intent is to mislead them its their own fault for being stupid, lazy and ignorant.
It is not, however. Politicians, policy advocates, scientists, academics, lawyers and the rest have an ethical obligation to recognize the abilities of their likely audience (including those who will relay or interpret it, like the news media), and make their meaning as clear, direct and unambiguous as possible.
___________
Pointer: Zoltar Speaks!
From: Chuck Gallagher -- The Business Ethics Expert - Keynote Speaker For Immediate Release: Dateline: Greenville , SC Tuesday, July 19, 2016
Unfortunately, standing up in front of a class and teaching, are not equivalent behaviors to being an ethical business person capable of making good decisions. Mr. Baker has just been sentenced to jail for 64 months for bilking the United Auburn Indian Community out of $18 million. Not only did he defraud, but he is also guilty of money laundering and filing false tax returns. His unethical vehicle of choice was a construction project with inflated overruns and kickbacks.
In addition to presenting himself as a fount of knowledge to his students, Baker managed earn the trust of the tribal council as an administrator, and then he proceeded to defraud them as well. This should be a warning to us all, no matter your ethnic, racial, religious or tribal background (regardless of how you define tribe). Because someone may look or worship or identify culturally as we do, does not mean they will tend to be more ethical toward us. Ethics apparently another example of things they dont teach in business school.
No shame
As the case was presented, it became apparent that the defendant funneled money away from the project to personal use such as a new swimming pool, home improvements and other perks. He was not alone in his fraud, but he also attracted builders and suppliers to participate in the web of unethical lies he managed to create between 2006 and 2007. We cannot just blame the teacher, but those he managed to attract as well. They are awaiting sentencing as I write this.
The attraction of unethical people to one another should be an additional warning to us as well. Unethical behavior does not usually occur in a vacuum. Organizations, associations and even tribes frequently set themselves to allow unchecked, unsupervised or unaware behaviors. Unless serious checks and balances are incorporated into projects or programs, the opportunity for unethical behavior can always exist.
I seriously doubt if Gregory Scott Baker was expected to submit to rigorous oversight where deadlines, expectations and budgets were tightly controlled and reviewed. While trust and confidence are wonderful qualities to nurture in any organization, they are not enough no matter how lofty the credentials.
It leads me to another point (this case overflows with examples): credentials simply tell us that potentially someone can do a job, not whether they will be ethical or effective on the job. I frequently write about fraud and other unethical behaviors committed by M.D.s, lawyers, investment advisors, Ph.D.s, CPAs, and other professionals. They all have impressive backgrounds and stellar educations, but it does not necessarily make them ethical. What to do? For starters, make certain that proper oversight has been put into place.
Then there is the importance of ethical training
I am quite certain that Mr. Baker was compensated handsomely for this project. He got off track, and he caused others to go off track, because good ethics was not a consideration. It was a joke or an afterthought. None of the defendants, starting with Mr. Baker are laughing at this moment. When these characters are hauled before a judge wearing their sincere ties and freshly cleaned and creased clothing, no one will be cracking jokes. They may even stop to wonder how Baker managed to convince them to screw up so royally. Sad, then again an example of things they dont teach in business school.
I clearly favor ethical teaching and ethical screening for all vendors of multi-million dollar projects. It would not be difficult to institute or monitor in the long term. Finalists for a bid should expect to do so. The alternative of course, is to do nothing; none of the above, where hard working people ultimately pay for someones swimming pool. What they dont teach in business school is how to sit in jail for more than five years of a life. Perhaps Gregory Scott Baker can teach a new course when he is released.
Feel free to share Things They Dont Teach in Business School
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Gregory Scott Baker is one of guys people must have pointed to and said, Hes got to be one of the brightest people in the room. After all, he was a business professor at American River College, where he sought to mold the minds of future business leaders. But then there are things they dont teach in business school.Unfortunately, standing up in front of a class and teaching, are not equivalent behaviors to being an ethical business person capable of making good decisions. Mr. Baker has just been sentenced to jail for 64 months for bilking the United Auburn Indian Community out of $18 million. Not only did he defraud, but he is also guilty of money laundering and filing false tax returns. His unethical vehicle of choice was a construction project with inflated overruns and kickbacks.In addition to presenting himself as a fount of knowledge to his students, Baker managed earn the trust of the tribal council as an administrator, and then he proceeded to defraud them as well. This should be a warning to us all, no matter your ethnic, racial, religious or tribal background (regardless of how you define tribe). Because someone may look or worship or identify culturally as we do, does not mean they will tend to be more ethical toward us. Ethics apparently another example of things they dont teach in business school.As the case was presented, it became apparent that the defendant funneled money away from the project to personal use such as a new swimming pool, home improvements and other perks. He was not alone in his fraud, but he also attracted builders and suppliers to participate in the web of unethical lies he managed to create between 2006 and 2007. We cannot just blame the teacher, but those he managed to attract as well. They are awaiting sentencing as I write this.The attraction of unethical people to one another should be an additional warning to us as well. Unethical behavior does not usually occur in a vacuum. Organizations, associations and even tribes frequently set themselves to allow unchecked, unsupervised or unaware behaviors. Unless serious checks and balances are incorporated into projects or programs, the opportunity for unethical behavior can always exist.I seriously doubt if Gregory Scott Baker was expected to submit to rigorous oversight where deadlines, expectations and budgets were tightly controlled and reviewed. While trust and confidence are wonderful qualities to nurture in any organization, they are not enough no matter how lofty the credentials.It leads me to another point (this case overflows with examples): credentials simply tell us that potentially someone can do a job, not whether they will be ethical or effective on the job. I frequently write about fraud and other unethical behaviors committed by M.D.s, lawyers, investment advisors, Ph.D.s, CPAs, and other professionals. They all have impressive backgrounds and stellar educations, but it does not necessarily make them ethical. What to do? For starters, make certain that proper oversight has been put into place.I am quite certain that Mr. Baker was compensated handsomely for this project. He got off track, and he caused others to go off track, because good ethics was not a consideration. It was a joke or an afterthought. None of the defendants, starting with Mr. Baker are laughing at this moment. When these characters are hauled before a judge wearing their sincere ties and freshly cleaned and creased clothing, no one will be cracking jokes. They may even stop to wonder how Baker managed to convince them to screw up so royally. Sad, then again an example of things they dont teach in business school.I clearly favor ethical teaching and ethical screening for all vendors of multi-million dollar projects. It would not be difficult to institute or monitor in the long term. Finalists for a bid should expect to do so. The alternative of course, is to do nothing; none of the above, where hard working people ultimately pay for someones swimming pool. What they dont teach in business school is how to sit in jail for more than five years of a life. Perhaps Gregory Scott Baker can teach a new course when he is released.Feel free to share Things They Dont Teach in Business SchoolThe post Things They Dont Teach in Business School appeared first on Chuck Gallagher
STERLING, Ohio Nearly 2,000 people from Wayne and surrounding counties visited Stollers Organic Dairy near Sterling, July 12, during the annual Dairy Twilight Tour, sponsored by the Wayne-Ashland Dairy Service Unit.
The farm is owned and operated by Scott and Charlene Stoller and their family. Scott and Charlene are in the process of transitioning to the next generation as their sons, Nelson, and his wife, Jessica, and Doyle and his wife, Naomi, take on ownership and day-to-day management decisions.
Family roles
Sons Warren, Clark and Toby are involved in the farm as employees until they turn 18, and join their brothers as part owners. As a family farm, everyone has their area of responsibility.
Nelson and Warren handle morning chores, while Doyle manages the pastures and fencing, as well as the heifers from weaning age to freshening. Nelson also helps Clark with the young calves, while Toby handles feed mixing duties.
Warren, Charlene, Naomi and Jessica handle the evening milking. Scott takes care of the odd jobs such as scraping the barns, feeding, and finishing milking and clean-up.
Scott Stollers younger daughters, Melody and Rose Mary, have inside chores until they are older. His oldest daughter, Lynelle, and her husband, Craig, operate their own organic dairy farm.
Charlene told the audience that although she was not raised on a farm, she enjoys life on the farm and working together as a family.
I wanted to do my part, she said.
She said milking in the old two-story bank barn was therapy for her after Scott had his accident 20 years ago. She said as the family worked together they sang, cried, prayed and shared the problems and events of the day.
Growing family
As the family grew, so did the size of the farming operation. The Stollers milk 160 Holsteins and have another 180 head of young stock. Because they rely on forage for a majority of their ration, they want a cow that fits their operation.
The right cow for our herd is one that is problem-free, and has a calf every year, said Scott. We are a bull-bred herd, so we select bulls from cows that have been in the herd at least three or four lactations. We want a cow that is sound and can walk freely; she needs to have a nicely shaped udder and a low somatic cell score.
Currently, the herd averages 18,000 pounds of milk with fat tests ranging from 4.0 to 4.5 and protein tests ranging from 3.0 to 3.2. They try to hold their somatic cell count between 100,000 and 150,000, according to Doyle.
It gives consumers a better quality product in the end, said Doyle.
High components and low somatic cell counts are important, according to Scott, because their processor pays nice bonuses for quality and components, on top of the base milk price.
They have been shipping organic milk since 2003 and are actively involved in Organic Valley, a farmer-owned co-op based out of La Farge, Wisconsin. In addition to their dairy and crops, the Stollers raise poultry, produce maple syrup and honey from their own beehives and raise their own fruit and vegetables.
Making changes
After Scott was injured, the couple knew they had to make some changes in their farming operation if Scott was going to continue to farm the farm that had been in the family for several generations.
In 2001, they moved toward an organic, foraged based operation with the cows doing much of the harvesting and the goal of keeping nutrients and soil on the farm and out of the streams.
Scott added that production in the herd is not limited by genetics, but instead it can be limited by energy in the forage.
When we have a lot of cloudy days, it drops the energy level in the grass, said Scott. That impacts our production.
Doyle said they prefer not to feed an expensive grain mix to the cows; instead they have a pasture-based feeding program and in a normal year, the cows are on pasture by mid-April and are off the pasture by Thanksgiving.
In the summer, 60 percent of the cows dry matter intake comes from the pasture and forty percent coming from a TMR of corn silage, haylage, ground grains, bean meal and minerals.
When the cows come off the pasture during the winter months, about 60 percent of the ration comes from the TMR with baleage and long-stemmed hay making up the balance of the ration.
I am not afraid to pull them off the pasture instead of making mud, said Doyle. If your cows are fed at the expense of your pastures, you are no longer feeding your cows.
New facilities
As the cropping practices have changed, so have the facilities on the farm. The Stollers made the transition from a stanchion barn to a free-stall barn and milking parlor. Scott said the stanchion barn worked for them because it was economical and efficient, but they spent too much time milking.
The new parlor has speeded up the process immensely and the only change, according to Scott, would be to make it a couple of stalls longer on each side.
He added that the addition of a space-eliminating gate in the holding area kept cows moving, improving the cow flow and speeding up the milking time because they werent stopping to move cows into the parlor.
Scott said building the new parlor came sooner than expected, but he is glad they made the change.
Our sons really pushed for this; it speeds up milking, he said. Charlene, Jessica and Naomi really like it. It makes things easier for them, especially when we are in the fields.
The Stollers farm about 750 acres of owned and rented ground. They currently have about 548 acres that have been certified for organic production, with another 207 acres in transition to organic.
All of the crops raised on the certified organic acres are fed to livestock, while crops from the ground in transition are sold off the farm until the three year transition process is complete.
In a normal year, we are self-sufficient, said Scott.
Crops include corn, beans, wheat, rye, alfalfa and clover, as well as some oat and a lot of pasture mixes. This year they have a 150-acre test plot of Italian Rye Grass that they are using as a nurse crop for their alfalfa seedings.
The Stollers hope to use this in their rotations in place of oats. Scott said a typical rotation on the farm starts with hay or clover, followed by corn, which is followed by beans or small grains which are under-seeded with clover, going back to hay.
Our goal is to have 100 percent of the crop and pasture land growing something in the spring, said Scott. This helps control soil erosion and allows us to capture energy from the sun through photosynthesis. We try to capture as much energy as possible.
Conservation efforts
They installed a tile line to direct all silage leachate into the manure storage ponds, water ways, contour strips and adopted forest stand improvement, upland wildlife habitat and riparian buffer zone management plans.
Charelene told the audience that as the boys were growing up, Scott trained the next generation to take over the farm by giving them responsibilities, allowing them to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes.
Today, that training has paid off as their sons are actively involved on the farm.
Dad took me faithfully when I wasnt much help, said Doyle. I hope I have paid him back. I want my little boy to have the same life that I did when I was growing up. Nelson and Lynnell added that as a family, they did a lot together and there was never a dull moment around the farm.
Perhaps Warren summed it up the best when he told the audience that he wouldnt exchange his experience growing up on the family farm for anything.
I dont want to do it, but I would lose my right hand to be like my dad, he said.
High tunnel crops to be featured during educational short course
Growers, educators and industry personnel can learn more about the aspects of high tunnel crop production during a short course Nov. 9 offered by ISU.
The Ulster Farmers' Union says the package tabled by the EU Commission to alleviate the impact of the EU wide agricultural crisis is 'positive' but 'more detail is needed'.
The EU Commission has laid out plans for a 500 million package that would see 150 million allocated as an incentive to dairy producers throughout the EU to reduce production by around two billion litres on a voluntary basis and a total of 350 million in national envelopes for Member States.
"The UK is set to get just over 30 million", explains the Union, "which is slightly lower in Euro terms than our allocation from the separate similar EU aid package last September, that can be given as targeted aid to EU milk and other livestock farmers.
"While this is welcome news, there is still very little detail and we need clarification as to how these schemes will work in practice.
"However, spread across 28 Member States it is likely that this, while welcome, will mean little at individual farm level and will certainly not solve all the problems farmers face.
"The further extension of EU dairy product intervention and private storage aid and updating EU support for the withdrawal of fruit and vegetables will also be beneficial," said UFU president Barclay Bell.
Direct payments
Barclay Bell added: "More helpful to farmers generally however will be the announcement by our Minister that Northern Ireland will take up the now agreed EU option to pay 70% of the direct payments which can be paid from 16 October.
"This increase from 50% is something which the UFU has pursued since our Ministers announcement at the beginning of July that advanced payments would be made.
"Also, the weakening of sterling against the Euro is likely to provide increased producer prices here, over the coming months as well as deliver on a significant beneficial Sterling/Euro exchange rate for direct payments when it is set this September.
"The EU farm commissioner, Phil Hogan, deserves credit for battling to secure funding for this aid package against very difficult prevailing economic conditions within the European Union.
"Now that the announcement has been made, we want to see the details fleshed out urgently and we will be pressing to have this money delivered to farmers as quickly as possible whenever funding comes from Brussels."
The measures adopted by the EU's Agriculture Council to give 500 million is "far from enough to overcome the crisis," according to the European Milk Board.
"Producers on the dairy market are under exceptional pressure," the Board said, describing thebcrisis with 'continuously sinking milk prices' that has dairy farms across the EU at the 'end of their tether.'
"It was therefore key that yesterday's Agriculture Council decided on radical measures to reduce overproduction on the market.
"This amount is not nearly enough in light of the severity of the current crisis"
"However, the measures adopted yesterday are not going to provide the urgent reorientation the sector needs
"Instead of taking a consequent EU-wide approach, which would offer all producers the possibility of voluntary production cuts, 350 million euros of the total 500 million package, that is, the majority was allocated to measures that are not clearly defined."
Romuald Schaber, President of the European Milk Board (EMB), is disappointed: "Production cuts is the label used to describe the current package of measures.
"However, no one wants to take a crack at their proper implementation, with 150 million euros merely to be used for measures to reduce production.
"This amount is not nearly enough in light of the severity of the current crisis."
Too short a reduction period and no simultaneous capping
The EMB explained that the envisaged reduction period of 3 months is 'too short'.
This is during the time which willing producers will receive financial compensation, but there is no simultaneous volume capping for other producers.
"Therefore, there is a great risk that the achieved reductions will be neutralised by increased production by other producers and the effect on milk prices will be minimal or insignificant.
"The equivalent 14 cents to be paid for each litre of milk not produced is not enough of an incentive either.
"This compensation has to be higher in order to generate enough willingness and bring about sufficient volume reduction on the market.
"With prices that are sometimes below 20 cents per litre of milk, we are facing an acute and significant crisis in the dairy sector in Europe. This crisis must be combated with consequent and clear policy," says Schaber.
"However, the European Commission and some Member States have been trying to ignore the consequences of this crisis for months now.
The EMB concluded: "Sadly, the measures adopted yesterday show that nothing has changed."
The farming sector has told the House of Commons environment, food and rural affairs (Efra) committee the concentration of slaughtering in the hands of a few large abattoirs is hurting producers.
MPs were seeking evidence on the beef payment grids introduced last winter by several large processors, which included harsher penalties for heavy animals.
UFU deputy president, Victor Chestnutt said that retailers, food service companies and processors must be held accountable for their actions on beef specifications.
He added that more constructive solutions are required which ensure that farmers are not disadvantaged in the supply chain.
Commenting Mr Chestnutt said: "We welcome the interest the EFRA committee at Westminster has taken in changes to cattle specifications and the notice periods traditionally given to farmers.
"This is an area which has caused great financial and practical difficulties for farmers in Northern Ireland."
'Harsh financial penalties'
He added that often these changes see the value of cattle suddenly deemed out of spec steeply depreciate where harsh financial penalties are applied, leaving farmers to carry the cost.
"From experience we know that it is processors who are responsible for changing the specification for farmers and for putting in place the penalties.
"However major companies in retail and food service must also be held accountable as they dictate the changes to the rest of the supply chain," said Mr Chestnutt.
"We believe it is unacceptable that swift changes in specification creates financial hardship for farmers.
"But it also disappoints me that to date processors have not felt comfortable enough to challenge the introduction of specifications which they know will have a negative impact on the beef industry," said Mr Chestnutt.
"I can only assume this is because they fear losing business and that the cost of not complying is too great a risk, but to me this is a perfect example of a dysfunctional supply chain and a set of circumstances which requires big changes."
'Not enough time for farmers to adjust'
"Farmers are passionate about producing the end product that the consumer will want to buy and enjoy, but the supply chain needs to recognise that from the day a bull is put in with a cow to the day that their offspring is slaughtered is a long term process," said Mr Chestnutt.
"Differing farm production systems means this could take in the region of 3 years to produce a prime animal, so if the specification changes within a number of weeks this is clearly not enough time for farmers to adjust.
"I would strongly encourage the EFRA committee to challenge retailers, food service companies and processors on short notice periods and also on how specifications are devised.
"Specifications are supposed to reflect what consumers want, but I doubt consumers would be happy if they knew that the dominant retailers, food service companies and processors were financially penalising farmers to achieve this.
"Farmers are the first link in our supply chain but are the last to be consulted on specification changes, therefore we need a process which sees farmer involvement in discussions around these changes and one which will deliver the long term notice that our farmers really need."
A lecturer from the Aberdeen Campus of Scotlands Rural College (SRUC) has won a prestigious six week summer study tour of North America which will focus on the historic links between land ownership in Scotland and the USA.
Dr Nick Prince is researching what Scotland can learn from the education system in agriculture in North America and will include his findings in his teaching as a lecturer in Rural Business Management.
Nick leads the new Rural Surveying and Land Use stream of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) accredited Rural Business Management degree.
As part of a bid to beef up the course and attract more RICS students he won a scholarship from the esteemed Farmers Club Charitable Trust to allow him to compare land reform issues between Scotland and North America.
Nick said: "The purpose of the study trip is to allow me to observe and review the role of land in agricultural education in North America - with a view to incorporating the good points and best practice into our teaching in Scotland.
"There are similar historic land ownership issues between Scotland and USA despite the obvious differences in terms of size.
"I believe that academic study relating to rural and agricultural property rights in North America is much more akin to Scotland given the contested nature of rural land in these two geographic areas.
"I am looking forward to seeing the huge farms and fields of crops the proper mid-West farms that you see in the movies!"
Significance of land
A key focus of his trip will be to explore the significance of land as a means of making money which Nick feels is at the core of the survival of the Scottish agricultural industry.
"I want to examine how they optimise land in the USA as I feel we ignore that in Scotland. I want to learn about flexibility in land tenure.
"We covet land in Scotland - we dont have that flexibility. There is an assumption in Scotland that we need to chase economies of scale.
"But this scholarship will consider whether we actually need to question that view.
"We need to ask tough questions - what is the idea size of a small family farm in Scotland? Are we following the right model? Is there a better way for the future? If the industry wants to survive we have to address these issues."
The study tour has a hectic schedule starting with a visit to the Association of Agricultural Educators conference in Minnesota.
The itinerary then includes visits to two academic institutions the Leopold Centre for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, and the College of Agricultural Sciences at University of Nebraska.
Paul Kelly's sales mission to New York has left him in confident mood, convinced there is a premium market for the KellyBronze turkey at Thanksgiving festivities in the United States.
"I had a great trip and was well received," said Paul on his return to the family farm near Danbury in Essex.
"We are supplying Dicksons Farmstand in Chelsea market and Fleishers Craft Butchery who have five outlets in New York and surrounding areas.
"They had a sample last Thanksgiving and loved our turkey and presentation.
Paul Kelly in New York
"They were impressed that the KellyBronze was so dramatically different to what theyre used to selling - and even with the huge price differential theyre going to stock it this year.
"And the butcher we have in Washington last year sold 30 percent of his turkeys as KellyBronze."
The irony is that although UK traditional turkeys are New York dressed hung for two or three weeks before processing for a more mature flavour hardly anyone in the US understands that term.
"The dry plucking and hanging process is totally alien to them, which is great!" said Paul.
"Its great fun as it takes me back 30 years to when the KellyBronze started in UK and we were pushing water uphill at times.
"The difference starting in US now is that weve far more resources and we know what to do as all the pitfalls, and the issues around free range farming and dry processing have been resolved in the UK over these 30 years.
"We can hit the ground running in the US and can afford the investment needed. I fully appreciate weve a long way to go and Im well aware that USA has been a graveyard for many UK companies. But I am quietly very confident. I love the challenge!"
The KellyBronze turkeys for Thanksgiving 2016 have now hatched and are being reared at Heritage Glen Farm, Crozet, in Virginia, home of Judd and Cari Culver.
"Judd and Cari, are both alumni of Virginia Tech, so as Hokies turkey farming must come naturally! added Paul Kelly, who has a reputation in the UK as a Maverick turkey farmer, and holds two Guinness world records for plucking and carving a turkey.
He will be over from England to demonstrate his skills in turkey carving.
Poor customer service and an overreliance on a copper network that may not meet the future needs of rural homes and businesses are the main challenges set out in a report by an influential group of MPs.
The CLA, which represents more than 32,000 farmers, landowners and other rural businesses, has called on Ministers and BT to act quickly to set out its plans for addressing these failings and to deliver the broadband connections our countryside needs.
The report welcomes the Governments commitment to a legal right to broadband at least 10 megabits per second.
However, the organisation questions whether the timeframe for bringing it in (by the end of 2020) is soon enough; whether the minimum speed suggested will be sufficient in the future and whether there is sufficient investment planned in new infrastructure to replace the copper, domestic phone line, network.
Broadband discrimination
CLA Deputy President Tim Breitmeyer said: "The Governments commitment to a broadband universal service obligation was a major breakthrough for those of us who have campaigned for an end to the discrimination felt by those that live and work in the countryside.
"The day this legal right to a superfast broadband connection becomes law cannot come a day too soon and we support the MPs challenge to government to see if it can be brought in earlier than the current target of end of 2020.
"MPs have challenged Government and BT to rethink their longstanding strategy of targeting the easiest to reach premises first and their reliance on the existing copper wire network rather than fibre-optic, mobile or other wireless connection methods.
"MPs are right to point out the risks of this strategy in failing to end the digital divide between our towns and countryside.
"Rural communities and small alternative providers need immediate clarity from Openreach as to the extent of their roll-out plans for fibre, so that other solutions can be chosen if required.
"As the Government implements the universal service obligation, it must include clear targets for replacing and upgrading infrastructure, such as replacing copper wires with fibre optic cables, in rural areas.
"We do not have to accept a model whereby our rural areas wait in line behind urban centres, and we wont."
'Not a luxury, but a necessity'
The Countryside Alliance has said the finding is disappointing for rural residents and businesses.
Head of Policy, Sarah Lee said: "Digital communication is no longer a luxury but a necessity and we all need meaningful access to it.
"To achieve this we need a Government whose digital vision is ambitious and telecommunication companies who are prepared to invest in our future and meet the demands of individual consumers and businesses.
"The Countryside Alliance champions the contribution the rural economy could make if it was part of this digital revolution, so the concerns raised by the DCMS Select Committee regarding the under investment in Openreach are alarming.
"The Government and Ofcom need to put consumers at the heart of their decision making process, as it is vital that we end up with a competitive broadband market that delivers the modern digital services and the infrastructure Britain desperately needs, wherever you live."
"If we want to have a digital economy that is world leading then we need to invest in our infrastructure and ensure we have a competitive broadband market with end-to-end competition which is effective and sustainable, including delivering connectivity to the countryside and other hard to reach areas."
The Farmers Union of Wales has today welcomed China at the Royal Welsh Show, welcoming Managing Director of Goodwell China Marketing Services Co Ltd, Mr Daniel Zhou, to its pavilion in order to thank him for supporting the Welsh dairy industry.
Both Mr Zhou, who is visiting Wales, and Laurence Harris of Ffosyficer farm the heart of the Daioni Organic business, were welcomed by FUW Deputy President Brian Thomas, who said: "I would first of all like to welcome Mr Zhou wholeheartedly to Wales and what a perfect time to visit us.
"We are always honoured to meet our overseas trading partners and have done so for many years.
"It was during the 2010 lunch at the House of Lords that we welcomed Mr Zhou Xiaoming, Minister Counsellor of Economic and Commercial Office of the Embassy of the Peoples Republic of China and it was at the invitation of the FUW that he attended the 2010 Royal Welsh Show.
"Supporting our dairy industry and forging strong links for our export markets is at the forefront of everyones mind, especially in light of our decision to exit the European Union.
"Rural Wales needs to be recognised for the part that it can play in building a vibrant Wales with a thriving rural economic powerhouse and businesses like Daioni Organic are a perfect example of just that.
"We must remember that such trade partnerships are only possible because of excellent people like Laurence Harris of Daioni Organic, who produce such wonderful dairy products that we can be proud to export across the world.
"In order to honour and thank our guest Mr Zhou for supporting our excellent and efficient dairy sector, I would today like to present him with the Farmers Union of Wales gold medal in recognition of his services to the Welsh dairy industry."
'Daioni' (goodness) organic
North Pembrokeshire organic dairy farmer Laurence Harris, who joined the meeting at the FUW pavilion, has taken Daioni Organic meaning 'goodness' from strength to strength.
The brands humble beginnings began with a 150-acre farm in Pembrokeshire, Wales.
Since taking over Ffosyficer farm still the heart of the Daioni business from his father in 1970, Laurence expanded the family farm to well over 3,000 acres of fertile pasture.
"We initially set up the business with a single tanker and a couple of lorries and sent our milk to north Wales to be processed and packaged and in 2003 we launched Daioni, the first range of flavoured organic milk drinks in Britain," added Mr Harris.
From the initial interest shown by local schools to put the product in their vending machines as an alternative to fizzy, sugary drinks, the business has flourished.
Today the range of products has grown to include organic fresh milk and cream, organic UHT/longlife milk, and flavoured milk.
Organic certification in mainland China
In 2008 Daioni flavoured milk was exported overseas for the first time and is now stocked in outlets around the world as well as in small retailers and major supermarkets across the UK.
In addition, in 2012 Daioni Organic became the first British dairy company to gain organic certification in mainland China and in 2014 they opened their Hong Kong office to focus on Asia Pacific sales. Today exports account for over 25 percent of the business turnover.
Around twenty local people are employed by the farming business which today is solely owned by the Harris family and continues to go from strength to strength.
"We pride ourselves on the quality of our organic milk, from home-grown cows that freely roam the grassy climbs of West Wales.
"Through the combination of happy cows, fertile soils and abundant grass, we have found the winning formula for delicious, flavoursome and quality milk," said Mr Harris.
Rural businesses and organisations are urging the government to act quickly to alleviate post-Brexit uncertainty.
"The Government needs to act quickly to quell uncertainty over Countryside Stewardship in the wake of the Brexit vote," says David Morley, Head of Conservation & Environment at H&H Land and Property.
The Government has committed to support farmers at levels provided under the Common Agricultural Policy until 2020.
However, new Countryside Stewardship agreements starting in 2017 would run until the end of 2021.
Natural England, who administer the Scheme on behalf of the Government, have so far not confirmed that they will issue any further Countryside Stewardship agreements, or indicated how they might be funded past 2020.
With many farmers currently in the process of applying for a Countryside Stewardship agreement, and a fast-approaching deadline of 30th September, it is important that they are informed on the decision surrounding 2017 agreements.
Wasted applications
"If the outcome is that no 2017 agreements will be issued, then the significant cost of making the application will have been wasted," continues David.
"On the other hand, if they put their applications on hold, they run the risk of missing the deadline if the Government belatedly gives the green light.
"Countryside Stewardship applications, both Mid Tier and Higher Tier, are complex and cannot be completed in a short turnaround time.
"Therefore, the Government must make a decision quickly with regard to this application round."
A financial commitment from the Government is also needed for existing Higher Level Environmental Stewardship agreements, some of which run until 2024.
Farmers have been urged to contact the Government to make sure it will continue to pay for the positive environmental management that farmers are undertaking until the end of these current agreements.
There is also further uncertainty about the fate of the 900 Hedgerows and Boundaries Grant applications that were submitted by April this year.
The Government was due to issue agreements by the end of June however, in the wake of the Brexit vote, but as of yet has not done so.
David comments: "As these are only two year agreements, and funding is allegedly guaranteed until 2020, it is unclear as to why the issuing of these agreements has been delayed.
"Farmers are facing a state of uncertainty with regards to Countryside Stewardship schemes and prompt decisions are needed to allow them to plan and move forward."
Leading Wiltshire farm business Steve Benson Farming is set for further growth following agreement on a new 1.2 million funding package from Clydesdale Bank.
Owner Steve Benson operates more than 10,000 acres of land across Wiltshire and Oxfordshire in hand and contract farming, centred around farmland in Highworth and Bourton.
Two thirds of the acreage is rented with the remaining third contracted out to other operators.
Steve Benson Farming
The business employs 12 staff and also operates a highly successful grain storage facility on a former Ministry of Defence site at Wroughton comprising two 30,000 square feet grain stores with a total capacity of 19,000 tonnes.
Clydesdale Banks 1.2 million funding package includes a refinance of term debt funding used to purchase and fit out the grain stores as well overdraft, asset finance and credit card facilities.
The deal was facilitated by Justin Hayward, Relationship Manager for Agribusiness at Clydesdale Banks Business and Private banking centre in Oxford.
Growing the business further
Steve Benson commented: "The decision to broaden our successful farm operation into grain storage has paid dividends and we are continually looking at other opportunities to grow the business further.
"We were keen to work with a funding partner who understood the farming industry and had the sector expertise we required.
"The Clydesdale Bank team have shown a real enthusiasm for working with us and the fact that Justin himself comes from a farming background is a definite advantage.
"Their flexibility and speed in arranging the facilities we required has demonstrated their willingness to support our strategy for the business."
Mark Laughlan, Head of Clydesdale Banks Reading and Oxford Customer Banking Centres, said: "Under Steves guidance, the business has enjoyed sustained growth and is well established as one of the areas most significant farming operations.
"Were looking forward to supporting Steve further as he moves into this latest growth phase."
Nine young farmers from across Wales have financially benefited from this years Gareth Raw Rees Memorial Travel Scholarship.
A total of 2,500 has been awarded by the Management Committee to scholars wishing to broaden their knowledge of agriculture, following a donation from the NFU Mutual Charitable Trust.
This years awards will be presented by Mr Lindsay Sinclair, NFU Mutual Group Chief Executive, at the Royal Welsh Show on Tuesday, 19 July 2016.
Alex Robinson, the main winner, from Llanddewi Velfrey, in Pembrokeshire, will receive 700 to help him travel to New Zealand for an eight month trip to visit and work on farms.
Going to New Zealand to learn more
Twenty-three year old Alex, who has recently graduated from Harper Adams University after gaining a BSc (Honours) in Agriculture with Mechanisation, has a deep passion for farming and the countryside which was fostered at a young age from spending time on his grandparents dairy farm.
He has a keen interest in farm machinery and has previously undertaken a 15 month student placement with CLAAS UK, one of the world's leading manufacturers of agricultural engineering equipment.
Alex has also gained much experience of general farm work and working as a relief milker on a number of local dairy farms and also works for a local agricultural contractor.
Commenting on his impending trip, Alex said: "I am really looking forward to spending time in New Zealand to widen my knowledge of agriculture and in particular to see how the Kiwis operate their grass-based dairy farming systems.
"I intend to spend time working with an agricultural contractor in New Zealand and Im keen to learn new techniques and innovations that Ill be able to bring back to benefit me, as I ultimately want to manage my own farm at some point in the future."
There are eight further recipients from the scholarship this year who are each receiving a financial contribution to help with their travels.
Host farming families in Illinois
Bleddyn Davies, from Talgarreg in Ceredigion, who is the Farming Connect Development Officer for South Ceredigion, receives 300 towards a three week trip to the USA as part of the Wales YFC International Programme.
He will spend time with host farming families in Illinois and is excited about meeting like-minded individuals who live and work in the countryside and getting an insight into their daily lives.
Hes particularly keen to learn more about the use of timber framed housing in the dairy industry in the USA and hopes to take some new experiences and ideas home with him that will help benefit the new calf rearing enterprise operated on his family farm.
Visiting Welsh black cattle herds in New Zealand
Carwyn Thomas, from Llanerchymedd in Anglesey receives 300 towards a two week trip to New Zealand organised by the Welsh Black Cattle Society.
Carwyns travels will take him away from his work on the family beef and sheep farm to broaden his knowledge of agriculture.
Carwyn will use his time in New Zealand to visit some of their Welsh Black cattle herds and to learn more about farming in an environment without government subsidy.
Mark Harries, Aled Wyn Davies and Jordan Davies, all from Carmarthenshire and currently studying Agriculture at Coleg Sir Gars Gelli Aur campus will each receive 300 towards a three week study tour of New Zealand in October and November as part of a trip organised by Coleg Sir Gar.
They will spend time touring various farming enterprises in New Zealand, including share farming systems, and will further their knowledge on various grassland management methods used there.
They hope to take some new experiences and ideas home with them that will help in their respective future careers in agriculture.
The three other recipients from the scholarship this year will each receive 100 to help with their travels.
Rural Youth Europe
Rhiannon Davies from Talgarreg, in Ceredigion, a recent graduate in Business Management from the University of South Wales, receives 100 towards the costs of attending the week-long Rural Youth Europe rally which will be held in Norway in October.
She will represent Wales YFC at the event and will participate in various workshops, seminars and study visits to help develop community engagement in rural communities.
Frances Evans from Dryslwyn in Carmarthenshire receives 100 from the scholarship fund towards the costs of a 12 month Dairy Fellows Programme in Cornell University, USA.
Frances, a former student of Ysgol Bro Myrddin and Hartpury College will widen her knowledge and understanding of dairy management techniques and is looking to utilise what she learns in the future on the family dairy farm.
Dafydd Owen from Rowen near Conwy also receives 100 towards the costs of a one week study tour to Belgium.
He will use his trip to further his knowledge of Beltex sheep, which originated from Belgium, with the aim of further developing and advancing the use of genetics in his pedigree flock.
The scholarship, which is administered by NFU Cymru, was set up in memory of the late Gareth Raw Rees who, for many years, was a delegate on the NFU Council and Chairman of the NFU Cymru Education Committee.
Gareth believed fervently that travel was an important form of education for young people.
The Farmers Union of Wales has called upon politicians at the Royal Welsh Show to 'do a 360' in order to see the importance of agriculture to the wider economy.
"If politicians and visitors to the show stop and turn around 360 degrees they will see a vast array of different businesses which are all reliant on agriculture, some employing just one or two, some employing thousands," said FUW President Glyn Roberts.
"The show is a microcosm of our wider rural community and economy, and for every business here there are thousands more across Wales and the UK which are directly and indirectly reliant on agriculture."
Welsh Farm Business Survey figures show that, despite having average incomes which fall well below that of the average UK household, farms can typically contribute between 100,000 and 250,000 to the local and wider economy each year.
"Lets not forget that circa 60,000 people are employed on farm holdings in Wales, in addition to the thousands employed in businesses which are reliant on agriculture such as contractors, feed and machinery merchants, mechanics etc," said Mr Roberts.
'Two out of every five'
A 2001 Welsh Assembly Government report classed around two out of every five rural businesses as being involved in the farming industry, while the Central Science Laboratories has estimated that agriculture supports over 10 percent of Wales full time employees.
"Farming is the backbone of rural areas and is the linchpin of rural communities so this is not just about farming; it is about the wider recognition that farming matters to our entire economy, how money circulates, and how communities are sustained and our culture continues to thrive.
"This needs to be recognised in the forthcoming discussions and negotiations regarding Brexit, while we also need a post Brexit agricultural policy which protects family farms, rural economies and the environment, while also enhancing food security," he added.
Farming unions in Wales have been involved in debates surrounding Nitrate Vulnerable Zones (NVZs) and whether the Welsh government plans to extend them to tackle pollution.
Nitrate Vulnerable Zones (NVZs) are areas designated as being at risk from agricultural nitrate pollution. They include about 58% of land in England and 3% in Wales.
Throughout the European Union, the Nitrates Directive aims to reduce water pollution from agricultural sources.
Areas where the concentrations of nitrate in water exceed, or are likely to exceed, the levels set in the Directive are designated as NVZs, and legally binding rules must be put in place to reduce nitrate loss from agricultural land.
The Farmers' Union of Wales has been intensely involved in the review of NVZ designations in Wales and remains opposed to any further increases.
Lengthy delays
The issue of NVZs along with bovine Tuberculosis were hotly debated in April when Pembrokshire farmers met their Welsh Assembly election candidates.
FUW Pembrokeshire County County Chairman David Nicholas said the Welsh Government are expected to increase the areas given over to NVZs and this includes a sizeable area in Pembrokeshire.
"The FUW reviewed the methodologies and conclusions with intense scrutiny and was able to present a case against designation in some cases. We will be meeting with the relevant bodies after the election in order to discuss the way forward."
Given the lengthy delay in releasing both the NVZ designation consultation, and the consultation relating to the Action Programme measures, it will be important to ensure that there remains sufficient time for the appeals process that will follow the confirmed designations.
Rebecca Voyle, FUW county executive officer for Pembrokeshire, told BBC Wales: "Various different dates have been given for a consultation to be issued and yet people are still waiting to see what's going to happen.
"We're in a big dairying area and lots of farms here would need to increase their slurry storage capacity. We're talking hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of work on some farms to get to the standards that they would need to have."
FUW senior policy officer Dr Hazel Wright said: The FUW has devoted many days of work to the NVZ issue in Pembrokeshire and meetings are being held on an almost weekly basis.
"Given the severe repercussions of NVZ designation for farmers, the focus must be to minimise the area designated under the regulations while finding solutions for those within areas which are designated, including through best use of RDP funding.
"The threat of NVZ designation could not come at a worse time given the collapse in farmgate prices and there being little hope of an improvement in European and global dairy markets."
What are the benefits of tackling nitrate pollution?
Manures and slurries are a valuable resource to farmers as they provide available nitrogen to plants.
If this nitrogen is lost by leaching or surface runoff, this can be a loss for farmers as they may need to buy additional fertiliser.
Other benefits include helping to ensure industries that need high water quality remain viable, including recreation and tourism, fisheries and agriculture, horticulture and food processing.
Helping to maintain and improve the quality of drinking water and reduce the complexity and cost of water treatment.
And reducing the loss of nitrate and other nutrients into the water environment to reduce excessive plant growth or other associated risks
helping to protect habitats important for wildlife conservation and to prevent decreases in biodiversity.
Farm leaders warn of 'devastating' new veterinary rule for exports
Fort Bragg to be known as Fort Liberty. Here's what to know.
military
Interview mit CNN : So hat Erdogan die Putschnacht erlebt
Der turkische Prasident Erdogan hat dem amerikanischen Sender CNN das erste Interview nach dem gescheiterten Putschversuch gegeben. FAZ.NET dokumentiert das Gesprach im amerikanischen Wortlaut.
Nach dem gescheiterten Putschversuch hat der turkische Prasident Erdogan, der mit grotmoglicher Harte gegen mutmaliche Putschisten und deren Unterstutzer vorgeht, dem amerikanischen Sender CNN das erste Interview gegeben. Hier dokumentieren wir das Gesprach mit der CNN-Moderatorin Becky Anderson im amerikanischen Wortlaut.
Mr. President, thank you for doing this with us. Before we talk about the outcome and fallout of that attempted coup, take me back to what happened that night. Where were you? What were you doing? And how did you find out?
Erdogan: Thank you very much. First of all, on the 15th, I was with my family. We were on a vacation of five days. We were in Marmaris. And that night, around 10:00 p.m., I got some news. And they told me about what was going on. And I was informed that in Istanbul and Ankara and some other places, there was some kind of movement that was going on. So we decided to move out, and I had my wife, my son-in-law, my grandchildren. They were all with me when this was going on. Therefore, it was all the more serious, if you will.
Mehr zum Thema 1/ Infolge des gescheiterten Putsches verliert die Turkei ihre Garanten fur halbwegs berechenbare und faire Ablaufe in der Wirtschaft: Die richtige Gesinnung wird wichtiger als eine gute Qualifikation.
But before moving out, I just wanted to invite the cameras in, the media in. And I just reached out to the whole Turkish population by the TV channels. But the national broadcast was not reaching people's TVs, people's homes. So we had to switch to Plan B in terms of media and broadcasting as well. So what we did was we resorted to cellphones, smartphones, and went on live TV via the smartphones on a number of private TV channels. And via those broadcasts, I invited people to take to the streets, to go to the squares in their cities.
And the first reactions I got was that -- well, immediately after that invitation, I was informed that people were actually taking to the streets en masse. And that was very important because the only language these putschists, these coup-attempters, would be the only way to fight this coup would be a counter-coup by the hand of the people. And thats what our people achieved.
You took to the airwaves of our affiliate channel, CNN Turk, using FaceTime. You said youd called for your supporters to hit these streets. This was a pivotal moment. This was the first time that anybody had seen you. Do you agree there is a sense of irony in your call to one of the privately-owned, independent channels in Turkey, proved to be that pivotal moment? And do you have an appreciation, to a certain extent, of the free press and social media since your experience? (Laughter)
Erdogan: Now, of course, we have always had estimation for free press and, of course, privately-owned media outlets. And over the course of our government, 14-year rule in government, we've always facilitated these things. We've removed some obstacles, and we've supported these kinds of entrepreneurs. And when CNN wanted to do that with us that night, the first four talks, if you will, or broadcasts, were with privately-held channels. There was CNN, and A-Habesh (ph), and NTV and NTGRT -- those were the channels.
Given the opportunity for your own freedom of speech that night, will you commit to a free media in what is a democracy here going forward? I just want to put that to you before we move on.
Erdogan: Now, Becky, when it comes to free press, Ive never had that issue whatsoever. If some people keep saying that the press is still not free in Turkey, then I would like to say this: there has been a coup attempt in Turkey. And there are people siding with the coup plotters. And there are -- there is also media outlets that have been against -- that are against the coup attempt.
Lets recap. In my first post, I examined a limited set of circumstances where I believe it is reasonable under the FCPA to pay per diems to foreign officials.
In my second post, I looked at the enforcement agencies take on per diems by analyzing the FCPA Resource Guide as well as the Opinion Procedure Releases where the DOJ found it appropriate to make cash payments to foreign officials. In case there are still some doubters out there, lets spend a little time looking at some recent FCPA enforcement actions that involved the provision of excessive per diems and other cash payments.
In this post, Ill distinguish the problematic conduct in those enforcement actions from the situations where I believe cash per diems are permissible.
Lets start with IBMs settlement with the SEC from 2011. I begin here because the SECs complaint actually uses the term per diem. According to the SECs complaint, IBM entered into numerous contracts with government-owned or controlled customers in China that often called for the company to provide off-site training.
Among other things, the SEC alleged that IBM sent Chinese officials on training trips at least 114 times over a five-year period. Not only did IBM cover the officials travel expenditures, the trips consisted of little business activity. In addition, the SEC faulted IBM because its internal controls failed to detect trips where per diem payments and gifts were provided to Chinese government officials.
Several issues jump out at me, and they have nothing to do with the payment of per diems.
To begin with, the trips were supposed to be for training, but actually had little or no business content. Moreover, IBM personnel allegedly submitted fake receipts to create slush funds for the purpose of funding many of these trips. Finally, the SECs concern with the per diems was not that IBM paid them, but that the company did not have adequate controls to detect that this was the case. In other words, the company paid per diems without the requisite oversight and approval.
What we have, therefore, is not an indictment of per diems in and of themselves. Instead, the SEC alleged that IBMs controls were insufficient to detect contractually mandated business trips that were really vacations, the fact that its personnel were engaging in corrupt conduct, and that there was no oversight of the payment of per diems or the giving of gifts.
Now lets turn to UTStarcoms FCPA settlement from 2009. While this settlement does not use the magic phrase per diem, it does reference its dreaded sibling cash allowance.
The SEC alleged that between 2002 and 2004, UTStarcom covered the costs for Chinese officials to attend executive training programs at universities in the United States at least seven times. UTStarcom spent over $4 million on these programs, and covered travel, tuition, room and board, field trips to nearby tourist destinations, and a cash allowance of between $800 and $3,000 per person.
None of these trips was required by a written contract. Rather, UTStarcom conceived of these trips as marketing expenses. In other words, UTStarcom dispensed cash allowances not in response to a clear contractual mandate, but on a purely voluntary basis in an effort to get business.
Im not suggesting that per diems in the context of marketing trips are by definition improper indeed, in my prior post, I noted that the DOJ has approved of the practice in several opinion procedure releases. However, doing so falls outside the circumstances I examine in this series. Moreover, as Ive previously written, it is critical that the amount of a per diem must be reasonable. A $3,000 cash allowance seems rather hard to stomach from a compliance perspective.
Lets briefly look at two more settlements that mention the provision of cash to foreign officials in connection with travel and see how they shook out.
In 2010, Universal Corporation resolved an FCPA probe with the SEC. The SEC alleged that Universal, together with its sales representative, organized a trip by Thai officials to Brazil to sample the companys tobacco products. Universals sales representative asked the company to provide each official with $1,000 in pocket money as part of the trip. Universal ultimately reimbursed the representative $3,000 for the pocket money, but recorded the expenditures as sales commissions.
Daimler had its own dalliance with pocket money. The company allegedly paid for Chinese officials to travel to Europe for factory inspections trips in 2004. However, internal emails indicated that the delegation planned to travel throughout Europe to tourist destinations, rather than conduct business. The delegation was also provided with pocket money. According to the DOJ, the trips were discussed by Daimler and its affiliates during contract negotiations with the Chinese officials.
In each of these cases, it was not the provision of cash to traveling officials in an otherwise legitimate trip that resulted in liability. Rather, its clear that the travel itself was problematic.
In some cases, the travel lacked any clear business purpose, and was in actuality a vacation. In other cases, the travel was not subject to proper oversight or was purposefully misreported in the companys books and records. In most of these situations, the purpose of the trip was to corruptly influence the official to award business to the company in question. In all likelihood, these trips would have run afoul of the FCPA regardless of whether the officials had received cash payments. In short, these are plain vanilla violations of the FCPA, and stand in stark contrast to the circumstances I described in my earlier posts where I believe per diems to be sound.
I havent set out to provide a comprehensive survey of every FCPA enforcement action involving cash payments provided in conjunction with travel. But the foregoing illustrates that the type of cash payments that have gotten companies into trouble are easily distinguishable from the circumstances described in my first post. Hopefully the remaining naysayers are on board with my view, or at least are softening up a bit.
In the next (and probably final) installment of this series, Ill highlight the nuts and bolts risk mitigation measures I recommend companies consider when paying out contractually mandated per diems.
Until next time, stay safe out there.
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Bill Steinman is the senior partner at Steinman & Rodgers LLP, a boutique law firm in Washington, D.C. specializing in international anti-corruption compliance and investigations. Hell be a speaker at the FCPA Blog NYC Conference 2016.
The author thanks Audrey Karman for her contributions to this post. Shes an associate at Steinman & Rodgers LLP, where she assists clients with FCPA compliance in the engagement of international intermediaries, the review of due diligence materials for potential risks of FCPA violations, and internal risk mitigation recommendations.
The oil sector is well known for its corruption risks, but one corner of the industry has received less attention than it deserves: commodity trading.
Companies that engage in physical commodity trading, including such giants as Glencore, Trafigura, Gunvor and Vitol, often compete for high-value deals buying and selling oil and other commodities from governments, including those in countries where corruption is widespread.
So far, for example, only one FCPA matter part of the Iraq Oil-for-Food Program cases has focused on graft in oil trading.
Our new report uses ten real-world examples to illustrate the corruption risks that can accompany oil trading activities. In many oil producing countries, the government sells a share of its production to traders, and our analysis focuses on these deals.
The risks concentrate in three areas.
First, as with the allocation of valuable licenses or contracts, bribery and other kinds of illicit favoritism can surface when governments sell their oil. Examples include an Indonesian official convicted of receiving a bribe from a trading company seeking a contract, and a Swiss investigation into whether a Gunvor employee made illegal payments to officials in the Republic of Congo via two politically-connected intermediaries.
Second, officials can skew the terms of a deal to benefit a favored company, usually at the countrys expense. The previous Nigerian government signed several trading deals with local companies that had highly imbalanced terms. We estimate Nigeria lost as much as $381 million in a year from three provisions in just one of the bad contracts. The current government cancelled the deals in 2015; several of the officials and companies involved now face investigation in several jurisdictions.
Third, corruption can result in the diversion of trading revenues. In countries including Angola, Nigeria and Turkmenistan, some of these revenues from oil trading deals never found their way to the treasury. The revenues are often spent directly by the national oil company, a channel which avoids the scrutiny of the national budget process.
For oil producing countries like Angola, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Libya and Nigeria, oil sales are the governments single largest revenue stream. Due to their size and the apparent corruption risks, commodity trading deals with governments should receive more attention from regulators and law enforcement. This cause appears to be gathering steam, as the issue of commodity trading corruption received explicit attention at the May 2016 Anti-Corruption Summit hosted in London.
Greater transparency would be a good first step.
New regulations now require American and European oil and mining companies to publicly report all payments they make to governments. Commodity traders should be required to do the same, in order to discourage bribery and other illicit actions in this often overlooked corner of the sector. Prosecutors and police that enforce anti-corruption laws should also learn more about trading, and be open to pursuing cases as they arise.
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Alexandra Gillies and Aaron Sayne lead the anti-corruption programs of the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI), a non-profit organization that promotes transparency and good governance in the oil, gas and mining sectors. Alexandra tweets on oil and corruption issues at @acgillies, and both can be reached at [email protected].
Former Louis Berger executive James McClung was sentenced this month to a year and a day in jail for violating the FCPA. If a year and a day sounds familiar, it should.
In 2009, Frederic Bourke was sentenced to a year and a day in prison for conspiring to violate the FCPA.
In 2002, Richard Pitchford was sentenced to a year and a day in prison for an FCPA offense.
And in 1998, Herbert Tannenbaum was jailed for a year and a day for conspiracy to violate the FCPA.
Whats that extra day about?
Is the judge being petty and cruel by making the sentence more than a year? Not at all. The judge is actually showing mercy.
Heres why.
A federal prison inmate can only receive good time credit (early release) of up to 54 days for displaying exemplary compliance with institutional disciplinary regulations if his or her sentence is more than a year.
So the sentence of a year and a day is a judicial gift. Its wonderful news for the defendant in the midst of an otherwise enormous catastrophe.
Frederic Bourke, for example, reported to Englewood Camp, a minimum-security facility in the southwest suburbs of Denver, Colorado, on May 10, 2013 to serve his year-and-a-day sentence. The federal bureau of prisons shows Bourkes release date as March 21, 2014. Thats about 50 days before his full sentence would have ended, and evidence of good time credit.
There used to be parole in the federal system. It allowed for about 30 percent or even 40 percent early release time. But in the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, Congress eliminated federal parole for all prisoners convicted on or after November 1, 1987. In its place is the good time credit available to those defendants sentenced to a term of imprisonment of more than 1 year.
Good time credit is a big deal on the inside. A day in prison ends with the standing count. Inmates stand in their cells, and the Correctional Officers come around and count everyone to make sure that the population is all accounted for and in their cells. Then its lights out and you usually hear someone say another day down.
That day down cant be taken for granted. A lot can go wrong in prison a health crisis, the suspension of privileges, even disciplinary action just for being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
A fellow GED and ESL instructor (that was my job when I was incarcerated) qualified for a community service day, when he could work outside the prison on a local project. Thats a nice way to spend a day and contribute to society.
What he didnt know was on that same day, Homeland Security was going to conduct a routine interview with him on the future of his immigration status. When they showed up at the prison and he wasnt there, there was some turmoil among staff as to his locale.
He was swiftly returned to the prison and abruptly put in the Special Housing Unit (SHU) until there was a proper accounting for what happened. The SHU is solitary confinement and he was there for a month. When he was released from the SHU, staff were apologetic and shared how it was an internal communication issue he did nothing wrong.
As far as I know, his month in the SHU didnt impact his good time credit. But the story illustrates how easily and arbitrarily things can wrong in prison.
White collar inmates including those sentenced for FCPA violations have often come from a background as business leaders, where they commanded a staff and had great discretion. In prison, however, all control is ceded to the institution. Each day brings potential peril, and with the end of each day comes gratitude.
Being sentenced to a year and a day and thereby becoming eligible to return home fifty-four days earlier, well, thats fifty-four less daily opportunities for something to go terribly wrong.
James McClung and before him FCPA defendants Frederic Bourke, Richard Pitchford, and Herbert Tannenbaum received one more day on their prison sentences. For each defendant, that day was a valuable judicial gift.
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Richard Bistrong is a contributing editor of the FCPA Blog and CEO of Front-Line Anti-Bribery LLC. He was named one of Ethispheres 100 Most Influential in Business Ethics for 2015. He consults, writes and speaks about compliance issues. He can be contacted by email here and on twitter @richardbistrong. Hell be a speaker at the FCPA Blog NYC Conference 2016.
Labels Matter
At the age of five I was told I had Learning Difficulties, I understood this to be an adult's way of saying I was stupid. I have a 'Reading Disorder' - otherwise known as Dyslexia but nobody mentioned this to me when I was young. I therefore not only struggled to read and write but also had low self-esteem. As the years passed I would be able to start to conquer my reading disability but my self-image would take forty years to repair.
T N Traynor
Isolation
When I started high school I was told that as my English was so bad I couldn't have French lessons, but instead would have to attend an extra-English class (the one where all the stupid children were I thought to myself). It's hard to put into words the feelings that became ingrained in my spirit because of constantly telling myself that I was stupid. Between 3-7% of the population may have some degree of learning difficulties due to Dyslexia but I felt isolated.
Constant Knock-backs
People with Dyslexia are usually more creative and have a high level of intelligence (I wish someone had told me this when I was young). I was the fastest typist in my last year of sixth form. I had found something I was good at and it did masses for my self-esteem, however at the first interview I went for I froze and couldn't type. My first job after leaving school was washing up dishes in a restaurant I believed this was the only job I was capable of. You see the side-effect is more harmful than the disability. It was a knock back but not a knock out.
Passing on the Problems of Dyslexia
I got married in my early twenties and within seven years had four sons, who became my world. When your children hurt you hurt. When my third son started school I already knew he had a problem. Dyslexia can be heredity and if you have it your children have a 50% chance of getting it to.
Getting Help is Still Difficult
I always thought that I never received help in school because it was the 60's and they hadn't heard Dyslexia. I was therefore, shocked to discover that it was first identified by Oswald Berkhan in 1881! This angers me, why then in 1984 was I still struggling to get help for my son? And even now parents are still battling with the schools to help their children. Dyslexia is defined as 'A difficulty in reading despite normal intelligence.' I knew my son was intelligent but he couldn't read and everything in life swings around being able to read and write.
Mastering Dyslexia
Toe to Toe is a brilliant book for children with Dyslexia. I spent exactly ten minutes a day with Ben going through the book. Within weeks he was beginning to read at last at the age of eight, tears are falling now as I write, because like me he not only has Dyslexia but the side-effect of it and he believed he was stupid. If only I had got the school to act when he was five and we had help then things might be different because the earlier you diagnose a child with Dyslexia the better chance they have of mastering it.
Dyslexia Does Not Have to Hold You Back
Dyslexia is not a disease and there is no cure, it's a learning disability which slows a child's progression but it doesn't have to hold them back. At the age of forty and a single Mum I decided to go back to college to learn a trade to support us all. I completed my AAT course with flying colours and I went into a job straight away where over the next eight years I got promoted three times and I am now the Finance Manager. Ben, who suffers from this reading disorder far greater than me, is now a farm manager in Australia - the top guy, after several promotions.
Inspirational Dyslexics
I like to look at the list of famous people who have Dyslexia but never let it hold them back. Agatha Christie, Lynda La Plante, Tom Cruise and Jennifer Aniston to name only a few. People who can't see letters like other people do, learning scripts and writing books - it's inspirational and motivates me.
What to Look Out For
Dyslexic people see letters upside down. If you think you have a child who is struggling look out for them swapping d with b and g with p. My son also used to cross his hands over his plate to pick up his knife and fork, another tell-tale sign. Dyslexics can also have difficulty in remembering names, dates and telephone numbers and learning new languages. I believe the crush to your confidence is the most destroying part - the belief that you are stupid can cripple your life and my heart breaks for children who are still not being given the help they need.
Why I Wrote Idi and the Oracle's Quest
I poured my heart into the main character of my book, a young orphan boy called Idi. He starts his life being called names and bullied. The villagers know him as the idiot and as he grows the name is shortened to Idi. There will be three books and each one will see him learning to like himself and begin to overcome his past and low
Sigourney Weaver will receive the 2016 Donostia Award at the 64th San Sebastian Festival.
Sigourney Weaver
The 66-year-old actress - who has recently been seen and heard in a couple of high-profile cameos in 'Ghostbusters' and 'Finding Dory' - will accept the prestigious prize for her career achievements when the event takes place between September 18 and September 26 at the Basque resort city.
A statement released read: "The festival's most important honorary award acknowledges the career of the North American actress whose name has presided over some of the biggest productions in the last few decades, under the direction of movie makers such as Sir Ridley Scott, Peter Weir, James Cameron, Mike Nichols, Roman Polanski, Ang Lee and David Fincher."
Sigourney's most famous role has been as heroine Ellen Ripley in the 'Alien' franchise - a part she first played in Scott's 1979 sci-fi horror classic and is reprising for a fifth time in Neill Blomkamp's take on the killer Xenomorph extra-terrestrial species.
The festival will also be showing an out-of-competition screening of Sigourney's latest movie 'A Monster Calls' and she will receive the honour at the showing.
'A Monster Calls' is due for release on October 21 this year, and the Spanish/British fantasy drama film directed by J. A. Bayona is based on the 2011 novel of the same name by Patrick Ness.
Sigourney stars in the film as the grandmother of a little boy, Conor, who encounters a monster - played by Liam Neeson - who is made of leaves and sticks in a human shape that tells him stories.
James Corden has just upped the stakes for his Carpool Karaoke once again, arriving at The White House to pick up First Lady Michelle Obama for what could be the most epic scenes to grace the Late Late Show.
A preview clip shows Michelle getting into the car to give James a tour of the White House, asking for music to be played as she "rarely" gets to listen to it when she's in a vehicle, and even singing and dancing along to a bit of Beyonce's 'Single Ladies'.
The full edition of Carpool Karaoke will air on the Late Late Show with James Corden on Wednesday, July 20.
Michelle Obama meanwhile has recently launched her Let Girls Learn initiative, aiming to inspiring the 62 million young females across the globe to enter education.
by Daniel Falconer for www.femalefirst.co.uk
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Denmark based fashion retailer Jack & Jones, now offers clothing carrying the Cotton Made in Africa (CMIA) seal and which are completely made in Uganda, from cotton to finished products.By purchasing apparel with the CMIA seal, consumers directly support in improving conditions of cotton farmers and create job opportunities for local communities in Uganda, Aid by Trade Foundation said.
Denmark based fashion retailer Jack & Jones, now offers clothing carrying the 'Cotton Made in Africa' (CMIA) seal and which are completely made in Uganda, from cotton to finished products. By purchasing apparel with the CMIA seal, consumers directly support in improving conditions of cotton farmers and create job opportunities for local communities in...#
We want to support cotton that is grown under better social and environmental conditions and our partnership with Cotton Made in Africa supports this goal, Dorte Rye-Olsen, sustainability manager at Jack & Jones said.Apart from buying CMIA labeled cotton from Uganda, Jack & Jones has taken a further decisive step, by partnering with Fine Spinners, a vertically integrated textile company based in Kampala.Through this initiative, we are establishing a fully integrated textile production chain from field to fashion in Uganda and thereby increasing textile value addition within the cotton producing country , Rye-Olsen added.This also takes care to ensure all our CMIA labelled products can be completely traced back within our textile value chain from the final product in the store down to the South-Western CMIA growing region in Uganda, she stated.CMIA labelled products directly support smallholder cotton farmers who stand at the beginning of the textile supply chain to produce a sustainable raw material for the textile supply chain.CMIA excludes utilisation of GMO seeds or hazardous pesticides, excludes irrigation and bans cutting of primary forests, while farmers profit from fair working conditions and learn how to improve their livelihoods. (AR)
Fibre2fashion News Desk - India
For the first nine months ended May 31, 2016, parent company of Uniqlo brand, Fast Retailing Group recorded an increase in sales but a fall in profit.According to Fast Retailing, consolidated sales totaled 1.4346 trillion, up 6.4 per cent year on year, while consolidated operating profit reached 145.8 billion, down a steep 23.0 per cent.
For the first nine months ended May 31, 2016, parent company of Uniqlo brand, Fast Retailing Group recorded an increase in sales but a fall in profit. According to Fast Retailing, consolidated sales totaled 1.4346 trillion, up 6.4 per cent year on year, while consolidated operating profit reached 145.8 billion, down a steep 23.0 per cent.#
Consolidated profit before income tax stood at 122.0 billion, down a massive 41.9 per cent, from a fiscal ago period and profit attributable to owners of the parent reached 71.0 billion, a drop of 46.4 per cent.Among its various brands, Global Brands reported a rise in both revenue and profit, while both Uniqlo Japan and Uniqlo International recorded an increase in sales but a decline in profit.Furthermore, due to the yen appreciating at the end of May than at the beginning of the period, foreign exchange losses in other expenses were down 14.8 billion year on year to 6.7 billion, the company said.While the yen equivalent of long-term assets in foreign currencies etc. reduced, so foreign exchange losses in finance costs were down 43.4 billion year on year to 23.4 billion, Fast Retailing explained.As a result, consolidated profit before income tax declined by a considerable 41.9 per cent year-on-year over the same period, the retailer averred.However, the Group posted a clear improvement in consolidated results for the three months to May 31, 2016, with consolidated sales rising 6.2 per cent year over year.Consolidated operating profit too expanded 18.6 per cent over the prior fiscal's same quarter, due to a recovery in performance at both, Uniqlo Japan and Uniqlo International. (AR)
Fibre2fashion News Desk - India
SPGPrints will debut its new range of Nebula Acid HD (High Density) inks at Febratex 2016 to be held in Brazil from August 9-12 in hall 1, stand 18.The company will also be introducing the Javelin digital inkjet printer for companies printing up to two million metres of fabrics annually, for the first time in the Americas.
SPGPrints will debut its new range of Nebula Acid HD (High Density) inks at Febratex 2016 to be held in Brazil from August 9-12 in hall 1, stand 18. The company will also be introducing the Javelin digital inkjet printer for companies printing up to two million metres of fabrics annually, for the first time in the Americas. According to SPGPrints, the...#
According to SPGPrints, the Nebula Acid HD inks are a whole new formulation, offering increased colour depth and improved runnability and can be used with printers using Kyocera print heads.The new ink range is ideal for Polyamide (PA) Lycra swimwear, luxury silk items like fashion scarves, neck ties and wools, the company added.Nebula Acid HD inks meet all industry standards for colour and water-fastness and the specifications for all major swimwear manufacturers and will be initially in CMYK, orange, red, blue and grey colours, SPGPrints stated.Designed for annual production up to two million metres, the Javelin printer features the same innovative Archer print head technology used in the recently launched, high-volume Pike printer.Using only six colours, Archer technology enables a wider gamut than the HD-gamut of other digital textile printing solutions, the Netherlands based digital textile printer and ink producer informed.It further added that fine line details, smooth gradients, blotches and geometrics can be accurately printed; due to the Javelin's variable drop-size capability of 2pL10pL in resolutions of up to 1200x1200 dpi.The Javelin uses multi-pass scanning action with an array of Fujifilm Dimatix Samba print heads to cover the 1850 mm width with sharp image production. (AR)
Fibre2fashion News Desk - India
WiYarn conference, organised by China based Nantong Co-op Textile Exchange Co., opened new business bonding between the Chinese and Indian companies.
WiYarn conference, organised by China based Nantong Co-op Textile Exchange Co., opened new business bonding between the Chinese and Indian companies. The conference for cotton yarn exporters, hosted by Fibre2Fashion in Ahmedabad on July 8, turned out to be a great success as the number of attendees surpassed expectation. It brought together cotton yarn...#
The conference for cotton yarn exporters, hosted by Fibre2Fashion in Ahmedabad on July 8, turned out to be a great success as the number of attendees surpassed expectation. It brought together cotton yarn exporters from different parts of India rendering business and networking opportunities.
WiYarn conference, organised by China based Nantong Co-op Textile Exchange Co., opened new business bonding between the Chinese and Indian companies. The conference for cotton yarn exporters, hosted by Fibre2Fashion in Ahmedabad on July 8, turned out to be a great success as the number of attendees surpassed expectation. It brought together cotton yarn...#
The objective of the conference was to acquaint Indian manufacturers with the China market, as well as procedures and benefits of associating with Nantong Co-op Textile Exchange Co. for commencing business in China. The event provided valuable information that would help entrepreneurs set up and expand their business in China. It gave out informative details about the services offered by Nantong Co-op Textile Exchange Co. that can be a helping tool for manufacturers who intend to widen or begin their business in China.
WiYarn conference, organised by China based Nantong Co-op Textile Exchange Co., opened new business bonding between the Chinese and Indian companies. The conference for cotton yarn exporters, hosted by Fibre2Fashion in Ahmedabad on July 8, turned out to be a great success as the number of attendees surpassed expectation. It brought together cotton yarn...#
A special business mobile app that connects global buyers and suppliers was unveiled by Nantong Co-op Textile Exchange Co. at this event. The app enables spinning mills to showcase their company and products and interact with buyers. Participants learnt about the exclusive features of this mobile application designed especially for the textile entrepreneurs.
WiYarn conference, organised by China based Nantong Co-op Textile Exchange Co., opened new business bonding between the Chinese and Indian companies. The conference for cotton yarn exporters, hosted by Fibre2Fashion in Ahmedabad on July 8, turned out to be a great success as the number of attendees surpassed expectation. It brought together cotton yarn...#
The conference received an overwhelming response and there was active participation of attendees, who asked questions to understand the various services offered by Nantong Co-op Textile Exchange Co. This new bonding between the Indian and Chinese companies may turn out to be fruitful, said Fibre2Fashion executive director Jose Daniel.
WiYarn conference, organised by China based Nantong Co-op Textile Exchange Co., opened new business bonding between the Chinese and Indian companies. The conference for cotton yarn exporters, hosted by Fibre2Fashion in Ahmedabad on July 8, turned out to be a great success as the number of attendees surpassed expectation. It brought together cotton yarn...#
Nantong Co-op Textile Exchange Co. provides textile exchange service and complete solution to do yarn business in China. The services offered include legal and other statutory services to the new entrepreneurs to establish and grow their cotton yarn business. (RKS)
WiYarn conference, organised by China based Nantong Co-op Textile Exchange Co., opened new business bonding between the Chinese and Indian companies. The conference for cotton yarn exporters, hosted by Fibre2Fashion in Ahmedabad on July 8, turned out to be a great success as the number of attendees surpassed expectation. It brought together cotton yarn...#
Fibre2Fashion News Desk India
HON PM BAINIMARAMA SPEECH AT OPENING OF THE LAUTOKA SANATAN TECHINCAL COLLEGE CAMPUS
The Minister for Education, Heritage and Arts, Dr. Mahendra Reddy;The members of Sanatan Dharam Pratinidhi Sabha of Fiji, members;The Head of Campus, staff and students of Lautoka Sanatan Campus;Other invited guests and parents.Bula vinaka and a good afternoon to you all.Just yesterday I was in Nadroga-Navosa to open a new technical college campus, and Im delighted to be here today with all of you to do the same at the opening of the Lautoka Sanatan Technical College Campus.As I told the staff and students in Nadroga-Navosa, the work my Government has done to spur Fijis education revolution is my most proud achievement as Prime Minister. And these technical college campuses are a part of that revolution. Together, they stand as a nationwide system and represent a nationwide priority.This is one of eight new technical college campuses being opened in the coming weeks all over Fiji. These new campuses will teach our young people the trade skills they need to find meaningful careers and enjoy productive lives. These skills give our young people a strong foundation to build on. And the rest depends on what they bring to the table their resourcefulness, their drive and their vision. These are the skills that we need to take our dynamic economy to even greater levels of success.The Lautoka Sanatan Campus being opened today will service villages, and nearby settlements and urban centres. It is the result of collaboration and partnership between Government and the Sanatan Dharan Pratinidhi Sabha of Fiji, and we are very pleased to work with an organisation that has time and time again demonstrated a commitment to increasing educational access in Fiji and assisting my Government in making us a more knowledge-based society.With the opening of this campus, another modern, inclusive, comprehensive and quality educational option is at your disposal here in Lautoka. The young people of Lautoka can now join the 2,777 other students enrolled in Technical Colleges throughout the nation. Young people who are learning valuable skills that translate into rewarding jobs. Jobs in sectors that have a high demand for local talent.In May this year, we graduated our first classes from the three pioneer FNU technical college campuses. Of the 350 graduates, 70 per cent are already in the workforce, while the rest have opted to continue their education at FNU. There is real demand for the talent this university will help you develop. There is real opportunity that awaits you. Opportunity this campus will help you grab hold of.In Fiji we are blessed with a young and energetic population. That is a great advantage if we provide our young people with the tools to realise their hopes and dreams. Every time I speak with young people throughout the country, they always share a sense of optimism and excitement for the future. They see their lives ahead of them and a world of possibilities unfolding before them. We need to create pathways that allow them to make those dreams a reality. That is what I want for them -- that is what I want for you.We can achieve that by creating employment opportunities, by creating environments that allow our young people to be productive, to have a future, and to contribute to the development of our growing economy.This new campus is the embodiment of that opportunity. The opportunity to develop skills in the areas of mechanical engineering, carpentry, woodworking and many other fields. Skills that are as important to the development of our economy as any other field of study. We have a diverse economy that needs varied skill sets to grow effectively, that includes the skills that his college will impart to its students.Getting our young people into the workforce is one of my Governments major priorities. If that is to happen, they need valuable experience and knowledge to prepare them for the challenges and demands of the working world. Education is the most effective way to do that, and the establishment of this campus is an important step in making that happen. But that is only one of the many strategies my Government is implementing to empower our young people and assist them with the transition into the workplace.My Government, as announced in the 2016-2017 Budget, has put in place a series of incentives to encourage employers to engage with our youth. Employers will now receive a 200 per cent tax deduction on wages paid to students in work placements and students working over the holidays. That includes students of this Lautoka Sanatan Campus who are looking for work in an area related to their studies. And, of course, the Tertiary Loans Scheme is available for all students looking to enrol.On top of that, we also are working to relieve the financial burden on disadvantaged families through TELS and Bus-fare assistance programs, so that no student is denied access to education because of their socio-economic status. My Government is all about creating an equal playing field where anyone who works hard will be rewarded with a coveted skill-set and gainful employment.Ladies and gentlemen,No one gains when we restrict learning only to the classroom. Work experience is a practical way to test what you have learned in real-world situations. Anyone with experience can tell you, not every lesson can be found in a textbook. In fact, work experience accelerates your classroom learning. We want you to build up the know-how and gain work experience, because we know that that is what employers want to see. That is what will separate you from the competition when you make the transition from the classroom into the workplace.But this campus does not only represent an opportunity for young people. Fijians at every stage of their life can and do benefit from a continued education. Age is no obstacle to understanding. It is never too late to pursue new knowledge, explore a curiosity or find other ways to expand your horizons. You may be currently employed and looking to advance your career, or keen on an entirely new career path. Either way, you can take advantage of the course offerings at this new campus. The opportunity to better yourselves through education remains open to any and every one.We recognise that full-time course loads do not suit everyones schedules. And for some of you, the short courses offered in the evening may be more attractive. You can spend your nights learning skills such as cooking, carpentry, welding, engineering and other skills that you can develop in your free time. I urge you all to see how a few hours in the evening can add up and, over time improve your standard of living by opening up new career paths and increasing your incomes.Never in our history have there been more options to pursue quality education in Fiji. And each year, my Government plans to offer even more. Each student is different, and the more options we have available, the more tailored and effective our teaching can be. That diversity is good for Fiji and will help us grow. So I encourage everyone to make the most of this opportunity. It is my pleasure to declare open the Lautoka Sanatan Campus.Vinaka vakalevu, Thank you.
Shahrukh Khan's son Aryan Khan is dashing, handsome and the darling of the media. But even before making his debut in the dreamy world of Bollywood, he is already a star and has a huge fan following.
Recently, Aryan Khan was spotted posing with a fan and he looks so dapper in the picture.
Can't get enough of Aryan? Then click on the slider to see some more pics of the handsome star son!
Aryan Khan will soon be starting his education in films at a prestigious educational institution in USA. And like a responsible father, Shahrukh Khan is helping Aryan for his future in the best possible manner.
Revealing about his formal education in films, Shahrukh Khan told a leading daily, "I am showing Aryan a lot of films because he will be going to a film school now. I have made a folder which has all the great English classics like The Untouchables, Goodfellas and Michael Douglas' Falling Down. For the moment, I am showing him English films.''
Shahrukh Khan further added, ''I have also made another folder that has Hindi classics like Sholay, Do Aakhen Barah Haath and Devdas - both Dilip Saab's and mine. I want him to see more films and he does watch a lot of films including mine."
Also Read: John Abraham Thinks Film Promotions Are Ineffective?
"For the moment, my kids are following my footsteps as far as education goes. I had done my masters and my kids are pursuing their graduation. As far as following my footsteps as an actor is concerned, it is up to them what they want to do and I will be happy with whatever their decision is," SRK added.
Shahrukh Khan surely knows the importance of education. Gone are the days when actors used to leave their studies to pursue a career in Bollywood!
Well done SRK, you are setting a great example!
CALGARY, ALBERTA -- (Marketwired) -- 07/18/16 -- ROOSTER ENERGY LTD. (or the "Company") (www.roosterenergyltd.com) (TSX VENTURE: COQ) today announces that effective June 30, 2016, it entered into a Second Amendment and Waiver to the Amended and Restated Note Purchase Agreement (the "Second Amendment") pursuant to which it issued senior secured notes in the amount of US$60 million (the "Notes") due on June 25, 2018.
The Notes are secured by a first priority security interest, lien and mortgage on all of the assets of the Company. Pursuant to the Second Amendment, the EBITDA and leverage ratio covenants of the credit facility are waived for the fiscal quarter ending September 30, 2016, and the asset coverage ratio covenant is waived for the fiscal quarter ending December 31, 2016. The scheduled loan amortization has been waived for the remainder of fiscal year 2016, and replaced with a requirement for principal repayments summing to no less than $7,532,000 for the six months ending December 31, 2016. The Notes will continue to bear interest at a rate equal to Libor + 11.5% per annum (minimum of 13.0%) with interest payments due monthly; the Notes will also continue to bear additional interest for the term of the term of the waiver period at the rate of eight percent (8.0%) per annum that shall be payable in kind. Lastly, the Company has agreed to enter into fixed price commodity swap agreements covering 50% of its estimated proved developed producing natural gas production for a 24 month period, thru August 2018.
The Company is also pleased to announce that it has entered into a new decommissioning contract in the Gulf of Mexico. Total revenues under the "lump sum" contract will be approximately $22 million when the work is completed. The work is scheduled to commence in August, 2016.
Robert P. Murphy, Chief Executive Officer, commented, "the Second Amendment demonstrates our lenders' confidence in the Company's ability to implement its unique strategy during this low commodity price environment. This new contract reflects the demand for creative business solutions for decommissioning oil and gas fields and will provide a beneficial source of revenue in 2016. Additionally, the Company continues to evaluate new business opportunities from both the production and decommissioning arenas during this unique, but challenging, time in our industry."
If the Company is unable to restructure the financial and performance covenants of the credit facility or extend the term of the waiver on or before the end of the fiscal quarter ending December 31, 2016, then the Company may be in default of one or more of the covenants and in that event the holders of the Notes may exercise their remedies against the Company. No assurances can be given that the Company will be able to reach agreement with the holders of the Notes on the consequences of any possible default at that time and in that event the Company may not be able to continue as a going concern.
ABOUT ROOSTER ENERGY LTD.
Rooster Energy Ltd. is a Houston, Texas, based vertically integrated oil and gas exploration production company combined with a well service intervention/plugging and abandonment subsidiary focused in the shallow waters of the U.S. Gulf of Mexico. Our primary oil and gas assets consist of producing oil and gas wells located on US federal and state oil and gas leases and service company assets consisting of rigless well plugging and abandonment/intervention units.
Investors are welcome to visit our website at www.roosterenergyltd.com.
Forward Looking Information and Statements
Certain statements and information in this press release may constitute "forward-looking information" or statements as such terms are used in applicable Canadian securities laws. Any statement that expresses, involves or includes expectations of the anticipated benefits of the refinancing or modification of existing debt or future operations (including drill rig commitments and use of proceeds), commerciality of any hydrocarbon discovered, production rates, operating costs, commodity prices, administrative costs, commodity price risk and other components of cash flow and earnings, management activity, acquisitions and dispositions, capital spending, access to credit facilities taxes, regulatory changes, projections, objective, assumptions or future events that are not statements of historical fact should be viewed as "forward-looking statements". Events or circumstances may cause actual results to differ materially from those predicted, a result of numerous known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, many of which are beyond the control of the Company. These risks include, but are not limited to, the risks associated with the oil and gas industry, commodity prices, and interest and exchange rate changes. Industry related risks could include, but are not limited to, operational risks in exploration, development and production, delays or changes in plans, risks associated with the uncertainty of reserve estimates, or reservoir performance, health and safety risks and the uncertainty of estimates and projections of production, costs and expenses. The reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statement in this press release. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable law.
Financial outlook information contained in this press release about the Company's prospective cash flows and/or financial position is based on assumptions about future events, including economic conditions and proposed courses of action, based on management's assessment of the relevant information currently available. Readers are cautioned that any such financial outlook information contained herein should not be used for purposes other than for which it is disclosed herein.
NEITHER THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATION SERVICE PROVIDER (AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN THE POLICIES OF THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE) ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS PRESS RELEASE.
Contacts:
Rooster Energy Ltd.
Gary L. Nuschler, Jr.
Chief Financial Officer
16285 Park Ten Place, Suite 120
Houston, Texas, USA 77084
(832) 772-6313 ext. 555
IRVING (dpa-AFX) - Oil Search Limited (OSH.AX) said that it has been notified by InterOil Corp. (IOC) that InterOil has received what the InterOil Board has determined constitutes a 'Superior Proposal' from Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM), Oil Search's co-venturer in, and operator of, the PNG LNG Project. InterOil has advised that it intends to make a change in its recommendation and enter into an Arrangement Agreement with ExxonMobil.
The proposal from ExxonMobil for InterOil comprises a fixed price of US$45 per InterOil share paid in ExxonMobil shares and a contingent resource payment (CRP) of US$0.90 per mcfe of Elk-Antelope 2C resource in excess of 6.2 tcfe, subject to a cap of 10 tcfe. The CRP will be payable in cash at resource certification and will not be transfer able or listed on an exchange.
As per the Arrangement Agreement between Oil Search and InterOil dated 20 May 2016, InterOil must provide Oil Search a minimum of three days (up to 21 July 2016) to submit a revised offer before it is able to enter into an Arrangement Agreement with ExxonMobil.
Total SA, with which Oil Search has a memorandum of understanding regarding the InterOil assets, is aware of these developments and Oil Search's right to submit a revised offer.
The parties are in active dialogue and have the flexibility to submit a revised offer either during the three day notice period or after InterOil enters into an Arrangement Agreement with ExxonMobil.
Oil Search's Board and management are committed to acting in the best interests of shareholders at all times and are presently considering their position. The proposal from ExxonMobil endorses Oil Search's view on the quality of the Elk-Antelope gas fields and the value of the Papua LNG Project.
Given its existing material interests in both the PNG LNG Project and in the Papua LNG Project, Oil Search is well placed to participate in the potentially very significant benefits that are expected to arise from cooperation between, and/or integration of, the projects.
In the event that the Oil Search Arrangement Agreement is terminated following a change in recommendation from InterOil's Board, Oil Search is entitled to be paid a US$60 million break fee (of which Total is entitled to 20%), which would more than cover the costs associated with its offer.
In light of the above development, the Company intends to delay the release of its Activities Report for the Second Quarter of 2016 until Thursday 21 July.
Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX
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NEW YORK, NY -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 -- EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC), G4S (LSE: GFS), GTX Corp (OTC PINK: GTXO), ImageWare Systems (OTCQB: IWSY); Route1 (TSX VENTURE: ROI)
THANK YOU FOR JOINING US "IN THE BOARDROOM" TO DISCUSS THREATS & SOLUTIONS
Dave Schmitt, Cisco, Solutions Architect, IoT Vertical Solutions Group: Utilities, Cisco
Tony Shakib, Vice President, IoE Verticals Solutions Engineering, Cisco
Vikas Butaney, Director Product Management, Cisco
Kurt Takahashi, Senior VP of Sales, AMAG Technology
Ken Mills, EMC, Global Marketing and CTO, Surveillance and Security
Robert Dodge, G4S Corporate Risk Services, CPP, Senior VP
Patrick Bertagna, GTX CEO, Founder, Chairman
Jim Miller ImageWare Systems, Chairman and CEO
Scott B. Suhy, CEO, NetWatcher
Michael Oldham, Chief Executive Officer, PortSys
Tony Busseri, Route1, CEO and Brian Brunetti, President
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MARK YOUR CALENDAR !
ASIS INTERNATIONAL 62ND ANNUAL SEMINAR AND EXHIBITS
SEPTEMBER 12-15 ORLANDO, FLORIDA
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CISCO
Tony Shakib, Vice President, IoE Verticals Solutions Engineering said that on June 28, 2016, Cisco announced, "...the extension of scalable industrial solutions in the Internet of Things (IoT) portfolio with new IoT products. With these new technologies, Cisco continues to extend its leadership in the Industrial IoT space.
Enhanced Cisco Solutions Support Three Major IoT Use Cases:
Connected Machines:
"With 92 percent of today's 64 million machines not connected to a network, there is a great opportunity for organizations to make their production environments smarter and more efficient.
Cisco Connected Machines delivers a complete solution to securely connect devices, transform machine data into real-time insight and grow recurring business when working with machine builders and manufacturers.
By implementing the Connected Machines solution, Cisco's manufacturing customers can benefit from the domain expertise of machine builders to drive machine process improvements through real-time corrective action and continuous, predictive maintenance.
For more information: http://blogs.cisco.com/digital/cisco-digitizes-industrial-solutions-with-iot
And, Vikas Butaney, Director Product Management - US provides an update regarding "3 Ways Cisco is Enhancing the Industrial IoT"
"As the Internet of Things (IoT) gains widespread adoption, we now have the opportunity to accelerate business outcomes. Whether a business needs to create agile supply chains, automate manufacturing processes, or reduced operating costs, Cisco Industrial IoT solutions and products make it easier to innovate, boost productivity and derive value from IoT data.
The new IoT products and solutions deliver business impact as part of the digital transformation process taking shape across organizations. As a massive source of raw data, IoT offers a major opportunity for organizations to enable digital transformation.
The IoT initiatives that fuel digital transformation within our customers are centered on specific business outcomes. With such an orientation we have introduced new IoT products and solutions to support evolutionary adoption of IoT tied to business results and supported with architectures and Cisco validated designs to accelerate time to value. "
For more information: http://blogs.cisco.com/digital/3-ways-cisco-is-enhancing-the-industrial-iot
Dave Schmitt, Cisco, Solutions Architect, IoT Vertical Solutions Group: Utilities, also told us, "Utilities are especially popular, high-profile targets for attacks. According to the Cisco Security Capabilities Benchmark Study, 73% of utility IT security professionals say they've suffered a public security breach, compared with an average of 55% in other industries. Most U.S. utilities have already undertaken substantial security measures throughout many parts of their systems. However, the nature of cyber threats and vulnerabilities keeps changing. U.S. utilities have, for several years, been deploying IoT technology (aka Smart Grid) because it enables significant business and operational benefits: increased grid reliability, enhanced integration of renewables and other distributed energy resources, reduced operating costs, and more. However, all of this opportunity comes with the tradeoffs of increased complexity and new risks."
For our complete interview with Dave Schmitt at Cisco please click here, or here: www.securitysolutionswatch.com/Interviews/in_Boardroom_Cisco_Schmitt.html
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AMAG Technology / www.AMAG.com
Dominion Resources Selects Symmetry
Symmetry helps Dominion meet critical government regulations
http://www.amag.com/en-US/Company/News/2016/06/15/Dominion%20Resources%20Selects%20Symmetry/
For insights from Mr. Kurt Takahashi, Senior VP of Sales, AMAG Technology, please click here or here: http://www.amag.com/en-US/Resources/Videos/Symmetry%20Videos/Senior%20Vice%20President%20Kurt%20Takahashi%20with%20AMAG%20at%20ISC%20West%202016/
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EMC / www.EMC.com
Ken Mills, EMC, Global Marketing and CTO, Surveillance and Security, told us, "We have launched five new solutions for surveillance. We've partnered with Avnet to build a compute plus storage bundle that greatly simplifies the deployment of an enterprise surveillance solution. With ATOS, a global partner of EMC, we are working to develop and bring to market surveillance storage as a service. As customers begin to consider cloud for their surveillance storage needs, we want to make sure they have a best in class enterprise option.
We have also launched a surveillance solution with VCE, the Converged Platforms Division of EMC. VCE brings together VMware, Cisco and EMC together in a single package for large-scale surveillance deployments. The VCE solutions for surveillance can handle thousands of cameras in a single rack with one number to call for support. It has never been easier to take advantage of this kind of pedigree in surveillance. And, finally we are launching a partner solution with Axis, Genetec and Avaya at ISC West. This partnership delivers "LINK", the security industry's first validated surveillance solution that helps secure video from the device all the way to the storage. It offers a cyber-hardened solution that provides scalability and reliability for enhanced security management while helping to reduce the possibility of a cyber-security breach. The partnership ensures that customers have the best solution to deliver surveillance at scale with the confidence they expect from market leaders in surveillance.
Lastly, we are releasing our second generation of the Video Surveillance Storage platform. We strongly believe that the surveillance market needs unique solutions and to that end we have brought our 6-9s enterprise class storage platforms to the surveillance market. Due to the success we had with our first generation Video Surveillance Storage (VSS), it was a no-brainer to take our most current generation storage platform and customize it for the surveillance market."
For the complete interview with Ken Mills at EMC, and Terry Gainer please click here, or here: www.securitysolutionswatch.com/Interviews/in_Boardroom_EMC_Gainer.html.
For more information about evidence management solutions at EMC, please click here: "Evidence Storage: In the cloud or not?" or here: www.emc.com/collateral/handout/emc-on-prem-vs-cloud.pdf.
KEN MILLS DISCUSSES "COPS AND BIG DATA" ON SECURITY GUY RADIO...watch the broadcast here, or here: https://soundcloud.com/security-guy-radio/187-cops-and-big-data-with-emccom-ken-mills?in=security-guy-radio/sets/2014-security-guy-radio
And, for general information on EMC Surveillance solutions, please click here, or here: www.emc.com/surveillance.
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G4S / www.G4S.us
Mr. Robert Dodge, CPP, Senior VP, G4S Corporate Risk Services, said, "On a Friday in October 2015, a disgruntled customer arrived at a leading, international publisher's New York City headquarters and insisted on seeing the company's CEO. When the receptionist asked the man to leave, he became aggressive and made threats against staff and the CEO before leaving the building. Concerned about the potential for violence, the company reached out to G4S to respond to the threat. Within hours, workplace violence expert Robert Dodge, CPP, Senior VP of G4S Corporate Risk Services, deployed armed protection agents at the CEOs Manhattan residence to protect him and his family over the weekend."
For the complete content with Robert Dodge, CPP, Senior VP, G4S Corporate Risk Services, please click here or here:
www.g4s.us/~/media/Files/USA/PDF-Case-Studies/Executive%20Threat%20Case%20Study%20FINAL.pdf.
G4S PLC - STATEMENT ON ATTACK IN ORLANDO, FLORIDA
(http://www.g4s.com/en/Media%20Centre/News/2016/06/12/Statement%20on%20Omar%20Mateen/)
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GTX Corp / www.GTXcorp.com
Patrick Bertagna, CEO, Founder, Chairman, GTX, told us, "The SmartSole is our flagship product, think Dr. Scholl's meets LoJack. We make a miniaturized GPS and Cellular module and imbed it inside an orthotic insole. The application is for people who have a memory disorder and have a tendency to wander, anyone with Alzheimer's, dementia, autism, traumatic brain injury, etc. Currently there are over 100 million people worldwide who are afflicted with one of these debilitating aliments. Being that our module is small and robust we also imbed it inside other form factors and we are starting to look at OEM deals. And then we have our tracking App, which basically turns a smartphone into a tracking device, the application there is for mobile work force, sales people, delivery people, service business like electricians and plumbers, police officers, just about anyone that works in the field and benefits their superiors to know where they are at any time at the touch of a button.
For our complete interview with Patrick Bertagna, CEO, Founder, Chairman, GTX Corp, please click here or here:
www.securitysolutionswatch.com/Interviews/in_Boardroom_GTX_Bertanga.html.
GTX Corp and RACO Industries Sign Distribution Agreement to Sell SmartSoles
GTX Corp Signs Definitive Patent Agreement With Inventergy and Receives First Payment
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ImageWare Systems / www.IWSINC.com
Exciting developments at ImageWare Systems regarding Fujitsu, Telos, Amazon and more:
Fujitsu Upgrades Biometrics-as-a-Service with Latest Catalog Manager Marketplace and ImageWare's GoVerifyID
ImageWare Systems Partners With Telos Corporation to Provide Biometric Authentication SaaS Solution
ImageWare Launches Enterprise-Ready, Turn-Key Biometric Authentication SaaS for Mass Adoption on Amazon Web Service Cloud
For our complete interview with Jim Miller, ImageWare Systems, Chairman and CEO, please click here or here: www.securitystockwatch.com/Interviews/in_Boardroom_ImageWare.html. For more information: www.iwsinc.com
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NetWatcher / www.NetWatcher.com
Scott Suhy, CEO, NetWatcher, told us, regarding how NetWatcher is making security easy for anyone to use, "One example is our iPhone application. The app provides businesses with a real time snapshot of their overall network security, allowing them to access their user portal on-the-go. The app also features an overview of the user's NetWatcher Score, which shows real-time vulnerability levels and how susceptible their company is to an attack. Based on the score the app recommends if action needs to be taken to secure the network and enables companies to resolve issues before a breach even occurs."
For our complete interview with Scott Suhy, CEO, NetWatcher, please click here or here: www.securitysolutionswatch.com/Interviews/in_Boardroom_Netwatcher_Suhy.html
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PortSys / www.PortSys.com
Michael Oldham, Chief Executive Officer, PortSys, told us, "We protect access for one of the major defense departments in Europe. Every item that's purchased in that country, or around the world, is procured through systems we protect. Whether you are buying a pencil or a battleship, PortSys protects the access to those systems. We also have several critical infrastructure customers who supply power to their regions of the world. These customers are in the United States and in Europe, but that's about as specific as I can get as these organizations understandably maintain a high level of secrecy about their infrastructure and security. We all know how critical the electrical infrastructure is and how it has continued to be in the news as a potential source of vulnerability. PortSys provides security and access control technologies for these organizations so they can continue to provide electricity to their constituents. These are tens of millions of people who depend on these organizations for everyday life. These are absolutely crucial services and are among some of the most targeted institutions in the world. We are proud to be part of their defense."
For our complete interview with Michael Oldham, Chief Executive Officer, PortSys, please click here or here:
http://www.securitysolutionswatch.com/Interviews/in_Boardroom_Portsys_Oldham.html
*****
Route1 / www.Route1.com
Route1 Posts its Ninth Consecutive Quarter of Growth in Services Revenue and MobiKEY Subscribers
Route1 enables the mobile workspace without compromising on security. Its flagship technology MobiKEY uniquely combines secure mobile access, with high assurance identity validation and plug-and-play usability. Remote and mobile workers are able to securely and cost-effectively access their workspace from any device without exposing the organization to the risk of data spillage or malware propagation. MobiKEY customers include Fortune 500 enterprises as well as the U.S. Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Energy and the Government of Canada. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Route1 is listed on the TSX Venture Exchange.
For our complete interview with Mr. Brian Brunetti, President, Route1, please click here, or here
www.securitysolutionswatch.com/Interviews/in_Boardroom_Route1_Brunetti.html
*****
Would your company like to be featured in our "In The Boardroom" thought leadership series?
Please contact us for a quick tour to see exactly how YOUR SOLUTIONS will be featured?
Contact Mark Elliott: MBE@SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, or call 1+914.690.9351
*****
Visit Us On Twitter: https://twitter.com/SecStockWatch
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We are proud to be media sponsors of these important upcoming SECURITY EVENTS AND TRADE SHOWS...
www.securitysolutionswatch.com/Main/Events_Shows.html
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ASIS INTERNATIONAL 62ND ANNUAL SEMINAR AND EXHIBITS
SEPTEMBER 12-15 ORLANDO, FLORIDA
ASIS International (ASIS) is the largest membership organization for security management professionals that crosses industry sectors, embracing every discipline along the security spectrum, from physical security and crisis management to loss prevention and cybersecurity. Founded in 1955, ASIS is dedicated to increasing the effectiveness of security professionals at all levels.
Through hundreds of chapters across the globe, ASIS develops and delivers board certifications and industry standards, hosts networking opportunities, publishes the award-winning Security Management magazine, and offers educational programs, including the Annual Seminar and Exhibits -- the security industry's most influential event. Whether providing thought leadership through the CSO Center for the industry's most senior executives or advocating before business, government, or the media, ASIS is focused on advancing the profession and ensuring that the security community has access to intelligence, resources, and technology needed within the business enterprise. For more information: www.asisonline.org, https://securityexpo.asisonline.org
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Cyber Intelligence Europe event on the 28th - 30th September 2016
Cyber-attacks are continuing to rise across Europe with many government and private sector firms being attacked through Malware, DDoS and Trojan Horse attacks and losing sensitive information. Cyber Intelligence Europe 2016 will once again take place in Romania who is the leading cyber security nation in Eastern Europe with a high level of investment being used to create a strong cyber defence strategy for the region.
Our 4th annual Cyber Intelligence Europe conference and exhibition will bring together leading public sector officials who will discuss the latest challenges and threats they are facing to their computer networks. There is now a greater need to track the criminals and a high level of intelligence is needed to monitor computer systems and tracing the threat before it is too late.
Cybercrimes have also been on the increase in recent years and many companies and critical infrastructure organisations have been attacked. This has created a greater need for the public and private sectors to share information to combat against the criminals.
Don't miss out on taking part at our international Cyber Intelligence Europe event on the 28th - 30th September 2016. For more information regarding this international event please contact us at events@intelligence-sec.com or +44 (0)1582 346 706.
*****
Defense Strategies Institute
Mobile Security for Defense and Government Summit
July 26 - 27, 2016 Mary M Gates Learning Center, Alexandria, VA
DSI's Mobile Security for Defense and Government Summit is designed as an educational and training "Town Hall" forum that is off the record / non attribution, The Summit brings together thought leaders and key policy-makers across military and civilian organizations, private ndustry and academia for two days of actionable discussions and debate. Open to US citizens only. Seating is limited.
This year's Summit will focus on "Improving Enterprise Mobility through Security & Innovation." Specifically, this event will highlight the initiatives, interests and current challenges facing the DoD and Federal Agencies as they move towards a more mobile enterprise in an environment of increased cyber security and quickly evolving commercial innovation in mobility for the network.
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US/Canada Border Conference Welcomes New Advisory Board Members
The US/Canada Border Conference, taking place September 20-21, 2016 at the Cobo Center in Detroit, MI, is preparing the 2016 conference program with the addition of four new influential and highly respected Advisory Board Members, led by Chairman Robert C. Bonner, Senior Principal, Sentinel Strategy & Policy Consulting; Former Commissioner, U.S. Customs and Border Protection; Former Administrator, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
The new members are: Stephen J. Comber, Senior Vice President and General Manager, ManTech, Health and Federal Civilian Business Unit; Luc Portelance, ICD.D, President and CEO at CrossPoint Integrated Strategies, Inc., Former President of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA); John P. Woods, Senior Director, Immigration & National Security Solutions, Health & Civilian Solutions Division, General Dynamics Information Technology; Thomas Winkowski, President, Global Border Solutions, LLC, Former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; Former Acting Commissioner, U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
The 4th Annual edition theme, 'Border of the Future', will emphasize the importance of taking a holistic approach when addressing border functions and security, an understanding of the border as more than a line dividing two nations' boundaries and approaching border control with technology, strategies and communication that takes place not just at ports of entry but throughout the respective countries' interiors.
For more information, visit http://www.beyond-border.com/
*****
Border Management & Technologies Summit to Asia
Asian nations have been developing their borders significantly in the past few years. Many Asian airports now have the latest biometric and passenger naming systems available, however, many nations are still catching up, and with more passengers flying through Asian nation's development on their borders is critical. We are pleased to bring our successful Border Management & Technologies Summit to Asia. Our event will focus on the current border management systems in place across Asia-Pacific. Many countries in Asia have separate borders from the mainland, such as islands, which makes it harder to manage the borders.
The maritime environment in Asia is critical and many countries rely on fisheries to generate their country's GDP. With this in mind surveillance of the maritime domain is an important aspect of border security in Asia. Our event will focus on the challenges of managing coastal borders and tracking migration through the maritime domain. Border Management & Technologies Summit Asia will also discuss the development of Integrated Border Management (IBM) systems in Asia and review the capabilities of a number of nations in Asia.
To take part in our international event either as a speaker, sponsor, exhibitor or as a delegate please contact us at events@intelligence-sec.com or call us on +44 (0)1582 346 706
*****
The Smart Card Alliance
Security of Things 2016
Bringing Security, Privacy and Authentication to the Forefront of the Internet of Things
Security and privacy are top priorities as the Internet of Things (IoT) creates an increasingly connected world -- connected devices are expected to reach 21 billion by the year 2020. The Security of Things, the Smart Card Alliance's newest event, takes a deep dive into the advantages and challenges IoT presents across every market, including payments, transportation, industrial, consumer and healthcare, and highlights the need for secure IoT architectures using embedded security and privacy technology.
Don't miss this event, the best venue to learn, communicate and network with fellow IoT security industry colleagues!
*****
THIS PRESS RELEASE, AND ALL ADVERTISING, CONTENT AND ALL OTHER MATERIAL AND INFORMATION WHICH APPEARS ON SECURITYSOLUTIONSWATCH.COM AND/OR SECURITYSTOCKWATCH.COM, ONLINE AND/OR IN PRINT, IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS OF USE, CONDITIONS, AND DISCLAIMER HERE: www.securitysolutionswatch.com/Main/Terms_of_Use.html.
*****
Regulatory News:
ASSA ABLOY (STO:ASSAB)
Second quarter
Net sales increased by 5% to SEK 17,894 M (17,082), of which 4% (4) was organic growth and 4% (3) was acquired growth
Strong growth in Americas, EMEA and Global Technologies and good growth in Entrance Systems
Negative growth in Asia Pacific owing to weak demand in China
Contracts have been signed for the acquisition of six companies with combined expected annual sales of about SEK 950 M
Operating income (EBIT) increased by 6% to SEK 2,910 M (2,742). The operating margin was 16.3% (16.1)
Net income amounted to SEK 2,026 M (1,888)
Earnings per share rose by 7% and amounted to SEK 1.82 (1.70)
The quarter's operating cash flow increased by 27% to SEK 2,519 M (1,991).
Sales and income
Second quarter First half-year
Second quarter First half-year 2015 2016 2015 2016 Sales, SEK M 17,082 17,894 5% 32,334 33,785 4% Of which: Organic growth 656 650 4% 1,336 1,099 4% Acquisitions 453 593 4% 829 1,083 3% Exchange-rate effects 2,008 -431 -3% 3,900 -730 -3% Operating income (EBIT), SEK M 2,742 2,910 6% 5,071 5,321 5% Operating margin (EBIT), 16.1% 16.3% 15.70% 15.70% Income before tax, SEK M 2,551 2,729 7% 4,735 4,938 4% Net income, SEK M 1,888 2,026 7% 3,504 3,664 5% Operating cash flow, SEK M 1,991 2,519 27% 2,511 3,017 20% Earnings per share (EPS), SEK 1.70 1.82 7% 3.15 3.3 5%
Comments by the President and CEO
"The second quarter of the year showed strong demand for ASSA ABLOY," says Johan Molin, President and CEO. "The mature markets in general produced strong growth, something we have not seen since the financial crisis, at the same time as the emerging markets continued their slowdown. Sales increased by 5% during the quarter, of which 4% was organic growth. Operating income outstripped sales growth and increased by 6%.
"Organic growth during the quarter was affected by a positive calendar effect of approximately one day. In Americas, EMEA and Global Technologies an encouraging sales growth continued, while Entrance Systems showed a rather weaker growth. The downturn in Asia Pacific continued because of a weak demand situation, especially in China. The emerging markets also remained weak, but with some bright points in eastern Europe and in Latin America apart from Brazil.
"ASSA ABLOY has once again been named as one of the world's one hundred most innovative companies by Forbes magazine. It is pleasing to see that our innovative new products are growing strongly. During the quarter a so-called multi-family solution was launched, whereby ASSA ABLOY for the first time offers a total solution for multi-family buildings where all lock units are both electronic and connected. The electronic content is growing steadily on the market, and there is great potential for the future.
"A further six companies were acquired during the quarter. Consolidation of the market for entrance automation continued with the acquisition of Nassau, which is a regional leader primarily in Denmark. Another interesting acquisition was the company Mauer, the market leader in locks in Bulgaria. ASSA ABLOY has been building a market leadership in eastern Europe for a number of years, which Mauer complements very well.
"Operating income for the quarter increased by 6%. At the same time the operating margin rose to 16.3% in spite of negative effects from both acquisition dilution and exchange-rate effects. The improvement in the margin was mainly due to good organic growth of 4% and lower raw-material costs.
"My judgment is that the global economic trend remains weak, but with a positive trend in America and parts of Europe. Elsewhere, many of the emerging markets are stagnating. However, our strategy of expanding on the emerging markets remains unchanged, since in the long term they are expected to achieve very good economic growth. We are also continuing our investments in new products, especially in the growth area of electromechanics."
ASSA ABLOY is holding an analysts' meeting at 10.00 today at Operaterrassen in Stockholm, Sweden.
The analysts' meeting can also be followed on the Internet at www.assaabloy.com. It is possible to submit questions by telephone on: +46 8 5055 6476, +44 203 364 5371 or +1 877 679 2993.
This information is information that ASSA ABLOY AB is obliged to make public pursuant to the EU Market Abuse Regulation and the Securities Markets Act. The information was submitted for publication, through the agency of the contact persons set out above, at 08.00 CET on 19 July 2016.
This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160718006438/en/
Contacts:
ASSA ABLOY
Johan Molin, President and CEO
Tel: +46 8 506 485 42
or
Carolina Dybeck Happe, Chief Financial Officer
Tel: +46 8 506 485 72
LAGOS, Nigeria, July 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --
SOUTH AMERICA RECEIVES AID FROM CHARITY ORGANIZATION IN AFRICA
On April 16th 2016, the nation, Ecuador was hit by a colossal earthquake of magnitude 7.8. The severity of the disaster reverberated throughout the entire country, leaving at least 500 dead and 27,500 injured. Moved by the plight of Ecuadorians, T.B. Joshua - Founder of Emmanuel TV - sent a relief team to Esmeraldas Province, Ecuador and dispatched a Boeing 727 Cargo Plane, which contained 20 tons of relief hygiene materials, perishable, and non-perishable food stuff.
(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160718/390379 )
(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160718/390380 )
(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160718/390381 )
(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160718/390382 )
Upon arrival, the relief and aid supplies were received by representatives of the Minister of Defense on behalf of the people of Ecuador. The Armed Forces of Ecuador loaded the aid into army trucks and transported to the Emmanuel TV Operations Center, situated close to Esmeraldas City. The supplies were offloaded, repackaged, and distributed to various shelter camps in the Esmeraldas Province.
The Emmanuel TV Team also extended its relief efforts to a remote village, Chachi de San Salvador, which had also been gravely affected by the quake in the areas of access to clean water and the destruction of its local school. In response to this particular community's needs, the Team supplied the community with equipment that converts river and unclean water into potable water. The Team is also undergoing a school construction project - at a cost of US$262,000 - to rebuild the entire school complex that was destroyed. The reconstructed school will provide learning facilities for 350 students.
The people of Ecuador, as well as its Government, continue to express their gratitude for the Emmanuel TV Ecuador Relief efforts. A grateful beneficiary, from the Chachi community, said: "This is the first aid we have received from another country". The relief efforts have aided over 5,000 Ecuadorians, totaling over half a million US Dollars.
About Emmanuel TV
Emmanuel TV is an international TV Station and NGO, headquartered in Lagos, Nigeria. It was founded by T.B. Joshua, a philanthropist, who has been responding to individual and societal needs across the world. Emmanuel TV has been providing food aid to poor communities in Colorado, USA; promoting women's rights by providing funds to widows to start small businesses; building a school in Lahore, Pakistan and granting international scholarships - these are among a fraction of its practices. Such humanitarian endeavors are its strides to achieving the international community's Sustainable Development Goals.
To find out more, click here.
HOUSTON (dpa-AFX) - Oilfield services provider Halliburton Co. (HAL) is likely to release its second-quarter results before the bell on Wednesday, July 20, with analysts polled by Thomson Reuters estimating a loss of $0.19 per share on revenue of $3.76 billion. Analysts' estimate typically exclude certain special items.
Last quarter, Halliburton reported a loss from continuing operations of $2.4 billion or $2.81 per share compared to a loss of $639 million or $0.75 per share in the previous year.
The company recorded company-wide charges related primarily to asset impairments and severance costs of about $2.1 billion, after-tax, or $2.39 per share, in the first quarter of 2016. Halliburton also recorded Baker Hughes acquisition-related costs of $378 million, after-tax, or $0.44 per share, in the first quarter of 2016. The company also incurred $45 million, after-tax, or $0.05 per share, of interest expense in the first quarter of 2016 associated with the $7.5 billion of debt issued in late 2015.
Income from continuing operations for the first quarter of 2016 was $64 million or $0.07 per share, excluding special items. Adjusted operating income was $225 million in the first quarter of 2016. Analysts expected earnings per share of $0.04.
Halliburton said market conditions continued to negatively impact its business in the first quarter of 2016. The rig count declined to historic lows during the quarter, in the face of continued depressed commodity prices, which created further widespread pricing pressure and activity reductions for the company's products and services on a global basis.
Total revenue was $4.20 billion compared to $7.05 billion generated a year ago. Analysts expected revenue of $4.17 billion, for the quarter.
May 1, Halliburton and Baker Hughes announced that the companies have terminated the merger agreement they entered into in November 2014, effective April 30, 2016.
'While both companies expected the proposed merger to result in compelling benefits to shareholders, customers and other stakeholders, challenges in obtaining remaining regulatory approvals and general industry conditions that severely damaged deal economics led to the conclusion that termination is the best course of action,' said Dave Lesar, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Halliburton.
'...While disappointing, Halliburton remains strong. We are the execution company - our strategy, technologies and service quality are focused on helping customers maximize production at the lowest cost and driving industry leading growth, margins and returns,' Lesar added.
Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX
Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de
NOTTINGHAM, England, July 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --
Award-winning East Midlands-based Independent Financial Planners, Cockburn Lucas, are delighted to launch Cockburn Lucas for Women (CL4W), their new dedicated female-only planning service.
CL4W is an empowering new financial planning service, run by women for women. Headed up by Jo Noon and supported by the award-winning advisory team at Cockburn Lucas, CL4W aims to close the gender investing gap. It means that women in the East Midlands and across the United Kingdom can now access a financial planning service that truly reflects their specific needs. Paying close attention to the financial issues facing women following divorce and bereavement, as well as general financial planning issues, the new service delivers a female approach to savings, pension planning and investment. Clients will enjoy a person-specific focus on goal-based investing and access to a dedicated female only team, with less emphasis on jargon and statistics.
Leading CL4W's women-only team is Jo Noon, who has 20 years' experience as an Independent Financial Planner. She explains why this is the right time for a financial planning service designed exclusively for women: "As women in general live longer than men they often end up in control of the purse strings, which requires specific planning advice. Sadly, despite improvements in pay inequality, women still tend to earn less than their male counterparts and also take more career breaks, which can have a profound effect on their own retirement planning outcomes."
"Another important consideration is the situation covering pensions and divorce, especially in view of the new pension freedom rules. So, I felt a women-only service, to help women through some of the most traumatic moments in their life, will provide the expert advice they need in a more caring and empathetic way."
CL4W will also utilise a number of Investment Platforms, along with Customer relationship provider XPLAN, to provide a cost-efficient and dedicated client service experience from beginning to end.
The service will also provide a range of "Greener" investment solutions for those clients wanting the option of ethically screened funds.
CL4W will collaborate with other female networks and professional services providers too, including lawyers and tax advisers, and specialists within the health and protection sector, to create a "Sisterhood". This means CL4W's clients will enjoy more than just a financial planning service; they will have access to a wealth of women-only providers offering tailored support and advice, as well as access to a calendar of social events.
The CL4W website - http://www.cl4women.co.uk - is now live and Jo and the team are already helping female clients work towards a more secure financial future.
ABOUT COCKBURN LUCAS
Cockburn Lucas was established in 1997to providereliable and trustworthyindependent financial advice to private clients, companies andfamily trusts based within the East Midlands region.
BASEL (dpa-AFX) - Swiss drug major Novartis AG (NVS) reported Tuesday a decline in second-quarter profit, as sales were hurt mainly by the full-quarter impact of loss of exclusivity on cancer drug Gleevec.
However, sales from Growth Products, an indicator of the ongoing rejuvenation of portfolio, climbed 19 percent and contributed 35 percent of total sales. The company warned on fiscal 2016 core operating income, while maintaining view for flat sales at constant currencies.
Chief Executive Officer Joseph Jimenez said, 'Performance in Q2 was solid despite a full quarter of Gleevec loss of exclusivity impact in the US. We have strong innovation momentum ... We will increase investments behind these growth opportunities, particularly Entresto, in the second half of 2016 for long-term growth.'
For the second-quarter, net income dropped 2 percent to $1.806 billion from last year's $1.838 billion, while earnings per share remained flat at $0.76. Net income from continuing operations declined 3 percent.
Core net income was $2.93 billion, compared to $3.07 billion a year ago. Core earnings per share were $1.23, versus $1.27 last year.
In the quarter, core operating income declined 7 percent to $3.33 billion, due to generic erosion and growth investments. Core operating income margin declined 1.1 percentage points.
Net sales from continuing operations declined 2 percent to $12.47 billion from $12.69 billion in the prior year, despite volume growth of 5 percentage points.
On a constant currency basis, net sales were flat as Growth Products offset Gleevec generic impact.
Generic competition had a negative impact of 4 percentage points and pricing had a negative impact of 1 percentage point, both largely due to Gleevec/Glivec genericization in the US, which impacted a full quarter for the first time.
In Innovative Medicines, formerly the Pharmaceuticals Division, net sales dropped 3 percent, despite volume growth of 6 percentage points, while growth products contributed 45 percent of division net sales.
Net sales in Emerging Growth Markets grew 2 percent at constant currencies, led by Russia and Brazil. China grew 2 percent, while India fell 16 percent and Venezuela was down 14 percent.
Looking ahead to fiscal 2016, Novartis affirmed its outlook for group net sales to be broadly in line with prior year at constant currencies, with Growth Products offsetting the impact of generic competition.
However, based on the increased spending for Entresto, and depending on Gleevec erosion curve, full-year core operating income is now expected to be broadly in line or decline low single digit at constant currency. Earlier, the company had forecast core operating income to be broadly in line with the prior year.
Novartis shares are currently trading at 79.70 Swiss francs, down 0.93 percent.
Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX
Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de
19 July 2016
Doriemus PLC
("Doriemus" or the "Company")
Significant Update on Horse Hill Oil Discovery, Onshore UK Weald Basin
Doriemus PLC (ISDX:DOR), the London Listed UK focused oil and gas exploration and production investment company with a new focus of increasing the UK's onshore oil production, is pleased to announce a number of significant updates to the Horse Hill oil discovery near London's Gatwick Airport, made today by UK Oil & Gas Investments Plc, the operators of the Horse Hill-1 well and the Horse Hill Licences. The full news release is appended below.
Highlights:
3 fold increase to the Portland Sandstone Oil-In-Place numbers.
Flow tests reinforce independent expert's views of the potential of the Kimmeridge and Jurassic shales and limestones for oil.
Future works planned, through the preparation and submission of a planning application to Surrey County Council ("SCC"), and to assist with obtaining necessary permissions from the Environment Agency ("EA"), for a significant appraisal programme at Horse Hill, for production flow testing of 3 Kimmeridge Limestone zones plus the overlying Portland over a total flow period of up to 360 days, plus two further appraisal/development wells and the acquisition of 3D seismic data.
Engineering studies to examine the range of possible flow rates from a planned horizontal sidetrack well are ongoing.
HH-1 Discovery Well Location and Company Interest:
The HH-1 well is located within onshore exploration Licence PEDL137, on the northern side of the Weald Basin near Gatwick Airport. PEDL246 lies adjacent to and immediately to the east of PEDL137 and combined form the "Licences". Doriemus owns a 10% interest in Horse Hill Developments Ltd, the operator and 65% shareholder of the Licences.
David Lenigas, Doriemus's Executive Chairman, commented;
"The UK will require a lot more domestic oil production both from new onshore and offshore sources, as its sets course on its path to leave the European Union, and we look forward to being part of this equation and the start of the planned long term flow testing of the Horse Hill -1 well, drilling of new appraisal and development wells and the drilling the first of hopefully a number of potential horizontal wells over time."
"I'm delighted to see that independent consultants, with global standing and recognition, continue to upgrade the oil potential of the new Horse Hill oil discovery near Gatwick Airport."
"I'm particularly pleased with the validation by Nutech of the Kimmeridge oil potential by the flow tests earlier this year, which also underscores the Company's expectation that significant volumes of oil lie in the ground within the licence and which can be brought to the surface."
The directors of the Company accept responsibility for the contents of this announcement.
-ENDS-
Doriemus Plc:
David Lenigas
Hamish Harris
Donald Strang
+44 (0)20 7440 0640 Peterhouse Corporate Finance Limited
Guy Miller
Fungai Ndoro
+44 (0)20 7469 0930
ABOUT DORIEMUS
Doriemus has three main UK oil investments, and these are all conventional onshore oil plays in the Weald Basin south of London. The Company has a direct 10% interest in the producing Brockham oil field (PL235), located 6 miles north of Gatwick Airport; a 20% interest in the producing Lidsey oil field (PL241), located north of Bognor Regis; and a 10% interest in Horse Hill Developments Limited, which owns a 65% interest in the new Horse Hill oil discovery (PEDL137/PEDL246) near Gatwick Airport.
UK Oil & Gas Investments Plc reported today, the 19 July 2016:
"UK Oil & Gas Investments PLC
("UKOG" or the "Company")
Upgrade to Portland Oil in Place, Horse Hill-1 Discovery, Weald Basin
UK Oil & Gas Investments PLC (LSE AIM/ISDX: UKOG) announces that a new petrophysical analysis by Nutech, incorporating the findings of the successful Horse Hill-1 ("HH-1") flow test, demonstrates a threefold increase in calculated total oil in place (OIP) per square mile at the HH-1 well within the Upper Portland pay zone. As reported in May 2015 a total Horse Hill Portland P50 OIP of 21 million barrels ("MMbbl") was calculated utilising Nutech's petrophysical analyses. Nutech's May 2015 evaluation assigned a Portland OIP value of 7.7 MMbbl per square mile at the HH-1 well. Nutech's current evaluation upgrades the Portland OIP at HH-1 to 22.9 MMbbl per square mile, a 200% increase.
As previously announced the final HH-1 Portland test flowed at a constrained stable dry oil rate of 323 barrels of oil per day ("bopd"). The Portland was produced at maximum pump capacity and showed no clear indication of depletion. It is likely that the rate can be further increased using a higher capacity downhole pump during the next planned test.
As previously stated by the Company, the calculated OIP per square mile should not be construed as recoverable resources, contingent or prospective resources or reserves.
HH-1 Discovery Well Location and Company Interest
The HH-1 well is located within onshore exploration Licence PEDL137, on the northern side of the Weald Basin near Gatwick Airport. PEDL246 lies adjacent to and immediately to the east of PEDL137 ("the Licences"). UKOG owns a 27.3% interest in the Licences, which are operated by Horse Hill Developments Ltd.
Background
Nutech's Report ("Report") details that the production of dry oil from the Portland, with little or no observed water production, required a rethink of the pre-flow test petrophysical model. Prior to the flow test, interpretations suggested that water would likely be produced along with oil, as is seen in Portland reservoirs in nearby producing oil fields. The revised model fully incorporates well test observations and measurements.
From a similar review of the petrophysical response within the Kimmeridge Limestones, the Report concludes that the well test results reinforce Nutech's and the Company's expectations regarding the significant volumes of OIP seen at the HH-1 well. As previously reported in April and June 2015, the overall Kimmeridge and Jurassic shale and limestone sequence is calculated to contain an OIP of 158 MMbbl per square mile at the HH-1 well and P50 9,245 MMbbl over the 55 square miles of the Licences.
Horse Hill Future Plans
The revised petrophysical model will be used to update Xodus' 2015 estimates of the total OIP contained within the mapped Horse Hill Portland oil accumulation. This will include an estimate of Contingent Resources net to the Company and will be reported in due course.
The Operator has also informed the Company that the flow test data analysis undertaken by Nutech and Xodus provides the necessary technical encouragement to engage Barton Wilmore Ltd, one of the UK's leading planning and environmental assessment practitioners, to prepare and submit a planning application to Surrey County Council ("SCC"), and to assist with obtaining necessary permissions from the Environment Agency ("EA"), for a significant appraisal programme at Horse Hill.
The applications will seek permission to conduct a programme consisting of the production flow testing of 3 Kimmeridge Limestone zones plus the overlying Portland over a total flow period of up to 360 days, plus two further appraisal/development wells and the acquisition of 3D seismic data.
A public consultation and engagement process related to the planning application is scheduled to take place, leading to an application to SCC and the EA.
Engineering studies to examine the range of possible flow rates from a planned horizontal sidetrack well are ongoing. Data to further calibrate these studies will be acquired during the further planned extended flow tests.
Stephen Sanderson, UKOG's Executive Chairman, commented:
"The record breaking flow test results and revised Nutech analysis gives us key new technical insight into the oil bearing Portland reservoir. More importantly than the simple increase in Portland oil in the ground, these learnings have significant positive implications for potential recovery factors and for future commercial viability. The economic potential of the Portland looks increasingly positive.
The validation of Nutech's Kimmeridge evaluation by the flow tests also underscore the Company's expectation that significant volumes of oil lie in the ground within the licence and can be brought to the surface at commercial rates.
We will work closely with Barton Willmore and others to ensure the necessary applications for regulatory consents are submitted. The granting of these permissions is the next key step to enable us to move the Horse Hill Portland and Kimmeridge projects forwards towards early monetisation.
We look forward to the conclusion of the regulatory consent cycle and eagerly await the start of planned long term flow testing."
Qualified Person's Statement:
Stephen Sanderson, UKOG's Executive Chairman, who has over 35 years of relevant experience in the oil industry, has approved the information contained in this announcement.Mr Sanderson is a Fellow of the Geological Society of London and is an active member of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.
For further information, please contact:
UK Oil & Gas Investments PLC Stephen Sanderson / Jason Berry Tel: 020 7440 0640
WH Ireland (Nominated Adviser and Broker) James Joyce / James Bavister Tel: 020 7220 1666
Square 1 Consulting (Public Relations) David Bick / Brian Alexander Tel: 020 7929 5599
Glossary:
discovery a discovery is a petroleum accumulation for which one or several exploratory wells have established through testing, sampling and/or logging the existence of a significant quantity of potentially moveable hydrocarbons contingent resources contingent resources are those quantities of petroleum estimated, as of a given date, to be potentially recoverable from known accumulations, but the applied project(s) are not yet considered mature enough for commercial development due to one or more contingencies. Contingent resources may include, for example, projects for which there are currently no viable markets, or where commercial recovery is dependent on technology under development, or where evaluation of the accumulation is insufficient to clearly assess commerciality. Contingent Resources are further categorized in accordance with the level of certainty associated with the estimates and may be sub-classified based on project maturity and/or characterized by their economic status flow test a flow test or well test involves testing a well by flowing hydrocarbons to the surface, typically through a test separator. Key measured parameters are oil and gas flow rates, downhole pressure and surface pressure. The overall objective is to identify the well's capacity to produce hydrocarbons at a commercial flow rate horizontal well the study of physical and chemical rock properties and their interactions with fluids utilising electric logs, physical rock and fluid measurements limestone a sedimentary rock predominantly composed of calcite (a crystalline mineral form of calcium carbonate) of organic, chemical or detrital origin. Minor amounts of dolomite, chert and clay are common in limestones. Chalk is a form of fine-grained limestone. The Kimmeridge Limestones are effectively chalks being comprised of the remains of calcareous planktonic algae oil field an accumulation, pool or group of pools of oil in the subsurface. An oil field consists of a reservoir in a shape that will trap hydrocarbons and that is covered by an impermeable or sealing rock oil in place the quantity of oil or petroleum that is estimated to exist originally in naturally occurring accumulations before any extraction or production pay the zone within a reservoir that contains economically recoverable hydrocarbons petrophysics the study of physical and chemical rock properties and their interactions with fluids utilising electric logs, physical rock and fluid measurements P50 a 50% probability that a stated volume will be equalled or exceeded reserves those quantities of petroleum anticipated to be commercially recoverable by application of development projects to known accumulations from a given date forward under defined conditions; reserves must further satisfy four criteria: they must be discovered, recoverable, commercial and remaining (as of the evaluation date) based on the development project(s) applied; reserves are further categorized in accordance with the level of certainty associated with the estimates and may be sub-classified based on project maturity and/or characterised by development and production status
Notes to Editors:
About Barton Willmore
Barton Willmore is one the UK's largest planning practices, specialising in the planning, design and environmental assessment of energy projects from eleven regional o?ces. Barton Willmore and their energy projects can be found be found on their website: www.bartonwillmore.co.uk/energy/
END OF UKOG NEWS RELEASE - Relevant Section."
Acquisition will enhance end-to-end digital mobility services in Europe, from strategy and service design, to implementation and solution maintenance
Accenture (NYSE:ACN) has acquired MOBGEN, an end-to-end digital services company that combines mobility strategy, creativity and technology to deliver solutions that drive engagement for global brands with their customers, employees and partners.
This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160719005298/en/
(Photo: Business Wire)
Headquartered in the Netherlands and with offices in Spain, MOBGEN has over 160 employees and develops holistic solutions with a focus on the user experience, for both mobile devices and the Internet of Things (IoT). MOBGEN integrates these solutions with existing systems ready for deployment, and continues to run and maintain them as a service. This includes advanced analytics to provide user behaviour insight, and to analyse valuable data regarding solution performance. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Organizations are increasingly under pressure to deliver rapid iterations for advanced mobile and IoT services, and require strong roadmaps, agile development capabilities and scalable solutions to address this. By bringing MOBGEN into Accenture Digital, clients in Europe and beyond will have access to the skills they need to help overcome these challenges.
"The MOBGEN acquisition strengthens and expands the capabilities of Accenture Digital in Europe," said Marc Huijbregts, Accenture Digital lead in the Netherlands. "Demand for mobility platforms, services and applications is mounting, but as the IoT grows, these need to be built for an increasingly complex range of functions and devices while keeping the user experience in mind."
Jack Ramsay, senior managing director, Accenture Digital, continued: "To deliver the greatest value, mobility solutions must support overall business strategies, and be wholly integrated with back-end systems to ensure data-driven personalised services can be delivered to users. With their holistic approach and focus on service design, meshing their creative and technology experience to strengthen brand relationships, MOBGEN will help Accenture offer clients across Europe the support they need to match the fast pace of technological change."
"Being chosen for acquisition by a company with the stature of Accenture is fantastic news for our employees and our clients," said Ron Vrijmoet, CEO and founder of MOBGEN. "We are still only in the discovery phase of how this mobile revolution will transform the way we live and work, and our clients know that to provide the very best, most exciting customer experiences, the underpinning digital solutions are critical. MOBGEN is and will remain at the centre of this revolution as part of Accenture Digital, offering our existing and new clients access to deep industry expertise and global, scalable service design and technology resources that will help them build ever-stronger relationships with their customers and employees."
MOBGEN serves clients across a wide range of industries including finance, retail and travel, and has won industry recognition from the Webby Awards, the Red Dot Best of the Best Award, the Dutch Interactive Awards, and the European Business Awards, among others.
Aegon, one of MOBGEN's first corporate clients, made a significant contribution to the success of MOBGEN and became an important investor in the company. As part of this acquisition, Aegon who will stay focused on supporting startups has sold its shares to Accenture, and MOBGEN will now operate as part of Accenture Digital.
About Accenture
Accenture is a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range of services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations. Combining unmatched experience and specialized skills across more than 40 industries and all business functions underpinned by the world's largest delivery network Accenture works at the intersection of business and technology to help clients improve their performance and create sustainable value for their stakeholders. With more than 375,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries, Accenture drives innovation to improve the way the world works and lives. Visit us at www.accenture.com.
Accenture Digital comprised of Accenture Analytics, Accenture Interactive and Accenture Mobility, offers a comprehensive portfolio of business and technology services across digital marketing, mobility and analytics. From developing digital strategies to implementing digital technologies and running digital processes on their behalf, Accenture Digital helps clients leverage connected and mobile devices; extract insights from data using analytics; and enrich end-customer experiences and interactions, delivering tangible results from the virtual world and driving growth. To learn more about Accenture Digital, follow us @AccentureDigi and visit www.accenture.com/digital.
Forward-Looking Statements
Except for the historical information and discussions contained herein, statements in this news release may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "may," "will," "should," "likely," "anticipates," "expects," "intends," "plans," "projects," "believes," "estimates," "positioned," "outlook" and similar expressions are used to identify these forward-looking statements. These statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied. These include, without limitation, risks that: the transaction might not achieve the anticipated benefits for the company; the company's results of operations could be adversely affected by volatile, negative or uncertain economic conditions and the effects of these conditions on the company's clients' businesses and levels of business activity; the company's business depends on generating and maintaining ongoing, profitable client demand for the company's services and solutions, and a significant reduction in such demand could materially affect the company's results of operations; if the company is unable to keep its supply of skills and resources in balance with client demand around the world and attract and retain professionals with strong leadership skills, the company's business, the utilization rate of the company's professionals and the company's results of operations may be materially adversely affected; the markets in which the company competes are highly competitive, and the company might not be able to compete effectively; the company could have liability or the company's reputation could be damaged if the company fails to protect client and/or company data or information systems as obligated by law or contract or if the company's information systems are breached; the company's results of operations and ability to grow could be materially negatively affected if the company cannot adapt and expand its services and solutions in response to ongoing changes in technology and offerings by new entrants; the company's results of operations could materially suffer if the company is not able to obtain sufficient pricing to enable it to meet its profitability expectations; if the company does not accurately anticipate the cost, risk and complexity of performing its work or if the third parties upon whom it relies do not meet their commitments, then the company's contracts could have delivery inefficiencies and be less profitable than expected or unprofitable; the company's results of operations could be materially adversely affected by fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates; the company's profitability could suffer if its cost-management strategies are unsuccessful, and the company may not be able to improve its profitability through improvements to cost-management to the degree it has done in the past; the company's business could be materially adversely affected if the company incurs legal liability; the company's work with government clients exposes the company to additional risks inherent in the government contracting environment; the company might not be successful at identifying, acquiring or integrating businesses, entering into joint ventures or divesting businesses; the company's Global Delivery Network is increasingly concentrated in India and the Philippines, which may expose it to operational risks; changes in the company's level of taxes, as well as audits, investigations and tax proceedings, or changes in the company's treatment as an Irish company, could have a material adverse effect on the company's results of operations and financial condition; as a result of the company's geographically diverse operations and its growth strategy to continue geographic expansion, the company is more susceptible to certain risks; adverse changes to the company's relationships with key alliance partners or in the business of its key alliance partners could adversely affect the company's results of operations; the company's services or solutions could infringe upon the intellectual property rights of others or the company might lose its ability to utilize the intellectual property of others; if the company is unable to protect its intellectual property rights from unauthorized use or infringement by third parties, its business could be adversely affected; the company's ability to attract and retain business and employees may depend on its reputation in the marketplace; if the company is unable to manage the organizational challenges associated with its size, the company might be unable to achieve its business objectives; any changes to the estimates and assumptions that the company makes in connection with the preparation of its consolidated financial statements could adversely affect its financial results; many of the company's contracts include payments that link some of its fees to the attainment of performance or business targets and/or require the company to meet specific service levels, which could increase the variability of the company's revenues and impact its margins; if the company is unable to collect its receivables or unbilled services, the company's results of operations, financial condition and cash flows could be adversely affected; the company's results of operations and share price could be adversely affected if it is unable to maintain effective internal controls; the company may be subject to criticism and negative publicity related to its incorporation in Ireland; as well as the risks, uncertainties and other factors discussed under the "Risk Factors" heading in Accenture plc's most recent annual report on Form 10-K and other documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Statements in this news release speak only as of the date they were made, and Accenture undertakes no duty to update any forward-looking statements made in this news release or to conform such statements to actual results or changes in Accenture's expectations.
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160719005298/en/
Contacts:
Accenture
Anja van Beijnum, 31 6 133 00 503
anja.van.beijnum@accenture.com
or
Anthony Hatter, 44 7810 756 138
anthony.hatter@accenture.com
VIENNA (dpa-AFX) - German economic sentiment plunged in July to its lowest level in more than three years, hurt by the surprise 'Brexit' vote and the consequent uncertainty for the economy, results of a survey by the ZEW showed Tuesday.
The ZEW Indicator of Economic Sentiment for Germany plummeted to -6.8 from 19.2 in June. The latest reading was the lowest since November 2012 and well below its long-term average of 24.3 points.
Economists had forecast a score of 9.
In June 23 referendum, 52 percent Britons voted to leave the EU in a surprise and historic move.
'The Brexit vote has surprised the majority of financial market experts. Uncertainty about the vote's consequences for the German economy is largely responsible for the substantial decline in economic sentiment,' ZEW President Achim Wambach said.
'In particular, concerns about the export prospects and the stability of the European banking and financial system are likely to be a burden on the economic outlook.'
The current conditions index of the survey declined to 49.8 from 54.5. Economists had expected a score of 51.8.
The ZEW Indicator of Economic Sentiment for the Eurozone shed 34.9 points to reach minus 14.7 points.
The indicator for the current economic situation declined 2.4 points to minus 12.4 points.
Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX
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Regulatory News:
United Company RUSAL Plc (Paris:RUSAL) (Paris:RUAL):
Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited and The Stock Exchange of Hong Kong Limited take no responsibility for the contents of this announcement, make no representation as to its accuracy or completeness and expressly disclaim any liability whatsoever for any loss howsoever arising from or in reliance upon the whole or any part of the contents of this announcement.
UNITED COMPANY RUSAL PLC
(Incorporated under the laws of Jersey with limited liability)
(Stock Code: 486)
INSIDE INFORMATION
DISCLOSEABLE TRANSACTION
DISPOSAL OF THE ENTIRE EQUITY INTEREST IN
UC RUSAL NORWAY AS
AND
UC RUSAL JAMAICA HOLDINGS LIMITED
INTRODUCTION
This announcement is made by the Company pursuant to Rule 13.09(2) of the Listing Rules and the Inside Information Provisions (as defined under the Listing Rules) under Part XIVA of the SFO.
The Company announces that on 19 July 2016, the Sellers and the Buyer entered into the Agreement pursuant to which the Sellers agreed to sell and the Buyer agreed to purchase the Sale Shares, for a consideration of USD299,000,000.
LISTING RULES IMPLICATIONS
As one or more of the applicable percentage ratios in respect of the Disposal is more than 5% but all of the applicable percentage ratios are less than 25%, the Disposal constitutes a discloseable transaction for the Company and is subject to the disclosure and announcement requirements under Chapter 14 of the Listing Rules.
Shareholders and potential investors should note that pending the fulfillment of the conditions to the Agreement, the Disposal may or may not proceed. Shareholders and potential investors are reminded to exercise caution when dealing in the securities of the Company.
INTRODUCTION
This announcement is made by the Company pursuant to Rule 13.09(2) of the Listing Rules and the Inside Information Provisions (as defined under the Listing Rules) under Part XIVA of the SFO.
The Company announces that on 19 July 2016, the Sellers and the Buyer entered into the Agreement pursuant to which the Sellers agreed to sell and the Buyer agreed to purchase the Sale Shares, for a consideration of USD299,000,000.
THE DISPOSAL
The Agreement
Date: 19 July 2016 Parties: (i) RUSAL Ltd. and RUSAL AL, each a wholly-owned subsidiary of the
Company, collectively being the Sellers; (ii) Jiugang International Resources Singapore Pte. Ltd., a wholly owned
subsidiary of Jiuquan Iron Steel (Group) Co., Ltd., being the Buyer; (iii) the Company, being the Sellers' guarantor; and (iv) Jinquan Iron Steel (Group) Co., Ltd., being the Buyer's guarantor.
The Buyer is a company incorporated in Singapore with limited liability. As informed by the Buyer, the principal business activity of the Buyer and its parent company is the production of steel, stainless steel, primary aluminium power generation and similar activities.
To the best of the Directors' knowledge, information and belief having made all reasonable enquiries, the Buyer and its ultimate beneficial owner are third parties independent of the Company and its connected persons.
Assets to be disposed of
Pursuant to the Agreement, the Sellers have agreed to sell and the Buyer has agreed to purchase the Sale Shares, being the interests of the respective Seller as set out below, representing all of the Sellers' interest in RUSAL Norway and RUSAL Jamaica Holdings, free of all encumbrances:
(i) 1220 ordinary shares without par value in the issued share capital of RUSAL Norway, representing the entire issued share capital of RUSAL Norway, owned by RUSAL AL;
(ii) 2000 ordinary shares of USD1.00 each in the issued share capital of RUSAL Jamaica Holdings, representing 50% of the issued share capital of RUSAL Jamaica Holdings, owned by RUSAL Ltd.; and
(iii) 2000 ordinary shares of USD1.00 each in the issued share capital of RUSAL Jamaica Holdings, representing the remaining 50% of the issued share capital of RUSAL Jamaica Holdings, owned by RUSAL AL.
RUSAL Jamaica Holdings holds all of the interests of RUSAL Jamaica. RUSAL Jamaica holds (i) 65% of the interests of Alpart and (ii) 66.6% of the interests of Alpart Farms. RUSAL Norway holds (i) 35% of the interests of Alpart and (ii) 33.4% of the interests of Alpart Farms.
RUSAL Jamaica Holdings, RUSAL Jamaica and RUSAL Norway are non-operating holding companies whose purpose is to hold the interests described above. Alpart and Alpart Farms are engaged in the business of (i) maintaining the inactive, non-operating Alpart alumina refinery plant located in Nain, St. Elizabeth, Jamaica, and the associated surrounding land, including the surrounding bauxite mines, and (ii) bauxite mining and export of bauxite.
Consideration
The consideration for the Sale Shares is USD299,000,000, which will be payable by the Buyer to the Sellers on Closing by cash via bank transfer.
The consideration was determined after arm's length negotiation between the parties with reference to underlying value of the Alpart alumina refinery and associated bauxite resources.
Conditions precedent
The transfer of title to the Sale Shares from the Sellers to the Buyer is subject to and conditional on a certain number of conditions being fulfilled or waived:
(i) Mutual conditions
The obligations of each party under the Agreement are subject to the satisfaction, on or prior to the Closing, of the following conditions, unless waived by each party to the Agreement:
(a) The Buyer shall have made the necessary filings with the PRC authorities.
(b) The Sellers shall have obtained the necessary consent from the Jamaican authorities.
(ii) Conditions to obligations of the Buyer
The obligations of the Buyer under the Agreement are subject to the satisfaction, on or prior to the Closing, of certain conditions, unless waived by the Buyer, among which include the effectiveness of representations and warranties of the Sellers, compliance by the Sellers with all agreements and conditions under the Agreement, obtaining by the Sellers of all consents, approvals and authorizations required for execution, delivery and performance of the Agreement, and some others.
(iii) Conditions to obligations of the Sellers
The obligations of the Sellers under the Agreement are subject to the satisfaction, at or prior to the Closing, of certain conditions, unless waived by the Sellers, among which include the effectiveness of representations and warranties of the Buyer, compliance by the Buyer with all agreements and conditions under the Agreement, obtaining by the Buyer of all consents, approvals and authorizations required for execution, delivery and performance of the Agreement and some others.
Closing
Closing shall take place within ten Business Days after all of the conditions have been fulfilled or waived which shall be a date on or before 31 December 2016 (or such other date as the parties may agree in writing).
Upon Closing, each of RUSAL Norway and RUSAL Jamaica Holdings will cease to be a subsidiary of the Company. The financial results of each of RUSAL Norway and RUSAL Jamaica Holdings will no longer be consolidated into the Group's financial statements.
Pursuant to the Agreement, the Company will act as the Sellers' guarantor to guarantee the Sellers' obligations under the Agreement and Jinquan Iron Steel (Group) Co., Ltd. will act as the Buyer's guarantor to guarantee the Buyer's obligations under the Agreement.
INFORMATION ON RUSAL NORWAY AND RUSAL JAMAICA HOLDINGS
RUSAL Norway is a company incorporated in Norway with limited liability and is wholly-owned by RUSAL AL as at the date of this announcement. RUSAL Jamaica Holdings is a company incorporated in St Lucia with limited liability. Each of RUSAL Ltd. and RUSAL AL owns 50% of its issued share capital respectively as at the date of this announcement.
Assets which are the subject of the transaction did not generate any profits/losses for the year ended 31 December 2014 and 31 December 2015.
Carrying value attributable to RUSAL Norway's and RUSAL Jamaica Holdings' net assets comprise approximately USD3 million as at 31 December 2014 and 31 December 2015, respectively.
REASONS AND BENEFITS OF THE DISPOSAL
The Directors are of the view that the transaction contemplated by the Agreement is beneficial to the Company, as it will allow it to concentrate on other assets currently in operation.
The Directors consider that the terms of the Agreement are on normal commercial terms which are fair and reasonable and the Disposal is in the interests of the Company and the Shareholders as a whole.
FINANCIAL EFFECT OF THE DISPOSAL
It is estimated that a gain of approximately USD295 million (before taxation) will be recorded after the Disposal, which is calculated with reference to the consideration for the Disposal less the net asset value of RUSAL Norway and RUSAL Jamaica Holdings but before any selling expenses and other related expenses. The actual amount of the gain or loss on the Disposal to be recognized in the consolidated financial statements of the Group will be based on the net assets/liabilities of RUSAL Norway and RUSAL Jamaica Holdings as at Closing and therefore may vary from the amount mentioned above.
USE OF PROCEEDS
The net proceeds from the Disposal will be used for general corporate purposes of the Group.
LISTING RULES IMPLICATIONS
As one or more of the applicable percentage ratios in respect of the Disposal is more than 5% but all of the applicable percentage ratios are less than 25%, the Disposal constitutes a discloseable transaction for the Company and is subject to the reporting and announcement requirements under Chapter 14 of the Listing Rules.
INFORMATION ON THE COMPANY
The Company is principally engaged in the production and sale of aluminium, including alloys and value-added products, and alumina.
Shareholders and potential investors should note that pending the fulfillment of the conditions to the Agreement, the Disposal may or may not proceed. Shareholders and potential investors are reminded to exercise caution when dealing in the securities of the Company.
DEFINITIONS
In this announcement, the following expressions have the following meanings, unless the context otherwise requires:
"Agreement" the sale and purchase agreement dated 19 July 2016 entered into between the
Sellers and the Buyer regarding the Disposal. "Alpart" RUSAL Alpart Jamaica, a Delaware general partnership. "Alpart Farms" Alpart Farms (Jamaica), Ltd., a Delaware corporation. "Board" the board of Directors. "Business Day" a bank working day other than a Saturday, Sunday or a statutory holiday in the
People's Republic of China or New York City. "Buyer" Jiugang International Resources Singapore Pte. Ltd., a company incorporated in
Singapore with limited liability, a wholly owned subsidiary of Jiuquan Iron &
Steel (Group) Co., Ltd. "Company" United Company RUSAL Plc, a limited liability company incorporated in Jersey,
the shares of which are listed on the main board of the Stock Exchange. "Closing" closing of the sale and purchase of the Sale Shares pursuant to the Agreement. "Closing Date" the date Closing occurs. "connected person" has the same meaning ascribed thereto under the Listing Rules. "Director(s)" the director(s) of the Company. "Disposal" the disposal of the Sale Shares by the Sellers to the Buyer pursuant to the
Agreement. "Group" the Company and its subsidiaries. "Listing Rules" the Rules Governing the Listing of Securities on the Stock Exchange. "percentage ratios" the percentage ratios under Rule 14.07 of the Listing Rules. "RUSAL AL" United Company RUSAL Alumina Limited, a company incorporated in Cyprus
with limited liability. "RUSAL Jamaica" UC RUSAL Alumina Jamaica II Limited, a company incorporated in Jamaica
with limited liability. "RUSAL Jamaica Holdings" UC RUSAL Jamaica Holdings Limited, a company incorporated in St. Lucia
with limited liability. "RUSAL Ltd." RUSAL Limited, a company incorporated in Jersey with limited liability. "RUSAL Norway" UC RUSAL Norway AS, a company incorporated in Norway with limited
liability. "Sale Shares" the interests of the respective Sellers as set out below, representing all of the
Sellers' interest in RUSAL Norway and RUSAL Jamaica Holdings: (i) 1220 ordinary shares without par value in the issued share capital of
RUSAL Norway, representing the entire issued share capital of RUSAL
Norway, owned by RUSAL AL; (ii) 2000 ordinary shares of USD1.00 each in the issued share capital of
RUSAL Jamaica Holdings, representing 50% of the issued share capital
of RUSAL Jamaica Holdings, owned by RUSAL Ltd.; and (iii) 2000 ordinary shares of USD1.00 each in the issued share capital of
RUSAL Jamaica Holdings, representing the remaining 50% of the issued
share capital of RUSAL Jamaica Holdings, owned by RUSAL AL. "Sellers" collectively RUSAL Ltd. and RUSAL AL, each a wholly-owned subsidiary of the
Company. "SFO" the Securities and Futures Ordinance (Chapter 571 of the Laws of Hong Kong). "Shareholder(s)" shareholder(s) of the Company. "Stock Exchange" The Stock Exchange of Hong Kong Limited. "USD" United States dollars, the lawful currency of the United States of America.
By Order of the Board of Directors of
United Company RUSAL Plc
Aby Wong Po Ying
Company Secretary
19 July 2016
As at the date of this announcement, the executive Directors are Mr. Oleg Deripaska, Mr. Vladislav Soloviev and Mr. Siegfried Wolf, the non-executive Directors are Mr. Maxim Sokov, Mr. Dmitry Afanasiev, Mr. Len Blavatnik, Mr. Ivan Glasenberg, Mr. Maksim Goldman, Ms. Gulzhan Moldazhanova, Mr. Daniel Lesin Wolfe, Ms. Olga Mashkovskaya, and Ms. Ekaterina Nikitina, and the independent non-executive Directors are Mr. Matthias Warnig (Chairman), Mr. Philip Lader, Dr. Elsie Leung Oi-sie, Mr. Mark Garber, Mr. Dmitry Vasiliev and Mr. Bernard Zonneveld.
All announcements and press releases published by the Company are available on its website under the links http://www.rusal.ru/en/investors/info.aspxhttp://rusal.ru/investors/info/moex/ and http://www.rusal.ru/en/press-center/press- releases.aspx, respectively.
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160719005663/en/
Contacts:
United Company RUSAL Plc
Pan African Resources PLC
(Incorporated and registered in England and Wales under Companies Act 1985 with registered number 3937466 on 25 February 2000)
AIM Code: PAF
JSE Code: PAN
ISIN: GB0004300496
("Pan African" or the "Company")
UPDATE ON PHOENIX PLATINUM AND IFMSA BUSINESS RESCUE PROCEEDINGS
Pan African shareholders are referred to the announcement published by the Company on 27 August 2015, informing shareholders that International Ferro Metals Limited announced that as a result of deteriorating business conditions, its South African subsidiary, International Ferro Metals (SA) Pty Limited ("IFMSA"), had entered into Business Rescue. Business Rescue is a statutory means of enabling a financially distressed company to continue business, under the supervision of a Business Rescue Practitioner, protected from its creditors.
Pan African's wholly-owned subsidiary, Phoenix Platinum Mining (Proprietary) Limited ("Phoenix"), is situated on the IFMSA property, and a portion of the feedstock for the Phoenix operation was obtained from IFMSA's processing activities. Phoenix also sources electricity, water and certain other services from IFMSA. The relationship between Phoenix and IFMSA was governed by a tailings treatment agreement ("TTA") entered into by Pan African, Phoenix and IFMSA.
Although Phoenix was not solely reliant on material from IFMSA, the Business Rescue proceedings created a number of uncertainties and operating difficulties for Phoenix.
In terms of the Business Rescue proceedings, Samancor Chrome Limited ("Samancor") was selected as the successful bidder to acquire the business and assets of IFMSA. Samancor subsequently nominated its subsidiary TC Smelters Proprietary Limited ("TC Smelters") as the acquirer of the IFMSA business and assets.
Pan African is now pleased to announce that it has reached an agreement (the "Agreement") with TC Smelters. The Agreement allows, inter alia, for the assignment of the TTA to TC Smelters. The Agreement further clarifies a number of the provisions contained in the TTA, and will become effective at the same time as the IFMSA and TC Smelters sale of business agreement.
Even though the Agreement does not guarantee current arising feedstock to Phoenix (this will be dependent on the manner in which TC Smelters utilises the IFMSA assets), it places Phoenix in a position where it will continue operations under similar conditions as those that existed prior to the Business Rescue proceedings. It also ensures that Phoenix's operations and interests are safeguarded. As previously stated, Phoenix also has alternative sources of feedstock, which it processed during the Business Rescue proceedings.
For further information on Pan African, please visit the Company's website at www.panafricanresources.com
19 July 2016
CONTACT INFORMATION
Corporate Office
The Firs Office Building
1st Floor, Office 101
Cnr. Cradock and Biermann Avenues
Rosebank, Johannesburg
South Africa
Office: +27 (0) 11 243 2900
Facsimile: +27 (0) 11 880 1240
Registered Office
Suite 31
Second Floor
107 Cheapside
London
EC2V 6DN
United Kingdom
Office: +44 (0) 20 7796 8644
Facsimile: +44 (0) 20 7796 8645
Cobus Loots Deon Louw
Pan African Resources PLC Pan African Resources PLC
Chief Executive Officer Financial Director
Office: +27 (0)11 243 2900 Office: +27 (0) 11 243 2900
Phil Dexter John Prior / Paul Gillam / James Black
St James's Corporate Services Limited Numis Securities Limited
Company Secretary Nominated Adviser & Joint Broker
Office: +44 (0)20 7796 8644 Office: +44 (0)20 7260 1000
Sholto Simpson Matthew Armitt / Ross Allister
One Capital Peel Hunt LLP
JSE Sponsor Joint Broker
Office: +27 (0)11 550 5009 Office: +44 (0)020 7418 8900
Julian Gwillim Daniel Thole/Aarti Iyer
Aprio Strategic Communications Bell Pottinger PR
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TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 -- Denison Mines Corp. ("Denison" or the "Company") (TSX: DML)(NYSE MKT: DNN) is pleased to announce the initiation of a Pre-Feasibility Study ("PFS") for its 60% owned Wheeler River property, located in the infrastructure rich eastern portion of the Athabasca Basin region in northern Saskatchewan, and the results from its first infill drill hole at the basement-hosted Gryphon deposit. Drill hole WR-668 intersected 0.93% eU3O8 over 14.1 metres (including 2.1% eU3O8 over 3.7 metres and 1.4% eU3O8 over 1.3 metres) and 2.4% eU3O8 over 7.3 meters (including 3.7% eU3O8 over 4.5 metres), which reinforces the high grade results previously reported for the Gryphon deposit.
Work towards a PFS for Wheeler River was initiated earlier this year, following the completion of a successful Preliminary Economic Assessment ("PEA"), which evaluated the economic merit of co-developing the high grade Gryphon and Phoenix deposits. The results of the PEA were released on April 4, 2016 and were highlighted by a pre-tax IRR of 20.4%, based on a long term uranium price of US$44 per pound U3O8, and initial capital costs to Denison of CAD$336M.
The objective of the infill drilling program is to increase the level of confidence of the previously released inferred resources estimated for the Gryphon deposit to an indicated level - an important step in completing the PFS. Based on the drilling completed to the end of 2015, the Gryphon deposit is estimated to contain 43.0 million pounds U3O8 (above a cut-off grade of 0.2% U3O8) based on 834,000 tonnes of mineralization at an average grade of 2.3% U3O8. The PFS activities and related infill drilling program will continue throughout the summer and will run in parallel to a two drill exploration program, which is focused on resource expansion through the discovery of additional mineralization in the Gryphon D series lenses. Significant D series lenses were discovered during the winter 2016 exploration program and remain open in all directions. The D series lenses are not included in the current resource estimate for the Gryphon deposit, or the Wheeler River PEA.
Denison's President and CEO, David Cates, commented, "The first infill drilling result at Gryphon reminds us of the high-grade nature of this basement hosted uranium deposit. Based on the PEA for the Wheeler River project, the Gryphon deposit is expected to be mined using low-cost conventional mining techniques in advance of mining the unconformity hosted Phoenix deposit. In addition to the PFS and related infill drilling program, we are focused on expanding the resource base at Gryphon, as we follow up on the discovery of additional Gryphon D series lenses to the north of the main Gryphon deposit. Taken together, our exploration and project development teams are planning to be very active on the Wheeler River project this summer."
Initiation of Pre-Feasibility Study Program
In the second quarter of 2016, Denison initiated a work program to support the completion of a PFS for the Wheeler River project and to ultimately advance the project a further step towards production. Initial PFS activities, to date, have included:
-- Launch of the Gryphon infill drilling program; -- Initiation of extensive geotechnical and hydrogeological data collection programs to support mine designs, water treatment designs and environmental assessments; -- Commencement of engineering evaluations for shaft sinking and mine designs; -- Retention of Pam Bennett as Environment Manager, responsible for the preparation of the Environmental Impact Assessment ("EIA") for the project. Pam comes to Denison with an M.Sc in Environmental Toxicology and is a registered Professional Biologist (P. Biol). Pam has over 15 years of international experience in the environmental sciences field, including experience with both Cameco Corp. and AREVA Resources Canada Inc. on EIAs for uranium projects in Saskatchewan; -- Initiation of environmental baseline data collection programs (archeological, terrestrial, aquatic) required to support project designs and environmental assessments; and -- Initiation of stakeholder consultations with local communities.
Gryphon Infill Drilling Program
The Gryphon uranium deposit is hosted in basement rock, centred approximately 220 metres below the sub-Athabasca unconformity, and is currently estimated to contain inferred resources of 43.0 million pounds U3O8 (above a cut-off grade of 0.2% U3O8) based on 834,000 tonnes of mineralization at an average grade of 2.3% U3O8. The resource estimate for the Gryphon deposit includes the A, B and C series lenses - a set of parallel, stacked, elongate mineralized lenses that are broadly conformable with the basement geology and dip moderately to the southeast and plunge moderately to the northeast. The inferred resource estimate was derived from a drill hole spacing of approximately 50 x 50 metres with drill holes oriented steeply toward the northwest - intersecting the geology and mineralized lenses at high angles to provide for an accurate evaluation of the true thickness of the mineralization. An infill drilling program has been designed to achieve a drill hole spacing across the A, B and C series lenses of approximately 25 x 25 metres. The infill drilling program has been designed with the assistance of Roscoe Postle Associates Inc. ("RPA"), an independent technical consulting firm who prepared the current resource estimate for the Gryphon deposit, and is expected to require approximately 40 drill holes, which will also be oriented steeply toward the northwest. To reduce drill time to mineralization as well as drilling costs, and improve drilling accuracy, a directional drilling method will be employed which involves drilling of a single parent hole from surface with multiple "daughter holes" drilled from part way down the parent hole. The daughter holes are steered to their respective targets using specialized drilling equipment.
Infill drilling planned for the summer 2016 work program is expected to complete approximately 10 of the estimated 40 infill drill holes required to upgrade the confidence of the A, B and C series lenses at Gryphon. With the Gryphon D series lenses expanding the mineralized footprint around the Gryphon deposit, commencing infill drilling in 2016 is expected to allow for a larger portion of the resources at or around Gryphon to be categorized as indicated and incorporated into the Wheeler River PFS in late 2017. The summer 2016 infill program will also provide the exploration team an opportunity to gain experience with the directional drilling method under local bedrock conditions in advance of the winter 2017 drilling season - where drilling is expected to be focused primarily on completion of the Gryphon infill drilling program.
Results from the first infill drill hole WR-668 included:
-- 0.93% eU3O8 over 14.1 metres (including 2.1% eU3O8 over 3.7 metres and 1.4% eU3O8 over 1.3 metres) from 754.7 to 768.8 metres, and -- 2.4% eU3O8 over 7.3 meters (including 3.7% eU3O8 over 4.5 metres) from 772.6 to 779.9 metres
The results can be correlated with previous intersections of the A, B and C lenses in neighbouring holes and the high grades were consistent with previous results demonstrating good lens and grade continuity. As the drill hole was oriented steeply toward the northwest, consistent with previous Gryphon drill holes, and the basement mineralization is interpreted to dip moderately to the southeast, the true thickness of the mineralization is expected to be approximately 75% of the intersection lengths. The results are reported as radiometric equivalent U3O8 ("eU3O8") derived from a calibrated total gamma down-hole probe using a cut-off of 0.1% eU3O8, a minimum mineralization thickness of 1.0 metre and maximum waste of 2.0 metres. All mineralized intersections will be sampled for chemical U3O8 assay. A property location map of Wheeler River is provided in Figure 1 and the location of WR-668 is shown in Figure 2.
Further details regarding the Gryphon deposit and the current mineral resources estimated at Wheeler River are provided in the report titled "Technical Report on a Mineral Resource Estimate For The Wheeler River Property, Eastern Athabasca Basin, Northern Saskatchewan, Canada.", dated Nov. 25, 2015, authored by William E. Roscoe Ph.D, P.Eng. and Mark B. Mathisen C.P.G of RPA. A copy of this report is available on Denison's website and under Denison's profile on SEDAR (www.sedar.com).
Qualified Persons
The disclosure of a scientific or technical nature contained in this news release was prepared by Dale Verran, MSc, Pr.Sci.Nat., Denison's Vice President, Exploration, who is a Qualified Person in accordance with the requirements of NI 43-101. For a description of the assay procedures and the quality assurance program and quality control measures applied by Denison, please see Denison's Annual Information Form dated March 24, 2016 filed under the Company's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.
The disclosure regarding the initiation of Pre-Feasibility Study Program contained in this news release was reviewed and approved by Peter Longo, P. Eng, MBA, PMP, Denison's Vice-President, Project Development, who is a Qualified Person in accordance with the requirements of NI 43-101.
RPA, an independent technical consulting firm, was retained by Denison on behalf of the Wheeler River Joint Venture to assist in the design of the infill drilling program for the Gryphon deposit. The work was undertaken by Mark Mathisen, C.P.G., Senior Geologist, and peer reviewed by David Ross, M.Sc., P.Geo, Director - Resource Estimation who are both "Qualified Persons" in accordance with NI 43-101.
About Wheeler River
The Wheeler River property is a joint venture between Denison (60% and operator), Cameco Corp. (30%), and JCU (Canada) Exploration Company Limited (10%), and is host to the high-grade Gryphon and Phoenix uranium deposits discovered by Denison in 2014 and 2008, respectively. The Gryphon deposit is hosted in basement rock and is currently estimated to contain inferred resources of 43.0 million pounds U3O8 (above a cut-off grade of 0.2% U3O8) based on 834,000 tonnes of mineralization at an average grade of 2.3% U3O8. The Phoenix unconformity deposit is located approximately 3 kilometres to the southeast of Gryphon and is estimated to include indicated resources of 70.2 million pounds U3O8 (above a cut-off grade of 0.8% U3O8) based on 166,000 tonnes of mineralization at an average grade of 19.1% U3O8, and is the highest grade undeveloped uranium deposit in the world.
On April 4th, 2016 Denison announced the results of a Preliminary Economic Assessment ("PEA") for the Wheeler River Project, which considers the potential economic merit of co-developing the high-grade Gryphon and Phoenix deposits as a single underground mining operation. The PEA returned a base case pre-tax Internal Rate of Return ("IRR") of 20.4% based on the current long term contract price of uranium (US$44.00 per pound U3O8), and Denison's share of estimated initial capital expenditures ("CAPEX") of CAD$336M (CAD$560M on 100% ownership basis). Exploration results from the winter and summer 2016 drilling program have not been incorporated into the resource estimate or the PEA. Additional infill drilling, required to improve the confidence in the existing mineral resources estimated for the Gryphon deposit, commenced in the summer of 2016 and is expected to be completed in 2017 as the Company advances the project towards the completion of a Pre-Feasibility study ("PFS"). The PEA is preliminary in nature and includes inferred mineral resources that are considered too speculative geologically to have the economic considerations applied to them to be categorized as mineral reserves, and there is no certainty that the preliminary economic assessment will be realized. Mineral resources are not mineral reserves and do not have demonstrated economic viability.
About Denison
Denison is a uranium development and exploration company focused in the infrastructure rich eastern portion of the Athabasca Basin region in northern Saskatchewan, Canada. Highlighted by its 60% owned Wheeler River development project, which hosts the high grade Gryphon and Phoenix uranium deposits, Denison's project portfolio covers over 350,000 hectares and includes a 22.5% interest in the McClean Lake uranium mill, which is permitted for annual production of up to 24 million pounds U3O8 and is currently processing ore from the Cigar Lake mine under a toll milling agreement. Denison's interests in the eastern Athabasca Basin also include a 61.55% interest in the J Zone deposit on the Waterbury Lake property, a 25.17% interest in the Midwest deposit, and a 22.5% interest in the McClean lake uranium deposits - all of which are located within 20 kilometres of the McClean Lake mill.
Denison is also engaged in mine decommissioning and environmental services through its Denison Environmental Services division and is the manager of Uranium Participation Corp., a publicly traded company which invests in uranium oxide and uranium hexafluoride.
Follow Denison on Twitter: @DenisonMinesCo.
Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements
Certain information contained in this press release constitutes "forward-looking information", within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and similar Canadian legislation concerning the business, operations and financial performance and condition of Denison. Generally, these forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "plans", "expects", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates" or "believes", or the negatives and/or variations of such words and phrases, or state that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will be taken", "occur", "be achieved" or "has the potential to". In particular, this press release contains forward-looking information pertaining to the following: exploration (including drilling) and evaluation activities, plans and objectives; potential mineralization of drill targets; and the estimates of Denison's mineral resources.
Forward looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management as of the date such statements are made, and they are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of Denison to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Denison believes that the expectations reflected in this forward-looking information are reasonable but there can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and may differ materially from those anticipated in this forward looking information. For a discussion in respect of risks and other factors that could influence forward-looking events, please refer to the "Risk Factors" in Denison's Annual Information Form dated March 24, 2016 available under its profile at www.sedar.com and in its Form 40-F available at www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml. These factors are not, and should not be construed as being, exhaustive.
Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. The forward-looking information contained in this press release is expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. Denison does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking information after the date of this press release to conform such information to actual results or to changes in its expectations except as otherwise required by applicable legislation.
Cautionary Note to United States Investors Concerning Estimates of Measured, Indicated and Inferred Mineral Resources: This press release may use the terms "measured", "indicated" and "inferred" mineral resources. United States investors are advised that while such terms are recognized and required by Canadian regulations, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission does not recognize them. "Inferred mineral resources" have a great amount of uncertainty as to their existence, and as to their economic and legal feasibility. It cannot be assumed that all or any part of an inferred mineral resource will ever be upgraded to a higher category. Under Canadian rules, estimates of inferred mineral resources may not form the basis of feasibility or other economic studies. United States investors are cautioned not to assume that all or any part of measured or indicated mineral resources will ever be converted into mineral reserves. United States investors are also cautioned not to assume that all or any part of an inferred mineral resource exists, or is economically or legally mineable.
To view Figure 1, please visit the following link: http://media3.marketwire.com/docs/dml0719fig1.pdf.
To view Figure 2, please visit the following link: http://media3.marketwire.com/docs/dml0719fig2.pdf.
Contacts:
Denison Mines Corp.
David Cates
President and Chief Executive Officer
(416) 979-1991 ext. 362
Denison Mines Corp.
Sophia Shane
Investor Relations
(604) 689-7842
www.denisonmines.com
PETAH TIKVA, ISRAEL -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 -- Cellebrite, the leader in digital forensic extraction, decoding and analysis solutions, today unveiled UFED Touch2, the latest addition to the company's industry-leading UFED Series family of mobile forensic solutions. With enhanced speed, usability, and portability, UFED Touch2 is a comprehensive mobile forensic solution that allows law enforcement, military, and intelligence agencies to extract evidentiary data in a forensically sound manner. The Touch2 can extract mobile device content up to three times faster than the UFED Touch, enabling investigators and examiners to accelerate investigations.
"Many of our customers prefer a purpose-built device for extracting and viewing digital evidence regardless of location," said Yossi Carmil, Global Co-CEO, Cellebrite. "The UFED Touch2 delivers the performance, reliability and usability required to allow customers to meet their mission in the lab or field, while simplifying the procurement process by eliminating the need to buy separate hardware."
With its intuitive GUI and easy-to-use touch screen, UFED Touch2 enables physical, file system and logical extractions of data and passwords, including deleted data, from the widest range of mobile devices. UFED Touch2 is available in both standard and ruggedized editions, running Logical or Ultimate (logical, file system and physical extraction) configurations and comes with a suite of supporting software applications, peripherals and accessories.
UFED Touch2 delivers a range of enhanced capabilities designed to increase performance, usability, and portability. Key performance enhancements designed to reduce extraction time include:
-- 5x faster CPU than the UFED Touch -- DDR3 memory -- Large and fast hard drive (SSD 128MB) -- USB 3.1 phase 1 axillaries (Up to 5Mbps)
In addition, the UFED Touch2 includes a number of features that simplify usage and increase flexibility:
-- High-resolution (1024), capacitive multi-touch display with intuitive GUI -- Built-in multi-SIM Reader -- Mini Display Port -- Customized Windows 10
Finally, the Touch2 delivers new capabilities to allow for improved portability:
-- WiFi b\g
\ac (up to 350 Mbps) -- All-inclusive field-ready operational kit - smaller, lighter connector tips, and external hard drive -- Long-lasting battery
Cellebrite will continue to support its customers using UFED Touch. Any future announcement regarding the end of support for the Touch platform will be made 18 months in advance to allow users to effectively plan for the transition. Customers that purchased a UFED Touch in 2016 will receive attractive offers to trade in their device for a Touch2. Customers that purchased a UFED Touch after June 15, 2016 will be able to trade in their device for a UFED Touch2 at no cost.
About Cellebrite
Every day around the world digital data is impacting investigations. Making it intelligent and actionable is what Cellebrite does best. A pioneer of mobile data forensics since 1999 with a passion for technology innovation, Cellebrite is uniquely positioned to address the rapidly evolving needs of its diverse customer base to access, unify and defend digital evidence of all kinds. Together, our powerful UFED solutions deliver the only complete, end-to-end Digital Forensics Platform on the market. Our track record remains unchallenged. Our results? Proven and well documented. With more than 40,000 UFED licenses deployed globally in 100 countries, we allow law enforcement, intelligence services, border patrols, special forces, military and the private sector to achieve their missions quickly and effectively.
Cellebrite is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Sun Corporation, a listed Japanese company (6736/JQ)
Contacts:
Jeremy Nazarian
CMO
+1(973) 941-7200
jeremy.nazarian@cellebrite.com
DUBLIN, 19 July, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --
Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Wall Decor Market in the US 2016-2020" report to their offering.
The analysts forecast the wall decor market in the US to grow at a CAGR of 8.41% during the period 2016-2020.
The report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the wall decor market in the US for 2016-2020. To calculate the market size, the report considers the revenue generated from the sale of wall decor products sold by retailers. Market sizing has been done only for the products outlined in the report and does not include sales from galleries, museums, fairs, and auctions, and re-sale value of old/antique wall decor.
A trend which is helping to boost market growth immensely is the online retailing of wall decor. Wall decor manufacturers and retailers have begun selling artwork and designer wall decor products online. They are entering the e-commerce market with attractive websites and product offers. Companies such as IKEA, Wayfair, and Ashley Furniture have already entered the e-commerce market and make their products available online, often at reduced prices and with free shipping. The online platform allows manufacturers to widen their reach without the need for physical brick-and-mortar presence. It also helps reduce costs involved in warehousing at different locations.
According to the report, a key growth driver is the globalization of vendors. The US attracts global wall decor vendors to its market. This is bringing in new designs, styles, and varied wall decor products and encouraging consumers to buy them. In 2015, for instance, the US was one of the top markets for wall decor products for Europe based IKEA. The company has 42 stores in the US.
Key vendors
- Bed Bath & Beyond
- Home Depot
- IKEA
- Lowe's
- Target
- Wal-Mart
Other prominent vendors
- Art.com
- Costco
- Ethan Allen
- Franchise Concepts
- Havertys
- J.C. Penney
- Kirkland
- Kohl's
- Macy's Inc.
- Pier 1 Imports
- Restoration Hardware
- Sears
- West Elm
- Williams-Sonoma
- Wayfair
Key Topics Covered:
Part 01: Executive summary
Part 02: Scope of the report
Part 03: Market research methodology
Part 04: Introduction
Part 05: Country profile: US
Part 06: Market landscape
Part 07: Market segmentation by product category
Part 08: Market drivers
Part 09: Impact of drivers
Part 10: Market challenges
Part 11: Impact of drivers and challenges
Part 12: Market trends
Part 13: Vendor landscape
For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/55klp5/wall_decor_market
Media Contact:
Laura Wood, Senior Manager
press@researchandmarkets.com
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DUBLIN, July 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --
Dublin - Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Laboratory Freezers Market - Global Forecast to 2021" report to their offering.
The global laboratory freezers market is forecast to be worth USD 3.76 billion by 2021. The growth in this market is majorly driven by the increasing number of organ transplant procedures and rising demand for blood & blood components across the globe.
Key Topics Covered:
Market Penetration: Comprehensive information on the product portfolios offered by top players operating in the laboratory freezers market. The report analyzes the laboratory freezers market by product type across all regions
Product Development/Innovation: Detailed insights on the upcoming trends, R&D activities, and new product launches in the laboratory freezers market
Market Development: Comprehensive information on the lucrative emerging markets based on product and region
Market Diversification: Exhaustive information about new products, growing regions, recent developments, and investments in the laboratory freezers market
Competitive Assessment: In-depth assessment of market shares, growth strategies, products, distribution networks, and manufacturing capabilities of the leading players in the laboratory freezers market.
In this report, the laboratory freezers market is segmented by product type, end user, and region. Based on product type, the market is segmented into freezers, refrigerators, and cryopreservation systems. In 2015, the freezers segment accounted for the largest share of the laboratory freezers market. However, the cryopreservation systems segment is expected to register the highest CAGR during the forecast period, primarily due to the increasing use of cryopreservation techniques and equipment for long-term storage of biological samples, cryopreserved cell lines, and laboratory samples.
This report will enrich established firms as well as new entrants/smaller firms to gauge the pulse of the market, which in turn would help them garner a greater market share. Firms purchasing the report could use one or a combination of the below-mentioned five strategies (market penetration, product development/innovation, market development, market diversification, and competitive assessment) for reaping greater market shares.
Companies Mentioned:
Arctiko A/S
Biomedical Solutions Inc.
Eppendorf AG
Evermed S.R.L.
Haier Biomedical
Helmer Scientific
Panasonic Healthcare Co., Ltd.
Philipp Kirsch GmbH
Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc.
VWR Corporation
Report Structure:
1 Introduction
2 Research Methodology
3 Executive Summary
4 Premium Insights
5 Market Overview
6 Global Laboratory Freezers Market, By Product Type
7 Global Laboratory Freezers Market, By End User
8 Laboratory Freezers Market, By Region
9 Competitive Landscape
10 Company Profiles
11 Appendix
For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/z9x3ld/laboratory
Media Contact:
Research and Markets
Laura Wood, Senior Manager
press@researchandmarkets.com
For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470
For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630
For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900
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19 July 2016
PayPoint plc Notice of Interim Management Statement
PayPoint plc advises that it will issue its Interim Management Statement for the first quarter, period ended 30 June 2016, on Thursday 28 July 2016.
Enquiries: RLM Finsbury: 020 7251 3801 Rollo Head
PayPoint plc: 01707 600300 Susan Court
ABOUT PAYPOINT
We support market leading national networks across 39,000 convenience stores in the UK and Romania so that our customers are always close to a PayPoint store. In thousands of locations, as well as at home or on the move, people use us better to control their household finances, essential payments and in-store services, like parcels. Our UK network contains more branches than all banks, supermarkets and Post Offices together, putting us at the heart of communities for over 10 million regular weekly customers.
We have a proven track record of decades of tech-led innovation, providing retailers with tools that attract customers into their shops. Our industry- leading payments systems give first class service to the customers of over 1,500 clients - utility companies, retailers, transport firms and mobile phone providers, government and more.
We are on and offline; providing for payments by cash, card including contactless; retail, phone and digital; at home, work and whilst out and about from Land's End to the highlands and islands - helping to keep modern life moving.
Multichannel payments
We offer clients streamlined consumer payment processing and transaction routing in one, seamlessly integrated solution, through MultiPay. This gives customers the flexibility to pay in the way that best suits them; including mobile app, online, text, phone/IVR and cash in-store.
MultiPay is live with Utilita, a fast growing challenger energy supplier. We have signed several other energy companies, a framework agreement with Procurement for Housing and, significantly, Scottish and Southern Energy, our first Big 6 energy client
Retail networks
In the UK, our network includes over 29,000 local shops including Co-op, Spar, Sainsbury's Local, Tesco Express and thousands of independent outlets. These outlets are quick and convenient places to make energy meter prepayments, bill payments, benefit payments, mobile phone top-ups, transport tickets, TV licences, cash withdrawals and more.
Our Romanian network continues to grow profitably. We have more than 10,200 local shops, helping people to make cash bill payments, money transfers, road tax payments and mobile phone top-ups. Our clients include all the major utilities and telcos and many other consumer service companies.
In the UK, our Collect+ joint venture with Yodel offers parcel drop-off and pick-up services in nearly 6,000 convenience stores. Customers use Collect+ to handle parcels from major retailers including Amazon, eBay, ASOS, New Look, John Lewis, House of Fraser, M&S and Very.
The UK network also includes over 4,200 LINK branded ATMs, and 10,000 of our terminals enable retailers to accept debit, credit and contactless payments, including Apple Pay.
We operate over 3,000 Western Union agencies in the UK and Romania for international and domestic money transfers.
This announcement is distributed by GlobeNewswire on behalf of GlobeNewswire clients. The owner of this announcement warrants that: (i) the releases contained herein are protected by copyright and other applicable laws; and (ii) they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the information contained therein.
Source: PayPoint plc via GlobeNewswire [HUG#2029382]
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MARLBOROUGH, MA -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 -- BRIDGE Energy Group (BRIDGE), today announced that the company's Vice President of Grid Optimization, Forrest Small, will share his utility industry knowledge with attendees at the 2nd New York Energy REVolution Summit. Additional BRIDGE executives will also attend the event to showcase the company's Grid Modernization solutions and discuss the technological, business, and social pressures that are challenging utilities to transform their industry.
Tweet this: .@BridgeEnergyGrp Gridmodernization VP @ForrestSmall to address attendees @Infocast_Events 2nd NY Energy REVolution Summit
Held from July 26th to July 28th at the Times Square Westin, the summit focuses on New York's Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) initiative, and offers a platform to discuss and evaluate the state's multiple efforts to finance and encourage the establishment of clean energy markets for sustainable and reliable power delivery system. Small will speak on the "Can the NY REV be replicated" topic on July 28, 11:30 a.m. -12:30 p.m. Small, along with other speakers, will focus on challenges of NY's REV initiative as the utilities move towards developing robust implementation plans and will outline various ways to improve goal attainment. In addition, Small will review New York's energy initiative and compare it with similar states including California.
"New York has developed an ambitious plan that is poised to help energy stakeholders throughout the state enjoy clean, reliable electricity that form a secure and efficient platform infrastructure," Small said. "BRIDGE Energy Group is proud to be part of developing the Distributed Systems Platform and the capabilities it will bring for improving grid operations, distribution planning and energy markets."
Small will also moderate a pre-conference workshop panel on microgrids, hosted by NY Prize whose mission is to help communities reduce costs, develop local clean energy, and increase the reliability and resiliency of the grid. The panel, 'Interconnection, Interoperability & Resource Planning Challenges,' will be held on July 26, 3:30 p.m. - 4:15 p.m.
To empower your utility organization with grid reliability, transformation, security and management stop by BRIDGE Energy Group's table at the Summit, or contact BRIDGE at 1.888.351.8999 or email: info@BridgeEnergyGroup.com.
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About BRIDGE Energy Group
BRIDGE Energy Group is the leading consulting and systems integration company focused on improving utility operational performance. BRIDGE combines business, OT and IT domain expertise to deliver and optimize innovative grid operations solutions. BRIDGE's capabilities and expert services enable engagement at any stage in the lifecycle, from strategy & regulatory to implementation & optimization. Founded in 2004, BRIDGE is headquartered in Marlborough, MA. For more information on BRIDGE, please contact 888-351-8999 or visit www.BridgeEnergyGroup.com.
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For more information, contact:
Jackie Abramian
BridgeView Marketing (for BRIDGE Energy Group)
603-570-7533
Jackie@bridgeviewmarketing.com
https://twitter.com/BridgeEnergyGrp
AMSTERDAM (dpa-AFX) - Cytori Therapeutics Inc. (CYTX) said it has published the results from an investigator-initiated Phase I trial using Cytori Cell Therapy in patients with insufficient maxillary bone prior to dental implantation. The publication reported approximately 42 percent greater bone formation in maxillary sinus floor elevation or MSFE procedures treated with cells in combination with scaffolds, versus those that received scaffold alone. The study, conducted by investigators from Departments of Orthopedic Surgery, Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, and Oral Cell Biology of the VU University in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, enrolled 10 patients requiring dental implants but who had insufficient bone into which the implant could be inserted. The maxillary bone deficiency was treated with two different commonly-used, off-the-shelf bone calcium phosphate scaffolds that were used either alone or pre-loaded with Adipose-Derived Regenerative Cells or ADRCs prepared using Cytori's Celution System. Six months after treatment all patients underwent dental implant placement at which time a biopsy of the regenerated bone at the graft site was performed. The trial results reported approximately 42 percent greater bone formation in grafts that were supplemented with ADRCs. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX
Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 -- Greencastle Resources Ltd. (TSX VENTURE: VGN) ("Greencastle" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that the common shares of Greencastle subsidiary, Deveron UAS Corp. ("Deveron"), will commence trading today on the Canadian Securities Exchange under the ticker symbol DVR. Greencastle owns approximately 56% of Deveron.
Deveron UAS, is a full-service company providing farmers with the opportunity to increase yields and reduce costs through the use of sophisticated Unmanned Aerial Systems ("UAS" or "drones"), sensors, software and analytics. The service offering is targeted at farmers, agricultural retailers and independent agronomists and provides a strong value proposition through reduced costs and/or increased yields by optimizing input costs such as water, fertilizer and pesticides.
"David MacMillan and Norm Lamothe have very quickly built Deveron into Canada's leading precision Ag UAS company," stated Anthony Roodenburg, Greencastle CEO. "This is a rapidly expanding global sector that brings together unmanned systems, robotics, sophisticated software and sensors, 'the internet of things' and big data to improve global food production. We continue to support Deveron and the team and look forward to their future successes."
Currently, Greencastle owns 8,631,005 common shares of Deveron. Greencastle has granted an incentive option to purchase up to 1,000,000 common shares of Deveron to David MacMillan, Deveron President and CEO at an exercise price of $0.30 and expiring on July 14, 2019.
For additional information, please visit www.greencastleresources.com.
Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
This news release contains forward-looking statements. These statements are based on information currently available to the Company and the Company provides no assurance that actual results will meet management's expectations. Forward-looking statements include estimates and statements that describe the Company's future plans, objectives or goals, including words to the effect that the Company or management expects a stated condition or result to occur. Forward-looking statements may be identified by such terms as "believes", "anticipates", "expects", "estimates", "may", "could", "would", "will", or "plan". Since forward-looking statements are based on assumptions and address future events and conditions, by their very nature they involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Actual results relating to, among other things, results of exploration, project development, reclamation and capital costs of the Company's mineral properties, and the Company's financial condition and prospects, could differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements for many reasons such as: changes in general economic conditions and conditions in the financial markets; changes in demand and prices for minerals; litigation, legislative, environmental and other judicial, regulatory, political and competitive developments; technological and operational difficulties encountered in connection with the activities of the Company; and other matters discussed in this news release. This list is not exhaustive of the factors that may affect any of the Company's forward-looking statements. These and other factors should be considered carefully and readers should not place undue reliance on the Company's forward-looking statements. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statement that may be made from time to time by the Company or on its behalf, except in accordance with applicable securities laws.
Contacts:
Greencastle Resources Ltd.
Anthony Roodenburg
CEO
416-367-4571 ext. 233
www.greencastleresources.com
PROVIDENCE, RI--(Marketwired - July 19, 2016) - Energy Source, a division of Revolution Lighting Technologies, today announced that it has recently completed its latest LED retrofit project for Signature Healthcare's Brockton Hospital in Massachusetts. Over the recent past, the company was awarded LED retrofit projects among northeast medical and healthcare facilities totaling $1.6M.
The project with Signature Healthcare's Brockton Hospital addressed interior and exterior medical and administrative office lighting. As part of the retrofit program Energy Source provided comprehensive turnkey services to install high efficiency LED lighting, including Revolution Lighting's LED tubes. The turnkey services assisted with all phases of project development including scope development, material selection, incentive procurement, bidding and project management. As a result of the project's success, additional LED retrofit opportunities are being considered within other campus medical facilities.
This project marks the latest healthcare related project completed by Energy Source and its parent company, Revolution Lighting. Other recently completed projects by Energy Source include Rhode Island Hospital, Miriam Hospital, Newport Hospital, Bradley Hospital, Nashoba Valley Medical St. Vincent's Hospital. This success is expected to continue as the broad adoption of LED lighting among health care facilities grows. LED lighting, which is more than 50% more efficient and lasts three times longer than fluorescent lighting, is being widely recognized among facilities managers as a key opportunity to reduce long term operational and maintenance costs.
"We wanted to introduce the latest LED lighting solutions throughout our facilities that not only improve energy use, but improve the quality of light for our employees and patients," said John P. Duraes, Director of Facilities & Engineering, Signature Healthcare Brockton Hospital. "Revolution Lighting's division, Energy Source, acted as an invested partner to deliver the most authoritative knowledge, the best solutions in the market place, the best technical expertise and seamless project experience to ensure the most visible, positive impact for our project."
"We are proud to work with Signature Healthcare and Brockton Hospital, providing comprehensive turnkey services and our market leading LED solutions to exceed their project goals," said Ron Sliney, Vice President, Energy Source. "The continued selection of Revolution Lighting by health care facilities throughout the U.S. validates the confidence in our company as a leader to transform lighting into a source of superior energy savings, quality light and well-being."
Health care in the United States, including approximately 5,700 hospital facilities, spends over $6.5 billion annually in energy to meet patient needs. With an average of 15% of total energy costs dedicated to lighting, hospitals could save more than $487M annually by incorporating LED technology, providing a significant opportunity for Revolution Lighting.
As a leading provider of LED solutions and services, Revolution Lighting partners with each customer and its approved installation contractor to ensure each project maximizes its goals. For more information about how Revolution Lighting can support your lighting retrofit project, please contact 1-877-578-2536 or email at support@rvlti.com.
About Energy Source
Energy Source, LLC is a leading provider of comprehensive energy efficiency solutions, including lighting retrofit, lighting controls, and energy management solutions. Energy Source's headquarters are located in Providence, Rhode Island, assisting its customers throughout Rhode Island, Massachusetts and greater New England area. Energy Source partners with its customers, utilizing its extensive experience to deliver the authoritative knowledge and seamless project experience to maximize project benefits and savings. For additional information, please visit www.energysource.com.
Media Contact:
Matthew Bretzius
FischTank Marketing and PR
matt@fischtankpr.com
SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 -- Medical device innovator Velano Vascular today announced that it has been named the Frost & Sullivan 2016 New Product Innovation Award winner for its disruptive PIVO blood draw device. Based on an analysis of the vascular access device market, Frost & Sullivan recognized Velano Vascular for its efforts to reduce the pain, risk, and inefficiency of traditional blood collection methods.
"It is always exciting to witness the introduction of innovation in healthcare, and especially so when it addresses a universal need that could positively impact everyone around the world," said Greg Caressi, Senior Vice President of Transformational Health at Frost & Sullivan. "Congratulations to Velano Vascular for respectfully challenging long-held industry practices for how we draw blood in a hospital setting. Their PIVO innovation has the potential to create a new and enhanced standard of care in blood collection."
Venous blood draws are one of the most common and critical, yet overlooked, practices in medicine with little improvement or innovation in recent history. With hundreds of millions of blood draws conducted annually in US hospitals alone, there is a tremendous opportunity to minimize pain and anxiety for patients, the potential for accidental injury for nurses, and inefficiencies for healthcare institutions.
Velano Vascular's PIVO is a single-use, disposable device that enables consistent blood draws from indwelling peripheral IV lines. This innovative blood collection practice aims to reduce hospitals' reliance on repeat needle sticks and central line access for blood draws. It also seeks to provide a more compassionate care experience for patients, a safer environment for caregivers, and a more financially responsible alternative for health systems.
PIVO scored an average 9.5 out of 10 possible points on the Frost & Sullivan Innovation Scorecard across 10 different criteria assessing product attributes and customer impact. In concluding its report on the 2016 Innovation award winner, Frost & Sullivan noted that "the PIVO system is expected to become the standard of care in the vascular space with its easy-to-use, affordable, high-quality products, all while facilitating the highest degree of patient satisfaction."
"We are honored to be a part of Frost & Sullivan's prestigious innovation and best practices program," said Velano Vascular chief executive Eric M. Stone. "This award further validates our vision and recognizes that a new, more humane standard of care is within our reach."
Frost & Sullivan Awards follow a 10-step process to evaluate award candidates and assess their fit with select best practice criteria. The reputation and integrity of the Awards are based on close adherence to this process. The firm's 360-degree research methodology represents the analytical rigor of its research process, offering a 360-degree-view of industry challenges, trends, and issues by integrating all 7 of Frost & Sullivan's research methodologies into an evaluation platform for benchmarking industry players and for identifying those performing at best-in-class levels.
About Velano Vascular
Velano Vascular is a medical device company committed to reducing the pain, risk, and inefficiencies of vascular access and blood collection practices. The company's revolutionary PIVO device enables needle free blood draws directly from Peripheral IV catheters, aiming to enable more compassionate care for hospital inpatients, a safer practice for caregivers, and a more financially responsible alternative for health systems. Founded by a healthcare entrepreneur and patient advocate and a physician, Velano Vascular is backed by a series of well-respected investment firms, health systems, and dozens of health-industry veterans. Velano Vascular's collaborators include several of the leading hospital systems in the United States. More information is available at www.velanovascular.com.
About Frost & Sullivan
Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, enables clients to accelerate growth and achieve best in class positions in growth, innovation, and leadership. The company's Growth Partnership Service provides the CEO and the CEO's Growth Team with disciplined research and best practice models to drive the generation, evaluation, and implementation of powerful growth strategies. Frost & Sullivan leverages almost 50 years of experience in partnering with Global 1000 companies, emerging businesses and the investment community from 31 offices on 6 continents. To join our Growth Partnership, please visit http://www.frost.com.
PRESS CONTACT:
Michael Azzano
Cosmo PR for Velano Vascular
415.596.1978
michael@cosmo-pr.com
SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 -- Industry Ventures LLC, a leading investment firm for venture capital, today announced the closing of a total of over $400 million in a pair of funds: Industry Ventures Partnership Holdings IV, L.P., a hybrid fund of funds, and Industry Ventures Direct, L.P., the firm's debut direct co-investment fund. The funds target primary commitments and early secondary purchases in smaller venture capital funds as well as direct co-investments alongside venture capital funds in which Industry has invested. The new funds bring the firm's total institutional capital under management to over $3 billion, of which $1.1 billion has been raised this year.
In addition, Industry Ventures recently was cited as a top consistent performing fund of funds manager for 2015 by Preqin, the alternative assets industry's leading source of data and intelligence. The 2015 Preqin Private Equity Performance Monitor assessed 84 firms and 776 funds from around the globe and determined the most consistent performing firms.
"Partnership Holdings IV enables our team to continue our successful strategy of investing with great managers and entrepreneurs," said Hans Swildens, CEO and Founder of Industry Ventures. "We're very excited to support, partner and work closely with some of the best seed and early-stage investors in the venture business."
"The Direct fund was established to further collaborate with our venture fund managers to be a friendly direct co-investor for post-seed and A round financings. It completes our investment platform by enabling our team to provide capital across the lifecycle of high growth tech companies and funds," added Roland Reynolds, an Industry Ventures Managing Director.
Partnership Holdings IV and Direct I enable the firm to fund new early stage venture capital partnerships and invest in early and mid-stage companies when they need more capital for growth. As a pioneer in the seed fund and emerging manager categories, the firm's 10-year track record contains investments in over 66 new venture capital partnerships, 12 co-investment funds and 26 direct co-investments. The Funds focus generally on technology investments in the software, internet infrastructure, hardware, digital education, fintech, mobile applications, digital health, and cyber security sectors. The Funds' investor base includes leading institutions representing government and corporate pension funds, insurance companies, endowments, foundations, high net worth family offices and the firm's Managing Directors.
For more on the firm's Partnership Holdings investment strategy, click here.
About Industry Ventures LLC
Industry Ventures is a leading investment firm that focuses on venture capital. The firm has three investment strategies: secondary investments, primary fund of funds investments and direct co-investments. Founded in 2000, the firm manages over $3 billion of institutional capital and is headquartered in San Francisco with an office in Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit www.industryventures.com.
(1) 2016 Preqin Global Private Equity & Venture Capital Report
Media contact
Kim Hughes
The Blueshirt Group
415-516-6187
Kim@blueshirtgroup.comACT
SAN DIEGO, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 -- (OTCQB: VEND) -- Generation NEXT Franchise Brands announced today its 2016 Q4 booking results, ending fiscal 2016 with the highest month of bookings to date and showcasing a record year that saw both consistent growth, a strong Q4 finish and the launch of a new franchise concept; Reis & Irvy's.
Generation NEXT closed out Q4 with an impressive $3,281,000 in deferred revenues. Included within the quarter was the company's strongest month to date being June, which accounted for $1,900,000 in deferred sales. The solid growth came in part from the Fresh Healthy Vending and Micro Market brand concepts, but was fueled by the addition of the company's newest franchise entity, Reis & Irvy's Frozen Yogurt Robotic Kiosks in Q4. The point-of-purchase robotic frozen yogurt robots were launched April 11th and accounted for 92 units booked and the procurement of 27 new franchisees within the last fiscal quarter.
Generation NEXT is now focusing its efforts on the development of the Reis & Irvy's concept, while dedicating resources to continue growing, and maintain and support the already established Fresh Healthy Vending franchise business.
"Fiscal 2016 has come to a close and overall I am pleased with our performance and excited about the future of our Company," says Nick Yates, Chairman of Generation NEXT Franchise Brands. "The last twelve months saw us scale Fresh Healthy Vending to 246 Franchisees operating over 3,000 healthy vending machines and micro markets. We introduced Reis & Irvy's to overwhelming demand in May and have since sold 27 new franchises for over $3.2 million in deferred revenues. This includes $1.9 million in bookings for June 2016, representing our best month of sales as a public company. In addition, we have paid down $23,000 of debt and $79,000 of interest in Q4 and have negotiated the extension of a $600,000 note, which has a feature that allows it to be converted to equity by its maker. To conclude, we are slowly but surely eliminating debt from our books, bookings are growing, we've proven our new concept to be a success and we continue to work with our current Fresh Healthy Vending franchisees to grow their businesses."
For more information on Fresh Healthy Vending, please visit www.freshvending.com or call toll free 888-902-7558. For more information on Reis & Irvy's, please visit www.reisandirvys.com or call toll free 855-385-5333.
This information is not intended as an offer to sell, or the solicitation of an offer to buy, a franchise. It is for information purposes only. No Reis & Irvy's franchises will be sold to any resident of any state until the offering has been exempted from the requirements of, or duly registered in and declared effective by, such state and the required FDD (if any) has been delivered to the prospective franchisee before the sale in compliance with applicable law. Currently, the following states in the United States regulate the offer and sale of franchises: California, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin. If you reside in one of these states, or even if you reside elsewhere, you may have certain rights under applicable franchise laws or regulations.
Generation NEXT Franchise Brands
Generation NEXT Franchise Brands, based in San Diego, California, is a publicly traded company on the OTC Markets trading under the symbol: VEND. Generation NEXT Franchise Brands is parent company to Fresh Healthy Vending LLC, the market's leading healthy-choice vending machine franchise, Reis and Irvy's LLC, the world's first robotic frozen yogurt vending kiosk and 19 Degrees, a corporate-focused frozen yogurt kiosk brand. The Company hosts a combined total of 274 active franchisees throughout the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico and the Bahamas, and continually looks to partner with like-minded entrepreneurs who share its vision.
Generation NEXT Franchise Brand's stock is traded on the OTC Markets under the symbol: VEND.
Cautionary note on forward-looking statements
Except for historical information contained in this release, statements in this release may constitute forward-looking statements regarding assumptions, projections, expectations, targets, intentions or beliefs about future events that are based on management's belief, as well as assumptions made by, and information currently available to, management. While the Company believes that expectations are based upon reasonable assumptions, there can be no assurances that goals, results and strategy will be realized. Numerous factors, including risks and uncertainties, terms and availability of financing, may affect actual results and may cause results to differ materially from those expressed in forward-looking statements made by the Company or on its behalf. In addition to statements, which explicitly describe risks and uncertainties, readers are urged to consider statements labeled with such terms as "believes," "belief," "expects," "intends," "feels," "anticipates," "proposes," "proposed," or "plans" to be uncertain and forward-looking. More detailed information on these and additional factors that could affect Generation NEXT's actual results are described in Generation NEXT's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Form 10-Q's for the quarterly periods ended March 31, 2016, December 31, 2015 and September 30, 2015, and its annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2015. All forward-looking statements in this news release speak only as of the date of this news release and are based on Generation NEXT's current beliefs and expectations. Generation NEXT undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.
Media Contact:
Generation NEXT Franchise Brands
info@gennextbrands.com
DALLAS, TX -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 -- Calpian, Inc. (OTC PINK: CLPI), is scheduled to present at RedChip's Small Stocks, Big Money Investor Conference on Wednesday, July 20, 2016, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern time. The presentation can be viewed at www.RedChip.com. A live Q&A session will follow the investor presentation.
RedChip's Small Stocks, Big Money Investor Conference brings together investors and executives of leading microcap companies, representing a broad spectrum of industries and sectors, including oil & gas, technology, mining, healthcare, consumer goods, energy, and more. More than 10,000 investors attend RedChip's microcap conference series each year.
No registration is required to participate in the conference. Start times are subject to change.
About Calpian
Calpian, Inc. is a global mobile payments technology and processing company offering mobile payment services through Indian subsidiary MoneyOnMobile. MoneyOnMobile is a mobile payment service provider that enables Indian consumers to use their mobile phones to pay for goods and services, or transfer funds from one cell phone to another using simple SMS text functionality. Read about Calpian and MoneyOnMobile in The New York Times at New York Times - MoneyOnMobile.
Safe Harbor Statement
This press release contains forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. With the exception of historical information, the matters discussed in this presentation are forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. The actual future results of Calpian, Inc. could differ significantly from those statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include risks and uncertainties such as the inability to finance the company's operations, inability to hire and retain qualified personnel, and changes in the general economic climate, as well as the risk factors disclosed in Calpian, Inc.'s Form 10-K filed on December 1, 2015. Calpian, Inc. may, in some cases, use terms such as "anticipates," "continue," "estimates," "predicts," "believes," "potential," "proposed," "expects," "plans," "intends," "may," "could," "should," "might," "will," or other words that convey uncertainty of future events or outcomes to identify these forward-looking statements. These statements are only predictions. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, such statements should not be regarded as a representation by Calpian, Inc. or any other person, that such forward-looking statements will be achieved. Calpian, Inc. undertakes no duty to update any of the forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. In light of the foregoing, readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements. This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of offers to buy any securities of any entity.
Investor Relations Contact:
Harold Montgomery
CEO
Calpian, Inc.
214-837-2765
hmontgomery@calpian.com
SAN JOSE, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 -- PatternEx, the pioneer in Artificial Intelligence for information security, today announced it will be hosting a workshop during the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. The workshop will be led by two AI security experts with years in the field, and will demystify Artificial Intelligence before exploring its application in cyber defense.
Dr. Kalyan Veeramachaneni is currently a research scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and has been conducting research in the field for years. He will be joined by Dr. Ignacio Arnaldo, the Chief Data Scientist at PatternEx and former researcher at MIT CSAIL. Together they will facilitate an interactive, vendor agnostic discussion which will provide a foundation for understanding emerging artificial intelligence solutions in InfoSec.
"During the time that we have been talking with security leaders from around the world we have found a strong interest in the potential of AI in InfoSec, but there is too much jargon and marketing speak out there," comments Travis Reed, CMO for PatternEx. "This workshop will start at a high level and then take a deep dive; explaining what AI is and isn't, how it works in the context of security, how it fits into existing security postures, and the ROI that can be expected. It's a workshop that CISOs have been asking for."
The session will be held from 11am to 1pm on August 3rd at the Luxor Towers. Attendance is limited. Please click here to request an invitation.
For those who would prefer one-on-one sessions with Dr. Veeramachaneni and Dr. Arnaldo, they are planning meetings August 2nd in the Mandalay Bay at the Voyager Boardroom, Level 3 in the South Convention Hall from 9am to 5pm. They will also be available from Monday through Thursday at the Luxor. Please click here to request a 1:1 session.
About PatternEx:
PatternEx's Threat Prediction Platform is changing the nature of Information Security. Powered by patent-pending Active Contextual Modeling technology, the Platform combines artificial intelligence and analyst intuition in a revolutionary methodology that teaches software to identify malicious intent to defend against cyber attacks in real time, at scale across the enterprise. Founded in 2014, PatternEx is headquartered in Silicon Valley.
For more information go to www.patternex.com.
Follow PatternEx: Twitter and LinkedIn.
NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - July 19, 2016) - Event Cardio Group, Inc. (OTCQB: ECGI), whose core product is the NowCardio' Advanced Ambulatory Arrhythmia Monitoring System, has sold 2,000,000 shares of its common stock and 1,000,000 warrants pursuant to subscription agreements ("Agreements") with two Australian investors. The $300,000 (.15 cents a share) was invested by Rod Sutherland, who invested $150,000 directly into ECGI through his pension plan, Polyco Pty Ltd ATF Sutherland Super Fund. The balance was invested by Mr. Sutherland in Mepac Asia Pacific Pty Ltd., the Australian distributor of NowCardio', which invested the funds in ECGI.
The Agreements provide for the sale of an aggregate of 2,000,000 shares of Event Cardio Group's common stock, together with warrants (the "Warrants") to purchase an additional 1,000,000 shares of common stock, for a total purchase price of $US 300,000. The Warrants may be exercised for a period commencing on the date of issuance and ending on December 31, 2019, at an initial exercise price of $US 0.25 per share.
John Bentivoglio, CEO and President of Event Cardio Group, stated, "We are thankful for the continued support of Medpac and welcome Rod Sutherland as a new shareholder. This investment comes at a critical juncture as the company achieves several milestones, including our recent acquisition of National Cardiac Monitoring Center and Health Canada's clearance of our NowCardio' heart monitoring system."
About Event Cardio Group, Inc.
Event Cardio Group, Inc. is a developer of medical diagnostic equipment that focuses on the detection, and preventive treatment, of high-risk diseases. The Company's core product is NowCardio', an Advanced Ambulatory Arrhythmia Monitoring System, which offers the combined functionality of holter monitoring, event recording, and mobile cardiac telemetry simultaneously within in a single device. For more information on the company please visit www.eventcardiogroup.com.
Statements in this release may be regarded, in certain instances, as "forward-looking statements" pursuant to certain sections of the Securities Act 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act 1934, respectively. "Forward-looking statements" are based on expectations, estimates and projections at the time the statements are made, and involve risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results or events to differ materially from those currently anticipated, including, but not limited to delays, difficulties, changed strategies, or unanticipated factors or circumstances affecting Event Cardio Group, Inc. and its business. There can be no assurance that such forward-looking statements will ever prove to be accurate and readers should not place undue reliance on any such forward-looking statements contained herein. Event Cardio Group, Inc. will not republish revised forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.
Contact:
John Bentivoglio
President & CEO
212-321-0091 USA
416-571-6264 Canada
johnb@eventcardiogroup.com
Media Relations:
Dian Griesel Int'l.
Laura Radocaj or Susan Forman
212-825-3210
OTTAWA, ON--(Marketwired - July 19, 2016) - C-COM Satellite Systems Inc. (TSX VENTURE: CMI), a leading global provider of mobile auto-deploying satellite antenna systems, announced today financial results for its second quarter ended May 31, 2016.
The company has generated revenues of $1,804,131 and a net after tax profit of $15,811 or 0 cents per share. This compared to revenues of $3,101,579 and a net after tax profit of $313,201 or 1 cent per share as reported in Q2 2015, representing a decrease of 41.8% and a decrease of 94.6% respectively.
The working capital of the Company has decreased by 0.3% to 19,922,385 at May 31, 2016 as compared to $19,983,993 at May 31, 2015.
The Company also announced the payment of its quarterly eligible dividend in the amount of $0.0125 per common share payable on August 18, 2016 to all shareholders of record as of August 4, 2016. Based on the closing price of $1.16 per share on July 18, 2016, this dividend represents a yield of 4.31% on an annualized basis. This is the Company's 21 st consecutive quarter of profitability and 17 th consecutive dividend paying quarter. The Company ended the quarter with a strong cash position of over $15 Million and free of debt.
"C-COM continues to persevere in the face of strong global macroeconomic headwinds," said Leslie Klein, President and CEO of C-COM Satellite Systems Inc. "The quarter was disappointing, but the numbers reflect some delays in orders that have already been booked into Q3. Weakness in North America, Europe and Latin America, as each of the regions face their own dilemmas, weighed on sales," Klein continued.
The company did note some uptick in orders and prospects from the extremely quiet Oil & Gas markets, as well as a minor resurgence in Asia and new sales from parts of Africa that have never ordered mobile antenna systems.
"The company remains in a very strong financial position and we continue to push resources towards R&D for our extremely innovative, and potentially game changing, future antenna design. We remain very excited about both the short and long term prospects of our business, and the marketplace in general," Klein continued.
C-COM continues to develop new products for new markets and is expanding its worldwide reseller network for its proprietary iNetVu Mobile antenna systems. One of the new products the Company is developing is an in-motion antenna, which will deliver broadband Internet over satellite into vehicles and trains while in full motion. This new product will work with the most advanced Ka and Ku band high throughput satellites. C-COM also continues to establish new partnerships with companies around the world interested in combining the capabilities of the iNetVu antennas with the products and services they offer.
About C-COM Satellite Systems Inc.
C-COM Satellite Systems Inc. is a leader in the development, manufacture and deployment of commercial grade mobile satellite-based technology for the delivery of two-way high-speed Internet, VoIP and Video services into vehicles. C-COM has developed a number of proprietary Mobile auto-deploying (iNetVu ) antennas that deliver broadband over satellite into vehicles while stationary virtually anywhere where one can drive. The iNetVu Mobile antennas have also been adapted to be airline checkable and easily transportable. More than 7000 C-COM antennas have been deployed in 103 countries around the world in vertical markets such as Oil & Gas Exploration, Military Communications, Disaster Management, SNG, Emergency Communications, Cellular Backhaul, Telemedicine, Mobile Banking, and others. The Company's satellite-based products are known worldwide for their high quality, reliability and cost-effectiveness.
C-COM is also involved in the design and development of a new generation of Ka-band (communications on the move) antennas, which will deliver satellite broadband solutions into vehicles while in motion. More information is available at: www.c-comsat.com
iNetVu is a registered trademark of C-COM Satellite Systems Inc.
Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
Forward Looking Statements
This news release contains forward-looking information. These statements relate to future events or future performance and reflect management's current expectations and assumptions. A number of factors could cause actual events, performance or results to differ materially from the events, performance and results discussed in the forward-looking statements. New orders anticipated by C-COM Satellite Systems Inc. may not be received and current orders may be cancelled. New products and services under development may not be released or may not gain market acceptance. Any of those events could have an effect on future performance and C-COM Satellite Systems Inc.'s ability to achieve the results mentioned above. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date hereof and C-COM Satellite Systems Inc. does not assume any obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances.
Contact:
Investor Relations
C-COM Satellite Systems Inc.
Tel: (613) 745-4110 ext. 4950
Fax: (613) 745-7144
lklein@c-comsat.com
SAN MATEO, CA--(Marketwired - July 19, 2016) - In an industry first, Farsight Security, Inc. today announced Brand Watch, a breakthrough technology that can monitor company brands across the Internet to help organizations protect their brand by defending against phishing, counterfeiting and other cyber threats.
Brand Watch, along with DNS Watch, also announced today, will debut at Black Hat USA 2016, taking place July 30 th - August 4 th , 2016 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. Farsight created both "Watch" products using innovative filtering techniques to make real-time Internet intelligence more accessible and actionable than ever before.
Today criminals create thousands of domains similar to marquis brands, from large corporations to popular consumer products, to use for nefarious purposes. Brand Watch puts control of your brand -- and your business -- back into your hands.
"Farsight provides the world's largest view of the changing Internet. Brand Watch allows organizations to monitor and discover infringing domains and malicious host names targeting their business, partners and users -- in real-time," said Farsight Security CEO and Internet pioneer Dr. Paul Vixie. "Farsight remains committed to continuing to develop new solutions to help our customers quickly and accurately counter cyber threats and reduce risks to their organization."
Brand Watch: How It Works
Brand Watch is built upon Farsight's flagship Security Information Exchange (SIE) platform, a highly scalable data-sharing platform in which data is collected, aggregated, processed, and rebroadcast in real-time. Using Brand Watch, organizations can set their own pre-defined parameters to "watch" specific domains and hostnames and be alerted any time their brands, or lookalike domains, are first detected. It will look at the DNS label(s) and perform transformations and computations on the strings with the goal of determining "how similar" a DNS label or fully qualified domain name ("FQDN") is to a specified set of brands.
Brand Watch Use Cases
Phishing: Lookalike malicious domains used to create websites or emails to lure unsuspecting users for fraud and other cybercrime
Brand Infringement: Unauthorized use of a trademark
Brand Dilution: Brand is maliciously used diminishing its perceived quality
Brandjacking: An activity whereby someone acquires or otherwise assumes the online identity of another entity for the purposes of acquiring that organization's brand equity
Brand Typocamping: Registration of a "typo domain" that is lexically similar to an entity's brand with the intention of launching an attack listed above
Pricing & Availability
Brand Watch is available now. Pricing starts at $19,500. For more information on subscription services, contact a Farsight Security account executive at sales@farsightsecurity.com or call +1-650-489-7919. In addition to Brand Watch, DNS Watch is also available. Additional Watch products are planned for 2017.
About Farsight Security, Inc.
Farsight Security, Inc. provides the world's largest real-time threat intelligence on changes to the Internet. Leveraging proprietary technology with over 200,000 observations/second, Farsight provides the Internet's view of an organization and how it is changing purposely, inadvertently or maliciously. For more information on Farsight Security, Inc., please visit https://farsightsecurity.com.
Karen Burke
For Farsight Security, Inc.
kburke@fsi.io
With this critical geophysical information in hand, Zadar now intends to prioritize locations for exploration drill holes "that will test in situ lithium concentrations within brines hosted beneath the WSP claims through a drill hole supported, fluid sampling program.
The WSP gravity survey was conducted by Hasbrouck Geophysics, Inc. from June 12 through June 23, 2016. The survey included a total of 126 gravity stations acquired over the entire WSP claims area with a LaCoste & Romberg Model G gravity meter. The data were acquired along fourteen lines nominally separated by 250 meters, at intervals of 125 and 250 meters.
"Maps and visuals highlighting the results of the WSP gravity survey will be made available on the Company's website.
About the WSP and CR Lithium Projects:
The WSP project is located immediately adjacent to the Rockwood/Albamarle claims in North Clayton Valley and covers approximately 425 hectares, including a gravity low anomaly interpreted to represent a basinal low permissive to host brines containing elevated concentrations of lithium. This project's merit is supported by a USGS test hole (Drillhole CV-2) located ~600m from the eastern claim boundary that reported a 55ppm Li maximum content from analyzed fluid samples.
The CR project lies approximately 18 kilometres southeast of Silver Peak, Nevada and covers over 330 hectares of an isolated and un-drilled basin which has the potential to host a similar lithium brine environment by virtue of its proximal location to the possible source of the lithium within the Clayton Valley system. This later project has also been the subject of a suite of initial gravity surveys and shows a basinal feature, which if closed, could host brines with elevated lithium concentrations.
Zadar Ventures Ltd. is a Resource Company focused on the acquisition and exploration of economically viable green energy resources in jurisdictions favorable to mining and industry. For more information we invite you to visit the company's website at www.zadarventures.com.
The Company is looking forward to an active and accretive 2016.
ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Paul D. Gray, P. Geo.
President
Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Service Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. This press release may contain certain forward-looking information. All statements included herein, other than statements of historical fact, forward-looking information and such information involves various risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such information will prove to be accurate, and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such information. A description of assumptions used to develop such forward-looking information and a description of risk factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking information can be found in the company's disclosure documents on the SEDAR website at www.sedar.com. The company does not undertake to update any forward-looking information except in accordance with applicable securities laws.
ZADAR VENTURES LTD.
1100-888 Dunsmuir St
Vancouver, B.C. V6C 3K4
Phone: 604-682-1643
ALBANY, NY -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 -- FirstLight Fiber, a leading fiber-optic bandwidth infrastructure services provider operating in New York and Northern New England, announced today that Colby-Sawyer College, a comprehensive college that integrates the liberal arts and sciences with professional preparation, has chosen FirstLight over several other vendors to upgrade its Internet services to 1 Gbps. Located in the Lake Sunapee region of New Hampshire, Colby-Sawyer College sought FirstLight's fiber-based Internet services to improve connectivity and enhance the private college's administrative services and academic resources.
"In accordance with Colby-Sawyer College's mission of preparing its students for professions and lives of ongoing learning, it was important that the college have the bandwidth and connectivity necessary to support a 21st century educational experience," said Kenneth Kochien, director of Information Resources at Colby-Sawyer College. "We chose FirstLight because it promises a reliable service paired with competitive pricing along with outstanding support. We look forward to building a strong working relationship with the FirstLight team."
FirstLight's fiber-based, dedicated, symmetrical Internet service offers connection speeds up to 10 Gbps. The network's industry leading design is architected with the fewest hop counts possible, which lowers latency and improves the overall user experience.
"FirstLight is pleased to solve the growing bandwidth needs of leading educational institutions such as Colby-Sawyer College," stated Kurt Van Wagenen, President and CEO of FirstLight Fiber. "With initiatives such as distance learning, e-learning and videoconferencing enriching the learning environment, colleges and universities require a scalable, secure and reliable network to support them. FirstLight is proud to provide this critical connectivity, and to help Colby-Sawyer College stay ahead of the technology curve."
FirstLight provides a comprehensive portfolio of secure, scalable telecommunications solutions combined with a knowledgeable staff experienced in working with colleges and universities to support advanced voice/VoIP, multicast, video and distance learning applications for single and multi- site institutions.
About FirstLight Fiber
FirstLight Fiber headquartered in Albany, New York, provides fiber-optic data, Internet, data center and voice services to enterprise and carrier customers in New York and Northern New England with connectivity to Canada connecting nearly 2,000 locations in service with an additional 14,000 locations serviceable by our 260,000 fiber mile network. FirstLight offers a robust suite of advanced telecommunications products featuring a comprehensive portfolio of high bandwidth connectivity solutions including Ethernet, wavelengths and dark fiber as well as dedicated Internet access solutions, data center services, and voice services such as SIP trunks, virtual PBX, and traditional TDM solutions. FirstLight's clientele includes national cellular providers and wireline carriers and many leading enterprises, spanning high tech manufacturing and research, hospitals and healthcare, banking and financial, secondary education, colleges and universities, and local and state governments.
To learn more about FirstLight, visit www.firstlight.net, or follow the company on Twitter and LinkedIn.
About Colby-Sawyer College
Colby-Sawyer College is a comprehensive college that integrates the liberal arts and sciences with professional preparation. The college's faculty, staff and students strive for excellence in an engaged teaching and learning community that fosters students' academic, intellectual and personal growth. With a strong emphasis on learning outcomes, including breadth and depth of knowledge, self-growth, creative and critical thinking, and effective communication, Colby-Sawyer prepares students to thrive post-graduation and make a positive impact upon a dynamic, diverse and interdependent world.
Founded in 1837, Colby-Sawyer is located in the scenic Lake Sunapee Region of central New Hampshire. Learn more about the college's vibrant teaching and learning community at www.colby-sawyer.edu.
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CANBERA (dpa-AFX) - The U.S. dollar drifted higher against the other major currencies in European trading on Tuesday. The greenback firmed to a 6-day high of 0.9863 against the Swiss franc and a 4-day high of 1.1024 versus the euro, from Monday's closing values of 0.9822 and 1.1075, respectively. The greenback that ended yesterday's trading at 1.3253 against the pound climbed to a 5-day high of 1.3121. The greenback was trading higher at 106.19 against the Japanese yen, edging closer to pierce its early near 4-week high of 106.33. The greenback spiked up to a 3-week high of 0.7010 against the kiwi, 6-day high of 1.3045 against the loonie and near a 2-week high of 0.7487 against the aussie, up from Monday's closing quotes of 0.7115, 1.2943 and 0.7590, respectively. The greenback is likely to find resistance around 1.00 against the franc, 1.09 against the euro, 1.30 against the pound, 108.00 against the yen, 0.69 against the kiwi, 1.32 against the loonie and 0.73 against the aussie. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX
Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
VANCOUVER, BC--(Marketwired - July 19, 2016) - Sarama Resources Ltd. (TSX VENTURE: SWA) (the "Company" or "Sarama") is pleased to advise that Savary Gold Corp. ("Savary"), the operator of the Karankasso Project Joint Venture 1 between Sarama and Savary, provided an update on July 19, 2016 of the final drill results from the Q2, 2016 drilling campaign. The drilling was undertaken across multiple target zones within the 47km-long mineralised corridor situated within the Karankasso Project area. Highlights from Savary's release are presented below.
Highlights
43 holes totalling 6,579 metres were completed during the second quarter of 2016. The drilling was comprised of diamond core ("DH") and reverse-circulation ("RC") and a summary of select results are presented below.
A number of drill holes returned significant results including*:
DH-16-04 11.6m @ 1.34 g/t Au from 59.8m S-Nosa Zone DH-16-07 13.0m @ 3.82 g/t Au from 270.1m Karangosso Zone DH-16-09 28.0m @ 1.73 g/t Au from 140.0m Karangosso Zone RC-16-07 7.0m @ 3.98 g/t Au from 108.0m Karangosso Zone RC-16-22 7.0m @ 1.46 g/t Au from 136.0m Karangosso Zone RC-16-12 6.0m @ 2.77 g/t Au from 89.0m NWQV Zone RC-16-23 4.0m @ 12.24 g/t Au from 68.0m Splay 2 Zone 7.0m @ 9.75 g/t Au from 85.0m * True widths are estimated at 70% to 90% of drilled length
Savary stated that the drill program had successfully extended gold mineralization along strike at Kueredougou West Trend, Diosso South and Kueredougou West Zones and the Karangosso Zone, which was also extended to depth. Further details of these drill results, including sampling and QA/QC procedures, are contained in Savary's news release dated July 19, 2016.
Sarama's President and CEO, Andrew Dinning commented:
"We are pleased with the results of Savary Gold's second quarter 2016 drill campaign which has identified and extended a number of areas of mineralisation and continues to support our belief that the southern Hounde Gold Belt is a great place to be.
Sarama is leading the discovery, development and consolidation of Burkina Faso's South Hounde Gold Belt where we continue to work with our partners to progress our interests in the area. The pending addition of Orezone's Bondi deposit will further strengthen our position with our three adjoining projects, which collectively host in excess of 3 million ounces of gold between them."
Savary's July 19, 2016 news release contains a complete list of results and further information on Savary's drill campaign on the Karankasso JV Project.
ABOUT SARAMA RESOURCES LTD
Sarama Resources Ltd (TSX VENTURE: SWA) is a West African focused gold explorer with substantial landholdings in Burkina Faso. Sarama is focused on consolidating under-explored landholdings in Burkina Faso and other established mining jurisdictions.
Sarama's flagship properties are situated within the Company's South Hounde Project area in south-west Burkina Faso. Located within the prolific Hounde greenstone belt, Sarama's exploration programs have built on significant early success to deliver an inferred mineral resource estimate of 2.1 Moz gold 2,3 . Acacia Mining plc is earning up to a 70% interest in the South Hounde Project by satisfying certain conditions, including funding earn-in expenditures of up to US$14 million, over a 4-year earn-in period and may acquire an additional 5% interest, for an aggregate 75% interest in the Project, upon declaration of a minimum mineral reserve of 1.6 million ounces of gold.
Sarama holds a 33.7% participating interest in the Karankasso Project Joint Venture which is situated adjacent to the Company's South Hounde Project in Burkina Faso and is a JV between Sarama and Savary Gold Corp. ("Savary"). Savary is the operator of the JV and in October 2015, declared a maiden inferred mineral resource estimate of 671,000 ounces of contained gold 4,5 at the Karankasso Project.
Sarama has also agreed to acquire a 100% interest in the Bondi gold deposit from Orezone Gold Corporation (refer news release May 24, 2016). Bondi has a historical estimate of mineral resources of 0.3Moz Au (measured and indicated) and 0.1Moz Au (inferred) 6,7 .
Together, the South Hounde Project, Bondi deposit and the Karankasso Project form a cluster of advanced gold deposits, within trucking distance of one another, which potentially offers a development option for a multi-source fed central processing facility in the southern Hounde Belt region of Burkina Faso.
Incorporated in 2010, the Company's Board and management team have a proven track record in Africa and a strong history in the discovery and development of large-scale gold deposits. Sarama is well positioned to build on its current success with a sound exploration strategy across its property portfolio.
CAUTION REGARDING FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS
Information in this news release that is not a statement of historical fact constitutes forward-looking information. Such forward-looking information includes statements regarding the use of proceeds from the private placement, for drilling and geochemical and geophysical surveys at the South Hounde Project, the Earn-In Agreement with Acacia, including the amounts that may be spent on exploration and interests in the South Hounde Project that may be earned by Acacia upon making certain expenditures and estimating a minimum reserve, the potential to expand the present oxide component of the Company's existing estimated mineral resources" future exploration plans and the potential development of the Bondi, Karankasso and South Hounde Projects on a combined basis. Actual results, performance or achievements of the Company may vary from the results suggested by such forward-looking statements due to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors. Such factors include, among others, that the business of exploration for gold and other precious minerals involves a high degree of risk and is highly speculative in nature; Mineral Resources are not Mineral Reserves, they do not have demonstrated economic viability, and there is no certainty that they can be upgraded to Mineral Reserves through continued exploration; few properties that are explored are ultimately developed into producing mines; geological factors; the actual results of current and future exploration; changes in project parameters as plans continue to be evaluated, as well as those factors disclosed in the Company's publicly filed documents. There can be no assurance that any mineralisation that is discovered will be proven to be economic, or that future required regulatory licensing or approvals will be obtained. However, the Company believes that the assumptions and expectations reflected in the forward-looking information are reasonable. Assumptions have been made regarding, among other things, Acacia's continued funding of exploration activities, the Company's ability to carry on its exploration activities, the sufficiency of funding, the timely receipt of required approvals, the price of gold and other precious metals, that the Company will not be affected by adverse political events, the ability of the Company to operate in a safe, efficient and effective manner and the ability of the Company to obtain further financing as and when required and on reasonable terms. Readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information.
Sarama does not undertake to update any forward-looking information, except as required by applicable laws.
Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
QUALIFIED PERSONS' STATEMENT
Scientific or technical information in this news release that relates to the preparation of the Company's mineral resource estimate for the South Hounde Project is based on information compiled or approved by Adrian Shepherd. Adrian Shepherd is an employee of Cube Consulting Pty Ltd and is considered to be independent of Sarama Resources Ltd. Adrian Shepherd is a Chartered Professional Member in good standing of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy and has sufficient experience which is relevant to the commodity, style of mineralisation under consideration and activity which he is undertaking to qualify as a Qualified Person under National Instrument 43-101. Adrian Shepherd consents to the inclusion in this news release of the information, in the form and context in which it appears.
Scientific or technical information in this news release that relates to the preparation of the Karankasso Project's mineral resource estimate is based on information compiled or approved by Eugene Puritch and Antoine Yassa. Eugene Puritch and Antoine Yassa are employees of P&E Mining Consultants Inc. and are considered to be independent of Savary Gold Corp. and Sarama Resources Ltd. Antoine Yassa is a member in good standing of the Ordre des Geologues du Quebec and Eugene Puritch is a member in good standing of Professional Engineers Ontario. Eugene Puritch and Antoine Yassa have sufficient experience which is relevant to the commodity, style of mineralisation under consideration and activity which they are undertaking to qualify as a Qualified Person under National Instrument 43-101. Eugene Puritch and Antoine Yassa consent to the inclusion in this news release of the information, in the form and context in which it appears.
Scientific or technical information in this news release, in respect of the Bondi gold deposit relating to mineral resource and exploration information drawn from the Technical Report prepared for Orezone on that deposit has been approved by Guy Scherrer. Guy Scherrer is an employee of Sarama Resources Ltd and is a member in good standing of the Ordre des Geologues du Quebec and has sufficient experience which is relevant to the commodity, style of mineralisation under consideration and activity which he is undertaking to qualify as a Qualified Person under National Instrument 43-101. Guy Scherrer consents to the inclusion in this report of the information, in the form and context in which it appears.
1 Sarama has 33.7% and Savary Gold has 66.3% relative ownership interests as of December 31, 2015
2 43.0 Mt @ 1.5 g/t Au (reported above cut-off grades ranging 0.3-2.2 g/t Au, reflecting the mining methods and processing flowsheets assumed to assess the likelihood of the inferred mineral resources having reasonable prospects for eventual economic extraction)
3 The effective date of the Company's inferred mineral resource estimate is February 4, 2016. For further information regarding the mineral resource estimate please refer to the technical report titled "NI 43-101 Independent Technical Report South Hounde Project Update, Bougouriba and Ioba Provinces, Burkina Faso", dated March 31, 2016. The technical report is available under Sarama Resources Ltd.'s profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.
4 9.2 Mt @ 2.3 g/t Au (at a 0.5 g/t Au cut-off)
5 The effective date of the Karankasso Project JV mineral resource estimate is October 7, 2015. For further information regarding the mineral resource estimate please refer to the technical report titled "Technical Report and Resource Estimate on the Karankasso Project, Burkina Faso", dated October 7, 2015. The technical report is available under Savary Gold Corp's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.
6 4.1Mt @ 2.1g/t Au for 282,000 oz Au (measured and indicated) and 2.5Mt @ 1.8g/t Au for 149,700 oz Au (inferred), reported at a 0.5 g/t Au cut-off
7 The effective date of the historical estimate of the Bondi deposit mineral resource estimate is February 20, 2009. For further information regarding the mineral resource estimate please refer to the technical report titled "Technical Report on the Mineral Resource of the Bondigui Gold Project", dated February 20, 2009. The technical report is available under Orezone Gold Corporation's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.
For further information on the Company's activities, please contact:
Andrew Dinning or Paul Schmiede
e: info@saramaresources.com
t: +61 (0) 8 9363 7600
BERLIN (dpa-AFX) - German economic sentiment plunged to a level last seen in late 2012 in July, hurt by the surprise 'Brexit' vote and the consequent uncertainty for the economy, a closely watched survey revealed Tuesday.
The ZEW Indicator of Economic Sentiment for Germany plummeted to -6.8 from 19.2 in June, a monthly survey from ZEW showed.
The latest reading was the lowest since November 2012 and well below its long-term average of 24.3 points. Economists had forecast a score of 9.
The sharp decline in July is no reliable signal that economic activity will soon decelerate significantly, as the financial analysts surveyed by the ZEW tended to overestimate the effects of certain events on the economy in the past, Ralph Solveen at Commerzbank, said.
Jennifer McKeown at Capital Economics said the survey supports the assessment that the growth will slow in the coming quarters. The economist expects the largest euro area economy to expand 1.5 percent this year.
'The Brexit vote has surprised the majority of financial market experts. Uncertainty about the vote's consequences for the German economy is largely responsible for the substantial decline in economic sentiment,' ZEW President Achim Wambach said.
'In particular, concerns about the export prospects and the stability of the European banking and financial system are likely to be a burden on the economic outlook,' said Wambach.
In the June 23 referendum, 52 percent Britons voted to leave the EU in a surprise and historic move.
The current conditions index of the survey declined to 49.8 in July from 54.5. Economists had expected a score of 51.8.
Financial market experts' confidence concerning the economic development of the currency bloc also weakened notably in July.
The ZEW Indicator of Economic Sentiment for the Eurozone shed 34.9 points to reach minus 14.7 points. The indicator for the current economic situation declined 2.4 points to minus 12.4 points.
Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX
Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de
BRUSSELS (dpa-AFX) - The Commerce Department is set to release its housing starts and building permits reports for July at 8:30 am ET Tuesday. Economists expect housing starts to come in at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.170 million units, while building permits are expected at 1.150 million units. The greenback climbed against its major rivals before these reports. The greenback was worth 1.1030 against the euro, 106.25 against the yen, 1.3146 against the pound and 1.0876 against the franc as of 8:25 am ET. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX
Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
SEATTLE, WA -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 --SinglePoint Inc. (OTC: SING) is pleased to announce that Milost Advisors has identified acquisition targets for a leveraged buyout by SinglePoint, in addition to funding necessary to execute the acquisition(s) alongside its SEC registration for listing on the OTCQB.
We expect to announce news on acquisitions and financing in the near future.
The Company is nearing completion on the audit for SinglePoint's Form 10 with MaloneBailey, a PCAOB firm based in Houston, Texas. Research firm L. Alan Davis has issued a favorable detailed market analysis on SinglePoint that shareholders are encouraged to review.
CEO Greg Lambrecht comments: "This has been an exciting year for SinglePoint. In addition to our equity ownership in DFS enterprise, DraftFury, our stock price has also incurred organic growth since beginning of Q2 and I'm optimistic it will follow suit moving forward as we explore the acquisition targets identified by Milost Advisors."
In June 2016, SinglePoint announced that it had engaged Milost Advisors to pursue acquisitions and financing facilities toward funding acquisitions, as well as to provide working capital. Milost Advisors, as a lead advisor, has stated they will assist the Company in the acquisition of undervalued companies with annual revenues in excess of $50m.
As well, SinglePoint has issued a Letter of Intent to acquire the assets and technology of Mobile Bidding Technologies, Inc. (MBI) including its primary asset, Text2Bid, which Is an industry leading auction software company generating over $10 million a year in donations for its users.
SinglePoint intends to finalize the MBI acquisition there pursuant to completion of audit and filing of Form 10.
SinglePoint Inc. began as a full-service mobile technology and marketing provider. Through diversification of its own model into horizontal markets, SinglePoint recognized the strength in acquiring interest in undervalued subsidiaries in other markets, such as Daily Fantasy Sports, to create a diversified holding base. We are currently exploring the benefits of taking controlling interests in undervalued cash-flow positive, yet high potential companies and assets where we have the ability to be active and influence strategy and direction.
Milost Advisors is a global investment banking firm for mid to large market clients and entrepreneurs. Our team experience continues to help us to offer our clients comprehensive advisory services including M&A, capital markets, Research as well as restructuring and strategic advisory.
Our senior partners have each over 20 years international investment banking experience having worked for investment banking firms in Johannesburg, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, London and New York as well as on transactions in most geographies. In addition, they have also held corporate leadership positions in the industry. They combine cross over skills in restructuring, legal advisory, capital markets, and funding activities.
The firm and its partners have a broad network in the business and funding community both locally and in other financial centres. We combine relationships with corporates with access to specialist equity and debt investors, be it private or public markets capital. We draw on these networks to craft bespoke as well as innovative financing and funding solutions free of potential conflicts.
Forward-Looking Statements
Certain statements in this news release may contain forward-looking information within the meaning of Rule 175 under the Securities Act of 1933 and Rule 3b-6 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and are subject to the safe harbor created by those rules. All statements, other than statements of fact, included in this release, including, without limitation, statements regarding potential future plans and objectives of the Company, are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements.
Technical complications, which may arise, could prevent the prompt implementation of any strategically significant plan(s) outlined above. The Company undertakes no duty to revise or update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this release.
Contact:
Investor Relations
SinglePoint, Inc.
Greg Lambrecht
602-481-1544
OXFORD, UNITED KINGDOM -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 --
Always-on encryption follows files wherever they go
Users can easily collaborate on encrypted documents from Windows, Mac, iOS and Android platforms and devices
Businesses can accelerate compliance with EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), HIPAA and other required data privacy standards
Sophos SafeGuard 8 is enabled to directly communicate with endpoint protection as part of Sophos' synchronized security strategy
Sophos (LSE: SOPH), a global leader in network and endpoint security, today announced Sophos SafeGuard Encryption 8, a new synchronized encryption solution that protects data against theft from malware, attackers or accidental leaks. All organizations can now choose to adopt the best practice of "always-on" file-level encryption to protect data accessed from mobile devices, laptops, desktops, on-prem networks and cloud-based file sharing applications. Sophos is the first vendor to provide persistent, transparent and proactive encryption that protects files across Windows, Mac, iOS or Android platforms by default.
Tweet This: Classified, unclassified? Now it can all be simply protected by default
Until now, the management and adoption of encryption has been viewed as too complex and is not uniformly adopted. According to the Sophos survey, The State of Encryption Today(1), only 29 percent of IT managers said they always encrypt smartphones and only 43 percent of Macs, leaving high levels of exposure across an organization.
"Full disk encryption alone only protects data in the event of the theft or loss of a laptop or mobile device. But data travels everywhere -- it's vulnerable and extremely difficult to protect consistently when shared and opened from multiple devices and cloud-based collaboration applications," said Dan Schiappa, senior vice president and general manager, Enduser Security Group, Sophos. "We've completely re-imagined SafeGuard Encryption 8 to encrypt each individual file by default and continuously validate users, applications and devices for secure collaboration. We also provide password protected files, allowing users to share encrypted files with external recipients. When data security is simple and transparent, end users are more likely to accept it, making your whole business more secure and more likely to stay compliant."
Comprehensive, manageable encryption should be high on the agenda for all IT leaders as they reassess data protection strategies to meet new legislation requirements. The European Union's (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect on May 25, 2018, when all companies holding customer or employee data of EU citizens will face severe financial penalties of up to 4 percent of annual worldwide revenue if they suffer a data breach. This includes companies that are not necessarily based in the EU, but hold EU citizen data.
"Data privacy legislation is being introduced all over the world, and organizations of every size should review their data protection measures before they face increased consequences. Every company that conducts business in countries that have data privacy laws must comply with those local regulations," said Schiappa. "Encryption is widely agreed to be the best security measure available. Having Sophos SafeGuard Encryption can be an easy-to-manage, best practice step for any global business that needs to protect sensitive and proprietary information or maintain compliance with legislation."
As part of Sophos' synchronized security strategy, Sophos SafeGuard Encryption can respond automatically to threat incidents from connected endpoint protection. During an active infection, Sophos SafeGuard Encryption can temporarily revoke encryption keys to protect data, and users can automatically get those keys back after the incident is resolved. Sophos SafeGuard Encryption also synchronizes keys with Sophos Mobile Control, which seamlessly secures file access rights on smartphones and tablets. Even encrypted documents can be accessed securely within the application's Secure Work Space feature.
"There are four key reasons businesses need to consider encryption. The first and most important is protection for sensitive data against hacking and data breaches. The second is unintended disclosure. People leave mobile phones and USB sticks in the back of taxis and accidentally email documents to the wrong person all the time, exposing files and other private information. Thirdly, encryption helps companies comply with regulation such as the GDPR, mitigating potentially huge fines. Lastly, the migration to cloud-based services presents a security issue, and encryption can help companies protect data that may be vulnerable," said Duncan Brown, research director, European security practice, IDC. "In order for encryption to be effective in these four scenarios, it has to be easy for an IT admin to manage, transparent to users and work with multiple platforms and file types. Sophos does all of this within SafeGuard Encryption, allowing companies to quickly adopt encryption as a necessary security measure."
Sophos Partners Support Sophos SafeGuard Encryption
Steve Neverve, president and chief executive officer of Calif.-based based Nevtec: "There's a huge need for data protection with our clients, including those most specifically in law enforcement and who are subject to HIPAA and PCI regulations. As a trusted partner to organizations following data privacy regulations, we already have an extremely sophisticated process in place to deploy encryption. Sophos SafeGuard Encryption 8 allows us to elevate the quality of this encryption because it easily protects and manages sensitive data on multiple computers and devices. We have tested SafeGuard Encryption 8 in our own labs, and we're impressed with the technology. At Nevtec, we are excited about the Sophos partnership and 'always-on' encryption being brought to market."
Michelle Drolet, president and chief executive officer of Mass.-based Towerwall, Inc.: "As a company, we've experienced continued success with the Sophos SafeGuard Encryption solution and believe that encryption is a fundamental part of data protection and the overall threat protection landscape. Sophos SafeGuard Encryption expands Sophos' synchronized security strategy that directly shares intelligence between security products to respond automatically. We're excited to bring synchronized encryption to our customers."
For additional information, please reference the Sophos Next Generation Encryption technology whitepaper or watch the Sophos encryption webinar featuring Duncan Brown, research director, European security practice from IDC and Dan Schiappa, senior vice president and general manager, Enduser Security Group from Sophos, who explain the benefits and technology behind Sophos SafeGuard Encryption 8.
Read the latest security news and views on our award-winning Naked Security News and read more about us at Sophos News.
Protect every Mac and PC in your home with the next generation of centrally managed free internet security software, Sophos Home.
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About Sophos
More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos' complete security solutions as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Simple to deploy, manage, and use, Sophos' award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, mobile and network security solutions are backed by SophosLabs -- a global network of threat intelligence centers. Sophos is headquartered in Oxford, U.K., and is publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange under the symbol "SOPH." More information is available at www.sophos.com.
(1) The Sophos survey polled IT decision makers from mid-sized businesses in the United States, Canada, India, Australia, Japan and Malaysia about their encryption habits and concerns.
For more information, please contact:
Sara Eberle
PR manager, Sophos
Sara.eberle@Sophos.com
339-223-9265
Mike Bradshaw
partner, Connect Marketing
mikeb@connectmarketing.com
801-373-7888 - office
801-361-2580 - mobile
SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 -- VinCompass Corp. (OTC PINK: VCPS) reported in the Form 10Q for the period ending May 31, 2106 results of an operating loss of $156,060 in the period ending May 31, 2016 compared to a loss of $129,307 in period ending May 31, 2015. The losses were attributed to further investment in the business advancement, while over 70% of the expenses are from development.
The Company has invested heavily in upscale technology, marketing, and the acquisition of more restaurants to accelerate the business plan. Specifically, the Company expects to have more than 25,000 restaurants under management compared to over 10,000 restaurants and over 1,000,000 wines under management currently. Founder & CEO Peter Lachapelle commented "the great thing about our technology is that usually wines under management can not be forecasted because each restaurant has an unknown wine list until it is added into the VinPrint catalog. Once in the VinPrint catalog, the matching of wines available and preferences can seamlessly begin with our patent pending technology."
Upgraded the financial reporting and compliance systems to support the business and help address deficiencies identified by both the Management team and the Auditors.
The Company recently released a research study that indicated that 92% of consumers experience anxiety when pairing wine in a restaurant. This phenomenon, as "fear of the wine list" (FoWL).
Subsequent Invents:
We have continued to raise capital to support our growth plans. We secured $88,500 from third parties since May 31, 2016. While below market priced at $0.80, it is in line with our previous debt conversion from the pervious quarter and our new private placements. The total amount converted or raised from third parties totals $246,614 for the period between Jan 15, 2016 and July 15, 2016.. We are also considering additional options to the private placements as we continue to raise additional capital. For example, but not limited to debt, crowd funding or a registration statement. We have not made any statement or time table other than what was included in the 10K and Form D.
We announced an addition to the board of directors, Micheal Profita. "We are at a point of corporate growth and we believe Michael's business acumen, network, and experience with public companies would help us get to the next level," said Peter Lachapelle
About the Company
VinCompass (OTC PINK: VCPS) -- guiding your wine journey with personal curation starting in the restaurant -- makes a mobile solution that guides the users through the wine selection process and provides personalized wine club and private label wine while offering ecommerce convenience. Users create a digital blue print of their wine preferences (VinPrint) to overcome the fear and anxiety of selecting wine. In social settings, VinCompass matches consumers' wine preferences with a database of over 1 million wines and wine lists at more than 10,000 restaurants. No other solution solves the $12 billion+ restaurant angst sometime known as "fear of the wine list" (FoWL). With consumers' VinPrint on hand, VinCompass ecomm solution is a one-to-one wine club that tailors its monthly offering based on the preferred quality and tastes of its subscribers on an individual basis. Private label wines are also available to both corporations and individuals via VinCompass' ecomm solution. In the $4 billion wine club and private label business, VinCompass is the first to apply predictive analytics to fulfill consumer ecommerce purchases. VinCompass's mission is to use its patent pending data engine technology to help everyone enjoy wine more with less effort, starting in the restaurant and shipping wine to your office or home in over 40 states.
Safe Harbor Statement
Statements in this press release may be "forward-looking statements". Words such as "expects," "anticipates," "intends," "plans," "believes," "seeks," "estimates," "optimizing," "potential," "goal," and similar expressions, as they relate to the Company, its business or management, are forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations, estimates and projections about the Company's business based, in part, on assumptions made by management. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions that are difficult to predict. Actual outcomes and results may, and probably will, differ materially from what is expressed or forecasted in such forward-looking statements due to numerous factors, including those described above and those risks discussed from time to time in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Contact Information
VinCompass Corp.
Investor Relations
Email: IR@VinCompass.com
Phone :415 - 817 9955 ext 8
Web: http://www.vincompass.com/investor_relations
The Iranian news agency Tasnim said today that Tehran had received the first batch of interceptor missiles of the Russian S-300 PMU-2 air defense system. Parts of the systems, including radars and reloaders, were unveiled during April 17, 2016, National Army Day. According to the contract signed in 2007, Iran ordered five batteries of S-300 PMU 1, but Moscow blocked the delivery of those systems under the sanctions imposed on Iran by the UN Security Council. The original contract revised in 2015 enabled Moscow to upgrade the systems delivered to Iran to the more advanced PMU2 version. The system is expected to reach operational capability within months.
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TORONTO, ON--(Marketwired - July 19, 2016) - Launching today, a groundbreaking precision diagnostic tool will help classify the aggressiveness of non-muscle invasive bladder tumours, announced Mount Sinai Services of Toronto, a global provider of customized clinical laboratory and research services. The new technology is marketed by iTP Biomedica as BladderPredict', and is the first of a series of proprietary next generation sequencing diagnostic tests resulting from collaborative work at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute and Mount Sinai Services.
The new technology reduces diagnostic subjectivity, providing clinicians with a higher degree of certainty regarding disease type and allowing for more evidence-based point of care treatment. The unique strategy measures the entire output of the human genome, providing a more holistic and reliable evaluation of tissue biopsies than conventional tests, which rely on more narrow sequencing methodologies.
"The current course of treatment for bladder cancer is often selected based upon presumed prognosis of the disease type, which is determined by the microscopic appearance of the tumor cells; however these are presumed and many tumors may appear identical under the microscope but behave dramatically differently," says Mount Sinai Hospital surgeon Dr. Alexandre Zlotta, who leads the hospital's Bladder Cancer Research Program. "Because bladder cancer has a variable course with tumors behaving in very different ways, quite often we treat either too aggressively, or not aggressively enough."
By contrast, BladderPredict provides both an objective molecular fingerprint of the tumour grade to inform the clinicians' judgment, and the potential clinical trajectory of disease.
Research supporting the technology has already been well received by the academic and clinical communities. In recent years, findings related to the development of the test were published in the scientific journal European Urology and presented at major scientific meetings, namely the ASCO GU (American Society of Clinical Oncology), EAU (European Association of Urology) and AUA (American Urological Association).
The BladderPredict tool is the first of many similar proprietary precision diagnostic tests to assist clinicians and researchers in the area of cancer care. The tests are being developed and validated in collaboration with Mount Sinai Hospital's Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, one of the leading research institutes in the world, and Mount Sinai Services. These tests are being commercialized by iTP Biomedica with the operational support of Mount Sinai Services, a CAP/CLIA and ISO certified laboratory. Bladder cancer, which is the 4 th leading cause of cancer in men, and 6 th overall, is the most expensive to treat, and was selected as a lead disease due to the current paucity of related molecular diagnostic procedures.
"We are extremely pleased to be the team that introduces the BladderPredict test to clinicians and patients. We are confident that BladderPredict will greatly assist practitioners in treating patients who are faced with such a difficult disease," said Dr. Ken Hughes, iTP Biomedica's CEO. "This is an important milestone for the company as it exemplifies our overarching technology platform by showing a clear clinical application. In the coming months we will be applying our approach to multiple cancers and other diseases in our pipeline."
"We believe this is the future of cancer diagnostics and prognostics," says lead researcher and Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute scientist, Dr. Jeff Wrana. "Especially because very little is known about bladder cancer and with these technologies we can probe the functions of genes and their protein products. We can also assess how genes might be mutated or rearranged in cancer."
The availability of BladderPredict will not only help clinicians and their patients in making treatment decisions, but also enable more comprehensive, insightful and cost-effective studies to be managed by the research community. It will also provide better pre-trial screening and ongoing measurement of subject response to treatment.
About Bladder Cancer
An estimated 85,000 North Americans are diagnosed with bladder cancer each year. Although less common in women, it is the fourth most common cancer in men. Because of an 80 per cent recurrence rate, bladder cancer is also the most expensive cancer to treat on a per-patient basis. Despite progress in other areas of cancer treatment, five year survival rates of bladder cancer have not shown any improvement in recent history.
A key obstacle to improving outcomes in bladder cancer is the difficulty in securing reliable diagnoses regarding tumour stage and grade. Highly experienced pathologists may still arrive at separate conclusions about the grade of the same tumour biopsy. In fact, case studies have demonstrated that different pathologists examining the same biopsy may disagree on tumour grade in up to 40 per cent of cases. Since tumour grade is a critical data point to be used in providing effective patient care, this lack of diagnostic insight has frustrated clinicians' efforts to manage the disease.
About Mount Sinai Services, Inc.
Mount Sinai Services is a CAP/CLIA and ISO 15189 certified global provider of customized clinical diagnostic laboratory and research services. Mount Sinai Services works closely with world-renowned clinicians and researchers at Sinai Health System, Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, University of Toronto and other Canadian academic and healthcare providers to offer comprehensive services supporting discovery and innovation in the life sciences, including medical device and diagnostic assay development and validation, clinical trial management and providing customized services to biotech and pharma industry. Mount Sinai Services provides specialized clinical laboratory testing throughout Canada and supports processes to achieve new assay reimbursements. Mount Sinai Services is committed to providing its clients with superior customer service and high-quality results based on a truly collaborative approach. For information, visit www.mountsinaiservices.com.
About iTP Biomedica
iTP Biomedica Corporation ("integrated Transcriptomics for Personalized medicine") is a Toronto-based company founded to commercialize unique technology developed at Mount Sinai Hospital's Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute. This proprietary whole-genome technology platform is positioned to supersede other molecular approaches to diagnosis/prognosis that have recently been commercialized. Current tests depend on limited numbers of marker genes to predict the behaviour of complex diseases, and therefore are prone to false positive and false negative results. By contrast, iTP Biomedica delivers a functional readout of the entire human genome and its Next-Gen Transcriptomic platform, incorporating a fully-developed Quality System, efficiently handles massive bioinformatics data sets to allow rapid development and commercialization of exquisitely accurate tests for cancer and other diseases. iTP's lead products are diagnostic/prognostics for bladder cancer progression, with pipeline products for prostate cancer and breast cancer to follow. The company is also developing a portfolio of blood and urine-based diagnostic tests as part of its R&D pipeline and is oriented to collaborative co-diagnostics development. For information, visit http://www.itpbiomedica.com/
Mount Sinai Services Contact:
Azar Azad Ph.D.
Managing Director
(416) 586-4800 ext. 7266
mss@mountsinaiservices.com
COLUMBUS, OH--(Marketwired - July 19, 2016) - AMETEK Solidstate Controls, Inc. (SCI), a leader in highly customized uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), today announces that it has partnered with BTECH, Rockaway, NJ, a manufacturer of industrial battery monitoring systems. BTECH's flagship product, the S5 Battery Monitor System, is designed to accept data from any battery type and complements SCI's line of industrial UPS and power equipment.
"This partnership offers SCI customers a turn-key power system complete with advanced monitoring equipment to ensure maximum performance from their industrial battery systems," comments John Ely, Marketing Manager for SCI.
BTECH has incorporated 25 years' worth of battery monitoring experience and data to offer solutions that virtually eliminate battery failure risk. BTECH's advanced approach is based on managing battery systems with real-time measurement data that is easily implemented in a variety of applications. Its predictive technology works to precisely identify those cells that need to be replaced in advance, preventing potentially devastating power outages.
BTECH also offers a comprehensive service division, led by industry experts who support its customers in the management of their battery data under BTECH's NEVERFAIL Battery Monitoring Partnership. This service provides an annual inspection of the battery monitoring hardware, including preventative maintenance along with software and firmware upgrades.
About AMETEK Solidstate Controls:
SCI is a recognized leader in highly customized inverters and UPS systems for critical processes involving harsh environments such as power generation and petrochemical processing (including fossil fuel and nuclear power utilities).
SCI has administrative and manufacturing operations at its world headquarters in Columbus, Ohio. It is a unit of AMETEK, Inc., a leading global manufacturer of electronic instruments and electromechanical devices with annual sales of $4.0 billion. For additional information, visit: www.solidstatecontrolsinc.com.
For more information, contact:
AMETEK Solidstate Controls Media Relations
Master Plan Communications, Inc.
Manda Manning
(850) 549.5652
manda@masterplanpr.com
Deborah Cser
(714) 310.9651
deborah@masterplanpr.com
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 -- Editors Note: There are three images associated with this press release.
Hootsuite, the most widely used platform for managing social media, has integrated Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Box, Google Drive, and other content sources into the Hootsuite publishing platform. The integration will allow customers to access photos, gifs, and other digital assets directly from their cloud content repositories within Hootsuite, making it simple to access and publish engaging and dynamic content.
"Hundreds of millions of people across the globe use Dropbox to work and collaborate with their teams, from anywhere on any device. With this integration, our customers can access their Dropbox files directly from Hootsuite, allowing them to enhance their social posts with content they already have saved in Dropbox," said Billy Blau, head of technology partnerships at Dropbox. "In today's competitive market, companies using both Hootsuite and Dropbox can act faster and be more agile with their marketing and social efforts."
With an open ecosystem of 200+ best of breed partner applications, Hootsuite enables customers to utilize the solutions that best fit their needs. Hootsuite's integration with leading content source partners - whether they're digital asset management platforms or content repositories - makes it seamless for customers to access their digital assets, anywhere and at anytime. With easier access to content, organizations can better engage with customers, quickly implement social marketing campaigns, or offer improved customer support. This integration will allow customers to:
-- Add a content source they already use into their Hootsuite dashboard -- Search and organize digital assets directly within their content sources -- Access assets from content sources within the compose message box of Hootsuite Publisher
"Hootsuite's integration with OneDrive enables joint customers to access their assets seamlessly and securely before they publish on social media. Team members across organizations also enjoy improved productivity as they get to collaborate on social content in the cloud from any device," said Rob Howard, director, Office 365 Ecosystem, Microsoft.
"As social media becomes a primary channel for businesses of all sizes to connect with customers, the ability to manage digital assets intelligently and create engaging social content is critical. Box helps marketers to securely manage content of all kinds, everything from video and images to ad and social copy. By leveraging strategic platforms like Hootsuite and Box, teams can work faster and smarter, delivering more successful digital campaigns," said Roger Murff, vice president of business development and technology partnerships, Box.
In addition to Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Box, and Google Drive, Hootsuite users can access other content sources such as:
-- UpContent - A content discovery tool that curates social feeds with more meaningful content -- MediaValet - A cloud-based digital asset management system -- Flashstock - An on-demand photo service that connects photographers to organizations for custom visual content -- WebDAM - A digital asset management system
More Information:
-- Blog Post: https://blog.hootsuite.com/content-sources/ -- Landing Page: http://hootsuite.com/pages/landing/content-sources -- Media Kit: http://media.hootsuite.com/media-kit
About Hootsuite
Hootsuite is the most widely used platform for managing social media, loved by over 14 million people around the globe and trusted by more than 800 of the Fortune 1000. With Hootsuite, brands harness the power of social. Our platform brings together your social networks and integrates with hundreds of business applications. It's the one place to build customer relationships, listen to the needs of the market and grow your revenue. To learn more, visit www.hootsuite.com.
To view the images associated with this press release, please visit the following links:
www.marketwire.com/library/20160718-hootsuite0719photo1px800.jpg
www.marketwire.com/library/20160718-hootsuite0719photo2px800.jpg
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Contacts:
Hootsuite
Julie Huang
Corporate Communications
media@hootsuite.com
Twitter: @juliewh11
DALLAS, TX--(Marketwired - July 19, 2016) - BidNet has officially launched an enhanced Texas Purchasing Group, including upgrades to the SourceSuite e-Sourcing technology and new e-sourcing modules. These new sourcing features include:
Enhanced Vendor Management & Pre-qualification
Bid Evaluation
Contract Lifecycle Management
Vendor Performance Management
Workflow Approval
The Texas Purchasing Group is a community of 31 local government agencies across Texas that use SourceSuite technology to simplify their procurement process, including Dallas County and San Antonio ISD. The Texas Purchasing Group offers time-saving features to help buyers and purchasing professionals connect directly with interested vendors, thus streamlining the processes to publish, distribute, amend, track and award solicitations. The purchasing community also facilitates local government collaboration throughout the state, including a shared bid library and self-maintained vendor database, which aide in lowering the costs of goods and increase outreach to local vendors.
Now, with the launch of the new system upgrades, the Texas Purchasing Group offers a complete sourcing solution that will keep up with the ever evolving needs of public purchasing professionals.
The Texas Purchasing Group is seeking local government agencies to join the community at no cost. All public purchasing professionals from counties, municipalities, school districts, nonprofits and special districts across Texas who are interested in learning more about the benefits of joining the enhanced Texas Purchasing Group can schedule a personalized demonstration at www.BidNetDirect.com/buyer-demo.
About BidNet's E-Sourcing Solution
BidNet's e-Sourcing solution, SourceSuite, provides more than 1,100 local government agencies and over 9,000 departments with vendor management, document distribution, and audit control tools. With years of input from procurement professionals, BidNet has launched regional purchasing groups to address the specific bid and supplier management needs of local government agencies across the country. To learn more about the benefits to local government agencies, please visit www.BidNetDirect.com/buyers. Full feature and sourcing module information is available at www.SourceSuite.com.
Image Available: http://www.marketwire.com/library/MwGo/2016/7/18/11G107051/Images/Texas_Purchasing_Group-f0f634f99f2c956c939429616c56048f.jpg
Image Available: http://www.marketwire.com/library/MwGo/2016/7/18/11G107051/Images/BidNet_Direct_Logo-80c060999968a0f5917badeff5c70bcd.jpg
Image Available: http://www.marketwire.com/library/MwGo/2016/7/18/11G107051/Images/SourceSuite_E-Procurement_Solution_-_Logo-430200786686.jpg
Media Inquiries:
Kim Cullen
Director of Marketing
518-689-7036
Kcullen@bidnet.com
HOUSTON, TX -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 -- Zehl & Associates, PC, a leading personal injury law firm, was honored by VerdictSearch for obtaining two of the top 10 largest accident settlements in the state of Texas in 2015.
This is the third consecutive year that Zehl & Associates has won the largest accident verdict or settlement in Texas and the fifth consecutive year that it has obtained the largest accident recovery in a defendant's corporate history.
Firm founder Ryan Zehl said, "Our goal, as trial lawyers, is and always has been to improve our clients' lives. The fact that we're consistently able to achieve that goal -- and set records while doing so -- is simply a product of the dedication and commitment that's shared by our lawyers and staff.
In December, the firm announced a $6 million settlement on behalf of five bus passengers who were injured when the driver lost control and flipped the bus. The bus company attempted to avoid liability by claiming that the driver suffered a sudden medical emergency -- in other words, that he choked on coffee. The case settled shortly after the firm obtained what appears to be the first court-ordered sleep study in Texas, which confirmed that the driver had been suffering from moderate to severe Obstructive Sleep Apnea. This was the fifth largest in Texas in 2015.
Several months earlier, Zehl & Associates obtained a $3.35 million settlement on behalf of a client who herniated disks in his neck and lower back after being rear-ended by an 18 wheeler that was owned and operated by Oakley Trucking.
This was the ninth largest settlement in Texas in 2015 and remains the largest in Oakley Trucking's corporate history.
About the Personal Injury Lawyers at Zehl & Associates, PC
Based in Houston, Zehl & Associates is a personal injury law firm that represents clients across the country who were seriously injured or killed in offshore accidents, bus and truck accidents, refinery and plant explosions, and by dangerous products and medical devices. In the past five years alone, the firm has won over $750 million for its clients, including the largest accident verdicts and settlements in Texas, as well as the largest verdicts in their opponent's corporate histories. For more information about the firm, please visit www.zehllaw.com.
Contact:
Ryan Zehl
Zehl & Associates, PC
Galleria Tower I, 2700 Post Oak Blvd., Suite 1120
Houston, Texas 77056
1-888-603-3636
OTTAWA, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 -- The Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation (CDIC) is pleased to announce that Mr. David Walker, most recently CDIC's Managing Director, Executive Office and International Affairs, has been appointed the Secretary General of the International Association of Deposit Insurers (IADI).
Mr. Walker has over 20 years of experience with CDIC, having progressed through increasingly senior roles and working to enhance Canada's leadership in deposit insurance.
CDIC was instrumental to the foundation of IADI and played a key role in the working groups which led to its creation in 2002. "David brings deep knowledge to the international deposit insurance community and IADI is very fortunate to have him", said Michele Bourque, President and CEO of CDIC. "With David at the helm, IADI will continue to enhance support for its members and promote more effective deposit insurance systems around the world", she added.
Mr. Walker's appointment is a continuation of CDIC's international leadership, particularly in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
IADI is a forum for deposit insurers from around the world to gather to share knowledge and expertise. Its mission is to contribute to the enhancement of deposit insurance effectiveness by promoting guidance and international cooperation.
"CDIC has always provided strong international leadership on deposit insurance," said David Walker. "I am honoured to have the opportunity to play my part in this proud tradition, and join the leading international organization of deposit insurance providers. Working with the excellent team at IADI, I am confident that we will continue to help our members find innovative solutions to the deposit insurance challenges of the 21st Century."
CDIC is a federal Crown corporation that contributes to the stability of the Canadian financial system by providing deposit insurance against the loss of eligible deposits at member institutions in the event of failure. Eligible deposits are automatically covered to a limit of $100,000 per insured category at each member institution. CDIC members include banks, federally regulated credit unions as well as loan and trust companies and associations governed by the Cooperative Credit Associations Act that take deposits. CDIC is funded by premiums paid by member institutions and does not receive public funds to operate.
Contacts:
Brad Evenson
Director, Communications and Public Affairs
613.943.4395
media@cdic.ca
BOSTON, MA -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 -- Pillar Technologies, innovators in sensor-based construction site risk management, today announced it has secured $425,000 in seed funding from organizations including the 1517 Fund, Insure.VC, and angel investors Anil Jha and Sam Altschuler, both of which are Wentworth alums. The company has also been invited to participate in Autodesk's BUILD Space Startup Incubator in Boston, which provides space for early stage companies in the architecture, engineering, and construction industry.
"Construction sites are dangerous places and accidents are costly," said Alex Schwarzkopf, one of the founders of Pillar Technologies. "Our advanced sensor-based technology benefits general contractors, insurance companies and building owners alike by significantly reducing risk and more accurately predicting damage from destructive environmental conditions."
Pillar Technologies deploys on-site sensors to monitor for dangerous environmental conditions such as fire outbreaks, high humidity exposure, and mold growth which are some of the leading causes of revenue loss while building. With Pillar's sensor-based technology, general contractors have access to real-time information and receive alerts notifying them of destructive conditions before damage occurs. Pillar's predictive analytics helps drive process changes which allow for jobs to be completed on time and under budget, with fewer accidents and reduced insurance claims.
Pillar is expanding its testing program and will be seeking additional contractors starting in November. Interested parties can contact the company through its website.
Pillar Technologies was originally conceptualized and founded by Schwarzkopf, Sean Iacobone and Matt Joyal, a team of students participating in the Startup Challenge within Accelerate, Wentworth Institute of Technology's Innovation + Entrepreneurship Center. The center promotes interdisciplinary collaboration among students, alumni, industry, and the Boston community while building innovative thinking and entrepreneurial confidence.
"Even though we are now Wentworth alumni, Accelerate continues to play an important role in our success," said Schwarzkopf. "For example, the Wentworth community and key mentors connected us with early customers, partners and investors."
"The success of Pillar Technologies clearly demonstrates that Accelerate's 'learning-by-doing' approach is working," said Monique Fuchs, co-founder of Accelerate and Wentworth's associate vice president, innovation and entrepreneurship. "Teaching students how to solve real-world problems and add value through innovation and the spirit of entrepreneurship is our mission."
About Pillar Technologies
Pillar Technologies, based in Boston's Seaport District, is innovating construction site risk management with advanced sensor-based technology and predictive analytics. The company is focused on making construction safer and more efficient by reducing risk, forecasting failures and preventing damage. Learn more online.
About Wentworth Institute of Technology's Accelerate
Accelerate, Wentworth Innovation + Entrepreneurship Center, was formed in May 2012 to build innovative thinking and entrepreneurship confidence among students impacting their career choices and success. The mission of the center is to prepare students with critical competencies for today's competitive work environment. The center's focus on experiential learning allows students to gain experience in idea iteration, prototyping, building confidence by taking risks with small projects and big ideas, see the bigger picture and solve real-world problems. The center promotes interdisciplinary collaboration and intentional networking among students, alumni, industry, and the Boston community. To learn more, visit http://www.wit.edu/accelerate/
CONTACT
Colleen Bradley-MacArthur
Email Contact
Carlton PR & Marketing - Integrated Marketing Services
617-272-5820
ALBANY, New York, July 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --
MarketResearchReports.biz has released a new market report titled "European LiFi (Light Fidelity) Technology Industry 2016 Market Research Report". LiFi is a revolutionary wireless technology that is several times faster than Wi-Fi. LiFi, short for Light Fidelity, is a technology that helps light bulbs function as wireless hotspots, with speeds that are way faster than the current generation of Wi-Fi. A new report featured on MarketResearchReports.biz presents a detailed overview of the European LiFi technology industry for 2016. The report studies every important facet of the technology and its evolution as well as its adoption across various industries. Although a relatively new technology, the blistering speed it proffers has roused the interest of people in Li-Fi. All of these details are captured in the report.
The report begins with an overview of the global Li-Fi industry and then turns the focus on the European Li-Fi market. Prepared by a team of highly experienced analysts, the report is designed to function as a support tool for making course-altering business decisions.
View Press Release at http://www.marketresearchreports.biz/pressrelease/1150
The market for Li-Fi is finally about to take off commercially with recent tests showing that this wireless technology can deliver speeds that are about a hundred times faster than Wi-Fi. For instance, Velmenni, a startup based in Estonia (Europe), demonstrated that data could be transmitted at speeds of 1 Gbps using Li-Fi. If successfully deployed commercially, Li-Fi could help download high definition films in a matter of seconds, revolutionizing the technology and media industry.
Spurred by the promise of unprecedented data transfer speeds, governments and technology companies alike have begun to explore how to bring Li-Fi technology to more and more people in Europe. With developed and developing European nations being a hotbed of technology-related innovation, it the prospects of the European Li-Fi market look promising.
For Sample Copy, click here: http://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/sample/566533
An analysis of latest and potential investments in Li-Fi in Europe is conducted in the report. To better demonstrate the potential of the market, the report profiles companies that have made strides in the European Li-Fi industry. These companies include Velmenni, Apple, Sanan, PureVLC, and KingSun. The report presents predictions and forecasts for the European Li-Fi industry for the period ranging from 2016 to 2021.
The other highlights of the report include an analysis of traders and distributors playing an active role in the development of the European Li-Fi market. Milestone developments in this space are also captured and analyzed in the report. Whether or not making an investment in specific Li-Fi projects is feasible is also studied under the purview of the report. Moreover, the report encapsulates all of the important regulatory moves that have either benefited or hindered the growth of the European Li-Fi industry.
Related Research Reports:
United States LiFi (Light Fidelity) Technology Industry 2016 Market Research Report: http://www.marketresearchreports.biz/analysis/544611
The United States LiFi (Light Fidelity) Technology Industry 2016 Market Research Report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the LiFi (Light Fidelity) Technology industry.
The report provides a basic overview of the industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. The LiFi (Light Fidelity) Technology market analysis is provided for the United States markets including development trends, competitive landscape analysis, and key regions development status.
Global LiFi (Light Fidelity) Technology Industry 2015 Market Research Report: http://www.marketresearchreports.biz/analysis/556407
The Global LiFi (Light Fidelity) Technology Industry 2016 Market Research Report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the LiFi (Light Fidelity) Technology industry.
The report provides a basic overview of the industry including definitions and classifications. The LiFi (Light Fidelity) Technology market analysis is provided for the international markets including development trends, competitive landscape analysis, and key regions development status.
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WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Donald Trump is hoping to put New York in play for the first time in decades, but the results of a new Quinnipiac University poll show Hillary Clinton with a commanding lead in her adopted home state. Forty-seven percent of New York voters said they would support Clinton if the election were held today, while 35 percent said they would vote for Trump. The double-digit lead for Clinton primarily reflects her substantial advantage among voters in New York City, where she leads by 63 percent to 20 percent. Clinton also benefits from strong support among women and younger voters, while Trump has a slim lead among men. When third party candidates are included, Clinton continues to lead Trump by 45 percent to 33 percent, with Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson at 6 percent and Green Party candidate Jill Stein at 4 percent. 'As Republicans rally in Cleveland and Democrats prepare for their Philadelphia convention, Hillary Clinton seems to have her adopted home state votes safely locked up,' said Maurice Carroll, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll. He added, 'Donald Trump's a native New Yorker. He even sounds like one, compared with Clinton's flat Midwestern accent, but he lags by double digits in the state where they'll both vote.' New York State has voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in each of the last seven elections, with President Barack Obama winning the Empire State by 28 points in 2012. The Quinnipiac survey of 1,104 New York voters was conducted July 13th through 17th and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. (Photo: Gage Skidmore) Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX
Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
The command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance & reconnaissance (C4ISR) market is projected to reach USD 110.78 billion by 2021. The intelligence segment in C4ISR market is anticipated to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period. Intelligence acts as a force-multiplier by providing advanced situational awareness to armed forces and is the greatest attribute to militaries wielding such platforms as manned, maritime surveillance aircraft, and unmanned aerial systems. Surveillance & reconnaissance is the second fastest-growing segment in the C4ISR market, by application. North America dominates the C4ISR market, by region. Countries in this region include the U.S. and Canada. North American C4ISR market is mainly driven by the U.S. army's overseas missions and the need to safeguard homeland security. To shorten mission cycle time and to reduce the number of casualties, the countries in North America are investing in C4ISR systems. Key Topics Covered:
Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
SASKATOON, SASKATCHEWAN -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 -- International Road Dynamics Inc. (TSX: IRD) (IRD) announced today that it has been awarded a USD $4,618,555 contract from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) for the installation, calibration and maintenance of Weigh-in-Motion (WIM) systems across the state. This contract has an initial term of two years and provides an option for renewal for up to three additional years.
PennDOT currently has 38 active IRD WIM systems that are covered under this agreement. Nine of these systems also include overview camera systems. Data collection and planning site locations are made up of in-road instrumentation and IRD iSINC WIM electronics and software. Historical data collected from these sites are used to develop daily and seasonal factors, as well as to identify changes in traffic patterns. Real time data is used to enhance safety and assist the State Police with enforcement activities, resulting in reduced roadway damage and increased preservation of pavement and infrastructure.
Mr. Terry Bergan, IRD's President and CEO stated: "We are very pleased to be extending our long-term relationship with PennDOT. Our proven WIM technologies, and the data collected by these state-of-the-art solutions, are helping extend the life of highway and roadway infrastructure, enhance driver safety, and improve environmental performance. These long-term service and maintenance contracts also contribute to the stability of our cash flows and our increased presence in key markets around the world."
IRD is a highway traffic management technology company specializing in supplying products and systems to the global Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) industry. IRD is a North American company based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Canada with sales and service offices throughout the United States and overseas. Private corporations, transportation agencies and highway authorities around the world use IRD's products and advanced systems to manage and protect their highway infrastructures.
The Company's shares trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol IRD.
IRD is listed on the TSX - trading symbol - IRD
www.irdinc.com
Contacts:
International Road Dynamics Inc.
Terry Bergan
President & CEO
(306) 653-6600
International Road Dynamics Inc.
Francine Senecal-Lepage
Investor Relations
(306) 653-6603
(306) 653-1454 (FAX)
Email: irdir@irdinc.com
Website: www.irdinc.com
ANKARA (dpa-AFX) - The Federal Aviation Administration has lifted all restrictions on flights to Turkey, which was imposed following the launch of an unsuccessful military coup in Turkey last week. On Friday, FAA issued a notice to airmen (NOTAM) prohibiting U.S. airline carriers from flying to or from Turkish airports and all airline carriers, regardless of country of registry, from flying into the United States from Turkey either directly or via a third country. Normal flight operations for all carriers between the United States and Turkey have resumed, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement Monday. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX
Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - July 19, 2016) - The 2016 edition of Advancing Human Rights: Update on Global Foundation Grantmaking provides a more comprehensive view of the human rights funding landscape than ever before. Released today by the International Human Rights Funders Group (IHRFG) and Foundation Center, the report analyzes 20,300 grants to 12,262 organizations worldwide in 2013. In total, 803 funders awarded $2.3 billion in funding for human rights -- a 23 percent increase in giving between 2012 and 2013 among a consistent subset of funders.
For the first time, the research examines bilateral and multilateral funding using data compiled from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)'s Creditor Reporting System. Researchers identified 13,721 aid disbursements for human rights in 2013, totaling $3.7 billion. Among the top donors of human rights aid, Sweden led with 14 percent of total giving, followed by the United States (12 percent) and European Union Institutions and Norway (both 11 percent). Afghanistan, Rwanda, Colombia, and Indonesia were top recipients of human rights-related disbursements, each receiving over $80 million. The report's approach to illustrating these data was years in the making and is informed by considerable input from multiple stakeholders, including advisors, funders, and experts at OECD and elsewhere.
Also for the first time, foundation giving has been broken out by strategy to illustrate approaches funded in the human rights space. This new lens on the data highlights 11 strategies supported by human rights grantmaking, including:
Advocacy, systems reform, and implementation (27 percent)
Capacity-building and technical assistance (15 percent)
Research and documentation (13 percent)
By giving funders and advocates a broader perspective of human rights philanthropy, these new data put them in a better position to make informed decisions that strengthen the field. "From Brussels to Cape Town, the philanthropic world is using this knowledge to inform its work," said Mona Chun, executive director of International Human Rights Funders Group. "Whether examining the funding landscape for strategic litigation, exploring the intersection of women's rights and rule-of-law, or advocating with government actors to increase their rights funding, grantmakers have used this research to find partners, understand cross-cutting themes, and be more strategic in their work."
Advancing Human Rights also explores grantmaking by issue, population, and regional focus. Among the issue areas it analyzes, equality rights and freedom from discrimination benefited from the largest share of funding (15 percent). By population, women and girls were a stated focus of 21 percent of funding, followed by children and youth (19 percent), and migrants and refugees (11 percent).
The research includes grantmaking data from funders spanning 46 countries. Of the top 20 human rights funders by number of grants, ten are located outside of the United States. The three largest human rights funders by grant dollars were Open Society Foundations, Ford Foundation, and Nationale Postcode Loterij (Netherlands), providing over $250 million each.
The 2016 report is the fourth in an annual series produced jointly by Foundation Center and IHRFG as part of a multi-year effort to track the evolving state of global human rights funding and to create a set of dynamic, interactive research tools to help human rights funders and advocates increase their effectiveness. The first edition of this research was launched in 2013, providing important baseline data to enable tracking trends in human rights funding for years to come.
"Foundation Center's partnership with IHRFG on Advancing Human Rights: Knowledge Tools for Funders is an impressive contribution not only to knowledge sharing within the human rights field, but also for the world of global grantmaking," said Lawrence T. McGill, vice president for knowledge services at Foundation Center. "The initiative has generated an unprecedented amount of international grants data from the philanthropic sector. We're proud to work together with IHRFG to advance funding transparency and extend the knowledge base for human rights, while also balancing these ideals with security and respect for grantee safety."
In addition to the report, the latest data have been added to the interactive Advancing Human Rights website, which enables funders, activists, researchers, academics, and others interested in human rights funding to explore giving by issue, population, strategy, and region. Looking ahead, the partners plan to release an analysis of giving trends over a five-year period.
The partnership between Foundation Center and IHRFG is strengthened by collaboration with Ariadne - European Funders for Social Change and Human Rights and Prospera - the International Network of Women's Funds. The project is also part of Foundation Center's suite of Knowledge Services, which blends information, analysis, and technology to help funders and others in the social sector make strategic decisions and improve their practice. The Advancing Human Rights initiative is supported by the Ford Foundation, Oak Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Advancing Human Rights: Update on Global Foundation Grantmaking can be downloaded for free at the Advancing Human Rights website, where visitors can also interact with the data.
Share on Twitter: New international aid & foundation data show how funders are advancinghumanrights: bit.ly/HumanRts16 @fdncenter @IHRFG
About Foundation Center
Established in 1956, Foundation Center is the leading source of information about philanthropy worldwide. Through data, analysis, and training, it connects people who want to change the world to the resources they need to succeed. Foundation Center maintains the most comprehensive database on U.S. and, increasingly, global grantmakers and their grants -- a robust, accessible knowledge bank for the sector. It also operates research, education, and training programs designed to advance knowledge of philanthropy at every level. Thousands of people visit Foundation Center's website each day and are served in its five regional library/learning centers and its network of more than 450 funding information centers located in public libraries, community foundations, and educational institutions nationwide and around the world. For more information, please visit foundationcenter.org or call (212) 620-4230.
About the International Human Rights Funders Group
The International Human Rights Funders Group (IHRFG) is a global network of donors and grantmakers committed to advancing human rights around the world through effective philanthropy. IHRFG's overarching goal is to assist funders in strengthening the impact and strategic effectiveness of their human rights grantmaking. To achieve this goal, IHRFG aims to: cultivate thought leadership on strategic human rights grantmaking and future directions for the human rights movement; build stronger and expanded learning, peer education, and community among funders; develop a funder network more truly global in participation, perspective and linkages; broaden opportunities for IHRFG members to engage in key efforts to shape relevant public policies; widen understanding of human rights in the philanthropic community; and, ultimately, expand overall funding for human rights. For more information, please visit ihrfg.org or call (646) 381-7580.
Image Available: http://www.marketwire.com/library/MwGo/2016/7/18/11G107042/Images/Cover_Key_Findings_2016-ae405a7a564bafe7a7ab483c7dd1a120.jpg
Noli Vega
Communications Associate
Foundation Center
(888) 356-0354 ext. 701
communications@foundationcenter.org
Sarah Tansey
Program Manager, Research and Policy
International Human Rights Funders Group
(646) 381-7582
stansey@ihrfg.org
Technavio analysts forecast the fabricated metal market in Bosnia and Herzegovinato grow at a CAGR of more than 5% during the forecast period, according to their latest report. The market is expected to be driven primarily by demand from the global automotive industry. The fabricated metals market in Bosnia and Herzegovina is highly dependent on exports to Slovenian and German markets, and they respectively account for approximately 27% and 25% of Bosnia and Herzegovina's total exports to member nations in the EU and Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFTA).
The research study covers the present scenario and growth prospects of the fabricated metal market in Bosnia and Herzegovina for 2016-2020. The report discusses the major drivers that influence the growth of the market. Furthermore, it outlines the challenges faced by the manufacturers and the market at large, as well as the key trends emerging in the market.
Technavio chemicals and materials analysts highlight the following three factors that are contributing to the growth of the fabricated metal market in Bosnia and Herzegovina:
Availability of cheap skilled labor
Growth of real estate sector
Increase in demand for metal doors and windows
Availability of cheap skilled labor
"The youth in the country are inclined to work in the fabricated metal products sector due to higher remuneration in this sector. There is an abundance of skilled labor in the country due to the closure of old production facilities," says Chandrakumar Badala Jaganathan, a lead analyst at Technavio for metals and minerals research.
Also, the presence of a large number of educational and training institutions, such as Faculties for Mechanics, technical/vocational high schools, Welding Institute in Tuzla, and HTEC Center for Advanced CNC Technology ensures a constant supply of skilled labor. This abundance of skilled labor has resulted in the availability of labor at a low cost. Average wages range between USD 220 (low-skilled workers) and USD 850 (senior engineers, project managers, etc.). This availability of cheap skilled labor is a factor that is contributing significantly to the growth of the market.
Growth of real estate sector
Bosnia and Herzegovina's extensive urbanization, a favorable tax system, huge demand from energy sector, a well-established construction sector, population growth, and strategic location (proximity to major export markets such as Germany, Croatia, and Slovenia), increase in per capita income, and low operating costs are some of the factors contributing to the growth of real estate sector in the country.
Construction companies in Bosnia and Herzegovina are known for their skill in several spheres of construction, such as design and structural engineering. The construction industry is forecast to grow at an annual rate of more than 4.5% during 2015-2024, and civil construction projects, such as the Corridor Vc project, are expected to generate a lot of opportunities for construction companies. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is expected to provide a loan of USD 67.10 million to JP Autoceste for the construction of three sections of the project. Also, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia have agreed on the construction of a core network of corridors to enhance their connectivity.
"The above mentioned projects and the overall growth of the real estate sector in the country are expected to contribute to the growth of the fabricated metal products market, as fabricated metal products are used extensively in constructions," says Chandrakumar.
Increase in demand for metal doors and windows
The demand for metal doors and windows increased tremendously during 2011-2014, resulting in a 70% increase in the revenue generated by this segment. Strong demand for aluminum doors, aluminum thresholds for doors and windows, and aluminum frames from domestic and export markets was a major contributor to the growth of the segment.
There was also a substantial increase in demand for iron and steel doors and windows also, with this segment witnessing a growth of over 50% between 2014 and 2015. This is likely to provide manufacturers operating in the metal doors and windows segment with significant growth opportunities during the forecast period.
Browse Related Reports:
Global Stainless Steel Market 2016-2020
Global Metalworking Fluids Market 2016-2020
Global Heat Transfer Fluid Market 2016-2020
Do you need a report on a market in a specific geographical cluster or country but can't find what you're looking for? Don't worry, Technavio also takes client requests. Please contact enquiry@technavio.com with your requirements and our analysts will be happy to create a customized report just for you.
About Technavio
Technaviois a leading global technology research and advisory company. The company develops over 2000 pieces of research every year, covering more than 500 technologies across 80 countries. Technavio has about 300 analysts globally who specialize in customized consulting and business research assignments across the latest leading edge technologies.
Technavio analysts employ primary as well as secondary research techniques to ascertain the size and vendor landscape in a range of markets. Analysts obtain information using a combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches, besides using in-house market modeling tools and proprietary databases. They corroborate this data with the data obtained from various market participants and stakeholders across the value chain, including vendors, service providers, distributors, re-sellers, and end-users.
If you are interested in more information, please contact our media team at media@technavio.com.
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160719005087/en/
Contacts:
Technavio Research
Jesse Maida
Media Marketing Executive
US: +1 630 333 9501
UK: +44 208 123 1770
www.technavio.com
OAK BROOK, IL -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 -- To continue being part of the solution to close the education gap for Hispanic students in the U.S., Ronald McDonald House Charities (RMHC), with the exclusive support of McDonald's Hispanic owner/operators, will award five college-bound Hispanic high school seniors a $100,000 RMHC/HACER National Scholarship, increasing McDonald's annual contribution to half a million dollars annually.
This year's five scholarship recipients are: Darinelle Merced-Calderon, Archer, Fla.; Gianfranco Filice, Gilroy, Calif.; Helena Silva-Nichols, Phoenix, Ariz.; Sarah Jackson, Fresno, Calif.; and Elizabeth Manero, Hamilton, Va.
For the first time, this year all five RMHC/HACER National Scholarship recipients will also be paired with a McDonald's mentor who will offer support and guidance throughout the students' college years, fostering continued growth and success.
"The United States Hispanic Leadership Institute applauds McDonald's for the addition of its first-ever Hispanic student mentorship program, which ensures that scholarship recipients will have the academic and moral support that is key to college success," said Dr. Juan Andrade, Jr., president of the United States Hispanic Leadership Institute and former judge for the RMHC/HACER National Scholarship. "As longstanding educational partners, we are proud to support McDonald's and RMHC in its unparalleled commitment to the education of our U.S. Hispanic youth."
"I am incredibly grateful to receive the RMHC/HACER National Scholarship, which is giving me the chance to pursue my dreams of a post-secondary education," said Gianfranco Filice, one of this year's five scholarship winners. "With the help of this scholarship, I hope to continue to grow into an impact-driven and results-oriented leader at Stanford University."
The RMHC/HACER Scholarship was founded in 1985 by McDonald's owner/operator Richard Castro of El Paso, Texas, with the support of RMHC, McDonald's Corporation and local McDonald's Hispanic owner/operators throughout the country. Castro, a former educator, established the scholarship after noticing increasing school drop-out rates among Hispanic students due to financial difficulties. He called upon his fellow owner/operators and the community at large to help remove the financial barrier of attending college.
In 2008, the national scholarship was added, offering four $100,000 awards to Hispanic students. Last fall, McDonald's increased its annual donation to RMHC, adding a fifth RMHC/HACER National Scholarship to the existing four $100,000 awards.
"We are so proud of our RMHC/HACER winners and want to make sure they are armed with everything they need for success," explained a champion of the program Ana Madan, member and Vice Chair of the McDonald's Hispanic Owner Operator Association and one of the 45 percent of women and People of Color who make up McDonald's Owner/Operator community. "Knowing they are often the first to go to school and leave home, providing a support system for them will make the transition into school and the business world a bit easier for them. We are very excited to have such wonderful students to mentor and look forward to seeing them grow throughout their career."
To date, more than $31 million in local and national RMHC/HACER Scholarship monies have been awarded to more than 17,800 students. RMHC/HACER, which stands for Hispanic American Commitment to Education Resources, counts on the support of RMHC, McDonald's Corporation, McDonald's Hispanic owner/operators and other donors for its local scholarships.
"At RMHC, we understand the importance of education and are committed to providing resources to students so they can reach their full potential," said Sheila Musolino, president and CEO of RMHC. "With the support of McDonald's, we're able to provide hardworking, determined Hispanic students across the country opportunities to continue building promising futures."
It is fitting that HACER means "to do" in Spanish. National scholarship recipients are selected based on academic achievement, community involvement and financial need. The rigorous selection process includes a completed application, essay and interviews with a distinguished panel of judges representing academia, business, media, RMHC and McDonald's. Past scholarship recipients have attended prestigious universities, including Stanford University and Harvard University, and continued on to pursue careers in the medical, engineering and business fields, among others.
College-bound high school seniors are encouraged to apply for the upcoming 2017 RMHC/HACER Scholarship. Applications become available in October 2016 and awarded students are notified in the spring to coincide with college acceptances.
About Ronald McDonald House Charities
About Ronald McDonald House Charities: Ronald McDonald House Charities (RMHC), a non-profit, 501 (c) (3) corporation, creates, finds and supports programs that directly improve the health and well-being of children. Through its global network of 300 Chapters in more than 63 countries and regions, its three core programs, the Ronald McDonald House, the Ronald McDonald Family Room and the Ronald McDonald Care Mobile, and millions of dollars in grants to support children's programs worldwide, RMHC provides stability and vital resources to families so they can get and keep their children healthy and happy. All RMHC-operated and supported programs, enable family-centered care, provide a bridge to quality health care, are a vital part of the health care continuum and give children and families the time they need to heal and cope better together. For more information, visit www.rmhc.org, follow RMHC on Twitter (@RMHC), or like RMHC on Facebook (Facebook.com/RMHC Global).
About McDonald's
McDonald's USA, LLC, serves a variety of menu options made with quality ingredients to approximately 25 million customers every day. Nearly 90 percent of McDonald's 14,000 U.S. restaurants are independently owned and operated by businessmen and women. Customers can now log online for free at approximately 11,500 participating Wi-Fi enabled McDonald's U.S. restaurants. For more information, visit www.mcdonalds.com, or follow us on Twitter @McDonalds and @MeEncanta and Facebook www.facebook.com/mcdonalds and www.facebook.com/mcdonaldslatino.
Lainey Garcia
McDonald's USA
lainey.garcia@us.mcd.com
630-209-1555
Technavio has announced the leading manufacturers in their recentfabricated metal market in Romania 2016-2020report. This report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the fabricated metal product market in Romania until 2020.
The fabricated metal product market in Romania will grow steadily at a CAGR of more than 2% during the forecast period. "The country's accession to the EU in 2007 has led to many developmental and rehabilitation activities in Romania's key towns and counties. With substantial support from the EU and IMF structural funds, the GDP growth in Romania is likely to increase, which will create more employment opportunities. A consequent increase in per capita income will propel the demand for housing, commercial, and industrial development. This will lead to an increased demand for fabricated metal products in the country," says Chandrakumar Badala Jaganathan, a lead analyst at Technavio for metals and minerals research.
Manufacturer landscape
The fabricated metal product market in Romania is fragmented with the presence of more than 5,800 manufacturers. Both multinational as well as regional and indigenous manufacturers dominate the market. Multinationals focus primarily on large-scale construction projects, whereas indigenous players focus more on small-scale construction projects. Since indigenous players are cost-effective, SMEs, and smaller construction companies and contractors prefer to procure fabricated metal products from these manufacturers. Several regional manufacturers are providing stiff competition by enhancing customer relationships. Manufacturers compete on the basis of price, innovation, quality, and performance.
Key manufacturers are more focused on the development and introduction of energy-efficient fabrication techniques. These manufacturers have increased their R&D expenditure. However, larger MNCs with sound financial backing are the major innovators. SMEs in Romania lack adequate financial resources to carry out R&D activities on a high scale.
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Key manufacturers:
Some of the key manufacturers in the fabricated metal products market in Romania are:
Company Description Allstar Prod Manufacturer of fabricated metal products such as armatures, valves, and bulldozer rollers. Can Pack Romania A leading player in the metal packaging industry, the manufacturer is based in Poland. It manufactures metal cans and packaging for foods, beverages, and chemicals. Canam Group A leading manufacturer of steel fabricated products globally. Dioma International A manufacturer of structural steel for the construction industry. Doladela A manufacturer of fabricated metal products for the industrial and civil construction sectors. Impress Buftea (Ardagh Group) A manufacturer that specializes in metal and glass packaging. Isopan Isopan, based in Italy is a supplier of fasteners, finishing and rainwater collection sheets, translucid chequered or corrugated elements, window portholes, fixed and motorised skylights, fabricated metal products such as roofing and walls, and fireproof and sound absorbent panels. Lindab A manufacturer of metal building products, ventilation, and metal buildings, based in Switzerland. Metal Frame Buildings A manufacturer of metal structures. Metalicplas Impex A manufacturer of wire products, welded and braided nets, fence panels, and nails. Nimet A manufacturer of hard chrome plated steel bars and tubes, nickel and chrome plated bars and tubes, linear shafts, and customized precision shafts. Plastsistem A manufacturer of galvanized sheets, assembly accessories, and reinforcements for PVC profiles. Quatron Steel A steel fabricator based in Vietnam with operational presence in Romania. Stelco Metalworking Steel Fabrication A manufacturer of steel structures such as machine frames, chassis, trailers, custom-made equipment, special containers, and industrial racks and platforms. Vilmar A manufacturer of pressure vessels, machine fittings, forged metal components, the company also provides services such as heat treatment.
Source: Technavio
Browse Related Reports:
Global Stainless Steel Market 2016-2020
Global Metalworking Fluids Market 2016-2020
Non-Metallic Minerals Market in Bosnia and Herzegovina 2016-2020
Do you need a report on a market in a specific geographical cluster or country but can't find what you're looking for? Don't worry, Technavio also takes client requests. Please contact enquiry@technavio.com with your requirements and our analysts will be happy to create a customized report just for you.
About Technavio
Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. The company develops over 2000 pieces of research every year, covering more than 500 technologies across 80 countries. Technavio has about 300 analysts globally who specialize in customized consulting and business research assignments across the latest leading edge technologies.
Technavio analysts employ primary as well as secondary research techniques to ascertain the size and vendor landscape in a range of markets. Analysts obtain information using a combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches, besides using in-house market modeling tools and proprietary databases. They corroborate this data with the data obtained from various market participants and stakeholders across the value chain, including vendors, service providers, distributors, re-sellers, and end-users.
If you are interested in more information, please contact our media team at media@technavio.com.
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160719005103/en/
Contacts:
Technavio Research
Jesse Maida
Media Marketing Executive
US: +1 630 333 9501
UK: +44 208 123 1770
www.technavio.com
Technavio's latest report on the fabricated metal market in Serbia provides an analysis on the most important trends expected to impact the market outlook from 2016-2020. Technavio defines an emerging trend as a factor that has the potential to significantly impact the market and contribute to its growth or decline.
Chandrakumar Badala Jaganathan, a lead analyst from Technavio, specializing in research on the metals and minerals sector, says, "The manufacturing sector is showing signs of rapid growth and is making a much larger contribution to the Serbian economy compared to the services sector. The fabricated metal products market in Serbia will grow at a steady rate, posting a CAGR of over 3% during the forecast period to reach USD1.7 billion by 2020. A wide variety of fabricated metal components such as hinges, locks, and rivets are expected to be in substantial demand. The demand for fabricated metal components used in the automotive sector is also likely to increase due to investments by foreign automobile manufacturers such as Fiat."
The top three emerging trends driving the fabricated metal market in Serbia according to Technavio chemicals and materials research analysts are:
Increase in M&A
Focus on new export markets
Rise in demand from Western Europe
Increase in M&A
Manufacturers are enhancing their existing product portfolios through M&A, and some international manufacturers are forging strategic alliances and partnerships with local manufacturers to tap into the growth potential of local markets. Large manufacturers are acquiring small and local manufacturers to consolidate their positions in the market. For instance, Esmark has envisaged interest in acquiring companies in Serbia, especially those that have fabrication facilities.
The government of Serbia is also inviting bids for loss making facilities as part of its divestment strategy, as well as to optimize the utilization of manufacturing capacities. This is expected to attract investments from global companies. Many manufacturers in Serbia are being acquired by European and North American companies to gain entry into the market and set up their manufacturing base.
Focus on new export markets
Manufacturers in the market are focusing on expanding into new export markets that are expected to grow at a rapid pace. For instance, export-oriented manufacturers in the market are assessing potential growth opportunities in developing countries in the Middle East, Africa and APAC. However, the dominance of low-cost products from countries such as China and India have limited the probability of success. Nevertheless, many manufacturers in Serbia employ advanced technologies and have acquired quality certifications which most small and medium-sized low-cost producers of fabricated metal products in Asia do not have. Such manufacturers are considering the probability of joint ventures in APAC to capitalize on new growth opportunities in these countries.
Rise in demand from Western Europe
The business environment in Europe is expected to become more positive in the future, as the European Central Bank has announced the implementation of a huge quantitative easing program worth USD 1.3 trillion by 2016. This will increase the circulation of currency in the economies in Europe, leading to higher spending by governments and industries for modernization of production facilities and related capital expenditure. The capital expenditure is likely to be earmarked for the building of new production facilities and expansion of existing production capacities, particularly by companies in Western Europe. This is expected to result in an increased demand for fabricated metals, which will provide potential growth opportunities for Serbian manufacturers that cater to the export markets in Western Europe.
The low cost of fabricated metal products manufactured in Serbia owing to factors such as proximity to countries in Western Europe and low logistic costs is a key competitive advantage. "Moreover, many companies in Western Europe are willing to invest in joint ventures with Serbian manufacturers to leverage the cost advantage. This will also provide an opportunity for local small and medium-sized manufacturers in Serbia to gain access to advanced manufacturing technologies," says Chandrakumar.
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NEW YORK, July 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --
Expanding Vehicle Fleet Size, Favorable Government Policies and Expanding Tourism Sector to Drive Greece Tire Market Through 2021
According to recently released TechSci Research report, "Greece Tire Market Forecast & Opportunities, 2021", tire market in Greece is projected to cross US$ 3.4 billion (Euro 3 Bn) by the end of 2021. Owing to the Eurozone crisis, the country's economy witnessed severe setbacks over the last few years, with almost all major industries, including automotive, registering a considerable decline during 2011 - 2015. However, owing to several bailout packages by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) coupled with the introduction of various favorable government initiatives, the country's tire market is expected to revive over the next five years.
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Browse 15 market data Tables and 24 Figures spread through100 Pages and an in-depth TOC on "Greece Tire Market"
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Greece's motorization rate has been quite stagnant over the last few years, with the same standing at 583 per 1,000 inhabitants in 2013 to 582 per 1,000 inhabitants in 2014. Moreover, the automotive fleet (including passenger cars & commercial vehicle) of the country also shrunk from 6,552 thousand units in 2011 to 6,456 thousand units in 2015. However, the scenario is expected to change over the next five years, and one of the key reasons forecast to contribute to the growth revival in the country's tire market is booming tourism sector. As per the World Travel & Tourism Council, the contribution of travel & tourism sector in the country's GDP was around 7% in 2014, which amounts to around US$ 13 billion.
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Passenger car segment is forecast to dominate Greece tire market over the next five years, owing to increasing purchasing power and rising number of nuclear families in the country. Region-wise, in 2015, Northern Greece region accounted for the largest volume share in the country's tire market, and the same trend is anticipated to continue through 2021. Few of the major companies operating in Greece tire market include Michelin, Bridgestone, Goodyear, Continental and Pirelli, among others.
"Due to lack of automobile manufacturing plants in the country, the country's automotive market is entirely dependent on imports from European and Asian manufacturers. The country's vehicle fleet is dominated by the passenger car segment. As a result, over three-fourths of the tire demand emanating in the country is accounted for by the passenger car tire segment.", said Mr. Karan Chechi, Research Director with TechSci Research, a research based global management consulting firm.
"Greece Tire Market Forecast & Opportunities, 2021" has evaluated the future growth potential of tire market in Greece, and provides statistics and information on market size, consumer behaviour and trends. The report is intended to provide cutting-edge market intelligence and help decision makers take sound investment evaluation. Besides, the report also identifies and analyzes emerging trends along with essential drivers, challenges and opportunities available in Greece tire market.
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VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 -- Fairmont Resources Inc. (TSX VENTURE: FMR)(OTC: FRSSF)(FRANKFURT: F0O1) ("Fairmont") Fairmont intends to make the final payment on the Grabasa purchase of 2,550,000 Euros to the Spanish courts before the expiry of the exclusivity period on July 25, 2016.
The Grabasa transaction purchase exclusivity period expires 90 days from April 26, 2016. The transaction itself will remain valid and does not expire after that date, but the courts and receivers will be able to discuss the assets of Granitos de Badajoz with other potential purchasers should Fairmont not complete the payment terms of the purchase.
About Fairmont
Fairmont Resources Inc. is a rapidly growing industrial mineral and dimensional stone company trading on the Toronto Venture Exchange symbol FMR.
Fairmont's Quebec properties cover numerous occurrences of high-grade titaniferous magnetite with vanadium, with the Buttercup property having a permit to quarry dense aggregate. Where these occurrences have been tested they have display exceptional uniformity with respect to grade. Fairmont also controls three quartz/quartzite properties, with the Forestville property having independent end user testing confirming the suitability of quartzite from Forestville for Ferro Silicon production. Fairmont is also in the process of acquiring the assets of Granitos de Badajoz (GRABASA) in Spain which includes 23 quarries and a 40,000 square metre granite finishing facility that has produced finished granite installed across Europe.
Forward-Looking Statements
Information set forth in this news release contains forward-looking statements that are based on assumptions as of the date of this news release. These statements reflect management's current estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations. They are not guarantees of future performance. Fairmont cautions that all forward looking statements are inherently uncertain and that actual performance may be affected by a number of material factors, many of which are beyond Fairmont's control. Such factors include, among other things: risks and uncertainties relating to Fairmont's exploration program of its mineral properties and Fairmont's limited operating history. Accordingly, actual and future events, conditions and results may differ materially from the estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations expressed or implied in the forward looking information. Except as required under applicable securities legislation, Fairmont undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise forward-looking information. Except as required under applicable securities legislation, Fairmont undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise forward-looking information.
NEITHER TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATION SERVICES PROVIDER (AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN THE POLICIES OF THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE) ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE.
Contacts:
Michael A. Dehn
President and CEO
Fairmont Resources Inc.
647-477-2382
michael@fairmontresources.ca
www.fairmontresources.ca
Doren Quinton
President
QIS Capital
250-377-1182
info@smallcaps.ca
www.smallcaps.ca
A group of environmental and wildlife advocacy groups will not be allowed to intervene in the $1.4 billion breach of contract lawsuit brought by Linn County against the Oregon Department of Forestry.
Linn County Circuit Court Judge Daniel Murphy issued his ruling Monday, a week after a 3-hour motions hearing.
Ralph Bloemers of the Crag Law Center in Portland, which specializes in environmental issues, represented Robert Van Dyk, the Wild Salmon Center, Association of Northwest Steelheaders, Association of Northwest Guides and Anglers, and the Pacific Rivers Council.
Linn County is seeking $1.4 billion in a class-action lawsuit for the 15 counties that receive annual payments from the sale of timber from the 700,000 acres of State Forest Trust Lands. There are about 21,000 acres of such lands in Linn County.
Linn County is charging that the state has breached a contract with the counties and has not managed timber or timber sales on those lands based on the greatest permanent value premise that dates back to the 1930s.
By placing greater emphasis on recreation and wildlife habitat restoration in recent years, timber sales, and therefore income to the counties, has been less than maximum.
Judge Murphy noted in his ruling that the petitioners argue that the case isnt about breach of contract, but is really about Oregon Administrative Rule, which they say is a policy issue.
Applicants offer no legal basis for mandatory intervention, Murphy noted. They were not parties to the statutory contacts created and subject of this suit. The remainder of the applicants arguments are policy arguments about whether or not the Department of Forestry should be permitted to continue its timber land management as in the past.
Murphy added that although the petitioners hold passionate views about timber land management including its impact on wildlife and other environmental concerns, as do many others on both sides of the issue. Passionate concern about something does not qualify an applicant for intervener status.
Murphy said that adding another attorney and parties to the case would likely increase the amount of time for the case to be heard and make an already complex case more complex for certain.
The existing parties and the court can resolve the issues at hand, Murphy said.
The key issues are: Did a contract exist? What was the form and nature of that contract? What were the provisions of that contract? Were any of those provisions breached? If there was a breach, are there any defenses to that breach? If there are no defenses, what are the damages?
Murphy said the petitioners have both political and legal remedies if the state adopts policies that the petitioners can successfully argue are inconsistent with the law and their enjoyment of the lands in question.
Plus, if the case ends up in appellate court, the petitioners could file amici briefs supporting their positions.
The motions hearing that began July 11 will continue at 10 a.m. on Aug. 17 in Linn County Circuit Court.
We are grateful the court recognizes this is a breach of contract case, pure and simple, Roger Nyquist, chairman of the Linn County Board of Commissioners.
But Bloemers said that State law identifies the protection of watersheds, the conservation of fish and wildlife and the prevention of soil erosion among the multiple purposes of State forest lands."
He added that the Association of Northwest Steelheaders, Association of Northwest Guides and Anglers, Wild Salmon Center, and Pacific Rivers Council sought to intervene to protect their interests in Oregon's coastal rivers and to present the argument that, if anything, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act require the State to log less, not more, of these forests to protect Oregon Coast Coho and comply with federal law.
It is very disappointing to have the courthouse doors be closed to fishing guides and anglers who derive their livelihood from and use the forests at stake in this case," Bloemers said.
WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - New York Senator Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has a substantial lead over his Republican challenger in his race for re-election to a fourth term, according to the results of a Quinnipiac University poll released Tuesday. The poll found that 60 percent of New York voters support Schumer, while just 28 percent intend to vote for Republican attorney Wendy Long. Quinnipiac noted Schumer leads among every gender, age and regional group listed as well as among Democrats and independent voters. Schumer benefits from a positive 62 percent to 29 percent approval rating and a positive 57 percent to 25 percent favorability rating. Meanwhile, the poll showed that Long remains largely unknown less than four months before the election, with 74 percent of voters saying they haven't heard enough to form an opinion of her. Schumer is poised to take over from Senator Harry Reid, D-Nev., as the Democratic leader in the Senate assuming he wins re-election. New York's other Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., also has a positive 56 percent to 22 percent job approval rating, according to the poll. The Quinnipiac survey of 1,104 New York voters was conducted July 13th through 17th and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. (Photo: John J. Meola) Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX
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OAKVILLE, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 -- Giyani Gold Corp. (TSX VENTURE: WDG) (hereinafter referred to as the "Company") wishes to announce that further to the Company's News Release dated June 24, 2016, the Company has closed the non-brokered private placement financing (the "Private Placement") and has issued a total of 3,450,000 common shares of the Company at a price of $0.10 per share for total proceeds to the Company of $345,000. The proceeds will be used for general working capital purposes.
No fees were paid by the Company to any broker or finder in connection with the Private Placement. The common shares issued pursuant to the Private Placement are subject to a four month hold period expiring November 19, 2016.
On behalf of the Board of Giyani Gold Corp,
Duane Parnham, Executive Chairman
Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its regulatory Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
Contacts:
Giyani Gold Corp.
Duane Parnham
Executive Chairman
(289) 837-0066
NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - July 19, 2016) - Tarsier Ltd. (OTC PINK: TAER) has announced entering into a multi country Distributor Agreement with Israeli based Optibus to further its Smart City offering. Israeli company Optibus (www.optibus.co) has the solution for bus lines running late while making it easier for public transportation companies to set cost-effective schedules. The company offers a SaaS cloud platform for public transportation companies which optimize the scheduling of vehicles and drivers in real-time. Optibus' super-fast innovative optimization technology is based on patent pending mathematical algorithms, developed together by mathematicians and transportation planning experts. Using Optibus technology, bus operators create full optimal vehicle and crew schedules within seconds. Most of Israel's largest bus operators, as well as large operators from Europe and the US, are already customers. Optibus recently finished a pilot with a large North American operator, showing potential yearly savings of millions of dollars. The agreement calls for a monthly recurring fixed fee per bus, providing a residual income stream for Tarsier and substantial savings for Tarsier clients.
Isaac H Sutton, Tarsier CEO commented, "If you use public buses then you are probably one of millions of people worldwide with the same complaints. How often does it seem like the bus that you need is taking forever to arrive, even though, that line is supposed to come every five minutes? Have you ever waited more than a half hour at a bus stop, only to see three buses of the same line all show up at once? Using the Optibus' technology, the scheduler tests various alternatives in real-time, selecting the best one. Bus operators can save up to 10% of annual Operating Expenses. Tarsier's 2017 goal is to have 10,000 buses using Optibus software generating millions of dollars in saving and recurring monthly revenues for Tarsier. We are looking forward to working with Optibus."
Gady Shlasky, Optibus CEO stated, "Optibus is an essential part of Smart Cities technologies. The urbanization trend requires us to find innovative solutions for cost-effective flexible transportation. Optibus' blazing speed optimization technology offers interactive schedule optimization for the planners, and real-time schedule adjustments for the control room operators. As we prepare for the use of autonomous driving technology to improve cost-efficiency and passengers' service, Dynamic Scheduling Systems (DSS) will be one of the most important pillars. The partnership with Tarsier is an important milestone in our strategy of offering customers a comprehensive smart cities technologies offering."
About Tarsier Ltd.
Tarsier (OTC PINK: TAER) is a New York City based Energy, Big Data and Smart City Solutions Company. Through acquisitions and organic growth, Tarsier plans to manufacture, develop and distribute LED Bulbs and Fixtures, develop and manage Intelligent LED/Smart City products, provide energy audits, resell electric and gas in U.S. deregulated markets and manage energy demand response & battery storage through proprietary software. For more information on Tarsier please visit the Company's web site at www.tarsierltd.com.
About Optibus Ltd.
Optibus revolutionizes public transportation scheduling and operations by introducing Optibize' -- an innovative, super-fast optimization technology, which is based on new patent pending algorithms. Optibize' transforms legacy offline planning and problem handling into an interactive real-time process, thus elevating public transportation companies to operate much more efficiently, reduce cost, and deliver better passenger service. For more information on Optibus please visit the Company's web site at www.optibus.co
Safe Harbor Statement
Information in this news release may contain statements about future expectations, plans, prospects or performance of Tarsier Ltd.( the "Company") that constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The words or phrases "can be," "expects," "may affect," "believes," "estimate," "project," and similar words and phrases are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. The Company cautions you that any forward-looking information provided by or on behalf of the Company is not a guarantee of future performance. None of the information in this press release constitutes or is intended as an offer to sell securities or investment advice of any kind. The Company's actual results may differ materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, some of which are beyond the Company's control. In addition to those discussed in the Company's press releases, public filings, and statements by the Company's management, such statements may include, but are not limited to, the Company's estimate of the sufficiency of its existing capital resources, the Company's ability to raise additional capital to fund future operations, the Company's ability to repay its existing indebtedness, the uncertainties involved in estimating market opportunities and, in identifying contracts which match the Company's capability to be awarded contracts. All such forward-looking statements are current only as of the date on which such statements were made. The Company does not undertake any obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement to reflect events or circumstances after the date on which any such statement is made or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.
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Investor Relations
Everest Corporate Advisors Inc.
Email contact
702-902-2361
705-982-1339
WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - California Attorney General Kamala Harris received a big boost in her race for the Senate on Tuesday, as she was endorsed by both President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.
In an unusual turn of events, Harris is running against fellow Democrat Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-Calif., as they were the top two vote-getters in California's open primary.
A statement from Obama praised Harris for taking on big banks, big for-profit colleges, and big oil in her role as Attorney General.
'Kamala is a lifelong courtroom prosecutor with only one client: the people of the State of California,' Obama said. 'That's the approach she'll take to the United States Senate.'
He added, 'Kamala's experience has taught her that if you're going to give everybody a fair shot, you've got to take on the special interests that too often stand in the way of progress.'
Meanwhile, Biden noted that he came to know Harris through his late son Beau, who served as Delaware Attorney General.
'Beau always supported her, and I'm proud to support her candidacy for the United States Senate,' Biden said. 'Today's Senate needs people like her - leaders who will always fight to make a difference and who never forget where they come from.'
Harris said she was honored to receive Obama and Biden's support, calling them incredible leaders who have worked tirelessly to improve life and get results for all people.
The Attorney General is seen as the favorite over Sanchez, who is the more moderate of the two Democrats and has joined Republicans on some issues during her time in the House.
Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX
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RIMOUSKI, QUEBEC -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 -- Puma Exploration (TSX VENTURE: PUM)(SSE: PUMA) ("Puma") is pleased to report progress on its New Brunswick operations. Puma will maintain its focus in the prolific Bathurst Mining Camp of New Brunswick, while it is currently in the process to sell the Little Stull Lake Gold project in Manitoba, the only project outside New Brunswick.
The Bathurst Mining Camp, famous for its Giant Brunswick 12# Mine, host significant resources that are near surface and within close proximity to all infrastructure's needed for mine development within the established Canadian mining jurisdiction. Puma's main active Projects are the Turgeon VMS (Cu-Zn), the Red Brook Skarn (Zn-Cu-Au), the Ann's Creek Polymetallic Deposits (Ag-Au-Zn-Pb) and the Beresford Copper Porphyry (Mo-Cu). In fact, Puma's projects in New Brunswick offer a wide range of commodities to investors which are mainly oriented toward base metals (Zinc - Copper) but also give significant exposure to precious metals (Gold - Silver) and to strategic metals (Molybdenum).
With the recent acquisition of the Red Brook, high grade zinc property, Puma is strengthening his high quality base metal projects in its portfolio. Both, Turgeon (Zn-Cu) and Red Brook (Zn) properties will get most of the field exploration during the summer and fall seasons.
Turgeon VMS (Zn-Cu)
Puma's initiated a drilling program (2,000 meters) is designed to test the first priority targets defined from the recent ground geophysical survey (IP) carried out on the Turgeon VMS (Cu-Zn) project. The survey revealed five (5) first priority untested target anomalies along the favourable horizon and also on new zones never tested. One of those represents a potential major VMS anomaly of a size of 350 meters by 350 meters, open at depth and along strike, located on the extension of the main Dragon hydrothermal alteration zone. The program is still underway and the results will be released when they will come available.
Red Brook Skarn (Zn-Cu-Au)
Red Brook was acquired from a local prospector's following his recent discovery of high grade Zinc Massive Sulphide outcrop grading up to 13% Zn, 0.23% Cu and 2.5g/t Ag. The initial excavation, 40 meters by 15 meters area, also contains a Gold and Copper zone grading up-to 1.3 g/t Au and 0.53% Cu (see News 19/01/2016). The mineralization is open in all directions. Currently, Puma's crew is prospecting and exploring the area in preparation for major stripping program over the main Zinc showing.
Ann's Creek Polymetallic Lenses (Ag-Au-Zn-Pb)
The mineralized lenses, namely Hache, Shaft, Henry, Henry East, Half Mile and Pine Tree of the Ann's Creek Property are spread over a distance of 6 kilometers and have received very little advanced exploration work with the exception of the Hache Lens. 3D modelling focusing on the high grade portions of the Hache lens containing at least 300 g/t Ag (10 oz/t) is done and Puma is currently evaluating different scenario's to develop and benefit from this outcropping high grade Ag-Au-Zn-Pb Hache lens. Also, geologists have prospected and mapped over the other existing lenses and in new areas to define other high grade base and precious metals potential. Results from this work will be released shortly.
Beresford Copper Porphyry (Cu-Mo)
The Beresford Copper Project consists mainly of the large 4 km diameter Nicholas-Denys porphyry intrusion. In 2014, continuous molybdenum, copper and silver mineralization and alteration were intersected over 486.4 meters representing the first discovery of a significant Mo-Cu Porphyry system in New Brunswick. Ten (10) first priority IP targets remain to be drilled. Holes FND14-01 and FND14-02 are located on the northwestern boundary of the 4km diameter ND granodiorite intrusion at the terminus of a NW-SE trending 1km wide by 5 km long fairway defined by drillholes, mineralized trenches and prominent Induced Polarization ("IP") and magnetic anomalies. Puma is currently seeking a strategic partner to explore and develop the Nicholas-Denys Porphyry system.
Puma also announces the closing of private placement offering with qualified investors, employees, executive officers, directors and consultant in the amount of $545,980. With this placement, Puma Exploration issued 9,099,665 common shares at the price of $0.06 per share and 9,099,665 warrants. Each full warrant gives its holder the right to purchase one common share at a price of $0.10 per share until July 19th, 2018. In connection with this Private Placement, the Company has paid cash finder's fees in an amount of only $2,558 and issued only 42,640 finder's warrants will entitle holder to acquire one additional common share of Puma at a price of $0.06 for 24 months.
All securities issued to purchasers and finders under the Offering are subject to a four-month hold period from the date of issuance of the securities, pursuant to applicable securities legislation and the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange. These placements have received the conditional approval of the TSX Venture Exchange. The proceeds of the Offerings will be used for the exploration and development of Puma's properties in New Brunswick and for general purposes of the company. Further to the placement, Puma will hold 131,965,598 shares issued and outstanding common shares.
About Puma Exploration
Puma Exploration is a Canadian mineral exploration company with advanced precious and base metals projects in Canada. The Company's major assets are the Turgeon Zinc-Copper Project and the Nicholas-Denys Project in New Brunswick and their equity interest in BWR as related to the Little Stull Lake Gold Project in Manitoba. Puma is focusing its exploration efforts in New Brunswick, Canada.
Learn more by clicking here: www.pumaexploration.com
The contents of this press release were prepared by Marcel Robillard, a Qualified Person as defined in NI 43-101. Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
Forward-Looking Statements: This press release may contain forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements involve a number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of Puma Exploration Inc. to be materially different from actual future results and achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements which speak only as of the date the statements were made, except as required by law. Puma Exploration undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties are described in the quarterly and annual reports and in the documents submitted to the securities administration.
Contacts:
Marcel Robillard
President
Puma Exploration
(418) 724-0901
president@explorationpuma.com
More information
Toll free: (800) 321-8564
MONTREAL, QUEBEC -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 -- MDN Inc. (the "Company") (TSX VENTURE: MDN) today announced the convening of a special meeting of the Company's shareholders (the "Meeting") which will be held on September 1st, 2016 in Montreal.
Further to the acquisition by the Company of the James Bay niobium project announced on June 28, 2016, and considering that the Company plans to concentrate its efforts principally on enhancing the value of this niobium project, during the Meeting, the Company will solicit the adoption by its shareholders of special resolutions authorizing the amendment of its articles (the "Articles") to consolidate its common shares (the "Common Shares"), modify the name of the Company and to authorize the Company's directors to name one or more directors between annual meetings of shareholders, as further described below.
Share Consolidation
In order to raise the share price to more attractive levels and to facilitate raising additional capital in the future, the Company considers it may be advisable to consolidate its issued and outstanding Common Shares.
Accordingly, shareholders will be asked to consider, and if deemed advisable, to adopt a special resolution to authorize an amendment to the Articles on such basis as the directors of the Company may determine, so as to consolidate the issued and outstanding Common Shares of the Company on the basis of one (1) Common Share for a maximum of five (5) issued and outstanding Common Shares.
As of this date, 119,657,539 Common Shares of the Company are issued and outstanding; should a share consolidation on the basis of a 1 to 5 ratio be implemented, a total of approximately 23,901,508 shares would be issued and outstanding. The share consolidation will not change a shareholder's proportionate interest in the Company; except that if, as a result of the share consolidation, a shareholder becomes entitled to a fractional Common Share, such fraction will be rounded down to the nearest whole number.
Change of the Name of the Company
The shareholders of the Company will be asked to consider, and if deemed advisable, to approve a special resolution to authorize an amendment to its Articles to modify the name of the Company from "MDN Inc." to "Les metaux Niobay inc. / Niobay Metals Inc."
The Company wishes to adopt the name "Les metaux Niobay inc. / Niobay Metals Inc." to re-brand the Company in consideration of its evolution over the past months including, notably, the acquisition by the Company of the James Bay niobium property concluded on June 28, 2016.
Modifications to the Articles to Allow the Addition of Directors
The Company's board of directors believes that it would be beneficial to the Company and its shareholders to give the board flexibility to add directors who possess expertise and knowledge relevant to the Company's operations from time to time between two annual shareholder meetings.
The shareholders will be asked to consider and, if deemed advisable, to approve, a special resolution, as provided in the Business Corporations Act (Quebec), to authorize an amendment of the Company's Articles to authorize the directors to appoint one or more additional directors to hold office for a term expiring not later than the close of the annual shareholders meeting following their appointment, provided that the total number of directors so appointed may not exceed one third of the number of directors elected at the annual shareholder meeting preceding their appointment.
Approvals
In addition to the approval of these special resolutions by the Company's shareholders, these resolutions are also subject to the receipt of all required regulatory approvals, including those of the TSX Venture Exchange. In addition, notwithstanding whether these resolutions are passed by shareholders at the Meeting, the board of directors of the Corporation may choose not to implement the proposed amendments to the Articles at any time prior to the issuance of a Certificate of Amendment giving effect to the amendment of the Corporation's Articles of Incorporation, without further notice to or approval of the shareholders.
Information Circular
An information circular which describes each of these special resolutions will be communicated to all shareholders of the Company during the month of August 2016.
About MDN (TSX VENTURE: MDN)
MDN Inc. is a mining exploration company that recently acquired the James Bay Niobium (Argor) property in Ontario, Canada. MDN also holds a 72.5% interest in Crevier Minerals Inc., which owns a niobium tantalum resource in Quebec, Canada and the Ikungu and Ikungu East Gold properties in Tanzania.
Forward-Looking Statements
The statements set forth in this press release, which describe MDN's objectives, projections, estimates, expectations or forecasts, may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of securities legislation. Positive or negative verbs such as "will", "plan", "evaluate", "estimate", "believe", "expect" and other related expressions are used to identify such statements. MDN would like to point out that, by their very nature, forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties such that its results, or the measures it adopts, could differ materially from those indicated or underlying these statements, or could have an impact on the degree of realization of a particular projection. Major factors that may lead to a material difference between MDN's actual results and the projections or expectations set forth in the forward-looking statements include financing risks, title matters, metal and mineral prices, operations in foreign countries, laws and regulatory requirements, currency risks, volatility of share prices and uninsured risks, and such other risks as described in detail from time to time in documents filed by MDN with securities regulatory authorities in Canada. Unless otherwise required by applicable securities laws, MDN disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. The forward-looking information in this press release is based on information available as of the date of the release.
Follow us on Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/MDN_INC
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/1318737
Contacts:
Claude Dufresne, P.Eng.
President & CEO
MDN Inc.
514 866-6500, Ext. 221
cdufresne@mdn-mines.com
www.mdn-mines.com
NAPA, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 -- SpringHill Suites Napa Valley, located on the edge of Napa's beautiful Northern California Wine Country, proudly welcomes Lee Cote as its new General Manager and names Megan Blankenheim as the hotel's new Senior Sales Manager. These two dedicated hospitality veterans join the team as they prepare to highlight even more of the unique discoveries and offerings surrounding the hotel in Napa Valley.
Lee Cote comes to the hotel as the new General Manager, following time spent managing hotels in East Lansing MI, Tampa FL, and Columbia SC. A life-long Spartan and Hospitality Business graduate from Michigan State University, Lee Cote brings a wealth of experience creating unique stays for guests throughout the country. The goals for the hotel's future include providing an elite level of customer service that highlights the staff's knowledge of the beautiful offerings of the Napa Valley.
"I am extremely excited to join the fantastic team here at the Springhill Suites Napa Valley," said Lee Cote. "Our clearly defined mission will be to provide the premier customer service experience in Napa Valley, fueled by a hotel culture of relentless positive attitude and energy. I am very much looking forward to what our team and our hotel will achieve in the future."
Stepping up from the role of Sales & Events Manager is the hotel's new Senior Sales Manager, Megan Blankenheim. After joining the team in 2012, Megan was promoted to the role of Sales & Events manager after just three months, proving her dedication and expertise in the field.
"I am very excited for my new role and the new challenges and opportunities it will present. Our client relationships are the most important part of my current role. I will work to maintain and improve our current relationships, while creating more relationships with new clients in and around Napa. I love what the Springhill Suites represents and am excited to grow the hotel's presence within the community."
SpringHill Suites Napa Valley's passionate hospitality team is what makes the iconic hotel one of the most vibrant property's in the Northern California Wine Country. With free breakfast and welcoming offerings like spacious and stylish Napa suites, and expansive wedding venues designed to create flawless Napa Valley backdrops, the hotel is one of the region's best refuges for exploring the area's events, attractions and beautiful wineries.
About the SpringHill Suites Napa Valley
SpringHill Suites Napa Valley offers stylish, well-appointed accommodations located on the edge of Napa, featuring everything from ergonomic workspaces in every suite to free Wi-Fi access and a delicious complimentary breakfast every morning. Additional hotel amenities include a heated outdoor pool and whirlpool, a fitness center, and complimentary parking. Guests can gather with friends at the fire pit at the end of the day and soak up the sunset and cool breeze. The hotel's sophisticated meeting and event space includes an elegant ballroom and the striking outdoor terrace. Its superb hotel location in the center of Napa, California enables guests to experience the best of the area with ease - from wine tasting to shopping and dining, as well as fun and excitement at nearby Six Flags Discovery Kingdom. Whether traveling for business or leisure, the hotel is an iconic rest stop amidst the beauty, wonder and sights of Napa, California.
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CONTACT:
SpringHill Suites Napa Valley
101 Gateway Road East Napa California 94558 USA
1-707-253-1900
http://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/sfons-springhill-suites-napa-valley/
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 -- Aton Resources Inc. (the "Company") (TSX VENTURE: AAN) is extremely pleased to announce the approval by the Egyptian Mineral Resource Authority ("EMRA") to extend the term for the exploration phase on its Fatiri and Abu Marawat concessions by two years until July 2018.
Mark W. Campbell, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Company, said, "We are very pleased with the support given to us by EMRA and the Ministry of Petroleum. The extensions to the exploration terms are an important part in providing the Company due time to advance both the development of our flagship Hamama project at Abu Marawat and the exploration of our exciting Fatiri concession. We believe that this decision demonstrates the Ministry of Petroleum's and EMRA's commitment to the development of Egypt's mineral resource sector. EMRA has been a very helpful and supportive partner and we are very pleased to be working closely with them." Campbell further commented, "The positive drilling results at the Hamama on the Abu Marawat concession and the potential bonanza gold grades at Rouh Al Hadid on the Fatiri concession, confirm the potential for significant deposits within our two concession areas. Further showing the potential that Aton has at two of the most exciting areas anywhere in the world today."
The award of the term extension to the licenses was a result of EMRA and the Ministry of Petroleum's recognition of the challenges the company weathered and the delays associated with the political transition in Egypt, operating environment and global market conditions that impacted the rate at which the Company was able to explore its two concessions.
About Aton Resources Inc. Inc.:
Aton Resources Inc. (TSX VENTURE: AAN) is a focused gold exploration company, working in Egypt exploring for and developing economic gold deposits in the Central Eastern Desert of the Arabian-Nubian Shield (ANS). The Company's 100%- owned concessions, Abu Marawat and the Fatiri, combined cover 2,772 square kilometers of underexplored ground. Evidence of gold on the concessions dates the many surface workings to pre-historic (Copper Age) and Old Kingdom (Pharaonic), through Ptolemaic and Roman and into Early Arab times and the early 20th century European period. Several historic gold mines and numerous gold showings and gossans occur within the two concessions.
The Company's land package is located some 400 km southeast of Cairo and is enhanced by expanding infrastructure, including access to highway and railway right-of-way, a high-capacity electricity grid, and nearby major cities; Qena, on the Nile River, and Port of Safaga, on the Red Sea, only 50 km to the East.
ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF ATON RESOURCES INC.
Mark W. Campbell, President & CEO
Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements
Some of the statements contained in this release are forward-looking statements. Since forward- looking statements address future events and conditions; by their very nature they involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Actual results in each case could differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements. Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
Contacts:
Aton Resources Inc.
Mark W. Campbell
President and CEO
+1-936-689-2589
www.atonresources.com
Air transport: supports 6.8 million jobs and $72.5 billion of African GDP
Aviation is vital to the modern, globalised world, supporting millions of jobs and driving economic growth. But the benefits of connectivity must be protected with appropriate support from governments if the air transport sector is to help fulfil its potential as a connector of people, trade and tourism and a driver of sustainable development. These are the conclusions drawn in a new report, Aviation: Benefits Beyond Borders, issued by the Air Transport Action Group (ATAG).
Worldwide, aviation supports 62.7 million jobs and generates $2.7 trillion in gross domestic product (GDP). Not only does air transport provide significant economic benefits, but it also plays a major role in the social development of people and communities all over the globe, allowing people to travel for educational opportunities and cultural exchange, more broadly. Across Africa, specifically, air transport supports 6.8 million jobs and contributes $72.5 billion to the African continent's GDP.
In the next 20 years, forecasts suggest that aviation-supported jobs worldwide will increase to over 99 million and GDP to $5.9 trillion. Africa is the second-fastest growing region in the world as far as international air traffic is concerned. However, the overly strict regulatory environment in the region must be simplified if Africa's true economic potential is to be realised. For decades, industry leaders have been urging governments in Africa to unlock this potential by moving ahead with the policy of open skies in the region, allowing aviation services to flourish and continue to support growth. Industry costs in Africa, including passenger fees, are among the highest in the world. These regulatory arrangements should be improved, according to industry experts in the region.
ATAG executive director, Michael Gill, says that the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development at the United Nations highlights a number of goals that the international community should strive to achieve by 2030: "We found that air transport in some way supports 14 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, from decent work and economic growth to quality education and reduced inequalities. By continuing to grow in a sustainable manner, aviation can strive to be a force for good for many years to come."
"A significant factor in our work on sustainable development is the industry's world-leading climate action plan. We need support from governments around the world to agree on a key part of that plan at the upcoming International Civil Aviation Organization Assembly, where we hope an agreement can be reached on a global offsetting scheme for air transport. It is a vital part of our industry's future role in helping to support development worldwide."
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Elijah Chingoso, Secretary General of the African Airlines Association (AFRAA): "Sustainable development of air transport in Africa requires that the industry be fully liberalised, industry costs are brought down to global standards through adhering to ICAO stipulations as well as removal of constraints to the development of the industry such as monopolies and visa requirements. Reliable aviation infrastructure, efficient, inexpensive and sustainable transport services are crucial for speedy socio-economic development, regional integration and for the continent's competitiveness in the global economy."
Boni Dibate, Director Africa Affairs for the Civil Air Navigation Services Organisation (CANSO): "As the second fastest growing region for international air traffic, Africa needs efficient, cost-effective and safe air traffic management (ATM) infrastructure to fully realise the economic benefits of aviation. CANSO is working hard with its industry partners to improve the safety, efficiency and sustainability of ATM across Africa, by improving safety through its standard of excellence; providing training; disseminating best practice; and promoting opportunities for collaborative decision-making. States have a key role to play by investing in ATM infrastructure; modernising airspace by implementing the ICAO Aviation System Block Upgrades; and liberalising air transport by implementing the Yamoussoukro Declaration."
The report, Aviation: Benefits Beyond Borders, covers the global aviation sector, with regional and some national analysis. It is available for download at www.aviationbenefits.org.
ends
Notes:
The full report and case studies are available from www.aviationbenefits.org
Media may also be interested in the newswire, capturing sustainable aviation news from across the industry at www.aviationbenefits.org/newswire
The Air Transport Action Group is a coalition of organisations and companies throughout the air transport industry that drive the sustainable development of the air transport sector. Funding members include ACI, Airbus, ATR, Boeing, Bombardier, CANSO, CFM, Embraer, Honeywell Aerospace, GE, IATA, Pratt Whitney, Rolls-Royce and Safran. www.atag.org
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160719005115/en/
Contacts:
Air Transport Action Group
Haldane Dodd
doddh@atag.org
Twitter: @enviroaero @ATAG_Aviation
www.atag.org
WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Discover Financial Services (DFS) reported second-quarter net income of $616 million or $1.47 per share compared to $599 million or $1.33 per share for the second quarter of 2015. The company noted that its net income included a non-recurring tax benefit of $44 million which contributed $0.11 to earnings per share. On average, 23 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected the company to report profit per share of $1.42 for the quarter. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items. Total loans ended the quarter at $71.9 billion, up 4% compared to the prior year. Credit card loans ended the quarter at $57.2 billion, up 4% from the prior year. Net interest income increased 7%, from the prior year, driven by loan growth and higher net interest margin. Other income decreased 15% from the prior year. Revenue Net of Interest Expense was $2.22 billion compared to $2.17 billion, a year ago. Analysts expected revenue of $2.23 billion for the quarter. David Nelms, chairman and CEO of Discover, stated: 'During the second quarter, we achieved loan growth within our target range and delivered strong profitability. We also announced plans to increase our dividend and share repurchases, which we expect will result in one of the highest total yields among CCAR banks over the next four quarters.' Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX
Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
ALBANY POLICE
Blocking crash 8:17 a.m. Monday, 2200 block Pacific Boulevard. Donna Hernandez, 59, of Albany, was cited for unsafe lane change after she switched travel lanes and hit a utility trailer and tipped it over, completely blocking the roadway. No injuries were reported due to the wreck.
Human waste ordinance 11:30 a.m. Sunday, 400 block Third Avenue S.E. A caller reported that a male on a bike openly urinated on the Albany Christian School building and in front of his children, who were outside playing. William David Harrison, 51, was cited on a human waste ordinance.
LINN COUNTY SHERIFF
Death update Detectives continue to investigate the death of James Arthur Byrns, 55, but little new information was available about the case on Monday. Byrns, a transient staying in the Scio area, was unresponsive after passing out on Saturday morning, according to a friend who called 9-1-1. He was taken to the Samaritan Lebanon Community Hospital, where he died. There were no obvious signs of foul play in the case.
MIP party 12:58 a.m. Saturday, 36000 block Santiam Highway, between Albany and Lebanon. More than 10 deputies responded to a party and at least twelve people were cited for minor in possession of alcohol and perhaps several more. A full report on the incident was not available on Monday afternoon. One teen was taken to the hospital with medical problems. Jacob Bonilla, 21, and Austin Foster, 22, were each arrested on charges of interfering with a police officer and reckless endangering.
Menacing arrest 2:32 p.m. Sunday, 40600 Baptist Church Drive, near Lacomb. A caller reported that a woman was chasing after him with a pistol. He added that she was threatening his friend on the property, as well, and was intoxicated. Sherry Manasco, 43, was arrested on a charge of menacing.
OREGON STATE POLICE
Injury crash 4:48 p.m. Sunday, Highway 99E and Lake Creek Drive. A driver did not stop for a stop sign at the intersection and collided with another vehicle. Both vehicles ended up on their sides. Drivers Janelle Marie Roberts, 29, of Albany and Paden Wallace Tyler, 21, of Sweet Home each were taken to Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center in Corvallis. No other occupants were in either automobile. No information was listed regarding whether Tyler or Roberts were the at-fault driver. The police report, however, was forwarded to the Linn County District Attorneys Office for review. Halsey-Shedd fire personnel and one Linn County deputy also responded to the crash.
LEBANON POLICE
Stolen car 11:02 A.M. Friday, 3600 block Santiam Highway. A tan 1986 Toyota Corolla was reported stolen sometime during the night.
MARKHAM, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 -- MBMI RESOURCES INC. ("MBMI" or the "Company") (NEX: MBR.H) announces that it has filed its unaudited interim financial statements for the period ended April 30, 2016 ("Financial Statements"), and the related management's discussion and analysis of those financial statements ("MD&A"). Copies of the Financial Statements and MD&A can be accessed on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.
For further information relating to the Company or this release, please refer to MBMI's website at www.mbmiresources.com.
Cautionary Statement:
Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. No stock exchange, securities commission or other regulatory authority has approved or disapproved the information contained herein.
The foregoing information may contain forward-looking statements relating to the future performance of MBMI Resources Inc. Forward-looking statements, specifically those concerning future performance, are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially from MBMI's plans and expectations. These plans, expectations, risks and uncertainties are detailed herein and from time to time in the filings made by MBMI with the TSX Venture Exchange and securities regulators. MBMI Resources Inc. does not assume any obligation to update or revise its forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
Contacts:
MBMI Resources Inc.
Joseph Chan
+1 (647) 299-9203
mbmi@mail.com
www.mbmiresources.com
LUXEMBOURG -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 -- Tenaris S.A. (NYSE: TS) (BAE: TS) (BMV: TS) (MILAN: TEN) announced today that, following the completion of the subscription process in connection with the previously announced issuance of 200 million ordinary shares of Usinas Siderurgicas de Minas Gerais - Usiminas at BRL 5.0 per share, Usiminas' extraordinary general shareholders' meeting homologated the resulting BRL 1 billion capital increase and authorized the issuance of such ordinary shares.
Throughout the various stages of the subscription process, TenarisConfab has subscribed to a total of 11.5 million ordinary shares for a total amount of BRL 57.5 million (approximately USD 16.6 million). In addition, on April 20, 2016, TenarisConfab subscribed to 1.3 million preferred shares for a total amount of BRL 1.6 million (approximately USD 0.5 million).
Following the issuance of these ordinary shares, TenarisConfab will own a total of 36.5 million ordinary shares and 1.3 million preferred shares, representing 3.0% of Usiminas' capital, and the T/T Group (including TenarisConfab, Ternium and its subsidiaries Siderar and Prosid) will own 39.6% of Usiminas' ordinary shares and 1.8% of Usiminas' preferred shares.
Some of the statements contained in this press release are "forward-looking statements." Forward-looking statements are based on management's current views and assumptions and involve known and unknown risks that could cause actual results, performance or events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by those statements.
Tenaris is a leading global supplier of steel tubes and related services for the world's energy industry and certain other industrial applications.
Giovanni Sardagna
Tenaris
1-888-300-5432
www.tenaris.com
TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwired) -- 07/19/16 -- Teranga Gold Corporation ("Teranga" or the "Company") (TSX: TGZ)(ASX: TGZ) is pleased to announce that it has subscribed by way of a placement (the "Placement") and acquired a 5% interest in Gryphon Minerals Limited ("Gryphon") (ASX: GRY).
The Placement, which was made pursuant to section 708 of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) ("Australian Corporations Act") and in accordance with section 7.1 of the ASX Listing Rules, follows the announcement on June 19, 2016 that Teranga has signed an agreement to acquire Gryphon as part of the all share transaction (the "Proposed Gryphon Acquisition"). A meeting of Gryphon shareholders to approve the Proposed Gryphon Acquisition is expected to take place in late September 2016, with closing anticipated in October 2016.
The Placement is not subject to the approval of the Gryphon shareholders nor is it contingent on the completion of the Proposed Gryphon Acquisition.
Through the Placement, Teranga has subscribed for 21.2 million fully paid ordinary shares of Gryphon for total consideration of approximately A$4.4 million (US$3.4 million). The Placement price of A$0.206 per Gryphon share, which is equivalent to Teranga's offer price for one Gryphon share under the Proposed Gryphon Acquisition, represents a premium to Gryphon's closing share price on the Australian Securities Exchange on July 19, 2016. As a result of the Placement, Teranga owns approximately 5% of Gryphon's issued shares.
"Accelerating the development of the Banfora gold project is a top priority for us following the closing of the Proposed Gryphon Acquisition," said Richard Young, President and Chief Executive Officer. "In order to maximize our return and mitigate project risk, construction at Banfora needs to commence following next year's rainy season. The capital from the Placement will be used immediately to start the resource conversion drill program and plant optimization studies required to complete a fully optimized and de-risked feasibility study by the first half of 2017 and to update the tailings storage facility design and relocation action plan required as a result of the decision to move forward with a carbon-in-leach plant."
Added Mr. Young, "Launching this process in advance of closing the Proposed Gryphon Acquisition, allows for a target date of fall 2017 for commencement of major construction, with a targeted first pour in the first half of 2019."
In accordance with the Australian Corporations Act, a notice of initial substantial holding has been filed with the Australian Securities Exchange.
Cautionary Forward-Looking Statement
This press release contains certain statements that constitute forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws ("forward-looking statements"), which reflects management's expectations regarding Teranga Gold Corporation's ("Teranga" or the "Company") future growth, results of operations (including,
without limitation, future production and capital expenditures), performance (both operational and financial) and business prospects (including the timing and development of new deposits and the success of exploration activities) and opportunities. Wherever possible, words such as "plans", "expects", "does not expect", "budget", "scheduled", "trends", "indications", "potential", "estimates", "predicts", "forecasts", "anticipate" or "does not anticipate", "believe", "intend", "ability to" and similar expressions or statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might", "will", or are "likely" to be taken, occur or be achieved, have been used to identify such forward looking information. Although the forward-looking information contained in this presentation reflect management's current beliefs based upon information currently available to management and based upon what management believes to be reasonable assumptions, Teranga cannot be certain that actual results will be consistent with such forward looking information. Such forward-looking statements are based upon assumptions, opinions and analysis made by management in light of its experience, current conditions and its expectations of future developments that management believe to be reasonable and relevant but that may prove to be incorrect. These assumptions include, among other things, the ability to obtain any requisite Senegalese governmental approvals, the accuracy of mineral reserve and mineral resource estimates, gold price, exchange rates, fuel and energy costs, future economic conditions, anticipated future estimates of free cash flow, and courses of action. Teranga cautions you not to place undue reliance upon any such forward-looking statements.
The risks and uncertainties that may affect forward-looking statements include, among others: the inherent risks involved in exploration and development of mineral properties, including government approvals and permitting, changes in economic conditions, changes in the worldwide price of gold and other key inputs, changes in mine plans and other factors, such as project execution delays, many of which are beyond the control of Teranga, as well as other risks and uncertainties which are more fully described in the Company's Annual Information Form dated March 30, 2016, and in other filings of Teranga with securities and regulatory authorities which are available at www.sedar.com. Teranga does not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements should assumptions related to these plans, estimates, projections, beliefs and opinions change. Nothing in this report should be construed as either an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy or sell Teranga securities.
This press release is dated as of the date on the first page. All references to the Company include its subsidiaries unless the context requires otherwise.
This press release contains references to Teranga using the words "we", "us", "our" and similar words and the reader is referred to using the words "you", "your" and similar words.
About Teranga Gold
Teranga is a Canadian-based gold company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: TGZ) and Australian Securities Exchange (ASX: TGZ). Teranga is principally engaged in the production and sale of gold, as well as related activities such as exploration and mine development in West Africa.
Teranga's mission is to create value for all of its stakeholders through responsible mining. Its vision is to explore, discover and develop gold mines in greater West Africa, in accordance with the highest international standards, and to be a catalyst for sustainable economic, environmental and community development. All of its actions from exploration, through development, operations and closure will be based on the best available techniques. For more information, please refer to www.terangagold.com.
Contacts:
Teranga Gold Corporation
Richard Young
President & CEO
+1 416-594-0000
ryoung@terangagold.com
Teranga Gold Corporation
Trish Moran
Head of Investor Relations
+1 416-607-4507
tmoran@terangagold.com
Bloombergs venture capital arm Bloomberg Beta closed a second $75m fund.
The new fund will continue to focus on the future of work, building on the firms specialty in machine intelligence, investing in companies that make business work better.
Bloomberg Betas first fund invested in companies which have secured more than $340m in total capital. Three of them have been acquired.
Led by Roy Bahat, Karin Klein, James Cham, and Shivon Zilis, Bloomberg Beta open sourced its internal operating manual on GitHub, abandoning a traditional website entirely and developed a methodology to predict who will start companies. Now in its 3rd year, the Future Founders program uses a predictive model to identify people most likely to found a startup.
Based in San Francisco and New York, Bloomberg Beta now has $150M under management, capitalized solely by Bloomberg.
FinSMEs
20/07/2016
Ocee Design, a UK-based supplier of contemporary commercial furniture, received a 10m investment.
Business Growth Fund invested in the company to support the acquisition of Danish furniture designer Four Design, which has sales throughout Europe and manufacturing partners in North America, China and Australia.
The funding will be used to scale the companys operations in the UK and internationally.
Led by Chief Executive Officer Alistair Gough, Ocee Design is a commercial furniture market leader with showrooms in Northampton and London. The company currently employs 85 staff, 50 of whom are engaged in the assembly of furniture.
The investment for Business Growth Fund was led by Mark Freer and James Syrotiuk. To support the next phase of growth, Steve Halbert, previous head of UK M&A at KPMG and former Chair and Executive Chair of GVA Grimley and current Chairman at Inflexion backed Alcumus, National Accident Helpline and Safestyle UK, joined the board as Non-Executive Chairman.
FinSMEs
19/07/2016
Skycure, a Palo Alto, California and Tel Aviv, Israel-based mobile threat defense platform provider, closed $16.5m Series B funding round.
The round was led by Foundation Capital with participation from Shasta Ventures, Pitango Venture Capital, New York Life, and private investors Peter McKay, Michael Weider and Lane Bess. In conjunction with the funding, Paul Holland, a general partner at Foundation Capital, joined Skycures board of directors.
The company, which has raised $27.5m in total funding to date, intends to use the funds to expand in EMEA and APAC, broaden its presence with Global 1000 customers, and invest in further developing its platform.
Led by Adi Sharabani, CEO, Yair Amit, CTO, Skycure provides a mobile threat defense platform that allows enterprises to secure employee mobile devices when adopting BYOD to increase productivity.
Its predictive technology uses a layered approach that leverages massive crowd-sourced threat intelligence, in addition to both device- and server-based analysis, to proactively protect mobile devices from malware, network threats, and app/OS vulnerability exploits. Malware detection techniques include static and dynamic analysis, crowd-based anomaly detection, as well as analysis based on signatures, app behavior, structure, permissions, etc.
Protection against network threats includes a built-in VPN that protects the device while maintaining network connectivity during an attack and a corporate resource protection feature that blocks communication with specific valuable resources (mail servers, file shares and other business systems) during a network attack, while allowing non-critical connections.
The platform has performed more than 150 million network tests and detected tens of thousands of malware installations, including repackaged versions of the latest mobile game sensation, Pokemon Go.
FinSMEs
20/07/2016
CommonBond, a NYC-based online lender that uses data and technology to lower the cost of student loans, received approx $330m in new funding.
The capital was a combination of equity capital to fund operations and lending capital to fund loans.
The $30m Series C equity round was led by the Neuberger Berman Private Equity round, which joined existing investors August Capital, Tribeca Venture Partners, Social Capital, Nyca Partners and Victory Park Capital and individual investors Vikram Pandit, Tom Glocer and Tom Kalaris.
In addition to the equity funding, the company announced a $300m in loan purchases by a global asset management firm.
With these new operations, CommonBond will surpass $1 billion in financing across equity and debt.
The company will use the new equity funding to hire across the organization, build out its technology platforms for consumers and employers, and continue to scale its loan operations. It has also announced the acquisition of Gradible, a personal finance platform founded in 2013 by Pete Wylie, Grant Biles and Lee Smallwood, which provides users with personalized recommendations on how to better manage and repay their student loans. With Gradible, CommonBond will now offer a full suite of student loan repayment programs for their employees, beyond student loan refinancing options.
Led by David Klein, CEO and Co-Founder, CommonBond is a direct lender, licensed in more than 40 states nationally. It has nearly 100 employer partnerships with companies such as Mercer, WeWork, Betterment, Skadden Arps and Dentons.
FinSMEs
19/07/2016
The National Green Tribunal today has asked the Delhi RTO to de-register all diesel vehicles in the NCR region that are more than 10 years old. Thats a huge blow to a very large segment of diesel vehicles. The ban is universal encompassing everything from passenger cars to commercial vehicles. Obviously the ruling is going to have a cascading effect on various segments of the automotive industry, consumers and manufacturer sentiment and outlay is going to shift tremendously. What all could happen, lets take a look:
1. Deregistration...
Their collaboration has led to Bollywood's biggest blockbusters, like Ek Tha Tiger and Bajrangi Bhaijaan.
So Kabir Khan and Salman Khan's latest film together Tubelight has also generated substantial buzz.
Tubelight, which is set against the backdrop of the 1962 Sino-Indian War, required extensive shoot schedules in Ladakh and Kashmir.
However, the latest news reports suggest that the unrest in the Valley has thrown a spanner in the Tubelight team's plans.
The Times of India reported that Kabir Khan has now put his plans for shooting in Kashmir on hold, "indefinitely".
The Tubelight team will leave for Ladakh on 25 July. Unlike the original plan, they will not be moving on to Kashmir, but returning home to Mumbai, once the Ladakh leg of the shoot wraps up.
A spokesperson for the film has said that the team does not at present know when they will be able to shoot the Kashmir portions.
Salman and Kabir had shot extensively in Kashmir while working on Bajrangi Bhaijaan as well. In fact, Salman had even 'adopted' a Kashmiri family, helping them out financially.
Gov. Kate Brown last week ensured that gun control would be a contentious issue again next year in the 2017 Legislature, as she unveiled three legislative priorities and an executive order meant to tighten existing Oregon law.
We don't have much issue with at least some parts of her executive order, but our sense is that her legislative priorities again will find some tough sledding when the Legislature convenes and we're not convinced that any of those ideas will do anything to make Oregon residents safer, which seems to us to be the acid test for any such proposal.
"Since I was sworn in as governor 17 months ago, more than 600 Oregonians have died from violence inflicted by a gun," Brown said on Friday. "Violence answers nothing, offers nothing, solves nothing. If we want to end violence, we must instill hope and create opportunity. I call on each of us, as Oregonians and as Americans, to join this call to end gun violence now."
(By the way, the number Brown gave about more than 600 Oregonians dying from gun violence is strictly true, but there's an important asterisk that she didn't add: The number includes deaths by suicide, which make up more than 80 percent of those cases. And, as The Washington Post reported last year, studies have shown little connection between suicides and access to guns. But this does suggest that bolstering access to mental health services across Oregon might be a considerably more effective step at reducing the number of suicides in the state, although that would be more expensive and more challenging than launching another effort to reduce access to firearms.)
In any event, Brown's executive order, titled "Oregonians United to End Gun Violence," gives Oregon State Police and local authorities additional tools to track and analyze gun transactions for use in gun-related prosecutions. That merely amplifies existing laws. She also asked the Oregon Health Authority to report on gun violence as a public health issue; that could provide some useful information, especially considering the dearth of academic research into gun violence.
But our guess is that Brown's three legislative priorities will be nonstarters when the session convenes next year. Here's what she plans to present to legislators:
An initiative to limit default gun sales when background checks take longer than expected. This measure sounds familiar because a similar bill to close this so-called "Charleston Loophole" failed to clear this year's legislative session. (Allocating additional resources to the agencies charged with making those background checks would be helpful.)
A ban on future purchases of high-capacity ammunition magazines. Again, this is a measure that has failed to past muster in previous legislative sessions.
A bill to close the so-called "Boyfriend Loophole." The idea here is to expand the types of relationships that qualify under domestic violence charges, so that people convicted of certain crimes of domestic violence and stalking will no longer have access to firearms. (This proposal might go hand-in-hand with Brown's creation of a work group to review and assess firearms-related domestic violence offenses.) It will be interesting to see how legislators react to this proposal.
But here's the tough question: Will any of these initiatives do anything to prevent people intent on doing harm, to themselves or others, from gaining access to a weapon? We are unconvinced.
It's true, as Brown says, that "violence answers nothing, offers nothing, solves nothing." But we don't believe these proposals offer anything to answer or solve gun violence. (mm)
LIUZHOU, China General Motors (GM.N) has enjoyed first-mover advantage in China's cheap, no-frills car market as foreign rivals focussed on selling higher-end cars in the country's wealthier mega-cities.
But now, with sales growth in Beijing and the biggest cities stalling, other global car makers are looking more closely at selling affordable, basic cars in smaller cities and rural areas where local brands such as Geely and Great Wall Motor (601633.SS), and GM, dominate.
GM has been almost alone among the big foreign car makers to see the potential for selling passenger cars to the developing so-called tier-three, -four and -five cities where buyers can now afford to upgrade from noisier, uncomfortable, rear-wheel drive vans. It estimated several years ago that China's entry car segment could grow to 7 million cars a year - some way bigger than Japan's entire autos market.
GM's China chief Matt Tsien said some automakers are seeing "negative growth" in some of China's bigger cities. "But when you go into tier-three and -four cities, we saw double-digit growth for the whole of last year. It's still growing at double-digits this year and will continue," he told Reuters.
GM launched its low-end Baojun brand in 2011, catering to the needs of rural and smaller city Chinese, often buying their first car. This was no accident, Tsien says, as GM aimed to be in all corners of China, "a market of many markets," from the get-go. Baojun looks on track to sell more than 600,000 vehicles this year.
Others launched basic brands around the same time, but for most this was a half-hearted effort in part to meet a Chinese government requirement that they set up brands with local partners. After several years, BMW (BMWG.DE), Toyota Motor (7203.T) and Honda Motor (7267.T) have each launched just one or two models.
That is now changing.
Nissan Motor (7201.T) China chief Jun Seki told Reuters in April the company is putting more effort into its Venucia brand, with some big design changes. Nissan launched Venucia in 2012 with its China partner, but mainly sold retired Nissan models with few significant changes as 'new' Venucia cars. It sold 122,000 cars last year.
Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) plans to launch budget cars in the 80,000-100,000 yuan ($12,000-$15,000) bracket, including two SUVs, by 2018-19. "They will be built in China and very possibly under its own brand," VW said in a statement.
"Global automakers have largely focussed on more expensive segments instead of the no-frills market that local Chinese brands have targeted," said James Chao, Asia-Pacific managing director at consultant IHS.
"Now, the lower-cost market is taking off and some global makers are finding their more premium products poorly positioned for this growth shift. And the worse news is that their product pipelines for the no-frills market is, with only a few exceptions, empty."
FRONT-SEAT VIEW
Baojun's inception owed much, Tsien says, to the 2002 creation of SAIC-GM-Wuling Auto (SGMW), a venture between GM, SAIC Motor (600104.SS) and Guangxi Automobile Group, formerly Wuling.
Headquartered in the southern city of Liuzhou, SGMW gave GM a front-seat view of China's smaller, lower-tier cities, largely overlooked by mainstream rivals.
"In the 2000s, all the action was in tier-one and tier-two cities like Beijing and Shanghai where growth was mostly double digit," Tsien said. "But because of SGMW ... we had a window into tier-three, -four and -five cities. That helped convince us Baojun was a genuine play."
GM used existing technologies for its Baojun brand, but, unlike its rivals, it gave them a China makeover, such as beefing up suspension and axles to make them more durable for poorer road conditions.
"Our design is a little conservative, but we're creating a certain fundamental base a root we can build on," says design chief Steve Eum, a GM veteran.
Baojun now offers six models including a multipurpose minivan and sport-utility vehicle starting from 61,000 yuan and 78,000 yuan, respectively. A hatchback will be launched this year.
Gustavo Cespedes, SGMW executive vice president, says Baojun is profitable enough to fund growth on its own, without relying on GM, SAIC or Guangxi Auto for capital. "We have aggressive growth plans (and) can fund our own growth, while providing good returns for all the shareholders," he told Reuters.
PET PROJECT
Fuelling that growth are customers like 37-year-old Zhang Tao, a pet shop owner in Linyi, a lower-tier city in Shandong province.
In 2010, Zhang quit his low-paying factory job and took a chance on opening a pet shop - just in time to ride China's domestic pet boom. Within two years, and with a second child on the way, Zhang and his wife upgraded from their Suzuki minicar to a Wuling commercial microvan, swayed by its popularity among his friends. With his annual net income now topping 100,000 yuan, he last year traded in his Wuling for a new Baojun minivan.
"My business does very well these days ... I can take my two sons, my wife, and even my parents on family outings, all sitting comfortably in this Baojun van," he said.
(Reporting By Norihiko Shirouzu; Editing by Ian Geoghegan)
This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
WASHINGTON Senior executives at Volkswagen AG including its former chief executive covered up evidence that the German automaker had cheated on U.S. diesel emissions tests for years, three U.S. states charged on Tuesday in civil lawsuits against the company.
New York, Massachusetts and Maryland filed separate, nearly identical lawsuits in state courts, accusing the world's No. 2 automaker of violating their environmental laws. The lawsuits, which could lead to state fines of hundreds of millions of dollars or more, complicate VW's efforts to move past the "Dieselgate" scandal that has hurt its business and reputation, and already cost it billions of dollars.
The suits outlined more than a decade of efforts by VW to deceive regulators in the United States and Europe, citing internal VW documents.
VW last September admitted using sophisticated secret software in its cars to cheat exhaust emissions tests, with millions of vehicles worldwide affected. The scandal prompted the departure of VW's CEO and other executives.
The states charged that dozens of VW employees at various levels knew that the company's "clean diesel" engines could not meet pollution standards in normal driving without compromises to performance or fuel economy. The suits publicly identified for the first time many of these employees and accused them of "unlawful conduct."
The suits said at least eight employees in VW's engineering department deleted or removed incriminating data in August 2015 after a senior attorney advised them of an impending order not to destroy documents. The New York suit stated that "some but not all of the data has been recovered."
The suits were filed by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in Albany, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey in Boston and Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh in Baltimore. Additional states could file similar actions, Schneiderman's office said.
Healey said the suit is aimed at sending a message "to all auto manufacturers that violating laws designed to protect our environment and our public health is unacceptable and will be punished with significant penalties."
Volkswagen spokeswoman Jeannine Ginivan criticized the states' decision to file suit and said the company already has agreed to spend billions of dollars to address all environmental harms from the excess emissions.
The states' claims "are essentially not new and we have been addressing them in our discussions with U.S. federal and state authorities," Ginivan said. "... It is regrettable that some states have decided to sue for environmental claims now."
Former VW CEO Martin Winterkorn and VW's former global head of marketing, Christian Klingler, knew by spring 2014 "of the existence of unlawful "defeat devices" and did nothing to prevent both Audi and Volkswagen from repeatedly deceiving regulators," the New York lawsuit stated.
REAL-WORLD TESTING
In March 2014, VW learned that West Virginia University had conducted testing that found real-world testing on two VW diesel cars had emissions five to 35 times legally allowable limits, the suits alleged.
That prompted an email to Winterkorn in May 2014 from Frank Tuch, then head of group quality management for Volkswagen, who wrote that "a thorough explanation for the dramatic increase in NOx (nitrogen oxide) emissions cannot be given to the authorities."
German prosecutors said last month that Winterkorn is under investigation.
The New York suit stated that current CEO Matthias Muller, then head of project of management at Audi, and Winterkorn became aware in July 2006 of the effect of undersized urea tanks on the ability to comply with emissions standards. The suit said VW opted to install defeat software instead of larger tanks to save money.
The suits did not state Muller was aware of the cheating.
The suits alleged that VW initially used the defeat devices in 2.0 liter vehicles because the soot filter would break within 50,000 miles if used at all times, far sooner than required under U.S. law.
The suits cited internal documents from as early as 2007 about Volkswagen's determination to promote "clean diesel" technology as a rival to Toyota Motor Corp's Prius hybrid. The states obtained 1.1 million documents totaling 7.5 million pages in their nine-month VW investigation.
VW has admitted that it installed improper software that deactivated pollution controls on more than 11 million diesel vehicles sold worldwide, and last month agreed to pay $15.3 billion to settle U.S. federal litigation and charges lodged by 44 U.S. states that the company violated consumer fraud laws.
The U.S. Justice Department and Environmental Protection Agency have not yet reached a deal with Volkswagen on fines as part of separate settlement that could lead to an outside monitor overseeing VW's compliance with U.S. laws. VW also faces a Justice Department criminal investigation.
VW faces potentially billions of dollars more in costs in the United States if it is forced to buy back 85,000 3.0 liter Audi, Porsche and VW cars and SUVs sold since 2009. Last week, California rejected its proposed fix plan.
(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Will Dunham)
This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Rajkot: Dalit protests in Gujarat spread to several parts of the state including Ahmedabad on Tuesday unleashing violence in which a head constable was killed in stone pelting and state transport buses attacked while three more members of the community allegedly attempted suicide.
The Dalits are protesting against the brutal assault on fellow community members on 11 July for allegedly skinning a cow in Una in Gir-Somnath district.
"Head Constable with local crime branch Pankaj Amreli was injured in stone-pelting in Amreli town. He died during treatment at Rajkot hospital. Ten other persons including protestrs and policemen have been injured," police said.
Wednesday, three youths attempted to kill themselves by consuming poison at their residential society in Batwa town in Junagadh district, Police said.
After seven Dalit youths attempted suicide at Gondal and Jamkandorna in Rajkot district against the assault yesterday, several incidents of damage to state transport buses and road
blockades were reported from different parts of Saurashtra region across Junagadh, Jamnagar, Rajkot and Amreli districts since late Monday night.
The protests also spread to Ahmedabad, where dozens of Dalits were detained, police said.
While a bus was torched in Dhoraji town of Rajkot district and several others damaged, protestors allegedly vandalised sheds for Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS) in Rajkot late last night, police said.
"Dinesh Parmar (21), Dinesh Vegra (23) and Rasik Vinjura (40) gathered at Ambedkar Nagar society and consumed poison to protest against the beating (of Dalit youths in Una). We rushed them to Junagadh civil hospital for treatment," police said, adding their condition is stable.
Hundreds of protesters gathered at Chital road locality in Amreli town this morning and started hurling stones at police who in turn fired two teargas shells to disperse them.
In Surendranagar, agitators blocked a highway by putting carcass of a cow in the middle of the road, police said.
In the wake of the tense situation, the state road transport department today suspended bus services from Porbandar and other parts as protesters continued to block roads.
Some persons hurled stones at Ahmedabad-Veraval train as it was entering Rajkot, injuring an assistant driver last night, police said.
"There was a report of BRTS buses being ransacked by the community members and several public transport vehicles also being ransacked," DCP, Rajkot, Karanraj Vaghela said.
He said situation is under control and no untoward incident has taken place in Rajkot today.
The opposition Congress demanded a probe by a sitting High Court judge into the Una incident. Senior Congress leader Ahmed Patel tweeted, "Failure of authorities to protect Dalits in Gujarat is absolutely shocking. Is it the Gujarat model? Independent probe is need of the hour".
Nine persons have been arrested so far in connection with the assault on Dalits, while three policemen have been suspended for dereliction of duty.
BATON ROUGE, La. The black U.S. Marine Corps veteran who shot dead three police officers in Louisiana's capital specifically targeted them, police said on Monday, as the United States reeled from the latest deadly violence involving police and black people.
Following Sunday's shootings, Baton Rouge police officers took steps to increase their own security. Baton Rouge police spokesman Sergeant Don Coppola said, "We usually ride solo. We're riding in pairs for now."
The city had been the scene of repeated protests against police violence following the July 5 fatal shooting by officers of Alton Sterling, a black man, outside a convenience store.
The Baton Rouge gunman has been identified as Gavin Long, a 29-year-old from Kansas City, Missouri, who served in the Marines for five years, including a 2008 deployment in the Iraq war. Long, dressed in black and armed with a rifle, was shot dead on Sunday morning in a gunfight with police.
Long had legally changed his name in May 2015 to Cosmo Ausar Setepenra, according to records in Jackson County, Missouri.
Racial tension in the United States has been especially high since a black former U.S. Army Reserve soldier fatally shot five Dallas police officers who were patrolling a protest over the police shootings of Sterling and another black man in Minnesota.
"It's a very tough situation here, an attack on the very fabric of society," Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards told MSNBC on Monday.
Louisiana State Police spokesman Lieutenant J.B. Slaton told the New York Times on Monday that a preliminary investigation shows the Baton Rouge gunman "definitely ambushed those officers."
"We are still trying to find out what his motive was, and thats going to be part of our investigation. But we believe he was targeting those officers," Slaton said.
A website, social media accounts and YouTube videos that appeared tied to Long include complaints about police treatment of black people and praise for killings of the Dallas policemen.Documents also showed that Long pledged affiliation to an African-American offshoot of the U.S. anti-government Sovereign Citizen Movement.
The dead officers in Baton Rouge were identified as Montrell Jackson, 32; Matthew Gerald, 41; and Brad Garafola, 45.
Edwards said one of the wounded officers was fighting for his life while a second underwent surgery and needed further surgery on his neck. A third officer who had a graze wound to his neck was released from a hospital on Sunday.
MEMORIAL AT SHOOTING SCENE
At the B Quick gas station where the shootings occurred, people left flowers and balloons in memory of the slain officers.
"I just want us to have peace and drive down the road and not feel like we have to duck our heads and look around and see if someone's going to be on top of a roof," said Pam Collins, a resident of the Baton Rouge suburb of Prairieville who brought three shiny balloons to honor the officers.
Law enforcement officials were working to determine if the Baton Rouge gunman acted alone or conspired with others, Baton Rouge Mayor Kip Holden told CNN.
"We are on every lead," he said.
U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, in remarks prepared for a conference of black law enforcement officers in Washington, said federal law enforcement agents from the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the U.S. Marshals Service were on the scene in Baton Rouge.
"At the Department of Justice, we are determined to do everything we can to bridge divides, to heal rifts, to restore trust, and to ensure that every American feels respected, supported, and safe," Lynch said in her remarks.
Louisiana's capital is a city with a long history of distrust between black residents and law enforcement that has been inflamed by Sterling's death. For many in Baton Rouge, the police have been viewed as overly aggressive and unrepresentative of a city where more than half the 230,000 residents are black.
On a July 10 YouTube video attributed to Long, he said he was speaking from Dallas after going there to join protests against police violence, and suggested that only violence and financial pressure will cause change.
The recent U.S. violence has heightened security concerns, notably for the Republican convention beginning in Cleveland where Donald Trump is positioned to get his party's presidential nomination for the Nov. 8 election, and the upcoming Democratic convention in Philadelphia where Hillary Clinton is due to get her party's nomination.
In Cincinnati, Clinton promised in a speech to the NAACP civil rights group to bring the "full weight of the law" against people who kill police officers.
(Additional reporting by David Alexander and Eric Walsh in Washington and Laila Kearney in New York; Writing by Will Dunham; Editing by Bill Trott)
This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday condoled the death of CRPF personnel who were killed in an improvised explosive device (IED) blast set off by Maoists.
"Prime Minister Narendra Modi has expressed grief on the loss of lives of CRPF personnel in Bihar. Prime Minister has prayed for the speedy recovery of the injured and extended his condolences to the families of the martyred CRPF personnel in this hour of sadness," said an official statement.
Ten CRPF commandos belonging to its Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (CoBRA) were on Monday killed in an IED blast triggered by Maoists in the forests of Bihars Aurangabad district.
Four Maoists were also killed in the encounter that lasted for nearly eight hours.
New Delhi: BJD and JD(U) members on Tuesday demanded a separate Ministry to deal with natural calamities like flood and drought, even as they sought a more pro-active approach by the Centre in releasing funds to affected states.
Participating in a discussion in Rajya Sabha on a Calling Attention Motion regarding the situation arising due to floods, several leaders also questioned the official data on damages caused in the calamities and sought steps to put in place a warning system for floods and cloudbursts.
Responding to the members, Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju admitted that 196 people have lost their lives, 2,184 cattle perished and 38,285 houses and huts damaged besides 0.357 lakh hectares of crop area damaged this year due to floods.
He, however, said the primary responsibility to deal with natural calamities lies with the state government concerned. Maintaining that the country received heavy rainfall from June to September each year during the southwest monsoons, he said "the rainfall during this period accounts for about 70-90 percent of the total rainfall over India. As a consequence of this rainfall, flooding of rivers is a natural phenomenon."
Dilip Kumar Tirkey (BJD) sought a separate Ministry to deal with the calamities saying the present system of having the department under the Home Ministry, was not functioning well.
He got support from JD(U) leader Sharad Yadav who questioned the effectiveness of the National Disaster Management Authority and also demanded a separate Ministry to take care of the matter. Many other leaders questions the effectiveness of the concerned authorities and agencies.
"You talk about steps taken after the flood, but what are the steps being taken for prevention of flood," questioned AU Singh Deo of BJD. He said that there was urban flooding, river side flooding and flooding in the hills due to various reasons, including rampant construction activity.
Deo said it was a national shame that New Delhi also gets flooded even after an hour of rain. Raising the issue of Polavaram project, he accused the Chhattisgarh government to making barrages despite objections by Odisha and sought a meeting at the level of Prime Minister or the Home Minister to resolve the issue.
Viplove Thakur of the Congress demanded that the Centre be more pro-active and release special funds for maintenance of roads in the hills which are affected by floods. D Raja (CPI) said while he agreed with Rijiju that the primary responsibility lies with state governments, there was a need for a national level understanding on the subject.
He pointed out that the House during the last session discussed drought and this session was discussing floods. "In he next session, we will discuss either flood or drought...The country needs a proper water management policy," Raja said adding that river beds have become real estates.
Raja also spoke on the importance of river linking. Congress leader Digvijay Singh questioned the figures given by Rijiju saying as per Madhya Pradesh government, the total number of houses affected was about 32,000 even though the Minister claimed the country-wide figure was 38,000.
"The number of cattle killed and loss of crop is much more than what you have given," Singh said. Anand Bhaskar Rapolu (also Cong) said the Minister's statement clearly showed that India is not prepared to tackle floods. Tiruchi Siva of the DMK urged the government to seriously work out schemes to check floods and droughts.
Editor's note: This piece was first published on 19 July, 2016.
The numbers are stacking up in Kashmir. Home Minister Rajnath Singh told Rajya Sabha on Monday that there have been 566 reported incidents of violence from the Valley. About 43 civilians have died, while 1,948 have suffered injuries. Though 1,744 of them have been discharged, 204 are still receiving treatment. Among the security forces, 1671 have suffered injuries while one has died.
Since the minister's speech in Parliament, two more protesters have died when a violent mob attacked an army patrol in Qazigund area of Anantnag district, taking the overall toll to 45 since 7 July, the day Hizbul Mujaheedin commander Burhan Wani was eliminated by security forces in a gunfight.
Meanwhile, the curfew entered its 12th day in 10 affected districts of Kashmir. Internet is largely inaccessible, mobile services shut, cable TV is blocked while newspapers have failed to hit the stands for the fourth day. Mehbooba Mufti government, however, has clarified to Union I&B minister Venkaiah Naidu that no gag order is in place.
Petrol pumps and ATMs are running dry, mounds of garbage are piling up with municipalities unable to clear trash.
As the elected government goes missing in action and administration collapses, in a repeat of the scenario when the Hurriyat ran a de facto parallel government for five months during the 2010 street agitation, separatists Syed Ali Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Yasin Malik and JKLF have called for a fresh three-day shutdown in the valley.
China, which holds on to a disputed 5,180 sq km in Ladakh sector and calls it Aksai Chin, has jumped in. Lu Kang, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, has said China was concerned about the casualties due to violence in Kashmir and have called for proper settlement of 'clashes'.
Pakistan, whose stated intention is a 1000-year war with India on Kashmir, has again raised the issue in United Nations, calling for a "UN-backed independent and transparent inquiry" into the "extra-judicial" killings in Kashmir. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has called terrorist Burhan Wani a "martyr" and has called for 19 July to be observed as 'black day'.
How has the BJP-PDP coalition government responded so far?
While Home Minister Rajnath Singh gives all the impression of living in a cocooned ivory tower, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti has failed to take charge.
As terrorists fan the flames of unrest, non-state actors like Yasin Malik brew the cauldron with provocative speeches and Pakistan funds and instigates violence as part of its proxy war, the BJP-PDP government lies completely exposed as an impotent, unsure, powerless and weak administration which is happy to let security forces carry out the firefight while mouthing platitudes from the sidelines.
There is no space for doubt that we are in the middle of a full-blown war. The cry for 'azaadi' in Kashmir (with recent, deeply worrying Islamist overtones) is a jihad foisted on us by Pakistan. They have, after long last, finally managed to outsource the battle over India's territorial rights to a section of local Kashmiris.
This significantly raises the stakes because we stand to lose both the war over territory and the battle of perception if we aren't careful. Pakistan can afford to crush dissent mercilessly in the part of Kashmir occupied by it because it has no reputation to protect. India, which is seen as a responsible, rising power, must tackle insurgency and protect its sovereignty all the while being mindful of the fact that at the other end of the barrel lie its own citizens.
Is the BJP government at the Centre and the coalition at the state being able to do that?
India Today quotes an Intelligence Bureau report which has revealed that every year almost Rs 100 crore is being channeled from Pakistan to Kashmir through hawala channel to create trouble in the state. The funds go straight to separatists who distribute it among young men to take part in protest rallies against security forces. Stone-pelters, funded by the separatists, are being used as a human shield by trained terrorists who are targeting the security forces during protest rallies.
Pakistan's ISI, says the IB report, recently held a meeting with Hizbul supreme commander Syed Salahuddin and Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) chief Hafiz Saeed for illicit fund transfers and to appoint four new 'commanders' to fan trouble in the valley. The meeting also saw the presence of Jaish-e-Mohammed commander Abdul Rauf, who is based in PoK.
It's not even a secret any more. A video of Hafiz Saeeds Urdu speech has surfaced on social media. The terrorist says that "after Burhans martyrdom and the martyrdom of many others, I expect the jihad in Kashmir will rise with strength. The scene will change completely."
Unless we dismiss the intelligence report as a "lie" and believe a section of the Indian media more who claim that the Kashmir unrest is "completely vociferous", it stands to reason that the BJP-PDP government must move swiftly to tackle the battle on the streets as well the propaganda war.
Problem arises when the centre's own coalition partner speaks in forked tongue and endorses Pakistan's view that the elimination of terrorist Burhan Wani was an 'extra-judicial' killing.
As many as two PDP leaders MP Muzaffar Baig and minister Naeem Akhtar have sought a probe into Wani's killing. These comments not only run contrary to India's stated position that there could be no compromise on terror, they also serve to demoralize the security forces that are fighting daily aggression on the streets.
And even as PDP MLAs are bent on embarrassing the Centre and undercutting its efforts in containing the violence, the Home Minister tells Firstpost's Ajay Singh in an interview that "Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti is doing an excellent job and her popularity is growing."
That the PDP, which faces an unprecedented crisis, would resort to this isn't surprising. Crucially, it seems the BJP is ready to forego India's stated Kashmir policy and its own ideology at the altar of power.
Even as unrest continues in the Kashmir Valley over Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wanis death in police encounter, Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Monday made a statement in the Rajya Sabha that the Government of India will take a tougher stand against the separatists.
With terrorists we will deal with sakhti (toughness) and civilians will be dealt with sympathy, he said.
The home minister said that talks on Kashmir will be based on Kashmiriyat (Kashmiri identity), jamhooriyat (democracy) and insaniyat (humanity) and added that without sensitivity no one can save India.
Referring to the demand on referendum over Kashmir issue, he said, This demand has become outdated.
He also stated that Kashmiri identity has always stood for humanity. But when security forces are killed, some in the Valley rejoice. Is it a humanly or beastly act? he asked.
He also said that no Kashmiri will ever support such act.
The home minister also sent out a strong message to Pakistan by saying, Everything that is happening in Kashmir today is created by Pakistan. Under the instruction of Pakistan, United Jihad Council has created all this unrest.
Pakistan is a country that cannot save its own problems, but now poses to protect Indian Muslims, he said.
Indian Muslims will be protected by Hindus, Christians and Sikhs in India, said Rajnath Singh and added that terrorist outfit Hizbul Mujahideen has its headquarters in Islamabad and Rawalpindi and base camp in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.
On Burhan Wani, he said that he was a commander of Hizbul Mujahideen, who was accused in 15 criminal cases, and misled the tech-savvy youths by using social media.
He said that in the recent law and order situation in Jammu and Kashmir, 33 civilians and one security person had died and among the injured were 1,948 civilians and 1,671 security personnel. He assured that all the injured people will be provided with medications.
The comical sight of a Janata Dal (U) legislator from Barhariya in Siwan district, Shyam Bahadur Singh, awkwardly dancing a suggestive jig with nautch girls only goes to reaffirm a stereotype about Bihar that it is a state with acute poverty of culture and a lumpenised legacy of politics.
Ironically this imagery reflected in a video of the MLA that has since gone viral is not entirely untrue. It would not be wrong to say that the people of Bihar have earned it well-deservedly. People who vote for Shyam Bahadur Singh and his ilk all across the state cannot then escape the responsibility for electing the people they deserve.
Singh is not an aberration but rather a trend. After all, look at the manner in which one of the biggest gangsters of the state and ex-MP, Mohammad Shahabuddin, is being treated in jail and at the All India Institute of Medical science (AIIMS) in Delhi. He looks like an honourable member of the ruling class, not a criminal charged with murders. The gait in his walk belies any impression of being a convict and a criminal. Far from it, police officers accompanying him look like minions tending to their master.
Over the years, the state got dwarfed as criminals and thugs emerged as powerful leaders representing various caste groups. Perhaps acclaimed political scientist Rajni Kotharis thesis has turned on its head, as politics of caste led to lumpenisation of castes and the society. Guns and muscle matter more than anything else in politics. Morality and ethics are expedient at pragmatism.
It was in the backdrop of despondency and dejected cynicism, that the emergence of leaders like Nitish Kumar gave a ray of hope. He defied the stereotype of Bihar and came across as a sober and sagacious voice. Despite the fact that his alliance with Lalu Prasad Yadav was much frowned upon, Nitish Kumar remained a flickering hope to restore Bihar to sanity.
His decision to ban liquor across the state was seen as a sequel to social reform something that is rarely initiated in politics. He was seen as someone who will bring a revolution from above in Bihar, to borrow from social scientist Dipankar Guptas phrase. Nitish Kumar listed prohibition as one of his major achievements, and has been campaigning across the state since with promises of making the entire country liquor-free.
Herein lies the rub. It will be quite unconvincing for people of other states to believe in Kumars words when his own legislators like Shyam Bahadur Singh openly defy the prohibition and flaunt their misdemeanours as achievements.
Similarly, the state has once again started looking subservient to gangsters and thugs who thrive under the patronage of the ruling power's dispensation. Obviously, there is little doubt that the hard-earned goodwill will fritter away sooner rather than later. The people of Bihar will continue to make political choices irrespective of party domination that will embarrass them more, than bringing laurels from elsewhere in the country.
That Siwan is identified with people like Shyam Bahadur Singh, Shahabuddin, Prabhunath Singh or Dhumal Singh is nothing less than a sad commentary on the state of affairs in Bihar. Each of them has a past which is not to be proud of. Yet, all of them have acquired a social status befitting of royalty.
But was Siwan always like this? Barely a few kilometres away from the district headquarters lies a place called Ziradei, where Indias first President Rajendra Prasads house is preserved as a monument. Mahatma Gandhi visited that house. Dr Rajendra Prasad, who had a roaring practice in Patna, gave up all luxuries to follow the path of Gandhi.
More recently, Jayaprakash Narain, better known as JP, who came from this region captured the peoples imagination across India against the tyranny of Indira Gandhi, in the seventies. But, can a Rajendra Prasad or a JP be called upon for moral regeneration, while keeping a Shyam Bahadur Singh as August company? It seems that the politicians of Bihar need as much introspection as the people of Bihar.
At 17, Akbar Road, the official residence of Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, there is hardly any indication of all the adverse national security and constitutional issues with which he is currently grappling. A handful of visitors possibly party workers are waiting at the heavily-barricaded gate and perimeter of the sprawling Lutyens Delhi bungalow. The lush green lawns and the noiseless interiors of the meeting room in Singhs home-office could lull you into believing all is well, peaceful and under control a far cry from the issues his ministry is facing.
Kashmir is on the boil (like it has not been since some time in 2010) following the death of Hizbul Mujahideen commander-in-chief Burhan Wani in an encounter with security forces. His government is being cautioned even in Parliament for use of excessive force causing the death of dozens of youth and blinding of many others.
More than 10 days of a complete clampdown including curfew, shutting down of mobile and internet operations and even newspapers has not helped much. Add to this the big embarrassment of the Supreme Court ruling on Arunachal Pradesh and the constant threat from left-wing extremism in large parts of the country this interview was conducted before news of the killing of 10 CRPF personnel in Aurangabad and you have a minister who is facing many questions.
Singh answers all these and more in this hour-long chat with Firstpost's executive editor Ajay Singh.
There's so much to ask that I dont know where to begin. But let me start by asking you about Burhan Wani first. How do you see him?
He was a terrorist, period.
Is that description enough?
Of course that is the most apt description. He killed our soldiers. How else would one describe such a person?
But the kind of response that the Kashmir Valley witnessed after his death was unprecedented
Not at all. Let me clarify that it would be wrong to assume that the entire Valley has erupted in protests. I would say that the protests were confined to certain pockets with some people motivated by Pakistani propaganda. To say that the events are unprecedented would be factually erroneous. Is it not a fact that the Valley has been through much worse in the past? We are fully in control with the help of the state government. And there is a huge section of sagacious and mature people whose support we are getting in Kashmir.
But people are getting killed in firing by security forces. How could you say that the situation is under control?
What do you do when someone attacks security forces? Our guideline is crystal clear we shall not tolerate violence of any kind. The fig leaf of ideology or religion must not be used to cover the hideous face of violence. I am quite clear in my mind that it would be wrong to associate terrorism with religion, caste or creed. It has to be resisted and neutralised to maintain peace in society. We directed our forces to exercise utmost restraint while using force. That is exactly what they are doing. As of now the situation is under control.
Yet you cancelled your scheduled visit to the United States?
Of course, I cancelled my visit. The situation in Kashmir merited that. My visit to the United States was planned in advance and was very important for Indias security interests, but the situation in Kashmir required me to call it off. I am not saying that the situation was not serious. Im saying we have it under control with the help of the state government.
To what extent did you find involvement of Pakistan in Jammu and Kashmir? And how do you see it in the context of peace initiatives with Pakistan by India?
You see we have tried every effort to make peace with Pakistan. This shows our willingness to engage anyone for negotiations. Pakistans response was never positive. In Jammu and Kashmir, there is incontrovertible evidence of Pakistans involvement in provoking people and giving logistic support to terrorists. Our security forces are responding to the challenge adequately.
When you took over as home minister, you had said that Indian Islam would reject the violence and intolerance of jihadi ideology. Are you still convinced about that? More so in view of reports of some Muslim youths in Maharashtra and southern India are getting attracted to the Islamic State and the jihadi ideology?
I am fully convinced that syncretism is the essential feature of Indian Islam that believes in tolerance and brotherhood. There may be certain misguided youth getting attracted to a pernicious ideology. Yet we also know that in some cases parents of such boys informed the police about their wards dubious conduct. The other day I met a group of Ulemmas who were willing to go to Jammu and Kashmir and other places to spread the correct message of Islam and bring errant youth to right path. I told them to do it.
But why are you so hesitant to appoint interlocutors for Kashmir like the previous government?
(Laughs) The situation earlier may have been serious and may have warranted such steps. I am not averse to people volunteering to help to restore the situation to normalcy. With regard to Kashmir, the government is committed to preserve its twin identities Jamhuriat (democracy) and Kashmiriyat employing insaniyat (a humane touch). We are in constant touch with Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, who is doing an excellent job. Her popularity is growing.
You say Mehboobas popularity is growing. But she was criticised for not showing up in the first three days of extreme disturbances. Her ministers were afraid to step out into their constituencies.
That is unfair criticism. I have been a chief minister myself and know that the job of the head of government is not to be on the spot. Crisis management does not mean being at trouble spots, that is the job of the law enforcement agencies.
But a section of Indian intelligentsia is critical of the handling of the situation by her.
Who is the intelligentsia? It depends on how you define intelligentsia. Self-proclaimed intelligent people do not form intelligentsia. This is a democracy and everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. But we will not tolerate violence.
When you say this, how do you react to the allegations that the government has been shielding those accused of indulging in far-right extremism? I am referring to the cases like Samjhauta Express blasts and Malegaon blasts handled by the National Investigation Agency (NIA).
It is absolutely wrong to imply that the government has anything to do with the NIAs investigation. You see this is the first time that the NIA has been given complete autonomy. Recently, the NIA wanted to consult the law ministry on some matter. So they sent the file to the home ministry to vet it and forward it. When it came to my notice, I asked 'Why is the file coming to us?' and sent it back to the NIA saying on such matters, they should directly write to the law ministry. That is the kind of autonomy NIA is getting. It's unprecedented.
The general impression is that Atal Bihari Vajpayees approach to Kashmir was more humane than this government? You have seen both the regimes as an insider. Do you find any difference?
Prime Minister Narendra Modis government is just a continuum of Vajpayee's. Both Vajpayeeji and Modiji belong to the same ideology and the same party. How can there be any difference? We follow the same humane approach now that we did then.
But the impression is that use of force has been disproportionate. And many youth have suffered eye injuries caused by pellet guns...
We immediately dispatched a team of doctors from Delhi to treat them. That is the humane approach I spoke about. We are giving all assistance to the state government and deploying resources to mitigate peoples plight. Frankly, our approach is more humane than that of our predecessor.
Has the government taken any initiative for the de-radicalisation of youth won over by jihadi ideology? Is the situation serious?
Many state governments have taken their own initiatives. We are monitoring the situation. I would say that the resonance that the jihadi ideology finds among a small section of youth is indeed a matter of concern. But it is not alarming. Such a trend may get traction initially, but tapers off sooner than later. It might appear alarming at a particular moment, but things will even out. The fabric of Indian family and society is such that things will never go out of hand with regard to radicalisation of any religion.
Let's turn to Left-Wing Extremism (LWE), which is a major security threat to our elected democracy. How do you assess the situation?
I am sure that you may be aware of the fact that security forces have gained unprecedented success in areas held under the Maoist sway. It would not be wrong to say that we have gained much more on the ground in the past two years, when compared with what we had gained in 20 years. Extremists are surrendering. Many of their top commanders have been killed in encounters with security forces. At the same time, we are taking up various initiatives to speed up development work and create employment for the youth. It is a multi-pronged approach that has been bearing fruit.
It is in this context that I asked you a question about the state turning to machismo. Is it not a fact that the state has developed a tendency to use excessive force on issues related to internal security?
This is mischievous propaganda that has nothing to do with reality. Our security forces resort to coercive powers quite sparingly in extraordinary situations only when it is necessary. As I told you earlier, our governments cardinal principle is that we shall not tolerate violence. If there is any issue, dialogue and not violence is the method to resolve it.
How much are you convinced about the efficacy of the framework for Naga peace accord?
This framework will pave the way for restoring peace in the troubled regions of the North East. I am very optimistic about its efficacy.
What about speculation that the government has promised to induct 5,000odd NSCN-IM cadres into the BSF?
Right from the first day, when the framework for the accord was signed, this speculation began. There is no truth in it. It would not be proper for me to talk about the details of the negotiations. Let us wait and see.
Lets turn to the Supreme Court's recent order on Arunachal Pradesh restoring the Congress government. Is it not a setback to the governments image that promised to usher in cooperative federalism?
I am not going to say anything on the Supreme Courts judgment. We will study it. But let me state one fact: There is a stampede in the Congress following the BJPs landslide victory in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. Is it not a fact that there was a revolt within the Congress in Arunachal Pradesh that caused instability? A similar situation happened in Uttarakhand. It is strange that allegations are hurled at us (the BJP) for destablising the government. Why did the Congress not stop it? Naav mein chhed hain par nadi mein naav dalenge aur jab naav dubegi to paani ko doshi kahenge (if you put a boat with a whole in the water, you cannot blame the water for drowning the boat).
But how about the role played by governors in facilitating the toppling of the governments?
Governors have to play their constitutional roles when such a situation arises. They have to take decisions while discharging their responsibilities. I do not see any deviation in their roles.
There was speculation in the media about you being put up as Uttar Pradeshs chief ministerial candidate. Is there any credence to this speculation?
None whatsoever! Nobody talked to me about this. To this day, I am not aware of any such move. I have also seen only reports in the media. I am baffled as how such reports find their way to the media.
Will the BJP put up a chief ministerial candidate in Uttar Pradesh?
This is an issue that will be decided upon by the partys parliamentary board. In some states, we put up chief ministerial candidates, while in some we go collectively. I do not think it appropriate to talk about it before the issue is discussed in the CPB. But one thing is certain, the BJP is going to form the next government in Uttar Pradesh. We have gained substantial ground in the state as our rivals have been ceding space.
You headed the BJP longer than anybody except LK Advani. Are you happy with the direction in which the organisation is going?
Of course, I am too happy to note that the organisation is going from strength to strength. The BJP has become the worlds biggest party with 11 crore members at last count.
Does this expansion not dilute your core strength which is ideologically-driven cadres?
I dont think so. Mahasagar me jitna bhi paani aa jaye mahasagar toh mahasagar hi rehta hai (no matter how much water flows into the ocean, the ocean doesn't change, it remains an ocean).
Chandigarh: Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi will hold a meeting with top leaders of the party's Punjab unit on Wednesday in Delhi to discuss the strategy for the high-stake Assembly polls in the state in 2017.
The meeting will be attended by Punjab Congress chief Amarinder Singh and state in-charge of the party Asha Kumari, party sources said.
Besides, Leader of Opposition in the Punjab Assembly Charanjit Singh Channi and the party's campaign committee chairperson Ambika Soni will also be there.
The meeting will take place in the backdrop of BJP MP Navjot Singh Sidhu resigning from Rajya Sabha amidst
speculation that he, along with his wife, a BJP MLA, may join the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).
The Congress, which has twice lost the Punjab Assembly polls to the SAD-BJP combine, is eyeing to wrest power in the state next year.
Amarinder has already launched a mass outreach programme, 'Halke Vich Captain' (Captain in your constituency), which Congress leaders claim has been getting a "massive response" from the public. Besides, several sessions of 'Coffee with Captain' had also taken place before 'Halke Vich Captain'.
Both the programmes, centered around Amarinder, have been designed by poll strategist Prashant Kishor's Indian Political Action Committee (IPAC) team.
Congress has already asked ticket aspirants to submit applications to the state unit by 15 August while Amarinder has said "winnability" of a candidate would be the only criteria for allotment of party tickets.
The party has even asked ticket aspirants to give an undertaking not to contest polls against any Congress
candidate if they are not given tickets.
Melania Trump's well-received speech Monday to the Republican National Convention contained two passages that match nearly word-for-word the speech that first lady Michelle Obama delivered in 2008 at the Democratic National Convention.
The passages in question focus on lessons that Melania Trump, the wife of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, said she learned from her parents and the relevance of their lessons in her experience as a mother. They came near the beginning of her roughly 10-minute speech, which was otherwise distinct from the address that Michelle Obama gave when her husband, then-Sen. Barack Obama, was being nominated for president.
In Melania's speech in Cleveland, she said: "From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise, that you treat people with respect. They taught and showed me values and morals in their daily life."
In Michelle Obama's 2008 speech in Denver, she said: "And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: like, you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond, that you do what you say you're going to do, that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them and even if you don't agree with them."
Another passage with notable similarities that follows two sentences later in Melania's speech addresses her attempts to instill those values in her son.
"We need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow," said Melania. "Because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them."
In the First Lady's 2008 speech, she said, "Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values and to pass them onto the next generation, because we want our children and all children in this nation to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work hard for them."
Trump's campaign had no immediate reaction when asked about the similarities in the two speeches. White House officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment late Monday evening.
In an interview with NBC News taped ahead of her convention appearance and posted online early Tuesday, Melania Trump said of her speech, "I wrote it." She added that she had "a little help."
Here are some Twitter reactions:
More on the similarities between Melania Trump's speech & Michelle Obama's speech https://t.co/DsKbqBaV2e pic.twitter.com/Y5ldYzkxLm Javier Panzar (@jpanzar) July 19, 2016
On the other hand, early drafts of Melania Trump's speech were much more awkward. pic.twitter.com/5Tvv7jz5Qq Paul Fairie (@paulisci) July 19, 2016
Guess Melania Trump is just like @realDonaldTrump .. can't come up with an original thought so they just copy others. #RNCinCLE Triggs (@Triggs390) July 19, 2016
MONG YAW, Myanmar The first and second bodies pulled from the shallow grave in northern Myanmar didn't belong to Aik Chin's missing son. Nor, he prayed, did the third, whose face was unrecognisable from a severe beating.
But then Aik Chin checked the corpse's fingertips - his 17-year-old son had lost one in a childhood accident - and his legs began to buckle.
"When I realized it was my little boy, I collapsed and blacked out," he said. "I don't remember anything after that."
Soldiers entered the village of Mong Yaw on June 25 and rounded up dozens of men, witnesses told Reuters. Aik Chin's son and four others were led away, never to be seen alive again. Two other men - brothers - were shot while trying to escape on a motorbike and their bodies found in a ditch, villagers said.
Myanmar's armed forces have often been accused of abuses by human rights groups and Western governments during decades of conflict with ethnic armed separatists in its wild border zones. What is unusual in this case is that the military high command has been taking the allegations seriously.
Major Thein Zaw of the army's Northeast Command said a court martial had begun, although he could not say how many soldiers were on trial or what charges they faced, and local government officials said several soldiers had been arrested.
Villagers say a senior army officer has promised them a full investigation.
However, multiple requests by Reuters for comment from the army in the northern city Lashio and the capital Naypyitaw were declined or went unanswered. The military said it would address the issue at a news conference on Wednesday.
Ringed by misty hills, Mong Yaw lies in a remote corner of northern Shan State, a region ravaged by war and poverty. Thousands of people have been displaced by decades of fighting between the military and ethnic insurgents.
Last year the military lost hundreds of men in a bid to re-take a rebel-held region bordering China. Fuelling the conflict is Myanmar's lucrative narcotics trade, which is centred in lawless Shan state.
SENSITIVE IMAGE
It is extremely rare in Myanmar for soldiers to be held accountable for alleged abuses, or for such allegations to be investigated transparently, rights groups such as Amnesty International say.
The military's response this time suggests a heightened sensitivity about its image as it tries to present itself as a responsible partner in Myanmar's democratic transition and seeks closer ties with its Western counterparts.
Myanmar was a military dictatorship for nearly half a century until a quasi-civilian government of former generals replaced the junta in 2011 and launched a series of political and economic reforms.
Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was swept into office in April after winning a landslide election last year, but the military still holds immense power.
Police and local officials told villagers in Mong Yaw in the days after the late June killings that they couldn't investigate because the military was already doing so.
Then, on July 3, the region's vice-commander, Major General Kyaw Kyaw Soe, visited Mong Yaw and promised a full probe, said villagers. He also gave each bereaved family 300,000 kyat ($250) as a gesture of sympathy, local people said.
General Kyaw Kyaw Soe said some soldiers had been arrested, but gave no further details.
This surprised local activists, who say they have spent decades documenting similar incidents by ill-disciplined troops amid a culture of impunity.
"The military has never done anything like this," said Sai Han, an ethnic Shan leader of the Tai Youth Organization, based in Lashio. He called what happened at Mong Yaw a "war crime" committed by soldiers against civilians.
News of the killings had spread fast, aided by cellphones that have only recently become ubiquitous in Myanmar and by testimony from a population emboldened in an era of reform, Sai Han said, suggesting that the publicity had made it impossible for the military to brush aside the allegations.
"DRUNK AND ANGRY"
Sai Mong Tan, 22, was weeding a cornfield with his 17-year-old brother, Sai Shwe Lu, when the soldiers arrived. "They seemed drunk," he told Reuters. "I could smell alcohol on them. They were very angry."
The military later said they had come under attack from rebels in the area, although Sai Han and other local activists said there had been no insurgent activity.
The brothers were marched to a nearby road, where dozens more soldiers had detained about a hundred people, and were forced to squat with their hands behind their heads.
The soldiers beat and interrogated the men, demanding to know if anyone had spotted insurgents in the area, said Sai Mong Tan.
He then watched as soldiers tied up his younger brother and the four other victims and led them away.
Reuters could not independently confirm this account, although it matched the version of events described by other villagers and local officials and rights activists.
Sai Mong Tan believes his brother was singled out because he didn't speak Burmese and couldn't answer the soldiers' questions.
Most people in Mong Yaw are from the Shan or Palaung ethnic minorities. Soldiers mostly hail from the majority Bamar ethnic group, and often accuse villagers of harbouring insurgents.
Aik Sai, 23, was also among the five men led away. By nightfall, his fretful wife Aye Lu, 18, was hiding at home with their newborn child.
"The soldiers came to the village and told us to stay inside," she said. "I didn't dare go out."
Only three days later, when the soldiers had left, did the villagers start looking for the missing men. A blood-spattered path above a cornfield led them to patches of recently turned soil.
(Reporting by Andrew R.C. Marshall and Wa Lone; Editing by Alex Richardson)
This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Peshawar: A special court hearing treason charges against former Pakistani dictator General Pervez Musharraf on Tuesday ordered the freezing of the 'proclaimed offender's' bank accounts and confiscate his property for not appearing before it despite repeated notices.
A three-member bench of the special court headed by Chief Justice Peshawar High Court Justice Mazhar Alam Miankhel passed the orders over the non-appearance of the former president before the court despite repeated notices.
The court also adjourned the hearing of the case until Musharraf, 72, is arrested or he surrenders.
Justice Miankhel remarked that the court cannot initiate further proceedings in the absence of the accused.
"According to law, the accused cannot be trialed in absentia," Dawn quoted him as saying.
If found guilty in the high treason case, Musharraf could face death sentence.
He said the attitude of the accused left no option for the court, and the special court ordered authorities to freeze
Musharraf's bank accounts and confiscate his property.
"A compliance report of the orders must be submitted with the court," the court ordered.
Musharraf in July flew to Dubai for purported medical treatment after the Supreme Court lifted the ban on his foreign trips and it is believed that he may never return to face a slew of several high-profile cases against him.
The Interior Ministry also submitted a report related to the ex-president's assets to the court, Geo TV reported.
Musharraf's counsel said that his client is ailing and currently abroad for treatment. The counsel's request to record his client's statement via Skype was turned down by the bench.
Musharraf left Pakistan on 18 March, soon after the Supreme Court upheld the Sindh High Court directions to remove
his name from the exit control list (ECL).
The court in one of its previous rulings had declared ex-president Musharraf a 'proclaimed offender'. In March 2014, Musharraf was formally indicted over treason charges for imposing emergency and the Provisional Constitutional Order on 3 November, 2007.
Earlier, the court also seized the surety bonds submitted by Musharraf's guarantor, Rashid Qureshi, and ordered him to
submit a sum of Rs 2.5 million as security deposit to the Registrar of the special court.
Musharraf came to power in a bloodless coup in 1999, deposing then-prime minister Nawaz Sharif. Facing impeachment following elections in 2008, he resigned as president and went into self-imposed exile in Dubai.
He returned in 2013 to contest elections but was implicated in several high-profile cases and was not allowed
to leave the country. He is facing trial in illegal detention of judges, also in 2007.
Musharraf has also been charged in connection with the 2007 assassination of prime minister Benazir Bhutto.
London: Theresa May on Tuesday chaired her first Cabinet meeting as British Prime Minister with a call out to her ministers to "make Brexit work for Britain".
She, however, underlined she did not want her government to be "defined by Brexit" as work gets underway for Britain to begin its exit from the European Union following the historic 23 June referendum.
"It will be the responsibility of everyone sitting around the Cabinet table to make Brexit work for Britain," she said. "We will not allow the country to be defined by Brexit, but instead will build the education, skills and social mobility to allow everyone to prosper from the opportunities of leaving the EU," she added.
The meeting comes days after the 59-year-old Prime Minister set her stamp on the new government by shaking up nearly the entire set of ministerial portfolios. Of the 22 full members of the Cabinet and five who have the right to attend Cabinet meetings, only five - Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, Defence Secretary Michael Fallon, Welsh Secretary Alun Cairns, Scottish Secretary David Mundell and Attorney General Jeremy Wright - retained the roles they held previously under David Cameron.
Indian-origin minister Priti Patel, who previously had the right to attend Cabinet meetings as a junior minister, on Tuesday took her position as a full-fledged minister in charge of the Department for International Development (DfID). Other key appointments included Philip Hammond as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Boris Johnson as foreign secretary, Amber Rudd as Home Secretary and Justine Greening as Education Secretary.
David Davis has been put in charge of a brand new ministry to take the UK out of the EU. May, who has already held talks with Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones, received a boost on Monday when MPs overwhelmingly voted by a majority of 355 to proceed with the full renewal of the UK's Trident nuclear weapons system.
She faces her first Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday, after which she will travel to Germany for talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. On Thursday, she will meet French President Francois Hollande.
May has said she does not expect the UK to officially notify the EU of its intention to leave, which involves triggering Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, before the end of the year.
France concluded three days of national mourning for over 80 people mowed down by a truck driver as they celebrated Bastille Day in the Riviera city of Nice. But as official ceremonies came to a close, emotions remain high, with politicians scrambling for answers and the nation in distress over the third major attack on French soil in less than two years.
This government's answer has been to add 9,000 security jobs over Hollande's term, and the success of a relatively safe Euro tournament had officials momentarily celebrating. With that confidence fading fast, leaders seem eager to point fingers -- and with presidential elections looming in 2017, France could be settling in for months of divisive rhetoric.
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A man climbs on steel packages at Hoa Phat steel mill in Hai Duong province, Vietnam June 14, 2016. Photo by Reuters/Kham
Steel imports from China accounted for more than half of the total import volume.
After over four months of applying temporary safeguard measures, the Ministry of Industry and Trade has made a final decision to impose import tariffs on steel billets and steel bars.
The tariffs will be applied from now until March 22, 2020.
Specifically, steel billets will incur a tax duty of 23.3 percent from March 22, 2017. The tariff will be adjusted down by 2 percent each year to 7.3 percent in March 2019, and to 0 percent from March 22, 2020.
Import tariffs on steel bars have been at a lower rate of just under 15 percent, and will be cut to 10.9 percent by March 2019.
The ministry explained that over the past few months, a surge in steel imports, especially from China, has put pressure on domestic producers, reducing their market shares while increasing steel inventories.
Data from Vietnam Customs showed that the country imported around 9.6 million tons of steel in the first half of this year, rising by 43.9 percent against last years figure. China was the biggest supplier with some 5.6 million tons shipped to Vietnam, up 45 percent on-year.
On March 22 this year, the ministry applied temporary safeguard tariffs of 23.3 percent on steel billets and 14.2 percent on steel bars to protect the local market.
They also decided to raise anti-dumping tax rates on Chinese steel imports from 4.64 percent to 17.47 percent in May.
Related news:
> Domestic steel demand to fall further in upcoming months
> China says Vietnam investigation into steel imports should be fair
> Vietnam revises anti-dumping fees on steel imports
Despite favorable conditions for fruit and vegetable production, Vietnam is still looking overseas for its fruit fix.
Data released by Vietnam Customs said that the country spent more than $350 million on fruit imports in the first six months of this year, surging 39.5 percent against the same period last year.
Vietnams key suppliers were Thailand, China and the U.S.
In the past, China was the country's main fruit supplier, but last year Thailand surpassed it to dominate Vietnams fruit market.
Over the six-month period, Vietnam spent $143 million on fruit from Thailand, jumping 83 percent on-year. China ranked second with a 30 percent jump to hit $80 million while the U.S ranked third with $32 million, up 6.4 percent.
Vietnam also reached out to New Zealand and Australia, with import value from the two countries rising to more than $11 million from just under $5 million in the first half of last year.
Fruit imports can be found on the shelves of big supermarkets like Big C, Metro and Fivimart, but have also found their way into traditional markets where they are competing with homegrown products.
Related news:
> Vietnamese dragon fruit finds their way onto Big C Thailand's shelves
> Thailand surpasses China to dominate Vietnams fruit market
> Vietnam earns $42mln from lychee export to China
One of the most significant proposed utility mergers of the last decade is officially off, and regulators appear to have won in a battle against big power generators. The deal I'm talking about is NextEra Energy's (NEE -0.17%) proposed $2.6 billion buyout of Hawaiian Electric Industries (HE 0.22%), the state of Hawaii's largest electricity provider.
In a state where sunshine is prevalent and imported oil to run power plants is expensive, the utilities didn't show enough commitment to renewable energy for regulators to give the go-ahead. And now Hawaii faces further questions about its own energy future.
How NextEra lost Hawaiian Electric
When NextEra Energy agreed to buy Hawaiian Electric the deal immediately came under fire. Hawaiian Electric had recently been lambasted by regulators for dragging its feet on connecting rooftop solar systems to the grid, while NextEra Energy owns Florida Power & Light, which has fought solar in the sunshine state.
I should note that NextEra Energy and NextEra Energy Partners (NEP 1.61%) are the biggest owners of renewable energy assets in the U.S. -- but owning a renewable energy plant with a long-term contract to sell energy to a utility and allowing your own utility customers to create their own energy with solar are two very different things. NextEra Energy loves renewable energy when it serves its own profit goals, but not when it gives customers more choice. And that's what Hawaii really wants. Hajime Alabonza of the Hawaii Solar Energy Association put it this way:
Instead of envisioning a 21st century grid that enables customer options like rooftop solar, NextEra wanted to double-down on its 'build more, pay more' monopoly business. The commission understood this isn't the right direction for Hawaii's customers.
Hawaii wants to create a next generation utility with 100% renewables by 2045, and with 16% of customers already using rooftop solar, it's on its way. But the old Hawaiian Electric wasn't making enough progress in building the grid of the future, and regulators didn't feel NextEra Energy was going to be a step in the right direction.
Where does Hawaii go from here?
For a year and a half, Hawaiian Electric has been going through this buyout process, while regulators have been examining the deal. Now that it's called off, both parties have to get down to the business of creating the utility of the future in Hawaii. We know that regulators want more renewable energy, but we don't know how they'll get the utility to build a reliable grid that's 100% renewable in the next 30 years.
It's a challenge, but with solar energy and energy storage costs coming down rapidly, Hawaii has a chance to build the grid of the future before any other state. It'll be a proving ground for energy, and that makes it worth watching for investors.
3 Australian exporters get the axe following brutal images of animal cruelty in Vietnam.
After video footage emerged last month of Australian cattle being bludgeoned to death in Vietnamese abattoirs, Australias Department of Agriculture has suspended trade at three exporters.
The department has banned two unnamed Australian exporters and an unapproved facility under Australia's Exporter Supply Chain Assurance System (ESCAS) rules from supplying cattle to Vietnam.
ESCAS is designed to ensure that exported Australian livestock are handled in accordance with international animal welfare standards and to provide a mechanism to deal with animal welfare issues when they occur.
Additional conditions have also been placed on four exporters including extra monitoring and supervision by in-market staff. A statement published by the Agriculture Department said it was conducting exporter control and traceability audits for all eight exporters with supply chains in Vietnam, which are due to be finalized by the end of this month.
"The investigation already is revealing fatal flaws in the traceability system," Animals Australia chief investigator Lyn White told Sky News Australia. "Until these can be rectified and the industry can declare all of their supply chains are secure, they should themselves be suspending the trade to Vietnam."
In mid-June, Australia suspended livestock supplies to 18 abattoirs and feedlots in Vietnam pending an investigation into alleged animal cruelty, the Australian Embassy told VnExpress International.
In the wake of the suspension, Vietnamese authorities have been looking at other sources of cattle imports, mostly from South American countries, in a bid to reduce the possible impact on Vietnams livestock supply.
Tong Xuan Chinh, deputy director of the Department of Livestock under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, told Vietnam News Agency the suspension is unlikely to affect Vietnamese companies much at the moment because Vietnam can still import animals from other sources.
However, if it continues, it will have serious consequences for companies such as Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL) Joint-Stock Company, which have invested heavily in feedlots. Vietnam's cattle herd is currently not big enough to meet local demand, Chinh said.
Other Vietnamese importers of Australian livestock such as Vissan Company Ltd, a domestic meat processor and supplier, and Trung Dong Co Ltd werent immediately available for comment.
According to the Meat & Livestock Australia Limited, a producer-owned company that provides domestic livestock-related services, Vietnam was the second largest live cattle importer of Australia in the 2014-2015 fiscal year, shipping in 309,505 heads valued at AU$328 million.
Experts have been expressing concerns over domestic breeding when Vietnam joins the Trans-Pacific Partnership as import tariffs on animal feed, veterinary medicine and livestock will be cut.
Over the last seven years the number of cattle has fallen by 25 percent and the buffalo herd has dropped 13 percent, reported Vietnam's General Statistics Office. The country has approximately six million beef cattle at the moment and consumes about 3,000 per day.
Related news:
> Australia to permanently ban livestock supply to Vietnam's
> TPP trade deal could trample Vietnam's livestock industry
> Vietnam eyes cattle imports from S. America after Australia cuts supply
> Australia suspends 18 facilities in Vietnam for animal cruelty: Embassy
Hillary Clinton, the Democratic opponent to presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, was a major topic of conversation during the first day of the Republican National Convention on Monday.
Many speeches, including those from former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Patricia Smith, whose son was killed during an attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, centered on the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, who has come under intense scrutiny for her actions during that Benghazi attack.
During an interview on the FOX Business Networks Mornings with Maria on Tuesday, the Democratic National Committee Chairwoman, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, said there wasnt any evidence that there was any wrongdoing by Clinton on that night of September 11, 2012.
Secretary Clinton created a commission, acknowledged that there were certainly things that couldve been handled differently, Wasserman Schultz said. Kevin McCarthy, the [House] Majority Leader [and] my colleague in Congress admitted on national television that the reason the Republicans created that Benghazi Select Committee was to bring down Hillary Clintons poll numbers.
Despite recent polls showing the race between Trump and Clinton tightening, Wasserman Schultz said she is confident in where her party is now.
We are continuing to outorganize and outmobilize Donald Trumps campaign, she said. His campaign is not ready for primetime. He has no staff on the ground here in Ohio. This is one of two most important battleground states in any presidential election.
She added that in her view, the Republican candidate is not raising the appropriate funds necessary to compete until November.
"Theyre clearly unprepared. Theres chaos reigning on the convention floor yesterday. There is a real issue with Donald Trumps personal preparation to be president and the organization behind him, she said.
Wasserman Schultz, a representative serving Floridas 23 District, explained the most important policy Clinton would need to implement if she became president.
An economic policy thats going to help people reach the middle class, Wasserman Schultz said. One that ensures that they can get a good job that pays them well, they have a good roof over their head, continue to have access to healthcare. Make sure that they have a good education that doesnt bankrupt them and preserve their retirement security.
Senior executives at Volkswagen AG including its former chief executive covered up evidence that the German automaker had cheated on U.S. diesel emissions tests for years, New York state charged on Tuesday in a civil lawsuit against the company.
New York was one of three states bringing separate lawsuits in state courts against VW, along with Maryland and Massachusetts. The suit filed by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in state court in Albany on Tuesday outlined more than a decade of efforts by the world's No. 2 automaker to deceive regulators in the United States and Europe, citing internal VW documents.
The suits are the latest developments in the so-called Dieselgate scandal that has harmed VW's global business, sullied its reputation and led to the departure of its CEO and other executives. VW last September admitted using sophisticated secret software in its cars to cheat exhaust emissions tests, with millions of vehicles worldwide affected.
The three states accuse VW of violating their environmental laws.
(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Will Dunham)
United Continental Holdings Inc on Tuesday reported lower second-quarter profit that beat analysts' expectations as aircraft routing and engine usage helped it save on fuel.
The company also said it would buy back $2 billion of its stock.
The No. 3 U.S. airline by passenger traffic earned $588 million in the second quarter. Excluding items such as airport assets that lost value, profit fell 32 percent to $863 million, or $2.61 per share. Analysts on average had estimated earnings of $2.56 per share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. (Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; Editing by Richard Chang)
Melania Trump offered a softer, more compassionate image of her husband in her speech to the Republican National Convention, a contrast not just to the rhetoric of the campaign, but an evening of dire warnings about the security of the United States.
"Donald intends to represent all the people, not just some of the people. That includes Christians and Jews and Muslims," she told the crowd, which greeted her warmly.
Her husband greeted her on stage with a brief introduction in which he called her the"next first lady of the United States."
Related Donald Trump Walks Out to 'We Are the Champions' in First RNC Appearance
Melania Trump recounted how she grew up in Slovenia, "worked very hard in the incredible arena of fashion" and she saw "both the joys and hardships of daily life." She became a U.S. citizen in 2006, something she called "the greatest privilege on planet Earth."
"I did not take the freedoms this country offers for granted," she said.
Her appearance followed that of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who gave a blistering attack on President Obama, Hillary Clinton and Democrats. But Melania Trump stayed away from biting comments.
Her closest moment of criticism came when she said, "Our country is underperforming and needs new leadership." She also said her husband "will never be bought," perhaps a reference to Hillary Clinton."
Instead, in her accented English, she sought to give assurances that Trump was fit for the White House.
"If you want someone to fight for you and your country, I can assure you, he is the guy," she said. "He will never give up, and most importantly, he will never let you down."
She said that her husband "is tough and he has to be, but he is also kind and caring."
"Donald is intensely loyal to friends, family, employees and country," she said.
She didn't offer anecdotes, but said that "kindness, love and compassion" were "the values Donald and I would bring to the White House."
Trump took the stage again with his wife, to the song "We Are the Champions."
The outbreak of diphtheria has resulted in at least 61 cases.
Binh Phuoc Province, 140 kilometers to the north of Ho Chi Minh City, has seen an outbreak of preventable diphtheria which so far has killed three people aged 6-26, according to local health authorities.
The resurgence of diphtheria, according to health experts, is due to a low vaccination rate.
Although some of the dead had been vaccinated, they probably didnt follow the recommended schedule and doses of the vaccine, Phan Trong Lan, director of Ho Chi Minh Citys Pasteur Institute, was quoted by the government's online newspaper as saying.
He said that the vast majority of vaccinated people will be immune to the disease.
Statistics show that the vaccination rate in Binh Phuoc Provinces Dong Phu District was on a steady decline from 2008 to 2013, creating a dangerously lower immunity level in the area.
Every person who is successfully vaccinated helps slow the spread of the infection, reducing the risk to unvaccinated people, said Nguyen Trung Cap, deputy head of the emergency department at the Central Hospital for Tropical Diseases.
He added in other words, unvaccinated people are highly likely to be protected by what is known as herd immunity. Those who are not immunized are much more highly likely to become infected in an outbreak in a community where the vaccination rate is low.
Diphtheria, a bacterial infection, can result in high fevers, a sore throat, swollen gland in the neck, and loss of appetite. In severe cases, it can cause life-threatening complications like difficulty breathing, pneumonia, nerve damage, paralysis and damage to the heart muscle.
At least 59 new cases have been recorded in the districts of Thuan Phu, Thuan Loi and Dong Tien in Binh Phuoc Province since the beginning of July, bringing the total cases to 61 since the disease broke out last month.
The disease originated in a community of ethnic minority STieng people who have limited access to information, said Huynh Thi Hang, vice chairwoman of the provincial Peoples Committee. She said that local health authorities need to quickly take preventive measures and ask these people to go for checkups and vaccinations.
The Ministry of Health has urged Binh Phuoc Provinces health authorities to work closely with the Pasteur Institute and Ho Chi Minh Citys Hospital for Tropical Diseases to stop the disease from killing more people, said Tran Dac Phu, head of the Preventive Medicine Department.
The Ministry of Health is committed to putting an end to the epidemic as soon as possible, Phu said.
More than 700 people in Binh Phuoc Province have been vaccinated in an attempt to prevent the disease from spreading, according to local authorities.
The Republican National Convention kicked off at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio on Monday night with one central theme: Make America Safe Again. Hillary Clinton's performance as Secretary of State during the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya has left many wondering if she is unfit to be president of the United States.
During an interview with FOX Business Networks Varney & Co., Benghazi survivor Mark Geist discussed some of the missed opportunities by the former first lady that would have helped the security detail in Benghazi.
She should have provided an answer to the emails and the request for security there at the consulate, Geist told host Stuart Varney.
The 13 Hours co-author said the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, which covered an estimated eight acres, was guarded by just five diplomatic security officers as a result of Clintons foreign policy with Libya.
Geist says he directly blames Clinton for the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission that resulted in the deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
If you are in charge, you can delegate your authority, but you cant delegate responsibility. If you are the person in charge and you choose to take on that position as if she is to be elected president, is she going to take responsibility for the things that go wrong," Geist asked.
Geist described a good leader as someone who takes responsibiliy for the errors as well as, you know, the homeruns.
The death of Ambassador Stevens marked the first time since 1979 that a U.S. ambassador was killed in the line of duty.
Ariel Winter just turned 18, and lately shes been gaining social media attention for posting nearly nude snap after nearly nude snap.
Winter plays a nerdy, college freshman on the ABC show Modern Family. Her outfits in real life differ greatly from her characters covered up style. Is Winter headed down a dangerous Hollywood path?
Some fans think she is.
Amy Palmer, founder and CEO of PowerwomenTV, told FOX411 Winter is going through a typical Hollywood evolution from child star to adult.
She's been on television almost her entire life and has come of age in the advent of the Kardashians. She's learned that the [more skin] you show, the more press coverage and attention you get in Hollywood. We've seen this before countless times. From Britney Spears to Christina Aguilera to Kim [Kardashian] and her sisters, she's trying to break free from her good girl image to a sex symbol, Palmer said.
However, one expert speculated Winters case may actual be more unique. Dr. Montana Miller, associate professor at the Department of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University, said Winter is trying to show off her body transformation following negative comments she received.
The 18-year-old had breast reduction surgery and has previously opened up about being called fat by her critics.
The Internet scrutiny of her body has pushed her over the limit that any person would experience, Miller said. Perhaps her seemingly inappropriate posting of nearly nude photos is an in-your-face rebellious response. [Its] a way of asserting that she owns her body and not the massive anonymous invisible crowd of critics out there who have been haranguing her for the past months.
Either way, brand expert Scott Pinsker cautioned that Winters new career strategy could backfire. He said Winter runs the risk of not appealing to a family-friendly audience.
Ms. Winters highly-sexual transformation is certainly bad for her brand identity as a Disney-friendly, teenage actress, but shes now 18. She probably assumes that shes reached the end of that road anyway. By debuting her new look and new brand image with a social media splash, shes maximizing her public exposure. For better or worse, shes telling us how she wants to be perceived. Its up to the public and Hollywood producers to either accept it or reject it.
Did Disney weigh in on the headlines swirling around law enforcement on Fridays episode of Girl Meets World?
Bloggers and social media users sure think so.
In the episode, Danielle Fishel, who plays Topanga, repeatedly thanked a stern-but-friendly cop character and pointed out what a hard job police have.
The episode, Girl Meets True Maya, featured a guest appearance by Reginald VelJohnson, of Family Matters fame, who played a local police officer trying to protect the local park. The officer took notice of Sabrina Carpenters character, Maya, as she painted a mural in the park with the word hope. Though it was an act of vandalism, he let her off with a warning.
Earlier in the episode, the same officer showed leniency with a child who accidentally stole candy from a store, not realizing he was supposed to pay.
One fan blog noted, "To us, whether intentional or unintentional, there was also a really important message about the police in this episode, as well: Theyre not all bad... You can argue against the realism of this said cop character, but reading between the lines, it felt as though the show was trying to enforce that there are still good police officers out there, ones who exercise empathy and know that certain punishments do not always fit certain crimes."
Some viewers took note of the epsiode's message as well.
Topanga said the police do a tough job and said thank you for it in #GirlMeetsTrueMaya, I'm surprised the fandom haven't called for her head Jack Star (@JackStar016) July 15, 2016 Omg im watching girl meets world and the black cop was nice and he was like "see sometimes the system does work" Gabriella Rae Cantu (@gabbycan2) July 16, 2016
Disney did not immediately respond to FOX411's inquiries into when the episode was filmed. The show's stars, including outspoken teen Rowan Blanchard, have not made mention of the police presence in the show on social media. Blanchard did not return FOX411's request for comment.
While there are plenty of legitimate models with millions of followers on Instagram (IG), there are also a bevy of Insta-models" whose glamorous lives sources tell FOX411 are provided not by actual modeling work, but by Johns from whom they solicit sex by using the popular social media app.
Now sites like The Dirty, Tag Your Sponsor, and Tag The Sponsor are being used to out women allegedly using Instagram to secure sex clients.
Nik Richie, founder of The Dirty.com, told FOX411 he began to see call girls using the social media app around three years ago.
I started getting swarms of submissions to TheDirty.com from guys debunking female modeling careers because these women would constantly be flashing cash, private jet flights and exotic trips, but they had no jobs, Richie told FOX411. Their IG photos flaunted the ultimate lifestyle only afforded by rich men.
The blogger, whose site broke the Sydney Leathers and Anthony Weiner sexting scandal story, said he can tell a legitimate working model from an IG call girl based on their app activity.
For some reason these women need to brag about their facade; posting pictures on their IG of $25,000 dollar purses, red bottom shoes, cash and of course the selfies from a yacht in the South of France or Dubai, Richie said. 100 percent of their IG postings are fake set up situations to lure more men to like their pictures.
A modeling industry insider explained that these women use social media as a way to attract future clients with seductive photos, noting there is no way selfies can translate into enough money to maintain the luxurious lifestyle they document.
The sexy photos and videos are always giveaways to lure people in. The vast majority of these women arent making money from modeling, the source said. Going to a beach in a bikini isnt a paying job. You get no income for having 30,000 followers on IG. That $1/1K followers [rate] is pretty much the standard for any kind of endorsement deals, should a model secure one.
Which means sending a pic of oneself modeling a product to 30,000 followers would typically net a model with an endorsement deal around $300.
The site Tag The Sponsor refers to such women as sponsorettes whose lifestyle is provided by a sponsor, their term for John.
A source added that while Instagram is the latest frontier for prostitution, the buying market hasnt changed. This is just a recent avenue for the oldest profession.
A John who asked we not use his name told FOX411 he solicits escorts on Instagram by looking for models who pose alone on yachts, private jets, exotic vacations, and wear luxury items, as well as those who post personal email addresses using domains like Yahoo! or Gmail rather than listing a legitimate modeling agency like Elite or Ford.
I email her first saying shes beautiful. Then, I ask how much her time is worth. How much would lunch cost me $500? he said. We go back and forth until we reach an agreement. If shes meets me in person, then I know shes willing to do anything for money.
The John said that IG prostitutes can make a range of money for sexual favors starting at around $500 per hour, and that seasoned escorts can bank over $10,000 for an overnight stay.
Of course Instagram does not approve of such behavior from the Johns or the women, stating in their Terms of Use: You may not use the Service for any illegal or unauthorized purpose. You agree to comply with all laws, rules and regulations (for example, federal, state, local and provincial) applicable to your use of the Service and your Content (defined below), including but not limited to, copyright laws.
We reached out to Instagram to see if anyone has been removed from the service for using it to promote prostitution but did not hear back.
As for a woman who might be outed on sites like The Dirty and Tag Your Sponsor, Richie said the publicity can actually help increase their business.
These women panic at first, threatening legal action against TheDirty.com, but what is better than money is fame," he said. "They instantly become Insta-famous and a sea of men reach out to them ready to open their wallets for sex.
FOX411 reached out to Tag Your Sponsor and Tag The Sponsor but did not receive comment.
"Duck Dynasty" star Willie Robertson was one of several celebrities that graced the stage at the opening night of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, Monday night.
The reality star shared a clear message of support for the presumptive Republican nominee: "No matter who you are, Donald Trump will have your back."
Robertson went on to compare himself to Trump, saying they have a lot in common.
"We're both successful businessmen, although I flew here commercial and Im guessing he didn't," the outspoken star said adding they also both had successful television shows.
"And we both have intelligent wives who are much better looking than we are," Robertson joked.
The Louisiana native also took a shot at "media experts," saying "it must be humbling to be so wrong about so much for so long."
But, he has a theory about why the press "missed the Trump Train."
"They dont hang out with regular folks like us, who like to hunt and fish and pray and actually work for a living," he told a cheering crowd.
Robertson wasn't the only Hollywood star in attendance; "Happy Days" actor Scott Baio took the stage in support of Trump and so did soap opera star Antonio Sabato Jr.
As many as 11 members of the California delegation at the Republican National Convention (RNC) may have been infected by norovirus, reports suggest.
According to STAT News, the Erie County health commissioner is investigating the possible outbreak at the Cleveland convention. The affected delegates are staying at a hotel in Sandusky, about an hour from Cleveland; some delegates and alternates are staying at two other locations.
Weve got about 11 who have been sick over the last few days, and weve been out there every day and working with them to eliminate the spread [between] the resort and the delegation from California, Erie County health commissioner Peter Schade told STAT.
The Republican staffers are undergoing tests to confirm whether they have the contagious virus, a common problem among cruise ship passengers.
The first infected staff member infected her husband, Jim Brulte, the California delegation chairman, told STAT. Infected staff members are being quarantined until they havent shown symptoms for 24 hours.
According to STAT, the delegates hotel has a large indoor water park a potential breeding ground for norovirus. Hand sanitizer stations have been added, and delegates have been advised on precautions to avoid illness.
Norovirus is spread by infected individuals, contaminated food or water, or by touching contaminated surfaces, and causes the stomach, intestines, or both to get inflamed. Symptoms stomach pain, nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting develop 12 to 48 hours after exposure and most people improve within 1 to 3 days. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, norovirus causes 19 to 21 million cases of acute gastroenteritis (inflammation of the stomach, intestines or both).
Celebrity chef Elizabeth Falkner knows how to handle the heat in the kitchen, but 20 years ago when she developed a painful, irritating skin condition that seemed to worsen in hot conditions, she began to question whether shed be able to keep her career. She was eventually diagnosed with moderate to severe atopic dermatitis, a chronic skin disease that causes rashes, itchiness and cracked skin.
My dermatologist told me to maybe stop cooking so much, the San Francisco-based star told FoxNews.com, [But] I wouldn't stop cooking, I didnt want [atopic dermatitis] to stop my life.
Falkner, who has appeared on Food Network Star and Iron Chef: Redemption, has attempted to use food as a way to lessen her symptoms, but finds there is not one superfood solution to her disease.
I feel like as a chef Im almost an alchemist sometimes, so I do kind of try to figure out what [foods] would help these flare ups, Falkner said. But what Ive learned is that [the solutions are] different for everybody.
Falkner is also helping to spread awareness of the disease through a partnership with the National Eczema Association. Theyve launched a campaign called Understand AD so that others can continue to pursue their passion after a diagnosis.
I wanted to help bring awareness to this disease, Falkner told FoxNews.com. Its overlooked by a lot of people, and I think when you say you have a skin problem people just think its a rash [and that] itll go away. [Atopic dermatitis] doesnt really ever go away.
According to the National Eczema Association, approximately 1.6 million Americans suffer from uncontrolled moderate to severe atopic dermatitis. Doctors will typically prescribe topical corticosteroids to treat the symptoms; however, currently there is no cure for atopic dermatitis.
Doctors may also recommend lifestyle changes to combat the condition, and Falkner exercises heavily. Her exercise regime includes running, yoga, Pilates and Jungshin a workout that utilizes wooden swords. Nonetheless, the best thing to do if you are suffering from atopic dermatitis, Falkner said, is to consult a dermatologist
To learn more about atopic dermatitis visit understandad.com
Radiologists don't agree on what qualifies as "dense breasts," according to a new study.
Because tumors are harder to spot in dense breast tissue, and women with dense breasts are at higher risk of breast cancer, about half of U.S. states currently require that women be informed if they have "dense breasts."
But this determination may vary widely based on the individual doctor, say the authors of the study.
"Part of the message is that the assessment of dense breasts is subjective," said lead author Brian Sprague of the Office of Health Promotion Research at the University of Vermont in Burlington.
Dense breasts are one factor for decision-making about breast cancer screening, but not the only factor, Sprague told Reuters Health by phone.
The researchers studied more than 200,000 mammograms performed on 145,000 women ages 40 to 89 between 2011 and 2013. The mammograms were evaluated by 83 radiologists at 30 radiology facilities.
The radiologists rated each breast as "almost entirely fat," "scattered densities," "heterogeneously dense" (some nondense tissue, but most of the tissue is dense) and "extremely dense." The last two categories qualify as "dense" based on state legislation.
Overall, almost 37 percent of mammograms were rated as showing dense breasts, but the distribution of the four categories varied widely by radiologist. Some rated as few as 7 percent as dense, while others rated up to 85 percent as dense, the study authors reported in Annals of Internal Medicine.
Most women are in the middle two categories, and the line between those categories is blurry, Sprague said.
Women in the top two categories are at 50 percent greater risk of a cancer diagnosis than women in the bottom two categories, he said. Age at first period, age at the birth of first child, having a first degree relative with breast cancer and a history of prior benign disease all influence breast cancer risk as well, he said.
"The paper highlights the disconnect between density laws and breast density measurement, it was never intended to be something that really dictated screening decisions," Sprague said.
Most women need not be concerned about the results of this study, said Dr. Norman Boyd of the University of Toronto in Canada, who was not involved in the analysis.
Dense breast tissue is "not a diagnosis, just a description," Boyd told Reuters Health by phone. Anything that involves subjective human interpretation varies widely, including classification of nonmalignant tumors and actual cancers, he said.
In the future, he said, automated methods being developed for use with digital mammograms will probably be extremely reliable.
A Georgia teen is forced to spend her summer indoors rather than outside with friends as she waits for a kidney and takes upwards of 20 pills per day. Mychel Cunningham Armour, 16, was diagnosed with Lupus at age 9, Fox 5 Atlanta reported.
The teen suffers from high blood pressure, seizures, kidney and heart issues, and is currently undergoing chemotherapy.
She wont stop, Jacqueline Armour, Mychels mother, told Fox 5 Atlanta. Were like, Lay down, you just had chemo, she wont stop. She wants to move, she wants to go.
The family has had some experience with the autoimmune disorder as older sister Elantra Cunningham was diagnosed with a milder form of it in 2014. She told Fox 5 Atlanta she helps push her sister through her illness to make sure she keeps up with school.
In April, doctors approved Mychel for a kidney transplant which will help with her nightly routine. Currently she has to sleep tethered to a dialysis machine for nine hours as it works to remove toxins from her blood.
It buzzes and beeps all the time, Jacqueline told Fox 5 Atlanta.
But now the family must find a donor. Theyve started a Facebook page called Find a Kidney for Mychel Armour, to help raise awareness and raise funds for the procedure. Theyre also working with the Childrens Organ Transplant Association to help with costs not covered by insurance.
We are just kind of waiting for that call, Jacqueline told the news station. Sitting by the phone, waiting.
Lupus affects about 5 million people worldwide, including an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 children in the U.S., according to Boston Childrens Hospital.
A new kidney would mean Mychel could swim with her friends and go back to having sleepovers.
Because I wont have to be on the machine at night anymore, she told the Fox 5 Atlanta.
Children and adolescents should receive age-appropriate and evidence-based education about sex and sexuality from pediatricians, schools, professionals and parents, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
In the U.S., according to the AAP, about one in three adolescents does not receive any information on sexuality from pediatricians.
And when the subject does come up between doctors and kids, the average conversation lasts less than 40 seconds, the group says in a new report.
"Which means two-thirds of the time it's not discussed at all, and when it is discussed it's such a brief time," said Dr. Cora Breuner, chairperson of the AAP's Committee on Adolescence.
Children and adolescents should have an open discussion with their parents, pediatricians or healthcare providers and in their schools as well, she said.
"If we don't bring it up in a calm and open environment, they are going to turn elsewhere," said Breuner, who is also a pediatrician at Seattle Children's.
The AAP's report - its first on the topic since 2001 - was published in Pediatrics. It defines sexuality education as "teaching about human sexuality, including intimate relationships, human sexual anatomy, sexual reproduction, sexually transmitted infections, sexual activity, sexual orientation, gender identity, abstinence, contraception and reproductive rights and responsibilities."
The report says sexuality education has been shown to prevent and reduce the risks of adolescent pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.
Pediatricians are in an excellent position to provide and support sexuality education as part of preventive healthcare, the report says.
Additionally, it says, formal sexuality education in schools can improve the health and well-being of adolescents and young adults.
Parents and caregivers are their children's primary sexuality educators, says the report. But lack of knowledge, skills or comfort may impede parents or caregivers from fulfilling that role.
Breuner suggested people remember the acronym A-B-L-E when talking to young people about sexuality.
She said the letter A should remind people to ask kids if they have questions, assume they have questions and at all ages. The letter B is a reminder to be respectful and calm, and be aware of their own issues and agendas. The letter L is to listen, let the youth guide the conversation and learn from others if you need help. The letter E is to educate using methods backed by research and to encourage more questions.
"You need to be a resource for them, as well as your pediatrician and school," said Breuner.
The report also says that while abstinence is 100 percent effective, promoting abstinence-only until heterosexual marriage occurs is ineffective.
"Not only do kids have sex when you have an abstinence-only curriculum, they get pregnant more than those who have a comprehensive sexual education," said Breuner.
She said youngsters who get abstinence-only education tend to get more sexually transmitted infections, too.
For schools and the community, Breuner recommends a document from the Future of Sexuality Education (http://bit.ly/29IYOuP). For youth, she recommends the website Scarleteen (http://www.scarleteen.com/).
Philippines Foreign Minister Yasay says no framework in place for China dialogue.
The Philippines has turned down a Chinese proposal to start bilateral talks, its foreign minister said on Tuesday, because of Beijing's pre-condition of not discussing a court ruling that nullified most of its South China Sea (Vietnam's East Sea) claims.
Perfecto Yasay said he had met his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on the sidelines of a summit of Asian and European leaders on the weekend and after raising the topic of last week's ruling, it became clear that was a no-go area.
China has angrily rejected the verdict by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) and the initial case as illegal and farcical. It has repeatedly said it will not change its approach or its sovereignty claims in the South China Sea.
"They said if you will insist on the ruling, discussing it along those lines, then we might be headed for a confrontation," Yasay said during an interview with the news channel of broadcaster ABS-CBN.
"But I really honestly feel that this is something they have to make on a public basis but I also sensed there was room for us to talk very quietly using backdoor channelling."
Yasay said Yi had proposed bilateral talks but only on issues "outside, or (in) disregard of, the arbitral ruling," which he declined because it was not in the Philippines' national interests.
Yasay's account of the meeting highlights the challenge ahead for the Philippines, a U.S. ally, in getting China to comply with the decision which has ramped up tensions in the vital trade route.
The ruling laid out what maritime rights Manila had and where Beijing had violated its rights under international law, including its massive construction works on Mischief Reef.
Manila wanted to enforce the points of the complex ruling step-by-step but as a priority had asked China to let its fishermen go to the Scarborough Shoal without being harassed by its coastguard, Yasay said.
China's coastguard was preventing Filipino boats from fishing around the hotly contested Scarborough Shoal, fishermen and officials said on Friday, and China's air force has released pictures showing bombers recently flying over the area.
China claims most of the South China Sea, through which more than $5 trillion of trade moves annually. Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam have rival claims.
Yasay said hoped the ruling would lead to other Southeast Asian countries issuing a joint statement, adding that it could help neighbors also locked in disputes with China.
"We are not yet engaged in bilateral talks with anyone," he said. "But I would like to see how we can pursue certain provisional arrangements so that it would lead to opening of bilateral or multilateral engagements should that be necessary."
Related news:
> Vietnam says Chinese reports of PM backing Beijing stance 'untruthful'
> South China Sea ruling will 'intensify conflict': Chinese envoy
> Hague tribunal overwhelmingly rejects Beijing's South China Sea claims
With the Republican National Convention underway, Republicans who dont understand the appeal of Donald Trump might ask, of those Republicans who do: What do you see in this guy?
An interesting group to answer this question would be conservative Hispanic voters, 43 percent of whom have a positive or very positive impression of Mr. Trump, according to a new poll commissioned by The Latino Coalition.
This data does not fit well with the prevailing narrative that Trump is a bigot and no self-respecting Hispanic would ever support his candidacy.
And theres more. Although 67 percent of Latino voters registered as Republicans and Independents who self-define as moderate or conservative have a negative or very negative impression of Trump, 40 percent of those voters would still consider voting for Trump over Hillary Clinton.
Only 20 percent of those surveyed had a positive or very positive view of Clinton.
In other words: If you thought rank and file Republicans were struggling a bit with this years presidential choices, welltry being a Hispanic conservative or moderate this year. Its complicated, at best.
A look at the issues of importance to Latino voters in this category does shed some light. Across the board, Latino voters in our sample are focused on national security and the economy. Working on an immigration solution comes in third overall, with address the Latino community with respect following closely in fourth place.
Among both moderate and foreign-born Latinos (who, incidentally, self-identify as conservative at higher rates than U.S.-born Latinos), that issue of respect resonates most strongly.
This is an important message for Trump to hear, but also for down-ballot Republicans across the country. Candidates cannot assume that Hispanics are monolithic concerned only about immigration and defeating Trump, as the elite narrative suggests.
Our data indicates that conservative and moderate Latinos are still very much open to Republicans and Trump, but any and all candidates should be mindful to address the Latino community in a way that is respectful. A good way to start would be by hearing and voicing their concerns about national security and our economy.
Moderate and conservative Latinos are business-minded, with 68 percent concerned about the negative impact of red tape and taxes on small businesses and two-thirds (66 percent) believing that increases to the minimum wage would harm the ability of businesses to hire workers.
This group of voters also sees Obamacare to be a hindrance to small business, with 60 percent agreeing the healthcare law has increased both the complexity and cost of operating a small business.
Perhaps influenced by the fact that so many Hispanic Americans have been killed in recent terror attacks (in Paris, San Bernardino and Orlando), the issue they want to hear about first is improving national security. There is very little difference between conservative and moderate Latino voters here 91 percent of conservatives and 95 percent of moderates in our sample said this was very important or important.
My advice to Republican candidates from presidential to congressional, gubernatorial to state legislative: Talk to Latino voters as you do to any constituent with whom you hope to gain favor. Start with respect. Listen carefully. And then thoughtfully, fairly address the issues theyve said are of most pressing concern, regardless of what the headlines of the day tell you matters most.
In this case, youve got a head start you now know that our nations physical and economic security is of utmost importance to moderate and conservative Latino voters. Now go out there and talk to them with respect. If you do, theyll help you make history.
What have we learned, so far, about the Republican National Convention?
Like the mans many properties, Donald Trumps name ought to be on this Cleveland production. For Monday night was vintage Trump: physical confrontation (a failed rules rebellion on the convention floor); rhetoric that was blunt, bordering on impolite and offensive.
Plus, like too many a Trump event, an unforced error the campaign cant quite explain or justify: in this case, why portions of Melania Trumps speech seemingly were cut-and-pasted from a Michelle Obama speech at 2008s Democratic National Convention.
Here are four observations from last night:
Melania Trump deserved to be cut a lot a slack: shes not used to high-profile speeches; English isnt her first language; expectations were at times nonsensical...
Spousal Support. Lets start with the nights biggest controversy.
Remarks from the woman who hopes to be Americas next first lady are an opening-night tradition. Ann Romney did it in 2012, as did Michelle Obama in 2008.
And, in fairness, Melania Trump deserved to be cut a lot a slack: shes not used to high-profile speeches; English isnt her first language; expectations were at times nonsensical at least one television pundit expected her talk to about her love for The Donald, what kind of man he is, and how they raise their 10-year-old-son.
In all of five minutes.
Melania spoke much longer 14 very polished minutes, in fact focusing on her husbands drive and determination and their shared passion for America.
There were no cute anecdotes about how they met (get ready to hear it one last time in Philadelphia) or hokey yarns about her husbands around-the-house idiosyncrasies.
Anyone who thinks Mrs. Trump should have done more: feel free to try it yourself, in an adopted language, with 20,000 sets of eyes staring back at you.
However, theres no excuse for plagiarism regardless of who did it (Mrs. Trump said she wrote the speech, with help from aides).
Its the kind of needless mistake that makes Trump-wary Republicans wary of this campaigns chances. The convention cant afford to lead with this kind of news three more nights.
Security Blanket. Back in 2004, a GOP conventionin New York City, dovetailing with George W. Bushs re-election campaign, had a singular focus: national security. Bush being a wartime president and Manhattan one of the 9/11 targets, it made perfect sense.
Mondays overarching theme for the Cleveland show: make American safe again (every nights a variation of Donald Trumps make America great again brand).
It featured a host of speakers who tore into Hillary Clinton and her party as soft on terrorism and responsible for America losing face on the world stage.
Twelve years ago, the Bush campaign entrusted the likes of Giuliani, John McCain and Michael Bloomberg to make the GOPs case.
In 2016, and this being Trumps show, the honors went not so much to politicians as to emissaries from the victim class: Pat Smith, mother of Sean Smith, killed in the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya; Kent Terry and Kelly Terry-Willis, siblings of Brian Terry, a Border Patrol agent whose shooting death revealed the "Fast and Furious" gun-smuggling operation; Karen Vaughn, mother of a U.S. Navy SEAL killed in Afghanistan.
Benghazi and Fast and Furious are topics that inflame the right in part, because the mainstream media have moved on. Does reliving both episodes move the needle for Trump? Wait for the poll-convention polls. But at a minimum, it was refreshing to see non-politicians speak from personal experience.
Not coincidentally, the Clinton campaign recently put out this Dictators ad mocking Trumps foreign policy chops after this Trump ad featuring a barking Clinton and a laughing Vladimir Putin. Lets see if she continues that theme next week in Philadelphia and how her convention surrogates react now that the attacks have become very personal.
The Past Is Not Prolonged. Mondays are a convenient moment to trot out party legends former presidents, legendary statesmen.
That wasnt so, in Cleveland, on Day One.
Time and again, the spotlight went to congressional newbies Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke with links to Iraq and Afghanistan but not previous conflicts.
Not to disparage their service, but this is the pity of Trumps relationship with the Republican Establishment. Bob Dole, the only former GOP nominee in attendance, did get a nice acknowledgement from Melania Trump. But Dole and George H.W. Bush, a pair of World War II veterans who may not live to see the 2020 convention, deserved better. At the least, one last filmed tribute for the Greatest Generation. Hopefully, Trump gives the two elders a nod on Thursday.
Consider what an odd pair of conventions we have this year. In Philadelphia, Hillary will juggle 1990s nostalgia with a hard sell that shes fresh off the shelf. In Cleveland, its as if history hit the pause button from the end of the Reagan presidency to the dawn of the Trump candidacy.
Reality Check. For weeks, weve heard about a different look and feel in Cleveland Trump changing the Republican convention from political theater to reality television.
There were threads of reality throughout the first night moments both staged and unvarnished. The graphic details of the Benghazi talk were unsettling. Giuliani was more over-the-top more a Hillary-hating reality villain than an inspiring mayor. Audience chants of lock her up sounded more Jerry Springer than Jerry Ford.
And the ultimate reality moment: Trump, of course.
His silhouetted entrance was Alfred Hitchcock meets Freddie Mercury meets "The Apprentice." Ever the gracious reality host, he spoke for only 30 seconds in introducing his wife (oddly, this wasnt the nights closing act).
Trump fans will rave about the showmanship; his critics will offer scathing reviews about the nights dark and bitter tones.
And somewhere beyond Cleveland: three more days for Americans to better decide if this show gets a four-year run in Washington.
The last Republican convention that opened where no candidate had a majority of the delegates was the 1976 convention battle in Kansas City between incumbent President Gerald R. Ford and former California Gov. Ronald Reagan.
The primary had seesawed back and forth. Ford won the early contests in New Hampshire, Florida, Massachusetts, Illinois and Wisconsin and by the end of April had nearly half the delegates needed for the nomination.
Then Reagan won North Carolina. Even he was surprised, having flown out of the state early. The California governor then took Texas and Indiana. By the middle of May, Reagan was the frontrunner.
Ford stormed back in May and Michigan before Reagan took his home state. Ford answered with victories in Ohio and New Jersey as the primary season closed out. Neither man had the 1,130 needed for nomination: the balance lay with about 150 uncommitted delegates, many in the Mississippi and Pennsylvania delegations.
Knowing he was falling behind as Ford effectively cultivated delegates by inviting them to state dinners, to enjoy flights on Air Force One, and that years Bicentennial celebrations, Reagan took not one, but two bold yet dangerous steps.
Just before the convention, he named liberal Republican Sen. Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania as his running mate in an attempt to sway his states uncommitted delegates. Then his team forced a floor fight over a change to the partys rules that required all candidates to name their running mates before balloting for the presidential nomination began.
The proposal served as a test vote that would show the support each candidate had. The Reagan forces felt that many of the uncommitted delegates and some pledged to Ford would stand with them in forcing Ford to name his running mate.
Since Ford had previously picked New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller to serve as his vice president after Ford assumed the presidency following Richard Nixons resignation, the Reaganites felt a similar misstep by Ford in naming a moderate running mate would break the convention wide open.
After a spirited debate, the roll was called. Florida and Mississippi passed and when the final state was called, neither the Reagan or Ford forces had a majority. The chair then called on Florida again. The Sunshine State voted 28 ayes (for the Reagan position) and 38 nays (for the Ford position), giving the Ford forces a 1,130 majority. Mississippi, which was operating under the unit rule binding all 30 delegates to vote as the majority dictated, then piled on, making the final total 1,070 ayes to 1,187 nays. Reagans pick of Schweiker failed to sway Pennsylvania delegates as they voted 14 ayes to 89 nays.
When the convention turned to the presidential nomination, Ford won a narrow 1,187 to 1,070 victory over Reagan.
Reagan gave a gracious concession speech that, while unifying the party, nonetheless laid the basis for another run four years later where he defeated Jimmy Carter and became the 40th president.
When Republicans gathered in Chicago on June 2, 1880, the frontrunner was a familiar face former President Ulysses S. Grant, who after serving in the White House from 1869 to 1877 had stayed out of politics for four years. But by seeking an unprecedented third term, Grant had roused strong opposition from two other hopefuls, Maine Sen. James G. Blaine and Secretary of the Treasury John Sherman.
The two mens supporters helped stop Grant from after installing his personal choice, Sen. Don Cameron of Pennsylvania, as Republican National Chairman.
Grant was counting on Cameron to restore the unit rule where a majority of a states delegation could bind all its members, but Blaine and Sherman threatened to remove Cameron if he persisted in trying to lock in the unit rule.
At the convention, Blaine was the first candidate placed in nomination, followed by Grant. Sherman was placed in nomination by Ohio Rep. James A. Garfield, who gave a history of the GOP, discussed party harmony, and described in a general way the kind of man needed in the presidency before finally mentioning the candidates name in his final sentence.
Garfield had wanted to be considered himself but knew as long as his states deeply respected former U.S. Senator and current Treasury Secretary was a serious contender to lead the partys ticket. Two more senators and a former ambassador to France were put into the race before the session adjourned.
When balloting began the next morning, Grant led with 304: just 75 short of what was needed for a convention majority. Blaine was close behind with 284, followed by Sherman with 93 and 74 for the other three hopefuls. The convention then proceeded to cast 28 more ballots that day with Grant stuck between 303 and 313 votes before the convention adjourned for the night.
The next morning, Sherman rallied for five ballots but starting on the 34th, Midwesterners began voting for Garfield, who in order to protect his reputation protested that he was not a candidate. The next ballot, both Blaine and Sherman began bleeding delegates to Garfield. By the 36th ballot, it was over as the Ohio congressman took 399 votes and the nomination, followed by the former president at 306 and Blaine at 42.
This made Garfield the GOPs only presidential candidate whose name was not formally placed in nomination. He went on to win that fall with a substantial margin in the Electoral College 214 electoral votes to Democratic Winfield Hancocks 155 but a popular vote plurality of only 1,998 nationwide.
President Ronald Reagan once famously said, The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: Im from the government and Im here to help.
No one could have seen it at the time, but we now know that, with respect to our justice system, truer words were never spoken. In 1994, then-President Bill Clinton signed into law a tough on crime bill that contributed to the explosion of the federal prison population. Whats worse, the legislation bestowed federal dollars to states that built more prisons and passed laws to put more people behind bars for longer sentences.
The result? We now spend $80 billion a year to incarcerate or jail more than 2.2 million people, many of whom, because of their prison sentence, cannot find jobs or housing when they leave prison. So they return to crime and return to prison. We keep throwing good, hard earned, tax payer money after bad, and public safety continues to be neglected.
While Washington may have contributed to damaging this system, it is the states that are working to fix it.
We support efforts in our states to safely reduce prison populations and the astronomical cost to our taxpayers, while simultaneously lowering crime and recidivism rates. We urge our fellow governors who havent done so already as well as Congress to follow our lead.
We are all governors of states that are leading the way. We believe in personal responsibility, government accountability, curbing government overreach and strengthening families. For this reason, we support efforts in our states to safely reduce prison populations and the astronomical cost to our taxpayers, while simultaneously lowering crime and recidivism rates. We urge our fellow governors who havent done so already as well as Congress to follow our lead.
Prior to reforms, the prison population of Georgia was projected to grow 8 percent within five years, costing taxpayers an additional $264 million. Two rounds of sweeping reforms have helped decrease the Peach States prison population by 5 percent while crime continues to decline.
A similar problem plagued Oklahoma. Faced with a state prison system where almost 27,000 inmates filled the facilities to 112 percent of capacity, one-half of them imprisoned for nonviolent or drug crimes, the state enacted four measures that will begin to relieve the overcrowding. Oklahoma is united in making sure those who harm our communities will be held accountable, while at the same time believing in the power of redemption for those who have earned a second chance.
Meanwhile, Kentucky recently passed a felony expungement bill giving non-violent offenders who have paid their debt to society an opportunity to wipe their records clean, opening doors to employment, further education and a chance to be assimilated back into society. The Bluegrass State also just announced a diverse 23-member Criminal Justice Policy Assessment Council comprised of prosecutors and judges, state lawmakers, business and faith leaders to conduct a thorough review of the justice system and propose legislation that will create a smarter, stronger, fairer, and less costly system.
These three states join many others, including Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, South Dakota, Texas, and Utah in adopting justice reforms that are smart, but not soft, on crime.
Given the success of reforms such as these, members of the Republican National Committee unanimously adopted a groundbreaking resolution in support of justice reform. Additionally, delegates to the convention in Cleveland are invited to a screening of a short film that follows the three of us on our journey to reform our state justice systems, which we hope will inspire a movement across the country. After the screening, we will share why we are so committed to justice reform, afterwards taking uncensored, unfiltered questions from the press on this issue.
Too many people are spending too much time behind bars when they could be committing themselves to treatment programs, continuing their employment and supporting their families. For those who have paid their debt to society and are leaving prison, we must offer hope and an opportunity for redemption. While President Reagan had a healthy skepticism of government, he had a powerful belief in humanity:
I know in my heart that man is good. That what is right will always eventually triumph. And there's purpose and worth to each and every life.
We couldnt have said it better ourselves.
Nathan Deal is governor of Georgia. Mary Fallin is governor of Oklahoma. Matt Bevin is governor of Kentucky. All are Republicans.
While promoting his latest gun-toting action movie, Matt Damon took time to praise Australia for its gun-restrictive laws and unsuccessful buyback program while also lamenting that America was not evolved enough to pass gun control measures.
You guys did it here in one fell swoop and I wish that could happen in my country, but its such a personal issue for people that we cannot talk about it sensibly, Damon said to The Sydney Morning Herald.
People get so emotional that even when you make a suggestion about not selling AK-47s to people on terror watch lists, thats a non-starter, he said. Obviously mass shootings arent going to do it. There have been so many of them at this point. Sandy Hook, when those children were murdered if that didnt do it, you know, I just dont know. Maybe we just need to evolve further before we can have that conversation, I dont know.
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Damon is just another left-wing public figure being dismissive of gun rights advocates and people on the right as he argues for a program that didnt work.
In Australia, the country Damon and even President Obama have praised for its gun control measures, the laws are simply pleasing to the media and public figures looking to justify gun control. In reality, the program has turned out to be disastrous.
The infamous gun buyback program first came about in Australia in 1996. The program was said to have taken over 650,000 guns out of civilian hands before implementing much harsher gun restrictions in the country.
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Though its a move that has been praised by President Obama, as well as Hillary Clinton on her current campaign trail, the buyback program is simply a glossy way for the Left to deem gun control successful. Once you dig into the facts of the matter, the gun buyback program is actually a near-perfect glimpse of how little gun control actually accomplishes.
It's a shame liberal politicians and activists like Damon don't want to dig into the complicated solutions to complicated issues things like mental health, radical Islam, etc. or allow themselves to see the benefits of legal gun ownership.
It is estimated by multiple groups, including The Sporting Shooters Association of Australia, that the buyback program only succeeded in taking around 20 percent of guns in the country
The massive problem the program has created, which has especially come to light this year, is a dangerous black market for guns that seems far more volatile than any previous legal gun ownership in the country.
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Just this year, Australia's Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, Peter Dutton, and Minister for Justice Michael Keenan put out a joint statement regarding the growing black market for firearms, run predominantly by Australian criminal biker gangs.
"We don't tolerate gun smuggling in Australia and we know outlaw motorcycle gangs are engaged in it. We have been keen to send the strongest possible message from Canberra that we're not going to tolerate people smuggling in guns or smuggling in gun parts. You'd appreciate that even one smuggled gun can do an enormous amount of damage."
Australia's The News Daily reported recently that it had gained access to unreleased crime reports that found a surge in crime, "including a massive 83 percent increase" in firearms offenses, in the last 10 years.
Despite the uncontrollable black market, which has thrived since the gun buyback program and new firearm restrictions, Australia has remained a country with a relatively low murder rate. Their homicide rate has remained essentially unchanged since the buyback program, with modest declines.
Still, it's not difficult to see that Australia is a prime example of why gun control doesn't work to combat the very things it intends to. America has seen a sharp increase in gun ownership while also seeing sharp declines in murder rates.
Matt Damon is the most recent prominent liberal figure to praise Australia's gun control measures without looking beyond the facade. It's a shame liberal politicians and activists like Damon don't want to dig into the complicated solutions to complicated issues things like mental health, radical Islam, etc. or allow themselves to see the benefits of legal gun ownership.
You can next see Damon shooting plenty of guns when his new movie, "Jason Bourne," opens on July 29.
Zachary Leeman is a reporter for LifeZette.com.
Several protesters briefly disrupted the opening-night speeches Monday at the Republican National Convention, including a Code Pink demonstrator who tangled with Donald Trump supporters and was removed by police.
The incident occurred when the Code Pink protester unfurled a banner near the VIP box of vice-presidential nominee Indiana Gov. Mike Pence that read Yes We Can End War.
Nearby convention-goers surrounded the woman and shouted arrest her until Secret Service agents and other law-enforcement officials arrived and removed her.
A man wearing a "Bikers for Trump" shirt tried to rip the sign out of her hands and help police.
Another Code Pink protester also purportedly tried to disrupt the speeches. And a third protester, in the second deck of the Quicken Loans Area, where the four-day convention is being held, put up a sign that read Refugees Welcome, which brought on loud cheers of USA, USA, USA.
The expected protests outside the conventions security perimeter took place through the day and night, but there were no reports of clashes or other violence.
Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson told reporters in the early evening that the protests have so far been peaceful and that just one arrest was made and that a small knife, gas masks and a sling shot has been confiscated.
There was a timea few days ago, actuallywhen Donald Trump was getting hammered for the seemingly convoluted process of picking a running mate.
Then there was a time when Trump was being panned for the rollout of Mike Pence, and how he spent most of the appearance talking about himself and other subjects.
Then there was the joint 60 Minutes interview, when Trump drew flak for finishing some of the Indiana governors sentences.
But right now here in Cleveland, no one is talking about any of that. And thats because news has an incredibly short half-life these days. Big stories flash across the sky like meteors, burn incredibly brightly, and disappear beyond the horizon.
Thats in part because of the tsunami of terror and tragedy that has gripped this country, blowing most other news off the screen, until its replaced by another burst of gunfire.
The past two weeks have been heartbreakingand are giving us whiplash.
There was, in rapid succession, the fatal police shooting in Baton Rouge and a second fatal shooting, less than 24 hours later, in suburban St. Paul. And the horrifying massacre of five police officers in Dallas.
Just as we were reeling from all that came the terrible terrorist attack in Nice. And 24 hours later, an attempted coup in Turkey. And on Sunday, just as my show was starting from the convention here, we got word that six police officers had been shot in Baton Rouge, and three of them would die.
The massacre at the gay nightclub in Orlando was just a month ago, but feels like many months ago.
And yet, with Trumps convention under way, who is still heavily focused on Nice, as awful as that truck attack was?
And who is still heavily focused on Dallas, now that its been superseded by Baton Rouge?
This is not only because the media have a notoriously short attention span. Its because the human brain can only process so much tragedy at any one time.
Perhaps its inevitable that the stories bleed together. And then bleed into the political coverage. Thats why Trump made law and order a theme of the conventions first session last night. And its why Hillary Clinton told the NAACP yesterday that this madness has to stop.
Its no secret that the news cycle is now stuck on hyperspeed, that many of us get second-by-second updates on Twitter or Snapchat as we watch stories unfold on television.
I hate the term the new normal, but that is where we are. I hate the notion that were becoming less outraged by each attack, on police or on innocent civilians, because we havent quite gotten over the one that took place a few days before. But that is where we are.
A Pennsylvania woman accused of trying to kill her husband over the weekend was one of the more than 4,500 delegates to next week's Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
But Democratic Party officials say they accepted Deanna Vicites's resignation Tuesday, and an at-large alternate was named to take her place.
Authorities say the 47-year-old Vicites shot her husband, Vincent, in the neck Sunday. He is a Fayette County commissioner.
She is being held on bond on an attempted homicide charge. Court records don't list a lawyer for her.
Her husband is recovering at a West Virginia hospital.
According to a criminal complaint, the couple told responding officers the shooting was an accident, but investigators say they determined that Deanna Vicites tried to kill her husband.
Nobody is blaming Melania Trump, who did a nice job in the harsh spotlight.
But the colossal screwup over the passages that were strikingly similar to Michelle Obamas Democratic convention speech is getting worse because the campaign is denying the obvious.
Folks, the video evidence is out there. Cable news channels are playing the Melania/Michelle similarities back to back. Everyone knows the Trump campaign is allergic to apologies, but insisting that this was a mere coincidence is just inflaming the media coverage.
It is, of course, not that big a deal. Melania is neither a politician nor a practiced public speaker. Although she claimed ownership of the Cleveland address in an interview, its clear that it was largely the work of speechwriters. What, they thought no one would notice that the current first lady used some of the same phrases in 2008?
So in insisting that the story is bogus, campaign officials are actually giving it legs by prompting anchors and reporters to prove the case and to question why the Trump operation persists in its denials.
There's no cribbing of Michelle Obama's speech, campaign chief Paul Manafort told CNNs New Day this morning. These were common words and values To think that she would be cribbing Michelle Obama's words is crazy. I mean and so this is once again an example of when a woman threatens Hillary Clinton, she seeks out to demean her and take her down it's not going to work.
What does this have to do with threatening Hillary Clinton?
The controversy is taking the focus off the hard-edged speeches by Rudy Giuliani and others on Monday night in favor of a flap that is, in all honesty, more fun for journalists to cover.
Here is some of the wording, via the New York Times:
Melania Trump, 2016:
"From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise, that you treat people with respect. They taught and showed me values and morals in their daily lives. That is a lesson that I continue to pass along to our son. And we need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow. Because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.
Michelle Obama, 2008:
Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say youre going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you dont know them, and even if you dont agree with them. And Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values, and pass them on to the next generation. Because we want our children and all children in this nation to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.
Whatever you think of the contretemps, I love that it was broken by a random dude on Twitter. Jarrett Hill, described as an interior designer and journalist, was sitting in a Starbucks in L.A. when he noticed one similarity from eight years ago and began checking for others.
The other striking thing from last night: While Patricia Smith, whose son was killed in Benghazi, was blaming Hillary Clinton on stage, Trump called in to Bill OReillyessentially preempting his own convention for those few minutes. No one ever called him a conventional candidate.
The dubious promotion of an embattled official comes back to bite the former trade minister.
Communist Party's General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong has called for a thorough inspection into the responsibility of Vu Huy Hoang, the former Minister of Industry and Trade, in the questionable promotion of an embattled lawmaker-elect who has just been dismissed for his financial wrongdoings and lavish lifestyle.
Trong asked the Central Inspection Committee, the Communist Party's top watchdog, to instruct agencies concerned to ensure the investigation is "just, objective, integral and no-holds-barred".
Under Hoang's leadership between 2010 and 2015, Trinh Xuan Thanh, whose lawmaker-elect status was stripped on July 15, was kicked upstairs in the political apparatus of the Ministry of Industry and Trade even though the state-run PetroVietnam Construction Corporation (PVC) he chaired from 2007 to 2013 incurred losses of around VND3.3 trillion ($144 million).
The Central Inspection Committee on July 11 held Thanh accountable for dereliction of duty and violations on economic management, resulting in the losses. The committee proposed strict punishment against him.
Thanh was also elected to the National Assembly, Vietnam's legislature, last May. He was dismissed on July 15, just days before the full house convenes its first plenary session next week.
He had already "voluntarily" withdrawn from the re-election race for the position of vice mayor of the Mekong Delta province of Hau Giang after his alleged misuse of an official plate on his private luxury car raised public hackles, prompting an investigation.
Thanh was in the spotlight for three reasons. First, he used a blue license plate on a private Lexus LX570 that should only be used by government-owned vehicles. Second, PVC, where Thanh was chairman from 2007 to 2013, incurred heavy losses under his leadership. Third, it is still not clear why he has continued to be kicked upstairs despite his track record.
Following the public outcry, Party chief Nguyen Phu Trong had ordered a probe into his promotion process.
Hoang was appointed as minister of Industry and Trade in August 2007 and retired last April.
Related news:
> Vietnams former industry minister under fire over son's promotions
> Vietnams lawmaker-elect dismissed for economic mismanagement, lavish lifestyle
Melania Trump and her introduction by the presumptive Republican nominee may have been the long-awaited highlight but it was pointed attacks on Hillary Clinton that included the mother of one of the Benghazi terror attack victims that set the tone Monday for the weeklong convention in Cleveland.
Donald Trump broke from the tradition of not appearing before the convention crowd before accepting the presidential nomination to introduce his wife, and assured the crowd at the Quicken Loans Arena that were going to win, were going to win so big.
The energized crowd was still cheering from the speech former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani gave just moments before Melania Trump was introduced.
Melania Trump was the first of several other family members who are set to speak at the convention. She broke away from the tone that Giuliani had set minutes prior and spoke about how her husband plans to fight for the country and shed some insight on her plans to help women and children should she become the next First Lady.
"If you want someone to fight for you and your country, I can assure you, he is the guy," she said. No room for small thinking. No room for small results. Donald gets things done.
My husband is ready to lead this great nationto fight every day, to give our children the better future they deserve.
Highlighting the theme of the night Make America Safe Again was Giuliani who reinvigorated the crowd with passionate words about the countrys police force and bold attacks on Clinton about the state of the Middle East after she departed the State Department.
Libya is in chaos. (Hillary Clinton) is accountable for this and much more, he said. Who would trust Hillary Clinton to protect them? I wouldnt. Would you?
The biggest roar Giuliani got from the crowd was when he defended law enforcement officers across the nation, in wake of the police ambushes in Texas and Louisiana that left a total of eight officers dead.
He said police officers dont see color when it comes to saving and protecting Americans from danger.
When they come to save your life, they don't ask if you're black or white, they just come to save you.
He also took a dig at then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obamas 2004 convention speech.
What happened to - 'there is no black America, there is no white America, there is just America' - what happened to it? Giuliani said.
He told the crowd that Donald Trump would make Americans feel safe again and promised What I did for New York, Donald Trump will do for America.
Giuliani echoed the sentiments that were felt throughout the entire day from the mother of a Benghazi victim, Patricia Smith, Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke and several others.
I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son, Smith said earlier in the night. Her son Sean was killed in the Benghazi terror attack.
Clarke also talked about the police force in wake of the Dallas and Baton Rouge shootings and stated that Blue Lives Matter.
We simply cannot be great if we do not feel safe in our homes, on our streets and in our schools, Clarke added.
Former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Mon., and Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst wrapped up the night with their speeches. However, most of the crowd had already departed before Flynn got up to the podium.
Flynn was originally scheduled to speak on Tuesday. He urged those left in the crowd to not sit the election out.
Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Tex., also touched on the police murders and noted that Islamic terror is coming to American soil.
He made clear that the enemy is radical Islam, something that has been a big part of Trumps presidential campaign.
Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions addressed the crowd about the economy and illegal immigration and the need to secure the countrys borders. He also railed against the economy, telling the crowd that we are on the wrong side of the track, and the American people know it.
Is it too much to ask that we slow down and protect our national security and job? he asked.
Jamiel Shaw, whose son was killed by an illegal immigrant, spoke too sharing his story and the need to protect the countrys borders.
Congressman Sean Duffy and his wife, Rachel Duffy, took a jab at Clintons email scandal, saying one of their family rules is no servers in the basement.
Among the celebrities that are set to speak at the convention, Duck Dynasty star Willie Robertson opened the night telling the media how they have been wrong about Trump over the last year.
Former model Antonio Sabato Jr., also assured the crowd that Trump is for unity.
The convention floor turned chaotic earlier in the day when Republican officials hastily adopted a set of much-contested convention rules. It set off a protest from anti-Donald Trump delegates who hoped to challenge the rules that bind delegates to vote for the presumptive GOP nominee.
The convention's presiding officer, Arkansas GOP Rep. Steve Womack, abruptly put the rules to a vote -- twice -- and declared them approved by voice. The decision prompted loud objects from Trump opponents, but nothing more than that.
The second days theme is Make America Work Again and some of the speakers slated for Tuesday are Donald Trump Jr., Eric and Tiffany Trump and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
A Mississippi lawmaker is suing the speaker of the state House for allegedly abusing a speed-reading machine that House members have referred to as the demon chipmunk.
The case was heard by the state Supreme Court on Tuesday.
The challenge was brought by first-year Democratic state Rep. Jay Hughes, who accused Speaker Philip Gunn of violating the state Constitution by setting the machine to read bills at a speed so fast that the words are unintelligible.
Hughes attorney S. Ray Hill III wrote in a brief that the bills were played at a brisk pace, but slow enough to hear.
Any member of the Mississippi House or Senate can demand that a bill be read aloud immediately before a final vote on it, according to Section 59 of the 1890 state Constitution. Bill-reading is also a common filibuster tactic.
When House Democrats demanded a reading in March, Gunn allegedly retaliated by having the machine play at warp speed so that no member could understand what was being said, wrote Hill.
In response, Hughes petitioned the Hinds County Circuit Court for a temporary restraining order. Judge Winston Kidd issued the restraining order on March 23, which forced Gunn to slow down the readings.
But when Gunn appealed the decision, the state Supreme Court put Kidds order on hold.
Gunns attorneys argued to the Supreme Court that all lawmakers have computers and can read bills on them if they so choose.
Having heard the arguments, the court has not specified a time frame for a decision.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Apparently sensing a need to quell any further attempts by anti-Trump forces to sidetrack the Republican National Convention, the Trump campaign turned Tuesday to Mike Pence to deliver an impromptu call for party unity, telling Republicans, The time has come for us to come together Lets get to work.
The Indiana governor showed up as a surprise guest for a meeting of the American Conservative Union at a restaurant in downtown Cleveland. He delivered impassioned remarks, and closed with a ringing endorsement of his running mate.
He loves this country. He believes in the American people and their boundless potential. He is unintimidated by the world but he is in awe of the people of this country, he said.
Pence said if they all come together to work for it, come Inauguration Day, Donald Trump will raise his hand, become the 45th president of the United States of America, and he and we will make America great again.
The remarks were a clear attempt to get any remaining hold-outs on board with Trumps nomination, a day after an uproar on the convention floor by anti-Trump delegates who tried to force a roll-call vote on rules that blocked their bid to free delegates committed to the billionaire businessman.
Both Trump and Pence are set to be formally nominated by Tuesday evening, to be followed by a set of speeches from senior establishment Republicans a chance for party leaders to give a clear signal of party unity after the fractious primary.
House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are set to speak, as are former Trump rivals and now-allies Ben Carson and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
After their crushing defeat on the floor of the Republican convention Monday, some anti-Trump delegates seemed to be coming around to the reality that Trumps nomination is all but inevitable.
Theres talk about abstentions and walkouts but I imagine those are symbolic -- this was the last best effort to stop it, Peter Lee, a D.C. delegate, told FoxNews.com Monday night. Ill listen to people coming up with alternatives, but am not optimistic.
D.C.s was one of a number of delegations that called for a formal roll call vote Monday on a controversial rules package, that anti-Trump delegates wanted to overturn in order to allow a free vote by delegates for the nominee. The uprising was quashed by Rep. Steve Womack, R-Ark., who was presiding over the convention. Womack called for a voice vote and declared the rules approved.
For many anti-Trump delegates, it was their last card to play.
Lee described the mood among fellow delegates as resignation but not necessarily begrudging support.
Others said that while they accepted defeat, they still intended to make a statement for the rest of the convention.
I think the opinion of people who think like I do is we know hes going to be nominated, but we think a statement needs to be made, Norm Frink, an alternate delegate for Oregon who sported a Never Trump T-shirt, told FoxNews.com
Rick Wilson, a GOP strategist and a key voice in the anti-Trump movement, said they were under no illusions on how hard this would be.
"Were in a position right now, the folks who opposed Donald Trumps nomination played our cards, he said. Now hes going to be the nominee short of a meteorite hitting him in the face, and we recognize that.
He said the mood among delegates is of disappointment and a sense that defeat is around the corner for the GOP.
Theyre disappointed Trump is the nominee for a very simple reason: all the scenarios that play out, few lead to a Donald Trump victory, he said. "If hes not going to win why are we putting our party in this agony? Why are we putting our party through this absolute s---show of a campaign? Thats on the minds of a lot of people in Cleveland.
FoxNews.coms Adam Shaw contributed to this report.
Iowa GOP Rep. Steve King caused a stir Monday with controversial remarks on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention questioning the contributions of non-whites in society.
King made the comments during an MSNBC panel that included Esquire writer Charles Pierce, journalist April Ryan and host Chris Hayes.
When Pierce said the Republican Party continues to cater to disaffected white people, King pushed back.
This 'old white people' business does get a little tired, Charlie," King said. "I'd ask you to go back through history and figure out: Where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you're talking about? Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?"
Host Hayes prompted: Than white people?
"Than, than Western civilization itself," King said. "It's rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world. That's all of Western civilization."
Ryan weighed in, asking about contributions from Africa and Asia.
Hayes said, Let me note for the record that if youre looking at the ledger of Western civilization, for every flourishing democracy, you have Hitler and Stalin as well."
After the segment aired, Hayes tweeted that he should have spoken up more following Kings comments.
1. I was pretty taken aback by Steve King's comments. I probably should've blown through beak and let @AprilDRyan respond. But... Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) July 18, 2016
King is no stranger to controversy. His comments have gotten him into hot water in the past.
Earlier this year, King rigiously lobbied against adding Harriet Tubman to the $20 bill.
In 2013, he made waves when he said that for every immigrant in the country illegally who becomes a valedictorian, theres another 100 out there that weigh 130 pounds, and theyve got the calves the size of cantaloupes because theyre hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.
Theres a reason why Republicans tapped Rep. Steve Womack, R-Ark., to preside over the GOP convention Monday afternoon and quash a demand for a roll-call vote on a controversial rules package by forces who oppose Donald Trump: Womacks done this before.
He has a history of deploying heavy-handed tactics from the dais in the House of Representatives.
The House Republican brass often summons Womack to preside over combustible debates in Congress. And on at least two occasions, the House Republican leadership has installed Womack in the chair when they needed someone to tilt the playing field to secure a particular outcome.
Such was the case in January 2012 when Democrats and Republicans alike were demanding a vote on a bill to provide relief for millions of people in New York, New Jersey and elsewhere following Superstorm Sandy.
With Womack presiding, a Republican congressman tried to adjourn the House over the bipartisan wishes of lawmakers wanting the House to consider the Sandy legislation. In much the same way that things unfolded Monday afternoon in Cleveland, Womack called for those in favor of adjourning to yell aye and those opposed to shout nay. Only a skeleton crew of lawmakers blurted a meek aye in favor of adjournment. The boisterous lawmakers hoping to get a vote on the Sandy bill ear-splittingly screeched no!
As the presiding officer wielding the gavel, Womack paused for a moment and gripped the rostrum. He inhaled deeply and grimaced, turning his head to the right as he pondered what he should do. The noes had clearly prevailed at least audibly. Yet the House was supposed to adjourn. So Womack weighed this decision in silence for what seemed like an eternity, holding those occupying the House floor in rapt attention.
Then, Womack pronounced his decree.
In the opinion of the chair, the ayes have it, proclaimed Womack. He then hastily rapped the gavel, terminating the House session.
The Sandy bill was dead for the time being -- until lawmakers finally approved it nearly a month later.
Mondays scene on the convention floor Monday was not quite so shocking, but nevertheless dramatic. He was presiding when anti-Trump forces tried to call a roll-call vote on rules that blocked their bid to free delegates committed to the billionaire businessman. Both the ayes and the nays were loud, but Womack triggered an uproar by abruptly quashing the anti-Trump effort.
Womack, in the House, also found himself presiding on another occasion in March 2014 in what turned out to be an even tougher parliamentary pickle.
Democrats and Republicans struggled to find the votes to approve something called the doc fix. The doc fix was an onerous, expensive multi-billion dollar patch Congress approved for years to reimburse physicians who treat Medicare patients. The patch consistently added to the deficit. But lawmakers had to approve each Band-Aid, or physicians would quit taking Medicare patients and the entire system might collapse.
But no one was quite ready to approve the doc fix in March of 2014.
The House debated the bill and lurched into an abrupt recess. After an hour of off-floor negotiations, Womack quickly gaveled the House back into session. He immediately summoned the doc fix legislation to the floor and rapidly read from a piece of paper before him:
The question is will the House suspend the rules and pass the bill. So many as are in favor say aye, stated Womack.
A few meek voices meekly spat out an aye.
Womack didnt stop.
Those opposed, no, said Womack.
Some different voices in the chamber hacked out a no. But without acknowledging them and with some lawmakers still uttering no, Womack steamed ahead. Not even a millisecond elapsed between. Nor did Womack look up to evaluate whether there were more nays than yeas.
In the opinion of the chair, two-thirds of those being in the affirmative, the rules are suspended the bill is passed, and the motion to reconsider is laid on the table, claimed Womack.
At that point, the right hand of the Arkansas Republican released its grip on the rostrum. Womack grabbed the gavel and with an efficient stroke, rapped it on the dais. Without missing a beat, Womack announced a roll-call vote on a measure to sanction Russia. Bells rang throughout the Capitol complex, summoning lawmakers to the chamber.
And no one was quite sure what was going on.
They voiced it? My God, exclaimed an incredulous then-rank-and-file Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., as he cut through the Speakers Lobby en route to the floor.
I've seen some dumb things. But I've never seen anything as comical as this, affirmed then-Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., the longest-serving lawmaker in the history of Congress.
Lawmakers from both sides grew angry when they realized the House approved the doc fix without their knowledge and probably without the necessary votes.
Im outraged by this political ploy today to push through the legislation by voice vote, fumed Rep. Luke Messer, R-Ind.
The common denominator between the 2012 motion to adjourn, the 2014 doc fix vote and the effort to block anti-Trump forces on the floor of the convention in Cleveland: Rep. Steve Womack.
A Utah delegate at the Republican National Convention says she was threatened Monday night inside one of the venues bathrooms, after her delegation led an effort to challenge Donald Trumps presidential nomination.
I came out of my stall, and there I was confronted by two women, said at-large delegate Kera Birkeland, according to her account on Facebook of the incident. They yelled at me, called me names. They said I should die.
The incident, as reported first by the Salt Lake City Tribune, followed an uproar on the convention floor when delegates objected to convention rules that would smooth the way for Trump's nomination.
The attempt was led by the Utah delegation.
But Birkeland insists she isn't part of the Never Trump movement that has persisted through the election season. And she said the failed push Monday for a roll-call vote on the rules wasnt about Trump, just an attempt to make the national Republican Party more transparent.
She said the two female Trump supporters in the bathroom of the Quicken Loans Arena said police protection should be pulled from the Utah delegation and that we should all die.
It shook me at first, said Birkeland, who apparently did not report the incident to police. I came out of the bathroom crying.
Utah Delegation Chairman Phil Wright, who helped lead the effort to overturn the rules, condemned Birkelands treatment, suggesting it was against the law and arguing political disagreements should never escalate like that.
"Obviously, that's a horrible thing for anyone to say," Wright told the Tribune. "That's a legal issue when someone is threatened."
The newspaper also reported a second Utah delegate was threatened. Delegate Stefani Stone Williams reportedly received an email from Carl Paladino, the co-chairman of Trump's New York campaign, saying she should be "hung for treason" for being part of the effort to try to use the rules to vote for a candidate other than Trump, the paper reported.
"You should be hung [sic] for treason Stefani," Paladino purportedly wrote. "There will not be a Republican Party if you attempt to replace Trump. I'll be in your face in Cleveland."
Housing Secretary and potential Democratic vice-presidential prospect Julian Castro violated federal law when he touted Hillary Clinton's candidacy in a media interview earlier this year, according to a federal watchdog report released Monday.
The seven-page report by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel concluded Castro violated the Hatch Act, which bars most Executive Branch officials from expressing their political views while on official business. According to the report, he crossed the line during an April 4 interview that mostly was about HUDs plans to increase Internet access to children and other agency-related issues.
Castro, though, responded to a question during the Yahoo News interview about Clintons presidential bid.
Taking off my HUD hat for a second and speaking individually, Castro said, while going on to call Clinton the most experienced 2016 candidate and criticizing Republicans. BuzzFeed News first reported on the OSC findings.
Castros statements during the interview impermissibly mixed his personal political views with official agency business, despite his efforts to clarify that some answers were being given in his personal capacity, states the OSC report, which will now be referred to President Obama, who will decide on what if any action to take.
Castro is considered a potential running-mate pick for Clinton as she prepares to name her choice going into the Democratic convention next week.
Castro, in response to the report findings, said he thought during the interview that he avoided violating the act but agreed with the OSC findings.
I offered my opinion to the interviewer after making it clear that I was articulating my personal view and not an official position, he said. At the time, I believed that this disclaimer was what was required by the Hatch Act. However, your analysis provides that it was not sufficient.
He also purportedly plans to provide training for top agency officials to avoid future violations.
The Obama administration recently said Cabinet-level officials like Castro cannot speak at next weeks Democratic National Convention in support of Clinton, the partys presumptive presidential nominee.
In 2012, the OSC, which focuses on Hatch Act violations, concluded then-Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius also was in violation when she said at a Human Rights Campaign event that Obama should be reelected.
FoxNews.com's Joseph Weber contributed to this report.
The Honda CBR250RR from the 90s is a cult favorite thanks to its screaming redline of 19,000 rpm. Sold only in Asia and Australia, these motorcycles were a favorite among sport bike enthusiasts living in areas with engine-displacement restricted licensing systems.
Now, more than 20 years after Honda ceased production of the last model, the CBR250RR is coming back later this year.
First teased at the Tokyo Motor Show last fall as the " Light Weight Super Sports" concept bike, the upcoming 2017 CBR250RR partially breaks cover in a very brief video teaser showing off twin-piston ABS brakes on a petal disc rotor, upside-down forks, clip-on bars, a fairly large exhaust, and aggressive, angular body styling.
The 2017 CBR250RR certainly looks the part, but those expecting the stratospheric redlines from the previous model may be disappointed. The new model is expected to rev to 14,000 rpm, which is still very sporty for a parallel twin motor -- but potentially yet another disappointment for those hoping for an inline four cylinder like the old one.
Related: GoPro LiveVR shows 360-degree view of motorcycle race from rider's POV
Comparisons to the decades-old bike aside, the upcoming CBR250RR has a lot going for it against Honda's recent small-displacement sport bikes. The CBR250R debuted in 2011 with a single cylinder engine and was given a 50cc displacement bump to become the CBR300R in 2014. They were dependable and easy to ride, but lacked in the thrills department.
Honda hasn't released engine output numbers yet, but the four-cylinder CBR250RR of old made 45 hp and the more recent single-cylinder CBR250R was rated at 27 hp, so expect something in-between those figures.
Artist Dennis Cooper made a horrifying discovery June 27: His 14-year-old blogthe sole home of his experimental writing, research, photographs, and morewas gone, Art Forum reports.
According to Fusion, Cooper's blog was hosted by Google-owned Blogger, and those headed to denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com are greeted with the message, "Sorry, the blog at denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com has been removed. This address is not available for new blogs." It's not all he lost: Google also deactivated his Gmail account, which held his contacts and gig offers, the Guardian reports.
The only explanation Google gave Cooper, who considers his blog a "serious work of mine," was a stock message that he was in "violation of the terms of service agreement." Cooper on Saturday wrote on Facebook that despite numerous efforts to communicate with Google, it "remains completely silent, not a comment, response, explanation, nothing." Google has apparently made one comment, to Fusion, saying only it is "aware of this matter." The incident is raising concerns among the art community about the power Google and other corporations now have to control artistic voices.
"I think this is definitely censorship. The problem is nobody knows what the specific issue is and certainly Dennis has posted images that one might find troubling, Stuart Comer, curator at MoMA, tells the Guardian, which notes Cooper's blog featured an adult content warning. All Cooper knows is that other artists need to learn from him and "back everything up," something he did not do, meaning he has lost, among other things, a gif novel he's been writing for seven months. A Change.org petition is asking Google to restore the blog.
This article originally appeared on Newser: Man Loses 14 Years of Work When Google Deletes His Blog
Futuristic transportation startup Hyperloop One has filed a $250 million countersuit against four former employees who alleged mismanagement, nepotism and threatening behavior at the high-tech firm.
A lawsuit filed earlier this month against Hyperloop One, its co-founder and Executive Chairman Shervin Pishevar, and three other company leaders claims that the technological promise of the system is being strangled by the mismanagement and greed of the venture capitalists who control the company. Former Hyperloop One CTO Brogan BamBrogan, who also co-founded the startup, is lead plaintiff in the suit for unspecified damages.
The countersuit by Hyperloop One, Shervin Pishevar, and the three company leaders is the latest twist in a high-profile row that has shone a spotlight on the power struggles that have rocked Hyperloop One. The startup plans to develop a new high-speed transportation system using electric propulsion, which was recently tested in the desert near Las Vegas.
The companys countersuit against BamBrogan, Knut Sauer, David Pendergast and William Mulholland describes their lawsuit as a sham complaint. Court documents filed Tuesday describe the former employees as the Gang of Four and allege that they were planning to take over the company through a coordinated coup.
Todays lawsuit demonstrates that these four defendants staged a failed coup to try to take over Hyperloop One and, failing that, conspired to steal our intellectual property and start their own company, said Orin Snyder, a partner at law firm Gibson Dunn, who is representing Hyperloop One, in a statement emailed to FoxNews.com. They engaged in gross misconduct in pursuit of their illegal plan.
The suit against Hyperloop One alleges that one defendant, Afshin Pishevar, the companys then chief legal officer, and brother of Shervin Pishevar, placed a hangmans noose on BamBrogans office chair following a dispute over a business trip to Russia.
A purported surveillance camera image in the suit allegedly shows Afshin Pishevar approaching BamBrogans desk with a noose coiled in his hand.
In its countersuit, Los Angeles-based Hyperloop One claims that the incident has been misrepresented. The Sham Complaint attempts to dramatize a workplace incident a rope tied with a lasso knot, not a hangmans knot, left on the desk where BamBrogans [sic] kept his trademark cowboy hat into a story about a threatening hangmans noose' that is tabloid fodder and fiction.
However, the countersuit acknowledges that leaving the rope was ill-considered and in poor taste, noting that Afshin Pishevar was terminated for the stunt.
Justin T. Berger, attorney for BamBrogan, Sauer, Pendergast and Mulholland, fired back at Hyperloop One Tuesday. Hyperloop Ones cross complaint goes beyond revisionist history -- it's pure fiction, and that will be shown by the evidence, he said, in a statement emailed to FoxNews.com. Knowing their improper actions made them culpable, Defendants fabricated a story, put part of it out in a so-called statement and then expanded it in their court papers.
Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogers
The Chinese media said Vietnam "respects China's position" on the Hague's ruling, which Vietnamese media deemed "incorrect".
Vietnam dismissed as "untruthful" reports carried in Chinese state media that said its prime minister respected China's stance on an arbitration ruling over the South China Sea (Vietnam's East Sea), the latest sign of regional discord over the landmark verdict.
China has refused to recognize last week's ruling by an arbitration court in The Hague, which invalidated its vast claims in the South China Sea. China has said its position has support from numerous countries and has responded with fury to western calls for it to abide by the decision.
Vietnam Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc met Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on the sidelines of a summit of Asian and European leaders in Ulanbaatar last week.
The Vietnamese government's news website said on Monday articles by several Chinese outlets, which quoted Phuc as telling Li that Vietnam respected China's stance and was willing to promote bilateral talks, were incorrect.
The reports backed up a statement by China's Foreign Ministry on Thursday, which also quoted Phuc saying Vietnam "respect's China's position" on the arbitration.
The Vietnamese report reeled off a list of points it said Phuc did raise in the meeting. It did not clarify what Vietnam's position on the verdict was.
Vietnam has been circumspect on the ruling, saying only that it welcomed the court delivering a verdict. Analysts say the victory for the Philippines is a favorable outcome for Vietnam, which has its own maritime problems with its giant neighbor China, but limits the extent of its criticism.
Related news:
> Vietnam calls on China not to complicate maritime issues
> Vietnam denounces China sending aircraft to Spratly Islands
> Hague tribunal overwhelmingly rejects Beijing's South China Sea claims
The U.S. Army is looking to harness genetically modified Dragon Silk fibers for bullet proof vests.
Michigan-based Kraig Biocraft Laboratories has genetically modified silkworms using the DNA from spiders that makes silk-related proteins.
Although spiders can weave a stronger thread, their cannibalistic tendencies make it difficult to creat a 'one-stop shop' for spider silk, according to Live Science.
Kraig Biocraft Laboratories implanted spider DNA into the silkworms, resulting in 'super silkworms' with the ability to weave a stronger and more flexible silk thread than they traditionally weave.
According to Kraig Biocraft, a silkworms lifecycle mirrors that of a caterpillars. When the worm is around 30 to 35 days old, they spin cocoons that are then collected and made into silk.
Dragon Silk was first described in an article in the Journal Proceedings of the National Academy of sciences in 2011. The GMO silk is said to be 1,000 times more cost effective than its competitors, according to Live Science.
On July 12, Kraig Biocraft announced on its website that it has been awarded a contract of up to $1 million with the US Army to test the product. This will allow for the product to be put through tests that include ballistic-impact trials.
Dragon Silk scores very highly in tensile strength and elasticity, which makes it one of the toughest fibers known to man and the ideal material for many applications, said Jon Rice, COO of Kraig Biocraft in a statement. Providing material for this ballistic shoot pack initiative is an important next step for Kraig and spider silk. This contract reinforces the many significant potential applications for recombinant spider silk.
Rice added that some silkworm parents have been able to successfully pass along their new spider silk DNA to their offspring.
Call it the fast and the furious and the broken.
Just weeks after the opening of downtown Los Angeles Skyslide a recreational glass slide 1,000 feet above the ground on the outside of the U.S. Bank Tower a Woodmere, NY, woman has sued, calling foul on the ride, which she says caused a broken ankle.
Gayle Yashar, along with hubby Morty, filed a suit last week in Los Angeles Superior Court, taking aim at OUE, the buildings landlord, and Legends, the hospitality group that operates the slide. The couple is seeking unspecified damages to cover medical costs, legal fees and lost earnings. Yashar charges dangerous and defective design of the attraction, which travels from the 70th to 69th floor and allegedly doesnt give riders enough time to slow down at its base.
The suit also charges that a gap between the end of the slide and stacked mats meant to catch riders actually snags thrill-seekers feet.
A YouTube video of Yashars ride posted online last week shows her rapid descent onto the mats before her camera takes a tumble. Viewers can hear her laughing when her ride ends, as well as a clearly audible Ow as she stands up.
The Skyslide comes as part of a $50 million renovation to the upper floors of the 73-story U.S. Bank Tower, the tallest building west of Chicago.
This story originally appeared on NYPost.com.
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Authorities said Monday that police officers were clearly targeted and ambushed in this weekend's shooting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which killed three officers and wounded three others. It's the latest such ambush in the United States, and happened just 10 days after five police officers in Dallas were gunned down.
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July 7: A gunman in Dallas opened fire on police officers working at a protest about recent killings by police of black men in Minnesota and Louisiana. The attacker, Micah Johnson, killed five officers and wounded nine others and two civilians before police killed him with a robot-delivered bomb when negotiations failed. Authorities say Johnson, who was black, told negotiators he wanted to kill as many white police officers as he could. It was the deadliest day for American law enforcement since September 11, 2001.
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Dec 28, 2015: Officer Guarionex Candelario Rivera showed up unannounced at his police station in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and fatally shot three fellow officers. Candelario, a 19-year police veteran, killed Lt. Luz Soto Segarra, Cmdr. Frank Roman Rodriguez and policewoman Rosario Hernandez De Hoyos. Candelario was shot twice but survived.
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May 9, 2015: Two Hattiesburg, Mississippi, police officers, Benjamin Deen and Liquori Tate, were shot to death during a traffic stop. Three suspects were later arrested.
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Dec 20, 2014: Two New York City police officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, were ambushed and shot to death in their vehicle without warning by a man who approached the passenger window of their marked police car. The suspect, 28-year-old Ismaaiyl Brinsley, then fatally shot himself. Brinsley was black; the officers were Asian and Hispanic, police said. The shooting came amid heightened tensions between law enforcement and minority communities.
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June 8, 2014: A man and a woman ambushed two police officers eating lunch at a Las Vegas pizza restaurant, fatally shooting them before fleeing to a nearby Wal-Mart where they killed a third person and then themselves in an apparent suicide pact. Officers Alyn Beck and Igor Soldo died.
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Aug. 28, 2010: Two police officers were ambushed in a tiny Alaskan village of Hoonah before a SWAT team and dozens of other law officers surrounded a house where the gunman took refuge. Officers Tony Wallace and Matt Tokuoka died after the shooting. Hoonah resident John Marvin Jr. was captured and charged in the deaths.
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May 20, 2010: Two West Memphis, Arkansas, police officers doing anti-drug work were shot to death by two men wielding AK-47s along a busy Arkansas interstate. Sgt. Brandon Paudert and Officer Bill Evans died at a nearby hospital. The suspects were later killed in a shootout that injured the local sheriff and a deputy at a crowded Wal-Mart parking lot.
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Nov. 29, 2009: Four police officers were shot and killed in an ambush in a coffee shop in Lakewood, Washington, by ex-convict Maurice Clemmons. Killed were officers Mark Renninger, Ronald Owens, Tina Griswold and Greg Richards. Clemmons was shot and killed by police after a two-day manhunt.
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Dec. 31, 1972, and Jan. 7, 1973: Mark James Essex, a member of the Black Panthers who was discharged from the Navy for going AWOL, kills nine people in New Orleans, including five police officers, in two sniper attacks. Essex is shot more than 200 times by police sharpshooters on Jan. 7. Authorities find the walls of his apartment covered in anti-white graffiti.
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April 6, 1970: Career criminals Bobby Davis and Jack Twinning kill four California state troopers in a four-minute gunbattle in Los Angeles County. Twinning kills himself when authorities surround a house where he is holding a hostage; Davis is soon arrested and, almost three decades later, kills himself at Kern State Prison.
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Oct. 30, 1950: Members of a nationalist party seeking to overthrow the government of Puerto Rico shoot and kill eight police officers in San Juan, including Chief Aurelio Miranda-Rivera. The revolt is put down by the U.S. military, the FBI and the CIA.
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Jan. 2, 1932: Six officers from two Missouri agencies are killed as they surround a house where two suspects wanted in the murder of a Greene County marshal are holed up. The suspects flee to Texas and kill themselves when authorities track them down.
Authorities blame a gang rivalry for a mass shooting at a California house party for teenagers over the weekend that injured 14 people, officials said Monday.
The party at a Bakersfield-area home grew to more than 150 people after it was publicized on social media.
A fight broke out, prompting parents at the home to force three people to leave, Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said. The three later returned, and at least one of them opened fire on the crowd with a semi-automatic handgun.
"This is a brazen attack on a group of people," he said. "When you shoot into a crowd of people, you don't know who you're going to hit, what kind of damage you're going to do."
Youngblood said one person in the crowed fired back.
Two shooting victims were hospitalized in critical condition and are expected to survive. The remaining 12 victims also suffered gunshot wounds, but their injuries were less serious, Youngblood said.
Detectives have determined a gang rivalry prompted the fight, and they are trying to identify the suspects who opened fire, Youngblood said. No one has been arrested, and the sheriff said witnesses have not cooperated with investigators.
Officials are considering whether to cite the parents under a county social host ordinance because alcohol was served, Youngblood said.
Violations carry fines of up to $1,000, the county's website says.
Alicia Wallace said Sunday her two teenage children begged to hold the party.
The fight started at about 1 a.m. Saturday. The three ejected partygoers returned a short time later as the party was being shut down, firing from the street on the crowd in the front of the home.
The victims included a 13-year-old and Wallace's husband, Jessie, who was treated and released from the hospital.
"I'm sorry for what happened to the kids that was here last night," Wallace told KBAK-TV (http://bit.ly/29FvMA5) in Bakersfield. "My heart goes out to every mother, every child."
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Information from: KBAK-TV, http://www.bakersfieldnow.com/
In December 2015, Amazon discontinued its highly popular Product Ads programs, even though the ads had been popular for both the company and its advertisers. Reason? Amazon made its decision based on rival Googles entry into the shopping sphere, with its launch of Google Shopping and Google Product Listing ads.
Related: Amazon Sues Alleged Sellers of Bogus 5-Star Product Reviews
Essentially, Amazon chose to shut down a popular service rather than allow data from its endeavors to fuel Googles success.
The decision was probably a tough one for Amazon, but it was the right one, given the battle lines that have been drawn between the two internet giants. The void left by the removal of Amazon Product Ads, however, needs to be filled, and not every company is as enamored with Google as the search engine giant would hope.
So, how is your company going to fill that void? The following suggested alternatives to Amazon Product Ads may be the opportunity your company is looking for, to reach new consumers via search-based strategies. While we dont talk much about Google Product Listing ads, if you dont share my distaste for that company's Monopoly-like strategies, they too may be worth adding to the list.
Here are those three alternatives to Amazon Product Ads:
1. Facebook Product Ads
Facebook, which remains the worlds most popular social media site, with 1.09 billion active users on the site daily, launched Facebook Product Ads in early 2015. Like sponsored advertisements on the site, Facebooks robust demographic sorts are available to advertisers to better target potential customers.
Companies with a Facebook business page can run dynamic product ads and upload their entire catalog into the system. Rachel Kwan, manager of The Honest Company, reports a 34 percent increase in her organization's click-through rate and a 38 percent reduction in its cost per purchase, thanks to the new dynamic ads. Like other forms of search marketing, advertisers set their own budgets and can tailor their campaigns based on relevancy to user interests.
2. Bing Product Ads
Bing is Microsofts rival search engine to Googles dominant one, and it actively promotes its Bing Product Ads, which reach 117 million searchers monthly. To get started, companies must first claim a domain, then create a Bing store. From there, they can upload their product catalog and create a shopping campaign based on keywords and available demographic data on searchers.
The ad campaigns highlight product ads on searchers SERPs, making them stand out among the organic search ads, and directing clicks and traffic to online stores. One caution: Only U.S.-based businesses may use Bing product ads. When you verify your online domain, youll need to verify that you are a U.S.-based business.
Related: 9 Ways Small Businesses Can Be Big on Google
3. Amazon Marketplace Ads
Just because Amazon took away one form of advertising doesnt mean the channel isnt offering other alternatives. Amazon Marketplace Ads are worth investigating if you had good success on Amazon before it discontinued Amazon Product Ads.
Currently, the Marketplace reaches 285 million paid customer accounts. Its power lies in the fact that ads are displayed to customers exactly at the point of decision-making when theyre considering a product. To list products on Amazon, start by opening a seller account and uploading your catalog. Begin on the Selling on Amazon page to get started.
Comparison shopping sites
Comparison-shopping sites such as Nextag are another possible alternative to product ads. Nextag reaches 26 million viewers per month, and the company claims theres only a 20 percent overlap between its audience and other price-comparison search engines.
That said, Nextag may reach a different audience more concerned with price than exclusivity or quality. If your business uses price as an important selling feature, then Nextag may be a better option than search engines like Bing, which give you some room to add value through web page copy about your products.
The importance of keywords to product ads
As with most forms of cost-per-click or cost-per-acquisition ads, finding and testing keywords is important. Invest time and energy into your product keyword research. Test available keywords until you find the right combination of long- and short-tail keywords that generates the best results for your product listings.
The bottom line: targeted, extensive product reach
The goal of all online retailers is to reach the greatest number of potential customers while spending the least on advertising.
Among all of the platforms mentioned, Facebook and Bing offer the best targeting features, with Facebook far exceeding the potential number of viewers for your ads. Many advertisers find that Facebooks targeting options exceed even Googles ability to locate the exact customer demographic you wish to advertise to, a notion thats probably made Googles team sweat a bit.
Testing not just your keyword strategy but various platforms like Facebook, Bing, Amazon Marketplace and others provides you with the data you need to make fact-based decisions on future campaigns. Most of the companies included here require at least a $100 investment, but for most retailers, thats very affordable.
Related: Of the 4 Popular Pay-Per-Click Platforms, Which is Best for You?
Set up a few tests, compare the results and find your new best advertising platform. Amazon Product Ads may be gone, but the alternatives are still appealing.
Virginia police said they found a baby Saturday unhurt in the backseat of a car where the infant's parents died in an apparent murder-suicide.
The Accomack County Sheriff's Office reported in a news release that deputies found 20-year-old Elizabeth Madison Ann Jensen of Sanford and 27-year-old Jonan Fabricio Gonzales-Funes of Bloxom both dead from apparent gunshot wounds inside a vehicle on Saturday morning.
Authorities said Gonzales-Funes was a correctional officer who worked for the sheriff's office since September 2015. He reportedly had served as a Marine.
Neighbors tell me this is where the murder-suicide couple was was found. https://t.co/IQyXvIngKc @WTKR3 pic.twitter.com/1u39k7gxNc Merris Badcock (@MerrisBadcock) July 18, 2016
It was unclear how long the baby was left inside the car. Friends of the couple told WTKR that the baby had a lot of mosquito bites but otherwise was doing fine.
The infant was placed in the care of family members. Investigators believe Gonzales-Funes killed Jensen before turning the gun on himself.
A friend of the woman told WAVY that Jensen enjoyed horseback riding. She always had a smile on her face, always laughing and having a good time, Alyssa Behr said.
Both bodies were taken to the medical examiner's office for autopsies.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
At least 13 people were arrested after protesters holding Black Lives Matter signs blocked all southbound lanes of Interstate 95 in downtown Richmond, Virginia Monday, local media reported.
Photos and videos from the scene showed the protesters standing in the interstate around 6 p.m. Monday. They also draped a Black Lives Matter sign on an overpass.
"It does not appear that the majority of those individuals are from the Richmond metro area," Deputy Steve Drew told WAFB. He said police arrested the protesters after they refused to budge.
Many of the protesters were white. Organizers told the news station the purpose of demonstration was to show white people "putting their lives on the line for black people."
Media outlets reported that traffic was backed up for several miles. The police were able to get the lane back open by 6:20 p.m.
"We respect the right of individuals to protest, however, we draw the line when the activities of life become handicapped. When you block an intersection, you dont know if people are going to the hospital, or emergency vehicles need to get from place to place. So when that happens, it becomes a problem," Richmond Mayor Dwight Jones responded.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A federal judge has ordered a Connecticut father and son to testify under oath at depositions and hand over documents about drones shown in YouTube videos firing a gun and deploying a flame thrower in their backyard.
Judge Jeffrey Meyer in New Haven ruled Monday in the case of 19-year-old Austin Haughwout of Clinton and his father, Bret Haughwout, who both have refused to comply with Federal Aviation Administration subpoenas seeking their testimony and documents. The judge ordered them to comply within 30 days.
"Because I conclude that the FAA has a legitimate purpose for its subpoenas and that the subpoenas are otherwise appropriate in scope, I will grant the petition," Meyer ruled.
Austin Haughwout uploaded the videos to his YouTube channel last year. One video, viewed nearly 3.8 million times, shows a flying drone equipped with a handgun firing rounds. Another video, viewed nearly 600,000 times, shows a flying drone with a flamethrower lighting up a spit-roasting Thanksgiving turkey.
Federal prosecutors, on behalf of the FAA, argued the subpoenas are part of a legitimate investigation into potential violations of FAA regulations banning people from operating "aircraft" in a reckless manner.
The Haughwouts' lawyer, Mario Cerame, told the judge that the subpoenas violate their constitutional right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures and questioned the agency's authority to regulate recreational drones.
It wasn't clear whether the Haughwouts plan to appeal Meyer's order. Cerame didn't immediately return messages Tuesday.
Cerame previously argued the FAA was wrong to rely on aircraft regulations to try to subpoena his clients about their recreational use of drones. He believes the case potentially has national significance because it would set a precedent on how much authority the FAA has over recreational drone use.
The FAA has no formal regulations for the recreational use of drones but says there are some requirements, including having to register any unmanned aircraft weighing more than 0.55 pounds and notifying airport operators before flying drones within 5 miles of airports. The agency proposed its first set of regulations for commercial drone use in June.
Meyer said in his decision that Congress has defined the term "aircraft" in "stunningly broad terms," but there is no dispute the weaponized drones in the videos raise questions about possible danger to life or property.
Fox News' Lissa Kaplan and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Police on Tuesday were investigating what may have led to the firebombing of an unoccupied squad car early Sunday morning in front of a Florida mosque, after a note was found nearby voicing support for Black Lives Matter.
The Daytona Beach News-Journal reported that the vehicle was completely destroyed. Police Chief Mike Chitwood told the paper that a note was found at the scene that read, Black Lives Matter A. Sterling P. Castile (expletive) the police.
The car was being used as a "ghost car" to deter crime in the area near the Islamic Center of Daytona Beach.
Authorities believe a Molotov cocktail was used in the attack. Fire crews responded and put the fire out. No one was hurt.
Police are looking over surveillance video and have not yet concluded that the firebombing was a result of anti-police protesters.
I really do believe in my heart of hearts that we have a really great rapport with our community overall. They know that if theres a problem, they can come and talk to us, Chitwood said.
The burning comes amid rising tension nationwide following the police shootings that killed Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in suburban St. Paul, Minnesota. Also Sunday, a gunman shot six law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge, killing three of them.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Back when all of us were young, children used to gaze at the night sky and dream of being the first to walk on the moon. Today, kids stare at the stars and likely think about Mars in much the same way.
Related: Why This Entrepreneur Dreams of Living on Mars
That would be especially appropriate this week because tomorrow, July 20, is the 40th anniversary of the Viking 1's landing on Mars -- when it became the first spacecraft to successfully accomplish that feat.
Of course, we're pursuing much more today, when it comes to Mars. Its likely that the astronaut who will someday take that initial one small step for man, and one giant leap for mankind on the Red Planet is sitting in a high school classroom in the United States right now, probably taking a summer science enrichment course.
David Gingerich, a senior staff engineer at Lockheed Martin, certainly hopes so. Recently, I spoke with him about the possibility of a crewed flight to Mars, and how we, as a nation, should teach our kids and retool our public education system to help make such a mission happen.
Gingerich, who believes a crewed mission may be possible by 2028, has been responsible for the operation and maintenance of flight software on five NASA space explorations, including two to Mars. As such, he has some strongly held views about the role public schoolteachers -- and entrepreneurs -- have to play in that effort. We need teachers who can inspire, get students engaged and make them capable, Gingerich says. Lets face it. If you graduate from high school now, and you dont have a math and science background, you are going to have a hard time making it as an engineer.
One way to inspire students, Gingerich says, is through business initiatives that provide touch points for students. Think of museums, practical, real-world experiences for teachers and classrooms with up-to-date technology as touch points, he says. The things we remember are the goofy experiments physics teacher did, he notes. Those are the things that still get kids excited to learn.
Related: Elon Musk Wants to Colonize Mars in Order to Fend Off Human Extinction
A touch point today, Gingerich explains, could involve GPS technology, which was born in the Space Age but is now found on every cell phone (as the Pokemon Go craze makes clear!). Drones are another source of student engagement. [Just] one touch point doesnt count, either, the engineer continues It really takes at least two or three, and starting in elementary school, for any of this to have an impact and influence a students future ambitions.
Creating connections among technology innovators, then -- entrepreneurs and startup engineers as well as larger technology players -- can provide much needed real-world links and inspiration for the next generation and their teachers, Gingerich says.
The engineer adds that more needs to be done beyond simply promoting courses in STEM -- science, technology, engineering and math -- to students and parents. For example, teachers need to be more exposed to innovative ideas outside the classroom that apply to learning.
A challenge will always be how to keep teachers excited when they have so many other things to do, no time and poor equipment, he points out. We have to help solve that issue. Business can be the bridge for educators so they can see firsthand what will be expected of their students when they leave school.
Gingerich cited a teacher professional development program Lockheed Martin is involved with in California, in which a coalition of businesses fund internships for educators, at various companies, and the teachers take their experiences back to the classroom. One teacher we hosted created a science experiment for his class and has now been invited to the White House, Gingerich says. We need to connect more teachers with these kinds of opportunities.
Indeed, parents and schools and the entrepreneurs who serve them need to encourage the following behaviors to help kids succeed in the future of space exploration, and in innovation generally:
Intellectual Curiosity. The students who become astronauts and space engineers are people who are never satisfied with what they already know. They are continuing to learn. This trait will be mandatory in the future, because technology is evolving so fast that knowing only one skill or tool quickly renders the learner as obsolete.
Exploration. Questions are not always binary -- as in "solving for x," or choosing between right and wrong. Sometimes, there is more to explore than meets the eye. Having the ability to keep searching and never being satisfied helps an individual become invaluable to his or her team.
Failing Better. Failing better means accepting, even embracing, and learning from failure. When innovating or risk-taking, scientific explorers always experience failure. Thats part of the process, the scientific method, and it shouldnt kill curiosity or paralyze anyone from acting again. Very few minds get something right the first time. And even then it might be luck.
Intuition. We often call this the sixth sense -- the spidy sense. You know what that means: The numbers are right, but theres still something that makes researchers scratch their heads? So, when this happens, do those researchers say: "Okay, lets run with it?" Or, do they stop and double-check, go back through the process and their network to make sure everything is correct?
Of course, pride, passion and skills, such as creativity, communication and even a proper amount of paranoia, are vital. Inquiry-based learning -- or asking better questions -- is a notion many students need to master, too. Remember hypotheses, theses and theorems from your own geometry class?
Its okay for the teacher not to know all the answers, Gingerich says. We should be teaching inquisitiveness, thinking outside the box and about all the things that dont have answers.
Related: Microsoft and NASA Team Up to Take You on a Tour of Mars
After all, thats what were doing in the space program a lot of the time, he says. Were solving problems that dont have answers.
The affected loudspeakers have already been unplugged. Photo by VnExpress/Nguyen Dong
Chinese suspected of buying up land around a Vietnamese military airport near Da Nang.
Unidentified Chinese waves have been disrupting an FM transmission radio station in Vietnams coastal city of Da Nang since May 21 this year, Pham Thanh Liem, head of Da Nangs Ngu Hanh Son District Radio Station, told VnExpress on Monday.
The radio station in Khue My Ward [Ngu Hanh Son] has unexpectedly broadcast in Chinese for about 5-7 seconds on a number of occasions. We do not understand Chinese so we do not know the content of the broadcasts, Liem said.
During the Vietnam War, the loudspeakers aired crucial warnings about air raids. Today, they still exist to provide local people with news, songs and information at dawn and at dusk.
Several locals in Ngu Hanh Son also said on their Facebook pages that they have heard Chinese from the loudspeakers many times.
According to Liem, there are five radios in the district. One is operated by the district government and the other four by ward authorities. Each of them has been granted their own frequency by the Authority of Radio Frequency Management in Zone 3.
The frequency in Khue My is 97.5 MHZ with 24 wireless FM transmission stations. These stations need electricity to operate.
The Chinese radio waves along the coast are very strong with many frequencies. They probably transmit them from far out at sea but only the Authority of Radio Frequency Management will know where they are coming from, Liem said. He denied rumors that radio stations have been installed in coastal resorts managed by Chinese people.
The Authority of Radio Frenquency Management is under the management of Vietnams Ministry of Information and Communications.
Ngu Hanh Son District Radio Station has already briefed the Authority of Radio Frequency Management, but only reported the matter to the local government on Monday morning, according to Liem.
The Ngu Hanh Son District Radio Station unplugged its FM transmission station on top of a local house near Nuoc Man Military Airport on Sunday. The district plans to send the equipment to Hanoi to upgrade its capacity and coding system, but that will take nearly a month, Liem added.
Da Nang authorities previously said they will look into claims that Chinese nationals are purchasing multiple land lots very close to Nuoc Man Military Airport in Ngu Hanh Son.
Local people have expressed concerns that hotels and other high buildings near Nuoc Man, which are managed by Chinese people, will seriously affect operations at the military airport. The airport oversees the East Sea, internationally known as South China Sea.
Related news:
> Chinese tourists with bad behavior will be deported: Vietnamese minister
A Kansas City, Kan. police officer was shot and killed Tuesday afternoon while responding to a reported drive-by shooting.
Officials said Capt. Robert David Melton, 46, was pronounced dead at University of Kansas Hospital at 2:55 p.m. local time.
Later Tuesday, authorities said the suspected shooter was caught about a block away from where Melton was shot. The suspect was being questioned along with a second person suspected in the initial drive-by. A third person who had been taken into custody was determined not to have been involved and was released, police said.
"There's a lot of pain and brokenness in our community and our nation right now, and we just want to ask everyone to be prayerful and thoughtful right now," Mayor Mark Holland of the Unified Government of Wyandotte County said.
Tuesday marked the second time this year that a Kansas City, Kan., police officer had been shot in the line of duty. Detective Brad Lancaster, 39, was shot and killed near Kansas Speedway during a violent crime spree on May 9. Melton had been part of the police honor guard at Lancaster's funeral.
Chief Terry Zeigler tweeted news of the shooting just after 2 p.m.
Ida Ford, 87, was watching television in her two-story brick home when gunfire erupted just outside. Ford said she thought someone was knocking on her air conditioner until her son rushed downstairs and told her the three loud noises she had heard were gunshots. Ford said she looked through her window and saw the officer sprawled and unresponsive on the asphalt road in front of her home. She watched for a few minutes as paramedics worked on the officer.
"I'm just so sorry for his family," she said.
The shooting happened after police responded to a report around 1:30 p.m. from a person who said several people in a car were firing shots. The suspect vehicle took off as police arrived, but it crashed into a fence and the occupants bailed out at 1:36 p.m., police spokesman Tom Tomasic said. Two people were taken into custody within three minutes of the wreck, he said.
About a half-hour after the initial call, Melton saw someone who matched the description of the third suspect about 20 blocks from the original scene and pulled up to them, police spokesman Tom Tomasic said. Before he could get out of his car, he was shot multiple times.
Tomasic told reporters it was too early to determine whether the shooting was linked to other attacks on police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge.
"As far as we know this started out as a crime that we were investigating, so to just say that he was shot for no reason, we don't know that yet. We do believe that he was investigating a crime so he was out here doing his service."
Tomasic went on to describe Melton as a "good friend, good person. [I] knew him well, worked with him everyday."
Melton was a 17-year veteran of the Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department. According to his LinkedIn profile, he had also served in the Kansas Army National Guard and was deployed to Afghanistan from September 2010 to March 2012
Outside the hospital where Melton died, local Baptist preacher Jimmie Banks -- a friend of the city's mayor -- sat dejected on a bench, head lowered, after attending the news conference announcing the officer's passing. He said it was painful to sit in that room and see the grief-stricken faces.
"The contributions that peace officers make to protect and serve -- they deserve better," said Banks. "When they leave home, the family expects them to return. It's shameful this has happened."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Click for more from Fox4KC.com.
Authorities in Michigan Tuesday are investigating the death of a single mom who was run over in front of her home, and questioned her boyfriend about the incident.
The family of Julie Williamson, 27, decided to take the mother of two off life support after learning that she would never recover her brain function after a series of strokes.
Williamson had two children: a 9-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter.
Her injuries, according to her family, were extensive and severe: every rib in her body was broken, her lungs were collapsed and the only organs salvageable for donation were her kidneys, they reportedly said.
The incident occurred at about 4:30 a.m. on July 10, outside the home in Mount Clemens, northeast of Detroit. Her family reportedly suspects that her boyfriend was involved in the incident and ClickOnDetroit.com reported that he is a person of interest.
Sheriff Anthony Wickersham from the Macomb County Sheriffs Department told FoxNews.com that the investigation is underway and confirmed that the boyfriend was interviewed by authorities. He said, at this point in the investigation, it appears only the boyfriend and Williamson were at the scene at the time.
The boyfriend, who was not identified, has not been arrested.
The person who ran over Williamson stayed at the scene, Wickersham said.
How do you explain to a two-year-old that shell never see her mother again? the woman's mother, Cheryl Simmons, asked. "Everything's a mystery - we have no exact story of what happened."
FoxNews.com's Edmund DeMarche and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Matthew Gerald's bravery and enthusiasm for his new job -- Baton Rouge police officer -- was no surprise to Ryan Cabral, who served with Gerald on a helicopter crew in Iraq.
"Like most other police officers, they go where they're needed," Cabral, an Army veteran and police officer in Temple, Texas, said in a telephone interview Monday night. "They know what the dangers are, but that's how they're made. They're made to serve."
The 41-year-old Gerald was one of three officers killed Sunday in what police called an ambush by a lone gunman, who also died. The shooting traumatized a nation already on edge.
Cabral remembers Gerald as a man of infectious enthusiasm for anything he took on.
So does Gerald's neighbor, Ashley Poe. She recalls a few months ago when Gerald was fresh out of the police academy, proudly washing his new police cruiser in the driveway of his home under a blazing Louisiana sun. She watched as he flicked the blue lights on and off, on and off.
Poe and her husband shared a laugh. The former soldier and Marine looked like an excited kid.
"It's like living out the dream," she said.
That dream ended Sunday.
Others killed were 45-year-old Brad Garafola, an East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff's deputy and a father of four; and 32-year-old Montrell Jackson, a 10-year veteran of the Baton Rouge Police Department with a newborn baby at home.
The three are among 10 law enforcement officers killed over a span of 10 turbulent days around the country by attackers - at a protest march in Dallas, a courthouse in Michigan and now a convenience store in Baton Rouge.
The officers who died Sunday all lived in the area of Denham Springs, a quiet bedroom community across the Amite River from Baton Rouge, which has been in turmoil for two weeks. Tensions rose sharply after the death of Alton Sterling, 37, a black man killed by white Baton Rouge officers after a scuffle at a convenience store. The killing was captured on cellphone video.
As the nation debates race and policing, this community is mourning three of its sons -- all husbands and fathers described by friends as being committed to protecting and serving the public.
"You hear about these things happening across the country to officers just trying to defend us, but this brings it right here, to our home," Livingston Parish President Layton Ricks said. "These are our families. These are good men. They're the only line of defense between good and evil. We say we don't want to let this evil affect how we live our daily lives. But it does."
Gavin Long, a former Marine from Missouri dressed in black and carrying extra ammunition, opened fire on officers about 8:45 a.m. Sunday, police said.
Garafola and Gerald were white. Jackson was black, as was the gunman.
"The world is crazy right now. It is complete chaos," Jackson's sister-in-law Lauren Rose said. "And it all needs to stop, everything. We all need peace."
Three other officers were wounded. One of them, Deputy Nicholas Tullier, remained in critical condition Monday. The gunman was killed at the scene.
Poe watched from the window Sunday morning as a line of police cars pulled up in front of Gerald's house. She woke up her husband, a former city police officer.
"He said, 'What's wrong?' and I said, 'There's units everywhere, and you've told me that's never a good sign,"' she said. They turned on the news.
The gunman shot Gerald and Jackson first.
Gerald was a Marine from 1994 to 1998. He later joined the Army and served as a decorated soldier from 2002 to 2009, including three tours in Iraq. Less than a year ago, he joined the Baton Rouge Police Department.
He had a wife and two daughters, Poe said, and was devoted to them.
Poe said her 14-year-old son was interested in the military, and Gerald was always ready to answer his questions.
Denham Springs, population 10,000, is the sort of town where everyone is connected, said Mayor Gerard Landry. There's a palpable sense of anger and despair.
"There's no way to describe what it does to a small city like this," Marilyn Wallace said Monday, standing behind the counter of the store she and her husband, Randy, own on a two-block long stretch of antique shops in the historic district of Denham Springs.
The city is in Livingston Parish, about 13 miles from Baton Rouge, with a history of racial tension. But that history -- and the racial divide in nearby Baton Rouge -- seem remote here.
Jackson's father-in-law, Lonnie Jordan, called him a "gentle giant" -- tall and stout and formidable looking, but with a peaceful disposition.
Jordan said his son-in-law had been working long hours since Sterling was killed.
Jackson posted on Facebook that he was physically and emotionally tired. He wrote that while in uniform he gets nasty looks and out of uniform some consider him a threat.
"I swear to God I love this city," he wrote, "but I wonder if this city loves me."
The police chief described at a news conference how he had gone to the district where Jackson worked just days earlier in an attempt to boost the spirits of the officers. Instead Jackson ended up giving him the pep talk.
He had been on the force 10 years and risen to the rank of corporal, said Kedrick Pitts, his half brother. He worked hard, sometimes seven days a week.
He was funny and good natured, Pitts said. He collected shoes, 500 pairs, including special Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan lines.
But what he loved most was his wife and 4-month-old son.
"He's going to grow up without a father," sister-in-law Rose said. "But we'll be there to give him memories and let him know how his dad was a great man, and how he died with honor ... Hopefully one day, he'll be like his dad."
At the convenience store Sunday, Garafola tried to intervene and help the fallen officers.
Surveillance video showed Garafola firing at the gunman from behind a dumpster as bullets hit the concrete around him, East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff Sid Gautreaux said.
"My deputy went down fighting. He returned fire to the very end," the sheriff said.
Garafola's friends described him as a man committed to public service and devoted to his family.
He had a wife and four children: a 21-year-old son, a 15-year-old daughter, a 12-year-old son and a 7-year-old daughter.
Sgt. Gerald Parker, a close friend, described him as a "jack of all trades" who enjoyed helping people in his neighborhood, like mending their fences or mowing their lawns. He worked hard, often picking up extra hours.
"He was a man of strong character," Parker said. "All these officers are heroes. Some people would run. But these gentlemen leave their families knowing something can happen."
The U.S. Air Force dropped more bombs on the Islamic State terror group in June than any time in the past seven months.
In all, the U.S. released more than 3,000 weapons on ISIS in Iraq and Syria last month, according to Air Force Central Command. It's the third-highest monthly total since the air war began nearly two years ago.
In June, U.S. airstrikes helped Iraqi forces liberate Fallujah from the terror network. A convoy of 500 vehicles carrying ISIS fighters was destroyed trying to escape the city.
Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said Defense Secretary Ash Carter wanted to pick up the pace.
Carter this week was set to host a meeting at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland convening international defense ministers whose countries were fighting ISIS.
In Iraq, firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr called on his Iranian-backed forces to attack U.S. troops. "Obviously, it's a concern if anyone's threatening U.S. forces, but it's something we prepare for," Cook responded.
Al-Sadr's forces killed hundreds of American troops during the Iraq war.
Fox News' Lucas Tomlinson contributed to this report.
Forget cats in trees, these firefighters save dogs stuck under fences.
Firefighters in Sacramento last week managed to rescue a German shepherd who got stuck at the base of a metal fence.
The video was posted to the West Sacramento Fire Departments Facebook page and went viral. The firefighters reported that the dog did not suffer any serious injuries and is back with its owners.
Ohio police on Tuesday were investigating a shooting at an impromptu anti-violence rally that killed a 19-year-old man and wounded a 12-year-old boy.
Person or persons who murdered 19yo Phillip Banks & shot 12yo boy in the back at Stop the Violence rally NOT caught pic.twitter.com/cjaDobCJmT Homa Bash (@HomaBash) July 18, 2016
As many as 300 people filled a lakeside park Sunday night in Euclid, outside Cleveland, for the "Stop the Violence Beach Party" when the shots rang out.
The Cuyahoga County medical examiner said Phillip Banks was shot in the head and died later in a nearby hospital.
Police did not identify the 12-year-old boy. They said he was shot in the back. Paramedics rushed him to the hospital.
Residents had organized the beach party on the shore of Lake Erie.
Police said they were trying to determine who exactly was the target of the shooting.
They were also investigating whether another shooting in the area later in the evening was related. Police said somebody shot an 18-year-old in the shoulder, but the man survived.
In March, a stray bullet hit a 13-year-old Chicago boy who had appeared in an anti-violence video campaign. The teen, Zarriel Trotter, survived.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
In the past, nodding off at your desk was considered not only embarrassing but also exceedingly bad form. Not to mention probable cause for reprimand, if not firing. But in todays highly stressed, sleep-deprived, caffeine-dependent culture, the ability to take a guilt-free nap is more often considered a welcome, healthful workplace amenity. Even better, it can have significant positive effects on a companys bottom line.
A rested employee is a productive employee. It makes sense for employers to allow todays highly mobile worker to sneak in rest any time and any way they can -- even if it means stealing a few minutes for snoozing on company time.
There are many reasons why smart employers are considering pro-napping policies for their workplaces. Here are a few:
They arent getting it at home.
According to National Sleep Foundation research, nearly half of all Americans today say that insufficient sleep at night affects their daily activities. Many of us aren't getting the recommended seven to nine hours of rest most adults need to be happy, healthy and productive. A quick daytime nap (20 to 30 minutes should do the trick) can satisfactorily augment nighttime sleep -- and therefore improve employee productivity.
Related: Rest Well, Live Well: 10 Sleep Hacks to Help You Live Your Best Life
It's backed by science.
A huge quantity of scientific evidence supports napping as a useful tool to heighten employee performance. Study after study overwhelmingly suggests that a quick cat nap (even 10 minutes helps) can boost brain activity, enhance concentration, support creativity and even reduce the risk of disease.
Related: Why You Should Let Your Employees Nap at Work
It can bolster worker effectiveness.
Nap breaks can enhance productivity and efficiency in five ways.
First, naps boost alertness. Research conducted at the Department of Veterans Affairs Hospital in Northport, N.Y., concluded that a short sleep session can improve cognitive functioning and alertness, resulting in a 30 percent decline in attention failures from the baseline measure. This is especially valuable in environments focused on safety. There, workers can expect a 30 percent boost -- a key to maintaining safe procedures -- after a nap.
Second, naps increase productivity. When employees are tired, they perform at less-than-optimal levels. Harvard researchers estimate that sleep deprivation costs the U.S. roughly $63.2 billion in lost productivity each year. A quick nap can be restorative enough to keep an employee working at desired productivity levels for longer periods of time.
Naps also enhance well-being. A happy employee is a more productive employee, and adequate rest can improve an employees happiness. A study from Hiroshima University's Department of Behavioral Sciences shows that naps improve an employees self confidence when performing tasks. Naps also can mitigate the type of stress fatigue that often occurs in and makes it difficult to cope with fast-paced, high-volume environments. Giving people a chance to recharge helps them deal with work overload and the stress that comes with it.
Napping heightens learning, too. Even a very short period of sleep is sufficient to enhance memory processing, according to a study by the University of Dusseldorf. This can not only benefit employees with their current tasks but also improve effectiveness and efficiency when it comes to learning new products, training on new systems and incorporating new processes.
Finally, employees who nap make customers happier. When customers see smiling faces around the office, everybody benefits. This is especially true for employees who have direct contact with customers and clients. Happiness and a sense of well-being are contagious. When napping at work fosters these feelings, the net-net looks something like this: Happy employees nurture happy clients, and happy clients make your bottom line happy, too.
If none of these reasons can convince you to trial a nap zone or policy for your organization, consider this: Today's pro-nap companies aren't solely the small, quirky startups. Some of the world's biggest, most successful companies now encourage naps at work. These include Google, The Huffington Post, Salesforce.com, Uber, Zappos, Capital One Labs, Ben & Jerrys and PwC.
Related: How the Sleep Industry Has 'Awakened'
So next time you join that mid-afternoon meeting and colleagues lament they could fall asleep, perhaps you should tell them to go right ahead. It could start a new era of happiness and productivity among workers at all levels of your organization. And it could put you ahead of the competition thats been sleeping on the job when it comes to being in-the-know about the solid benefits of napping.
A new California homeowner eager to move in made a gruesome discovery upon opening their bedroom door.
The Los Angeles Times reported Monday that the unidentified homeowner found the body of 84-year-old Salvatore Orefice in the Simi Valley house on a bed. The buyer had paid $430,000 for the house last month.
Simi Valley police Cmdr. Roy Jones told the LA Times that Mary Karacas, 75, was arrested on suspicion of murder in the elderly mans death.
Police said the new homeowner called them to tell them about the discovery of the body. Authorities then called Karacas and told her to meet at the house, Jones said.
Karacas told detectives that she and Orefice got into an altercation and at some point Karacas said she shot the man. Karacas was subsequently placed in handcuffs.
She also told police that she had a relationship with Orefice, according to KTLA.
Jones said that Orefice and Karacas had 30 days to vacate the home after they sold it. It was unclear how long the body had been in the home.
Click for more from the Los Angeles Times.
Chinese students attending a Christian house church in the central Guizhou province are being threatened by government authorities who are warning them that if they don't stop going to the church, they will be barred from going to college.
"This notice was sent to all of the schools in Huaqiu," explained Mou, the person that human-rights advocacy group China Aid said was in charge of Huaqiu Church. "They (public security) intend to cleanse us and ask us to join the Three-Self Church."
The house church members have also reportedly been pressured into signing a document vowing that they will not take minors into the church. Additionally, parents have been told that they will be sued if they bring their children to church, while the children themselves will not be allowed to take the college entrance exam or be admitted into the army.
House churches in China face regular crackdowns from the Communist Party, which fears the rise of Christianity in the world's most populous nation, with followers of Christ outnumbering members of the Party.
Even state-run churches have faced religious freedom challenges in the past couple of years, with an ongoing-campaign continuing to tear down church buildings and church rooftop-crosses over alleged building code violations in several Chinese provinces. Protests from Christian pastors and church members have led to hundreds of arrests.
Click Here to Read the Full Story at ChristianPost.com
American children are taught that the U.S. government has three separate but equal branches. However, this curriculum needs to be updated to reflect todays realities.
Now, executive branch agencies are effectively given legislative power. And, due to what is known as Chevron deference, they can operate outside of proper judicial scrutiny. Todays administrative state is truly an unaccountable fourth branch of government, with control over how regulations are issued, enforced, and litigated.
The Separation of Powers Restoration Act, sponsored by Representative John Ratcliffe (R-TX) and 113 cosponsors, would empower courts to hold executive agencies fully accountable, consistent with the Constitution. The bill was introduced in the House on March 16 and the Senate version, introduced on March 17, is sponsored by Finance Committee chairman Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and 12 cosponsors.
In what follows, Representative Ratcliffe and House Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) explain why the judicial branch has given far too much deference to executive agencies, and how this abdication can be reversed.
Jared Meyer: Ill start with an easy question that is right to the point. Why is the growth in executive agencies powers a problem?
Chairman Goodlatte: Our Framers created a system of government with co-equal branches, in which each would check the power of another. Today, we have a system that is imbalanced, with the executive branch grabbing powers away from the judiciary and legislative branches. James Madison warned of the consequences of one branch grabbing power from the others in Federalist No. 47, and today his fears are coming to fruition. When you have one branch grabbing power away from the others, it creates an imbalance that only opens the door for abuse.
Jared Meyer: All of the Separation of Powers Restoration Acts sponsors in both the House and the Senate are Republicans. Why do you think this issue is split along party lines?
Rep. Ratcliffe: In the years following the Chevron decision, court deference to agencies has proven politically expedient for Republican presidents and Democratic presidents alike. With a Democratic president in office, Democrats in Congress have made it clear that theyre willing to continue allowing the neglect of the boundaries set forth in the Constitution to advance their agenda.
Chairman Goodlatte: But this is not and should not be a partisan issue. It is a balance of power issue among the branches of government. It is difficult for members of the same party as the president to take a stand against executive overreach, but the reforms in SOPRA will benefit the American people by restoring a proper balance of powers and restoring strength to the laws Congress passes.
Jared Meyer: Since this bill requires a de novo (or new) judicial review of agency actions, would it not also affect other forms of deference besides Chevron, such as Auer deference and Skidmore deference?
Rep. Ratcliffe: While Chevron is the more often discussed deference, Auer is similarly egregious. Auer deference expands upon Chevron to require the court to defer to agencies interpretations of their own regulations. The Separation of Powers Restoration Act reverses both of these forms of deference by requiring a de novo standard of review. Overturning Chevron and Auer is vital to reestablishing the proper role of the court as interpreter of the meaning of the law.
Chairman Goodlatte: So-called Skidmore deference is a bit of a misnomer. Many argue with reason that the Skidmore decision didnt authorize judges to defer to agencies. It just stated the common-sense notion that judges should pay attention to factors that give an agencys views power to persuade, if lacking power to control. Agencies still have the opportunityindeed, the responsibilityto offer the courts and the people views with the power to persuade. But under the bill, judges clearly need not and must not find themselves controlled by the agencys interpretation.
Jared Meyer: This is clearly a problem that is increasingly recognized by the Supreme Court. In 2013, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, It would be a bit much to describe the result as the very definition of tyranny, but the danger posed by the growing power of the administrative state cannot be dismissed.
Even though Justice Scalia was once a strong advocate of administrative deference, over his last half decade on the bench he repeatedly called for the Supreme Court to overrule his own unanimous opinion in favor of deference. And Justice Thomas and Justice Alito also support a greater role for the judiciary acting as an impartial judge in cases against executive agencies. So why is it necessary to push a bill through Congress when the conservative wing of the court is on board with your argument?
Chairman Goodlatte: While conservative justices on the Supreme Court are realizing just how much power the federal judiciary has ceded to the bureaucrats, it still takes five justices to overturn Chevron and Auer. It may also take years for cases to come before the Supreme Court that could open the door for full reversals of the Chevron and Auer precedents. Our legislation would address the problem now, and guide the federal judiciary back to its proper place within our system of checks and balances.
Rep. Ratcliffe: Additionally, it is entirely appropriate for Congress to amend the Administrative Procedure Acta law passed by Congress in the first placeto clarify its intent with respect to how regulatory action should be assessed by courts.
Jared Meyer: Congress is already able to overrule actions by executive agencies through the Congressional Review Act of 1996. But this tool was only successfully used once in 2001 to stop an Occupational Safety and Health Administration rule on workplace ergonomics. Even though starting the review process is relatively easy, during the 113th Congress only two Congressional Review Act resolutions were introduced in the House and none were introduced in the Senate. This means the Congressional Review Act was used on less than .03% of the 7,000 or so rules issued over that time. Why has the Congressional Review Act failed to constrain the growth of the regulatory state?
Rep. Ratcliffe: The Congressional Review Act is an important agency corrector, as it allows Congress to push through legislation that tells an agency its not accurately administering the law. But frankly, Congress shouldnt have to come in and use the Congressional Review Act every time a federal agency decides to interpret an ambiguous statute in a way that violates the meaning of the law. The Constitution gave this responsibility to the courts, and thats where the power needs to be redirected. Thats why we need to overturn Chevron.
Chairman Goodlatte: I agree. While the Congressional Review Act is a useful tool to put the regulators on notice, overruling actions by executive agencies still requires the approval of both houses of Congress, as well as a signature by the president. Given that we have seen so few instances in which the president and both houses of Congress were all aligned in opposition to regulations coming out of an administration, you can see why the window for an overrule of executive action has been so small.
Jared Meyer: Congressional action in order to hold executive agencies accountable to the law is clearly necessary. Do you see any other areas in the regulatory process that are ripe for reform?
Chairman Goodlatte: We need to enact the REINS Act, which would reform the Congressional Review Act so that new major regulations cannot go into effect until Congress approves them. Instead of costly regulations simply going on the books unless Congress specifically overrules them, the REINS Act would make sure that regulators follow the intent of the legislative branch.
But just as important is enactment of the Regulatory Accountability Act, my bill to reform the Administrative Procedure Act. The APA is often termed the constitution of administrative law. As currently written, the APA is a general guidepost and provides few strong constraints on agency overreach. The Regulatory Accountability Act contains a strong but practical rewrite of the APAs core provisions on how agencies develop and issue new regulations. Once it becomes law, we will see far fewer attempts by agencies to overreach and much smarter, cost-effective rules when regulation is actually needed. And there are other reforms we need and have proposed or will proposeincluding the institution of a regulatory budget to keep the costs of new regulations down.
Rep. Ratcliffe: While overturning Chevron specifically addresses powers siphoned away from the judicial branch to regulatory agencies, Im also working to address the powers that have been usurped from Congress through the Article I Project, led by Senator Mike Lee (R-UT). One other focus I hope to tackle specifically is Midnight Regulations, which administrations are notorious for ramming through toward the end of their term. For evidence of this, just look at what the Obama administration has pushed through in the last few months.
Jared Meyer: It is clear that executive agencies have no intention of slowing their decades-long power grab. Even more troubling, the judiciary does not show enough interest in forcing them to do so. People of all political persuasions should realize that Congress needs to restore its constitutional authority over the legislative process. If not, it is time for Schoolhouse Rock! to get an update.
This article originally appeared on Forbes.
Jared Meyer is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Follow him on Twitter here.
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A first-of-its-kind German police raid targeted suspects across the country accused of posting anti-Semitic language on their social media accounts, according to reports.
Police confiscated the computer equipment and smartphones of around 60 people in 14 of Germanys 16 states but did not make any arrests. It marked the countrys first-ever mass raid aimed at fighting online hate crime, The Times of Israel reports.
Most of the suspects were members of a neo-Nazi Facebook group that had xenophobic language, the newspaper reports. Some of that language promoted Nazi symbolism, denied the Holocaust or called for its revival.
The targeted social media users also encouraged attacks against refugees and politicians, a practice condemned by Holger Muench, president of the BKA, the countrys federal police agency.
Muench cited radicalization on social networks as the fuel behind many attacks on refugee shelters, which he said increased significantly as refugees flooded from the Middle East and Africa into Europe, according to a BKA news release.
The raid follows a call for harsher action against online hate speech by German Justice Minister Heiko Mass, who recently denounced Facebooks slow removal of racist posts intended to offend migrants.
The social media site pledged last September to reduce instances of racism on its German network by endorsing counter-speech and elevating its monitoring of migrant criticism, according to The Times of Israel.
Last week, an Israeli rights group said it was suing Facebook for $1 billion on behalf of Americans killed in Palestinian attacks. The suit claimed the site provided terrorist groups with a platform to incite violence, FoxNews.com reported.
A fire broke out in Turkey's capital city of Ankara Tuesday with initial reports indicating a large explosion, but Twitter reports later suggesting it was a fire in a large residential building.
The report emerged less than a week after a failed coup in Turkey reportedly left more than 200 people dead. The government arrested dozens of military officials were and fired thousands of workers.
The state-run Anadolu news agency reported those formally arrested included former air force commander Gen. Akin Ozturk, alleged to be the ringleader of the July 15 uprising, and Gen. Adem Hududi, commander of Turkey's 2nd Army, which is in charge of countering possible threats to Turkey from Syria, Iran and Iraq.
Ozturk has denied the allegation, saying he neither planned nor directed the failed military coup.
The news agency said Erdogan's Air Force adviser, Lt. Col. Erkan Kivrak, had been detained at a hotel where he was vacationing in Turkey's southern province of Antalya. No reason was given for the detention.
Addressing hundreds of supporters outside his Istanbul residence early Tuesday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan responded to calls for the reintroduction of the death penalty with the simple statement: "You cannot put aside the people's demands."
"In a country where our youths are killed with tanks and bombs, if we stay silent, as political people we will be held responsible in the afterlife," Erdogan said, pointing out that capital punishment exists around the world, including in the United States and China.
Anadolu also reported Tuesday that Turkey's media regulatory agency canceled all broadcast rights and licenses for any media outlets linked to or supporting the group the government holds responsible for Friday night's failed coup.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
North Korea launched three missiles Monday, according to a statement from the U.S. Strategic Command in Nebraska.
The statement said that North Korea launch two Scud tactical ballistic missiles back-to-back and was followed by a No Dong intermediate range ballistic missile.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) determined the missile launches from North Korea did not pose a threat to North America, the statement said.
The missiles launched from a western North Korea town flew across the country before crashing into the waters off its east coast, Seoul's Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement.
Two of them flew about 310 to 375 miles, displaying a sufficient range to reach entire South Korea, JCS spokesman Jeon Ha Gyu said. He said South Korea's military was analyzing how far the third missile flew. An earlier JCS statement said all three flew over 300 miles.
Its unclear whether the missiles were launched to coincide with the first day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland where national security was the focal point.
North Korea have previously been testing Musudans since April. Pyongyang had failed five consecutive missile test last month before successfully launching one into space and then into the Sea of Japan.
The men and women of USSTRATCOM, NORAD and U.S. Northern Command, and U.S. Pacific Command remain vigilant in the face of North Korean provocations and are fully committed to working closely with our Republic of Korea and Japanese allies to maintain security, the U.S. military said.
North Korea routinely tests short-range missiles and artillery systems but the latest launches came days after the country warned of unspecified "physical counter-action" over the deployment of the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, system in the southern town of Seongju.
Jeon said South Korea "strongly condemns" the launches that he described as an "armed protest" against the THAAD deployment.
In Tokyo, Defense Minister Gen Nakatani said the launches were "an act of provocation that undermines regional and international security. ... We absolutely cannot accept it."
North Korea has already deployed a variety of missiles that can reach most of South Korea and Japan, including American military bases in those countries. The country is also pushing to develop a long-range nuclear-tipped missile that can strike the mainland U.S., but South Korean defense officials believe the North does not possess such a weapon.
Analyst Kim Dong-yub at Seoul's Institute for Far East Studies said the North appears to have demonstrated its ability to strike southern South Korean targets including an area where a THAAD battery is to be placed by the end of next year.
Seoul and Washington say they need the THAAD system to better deal with what they call increasing North Korean threats in the aftermath of its fourth nuclear test and long-range rocket launch earlier this year.
The Korean Peninsula remains in a technical state of war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. About 28,500 U.S. soldiers are stationed in South Korea to deter possible aggression from North Korea; tens of thousands more are stationed in Japan.
Fox News Lucas Tomlinson and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
The Turkish government on Tuesday escalated its wide-ranging crackdown against people it claims have ties to plotters of last week's attempted coup, firing tens of thousands of public employees across the country.
The dismissals touched every aspect of government life.
Turkish media, in rapid-fire reports, said the Ministry of Education fired 15,200 people across the country; the Interior Ministry 8,777 employees; and Turkey's Board of Higher Education requested the resignation of 1,577 university deans -- akin to dismissing them.
In addition, 257 people working at the office of the prime minister were dismissed and the Directorate of Religious Affairs announced it had sacked 492 staff including clerics, preachers and religious teachers. Turkey's Family and Social Policy Ministry said it dismissed 393 personnel.
The firings come on top of the roughly 9,000 people who have been detained by the government, including security personnel, judges, prosecutors, religious figures and others. Turkey's state-run Anadolu news agency said courts have ordered 85 generals and admirals jailed pending trial over their suspected roles in the coup attempt. Dozens of others were still being questioned.
The violence surrounding the Friday night coup attempt claimed the lives of 208 government supporters and 24 coup plotters, according to the government. Turkey says Fethullah Gulen, a U.S.-based Muslim cleric, was behind the coup and has demanded his extradition. Gulen has denied any knowledge.
Ibrahim Kalin, a spokesman for Erdogan, blamed a "Gulenist clique within the Turkish army" for the attempted coup.
"There will be legal evidence collected in this investigation and we will present all of this to the Americans as part of our extradition request," he said.
"On the grounds of suspicion, he can be easily extradited. We would like to see cooperation from the U.S. authorities on this issue.
Anadolu Agency said Tuesday those formally arrested include former air force commander Gen. Akin Ozturk, alleged to be the ringleader of the July 15 uprising, and Gen. Adem Hududi, commander of Turkey's 2nd Army, which is in charge of countering possible threats to Turkey from Syria, Iran and Iraq.
Ozturk has denied the allegation, saying he neither planned nor directed the failed military coup, according to the Anadolu Agency.
The agency said Erdogan's Air Force adviser, Lt. Col. Erkan Kivrak, had been detained at a hotel where he was vacationing in Turkey's southern province of Antalya. No reason was given for the detention.
A thousand pro-government demonstrators gathered for a rally in Istanbul Tuesday, waving flags and chanting slogans and songs praising President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The demonstrators amassed in the conservative district of Fatih and demanded the death penalty for those responsible for the failed coup.
"We are not leaving these squares," said Durhan Yilmiz, an Istanbul municipality worker. "(The) Turkish flag cannot be lowered."
Pro-democracy meetings and rallies have been held in all of the major cities of Turkey.
In a bid to calm markets roiled by the coup attempt, Turkey's central bank cut a key interest rate Tuesday to shore up liquidity in the economy. The bank's Monetary Policy Committee said it has reduced its overnight marginal funding rate from 9 percent to 8.75 percent.
Erdogan, meanwhile, made a series of televised appearances in which he disclosed dramatic details of his survival on the night of a failed coup and raised the specter of reintroducing the death penalty to punish conspirators.
He told U.S. broadcaster CNN that he narrowly escaped death after coup plotters stormed the resort town of Marmaris where he was vacationing.
"Had I stayed 10, 15 additional minutes, I would have been killed or I would have been taken," he said in the interview late Monday.
The president and other officials have strongly suggested the government is considering reinstating the death penalty, a practice abolished in 2004 as part of Turkey's bid to join the European Union. Several European officials have said such a move would be the end of Turkey's attempts to join.
Addressing hundreds of supporters outside his Istanbul residence early Tuesday, Erdogan responded to calls for the reintroduction of the death penalty with the simple statement: "You cannot put aside the people's demands."
"In a country where our youths are killed with tanks and bombs, if we stay silent, as political people we will be held responsible in the afterlife," Erdogan said, pointing out that capital punishment exists around the world, including in the United States and China.
Turkey's deputy prime minister said dossiers containing details of Gulen's activities have been sent to the U.S. Numan Kurtulmus would not provide details about the files but said they include the past actions of the group that Gulen leads. They may also include new evidence that has emerged from the current investigation. Kurtulmus said an extradition request will follow.
Speaking to parliament, the chairman of the opposition Nationalist Movement Party, Devlet Bahceli, said his party would back legislation to reintroduce the death penalty if it was put forward by the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP.
"If the AKP is ready, we are in for the death penalty," Bahceli said.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, meanwhile, reflected the triumphant mood of authorities. He said the July 15 victory over the plotters was "epic" and that no coup in the history of Turkey had been as brutal as the one that this government survived.
"The force of the tanks could not beat the force of the people," he said.
Yildirim also lashed out at Europe, whose leaders have expressed concerns over the purges underway across Turkey's key state institutions.
"We thank our European friends for their support against the coup, however their sentences starting with `but' did not please us at all," he said.
Last weeks failed coup attempt left Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan in such a strong position that many Turks and others believe he himself engineered it or at the very least knew of it and let it play out to his advantage.
Supporters of the staged coup theory say theres plenty of circumstantial evidence to support their claim, and have busily discussed and debated the topic in social media which has a huge engagement rate in Turkey and other platforms.
Among the questions being asked are why coup plotters didnt execute the most basic steps in seizing power, like securing Erdogan and other top officials. Not a single member of his cabinet and inner-circle AKP party leadership was detained. Nor did coup plotters effectively take control of TV, radio and internet outlets. The government TRT station and CNN Turk were for a time occupied by alleged coup plotters, who quickly retreated as the putsch fell apart.
As a result, Erdogan and a slew of his key ministers were able to make statements and appeals to loyalists on television in the chaotic early hours Friday night. Any reasonably organized coup attempt and Turkey has a significant history of successful military coups over the years - would have made cutting off such communication a top priority, according to both advocates and deniers of the staged coup theory.
Coup plotters also failed to secure most airports and other transportation hubs, didnt occupy or attack Erdogans $600 million presidential palace, and failed to intercept his plane before, during or after he flew from one of the countrys busiest and most accessible airports back to Istanbul. This despite the supposed active participation of top generals in Turkeys Air Force, which maintains a fleet of F-16 aircraft easily capable of tracking, intercepting or if it came to it shooting down Erdogans plane.
Even the aggressive actions that were allegedly taken by the coup plotters attacking the mostly empty parliament building in Ankara, occupying Ataturk International Airport but conveniently leaving in time for Erdogan to land his plane there have raised much suspicion among the presidents many opponents.
The man Erdogan claimed to be the mastermind of the coup, U.S.-based cleric Fetullah Gulen, issued a statement strongly denying any role in the action, and said what many Turks were already expressing from the moment the news broke.
There is a possibility that it could be a staged coup, Gulen told reporters from his Pennsylvania compound on Saturday.
In a televised interview after regaining power, Erdogan angrily denied staging a coup attempt, and noted two of his bodyguards were killed when he narrowly escaped the Mediterranean villa where he was vacationing. The attack on the villa came only after he had left for the airport even though it was publicly known exactly where he was staying which has only fueled more skepticism about his role in the plot.
Thats misinformation, Erdogan said. How can you plan such a thing? How can you plan for so many civilians to lose their lives 208 civilians dying, 1,500 people lying on the ground trying to block tanks how can you do that?
Others argue there are good reasons to believe the failed coup was exactly what Erdogan claimed it was: an effort by a small faction within the military to seize power. While Erdogans increasing authoritarianism has not lessened his Islamist religious base, Turkish secularists are still strongly represented in the military.
Others believe the most plausible scenario may lie between the two theories: The attempted coup may have begun as an independent and organic movement, but in the hours or days before it was executed Erdogan was tipped off. He then allegedly allowed it to unfold in order to draw out his enemies.
Indeed, the Turkish military acknowledged Tuesday it had received intelligence some six hours in advance that a rogue element planned to mount a coup.
In the initial uncertain hours, it appeared to many the coup had succeeded. The plotters announced the military had taken control of the government and, with Erdogan on vacation in the seaside village of Marmaris, emboldened collaborators and sympathizers may have revealed themselves.
Whether the coup attempt was authentic, staged or tolerated, Erdogan has taken full advantage. On Tuesday, the government escalated its crackdown on people it claims have ties to Gulen, firing nearly 24,000 teachers and Interior Ministry workers, and demanding the resignations of another 1,577 university deans.
The latest purge was in addition to the roughly 9,000 people who have been detained by the government, including police, judges, prosecutors, religious figures and others.
Turkey's state-run Anadolu news agency says courts have also ordered 85 generals and admirals jailed pending trial over their roles in the coup attempt.
You cannot deny how strong Erdogan is, said a 38-year-old Istanbul-based professor, speaking under the condition of anonymity. He has incredible control over almost all state institutions. So, the idea that Erdogan might have looked the other way while a small faction within the army planned this coup would not at all surprise me.
After all, look at the outcome; he is perhaps more popular than he has ever been, he is able to implement his own agenda, run the show as he likes, and [do not be] surprised to see a presidential system, or at least a referendum for it, announcement coming up soon, he added.
Bennigans Returns to Panama City Mall
July 14, 2016 // Franchising.com // PANAMA CITY, FL Those cheering sounds you hear are from Bennigans fans whove seen the signs that their favorite restaurant is coming back to town!
Indeed, final preparations are underway to re-open the Bennigans restaurant at the Panama City Mall. And this time, the beloved home of friendly Irish hospitality, craveable chef-driven food and innovative drinks is here to stay!
Bennigans will officially re-open its doors on Monday, July 18, in the Panama City Mall at 2100 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. The corporate restaurant owned and operated by Legendary Restaurant Brands LLC and its CEO, Paul Mangiamele will then hold its official grand re-opening celebration on Wednesday, July 20, with a special ceremony hosted by the Bay County Chamber of Commerce, beginning at 10:30 a.m.
Mangiamele will join Mayor Greg Brudnicki, the Chamber and several city officials for the traditional ribbon cutting, as well as a trademark Bennigans flourish: An official World Famous Monte Cristo cutting!
The Bennigans brand has an enormous following in Northern Florida and across the world so its wonderful to be back, said Mangiamele, who has led the renaissance of Bennigans worldwide since 2011. The Panama City Mall is a perfect location for our restaurant and were looking forward to reminding residents and visitors alike just how great the casual dining experience can be!
The restaurant, which will bring back nearly 100 jobs to the local economy, offers 16 beers on tap, 12 HD TVs and a climate-controlled in-door patio that can double as a VIP meeting room. Its menu features such signature Bennigans favorites as the Monte Cristo, Oh, Baby Back Ribs, the Turkey OToole, the Big Irish double-decker hamburger and a wide assortment of handcrafted specialty drinks.
My entire team and I are excited to re-open our doors and start serving mall shoppers, beach lovers, local families and the good folks over at Tyndall, said General Manager Sean Patrick Hall. We absolutely love Panama City and cant wait to share our Legendary food, drinks and hospitality with friends old and new!
In appreciation for their dedication and sacrifices for our nation and our local community, Bennigans is pleased to offer a 15% discount to all active duty and retired members of the United States military as well as local police, firefighters and other first responders. (Simply present valid government ID for discount.)
Now with more than 150 restaurants open or under contract worldwide, Legendary Restaurant Brands LLC is continuing to experience strong growth while simultaneously redefining casual dining. Since the end of 2012, the company has opened new franchise locations in Clarksburg and Frederick, Md; Santa Clara and Fremont, Calif.; Melbourne, Fla., Saddle Brook, NJ; Tysons Corner, Va.; Veracruz, Mexico; Larnaca, Cyprus; and Dubai, UAE.
Additional restaurants are planned for California, Florida, Kentucky, New Jersey, Tennessee, Texas, Pennsylvania and Virginia; and internationally in Mexico, Central America, Cyprus, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and South America.
The Panama City Mall restaurant will be open from 11 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to Midnight Friday and Saturday and 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday.
For your nearest location, menu, hours and additional information, visit Bennigans.com.
About Legendary Restaurant Brands
Legendary Restaurant Brands owns the iconic Bennigans and Steak and Ale brands the pioneers of casual dining as well as the non-traditional, fast-casual concept, Bennigans On The Fly. Bennigans is a high-energy neighborhood restaurant and tavern that is redefining casual dining. With chef-driven food, innovative drinks and warm, friendly Irish hospitality, this Legendary brand delivers memorable dining experiences to every guest and compelling returns to all its franchisees. Steak and Ale is another American classic poised for a triumphant return. Redefined as a 21st Century polished-casual concept, the new Steak and Ale will once again set the standard for affordable steakhouses. Bennigans and Steak and Ale are celebrating their 40th and 50th anniversaries, respectively, in 2016.
For franchising information, visit Bennigans.com or call 855-GOT-BENN.
SOURCE Legendary Restaurant Brands
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Pollo Campero Shakes Up Summer with the Return of Latin Shakers!
Latin Shakers Offer Exciting New Way to Enjoy Campero's Boneless Chicken Bites and Flavorful Latin Sauces
DALLAS - July 19, 2016 // PRNewswire // - There's a whole lot of shaking going on at Pollo Campero, as the world's largest Latin chicken restaurant brand welcomes the return of its Latin Shakers. Latin Shakers, available through September 5, 2016, are an exciting and convenient new way for chicken-lovers to enjoy Campero's boneless white meat chicken bites covered with Campero's famous Latin sauces.
"Pollo Campero is thrilled to be able to shake things up again with our Camperitos," said Federico Valiente, Pollo Campero International's brand lead. "Our Latin Shakers have been a hit with our guests because they offer everything in a single cup Latin flavor, convenience and even fun."
Latin Shakers include Pollo Campero's 100 percent white meat boneless chicken bites, known asCamperitos, and any one of Campero's unique Latin sauces. Served inside a portable shaker cup, guests are then encouraged to do the #LatinShake, shaking the cup to coat the chicken with the sauce's Latin flavors. Sauce flavors include Sweet Adobo, Guava Barbecue, and Latin Buffalo.
"Our guests get to customize their Latin Shakers via the sauces - they can choose from spicy to sweet," said Valiente. "The Latin culture is all about food that brings friends and family together, so this year we're also offering the Latin Shakers in family format to share."
For a limited time at participating restaurants only, guests can purchase an individual Latin Shaker meal, which includes seven Camperitos with a choice of sauce, a classic side, and a medium soda for $6.99. The family meal includes 10 pieces of Campero's hand-breaded or citrus-grilled chicken, two classic family sides and 10 Camperitos with a choice of sauce for $24.99.
About Pollo Campero
Pollo Campero, considered the home of Authentic Latin Chicken, is the largest Latin chicken restaurant brand in the world. It first opened its doors as a tiny, family-owned restaurant in Guatemala in 1971 with the goal of treating family and friends to its prized chicken recipe passed down from generation to generation. Today, as Pollo Campero marks its 45th anniversary, its focus on quality, and its mission to stay true to its Latin roots remain the same. Pollo Campero is committed to serving unique Latin recipes prepared by hand daily using high-quality and all-natural ingredients. At the heart of that commitment: the promise to use fresh, never frozen, hormone-free chicken paired with traditional Latin sides, drinks and desserts in a vibrant atmosphere. There are more than 350 Pollo Campero restaurants around the world and Campero is still growing. For franchise information, or to learn more about Pollo Campero, visit Campero.com. Follow the flavor on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @CamperoUSA.
SOURCE Pollo Campero
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The Melting Pot Announces Return to Mobile, Alabama as Part of Strategic Company Growth Plans
Burners Ignite as the Leading Polished Casual Fondue Restaurant Opens Doors to the Public on July 25
July 19, 2016 // Franchising.com // TAMPA, Fla. The Melting Pot Restaurants, Inc., the worlds premier fondue restaurant and a leading polished casual dining franchise, announced today the return of its Mobile, Alabama location at 840 Montlimar Drive. This new company-operated location opens its doors to the public on Monday, July 25 and will feature a new, limited-time Fondue Across America menu for guests to enjoy through Labor Day. The Mobile announcement comes on the heels of the brands recently launched strategic initiative to expand its company-operated footprint as a vehicle for further growth.
Increasing our national presence of company-operated units allows us to test store designs and new approaches to our menu while further increasing our understanding of our franchises day-to-day business operations, said Dan Stone, chief business & people development officer at Front Burner. Our rich history, unique brand positioning in the polished dining category mixed with our award-winning menu offerings all make for the perfect recipe for continued growth and success.
In June, The Melting Pot debuted their limited-time summer menu, Fondue Across America, which features iconic fondue takes on some of Americas quintessential dishes like Chicago deep-dish pizza and New York cheesecake. The menu also showcases a line of signature craft cocktails inspired by favorite flavors from across the country.
The Mobile location also will showcase The Melting Pot's updated design initiative. After conducting a detailed seating analysis and study of customer design preferences, The Melting Pot created the optimal dining and bar space for guests.
We are incredibly excited to re-introduce the residents of Mobile to The Melting Pot, said Mike Lester, president of The Melting Pot Restaurants, Inc. The Melting Pot brand remains strong and relevant, and while growth via franchising remains our top priority, well continue our strategic growth strategy of increasing our number of company-operated locations through 2016 and beyond.
Domestically, the company is seeking new franchisees in select markets, including Houston, Texas; Los Angeles, California; Gainesville, Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Des Moines, Iowa; the New York City area; and Charleston, South Carolina. On the international front, The Melting Pot is focusing its expansion efforts in target markets across Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Indonesia, Mexico, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan.
The Melting Pot operates more than 125 restaurants across 35 U.S. states, Canada, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, and has over 10 locations in development internationally. The concept is known for offering an assortment of flavorful fondue cooking styles and a variety of unique entrees served with signature dipping sauces. The menu features a variety of a la carte selections, highlighting customizable options that invite guests to enjoy one, two, three or more courses as they select any combination of individually-priced cheese fondues, salads, entrees and chocolate fondues.
To catapult the brands growth in the area, the company is actively seeking qualified franchisees and will host a franchising webinar on July 28 at 11 a.m. (EDT). To register, please visit http://www.meltingpotfranchise.com/upcomingEvents.aspx.
To learn more about ownership opportunities with The Melting Pot, contact Christina Hobbs, director of franchise development for The Melting Pot, at chobbs@meltingpot.com, or call 800-783-0867 ext. 109.
About The Melting Pot Restaurants, Inc.
Founded in 1975, The Melting Pot has offered a unique fondue dining experience for more than 40 years. As the premier fondue restaurant franchise, The Melting Pot Restaurants, Inc. has more than 125 restaurants in 35 U.S. states, Canada, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and over 10 international locations in development. A leading polished casual dining franchise, The Melting Pot was recognized as the No. 2 casual dining restaurant in the Nations Restaurant News 2016 Consumer Picks report. Known for offering a choice of fondue cooking styles and a variety of unique entrees, The Melting Pots menu also features cheese fondues, salads, fine wines and chocolate fondue desserts. Fondue fans can join The Melting Pots Club Fondue for exclusive promotions, special events and advance holiday reservation privileges. The Melting Pot is an affiliate of Front Burner, a restaurant management company headquartered in Tampa, Florida. For more information, visit www.meltingpot.com. To learn more about franchise opportunities with The Melting Pot, please visit www.meltingpotfranchise.com.
About Front Burner
Front Burner is a franchise management company headquartered in Tampa, Florida. It is affiliated with the corporate owners of and its management services extended to The Melting Pot Restaurants, Inc., founded in 1975 with 126 restaurants in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and 10 locations currently in development internationally. For more information, visit http://www.frontburnerbrands.com.
SOURCE The Melting Pot Restaurants, Inc.
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O: (954) 893-9150
C: (954) 789-0432
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South Sudan's rebel leader Riek Machar returned to the capital Juba on Tuesday, April 26, to be sworn in as vice president in an effort to end the civil war that has killed tens of thousands of people and forced more than 2 million from their homes.
"I'm happy to be back," Machar told reporters at the airport. "The war was vicious. We have lost a lot of people in it and we need to bring our people together so that they can unite, reconcile, heal the wounds, the mental wounds that they have."
"Peace is the only choice for us to relieve our people from the undeserved suffering associated with armed conflict enforced upon them, said South Sudans President Salva Kiir, following the ceremony.
I believe this is the only way to return South Sudan to the path of peace, stability and prosperity."
The conflict erupted in December 2013 after a power struggle between Kiir and Machar, his former deputy. The peace agreement, signed in August 2015, calls for a 30-month transitional period, during which the Transitional Government of National Unity, comprised of representatives from the government, the opposition, the Former Detainees, and other political parties, will preside, leading to elections in 2018.
"This is clearly an important step for South Sudan, said U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power.After months of delay and obstructionism, both sides compromised to make this happen. It's the best hope that South Sudan has had in a very long time."
U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner said: It is important now for South Sudans leaders to take additional steps ... form the Transitional Government of National Unity, to make progress on the core agenda of the peace agreement, according to the timeline that was established by the Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Commission.
The United States will continue to press South Sudans leaders to take those steps for the good of their country and its people.
The United States Trade Representatives office announced on July 7th, the Annual Product Review under the Generalized System of Preferences program. This measure adds new duty-free status for travel goods such as luggage, backpacks, handbags, and wallets for Least Developed Beneficiary Developing Countries, including Nepal.
The new rule makes these products eligible for duty-free status beginning July 1. U.S. imports of travel and luggage goods products totaled almost $10 billion in 2015.
In 2015, Nepal ranked second, after Cambodia, of all Least Developed Countries exporters of luggage products to the United States. Nepals exports of these products have grown seven percent since 2014, totaling $1.8 million in 2015.
U.S. trade preference programs provide opportunities for many of the worlds poorest countries to use trade to grow their economies and climb out of poverty. At 40 years old, the Generalized System of Preferences program, or GSP, is the largest and oldest U.S. trade preference program.
Under GSP, the United States provides duty-free treatment for many imports from beneficiary developing countries, and additional products for Least Developed Beneficiary Developing Countries. About 5,000 products from 122 beneficiary developing countries and territories, including 43 least-developed countries, are eligible for duty-free treatment when exported to the United States under the GSP program. Nearly 1,500 of these products are reserved for duty-free treatment for Least Developed Beneficiary Developing Countries only.
This is a tremendous opportunity for Nepali businesses to expand their exports to U.S. markets, said U.S. Ambassador Alaina B. Teplitz. A strong commitment to open-market policies, a stable and transparent legal environment that secures property rights, policies that foster dynamic entrepreneurial activity, and strategic infrastructure investments will help Nepal make the most of this opportunity.
U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker joined European Union Commissioner Vera Jourova on July 12th to announce the adoption of the EU-US Privacy Shield Framework. The Framework is a milestone achievement that will provide strong data privacy and facilitate more trade and job creating investments in both the U.S. and Europe.
The EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework was designed by the U.S. Department of Commerce and European Commission to provide companies on both sides of the Atlantic with a mechanism to comply with EU data protection requirements when transferring personal data from the European Union to the United States in support of transatlantic commerce.
The Privacy Shield Framework provides a set of robust and enforceable protections for the personal data of EU individuals. The Framework provides transparency regarding how participating companies use personal data, strong U.S. government oversight, and increased cooperation with EU data protection authorities (DPAs).
The European Commission deemed the Privacy Shield Framework adequate to enable data transfers under EU law. The U.S. Department of Commerce will allow companies time to review the Framework and update their compliance programs and then, on August 1, will begin accepting certifications.
To join the Privacy Shield Framework, a U.S.-based company will be required to self-certify to the Department of Commerce and publicly commit to comply with the Frameworks requirements.
While joining the Privacy Shield Framework will be voluntary, once an eligible company makes the public commitment to comply with the Frameworks requirements, the commitment will become enforceable under U.S. law. All companies interested in joining the Privacy Shield Framework should review its requirements in their entirety.
With the approval of the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield, Secretary Pritzker noted, we send an important message to the world: The sharing of ideas and information across borders is not only good for our businesses but also for our communities and our people. For businesses, the free flow of data makes it possible for a startup in Silicon Valley to hire programmers in the Czech Republic, or a manufacturer in Germany to collaborate with a research lab in Tennessee. For consumers, the free flow of data means that you can take advantage of the latest, most innovative digital products and services, no matter where they originate.
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Ellsen Cutting Machine Launch International Website To Offer The Best Bar Cutters To World Market
Ellsen Cutting Machine creates some of the best bar cutters in the world, and is now offering them to businesses throughout the globe via a newly optimized international website.
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Bridges, tunnels and even houses are all constructed using rebar, which is one of the most fundamental elements of construction. Cutting this rebar efficiently and effectively can help optimize the construction process, saving time and money. Ellsen Machinery have created a whole suite of different bar cutters that offer optimized performance across a wide range of different industrial uses, and are now selling these to construction companies worldwide via a newly optimized website.
Ellsen Machinery create a huge range of different heavy industry tools and machinery, but the new site is optimized solely for bar cutters. As such, it has a comprehensive overview of all the available Ellsen cutting equipment, including cutters, rebar cutters, steel cutters, rod cutters and benders, and more. Every item comes with a comprehensive product description, high quality imagery, and clear pricing.
The website (Ellsencuttingmachine.com) also encourages individuals to contact the customer service team for expert advice and guidance, as well as having a resource center covering best practices, together with health and safety considerations. The site is designed to offer everything people could need to make a sound investment, wherever they are in the world.
A spokesperson for Ellsen Cutting Machine explained, "We have launched the site internationally with native English language support to appeal to the broadest possible audience. We want businesses throughout the world to know the quality of Ellsen machinery. We want them to experience the outstanding commitment to customer service we delivery to every client. Our contact details are on the website, and we encourage anyone interested in forming a business relationship with us to get in touch. Businesses can find out for themselves how committed we are to delivering customized, optimized solutions. This is an exciting time for us, and an amazing opportunity for international industry."
About Ellsen Cutting Machine: Ellsen Cutting Machine is an optimized online presence for Ellsen Machinery Equipment Co., Ltd. Established in 1996, Ellsen is a professional manufacturer of integrating construction machines with wrought iron craft equipment. The business excels in development, production, sales and after-sales service. Their experienced and expert teams across every division are committed to providing outstanding products at the best possible value, tailored to the specific needs of the client.
For more information, please visit http://ellsencuttingmachine.com/
Contact Info:
Name: Catherine
Email: Sales@ellsencuttingmachine.com
Organization: Zhengzhou Ellsen Machinery Equipment Co., Ltd
Phone: 0086-371-55638389
Source: http://marketersmedia.com/ellsen-cutting-machine-launch-international-website-to-offer-the-best-bar-cutters-to-world-market/124089
Release ID: 124089
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Ellsen Jib Crane Launches Website To Promote China's Best Jib Crane Products To Worldwide Markets
Ellsen Jib Crane is a brand new web presence dedicated to promoting Ellsen Machinery's full range of industrial jib cranes, available for delivery worldwide for the first time.
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Jib cranes use a single fixed point mount with a horizontal bar, or jib, to create a movable lifting device that has hundreds of applications across heavy industry. These include moving and transporting components, assembly, storage and more. Ellsen Machinery Co. in China is one of the country's leading jib crane manufacturers. They have just created a brand new website specifically to advertise their huge range of cranes overseas. The site marks the first time these products will be supported by worldwide distribution.
The site has English as its first language, and uses a responsive infrastructure to ensure it displays beautifully on any device or screen size. The website features a huge range of different jib models, from wall traveling jibs to articulated jibs, and even jib hoists and accessories to further increase their adaptability.
The website (Ellsenjibcrane.com) then further breaks down the available cranes by their capacity and tonnage, so individuals can shortlist the items according to their performance requirements. Customers can also contact Ellsen Machinery to have the cranes custom-outfitted to meet their particular industrial needs. There is even a resource center on safety considerations and best practices, to ensure people order the perfect machinery to match their existing environment.
A spokesperson for Ellsen Jibs explained, "Ellsen Jib Crane is a wonderful new resource for anyone looking online for the very best industrial jib cranes. We have a wonderful range of products with the very latest specifications and features, created through the highest manufacturing standards. Thanks to our base in China, we are able to provide some of the most competitive rates available anywhere in the world, while remaining passionate about the quality of our customer experience. We hope this site will encourage more international partners to come to us for all their jib crane needs."
About Ellsen Jib Crane: Ellsen Jib Crane is an online resource center showcasing the jib cranes of Ellsen Machinery Co., Ltd. Located in China's biggest heavy manufacture base, Henan province, Ellsen is a subsidiary corporation of Yufei Heavy Industries. Ellsen has always played a leading role in China's jib crane business, and have a well-earned reputation for outstanding manufacturing quality, customer service and value.
For more information, please visit http://ellsenjibcrane.com/
Contact Info:
Name: Alisa
Email: Sales@ellsenjibcrane.com
Organization: Ellsen Machinery Co., Ltd
Phone: 0086-371-55036319
Source: http://marketersmedia.com/ellsen-jib-crane-launches-website-to-promote-chinas-best-jib-crane-products-to-worldwide-markets/124085
Release ID: 124085
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Ellsen Bending Machine Website Launched To Promote Bar Bending Machines To New Clients Online
Ellsen Machinery Equipment Co., Ltd. has exported high quality bar bending machines for two decades, and is now using 21st century methods to attract new customers.
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Bar bending, wire bending and rod bending are all essential processes within heavy industry, and now this difficult and precise process can be completed in just minutes, thanks to purpose built machinery. Ellsen Machinery has been creating high quality bending machines for twenty years, and is now advertising them online through the power of a uniquely optimized new website. The move is part of a new and aggressive strategy by Ellsen to increase their global client portfolio.
The website (Ellsenbendingmachine.com) is responsively designed to display perfectly on any device or screen size. The website has been outfitted with comprehensive on-page SEO strategies, enabling the website to organically generate more leads and attract potential customers.
The website includes complete listings of the bar bending machines available, covering wire benders, steel bar benders, rod benders and more. The website enables individuals to browse the products by type, with each accompanied with high quality imagery, detailed descriptions, and easy ordering information.
Individuals interested in purchasing from Ellsen can do so directly via the website or use the contact form speak to their sales representatives. Explaining their needs, customers can benefit from industry expertise and insight in choosing the right products. Ellsen can even customize products for the needs of niche industries.
A spokesperson for Ellsen Bending Equipment explained, "We are excited to be able to launch this new online venture, which will enable us to expand our global market share in bending machines. This new website, in native English, will help us promote to a vast range of new businesses. Our manufacturing is second to none, and we meet the strictest European standards to ensure quality. Thanks to our base in China, we can offer unbeatable value, and help businesses get the best possible return on their investment."
About Ellsen Machinery Equipment Co., Ltd.: Ellsen Machinery Equipment Co., Ltd. has specialized in manufacturing and exporting bar benders for 20 years. Their factories are equipped with sophisticated equipment, operated by experienced, skilled staff. Ellsen has developed a comprehensive and thorough running system, from advanced manufacturing processes to the most comprehensive testing systems. These guarantee the finest manufacture of high-quality bar-bending machines.
For more information, please visit http://ellsenbendingmachine.com/
Contact Info:
Name: Angela
Email: Sales@ellsenbendingmachine.com
Organization: Ellsen Machinery Equipment Co., Ltd
Phone: 0086-371-55638389
Source: http://marketersmedia.com/ellsen-bending-machine-website-launched-to-promote-bar-bending-machines-to-new-clients-online/124087
Release ID: 124087
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Sighisoara Bucharest & Transylvania Dracula Castle Romania Guided Tour Announced
Original World announced its September 2016 small group tour to Romania, with stays in local villages, horse-carriage rides, dinner with 'ceterasi' violin players and guided exploration of the most historical sites to ensure an authentic immersion in the country's traditions, lifestyle and culture.
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The popular boutique international tour company Original World announced a small group escorted tour to Romania, taking place in September 2016, tailored to provide an authentic, absorbing and unique experience and immersion in the country's traditions and culture. The group size is limited to a maximum of 8 people, allowing the group to travel into the rural countryside without disturbing the local life, have an authentic immersion with the culture and enjoy plenty of one-on-one time with the wonderful expert accompanying guide.
More information is available at http://originalworld.com/travel-to-romania/.
Original World is an international tour company providing a broad range of unique guided small group and private custom tours crafted to provide memorable, authentic and personal cultural exchange and immersion experiences in Asia, Europe, Middle East or Africa.
The tour company has announced a limited time discount offer on its September 2016 small group tour to Romania. The tour includes a comprehensive guided exploration of Bucharest and its historic cultural sites along with Sighisoara, one the best preserved inhabited medieval cities of Europe, the unique Merry Cemetery in Sapanta Village, the painted monasteries of northern Moldova, including the 'Sistine Chapel of the East' or a tour of medieval Transylvania and its palaces, fortifications or the famous 'Dracula's Castle', and more.
The unique Original World 12-day tour of Romania also includes visits to the oldest art museum in the country, horse and carriage rides thru the open air museum of Astra or dinner with "ceterasi" violin players along with stays in local villages to ensure the small group, comprised of 12 people maximum and led by an experienced accompanying guide, is able to enjoy an authentic experience and immersion in the country's traditions, lifestyle and culture.
More information on Original World and its small group escorted tours of Romania, taking place in September 2016 and Spring thru Fall of 2017, including the full 12-day itinerary, special last minute discounts, accommodation and meals, trip preparations, and more, can be viewed on the website link provided above. The deadline to book a place on the tour September tour is August 15th, 2016.
The founder of Original World, Barbara Sansone, explains that "traveling to Romania with Original World will allow you to truly experience the delights of a country rich in heritage and endearing charm. Travelers looking for a unique European vacation, should look no further than Romania, still an undiscovered gem".
She adds that "after the hustle-bustle of Western Europe's big urban cities, Romania is a pristine untouched landscape and paradise for photographers with charming villages, precious beautiful churches and monasteries and very friendly local people. Romania has so much to offer that I'm surprised it is not on the top of list when choosing where to go in Europe".
For more information, please visit http://originalworld.com/travel-to-romania/
Contact Info:
Name: barbara sansone
Organization: original world
Address: 930 Irwin Street, Ste 222, San rafael, CA 94901
Phone: 4153605152
Release ID: 124026
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Stair Lift Dealers In Maine Will Benefit From A Special Offer Launched By Stairlift Company Reviews
Stairlift Company Reviews now offers a completely free mini website service so Maine dealers can effectively present their products and services to discriminating online consumers
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As the most important single independent source of online stair lift info StairliftCompanyReviews.com occupies a sought-after top of the league position, and now they are planning further expansion with a free dedicated mini website offering designed for Maine local dealers. These mini-websites will give the dealers the chance to display their product details and imagery, business profiles, ratings, and customer reviews as they wish to present them. These websites also allow visitors to easily contact the dealers and make online purchases. This dedicated effort aims to ensure that Maine dealers can benefit from a new platform for presenting their products and services to stairlift purchase intenders. For dealers who lack their own website capability this offer is going to be particularly attractive.
Yale Lipshick, Co-Founder of StairliftCompanyReviews.com says, "The objective of our mini websites offer is to allow Maine dealers to more effectively promote their products and services in line with their own business preferences and style. This is the best way to open up a new online dealer revenue stream while at the same time improving consumer choice. We will explain to dealers the best imagery to use and other ways of making their websites very successful."
Stairlift Company Reviews values its long-established links with Maine stairlift dealers and looks forward to enhancing these connections as the website connects more local dealers with a discerning and interested demographic for stairlifts. Maine stairlifts dealer Ed Carter states "Many thanks to StairliftCompanyReviews.com for the professional assistance we have enjoyed. We are convinced this help was a vital factor in our successful first entry into the online consumer market. For anyone without internet experience, support of this kind is vital if the business website is going to realize its potential."
As StairliftCompanyReviews.com strengthens its involvement in the Maine market, additional service/product rollout in the coming months is definitely on the cards. For more information please visit www.stairliftcompanyreviews.com.
About StairliftCompanyReviews.com
StairliftCompanyReviews.com is the internet's largest single source of stairlift information. We connect stairlift shoppers with the best local stairlift dealers, installers, and servicers who represent the most popular brands in the industry. Chair lift customers can quickly and easily get price quotes from all major brands on stairlift rentals and on all new and pre-owned models from manufacturers like Acorn, Stannah, Hawle and Bruno. Consumers who use StairliftCompanyReviews.com receive competitive quotes from only prescreened, trusted dealers and service representatives for new, pre-owned, and rental stairlifts
For more information, please visit http://www.stairliftcompanyreviews.com
Contact Info:
Name: Yale Lipschik
Email: info@stairliftcompanyreviews.com
Organization: Stairlift Company Reviews
Address: 500 Mamaroneck Avenue
Phone: 1-888-507-2015
Source: http://marketersmedia.com/stair-lift-dealers-in-maine-will-benefit-from-a-special-offer-launched-by-stairlift-company-reviews/124044
Release ID: 124044
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Gilbert Chocolates Downtown Jackson Renovation Project Underway
Gilbert Chocolates production facility and Made-In-Michigan Chocolate retail store on schedule with ongoing renovation work to relocate in downtown Jackson MI.
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Brian Krichbaum, co-owner of Gilbert Chocolates, announced the reconstruction and renovation project of the Gilbert Chocolates production facility and retail store is underway in downtown Jackson, Michigan.
"We want to preserve some of the old-fashioned appeal, since this is a legacy business. Showing the real brick on the walls, hardwood flooring, and glass candy cases will give the store an appeal that ties in with the historical aspect of what the business stands for," Krichbaum explained.
However, renovating an older building requires some updates, and the vision of the business will include not only the production area but also a retail store, with ample space to allow for small factory tours.
Krichbaum started the lengthy process by working with Alpha Design Studio, LLC of Jackson, to develop the initial building design. "We are sub-contracting with Jackson-area businesses as we begin work on this renovation," he explained. "Gilbert Chocolates originated in Michigan and creates Made-in-Michigan gourmet chocolates, so we want to continue the local loyalty throughout our project."
Krichbaum's ideas for the development are being incorporated into the site plans by the building designer; and renovations include construction work with additional contractors as well as a glass specialist.
"There are a number of mini-projects within our overall renovation to make this the best facility for Gilbert Chocolates production and the new retail store. For instance, 5 Leprechauns LLC of Jackson are using the site plan to work through structural changes. We are also working with Bruton Electric of Jackson, Faber Sandblasting from Rives Junction, Grimes Mechanical of Concord, and A&A Plumbing LLC of Cement City. The storefront glass will be designed and replaced by Jackson Glass Works."
The downtown Jackson location will have 2,200 square feet of manufacturing space, 2,000 square feet of non-perishable storage space, and retail space of 800 square feet.
"Because of the long history of Gilbert Chocolates in Jackson, we have people contacting us who were related to some of the earlier employees from decades ago. They are looking forward to shopping in our candy store downtown, or in working for us in Jackson like their relatives did."
The chocolate company is keeping loyal customers updated of the progress via the online chocolate website at www.gilbertchocolates.com, and their Facebook page.
For more information, please visit https://www.gilbertchocolates.com/
Contact Info:
Name: Sally Krichbaum
Organization: Gilbert Chocolates
Address: 273 Ackerson Lake Dr. Jackson, MI 49201
Phone: +1 517 764 3141
Release ID: 124002
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Australian Ducting Supplier Develops Innovative Shopping Cart Technology
Australian ducting component supplier Advanced Duct Systems launched a new online shopping cart that addresses the unique complexities of listing duct components for sale online. The cart was developed by digital solutions company Click Campaigns, and was launched at the AWISA conference in Melbourne.
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Australian ducting component supplier Advanced Duct Systems has developed a new and innovative online shopping cart that addresses the unique complexities of listing duct components for sale online. Managing Director Neil Southwell explained the shopping cart innovation at the recent AWISA (Australian, Woodworking Industry Suppliers Association) Conference in Melbourne.
"It's difficult to set up an online shopping cart for ducting supplies because there are an incredible variety of duct component dimensions, and each one has a different price". he said. "Common dimension variables in duct include specific diameters, lengths, and angles and the only way a standard shopping cart can accommodate all of these variations is to list the product over and over again, with the only variation between listings being the dimension and the price. This makes using the online shopping cart cumbersome and impractical, especially for people browsing the shopping cart" he said.
For the sake of clarity he then outlined an example of someone wanting to buy some straight standard galvanized duct online. "The variety of length and diameter permutations is quite significant, in fact in our product range there are 42 different combinations of straight galvanised duct he said". He then listed the dimension paramaters people could order starting with the length. There are 3 lengths, 0.5 of a meter, 1 meter and 2 meters. The diameters are 80mm, 100mm, 125mm, 140mm, 150mm, 160mm,180mm, 200mm, 225mm, 250mm, 275mm, 300mm, 350 mm and 400mm.
"That's 42 individual catalogue items for just this one duct component." said Mr Southwell. "And there's a plethora of other pieces that need to be listed including bends, branches, duct with door access, rings, flanges, gaskets, gates, valves, sweeps etc... the list goes on and on, and each one has a variety of variables, all of which affect price" he said.
The shopping cart designer, David Mollet from Melbourne based digital solutions company Click Campaigns, spoke about the challenges involved in developing the new shopping cart.
"When we were consulting with Neil and scoping the website requirements it became obvious that using a standard shopping cart wouldn't create a user friendly site, because the cart listing would be tedious to navigate with many repetitive entries. Our challenge was to create a cart whereby a buyer need only visit one single component page to select any variable for that component from a drop down menu, and have the prices for any combination of variables update live in the shopping cart, which makes online ordering infinitely easier", he said.
Advanced Duct Systems has offices in Melbourne and Sydney and sells standard galvanised duct, pneumatic tubing, powder coated duct, pneumatic conveying duct systems, stainless steel duct and flexible duct, from what Mr Mollet says is now "probably the world's easiest to use online shopping cart for buying duct". Online orders are delivered straight to the pick and pack facilities in Advance Duct Systems Cambelfield facility and clients get an order confirmation sent by email. Trade and wholesaler buyers can also get special pricing by entering a special code that presents them with discounted pricing.
For more information, please visit http://www.ductsystems.com.au/
Contact Info:
Name: Neil Southwell
Organization: Advanced Duct Systems
Address: 3/11 Cooper St, Campbellfield, VIC 3061.
Phone: 613 8339 0894
Release ID: 124032
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The online pension hub launched by Scottish Widows earlier this year, as part of its 50m digital investment programme, has taken more than 1m in regular customer contributions since March.
David Holton, director of corporate propositions at Scottish Widows, said the company is also testing other digital services, which will be launching shortly.
In the spring, Mr Holton said Scottish Widows would spend 50m on a programme to improve its products and services , as well as on improving its adviser support.
Mr Holton explained the priority was initially focused on bolstering adviser and employer support, by developing a broad range of digital capabilities over an 18-month period.
He said: In just 20 weeks, we launched a working adviser and employer hub that has already taken more than 1m in regular customer contributions.
We are also in the process of testing digital developments to support employees, building an interactive front end that we hope to roll-out over the coming months.
The fundamental element to this new and agile way of working is to engage with our customers at every stage, bringing them back into the labs at every opportunity to ensure their thoughts are built into the next phase of our developments.
At the end of March, the new online portal was being tested in a live environment, with six pilot employers before being fully rolled out.
It allows clients to upload payroll files in a variety of formats, providing immediate feedback on any errors with their data, so that any issues can be corrected instantly.
At the time, Mr Holton also said the company is looking into developing a form of robo-advice, saying he was discussing with advisers what it could look like.
But he said it would have to be the right thing for the consumer and said he wasnt sure the industry had worked out the right place for robo-advice yet.
Adviser view
Robert Forbes, a chartered financial planner with London-based Stadden Forbes Wealth Management, said: I would say the 50m is long overdue. The reason we dont really use them is because they are 50m light on their IT and systems.
BMO Global Asset Management has added to its fixed income absolute return strategies with a new global bond vehicle.
The BMO Global Absolute Return Bond fund, to be managed by Keith Patton and Ian Robinson, adds to a range which already includes the Total Return Fixed Income and Sterling Credits Absolute Return strategies.
It will aim for a cash plus 3 per cent return, using a buy-and-hold strategy with the ability to short instruments in order to stay within volatility ranges. The fund will not be restricted by credit rating, maturity, sector or geography.
The sterling retail ongoing charges figure (OCF) has been set at 0.32 per cent, with a minmum investment of 2,500 (2,098) for the Luxembourg-domiciled Sicav.
Mr Patton and Mr Robinson already manage several vehicles between them, including the F&C Strategic Bond, the BMO Global Total Return Bond and the F&C Corporate Bond funds.
The 12 months to May 31 were, its fair to say, a lot more difficult for investors than the year before. So its no surprise that this backdrop has led to a shake-up of Investment Adviser 100 Club membership for 2016.
The Club, details of which can be found at ia100.ftadviser.com, is reviewed annually and aims to highlight the best funds and investment trusts available to intermediaries by analysing short- and long-term performances, alongside other criteria.
Rather than just one standout firm, this year there are several. Last years leader, JPMorgan Asset Management (JPMAM), has been joined by Axa Investment Managers (IM), Fidelity International and Old Mutual Global Investors (OMGI) in having the most member funds. JPMAM led the way with seven funds in 2015; this year each of the quartet has four portfolios included in the Club.
As a result, JPMAM, Axa IM and Fidelity make repeat appearances in the Large Investment Group category, with OMGI again featuring in the Small to Mid Investment Group section. Jupiter Asset Management and Royal London Asset Management also return in the latter category.
However, in a sign of the extent to which fund performance has been recast over the past year, few individual portfolios make repeat appearances: just one in 10 vehicles return this year.
This has created opportunities for a number of groups to move up the rankings. Schroders is a group member for the first time in three years, while BlackRock makes its inaugural appearance. The extent of the outperformance displayed by BlackRocks two member funds was enough for it to pip other asset managers with two member portfolios.
This means there is no group membership for last years Large Investment Group winner, Baillie Gifford. Its number of member funds has halved from four to two.
It is a similar story in the Small to Mid Investment Group, where 2015 standout Henderson was beaten out by Royal London Asset Management on the basis of relative outperformance. This is the first time in the Clubs history that Henderson has not featured in a group category.
Meanwhile, Lindsell Train and Troy Asset Management return to the smaller grouping, having last featured in 2013 and 2012, respectively.
Of course, the volatility seen during the assessment period June 2015 to May 2016 has already been surpassed by that experienced in the aftermath of the UK referendum vote. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Property sector, with multiple funds having suspended trading entirely in July. As it happens, none of those portfolios had strong enough performances prior to this to qualify for this years Club.
One vehicle, L&G UK Property, has seen its value slashed in an attempt to stave off redemptions. But the fact that it remains open, coupled with its prior performance, meant it was still eligible for inclusion at the time of writing.
A panel of fund selection experts due to be announced shortly will decide which is the best fund or group in each category later this summer.
An Essex man found guilty of orchestrating a boiler room fraud is among the National Crime Agencys wanted fraudsters.
Levi John Coyle, 36, of Colchester, is wanted by the City of London Police for fraud which he was found guilty of despite failing to appear at court.
Coyle claimed to be a broker while selling fake shares and defrauding investors out of 700,000 between 2009 and 2010.
He cold-called victims to offer stock market shares at discounted prices or for sought-after shares that were not at the time available to the general public to buy.
After paying money victims never received any share certificates and the proceeds were laundered by Coyle.
Coyle was sentenced in his absence at the Old Bailey in September 2013 to six years imprisonment for conspiracy to defraud, fraud by false representation and money laundering.
Joseph Ford, of the City of London Police fraud investigation team, said: We are calling upon the public for their assistance in locating Coyle.
Coyle must accept the consequences of his crimes, face the courts and begin his jail term handed to him in his absence.
As well as Coyle the NCAs list, drawn up with the help of City of London Police, features Sandeep Arora, 42, who is wanted in connection with the evasion of more than 4.5m VAT and film tax from HMRC and is believed to be in India.
Between 2007 and 2011, Arora is alleged to have set up a production company with offices in central London while he lived in Beckton and made the VAT and film tax claims for films called Billy the Beagle, London Dreams, Kuan Bola, Aagosh, Trapped and Kia the Dream Girl, but they either didnt exist at all or he had no involvement with the productions.
Also wanted is Alex Mckenzie, 33, of London, who is wanted for a range of fraud offences including obtaining credit cards, bank accounts, and loans in his partners parents names, and two former partners names with losses totalling more than 300,000.
In order to perpetuate his frauds, and deceive former partners, police say McKenzie claimed to work for MI6 and provided forged documents, uniform, and identification of his various pseudonyms.
Donald Toon, director of the NCAs economic crime command, said: The annual losses to the UK from fraud are estimated to be more than 190bn.
Behind this headline figure lie the actions of criminals like the wanted fraudsters highlighted in this appeal, who have caused distress and loss to people and businesses up and down the country.
Law enforcement cannot tackle this problem alone. It is only by working together, individuals, law enforcement, Government and the private sector using structures like the Joint Fraud Task Force that we can protect the UK against fraud.
damian.fantato@ft.com
Andrew Bailey, who took on the role of chief executive of the Financial Conduct Authority on 1 July, has revealed the part played by the Retail Distribution Review in creating the advice gap.
At the FCAs annual public meeting, he said while the RDR achieved the objective of removing opaque charges and raising professional standards of intermediaries, it caused advisers to pull away or make their service too expensive for one-off or limited advice.
Last year, the regulator reported that in 2007, two-thirds of retail investment products were sold with professional advice. This conjunction of professional advice and product sales is also a feature in other countries, it added.
However, in recent years there was a decline in the number of financial advisers offering professional advice - from around 26,000 in 2011 to 24,000 in 2014.
The FCAs product sales data suggested the proportion of retail investment products - including pensions, retirement income products and investments - sold without advice has increased, from around 40 per cent in 2011 to 2012 to around two thirds in 2014 to 2015.
Mr Baileys comments came four months after his predecessor, acting chief executive Tracey McDermott, acknowledged the RDR led to banks leaving the sector, making it harder for the less-affluent to seek advice.
Speaking at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre this morning (19 July), Mr Bailey also said he was confident that the Financial Advice Market Review would help plug the advice gap.
Speaking in his third week at the helm of the City watchdog, Mr Bailey, who was previously chief executive of the Prudential Regulation Authority, said the regulator was already implementing proposals put forward by the FAMR to bring advice back to the mass market.
To provide greater certainty for advisers regarding their future liability, while maintaining robust consumer protections, the FAMR made various recommendations for the FCA to consider in its review of how the Financial Service Compensation Scheme is funded.
The review also highlighted the increasing role that technology can play in creating a more engaging, cost-effective advice market. It recommended that the FCA extend the work of Project Innovate and establish a unit to help firms develop their automated advice models.
Mr Bailey said the regulator has already set up a unit for firms looking at low cost automated solutions, along with the creation of a new FAMR working group.
I can assure you as we take them [FAMR proposals] forward we will want to be consulting actively so we can get them in the best place they can be, he commented.
The challenge for me is to get the FCA firing on all four cylinders.
I was fortunate to grow up as a kid on a ranch, said Norm Glaser once in an interview. Ranching was one part of Glasers life that also included serving in the state Legislature for 24 years, supporting agriculture and education for Elko residents.
Norman Glaser was born April 4, 1921, to Clarence and Kathryn Glaser in Elko. The Glaser ranching family lived in Halleck for two generations and Norm and his brother, Arthur, grew up on the ranch and went to school in Halleck
Norm graduated from Elko County High School in 1939 along with lifelong friends Dr. Thomas Hood, Leo Puccinelli and Jack Griswold. He attended Oklahoma State University and earned a degree in agricultural engineering in 1943. That same year he married Nelda Lancaster and enlisted in the Navy during World War II.
After the war, he and Nelda moved to Halleck where they raised their children, Steven, Brent and Sharon. With his father and brother, they formed Glaser Land and Livestock Company.
Norm began public service as a member of the Elko County School Board before being elected to the state Assembly as a Democrat in 1960 serving until 1973. As Assemblyman, Norm was Speaker pro tem and was chairman of the Education and Ways and Means committees, supporting the Greenbelt Amendments tax incentives for farmers.
In 1976, Glaser was elected to the state Senate and served two terms. There, his Bill 398 sparked the Sagebrush Rebellion where western states sought more authority and control over federal lands
In 1992, Norm and Art were named Ranchers of the Year along with their livestock company as Outstanding Nevada Ranch. Norm also served as director of the Nevada Cattlemens Association and president of the Nevada Farm Bureau.
In Elko, Norm was one of the founding members of Great Basin College, was on the board of directors for the Elko Senior Citizens Center and a member of the VFW and Rotary.
Members of the Northeastern Nevada Historical Society, Norm, Art and Chach Evans restored and donated the Halleck Bar to the museum in 1970 upon the condition that a party would be held with Beefeaters Gin served each year, which has become an annual event and includes a toast to the donors.
New Financial Conduct Authority chief executive Andrew Bailey has said he will not have a particularly different approach to his predecessor.
Martin Wheatley stood down as FCA chief executive last year after former chancellor George Osborne told him his contract would not be renewed when it expired.
Mr Wheatley, who famously said he would shoot first and ask questions later, was first replaced by interim chief executive Tracey McDermott and then by former Prudential Regulation Authority chief executive Mr Bailey, who took charge of the FCA at the start of this month.
But speaking at a press conference after todays (19 July) FCA annual public meeting, where Mr Bailey announced a review of the regulators mission, he said he was not prompted by the fact he disagreed with his predecessor.
He said: The mission is not about heavy touch regulation or light touch regulation. There is no agenda there. I have got no different agenda than Martin Wheatley on that front.
The mission is about getting a philosophical base for how we choose what we do.
Martin Wheatley made some comments about shooting which I have already said I dont agree with.
I talk to him a lot and I dont think he had an agenda about light touch or heavy touch regulation.
The reason I say that about Martin Wheatley is not because I am swinging to some other end of the pendulum.
We have had those big swings and they are not conducive towards a stable institutional structure.
Mr Bailey also addressed the issue of the Financial Services Compensation Scheme levy, which the FCA is currently reviewing.
He said: I would say recent experiences have asked some very hard questions about how we fund the FSCS.
We want to have FSCS protection in place but it is also clear that the question of who pays and how it is paid bring to mind a range of systems.
He said the FCA will consider all proposals before forming a view on how the compensation scheme should be funded.
One of the most popular proposals for reform is the introduction of a product levy but the FCA has already ruled this out as an option in the current review because this would require legislation, which would put it outside the scope of the study.
Mobile phone operators must fulfil their promises to improve 4G coverage across Wales and reduce the number of not-spots affecting farm businesses, say union leaders.
Farm leaders, ministers, Ofcom and representatives from the four mobile phone operators EE, O2, Vodafone and Three held talks to discuss plans to increase poor mobile signal coverage across Wales.
The briefing at the Farmers Union of Wales (FUW) stand at the Royal Welsh Show on Tuesday (19 July) was told that operators were seeking to increase 4G mobile coverage to more than 90% of the UK by 2017.
See also: Rural phone coverage worse than broadband
Data from Ofcoms recent Connected Nation report shows that outdoor voice 2G and 3G services by all four operators can be reached by 93% of Wales.
However, coverage on A and B roads by the four operators is around 50%, with only one operator reaching 76%.
Wales has about the same level of data not-spots areas where there is little or no mobile phone coverage as the UK overall, with 21% of the landmass not covered by a data service operator.
Paul James, of O2, said mobile phone coverage was being constrained by planning issues, especially limits on the size of masts, and bureaucracy at the Assembly.
However, this year EE has deployed a new permanent 4G mast, which allowed visitors to access free wi-fi at the showground in Builth Wells, Powys.
Brian Thomas, FUW deputy president, said the farming industry was increasingly reliant on reliable mobile phone access to ensure access to 21st century services.
Its very important for us as farmers to have access to the internet through our mobile phones, he added.
We have got the BCMS (British Cattle Movement Service), SFP (single farm payment) and EID. All of these things are online.
Appropriate mobile phone coverage is needed, especially if no broadband service is accessible.
Mobile phone summit
Wales Office minister Guto Bebb revealed a further summit would take place this autumn to discuss how to improve mobile phone coverage in Wales.
He said a multi-billion pound investment by operators would improve mobile phone coverage over the next few years.
The permanent mast which has been established at the showground is an example of what can be done, he added.
Its not just there for the show, but is an example of an improvement to the area.
During the four-day show, farmers highlighted areas in Wales on a map where there was still either no broadband, no mobile phone signal, or no broadband and mobile phone signal (See photo).
BT broadband commitment
Meanwhile, at a CLA Breakfast briefing on Tuesday, about 60% of an audience of 50 farmers and landowners raised their hands when asked if they felt their broadband service was inadequate.
Alwen Williams, BT director for Wales, said superfast broadband was now available in 50% of homes and businesses in rural Wales.
However, she was confident that 96% of homes and businesses in Wales would have access to superfast broadband (speeds of 30MB or above) by next summer.
Mrs Williams said her company was committed to finding the remaining 4% with no access to broadband, which includes many farmers. We will never say no to any community that wants faster broadband.
'Homeland' Season 6 Air Date, Spoilers, News & Update: Carrie's Daughter Frannie Grows Up And Becomes A More Prominent Character
"Homeland" Season 6 is currently in development. The next season will feature more changes for Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) as well as her daughter, Frannie.
Through the years, Carrie has undergone a lot of struggles. Despite trying to live a normal life previously, she realized that she is very much needed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and still has more to contribute.
"Homeland" Season 6 is expected to feature more of Carrie's special talents, as well as her endeavors with her bipolar disorder. Furthermore, "Homeland" Season 6 will present her daughter, Frannie, all grown up and having a more prominent presence on the show.
TVLine stated that Frannie will be a major recurring character in "Homeland" Season 6. Carrie's daughter will be four years old in the new season, set in New York City. The mother and child will be living in Brooklyn and Frannie will most likely be shown interacting with her environment and the people in it.
Casting is currently underway for the role of the young girl in "Homeland" Season 6.
CinemaBlend noted that Frannie will most likely be spending a lot of time with Carrie's sister in "Homeland" Season 6, since she will have to be out frequently to solve cases and search for terrorists.
Frannie is the third child of Carrie and Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), who was killed before she was born. Carrie and Frannie has a special relationship which will be shown more in "Homeland" Season 6, and there was one point when Carrie seriously thought about drowning her own baby daughter.
In the meantime, Carrie is still trying to determine whether she can continue living a normal life later on.
Having Frannie with her in "Homeland" Season 6may actually change her perspective much, especially when her maternal instincts will be tapped every now and then. Having a more active role in raising Franniein "Homeland" Season 6 change how Carrie does things at work.
Deadline reported that "Homeland" Season 6 will proceed to a seventh and eighth season after the network previously ordered two more seasons. This can mean that the show may see Frannie grow up to her teens or even adult stages.
The "Homeland" Season 6 story may even come full circle by showing how Frannie also inherited some of her mother's best traits that would make her a great candidate for the agency after her mother retires.
Claire Danes and showrunner Alex Gansa are reportedly already prepared for the next three seasons.
"Homeland" Season 6 is set to launch in January 2017 on Showtime. More updates and details are expected soon.
'Street Fighter 5' Latest News & Update: New DLC Contains New Costumes, New Stages!
Some new and amazing news has come out for all the fans and avid gamers of "Street Fighter 5" as new downloadable content has just been available for purchase. Creator of "Street Fighter 5" Capcom has announced this brand new downloadable content through their game blog .
The downloadable content of "Street Fighter 5," which is called Capcom Pro Tour Premier Package, has been a buzzed after its release. If gamers favor the heroes Chun-Li and Cammy, there are new available costumes for the two characters called "Capcom Cup Collection."
According to Capcom's "Street Fighter 5" blog, the two costumes exude elegance. Fans have speculated that it will totally match the atmosphere of the new downloadable content for "Street Fighter 5" game..
Each of the character costume in "Street Fighter 5" game is available for purchase for $5.99. A new costume will also be available for download this year but Capcom has yet to disclose whether it would be for Chun-Li or for Cammy or for another character in "Street Fighter 5" game.
There is also a new stage in the newest "Street Fighter 5" downloadable content called "Ring Of Destiny." According to reports, the downloadable content will cost $9.99.
However, Capcom has made sure that the loyal fans of "Street Fighter 5" will only have the best and so the Capcom Pro Tour Premier Package is being sold in a bundle for only $25. The downloadable content bundle will include not only the new costumes of Chun-Li and Cammy but also an exclusive Capcom Pro Tour-themed color option for all 22 characters in "Street Fighter 5" game.
The bundle also includes two new exclusive titles "Capcom Cup 2016" and "Capcom Pro Tour 2016." However, that is not the rest of it because news have been circulating that a new "Street Fighter 5" downloadable content will again be coming soon and, this time, it will feature nostalgic items from the past "Street Fighter" video games, more specifically the second and third instalments.
Ben Higgins, Lauren Bushnell Engaged: The Bachelor 2016 Couple Wedding Finally Cancelled? Jojo Fletchers Ex To Focus More on Politics?
Ben Higgins and Lauren Bushnell are hitting the headlines again after the couple hosted their engagement party last week. However, recent reports are suggesting that "The Bachelor" 2016 couple are totally not going to tie the knot yet as Jojo Fletcher's ex has to focus on his political career.
Ben Higgins cancels wedding with Lauren Bushnell for political career
Hall of Fame Magazine has reported that Lauren Bushnell will have to wait longer before she can finally say "I do" with Ben Higgins in front of the altar. Reports have it that the wedding preparation is currently on a halt after "The Bachelor" 2016 decided to run for a local office in Colorado.
As a matter of fact, Lauren Bushnell has previously revealed to PEOPLE Magazine that she and Ben Higgins do not have concrete wedding plans as of yet. "The Bachelor" 2016 winner added that there have been talks already but everything remains unsure as of yet.
It can be recalled that "The Bachelor" 2016 star Ben Higgins has reportedly launched his campaign to secure a seat in the Colorado House of Representatives. According to insiders, the fiance of Lauren Bushnell is making use of his popularity to enter the world of politics.
Ben Higgins, Lauren Bushnell to have a scripted wedding for reality show
With these reports, followers of Ben Higgins and Lauren Bushnell cannot help but speculate that the wedding is not happening anymore as "The Bachelor" 2016 star has to focus more on his political plight. However, some are also saying that the two are just waiting for the premiere of their own Freeform reality show titled as "Ben and Lauren: Happily Ever After," which is said to feature their loves as a couple after the Final Rose ceremony.
Rumors are rife that Ben Higgins and Lauren Bushnell are definitely going to have a scripted wedding for the "Ben and Lauren: Happily Ever After" show. Though this could possibly be true, "The Bachelor" 2016 couple remains tightlipped on these issues until now. Hence, fans should take the rumors with a grain of salt until proven true.
July 18
Raymond Espeland, 47, of Elko was arrested at 398 Hot Springs Road for attempted murder and battery with a deadly weapon. Bail: $150,000
Alyssa M. Haney, 24, of Elko was arrested at 568 Spring Valley Court for failure to appear on a traffic citation. Bail: $830
Alberta S. V. Johnson, 33, of Boise, Idaho, was arrested at 1385 U.S. Highway 93 for two counts of resisting a public official. Bail: $2,280
Thomas D. Jordan IV, 28, of Elko was arrested at 1660 Mountain City Highway for failure to appear after bail for a misdemeanor. Bail: $415
Dion M. La Rue, 36, of Elko was arrested at 2050 Idaho St. for trespassing. Bail: $192
Ryan J. Macias, 23, of Elko was arrested at the 700-block of Fourth Street for disturbing the peace, possession of a dangerous drug without a prescription and buying, possessing or receiving stolen property. Bail: $6,495
Christopher P. Wilkins, 47, of Elko was arrested at the Elko County Jail for failure to appear after bail for a felony. Bail: $5,000
'Teen Mom' 2 Season 7 Latest Spoilers, News & Update: Jenelle Evans Accidentally Announces Third Pregnancy? Read Post Here!
Announcing that you're going to have a baby is such a magical moment, but not if you're "Teen Mom 2" Season 7 star Jenelle Evans.
"Teen Mom 2" Season 7 star Jenelle Evans shared her frustrations in social media towards people who she felt were disrespecting her.
READ: 'Teen Mom' 2 Spoilers, News & Update: Show Canceled After Season 7?
In a since deleted Instagram post, "Teen Mom 2" Season 7 star Jenelle Evans seemingly revealed that she's pregnant with her third child, reports The Ashley's Reality Roundup.
"I dont understand what is 'disappointing' or 'sad'?! Why not ask if Im ok from the car accident?! Why not be concerned about my health?! I want privacy," "Teen Mom 2" Season 7 star Jenelle Evans wrote. "All of you disgust me. Its all about gossip these days And everyone wonders why Im so private lately?! Because all of you are up my a** and so nosy its unbelievable."
READ: 'Teen Mom' 2 Season 7 Latest Spoilers, News & Update: Kailyn Lowry Romancing Another Girl? See Photo Here!
When Teen Mom 2" Season 7 star Jenelle Evans deleted her Instagram post, it appears like she revealed something personal in the heat of the moment, leaving her with no choice but to delete her post but it was a little bit too late as some people have already managed to save her social media rant.
But just when you thought that the controversies in "Teen Mom" 2 is too much for the viewers, the ratings of "Teen Mom" 2 keeps on getting higher and higher giving it a much comfortable spot to be renewed for more seasons.
READ: 'Teen Mom' 2 Season 7 Spoilers, News & Update: Show in Jeopardy Due To Poor Ratings?
Do you think Teen Mom 2" Season 7 star Jenelle Evans is really pregnant with her third child? Let us know in the comment section below!
'Grand Theft Auto 6' Release Date, News & Update: Full Details Will Be Revealed in E3 2017?
With "Grand Theft Auto 5" still living up to the hype, nothing much is said about "Grand Theft Auto 6" except for some updates here and there.
Rockstar Games made sure that fans will focus on "Grand Theft Auto 5" for now and didn't reveal more important details about "Grand Theft Auto 6."
READ: 'Grand Theft Auto 6' Release Date, News & Update: What We Know So Far!
One of the things that we're aware about "Grand Theft Auto 6" is that it's going to have a UK setting this time around, particularly London.
But just as fans thought that "Grand Theft Auto 6" will steer clear from the usual American location, it was then revealed that San Diego will be a part of "Grand Theft Auto 6."
Although nothing much is said about "Grand Theft Auto 6," it's existence is good enough to start the "Grand Theft Auto 6" hype.
READ: 'Grand Theft Auto 6' Release Date, News & Update: Game Setting Revealed! Other Features & Details Unveiled
Fans were expecting to learn more about "Grand Theft Auto 6" during the recently concluded E3 2016, but they were left without an inch of detail regarding the highly-anticipated "Grand Theft Auto 6."
But just because Rockstar Games didn't touch the"Grand Theft Auto 6" subject at E3 2016, doesn't mean that they have no plans in sharing some important announcements regarding "Grand Theft Auto 6."
There is a big possibility that Rockstar Games will finally unveil some amazing "Grand Theft Auto 6" details in E3 2017.
READ: 'Grand Theft Auto 6' Release Date, News & Update: Plot Details Revealed!
Rockstar Games didn't mean to keep all the juicy "Grand Theft Auto 6" details from the public, but for now the focus is all about "Grand Theft Auto 5" and they want to keep it that way for as long as they can.
The latest "Grand Theft Auto 6" release date rumor points out to a 2018 launch.
The "Grand Theft Auto 6" release date rumor was based on the fact that "Grand Theft Auto" usually has a five-year gap between games.
Since "Grand Theft Auto 5" debuts back in 2013, there is a high chance that "Grand Theft Auto 6" will be launched in 2018.
Even with the 2018 "Grand Theft Auto 6" release date news, multiple reports also suggest that "Grand Theft Auto 6" could be released in 2020.
iPhone 7 Release Date, News & Update: New Apple Device Leak Shows iPhone 7, Pro, Plus Featuring Dual Cameras
With the impending release of one of Apple's most loved products this fall, it's no surprise that more and details about the seventh iteration of the iPhone 7, Pro, Plus are surfacing from various sources. The latest one comes via a source that has leaked photographs of the mobile devices, shedding light on what is to visually expect once the iPhone 7, Pro, Plus come out later this year.
The new leak isn't much, but it does imply several things. The leak is a photo of the iPhone 7, Pro, Plus smartphones from Apple, showing their differences in terms of size.
The iPhone 7 looks like its brother, the iPhone 6, while the Plus and Pro models have a 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch screen, respectively. According to 9 to 5 Mac, the upcoming iPhone 7, Pro, Plus will have 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB worth of storage, respectively, which means more space for data, music, videos, and whatever else one would like to store handy in his or her mobile phone.
At the back of the iPhone 7, Pro, Plus handheld devices, an "S" branding can be seen in the photos, implying that Apple may have shifted their iPhone refresh cycle to every three years for major updates. Unlike its iPhone 7 and Plus siblings, the Pro also has what looks like a special connector or Smart Connector such as that of the latest iPads.
This curious new iPhone 7 leak stomps on our 'Space Black' dreams https://t.co/roD32Hik2B pic.twitter.com/4yLP6SSjVp The Next Web (@TheNextWeb) July 17, 2016
More interestingly is the dual camera that can be found at the back of the iPhone Pro model, which showcases two cameras seemingly of the same size. But why the need for two cameras? According to Tech Crunch, dual lenses can work together to deliver better images, from better background focus to clearer depth of field. In addition, two lenses can make for better light management, color fidelity, and HDR performance.
Lastly, the iPhone 7, Pro, Plus models will come in a pebble-like design with smoother, rounded edges for a more comfortable grip. The antenna lines have also been redesigned, and there is a clear absence of the headphone jack.
Most of the findings remain to be rumors, so fans will have to wait for the iPhone 7, Pro, Plus to be released later this year.
'Guardians of the Galaxy 2' Release Date, News, Update: Nebula Switching Teams as Guardians Expand, Adds Mantis to Roster
Earlier this month, "Guardians of the Galaxy 2" director and writer James Gunn began the 300-day countdown to the release of the highly anticipated sequel to the 2014 hit that brought "Parks and Recreation" star Chris Pratt to the front and center as one of the newer Marvel superhero recruits (alongside "Ant-Man"'s Paul Rudd and "Doctor Strange"'s Benedict Cumberbatch).
Gunn remains tight-lipped about the storyline of the second film, which was rumored to shed light on Star-Lord/Peter Quill's biological father, whose "absentee father" status was glazed over in the first film.
The concept art for "Guardians of the Galaxy 2" was recently released, showing the heroes in a fighting stance in front of a bright, explosive backdrop, which implies another war against Marvel big bad Thanos, or one of his minions. Based on the concept art alone, there are a few changes in the lineup.
First being that Yondu (Michael Rooker) gets a starring role, albeit behind the main Guardians. Secondly, Gamora (Karen Gillan), step-sister to Gamora (Zoe Saldana) gets featured a bit more prominently this time, as it seems she has switched sides to #TeamGuardians. Saldana confirms this to IGN.
Describing Nebula as "teeny," "hateful," "resentful and bitter," Saldana says that Gamora may be reluctantly joining #TeamGuardians because she finally gets fed up being pushed around by the guy in the chair (Thanos). Saldana admitted that the movie will give Nebula a chance to tell her story, of a "terrible life" growing up with a supervillain.
"Obviously, their relationship is very volatile," Saldana explained. "Were starting somewhere very crazy but appropriate given where we had ended things off in the first installment. So Thanos is definitely spoken about not highly."
Given those details, it seems that "Guardians of the Galaxy 2" will revolve around the theme of family, tackling issues about Quill's father and Nebula's lack thereof. Meanwhile, another addition to #TeamGuardians (who hopefully doesn't have daddy issues), is Mantis, played by Pom Klementieff, who executive producer Jonathan Schwartz describes as very socially awkward.
Too bad we have to wait for May 5, 2017 to see the interactions of these new faces once "Guardians of the Galaxy 2" hits theaters.
CSULB alum wins gold at the 38th Long Beach Marathon which was his first
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Four people injured in a head-on collision on Highway 20 near Blodgett Monday afternoon were being treated Tuesday at Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center in Corvallis.
Nicolas Derbaum, 25, of Corvallis was airlifted to the hospital with critical injuries from the scene of the accident, which happened about 4:40 p.m. Monday at milepost 35 on the two-lane highway between Corvallis and the coast. Derbaum was listed in serious condition Tuesday afternoon, according to representatives at Good Samaritan.
Three women from Gig Harbor, Washington Amy Breeze, 54; Alma Morgan, 75; and Katherine Harris, 58 were transported to Good Samaritan via ground ambulance with serious injuries. Breeze and Morgan were considered to be in fair condition, while Harris was in critical condition Tuesday afternoon, hospital representatives said.
The four victims were identified in a statement released Tuesday by the Benton County Sheriffs Office. Updated information on their medical conditions was not immediately available Tuesday afternoon.
According to the sheriffs statement, investigators believe Derbaum was driving east on Highway 20 when his 2003 Chevrolet Impala sedan crossed the centerline and crashed into a westbound 2007 Lexus sport-utility vehicle driven by Breeze, with the other two women riding as passengers.
The Lexus rolled once and came to rest on the north side of the road, with the Chevy on the opposite side. Both vehicles sustained severe front-end damage.
Crews from the Blodgett and Philomath fire departments extracted the four victims from their vehicles. Derbaum was flown to Good Samaritan aboard a REACH Air Medical Services helicopter, while Corvallis Fire Department ambulances transported the injured women.
The Benton County Multi-Agency Traffic Collision Investigation Team examined the scene, and deputies are continuing to investigate the crash. Anyone with information about the incident is asked to call Detective Sgt. David Peterson at 541-766-6820.
The highway was closed for about four hours.
Units from the Alsea Fire Department and Philomath Police Department also responded to the scene, and the Oregon Department of Transportation assisted with traffic control.
The presidents of Oregon's public universities have created a new organization, complete with an executive director, in part to ensure that the state's institutions of higher learning present a united front at the Legislature.
The organization, aptly dubbed the Oregon Public Universities Council of Presidents, last week announced its hiring of an executive director: Dana Richardson, deputy director of the state's Higher Education Coordinating Commission and a former legislative director for Senate President Peter Courtney. (The Oregonian first reported on the existence of the council in a story last week.)
The move to create the council makes sense, especially now that the state's board of higher education is no more and each of Oregon's public universities and colleges is governed by its own institutional board. Richardson certainly seems qualified to assist the presidents, with her experience with the commission and her work to help craft the legislation that essentially broke apart the Oregon University System and paved the way for the individual governing boards.
The jury still is out on whether Oregon higher education is better served under this new structure. But one of the worries, that each school would beat its own path to the Legislature with competing funding proposals, has not yet come to pass, in part because the presidents worked to present a united front to the 2015 session. Formalizing the council and naming an executive director should help to preserve that united front, and that will be helpful. The council also gives the presidents a platform from which to respond to other public-policy issues, such as the role of the state's universities and colleges in reaching Oregon's educational goals.
Because the council is a "voluntary association" among the presidents, there's some question as to whether it's a public body that's subject to the state's open meetings and public meeting laws.
Let's cut through the legal smoke: Regardless of how you interpret the law, the council should consider itself a public body. Its meetings should be open. Its records should be public. It's hard to imagine what sort of issues the council would consider that wouldn't be of considerable public interest.
And, frankly, the more the council conducts its affairs in the open, the more it will be perceived as an authority on Oregon's higher education the challenges it faces and the promises it offers to the state's residents. From time to time, university presidents lament that the contributions their institutions make to the state often are underappreciated. The council could help to reverse that but not if it retreats into the shadows.
Refugee statistics in NRW : 188 underage girls married
Dusseldorf A state parliamentarian expresses concern over the number of marriages involving minors within the refugee population. Legally, the marriages must be recognized.
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Amongst the refugee population in North Rhine Westphalia (NRW), 188 of the married females are minors. The information was obtained by the FDP party in an inquiry to NRW authorities. Three of them, two Syrians and one Iraqi are 14-years-old. According to the State Chancellery, the underage marriages do not break current German laws if they took place in countries where the marriages were legal.
Most of the married minor females who came to Germany in 2015 were from Syria (113), followed by Iraq (23) and Afghanistan (21). Others came from Serbia, Macedonia, Georgia, Albania, Eritrea, Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Iran, Lebanon and Tajikistan. At the time of their registration in NRW, 18 of the married girls were 15-years-old, 54 were 16-years-old and 113 were 17-years-old.
188 cases in NRW alone is concerning, said Susanne Schneider, state parliament member from the FDP party, representing womens issues. The well-being of the girls must take precedent over the recognition of the underage marriages which took place in foreign countries.
In fact, there is apparently not much of a possibility to refuse recognition of these marriages. Head of the State Chancellery, Franz-Josef Lersch-Mense refers to German international private law. Even marriages involving minors must be recognized in Germany when they are legally binding in another country.
Refugee asylum process : Anger at appointments falling through
Bonn Chickenpox and failed communication contribute to a testy situation at the asylum bureau in Bonn.
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Disappointment is written all over the faces of the refugees. 35 men and women as well as four children, including three babies, have been waiting in the Monday morning heat in front of the Ermekeilkaserne (former Ermekeil military barracks). They dont want to give up hope that they will be let in for their appointment at the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (Bamf), which has established a bureau at the former barracks. All of them have received written confirmation of their appointments for this day. But the security workers do not let them through. The barracks, which also serve as emergency refugee housing, have been closed for two weeks due to an outbreak of chickenpox.
The mood outside is heated. Police are brought in to keep the situation calm. A tour bus waits on the street. It is there to bring the refugees back to their housing in Numbrecht, around 50 kilometers northeast of Bonn. But they refuse to get in the bus. Agnes von Kempis lives near the former barracks and is distributing water and bananas. Otherwise no one is taking care of them, she says. She complained to the city about the situation there. Many refugees waited on her property. On Sunday, there were more than 70 people there and again, they had to leave without any process having taken place. Last week there was a similar situation. I dont know why authorities are leaving the people out there for hours on the street.
Benjamin Hahn is the spokesperson for the corresponding district government in Arnsberg. He says, There is seemingly something in the communication which has flat-out gone wrong. He adds, The news that the building has been shut down due to a chicken pox outbreak apparently did not reach the bus drivers in both of these cases. They should have brought the refugees instead to a shelter in Cologne, from where they could be transferred to Ermekeilkaserne tomorrow.
Background: Because the appointments are so tightly scheduled, authorities are busing in refugees to stay overnight in shelters close to the Bamf bureau on the evening before they have their time slot. The refugees who were asked to come to Bonn by Bamf for their appointments were to stay in housing at the former barracks, but were blocked due to the chicken pox. Because that didnt work, their appointments were given to others.
A Syrian woman, aged 29, shows her confirmed appointment for Monday in Bonn. We were promised on Sunday, we would know Monday early, when we would be driven again to Ermekeilkaserne. When we didnt hear anything, we got into some taxis and came here on our own, said the woman in good German. They paid 100 euro per taxi.
Water quality : Rotter Lake deemed safe for swimmers
Troisdorf Although water samples were rated only sufficient, officials say water at Rotter Lake in Troisdorf is safe for swimming.
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Rotter See (Rotter Lake) has landed in last place in a water analysis study of lakes in North Rhine Westphalia (NRW). Despite the worst water quality of all tested lakes in NRW, Rhine-Sieg County sees no danger for swimmers. Recently, the lake had received a sufficient rating from the European Environment Agency (EEA). It was the only one of 106 lakes in NRW to receive this rating, the data relating to the past year.
According to the State Office for Nature, Environment and Consumer Protection of NRW (Lanuv), a sufficient rating means the water is adequate from a hygiene standpoint. The Rotter Lake is the only lake in the district which is labeled as a swimming lake.
At least five times a year, water samples are taken by the county health department and tested for E.coli bacteria and other contaminants. E.coli belong to the intestinal flora of humans and animals. That means if one finds a certain amount, indicating fecal contamination, it can be disease carrying. In 2011 and 2012, the lake was still classified as excellent. In 2013 it was only rated good and in the past two years just sufficient.
There are different views about the water quality issues. According to the city of Troisdorf, it is partly due to improperly collected water samples. The biologist responsible, Thomas Petruszek told General-Anzeiger, The samples have not been taken properly. He goes on to explain that the samples were not taken far enough away from the shore and that means the values are distorted. Waterside area contamination is higher due to duck droppings and garbage. Since the German Lifeguard Association (DLRG) has taken over the measuring, the values are now accurate, says the biologist.
County spokesperson Katja Eschmann confirmed that there was a change in who is collecting samples and says that they are now gathered by the DLRG from a boat. But she adds that in the years when the water was rated excellent, those samples were taken close to the shore. She believes the reason for the poorer water quality is due to human behavior, people leaving their garage behind.
Even sunscreen and dandruff can contribute to water quality problems, in addition to waterfowl leaving their excrement. The problem increases when people feed the animals. Even though signs are put up to not feed the animals, this cannot be controlled. In the summer, the city removes the excrement from the beach before each weekend.
For the future, the county sees a positive development of the water quality. Eschmann says measurements are pointing again in the right direction and a good rating is hoped for by next year.
Press card used by French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery during the Spanish Civil War. AFP
The press card used by the French novelist and pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupery during the Spanish Civil War has been discovered by historian and researcher Policarpo Sanchez.
According to his press card, Saint-Exupery was checked into the Hotel Florida in Madrid where US writers Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn were staying
The author of The Little Prince, who disappeared over the Mediterranean on a reconnaissance mission in July 1944, covered the Spanish Civil War for a number of French newspapers. His press card was not found earlier because it wasnt with the other foreign figures who came to Spain during this period, such as Ernest Hemingway or the photographers Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, says Maria Jose Turrion, assistant director of the General Archives of the Spanish Civil War, in Salamanca.
The press card was issued on April 16, 1937 by the Republican Ministry of Propaganda. At the time, forces loyal to the democratically elected government were defending the capital from the Nationalist forces half of which was under the command of General Francisco Franco and all journalists working in Republican-held territory had to sign in with this department.
Saint-Exupery's press card photo AFP
When Francos troops conquered Madrid in April 1939, all Republican documents were sent to Salamanca in boxes. It's not unusual that Saint-Exuperys press card turned up somewhere else because everything was scattered and there is not much thats complete, says Turrion. We have identified the main box of press cards belonging to writers and journalists. Press cards were issued by the Ministry of Propaganda allowing them to be at the front taking photographs and gathering news.
The French writer was 36 when he arrived in Spain and signed up as a pilot and writer, although a mistake in translation meant he was registered as a clerk and pilot the French word for writer is ecrivain and the Spanish word for clerk is escribano.
According to his press card, Saint-Exupery was checked into the Hotel Florida in Madrid where US writers Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn also stayed.
But despite being in the wrong box, Saint-Exuperys press card will remain where it was found. It doesnt make any difference, says Turrion. It has been registered on our website with the corresponding description.
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English version by Heather Galloway.
Article
Protecting the worlds oceans an important goal of Germanys climate diplomacy
The worlds oceans are vital to our survival. They regulate the global climate and are a source of food and income for billions of people. Only a very small part of the seas enjoys legal protection, however. Our diplomats are working in New York right now to change this state of affairs.
The Popular Party's Ana Pastor, the new speaker of Congress. J. J. Guillen
Spains parliament held its inaugural session on Tuesday at 10am, when 350 deputies and 266 senators began voting for the speakers of both houses following the repeat national election of June 26.
Ana Pastor of the Popular Party (PP) became the new speaker of Congress in a run-off vote held in the lower house shortly before noon. With 169 votes, she beat out the Socialist candidate, Patxi Lopez (155), who was the speaker in the previous, short-lived Congress.
I am happy but concerned. This will not be an easy term, said Pastor on Tuesday morning.
I am happy but concerned. This will not be an easy term
Ana Pastor, acting public works minister
But the new term begins with no clear picture of who will ultimately be the new prime minister. Although the most likely candidate is Mariano Rajoy, who has been at the helm of a caretaker government since the first inconclusive election of December 20, the conservative politician has yet to confirm that he will bid for the post.
Although his Popular Party (PP) emerged the winner on June 26 with 137 seats, it is still well short of the 176 required for a congressional majority. And so far, attempts at building coalitions with other parties have failed as they did earlier this year, leading to the fresh election.
At a meeting of top PP officials, participants emerged with the feeling that Rajoy is now ready to try to form a minority government rather than attempt a grand coalition with the Socialists (PSOE). Although he did not say so in so many words, Rajoy also suggested that his new government will undergo a generational change.
But the Socialist leader, Pedro Sanchez, on Monday insinuated that he might be open to attempting a parliamentary majority with Unidos Podemos and regional parties if Rajoy fails in his bid to be reinstated.
The 17 deputies from Catalan Republican Left (ERC) and Convergencia need to be taken out of limbo, he told a group of aides at a closed-door meeting, in a reference to Catalan nationalist parties.
If no agreements are reached this time round either, Spaniards could be facing a record third election within a year.
In the first address at the newly constituted chamber on Tuesday, Maria Teresa de Lara, the oldest member of Congress, asked her fellow deputies for a sense of responsibility and to set their sights high.
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Speakers
Pio Garcia Escudero is the new speaker of the Senate after receiving 151 favorable votes. In the lower house, PP candidate Ana Pastor received 169 votes in the first round, followed by the Socialist Patxi Lopez with 85. This triggered a run-off between the two candidates.
Pastor's candidacy was the result of a preliminary deal with the emerging Ciudadanos party over the speaker of Congress and the makeup of the Mesa del Congreso, the lower houses governing board.
Under the terms of the agreement, Rajoy put forward Pastor, a veteran party member and trusted aide of his. But her name only came forward after Rajoys two other suggestions were struck down by Ciudadanos. One was acting interior minister Jorge Fernandez Diaz, who was recently embroiled in a political scandal, and the second was PP Secretary General Maria Dolores de Cospedal, who is viewed as too partisan.
Meanwhile, Ciudadanos will get two seats on the Mesa, even though its election results (32) did not entitle the party to any. The Socialist Party (PSOE) and the anti-austerity Podemos each get two representatives, while the PP gets three.
This arrangement will only come to pass if other forces in Congress fail to come up with an alternative. This, however, would require a difficult combination of PSOE, Podemos and regional parties that defend independence from Spain in varying degrees.
Relations between the Socialists and Podemos, once considered potential partners in a leftist coalition, have been deteriorating since the December elections. The former have already stated that they will vote for their own candidate to head the lower chamber, Patxi Lopez who was speaker of the previous, short-lived Congress rather than for Podemos candidate, Xavier Domenech.
English version by Susana Urra.
NEW REPORT: Samsung Galaxy Note 7 to Come with Android 7 Nougat Features oi -Akansha Srivastava
Rumors continue to surface ahead of the launch of the much-awaited Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphone scheduled for August 2nd.
Now a new report has come which claims that Note 7 could launch running Android 7 out-of-the-box.
As per a new report by Phonearena sourcing Android Developers blog, states, "Google confirmed that a "consumer release" of Android 7 Nougat will be coming by the end of Summer, not in Autumn, hence there are chances that Note 7 could feature the same OS at the time of launch."
SEE ALSO: Samsung Galaxy Note 7 to feature USB Type-C port for quicker charging and faster data transfer
Well, only time will tell and confirm this as reports are also in that Android 7 Nougat could be released around mid-August and Galaxy Note 7 will also come in the market around same time, hence, the timeline definitely fits.
As per the rumors, the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 is expected to come with 5.7-inch Quad HD Super AMOLED curved dual edge display with 518PPI, and be powered by an Octa-Core Exynos 8 / Snapdragon 821 processor along with 6GB LPDDR4 RAM on board. It is expected to come with 64GB of inbuilt storage along with expandable memory option.
SEE ALSO: Samsung to Employ Force Touch Technology on Galaxy Note 7
Also it is to be believed, the Galaxy Note 7 will flaunt a 12MP rear camera with LED Flash and 5MP front camera. The rumor also suggests that this device will have IP68 certification, which means it will be water and dust resistant and will feature USB Type C port.
The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 will be introduced during the company's upcoming Unpacked Event, which will happen in New York City on August 2.
Best Mobiles in India
Meizu MX6 smartphone officially announced with 10-core mobile processor News oi -Sharath Gr
The Chinese smartphone company, Meizu is taking every possible step to beat the competition from its rivals, including locals as well as top tier ones.
The company today has unveiled its new flagship smartphone to take on the high-end smartphones of competitors such as Xiaomi and LeEco, which have been disrupting the market, not only in China but in India as well.
Meizu finally took the wraps off its much awaited and rumored smartphone, dubbed as Meizu MX6, the successor of Meizu MX 5 launched last year around the same time period.
The company today hosted a launch event in Beijing, China, where it launched the MX6 smartphone, the successor of last year's MX5.
The new smartphone, brings notable upgrades in specifications and features, to beat the competition from Xiaomi Mi5, LeEco Le Max 2 and OnePlus 3 among others in this segment.
Design and looks:
With metal clad smartphones now in trend, Meizu would not want the MX6 look old fashioned in front of its competitor.
It dons a metal body design that resembles closely to the company's previously launched Pro 6 smartphones.
The unibody design of the MX6 looks pretty, especially because the company has placed the antennae grid to the sides of the phone, making the rear panel plain and smooth.
Key specifications and features:
Speaking of the specifications, the MX6 features a 5.5-inch Full HD display offering 1080p resolution for good viewing experience. Though, we cannot comment on how bright, sharp and good the display is, until we use it!
As for processor, Meizu MX6 is powered by a 1.39 GHz deca-core MediaTek's Helio X20 chipset, paired with Mali-T880 GPU to take care of processing and ensure smooth performance of the device.
The deca-core processor on the phone will power it up to pit against the Snapdragon 820 CPU based Xiaomi Mi5, LeEco Le Max2, and OnePlus 3. There is 4GB of RAM and 32GB of expandable storage, clubbed with the chipset.
In the photography department, Meizu MX6 offers a 12MP primary camera with LED flash, PDAF and more, and an 8MP front-facing camera. The MX6 is runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow, topped with the company's own Flyme 5.2.2 OS, which brings additional apps and software features on table.
Also, there is a fingerprint scanner integrated within the mTouch home button of the device. Other features in the phone include a 4,000mAh battery with quick charge support (as they call it 'mCharge'), dual SIM support, 4G connectivity, and other standard connectivity options.
Accessorize it right!
Loop Jacket Smart Cover
Meizu has introduced Smart Cover with the MX6 called Loop Jacket. The Smart Cover essentially will offer a round clock display in the center and will alert user when there is a new notification arrives on the phone. It is announced at a price of 79CNY (Rs 800 approx.)
Lifeme BTS 30
At the same time, Meizu has also announced a bluetooth speaker as an addition to its accessory portfolio. Dubbed as Lifeme BTS 30, the speakers will be made available at 399CNY (Rs. 4,000 approximately).
Meizu MX6 - Pricing and availability:
Meizu has been at par with its rivals with aggressive pricing of its products. The MX6 smartphone is also priced strategically to give a tough competition to its rivals, though its price is higher than the last year's MX5. The Meizu MX6 has been priced at 1999CNY, translating to approximately Rs. 20,000. Further, the phone will come in four color variants including Gray, Silver White, Silver Black and Gold.
The phone will be available in China from July 30th, however, we currently have no official statement from the company about the India release so far, however, we'll find out soon. Stay tuned till then.
Best Mobiles in India
Venezuelans cross into Colombia to buy basic goods. Schneyder Mendoza (EFE)
More information Colombia y Venezuela pactan no permitir otro paso masivo en la frontera
Following two weeks that have seen chaotic scenes as tens of thousands of desperate Venezuelans cross into Colombia to buy food and medicine in short supply at home, the two countries have announced they are moving closer to reopening their borders indefinitely.
Were not going to have a repeat of the situation of the last few days, said Maria Angela Holguin, Colombias foreign minister, on Monday, adding: The next opening will be for good.
Venezuelas President Nicolas Maduro unilaterally closed the 2,000-kilometer border with Colombia in August last year. But as his countrys economic crisis deepens, growing numbers of people have been making their way into Colombia to buy basic goods no longer available in Venezuela.
The two countries will have to agree about how to counter smuggling across their 2,219 kilometer frontier
Before they were closed, more than 100,000 people a day used the two main crossings into Colombia, according to the Venezuelan government. That figure had shrunk to just 3,000 a day, many of them students and sick people given special day passes, according to nonprofit groups working in the region.
But on July 11, Colombia allowed thousands of people through its border crossing at Cucuta. The following weekend saw an estimated 130,000 Venezuelans enter over a two-day period.
Each of these openings has delayed negotiations, said Jose Guillermo Vielma Mora, governor of Venezuelas Tachira state, which borders Colombia.
More information Venezuela opens border crossing with Colombia for second weekend
He added that next weekend the Venezuelan authorities will try out registration systems to guarantee a proper opening. Neither country expects any further surprise arrivals. What has happened over recent days is that Venezuela invited its citizens to make the crossing, said Holguin.
She added that she would be meeting her Venezuelan counterpart, Delcy Rodriguez, but would not confirm where the encounter would take place, or if it would be on the August 4 date previously mentioned. The key issue both parties will have to agree on is how to counter smuggling across the 2,219-kilometer frontier, which runs north-south from the Caribbean down to the Amazon basin.
This is one of the conditions that will enable a later meeting between the two countries presidents, said Holguin.
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The 130,000 Venezuelans who last week flooded into Cucuta, in northeast Colombia, spent some $1.3 million.
The mass exodus has raised the question as to how many of the Venezuelans to have crossed over in the last two weeks have stayed in Colombia. Estimates suggest that around 70% of the more than 88,000 who crossed over into Cucuta on Sunday had returned to their home country. Holguin said Colombian police would be checking Venezuelans documents: We welcome foreigners whose papers are in order, but anybody else will be expelled.
English version by Nick Lyne.
KC-46 completes required flight tests
By 88th Air Base Wing Public Affairs, / Published July 18, 2016
WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio (AFNS) -- The KC-46 Pegasus program completed all flight tests required for the Milestone C production decision July 15 by offloading 1,500 pounds of fuel to an A-10 Thunderbolt II.
The successful A-10 mission was the last of six in-flight refueling demonstrations required before the tanker program can request approval from Frank Kendall, the under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, to award production Lots 1 and 2, totaling 19 KC-46A aircraft.
"It is great to see the KC-46 boom back in action and the program moving forward to a production decision" said Col. John Newberry, the KC-46 system program manager.
The other five required air refueling demonstrations were with the C-17 Globemaster III and F-16 Fighting Falcon using the air refueling boom, the Navy's F-18 Hornet and AV-8B Harrier II using the centerline and wing drogue systems, and the KC-46 as a receiver aircraft.
"Today's flight marks the final step we needed to see on the boom fix in order to request production go-ahead," said Brig. Gen. Duke Richardson, the Air Force program executive officer for tankers. "Our joint team's tireless efforts are paying off, preparing us for the next step of this critical need to our warfighter."
This test would not have been possible without contributions from the 412th Test Wing, 23rd Fighter Wing, 355th FW, 124th FW, 896th Test Support Squadron and 40th Flight Test Squadron, which all provided aircraft, manpower and equipment.
The Milestone C decision to begin low-rate initial production is expected in August.
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New Africom Commander to Seek Creative, Viable Solutions to Africa's Challenges
By Lisa Ferdinando DoD News, Defense Media Activity
STUTTGART, Germany, July 18, 2016 In a change-of-command ceremony here today, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff welcomed the new commander of U.S. Africa Command, Marine Corps Gen. Thomas D. Waldhauser, hailing him as an exceptional leader who is ready to address Africa's complex security challenges.
Marine Corps Gen. Joe Dunford presided over the event, which saw Waldhauser assume command from retiring Army Gen. David M. Rodriguez.
Dunford described Waldhauser and Rodriguez as extraordinary leaders who have served the nation for decades. Rodriguez demonstrated great leadership at Africom, Dunford said, noting that the same level of excellence will continue under Waldhauser.
"I can assure the men and women of Africom that in General Tom Waldhauser you're getting the best our nation has to offer," the chairman said.
Waldhauser, the first Marine to command Africom, is regarded "as one of the most operationally competent leaders we have in our force today," Dunford said, noting he has known Waldhauser for decades, from when they both served together as lieutenants.
Challenging Mission
In partnership with 53 African nations, Africom tackles diverse and broad challenges including Ebola, violent extremism, transnational terrorism, trafficking and piracy and the recent crisis in South Sudan, chairman said.
"The responsibilities of Africom highlight both the complexity of today's security environment and the demand for a capable, flexible and responsive joint force," Dunford said.
It would be an understatement to say that Africom's mission is dynamic and challenging, he added.
New Commander Seeks Creative, Viable Solutions
Waldhauser said he is honored to have been selected for the post. He acknowledged the many challenges ahead.
"It is up to us to bring forward creative and viable solutions to these challenges and view each one as an opportunity to work with and assist our African partners, not only today, but in the future as well in building a secure, a stable and prosperous African continent," he said.
Waldhauser received his fourth star prior to the change-of-command ceremony, with his mother and his wife pinning the new rank on his uniform.
In his speech, Dunford recognized Waldhauser's distinguished career -- he led the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit after 9/11 -- and planned, executed and conducted operations in Pakistan, Djibouti, Afghanistan and Iraq. He commanded a division, a Marine expeditionary force, and Marine Forces Central Command.
Waldhauser also served as the senior military assistant to the secretary of defense, and was most recently the director of joint force development for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Outgoing Commander Reflects on Challenges, Successes
Rodriguez said he thought he was ready for the challenges of Africom when he assumed command in 2013. But, he said, he never imaged the situations that would arise, including the fast-spreading deadly Ebola outbreak, an embassy evacuation, piracy in the waters off Africa, as well as challenges with trafficking and migration.
"Despite my steep learning curve, I'm extremely proud of everything we've accomplished here at Africa Command and in Africa with our partners, our allies and the interagency team," he said.
Rodriguez credits the generosity of the partners for making it possible for the command to improve its responsiveness, posture and access, and reach agreements to increase the security for U.S. personnel and facilities in Africa.
Retiring after 40 years of service, Rodriguez said he learned from each of his posts over the years, but described Africom as the one in which he is most proud.
"The command embodies the spirit of the African proverb that Africom has been quoting long before my time here, and I hope a long time after: 'If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together,'" he said.
Africom was established in 2008 to coordinate U.S. military relations and activities with African nations, regional organizations and the African Union.
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U.S. Personnel in Turkey Safe, Pentagon Spokesman Says
By Terri Moon Cronk DoD News, Defense Media Activity
WASHINGTON, July 18, 2016 All U.S. service members and civilians in Turkey are safe in the wake of the July 15 attempted coup there, Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook told reporters today.
"We've taken appropriate steps to maintain the safety and security of our civilian and military personnel, their families and our facilities, and we will continue to do so," he said of about the roughly 3,000 Americans in Turkey, about 100 of whom are family members.
Family Departure Previously Ordered
Cook noted a departure order that was previously issued for families, and particularly those who were tied to Turkey's Incirlik Air Base, where the U.S.-led coalition is a tenant and is using the base to conduct counter-Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant airstrikes and other operations. Turkey is a NATO ally and is a member of the counter-ISIL coalition.
"We've had a clear assessment of what the situation is now with regard to safety and security of our people," Cook said. "And that was our primary concern throughout this entire process."
U.S. Operations Continue
Defense Secretary Ash Carter is focused on making sure U.S. operations continue, personnel remain secure and the relationship with Turkey continues to progress, the press secretary said.
"We are confident that the measures we have in place and the support we're receiving from the Turkish government is adequate to address any security concerns we have at this time, and we'll continue to watch it very, very closely, as you would expect we would," Cook added.
Force protection efforts also have ensured U.S. assets are safe, he said.
"We were, of course, concerned enough that we elevated our force protection," the press secretary said. "So this was clearly a situation of unrest in Turkey that was a cause of concern for us. We took steps to protect our people and our facilities, and I think that was the appropriate thing to do in light of the circumstances."
Power at Incirlik Not Restored
Cook said power has not yet been restored at Incirlik, but U.S. operations there continue. "[We'll take] whatever steps we need to try to mitigate any impact that there could be on the [counter-ISIL] campaign," he said, and he confirmed that the United States has backup power to conduct its operations.
"We adjust as we need to, to make sure we keep the pressure on ISIL [and] that we keep our operations going," Cook said. "And we are very thankful the coalition is able to adjust in other ways, should there be any sort of delay or some sort of impact on our operations going forward."
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Taiwan's stance on Taiping Island widely covered by global media
ROC Central News Agency
2016/07/18 23:18:59
Taipei, July 17 (CNA) Taiwan's assertion of sovereignty over the Taiping Island in the wake of a ruling issued by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague has been widely covered by international media, Cabinet spokesman Tung Chen-yuan () said Monday.
In a case brought by the Philippines against China in 2013, the tribunal ruled on July 12 that none of the Spratly Islands, including the Taiwan-controlled Taiping Island (also known as Itu Aba Island) could be considered "islands" and are not eligible to claim 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zones.
Right after the arbitration ruling was laid down, Tung said, the government immediately called the ruling unacceptable since Taiwan was not invited to participate in the arbitration process to present its views.
The government has repeatedly said that it refused to accept the ruling and the decision was not legally binding, vowing to protect its sovereignty over Taiping, the largest island in the Spratly Islands, Tung said.
Such messages have been conveyed by the government through a slew of news releases and statements, and many international media have published or aired the information globally, Tung said.
Tung cited statistics as saying that international media carried or broadcast more than 40 stories on the government's stance on Taiping Island. The international media included CNN, Reuters, AFP, Bloomberg and those from Japan, the Philippines and Singapore.
After making the stance on Taiping Island clear to the world, the government has now focused on a move to step up coast guard patrol of the South China Sea, Tung said.
Tung said although the waters surrounding Taiping Island are not the major fishing area for Taiwan, the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) still dispatched a 1,000-ton patrol vessel, the Taitung, on July 16. The vessel will remain in the area indefinitely to safeguard Taiwan's territory and protect its fishermen's rights, according to the CGA.
The 1,800-ton Wei Hsing patrol vessel, which left for Taiping Island on July 10, will head back to Taiwan on Tuesday . Tung said that the dispatches of the two patrol vessels showed the government's determination to make sure Taiwan's fishermen will be protected while fishing in the waters around Taiping Island.
(By Tai Ya-chen and Frances Huang)
enditem/sc
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U.S. Department of Defense
Press Operations
News Transcript
Presenter: Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook July 18, 2016
Department of Defense Press Briefing by Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook in the Pentagon Briefing Room
PETER COOK: Afternoon, everybody. Got a couple of quick scheduling notes up top here before I take your questions.
As you know, today, President Obama presented retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Charles Kettles with the Medal of Honor at the White House for her heroism back in May of 1967 during the Vietnam War. Tomorrow, Secretary Carter will host a ceremony here at the Pentagon to induct Lieutenant Colonel Kettles in the Pentagon's Hall of Heroes.
On Wednesday, Secretary Carter will host colleagues from more than 30 nations at Joint Base Andrews for a ministerial meeting on the campaign against ISIL. And as you know -- there --additional meetings of officials from coalition nations are happening this week -- additional meetings, including a session involving both foreign and defense ministers that will be hosted by Secretary Kerry at the State Department. Secretary Carter is looking forward to that discussion as well.
The secretary is eager to share information on the status of the campaign, to discuss next steps in the military plan and to identify with members of the counter-ISIL coalition the next steps we can take to accelerate military progress in that campaign.
And that progress has continued over the weekend. Members of the Syrian Arab Coalition freed additional territory in the city of Manbij in the face of determined resistance from ISIL. Those forces captured Manbij Hospital, which is being used by ISIL as a command and control center.
The hospital was contested for some time and it was a significant challenge for these forces operating in Manbij to expel ISIL from the building without doing major damage. They have succeeded in that effort, and so once the city is secured, the hospital will be returned to local civilian control so it can once again serve city residents.
Meanwhile, in Iraq, security forces continue to clear territory near the Qayyarah West Airfield in preparation for operations to eject ISIL from Mosul. They've cleared additional territory in the vicinity of the airfield and on either side of the Tigris River. And this is another significant step forward for Iraqi security forces, again, in a crucial part of the campaign against ISIL.
And with that, I'd be happy to take your questions. Idris.
Q: Peter, quick question. Has the defense secretary spoken with his Turkish counterpart after the attempted coup? And if he has, you know, what was discussed?
MR. COOK: He has not spoken directly with the minister of defense. As you know, the Turks have been invited to participate in Wednesday's meeting. He spoke recently with the minister of defense at the Warsaw Summit. They had an excellent bilateral conversation then and he looks forward to talking with the minister in coming days.
Q: Could you give an update on the Incirlik Air Base? I believe power has still not been restored?
MR. COOK: Yeah. My understanding, power has not yet been restored, but our operations there do continue. And we're going to continue to take whatever steps we need to, to try to mitigate any impact that there could be on the campaign itself.
Q: Do you know why the power was first cut off and how much longer it would take?
MR. COOK: My understanding is that the power issue is something that is outside the walls of the base itself. So, I'll leave it to the Turkish officials to describe to you what's happening with -- in terms of the effort to restore power and what led to the outage in the first place.
Tony.
Q: Could you talk to the -- a little bit about the operations going on there, the counter-ISIL operations in terms of what types of airplanes -- are F-16s still operating out of there?
And you know, roughly, how crucial is Incirlik to the kinetic aspects to the campaign? They were quite crucial last year. Are they less crucial now, or -- just give a sense of that.
MR. COOK: Tony, we've talked to, in the past, about some of the platforms there. I'm not going to get into specific numbers of aircraft, but we've had refueling aircraft. We've also had attack aircraft as well.
And Incirlik is obviously an important part of our military campaign. And we've used it very effectively. And we appreciate, of course, the Turks' willingness to allow us to fly operations out of there, the coalition as a whole. It's not just U.S. aircraft.
And it will continue to be an important part of the campaign. We were able to conduct the campaign previously, without having Incirlik. We have the ability to adjust our operations in such a way that we can account for problems or -- or delays there.
And so, we will adjust, as we need to, to make sure we keep the pressure on ISIL, that we keep our operations going. And we are very thankful the -- that the coalition is able to -- to adjust in other ways should there be any sort of delay or some sort of impact on our operations going forward.
Q: Can I -- given all of the chaos over -- on Friday, were at any point U.S. conventional munitions, or so-called special munitions that arms control advocates talk about endangered in the base in terms of being taken by the coup plotters and the coup participants?
MR. COOK: Tony, I will just say, broadly, that we've taken appropriate steps to maintain the safety and security of our personnel, our civilian and military personnel, their families and our facilities. And we will continue to do so.
Q: Just a quick one on Afghanistan? Two weeks ago, the president announced a retention of an additional 2,900 troops. This building has yet to come up with the incremental cost of what those 2,900 will cost.
Do you have a figure? And if not, why can't they come up with a dollar figure at this point?
MR. COOK: Tony, it's a conversation that I know we're continuing to have and will have on an ongoing basis with Congress, of course, which authorizes that money. And when we've got more for you, we'll let you know.
Q: Why can't you come up with a figure, though? I mean, it's -- this is pretty by rote over the last decade about how much per troop cost in Afghanistan.
MR. COOK: Tony, as you know, these -- we want to be precise in our figures. We want to make sure we provide the most accurate information to members of Congress and to the -- the national security team as to exactly what this is going to cost and the best way, most efficient way, to fund those needs.
We are confident that we will get the support of Congress for this effort. We have in the past. This has been an effort in Afghanistan that has won bipartisan support in the past. And we'll have those conversations with Congress at the appropriate time.
Q: You agree, though, they need a number in order to give you support, right?
MR. COOK: Absolutely. And -- and we're -- we'll have that conversation with them with the best information we have at the appropriate time.
Q: Fair enough.
MR. COOK: Tara.
Q: (Inaudible) accused of harassing U.S. military personnel on base. And for the Turkish military officials, some of whom have been rounded up in the last few days from Incirlik. Were any of those officials people that the U.S. was coordinating the counter-ISIL strikes with?
MR. COOK: First of all, I think it's fair to say that the attempted coup was a surprise to -- to us as it was to people in Turkey and elsewhere. And with regard to your other question, I'll leave to the -- to the Turks to describe who was involved and who was not involved.
But I think it's fair to say that there are -- we have excellent close relations with the Turkish military. We will continue to have close relations with the Turkish military. And as for who was involved and who was not involved, I leave that, again, to the Turkish authorities to describe.
Q: What were the first indications for the military personnel on base that a coup was happening and what were the immediate actions taken for the personnel and the aircraft there?
MR. COOK: I -- I don't have a media readout for the tick-tock as to what was happening. Obviously there were news reports in Turkey itself of events that were playing out and so I -- I do not know the first inclination that our folks had that something was going on, but obviously they had publicly available information over the news media in Turkey that something was happening.
Q: In between the two bases were there still about 2500 U.S. personnel in Turkey?
MR. COOK: The number between -- between the two is -- our number has not changed. There hasn't been any additional people, but I think our overall number is larger than that and has been for some time. So it's -- it's more than 3,000 people.
Barbara.
Q: In the answer to Tony's question -- when he asked about, I think his words are "the chaos on Friday night," you said that the U.S. has taken appropriate action to secure everything.
Maybe not a tick-tock, but can you tell us any single action -- military action that you had to take, that the department had to take, to ensure the security of U.S. weapons, aircraft, personnel?
Did anything happen additionally since Friday night to secure all of that?
MR. COOK: Barbara, as I just repeat, we took the appropriate steps. I can tell you that we did elevate our force protection level at our facilities in Turkey. I'm not going to walk through exactly what that entails, but we took the appropriate steps to make sure our people were as safe as possible.
We've gone though an accountability review right now and all of our people are accounted for, for example, and that took us some time to account for both our EUCOM and CENTCOM personnel.
Q: So if I could just follow up on a couple of points. What is your current -- your current assessment of central command and control by the Turkish military over Turkish forces? What -- not -- not their view. Your view. Do you believe they are in full control of their military?
MR. COOK: I'm going to leave the Turkish authorities to describe their current command and control. The Turkish government is in charge. And I'll defer to the Ministry of Defense of Turkey to describe their current situation.
But we are continuing to have -- operate within Turkey. And we are continuing to -- to engage with the -- the Turkish military. Obviously there's been a significant amount of -- of turmoil in that country and -- and so I'm going to defer those questions to the Turks.
Q: But with respect, Peter, with -- you know, more than 2500 U.S. troops in Turkey, dozens of warplanes, special weapons, certainly there must be some assessment for the secretary of defense about the command and control that the Turks have over their military.
Can you give us any indication of what the U.S. Defense Department thinks about this at the moment?
MR. COOK: We continue to operate, Barbara, in Turkey. And we continue to engage with the Turks and that will continue. And again I'm going to leave the situation in terms of the turmoil in Turkey and the questions that were raised with the events on Friday. I'll leave that to the Turks. But we continue our operations in Turkey and we're satisfied that our forces and our people with the proper precautions will continue to be safe in Turkey.
Q: It doesn't sound like you're saying, and I'm sorry I have one very other quick follow-up. It doesn't sound like you're willing to say that you have faith and confidence that the Turkish military right now is in full control of their military force.
MR. COOK: We don't have any indication that the Turkish military does not have control. We will continue to work closely with Turkey. This is a NATO ally, Barbara, as you know. This is a member of the ISIL coalition. And we look forward to a continued working relationship with the Turks.
It's been a good relationship. Obviously one that has helped in the counter-ISIL campaign. It's one the Secretary was very engaged with in Warsaw with his counterpart -- had a very good and productive meeting with his Turkish counterpart. Where they talked about the next steps in the counter-ISIL campaign in particular. And we don't see any reason why that can't continue.
Q: Can I just have one quick one on another subject.
MR. COOK: This is the last one and then I've got to go to others.
Q: I promise, I promise. So we've had two back-to-back shootings in the United States with people who had prior U.S. military service. No one I know suggests their military service played any role in their criminal actions. But that said two back-to-back ones and people are curious about all of this. Is there any indication that the Department might be thinking about reviewing how it conducts mental health assessments either coming in during service or leaving service?
MR. COOK: Barbara as you said at the top of your question, I'm not aware of any information that their military service necessarily played any role in the tragic events that have played out in Baton Rouge and in Dallas. And in fact you can look at the victims in those instances and they're people who served in the U.S. military as well.
So I'm not aware of a connection here at this point. And I don't want to suggest that there is one. So in light of that, again I'm not sure I have an answer to your question here. I'm not sure of the need for us to review of something because I'm not aware that any connection's been made. Christina?
Q: Thanks Peter. When you say operations do continue in Turkey, does that mean all planes that were flying before are flying now? Are you just talking specifically about all air operations have full air operations continue?
MR. COOK: I'm not aware of any impact on specific aircraft. We've been able to recover our aircraft and there have been additional takeoffs as well. Remember this is part of a wider air campaign that involves multiple locations. And this is a situation where we will continue because the power situation to look at very closely to see if we need to make adjustments. The good news is, thanks to our partners, our coalition members and our flexibility we are able to make adjustments as we did over the weekend, to account for changes going forward.
Q: When you say recovery, you mean just take full control over the aircraft?
MR. COOK: I mean planes landing. So --
Q: OK.
And then just from Tony's question, when you talk about a number for the extra additional Afghan troops, does that mean that there will be some sort of request that number will be tied to? Or are you working within the budget to find--
MR. COOK: These are -- these are the questions that we're looking to -- we're talking with our partners within the administration, other agencies as well -- OMB, of course -- and a conversation we're going to have with Congress on the most efficient and best way to -- to fund those forces.
But we are -- remain confident is that this is a mission that has been funded previously by bipartisan Congresses in the past and we expect that that will be the case going forward.
Jamie?
Q: I'm not sure I -- help me understand what the actual impact was of this attempted -- failed military coup. I -- I know you've -- you've basically described that you're back up and running and things are going, but to what extent did it affect the operations? Were there sorties that were canceled, that had to be transferred to other -- you know, what was -- what was the impact, however minimal, on operations in Incirlik?
MR. COOK: Jamie, just broadly, there was a period of time when we were not able to fly, when the Turkish air space was closed to military aircraft. That did affect our plans for the day, our tasking order for the day. So in some cases, we had to look for aircraft at other locations to conduct certain missions.
This is all tied together. This is all carefully linked together, carefully planned, yet there are some redundancies and we are able to adjust. But clearly, it would be our preference to be able to conduct operations without any risk of a -- of a delay or inefficiencies at Incirlik. That was not the case this weekend for a portion of the time and we had to adjust.
Q: Is there a limit to how long you can operate just on internal power with generators if -- if the external power doesn't come back on?
MR. COOK: As I said, there are redundancies. This is -- this is something we do plan for and we'll continue to assess the situation if it reaches a point where we decide that we need to make other adjustments because we do not see power being restored in a -- in a quick enough fashion, then we will adjust accordingly.
We are hoping to have power restored and to maintain operations at Incirlik, but we will adjust as needed.
Q: And -- (inaudible) -- just a quick follow-up. There have been some reports of anti-American sentiment in -- in the wake of -- of the events of the weekend. Are you concerned at all about the security of U.S. personnel or families or dependents? And are there still dependents at the bases in Turkey?
MR. COOK: My understanding is that there are about 100 dependents that are in Turkey. As you know, there was the ordered departure of most of our dependents, particularly tied to Incirlik, previously. And Jamie, force protection, you've heard it from me before, is job one for us everywhere in the world we operate, including here at home and will continue to be -- be so.
So -- but we are confident that the measures we have in place and the support we're receiving from the Turkish government is adequate to address any security concerns we have at this time and we'll continue to watch it very, very closely, as you would expect we would.
Lucas?
Q: Peter, the Turkish defense minister, will he still be attending the counter-ISIS meetings at Andrews?
MR. COOK: I'll leave that to the Turks to describe -- I know that they've been invited and we expect the Turks will be represented in some way.
Q: You mentioned that the U.S. military's been able to bounce back since the coup against the ISIS war, but are -- is the secretary concerned that Turkey -- this is actually a step back for them, that they will not be able to support the coalition in ways they had previously?
MR. COOK: Well, the secretary certainly -- again, he had, as I said, extensive conversation with his Turkish counterpart in Warsaw, talked about a number of issues, including the counter-ISIL campaign--
Q: (off mic.)
MR. COOK: Absolutely. We don't have any indication at this point that -- that the discussions that he had there in the -- and the -- the outlook that the two shared with regard to the fight against ISIL won't continue. But I'll leave it to the -- to the Turkish minister of defense to describe their own activities and actions going forward.
Q: Why hasn't the secretary spoken to his Turkish counterpart since this coup attempt?
MR. COOK: There's a lot going on in Turkey right now, as you know. A lot of things within the country itself, within the government itself.
And the secretary is absolutely looking forward to engaging with the minister of defense and looks forward to doing so in the near future. It just -- it hasn't happened at this time. But there's no significance to that, other than they just have not spoken.
Q: And can you tell us about the secretary's initial reaction to the coup attempt? Did he watch this on TV like everybody else, or does he think there's some kind of intelligence failure on the part of the U.S. military that this couldn't have been -- he didn't have a heads-up, an was he getting regular reports from his intelligence units?
MR. COOK: Well, absolutely the secretary was being regularly informed about what was happening.
But I think it's fair to say that the -- that the secretary was surprised by -- by the activities on Friday, as others in the U.S. government were. And obviously, this was a cause for concern, and he was getting regular updates on what was happening.
Of course, primary concern for us in this situation is, as we've been talking about, our service members and our civilians. And so, he was making sure that every step that could be taken was being taken to ensure their safety.
Q: And lastly, switching gears over to Iraq, the firebrand Shia cleric al-Sadr has threatened U.S. troops. Is the secretary concerned that the war in Iraq is now expanding to include these Shia militias, now that this fatwa, or whatever you want to call it, has been extended to U.S. forces?
MR. COOK: I'll go back to what I just said about force protection.
Obviously, it's a concern if anyone's threatening U.S. forces, but it's something we prepare for. We've worked very closely with the government of Prime Minister Abadi. WE are working at the invitation of the Iraqi government, working hand-in-hand in our train, advise -- advise and assist mission.
And we'll continue to do that, and we'll take every step we need to protect our people, if needed. And we're more focused, quite honestly, on the good work being down by the Iraqi Security Forces right now, the progress they're making with the help of the United States and other members of the coalition.
We're making good progress, they're making good progress. And that's where our focus is.
Q: Is there any worry in this building that the war in Iraqi could be expanding?
MR. COOK: There is a hope that the war against ISIL is expanding, and there is a sincere interest -- and you'll see it reflected Wednesday at this meeting -- that that effort will accelerate, and -- and everything we've seen from our recent visit to Iraqi indicates that that's the focus of Prime Minister Abadi, and it should be the focus of everyone in Iraq as well, if they want to get rid of the common threat that ISIL poses to the people of Iraq.
Yes, Paul.
Q: I was just wondering if -- and this is a follow-up on Tony's question -- if any -- if the U.S. has stepped up security at any -- of any of the weapons that may be stationed at Incirlik, or whether the events over the weekend have caused any re-think on whether it's appropriate to have those kind of weapons there?
MR. COOK: I'm not going to talk about our strategic assets anywhere in the world. As you've heard me say, we've taken the prudent steps that need to be taken to make sure that our people, our facilities, their families are protected and -- in the safest place possible.
And we will continue to do what we need to, to make sure that happens.
Q: Peter, you said that the secretary has not had a conversation with his Turkish counterpart.
Have there been any communications that initiated or received from mil-to-mil channels between the Defense Department and the Turkish military?
MR. COOK: I think it's fair to say there have been conversations. I'm not going to read out each and every one. Obviously we have a permanent presence in Turkey itself, but, Andrew, at the same time, there's been a lot going on in Turkey and I think -- I think it's fair to say that Turkish officials have been fairly busy with accounting for what's happened the last few days and so --
Q: Can you read out any? I'm just -- in general, like -- what those communications -- have they been about operations at the base, have they been about the -- the existing authorities that we have and continue to exercise? What -- what -- what in -- in general, what are the substance of those communications?
MR. COOK: Again, I'm not going to read out all those conversations, but you know what we're trying to do with Incirlik in terms of trying to restore power to the base. We've been in conversations specifically about the takeoffs and -- and landings, the recovery of our aircraft at Incirlik.
So it's been operational. It's about safety and security and -- and we'll have ample opportunities to talk with our Turkish counterparts going forward.
Q: (Inaudible) just one more -- if there's any concern that the authorities that we've worked out with them over the past 18 months, in terms of using facilities and airspace and all that, is there -- is any of that under new discussion? Is there any concern in the building that -- that somehow the arrangement that we've had for the past few months may be under reconsideration?
MR. COOK: I'm not aware of any. Again, the secretary just had an excellent conversation with the Minister of Defense for Turkey about our operations there and about our collaboration together. And we look forward to continuing that conversation.
Q: Quick follow-up on Andrew's questions. If the electricity's still out, how are -- how's the U.S. side of it able to light runways and things? Are you using backup generators for taxi way lights, for the tower--?
MR. COOK: We have -- we have backup power source.
Yes.
Q: Peter, you know that the events in Turkey started at 10:00 in the p.m. in -- on Friday and then EUCOM issued a Force Protection Condition level Delta Saturday morning a.m. around seven, eight or something. What triggered, you know, this decision at -- Saturday morning when the coup was nearly over?
MR. COOK: I think they were taking -- we were already -- we have excellent force protection to begin with and I'm not even sure the exact timeline you mapped out, but I know that EUCOM commanders were doing what they thought was appropriate in light of the uncertain situation to protect our people at -- in every way that they could.
And -- so -- those -- that decision, if it was made on -- at that particular time, just reflected the European -- EUCOM's decision on what the most appropriate step would be in terms of security for our people.
Q: And also the -- the commander -- one of the senior commanders in the -- in Incirlik Air Base was allegedly involved in this coup attempt, and two of the tankers were launched from the air base were refueling coup-linked aircraft over -- (inaudible) -- Istanbul. Was the -- United States aware of this aircraft flying from Incirlik to refuel the coup aircraft? And also, did you have --
MR. COOK: If you are suggesting that a coalition aircraft did a refueling, that is not correct.
Q: Turkish tankers flying from Incirlik were refueling the coup?
MR. COOK: I'm not aware of those details. But again as you know probably better than most, this is a Turkish air base where we are guests. We are tenants and there are Turkish air operations at Incirlik. And so I leave it to the Turks to describe what activities on the part of their aircraft.
Q: The U.S. military was concerned in terms of the chaotic situation over there?
MR. COOK: We were of course concerned enough that we elevated our force protection. So this was clearly a situation of unrest in Turkey that was a cause of concern for us. We took steps to protect our people and our facilities. And I think that was the appropriate thing to do in light of the circumstances.
Q: So you don't think that the force protection measures that were upgraded taken like a little bit late?
MR. COOK: As you know, force protection is something we take very seriously. We already had taken steps. We had an ordered departure of dependents some time earlier. So we have taken steps to make sure our people are as safe as possible. And I'm not going to second guess the EUCOM commanders for elevating the force protection level to an even higher level in light of what had taken place in Turkey.
Yes, Janne.
Q: Thank you, Peter. Peter, China currently joined ongoing -- (inaudible) -- military exercises in Hawaii. China because the Chinese don't want to join any exercise with the United States because of the U.S. -- (inaudible) -- deploying -- (inaudible)?
MR. COOK: I don't have the full read out here. But my understanding was there were Chinese naval ships participating in RIMPAC this year.
Q: Who's leading these operations -- (inaudible) -- operations?
MR. COOK: I'm sorry?
Q: Who, who --
MR. COOK: Who is leading it?
Q: Yes.
MR. COOK: Well you know there are multiple nations involved here. But this is a US-led exercise. But there are multiple countries involved if you want I can get the full number. But it's substantial. If you bear with me I might even have it right here. I don't have it, but I'm happy to get it.
But it's multiple nations and it's an exercise, as you know, the biggest we do in that part of the world. And one that's been a big success in terms of promoting interoperability between ourselves and other countries in the region. And again an opportunity for us to work with the Chinese military in a way that hopefully improves understanding and our mil-to-mil relationship.
Q: So how long do they take, these exercises -- (inaudible)?
MR. COOK: Yeah. I'll double check the exact timing of it. But it's an extensive, it lasts for multiple days. And I'm happy to get those questions and have it fully answered for you.
Q: Thank you very much.
MR. COOK: OK. Yes?
Q: With the reported arrest of the Turkish Commander at the Air Base can you give us a timeline of how that transpired and whether there was a period in which the U.S. military presence had no interlocutor there at the base? How did it cope with that?
MR. COOK: I'll leave it to the Turkish authorities to describe if there was an arrest made by Turkish law enforcement. I'll leave it to them to describe. We have as you know a presence that's been at Incirlik for some time. And I'm not aware of any problems we had in terms of engaging and understanding what was going on.
We've been able to arrange for resumption of flight operations. We've been able to again have these conversations about trying to restore power to the base. So obviously there were events in Turkey that were playing out over time on Friday and there were questions being raised about several aspects of the Turkish government and what was happening. And so obviously, our folks had questions, but we're satisfied now that our people are safe and accounted for. And our operations -- again, we're hoping to maintain them as we were before this took place. We are still working to be able to do that.
Q: Were any munitions moved off of the base?
MR. COOK: I'm not going to get into any discussions about our -- the safety precautions, security precautions we took.
Q: Any shots fired at the base? Any signs of violence of -- on the Turkish side of the base?
MR. COOK: I'm not aware of any and -- so.
Q: Last week, did the U.S. take any action? As my colleague over here cited, you know, possible Turkish involvement from the base to support the coup. Did the U.S. do anything to try to halt that?
MR. COOK: I'm not aware of -- I'm not aware of every allegation that's been depicted here as to what the activities of the Turkish -- remember, this is a Turkish air base in which we occupy a portion of that air base. So I'm going to leave it to the Turks to describe the activities and actions of their personnel on that base.
Nancy?
Q: I want to follow-up on a couple of questions on Turkey. I'm having a hard time understanding how the U.S. is going about asserting force protection. You've said there are 3,000 personnel there, including 100 dependents. You said the U.S. was caught by surprise by the attempted coup. The power's been cut off. There's been some sort of -- there have been reports of an arrest there.
I'm having a hard time understanding how the U.S. is making an assessment of force protection at Incirlik when the secretary hasn't called his Turkish counterpart. I just don't understand how you're making those assessments when you clearly didn't have the intelligence in place to know that this attempt was going to start.
How are you making these assessments? And then Tim's questions you weren't able to answer about things -- about whether shots were fired, anything. Can you walk me through how the U.S. is actually making its assessments on force protection if it's not even engaging its Turkish counterparts in terms of what happened?
MR. COOK: It's a daily conversation, regular conversations, Nancy, between the commanders, EUCOM and CENTCOM as well with folks on the ground at the base who have the best view of what's happening at that particular moment in time. They receive regular updates. The secretary was updated as well.
And again, remember, this is a base that is a Turkish air base where they provide the perimeter security and there is further security within that base for our personnel. And we were taking the appropriate steps to make sure people our safe and we're satisfied that that was done. Everyone's been accounted for, which we're pleased with, and we'll continue to have a conversation with the Turks about maintaining the safety and security of our people going forward, which is incredibly important to us.
Q: But at what level is the conversation happening between the United States and the Turks? And who precisely briefed the secretary on the security situation at Incirlik?
MR. COOK: I'm not going to provide you the names of the people the secretary spoke to regarding this, but you can be sure that his top commanders--
Q: (inaudible) -- some level of what levels we're talking about.
MR. COOK: He has regular conversation with his commanders, including General Scaparrotti at EUCOM, General Votel at Central Command. There have been conversations, again, with commanders at the base itself and our other personnel within Turkey. And of course, very close conversations with the president's entire national security team.
As you know, secretary -- the secretary of state's spoken to the -- the foreign minister. So we've had conversations. We've had a clear assessment of what the situation is now with regard to safety and security of our people. And that was our primary concern throughout this entire process, was making sure our people in our facilities were safe and their dependents as well.
Q: And then can I go back to Barbara's question, please, on these shootings that have happened in the United States now, two of them involving veterans of the United States military?
It was reported in the Dallas morning news that Micah Johnson, the man involved in the Dallas attack didn't receive the kind of support he needed from the Army as he left, that he hadn't heard from leadership.
And I'm just curious, you mentioned earlier that you didn't feel that there was a need to do any sort of additional investigation, because there was nothing to believe that one's military -- their military careers contributed to these shootings.
I'm curious if at a service level, if there is anything being investigated in terms of post post-service care? If there's any sort of assessment going on at the service level. When you said that there wasn't any need to investigate, is that at an OSD level, or is that at a service level as well?
MR. COOK: I -- my point to Barbara was that, in terms of a direct connection between their military service and what has taken place, I'm not aware of a direct connection. That's the only point I was making there.
Q: Right. But you said subsequently that you didn't -- there was no need for an investigation, given that there was no link that that could be seen.
And I'm just curious: is that at an OSD level or is that at a service level that that determination's (inaudible)?
MR. COOK: As you know, Nancy, these people were beyond their active duty service with the Department of Defense. And so, there's limits as to our contact with these people.
Of course there was a relationship with the VA. And so, I'm not aware of a specific situation or the specifics of this case in which they had asked for direct contact with -- with us or that this had been an issue.
So, if it was, then I would refer you to the Army. Or in this case, the Marine Corps. But they've provided you the information they can on the active duty service of these individuals and the Reserve service, as well.
Tony, and then --
Q: A quick Cleveland question. Is the -- is the Pentagon providing any support to the GOP or the Democratic Conventions? Any like intelligence or logistics support?
MR. COOK: Tony, let me take that question and get back to you. I -- I don't have a great answer for you right here. I want to make sure I can answer that as authoritatively as possible.
Yes? I'm sorry, I don't know your name.
Q: Tim Johnson from McClatchy Newspapers.
MR. COOK: Tim, nice to see you.
Q: Nice to see you. I -- you know, I -- I have to say I'm pretty surprised at this -- at least the sensation that I get is that there was very little contact at upper levels between Turkey and the U.S. government, certainly the Pentagon, in the first, what, 72 hours after this coup.
Can you describe any contact how --
MR. COOK: I -- I -- again, I'm not going to read out the conversations at all of the commanders, who have regular contact with their Turkish counterparts, whether it be through EUCOM or Central Command.
There were conversations happening. I'm not going to provide you and cannot provide you the tick-tock and detail on each and every one of those conversations.
But you can be sure, we were trying to find out exactly what was happening using all of the resources at our disposal to do that. And that included mil-to-mil conversations to make sure we knew what was happening on the ground and to make sure our people were safe and that that was being done.
I just cannot detail each and every one of those to you. I can provide you a picture of the information the secretary was getting.
But I can assure you, from meetings that I participated in and -- and others that took place that there was an active effort to find out exactly what was happening, to find out the status of our personnel and to make sure that everything possible was being done to make sure our people were safe, and that this situation, that we had a good grip on this situation -- which was, as I said at the top, was a surprise to us.
Q: Yeah. Was there any reason why the secretary of defense didn't pick up the phone -- pick up the phone and call his counterpart?
MR. COOK: Again, we were -- had commanders on the ground, who were responsible for this area.
And it was, at that time, the decision -- they were in the best means to have an understanding of what was happening at that time. And that's what they did.
Tara?
Q: Quick follow-up. All personnel have been accounted for. Can you assure the public that all U.S. weapons, small arms, ammunition, aircraft, have also been secured and accounted for?
MR. COOK: As I said before, we've taken all the appropriate steps we feel we needed to take to ensure the safety of our people, dependents, military and civilian personnel, as well as the facilities. So.
Q: What about the weapons?
MR. COOK: We've taken all those steps that we need to take to make sure that everything that we control in Turkey is safe and secure.
Yes?
Q: OK. The one thing -- can you go back? You've mentioned the power supply several times, and I'm not sure I really do understand.
If you -- and if you can't say timeframes, but if you have to stay on generator power, does that itself become a limiting factor in continuing full -- trying to get back to full operations and continuing full operations? In other words, does there come a point when you have to be back on the commercial power system, or you can't really get back to full operations?
Is lack of power -- is the reliance on generator power a limiting factor?
MR. COOK: I don't believe it's a limiting factor right now. But I think, Barbara, I think it's safe to say over time that it could become a limiting factor. But at this moment, I'm not aware that it is. The concern would be if it were a protracted period of time, then we would potentially have to make adjustments.
Q: And the -- one last question. You've said a couple of times that the secretary was surprised by the coup Friday night.
What -- I don't even know how to ask it. I mean, a coup -- a military coup in a NATO country where the U.S. maintains a very sophisticated stockpile of weapons, and the secretary of defense genuinely surprised.
How is this anything other than a significant failure in military intelligence? Because there were over 3,000 Turkish personnel involved in it. It wasn't like one random act.
How -- how does he view this? I can't imagine he's too happy about being surprised by this. So, how does he view this as anything other than a failure in intelligence?
MR. COOK: As you said, I think it was not just the Department of Defense, but others who were surprised by the events that played out on Friday. And there will be I'm sure an effort to assess if there was -- should have been more information that we should have obtained previously.
But we reacted as we did to the facts as we knew them, to the reality on the ground. And that's where we are today. And the secretary is focused on making sure our operations continue, that our people are safe and secure and that our relationship with Turkey, again, continue to progress.
Q: Is it an intelligence failure?
MR. COOK: I'm not going to label the events in Turkey any particular thing, Barbara. This was obviously something that points to issues within Turkey itself that, I think, are best left to the Turks.
Q: Thank you.
MR. COOK: Yes, Lucas?
Q: Is it a -- did the U.S. lose an ally when the commander of the Incirlik Air Base was arrested?
MR. COOK: Our ally is -- NATO ally is Turkey itself. So, I'm not going to get into the individual members of the military. Our ally is Turkey. Our relationship is with the country of Turkey.
Q: Did it bother the secretary, since Turkey is this NATO ally, a member ally, that our -- U.S. military's colleagues on the ground, while they were helping the United States and the coalition fight ISIS, they were also plotting a coup in their spare time?
MR. COOK: Again, Lucas, I'm not going to get into the goals or ambitions of individual members of the Turkish militarily. I will leave that to the Turkish officials to -- to describe.
Paul and then Jamie -- (inaudible).
Q: A quick follow-up on Barbara and Nancy's question about the shooters in Dallas and in Baton Rouge. Has there been any effort on behalf of the Pentagon to look at -- it's not just Dallas and Baton Rouge, there have been other incidences where military veterans have been involved in shootings, the D.C. sniper, Washington Navy Yard, Fort Hood. There's a number of other -- other examples of this, active or former -- former active duty or former military folks involved.
Is there any effort on behalf of the Pentagon or any interest in looking into whether there is any connection here and there is anything that can be done to possibly mitigate that? Or that is just not the -- (inaudible)?
MR. COOK: A couple things. We are a very large organization, as you know, with literally millions of people who have served. In the past, we -- in that sense that there are -- there are many people in this country who have served the U.S. military. So I'd just make that broad point; we're a big organization. Big organizations have, on occasion, people who have done bad things. So we're not unlike other institutions.
With regard to the specific question you have, I -- I'd have to take the question to see if there's ever been a formal review. I'm not -- I'm not aware of one, but obviously, the -- the idea or the discussion that we've had and Secretary Carter and others have been part of it in looking at how service members transition from active duty to -- to non-active status.
Obviously, the relationship, the handoff between the active-duty Department of Defense to the Veteran's Administration, that's something that's been an ongoing conversation, something we've been very eager to try and -- and -- as has the VA in trying to make sure that that relationship is -- is as solid as possible and that transition is done as successfully as possible.
And so in that broad context, I'm sure that's a conversation we've been having, but not necessarily because of these individual shootings. It's something that was the right thing to do for our service members and I think that's what we're most concerned about.
So Jamie?
Q: Peter, I'm just -- I'm sorry, but I have to ask this question sort of straight out. Tony referred to special weapons and Barbara referred to sophisticated weapons. Arms control advocates allege that the United States has a small stock pile of nuclear weapons at the base in Incirlik and they say that given the instability in Turkey demonstrated by this attempted coup, that it would be prudent to remove those weapons and either bring them back to the U.S. or put them someplace else.
What, if anything, can you say about that?
Q: Jamie, as you know, as a matter of policy, we don't discuss our strategic assets and -- but you know as well the kind of thought and care that we put into safely securing every part of the U.S. military and we're going to continue to do that.
Last question.
Q: You say that while Secretary Carter is somehow briefed by his commanders on the ground and also the dialogue between -- military-to-military between Turkish military and the U.S. military was conducted through these commanders. But -- I don't know how to ask it, but it may be a little bit straight out.
But wouldn't it be a little bit kind of secretary to call his counterparts saying that, look, your country and your government faced something like this and I'm a little bit sorry for you, but that we, as the ally, NATO ally, we are committed to our security strategic partnership and so on?
MR. COOK: There were -- as you know, there were conversations between the secretary of state and the foreign minister, and the secretary has spoken recently to his counterpart. He will be speaking with representatives from the Turkish government at this event on Wednesday that he knew was coming up and he's open to having a discussion at any point with the minister of defense.
This was a, obviously, very unusual event. There's been a lot of turmoil in Turkey. There's been a lot of effort on the part of the Turks to try and -- and find out what's been going on, including, I'm sure, at the Ministry of Defense.
So there's been a significant amount of engagement and there will be going forward and I'm sure the secretary and his -- and his minister counterpart will engage in conversation.
OK. Thanks, everybody.
-END-
http://www.defense.gov/News/News-Transcripts/Transcript-View/Article/848638/
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Buffalo Visits Singapore during Indo-Asia-Pacific Deployment
Navy News Service
Story Number: NNS160718-01
Release Date: 7/18/2016 8:14:00 AM
By Lt. j.g. Eric Provost, USS Buffalo (SSN 715) Public Affairs
SINGAPORE (NNS) -- Los Angeles-class attack submarine USS Buffalo (SSN 715) arrived in Singapore July 16 for a port visit as part of its Indo-Asia-Pacific deployment.
With a crew of approximately 150 Sailors, Buffalo will conduct a multitude of missions while maintaining proficiency of the latest capabilities of the submarine fleet.
"The United States submarine force is a small but vital asset to national security," said Cmdr. Micha Maxwell, Buffalo commanding officer. "Port calls like these help us to demonstrate the capabilities of our submarine force, while simultaneously advancing international relations. I'm elated for our crew to have the opportunity to work with members of the [Republic of Singapore Navy] and to experience some of the amazing sights that Singapore has to offer."
As one of the fastest and stealthiest submarines in the world, Buffalo exhibits the pinnacle of modern undersea warfighting technology. The submarine is capable of forward-deployed operations for extended periods of time, ensuring America's access to the world's maritime trade routes and providing credible defense against hostile maritime forces.
"The crew has worked extremely hard since the start of this deployment," said Master Chief Machinist's Mate David Pojar, chief of the boat. "One of the most exciting things about any deployment is the potential for port visits in foreign nations. This visit to Singapore offers the crew of Buffalo a chance to learn, teach and relax in one of the most beautiful cities in the world."
For some of the crew members, this is their first time visiting Singapore.
"I can't wait to see what Singapore has to offer," said Lt. Nicholas Chase, assistant weapons officer. "I've heard that it is an exciting city with a vibrant culture. Port visits like these are what being in the Navy is all about."
Measuring more than 350 feet long and weighing approximately 7,000 tons when submerged, Buffalo is one of the most advanced submarines in the world. Buffalo is capable of a multitude of missions including anti-submarine warfare, anti-surface ship warfare, mine warfare, naval special warfare, surveillance and reconnaissance.
Currently homeported in Pearl Harbor, Buffalo was commissioned in 1983 and completed an inter-fleet transfer to the Pacific in 1984, where it has served ever since.
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Swamp Foxes Conduct First Swing Loaded Operational Flight
Navy News Service
Story Number: NNS160718-13
Release Date: 7/18/2016 11:56:00 AM
By Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Cole Keller, USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Public Affairs
STRAIT OF BAB-EL-MANDEB (NNS) -- The Swamp Foxes of Helicopter Attack Squadron (HSM) 74 and the U.S. Navy saw an operational breakthrough July 12 when transiting through the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb.
For the first time, an MH-60R Seahawk, the Navy's next-generation submarine hunter and surface attack helicopter, was swing loaded with both AGM-114 Hellfire missiles and Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System II (APKWS II) in an operational area.
The thin, 16-mile wide strip of waterway in the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb sees an enormous amount of activity and is located between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula, and Djibouti and Eritrea in the Horn of Africa. Because it connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, it is an essential route of travel for the Navy, but can also prove a very dangerous one. Bab-el-Mandeb is an Arabic phrase meaning "Gate of Tears" and derives its name from its inherent navigational dangers.
"The swing load helps in some of the more dangerous chokepoints where we want the flexibility of different weapons systems," said Cmdr. Nicholas DeLeo, executive officer of HSM-74.
The APKWS II is a laser-guided rocket similar to standard Hellfire missiles. The new system serves as a low-cost, high-accuracy variant to the Hellfire missiles previously used against lightly armored targets.
"For MH-60R aircraft, the APKWS II adds a medium-range guided option to its robust weapons footprint," said Lt. Brian Crosby, HSM 74 tactics officer. "The MH-60R will employ APKWS II along with its existing Hellfire missiles and crew-served door guns, providing the warfare commander with a lethal and effective helicopter weapons system."
The helicopters of the Swamp Foxes serve to bridge the gap between long-range weapons and the crew-served weapons aboard the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69) (Ike). Swing loaded, the MH-60R has both the range and bulk of the Hellfire with the addition of the lighter and more numerous APKWS II. This means both small, close-range watercraft and farther, heavier targets can be effectively neutralized by one crew on one platform.
The Swamp Foxes are the first squadron on the East Coast to have the software capable of supporting both weapons systems on one helicopter. They are the first to put their training and their equipment to the test.
"This system has been briefed up to the highest levels of the Navy, and everyone has been extremely pleased with how HSM-74 has been able to utilize and prove the weapons," said Cmdr. Daniel Testa, commanding officer of HSM-74. "We've well surpassed all goals that we've set."
HSM-74 is assigned to Carrier Air Wing (CVW) 3, embarked aboard Ike. Ike and its Carrier Strike Group are deployed in support of maritime security operations and theater security cooperation efforts in the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations.
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Chiefs of US and Chinese Navies Agree on Need for Cooperation
Navy News Service
Story Number: NNS160718-17
Release Date: 7/18/2016 2:05:00 PM
From Chief of Naval Operations Public Affairs
BEIJING (NNS) -- Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Adm. John Richardson met with People's Liberation Army (Navy) (PLA(N)) Commander Adm. Wu Shengli during professional and social events held July 18 at navy headquarters in Beijing.
The goal of the engagement was to improve mutual understanding and encourage professional interaction between the two navies.
"I appreciate the opportunity to visit China and to meet with Adm. Shengli in person-there is no substitute for these types of face-to-face meetings," said Richardson. "My goal is to forge a relationship built on frankness and cooperation. Given the responsibilities that our navies have, we must work together and speak candidly-when we agree as well as when we have differing opinions."
"I am very happy to receive you here today," said Shengli. "We attach great importance to your visit. Your visit to China, at our invitation, shows how both sides put great priority on maritime issues."
The two leaders had frank and substantive conversations on the importance of operating safely, in accordance with international law; future opportunities for the two navies to engage; and the South China Sea.
The visit, which has been in works for months, was Richardson's first visit to China as the chief of naval operations and his first in-person meeting with Shengli. Over the last year, the two admirals have held three discussions via video teleconference.
CNO will travel next to Qingdao, home of the Chinese North Sea Fleet, where he is scheduled to visit the Chinese Navy's submarine academy and tour the aircraft carrier Liaoning (CV-16).
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Pentagon Wants to Send F-35s to Russia's Doorstep
Sputnik News
16:13 18.07.2016
The Pentagon apparently plans to deploy the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II to the Baltic region to take part in NATO's air-policing mission in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. This step, if approved, would likely receive a cold welcome in Moscow that has repeatedly voiced concern over the bloc's massive military buildup close to Russia's borders.
The initiative was unveiled on July 13. Air Combat Command (ACC) Commander General Herbert Carlisle told the US House Armed Services Committee that he "would like" the F-35 jets "do some Baltic air policing" as soon as the fifth generation stealth multirole fighter becomes operational. He added that it could happen in the near future.
Carlisle has already discussed the idea with NATO Supreme Allied Commander General Curtis Scaparrotti, US Air Forces Europe US Air Forces Africa commander General Frank Gorenc and Air Force commanders in the Baltics. They appear to be on board.
"As I talked to the air chiefs over in Europe in this past week, all of them are very interested for their own countries to be able to see the visibility of that airplane out doing operational missions," Carlisle said.
A day later, Commander of the Estonian Air Force, Colonel Jaak Tarien, said that if the Pentagon approves the measure, Estonia will be ready to host the F-35s.
"This plane is often referred to as a supercomputer. The F-35 could for instance remain invisible to Russian air-force defense systems stationed in Kaliningrad," he told Estonian Public Broadcasting (ERR).
According to Carlisle Warplanes, like the F-35, are meant to demonstrate capabilities and resolve when deployed to Europe. They also serve as "a great messaging tool," as the US general put it. He was referring to a cold spell between NATO and Russia that has seen the bloc enhance war gaming, increase defense spending, preposition military equipment, deploy more forces and open command and control centers on its eastern flank.
The North Atlantic Alliance views these measures as a message that is meant to show that the bloc is ready to protect itself from a non-existent threat emanating from Russia. For its part, Moscow has been alarmed with these developments, saying that they pose a threat to the region and beyond.
NATO has failed to focus on real challenges that need to be addressed, Russian Duma Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Alexei Pushkov observed. "Non-stop terrorism: Orlando, Baghdad, Istanbul, Nice, Almaty. Meanwhile NATO is worried about defensing the Baltics from an imaginary threat," he tweeted.
Sputnik
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Counter-ISIL Strikes Target Terrorists in Syria, Iraq
From a Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve News Release
SOUTHWEST ASIA, July 19, 2016 U.S. and coalition military forces continued to attack Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant terrorists in Syria and Iraq yesterday, Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve officials reported today.
Officials reported details of the latest strikes, noting that assessments of results are based on initial reports.
Strikes in Syria
Bomber, attack, fighter and remotely piloted aircraft conducted 21 strikes in Syria:
-- Near Dayr Az Zawr, a strike destroyed an ISIL crane and an ISIL front-end loader.
-- Near Manbij, 18 strikes struck 15 separate ISIL tactical units and destroyed 13 ISIL fighting positions, an ISIL heavy machine gun, an ISIL mortar system, seven ISIL vehicles, two ISIL vehicle bombs, an ISIL staging area and an ISIL tactical vehicle.
-- Near Mar'a, two strikes struck two separate ISIL tactical units and destroyed four ISIL fighting positions.
Strikes in Iraq
Attack, fighter, and remotely piloted aircraft and rocket artillery conducted 10 strikes in Iraq, coordinated with and in support of Iraq's government:
-- Near Baghdadi, two strikes struck an ISIL tactical unit and an ISIL staging area and destroyed two ISIL vehicles and an ISIL weapons cache.
-- Near Hit, a strike struck an ISIL vehicle bomb-making facility.
-- Near Mosul, four strikes struck an ISIL headquarters and destroyed two ISIL vehicles and an ISIL tunnel entrance.
-- Near Qayyarah, two strikes destroyed an ISIL headquarters and an ISIL training camp.
-- Near Tal Afar, a strike struck an ISIL headquarters.
Task force officials define a strike as one or more kinetic events that occur in roughly the same geographic location to produce a single, sometimes cumulative, effect. Therefore, officials explained, a single aircraft delivering a single weapon against a lone ISIL vehicle is one strike, but so is multiple aircraft delivering dozens of weapons against buildings, vehicles and weapon systems in a compound, for example, having the cumulative effect of making those targets harder or impossible for ISIL to use. Accordingly, officials said, they do not report the number or type of aircraft employed in a strike, the number of munitions dropped in each strike, or the number of individual munition impact points against a target. Ground-based artillery fired in counterfire or in fire support to maneuver roles is not classified as a strike.
Part of Operation Inherent Resolve
The strikes were conducted as part of Operation Inherent Resolve, the operation to eliminate the ISIL terrorist group and the threat they pose to Iraq, Syria, and the wider international community. The destruction of ISIL targets in Syria and Iraq further limits the terrorist group's ability to project terror and conduct operations, officials said.
Coalition nations that have conducted strikes in Iraq include the United States, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Jordan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Coalition nations that have conducted strikes in Syria include the United States, Australia, Bahrain, Canada, France, Jordan, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.
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Tense Hostage Standoff Continues At Yerevan Police Station
July 19, 2016
by RFE/RL's Armenian Service
Armed members of a radical opposition group continue to hold four police officers hostage in the Armenian capital two days after they seized a police station, killing one officer.
General Hunan Poghosian, the first deputy chief of the Armenian national police force, said he still hoped the situation would be resolved peacefully.
"Talks are under way with the hostage takers," Poghosian told journalists on July 19. "We are doing our best to resolve the situation without bloodshed."
The remaining hostages reportedly include two senior Armenian police commanders.
Five hostages have been freed since July 17, when the police station in Yerevan's southeastern Erebuni district was stormed and six people wounded in addition to the slain police colonel.
Poghosian said law-enforcement agencies were not ruling out the use of force as a last resort.
Lines of riot police gathered outside the building on July 19 while trucks blocked access from adjacent streets.
The attackers have demanded the resignation of President Serzh Sarkisian and the release of Zhirayr Sefilian, the leader of the radical opposition movement Founding Parliament, who was arrested last month for allegedly plotting an armed revolt.
Armenia's Health Ministry says four of those wounded in the initial attack are still hospitalized.
Late on July 18, more than 1,000 antigovernment protesters rallied on Yerevan's Liberty Square to call for a peaceful resolution to the crisis. A number of protesters wanted to march toward the occupied police station but were stopped by riot police.
They were demanding that police guarantee no force would be used against the dozen or so hostage takers, who apparently are members of a little-known group called Sasna Tsrer, dubbed by some the Daredevils of Sassoun, which is loyal to Sefilian's Founding Parliament.
Most of Sasna Tsrer members are veterans of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
More than a dozen other people were detained earlier on July 18 when they tried to demonstrate near the seized Erebuni compound, which has been cordoned off by security forces.
The Founding Parliament is particularly critical of the way the government has handled a long-running conflict in Azerbaijan's breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh, territory claimed by both Armenia and Azerbaijan.
The group frequently stages street protests in Yerevan demanding Sarkisian's resignation.
Sefilian and six of his supporters were arrested on June 20 after authorities initially said they were preparing a plot to seize several government buildings and telecommunication facilities in Yerevan. He was formally charged with illegal acquisition and possession of weapons.
Sefilian says the case against him is politically motivated.
Just days before his arrest, Sefilian announced plans to set up a new opposition movement called the National Resistance Committee. He said the new movement would try to topple the government "with the help of the people and the army."
Sefilian was detained in 2006 over calls for "a violent overthrow of the government." He was released in 2008.
In 2015, Sefilian was arrested again along with several of his supporters on suspicion of preparing a coup but released shortly afterward.
Serzh Sarkisian, a former military officer, has been president of the Caucasus country of 2.9 million since winning a vote in 2008 that followed by clashes between police and opposition supporters in which 10 people died.
With additional reporting by AFP
Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/armenia-standoff-founding-parliament-sefilian/27866740.html
Copyright (c) 2016. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.
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Islamic State, Nice, And The European Jihadism That Is Here To Stay
July 19, 2016
by David Patrikarakos
Brussels, Paris (twice), and now Nice: Four crippling jihadist attacks in just over 18 months. The extremist group Islamic State's fastidious sadism has arrived in Europe, and it looks like our problems are only just beginning.
Last week, on July 14, as evening celebrations for Bastille Day (France's version of Independence Day) took place on the Promenade des Anglais -- the central promenade of the Mediterranean coastal city of Nice -- Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a Tunisian living in France, deliberately drove a 19-ton refrigerated truck into the crowds, killing 84 people and wounding more than 300.
Panic broke out among the thousands that had gathered to watch the evening's fireworks as the attacker entered the promenade, repeatedly swerving to hit as many people as possible. He exchanged some initial fire with police but was able to continue for almost 2 kilometers before they were finally able to surround the truck, strafe it with gunfire, and finally kill him. By that point, hundreds of twisted bodies and pools of blood littered the seafront. It was a true act of savagery.
As French security officials scrambled to make sense of the situation, it initially appeared that Lahouaiej-Bouhlel might be a "lone wolf" attacker, one with perhaps psychological problems or unknown grievances. He had, it emerged, a criminal record, mostly for violence and petty theft, as well a history of psychiatric problems. Critically, however, he was not on the French intelligence "fiche S" list of suspected jihadists.
Two days later, however, IS claimed responsibility for the attack, announcing on its Amaq News Agency channel that the "executor of the deadly operation in Nice, France, was a soldier of the Islamic State. He executed the operation in response to calls to target citizens of coalition nations, which fight the Islamic State."
It does appear that Lahouaiej-Bouhlel may have been part of a wider network. On July 17, two Albanians were arrested on suspicion of supplying him with the 7.65 mm automatic pistol he used to fire on police.
But according to historian and Arabist Pieter Van Ostaeyen, the delay between the attack and IS's claim of responsibility for it raises doubts over the true extent of his links to the group -- an assessment the French authorities appear to share.
"It seems he became radicalized very quickly," French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said on July 17. "This is a new type of attack. We are now confronted with individuals that are sensitive to the message of [IS] and are committed to extremely violent actions without necessarily being trained by them."
This would be in keeping with IS strategy. As far back as September 22, 2014, IS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani ash-Shami had advised wannabe jihadists who wanted to carry out lone attacks on the various means by which they could strike at the infidel:
"If you are not able to find an IED or a bullet, then single out the disbelieving American, Frenchman, or any of their allies. Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car..."
"This call to kill crusaders has been repeated many times since," Van Ostaeyen told me by e-mail, and clearly it struck a chord with Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, on whose computer police found many IS videos.
But perhaps the real clue to all this goes even further back, to 2004, when the Islamist strategist Abu Bakr Naji published, online, The Management Of Savagery, a pamphlet aiming to provide a strategy by which Al-Qaeda could eventually form an Islamic caliphate. Published before IS even came into being (in its present form), it has since become one its guiding principles; it is reportedly read widely among the group's commanders.
Central to Naji's ethos is that the more military responses Islamic extremists can provoke from the West, the more those powers will become worn down through a process of attrition -- both in terms of resources, public support at home, and anger among the ummah -- the world's global Muslim community. If nothing else, the Iraq war proved him right on this count.
A more recent example came in November of last year, when, just two days after the Bataclan concert hall attack, which left 130 people dead, France launched its most extensive bombing campaign against IS to date, repeatedly pounding its stronghold of Raqqa. In essence, French President Francois Hollande played right into Naji's hands. But he had no choice. The enraged French public needed to see their leader take clear and decisive action. Thus did France expend military resources and anger Muslims in the Middle East -- without making a significant dent in IS's capabilities.
IS has taken Naji's strategy and improved on it -- namely by forcing Western nations into a double bind by the use of terrorist acts carried out by (usually) locally born militants to create divisions, and preferably sow hatred, between minority Muslim communities and the majority in Western countries. The formula is simple yet deadly effective: The more homegrown jihadists appear in France, Belgium, and the U.K., the more their respective governments must monitor their Muslim communities. And the more they monitor them, the more it fuels resentment among them. And the more resentment that is fueled, the more jihadists are produced. It's the definition of a vicious circle.
And that this strategy is working is plain to see. The attack was a gift to the French far right. The day after the attack, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French National Front party, issued a statement urging the country to "declare war" against "the scourge of Islamist fundamentalism." Several more attacks like Nice could one day see her become France's president. What comes after that could destabilize the whole of Europe.
In the meantime, one thing is for sure: European jihadism is here to stay. And all Western countries that have participated in international military coalitions in the Middle East are targets.
As Van Ostaeyen explained: "The logic followed is that of qisas or retaliation (an eye for an eye, blood for blood). I'm afraid this climate of terror will haunt us for many years to come."
David Patrikarakos is a contributing editor at The Daily Beast and the author of Nuclear Iran: The Birth Of An Atomic State. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Guardian, Politico, Foreign Policy, Spectator, The New Republic, The New Statesman, The Telegraph, and many others.
Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/islamic-state-nice- france-european-jihadism/27866988.html
Copyright (c) 2016. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.
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China announces military exercises in South China Sea
Iran Press TV
Mon Jul 18, 2016 8:27AM
China has announced that it is closing off a part of South China Sea to conduct a series of military drills this week.
China's maritime administration said Monday that an area off the east coast of the island province of Hainan would be closed from Tuesday to Thursday.
The area of the sea identified is some distance from the Paracel islands and even further from the Spratlys, with both chains claimed by Beijing and several other neighboring states.
No further details have been released about the nature of the maneuvers.
The navy and Defense Ministry had no immediate comment in this regard.
The announcement comes days after the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled against Beijing's claims to the Spratly Islands, and sided with the Philippines that had filed the complaint.
China rejected the July 12 verdict, calling it unlawful and an attempt to deny Beijing's territorial sovereignty and maritime rights.
Beijing claims nearly all of the strategically vital South China Sea, which is also claimed in part by Taiwan, Brunei, Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines. The contested waters are believed to be rich in oil and gas.
The dispute has at times drawn in trans-regional countries, particularly the US, which says the court ruling is "final and legally binding."
Beijing accuses Washington of meddling in regional issues and deliberately stirring up tensions in the South China Sea.
The US, in turn, accuses China of carrying out what it calls a land reclamation program in the South China Sea by building artificial islands in the disputed areas.
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Beijing 'will never' halt island work
People's Daily Online
(China Daily) 08:18, July 19, 2016
China's naval chief told a visiting US Navy officer on Monday that Beijing "will never give up halfway" the construction of its islands in the South China Sea.
Admiral Wu Shengli, commander of the People's Liberation Army Navy, also told Admiral John Richardson, US chief of naval operations, that the Chinese Navy has made "sufficient preparations" to deal with any sovereignty infringement or provocation.
Despite negative factors, Beijing is still willing to peacefully resolve disputes via negotiations and "manage and control crisis through rules and mechanisms", Wu said.
Washington has militarily pressured Beijing this year by sending military ships and planes to approach or intrude on Chinese territorial space in the South China Sea.
Wu said any attempt to intimidate China by flexing military muscle "will only backfire".
Beijing will "advance and complete island and reef construction as planned", no matter which country or individual pressures China to do otherwise, and "the level of our defense on these islands and reefs depends on the threats facing us", Wu said.
Richardson began his first visit to China on Sunday and will stay until Wednesday.
He told Wu in Beijing on Monday that he is ready to join hands in boosting trust and friendship to achieve lasting development of ties between the two navies, militaries and countries.
Fan Jishe, a US researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the US "has played a negative role in the South China Sea disputes, and its proactive engagement in the Asia-Pacific region has aggravated conflicts".
Zuo Xiying, an international studies specialist at Renmin University of China, said the South China Sea has become the forefront of China-US competition, and "it would be a good thing if they reinforce strategic communication and formulate more rules accepted by both".
Su Ge, president of the China Institute of International Studies, told the World Peace Forum in Beijing over the weekend that "although cooperation between Beijing and Washington cannot end all the issues in the world, not a single major issue could be resolved if the two sides walk into full-scale confrontation".
On Monday, Chinese Air Force spokesman Shen Jinke said the PLA Air Force recently conducted a combat readiness patrol in the South China Sea, including sending its H-6K bombers to patrol around Huangyan Island.
Such combat readiness patrols in the South China Sea "will continue on a regular basis", Shen said.
Meanwhile, a navigationalert issued on Monday at the website of China's MaritimeSafety Administration said military activities will be conducted from Tuesday to Thursday in designated waters in the South China Sea.
The alert gave coordinates to define the designated area in which entry by other vessels will be prohibited. The area is southeast of Hainan Island.
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China vows to continue construction in disputed sea
Iran Press TV
Tue Jul 19, 2016 5:41AM
Beijing has pledged to continue its construction activities in the South China Sea despite an international court ruling against its claims to rights in the disputed waters.
"We will never stop our construction on the Nansha Islands halfway," Wu Shengli, the commander of the People's Liberation Army Navy told US counterpart Admiral John Richardson, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
Beijing has been turning reefs into artificial islands in the Nansha chain, known as Spratly, by China's rivals.
Last week, The Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled that Beijing's claims to islands in the South China Sea had no legal basis, siding with the Philippines that had filed the complaint.
The ruling said China's construction on Mischief Reef had "violated the Philippines' sovereign rights with respect to its exclusive economic zone and continental shelf."
China, which made clear from the start that it would not comply with any decisions by the court, slammed the verdict as an attempt to strip China of its historic sovereignty and maritime rights.
The top military official further described the islands as "China's inherent territory," saying Beijing's "necessary construction on the islands is reasonable, justified and lawful."
"Any attempt to force China to give in through flexing military muscles will only have the opposite effect," he added.
China claims almost all of the South China Sea, and is locked in disputes with its neighbors, namely Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, tiny Brunei and Taiwan.
Beijing says construction projects in the South China Sea are in accordance with international law as they do not affect the freedom of navigation and overflight by all countries.
It also argues that the activities do no cause damage to the marine ecological system in the disputed waters.
Manila rejects talks with Beijing
In another development, the Philippines rejected China's call for bilateral talks on the South China Sea dispute after the arbitration court ruling.
Philippine Foreign Minister Perfecto Yasay said Tuesday the proposal was put forward by his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi during their meeting on the sidelines of a summit of Asian and European leaders on the weekend.
Yasay said the Chinese side wanted the talks to be only on issues "outside, or (in) disregard of, the arbitral ruling," adding that Manila turned down the offer as it was not in its national interests.
The Philippines, he said, wanted to enforce the points of the ruling by The Hague-based tribunal. "They said if you insist on the ruling, discussing it along those lines, then we might be headed for a confrontation."
The Philippine minister further expressed hope that the court's judgment will push other countries which have overlapping claims in the South China Sea to cooperate with Manila and issue a joint statement on the case.
The dispute has at times drawn in trans-regional countries, particularly the US.
Beijing accuses Washington of meddling in regional issues and deliberately stirring up tensions in the South China Sea.
The US, in turn, accuses China of carrying out what it calls a land reclamation program in the South China Sea by building artificial islands in the disputed areas.
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Pyongyang Dismisses ASEM Criticism Over Missile Tests
Sputnik News
07:17 18.07.2016(updated 07:18 18.07.2016)
Pyongyang refuted criticism of the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) leaders over its missile tests and blamed the United States for the Korean conflict escalation, the country's Foreign Ministry said on Monday.
TOKYO (Sputnik) On Saturday, a statement adopted at the ASEM summit strongly condemned North Korea's missile tests and called for vigilance against assistance to Pyongyang's nuclear program.
"Raising chances of a conflict on the Korean peninsula, the U.S. continues to carry out joint military drills and brings nuclear-powered submarines, bombers and other strategic weapons, including the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system, into South Korea," the ministry's spokesman said, as quoted by Yonhap agency.
On July 8, Seoul disclosed that it was going to station the THAAD missile defense system in the southern Seongju County. The governments of Russia and China protested the decision, stating that the agreement to deploy the THAAD system will have a highly negative impact on global strategic stability.
The THAAD system is designed to intercept short, medium and intermediate ballistic missiles at the terminal incoming stage.
Sputnik
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North Korea Responds to THAAD With Missile Test
by Brian Padden July 19, 2016
North Korea test fired three ballistic missiles on Tuesday, a week after it threatened to retaliate against South Korea over the deployment of the THAAD missile defense system.
Both the U.S. and South Korea said the missiles Pyongyang launched early on Tuesday were likely medium range Scud or Rodong types that flew between 500 and 600 kilometers before falling into the sea off the east coast of the Korean peninsula.
Tokyo denounced North Korea's multiple missile launch and said it would strengthen cooperation with the U.S. and South Korea to deal with the continuing threat.
"We urge strongly that North Korea restrain from further [missile] activities, and will take all possible measures to deal with any situation [which may arise], said Japanese Defense Minister Gen Nakatani.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) determined the missile launches from North Korea did not pose a threat to North America.
Intimidation tactic
The U.S. and South Korea recently agreed to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) defense system to defend against the North's increasing nuclear and missile capabilities.
North Korea on July 11 responded by threatening to launch a retaliatory strike against the THAAD deployment by turning the South "into a sea of fire and a pile of ashes."
Jeon Ha-gyu, the Joint Chiefs of Staff spokesman for the South Korean military, said Tuesday's missile launches were meant to further intimidate.
"Our assessment is that this was done as a show of force. The range of the ballistic missiles fired today is enough to hit the entire area of South Korea including Busan as a target," said Jeon.
Following its fourth nuclear test in January, North Korea has conducted numerous ballistic missile launches, often to test technological advancements made to increase the range and accuracy of the missiles.
But the Scud and Rodong missiles test fired on Tuesday are based on old Soviet designs that are considered "entry level" ballistic missiles and inaccurate weapons that do not use sophisticated technology.
"This (missile launch) was not to advance any technological capability. The missiles North Korea has fired in the past are almost same as the ones it fired today," said Professor Kim Dong-yeop, a military analyst at Kyungnam University in South Korea.
THAAD discontent
The North Korean missile launch may have also been, in part, an attempt to increase public anxiety over THAAD in South Korea.
Joshua Pollack, editor of the U.S.-based Nonproliferation Review, said Tuesday's launches, "might be a way of reminding their southern neighbors that the site chosen for a THAAD battery in South Korea is within reach".
Citing concerns over public health and safety, THAAD opponents in South Korea have staged mass demonstrations and are organizing petition drives to force the government to reverse its decision to deploy the controversial missile defense system.
Most of the protests have occurred in Seongju County, near the site where THAAD is to be deployed in the southeastern part of the country.
Many local residents worry that locating THAAD near their communities will make them targets for North Korean retaliatory strikes.
THAAD uses high-resolution radar designed to detect and track ballistic missile threats at long distances and high altitudes.
There is also concern that exposure to electromagnetic radiation from the system's radar could cause serious harm to nearby residents and could contaminate agricultural products.
This week, U.S. military officials invited South Korean journalists to Guam to inspect the THAAD battery in place there and address their concerns.
Last week the South Korean military brought journalists to a Patriot missile defense site south of Seoul that uses the same model radar.
Officials measured the system's electromagnetic emissions and said they fell within safety standards and reassured the public that the THAAD site will be placed 1.5 kilometers away from the nearest population center.
China
China supported the strong United Nations sanctions imposed on North Korea for its nuclear test this year, and has called on Pyongyang to end its banned nuclear and missiles tests.
But Beijing also opposes the THAAD deployment and there is concern that Beijing may take economic measures to retaliate against South Korea.
Analysts say Beijing is concerned in particular about THAAD's radar capability to monitor Chinese military installations and in general about Washington's increasing military strength in the region.
Youmi Kim and Han Sang-mi in Seoul contributed to this report.
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Iran urges Ban Ki-moon not to damage N. deal
ISNA - Iranian Students' News Agency
Mon / 18 July 2016 / 13:55
TEHRAN (ISNA)- Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad-Javad Zarf slammed the UN Chief's remarks on Iranian missile program, calling on him not to damage the JCPOA.
He said that the recent remarks of Ban Ki-moon on Iranian missile program are not sensible, adding that, "Unfortunately, the UN chief had failed to leave a good record over last few years, especially in the case of removing the name of Saudi Arabia from the list of child killers."
He said Ban Ki-moon had called the issue (removing the name) one of the most difficult decisions in his life which had a very bad impact on the UN's credit.
Zarif also said Iran is seriously abiding by its commitments based on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
Moreover, Zarif described the US's mark in implementing the JCPOA as low.
The accord, was reached between Iran and the US, Britain, Russia, France, China, and the Germany known as the P5+1 on July 14, 2015 following some 23 months of intensive talks.
Under the deal, Iran agreed to limit its nuclear program and provide enhanced access to international atomic monitors in return for the termination of all nuclear-related sanctions against the Islamic Republic.
End Item
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Iran Navy keeps watchful eye on foreigners' moves: Commander
Iran Press TV
Mon Jul 18, 2016 5:6PM
Iran's Navy Commander Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari says Iranian naval forces are keeping a watchful eye on all moves by foreign military units whether at sea or onshore.
Sayyari made the remarks on Monday in a ceremony held to welcome the 41st fleet of the Iranian Navy upon its homecoming and see off the country's 42nd flotilla to high seas to safeguard maritime routes used by Iranian vessels operating in international waters.
He added that the Iranian naval forces are prepared to counter any threat anywhere in regional waters.
"We know the enemy very well and are monitoring and controlling all its moves," he said, adding that the Iranian naval forces are closely scrutinizing all the movements of extra-regional countries.
Sayyari said Iran's Navy dispatches flotillas to high seas to convey the message of peace and friendship to other countries, counter efforts to spread Iranophobia, display the country's might, safeguard maritime routes and monitor all moves by regional and extra-regional countries in the north of the Indian Ocean, particularly the Gulf of Aden and Bab-el-Mandab.
The 41st flotilla, consisting of Lavan logistic warship and Alborz destroyer, arrived in the country's southern coasts on Monday after sailing over 5,130 miles in 48 days.
During its presence in high seas, the fleet managed to escort 46 Iranian merchant ships and oil tankers.
In recent years, Iran's Navy has increased its presence in international waters to protect naval routes and provide security for merchant vessels and tankers.
In line with international efforts against piracy, the Iranian Navy has been also conducting patrols in the Gulf of Aden since November 2008 in order to safeguard merchant ships and oil tankers owned or leased by Iran or other countries.
Iran's Navy has managed to foil several attacks on both Iranian and foreign vessels during its missions in international waters.
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US gets low grade in JCPOA implementation: Iran FM
Iran Press TV
Mon Jul 18, 2016 1:25PM
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif says the United States will likely receive a low grade for its commitment to implementation of last July's nuclear agreement between Iran and the P5+1 group of countries.
Zarif made the remarks in an exclusive interview with Iran's IRIB News Agency on the occasion of the first anniversary of the nuclear agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council the United States, France, Britain, China and Russia plus Germany on July 14, 2015.
"If we want to give a grade to the JCPOA, it will definitely get a very good score considering the time frame and international circumstances, but if we want to give a grade to the way that the Americans implemented [the agreement], they will probably receive a low score," said Zarif, who headed Iran's nuclear negotiating team in talks with the six countries.
He added that the JCPOA is a "very important achievement" for the Islamic Republic as it safeguarded the Iranian nation's dignity on the international scale, recognized its rights, scrapped the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council and prevented new sanctions against the country.
Iran and the six world powers started implementing the JCPOA on January 16.
Under the deal, all nuclear-related sanctions imposed on Iran by the European Union, the Security Council and the US should be lifted. Iran has, in return, put some limitations on its nuclear activities.
Zarif emphasized that the JCPOA was "a very defensible document" which proved that nothing can be imposed on the Iranian nation through pressure.
He reasserted Iran's continued implementation of its obligations under the JCPOA with seriousness and precision, and the country's resolve to prevent the opposite side from failing to meet its own commitments.
Following the JCPOA implementation, many European banks started transacting with their Iranian counterparts, he said.
"However, a number of banks are still in fear of US regulations, but we believe that such fear is a psychological fear emanating from conservative nature of monetary and banking institutions and not from regulations which prevent cooperation with Iran," the foreign minister pointed out.
He said Iran has focused its attention on making the best use of the opportunity created after the JCPOA implementation, but the country will always remember that the US does not keep its promises.
Zarif added that Washington has certainly failed to make enough efforts to allay the international community's concerns, which were the result of its policies against Tehran over almost a decade.
After the JCPOA went into effect, congressional Republicans have introduced many sanctions bills and other legislation to undermine the agreement that is viewed as a foreign policy legacy of President Obama's administration.
The American banks are still banned from dealing with Iran as part of an old US trade embargo that still remains in place. Accordingly, this is believed to have already effectively blocked any transactions with Iran which is based on US dollar, because they would ultimately have to be cleared in the US.
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Russia delivers first S-300 missiles to Iran: Report
Iran Press TV
Mon Jul 18, 2016 8:35AM
Russia has reportedly delivered the first missiles of the advanced S-300 long-range air defense system as part of a military contract between Moscow and Tehran.
According to a report published by Tasnim news agency on Monday, the first shipment of the missiles was delivered to Iran "recently."
Russia had committed to delivering the systems to Iran under an 800-million-dollar deal in 2007. It, however, refused to deliver the systems to Tehran in 2010 under the pretext that the agreement was covered by the fourth round of the United Nations Security Council sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program.
Following Moscow's refusal to deliver the systems, Tehran filed a complaint against the relevant Russian arms firm with the International Court of Arbitration in Geneva.
In April 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a presidential decree, paving the way for the long-overdue delivery of the missile defense systems to Iran.
The decision to deliver the S-300 long-range air defense system came after Iran and the P5+1 group of countries the United States, France, Britain, China and Russia plus Germany reached mutual understanding on Tehran's nuclear program in the Swiss city of Lausanne on April 2, 2015.
Brigadier General Farzad Esmaili, the commander of the Khatam al-Anbia Air Defense Base, said on July 1 that the S-300 missile defense system is to go operational in Iran by the end of the current Iranian calendar year (ending on March 20, 2017).
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Iran's Atomic Agency Refutes Reports on Purchase of Bulgarian Old Reactors
Sputnik News
14:42 18.07.2016
The head of Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), Ali Akbar Salehi, said on Monday that rumors about Tehran's purchase of old reactors from Sofia for the needs of its nuclear energy program were false.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) Earlier in July, media reported about plans of Sofia and Tehran to conduct a deal on purchasing "secondhand" reactors for the needs of Iranian nuclear power plant in southwestern city of Bushehr.
"This claim is completely false since nuclear reactors cannot become 'secondhand' to begin with," Salehi said, as quoted by the Iranian Mehr news agency.
At the same time he added that Bulgaria wanted to sell the equipment it had after the cancellation of project on construction of two reactors with Russia's Rosatom state-owned nuclear energy corporation.
The Russian-built Bushehr nuclear power plant started operating in 2011 and reached full capacity the following year.
The project for Bushehr-2 was presented by Russian nuclear experts in Tehran in September, 2014. In November, Iran signed a number of deals with Russia for the construction of two more nuclear reactors and an option for an additional six.
Sputnik
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Iran rejects French envoy's biased remarks
Iran Press TV
Tue Jul 19, 2016 2:30PM
Iran has lashed out at the French ambassador to the UN for making "consciously biased" remarks about Tehran's role in the Middle East, saying such fabricated claims aim to cover up Paris widespread interference in Syria's internal affairs.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi said on Tuesday that French Ambassador to the United Nations Francois Delattre made "spiteful" remarks about Iran's nuclear and missile activities and its regional policies.
"The French ambassador's remarks are devoid of truth and are aimed at covering up France broad interference in Syria's affairs which has inflicted heavy human and financial losses on the Syrian people," Qasemi said.
Addressing a UN Security Council's meeting in New York on Monday, the French envoy expressed concern over several "destabilizing" actions by Iran, including the testing of ballistic missiles "capable of carrying nuclear weapons."
"It is important for regional stability for Iran to abstain from any destabilizing and dangerous activity," Delattre alleged.
The Iranian spokesman rejected the claims and said, "Iran's military capabilities, including missiles, have not been designed to carry nuclear weapons and are not within the jurisdiction of the Security Council's resolutions and their annexes."
He added that countries equipping armed groups are responsible for further complicating and escalating the crisis in Syria.
"The Islamic Republic of Iran has always supported [the introduction of] reforms in Syria and the cessation of violence and regards holding national dialog within the framework of Syria-Syria negotiations as the solution to the country's crisis," the spokesperson pointed out.
He expressed Iran's determination to actively help improve peace and stability in the Middle East in a bid to counter violent terrorism and extremism, saying Tehran is ready to fully cooperate with its neighboring countries and the international community to fight this common global threat.
He also said the French diplomat's comments about Iran's missile program run counter to the nuclear agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), reached between the Islamic Republic and the P5+1 group of countries on July 14, 2015.
"Iran's military capabilities, including missiles, are exclusively for legitimate defense purposes. Such equipment have not been designed to carry nuclear weapons," Qasemi said.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman further criticized the French diplomat for leveling allegations against Major General Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC).
"The comments by this French official ... come as French leaders and authorities are consciously ignoring the Zionist regime as the source of crisis and the main obstacle to regional and global peace."
In his address to the Security Council session, Delattre said France was concerned by information about foreign travel by General Qasem Soleimani, who was still subject to a travel ban.
The Iranian spokesperson said France itself is one of the sources of instability in the region.
"Regrettably, France, besides its continuous efforts to destabilize the region through its convergence with the creators and supporters of Daesh, has recently hosted a gathering of terrorist groups such as the terrorist Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) and the directors of the Taliban, al-Qaeda and Daesh," he added.
He said such measures by the French authorities are aimed at whitewashing the crimes of the MKO terrorist group against the Iranian nation and officials and stand in stark contrast to the obligations of this country and declared policies of French political leaders.
Paris on July 9 hosted an annual meeting organized by the MKO terrorist group which was attended by former Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Turki al-Faisal. The former Saudi spy chief gave a 30-minute address to the gathering.
The MKO is the most hated terrorist group among the Iranians because of its dark history of assassinations and bombings and for siding with Saddam Hussein in his eight-year war against Iran in the 1980s.
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Mosul residents revolt against Daesh, kill five: Report
Iran Press TV
Mon Jul 18, 2016 4:16AM
Residents in several neighborhoods in the Iraqi city of Mosul have reportedly staged an uprising against the Daesh terrorist group which holds the city killing at least five Takfiri militants.
Armed clashes erupted between the residents of the Bab al-Jadid neighborhood in central Mosul and Daesh terrorists late on Sunday, a local source told Iraq's al-Sumaria news website on Sunday.
The uprising has led to the expulsion of the Daesh militants from their positions in the area and the death of two terrorists.
Two vehicles belonging to the terrorists were also burned, according to the report.
The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, further said that the residents of Mosul's southern district of Hammam al-Alil also clashed with Daesh in the center of the district, killing three terrorists.
The source added that the residents seek to take full control of the district and to purge it of the terrorists.
According to the report, the residents have already raised the Iraqi flag over a number of the district's buildings.
The northern and western parts of Iraq have been plagued by gruesome violence ever since Daesh terrorists began a campaign of terror in the country in June 2014, when they overran Mosul and declared it their so-called headquarters in Iraq.
Daesh terrorists have gained notoriety for their barbarity, heinous atrocities and sacrilegious acts. The militants have been accused of committing gross human rights violations and war crimes in the areas they control in Iraq as well as in neighboring Syria.
Iraqi army soldiers and allied volunteer fighters have been fighting to win back militant-held regions in joint operations.
Iraq's Defense Minister Khaled al-Obaidi said on February 21 that the country has undertaken a decisive battle to retake the northern city of Mosul by the yearend.
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Background Briefing on the Pledging Conference in Support of Iraq
Special Briefing
Office of the Spokesperson
Via Teleconference
July 18, 2016
MODERATOR: Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Today's call will provide context for the upcoming pledging conference in Washington in support of Iraq which will be co-hosted by the United States on July 20th. We have three State Department officials here with us. Each of our speakers will make brief remarks and then we'll turn it over to you for your questions. This call is on background only, so for your information not for reporting purposes we have with us [name and title withheld], who will be State Department Official One; [name and title withheld], who will be State Department Official Two; and [name and title withheld], who will be State Department Official Three.
With that, I will turn it over to State Department Official One.
STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: Good afternoon, everybody. We're very excited that this week we have an opportunity to bring 24 nations together on the day before the counter-ISIL ministerial here in Washington in order to bring a focus to the needs the ongoing needs in Iraq. We are leading this in effort in partnership with Canada, Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, and Kuwait. We're hoping to raise in excess of $2 billion in what has been a roughly six-and-a-half-week pledging effort. This is new money and it's intended to go for four distinct objectives.
In the first instance, as you know, Iraq, as cities are liberated from the scourge of ISIL, they face a number of different challenges. The first challenge in many instances is one of demining, and we have another official here that can go into greater depth, but one of the things that we're trying to address in this conference is the funding for demining.
The second thing that is affected that these communities are affected by, of course, is the fact that their communities themselves have been devastated by the war and by the time that they have been occupied by ISIL forces. So the second thing we're doing is we're trying to make sure that the coffers for the funding facility for immediate stabilization, which is run by the UNDP in cooperation with the Iraqi Government, are as full as they can be because they provide the first-order immediate stabilization assistance for these communities. They bring in electricity, they start to create a light but important job base, and they create the conditions for people to return to their towns, like very much in Tikrit, which is an example I think you're well familiar with.
The third basket that we're trying to raise money for is the funding facility for expanded stabilization, because we realize that once we get past immediate stabilization, there are still things that we need to do to try to raise the antibodies in communities to the possibility of them becoming weak again and preyed again by Daesh and other extremist groups. So this extended facility is just starting. We're going to be kicking it off with some first pledges during the course of this pledging round.
And of course, the last and perhaps the largest single need and there is somebody here that can speak to it in greater depth is humanitarian assistance. As you are well aware, the UN humanitarian appeal for Iraq is well underfunded this year, and in fact today just today the UN came out with a new request for $184 million, which is just for the pre-positioning and planning for the Mosul campaign, which we anticipate will cause a significant amount of internal displacement along the course of the campaign. And so this work is prophylactic to try to get ahead of it so that we're ready for taking care of any IDPs out of the Mosul campaign before we get there.
So all told, those are the four things that we're trying to raise money for on Wednesday afternoon. We've got 24 countries coming; it's a very good turnout, and we expect to raise and we hope to raise in excess of $2 billion. Thank you.
MODERATOR: And now we'll go to State Department Official Number Two.
STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL TWO: I will address the humanitarian part of the pledging conference, and let me begin by saying that since 2014, as Daesh has expanded its territory in Iraq, 3.3 million people have been displaced. As my colleague said, as areas are liberated from Daesh, there are frequently other displacements, as we saw in the battle to liberate Fallujah. Humanitarian assistance is aimed directly at these populations. It exists it consists of food, water, shelter, sanitation, medical services, livelihood, and protection for these individuals. The entire humanitarian requirement for Iraq if it were addressed all at once has been estimated by the United Nations at $4.5 billion. That is obviously an enormous amount of money. The current Humanitarian Response Plan for Iraq is set by the United Nations at $778 million. That does not include the requirements that are expected for the liberation of Mosul. The Fallujah campaign taught us all a number of lessons many of them we knew already but they certainly were drive home there and those lessons included the need to do as much pre-planning and pre-positioning of materials for displaced populations in advance. And my colleague has referred to some of that. Of the pardon me, I have I gave you a wrong number. The humanitarian plan right now is set at $861 million for immediate requirements, and of that, only 38 percent is subscribed. The problem is that results from inadequate resources are very real. The United Nations has been forced to close many life-saving programs, including in health and sanitation sectors, due to the shortfall.
So far, since 2014, the United States has provided $778 million in humanitarian assistance. Back on June 21st, we announced an additional $20 million. And we plan to make a substantial contribution at the conference that will take place on July 20th.
I'd like to note that to date the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration has pledged $105 million of State Department funds towards the requirements for the Humanitarian Response Plan. Other funding from the American side comes from USAID. Thank you.
MODERATOR: And finally, State Department Official Three.
STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL THREE: Good afternoon. I'm going to talk a little bit about humanitarian demining and battle area clearance and the removing of the explosive remnants of war that are preventing IDPs from being able to safely return to their homes. Historically, the United States has provided over $300 million to Iraq for demining since 2003. And over the next three through 2017 we're expecting to provide at least 45 million for this effort.
The U.S. assistance for Conventional Weapons Destruction Program is directed through Iraqi and international NGOs who do the work on the ground. This has been very important and has made a significant progress toward helping save lives and enable people to be able to return to their homes.
As Iraq continues to make progress liberating areas from ISIL, the United States is committed to further expanding its efforts to help with the critical clearance of explosive remnants of war, especially around the areas that are infrastructure-related whether it's water, electric, and things of that nature so that we can get those things back running to help with the return of IDPs.
We're proud to have led the first demining effort in Ramadi through the awarding of a $20 million contract to Janus Corporation and to their sub Iraqi subcontractor Al Bahad. We're looking at finalizing MOUs with some of our international partners being Germany, Canada, and Denmark who are pledging to contributions toward other clearance work in Iraq. At this time, the clearance of unexploded ordnance and abandoned explosive ordnance and IEDs, quite frankly, have, again, allowed the restoration of water, electricity, healthcare, and schools, as well as some housing, while simultaneously we are training Iraqis to be able to do this work so that they can continue this work even as we move from to other provinces and other areas.
Again, I want to stress we must help Iraqis clear this ordnance and clear these battlefields so that IDPs can return home safely and resume their lives. Thank you.
MODERATOR: Operator, we're ready for questions now.
OPERATOR: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you'd like to ask a question, please press * then 1 on your telephone keypad. You'll hear a tone indicating you've been placed in queue, and you may remove yourself from the queue at any time by pressing the # key. So once again, press *1 if you have a question.
And we do have a question from Nick Wadhams with Bloomberg News. Please go ahead.
QUESTION: Hi. Thanks for the holding the call. I'm wondering you mentioned you expect about $2 billion in pledges. Is that essentially set? I mean, you do you expect overall to hit the $2 billion figure? Presumably, countries would have telegraphed in advance how much they were willing to pledge. Also, you said you expect the U.S. to make a sizeable donation. Can you say what portion of the 2 billion or just how much the U.S. is planning to give in the conference? Thank you.
STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: We're not able to tell you what the U.S. pledge will be just like we're not delineating any of the individual pledges. We had a target of $2 billion. We believe that we are going to hit that target of $2 billion on Wednesday.
OPERATOR: Thank you. Then for any further questions please press *1 now. We have a question from Warren Strobel with Reuters. Please go ahead.
QUESTION: Thank you and thanks for doing the call. My understanding in talking to UN officials is that their coffers they're essentially empty right now, which raises the question of how quickly you can turn the pledges into actual material on the ground that will be pre-positioned for the Mosul campaign. And can you have can you give us some sense of the timeline there or how easy or difficult it will be to make that transition?
STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: I can speak to part of that on the money side. We have asked donors to do everything they can to make pledges available during the course of 2016, understanding that a large amount of what we need to do for the Mosul campaign in the preparation area will need to be done in the next couple of months. So we do have a mix of pledging over a couple of years by a number of different pledgers, but we do have a significant amount of money, we believe, coming in to address needs in 2016 specifically to get ready for Mosul.
STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL TWO: If I could, I would add to that that when UN agencies have firm pledges, they are in some cases able to begin drawing funds from other resources that they have to fill the most immediate demands. So firm pledges can be translated into resources that can be used in some cases almost immediately.
OPERATOR: Thank you. Our next question is from Susan Bainbridge with Bainbridge News. Please, go ahead.
QUESTION: Thank you very much for doing this call. You can you give us any indication as to how many people have pledged any amount of money not how much they have pledged but how many people or companies are pledging for this conference?
STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: Yes, we have over we have 24 countries who have made pledges as of today in conjunction with this conference on Wednesday. And I will only tell you that some of them, more than a few, are in the nine figure range.
OPERATOR: Thank you. Then one last time, press *1 now if you have a question. We do have a question from Carter Rice with Asahi Shimbun. Go ahead, please.
QUESTION: Thank you. I just wondered if you could provide any additional details on Japan's participation in the conference.
STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: Japan is a co-host of the conference. We're very pleased to have them on board. Japan is a leader in the area of humanitarian assistance throughout the region but also and especially in Iraq. They were one of our very first co-hosts to sign up when we started this initiative a couple of weeks ago.
OPERATOR: Okay, thank you. And [Moderator], we have no further questions.
MODERATOR: I think that concludes the call then. Thank you very much.
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Secretary Kerry's Call With Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu
Readout
Office of the Spokesperson
Washington, DC
July 16, 2016
The following is attributable to Spokesperson John Kirby:
Secretary Kerry spoke this evening with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu.
The foreign minister provided an update on events in Turkey, and made clear the Turkish government remains in control of state institutions. The foreign minster thanked the United States for its support.
The Secretary reiterated U.S. support for the democratically elected government in Turkey, for the rule of law and for the need for authorities to take all necessary precautions to safeguard civilian life and property as they respond to this attempted coup.
Secretary Kerry also urged restraint by the Turkish government and respect for due process -- and its international obligations -- as it investigates and uncovers additional information about those involved. He made clear that the United States would be willing to provide assistance to Turkish authorities conducting this investigation, but that public insinuations or claims about any role by the United States in the failed coup attempt are utterly false and harmful to our bilateral relations.
Finally, both ministers discussed Turkey's importance as both a NATO ally and a key member of the coalition to defeat Da'esh, and stressed the need to stay focused on ensuring operational support to those efforts continue unabated.
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NATO Secretary General statement following attempted coup in Turkey
NATO - North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
18 Jul. 2016
Press Release (2016) 129
Issued on 18 Jul. 2016
I have spoken to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in the aftermath of the attempted coup in Turkey. I welcomed the strong support shown by the people and all political parties to democracy and to the democratically elected government. The Turkish people have shown great courage.
I also conveyed my condolences to the families of the innocent people who lost their lives and wished speedy recovery to those who have been injured.
I once again condemned the attempted coup in Turkey and reiterated my full support to Turkey's democratic institutions.
Being part of a unique community of values, it is essential for Turkey, like all other Allies, to ensure full respect for democracy and its institutions, the constitutional order, the rule of law and fundamental freedoms.
Turkey is a valued NATO Ally with whom I stand in solidarity in this difficult time.
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Cleansing operation to be continued in Turkey
People's Daily Online
(CRI Online) 08:01, July 18, 2016
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Sunday that the government's actions against the organizers of the attempted coup are not over and a cleansing operation will be carried out.
"We don't have to mix soldiers who love their nation and country and parallel terrorist groups who were disguised in those soldiers' (loyal to nation) uniforms. They are not soldiers. They are riding tanks mercilessly on citizens. They are slayers who opened fire against their nation without closing their eyes. They will take punishment that they deserve."
The prime minister made the statement during a visit to the TRT state television studios.
At the height of the action on Friday, rebel soldiers took control of TRT, and announced a countrywide curfew and martial law.
Yildrim also said life will go back to normal following the failed coup attempt.
He added that the central bank, capital markets board, banking system and stock exchange were all functional.
The death toll from Turkey's failed military coup has risen to more than 290 with more than 1,400 people wounded.
In the meanwhile, more than 6,000 have been detained so far due to their involvement in the coup.
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EU urges Turkey to respect rule of law after failed coup
Iran Press TV
Mon Jul 18, 2016 9:56AM
The European Union (EU) has urged Turkey to respect the rule of law amid a Turkish crackdown on those believed to have been involved in a recent coup attempt in the country.
"We are the ones saying today rule of law has to be protected in the country, there is no excuse for any steps that take the country away from that," said Federica Mogherini, who is the EU's high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, in Brussels on Monday.
"As we have been the first ones to say that in that tragic night, the democratic and legislative institutions needed to be protected," she told journalists before an EU foreign ministers meeting, referring to last Friday night, when the coup attempt in Turkey began.
"Today, we will say, together with ministers, that obviously doesn't mean that rule of law and the system of checks and balances in the country does not count. On the contrary, it needs to be protected for the sake of the country So we will send a strong message on that," she added.
The measures taken by Ankara following the failed coup attempt has prompted increasing international concern.
At least 6,000 people, including judges, have been arrested across the country after the failed coup.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault earlier said "the rule of law must prevail" in Turkey.
"France has condemned the coup, you can't accept the military taking power," Ayrault said. "At the same time, we have to be vigilant that the Turkish authorities don't put in place a system which turns back democracy."
Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders also called for restraint. "It's normal to punish those involved in the coup, but it's normal to ask for respect for the rule of law," he said.
'List of people to arrest was prepared before coup'
EU commissioner Johannes Hahn, who is dealing with Turkey's request to join the bloc, has said it appears that the Turkish government had prepared a list of people to be arrested even before the coup attempt.
"It looks at least as if something has been prepared. The lists are available, which indicates it was prepared and to be used at a certain stage," Hahn said.
Meanwhile, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has hinted that the death penalty may be reintroduced in Turkey to allow the execution of those involved in the coup bid.
The move has been condemned by the Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz as "unacceptable."
"There must be no arbitrary purges, no criminal sanctions outside the framework of the rule of law and the justice system," Kurz said.
"Austria will push at the foreign ministers' meeting to set very clear boundaries for Erdogan," he added.
More arrests and dismissals across Turkey
Turkey conducted fresh raids against suspected coup plotters on Monday.
The state-run Anadolu news agency reported that special Istanbul anti-terror police units raided the air force military academy in the city in search of more suspects.
Meanwhile, General Mehmet Disli, who allegedly conducted the operation to capture Turkey's chief of staff, Hulusi Akar, during the coup, was also arrested.
Turkish media said some 36 generals had been arrested so far.
On Sunday, 11 soldiers were also arrested at Istanbul's Sabiha Gokcen airport over alleged links to the coup.
Meanwhile, a top security official said on Monday that some senior military officials involved in the coup attempt have fled the country.
Also on Monday, Turkey dismissed 8,000 police officers in several cities across the country, including Istanbul and the capital, Ankara, over their alleged links with the failed coup attempt, a senior security official said.
The attempted coup began on Friday night and the violence and fighting between the putschists and government loyalists dragged into Saturday, when the coup was largely defeated.
A total of 290 people were killed in the attempted coup d'etat in Turkey.
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Ex-Commander of Turkish Air Force Pleads Guilty to Organizing Coup Attempt
Sputnik News
18:54 18.07.2016(updated 19:14 18.07.2016)
The ex-commander of the Turkish Air Force has pleaded guilty to organizing the coup attempt, Anadolu news agency reported.
"I started to act aiming to stage a coup," Akin Ozturk said during the interrogation.
Ozturk was the commander of the Turkish Air Force from 2013 until 2015.
Earlier, Akin Ozturk, who is the leader of the military coup attempt in Turkey and the former commander of the country's air force, was detained in Turkey.
According to Sabah newspaper, Ozturk may be linked to Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gulen staying in self-imposed exile in the United States, who was blamed by Ankara for the attempted coup.
Late on Friday, Turkish authorities said that an attempted coup is taking place in the country. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged Turkish citizens to take to streets, stating that the coup attempt was carried out by a small group within the military.
The coup attempt was suppressed by early Saturday, with Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim stating that all coup supporters have been detained and the country is returning to normal life.
Some 208 people were killed and over a thousand wounded in a coup attempt by a faction in the military on Friday. Turkish authorities have arrested over thousands of people, including a number of high-ranking military officials in connection with the failed coup.
Sputnik
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Rebel Pilots of Turkish Fighter Jets Switched Off Radio During Coup Attempt
Sputnik News
15:47 18.07.2016(updated 15:52 18.07.2016)
Turkey's F-16 fighter jets under the control of rebels during the attempted coup ignored orders to return to Akinci Air Base near Ankara before turning off the communication channel, local media reported Monday.
ANKARA (Sputnik) The pilots were contacted by radio and warned that their flight is illegal, at which point they responded by claiming to be acting on the orders of the air force command and turned off the radio equipment, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported, citing military sources.
The jets were refueled in the air by two tanker aircraft manned by coup supporters from Incirlik Air Base in Adana. The F-16s were later forced to land when pro-government fighter jets arrived from various bases from across the country, according to the news outlet.
The coup attempt was suppressed by early Saturday, with Turkish authorities stating that all coup supporters were identified and would be apprehended as the country returned to normal. Over 290 people were killed and at least 1,400 injured during the attempted coup, according to the country's Foreign Ministry.
Soon after the start of the attempted coup, the airspace over the region of the Sea of Marmara in northwestern Turkey was closed to civil aviation and the Turkish Airlines company announced the cancellation of all flights scheduled for Saturday.
Sputnik
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Ex-Commander of Turkish Air Force Denies Admission of Masterminding Coup
Sputnik News
19:31 18.07.2016(updated 20:46 18.07.2016)
The ex-commander of the Turkish Air Force has denied the admission of masterminding the coup attempt during the interrogation, NTV reported.
Earlier in the day, Anadolu news agency reported that Akin Ozturk pleaded guilty to organizing the coup attempt.
"I am not the organizer of the military coup. I had no information about who is the organizer of the coup attempt. I have to attend the wedding of the daughter of my friend. But this morning I was in Izmir, I had some business with the notary. I can prove it," Akin Ozturk told the prosecutor.
Earlier, Akin Ozturk was reportedly detained in Turkey on the suspicion of organizing the coup attempt. Ozturk was the commander of the Turkish Air Force from 2013 until 2015.
According to Sabah newspaper, Ozturk may be linked to Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gulen staying in self-imposed exile in the United States, who was blamed by Ankara for the attempted coup.
Late on Friday, Turkish authorities said that an attempted coup is taking place in the country. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged Turkish citizens to take to streets, stating that the coup attempt was carried out by a small group within the military.
The coup attempt was suppressed by early Saturday, with Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim stating that all coup supporters have been detained and the country is returning to normal life.
Some 208 people were killed and over a thousand wounded in a coup attempt by a faction in the military on Friday. Turkish authorities have arrested over thousands of people, including a number of high-ranking military officials in connection with the failed coup.
Sputnik
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Turkey, US Deadlocked Over Extradition of Alleged Coup-plotter Cleric
by Ken Bredemeier July 18, 2016
The United States and Turkey are deadlocked over Ankara's demand that Washington extradite Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric it is blaming for the attempted military coup in Turkey, even though he has lived in self-imposed exile in the U.S. for 17 years.
So far, the U.S. is balking at the request.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told Turkey on Monday the U.S. needs "genuine evidence that withstands the standard of scrutiny that exists in many countries" before it would consider extraditing the 75-year-old Gulen, who lives in semi-seclusion in the Poconos Mountains in the northeastern state of Pennsylvania.
The top U.S. diplomat said in Brussels that he told Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu "to make certain that in whatever portfolio and request they send us, they send us evidence, not allegations."
Many countries around the world, including the U.S., have treaties with other governments to turn over individuals accused of crimes in foreign lands, but only when there is documented evidence of a crime.
Gulen has denied any connection to last Friday's failed coup, saying, "There is a possibility it could be a staged coup," a pretext for a crackdown on his adherents in Turkey.
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim remained adamant about Gulen's alleged involvement.
"We would be disappointed if our [American] friends told us to present proof even though members of the assassin organization are trying to destroy an elected government under the directions of that person," Yildirim said. "At this stage, there could even be a questioning of our friendship."
Gulen lives in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, on the grounds of the Golden Generation Worship & Retreat Center, an Islamic facility founded by Turkish-Americans. His philosophy mixes a mystical form of Islam with staunch advocacy of democracy, education, science and interfaith dialogue. His movement operates dozens of charter schools in the U.S.
Gulen continues to exert considerable influence in Turkey from 8,000 kilometers away, with supporters in the media, police and judiciary.
Gulen and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan were once allies, but had a falling out over 2013 corruption investigations in Turkey, which the Turkish leader blamed on Gulen.
The exiled Gulen has also criticized Erdogan's increasingly authoritarian rule, while the Turkish leader has carried out a broad campaign against Gulen's movement in the country, purging civil servants, seizing businesses and closing some media organizations.
The government has accused the 103 generals detained so far for their alleged involvement in the coup attempt of belonging to what the authorities call the Fethullahci Terror Organization, purportedly led by Gulen.
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Azerbaijani TV Station Closed Over 'Interview' With U.S.-Based Turkish Cleric Accused By Ankara In Coup
July 19, 2016
by RFE/RL's Azerbaijani Service
A private Azerbaijani television station has been taken off the air and accused of damaging Baku's "strategic" links with Turkey after announcing it would broadcast an interview with U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen.
Turkey's government blames Gulen for orchestrating last weekend's failed military coup, in which hundreds died and more than 1,500 more were injured when troops tried to oust President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Azerbaijan's National Television and Radio Council (NTRC) on July 18 announced on its website that it was temporarily suspending the operations of private-owned ANS television while also filing legal action to revoke the station's license.
"To avert provocations aimed at disrupting strategic relations between Azerbaijan and Turkey, and to prevent overt terrorist propaganda it has been decided to suspend the operations of ANS television channel for one month," said a July 18 statement posted on the council's website.
Erdogan has repeatedly called for the cleric's extradition from the United States since the plot was defeated.
Gulen has condemned the coup and denied involvement, and U.S. officials have said they would only consider an extradition request based on evidence of Gulen's involvement.
ANS (Azerbaijani News Service) was founded in 1991, and it was the first privately owned independent television company in the former Soviet Union.
Although ANS is a staunchly pro-government station, the regulatory council said it would "file a lawsuit in court" to have the channel's license withdrawn permanently.
The statement accused the channel of "propaganda aimed against the Turkish state and government" and claimed that it had depicted developments in Turkey as "a show staged by the Turkish government" while backing cleric Gulen.
It also said ANS "interviewed Gulen in the United States" and announced its intention to broadcast the interview in advance "through local and foreign media."
In fact, Gulen spoke on July 16 -- before the coup had been completely put down -- at an impromptu news conference with multiple news outlets at his home in the remote village of Saylorsburg, in eastern Pennsylvania.
'Fraternal Stance'
The statement said that Turkey's embassy to Baku voiced "deep concern" over ANS's intention to broadcast Gulen's discussion with the media and called on Azerbaijani authorities "to take relevant measures."
Both Azerbaijan and Turkey are Turkic nations and have generally enjoyed strong relations.
Azerbaijan's authoritarian President Ilham Aliyev is a close Erdogan ally.
On July 18, Aliyev telephoned Erdogan to reassure him of his full support and "noted that Azerbaijan stands by the Turkish state and people, and fully supports the democratically elected Turkish government," according to an Azerbaijani presidential statement that said Erdogan was "highly appreciative" of Aliyev's "fraternal stance."
In a separate move, Turkish authorities on July 19 scrapped all television and radio-station licenses linked to Gulen.
The broadcasting watchdog said it had "canceled all broadcasting rights and licenses for media that had links to FETO/PDY," the acronym for the Gulen movement.
Source: http://www.rferl.org/content /azerbaijani-tv-station-shut-down- gulen-interview-turkey/27867890.html
Copyright (c) 2016. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.
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May Calls on UK to Maintain Commitment to Trident Nuclear Deterrent
Sputnik News
19:04 18.07.2016(updated 19:47 18.07.2016)
UK Prime Minister Theresa May called on the United Kingdom on Monday to maintain commitment to its Trident nuclear deterrent program, expressing confidence that the country's lawmakers would vote in favor of renewing the program.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) The UK government is expected to force a vote on the Trident program. Members of Parliament will be asked to approve the construction of four new Trident nuclear missile submarines.
"Britain must remain committed to a minimum, credible, independent nuclear capability delivered through a continuous at-sea deterrent," May said in the parliament.
The prime minister expressed confidence that many lawmakers would back the renewal.
However, Confronting terrorism and renewing the United Kingdom's Trident nuclear deterrent is not a choice in the face of a "variety" of threats facing the country, British Prime Minister Theresa May said Monday.
"It is not a choice. What this country needs to do is to recognize that it faces a variety of threats and make sure that it has the capabilities that are necessary and appropriate to deal with each of those threats," May told lawmakers.
Singling out the perceived nuclear threat from Russia and North Korea, the prime minister argued that threat "has not gone away, if anything it has increased."
"You cannot develop a deterrent fast enough to respond to a new and unforeseen nuclear threat. So the decision on whether to renew our nuclear deterrent hinges not only on what we face today, but also on an assessment of what the world would be like over the coming decades," she stressed.
May also said she would authorize a nuclear strike as she set out her case for the Trident nuclear deterrent's renewal to lawmakers.
"Yes," May said when asked if she was personally prepared to authorize a nuclear strike. "The whole point of a deterrent is that our enemies need to know that we would be prepared to use it."
Sputnik
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Armenia-Azerbaijan: EU sets up monitoring capacity along the international borders
PACE co-rapporteurs on Armenia concerned by reports of alleged war crimes or inhuman treatment perpetrated by Azerbaijans armed forces
There is still 35% gender pay gap: Sona Ghazaryan
Global Finance Names Ameriabank the Safest Bank in Armenia
Mikayel and Karen Vardanyans provided 136 million AMD support for the overhaul of the Myasnikyan statue, which was in unsafe state of disrepair
Believe me, as a representative of a country which uses the Schengen system very often, it is quite important. Vardanyan
I really look forward to having answers from the Azerbaijani side for these alleged gross human rights violations: Secretary General
I call on Armenian and Azerbaijani parliamentarians to use this Assembly as an agora of opportunities President Tiny Kox
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There is no place for the death penalty in a State that respects human rights: PACE General Rapporteur
EU and CoE call on two Member States that have not yet acceded to this Protocol Armenia and Azerbaijan to do so without delay
An urgent debate requested on "The military hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan".
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The statement of the meeting between Prime Minister Pashinyan, President Aliyev, President Macron and President Michel of October 6, 2022
Largest Corporate Bond Program at the Securities Market of Armenia Completed Successfully
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STATEMENT BY SECRETARY ANTONY J. BLINKEN
This criminal act is another proof that the Armenophobia policy. Tatoyan
Nikol Pashinyan, Nancy Pelosi discuss a number of issues related to the Armenian-American agenda and regional developments
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Armenian Revytech, global technology leader SAP and financial services software specialist SAP Fioneer sign a cooperation agreement
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Negotiations are underway between Jirayr Sefilyan and authorities - Armtimes.com
Negotiations are underway between Jirayr Sefilyan, the leader of the Founding Parliament movement arrested last month on charges of illegal arms possession, and the countrys authorities over the hostage crisis in Yerevan, Varujan Avetisyan, a member of the group calling itself Sasna Dzrer (Daredevils of Sasoun) that seized a police building in Yerevans Erebuni district on Sunday morning, told Armtimes.com. They are discussing Sefilyans proposal to meet representatives of authorities. Mr Avetisyan, what is going on near the police patrol service building at this moment? We are having a rest now, listening to news, talking and discussing our daily lives Hayk Kyuregyan said that the situation was tense and restless. Has everything calmed down? There was such a thing, everything is settled now. The National Security Service said on Monday that they had sent food to the hostages and hostage takers. Did you receive it? Yes, we did. They sent us food yesterday and today. They send us canned food and bread. Is there any response from the authorities in connection with your demands? At present, the negotiations are underway according to the option offered by Jirayr Sefilyan. Between whom? Between Sefilyan and authorities. There is some progress in the process which is constructive. Let us see what will happen. We want to see the right solution in this case and in general, in changes that have started in the country. We do not want any shocks. Are those direct or indirect talks? They are not mediated but I do not know the details. I have little information about the talks. Vartan Oskanians Hamakhmbum (Consolidation) Party has offered its option to resolve the situation. They offer to create a group consisting of representatives of various political forces which will be authorized to negotiate with the two parties and will find a political solution to the crisis without further bloodshed. What is your opinion of this proposal? I am sure that if the so-called political parties and politicians want to live in a normal state, they should first of all confess their sins and admit their mistakes, they should give a political assessment to the processes taking place in Third Republic of Armenia, clearly indicate their causes and perpetrators and then show their vision of the Armenia that they want to have. Only then it will be possible to think of trusting these people or their plans connected with the countrys future. The sad side of the story is that all these political forces (with few exceptions) and their leaders have created this anti-Armenian system together with this criminal regime. They also have their share of guilt and let them not act here. We initiated an armed rebellion to clean our country from this dirt, to liberate our country. This fake opposition has legitimized the criminal regime during the past 25 years. Are you speaking about Oskanian? Not only him. This is not a matter of personalities. A person cannot have six faces. Let them admit their misdeeds and sins committed during these years and then speak about the Armenia of their dreams. They should understand that representatives of the old political system have nothing to do with the future Armenia. They can have the status of an adviser, but not that of a political figure or official. Details here
The Democratic candidate for the 5th Congressional District raised almost three times the money her Republican opponent did during the last quarter, according to Federal Election Commission reports.
Jane Dittmars campaign to replace Republican Rep. Robert Hurt goes into the third quarter of 2016 with five times more cash on-hand than state Sen. Tom Garrett, R-Buckingham, although his campaign said its fundraising is beefing up.
Dittmar raised $300,929 from April 1 through June 30 compared to Garretts $105,306, according to campaign reports released this weekend and those filed ahead ofparty district conventions for a portion of April.
I think its an incredibly positive sign. It means that we are getting a huge outpouring of support, particularly from within the district, Dittmar Finance Director Robert Grier said. He said Dittmar supports campaign finance reform so candidates and representatives can spend less time raising money.
Va.s 5th District named emerging race by national Democratic committee Reinforcements may be riding in to aid the Democratic candidate for the right-leaning 5th Congressional District after the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee named the contest to its Emerging Races list Tuesday.
In an interview this weekend after the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee named the 5th an Emerging Race worth national attention, Dittmar said her focus has been on individual donations within the district.
I really have tried to stay within the district to raise the money. I wont be able to be totally in district, but weve got more in Virginia to call, a lot more, Dittmar said in an interview Saturday.
Grier said 70 percent of the donations came from within the district and 90 percent came from within Virginia.
Dittmar collected support through many small home-hosted groups of 20 to 40 people, where her campaign thinks she best reaches donors and voters.
She really resonates and connects very well in that setting, Deputy Campaign Manager Joel Schechtman said. Shes really good at reading people, which is nice, just understanding what they want to talk about, where theyre coming from, what theyre feeling at the time.
Dittmar enters the third quarter with a $282,237 war chest compared to Garretts $54,546. Garretts campaign said, though, the heft of its fundraising started after the June 30 deadline and will build toward the fall.
Its amazing how much easier the fundraising gets in September and October, Garrett consultant Carlyle Gregory said.
Dittmar faced a brief challenger early on, but has been able to implement a general election strategy while Garrett targeted the 5ths Republican faithful to win what ended up a bitter convention battle.
Its taken us a while to get our fundraising act together, but we are doing it, and its actually starting to raise some money, Gregory said, adding the campaign has stayed lean and spent little. Were still going after the low-hanging fruit, and I think shes already gotten all of hers.
5th District candidates address terrorism, guns in Orlando aftermath The country should look inward, rather than outward, in preventing domestic terrorism, according to the Democratic candidate for the 5th Congressional District.
Both campaigns intend to raise money for TV advertising to get the word out closer to the campaign.
Reaching voters over the airwaves can be expensive in the spread-out 5th, which touches Richmond, Charlottesville, and Roanoke-Lynchburg media markets, Gregory said. One county touches the Raleigh, North Carolina market, he said. He said an average winning congressional campaign spends over $1 million.
Over the life of the election cycle, Dittmars campaign has spent $269,530 compared Garretts $97,581, according to FEC reports.
The thing in political campaigns is, you dont necessarily outspend your opponent, Carlyle said. You have to have enough money so people know who your candidate is and why they should vote for them.
In planning for a Garrett victory, Lynchburg-area attorney Mark Peake who is seeking to fill the possible void in the 22nd state senatorial district, if Garrett wins a congressional seat has started fundraising for a potential special election.
The report filed Friday was not yet available on the Department of Elections website, but Peake said he raised $26,675 to set up his campaign, including hiring two staffers. He said he has $25,975 cash on-hand.
He wants to be prepared so Republicans can keep their 21-19 splitof the state Senate in case of a special election that would be triggered by a Garrett win.
He said Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe could raise significant capital and then target the special election over a two-month period to flip the Senate.
If we dont have a good, credible, conservative Republican candidate, they could recruit somebody, dump a million dollars into a campaign and they could win this race, Peake said.
The Sixth Congressional District money race shows a sharp disparity between two-decade incumbent Republican Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Roanoke County, and Democratic Harrisonburg City Councilman Kai Degner.
Goodlatte raised $348,175 during the filing period, according to FEC reports, compared to Degners $30,120. Goodlatte, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, ended with $1.09 million cash on-hand compared to Degners $20,456.
Thirteen people were arrested Monday evening after a group of protesters shut down rush-hour traffic on Interstate 95 south of the Belvidere Street exit.
The demonstration, which began shortly before 6 p.m. in the southbound lanes, was in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, according to a press release from the group.
The protesters held signs - one of which read "White silence is violence" - while shouting, "Black lives matter," and "No justice, no peace, no respect, police."
The press release said "the protesters emphasized the crisis faced by Black trans women and Black women in Virginia, especially at the hands of the police."
By 6:20 p.m., Richmond police were on the scene and after two warnings to move from the road to the grass, several protesters were in handcuffs.
Those who refused to exit the Interstate were charged with being pedestrians on a highway and for impeding the flow of traffic. Thirteen protesters were arrested and transported by two police vans to the Richmond City Justice Center for processing.
Those who chose to move stood along Belvidere continuing to protest.
One woman in handcuffs shouted "Black lives matter," from the street below while those on the sidewalk above echoed her chants.
In the release, which protesters handed out along Belvidere Street, the group cited several black trans women they said had gone missing or were killed, adding, "As in the rest of the country and the rest of the world, Virginia does too little to love and protect Black trans women from harm."
The group also cited several people killed by police.
"We support the national Black Lives Matter movements demands to disarm the police, divest from prisons, and ensure safe and clean housing for Black communities," the release said.
The protest was organized by a group out of Charlottesville via social media, said protester Nqoblie Mthethwa.
"As an ally and a white person, it's important to take action. I'm a supporter in ending racism and police brutality," said protester Noah Goodwin.
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - Jul 19, 2016) - IDM Mining Ltd. (TSX VENTURE:IDM) ("IDM" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that surface mapping and sampling has identified a new, extensive zone of multiphase veining and shearing, hosting high-grade, intrusive-related, gold-silver-molybdenum mineralization at the Lost Valley area of the Company's Red Mountain Project (the "Property"). This new area of the Property was recently exposed by the retreating Cambria icefield.
"Melting alpine glaciers have revealed significant new discoveries in the Golden Triangle area of British Columbia during recent years, including Pretium's Valley of the Kings gold-silver deposit and Seabridge's Mitchell gold-molybdenum deposit," said Rob McLeod, President and CEO of IDM. "The new, high-grade gold, silver and molybdenum-bearing structures found over an extensive area at Red Mountain suggest that the Lost Valley area could be the latest discovery in this prolific region of the province. This area was under a glacier when I worked on the Property as a junior geologist in the 1990's and is now emerging as an exciting new zone of potential significance."
LOST VALLEY PROSPECT
The Lost Valley area is underlain by a monzonite pluton, ringed by hornfelsed sediments and intruding the sulphide-rich Hillside Porphyry. The intrusive is located approximately 4,000 meters southwest of the Marc/AV/JW Zones, and at 800 meters lower elevation. Multiple sets of veins have been identified and are being mapped and sampled as part of an ongoing surface exploration program. Assays have been received for a total of 66 grab, channel and float/subcrop samples to date from throughout the target area at Lost Valley. Assay values range from trace to 165 g/t Au, averaging 10.5 g/t Au, as well as trace to 1,065 g/t Ag, averaging 81 g/t Ag. A total of 22 samples assayed over 3.0 g/t Au, averaging 30.45 g/t Au. Individual assays include: 38 g/t Au and 1,048 g/t Ag, 41 g/t Au and 102 g/t Ag, 42g/t Au and 95 g/t Ag, 49 g/t Au and 280 g/t Ag, 53 g/t Au and 109 g/t Ag, 54 g/t Au and 207 g/t Ag, 56 g/t Au and 81 g/t Ag, 165 g/t Au and 371 g/t Ag. High grades of molybdenum have also been identified at Lost Valley, with all 66 samples ranging from trace to >1.0% Mo, averaging 0.17% Mo. Three samples assayed over 1.0% Mo, including 1.94, 2.05 and 3.45% Mo. The samples are also found to be strongly anomalous in Rhenium, assaying up to 1.65 g/t Re.
The high precious metals results sampled to date at Lost Valley, plus strong molybdenum values along with anomalous rhenium, copper and bismuth geochemistry, suggests an intrusive-related mineralizing system. To date, mineralization has been traced over a 1,200 by 1,000 meter area with over 300 meters of vertical relief on the valley walls.
Multiple phases of quartz veining have been identified within the monzonite intrusive and surrounding hornfels at Lost Valley, typically with abundant coarse-grained pyrite, and commonly found along with molybdenite and local chalcopyrite and sphalerite mineralization. This includes the highest grades samples encountered, which tend to occur in shallow-dipping quartz veins that average 10 to 30 cm in thickness and range up to one meter thick, often occurring along thrust faults. A second dominant set of steeply-dipping veins, typically averaging 3 to 10 cm wide, occur along north-south trends and within multiple identified phases, often within fault zones.
Exploration crews are currently completing follow-up structural and vein density mapping and sampling, including chip-channel and saw-channel sampling. The objective is to refine initial drill targets to be potentially tested later in the 2016 drilling season.
"These exciting new exploration results from Lost Valley highlight the excellent exploration potential at Red Mountain," said Mike McPhie, Executive Chairman of IDM. "Additional discoveries will augment the solid results of our recently updated Preliminary Economic Assessment and provide further evidence of the scope of opportunity at Red Mountain, as we advance engineering and permitting work towards a potential 2017 final investment decision."
IDM's management and board acknowledges the work by geologists David Pawliuk, Natalie King, Andy Randell, Marilyne Lacasse and Andrew Wilkins as well as students Christopher Smith and Mackenzie Baxter. Maps and annotated photos of the Lost Valley area can be found at www.idmmining.com.
Wide, steeply dipping quartz veins, such as the McAdam veins occur within the hornfels zone surrounding the monzonite. This undrilled prospect on the north side of Lost Valley hosts multiple en-echelon shears and quartz-pyrite-molybdenite veins, ranging from 0.2 to 1.5 meters in thickness. Located in steep terrain requiring rope-assisted sampling, 102 chip samples were previously collected by Lac Minerals in 1991. A total of 31 of these historic samples assayed over 1.0 g/t Au, averaging 18.7 g/t Au and 56.1 g/t Ag. Individual channel samples included: 0.2 meters averaging 103.8 g/t Au, 1.0 meter averaging 24.7 g/t Au and 0.6 meters averaging 57.1 g/t Au. Confirmation sampling of quartz-pyrite-molybdenite veins at McAdam as well as some samples from Lost Valley by IDM in 2014 returned assay values ranging from 1.5 g/t Au to 36.7g/t Au. The average of all 42 rock samples collected in the McAdam area was 2.8 g/t Au (see IDM Mining News Release August 12, 2014).
WATERFALL PROSPECT
Additional gold and silver mineralization associated with shear-zone hosted quartz veining within sedimentary rocks has been identified at the Waterfall Prospect, a new zone approximately 700 meters southwest of Lost Valley. In this area, 43 channel and grab samples were collected, ranging from trace to 13.0 g/t Au, averaging 0.65 g/t Au, and trace to 544 g/t Ag, averaging 21.7 g/t Ag. A total of 7 grab samples assayed over 1.0 g/t Au. This area may represent distal veins related to the pluton at Lost Valley.
About Red Mountain
The 17,125 hectare Red Mountain Gold Project is located in northwestern BC, 15km northeast of the town of Stewart. Discovered in 1989, the property was explored extensively until 1996 by Lac Minerals Ltd. and Royal Oak Mines Inc., with 466 diamond drill holes and over 2,000 meters of underground development completed, along with extensive engineering and environmental baseline work. Additional studies were completed over the past 12 years by Seabridge Gold Inc., North American Metals Corp. and Banks Island Gold Ltd.
The Phase I underground drilling program is currently underway at Red Mountain. This drilling is targeting resource upgrading, as well as metallurgical, geotechnical and hydrological testwork at the Marc, AV and JW zones. Step out holes are also planned along strike and down-dip from the current resources.
Additionally, the Company is continuing with ongoing surface engineering work and environmental baseline studies in the project study area. This includes detailed surveys for the tailings management facility, mill, and ore stockpile at the proposed Bromley Humps location as well as the access road and proposed power line right-of-way, and planning for surface facilities. Ongoing hydrological and environmental studies are being performed in support of the environmental assessment process currently underway for the project by BC and Canada.
On April 4, 2016, the Company announced an updated mineral resource estimate reported at 3.0 g/t Au cut-off for the Red Mountain Project.
Classification Tonnage Au (g/t) Ag (g/t) Oz Au Oz Ag Measured 847,200 9.38 34 255,400 920,700 Indicated 794,600 7.29 18 186,100 459,100 Measured + Indicated 1,641,800 8.36 26 441,500 1,379,800 Inferred 548,100 6.10 9 107,500 153,700
Additional information, including the Company's NI 43-101 Technical Reports for the Red Mountain Project is available at www.idmmining.com and at www.sedar.com.
QA/QC AND QUALIFIED PERSON
Samples for the 2016 program are collected by experienced geologists and technicians, placed in sealed bags and shipped to ALS Labs Ltd in Terrace, BC for sample preparation, with pulps subsequently shipped to Vancouver, BC for gold and multi-element ICP analysis. A Quality Control/Quality Assurance program including the insertion of Standards and Blanks has been implemented. The 2016 Exploration Program is performed under the supervision of Rob McLeod, P.Geo, President and CEO of IDM Mining Ltd. and a 'Qualified Person' under NI 43-10. Mr. McLeod has reviewed and approved the technical content of this release.
CORPORATE UPDATE
Further to the Company's new release dated June 9, 2016, the Company has granted 350,000 options to purchase common shares in IDM (the "Options"), pursuant to an agreement with Vertex Strategies, at an exercise price of $0.23 per share. The Options have a five year term and vest as follows: 25% three months after the date of grant and an additional 25% each three month period thereafter until fully vested.
ABOUT IDM MINING LTD.
IDM Mining Ltd. is a mineral exploration and development company based in Vancouver, BC, Canada. The Company's current exploration and development activities are focused on precious metals in British Columbia and Yukon with a primary focus on the high grade underground Red Mountain Project which has entered the BC and Canadian environmental assessment process. Further information can be found on the Company's website at www.IDMmining.com
ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD of IDM Mining Ltd.
Robert McLeod, President, CEO and Director
"Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release."
Forward-Looking Statements: Some statements in this news release contain forward-looking information or forward-looking statements for the purposes of applicable securities laws. These statements include, among others, statements with respect to the proposed exploration and development activities and their timing, resource estimates and potential mineralization, the Company's plans to complete an Environmental Assessment Application, a feasibility study and ultimate investment decision. These statements address future events and conditions and, as such, involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the statements. Such factors include, among others and in addition to those described elsewhere in this release, timing and success of future exploration and development activities, exploration and development risks, delays in obtaining or inability to obtain required government or other regulatory approvals, permits or financing, the risk of unexpected variations in mineral resources, grade or recovery rates, of failure of plant, equipment or processes to operate as anticipated, of accidents, labor disputes, and unanticipated delays in completing other development activities, the risk that estimated costs will be higher than anticipated and the risk that the proposed mine plan and recoveries will not be achieved, equipment breakdowns and bad weather, the timing and success of future exploration and development activities, exploration and development risks, mineral resources are not as estimated, title matters, third party consents, operating hazards, metal prices, political and economic factors, competitive factors and general economic conditions. In making the forward-looking statements, the Company has applied several material assumptions including, but not limited to, the assumptions that: required regulatory approval, permits and financing will be obtained; the proposed exploration and development will proceed as planned; with respect to mineral resource estimates, the key assumptions and parameters on which such estimates are based; that the proposed mine plan and recoveries will be achieved, that capital costs and sustaining costs will be as estimated, and that no unforeseen accident, fire, ground instability, flooding, labor disruption, equipment failure, metallurgical, environmental or other events that could delay or increase the cost of development will occur, and market fundamentals will result in sustained metals and minerals prices. The Company expressly disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise except as otherwise required by applicable securities legislation.
OTTAWA, ONTARIO--(Marketwired - July 19, 2016) -
NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO U.S. NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR FOR RELEASE, PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION OR DISSEMINATION DIRECTLY, OR INDIRECTLY, IN WHOLE OR IN PART, IN OR INTO THE UNITED STATES.
Orezone Gold Corp. (TSX VENTURE:ORE) ("Orezone" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has completed its previously announced $26,450,000 equity financing. A total of 26,450,000 common shares, including 3,450,000 common shares issued pursuant to the exercise in full of the over-allotment option, have been issued today at a price of $1.00 per share to a syndicate of underwriters co-led by Raymond James Ltd. and National Bank Financial Inc.
The common shares were sold by way of a short form prospectus in each of the provinces and territories of Canada other than Quebec.
About Orezone Gold Corporation
Orezone is a Canadian company with a successful gold discovery track record and mine development experience in Burkina Faso, West Africa. The Company owns a 100% interest in Bombore, the largest undeveloped oxide gold deposit in West Africa, situated 85 km east of the capital city and adjacent to an international highway. The Company has completed a Feasibility Study and received all environmental and critical approvals for the granting of a mining permit at Bombore that is expected during the third quarter of 2016.
Ron Little, CEO of Orezone, is a "Qualified Person" under National Instrument 43-101 and has reviewed the information in this release. Readers should refer to Orezone's annual information form for the year ended December 31, 2015 and other continuous disclosure documents filed by Orezone since January 1, 2016 available at www.sedar.com, for this detailed information, which is subject to the qualifications and notes set forth therein.
FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS AND FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION: This news release contains certain "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities laws. Forward-looking statements and forward-looking information are frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate", "potential", "possible" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may", "will", "could", or "should" occur. Forward-looking statements in this release include statements regarding, among others; the granting of the Bombore mining permit in Q3 2016. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. These risks include, but are not limited to, the risks set out under "Risk Factors" in the Company's annual information form for the year ended December 31, 2015 and those set out under "Risk Factors" in the Company's final short form prospectus dated July 12, 2016.
Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - Jul 19, 2016) - Pacific Ridge Exploration Ltd. (TSX VENTURE:PEX) ("Pacific Ridge" or the "Company") reports that MinQuest Limited ("MinQuest") has notified the Company that it is terminating its option agreement on the Fyre Lake project, effective immediately. MinQuest has announced that it will be acquiring a medical technology company and, as a result, is divesting its mining assets. The Company will now be examining other ways to move the Fyre Lake project forward, including other option or joint venture possibilities.
About Fyre Lake
The Company's 100 percent owned Fyre Lake copper-gold-cobalt massive sulphide project in the Yukon's Finlayson Lake District has seen in excess of $6 million in historical expenditures by the Company. The property is located 25 km south of BMC Minerals' Kudz Ze Kayah deposit, currently the subject of a prefeasibility study, and 30 km southwest of Yukon Zinc's Wolverine Mine. The Fyre Lake Kona Deposit has been defined by 115 holes totaling over 23,200 metres of diamond drilling. A NI 43-101 compliant mineral resource estimate of the Kona Deposit reported in 2006 includes an indicated mineral resource of 3.571 million tonnes grading 1.57% copper, 0.10% cobalt and 0.61 grams of gold per tonne at a 1% copper cut-off grade. In addition, an inferred mineral resource, at the same cut-off grade, includes 5.361 million tonnes grading 1.48% copper, 0.08% cobalt and 0.53 grams of gold per tonne. These estimates were prepared by D. Blanchflower, P.Geo., of Minorex Consulting Ltd., who is the qualified person for this purpose.
The Company's 2016 field season plans include surface exploration programs on its Mariposa and Eureka Dome properties, located in the Yukon's Klondike-White Gold District. In addition, we continue to evaluate new acquisition opportunities.
On behalf of the Board of Directors,
Gerald G. Carlson
President & CEO
Pacific Ridge Exploration Ltd.
Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
The technical information contained within this News Release has been reviewed and approved by Gerald G. Carlson, Ph.D., P.Eng., President and CEO of Pacific Ridge and Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 policy.
Forward-Looking Information: This release includes certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements". All statements in this release, other than statements of historical facts, that address exploration drilling and other activities and events or developments that Pacific Ridge Exploration Ltd. ("Pacific Ridge") expects to occur, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements in this news release include statements regarding the placements and future exploration plans and expenditures. Although Pacific Ridge believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward looking statements include market prices, exploration successes, and continued availability of capital and financing and general economic, market or business conditions. These statements are based on a number of assumptions including, among other things, assumptions regarding general business and economic conditions, the timing and receipt of regulatory and governmental approvals for the transactions described herein, the ability of Pacific Ridge and other parties to satisfy stock exchange and other regulatory requirements in a timely manner, the availability of financing for Pacific Ridge's proposed transactions and programs on reasonable terms, and the ability of third party service providers to deliver services in a timely manner. Investors are cautioned that any such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Pacific Ridge does not assume any obligation to update or revise its forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable law.
ROUYN-NORANDA, QUEBEC--(Marketwired - Jul 19, 2016) - Explor Resources Inc. ("Explor" or "the Corporation") (TSX VENTURE:EXS)(OTCQX:EXSFF)(FRANKFURT:E1H1)(BERLIN:E1H1) is pleased to announce that Teck Resources Ltd. ("Teck") has met its first year commitments under the Earn-in Option agreement for the Timmins Porcupine West Property ("TPW Property" or the "Property") by completing exploration expenditures of at least $1,500,000 prior to May 1st, 2016. They are currently working on the next phase of their earn-in.
In December 2014, the Corporation signed an agreement with Teck under which Teck can acquire an initial 55% interest in the Timmins Porcupine West property by completing exploration work expenditures totalling $8,000,000 by May 1st, 2019.
During the 2015-2016 exploration program on Timmins Porcupine West Property, Teck completed five diamond drill holes (as per the attached drill hole location plan) preceded by TerraSpec (Short Wave Infrared) analyses on coarse reject material to assist in mapping of alteration patterns and vectors to assist with diamond drill hole targeting. Additional work included sampling, whole rock geochemistry, magnetic susceptibility and TerraSpec scanning on holes TPW-10-09 and BRS 02-17 to characterize mineralization styles.
A summary of the work completed by Teck is as follows:
Work completed in 2015 included multi-element geochemical analyses of historic diamond drill core and coarse reject material; collection of short wave infrared ("SWIR") spectral data on historic core and reject material; completion of five new diamond drill holes; collection of portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) data on new drill core, completion of a geological and structural review of historic drill core and available geological data. An initial environmental baseline study was also completed on the Timmins Porcupine West Project by Teck.
Phase I of the 2015 exploration program was focused on data acquisition of geochemical, geological and alteration vectors towards mineralization, starting in April of 2015 and culminating in target selection for the Phase II drill program in September. Details of work completed during Phase I include:
2,831 samples (including QAQC samples) from historic core were sent to Bureau Veritas Laboratories for multi-element and fire-assay analyses. In addition, 141 samples were also sent for litho-geochemical analysis (including QAQC samples). Sample medium included halved-core of previously un-sampled intervals, quarter-cut core, and coarse reject material;
20,399 core and coarse reject samples (including QAQC samples) were scanned using SWIR;
2,246 meters of core were logged in detail, and an additional 13 holes were reviewed to confirm deposit geology, structure, alteration, and mineralization.
The Phase I geochemical and spectral program was successful in the development of an alteration and geochemical model for select areas of the project, defining gold-bearing corridors which were subsequently incorporated into drill target selection. The 2015 Phase II program tested five targets around the West Deep zone with one 250 meters step-out, two 150 meters step-outs and two 60 meters step-outs from historic drilling. Details of the Phase II program include:
4,706.5 meters of core were drilled testing five targets;
2,704 meters of core was cut and sampled, totaling 2,094 samples (including QAQC samples) were sent to Bureau Veritas Laboratories for multi-element and fire-assay analyses. In addition, 60 samples were also sent for lithogeochemical analysis (including QAQC samples);
1,777 spot-analyses (including QAQC) on core were analyzed with SWIR, and 1,969 spot analyses (including QAQC) on core were taken using a pXRF for geochemical pathfinders, at a rate of approximately 1 measurement per 3 meters run block;
4,706.5 meters of core was logged in detail.
Lithology intersected from the 2015 drill program includes approximately 25 meters of overburden consisting of glacial till and boulders, with bedrock dominated by sandstones, mudstones, and siltstones, and conglomerates of the Porcupine assemblage, with several relatively short intervals of quartz feldspar porphyry sills and dykes ("PQF") of the Bristol Stock, and occasional Proterozoic diabase related to the Matachewan large igneous province. Where observed, fining directions in the sedimentary pile generally support a steep to overturned bedding interpretation, younging to the south which is consistent with observations from historic core in this part of the property.
Alteration consists of wide zones of weak to moderate sericite, locally pervasive, focused on portions of the holes with PQF or PQF-associated rocks such as massive sandstone and PQF-clast conglomerate. Zones of moderate to strong sericite alteration are closely associated with areas of white quartz-carbonate vein stockwork and quartz-tourmaline veining in a number of the PQF units intersected in the upper portions of TPW-15-123A and TPW15-122W1. Alteration associated with sulphide mineralization in the West Deep zone includes strong muscovite (sericite), Fe-chlorite, and Fe-carbonate (siderite) as identified visually and through SWIR analysis.
Veins on the project are typically intensely deformed, partially to completely transposed into the dominant foliation, and commonly isoclinally folded. Due to this deformation, it is not possible to fully ascertain the origin or paragenesis of the vein sets on the project with observations to date. During the 2015 exploration program, a coarse classification was used, which consisted of 3 primary vein types: quartz carbonate tourmaline veins; pyrite ("pyr") + gangue (chlorite, tourmaline, calcite) veins; and pyrite sphalerite ("sph") (honey colored to reddish) pyrrhotite ("poh") chalcopyrite veins. The pyr-sph-poh veins are interpreted to be the primary mineralization assemblage in the West Deep zone.
Mineralization in the West Deep zone is associated with deformed bands of pyrite, sphalerite, pyrrhotite, and chalcopyrite. These bands are interpreted as veins or lenses which have been transposed into the dominant foliation, and can be seen isoclinally folded in many sections of core. Sulphide contents in mineralized zones can range from 1-15%, with gold grades generally correlated to visual estimates of sulphide content. Outside of mineralized zones, pyrite can be found disseminated up to 1-2%, however is not associated with significant gold grades, and usually does not contain chalcopyrite, pyrrhotite, or sphalerite.
All five of the completed 2015 drill holes returned sporadic multi-gram gold grades in the hanging wall to the West Deep zone. Only hole TPW-15-120 returned significant mineralization along strike of the West Deep zone, with assay results of 8.379 g/t Au over 2.4 meters from 710.2 to 712.6 meters including one section of 17.9 g/t Au over 0.7 meters.
Teck is currently integrating results from 2015 with ongoing work, in order to optimize exploration plans moving forward.
The Timmins Porcupine West Gold Property consists of 185 unpatented mining units and 3 patented claims located in the Bristol and Ogden Townships in the Timmins-Porcupine Mining Camp for a total 3,200 hectares. The highway 101 bisects the property and provides access from the city of Timmins located 13 km to the east. The 3-D geological model may be viewed on our website: www.explorresources.com. The property has been explored since 1927 by numerous ground geophysical surveys and diamond drilling of up to 111 holes. In 1984, Dome Exploration discovered and delineated a gold mineralized zone that was approximately 350 meters long and 45 meters wide and open below 350 meters of vertical depth.
The Timmins Porcupine West Project has a structural target model developed by Explor based on the "Hollinger-McIntyre-Coniaurum System". The Hollinger-McIntyre-Coniaurum (HMC) System has produced a total of over 30 million oz of gold and is spatially associated with the Pearl Lake Porphyry.
Chris Dupont, P.Eng is the qualified person responsible for the technical information contained in this release.
Explor Resources Inc. is a publicly listed company trading on the TSX Venture (EXS), on the OTCQX (EXSFF) and on the Frankfurt and Berlin Stock Exchanges (E1H1).
This Press Release was prepared by Explor. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the Policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) has reviewed or accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
About Explor Resources Inc.
Explor Resources Inc. is a Canadian-based natural resources company with mineral holdings in Ontario, Quebec, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick. Explor is currently focused on exploration in the Abitibi Greenstone Belt. The belt is found in both provinces of Ontario and Quebec with approximately 33% in Ontario and 67% in Quebec. The Belt has produced in excess of 180,000,000 ounces of gold and 450,000,000 tonnes of Cu-Zn ore over the last 100 years. The Corporation was continued under the laws of Alberta in 1986 and has had its main office in Quebec since 2006.
Explor Resources Flagship project is the Timmins Porcupine West (TPW) Project located in the Porcupine mining camp, in the Province of Ontario. Teck Resources Ltd. is currently conducting an exploration program as part of an earn-in on the TPW property. The TPW mineral resource (Press Release dated August 27, 2013) includes the following:
Open Pit Mineral Resources at a 0.30 g/t Au cut-off grade are as follows: Indicated: 213,000 oz (4,283,000 tonnes at 1.55 g/t Au) Inferred: 77,000 oz (1,140,000 tonnes at 2.09 g/t Au) Underground Mineral Resources at a 1.70 g/t Au cut-off grade are as follows: Indicated: 396,000 oz (4,420,000 tonnes at 2.79 g/t Au) Inferred: 393,000 oz (5,185,000 tonnes at 2.36 g/t Au)
This document may contain forward-looking statements relating to Explor's operations or to the environment in which it operates. Such statements are based on operations, estimates, forecasts and projections. They are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict and may be beyond Explor's control. A number of important factors could cause actual outcomes and results to differ materially from those expressed in forward-looking statements, including those set forth in other public filling. In addition, such statements relate to the date on which they are made. Consequently, undue reliance should not be placed on such forward-looking statements. Explor disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, save and except as may be required by applicable securities laws.
A map of Teck Resources Ltd. - TIMMINS PORPUCINE WEST 2015 DRILLING is available at the following address: http://media3.marketwire.com/docs/160719_EXS_Map.pdf
14/20
Hellenic Hotel Williamstown
Address 28 Ferguson Street, Williamstown, 03 9393 1000 hellenicrepublic.com.au
Open Daily noon-10.30pm
Cost $49 tasting menu, or souvas $14, snacks $7-$15, chicken $18 half, $34 whole
Vegetarian They'll cater, but the normal menu only features a few salads, cheese, dips and a couple of snacks.
Drinks Cocktails are adventurous. Greek wines are tasty.
Wheelchair accessible Yes
George Calombaris doesn't do restaurants any more, he does businesses. And he's become pretty damn good at it. His empire, which once included St Katherine's, Maha, and the short-lived Le Grand Cirque is now a delicious Greek pyramid. At the pinnacle, the gold-plated Press Club, where contemporary tricks meet the silkiest service in town. At the ground floor, Jimmy Grants slings souvas to the masses. Instead of risking on the new, he's doubling down on the good, and it's working.
You can now get his trademark tarama, Cypriot grain salads and puffy pita souvas at five Jimmy Grants; fluoro city boozatorium Gazi (with cocktails!), or at one of three Hellenic Republics including this latest in Williamstown. It's a lean, mean Greek machine that's arguably doing better than Greece itself.
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And so you already know much of what to expect from this renovation of Hobson's Bay Hotel. Only not quite. The look and perfunctory service is closer to Jimmy Grants' than that of the Hellenic original. It's an admirably maintained war zone. You get your order, sometimes with explanations. They try with the Hellenic-favouring wine list, but it's clearly still Greek to most crew. Chancing your hand will get you an apple-y and um, bracing, sparkling on the cheaper end, but pay $75 and you'll get a deeply golden assyrtiko from Santorini, where ground-hugging vines create complex and salty grapes.
The gutted pub features big yawning spaces with a strong industrial bent: cages hang over tables, murals cover brickwork and the aroma is of roasting chicken and fresh paint. It's bright white and blue, with the requisite roar in the air, though it's the bustle of a big machine over the cackling community of classics like Jim's Greek Tavern.
Call on a Friday and you might find all 100 seats booked. Trying for walk-ins involves arriving before 6pm or accepting the bar upstairs. Here you watch the footy eating crisp fish and chips. Outside, a line of families waits for take-away packs of spit-roasted chicken and dips.
Lamb's Brain Souva. Photo: Daniel Pockett
You might find this an odd move for chef Josh Pelham, last seen tweezing artful dishes at Scott Pickett's ESP. But he's played the Calombaris game at Mama Baba and, back in the day, Press Club. And while you know the grilled saganaki that squeaks protest to the knife, or the creamy white cod roe dip, just on the right side of fishy, as it should be for $9.50 a serve, Pelham has had a little rein.
Prawn toasts arrive dressed not in sesame but pepitas with bonito curls dancing in the heat. Sriracha-stained tarama gives it a Greek kick in the pants. There's a lot that calls for one fist to be wrapped around a Mythos beer. Juicy green olives are "scotched", cocooned in a lamb kofta to swoop through tangy mint yoghurt.
There's a tasting menu, as always, for $49 a head. It's good value if you want the safest plates. I'm more interested in the crumbed lamb's brains, which transpire to be tastier out of the bread-heavy souva and into a pool of tarama.
If the brains appeal, so too might the arroz negre situation, beads of rice-sized Greek kritharaki pasta cooked to a slippery midnight mass with mussel stock and squid ink. Topped with pippies and a jumble of shaved fennel it appeals way more for taste over texture. Or looks.
A salad of brussels sprouts and all the trappings of a caesar salad is surprisingly chilled, but a creamy, sharp, cruciferous win. The spit-roasted chicken tastes exactly like a spit-roasted chicken. Friends have reported dryness, ours hits the marks, an oregano-forward gremolata scything through.
We limp to dessert. But there's crisp loukoumades (doughnut balls) to consider although you can get those from any Jimmy Grants. Jars of rice pudding with rhubarb are a cooling way to end. Maybe with a syrupy licorice hit of ouzo. There's fun to be had. Probably more for Williamstowners than those of us with a Calombaris branch of our own. Though it's the only one you can get to by ferry. Surely that's a win.
The lowdown
George Calombaris brings his brand of Greek to the beach
Pro tip Treat yourself, take a ferry.
Go-to dish A lamb's brain souva with extra tarama added.
Markets End The Day Higher; HUL Drops 3% Post Results Business oi-Sunil Fernandes
Benchmark indices ended the day flat, after trading in the negative zone throughout the trading session as European cues remained weak.
The Sensex ended the day highey by 40 points, while the Nifty gained 19 points in trade. The biggest loser from the Sensex was Hindustan Unilever , which dropped following a poor set of results. Other notable losers in trade were Mahindra and Mahindra , Vedanta and HDFC Bank.
Stocks that gained ground in trade were some of the PSU banking stocks like Allahabad Bank, which saw a fresh capital infusion from the government. Canara Bank too rallied after reports that the bank has received Rs 997 crore out of total recapitalisation fund (Rs 22,915 crore) from the government.
Mindtree shares saw a big fall after the company reported a disappointing set of results for the quarter ending June 30, 2016. The net profits of the company fell 7 per cent in dollar terms.
Jaiprakash Power Ventures was up 4 per cent after reports that JSW Energy had acquired 500 MW Bina thermal power plant from Jaiprakash Power Ventures.
Meanwhile, Asian markets were trading mixed, while most of Europe was lower. Shares in Essel Propack gained as much as 3 per cent, after the company said that it had opened a new unit in Colombia.
The rupee was last seen trading at 67.23 to the US dollar. Check and convert currency rates here
GoodReturns.in
Associated Press Subscriber churn has been blamed for a drop in Netflix subscribers. The churn happened amid the service's long-planned $2 increase in its monthly subscription. Netflix had maintained that price level for current subscribers for two years.
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By Mike Snider, USA TODAY NETWORK
Netflix shares plummeted Monday after the streaming video provider added far fewer subscribers than it or Wall Street expected between April and June.
The streaming video provider said it has added about 1.7 million subscribers globally its lowest growth in two years increasing its total subscriber base to 83.2 million, up from 81.5 million at the end of March.
Netflix (NFLX) shares fell 15 percent in after-hours trading to $83.90, after closing up 0.4 percent Monday at $98.81.
The culprit: U.S. subscriber concern about rising monthly subscription prices, which led to a net addition of only 160,000 subscribers, bringing Netflix's U.S. subscriber base to 47 million. "Churn ticked up slightly and unexpectedly," said CEO Reed Hastings in a note to shareholders.
That happened amid the service's long-planned $2 increase in its monthly $7.99 subscription. Netflix had maintained that price level for current subscribers to its standard HD streaming for two years, while charging new subscribers $9.99.
"We think some members perceived the news as an impending new price increase rather than the completion of two years of grandfathering," Hastings said. "Churn of members who were actually ungrandfathered is modest and conforms to our expectations. With our large subscriber base, slight variances in retention versus forecast can result in significant swings in net adds, particularly in a seasonally small net add quarter like (the second quarter)," he said.
Even though Netflix had attempted to lower expectations for growth during the April-to-June period by forecasting the addition of 2.5 million new subscribers 500,000 U.S. and 2 million international subscribers many Wall Street analysts had looked for higher numbers.
Earnings per share of 9 cents surpassed analysts' estimate of 2 cents. Net income rose 58 percent to $41 million, surpassing expectations of $9.65 billion.
The company reported revenue of $2.1 billion vs. $1.6 billion a year ago, matching analysts' expectations of $2.2 billion. The company had forecast total streaming revenue forecast of $1.96 billion.
During the current July-September quarter, Netflix expects to add 2 million international and 300,000 U.S. subscribers, with Olympic viewership likely leading to lower domestic additions, Hastings said.
Netflix will withstand its growing pains, including the possible loss of some subscribers because of the $2 monthly increase for current users, said Investing.com Senior Analyst, Clement Thibault. "Back in May, Netflix began rolling out a gradual price hike to all its customers, raising rates from $7.99 to $9.99," he said in an earnings preview Monday.
Melissa Healy/Los Angeles Times/TNS Ana Ong, a molecular lab tech at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, holds a culture of E. coli with the drug-resistant gene called mcr-1.
SHARE Kim Lewis/Northeastern University A diagram of the isolation chip or "iChip" device that scientists used to discover a new kind of antibiotic compound.
By Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times (TNS)
BETHESDA, Md. In early April, experts at a military lab outside Washington intensified their search for evidence that a dangerous new biological threat had penetrated the nation's borders.
They didn't have to hunt long.
On May 18, a team working at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research here had its first look at a sample of the bacterium Escherichia coli taken from a 49-year-old woman in Pennsylvania. She had a urinary tract infection with a disconcerting knack for surviving the assaults of antibiotic medications. Her sample was one of six from across the country delivered to the lab of microbiologist Patrick McGann.
Within hours, a preliminary analysis deepened concern at the lab. Over the next several days, more sophisticated genetic sleuthing confirmed McGann's worst fears.
There in the bacterium's DNA was a gene dubbed mcr-1. Its presence made the pathogen impervious to the venerable antibiotic colistin.
More ominous, the gene's presence on a plasmid a tiny mobile loop of DNA that can be readily snapped off and attached to other bacteria suggested that it could readily jump to other E. coli bacteria or to entirely different forms of disease-causing organisms. That would make them impervious to colistin as well.
It was a milestone public health officials have been anticipating for years. In a steady march, disease-causing microbes have evolved ways to evade the bulwark of medications used to treat bacterial infections. For a variety of those illnesses, only colistin continued to work every time. Now this last line of defense had been breached as well.
A second U.S. case of E. coli with the mcr-1 resistance gene was reported this month in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. Researchers are still working to determine whether it, or any of 18 other samples from around the world, contained the gene on an easy-to-spread plasmid.
The golden age of antibiotics appears to be coming to an end, its demise hastened by a combination of medical, social and economic factors. For decades, these drugs made it easy for doctors to treat infections and injuries. Now, common ailments are regaining the power to kill.
Harvard University infectious disease epidemiologist William P. Hanage said that "we will not be flying back into the dark ages" overnight. Hospitals are improving their infection control, and public health experts are getting better at tracking new threats. But in a race against nature, he said, the humans are losing ground.
"We're seeing more drug-resistant infections," Hanage said. "And people will die."
In 1928, British bacteriologist Alexander Fleming discovered that an errant penicillin mold growing in one of his petri dishes had the power to kill staphylococcus, a type of bacteria that causes pneumonia, skin infections and food poisoning. It took scientists, industrialists and the pressures of a world war to convert the mold into a mass-produced medicine, which was ready in time for troops to pack on D-Day.
More than 100 antibiotic compounds have been introduced since. But almost as soon as they were given to patients, scientists began finding evidence that disease-causing bacteria were developing resistance to these new wonder drugs.
Bacteria meet, mate, compete and evolve inside living bodies. When an antibiotic is added to the mix, only the strongest survive.
Humans have accelerated this natural process by indiscriminately prescribing antibiotics and by routinely feeding the drugs to livestock, scientists say. Multiply the number of humans and animals taking these drugs, and you multiply the opportunities for antibiotic-resistant strains to emerge.
Until very recently, few made the connection between antibiotic use in individual cases and the emergence of antibiotic resistance, said Dr. Susan Bleasdale, an infection-control expert at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Patients with earaches, sinus pressure and sore throats demanded antibiotics, and physicians tended to oblige.
The results have been deadly. Each year, more than 2 million people in the U.S. are infected with a bacterium that has become resistant to one or more antibiotic medication designed to kill it, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At least 23,000 people die as a direct result of antibiotic-resistant infections, and many more die from other conditions that were complicated by an antibiotic-resistant infection, the agency says.
As medicines such as tetracycline, erythromycin and vancomycin lost much of their effectiveness, colistin continued to overwhelm troublemaking bacteria such as salmonella, klebsiella and E. coli.
Colistin is toxic to the human kidney, and doctors largely stopped using it in the 1970s when safer medications became available. But now that so many antibiotics have lost their ability to vanquish E. coli and other bacterial invaders, colistin has become the only hope for some desperate patients.
The slow, steady march of antibiotic resistance doesn't cause people to bleed to death in the streets, the way the Ebola virus does. It doesn't cause heart-rending birth defects, as the Zika virus does.
And it rarely makes headlines. A survey released in June by the Infectious Diseases Society of America found that only 30 percent of Americans believe that antibiotic resistance is a significant problem for public health.
Yet officials at the World Health Organization warn that gonorrhea "may soon become untreatable" because of growing resistance to the antibiotic ceftriaxone, a member of the cephalosporin class. The WHO also notes that extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis is now circulating in 100 countries, and that worldwide resistance to carbapenem antibiotics has weakened physicians' last line of attack against life-threatening intestinal enterobacteriaceae infections.
"It's a slow catastrophe," said Army Col. Emil Lesho, director of the Defense Department's Multidrug-resistant Organism Repository and Surveillance Network.
The problem goes beyond treating infections. As bacterial resistance grows, Lesho said, "we're all at risk of losing our access" to medical miracles we've come to take for granted: elective surgeries, joint replacements, organ transplants, cancer chemotherapies. These treatments give bacteria an opportunity to hitch a ride on a catheter or an unwashed hand and invade an already vulnerable patient.
The struggle to sustain the effectiveness of antibiotics is a never-ending arms race. If humankind were regularly finding new antimicrobial agents and turning them into medicines, there might be less cause for worry.
Researchers haven't identified a new class of antibiotic medication since 1987. As a result, though bacteria have continuously evolved new ways to thwart antibiotics, the medicines have not gained new mechanisms to fight back.
The economics of drug development are partly to blame.
To offset the millions of dollars they pour into research, clinical trials and the Food and Drug Administration approval process, pharmaceutical companies aim to develop blockbuster drugs, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. An ideal candidate would be used by millions of people every day for the rest of their lives, like pills to keep cholesterol or blood pressure in check.
Antibiotics won't pay the freight. They should be prescribed sparingly and used only for about a week. They could be rendered obsolete at any time by resistance genes. Worst of all, they compete in a field of inexpensive generics.
Without government policies that encourage investment in the antibiotics, "there's very little incentive" for companies to do it themselves, Fauci said.
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By Will Weissert, Associated Press
AUSTIN Activists and educators on Monday called a Mexican-American studies textbook proposed for use across Texas biased and poorly researched and argued that its contents are especially offensive in a state where a majority of public school students are Hispanic.
A battle over the high school text is shaping up to become the latest ideological clash for the Republican-controlled Texas Board of Education. Its members have long waged high-profile debates over the teaching of evolution, climate change and Christianity's influence on America's Founding Fathers to more than 5.2 million public school students statewide.
Democrats, who are outnumbered 10-5 on the board, pushed unsuccessfully two years ago to create a full Mexican-American studies program. Instead, publishers were asked to submit textbooks on a variety of ethnic studies topics that the board could consider for use beginning in the 2017-2018 academic year.
Texas got one submission: Virginia-based publisher Momentum Instruction offered a textbook titled "Mexican American Heritage." But the book is now being decried as racist and inaccurate by many of the same advocates who had wanted a broader Mexican-American studies course.
"What we have now is a deeply flawed and a deeply offensive textbook," Celina Moreno, an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said at a news conference in the lobby of the Texas Education Agency, where the board meets.
Moreno and other activists formed the Texas Latino Education Coalition, which scrutinized the proposed textbooks and detailed what it described as "multiple factual errors."
They said those included suggesting that Mexican culture promotes laziness, linking Mexican-Americans to immigrants who are not in the country legally, and characterizing leaders of the Chicano movement that advanced Mexican-American civil rights in the 1960s and '70s as adopting "a revolutionary narrative that opposed Western civilization and wanted to destroy this society."
"Industrialists were very driven, competitive men," the textbook says, according to excerpts. "In contrast, Mexican laborers were not reared to put in a full day's work so vigorously. There was a cultural attitude of 'manana,' or 'tomorrow.'"
A phone number for Momentum Instruction rang unanswered Monday.The liberal watchdog group Texas Freedom Network says the textbook publisher is controlled by Cynthia Dunbar, a former Texas Board of Education member who has advocated for state curriculum standards downplaying the constitutional separation of church and state.
Hispanics now make up 52 percent of Texas public school students, with most being Mexican-Americans.
The education board plans to vote in November on whether to approve the "Mexican American Heritage" textbook. Texas' more than 1,000 school districts don't have to use board-sanctioned classroom materials, but most do.
As a result, Texas has an outsized influence on school textbooks nationally.
Its market is so large that edits made by publishers to meet the state's curriculum standards can wind up altering content in textbooks sold elsewhere.
David Bradley, a social conservative and veteran Board of Education member, said Monday that activists who forced Texas to solicit proposed ethnic studies textbooks are now angry with the results.
"You ought to be careful what you ask for. You got it," Bradley, a Republican from Beaumont, said in a phone interview.
He said Texas should focus on basics like reading, writing and math before worrying about more specialized courses.
"I'm Italian, Irish and French," Bradley said. "And I feel like I'm being discriminated against when we only have an exclusive minority studies program in Texas."
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By Staff Report
San Angelo and Tom Green County have been recognized by the Texas Healthy Communities Program for their efforts in preventing and controlling heart disease, stroke and other chronic diseases in their communities.
Local efforts scored 82.5 points on a 100-point scale, earning a silver recognition level, up from honorable mention last year, according to a city of San Angelo news release.
This recognition signifies the community as a whole working together to implement things to improve the health and well-being of the community, said Sandra Villarreal, the city's health services director.
The city has a number of hiking and bike trails, including the Red Arroyo, it has a 100 percent smoke-free ordinance, its EMS services have improved with their rapid response times, and many workplaces offer health and wellness programs all indicators that helped the city score high with the program, she said.
Schools throughout the county have physical and health programs, and some business also have mother-friendly worksites that allow breast-feeding, which also helped the city and county score points to bring the level to silver, she said.
The program assists communities by helping them assess their existing environments, implement changes in local environmental and policy infrastructure and adopt priority public health practices to reduce risk factors for chronic diseases and honors cities that advance recognized best practices for preventing and controlling CVD, stroke and other chronic diseases, the release stated.
Communities are assessed on eight indicators to determine recognition as a Texas Healthy Community. Environmental indicators include offering physical activity areas, healthy eating options, mother friendly worksites and an evidence-based health curriculum in schools. Policy indicators include a 100-percent smoke-free city smoking ordinance; an emergency medical system that maintains a rapid response time for cardiac events and treatment of stroke as a medical emergency in the community, with appropriate acute stroke treatment protocols in place, the releases stated.
There's always room for improvement, Villarreal said, but the health care is good here with plenty of opportunities to get involved in physical activity, to improve health and reduce chronic diseases such as diabetes.
The city also manages its FitCity San Angelo website, www.cosatx.us/departments-services/fit-angelo, which provides information and resources about nutrition, exercise and mental and spiritual health, she said.
In addition to San Angelo and Tom Green County, the following communities were also recognized at the Gold, Silver, Bronze and Honorable Mention levels this year:
Gold Level: Harris County, city of Houston, Nueces County, Webb County.
Silver Level: Angelina County, Lubbock County, McLennan County, Smith County, Tom Green County, Wichita County
Bronze Level: Hidalgo County, Lamar County, Parker County, Taylor County, Victoria County
Honorable Mention: city of Red Oak, city of Waxahachie, El Paso County, Jasper County, Nacogdoches County, Newton County, Waller County, Wood County
For more information about the program visit the Texas Department of State Health Services website at dshs.state.tx.us/heart/Texas-Healthy-Communities-Program. aspx.
SHARE Michael S. Wirtz/Philadelphia Inquirer Trevor Johnson, 15, does an exercise Oct. 6 at Empower Physical Therapy in Exton, Pa. Lisa Angioli, a physical therapist at Empower Physical Therapy, uses the Soliosis Schroth method with Johnson. Michael S. Wirtz/Philadelphia Inquirer Trevor Johnson, 15, does an exercise Oct. 6 at Empower Physical Therapy in Exton, Pa. Lisa Angioli, a physical therapist at Empower Physical Therapy, uses the Scoliosis Schroth method with Johnson. Michael S. Wirtz/Philadelphia Inquirer Trevor Johnson, 15, does an exercise Oct. 6 at Empower Physical Therapy in Exton, Pa. Lisa Angioli, a physical therapist at Empower Physical Therapy, uses the Soliosis Schroth method with Johnson. Johnson stands in front of a grid for evaluation of his scoliosis.
By Melissa Dribben
PHILADELPHIA When Trevor Johnson was 11, his growing spine took a detour from the normal straight path. Instead of stacking neatly one atop the other, his vertebrae began to drift sideways into an S-shape and his rib cage started torquing to the left.
This spinal deformity, called idiopathic adolescent scoliosis, is common, affecting nearly 6 million Americans. In its early stages, the long-accepted approach is to wait and see whether the curve worsens.
Trevors parents had been down this road before and were not alarmed. His older sister has scoliosis, too. By the time she finished her growth spurt, the slight swerve in her back was hardly noticeable and posed no health problems. But Trevor would not be so lucky. Periodic X-rays showed his spine bending and twisting like a sapling surrendering to gale-force winds.
First the curve was 11 degrees, said his mother, Amy. It went to 19, then 25, then 34, then panic.
In February, the Johnsons were told Trevor needed surgery to straighten his spine so he could breathe properly and enjoy an active life. Isnt there anything else we can do? they asked.
There was.
Only a few months earlier, Lisa Angioli, a physical therapist in Exton, had been trained in the Schroth method, which uses posture correction, resistance training and breathing exercises to stabilize the spine.
The method was developed in the 1920s and has been used in Europe for decades, but until three years ago, few places in the United States offered the treatment other than a small clinic in Wisconsin.
With pressure from an increasing number of parents like Trevors who are loath to subject their children to major back surgery, more physical therapists are training in variations of the Schroth technique and more doctors are willing to consider its merits.
Five or six years ago, I first started hearing parents ask me about it, said Suken Shah, the pediatric orthopedic surgeon who evaluated Trevor. As division chief of the Nemours Spine and Scoliosis Center in Wilmington, Shah said he had always encouraged patients to get exercise and stay active. Although many studies have been published in Europe about Schroth, no solid work has appeared in the top U.S. journals supporting claims that Schroth and similar therapies can help stop a scoliotic curve from progressing or actually reverse it, as many advocates claim.
That does not mean, however, the method is ineffective, Shah said.
Im open, he said. Were interested in really good outcomes, whether thats operative or nonoperative. And nonoperative care is not optimal right now. We may not be acting early enough. And we may not be taking advantage of things available elsewhere.
John P. Dormans, chief of orthopedic surgery at Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia and president of the Scoliosis Research Society, said the buzz about Schroth had been growing.
There is still a lot of skepticism, he said. But there is mounting evidence that specific exercises can be effective. As thoughtful surgeons, we support better, high-quality research to see if it really does work.
Nearly a century ago, Katharina Schroth, a German teacher who had worn a steel brace as a teenager to straighten her spine, developed exercises to treat scoliosis. She discovered that by assessing the back in three dimensions, practicing deep breathing, strengthening weak muscles, and training herself to reposition her shoulders, hips and torso, she stood straighter and expanded her lung capacity.
She opened several clinics and began working with her daughter, Christa. After her mothers death in 1985, Christa treated patients in Germany, then went on to join forces with a doctor in Barcelona, fine-tuning the technique.
The treatment was brought to the U.S. in 2003 by Beth Janssen, a physical therapist from Wisconsin. Janssens son had scoliosis and after two years in a rigid brace, still had problems with his posture and breathing. After hearing about the clinic in Barcelona, she took him there for treatment, then trained as a practitioner.
Janssens clinic, Scoliosis Rehab, and one in Milwaukee, Spinal Dynamics of Wisconsin, were the two main sites offering treatment and training therapists in the method until 2012, when the Hunter College School of Physical Therapy launched a program.
So far, only two physical therapists in the Philadelphia area are certified to practice the method: Johan van Schalkwyk in Cherry Hill and Angioli in Exton.
Like most physical therapists, Van Schalkwyk, 46, said that in his 16 years of practice, all his training, and continuing education, no one ever suggested patients with scoliosis needed specialized care.
A few years ago, when a patient asked him about Schroth, he looked into it and was struck by its logic. Last year, he took the course at Hunter, which has now certified more than 60 therapists, said Gary Krasilovsky, chair of the physical therapy department.
Scoliosis normally starts early in puberty and occurs equally in boys and girls, although girls are eight times more likely to have a curve progress to the point that they need a brace or surgery.
The catch-22 is that there is a higher probability of preventing a curve from getting worse when patients are braced early on, before they enter the peak of their growth spurt. But because it is impossible to predict whose curve will progress enough to require intervention, and it is impractical and from a public-health perspective, too costly to brace every child at the first sign of scoliosis, doctors do not recommend doing anything until the curve reaches 25 degrees.
If you committed every kid with a 20-degree curve to a brace, youd be overtreating, said Dormans. Studies have shown, he said, that people who enter adulthood with a curve of less than 40 degrees usually do not get any worse as they age.
For patients at risk of more serious curvature, reaching a consensus on the best treatment has been difficult for physicians.
In 2013, a large multicenter study was halted because researchers found bracing so effective in preventing curves from advancing that continuing with a control group would have been unethical.
The benefit increased with longer hours of brace wear, the authors wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Yet in the same issue, an editorial doubted the researchers conclusions, saying the study wasnt big enough to evaluate a diverse group of patients.
It is no surprise, then, that an alternative therapy such as Schroth has been slow to gain acceptance among surgeons.
Advocates of Schroth and similar exercises say the central question is: Why not teach patients how to strengthen their backs, correct their posture and breathe more effectively rather than passively waiting to see how far their curves progress?
I believe in exercise as active observation, said Amy Sbihli, a Schroth-certified therapist in Burlington, Mass. She teaches the method at Hunter, which had a waiting list of 20 therapists for the course this fall.
A lot of physical therapists who come to my courses tell me theyre seeing so much scoliosis and dont know what to do with it, Sbihli said. Theres a world of unmet need.
SHARE Members of the Texas delegation showed their solidarity at the Republican National Convention Monday, opting to wear matching outfits consisting of Lone Star flag shirts and white straw hats.
By Federico Martinez, Federico.Martinez@gosanangelo.com @federico_sast
West Texas Republicans were treated to an afternoon of pomp and ceremony, and an opportunity to meet thousands of other delegates from around the country, Monday during the first day of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio.
Most of the Texas delegation were not privy to a behind-the-scenes attempt by the anti-Donald Trump faction to force a convention rules change that would allow another candidate could be chosen, even though Trump collected enough delegates to secure the nomination.
"It's great to be here," said Geoffrey S. Connor, an alternate delegate from Runnels County, who spoke to the Standard-Times by phone. "These conditions are at the heart of American democracy. People from all walks of life coming together to choose a candidate, write a platform and then go out and campaign for their position."
Three West Texas voting delegates Dennis Graham of Brownwood, Sherry Hurt of Ector County and Rhonda J. Lacy of Midland, headed to the Buckeye State on Friday. Lacy is a member of the Texas State Republican Executive Committee. Conner, Thomas Mathis of Ector County and Theresa Mattingly-Close of San Angelo are attending the convention as alternative delegates.
Before leaving for the convention, Lacy noted that she has attended at least two previous national Republican conventions as a guest, but this would be her first time as a voter.
Lacy said she's excited about the convention, but also eager as a district "Strikeforce" chairwoman, to begin mobilizing Republicans in various states to prepare for the November election.
Many of the Texas delegates who arrived in Cleveland during the weekend were treated to a tour and show at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum on Sunday, said Conner, the former Texas Secretary of State.
The Texas delegation agreed in advance to show up to Monday's convention wearing matching Texas flag shirts and cowboy hats.
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By Federico Martinez, Federico.Martinez@gosanangelo.com / @Federico_SAST
For a brief moment time seemed to come to a standstill. A hush came over the thousands of people gathered at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, as the New York delegate votes were announced officially placing the party's presidential nomination in the lap of Donald Trump.
That was the scene described by Geoff S. Connor, a West Texas alternate delegate from Runnels County, who stood among those gathered on the convention floor late Tuesday afternoon.
"Everything stopped while the band began to play Sinatra's 'New York, New York,' " Connor said via text as the scenario unfolded. "The majority of the Texas delegation were Cruz delegates. But we have united in cheering party unity and Trump's nomination."
The conclusion of the nomination process capped off a hectic day for delegates as they hustled into meetings to discuss the Republican Party's platform issues. As evening approached convention attendees began to prepare for a litany of speakers, including House Speaker Paul Ryan and Ben Carson, whose own bid for the presidential nomination fell short.
Republican delegates from West Texas got down to business early Tuesday by reviewing the party's anti-abortion platform with U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas and U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, who represents the 21st District.
"It's going to be a very busy day with delegation meetings, a luncheon and speakers," Rhonda J. Lacy, a delegate from Midland, said Tuesday. "Last night was filled with incredible speakers. It was just remarkable."
Lacy said convention attendees expected a busy but calmer day than Monday, which featured a failed attempt by anti-Trump forces to change convention rules so that delegates would be free to select a different nominee to represent the party in November.
Video and news reports cast the incident as a chaotic clash, showing footage of screaming delegates arguing from the convention floor. Lacy downplayed the incident, noting that it's not unusual for debates to occur at conventions.
"People need to remember that we're not following Robert's Rules of Order," she said. "We have convention rules that allow people to express their opinions.
"After the debate was over everyone came together because Republicans are like family."
Lacy is one of three West Texas voting delegates attending the convention. The other delegates are Dennis Graham of Brownwood and Sherry Hurt of Ector County. Their group also includes three alternative delegates, including Connor, Thomas Mathis of Ector County and Theresa Mattingly-Close of San Angelo.
A united Texas delegation opposed the effort by the anti-Trump group, said Lacy, who is also a member of the Texas State Republican Executive Committee. According to convention rules, if the anti-Trump group had been successful, it would have cost Texas several electoral votes, meaning Texas would have less impact on this fall's presidential election, Lacy said.
Several members of the West Texas delegation have reported that the atmosphere at the convention has been festive and relatively trouble free.
"I've seen very, very little protesting," Lacy said. "We haven't seen that a lot.
"I will say that Cleveland has been so, so gracious."
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Maybe the most important lesson to be learned from the recent events in Baton Rouge, Minnesota and Dallas is that from time to time we can all benefit from challenging our assumptions.
That is particularly true when it comes to issues such as police brutality and racial disparities in the criminal justice system.
When incidents like the shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile at the hands of police occur, Americans tend to run to their corners where they are shielded by narratives that conveniently fulfill what they already believe to be true about the world.
For those on the left, police brutality is a systemic problem that targets black men in particular, racism is rampant and animates officers all over the country, and the criminal justice system and its operators have it out for minorities in general.
For the right, lethal force by police is usually justified, under the Obama administration officers have become targets and victims, and the major threat to the black community is its own self-destructive behavior.
There are kernels of truth in both perspectives, but reality lies somewhere in between.
Although the facts surrounding the deaths of Sterling and Castile are still emerging, video footage of the encounters spread like wildfire and appeared to vindicate the liberal narrative.
Sterling looks to have been gunned down by an officer while he was pinned to the ground and no longer a threat. Police initially approached him for a minor infraction selling CDs on the street although a 911 caller said he was brandishing a handgun.
The case involving Castile, a man who was beloved by his community and who was legally carrying a concealed weapon, shows he appeared to be abiding by all proper protocols but was shot anyway. This gave great pause to conservatives, who tend to favor gun rights and to defend police.
Are there times when agents of the government exceed their authority? Of course, and conservatives in particular should want to guard against that phenomenon.
Then Dallas happened.
A solo shooter, upset about recent police shootings and the Black Lives Matter movement, brutally ambushed police officers who were protecting the rights of protesters to peacefully take their grievances to the public square.
Personal accounts of civilian victims told how officers threw themselves on women and children in an effort to shield them from the spray of bullets.
Those on the left, who so often criticize the right for allegedly inspiring violence with their words, have been forced to concede that their rhetoric which has often been irresponsible may have contributed to the murder of five police officers who were part of a police department that has been praised widely for its community policing efforts.
Indeed, the Dallas Police Department has been hailed for its "demilitarization" an approach strongly advocated by many on both the right and left and credited with dramatically reducing crime and improving the relationship between law enforcement and civilians in Dallas.
On both sides of the debate, familiar talking points have failed. That is usually the time to seek objective truths.
But even new data recently released by Harvard economist and professor Roland Fryer illustrates the complexity of the situation.
In extensive research that evaluated racial differences in uses of force, Fryer, who is African-American, unearthed what he called the "most surprising result I have found in my entire career."
After controlling for numerous variables, Fryer found that blacks are more likely to experience nonlethal force during encounters with police.
But in lethal interactions with police, he found no racial bias. In fact, his data showed "that blacks and Hispanics are marginally less likely to have lethal force used against them in police altercations."
Such data validate perceptions on both sides and serve as a reminder that no single narrative can fully explain or justify what appear to be sincerely held beliefs.
Our challenge now is twofold: to be empathetic truth-tellers but also agents of positive change.
Cynthia M. Allen is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Contact her at cmallen@star-telegram.com.
Graphic Illustration
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I'll save you the guesswork. On Thursday, Donald Trump will become the Republican nominee for president of the United States. On July 28, Hillary Clinton will become the Democratic nominee.
Trump's pending coronation won't please elected Republicans who put the nation's welfare above party loyalty. Nor will it please demonstrators who protesting the nomination of someone who has gone out of his way to denigrate Latinos, blacks, Muslims and immigrants.
Clinton's nomination won't please Bernie Sanders' delegates and others who want big money out of American politics. Nor will it assuage other anti-establishmentarians who may demonstrate outside the convention center in Philadelphia.
But these will be sideshows. So why have the conventions at all?
First, because they're perks awarded to people who worked hard for candidates during the primaries just as top sales reps in companies are awarded trips to national sales conventions.
Delegates will have fun and spend money, which hotels and restaurants in downtown Cleveland and Philadelphia will sop up like dry sponges. They'll enjoy circulating on the convention floors for five or six hours each night exchanging gossip and business cards, hugging old friends and meeting new ones, and taking selfies.
And they'll feel important when they hear party leaders, heads of state delegations, members of Congress and occasional celebrities tell them how critical it is to defeat the opposing party in November, how strong their nominee will be, and what makes America great.
Second, the conventions will generate prime-time TV infomercials produced and directed by Hollywood professionals and marketing specialists whose goal is to get the major networks (or at least CNN, Fox News and MSNBC) to project stirring images into the living rooms of swing voters.
Intermittently, TV anchors and their pundit panels will offer trivial or cynical commentary, and will interview congressional leaders and key advisers to the nominee, who will repeat what they've heard everyone else say.
The third reason for these conventions is hidden far away from the delegates and the prime-time performers: It's to ingratiate the big funders corporate executives, Wall Street investment bankers, partners in major law firms, top Washington lawyers and lobbyists, and billionaires.
The big funders will travel either to Cleveland or to Philadelphia (many will go to both) in their private jets and be discretely whisked by limo to the VIP suites of downtown hotels.
In the evenings, the big funders will fill the skyboxes of the convention centers just above where the media position their cameras and anchors and high above the din of the delegates, whom they will never see and will feast on shrimp, lobster tails and caviar, and will sip wine.
Each party will try to make these big funders feel like the VIPs they've paid to be, letting them shake hands with congressional leaders, Cabinet officers and the nominee's closest advisers, who will be circulating through the skyboxes like visiting dignitaries. If they're lucky, the big funders will have a chance to clench the hand of the nominee himself or herself.
The three conventions for delegates, for prime-time audiences at home and for big funders will occur simultaneously, but they will occupy different dimensions of reality.
Our two major political parties no longer nominate people to be president. Candidates choose themselves, they run in primaries, and the winners of the primaries become the parties' nominees.
The parties have instead become giant machines for producing infomercials, raising big money and rewarding top sales reps with big bashes every four years.
That Donald Trump, the most unqualified and incendiary person ever to become a major party's nominee, and Hillary Clinton, perhaps the most qualified yet least trusted person ever to become a major party's nominee, will emerge from the conventions to take each other on in the general election of 2016 is almost beside the point.
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich is a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of "Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future." He blogs at www.robertreich.org.
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Portland Superintendent Carole Smith announced Monday she is stepping down "now" in the wake of the lead controversy in Oregon's largest school district.She made that announcement just minutes after the school board released a damning report showing how Portland Public Schools dropped the ball on testing water for lead, fixing problems that were found and notifying the public of test results.Smith, who served nine years as Portland's superintendent and reshaped the city's high school system, said she provided the school board with a 90-day notice of her departure, as required by her contract, but that she has accumulated 90 days of unused vacation and leave time, so she will cease working for the district immediately.She acknowledged the lead crisis was the cause, saying that with the release of the report about what went wrong and why, "I have reached the decision that I need to move up the date of my departure." She had previously announced plans to retire at the end of the school year.In a statement, school board chairman Tom Koehler said, "I want to thank Superintendent Smith for her decades of service to public education in Oregon and for her leadership over the last ten years as the Superintendent of Portland Public Schools ... She prioritized and championed putting equity at the core of the school district's work. This will be an enduring and lasting legacy."Koehler said the board will hire an interim superintendent to lead the district while they do a national search for a permanent successor.The report on what went wrong with lead testing and remediation indicates Smith expected she would be told of any significant findings or problems, but she was not. The district's inept approaches to lead testing and remediation predated her hiring in fall 2007, the report shows.Still, the report cites "an absence of diligent inquiry by PPS individuals in the upper levels of administration hierarchy regarding PPS's procedures and protocols for lead in water testing remediation." And it suggests performance evaluations were routinely skipped or conducted with little rigor, allowing sub-par performance to go unaddressed.Smith refashioned the district's system of high schools, ending the practice of letting students transfer to high schools in other neighborhoods and taking controversial steps, including closing Marshall High and limiting enrollment at Benson High, in order to create schools more similar in size and course offerings in all parts of the district.She said her proudest accomplishment was helping raise the district's once-moribund graduation rate. Still, the district's rate merely matches the state average and is below state averages among low-income students, Latinos, Native Americans and students with disabilities.Sandra McDonough, president of the Portland Business Alliance, expressed strong support for Smith in the wake of her announcement."Carole Smith has been a strong educational leader in Portland," she said, noting the big imporvements in the graduation rate and "steps taken to modernize the district's high schools.""We urge the school board to move swiftly to fill this important role and to focus immediately on the serious issues facing the district, including the findings of lead in some schools' water supplies," McDonough said in a statement.
Things have gone from bad to worse for the Affordable Care Acts health-care co-op experiment.The federal law created co-ops (consumer-operated and -oriented plans) as a non-profit alternative to private insurers in an attempt to keep premiums down and prevent monopolies. Initially every state was slated to get their own co-op, but only 23 launched in 2014.Two years later, all but seven have closed or have plans to close. Just this month, co-ops in Connecticut, Illinois and Oregon announced they were going out of business because of financial insolvency.But some aren't going down without a fight.Marylands co-op, Evergreen Health, filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit in June against the federal government claiming that private insurers have gamed the system to avoid making "risk adjustment payments." Under the ACA, insurers with healthier members must make these payments to insurers with unhealthier members. But Evergreen CEO Peter Beilenson argues that his co-op was unfairly labeled as healthier because private insurers encouraged their less healthy members to go to the doctor so their patient pools would appear less healthy. Evergreen is now expected to owe between $18 million and $22 million in risk adjustment payments.Im convinced the federal government is trying to kill us off," said Beilenson. "One of the goals of co-ops was to increase competition, and theyve done the exact opposite. We think filing suit is the only way to get them to change."And he's not the only one.Several other co-ops and private insurers have filed lawsuits over the ACA's "risk adjustment corridor program," which differs from the risk adjustment payments that Maryland is fighting. The corridor program is a financial lifeline from the federal government to help insurers weather the uncertainty during the early years of Obamacare. But the feds announced last year that they would only honor 12.6 percent of co-ops' requested payments.Separate lawsuits have since been filed over the corridor program by Health Republic, a co-op in Oregon that has no plans to close; Illinois' co-op, Land of Lincoln; Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina; Highmark, a Pennsylvania-based insurer; and Moda Health, which is based in Alaska and Oregon. New Mexicos co-op, Health Connections, is also reportedly working on plans to sue.Legal challenges to Obamacare aren't new. Most Republican-led states and GOP members of Congress have filed lawsuits over the years but have only won a few of them. With rare exceptions , the courts have typically ruled in favor of the Affordable Care Act.This new wave of litigation, however, may change that.Timothy Jost, a health law professor at Washington and Lee University, is confident they have a case since the federal government promised those payments until GOP-backed legislation forced the feds to drastically cut them last year. But as for Evergreen Healths claim that the risk adjustment payments disproportionately hurt co-ops, he has a hard time imagining that the court will go along with that."Its unclear what will happen to Land of Lincolns suit now that it's shutting down. A representative from the Illinois Department of Insurance said they dont comment on pending litigation, and the question even stumped experts.Land of Lincoln could continue to exist as a legal entity in order to keep the suit going, but I cant say that will happen for certain, said Jost.For now, there are around50,000 people in Illinois with co-op plans that are going away soon.Its all a wait-and-see right now. We are telling people to keep paying their premiums, since most co-ops have waited until the end of the year to officially close their doors. Were hoping thatll be the case with Land of Lincoln, said Stephani Becker, a health policy specialist for the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law.Regardless of the outcome of any of the lawsuits, experts -- and even President Obama -- seem to agree that its only a matter of time before all the co-ops dissolve. The co-ops are considered to be the substitute for a public option plan, which didnt make it into the final draft of the ACA. Last week, Obama wrote in the journal of thethat he hopes Congress revisits a public option plan after he leaves office.Im sure the administration could have handled things differently, but I dont think [the co-ops] were an adequate substitute for a public option, said Jost. It was an interesting experiment, but I just dont think it will work out."
If you like political patronage, youll be pleased with whats happening in Wisconsin. A new law that took effect July 1 brings much of the states century-old civil service system to an end. The return of old-fashioned political hiring may be the result.Rather than requiring job applicants to take a qualifying exam, initial assessments will follow a resume-based system. Hiring decisions will be centralized in the Department of Administration. The law defines just cause for termination, making it easier to fire employees, while also curtailing their ability to appeal such decisions. Seniority will no longer offer protection against layoffs.The laws sponsors say their intent was to modernize the hiring process, making it faster and more efficient at a time of high turnover thanks to the aging of baby boom employees. Nationwide, roughly a third of state workers are already eligible for retirement. Under the new system, Wisconsin aims to fill vacant positions within 60 days, rather than the old deadline of 105 days.Theres no question that civil service practices can calcify in ways that leave prospective employees frustrated by lengthy applications and long waits to get hired. Its imperative were able to attract and hire good workers more quickly, says state Sen. Roger Roth, a lead sponsor of the new law.But not everyone is so happy. Critics of the law say its just the latest step in dismantling workers rights, something they claim has been an ongoing project since the GOP takeover of state government back in 2010. Wisconsin has become a right-to-work state, and Gov. Scott Walker drew protests and national attention with the 2011 law that eviscerated public-sector unions by ending collective bargaining rights for most employees.The irony is, when Walker was pushing through Act 10, which took away most union rights for public-sector workers, he said that those workers didnt need union protection because of Wisconsins great civil service law, says Matt Rothschild, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a watchdog group. Now, five years later, he takes the ax to that, too.The exodus of veteran state employees accelerated even before the law took effect. The fear going forward is that qualified workers will be discouraged from applying for jobs, calculating that their odds of getting one will be hurt if they arent campaign contributors or dont have friends on the inside. Shortly after the bill was introduced last fall, the states own personnel agency warned in a memo to the governors office that the changes would increase the number of qualified applicants who are turned away, while pushing a greater number of unqualified applicants to the interview stage. This allows them to do quick hiring of people they like, who are loyal to them, says Paul Secunda, who directs the labor and employment law program at Marquette University. It leads to a government that is not very efficient or effective.The Walker administration insists such complaints are overblown. Statutes are still in place that protect against cronyism, says Stacey Rolston, deputy administrator of the division of personnel management. You still have to have hires that are defensible, because they are subject to appeal at several different levels, she says. Really, all thats changed is our mechanism of bringing people in.Theres a case to be made for patronage. It creates more accountability for the governor if an agency isnt functioning well. But hiring and promoting workers on a basis other than traditional merit runs the risk that an administration will better serve its political donors and allies than the public at large.Whether Wisconsins new approach ends up making personnel management more efficient, or simply politicizes it, will go a long way toward determining whether standard civil service procedures are revisited elsewhere. Weve been talking with other states about what were doing, Rolston says. Were hoping that we can build a model that others can find useful.
Police departments across the country are implementing extra safety precautions after gunmen killed eight officers and wounded 10 others in Dallas and Baton Rouge, La. , in the past two weeks. In many cities -- including Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Milwaukee, New Orleans, New York and Washington, D.C. -- police chiefs have ordered their officers not to patrol alone for the foreseeable future.For so many departments to adopt the tactic is unusual, said Darrel Stephens, executive director of Major Cities Chiefs Association, but to have direct attacks on police, two of them back-to-back, is a pretty unusual situation. I think people can understand that police might be concerned about their safety.Some, however, worry that the new policy may slow response times, force officers to work even more overtime than they already do and strain tight law enforcement budgets. According to the Associated Press , "response times could slow for lower-priority cases, like thefts, that typically require just one officer."Having police travel in pairs is intended to deter confrontation and violence in the first place. A person might have second thoughts about resisting arrest or running away if they're outnumbered. If there is an attack on police, having an extra officer could help stop the shooter.But in Dallas, where a sniper shot officers from an elevated position, experts say two-person patrols wouldnt have made a difference. In Baton Rouge, where the shooter was on the ground, its open to speculation, said Stephens.According to Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn, "research and experience have overwhelmingly demonstrated that officers are not made any safer in a two-officer squad." But he decided to make them a requirement right now anyway out of an abundance of caution and in recognition of expressed concerns.In Cleveland, another city to adopt two-person patrols, officers also have to worry about being at higher risk because of the Republican National Convention this week. To increase security during the event, the city is recruiting additional manpower from neighboring cities and counties.The law enforcement community has debated the effectiveness of two-officer patrols for decades. The primary evidence against the practice is a 1977 study that found one-person patrols were just as safe, cheaper and made more arrests. Critics of two-person patrols also argue that officers can cover more area by themselves and call for backup when necessary.But Stephens argues that it makes sense as a temporary measure after the two recent attacks on police.One study almost 40 years ago shouldnt guide policy today, said Stephens. Whether theres any evidence at all, I think it does in fact make police officers more comfortable on the street under some trying circumstances.
Despite three acquittals and a hung jury through the first four trials of officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray, prosecutors have the prerogative to push forward with the remaining trials.Circuit Judge Barry G. Williams on Monday soundly rejected the case of the Baltimore State's Attorneys Office in the latest trial, of Lt. Brian Rice. He cited some of the same holes in the case he had pointed to in two previous trials in which he found officers not guilty.Legal experts said prosecutors must reassess their cases _ but are unlikely to be blocked by Williams if they decide to push forward with the next three trials.University of Maryland law professor Douglas Colbert said the trials are sending a message to police, and prosecutors should keep going after adapting their strategy based on Williams' latest ruling."It would be irresponsible not to continue prosecution as long as our elected official believes that there's evidence to satisfy the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt," Colbert said, referring to Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby. "An elected official cannot fall to the public pressure being placed by the police union and others."But many others say Williams has sent a clear message at this point that prosecutors lack the evidence needed to prove the officers' conduct was criminal."The state is not simply 0-for-4," said defense attorney Warren Brown, who is not involved in the cases but has observed the proceedings. "They're 0-for-24 when you add up all the charges that the judge or jury considered through the court of four trials.""The judge has said over and over and over again (that the evidence) falls short of convincing him beyond a reasonable doubt" that the officers are criminally culpable, Brown said.Officer Garrett Miller, who observed Monday's ruling, is the next officer scheduled to be tried. Miller's case is fraught with new challenges for prosecutors: Because they compelled him to testify under immunity at the trial of Officer Edward Nero, a new team of prosecutors was appointed to handle his case.Before his case, the court will hold a hearing where prosecutors will have to prove that they were not exposed to any of Miller's testimony. During the process in which prosecutors lobbied to be able to compel Miller to testify, Williams, the attorney general's office and the Court of Appeals judges all said prosecutors face a high bar at such a hearing.Officer William Porter was also compelled to testify, and his retrial will also require such a hearing, known as a "Kastigar hearing." The third officer who still has pending charges is Sgt. Alicia White.Several challenges for prosecutors have emerged through the trials so far:_Williams has agreed with defense arguments that a crowd that formed around the arrest scene gave officers reasonable cause to use their discretion not to adhere to the department's police general orders on using seat belts._Williams has said medical evidence was unclear about when exactly during Gray's ride in the van his injuries occurred._He has said that the state can't prove that police were aware of new department rules, issued just days before Gray's arrest and which took away officers' discretion regarding putting seat belts on detainees._And he has said that failure to follow general orders is not in and of itself a crime, particularly without being able to show that those rules were recklessly disregarded instead of a mere error in judgment.Miller's case focuses on Gray's initial detention and arrest. Nero was already acquitted for his role in arresting Gray, and prosecutors dropped a charge against Rice related to that aspect of the case.Williams left some room for prosecutors in Miller's trial, however, finding that Nero did not participate directly in the arrest as opposed to rejecting prosecutors' argument that the detention was illegal. Still, he skeptically questioned prosecutors during closing arguments of Nero's trial.David Jaros, a University of Baltimore law professor who has been observing the trials, said prosecutors' best hope may be if Miller made an incriminating comment in his statement to investigators."Absent more evidence than we've seen, it wouldn't seem like that's a hurdle they can get over," Jaros said."This is a hard case," Jaros said. "There are reasons to have doubts about what happened."But Jaros said people watching the cases shouldn't interpret Williams' verdicts as absolving the officers of wrongdoing."The judge made it clear that just because you made a mistake _ someone may have done something that was very wrong, that vas very inappropriate, but that doesn't necessarily make it a crime," Jaros said. "If you do something that is grossly unreasonable, but you're not aware of the risk you're taking, you're not being grossly criminally negligent, even though you're being negligent."Williams repeatedly stressed Monday that there was a difference between civil negligence _ finding that the officers' conduct caused Gray's death _ and criminal liability _ determining that their conduct had been so reckless with results that were anticipatable that they should be convicted of a crime."To say there's a tragedy, therefore somebody has to be criminally responsible, is really an inappropriate manner to approach this case," said Brown, the defense attorney and observer.David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who studies racial profiling and police misconduct, said while he is "strongly sympathetic that police ought to be held accountable for wrongdoing," prosecutors have proceeded with a legally dicey case."The American legal system is very reluctant to hold anybody, not just these police officers but anybody, criminally responsible for not doing something," Harris said. "Criminal law is not always the best tool available. Many times it feels like it should be, when there has been a parade of injustices over so many years. But any given case depends on its facts and evidence."Colbert thinks prosecutors can dig into their evidence and find something to satisfy what Williams is looking for. "I have to believe that evidence is available, and I hope we get to hear it at the next trial," he said.Defense attorneys have asked, prior to trials beginning, for Williams to dismiss charges. Warren Alperstein, a defense attorney and former prosecutor who has been observing the cases, said Williams will not be able to step in and dismiss the cases because of his views on the previous trials."No judge can control whether or not the state goes forward with any case," Alperstein said. "I don't see a scenario where any of these cases are going to be dismissed by the court. The only way the cases are not going to go forward is if the state elects to dismiss them."
Missourians with criminal convictions could have an easier time sealing those records under legislation signed Wednesday by Gov. Jay Nixon.The measure was among a handful of new crime-related laws signed by the governor, a Democrat, including a long-awaited update to youth sentencing laws, a ban on traffic ticket quotas and an overhaul of the Missouri's use-of-force statute.Current state law requires people to wait 20 years to petition the courts for an expungement of a felony record. The wait time for a misdemeanor is 10 years.The new law reduces those waiting periods to seven years for a felony and three years for a misdemeanor conviction. They must be free of any convictions during that time and must pay a fee of $250.People who have committed dangerous felonies, sex offenses, domestic assault and other violent crimes would not be eligible.The legislation, approved by large margins in both the House and Senate this spring, takes effect in 2018.During debate on the measure in the Legislature, supporters also contended House Bill 588 would help former criminals find employment more easily. While the records would be sealed from public viewing, prosecutors and police could still access the information."Missourians who have paid their debt to society and become law-abiding citizens deserve a chance to get a job and support their families," Nixon said in a prepared statement.The governor also signed off on a plan to bring Missouri into compliance with the U.S. Constitution when it comes to sentencing violent youth to prison.Along with the current sentence of life without parole, juvenile murderers older than 16 could be assessed a minimum 50 years and be eligible for a parole hearing, while juvenile murderers younger than 16 could be sentenced to a minimum of 35 years and then be eligible for a parole hearing.Senate Bill 590 came in response to a number of court cases that left Missouri out of step with the nation.In 2005, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that sentencing a juvenile to death was unconstitutional, leaving Missouri with only one option for juveniles convicted of first-degree murder.In 2012, the high court ruled that allowing only one sentencing option for those juveniles -- life without parole -- also was unconstitutional.In March, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled a group of 84 inmates affected by the ruling should be granted a parole hearing after serving 25 years of their life sentences.Also signed by the governor is a change to the law regarding how much physical force a police officer may use.The change is designed by bring Missouri in compliance with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Tennessee v. Garner."These are life-and-death decisions, and it is vital that Missouri statutes governing the use of force are clear and consistent with U.S. Supreme Court precedent," Nixon said.Missourians also could see fewer speed traps as part of a new law that prohibits cities from requiring or encouraging an employee to issue a certain number of traffic tickets.The measure banning ticket quotas is part of an ongoing push to address municipal court laws in the aftermath of the 2014 protests in Ferguson.
The Justice Department on Monday filed a petition asking that the full nine-member U.S. Supreme Court rehear the blockbuster lawsuit against President Barack Obama's plan on immigration.Last month, the high court deadlocked in a 4-4 tie, leaving in place an appeals court ruling that blocked the president's policy on immigration that would grant more than 4 million immigrants deportation reprieves and allow them to work in the country.Justice Antonin Scalia's death earlier this year left the court with only eight justices.Though it is rare for the Supreme Court to grant a rehearing, Acting Solicitor General Ian Gershengorn argued that because the same thorny issues in the immigration case could arise again there is "a strong need for definitive resolution" by the high court."Unless the Court resolves this case in a precedential manner, a matter of 'great national importance' involving an 'unprecedented and momentous' injunction barring implementation of the Guidance will have been effectively resolved for the country as a whole by a court of appeals that has divided twice, with two judges voting for petitioners and two for respondent States," Gershengorn wrote.In November 2014, Obama announced the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents program to shield millions of undocumented adults from deportation. Also under Obama's initiative, an existing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which was implemented in 2012, would be expanded.The Texas-led challenge, joined by 25 other states, asserts that Obama overstepped his authority in launching the deferred action for parents program and in expanding the children's program. Texas has argued the program would force the state to spend millions on schools, health care and law enforcement.U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen ruled in February 2015 that the administration had violated the Administrative Procedure Act by circumventing public hearings in the federal rule-making process when it announced its immigration policy. The decision was upheld by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last in November, which suggested that Obama had also exceeded his authority by granting benefits to immigrants."If the court doesn't designate for rehearing when there's nine justices there will be new constraints placed on the executive, and an important national program blocked without the Supreme Court weighing in and declaring what the law is," said Elizabeth Wydra, president of the liberal Constitutional Accountability.
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GIS - 19 July, 2016: Airport security, training for aviation and airport personnel and consolidation of existing bilateral relationships between Mauritius and China were at the fore of discussions yesterday afternoon between the Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Tourism and External Communications, Mr Xavier Luc Duval and the Vice Minister of Civil Aviation of China, Mr Dong Zhiyi. Airport security, training for aviation and airport personnel and consolidation of existing bilateral relationships between Mauritius and China were at the fore of discussions yesterday afternoon between the Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Tourism and External Communications, Mr Xavier Luc Duval and the Vice Minister of Civil Aviation of China, Mr Dong Zhiyi.
The Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Duval, had a working session with Mr Zhiyi and his delegation at his office to discuss about the setting up of a Regional Civil Aviation Academy in Mauritius in the vicinity of the airport which will provide training for personnel of the aviation sector for Mauritius as well as Africa. Mr Duval highlighted that this Academy will further help to enhance cooperation between China-Mauritius-Africa.
The External communication Minister stressed that airport security is of utmost importance and that with its expertise, China will help the Civil Aviation personnel of Mauritius, through training and exchange of knowledge, achieve the required levels of high security as the safety of passengers is high on the agenda of the Government.
The Vice Minister of Civil Aviation of China, Mr Dong Zhiyi, on his part highlighted that the purpose his visit is to enhance the bilateral relations between the two countries and to strengthen the existing cooperation in the aviation sector with Mauritius and Africa.
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GIS - 19 July 2016 : The importance that the Mauritian Government attaches to the value of the transformative capacity of scientific research and the development of science policies were highlighted by the Minister of Education and Human Resources, Tertiary Education and Scientific Research, Mrs Leela Devi Dookun-Luchoomun, yesterday at the Sofitel Mauritius lImperial Resort & Spa, in Flic-en-Flac.
The Minister was addressing delegates attending in the International Conference on Pure and Applied Chemistry (ICPAC-2016). It is being organised by the University of Mauritius and sponsored by other stakeholders under the theme Emerging Trends in Chemical Sciences.
ICPAC-2016 is providing a platform to share and discuss recent findings and shape new ideas of research covering all topics related to Chemistry. Chemistry is one of the subjects of Science for understanding and explaining makeup and changes of everything that has mass and occupies space.
In her opening address, Minister Dookun-Luchoomun observed that this gathering of scientists clearly matches with the vision and mission of her Ministry in transforming Mauritius into a knowledge-based economy and in promoting quality research. Your presence is indeed an opportunity to establish new scientific and professional bridges with diverse geographical realities. T hese are in line with one of the objectives of the Government of Mauritius and my Ministry to promote high level research, especially interdisciplinary and collaborative research, she stressed.
According to the Minister, a number of participants attending ICPAC 2016 are leaders in their respective fields. Emerging young scientists from diverse multidisciplinary chemical fields, will be on the same platform to disseminate their research findings. She also said that it is a reflection of our times that, in our complex and, sometimes, dangerous world, there is greater need than ever for the best scientific minds to grapple with pressing problems such as water shortages, climate change and food security.
For his part, the Director of the OPCWs (Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) Verification Division, Mr Philippe Denier, gave an overview of the OPCW which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013. His presentation focused on the topic Towards a World Free of Chemical Weapons: How Science Serves Disarmament. We are only too aware of the fact that for health, prosperity and security, chemistry matters he said. He underlined the need to understand each other better in pursuit of a common cause and that cause is science always working in pursuit of peace, security and prosperity.
ICPAC 2016
The International Conference is being held from July 18 to 22, 2016, in Mauritius. It is featuring a wide variety of keynote, plenary, invited and contributed lectures, as well as poster sessions. Workshops and symposia are also being conducted by experts on different chemical aspects.
Around 220 participants from 44 countries such as India, Brazil, USA, Canada, the UK as well as countries from the African continent are attending.
ICPAC 2016 is being organised against the backdrop that the world has condensed into a global village with progress in Science and Technology. However the world is now facing a crisis due to explosive increase in the demand for energy, food and water. On that score, Science and Chemistry have crucial roles for achieving some of the goals set by the United Nations for sustainable development of our planet.
(TNS) -- A city developer wants to build what he calls Portsmouths first net zero community, on Maplewood Avenue.Michael James Brigham, the owner of Lorax Sustainable Development LLC, is scheduled to appear before the Board of Adjustment to ask for a variance to build five single-family homes where only one is allowed under the citys zoning ordinance.Theyre ultra high performance, heavily insulated, with triple pane windows, Brigham said about the five homes planned for a roughly 2.6-acre lot at 996 Maplewood Ave. All are going to face south, all are going to have solar panels.He predicted that the solar panels will produce enough energy so the average homeowner can heat and cool their homes, and provide electricity without needing utilities.The construction costs a little more because of the solar panels, but then the panels will provide the energy you need, he said. Its the right thing to do.The houses will range in size from 2,000 to 2,500 square feet, Brigham said, and will likely be sold somewhere in the low $500,000 range.He acknowledged the homes are called condominiums in the application for a variance his attorneys filed with the city, but stressed that they are full-blown houses.The only reason were calling them condos is because were going to share the lot, which features a pond on the property, he said.Brigham, who has built many conventional housing developments, said from here forward Im not going to use fossil fuels ever again.He wants to build these homes with solar panels because as the technology has improved we finally got to the breaking point where its actually financially beneficial to go green.Youre basically making your own power, Brigham said.His attorney, R. Timothy Phoenix, contends in city documents that the planned net zero development will meet the goals of Portsmouths 2025 draft master plan.It meets those goals, Phoenix says, because it encourages sustainable low impact building, it is designed to maximize open space and uses green technologies.He also argues that the development, if granted a variance, would not diminish surrounding property values, and noted it is located adjacent to a church property which is or will be up for sale.There is little if any doubt this lot and the church lot will be developed for residential purposes, Phoenix said. Since the homes are grouped to respect the wetland buffer and provide beautiful open space, meet all dimensional requirements of the ordinance; the overall value of this lot will be enhanced. Clearly five homes on an average of over 22,000 square feet of lot area where 15,000 square feet is required will not diminish surrounding property values.Brigham acknowledged the classic Dr. Seuss book The Lorax inspired him when he created his companys name.In the book, the Lorax speaks for the trees and against corporate greed.I think it infers sustainable development, even though its certainly meant to bring in memories of Dr. Seuss The Lorax, he said.Tuesdays Board of Adjustment meeting is scheduled to start at 7 p.m. in council chambers in City Hall.
Italian officials are refusing to acknowledge that Monza's chances of keeping the grand prix are now over.
Reports this week have suggested Bernie Ecclestone has inked a deal with alternative race host Imola, but the truth is that the contract is not yet signed.
F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone told the Italian media from his holiday in Croatia that Monza's problem is "political", and that if a deal with Imola falls through, "we will have to say 'goodbye' to F1 in Italy".
But Italian automobile club chief Angelo Sticchi Damiani hit back by saying those political hurdles have now been cleared.
Lombardy vice president Fabrizio Sala has now told Italy's La Gazzetta dello Sport: "I'm sorry that Ecclestone said the obstacles for the Monza GP are political.
"The region has already done its part and at the end of May confirmed the allocation of EUR 5 million per year needed to close the contract.
"We are pleased that the president of the Aci, Sticchi Damiani, has clarified that there is no political problem and that next week a binding offer will be presented to FOM.
"We hope a conclusion can be reached quickly. The grand prix of Italy at Monza is part of our tradition and we can't allow it to be lost," Sala added.
(GMM)
Serzh Sargsyan is responsible for the death of Colonel Artur Vanoyan - Aram Harutyunyan
The key to prevent further bloodshed is in the hands of Serzh Sargsyan, National Accord party leader Aram Harutyunyan said on Tuesday as he commented on the latest developments in Yerevan. He [Sargsyan] should tender his resignation, I cannot imagine any other way out of the situation. The guys will not surrender themselves to law enforcement agencies and in case they attack bloodshed will be inevitable, Harutyunyan said speaking about Sasna Dzrer, a radical group that stirred tensions in the Armenian capital after seizing a police building and taking police officers hostage since Sunday. Aram Harutyunyan believes that the group has gone to such a move because it had no other choice. This is the result of governments wrong policy, the consequence of rigged elections, serious failures in the Karabakh issue, and disrespect for Armenia in the world. People in Armenia live in abject conditions and emigration is increasing day by day, he said. The chairman of the National Accord party reminds that Serzh Sargsyan came to power by means of the March 1 bloodshed but was unable to legitimize his power. He did not have the confidence of people from the very beginning, hence, the result. Mr Harutyunyan considers it normal that none of the high-ranking officials in the country has made a statement in connection with the continuing standoff between the gunmen and law enforcement agencies. Who can they turn to? They do not have great influence. On the other hand, Serzh Sargsyan has not had any communication with ordinary people for a long time. Our authorities know that they are not legitimate and cannot find support from people. Unlike Erdogan who was able to rely on people in the most critical moment, Serzh Sargsyan cannot even take 10 people to the street. In conclusion, the political figure called on people to be masters of their country. A few people have no right to cause suffering to an entire nation. Serzh Sargsyan is to bear full responsibility for the March 1 victims, the April war in Karabakh and the death of Colonel Artur Vanoyan, Harutyunyan said. Vanoyan was killed on Sunday during the seizure of the Erebuni police building.
The paper by the team from Tsinghua University, Duke University, NASA Goddard Institue for Space Studies and North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics is published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Emissions from ships and ports include both long- and short-lived climate pollutants (SLCP), for example, CO 2 , CH 4 and black carb on (BC), and criteria pollutants, such as SO 2 , NO x and PM 2.5 . Attention on ships and ports has increased as seaborne trade has grown significantly in recent decades. Asias share of world seaborne trade reached 38.7% and 49.4% for goods loaded and unloaded in 2013, and eight of the top ten global container ports are located in East Asia, as the region continues to dominate the league table for port throughput. Shipping volume in East Asia is expected to grow in the near future, mainly due to the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road strategy, which is designed to go from Chinas coast through the South China Sea to Europe via the Indian Ocean in one route, and to the South Pacific in the other.
Opinion: Crowds cannot rule, they can be guided (video)
The Republican Party of Armenia (HHK) has not made a statement in connection with the events taking place in Yerevans Erebuni district where a police compound was seized on Sunday by an armed group calling itself Sasna Dzrer. The position of the ruling party is unclear up to this moment. Nor is it known which charges will be levied against the gunmen that hold four police officers hostage inside the building. Judging from the stance of the HHK, political analyst Aghasi Yenokyan concluded that the government is not adequate in their actions. On the other hand, making ungrounded and inopportune arrests, the police forced people to take to the street to support their friends and adherents, he said. This must be a warning to the authorities. When someone poses demands to the authorities, they use it in the opposite direction they create a new constitution which is much less democratic, they amend the Electoral Code which puts the issue of fair elections into question. The last step of the government is more disgusting they suspend recreational component of social packages as part of the fight against corruption. The social package is used by 200 thousand people in Armenia and the government is punishing all of them, Mr Yenokyan said. Karen Aghamyan, President of the Artist's Union of Armenia, says street-style politics will lead to nothing good and it may have bad consequences. Many do not know or have forgotten that the Karabakh movement started because of environmental problems. People took to the streets to raise environmental issues, but later the movement took a different turn. These scenarios were developed long ago and we have witnessed destruction of countries. Let us not forget what happened in Lebanon, Syria and Ukraine. Crowds cannot rule, they can be guided, Karen Aghamyan said in conclusion.
The settlement, a consent decree lodged in US District Court for the Western District of Texas, includes provisions that resolves ongoing Clean Air Act violations at refineries in Kenai, Alaska; Martinez, California; Kapolei, Hawaii; Mandan, North Dakota; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Anacortes, Washington. Of the $10.45-million civil penalty that Tesoro will pay, the United States will receive $8,050,000, and co-plaintiffs including the states of Alaska and Hawaii, and the Northwest Clean Air Agency will share $2.4 million. Under the settlement, all six refineries must implement specific provisions to reduce flaring and enhance leak detection and repair:
The Department of Justice and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a $425-million settlement with subsidiaries of Tesoro Corp., and Par Hawaii Refining that resolves alleged Clean Air Act violations and protects public health by reducing air pollution at six refineries. Under the settlement, the two companies will spend about $403 million to install and operate pollution control equipment, and Tesoro will spend about $12 million to fund environmental projects in local communities previously impacted by pollution. Tesoro will also pay a $10.45 million civil penalty.
Flaring
Installation of flare gas recovery systems.
Implementation of a detailed plan for reducing waste gas to flares.
A refinery-wide flare cap.
Insstall and operate enhanced monitoring systems and equipment on flares.
Operate with a minimum of 96.5% combustion efficiency at all times when waste gases are vented.
Enhanced leak detection and repair (ELDAR) program
Training, including refersher courses, for refinery personnel with ELDAR responsibility.
Required ELDAR compliance audits.
Strict internal leak definitions: 500 ppm for valves and 2000 ppm for pumps.
Internal first attempt at repair at 100 ppm for valves.
More frequent monitoring than required by regulation.
Limitation on use of delay of repair exception.
Installation of certified low-leaking valve or certified low-leaking valve packing technology in all new applications.
Once the companies install the pollution controls required by the settlement, annual emissions reductions at the six refineries will total an estimated 773 tons of sulfur dioxide, 407 tons of nitrogen oxides, 1,140 tons of volatile organic compounds, 27 tons of hazardous air pollutants, 20 tons of hydrogen sulfide and the equivalent of 47,034 tons of carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas.
A large number of the emissions reductions will occur in areas with impaired air quality and protect populations at risk for respiratory illnesses. In particular, this settlement will reduce greenhouse gas emissions from flaring at the subject refineries by more than 60%.
The settlement addresses a range of alleged leak detection and repair and flaring violations under the Clean Air Act at all six refineries as well as violations of the Acts Prevention of Significant Deterioration, Non-Attainment New Source Review, New Source Performance Standards and National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants at certain refineries. The settlement also addresses various violations of state clean air laws, programs and permits.
At the refineries subject to this settlement, fluid catalytic cracking units, sulfuric acid plants, heaters, boilers and sulfur recovery units, are substantial emitters of nitrogen oxides (NO x ) and sulfur dioxide (SO 2 ).
Flaring results in emissions of SO 2 , greenhouse gases and toxic air pollutants, including volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and hazardous air pollutants. Fugitive emissions of VOCs result from leaking valves and pumps and can result in numerous health effects, including eye, nose and throat irritation, headaches, loss of coordination, nausea and damage to liver, kidney and the central nervous system, among other effects.
Leaks, flares, and excess emissions from refineries emit hazardous air pollutants, or air toxics, that are known or suspected to cause cancer, birth defects, and seriously impact the environment. SO 2 and NO x have numerous adverse effects on human health and are significant contributors to acid rain, smog and haze. Refineries also emit greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change, as well as fugitive VOCs.
The settlement incorporates the latest technological approaches to reducing flaring and making the flaring that does occur as efficient as possible. In addition to installing pollution control equipment, the settlement requires Tesoro to use a series of state-of-the-art Next Generation Compliance tools to monitor pollution.
Tesoro will use infrared gas-imaging cameras at four refineries to supplement the companys enhanced leak detection and repair program. These cameras are able to locate fugitive VOC emissions that may not be otherwise detected and to address these fugitive emissions and in doing so protect refinery employees from them. Tesoro will also pay for third-party auditing of compliance with the enhanced leak detection and repair requirements at all six facilities.
Under the settlement, Tesoro will also spend about $12.2 million to fund three pollution mitigation projects. In addition to installing infrared cameras, Tesoro will install ultra-low NO x burners on a furnace at its Salt Lake City refinery. Tesoro estimates that the cost of this mitigation project is $10.8 million and is expected to result in significant quantifiable reductions in NO x emissions. Tesoro will also contribute $1 million to fund the replacement of old diesel school buses in Contra Costa County, California, with new compressed natural gas (CNG) school buses. Replacing existing school buses that run on diesel with vehicles that are powered by CNG decreases emissions of NO x , SO 2 , PM, greenhouse gases and other air pollutants.
This settlement is part of EPAs National Enforcement Initiative to control harmful emissions from large sources of pollution, which includes refineries, under the Clean Air Acts Prevention of Significant Deterioration requirements. The total combined SO 2 and NO x emission reductions secured from all settlements under this initiative will exceed 2 million tons each year once all the required pollution controls have been installed and implemented.
There will be a 30 day public comment period on the consent decree lodged today. Information on how to comment on the consent decree will be available in the Federal Register and on the Department of Justices Web site.
RALEIGH CSX Corp. will build an intermodal cargo hub near the Virginia border in Edgecombe County after landowner opposition blocked the railroad company's first option, officials said Tuesday.
The CSX hub would transfer 260,000 cargo containers per year between railroad cars and trucks, with connections to North Carolina ports. CSX will invest $160 million in the project.
North Carolina will spend about $100 million for track improvements and other transportation infrastructure, plus tax breaks worth up to $4 million. About 150 new jobs are expected, though state officials projected the hub could to lead to 10 times that many across the state.
The hub "will enhance connections among suppliers and buyers in a way that spins off exciting opportunities for job growth throughout North Carolina," state Commerce Secretary John Skvarla said in a prepared statement.
The terminal near Rocky Mount will be the railroad's southern hub, a freight destination where cargo will be sorted and re-routed for delivery, similar to airlines sending passengers to a hub airport for connecting flights to their destinations, CSX spokeswoman Kristin Seay said in an email.
CSX announced in January that it planned to build the cargo hub south of Raleigh in Johnston County. That plan was scratched after landowners opposed the prospect of being forced to sell their property.
Jacksonville, Florida-based CSX last week reported a nearly 20 percent drop in second-quarter profit to $445 million as freight volume slowed 9 percent.
We must create a temporary government - Zaruhi Postanjyan (video)
Armenian lawmaker Nikol Pashinyan has offered Speaker of the Armenian National Assembly, Galust Sahakyan, to convene parliamentary hearings to discuss the latest events in Yerevan. He [Sahakyan] did not seem to be so enthusiastic about the idea, Pashinyan says. Nikol Pashinyan is angered to hear some people calling the members of the Sasna Dzrer group terrorists. Those who call them terrorists do not know the citizens of Armenia well enough. Any political figure will tell you that people in our villages, towns and cities are not interested in politics. They say what are you speaking about? We must take up arms and fight! It means a significant part of our population has become terrorists," he said. Nikol Pashinyan says that thanks to Serzh Sargsyan, the country has appeared in such a situation that many citizens believe that they can take up to internal challenges only by force. The Police must explain why and on what grounds they have detained hundreds of citizens in two days. I am worried by the fact that only the National Security Service and the Police are speaking about the events in Yerevan, he said. Zaruhi Postanjyan, another opposition lawmaker in Armenia, says the police are unable to control the situation in the country and are carrying out repression against citizens instead. The author of these repressions is Serzh Sargsyan, she says. The lawmaker thinks that Serzh Sargsyn should personally visit Khorenatsi street to negotiate with the hostage takers. Our citizens should go out to the streets and squares, otherwise we cannot resolve the problem, she said. At the same time, Zaruhi Postanjyan reminds that the demand of the armed group controlling the police unit for the third day coincides with the demand of Armenian citizens we all want Serzh Sargsyan to step down as the countrys head. It is Serzh Sargsyn who has ordered the Republicans to remain silent and not to comment on the tense political situation in Armenia, she added. We must create a temporary government that will serve the future parliamentary or presidential elections, Postanjyan said in conclusion.
The Washington state Supreme Court has ruled that lenders cannot take possession of a property due to missed mortgage payments without first going through foreclosure. This ruling opens the door to a federal class action spearheaded by Laura Jordan and joined by more than 3,600 borrowers. Jordan started the case after her mortgage provider seized her property following two missed payments. The lender made a forced entry into her home while she was at work and changed the locks.
While many view the lender's actions as trespassing and theft, others in the industry say that the ruling is in conflict with many terms listed in standard mortgage agreements. The language found in many of these documents states that lenders can take several steps to maintain the value of a property that has been abandoned or is in default, including changing the locks. A brief filed by Freddie Mac supported these terms, saying that by keeping up these properties, lenders were protecting their investments and also maintaining the value of surrounding properties.
The court ruled six to three that without going through foreclosure, these lenders were violating the law. While the state Supreme Court was not hearing the case, the federal judge overseeing Jordan's class action lawsuit asked the higher court to address the question.
Jordan's lawyers say this may be the first time a state court has ruled against lenders in this issue.
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As brutal as we may think 2016 has been to our favorite, local eateries, there have been quite a few additions for us to sink our teeth into.
In fact, almost every month so far this year has introduced a new dining option into our livesand stomachs.
In January, River Rock Tavern, in Derby, Copas, in Bethel, and Eastend Restaurant, in Greenwich, each hit the scene running. And the options have only gotten better with Bravo NY Pizza, in New Milford, Connecticut BBQ, in Bridgeport, and the latest The Granola Bar location in Westport.
Related: The biggest local bar, restaurant closings so far this year
And there are even more set to open later this year.
As more housing develops in cities, more businesses and restaurants move. Take downtown Bridgeport, for example.
"We saw that in Stamford early," Joseph McGee, vice president of public policy and programs at the Business Council of Fairfield County, told Hearst Media Connecticut recently. "These stores kept opening and closing. Then the housing boom downtown occurred and within 10 years everything changed. As you increase the housing, you begin to see the success of the stores and restaurants."
And with the surging popularity of Stamford, South Norwalk, and Danburyall where some of the county's finest eats can be foundthere's a chance even more options are heading our way.
"One of the most appealing features of the area is the food and nightlife scene in SoNo," Ken Tuccio, voice of the podcast "Welcome To Connecticut" and one of Connecticut Magazine's 40 Under 40, told Hearst Connecticut Media.
"I love the fact that there are a ton of different options in SoNo depending on your mood for the night. You're not pigeonholed in SoNo. That's what's cool about it."
Foodies rejoice. There's more fun to be had in 2016.
Check out the biggest local restaurant openings so far this year in the slideshow above.
Road food is cuisine for the traveler. It's what we find in shacks, food trucks and small town restaurants while out on the open road.
In Connecticut, there is no shortage of great spots for the foodies at heart. Using Yelp reviews and roadfood.com, we were able to find plenty of authentic road food hamburgers, tacos and fries.
Click through the slideshow above to check them out.
Roadfood.com is a trusted foodie site based off of the book "Roadfood" by Michael and Jane Stern. The Sterns met right here in Connecticut, at a pizza place in New Haven. Now they travel the country in pursuit of great road food, happily ever after.
BRIDGEPORT-His friends and relatives describe Aria Maleki as a giving person.
But it was taking that landed him in federal prison Monday.
For nearly nine years Maleki and his salesmen took slightly more than $3 million from desperate homeowners across the country looking to refinance their homes at more favorable rates.
They took food off the table of Lisa Bates of Mahopac, N.Y.; confidence in financial institutions from Diana Guzman of Norwalk and the ability to vet companies from Michael Aldridge, a retired Corrections lieutenant who owned property in Stratford.
On Monday it was U.S. District Judge Stefan R. Underhills turn to do the taking.
No sentence can be imposed that will restore what was lost, the judge told his nearly packed courtroom. This is a crime that resulted in the loss of dreams emotional distress and daily reminders of the pain inflicted by your predatory conduct.
Underhill said he wished he had a magic wand to wave but all he could is order Maleki to spend the next nine years and four months of his life in federal prison beginning Oct. 26. That will be followed by three years of supervision by the U.S. Probation Department.
You feel stupid, gullible, said Guzman, who was fleeced by one of the 29 companies Maleki created, some bearing names very similar to well-known banks and mortgage companies. You feel like you can not trust financial institutions.
Maleki and his confederates robocalled numbers they bought from data collection firms. They offered lower mortgage payments allegedly through government-stimulated program. They preyed on those who called back requiring an upfront payment and telling some to stop paying their current lender.
As a result homes fell into foreclosure.
And Maleki?
Assistant U.S. Attorney Avi Perry said investigators seized $350,000 from various bank accounts and $362,000 from a Bitcoin account; a $100,000 cashiers check, two Ferraris and a Porsche.
Underhill ordered $800,000 forfeited. The money will be used to pay victims between 30 and 40 cents on every dollar they lost.
But it was Bates who directly took on Maleki, a well-dressed, neatly coiffured and tanned 33-year-old Californian of Iranian descent.
My children cant go to camp...I cant take them to a waterpark. We cant go to Chilis....I am almost going through a divorce...Will you look at me, she said staring at the defendant who kept his head down. I demand my money back every single dime.
As Bates walked back to the gallery she was met with a standing ovation by the nearly two dozen of Malekis 2,855 victims from whom he and his co-conspirators grabbed $3,064,182.
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GREENWICH Each morning, Stephanie Paulmeno walks her dogs to Binney Park in Old Greenwich where they like to eat the long grass that grows amongst the rocks lining the pond there.
Tuesday morning, the dogs stood on their short legs staring into the popped-out eyes of dozens of dead, fetid fish washed up against the ponds shore.
I walk here at least once a day, sometimes more. Its usually such a nice, pristine little park, said Paulmeno, former director of community health planning for the town who has been visiting the park for 35 years. Its a shame to see it looking so shabby. Even the water doesnt have the clarity it used to. I cant think its a good thing to see our fish belly up in the pond, its distressing to see.
The pond is full of chip bags, beer cans and vodka bottles, but city officials do not think the fish were killed by some peoples affinity for drinking Natural Ice in public parks.
Amanda Ryan, conservation resource manager with the Greenwich Conservation Commission, said it is likely the fish were killed when they swam out of Long Island Sound at high tide and got stranded in the pond when the tide went back out.
At high tide, Ryan said, the fish can swim over the dam and make it up the stream between the Sound and pond. When the tide goes back out, the dam again becomes a barricade and the saltwater fish are stranded in a pool of freshwater.
This theory makes sense, Ryan said, but does not explain why it doesnt happen at every high tide.
Obviously high tide occurs frequently and this does not occur frequently, so what we need to determine is why it happened this time, she said.
The ponds temperature likely quickened the killing process, she said. Binney Park pond is a tiny body of water compared to the Sound, and during one of the hottest stretches of the summer it quickly heats to temperatures far above what the Sound fish are used to, Ryan said.
Sandra Shumway, a research professor of marine sciences at the University of Connecticut, said that was a likely cause of death.
High temperatures increase the fish activity and they need more oxygen and the take more oxygen out of the water and it kills them, same as overheating the aquarium, Shumway said. I dont think its anything sinister, and I dont think its algae.
Ryan said she had been in contact with the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection to see if they had any evidence of this happening elsewhere in the state. She said that could help determine the exact cause of the fish kill here.
Since its a freshwater pond influenced by a tidal zone, she reached out to both the departments marine fisheries and inland fisheries divisions. She hopes to hear back from them this week.
Employees from the Greenwich Parks and Recreation Department removed many of the dead fish by early Tuesday afternoon, she said.
Michael Long, director of the Division of Environmental Services in the Greenwich Health Department, said the fish posed no real public health concern, unless a person or pet tried to eat them.
Anything dead, the longer it has been dead the more chance of it being contaminated, Long said. Being preyed on by flies or just festering bacteria and that kind of stuff. Its a natural process.
pfrissell@hearstmediact.com; @PeregrineFriss
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Esperance
State Police investigators and a Federal Aviation Administration official were at the wooded scene of a small plane crash Sunday that killed three people and critically injured another.
Police would not answer questions at the privately owned air strip, saying the crash of a Piper PA-28 just outside the airport perimeter Saturday evening is still under investigation.
Schoharie County Sheriff Anthony Desmond said Sunday that three bodies were removed from the wreckage and transported to Albany Medical Center Hospital, where autopsies will be performed Monday. Schoharie County Coroner Matthew Coltrain declared the passengers deceased at the scene.
Desmond said a fourth injured male passenger was flown to Albany Medical Center Hospital, but he said the person might have then been transferred elsewhere, as they suffered from burns.
The sheriff said the plane took off from the air strip called Hogan Airport, 212 Brandon Road, in the town of Esperance, and managed to stay airborne for about 1,000 feet before crashing southwest of the airport into a woody, swampy area. On Sunday, police were restricting access to a gravel, private road that runs along the air strip property named Whitetail Lane. A State Police helicopter was also stationed at the air strip, and was occasionally taking off to view the crash area.
The air strip, which sits on the border between Schoharie and Montgomery counties, is listed as being owned by Tim Hogan, who has an address near the air strip and in Bedford Hills, Westchester County.
A Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman said the aircraft was destroyed by fire in the accident. There was no information immediately available about who the plane was registered to.
Desmond said he did not know the identities of the victims, but said they were apparently traveling back to Connecticut when the crash happened.
State Police are handling the investigation out of the Cobleskill barracks.
lstanforth@timesunion.com 518-454-5697
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NEW CANAAN Tucked on a quiet neighborhood cul-de-sac off of New Canaans elite Rosebrook Road, this East-side Dutch Colonial offers a desirable address in move-in ready condition.
The storybook exterior on Bittersweet Lane is carefully trimmed with sculpted boxwoods, New England stonewalls and its own private aerated pond.
A schoolroom red front door flanked by arched sidelights stands out against the classic white clapboard siding and black shutters.
Inside, the foyer unfolds into a formal living room featuring clean chair rail and crown moldings, a wood burning fireplace and plantation shutters for added privacy.
A formal dining room is quite charming with a built-in corner hutch for displaying serve ware.
Steps down from the dining room is a large family room with a floor to ceiling stone fireplace, a wet bar with added storage space and plenty of natural light.
Renovated by current owners in 2006, a European-inspired kitchen features tumbled Italian stone floors, custom cabinetry handcrafted to resemble furniture and Uba Tuba granite counters.
With a tile backsplash imported from Barcelona, front apron farm sink sourced from England with an aged Brass faucet, this kitchen offers plenty of old world European charm.
Appliances include a five-burner Wolf cooktop, dual Miele wall oven and Subzero refrigerator.
More Information ABOUT THIS HOUSE TYPE: Dutch Colonial ADDRESS: 56 Bittersweet Lane PRICE: $ 1,295,000 ACREAGE: 2.01 YEAR BUILT: 1967 SQUARE FOOTAGE: 3,367 NUMBER OF ROOMS: 10 BEDROOMS: 4 FULL BATH: 3 HALF BATH: 0 NOTABLE FEATURES: aerated pond, stonewalls, stone terrace, screened porch, pool site, tennis court site, land trust, library, SCHOOLS: East Elementary, Sax Middle School, New Canaan High School ASSESSMENT: 1,062,740 TAXES: $17,333 See More Collapse
The kitchen includes a center island offering prep space and a high-top bar for everyday dining in addition to an eat-in breakfast room.
Just off the kitchen is a screened porch with a vaulted wood-paneled ceiling with beams and three walls of windows overlooking the backyard and terrace.
The first floor also includes a wood-paneled library with built-ins, a wet bar and access to a full bath offering an option bedroom space if desired.
The second floor of the home includes three guest bedrooms that share a wainscoted hall bath and a master bedroom with an en suite bath and water views of the aerated pond.
For more information or to see the property please contact the Sneddon Team at 203-219-3769 or email them at sneddonteam@halstead.com
It has to do with a unified theory of deliciousness. Photo: NBC/Getty Images
Taking a break from conquering the delivery world, Momofuku head honcho David Chang sat down to write this months Wired cover story. In it, he presents his unified theory of deliciousness, which basically boils down to the idea of applying the theory of strange loops to food, dishes like bolognese and mapo tofu having fundamental similarities, and people liking dishes that remind them of other food theyve liked in the past. Also, umami is super important.
Its not so straightforward, of course. Chang continues, in a bit of philosophical clarity, to declare that a perfectly seasoned dish will taste both too salty and not salty enough, which is something you may have thought while microwaving instant ramen during your sophomore year of college. More important, though, he finally answers the question everyone has been asking for years: Why are his famous pork buns, the tiny sandwiches upon which the entire Momofuku empire has been built, so damn good?
Despite the dish being an 11th hour addition to the Momofuku Noodle Bar menu, and a pretty basic one at that, people went nuts for the combination of fatty pork, sweet hoisin, and fresh cucumber. And for Chang, the buns success is pinned to the combination of steamed bread and pork belly, a classic in East Asian countries like Taiwan and Japan, that also hits the same notes as the BLTs sandwich-obsessed Americans grew up on. Put another way: Everyone loves pork belly.
Apple Pay has significantly increased its European presence and has now launched in France (previously, it was available in UK and Switzerland).
It supports Visa and MasterCards (credit and debit) from four banks - Banque Populaire, Carrefour Banque, Caisse d'EpargenTicket Restaurant. Orange and Boom will be added soon.
The mobile payment service works on iPhones (6 and later, SE included) and the Apple Watch. iPads (Pro, Air 2, mini 4) are supported too, but only for in-app payments (i.e. not in stores). You can pay in the following stores:
Apple Pay is coming to Spain soon (where it will clash with Samsung Pay).
Source (in French) | Via
If you are just tuning in to the ongoing Samsung Galaxy Note7 leak series, it appears the time has finally come for us to inspect the bottom side of the device. Despite the abundance of shots and renders already available, this part just seemed to mostly elude us until now. Examining said angle of the phablet is actually pretty important as it holds the key to the type of USB port and the mechanics of the S Pen.
Rumors regarding a USB Type-C connector are not new, but a visual confirmation is still a necessity. We are not talking about renders either, as we do already have a bunch of those, but they are quite easy to manipulate. A couple of live shots would be ideal and while this is not the case with this new leak, it is probably the next best thing, as it shows an original USB Type-C cable for the Note7.
Another recent leak also offers a close look at what appears to be the Adaptive Fast charger of the upcoming Note. The unit lists a total of three voltage ratings 12V at 2.1A, 9V at 1.67A and 5V at 2A. The latter two coincide perfectly with what a current Galaxy S7 fast charger can pump out, but the 12V mode could potentially be new. Some rough calculation makes this out to 25.5W and if the device and its specs check out, we can't help but wonder it Samsung will break its quick charging record with the Note7.
Meanwhile, another leaked still offers a glimpse of all the alleged color options of the device. These should include Coral Blue, Gold, Silver Titanium and Black. Sadly, the photo does not show any other part of the device besides the front glass.
You can mark August 2 on your calendars, as it will officially be the date of the Note's launch.
Source 1 (in French) | Source 2 (in Romanian) | Source 3
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Xiaomi unveiled the Mi Max in May, as an upper-midrange handset with a huge 6.44-inch screen. Interest for it was high from the beginning, with 8 million registrations received for its first flash sale in China.
But what about actual sales numbers? Well, while we still don't have those, a well known Chinese analyst has revealed how many units were shipped by Xiaomi in the first two months of availability.
1.5 million. That's how many Mi Max devices Xiaomi managed to ship - and most of those should actually be counted as sales because of the company's strong reliance on direct-to-consumer channels (it mainly sells through its own website in China).
Needless to say, this is record-breaking for a device that's more a tablet than a phone (again, it comes with a 6.44" display). In fact, the analyst sharing these numbers claims that usual sales numbers for similar huge devices in 2015 were around 300,000 units for each model for the whole year. And now Xiaomi swoops in and moves five times more handsets in just two months.
The information has pretty much been confirmed by Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun since he reposted it on his Weibo account, adding that "for heavy mobile phone users, the Mi Max is the best choice". Clearly, Chinese consumers think that way too.
Via
Haiti - Elections : A tool to fight against electoral fraud
Friday Provisional Electoral Council released the "regulatory framework for the deployment of representatives" which is according to the Council an instrument to fight against electoral fraud and "[...] for the management of representatives in the polling stations. It is a document which now sets their modality registration and assignment."
The Electoral Council explains that "The regulatory framework establishes that political parties register themselves their representatives on the CEP website within the time limit in the electoral calendar. The selection of representatives is made among voters being on the voter list. The representative card will be nominative and will includes the photo of representative of the political party or group, department, the commune and its polling center of assignment.
The design of the regulatory framework of representatives has been previously discussed with the political entities involved in the electoral process. During meetings in June, it was agreed between the CEP and the political leaders that the electoral institution would make available to the political parties, a technical process of application on the institution's website, in order to implement the project. To access the regulatory framework for the deployment of representatives, the political parties, once on the website should consult the section 'Liens utiles'"
Furthermore, the Executive Board of the CEP, informs the population in general, political parties, political groups and candidates in particular, "that the online registration of representatives will begin this Tuesday, July 19 and runs until August 23, 2016, on the website : mandataires.cephaiti.ht . Note that a phone number is required for each registered representative."
HL/ HaitiLibre
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Published on 2016/07/19 | Source
Updated cast and added new stills and on-the-set images for the upcoming Korean movie "Train to Busan" (2015)
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Directed by Yeon Sang-ho
With Gong Yoo, Jung Yu-mi, Ma Dong-seok, Kim Su-an, Kim Eui-sung, Choi Wooshik,... More
Also known as "Busan Bound"
Crank in : 2015/04/26
Crank up : 2015/08/19
Synopsis
"Train to Busan" is about the zombie appearance on a KTX headed for Busan. Produced by Yeon Sang-ho, an animation producer with a firm fan base.
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The Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) has been fined $132,000 for illegally entering three Adelaide construction sites in 2014.
The Federal Court ruled that the Union unlawfully entered St Mark's College in North Adelaide, Flinders University at Tonsley, and the Southern Expressway Duplication project.
Five officials from the union Aaron Cartledge, Michael McDermott, David Bolton, Michael Huddy and Brendan Pitt were found to have failed or refused to comply with right-of-entry provisions details in the Fair Work Act.
This is the second ruling of this nature involving the CFMEU. Three months ago, 15 officials were fined over $900,000 for breaking right-of-entry laws also in 2014.
The CFMEU has a significant record of non-compliance with the provisions of industrial legislation, said Justice Berna Collier when handing down the judgment.
All individual respondents have previously contravened industrial legislation. Indeed the obvious inference to be drawn is that the CFMEU has ignored such penalties as inconsequential.
Nigel Hadgkiss of the Fair Work Commission told ABC News that the fine reflected the seriousness of the offences.
The responsibilities of permit holders when exercising right of entry are clearly set out in the Fair Work Act 2009, he said. That the CFMEU would pressure its officials to deliberately defy these provisions is frankly astounding.
Actions by the union showed a level of contempt for the law which should be a cause for concern for all those in the building industry, he added.
ermarket giant Coles has succeeded in doubling its indigenous workforce over a period of only 12 months, bringing the total number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders from 1,115 to 2,321.This success has been led by the firms head of indigenous affairs, Topaz McAuliffe, who helped start First Steps a three-week pre-employment program which targets indigenous applicants in communities where there are more than 15 vacancies.First developed in 2011, initially with support from the Australian Government, the program is now wholly funded by Coles with 10 programs planned over the next year, a Coles spokesperson told HC.The program, which is aimed at Indigenous Australians who have been out of the workforce for a period of time or not previously employed, provides guaranteed permanent part-time roles to all participants and includes dedicated mentoring from the training phase and throughout the first six months of employment.Since 2011, First Steps has been delivered in 37 locations across regional and metropolitan Australia and resulted in an additional 550 Indigenous team members joining the firm, the spokesperson said.This has been part of the overall strategy, headed by McAuliffe, to boost Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employees at Coles.Jobs are the solution; jobs are the key to closing the gap, she told The Australian.While indigenous Australians now may up 2.2% of the workforce, Coles aims at increasing this to 3% a target the firm says it can reach by 2018.This is a dramatic turnaround for a firm which announced increase indigenous employment from 500 to 2,000 employees by 2013 and then failed to reach this goal.The firm probably underestimated the difficulty of recruiting such a large number of employees, managing director John Durkan told The Australian.Its not disappointing; its great to set targets and now weve accelerated past them, he said. With the groundwork in the beginning, and what Topaz has done, weve done better than we thought we would. Its our duty. Weve got to do the right thing.
By Jessica Isaacs | [email protected]
Theyve been bringing their version of old-time string music to the High Country for the past four decades, and you can check them out for yourselves this weekend at Beech Mountain Resorts 5506 Skybar.
Since their debut, the Corklickers have been sharing their passion for music with audience across western North Carolina, especially right here in our area.
We play whats called old-time music. Banjo, fiddles, guitar and upright bass, said Gil Adams, who plays the fiddle in the band. If people heard us playing theyd say its bluegrass, but old-time music actually predates bluegrass chronologically. Its the same instruments, just a little bit different style.
The crew has been playing together since the early 1970s and theyve performed at many of the communitys favorite hot spots over the years.
The Corklickers have become regular favorites up at Beech Mountain, and Adams, who also works as mountain manager at the resort, enjoys a close connection with the town.
I just enjoy playing the music to start with. Weve played together for a long time, he said. We played at the Skybar last year, too. Youre up there at 5506 on a big deck and you look out and can see for miles and miles if the weathers nice. Being that its like home territory, that makes it kind of fun.
The Corklickers are no strangers to the mountain, and played there as early as the 1980s when they opened for Doc Watson at the Beech Tree restaurant.
Weve played there a lot of different times over the years, said Adams.
No matter who you are, where you come from or what youre into, the Corklickers guarantee a good time.
The kind of music we play is a form of folk music, and its played as a very social music. People played it at the turn of the century for social things like corn shucking, bean stringing or local dances, Adams said. Its more like a social music than it is a type that you perform for an audience. We play a lot of dance tunes.
This show is worth the trip up the mountain, for sure, and Adams says youre bound to join the fun when you see them take the stage.
They will see how much fun were having. Your foot cant stand still while the musics going on, he said. Ive also found that kids love it because they like to get up and jump up and down dancing; and if kids like, then the parents will like it even better.
Dont miss the crowd-pleasing Corklickers this weekend. Theyll perform from 2:30-5:30 p.m. on Saturday, July 23 at Beech Mountain Resorts 5506 Skybar.
Part of the highest ski area in eastern America, the bars awe-inspiring elevation lends to a breathtaking view of the Blue Ridge Mountains that stretches across North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.
Although there is no space for parking at the summit, there are two ways to get to the top and check out 5506.
If youre feeling adventurous, take the scenic chairlift and soak up the incredible vistas for just $10. If youre not so much a fan of heights, the resort now offers shuttle services to and from the summit for just $5.
More About the Corklickers:
Corklickers
Old time music from the 1920s-30s
History
Band started in early 1976 Enjoying our 37th 38th year playing. Members from east TN and western North Carolina.
Original members : Clay Buckner, Gil Adams, Mark Adams, Ben Moore, Dick Tarrier, Rick Stone, Mike Fisher
Band evolution with other members. Lots to choose from.
Gil says corklicker is a lifestyle or mindset
Current members (todays band) Mark Adams banjo, Gil Adams-fiddle, Rick Palmer-fiddle, David Burns fiddle, Ben Moore guitar, Rick Moore bass, Rob Nicar fiddle
Mention Mack Vannoy guitar. Passed a few years back.
Musical Influences
Skillet Lickers, Pop Stoneman, Uncle Dave Macon, Charlie Bowman (from Gray, TN), Highwood String Band,
Interesting History
Toured in 1970s in van purchased from Merle Watson
Gils Albert Hash fiddle
Marks Kyle Creed banjo stolen and a festival and recovered 25 years later. This can be discussed without mentioning any namesHa!
Noted past/recent gigs
Down Home festivals in 70s, Bean Blossom in PA, Kent State,
More recently Merlefest, Bristol Rythum and Roots, Nashville Old-Time Music Assoc Breakin up winter Festival in Lebanon TN
Musical Free for Alls !
Recording Efforts
LP, Old Time Tunes and Songs from the South, recorded in 1978 and released on Kyle Creeds Mountain Label . Engineered by Doug Dorshug Menbers on this record: Casey Morrell, Gil Adams, Mark Adams, Macky Vannoy, David Burns, Andy Wallach
Uncorked CD 2003 Recorded at Classic Studios in Bristol. Engineered by Stan bowman.
Plans for another CD soon
Together since 1976,and still going strong!2006 was another successful year for us,with performances at the Todd NC Summer Concert Series,Down Home,Carter Fold,Leon Kiser Tribute,and Rhythm & Roots Fest in Bristol. We filmed a segment of the VA Public Television SeriesSong of the Mountains that hopefully will be broadcast nationwide this year.We will be doing the Tri-State Bluegrass Festival in Indiana on May 26-27.We will be celebrating our 31st year in 2007.
Follow this link for more info: http://www.corklickers.com/page3.html
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Citizens can now easily request dismissal of certain traffic violations online with the launch of the new Electronic Compliance and Dismissal (ECAD) system. The application delivers a modern and user-friendly experience to quickly process traffic violations online without ever having to appear at the courthouse.
Online dismissals and services are changing the way the public does business with our courts, said Judge Marion Warren, director of the N.C. Administrative Office of the Courts. This modern court technology is more efficient and convenient to process a significant portion of traffic cases online and not have to stand in line at the courthouse.
Following Chief Justice Mark Martins vision for eCourts and modernizing court technology systems statewide, ECAD was designed to reduce foot traffic in courthouses across the state while allowing the public a fast, convenient way to request dismissal for certain traffic violations online. The efficient, user-friendly system also benefits district attorneys and clerks by dramatically reducing the time needed to review and process dismissals of minor traffic cases.
With the rollout of the Electronic Compliance and Dismissal system, members of the public have been able to avoid the inconvenience and time spent coming to the courthouse once they have come into compliance with the law, said Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman. Not only does this streamline the process for them, but by reducing the number of cases on the docket in court, ECAD also gives our prosecutors and the court more time to focus on other matters. ECAD is a great public service.
A key benefit of ECAD is its direct link to the N.C. Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) database, which allows the system to electronically validate whether a defendant is compliant before allowing the request to be submitted. This means that no review of documents or DMV data is required on the part of the district attorneys office and a one-click approval will electronically dismiss / dispose the case with no data entry needed from the clerks office. Whether a request is approved or denied, ECAD will notify the defendant by email if they need to appear in court on the assigned date.
Prior to ECAD, citizens had to appear in court and visit the courthouse to request dismissal. In 2015, over 220,000 cases with ECAD-eligible offenses were dismissed in North Carolina. This represents a significant portion of the traffic cases handled in our state and underscores the importance and convenience for the public. There is no cost associated with requesting dismissal of a case online through ECAD, and the system is available 24/7.
The system was funded by S.L. 2015-241 (HB 97) in September 2015 and work on the system began in October. ECAD was piloted beginning in May 2016, and is now available in all 100 counties statewide as of July. New language will be added to traffic citations statewide to inform the general public about ECAD and the courts online services available at onlineservices.NCcourts.org.
More information
ECAD fact sheet
onlineservices.NCcourts.org
###
About N.C. Judicial Branch The Judicial Branch is an equal and distinctively separate branch and core function of government. More than 6,000 Judicial Branch employees statewide administer justice in courthouses in North Carolinas 100 counties. The Judicial Branch budget for FY 2015 2016 is $484.9M, 92% of which is used to pay salaries and the remaining 8% is used for operations. The Judicial Branch receives only 2.23% of the overall State budget. More than 54% of the Judicial Branchs appropriation is equivalent to revenues collected by the courts through imposed fines and fees that are deposited in the State General Fund.
About N.C. Administrative Office of the Courts The N.C. Administrative Office of the Courts (NCAOC) is the administrative agency for the N.C. Judicial Branch, providing administrative services to help the North Carolina court system operate more efficiently and effectively, taking into account each courthouses diverse needs, caseloads, and available resources.
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The High Country will continue its role as one of the premier arts and cultural destinations in the Southeast Friday through Sunday, July 29-21, when the annual Blowing Rock Art and Antiques Show comes to town.
Over 5,000 square feet of gallery space at the Blowing Rock Art and History Museum will be transformed into a show-floor filled with furnishings, porcelain, jewelry, silver, art and more on display from antique dealers along the east coast, from New York City to Atlanta and everywhere in between.
Additionally, the three-day event begin with a Preview Party on the evening of Thursday, July 28 before the show begins. There, attendees will have the first opportunity to acquire that must have antique. Preview Party tickets are sold separately and include admission to the three-day show. Click here to view our 2016 sponsors or email [email protected] to learn more about becoming a vendor.
The show will also feature a special presentation from author Kathryn Greenley about her latest book, The Collected Tabletop: Inspirations for Creative Entertaining, on Saturday, July 30.
Preview Party at BRAHM: Thursday, July 28
The Blowing Rock Art and History Museum invites you to the Preview Party for its 10th annual Blowing Rock Art and Antiques Show from 6:3-9 p.m. on Thursday, July 28.
The show kicks off with an evening Preview Party from 6:30 to 9:00 p.m. on Thursday, July 28, giving guests a sneak preview of this years show and the first chance to purchase items for sale. This is the best opportunity for guests to acquire that must have antique or artwork, said BRAHMs Executive Director Lee Carol.
Each year the show brings antique dealers from around the country; this year will feature many from the Southeast and several from as far as Oklahoma and Texas.
This is our tenth show, says BRAHMs Business Manager David Harwood, and over the years it has become upscale while having a little something for everyone art, oriental rugs, estate jewelry, porcelains, furniture, and more.
Preview Party tickets include admission to the three-day Blowing Rock Art & Antiques Show, happening 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, July 29-30, and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday, July 31.
Preview Party tickets, which include admission to the 3-day show, are $80. Advanced registration is required. Access to a full bar and heavy hor doeuvres catered by local restaurants included.
Tickets may be purchased at the Museum or by calling 828-295-9099 ext. 3001.
For questions, contact David at [email protected].
Booth Talks: Friday and Saturday, July 29-30
Booth talks are short presentations by some of our vendors. They are a great way to learn more about the wonderful art and antiques on display in the show and give the visitor a chance to ask questions of the experts. All talks are included with admission to the Show and no advance registration is required. All talks will be held in the Alexander Community Room on the second floor of the museum. Please arrive a few minutes before the talk.
Friday, July 29
11 AM: Jerry Hayes Majolica 101
Get an introduction to this unique and intricate ceramic ware. Learn about the elaborate patterns and designs and the history of the art form.
2 PM: Josephine McDonough, McDonough Fine Art How Do I know it is Real and Does it have Value?
Learn what to look for in a painting. Is it an original? Is it a print? This is a chance to learn identifying features and clues when buying art.
Saturday, July 30
1 PM: Steven Koman, Koman Fine Art The Investment of Art
Most people believe that the value of art increases after the death of an artist. Is this truth or myth? Steven will discuss what he has learned in forty years of art dealing.
2 PM: Frank Shaia, Shaia Oriental Rugs An Overview of Antique Oriental Rugs
Frank Shaia is a second generation rug dealer. Although many new rugs are sold in the shop, Frank spends almost all of his time at antiques shows all over the country. He has a great passion for antique oriental rugs. Because of his experience, he has given talks and lectures throughout the South and once or twice a year teaches a 12-hour class for the Christopher Wren Society in his home town of Williamsburg, VA.
Author Kathryn Greeley: Saturday, July 30
Greeley will discuss her latest book, The Collected Tabletop: Inspirations for Creative Entertaining, and have copies for purchase and signing at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, July 30.
The talk will include many insights on how to present the perfect table. There is something lovely to collect and use for every event when you know how to use them, Greeley said. These collections combined with principals of design and grace, make for very elegant entertaining.
Greeley, owner of Kathryn Greeley Designs, has been providing professional interior design services for elegant lifestyles in the Southeast for more than 30 years. She is a professional member of the American Society of Interior Designers and is a past president of the North and South Carolina chapter of ASID. She lives in Waynesville, N.C. with her husband Wells and their West Highland Terrier, Duncan MacDuff. Kathryns first book, The Collected Tabletop, debuted in September 2011 and is currently in its third printing. To learn more about Greeley, visit thecollectedtable.com.
Admission to the talk will be $10 per person or $50 per person which includes a copy of Greeleys book ($50 value). Advanced registration is suggested.
The Art & Antiques Show features over 5,000 square feet of gallery space transformed into a show floor filled with antiques and artwork of all kind. Each year the show brings antique dealers from around the country; this year will feature many from the Southeast and several from as far as Oklahoma and Texas.
The Blowing Rock Art & Antiques Show kicks off with an evening Preview Party on Thursday, July 28 from 6:30 to 9 p.m. giving guests a sneak preview of this years show and the first chance to purchase items for sale. Tickets, which are $80, include admission to the show throughout the weekend. Advanced registration is required. Access to a full bar and heavy hor doeuvres catered by local restaurants included.
The Blowing Rock Art & Antiques Show hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, July 29-30, and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday, July 31. Tickets to the show, which are good for entry throughout the weekend, are $10. Advanced registration not required.
All tickets may be purchased at the Museum or over the phone at 828-295-9099 ext. 3001. For questions, contact David Harwood at [email protected].
Blowing Rock Art and History Museum
The Blowing Rock Art & History Museum seeks to provide cultural enrichment to the High Country communities by promoting the arts and Southern Appalachian heritage and history through educational programs, exhibitions, activities and permanent collections. General admission to the Blowing Rock Art & History Museum is $7 for adults and $6 for students, seniors, and children ages 5 and up. Free for active military. Donations are accepted for full admission to the Museum on Thursdays. Located at 159 Chestnut Street on the corner of Chestnut and Main in Blowing Rock, N.C., the Museum is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tues-Wed, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thurs, and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Fri-Sat. The Museum is open 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays June-Nov. For more information, please call 828-295-9099 or visit www.blowingrockmuseum.org.
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Cannon Memorial Hospital Laboratory Receives Accreditation from College of American Pathologists
The Accreditation Committee of the College of American Pathologists (CAP) has awarded accreditation to Cannon Memorial Hospitals Laboratory based on results of a recent on-site inspection as part of the CAPs Accreditation Programs.
Beth Miller, Director of Imaging, Laboratory and Pathology services for Appalachian Regional Healthcare System (ARHS), was advised of this national recognition and congratulated for the excellence of the services being provided. Cannon Memorial Hospitals Laboratory is one of more than 7,700 CAP-accredited facilities world-wide.
It is a great honor to once again receive this recognition of our laboratory and health systems commitment to excellence. shared Dr. Steve Bredehoeft, Medical Director for ARHS Imaging, Laboratory and Pathology services. Being recognized by The College of American Pathologists, based on their standards of excellence, reflects the consistent professionalism of each and every member of the laboratory staff. Additionally, it acknowledges the laboratorys close working relationship with our clinical and administrative colleagues,
Kim Bianca, Sr. Vice President of Clinical Services for Appalachian Regional Healthcare System, upon learning of the laboratorys accreditation, said: We are so very proud of our Laboratory and Pathology team! Clearly they are living the ARHS value of excellence by and continuing to make life better for the community.
The U.S. federal government recognizes the CAP Laboratory Accreditation Program, begun in the early 1960s, as being equal-to or more-stringent-than the governments own inspection program.
During the CAP accreditation process, designed to ensure the highest standard of care for all laboratory patients, inspectors examine the laboratorys records and quality control of procedures for the preceding two years. CAP inspectors also examine laboratory staff qualifications, equipment, facilities, safety program and record, and overall management.
ARHS laboratories perform approximately 550,000 tests annually. Services include anatomic pathology, chemistry/immunology, hematology, microbiology, serology, urinalysis, transfusions and more. For more information, visit www.apprhs.org/services/ laboratory.
Medicare 101 Seminar July 27
Approaching 65? Confused about Medicare? Work with individuals turning 65? Join us for an information session at the Lois E. Harrill Senior Center in Boone on Wednesday July 27, 2-4pm. Well discuss the basics of Medicare, supplements, and drug plans. Please call Jen Teague to register at 265-8090. This event is part of the SHIIP Program (Seniors Health Insurance Information Program) and is not sponsored by any insurance company or agent. For more information about the N.C. SHIIP program, please call 1-855-408-1212.
Book Talk with Local Author Lisa Muir
August 3rd, 2016 Watauga County Public Library Meeting Room
The Watauga County Public Library would like to invite you to join local author Lisa Muir for an author talk and book signing at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, August 3rd.
Dr. Lisa Muirs collection of short stories entitled, Taking Down the Moon, gathers an eccentric cast of characters, animals, beauty queens and community college teachers, to name a few, and places them in such far flung places as Nevadas Fire Valley, New Zealand and the western mountains of North Carolina.
To learn more about Lisas book, Taking Down the Moon, go to: http://ashemountaintimes.com/ community/wcc-instructor- publishes-first-book/article_ 04f00b40-7dfc-59c4-840d- a4d65e9a5a26.html
For more information, please call (828) 264-8784 ext. 2.
TWINS: TRAC Gallery Presents Photographs by Marthanna Yater
Marthanna Yater presents a photography exhibition, Growing TogetherA photographic study of the evolution of twin sisters and a photographer documenting their lives, August 13 through September 24, at the Burnsville TRAC Gallery, located at 102 W. Main Street. An opening reception, which welcomes the public, will be on August 13, from 5 to 7 pm. The twin sisters, Hannah and Molly Levin, will be present.
North Carolina-based photographer, Marthanna Yater, will present her decades-long study of twin sisters. The genesis was in Celo, an artist community nestled in the North Carolina mountains, when the sisters were six years old, and Yater was enrolled as a beginning student in photography at Penland School of Crafts. Through the years, Yater has continued documenting moments in the lives of Hannah and Molly and has compiled an historic exhibition from this collection. The study incorporates the sisters evolution, Yaters own photographic growth, and the transition from film to digital.
In describing her journey of self discovery, Yater says, While studying education, I exchanged the confines of graduate school for the classroom of the world. During my travels, I experienced an epiphany in the Australian Outback at Uluru, Ayers Rock. After a brief rain, the evening light burst through gray clouds striking the rock. The sacred monolith was set ablaze into a fiery red display, and a double rainbow poured over Uluru. In that moment, it was revealedthere was an artist within, and I must pursue the study of photography. This mission led Yater to North Carolina, to Penland, to Hannah and Molly, and to the unfolding of this story.
Marthanna Yater specializes in storytelling images of women and children in organic and natural settings. It is her love for, and understanding of people, that is both enthusiastically and brilliantly exhibited in her photographs.
Yater has photographed Good Morning Americas Love at Times Square, and her work appears on national and international book jackets, magazine covers, in international magazines, advertising and print work illustrations, and in galleries and fine art exhibitions. Yaters work has received numerous national and international awards.
For information about the exhibition, contact Toe River Arts Council at 828-682-7215 or visit the website, www.toeriverarts.org.
TRAC is a non-profit organization founded in 1976 to promote the arts in Mitchell and Yancey Counties.
This article is reviewed by a team of registered dietitians and medical doctors with extensive, practical clinical and public health experience.
All articles are produced independently. When you click our links for purchasing products, we earn an affiliate commission. Learn more about how we earn revenue by reading our advertise disclaimer.
7.0 Quality 7.0 Support Research 7.0 Reputation 7.0 Price Features Improved memory
Helps support cognitive functions
Helps your brain produce more alpha waves
Ability to perform complex tasks
Lasting mental clarity
Third-party testing for safety
Positive user reviews Brand Information Based out of Austin, TX
Founded in 2011
Offers various health products Medical Benefits May improve cognitive function
Clinically studied ingredients
Promotes alpha waves
About The Brand
If youre searching for brain-boosting supplements, you will likely encounter Onnit, a supplier of high-quality nootropics. Onnit was founded in 2011 by a man named Aubrey Marcus.
With a background in ancient philosophy and history as an athlete, Marcus goal was to create a company that allows customers to reach their fullest potential.
Today, Onnit is a leader in the health and wellness industry and carries over 250 products. Their best sellers include clinically researched dietary supplements, earth-grown foods, apparel, and unconventional fitness equipment. Onnits flagship nootropic, Alpha Brain, has dominated the market since its release in 2011.
What is Onnit Alpha Brain?
Alpha brain is formulated with natural ingredients to support cognitive function by promoting alpha wave and neurotransmitter production, therefore boosting cognitive performance. Unlike many nootropics on the market, it has scientific research supporting its effectiveness. Additionally, it has been endorsed by famous athletes and celebrities, including Joe Rogan. To date, over one million bottles have been sold.
Lets delve deeper into Onnit Alpha Brain, find out how it works, and if its something you should give a try.
Does It Really Work?
In theory, Alpha Brain works to help users get in the zone by supporting the production of alpha brain waves and neurotransmitters.
Our brain produces alpha waves when were in a relaxed or calm state. Many individuals experience these waves during stress-relieving activities like meditation[1].
In addition to significant anecdotal evidence, there is clinical research supporting its use.
In one placebo-controlled study[2] conducted in 2016, Alpha Brain or a placebo was given to 63 individuals between the ages of 18 and 35 for six weeks.
The study found that, compared to the placebo, Alpha Brain supplementation resulted in significant improvements in verbal recall and cognitive function. Participants also showed higher alpha wave frequency thought to be related to an overall healthy brain environment.
Its important to note, however, that the company funded this study, which can result in sponsorship bias.
In contrast, another study[3] from 2018 on 43 United States soldiers found no significant improvements in marksmanship performance between the soldiers given Alpha Brain and the placebo.
All in all, we need more studies to prove the effectiveness of the Alpha Brain.
See Nootropics Buying Guide Here
Is It Legit?
Yes, although limited, science does exist to support the cognitive enhancing benefits produced by Alpha Brain. Plus, Onnit is so confident that youll love Alpha Brain, they offer a free trial. Simply pay for shipping, and youll receive a free 15-day supply of Alpha Brain to try for yourself. They also offer a generous 90-day money-back guarantee. However, results will likely vary between users.
Pros
Supports memory
Promotes focus
Improves cognitive processing speed
BSCG Certified Drug-Free
Gluten-free
Third-party tested for safety
Caffeine-free
Paleo-friendly
Clinically proven to work
Money-back guarantee
Cons
May interact with other medications
Limited research available
Expensive
Feature Product & Coupon
Best Choice Alpha Brain Improved memory
Helps support cognitive functions
Helps your brain produce more alpha waves
Ability to perform complex tasks
Lasting mental clarity
Third-party testing for safety
Positive user reviews
Alpha Brain Ingredients
Alpha Brain is made up of three main proprietary blends to support the production of alpha waves and neurotransmitters in your brain. Though studies are limited, there is research to support its use as a nootropic.
The product is made with natural ingredients, stimulant-free, gluten-free, and third-party tested for safety. If youre looking for a high-quality nootropic, Alpha Brain may be a good choice.
Alpha Brain is made of ingredients that work together to support cognitive performance, improve focus, memory, and mental processing.
Together, these ingredients may help build an environment where our brain can function at its best, thus promoting mental clarity and reducing brain fog.
Although Alpha Brain is clinically proven to benefit its users, research is still limited. It is also made up of proprietary blends, resulting in a lack of ingredient transparency.
Most of the solid research supporting the use of many of Alpha Brains ingredients targets the elderly population. Since the quantities of ingredients are not displayed, we do not know if the ingredients are present in adequate amounts to provide benefits similar to those studied.
Alpha Brain is third-party tested by the Banned Substances Control Group (BSCG) to ensure the product is free of any banned or controlled ingredients. However, third-party testing results are not publicly available on their website at this time.
Lets take a look at whats inside of Alpha Brain.
Onnit Flow Blend (650 mg)
The Onnit Flow Blend is formulated to promote alpha brain wave production.
Heres a look at the ingredients that make up the Onnit Flow Blend:
L-tyrosine
A non-essential amino acid thats commonly in brain-boosting supplements. It can help your body produce neurotransmitters that allow nerve cells throughout the body to communicate. According to a 2015 review[4], tyrosine improved cognitive performance during short-term periods of stress. However, its effectiveness can vary from person to person.
L-theanine
A non-essential amino acid that is often used as an anxiolytic (to reduce anxiety). Research[5] has shown that otherwise healthy people with high anxiety levels may benefit from 200mg of L-theanine.
Oat straw extract
An extract from an unripened Sativa plant is widely believed to improve cognitive abilities. According to one study[6], 1,600mg of oat herb extract improved attention and concentration. However, this study used a much larger quantity than what is in Alpha Brain, and the participants had pre-existing cognitive delays.
Phosphatidylserine
Phosphatidylserine is a type of phospholipid that research suggests may increase cognitive function[7] before exercise.
Cats claw extract (350mg)
Cats claw is found in the bark of a vine from the Amazon rainforest. According to Onnit, it promotes cellular integrity. However, at this time, there is no compelling evidence[8] that associates cats claw with any health benefits.
Onnit Focus Blend, 240mg
The Onnit Focus Blend is formulated to achieve optimal acetylcholine levels. Acetylcholine controls muscle cells and nerves.
Heres what youll find in the Onnit Focus Blend:
Alpha-GPC
It supports the function of acetylcholine, a key neurotransmitter. Its commonly used to improve cognitive functions, including supporting focus and mental performance. Although there is ongoing research[9] to support Alpha-GPCs use in Alzheimers patients, more research is needed to prove its effectiveness in healthy individuals.
Bacopa Extract (100mg)
Bacopa is an herb used in traditional Ayurvedic medicine. Its used to treat Alzheimers disease and improve brain functions. One six-week, randomized placebo-controlled trial[10] found that supplementation of 150mg of Bacopa monnieri extract in medical students led to significant improvements in cognition and memory.
Toothed clubmoss (Huperzia Serrata, 400mg)
It may prevent the breakdown of acetylcholine. Its a Chinese herb commonly used to treat Alzheimers disease. Research[11] shows it may improve cognitive function in those with Alzheimers.
Onnit Fuel Blend, 60mg
The Onnit Fuel Blend is formulated to promote optimal communication throughout your nervous system. It also may help maintain a healthy brain environment, further optimizing neural communication.
The ingredients in this blend are as follows:
L-leucine
A branched-chain amino acid (BCAA) that helps your body synthesize protein and repair muscle. Most research to date is related to its role in athletic performance.
Pterostilbene
It has antioxidant properties and, according to Onnit, may help protect brain and nerve cells. However, research is limited that supports these benefits.
Vitamin B6, 10 mg
Vitamin B6 is essential for healthy brain development and is a cofactor in neurotransmitter synthesis.
Health Benefits of Alpha Brain According to their website, Alpha Brain can help you feel in the zone on a day-to-day basis. They claim the product provides laser focus and razor-sharp clarity in a bottle. It can also help you: Have quicker reaction times
Think clear under stress
Focus on difficult tasks
Remember names and places Onnit reports it may take several weeks for users to experience the full benefits of Alpha Brain. However, its important to note that more research should be completed to verify health claims associated with taking Alpha Brain. Dosage & Side Effects According to the Alpha Brain product label, users should take two capsules daily with a light meal. Onnit also suggests consulting with a physician before use if you are pregnant, nursing, have a history of any medical conditions, or are currently taking any medications. In addition, you can also purchase Alpha Brain in pre-dosed instant packages. The nootropic drink mix is made by mixing one packet with 8 oz of cold water. Users should not exceed more than one packet within 24 hours. However, its always essential to consult with a physician before starting any dietary supplement, regardless of your medical history. Although Alpha Brain is generally safe, users may experience a few minor side effects associated with general nootropic use, including: Nausea
Headaches
Insomnia
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The investigation commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) found that Russia has co-ordinated and overseen widespread doping by its athletes through its anti-doping agency and sports ministry.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) have issued statements expressing their dismay with the findings of an independent investigation into alleged manipulation of doping samples by Russia.
The findings of the report show a shocking and unprecedented attack on the integrity of sport and the Olympic Games. Therefore, the IOC will not hesitate to take the toughest sanctions available against any individual or organisation implicated, Thomas Bach, the president of IOC, states in a press release.
The IOC also reveals that its executive board will convene for a teleconference today to discuss its immediate response to the findings, which may include provisional measures and sanctions with regard to the Olympic Games Rio 2016.
Philip Craven, the president of IPC, is similarly appalled by the findings.
We are truly shocked, appalled and deeply saddened at the extent of the state-sponsored doping programme implemented in Russia ahead of Sochi 2014. The findings of [] the report mark a very dark day for sport, he says in a press release.
Some international anti-doping agencies have already demanded that Russia be banned altogether from the Rio Olympics. Such demands are echoed in a statement issued by the executive committee of WADA, which recommends, for example, that the IOC and IPC should consider declining entries for Rio 2016 of all athletes submitted by the Russian Olympic Committee and the Russian Paralympic Committee.
Thirty-five of the manipulated positive doping samples were collected from Paralympic Games between 2012 and 2015, according to the IPC.
The report was compiled by an independent task force led by Richard McLaren, a professor of law at the University of Ontario, Canada.
Aleksi Teivainen HT
Photo: Andrej Isakovic AFP / Lehtikuva
Source: Uusi Suomi
A teenager charged with the murder of a man in a fatal stabbing called out in court: "Tell my mam I love her."
Graham McEvoy (18) is accused of killing Paul Curran, who was fatally stabbed in a flats complex in Crumlin.
He was remanded in custody for a week at Dublin District Court.
Mr McEvoy was arrested and brought before the court following the death of Mr Curran at the weekend.
The accused, with an address at Captain's Road, also in Crumlin, is charged with murdering Paul Curran at Seagull House, Rutland Street, on July 16.
Mr Curran (24) died after he was stabbed in the stairwell of the complex on Saturday afternoon.
Detective Sergeant Danny Kelly said in evidence he arrested the defendant for the purpose of charging him at Sundrive Road Garda Station in the early hours of yesterday morning.
Remanded
He was charged at 12.57am and made "no comment" to the charge after caution, Det Sgt Kelly said.
He told Judge Michael Walsh he was applying for the accused to be remanded in custody for a week.
"Obviously there is no application for bail, considering the charge," defence solicitor Michael Kelleher said.
A bail application on a murder charge can only be made in the High Court.
Judge Walsh remanded Mr McEvoy in custody to appear in court again on July 25.
His next appearance will be in the same courtroom in the Criminal Courts of Justice.
The defendant, wearing a white polo shirt, black tracksuit bottoms and white runners, gave a thumbs up to a family member who was sitting in the courtroom's public gallery.
"I love yous tell my mam I love her," he said as the brief hearing ended.
He had not addressed the court during the proceedings.
Judge Walsh granted free legal aid in the case after Mr Kelleher made an application and there was no garda objection.
Gardai were called to the scene at around 4pm on Saturday and Mr Curran was brought to St James's Hospital where he was pronounced dead a short time later.
Plead
A young woman (18) was also arrested and was released without charge, with a file being prepared for the DPP.
Mr McEvoy has not yet indicated how he intends to plead to the charge against him.
Anyone charged with murder who is later convicted faces a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment.
'The woman delivered a powerful victim impact statement during a sentencing hearing of her husband, who was convicted at the Central Criminal Court of raping and threatening to kill his wife over a three-month period' (stock photo)
A Dublin woman who was raped and beaten by her husband with a hammer said she feared she was going to be murdered in front of their four-year-old son.
The woman delivered a powerful victim impact statement during a sentencing hearing of her husband, who was convicted at the Central Criminal Court of raping and threatening to kill his wife over a three-month period.
It was only the third conviction of rape within a marriage in Ireland since marital rape was made illegal in 1990.
The 46-year-old woman said that she and her young son are still suffering and the night of May 25, 2014, "will stay with me forever".
"From the moment I walked in the hall door and saw [the accused], I knew I had got things terribly wrong, his complete insistence and entitlement to me and [my son] no matter what," she said.
"The terror I felt when he took out the knife. I knew there was nothing I could do to stop him. That is one of the hardest things to live with.
"The rape left me with a complete sense of powerlessness, like everything of me had been taken away from me.
Terror
"Being raped has affected every piece of me, it went to the core of myself, I felt so broken and for a long time angry with myself for what I saw as 'letting it happen'," she added.
"The terror [the accused] continued to put me through during that never-ending night, the constant threats, instilled a level of fear that I never knew I could feel."
The victim paid tribute to the brave actions of a passerby who set his dog on the man and chased him off during a particularly horrific attack on both her and her mother.
She said that before going unconscious she feared she was going to be murdered in front of her four-year-old son after seeing the "cold determination and focus" of her husband.
"I will never forget, before I went unconscious, looking down at the door of the room where [my son] was sleeping and thinking whatever happens now 'don't come out, don't see this'," she said.
"I believed in that moment I was going to die. I know if it wasn't for the actions of [a passer-by] I may not be alive."
The victim's ordeal began at the start of 2014 when she told her husband of nine years that she wanted a separation.
Their marriage had been under strain for some time. The man was jealous of the woman's successful career and unhappy about the attention she was giving their young son.
On May 25, 2014, they were arguing when he picked up a carving knife and threatened to cut her face open.
He then told her "right, upstairs".
He raped her in the spare bedroom while telling her to open her eyes and insisting they weren't separating.
The next day she went to the Family Court and obtained a interim barring order. She did not disclose the rape for five months because she couldn't bring herself to admit it, she said.
In the following weeks the woman realised her husband was tracking her phone and knew her location at all times.
On August 6 he rang her at home and said he was going to "end things tonight".
The next day he showed up at her parents' house demanding to see their son. The woman and her mother refused to let him in. He returned with a hammer and attacked both women. His wife lost consciousness at one stage.
It was at this point that a passerby set his dog on the accused who swung the hammer at them. This man then chased the accused away.
In June at the Central Criminal Court a jury convicted him of raping his wife and of threatening to cut her face. He was also convicted of threatening to kill the woman the next day over the phone.
Yesterday he was remanded in continuing custody until July 25 when Ms Justice Isobel Kennedy will impose sentence.
The prosecution said at one stage the accused blamed "black magic" and "the occult" for the hammer attack.
The defence said his client was judged to be at a low risk of committing future violence and that he was ashamed of his actions. The defence said his client will find prison very difficult as a foreign national, far away from his family.
The 42-year-old man had his barrister read a letter of apology to the court for the hammer attack - but made no reference to the rape or other charges.
Crimes
In her victim impact statement, his wife said that she was in a "complete state of confusion and turmoil" throughout the entire ordeal.
"All of the crimes both individually and collectively have had a devastating and long-lasting impact on me and [my son], who is six now," she said.
"The psychological impact of that day cannot be erased. While everything in my head rationally knows that I have absolutely no responsibility for each and every one of these crimes, it's a very different thing to feel it and believe it."
She said that she feels "responsible" for changing the lives of her parents because she went to their house to be safe.
"But this experience and these events don't define me, the inner strength and courage that I found, which kept me alive during some of those horrendous events and sustained me up to and during this trial, gives me and [my son] a strong foundation for living very positive and happy lives."
Janet Morrissey is going into a rehab centre
A woman was allegedly caught in possession of nearly 120,000 in cash believed to be the proceeds of crime when gardai raided her west Dublin home.
Janet Morrissey (35) was granted bail when she appeared before Blanchardstown District Court.
The court heard detectives had no objection to bail because Ms Morrissey was due to enter a rehabilitation centre to receive treatment for an addiction.
A state solicitor said the accused is facing trial by judge and jury in the circuit court on the charge.
Judge David McHugh adjourned the case to a date in October.
The accused, of Meile An Ri Drive, Balgaddy, Lucan, is accused of engaging in the possession of property - 117,800 - that was the proceeds of criminal conduct or that she was reckless as to whether the money was the proceeds of crime.
The alleged incident took place at her home in Lucan last April 4.
Arrested
Det Gda Jerome Twomey, from the Garda Drugs and Organised Crimed Unit, said he arrested and charged Ms Morrissey before the court sitting.
Gda Twomey said the accused was handed a true copy of the charge sheet and she made no reply to the charge after caution.
Gda Twomey said he would normally be looking for the court to impose bail conditions, but was not seeking any such order in this case because Ms Morrissey was due to enter a course of rehab.
Defence lawyer Ciaran Mac- Loughlin said it was expected that the accused would be in treatment for three months.
He handed a letter from the rehab centre into the court to confirm this.
Mr MacLoughlin applied for free legal aid after the court heard the accused is not working.
Judge McHugh assigned defence solicitor Michael Staines on legal aid.
Ms Morrissey has not yet indicated how she is pleading to the charge.
Living close to a Luas or Dart stop in the capital will increase the value of your home by up to 6pc - but only if you live in the leafy suburbs, according to a new report.
The research conducted by Daft.ie investigated the price of two-bedroom, one bathroom properties within 1km of Luas and Dart stops.
It found that living near stops associated with anti-social behaviour will have a negative effect on sales prices in particular.
Daft.ie's Ronan Lyons told the Herald that the Luas Green Line extension to Cherrywood in south Dublin had one of the most significant impacts.
"One stand-out figure was Cherrywood, prices were between 10 and 15pc higher after the Luas than they were before and rents were between 5 and 8pc higher," Mr Lyons said.
However, Mr Lyons pointed to a recent extension to Saggart on the Luas Red Line where prices dropped 5pc.
"It varies so much across the different lines, so the Dart and the Luas Green Line had a big impact on prices but the Luas Red Line didn't - at least not on house prices.
"That highlights the importance of security and safety, that some stations will be of clear benefit but others - if they're put in an area where it may actually encourage anti-social behaviour - may actually mean that being very close won't be a good thing," he said.
"It seems to be that being right on top of the Red Line stations does have a negative impact compared to other properties in the area which just aren't as close," he added.
Buyers are paying close attention to new infrastructure in Dublin. Mr Lyons told the Herald that there has been an upsurge in interest for property in the areas where the Luas cross-city line is being laid.
Interest
"If you look at the cross-city Luas you're probably seeing an increase in interest because they will be close to Luas stops, even though there's nothing there just yet," he said.
"This year and next year, you will see an effect in those areas, in the same way that Cherrywood had a big impact on prices.
"In probably three years time we'll be able to do the same with the cross-city Luas and look at the before and after prices," he added.
Across the board there has been a much more significant impact on house prices than on rental prices, averaging at around 6pc compared to 2pc.
Mr Lyons said this is down to sell-on opportunities for buyers.
'It is understood that the crime is being investigated as an aggravated burglary and no arrests have yet been made'
A young mother-of-two has been forced to flee her home after she and two of her pals were subjected to a brutal early morning attack.
Kevin Street gardai are investigating the disturbing incident which unfolded at around 8am on Sunday in the Oliver Bond flats complex in Dublin's south inner city.
Two men wearing balaclavas and armed with wooden implements kicked in the door of the flat and then brutally assaulted the three people who were in the property.
The victims were a man aged 30 and two women aged 29 and 30.
Sources have revealed that the suspected attackers are known to one of the victims, and the violent incident is linked to a "personal dispute".
Both suspects are known to gardai and are from the south inner city area.
In the mayhem, one of the women attempted to flee the assailants by climbing out a window.
The attackers fled the scene before gardai arrived.
It is understood that the crime is being investigated as an aggravated burglary and no arrests have yet been made.
Sources have revealed that the targeted female "no longer feels safe" in the flat and moved her belongings out of the property on Sunday evening. It is understood that she suffered facial injuries in the attack.
The incident is not linked to the city's gangland feud.
Patrols
Gardai continue to mount regular armed patrols in the Oliver Bond area as a number of key players linked to the Kinahan cartel are based in that locality.
These include Gerard 'Bra' Brady, the father of notorious heroin trafficker Greg Lynch, who considers the flat complex his "stronghold".
Brady (56) is a close pal of godfather Christy Kinahan, who also lived in the Oliver Bond flats for years.
He has 18 convictions for crimes including theft and possession of dangerous weapons
In February, Dublin City Council repaired and upgraded CCTV cameras in the flats as tensions in the capital's gang feud spiralled out of control.
The Distillery apartment complex near Croke Park, which was completed in 2005 Photo: Arthur Carron
Homeowners will have to foot a massive bill up to 2.2m after serious fire safety issues were discovered in a city centre apartment complex, the Herald can reveal.
The Distillery apartments in north Dublin - finished in 2005 at the height of the boom - is the latest development where severe issues have been found.
Problems have been identified with fire compartmentation (to prevent rapid fire spread), fire doors, protection of the structural elements of the building, and fire alarms.
The issues affect both common areas and individual apartments.
There are 78 apartments and duplexes in the building.
Bill
This means that the owner of each apartment could have to pay up to 28,000 for the works, based on estimates.
A private meeting of anxious apartment owners was held last week and the Herald understands that residents were informed they will have to cover the costs.
Several people renting in the development told this newspaper that they had not been informed of the risks found in the building, although investigations into the defects were carried out in April.
Early estimates have been provided to owners, warning that "unforeseen works are inevitable therefore the actual price will change as works progress".
It estimates that the cost of the remedial work will be between 1.5m and 2.2m.
The owner of each apartment will need to pay between 19,000 and 28,000 for the works on that scale but there is a fear that this number will climb.
Engineers have completed some "opening up" works to investigate the defects and photos of some of the faults were distributed.
They include images of the common area fire door and compartmentation issues.
A handful of apartments also house Dublin City Council tenants.
The summary of the concerns, outlined in a document distributed to owners and seen by the Herald, are as follows:
Fire compartmentation/separation found to be inadequate
Defects to fire doors
Protection to escape stairs not complete - smoke ventilation
Additional work required to common areas fire alarm
Inadequate protection to elements of structure (steel beams/columns).
Changes required to improve escape efficiency (particularly car parks)
Testing of fire main outlets and pumps
Adequacy of door at entrance (in relation to apartments)
Adequacy of partition surrounding entrance hallway (in relation to apartments)
Adequacy of apartment-specific fire alarms (in relation to apartments)
Further investigation is required to fully determine the scale of the issue, including examination of the external walls of the complex.
Apartment owners have also been advised that extra costs may occur for redecoration or possibly alternative accommodation, should the need arise.
Residents have been warned that the works will be disruptive, and while the issues mostly affect the common areas, some of the work on those areas will have to be undertaken from inside individual homes.
The Distillery complex was developed by the now-dissolved Albion Property Holdings, of which boom-time developer Pascal Conroy was a director. The company went into receivership in 2012.
The homes lie in the shadow of Croke Park and were completed in 2005.
The Herald understands that senior Dublin City Council management are aware that there are fire safety issues in the complex, but the council had not responded to queries for a comment last night.
A statement on behalf of Distillery Road Management Company Ltd has been released to the Herald.
It confirmed there has been "full dialogue between the members of the management company, their fire engineering consultants, and representatives of Dublin City Council together with Dublin Fire Brigade in relation to the fire safety issues".
"The board of the management company has been proactive during this matter and have liaised closely with the appropriate authorities at all times," it said.
"All of the above parties have agreed to a programme of works which will commence shortly. There is an approved method of payment by the members of the OMC (Owners Management Company) with no requirement to vacate the property," it added.
They confirmed that the fire officers have approved a "phased repair programme", which will be adhered to by management.
Cancer patient Shan Tynan (17) was devastated when her holiday plans fell through after the collapse of travel company Lowcostholdiays
The young cancer sufferer whose holiday was cancelled due to the collapse of Lowcostholidays looks set to be going away after a flood of offers from people touched by her story.
Shan Tynan (17), who had been due to go on holiday with her heartbroken family, is the latest casualty of the collapse of the Lowcostholidays company.
Shan was diagnosed with a very rare form of cancer last year and is due to turn 18 tomorrow.
The Carlow girl's family battled to raise funds to bring her to a specialist in Texas where she has been treated with a gruelling chemotherapy regime, but recently she received the bad news that the cancer has spread to the bowel and stomach.
"We were devastated at the news. My mother and aunt decided to book us a holiday so that Shan could have some time away from hospitals and doctors and Shan can just be with her family and friends," her mother Leona explained.
"We booked the flights to Santa Ponsa through Ryanair, but the two apartments were booked through Lowcostholidays," she added.
The family were then told that the accommodation element of the booking had been cancelled because of the holiday company collapse.
The family were left devastated by the news - particularly Shan - after all they had been through in recent months.
Viral
However, speaking to the Herald last night, Shan's mother Leona is now optimistic that they will get to go away after all.
After Shan's story was published in the Herald and on independent.ie, several people got in touch to try and help make the holiday happen.
"I just thought that we were at a complete loss, because there was no way that we would be able to go without the accommodation - we had no cover for the price," Leona said.
"We're emailing people at the moment and so many have offered to help, so it looks like we'll actually be able to cover the accommodation. So it's looking very positive.
"One company is going to donate 1,000, and another person has offered to pay 1,300 towards the accommodation.
"We've found accommodation at the moment for 2,600 which is twice the amount we'd originally paid.
"We have an agent trying to negotiate with the apartment that we booked to try and get them to honour the original price."
Leona has admitted that the family are reluctant to book online with a travel operator that needs to be paid in advance, and that they are looking for somewhere that takes payment on arrival.
Donations
The family expect to find out soon if their holiday plans are back on track, and Leona said that given the number of donations they have been offered, it is likely the cost of accommodation will be surpassed.
She said she has emailed all the people that have offered donations and told them that if there is any surplus after paying for the accommodation, the money will go into the funds being raised for Shan's cancer treatment.
Thousands of holidaymakers have been left in limbo since the online travel company closed on Friday afternoon.
People currently on holidays may be forced to pay for their accommodation again or be forced out, and those with bookings face having their accommodation cancelled.
County cross country: Hubs sweep titles, boys score a perfect 15
North Hagerstown claimed both team championships and had both individual champions, with the boys achieving the first perfect score in meet history.
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The failed coup against Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has thrown light on deteriorating stability in a country that was for long held up to the rest of the Muslim world as a functioning democracy and a symbol of economic prosperity.
Despite leaders of Europe and the US calling on Turkey to respect the rule of law in the aftermath of the putsch, Erdogan has pushed ahead with a swift purging of the military, judiciary and other branches of his government, with some 20,000 officials being either detained or removed from their positions.
Erdogan has even talked of reinstating the death penalty, which Turkey got rid of in 2004 as part of its efforts to join the European Union. He has also referred to Fridays attempted coup as a gift from God that will help him cleanse our army.
The developments in Turkey are expected to have far-reaching implications for the campaign against terrorism, especially the Islamic State (IS) in Syria, and the role played by Ankara as a buffer between Europe and the Middle East.
They have also resulted in tensions between Turkey and the US after Erdogan demanded the Obama administration extradite Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, who lives in exile in Pennsylvania and has been accused of directing the coup plot. Other Turkish leaders have claimed the US was behind the uprising.
US secretary of state John Kerry, in a phone call to his Turkish counterpart, dismissed insinuations or claims about any role by the US as false and harmful for bilateral relations.
The closure of Turkish airspace during the coup led to the suspension of US airstrikes against the IS in Syria from Incirlik airbase. Turkey is a major ally of the US in the fight against terrorism and extremism in the region.
A soldier protects himself from the mob after troops involved in the coup attempt surrendered on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul on July 16. (REUTERS)
However, experts believe tensions over the issue of Gulen--who was once a close ally of Erdogan and heads the Hizmet movement that still has considerable influence over Turkish military officers, bureaucrats and members of the judiciary--could impact this security cooperation.
European leaders such as the EUs commissioner of neighbourhood policy Johannes Hahn have even accused the Turkish government of using the coup as an excuse to crack down on opponents. That the lists are available already after the event indicates that this was prepared, that at a certain moment it should be used, Hahn said.
Experts have also noted that Erdogans purge has focused on the military and judiciary, two institutions that are perceived as capable of standing up to the presidents efforts to concentrate greater powers in his hands. Since he came to power in 2003, Erdogan has focussed on increasing his authority through constitutional changes.
In recent years, moves made by Erdogan and his AK Party have eroded the secularism seen as the bedrock of the modern Turkey founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The military, since the days of Ataturk, was the guardian of this secularism and a statement issued by the coup plotters on Friday had spoken of the elimination of secular and democratic rule of law by Erdogans government.
For years, Erdogans government turned a blind eye to jihadis travelling to Syria through Turkeys open borders. It was only a string of deadly attacks in Turkish cities blamed on the IS that led to a change in this policy and a belated crackdown on the groups elements within the country.
Erdogans detractors fear he will replace secular elements in the military with generals close to him and this could have an impact on morale at a time when the armed forces are playing a key role in the fight against IS.
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The government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan managed to withstand an attempted coup last week. As soon as the coup failed, the crackdown began. The government moved quickly to arrest at least 6,000 people mostly military personnel dismissed nearly 3,000 prosecutors and judges, and sacked a staggering 8,000 police officers in a wholesale gutting of the nations military and legal apparatus. Supporters of Erdogan rallied in Istanbul on Sunday and chanted slogans advocating the reauthorisation of the death penalty, abolished in Turkey in 2004, for the coups supporters. This has been backed by Erdogan himself, suggesting that in democracies, whatever the people say has to happen.
Read: Post-coup purge continues in Turkey, over 7,000 arrested
The Turkish government has also accused Washington of directly helping to foment the putsch. Erdogan has claimed the conspirators were loyal to US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan has accused of attempting to overthrow the government. A one-time ally of Erdogan, the Gulenists have become rivals in recent years and in May the Turkish government declared them a terrorist organisation. Turkey has demanded that Washington extradite Gulen, something secretary of state John Kerry said is possible if enough evidence against him could be furnished. The Obama Administration has been very critical of the Erdogan regimes increasingly authoritarian tendencies.
The Turkish armed forces remain badly divided and it is clear that the country remains far less stable than had been thought. It is expected that Erdogan will use this opportunity to purge the military at all levels. The Turkish governments response to the failed coup has alarmed both the US and the EU, after it described the plotters as a cancer which had to be cleansed from public institutions. It is likely that the turmoil in Turkey wont be good news for the fight against the Islamic State. Washington has long been openly critical of the limited role the Turkish military has played in stopping the flow of foreign fighters into Syria. Turkey could fall foul of NATOs requirement with respect to democracy if it fails to uphold the rule of law in the wake of an attempted coup, Kerry has warned.
Read: The purge after failed coup: Erdogan pushes Turkey to the brink
For Europe, this crisis couldnt have come at a worse time. The European Union is fraying at the edges and this is likely to further exacerbate the situation. Europe, like the US, had long been concerned about Erdogans authoritarian tendencies, and now there is reason to believe that Erdogan will go all out to consolidate his hold over the country. Johannes Hahn, European commissioner for regional affairs, suggested that Erdogan was more than ready for the crackdown. The arrests showed at least that something has been prepared because lists are available already, Hahn said. European officials also underline that reinstating the death penalty would end consideration for Turkish accession to the European Union.
Read: No excuse to abandon rule of law: EU tells Turkey after failed coup
Turkish democracy now seems on its death-bed with no major political player in the country having any incentive to prevent its terminal decline. Civil strife is likely to increase in the coming years. This can neither be good news for the Turkish people nor for the wider Europe, which is struggling to manage multiple crises staring the continent in its face.
Harsh V Pant is professor of international relations at Kings College, London
The views expressed are personal
Former wrestler and Australian actor Nathan Jones, who is making his Bollywood debut with A Flying Jatt, says Hindi film actors are top-notch.
The better the actors I am working with, the better I become. Bollywood actors are top-notch, and that made my job much easier, says Nathan, adding, Its awesome seeing them (Bollywood actors such as Priyanka Chopra and Deepika Padukone) working there (in Hollywood). Its a pleasure working here (in Bollywood).
Read: When Tiger Shroff played Holi with Mad Max star Nathan Jones
The 45 year old Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) star, who will be seen as a villain in director Remo DSouzas film, reveals that he has watched a few Bollywood movies. I have watched a couple of Bollywood films. Romance is not my style. I am an action guy. I dont mind doing romance, but there should be action as well, he says. .
Read: Gauthamiputra Satakarni: Nathan Jones not part of Balakrishnas film
Nathan Jones plays a villain in the upcoming film, A Flying Jatt, which also stars Tiger Shroff
In A Flying Jatt, which has been produced by Ekta Kapoor, Nathans co-star Tiger Shroff will be seen romancing Jacqueline Fernandez. Ask the American actor which Indian actress would he like to romance on screen, and he says, Jacqueline.
Watch A Flying Jatt trailer
Nathan Jones says he would like to romance Jacqueline Fernandez on screen.
The film will release on August 25.
She made a special appearance in the song Love mera hit hit (from Billu; 2009) with Shah Rukh Khan, seven years ago. She was seen in the title track of Dum Maro Dum (2011), and also made heads turn with her sultry outing in the song Lovely from her 2014 film Happy New Year. In Bollywood parlance, such tracks are called special numbers or item numbers.
Read: Deepika Padukone refuses to work with TV actor, Vicky quits Padmavati?
But Deepika Padukone finds the definition strange. Now, she has shot for a special dance number for film-maker Dinesh Vijans Raabta, which will release next year.
Yes, I shot for the song. It took me a day to wrap it up. Its basically called an item number (smiles). But someone like me, who is a trained classical dancer, finds it strange that people call it an item song. As far as I am concerned, dance is just another form of expression, says the actor.
Read: I want to work with Salman soon: Deepika Padukone
Deepika admits that she has done the special song for Dinesh and Homi Adajania (film-maker). I decided to do this track because, after all, they are the ones who gave me Cocktail (2012), which was an important film for me. A lot of people call it the turning point of my career. Plus, relationships and friendships are important for me. So, Ill do anything for them (smiles), she Deepika.
Item girls on the big screen!
Parineeti Chopra has done her first-ever item number, Jaaneman aah in Dishoom.
Parineeti Chopra: The actor, who is making news for her new svelte avatar, has danced with Varun Dhawan in the song Jaaneman aah from Dishoom. I was excited about it. I wanted to show people this side of me (laughs), says Parineeti about her first-ever special dance number.
Rumours claim that Karisma Kapoor will be doing a special dance number in the sequel to Judwaa. (Viral Bhayani/ HT Photo)
Karisma Kapoor: She had starred opposite Salman Khan in Judwaa (1997). Now, as Varun readies to step into Salmans shoes for the sequel to the movie, rumours claim that Karisma might do an item number in the film, which will be directed by Varuns father, David Dhawan. He directed the 1997 film as well.
Sunny Leone has shot for an item number with Shah Rukh Khan in his upcoming film, Raees.
Sunny Leone: The actor, who has done a few special songs in the past, has shot for a new track (reportedly a remix of the 1980 chartbuster Laila o Laila from Qurbaani) along with Shah Rukh Khan for his next film. It was a dream come true. We all want to work with him, and it actually happened, she says.
Priyanka Chopra has apparently shot for a special song for her Marathi production, Ventilator.
Priyanka Chopra: She has done a few special numbers in Hindi films. It is believed that before taking off for the US recently, Priyanka shot for a special number for her maiden Marathi production, Ventilator. The film is apparently being directed by Rajesh Mapuskar of Ferrari Ki Sawaari (2012) fame.
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Actor Salman Khan and filmmaker Kabir Khan wont be able to shoot in Kashmir for their upcoming film together because of the ongoing violence in the valley.
Read: I wont be Salman Khan without my family, says Salman
According to reports, Salman and Kabir, were planning to shoot in Ladakh and later in Kashmir.
Read: All eyes on Salman as IOA wishes good luck to Olympic contingent at send-off
We are flying to Ladakh on July 25 for the first leg of shoot, but will return to Mumbai after that, considering recent developments in Kashmir. We have been asked to keep away due to security reasons. So, the schedule has been indefinitely put on hold. As of now, no decision has been taken on shooting at alternate locations that can pass off as Kashmir, a source was quoted as saying to Mid day.
GURGAON: After a delay of four years, the Haryana government approved the extension of the Delhi Metro from Sector 21, Dwarka to Iffco Chowk in Gurgaon on Monday.
Prior to this decision, three project reports on the Dwarka-Iffco Chowk link were junked by successive governments as there was no clarity on alignment of the route. The high cost of constructing the Metro line proved an impediment for the project.
On Monday, however, a review meeting of the Haryana Mass Rapid Transport Corporation chaired by chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar cleared the proposal to build the 12.6-km Metro route which will connect Dwarka to Gurgaon.
The proposed alignment will start from Dwarka Sector 21, pass through Sector 111 in Gurgaon, move across the Dwarka Expressway, and pass through Palam Vihar, Sector 23, 22, Sector 18 Udyog Vihar and finally reach Iffco Chowk.
The cost of the project and the time frame for its completion werent, however, clarified.
The chief minister has accorded approval for the extension of Delhi Metro from Sector 21 in Dwarka to Iffco Chowk in Gurgaon. The Haryana government has also authorised the Haryana Mass Rapid Transport Corporation (HMRTC) to review the agreements made in the past with Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, said a statement issued by the state government.
Sources said that two alignments were considered by the government, one, around 14-km long, which will pass through Kapashera and reach Udyog Vihar and the second 12.6km long, which has been approved and will pass through Bijwasan and reach Iffco Chowk via heavily populated areas of Old Gurgaon.
Gurgaon MLA Umesh Agarwal, who has been pushing for greater Metro connectivity said the Dwarka-Gurgaon link will help commuters and reduce congestion on the Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway. This project will greatly help the people of Delhi and Gurgaon, he said.
Meanwhile, the Haryana government hinted it might build the 3.4 kilometre stretch in Delhi itself, and prefer to amend the revenue sharing agreement with Delhi government.
The government, taking note of poor connectivity, said HMRTC could work on plans to improve the network.
The Haryana Mass Rapid Transport Corporation could explore possibilities for increasing connectivity in Gurgaon, said the official statement.
Earlier in March this year, the Haryana Mass Rapid Transport Corporation (HMRTC) had asked the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) to draft a fresh feasibility report for the Gurgaon-Dwarka Metro link.
(With inputs from Abhishek Behl)
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NEW DELHI: On Monday, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) passed an order stating diesel vehicles over 10-year-old in Delhi about 2.8 lakh should go off the roads in an attempt to reduce pollution.
A similar ban was imposed by the NGT in 10 districts of Kerala in March, which is expected to impact 2,00,000 vehicles.
Carmakers said that the order may have a larger impact on consumers and the industry. De-registering vehicles older than 10 years is extremely unfair to the consumers, who bought these vehicles conforming to the rules and regulations, said a Maruti Suzuki spokesperson.
Less than 30% of Maruti vehicles sold have diesel engines. For Tata Motors and Mahindra and Mahindra (M&M) the share of diesel vehicles is higher. Tata Motors and M&M didnt comment.
Delhi being the largest car market 15-18% of all passenger vehicle sales can set precedence to a nationwide ban on such vehicles.
Industry experts, however, said that the move is not all that bad. The old cars were based on old technology Companies will conform to 10 years as the effective life-cycle of the car, said Anil Sharma, senior analyst at IHS World Markets Automotive service. The ban will also create demand for new car purchases.
But, for second-hand car buyers it isnt happy news. If a person bought a used 10-year-old diesel car yesterday, it can potentially be useless tomorrow, irrespective of what condition it is in, said Kumar Kandaswami, senior director at Deloitte.
Similar policies, though not as stark as taking cars off the road, are there in developed countries. For example, in the UK, after three years, every year a car needs to go through a check and get an MOT certification.
Meanwhile, the NGT has directed the Ministry of Heavy Industries to give the status of electric and hybrid vehicles, and the benefits the ministry wishes to extend for disposal of old vehicles.
Will that mean new regulations even for petrol vehicles? What if the industry shifts to electric and the tribunal comes up with a ban on petrol vehicles The government should work on long-term plans, as that affects automobile firms investments, said London-based Deepesh Rathore, co-founder of Emerging Markets Automotive Advisors.
But there is a silver lining. The fact that the ban on new registrations was later changed would suggest this order may also be challenged, said Kandaswami.
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GURGAON: A 56-year-old woman from Iraq who had come for treatment to Gurgaon was allegedly molested by a contractual staffer of a private hospital here two months ago.
The ministry of external affairs (MEA) forwarded the complaint to Gurgaon Police. A case has been lodged against an unknown staffer of the hospital at the Sushant Lok police station
Police said the woman, admitted at the Fortis Memorial Research Institute in Sector 44 near Huda City Metro station for a brain disorder in May, had raised an alarm about some staffer allegedly misbehaving with her verbally and molesting her.
She did not lodge a police complaint. Instead, she informed the office of the Embassy of the Republic of Iraq in New Delhi. Two months later, the Embassy approached Gurgaon Police last week. We have lodged a case of sexual harassment against the unknown accused. The probe is on, said deputy commissioner of police (east) Deepak Saharan.
Neither the accused nor the complainant has been named in the intimation that the Iraqi Embassy sent the Gurgaon Police. The police handed over the probe to assistant commissioner of police (ACP) Dharna Yadav, who visited the hospital for questioning.
Hospital authorities said the incident took place two months ago and the accused was sacked soon after the incident.
This is a case dating back over two months allegedly involving a contractual worker employed by an external agency. The worker was immediately relieved of his duties.., said a hospital spokesperson.
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NEW DELHI: The spiralling of violence in Kashmir reverberated in Parliament on Monday, with the government blaming Pakistan for the unrest while opposition parties insisted the authorities had mishandled the street protests which killed at least 43 people.
The opposition parties rounded on the Centre for excessive use of force, and cautioned the government that bullets would not douse the violence, triggered by the killing of militant commander Burhan Wani by security forces on July 8.
Later, Prime Minister Narendra Modi told NDA leaders the government had nothing to hide and that it would take everybody along on how to move forward. Modis remarks came after Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut suggested the PM who had had a meeting over tea with his Pakistan counterpart Nawaz Sharif also hold a chai pe charcha with the people of Kashmir.
The violence in Kashmir is among a host of prickly issues facing the government in this session of Parliament, where the latter hopes to win legislative approval for several key reform measures, including a long-pending Goods and Services Tax. Faced with criticism in the Rajya Sabha on Monday, the government blamed Pakistan for the violence. Finance minister Arun Jaitley said Pakistan was the sole reason for the unrest.
It is not television debates on the issue of J&K or anything else the unrest is because Pakistan is creating the problem, he said during a debate on the situation in Kashmir on the opening day of Parliaments monsoon session.
Home minister Rajnath Singh promised to review the use of pellet guns, blamed for most civilian injuries in Kashmir. He also offered to visit Kashmir for a dialogue with the people but state chief minister Mehbooba Mufti suggested they discuss the format for talks once normality returned.
Whatever is happening in Kashmir is Pakistan-sponsored. The name is Pakistan but every act is na-pak (impious), Singh said, adding that the country felt the pain of innocent Kashmiris suffering because of the violence.
Earlier, Ghulam Nabi Azad, the leader of the opposition in the upper House, said the government had not learned from its past mistakes. Militants were always killed in the state. But this present environment did not exist even during the 1990s, he said, referring to the early days of the Kashmiri insurgency.
Youngsters have been killed in all the 10 districts of the Kashmir Valley this time.
Opposition leaders Sitaram Yechury (CPM) and Sharad Y ad av( J D-U) demanded answers as to why the NDA government was not following the Atal Behari Vajpayee governments policy which spoke of insaniyat in handling Kashmir issue. Trinamools Derek O Brien urged the government to protect the soul of Kashmir even when there is a need for hard policing.
Congress leader Karan Singh termed the current situation as an unprecedented outburst of anger and frustration. If young people are blinded, our people are blinded, he said.
Many Opposition leaders asked for an all-party meeting and maintained that the government must make a distinction between a civilian and a militant.
The same bullet used to kill militants should not be used to kill children, women and youngsters. Should we treat them as militants? the Congress partys Azad said.
The Animal Welfare Board of India (AWBI) has suggested that extremely aggressive and bad tempered dogs should be euthanised or put to sleep but later clarified that it was a mistake and would be rectified soon.
The board officials said they meant only those dogs suffering and were terminally ill should be euthanised.
In its Module for Dog Population Management Rabies Eradication Reducing Man - Dog Conflict in India submitted to the Supreme Court early this month, the board suggested that euthanasia should be allowed for dogs prone to biting people and with a history of having bitten people.
Sources in the animal board said the suggestion was made on July 12. The next hearing is on July 20.
The Animal Welfare Board of India is a statutory advisory body on animal welfare laws and promotes animal welfare in the country.
The Bombay high court and the Kerala high court had okayed killing of stray dogs in 2008 and 2015, respectively. Both the orders were challenged in the Supreme Court. The apex court in March this year sought responses of the state governments and asked the AWBI to come out with a module by July 12.
Animal activists fear that such directions would encourage stray dog culling in the country.
Read more: Man runs over dog, says it deserved to die
The section essentially means that any dog, which the civic body thinks is dangerous or aggressive, should be put down. Also, the module is contradictory to the AWBIs earlier stand where it had objected to similar policies being implemented by several civic agencies of the country, said Rishi Dev, animal activist.
Dev questioned the error by the board and said, The module has been submitted to the Supreme Court by an agency whose primary job is to work for animal welfare. There should be no scope for error. It seems that this new section has been specially introduced to reduce the population of dogs in India.
Others demanded immediate correction in the module. Such suggestions threaten the life of dogs. They may be misinterpreted to kill dogs with impunity. This has left a grey area and will encourage a blood bath, something similar to what happened in Kerala. This requires immediate rectification, said Geeta Seshamani, chairperson, Friendicoes SECA, an animal rights group.
The board maintained that it was correcting the module. There was an error in the module and we have initiated the process to correct it. The board meant to suggest that only those dogs, which are suffering from incurable diseases or are paralytic and cant move at all or are suffering from rabies should be put down or euthanised, said Major General (Retd) RM Kharb, chairman, AWBI.
The body of a 23-year-old school teacher was found in a canal near Hapur in Uttar Pradesh, more than 30 hours after she went missing from her home in Delhis Wazirabad village on Saturday.
Hapur police said the woman, identified as Naina, was murdered and her body was dumped in the canal. They suspect the involvement of her family members as her parents and brother are also missing since Saturday.
Police have also not ruled out the possibility of a suicide pact among the missing family members after killing the daughter.
According to the police, a Hyundai Santro car belonging to Nainas father was found parked near the spot from where her body was discovered. There were blood stains on the seats, which indicated that she was murdered inside the car before her body was dumped in the canal. The cars doors were open when the local police reached the crime scene.
A case has been registered at Hapur. On Monday morning, the Hapur police team informed their counterparts in Delhi about Nainas murder. They sought their assistance in tracing her missing family members and questioned relatives to find out more about the murder.
A police officer said Naina was a teacher in a private school in northeast Delhis Bhajanpura. She lived with her parents, Ved Prakash and Sadhna, and brother, Shubham, at their Wazirabad home.
Questioning relatives revealed that Naina left home around 6pm on Saturday, while her family members followed her half an hour later in their car.
Prime facie it is believed that Nainas family members met her mid way and drove towards Hapur. Their mobiles were switched off soon after they crossed the Delhi border. What happened thereafter is a matter of probe, said the officer.
Ved Prakash owned a garments store in Majnu Ka Tilla and rented out two floors of his house to tenants in Wazirabad village, the officer said.
A Rajasthan police sub-inspector, a hacker who worked for Jaipur police and two private detectives were arrested for illegally accessing cell phone call detail records (CDR). Police said sub-inspector Mukesh Kumar Meena,38, posted with the Jaipur police cyber wing, used his departments email address to get the CDRs.
Meenas friend in the department, Jaipur resident Gajraj Singh, 23, a third-year BCA student and a hacker, was arrested along with private detectives Aniket Dhamle and Abhinav Kumar.
Singh worked part-time with Jaipur police and helped them solve white collar crimes. Dhamle and Kumar ran two different agencies in Mumbai and Pune.
Joint commissioner of police (crime) RS Yadav said a Delhi resident had filed a complaint about some men who illegally got his sons CDRs of the past six months.
Yadav said the complainant had received a text message, with the sender claiming to get any CDRs for a fee. Surprised if anyone could do that, the man called back on the number and fixed a deal for his sons call records.
Once he managed to get the records from Pune-based Dhamle for R 8,000, the man (identity being withheld) then filed a complaint with the crime branch.
We arrested Dhamle from Pune on July 15. His interrogation led to the arrest of his associate Abhinav Kumar, 35, in Mumbai and then Gajraj Singh from Jaipur. Singh told us that the CDRs were provided to them by sub-inspector Meena, after which Meena was also arrested, said Yadav.
The four reportedly confessed to have accessed at least 2,000 CDRs in the past six months. Police sources said the four were making so much money that Kumar had recently opened a restro-bar in Maharashtra.
Singh had recently bought a motorcycle.
Police said Dhamle and Abhinav promised their clients to conduct background checks, fraud investigation and surveillance. They depended mostly on the call detail records to note a pattern.
Abhinav said he is a hacker and met Gajraj during a hackers conference. On his Facebook post, he claims to be a security expert. Gajraj has posted articles about him published in regional newspapers on his Facebook wall.
Abhinav and Dhamle used to pass on phone numbers given by their clients to Singh who then sought the call records from Meena. Singh met Meena while helping the Jaipur police help cyber crime cases.
Due for a promotion this month as an Inspector, Meena was undergoing training when he was arrested. Meena charged R1,500-R2,000 for providing details of one cell number. Abhinav sold it for R3,000- R5,000 while Dhamle and Abhinav charged their clients around R10,000-R100,000. They used to charge extra for background checks on prospective brides or grooms.
Non-functional streetlights in Defence Colony have sparked concern among residents who fear that the lanes have now become vulnerable to crimes. Residents claim that in the absence of adequate lighting, perpetrators find it easy to escape after committing crimes. Following the complaints, a survey of the area was conducted by the police with the help of locals and six vulnerable stretches were indentified. The South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC) will now light up these spots.
Inadequate police patrols and poor streetlights make deserted stretches fertile grounds for criminal activities, residents said. A senior police official said they were aware of the situation and it will be resolved soon. He said there have been reports of chain snatching and anti-social elements frequenting these areas.
According to the police, Type-II, Sector 2 in Sadiq Nagar is notorious for eve-teasing. In Type-II Sector 2 near Aurvigyaan Nagar behind Municipal School in Sadiq Nagar, many motorcycle theft cases are reported while the area near the gurdwara roundabout in Defence Colony, Andrews Ganj Extension, and the area behind A block Defence Colony main market in A block are notorious for chain snatching.
Read: Defunct streetlights make new areas unsafe at night: Residents
There will be a high mast light installed in each of these places, said councillor Abhishek Dutt, who has sanctioned funds for the project. A senior police officer said that some of these areas are highly vulnerable such as Sector 2, Sadiq Nagar and the area behind Municipal School in Sadiq Nagar. The project of installing lights will cost around Rs 20 lakh.
Hraish Bisht a resident of Defence Colony, A block, said, We had been complaining about the dark stretch as several people would come and consume alcohol here. After buying booze, people preferred this location to drink as there are some vendors who sell snacks and pakoras. He said that there have also been cases of chain snatching and harassment of women.
A resident of Sector II in Sadiq Nagar, Amba Kumari said, This part becomes vulnerable after 8pm. When I return late from work I find it dangerous to walk through this area. Often, I have to ask a male member of my family to accompany or receive me, she added.
Apart from such cases, there have been reports of petty thefts like stealing of fuel from motorbikes. Acknowledging the situation, the senior police officer said that because of staff shortage, police personnel cannot be present in every area at night. They keep patrolling the area. The best way, therefore, to prevent crime is to light up those problematic points. We had conducted a survey and the SDMC will make adequate arrangements for the same, he said.
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Delhi University will soon translate textbooks from different parts of the country and the world into Hindi, vice chancellor Yogesh Tyagi announced on Tuesday. He was addressing the first academic and executive council meeting, where he stressed the need to focus on languages.
The academic and executive councils are statutory bodies that decide on matters related to the university.
Tyagi said that in a few weeks, permanent appointments will be made in the university, which have been on hold since 2010.
He said promotions will be made soon. He first heard out the teachers in the zero hour and then spoke of his vision, said Nachiketa Singh, an academic council member.
The VC said they would act against principals and chairpersons of the governing body, who have got complaints filed against them.
Stressing on zero tolerance on malpractice, the VC said there would be a new process for e-tendering for any project worth above R2 lakh, said Singh.
As the discussions went on for a while, the agenda was not approved when this paper went to press. On the agenda is the setting up of three centres. The university wants to open the School of Journalism, School of Transnational Affairs and the Institute of Cyber Law and Security.
The university has put forward a proposal to set up a research council for promoting research at the university.
Among others is the proposal of the Department of East Asian Studies for the introduction of part-time language courses in Chinese, Japanese and Korean from this academic session.
A change in syllabus of the Netaji Subhash Institute of Technology to bring it in line with the Choice-Based Credit System was passed with several objections.
A gang of suspected Romanian nationals allegedly involved in thefts across the country was busted in Faridabad on Tuesday. The suspects, three men and four women, were operating from a Paharganj hotel in New Delhi.
A team of Rajasthan police too arrived in the town to take them into custody.
Police said that on July 17, they received a complaint from one Gulshan Taneja of Jawahar colony. He said some foreign nationals on the pretext of purchasing items from his shop stole valuables from his house near his shop.
We registered a case and started scanning CCTV cameras in the locality, said a police officer, adding, they noticed the foreign nationals in a Fortuner SUV on July 17.
The police said they got details of the accused from the travel agency that rented out the vehicle to them.
Being foreigners, they were confident they would not be caught. They responded to our call and reached Faridabad in the wee hours of Tuesday, said an officer.
During preliminary questioning, they said they belonged to Romania.
On July 17, the gang reached Jawahar Colony in Faridabad and entered Tanejas garments shop.
Police said the modus operandi was simple to distract the owner while committing the theft. In the Jawahar Colony case, the women members of the gang bought items worth Rs 2,500 and paid him in Rs 10 notes.
When the shop owner was busy counting the notes, the men entered his house, broke the almirah with sharp tools and fled with Rs 40,000 in cash and valuables, police said.
The gang had committed a theft the same way in Jaipur on July 15. The Jaipur police rushed to Faridabad to take custody of the Romanian nationals.
We produced the seven before the court on Tuesday that remanded the women in judicial custody. The men were sent to one-day police remand, the police said. We are now trying to find out where they stayed, said the police.
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Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) has refused to register for the new semester, the 21 students who were involved in the events of February 9.
This move by the university has come as a surprise, because the Delhi High Court had put a stay against punishment, ranging from rustication to penalty, in May this year.
Students are required to register for class after every semester.
Earlier, the universitys high-level enquiry committee punished 21 students after the event commemorating the death anniversary of Afzal Guru blew up into a controversy.
Anirban Bhattacharya, Umar Khalid and JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar were jailed. The punishment given to the three ranged from rustication to fines.
For Bhattacharya, starting July 23, the campus was declared out of bounds for five years. Khalid was rusticated for one semester with a fine of R20,000 while a fine of R10,000 was imposed on Kumar.
These students moved court against the punishment.
But on Monday, the deans of different centres of the varsity were sent a circular that said the registration of all 21 students should be blocked till further notice.
The high court had put a stay on the punishment now how can the university use as a reason to block our registration. This is a clear violation of the court order. We are seeking for legal advice on what we can do now, said Ashutosh Kumar, former JNUSU president. He is also in the list of the 21 who have been penalised.
JNU officials refused to comment on why such an action had been taken even after the high court order.
Vice-Chancellor M Jagadesh Kumar could not be reached for a comment despite several attempts.
Monsoon woes are likely to get worse for Delhi residents in the coming days as more rain is expected, officials have warned. The Met department has said rainfall is likely to exceed the average this year.
Transport officials said the citys infrastructure is not equipped to withstand such continuous showers and that commuters should brace for more delays and snarls.
Dr Sendil Kumar, a researcher IIT Delhi, said the citys drains are not built to flush out rain water efficiently and that the accumulated water worsened the surface of the roads.
The slopes and gradients in many important junctions have not been properly made. The accumulated water increases the risk of road damage and cave-ins as well as breakdowns. Of all the metro cities, Delhi is the worst equipped when it comes to managing its infrastructure during monsoon. A few minutes of shower are enough to bring the city to a halt, he said.
Last week, when the rainfall was above normal, complaints of transport snags, flooded roads and cave-ins were reported from across the capital.
Read more: Morning rain sends Delhi under water, mile-long traffic jams reported
Eight road cave-ins were reported from different parts of the city. On Monday, an Indian Navy bus was stuck in a damaged road in Lutyens zone.
In a similar incident, a 20-foot crater was formed near the Nehru Place flyover after heavy rain on Friday.
Crossing the Nehru Place flyover is a task in itself, with the construction work and heavy traffic. The cave-in added to the traffic woes. On Saturday evening, it took me 20mins to just reach the foot of the flyover after crossing Savitri Cinema. In the last two days, I have started taking a different route, said Susheel Yadav of Malviya Nagar.
More than 230 complaints of DTC bus breakdowns were registered with the helpline.
The biggest worry during a rainy day is a bus breakdown at a busy junction. That is enough to hold up the traffic for hours. The chances of breakdowns in low-floor buses are higher and the process of removing them is time consuming. We need specialised cranes, which are only a few, to remove the buses, said a senior traffic official.
Read more: Waterlogging, traffic jams hit city after rain
Last week, as many as 1,468 auto rickshaw drivers registered with the Delhi Autorickshaw Sangh complained of breakdowns. Data by the India Meteorological Department (IMD) shows 102mm of rainfall has been recorded in the last nine days.
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On the initiative of the Delhi Police North East Unit , 47 private hospitals have begun offering discounted treatment to youths from northeastern states in NCR.
Over the last four days, police said at least 147 youths used this facility at hospitals across the national capital region. Out of these, 26 were treated in Delhi.
At the DPNEU office in Nanakpura, a help desk that runs 24/7 was set up to verify the antecedents of the applicants and provide approval letters.
It all started last month when the nodal officer of the North East unit, joint commissioner of police, Robin Hibu, met the management of top city hospitals and sought their help.
He told them that thousands of youths who come to work in Delhi from the seven northeastern states were from lower and middle-class families.
Unable to adjust to life in the plains, many fall ill and return home. Most of them couldnt pay their medical expenses.
The hospitals have assured the police they would offer at least a discount of 15-30%, if they receive a recommendation from the NE unit. The facility, Hibu said, was not available for government servants.
Anyone who wants to use this facility must approach the nodal officer of the Delhi Police. After verification, we will give the applicant a referral letter, said Hibu.
Hibu said any North East resident in Delhi was eligible for treatment. They should not be government employees. These top hospitals are offering discount under the Corporate Social Responsibility scheme, he said.
In each city hospital, two nodal officers will deal with the police and verify the referral letters.
The DPNEU, a separate unit of the city police, was set up to address the problems of NE residents in Delhi. It has over the last two years helped fund the final rites of NE youths who died in the city. In at least 15 cases, the victims kin have been unable to take the bodies home.
In March, the ministry of home affairs sanctioned a grant of `5 lakh for the unit to fund their last rites. After racist attacks on people from the North East, a special recruitment drive was held in Sikkim and the Seven Sister States last year.
Around 400 men and women joined the city police and are undergoing training at the Police Training College in Jharoda Kalan.
Joint Commissioner Hibu said the unit was also in talks with diagnostic centres and labs across the city.
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The ministry of home affairs and city police on Monday told the Delhi high court that inconvenience caused to a judge, whose calls to its emergency helpline number 100 went unanswered, was inadvertent and due to reasons beyond their control, including congestion in the systems of telephone service providers.
Justice Vipin Sanghi called the helpline number when he was stuck in a traffic jam on April 29 this year but his calls went unanswered. Sanghi then wrote to the commissioner of police about the poor response of the helpline service.
The letter was converted into a PIL in May after Chief Justice G Rohini took suo motu cognisance of the issue.
The present police assistance 100 system in Central Police Control Room (CPCR) of Delhi Police was installed in 2008 and it attends about 24,000 calls on a daily basis.
The inconvenience caused to Justice Vipin Sanghi was inadvertent and due to reasons beyond their control and it is assured that all sincere steps are being taken to ensure that such incidents do not recur in future, the MHA told a bench of Chief Justice Rohini and justice Sangita Dhingra Sehgal in an affidavit.
The ministry said the matter regarding priority routing of emergency calls has been taken up with authorities concerned to tackle the problem of calls queuing up at the telecom service provider (TSP).
Delhi Police said that there was a heavy rush of calls due to which the call made by the judge could not be attended.
Heavy traffic on TSP leads to congestion in their system as a result of which few calls do not reach Delhi police exchange in CPCR and get abandoned, Delhi Police said in its affidavit.
It clarified that this creates an impression to the caller that their call has not been attended by the police assistance call taker, whereas actually the call never reaches CPCR. It also said that during peak hours, calls are put on hold and they remain in queue till they are attended or disconnected by the caller themselves.
The ministry said that since the system is old, preventive maintenance cycle of the technical infrastructure has been made more stringent and frequent. It also said feedback staff has been deputed around the clock in CPCR to make calls to the telephone number from which calls made to CPCR are found to be abandoned.
It added that priority proposal for creating 663 additional posts for the functioning of various control rooms in Delhi Police has already been taken up.
The bench has now fixed the matter for hearing on August 29.
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For over a decade, Sarita Vihar H block market has been in need of renovation. But repeated requests to the civic agency to spruce up the facilities here have failed. Damaged drainage, tattered flooring and lack of power and water in the toilet complex are some of the issues that need immediate action. With the market infrastructure crumbling, the footfall has reduced and the shopkeepers are losing out on business.
Last renovation of the complex was done in 2003. The South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC) claims that the redevelopment project could not be taken up due to lack of funds. However, the south corporation is believed to have surplus funds and is reportedly the richest among the three civic bodies in the Capital.
The market, which has 150 shops, was constructed in 1994 by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) and its maintenance was handed over to the municipality later. In 2003, the repair work was carried out by the DDA after the L-G directed the department. According to shopkeepers, the market saw proper repair and rehabilitation work almost 13 years ago in 1994.
Following much persuasion, the SDMC officials visited the market last month and gave assurance to fix the problems. However, the plan has remained on papers so far.
Drainage pipelines were laid here in 1994 but due to poor maintenance these are damaged at various places. The faulty drain resulted in waterlogging during the monsoons. For the last one year, the agency has been assuring that the drainage system will be fixed but nothing has been done, said a shopkeeper on the condition of anonymity.
A toilet complex was constructed in the market three months back, however it is yet to get water and power connection. HT had reported the matter in May 24, following which, the officials of the SDMCs maintenance department visited the market. After the newspaper report, a team of officials came and gauged the damage. The team then took the measurement of the damaged storm water drain and floor. Later, an estimate was prepared and we were assured that the work will be started within a month. But nothing happened. When we asked the superintending official Sudhir Mehta, we were informed that due to paucity of funds, money could not be sanctioned, said Dr SK Awana, president of Sarita Vihar H block Market Association.
The RWA said that the shopkeepers had a series of correspondence with other departments also to resolve the issues. After the construction of the toilet we did the complete electrical wiring and provided switches on our own. We then approached the sanitation superintendent, SDMC for the permission to install a meter but he refused, Awana said.
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The water level in the Yamuna in Delhi has crossed the warning level due to discharge of water from a barrage in Haryana. The state government has deployed motor boats to evacuate riverside dwellers.
Due to discharge of large volume of water from Hathni Kund Barrage in Haryana, the water level in the Yamuna has gone up to 204.22 m, as recorded at 1pm, a Central Water Commission official said.
The warning level for Yamuna is 204 m and the danger level 204.83 m. The highest water level of 207.49 m in Yamuna was recorded in 1978.
The water level initially rose, but since rains have not taken place that much, the water level is receding, the official said.
On Saturday, 160,000 cusec water was released from Hathni Kund Barrage, they said.
The Irrigation and Flood Control Department of the government had last week deployed 18 motor boats in areas, including Badarpur, Burari, Soniya Vihar, Jagatpur, Surghar Wazirpur, Boat Club, Geeta Colony, shamshan ghaat, Haithi Ghaat, Chilla Village, Mayur Vihar, Batla House, Kalindi Kunj and Bawana Nehar.
It had also directed that the boats be not shifted from these locations until further orders.
The Indian States actions in Kashmir since the killing of militant Burhan Wani on July 8 have been worrying to say the least. The terrorist attack in Nice and the dramatic events in Turkey took the attention away from the crisis over the weekend and notwithstanding the debate in Parliament the Valley is still experiencing a severe State crackdown, the kind we do not expect to see in a media-saturated age. The residents of the Valley have been living under curfew for the last 12 days. At least 44 people have died in shooting by security forces, around 2,115 injured and many, including children, have been blinded by pellets. In any other country these figures would constitute a national emergency that would prompt urgent measures to defuse the situation.
Read | Still no newspaper in Kashmir, death toll 44 as teen dies of bullet injuries
The Centre is still searching for the way forward. There is, to make matters worse, a palpable sense of policy confusion. Home Minister Rajnath Singh has said he would look into the issue of excessive force but it is not clear how such heavy-handed measures were deployed in the first place, particularly since security forces have had a lot of prior experience of facing stone-pelting protesters. Who is taking which decision is not clear. A case in point is the three-day gag on the media it has been lifted now where cable TV was shut down and newspaper offices in Kashmir were raided, printing press staff were beaten up and detained, journalists intimidated and copies of dailies seized. Senior minister Naeem Akhtar indicated that the media ban was an undesirable step taken to ensure peace, while others maintain that chief minister Mehbooba Mufti had not approved the ban. The disruption of phone and internet services across Kashmir suggests that the Centre and state governments are still wary of protests and more revelations about the violence last week. The tense standoff looks set to continue. Separatists have called for a three-day shutdown and no political formation seems able to approach and engage the youth let alone placate their anger.
Read | Kashmir newspapers raided, printing banned for 3 days to ensure peace
The Centres messaging needs to improve for the situation to improve. Home minister Singh said he understood Kashmirs pain and mentioned the Centres relief measures like rushing in eye doctors, but the thrust of his speech was on Pakistans machinations rather than candidly reflecting on the mistakes made so far, particularly in recent days. No one disputes Pakistan violently meddles in Kashmir, but the failure to recognise and admit that excessive force against civilians has resulted in the situation at hand is to be oblivious to the source of anger in the Valley and potentially block off avenues for forward movement. No political initiative to pacify Kashmir, including all party meetings, will succeed unless there is a measure of accountability for what has happened.
Read | Its yesterday again: Kashmirs old wounds need political healing
In an interview to a business daily on his new book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, author Amitav Ghosh said the entire vocabulary of the Paris climate change agreement is a vocabulary of concealment It produces a rhetoric that is geared towards something while all the players are doing exactly the opposite.
While his comments were on climate change, it holds true for the management of Indias cities too, which are already facing the brunt of climate change but are in a denial mode.
Come monsoon, every year without fail, roads get inundated resulting in massive traffic snarls. In the recent past, there have been several such man-made chaotic situations: Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai. Urban flooding has become a yearly phenomenon. Leave alone enjoying the sights, sounds and smell of the life-giving monsoon, we are busy evading the next pothole and slush.
Read: Crores go down the drain as Delhi fails to fix its monsoon mess
Mumbai is no better. With the monsoon in full flow, potholed roads and the traffic gridlocks are likely to continue. Until July 10, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) recorded 612 potholes. In both cities, the culprit is the lack of coordination between different agencies tasked with cleaning drains and maintaining the roads. There are at least 17 government agencies in Delhi, which are in some way involved in road, drainage and their maintenance. Therefore, even though the three municipal corporations are responsible for providing civic amenities to 98% of the city, there are areas that do not fall under its jurisdiction.
Read: Pothole horror: Same old potholes in Mumbais monsoon story
The vocabulary of concealment works here too. While Delhis deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia has asked the civic agencies to pull up their socks, the North Delhi Municipal Corporation said that the Delhi Government was to be blamed for the water-logging woes of the city. Come to think of it, this passing the buck game works beautifully for both parties. However, it may impact the ruling AAP politically much more than the civic agencies because citizens are far more demanding now that they were even a few years ago and are aware that the taxes they pay are literally going down the drain. This week, many took to social media to vent their anger and posted photos of people wading through knee-deep water. The time for how to rectify has long passed; city governments and civic agencies must stop playing these petty games and get the work done instead of hiding behind lofty promises and jargon.
Read: How to escape watery graves in a city
In a bid to clamp down on bungling in evaluation works and managing answersheets, the Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) would introduce bar coding of answer sheets and develop pre and post examination software with barcoding system soon.
The proposal, which was mulled for a long time, finally got approval of BSEBs governing body at its Monday meeting.
The process would be introduced in matriculation, intermediate examinations and Teachers Eligibility Test (TET). We will release tender for it on Tuesday and are planning to introduce it from the next scheduled examination, said BSEB chairman Anand Kishor.
He said the move would curb lobbying for increasing marks during evaluation, as it would minimise human intervention regarding where copies are being sent for evaluation.
The governing body also approved the proposal to conduct compartmental examination for the first time of students who failed in one subject in intermediate.
Intermediate students failing in one subject would get three attempts, one the same year, one in scheduled annual examination next year and third in compartmental examination in July that year. Questions would be asked from syllabi of corresponding year of examination, said Kishor.
Read more: 42 students topped and flunked at the same time, say cops
The intermediate compartmental examinations and TET examinations would possibly be conducted by November and December, respectively, and have barcoding system, he added.
Approval for restructuring BSEB by creating three independent wings, one each under BSEB secretary, examination controller and director (academic), forming 21 posts in the wings, establishing examination centres in nine divisions at an estimated cost of Rs. 147.11 crores, renovation of decrepit portions in BSEB and intermediate council premises and others was also given at the meeting.
The examination centres in each division would house examinees of sensitive centres in the division and would also function as evaluation centres and strong rooms, said Kishor.
Locations were ear marked in all nine divisions to establish examination centres, Kishor added.
Patna division: Shastrinagar boys school, Patna. Magadh: Harid as Seminary, Gaya. Bhagalpur: Jaglal High School, Bhagalpur. Munger: High School, Vasudevpur, Munger. Purnia: District School, Purnia. Saharsa: District School, Saharsa. Darbhanga: District School, Darbhanga. Muzaffarpur: BB Collegiate School, Muzaffarpur. Saran: B Seminary High School, Chapra.
Besides Kishor and BSEB secretary Anup Kumar Sinha, director (higher education) RPS Ranjan, District Institute of Education and Training, Gaya, principal Ratna Ghosh, TMBU, Bhagalpur pro-VC Awadh Kishor Rai, BNMU, Madhepura pro-VC Jai Prakash Jha and Patna University examination controller, RK Mandal attended the meeting.
Given the high cut-offs and applications, that were thrice the number of seats at the undergraduate level in institutions such as Delhi University (with more than 2.5 lakh registered applications for about 54,000 seats), many young people find themselves left high and dry as admissions to various courses have closed in colleges around the country. For those who want to continue studies anyway, distance learning is the best option, especially when it comes to joining the Indira Gandhi National Open University (Ignou).
Courses on offer
Ignou is inviting applications for admission to various courses including bachelor of science and arts, tourism studies, commerce, computer applications, library and information science and social work for the next academic session.
A range of diploma courses are on offer in fields such as nutrition and health education, aquaculture, business process outsourcing finance and accounting, English creative writing, tourism studies, dairy technology and womens empowerment and development. Applications can be submitted online till August 17.
Reaching out to learners
Elaborating on Ignous efforts to reach out to as many learners as possible, Professor Ravindra Kumar, vice chancellor (in-charge), Ignou, says, the institute is serving students through its learner support centres and teaching tools. The fact that the universitys self-learning material has not received any adverse remarks from the most discerning readers, learners and academic critiques in any part of the country is quite reassuring. It is also a good testimonial to dedicate ourselves to the cause of meaningful and quality open learning (and teaching) in the higher education sector.
The university has also expanded its reach in terms of the number of programmes. We are always on the lookout for an untraversed tract which can be explored and somewhat formalised as a learning programme. Ignou has, in the kitty, 228 learning programmes offering a variety including professional courses like BCA, MCA, tourism programmes like bachelors in tourism studies, and masters of art in tourism management, social work programmes like bachelors in social work and masters in social work, besides general education programmes like BA, BCom, BSc and related PG programmes in social sciences, humanities, extension and development education etc. Now we are focusing on development of skill-based and competency enhancement programmes along with vocational courses, says Professor Kumar.
For the current year in the July 2016 cycle, admission is open in certificate, diploma, bachelors degree and postgraduate degree programmes. We are very hopeful that we will be able to touch a cumulative figure of 10 lakh in the current admission cycle, adds Professor Kumar.
Evaluation system and pedagogy
The university follows a credit system for most of its programmes. Each credit is equivalent to 30 hours of study. A multimedia approach is used for imparting education. This includes self-instructional written material, audio-visual material aids, counselling sessions, teleconferences and writing assignment responses. Thus, a four-credit course involves 120 hours of study. This helps the learner to analyse how much effort he/she has to put in, to successfully complete a course.
The university also offers eGyanKosh (www.egyankosh.ac.in) one of the worlds largest repositories of educational resources in higher education to learners for free. The eGyanKosh has self-learning material of around 2,565 courses and over 2,389 video programmes of Ignou.
Completion of an academic programme, degree or diploma, is based on a multi-tier evaluation system . This comprises self-assessment exercises within each unit of study, project work, term-end examinations, continuous evaluation mainly through assignments which are tutor-marked, practical assignments and seminar/workshops/extended contact programmes. In order to provide individualised support to its learners, the university has a large number of study centres, spread throughout the country and co-ordinated by 67 regional centres.
Read more: Eager, nervous students start first day of college at Delhi University
Focus on placements
According to Professor Kumar, Ignou campus placements have a lot of success stories to share. In 2015, we had conducted four campus placement events and nearly 200 students were given job offers by the participating organisations. Our placement activities are now being extended to our regional centres. We are now also planning to expand these activities and set up a unit called Employment Guidance and Career Counselling which will provide the necessary prelude to campus placement, says Kumar.
Box 1: Admissions info
Deadline to apply: August 17; August 31 (with late fee of Rs 300)
How to apply: Apply online at www.onlineadmission.ignou.ac.in for 142 academic programmes in July 2016 session
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The information and broadcasting (I&B) ministry has given the go-ahead to the Indian Institute of Mass Communication to apply for deemed university status. Once it becomes a deemed university, the institute will be able to award degrees instead of diplomas. This will help students wanting to pursue a career in academics as well as those wanting to take up mass communication as a subject in civil services.
IIMC, an autonomous institute under the ministry, will now have to seek permission from University Grants Commission (UGC) for a change in status.
A deemed university status means the institute does not have to seek consent from Parliament for its elevation. Currently, IIMC offers only post-graduate diploma courses.
Once students get a post graduate degree from IIMC, they can pursue a MPhil in media studies or even a PhD at the institute if they are keen on pursuing academic interests. This will go a long way in helping improve research in the field of media studies. Students can even take up mass communication as a subject choice for civil services exam, especially prelims, says KG Suresh, director general, IIMC.
It will be a win-win for students. The present post graduate diploma courses will be extended to two years. Those who pursue a one-year course will be awarded post graduate diploma while those completing two years would be given post graduate degree. We are aiming to develop IIMC as a centre of higher learning for media, says Suresh.
At present students pursue a media studies diploma course to get a general overview of journalism. Once we are able to grant degrees, we can dedicate the first year to general media studies and offer a specialisation in the second year of the course, he adds. IIMC has six campuses across the country.
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The thrill of being at a college festival; the attraction of working at a start-up; the glamour of living in the home of Bollywood Mumbais glitz pulls thousands of students away from their homes each year, who, more often than not, make the city their permanent address.
Mumbai has perfected the good cop-bad cop routine, say students. On one hand, you find yourself stranded on a train, pushed around by the crowd, unable to reach the footboard to get off at your destination. On the other, a hardened old lady softens to show you the ropes she pushes you down when the time comes, so you finally make it home.
On the one hand, the city eats money more quickly than you can imagine. On the other, the street vendor, the landlord, the cook willingly lowers their prices when you request a bargain.
Things dont come easy in Mumbai, says Manisha Shewaramani, 19, a student from Varanasi currently studying in Mumbai. But if you are passionate, the city shows you the way.
Read about what makes thousands of students fall in love with Mumbai every year, and lessons they learned the hard way.
Theres always someone to help
Apeksha Jain, 21, BCom student at University of Mumbai
From: Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh
Moved to Mumbai in August 2014
It was a difficult decision to leave home, but I knew that the exposure I got in Mumbai would be unparalleled. I want to become a chartered accountant (CA), and this is the heart of Indias finance industry. Here, I am pursuing an articleship at an accountancy firm, where I get to meet clients every day, undertake challenging audits, and go beyond theory. This scale of learning would not be possible in my hometown.
Slowly, I got used to living alone cooking, managing a budget, and most importantly, learning to navigate this big, chaotic city.
For instance, to get to my home in Goregaon from my office in Churchgate, I would initially take a taxi, but soon realised that that was both expensive as well as a waste of time. I started taking the local train, warily at first. One of the first few times, I climbed on board a Virar fast, and luckily got a window seat. On my way to Goregaon, I got up when the train crossed Andheri but couldnt make it to the footboard, being jostled around in the huge crowd. I couldnt get off at Goregaon. Borivli came and went, and I still couldnt make it to the door.
Noticing my frustration, a fellow passenger asked me, Kuthe utrayche? [Where do you want to get off in Marathi] I didnt understand the language. She repeated the questions in Hindi, and I, a little miffed, replied, Jahaan aap log utarne doge (Wherever you guys let me get off).
Everyone around burst out laughing. They told me with that attitude, I would never get off. A lady then told me that at Mira Road, where she was getting off, she would stand behind and push me through. This worked I got off, and made it to my destination eventually. This was the first and last time I boarded a Virar train,but the experience taught me something invaluable. You may find yourself stuck here, but theres always someone to bail you out.
Read : Check out Mumbais top colleges
The city is safe, so dont mind you working, and you achieve more
Vachika Gupta, 21, BCom graduate from the University of Mumbai; chartered accountancy student
From: Kota, Rajasthan
Moved to Mumbai in: February 2015
Like most people, I was fascinated by the idea of the city. When it actually turned real, I was excited and nervous.
I have always been totally dependent on my parents. I wanted a sense of freedom, and Mumbai is the best place for that. I quickly realised that the city is quite safe, and this gave me independence. In Kota, everything is dead by 10 pm. But here, even past midnight, you never feel alone. So I push myself and work late nights, and dont feel tired because there are so many people around all the time.
Mumbai has changed me a lot, in a good way. I was always an introvert, and the city has helped me overcome my hesitation to some extent. I didnt know anyone here when I first moved in. But I met new people almost every day at the hostel, in college, office, new clients. It really is a melting pot of cultures.
For instance, during the Ganeshotsav last year, we divided ourselves into groups at the hotel, and brought an idol in. I learned so much about the festival and the city through that experience each group undertook different activities, and all of us, not native Mumbaiites, embedded ourselves into the city.
You experience new food, rituals, culture here
Manisha Shewaramani, 19, mass media student at HR College
From: Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh
Moved to Mumbai: In July 2014
Unlike many others, I was not scared to leave home and come to Mumbai this was my dream city, and studying here, part of the dream.
I moved in to Mumbai on a rainy day, and fell in love with it instantly. On my way home from college, I would stop at Marine Drive and take in the irresistible city.
I have learned so much since. I decided to move from paying guest accommodation to a rented flat with a friend, and we fought so hard to get the landlord to give us a reasonable rate. We were relentless, and in the end, it actually worked. Similarly, we bargained with our cleaning lady too, and she gave us a discount as well.
I also encountered cultures I hadnt in north India. For instance, the caretaker of the PG accommodation was Parsi, and through him, I discovered new food and rituals. He would make Dhanshak for us often there isnt anything else like it.
With so many start-ups, its the perfect place to begin a career
Ratnam Jain, 21, BCom student at Jai Hind College
From: Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh
Moved to Mumbai in: August 2014
Mumbai has great access to education, jobs and start-ups. I thought it would be the perfect place to start a career, but right from the beginning, I realised it wasnt going to be easy.
My monthly allowance is about Rs 35,000, and initially, I did not realise how quickly money could vanish in this city. By the 20th of each month, I would be left almost broke. Gradually, I learned how to make a sensible budget for the month, factoring in rent, food and travel.
One thing I have learned since moving to Mumbai categorically, the value of home-cooked food. We have a cook at our rented flat, but everytime I see classmates eat from their dabbas, I miss home a whole lot. Being independent is great, but its incomplete without your family.
If you are smart, things go your way
Eric Fredy Kapadia, 21, MCom student at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Chowpatty
From: Qatar
Moved to Mumbai in: June 2013
Mumbai is exactly as I had imagined. You have to be quick here, and thats what I have adopted.
It took me some time to adjust, but I soon learned a golden rule always bargain. Mumbai could actually be considered cheap for a foreigner like me if you know how to get around. One of the first few times I went to Colaba Causeway, I was initially shocked at the price of things. When a friend laughed and told me to push a hard bargain, I was then surprised by how much the price fell. The streets offer some really fashionable clothes, and you can get them for quite cheap.
Read : Students divided over approval for new courses in city colleges
Delhi University will release the fifth and last cutoff list for admissions to its undergraduate courses on Tuesday night and Friday will the last date for students to enrol themselves.
For the first time, the university is releasing only five cutoff lists this year. However, very few seats are on offer in many of the colleges.
Authorities said students should enrol in the course and college where they meet the cutoff.
If any of the colleges still have seats to offer they will release a separate merit list. Students will have to find out about the vacancies from individual colleges and apply separately through the DU UG portal.
Read more: Find your college on interactive map, know details
The colleges will then release a merit list and admit students accordingly.
The new academic session will begin on Wednesday.
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The Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT) has announced dates for admission into the institutes Delhi and Kolkata campuses flagship course, MBA (International Business). The two-hour long exam will be held on November 27.
The multiple choice objective type written test in English covers English comprehension, general knowledge (GK) and awareness, logical reasoning and quantitative analysis.
IIFT has consistently maintained a keen focus on sectional cut-offs.
Read more: Smart ways to convert internships to job offers
Sectional cut-offs are present in all other important exams like Common Admission Test (CAT), Xaviers Admission Test, Symbiosis National Aptitude Test 2015 and others. As in those exams, the key to doing well is that students must allocate time proportionate to the marks of the section. Some adjustments, based on ones strengths and weaknesses, are acceptable. However, such adjustments should not be more than 20% of the time allocated, says Ankur Jain, chief knowledge expert, TIME, Delhi.
The exam is held in paper-pencil mode instead of electronic mode. After much preparation of CAT in electronic mode, adjusting to paper-pencil mode takes time. Experts suggest students should prepare accordingly.
Where studies go, Students are normally well-prepared for all the sections but dont prepare well for GK. Thus, they lose out. Good candidates must prepare well for GK, Jain adds
While most of the sections are in the pattern of CAT, there are differences in the question types. Students not good with calculations are advised to prepare for these specific test patterns. All aspirants should look up the old papers of the IIFT entrance test. They should read newspapers from now on a regular basis. A good GK magazine like MBA Education and Careers contains relevant GK for the exam. Mock tests can also help to prepare, Jain suggests.
Graduates in any discipline can apply for the test.
Important dates:
Online
Last date to fill the online application form: September 5, 2016
Offline
Last date for obtaining application form across the counter at IIFT / through post: September 5, 2016
Last date for receipt of filled in application form: September 5, 2016
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After a delay of four years, the Haryana government approved the extension of the Delhi Metro from Sector 21, Dwarka to Iffco Chowk in Gurgaon on Monday.
Prior to this decision, three project reports on the Dwarka-Iffco Chowk link were junked by successive governments as there was no clarity on alignment of the route. The high cost of constructing the Metro line proved an impediment for the project.
On Monday, however, a review meeting of the Haryana Mass Rapid Transport Corporation chaired by chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar cleared the proposal to build the 12.6-km Metro route which will connect Dwarka to Gurgaon.
The proposed alignment will start from Dwarka Sector 21, pass through Sector 111 in Gurgaon, move across the Dwarka Expressway, and pass through Palam Vihar, Sector 23, 22, Sector 18 Udyog Vihar and finally reach Iffco Chowk.
The cost of the project and the timeframe for its completion werent, however, clarified.
The chief minister has accorded approval for the extension of Delhi Metro from Sector 21 in Dwarka to IFFCO Chowk in Gurgaon. The Haryana government has also authorised the Haryana Mass Rapid Transport Corporation (HMRTC) to review the agreements made in the past with Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, said a statement issued by the state government.
Sources said that two alignments were considered by the government one which passed through Kapashera and reached Udyog Vihar and was around 14-km long. The second, which has been approved, is 12.6-km long and passes through Bijwasan and reaches Iffco Chowk via heavily populated areas of Old Gurgaon.
Gurgaon MLA Umesh Agarwal, who has been pushing for greater Metro connectivity said the Dwarka-Gurgaon link will help commuters and reduce congestion on the Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway. This project will greatly help the people of Delhi and Gurgaon, he said.
Meanwhile, the Haryana government hinted it might build the 3.4 kilometre stretch in Delhi itself, and prefer to amend the revenue sharing agreement with Delhi government.
The government, taking note of poor connectivity, said HMRTC could work on plans to improve the network.
The Haryana Mass Rapid Transport Corporation could explore possibilities for increasing connectivity in Gurgaon, said the official statement.
Earlier in March this year, the Haryana Mass Rapid Transport Corporation (HMRTC) had asked the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) to draft a fresh feasibility report for the Gurgaon-Dwarka Metro link.
(With inputs from Abhishek Behl)
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Mushtaq Ahmad travelled 5 km on foot amid a curfew to reach Srinagars Shri Maharaja Hari Singh (SMHS) Hospital to donate blood for those injured in the violence following the death of Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani.
The 32-year-old Ahmad joined Syed Mohsin, a lawyer who came from come from the volatile Qamarwari, and a group of 10 men from nearby Chattabal.
I had come from Natipora dodging protests, angry cops and CRPF men to donate blood for my brothers. But they are not accepting now, Ahmad said.
An enthusiastic minor from the old city was also seen trying to convince officials to accept his blood only to be turned away like many others.
Sorry, we have enough blood in storage now. We cant accept more, hospital officials told those in the queue.
Kashmir has been on the boil after Wani was killed in an encounter with security forces on July 8. Violent clashes between angry protesters and security forces across the valley have killed over 40 people and injured thousands in the 11-day unrest even as curfew continues in the region.
Read: Army says it deeply regrets death of Kashmiri protestors in firing.
Despite receiving an unprecedented number of patients with bullet and pellet injuries, hospitals in Srinagar say they have managed to keep enough blood in stock following a huge response from people who have eagerly donated for the injured.
The SMHS hospital, one of the two tertiary care hospitals in Srinagar, has received the highest number of critical patients from south and north Kashmir in the last 11 days.
Its medical superintendent, Dr Nazir Chowdhary, said that as many as 394 patients were brought to the hospital since July 9, a day after Wanis death. Many of them had bullets, pellets, stones or other physical injuries.
The hospital has used as many as 320 units of blood for the injured but the supply of fresh blood is more than enough.
The volunteers are still ready to donate. We have enough reserves, Chowdhary said.
Read: From Ashfaq Majid Wani to Burhan Wani - Are protests in Kashmir a redux of 1990?
SMHS head of pathology department, Dr Ruby Reshi, told Hindustan Times that besides 320 blood units, they have also transfused 185 blood products, including 84 units of plasmas, to the injured so far.
On an average, 30- 40 blood units are transfused to the injured every day at SMHS hospital, Reshi said.
She said that they collected 350 units from donors even as the hospital already had 375 pints in stock even before the violence erupted.
With each injury, we would get 20 donors mostly young boys and girls. Police also donated some 50 pints, she said.
The hospital has started maintaining a list of prospective donors and calls them when the need arises.
We are now collecting rare blood groups, the doctor said.
Even as Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is locked in a one-upmanship race with the Army chief Gen Raheel Sharif on cornering India over violence in the Srinagar valley, Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) is getting ready for army - supervised assembly elections under the shadow of violence and arson. The field is open only to parties that have accepted accession of PoK with Pakistan.
More than 17,000 army personnel and 15,200 paramilitary personal are already on election duty, prompting Pakistan Peoples Party to cry foul. In fact, the PPP has already hit the streets saying that the Sharifs are rigging the one day- ballot on July 21.
Elections in PoK are generally a mere formality with the Kings party in the saddle in Islamabad securing the mandate.
Pakistan Muslim League -N (PML-N) is the front runner this time around though Rawalpindis Team B (Imran Khans Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, PTI) is giving both PML-N and PTI a run for their money.
Read: Politicians nervous as Imran Khan pushes for army takeover in Pakistan
Repeated clashes between PML-N and PPP have claimed several lives. Minister for electricity Faisal Mumtaz Rathore was attacked during a campaign meeting. And at an Eid Milan party, activists of both parties opened indiscriminate fire, and indulged in acts of arson. Scores of people including a former minister were injured.
As many as 427 candidates are in the race for the 41-elected seats in the 49-member PoK assembly, which has very limited powers. Of them, 328 are contesting in the 29 constituencies in PoK and 99 will be competing for 12 Kashmiri refugee constituencies spread across Pakistan. An estimated 21.81 lakh voters will decide their political fortunes.
While the PPP is going alone, the PML-N has entered into an alliance with Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) and Jammu Kashmir Peoples Party (JKPP). The Sharifs party tried to woo the Muslim conference (MC) chief, Sardar Attique but without success. The big brother wanted the Sardar to vacate his party strong holds for PML-N. This was not acceptable to the MC supremo, and he closed ranks with Imran Khans party. The new combine has fielded joint candidates for seven seats.
The army on Tuesday expressed regret for the deaths of two people in firing by its soldiers in south Kashmir, accusing a mob of violence.
The army deeply regrets, the unfortunate loss of life in the incident at Churat, Qaziund, where the troops were forced to open fire yesterday, when a large mob turned violent resorting to heavy stone pelting and attempted to snatch weapons from the soldiers, said an army statement.
Two people were killed on Monday evening in retaliatory firing after protesters threw stones at an army patrol. The killings take the death toll in ongoing protests to 44 even as curfew continued across the Valley.
The army appealed to the people to maintain peace and refrain from attacking security forces or their vehicles or establishments thus creating situations where the security forces are left with no option but to retaliate in self defence.
The army also pledges to provide all possible assistance to the bereaved families and to the persons injured in the unfortunate incident. An inquiry has been ordered into the incident, the statement said.
Protests erupted in Kashmir over the killing of Burhan Wani, a 22-year-old militant of the Hizbul Mujahideen militant group on July 9.
At least 10 paramilitary soldiers were killed and seven injured in an attack by Maoist rebels in a forest in Bihar, police said on Tuesday.
Officials said three Maoists were killed in the encounter that took place in Dumari Nala forest area on the border of Gaya and Aurangabad districts, 172km south of Patna, where the CRPF had launched a combing operation.
A team of Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel were trapped after the rebels triggered around 21 improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and came under heavy firing on Monday night, police said.
PK Thakur, the director-general of state police, said eight paramilitary soldiers were killed immediately and two of the five wounded died later in a hospital.
The bodies of three dead insurgents were recovered, he said.
The CRPF personnel were conducting anti-rebel operations in the area over the last two days. The CRPFs director general will visit Gaya on Tuesday to assess the situation.
Maoist rebels, known as Indias biggest internal security threat, operate in 20 states and have thousands of fighters, according to the home ministry.
The Maoists have been fighting for more than three decades in central and eastern India, staging hit-and-run attacks against authorities as they demand a greater share of wealth from the areas natural resources and more jobs for farmers and the poor.
Major Maoist strikes in Bihar June 10, 2012: CRPF trooper killed in a blast triggered by Maoists in a forest area in Gaya
CRPF trooper killed in a blast triggered by Maoists in a forest area in Gaya October 18, 2012: Six CRPF men killed, eight wounded in landmine blasts and gun battle near Barha village in Gaya
Six CRPF men killed, eight wounded in landmine blasts and gun battle near Barha village in Gaya December 3, 2013: Eight policemen killed in Aurangabad district
Eight policemen killed in Aurangabad district July 4, 2014: Deputy commandant HK Jha killed in Lakhari village in Jamui district
Deputy commandant HK Jha killed in Lakhari village in Jamui district August 10, 2014: Two CRPF men killed, four wounded in landmine blast in Munger
Two CRPF men killed, four wounded in landmine blast in Munger February 24, 2015: Two CoBRA troopers killed, 10 wounded as Maoits blow up a bus in Gaya district
(with inputs from Ruchir Kumar in Patna and agencies)
In a sharp exchange between the Congress and the government, the Opposition party on Tuesday accused the Centre of trying to grab power through the back door in states.
Congress floor leader Mallikarjun Kharge attacked the Centre in Lok Sabha over the political crises in Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhandwhere the Congress governments were dismissed but later returned to power in floor tests.
You have decided to execute your Congress-mukt (Congress-free) slogan by any means. Wherever you get a chance, you destabilise governments and work to replace them with yours. You did so in Uttarakhand and Arunachal and tried in Manipur and Himachal Pradesh too, Kharge said.
Read | Rajnath blames Congress for political instability in Uttarakhand, Arunachal
Refuting the charges, home minister Rajnath Singh squarely put the onus on the Congress for the instability in Uttarakhand and Arunachal Pradesh. The unfortunate crisis in Uttarakhand happened only because of internal rift in the Congress. Nine Congress MLAs had opposed their own government. In Arunachal Pradesh, the BJP didnt try to break the government but the Congress leaders showed no confidence in their government, Singh said.
The Congress staged a walk-out in protest but not before telling the government that the recent SC order asking for a floor test in Arunachal was a slap for the Centre. The SC has slapped you and, hopefully, you will not do such things again, Kharge said.
Taunting the Congress in return for being unable to keep its flock together, the home minister said, If your boat has hole then it will definitely sink. You cant blame the water.
The Maoist attack in Bihar on Monday that killed 10 CRPF jawans has not only left a trail of bodies and dismembered limbs, but also stumped the authorities in the state.
Security forces on Tuesday were busy scouring for evidence on the hilly terrain close to the Aurangabad-Gaya border to piece together the chain of events that resulted in the heavy casualties.
The area where the encounter took place is close to the Lutma hill dividing Bihar and Jharkhand, and 3 km south of Amas town on the Grand Trunk Road.
Combing operations by CRPF CoBRA battalion in Aurangabad on Tuesday (above and below). (HT Photos)
Police said the CRPF team had forayed deep into the jungles around Saundaha to track down Maoists who had reportedly gathered atop a hill.
The first team set out around 9 am and waded some 15 km deep into the jungles. Another team was to join them as reinforcement. It was then that the Maoists struck.
According to PK Thakur, the state police chief, the rebels hiding in the hills first opened fire at a group of 25 CRPF personnel as they were walking up the hill.
Around 11 am we got first information about the Maoists engaging security personnel in a gun battle. We sent a helicopter, but it was unable to evacuate our people as the Maoists were firing heavily on the jawans, Gaya district magistrate Ravi Kumar said.
Sometime between 11am and 6pm the duration of the gun battle the Maoists detonated IEDs, inflicting heavy casualties.
The Maoists had planted several IEDs along a narrow passage, which the CRPF jawans were trying to negotiate on foot, Thakur told HT. They had specific information about the Maoists activity but were perhaps caught on the wrong foot due to the treacherous terrain.
A IAF chopper waits to airlift bodies of CRPF men. (HT Photo)
The gunfight also left five men of the Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (CoBRA) injured. Three with serious injuries were airlifted to Patna Medical College and Hospital. Bodies of the three Maoists killed in the gunfight have been recovered, Thakur added.
According to the police, the region is typical guerrilla country, where security forces either use motorcycles or patrol on foot to avoid landmines laid by Maoists. They also avoid concrete roads since the Maoists are known to plant bombs for detonating at their convenience.
Hills and dense forests separate Bihar from Jharkhand and offer a safe hiding place to Maoists who are well-acquainted with the topography.
Police said the area has been categorised as disturbed since the 1980s, especially after the advent of the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC), which merged with the Peoples War Group in 2004 to form the CPI-Maoist.
The Maoists have used the hills to make ingress and exit from Jharkhand after targeting security forces and their assets and police operations are mainly restricted to day time, due to lack of night vision devices and the fear of landmines.
Read | Bihar: 10 CRPF men killed in Maoist attack, bodies of 3 rebels found
The Indian Coast Guard (ICG) while patrolling near the Narcondum Island in the Andamans, seized a suspicious Myanmarese boat along with 11 crew members in a late night operation.
On Monday night, the Coast Guard ships were on a routine patrol when they sighted the boat.
When asked to stop and identify themselves, the boat reportedly did not respond and increased the speed to run away.
According to reports, the crew members of the boat were also seen throwing some items overboard into the sea, causing more suspicion, thereafter the Coast Guard ships fired warning shots across the bow of the boat to forcefully stop them.
Finally, the boat stopped and surrendered after approximately two hours of chase.
The vessel is suspected to be involved in human trafficking, as large number of used clothes of men and women have been found onboard.
The Indian Coast Guard has been maintaining constant vigil in maritime zones of India by deploying ships and aircraft regularly to monitor suspicious activities in Indian waters.
China said on Monday it was concerned about casualties in Kashmir and reiterated its position that India and Pakistan should resolve the issue through dialogue.
In a statement published on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, China said the Kashmir-issue was a left-over from history.
We (China) are equally concerned about the casualties in the clash, and hope that relevant incident will be handled properly. The Kashmir issue is left over from history. China holds a consistent stance and hopes relevant parties will address the issue peacefully through dialogue, the statement said.
In an earlier report, published by the official news agency, Xinhua, it said: China on Monday called for proper settlement of clashes in Indian-controlled Kashmir, which have left more than 40 people dead.
Foreign ministry spokesperson Lu Kang was quoted as saying: Chinese side is concerned about the deaths and casualties caused by the incident.
Stressing that China's position on the Kashmir issue has been consistent, Lu said the Chinese side hopes relevant parties can resolve the issue through peaceful means, the statement said.
The Xinhua report said that clashes between civilians and Indian security forces broke out after the killing of 22-year-old Burhan Wani of the militant group Hizbul Mujahideen in Indian-controlled Kashmir during a police operation on July 8.
It added: More than 40 people have been killed and nearly 2,000 others injured so far during the clashes.
More than 40 people died and around 1500 injured in a spate of violence in Kashmir triggered by the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen militant commander Burhaan Wani on July 8, which sparked protests across the Valley. Normal life has been paralysed in Kashmir due to the curfew and a strike call by separatists.
New Delhi: The use of animal parts or product in silver leaf (chandi ka varq) has been banned from August 1, 2016 by Indias top food regulator.
Silver leaf, which is used to garnish Indian sweets, traditional desserts and spices such as cardamom and paan etc, is traditionally manufactured by placing silver between the intestines of animals obtained from slaughterhouses and hammering it thin .
The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) issued a gazette notification on Tuesday that said silver leaf cannot be manufactured using any animal material of animal origin at any stage.
State food regulators will take action against manufacturers who still use animal parts to make chandi varq, said a senior official at FSSAI.
Modern machinery is equipped of manufacturing fine silver leaves, which bypasses the traditional method.
The notification has also fixed norms for thickness, weight and purity of silver to ensure hazardous aluminium foil is not passed off as silver leaf.
The sheet needs to be of uniform thickness, free from creases and folds; have weight of silver foil up to 2.8 gm/sq-m; and silver content of minimum 999/1000 fineness, says the notification.
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It was a death trap -- a hostile terrain and at a forest stretch booby-trapped with landmines that the CRPFs elite commandos walked into in Bihars remote south on Monday.
As the group of 25 security personnel made their way to the hilltop in a forested area near Dumri Nala along the Gaya-Aurangabad border where Maoists were holding a meeting, the rebels hiding in the hills triggered a series of blasts, killing 10 men, state police chief PK Thakur said.
The Maoists had laid several IEDs on a narrow passage, which the CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force) jawans were trying to negotiate on foot, the police chief told HT. They had specific information about the Maoists activity but perhaps, they were caught on the wrong foot due to the treacherous terrain, he said.
The police party had almost 100 troops. The first group got trapped in an area of land mines and there were serial blasts. The terrain is very difficult there and the extremists were on higher ground, news agency Reuters quoted Thakur as saying.
Read: Bihar: 10 CRPF men killed in Maoist attack, bodies of 3 rebels found
The 10-hour gunfight that started at 11am also left five men of the Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (CoBRA) injured. Three with serious injuries were airlifted to Patna medical college and hospital. Three Maoists were killed in the gunfight and their bodies recovered, he said.
Search operations could only be launched Tuesday morning as there was a heavy exchange of fire the evening before.
Hills and dense forests separate Bihar from Jharkhand and offer a safe hiding place to Maoists who are well acquainted with the topography.
The ambush is significant. In 2015 the Bihar government claimed arresting 527 Maoists, the highest in a year since 2010. According to a union home ministry report, last year also witnessed lowest Maoist violence, which has been plaguing several parts of the country for many years.
Read: Jharkhand joins Bihar in anti-Maoist ops after rebels kill 10 CRPF men
The rebels have for decades launched violent strikes and especially targeted security forces from camps in forests and remote areas of central and eastern India.
Bihar, too, has been at the receiving end but Mondays toll is the highest in two years.
The DGP said it was the CRPF that started the attack. First there were three casualties on the Maoists side and the incident happened after the CRPF men advanced towards them in the heavily forested area, he said.
Eight jawans died on the spot, two succumbed to injuries while being taken to hospital, the police chief said.
In February 2015, two CoBRA troopers were killed and 12 injured when Maoits blew up a mini-bus in Gaya district.
Twenty-two of the 38 Bihar districts have a presence of the Left-wing extremists. The CPRF is deployed in many of these areas including Aurangabad, Gaya Jamui and Banka.
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Punjab Congress chief Amarinder Singh on Tuesday said former Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Navjot Singh Sidhu was welcome to join the party if he so desired.
Congress partys doors are open for everyone, he told reporters when asked if he would welcome Sidhu to the Congress fold.
He, however, said there was no communication between him and Sidhu so far. Asked if any Congress leader was in touch with Sidhu, he said, Not to my knowledge.
Amarinder said Sidhu, who hails from Patiala, had a Congress background as his father, late Bhagwant Singh Sidhu, had been an office-bearer of the District Congress Committee.
When my mother was Patiala DCC chief, Sidhus father was her general secretary, he said, referring to the association the Sidhu family had with the Congress.
When asked if he had met Sidhu in the recent past, Amarinder said, We are both from Patiala and we are both Sidhus. I dont remember having met him for a long time now.
On whether Congress would invite the former Amritsar MP to join the party, the PCC chief said, He is yet to resign from the BJP.
In a jolt to the BJP ahead of Punjab elections, Sidhu on Monday resigned his Rajya Sabha membership, saying the burden is over.
Read | Sidhus resignation to have no impact on Punjab polls: Sukhbir Badal
He is widely speculated to join the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and be its face in Punjab, though party chief Arvind Kejriwal indicated projecting him as chief ministerial candidate would be premature.
Sidhu on Tuesday kept himself away from the media while his wife Navjot Kaur, a BJP MLA, did all the talking, saying his resignation from the Rajya Sabha meant he has also quit the party and the only option for them now was to join the AAP.
Read | Sidhus wife says he has left BJP, rules out comeback, hints at AAP tilt
Union minister of road transport, highways and shipping, Nitin Gadkari concluded his weeklong whirlwind official visit to the US, successfully extracting assurances from infrastructure and investment companies to provide the necessary technical expertise as well as capital to further boost the robust Indian maritime, roads and highways sectors.
Gadkari held a series of productive interactions with investment bankers, fund managers and captains of trade and industry in infrastructure sector at business platforms in Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and placed on record convincing statistics of the rapid growth of this sector under the dynamic leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which the potential American investors found highly exciting and rewarding.
Gadkari outlined governments policy initiatives and his own vision to strengthen Indias infrastructure sector and offered lucrative investment opportunities in road and highways construction and port-led industrialisation listing the incentives to the U.S. industry for joint ventures and collaborations on Public Private Partnership (PPP) model.
He dispelled apprehensions with regard to bottle necks and red tape in Indias administrative set up and assured that Prime Minister Modi has made the countrys infrastructure development top-most priority of his government.
India, under Prime Minister Modi, the minister asserted, remains committed to improving the countrys road, highways, and port connectivity in a time-bound, result oriented, corruption-free and transparent manner through e-governance and fast-tracking decision-making process.
Gadkari also explained the new highways under construction in the difficult terrains of Jammu, Kashmir & Ladakh, Himalayas, the North-Eastern Region and coastal areas and the financing mechanisms under PPP models, framing of policies for logistics parks and modernisation of roads.
Nitin Gadkari with officials during a visit to Mississippi Inland Waterways on Thursday. (PTI)
Gadkari held official talks with US Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx and sought cooperation in sharing the intelligent traffic systems and transfer of technology in road engineering, use of IT in reducing road accidents, centrally controlled traffic light surveillance systems for road safety.
He also visited Tesla and proposed joint ventures between the electric car manufacturers and the Indian automobile companies with a view to introducing pollution free road transport in India, especially commercial and public motor vehicles.
He offered Tesla to make India their Asia manufacturing hub and offered land near major Indian ports to facilitate export of their vehicles to South and South East Asian countries.
Gadkari said Indian was committed to encouraging alternate pollution free transport in the country by providing incentives to bio-fuel, CNG, Ethanol and electric vehicles.
Gadkari said he was returning home fully satisfied with his visit which has broken new grounds in the bilateral ties between India and the US and given the much needed impetus to cooperation in the field of infrastructure, particularly road transport, highways and shipping sectors.
Gujarat chief minister Anandiben Patel has ordered a CBI probe in the case of a Dalit family being assaulted for allegedly skinning a dead cow in the Gir Somnath district of the state.
Patel called for a designated court to be set in consultation with the high court to ensure speedy trial in the matter.
She also asked for a special public prosecutor to take up the case, adding that the investigating officer has to submit the charge sheet to the court in 60 days.
The CM added that the state government would bear all the medical expenses of the victims.
On July 11, the four Dalit youths were thrashed by a group claiming to be from the Shiv Sena in four Dalit youths in Gir-Somnath districts Samadhiyala village on July 11 for allegedly slaughtering a cow. The youth explained they were skinning dead animals, as was their traditional vocation, but they were beaten with iron rods and dragged for half a kilometre behind an SUV by the assailants.
A video clip of the incident was shared widely on social media, sparking outrage across the country.
A case was registered under the Una Police Station on the same day under Sections 307, 323, 324, 395 and 504 of the Indian Penal Code, Gujarat Police Act Section 135, Section 3 (2) (v)-Prevention of Atrocities Act against six persons by Vasarambhai Balubhai Sarvaiya of Mota Samdiyala village of Una taluka of Gir Somnath district.
The district officials including the District Collector had visited the hospital and met the victims and are currently supervising all necessary action.
Read: Five attempt suicide in Rajkot to protest inaction in Dalit atrocity case, held
As many as seven persons were undergoing treatment. Three were undergoing treatment in Junagadh Hospital and four in Una Civil Hospital. Three of the persons admitted to Una Civil Hospital have since been referred from Una to Rajkot Civil Hospital and one patient has been discharged. As of date, two persons are still hospital undergoing treatment.
Parliamentary secretary Jethabhai Solanki visited the victims earlier on July 12, while former Congress MLA from Somnath Assembly Jashabhai Barad visited the patients and met the family members earlier on July 13.
The investigation handled Deputy Superintendent of Police (SC/ST cell) have arrested as many as eight persons in this regard.
In view of alleged mishandling, one police inspector and two assistant sub-inspectors and one head constable were suspended earlier on July 14 and July 17 respectively for dereliction of duty.
A compensation of Rs 1 lakh was paid on the basis of registration of offence earlier on July 14.
Jharkhand Armed Police joined the Central Reserve Police Force and Bihar police as they resumed an anti-Maoist combing operation after at least 10 CRPF soldiers were killed in an attack by the rebels in a forest in Bihar.
Officials said four Maoists were also killed in the nearly 10-hour operation that took place in Dumari Nala forest area on the border of Gaya and Aurangabad districts, 172km south of Patna, where the CRPF had launched a combing operation. Bodies of three Maoists have been recovered so far.
Union home minister Rajnath Singh spoke to Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar about the incident on Tuesday morning. Jharkhand rushed in reinforcement after the Singh and Kumar spoke over the phone.
We have sought help from Jharkhand. The JAP has been asked to converge on the forest area from Palamu and Chatra side, Patna zonal inspector general (central zone) NH Khan said.
Police said the operation was launched two days ago and the 205th Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (CoBRA) zeroed in on the rebels in the dense forests of Langarahi and Panchrukhia around Dumri Nala.
They were acting on an intelligence input that Sudhakaran, a top Maoist commander, was inducted into the region to assist Sandeep Ji, the zonal commander to plot a spectacular strike. Sandeep Ji carries a reward of Rs 5 lakh on his head.
Khan said that the Maoists used 35 improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Automatic weapons, an AK 47 assault rifle, a grenade and an Insas rifle were reportedly recovered from the scene.
All the seven injured soldiers are reported to be out of danger. Khan said two others were on their way to Anugrah Narayan Magadh Medical College Hospital (ANMMCH) in Gaya from the Amas base camp of the CRPF.
Pancharam Arya (26), Ravi Shankar Yadav (32), Udaybhan Singh (32) are being treated in Patna and Mithun Kumar Goswami (21) and DS Rao (26) have been admitted to the ANMMCH.
Goswami, who has a splinter injury on his leg, said the blasts took place when additional reinforcement was being sent there. He said heavy casualties were reported during the blasts.
Sources said the bodies of the soldiers had to be carried on foot for 20 km from the interiors of the jungle to Amas, from where they were brought on a tractor and then on an ambulance.
Maoist rebels, known as Indias biggest internal security threat, operate in 20 states and have thousands of fighters, according to the home ministry.
They have been fighting for more than three decades in central and eastern India, staging hit-and-run attacks against authorities as they demand a greater share of wealth from the areas natural resources and more jobs for farmers and the poor.
The Kerala high court on Monday upheld a girls expulsion from college for living with her lover, polarising the debate over live-in relationships.
Activists and some students flayed the verdict for being discriminatory and against a Supreme Court ruling on live-in relationships, but many parents and college authorities hailed it as necessary for discipline on campus.
The 19-year-old girl, a student of Mar Thoma College of Science and Technology near Kollam (South Kerala), had approached the court after the college rusticated her citing her live-in relationship with a 20-year-old youth who was studying in the same college.
The girl was expelled from college after the couple was apprehended by police from hotel on a missing person complaint filed by her parents. No arrests were made.
She submitted before the high court that she was in the fourth semester, and should be re-admitted given good academic track record. But the single-bench headed by justice K Vinod Chandran turned down her plea.
This is not a mere case of falling in love two students taking a drastic step of eloping and living together without contracting a marriage. When taking such a drastic step for the sake of love, they should also be ready to face consequences, the court observed while upholding the decision of the college.
The court noted that the colleges concern of setting an example for other students and ensuring discipline could also not be brushed aside. Earlier, the University of Kerala, to which the college is affiliated, had refused to interfere with the action taken by the college management.
The court requested the college to explore all possibilities of re-admitting the student with some conditions, but the college expressed helplessness claiming such a precedent would set a bad example.
We are not against live-in relationships. But discipline is the touchstone of any educational institution. Reputation is essential for a privately-run institution like this, said principal Prof KC Mathew.
The decision against the right of two consenting adults has draw flaw from women rights activists, many whom have pledged their support to the girl.
Last year, the Supreme Court had ruled that live-in relationship is an accepted norm in society and it does not attract any penal action, a woman activist in Kochi. The minor irritant here is the boy is yet to complete 21 years. But it doesnt mean the poor girl should be thrown out of her college.
The girls counsel KV Anil Kumar said: We are planning to move an appeal either in a division bench or the Supreme Court. Otherwise the judgment will affect the career of a bright student who scored more than 80% marks in all semesters.
He claimed the college authorities initially promised to allow the girl to continue her studies there but later backtracked.
The boy has already transferred out of the college, he added, and the parents of the couple have agreed to their marriage once the boy turns 21.
The #IAmTrolledHelp for women, started by women and child development minister Maneka Gandhi to tackle online bullying, stalking and abuse, has drawn many complaints which are simply hilarious and unconnected to the helpline created for the purpose.
Seeking help on my home mortgage case in United Kingdom and demanding action against my husband, says one complaint.
Another pleads, Maneka ji, please ensure that people do not unnecessarily bother Madhuri Dixit with nasty comments. She is a good actress.
The helpline along with a special cyber cell was started by the WCD ministry on July 6. Out of the 200 complaints that have landed at mwcd@gov.in so far, the cell has filtered about 30 actionable ones and managed to get two Twitter accounts blocked.
Most of the actionable complaints involve online stalking and indecent behaviour. For instance, a girl has written how after she accepted a friend request from a man on Facebook, he has bombarded her FB page with pornographic pictures. She had sent screenshots of the page. We have forwarded the complaint to FB and also told the girl to lodge a police complaint, said one of the staffers manning the helpline who did not want to be named.
The ministry also follows up the complaints with the police.
Dealing with serious complaints is the easy part of the job for the two-member staff manning the helpline. We follow the standard operating procedure given to us. Once we filter a serious complaint, we forward it to Twitter. Depending on the nature of complaint, Twitter decides to block or suspend the account, said the staffer.
But its complaints like the one from the Madhuri Dixit fan that leave the team foxed. The complainant wants the minister to ensure that the Bollywood star is not harassed.
On a given day, we receive 25-30 complaints that range from outright ridiculous to sundry complaints seeking help on a relationship gone bad or some domestic violence issue, said the second staffer. We receive a lot of complaints about domestic violence which we forward to the ministrys cell that handles such cases, the staffer added.
Among the complainants was a girl who claimed she was being harassed by her neighbours for feeding street dogs.Another woman wanted the ministry to sort out a fight she had with a friend.
Maneka Gandhi had initially asked women who have been at the receiving end of online abuse, to complain to her directly at gandhim@nic.in, but later created a dedicated email address for the purpose. Though the move has been welcomed by women at the receiving end of online abuse, it has not gone down well with a section of the BJP and the RSS.
A senior BJP functionary had told Hindustan Times last week that though the party is firm that there should be no abuse or intimidation on platforms such as Twitter, there is an overwhelming concern over the implications of the government stepping in. It is for the platforms to take action against abuse, or else the mandate lies with law-enforcement agencies.
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A case of sedition has been registered against the management of a private school in Budhar town in the district for allegedly marking Jammu and Kashmir incorrectly on Indias map in the school diary.
Acting on the complaint of Shrikrishna Gupta, the case was registered against Green Wales School, its director Mohammad Sharif Niyazi, principal Govind Chand Das and publisher of the diary Arun Kumar Agrawal.
Budhar police station in-charge Satish Dwivedi said the three men were arrested and a local court sent them in judicial custody for 14 days on Monday.
The case was registered under IPC sections 124A (sedition), he added.
The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) on Tuesday issued notices to the home ministry and the Jammu and Kashmir government, seeking reports within two weeks on casualties in connection with the ongoing violence in the state.
The commission has taken suo motu cognisance of media reports about numerous casualties and injuries in the clashes between the protesters and the security forces in the Valley in Jammu and Kashmir.
It has observed that it is closely watching the incidents of violence in the aftermath of the killing of alleged militant Burhan Wani in an encounter with the security forces on July 8, 2016, the NHRC said in a statement.
Expressing its utmost concern over the developments, the Commission has issued notices to the Union Home Secretary and the Chief Secretary and government of Jammu and Kashmir calling for reports in the matter. The Commission has given two weeks to respond, it said.
Read | Amid violence and curfews, Kashmiris flock to hospitals to donate blood
Read | Army says it deeply regrets death of Kashmiri protesters in firing
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Tuesday filed a charge-sheet before a special court against 16 suspected Islamic State (IS) operatives, arrested from across the country allegedly on the charges of recruiting and financing people to join the terror group.
Sources said the agency filed the charge-sheet before district judge Amar Nath in which it outlined the role of all the accused in a larger conspiracy of the IS to further its ideology.
The agency claimed members of the banned terror group, in connivance with a few resident and non-resident Indians, have been indulging in identification, radicalisation, recruitment and training, a source said.
The final report also alleged that some Indian youths were sent by the accused to countries such as Syria, Lybia and Iraq to carry out terror acts.
It also claimed the accused, who are currently in judicial custody, were using different internet channels and services, telephone and one-on-one meetings to further the outfits ideology.
The accused persons against whom the agency filed the charge-sheet include Mohd Aleem, Mohd Obaidullah Khan, Nafees Khan, Mohd Shareef Moinuddin Khan, Asif Ali, Najmul Huda, Mudabbir Mushtaq Shaikh, Mohd Abdul Ahad, Suhail Ahmed, Syed Mujahid, Mohd Hussain Khan, Mohd Afzal, Imran and Abu Anas.
They were arrested under various sections of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and the Indian Penal Code (IPC). A case was registered by the NIA on December 9 last year against unknown and unidentified persons involved in the activities of IS in India and other Asian countries.
The NIA had earlier filed a charge-sheet against 23-year-old Naser Packeer, outlining his modus operandi in identifying, radicalising, recruiting and sending Indians to join the terrorists in Syria and Iraq.
On October 5, 2015, Packeer was apprehended in Sudan for concealing his identity and trying to join the IS in Syria. He was deported to India on December 10, 2015.
The agency has claimed that several incriminating documents and articles, including a laptop, mobile phones, pen drives and DVDs have been recovered from the accused. An FIR in the matter was filed on December 9 last year on inputs received from the ministry of home affairs.
Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on Tuesday said he admired Navjot Singh Sidhus courage in resigning from the Rajya Sabha.
I admire his courage. I think all good people should resign from the BJP, he said.
Kejriwal denied that Sidhu was set to become Aam Aadmi Partys (AAP) chief ministerial face in Punjab and said that all such talk was premature. There is nothing of this sort yet. Nothing has been decided, he said.
While speaking at the launch of the book Arvind Kejriwal and the Aam Aadmi Party, penned by one his IIT Kharagpur batchmates, the AAP national convener brushed aside Sidhus criticism of him in the past.
Read| Sidhus wife says he has left BJP, rules out comeback, hints at AAP tilt
Following Sidhus decision to resign from the Upper House on Monday, AAPs Punjab convener Sucha Singh Chhotepur had tweeted that the three-time MP and his wife were welcome to join AAP.
Kejriwal too had taken to Twitter, to salute Sidhu. People can give their right hand for an RS (Rajya Sabha) seat. Ever seen a sitting RS MP resigning to save his state? I salute Sidhu ji for his courage, he tweeted.
Read| HT Analysis: The importance of being Navjot Singh Sidhu
The tug of war between West Bengal and Odisha over rasogolla has reached a new height with the neighbouring states celebration of Rasagola Dibas and its claim that the syrupy, spongy sweet originated in Odisha.
On Sunday, Odisha celebrated the event for the second year in succession on the occasion of Niladri Bije when Lord Jagannath, Balabhadra and Subhadra enter the Jagannath temple after their nine-day long annual Rath Yatra to their aunts house.
People took to social media to celebrate Rasagola Dibasa and noted sand artist Sudarsan Pattnaik created a sand art at Puri beach on the occasion.
May your life be more sweeter than Rasogolla. And remember Rasogolla origin is Odisha not WB #RasogolaDibasa #JaiJagganath #HappyEating Rajnikant Speaks (@npratapreddy13) 17 July 2016
This is ridiculous. Rasogolla is unique to Bengal, and Pahala Rasgulla, which Odisha claims to be its speciality, is not the same thing. Historical researchers have shown that rasogolla originated in Bengal, Dhiman Das of KC Das and Co said. His ancestor, Nobin Chandra Das, is widely regarded as the man who invented rasogolla.
Read: Revenge is sweet: How Bengalis made rosogolla their own
The Patent Information Centre of West Bengal governments department of science and technology applied for Geographical Indication (GI) status for Banglar Rasogolla on September 18, 2015. Since then, there have been several rounds of communications between the central governments Geographical Indications Registry and the states Patent Information Centre.
In its application for GI status, the state government has described the uniqueness of Banglar Rasogolla as a syrupy dessert/sweet popular in all over West Bengal as well as India and abroad. It is made with dumplings of chhana (Indian cottage cheese) dough, cooked in a light syrup made of sugar. The size of rasogolla varies from 37-62 cm approx. The spongy characteristic is the unique speciality for Banglar Rasogolla, it said.
Read: Why Bengal, Odishas claim to rasgulla is not rational
While Odisha is yet to apply for the GI status, the recent report by a committee set up by the state governments department of science and technology said that it has found a new evidence to prove that the sweet originated in the state.
Odisha science and technology minister Pradip Kumar Panigrahi recently said the state would apply for rasogollas GI status soon. Odisha claims rasogolla was invented there more than 500 years ago.
There is unnecessary hype over Odishas claim on rasogolla. We are the only state to apply for its GI status and Odisha has not even applied for it. We have submitted with the concerned agency every document necessary, Mohua Homchoudhury of Bengals Patent Information Centre told Hindustan Times.
The department claimed that more than 1,00,000 sweet makers of different categories across the state are engaged in making rasogolla.
Human resource development minister Prakash Javadekar felicitated parliamentarians who have contributed to the field of teaching on the occasion of Guru Purnima on Tuesday.
Javadekar said Parliament is full of luminaries from various fields, be it education, medicine or other professions, as against what is generally projected. About 50 such MPs were invited by the minister of whom 30 attended.
Those felicitated were given a Tulsi plant and a CD containing Mahatma Gandhis works.
Javadekar with all the MPs from academic background on Guru Purnima. (Arvind Yadav/ HT Photo )
Deputy chairperson of Rajya Sabha PJ Kurien, Union minister Jitendra Singh, Congress MP Karan Singh, former minister KV Thomas, TMC MP Saugata Roy and BJP MP Subramanian Swamy were among the MPs who were felicitated.
The move, though welcomed by MPs, drew flak from academicians. Why should you expect a Hindutva brigade to celebrate or do something secular? noted historian DN Jha said. He brushed aside the function, saying such celebrations did not have any importance in academic circles. A number of professors and teachers said the government should keep itself away from such events.
Border Security Force (BSF) apprehended a Pakistan national on Monday night after he crossed the International Border and entered the Arnia sub-sector of RS Pura sector in Jammu district.
At around 10.30 pm on Monday night, BSF personnel noticed a man entering Indian Territory in the Arnia sub-sector. They immediately swung into action and nabbed him, a BSF spokesperson said.
The individual has been identified as 25-year-old Waris, who lived in a village near Zafarwal Tehsil of Narowal district in Pakistans Punjab province.
During preliminary questioning, he told us that he had a family feud back home and in a fit of rage left the house and unknowingly crossed the border. Various agencies are questioning him, the spokesperson added.
Waris appears to be mentally stable and nothing incriminating was found from him, he added.
Agencies recovered Rs 250 in Pakistani currency and a tobacco pouch from him.
Home minister Rajnath Singh blamed the Congress on Tuesday over the political uncertainty in Uttarakhand and Arunachal Pradesh. He also refuted Congress allegations that the BJP tried to topple its governments in these two states.
On the first day of the monsoon session on Monday, the Rajya Sabha discussed about the Kashmir unrest that erupted after the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani. The Upper House also passed The Regional Centre for Biotechnology Bill, 2016.
A total of 25 bills, including the crucial GST Bill, are expected to come up for consideration and passage during the monsoon session. Here are the live updates from the second day of the monsoon session:
Updates from the Parliament
1pm: Rajya Sabha adjourned till 2pm.
12.40pm: It was Congress that always tried to destabilise elected governments: Rajnath Singh says responding to Congress charge on the Arunachal issue.
Congress stages walk out from Lok Sabha following HM Rajnath Singh's statement on Congress's allegations regarding #ArunachalPradesh ANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2016
12.10pm: Congress questions government on Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhnd crises. This government destabilises popular governments, says Mallikarjun Kharge.
12noon: We are all working on how to deal with cyber crime, says Home minister Rajnath Singh in Lok Sabha.
11.10am: Zero Hour begins in Rajya Sabha. Sitaram Yechury raises the issue of demolition of Ambedkar Bhavan in Maharashtra.
11am: Rajya Sabha proceedings begin. New members take oath.
The thrashing of Dalits in Una last week sparked protests among the Scheduled Castes with several incidents of stone-pelting and road blockades reported from many parts of Gujarat on Tuesday. The pelting and burning of buses led to the cancellation of transport services in Saurashtra.
A policeman was also killed in the violence. Head constable with local crime branch, Pankaj Amreli, was injured in the stone-pelting. He died during treatment at Rajkot hospital, police said.
The police arrested one more person who attempted suicide in Gondal town of Rajkot. He was arrested and admitted to the government hospital. His condition is stable, said an official from the state police control room. Official also said that local bus services such as the BRTS were affected due to stone-pelting in Malavianagar and Puneetnagar areas of Rajkot city. A local bus was damaged by protesters even in Chandkheda region of Ahmedabad.
The Gujarat State Roads and Transportation Corporation (GSRTC) had to cancel all the buses on the Saurashtra Rajkot route. Buses from Jamnagar, Junagadh, Amreli and Porbandar leaving for Rajkot were cancelled on advise of the police department. We are keeping a watch on the situation in coordinating with the police and will resume the services only after clearance from them, said GSRTC chief traffic and chief commercial officer JH Solanki.
Condemning the Una incident, opposition Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) called for a protest rally on Wednesday. I see a clear hand of the BJP in the incident, where police were mute spectators, Congress leader Shankersinh Vaghela said. In Surendranagar, agitators blocked a highway by putting carcass of a cow in the middle of the road, police said.
(With inputs from agencies)
Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi may have to stand trial in a defamation case for blaming the RSS for Mahatma Gandhis assassination after the Supreme Court on Tuesday told him, You cant make wholesale denunciation of an organisation.
The courts observation came on Gandhis petition that has sought quashing of proceedings against him in a Maharashtra court.
There is a difference between Nathuram Godse killing Mahatma Gandhi and the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh) killing him, a bench headed by justice Dipak Misra said, referring to the ideological parent of the BJP.
You must face trial, case must be decided on merits whether what you spoke was for public good or not.
Gandhis counsel sought to justify the remarks, arguing they were historical facts. They are part of government records and also a judgment delivered by the Bombay high court, senior advocate Harin Raval said.
The court fixed July 27 as the next date of hearing, turning down the 46-year-old leaders request to defer the case for two weeks as senior advocate Kapil Sibal was unavailable.
Let someone else argue the matter, said the bench, also comprising justice RF Nariman. The Amethi MP was not present in the court.
Purpose of law is not to turn citizens into litigants, history is the biggest enemy of privacy, the bench said, pointing that law couldnt be misused even thought the court had upheld criminalisation of defamatory speech.
Gandhi was one of the petitioners who had challenged the criminal defamation law.
Senior advocate MN Krishnamani, counsel for complainant Rajesh Kunte, said his client would withdraw the case if Gandhi apologised for his remarks. Krishnamani had made a similar submission during the previous hearing. Gandhi has, so far, refused to apologies.
An RSS activist, Kunte had in March 2014 filed a complaint against Gandhi in a Maharashtra court, alleging he had told an election rally that RSS people killed Gandhiji.
The Congress leader had in May 2015 challenged the complaint in the Supreme Court.
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Home minister Rajnath Singh blamed the Congress on Tuesday for political instability in Uttarakhand and Arunachal Pradesh.
Replying to the principal Opposition partys attacks in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday, the home minister refuted allegations that the BJP tried to topple its governments in Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand.
If any party has an old habit of toppling popular government, it is not the BJP but the Congress. The Congress has dismissed 105 elected governments in this country. How can they accuse us? Singh said amid a protest from the Congress.
The home minister maintained that no popular government should be destabilised, adding the Congress was unable to keep its flock together.
The unfortunate crisis in Uttarakhand happened only because of internal rift in the Congress. Nine Congress MLAs had opposed its own government. In Arunachal Pradesh, the BJP didnt try to break the government but the Congress leaders showed no-confidence in their government, Singh said.
Earlier, Congress floor leader in the Lok Sabha, Mallikarjun Kharge, accused the BJP of engineering a conspiracy to topple elected governments in Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. In both states, the Congress came back to power in floor tests after brief periods of the Presidents rule.
If your boat has a hole, then it will definitely sink. You cant blame the water, Singh said, referring to rebellions within the Congress in the two states.
Babus will need to be careful what they say, or draw, on social media.
The Centre on Tuesday proposed changes to the rulebook to explicitly treat criticism of government policies on social media as a violation of conduct rules. And the threat of disciplinary action is not limited to the written word. It includes caricatures that are uncharitable to the government too.
The proposal comes weeks after an IAS officer Ajay Gangwar liked a Facebook post critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and praised first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
Let me know the mistakes that Nehru should not have committed...Is it his mistake that he prevented all of us from becoming Hindu Talibani Rashtra in 1947?... he wrote in the post, an oblique rebuttal to continuing attacks on Nehru by BJP leaders.
Gangwar, who was Barwani collector, was transferred to the secretariat in Bhopal by the BJPs Madhya Pradesh government and told to give an explanation.
Government officials have always been barred from criticising government policy or making statements that embarrass the Centres relations with a state government or a foreign country.
But the provision only spoke about criticism made in a radio broadcast, public media (such as television) or documents. Social media was not clearly covered.
The change now fixes this gap.
The member of service shall also not make any such statement on television, social media or any other communication application, the draft rule, sent by the Centres department of personnel & training to state governments for their views, said. It will be applicable to anonymous and pseudonymous posts by officials too.
The restriction, however, is not unique to India.
Back in 2011, a British civil servant, identified at the end of a 7-month investigation, was dismissed for mocking ministers through an anonymous Twitter account. Next year, a Sergeant in the US Marines was sacked for a Facebook post critical of US President Barack Obama. In 2013, an immigration officer lost her job in Australia for posting tweets critical of the countrys asylum policy. She too had tweeted from an anonymous account but it didnt help.
In India, governments and courts have taken a more liberal view of officials criticising its policy.
A senior IAS officer serving in the central government who criticised the Election Commission in 2005 was only sent back to his cadre, West Bengal, in 2005. And the Supreme Court shielded another officer now fertilizer secretary VS Pandey -- from penalties in 2014 for remarks against corruption in the government in his petition.
A government source said the existing rules were primarily addressed at criticism made by officials in traditional television and print media, not the new media. The change primarily seeks to clarify the situation and not leave any scope for misinterpretation, he said.
For now, the changes are being made to the conduct rules for the three All India Services Indian Administrative Service, Indian Police Service and Indian Forest Service.
Once the government notifies the changes after reviewing suggestions from the state governments, similar changes will be made to a separate set of the conduct rules applicable for other employees too.
They paid for FB posts
January, 2016: A trainee civil police officer in Kochi is suspended for posting lewd comments on a Facebook photo of Malayalam actress Manju Warrier
February, 2016: A senior Assam police officer is suspended for posting comments against Muslims on Facebook
May, 2016: Barwani district collector Ajay Singh Gangwar is transferred by the Madhya Pradesh government for praising the countrys first prime minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, in a Facebook post
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The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a petition seeking a direction that elected lawmakers, apart from filing their assets at the time of contesting elections, also reveal the sources of their income.
A Lucknow-based non-profit organisation Lok Prahari has also asked for a direction to Parliament to consider amending the law to disqualify a lawmaker if he has a share or interest in a firm that enters into a business contract with the government or a public company.
A bench headed by justice J Chelameswar issued notices to the Centre and the Election Commission on the petition.
SN Sukhla, founder of Lok Prahari, pointed out that 113 members of Parliament (MPs) had shown themselves as social activists or housewives or those without any adequate source of income. However, their assets seemed to have gone up by 5-10 times, the petitioner said.
How is that possible? The source must be declared to enable the voters to decide whether the wealth acquired by the candidate is legitimate or not, Shukla told the bench.
During the previous hearing, the bench had advised Shukla to examine the conflict of interest issues arising from awarding of multi-crore government contracts to elected lawmakers.
How many people have contracts in the government? This is something which we should be worried about... People borrow hundreds and thousands of crores of rupees and when something goes wrong they fly away from the country, the bench had observed, asking Shukla to amend his petition.
Till 1950, Section 7(D) of the Representation of Peoples Act prevented a legislator from holding office even if he had 1% share in a government contract, the bench noted. But the provision was repealed in 1951.
Shukla told the bench he had not challenged the amendment as of now but would do so later. In this petition, I am, as of now, seeking changes in the way affidavits are filed, Shukla said.
The law, as it stands declared by the Supreme Court in a 2014 judgment, does not allow those with subsisting government contracts to contest elections.
As of now, the only requirement for a candidate is to declare his or her assets.
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A nine-judge constitution bench of the Supreme Court headed by Chief Justice TS Thakur will start hearing petitions on Tuesday by corporate houses challenging the imposition of entry tax by state governments, arguing it violated their constitutional right to carry out free trade and commerce.
There are about 2,000 petitions pending in the apex court since 2002, awaiting a final decision. Manufacturers and associations have challenged the constitutional validity of entry tax laws enacted by the states. They claim that Entry Tax breaches Article 301 of the Constitution which provides for freedom of trade, commerce and intercourse within the country.
The other members of the bench are justice AK Sikri, justice SA Bobde, justice Shiva Kirti Singh, justice NV Ramana, justice R Banumathi, justice AM Khanwilkar, justice DY Chandrachud and justice Ashok Bhushan.
Entry Tax is levied on movement of goods from one state to into another and is charged by the recipient state to protect its tax base.
The core constitutional question before the top court is whether the states have a right to levy entry tax on goods entering their territories. Corporate major including Reliance and Vedanta have assailed the practice and submitted that no party can impede free movement of goods within the boundaries of a single nation.
The Supreme Courts hearing comes at a time when the NDA government is all geared up to give a push to the Goods and Service Tax (GST) Bill in the monsoon session of Parliament. Should the bench agree with the petitioners and strike down the entry tax laws as unconstitutional, it will bring about large-scale changes in the taxation regime, making it more harmonious.
The judgement will also have huge financial ramifications. About Rs 30,000 crore is collected by states every year by way of entry tax. States such as Odisha earn around Rs 16,000 crore. Similarly the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai collects around Rs 7,500 crore annually through octroi levy - another form of entry tax.
Jindal Stainless Limited (JSL) was the first company to approach the top court in 2002 when it challenged the validity of the Haryana Local Area Development Tax Act, 2000. In 2010, a bench headed by then chief justice SH Kapadia had referred the matter to a constitution bench for a final decree. However, the bench was never constituted.
JSL said the constitution provides that no law, which imposes reasonable restrictions on the freedom of trade in public interest, would be brought before the state assembly without Presidents prior sanction.
The SC had on April 16, 2010 framed several questions, including the balancing of freedom of trade and commerce vis-a-vis the states authority to levy taxes under the Constitution.
Chief Justice Thakur had on May 17, while constituting the bench, observed: These matters have lingered. The time has come we must discuss (this issue)...There is no way we can escape this.
The court made it clear to the advocates that no adjournments will be given once the hearing starts. Lawyers have been advised to file their written submissions in the case in not more than 10 pages. The directions will ensure a speedy disposal of the petitions that have piled up in the top court over the years.
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Srinagar: The army on Tuesday expressed regret for the death of three civilians in firing by its troops and announced an inquiry into the incident, while a court directed the police to register a case against one of their own for the killing of a Srinagar resident.
The developments marked another day of tension in Kashmir as the toll touched 44, citizens had to go without newspapers despite the end of a three-day publication ban, and chief minister Mehbooba Mufti faced widespread criticism over her advisers claim that she had not approved the media blackout.
In Pakistan, Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Saeed led a Kashmir Caravan from Lahore to Islamabad to protest the deaths in Jammu and Kashmir, vowing to march to the Indian state. With the Nawaz Sharif government planning to observe a black day to express solidarity with Kashmiris on Wednesday, strict restrictions are expected to be imposed in the Valley .
Terming the civilian deaths on Monday in south Kashmirs Qazigund unfortunate, a defence spokesman said, The army deeply regrets the unfortunate loss of life in the incident where troops were forced to open fire when a mob turned violent, resorting to heavy stone-pelting, and attempted to snatch the weapons of soldiers. An inquiry has been ordered.
A man and a woman were killed in the firing while another woman succumbed to her injuries on Tuesday.
The police also felt the heat as Srinagar chief judicial magistrate Masrat Shaheen ordered an FIR against a deputy superintendent of police accused of killing Shabir Ahmad in cold blood in his house on July 10. Witnesses and sources claimed Ahmad was targeted as he had a history of stone-pelting. His family maintains he was shot at close range.
The court order quoted Ahmads father as saying a police party headed by DSP Yasir Qadri barged into his home, smashed windowpanes and assaulted his wife. When Ahmad intervened, the police officer took out his pistol and fired two shots at him, resulting in his death on the spot. Seeking an investigation, the court listed the matter for hearing on July 28.
Ten days after security forces killed militant commander Burhan Wani in a gunfight on July 8, the Valley remained on edge and curfew-bound. The annual Amarnath Yatra was suspended for the third time in the same period. And Srinagar-based newspapers have not printed since Saturday when copies were seized during midnight raids by police.
On Monday, Amitabh Mattoo, political adviser to the CM, told NDTV the gag order was imposed without Mehboobas knowledge and consent.
We want them to own up to the ban and want their assurance that there will be no hurdles in staff movement and distribution of newspapers, Rashid Maqdoomi, printer and publisher of Greater Kashmir, the Valleys largest circulating daily, said.
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Three of the five accused were arrested in the Rohtak gangrape case on Tuesday. Haryana director general of police KP Singh disclosed this in Chandigarh.
The arrests were made after social organisations and political parties raised voice against the increasing cases of rapes and gangrapes in the state and poor functioning of the police.
Singh said while the accused Amit, Jagmohan and Sandeep had been arrested, the fourth accused was on the run and the identity of the fifth was yet to be ascertained.
The DGP said it was the police and not the passers-by who found the victim lying near Sukhpura chowk, Rohtak, unconscious. The police took her to the hospital and registered a case the next day on the basis of her complaint against Mausam and Akash, besides the three named above.
Three men, including the owner of a private school, have been arrested for allegedly distributing academic year diaries bearing truncated maps that dont show Jammu and Kashmir as a part of India among students in Shahdol district of Madhya Pradesh.
The arrested people were booked for sedition, imputations and assertions prejudicial to national integration, and crime with a common intent under sections 124A, 153B and 34 of the Indian Penal Code.
Shahdol superintendent of police Sushant Saxena said the accused identified as Green Bells Public School owner Mohd Sharif Niyazi, school principal Govind Charan Das and printing press owner Arun Agrawal were taken into custody on Monday. The three were produced before a local court in Shahdol the same day, following which the court remanded them in judicial custody for 14 days.
The police took action after Srikrishna Gupta, Burhar division chief of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, lodged a complaint regarding the truncated map on Sunday. We investigated the matter and found the allegations to be true, said Saxena.
When the school owner and the principal were questioned by the police, they claimed it was a publication error by the printing press. However, they admitted to not rectifying the error despite several parents bringing the matter to their notice, Burhar police station in-charge Satish Dwivedi said.
Though nobody at the Green Bells Public School could be reached for comment, the opposition Congress termed the development as yet another instance of the BJP government arbitrarily using the sedition law to target people.
The sedition law is being used arbitrarily by the BJP governments in states as well as the Centre to target opponents whether they are JNU protesters or Patidar leader Hardik Patel. This particular act of targeting certain people with the sedition law just because of a publication error serves to illustrate the same point, state Congress spokesperson KK Mishra said.
A head constable was killed in stone-pelting by a mob on Tuesday, as the ongoing protests by Dalits over four community members being assaulted allegedly for skinning a cow in Una spread to several parts of Gujarat.
The head constable with the local crime branch, Pankaj Amreli, was injured in stone-pelting in Amreli. He died during treatment at Rajkot hospital. Ten other persons, including protesters and policemen, have been injured, police said.
Three youths attempted suicide at their residential society in Batwa town in Junagadh district on Tuesday, a day after seven Dalit youths tried to consume poison in Rajkot district demanding justice.
Dinesh Parmar, 21, Dinesh Vegra, 23, and Rasik Vinjura, 40, gathered at Ambedkar Nagar society and consumed poison to protest against the beating (of Dalit youths in Una). We rushed them to Junagadh civil hospital for treatment, police said, adding their condition is stable.
Several incidents of damage to state transport buses and road blockades were reported from different parts of Saurashtra region across Junagadh, Jamnagar, Rajkot and Amreli districts since late night on Monday.
There was a report of BRTS buses being ransacked by the community members as several public transport vehicles were also ransacked, DCP, Rajkot, Karanraj Vaghela said.
A bus was torched in Dhoraji town and several others damaged. Protestors also allegedly vandalised sheds of the Bus Rapid Transit System in Rajkot, police said.
A mob gathered at Chital Road locality in Amreli town in the morning and started pelting stones at police, who in turn fired two teargas shells to disperse them. In Surendranagar, agitators blocked a highway by putting the carcass of a cow in the middle of the road, police said.
Some people hurled stones at the Ahmedabad-Veraval train as it was entering Rajkot, injuring an assistant driver on Monday night, police said.
The state road transport department has suspended bus services from Porbandar in view of the prevailing situation.
The state has been on the boil since four Dalit youths were thrashed by a group claiming to be from the Shiv Sena in Gir-Somnath districts Samadhiyala village on July 11 for allegedly slaughtering a cow. The youth explained they were skinning dead animals, as was their traditional vocation, but they were beaten with iron rods and dragged for half a kilometre behind an SUV by the assailants.
A video clip of the incident was shared widely on social media, sparking outrage across the country.
Chief minister Anandiben Patel had on Monday ordered a CID probe into the alleged assault on the four Dalits at Una in Gir-Somnath district and also announced setting up a special court for speedy trial of the case.
Nine people have been arrested so far in connection with the case, and three policemen have been suspended for dereliction of duty.
The issue also rocked Rajya Sabha, with the House being adjourned for a short period on the opening day of the monsoon session as BSP members trooped into the well alleging atrocities on Dalits in BJP-ruled Gujarat.
The Congress has demanded a judicial probe into the incident. State Congress president Bharatsinh Solanki visited Rajkot civil hospital on Tuesday to meet the Dalit youths who tried to kill themselves yesterday.
We demand that the (Una) incident be probed by a sitting high court judge. We would meet the Governor to put forth demand, he told reporters.
Senior Congress leader Ahmed Patel tweeted: Failure of authorities to protect Dalits in Gujarat is absolutely shocking. Is it the Gujarat model? Independent probe is need of the hour.
Accusing the Congress of playing the diversionary politics by provoking the sentiments, state BJP president Bharat Pandya said, BJP was the first to condemn the (Una) incident. Elected MLAs, ministers, MPs, chairmen and organisation office-bearers had visited the affected families. The party has stood by the victims and government immediately extended financial aid to them.
Buoyed by the Supreme Courts ruling on Arunachal Pradesh, the BJP on Tuesday demanded the resignation of Uttarakhand assembly speaker and deputy speaker saying the apex courts order makes it clear that the speaker cannot disqualify a member until the disposal of no-confidence motion pending against himself.
Describing the recent Supreme Court ruling as a life-saver for the disqualified MLAs of Uttarakhand, state BJP president and leader of Opposition in the state assembly Ajay Bhatt in a statement in Dehradun said the order has the potential to put the clock back in the state.
Questioning the action of speaker Govind Singh Kunjwal of ousting the rebel MLAs, Bhatt asked how could the Speaker and his deputy initiate the process of disqualifying the legislators even before the disposal of a no-confidence motion against himself (Kunjwal) for his unconstitutional conduct in the state assembly.
Accusing Kunjwal of setting aside Constitutional norms in disqualifying rebel MLAs with the intention of saving the Harish Rawat government by hook or by crook, Bhatt demanded the resignations of both the speaker and his deputy Anusuya Prasad Maikhuri, saying they could at least partially atone for their sin of murdering democracy by quitting their offices.
26 BJP MLAs supported by nine rebel Congress legislators had brought a no-confidence motion against the speaker on the evening of March 18 when he rejected their demand for a division of votes on the appropriation bill in the Assembly.
However, even before taking a call on the motion, the speaker began the process of disqualifying the MLAs who had revolted against their own government.
Disqualification of the nine disgruntled MLAs had helped Rawat in a big way as he won a Supreme Court-monitored floor test in the state Assembly with relative ease.
Ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modis scheduled visit to Gorakhpur on July 22, Uttar Pradesh Police and the Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) have stepped up vigil along the Indo-Nepal border that falls under the Gorakhpur-Basti division.
During the visit, Modi is expected to announce the restarting of a fertiliser factory and to lay the foundation stone of the proposed All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) beside addressing a rally.
To prevent movement of terrorists in the area, security agencies have been asked to ascertain identities of people before allowing them to cross over the border, IG (Gorakhpur Zone) Mohit Agarwal said.
Orders have also been issued to other security agencies such as Indo-Nepal Border Police and Local Intelligence Unit (LIU) to be on alert at the border.
All the border outposts (BOPs) have been kept on high alert. Patrolling in sensitive border areas has been increased to check anti-national element, a senior SSB official said.
We received instruction that some insurgent might be crossing over and so we have been asked to maintain a strict vigil, SSB deputy commandant Manish Kumar said.
Police in the districts of Mahrajganj, Siddharthanagar, Shrawasti and Bahraich, sharing border with Nepal, have been put on high alert, Agarwal said.
Intelligence units have also been asked to keep an eye on religious places along the border.
Patrolling of public spots such as cinema halls, hotels, rail and bus stations has been intensified to prevent untoward incidents, Agarwal added.
New Delhi: The Union Health ministry officials met on Friday to give the final touches to the Terminally Ill Patients (protection of patients and medical practitioners) Bill, popularly referred to as the Passive Euthanasia Bill.
The draft Bill does not use the emotive word euthanasia at all. We want to simplify the term euthanasia so everyone understands it and we can skirt the unnecessary complications surrounding the term, said a senior health ministry official, requesting anonymity.
Officials sifted through the suggestions on the Terminally Ill Patients (Protection of Patients and Medical Practitioners) Bill , which had been posted online on May 9 for public comments.The response was overwhelming. We received a lot of comments and suggestions, filtered them and have taken the valuable ones, said the official.
The BIll is expected to be tabled in the winter session of Parliament.
According to the draft Bill, a terminally ill patient above the age of 16 years on life-support treatment could decide to stop treatment or intravenous food with the intention to hastening death
The issue of euthanasia was first examined by the health ministry in consultation with the experts in 2006, based on the 196th Law Commission of India report. However, it was decided to not make any laws on euthanasia.
In 2011 the Supreme Court, while hearing the case of nurse Aruna Shanbaug, who was in a vegetative state for nearly 30 years, had legalised passive euthanasia partially.
In a landmark judgement, the SC had given thousands of patients living in a vegetative state all over the country the right to have treatment or food withdrawn that would allow the patient to live.
It laid down comprehensive guidelines to process passive euthanasia in the case of incompetent patients, also saying the procedure should be followed all over India until the Parliament makes a legislation on the subject.
The guidelines include seeking a declaration from the High Court, after getting clearance from a medical board and state government.
Right to die in India
Active euthanasia. The intentional act of causing the death of a patient in great suffering is illegal in India
Passive euthanasia: The withdrawal of medical treatment with the deliberate intention to hasten a terminally ill-patients death is partially allowed : The patient, family, friends and legal guardians cant take the decision on their own, they need a High Court nod for stopping treatment .
Proposed Bill
Draft of Medical Treatment of Terminally-Ill patients (protection of patients and medical practitioners) Bill
Allows patients on medical treatment to sustain, restore or replace vital functions to postpone sure death to stop treatment
Doctors will have to follow the decision of a competent patient on withholding or withdrawing treatment
Allows for a living will, where you can make a document off decision on whether you want to be given medical treatment or not if you become terminally ill in the future.
Immediate family or someone with medical power-of-attorney can take the call for terminally-ill children below 16 years, people of unsound mind, and those who cant take an informed decision
Effective across India, except J&K
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Nhan said Vietnam is delighted at the recent developments of Laos, especially the success of the 10th Congress of the Lao Peoples Revolutionary Party.
VFF President Nguyen Thien Nhan and LFNC Vice President Chanthavong Senamatmontry (Source: VNA)
He informed his guest that the 2013 Constitution has further specified the VFFs role to continue working with its 46 member units on mass mobilisation for national construction.
As fraternal countries, Vietnam and Laos should learn from each others experience, he said, adding that Vietnam is ready to share its expertise with Lao Front officials.
Chanthavong Senamatmontry, for his part, informed his host about the outcomes of talks between the VFF and LFNC.
He believed that under the leadership of the President of the VFF Central Committee, the special solidarity between Vietnam and Laos would be deepened.
During the earlier talks, Vice President of the VFF Central Committee Nguyen Van Pha said both sides have effectively realised the 2012-2016 agreement, with its contents to be continued in 2017-2021.
The two countries VFF Central Committees will increase bilateral friendship and cooperation to celebrate the 55th anniversary of bilateral diplomatic ties and the 40th anniversary of the signing of Vietnam-Laos Cooperation and Amity Agreement, he said.
The guest wished that the two sides would sign a cooperation agreement for the next five years, featuring the regular exchange of information and visits by the two fronts, celebrations for the 55th anniversary of bilateral diplomatic ties and the 40th anniversary of the signing of Vietnam-Laos Cooperation and Amity Agreement, and training officials of the LFNCs Central Committee.
Host and guest expressed their belief that bilateral ties between VFF and LFNC will contribute to fostering special solidarity, friendship and comprehensive cooperation between the two peoples./.
VFF President Nguyen Thien Nhan (R) and LFNC Vice President Chanthavong Senamatmontry (Source: VNA)
VFF President Nguyen Thien Nhan (R) and LFNC Vice President Chanthavong Senamatmontry (Source: VNA)
A clear directive from chief minister Mamata Banerjee to act fast and tough on building material syndicates prompted the police on Monday to make an unprecedented number of arrests around 11,000 and seize a number of firearms and bombs throughout the state.
The timing was also significant just three days before the showpiece annual party event on July 21 in Kolkata, when the chief minister is expected to drive home the message that she wont tolerate indiscipline by party workers, many of whom are involved in such activities.
On Monday morning, the chief minister directed all the officers of the chief ministers office (CMO) to act immediately and without mercy on all the complaints coming to the CMO relating to extortion and real estate syndicate-related menace. These syndicates typically operate with patronisation by local ruling party leaders and force those building/repairing houses to buy raw materials from them, which in reality translate into poor material being forced down the throat of the buyers at a premium.
Within hours of the chief ministers direction, the additional director general (law and order), Anuj Sharma, informed the media that following her order the police have arrested around 11,000 miscreants directly or indirectly related to the crimes. The police have arrested around 1,000 persons against whom there were prior warrants. Apart from that, we have also made 9,972 preventive arrests. The police have also seized 781 bombs and 85 guns, Sharma said at the state secretariat on Monday afternoon.
Sources in the government said that in the meeting with the CMO officers on Monday, the chief minister was quite clear in her directives on this matter.
The crackdown seemed to be coming when, a few days ago, she ordered the arrest of one of her party councillors in Salt Lake, Anindya Chatterjee, for trying to extort money from residents of his ward (No. 41). The cops have slapped non-bailable sections against him and two of his accomplices and the court sent him to jail custody for 14 days.
The chief minister lamented that it was quite unfortunate that the police act only after cases of extortion and other syndicate-related menaces are brought to her notice. She clearly said that any complaint received by the CMO should be acted upon immediately and without leniency. She also said that no discrimination on the basis of political affiliation should be made while dealing with such cases, said a government official.
Congress MLA and leader of the opposition Abdul Mannan, however, claimed that such developments are just an eyewash. She is trying to be in the limelight through the arrest of Bidhannagar councillor Anindya Chatterjee. But there are thousands of such Anindyas in her party, he said.
Since she assumed power for the second time, Mamata Banerjee has been emphasising the need to clean up the party.
She has made it clear that she will not tolerate her partymen indulging in such activities that was giving the entire party a bad name. In the internal meetings of the party she warned leaders against involvement with real estate syndicates again and again. She is now irritated that despite her repeated appeals, a section of the party leaders are still associated with syndicates or are encouraging it, said a Trinamool leader.
In fact, Trinamool leaders Sanjay Bakshi and Smita Bakshi were alleged to be involved with such a building material outfit that supplied raw materials to the Vivekananda flyover that collapsed on March 31 killing 27 people.
The Powai police on Tuesday arrested a seventh person over an illegal kidney transplant allegedly part of a wider racket that was halted at Dr LH Hiranandani Hospital last Thursday.
The accused is Yusufsa Bismillasa Dhiwan, 45, a lorry driver from Nadiad in Gujarats Kheda district. He was allegedly the link between the donor and the alleged kingpin of the racket.
A source in the Powai police said that the role of a doctor at Hiranandani hospital is being investigated. The doctor allegedly connived with Nilesh Kamble, 36, the hospitals organ transplant co-ordinator, who has been arrested.
According to the Powai police, Dhiwan introduced 42-year-old would-be kidney donor Shobha Thakur, alias Rekhadevi Jaiswal, to Bhijedra Bisen, an agent and the alleged kingpin of the racket. Thakur, a domestic help from Gujarat, posed as the wife of Surat businessman Brijkishore Jaiswal as a kidney can only be donated by a persons parents, grandparents, siblings, children or spouse. However, the operation was called off after whistleblower Mahesh G Tanna, 51, alerted the police, who registered a case on Thursday.
Read: More officials involved in kidney racket, claims whistleblower
The next day, the police arrested four people Bisen, his alleged accomplices Bharat Sharma and Iqbal Siddiqui, and Jaiswals son Kishan. They also booked Jaiswal and Thakur, who will be arrested once they are discharged. Transplant co-ordinator Kamble and Khwaja Patel, 66, another of Bisens alleged accomplices, were arrested on the weekend.
Dhiwan and the six other arrested suspects were produced in a magistrates court at Andheri on Tuesday, which remanded them in police custody until July 22.
The police told the court that they want to find out whether doctors or senior officials at Hiranandani hospital were also involved in the racket.
The police have also learnt that Jaiswals son Kishen was desperately looking for a kidney for his father when a friend introduced him to Bisen. We are trying to trace Kishens friend, added the source.
Meanwhile, whistleblower Tanna told HT, Fearing arrest, Sunder Singh, who helped me unravel this racket, has left for his hometown in UP. His wife was being blackmailed and so he wanted to take her back home safely. He told me will return in 15 to 20 days for a press conference.
Singh had illegally donated a kidney, allegedly with Bisens help, three months ago but was not given the money he was promised.
Instead, Bisen allegedly roped him into the racket. Singh told Tanna that he cleared fake documents for three such transplants and gave Tanna the documents for a fourth operation, which was halted. When asked if Singh has been made an accused, deputy commissioner of police Ashok Dudhe said, No he has not. It will depend on the evidence we get against him in the course of the investigation.
Traffic in South Mumbai was affected after three people were killed in a fatal crash between three vehicles on the Eastern Freeway on Tuesday morning. Adding to the chaos will be a rally organised near JJ Flyover, which will further affect the traffic in south Mumbai.
The accident took place around 9am between an Innova, a taxi and another car near Trombay. The RCF police reached the spot. The traffic police personnel removed the vehicles off the road and the victims were rushed to the hospital. While the vehicles continued using the Freeway, traffic police are on the spot to ease the congestion.
Motorists taking the stretch between Chembur and Mumbai Port Trust are facing heavy traffic snarls.
Meanwhile, a rally from Byculla towards CST is causing traffic snarls in south Mumbai. The Mumbai traffic police have advised motorists to avoid the JJ flyover during the day.
The rally will commence around noon from the JJ flyover to Azad Maidan.
Motorists are requested to take alternate route via P DMello road or Pedder road to reach south Mumbai, said DCP Ashok Dudhe, Mumbai police spokesperson.
Read more: Three dead in accident on freeway
The traffic police will deploy personnel to divert traffic off the JJ flyover so vehicles will continue to move from P DMello Road. The police said they will make necessary diversions for motorists travelling along the stretch with on-duty personnel directing them.
JJ Flyover is heavily congested while parts in the island city, including Fort, is reported to have slow-moving traffic.
Mahesh G Tanna, 51, the whistleblower in the kidney transplant racket at Dr L H Hiranandani Hospital, on Monday claimed he has evidence to prove that the illegal kidney transplant he prevented was not the first one attempted or carried out at the hospital.
Acting on a tip-off from Tanna, the police and hospital authorities had on Thursday halted an illegal kidney transplant for Surat businessman Brijkishore Jaiswal, 48. The donor, Shobha Thakur, 42, pretended to be his wife as a kidney can only be donated by a persons parents, grandparents, siblings, children or spouse. They were both booked and will be arrested once they are discharged from the hospital.
Tanna, a senior Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) leader, said if the police do not take action against others involved in the racket with a couple of days, he will go public with his evidence.
He said he stumbled on the racket after someone told him about a certain Sunder Singh. Singh, 21, is said to have donated a kidney at Hiranandani hospital about three months ago. He is from a poor family and was in dire need of money.
Tanna said, Singh donated his kidney illegally after the alleged kingpin, Bijendra Bisen, 42, promised him a hefty sum. But Singh was never given the money, which he wanted to use to start a business. Instead, Bisen exploited Singh and convinced him to work for him on commission. Bisen also paid the rent for Singhs house in in Dombivli, where he lives with his wife.
He added, We pursued Singh for three months to help us bust the racket. He finally agreed and gave us all the documents, which we used to stop the (illegal) transplant from happening. Singh told us he has helped Bisen with fake documents for three such transplants at the hospital. We are protecting Singh and we have not disclosed his location to anyone, not even the police. He has all the documents to prove that more such transplants have taken place at the hospital.
Bisen connived with hospital employee Nilesh Kamble (36), who since has been arrested, to clear the fake documents. Kamble was a transplant coordinator for all organ transplants. Tanna said he strongly suspects that more people at the hospital are involved in the racket. He said if the police do not take action against them, he will hold a press conference and reveal all the details of the racket.
Dr Sujit Chatterjee, CEO of Hiranandani hospital, said, One case has been established and an FIR registered. But we do not know what these other cases are. Nobody can tell whether the documents cleared by Kamble were forged. We are setting up an internal committee to find out. It will check all the documents for discrepancies. If we find any, we will request the police to look into it.
Chatterjee added, The racket is the work of clever, unscrupulous people. Kamble had been working with us for three years. He has a degree in social sciences and worked as a senior medical social worker, assisted by a junior.
It was not just Jignesh Shah who benefited from the fall of National Spot Exchange Limited (NSEL). Top NSEL officials received huge money in kickbacks illicit payments made in exchange for facilitating transactions from defaulters, said the complaint filed by the Enforcement Directorate (ED).
The complaint stated that Amit Mukherjee, assistant Vice President (VP) Business Development, NSEL created fake warehouse receipts without the support of adequate physical stock of commodities traded on NSEL platforms.
Read: NSEL scam: Shah ran stock exchange as a financial company, says ED
He arranged loan facilities in the guise of trading facilities. He received kickbacks from the defaulting members. He was the key management person who perpetrated the fraud with the help of his associates and MD (Managing Director) and CEO (chief executive officer) of NSEL, reads the complaint.
The complaint lists several transactions and benefits received by the VP, MD and CEO of the company. It states that Mukherjee received Rs 25 lakh under his wifes name from the Aastha group of companies, whose liability is Rs 186.22 crores. It is alleged that the company paid Mukherjees wife to facilitate the flow of funds from the NSEL.
Read: FTIL founder Jignesh Shah arrested in money laundering case
In her statement, Mukherjees wife, Bonhi, said a flat in Thane was purchased partly through her savings and partly through the consultancy charges she was paid by the Aastha group of companies.
The complaint states that the Mohan India group paid Mukherjee and his wife Rs 5.02 crores as kickbacks to make the group a member of the NSEL. The Mohan India group tops the list of defaulters, with liabilities worth Rs 843.53 crores. Mukherjees wife said she and her husband own a house Mira Road and another in Borivli. They had a Range Rover, purchased through the funds received from Jai Shankar Shrivastava, the director of Mohan India Pvt Ltd.
The Mukherjees trip to Bangkok was sponsored by P. D. Agroprocessors LTD, a company accused of defaulting payments worth Rs 420 crores. The complaint states that Rajeev Aggarwal, the ex-CFO of P. D. Agroprocessors LTD booked the trip in April 2013 through a travel agent. Air tickets and hotel charges for this seven-eight-day trip amounted to Rs 7 lakh, which he paid for.
Aggrawal stated Mukherjee booked eight plots, spread over 1,000 yards at the formers Prime City project at Assand, Karnal, Haryana for Rs 10 crores. Payments were received from Ram Awadh Sharma, a driver in his company and Mohan India Pvt Ltd, he said.
The complaint states that Anjani Sinha, the ex-CMD and CEO of NSEL and Jai Bahukhandi, the ex-AVP of NSEL were also responsible for the companys collapse as they aided and abetted the defaulting members.
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On July 21, flautist Rakesh Chaurasia and Ustad Zakir Hussain (tabla player) will perform together at a classical concert in the city. Rakesh dedicates the show to his paternal uncle and guru, Pt Hariparsad Chaurasia. I was four years old when Hariji gave me a small flute. I didnt even know the name of the instrument. That was when my journey started, he says.
However, it was only when he was a teenager that Rakesh realised he wanted to become a professional musician. I was about 14 when I went to Moscow (Russia) for the Festival of India with Hariji. There, I realised that this instrument can take me a long way. That is when I started taking it seriously, says the maestro.
Read: Many young Indians dont know what a flute looks like, says Rakesh Chaurasia
Rakesh adds that Chaurasia always encouraged him to incorporate his creativity while playing the flute. He was never allowed to blindly copy him. Hariji used to say, If you keep imitating me, then you will have to give me credit all the time. He never allowed us to record [our rehearsals] for that same reason, says Rakesh, who believes there is no end to how much one can learn when it comes to classical music. He admits that it is a bit scary to play alongside a legend like Zakir. But Zakir saab never makes me uncomfortable, and doesnt treat me like a kid or a newcomer. He gives the performance his 100%. If we make any mistake, he covers it up in such a way that nobody finds out about it, says Rakesh.
The artiste also feels that while there are audiences for every genre of music in India, the main difference between Bollywood and classical music is that the former is seasonal. Classical music stays in the minds of people for longer. Also, a lot of people enjoy classical music. A classical musician can fill up an auditorium. I recently went for the Cape Town Jazz International Festival (in South Africa), where my band was the only Indian group. We had an audience of 7,000 people, he says.
ROHTAK: Two of the five accused booked for the gang rape of a 21-year-old Dalit girl in Rohtak joined the investigation on Monday but they were not arrested as police said neither of them was in town the day the incident occurred.
Meanwhile, families of two more accused approached the police with evidence claiming that they were not in town on the specific day.
Rohtak SP Rakesh Arya said, We have verified their mobile location and it shows they were not in Rohtak. Their families have also submitted CCTV footage that shows two of them were in Bhiwani, while two others were in Ambala and Rohtak when the alleged crime took place. The one in Rohtak was seen in a bank in the CCTV footage.
The SP added that the victim did not record her statement in front of the magistrate this time, while her statement in the previous rape case was submitted twice and was contradictory.
The Dalit girl, who was gang-raped three years ago in Bhiwani by five men, had alleged that she was kidnapped and raped again by the same men in Rohtak on Wednesday when she was returning home from college. Based on her complaint, police registered an FIR against Amit, Jagmohan, Mausam, Sandeep and Akash. While Amit and Jagmohan joined the investigation on Monday, families of Mausam and Sandeep approached the police with the evidence.
Meanwhile, Mahila Congress president Shobha Oza held a protest at the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences in Rohtak, where the victim is admitted.
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NEW DELHI: The Rajya Sabha was adjourned briefly on the opening day of the monsoon session after angry Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) members stormed the Well of House, shouting slogans against the government and accusing it of being anti-Dalit.
Chaotic scenes were witnessed after BSP chief Mayawati raised the issue of some members of the Dalit community being thrashed in Gujarats Una town for skinning a dead cow. Soon after the Question Hour began on Monday, the BSP leader said some anti-social elements stripped the Dalits, tied their hands and beat them up in the BJP-ruled state.
Urban development and information and broadcasting minister M Venkaiah Naidu reacted by saying that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the entire countrys saviour. He said while there was no problem in raising such issues, it was against the convention of the House to name a political party.
Under attack from Mayawati, the Gujarat government said all eight people accused of beating up the Dalits were arrested and sent to jail. Chairman Hamid Ansari had to adjourn the House for 10 minutes after four BSP MPs trooped into the Well.
KANPUR: The Congress is planning to rope in Gujarat Patel agitation leader Hardik Patel to blunt the BJPs appointment of Anupriya Patel in order to grab Kurmi votes in the upcoming Uttar Pradesh polls.
Hardik, who got bail in Gujarat on Friday, could be introduced as a star campaigner in 35 assembly seats where Kurmis are the deciding factor. Strategist Prashant Kishor has discussed the plan with senior party leaders and former state Congress president Nirmal Khatri has reportedly endorsed the suggestion.
PKs team is likely to meet Hardik in Udaipur this week or the next to discuss modalities, said a senior leader on the condition of anonymity. He added, PKs team members are in touch with Hardik. He is quite keen to get him on board.
Sources said that following Anupriyas induction as a minister in the NDA government, Congress leaders met in Lucknow to discuss the impact of her appointment on Kurmi voters. A list of seats, where Kurmi voters are the decisive factor, was discussed in this meeting and a formal strategy finalised.
Congress Kanpur Dehat president and a Patel leader, Neetam Sachan, said Hardik has lately been a point of discussion but refused to share further details.
After being released from Surat jail, where he was lodged on sedition charges, was planning to relocate to Udaipur as courts condition binds him to stay away from Gujarat for six months.
NEW DELHI: Opposition parties on Monday slammed the Centre over excessive use of force in Jammu and Kashmir and cautioned the government that bullets cant bring a solution to the unrest in the Valley.
During the discussion on the latest crisis, Opposition parties in the Rajya Sabha also urged the government to immediately start a dialogue process with Kashmiris.
Initiating the discussions, Leader of the Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad said while his party supported efforts to deal firmly with militancy, the excessive use of force against the common citizens, including children and women, was not acceptable.
Kashmir cant be ruled through the barrel of the gun or bullets, said Azad. He also blamed BJPs participation in the state government and the provocative statements made by some leaders of BJP and RSS for the crisis.
Samajwadi Party leader Naresh Agarwal asked the government to understand the sentiments of the Kashmiris. Our leader Mulayam Singh Yadav has said if you go on a war against Pakistan, we will stand by you. But if there is a need to change policy, you have to do it with a brave heart, Agarwal said.
Opposition leaders also questioned why the government was not following the political process the Atal Bihari Vajpayees NDA government started. JD(U) leader Sharad Yadav said, In Ataljis government, there was a political effort. Why is there so much difference between Vajpayees government and this government? BJD, CPI(M) and some other parties asked the government to probe into allegations of use of excessive force.
Meeting with the Slovakian PM, the Party leader praised the high-level political talks between the two countries and urged for continued exchanges of visits and cooperation.
He thanked Slovakian government for facilitating the Vietnamese community there and called on Slovakia to continue support the views of Vietnam and ASEAN on East Sea issue.
Party leader Nguyen Phu Trong welcomes Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico in Hanoi Slovak PM Fico said his nation has always placed high importance on consolidating and developing traditional friendship and cooperation with Vietnam. The country will accelerate the implementation of signed cooperation agreements between the two countries in the spheres of economics, trade, science-technology, culture and labor-society, he said.
As the rotating president of the European Union (EU) from July 2016, Slovakia will do its utmost to bolster relationship between the EU and Vietnam, closely coordinate with the southeast Asian country at international forums, the Slovak guest said.
During the reception for the Slovakian guest, President Tran Dai Quang said the Vietnamese people treasure the precious and effective assistance the Slovakian people gave during Vietnams previous struggles for national liberation and todays national construction and defense. He reiterated the unswerving policy of facilitating Slovakian businesses to invest in Vietnam.
President Tran Dai Quang meeting with the Slovakian PM
Highlighting the outcomes of talks between the two PMs, Quang said Slovakia is one of the Central Eastern Europes top trade partners and investors in Vietnam, and Vietnam wants Slovakia to facilitate Vietnamese goods' easier penetration into the country, particularly agro-forestry-fisheries, garment and footwear.
Fico, for his part, told his host the Vietnam-Slovakia Inter-Governmental Joint Committee on Economic Cooperations meeting in Slovakia in early 2017 will focus on four or five specific and high added value projects, and the Slovak government will convene a special meeting discussing bilateral economic collaboration.
HYDERABAD/BHOPAL: ABVP activists beat up a Punjabi research scholar pursuing an M.Phil degree from the University of Hyderabad after allegedly mistaking him to be from the Valley while a Kashmiri student was thrashed in Bhopal, the latest in a string of attacks on students from Jammu and Kashmir.
In Hyderabad, a group of 20-25 Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad members attacked 25-year-old Amol Singh who was on his way back after a protest against alleged police atrocities in Kashmir late on Saturday, sources said. They knocked me down, started to punch me on my face and stomach, and hit my knees. My friends and I tried to run away into the hostel and they chased us, Singh said.
He said the activists apparently mistook him for his senior Bilal, who was from Kashmir. Singhs beard and complexion resembled that of Bilal.
Other students from Singhs hostel alleged that while guards witnessed the attack, they did not intervene. ABVP students barged into the hostel saying: Where is Bilal? We will teach a lesson to that anti-national, said Munna, staying in the same hostel.
But ABVP leader N Sushil Kumar rejected the allegations and said Singh and his friends attacked ABVP students who were taking out a bike rally in protest against the violence in Kashmir.
In Bhopal, doctoral student Umar Rashid was allegedly attacked by two people inside the campus of the Barakatullah University after he told them he hailed from Kashmirs Pampore.
When they started beating me, I held my ears seeking forgiveness just to save myself but they thrashed me brutally in front of security guards, said Rashid. One of them said we were responsible for the poor condition of Kashmir.
Student Shahbez Ali, who was present with Rashid, said, He was talking to someone over the phone. They called me first and asked about my whereabouts. Later, they called Rashid and after knowing he is from Kashmir, they beat him up. I managed to save him.
He was in an unconscious state. I took him to a mosque on the campus. We called a professor and other Kashmiri students. The professor asked us to take him to the hospital, said Ali. After first aid, Rashid was released from hospital.
Despite having knowledge of the incident, university administration didnt help Rashid. Kashmiri students later staged a demonstration for five hours in front of the vice-chancellors office.
Another student from Kashmir, Irfan Rashid, said, We want security. We came to Bhopal as we feel safe here but this incident has worried us. We got surprised with the reaction of the administration as they didnt even pay attention to this incident.
But MD Tiwari, BU vice chancellor, said, The Kashmiri students are lying. There was jostling among students present near the administration building but the Kashmiri students are trying to give a different colour to the whole issue.
We have tightened security and also held a meeting with the proctor, registrar, dean of student welfare and the head of the department to discuss the issue, Tiwari added.
These incidents follow violence in Kashmir after the death of Hizbul militant Burhan Wani. The violence has triggered sharp reaction from other parts in the country as well, with several protests against the allegations of human rights violations by state forces held in Kolkata, Delhi and Bengaluru.
SRINAGAR: Newspapers are likely to hit the stands in Kashmir on Tuesday after a three-day ban not approved by chief minister Mehbooba Mufti even as two civilians were killed in a clash with security forces, taking the toll in the ongoing protests to 43.
Amitabh Mattoo, the chief ministers political adviser, told NDTV that Mehbooba did not approve of the ban, contradicting an earlier statement of the government spokesman.
Senior minister Nayeem Akhtar had told HT that the undesirable step was taken to ensure peace and to save lives.
This is an extraordinary situation. Very strict curfew will be imposed in the city and newspaper distribution will not be possible. So we have asked the newspapers not to publish, he had said, adding that the ban was only for three days till Monday.
Former CM Omar Abdullah dismissed the governments claim that Mehbooba was not informed about Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wanis killing, saying the CM is informed about every encounter involving a high-profile person.
Meanwhile, a senior journalist at the Valleys largest circulating daily Greater Kashmir confirmed that newspapers would hit the stands on Tuesday.
The uneasy calm prevailing in the Valley on Monday was short-lived as two civilians were killed and seven injured in retaliatory firing after protesters pelted stones at a 9RR Army patrol in Churat Qazigund in South Kashmir, police said. The deceased were identified as 25-year-old Showkat Ahmad and 45-year-old Saida.
The fresh killings took the death toll in ongoing protests to 43, excluding two people who drowned and one who died when his car overturned while fleeing from a spot where police and protesters had clashed.
While most areas remained peaceful, sporadic incidents were reported at several places in north Kashmir, including Trehgam in Kupwara district, and Sopore and Rafiabad in Baramulla district, a police official said.
All 10 districts of Kashmir Valley continue to remain under curfew today as a precautionary measure for maintaining law and order, he added.
Normal life remained paralysed due to the curfew and the strike call by separatists, which has been extended till July 22.
Schools and colleges, which were scheduled to reopen on Monday after a 17-day summer vacation, remained closed as the government extended the holidays by a week in view of the prevailing situation.
Rumours had a field day in the absence of newspapers and internet, as unconfirmed stories of a PDP MLA being injured in an attack by protesters and a policeman dying, did the rounds.
The government claimed the reports were just rumours and asserted that the legislator had been injured in a road accident.
The police constable, rumoured to be dead in Kulgam, was not dead but critical, an official press statement later clarified.
NEW DELHI: The CBI probe against a senior official in the ministry of corporate affairs revealed that the civil servant had allegedly accepted a bribe from a Mumbai firm for not investigating complaints that the firm had duped investors.
Anuj Saxena, who has acted in television serials, is Elder Pharmaceuticals chief operating officer (COO), and is under the agencys scanner.
Saxena was named as an accused in the CBIs first information report (FIR) in the case. The agency is likely to question him once he returns from abroad, said an agency source.
Anuj Saxena, COO of the Mumbai firm, had sought the assistance of a Delhi-based middleman who was also working as their distributor in Delhi to get in touch with the senior ministry official to scuttle the probe, said the source.
The CBI on Saturday had nabbed BK Bansal, director general of corporate affairs in the ministry for allegedly accepting a bribe of Rs 9 lakh from representatives of the firm . An internal inquiry by the ministry, which examined over a 1,000 complaints against the firm, had sought a probe by the serious fraud investigation office (SFIO).
Earlier in July, Bansal had also accepted Rs 11 lakh from the firms middleman as the first installment of the total of Rs 20 lakh he sought as bribe for favouring the firm, a CBI official alleged. The agency arrested Bansal and alleged middleman Vishwadeep Bansal along with two other private persons in the case. Bansal, a senior officer of the Indian Corporate Law Service, was promoted to the post of director-general last year.
A Punjab Roadways bus going to Chandigarh crashed into 10 vehicles on Tuesday here, killing a fruit-seller and injuring five commuters, after the driver received heart attack.
The accident occurred around 11am at Jamalpur Chowk on the Chandigarh road after driver Harjinder Singh (40) went unconscious. The bus hit two cars, six motorcycles, two scooters, and a cart before ramming an electricity pole. Cart-puller Aashish was crushed to death under the bus wheels. Power-transmission wires fell over the bus, giving a mild jolt to the passengers, who were later moved to another coach.
The damaged car at Jamalpur Chowk after being hit by the bus. (JS Grewal/HT Photo)
Pedestrians ran for their lives as the bus swerved. A car and three motorcycles drove into a chemists shop, while avoiding the bus. I was standing near the pole that halted the bus. A cobbler seated beside and had a narrow escape, said eyewitness Indu.
Seeing the police, ambulance, and administration late to respond, a mob smashed the windowpanes of the bus. The bus driver was moved to Fortis hospital, where his condition is critical. The injured are at different hospitals. Nishant Kumar (21) of Jamalpur and Harmel Singh (60) of Mangli are among them. Nishant had been standing on the roadside, while Harmel had come to the market on his scooter.
The family of victim Aashish Kumar (18) of Sanjay Gandhi Colony here blocked traffic for an-hour-and-a-half on the highway, demanding compensation from the government. The logjam forced additional deputy commissioner of police (ADCP) Satvir Singh Atwal and subdivisional magistrate (SDM) Prem Chand to come over and pacify the protesters.
Jamalpur station house officer (SHO) Satnam Singh Dhillon said police were collecting more details of the incident.
French ambassador to India Alexandre Ziegler says that the Capitol Complex making it to the list of World Heritage Sites will help preserve the citys exceptional architectural heritage. He tells HTs Arvind Chhabra that the citys modernity has withstood the test of time.
Also read: Locals yet to feel immediate tug for Capitol heritage despite UNESCO tag
Your first thoughts on heritage status to the Capitol Complex?
I was in Chandigarh only last week and was amazed and impressed by this spectacular city. I am particularly happy the magnificent heritage of Le Corbusier is now inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. It is an important achievement and a fantastic success. It is also a symbol of our dynamic cultural relationship with India.
What does this status mean for Chandigarh?
Chandigarh was built according to the visionary plans of Le Corbusier to reflect modern India. This modernity that has withstood the test of time, this exemplarity, are emphasised by this nomination as a World Heritage Site.
Whats your impression about the Capitol Complex?
Chandigarh has a particular significance in the work of Le Corbusier as it offered him the opportunity to realise his dream: build a whole new city. The Capitol Complex is one of his most spectacular works.
What does this mean for Le Corbusiers legacy?
This nomination acknowledges the fundamental importance of his work. Le Corbusier invented new forms and new principles and models for living.
Also read: Unesco lists Le Corbusiers works among World Heritage Sites
France is a partner in developing Chandigarh as a smart city. Where does the Capitol Complex with the heritage tag fit into the Chandigarh smart city project?
France has a close and special relationship with Chandigarh. Prime Minister Georges Pompidou visited the city shortly after its construction in 1965 and since then, France has maintained strong ties with Chandigarh.
With Puducherry and Nagpur, Chandigarh is a flagship city for our partnership with India to develop cutting-edge projects in renewable energy, urban transport and sustainable development.
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A dramatic stroke that cricketer-turned-politician Navjot Singh Sidhu played on Monday by resigning from the Rajya Sabha has a potential to turn the political pitch in poll-bound Punjab.
His exit from the Upper House, in less than three months of being nominated by the Narendra Modi government, is sudden. But, its not entirely unexpected, considering how Sidhu found himself hitting a political cul-de-sac in the saffron party that had launched his political innings and sent him to the Lok Sabha thrice from Amritsar. More than his estrangement with BJP, it was an alluring Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) that hastened his rupture from the mother party. The stage is now set for a formal announcement of his most ambitious gambit as the spearhead of the AAPs race for power in Punjab.
Aam Aadmi Party welcomes Navjot Sidhus resignation on Twitter
Having struck a behind-the-scenes deal with the AAP in the last couple of weeks, Sidhu chose the timing of his switch shrewdly. He resigned on the very first day of the monsoon session of Parliament, leaving the BJP red-faced.
The symbolism in his move was also not lost on political pundits, as it coincided with Arvind Kejriwals penance pilgrimage to the Golden Temple in Amritsar. As the news of Sidhus exit broke, the AAP, beleaguered by the manifesto fiasco over the last two weeks, could barely conceal its glee on the pre-scripted move.
Prime mover
In Sidhu, the AAP sees a prime mover and mascot to take it close to the victory pedestal in a three-horse race in Punjab. The new development portends worries for both the Akali-BJP combine and the Congress. Despite a false bravado in their statements, the BJP and the Shiromani Akali Dal leaders admit privately that Sidhu has a potential to change the electoral dynamics and dent their prospects.
Dont miss: Sidhu joining leaderless AAP to boost partys prospects in Punjab polls
So, what makes Sidhu an important factor in Punjab? He has a star value and a sharp political acumen. Both traits make him an uncanny crowd puller, says a senior Akali leader. A Jat Sikh with moderate moorings, Sidhu (52) has age on his side. Most crucially, Sidhu represents what the AAP is riding on in Punjab a deep-seated public disenchantment with traditional political parties and a bubble of hope.
Equally, if not more, crucial are his unquestionable anti-Badal credentials a reputation he has built assiduously and aggressively by taking the ruling Badal clan head-on. Sidhu is widely seen as a fighter against the Badals. He wears that on his sleeve as badge of honour, says a Punjab BJP leader. Thats one USP that the AAP would hope to exploit to the hilt because its entire campaign is centred on attacks against the Badals.
The genesis of Sidhus exit lies in his long drawn-out face-off with chief minister Parkash Singh Badal, deputy CM Sukhbir Singh Badal, and revenue minister Bikram Singh Majithia. At the centre of the power games was the supremacy in the Majha politics. With Sidhu playing hardball on the issues of development funds for Amritsar, he fell out quickly with the Badals, who saw him as a rising political star in the constituency , which is the nerve centre of Sikh politics.
Read more: Navjot Singh Sidhu sixer robs BJP of its Punjab face, Plan B goes for a toss
To cut Sidhu to size before the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the Badals persuaded Arun Jaitley to contest from what they had pitched as a cakewalk for the BJP leader. That also soured Sidhus ties with the BJP beyond mend. Though Sidhu self-exiled himself from Amritsar and went into a silent mode, his wife, Dr Navjot Kaur Sidhu, BJP MLA and chief parliamentary secretary, has been a thorn in the flesh for the ruling alliance. Outspoken and acerbic, she has been one-person opposition with her ambushes that left the ruling alliance scurrying for cover.
Political observers also count on Sidhus blotless political career which could give firepower to his electoral spiel. Known for his eccentricities and ego trips, Sidhu, however, is not without his blind spots. But, if he follows the script and jumps on to the AAP bandwagon, he will be a man to be watched in the shape-shifting politics of Punjab.
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The issue of regularisation of illegal buildings has escalated to a major controversy between mayor Sunil Jyoti and senior deputy mayor Kamaljeet Singh Bhatia.
Sources in the MC told Hindustan Times that since the regularisation process involves large amount of money and heavy political pressures, both BJP and SAD sides often accuse each other of extending undue favours to their near and dear ones.
Bhatia has often accused Jyoti of regularising buildings owned by people close to the BJP and RSS quarters whereas the mayor has also hit back repeatedly at Bhatia that even his recommendations in regularising the buildings is paid equal attention.
When Bhatia hurled allegations of Jyoti being a drug addict, during the Finance and Contract Committee (F&CC) meet on Friday, sources said the mayor instantly hit back at Bhatia saying that he (Bhatia) has accepted `2 lakh for regularising a persons building.
Read more | Drug-addict remark: 16 BJP, 8 SAD councillors resign from Jalandhar MC
It is not a political fight. It is a fight involving money for regularisation of illegal buildings. Both sides are involved in promoting illegal buildings and are now calling each other names., said a senior BJP leader on the condition of anonymity.
Both Bhatia and Jyoti have rejected allegations of the other that minting money was the root cause of their fights. You may ask Bhatia better, said the mayor.
Meanwhile, the mayor said he was having no idea that the party councillors have planned a strategy to submit their resignation.
I was just getting ready for the F&CC meeting when my party councillors called me for a meet before going to my office. They conveyed me that Bhatias remarks against me were tarnishing the image of the party and is also violation of the coalition dharma. I have forwarded the resignation to district BJP chief Ramesh Sharma, said Jyoti.
Three BJP councillors dont resign
Though 16 councillors out of total 20 (including mayor) of the BJP in 60-member house of the MCJ resigned, three BJP councillors didnt submit their resignation. These include Ravi Mahendru, Ram Gopal Gupta and Kishan Kochar (all political opponents of the mayor). They all said that they did not resign as they have not received any orders from the high command.
Bhatias move to use unparliamentarily language against the mayor is condemnable. But we didnt resign as there are no orders from the party high-ups, said Mahendru.
Mayor to boycott office
Jalandhar: In protest against Bhatia, mayor Sunil Jyoti also announced that he will neither attend his office nor use his official car till an action is ensured against Bhatia.
Even I have a limit to bear any negative agenda aimed to malign my image. Its height now. I have told my party that I cannot bear more as I also have a social life. Till no action is initiated against Bhatia, I will not go to the MC office. But to ensure that there is no public harassment, I will keep on working from my camp office, he said.
Projects that will suffer
* Hiring sweeping machine for cleaning main roads of the city at the cost of `30 crore.
* Basti Bawa Khel 4-lane in limbo for over two years
* Action against 25 illegal buildings listed by senior deputy mayor
* Poor sewage due to which many areas remains flooded during monsoon.
* No action against 116 hospitals indentified for violating building bylaws
* Delay in the constrctuion of dog pound
The father and the uncle of a woman found hanged from a tree along National Highway-1 near Ladhowal village here on July 16 were arrested on Monday and charged with honour killing.
The woman from Nazibabad in Uttar Pradesh reportedly annoyed her family by falling in love with a man from another faith.
When the family failed to break up the relationship, her father allegedly plotted to kill her and involved one of his cousins.
For secrecy, they decided to kill her in some other state.
The uncle brought her to Punjab on the pretext of taking her to some shrines, and on way to Ludhiana, strangulated her after rape. He hanged the body from a tree and stripped it of belongings to conceal the victims identity, says a police officer.
A mobile-phone number on a piece of paper left on the spot led the police to the womans father and uncle.
It had looked like murder from the first appearance, said assistant commissioner of police (ACP) Surinder Mohan.
Parents withdrew their wards from Pathankot-based private Chintpurni Medical College on Monday, in their fresh bid to mount pressure on the state government for early shifting of the MBBS students to other state-run medical colleges.
Their petition to expedite the shifting process of 101 last batch students, enrolled in the 2014-15 session, is already pending in the Punjab and Haryana High court.
What is the point in keeping the kids in the college when they are not being taught anything, questions Sushil Garg, who heads a joint forum of parents fighting for their shifting.
He said that state government in its recent affidavit to high court maintained that the students would be shifted in November after they finish their second-year session in the college. But how can the government expect them to pass out the session when they have not attended even a single practical session on forensic medicine since the beginning of the current session, said Garg, adding that only a few sessions in pathology and microbiology have been held. Further classes are held just to maintain the attendance, he alleged. Just two-three teachers visit every day in morning hours. We even dont know whether they are duly recognised by the medical council of India since its inspection report in March categorically stated that the college had zero faculties, Garg said.
Amid all these, he said, the college management has been forcing parents to submit next sessions fee despite knowing that their shifting has already been ordered by the high court on June 7.
Pressing the state government for early implementation of these orders, Garg informed that all the students and parents would march towards the office of Director Research and Medical Education in Mohali on Wednesday to demand their early exit. They will also meet the medical education secretary
If the students are forced to join the college, they will not attend classes, he added
Another member Arun Batra said that the departments stand in the court that shifting process would take few months due to departments inspections and other formalities was just a waste of time
Successive MCIs reports have exposed the colleges infrastructure which is sufficient ground for the department to shift our wards, he added
Medical education secretary Vikas Partap said that he cannot comment anything since the matter is sub judice. We will submit our detailed reply in courts next hearing, he added
The hearing on parents contempt petition against June 7 orders is pending on July 22 while MCI is likely to file its response on the matter during the resumed hearing of the original case.
Terming the protest march from Bhagta Bhai Ka to Bargari, a successful event. Dhian Singh Mand, who was installed as the Akal Takht jathedar by radical outfits during the last years Sarbat Khalsa, at a press conference said that despite governments oppression they had successfully held the march for 18 km, on Monday.
By showing their persecution on innocent Sikhs, who were protesting peacefully, the government has shown their nadarshahi and jungle raj. But people made our event successful which is a slap on the governments face, Mand said.
Mand along with Amrik Singh Ajnala and Baljit Singh Daduwal were here at the press conference.
Mand said that Punjab has become law less and government less, the government has miserably failed to find out the culprits of the sacrilege incident.
The government has also failed to arrest the identified culprits in Behbal Kalan firing incident in which two persons lost their lives in police firing, he said.
Mand said that instead of nabbing the culprits, the police force was deployed to nab innocent protestors.
Whenever the Sikh protesters tried to raise their voice the government registered a case on them and put them behind the bars, he said.
We dont count Badals in a Sikh community, as they have a habit of fabricating these kinds of incidents just to get political mileage without having any fear of public sentiments, he added.
Daduwal said that they will soon hold a meeting and announce another protest march. This time it will be planned in a way that the government will not be able to foil it.
We will keep holding protests until the government arrest the real culprits behind sacrilege and Behbal Kalan firing, he added. Mand said that they are also holding Sarbat Khalsa again in Talwandi Sabo on November 10.
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It is not a bad thing for us, that the route known as the Goldene Strae or the Golden Road as we will get to know it- has escaped the attention of so many. It has been spared being overrun by hordes of tourists and as you will discover the
Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, who performed sewa (service) at the Golden Temple in Amritsar on Monday, is not the first politician to seek forgiveness at the holiest shrine of the Sikhs. But, he is the first non-Sikh to do so and that too voluntarily.
Dont miss | To say sorry or not: The different shades of apology politics in India
Here are other prominent political figures who atoned at Golden Temple in the recent past:
Surjit Singh Barnala: The former Punjab chief minister was declared tankhaiya (derelict) and excommunicated from the Sikh community by Akal Takht, the highest temporal seat of the Sikhs, for sending police into the Golden Temple in 1986 to flush out pro-Khalistan militants. Five years later, he submitted before the Sikh clergy and was made to repent by performing a 21-day sewa that included cleaning pilgrimss shoes and washing utensils at the community kitchen in the shrine.
He was pardoned and re-admitted into the Sikh fold.
Buta Singh: The former Union home minister earned the Akal Takhts wrath for his role in Operation Bluestar in 1984. He was ex-communicated from the Sikh community. Ten years later, he sought pardon and was let off after atoning for his sin.
Baba Santa Singh:
In March 2001, Santa Singh appeared before the Sikh head priests and apologised. (HT File Photo)
The chief of a Nihang faction who took up the kar sewa of the severely damaged Akal Takht building soon after Operation Bluestar. The Sikh clergy disapproved his act and declared him tankhaiya. In March 2001, Santa Singh appeared before the Sikh head priests and apologised. He was asked to do sewa at all five Sikh Takhts and then pardoned.
Jagdev Singh Talwandi: A former president of the Shiromani Akali Dal, he was punished for defying the Akal Takhts directive on unity in Akali factions. Talwandi atoned for his indiscretion in 1979 by doing sewa and was pardoned.
Bikram Singh Majithia: An influential minister in the current Badal government, he sparked off a blasphemy row in May 2014 when he allegedly distorted a Sikh hymn while canvassing for BJP candidate Arun Jaitley in Amritsar during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. Majithia appeared before Akal Takht and sought an apology. To repent, he washed utensils and cleaned shoes of pilgrims at Golden Temple. He was pardoned.
Also read | Kejriwals sewa a sham, blasphemous act: SAD-BJP
Getting impatient over the delay on part of the doctors, a 22-year-old woman delivered her baby with the help of her mother, after rushing out of the labour room of Bebe Nanki Mother and Child Care Centre at Guru Nanak Dev Hospital here in the wee hours of Monday.
It was after the delivery on the hospital premises that the staff came forward to provide medication to the woman, Sandeep Kaur. They also tried to convince her to get admitted to the ward, but the woman refused, saying she did not trust the hospital authorities and could not put the life of her baby girl in danger.
Sandeeps mother, Swarn Kaur, a resident of Rajatal village near Attari, said: After Sandeep experienced labour pains around midnight, we took her to the Amritsar civil hospital. The hospital refused to take up her case, citing low blood count, and referred her to Guru Nanak Dev Hospital. On reaching here, Sandeep was taken to the labour room, where she was examined, but was kept waiting in state of severe pain.
Sandeeps sister Jaswant Kaur said they were told Sandeep would need two bottles of blood to address her low blood count, and the family members would have to donate blood in return. Apart from this, we were also told to buy medicines, after which the operation would take place. We are not educated and financially sound. We panicked on hearing these instructions, and a traumatised Sandeep ran out of the ward to save her child.
It was during this chaos that Sandeep delivered the baby in absence of medical supervision on the hospital premises.
Authorities to conduct probe
Following the delivery, Sandeep and her family accused the hospital authorities of negligence. People gathered outside the centre, where the woman was lying with her child. Medical superintendent Dr Ram Sarup Sharma reached there to pacify them.
The doctors did check the woman and told her to sit in the room, but she and her family left. After the doctors came to know that she had delivered the baby, they immediately reached there to cut the umbilical cord, said Dr Sharma, while claiming to conduct an inquiry into the incident.
Rare riches from Frances famous museum, Palace of Versailles, will be put on show at Australias national gallery in Canberra from December as part of a display never seen outside the French borders.
Over 130 paintings, tapestries, pieces of furniture, statues and other objects (including a celebrated harp belonging to Marie Antoinette) from Versailles will be displayed.
Read: Head to Salzburg with family for some music, drama and action
The Palace of Versailles has never before lent a collection like this, drawn from all over the palace, to an exhibition outside France, National Gallery of Australia director Gerard Vaughan told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Items making the long journey include a marble bust of Louis XIV, a formal portrait of Marie Antoinette, and the 1.5 tonne-statue of Latona and Her Children from one of the main fountains of Versailles outside Paris.
The palace is located in Versailles, a wealthy Parisian suburb. (Shutterstock)
Versailles: Treasures from the Palace will also showcase personal items, including Marie Antoinettes hand-crafted chair and harp.
President of the Palace of Versailles, Catherine Pegard said it was the first time the items from the museum had travelled so far from France.
Speaking from Canberra, she said it was important to show that the landmark museum was not closed in on itself but open to the world.
Read: Want to travel like youre rich, but not spend a lot? Right this way...
The exhibition, which will run from 9 December 2016 to 17 April 2017, had been under discussion for several years, she said.
We thought that Canberra was a wonderful place because it is so different from Versailles but, at the same time, the power is located in Canberra as it was in Versailles, she added.
A look at the sprawling interiors of the Palace of Versailles:
Follow @htlifeandstyle for more.
Have you watched the newest short film on the block?
You should, because it stars former child actor Shweta Basu Prasad, who was caught in an alleged prostitution racket in 2014.
Interior Cafe Night, which also features veteran actor Naseeruddin Shah, marks the return of the actress after she was arrested, then acquitted, for alleged prostitution. Shweta, 26, who won a National Award at the age of 11, is also credited as the films co-producer.
Shweta, 26, who won a National Award at the age of 11, is also credited as the films co-producer. (YouTube)
Directed by Adhiraj Bose, Interior Cafe Night is set in, as the title suggests, the interior of a cafe in Kolkata at night.
Some background: Its almost closing time when cafe owner Naseeruddin Shah spots customer Shernaz Patel at a table. Shweta plays the younger version of Patel in the 13-minute film, which is about a chance meeting of two former lovers, who parted 30 years ago in Kolkata.
Shah and Shweta worked together in the 2005 film Iqbal. (YouTube)
Forced apart once by circumstances, it appears that serendipity has provided only a short lived reunion. Or has it?
Watch the film to fill in the blanks. The film also stars Naveen Kasturia as Naseeruddin Shahs younger self. Shah and Shweta worked together in the 2005 film Iqbal.
Donald Trumps campaign on Tuesday tried to brush off charges of plagiarism and recover quickly from an unforced stumble as he advanced within steps of officially seizing the Republican nomination for the US president.
The Day 2 of the Republican National Convention was full of accusations that Trumps wife, Melania Trump, had lifted portions of her Monday night speech from Michelle Obamas 2008 convention address.
Trumps campaign and allies described the controversy as a meaningless distraction, but offered no explanation for why two passages in the speeches each 30 words or longer matched nearly word-for-word.
This is totally blown out of proportion, Trump adviser Paul Manafort told The Associated Press. Theyre not even sentences. Theyre literally phrases. I was impressed somebody did their homework to think that that could be possibly done.
The dustup came at an inconvenient moment. Barring a last-minute jolt to the proceedings, the New York businessman is hours away from a roll call vote that will make official something the political establishment once deemed impossible. His quest will finally come to an end, Manafort said. It will have happened.
The campaign had hoped to relish the moment, having quieted persistent worries about its competence and pushed past raucous party divisions. The plagiarism question ensures neither worry will be far behind.
As the convention opened on Monday, the Cleveland arena resembled the convention-floor battles of old as aggrieved anti-Trump Republicans protested the adoption by voice vote of rules aimed at quashing an already flailing effort to deny him the prize. Instead of a manicured message of unity, viewers saw the fractured face of a party still coming to grips with the polarising man of the moment.
But to borrow the parlance of Trump the businessman, the deal should be sealed on Tuesday night.
Thats when the roll call of states is to unfold, delivering the delegates to make him the standard-bearer after a rollicking primary season that saw him vanquish 16 rivals. Typically in both parties, the roll call is heavy with ceremonial flourishes, good cheer and puffery about the virtues of each state. This time, its also another opportunity for discord to be heard.
The Republican Party opened its national convention, kicking off a four-day political jamboree that will anoint billionaire Donald Trump as its presidential nominee. (AFP)
Dissident delegates from several states planned to insist on abstaining or backing other candidates, Regina Thomson of Colorado, a leader of a group calling itself Free the Delegates. Their position, she said, is that Im not here to be a rubber stamp or a pawn.
On Monday, the floor flight gave way to a lineup of hard-edged, prime-time speeches in which Republicans painted a grim picture of the countrys future and an evener darker view of Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Speakers accused Clinton of lying, putting all of our childrens lives at risk, and threatening the nations security. When delegates chanted Lock her up! retired Gen. Michael Flynn responded from the podium: Youre damn right. Theres nothing wrong with that.
With a rock-star entrance, Trump changed the tone and introduced his wife, Melania. She traced her own life story, coming to America from Slovenia, and painted a softer, more rounded portrait of her husband than the hard-nosed, insult-throwing candidate voters have seen at every turn. She praised his simple goodness and his loyalty to and love of family while noting the drama that comes with Trump in politics.
If you want someone to fight for you and your country, I can assure you, he is the guy, Mrs. Trump told delegates.
Her speech contained several striking resemblances to Michele Obamas. For example, when she said her parents taught her that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise, that you treat people with respect.
Obama, in her 2008 speech, said she was raised to believe that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond, that you do what you say youre going to do, that you treat people with dignity and respect.
Other sections of Mrs. Trumps Trump speech also tracked closely with Obamas remarks.
The campaign said Monday nights speech was written by a team of writers who had spoken with Mrs Trump about her life experiences and included fragments that reflected her thinking. The White House declined to comment on Tuesday morning, but was expected to answer questions about the similarities later in the day.
Mrs Trumps speech was part of a four-day campaign to show the softer side of the tough-talking showman. On Tuesday night, two of his children will pick up where she left off. Tiffany Trump, his 22-year-old daughter from his marriage to Marla Maples, and Donald Trump Jr., his eldest son and an executive vice-president at The Trump Organization, will take the podium.
Former GOP presidents, the home-state governor and other top Republicans have skipped Trumps convention, but Tuesdays bill highlights some establishment support.
House speaker Paul Ryan, senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, New Jersey governor Chris Christie planned to address the convention along with senator Steve Daines, who had earlier planned to go fly-fishing in Montana.
The Republican party policy platform released on Monday, the opening day of its convention, called for protection of all religious communities in India from violence and discrimination.
The platform, much like a partys election manifesto in India, skipped specifics, but could be reflecting concerns over incidents of religious intolerance.
Both Republicans and Democrats have taken them up with India most famously by President Barack Obama in his Siri Fort speech in 2010, and then a few days later, on his return to Washington DC.
A semi-congressional body, largely aligned with religious conservatives in the Republican party, has long been trying to send a delegation to India to assess the situation.
But India has pushed back, arguing it is dealing with them on its own and is willing to discuss them with the US as part of their ongoing governmental dialogue.
The platform is considered a preview of the nominees administration, policies and vision, if elected. Platform 2016 is what a Trump administration could look like.
Could India, then, expect to face more heat from the US under Trump on religious freedom? The platform, which may indicate so, also made some assuring observations.
Ambiguous Trump
The party policy platform calls India a geopolitical ally, which may be heartening to some Indians even though New Delhi is usually wary of such words of endearments and indications of an alliance.
It also refers to India as a strategic trading partner, encouraging it to permit expanded foreign investment and trade, the key to rising living standards for those left out.
That, in fact, is a nod to a section of the US industry that has long pressured India to speed up market reforms and, crucially, align its intellectual property rights regime with Washingtons interests.
If this sounds confusing, Trump may have willed it thus to, typically, let the ambiguity accord him the flexibility to traipse out of positions he can no longer explain or defend.
On Pakistan
The platform hints at problems in normalising relations as long as any citizen of Pakistan can be punished for helping the war on terror. The reference is to the doctor who is believed to have helped the US hunt down al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Shakil Afridi remains in jail despite public and private pressure on Islamabad by Washington DC to release him.
Some 49,000 children will die of malnutrition in areas once cut off by northeastern Nigerias Islamic extremist uprising if they dont get treatment, the UN childrens agency warned on Tuesday.
Unicef called on charities and donors to respond quickly to avert a tragedy in Borno state, where nearly a quarter of a million children are severely malnourished.
Most of the children are in areas that had been inaccessible before a multinational force liberated them from Boko Haram extremists earlier this year.
Some 134 children on average will die every day from causes linked to acute malnutrition if the response is not scaled up quickly, the agencys regional director, Manuel Fontaine said.
A woman measures the diameter of a girl's arm suffering from severe acute malnutrition in the Muna informal settlement in the outskirts of Maiduguri capital of Borno State, northeastern Nigeria. (AFP file photo)
Children already are dying. Doctors Without Borders has warned of a catastrophic humanitarian emergency unfolding in the city of Bama, where it said 200 people had died in June and where refugees spoke of children dying of hunger every day.
The seven-year Boko Haram insurgency, which pledged support for the Islamic State group last year, has killed more than 20,000 people and spread across Nigerias borders, forcing about 2.7 million people from their homes.
Unicef said the agency has received less than half of the $55.5 million it appealed for earlier this year, and now the needs are even greater.
Vietnam has accused China of being untruthful about how much support it has on the South China Sea arbitration case days after New Delhi dismissed a similar misinformation campaign by Beijing.
Late on Monday, Vietnam described as untruthful Chinese state media reports that said Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc told Premier L Keqiang he respects Chinas position on the South China Sea arbitration case during a meeting in Ulan Bator two days after an international court dismissed Beijings maritime claims in the region.
Phuc and Li met on the sidelines of the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) summit in the Mongolian capital on July 14.
China had dismissed The Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitrations ruling as illegal and a piece of waste paper.
Following their meeting, Chinese state media, led by official news agency Xinhua and the Communist Party of China mouthpiece, Peoples Daily, apparently quoted Phuc and reported: Vietnam respects Chinas stance on the SCS arbitration case, which was unilaterally initiated by the Philippines, and maintains that such disputes should be solved peacefully through negotiations.
Phuc was further quoted as saying, Vietnam stands ready to push forward bilateral maritime negotiations and properly manage differences with China, in order to contribute to regional peace and stability.
A report published in Vietnams national daily, Vietnam News, said the version of events published in China was not true.
Vietnam refuted the untruthful coverage by Chinese media regarding the East Sea (the name Vietnam uses for the South China Sea) issue from the meeting between Phuc and Li.
The Vietnamese newspaper added: In fact, PM Phuc asked both sides to seriously implement agreements by senior leaders, including the agreement on the basic principles guiding the settlement of issues at sea between Vietnam and China signed by Party Secretary General Nguyen Phu Trong and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, in October 2011.
Phuc told Li the 2011 agreement was meant to promote mechanisms of negotiating sea-related issues, manage differences at sea, avoid further complicating the situation, and fully and effectively realise the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the East Sea, as well as to reach a Code a Conduct in the East Sea soon, contributing to maintaining peace and stability in the region.
Last week, New Delhi had dismissed a map printed in a state-run Chinese newspaper that showed India among countries supporting China.
Sources in New Delhi told HT the Chinese dailys report was part of a misinformation campaign by China. An official statement issued by India after the tribunals ruling didnt convey explicit support for China on the disputed region, especially after Beijing belligerently dismissed the verdict as null and void.
The son of a Pakistani high court chief justice, who was kidnapped from a busy Karachi street in June, was rescued by the army during an operation close to the tribal areas early on Tuesday.
Awais Ali Shah was recovered from the custody of terrorists during the intelligence-based operation near Tank in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, Gen Asim Bajwa, the head of the militarys media arm, said in a tweet.
Three terrorists were killed during the operation, Bajwa said.
Shah, the son of the chief justice of the Sindh high court, was reunited with his family in Karachi at 9.30 am.
I got a call from Gen Raheel Sharif at 3 am informing me my son has been rescued, chief justice Sajjad Ali Shah told the media after being reunited with his son. "Gen Raheel told me he was personally monitoring the case and informed me of my sons safe recovery."
The chief justice said the Pakistan Army "is the only one to credit for the recovery of my son." Asked whether he knew who was responsible for the kidnapping, he said, "All I know is that my son is back."
Army officials said the driver of the vehicle in which Awais was being transported was shot and died instantly. After the car came to a halt, two assailants emerged from the back and tried to intervene. Troops approached the car and questioned the person inside, who was wearing a burqa and said he was Awais Ali Shah.
Masked men had kidnapped Shah on June 20. He was picked up outside a supermarket in Karachi and it was feared he could be used as a bargaining chip in negotiations to free imprisoned militants.
Earlier this year, Shahbaz Taseer, the son of slain Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer, was rescued four years after he was kidnapped by militants in Lahore.
Last month, US and Afghan forces freed Ali Haider Gilani, the son of former premier Yousuf Raza Gilani, three years after gunmen abducted him from Punjab province.
Fresh out of the police academy, Matthew Gerald was so proud to bring his cruiser home that he stood in the driveway, wiping it down under the hot Louisiana sun. His neighbour Ashley Poe watched as he flicked the blue lights on and off, on and off.
Poe and her husband shared a laugh. The 41-year-old former soldier and Marine looked like an excited kid.
Its like living out the dream, she said.
Gerald got to live it only for a few months. He was one of three officers gunned down in an ambush Sunday in Baton Rouge, traumatising a nation already on edge.
In the span of 10 turbulent days, 10 law enforcement officers have been killed by attackers at a protest march in Dallas, a courthouse in Michigan and now a convenience store in Baton Rouge.
The officers who died on Sunday all lived just outside Denham Springs, a quiet bedroom community across the Amite River from Baton Rouge, which has been in turmoil for two weeks. Tensions rose sharply after the death of Alton Sterling, a black man killed by white Baton Rouge officers after a scuffle at a convenience store. The killing was captured on cellphone video.
As the nation debates race and policing, this community is mourning three of its sons all husbands and fathers described by friends as being committed to protecting and serving the public.
You hear about these things happening across the country to officers just trying to defend us, but this brings it right here, to our home, Livingston Parish President Layton Ricks said. These are our families. These are good men. Theyre the only line of defence between good and evil. We say we dont want to let this evil affect how we live our daily lives. But it does.
People holds up their hands in prayer during a candlelight vigil for fallen Baton Rouge police officers at the Healing Place Church in Baton Rouge. (AP Photo)
Gavin Long, a former Marine from Missouri dressed in black and carrying extra ammunition, opened fire on officers around 8:45am on Sunday, police said.
The gunfire also killed 45-year-old Brad Garafola, an East Baton Rouge Parish sheriffs deputy and a father of four, and 32-year-old Montrell Jackson, a 10-year veteran of the Baton Rouge Police Department with a newborn baby at home.
Garafola and Gerald were white. Jackson was black, as was the gunman.
The world is crazy right now. It is complete chaos, Jacksons sister-in-law Lauren Rose said. And it all needs to stop, everything. We all need peace.
Three other officers were wounded. One of them, deputy Nicholas Tullier, remained in critical condition on Monday. The gunman was killed at the scene.
Poe watched from the window on Sunday morning as a line of police cars pulled up in front of Geralds house. She woke up her husband, a former city police officer.
He said, Whats wrong? and I said, Theres units everywhere, and youve told me thats never a good sign, she said. They turned on the news.
The gunman shot Gerald and Jackson first.
Members of The Rock Church, located on the outskirts of Baton Rouge, hold a prayer vigil for the officers killed and wounded by a gunman. (AP Photo)
Gerald was a Marine from 1994 to 1998. He later joined the Army and served as a decorated soldier from 2002 to 2009, including three tours in Iraq. Less than a year ago, he joined the Baton Rouge Police Department.
He had a wife and two daughters, Poe said, and was devoted to them.
Poe said her 14-year-old son was interested in the military and Gerald was always ready to answer his questions.
Hed tell him how he was proud to protect his country, she said. It seemed like that was his passion to do that.
Denham Springs, population 10,000, is the sort of town where everyone is connected, said mayor Gerard Landry. Theres a palpable sense of anger and despair.
Theres no way to describe what it does to a small city like this, Marilyn Wallace said on Monday, standing behind the counter of the store she and her husband, Randy, own on a two-block long stretch of antique shops in the historic district of Denham Springs.
Gavin Long, a black US Marine Corps veteran who shot dead three policemen in Louisiana's capital reportedly sought out officers to kill them. (Reuters Photo/ Surveillance footage)
The city is in Livingston Parish, about 13 miles from Baton Rouge, with a history of racial tension. But that history and the racial divide in nearby Baton Rouge seem remote here.
Jacksons father-in-law, Lonnie Jordan, called him a gentle giant tall and stout and formidable looking, but with a peaceful disposition.
Jordan said his son-in-law had been working long hours since Sterling was killed.
Jackson posted on Facebook that he was physically and emotionally tired. He wrote that while in uniform he gets nasty looks and out of uniform some consider him a threat.
I swear to God I love this city, he wrote, but I wonder if this city loves me.
The police chief described at a news conference how he had gone to the district where Jackson worked just days earlier in an attempt to boost the spirits of the officers. Instead Jackson ended up giving him the pep talk.
He had been on the force 10 years and risen to the rank of corporal, said Kedrick Pitts, his half-brother. He worked hard, sometimes seven days a week.
Baton Rouge police officer Montrell Jackson, who was killed in a shooting attack, is seen in a photograph from his social media account. (Reuters Photo)
He was funny and good natured, Pitts said. He collected shoes, 500 pairs, including special Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan lines.
But what he loved most was his wife and 4-month-old son.
Hes going to grow up without a father, sister-in-law Rose said. But well be there to give him memories and let him know how his dad was a great man, and how he died with honour ... Hopefully one day, hell be like his dad.
At the convenience store Sunday, Garafola tried to intervene and help the fallen officers.
Surveillance video showed Garafola firing at the gunman from behind a dumpster as bullets hit the concrete around him, East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff Sid Gautreaux said.
My deputy went down fighting. He returned fire to the very end, the sheriff said.
Garafolas friends described him as a man committed to public service and devoted to his family.
He had a wife and four children: a 21-year-old son, a 15-year-old daughter, a 12-year-old son and a 7-year-old daughter.
Sgt. Gerald Parker, a close friend, described him as a jack of all trades who enjoyed helping people in his neighbourhood, like mending their fences or mowing their lawns. He worked hard, often picking up extra hours.
He was a man of strong character, Parker said. All these officers are heroes. Some people would run. But these gentlemen leave their families knowing something can happen.
His colleague, deputy Nicholas Tullier, a father of two teenage sons, is surrounded by family at the hospital.
Carol Sue McManus, a relative, said hes a workaholic who serves on two units, one patrol and the other motorcycle. She said he was injured at one point when he was run over while escorting a funeral procession.
Im mad, she said with tears in her eyes. I wish all this madness would stop.
Erdogan's purge picks up pace as allies warn him not to go too far
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's retribution against this weekends coup-plotters picked up pace Monday as his EU allies warned him not to go too far, matching talk of reintroducing the death penalty with threats to suspend the path to EU membership.
GALLERY
A handout picture provided by Prime Minister Press Office shows Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim speaks after ministerial cabinet meeting in Ankara, Turkey, 18 July 2016.
Istanbul (dpa) - Less than two days after the attempted coup was shut down, government officials reported thousands of arrests and detentions, essentially hollowing out parts of the armed forces and the civil service.Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said Monday that the most recent tally of coup-related arrests was 7,543 arrests, including 6,038 soldiers, 100 police officers, 755 judges and prosecutors and 650 civilians.In all, more than 13,000 government workers - excluding the armed forces - have been suspended, according to Yildirim. There appeared to be some overlap between non-military suspensions and the arrests of civil servants.All civil servants in the country - more than 3 million people - were ordered to return to their duties as soon as possible and all annual leave for employees was cancelled until further notice, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported.The question in Turkey now turned to how to punish all the alleged coup plotters, who stand accused of leading an uprising that started late Friday before being crushed by loyalists. Yildirim said Monday the death toll among loyalist forces was 60 police officers and three soldiers, on top of 145 civilians killed.Among putsch backers, Yildirim reported 24 dead and 50 injured. That contradicted earlier Foreign Ministry figures stating more than 100 had died. Nearly 1,491 people - loyalists and civilians- were reported injured.Erdogan said he and legislators will discuss reviving the death penalty, which has not been used in Turkey since 1984 and was abolished in 2004."It will take a parliamentary decision for that to take action in the form of a constitutional measure. So the leaders will have to come together, discuss it. If they accept to discuss it then as the president I will approve any decision to come out of the parliament," Erdogan told CNN from Istanbul.In his first interview since the failed putsch, Erdogan denounced the "clear crime of treason."Reinstituting capital punishment would be diplomatically troubling to many of Turkeys Western allies. The EU - which Turkey has sought to join since 1999 - has no member that allows the death penalty.Germany said that restoring the death penalty would lead to a suspension of EU membership talks.Nonetheless Erdogan has pledged the "cleansing" of state institutions will continue, saying a cancer had spread like a "virus" and needed to be eradicated.Turkish authorities, including prosecutors, on Monday began a search at Incirlik airbase in the south of the country, Hurriyet newspaper reported.General Bekir Ercan Van, commander of Incirlik airbase, was arrested with 10 of his soldiers for alleged complicity on Sunday.The joint US-Turkish base, which is also host to soldiers from several countries, including Germany, was reportedly used during the failed coup attempt, which saw mutineers hijack fighter jets. The base is used by the US for its air campaign against Islamic State.The alleged ringleader of the coup, former air force head Akin Ozturk, has denied involvement. Ozturks testimony to prosecutors was leaked to private media outlets, who posted it online, showing he categorically denied being part of the coup plot at any level.Ozturk has been shown on state media in custody, badly battered and bloody, his ear bandaged. Many of those in custody - including some of the more than 100 generals and admirals detained - have been shown with severe bruise marks, some stripped to their underwear.The diplomatic fight was also touching the United States, where alleged coup organizer Fethullah Gulen, once a close Erdogan ally, resides. Turkey has demanded Gulen be extradited, despite Gulens insistence he had nothing to do with the coup.The United States has said it would look at any extradition requests, but US Secretary of State John Kerry also made clear Monday that Turkey should respect the rule of law. Erdogan said a request would be made soon.The US embassy in Ankara also reacted to news reports and comments from public figures that Washington "in some way supported the coup attempt.""This is categorically untrue, and such speculation is harmful to the decades-long friendship between two great nations," a statement from the embassy said.Meanwhile, the US has lifted a ban on flights to and from Turkey that was put in place following the coup attempt.
Britain has renewed its Trident project that will build another generation of nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines after Prime Minister Theresa May unequivocally declared her intention to authorise a nuclear strike if needed.
The nuclear fleet is based at Clyde in Scotland, whose MPs voted against renewing the 40-billion project. Asking for the fleet to removed from Scotland, the MPs said its continuing presence there would be another reason to seek a second independence referendum.
In a significant interaction in the House of Commons on Monday night , George Kerevan of the Scottish National Party asked May, I congratulate the Prime Minister on her new role, but let us cut to the chase: Is she personally prepared to authorise a nuclear strike that could kill 100,000 innocent men, women and children?
May responded: Yes. The whole point of a deterrent is that our enemies need to know that we would be prepared to use it, unlike the suggestion that we could have a nuclear deterrent but not actually be willing to use it, which seemed to come from the Labour front bench.
Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, known for his long commitment to nuclear disarmament, strongly opposed the government motion but faced much opposition in the House from most of his MPs, who voted for the motion and used the occasion to attack his leadership.
The government won the motion by a majority of 355 votes, when 140 of Labours 230 MPs voted in its favour, 47 opposed it and others abstained.
Defence secretary Michael Fallon, after winning the vote, said: MPs on all sides have voted by an overwhelming margin, to renew our nuclear deterrent - the ultimate guarantee of our national security.
We have voted to protect our nation from the most serious threats we may face in the 2030s, 2040s and 2050s. The British Parliament has sent a powerful message to our allies that Britain is stepping up its international commitments, not stepping back from them.
Fallon added, We will now get on with building the next generation of nuclear submarines to help keep the nation, and our allies, safe for decades to come.
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Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Saeed on Tuesday led hundreds of his supporters in a rally from Lahore to Islamabad to protest against the unrest and deaths in Jammu and Kashmir, vowing to march towards the Indian state in support of the Kashmiri people.
The Kashmir Caravan organised by Jamaat-ud-Dawah (JuD), the organisation now headed by Saeed, began from Lahores busy Mall Road on Tuesday afternoon. The caravan, comprising trucks and buses, stretched for several kilometres.
Members of the JuD, Jamaat-e-Islami and other religious parties are expected to join the rally at places such as Muridke and Gujranwala in Punjab province. The caravan is expected to reach Islamabad on Wednesday and the JuD plans to hold a public meeting in the Pakistani capital to express solidarity with Kashmiris.
Saeed, for whom the US has offered a $10 million, told supporters in Lahore that the rally will have three phases. In the first phase, the caravan will go to Islamabad to wake up members of the National Assembly and Senate so that they raise their voice for the rights of Kashmiris.
In the second phase, Saeed said the caravan will travel to Muzaffarabad and Chakothi in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir to campaign for the freedom of Kashmiris.
And in the third phase, we will march into occupied Kashmir (Jammu and Kashmir) and we will continue marching till Kashmiris get freedom, he said. Saeed did not say how the caravan would get across the heavily guarded Line of Control that divides the two parts of Kashmir.
The recent killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani by Indian security forces triggered violent protests in Jammu and Kashmir that have claimed more than 40 lives.
Like the Pakistan government, Saeed has referred to Wani as a freedom fighter. He said Wanis death would strengthen the jihad in Kashmir.
Saeed, accused of masterminding the 2008 Mumbai attacks, has asked the Pakistan government to immediately suspend diplomatic and trade ties with India, expel the Indian envoy and recall its high commissioner from New Delhi.
A statement from the Pakistan government said a Black Day will be observed across the country on Wednesday to express solidarity with Kashmiri brethren and protest grave human rights violations in Jammu and Kashmir.
Rallies and functions will be held all over Pakistan and (PoK) to draw attention of the world community towards the burning issue of Kashmir, the statement said.
Officials of the federal and provincial governments will wear black arm bands on duty to express political, moral and diplomatic support to Kashmiris. Special prayers will also be held for martyrs of Kashmir.
The statement said Pakistani diaspora will protests in front of parliaments of their respective countries and UN organisations.
The Islamic State claimed responsibility on Tuesday for an attack by an axe-wielding Afghan refugee on a German train, according to its online Amaq news agency.
The perpetrator of the stabbing attack in Germany was one of the fighters of the Islamic State and carried out the operation in answer to the calls to target the countries of the coalition fighting the Islamic State, the statement said.
A hand-drawn Islamic State flag was found in the room of the 17-year-old who attacked passengers on a train in southern Germany, a senior state official said on Tuesday.
The teen severely wounded four passengers before police shot him dead late on Monday -- days after a Tunisian delivery man ploughed a 19-tonne truck into crowds of revelers in the southern French city of Nice, killing 84.
The case is likely to deepen worries about so-called lone wolf attacks in Europe and could put political pressure on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who welcomed hundreds of thousands of migrants to Germany over the past year.
Two of those injured in the attacks were in a critical condition and several of the injured included members of a Chinese family, he added, without giving any further details.
Police officers stand beside a train in Wuerzburg, southern Germany after a 17-year-old Afghan armed with an axe and a knife attacked passengers aboard a regional train in southern Germany. (AP)
Read: Afghan teen attacks German train passengers with axe and knife, shot dead
At least one witness reported that the attacker, who had been living with a foster family in the nearby town of Ochsenfurt, had shouted Allahu Akbar (God is greatest), Herrmann told ZDF television.
All of that has to be put together in a large mosaic as to what his motivations were, and to what extent he can be counted as an Islamist, or to what extent he radicalised himself in recent times, Herrmann said. We are pursuing every piece of evidence.
Herrmann told the Bayerischer Rundfunk radio station in a separate interview that the attacker had come to Germany as an unaccompanied minor about two years ago.
He started attacking his passengers with an axe and a knife as the train was approaching its last stop, the Bavarian city of Wuerzburg.
He fled after the emergency brake was pulled and was pursued by a police unit and shot dead when he tried to attack the officers, officials said.
The South China Morning Post said the injured passengers were from Hong Kong.
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich on Tuesday said Republican Party nominee Donald Trump, as an entrepreneur, is a natural partner for Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Gingrich, likely to land a senior position in a Trump administration, referred to Modis stint in Gujarat to make that point creating jobs and developing free enterprises.
He was addressing a news briefing hosted by the Republican Hindu Committee along with its founder Shalli Kumar, a Chicago businessman. The former speaker supports the organisation.
Later, acknowledging Modi and Trump were two different people one was a career politician and the other a career businessman Gingrich doubled down on them being natural partners.
Modi was a career politician who was the most successful advocate of free enterprise in India, he said pointing to his stint in Gujarat and efforts in Delhi, where he is cutting red tape and bureaucracy.
About Trump being a businessman, Gingrich, who was nearly picked as the real-estate magnates running mate, said a lot of what businessmen and politicians do is quite similar, such as deal-making and negotiations. And Trump, he added, was very good at that.
Gingrichs second and final point was that both of them were extremely self-confident people.
Scientists have discovered a treasure trove of over 100 new worlds outside the solar system using data from NASAs Kepler spacecraft, some of which have the possibility of hosting life.
Out of 197 initial planet candidates, scientists have confirmed 104 planets outside our solar system. Among the confirmed is a planetary system comprising four promising planets that could be rocky.
These four planets, all between 20 and 50% larger than Earth by diameter, are orbiting the M dwarf star K2-72, found 181 light-years away in the direction of the Aquarius constellation.
The host star is less than half the size of the Sun and less bright. The planets orbital periods range from five-and-a-half to 24 days, and two of them may experience irradiation levels from their star comparable to those on Earth.
Despite their tight orbits -- closer than Mercurys orbit around our Sun -- the possibility that life could arise on a planet around such a star cannot be ruled out, said lead author Ian Crossfield, from the University of Arizona.
The researchers achieved this extraordinary roundup of exoplanets by combining data with follow-up observations by Earth-based telescopes including the North Gemini telescope and the W M Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the Automated Planet Finder of the University of California Observatories, and the Large Binocular Telescope operated by the University of Arizona.
Both Kepler and its K2 mission discover new planets by measuring the subtle dip in a stars brightness caused by a planet passing in front of its star.
The findings were published in the Astrophysical Journal.
In fresh trouble for former Pakistan president general (retd) Pervez Musharraf, a special court hearing the treason charges against him ordered authorities to freeze his bank accounts and confiscate his property on Tuesday.
A three-member bench of the special court, headed by Peshawar high court chief justice Mazhar Alam Miankhel, passed the order over the non-appearance of the accused before the court despite repeated summons, reports the Dawn.
The court also adjourned the hearing of the case until the former president is either arrested or surrenders himself.
Justice Miankhel remarked that the court cannot initiate further proceedings in the absence of the accused.
According to law, the accused cannot be trialed in absentia, he said, adding that the attitude of the accused left no option for the court.
A compliance report of the orders must be submitted with the court, the court ordered.
In his defence, Musharrafs counsel said that his client is ailing and currently abroad for treatment.
The counsels request to record Musharrafs statement via Skype was turned down by the bench.
In an earlier hearing in May this year, the special court had declared Musharraf an absconder in the ongoing treason case.
Musharraf left the country on March 18, soon after the Supreme Court upheld the Sindh high courts directions to remove his name from the Exit Control List (ECL).
Portions of Melania Trumps prime-time speech to the Republican National Convention on Monday appear to have been plagiarized, tarnishing what should have been her big moment to introduce herself to the American public.
The apparent plagiarism came to light shortly after the 46-year-old former model took to the stage with husband Donald Trump Monday night to offer an eloquent testimonial of his strengths as a husband, father, and potential leader of the United States.
A section of the speech describing the values that shaped her life strongly resembled a passage from Michelle Obamas speech to the 2008 Democratic convention.
My parents impressed on me the values: that you work hard for what you want in life. That your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise. That you treat people with respect. They taught me to show the values and morals in my daily life. That is the lesson that I continue to pass along to our son, Melania Trump said.
Read: Trump introduces wife Melania at Republican national convention
And we need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow. Because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.
In her speech, Michelle Obama said:
And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say youre going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you dont know them, and even if you dont agree with them.
And Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values, and pass them on to the next generation. Because we want our children -- and all children in this nation -- to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.
Watch the similarities in the speeches below:
Melania Trumps speech was the highlight of a chaotic opening day of a Republican convention that is set to formally nominate her husband as the partys presidential candidate later this week.
A beaming Trump personally introduced his wife to the cheering delegates gathered in Cleveland, breaking with tradition by appearing before his actual nomination.
Read: 88% Republicans back Trump against Clinton, up from last years 1%: Pew survey
It was truly an honor to introduce my wife, Melania. Her speech and demeanor were absolutely incredible. Very proud! the billionaire tweeted afterwards.
Police departments across the country are ordering officers to pair up after ambush attacks left eight officers dead in Texas and Louisiana, a precaution that could slow response times to low-level crimes and drive up overtime for already exhausted police.
Some agencies that normally let officers patrol alone began, forcing them to double up throughout their shifts, even during meals or other breaks during their shifts.
Los Angeles police assigned members of specialised crime-fighting units to back up officers responding to routine calls. Baltimore police began sending two squad cars to every call received. Dispatchers in Denver urged officers to travel in pairs indefinitely and keep their head on a swivel to protect themselves against the new threat. Police in Fort Worth extended the order beyond their uniformed officers to plainclothes detectives and high-ranking supervisors.
The new safety measures are some of the most intense since the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, said Darrel Stephens, executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs of Police Association. Los Angeles also ordered more of its helicopters to patrol the skies. Officers elsewhere were told to keep their guard up, especially around police stations. It was unclear when operations would return to normal.
Youre on the street eight, 10, 12 hours. Remaining with that heightened sense of alertness for that entire time is a pretty big challenge, Stephens said. Doubling up those officers helps them keep track of each other and helps them feel a sense of safety.
It was unclear whether the buddy system might have prevented Sundays targeted killings of three law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, or the July 7 killings of five officers during a Dallas protest march with a heavy police presence.
In some cities, doubling up means less police visibility and geographic coverage on the streets because putting two officers in one car means others stay parked. Some departments have compensated by asking officers to extend their shifts, further straining those already on overtime from long nights of protests.
In Denver, two officers already respond to most calls, either together or in separate cars. But response times could end up slower for lower-priority cases, like thefts, that typically require just one officer.
Two-person patrols are the safest approach, but what were seeing is the two-officer cars are responding to everything, so there are fewer cars to handle the calls, said Denver police Sgt. Bryan ONeill, vice-president of the citys Police Protective Association. Our two-man cars are going out and working as quickly and effectively as they can, knowing that the calls are going to stack up. They dont want to see the citizens suffer because we have fewer cars out there.
Two-officer patrols are not a fool-proof solution, and studies are mixed about their effectiveness. Seven of the 51 officers killed in 2014 were in a two-officer vehicle, according to FBI statistics.
But if an officer is shot, a two-person patrol usually ensures the second officer can radio and get help, said Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore officer who teaches law and police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
But two-officer patrols are difficult to sustain for departments short on money and manpower, said officer Robert Swartzwelder, president of the police union in Pittsburgh, where the chief called for fewer single-officer cars patrolling neighbourhoods.
Most police departments will continue to focus resources on high-crime neighbourhoods, in spite of manpower constraints, Stephens said.
Some officers said a strain on resources is worth it to improve officer safety during dangerous times. The shooting of an officer in Milwaukee Sunday as he sat alone in his police cruiser should be seen as proof of the buddy systems value, said Mike Crivello, who heads the Milwaukees Police Association union.
When there are two officers, obviously its double protection for both of them, he said.
The Milwaukee officer was wounded and undergoing surgery on Monday. Had he had a partner, the other one would be watching out, Crivello said.
North Korea on Tuesday fired three ballistic missiles into its eastern sea, which followed a week of verbal warnings against the South over its decision to deploy an advanced US missile defence system to better cope with North Korean threats, South Korean officials said.
The short-range missiles were launched from inland and flew about 500 to 600 kilometers before crashing into the sea, displaying a sufficient range to target the southern part of South Korea, where Seoul and Washington have decided to station the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, system, Seouls Joint Chiefs of Staff said.
A statement from the Pentagon said that U.S. Strategic Command systems tracked what we assess were three North Korean missile launches. It said two were presumed to be Scud tactical ballistic missiles, followed by the presumed launch of a No Dong intermediate range ballistic missile.
It said the missile launches did not pose a threat to North America.
North Korea routinely test fires short-range missiles and artillery systems but it tends to do more launches in times of tension with the outside world. North Korea also launched what was presumed to be a ballistic missile from a submarine on July 10, according to U.S. and South Korean officials, a day after U.S. and South Korean military officials held a news conference to officially announce they would deploy the THAAD system in South Korea.
South Koreas Defense Ministry announced last week that the southeastern rural town of Seongju had been picked as the site for the THAAD deployment.
Seoul and Washington had been discussing deploying the THAAD system since North Korea conducted a fourth nuclear test and a long-range rocket launch earlier this year.
The North last Monday said it will take physical counter-action as soon as the THAAD location is announced and has issued further warnings through its state media after Seongju was announced as the site.
The US and Pakistan do not agree on everything but the two countries are effectively coordinating on national security issues, the White House has said in a statement.
The United States has an important relationship with Pakistan. We dont agree on everything, but we certainly have been able to effectively coordinate on a variety of national security issues thats important to fighting extremists and protecting the citizens in both our countries, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters.
When asked about speculations of a military coup in Pakistan in the aftermath of a failed bid in Turkey, he said, I am certain not going to speculate about the political situation in another country.
The relationship between the US and Turkey is different than its relationship with Pakistan. Pakistan is not a NATO ally, but certainly the US benefits to have a productive relationship with Pakistan, he said.
DHAKA: A Bangladesh court on Monday indicted 41 people for murder in the deaths of more than 1,100 people in the collapse of a building that housed five garment factories and became known as the countrys worst industrial disaster. Investigators initially said those accused of wrongdoing in the 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza building would be charged with culpable homicide, but they later changed the charges to murder due to the gravity of the disaster. Masud Rana, who owned the building outside Dhaka, and 33 other people pleaded not guilty when the charges against them were read out in court. Another seven who absconded will be tried in absentia.
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DHAKA: The head of an elite Bangladeshi anti-crime agency on Monday asked militants from radical groups to return to normal life, promising they would be awarded 10 lakh Takas and an opportunity for rehabilitation.
Benazir Ahmed, director general of the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), made the announcement after a 12-hour search for militant hideouts across vast riverine chars (shoals) in Sariakandi and Dhunat sub-districts of northern Bogra district.
Ahmed also announced that any person who provides information to security agencies about suspected hideouts or militants will be awarded 5 lakh Takas. Members of several radicals groups, including the banned Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), will be rehabilitated if they want to return to normal life, he said.
The offer came a little more than a fortnight after armed militants stormed a cafe in the Gulshan diplomatic zone of Dhaka and butchered 20 hostages, most of them foreigners, before being gunned down by security forces.
Officials said they conducted a massive search with about 550 personnel of different security agencies since early on Monday, covering vast areas along the Jamuna river where some militants were reportedly trained.
During the search, Ahmed said, security forces seized some books on jihad and some weapons but did not give details of the recoveries and the places where they were made. The search covered the remote Char Kajla and Nimgachhi area of Bogra.
The drive was conducted after Shafiul, a suspected militant captured during an attack on Eid-ul-Fitr on July 7 at Sholakia in Kishorganj district, told officials he was trained up in the riverine area.
Ahmed said some recoveries showed that militants had hideouts in the area but had left. Mondays move was apparently aimed at spreading the message that no place would be spared from surveillance as Prime Minister Sheikh Hasinas government is facing the political challenge of rooting out militants reportedly belonging to domestic radical groups tied to international organisations.
BEIJING: Days after an international tribunal ruled China had no historic rights to islands in the South China Sea, Beijing announced that access to parts of the disputed region will be blocked for a few days for a naval drill beginning on Tuesday.
On July 12, a tribunal formed by The Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration rejected Chinas claims to exclusive economic rights across large swathes of the South China Sea in response to a petition filed by the Philippines.
China dismissed the ruling, saying the court had no jurisdiction to rule on the region.
Following the ruling, Beijing has been on the offensive, claiming the support scores of countries and saying it will not follow the verdict. Monday s announcement on the naval drill came against the backdrop of Chinas aggressive military posturing.
Chinas Maritime Safety Administration made an announcement on Monday that ships were prohibited from entering a certain area off the coast of Hainan between July 19 and July 21 as the navy will conduct a drill. The area off the east coast of Chinas island province of Hainan will host military exercises, the administration said on its website, adding that entrance was prohibited.
Reuters quoted a senior Chinese admiral as saying freedom of navigation patrols carried out by foreign navies in the South China Sea could end in disaster.
When has freedom of navigation in the SCS ever been affected? It has not, whether in the past or now, and in the future there wont be a problem as long as nobody plays tricks, Sun Jianguo, deputy chief of the Joint Staff Department of the powerful Central Military Commission, was quoted as saying.
But China consistently opposes so-called military freedom of navigation which brings with it a military threat, and which challenges and disrespects the international law of the sea, Sun said.
RABAT: Morocco wants to rejoin the African Union, 32 years after quitting the bloc in protest at its decision to accept Western Sahara as a member, King Mohammed VI said on Sunday. Morocco maintains that Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony, is an integral part of the kingdom even though local Sahrawi people led by the Polisario Front have long campaigned for the right to self-determination. For a long time our friends have been asking us to return to them, so that Morocco can take up its natural place within its institutional family. The moment has come, the monarch said.
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LONDON: Conservative MP Alok Sharma has been appointed parliamentary under-secretary of state in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office by Prime Minister Theresa May, adding a new face of Indian-origin to frontline British politics.
Sharma was first elected to parliament in the May 2010 elections and re-elected in May 2015 from Reading West.
He will work with foreign secretary Boris Johnson and is likely to have a role related to India.
S harm a had the role of Prime Ministers infrastructure envoy for India in the previous government headed by David Cameron , working on the implementation of massive projects announced during Prime Minister Narendra Modis visit to London in November 2015.
However, Sandip Verma, the Amritsar-born member of the House of Lords, was dropped from Mays council of ministers. Baroness Verma was the parliamentary under-secretary of state in the Department for International Development.
The new secretary in the Department for International Development is Priti Patel, who was appointed to the cabinetlevel post soon after May took over as prime minister last week.
JERUSALEM: A Palestinian stabbed two Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank on Monday before being shot and arrested, months after his brother was killed while carrying out an attack, the Israeli army said. An assailant armed with a knife stabbed two IDF (Israel Defence Forces) soldiers during routine activity near Al-Arroub, an army statement said, referring to an area south of Bethlehem in the southern West Bank. Forces shot and detained the assailant, it added. The Palestinian health ministry aid the man was Mustafa Baradeah from Al-Arroub refugee camp.
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BATONROUGE: Just days before he was shot and killed, a Baton Rouge police officer posted an emotional Facebook message, saying he was physically and emotionally tired and expressing how difficult it was to be both a police officer and a black man, a friend said Sunday.
I swear to God I love this city but I wonder if this city loves me, Montrell Jackson wrote.
Friends and family of Jackson, 32, were mourning the 10-year veteran of the police force that relatives described as agentle giant and aprotector after he and another two law enforcement officers were shot and killed Sunday morning by a gunman.
Sgt. Don Coppola Jr. of the Baton Rouge Police Department identified the other slain Baton Rouge police officer as 41-year-old Matthew Gerald, who had been with the department less than a year. The third officer killed was 45-year-old sheriffs deputy Brad Garafola, a 24-year veteran, spokeswoman Casey Rayborn Hicks for the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriffs Office said.
In the Facebook posting Jackson said while in uniform he gets nasty looks and out of uniform some consider him a threat.
Ive experienced so much in my short life and these last 3 days have tested me to the core, the posting read.
The message was posted July 8, just three days after a black man was shot and killed by police in Baton Rouge. That shooting was the beginning of an extremely tense week in the countrys fraught history of race relations.
Another black man was shot and killed by police the next day in Minnesota, with his girlfriend livestreaming the aftermath on Facebook. Then a black gunman opened fire during a protest against the police shootings in Dallas, killing five police officers.
Jackson does not specifically refer to those events but the posting appears to be a reaction to them.
DHAKA: A special tribunal in Bangladesh on Monday sentenced three militia members to death for carrying out killings and other serious crimes during the countrys independence war against Pakistan 35 years ago.
Five other defendants were sentenced to life in prison. Justice Anwarul Haque, head of a three-member panel of judges, announced the verdict in a packed courtroom with only two of the defendants in the docks.
The others were tried in absentia. The accused men were members of the Al Badr militia group that collaborated with the Pakistani Army to commit genocide in Bangladeshs Jamalpur district in 1971.
Bangladesh says Pakistani soldiers killed 3 million people, raped 200,000 women and forced 10 million people to flee to refugee camps across the border in India.
Prosecution lawyer Tureen Afroz said they were satisfied with the verdict. Defence lawyer Gazi Tamim said they would appeal the verdict.
The Quaker-dominated Loudoun Rangers openly defied Virginia tradition to serve the Union.
By Richard E. Crouch
Of all the special units that were formed to combat Confederate partisan rangers in Virginia during the Civil Warthe Blazer Scouts, the Jesse Scouts, Coles Maryland Cavalry and othersprobably the most promising was the Loudoun Rangers, an independent cavalry unit drawn from the largely Quaker and German farming communities of northern Loudoun County, Virginia.
Despite the pacifist beliefs of their church, many of Loudoun Countys Quakers took up arms on each side. The Loudoun Rangers founder and commander was Captain Samuel C. Means, himself a Quaker and the owner of a large grist mill in Waterford. Means also owned a substantial mercantile business in Point of Rocks, Md. Forced by vigorous Confederate persecution to take refuge in Maryland, Means was summoned to Washington and offered a commission to raise a cavalry company of disaffected refugee Virginians. He quickly raised two companies, which were mustered into Federal service on June 20, 1862.
Loudoun County was swarming with Confederates. It was the Loudoun Rangers job to make periodic raids to harass and capture them. To do so, the Rangers established camps on the Maryland side of the Potomac River. From there they made constant forays into Loudoun, Clarke and Jefferson counties.
Often the Rangers were merged into other commands and sent off to accompany the main army, fighting in such major battles as Fishers Hill, Cedar Creek and Monocacy, as well as in other engagements even farther from their native county. In fact, for Means men, the whole war was a constant struggle to maintain their units independence.
There was a curious parallel between the Loudoun Rangers and their archenemies, Lt. Col. Elijah V. Lige Whites 35th Battalion, Virginia Cavalry, also known as Whites Comanches. The first two companies were raised in exactly the same area of Loudoun County, and the same surnames appear in both the blue and the gray ranks. As the two groups clashed again and again, their special brand of warfare took on the nature of local family feuds.
The relationship between the two bands was especially antagonistic. Soldiers knew individual members of the opposing unit, exactly where they lived, their sweethearts and other loved ones. Like the Loudoun Rangers, the 35th Virginia had been raised for the specific purpose of ranging in the border counties, and the men never resigned themselves to being forced to follow the main army into distant regions in violation of their special enlistment contract.
Whites Comanches returned to Loudoun County as an entire unit only a few times during the war, but its smaller units and individuals of the regiment were constantly turning up there. Convalescent troopers were all too eager to rejoin the fight, and officers and men frequently went back home to recruit, forage or procure a new mount. At the beginning of the war, it was Means and other Loudoun Rangers who had to sneak back into Loudoun County to visit their homes; later in the war, the Confederates had to do so.
When General Robert E. Lees army moved north as part of the Antietam campaign, Whites Comanches were suddenly back in force in Loudoun County. The Rangers were sleeping in the Waterford Baptist Church when they were attacked by Whites men after midnight on August 27, 1862. Surrounded, the Rangers defended their position in the brick church until almost every man was wounded and ammunition was running low. When they surrendered, it was to relatives and to boys with whom they had gone to school. One of Whites men, William Snoots, loudly insisted on the right to kill his prisoner, and it took several of his fellow Confederates to force him to accept the rules of civilized warfare. The prisoner was Loudoun Ranger Charles Snoots, his brother.
On September 1, the Rangers hit nearby Hillsboro, driving off some of Whites cavalrymen and capturing two of them. Another clash the next day was much larger and much less successful. This time it was near Leesburg, a hotbed of Southern sympathizers, and the Rangers opponents were members of the 2nd Virginia Cavalry. These hardened Confederate veterans bested them in a pitched battle about a mile north of town. Coupled with the Waterford debacle, the costly defeat at Leesburg was very discouraging to recruiting efforts and probably kept the Rangers from raising enough men to make a full battalion.
Before Colonel Dixon Miles surrendered his 12,000-man force at Harpers Ferry to Confederate Maj. Gen. Stonewall Jackson later that same September, some 2,000 Union horsemen fought their way to safety. Among them were the Loudoun Rangers. Means, like most officers, was outraged at the plan to surrender. He and his Rangers had special reasons to avoid capture. Since they were Virginians, they could be hanged as traitors. Means already had a price on his head courtesy of Virginia authorities. He chose to live and fight another day.
The Virginia Yankees later fought Colonel Whites men again, as well as cavalrymen under the command of Colonel John S. Mosby. The Rangers fell upon and routed an unsuspecting company of Whites cavalry at Catoctin Mountain near Morven Park on September 13, 1863, and were ambushed in turn by a detachment of Mosbys men under Captain Dolly Richards on May 17, 1864.
The young men of the Loudoun Rangers, like their Rebel counterparts, were able to sustain fairly close relationships with the local womenfolk. Unlike the ordinary Union and Confederate troops who served far from home, the Rangers frequently saw girls they knew in the Waterford, Lovettsville and Taylorstown neighborhoods. Often they attended parties, dances, weddings and other social gatherings. The local boys in gray did likewise, and all too frequently the nicest parties were spoiled by gunfire.
On February 20, 1863, Sergeant Flemon B. Andersons sister Molly gave a ball at the James Filler house that was interrupted by some of Whites cavalrymen, led by a Lieutenant Marlow. When Molly begged and pleaded for the Rebels to spare her brother a trip to Libby Prison, Marlow finally agreed that Anderson would be paroled if she would dance the next set with him. Relieved, Sergeant Anderson took up the fiddle and played happily for the rest of the evening. The next morning he reported to Union headquarters at Point of Rocks and was sent to Camp Parole at Annapolis, where he stayed until properly exchanged.
Unfortunately, the party-going Anderson pushed his luck. On Christmas Eve 1864, a Ranger detachment left Maryland for a raid into their old home grounds near Waterford, knowing the Confederates were camped there. Andersons mother had arranged a dance at her home near Taylorstown, and the sergeant stopped by to visit. He was sitting beside his intended when Whites and Mosbys men surrounded the house around 9 p.m. Anderson tried to escape through the back door as they came in the front, but he was shot through the head and died in his mothers arms. The Confederates wanted to shoot captured Sergeant John Hickman as well for some alleged war crime in the past, but they desisted when one of Mosbys men who was related to the Andersons intervened.
The Rangers should have been successful in thwarting the Confederate partisans who preyed on communications and rear-echelon troops. The fact that they were not can be attributed to at least four identifiable factors.
First was a lack of formal training. The Rangers received no military training from the Union Army. Charles A. Webster, who was mustered in on June 20, 1862, did his best to teach the men how to drill. Webster, who apparently had prior military training, became the units drillmaster even before he was promoted to sergeant. He earned the Rangers undying gratitude for turning them into an efficient military unit with a working knowledge of cavalry drill, discipline and fighting techniques.
Webster was a terrific shot and a skilled hand with a saber, but he was quite reticent about discussing his past. It turned out that Webster was not really his name. He was Charles Brown from New Hampshire, and he was recognized by some Maine troops when they were camping nearby after the Battle of Antietam. He had taken the name Webster because his mother was distantly related to Daniel Webster and because his father, who had become a Californian in the 1849 Gold Rush, was a notorious Copperhead (anti-war Democrat). He never revealed where he had received his earlier military training.
Webster was captured in December 1862 and showed incredible toughness and an incorrigible fighting spirit in prison. He suffered numerous privations at Castle Thunder in Richmond and made three valiant efforts to escape. Finally, the Confederates hanged Webster on April 10, 1863, for the alleged murder of Confederate Captain Richard Simpson at the latters Loudoun County home in August 1862. (They had to put Webster in a chair for the hanging because he had broken both legs during his last escape attempt.) Apparently, there was nothing murderous about Simpsons death, which was rather typical of the Rangers brand of border warfare. Simpson, of the 8th Virginia Infantry, had been on a recruiting mission when he tried to visit his home at Mount Gilead. He was surrounded by the Rangers and shot down as he ran for the woods, ignoring demands to surrender.
The second factor working against the Rangers success was their original captain. Despite being a brave leader and a staunch loyalist, Means was always a bit suspect. He had no military background and had originally not wanted to take a stand. Means avoided joining the Union forces at first, he explained, because he had a brother serving in the Confederate Army and did not want to make trouble.
More important, Means was always in trouble with his Union superiors. Much of this friction arose from the Rangers attempts to preserve their status as an independent unit and serve in their home territory. This was a fight the Rangers ultimately lost. On March 31, 1864, Means was ordered to take his command to Parkersburg, W. Va., to be consolidated with the 3rd West Virginia Cavalry. Means refused to comply because this order violated Secretary of War Edwin Stantons specific directive that Means recruit the company for special service and that the unit be directly under Stantons orders. Stanton backed Means in the flurry of angry correspondence between officers that ensued, and the Rangers stayed in the East.
Means was victorious in the fight, but it cost him his command. The orders of consolidation were countermanded by Stanton on April 25, but Means had already resigned his commission and left the service as of April 13. Means, who could not go home to Waterford while there were still Confederates about, moved in with his daughter in Washington, D.C., apparently took to drink and died a broken man.
Whether Means drinking had affected his leadership during the war is an intriguing question. The reminiscences of at least one soldier from another unit described the commander of the Loudoun Rangers as a notorious drunk. To him the most hilarious moment of the whole war was when a very drunken captain tried to impress visiting government officials and their ladies on the riverbank at Lovettsville. Welcoming them to Virginia in cavalier fashion, he swept off his hat, bowed low, lost his footing and tumbled backward into the Potomac. Out of discretion, however, the soldier did not give the captains name, and without a precise date it is unclear whether it was Means or another officer who put on the embarrassing show.
The Loudoun Rangers generally seemed to have had, for a bunch of Quaker lads at least, a rather pronounced drinking problem, and that was the units third hindrance. A great many soldiers, both Northern and Southern, liked to get into peoples liquor when they could, but the Rangers had special opportunities. Operating on their own home ground, they tended to know exactly where alcohol could be found. They would pay visits to various local distilleries and cider mills in Loudoun County. If it was a Union sympathizers distillery and the liquor belonged to friends, it was drunk in friendship; if it was Confederate booze, it was treated as spoils of war. More than once this inebriation compromised the Rangers fighting ability and got them into trouble.
Finally, Federal Army commanders never really trusted the loyal Virginians. They were not true to their own state, and many Union military men tended to regard a turncoat as beneath contempt. A man once turned might easily turn again. The fact that the Rangers were specially recruited under the direct command of the secretary of war also rankled many Federal commanders.
Several times during the war, and at least three times on the Maryland bank of the Potomac, the Rangers were surprised in their camps and badly mauled by large, concentrated forces of Whites or Mosbys command. At least twice the Rangers claimed that the striking Rebels wore blue uniforms, which allowed them to get close enough to deliver a surprise knockout blow, but this has always been disputed.
When both companies of the Rangers were camped at Keyes Switch on the B&O Railroad just west of Harpers Ferry on April 6, 1865, few expected any threatening activity from the all-but-beaten Confederate Army. Military discipline, accordingly, was at low ebb. The Rangers were relaxing in camp when a force of 250 horsemen approached from the northwest on the Charlestown Pike. Since they wore blue uniforms, no one took undue notice. Mosbys troops, thus undetected, captured every horse and man in the camp, some 81 horses and 65 men.
This was the final blow to the Rangers. Chief of Staff Winfield Scott Hancock, when informed of the attack, threw away the tele-gram with a hearty laugh and said, Well, thats the last of the Loudoun Rangers.
In later years, the old veterans gathered to reminisce about the war and to remember their fallen comrades, many of whom had died in Southern prisons. The reunions were a lot like those of their Virginia Confederate neighborswith one notable exception: They met to celebrate a victory. *
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PERSONALITY
When Samuel Garland fell at South Mountain, the Confederacy lost a promising general and a proven leader.
By James K. Swisher
In the years following the Civil War, the loss of outstanding young leaders in that fratricidal conflict had an immeasurable effect upon state and local affairs. The war had rapidly expanded to a point where the relatively small number of professionally trained military officers could not provide all the leadership needed for the armies of both North and South. This leadership vacuum was filled by community leaders from hundreds of towns and villages.
As the size and organizational demands of the armies increased, it was natural that West Pointtrained officers advanced rapidly to the rank of general. Thus, large numbers of company and regimental leadership positions came to be held by citizen-soldiers. In the military tradition of the day, company, regimental and brigade commanders were expected to lead from the front, resulting in extremely high casualty rates among field-grade officers.
In the postwar years, many small towns or cities suffered from a very real loss of leadership. Prospective governors, mayors, attorneys, businessmen and educators lay dead on the various fields of battle.
The problem was well typified in the small, central Virginia town of Lynchburg, which provided eight officers of general rank to the Confederate armies, only four of whom survived. A sad example was the life, career and death of Brig. Gen. Samuel Garland, Jr.
Garland was born into a well-known and prosperous Virginia family in Lynchburg on December 16, 1830. His father, Maurice H. Garland, was the youngest of four prominent brothers. Judge James Garland, the eldest, lived to be the oldest presiding judge in the state. Another brother, General John Garland, was a career U.S. Army officer whose daughter married future Confederate Lt. Gen. James Longstreet. General Garlands sister-in-law became the wife of future Union commander U.S. Grant. Samuel Garland, Sr., the third brother and young Samuels namesake, was a partner in the law firm of which Maurice H. Garland was also a member. The elder Samuel accumulated considerable wealth from land speculation in Mississippi and constructed a large, Federal-style mansion on a hill in Lynchburg, which became known as Garlands Hill.
After the death of his father, young Samuel maintained a close relationship with his mother. While at boarding school, Garland kept a daily diary that he submitted to his mother for weekly review. At age 14, he enrolled as a student at Randolph Macon College. A maternal uncle was president of the school and could closely supervise his studies. One year later, when his uncle accepted the presidency of Vanderbilt University, Samuel persuaded his mother to allow him to attend Virginia Military Institute in Lexington.
As a cadet, young Garland compiled an outstanding record in both academic and military studies. He was the founder and first president of the VMI Literary So-
ciety. During his second year, Garland was ranked first in a class of 35 and was deemed outstanding in French. In his junior term he was appointed first sergeant of the cadet corps and seemed destined
for a responsible position his senior year. But when a new demerit system was instituted, Garland resigned his rank and, in a respectfully correct letter to the superintendent, forcefully explained that he was opposed to any system that required one cadet to assign demerits to another. Thus, Garland held no rank his senior year, but still graduated second in his class.
Upon graduation Garland considered a military career, but on the advice of his uncles he enrolled instead in law school at the University of Virginia. Two years later he received a bachelor of laws degree, having again achieved an outstanding academic record. At the age of 21, Garland returned home to Lynchburg to practice law with the firm of Garland and Slaughter, where his father had been a member and his uncle was a senior partner.
Garland courted Elizabeth Campbell Meem, the daughter of businessman John G. Meem, and married her on May 15, 1856. Their wedding was said to have been one of the most brilliant in Lynchburg memory. They purchased a house at 303 Madison Street on Garlands Hill, and the annual dress balls held there were a high point of Lynchburg society. During the first year of the war, tragedy struck when both Elizabeth and Sammie, their 4-year-old son, died in an influenza epidemic. Grief-stricken, the shattered Garland returned to Lynchburg for Elizabeths funeral. Although he found some solace in his strong religious beliefs, he seldom smiled after his crushing loss.
On April 23, 1861, Garland left Lynchburg as captain of the Lynchburg Home Guard. He led the company to Richmond, where the unit was mustered in as Company G of the 11th Virginia Infantry. The 11th Virginia included four Lynchburg militia companies and six units from the surrounding area. Colonel Jubal Early of Franklin County was appointed commanding officer. Four days after arrival, Early was promoted and, partially as a reflection of Company Gs high state of readiness, Garland was appointed colonel in his place.
Garland led the regiment to Manassas, where it was assigned to the brigade of Maj. Gen. James Longstreet. The regiment was delegated to guard Blackburns Ford, and three days before the First Battle of Manassas, the 11th was involved in heavy fighting to hold the crossing. Garland was commended by Longstreet for coolness and energy under fire. After the battle, Garland was given the responsibility of organizing and implementing the collection of weapons left behind on the battlefield. The 11th Virginia then marched north and was involved in a minor action at Dranesville. Following the Dranesville skirmish, the regiment distinguished itself in rear-guard service and repelled several Union cavalry charges. Again, Garland was cited for displaying great coolness, and in February 1862 General Joseph Johnston recommended Garland for promotion to brigadier general.
In the spring of 1862, the regiment was incorporated into the newly formed brigade of Maj. Gen. Daniel Harvey Hill. Hills brigade was detailed to Williamsburg in May and became heavily engaged in stabilizing the Confederate line on the peninsula. The 11th Virginia was a major part of the successful action there, and Garland was praised by Hill for refusing to leave the field and for continuing to lead his regiment after being wounded.
Brigadier General Jubal Early was seriously wounded during the Battle of Williamsburg and required several months to recuperate. As a result of Garlands three previous citations and his record of efficient administration, he was promoted to the rank of brigadier general and assigned command of Earlys brigade, which consisted of the 24th and 38th Virginia, the 5th and 23rd North Carolina, the 2nd Florida and the 24th Mississippi regiments.
After the retreat up the peninsula, Garland experienced his first major battle as a brigade commander at Seven Pines. Garlands brigade, in concert with that of Brig. Gen. George B. Anderson, was ordered to assault some earthworks adjacent to the Williamsburg Road. The two brigades advanced through heavy woods containing 3-foot-deep pools of water. The brigades were also halted by extensive abatis and became intermingled; but under the leadership of their commanders they lay down under the obstruction and returned such a heavy fire that the Union defenders evacuated the position. Such frontal assaults were costly, and Garlands brigade of about 2,200 men suffered 740 casualties. Garlands horse was killed under him, and he commandeered an artillery horse that was wounded twice.
After Robert E. Lee took command of the Army of Northern Virginia, Garland and his brigade were engaged in the Seven Days campaign east of Richmond as Lee attempted to drive the enemy away from the Confederate capital. At the Battle of Gaines Mill, Garland scouted the Union right flank and found it open. He felt the flank could be turned if the soldiers could advance through Union artillery fire. He returned to the lines and sought Hills permission to attack. Hill agreed, and assigned Andersons brigade to support Garland. The two brigades advanced rapidly through strong artillery fire and fell heavily on the open flank. The Union troops were forced to abandon the position with the loss of many prisoners and several guns. A few days later, at Malvern Hill, Garlands brigade took part in the hopeless charge on the Federal position. A mistake in command keyed a signal for a frontal assault by Hills entire division. Garland reported: We were returning to our old positions under the impression that the infantry assault had been canceled due to insufficient artillery support. Suddenly two of [Maj. Gen. John] Magruders brigades on our right charged out of the woods and up the slope. This was the signal to Harvey Hill who immediately sent in his whole division. All five of Hills brigades suffered heavily, with Garlands already weakened unit losing 844 additional casualties.
During and after the battles around Richmond, Lee evaluated his subordinates and found many lacking. Several were transferred; others left the army. But Garlands reputation was growing. He was considered outstanding in an army that was well known for the quality of its brigade commanders.
After Union General George McClellan retreated down the peninsula to Fort Monroe, Lee determined to carry the war north, away from the Confederate capital. During the Second Battle of Manassas, Garlands brigade was positioned in Fredericksburg to shield Richmond from Federal troops. Following Maj. Gen. John Popes defeat at Second Manassas, Hills division marched hard to join Lees army for the crossing of the Potomac into Maryland.
Lee determined to split the army into several parts. Several divisions were dispatched under Lt. Gen. Thomas J. Jackson to capture Harpers Ferry with its 11,000 garrison troops and abundant supplies. Hills division was sent to the small town of Boonesboro, near South Mountain. The mountain served as a shield between the widely scattered Confederate army and the Union army advancing from Washington. Hill was ordered to coordinate the defense of the passes on South Mountain in concert with Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuarts cavalry. There were two major openings in South Mountain, Turners Gap and Foxs Gap. Turners Gap presented a good defensive position, but Foxs Gap was wide and could be flanked by several avenues of approach. Hill assigned one brigade to Turners Gap and sent Garlands brigade to hold Foxs Gap.
Garland formed a line in Foxs Gap astride the old Sharpsburg Road with his brigade of about 1,200 men. Barely had he established his position when he was attacked by two brigades of the IX Union Corps under Brig. Gen. Jacob D. Cox. On the left, the newly arrived 13th North Carolina became involved in a heavy firefight with Union troops. As the North Carolina regiment began to waver under pressure, Garland rode up to the action. Colonel Thomas Ruffin of the 13th shouted, General, why are you here? Garland replied, I may as well be here as yourself. Ruffin answered, No, it is my duty, but you should lead your brigade from a safer position. At that moment Ruffin was hit in the hip, and as he went down Garland also fell, hit in the center of the back by a bullet that passed through his body and exited two inches above his right breast. Captain Don Halsey, his aide, rushed forward. Garlands last words to him were, I am killed. Send for the senior colonel.
Garlands remains were escorted home to Lynchburg by his cousin and aide-de-camp Lieutenant Maurice Garland. By order of the City Council, his body was to lie in state in the Lynchburg Courthouse for a period of 24 hours. On Friday, September 19, 1862, Garlands funeral was conducted at St. Pauls Episcopal Church, with interment following at Lynchburgs Presbyterian Cemetery. Garland was buried in the Meem family plot alongside his wife and young son. By resolution of the Lynchburg City Council, all business establishments were closed, all churches were ordered to toll their bells, and all soldiers then in the city were detailed to march in the procession. Almost the entire population of the city attended the ceremony for the much admired citizen who, in the words of The Lynchburg Virginian, hated war, but excelled at it. *
T ypically, first-time buyers in London would need to come up with a 20 per cent deposit to buy a new-build home.
This means for flats priced at 450,000, buyers need to find an eye-watering 90,000 to seal the deal. But, under the Help To Buy scheme, they need five per cent of the purchase price and a smaller mortgage loan of 55 per cent.
The Help to Buy scheme is continuing to keep dreams of home ownership alive for young Londoners. Under this scheme, the required deposit equates to five per cent of the purchase price, alongside a smaller mortgage loan of 55 per cent.
James Woodhall, 29, is a management consultant at professional services firm PwC and a DJ in his spare time.
James used a 40 per cent Help to Buy loan to land a new 450,000 one-bedroom flat at Titanium Point in Bethnal Green.
James Woodhall purchased his first home at Titanium Point in Bethnal Green
The development is by social housing landlord Guinness Trust, which aims to help first-time buyers on to the property ladder. Call 0300 456 0522.
The latest new homes in London 1 /26 The latest new homes in London St Clements From 440,000: new homes at St Clements, formerly a Victorian workhouse infirmary, in Mile End the site is being redeveloped into a walled estate of 252 private, shared-ownership and rental homes.
Scroll right for more new homes in London Camberwell on the Green From 446,000: 92 flats at the areas biggest new homes development, Camberwell on the Green. Call 020 7368 4830. Wing From 375,000: in Camberwell Road, Wing is another new launch of flats, with the offer of 1,000 towards legal fees. Call 020 7487 1710. Brickfield Court From 232,000: for a one-bedroom flat at Brickfield Court, one of six new residential buildings in Slough. The flats qualify for the Government-backed low-deposit Help to Buy scheme. Call 01753 331 064. Emerald Gardens From 435,000: Emerald Gardens is the latest apartment scheme seeking to bask in the glory of Kew's unmatched green spaces. There are 170 flats in low-rise blocks divided by landscaped courtyards. Call Taylor Wimpey (020 3667 5595). The Danvers From 975,000 : built on the site of a run-down council estate, these new homes have their own front door facing a new street called Danvers Avenue. Call Peabody on 020 3369 8690 for more information.
Read more Bermondsey Works From 507,500 : this stylish, contemporary block is made up of 148 flats and duplexes above a new free school and City of London sixth form academy. Call Telford Homes on 020 3538 3457 for more information.
Read more St Georges Gate From 825,000 : this new development of two-bedroom and four-bedroom townhouses are great for families looking to trade up to a bigger home. Call 0333 577 5878 for more information.
Read more Smithfield Square From 575,000 : duplex homes at Smithfield Square in Hornsey boast two entrances - one for a studio and one for a one-bedroom apartment. Call St James on 020 3411 9880 for more information.
Read more St. James Urban Living Lord Palmerston Court From 850,000 : an historic Victorian pub has been transformed into five light-filled apartments on Britannia Road, Fulham. Call Savills on 020 7731 9400 for more information.
Read more City North From 450,000 : City North is is the largest regeneration scheme in Islington borough since Arsenals Emirates stadium project, bringing 308 new homes to the area. Call Telford Homes on 020 3538 6897 for more information.
Read more Taper Building From 595,000 : located between London Bridge and Tower Bridge, this new scheme of apartments offer climate-control, underfloor heating and fast fibre cabling. Call KFH on 020 3486 2250 for more information.
Read more Leithfield Park From 409,000 : Homes in semi-rural commuter locations are proving firm favourites with the capital's homebuyers, and could result in savings of up to 450,000. Leithfield Park was formerly Milford Hospital and is based in the Surrey Hills.
Read more Acton Gardens From 625,000: new split-level homes come with sunken patios and first-floor terraces. The Uberhauses replace a bulldozed council estate in west London.
Read more
Camden Courtyards From 200,000: a new development in the canalside regeneration that has brought bars, cafes and a Eurostar terminal that puts Paris less than two hours away. Call Barratt on 020 7428 4455 for more information.
Read more Cadogan Terrace From 435,000: A new-build block of eight flats at 129 Cadogan Terrace has the advantage of backing onto Hertford Union Canal. The homes have up to three bedrooms and generous-size terraces and there is on-site parking too. Slough From 230,000: Milestone is a development being built on land next to the old town hall in Slough, with 73 homes ranging from one-bedroom apartments to three-bedroom houses. Prices range from 230,000 to 500,000, and buyers get a 100 voucher towards the cost of a new bike at one of the towns cycle shops. Call 01753 326 106 for more information. Horizons From 995,000: six spectacular penthouse homes, spilt over three levels, in Docklands offer panoramic views from their terraces. Call Cushman & Wakefield on 020 3296 2222 for more information.
Read more Maida Vale From 560,000: Renamed Westbourne Place, this former "nick" has been split into 25 flats with period features, and two new blocks have been built at the rear around a communal courtyard garden. Call Redrow on 020 3538 3791 for more information.
Read more Catford Green From 338,000: Catford Green is a new scheme of 558 new homes overlooking the recently upgraded Ladywell Fields park and the Ravensbourne River. Only a five per cent deposit is required for a one-bedroom flat. Call 0844 5566166 for more information.
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Most well-known house builders offer homes under the Governments loan scheme, but there is no central register of available developments, so you have to do your own legwork.
Barratt is promoting Help to Buy after a pre-EU referendum slump in sales, unveiling new phases at Catford Green, Hendon Waterside, Olympic Way in Wembley, and Putney Rise.
From 390,000. Call 0844 811 4321.
Without Help to Buy, a first-timer in London typically would need a deposit of about 90,000. Under the scheme, buyers need just five per cent typically between 10,000 and 25,000 of the purchase price and only require a mortgage for 55 per cent.
The economy designer brand is thinking big with the opening of not just one but two new hotels in Budapest! This is a new country for the brand and a new opportunity to once again convey the distinctive personality and character of ibis Styles. To mark the occasion, the teams from AccorHotels Hungary have organised a custom inauguration event bringing together partners, clients and members of the local communities.
Opened on 24 May 2016, the ibis Styles Budapest Center and ibis Styles Budapest City, both former Mercure establishments, convey the "Happy Mood" feel of the ibis family. During the launch event, inspired by a storytelling concept for the two establishments, Gilles Clavie, President and CEO of Orbis SA/AccorHotels Eastern Europe, explained that: "the opening of the first ibis Styles hotels in Hungary is a major step for our Group in the region, as well as for the brand. With the arrival of ibis Styles to Hungary we are bringing innovation and a new hotel experience for the guests, offering unique design and atmosphere, a friendly service and welcome, where guest can feel the conviviality and unique storytelling created around the hotels".
The talented Polish design agency Tremend created the interior decor for both establishments, which feature fun and distinctive living areas. Including bright and refreshing colours, modern materials, amusing geometric patterns and brightly-lit interiors, all aspects of the brand's distinctive style contribute to a well-established and hard-hitting storytelling concept.
The goal of the ibis Styles Budapest Center is to take its guests back to their happy childhood days with a "play" theme! With brightly coloured fitted carpets and video game illustrations featured on the walls of the bedrooms, game boards in the public areas and humorous signage, everything has been carefully designed to ensure that our guests have a fun and happy stay here.
For its part, the ibis Styles Budapest City offers guests a "bicycle ride" experience. This includes chair backs in the shape of handlebars, wheels for chandeliers, hanging bicycles or cycle lanes marked out on the ground. All cycle-related imagery inviting the guest to embark on a special journey!
"It was quite a gamble, but it paid off!" explained Armand Bikart, Design Director Eastern Europe at AccorHotels. "The challenge lay in totally redesigning the interior of two former Mercure hotels which were looking a little tired and even obsolete, with the aim of creating something completely different. And achieving all of this on a very tight budget. This is one of the brand's first openings in the country and so we had to get it right. In my view, today we can all be very proud of the results! These two hotels are a showcase for modernity, with a very clear and unashamed designer feel to them".
About Accor, a world-leading hospitality group
Accor is a world leading hospitality group consisting of 5,300 properties and 10,000 food and beverage venues throughout 110 countries. The group has one of the industry's most diverse and fully-integrated hospitality ecosystems encompassing more than 40 luxury, premium, midscale and economy hotel brands, entertainment and nightlife venues, restaurants and bars, branded private residences, shared accommodation properties, concierge services, co-working spaces and more. Accor's unmatched position in lifestyle hospitality one of the fastest growing categories in the industry is led by Ennismore, a joint venture, which Accor holds a majority shareholding. Ennismore is a creative hospitality company with a global collective of entrepreneurial and founder-built brands with purpose at their heart. Accor boasts an unrivalled portfolio of distinctive brands and more than 230,000 team members worldwide. Members benefit from the company's comprehensive loyalty program ALL Accor Live Limitless a daily lifestyle companion that provides access to a wide variety of rewards, services and experiences. Through its global sustainability commitments (such as achieving Net Zero Carbon emissions by 2050, global elimination of single use plastics in its hotels' guest experience, etc.), Accor Solidarity, RiiSE and ALL Heartist Fund initiatives, the Group is focused on driving positive action through business ethics, responsible tourism, environmental sustainability, community engagement, diversity and inclusivity. Founded in 1967, Accor SA is headquartered in France and publicly listed on the Euronext Paris Stock Exchange (ISIN code: FR0000120404) and on the OTC Market (Ticket: ACCYY) in the United States. For more information visit group.accor.com or follow Accor on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
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International Tourism Continues to Grow Above Average in the First Four Months Of 2016
2016 started on a strong note for international tourism. International tourist arrivals grew by 5% between January and April 2016 according to the latest UNWTO World Tourism Barometer. Results were robust across almost all subregions and many destinations reported double-digit growth. Prospects for May-August remain positive, with around 500 million tourists expected to travel abroad in the Northern Hemisphere summer holiday peak season.
Destinations worldwide received 348 million international tourists (overnight visitors) between January and April 2016, some 18 million more than the same period last year (+5.3%). This follows an increase of 4.6% in 2015, and could make 2016 the seventh consecutive year of above-average growth, with international arrivals increasing by 4% or more every year following the crisis in 2009.
Results show a strong desire to travel and this continues to drive tourism growth. Destinations keep benefitting from solid demand across all world regions despite ongoing challenges, showing that tourism is a dynamic and resilient economic sector, said UNWTO Secretary-General Taleb Rifai.
Yet, despite these good results, the tragic events of recent months remind us that safety and security remain a major challenge for all. We must continue to work closely together to address this global threat and ensure tourism is an integral part of emergency planning and response at global, regional and national level added Mr. Rifai.
By region, Asia and the Pacific (+9%) recorded the highest increase in international arrivals, with all Asian subregions enjoying growth of 7% or above. By subregion, Subsaharan Africa (+13%) led growth, strongly rebounding from previous years modest results.
UNWTO forecasts international tourist arrivals to increase by 3.5% to 4.5% over the full year 2016, in line with UNWTOs long-term projection of 3.8% growth a year for the period 2010 to 2020.
Results by region
Asia and the Pacific (+9%) recorded the highest growth in international arrivals across world regions in January-April 2016, with robust results in all four subregions. South-East Asia and Oceania both achieved 10% growth, while arrivals in North-East Asia increased by 8% and in South Asia by 7%.
In Africa (+7%), international tourist arrivals experienced a clear rebound in Subsaharan Africa (+13%), while in North Africa results were down by 8%.
In the Americas (+6%), all four subregions continued to enjoy significant growth in the first four months of 2016, led by Central America and South America (both at +7%). Arrivals in the Caribbean (+6%) and North America (+5%) were fuelled by continued strong outbound demand from the United States, where tourism expenditure increased by 9% through May.
Europe (+4%), the worlds most visited region, consolidated its healthy growth of recent years with Northern Europe and Central and Eastern Europe (both at +6%) in the lead, followed by Southern and Mediterranean Europe (+4%) and Western Europe (+3%).
International tourist arrivals in the Middle East are estimated to have declined by 7% through April according to available information.
Results for both Africa and the Middle East should be read with caution, as they are based on currently limited data available for these regions.
Prospects remain positive
UNWTO estimates that some 500 million tourists will travel internationally between May and August 2016, the Northern Hemisphere summer holiday peak season, accounting for about 41% of the years total international tourist arrivals.
According to the UNWTO Tourism Confidence Index, prospects for May-August 2016 remain positive and in line with the performance of January-April. The Index shows confidence is highest in Europe, followed by the Americas.
On the positive side, Brazil is looking forward to the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in August. A downside is that security concerns remain high on the agenda. Furthermore, the United Kingdoms vote to leave the European Union in the recent referendum (Brexit) has raised uncertainty in the market and led to a substantial depreciation of the UK pound Sterling. However, UNWTO does not expect this to have a significant impact on international travel in the short term.
Note: Results reflect preliminary data reported to date and are subject to revision.
Relevant links:
UNWTO World Tourism Barometer, including excerpt with tables on international tourism arrivals per world region for free download
UNWTO Tourism Highlights, 2016 Edition (free download)
Infographic: International Tourism in 2015 (International Tourist Arrivals and International Tourism Receipts)
Infographic: Why Tourism Matters
Hoteles City Express, S.A.B. de C.V. (BMV: HCITY), announces the opening of City Express Reynosa Aeropuerto, reaching 111 properties in operation and more than 12,450 rooms to host travelers along 61 cities in 29 states of Mexico, as well as in Cali, Colombia, and San Jose, Costa Rica.
City Express Reynosa Aeropuerto is the sixth hotel of the Company in the state of Tamaulipas and the second in the city of Reynosa. The property is 100% owned by Hoteles City Express. This new property is focused on offering a convenient lodging alternative to business travelers with industrial, commercial and manufacturing activities across the border between Mexico and the United States. The property will benefit from the strategic location between the local airport and the border crossing.
Hoteles City Express is considered the leading and fastest-growing limited-service hotel chain in Mexico, in terms of number of hotels, number of rooms, geographic presence, market share and revenues. Founded in 2002, Hoteles City Express specializes in offering high-quality, comfortable and safe lodging at affordable prices via a limited-service hotel chain geared mainly towards domestic business travelers. With 111 hotels in operation located throughout Mexico, Costa Rica and Colombia, Hoteles City Express operates four distinct brands: City Express, City Express Plus, City Express Suites and City Express Junior to serve different segments of its target market. In June 2013, Hoteles City Express completed its IPO and began trading on the Mexican Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "HCITY;" furthermore, on October 8, 2014, Hoteles City Express completed a subsequent public offering of stock with the aim of accelerating its growth in new hotels in coming years.
Many artists who arent currently making their way through the summer festival circuit have begun to announce their loaded tour schedules for the fall. One fall tour to look out for is Denzel Currys Black Metal Terrorist tour, which he announced today. Joining the South Florida XXL Freshman on the tour will be Compton rapper Boogie. Two of our favorite young artists, each with his own sound, together for a 32-date tour. Sounds epic.
The tour begins on September 17 at Chicagos Riot Fest and then covers the Northeast before moving down through the South, taking about a month hiatus after the show at the III Points Festival in Currys hometown of Miami. After that, the tour picks up again on November 4 in Austin and hits just about everywhere in the West before swinging through the Midwest and then into Nashville for the final show on the 22nd.
Based off the strength of his March project, Imperial, the Black Metal Terrorist tour should be Currys biggest one yet. Boogies last tour experience was opening for Tory Lanez last fall, so he should experience a different audience this time around. Its a well-curated lineup that will give folks the chance to experience some of the most forward-thinking sounds from hip-hops new guard.
Check out all the dates below.
Denzel Curry
All Tvvins have announced a live date at the Olympia on October 28. Tickets cost 21 and are on sale this Friday at 9am.
The band, will release their album 'IVV' on August 12, which saw them working with producers including Jim Abbiss (Arcade Fire, Kasabian), Mark Rankin (Queens of the Stone Age, Bombay Bicycle Club), Matt Schwartz (Massive Attack) and Dan Grech-Marguerat (Lana Del Rey, Wolf Alice). Advertisement
Chris Martin: my "favourite movie of all time"
Chris Martin and company were joined by Marty McFly himself Monday night.
At a New Jersey Coldplay concert, Michael J. Fox made a surprise appearance. The Back to the Future star and guitar player backed the band on 'Earth Angel' and 'Johnny B. Goode', effectively reenacting the 1985 film's school dance scene.
Before the numbers, Chris Martin's son appeared on the jumbotron to ask his dad to play a song from sci-fi classic, which he described as his and his dad's favourite movie.
Check out the performance and the Back to the Future it takes inspiration from below.
The film opened in French cinemas the day before the Nice terror attacks that left 84 dead.
British actor Idris Elba has said that he agrees with Studiocanal's decision to pull Bastille Day from French cinemas in light of the Nice attack.
Starring Elba, Bastille Day had opened in French cinemas the day before the terror attack that left 84 dead.
Elba has stated in an interview with Complex magazine that he supports the decision.
"Of course it's called Bastille Day, and it's a film that tackles violence on that particular day. So I suspect the filmmakers were like, 'This doesn't feel right to have out there. It's insensitive" he said.
For fans of Jackie Chan classics, his newest movie Skiptrace will provide all of his usual thrills, plus a bit of humour mixed in with plenty of fighting.
Jackie Chan is known for taking on humorous roles that involve a lot of ass kicking, and his latest movie, Skiptrace, falls in line with some of his greatest past hits.
The movie also stars Johnny Knoxville, who plays the lovable bad boy always getting Chan into trouble. His character is reminiscent of Owen Wilson's Roy O'Bannon from the 2000 hit Shanghai Noon.
Check out the trailer and the film's synopsis below:
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"When Bennies goddaughter Samantha (Bingbing Fan) gets into trouble with Wongs crime syndicate, Bennie must track down the man whose actions got her there: the fast-talking American gambler Connor Watts (Johnny Knoxville).
Bennie soon discovers, however, that in bringing Connor back to Hong Kong hes ensuring more than his goddaughters fate; Connor also possesses knowledge about Victor Wong that, if exposed, could finally bring the corrupt businessman to justice. As Bennie races against the clock to return with Connor to Hong Kong, the unlikely pair embarks on an entertaining and perilous adventure that spans from the mountains of Mongolia to the dunes of the Gobi desert."
He didn't think they'd hit the high note
In this world of Justin Biebers regularly being massive jerks to fans, it's heartening to see a beloved celebrity act appreciatively towards fans.
Enter John Williams: film composer mastermind.
The guy behind the scores for Jaws, Superman, and the first three Harry Potter movies just to name a few greeted fans outside his home in Los Angeles after they treated him to a performance of the Star Wars theme.
One might think the star tires of hearing amateur musicians constantly harangue him with his compositions, especially in the privacy of his own home, but the composer seemed humbled and pleased by the performance.
After applauding them, Williams came up to the musicians to shake their hands and compliment them on hitting the theme's famous high note.
To mark their 20th anniversary, Stereophonics is planning to release a new album next year.
Frontman Kelly Jones confirmed that the band is at the finishing stages with their 10th studio album.
The collection will follow the band's 2015 release 'Keep the Village Alive,' and unlike most other bands, who usually focus on their greatest hits in anniversary records, Jones wants to look toward the future of the band instead.
In an interview, Jones stated that Stereophonics would begin mixing their new album after their current tour ends on September 6.
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The band's debut LP, called 'Word Gets Around,' was released in 1997, but it was their next album 'Performance and Cocktails' that really put them on the map, which was released two years later in 1999.
Jones is confident that the 20th anniversary collection will drop by summer of next year.
One year ago, the massively successful band delighted the music world with the release of their inspirational album Currents.
Since their explosion onto the music scene in 2007, the Australian band have gone from strength to strength.
Sunday marked the one year anniversary of Currents release, and to celebrate the band will release a deluxe edition sometime in the near future.
To share the wonderful news with fans, the band posted a photo of the LP's original artwork with the caption: "1 year since this album was released! Feels like a liftetime ago but also like it was yesterday at the same time. Needless to say I didnt predict the effect it would have on my life and other peoples too it seems. Endless thank you to everyone who got onboard.
PS. Deluxe + B sides in the works! Stay tuned.."
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Here is a little tune from the album to get you in the mood:
Schmilco will follow last year's Star Wars
Wilco celebrated the one-year anniversary of Star Wars's release with the free single 'Locator', and now it seems that song will be included on an upcoming album!
Schmilco, which will be out September 9 through dBpm, fulfills frontman Jeff Tweedy's February promise that the band would release an album this year.
The album is available for preorder on iTunes, and a new single - 'If I Ever Was A Child' - has been released ahead of the album's release date.
Listen to that track via Spotify below.
'Locator' is still available for free download at the band's website.
Schmilco Tracklist
1. 'Normal American Kids'
2. 'If I Ever Was A Child'
3. 'Cry All Day'
4. 'Common Sense'
5. 'Nope'
6. 'Someone to Lose'
7. 'Happiness'
8. 'Quarters'
9. 'Locator'
10. 'Shrug And Destroy'
11. 'We Arent the World (Safety Girl)'
12. 'Just Say Goodbye'
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Almost two years before Micah Johnson shot five police officers dead in downtown Dallas, he bought an AK-47 semiautomatic rifle on Facebook, and met the seller in a Target parking lot.
Seems shady, but it was totally legal.
It's an issue at the heart of a contentious national debate, emblemized by a partisan shut down of the U.S. House of Representative earlier this month over calls to increase required background checks for gun buyers.
It appears that a background check would not have flagged Johnson, who had no criminal record and an honorable discharge from the U.S. Army.
Still, background checks are one of the latest battlegrounds in the history of gun laws in the United States, where residents own more firearms per capita than any other country in the world.
Advocates of gun control have called for bans on certain weapons or buybacks to reduce the number in circulation, while proponents of second amendment rights decry government attempts to restrict access to arms.
So what do the current laws actually allow? And how did it get to be that way? Long story.
"There's not a commonality among states about gun laws. They're all over the place," said Melissa Hamilton, a former Florida police officer and current professor of criminal law at the University of Houston Law Center.
Not surprisingly, Texas trends towards the hands-off end of firearm philosophy. It puts almost no regulation on gun owners. But that doesn't mean there are no regulations.
Despite the spectrum of state laws, they do share one commonality: federal law.
Federal gun laws
The U.S. Constitution, ratified 1788, made mention of firearms in the Second Amendment, which reads, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed."
At that time, the vast majority of firearms were long, single-shot rifles.
In 1929, a gang-related massacre of seven men with Thompson sub-machine guns in a Chicago warehouse brought to national attention the prominence of high-powered weapons in organized crime.
Congress reacted with the National Firearms Act in 1934. It required registry and taxation of firearms used primarily for criminal purposes, including sawed-off shotguns, machine guns and silencers.
Though overtly a tax law, "its underlying purpose was to curtail, if not prohibit, transactions in NFA firearms," according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
In 1939, the Supreme Court heard a constitutional challenge to that law. The court debated whether it meshed with the Second Amendment.
RELATED: What firearms looked like when the Second Amendment was adopted
The court denied that the weapon in question, a sawed-off shotgun, "has today any reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, and therefore cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees to the citizen the right to keep and bear such a weapons."
The next federal firearms legislation was spurred by a spate of high profile assassinations in the 1960s, including President John Kennedy, Malcom X, Senator Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
Under President Lyndon Johnson, Congress passed the Gun Control Act of 1968, which "as amended over the years, continues to be the primary vehicle for the federal regulation of firearms," according to the U.S Justice Department.
It established the hallmarks of modern American gun law.
It required gun makers and dealers to get a federal license and keep records of their sales.
It banned sale of firearms to:
Felons
Fugitives
Drug addicts
Mentally ill people, either involuntarily committed to a mental health institution or ruled by a court unfit to live alone
People dishonorably discharged from the U.S. military
People who have renounced their U.S. citizenship
Undocumented immigrants
People subject to restraining orders against "an intimate partner or child of the intimate partner"
People who have been convicted of domestic violence
Those bans were difficult to uphold, because they were based on an honor systema gun buyer should disclose any disqualifying credentials.
The law was updated in 1986, when Congress under President Ronald Reagan passed the Firearm Owners' Protection Act. It was meant to protect legal gun owners from burdens of federal regulation. It strengthened and weakened parts of the 1968 law.
It banned manufacture of machine guns for civilian use, but allowed civilians to keep registered machine guns made before that 1986.
It allowed licensed dealers to operate away from their business, such as at gun shows.
It made narrow and vague the definition of a firearms dealer as someone who devotes "time, attention, and labor in dealing in firearms as a regular course of trade or business with the principal objective of livelihood and profit through the repetitive purchase and resale of firearms."
Previously, anyone who sold firearms was considered a dealer. The narrower definition of that term meant that small-scale sellers could operate without a federal license, though the law also banned them from selling to prohibited customers.
Under the law, sellers could only be held liable for selling to prohibited customers if prosecutors proved they knew the customer was not eligible to buy.
That was hard to prove, since buyers could lie about their criminal background.
So in 1992, Congress under President Bill Clinton passed the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which required licensed gun sellers to check local law enforcement records of a buyer before making a sale. In 1998, the FBI launched the National Instant Criminal Background Check System to allow checks of national law enforcement records.
The background check requirement did not apply to unlicensed sellers or to sellers at a gun show.
In 1994, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which included a 10-year ban on manufacture of "assault weapons"certain semi-automatic or automatic long guns. But the law only applied to guns produced after 1994, and it expired in 2004 without renewal.
The Supreme Court issued a second landmark decision on gun rights in 2008. In hearing a case over the legality of a handgun, it reversed the court's 1939 interpretation of the constitution, ruling that "the Second Amendment protects and individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia."
So those are the basics of federal gun law. How about Texas?
Texas law
LM Otero/STF
The Lone Star State puts no additional restriction on gun ownership. It deals primarily with licensureissuing permits for residents to carry handguns in public. Long guns have always been permitted in public.
Previously, those handguns carried in public had to be concealed. In 2015, the state legislature voted to allowed the open carrying of handguns. It also voted to allow handguns on college campuses, where they had previously been banned.
RELATED: New law intended to clarify where open carry allowed
The state also sets penalties for firearm violations.
Licensed sellers face the minimum federal regulations: they must conduct instant background checks on buyers.
Anyone can sell a firearm online or at a gun show without a license, and they need not conduct a background check. The same is true in 31 other U.S. states.
There are no regulations on ammo sales in Texas, or on volume of firearm sales.
"Dealers have discretion," said Andrea Brauer, executive director of the group Texas Gun Sense. "If they see someone coming in everyday buying 20 guns, they can refuse to sell."
Hamilton at the University of Houston said cities play virtually no role in firearm regulation, especially since the 2008 Supreme Court case struck down a virtual handgun ban imposed by Washington D.C.
But most cities will keep basic gun laws on the books--such as no firing a weapon in the city limits.
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State Sen. John Whitmire says he agrees with experts who call on police departments to release their policies governing vehicular pursuits, which kill an American almost every day.
A Chronicle review of recent Houston-area chases from April through June found 13 crashes over 13 weeks that led to six deaths and nine injuries.
"I think the public has a right to know," Whitmire said of pursuit policies, suggesting that he might hold Senate hearings on the subject. "It would not hurt to have a public conversation about this."
Some small police departments in the Houston area refused recently to release their pursuit policies in response to requests from the Chronicle.
Leon "Pete" Verot, chief of the 20-person Patton Village department, has declined to discuss his agency's policy in the month since a Patton Village officer, Sgt. Stacey Baumgartner, was killed in a crash with an SUV while pursuing a suspect. The crash also killed an 11-year-old boy traveling in the SUV with his family. The suspect returned to the scene and was charged with felony murder, among other offenses.
"I personally like transparency," said Whitmire, chairman of the state Senate's Committee on Criminal Justice. "I think that the burden ought to be on the department to explain why they don't release the policy."
Police departments often say they do not want to publicly release their pursuit policies because criminals would know when they can flee without fear of pursuit.
"I'm not certain that's a rational excuse for not releasing the policy. ... I'm not sure the bad guys care what your policy is," Whitmire said.
Some relatives of innocent bystanders killed during police chases have called for a uniform pursuit policy in Texas.
Esther Seoanes lost her husband during an Austin pursuit in 2012. She recently marked the fourth anniversary of his death by visiting his grave and listening to recordings of him playing bass guitar.
"If public safety is number one, why are there so many different policies?" Seoanes asked. "Why is it that every department is different?"
She called for a statewide policy based on law-enforcement input, which she thinks would reduce the deaths among police officers and innocent victims.
However, Whitmire said he did not plan to legislate a statewide policy.
"If I had the ability to stop any more (chase deaths) from happening, I would do it," he said. "I don't believe that it's the best direction to do it from Austin."
The senator added that many people who flee police are using drugs or dealing with a mental illness.
"Nobody in their right mind runs from the cops," he said.
andrew.kragie@chron.com
TORONTO - The world's leading anti-doping officials Monday called for Russia to be barred from this summer's Rio Games after a damning report confirmed a Russian whistle-blower's claims of government-ordered cheating at the 2014 Sochi Olympics.
The request by anti-doping officials was extraordinary, if not unprecedented, in the history of the Olympics. President Vladimir Putin of Russia responded defiantly as the possibility emerged the Russian flag would be nowhere in sight when the Opening Ceremony begins Aug. 5 in Rio de Janeiro.
While saying the officials named in the report would be "temporarily suspended," he asked for "fuller, more objective information that is based on facts."
"Today we see a dangerous relapse of politics intruding into sports," Putin said in a statement.
Grigory Rodchenkov, Russia's former anti-doping lab director, told the New York Times in May that he covered up the use of performance-enhancing drugs by Russian Olympians at the 2014 Sochi Games, and that he did so under orders from Russian officials for the ministry of sport.
In a report of nearly 100 pages, Richard McLaren, a Canadian lawyer retained by the World Anti-Doping Agency to investigate Rodchenkov's allegations, presented proof Monday that a state-run doping program was executed during the Sochi Olympics, as well as before and after the Games.
The International Olympic Committee, which has the sole authority to ban an entire national delegation, called the actions outlined in the report a "shocking and unprecedented attack on the integrity of sport," pledging to pursue "the toughest possible sanctions available against any individual or organization implicated."
Top Olympic executives were next due to meet in Rio, two days before the Olympics begin Aug. 5, but the IOC said Monday it had scheduled a meeting for Tuesday to discuss "provisional measures and sanctions."
They are now under pressure from anti-doping officials and athletes to bring stiff sanctions against Russia, less than three weeks before the Opening Ceremony at the Rio Games.
Multiple inquiries
Discussing his findings in a Toronto hotel ballroom, McLaren said the results of his 57-day inquiry drew on forensic evidence, emails and metadata, and met criminal-law standards. In a subsequent interview, he confirmed that his team had communicated with the U.S. Department of Justice, which in May had opened its own inquiry into Russian doping.
McLaren said his team had established "beyond a reasonable doubt" that Russia's ministry of sport, its anti-doping organization and the country's federal security service were involved in an elaborate cheating scheme that stretched beyond the 2014 Olympics.
"The surprise result of the Sochi investigation was the revelation of the extent of State oversight and directed control of the Moscow laboratory in processing, and covering up urine samples of Russian athletes from virtually all sports before and after the Sochi Games," McLaren wrote in the report.
Craig Reedie, president of the global anti-doping organization that commissioned the report, was not present at the Toronto announcement Monday, but he said in a statement that the report showed, in addition to the Sochi Games, that there was a "serious manipulation of the doping control process" at the 2013 track and field world championships in Moscow and the 2013 World University Games in Kazan as well as measures to circumvent doping controls at the 2012 London Games.
Rodchenkov said he created a mixture of steroids and liquor - known as "the Duchess" cocktail among Russian sports officials, according to the report - that was provided to athletes. That combination promoted speedy absorption of the drugs to minimize the period of time during which they could be detected.
"In the face of such evidence of state-sponsored subversion of anti-doping processes," Reedie said, "WADA insists upon imposition of the most serious consequences to protect clean athletes from the scourge of doping in sport."
Reedie, who is also an executive board member of the Olympic organization, noted the Russian Olympic Committee was not untainted by the findings, and that cheating had extended to "all sport disciplines whose urine samples were being analyzed by the Moscow lab."
The anti-doping agency said that the evidence showed that the subversion of doping controls had occurred in 30 sports, including 20 Olympic summer sports and Paralympic sports.
Russia's denials
Russian officials emphatically dismissed Rodchenkov's claims after they were published in May.
Still, Russia's track and field team was banned last month from competing at the Games by the International Association of Athletics Federations, the sport's governing body. (Russia is contesting the track and field ban with the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland; the hearing is expected to take place Tuesday.)
"This is not just about what we in North America call track and field and what others in the world call athletics," McLaren said, confirming Rodchenkov's allegations that cheating extended across the spectrum of sports - affecting both the Winter and Summer Olympics.
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rsquo;s a good time for women in leadership roles right now: In the UK, Theresa May has been appointed Prime Minister, with MP Angela Eagle angling for the role of leader of the opposition Labour party, and across the pond in the US, Hillary Clinton has become the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party in this years presidential race.Scratch at the surface however, and research suggests that what these women are facing in their leadership roles is in fact a glass cliff.Alongside the concept of the glass ceiling that women face an invisible barrier when it comes to advancement in the workplace compared to men the glass cliff theory is based on research which suggests that women are more likely to be appointed to high-profile leadership positions at a time when the organisation has been facing a tough or tumultuous period.Academic research conducted by Michelle Ryan and Alexander Haslam in 2005 looked at the performance of FTSE 100 companies after they had appointed new CEOs, and found that female CEOs were more likely to be appointed to organisations whose share prices were already falling meaning their leadership and performance would be under even greater scrutiny.What does this tell us about gender bias when appointing women to leadership roles?"When you look at opportunities for leadership that one might describe as high-risk, women are more likely to be selected into that kind of role," according to Marianne Cooper, a sociologist at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University."There's this expression -- think crisis, think female," Cooper told the Washington Post.The 'glass cliff' concept is particularly apt in the current political situation in the UK May is taking the helm from David Cameron, who resigned after his vote remain campaign lost in a national referendum to an unexpected Brexit vote, leaving the undesirable task of leading Brexit negotiations to his successor.Its a complicated story with a number of different strands, but the key explanation put forward by the authors lies in the notion that in times of crisis we are more likely to take risks, Julia Yates, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, University of East London wrote in The Conversation.She added: If all the usual plans and ideas have failed, the organisation is likely to look around, desperate to try anything which might work. Even a woman.For all the latest HR news and info straight to your inbox, subscribe here
The beauty vlogging world has been hit with the "100 layers" bug, and it looks like it won't be stopping anytime soon.
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And it's not just one beauty vlogger trying out the gross challenge, but several, including Canadian YouTube star, Tasha Leelyn.
A photo posted by Tasha Leelyn (@tashaleelyn) on Jun 16, 2016 at 5:43pm PDT
In her vid "100 LAYERS OF LIQUID LIPSTICK," the Toronto-based MUCH creator explains how she came up with the idea after watching the "100 coats of nail polish" clip. She then goes on to apply 100 different shades of liquid lipstick (!!!) onto her lips, resulting in one gigantic, crusty, goopy mess.
In hindsight, it wasn't all bad at first.
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But once she reached layer 33, that's when things got icky:
By layer 74, Tasha uses a hair dryer to dry the layers of lipstick, telling everyone, "This feels horrible."
And finally, here's layer 100:
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"I don't know why I did this. This is so gross," Tasha says in her clip.
And that's not even the worst part. She then goes on to peel away at the lipstick to try to remove it.
Here's how we feel:
Hey Tasha, we give you kudos for trying this out, but after this, we're done with this 100 layers nonsense.
If you want to check out the madness, watch the video above.
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James Anderson via Getty Images [UNVERIFIED CONTENT] These wild horses are a smaller herd that roam the Ghost Forest of Alberta along the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. The dominate stallion that protects the herd is on the far left. Ghost Forest, Alberta, Canada
A plan to manage Alberta's wild horse population with birth control could save the animals from a cull, says a non-profit group.
A government survey last year counted over 700 feral horses in the province. With few natural limits on that population, an annual cull rounds up some of the wild horses to be adopted or sold, sometimes to slaughterhouses.
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However, a new pilot project shows there might be a better way.
The Wild Horses Of Alberta Society (WHOAS) has started a five-year program to test the viability of birth control to maintain the wild horse population.
The WHOAS is running a pilot project that administers birth control to wild horses near Sundre, Alta. (Map: WHOAS)
So far, a trained veterinarian has used a dart gun to vaccinate 73 mares. The horses feel a slight prick before the dart falls off, explained WHOAS. The contraceptive slowly wears off over a few years, unless the mares are given a booster shot.
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You cant just let 1,000 large grazers wander aimlessly through the ecosystem haphazardly and say, 'Leave them alone, theyll look after themselves. They wont, Marry Bates, a retired wildlife warden, told Global News.
While the project is underway, the government has temporarily stopped its cull, and will instead be studying what a sustainable wild horse population would look like.
"You cant just let 1,000 large grazers wander aimlessly through the ecosystem."
"We are temporarily deferring a decision on future feral horse roundups while the department completes the recommended work on a long-term management plan," said Alberta Environment and Parks spokesman Jamie Hanlon to the Calgary Herald.
The majority of the horses roam west of Sundre, where their ancestors were turned loose after being used for logging and mining in the early 20th century.
Feral horses are currently not protected in Alberta, but WHOAS is hoping the government will recognize them as their own species.
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They have almost evolved into their own distinct breed, the same as the Canadian horse is recognized as a distinct breed, Bob Henderson, president of WHOAS, told Western Producer, a weekly agricultural publication.
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Jacopo Raule via Getty Images PARIS, FRANCE - JULY 04: Celine Dion is seen arriving at Dior Fashion show during Paris Fashion Week : Haute Couture F/W 2016-2017 on July 4, 2016 in Paris, France. (Photo by Jacopo Raule/GC Images)
Canadian superstar Celine Dion is ready with a new album, the first since her husband's death, that will feature collaborations with French stars and uplifting lyricism, her label announced Monday.
The album, which will come out on August 26, is entitled "Encore Un Soir." Dion released the title track - which means "One More Night" in English in May.
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The pop diva, 48, had dedicated the ballad to her late husband Rene Angelil, who died in January from throat cancer at age 73.
Angelil was taken by Dion's voice when she was a child and became her musical guide and manager, marrying her in 1994 when she was 26.
The song "Encore Un Soir" was written by Jean-Jacques Goldman, a leading French pop star.
Label Sony Music said that the album will also feature Dion's first song written by two other prominent French rockers, Francis Cabrel and Serge Lama.
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"Celine voluntarily chose uplifting themes that focused on life and positivity," the label said in a statement.
Dion will also delve into her Quebecois heritage with a cover of "Ordinaire" by Robert Charlebois, a major artist of the French-speaking province.
Dion, who also sings in English, has sold 220 million albums, placing her among the ranks of the most successful recording artists of all time.
Dion is on a tour that includes nine sold-out shows at the Bercy arena in Paris as well as 10 concerts in Montreal, five in Quebec City and two in Trois-Rivieres, Quebec, before she returns to her residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
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Donald Trump has his sights set on the White House.
But his life began in a smaller, Tudor-style home, in the New York borough of Queens. A home that is now yours to own for the low, low price of C$2.1 million (US$1.65 million).
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The house, located at 85-15 Wareham Place in the affluent Jamaica Estates neighbourhood, is 2,000 square feet in size. It has six bedrooms, four-and-a-half bathrooms and a two-car garage.
It was the home that he was born into, as the very same address appears on a birth certificate that was provided to ABC News five years ago, according to Newsday.
Family patriarch Fred Trump, Donald's father, sold a number of homes located on Wareham in the 1940s and eventually moved his family into a larger house on Midland Parkway, just around the corner, the website added.
Donald was four years old when that home was ready to be moved into.
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The Wareham Place home last sold for $1,015,880.56 in 2008, according to Zillow. Its new price represents a 111 per cent increase.
Listing agent Howard Kaminowitz of Laffey Fine Homes told DNAInfo that the home may nevertheless be the least expensive one of its kind in the area. Tudor homes in Jamaica Estates sell, on average, for about $2.6 million.
The home has features such as a fireplace, a screened patio, a finished basement with a multi-purpose room, as well as a summer kitchen.
It also boasts a five-car driveway and a detached garage.
Here are more photos of Donald Trump's childhood home:
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Welcome to 2016, the year of back-to-back celebrity social media feuds.
And it looks like beauty gurus aren't exempt.
Makeup tycoon and tattoo artist Kat Von D took to Instagram Monday night to make it loud and clear that she was no longer rocking with fellow cosmetics businessman Jeffree Star.
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Jeffree Star and Kat Von D attend the opening of Kat Von D's 'Wonderland' gallery on September 2, 2010.
The 34-year-old Mexican-born influencer offered up an explanation for her overt disdain against Star in the photo's caption.
"After years of making excuses for, and rationalizing Jeffree's inappropriate behavior (including, promoting drug use, racism, and bullying) I can no longer hold my tongue after recent events," Von D wrote.
A photo posted by Kat Von D (@thekatvond) on Jul 18, 2016 at 10:21pm PDT
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She continued:
"I know that over the years, many of you were introduced to Jeffree through me, and regardless if you chose to continue to follow him or not, I just would like to disassociate myself from him and his brand from this point on. I plan on posting a video explanation as to why I felt compelled to make such a statement. But for the time being, I simply want to apologize to anybody and everybody who has ever had to deal with any of his negativity. And yes, with a heavy heart, I will be pulling the shade 'Jeffree' from my collection. Sending extra love to everyone out there."
But it looks like Star wasn't having that.
The former MySpacer took to Twitter to share his side of the story, stating that he allegedly hasn't even seen Von D in over a year.
Someone I haven't seen in over a year, wants to make a post about me. I'm yawning right now..... Jeffree Star (@JeffreeStar) July 19, 2016
Kat and I texted a few days ago after 6 MONTHS of silence. She never supported me or my brand and got distant when I launched mine. Jeffree Star (@JeffreeStar) July 19, 2016
She accused me of something that wasn't true, so I told her to fuck off and then blocked her number. Not that juicy of a story, sorry Jeffree Star (@JeffreeStar) July 19, 2016
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This whole situation is sad and gross. I don't need to clap back or make a video about someone's post. It's getting trite. Jeffree Star (@JeffreeStar) July 19, 2016
Instead of feeding into negativity and internet fights, I'm going back to the real world and off to enjoy the rest of my day <3 Jeffree Star (@JeffreeStar) July 19, 2016
Well, damn.
The former Miami Ink reality star published a YouTube video on Tuesday morning to clear the air and further explain her stance on the feud, and made it clear she wasn't going public with the matter in an attempt to bash anyone.
"The way Jeffree chooses to live his life and treat other people is not something that I personally agree with," she states in the video. "Being associated with someone who does do things that he does, it really makes me nervous. Because I don't want my fans or followers to think that's a good example of how be with each other and how we should treat the people who are in our lives."
She then went on to explain how he had allegedly done some of her artistic friends dirty, and left them in the dust after they had helped him create his makeup line.
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Star, who's best known for his hot pink ensembles, later wrapped up his part of the argument with one simple tweet, at least for now.
There are 2 sides to every story. The truth will come out later today. Jeffree Star (@JeffreeStar) July 19, 2016
Oh, dear. Can't we all just get along?
UPDATE: Jeffree Star has since responded with the following video:
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Curious visitors at this Toronto cafe may flood their Instagram accounts with photos of its desserts, but we question whether they'll actually eat them.
The city's Koreatown neighbourhood will soon have its own poop-themed restaurant, continuing a craze that has already taken over cities in Taiwan, as well as Moscow, Manila and other parts of Asia.
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Customers play cards on toilet seats at a toilet-themed restaurant in Shenzhen in south China's Guangdong province, October 22, 2006. (Photo: Reuters/Joe Tan)
Owner Lien Nguyen told CP24 that her Poop Cafe Dessert Bar, which is set to open in August, is similar to other toilet-themed restaurants but it will only serve desserts like chocolate ice cream and pudding.
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"We will be serving Thai, Japanese, and Korean desserts and we will name them in a bathroom theme, she told the outlet.
We will post online and ask people to vote for the names."
Not only will the er, sweets be served in dishes shaped like toilets, but customers can also eat while they sit on the (fake) can, Nguyen told BlogTO.
The Poop Cafe has shared several appetizing photos of its walls on Twitter and Facebook.
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What do you think? Would you actually eat the food? Let us know in the comments below.
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John Crux Photography via Getty Images Sunset on Lake Ometepe in Nicaragua
In the travel industry, the definition of luxury is evolving and shape-shifting. It is no longer about 1000 thread count linens and star chef's (although these are also wonderful). It is about a feeling. An authentic experience enjoyed alongside the like-minded. It is being off-the-grid and the beaten path, unplugging, the road less-travelled, but alongside other interesting people. Achieving this type of luxury, especially when it comes to family-friendly travel, is challenging in a world catering to formulaic, packaged tours and amusement-saturated destinations that tend to be over-crowded and over-priced.
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Like most remote and magical hidden corners, we heard whispers and rumblings from friends and colleagues about Nicaragua as a travellers' delight. One friend spoke of a laid-back boho beach town in the south, another insisted we visit a colourful colonial city, we read about the volcanos -- some still active, tropical birds and monkeys, okay they had me at the monkeys......
After a busy few months our little tribe was craving a getaway, and a tropical climate sounded like just the thing to cure the winter blues, and more importantly, renew our spirits, spark our imaginations and heighten our slightly dulled senses. It takes a special place to tick these last two boxes, especially somewhere that can also cater to our travel needs as parents to two little tykes - also along for the journey.
The flights to Managua were eventful (I was covered in vomit from hour two of the first leg). But despite the comedy of errors and a sick baby, we landed in the early afternoon, met by our driver Franklin who whisked us to Granada in his comfortable air-conditioned vehicle. Only an hour from the Aeropuerto Internacional Augusto C. Sandino, this vibrantly-hued, hot and humid town at the foot of Mombacho Volcano, dates back to 1524. It's brightly coloured buildings, tropical climate, cobbled streets and approachable size made it a great base for a few days of relaxing, dining and discovery.
We could never have imagined how welcoming Nicaraguenses (and their country) are to families. Almost all the restaurants we dined at in Granada had an inviting kids corner. There were many fellow families, both local and foreign and our boys made fast friends multiple times a day. We would exchange knowing glances with their parents, as if to acknowledge a mutual respect for discovering the beauty and bounty of Nicaragua for families, but also in solidarity for how tired we all felt after attempting to keep up with our children in the heat!
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While in Granada, be sure to check-in to Los Patios, a true boutique hotel, this design-conscious gem provides guests with the perfect oasis from the colourful, hot and dusty streets. The plunge pool is just the right temperature to refresh, the rooms are spacious and comfortably minimalist and the multiple hammocks, lounge chairs, couches welcome the weary traveler to repose. Family-friendly surroundings meant we met several other parents with young children during our stay. Be sure to request the large quarters looking onto the pool from above with a gorgeous little patio and massive bathroom (cots available).
Nicaragua is home to 19 active volcanoes. To our four year old, this information was fantastical. Next trip we will definitely add Ometepe to the itinerary, a beautiful island surrounded by a fresh water lake and home to not one but two volcanoes. A UNESCO world heritage site, we missed out on the reportedly beautiful beaches, archeological treasures, ancient myths and legends, hidden waterfalls and an enigmatic lagoon.
But we did get to spend a refreshing afternoon splashing and swimming in the crater of the Apoyo Volcano. We made black sand body masks, ate fresh seafood and beat the intense heat by floating in her turquoise waters. At 200 meters deep this Laguna is the lowest point in Central America.
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Also just a short drive from Granada is the Masaya Artisan Market. Full of colourful crafts and every manner of jewelry, hand-made straw things, textiles, woven goods, wooden toys and hammocks - truly something for every family member, little and big! The perfect place to do all your souvenir shopping - visit in the morning if possible, before the heat of the day.
Another easy field trip from Granada are the Isletas. Located just outside the city centre in lake Nicaragua, 365 islands dot the shore. A Nicaraguan cottage country, many of the wealthy locals and international guests keep their weekend and holiday hideaways here. The formation of islands is a result of a massive Volcano Masaya eruption 1000's of years ago. Fascinating for parents and kids alike, and a relaxing way to spend a morning on the water. Charter a shaded boat around the lake (request an English guide) and stop for lunch at one of the island cafes. Don't miss monkey island so your kids can say hello and feed the little rascals.
After a few days as tourists we were ready for some laid back beach time. Only a couple hours by car to San Juan del Sur, but a world away from home. This hot and humid hippie beach town is youthful and fun with a thriving nightlife and lots of hipster restaurants, boutiques and bars. We opted to spend our first four nights in a more remote location about 25 mins outside of town. Tucked in the hills above a trifecta of epic beaches is Hulakai.
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Part surf retreat, part boutique backpackers lodge, part contemporary b&b, hard to characterize but easy to enjoy. One of the Inn keepers and founders of Hulakai describes it as "a place we always thought and hoped we would find as travelers". Tyler is a father himself to three young children and beyond his warnings about the tropical creepy-crawlers, strong undertows and the gate-less infinity pool, the hotel is warm and welcoming to families. We spent our days here visiting the rugged beaches in the surrounding area, adventuring into town for ice cream, watching epic sunsets, enjoying family dinners around the long dining table at Hulakai and just generally relaxing.
An equally great family-friendly option for lodging is Pelican Eyes, in the hills just above San Juan Del Sur, it's an easy walk into town but has an air of exclusivity thanks to it's perch above it all. Living up to it's name, guests get a beautiful birds-eye view of the cove below. The refreshing infinity pool is where we spent the majority of our mornings and after a siesta we would wander into town for smoothies, sunset beach walks and dinner.
Nicaragua is brimming with natural wonders, seeing it through the eyes of our children allowed us to revel in the small nuances and delight in the mundane. We will definitely return again soon, if our boys have anything to say about it! If you are planning a Fall or Winter getaway, be sure to take our advice and see Nicaragua while it is still relatively untouched, you won't regret it!
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Brendan McDermid / Reuters Republican U.S.presidential candidate Donald Trump gestures during a news conference after he announced Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his vice presidential running mate in New York City, U.S., July 16, 2016. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
Donald Trump looks to be the Republican presidential nominee. What started out last year as a joke has turned into a nightmare for many Americans. The possibility of the Donald occupying the White House is terrifying millions.
But is there reason to worry? Would President Trump be a disaster as so many have predicted? How bad could it be?
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Rather than filling out forms for Canadian residency, Trumpophobes should take a chill pill and calm down. Chances are that four years of President Trump would not be that bad. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Trump would probably not be the worst U. S. president of all time.
Cast your mind back over the last 200 years and you'll see that things could be (and, in fact, have been) worse. Think of President James Buchanan, a bumbling politician whose ineptitude helped bring on the American Civil War. Or consider Millard Fillmore whose very name suggests incompetence.
America is a great nation and has managed to survive all manner of presidential shortcomings. Despite the limitations of Lincoln's successor Andrew Johnson, the country persevered. And even the feckless corruption of the Warren G. Harding administration didn't destroy the republic.
Is Donald Trump worse than these presidential failures? Maybe, although he'd have to try awfully hard in order to underperform them all.
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On my assessment of the current situation, I think Donald Trump would likely be one of the worst presidents of all time but probably not the absolute worst. In making that determination, I have employed what I call the Bushometer, an informal metric which measures a candidate's worth against the past performance of former president George W. Bush.
Whatever you think of Donald Trump, he did oppose the Iraq War, a hubristic debacle on the scale of the Vietnam War. Score one for Trump.
As for military service in Vietnam, Trump received a series of draft deferments whereas George W. Bush was given a cushy placement in the Texas Air National Guard yet still managed to go AWOL. Call this one a wash.
Trump claims great success as a businessman but has a mixed record. Still, it's a better record than Bush's which was dotted with failures and favouritism.
Financial management? Whatever Trump's shortcomings, he has managed to achieve a significant degree of wealth. In contrast, due to his financial mismanagement and the ill-conceived Iraq War, Bush left the country on the brink of economic collapse with a ten trillion-dollar debt.
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Independent decision-making? Like Bush, Trump eschews intellectual enquiry and decides with his gut. However, for better or worse, Trump makes his gut-centric decisions independently unlike Bush who foolishly yielded control to the cabal of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.
Attention to detail? Trump may not be one for fleshed-out domestic and foreign policies but he does run an effective and efficient campaign. In contrast to Bush's pre-9/11, asleep-at-the-switch approach to presidential briefings, Trump scores marginally better.
Many Americans liked Bush for his down-home, anti-intellectual style. He was the guy you'd like to have a beer with. Although Donald Trump has a definite anti-intellectual appeal, he comes up short on the "regular guy" scale. Deduct a point or two on this count.
Thus, based on my Bushometer assessment of President Donald Trump, it looks like he wouldn't be more of a failure than George W. Bush. That's not to say he won't be but he'd have to make an extraordinary effort to do so.
So relax, America; you've suffered through incompetent (and, in some cases, even disastrous) presidents before and you'll likely do so again. Just as Lincoln cleaned up after Buchanan, FDR fixed Hoover's mess and Obama saved the country from Bush's mismanagement, someone will be able to fix whatever damage a President Trump might do.
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During her 12 month jaunt around the world -- from Slovenia to Vietnam, Peru to Malaysia -- Geetika Agrawal, a Delhi-born, New York-based creative director and design educator, turned her passion for arts, culture and travel into a new creative startup.
Vacation with an Artist (VAWAA) is an eight-month-old platform helping travellers connect with artist studios around the world to learn a new skill.
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Learn rattan weaving in Malaysia, natural dyeing in Vietnam, work with a street artist in Argentina or contemporary ceramics in Slovenia. These interactive, creative experiences are for one to three guests at a time and range anywhere from 10 hours to 100 hours, typically over a couple of days to a few weeks. Taking place in an artist's workspace, travellers looking to dive into a new skill experience a seemingly longer, hands-on experience with periodic or daily interaction with the artist -- different from the typical two or three hour workshops usually offered to tourists.
For Geetika, the idea for VAWAA had been brewing for a long time, inspired by her early childhood and college travel experiences in India, her academic and professional background in Architecture and Industrial Design along with her personal need for creative learning during her travels. After taking a sabbatical from work and joining Remote Year, a yearlong program for digital nomads, Geetika had the opportunity to work on her idea while travelling to 12 countries in 12 months. During her travels, she focused on personally curating the artists, visiting them in their studios, taking photographs, developing the VAWAA brand and launching the site in November 2015, six months into her travels.
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When curating the artists, Geetika has a process and criteria in mind. "I look for two things -- their depth and mastery of art so they have an immense knowledge to share with different skill levels, and an open, welcoming personality to spend a few days with people from around the world."
For Juliet Imbert, a French artist and eco-fashion designer from Paris, collaborating on a specific project with Katja Spiler, a ceramics artist from Slovenia, is how she created an enriching, life-changing VAWAA experience for herself. Juliet is a young, stylish artist with an energetic spontaneity that carries into her travels. "I'm a freelancer so I have a chance to say, OK, let's go to Slovenia for a week!"
With that same carefree attitude, she found VAWAA on Facebook and within a week booked her ticket to Slovenia. "For a long time, I wanted to learn to make doll heads in ceramics. I didn't know Katja worked in that technique, using plaster to do moulds. I was expecting nothing, just you know, let's see how it goes. It was a huge surprise and a beautiful one. Katja is a friend now, we Skype and I'll be back in Slovenia in September to collaborate with her again."
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For Vu Thao, a textile artist and fashion designer from Hanoi, Vietnam, it's this idea of learning and sharing ideas that piqued her interest in offering travellers a chance to learn natural indigo dyeing techniques from ethnic groups in a remote part of Vietnam. "The thing that interested me [about VAWAA] is that it is a new concept of studying and travelling at the same time. I travel a lot and many times that's where the creative ideas come from, by observing other cultures and the people around you. You carry this back home and that's how you start to make things."
After working with a number of fashion designers in London and Berlin, Vu launched her own fashion brand, Kilomet 109. Collaborating with ethnic minority women in the mountain regions of Vietnam, she created an eco-sustainable fashion line focusing heavily on traditional techniques and textiles, 100 per cent developed in the country. "We plant our cotton, hemp and silk and we also weave and dye ourselves using 100 per cent natural dye."
Over the course of five days, travellers visit Cao Bang, an artisanal village north of Hanoi. "The community I'm working with is the Nung An ethnic group, which is one of the very few ethnic communities left in Vietnam to work as a community. We have 12 women working together in the village, well-known for weaving and indigo dye for a long, long time." Travellers learn to make dyes, understand how to grow indigo, magenta and other natural roots, take part in the pre-dye process and create their very own hand-woven, hand-dyed samples.
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Through VAWAA, Vu has already booked a few sessions with travellers this year, mainly with artists and designers from New York -- a few fashion designers, an interior designer and a knitting artist. "People who want to participate in VAWAA already have a love for what they are doing or trained in what they are doing so they have experience. The VAWAA platform is selective and because people invest in the trip, they have a real desire to learn about other cultures which I really like."
Back in New York, fresh from her remote year travels, Geetika is looking ahead to the future of VAWAA. "Beyond expanding the network of artists and countries, I also want to make this a platform the artists themselves can use. As I met with each artist, they have expressed interest in collaborating with each other as an international network of artists. If the Uruguayan musician wants to collaborate with the writer in Vietnam, then yes, I want to make that happen."
With a new platform like VAWAA, adventure travellers, sabbatical-seekers, artists and designers craving to explore the world while sharing ideas with like-minded people can hop a plane to Kyoto to learn calligraphy, Bangalore to learn bamboo bicycle making or like Juliet, to Slovenia to learn contemporary ceramics. Whether it's the desire to make something with your hands, to learn a new skill, take part in an artistic process from start to finish, or to express your individuality, all it takes is just a few clicks to kick-start your creative journey.
Photo Credit: Geetika Agrawal, Juliet Imbert, Vu Thao.
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Richard Lam / Reuters A Canadian Border Services Agent stands next to migrant ship The Ocean Lady during a Canadian government news conference announcing a series of new reforms to combat human smuggling in Delta, British Columbia October 21, 2010. The Ocean Lady in October 2009 carried 76 illegal Tamil migrants to Canada. REUTERS/Richard Lam (CANADAPOLITICS - Tags: POLITICS SOCIETY)
Every day at 117 land ports of entry, 13 international airports and 27 rail sites, officers of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) deal with more than a quarter of a million travellers seeking to come into this country - Canadians returning home, Americans and others coming here to do business, visitors and tourists from around the world, new immigrants following the correct procedure to make Canada their new home, refugees fleeing from abuse and hopelessness, and others.
CBSA carries a serious and difficult responsibility under the law - to protect the integrity of Canada's borders and to keep Canadians safe, while also facilitating the free and legitimate movement of both people and trade.
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The vast majority of border encounters are brief and routine. But a few present serious problems - especially when an individual wanting to enter or remain in Canada has not met the legal requirements set by Parliament to do so and cannot be identified with certainty, is a flight risk or threatens the safety of Canadians. In these limited circumstances, CBSA officers are empowered to detain that person until the defects in their status are corrected or security issues are resolved.
It is probably not surprising that there are an average of 400 individuals detained under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act at any given time.
Given the huge volume of people seeking entry to Canada virtually all the time, it is probably not surprising that there are an average of 400 individuals detained under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act at any given time. These make up less than 0.01 per cent of travellers to Canada per year. So what is the best way to handle their situations?
First, CBSA is required by law to consider all reasonable alternatives before detention. Detention is always a last resort. In the majority of cases, individuals are detained for only a very short time.
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Secondly, every decision to detain an individual is subject to immediate and regular legal reviews by a duly appointed and properly trained member of the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB). The IRB is an independent tribunal, focused on immigration law. In reviewing detention cases, the IRB has the full authority to release the individual, identify future conditions for release or maintain the detention.
In my first few months as the minister responsible for CBSA, I have certainly heard the concerns about immigration detention and have studied them with care. I've met with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers, the BC Civil Liberties Association and others. While the UNHCR recognizes Canada's refugee system as among the best in the world, the government is anxious to address weaknesses and do better.
Our objectives are:
To increase the availability of effective alternatives to detention and thus reduce the overall number of cases in which detention is the only technique that can be used to deal with difficult problems of identification, flight risk or danger to the public;
To reduce the use of provincial jails for immigration detention by making safe, higher quality, federally-operated facilities - specifically designed for immigration purposes - more readily accessible, thus avoiding as much as we can the intermingling of immigration/refugee cases with criminal elements;
To try to avoid housing children in detention facilities, as much as humanly possible;
To enhance the health, mental health and other human services available to those detained;
To maintain open access to detention facilities for agencies such as the UNHCR, the Canadian Red Cross, legal and spiritual advisers and others who provide support and counselling; and
To achieve greater transparency, including effective independent scrutiny and review of all CBSA operations and proper responses to any specific complaints about officers or facilities.
In my discussions with CBSA's leadership, I am finding a genuine desire to move forward in these better directions. To do so, the ideological limitations of the past 10 years are being left behind, but we'll have to find incremental funding for necessary capital improvements and better services.
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Work is underway to get these changes - real changes - launched. I hope to make specific announcements in the near future.
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Allan Baxter via Getty Images Food waste recycling caddy. The food waste in the UK is intended to be composted and thereby preventing it to be sent to landfill
While the old adage tells us to waste not and want not, all too often surplus food ends up uneaten. Canada's mounting amount of wasted food is costing consumers and cutting into the country's overall economy output.
Canada's economy is losing the equivalent of two per cent of its entire GDP each year to food waste. According to a recent report of the Value Chain Management Centre, Canadian food waste is equivalent to $31 billion lost from the nation's economy.
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Put in perspective, the $31 billion estimate is higher than the combined GDP of the world's poorest 29 countries. As a point of reference, World Bank data found that Canada's spending on military expenditure is only one per cent of its annual GDP.
Unfortunately, the $31 billion figure may considerably underestimate the true extent of Canada's food waste issue. As reported elsewhere, the estimated cumulative costs of producing, transporting, selling, and disposing of Canada's food waste exceeds $100 billion annually.
Considering that food waste is a substantial economic drain on the nation's economy, the area should be ripe for potential intervention. While an estimated 40 per cent of all food produced in the country ended up in the bin, a 2013 report from the Guelph-based Provision Coalition found a lack of sufficient existing data on the sources and causes of food waste in Canada. The report's authors also lamented that many businesses were unaware of the amount of food they waste or its real impact on their profitability. Canada's private, public, and social sectors can and should be doing more to fight food waste.
Take Action Now Join thousands of Canadians calling on our governments and grocers to help reduce food waste. Sign a petition at Change.org
While the cost of food waste piles up, all too often Canadian families lack regular access to healthy and nutritious foods. According to Food Banks Canada, over 850,000 people seek assistance from food banks every month, including hundreds of thousands of young people. With 13 per cent of the nation's population facing food insecurity, the call to action is clear.
Fortunately, efforts are underway across the country to feed families with surplus food. The US-based Food Donation Connection coordinates food recovery from Canadian locations of Darden Restaurants and Chipotle. Operating in the Halton region, the charity Food for Life is recovering approximately 2.2 million pounds (nearly 998,000 kilos) of surplus food for the communities the organization serves.
The city of Toronto has launched a Food Strategy to support a healthier and more sustainable food system in the city. Toronto's active Food Policy Council has worked for decades to improve food access, local food environments, and policy development. Food waste is among the Council's priority issues.
The nation's largest food rescue program, Second Harvest, operates in Toronto and provides food for over 220 social services agencies. The organization's vision is straightforward, claiming "No Waste. No Hunger." Every day, they recover enough surplus food to provide over 22,000 meals.
Canada is far from alone in fighting food waste. In late June, Toronto's Second Harvest attended a landmark food rescue conference at Harvard Law School. Co-organized by the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency among others, the action-oriented event convened hundreds of leading entrepreneurs, policy professionals, and practitioners to further innovations regarding reducing food waste and recovering edible food for people.
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Food waste is not an intangible policy problem. It is something we see every day. Each of us, as consumers and as eaters, can play a role. Nearly half of Canadian food waste is attributable households--what we buy, don't eat, and toss. As the University of Guelph's Kate Parizeau recently discussed, the cost of food waste is as if everyone in Canada is throwing away $760 every year.
Food waste is affecting the country's purse strings and heartstrings, with much good food wasted and many going without. Wasting less and feeding more is an achievable goal. Working together, Canadians can take a bite out of food insecurity.
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The five things you need to know on Tuesday July 19, 2016
1) SMITHEAGLE, EAGLESMITH
By this evening, or even well before it, the anti-Corbyn forces in the PLP may finally have one candidate. As I reported last night, Labour sources were claiming that Angela Eagle and Owen Smith had come to an agreement (though some prefer the phrase a common understanding, as its not written in blood or anything).
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And the common understanding is that they both recognise and respect the strong preference of the PLP to have a single candidate. Talks between the two camps were amicable but a lot of face-saving will have to take place, with not even a whiff of triumphalism for the one who emerges as the main candidate.
Team Eagle are still not giving up, however, not least after her impressive performance in the PLP hustings. Yvette Coopers plan for an indicative ballot got nowhere in the end. But an informal tally by tellers outside the PLP office last night, between 7pm and 8pm (when it closed) found Eagle and Smith were pretty close in the number of MPs who handed in nominations. Neither had the magic 51, but were on their way to it. That process resumes again from 9am.
Smith supporters claim they have twice as many MPs as Eagle, and could show that as the day goes on. By early evening, the party is set to formally give its first update on how many nominations each contender has so far, ahead of the closure of nominations of Wednesday.
In one indication of how split the party is, it seems even the Kinnock household is divided. Stephen Kinnock is a big Eagle fan, but dad Neil sounded after the hustings like he was moving towards Smith. Hilary Benn, asked if Eagle (his preferred choice) should step down, told Today: There is a strong view in the Parliamentary Labour Party that there should only be one challenger.
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But SmithEagle, or EagleSmith, it seems the vast majority of the PLP agree with Benn that they just want one candidate. And with a narrow window of two days to sign up moderate registered supporters at 25 a pop, they hope a single opponent to Corbyn can fuel the online fightback.
2) ANTI-JEZ, UNCLE JEZ
His avuncular image is one of the reasons Corbyn won such a landslide last year in the leadership election. That cardigan charisma, the willingness not to dance to the usual tunes of the media or Westminster norms, plus the high regard many had for him as a nice bloke whose time had come, will all feature again in this summers campaign. Add in a simple anti-cuts message and Bobs your uncle. Or rather Jez was. Corbyn had what Alastair Campbell used to call definition - and in spades.
Except that that this time, Corbyn could build even bigger support because all those bits of his image are much better known than last year (when a frankly sad band of us anoraks toured the country from hustings to hustings hearing the same speeches over and over). The Times/YouGov shows that the Labour leader would beat either Smith or Eagle by a margin of 20 points or more, among party members. The proportion who think he is doing well is up to 55%, up four points in just two weeks.
And yet, and yet. Corbyns critics think that whats different this year is that the downsides of his leadership - or lack of it - have been finally exposed. Lillian Greenwoods speech on the dysfunctionality of Corbyns team - the lack of communication, the undermining of campaigns on transport, the incompetence - may be an eye-opener for Labour members swept up by the JezWeCan movement. Loveable amateurishness was trumped by a basic failure to act like a functioning Opposition, let alone a Government-in-waiting, Greenwood suggests.
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3) GOING NUCLEAR
Aptly enough, the Trident vote had three prongs to it as far as Labour MPs were concerned. 140 for, 47 against, 41 absent or abstained. That three way split - read the full list of who voted which way HERE - laid bare deep divisions within the party over the nuclear deterrent.
And Corbyn is clearly putting Trident among the many touchstone issues (along with Iraq) he feels will win him an even bigger majority among the party members. Theresa Mays Thatcher-like clarity to the SNP question as to whether shed be prepared to kill 100,000 innocent civilians - Yes- was the perfect contrast to JCs own answer.
"I would not take a decision that kills millions of innocent people. I do not believe the threat of mass murder is a legitimate way to go about international relations, he said. And if your own leader wont use nukes, the any pro-nuke policy is irrelevant.
Jamie Reed dripped with contempt. For the first time I think ever weve witnessed the leader of the Labour party stand up at the despatch box of this House and argue against the policy of the party he leads. This is unprecedented, moreover this reckless, juvenile, narcissistic irresponsibility makes me fearful for the future of the party that I love. Angela Smith also rammed home the point that JC was defying policy approved overwhelmingly by his own party conference. Corbyn replied: Party policy is also to have reviews of policy thats why we have reviews.
David Cameron, sitting on the backbenches for the first time, looked absent-mindedly at his iPhone, before leaving the debate.
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BECAUSE YOUVE READ THIS FAR
When No means Yes. Watch the chair of the Republican Convention turn down calls for a roll call vote challenging Trump.
4) EVEN STEVENS
Even NHS chief Simon Stevens is now adopting the line that Brexit can be an opportunity rather than a curse. Writing for the Telegraph, he says that the EU referendum vote gives the PM the chance to oversee radical change in the health service.
Urging the Government to focus resources on GPs rather than hospitals he says that headlines about hospital deficits obscure the fact that over the past decade their share of funding has grown rapidly at the expense of primary care. But will some of that touted 100m extra a week for the NHS come down the track?
But Stevens also has a warning to Mrs May that foreign NHS workers must be given reassurance by the Government that they are still welcome in this country. In the referendum, hed issued dire warnings about the dangers to patient safety of losing so many EU staff.
And Stevens also says that May must urgently set out a child obesity strategy. Which is exactly what Jamie Oliver told me when he guest edited HuffPostUK last Friday. Heres the TV chefs plea (via my smartphone) Theresa, come on, we need you please. I know youve got my cookbooks.
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5) CABINET SAUVIGNON
Theresa Mays first ever Cabinet meeting as PM is today. And it shows a top team of slightly older vintage, and largely shaped in her own image (hardworking, state-educated, unshowy deliverers. Boris provides the extra zest and colour, along with the others in the Three Brexiteers (who will now share Chevening - a revelation that provoked the biggest laugh of Lobby yesterday).
Bojo wooed a few doubters at his first EU foreign ministers meeting yesterday, his French skills coming in very useful (unlike Nigel Farages Im very good with a wine list French). But not everything is plain sailing for the new team. May is facing claims of her first U-turn over the Japanese takeover of ARM Holdings (I asked No.10 what our Industrial Strategy was on tech yesterday and got some bromides in return).
DD is apparently being told he cant poach Boriss best FCO staff. Fox has been told by the Canadians not to boast about any swift trade deal. The FT is worried that May has downgraded the pensions minister role from Minister of State to mere Parliamentary Under Secretary, post-Altmann.
And the Times reveals that a minister has quit over the appointment of Liz Truss as lord chancellor. Lord Faulks QC, - brother of novelist Sebastian - says Trusss lack of legal background risks damaging the justice system because she lacks the experience to stand up to the prime minister.
Lord Pannick, QC, a crossbench peer, and others stand up for Truss.
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1. Anyone can be a (travel) blogger
A funny thing has happened within the blogger sphere. Once upon a time, everyone had a blog. Building on generation MySpace, people were blogging happily away without a care in the world. SEO, analytics, themes, social media counters, figures and collaborations, all meant very little. Instead, blogging was simply about enjoying writing; having a 'dear diary' moment; telling your story and connecting with others.
These days, blogging has become incredibly competitive. With the rise of 'super' bloggers, blogs have moved away from the private musings of angst-ridden teenagers (I must find and delete my first ever blog), and have instead become big brands. A hierarchy has been established and a gulf exists between those incredibly successful bloggers and well, the rest of us.
Yet don't be put off by this. If you travel, enjoy travel or just want to write about previous trips, then do it. You are just as much a travel blogger than anyone else. We began our travel blog over a sad, warm sandwich in Milton Keynes and we work full time. But does this make us any less a blogger? Nah. Blogging is about writing and sharing content: nothing more, nothing less. So get going!
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2. Content
It's been said a hundred times over: content is King. This is something we read time and time again when beginning the blog and it holds much truth. The more content you can get out there, the more people are likely to read your blog. It's the law of attraction.
This is something we experience firsthand. With busy day jobs outside of the blog, there can be a few weeks where our blog languishes, all alone in the World Wide Web. We haven't enough time to be posting regularly and our traffic reflects that. During this time, perhaps just one lone soul will browse our blog (Mum, is that you?), before drifting off again to some other content-crammed and fun blog. Sigh.
However, one thing we have learnt is that whilst content is King, that does not necessarily mean you must cram your blog full of mindless content fillers. This might be where other bloggers disagree, but we are careful to ensure that any content we do post is a) genuinely useful b) vaguely interesting and c) relevant. Like a good magazine, your readers want one that is interesting and enjoyable to read, not one full of junk mail and rehashed articles.
3. Listography
Top of all content fillers is perhaps every bloggers' favourite: the 'list'. From your top 50 travel essentials, to top 10 things to see in Paris, there is a list for everything. Whilst these can be genuinely useful, often they can also be superficial; gleaned from a Google search and not very helpful to readers. We've compiled a few lists in our time, but try to and avoid throwing too many out there. Nobody cares what my favourite 5 pairs of socks are, sadly.
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Creating great content is a delicate balance between ensuring your blog remains interesting and relevant, and also making sure that what you do post is interesting and distinctive. So before you begin scheduling your next ten posts on travel essentials, stop and consider whether a) it has been done before (yes) and b) if so, how you might make it a little different.
4. Find your voice
At the heart of every blog is your voice. It comes through in your writing; what you choose to write about; your use of grammar; your opinions and even your photography.
When I first began reading travel blogs, I was surprised by how similar the tone was amongst many of them. Many seemed to be 'voiceless' lists, offering deadpan recaps of where they visited and in what order. Whilst they were useful, they weren't necessarily interesting; making me laugh or conjuring up imagery of the beautiful places they had visited.
What I was searching for, and have indeed found in many of my favourite bloggers, is instead a real, distinctive voice: a character behind the flashy website. This can make all the difference between a good and bad blog.
Of course, this isn't something you want to force - making yourself write like Michael Palin or a Lonely Planet author isn't going to seem particularly authentic. So, just be yourself. I've always loved writing (I don't want to boast, but I won a lot of story writing competitions in primary school) and writing is part of my 'real life' job. I've therefore always written in a particular style and will probably continue to do so. Sure, it can be a bit flowery, definitely a bit waffly, and always too long, but it's me.
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As Christina Aguilera said (in a breathy voice): 'trust the voice within'.
5. Mix it up
Whilst we claim to be travel bloggers, we also ensure that every now and again, we go a little off-piste and write about something else. Whilst any good brand ambassador will rightly tell you - 'stick to your brand' - there have been a number of interesting articles on just how important it is to mix up your content.
The reason behind this? Making your blog personable.
Whilst it is lovely to read about people's endless adventures, luxury hotels, suggested itineraries and experience of flying first class with Emirates, (jealous), it's also reassuring to know that behind it all is a real person. My favourite magazine when I was growing up (shout out to 'Heat'), often used to run a feature based solely on pictures of celebrities with spots. As a teenager with all-out acne, this feature made me feel sadly happier. These celebrities were real people who needed to use industrial strength Clearasil, just like me. Yay!
Likewise, it's always nice to know that behind the Mediterranean adventures, bloggers are real and relatable people. Some of our most popular blog posts have been on breakups, anxiety and the realities of being twin sisters (whilst my literary masterpiece on the Isle of Skye has gone largely unnoticed).
6. Fake it till you make it
As I began this now lengthy post: anyone can be a blogger. If you're writing content and people are reading it, then you should consider yourself a success! However, to take it that little bit further, for example working with brands, tourism boards or PR agencies, you need to be a little braver. Something that we learnt is that when you're starting out, the worst thing you can do is to sit anxiously waiting for that first email, inviting you on a press trip. It's unlikely to happen (we spent a frustrating six months doing just this).
Instead, bite the bullet and get in contact with people. And don't worry - what's the worst that can happen? Provided you have a blog with high-quality content, that is well written and read by others, you have everything going for you.
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We began by simply putting together an introductory email, that provided an overview of who we were; what are aims were as travel bloggers; our audience; our demographics and of course, those great buzzwords: our social media following. We then sent that out to everyone we could ever think of. Honestly. Nobody in the tourism industry was safe.
And you know what? People responded, positively.
So, be confident of who you are, what you represent and get in touch with that hotel or tourism board!
Remember: blogging is all about ensuring you are connecting with people in a way that they find interesting and of course, that they enjoy. If you can get that right, then you're set. Forget for a moment the pressure to be working with brands, or PR companies, and instead focus on your relationship with your followers.
In the post-referendum landscape, ironies abound. Someone who campaigned, albeit largely unnoticed, to remain in the EU will now lead the Brexit government. After a referendum supposedly to 'take back control' from unelected elites, the Tory elite have rallied round the establishment candidate. Theresa May, whose failure to control immigration was allegedly a major factor in the Leave vote, has ironically become its principal beneficiary.
Her in-tray as the incoming Prime Minister and Tory leader is unusually daunting. The referendum created an ambiguous coalition united by the lightning rod of the EU, primarily what they were against. The aftermath revealed the incoherence of this position. So although May keeps repeating 'Brexit means Brexit', what this means in practice remains unclear. There's almost a need to resurrect the skills of cold war Kremlinologists to try to decipher the Delphic indications in her recent speeches.
A number of options are, however, already emerging. Cameron's government in March issued the Alternatives to Membership guide as one of the requirements of the referendum process. In essence, there is a choice between models which retain some access to the Single Market and the freedoms of movement that go with it, or not. Cameron's government concluded that all of these were worse than the status quo, but if Brexit is to mean Brexit May will presumably have to choose one.
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Leaving the Single Market would involve walking away from one of Margaret Thatcher's legacies. Thatcher was more of a nationalist than an economic liberal. However, because the Single Market was supposed to play to Britain's competitive advantages, not least in the City, economic liberalism could be a prop to nationalism in the 1980s. It seems likely that May will, like Thatcher, try to straddle economic, social and national conservatism.
The first is represented by her appointment of David Davis, at least as keen an economic liberal as Thatcher, to lead on Brexit. Alongside Davis, Brexiteers Liam Fox and Boris Johnson have also been appointed. This puts them on their mettle to deliver the kind of economic miracle of a Britain freed from the shackles of the EU that was promised during the referendum. Davis is an enthusiast for deregulation allowing Britain to thrive economically and has signalled intentions to retain some kind of access to the Single Market if possible. This is incompatible with the immigration controls that many Leave voters seem to want. It is therefore noticeable that immigration is among the many issues that May did not mention in her Prime Ministerial acceptance speech. Instead, she seems intent on appeasing the anger of Brexit voters with a rhetoric of listening, fairness and change in the division of spoils between rich and poor.
In doing so she has rightly spotted that the gripes of the Leave voters she addressed in Birmingham on 11 July are largely domestic. There are a few potential quick wins sketched out in her Birmingham speech, around employee access to boardrooms and so on. Such moves involve May turning her back on another part of Thatcher's legacy - the idea of a flexible workforce - for one which is more valued and protected.
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Delivering a more dynamic, productive and equal society is much easier said than done. Brexiteer expectations of enhanced prosperity, portrayed with Marxist certainty as inevitable as a result of leaving the EU, seem equally doubtful. The same is true of simply playing by the World Trade Organisation's rules, a favourite option of many Brexiteers during the recent referendum and an option May's speech of 11 July might suggest general support for. The process of adjusting to Thatcherism was long and painful. The process of inventing something else will not necessarily prove less so, just because Davis reassures us that it will be.
Thatcher and her ministers indeed had similarly sanguine expectations of an easy adjustment in the early 1980s.They had, however, reasonably clear ideas developed over the preceding decade of where they were taking Britain after 1979. Thatcher herself also provided a narrative which linked economic, social and national conservatism around a unifying project of national economic renewal.
In the last few months, I have made many trips across London, alone, using different mobility aids. All have been unnecessarily eventful, and have benefitted from the kindness of total strangers, who I am pretty sure I would have given up, wept, injured myself, or would still be stuck on a train. On some occasions I have felt unsafe, and recently I had to make the brave decision not to pack a bottle of beer in my bag, as it would likely have ended up smashed. (I was right. My bag threw itself on the Jubilee Line tube).
Generally, Londoners and visitors to the city are amazing. As I waited for the ramp on one train today, three separate individuals asked if I needed any help, within 1 minute. When the small step up onto the tube at Waterloo for the Jubilee Line proved too much for my heavily laden chair, and everything went flying, two people quietly grabbed my things, helped me on the train, and returned to their seats, with no comment or awkward conversation afterwards. When there are problems with the transport, it is the kindness of strangers that gets me to my destination.
People seem keen to help, but not sure how to, and so I thought I'd make some suggestions. I am still new to a lot about travelling with a disability, but as a result, I know how it is to travel without having to consider the issues disabled travellers face.
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1) Mind The Gang
You're having a night out, or the family are down. You're all excited to see each other, and that's great. Go have a drink for me. But when you're all strolling along, in a big gang, down that slight slope, I'm behind you. I have a heavy bag on my lap, which combined with the slope and the smooth flooring, is dragging me towards you quickly. I'm gripping my wheels tightly to stop myself flying into you (I go through LOTS of gloves, and have blisters on my blisters). I don't have a problem with you or your ankles, but it's not always easy to stay slow enough to stop myself careering into you. So if you're walking more slowly than the average London commuter, please don't dawdle 3 or 4 abreast, so I can't get round. I will ask you to let me past, but I'm sat down, and you may well not hear that behind you (again, understandably). But for the sake of my hands, stick to pairs, please! (Oh, and the middle of wide corridors? I am claiming those. I'm faster than you and my wheels light up. Chase me and argue.)
2) Mind The Pushchair
Much has been written about the ongoing battle between pushchair and wheelchair, especially regarding buses. I do NOT have a problem with pushchairs. I have a problem with buses that are so poorly designed that we are pushed into this wheeled face off, and with drivers who refuse to ask parents to fold down their child's buggy so I can board (generally, when alerted to me needing to get on the bus, most parents are lovely, and only too happy to help). It's easier to put a child on a lap than it is for me to wait in the rain for the next bus when I'm meant to have priority.
When using the few lifts we have on the Underground system, it would make my life quicker and easier if I'm only negotiating the toes and ankles of one or two parents with each buggy. When a group of five adults all take the lift with one pushchair, I either can't get in (and I don't, unlike most of them, have the option of taking the escalator), and have to wait, or I end up rolling into someone because they've dived in round me and I can't move. Meet at the bottom, or on the station, please!
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3) Mind The Stick
I have a taste for a colourful cane. If I have to use them, they can go with my outfit, and I refuse to be embarrassed by needing them. So they're spotty, or bubbly, and pretty damn unmissable. People may use sticks for life, or just for a week. Regardless, they need a bit more space, and will fall over if you push into them or kick their stick. I had to get across London in rush hour the other day (something I try to avoid). Despite being right at the train door as it pulled up, I was barged into, pushed out of the way and at one point, battered by a pushchair coming off because I had nowhere to go in the crowds around me. I still have bruises. I was pushed out of the way of getting onto 2 trains, and only made the third by trekking the length of the platform (harder for me than others). I avoid rush hour, because with my stick I feel unsafe in the crowds, and in my chair, there is little space or time for me to get on.
4) Mind The Seat
I would often benefit from a seat. I hate having to ask. Many don't have a problem with it, but I haven't got that confident yet. Please offer, particularly if you're sat in a priority seat. Glance up from your phone and around you briefly at each stop. If I'm wonky, older, or pregnant, I may need that seat. Last week, two women offered to get me a seat, despite them both being stood themselves. I was so grateful not to have to ask, thank you.
Please don't be offended if someone turns a seat down - sometimes if I'm getting off the train in one stop, it's less painful to balance on good leg than sit down and get back up. It's nothing personal. I just don't need it!
5) Mind The Kids
I love children. Really, I often prefer them to grown ups, and not just because I don't have to look up to speak to them. They just make more sense to me. I REALLY want one of those micro scooters. I have no desire to wrap myself and my chair around one though, and it's got close a few times. Scooting on platforms, you would think a bad idea, but apparently not for many small people. Please don't let them scoot around the Tube network. It's terrifying for me, knowing that I can't always control my chair completely on slopes/spillages/getting off trains.
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If your kid is staring at the lady in the light up chair, or asking you about her (totally awesome) stick - that's TOTALLY FINE. I'd rather they can ask, and see that I'm not scary; hopefully they then won't feel awkward around people with disabilities in the future. If they want to ask me questions or chat (and I've had my morning coffee), I'm happy to say hello. I believe the children are our future. Whitney said so.
There's no doubt more I could add. Want to know more about travelling as a disabled person in London? Check out Transport For All, who work to improve the travel experiences of disabled people across the capital. For actual travel examples from an interesting chap on wheels, I highly recommend Alan's 'Never a Dull Journey' blogs - I learn a lot about where to avoid and where to go.
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Is Britain's second woman Prime Minister really the direct heir to Margaret Thatcher? Theresa May has certainly been represented as such, and she has been measured against Thatcher's towering but also heavily tainted legacy. The day before May walked into No. 10, Metro (Tuesday 12 July 2016) placed their vital statistics side by side in "Maggie V May: How They Compare." The Thatcher factor looms large.
The comparison will no doubt be made when such a rare and remarkable milestone is reached. There will inevitably be points in common between these two women who defied the odds to rise to the top job in their party and to the top job in the nation.
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Nonetheless, there are quite significant differences between the two, and tracing the political ancestry on the basis of their common gender is misleading. A generation plus apart, May is not Thatcher's imitator in the field of gender politics--she is not Margaret Thatcher mark II.
We can accept hybrid political concepts like Tory democracy, One Nationism, and compassionate conservatism, or that neoliberals can counterbalance economic conservatism with social progressivism (Cameronian Conservatism, in fact). So why do we find it harder to fathom Tory feminism? Both feminism and contemporary conservatism of the pragmatic-opportunistic variety are more protean than might be expected.
May does not share Thatcher's apparent rancour for feminism. Thatcher was more than a let-down as the first woman PM from the point of view of the Women's Liberation Movement--she was a disaster. The Iron Lady called feminism a poison. She felt under no pressure to foster sisterhood or promote women. Only one woman was appointed to her Cabinet, the Baroness Young. 'Attila the Hen', as Francois Mitterrand called her, was only really at ease in the company of men.
Beatrix Campbell's brilliant The Iron Ladies: Why Do Women Vote Tory (1987) exposed Thatcher's contempt for other women, and the ways in which she reserved power and greatness for herself. But as Campbell also showed, paradoxically, this did little to threaten women's electoral support for her party.
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In contrast, Theresa May is as comfortable in her kitten heels as in the t-shirt of Fawcett Society ("this is what a feminist looks like"). Her newly formed Cabinet has the most women of any previous Conservative administration. May has other feminist-friendly credentials too: she co-founded with Baroness Jenkin Women 2 Win in 2005; she was Minister for Women and Equalities (2010-12); she was entrusted with one of the key Cabinet posts by David Cameron who as PM made deliberate efforts to promote women within the Tory frame. (But it is also true that women are also given the opportunity to stand in unsafe or unwinnable seats).
May is the product of her baby-boom generation where what is anathema is not feminism and the discourse of sexual equality. Rather it is old-school, old-boy homo-social sexism that catches the headlines.
Andrea Leadsom's clumsy playing of the mother card, and her sexual politics generally, was perceived to be at odds with the zeitgeist, and effectively put paid to her campaign to be the second woman Prime Minister--a remarkable riposte to the 'traditional values,' 'family values' of Thatcherism.
There is a longer history of Tory feminism that helps to explain May and, in fact, suggests Thatcher may actually be the anomaly.
A number of Tory women were prominent suffragists, and Louisa Knightley founded the Conservative and Unionist Women's Franchise Association in 1908. Conservatives were represented among the suffragettes as well, with Lady Constance Lytton as one example, and WSPU-donor Lady Lucy Houston, simultaneously a diehard feminist and ultra-Tory imperialist and defencist. Edith Lady Londonderry and Thelma Cazalet-Keir were two Tory suffragists who became important figures within the party between the wars.
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In the party's transition to mass democracy it formed the mixed-sex Primrose League in 1883 and, after suffrage, the Women's Unionist and later Women's Conservative Associations endowed women with significant social power. Campbell could start answering the question 'why do women vote Tory' by studying the effectiveness of the feminised party machine. With a membership of one million in the 1930s, the CWA was instrumental to the party's electoral success.
In 1919, the first woman MP to take her seat was the Conservative, American-born Nancy Astor, and throughout her twenty-six years as Plymouth's MP she eagerly embraced her role as the representative of all women.
While there was only a handful of women MPs in those first decades after the First World War, many of the Conservative ones self-identified as feminists (by the measure of their time), and scored firsts for women in national and international politics, and in the rituals of parliamentary democracy.
One can understand why the present-day Conservative Women's Organisation takes pride in a feminist pedigree. A number of former-suffragettes eventually found their political home on the Right, including WSPU leader Emmeline Pankhurst who joined the party before her death in 1928.
That it was Margaret Thatcher who became the first woman PM meant that this story, this strain of a feminised and even feminist Toryism, was sweep aside. It did not help to explain the advent of Thatcher.
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But May, as the second woman Conservative PM, needs to be set against a rather different historical backdrop. We have yet to see how well feminist Toryism can work in practice, and whether May will succeed to 'iron' out the obvious inconsistencies and 'iron' in a new ethos to the social and intellectual fabric of the Conservative party.
"It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones." Nelson Mandela
Until 17 December, 2015, the standard minimum rules for the treatment of prisoners (SMR) were those which had been adopted in 1955. The process of bringing them up to date took five years and owes much to the steadfast work of Quakers and Penal Reform International. In a fitting tribute, when the new rules were ratified by the UN they became known formally as the Nelson Mandela Rules.
Importantly these revised rules established for the first time prison safety as a duty of States. Specific revisions to the old rules spanned respect for dignity; healthcare; discipline (including solitary confinement); investigation of deaths and evidence of torture; needs of vulnerable groups; legal representation; complaints and inspections; replacing outdated terminology; and training of prison staff.
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Today on Nelson Mandela International Day, there are over ten million people in prison worldwide. Some will have lost their liberty as a measured and proportionate punishment for the serious crimes they have committed. Many will have been imprisoned for years awaiting trial. Others are being held in prison for want of adequate mental health or social care services. Some are forgotten behind bars with papers long lost and no lawyers or family to advocate for their release. And, for those in England and Wales who pride themselves on the fairness of our justice system, a reminder that there are over 4,000 people held beyond tariff in our jails still serving the Kafkaesque, abolished since 2012, sentence of indeterminate imprisonment for public protection (IPP).
Today is a testimony to the life of a man who, after 27 years behind bars, said: "As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn't leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I'd still be in prison." And later: "For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others."
The task now for all those who care about fundamental rights and freedoms is to build on Nelson Mandela's legacy, to challenge injustice, gather facts and figures and personal accounts that together will expose the massive social and economic costs of overuse of incarceration and profile States which are successfully managing down excessively high prison numbers in favour of justice reinvestment and effective alternatives to custody.
Having recently undertaken the perilous journey from Damascus to Berlin, researcher and filmmaker Reem Karssli - now seeking asylum in Germany - had a strong connection with the people she interviewed for BBC Media Action's research into the communication needs of refugees in Europe.
Filmmaker Reem Karssli knows first-hand the importance of reliable communications to refugees. Six months ago, she fled the war in Syria and is now a refugee herself in Germany where she became part of the team researching the communication needs of refugees for BBC Media Action's Voices of Refugees report.
"You have to be more than patient - you have to be a saint," Reem, 29, told me. "We lost four years of our lives in the war. Now we are losing more time just waiting - for papers, to understand our legal status, to learn the language...and throughout all this we never know what's going to happen to us next."
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The report examines the priority information and communication needs of refugees in three areas: on their journey, in "transit" camps in Greece and in Germany. Reem's task was to interview 13 refugees who had reached Berlin.
Her impressive CV includes working for BBC Media Action in Jordan, but since becoming a refugee she has not been allowed to work so did the research for this study voluntarily.
Reem arrived in Germany's capital last September after she and her brother bid farewell to their parents and sisters in Damascus, flew to Istanbul, before travelling with smugglers by boat across the Mediterranean. They then travelled, mainly by bus, from mainland Greece, through the Western Balkans corridor (which was closed in March) to Berlin.
"You just had to be crazy to take that decision," she says. "There was no information at all. We just followed everyone else."
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Reem told me the fact that she had already "made the journey" allowed her to connect with her interviewees. They were often weary of being interviewed by various agencies and fed up with still seeing no change in their situation. But very few were reluctant to share their story with her.
"I understand these people. Their stories are familiar to me and they trust me - I am not an outsider. I could share my experience with them and invite them to share theirs with me. I tried not to just question - I tried to listen, to let them talk, talk and talk more."
Reem's interviewees were at the "end" of their long and perilous journeys - sometimes as long as 3000 miles. So were they relieved to be safe at last? She found that rather depended upon where they were in the "process". Those who had managed to find an apartment and attend language/integration courses felt some sense of moving forward, of regaining control of their lives and had some optimism. But few had had their expectations met. They felt bewildered by paperwork. They were confused by the system. Having survived long and dangerous journeys, having protected the most vulnerable in their travelling groups - babies, toddlers, the elderly, sick and disabled - they found themselves powerless to effect further change and short of reliable information about their options.
This is echoed throughout our research and the findings highlight refugees' overarching need for critical information about their current and future situation, and their need to be listened to, to participate in dialogue that provides them with physical, social and psychosocial support. Many require trauma counselling.
Many of the people she spoke to were living in the decommissioned Tempelhof airport in central Berlin, where they expected to live for the first six months. At the time of the survey, an estimated 2000 refugees were living in this km long building. With so many people from different countries and ethnic groups, speaking diverse languages, crammed together and nobody knowing what was going to happen next, tensions often threatened to erupt into violence. Security was high.
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The tensions were heightened by the fact that some originated from higher priority source countries - e.g Syria, Iran, Iraq and Eritrea - and were more likely to be able to attend language/integration courses and be granted asylum status.
"People were not just frustrated, they were traumatised by their situation there," says Reem, "They couldn't do anything because they had no money. Two families I spoke with had asked to go back to Iraq. They couldn't stand it any more. For most their expectations had not been met."
"You survive the war, you survive the journey and then you are stuck in this place."
The research highlighted the importance of consistent communication between agencies and refugees to help reduce widespread confusion, foster tolerance between groups and help avert dangerous information vacuums in which rumour and anecdote can fuel powerlessness, panic and violence.
Indeed, the analysis also shows that participants who stay in regular contact with other refugees and who have wide communication networks (e.g. mobile networks and social networking sites/groups such as Facebook and WhatsApp) are likely to be more resilient than those who are less connected. This need for clarity was a major concern for refugees at all stages in their journey - including the so-called endpoint.
Katy Williams is Research Editor at BBC Media Action.
This blog is cross-posted on BBC Media Action's Insight blog, which features analysis and commentary on the role of the media in international development.
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One year ago, Sir Nicholas Winton passed away. He was the most incredible man whose bravery and selfless actions saved the lives of 669 Jewish children from the Holocaust. He also had a motto: "If it's not impossible, then there must be a way to do it." It is estimated that over 6,000 people are alive today thanks to his selfless and heroic actions.
On Monday, I attended the annual Holocaust Educational Trust Ambassador Conference which was as inspiring and mind-blowing as I had hoped for, but this year an acute sense of urgency was in the air as we reflected upon the recent rise of racism, prejudice and intolerance we are witnessing in today's society. Remembering the Holocaust in times like these could not be more relevant and I think I speak on behalf of all the conference participants when I say that I left feeling galvanised with knowledge and motivation to persevere in my role as a Regional Ambassador for the Trust.
I was inspired to become a Regional Ambassador for Scotland when I left university, as the Lessons from Auschwitz project I had completed in my final year of high school had entirely shaped my outlook on life. For this, I felt grateful and wanted to contribute more to the work of the Trust. It had inspired me to study Human Rights Law and work in the areas of migration and extremism as well as human rights education and training. In my role this year I organised an event at Glasgow University linking human rights to the Holocaust, with survivor testimony from Henry and Ingrid Wuga who came to Britain on Kindertransport as Jewish child refugees. This was followed by an expert panel discussion on human rights issues, including the Nuremberg trials and the role of the bystander, subsequent genocides and the current refugee crisis.
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Having met Henry and Ingrid and hearing their story, I knew how important it was to them that they found a safe haven in Britain before the war. But it also made me consider the people behind the Kindertransport, those who managed to rescue 10,000 children. It was therefore an incredible privilege to meet Sir Nicholas Winton's daughter Barbara at the Ambassador Conference. While Henry and Ingrid weren't rescued by Nicholas Winton, his actions saved the lives of 669 child refugees just like them. It was fascinating to hear from Barbara what she thought inspired her father to undertake this act of rescue on such a massive scale- his political astuteness, strong sense of justice and responsibility to act in spite of being told that what he was planning to do was impossible.
I was also fortunate enough to hear from Lord Alf Dubs who was rescued by Sir Nicholas all those years ago. Lord Dubs said that he was inspired by the actions of his rescuer when he advocated for the 'Dubs Amendment' to the current Immigration Bill to allow unaccompanied child refugees to be admitted to the UK. This got me thinking: what could I do? In times where I feel like intolerance reigns and public discourse about refugees can be irresponsible and dehumanising, hearing about how Lord Dubs and Nicholas Winton were able to make a difference when it seemed inconceivable has given me hope.
Armed with new knowledge and guidance about how to frame what we can learn from the Holocaust, I joined my fellow Ambassadors in pledging to #ShapeTheFuture in honour of Sir Nicholas Winton. I promised that I would not tolerate intolerance, I would not stand by and I would continue to raise awareness about the Holocaust and human rights protection in both my personal and professional life.
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Las Vegas may be most famous for its gambling, but being not much of a gambler myself, for me it's all about the Buffets. So when others may be throwing dice on the craps table, I'm stacking the shrimp on my plate. After gambling on a good range of eating options in Vegas, I've selected the top three Buffets that I believe are sure bets.
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The Buffet at Wynn
The Wynn hotel and casino is one of the most beautiful, it has found the right mix of show and sophistication to create a look of glamour. Nowhere is this more apparent than within the main dining area of The Buffet, where large floral towers reach the heights of the atrium, for a visual sensation. The light and airy space carries through to the serving area, where we were met with the most amazing array of options to choose from.
I spoke with Executive Chef, Russell Parker, who highlighted the fact that their were no signposts above the food areas. In many buffets there will be sections marked out for Italian, Chinese, Mexican etc., but here there were none. I liked how this encouraged you to discover the various foods for yourself, and a good excuse to wander around all the options.
Each station had the chefs work being very visible, so you can see how freshly prepared all the food is. There is great seafood on offer, from giant Alaskan Opilop crab legs to the juicy oysters. They have made good use of live stations, where they incorporate food theatre for items such as ramen noodles and crepes. The desert station overall was a real strength for The Buffet, as there was a super selection of carefully prepared options, along with an impressive revolving ice cream station.
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I can imagine that someone trying to approach a buffet with intolerances can be a daunting experience, so it's to be noted that this catered for at Wynn. If you tell a server, they will get a chef to personally guide you around the various stations, letting you know exactly what is safe to enjoy.
The Buffet at Wynn combines and interior that surpasses what you would come to expect at a buffet, delivering a much more fine dining experience. The quality and visual of the food is of a really high standard, and proved to be a very enjoyable experience.
The Buffet at Bellagio
We received a very warm welcome on entering The Buffet at Bellagio for breakfast. The service was some of the best we have received while in Las Vegas. On meeting the general manager, Luc Andres, we could see why. He had a great enthusiasm and knowledge of the food and a very personal approach to the diners.
There is really a great breakfast selection available at The Bellagio buffet, from your usual selection of bacon and eggs to many more adventurous options. Without compiling a list of what was on offer, some of my favourite finds were the Jalapeno Cornbread Muffins, O'Brien Potatoes and Eggs Benedict.
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I started the breakfast by heading to the omelette station, where I had my ham, cheese and onion creation cooked to perfection. There was a great selection of fruit available, which is certainly appreciated, and they had a perfectly formed honey, yoghurt and granola pot. For those with more of a sweet tooth, they had a splendid bread pudding and pancakes fresh off the griddle. As a lover of branding, I thought the waffles emblazoned with a Bellagio 'B' were a very nice touch.
I felt well catered for at The Buffet, with everything I could have wanted, along with lots more. There was a good atmosphere in the restaurant and I noticed that it got busier as time went on. At 11am the Buffet changes over to its lunchtime menu, which I think a few people had planned for. For me however, I had taken my fill of breakfast, but I can say that the Lunch selection also looked very impressive. The station that had earlier served sausages, transformed into a carvery and a very majestic mountain of shrimp was added to the central display.
Wicked Spoon at The Cosmopolitan
Wicked Spoon at the Cosmopolitan takes a different approach to buffet dining, not believing in piling your plate high, but alternatively seeing its selection as lots of little dishes. It has all the range on offer, as any other buffet, but with much more curated combinations. I found this to be a refreshing approach, as it portioned out the dishes, giving little tastes of flavours.
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As a lover of pasta, I was well catered for with a selection of four pasta based dishes, which were all equally delicious. I really enjoyed their Wicked Mac & Cheese, which had a spicy kick throughout, and the Short Rib Tortellacci in its perfectly packet parcel of rich flavour. You will see pizza at all the buffet's but there was something a little bit more special about the Wicked Spoon's offering, being a more hearty base and more adventurous combinations, such as the artichoke, mushroom and prosciutto. Everything was very tempting and I really liked the care and consideration in each bite. The presentation of each dish was very sweet with little steel bowls, frying baskets and even mini Chinese takeaway boxes.
Dessert came in equally dainty portions, and excelled in terms of taste. The Red Velvet Bunt Cake was delicious and their Raspberry Rice Crispy Treats were a welcome addition. Wicked Spoon is a great option for those looking for a buffet with a difference and the chefs have worked hard to deliver interesting flavours and combinations on a mini scale.
Last week I was interviewed by the BBC on the concerns that have been raised about the growing number of websites offering students bespoke academic essays in return for a fee. My encounter with these companies which offer students 'custom written essay services' for a fee - I have purposely omitted the names of the website that I visited as I do not want to promote or appear as endorsement for them - range from four websites guaranteeing me a reflective report of an entire dissertation. The websites offered me essay assignment of a 2,500 word length to be written within a week for around 450. For a dissertation work, they would provide me a 'first - quality' 10,500 word piece for 2000. This was to be written in 4 weeks. All of the four websites guaranteed a money back scheme if the work does not achieve the grade and if the paper was accused of plagiarism then the customer would receive their money back.
All of this sounds too good to be true, and the reality is it is.
Latest figures from the BBC article reveal that half of Welsh universities have seen an increase in the number of plagiarism cases
With students being targeted on social media through 'sponsored marketing'; essay writing companies have now become the new growing threat to students in Higher Education in Wales. (1)
It is said that there are over 1,000 websites - or essay mills - which currently offer students a bespoke academic essay in return for a fee. There are serious issues that must be addressed by the sector with regards to preventing students from falling into the trap of these companies. The financial implication is the first alarming thing that is a commonality with some of the stories and cases that I have been privy to hear about. Many of the companies lure students with a taster of the work and then they ask them to pay more and more money until the students are left in a situation in which they cannot afford. According to a report published in the Times Higher Education in 2013, more than half the offenders hailed from outside the UK. Some argue that the high fees paid by international students and the need to write in English (if this is not their first language) create greater incentives to cheat.
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As it currently stands, there does not seem to be any systematic solution to stop these companies. In 2007, Google banned advertisements for essay writing services on its website, a move welcomed by UUK (Universities UK). A UUK spokesman commented 'more should be done to clamp down on these essay companies' he adds that the body does not have specific proposals to tack the problem, although suggestions are welcome. In the recent weeks, a paper was put forward at my institution in Swansea University to ban these websites on campus therefore limiting their reach; other places have also enforced similar measures. Nevertheless, Institutions need to start doing more to address the threat and impact that these companies are having on students across Wales and the Higher Education sector in the UK. (2)
Murder is murder. Stop trying to justify it as something else.
Until two days ago I had never heard of Qandeel Baloch, the young woman that many have referred to as Pakistan's Kim Kardashian.
Now, I, along with many in the eastern and western world know that 26 year old Qandeel, real name Fauzia Azeem, was a social media star who was murdered by her own brother for the simple fact that he disapproved of her life choices. After being arrested (handed to police by his own father) 25 year old Waseem Azeem still maintains that he has no regret. After all, it was for the matter of his honour that his sister had to pay with her life.
I am the author of a fiction book which examines how honour plays a role in the practise of forced marriages. Having spoken to survivors and women's rights activists to understand the concept which controls and determines so many lives, I was not surprised when I skimmed Twitter to gage the opinions of the murdered woman's fellow Pakistanis.
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Tweets:
'Feel uncomfortable at the killing but 'understand' why the brother had killed her'
'Qandeel thoroughly deserved her end'
A few facebook posts included the following (verbatim):
-'First time I feel no empathy when someone has passed away'
- 'That's good news'
Of course, this is not to deny that there were many others who did condemn the murder, posting tweets which included the Quran's verse that the killing of one person is equivalent to killing all of mankind.
The majority, however, came from men and shamefully, women, who believed the killing to be justifiable. For many of us this mentality is abhorrent. Who gives anyone the right to judge or condemn an innocent murdered woman in this way? For she was innocent. Many may not have approved of her life choices but she had not committed a crime under Pakistan's legal system or indeed any other country's laws. As for breaking religious rules, well, only God can judge His believers. In Sharia law there are no grounds for killing a woman because she displeases you. If you don't like a family member, remove yourself from their life. Don't remove their right to live.
So why did total strangers think it acceptable to share their opinion openly to the world that Qandeel Baloch's murder was a good thing?
The answer lies in the two words which have accompanied her name in every news article from every media outlet.
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Honour killing.
Human Rights Watch defines it as the following: 'Honour killings are acts of vengeance, usually death, committed by male family members against female members who are held to have brought dishonour upon the family.'
From this perspective, a man's honour is determined by the actions and behaviour of his female relatives. He is not judged by society on his own good deeds and actions, but rather by his control of the women. This 'ownership' is irrespective of class and ethnicity.
It is the very use of the word 'honour' that almost excuses the action of the killer. As though somehow his actions are justified and therefore not subject to the same condemnation that other murderers would receive.
It is this patriarchal practise of control, candy wrapped as this romantic word that most of us associate with fairytale knights in shining armour, that led to Qandeel's murder. And it was about silencing the female voice.
This was a murder and it was as cold blooded as the killings of other girls of Pakistani origin around the world which made headlines. There was the 2003 murder of 17 year old Shifilea Ahmed by her parents in the UK for refusing a forced marriage. There was also the killing of 16 year old Canadian Aqsa Pervaz in 2007 for refusing to wear the hijab. Both these cases were labelled as honour killings in western law courts and therefore viewed through the eyes of the murderers. It should be noted that we in the west would never try to understand or try to empathise with a white skinned murderer. Why then do we do it for South Asian men? Is an Asian woman's life not equal to a white woman's life?
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NICE, FRANCE - JULY 16: A woman weeps as she views flowers and tributes on the Promenade des Anglais on July 16, 2016 in Nice, France. Five people believed to be linked to the man who killed 84 people in Nice are in police custody according to a statement by the Paris prosecutor's office after a French-Tunisian attacker killed 84 people as he drove a lorry through crowds who had gathered to watch a firework display during Bastille Day Celebrations. The attacker then opened fire on people in the crowd before being shot dead by police. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)
The father of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the Nice Bastille Day killer, said of his son, "He didn't pray, he didn't fast, he drank alcohol and even used drugs." Piecing together the information given by his father, his neighbors and the officials investigating him, it seems that Lahouaiej Bouhlel was not a devout Muslim. He had a criminal record, drank alcohol, ate pork, did drugs, did not fast, pray or regularly attend a mosque and was not religious in any way. He was cruel to his wife, who left him. This is not what many Muslims would typically consider reflective of their faith, particularly those who consider themselves religiously devout.
Yet the official French position, including that of the president and prime minister, on Lahouaiej Bouhlel's motive was exactly the same as for every act of violence recently perpetrated by Muslims: it was an act of "radical Islam." As a result, there were more threats of resolute military action against the culprits, more security measures, more surveillance and more public demonization of Muslims. "Security," "terrorism" and "counter-terrorism" experts, thriving in the hot market of ideas on how to tackle "Islamic radicalism," poured out from every nook and cranny, their bread and butter secure in the continuous Muslim mayhem, to write and talk of Quranic verses that encourage violence, of the mental make-up of the so-called "jihadis" and "Islamic radicals."
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The self-proclaimed Islamic State, as it often does, issued a statement claiming it was behind the Nice carnage, although the claim was belated and the group seemed caught off guard. The youthful French prime minister, who appears to do little fresh thinking on such matters judging by his unchanging analysis, said that although he could not confirm the attacker's motives, Lahouaiej Bouhlel "is a terrorist probably linked to radical Islam one way or another." This statement constructed a case that is simply not based on the facts: Lahouaiej Bouhlel was a disturbed, petty criminal and not remotely "Islamic." Those "experts" who place the burden of being a poster child of Islam on the shoulders of an alcohol-drinking, pig-eating, wife-beating criminal who did drugs, neither fasted nor prayed, and did not go to the mosque, know little of Islam and almost make us wish Inspector Clouseau was on the case.
Mourners in front of the Bataclan concert hall pay tribute to the shooting victims in Paris, France, December 8, 2015. (Charles Platiau/Reuters)
Unfortunately, this is a case this continent will have to continue to solve. Europe has been struck so regularly by violence claimed to be associated with Islam, and yet it has not budged an inch in the enquiry as to the motives of the perpetrators. It is as if the continent has lulled itself into believing it knows both the disease and the cure and refuses to change the doctor or the prescription even though both have repeatedly failed. On the contrary, with each bout of the disease, the doctors prescribe an even more severe dose of the medicine -- and each time it backfires. Neither doctor nor patient is any the wiser or safer. Clearly, the diagnosis and the cure are not working -- Islam is not the primary cause of these terror acts and anti-Muslim rhetoric will not prevent them.
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If not Islam, then, what is motivating the unfortunately frequent succession of European Muslim terrorists? The reality is that while ISIS may influence these Muslims in a general way, their animus is coming from their position as unwanted immigrants in Europe, especially in France, where they are still not treated French even if they are born there. The community as a whole has a disproportionate population of unemployed youth with poor education and housing and is constantly the butt of cultural humiliation. It is not an integrated community, barring some honorable exceptions. From it come the young men like Lahouaiej Bouhlel. The pattern of petty criminal may be observed in the other recent terrorist attacks in Europe, including those in Paris and Brussels.
If these terrorists are to be judged by their actions, then they are as far from Islam as is possible. In that sense, associating the word "Islam" with them is incorrect in every possible way and can only lead to an incorrect analysis of how to prevent further tragic incidents. These terrorists have not only rejected the essential pillars of the faith, but have also violated the fundamental precepts of Islam. Perhaps most damning, they have challenged the core notion of Islam emphasized in the Quran that absolutely forbids the taking of innocent lives. So while many of these terrorists may be sociologically identified as Muslim, because of the background of their parents, they cannot be associated with Islam by any stretch of the imagination. We therefore need to identify the roots of their anger and violence in sources other than Islam.
The reality is that while ISIS may influence these Muslims in a general way, their animus is coming from their position as unwanted immigrants in Europe.
The answer to this predicament presented itself as I conducted interviews across Europe for my current project on Islam in Europe, "Journey into Europe." It is perhaps best summed up in a conversation with the Paris-based French-Tunisian Muslim social activist Samia Hathroubi, who said that French Muslim terrorists have "similar paths":
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Dislocated family, being in the very beginning drug dealers, going to jails and being radicalized in jails. France failed to integrate and to make those people feeling happy in their own country. When I think about those guys and all those people, I really think it's like young kids being abandoned by their mother, which is France, and getting very frustrated and finding this ideology that gave them a reason to go to Daesh (ISIS) or to destroy the mother that didn't fully love them.
If our analysis based on the "Journey into Europe" project is correct, then it is clear that we need to present an alternative method to assist integration, and ultimately eliminate the sense of isolation and abandonment that leads some alienated Muslims -- or people from Muslim families -- in the West to carry out savage terror acts or become sympathetic to terrorist organizations.
Europe needs to act urgently to accommodate Muslims and ensure full protection and security for minorities. Law enforcement working to disrupt plots and provide security is, of course, essential, but the larger battle can only be won with this general strategy in mind. It should also be noted that such law enforcement efforts in European countries are bound to fail without a close, positive working relationship with the Muslim community.
Muslims in Brussels gather to protest against terror attacks in Brussels, Belgium on April 9, 2016. (Dursun Aydemir/Getty Images)
European governments should provide the Muslim community educational and employment opportunities, youth programs, and promote acceptance, diversity and understanding. There is much that governments can do to provide language, cultural and religious training for the community, which will help resolve, for example, the problem of foreign imams having difficulty transferring their roles of leadership into local society.
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Europe cannot be indifferent to the Muslim community and let it drift, or promote hatred and Islamophobia, as the rising right-wing parties are doing. Muslims and non-Muslims in Europe alike need to be reminded that Islam is a part of Europe and has been for over a millennium. We need to facilitate knowledge about each other and build bonds and friendships between religions and cultures.
The fact that the prime minister was booed in Nice during the memorial service shows the French are justifiably angry, frustrated and have lost their patience with what has become far too common in this country -- and no one would disagree with them that the scourge of terrorism must be effectively and permanently removed. Bombing the Middle East, however damaging to the Islamic State, will not defeat terrorism in Europe. Instead, successfully integrating and assimilating Muslims here at home in the West is the most viable solution.
Earlier on WorldPost:
In a relatively quiet court filing on July 15th, 5 women who sued Wal-Mart 15 years ago for sex discrimination in employment, reached a confidential settlement with Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. and voluntarily agreed to dismiss their claims. Their 2001 lawsuit launched a class action lawsuit with 1.5 million female plaintiffs-who were formally certified as a class in 2004, but were ultimately decertified as a class by the U.S. Supreme Court in June of 2011.
The original litigation alleged that female employees at Wal-Mart and Sams Club were discriminated against based on their gender, with respect to pay and promotion to management positionsin violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which became law two years after Wal-Mart opened for business.
A smaller class action suit also was dismissed in federal court in 2013.
This past weeks confidential settlement might have been the end of one of Wal-Mart most protracted and public legal battles-but it was not. The day before Betty Dukes and 4 other women workers at Wal-Mart dropped their suit, 6 other women from the affected plaintiff class stepped forward to assert their right to pursue their civil rights. Of these 6 women, 5 currently reside in California, and collectively they worked for Wal-Mart for a total of 89 years.
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In their motion to intervene, the Wal-Mart 6 argued that they had relied upon Ms. Dukes and the other named plaintiffs to protect their interests as class members. But once the lead plaintiffs from 2001 stipulated to dismissal of their cases, the proposed Plaintiff intervenors could no longer depend upon the named plaintiffs to protect their interests. The six women filing to intervene are Joyce Clark, Suzanne Hewey, Kristy Farias, Lucretia Johnson, Hilda Todd and Kristin Marsh. They are seeking the right to obtain appellate review of the denial of class certification.
According to these plaintiffs, Wal-Mart has engaged in a pattern or practice of discriminating against its female employees in making compensation and management track promotion decisions in its California Regions. The women charge that Wal-Mart has maintained a system for making decisions about compensation and promotion that has had an adverse impact on its female employees. They are seeking back pay, front pay, general and special damages for lost compensation and job benefits they would have received but for the discriminatory practices of Wal-Mart.
The new intervention says that the Supreme Court decision did not rule on the merits of the action, but only ruled that the class as certified could not proceed. Since guidelines and standards for class actions were issued by the court after the 2011 ruling in the Dukes case, the plaintiffs now argue that the litigation can continue.
The new case focuses on present and former female workers in 2 Wal-Mart regions in Northern and Southern California, and bordering states, covering 202 Wal-Mart stores, and one Sams club region of 73 stores in California and 13 other states. In each of these regions, the litigation charges that Wal-Mart maintained a pattern or practice of gender discrimination in compensation and promotion. The plaintiffs argue that Wal-Mart was warned repeatedly that woman are not sufficiently presented in management positions, that women are paid less than male employees in the same jobs, and that Wal-Mart lags behind its competitors in the promotion of women to management positions.
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According to the intervention filing:
A 1998 survey of Wal-Mart managers revealed that there was a good olboy philosophy at Wal-Mart, that many managers were close minded about the diversity in the workplace, and that some District Managers dont seem personally comfortable with women in leadership roles.
The Walton Institute trains managers that the reason there are few senior female managers at Wal-Mart is because men were more aggressive in achieving those levels of responsibility than women.
One of the plaintiffs heard a Store Manager make comments about women being too weak to do the job in management positions, and stating that they are just bitches.
One Regional Vice President presumed that women did not seek management positions because of their family commitments. A District Manager said higher male pay was justified because they were the head of their households.
One Sams Club manager suggested to a female employee that she doll up, and blow the cobwebs off her make-up to make herself more promotable.
It is not clear if this latest lawsuit will blow the cobwebs off Wal-Marts gender discrimination practices, but it certainly guarantees that Wal-Marts bitches problem is far from over. A hearing on the motion to intervene will take place in a San Francisco courtroom on August 19.
I first became interested in the history of medicine in middle school, when my seventh-grade science teacher lent me her copy of Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif. It is a small book, focusing on the struggles and discoveries of early microbiologists. Now, as I write this post, my own old, battered, well-thumbed copy sits in front of me. In our world of rapid innovation and emphasis on progress, what place do these stories hold? A group of committed historians, doctors and nurses gathered at the annual American Association of the History of Medicine conference in Minneapolis in April to explore the impact this field can have on our present understanding of health, disease and the medical professions.
Toward the end of the conference, this international group with varied and quite divergent interests came together for a lively discussion to consider the place of the history of medicine in medical education. Speakers emphasized the idea that a school of medicine, as a professional school, has a duty to teach not only what to do, but why to do it. In other words, what is taught in medical school is not simply information-oriented, but also value-oriented.
Why history matters in medical education
As such, teaching history is an integral component of the curriculum. History helps us better understand our place in the world. It also helps us cope and work with the messiness and uncertainty inherent in the practice of medicine. Furthermore, it promotes skepticism--the idea that things change and all current innovations will at some point be surpassed. It clarifies the mutability of truth.
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We have seen this countless times. One example is the use of a complex medicine (known as theriac) compounded from more than 30 ingredients, including the flesh or venom of vipers, believed to cure snakebite or other envenomation and later used in plague treatment during the Black Death. Another is the use of hepatica (liverwort), a flowering plant with a three-lobed leaf thought to resemble the lobes of the human liver and therefore, via the doctrine of signatures, considered a remedy for diseases of the liver. Yet another was the use of bloodletting, practiced for more than 2,000 years. Eventually all of these treatments were supplanted by discoveries of more effective ones.
Ironically, while these examples represent treatments that are no longer in use, some early concepts of good health have come full circle and become incorporated once more into our armamentarium, such as the ancient Greek concept of the six non-naturals: air; exercise and rest; sleep and waking; food and drink; repletion and excretion; and passions or emotions. All these were considered components of good health and have been reincorporated today into our ideas of lifestyle and environment as factors that contribute to health and illness.
A case study
For a detailed example, consider syphilis. This sexually transmitted disease is one that I frequently identify and treat in the Bronx at the Montefiore infectious disease clinic where I work. Its history has a great deal to teach medical students, not only about changing ideas of transmission and treatment, but also about the difficulties of diagnosis and the ethics of experimentation.
The latter refers, of course, to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study of African American males, sponsored by the Public Health Service of the United States and begun in 1932. This study was originally meant to examine the natural history of syphilis in those who had later stages of the disease. It was begun in a time before penicillin (introduced in 1943) was identified as an effective treatment and when there was considerable controversy about the efficacy of later-stage intervention. However, the study eventually spanned four decades, during which new treatments became available, and the subjects enrolled were often deliberately kept from receiving treatment.
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Over time, it became clear that subjects were part of a vulnerable population not adequately protected by the study protocol and from whom true informed consent was not obtained. This troubling and complex story highlights the roles of race and racism in medicine and medical research, and has directly affected the structures we have in place for oversight of medical research today.
The routes of disease
Syphilis was first mentioned in European literature of the late 15 century. Like many other infectious diseases, it was initially associated with the movements of people; the Columbian hypothesis suggested that when Columbus returned from Hispaniola, his crew brought along the disease--a claim more recently supported by genetic analysis and a study of bone remodeling.
The condition also highlights the link between war and disease, since one of the ways it is thought to have spread across Europe was with the dispersal of Charles VIII's mercenary troops after his ill-fated attempt to stake a controversial claim on the kingdom of Naples.
The importance of identifiers
Credit for coining the term "syphilis" goes to Girolamo Fracastoro, an Italian poet, mathematician and physician who wrote a poem called Syphilis, sive morbus gallicus, in which a shepherd of the same name is the first to be struck down by the disease after he angers the god Apollo. As the poem's title suggests, people were in a hurry to place the blame for syphilis elsewhere. Disfiguring and ultimately fatal, syphilis was highly stigmatized. For instance, in France, it was called the Neapolitan disease; in Italy, the French disease (morbus gallicus). The Japanese called it the Chinese disease, and the Turkish called it the Christian disease. You get the idea.
In another, less fanciful book, Fracastoro identifies the concept of contagion, describing the person-to-person spread of "seeds of disease" nearly a century before the first microscope was invented.
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Learning from historic treatment failures
Early treatments for syphilis such as mercury call into question the idea of how we gauge the efficacy of an intervention. In the absence of a microbiological understanding of disease, something worked if it produced a physiologic effect. There is no doubt that mercury, with its variety of toxicities ranging from excessive salivation to nerve and kidney damage, produced a notable effect. Even after syphilis was understood to be a bacterial illness--in fact, into the early 20 century--mercury was still in use as one of the remedies for syphilis. This may seem ridiculous now, but what doctors and scientists knew then about both mercury and syphilis meant that they were using the treatments that appeared, in their eyes at least, to provide the best outcomes.
Instead of such treatment being denigrated as outdated and harmful, perhaps it can serve as a reminder of our own relationship to healing, what we describe as cures and what we are willing to tolerate in order to find them. Our understanding and humility can give us perspective; one day medicine may regard our current treatments for syphilis (painful intramuscular injections or prolonged intravenous infusions of penicillin) and other conditions with the same disdain we hold for the administering of mercury.
Stories such as these, of syphilis or of the early microbiologists, prompt me to wonder how our current medical certainties will be regarded in a hundred years' time. In the end, I am also comforted to know that people have struggled with most of the same human experiences throughout the ages and found within themselves, despite sometimes catastrophic circumstances, the capacity for resilience.
Dr. Slosar-Cheah is an assistant professor of medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and an attending physician at Montefiore. Her clinical work is split between HIV primary care, hepatitis C treatment, and the inpatient infectious disease consult service.
***
Wonder why I joined #VetsVsHate? Why I do all this to oppose a candidate that is probably going to lose anyway? This is why.
This happened two days ago at the local mosque back home in Rhode Island.
This kind of un-American hate doesn't come out of nowhere. While it is impossible to blame demagogues like Donald Trump for individual acts of bigotry and violence, he is responsible for the rhetoric that has normalized, inspired and empowered the worst elements of our society by using fear to divide us in his grasp for political power. As a British newspaper wrote in the aftermath of the murder of a member of Parliament who defended the human rights of Muslim refugees, you can't blame politicians for the weather, but they created the climate which allowed it to occur.
Trump is responsible for the rhetoric that has normalized, inspired and empowered the worst elements of our society by using fear to divide us...
In our fraught political discourse, shrill comparisons to Hitler are generally overwrought, but there comes a time when it can no longer be seriously avoided. I believe now is one of these times. In the past week, in an attempt to woo Donald Trump's favor for the selection of Vice President, Newt Gingrich called for every American Muslim to be given a public test, asking them if they faithfully adhere to their religion, and, if they answer yes, Gingrich said they should be deported. To where these American citizens would be deported is unclear, but the message was not. It said "you are not welcome here. You are not one of us."
Donald Trump, Gingrich, and other Republicans have called for massive, invasive, blanket surveillance on all Americans who happen to worship a particular God. Trump's signature policy is to "ban Muslims," including American citizens born here from immigrant parents, including refugees fleeing oppression, including workers with the skills to help keep our economy vibrant. This policy is so contrary to the values our country was founded on that Trump's own Vice Presidential pick, Mike Pence, called it "offensive and unconstitutional."
This is beyond the normal partisan bickering. This is beyond the usual debates over whether we should raise taxes or lower them, cut welfare programs or the defense budget. This is not a normal election, and we must not allow it to become normal, must not allow ourselves to slip into the normal patterns. This is an existential moment for this country that tests what we really stand for.
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This is beyond the normal partisan bickering. ... This is not a normal election, and we must not allow it to become normal...
My home state of Rhode Island was founded on religious liberty. Now we see places of worship vandalized and citizens threatened for the simple act of worshiping according to their beliefs. I served in the Marine Corps alongside Muslims, and also alongside refugees whose Muslim families fled oppression in Iraq and Eritrea. These Marines were no less American, no less citizens than I am. They are no less patriotic, and no less deserving of the liberties our Constitution grants us, and which we swore to defend.
I can't stand by. It's not enough for me to quietly vote against the likes of Donald Trump. His ideology of hate and divisiveness must be utterly defeated, and his tactics of using fear to turn Americans against one another must be delegitimized completely.
To my conservative friends, you don't have to like Hillary Clinton, but you can at least be confident that our country would survive a Clinton presidency. I honestly am not sure I can say the same for Trump.
This week, I head to Cleveland to go to the Republican National Convention. I'll be joining members of #VetsVsHate from around the country to make our voices heard. While I'm there, I'll be thinking about this little Muslim community center in my little home state. I hope that together we can overcome irrational fear and make Rhode Island, and this country, once again a haven of toleration and Liberty.
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The black man is no longer invisible in America. He is a moving target.
This is not a social illusion. It is a horrifying existential fact. If you happen to be an African-American male, between the age of 15 and 34, you are nine times more likely to be killed, lawfully and/or unlawfully, by your local police force than any other racial demographic living in America today. This makes the African-American male an endangered species.
How so? There are 321.4 million people in America, 46,282,080 of them are African-American and they make up 14.3% of the total population. This figure is pertinent because the male of the species, young and old, is at risk from two environmental factors: the educational and criminal justice system. More African-American boys are failed and criminalized at school; out of the total 2.3 million inmates behind bars, 1 million of them are African-American men; and African-American males, young and old, from all walks of life, are more likely to be killed by the police in suspicious circumstances than any other group of color. Socially castrated, the African-American male might as well walk around this uncaring earth with a big assed target sown on his back.
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The problem is an old one. Racial profiling and a seething, seemingly inherent culture of violent racism that still exists with the rank and file of the police force. What's the solution, putting more black cops on the beat? Tokenism doesn't seem to do the trick in the hood. With great leaden irony, black communities often complain that black cops are more heavy-handed than white ones, more likely to arrest black people. So it's a question of mindset. Black or white, the police have issues when it comes to interacting with members of the black community. Put simply, it's been a case of draw down, shoot first and ask questions later for decades. This is plainly wrong. The police exist to protect and serve the public. They do not exist to shoot black men going about their day-to-day business on the flimsiest of pretexts.
What's the solution? Policing 101. Officers patrol by remote from blacked out cars and rarely do the beat on foot or bike. That has to change. Another consideration is more training to deal with people from other cultures. Many police officers come from provincial backgrounds and have had little interaction with people from other cultures in their community. And there would be few complaints of racism if the police continually brushed up on their interpersonal communication skills and silently expunged their institutional fears, delusions and prejudices, whatever they may or may not be. It's in the interests of public safety for them to do so. A police officer must be impartial, beyond reproach, a friend of the community, and not its foe.
The frequency of white cops gunning down, and choking out, African American men has now become an issue of international concern. People, black and white, young and old, male and female, are protesting everywhere -- even in Liverpool, England, where I'm from. We know what it's like to be chased, beat up and shot down by cops. It's not just an American phenomenon. It's an issue for black males, between the age of 15 and 34, who live in multicultural societies with exactly the same problem. They know first hand that Black Lives Matter because they have been cut short by jumpy police officers in faraway places like England and France, too.
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Among the dazzling variety of fiction and documentary offerings at the 2016 Jerusalem Film Festival (July 7 - 17), women seem to be dominant figures. Whether it's the protagonists or the directors that are female, movies such as Harmonia (Israel), Agnus Dei (France/Poland), Julieta (Spain) and Aquarius (Brazil) focus attentively and sympathetically on women.
Caption: Sarah, Hagar and Abraham in Harmonia.
Harmonia is an elliptical modernization of the Biblical tale of Abraham's sons, Ishmael and Isaac. Hagar (Yana Yossef), a French horn player from an Arab family, auditions for the Jerusalem Philharmonic. Its charismatic conductor Abraham (Alon Aboutboul) is married to the renowned harpist Sarah (Tali Sharon), who has suffered miscarriages. Hagar's offer to be a surrogate for Sarah reflects the women's own deep connection. Unlike Genesis 16, however, the film does not end in exile and disunity. Instead, director Ori Sivan uses music as the connective tissue of peace.
Agnus Dei (released in the US as The Innocents) is a mutedly powerful French-Polish drama set at the end of World War II. In a convent during winter resembling that of the Polish masterpiece Ida--and also starring Agata Kulesza (who played the cynical Communist aunt)--nuns are put to a poignant test. A French Red Cross doctor (Lou de Laage)--based on the Resistance heroine Madeleine Pauliac--ministers to them.
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Directed by Anne Fontaine, the film demonstrates how war, religion, and medicine share a hierarchy that depends on obedience to someone in charge. But it explores resistance from the ground up, through both Mathilde and a brave young Polish nun named Maria (Agata Buzek).
Julieta, the latest film of Pedro Almodovar, was the opening-night selection, screened outdoors at the 5000-seat Sultan's Pool. Based on three Alice Munro stories, this compelling melodrama boasts fine performances by the two actresses who play Julieta. Emma Suarez is the older title character, whose daughter disappeared 13 years later, refusing to have contact with her. Flashbacks reveal how the young Julieta (Adriana Ugarte) meets a handsome fisherman on a train: she and Xoan become lovers, and soon Antia is born. But in this high-toned soap opera, death looms large.
Caption: Emma Suarez in Julieta.
Aquarius, the second feature of Brazilian director Kleber Mendonca Filho, celebrates the riveting Sonia Braga as strong, independent Clara. Forty years after starring in Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, Braga is now a beautifully mature 65-year-old, her long black hair still abundant. A widow, Clara lives on her own in the lovely beachfront apartment of her youth. Although a corporation is forcing all the tenants out, she refuses to sell. Self-possessed, and enjoying her possession, Clara is comfortable in her own skin as well as her home. A former music critic with a palpable love of music--whether it's on vinyl or downloaded--she is politely tenacious with her three grown children as well as the developers.
In addition, a wide range of documentaries at the Jerusalem Film Festival center on compelling and often complex real women. These include Bernadette Lafont, Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story and A German Life.
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Bernadette Lafont, and Gd Created the Free Woman is an affectionate documentary about the French New Wave actress whose career spanned from 1958 to 2012. Director Esther Hoffenberg's voice-over accompanies images of the insouciant star who projected a love of freedom, as in Truffaut's Les Mistons as well as Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me, Chabrol's Les Bonnes Femmes, and Nelly Kaplan's A Very Curious Girl. Interviews and images from her films capture the "joyful insolence" that entranced Hoffenberg.
Even if Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story is about a couple whose personal and professional collaboration fed into six decades of Hollywood classics, Lillian is the feisty onscreen narrator of Daniel Raim's touching documentary. Harold was a storyboard artist and production designer; she was a research librarian, a pre-Google trove of knowledge. Together, they worked on hundreds of films including Reds, The Godfather 2, The Ten Commandments, The Apartment, The Birds, Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, Rosemary's Baby, Fiddler On The Roof, Scarface, and Full Metal Jacket.
In a much darker register, A German Life centers on Brunhilde Pomsel, who was the secretary of Joseph Goebbels. Aged 103 years old at the time of the interview, she is avowedly apolitical, alternating between self-serving memories and a sense of guilt. (She was imprisoned by the Russians at the end of World War II.) In this work by four Austrian filmmakers--Christian Krones, Florian Weigensamer, Roland Schrotthofer and Olaf Muller--extreme close-ups of her are cross cut with archival footage.
The result is a contrapuntal fugue between official images--all well identified in terms of their source (many of them staged propaganda)--and a personal voice. "He was a good actor," she recalls about Goebbels, who was Hitler's Minister of Propaganda; he appeared to her as not only elegant but "a raging midget."
Finally, a superb documentary like The Last Laugh is not only directed by a woman, Ferne Pearlstein, but anchored by the perspective of a female survivor, Renee Firestone. While the subject is whether the Holocaust can be treated comically, it's Firestone's own joie-de-vivre that sanctions humor as a survival tool. (She acknowledges, "Humor is the only thing the Nazis don't understand.")
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The film distinguishes between satirizing Nazis--which has been acceptable for decades--and using the Holocaust for humor. (Mel Brooks exemplifies revenge through ridicule on camera by displaying the difference between using a short comb as a mustache for Hitler, and a long comb to represent Stalin.)
With Theresa May as England's new Prime Minister and Hillary Clinton poised to become the next US president, perhaps the 2016 selection reflects how female empowerment at the Jerusalem Film Festival is a political as well as cinematic phenomenon.
By Hong Soon-do, Beijing correspondent, AsiaToday - Chinese security authorities' overseas search dubbed Operation "Fox Hunt" for corrupt officials and their assets has obtained excellent results. It has been reported that China grabbed 381 fugitives in the first half of this year, recovering illicit money worth over 1.24 billion yuan (or KRW 223.2 billion).
[A Chinese corrupt official is escorted back to Beijing by 'Fox Hunt' operated by Chinese security authorities./ Source: search engine Baidu]
According to the July 18th report of leading Beijing newspaper Beijing Times, such achievement is closely related to a nationwide anti-corruption campaign dubbed "Sky Net" that has been steadily obtaining good results since last year. Besides, the help of resident officers sent overseas and the local governments should not be overlooked.
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Since so many foxes are being hunted, there are many interesting cases. The most typical example is Zhu Haiping, former general manager of Shenzen Yuwei Industry Corporation, who has been hiding in the United States for 18 years. He fled to the US in the mid-30s, and faced the fate of being arrested in his 50s.
Among the arrested fugitives include 33 that had been tagged with Interpol red notices. This means that nobody is free from "Sky Net" as long as China's anti-graft watchdog has the will to arrest.
By Hong Soon-do, Beijing correspondent, AsiaToday - The Chinese yuan, which once skyrocketed though, is sliding endlessly. Looking at the current situation, the currency might be weaker than the previous fix at 6.69 per dollar, the weakest level since October 2010. If this is the case, the yuan may even slide to 7.
[Many bundle of Chinese yuan and US dollars are piled up in a bank in China. The Chinese yuan continues its devaluation./ Source: search engine Baidu]
According to a source well-acquainted with financial field in Beijing on Tuesday, the yuan was powerful in late October 2013, when it rose to its highest level in 20 years. The currency hit a record high of 6.08 per dollar by the time. Reaching below 6 per dollar seemed a matter of time as the Chinese economy had sky-high spirits.
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However, the situation has changed completely. Besides, the situation surrounding the market is likely to add depreciation pressures on the currency. Most of all, the Chinese authorities have a strong will to devalue the yuan as they are facing difficulties in economic management due to weakened competitiveness in exports. They are committed to continue the devaluation as long as it doesn't affect the market. This decision is inevitable considering the reality where export companies complain that the yuan is overvalued.
Besides, Britain's decision to leave the European Union will naturally lead to yuan weakness. This can be seen well from the fact that the yuan is not having a big impact on the market while its depreciation continues along with the pound. This is why the currency may weaken to 7.
However, it seems almost impossible for the currency to weaken to 8. It's because the Chinese authorities believe that excessive devaluation does more harm than good. Besides, the US will not tolerate it. As a result, the 7 yuan level could be the Maginot Line.
In September of 2013, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Montana) and Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Michigan) issued a joint statement calling for comprehensive reform of the U.S. tax code which they described as "broken." It is not broken. In fact, it is perhaps the most effective legislation ever passed by Congress.
Baucus and Camp's bipartisan mischaracterization stems from either not acknowledging or not understanding what tax law in our country is designed to do: perpetuate the magnification of wealth for those who already have it at the expense of those who will never get it. We absolutely do need to reform the U.S. tax code -- not because it is broken, but because it works.
The term "tax loophole" is another mischaracterization. It implies that taxes are fair, or meant to be fair, but that inadvertent inefficiencies exist which can be exploited by the wealthy to their own advantage. This language should stop. Tax law is structurally unfair, not as an unintended consequence, but by design, and is intentionally complex in order to mask its inherent structural inequality.
The U.S. tax code is sickening. Not metaphorically, but literally. According to the World Health Organization, and acknowledged by the Centers for Disease Control, "social determinants of health are mostly responsible for health inequities -- the unfair and avoidable differences in health status seen within and between countries." The fundamental social determinant of health in society is the economic gap between the rich and the poor. Countries that are more egalitarian have better health, while countries with wide income gaps between rich and poor have worse health. This is why, even though the United States is the wealthiest nation on earth, and spends more per capita on health care than any other country, the U.S. suffers the worst health of all wealthy developed nations. The health gap between the U.S. and other wealthy nations is so large that even if the U.S. completely cured heart disease or cancer, we still wouldn't be at the top of the list for health.
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It makes sense, then, that the most effective means for establishing and maintaining health in the U.S. would be economic intervention, not medical intervention. Although medicine is often necessary once ill health has set in, it is more effective and efficient to keep people healthy in the first place.
I started Bradco Supply Company in a single warehouse in New Jersey in 1966, and built the company up to over 130 branches in 30 states, with sales peaking at $1.9 billion. I was inspired after attending a Clinton Global Initiative meeting to start Segal Family Foundation, an organization dedicated to improving the well-being of communities in Sub-Saharan Africa. A few years later, I started a second foundation, Focus for Health, which strives to ensure that all individuals have the information they need to make the best decisions about their health. I've been successful both in my business career and in my philanthropic endeavors, and I have a unique perspective when it comes to tax reform.
People talk about changing the tax code, but I don't think they've come up with any meaningful suggestions so far.
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I agree with Warren Buffet -- the wealthy don't pay enough in taxes. I know from my situation that there are too many gimmicks that allow for someone like me to pay far less than the average working individual. I have two charitable foundations, and I think any income they generate should be taxed in the 5-10% area. Plus we should have to give away 10% of our equity.
What follows are a few of my economic prescriptions for reforming tax code that could get us some of the way back toward a more equitable and healthy society.
I feel strongly that you have to phase in changes and give advanced notice on them, but tax code changes must be instituted. Here are a few of my ideas:
1031 Exchange: This allows wealthy people to get out of paying capital gains tax on properties if they "exchange" their real estate for something similar. Some say this code creates jobs, but it seems to me that this only helps the rich get richer. My fix: give six months' notice, then completely stop this practice.
Long-term Capital Gains: It's too easy for the wealthy to benefit from this tax law. The really rich make most of their money through investments, and because they can afford to hold on for a year, they enjoy a much lower tax rate than they should. My fix: Long-term capital gains taxes should start at two years. While they're at it... they might want to start offering corporations a capital gains tax of 25% to 30%. This has the potential to generate needed funds.
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Depreciation and Accelerated Depreciation: The depreciation tax shield is another way to minimize taxable income. Because assets lose value over time, they can be written off as expenses (depreciation). If you want, you can legally say that these assets lose more value in the early years, allowing you to pay even less up front (accelerated depreciation). My fix: The depreciation rate is way too generous. It should be scaled back. Accelerated depreciation should be stopped completely.
GRATS and the Gift Tax: These only help very wealthy people keep their money in the family. By shuffling money around, the very wealthy use the GRAT shelter to legally bypass paying estate and gift taxes. The gift tax itself is too light. Right now, a married couple can literally gift $28,000 a year to as many people as they want... without any taxes being paid at all. My fix: Phase down GRATS and then eliminate. Untaxed yearly gifts per couple should be limited to $100,000 total. It would be nice to phase down the current 5 million lifetime limit to 4 million. Grantor trusts should just stop.
Social Security: I've been fighting the Social Security mess for a while now. I wrote to them in 2011 that I didn't need it, but they still won't stop sending me money. In this country, most people have the impression that the money they pay into social security belongs to them. In other countries, the general feeling is that it is the public's duty to take care of the needy. The American attitude towards poverty needs to change, but obviously that is very hard to do.
Right now, Social Security tax is only paid up to an annual income of $118,500. Every dollar earned above that amount is not taxed. Why should people making over that amount be given a break? My fix: They should start at $150,000 at a reduced rate, and continue forever.
And there should be a means test. People with income over $500,000 a year shouldn't be taking money from Social Security or Medicare. For those who want to, there should be an option to divert the money to charity. Give them four options to choose from -- veterans, poverty, etc. Too much of this money is going to people who don't want or need it.
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The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) is emerging as a major player in the health care cost debate. The organization through its affiliates is holding public meetings focusing on specific diseases and outlining their model of controlling costs, providing value and what the "best" treatment will be for patients.
When I read their website, however, I was shocked to discover how ICER tries to portray itself to the world as a fair arbiter of controlling cost, providing value and deciding the best treatment.
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First, let's look at their independence claim.
At the end of its website article titled "ICER Opens National Call for Proposed Improvements to its Value Assessment Framework," it says "the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) is an independent (emphasis added) non-profit research institute that produces reports analyzing the evidence on the effectiveness and value of drugs and other medical services."
Dr. Steve Pearson, who heads the nonprofit, says ICER tries to be transparent and "whenever an independent entity takes a hard look at data, there's going to be tension."
When ICER was launched, Dr. Steve Miller from the pharmacy benefit manger Express Scripts said "ICER's new program will make a huge difference by providing what is sorely needed: an independent, trusted (emphasis added) source of information about new drugs".
But, as described in the section titled "ICER Value Assessment Framework,"
"ICER led an initiative to develop a conceptual framework which insurers (emphasis added) can apply to guide their assessment of the value of medical services including drugs, medical services and procedures."
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Why develop a framework to directly help insurance companies and not patients? One clue is to examine the composition of the ICER Governance Board.
Its members include representatives from America's Health Insurance Plans (the insurance companies' lobbying arm), Kaiser Permanente, UnitedHealth Group, Blue Shield of California and the Blue Shield Foundation. The others are Big Data acolytes who value the group over the individual.
So, insurance companies comprise a majority of a not for profit board that directly states it is in the healthcare game to help insurers. As to why no patients -- the ultimate "consumers" of care -- are on the Governance Board, it is an ongoing story where insurance companies and medical bureaucrats want our premiums, copays, coinsurance and taxes, but not any wisdom and expertise we developed in our time as patients.
Second, they play the usual word games that seek to confuse and obfuscate.
They highlight "Choosing Wisely," an initiative of the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) -- which certifies that doctors have met nationally recognized standards -- and "Proven Best Choices," a program developed by ICER and board member Families USA, which works to ensure "health systems meet best practices for delivering high-quality care that is cost-effective and benefits patients."
"Choosing Wisely" (who can object to wisdom?) seeks to pressure patients into believing that they are overusing medical resources, a theory which this study debunked. Until its recent scandal involving its foundation is completely resolved, the American Board of Internal Medicine is probably not an organization that I would cite as an authority on acting "wisely" as it relates to finances.
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"Proven Best Choices" (who can argue with proven and best solutions?) attempts to examine "how well one option works compared to others based on scientific evidence" and "how much one option costs in relation to its benefits. But "scientific evidence" is only valid for looking at an entire group of patients and making a generic diagnosis. It ignores the development of precision medicine as promoted by the current administration and the genomic differences of patients as it relates to progression of a disease, its initial treatments and maintenance care.
There is both an art and science to medical care as practiced by our doctors in the office and at our bedside. They should be making all healthcare decisions to try to meet patient goals, not the goals of an anonymous and far removed Masters of Public Health. Their Big Data may get us into the ballpark, but a caring physician gets us to the right seat.
And how does ICER's insurance industry dominated board try to define value and benefits?
On its "ICER Opens National Call for Proposed Improvements to its Value Assessment Framework") page, it cites as one of its highest priorities the use of "incremental cost effectiveness ratios: appropriate thresholds, best practices in capturing health outcomes through the QALY or other measures. QALY (quality adjusted life years) is used by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence in the United Kingdom to basically ration expected results from treatments based on averages (which as I have stated before, we patients are not averages) .
I have a personal reason to abhor any cost-effectiveness program in the United States that proposes using QALY as a standard for care.
In 2009 I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. At the time that I was treated, most multiple myeloma patients were dying in one to three years. In the United Kingdom -- the home of QALY based care -- my novel treatment protocol had not yet been approved under their national health plan due to cost concerns and the statistical likelihood of its limited extension of a patient's life. If these rules had been in effect in the United States in early 2009, I probably would not have survived -- and those that endorsed these theories would have surely been complicit in my premature death from cancer.
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Despite this extremely successful course of treatment, some medical bureaucrats seem to think that I am an outlier -- a mere statistical oddity who was not economically worthy of receiving treatment. If these soulless administrators get their way and QALY restrictions become the accepted method of dispensing care in the United States, it will cause thousands of people like me with life-threatening but treatable illnesses to be denied medically justifiable care and could thwart the continuous innovation process that leads to the development of new and better medications in the future.
And "benefits" to a patient may include non-economic items such as living long enough to see lifecycle events -- marriages, births, graduations and weddings, those moments that make life worth living in the first place. sadly, these unquantifiable experiences have no place in the value calculations done by those that rely on spreadsheets, apps or an abacus to apportion care.
I was unable to attend the ICER session on myeloma held in St. Louis and will probably will not be able to attend any of the other public hearings that are being held, but I can summarize my opinion of their organization as it relates to patient access and choice in treatments in only four words:
Remember how a few weeks ago the State Department, almost five months late, finally produced the assessment on Bahrain that Congress had mandated last year? Well Congress is also waiting for another from the Department of Defense. So far this is four months overdue.
Congress has requested an analysis of how the current security situation in Bahrain affects the safety of U.S. personnel in the kingdom, and for the Pentagon to suggest alternative locations should they have to move.
Page 759 of the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) Committee Print directs "the Secretary of Defense to provide a report to the Armed Services Committees of the House of Representatives and the Senate, not later than 120 days after the date of enactment of this Act, on threats posed to Department of Defense personnel and operations associated with United States military installations in Bahrain. The report should, at a minimum, include an assessment of the current security situation in Bahrain, the safety and security of Department of Defense personnel and dependents, and appropriate measures to mitigate the threat to U.S. operations and personnel including potential alternative facilities should U.S. personnel require temporary relocation."
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President Obama signed the act into law on November 25, 2015, making March 25, 2016 the deadline. Since March, the issue has become even more urgent as the security situation in Bahrain has sharply declined.
On Sunday the main opposition group Al Wefaq was dissolved. Leading human rights defender Nabeel Rajab is currently on trial, hauled before a court for tweeting criticism of the repressive government. Leading Shia cleric Sheikh Isa Qassim has had his citizenship stripped and leading members of civil society are prevented from leaving the country.
These developments have led a series of expert analysts to predict a worsening security situation. On June 16, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) warned that the latest escalation "could contribute to further unrest and violence."
The Pentagon should immediately send a clear-eyed, detailed assessment of the security situation and its implications for the estimated 8,200 U.S. personnel to the Armed Services Committees of the House and Senate.
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The State Department disappointingly failed to produce the security assessment Congress had asked for in the report it delivered in June. But the Defense Department shouldn't shirk its responsibilities as the stakes and danger intensify for the safety of those based in the country.
Congress needs an analysis it can use to determine a new course for Washington-Bahrain relations. The Obama Administration policy of muted public criticism of the ruling family's repression, while arming Bahrain's military, is clearly not encouraging the kingdom towards reform.
A bipartisan group of senators has urged a rethink on policy towards Bahrain; legislation in both houses proposes ending the sale of small arms to Bahrain until real reform has been implemented. The time has come for these and other consequences.
A further splintering of society, the continued rise of sectarianism, and the choking of all opposition and civil society voices by the Bahraini government pose a risk to the U.S. Fifth Fleet, its service personnel and their dependents.
The cold, meticulous dissection of this crisis and its implication for U.S. personnel that the Pentagon owes Congress is already 115 days overdue.
The Painted Ladies - San Francisco Skyline
In front of the glowing new offices of Twitter on the edge of the Tenderloin, I watch the programmer step over the soiled, jean-clad legs of the homeless man lying on the sidewalk. As I descend into the underground BART station at Civic Center, I see a tired young woman who looks like a high school English teacher. Her heavy satchel is stuffed with essays as she stands in line for her 90-minute return commute to more affordable housing in Concord, 30 miles to the east. Her salary falls woefully short of what would afford her rent for a modest San Francisco apartment.
To know San Francisco today, to live here, to work here, is to bear witness to a growing inequality, a divergence in economic fortunes and real incomes. As a toddler I learned to walk on the jazzed-enveloped sidewalks of the Fillmore, a street I now cross each day coming to work at the oldest university in the city, where I teach economics. San Francisco has grown and has prospered in so many ways since my childhood. But today in the greatest of ironies, San Francisco is filled with the ravaged victims of its own unbridled economic prosperity.
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Inequality in San Francisco, and perhaps other cities like it that have experienced tech booms, has dramatically increased through a confluence of forces which I will call (in highly technical economics terms) the "tractor beam," the "idea hatchery" and the "internet megaphone".
Workers who are imaginative, creative and possess strong technical skills are pulled toward San Francisco as if drawn by a high-energy economic tractor beam. This is because their productivity and wages are highest when their super-skills are matched with other super-skilled workers. This phenomena is something economists call complementarities. Complementarities happen when somebody's skill as a human interface specialist matches up with a high-end programmer to create lucrative company products like Uber, Dropbox, Airbnb and Yelp.
The second economic force is the "idea hatchery." When groups of exceptionally creative and talented people work together, big ideas are hatched, big ideas that make a lot of money. It is only rare geographical places in the world that become big idea-hatching regions on a grand scale. San Francisco has become one of these places. This makes the rewards from location grow exponentially, pumping greater energy into the economic tractor beam.
The third force is of course the internet, which acts like a giant megaphone for technological creativity. We often think of the internet as a friend of the little guy, of the disadvantaged, the great playing field leveler. That's a pleasant narrative, but it really isn't. One of the effects of the internet is that it significantly amplifies the remuneration to the talents of the super-skilled relative to the less-than-super-skilled.
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For decades now, economists have understood how broadcast and recording media have allowed, for example, the most popular musicians and actors to earn super-star incomes through the mass marketing of their talents. Contrast this with centuries gone by when the most popular traveling bards and drama troupes could only perform live in local village markets, thereby earning them only a modest wage. Like actors during the advent of recorded motion pictures, the internet now allows super-star programmers to broadcast their skills to a massive global market.
So how do the confluence of the economic tractor beam, the idea hatchery, and the internet megaphone affect existing workers in local markets? The increased demand does benefit some local businesses, but everyone needs a place to live, and technology developers earning high returns from the global market compete over San Francisco's scarcest commodity: land. Fueled by the global market for locally developed technology, this competition propels the price of the available housing to Himalayan heights, giving rise to the $5,000/month two-bedroom apartment, the $2 million two-bedroom home, and an intractable homelessness problem that becomes even more costly to address.
Another irony to the growing inequality in San Francisco is that the policies of the city's liberal activists, ostensibly seeking to reverse inequality in San Francisco, have achieved precisely the opposite result -- they have profoundly exacerbated it. There is no better solution for putting downward pressure on rents and home prices in cities like San Francisco than building large quantities of high-rise affordable housing near work sites and transit centers. But rather than seeing this as an environmentally friendly solution that would simultaneously reduce urban sprawl, traffic congestion, and put downward pressure on rents, so-called progressives chose to cast their lot against the "rich developers" and city planners who have advocated this approach for decades.
There have also been unhelpful narratives that have forestalled the creation of more housing. Leading city planner William Fulton has worried, for example, that building more affordable housing in San Francisco will lead to a situation in which "more smart kids will show up wanting to work for tech start-ups, and that means you'll have more tech start-ups, and pretty soon demand will rise faster than supply" (which by the way sounds like exactly what many American cities are trying to achieve rather than prevent). But this assumes that the idea hatchery can be shut down by reducing the housing supply, a sketchy economic proposition at best. Clearly a more sensible approach is to continue to plan for environmentally friendly, high-density housing until the era when the idea hatchery slows down its hatching, or moves to another city.
Cities like San Francisco can also do more to address local inequality by investing in the skills of current residents left out of the tech boom, helping them to develop the hard and soft skills needed to compete effectively with outsiders for jobs in the dynamic local firms. Every local resident hired for a local tech job reduces the upward pressure on housing prices from migratory inflow. For the long term, better early childhood education is a proven means for successfully equipping children for adult participation in a modern economy.
Growing urban inequality has become one of the great features of American cities today. It is one of the most important factors fueling hopelessness, violence, and the growing tension between police and urban residents. How to harness the economic forces of technology booms to foster a higher quality of life for city residents more broadly is one of the greatest challenges today for American urban leadership.
How do synagogues and mosques in the US relate to (or conflict with) Christian models of organized community? What are some of the textual, cultural, and legal considerations in shaping contemporary communal life in you religious tradition? What are reasonable frameworks for and expectations of young adults to "join" and pay dues to religious communities? What do you think are the most important ways that the role of money in support of religious communities and institutions is being re-imagined?
Dear Yusufi,
This is an interesting moment in American Jewish history to be having a conversation about money and religious community. For the past century, almost every synagogue in America functioned financially in the same way: People interested in joining a synagogue paid membership dues. Their membership included: having the rabbi perform all lifecycle events; receiving religious education for their children; and being welcome at all religious services and programs. This system worked very well for a long time, but both because of economic factors (especially since the recession of 2008) and a decreased cultural orientation towards "belonging" to institutions, the non-Orthodox Jewish world has seen a not-insignificant decrease in synagogue membership. Individual synagogues are often struggling to pay their bills (and to figure out how to engage people within and beyond the membership model).
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One of my teachers, James Hudnot-Beumler, a scholar of American Protestantism, likens the different ways Christians and Jews raise money to the different ways National Public Radio and health clubs raise money. Protestant churches typically raise money and think about membership in the same way that NPR does - everyone is encouraged to give regularly as their heart moves them, and membership in a church (where that category is used, which it isn't always) doesn't really confer any particular benefits. But synagogues function, at least financially, more like a club; an annual or monthly payment allows the person access to the activities.
Because a lot of synagogues are struggling right now, many are rethinking this financial system. Over the past seven years, about 40 synagogues in America have eliminated dues altogether, and are using a voluntary giving system that looks more like NPR.
I think this is generally a positive for synagogues--not because I love NPR [although I do] but because synagogues will need to look more like NPR to survive. The prevailing culture has conditioned millennials and young adults in particular to think about non-profits in particular ways; they have come to expect transparency, appreciation, and low barriers to entry, and synagogues (which have not been especially good at any of those things) ignore that at their own peril.
I am curious if American mosques are facing some of these issues or doing similar rethinking of their financial models.
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B'shalom (in peace),
Dan
Assalamu Alaikum (peace be upon you) Dan,
I find what the Jewish community has done in a number of areas fascinating, because your community is nearly a hundred years ahead of us in America. Many Jews migrated in the early 20th century, facing many of the same struggles that we are going through now.
The mosque in America is still a pretty new institution. Mosques started to be built about 40 years ago. The typical story of a mosque goes like this: A group of immigrants from a particular ethnicity move to a city or town. They need a place to pray and gather for social/cultural activity. They build a mosque. (Money for the construction is very easy to raise from the nascent community; people like to give to tangible, concrete projects, and there is clear textual support for building mosques.) The mosque starts establishing the five prayers, the Friday sermon, and perhaps a Sunday school--all volunteer-led--and the community starts to grow. Pretty soon, the mosque leadership realizes that the needs of the community and particularly the younger generation are many. To respond to these needs, they need money to hire staff and to get the right programming going.
But money for operations and programming isn't as easy to come by as it was for construction. Most mosques try to get the bulk of their operating income from blanket fundraising - public "asks" after Friday sermons and other times of prayer, or public fundraisers during the month of Ramadan when the community is extremely generous (as was the custom of Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him). Other mosques try to buy rental property or build endowments. Still others have been experimenting with membership dues, but the club feeling you described above is a real turn off for many in the community.
I believe we are at a moment where there will be a lot of experimentation in finances and fundraising for mosque operations and programming. My sense is that the long-term recipe for financial stability for a mosque will depend a lot more on how the mosque functions than on how it raises money. It must be financially transparent, incorporate community voices into key institutional decisions, be inclusive and welcoming, and hire staff that executes programming which speaks to the realities of life in America. Like their peers in the Jewish community, this is what our young adults and millenials--future congregants and donors - most care about.
But mosques have not been particularly good at functioning in that way, and they too have to begin to make changes if they are to hold on to the next generation.
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Salam/Shalom,
Yusufi
Yusufi,
It seems that the financial challenges mosques and synagogues presently face are surprisingly similar--presumably, living in a common American milieu is the reason for this. Having said that, though, I am curious about where there may be religious and cultural differences here. Judaism differs from Protestant Christianity around money in a few important respects, and I wonder what similar differences may be present between mosques and synagogues. Judaism, for example, has traditional laws around not handling money on the Sabbath--this is different, of course, from the many churches that pass the plate during Sunday services. Perhaps the most significant difference between Judaism and Christianity is regarding language for organizational "stewardship."
Protestantism has a long history of speaking about fundraising for churches in theological terms, something that is foreign in a Jewish context. Leaders typically frame giving to the synagogue as necessary for sustaining the community, but it would be almost inconceivable to hear a rabbi say or even imply that "G-d wants you to give to the synagogue."
Jews broadly understand their giving to synagogues as an obligation or a tax of sorts. This makes sense within a traditional Jewish spiritual framework, which values obligation over spontaneous generosity. But the reality is that synagogues are needing to re-think not only fundamental congregational structures but also language. Because younger Jews don't respond as well to the language of obligation, synagogues are even reframing what to call "dues" (if they still retain that model).
I am curious if you see ways in which the particulars of Muslim culture might impact the way you fund your communities.
B'shalom,
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Dan
Dan,
The Islamic tradition seems much closer in this case to the Christian tradition. Mosques have a special place in our tradition. They are the houses of Allah, and the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) taught us that they are Allah's most beloved places on Earth. We learn that the person whose heart is deeply connected to a mosque is one of the seven categories of people given shade from the fire on the Day of Judgment.
Giving to the mosque, particularly its construction and maintenance, is therefore a spiritual practice. The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) said: "Whoever builds for Allah a mosque, seeking by it Allah's grace, Allah will build for him a house in paradise." It is more difficult to find specific sources about giving money for programming - such as prayer services, classes, and service programs - but our tradition has enough theological resources there to make that argument as well.
I should note that there is an expectation in our community that mosques serve the poor. In fact, there is a special charity category (zakat ul-maal, or 2.5% of one's wealth) to be giving yearly to the poor. Many community members will give to a mosque with the understanding that the community will take care of that obligation. There has been some criticisms of mosques because they aren't doing enough, with some mosques responding by initiating programs specifically to serve the poor.
I think whenever we talk about the financial structure of our communities, we have to also consider the question of what the synagogue's or mosque's role is in raising money for and serving those in need. And I wonder if that work might itself be relevant to the question of how to attract and retain the involvement of young adults in our communities.
Ma' Salama (With Peace),
Yusufi
Rabbi Dan Judson is Director of Professional Development and Placement, at the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College in Newton, MA.
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Since 2012 Yusufi Vali has served as the Executive Director of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center (ISBCC), the largest mosque in New England. During his time at the ISBCC, the mosque has been blessed to implement a robust religious programming vision, grow to 1500 regularly weekly worshipers, and become an integrated part of the city's faith institutions.
"I mentor an amazing young woman from Gherla, Romania," said George Deriso a serial tech entrepreneur who attended GlobalMindED this June. Amazing, indeed. Mara at the age of 8 realized that at school and at home money was almost never discussed. Living in a post-communist country, Mara knew instinctually that this was a deep-seeded uncomfort that had to be addressed.
At age 16, Mara created a financial literacy platform that took her insights to classrooms around Romania. She developed iXperiment, the first start-up accelerator for high school students from Romania. The platform works with students to experience all the stages of a launching a start-up, with the help of top entrepreneurs from both the national and international level.
Here are some questions I had for Mara and her prescient responses:
Q. How did your first know that you were called to help others understand financial options and entrepreneurial skills?
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"Mom, dad, are we rich?"
This is the question I was asking my parents when I was little. Not because I wanted to buy some new toys, but because this was the only question that they never answered, always avoiding the subject of money or resources management. Afterwards I got into school, and whenever I asked my teachers questions about personal finance, I was told that that was not the right time to talk about money. I was only supposed to study hard, get good grades, go to a good college, get a safe job and only later on think about money and finance.
I knew this was wrong. All this prevarication around such an ordinary subject made no sense. So I started approaching the subject, reading about it, talking about it, and doing something about it. This is how my journey in the world of financial education started, which was the "trigger" of my entrepreneurship experience. Once I got into this new universe of continuous challenges, trying to develop tools through which young students would better understand money through gaming-based learning, I realized that entrepreneurship is another key skill that is not properly addressed in schools. Therefore, I chose to also offer youth the opportunity to be entrepreneurially educated and I launched iXperiment, the first startup accelerator for high school students from Romania.
Q. You say that entrepreneurship is an attitude. How might other young people develop an entrepreneurial attitude that they can apply through school and life? What ignited that spirit within you?
I just started. Initially I was scared because I knew nobody in the field of entrepreneurship, but I started attending all kinds of events. Then I started mimicking the entrepreneurs that I admired - not in a sense that I lost my own originality, but in a sense that I developed different traits that I was missing. I became more confident, more determined, more resilient. It was a whole process that is still continuing through the people that I meet and work with, through the challenges I face, through my failures and successes.
It's really hard for me to offer advice to other young people, because I am still growing and I am part of a continuous experience that can hardly be summarized. However, one of the most valuable lessons I learned was to be open to do counterintuitive things. In entrepreneurship, unlike in school, nobody tells you what it takes in order to get an A*. No one tells you what's good and bad, because in entrepreneurship (and real life), the apparently bad decisions can lead to great successes and the apparently wise actions can cause huge failures. Just start, experiment and learn. Be open to do what you would normally not do.
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Q. What is about at iXperiment that has powered your business and fueled your passion for teaching young people about finance?
Through iXperiment, I try to shape students' mentalities. I don't want to convince them become entrepreneurs, because entrepreneurship is far from being the ideal option for all youth. What I'm aiming to do is get them realize that the jobs we see today will not be here tomorrow and that we are staying on an exponential curve, all the progress around us happening at accelerating paces.
Therefore iXperiment empowers students to be adaptive and aware of the technology and social trends, by offering them different tools and approaches (lean start-up approach, design thinking) through which they can launch their own initiatives, in any context, in any situation (entrepreneurs/intrapreneurs/explorers).
Q. If this work can surpass your wildest expectations for success, what would it look like in 5 years, In 10 years?
iXperiment is a scalable program that could be easily implemented anywhere in the world. Thereby, if my wildest and craziest expectations for success were surpassed, each and every high school student from around the world would be part of an iXperiment program, working at a start-up, creating social impact and innovation in her community.
Q. If/when you speak at the globalminded.org conference, what would you most want to say to the students attending and to the 600+ educational leaders?
I would most probably talk about entrepreneurship and finance education in the context of an exponential future.
Q. Over the course of your lifetime, how would you like to make the biggest difference with your unique gifts and talents?
I would love to create something that is used by millions of people. The thought of building a tool/service that is attractive, useful and impactful enough in order to be part of people's lives is more than exciting. Most probably, it would be an educational technology tool.
Credit: Amanda via Flickr Creative Commons
By Thomas Kennedy
A friend of mine recalls going outside of her office in South Miami one morning only to encounter a Thanksgiving turkey give-away hosted by the group Libre Initiative, which was handing out the holiday staple to members of the community. It is one of the many times around Miami that the Libre Initiative hosted events and community works providing civic and history lessons, driving lessons, citizenship clinics, and food giveaways like the one I described, not only in South Florida but in other states where Hispanic populations are prominent.
At first glance, their works seems like standard efforts in any community outreach project. But lift the veil, even a little, and the reality is that the Libre Initiative is a Republican-funded project with the goal of winning the hearts and minds of Latino voters.
Despite divisive rhetoric against Latino immigrants from many in the Republican party, including most hatefully from their presidential candidate, it is clear that some Republicans can do the math and add up the increasing role Latinos will play in this nation's elections. Hispanic millennials will make up almost half (44%) of the record 27.3 million eligible Latino voters projected for this year's election, more than any other racial or ethnic group of voters.
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One of the speakers of this week's Republican National Convention in Cleveland is Libre's national spokeswoman Rachel Campos Duffy, where she will no doubt talk about economic empowerment in the Latino community through Republican ideals.
Yet we must never forget that Libre is a wolf in sheep's clothing to the Latino community. Despite its outwardly good works, Libre exists to influence Latinos to go against their own interests.
Latinos who find themselves at Libre events might be subjected to a wide range of conservative talking points. They may be told that an increase in minimum wage would result in businesses hurting. They will hear opposition to Obamacare on the charge that it is unconstitutional. And they will be given arguments that President Obama's DAPA/DACA executive actions which would have provided relief for millions of undocumented immigrants in this country should be repealed and opposed.
Republican fingerprints are all over the Libre Initiative, starting with its executive Director Daniel Garza who is a former Bush administration official. Libre officials claim that they don't support candidates, only ideas and that their focus is on explaining conservative views, yet they have served the role of unofficial spokespeople for the Republican Party agenda consistently.
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When one follows the money Libre receives, it is not surprising that they regurgitate these right wing talking points in order to confuse and suppress Latinos from voting for their best interests. Since its inception in 2011, the Libre Initiative has received more than $10 million dollars from Freedom Partners, which is a group backed and funded by the Koch Brothers, billionaire Republican funders with deep pockets. The link between Libre and the Koch brother's was so strong that in Nevada, Libre initially shared an office with Koch funded Americans for Prosperity before moving in an effort to distance themselves from AFP. The money that the Koch's invest in Libre give them control over the organization and this is apparent when one sees the organizational structure of Libre which is organized as a trust with Daniel Garza as chief trustee, a position from which he can be removed.
Thanks to the financial backing by the Koch' brothers, Libre has expanded operations to states including Nevada, Texas and Florida, in which Hispanic voters will play a crucial role in deciding the outcome of the 2016 elections.
It's hard to understand how Daniel Garza, the son of a Mexican migrant worker, would choose to confuse the Latino immigrant community into voting against their interests. Here in South Florida, Libre targeted former U.S Congressman Joe Garcia in ads that misconstrued comments he made by making him seem as if he was in support of communism, a charge that was blatantly untrue. Congressman Garcia has been an ally of the immigrant community and sponsored a Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill, making it ironic that Libre sought to undermine his efforts as they hypocritically opposed Obama's DAPA/DACA executive actions on the basis that he should have worked with the legislature to pass immigration reform. This is pure nonsense as Republican backers riled up and funded the very opposition that makes a legislative solution to the immigration problem in this country impossible.
It has been amusing, though, to watch Donald Trump single handedly destroy the efforts of the Libre Initiative to confuse and divide Latino voters. The Republican mainstream was not expecting their nominee to engage in hateful rhetoric that would include forcibly deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants from this country and building a wall across the Mexican border that Mexico would pay for. It must be frustrating for Libre officials and their backers to see polls showing Trump trailing Hillary Clinton by 40 points among Hispanics. But for a group that's been trying to fool Latinos with free turkeys and other give-aways, I call it something else: Poetic justice.
CINCINNATI, OH - Democratic Presumptive Nominee for President former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, along with Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), speak to campaign volunteers at a 'get out the vote' event at University of Cincinnati in Cincinnati, Ohio on Monday, July 18, 2016. (Photo by Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Last week, Donald Trump announced his running mate, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, and it came as a surprise to no one. In fact, had it been one of the other two finalists, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie or former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the end result would still be much the same.
The finalists are similar in three ways: All are white men, all are mediocre, and all are unusually confident in their personal brands built on bigotry and bluster. In fact, so alike are they in confident white male mediocrity to the GOP's presumptive nominee that it's only fitting Trump is considering a less-flashier version of himself, someone similar enough to affirm his remarkably clueless worldview, yet desperate enough to reduce himself to a glorified valet with a Secret Service detail, playing Igor to Trump's Dr. Frankenstein.
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But that's what the Republican Party has become: a seemingly endless echo chamber of rants on political correctness and safe spaces enabled by conspiracy theories, racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, profound male fragility, and, underlying it all, a pervasive and palpable sense of fear of anyone who does not defer to the experiences of straight white men.
The decades-long effort of the GOP to build a party base exploiting the very worst in Americans has spiraled out-of-control and come tumbling down, and out of the rubble has emerged their new party standard-bearer: a man so disgustingly bigoted and ignorant that he makes the comparatively tame and chameleonic Mitt Romney look like Malcolm X.
On the other side, Hillary Clinton will most likely announce a running mate the weekend before the Democratic National Convention, and the safe bet is currently on Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, a reliably progressive white man who is loved by much of the Democratic Party, avoids the sticky problem of being replaced in the Senate that plagues other potential Veep candidates, and, it is assumed, will appeal to so-called "blue collar workers" (re: white men) who feel the Democratic Party has abandoned them.
This is a reasonable analysis, but it doesn't make it a righteous one. Whereas talk of diversifying tickets to include women and people of color and LGBTQ folks is meant to attract voters in marginalized groups and speak to their specific obstacles, putting a white man on a ticket so that other white men will feel less threatened and emasculated by a woman nominee seems enabling of bigotry and counter to the values of true progressivism.
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Hillary Clinton needs to double down on diversity in this election. She needs to make this about choosing between the sadly-familiar exclusionary culture of our country's past and an ideal future in which everyone has a seat at the table. What better way to accomplish this than to assert that white men do not have to be at the center of attention at all times in our country's affairs.
Yes, we're coming off eight years of having a black man as president, but alongside that has been an extraordinary effort to allay the concerns of white men who feel threatened. I love Joe Biden, but he was chosen primarily to court white male voters. I admire the President for spending eight years attempting to reach across the aisle to racist Republicans, but that effort has largely failed because they're racist.
Insecure white men in this country are that kid at birthday parties who has to have a present even when it's not their birthday being celebrated. They're that relative (and we all know them) who makes everything -- weddings, funerals, deathbed conversations -- about them. Their feelings and opinions must be known to all involved, and anything less is an attack on their dignity. The world is their therapist and cheerleader.
Surely, most of us, including millions of white men who also see this, are tired of living in a culture that is forced to placate "adults" who are better suited to the politics of kindergarten classrooms than the serious issues facing our country. We're exhausted.
Fortunately, there's no shortage of great choices out there. Sen. Elizabeth Warren's selection would put financial reform front-and-center and reinforce the demand for gender equality.
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Tapping Secretary Julian Castro or Secretary Tom Perez or Congressman Xavier Becerra would provide an historic Latino representation for a growing population that is routinely ignored and slandered. Sen. Cory Booker would bring to the table much-needed ground experience in problems afflicting urban centers.
Gov. Kaine, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Sen. Al Franken, Secretary Tom Vilsack, and Admiral Stavridis are all fantastic leaders and have done a great deal of good for this country, but none would be providing a life experience that has not been prioritized ad nauseam over that of others.
The progressive movement, itself, is going through growing pains. We're coming off a primary season that has seen jarring sexism and racism from white male "progressives" who took issue with any woman or person of color that claimed Sen. Bernie Sanders is less than perfect. Add to that the institutional centralization of white men in liberal circles, and we have another reason to make it clear that there are other experiences worth considering.
Privilege is a hell of a drug, and our country needs detoxing. I hope Sec. Clinton will take another step toward that with her VP choice.
Charles Clymer is an Army Veteran and writer based out of Washington, D.C., where they live with their girlfriend and two cats. They have been published in several places and quoted by TIME, Newsweek, The Guardian, and numerous other publications. You can follow them on Twitter here and on Facebook here.
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Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump introduces his wife Melania to speak during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S., July 18, 2016. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri
One absurdity of this plagiarism "scandal" that is marring Melania Trump's speech Monday night is that through all the handwringing is the suggestion that what she or her handlers lifted from Michelle Obama was something close to the Gettysburg Address -- it wasn't of course because there's just not that many different ways a woman can say how much she loves and admires her husband.
The other absurdity, and the one that really has people inside the Trump orbit here at the GOP convention in Cleveland so concerned, is that it happened in the first place.
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And it keeps happening with no end in sight.
Their worry gets to the heart of what even they concede will likely doom Trump's chances in November: If a presidential campaign can't prevent obvious cribbing of someone else's words (obvious, I say, because all this stuff can be found on Google) or the lifting of an image from a racist website (again, stuff that's easy to check out), how are the Trump people going to create a state-by-state infrastructure to beat Hillary Clinton?
The solution to not having enough staff to check things or people on the ground in must-win states to drive voter outreach is of course money.
So how ironic that a man who professes to be worth $10 billion will blow any chance to become the leader of the free world, and prevent his wife from being embarrassed before the nation, because he's cheap. (Sources close to Trump say Melania distraught by the backlash and right now is keeping a low profile)
But money or lack of it has always been the root of The Donald's problems. Trump never wanted to raise money because it negated his claim that he's so rich he can't be bought by special interests. Trump likes to tout that he could have spent whatever he wanted but he won the GOP nomination because he ran an efficient campaign on a shoe string, as if it was his game plan from the beginning.
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Based on what I know, that wasn't really the case. Trump's massive net worth has always been a function of his brand first and foremost; his real estate holdings, while formidable, are less than liquid.
He knows that, which is why he almost never let go of his Twitter account and his penchant for saying outrageous stuff was so strong: it generated the free publicity he needed in a crowded field where mistakes can be mollified because his hardcore supporters will always give him a pass even if he claims not to know David Duke.
General elections are different in many ways, which is why Trump grudgingly and way late began to take donor money; first there are two candidates who both get a lot free media. And with two candidates gaffes become bigger and more problematic and more expensive to prevent.
All of which is why modern campaigns spend so much money: this is more of a science than art, and to hire enough of the right people to handle the various tasks of even a moderately successful campaign is expensive.
And its worth it: gaffes change the news cycle and distort message; instead of talking terrorism or making America safe again, Trump adviser Paul Manafort spent the day parsing sentence structure and syntax.
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Trump's fundraisers tell me after a late start they're finally starting to convince big money donors to ante up. As for the speech, they say the outrage is much to do about relatively little since such sentiments are so commonplace they can't be plagiarized, even if Melania is shell-shocked from the ongoing media storm.
CLEVELAND, OH - JULY 18: Former Virginia Attorney General and current Delegate, Ken Cuccinelli, center, removes his credentials and threatens to leave while demanding a roll call vote on the convention rules during the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2016 in Cleveland, Ohio. (Photo by Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
I'm writing this while watching all of Day One of the Republican National Convention. I apologize in advance for the rather stream-of-consciousness nature of the post, but I also caution that you should get used to it, because we are in for two weeks of convention-palooza.
The Republicans went first this year, and it is actually notable that Day One is even happening. For the past two presidential election cycles, Mother Nature intervened and Republicans canceled their first day (in 2008 it was Hurricane Gustav, and in 2012 Hurricane Isaac that pre-empted the start of the GOP convention). Make of that what you will, I suppose.
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I turned on the campaign coverage early today just in time to catch the big floor fight among the delegates. Call it the final death throes of the "Never Trump" movement. After being blocked by the rules committee, this was their final protest -- an attempt to get a vote on changing the convention's rules to unbind all the delegates on the first vote. The dissenters thought they had enough votes to at least force a roll call vote on the rules, but after some back-room dealing, the convention chair announced that he had strong-armed several states into dropping their names from the bid -- making it small enough (by the rules) to be ignored.
There was some shouting back and forth between the two camps. At least two states' delegations reportedly walked out in protest. These clips will undoubtedly be shown on the evening news tonight, because it was the best example of how divided the Republican Party still is over the question of supporting Donald Trump. One New Hampshire delegate (a former senator) on the "Never Trump" side later denounced the convention denying them their chance for a vote, claiming the people on the other side "act like fascists. They may not be fascists but they act like fascists." He later called them "people I would refer to as brownshirts." For those unaware, this is not usually the sort of thing heard from the floor of a national convention. To say the least.
We then had a large break in the action, as the journalists scrambled to fill the airwaves until the main evening show began. Some interesting tidbits -- Trump put the Ohio delegation in a corner, because he was annoyed that Governor John Kasich was blowing off the convention (as indeed were many prominent Republicans, including the entire Bush clan). The hosting state usually gets a prime floor spot, but not Ohio -- which is, incidentally, one of the big key states Trump must win in November.
What else? Outside, the demonstrations seem to be a lot more low-key than predicted, at least so far. A pro-Trump rally and an anti-Trump rally both only drew "hundreds, not thousands" by some accounts, and the two sides are being kept so far apart that there haven't been any problems, so far. An outfit calling itself the "Western Ohio Militia" walked around carrying assault weapons, much to the delight of the cameras, but that was about all the reporters outside had to report on.
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It's also been reported that Reince Priebus nixed Trump's plan to invite Don King to speak, which surely would have been... um... splendiforously amazingtastic? Or something. Speaking of having fun with the English language, the funniest thing I've read yet on the convention came from the Washington Post, an entire article written in one-syllable words, in homage to Trump's speaking style. Check it out if you want a laugh.
In the "shouldn't be funny, of course, but really is" category comes this photo of a sign pointing to the "White Elevators" -- whoever signed off on that piece of idiocy obviously should be fired forthwith. I believe they took the sign down, but still... talk about unintended irony.
There was some more irony over the weekend that most people missed. You decide whether this one was intended or not -- I kind of lean towards "planned," myself. Reportedly, when Donald Trump walked on stage to announce his running mate, the song that was playing was "You Can't Always Get What You Want." Hoo boy, Mike Pence is going to have to get used to such slights, because there will probably be a few more before he's done.
OK, enough random impressions. What follows are my impressions of the lineup of speakers for Day One. I didn't listen to every minute from all of them, but I did hear enough to at least get the flavor of each of them. Then at the end, I'll give a few overall impressions to end on.
The proceedings opened with another bit of musical irony. After a mini-floor fight and shouting match, what I assume was an ex-Turtle belted out "Happy Together." A nice sentiment, if belied by the party's truly divided nature.
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First up, for some unfathomable reason, was one of the Duck Dynasty clan, wearing an American flag-themed headband. I wondered what Abbie Hoffman would have had to say about that, personally, but whatever.
After he bashed the media for a bit and then left the stage, we next got an episode of Chachi Loves Donnie. No, really -- after promising us a star-studded convention, all Trump could get was Chachi? Wow. That's just sad. Chachi helpfully explained to "first-time voters" what it meant to be an American. Or, specifically, what it doesn't mean: "It doesn't mean getting free stuff." Um, OK, Chachi. Wonder what Joanie and the Fonz think....
Rick Perry then became the first speaker to giddily ramble through his allotted time without ever actually using Donald Trump's name. Oops!
We then hit one of the two "theme" periods of the night (the other, immigrant-bashing, came later). I didn't write down every word, but I did jot down the gist of what was said, for approximately the next 40 minutes or so:
"Benghazi! Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi. Benghazi? Benghazi! Benghazi -- Benghazi. Benghazi: Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi. Benghazi... Benghazi... Benghazi... Benghazi. Benghazi?!? Benghazi. BenGHAZI? Benghazi! BENghazi! BENGHAZI! BENGHAZI!! BENGHAZI!!!"
This may not have been a 100-percent-accurate transcript, but I think you get the point. This spectacle included a mother of one of the dead, an bizarre little movie, and then two guys trying to be the most macho, blunt-talkin', blue-jeans-wearin' ex-soldiers you'd ever meet, complete with the sorriest attempts at humor all night long (which is really saying something, seeing as how many politicians think they're comedians themselves).
The conversation then shifted straight into the anti-immigrant part of the show, where we had a whole bunch of family members of victims of crimes by undocumented immigrants. In other words, the Latino-outreach part of the show! Just kidding (although they certainly weren't).
I had to sit and wonder where this newfound "loving of victims" comes from, in the GOP. They used to regularly sneer at Democrats for this sort of thing, and now they've apparently embraced it. But I also had to notice that all this frenzy of fear-mongering actually fell a little flat, at least when compared to years gone by. Even with all the anti-terrorist language from multiple speakers (for instance), it kind of paled in comparison to what Republicans used to say in the "Global War On Terror" years, at least to my ears. Representative Mike Somebody-or-another from Texas had the best line in this vein ("Are you safer than you were eight years ago"), but for the most part it all seemed a little uninspiring, at best. But maybe it was just me getting numb from hearing it all over and over again, who knows?
We also had a lot of pro-cops speakers, an obvious choice with what's been happening over the last two weeks. Trump is reportedly reading over Richard Nixon's "law and order" convention speech himself, but so far it's been pretty perfunctory ("Blue lives matter!").
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By this time, my notes were reflecting my weariness. One speaker I just listed as "some white guy: war, Hillary-bashing" for instance, which could actually cover a number of the middle-hours speakers. The only notable moment for me during this period was when Representative Sean Somebody used a line that seemed kind of prophetic and a bit too honest for Republicans: "We have won every election except the big one." If they lose this "big one" too, a lot of people are going to start saying Republicans will never win another presidential election for a generation, unless they fundamentally change the way they do things (the GOP candidate has lost five of the last six popular votes for president, so "six out of seven" could be the breaking point).
Senator Jeff Sessions began speaking right before the prime-time hour of coverage (around 7:00, Pacific time). He went through his stock anti-immigrant comments, complete with a call to "Build the wall!" but was most notable for the first protester of the night inside the hall (there was another one, later, during Giuliani's time on stage). While Sessions usually can be counted on for a pretty fiery speech, he was instantly overshadowed by the man who followed him.
There's just no other way to put it -- Rudy Giuliani absolutely came unhinged on national television tonight. His speech -- really the first one seen in full by those tuning in to the broadcast networks' hour of coverage -- was one long, shouty anger-fest. After Clint Eastwood's talking-to-an-empty-chair performance, you'd think the Republicans would learn who to put on at the top of the big hour of the night, but Rudy ranted for a solid 20 minutes or so without ever lowering his voice from the volume you'd use to yell for a cab on the streets of New York. I mean, at least he woke up the crowd, but he was so over-the-top almost from his first sentence that I had to wonder what sort of impression this was having on independent voters out there. Just one sample quote from Rudy: "Islamic! Extremist! Terrorism! You know who you are! And we're coming to get you!" And no, I'm not exaggerating with those exclamation points.
Gwen Ifill of PBS had the best comment, at the end of Rudy's anger-fest: "Giuliani's had his Wheaties tonight!" But then immediately, attention returned to the stage, where Donald Trump himself appeared (complete with spotlights and a fog machine) to introduce his wife. After several repetitions of "We're going to win so big!" he actually gave a very brief introduction (he stuck to what was on the TelePrompTer, in other words).
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Melania Trump, in all fairness, was impressive. She's never given a speech longer than a minute or so out on the campaign trail, so she was a real unknown quantity before tonight. Her English is heavily accented, but she delivered her lines almost flawlessly. She knew when to pause and flash a smile, her cadence was actually pretty good (for someone not used to public speaking or TelePrompTers), and she spoke about her personal story and her husband in ways the public simply hasn't heard before. She even gave gracious nods to all the other Republican candidates, and to Bob Dole (the only living Republican presidential nominee who showed up tonight).
I didn't have any expectations for what to expect from Trump's wife, but I have to say she gave a very good impression with her speech tonight. Her job was to humanize her husband, and I don't know if she achieved that or not with the public at large, but she certainly gave it her best shot. And her best shot was better than many political speeches heard throughout the evening, so my guess is that pundits on both sides of the aisle are going to give her some deserved credit for her speech.
However, this was the point where the convention just smacked right into a brick wall. Whoever was responsible for the schedule for tonight needs to be fired, there's just no other way to put it. If that was Donald Trump himself, then obviously he won't be fired, but the rest of the evening was nothing short of political malpractice. Trump's supposed to be some sort of television genius (after starring in a reality show himself), but the rest of the evening was just as embarrassing as can be imagined.
First, we got a failed vice-presidential pick, former admiral Flynn, who tried to channel the same "shouty guy" theme as Giuliani. He did so for way, way too long. He spoke for 20-25 minutes, when his entire speech should have lasted about three or four minutes, because he mostly just repeated the same things over and over again (Obama bad! Hillary bad! Military might! U-S-A! U-S-A!). This also may sound like an exaggeration, but really isn't -- he got distracted many different times by the audience's chanting, and he essentially just rambled on forever. He almost lost his voice, at one point, from all the shouting he was doing.
He didn't end his performance until after the network's hour of coverage was over, in fact. So the only hour the networks covered tonight was: Rudy Giuliani shouting for 20 solid minutes; Melania Trump giving a very nice speech; a retired admiral few had ever heard of shouting for 20 more minutes. This is why I call it political malpractice, because they squandered their prime-time window.
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But it wasn't just Flynn's speech, it was the fact that virtually all the delegates and everyone else in the hall left almost immediately after Melania's speech was over. She was billed as the keynote speaker, but they scheduled four other speakers after her. This was insane. It led to the worst convention optics I've ever seen in my life, in fact (which includes Clint Eastwood's embarrassment). When Senator Joni Ernst finally took the stage, the only people left were on the floor. All the seats above floor-level were empty. Ernst spoke to an empty hall. And there were two more speakers after her. I mean, she soldiered on and gave her speech with her trademark frozen-in-place smile, but it was just painful to watch -- especially the parts where the audience was supposed to clap (or chant), because it sounded so hollow and echoing. A few dozen people politely clapping in an arena that just held thousands sounds downright sad. I never in my life thought I'd ever feel sorry for Joni Ernst, but it was impossible not to tonight. If I were her, I would be supremely annoyed at whoever set the scheduling slots for the evening.
Following Ernst was some ex-soldier and a House member from Montana, but by that point I couldn't even watch. I had intended to watch the coverage from beginning to end, but it was just so absolutely pathetic seeing these guys up there in front of a cavernously-empty hall that I just couldn't do it. I'm not faulting the speakers, mind you, since it wasn't even close to being their fault. I do fault whatever yahoo came up with the bright idea: "We'll have the keynote speaker that everyone is waiting to hear -- introduced by the candidate himself, even -- oh, and then we're going to have four other folks speak and not put any sort of time limit on their remarks." What were they thinking? How can anyone have signed off on this as a good idea? It was downright cringe-worthy to watch.
And please remember, Donald Trump was supposed to personally be directing the convention's details, and he's also supposed to be a genius when it comes to understanding good television. But the first night in Cleveland ran over by at least 30 or 40 minutes, and the final three speakers spoke to an almost-empty hall, after Flynn's speech failed to convince anyone to stay.
I always write these snap reactions before reading what other pundits (and the late-night comedians) have to say, so I'm always left wondering: "Is it just me, or did others notice this too?" So I'll just leave it there for now, while I go find out what others are saying. To me, Day One was pretty standard stuff (if heavy on the fear-mongering, even for Republicans) for the first few hours, followed by Rudy Giuliani having an absolute meltdown to begin the single hour of broadcast coverage. A much-better-than-expected speech by Melania Trump was then followed by a scheduling train-wreck of epic proportions, and the worst optics (the empty hall) I've ever seen at a convention. We'll see if some of this is corrected on Day Two, I supposed that's the only positive thing you can say, at this point.
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Chris Weigant blogs at:
As Democrat Senators spent two days this week outlining the cash funneled to front groups in the fossil fuel-funded climate "Web of Denial," predictably, some of the spiders started crawling out of that web.
The senators received a sharply-worded missive from a line-up of 22 free market groups, 21 of whom have received money from fossil fuel companies - or "dark money" (money laundered to hide the funders), and the majority of whom are fighting climate action - or the science. The total funding added up to more than $92m.
"Sadly, our democracy and our freedom hangs in the balance as you use your office to bully and single out groups to blame rather than ideas to debate," they lamented.
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The American Citizenry "deserve and increasingly demand healthy and respectful political dialogue, and well-informed, well-debated public policies."
The letter, hosted on the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) website, started off reasonably politely, but quickly turned nasty as the writers accused the Senators of being tyrants, of shutting down free speech, yada yada yada.
In the interests of democracy and transparency, we decided to take a look at these groups.
We tallied up the funding they've received from just four entities since the late 90's: the Koch Brothers' various foundations, ExxonMobil, and the two Dark Money organizations, Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund.
The total tally of funding came to over $92 million to 21 of the 22 groups that signed the letter.
Not all of this (that we know of) went to climate denial specifically, because we don't know the details of why Donors Capital Fund gave them a total of $57,569,564, or, indeed, who provided the DCF with that cash. Neither do we know the details of Donors Trust, which provided $19,163,715 to these groups. But at least some of it, we know, was for these groups' fight against the climate science - or against action on climate.
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And all but one of these organisations have been working to either undermine the climate science, or to prevent action on climate change, either at State or a National level.
"You were elected by the people to build consensus and find compromise--to fiercely debate the most pressing issues of our day. Often, these debates are meant to be contentious and without a clear solution because innovation comes from great challenge," they told the 19 senators.
Yet many of them have worked fiercely to oppose any solutions to arguably THE most pressing issue of the day: climate change. For example, ALEC has written model bills and resolutions designed to undermine - or kill - innovation such as renewable energy. These groups have challenged the scientific consensus on the climate science, and blocked progress at state and federal level to curb emissions.
Then there is their insistence on debate. Many of this lot use the "doubt is their product" tobacco playbook - keep the "debate" going so that the public thinks there is a debate over climate science. That this debate is over doesn't stop them. So writing to the Senators complaining they are shutting down debate is pretty much what you'd expect them to do.
Let's break down the funding a little more.
The Heartland Institute received a total of 18,645,247 from Donors Capital Fund, and a total of $20,018,747 from the four of them. That's an enormous amount of money. Heartland staff have given presentations at ALEC annual meetings. ALEC itself has received $3,556,487 from these four funders.
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The Franklin Center for Government and Policy Integrity has received a total of $29,570,920- mostly from the Donors Capital Fund and Donors Trust. Its affiliated news outlets regularly publish articles questioning climate science and parroting long-debunked myths around climate change.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute, of course, is on the list. Again, a big recipient of Donors Trust money ($5 million), and it still coordinates the Cooler Heads Coalition, a group that's been going since the late 1990's.
Then there's the money that we haven't tallied.
For example, the John Locke Foundation, according to Robert Brulle and spelt out by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) in the debate, received $21 million from Art Pope's father's foundation 2003-2013. Art Pope is a good friend of the Koch brothers.
So in the end, one looks at these 22 organisations who've slammed the Democrat Senators' speeches in the house, and you can only conclude one thing: they would say that, it's the kind of thing they're paid to do.
Americans have faced the deepest of tragedies since Independence Day this year. First, the death of two black men after encounters with police. Then the shooting of five police officers in Dallas by a sniper who reportedly wanted to kill white cops as payback.
It has been four years since the death of Trayvon Martin, yet it feels that nothing has changed. Innocent black Americans have continued to die after run-ins with law enforcement officers. Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, the two black men killed after altercations with police, will be mourned in the black community just as Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, and Tamir Rice were. We also mourn the deaths of Patrick Zamarripa, Brent Thompson, Michael Krol, Michael Smith, and Lorne Ahrens, the Dallas officers slain by a senseless act of violence by a disturbed gunman seeking what he thought to be justice. He was most sadly mistaken, because this was not justice but madness.
Our melting pot has reached its boiling point. Black citizens (myself included) fear for our lives when we encounter the police. We teach our young to comply with officers, despite the violence that at times is still committed against us even when we do. The truth of the matter is that every day, both black families and blue families fear that their loved ones will not come back when they walk out their doors. This feeling has only intensified with the killing of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, as well as the killings of officers in Dallas and New York City.
The relationship between law enforcement and black communities has all too often been a negative one since the first police forces were formed in this country. The duties of the colonial police departments included keeping slaves in line and bringing them back to their owners, should they try to escape.
During the Civil Rights Era, police were charged with enforcing the unjust laws of segregation. At the time, some southern police officers changed into the robes of the KKK at night to carry out countless heinous acts against the black population. It's important to reflect on history and this relationship, because it has implications to this day.
We know that the vast majority of police officers have everyone's best interests at heart and are dedicated to serve and protect us. Nonetheless, it is difficult for many of us in the black community to have complete trust in law enforcement. We question whether the families of Sterling and Castile will receive any legal justice. In case after case, officers have walked free. The relationship between black citizens and law enforcement is emblematic of the larger issue of race relations in America. We have not yet laid to rest the systemic and institutionalized racism that has its roots in colonial times.
The ever increasing deterioration of race relations needs to be halted and repaired. We must stop going to our respective corners when the bell rings and then come out slugging. We are at a watershed moment. We must bring communities of all color together. It is now imperative for our leaders to show unity. We must talk. But we also must take action, no matter how difficult that may be, or how awkward our first steps are. In order to initiate the dialogue, President Obama must convene a summit at Camp David in which policymakers, civil rights organizations and law enforcement agencies engage in an open and honest dialogue, with a goal of developing concrete solutions to solve this national security issue. By bringing these leaders together, we will show the American public that our country is not afraid to take the steps necessary to address the cycle of violence. The conversation cannot stop there, though. Leaders in every community should organize and create an open atmosphere where race relations and law enforcement issues can be discussed
Concrete action must come out of these discussions, both at Camp David and in each and every community.
Here are some initial action steps I believe we should take:
Institute training about unconscious bias for every single police officer in every department, big and small, urban and rural, regardless of the race of the officer or the racial makeup of the community.
Set up standing police oversight boards in each community that includes members of the general public - of all races and ethnicities, both male and female, and across a wide age range - as well as elected officials and police personnel. These boards should replace the police oversight boards that are comprised primarily of police personnel.
Equip all police with body cameras and require the cameras to be on when the officer is on duty.
Establish anonymous hotlines to report any activities that seem improper, whether it is in the neighborhood or within the police department. Establish guidelines so that whistleblowers, whether they be cops or citizens, are not penalized for reporting improprieties. These hotlines will help eradicate the blue line of silence, which encourages police to stand silent when they see wrongdoing by their fellow officers.
These are just a few steps we must take if we are to move forward and create a society that respects and protects all of us - black, white, brown or blue.
It happened in a moment. The bursts of fireworks in celebration of a nation's independence were replaced with bursts of gunfire, shots fired to fell a man bent on the destruction of innocent lives. The giggles and gasps in wonderment at the colorful display turned to screams and wails as people wandered through bodies left bleeding in the street.
The Bastille Day massacre happened in a moment. But the pain it caused will last a lifetime for those who lost a loved one, who sustained an injury or who witnessed the horror.
Here in the U.S., people are reacting with disbelief, heartbreak and anger. How could something like this happen? What kind of hate motivates this level of destruction and devastation of human life?
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While details about the perpetrator or perpetrators of this attack are still coming together at this point, most agree that the attack was committed by one or more Islamic extremists. As the leader of an organization that works with one of the world's most persecuted groups, Christians, I believe I can guess the motive fairly accurately.
Here is the Islamic terrorist's line of thinking:
Europe is in the West.
The West is full of Christians.
Christians must be killed.
To be clear, we are talking about extremists, not all Muslims.
Now many will argue that much of Europe has abandoned its Christian faith and traditions. That can't possibly be right. To them I say you don't understand how Islamic extremists understand religion.
For these terrorists and the groups they represent, religion isn't a matter of belief but of identity. In their minds, you are Christian by virtue of the fact that you were born into a family that either practiced the Christian faith or whose ancestors practiced the Christian faith. They hate you because you are you. You don't have to do, say or believe anything for them to take your life. They simply despise the fact you are you.
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But for those who do believe in the Christian faith, for those who publicly identify with the Name and teachings of Christ, their enemies don't just want to kill them; they want them to suffer.
Every day, I hear the stories of those who are killed because they refuse to renounce their faith in Christ. They decline to save their own lives if it means denying the One they call Savior. Earlier this week, a mother of seven was hacked to death in Nigeria while preaching about the love of Jesus. Earlier this month, Sudan detains 14 evangelical Christians for the crime of... being evangelical Christians. And earlier this year, I met with a woman whose husband had been burned alive while out sharing his faith.
Their stories are unique, but they are also far too familiar. Their stories are woven into a tapestry of persecution taking place around the globe.
Being the comedy writer by trade that I am, I try to seek out the funny as much as I can in order to produce those wonderful little gas bubbles of giggles in the gut of my audience with a light cologne splash of enlightenment whenever possible.
I was all set to write about last night's Melania Trump Orange-C speech which was proof positive of what only someone who graduated from Trump University -- who got her Ph.D in jewelry shopping and plagiarism -- could have pulled off.
Her cap and gown, by the way, was a mortar board and matching thong bikini bottom.
There was SO much to mock from Chachi Arcola's incomprehensible speech (Henry Winkler evidently will be delivering a response at next week's DNC) to that guy from Duck Dynasty who evidently likes to dress like the toothless cast of Deliverance to Trump's entrance which seemed like a man at the end of his life walking cluelessly towards the white light. Did you not notice his constantly asking for directions back there? Which way is heaven? Really? I'm going... there?
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But I have to say despite being warned not to watch the show, in between watching the Yankee game I did catch a moment of that mom talking about the loss of her son in Benghazi, and while my heart goes out to her, are you fucking kidding me?
There in one single moment of pure outrage was what the GOP is all about. I'm sorry, after spending 7 MILLION dollars on the Benghazi hearing and coming up with NOTHING... which included the work of a bi-partisan panel, they came up with this. Using a woman like that.
So let me ask you this. Being that even Trump would admit that the Iraq war was insanely wrong because the entire thing was based on FAKE intelligence that was manufactured by the Bush/Cheney administration would it now be okay if the Democrats paraded out, in direct response to that horrible manipulation of America's emotions, say thousands and thousands of relatives of all the members of the American military who were either killed, crippled, blinded or committed suicide?
I mean what is the difference? Isn't it all about blame? But the thing is, Hillary is NOT to blame, but our previous administration of war criminals are.
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And in the end, Bush gets to dance the Wiggles Dance at the memorial service for the slain cops. And then he goes home and paints fucking clowns.
God, how despicable can a political party be?
Beyond being NOT Christian on ANY level and full of deceit and lies, let me tell you what that kind of behavior is going to provoke.
In fact, it already has.
When Carly Fiorina showed that FAKE Planned Parenthood film during her run for the presidency, what happened folks? One of her typical constituents followed her lead and went out and shot up a Planned Parenthood center in Colorado.
And she gets to go home and cackle -- when not falling off a stage.
The real writer of The Art of The Deal has come out and said that if Trump gets his hands on the nuclear code it will be the end of civilization. And this is a man who had full access to that private, lovable family man who Melania told us about last night. I guess love and diamonds just blind you.
Since Ghostbusters opened, Leslie Jones, one of America's funniest black performers has been receiving tweets that are beyond racist. I'm sorry, did Ernie Hudson get that kind of fan mail?
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Trump has unleashed the beast. While Bill Cosby and Roger Ailes go down in flames in the court of life and public opinion, we sit back like the nation of Calilgulas that we now are and allow all these irresponsible assholes the freedom to say and do whatever they want in order to achieve one single purpose: to mock experience, education and science so that the literal and metaphorical dummies of Americas are given a ventriloquist's thrown voice to make them feel empowered by being given the toy key to the exclusive bathroom of the city of Stupid.
Yes, of course this is exactly what Hitler did. He spread the BIG LIE, blamed the Jews and the rest is the kind of history that will never, ever leave our souls.
So welcome to the new game show in America, All Bets Are Off where the rules are no rules, where you can say and do whatever you want because that's what will make America great again: by speaking your mind.
Well, what happened when you have no mind?
Why, you buy up all the military grade weapons you want and you get to shoot whoever it is you feel like hatin' on. Blacks? Bang. Cops? Bang. Sandy Hook post-toddlers? Bang.
The answer to everything now is turn it into a target and go have yo'self one fine shooter up.
We are allowing this and we have to put a stop to this now. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, that the GOP is blaming on Obama is their fault. All of it.
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Their obstructionism, their covert/overt 8-year racism, their trying to impose their own anti-Christ agenda while pandering to the evangelicals is reason enough to send them all straight to the slums of hell which I assure is where they are all going.
Do they not get the concept of Judgement Day?
Stop them. Stop this anti-American, anti-Patriotic, anti-man, anti-woman, anti-black, anti-Latino, anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim insanity.
Every time we blame "Muslims" we get a gold fucking star from ISIS. We are their best recruiters now.
All we have to do is act like ourselves.
Now that the Republicans are about to nominate Donald Trump as their party's presidential nominee, a look at his religious background seems in order. It will likely tell us how well he will fare with churchgoing voters, and especially the most committed Christians among them, this fall.
One key factor in this area is generational. American religion has changed a lot over time, and Trump's generation was a distinctive one in terms of what religion was like when they were growing up. Donald Trump is an "early" baby boomer. Like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Trump was born in 1946, the first year of the post-World War II baby boom. Trump grew up in New York City during an era when a higher fraction of Americans engaged in weekly religious observance than at any other time in modern American history.
Trump's parents were Presbyterians, and they and their five children attended Marble Collegiate Church in lower Manhattan. Donald Trump retained a connection to that church in his adult life. He and his first wife, Ivana, were married there in 1977. Though not currently an active member, Donald Trump has stated publicly that he considers Marble Collegiate to be his church.
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It is no ordinary one. Marble Collegiate is one of the oldest continuous Protestant congregations in North America. During Trump's formative years it was led by the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale. Under his leadership, Marble Collegiate acquired a huge congregation numbering in the thousands. Most of those attending, in conventional Fifties' fashion, went once a week - mostly to hear Peale's sermon - but were not otherwise much involved in religious activities. Thus, Marble Collegiate was huge, but not a megachurch in the modern sense, which tends to provide lots of other kinds of programming in which many members participate.
Peale's message was a fairly simple one: Think positive thoughts (which can drive out negative ones), be optimistic, and concentrate on personal fulfillment. Peale elaborated on those ideas in many books, the most successful of which was called The Power of Positive Thinking. Published in 1952, it spent 186 consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. By 1958, the book had sold at least two million copies. Although many clergymen and mental health experts criticized the book's message as overly simplistic and even harmful, many others praised it. The clarity and simplicity of Peale's message may have reflected his roots in the Methodist Church (he was ordained a minister in the Methodist Church before switching to the Reformed Church in America).
Peale's message also seems to have been a response to the formative life experiences of what some have called America's "greatest generation." By far the most important were the Great Depression and World War II. Those who managed to survive, more or less intact, those deeply traumatic experiences tended to find an optimistic outlook and a focus on personal fulfillment very appealing. As the American middle class grew in the 1940's, '50's and '60's, so, too, did the appeal of that sort of middlebrow message. The advent of the Cold War in the late 1940's also increased the appeal of Peale's sermons. At a time when the danger of nuclear war seemed great, and New York City the most likely target of Soviet attack, Peale's emphasis on trying to stay positive and build a successful private life spoke to people who felt more than the usual need for reassurance.
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Many clergymen thought Peale's form of Protestantism too simplistic and generic. Although it is hard to know for sure, one suspects that to the extent Donald Trump went to Sunday school at Marble Collegiate, what he would have learned there would have been simple moral lessons based on bible stories drawn from both the Old and New Testaments. That plus Peale's weekly sermons would likely have constituted the entirety of Trump's religious instruction through church. Kids who experience religion that way tend to be almost biblically illiterate in terms of specifics about theology, and in that regard Trump is no exception. What they tend to retain is, at most, a certain kind of Christian sensibility, basic lessons in values and behavior, and not much more.
That kind of doctrinal looseness can have some positive results. When Trump's daughter Ivanka married a Jew (real estate developer Jared Kushner) and then converted to Judaism in 2009 (via an Orthodox ceremony), Donald Trump was supportive of her decision. All the indications are that father and daughter Trump remain very close.
Helping here, one suspects, is that Ivanka married someone in the same line of work as her dad. The values and behavior that are most central to Donald Trump appear to come from that world, rather than the spiritual one. The key teacher in his life wasn't Norman Vincent Peale, but rather Trump's father, a hard-nosed businessman. Fred Trump wanted son Donald to enter the family real estate business, and so groomed him to succeed in that intensely competitive and materialistic world. What is so interesting about Donald Trump's religious background is that much of Norman Vincent Peale's message went along with Fred Trump's rather than against it. Trump is, in a way, a cosmic optimist, embarked on a quest to "make America great again." By that he seems to mean: making America more like it was when Donald Trump was growing up. Trump's life story is also Pealesque in the sense that Trump has pursued personal fulfillment intensely, achieving worldly success beyond the dreams of most people.
On the other hand, Trump has also come to embody values and behavior to which Peale would likely have objected. Peale was a native Midwesterner from Bellefontaine, Ohio, and a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan. He thought of himself as a moderate, theologically and otherwise, and had the warmth and friendliness so typical of people with his background. Trump's angry side (and his negativity toward immigrants especially), his egotism, his sometimes boorish behavior, and his excessive materialism would all have disappointed Peale, one suspects. So, too, would Trump's chauvinistic attitudes toward women, which seem much more like Hugh Heffner's than Norman Vincent Peale's.
What, then, does Donald Trump's religious background tell us about the likely extent of his appeal to Christian voters this fall? First, that he has enough exposure to Christianity so as not to seem entirely foreign, religiously speaking, to such voters. Second, that he is far from being strongly appealing to them. Third, that Christians for whom religion is the central thing in their lives will likely be more put off by him than those whose connection to Christianity is more limited. That last point is an important one, because many evangelical Christians see their faith as the driving force in their lives. Without a robust turnout from voters in that group, it is hard to see how Trump can win.
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The selection last week of Indiana Governor Mike Pence as the vice presidential candidate reflects that concern on the part of Trump and his aides. Pence, the onetime Catholic altar boy turned evangelical Protestant, connects very well with Christian conservatives, especially the most pro-life of them. Donald Trump now has an effective surrogate he can dispatch to speak to those kinds of voters. Pence's campaign style also nicely complements Trump's, in the sense that Pence renounced negative campaigning many years ago. He is as positive as Trump can be negative, and many conservative Christians will respond well to that quality in Pence's campaigning. Delegating the task of reaching such voters has only one real drawback: Most voters don't choose a president based on his or her running mate. And so it's not clear how much Pence can help, unless Trump himself tries harder to be the kind of candidate Norman Vincent Peale would have wanted him to be.
These Olympic games, for the first time ever, will feature an all-refugee team. They are athletes without a country. They'll always, on the other hand, have a nation. Spend a few moments perusing an old atlas to remember just how much countries come and go. While many citizens are delighted to represent a nation, it's possible to be less than proud of their former country.
Our identification with nation can be enduring. Jews are proof of this. But few people are content to completely subsume their affiliation with nation in order to identify with country, particularly if the country dishonors their nation. When discussing India's liberation from Britain, the viceroy and friend of Mahatma Gandhi, Lord Mountbatten, told Gandhi, "If we leave, there will be chaos." Gandhi's reply? "Yes, but it will be our chaos."
While speaking with university students during a visit to Gugulethu, South Africa, I asked how it felt, as Africans, to know that the world looks at their governments as corrupt and failing. The reply was, "At least you are paying attention," reflecting on how the same powers turned a blind eye to the pillaging of their continent, along with atrocities, under colonial rule. People do not want to part of a country that dishonors their nation.
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When Canadians refer to aboriginal peoples as "First Nations" and not "Indians" or "Native Americans," they are at the very least offering a gesture of respect. It's ennobling. Instead of questioning their Canadian patriotism, or calling them what they do not ask to be called, Canada chooses, on some level, to show respect. There are no "Eskimos," there, only "Inuit."
There rages a debate in the United States over whether we are a Christian nation. The answer has to be "no" but not for the usual reasons. We cannot be a Christian nation because we are, simply stated, no nation at all. We are a country of many nations, some of whom feel honored enough.
"Nation" is closely related to "ethnicity". To Jews we are goyim. Each year, during Yom Kippur, Jews read the story of Jonah, in their Scriptures. Jonah is the prophet whom G-d sent to get the attention of their enemy people, the Assyrians. Jonah, instead, traveled in the opposite direction, bearing national offense.
National offense can be a heavy burden and yet hard to release, especially if it's informed with long and tortuous histories. Jews remind themselves each year to release any national offense, and turn their hearts to the nations, the goyim.
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Refugees and exiles are manifestly country-less, but let us not gloss over the populations who reside within their countries to find themselves shamed. We have never been "one nation, under God", and will continue to come apart at the seams, not even being "one country," with so many grudges. If we want more people to express pride of country, we have to find the pathway to providing them with the strength to be proud. Maybe we need an American Day of Atonement so we can release these oh-so-heavy burdens.
After being stripped of his title and forbidden to leave the country, the late great Muhammad Ali watched the 1968 Olympics on television. In his memoir, he noted,
I saw George Foreman parade around the ring waving an American flag after his Olympic victory. Not that George usually went around waving American flags. I've never heard of him waving a flag before or since. But he had been put up to it to offset black athletes like Tommy Smith and Carlos Jones, who dramatized before the world their objections to American injustice with their Black Power salute. There was hardly a black or fair-minded white who did not admire Smith and Jones, or who did admire Foreman. And despite his considerable ability as a fighter, his image as an Uncle Tom stuck with him.
President Erdogan of Turkey is the last person on Earth, surely the last Middle East leader, that President Barack Obama wanted to have a fight with. But a fight he has, and this is just another indication that the entire American Middle East policy of the outgoing president is in shambles. It started with so much gusto and promise, and it was in Egypt and Turkey where President Obama embarked on his ''be nice to Muslims'' strategy. It was logical, it was different, it was original. And it was not without political courage. That said, the fact is, nearly eight years later, President Obama will not be welcome in either Cairo or Ankara nor Istanbul. And most probably in most other Middle East capitals, almost certainly in nearly any other Muslim state.
Let us start from the end. What exactly happened in Turkey over the weekend is not so clear to me, and I, for one, subscribe to the view, that Erdogan and his men had a wind of ''something'' about to happen and they were ready. Unlike the dwindling ranks of the Kemalists in the Turkish army and society, they had a clear cut vision of where they aimed to be, what Turkey should be, how to do it, and who are those who stand in the way. Those who aim big and dare accordingly, do usually win. The plotters had a lot of frustration, a sense of a collapsing legacy, that of the great Ataturk (the Father of the Turks -- meaning of the name -- originally Mustafa Kemal), but no coherent action plan and no unity. They executed poorly and they lost. It is not the end of the struggle, it is going to change though, it will be more desperate and will include violent terror activities. When people realize that their old world is crumbling, they tend to be extreme.
That said, where is the U.S. in all that? To start with, from the very beginning of the Obama presidency, it was a very wrong assumption which guided his Muslim strategy. This is that Muslims looked for the West as their salvation, no different than the mistake of the neo-cons prior to Iraq's invasion of 2003. There too, the self-delusion was, that it is a Western solution, called democracy , which the Iraqis are longing for, and will be happy to have it silver-plated to them straight from DC. Yes, Muslims do not automatically resent democracy, do not prefer oppression over liberation, do not "understand" only force. All these are insulting nonsense. But they want it done by themselves, in their way, according to their legacy, traditions and needs. It is not Barack Obama with his ringing rhetoric which they were waiting for. In the case of Turkey, it was Erdogan whom they waited for, NOT Ataturk anymore, NOT Obama, and also NOT Fathullah Gulen. Erdogan's allegations against Gulen seem to be far-fetched, cooked up, and demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the American system, of what democracy is like. Assuming that President Obama will humiliate himself and decide to extradite Gulen, can he really do it? He simply cannot, as there are judges in the U.S., and courts are independent. Go and sell this strange idea to Erdogan, whose government fired already nearly 3,000 judges. And they call it democracy there. Then there is the humiliation of the besieged 1,500 American servicemen in Incirlik where maybe as many as fifty nuclear weapons are stored. Turkey as an ally, or the theatre of the absurd? So, Turkey is no more a credible ally, Egypt is not, Libya, where America intervened from behind, is a name on the map, not a functioning state, so is Yemen. Iraq? Syria? If there is any coherent and well-defined American policy there, it is yet to be exposed. Saudi Arabia fumes over the Iran deal, while Iran itself makes a mockery of this very deal. And by far not the least, ally Israel is no more the favorite son of the American foreign policy, much to the joy of Welt and Mersheimer, the writers of the ridiculous diatribe against AIPAC running American Middle East policy. Well, PM Netanyahu was much less liked in the corridors of the White House than say President Erdogan is, but alas, the Arab and Muslim worlds still do not rally to the US.
It's Cleveland in July, when young (well, middle-aged) Republicans' thoughts turn to love. Love of Ronald Reagan, that is. As the Republican National Convention convenes to... ummm... enthusiastically nominate Donald Trump for President of the United States, look forward to speeches about the future being infused with the past as convention planners try to convince hold-out Republicans that Donald Trump is the Gipper reincarnated with even better hair.
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence started the trend last week when he compared Trump to Reagan during his first speech as the 2016 GOP VP nominee. "Donald Trump understands the frustrations and the hopes of the American people like no leader since Ronald Reagan," Pence said. He went on to explain. "I actually started in politics in the other party, but when I came of age I was inspired by the ideals and the eloquence of our 40th president and I became a Republican." Now, apparently, Pence is inspired by the ideals and eloquence of Donald Trump.
I'm no Reagan fan myself, but even I will concede there are some similarities. After all:
"Donald" rhymes with "Ronald."
President Reagan's "Western White House" was his beloved Santa Barbara ranch. Trump Steaks came from cows that once lived on a ranch.
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President Reagan signaled the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union when he went to Berlin and implored of his counterpart, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Donald Trump signaled the end of the Republican relationship with Latino voters when he went to Texas and proclaimed, "I will build a big, beautiful wall."
There's only one way to handle the GOP close-your-eyes-and-pretend-he's-Reagan-fest we are about to behold.
Drink. To excess. Make a game of it.
REAGAN: The Drinking Game.
It's perfect for any gathering of responsible Republicans, moderate Republicans, establishment Republicans, "socially liberal but fiscally conservative" Republicans, and even libertarians. Progressives and liberals will enjoy it too. Yes friends, as you buckle in to watch four days of "Mistake by the Lake," why not have a little fun.
Here's how you play...
WHAT YOU NEED
An ample supply of your favorite Trump Wine: It doesn't matter if you prefer the "medium bodied Bordeaux blend" Meritage, the Blanc de Blanc's notes of green apple, lemon, pear and brioche, or the "fresh" and "creamy" Chardonnay, with its "subtle notes of butterscotch and spice." What's important is that you have a lot of it on hand. A whole lot.
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THE RULES
OR
Mike Pence explain his love for Ronald Reagan and how this has translated into a love of Donald Trump
Just go ahead and DRINK THE WHOLE TIME PENCE IS TALKING, as he has obviously been drinking since Trump asked him to be VP.
THE WINNER
Today's youth are the future leaders of tomorrow. Pope John Paul II said, " The future starts today not tomorrow." I had the privilege of interviewing two incredible organizations, Give Us The Floor and PeerSpring, who are working to inspire, motivate and empower today's youth. Give Us The Floor and PeerSpring share in the mission to help empower today's youth and are working in their own unique way by reaching out to the community an making a difference to inspire.
Give Us The Floor is a teen based organization based in San Fransisco, California that was founded by Valerie Grison. Their mission is to " to create and support a safe and trustworthy environment where we, as teenagers, know that whatever challenge we struggle with, Give Us The Floor is the place where we will find peers that have faced or are facing the same challenges. This is a place where teens encourage, support each other, and share wisdom. A place where we understand that we share common challenges and that we are not alone." Give Us the Floor gives teens the outlet to express themselves, offer peer-to-peer support, reflection, critical analysis, leadership, career develop, cultural awareness and more.
PeerSpring is an educational technology company based in Santa Monica, California founded by Lee Fox that is working to inspire today's youth through their educational platforms and workshops. Their mission is to empower youth social entrepreneurs to " build 21st century leadership skills through project-based learning [while fostering] critical thinking, conflict resolution, collaboration, citizenship and credibility." PeerSpring works to identify and solve issues facing today's society, design and code technology for social change as well as foster networking opportunities for stakeholders and more.
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These two incredibly inspiring women are working to empower today's youth while suppling them with the tools and resources build leadership skills and succeed through peer based learning.
What inspired you to begin the mission of youth-empowerment?
Valerie Grison (Give Us The Floor): I was invited to the preview of the Oakland "WE Day" (Organized by Free The Children). The preview was taking place in the theater of Burton Academic High School. The adult guests were sitting in the front rows and the students were behind us. At some point during the event I turned back to look at the teens and right then was the moment that changed my life. The teens were holding banners. Among those banners was one that said: "We have the power to make a difference". Their eyes were full of hope and joy.
It was a revelation to me:
Yes, youth has the power to make a difference
Making a difference by helping others is fulfilling them, and it is showing them how great each of them can be.
I realized then that what would fulfill me much more than continuing my business career, was to help recreate this level of hope in many other teens' eyes.
I have always believed and known that the teenage years are a difficult and unbalanced period of life. The challenges they struggle with and the ways they handle this time period shape them into the adults they'll become. They need to be able to express themselves safely about their difficulties, supported by people they trust, those who understand them better than anybody else: other teens.
This mission became my present passion.
Lee Fox (PeerSpring): With today's technological advances, anyone -- at any age -- can become a subject-matter expert just by having a connection to the internet. I honestly believe the groundswell of peer-to-peer exchanges across mobile and social platforms is catapulting humankind into a new evolutionary leap. Did you know, for example, that 72% of high school students and 64% of college students want to start their own business? My inspiration to work in the youth empowerment space largely grew out of "noticing." I noticed there weren't many support systems in place for young innovators. I noticed micro-entrepreneurs were born at younger and younger ages.I noticed non-profits were struggling to give youth volunteer activities that were meaningful. I noticed schools were looking for better ways to incorporate technology into their learning spaces. Out of this noticing, I recently launched PeerSpring.
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How do you empower young people to succeed and follow their passions in a positive way?
Valerie Grison (Give Us The Floor): Give Us The Floor's vision is:
If teenagers can share their difficulties freely and safely with their peers, then there won't be any more stigmas or taboo subjects for them to struggle with, and they would believe in themselves and in their future.
Give Us The Floor is "by teens - for teens".
It is a unique space designed by teens, for teens where they help each other and share their concerns and experiences.
First, teens (ages 13 - 19) choose a role within the organization:
Ambassador
Blogger
Creative Team (photographer, filmmaker, artist)
STEAM Team (Science, Tech, Engineering, Art, Math)
Social Media Team
Then they address and share the challenges they face by collaborating on media-based creations. This enables them to creatively express themselves about what they face while also seeing that within this safe, supportive, collaborative environment, they are not alone. As a result, they have built a very supportive teen-led community.
Teens are also supported by the adult team, who provide resources, facilitate collaborative Google Hangout meetings online to connect teens in different locations, and they offer free workshops with professionals to help build their skills in the areas that interest them.
You can see examples on our Teens' Voices page. Some of the challenges teens have addressed include: anxiety, abuse, bullying, beauty standards, stereotypes, relationship issues, racism, and struggles with self-esteem.
They also take on other responsibilities within Give Us The Floor:
Get trained as a discussion leader to be even better at supporting your peers during casual discussions or while creating projects.
Create social media posts to show how teens are facing challenges
Help put on events that raise awareness and amplify teens' voices
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Lee Fox (PeerSpring): At PeerSpring, we use the tool of storytelling to educate and empower young people to find and follow their passions. We know that in order to ignite human potential, youth need to be given a platform where they can matter. It's very powerful to see a "peer" making incredible advances in a field or area of study you care about and realize, "oh really?!?!? I bet I could do that too!" Furthermore, when these stories are weaved into the framework of a classroom, both students and faculty have an opportunity to learn about the cutting-edge advances of our economic, social and environmental challenges which might otherwise never be discussed in the halls of academia. Tapping into the genius of our youth as change-makers (and not just as students) is the best way to ensure they can master the skills for 21st century leadership and global workforce readiness!
What are some ways that young people can connect, feel empowered and network with each other?
Valerie Grison (Give Us The Floor): It depends on how large they want to have an impact:
A small group of friends can implement support within their group, independently from any organization. They can have a "pact" that stipules that they will not gossip about the other members of the group, and that they will be there for each other.
They can schedule a more formal weekly meeting where they talk about their struggles and share their thoughts and wisdom.
If they'd like to do this but don't know how to make it happen, they can join Give Us The Floor: we give them support for their group to work smoothly. When they feel confident enough, they can decide to stay or leave Give Us The Floor. This is absolutely fine.
They can join a youth organization that uses an art form or activity they like. This is a good way to connect when you have the same interest(s) and passion.
If they want to have a bigger impact on their peers, they can join an organization that supports a cause.
If they feel lonely, isolated, or if they want to help other teens, then the best way is to join a positive and supportive organization like Give Us The Floor.
Lee Fox (PeerSpring): Young people have unlimited ways in which they can connect, feel empowered and network with each other. Social technologies are perhaps the easiest place to start. Anyone who focuses on growing followers can become their own media channel, and there are "social media celebrities" on every platform with millions of followers who might be interested in helping. Almost 90 percent of American teens say they use at least one social media site, and 71 percent of teens say they use at least two sites. Social media empowers young people to create and promote their own content, but it also makes it easy to find peers who are in the same areas of interest. For youth who are drawn to experiencing things IRL (in real life), there are also lots of student clubs, many of which are cross-campus. One teen we have worked with, Ziad Ahmed, has close to 120 representatives in schools around the world, advocating for his organization's campaigns. Teen programs across libraries nationwide are also highly interested in bringing young people together, and so if you're an enterprising youth, you may be able to get free meeting spaces and support from your local library.
What advise can you give to today's youth?
Valerie Grison (Give Us The Floor): Have faith in yourself: You have some great talent but it might take time to find what you enjoy doing. Very often, your talent is different than your friends' talents or the people around you. Don't try to compare yourself. Try to find the happy and empowered "you". Sometimes the journey is long and not easy. But it is worth it.
You have the right to change what you focus on and what you're passionate about throughout your life. It is predicted that the current generation of teens will have between 4 and 5 different careers during their lifetimes. There are plenty of opportunities to explore and change your mind. I, myself, have followed that path: studying physics, working in film production, advertising, the tech industry and now running a nonprofit for adolescents. And every period was great and fun!
If you feel lonely, don't extract yourself even more from the world, try to find an organization with a supportive community of peers, a place where you feel welcome by the members and where you can share with them.
Trust your real friends. If you'd like them to help you, start by asking them how you can help them.
To me, the current generation of teens is the most curious, smart, and open generation, so embrace your power and superiority!
Lee Fox (PeerSpring): (i) There are other people out there seeking to solve the same problem you are focused on. Find them. Reach out. Ask lots of questions. Learn. (ii) You're authentic voice is powerful enough. Becoming an "expert" doesn't happen overnight, but people will nevertheless respond to your posts if you engage them in "conversation." With social media, for example, you can use #hashtags and @ influencers to increase response rates. (iii) Be bigger than "one." Having a co-founder or team of people with whom you can build your vision increases the chance of success. Finding a mentor who has years of experience can also open doors. (iv) Raise money. Crowdsourcing is an easy way to build some capital. More importantly, it shows prospective partners that you have a market. (v) Reach past your personal network. Organizations (even global enterprises) may be interested in working with youth. Don't be afraid to reach out and explore a potential partnership. (vi) Stay in touch! Use a newsletter, blog or micro-blog to keep people engaged and up-to-date. Your network is everything.
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How can others support your cause?
Valerie Grison (Give Us The Floor): Young people:
Spread the word about Give Us The Floor among your friends and peers, and share our social media posts
Regardless of where you live in the U.S., you can join Give Us The Floor to belong to a supportive, teen-led community
Adults & Parents
Donate
Volunteer your time to lead a workshop, sharing your expertise with our team of teens (contact: kara@giveusthefloor.org)
If you are an educator who works with teens, you can help start a Give Us The Floor Club in your school with a group of interested teens. (School Club Advisors receive a stipend for their time.)
You can find out more about Give Us The Floor on our website: www.giveusthefloor.org
Check out our Teens' Voices page where we publish our teens' inspiring creations: www.gutf.us
By: Omar Bawa
Choosing the right career is a journey. Your choice is not final when your teacher asks you your dream job, nor when you select your major at university; nor when you accept your first job offer. Every experience you have, person you meet, book you read, and film you watch guides your choice. It's likely that you will pursue many paths before you find the right one. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average person holds ten different jobs before age forty.
At 16, I never imagined doing what I do today. My idea of a perfect job evolved from particle physicist to humanitarian lawyer to entrepreneur. Today, at 24, I am the founder and head of product at a technology startup shaping the future of learning. I did not just wake up one day with a 10-year plan for my future. I simply kept doing what I loved, and that meant changing what I did when what I loved changed.
My parents were the first to play a big role in influencing my dreams. My father served the UNHCR to help refugees and my mother worked for the Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDs, TB and Malaria. They devoted their lives to helping others. While my brother and I were born in Switzerland, thanks to our parents, we traveled and witnessed things that were hard to see, like children our age at refugee camps in Iran and the tsunami's devastation of our village in Sri Lanka. We learned to see the world as a whole, not countries separated by borders. We were inspired to make a meaningful impact on the world. At school, this encouraged me to participate in MUN, set up an association called the Make a Difference Society and organize an event on World AIDs Day to raise awareness and raise over USD 15,000 for an orphanage in Ghana.
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My physics teacher was the next to influence my journey. I always loved math and science. I became obsessed with renewable energy and space exploration. My teacher, an applied physicist at CERN, the largest particle physics laboratory in the world, noticed me and helped fuel my passion. Sadly, she got promoted out of the classroom and into the administration. I no longer benefited from her guidance and soon other interests took center stage.
Sources of Inspiration
Inspiration can come from anywhere. I read a book recommended by my mother - The Street Lawyer - the story of a lawyer who quits a big firm to protect the rights of the homeless. After turning the final page, I decided that I could make a positive impact if I became a lawyer. My English teacher, a former lawyer from Oxford University, advised me. The summer after graduating high school, I interned for an NGO at UN Human Rights Council and studied International Humanitarian Law at the International Institute of Humanitarian Law. I then pursued Law at the University of Geneva.
My interest in human rights eventually sparked an obsession to learn about other global issues. Before long, I read books like Mountains Beyond Mountains, which narrates a Harvard doctor's journey to cure the world, and watched films like Sharkwater about the hundreds of millions of sharks killed every year. It was overwhelming. I wanted to address every challenge from climate change to poverty. So I started a website called Endignorance to get people informed, inspired and involved. The community was engaged but I realised that to create impact on a massive scale, we needed to provide people a direct incentive to do good.
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My brother joined me to pivot Endignorance into Goodwall : a social network dedicated to help high school students showcase their achievements to connect with each other, stand out when applying to university and win scholarships. By providing students with a clear incentive to create value to society, we started fulfilling our vision. Every day, students on Goodwall raise funds for relief efforts, volunteer for charities and pursue their passions. Already, over half a million students from 30,000 schools in 154 countries benefit from Goodwall.
Everyone wants to leave their mark on the world. They want to be satisfied with what they are doing each and every day. My journey so far has taught me that there is no direct, or correct path. I never thought that my love for physics would one-day make technical brainstorms with engineers a pleasure or that my legal education would make problem-solving with lawyers efficient or that my drive to make a difference would wake me up everyday. While your dream today might not be your dream tomorrow, every lesson you learn pursuing your dream today will help you achieve your dreams tomorrow.
"Do not look at the trees, look at the forest." - Ms. Edward, teacher
For more on GenDIY:
Omar Bawa, 24, is the Founder and Head of Product at Goodwall. Follow him on Twitter:@omarbawa.
By Mollie West
Imagine you've just received a job offer. Congratulations! If you're like most people, the first question on your mind is, "Wait? How do I know if I'll like this job?" All you have is an offer letter and a job description with policies and procedures. How can you understand an organization's culture from the outside? My favorite definition of culture comes from Airbnb's Brian Chesky: "Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with passion."
According to MIT culture scholar Edgar Schein, there are three ways to understand culture: 1) Artifacts--which are visible things like what people wear to work; 2) Beliefs and values--which are more invisible, like valuing consensus when making decisions; and 3) Basic underlying assumptions, which are usually unconscious, like a belief that you should hire people like yourself. So how can you find these out?
First, I recommend putting aside the letter and description. Start doing some Harriett-the-Spy style research and get curious! First, think back to your visit to the office during your last interview. (Even better, see if you can come back to the office for an informal visit or a lunch before you have to make a decision on your offer.) Within the office, scan for the following: what are people wearing? When do they arrive in the morning? Do people normally ask questions and interact with co-workers by sending an email or by walking to each other's desks? What is considered hero behavior within the organization? Just as important, what is considered sinner behavior? Imagine you're a detective trying to describe the organization in your spy notebook.
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What you're looking for are the norms of the organization. Just a few years ago, you'd never find norms actually written down anywhere. They remained unsaid and intangible. But as organizations have started becoming smart about sharing their cultures, some organizations have started writing down their cultural norms. This is helpful for your next step: searching for norms.
Second, ask your contacts in the organization to send you anything the organization has published about its culture. Additionally, dig around online and see what you can find. In 2009, Netflix published its seminal culture deck on slideshare.net. By publishing this deck, Netflix went down in the culture hall of fame. Ostensibly this deck was meant for internal use only, but the public eagerly browsed through the company's culture philosophy. Suddenly, anyone on the Internet could read about how Netflix employees communicated, requested vacation time, and got promoted. It satisfied our curiosity about what it's really like to work there.
Since 2009, many more companies have followed Netflix's lead, and are publishing culture decks, codes, manifestos, and handbooks. For example, Big Spaceship, a Brooklyn-based digital creative agency, created a different kind of employee manual: one that "will help you begin to understand our values and the way we make decisions as a team and as a company. Our manual belongs to you. Read it. Share it. Change it." Facebook published its Little Red Book, a manifesto about the company's culture. The only way to see all of Facebook's Little Red Book is to work at Facebook (and legend has it that it appeared overnight on all employees' desks across all offices), but the book's designer shared a sneak peek on his website. IDEO published its values in the Little Book of IDEO. You can read the digital book online, and all employees get a physical copy of the illustrated book.
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Third, connect with a couple of people from across disparate parts of the organization via email, LinkedIn, or phone. Specifically ask these people what their role is and what team they are on. This can reveal the internal power dynamics of an organization. For example, at Pixar, even the accountants are called "movie makers." As Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull explains in his book Creativity, Inc., if I asked an accountant what her role at Pixar is, she would say, "I'm a movie maker who works in accounting." This reveals that Pixar's structure is incredibly flat and purpose-driven. Similarly, when people at Square (the credit card processing company) meet other employees at Square whom they haven't met yet, instead of asking, "What do you do here?" or "What is your role?" they ask "What team are you on?" At Square, teams trump individual titles. This reveals how important teams are to Square's structure.
Fourth, ask your contacts about lunchtime. This is a particularly telling question because it reveals how people interact outside of project or team norms. In an interview on LinkedIn Pulse, an engineer who has worked at Microsoft, Apple, Google, Adobe, and Facebook, said that he always asks his interviewers, "Do they eat lunch as a team? At Apple, for example, because of the levels of secrecy, you can't talk to anyone else within the company about work except your team, so teams tend to eat together. At places like Facebook with free food all of the time, people tend to eat by themselves or with some friends they make there. How the company does things will determine how you will interact with people in general."
Lastly, ask your contacts at the organization one important final question. Wharton Psychology Professor Adam Grant (author of Give and Take and The Originals) has developed a few questions to elicit revealing stories about an organization. In an article in The New York Times, Grant reveals the one question that can instantly tell you volumes about a company's culture: "Tell me a story about something that would only happen here." Grant presents four types of common stories that follow from this question, and what they might mean about a company. The stories will help you answer three questions, he says: "First is justice: Is this a fair place? Second is security: Is it safe to work here? Third is control: Can I shape my destiny and have influence in this organization?"
All of these questions will help you answer your million-dollar question: what is the culture of this place actually like?
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Howard Broadman, a lawyer and retired judge from California, knows his grandson, Quinn, will probably one day require a kidney transplant.
By the time Quinn needs his help, however, Broadman said he may be dead or too old to donate a healthy organ.
"I approached UCLA and asked, 'Why don't I give a kidney to someone who needs it now, then get a voucher for my grandson to use when he needs a transplant in the future?' And that's just what we did," Broadman said in a statement.
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How the program works
Broadman worked with Dr. Jeffrey Veale, a transplant surgeon who helped initiate the program at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center.
The voucher program is relatively simple.
A person donates their kidney and selects a recipient for a future donation.
The recipient receives a voucher that can be used if they need a living kidney donation. Living kidney donations are made when a person who is alive donates one of their two kidneys and goes on living with the remaining one.
The program could change the face of kidney donation in the United States, bringing more donors to the operating table.
Essentially, you donate when it is convenient and others receive if it's necessary, Veale told Healthline.
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The American Society of Transplant Surgeons has endorsed the program, which is being used at nine other transplant programs across the United States under the umbrella of the National Kidney Registry (NKR).
There are 26 million people with chronic kidney disease in the United States. Some may progress to end-stage renal disease and would be ideal candidates for transplant, the National Kidney Foundation reports.
There also are 500,000 people in the U.S. with a functioning transplanted kidney. The new organ typically lasts 10 to 20 years.
Risks, logistics, and legalities
Ruthanne Leishman, who heads up the Kidney Paired Donation program for United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), said transplant surgery comes with pain and a risk of infection.
There is, however, only a low risk of death.
There is a waiting list for deceased donations but not for living donations, Leishman said. Her organization manages deceased donor allocation on behalf of the Health Resources and Services Administration, an arm of the Department of Health and Human Services.
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Unlike donations from the deceased, which only go through UNOS, living donations go through a variety of organizations such as the NKR.
Veale told Healthline that a donor can add up to five people onto a voucher. Potential recipients must have kidney disease and the voucher can be used only by the first person who needs it.
For some families with genetic polycystic kidney disease, they usually know someone will need a transplant in the future, so being able to name multiple possible recipients can be helpful.
"Whoever would need the transplant first, the voucher would go to that person," Veale said.
Vouchers are not transferable and they expire when the donor passes away. In that case, if the recipient does not use it, the donation becomes altruistic, meaning it would go to a stranger instead of a specified recipient.
Vouchers cannot be sold to another person and cannot be withdrawn.
To make sure the recipient is who they say they are, doctors complete human leukocyte antigen (HLA) typing and record the recipient's blood type -- a sort of blood fingerprinting system.
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The future of kidney donation
Veale said he hopes the program may spur more altruistic donations, too.
"The demand for kidney transplant is tremendous," Veale said. "For the first time in history we could actually start reducing the waiting [deceased donor] list."
Living organ donation is essential to increase the supply of available organs, and help more than 100,000 Americans waiting for a transplant, said Kevin Longino, chief executive officer of the National Kidney Foundation.
In 2014, there were 5,538 living donor kidney transplants in the United States.
"The voucher program through UCLA is an interesting idea that builds upon paired donor exchange, although many more details need to be unveiled, such as how the voucher program will be monitored and enforced, to best protect the needs of the donor and recipient," Longino told Healthline.
Dr. Tim Taber, transplant nephrologist and the medical director for the kidney transplant program at Indiana University Health, said it would be interesting if university-affiliated hospitals could run similar programs on their own without a national organization.
Universities may be more likely to be around in the future to honor vouchers for recipients getting kidneys decades down the road.
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"You have to give to an organization that you know will be there in time," he said.
Other than that, Taber thinks that the program will get more kidneys into the system, which is clearly needed as 13 people die each day waiting for a transplant.
For Broadman, the program has been rewarding -- mainly because he can help his grandson.
"I may not even be here when he realizes it, but I changed his life," he said. "It doesn't get much better than that."
By Kristen Fischer
Simon Williams , Flickr under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license
One year ago today, I injected my right leg with my first dose of testosterone. Swab leg, swab vial, pull the juice, fill leg, massage. I've done this every Tuesday since; I call it Testosterone Tuesday. A lot has happened in these last 12 months.
Suicide. Skylar Lee, a 16-year-old trans boy who lived in Madison, Wisconsin, committed suicide. Sixteen. He was an activist. He was a youth leader for the GSA Network. He was a writer. And he wasn't the only one. Earlier in the year, Kyler Prescott took his life. He was a 14-year-old trans boy. Many others did last year:
Nationwide, Prescott is the 11th reported suicide of a transgender youth this year, in an "epidemic" that trans advocates say sees far more casualties than make headlines. Earlier this month, 15-year-old Cameron Langrell of Racine, Wis., took her own life just days after coming out as trans on social media. The highly publicized suicides of 18-year-old Charlotte, N.C., activist Blake Brockington, as well as that of 17-year-old trans girl Leelah Alcorn in Union Township, Ohio, last December, saw hundreds of thousands mourning worldwide.
These are the ones who were reported. Rest.
Murder. According to this headline, 2015 saw the most transgender people reported murdered in one year than any other year -- 23. Reported. So far in 2016, 14 people worldwide have been reported murdered. Reported. They were mostly trans women of color. We're only halfway through the year.
Watch this:
The bathroom. North Carolina politicians lost their damn minds and voted to overturn a local LGBTQ+ anti-discrimination bill thus forcing trans and gender-non-conforming people to use the bathroom that coincides with their sex. Fools. To be clear, NC wasn't the first state to do this, nor was it the last. Perhaps it was the aggression with which it was enacted: the governor called an emergency session and pols ran back to vote. From The Atlantic:
Legislators returned to the state house to overrule a local ordinance in Charlotte banning discrimination against LGBT people. A bill written for that purpose passed Wednesday evening and was signed by Governor Pat McCrory, a Republican. In the House, every Republican and 11 Democrats backed the bill. In the Senate, Democrats walked out when a vote was called, resulting in a 32-0 passage by Republicans. The law not only overturns Charlotte's ban: It also prevents any local governments from passing their own non-discrimination ordinances, mandates that students in the state's schools use bathrooms corresponding to the gender on their birth certificate, and prevents cities from enacting minimum wages higher than the state's.
People so pissed about people using public facilities to expel waste are like dogs who suddenly discover a chew toy and can't let go. Musicians piled on the response train, with some either refusing to play in North Carolina or donating concert proceeds to LGBTQ+ groups. Companies got pissed, too. All kinds of them. Apple, GE, Nike, et cetera.
It's not over yet. The struggle to eradicate transphobia, homophobia and racism is bigger than the oppressor's bitter alligator tears.
Finally, President Obama wasn't having it and decided to offer some guidance on the issue: Basically, youth in school can use the bathroom of their choice or funding will dry up. States aren't happy about that, as you can imagine. Just last Friday, 10 of them thought it'd be a good idea to sue for the right to prevent kids from using facilities: Nebraska, Arkansas, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming. Pfft.
The military. On July 1, Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced that the United States can no longer ban transgender people from serving in the military. Here's what he had to say on the matter:
I am announcing today that we are ending the ban on transgender Americans in the United States military. Effective immediately, transgender Americans can serve openly, and they no longer can be discharged or otherwise separated from the military just for being transgender.
This year. It's not over yet. The struggle to eradicate transphobia, homophobia and racism is bigger than the oppressor's bitter alligator tears. Their unfounded and ignorant fears. And my responsibility to that struggle, my role as defined by the virtue of my identities, is much larger than what fits in my syringe each week. I wear it on my body and express it on my tongue. And I do it for those who came long before me and for those voices who have yet to be, or can't be, heard.
A version of this post originally appeared on Medium.
___________________
This article was originally posted on Inverse.
Let's kick things off with some depressing news first. Although the prospect of taking a vacay in space is thrilling, it's also unrealistic -- at least for the remainder of this century. Sure, there are reusable rockets and tourism-fitted spacecraft, but we're still decades away from delighting in weightlessness.
So if you can't bring people to space, the next best thing is to bring space to people -- through a combination of virtual and augmented reality.
Ben Grossmann is one of the nation's top video effects specialists. Given the kinds of breakthroughs in technology behind the development of artificial worlds that looked remarkably close to the real thing, he decided to help found a company that would focus on virtual reality and augmented reality services.
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That's how Ben Grossmann's venture Magnopus came into being. Grossmann is no stranger to the future of video: He's one of the nation's top video effects specialists and has an Academy Award to his name. But Grossmann wanted to move beyond film into offering a totally different experience for audiences.
On Wednesday afternoon at the International Space Station R&D Conference 2016, Grossmann described what VR and AR meant for the future of space travel and exploration.
In short: The technology is sick. Grossmann talked about how, in 2004, it took more than an hour for clusters of computers to render a single VR frame. Now, that performance rate for a single system is down to about 60 to 90 frames per second. And we've reached a point where VR and AR "transcend your body's ability to feel that it's fake," said Grossmann. "It feels real."
There are two major ways to use VR and AR to allow people to experience space. You can either capture a scene and render in a 3D interactive environment. Or you can create an entirely new world from scratch.
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In the first instance, you don't even have to rely on static images. Grossmann showed off a wicked-cool video of a 360-degree camera used to film the Space Shuttle Endeavor Crew several years ago. If you can manage to livestream a feed of the video back down to Earth and into VR and AR headsets, they could experience the spacecraft and the crew as if they were there. "There's an impression that you are observing what somebody else is doing," said Grossmann. "You forget very quickly that you're not sitting right there [away from the scene]." You're wearing a headset, but it feels like you're standing in front of someone who is on this world -- or off.
The more difficult endeavor is to create a whole world from scratch. Grossmann and his team turn to the advances made in game engine technology to create a simulated experience. He calls VR and AR "the intersection of Hollywood and video games," allowing people to go where they've never been before. (Spoiler alert: Everyone wants to go to space.)
A scene from a space station VR environment Grossmann and his colleagues have developed
VR and AR aren't exactly brand new ideas for NASA. Since 1990, NASA has used this kind of technology to train astronauts for tethered and untethered spacewalk activity. The agency recently teamed up with Microsoft to create Hololens-assisted virtual tours of Mars -- for both the public and for scientists -- using images taken by the Curiosity rover.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect that comes along with VR and AR experiences of space environments isn't just the ability to see space, but feel space as well. "When you experience space in a VR state, your body starts to lose weight," said Grossmann. (Not literally, of course, but your body begins to forget it's in a place where gravity exists, which is pretty trippy.) "You start to forget where your feet and hands are, and your brain begins to mimic weightlessness."
It's only a matter of time before VR and AR become a bigger focus of the way space is shared with the rest of the world. If you think the images NASA releases are amazing, just wait to get enraptured by the chance to drown in a 3D world of them from inside an Oculus Rift.
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Even when it is over, that dramatic weather phenomenon we call El Nino is never quite over. Its impacts, so often devastating to millions, can be felt for years to come. Frequently El Nino is followed by La Nina, which can turn droughts into floods and floods into droughts, often at the worst possible time for the millions already coping with losing their homes and their livelihoods. And just as so many of them are getting back on their feet, El Nino returns to wreak havoc all over again.
That's one of the unique hallmarks of El Nino: arriving once every three to seven years, it is eminently predictable. And it is that predictability that may offer us the key to better coping with its impact.
I can offer a perfect example: earlier this month I traveled to Ethiopia, a country that has suffered the ravages of this year's El Nino particularly severely. El Nino has brought with it devastating drought to the country, leaving more than ten million people in need of food aid. This could be far worse, though, since Ethiopia has itself long understood the need to be prepared and has made great progress in recent decades. Around the world, 60 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance due to drought, flooding and other extreme weather events.
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But I met a community of farmers that has weathered the Ethiopian drought through a surprisingly simple tool: insurance. My organization, the United Nations Development Programme, along with the Global Environment Facility, helped several communities take out a form of insurance against the loss of their crops, and helped them to pay their premiums.
When El Nino wrecked their crops, their insurance paid out. While their counterparts in neighboring districts were forced to seek humanitarian support, the people I met were not just weathering the storm, they were thriving. They told me they felt wealthier and were looking forward to investing a modest financial surplus in their farms once the drought had passed.
The farmers I met in Ethiopia were prepared. They did not know exactly when El Nino would arrive or how strong its impact might be this time around, but that did not stop them from preparing for the worst. And they did not just take out an insurance policy. With the help of the Government, they also undertook land management and were involved in early warning systems. In a sense, it was their willingness to prepare themselves that was their best insurance against El Nino.
And it is being prepared that can be the strongest form of insurance for all of the millions of people in dozens of countries that lie in the path of each and every El Nino. Being prepared does not necessarily mean literally taking out an insurance policy. There are almost as many ways to prepare for devastating weather effects as there are countries affected, from early-warning systems to comprehensive national preparedness plans.
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Investing in preparation and risk reduction protects lives and livelihoods, yet the humanitarian system is overwhelmingly focused on responding to disasters. Only 40 cents in every USD 100 spent on aid goes to disaster risk reduction, yet disasters have cost developing countries USD one trillion in the past two decades.
The point is, preparation of any kind is a simple but effective form of insurance that can help any community weather the impact of a natural phenomenon like El Nino. But preparation does not begin and end with El Nino. As the impacts of climate change are felt throughout the world, the need to prepare for its impacts become ever more pressing.
Of course, insurance of any kind only works if you take it out before a natural disaster, not afterwards. That may seem painfully obvious, but all too often we wait until after the impacts of phenomena like El Nino have been felt before we act. Humanitarian aid is, of course, crucial but cutting off the need for such aid in the first place is obviously better. As so many of our mothers used to say, prevention is better than cure.
That's why there is no time to wait in preparing ourselves for the next El Nino. It could be here in as little as three years. It will certainly arrive again in under a decade. And even before then, we will see the growing impact of climate change in so many regions and countries - some of which suffer the impacts of El Nino and many of which do not.
Today we will gather here at the United Nations in New York to seek answers to El Nino now and in the future. Less than a year ago, we agreed on a set of Global Goals and vowed to "leave no one behind". But we will never achieve our goals if crises like El Nino are allowed to wipe out gains and return us to square one every few years.
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"If you were to ask me where I'm from, I would say I'm from Internet," says Sudanese political cartoonist Khalid Albaih. "Identity is a deep question - with no single answer. It's really hard to be a 30-year old living with an identity crisis. I'm African yet I'm Arab and Muslim. Living in Sudan I lived under a government where Arabs and Muslims ruled - yet most of Sudan is not Arab or Muslim. I've lived as an oppressor and as an oppressed."
As I decipher my interview notes with Khalid, death tolls from the attacks in Nice, France keep rising, and Turkey lives through a coup replaying scenes from so many other coup d'etat throughout the Middle East in recent memory.
What's even more striking is the parallel's of the most recent news reflected in Khalid's witty, thought provoking, stark political cartoons ranging from 2016 U.S. presidential elections, to race relations in America, to injustice in Sudan and throughout the Arab world.
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Born in Romania to a family of Sudanese diplomat and social justice activist, Khalid Albaih grew up in Sudan but has lived in exile in Doha, Qatar for the last 27 years. Politics have been front and center in Khalid's daily life where oppression and oppressive government actions have been impossible to ignore. That's the very reason, Khalid believes, "revolutions happen in the Arab world and online."
The "generational identity problem" Khalid says is eased in Qatar where the population constitutes different nationalities and religions living in relative harmony. His fluency in various Arabic dialects allows him to weave through Egyptian, Lebanese, Sudanese and many other Arab communities with ease - sharing a common denominator.
"We're all in Qatar living in exile because we can't get simple rights in our own countries - and here everyone lives safety away from politics.. "
Trained as an interior architect and engineer, Khalid's first love was always art. But in the Arab world, studying art or aiming for an art degree is not a conventional career choice as say engineering.
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A fatigued Khalid professes that since the start of the "Arab Spring" uprisings in 2011 he hasn't had a good night's sleep. In fact, the uprisings brought his cartoons to the streets of Cairo (Egypt) and Sana'a (Yemen) as his work was stenciled and reproduced on city walls.
Working during the day as head of installations and design for public art in Qatar Museums Authority, Khalid spends his evenings and nights drawing, and on the Internet connecting and engaging with other artists in the Arab world and the world, and with thousands of his Facebook followers on "Khartoon!" a smart word play on "cartoon" and the capital city of Sudan, Khartoum, where he lived.
A prolific cartoonist, Khalid's works have been exhibited throughout Europe, U.S., Canada and the Middle East. He's often invited to speak, exhibit, and has been awarded residencies as with the Oak Institute for the Study of International Human Rights at Colby College where he's been selected as the 2016 Human Rights Fellow.
It all started at Childhood
Khalid's love and intrigue with cartoons started in childhood reading translated DC and Marvel comic books with white superheroes saving the day - a figurative symbolism absent in his Arab world. Moving to Doha exposed the young Khalid to the world of political cartoons like those in Sabah Al kheir magazine his father read. For the first time, Khalid was exposed to sharp criticisms and opinions expressed visually - and reaching across borders and ideology - and making an immediate impact.
Khalid's journey as a political cartoonist embarked when he was a 21 year-old university student at Ajman University of Science and Technology, where he received his B.A. in interior design engineering. Khalid drew a series of cartoons reflective of the candidates in the student elections - they were a hit, the students identified with his quick, witty visual statements.
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By the time he was 24 and searching for a job, working as a cartoonist was not an option. But turmoil in Sudan inspired him to write his thoughts. But his dyslexia made it challenging for him to freely express thoughts in written words.
The "Internet" became his savior, the equalizer empowering artists like him, and the rest of in the Arab world, to freely express and interact in real-time.
Camp
"Arabs have a hard time getting their rights," Khalid states, "So it's inevitable that the powers that oppress will someday be the oppressed."
By 2008, Khalid started actively applying for newspaper jobs as a cartoonist. Most editors rejected his work, unable to find it humorous and worried that his work would put their publication at risk.
That's when Khalid adopted a new homeland - the Internet.
"The Internet and social media became my first platform to publish without being associated with a publisher or an editor."
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And it was the Internet that opened a new means for Khalid to connect with young and talented artists throughout the Arab world and around the world - especially at the dawn of the "Arab Spring" where the Arab world exploded with expressions of grievance, distraught, demanding justice and freedom of expression. The Internet became the best platform to express, engage, and interact across borders and exchange ideas and opinions without the fear factor. It helped open the threshold to pass through the fears set by oppressive governments to hinder free expressions.
Behind ISIS
"The Arab world where graffiti was never allowed, was suddenly seeing walls covered with political thoughts by some very talented artists who were adopting the walls as their canvas, breaking through the barriers of fear and feeling free for the first time. It was a truly incredible ride of ups and downs. It was the time to not lose hope - the time to channel pain."
Khalid rode that thrilling ride - finding a massive audience on the Internet hungry for his thoughts and his political cartoons, which posed questions - incited conversations in a public space where his audience interacted and was always willing to discuss, ponder, listen and learn.
While in the west, Khalid says, citizens were naive (until the Snowden revelations) about the privacy factor of the social media, in the Arab world it was a given that common citizens "were spied upon and watched and that Facebook and Google provided private information to the governments."
"We know that we are under surveillance at all times - and that anything we say online can kill you."
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While he is cautious and "smart" about what he posts, he emphasizes:
"We feel very empowered - because we know that all governments are scared of what we have to say - and what we draw."
Khalid is well aware that his political cartoons are making an impact, and distressing government officials across the Middle East.
"My cartoons are my new weapons to talk back to those who are trying to silence us."
In 2014, when Khalid was invited to be part of an arts residency in Egypt, he was arrested upon arrival to Egypt and interrogated for hours. One of the frequently asked questions by his interrogators was whether he was going draw a cartoon about his interrogation. When he applied for a U.S. visa he waited for seven months for approval and upon entry into the U.S. was held and interrogated for two hours. He did manage to participate, however, as part of the culturunners program - an independent arts organization, which supports "artists' journeys and production across physical and ideological borders and collaborates with traveling artists to share stories and create art across contested borders." Khalid joined other artists from the Middle East, traveling in a fitted RV across America sharing his thoughts on human rights violations, race issues, discrimination and oppression. Issues Khalid has lived through all his life.
"Art is about disturbing the comfortable. Cartoons are the best way to accomplish this because you don't have to be a professor, an intellectual, or attend a museum to understand the meaning of a cartoon."
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While the Internet has given Khalid unimagined freedom, he is aware of its consequences as well. As a father of two toddlers he respects his wife's advice as his editor and censor - ensuring that his cartoons ignite conversation not insult.
Ultimately, Khalid's cartoons ask a question - forcing the viewer to think about the issue at hand, opening doors to further discussions and other perspectives. He considers Cartooning as his "calling" and mission - and a way to ensure that his children grow up living at home, not as refugees, and be treated as human beings, in a normal world.
"Our generation is tasked with the mission to solve this world's problems. The world has become a village - getting smaller - and hatred in a small place makes for a disaster. We must come to terms with the fact that we share as much similarities as differences."
Khalid hopes to someday return to Sudan where he can flourish as an artist and help bring a different perspective to his homeland based on his vast experiences and travels. With his father already back in Sudan and teaching at a university, he feels that the country is slowly opening up to a "breath of fresh air."
And it is in Sudan where he is building the steppingstones to a future he hopes to have, by building an actual center for his online community - Khartoum Contemporary Art Centre, involving western artists to share their works and thoughts with Sudanese and other artists from around the world. But he admits it's a long journey, and "hard work to get the world's attention with your art. We need a lot of funding to make this a reality."
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Khalid Albaih's love for his homeland is undeniable - his eyes glitter as he talks about his future plans of returning to his homeland.
"Did you know that Sudan has the most pyramids than any other country?"
No, I admit I didn't know that. And delighted to have learned something about Sudan other than details of war and brutalities.
By courtesy of Paul Kirchner
With the goal of harnessing the untapped potential of Iranian-Americans, and to build the capacity of the Iranian diaspora in effecting positive change in the U.S. and around the world, the West Asia Council has launched a series of interviews that explore the personal and professional backgrounds of prominent Iranian-Americans who have made seminal contributions to their fields of endeavor. Our latest interviewee is Neda Nobari.
Neda Nobari is a community activist and founder of the Neda Nobari Foundation, a decade-old private foundation that advocates for social justice through the arts and education. Before launching her career in community service, Nobari was the Vice Chair and founding member of Bebe Stores, Inc. for 22 years. During her tenure with the company, Bebe became an iconic leading women's fashion brand in the U.S. and abroad with a market capitalization over a billion dollars. Nobari is a graduate of San Francisco State University (B.S. Computer Science '84) and Dartmouth (M.A. Liberal Studies, '15.) Her graduate research at Dartmouth focused on the intersection of diaspora and cultural identity of Iranian-American women. In the summer of 2016, SFSU announced the creation of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies, enabled by a significant donation from Nobari. She is a mother of two sons.
Who is Neda Nobari? Can you tell us about your background, both personal and professional?
I was born in Tehran and raised in Abadan. Most of my recollection of Iran is from my life inside the British-built compound that we lived in which belonged to the National Iranian Oil Company. When other Iranians talk about their experiences from the old days in Tehran, I don't really relate because I hardly spent any time there.In September of 1978, I moved to the States to live with my aunt and uncle. Their kindness and generosity changed the course of my life over a summer.
I graduated from San Rafael High School in the San Francisco Bay Area in the winter of 1979. I was 16 years old. The hostilities from the hostage crisis were hard to endure, and often made high school life unpleasant. The two years at College of Marin proved to be more rewarding and the last two years of my undergraduate studies at San Francisco State University were a transformative and liberating experience.
I completed my B.S. in Computer Science from SFSU in 1984 and got a job as a software engineer at an Irish communications company. I didn't enjoy writing code and took the opportunity to switch to the fashion industry when I received an offer to join Bebe Stores. My first project was to computerize the inventory management system and set up P.O.S. stations at the three boutiques that comprised the company at the time. Over the next 22 years, I was part of a remarkable experience of building a successful vertical brand with hundreds of locations all over U.S. and other countries.
After transitioning away from the corporate sector, I established a private foundation that bears my name and went on to attend Dartmouth College. I graduated last year with a master's degree in Liberal Studies with a thesis on the intersection of diaspora and cultural identity of Iranian American women. I am currently actively involved with the foundation's work on harnessing the power of the arts, film and education in service of social and environmental justice.
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What was the motivation for starting your philanthropic work and how has this work evolved?
My parents were always helping others in the community. I learned from them the responsibility that comes with being a member of the larger family of humanity. I began volunteering at a young age, and recall giving money to charities even as a student who had so little of it. Years later, as an accomplished businesswoman, I was able to establish our foundation to focus more intensively on giving back. Since I was not familiar with the non-profit sector, I hired an experienced consultant to help me navigate the vast philanthropic landscape, narrow down focus areas and identify potential organizations of interest. We paid site visits, met the Executive Directors and learned about their programs.
It has been both eye-opening to fathom the scale of needs in our society: single moms facing homelessness while escaping domestic violence, rain forests disappearing, displaced indigenous communities, endangered species, abandoned teenage pregnant girls, formerly-incarcerated inmates trying to reenter society, and on and on.
The foundation has become my platform for learning about the pressing issues in my local community and beyond. I attended a two-week residential Non-Profit Leadership program at Stanford University and learned about the business approach to running efficient non-profit organizations, about impact investment and new hybrid for-profit with social investment models. Over the past eight years, the foundation and I have come a long way. We don't have all the answers, but I remain optimistic about the potential of seeking new solutions to our problems and the promises that the future holds for subsequent generations.
What specific lessons have you learned?
I have learned that giving a former foster youth or incarcerated individual access to free higher education can break the cycle of poverty not just for that person, but also for their community. I have learned the critical role of promoting awareness, and ability of independent journalism and documentary films can play in elevating the discourse and offering alternative narratives.
We must think of "education" not only in terms of the classic meaning of schooling, but also community education about issues that should concern us all. A democracy is built on well-informed citizens; thus, our foundation supports artists, filmmakers and journalists who provide such information. Ultimately, our goal is to foster real change through promotion of citizen participation and helping to build a movement that can sustain such positive change.
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Do you have a guiding philosophy or mission statement that directs or influences your philanthropy?
Our foundation's mission statement is: "Promoting social and environmental justice through arts and education" but that's just the work in progress. The issues are so interconnected that it's difficult for us to zero in on one single focus. We have an eco-system approach to addressing issues, a flexible model we call "Indie-Philanthropy."
What are SFSU's plans for the endowment that you have made to launch their program on Iranian Diaspora Studies? Will they be following in the footsteps of any diaspora programs in other universities?
We have designated $3.5 million out of the $5 million gift towards an endowment for the Chair of the Center because leadership is key to its success and the implementation of the vision. The University will conduct a search for the Chair position over the next several months and once the leadership is in place, we can better articulate the academic plan for the Center. To the best of my knowledge, there is no other center dedicated to the studies of Iranian diaspora, so we'll be pioneering this field. We have a new Dean for the College of Liberal and Creative Arts, Andrew Harris, who is very excited about the new Center that will be housed in his college. President Les Wong and Provost Sue Rosser have also been incredibly supportive throughout the proposal process. The Center's foundation is being built on accessibility, knowledge distribution and transnational collaboration, so we will definitely be looking at other diaspora studies programs at other universities across the globe.
In your view, what are the Iranian diaspora's distinguishing features? What about the Iranian-American community?
Over the past four decades, since the 1979 Revolution and the mass migration of millions of Iranians all over the globe, Iranians have often been seen through the prism of US foreign policy towards the Islamic Republic, and through media stereotypes built on Orientalism, Islamophobia, and misconceptions about this region of the world. All too rarely have Iranians been represented in terms of their significant artistic, cultural, or humanistic contributions, in the past and the present.
Political tensions between the U.S. and Iranian governments have indeed undermined the process of establishing a confident identity among Iranian-Americans, one that is reflective of our contributions to America and other societies. The second and third generations of Iranians born outside of Iran are well educated and interested in exploring their cultural richness through the arts and humanities. The goal of the recently launched Center at SFSU is to provide a platform to study the complex, diverse, and often misunderstood world of the Iranian diaspora.
What or who has been the biggest singular influence on your work?
I can't say that there has been one singular influence; it's been a culmination of 53 years of lived experience. The Liberal Arts Program at Dartmouth really helped me in identifying my passion and articulating my interests. It also gave me confidence to trust my intuition and "follow my bliss," as the great mythologist Joseph Campbell would say. Ironically, I reconnected with my Iranian cultural heritage at Dartmouth and have followed this renaissance with vigor over the past three years. I took a diaspora studies course that eventually led me to the idea of establishing the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at SFSU. Positive influences are everywhere if one is open to them.
Which project have you enjoyed working on the most so far?
It's not so much a singular project that I can identity, but more about the relationship with the people behind the projects that is most rewarding for me. Philanthropy has given me the opportunity to get connected with amazingly talented and dedicated individuals who are making the world a more enlightened place. To be in regular contact with their optimism, hope and fire for humanity is the most enjoyable part of my life.
How can you measure the impact of your efforts?
That's the 400 billion dollar question that has the philanthropic world in a spin! Impact measurement is what grant makers are urged to consider when donating to nonprofits; in turn, nonprofits are required to show the impact of their donors' funds. It's a valid point but not as simple as it may seem. Some things are easier to measure than others.
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For example, a four-year full scholarship including year-around housing for a former foster youth at SFSU cost a donor $50 K. At the same time, it costs taxpayers somewhere between $30K to $60K per year to keep that same person in prison. It's alarming to note that over half of the foster youth in this country end up in the prison after five years of leaving the foster system. The math is simple, the savings enormous, and, the impact obvious. But how can one really measure intangible and un- quantifiable impact of changing one person's life and the ripple effects of their transformation on others in their community? They pay it forward and the impact multiplies exponentially through the entire society.
The impact of documentary films is also difficult to measure. A well-investigated and researched documentary film can ignite the conversation about, for example, the effects of GMO on the environment or health, and ultimately become part of a movement to change consumer behavior that can in turn change the standards for the food supply chain. How can the impact of that one film be measured in the context of the larger movement? Who would take the credit? Does it matter? These are difficult questions to answer. At our foundation, we collect information about the impact of our support by getting involved with the organizations and learning from the inside. We are hands-on partners, making every effort to minimize the need for extensive reports, allowing the organizations to focus on the work that we so admire and wish to support. Clearly we cannot be involved at this level with every organization that we support at any given time, but we do a good job with most. We also do our due diligence by reviewing their tax returns and asking specific questions regarding their finances. There is no silver bullet. It's tough to measure the influence of the arts. And yet we believe in the power of art as an educational tool to increase cultural awareness, promote compassion and expand the mind.
How does your experience as a businesswoman inform your work in the non-profit world?
With racialized state violence, transphobia, and homophobia on the rise, in wake of the #AltonSterling, #PhilandoCastile, and #Orlando shootings, three African-American LGBT+ individuals share how they navigate the intersections of race and sexual identity in their everyday lives.
Last Tuesday, 37-year old Alton Sterling was viciously tackled and shot in the chest by two Baton Rouge police officers outside of a convenience store. Sterling, who was known in the community to sell CDs and DVDs outside of the store, was allegedly armed, however, was not holding or reaching for his gun during the altercation.
Louisiana is an open-carry state.
Two days later, 32-year old Philando Castile was also shot by an officer for reaching for his wallet in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. While he was armed, Castile's girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, who recorded the aftermath of the police attack via Facebook Live, claims Castile informed the police officer about his handgun and never showed it during the traffic stop.
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Castile had a valid permit to carry.
On Sunday, June 16, the nation reeled in sadness, anger and despair, as news emerged about the shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. The shooter, Omar Mateen, 29, in a violent rampage, shot and killed 49 people and severely injured 53 others.
Mateen was later found dead, killed by Orlando police. He was able to purchase high-capacity weapons, despite being listed on two federal watch lists.
The horrific shooting-murders in Louisiana, Minnesota, and Orlando have spurred national conversations, vigils, and protests about racialized state violence, systematic racism, gun control, terrorism, and anti-LGBT+ sentiments in America. However, each shooting -- as well as many other fatal gun-related incidences -- have also brought to the forefront the interconnectedness of race, sexual identity, ethnicity, class and other societal constructs in regards to violence against marginalized communities. Kimberle Crenshaw, legal scholar and creator of the #SayHerName campaign, coined the term 'intersectionality' in the 1980s to address the complex interactions of social identities and how social constructs (i.e. race, gender, sexual identity) overlap. Furthermore, individuals who have multiple social identities and belong to minority groups, can face and have endured further onslaughts of oppression, prejudice and discrimination. Often times, their stories, successes, and struggles are ignored and rendered invisible by those within and without their communities.
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According to a 2011 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), members of the LGBT+ community are more likely than any other minority group in the United States to be victimized by violent hate crimes. However, how do we assess the heightened magnitude of violence when persons of the LGBT+ community are also of color? This year, Alton Sterling became the 558th person and the 135th Black person killed by police in the United States, according to the Guardian's The Counted project. Countless Black women and girls have been victims of police brutality , like 28-year old Sandra Bland, who was mysteriously found hanged from her jail cell in Waller County, Texas in 2015 and 7-year old Aiyana Stanley-Jones, who was killed by a Detroit police officer in her sleep in 2010.
In 2015, 22 trans women of color were murdered. In the same year, findings from a Guardian study showed Black people were killed at twice the rate of white, Hispanic, and native Americans. According to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAPV) report, "people of color and transgender, and gender nonconforming people made up the majority of victims of LGBTQ and HIV-related hate violence." The report also showed the majority of survivors of LGBT+ violence in 2015, identified as gay, youth and young adults, and people of color.
To address the intersections of violence against the Black and LGBT+ communities, three Black and gay individuals share how they navigate the intersectionalities of race, gender, and sexual identity, and how they overcome and address racism, homophobia, discrimination, and prejudice daily.
Thom Green, 25, San Francisco, California
"Before I came out of the closet, I navigated the intersections of being Black and gay by suffocating one, while breathing through the other. I was a "Black man", which came with "rules" and "expectations" of what was expected of a "man." I was expected to talk to as many girls as I could or have as many girlfriends as I wanted. Often times, when growing up, relatives would ask me "how many girlfriends you got now?" I was expected to be tough and aggressive. I was expected to negotiate my feelings, before sharing them and to handle my business as a
'man.'
"When I realized that I didn't want to fulfill those expectations, I came out as gay. Coming out as a gay, Black man destroyed my relationship with the Black community. I remembered all the church sermons and hateful discussions about homosexuality that made me shrink on the inside."
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"When I came out as gay, for a while, I decided I wasn't black anymore. Since no one in the Black community teaches us how to embrace our sexuality, we don't [really] learn how to intersect the two. Now, I am learning how to fully be both. I still hear the sermons and I still suffocate one, but I'm learning to breathe."
Brittani Brown, 23, Laurel, Maryland
"Society has taught us to be ashamed of our blackness and sexuality, as if it is something we have to make unnoticeable in order to be successful. I couldn't disagree more. Rather than deny these aspects of myself, I choose to present both confidently and authentically. With my bountiful, untamed curly hair, and masculine style, when a stranger looks at me, I do not feel it is a secret that I am Black or queer. I wear both unapologetically, as they are each important parts of who I am, and how I identify in this world. In doing so, I am aware of the risk I am taking by being myself. I may not land a job or be considered for an opportunity because of my audaciousness, but I try my hardest not to let that risk stop me from being me."
"My approach to overcome racism, homophobia, and anti-LGBT+ sentiments are to speak and live my truth whenever possible. I do not believe we can combat racism, homophobia, and anti-LGBT+ by silencing ourselves, and letting false perceptions manifest. I think the first and biggest step to overcome oppression is to have uncomfortable, constructive conversations which acknowledge the disparities between the oppressed and the oppressors."
Photo Credit: Amanda Swiger
Malcolm Kenyatta, 25, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
"It is a difficult balance, for sure. On one end, LGBT+ people still have a difficult time being accepted writ-large in Black culture. On the other end, the LGBT+ community has yet to come to grips with some of the racism and discrimination that exists in our community (think: no fats, no femmes, no Blacks.) We have to be willing to have the tough conversations and do the hard work of "changing hearts and minds" and it'll take time - there's no substitute for it."
"[I see being Black and gay] as a gift. I have the ability to traverse so many groups and intersections, because my experience is so broad. I think the complexity actually helps me to be a convener for divergent groups to connect. I use these perspectives in my work and in my life [because] to be young, gifted, Black, and gay is amazing."
I'm sad for my children. I'm sad for your children. I'm sad for the children of the U.S. and France and Belgium, the children of Syria and Iraq, the children of Bangladesh and Nigeria. I'm sad for children all over the world who are growing up in fear of terrorism and its ever broadening attacks - so unpredictable and so random as they are.
Children in previous generations have known the fear of death and destruction, and in many cases, the scale has been much larger and more horrific. Just think of World War II, Vietnam, or Rwanda's civil war to name a few.
But I can only compare my children's experiences to my own childhood in the United States in the 1970's, when the Cold War loomed over us, but left us alone; when I was too young to understand Vietnam, a war too far away to be real. There was the Iran hostage crisis, and there were a few plane hijackings - but again, they were far away in a mysterious world that was completely foreign to my friends and me.
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As a child, my husband feared the Russians would nuke us. I don't remember worrying about that - maybe it was too abstract for my young mind. And certainly today, not all children worry about terrorism either. There will be those young people who fear terror attacks in their very own neighborhood, and there will be those children for whom terrorism is still too foreign an idea.
But whether or not they worry, terrorism is present - it's here and real, and like a horror movie, we never know when it will jump out of the shadows and strike.
With terror broadcast in living color on their phones and computers so vividly and frequently now, children today - especially teenagers - are rarely shielded from the frightening reality that terrorism could happen just about anywhere: even during a fireworks celebration in a lovely seaside French city where way too many young lives were taken so prematurely.
We were on vacation in a lovely American seaside town when that truck plowed through a crowd of families in Nice. My 18-year-old daughter had a nightmare two nights later. She told me in the morning that she dreamed the two of use were in our own, small hometown, when terrorists started dividing people into groups: brunettes and blonds. My daughter is brunette - I'm a dyed blonde. The blonds were to be executed. We had a bit of a laugh as my daughter told me that she begged the terrorists for my life, explaining that I was actually a brunette. But they didn't care. The dream really rattled her.
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We have tickets to see a Broadway show soon - and my daughter says she's a little concerned about being in midtown Manhattan, in a theater, not far from touristy Times Square, something she's done many times before. I have to admit that I think about that too. After terror attacks, people like to talk about how we can't let the terrorists stop our lives. I agree in theory, but it doesn't mean that living our lives isn't sometimes tinged with fear.
I worry about airports and trains and subways, and movie theaters and concert halls, and large public gatherings - or "soft targets" - one of the worst expressions in the English language. My children don't talk about their fears of terrorism much, but every time there's an attack somewhere in the world, they are aware of it. We talk about these events without dwelling on them. But I know they digest more details than any young person should know. I can only imagine what those children and teenagers who have been part of or close to an attack have digested, the horrors they have seen with their own young eyes. The attacks that in some cases, have ended their young lives.
We were so lucky - we American children who grew up without those fears. The big bad Russians were out there - but we couldn't see them. They were akin to cartoon characters, especially as they were portrayed in films. We didn't endure constant reminders from Buzzfeed or The New York Times or CNN, or any other media sites that the world was at risk of blowing up. We couldn't see the face of an Orlando terrorist in his Facebook selfies. Or the smiling faces of a Texas family irreconcilably split apart on a promenade in Nice, an 11-year-old boy and his father mowed down by a psychopath in a truck. Or the images of a husband and wife team who went on a shooting rampage at a San Bernadino office party where employees knew their names and their baby.
Those faces and the names and bios attached to them are real. Children know that all too well.
My daughter was only three on 9/11. My son was due to be born that day, but thankfully, he waited for ten days. I sat in front of the TV that morning waiting for my husband to return from work in downtown Manhattan, which he did in the late afternoon. My daughter asked about the image of the burning towers on TV, as she took a brief break from playing.
"It's a movie," I told her. The next day, she caught a glimpse of the same image on the front page of The New York Times sitting on the kitchen table.
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"Look Mommy, it's that movie you were watching," she said.
"You're right," I agreed.
We can only shield our children from the truth for a little while before they become old enough to see the terrible for themselves. But I wish they didn't have to grow up in a world rife with a brand of violence that is so evil and determined, so indiscriminate, and so omnipresent.
Melania Trump, wife of Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump, speaks at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S. July 18, 2016. REUTERS/Mike Segar
The centerpiece of the opening night of the Republican Convention was the speech by Melania Trump, the wife of Donald Trump. But her pleasant performance was soon overshadowed by allegations of plagiarism.
Candidate Trump, the ultimate showman, made an unprecedented and dramatic appearance on the first night of the convention to introduce his wife. Mrs. Trump praised her husband, speaking in a Slovenian accent, to an enthusiastic reception from the delegates. But shortly after the convention wrapped up she became the center of a swirling controversy. Two of the passages she read were strikingly similar to the speech Michelle Obama made to the Democratic National Convention in 2008.
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"From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life," a poised Mrs. Trump said, "that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise, that you treat people with respect. They taught and showed me values and morals in their daily life." In her 2008 speech Mrs. Obama said, "And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: like, you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond, that you do what you say you're going to do, that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them and even if you don't agree with them."
Mrs. Trump then added, "We need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow... Because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them." Back in 2008, Mrs. Obama added, "Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values and to pass them onto the next generation, because we want our children -- and all children in this nation -- to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work hard for them."
Earlier in the day Mrs. Trump told NBC News that she had written the speech. Whether she did or not, someone in the campaign should have caught the similarities. Instead, reactions to the convention speeches focused on whether Mrs. Trump had plagiarized Mrs. Obama. Had Mrs. Obama done the plagiarizing, the Republicans would have called for a Congressional investigation.
Donald Trump will have to find a scapegoat in order to save his wife's reputation.
Monday evening's convention theme was "Make America Safe Again." It is usually the practice of a political party to feature their values and positions on key issues during the first night. But this was an evening that reflected Mr. Trump's combative tone. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani electrified delegates, especially with an attack against the presumptive Democratic nominee. "It was Hillary Clinton who advocated the overthrow of Qaddafi in Libya. Now Libya is in chaos," he charged. "Hillary Clinton is accountable for this and much more. For dereliction of duty and failure to keep our people safe played a major role." At times seeming almost unhinged, he took a swipe at President Obama. "We must not be afraid to define our enemies. It is Islamic. Extremist," he yelled. "For the purposes of the media...I said Islamic. Extremist. Terrorism."
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The evening's most emotional speech was delivered before the broadcast networks began telecasting the proceedings. Pat Smith, the mother of U.S. diplomat Sean Smith, who was killed during the 2012 attack in Benghazi, drew the rapt attention of delegates as she blamed Hillary Clinton for the death of her son. "I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son," she said and accused Clinton of lying to her. "If Hillary Clinton can't give us the truth, why should we give her the presidency," she added. However, Smith's speech came before the large prime time audience tuned in. So too did the dramatic floor fight over convention rules led by the anti-Trump forces that failed. The GOP remains divided.
But Tuesday's news headlines focused on Melania Trump's speech. Trump campaign officials scrambled to explain the controversy. Campaign manager Paul Manafort tried to quell the dispute Tuesday, "There's no cribbing of Michele Obama's speech," he told CNN. "These were common words and values that she cares about -- her family, things like that." However, Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman, said that someone has to be fired for the plagiarism. And it is likely that Donald Trump will have to find a scapegoat in order to save his wife's reputation.
Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen is pictured at his residence in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, U.S. on September 26, 2013. Courtesy Selahattin Sevi/Zaman Daily via Cihan News Agency/Handout via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS - THIS IMAGE WAS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY. EDITORIAL USE ONLY. TURKEY OUT. NO COMMERCIAL OR EDITORIAL SALES IN TURKEY
If Barack Obama and John Kerry give in to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's demand to extradite Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, it will lead to more than his imprisonment and/or execution. It will signal the death of America's Middle East policy, as no moderate Muslim will ever be able to trust the United States to do what's right.
"Turkey will not be run from a house in Pennsylvania," Erdogan told his people on the evening of the military coup. He commanded that Gulen be sent to Turkey for trial. Analysts are nervous that unless the U.S. extradites him, we won't be able to use the Incirlik Airbase, and it will weaken our fight against ISIS. But kowtowing to the autocratic Turkish president could make matters far worse for the United States foreign policy in the Middle East. Here's how.
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There is no evidence that Gulen was behind the military coup. In fact, there's pretty strong evidence that Gulen was not behind the coup.
First, Gulen's group, the Alliance for Shared Values, condemned the coup at the exact time the military had the best chance of succeeding, when there were reports that Erdogan had fled abroad, and troops had taken over the media. If Gulen actually organized the coup, he sure squashed it when it was most likely to work.
Second of all, analysts have pointed out that Gulen actually has very little influence in the military, if he ever really did. He has more support among the police and judiciary. One source even documents how the military sided with the AKP against Gulen in 2004.
Perhaps that's why Erdogan arrested more than 3,000 judges, faster than he rounded up military officers and soldiers. And it wasn't as though judges were out there driving tanks and firing shots from helicopters. It follows a familiar pattern for Turkey's President Erdogan, who responded to the ISIS attack on Istanbul by arresting Gulen journalists, even though none of them detonated a bomb at the Ataturk airport. Remember, while Gulen was denouncing the coup, Erdogan was crowing that the coup was "a gift from God."
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This picture I took in Istanbul of Erdogan's image during the 2015 election season. Though he was not on the ballot, his face was on political posters everywhere.
Third, additional evidence against the notion that Gulen had anything to do with the coup comes to me whenever I write anything about Turkey and this Islamic cleric. I get angry emails from Turkish military secularists and their supporters, who deride Gulen for being an Islamist (even though he's pretty moderate). There's more than enough information to show that the military, which professes to defend the secular constitution, dislikes Gulen's brand of politics, even though he's nowhere near as extreme as Erdogan.
Fourth, America should consider who its friends really are. When America was attacked on 9/11 or other terror attacks, Gulen was among the first to loudly condemn such attacks, running advertisements to show that actions by Al-Qaeda or ISIS violate Muslim doctrines. Erdogan, on the other hand, is less forceful in his condemnation of such attacks, as noted by Fox News. He has sought to restrict America's use of the Incirlik base in Turkey, and bombed America's Kurdish allies in the fight against ISIS. His labor minister blamed America for the coup, and his prime minister said "Any country that stands by the Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen will not be a friend of Turkey and will be considered at war with the NATO member," according to the India Express.
Finally, the most important reason why not to extradite Gulen, is the signal it would send to moderate Muslims everywhere. Next to defending Israel, the key to America's Middle East policy is to cultivate moderate Islamic allies in the region. What would happen if we send the most moderate Muslim cleric to his death, on the word of a sworn political enemy of Gulen's whose statements on Hitler and Nazis are disturbing, according to critics? No moderate Muslim in his or her right mind would ever have a reason to trust the United States, if we do that. It would be a disaster for the country, as bad as sentencing an innocent man to his death.
John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Ga. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu.
Romans favor the same restaurants and dishes they always have, and everyone will have an opinion as to which restaurant serves the best pasta, the freshest seafood or the most flavorful lamb. Still, new restaurants do open that help diversify the city's dining scene. Here's a some of my favorites.
L'Hostaria Romana
via del Boccaccio 1
http://www.hostariaromana.it
L'Hostaria Romana, not far from the Trevi Fountain, is a no-frills trattoria begun sixty years ago and run since 1979 by the Camponeschi family. The upstairs room overlooks the narrow street; downstairs is an odd, windowless, brightly lighted room whose only decor is the thousands of graffiti left by satisfied customers over the years, which, in any other city, would make the place seem positively hipster.
The menu is fairly lengthy, with all the old Roman dishes, like bucatini all'amatriciana, spaghetti alla carbonara, tonnarelli cacio e pepe, and ravioli ricotta e spinaci--generous tangles of color, rich with butter, pecorino, tomato, pancetta, and eggs, the pasta truly al dente--brought with dispatch to the table piping hot, the aroma in the room smelling of honest cooking.
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A couple can have a three-course meal with wine (tax and service are always included in the menu prices) for under $100.
Closed Sunday.
LA MATRICIANELLA
Via del Leone, 4
+39 06 6832100
http://matricianella.it
La Matricianella, near the Piazza Borghese, has been around since 1957, and brother-and-sister Giacomo and Grazia Le Bianco welcome tourists with the same affability they do their Roman regulars, all of whom sit inches from one another at old tables with checkered cloths to feast on solid Roman cooking, with an emphasis on twelve delicately fried foods like artichokes alla giudia, zucchini flowers, baccala and much else.
There are as many lusty pastas, including rigatoni with what we'd call chitlins, and excellent, creamy carbonara, tagliolini with truffles, and tonnarelli with radicchio, most of them costing 11 euros (about $12).
The wine list is one of the most comprehensive in the city. There is also a cramped outdoor terrace, though there's not much to look at besides the throng of international and local customers and the Fiats and Vespas sprawled across the curb.
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Closed Sunday.
DA GIOVANNI
via Lungara 41A
+39 066 861514
Trastevere (across the Tiber) neighborhood almost comes as a shock when you find yourself winding your way through clean, quiet streets with far fewer tourists. Trastevere is an oasis amidst the honking chaos of Rome.
On my recent trip I arrived early to find Da Giovanni almost empty--it only has about six tables; it's pretty much a two-man show--the amiable owner who waits on every table and the cook in the back. The premises are cheerful enough, spruced up a bit since opening in 1951, with a menu posted outside.
You sit, the owner comes over, he gives you the menu and a choice of red or white Castelli Romani wines, all five to seven euros. You may want to order everything as you chew on the good bread with olive oil. All the pastas, four of them, are delicious, many lavished with a long-cooked tomato-and-meat ragu, on fettuccine and ravioli; there's also spaghetti with tuna. The roast rabbit is excellent, tender and suffused with rosemary, and the roast pork pink and tender. Spezzatino is a mushroom-rich meat stew.
The bill comes: Pastas five to six euros, main courses five to seven.
Da Giovanni is hardly alone in Trastevere for its down-to-earth local flavor and atmosphere, but even among competitors, it would be hard to beat Da Giovanni's prices.
Closed Sunday.
ZUMA
Palazzo Fendi
Via della Fontanella di Borghese, 48
+39 06 992 666 22
https://www.zumarestaurant.com/zuma-landing/rome/holding
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An argument can be made that it's difficult to get tired of eating Roman food in Rome, but the city does have other kinds of restaurants, not least a growing, if small, number of Japanese sushi spots. Raw fish, in Italian called crudi, has become fashionable, and there is currently no more fashionable place to find it than at ZUMA in the glamorous and very chic new boutique hotel Palazzo Fendi, owned by the Fendi fashion house.
ZUMA is actually the tenth of a very upscale chain opened by creator and co-founder Rainer Becker in 2002. Set on the fourth and fifth floors, with plenty of soaring wood, glass and stone, the restaurant is already being filled with fashionistas, models and tourists who have a chance to show off their new purchases on the Via Condotti.
Three different cooking styles are featured at ZUMA--the main kitchen, with an array of cooked and raw dishes, the sushi counter and the robata grill; upstairs is a beautifully lighted bar and lounge. On the night I visited I chose from all over those menus, with all dishes presented with an eye towards color and the texture of the serving surfaces, which range from artisanal china to polished stones and ceramic pottery.
(Photo by David Carey)
When 16-year-old Austin Murphy's parents arranged for conversion therapy sessions to help combat his burgeoning homosexuality, the gay teen was skeptical but now says the practice is working because he's no longer interested in dating other boys.
Before the therapy, Austin says he was just coming to terms with who he was and was ready to explore his identity. But now that he hates himself, Austin says his attraction to men isn't nearly as strong as it once was. "I'm so depressed and totally addicted to drugs that I just don't have the time to love or commit myself to another person," said a sniffling Austin as he tightly rolled up a dollar bill.
Given that gay conversion therapy has been rejected by all major medical and mental health organizations for decades, Austin was surprised that his sessions actually led him to sexually experiment with women. "Who knew so many girls would give me drugs in exchange for sex," said the cocaine-dependent teen.
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Alice Murphy, the self-loathing teen's mother, said she's "so proud" of her son for finding it in his heart to be who she wants him to be. Alice admitted that she does indeed miss her son's sobriety along with his smile, yet she cherishes the fact that "at least he's now a more normal boy."
News of Austin's success from gay conversion therapy has been met with praise by many GOP leaders who stressed the importance of pseudoscience and the right of parents to thrust their children into such controversial and psychologically harmful practices when outlining their party's platform ahead of the Republican National Convention.
One delegate called Austin's story "an inspiration," while adding that the young teen is a "trailblazer for all those kids who may be hesitant or uncomfortable about denying who they truly are."
The recent Louisiana and Minnesota shootings, combined with the Dallas police ambush, painfully bring to the forefront, Black Americans' deep feelings of mistrust and anger at our justice system.
The fact that 21 years ago, the quick innocent verdict of OJ Simpson's innocence was widely celebrated by Blacks nationally while Whites felt he had literally gotten away with murder, should have told us we had a major problem to address.
Inequality has always been a bone in America's throat since we were founded in 1776. We fought a bloody civil war over it in the 1860s. Even with the great civil rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we continue to struggle with issues of racial injustice today.
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Unaddressed, this can tear us apart. We need a just society; we need things to be fair. But the reality is, in America, if you have black skin, our police system is probably not going to treat you with the same respect it does if you have a white skin.
Don't get me wrong. This is a free country; everyone has a right to their opinions, and some, unfortunately, do not respect black people or other races. These people have the right to live here, but for the sake of the integrity of our nation and the rights of all citizens, they should not be allowed to participate in our system of justice.
We have 800,000 police officers who have both authority and weapons that can kill. To date, we don't seem to have an effective screening process to eliminate those who would misuse this power because of their biases.
So we need to make a dramatic national effort to address the situation, which would help inspire the confidence of Americans.
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Here is one idea:
To date, the primary concern of police training is dealing with criminals and keeping the peace. I suspect evidence of prejudice in members is rarely dealt with.
There are simple psychological tests available to reveal biases, and indicate if further training or termination is needed. If we could expect unbiased police chiefs across our nation, we would clean up a lot of prejudice in our police stations pretty quickly. We could then utilize the test for incoming recruits.
Insanity. That's what you get when you vote for the same people, expecting different results. According to Gallup polls, Congress has averaged an 18% approval rate over the past 8 years, yet the same minority of the population visit the polls to make sure they're re-elected. In 2014, less than 37% of the population voted, and little more than half of them made sure 96% of incumbents kept their seats.
2016 will be different. First, more voters will be coming to the polls because of the Presidential election. Second, they will be better educated because there is now a blacklist of the most heinous vote-against-the-public, vote-for-the-funders offenders, based on a cross-section of bills Republicans, Democrats, and tea-partiers oppose, yet were passed by Senators and House Representatives on the blacklist.
The blacklist refers to those who passed bills that make sweeping, negative impacts on our lives. The first caused the 2008 economic crisis and any further crises caused by derivatives, the second is about outsourcing jobs and making Internet Providers, Big Banks, Big Agriculture, and Big Pharma even bigger, and the third is about allowing Big Ag to hide the fact they are poisoning us.
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The 2008 economic meltdown would not have been possible if the Gramm - Leach - Bliley Act (GLB) a.k.a. the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 and the Commodity Futures Modernization (CFM) Act of 2000 had not gutted the Glass-Steagall Act. It's been almost two decades and yet we still haven't created a transparent derivatives market, making another crisis inevitable. Elizabeth Warren said of derivatives, "big financial firms will be able to rake in billions when things go well, then come back to taxpayers with their hands out when things come crashing down."
The second bill that is still within our grasp to stop if we create enough of a fuss, is the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). 600 special interest advisors who wrote the bill gave themselves: extension of patents on brand-name drugs, a framework for creating internet restrictions, the ability to chill "buy local" movements, easier offshoring of jobs, extension of copyright laws, protections against GMO labeling, rollbacks on environmental policies that stop polluters, and relief for the "too big to fail" banks, among other things.
"We understand the need for field experts to weigh in on trade agreements, but the one-sidedness to aspects of the TPP do far more harm than good for the future of Americans," said Independent Senate candidate Steve Gladstone of Maryland. "Reducing barriers to trade is critical to economic growth and job creation. Seeing a potentially good agreement get mucked up by special interests serves neither America nor our trading partners."
Under the Investment chapter of the TPP, 18,000 corporations who are a party to the agreement will have the ability to sue federal, state, and town governments for loss of expected future profits when a regulation, ordinance, or law stands in their way. The outcome is decided by three trade attorneys in special tribunals that are outside U.S. courts and cannot be appealed. The three lawyers aren't accountable to any country's legal system under this so-called "Investor State Dispute Settlement" process.
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The average cost of mounting a defense against these cases is $8 million per occurrence.
The Investor State Dispute Settlement process is already in place under NAFTA, but the TPP would expand corporations' rights beyond what they already enjoy through older trade agreements. Taxpayers will be on the hook for the settlements, yet have no say in any court of law to fight these cases. The TPP and its sister agreement with the European Union called the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) would give 44,000 corporations access to suing our government.
The blacklist shows all the phone numbers to the Congresspersons who voted to "fast track" the TPP, so that American citizens can urge them to vote NO to prevent it from being jammed through during this Thanksgiving to New Year's holiday season.
The third bill that earned Congresspersons their shame on the blacklist is the DARK Act (Deny Americans the Right to Know), a disingenuous GMO "labeling" bill by Pat Roberts (R-KS) and Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), chairman and ranking member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, respectively. Senators and House members voted in favor of Big Ag when they decided, against the wishes of 80 to 90% of Americans who would like to see their food clearly labeled, to pass Senate Bill 764 just in time to preempt Vermont's mandatory labeling laws that would have gone into effect on July 1st.
Ronnie Cummins, founder and International Director of the Organic Consumers Association said, "The problem with the DARK Act is they've re-defined genetically engineered foods. This Stabenow-Roberts is a no-labeling bill, and the message of it to the consumers is shut up and eat your Frankenfoods."
"They use the term 'bioengineered' and their new definition says that you don't have to label something unless you can detect its DNA in a lab, so that would exempt genetically engineered cooking oils and high fructose corn syrup. It's a total fraud. All the RoundUp Ready crops would not have to be labeled, all the bt (bacillus thuringiensis) spliced crops would not be labeled." --Ronnie Cummins, Organic Consumers Association
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders argued on the floor of the Senate to make Vermont's state law the national standard. "I find it interesting that this legislation has the support of a vast majority of Republicans who day after day tell us how they want to get the federal government out of people's lives. But this legislation preempts dozens of state laws all over this country passed by state legislatures and signed by the governors of those states," said Sanders. After giving a few examples of the ways in which the DARK Act overrides states' laws, Sanders said, "Mr. President, these are just a few of the laws, by the way. There are dozens and dozens more that would be nullified under the Roberts-Stabenow bill."
The FDA does not require long-term testing on human subjects exposed to genetically engineered foods, nor does it require human testing on the ingestion of RoundUp sprayed on RoundUp Ready crops.
Diana Reeves of GMOfreeUSA.org said, "The DARK Act is a patchwork of symbols, QR Codes and phone numbers instead of clear, on-package labels. It will confuse people, not inform them."
The Congressional Blacklist cross-references these bills, showing who voted and who didn't oppose these bills, and who is not up for re-election. All others listed are a warning to constituents: if don't you want the same old Congress, vote for someone else or learn how to run a campaign yourself. If you need help, Bernie Sanders is starting several new organizations to assist citizens and candidates in mounting robust campaigns.
To find out if your candidate is honest, ask them to sign this honesty pledge. It is a list of demands designed to clean up corruption in Congress and fix the ballot box.
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Last week was pretty hard for Americans. Two young African American men were brutality killed by police and than five officers were killed in Dallas, during a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest. Now we really need to talk about a major issue that is happening around the States and that is police brutality. I know more people are talking about and mourning the five police officers that died and that is the right thing to do and the human thing to do. But we are forgetting the two black men who lost their lives in a terrible way and these types of killings are happening more frequently in America.
I heard one time a black activist say that black men are either being shot by police or being incarcerated. When he said that it really opened my mind, because black men and boys have to constantly follow a particular set of guidelines that will secure them their safety that no other men or boys really need to follow. The fact that parents live in constant fear for their sons lives and fear that one day their son is not coming home. The fact parents teach their son to not go out at night, to never wear a hoodie, to respect police officers even if they don't respect them back is a huge problem of itself and it's a societal issue that if we don't stop, will keep happening to more men and boys like Eric Garner, Alton Sterling and Philando Castle (may you all rest in peace).
Lets look at statistics, shall we: According to the Guardian in 2015 young African American men are more times likely than other Americans to be killed by police. There were 1,134 deaths that have occurred by the hands of police and African American man between the ages of 15 to 34 make up 15% of all death committed by police. 89% of death were caused by gun shot wounds, 4% were tasered-related, 4% were deaths in custody following physical confrontation and 3% due to people struck by police cars. Not only that, black men are more times likely to be unarmed when encountering the police. 32% of black men were unarmed when killed by police, 25.4% of Latinos were unarmed when killed by police and 15% of whites were unarmed when killed by the police.
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If you think these numbers are sad, lets look at two cases in when the US Justice Department investigated two police departments in the States. In 2013 and in 2014 the US Justice Department issued a civil investigation in the police departments of the Albuquerque police department and the Cleveland police department. Both police departments had used violent and unnecessary forces towards citizens.
In the Albuquerque police department between 2009 to 2012 officers were involved in 20 of the police shootings which majority of them were unconstitutional. And in their investigation, they have found that the police department often use deadly force where there is no threat. And police officers often use lethal weapons, like tasers towards citizen who are non-threatening.
The civil investigation toward Cleveland police department is a simpler story. There were reports that the Cleveland police department were engaging in a pattern of using unreasonable and unnecessary force. Which include, shootings and head strikes, using lethal weapons like tasers, chemical spares and fists. They also used unnecessary force when dealing with a person who has mental illness.
Now I can go on and on about statistics and in what police department are doing in every state, but I am not going to, because I think you get the picture and if I continue talking about statistics, this article will be ten page these paper. Instead let's talk about what should be done to end police violence.
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When you have an alcohol problem, you often go to rehab to get better. The first thing they teach you before anything else is admitting that you have a problem. Before all the therapy, the doctors and you eventually being sober. You need to admit that you have a problem. When it comes to police brutality it is the same thing. There are some people that still don't think this is a problem and Police departments, Governors and even other politicians often don't admit there's a problem. When there is a police shooting and a Governor or chief of polices address the media, by saying and I quote, "I am deeply sadden, shocked and surprised that this happened." Does undermine the ongoing violence in the U.S. Now those words are not bad to use and some would say they are very kind words, which they are. But when you use the word shocked or surprised, it often means that it's recently been an issue and forget that this has been a huge problem for years.
Another way that I think will solve the problem with police brutality, is stop criminalizing black men. When news reports of police shooting that killed a black men or boy, the news has to always treat them as criminals. He was selling cigarettes in the streets, he robbed a store, he had a gun on him. It somehow justifies the police's actions, by saying they're doing their job. NO YOU WEREN'T! Let me tell you when a police has the right to even take his or her gun off of his or her belt is when the suspect is pointing a gun at you or at the victim and is going to kill you in five seconds, that's the only time police have the right to raise their gun. If a black man is carrying a gun but he is doing no harm to anyone else (which in the South, is every Tuesday.) and you shot him or if a black man is running for his life and you shot him in the back that's your fault, not theirs.
Earlier in the article I talked about the U.S justice department investigating the Cleveland police department and the Albuquerque police department and in the end they concluded and I 100% agree that the officers were not provided with good training, police guidance and supervision. Like I said before I 100% agree. So many police officers go to the academy, than complete a test and off they go to the field. Yeah, that's a bad idea. Police officers and specially rookie police officers, don't know how to deal with hard situation and how to work with visible minority group. So when they go to the field they could treat people differently and even act violently towards them and demonize them. Police should be trained the minute they were there badge how to deal with citizens and difficult situations.
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Photo by Timothy Alexander Phillips
From July 15th to 17th three thousand people attended a festival called Gratitude Migration in the seaside hamlet of Keansburg, New Jersey. Keansburg is about an hour south of New York City and it's hELLO beach offers a magnificent vista of New York City. At night the city is illuminated across the calm, shimmering waters and it's a magical setting for camping.
Gratitude Migration is a celebration of art, music, dance, fire spinning, yoga, costuming, body painting, lectures, and more. It's website describes it as "is a world where life becomes art and dreams become reality."
This year when planning for the event the festival organizers painstakingly endeavored to be as inclusive as possible to the town's leadership, businesses and residents. Gratitude Migration founder Drew Meeks explained to me that it wasn't about him, or the organization leaders, but the attendees who were creating the magic. He could facilitate the event, but the quality and success of it was about the individuals who came to co-create a collective experience. They were the creators, not him. I found this level of humility incredibly refreshing.
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Gratitude Migration in years past was a type of pre-Burning Man party for New York area camps. It has adapted some of the wonderful principles including leave no trace where you don't throw litter on the ground. What you carry in, you take out. I saw people each day 'mooping' (matter out of place) all on their own volition collecting cans, wrappers, bottles, from the sand.
Taking another cue from Burning Man's uniqueness is the fact that Gratitude Migration isn't a spectator festival. Everyone is participating, everyone is interacting and providing some type of meaningful experience. People wandered by with plates of food, free drinks, a tent with mystical glow in the dark paintings offered Chamomile tea. DJ's performed, fire spinners offered elaborate tribal rituals, a flock of women in delightful butterfly costumes emerged at sunset to skip and dance down the beach. It was a feast for the imagination.
I came to curate a discussion at the educational School of Dreams tent about how I turned my hobby of songwriting into a lifelong career. How to "Do What You Love." I was also tapped to do a musical performance with Catalyst, a 20 year old musician who grew up at the Jersey shore in the town of Brielle. We started off the live performances at noon on Saturday and delighted that a number of people spontaneously joined us including Natalie Lowe of Ellis Ashbook, a Brooklyn based rock group who's band performed on Sunday.
Kevin Buckwald aka Catalyst
An unexpected downpour of rain on Saturday afternoon caused all performances to shut down. Security hired for the event was extra cautious in protecting everyone, for their own safety. Everyone was ordered out of the ocean as lighting was seen nearby. All metal framed structures were temporarily evacuated. The following day I read that two women were struck by lightning in nearby Point Pleasant Beach so the caution of hired security team was indeed prudent. The rain however caused confusion as it canceled or delayed hundreds of lectures, performances, events. By Saturday night the skies cleared, and the beautiful people emerged full of light, sparkle, glitter, and elaborate costumes.
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The town was once a bustling destination for summer beach revelers but over the decades it's glory faded onto hard times. It's the kind of place you'd hear about in a classic Bruce Springsteen song. An aging amusement park, boarded up store fronts next to vacant lots covered in weeds. Particularly after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy this town needed some kind of lift, and a revival came in the most unexpected of ways.
Many of the locals I spoke with like Dennis who grew up in Keansburg told me "this festival is the best thing that ever happened in my town. Local people have been struggling. This festival helps revive the economy, provide jobs, and bring people back to our beach. I hope they come back every year again and again." Dennis told me he used to be a musician back in the day playing guitar in 1950's type groups and later in rock n roll bands. He celebrated his 64th birthday Friday night on the beach. Of course there were a few locals who were angry at the intrusion into their quiet community, but most brought folding chairs and watched the mirth going on around them.
Gratitude is an interesting concept. Wikipedia describes it as "a feeling or attitude in acknowledgment of a benefit that one has received or will receive. Psychologytoday.com describes it as "an emotion expressing appreciation for what one has--as opposed to, for example, a consumer-driven emphasis on what one wants."
This uplifting feeling was present everywhere I went. I moved my sleeping bag out of my tent and fell asleep under the stars Saturday night to the gentle sound of lapping waves. The boom of a nearby dance floor didn't deter a night full of vividly colorful dreams, echo'd sounds of laughter, and an early morning awakening to a peach and cream colored dawn.
A few hours earlier whilst walking toward the Pex stage a young girl remarked that the sand in the center road was rough and bumpy just the night before, but been smoothed down to a sandy silk texture that felt great under her bare feet from so many people walking upon it. This made the road more safe and enjoyable for many others who followed later. It was to me a metaphor of life. As we travel with gratitude, and share that feeling- like a ripple it spreads across the world.
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More than 44 million people across the globe have Alzheimer's disease. And that number is expected to multiply by three or more over the next several decades. Yet, despite billions of dollars of investments into research and advocacy for effective treatment and a cure, neither exists.
But what if some simple online questionnaires and internet brain games could make the difference?
That idea is at the heart of an ambitious plan to speed up treatment -- and just maybe a cure -- for Alzheimer's disease by 2025.
The clinical trial bottleneck
Alzheimer's advocates and medical experts agree: a cure for the progressive brain disease will be found in a clinical trial. But Alzheimer's clinical trials today are extremely costly (up to half $1 billion), time-consuming and severely hampered by a lack of participants.
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Plus, today's Alzheimer's trials collect data in so many different ways that it can be tough to get a clear read on whether the treatments being tested are working, says George Vradenburg, Chairman of the Global Alzheimer's Platform Foundation and advocacy non-profit UsAgainstAlzheimer's.
Dr. Michael Weiner, professor of radiology and biomedical engineering, psychiatry and neurology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), has reached the same conclusion. Despite major advances in Alzheimer's research pioneered by researchers like Weiner, and considerable investment from the pharmaceutical industry and the federal government, the clinical trial bottleneck remains.
"The single biggest problem for getting a cure is getting patients for the trials," he says. "It sounds so simple, but in fact it's a huge problem."
After decades of groundbreaking Alzheimer's research and advocacy, Weiner and Vradenburg believe they may have found a solution.
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The Brain Health Registry
As principal investigator of the federally funded Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) and the son of an Alzheimer's sufferer, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more passionate or dedicated advocate for a cure.
During a trip to France in 2009, Weiner got a firsthand glimpse of an innovative program led by Dr. Bruno Vellas. The French professor of geriatrics had built up a network of clinics and a ready cohort of older patients ready to participate in clinical trials for Alzheimer's treatments. Since France's universal healthcare system enables access to all of the patients' records under a single integrated computer system, finding the right candidates for clinical trials is easier than in the U.S.
Back in San Francisco and in the midst of a high-tech boom, Weiner found himself inspired by what he'd seen abroad and pondering why there wasn't an online platform to enroll potential clinical trial participants in the U.S. That kernel of an idea, along with support from various donors, gave way to the Brain Health Registry, a first-of-its-kind online platform to recruit potential clinical trial candidates for treatments for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, depression, PTSD and other brain disorders.
How it Works
Users on the Brain Health Registry website are asked to provide basic information about themselves, sign a consent form and take some online brain tests. Participants then receive reminders to return to the site about three to six months later to answer more questions and take more tests via the site, then again several months later and so on.
These participants are incredibly valuable, as they represent a ready pool of potential candidates for clinical trials. And their responses to online tests and questionnaires is also crucial, because they may contain major clues about any changes in the person's brain health.
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When users disclose new symptoms they're experiencing such as gait disturbances, mood changes or sleep disorders, these can all be initial signs to researchers that the person will later develop Alzheimer's.
Most people who experience these and other possible early signs of the disease don't consider that they could be precursors to dementia. Many of these people may be what is called "pre-clinical," meaning they aren't yet showing any symptoms of cognitive decline, but are building up toxic proteins in the brain that will one day develop into Alzheimer's.
The cost and time typically involved in recruiting pre-clinical people to participate in a lengthy clinical trial that may involve side effects is a huge obstacle, says Vradenburg.
That's where registries can be a big help, he says.
So far, there are some 43,000 participants, but Weiner says the Brain Health Registry won't stop there. Not everyone who joins the platform provides complete data over a long period of time, and of those who do, only up to about 20 percent will be good candidates for trials. So it's critical to have as many participants as possible, he says.
Having a reliable source of trial-ready people is a major breakthrough, not least of which because it could greatly widen access to people who are pre-clinical.
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The Global Alzheimer's Platform
The next piece of the puzzle? A standing network of doctors and certified clinical trial sites ready to take in potential enrollees. That's where George Vradenburg comes in.
Vradenburg's first personal experience with Alzheimer's came when his mother-in-law called early one morning to say that a strange man was in her home. He and his wife Trish Vradenburg rushed over, only to learn that the "strange man" was actually his mother-in-law's husband. It was the start of her downward spiral into the depths of the disease, which, as it does for so many, ended with her in need of round-the-clock care and unable to recognize her loved ones.
"This disease is a cruel monster. It deserves a brutal response," he writes on the USAgainstAlzheimer's website.
Since that time, he and his wife have been fighting for Alzheimer's treatment and a cure, working to put pressure on political, business and civic leaders to provide more resources for Alzheimer's research and drug development. Vradenburg has been federally appointed to the National Alzheimer's Project's Advisory Council on Research, Care and Services and has testified numerous times before Congress about the worldwide Alzheimer's pandemic.
He also chairs the GAP Foundation, whose mission is to reduce the time, cost and risk involved with Alzheimer's clinical trials to hasten the development of treatments and a cure. When the organization learned about the Brain Health Registry, they quickly decided to team up.
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The GAP has identified and coordinated with clinical trial sites throughout the U.S. and worldwide that are ready to enroll qualified Brain Health Registry participants into their clinical trials. That network of clinics has agreed to standardized procedures to streamline the Alzheimer's clinical trial process and is ready to enroll qualified Brain Health Registry participants in trials.
The two organizations have pledged to work together to accelerate treatment for Alzheimer's by 2025. Vradenburg says he believes they can reduce the clinical testing cycle by at least two years.
Better treatment and a cure
With a speedier, higher-quality, more efficient clinical trial process, Vradenburg and Weiner both say they are confident that researchers will find effective treatments and ultimately a cure for Alzheimer's.
"I am an optimist about the prospects of finding a means of prevention and treatment," says Vradenburg.
He predicts that of the more than a dozen Alzheimer's drugs now being tested in late-stage clinical trials, some will be able to more effectively treat symptoms such as hallucinations and agitations while others will work to slow the disease's progress.
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Long-term, Weiner says the goal is for researchers will develop a test that can identify someone has having very early Alzheimer's and then a treatment that significantly delays or even prevents the development of symptoms.
Getting involved
A campaign is under way to spread the word about Brain Health Registry and enlist more online participants. Celebrities like Paula Abdul, Linda Gray, B. Smith and the Golden State Warriors' Draymond Green have also signed on to help.
With Alzheimer's disease as prevalent as it is (over 5 million people have the illness in the U.S. alone, and those number are only expected to rise), its effects are far-reaching. The emotional and financial toll on families and taxpayers is staggering, Weiner points out.
"When I give talks about Alzheimer's disease, the first thing I say is, 'How many of you know someone with Alzheimer's disease?' and three-quarters of the audience raises their hand," he says.
Weiner notes that joining Brain Health Registry is free, fun, and just might lead to a long-awaited breakthrough in the pursuit of a cure for Alzheimer's.
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In addition to joining the registry, Vradenburg encourages people who are interested to ask their doctor about clinical trials.
"In a sense it's in your own self-interest to do it, it's also in the interest of your family and in the interest of the nation that we participate in clinical trials," he says.
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This article was originally published on Caring.com. Read the original article here.
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Earlier on Huff/Post50:
At the same time President Obama was giving his talk to police officers and others in Dallas last week, I was a block away talking to lawyers and judges of the Dallas Bar Association. I was surprised anyone made it through the traffic cordon, but there was a good turn out in large part because I was talking about a subject that had suddenly become poignantly relevant. I was discussing my new book, The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle that Brought Down the Klan.
I spent most of my time talking about the 1981 killing in Mobile, Alabama of nineteen-year-old Michael Donald. At one point, I said that I wanted to talk a moment about something else. I explained how I had written three books on the Kennedys, and it was so extraordinary that twice in my lifetime Dallas should be the center of a tragedy truly not of its making.
The caricature of the Texas city after the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 is one of the more shameful episodes in contemporary American journalism. It involves two of the most famous names in my profession: Dan Rather and William Manchester. They were both ambitious young men who used the death of President Kennedy as a device to catapult them to fame and fortune.
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When Kennedy was shot, Rather rushed to the local CBS bureau where the correspondent went on the air immediately and stayed there as much as he could. He had heard a story that the students at University Park Elementary School had cheered and applauded when told the president had been assassinated. Eddie Barker, the news director at the CBS affiliate, had children at the school. He checked it out and it wasn't true, and he told Rather so.
According to Barker, the man who would become the anchor of the CBS Evening News said he would forget the story. Instead, he rushed on the air live telling a tale that seemed to confirm northern prejudices about a southern city and helped cement the idea that Dallas was another country in which even little children were taught to hate the president of the United States.
By the time William Manchester began researching The Death of a President, his authorized account of the last days of the 35th president of the United States, millions of Americans recoiled at the mention of the name of the Texas city. It was bizarre. No one suggested that Washington, D.C. murdered Abraham Lincoln or Los Angeles killed Bobby Kennedy, but Dallas took out John F. Kennedy.
Manchester, a talented and vivid writer, cemented that idea in the minds of Americans for a generation. In Manchester's epic, it is as if Dallas itself is the murderer. The author kills Dallas with innuendo. He tells us the city "had a history of ugly incidents" involving right-wingers attacking liberal Democratic members of the administration. UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson had been assaulted on a visit, and Stevenson "had been shocked by the current of hatred in Dallas. He seriously wondered whether the President should go there."
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As we read on, we know the beloved President will meet his inevitable end in the evil city. It doesn't matter that assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was a recent arrival to Dallas and could have performed his nefarious act anywhere. Or if one chooses to believe any of the myriad conspiracy theories, none of them have anything to do with Dallas other than as a convenient location for the crime.
It was easy to miss in the United States, but newspaper front pages across the globe have been shouting about a decision on July 8 from a little-known and opaque tribunal. After more than six years of litigation, the International Centre for Investment Disputes found against Philip Morris International (PMI) in its suit against the government of Uruguay over rules on tobacco packaging. To emphasize their decision, the tribunal ordered PMI to pay most of Uruguay's legal costs.
The public health community, rightfully, is still gushing over this David-beats-Goliath victory.
Uruguay, a developing country whose GDP is dwarfed by PMI revenues, refused to back down, insisting that the health of its citizens takes precedence over corporate profits. Congratulations have filled the email inbox of Uruguayan President Tabare Vazquez, an oncologist.
Unlike Iceland's victory over England in the Eurocup, however, the decision is much more than a feel good story in an otherwise depressing news cycle. This victory will have profound implications for the future, beyond tobacco and even beyond health policy.
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First, the Uruguay case will embolden other governments who have the political will to fight the tobacco epidemic but have been understandably circumspect about the possibility of multi-million dollar litigation. But the fact that Uruguay won is not the only positive lesson from the case. PMI and other tobacco multinationals have nearly limitless resources - they can launch cases even when they are sure they will lose.
Second, Uruguay did not stand alone. Philanthropists (especially former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg), civil society and academics lined up to support the government, committing both funding and in-kind help. PMI's vast resources and the power that unfortunately often seems to flow from immorality were trumped by solidarity and a confidence of being on the right side of history. David had only his sling and stone. Uruguay had a volunteer army. Mayor Bloomberg, along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, have already set up an emergency fund to support other countries who fall into Big Tobacco's cross-hairs. Those governments can count on the same army of volunteers.
More broadly, the Uruguay decision strongly affirmed the right, and indeed duty, of governments to regulate in the public interest. Tobacco is world's number one preventable killer, but there are many other health risk factors for which policy is still in its infancy. The affirmation goes beyond health, and will yield policy space to governments on broader issues such as the environment, labor, and human rights.
Finally, the Uruguay decision is a signal that the trade community finally "gets it." For decades, trade tribunals have, behind closed doors, reliably overturned public interest regulations in the interest of corporate profits, even when the regulations are not discriminatory against foreign goods or services. There have been hundreds of legal treatises about the friction between trade and investment rules on the one hand and public interest legislation on the other. This decision is a small indication that the needle may be moving in the right direction.
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Trade is important and can create prosperity, but profit should not be prioritized over basic human needs.
This morning in your community, someone woke up before dawn, climbed on the back of a truck and went from house to house collecting trash.
Someone else headed to a nursing job at your local hospital, on his or her feet for hours, providing hands-on care with great compassion and competence.
Still others will put in long days answering life-and-death 911 calls, preparing nutritious school meals and keeping our prisons safe.
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These are the public service workers who make our communities safe and strong. They don't do it for the fame and fortune - that's for sure. But they do it with great diligence and devotion. They never quit.
For everything they do, these men and women deserve respect and need a voice. And the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), 1.6 million members strong, is that voice. We stand together to negotiate better wages and benefits, because fighting for every working person's future is the highest form of respect.
Beginning today in Las Vegas, AFSCME members will gather for our 42nd International Convention. And we do so at a time both of great peril and promise for public service workers and the American labor movement as a whole.
We continue to be a target for right-wing ideologues and wealthy special interests, who are attacking us with unprecedented ferocity. Their goal is not just to weaken us, but to destroy us. They used their deep pockets to bring cases all the way to the Supreme Court, where a wrong decision would have crushed long-established public sector collective bargaining rights.
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The more we are threatened, the more resolve we show, the more we are determined to never quit. At the bargaining table, the ballot box and elsewhere, we have secured important victories in the last few years. We have turned back so-called "right-to-work" in Missouri. We defeated assaults on public pensions in Cincinnati and Phoenix. We helped home care workers nationwide get the overtime pay they deserve. We have exposed the threat of outsourcing, making sure taxpayers - rather than profit-hungry corporations - remain in control of public services. Tomorrow at our convention, we will host Secretary Hillary Clinton, whom AFSCME has endorsed to be the next President of the United States. The contrast between her and Republican nominee Donald Trump, could not possibly be greater. And for supporters of unions and workers' rights, there is only one logical choice.
Hillary Clinton believes the strongest economy is one that works for everyone; Donald Trump wants to lavish tax breaks on the very wealthiest Americans. She has a message of inclusion; he insults a new group of Americans seemingly every week.
Hillary Clinton is a long-time friend of working people. Meanwhile, Donald Trump refuses to negotiate a contract with maids, servers and bartenders at Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas. So while we are in town, AFSCME members will head down to his property for a rally expressing our support for those workers whose voice Trump wants to muzzle. The choice in November boils down to this: Hillary Clinton, an unstoppable champion, versus Donald Trump, an unstable charlatan.
AFSCME members are working their hearts out for Secretary Clinton because she will approach her job as we do ours - with passion and professionalism, with an unfailing commitment to serve. Together, we will never quit.
Last week, as I was 35,000 feet in the air flying back from New York to LA, I thought I'd check my messages before trying to get in a nap during the six-hour flight. It is then, of course, that I read: "Man drives truck through crowd in Nice; 70 dead, over 100 injured, death toll could rise...."
For the next six hours, I was watching various news network's coverage of yet another devastating terrorist attack on innocent people. I was tweeting, emailing, on Facebook, and talking to the man seated next to me. I was drowning in the reports of bad news. So when I landed, I had to turn my phone off and come up for air.
Before bed, much like one who can't look away from the train wreck, I turned my phone on again and started reading the updates since I landed, and, the messages on social media I had received.
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I knew I would see the typical prejudicial, bigoted tweets toward Muslims and the religion of Islam. The expected ridiculous comments from those on the right blaming all liberals for this, especially our President and, of course, those mockingly calling for the banning of all trucks (white trucks specifically). All this while dozens of people's dead bodies lie on the ground on the Promenade in Nice. Many covered in white tablecloths from nearby restaurants that patrons had put on their bodies out of respect.
One of my followers on Twitter said, "some are saying this is like World War II, Leslie..." Personally, I felt that a bit of an overreach, seemingly more like fear-mongering than reality.
But it was then that I read Newt Gingrich's comments saying that "every person who is of a Muslim background in America should face a test." "We should frankly test every person here who is of a Muslim background and if they believe in Sharia, they should be deported."
Seriously!?
Does he realize that if you have a Muslim background, that you might not be a Muslim? And how would we go about determining who has a "Muslim background?" By the color of their skin? Their last name? The way they dress? Where their great grandparents might have been born?
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And once we go about determining who has a "Muslim background," how do we go about rounding those people up? And what of the Muslims serving in our military? Our police force? How about the two Congressmen, Keith Ellison of Minnesota and Andre Carson of Indiana, how would we go about questioning them? And since so many right wingers think President Obama is a Muslim, would he be questioned as well?
Unfortunately, those statements from Gingrich are eerily similar to a time in history, to a time in World War II. When under the command of one leader, one country questioned its citizens based on religion, rounded them up, identified them, and marked not only their I.D. cards, but their clothing also, in order to know who is who and of what religion.
Those talking of closing mosques, like they did in Paris, forget our Constitution, and that these are places of worship. And, forget their history. Who can forget Kristallnacht?
And does Mr. Gingrich know what Sharia law truly is? (Which is a form of governing by those living in a legal system based on Islam, and which the United States of America is not.) And, is why so many Muslims actually fled TO America.
And does Mr. Gingrich think a 'chat' with someone who believes in Sharia AND might be planning an attack would just to come clean about it?? I can see it now:
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Question: "Do you believe in Sharia law?"
Answer: "No."
Question: "Are you a terrorist?"
Answer: "What is a terrorist?"
Then the big government military complex Gingrich wants ruling us says: "I think this one's ok boys, you can go back to kindergarten class now..."
Place matters to all people. Latinos included. Many of our families have lived in this great nation for a long time and have lived on and worked the land. In some cases, our stories in those places are told today, and many are not.
Today, Latinos are not as actively engaged today in participating in our nation's public lands. Even with widely documented support, only eight percent of Latinos participated in outdoor recreation in 2015, according to the Outdoor Foundation.
Yet, as the largest minority group in America -- one that is expected to grow to nearly 30 percent of the population by 2050 -- the Latino community's engagement is critical to ensuring the future success and preservation of our nation's public lands. There is a wide gap between population and use, but by closing it we can inspire a new movement of environmental stewards.
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This is why the third annual Latino Conservation Week, which kicked off this past weekend and continues through July 24, is so encouraging.
More than 100 events are being held in 17 states and the District of Columbia - more than double the totals from 2015. The week is an opportunity for Latinos to demonstrate their passion for enjoying and protecting public lands, and it provides new possibilities for parks, agencies, organizations and even business to engage the Latino community.
Latinos are passionate about enjoying the outdoors and hold a strong belief that we have a moral obligation to protect it for future generations. Latino Conservation Week's events introduce Latinos to new opportunities, new locations and new ways to translate their passion for the outdoors into making a difference for our nation's treasured natural resources.
The National Park Service, as well as its Latino Heritage Internship Program, is holding more than a quarter of the year's events at NPS sites throughout the country. Events include helping to protect the Colorado River at Lake Mead National Recreation Area, exploring Cuban American history at Everglades National Park and learning about the trails at C&O Canal National Park. NPS's widespread participation demonstrates the spirit of Latino Conservation Week.
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As National Park Service Director Jonathan B. Jarvis said in announcing the agency's involvement, "We are thrilled to be a part of Latino Conservation Week ... As we look ahead to the second century, we want everyone to find their own special connections to the incredible places that are our national parks."
More than 60 parks, organizations and community groups have joined Latino Conservation Week as sponsors and event partners. From agencies like NPS, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Forest Service to environment groups like Conservation Lands Foundation, Sierra Club, and Wilderness Society to Latino groups like Por la Creacion Faith-based Alliance, Latino Outdoors, COFEM and LULAC, it's evident that Latino Conservation Week is a collaborative effort with the potential to have a significant positive impact on the Latino community and our nation's treasured spaces.
Latino Conservation Week is helping to break down barriers - a primary one being information - to the Latino population's access of public lands, to encourage new opportunities to experience these sites, identify our personal connection to them and to create a unique platform for groups to reach out to this community.
Seems like SeaWorld and its CEO Joel Manby just cannot say enough bad things about sea pens -- or in official SeaWorld-speak, "sea cages" -- for their captive orcas and other cetaceans.
Environmentalists and scientists have been promoting the idea of large sea pens -- areas of the ocean, such as large coves, netted off from the ocean -- as a more humane and ecologically sound alternative to the current small concrete tanks that orcas and other cetaceans now live in, working every day to earn their food. SeaWorld and other aquariums use food to induce whales, dolphins and seals to do their tricks for the public. If the captive does not do the trick correctly, they don't eat. They must be kept hungry, or they ignore their trainers.
In response to reporters about the news that the National Aquarium in Baltimore was planning to retire their eight dolphins (including seven bred in captivity) to a sea pen sanctuary in Florida or the Caribbean, SeaWorld made the statement:
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"While some may use today's announcement to continue to call for the release of our orcas to sea cages, our point of view has not changed. Sea cages for our whales are high risk. Most of our whales were born at SeaWorld, and the best, and safest, future for them is to let them live out their lives here, receiving top care, in state-of-the-art habitats, safe from pollution and the other environmental threats they would face in our oceans."
Then, during an online meeting with shareholders, SeaWorld CEO Manby stated:
"We have the utmost respect for the National Aquarium. We certainly know they're going to take into account what we think are some health challenges of taking dolphins born and raised in an aquarium and placing them in an unfamiliar ocean environment, but having said that, we know they intend to pursue this experiment in a very mindful way and to monitor the health of their dolphins as they move them."
CEO Manby later doubled down on his disdain for sea pens:
"Could it be done to move whales to sea cages? Yeah, it technically possibly could be done. But is it the safest thing for our animals? We do not believe it is."
Sounds like a big "NO" to me.
Yahoo Finance shows SeaWorld stock plunging another 68 cents per share (4.48%) and is issuing a Strong Sell recommendation for SeaWorld. We believe at least part of the reason for the decline is SeaWorld's continued refusal to retire their orcas and dolphins to sea pens.
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Sea pens have been used for years to hold cetaceans in captivity. One example is the US Navy, which just a few klicks from SeaWorld San Diego has a large number of bottlenose dolphins and sea lions in sea pens, exploited (unfortunately) for defense purposes.
The proposals for sea pens by scientists and expert marine mammal trainers (some from SeaWorld itself) are aimed at providing the best care available for orcas and dolphins while giving them much more room and a much less sterile environment than the concrete tanks that SeaWorld and other aquariums use.
And how can they seriously suggest that well designed sea pens pose any threat of pollution or other "dangers" to dolphins and whales? These animals have adapted through thousands of years of evolution to thrive in their oceans homes. Small concrete tanks are not at all suited to these large, intelligent, and social sea mammals.
SeaWorld has criticized the Keiko release effort as being a "failure." Keiko was the name of the orca star of the hit movie "Free Willy." The parts of the film with Keiko were done in his aquarium home in Mexico City. Conditions there were poor, with artificial seawater and very tight conditions, and Keiko contracted a skin infection as well as poor muscle tone and the telltale droopy dorsal fin, characteristic of captive orcas but rare in the wild.
At the behest of Warner Brothers films, Earth Island's International Marine Mammal Project formed the Free Willy -- Keiko Foundation to rehabilitate and release Keiko. After moving Keiko to a large state-of-the-art tank in Oregon to cure his skin problems and build up his strength, he was then flown to his home waters of Iceland. Keiko lived for about five years in Iceland, spending his days, without the circus performances, in both large sea pens and the open Atlantic Ocean, eventually swimming to Norway.
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Keiko was the first captive orca whale ever returned to his home waters, a historic first. He lived out his life free of the stresses and dangers of life in a concrete tank.
His death was indeed unfortunate, but what SeaWorld's Manby and the rest of the captivity industry don't say is that while the International Marine Mammal Project and the Free Willy -- Keiko Foundation were rehabilitating Keiko and bringing him back to his home waters, 17 captive orcas died in aquariums around the world. Sea pens look a lot better when one considers the hidden death records of aquariums for their captive orcas.
Manby and other critics also fail to mention that SeaWorld and other aquariums rejected bringing in Keiko to their facilities, leaving him to die in a small Mexico aquarium until the International Marine Mammal Project and the Free Willy -- Keiko Foundation efforts saved him and brought him back to health.
When Keiko died, he was the second longest-lived male orca ever kept in captivity at that time.
So sea pens can be a healthy alternative to keeping captive orca whales and dolphins alive and healthy, far more so than the constraining and sterile environments provided by small concrete tanks. SeaWorld should reconsider their active opposition to sea pens and should work with scientists, trainers, and environmental organizations to establish sea pen sanctuaries to retire their orcas, beluga whales, and dolphins.
Unlike sea pens, SeaWorld's argument against them doesn't hold water.
Young female entrepreneur working in a home office at her desk
American colleges and universities attract and educate some of the world's most talented and ambitious foreign graduate students. But thanks to restrictive immigration laws, many of these brilliant, highly-trained individuals are forced to head straight to the nearest airport upon graduation.
They take a lot more than their suitcases home with them. They take the valuable skills, talents, and ideas incubated by America's graduate programs. What's worse, the innovations and businesses, which would have created good American jobs, materialize instead on foreign shores.
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Better legal immigration options for foreign students would alleviate shortages for skilled worker, boost economic growth, and promote job creation for all Americans. An innovative program in Massachusetts shows how it can be done.
It's called the Global Entrepreneur in Residence Program (GEIR), and it's becoming a model for capturing more of the value of America's world-leading universities by keeping job creators on American soil. GEIR is aimed at retaining the entrepreneurial foreign graduates who, despite their talents, lost the lottery for H-1B visas.
The concept is simple: universities are granted an exemption from the H-1B high-skilled worker visa cap. By working part-time at the university and part-time on their start-up, a foreign student can stay in the U.S. and build a business, facilitating job creation for locals.
THE PROBLEM:
The visa for high-skilled foreign workers--the H-1B--is capped at just 85,000 per year. However, firms file in excess of 300,000 H-1B visa petitions each year, and a lottery system determines who gets them. The application process is restrictive and expensive. Because applications are submitted only once per year, fast-moving start-ups are forced to make hiring decisions around an arbitrary deadline.
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The experience of Massachusetts shows why current visa policy is such a big problem. There are about 50,000 foreign college students at Massachusetts colleges. Every year, it's estimated that more than a thousand entrepreneurs leave the state due to the national limitation on H-1B visas.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has noted several "cases in which entrepreneurs attempting to establish very early-stage technology start-ups were unable to obtain H-1B or other work visas for themselves and either relocated the project abroad or had to abandon the start-up."
Furthermore, the Boston Federal Reserve found that New England has the highest concentration of regional employment in STEM fields nationally and some of the highest demand for H-1B workers.
High-skilled visa reform is badly needed, but Congress shows no signs of making meaningful reform a reality any time soon. That is where GEIR comes in.
THE SOLUTION:
The good news is that some entities, including universities and nonprofit research organizations, are already exempt from the H-1B visa cap. Several years ago, this little-known fact piqued the interest of Jeffrey Goldman--a Boston-based immigration lawyer--and Jeffrey Bussgang--venture capitalist and Harvard Business School lecturer.
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They asked: could universities use the cap exemption to sponsor graduates of advanced degree programs who want to build their businesses in Massachusetts but would otherwise be unable to due to the lack of H-1B visa slots?
"I teach at Harvard Business School," Bussgang said. "And at the end of my class I would have all these incredibly brilliant students come up to me and tell me about their startups that they were working on, and yet they couldn't stay to launch those startups here in the U.S."
The Massachusetts Legislature provided a framework for the program in 2014, with initial GEIR programs taking root at UMass Boston and UMass Lowell. Though initially funded entirely by the state, the UMass programs have shifted to a public-private partnership with modest public funding and a growing effort to enlist private philanthropy. More recently, Babson College in Wellesley became the first private college to establish a program.
In order to qualify for the program, candidates must be in a leadership position at an early-stage venture, have a masters degree or higher in a STEM or business field, and have their company headquartered in Massachusetts.
The entrepreneurs-in-residence spend part of their time (eight to ten hours weekly) mentoring aspiring entrepreneurs amongst the university's students, faculty, and alumni and teaching classes which triggers the exemption as university employees. The other half of their time will be spent building their company, incubating new ideas, and creating value and jobs for the people of Massachusetts.
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Once the startup firm develops sufficiently, it can apply to directly sponsor the entrepreneur-in-residence for an H-1B visa. Because the entrepreneur has work authorization from the participating university, the startup's application to sponsor the entrepreneur is not included in the lottery process--the startup's ability to sponsor the H-1B visa is therefore judged strictly on the merits of the application rather than the luck of the draw.
The Massachusetts Technology Collaborative vets applicants and the participating universities sponsor them. The GEIR program now has two corporate partners. This public-private program has the support of the Governor's office and the investment community in Massachusetts.
In less than two years, twenty entrepreneurs have received visas--a 100 percent success rate--and the companies those students have created produced 261 jobs and raised $118.5M in private investment.
NOT JUST FOR NERDS IN MASSACHUSETTS:
The GEIR program tends to focus on entrepreneurs in high technology that will generate high-skill job positions. But this program isn't just a win for Silicon Valley-type techies in their t-shirts and sandals making the next Facebook or Snapchat.
As the work of UC Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti suggests, the addition of high-tech jobs to cities ultimately leads to the creation of 5 additional service jobs, ranging from lower-skilled jobs in security to higher-skilled jobs in design and architecture.
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Similar programs elsewhere show promise. Colorado and New York have already picked up on Massachusetts' example. Working on its own, the University of Colorado Boulder launched an entrepreneur-in-residence program in 2015 with philanthropic support from venture capitalist Brad Feld.
In early 2016, seven City University of New York (CUNY) campuses announced they are collaborating with New York City's Economic Development Corporation to launch the International Innovations Initiative NYC (IN2NYC), a program for foreign entrepreneurs that shares similarities with GEIR. It's the first city-run program and seeks to allow 80 entrepreneurs to work at CUNY institutions while building their business for two years.
The New York program seeks to "create quality 21st-century jobs for New Yorkers" and "support the CUNY system by attracting international talent and fostering entrepreneurship among its student and faculty population."
Retention programs like these could also work in other places. The approach could work well in areas where academic institutions already draw top foreign talent for advanced degrees in STEM fields, such as Raleigh-Durham, Chicago, or Southern California. It could work even better in places where the industries generating new and growing firms are well-matched to the research and training programs at local academic institutions: be it healthcare in Atlanta or Nashville, or software in Austin or the San Francisco Bay Area.
Creating Jobs Through Better Immigration Policy
Each year, American universities educate hundreds of thousands of foreign students, many of them pursuing degrees in science, math, engineering, and technology--fields that are central to innovation and economic growth. Doing more to retain the exceptional foreign graduates who wish to stay in the United States--particularly those with a demonstrated ability to start new companies and create jobs--would be an unambiguous economic good.
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Entrepreneurs will start companies somewhere. By making sure it happens in the U.S., the entrepreneur-in-residence approach emphasizes a better sense of entrepreneurship at world class American institutions and contributes to the growth of new firms, jobs, and tax revenues that will reverberate through local economies.
Existing policy amounts to the de facto deportation of some the world's smartest and most creative minds--blocking tangible benefits and jobs for Americans.
CLEVELAND, OH - JULY 18: Rudy Guliani addressed the delegates on the first night of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, OH on July 18, 2016. (Photo by Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Whoever chose former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani to be the prime-time speaker at the opening night of the Republican Convention, moments after ten p.m. in the east coast, should have his head handed to him/her.
Donald Trump's wife Melania, who gave a generally good, polished speech as a means to provide introduction to her persona had to wait until 10:23 and closed her fifteen minute talk on the approach to 11. And her delivery was fine. Not too personal about her life with Trump, but nonetheless dignified as she put forth mostly political reasons to vote for her husband, reminding one and all that he was so successful. Pity, though, that it now appears she appropriated several lines from Michelle Obama's 2008 speech without any acknowledgment.
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But that's chickenfeed compared to Giuliani. And admittedly I am biased against Trump, his speech was blood red meat to the crowd in the hall. The schedule planners, however, apparently never read media expert Marshall McLuhan's famous remark that The Medium is the Message. McLuhan also referred to TV as a cool medium and cool was anything but what Rudy personified. He was continually shrill, shouting pronouncements about Donald Trump and how he would make America great again, even as he castigated Barack Obama and his secretary of state Hillary Clinton. Literally screaming his exhortations, I was waiting for the men in white coats to drag him off, or at least a stage manager with the proverbial hook.
In 2012 Clint Eastwood famously erred talking to an empty chair in mock debate with President Obama. Next to Giuliani's performance it was sober and reasonable, as the ex-mayor spewed venom and took Hillary's statements to the 2013 House Oversight committee out of context. Quoting her twice in non-stop shouts he indicated she said, "What difference does it make?" which she had said in exasperation and not at all what Giuliani implied, that it didn't matter that the American ambassador to Libya and three others had died. Her point was she would rather not continually debate whether the attack was due to an anti-Islam video or angry mob, preferring instead to move forward to learn from the experience and make sure it didn't happen again.
But Giuliani didn't care that his use of the quote was akin to a lie. That the various House investigations had not proven any culpability on Hillary's part, a fact echoed by numerous commentators after Pat Smith the grieving mother of Sean Smith, one of the four who died in Benghazi, blamed Hillary directly for the death of her son from the convention rostrum. Indeed, the media experts all refuted this sort of emotional behavior not based upon facts that had been exhaustively studied, and dismissed the mother's speech as typical political convention exaggeration.
Remember, too, that Giuliani is the man who after the Dallas police killings decried the slogan Black Lives Matter, stating it implied that white lives do not. That he did not seem to compute that Black Lives Matter was a response to all the killings and incarcerations of Black people in our society, disproportionate to their number and the group was really saying that Black Lives Matter as much as White Lives do -- not more as Giuliani implied.
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Look, I understand political conventions are a theatrical exercise and there will definitely be exaggerations of Donald Trump next week at the Democratic conclave in Philadelphia. That, and the ads and political commentaries and the fall presidential debates will help those on the fence to decide what they're going to do on November 8.
But it was not a good start for the GOP. Some of the speeches were better than others, in between C and D level actors Scott Baio and Duck Dynasty star Willie Robertson, not to mention the fact that the two former GOP presidents, two other GOP presidential candidates, numerous candidates this year, including home state Governor John Kasich refused to attend the convention.
You know, the Trump side had a chance to show magnanimity when the anti-Trump people simply wanted a roll call vote on rules changes -- a vote they were sure to lose, but they wanted the chance to make their views known. Instead, the powers who ran the convention insisted the petitions submitted to get such a roll call had fallen short and they didn't want to discuss it or in fact even show proof that the petitions earlier delivered had been withdrawn. Instead of venting the built-up steam they rammed their rejection through, riling many delegates and causing the Colorado contingent to walk out.
And that proved to be what the commentators were talking about for most of the afternoon before the evening session. That the unity being sought by Trump in anointing as vice president right-wing Indiana Governor Mike Spence was pretty much spoiled, and it will now remain to be seen what the next few nights bring.
HILTON HOTEL MIDTOWN, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES - 2016/07/16: Donald Trump speaks during introduction of Governor Mike Pence as running for vice president at Hilton hotel Midtown Manhattan. (Photo by Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Republican President Teddy Roosevelt, hardly anyone's idea of a dove, famously proclaimed that in exercising diplomatic and military power, the US should "Talk softly and carry a big stick."
In contrast, each time there's a terror attack or other violent incident anywhere in the world, Donald Trump speaks loudly, while his small fingers are firmly wrapped around a tiny little stick.
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In response to the tragic attack in Nice by a deranged man of Moroccan descent, Trump's first response was to promise that "if we're elected, we'll be very strong and very smart". Speaking by phone to Bill O'Reilly, Trump then called for a Congressional Declaration of War on ISIL.
But when pressed by Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes how he would conduct that war and whether he'd send American troops, Trump suddenly turned timid:
"I'm going to have very few troops on the ground. We're going to have unbelievable intelligence, which we need, which right now we don't have. We don't have the people over there. And we're going to have surrounding states and, very importantly, get NATO involved because we support NATO far more than we should, frankly, because you have a lot of countries that aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing. " And we have to wipe out ISIL. "And speaking of Turkey, Turkey is an ally. Turkey can do it by themselves. But they have to be incentivized. For whatever reason, they're not. So we have no choice."
So there you have it, Trump's plan to be "strong and smart" to crush ISIL:
First , Trump would wait for a Declaration of War from Congress, something that has occurred only 5 times in US history, the last right after Pearl Harbor. Although Section 8 of the Constitution states that Congress shall have the power to declare war, since World War II, many military conflicts like the Vietnam War, the Afghanisitan War and both Iraq Wars were conducted by the President under lesser authorizations of force. (As an aside, Trump, in his skewed way, may have raised a valid issue--The willingness of Presidents to conduct extended wars without a Congressional Declaration of War and the willingness of Congress to turn a blind eye in order to avoid a controversial vote is, to say the least, Constitutionally troubling.) But the idea that the nation with the most powerful military on earth would declare War on a non-state actor which the CIA estimates has 20,000-31,500 fighters in Iraq and Syria is slightly absurd and would do little to make the war efforts stronger. Indeed, the US declaring War on ISIL would more likely strengthen ISIL by giving it the legitimacy it so badly craves.
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Then, having obtained a Congressional Declaration of War against ISIL, Trump promises to deploy "very few troops". WTF? That's how he's going to smash ISIL?
Instead of troops, Trump promises "unbelievable intelligence". What does he think the CIA, the NSA, and military intelligence have been trying to obtain? If he thinks US intelligence agencies are incompetent, he should say so and present a plan to fix it.
Then, he'll avoid sending many US troops by getting surrounding states and NATO to do the fighting (presumably by threatening to cut off funding to NATO.) But according to the State Department there are already 60 countries, including most NATO allies and friendly Arab states involved in the anti-ISIL coalition (of which 22 have joined the military component). How, exactly, does Trump plan to convince them to put more boots on the ground when the US is unwilling to?
Finally, Trump would get Turkey, which just avoided a military coup, to wipe out ISIL itself by providing the right incentives. What incentives? A tax abatement on a new Casino?
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That's it, Trump's strong and smart plan to smash ISIL and make America safe again: Declare War, send few troops, obtain better intelligence, and get our NATO, Arab and Turkish allies to do most of the fighting.
Trump's weak and thoughtless plans for quickly smashing ISIL wouldn't be as troubling were it not for his belligerent rhetoric. Indeed, after much research, I haven't found anyone, left, right or center, with a coherent plan to defeat ISIL and other terrorist groups, in a short period of time.
Ending the jihadist threat (or to make Republicans happy, call it the threat from radical Islamists) will likely take years and involve a complex combination of economic development, education, diplomacy, and military action. But any strategy has to be exercised carefully. Too many American actions in the Middle East--from overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iran and installing the Shah in 1953; too supporting the Mujahidin to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan, which morphed into Al Qaeda; to invading Iraq which birthed the forces who became ISIL--have led to blowback and a bigger terrorist threat.
Actually, President Obama's strategy of assembling a coalition, conducting air strikes, and working with sympathetic forces has begun to produce some results, significantly reducing the amount of territory which ISIL holds. Indeed, ISIL's strategy of encouraging terrorist acts by small groups or lone wolves in the West with little or no central coordination may be a reaction to its weakness rather than its strength.
The only Western politician with the courage to tell the truth may be French President Manuel Vallis who stated after Nice "The times have changed. France is going to have to get used to terrorism". Truth be told, so may the US.( And I say this with no joy. I lost a close first cousin who worked in the Twin Towers on 9/11, and I still grieve.)
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But with a public whipped into a frenzy by hysterical 24-hour a day news coverage, and a military-industrial complex that stands to benefit, no national American politician, including Hillary Clinton, is willing to say so.
As overly hawkish as I fear Hillary may be, unlike Trump, she at least has a basic knowledge of the players in the Middle East and a complex view of geopolitical strategy. If we only have a choice of two people to be the next Commander in Chief with a finger on the nuclear button, better it not be an ignorant bully like Donald Trump, who speaks loudly and carries a small stick.
Over 20 years ago, my friend and I were jogging in my suburban Philadelphia neighborhood, one in which rapid demographic changes had seen a mostly white area turn more black and brown.
Just a few yards from my house, a cop stopped us. He asked us -- a young Indian man and a young black man -- what we were doing in the neighborhood? When I pointed to my house, he proceeded to ask me if I knew the people who lived at certain addresses on the block. All of those homes had black people.
My neighbor and classmate used to joke that whenever he got pulled over in his 1987 Pontiac Trans Am, he would always simply respond "Yes sir" or "No sir" to avoid escalations. His mother and stepfather told him that would be the only way to avoid a jail cell for something as minor as a traffic violation. In high school, he would tell me of the number of times he'd been pulled over that week. Sadly, my friend would disobey his own advice 10 years later, leading police on a 15-mile car chase through several adjoining Philly suburbs.
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While my own experiences lie at the periphery of police interactions with communities of color, I've seen firsthand how dehumanizing it is for African-Americans -- particularly young black men -- to have their very right to exist questioned by police. The disproportionate singling out of young African-Americans in police stops, and sometimes violent confrontations, also is part of a larger issue of institutional racism: the disenfranchisement of Blacks through social and economic segregation, often enforced by the criminal justice system or white vigilantism.
Mutual distrust and double consciousness
Perhaps the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, followed by the killings of five Dallas police officers, has created an opening for the long-promised (but never materialized) conversation and action on race in our country. Even some conservatives, long resistant to the idea of systemic racism, are finally acknowledging that there's a problem.
But Black Lives Matter -- and the visceral reactions the term has drawn from various sides -- has also exposed deeper problems: that law enforcement's interactions with communities of color cannot be painted with a broad brush, and that our society's polarization is framing these issues as black-and-white, whereas the vast majority of experiences exist firmly in the gray.
Ironically, while some police groups view BLM activists as adversaries, and vice versa, the relationships between police and communities of color seem to be marked by an unsaid co-dependency. For the lost black lives to get justice, police need to act responsively. When I was in college, my fraternity brother's cousin was murdered in Gary, Indiana, in front of 20 people. When the police tried to investigate, none of those witnesses were willing to cooperate. More than 20 years later, the case is still cold, and my fraternity brother continues to utter the line, "There is no justice in the world," referencing his cousin's murder.
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Similarly, my best friend, a math teacher, has been pulled over by police just blocks from our neighborhood for the most spurious reasons. The anger he has felt at being singled out for the perception that he was in the wrong place is palpable, just as his sadness and frustration resonated in the text he sent me following Sterling's death two weeks ago.
While I came of age with friends with a distrust of police, some of my friends also chose careers in law enforcement and became acculturated to believe that there were elements of their own communities to be viewed as adversaries. This is what many police officers of color, particularly African-Americans, struggle with the idea that they want to serve their communities, even when their own communities distrust them or when their colleagues harbor deep-seated suspicion of minorities. And even within structures that are disproportionately adverse to Blacks and Latinos, there are police and community activists who are trying to find common ground.
No more talking past each other
There has to be a way to police our communities, particularly those in which justice is too often delayed or denied to victims, without the mutual distrust that seems to be figuring prominently into the spate of incidents in Baton Rouge (twice), Falcon Heights, and Dallas. For law enforcement leaders, acknowledging the dehumanizing feeling for young Black men (and women) to be pulled over or questioned with no cause would be a significant step. There also needs to be more for civic leaders and politicians to acknowledge that the boundaries (real and imagined) erected to keep young African-Americans from having equitable opportunities need to be addressed. Mike Davis, Ta-Nehisi Coates and others have all written extensively about how the criminal justice system is used to enforce spatialized racial segregation. Just look at how many times Castile was pulled over for simply crossing into neighborhoods in which young Black men were deemed out of place.
But in acknowledging and addressing the institutional racism that continues to impact our society's efforts to become a more perfect union, it might be worth the time for BLM activists to begin the sort of constructive engagement necessary for real and meaningful reforms. This doesn't have to be a waiting game, in which police and activists are pushing each other to make the first move.
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Since 2014, there has been small but meaningful progress in that regard, with a number of BLM activists joining commissions to change the way police serve their communities, and the movement itself helping to inject new blood into venerable civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the National Urban League.
If there's another significant outcome that can't be ignored, we are as a country finally acknowledging the disparity in how Black lives are treated. And it's drawing Americans of all racial and religious backgrounds into an uncomfortable yet necessary conversation about how equally we fit into America's social landscape.
Baton Rouge police officer Montrell Jackson saw the pain of Alton Sterling's death and how it ripped apart both communities he belonged to--police officers and the African American community. He made a plea for peace and sought to be the change he wished to see, writing last week on Facebook:
"Please don't let hate infect your heart. This city MUST and WILL get better. I'm working in these streets so any protestors (sic), officers, friends, family, or whoever, if you see me and need a hug or want to say a prayer. I got you."
Officer Jackson was one of three officers killed in Baton Rouge over the weekend in an ambush by a lone gunman. Just as we owe it to the memories of Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Eric Garner, and others, we equally owe it to the legacy of officers like Montrell Jackson to be better than this.
The UNITED States of America. Sounds great. A diversified people forging common goals for the common good and welfare of its citizenry.
Hardly any politician does not extol his or her commitment to unifying the country while lamenting, sometimes in extraordinarily harsh language, the divisive nature of his or her opponent.
Monday morning on NPR, Roger F. Villere Jr., chairman of Louisiana's Republican Party, said the high hopes that an Obama presidency would bring the country together had not come to fruition, that there was more distrust now than before. He laid the blame squarely on Obama's shoulders, ignoring Republican infatuation with the birther movement that questioned the president's legitimacy for office, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's marching orders to try to make Obama a one-term president, disrespect by a GOP congressman during one of Obama's speeches to Congress, the invitation to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak to Congress in opposition to the Iran nuclear deal as a way of undermining Obama's leadership, and continuing efforts to obstruct any Obama initiative including the naming of a replacement for the seat on the Supreme Court left vacant by the death of Antonin Scalia.
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But so goes our political discourse these days. Reality is not part of the dialogue. We seem to want unity; we wax euphoric for those halcyon days when it pervaded the land.
But really, people, it is hard to think of a time in our nation's 240-year history when we enjoyed long-term unity. From the get-go our leaders took sides. They were so antagonistic to each other that our second president, John Adams, signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, four bills that were passed by a Federalist-dominated Congress in 1798. As described by Wikipedia, the laws "made it harder for an immigrant to become a citizen (Naturalization Act), allowed the president to imprison and deport non-citizens who were deemed dangerous (Alien Friends Act) or who were from a hostile nation (Alien Enemies Act), and criminalized making false statements that were critical of the federal government (Sedition Act)."
When Thomas Jefferson succeeded Adams, a new Democratic-Republican Congress repealed all but the Aliens Enemies Act which, modified, remains in force today.
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Differences existed even before the U.S. of A. came into existence. Not everyone in the 13 colonies favored independence from Great Britain. And after liberty was proclaimed and won, not everyone living in the 13 states enjoyed the fruits of liberty. Slavery stained our nation from even before its inception and its legacy divided us through the decades before and after the Civil War, manifested after the conflict by the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow laws, segregation, the fight for civil rights and voting rights, and most recently the Black Lives Matter movement.
America has been divided on the merits of temperance and Prohibition, on the suffragette movement, on the entries into World War I and World War II, on the combat in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, on the treatment of immigrants from Ireland, China, Eastern Europe and now from Muslim and Latin American countries, on treatment of Catholics, Jews and now Muslims, on the right to life versus the right to choose, on the meaning of the Second Amendment's right to bear arms, on the balance between saving the environment and exploiting our natural resources. (For the sake of brevity I'll stop the list here.)
Trump has latched onto a slogan of "Make America Safe Again." Hardly anyone would reject personal safety as a lofty goal. But by declaring himself the "law and order" candidate, Trump invokes the racial origins of Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy to stigmatize Afro-Americans to appeal to white voters.
Politicians stoke the illusion of unity, but the reality is unity might be achieved if political dialogue accepted the right of one's opponents to hold and air contrasting principles. Here's what Utah Senator Mike Lee told CBS News' Scott Pelley after his side lost a convention floor fight to challenge the nomination of Donald Trump:
"We need to do things that united people do, which is respect each other's opinions. Treat each other with dignity and respect and allow people to cast their votes, express their differences and then we move on."
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Sounds fair, but Lee has not accorded similar sentiments toward President Obama.
Indiana Governor Mike Pence was chosen as vice presidential running mate because of his potential to unite the party, especially evangelicals and social conservatives, behind Trump. Maybe so, but the real challenge for Pence and any candidate during this national election is whether they can unite the country.
What killed the dinosaurs? It's a question as old as - well the dinosaurs themselves, and one that everyone from school children to scientists have been asking for decades. Movies like Jurassic Park and the Land Before Time only heighten that sense of wonder and raise the stakes behind that question. Now according to a new scientific study, it seems that black gold may have been the source of the dinos' demise.
Japanese researchers at Tohuku University and the Meteorological Research Institute authored a recent study in the research journal Scientific Reports suggesting that a meteor impact 66 million years ago on an oil rich region of Yucatan Peninsula led to the death of the dinosaurs. When the asteroid hit the vast oil deposits of Mexico, it sent thick black smoke into the atmosphere, changing the climate around the world. That soot blocked out the sun leading to a significant cooling of the planet. Equally importantly, it also led to a substantial drought around the world.
The asteroid in question was roughly 6 miles wide and its impacted created the 110 mile wide crater that exists in the Yucatan today - the third largest crater on Earth. The impact was the equivalent of roughly 1 billion atomic bombs of the equivalent power to what struck Hiroshima at the end of World War 2.
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The researchers calculate that the amount of soot released would have lowered sunlight exposure by 85 percent and reduced rainfall by 80 percent. That would have had a significant impact on plant growth, which in turn would have limited food options for most dinosaurs. In addition, the soot cooled the Earth by 16 degrees Celsius (about 61 degrees Fahrenheit) over the course of just 3 years. Think of the event as the reverse of global warming - and on steroids.
Against this backdrop it is not surprising that dinosaurs all died out. Only smaller mammals that could live underground would have survived. In fact, the fossil record suggests that only 12 percent of the pre-asteroid life was able to survive after the impact. It was not just dinosaurs that died either, contrary to myths about the Ice Age - around 93 percent of mammal species were killed off as well, according to a separate research study by scientists at the University of Bath. The largest animals that would have survived the extinction event were about the size of a house cat.
Still, life bounced back "fairly quickly" researchers say, with about twice as many species existing 300,000 years after the event versus before it. Of course, given that the course of human history only goes back around 25,000 years, three-hundred thousand years is still a long period of time. It reflects the reality that the asteroid strike had a significant enough impact that its effects took tens of thousands of years to dissipate. It was the adaptability of mammals after the strike versus various reptiles that led the mammals to ultimately come to dominate the planet. Dinosaurs were in decline for millions of years before the asteroid strike, but that event aided by the oil rich soil of the Yucatan finished them off.
It's ironic that oil, so fundamental for modern human life was ultimately the catalyst that wiped out the dinosaurs. Had the asteroid stuck in a less oil rich region, back of the envelope calculations suggest its impact would have only been around one-third as devastating. It's impossible to say if that would have allowed any of the dinosaurs to live or not, but it is at least a possibility. Perhaps if not for the existence of oil, none of us would have cars, but maybe we would all have a pet brontosaurus.
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A lot of people in Europe are wondering why political leaders on the continent seem to be ready to agree with whatever Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says, and do anything he demands. Many resent Erdogan's hand-twisting approach to the migrant crisis and worry about Turkey turning into a dictatorship, plain and simple.
Now, the attempted coup by the Turkish military over the weekend has become the latest event to highlight Turkey's major role in the global energy market and the implications of any political shakeup in the country for this same market.
The Bosphorus is where around 3 percent of daily global crude oil shipments pass, or some 3 million barrels. This may not be a lot in percentage terms, but for Europe it accounts for well over a quarter of its total crude oil imports. Europe imported 1.559 billion barrels from the former Soviet Union last year, or an average of 4 million barrels daily, according to European Commission figures.
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Besides the Bosphorus, Turkey is also home to two pipelines for Caspian and Iraqi crude, as well as the Southern Gas Corridor, which should provide Europe with an alternative source of natural gas in hopes of undermining the leading position of Russia's Gazprom on the European market.
There is also the Ceyhan port, Turkey's main crude export terminal. This is where the two pipelines from Azerbaijan and Iraq end up, and this is also allegedly where a lot of ISIS oil ends up. In short, Turkey is already a major hub for oil and gas coming from the Middle East and Central Asia, and its importance in this respect will only grow as new projects--especially gas projects--come online.
Then there is the Syrian war, and Turkey's vested interest in it in light of plans for a pipeline that would carry gas from Qatar to Turkey, and from there, on to Europe. This pipeline would serve the geopolitical interests of Saudi Arabia, helping it to get the upper hand over Iran, which, now that most of the economic sanctions against it have been lifted, is eager to return to the global energy market. It would also, some would argue, serve U.S. geopolitical interests by once again undermining Russia's dominance as gas supplier to the European continent.
These geopolitical interests largely overlap with European ones. The European Union (EU) has made it abundantly clear that it wants a variety of energy supply sources. Natural gas is especially important as a cleaner and cheaper alternative to crude. Europe will need more gas in the years to come, and it doesn't want it to come from Russia--or at least not so much of it.
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This is why Europe is tip-toeing around Erdogan; and this is why European leaders seem to dance to any tune Ankara's boss plays. That's also why European leaders were not too enthusiastic when the attempted coup failed, despite official declarations in support of Erdogan's government. They did have enough dignity left to warn him to watch himself when dealing with the coup plotters; yet one cannot help but ask: what is Europe going to do if Erdogan decides to re-introduce the death penalty, especially for them? What is it going to do if he uses the coup to further curb civil rights and cement himself at the helm? Refuse to admit Turkey into the European Union? Not a big deal as far as Erdogan and his vision of a new imperial Turkey that dominates the region are concerned.
Erdogan will in all likelihood be the new master of the European gas tap. It's ironic how democratic Europe seems to be forever dependent on dictators for its energy, at least until it goes fully renewable, which is not going to happen anytime soon.
"The New American Dream Is Living in a City," Time magazine declared -- just one of the thousands of think pieces over the last few years about why young people today are choosing to live downtown, where they can have diverse experiences, inhabit public spaces and walk everywhere they need to go.
That certainly sounds like lovely way to live -- healthy, connected and car-free. Unfortunately, residents many urban neighborhoods have been experiencing a different reality.
The truth is, many urban neighborhoods are effectively cut off from their cities by highways, constraining access to jobs and public services for the residents who live there. These highways may pose a health risk, too: studies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency suggest air pollution from traffic can exacerbate health issues for those living, working or attending school near major roads.
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It's taken almost 60 years, but we are finally realizing the error we made when the United States built highways through the middle of its cities, displacing and isolating hundreds of thousands of residents, and we're beginning to do something about it.
US Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx has made improving neighborhood connectivity and walkability a major part of one of his signature initiatives, Ladders of Opportunity. But as Charlie Sorrels noted in Fast Company, even Foxx can't rip out highways that are already there.
But local leaders can. In fact, cities all over the world are removing highways, rail lines, and other disruptive or derelict transportation infrastructure and replacing it with linear parks.
Here in Boston, near my home, a section of I-93 running through the middle of downtown was converted to the Rose Kennedy Greenway, a string of parks that reconnects some of Boston's oldest neighborhoods. New York's High Line, a converted industrial rail line, is perhaps the most famous example in the US, attracting 5 million visitors every year; the Cheonggyecheon Stream recreation area, the former site of a downtown highway in Seoul, South Korea, sees 64,000 visitors a day.
Greener Cities are Healthier Cities
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Linear parks are more than just tourist destinations, though: they offer wide range of benefits to city residents and to urban wildlife, too. There is growing body of research suggesting that being around trees can actively improve one's mental health, and some studies show that children learn better in schools located near vegetated areas. New research from the National Institutes of Heath suggests that living near vegetated areas can actually reduce mortality, perhaps because people in these areas get more exercise and social interaction.
Parks and other vegetated spaces also reduce the urban "heat island." In Seoul, the effects are quite dramatic: temperatures near the Cheonggyecheon Stream can be 3.3 to 5.9C cooler than temperature along roads four to seven blocks away.
Removing highways doesn't necessarily create traffic problems, either. Drivers tend to respond to "flexible demand": when there is more road capacity, more people drive, and there reverse is true, too. This has proved to be the case in Seoul--despite dire predictions, there's been little increase in congestion since the removal of the highway over Cheonggyecheon. Instead, more people are taking public transit, which has helped reduce air pollution in downtown--another health benefit.
Preserving Biodiversity
And it's not just people that benefit--linear parks can help preserve biodiversity in urban areas. Wildlife, too, suffers when habitats are fragmented and cut off from larger natural areas. Parks of any kind can offer refuge, particularly for migratory birds passing through urban areas, but linear parks are particularly beneficial because they often connect multiple parks and green spaces within an urban area. This creates "green corridors" that species can use to travel between habitats.
Linear-shaped parks also serve more people, as Dave Maddox explains at Nature of Cities. A long, narrow park provides more access than a square or circular park of the same area because it has a larger perimeter--more communities are adjacent to the park and more people live in walking distance.
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The Future of Cities?
Highway removal and linear parks are major trends in urban design right now, but we can't let this just be a trend, something that passes from fashion--green spaces should remain a part of all our urban planning. And not just where there's a road or railroad that's easily removed. With the world's population rapidly growing and urbanizing, we need to start thinking deliberately about where we put parks. What if we made proximity to green space part of the planning for new schools?
In a recent speech about Ladders of Opportunity, Secretary Foxx suggested US infrastructure planning should be driven by one question: "What kind of country do we want to build?" I say, let's make sure its one where people and nature thrive together--and where the benefits of this relationship are shared with everyone.
Around the globe, about one-third of all food produced for human consumption goes to waste. It rots, gets lost in transport or is simply left on our plates. The impact of this loss extends beyond just food: Production of food that is wasted uses 24% of all agriculture-related water, causes 8% of all human-created greenhouse gas emissions, and costs consumers, farmers and businesses up to $940 billion per year.
Last year's Sustainable Development Goals, signed by more than 193 countries, included a target to halve food waste by 2030, while some businesses have set even more ambitious deadlines. In 2015, The Consumer Goods Forum - a coalition of more than 400 of the world's largest manufacturers, retailers and service providers - resolved that its members should halve food waste from their own operations by 2025.
One major hurdle to meeting these commitments has been a lack of consistent guidance. The recent Global Green Growth Forum in Copenhagen addressed this need with the launch of the Food Loss and Waste Accounting and Reporting Standard (FLW Standard). This is the first-ever global guidance for businesses, governments and other groups to measure and report on their food loss and waste.
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The new FLW Standard establishes consistent definitions, requirements, and guidelines on what companies need to measure and how they should measure it. Companies that use the guidance will be better able to quantify how much food loss and waste occurs in their operations and supply chains, understand where it goes, and set baselines and measure progress against targets. Armed with this information, companies can develop smarter strategies and increase the efficiency of their supply chains.
As members of Champions 12.3, we are convinced that if we work together we can develop effective solutions to reduce food loss and waste, helping the world meet Sustainable Development Goal Target 12.3, which aims to cut food waste by 50% by 2030. Launched in January 2016, Champions 12.3 is a coalition of leaders in government, business and the non-profit sector dedicated to inspire ambition, mobilize action, and accelerate progress toward this global goal.
Achieving Target 12.3 is aligned with Nestle's goal to achieve zero waste for disposal by 2020. As the leading nutrition, health and wellness company, Nestle is committed to reducing food loss and waste across its value chain.
Reducing food loss and waste not only helps Nestle secure its supply of agricultural raw materials, but it will also have a positive impact on society by supporting rural development, water conservation, and food security. Shockingly, more than 800 million people - one in nine globally - are undernourished. And yet 1 billion tons of food that is produced for people never gets consumed. If we can get more food to more people, this will increase their nutrition intake and improve their well-being, while reducing pressure on natural resources.
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By measuring food loss and waste, companies can better see and report on where and how food is lost in their supply chains. Increased transparency can, in turn, help companies identify hotspots, develop new strategies and monitor progress. Nestle, for example, provides regular updates around its efforts and progress to reduce food loss and waste in its annual Nestle in Society: Creating Shared Value report and through related private and public reporting initiatives.
The FLW Standard was developed using input and feedback from more than 200 external stakeholders. Nestle provided input during the standard's development, drawing on pilot tests in its milk supply chain in Pakistan. The Pakistani dairy sector was chosen because of its complexity and high volumes, and because it offered an opportunity to test the efficiency of the company's dairy hub model.
At each stage of the value chain, Nestle analysed all potential causes of wastage using the FLW Standard. Results were impressive. The total milk loss in the company's supply chain was estimated to be only 1.4%, significantly lower than average country estimates. Indeed, approximately 15% to 19% of milk sold by Pakistani farmers is wasted in route to the market, according to a 2004 Asian Development Bank report. Nestle also found that sharing best practices among farmers contributes to an increase in milk production and less milk being rejected by chilling centres, while improved management at the retail stage could further reduce product losses. We expect that as more businesses use the FLW Standard, they will be able to identify similar opportunities.
The FLW Standard builds on a precedent. About 15 years ago, WRI teamed up with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development to launch the Greenhouse Gas Accounting and Reporting Standard, which is now the most widely used and trusted approach for measuring and reporting emissions. We hope the FLW Standard will have similar reach.
It's a travesty that so much food is lost and wasted. With ongoing collaboration and commitment, we can turn the tide. Those who measure waste can better manage it. That's good news for people, business and the planet.
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How should leadership style change over the course of a person's career? originally appeared on Quora - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.
Answer by Maxim Sytch, Associate Proffesor of Management, University of Michigan, Ross School of Business, on Quora:
Early in your career, you may be preoccupied with tactical managerial issues and have fewer opportunities to select your own team. One straightforward implication of career progression, however, is that you tend to move into more senior roles. This would naturally require you to be more focused on selecting, developing, and empowering the people whom you are leading. Mark Hurd, the co-CEO of Oracle, listed strategic talent development as "the number one issue for CEOs today." He is not alone. The Conference Board CEO Challenge report listed the focus on talent growth, training, development, engagement, and retention as the number one challenge for senior leaders.
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I believe three current dynamics will lead us to significantly alter our leadership style in our lifetime: 1) the influx of millennials into the workforce, 2) the changing organizational design, and 3) the impact of big data and artificial intelligence.
The Impact of Millennials
The infusion of millennials into the workforce may lead leaders to revisit assumptions on motivation: Millennials, for example, are less likely than previous generations to be driven by money or even a more interesting job. Instead, millennials tend to value leisure, which points to the fact that work simply becomes less central in their lives compared to both Baby Boomers and Gen Xers. Millennials will also have numerous employers in their careers, working for four different employers in just the first decade after graduating from college. For many current senior leaders, this would constitute their entire resume! This dynamic is likely to make leaders revisit and reevaluate how to approach retention and career development. We must think hard about how to engage the incoming workforce, what incentives to offer, how to facilitate their personal and professional growth, and, really, how to make them hang around to see their career come to life.
The Impact of Changing Organizational Design
We used to live in a world where organizations were built around deep reporting verticals, which were typically focused on distinct markets or geographies. You might have reported to your boss in the Asia Division or the Widgets Business Unit, and your ultimate goal might have been to become the Head of the Asia Division or the Head of the Widgets Business Unit. Responding to the needs for a more customer-centric design, most companies have now either revamped or are revamping their organizational design toward a more matrix-like structure.
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In a matrix design, companies organize simultaneously around two or three dimensions, such as both products and geographies (e.g., Widgets Asia). Many companies have introduced account manager roles, which cut across product or geographic verticals. This is another common element of a matrix design. In this organizational design, leaders often have to work across verticals rather than within them, where your formal power and authority--the power of your rank and title--is limited. Market demands increasingly lead many organizations and their leaders to work with numerous strategic partners, thus collaborating across organizational boundaries. Again, your formal title can carry you only so far in terms of getting things done. As a result, your ability to lead through influence and persuasion and to build and leverage interpersonal relationships with key stakeholders will become more important than ever.
The Impact of Artificial Intelligence
Senior leaders are rewarded handsomely for their experience. We expect this experience to translate into a superior ability to exercise sound judgement and to make effective decisions in complex and ambiguous situations. In fact, when I talk to executives and ask them about their number one criterion for hiring top talent, judgement often rises to the top.
And yet, we are accumulating significant evidence that people in general are very poor decision makers. We are prone to decision making biases, we tend to see systematic patterns where there are none, and we cannot consistently screen out noise in the information that is supplied to us. Unfortunately, these problems do not go away with experience or seniority. Even experienced decision makers make different decisions when they are presented with the *same* information on two different occasions, and the discrepancy in two experts' recommendations based on viewing the exact same information can swing all the way to 40%. In many of these situations, rather simple decision-making algorithms, which are based on just a few parameters, tend to outperform humans.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is not prone to biases, does not fatigue, is immune to noise, and--with the availability of big data--can base decisions on many more data points than any human can conceivably process. For example, Google's AlphaGo AI used information on and "learned" based on 30 million expert moves in beating the best human Go player in the world.
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A millennium's worth of European anti-Semitism spawned much dark humor. "Who is a Philo-Semite?" went the question: "Someone who hates Jews only as much as it is necessary."Based on that definition, there is plenty of "love" to go around in the United Kingdom these days.
*** The UK is the country where Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn remains the favorite of his party's rank-and-file despite -- or because -- of his failing to do anything effectual about endemic anti-Semitism in Labour, his declaring Hamas and Hezbollah are "our friends," and his recent "slip of the tongue" comparison of Israel to Islamic terrorist regimes.
*** The aversion to even mention Anti-Semitism was on full display when Councilor Simon Cooke put forth the following motion to the Bradford Council it to consider its "awareness and response to anti-Semitism and Islamophobia"; as well as support for new migrant communities facing prejudice, challenging the demonizing of white working-class communities and addressing homophobia. A fiery debate ensued and the measure failed to pass.
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*** The UK is where a British Muslim, Malia Bouattia, has been elected president of the National Union of Students with barely a beep of protest despite her having described Birmingham University as a "Zionist outpost" and her supporting not only BDS but "Palestinian resistance"--meaning violence. She also refuses to condemn ISIS.
And now -- in the midst of the bloodiest Ramadan rampages by ISIS, during a week in which a twelve-year-old American Israeli girl was butchered by a Palestinian terrorist while she slept in her bed, and when 10 orphans had to bury their father after another deadly Palestinian attack -- Scotland Yard swung into action by treating visiting former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni as an accused war criminal.
Her crime? Defending serving her country honorably during Operation Cast Lead to protect Israeli civilians from Hamas rockets, suicide bombers and terrorism. This was British authorities' third try to move on a 2009 indictment of the former senior Israeli official who is still a prominent leader of Israel's Left- leaning peace camp.
Curious. When Palestinian Authority(PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, now in the 11th year of his 4-year Presidency, last visited London in 2012, he was never confronted about the PA's incessant incitement against their Jewish neighbors or veneration of Palestinian terrorist mass murders as heroes, with streets and schools named in their honor.
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Instead, Britain condemns Israeli settlements as "deliberate vandalism." That comment on Jewish settlements was delivered by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who prefaced his one-sided anti-Israel broadside by saying there was no stronger supporter of the Jewish State than himself.
To top it off: The mainstream anti-Israel animus cloaked with a classic anti-Semitic screed of Jew-control has now been embroidered into the commentary by Rupert Cornwall in The Independent. He uses the death of renowned Holocaust Survivor and Nobel Peace Prize Eli Wiesel to attack Wiesel's love of Zion: After bemoaning the alleged "grip that Israel had on the politics of America," Cornwall convicts Wiesel of moral indifference to the Palestinians, charging him of failing to understand "that a people who had suffered so much should understand the miseries they were inflicting on another people."
Cornwall's biases blind him to the truth of which he makes a mockery. In fact, in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Wiesel said these words:
"And then, too, there are the Palestinians to whose plight I am sensitive but whose methods I deplore. Violence and terrorism are not the answer. Something must be done about their suffering, and soon. I trust Israel, for I have faith in the Jewish people. Let Israel be given a chance, let hatred and danger be removed from her horizons, and there will be peace in and around the Holy Land."
Anti-Semitic attacks in the UK rose from 95 in 2013 to 141 in 2014.Then the London Metropolitan Police reported a 61.5 percent increase in 2015. Eleven percent of UK Jews reported that they considered leaving their home country following the January 2015 Paris attacks. Statistics aside, without a Brexit of anti-Jewish attitudes in the UK, lovers of Zion are right to ask if there is any place for them in their native country's future.
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After he arrived back in Indiana after being chosen as Donald Trump's running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence gave thanks "to the best governor staff in the United States of America" and "my great Lieutenant Governor Eric Holcomb".
Let's stay with that.
Mike Pence has accepted the resignations of quite a few staff members and appointees during his three years as Governor, some as early as the first month of his term in January 2013. How many? I stopped counting, but safe to say it may out-number the times he and Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller have filed suit against the Federal Government for either the ACA or defending marriage (and Zoeller holds the record for suits and losses). But I digress.
Pence took office January 2013. State Auditor Tim Berry resigned in August of 2013 when Pence recommended him for chair of Indiana Republican Party, Pence appointed Dwayne Sawyer. Sawyer then resigned in November 2013 after serving less than four months.
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In the November 2012 elections, Glenda Ritz, Democrat, not only upset incumbent Tony Bennett for Superintendent of Education, she had more votes than Pence. Bennett nor Pence were happy. In a July 9 2014 report, Inspector General David Thomas found Bennett violated State law in Bennet's re-election campaign. Oh and Thomas also announced he was leaving the position he had held for decades since it was created.
Pence Chief of Staff Bill Smith, who was with Pence during his entire Congressional term from 2000-2012, resigned in early 2014 to start a new firm.
Deputy Chief of Staff Merilee Springer, with Pence since 2013, resigned in June 2014.
Pence loves to pontificate on the health of Hoosiers. His January 2013 appointments of Dr. William Van Ness as State Health Commissioner, and Debra Minott as head of Family and Social Services lasted just over a year. Van Ness resigned in Aug of 2014 for personal reasons. Minott left with no explanation -- also in the summer of 2014.
August was a bad month, as Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock announced on a Friday afternoon August 29, 2014, that he would resign from his post, effective at the end of the business day.
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Then there was his communications Director Christy Denault, who was with Pence since his gubernatorial campaign began in 2012. She resigned in April 2015 after the horrid RFRA debacle. In her resignation letter she cited time to devote energy to her family.
I applaud David Fagan, (a Region Rat) who resigned as Port of Indiana commissioner due to Pence supporting repeal of Common Construction Wage in 2015
And then there is Sue Ellesperman who resigned as Lieutenant Governor resigned this past February. The incumbent Lieutenant Governor resigned. That's unheard of in Indiana history, unless it is death or emergency issue (although writing this, I can see being tied to Pence IS an emergency).
And there are others.
As the Trump team adds staffers for Mike Pence, it's not as if this "great team" has been a cohesive unit for some time
Which brings me to my last point, the "Region". The Region, of which I am a proud Region Rat, is the colorful melting pot of Northwest Indiana (the Calumet Region) including communities of Lake and Porter counties. (Rat would be the Millrats who help pay for the rest of Indiana). When we see Governor or candidate we are reminded it's an election year.
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On 219 day, a holiday in The Region named for the area code, our soon to be ex-Governor tweeted this:
But after the TP ticket, this happened.
Which may not be a bad thing.
"Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention." This week I came across this rather large claim, made by Harold Bloom of Yale in his book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Bloom's argument is that Shakespeare was the first writer to describe the development - as opposed to the mere unfolding - of personality. In Shakespeare, Bloom says, characters such as Cleopatra change their personality, "and they develop because they reconceive themselves. Sometimes this comes about because they overhear themselves talking ... Self-overhearing is the royal road to individuation."
Well, this got me thinking about how individuals I know well - myself and close friends - actually have developed in our lives. Introspection and self-overhearing are indeed part of the answer. But another way we reconceive ourselves has perhaps been largely overlooked, and it is that way of changing our personality which I want to write about here. My idea is that one powerful way of changing ourselves - perhaps the most powerful way - is by becoming part of an unusual organization - a transforming organization.
What do I mean by this? I mean that you - or I - go into an organization as one person, and come out of it as another. You come out different than how you went in. Just possibly you change the organization a little bit, but it changes you a lot. And I think that if Shakespeare was alive today, he might also report how certain organization manage this feat.
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If I look back, I think there were four entities that transformed me. The first was Wadham College, Oxford, which taught me to think critically. Even more important it socialized me, and gave me confidence generally, to interact happily in large and small groups of people.
Business school had relatively little impact on me. But when I left Wharton to work at the Boston Consulting Group, the latter taught me about business strategy, and also the importance and excitement of being in a fast-growing company. BCG also convinced me that learning about "strategy" was not primarily a matter of learning, but rather of thinking and discovery - truth remained to be discovered. Even though I was not successful at BCG, this lesson has stayed with me ever since and greatly enriched my life. Just like my college, I came out of BCG a different person to how I went in - I'd acquired a skill and a curiosity that have directed my life.
Before I got fired, I jumped ship to Bain & Company, then a small offshoot from BCG. Bain taught me the discipline of playing the political game, as well as how consultants could have enormous impact on their clients. But I think the impact on the consultants was just as great or greater.
Then I was lucky enough to hook up with two ex-Bain colleagues to start our own spinoff, LEK. This taught me that I could be a prime mover, as well as the enormous satisfaction from teaching and developing raw talent, to the stage where many such careers have eclipsed my own. But I too was a new person at the end of six years at LEK. For the first time, I had the mentality and independence to become a serial entrepreneur and investor.
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Each time, then, with all four of these organizations, I was changed in a vital way. This strikes me as miraculous. You can read excellent self-help books but the impact is often marginal. You may know how you want to change, but it's hard work and lonely, like a solitary ant climbing Everest. Joining a transformational organization is a hell of a lot easier - and when they actually pay you for the privilege it is an extraordinary bargain.
How to identify transformational organizations
There are three catches.
One is that you only know after the event whether an organization has transformed you.
Another is that the vast majority of organizations - particularly business firms - are not transformational.
The third is that certain organizations - I think automatically of investment banks - may transform you, but not for the better. With many such outfits, indeed, "money costs too much". Your bank balance may fatten fantastically; but your joie de vivre, your relationships, and your whole curiosity may shrivel and die.
So - how do you find a good transformational ship in an ocean of more conventional or malign boats?
Here are three clues I have picked up:
First, go for high growth companies - growing at least 20 percent a year in revenues, profits (if any), and headcount. In most companies the supply of talent exceeds the demand. In high growth companies, demand exceeds supply. There is always the need for someone to open up a new front - a new geography, a new product, or deal with an important new customer. That someone might as well be you. Growth spawns opportunity. And it is so much more fun to be part of a rapidly expanding empire.
Second, ask yourself, do I really like the people? Do they appear to like you? Most likely, you can only be changed for the better within a secure and comfortable nest. Forget all the old guff about leaving comfort zones. That can work, but it's much more frequent that people thrive and blossom in a supportive environment, where they feel appreciated, can learn a lot, and feel an integral part of the team. And again, not only does it work, but it makes you happy as well. Being happy at work should be part of a civilized life.
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Third, try to anticipate and articulate to yourself how the institution might transform you. What would you like to be that you are not yet? Is it realistic to imagine that three years at the new organization will leave an indelible and joyful imprint on your character and your life?
If you can say YES! to all three questions, hesitate not. Carpe diem!
Action Implications
Join a transformational institution. Make a plan to do this within six months from today - or as soon as you find an organization that fits the three criteria above.
If at all possible, spend your entire working life in transformational organizations, hopping from one to another once one element of personal remodelling is complete.
On the eve of their convention, the erstwhile chief counselors of the GOP had, at last, comprehended the horror which is Donald Trump.
There is comedy in this. One imagines the ministers of some obscure Ruritanian monarchy, awakening to discover that their new King is the idiot former Crown Prince, who combines congenital feeble mindedness with preposterous vanity, irrational willfulness, unpredictable outbursts of rage, the attention span of an infant, and a frightening ignorance of statecraft. In short, the not-so-good King Drumpf.
If only Peter Sellers still lived.
Regrettably, this is not a movie set in Moldavia. It is an American presidential campaign, and the idiot King is the Republican nominee. Which is way too serious to serve as farce.
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Still, one must grant its farcical aspects -- not least in the two weeks prior to his coronation in Cleveland.
A chief source of drollery is what happens when his counselors cannot control him, which is pretty much all the time. The pluperfect example of which is his meanderings in the wake of a political gift from God -- James Comey's root and branch critique of Hillary Clinton's email practices.
Leaving nothing to chance, his aides gave him a script dedicated to Clinton's demolition. He read it for a while before, abruptly bored, throwing it away. What followed was that which his handlers most feared -- lint plucked from His Donald's all too woolly mind.
Never good. Even less good when, as often, Trump begins reciting his grievances. He attacked Chuck Todd and savaged CNN. He complained that the media had (accurately) reported his baroque praise of Saddam Hussein for supposedly killing terrorists -- which Saddam never did -- and then repeated it, cementing Saddam's place along with Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un as the despots Trump admires for being "strong." But even worse was his irrationally perverse revival of an incident which raised the specter of anti-Semitism.
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The controversy began with yet another tweet -- this passing on material from a white supremacist website. Small wonder, then, that the site made its point about Clinton's supposedly reality by imposing a Star of David over a pile of money. Not subtle. So when the media pointed this out, Trump's tweet patrol covered up the star before deleting the image altogether.
To the normal mind, mere damage control, and high time to move on. Not Trump. He was outraged -- at the media for reporting the origins of the tweet and, remarkably, at his campaign for taking it down. For Trump, this was a matter of principle -- and his chief principle is that "Trump" is never wrong. And so, bizarrely, he complained that the whole thing amounted to "racial profiling" by the media -- directed at Donald Trump.
In itself, this performance was nothing new. His entire primary campaign was one rally after another stuffed with ignorance, insults, lies, boasting, inflated poll numbers, and moronic bits of apocrypha snatched from God knows where. His policy statements were less positions than attitudes -- racism, nativism, xenophobia and a certain mindless machismo -- supplemented by an alarming obliviousness to known reality, and cemented by constant complaints that the media, his opponents, the GOP and pretty much the entire world was being grossly and inexplicably unfair to Donald Trump.
Trump's entire life has been a self-centered exercise in self-branding which blinds him to all else.
But somehow the panjandrums of the GOP told themselves this was all okay. It was only the primaries, after all, and the party been selling a milder version of this bilge to the lab rats for years. Surely, sobered by his anointment, Trump would listen to their advice.
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And so, for them, his latest burst of mania was a bit like looking up from a belated reading of the DSM, scales falling from their eyes, to discover that their leader was not the unpredictable but canny operator they imagined, but flat-out nuts.
Which, given that he is in the grips of a profound personality disorder, is true enough. Trump's entire life has been a self-centered exercise in self-branding which blinds him to all else. Thus his campaign has been a hall of mirrors in which he sees nothing but himself. And he brings nothing to the quest -- not self-discipline, self-knowledge or any interest in learning.
He has not bothered to build a sufficient staff or fundraising network, or a ground game in key states. His egotism and inattention repel the advisors he needs most, including in a critical area- foreign policy. He shows no appreciation, or even awareness, of the awesome responsibilities imposed on America's president. In sum, his quest for power is a rolling disaster which but augurs the disasters which would follow should he attain it.
Potentially disastrous, as well, for Senate Republicans batting to maintain their majority. Trump's gift for repelling Hispanics, women and millennials is potentially lethal -- for Republicans in swing states, he is the political equivalent of the Zika virus. And just to make things tougher, Trump has not built a campaign infrastructure which can help struggling senators win down-ballot races.
One would think, then, that he would approach this endangered species with at least a trace of faux humility, as behooves a man with an exceptionally impressive 70 percent disapproval rating.
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Not our Donald. In a calamitous meeting with Republican senators, he began by asking a prominent dissenter, Ben Sasse, if he preferred Hillary Clinton. This provoked Jeff Flake to introduce himself as "the other senator from Arizona -- the one who didn't get captured," adding that, to date, things like Trump's remarks about Hispanics had kept him from being supportive.
A lesser man might have attempted to mollify a senator concerned about an important voting bloc. Instead, Trump retorted that absent an attitude adjustment he would make sure that Flake lost his seat in November. This menacing threat was reduced to the merely astonishing by the fact that, apparently unknown to Trump, Flake is not up for reelection.
But the Idiot King did not reserve his bile for those present. In a particularly gratuitous attack, His Petulance labeled Mark Kirk of Illinois "dishonest" and "a loser." This did not go over well: if Kirk, indeed, turns out to be a loser, a principal reason will be Trump himself. Not that the man cares all that much. Asked by a reporter whether retaining a Senate majority meant anything to him, he answered, "Well, I'd like them to do that. But I don't mind being a free agent, either."
Having treated senators to a glimpse of a brave new era in congressional relations, Trump breezed on to a meeting with House Republicans. This, mercifully, was more pacific, if not altogether reassuring. Asked for his understanding of the powers of Congress under Article I, King Drumpf assured his minions that, as a "constitutionalist," "I want to protect Article I, Article II, Article XII" -- adding, with a monarch's grandeur, five nonexistent articles to the current seven.
Afterwards, His Superbity pronounced the meeting a howling success. But just to ensure that his new subjects expressed the appropriate appreciation, Trump gave them a script for the press: "It would be great if you could say we had an unbelievable meeting. 'Trump loves us. We love Trump." It's going to be so good. Okay? You gotta say great things."
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As an expression of Trump's worldview, if not reality, it was perfect.
Of course, the essence of Trump is a vast internal emptiness, a void of curiosity, a penchant for lying, a lust for attention, an infinitesimal attention span, a stunning deficit of self-awareness and yet, paradoxically, a monomaniacal absorption with self. Combine this with the need to dominate, an indifference to consequence, the complete absence of conscience, and an awe-inspiring lack of empathy for other human beings, and you have a would-be satrap who stiffs small contractors, stints on charity, treats women like serfs, and scams the credulous, whose business career is larded with fraud, bullying and mendacity and whose mode of inspiration is to talk about himself.
This is the man with no soul against whom journalists have warned us -- most recently in Jane Mayer's New Yorker article about Tony Schwartz, the conscience-ridden former journalist who, by ghostwriting The Art Of The Deal, created the myth of Donald Trump. Depicting his internal wasteland -- not parsing tactics or handicapping horse races -- is political journalism as it should be. Over time such portraits take their toll -- as truth often does. And the truth is that a man so dangerous and so damaged should never become president.
Granted, the bar for Trump remains astoundingly low -- all too often, the media still treats his stray scripted moments of simulated sanity as revelatory of the statesman within. But as more reporters capture the real man, more voters take notice, including a cadre he desperately needs: the college educated whites who boosted Romney within shouting distance of Obama. For every blue-collar white entranced by his persona, there is a more prosperous Caucasoid Trump repels. Instead of redrawing the electoral map, he may well be sticking the pencil in his own ear.
Trump's promises are the economic equivalent of bread and circuses.
But this demographic divide also reflects a fault line within the GOP itself. To appeal to blue-collar workers, Trump once again rejected the free-market dogma of the party with an imperious flick of his hand. Not for him the "financial elite," "powerful corporations" and "Wall Street funders," who have "rigged the system for their benefit." Not for him the politicians -- and that means you, Paul Ryan -- who practice "economic surrender" to the forces of free-trade.
Not for Trump, indeed, is the global economy as we have come to know it.
No, the new King promises a very old deal -- a call for protective tariffs which harks back to the 18th century. Like any satrap without sense, Trump proposes to repeal reality, throwing the engines of globalism into reverse. How? Simple -- he will magically restore manufacturing jobs which began vanishing years ago by exhuming the protectionism of centuries ago. Let lesser men -- or women -- propose job retraining for workers dislocated by the new economy. King Donald will simply abolish the new economy.
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Never mind that automation has transformed manufacturing: it's not American products which it disappeared -- it's American jobs. And so Trump's promises are the economic equivalent of bread and circuses.
Which poses a dilemma for the erstwhile GOP powers that be -- free-market politicians and their patrons, the donor class. Their modus operandi was to distract the dislocated by inventing imaginary scapegoats -- minorities, moochers and the government itself -- while preserving for themselves the enrichments of the marketplace. But their new leader has skewed the playbook, elevating minorities to arch-enemy status while deriding the free market as a scam.
The sans-culottes he has awakened are a restive bunch. Trump's blandishments may be fantastical, but their suffering is real. And the one thing they know for sure is that the apostles of "limited government" and "economic freedom" don't give a damn about them. Indeed these privileged grandees, in Trump's telling, are the very mustache-twirlers who "are moving our jobs, our wealth in our factories to Mexico and oversees."
Which, for the GOP, is a problem. For what Trump is proposing is to swap the politics of distraction for an outright fraud. When the bread is eaten and the circus disappears, his subjects will still be starving.
So what are party traditionalists to do? Some schemers fantasized about a coup. Others imagined that, in time, their dimwitted leader would revert to looking in the mirror while they replaced his "policies" with their own. One might call this Ryan's Hope.
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Given His Vacancy's vacancy, this is always possible. But he may well have gelded Ryan and his honor guard, the free marketeers. For one thing, the blue-collar base has routed their program. And Ryan's own principality, the House of Representatives, is so riven by GOP factionalism that the speaker can't even pass a budget. One looks at Ryan and, in moments of sympathy, imagines Prince Charles.
His impotence is equally apparent on matters of race and ethnicity. Granted, the GOP has shown little concern with the struggles of minorities. But, several times now, Ryan has felt compelled to rebuke Trump for racist rhetoric like the Muslim ban and his denunciation of a "Mexican" judge.
Trump rolls merrily on, racial animus bubbling in his wake. Compelled at last by the murders in Dallas to issue a limpid statement of sympathy, Trump shortly reverted to type, declaring himself the "law and order candidate" and, with his keen historical and sociological insight, blaming America's racial divide on Clinton and our first black president. And why not? After all, racism, nativism and xenophobia is what got Trump this far. And so the GOP arrived in Cleveland as the party of bigots and bigotry.
Not to mention fundamentalism. Here, yet again, Trump's regal inattention to detail had consequences: a platform which sprang straight from the heads of the furious fundamentalists who -- rejected again and again by our society writ large -- came to Cleveland to stake their claim to the party's soul.
Left unsupervised by the Trump campaign, the GOP's cretinous creationists doubled down on denunciations of abortion, gay marriage and gay rights in general. The Bible, we discovered, is not merely a text for Christians but should be taught in public schools. Particularly ironic then, is the party's large-spirited definition of "religious freedom": the freedom to refuse service to gays.
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One can but admire its principled stand against tolerance and diversity -- social or religious -- and its firm rejection of those enemies of society: women, minorities and the young. If only in the way one admires a herd of lemmings headed for Lake Erie.
In the meanwhile, tragedy struck again: the slaughter in Nice -- in Trump's world, a marketing opportunity. He responded with his usual gaseous bluster, calling for a congressional "declaration of war" against ISIS while offering no actual solutions to the hydra-headed problem of transnational terrorism. And so one was grateful for a moment of comic relief -- the King's audition of crown princes or, before she fled in horror, a princess.
The most prominent possibilities regarded this prospect less as a glass slipper than a political cement shoe, rooting them to the bottom of the lake as they expelled their last air bubble. They sought dry land in droves: John Kasich, Rob Portman, Scott Walker, Kelly Ayotte, Nikki Haley, Brian Sandoval, Susanna Martinez and pretty much anyone else with hopes of a better life.
Introducing Pence, Trump spoke glowingly and at length about... himself.
Lesser lights endured the seriocomic, compelled to audition for the king by praising him to gatherings of subjects and, as a reward, to flock to Indianapolis to seek the blessing of his kids. Fresh from his ordeal, the erstwhile establishment choice, Bob Corker, declared that he was otherwise employed. Joni Ernst too declared her fondness for the Senate, though her prior experience as an Iowa farm girl -- spent neutering pigs -- seemed ideal for any woman forced to work under Donald Trump. The four stragglers who remained were a perfect reflection of the party's plight -- second-tier white guys with nothing to lose.
The two most gifted were, politically, extinct volcanoes: Newt Gingrich and Chris Christie. The third, Jeff Sessions, was qualified only by that which was utterly disqualifying -- the actual belief that Trump should be president. And the fourth, Mike Pence -- faced with a potentially career-ending loss for reelection as governor of Indiana -- seemed to view becoming Trump's lackey as the political equivalent of the witness protection program.
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True to character, Trump treated his quartet of bobbleheads with the whimsy of a monarch and the empathy of a puppeteer. Invoking the tragedy in Nice as a pretext, he kept his prospects dangling by canceling his stated announcement date of 11 a.m. on Friday, as the rumored selection, Pence, flew to New York in anticipation of a joint press conference, only to be left twisting in the ever-shifting winds of King Donald's public musings. In this messy interregnum, conflicting rumors issued from inside the campaign; Gingrich and Christie publicly angled for the slot; and Pence faced a legal deadline of noon on Friday to withdraw his candidacy for governor.
As hours passed, decorum dissolved, replaced by a dispiriting glimpse of palace intrigue in the court of an idiot king. Trump took to the airwaves to deny choosing anyone; Gingrich launched a scene-stealing denunciation of Muslims; and Pence silently suffered the stature-shrinking role of puppet in waiting. Angry at the leaks from within naming Pence as his choice, Trump began looking for a way out.
Filled with hope and desperation, both Gingrich and Christie pleaded with the monarch for his favor. Reports buzzed that Trump regarded Pence as a drag on his "brand," another tired iteration of the also-rans he had kicked around in the primaries. But Pence was the choice of party regulars because he was precisely that -- just like they are. And so the professionals surrounding Trump were reduced to begging for Pence's life as if it were their own.
Then, abruptly, Trump popped his announcement -- in a tweet. Bypassing the risky personae of Gingrich and Christie, he at last anointed the humdrum but compliant Pence, a standard-issue evangelical conservative with all the fascination of a tire leak.
Pence's principal distinction is his stalwart opposition to abortion and gay rights in any form, most recently as champion of Indiana's anti-gay "religious freedom" statute. But while Pence buys Trump nothing outside the airless antechamber of the right -- save, of course, the potential for further alienating young people, women and social moderates -- the Sun King can be confident in the infinity of his gratitude. Not to mention his capacity for enduring all the humiliations to come.
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Their strained and tepid debut as a ticket augured their relationship. There was zero electricity in the room or chemistry between the candidates, and Trump looked like he had just committed an unnatural act -- taking advice.
Introducing Pence, Trump spoke glowingly and at length about... himself. "Back to Mike Pence," he said at long last, then forgot Pence altogether. After several minutes of this a certain fascination settled in -- how often, one wondered, would references to Pence interrupt Trump's song of self. Rarely, it turned out.
Finally, he summoned Pence, treating America to a middling Republican cheerleader, speaking as though to persuade a crowd of Rotarians that Trump was, contrary to the evidence of their senses, one of them yet also their salvation. His hit parade of provincial pieties -- God, country, family, freedom, Reagan, and the diabolical threat of Hillary Clinton -- culminated in a church organ recitation of his Majesty's mythic virtues. With enough huffing and puffing, one thought, Pence might inflate himself sufficiently to resemble the last vice president from Indiana - Dan Quayle. Nostalgia did not ensue.
As for the coronation in Cleveland it, too, boasts those special touches worthy of a rump regime in Ruritania. One particularly charming feature may turn out to be armed Republicans -- a redundant phrase, perhaps -- brandishing assault weapons outside the convention hall to dramatize their support for an armed America. Some stalwart delegates, thwarted by the Secret Service in their desire for a convention bristling with handguns, plan on packing heat at satellite events. As one delegate explained, "I think its part of Republican values, American values, to be responsible for our own safety."
Good luck with that. Under Ohio's open carry law passed by Republican legislators, other upstanding Americans are also free to carry weapons outside the hall. Less enthusiastic are the Cleveland police, hoping not to be caught in the crossfire.
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Should they make it inside, those delegates willing to brave the combat zone unarmed could anticipate a no doubt tasteful exploration of Bill Clinton's sex life. Further intellectual sustenance is being provided by Rudy Giuliani; practitioners of mixed martial arts; several border patrol agents; The Donald's third wife; and all four of Trump's kids.
This Z-list of luminaries is intended to compensate for the absence of the last two Republican presidents; the two prior presidential nominees; the entire Bush family; a brace of Republican senators whose alternate plans include getting reelected; the governor of the host state, John Kasich; and pretty much every GOP officeholder who ran against Trump save for the ever-charming Ted Cruz. The chief difference between purgatory and four nights in the court of King Donald is that the latter may feel like forever.
And so they have bunkered down in Cleveland, a once great party which now stands for little but racism, fundamentalism and AK-47s...
But day one was merely what this year has taught us to expect. As demonstrators gathered outside the convention hall, Trump blamed the murder of three Baton Rouge police officers on Barack Obama's "lack of leadership." And on Monday night we learned from various hectoring speakers that the poisons of terrorism, race and racial violence -- fed, in their telling, by a black man and a woman, Obama and Clinton -- will vanish if we but license Donald Trump to "make America safe again."
But that was not all. Not content with victory, Trump's campaign manager picked a pointless fight with John Kasich. Clumsily if briskly, Trump's housekarls put down a rebellion on the floor, an unwelcome reminder of discontent in the realm. Then a cadre of brave or emotionally wounded men and women appeared to pillory Clinton -- one, the mother of an American who died in Benghazi, to accuse her of lying and worse -- while certifying the strength and patriotism of a man who had pretzeled himself to avoid military service.
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Good enough for a night's work, one would think. But though a would-be nominee has never spoken before his actual nomination, Trump could not deny his followers the balm of his presence. And so The Donald appeared from a cloud of blue smoke to introduce his wife -- for a brief, crazy moment, the imagination struggled to substitute Mitt and Ann Romney before accepting that the GOP as we knew it was, indeed, smoldering embers in a dumpster fire.
To the surprise of those who have never read from a script, Melania affirmed that Drumpf is every inch the king we never knew him to be -- a caring friend to women and minorities, the spirit of American inclusiveness. Even by the standards of conventions this was, to say the least, a bold reinvention.
But though Mrs. Trump delivered it well, her text was oddly impersonal, without a trace of emotion or anecdote to attach it to the man she lives with. No accident, it turns out -- whoever wrote her speech appeared to have plagiarized whole chunks from the 2008 convention speech delivered by, of all people, Michelle Obama. Thus the evening ended on a bizarre if not disastrous note, evoking the hollow panoply of a craven court, assembled to clothe its naked Emperor's ravenous ego in empty praise and cynical falsehoods designed to gull the masses.
One Mental Disorder, Two Motivations
LHASA, TIBET.* On this morning after Donald J. Trump made his first entrance into the Republican National Convention in a scene that made it look like he was descending to us from heaven, the thoughts of one who has recently been on a trip in China and its subjugated territory of Tibet turn to a consideration of the Trump phenomenon in the light of China's past and present.
In occupied Tibet, which is crawling with Chinese military and police forces that spy on, control, and discriminate against a people and their religion, one cannot help but think of Trump's venomous speeches denouncing Mexicans and Muslims, and his calls for increasingly barbaric methods of torture ("make yourself tougher. Because they can chop off heads, they can drown people in steel cages, right? They can put people in steel cages by 25 and 50 people and drop them in the water and pull them up an hour later and we can't waterboard?"), and for using violence against those who oppose him: "I'd like to punch him in the face," "I love the old days . . . they'd be carried out on a stretcher, folks," "knock the crap out of him," and so on.
During our trip, a lead story in the International New York Times asked whether Trump's success indicates the rise of fascism in America. Wherever one might come down on the fascism question, it is certain that Donald Trump is no more communist than is China today. Yet filing past the preserved body of Chairman Mao Zedong in his mausoleum on Tiananmen Square, an American thinks of certain commonalities between the late Chinese dictator and the would-be American leader. Chairman Mao's slogans desecrate historical sites; his picture appears on all denominations of Chinese currency. Trump's penchant for putting his name in large letters everywhere he can is well known. Plainly, both men made themselves the focus of cults of personality.
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Textbook Cases of Megalomania
Donald Trump is, as Mao Zedong was, unquestionably possessed of a textbook case of megalomania, the dictionary definition of which sounds as if it were written by someone analyzing Mr. Trump: "a mania for great or grandiose performance; a delusional mental disorder that is marked by feelings of personal omnipotence and grandeur." In March, Trump said that he speaks mainly with himself, "because I have a very good brain and I've said a lot of things." Recently he again made it plain that he "sees himself as his own chief adviser."
During the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, Mao claimed to possess super-human qualities and was called the Great Teacher, the Great Leader, the Supreme Commander and, most memorably, the Great Helmsman. He also demanded "boundless loyalty" to him, his thought, and his "line." All of this marked Mao as a megalomaniac. No one who has observed Donald Trump can seriously doubt that he would like to claim similar titles and loyalty for himself. Like Mao, he expects his "people" to follow him and his "line" without question, even as he reverses and contradicts what he has previously said.
Trump has repeatedly expressed admiration for such "strongmen" as Vladimir Putin ("In terms of leadership, he's getting an 'A'"; "He's running his country and at least he's a leader"), Kim Jung-un ("you've got to give him credit. . . . he goes in, he takes over, he's the boss. It's incredible") and Saddam Hussein ("He was a bad guy -- really bad guy. But you know what he did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good. They didn't read them the rights. They didn't talk. They were terrorists. Over.")
Trump's practice of creating and endlessly repeating childish derogatory names for his opponents echoes that of Mao, who was a vicious name-caller of people with whom he fell out. In 1966, he denounced top former ally Liu Shaoqi as "a renegade, traitor and scab . . . a lackey of imperialism," and, most unforgettably, a "great poisonous weed"--which clearly trumps such Trumpisms as "Little Marco," "Lyin' Ted" and "Crooked Hillary."
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None of this is to say that Trump, were he to become president, would behave as Mao--the undisputed world heavyweight champion in mass murder--did. Mao was able to exercise complete, unrestrained power. While it is apparent that the presumptive 2016 Republican nominee would love to have such power, he would, if elected, have to operate within a long-established constitutional system of checks and balances.
Ideological vs. Self-Aggrandizing Megalomaniacs
The greatest difference between these two megalomaniacs is that Mao Zedong had an ideological belief--a vision of a perfect society that he would create. Trump has no such ideology; he doesn't give a hoot about advancing the proletariat or anyone else but Donald J. Trump.
"Make France Great Again!"
The question, then, is this: Which are more dangerous, megalomaniacs who believe in an ideology, or those who believe in nothing but self-promotion?
The answer seems to be that the former (think of Pol Pot as well as Mao) are more casual about mass murder and suffering as means to the utopian ends they envision. But the self-aggrandizers have often shown themselves to have a capacity for much evil. Let us take one example. Though he claimed to be the Son of the French Revolution and he institutionalized some of its achievements, Napoleon Bonaparte was far more intent on advancing himself than he was on promoting any ideals. Identifying himself with the nation, Napoleon in essence pledged to "Make France great again." Approximately two million people died in the process. In 1804 Napoleon made himself emperor, taking the crown from Pope Pius VI and placing it on his own head, indicating that his power came entirely from himself. Who doubts that Trump would want to do the same?
The disasters they caused did not prevent these two different types of megalomaniacs from being revered by their people after their deaths. Mao's body lies in its Beijing mausoleum to be worshipped by the Chinese faithful. Napoleon's remains rest in a marble sarcophagus in his grandiose Paris tomb, surrounded by bas-reliefs of his battles, situated like the Stations of the Cross.
It's not hard to envision a huge golden mausoleum celebrating the horrors of a Trump presidency.
* - This piece was written in Lhasa, with a few revisions made since my return.
During the Republican National Convention, United States Representative for Iowa's 4th congressional district Steve King, who has served in congress since 2003, shocked Chris Hayes and April Ryan with his white nationalist statements.
"Go back through history, Charlie, and ask yourself 'where are these contributions made by these other categories of people that you are talking about. Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization,'" King asked.
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Chris Hayes sought clarification, by asking, "Than white people?"
King continued, "Western civilization itself, rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States, and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world."
Chris Hayes, the witty and usually quick-on-his-feet host was stunned. The comments clearly caught him off guard. April Ryan and Chris Hayes went on Periscope after the interview to discuss what happened with Joy Reid. Chris Hayes correctly noted that the statement was "self-refuting." However, false statements, illogical arguments and invalid conclusions characterize Donald Trump's campaign best, along with racist and sexist comments that are unprecedented for a major party presidential nominee. Thus, to be surprised by the statements made by Representative Steve King is actually absurd.
It is no secret that a number of members of the Republican party, political leaders, representatives and its constituents hold these, not only Eurocentric views, but white nationalist ideologies. The Republican nominee, Donald Trump, is a manifestation, a symbol, of those very ideologies and views. His campaign is based on appeals to pathos and fear to the detriment of logic, evidence or facts. This has worked for his campaign. Yet, there is something more sinister to consider here. Set aside, the intersection of white-male privilege and class that lends Mr. Trump access to such a position. Representative Steve King is a purveyor of power as an elected official, an arm of political dominance as a member of Congress and by his own statements -- a racist.
I do not use the term racist glibly. I employ this term from the position that such Eurocentric ideologies, coupled with political power within our legislative and lawmaking body of government results in cultural domination and exploitation. In other words, it's not what Representative Steve King said that should concern us, so much as a system that substantiates such ideologies. He is a congressman. When ideologies are discriminatory and its internal structure justifies such ideologies, that society is, in fact, racist. Effectively, Representative Steve King and the symbolism of what Mr. Trump represents, looms the ever-nagging and elusive hierarchy of domination. To be clear, Eurocentrism is not tantamount to racism, except and when it intersects with political power and lodges within, across and into the systems that govern us. We know this intersection is at the heart, the foundation, of American history. Representative Steve King reminded us that it is at the heart of modern America. This statement of white cultural superiority characterizes the United States in more ways than we all would like to admit -- it is eugenics and slavery. It is the way the school system teaches Thanksgiving and Christopher Columbus. It is the absence of people of color in our history books, in our curriculum, except to talk about such people from a place of powerlessness and plunder. Yet, this is not the worse of it. If we were talking about an America that has acknowledged racism as much as it acknowledges race, we might be further ahead. Yet we try to "unite" in a self-justifying society made up of a prism of economic, political and cultural reinforcement of Representative King's statements -- see evidence here, here and here.
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After hearing Representative Steve King's comments, I wondered, How can someone lack such a deep sense of historical knowledge? White supremacy, the belief that white people are superior and should dominate society, is fundamental to the very existence of this country. From this view, the answer is clear. Cultural domination allows you to move through life without considering, acknowledging or learning about anything or anyone outside of your own culture. What other group in America has that luxury?
Representative Steve King juxtaposes the significant contributions of Europeans and Americans with the spread of Christianity. This juxtaposition is indeed historically significant. A cursory review of Western civilization will reveal the re-interpretation of Biblical texts dating back to the 16th century, which equated Black or dark-skin people, for example, with inferiority. White society worked to not only justify the mistreatment of Blacks through Christianity but also to offer Black slaves hope. Curtis Bunn, in an Atlanta Black Star article states it precisely:
The most important aspect of Christianity for the enslaved was the promise of heaven -- a promise made by plantation owners. This idea preached the notion that for all the suffering that is done in the physical world, your soul will be preserved and you will experience a hardship-free spiritual life, according to Slave Resistance, A Caribbean Study. What this did for enslaved Black people was give them hope for the future. Converted enslaved people's belief in heaven allowed some to passively resist their plantation owners and focus on the afterlife. With that belief, all of the beatings and lashings meant nothing because in heaven the enslaved person would be rewarded and the master would be punished.
This hope for the future kept Black people alive, yet it is also a variation of the same manifestation of hope Black people harbor today. April Ryan suggested in her post interview on Periscope with Chris Hayes that she was in disbelief at the comments. That disbelief is indeed hope. Even as we witness, via video and live stream, the murder of Black citizens and children by police officers, the rise of Donald Trump as a symbol of white anxiety and anger that reeks of white nationalism and anti-brown sentiments, we still maintain the optimism that President Obama seems to maintain. That is hope. As Black people, we give, even GOP constituents and representatives, the benefit of not assuming what we already know but refuse to believe. We continue to hope that we are not divided, that we can move the needle forward on systemic racism and white supremacy even as we know it still permeates every fiber of our institutions, political and educational systems and an alarming number of people who make up those institutions, political and educational systems. Hope -- that is a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen. So we live on, hoping that white racial ideology juxtaposed with cultural domination, will cease. Hoping that the hierarchy will flatten.
"Snap out of it!" my courageous mother might have said, were she alive today. I come from a generation that was not supposed to exaggerate our problems -- and some of our problems were staggering. We, as a country, were tested in so many ways. The Great Depression which caused so much misery and hardship was not met by the turning towards fascism, but by the creation of Social Security and banking laws under FDR. And the enormity of WW2 -- with all its losses of lives, and disruption of family life, was endured with a true stoicism, as we redefined our liberties while fighting those who threatened them. Yes, there were some grievous acts like the roundup and confinement of Japanese Americans, but these were exceptions to the courage and grit shown by most in power, and ordinary/extraordinary citizens. My wife's father -- too old for draft age -- volunteered, and as a doctor he healed the wounded and comforted the dying in the battles of the Far East -- and she was denied his presence during her childhood. But she endured it and grew into a wonderful young woman.
In Britain Nazi bombs reigned down on Londoners, completely destroying Coventry and other cities, thousands lost their lives, others lost their loved ones and their homes and the people did not cry out for a fascist leader. Instead, they put the British version of Hitler, Mosely, in jail for the duration of the war. In no way do I wish to diminish the terrible losses starting in 9/11 and the awful killings that lunatic murderers have brought on civilians and police in recent days -- but it does not compare to the suffering endured in WW2. And if we were able to resist the siren song of fascism then -- why are we so vulnerable to it now? Perhaps it is easier to have one of two nation state enemies than a hundred single secret killers endangering the lives of citizens -- but it is not enough -- it will never be enough -- to hand the reins of power to a fascistic, narcissistic, sociopath. We did not seek and elect our version of a Hitler to fight Hitler then, and we must not do so now. So, in the words of my very wise but no nonsense mother, "America, snap out of it." This is a testing time for courage and cool heads -- and I believe that we shall pass the test. Terrible times should not and will not force a country to elect a truly terrible man. Courage is in our DNA -- and we must use every bit of it to fight Trump and the dystopian world of repression and oppression that he would bring to all of us. He is the specter under the bed that we feared as children, now grown up and real -- his power is only that which we wish to give to him -- and by God we will not do that! Letting Trump win would be an act of cowardice that this country has yet to commit. Onwards!
For those of us with a love for big, showy celebrations, weddings are a source of constant fascination. Weddings all over the world share a lot of traditions, but each country has details that set it apart. Here are some things you'll see at a U.K. wedding that you're unlikely to see in the U.S.
1. Stormy Weather is a Feature.
Rain in the U.K. is a given, and talented wedding photographers don't just deal with it, they celebrate it. With artful lighting, stormy skies and water reflections make for spectacular fine art wedding photos. Photographer Martin Hill told me, "British couples are often more reserved than other bride and grooms from around the world and often don't enjoy having their pictures taken. It's for this reason I encourage them to become more figures in the landscape rather than be the centre of attention."
2. They throw flower petals instead of birdseed.
Birdseed is great, but not nearly as pretty as flower petals. Lancaster wedding photographer Nichola Morton tells me that some brides opt for paper wedding confetti instead. The birds might not help you clean up, but a shower of color adds something truly special to your wedding photos.
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3. Kilts are common.
You don't see a lot of kilts here in the U.S., but traditional Scottish tartans are a common sight at U.K. formal events. Photographer John Alexander captured this wonderful photo of a groom and his groomsmen on their way to a wedding in colorful tartans.
4. They hire London buses.
When you have to get an entire wedding party from point A to point B, what better mode of transportation than an iconic London bus? Routemaster Hire was kind enough to provide this wonderful photo of a wedding party boarding a double-decker bus.
5. And a silver sixpence in her shoe.
"Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue" is familiar, but did you know there's more? The poem goes on "and a silver sixpence for her shoe." It's a tradition that dates back to the 16th century. The coin, placed in the bride's left shoe, was part of the dowry and considered good luck for the new couple. Modern brides often opt to glue the coin to the left shoe - far more practical considering today's styles. This intimate moment between a bride and her dad was captured by Nichola Morton.
6. They take sweets very seriously.
We may share a love for sky-high wedding cakes, but U.K. weddings often go above and beyond by featuring a table laden with desserts of all kinds. Baked goods, jars of candy, and even ice cream carts are common. These photos, taken by Nigel Davidson of 2Tone Photography, are from the same wedding!
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7. Hats are really a thing.
It's not just royal weddings. Guests in glorious hats are found at many U.K. weddings. When you're getting married at a castle, it's probably best to go all out. Italian wedding photographer Amy Turner regularly visits the U.K. to capture extraordinary nuptials. At this wedding, held in the incomparable St Margaret's Church at Westminster Abbey, the groomsmen wore proper tailcoats and top hats, and the bride sported an elegant fascinator trimmed with a lace veil.
8. Grooms are not afraid of color.
While most U.S. grooms don predictably black, gray, or white tuxes and limit color choices to complementary cummerbunds and ties, U.K. grooms often opt for blues, greens, browns, and the occasional tartan. Photographer Joel Skingle captured this magnificent photo of a beautiful bride and her groom resplendent in bright blue tails.
9. They take their heritage on the road.
When this British couple decided on an island destination wedding in the Dominican Republic, they took their heritage with them. Did I mention that U.K. men don't shy away from color? Punta Cana Photographer Gaston Garcia sent me this wonderful shot of Union Jack shoes from a British wedding ceremony.
10. They book epic venues.
By Gidon Bromberg and Hilik Bar
Israelis and Palestinians often play the blame game on the crucial issue of water. Palestinians scream "water apartheid" and Israelis respond with accusations of a "sewage intifada."
But recently there has been some important progress in the form of an Israeli-Turkish agreement to normalize diplomatic relations signed last month. It permits Turkey to lead efforts to build a new seawater desalination plant in Gaza, as well as a power station. The desalination plant could supply urgently needed drinking water, while the power station could help run a World Bank-built sewage treatment plant that has so far been unable to open for lack of electricity.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cited Gaza's water problems as a key justification for the deal with Turkey. His concerns are well founded. Gaza has no modern sewage treatment plants, and its untreated sewage pollutes the aquifer that it shares with Israel.
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"It is in Israel's clear interest to deal with the water problem in the Gaza Strip," Netanyahu said. "When the aquifers become polluted, this is not limited to the Gaza side of the aquifer but also passes over to the aquifer on our side."
Poor sanitation threatens outbreaks of pandemic diseases and, as Netanyahu rightly observed, "outbreaks do not stop at the fences." An estimated 90 million liters of raw sewage from Gaza flow into the Mediterranean Sea every single day, polluting not only the shared coastline, but threatening Israel's desalination plant in Ashkelon. The Ashkelon plant supplies 20 percent of Israel's drinking water.
The rationale for urgent action on sewage in Gaza applies equally to the West Bank, whose sanitation problems affect Israelis just as much as Palestinians. Every Palestinian city in the West Bank, from Jenin in the north to Hebron in the south, is emitting sewage into streams that either flow west into Israel or east towards the Jordan River and the Dead Sea.
Every year about 50 billion liters of untreated West Bank sewage pollute shared groundwater, including the Mountain and Coastal Aquifers, as well as Israel's Mediterranean beaches. Just as Gaza's effluent threatens Ashkelon, West Bank sewage carried by cross-border streams brings the potential for disease into the heart of major Israeli cities like Tel Aviv, Haifa, Hadera, Netanya, and Be'ersheva.
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Drinking water has run out in Gaza
Sewage isn't the only problem. Some 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza have run out of drinking water. The Coastal Aquifer that is virtually the sole source of their water supply is no longer potable. On top of pollution from untreated sewage, over-extraction has caused seawater to be drawn into the aquifer, making it too saline for human consumption.
Water shortages in many West Bank Palestinian towns and cities are even worse than in Gaza. In summer, municipal water is supplied to many Palestinian homes as little as once a month.
Despite the current impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, allowing Turkey to take the lead in Gaza demonstrates that there are still ways to make progress on water issues. We have an opportunity to build on the momentum of the Gaza deal and expand this breakthrough to the West Bank, especially in light of summer water shortages.
Israelis are proud of their ingenuity in solving water problems. Israel is the world leader in wastewater treatment and reuse, and a world leader in desalination. Thanks to these technological achievements, Israel today enjoys a substantial water surplus--meaning we can increase supplies to the Palestinians without cutting water allocations to Israelis. The political cost is low, while both sides stand to gain enormously. More water in every Palestinian home is a chance to strengthen moderate Palestinian leadership.
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Two decades ago, Palestinians and Israelis signed the Oslo accords, which included an interim deal on how to share water resources until a final agreement on all issues could be reached. Oslo linked water with other final status issues such as Jerusalem and borders. This was a mistake. Water and sanitation have been held hostage to a broader political agreement, with potentially disastrous consequences for public health.
We urgently need to disentangle these critical issues and forge a new agreement to manage water and sanitation across the West Bank and Gaza, in the interests of both peoples. Such an agreement could stop water from poisoning both the imaginations and the daily lives of Palestinians and Israelis. Instead it could show that the two sides, separated by seemingly unbridgeable animosity, still can make concrete progress on vital issues that affect them both.
Given all that I've seen in my career I don't sweat the small stuff.
We didn't talk about product; we didn't talk about organization or raising money. We talked about our values, we talked about our hopes and dreams for the world, and that helped us realize why we were doing this project together.
Startups aren't only for twentysomethings. And a founding team needs more than a complementary skill set.
Experience and vision were the focus of today's Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show
The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup - from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. The program examines the DNA of entrepreneurs: what makes them tick, how they came up with their ideas; and explores the habits that make them successful, and the highs and lows that pushed them forward.
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Joining me in the Stanford University studio were
Peter Arvai, co-founder of Prezi, an interactive presentation platform
Jim Semick, co-founder of ProductPlan, which sells web-based software for building visual product roadmaps
Listen to my full interviews with Jim and Peter by downloading them from SoundCloud here and here.
(And download any of the past shows here.)
Clips from their interviews are below.
Peter Arvai, cofounder of Prezi, dreamed of being a particle physicist but working in a startup changed his career path.
In Sweden, he founded omvard.se a company that aggregates data on treatment outcomes for hospital patients. Soon after, he developed the world's first mobile newsreader so people could follow TED Talks from their mobile devices.
Prezi's founding team is a classic startup mix of hacker, hustler and designer. However, Peter says the company's success is also driven by the co-founders' shared values and vision:
For us, it was about really getting clear about why we were doing what we were doing. When the three of us met in a cafe in Budapest we didn't talk about product, we didn't talk about organization or raising money. We talked about our values, we talked about our hopes and dreams for the world, and that helped us realize why we were doing this project together.
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No matter how much you know your co-founders, you need to have more than understanding of them. You need an element of love, because you will have conflicts, you will have issues and then you need to have the foundation to work those through.
To hear the clip, click here
Prior to founding ProductPlan, Jim Semick was part of the founding team at AppFolio, helping validate and launch its first products. Before AppFolio, Jim created the product requirements for GoToMyPC and GoToMeeting which was acquired by Citrix.
Jim lectures at University of California Santa Barbara and elsewhere on the process of discovering successful business models.
Having started ProductPlan in midlife, Jim found that his age and the knowledge he's acquired have given him an edge:
I think that my experience with validation and launching other products has helped me immensely. So does my experience as a writer and instructor. I'm able to communicate effectively and that has contributed to ProductPlan's success.
Given all that I've seen in my career I don't sweat the small stuff.
Plus, having a family motivates me to make this successful.
To hear the clip, click here
--
Peter says they launched Prezi in the middle of the 2008 crash, with the audacious goal of taking on Apple, Microsoft and Google. To say it was an uphill battle at first would be an understatement. However they got early signs that they might be on to something:
Most people thought we were very wrong. Again, remember, everyone was losing their job, no one was willing to invest and so we had to bootstrap Prezi in the beginning.
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We went a full year without raising any serious money.
We launched Prezi at a startup competition. Unfortunately we came in second place, but within five minutes of introducing Prezi, the moderator asked the audience, "How many of you would be willing to pay for this?" and half of the audience members raised their hand.
That was the first time we knew that we were onto something really meaningful.
To hear the clip, click here
Peter and his co-founders were committed to making Prezi a global company. In doing so, they applied lessons Peter learned from working previously at Mobispine, a mobile communications company that developed the first mobile newsreader so people could watch TED talks from their smartphones:
At Mobispine we fell into the trap of thinking too local. When we shipped, Mobispine worked perfectly in the Stockholm subway. But then I went to other places in the world and it didn't work. We didn't understand what would work in the rest of the world.
One of the key things that I took away from the experience was that if you want to build a global company, you really have to understand the specific conditions in each of the places that you are going to. You have to think globally from day one.
To hear the clip, click here
--
Although Jim enjoyed bringing new products to market while working for others, starting ProductPlan allowed him fulfill the dream of being be master of his own fate:
I've always wanted to create a product that lived beyond me.
In my last job, when I was doing customer discovery, even though I was very invested and very passionate about the products, it was really for the organization, for someone else's company. It wasn't for myself.
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This time, at ProductPlan it was for myself. That actually makes a real difference. I get so much more satisfaction out of this.
To hear the clip, click here
Jim offered this advice for entrepreneurs doing customer discovery:
People want to be nice; people want you be successful. And it's human nature to want to hear good stuff about what you've built. But believing it all will put you out of business.
You need to ask polite, but challenging questions to confirm that you're not hearing these false positives.
If someone tells you: "I love the idea," ask, "Why do you love the idea?" That takes you down a path, because so many entrepreneurs take that answer at face value and they run with it and say, "Everyone says they love the product," which may or may not be the truth.
If someone says, "I love the idea," you need to ask them whether they'd give you the money they have in the wallet -- right now. If they won't they really didn't love it that much!
To hear the clip, click here
Listen to my full interviews with Jim and Peter by downloading them from SoundCloud here and here. (And download any of the past shows here.)
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Tune in Thursday at 1 pm PT, 4 pm ET on Sirius XM Channel 111.
Mark A. Schuster, M.D., Ph.D., Sari L. Reisner, Sc.D., and Sarah E. Onorato, B.A.
From the Division of General Pediatrics, Boston Children's Hospital (M.A.S., S.L.R., S.E.O.), the Department of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School (M.A.S., S.L.R.), the Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (S.L.R.), and the Fenway Institute, Fenway Health (S.L.R.) -- all in Boston.
One might have to go back to the era of racial desegregation of U.S. bathrooms to find a time when toilets received so much attention. Recently, several states have debated or passed legislation requiring people to use the public bathroom corresponding to their sex as "identified at birth" or "stated on a person's birth certificate." [1, 2] Some supporters of these laws have focused on the fear that male stalkers will claim to be transgender women in order to victimize girls and women in restrooms. Others have expressed vitriol and revulsion toward transgender people, describing them as "sexual predators," "voyeurs," and "pedophiles." Although transgender people have been characterized as dangerous, it is transgender people who have generally been the victims of verbal harassment and physical assaults when trying to use public bathrooms.
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Opposition to the recent legislation has been strong in some sectors, with businesses, performers, and states voicing objections and canceling planned expansions, concerts, and government-sponsored travel. At the federal level, the Obama administration filed a lawsuit against North Carolina, asserting that the state's Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act violates federal law. It also issued a letter outlining the legal obligation of public schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity. Eleven states have sued the administration over this directive.
Although these issues may ultimately be decided under civil rights law, bathrooms matter for health. Transgender people who are barred from using bathrooms where they feel safe might feel they have no choice but to suppress basic bodily needs. Delayed bathroom use can cause health problems including urinary tract or kidney infections, stool impaction, and hemorrhoids. Some transgender people even abstain from drinking during the day to avoid the need to urinate.
When transgender people are physically assaulted in public bathrooms, they may suffer bruises, broken bones, or worse. In addition, the ongoing fear of harassment and violence when using public bathrooms can take a toll on mental health. More broadly, laws like North Carolina's send a message that transgender people are not welcome in workplaces or schools, reinforcing the stigma, bias, and fear that fuel discrimination against transgender people.
Transgender people have a gender identity that does not match their sex assigned at birth, which is generally based on anatomical observation. Gender identity refers to an internal sense of oneself as being male, female, or outside these two categories (see table). Although representative studies of transgender people are rare, one estimate suggests that approximately 700,000 U.S. adults are transgender. [3]
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Visibility of transgender people and support for transgender rights have increased dramatically in recent years. Media portrayals, once dominated by killers and comic stereotypes, are becoming more common, diverse, and authentic. In 2015, a total of 375 Fortune 500 companies prohibited discrimination on the basis of gender identity, up from 15 in 2002. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia include gender identity in employment nondiscrimination laws.
Despite these shifts, transgender people still face substantial discrimination. Beyond bathroom accessibility, discrimination is associated with increased stress, anxiety, depressive symptoms, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, and suicide. It is also associated with increased risk of bullying, verbal harassment, sexual assault, and nonsexual violence, as well as decreased health care utilization. Discrimination and its consequences are often most pronounced for those whose gender expression (how one expresses oneself in terms of culturally defined masculine or feminine appearance, clothing, and mannerisms) does not fit traditional, binary male-female categories, such as a person assigned female sex at birth who is taking hormones and has grown a beard but has not undergone breast removal surgery.
Gender affirmation -- having one's gender identity acknowledged and accepted in social, legal, and other settings -- can greatly enhance overall psychological health. The health care community can promote gender affirmation through clinical care, research, and advocacy. But there are challenges. Most clinicians lack expertise in transgender health, some resist treating transgender patients, and some make prejudiced and abusive statements. The 2008-2009 U.S. National Transgender Discrimination Survey revealed that 28% of transgender adults experienced harassment in medical settings, 19% reported being refused care, and 28% postponed care because of discrimination; 50% of those who received care reported having to teach their clinicians about transgender care. [4]
Transgender people need clinicians who can provide proper health care. [5] Clinicians can actively support their health by addressing the risk of verbal and physical assault, helping with emotional challenges related to disclosing gender identity to family and friends, and discussing medical options for gender affirmation (e.g., hormone therapy). They can support people who express a gender identity different from their sex assigned at birth, as well as their families, who may be confused and scared. Clinicians can also learn to address health care needs related to a person's anatomy regardless of gender identity (e.g., Pap tests for a transgender man who has a cervix).
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Medical offices and hospitals can welcome transgender patients by, for example, adopting inclusive intake procedures and asking about gender identity on registration forms. Clinicians can ask patients which pronouns to use when referring to them and how to conduct a physical exam in a manner that will be most comfortable for them. If a clinician has not been trained to provide care to a particular group of patients, working with those patients can be intimidating. Education on providing health care for transgender patients can be integrated into clinical training at all levels.
Clinicians need to provide care to their patients using the best available knowledge. Although there are guidelines, protocols, and other resources covering health care to transgender people, a 2011 Institute of Medicine report recommended investment in more research on transgender-specific health needs. Open questions span topics from basic demographics and development to long-term effects of hormone therapy. There is more to be learned about general health as well as specific issues such as cancer risk, mental health, aging, and how best to support young people whose gender identity doesn't match their sex assigned at birth. This field needs skilled researchers, funding, and transgender communities open to partnering with researchers and participating in studies. Demographic and descriptive research would benefit from the inclusion of gender identity in population-based surveys. Further development of methods for identifying transgender people through surveys and claims data would enhance this work.
The medical community can continue to play a crucial role in advocacy, providing a key voice in legislative hearings and amicus briefs. Doctors, particularly psychiatrists, have been asked repeatedly to weigh in on the mental health of transgender people and on bathroom use and other controversies. In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) revised its guidelines to indicate that being transgender is not a mental disorder and that gender-affirming treatments are a valid focus of care for people who desire them; the APA has included gender dysphoria in its guidelines partly to cover people who have substantial distress or impairment and to ensure access to and coverage of desired medical interventions and treatments. The American Medical Association and other medical societies have called on clinicians to provide treatment to all patients regardless of gender identity and have advocated for insurance coverage of health care services for transgender people. In April 2016, the American Academy of Pediatrics repudiated North Carolina's public-facilities law. Physicians should not underestimate their ability to educate and reassure people who are misinformed and unaware or afraid of the unknown.
Before everybody loses their sh*t over this painting about police brutality, know that art can ask big questions and stir strong emotions for a reason. Images bypass intellect, and can transport us into anothers world. Awakened and aware of anothers experience, we just might be moved to become part of the solution. Lets help one another by being brave enough to understand one another. Art can help with that.
I 'm spelling out my intentions behind the painting like a magician explaining how a trick works because we are all trudging through the emotional carnage of recent events. Id rather you find meaning through your own experience of the image without me saying anything. But the nuanced leap from Whats that? to How do we make change? is near impossible with racial tensions fraying everyones nerves.
The police shootings of Alton Stering, Philando Castile, and now the bloody retaliatory killings of 5 officers in Dallas and 3 in Baton Rouge leave us despaired. Were rattled just being in public in stores, restaurants, malls, crowds, always wondering if violence will erupt.
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The police brutality painting is about finding peace by way of a reality check. It is the first in a painting series that will examine all voices victims, families, police, community. The art project is called Art As Social Inquiry. The painting of Alex Landau is from ASI's War / Violence series.
(Courtesy of the artist)
The years have brought different reactions to my activist art. STFU you lyin OFA shill. (Whats OFA? Had to Google it.) F*** YOU!!!!" sent in a private Facebook message meant to intimidate. In person, people were not so free with their taunts as I discovered in 2012 when I demonstrated in front of the US Supreme Court and Capitol in Washington DC. Debate about the new healthcare law raged at the time. I stood with signs and portraits from Art As Social Inquirys painting series, Healthcare in the US, to advocate for access to healthcare as a human right. I measured peoples disdain for my message by how loud they yelled. But hey, 1st Amendment, free speech and all that. My line is not easily crossed. I will tolerate a lot.
Through it all, though, I have never been censored. Until now.
The untitled painting of Alex Landau before and after a police beating he received in 2009, after being stopped for an alleged illegal left turn, was enough for Facebook to deny my request to boost the post, a paid promotion to augment a targeted audience.
I interviewed Alex for this portrait in 2015. The picture for the brutalized Alex in the painting is from a photo Alex insisted be taken before he would let doctors treat my broken nose, multiple lacerations and serious head injuries including a massive hematoma, a concussion, and a hemorrhage in my right eye. It took 45 stitches to control the bleeding. A doctor with a PhD in neuropsychology later diagnosed the hidden damage -- brain injury and PTSD. Here is an excerpt from my interview with Alex.
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Nixon (police officer) headed toward the trunk. I took a couple of steps forward with outstretched arms to signify no ill intent, and again asked to see a warrant. In response, Officers Middleton and Murr grabbed my hands and arms, and placed me in a restraint. I was obviously immobilized. Nixon looked at me and said, You dont have your license. He began punching me in the face. All three cops then began beating me with their fists, a police radio, and a police issue Mag flashlight. I heard Murr yell, Hes reaching for her gun. As I struggled just to breathe, I yelled with every ounce of energy, No I'm not. No I'm not. I'm not reaching for anything.
Paintings can make us feel what it might be like to suffer what the Alex-es of the world suffer. Others suffer, but we will not allow ourselves to empathize too much. Words, yes. But pictures, too upsetting. Social media honors those boundaries by censoring images like this painting.
What if we let ourselves feel and see others' suffering? We just might have to answer the call to participate in finding solutions. Our shared humanity will demand it of us. Yes, it will. We will suffer a crisis of conscience if we don't. So we avoid asking too many questions, and end up even more uncomfortable with circumstances and ourselves. Wanting to be part of the solution does not mean we abandon our lives for the cause.
Answering the call to act is personal. WE are the answer to the thoughts and prayers being offered after every human tragedy. WE are the instruments of change, large and small. One persons march on Washington is anothers quiet admission at a cocktail party that she called her congresswoman to demand bad cops be removed from the force.
By Nick Foster
In 2011, my editor at the Financial Times asked me to write a feature on the real estate boom in Panama. I had just spent a few days in the country and had found it surprisingly modern and bustling. Panama occupies the narrow isthmus separating the Caribbean Sea from the Pacific Ocean. Its canal, completed in 1914a remarkable piece of engineering in any age, and a considerable source of revenueimmediately set the country apart from its neighbors.
In Panama City, scores of high-rises poked at the sky on the waterfront, in a Latin copy of Dubai or Singapore. One of them was a dramatic, sail-shaped seventy-story tower called the Trump Ocean Club Panama, and it had just opened for business. Meanwhile, plans were afoot to turn a 3,460-acre former US Air Force base near the canal into a new urban environment with sleek business parks, malls, and thousands of new homes. It was part of the general ambition to transform this small, ideally located nation into a hub of the Americas, the perfect place for blue-chip corporations to locate their Latin American operations. I asked the communications director of the project to develop the old air force base if Panama, long considered a developing country, was now about to join the ranks of the first world. "Yes," he replied, "absolutely!"
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While I was writing my newspaper feature, I came across the story of an American expat known as William "Wild Bill" Corteza fearsome-looking young man in the photosaccused of killing five of his compatriots in Bocas del Toro, a remote archipelago off Panama's Caribbean coast, near the border with Costa Rica. Cortez had been apprehended on the run in Nicaragua, and promptly flown back to Panama to face the music. Under interrogation, he soon admitted to killing a total of six people: five American citizens and a Thai woman, married to one of the Americans. Cortez's victims had all been shot in the head, execution-style. His wife and presumed accomplice, Jane Cortez, was a tight-lipped young woman who, like Wild Bill, had been born and raised in North Carolina. At their home in Bocas del Toro, police found a stash of gold dental fillings and crowns, ammunition for an AK-47 assault rifle, and a number of credit cards and checkbooks that were not theirs. Bill had been described by a fellow expat as "the world's first capitalist serial killer."
In 2011, there were an estimated two thousand expats living more or less permanently on the tropical islands of Bocas del Toro, around two-thirds of them Americans. No one knew the true figure, but the number was certainly growing every year. Many homes were only accessible by boat. I wondered what kind of expat community Bocas del Toro was. Bloggers made arch comments about the kind of newcomer who washed up there. It turned out that Bocas del Toroliterally "Mouths of the Bull," or Bocas for shortis a place of sun-kissed beaches and pristine jungle. But scratch the surface and the islands of Bocas appear a whole lot more sinister: for thirty years or more they have been a key transit point for drug shipments from Colombia to North America. They were also known for their property scams. Among other things, unscrupulous realtors went as far as hawking tracts of land to people who already owned them, and trying to sell sandbars, only visible at low tide, hoping the gullible buyer wouldn't come back when the tide was high and the sandbar was underwater.
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Most of all, the islands of Bocas del Toro had become a hangout for the type of expat who appreciates anonymity and who might want to disappearfrom ex-spouses, tax authorities, the police. Many of these people adopt a false name, and few others seem to care. "The principle of live and let live has been taken to the extreme in Bocas," another expat told me. "Everyone here," he said, "came because back home they were either 'Wanted,' or unwanted." Some of them had precious few friends and family.
After 9/11, Bocas saw a huge new influx of expats. Even if it was the middle of nowhere, it was far away from likely terrorist targets. It was a place whose isolation forced an almost total self-reliance. It attracted the kind of person, often in their forties or fifties, the tail end of the baby boomers, who had given up on the idea that any government was going to take care of them.
From around 2002 onward, Bocas Townthe only large settlement in the chain of islands, with bars and restaurants right on the waterbecame a place to party. You could buy land or a house and, in a year or two, sell up and double your money. This was an accentuated version of what was happening in the United States: in the period preceding the housing crash of 2007, many American states saw years of double-digit house-price growth. A lot of folks thought there was no reason why house prices could not go up forever.
The disturbing Cortez story also connected with that global property boom and bust. Soon after he arrived in Panama in 2006, Wild Bill portrayed himself as a real estate developer with plenty of cash to spend, advertising HASSLE FREE AND FAST CLOSINGS in a local English-language newspaper. In Bocas it was known that Cortez was solvent and on the lookout for houses to buy. Piecing together accounts from locals and Panamanian and US news reports, I began to suspect that Cortez's numerous murdersif, indeed, he was the perpetratorhad property fraud at their heart.
Besides his real estate business and a Harley-Davidson repair shop, Cortez also ran a bare-bones drinking den called the Jolly Roger Social Club. The bar, open weekends only, was located four hundred yards from Bill and Jane's own home. The raucous parties at the Jolly Roger were the stuff of local legend. Some expats would not want to be seen within a mile of the bar, such was its reputation. But many others loved the place and its boisterous drinking games, and courted the company of Wild Bill himself. Cortez, with his beefed-up physiqueit was widely assumed he took steroidslong blond hair, and Viking helmet, was defiantly larger than life. And so was his life story. His father was Mexican and had been an ambassador. He owned oil fields in Texas. He had a $10 million trust fund. Meanwhile, Jane said she was a veterinarian, but when shown a sick Jack Russell terrier she said she couldn't help as she only treated "big animals like cows," not dogs. The Jolly Roger Social Club flew a skull and crossbones and its motto was: Over 90% of our members survive. One oddity about the place was that, for a successful, even hard-nosed businessman, Cortez appeared to run his dive on what could only be described as altruistic lines. All the time he spent serving drinks behind the bar, and in the kitchen preparing greasy finger food, made a profit of little more than $20 a night. On top of that, the Cortezes had to pay for electricity and upkeep of the wooden structure, jutting out on stilts over the Caribbean.
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But details of the Cortez case were sparse and sometimes contradictory. Panama's criminal justice system is flawed, and police have in the past used torture to extract confessions like Bill Cortez's. From the start I knew that I would have to navigate carefully through the leads that I was amassing, some of which would surely prove false. You have to keep your wits about you in Panama.
And yet, Bocas del Toro is seductive. It's easy to step off the plane and fall in love with the place and with its people; heaven knows, many have done so. The islands of the archipelago fringe a vast lagoon, where the sight of a native family setting off in their kayukoscanoes hollowed out from a single treegladdens the heart. Then there are the lobster cookouts with friends on the beach; the sound of the relentless, pounding rain on a corrugated iron roof; the multicolored bird-of-paradise flowers. In Bocas, many local families speak English with the lilting accent of the Caribbean, helping gringos settle in a bit more quickly. Here, witchcraft is taken seriously and shamans earn a decent living. All the locals, and indeed some expats, know which plants in the jungle to take for high blood pressure and rashes, and to soothe a hangover. In the 1980s, the English novelist Graham Greene wrote that Panama was "bizarre and beautiful." It still is.
Every paradise has its snake, of course, and often more than one. In 2011, soon after my first visit, former dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega arrived back in the country in handcuffs, after an absence of twenty-one years. In 1989, the United States had invaded Panama and removed General Noriega from power. He was detained as a prisoner of war, flown to Miami, Florida, and tried and convicted on eight counts of drug trafficking, racketeering, and money laundering. In the early 1990s, Panamanian courts had found the famously pockmarked Noriega guilty of murder in absentia, so Panama's hitherto most famous, if involuntary, expat was taken from the airport straight to jail. Meanwhile, his confiscated, once-opulent, hacienda-style mansion in Panama City was put up for auction twice. After Noriega's ouster, this was where a shrine to Adolf Hitler, voodoo materials, and ninety pounds of white powder were discovered. The white powder was initially reported as being cocaine but later found to be flour for making tamales. (The auctions, by the way, failed to attract a single bid.)
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After I filed my story with the Financial Times, I followed the Bill and Jane Cortez case at a distance. I also got to know a group of courageous women, a close friend of one of the American victims, and three family members of another, who had banded together to see that justice was served. None of these women spoke Spanish and they all found Panama perplexing. But they were determined, resolute. They wanted to find out exactly what had happened at the Jolly Roger Social Club.
Meanwhile, the police investigation progressed at a snail's pace and Panama's wheels of justice turned very slowly. Then something changed: in the middle of 2013, a slimmed-down Cortez, speaking fluent, confident Spanish, started to acquire a public presence. He appeared on television and radio and became president of an outfit calling itself the Panamanian Prisoners' Association. He had achieved, however improbably, a kind of jail-bound notoriety, even a warped celebrity. How was this possible?
I had lived in Latin America for a decade and had been looking for a Latin American story that demanded telling. But far from everyone in Bocas del Toro wanted this story out in the open. Some thought it was bad for business, others that it brought shame.
"It's too raw," one expat guesthouse owner, a woman from Europe, told me. "This isn't the right time to tell it."
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"When would be the right time?" I asked.
"In about a hundred years."
I don't agree. Many Americansand other nationalities, too, of coursedream of a new life next to a white-sand beach and an azure seaa place where you never need to switch on the heating or light a fire to keep warm, where it's pretty as a postcard and the living is easy. They want to start over in paradise. And in one such paradise, here was a strange American couple with an implausible and sometimes brutal backstory who were toleratedeven indulgedby so many of their compatriots. In the meantime, their neighbors went missing. Why were the expats in Bocas del Toro so slow to react? Whatif anythingwas it about Panama that made it the type of country where this sort of crime could happen?
Copyright 2016 by Nick Foster. Excerpted from The Jolly Roger Social Club
Nick Foster was born in Liverpool, UK in 1966, and educated at University College London. He worked for several years as a European Union diplomat, and as a stringer working out of Caracas, Venezuela, filing news stories and research to the UK's broadsheets. He now writes features for the Financial Times and the International New York Times, among other outlets. He is also producing a documentary film on France's highest-profile cold case. Foster is married with two young sons and lives in Belgium.
Miami Urban Sketchers About 20 people braved Sunday's heat and humidity to sketch images of Coconut Grove, Florida during the event. Coconut Grove is a small village in Miami. Created by Lisa Nance in September, the group has been meeting monthly in various locals around the county to spread out and capture what they see using pens, paper and even doing it digitally. Here, Pat Oblak,
Director of Sales and Art Reach at Jerry's Artarama, who is one of the founders with Lisa, addresses the crowd in front of CocoWalk at 1 pm, before the artists spread out around the village to create.
Federico Giraldo is the third founder/administrator of the Urban Sketchers Miami group
Lisa welcomes the artists before the event, this is one of many monthly events, in the past the group has met at Lincoln Road and Wynwood and they may sketch at the Perez Museum of Art Miami (PAMM) next month.
Daniel Dulitzky had a nice table and shady spot at Masa Taquerita.
Sebastian (just Sebastian) and Stuart Taft had a great space on Main Highway where they created their work.
Nadia Desjardins, a regular contributor at KROMA Gallery got into the spirit, she found a green space on Main Highway across from Lulu.
And next to Nadia were Maurizio Passariello and Sheri Friedman.
Abdon J. Romero and Katyuska Moran drew from a table at Starbucks.
Al Carro used an Ipad Pro and went digital and Elena Montijo used pad and pen. Al and I compared our Surface Pro and Ipad Pro and techniques as I use a Surface Pro 3 and a Wacom Cintiq.
Elena drawing CocoWalk.
Sheri met a busload of students from Italy, some artists who shared their work with Sheri.
The Urban Sketchers draw on location, indoors or out, capturing what they see from direct observation; their drawings tell the story of their surroundings.
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Pat at Virginia and Grand.
At the end of the day, the artists spread their work out and discuss what they saw and drew and they explain their technique.
It's a totally upbeat, charming event which we could use a lot more of around here.
To see some of the work from Sunday, their facebook page is here: https://www.facebook.com/miamiurbansketchers where they are sharing their works.
Being average means you are as close to the bottom as you are to the top. - John Wooden
CEOs rank customer service as the most important priority after growth, according a 2016 Gartner CEO survey. "CEOs seem to be concerned about improving customer service, relationship and satisfaction levels," said Mark Raskino, vice president and Gartner Fellow. In today's hyper connected, knowledge sharing economy, customer service is marketing.
A global customer service leadership survey ranked business challenges as: always-on service, personalized service, and faster service and the top priorities. The challenge is to deliver faster and smart service with strong self-service and personalized options. In the age of the customer, where access to answers through self-service and personalization is key to service differentiation, businesses need to invest in technology, talent and lean processes to amaze all stakeholders. Prior knowledge of customer (contact history, organizational visibility, purchase history, customer surveys, loyalty programs, advocacy activities, feature requests, and business related service level agreements) is vitally important to help companies develop strong service delivery models and capabilities. What can companies do today to bolster their ability to amaze customers? Amazing customers is a function of having a strong: culture, people, strategy, process, and technology (and the order matters).
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To better understand the art of amazing your customers, I recently interviewed Shep Hyken, customer service and experience expert, Hall of Fame speaker, and a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author.
Hyken is a customer service expert, professional speaker and bestselling author who works with companies and organizations who want to build loyal relationships with their customers and employees. His articles have been read in hundreds of publications, and he is the author of Moments of Magic, The Loyal Customer and the Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestsellers, The Cult of the Customer and The Amazement Revolution, which was also recognized as a New York Times bestseller. His latest book is titled Amaze Every Customer Every Time. Today, Hyken is working with Fortune 100 companies and SMBs to help them build world-class service delivery capabilities.
Here are 11 lessons on the Art of Amazing Your Customers:
Customer service is not a department. Service is a philosophy that has to be embraced by every person in the department - from the CEO to every single contributor. Strong customer service organization embrace a culture of transparency and accountability at every level of the organizations. Every employee is trained, empowered and rewarded for delivery excellent customer service, across the entire business. The passion to serve and to delight both internal and external customers is in the DNA of all high performing service teams.
Everybody has a customer - external (paying customers) and internal customers. You are either serving the external customer directly to serving someone who is responsible for serving your customers.
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Define what your culture looks like and your customer service ethos. Develop your customer service mission statement, vision and brand promise. What is your service vision? Make your customer service vision and mission easy to understand, meaningful, and inspiring - not two pages long.
Technology makes the service experience better. Today's customer service leaders deliver mobile apps, self-service web, communities and social networking access, and advanced analytics to help personalize service delivery. The best companies use technology to improve service delivery, backed-up by people for human support. People do business with people. People build relationships with people.
Excellent customer service organizations use data to anticipate the needs of their customers. Proactive customer service delivery and execution velocity is a function of a service organizations ability to use data to develop insights that lead to faster decisions and action, aimed at delivering customer value.
High performing customer service teams use both big data and 'little data' to achieve service excellence. By accessing historical customer data, businesses can tailor and customize the customer experience. Hyken references the hospitality industry and their use of customer data to personalize customer experience.
Strong customer service organizations understand what success looks like. Expand the net promoter score to go beyond the measure of intent, to include the 'Why?' element. Hyken advises companies to improve their contextual intelligence on NPS to better understand the reason behind customer advocacy.
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Amazing customer service means being better than average, consistently. This is a very important consideration when you implement an omni-channel strategy. So the first question: which channel should we use? Hyken has a simple and profound answer: 'the channel that your customer is on.' The key is for businesses to deliver high quality service across all of the channels that they choose to offer to their customers. The time to resolution on all channels, and the associated service level agreements, must be consistently above average.
73% of consumers say that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide them with good service -- whether on a call, in a chat, or while waiting for a service technician to troubleshoot and fix their product. - Kate Leggett, Forrester
Customer service is the new marketing. A 360 degree view of your customer must be shared across all lines-of-business, including sales, marketing and services. A CRM platform that integrates social listening and publication capabilities, whereby customer service organizations can leverage the right content, at the right time, and deliver on the right channel to the right audiences. To do this, customer service teams must be able to collaborate in real-time with sales, marketing, R&D and IT teams. In addition, high performing customer service teams also collaborate closely with customer and partner led communities to better serve customers. Embracing the genius of the crowd is in the DNA of high performance customer service teams.
Hiring is crucial for develop a customer service culture. Hire not only for their abilities. Hire for the personality. Does this person fit in with the personality of your culture? Hyken believes that aptitude and attitude is important but the personality type is what can make or break the brand promise. A customer service culture can easily drift away from their brand promises without the proper personality fit.
High performance service organizations have FUN. You cannot expect customers to love your company before your employees do. Hyken uses the F.U.N. acronym to advise companies on how to improve employee satisfaction. The F is for fulfillment (are employees happy about their assignments?), U is for uniqueness (are employee's unique talent aligned with their assignments?) and N is for next (are employees excited for what's next?). Hyken believes that there also must be a balance of accountability and fun. Leadership must keep company in alignment using both internal and external surveys. "What's happening on the inside of a company is going to be felt on the outside of the company," said Hyken.
Amazing customers means being above average, all of the time. All of the time is key. Another key is when there is a problem, you have to fix the problem and then restore confidence. Be positive, be accountable and have a sense of urgency. Restoring confidence is key to earning the right to your customer's future business. A good customer service mantra: "Dear customer, it's our problem, until it's no longer yours."
"When you're ready to do business, come back!"
It was the last thing I expected to hear from a Cuban street vendor, but there was no doubt about the depth of his intention to sell me an old Cuban pocket watch for a little more than $250.
The Fathom Adonia had arrived from Miami only a few hours earlier with nearly 700 passengers, many of whom were already on a walking tour of the city. The first square we visited, Plaza de Armas, was packed with vendors and their displays. The spirit of capitalism was clearly alive and well, and living in the Plaza del Armes.
Tables were set up with books, art work, jewelry, watches. One enterprising Cuban had even laid out an American nickel for sale. Not a particularly old one, mind you. Just a nickel. (I could not bring myself to ask him how much he wanted for it.)
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Our HavanaTur guide, Daniel, explained that Cuban families receive monthly food rations that are only good for about a week, and government workers are paid only $20 to $30 a month. Since food is the most expensive thing on the island, that money won't cover anyone's expenses. "Owning a business," he said, is pretty much the only way for Cubans to survive.
Driving the Economy
The most visible of the entrepreneurs were the owner-drivers of Havana's trademark, colorful, old American cars. Every day, they cruise the streets, hunting for passengers willing to pay for an out-of-town half-day tour... or, for those on a tighter budget, to pay $30 for a 20-minute spin through Old Havana for a glimpse of the city.
Everywhere, Cubans are hustling (in both the positive and negative sense of the word). Artists, musicians, and taxi drivers ply their wares to the tourists. Sketch-artists draw small (4" X 6") caricatures of passers-by. Strolling musicians follow tour groups, either playing classics or making up their own songs, using whatever information they can glean from the group they are following (names, points of origin, etc.). Drivers of taxis -- government, private, and human-powered -- stand on the corners, offering their services.
In Havana's large indoor tourist marketplace, the atmosphere was reminiscent of a Middle Eastern bazaar. Hundreds of small booths were dressed like the store windows of a tourist shop and squeezed together in a building the size of an airplane hangar. The barkers competed for the attention of tourists trying to navigate the narrow, crowded aisles. Inside the booths, sales people negotiated prices for their wares - which were just like the goods in the booth next door.
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Negotiating With Communists?
At one booth, I asked the merchant how much her tee-shirts cost. Her eyes lit up as she started to explain that her products had many prices. "For you, they will be different than for someone else."
At first, I mistook her comment as an attempt to flatter me, to convince me that she was about to offer me a uniquely low price. As she continued, however, her meaning became clearer. With words and motions, she acted out the process of offer and counter-offer, demonstrating that the price of anything I wanted to buy would depend on my bargaining skills.
Every transaction seemed to include some amount of negotiating. The evidence of a free-market mentality was so prevalent throughout Havana that one could easily have concluded that Cuban Communism was a thing of the past... until it was time to pay.
Two Different Cuban Pesos: Tourist & Local
The duality of Cuba is most clearly represented in its currency system. On the one hand, the infusion of money spent by visitors from other countries is too valuable to turn away. On the other, a communist government that doles out rations, provides education and health care, and tightly controls the economy cannot afford to let the value of its money rise and fall with an open market. Cuba seems to have solved the problem by creating two parallel pesos.
The pesos earned and spent by Cubans are of one variety, called CUP (pronounced "coop"). They have very little value outside Cuba, but locals use CUPs when dealing with each other.
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Foreigners, however, are required to use a different peso, called the CUC (pronounced "kook"). CUCs cost about 25 times more than CUPs, and they fluctuate with the worldwide currency markets.
The exchange rate for the CUC is approximately even with the U.S. dollar, except that converting U.S. money triggers a 10% tax at the start of the transaction. Well-informed American tourists exchange their U.S. dollars for Canadian dollars or Euros before leaving home. Those currencies don't trigger the 10 percent tax, leaving the visitor with more money to spend.
By creating a second tier of currency, Cuba has created a hybrid economy. The local currency allows the communist government to finance food distribution, schools, and hospitals, while giving residents access to stores, restaurants, and supermarkets where they can spend CUPs to supplement their rations. Meanwhile, in the parallel Cuban universe, an economy for foreigners (in CUC) is filled with products and services few Cubans can afford. Within this second-tier economy, Cubans are encouraged to generate an income stream of their own, and many appear to have done so.
The video below is a look at 30-seconds of the stroll through a Cuban street market on the way back to the Adonia in Cienfuegos, Cuba.
My Cuban Education
The recent thaw in U.S.-Cuban relations has provided an opportunity for Americans to visit the island, but only under certain conditions. The U.S. government requires its citizens to sign an affidavit saying that we are "traveling for the purpose of participating in people-to-people and educational exchanges." I certainly learned a lot in my week-long visit.
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Contrary to popular (American) belief, the Cuba I visited has not been cut off from the world for the last five decades. Instead, the U.S. has been isolated from Cuba, while the island has matured -- developing a tourist trade and transforming its economy in a way that gives individuals an opportunity to benefit from their own work.
It's Trump coronation week. My wife and I were out with friends last night, sitting in a bar, watching a muted screen that featured Melania Trump giving her (plagiarized?) speech at the convention. A muted screen was perfect to focus on what really matters at this convention -- the optics. The screen behind Melania was a fetching color of patriotic red. Shots of the audience showed a mostly clean-cut crowd of predominantly White people, politely applauding, sprinkled with occasional shouts (which happily I couldn't hear).
As I watched the spectacle, I turned to my friend, another historian. We both waxed nostalgic for political conventions that featured real news rather than manufactured drama. For example, I vividly recall the Republican Convention of 1980, when it seemed for a fleeting moment former President Gerald R. Ford was joining Ronald Reagan on a "unity" ticket. (It was not to be, which is sad. Such a ticket may have saved us from the rise of the Bushes.) Nowadays, barring a major gaffe (plagiarism again?) or perhaps a violent protest, nothing much of consequence happens at these conventions.
Of course, readers of this blog know that I reject Trump, and all his works, and all his empty promises. But that doesn't mean I won't give the devil his due. Trump is a deceiver, a con man par excellence, and many Americans are desperate to believe the con.
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An example from my local paper. A reader wrote: "Without Trump's help, we're all going down," following that with, "We are on the Titanic, and it is going down. Hillary is snug in a lifeboat. The rest of us are in steerage. I don't care what his hair looks like; we need to be rescued."
What can one say to that? As I recall, once it struck the iceberg, the Titanic was a doomed ship. Putting Trump at the helm would only help it to slip under the waves faster, perhaps a mercy for those fated to die, but certainly no salvation for ship, crew, and passengers. But if it sped up the Titanic movie and Leonardo DiCaprio's death scene, that at least would have been a cinematic mercy.
In all seriousness, this reader's letter moved me. Not for its logic, but for its desperation. Yes, for many people these are desperate times in America. They know the ship of state is sinking. They know they're stuck in steerage. And they know they're fated to suffer the consequences, even as Hillary Clinton and crew have ready escapes.
But, and it's a big "but," America: Putting a con man at the helm of a foundering ship is not exactly the wisest course of action.
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There are alternatives to Captain Trump and Lifeboat Hillary. Seek them out. Get involved. Leonardo DiCaprio's character found his way out of steerage. Yes, a bit of Hollywood fantasy, but remember the Unsinkable Molly Brown? She was real.
Give me the generosity of Molly Brown over the narcissism of Trump any day -- or any year.
On Tuesday night Speaker Ryan responded to my question on the CNN Town Hall with what appeared to be an implicit recognition of Donald Trump's racist and Islamophobic nature.
I posed the following question, "I cannot and will not support Trump. It concerns me when the Republican leadership is supporting somebody who's blatantly racist and has said Islamophobic statements, wants to shut down our borders. How can you morally justify your support for this kind of candidate, somebody who could be very destructive?"
Paul Ryan responded by arguing that my position is equivalent to supporting Hillary Clinton. He went on further to explain that he believes that he can push more of the Republican agenda with a Trump presidency than a Clinton presidency.
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I was not permitted a rebuttal but had I been I would have iterated the following.
First of all Mr. Speaker, what does Hillary Clinton have to do with the moral issue of supporting a racist? You have not denied Mr. Trump's racist and Islamophobic nature, and even if he isn't a racist he is certainly a symbol for such an ideology. I grew up as a Catholic as you did. I do not remember one homily that praised a leader for his/her prejudice and ignorance. Is there a moral foundation for the sponsorship of a man who denies fundamental rights to certain subsets of the population and who does not condemn the indiscriminate oppression of minorities (both historically with the Japanese internment camps and in the modern world with the ban on Muslims entering the country)?
Secondly, what price must our country pay for your party to push a conservative agenda? As a former Republican I do agree with many of your fiscal policies and your initiatives in foreign policy. However, one cannot support their implementation if such requires the placement of an ignorant firebrand at the command of the most powerful military force the world has ever seen. Have you forgotten about the unilateral power that the presidency holds? We do live in a nation of checks and balances, but the president can take radical action without the approval of Congress.
Mr. Speaker I could go on for pages about the dangers of Trump policy, but now let's turn to ideology and symbolism. Perhaps you recall John Winthrop's great speech at the genesis of American civilization, "We must always consider that we shall always be a city upon a hill - the eyes of all people are upon us." If you do not remember it from history class maybe you remember it from John F. Kennedy's 1961 address at the General Court of Massachusetts or from Ronald Reagan's 1980 speech on the eve of his election. What type of city shall we be if we elect Donald Trump as our mayor?
You see Mr. Speaker I believe in a certain vision for America. It's cliche but nevertheless fitting. America should always be the one place in the world where any individual regardless of his/her background can rise beyond the limitations of the human world and achieve what was once unachievable. Such is an America wherein all the peoples of the world can flee to find freedom and prosperity. How are we to persist as that beacon when we exclude the human inhabitants of our southern neighbor? How are we to persist if we exclude the 1.6 billion individuals who adhere to the faith so damned by the candidate you support?
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You will never convince me, Mr. Speaker, that Hillary Clinton could be as destructive. I never thought I would support her in an election, but as an American I simply cannot bring myself to support a man so removed from the founding principles of our country.
Hutchinson Zoo confirms avian flu in geese in its bird rehab center
The virus was in geese being treated at the center. One animal was euthanized. The zoo's exhibit birds are being isolated indoors to protect them.
As France continues to reel from the Thursday attack that left 84 people dead in Nice, insurance professionals are responding with an array of new products now relevant to even the smallest of businesses.Bastille Day celebrations were disrupted in the southern coastal city when Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, plowed through crowds in a 19-ton refrigerated truck. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the assault over the weekend, calling Lahouaiej Bouhlel its soldier.The attack is part of what may be a harsh new reality in global terrorism, in which incidents committed by one active assailant occur often and claim a high number of lives, says Ben Tucker, head of US Terrorism & Political Violence for XL Catlin Theres a trend of increasing frequency [in terror attacks] and, sadly, the level of people who have been killed is quite high, Tucker told Insurance Business America. From that perspective, the psychological impact is very negative [and] weve seen a significant, 35% increase in submission rates.Yet the peculiarities of the Nice attack dont always translate to traditional insurance options. Like the June nightclub shooting in Orlando, Nice yielded a high fatality rate, but a limited result for the property damage traditionally associated with terrorism.And that can lead to coverage gaps for businesses of all sizes, Tucker said.Much of the industrys rating on terrorism risk has been based on events like 9/11, which are very catastrophic and have a lot of property damage, but thats not what were seeing now, he said. The focus on physical damage and general liability often seen in standalone terrorism policies, then, means the products typically dont help clients respond immediately following an attack.Federally backed coverage through the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act suffers from the same limitations, in addition to a staggering $5 million trigger that few incidents will meet.XL Catlin has tried to fill that void with its new Active Assailant policy, a product that has driven much of the companys recent increase in submissions.Unveiled in February, Active Assailant offers time element coverage due to bodily injury or death, not just physical damage. It can be triggered when an event involving a handheld weapon (such as a gun or suicide bomb vest) affects three or more people and the definition of affects is broad. A person could simply be a witness.That has made the product appealing to businesses of all sizes, including smaller companies that would otherwise miss TRIA triggers or suffer from losses caused by a high-fatality attack that did not involve significant physical damage or generate legal action.I think the level of awareness is increasing quite dramatically, and its not limited to large risk management type of exposures, Tucker said. Its really about responding to the time element rather than waiting to be sued or having your property destroyed.The interest in diverse terrorism coverage is so great, XL Catlin is fielding calls from independent agents and wholesalers representing school districts, public buildings or small hospitality accounts. These are industry professionals the company traditionally wouldnt have heard from in the last two to three years.But events like Nice and Orlando have them concerned about coverage for their clients, and to them, Tucker has a few words of advice.What tends to happen on the smaller business side is that companies will buy their property and GL coverage as a package, and may or may not take up TRIA as a part of that. But they dont really appreciate that $5 million trigger, he said. You really need to put the coverage into silos, a bit.
The latest staff member at Worldwide Facilities Dallas office is a longtime insurance veteran and active player in the cyber security and data risk space and hes eager to bring that to the table as he gets ready to lead the offices efforts to build their executive/professional lines.Its a very unique time in the industry, with a very select number of people who understand cyber risk, Matt Donovan told Insurance Business America. Theres a very underserved portion of the market.Like many in the technology space, computers and all things digital interested Donovan from a young age. He also had a standing interest in insurance his father was an underwriter so when he graduated from the University of Georgia, he did so with a degree in risk management and insurance.Donovan was able to marry those two passions almost immediately.Coming out of school, I started at ACE Westchester, the wholesale arm of ACE USA, and wrote all lines of E&O with a specialty niche in cyber, he said. Ive definitely always had an interest in technology, and its always been something Ive worked with and been good at.His expertise quickly led him to the front of the industry pack, and in 2010, he joined Hiscox USA to start technology and privacy lines in the Southeast region. Just two years later, he was appointed National Underwriting and Global Practice head for Technology and Privacy, eventually helping to lead the brand across the world as Vice President and Global Practice Leader for Cyber and Data Risks for the Hiscox Group.I was really helping various regions across the EU get their cyber products off the ground, learning from successes and failures weve had in the US, Donovan said. Its very interesting looking at threats on a global basis rather than through a strictly US line of thought their market is much further behind ours, and it was unique to be able to influence how coverage was sold and how things moved forward there. It completely changed my thought process.One particular standout factor was the different legal environment in the EU. While data privacy and breach notification laws are cropping up across the US, Donovan says the European market does not yet have such a developed system. Instead, drivers of concern relate more to business interruption issues.Tailoring products to meet those needs and influencing the development of cyber on a global basis has been the most proud moment in Donovans career, he said so far.Two colleagues led Donovan to Worldwide Facilities, where says hes excited to help grow a historically West Coast-focused business in the Southeast, and into a worldwide presence.After building a book from scratch at Hiscox, the opportunity to build again was attractive to me, and the specialized team was really a unique opportunity, he said.All the while, Donovan is staying ahead of the curve in the cyber landscape, scoping out both hackers and competitors.It takes a whole lot of reading, Donovan said. Tons of reading, tons of talking to people in the industry and tons of keeping your ear to the tracks to identify upcoming concerns and make sure we customize and cater coverage to be one step ahead of whats happening out there.
PERC Treasurer Barry Clairmont presented some 31 pages of documents supporting PERC's agreement with Westwood for land leases.
PERC Presents 31-Page Document Supporting Westwood Lease Agreements
PITTSFIELD, Mass. Barry Clairmont on Monday dropped the mic, so to speak, ending uncertainty on the airport business park.
Clairmont essentially put a halt to an ongoing debate over land leases at the Westwood Business Park on Monday night when he delivered a 31-page packet of documents outlining the history and supporting the agreements as they exist to the Airport Study Group.
The study group was formed by Mayor Linda Tyer early this year and the land leases at Westwood have been an ongoing topic at every meeting since February. The entire matter centers on just $20,000 seven companies pay the city for the land on which their buildings sit.
The land leases are divvied up between the Airport Commission and the Pittsfield Economic Revitalization Corp. at an 85/15 percent split. The agreement was made in the mid-1980s and some members of the study group argued that a higher percentage of that funding should go to the Airport Commission while others support the existing agreement. There was also a concern that the city was not in compliance with federal regulations.
Clairmont is the treasurer of PERC and detailed all of the agreements that led to conclusions no portion of the 85 percent going to PERC can go to the airport, all agencies involved have approved the agreements, and the leases can't be changed for another 50 or so years.
The story starts in November 1983 when the city purchased five acres of land abutting the airport for $15,425, Clairmont said. On April 19, 1984, the minutes from an Airport Commission meeting show approvals to declare 25 acres of airport available for lease according to the plan presented by the Office of Economic Development for the "Barker Road Business Park." The Airport Commission also approved the plans, creating the business park.
In September of 1984, a letter from the Airport Commission shows that PERC was identified as the "sole and exclusive" developer of the park. A special piece of state legislation approved in November allowed for 40-year leases at the park.
Clairmont did find a letter dated December 1985 from the Massachusetts Aeronautics Commission (now the Aeronautics Division of the Transportation Department) warning airports not to develop or sell land with out its approval. However, Clairmont said that was sent to all airports and wasn't specifically for Pittsfield.
"They noticed some issues with airports selling or developing land without the commission's approval," he said.
On Feb. 23, 1986, the Airport Commission held a special meeting and approved the first lease with Leonard F. Gigliotti. That was one of two leases for $1 approved with the intention of spurring interest and development of the park.
Clairmont also found a March 13 letter from the city's Office of Economic Development outlining the restrictions on the properties including that no building be constructed to a total height greater than allowed by the Federal Aviation Administration or the state Aeronautics Commission, that no business could cause radio or electrical signals or frequencies that would interfere with air travel and that all lighting be shielded to avoid interference with the airport operations. Finally, the letter says all leases need to be approved by the FAA and Massachusetts Aeronautics Commission.
That July, state commission weighed in on the process calling on the city to "establish the value of fair market lease payments," an escalator clause tied to the consumer price index, that "fair market revenue must be returned to the Airport Commission's budget in some manner" and that money must be used for airport operations.
"They are basically laying down the ground rules," Clairmont said.
According to a memo between then Mayor Charles Smith and the Airport Commission in August 1986, that fair value was determined. Gigliotti Electric and Pittsfield News had both entered agreements for $1 but the agreement between the two city entities called for $1,000 lease per acre escalating every year.
"This is just an intercity memo but it lays out what went on in that particular meeting." Clairmont said.
On Sept. 3, 1986, the Massachusetts Aeronautics Commission wrote the city, "the portion of the fair-market lease value paid to the airport commission should be based on the ratio of the investment put up by the airport commissions to the total investment put up by the city and the airport"
Six days later the FAA approved the leases for Gigliotti and Pittsfield News.
The land was appraised twice at more than $90,000. Including the value of the 30 acres of land and the city's $400,000 and more to build the park out, the entire project was $504,189.
The city used federal Housing and Urban Development funds, via the Community Development Block Grant program, to build out the park. The value of the land at $90,000 was 17 percent of the entire project.
"This is laying out that initial split which the MAC and the FAA seemed to approve," Clairmont said.
In February 1987, the FAA wrote back, "we have also reviewed the appraisals and calculations you sent us regarding fair market values, return to the airport, etc. They are also acceptable."
The study group had been unsure of the FAA's opinion on the matter and that led to quite a debate this year in wondering if the airport was out of compliance with regulations. That February letter seems to be the first document showing the FAA did sign off on the agreements.
However, it also required additional leases to be approved individually and those separate documents haven't been found. Nonetheless, the letter Clairmont found shows that the FAA was aware of the split between the city and the airport.
In March 1987, the Massachusetts Aeronautics Commission gave its approval of the project to that time.
Clairmont also pulled the federal government's definition of "program income" from the Community Development Block Grant that reads "when income is generated by an activity that is only partially assisted with CDBG funds, the income shall be prorated to reflect the percent of CDBG funds used."
Later it was determined that the $90,000 value for the land included the $15,000 the city spent to acquire the five acres to add onto the park. Accordingly, the percent going to the Airport Commission was dropped to 15 percent.
"It drops the airport's number from $90,000 to $75,000," Clairmont said. "If anything, the airport has been getting slightly more than it should be."
What does it all mean? It means that the city and the airport agreed to split the revenue generated by an 85/15 split, and the federal funding agencies both approved. That eliminates the study group's fears that the city has been operating out of compliance to grant assurances. Airport officials say all money generated from the airport needs to go back to aeronautical use and sending 85 percent of it to PERC wouldn't be compliant.
PERC developed the park and has been handling the collections of rent. Last year it received $17,000 from the leases that is put back into programming. PERC was created for the business park so that the income generated stays locally. HUD requires that income generated go toward CDBG eligible projects, and PERC qualifies.
"The federal government owns the revenue stream," City Solicitor Richard Dohoney said. "It was a clever way in keeping HUD money local."
Dohoney said if the entire park was sold, the revenues from the sale would have to go to HUD. Should PERC dissolve, the lease money would go back to HUD.
In order to raise revenues through the land leases for the airport, the entire leases would have to rise so that the 15 percent is of a larger pie. But, Clairmont found some of the leases that show not only are they for 40 years which will start to expire in another decade but there is also an option for the tenant to extend for another 40 years.
"The few that I found which were actual leases, the tenant has the sole option to renew," Clairmont said.
PERC President Jay Anderson added, "there is no ability for us to go back and re-negotiate that lease."
Councilor at Large Melissa Mazzeo, however, still questions the interpenetration of many of the documents including the lease extensions. Mazzeo said she'd think the renewal would be the city's and not the tenants'. She also questioned the July 1986 document from the Massachusetts Aeronautics Commission saying the money needs to be used for airport operations. She questioned whether the Airport Commission at the time knew that most of the money would go to another agency.
Ward 4 Councilor Christopher Connell said the $400,000 or so put in through CDBG funds have been repaid by now, so the money should go to the airport instead.
But Dohoney said it wasn't a loan while Clairmont turned the statement around, saying the airport has been paid off.
"I could make the argument that the airport has been repaid," Clairmont said. "If you are trying to make an argument that someone has been repaid, I would argue that the airport has been repaid for its value."
Anderson added that PERC has been doing all of the billing and incurring the legal fees associated with changes to the leases while the Airport Commission has been hands-off, just receiving $3,000 a year for its contribution of 25 acres.
"If it wasn't for the city and PERC developing it then it would still be 25 acres generating no revenue for the airport," Anderson said. "The investment was completely made by the city of Pittsfield and PERC."
While Mazzeo and Connell still raised questions, overall the committee seemed to be done with the topic. The land leases have dominated every meeting of the group with a split among the members on where the money should be going, how much, the legality, etc. The lack of 30-year-old documents had kept the discussion from moving forward.
"I think we are beating a dead horse. People made deals, they were approved, there was a rational, it is consistent with what all of us know ... There is nothing here for this group to keep chasing." study group member Jeff Cook said. "To go back now and chase all this stuff, I don't think we are going to lead anything."
Westwood History by iBerkshires.com on Scribd
We work towards an equitable,
gender-just, self-reliant and
sustainable fisheries,
particularly in the small-scale,
artisanal sector
We work towards an equitable,
gender-just, self-reliant and
sustainable fisheries,
particularly in the small-scale,
artisanal sector
We work towards an equitable,
gender-just, self-reliant and
sustainable fisheries,
particularly in the small-scale,
artisanal sector
We work towards an equitable,
gender-just, self-reliant and
sustainable fisheries,
particularly in the small-scale,
artisanal sector
No company has submitted a bid to participate in a tender to sell 99.567% of shares in public joint-stock company Odesa Port-Side Plant, the press service of the State Property Fund (SPF) said late on Monday.
"Today, on July 18, 2016, the term for filing bids to participate in a tender to sell Odesa Port-Side Plant expired. As of 18:00 no bid was submitted. Due to the absence of the bids the fund has to declare a failure of the tender due to the absence of demand," the fund said.
The press service said that since the moment of the publication of the announcement to sell the plant potential investors had showed their interest. They signed relevant confidential agreements. After studying a package of documents and the situation in Ukraine and around the plant they said that they are not ready to take part in the tender. They gave the main reasons of their decision.
The debt to Group DF, lawsuits with Nortima, a restriction to repatriate dividends, the absence of tax benefits and preferences for investors, the price set too high in the light of the above-mentioned problems at the plant and general political and economic risks of the country caused many questions and doubts with investors.
"All risks about the plant and Ukraine have their price, and if we cannot settle some of the problems or risks, they should be taken into account and reflected in the conditions and the sale and purchase agreement. I think that this should be done before the repeated tender jointly with a working group for privatization and involving the group of advisors who prepared the plant for privatization," SPF Head Ihor Bilous said.
He said that the proposals will be presented to the prime minister and Ukraine's Cabinet of Ministers for consideration.
Coal stocks at Ukraine's TPPs 34.5% down in June
Coal stocks in the warehouses of thermal power plants (TPP) of Ukraine in June 2016 decreased by 34.5% and as of July 1, 2016 stood at 1.6 million tonnes, the Ministry of Energy and Coal Industry has told Interfax-Ukraine.
In particular, gas coal and long-flame coal stocks amounted to 1.091 million tonnes, while anthracite coal stocks amounted to 508,200 tonnes.
Fuel oil stocks at TPPs in June fell by 2.2%, to 112,400 tonnes.
Coal stocks at TPPs as of July 1, 2016 were 2.8% higher than on July 1, 2015, fuel oil stocks were 15.2% more.
Consumption of natural gas by power plants in June 2016 amounted to 93.9 million cubic meters against 98.2 million cubic meters in May this year and 119.3 million cubic meters in June 2015.
In January-June 2016 TPPs and combined heat and power plants were supplied 504,500 tonnes of imported coal, in particular South Africa delivered 287,000 tonnes of coal, Russia 217,500 tonnes. In June power plants received 24,100 tonnes of coal imported from Russia.
The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) on July 18 decided to withdraw the banking license and liquidate Fidobank, reads a posting on the NBU's website.
Fidobank was classified as insolvent on May 20, 2016. As a result of outflow of funds the bank has got problems with fulfillment of obligations to customers. As of May 20, 2016 the total amount of Fidobank's outstanding customer operations exceeded UAH 500 million (9% of its liabilities).
As reported, temporary administration was introduced in the bank for one month from May 20 to June 19, 2016.
In January 2016, the bank owner and chairman Oleksandr Adarych increased the bank regulatory capital by UAH 90 million under the conditions of a subordinated debt. At the same time, he acted as an individual investor.
Fidobank was established in 1991.
Fidobank ranked 22nd among 123 operating banks in the country on October 1, 2015 by total assets (UAH 7.616 billion), according to the NBU.
Imperial Valley News Center
Dr. Jill Biden Travels to Blantyre and Lilongwe, Malawi to Highlight Girls' Education, Women's Empowerment, and Food Security
Washington, DC - Dr. Jill Biden has arrived in Blantyre, Malawi as part of her three-country visit to Africa to engage government and civil society partners on issues related to economic empowerment and educational opportunities for women and girls, and food security.
On Monday evening, Dr. Biden will host a reception for humanitarian aid workers, civil society representatives, and staff from the American embassy. This event is pooled press.
On Tuesday, Dr. Biden will travel to Manchinjiri to visit a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Food for Peace program being implemented by Catholic Relief Services, where she will meet with local families, community leaders, government officials and representatives from Catholic Relief Services and Save the Children to learn more about how the Food for Peace program is helping to address the challenges posed by the severe drought in Malawi caused by El Nino. The Food for Peace program provides critical food assistance to members of the community in exchange for their work on community watershed management projects that help build resilience to the negative effects of the ongoing drought. This event is open press.
Afterwards, Dr. Biden will travel to Msamba Primary School in Zomba, Malawi, to visit the school which is assisted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's McGovern/Dole Food for Education program implemented by the United Nations World Food Program (WFP). She will be joined by the WFP Executive Director, Ambassador Etharin Cousin and meet with local students, teachers, and community leaders. The school is also a USAID-supported Early Grade Reading (EGRA) pilot school. Dr. Biden will visit one of the classrooms to learn more about an early grade reading lesson and to see the effect of school feeding and education quality programs on student learning. This event is open press.
In the afternoon, Dr. Biden will visit Mtubwi Primary School in the rural Machinga district to see USAID's Girls' Empowerment Through Education and Health Activity (ASPIRE). Dr. Biden will have an opportunity to hear from students, mothers' groups who serve as mentors to girls, and teachers about the integrated support, teacher training, and community after-school programs working to bring girls who have dropped out of school back to the classrooms, while making schools safe places for girls to learn and succeed. This event is open press.
On Wednesday morning, Dr. Biden will travel to Lilongwe, Malawi.
Upon arrival, Dr. Biden will visit the Chigonthi Farmers' Cooperative in Mbangombe, where a USAID Food for Peace Program, administered by WFP, buys maize from local farmers. Dr. Biden will meet with leaders of the farmer's cooperative and learn more about how local farmers produce and sell their maize to WFP, both as a means of economic empowerment and to provide food for distribution in drought-stricken areas of the country. This event is pooled press.
Dr. Biden will then visit State House in Lilongwe to meet with Malawi's First Lady, Madame Gertrude Mutharika. The two will discuss their countries' shared commitment to empowering women and girls, and fighting food insecurity. This event is pooled press.
Afterwards, Dr. Biden will depart Lilongwe, Malawi en route to Niamey, Niger.
FTC Approves Final Order Preserving Competition among Suppliers of Industrial Gases
Washington, DC - Following a public comment period, the Federal Trade Commission has approved a final order settling charges that the proposed $13.4 billion merger of American Air Liquide Holdings, Inc. and Airgas, Inc. would likely be anticompetitive.
Under the terms of the order, first announced in May 2016, the companies are required to
divest assets used to produce and supply seven types of industrial gas: bulk oxygen, bulk nitrogen, bulk argon, bulk nitrous oxide, bulk liquid carbon dioxide, dry ice, and packaged welding gases sold in retail stores. The FTC is currently accepting public comments on an application by American Air Liquide Holdings to divest these assets to Matheson Tri-Gas, Inc., a Delaware-based subsidiary of Taiyo Nippon Snso Corporation of Japan.
The Commission vote approving the final order was 3-0. (FTC File No. 161 0045; the staff contact is Christine Tasso, Bureau of Competition, 202-326-2232)
If the situation in the country's east continues to deteriorate, the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) of Ukraine may consider the imposition of martial law, NSDC Secretary Oleksandr Turchynov has said.
"If these dangerous trends continue in Ukraine, we will take all necessary measures to protect the integrity of our country and safety of its citizens up to including into the agenda of the NSDC of the issue of the introduction of martial law," the NSDC's press service quoted Turchynov as saying on Tuesday.
Interagency Team Travels to Central Asian Capitals for Bilateral Consultations
Washington, DC - The group will discuss the enduring U.S. commitment to the region as well as recent developments in Afghanistan with government officials in each of the capitals. Principal Deputy Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Laurel Miller will lead the interagency team to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan for bilateral consultations on Afghanistan, July 18-22.
Originating at the request of the governments of our Central Asian partners, these consultations have occurred annually for the past six years. Discussions will cover such topics as U.S-Afghanistan bilateral relations, recent political and economic developments in Afghanistan, security, and international assistance efforts.
The United States looks forward to collaborating with its Central Asian partners to address regional challenges and threats, and to continue our close partnership on security and stability.
Chiefs of US and Chinese Navies Agree on Need for Cooperation
Beijing, China - Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Adm. John Richardson met with People's Liberation Army (Navy) (PLA(N)) Commander Adm. Wu Shengli during professional and social events held July 18 at navy headquarters in Beijing.
The goal of the engagement was to improve mutual understanding and encourage professional interaction between the two navies.
"I appreciate the opportunity to visit China and to meet with Adm. Wu in person-there is no substitute for these types of face-to-face meetings," said Richardson. "My goal is to forge a relationship built on frankness and cooperation. Given the responsibilities that our navies have, we must work together and speak candidly-when we agree as well as when we have differing opinions."
"I am very happy to receive you here today," said Wu. "We attach great importance to your visit. Your visit to China, at our invitation, shows how both sides put great priority on maritime issues."
The two leaders had frank and substantive conversations on the importance of operating safely, in accordance with international law; future opportunities for the two navies to engage; and the South China Sea.
The visit, which has been in works for months, was Richardson's first visit to China as the chief of naval operations and his first in-person meeting with Wu. Over the last year, the two admirals have held three discussions via video teleconference.
CNO will travel next to Qingdao, home of the Chinese North Sea Fleet, where he is scheduled to visit the Chinese Navy's submarine academy and tour the aircraft carrier Liaoning (CV-16).
Deputy Secretary Blinken's Travel to the Maghreb
Washington, DC - Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, July 20-26, where he will meet with both government officials and civil society.
July 20-21, Deputy Secretary Blinken will be in Morocco to discuss the countrys environmental leadership role with government officials as Morocco prepares to host the 22nd Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC COP 22). He will also meet with university students, entrepreneurs, and NGOs active in the fight against violent extremism.
July 22-23, Deputy Secretary Blinken will travel to Tunisia to affirm with government officials the growing strategic partnership between our countries. He will also meet with civil society leaders and Tunisian youth to discuss their important role in ensuring citizen engagement in political processes.
July 24-26, Deputy Secretary Blinken will be in Algeria to meet with a range of government officials to review our countries strong cooperation, particularly on counterterrorism, and discuss avenues to enhance bilateral trade and investment. He will also visit the new American School in Algiers and meet with local business leaders and entrepreneurs interested in youth employment opportunities.
In all of his discussions, the Deputy Secretary seeks to strengthen our ties with the people of this important region through our trade relationship, cultural exchange, and government-to-government-relations.
This Isnt Our Last Love Letter
Dear Don Don,
Way back in 92
I walked into the room and knew
Never felt this way before
I shook your hand while gazing into your eyes
And the feeling grew
As I took a seat I knew
A love that would have my heart
Forever
I knew
Way back in 92
They say love at first sight doesnt always last or isnt true
We were the exception to that rule
Our love had no where to hide
A spark set fire
As if this is how the universe started
I never doubted our love or what we could do
Together we grew
Forming a bond everlasting
That became our glue
My euphoria was YOU
Im eternally grateful for the love and life we shared
For how fortunate we were :
to have and to hold
through sickness and in health
Til death do us part
Until we are together again
This isnt our last love letter
I love you with all my heart and soul
Yours forever,
Deirdre (Mrs. Hank Snow)
Im fortunate to have fallen in love with, marry and make a life with the sharpest, coolest, funniest, most rare, bad ass, tender loving, loyal man on the planet, my husband Don Imus.
A True American Hero
I dont know why it has been so hard for me to write about my dear friend Don Imus.
I certainly know what he meant to me, my family, my charity, my hospital and the millions of fans that listened and loved him for so many years.
I keep reading all the beautiful condolences that people are writing about how much a part of their lives were effected by listening to him over the years.
But what most people dont talk enough about is what he did for all of us.
In every sense of the word, he was an American Hero. His work with children with so many different illnesses and his dedication to their future was unmatched by anyone I have ever known or heard about.
Besides raising over $100,000,000 for so many causes, he took care of young people for over 20 years in a state where he could not breathe. Along with his incredible wife Deirdre, he created a world where children were not defined by their disease. That was a miracle! He was a miracle.
I will miss him ever day for the rest of my life.
I was blessed to be a part of his and Deirdes life.
No one will ever do what he did.
I love you Don Imus - A TRUE AMERICAN HERO
David Jurist
IMUS IN THE MORNING
FIRST DAY BACK!
Zimbabwe Man Who Started 'Pak Bean' Rivalry Had This to Say After Pakistan's Defeat
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Of the thousands of artists I have interviewed over the years, few have been as demonstrably brave as Atena Farghadani.
Farghadani was already an experienced activist in her 20s when she drew a cartoon mocking Iran's parliament to protest her native nation's anti-birth control policies. She was arrested by the Revolutionary Guard, a branch of Irans armed forces, in the summer of 2014 her freedom taken from her.
When Farghadani was kept in jail for most of the rest of that year, she still would not be refused her art, as she flattened the disposable cups in her cell as makeshift canvas until her materials were taken from her.
Early in 2015, a freed Farghadani spoke out about prisoner conditions, and was arrested again. By June, the 29-year-old woman was sentenced to nearly 13 years in prison her immediate hope for even a shred of justice taken from her.
The cartoon that led to the artists first arrest in 2014 depicts the Iranian government as animals
Soon, Farghadani shook hands with her male attorney, Mohammad Moghimi, who was likewise jailed for a time as a result. In response, Farghadani's captors subjected her to a virginity test apparently in an unsuccessful attempt to take her dignity, too.
Two months ago, Farghadani was finally freed.
Today, Farghadani vows to continue to make political art from within Iran, where her voice may have the greatest effect.
Recommended Read more Female cartoonist is finally free
This is a Q&A with the artist, in her first interview with the Western press since winning her release. The interview was conducted via email through Nikahang Kowsar, the Iranian-born board member of the Washington-based Cartoonists Rights Network International, who himself was jailed in Iran in 2000 for his art.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Michael Cavna: First off, Ms Farghadani, let me just say, now that the opportunity finally provides: congratulations on your freedom. We heard reports about the difficult conditions while you were imprisoned. How are you feeling, and doing? And how does one even recover from a mental and physical ordeal such as yours?
Atena Farghadani: I appreciate all the efforts you and your colleagues have made so far. My feelings at the moment are not very pleasant, because it's like I'm stuck in a limbo. Obviously, the mental weariness of imprisonment is more serious than the physical problems caused by it. At the moment, since I've arrived at the certainty that there is miracle lying in the art of drawing and painting, I'm more determined to continue doing it than ever.
MC: You, of course, have become an inspiration to so many around the world, Atena a beacon of creative and political resistance. While you were in prison in Evin and elsewhere how aware were of you of the degree to which the outside world knew and was following your story? Was Mr Moghimi able to provide you with news in that regard during your case?
AF: When I was in prison, I wasn't aware of outside events and the news about me, especially in 2015, when I was on a hunger strike in the gruesome Gharchak prison. At that point, I was absolutely hopeless and thought I would die there, without my voice ever being heard. But I kept going with the strike, constantly thinking that even if I die, I have a clear conscience for I've died for my beliefs and goals. After my appeal to be transferred to Evin prison was approved and I ended my hunger strike, my attorney, Mr Moghimi, gave me all news in two very short visits, boosting my morale and giving me hope.
MC: For the Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian who was in an Iranian prison for more than a year, one aspect of the ordeal of being there, for him, was not knowing one's fate feeling as though you are in the legal hands of a system that might not practice justice as you, the prisoner, might understand it, and all the uncertainty. Could you talk about what was hardest for you about your long detentions and imprisonment and whether you thought you might actually spend more than 13 years behind bars for your outspokenness and artwork?
AF: When I heard my sentence of 12 years and nine months' imprisonment, I thought it was unbelievable and very unjust. Since I was 29 at the time, I calculated that I'd have to be in prison till I'm 42. At first, I had a hard time accepting the sentence, but then I thought I could use this time, as much as possible, to draw and have an opportunity to put an exhibition of my works after my release. I considered prison my home for the next 13 years. My family could not accept this new attitude of mine towards prison and my beliefs and at times they were frightened by it and wept. At these times, I had no choice but to make faces for them from behind the glasses in the visitation cabin to make them laugh. These were the hardest and most bitter days I had during my incarceration.
Artists responded to Farghadanis imprisonment last year with protest cartoons using the hashtag Draw4Atena (Shahrokh Heidari/Cartoon Movement)
MC: Why do you think you were ultimately awarded your freedom? What swayed the legal system?
AF: As the results of the efforts made by my family and my attorney, and pressures from the international community and human rights organisations, my sentence was reduced from 12 years and nine months to 18 months and a three-year suspended sentence for insulting the supreme leader of Iran. I am grateful to all those whom I don't know and to whom I owe my freedom.
MC: Is there anything about your case (including the reported virginity test after shaking your male attorney's hand) that we should know about?
AF: Yes, that's ... caused lots of confusion: considering the fact that my family had refuted that I was tested for virginity and pregnancy because of shaking hands with my lawyer, people wanted to know the truth. The truth is that my family was in denial at the time because of the dominant traditions and the Iranian culture and fear for more pressure from the judiciary on me. But the tests were actually made, which led to my three-day dry hunger strike in objection. The Islamic Republic of Iran later confirmed this event. It is noteworthy that both my attorney and I were exonerated from the adultery accusations and I owe this to the judge of this specific case, who issued our exoneration verdict independently and neutrally in spite of the sensitivity of the case and security pressures.
MC: What art are you making now and will your art remain political, or might you steer your art and activism in a different direction?
AF: Right now, I'm painting and making a collection of artwork with political and social contents, and I intend to have an exhibition within a year, but I'm afraid I can't hold this exhibition in Iran, and thus I'm even thinking of having a street gallery, though it wouldn't be without consequences. I believe that criticism serves art. So, I have decided to use my art to challenge social issues as I have done before, like the cartoon I drew after I was released as an objection to the dean of Al-Zahra University, who expelled me and many other students.
MC: Do you feel safe now in Iran, and can you imagine coming to visit America?
AF: Of course, I could be more successful in developed countries, but when I witness the problems Iranians are dealing with, such as economic and cultural poverty and various limitations, I cannot leave them alone to live in another country in a better situation, despite all the constraints and issues I would possibly face. Many Iranians, though, have had to leave their homeland because of these constraints and have been active outside their country to improve human rights in Iran and are successful, too. But I don't see it in me to be able to leave my country because of my emotional attachments, which is perhaps a weakness of mine, but as long as I live, I will stay here, even if I have to go to prison again.
MC: Are you comfortable with being a symbol for artistic resistance and political freedom of expression?
AF: I don't consider myself a symbol. I simply acted on my thought, beliefs and principles, and I think all people have an individual and social task to fulfil.
MC: Is there something I didn't ask that you would especially like to tell readers?
AF: Yes, one of the things that has had (a) destructive impact on me after my release was the incarceration in the gruesome Gharchak prison, which is for prisoners with all sorts of non-security crimes. What bothered me the most was to see inmates many of whom were victims of the economic and cultural poverty in the Iranian system who were not treated like human beings; their most basic rights were violated. I consider Gharchak prison as a graveyard of time ... where time dies. I sometimes see those inmates in my nightmares. Once, I saw one of them collecting and braiding my fallen hair.
I see myself as a reflection of other people, and to respond to this question of yours, I would like to reflect the wishes of other women imprisoned in Gharchak most of them longed for cool drinking water, instead of the salty lukewarm water they had to drink from the tap. There were only four showers in each chamber for 189 inmates, with the same salty water for only an hour a day, so many of them missed a hot shower. Many of them (condemned to) death sentences wished to plant something that wouldn't wither from the salty water and (to) see that plant to leave a living mark before departing from this life.
The Washington Post
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Disney film Mulan is mischievous liberal propaganda aimed at encouraging women into combat, Donald Trumps new running mate Mike Pence once claimed.
The Indiana governor and former radio show host wrote a revealing 1999 op-ed that BuzzFeed has uncovered, in which he argued that the animated movie about a young Chinese woman who disguises herself as a man to go to war proves what a bad idea it is to employ women in the military.
Despite her delicate features and voice, Disney expects us to believe that Mulans ingenuity and courage were enough to carry her to military success on an equal basis with her cloddish cohorts, Pence wrote on The Mike Pence Show website.
Obviously, this is Walt Disneys attempt to add childhood expectation to the cultural debate over the role of women in the military. I suspect that some mischievous liberal at Disney assumes that Mulans story will cause a quiet change in the next generations attitude about women in combat and they just might be right.
Pence went on to reference how often we think of Bambi whenever the subject of deer hunting enters the mainstream media debate, before insisting that Mulans romance with her superior officer is an example of how dangerously interesting mixing the genders in the army could be.
[Filmmakers] likely added it because it added realism with which the viewer could identify with the characters, he wrote. You see, many young men find many young women to be attractive sexually. Many young women find many young men to be attractive sexually. Put them together, in close quarters, for long periods of time, and things will get interesting. Just like they eventually did for young Mulan. Moral of story: women in military, bad idea.
US Defence Secretary Ash Carter announced last December that all combat roles would be opened to both genders starting from 2016.
Mike Pence Confident of Victory As Trump VP Running Mate
Trump announced Pence as his running mate on Twitter last Friday (the first time a potential vice president has been announced through social media) and confirmed his decision at a press conference.
Though Pence stated he couldnt be more honoured to have been given the opportunity to run for vice president, an interview broadcast on CBS highlighted personal and political differences between himself and Trump, who have only known each other few months.
Over to Trump for his take on Mulan...
12:00 19.07.2016 Interfax-Ukraine to host press conference 'Social Policy Ministry's Verification of IDPs from Donbas and Crimea: Promises and Reality'
1 min read
On Tuesday, July 19, at 12.30, the Interfax-Ukraine News Agency's press center will host a press conference entitled "Social Policy Ministry's Verification of IDPs from Donbas and Crimea: Promises and Reality." The participants will include human rights activist, coordinator of the Zemliaky (Compatriots) public movement Gennadiy Borisichev; Chairman of NGO Social Youth Andriy Tymoshenko; representative of the Compatriots movement Denys Vergasov; and IDP, retiree who has faced difficulties due to the Social Policy Ministry's new policies Larysa Konokh. Representatives of the Social Policy Ministry for affairs of the occupied territories and internally displaced persons are expected to attend the event (8/5a Reitarska Street). Admission requires press accreditation. For more details, please call: +38050 755 5575.
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The Star Wars Celebration led to numerous big reveals about the upcoming films, not least of all confirming who will play the young Han Solo, re-introducing General Admiral Thrawn, and giving attendees their first glimpse of Darth Vader in Rogue One.
Unfortunately, for those of us at home, we were unable to see the Sith apprentice in action; instead, we were gifted with a behind the scenes look at the upcoming spin-off.
From the three minute clip (below), numerous surprising revelations came about, some more obvious than others.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Featurette - Celebration Sizzle
However, one of those only just picked up on by eagle-eyed fans is the apparent appearance of Bail Organa, General Leias adopted father.
In episodes two and three, Jimmy Smits portrayed the Senator, and from the behind the scenes footage, it looks very much like hes back for the spin-off, set between episodes three and four.
Meanwhile, a cast member from Rogue One seemingly gave away a massive spoiler from the film.
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Read our round-up of the five biggest things that happened at Celebration as well as our interview with host Warwick Davis.
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Since the Star Wars Celebration over the weekend, numerous tidbits of information about the future of the now-Disney franchise have hit the internet.
However, news about the intergalactic franchise hasn't just come from the convention; while promoting the upcoming Star Trek film, Force Awakens director JJ Abrams revealed the Anthology film he would love to see.
For those unaware, Disney is set to release numerous Star Wars spin-offs, called anthology films, the first of which is titled Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Following Episode VIII, the next anthology film will be about Han Solos younger years, the lead actor of which has just been announced.
So, what spin-off would Abrams like to see? I gotta say Kathy Kennedy, whos running it all, she seems to be pushing all the right buttons, he told Collider. There isnt something that Id love to seeI guess the one thing I would say is theres a Knights of Ren story that I think would be pretty cool to tell.
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During The Force Awakens, the audience were briefly introduced to the Knights of Ren, of whom lead villain Kylo Ren was a member. Very little is known about the group except they turned on the Jedi and killed most of Luke Skywalkers academy.
Perhaps Abrams will be back in the Star Wars Universe to make a Knights of Ren film? We can only hope.
Meanwhile, Rogue One is seemingly bringing back a familiar face from the prequels.
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Grace Jones will replace MIA as the headliner of the inaugural Afropunk London.
Last week, organizers dropped MIA from the bill after her comments on the Black Lives Matter movement. Jones joins musicians including SZA, Laura Mvula, Benjamin Booker, Kwabs and more.
We are excited and honored to do our first Afropunk Festival in London and want to do it right, the organizers wrote in a statement last week. After discussing the situation with the artist and the community, a decision was agreed upon by all involved that MIA will no longer headline Afropunk London.
MIA received criticism after her comments on Black Lives Matter by saying that black artists on the world stage spend too much time focusing on black issues.
Its interesting that in America the problem youre allowed to talk about is Black Lives Matter, MIA told The Evening Standard in April. Its not a new thing to me its what Lauryn Hill was saying in the 1990s, or Public Enemy in the 1980s. Is Beyonce or Kendrick Lamar going to say Muslim Lives Matter? Or Syrian Lives Matter? Or this kid in Pakistan matters? Thats a more interesting question.
The music festival takes place on September 24 at Alexandra Palace.
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Last month, after the final Republican primary, Donald Trump walked on stage for his victory speech to the song We Are The Champions by Queen.
Fans were quick to criticise the band for allowing their music to be used by the controversial Presidential nominee, something guitarist Brian May was quick to address.
"This is not an official Queen statement, but I can confirm that permission to use the track was neither sought nor given, he wrote in his online blog.
We are taking advice on what steps we can take to ensure this use does not continue. Regardless of our views on Mr. Trump's platform, it has always been against our policy to allow Queen music to be used as a political campaigning tool.
Donald Trump's most controversial quotes Show all 14 1 /14 Donald Trump's most controversial quotes Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On Isis: "Some of the candidates, they went in and didnt know the air conditioner didnt work and sweated like dogs, and they didnt know the room was too big because they didnt have anybody there. How are they going to beat ISIS?" Getty Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On immigration: "I will build a great wall and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me and Ill build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words." Reuters Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On Free Trade: "Free trade is terrible. Free trade can be wonderful if you have smart people. But we have stupid people." PAUL J. RICHARDS | AFP | Getty Images Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On Mexicans: "When Mexico sends its people, theyre not sending their best. Theyre sending people that have lots of problems. Theyre bringing drugs. Theyre bringing crime. Theyre rapists." Getty Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On China: "I just sold an apartment for $15 million to somebody from China. Am I supposed to dislike them?... I love China. The biggest bank in the world is from China. You know where their United States headquarters is located? In this building, in Trump Tower." Getty Images Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On work: "If you're interested in 'balancing' work and pleasure, stop trying to balance them. Instead make your work more pleasurable." AP Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On success: "What separates the winners from the losers is how a person reacts to each new twist of fate." Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On life: "Everything in life is luck." AFP Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On ambition: "You have to think anyway, so why not think big?" Getty Images Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On his opponents: "Bush is totally in favour of Common Core. I don't see how he can possibly get the nomination. He's weak on immigration. He's in favour of Common Core. How the hell can you vote for this guy? You just can't do it." Reuters Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On Obamacare: "You have to be hit by a tractor, literally, a tractor, to use it, because the deductibles are so high. It's virtually useless. And remember the $5 billion web site?... I have so many web sites, I have them all over the place. I hire people, they do a web site. It costs me $3." Getty Images Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On Barack Obama: "Obama is going to be out playing golf. He might be on one of my courses. I would invite him. I have the best courses in the world. I have one right next to the White House." PA Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On himself: "Love him or hate him, Trump is a man who is certain about what he wants and sets out to get it, no holds barred. Women find his power almost as much of a turn-on as his money." Getty Images Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On America: "The American Dream is dead. But if I get elected president I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before and we will make America great again." GETTY
Despite the warning from May, Trump once again used Queens music at the Republican Convention in Cleveland. This time, however, the bands official Twitter account quickly issued a statement reading: An unauthorised use at the Republican Convention against our wishes - Queen.
At the convention, Trump used the song We Are The Champions, emerging from a cloud of blue smoke to the iconic track.
During the same event, Trumps wife, Slovakian model Melania Trump, gave a speech; she has since been accused of ripping off a similar one given by Michelle Obama in the run-up to Barak Obamas presidency.
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Global warming will cost the world economy more than 1.5 trillion a year in lost productivity by 2030 as it becomes too hot to work in many jobs, according to a major new report.
In just 14 years' time in India, where some jobs are already shared by two people to allow regular breaks from the heat, the bill will be 340bn a year.
China is predicted to experience similar losses, while other countries among the worst affected include Indonesia (188bn), Malaysia (188bn) and Thailand (113bn).
The figures were published in a research paper launched at a forum on how to reduce the risks of severe weather events held in Kuala Lumpur by the United Nations University and UN Development Programme.
Other papers highlighted the risk of increasingly heavy rain helping to spread diseases by expanding insect-breeding sites, driving rodents from their burrows and contaminating freshwater supplies; a decline in air quality caused by fires and dust storms; and more floods, mudslides, drought and high winds.
Dr Tord Kjellstrom, author of the paper on the effect of heat stress on the economy, told The Independent: The effect of heat on peoples daily lives and particular on their work has not been given enough attention.
If you are physically active in work, the hotter it is, the slower you work. Your body adapts to the heat and in doing that it protects you from the heat.
For individual countries, even within a short timespan, the losses due to the increasing heat can be in the many billions.
Dr Kjellstrom, of the Health and Environment International Trust in New Zealand, said the increases in temperature until about 2050 were already inevitable.
Ludovico Einaudi plays the piano as Arctic melts around him
However he said reducing emissions now could still have a significant impact after that date.
Beyond 2050, it will make a big difference if we take action now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally, Dr Kjellstrom said.
However he said some countries appeared to be planning simply to cope with the coming changes, rather than try to prevent them.
A lot of countries have focussed in the last few years on adaptation with the impression that we can find methods to adjust to the future changes in climate and protect people and protect our societies, he said.
I think personally that the need for mitigation, which means to reduce climate change, has not been given enough focus.
Its quite urgent because the action needs to be taken now, not 40 years from now.
Climate change protests around the world Show all 25 1 /25 Climate change protests around the world Climate change protests around the world People rally to promote climate protection in Rome, Italy Climate change protests around the world Hundreds of demonstrators gather in front of City Hall in Los Angeles, California EPA Climate change protests around the world People hold hands to form a human chain during a gathering called by ecologist organisations in Marseille, southern France, to protest against global warming a day ahead of the United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP21) held in Paris Climate change protests around the world Demonstrators clash with French riot police during protests on Place de la Republique, ahead of the COP21 World Climate Change Conference 2015 in Paris, France Climate change protests around the world Demonstrators clash with French riot police during a protest on Place de la Republique ahead of the COP21 World Climate Change Conference 2015 in Paris, France Climate change protests around the world A group of people perform during a rally to promote climate protection in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Climate change protests around the world A protester sits next to his sign that reads 'Monsanto the Devil Incorporated ' as he joined hundreds of demonstrators who gathered in front of City Hall in Los Angeles, California EPA Climate change protests around the world Environmentalists dance during a protest near the Place de la Republique after the cancellation of a planned climate march following shootings in the French capital, ahead of the World Climate Change Conference 2015 (COP21), in Paris, France Reuters Climate change protests around the world People protest next to characters dressed as wild animals during a march against climate change near the Monument to the Revolution, in Mexico City AP Climate change protests around the world Protesters carries a banner while they take part in a protest about climate change at New York City Hall steps in lower Manhattan, New York Reuters Climate change protests around the world People take part in a protest about climate change around New York City Hall at lower Manhattan, New York Reuters Climate change protests around the world People rally to promote climate protection in Piazza Castello, Turin, Italy Climate change protests around the world A woman holds a globe during a protest for the global climate day in Lugano, Switzerland Climate change protests around the world Yemenis hold banners as they participate in the Global March for Climate in the old city of Sanaia, Yemen Climate change protests around the world Protesters dressed as Santa Claus take part in a protest about climate change at New York City Hall steps in lower Manhattan, New York Reuters Climate change protests around the world People gather at the Legislative Palace in Montevideo, during the Global Climate March to demand action on climate change telling world leaders on the eve of a crunch UN summit that there is "no planet B". From Sydney to London, humid Rio to chilly New York, at least 683,000 hit the streets in 2,300 events across 175 countries at the weekend, co-organiser and campaign group Avaaz said, calling it the largest number of people to protest over climate change all at once Getty Images Climate change protests around the world Climate change protests around the world Demonstrators participate in the Global March for Climate in Athens, Greece Climate change protests around the world A man wearing a Bernie Sanders mask leads hundreds of demonstrators who marched near City Hall in Los Angeles, California EPA Climate change protests around the world Patricia Hauser joined hundreds of demonstrators who gathered in front of City Hall in Los Angeles, California Climate change protests around the world A woman holds a poster of a sick Earth as she joined hundreds of demonstrators who gathered in front of City Hall in Los Angeles, California EPA Climate change protests around the world Hundreds of demonstrators march around City Hall in Los Angeles, California EPA Climate change protests around the world A demonstrator holds cut-out of US Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders as she joined hundreds of demonstrators who gathered in front of City Hall in Los Angeles, California EPA Climate change protests around the world George Patten holds a sign that reads 'No Fracking Ever!' as he joined hundreds of demonstrators who gathered in front of City Hall in Los Angeles, California EPA Climate change protests around the world Gabrielle Sosa wears 'Rising Sea Levels' sign as she joined hundreds of demonstrators who gathered in front of City Hall in Los Angeles, California EPA
The Paris climate summit last year was hailed as a success with countries committing to keep the amount of warming as close to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels as possible. The world has already seen nearly 1C of warming.
However the effect of the actions promised by individual states could allow a rise of 3.1C by 2100.
Anthony Capon, director of the UN Universitys International Institute for Global Health, said he hoped the research presented at the forum would help improve understanding of the threat climate change poses to hard-won advances in human health worldwide.
"It is not clear yet whether considerations of health and sustainability will overrule the press of economic progress in coming decades, and ethical considerations surrounding the right to development are thorny indeed, he said.
Decisions made today will have a profound impact on health around the world for many decades to come.
In an introduction to the papers, published in a special edition of the Asia Pacific Journal of Public Health, Professor Jamal Hashim and Dr Jose Siri, both of the UN University, wrote that humanity was facing substantial health risks from the degradation of the natural life support systems which are critical for human survival.
But they added: It has become increasingly apparent that actions to mitigate environmental change have powerful co-benefits for health."
Professor Jamal said the Asia-Pacific region was already seeing more extreme weather events, as predicted by models of climate change.
It doesnt look like carbon emissions will reduce significantly in the near future too we may be talking about a further increase in global temperature, he said.
I think we will be seeing more and more of this [extreme storms]. How severe and how extreme is anybodys guess, but we have to be prepared.
However Professor Jamal added that there were some reasons for optimism.
I think theres less argument now about whether there actually is climate change, he said.
At last we are over the stage of quarrelling about whether there actually is climate change."
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A European Court of Justice ruling could deal a serious blow to Theresa Mays most prized piece of legislation, campaigners have said.
The new Prime Ministers time in her previous job as Home Secretary was arguably defined by her oversight of the Investigatory Powers Bill which hands over vastly more spying powers to police and other agencies, and forces internet companies to store information about users entire browsing history. But that bill could have been dealt a serious blow by a case brought by a member of her own cabinet.
The European Court of Justice heard a case against the governments powers to store data on their own citizens, arguing that such bulk collection is not legal. And though the courts advocate general said that such storage might be legal its findings could still cause huge problems for Theresa Mays spying powers.
Gadget and tech news: In pictures Show all 25 1 /25 Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gun-toting humanoid robot sent into space Russia has launched a humanoid robot into space on a rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS). The robot Fedor will spend 10 days aboard the ISS practising skills such as using tools to fix issues onboard. Russia's deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin has previously shared videos of Fedor handling and shooting guns at a firing range with deadly accuracy. Dmitry Rogozin/Twitter Gadget and tech news: In pictures Google turns 21 Google celebrates its 21st birthday on September 27. The The search engine was founded in September 1998 by two PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in their dormitories at Californias Stanford University. Page and Brin chose the name google as it recalled the mathematic term 'googol', meaning 10 raised to the power of 100 Google Gadget and tech news: In pictures Hexa drone lifts off Chief engineer of LIFT aircraft Balazs Kerulo demonstrates the company's "Hexa" personal drone craft in Lago Vista, Texas on June 3 2019 Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures Project Scarlett to succeed Xbox One Microsoft announced Project Scarlett, the successor to the Xbox One, at E3 2019. The company said that the new console will be 4 times as powerful as the Xbox One and is slated for a release date of Christmas 2020 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures First new iPod in four years Apple has announced the new iPod Touch, the first new iPod in four years. The device will have the option of adding more storage, up to 256GB Apple Gadget and tech news: In pictures Folding phone may flop Samsung will cancel orders of its Galaxy Fold phone at the end of May if the phone is not then ready for sale. The $2000 folding phone has been found to break easily with review copies being recalled after backlash PA Gadget and tech news: In pictures Charging mat non-starter Apple has cancelled its AirPower wireless charging mat, which was slated as a way to charge numerous apple products at once AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures "Super league" India shoots down satellite India has claimed status as part of a "super league" of nations after shooting down a live satellite in a test of new missile technology EPA Gadget and tech news: In pictures 5G incoming 5G wireless internet is expected to launch in 2019, with the potential to reach speeds of 50mb/s Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Uber halts driverless testing after death Uber has halted testing of driverless vehicles after a woman was killed by one of their cars in Tempe, Arizona. March 19 2018 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie 'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway resembling the giant panda is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway, resembling a giant panda, is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A concept car by Trumpchi from GAC Group is shown at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A Mirai fuel cell vehicle by Toyota is displayed at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A visitor tries a Nissan VR experience at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A man looks at an exhibit entitled 'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A new Israeli Da-Vinci unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Elbit Systems is displayed during the 4th International conference on Home Land Security and Cyber in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv Getty
The case had originally been brought by a group including David Davis, the Conservative MP who has campaigned on privacy issues. But he dropped off the case in the last week, soon after he re-joined the cabinet.
Campaign group Privacy International said that the opinion is a serious blow to the bill, and that the full judgement from the court is likely to cause further problems.
The bulk powers - what we would call mass surveillance powers - embedded throughout the IPBill go far beyond tackling serious crime, said Privacy Internationals general counsel, Caroline Wilson Palow. They would give a range of public bodies, not just the Police and intelligence agencies, the power to access the personal data of innocent people, often without any form of warrant.
The Advocate General's opinion supports our calls for much stricter safeguards and oversight to protect us from serious violations of our privacy - including that all access to our data, including communications data, must be authorised by an independent authority such as a judge.
The group said that the opinion should serve as a wake up call for lawmakers that the IPBill's powers and safeguards need to be overhauled."
Green Party peers agreed that the opinion should lead lawmakers to rewrite major parts of the bill.
Todays European Court of Justice ruling - that bulk data collection is only lawful if it is used to tackle serious crime - makes it clearer than ever that the Investigatory Powers Bill currently passing through the House of Lords is simply not fit for purpose, said Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb, who represents the Green Party in the House of Lords.
The Bill poses serious risks to our civil liberties, sanctioning unprecedented surveillance of citizens communications and failing to put in place sufficient safeguards against the misuse of powers granted to the security services."
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Eroding peoples memories and wearing down the body, Alzheimers is a particularly startling and upsetting disease both for sufferers and their loved ones. And as the worlds population ages at an unprecedented and enduring rate, experts are racing to find a cure for a condition which blights an increasing number of people in their twilight years.
Alzheimers is the most common form of dementia an umbrella term used to describe degenerative diseases which currently affect 48million people across the world. With an estimated 135 million expected to be diagnosed with dementia by 2050, it is no wonder that half of adults in the UK fear it, according to a recent survey by the Alzheimers Society charity.
It is likely, then, that many welcomed the latest reports that a cure for Alzheimers could be just around the corner, to scrub the disease from the planet for once and for all. Currently, patients options are limited to treatments that reduce memory loss by replacing neurotransmitters eaten away by the condition. Now, researchers working in the US where over $1.3 billion has already been spent on investigating dementia believe that they have developed a breakthrough vaccine which uses the immune systems antibodies to attack proteins believed to cause Alzheimers disease.
Following tests on mice, experts from the Institute for Molecular Medicine and the University of California, Irvine published a paper on a vaccine that targets both beta-amyloid and tau proteins linked to the disease. The former are often described as plaques in the brain, while tau are referred to as tangles: both are the focus of many other research studies which either attempt to clear them away or stop them forming altogether.
If we are successful in pre-clinical trials, in three to five years we could be well on the way to one of the most important developments in recent medical history, Flinders University School of Medicine Professor Nikolai Petrovsky, and co-author of the study published in Natures 'Scientific Reports' journal, recently said.
If the drug ever makes it to human trials, the team believes that both patients in the early stages of Alzheimers disease and people at risk of developing it could be treated with the vaccine.
It certainly sounds revolutionary particularly to those desperately afraid of the disease. But experts working in a field where only 0.4 per cent of the almost 250 potential treatments for dementia tested between 2002 and 2012 have been successful are cautious to celebrate. Some even warn that harnessing the immune system against Alzheimers could be dangerous.
Six ways to help reduce the risk of dementia Show all 6 1 /6 Six ways to help reduce the risk of dementia Six ways to help reduce the risk of dementia Moderate, regular exercise Last year, a study found that walking briskly for 30 to 40 minutes a day, three times a week, was all it took to re-grow structures of the brain linked with cognitive decline in later life. Researchers have also said statins, designed to help those with heart conditions, may play an additional role in protecting the brain from dementia. Getty Images Six ways to help reduce the risk of dementia Quit smoking A review of studies relating smoking and dementia found that (when you remove studies funded by the tobacco industry) smokers have a significantly greater risk of dementia. Getty Six ways to help reduce the risk of dementia Protect your head A variety of observational studies have shown that professional boxers and war veterans are at greater risk of dementia due to repeated concussion and traumatic head injuries. Rex Six ways to help reduce the risk of dementia Puzzles and crosswords In 2010, studies suggested people who do puzzles and crosswords may stave off dementia for longer. However, the same study also found they may experience a more rapid decline once the disease sets in. Crosswords and Puzzles from The Independent can be solved here Getty Images Six ways to help reduce the risk of dementia A healthy lifestyle Dr Laura Phillips of Alzheimers Research UK says a healthy lifestyle is best for preventing dementia: Eating a balanced, healthy diet, exercising regularly, not smoking, and keeping blood pressure and weight in check. Getty Six ways to help reduce the risk of dementia A Mediterranean diet Research has suggested that a Mediterranean diet rich in fish, fresh fruit and vegetables, whole grains, nuts and seeds may reduce the risks of dementia. However NHS Choices has rpeviously warned some of the media coverage of this diet may overstate its benefits. Rex
Dr Rosa Sancho, Head of Research at Alzheimers Research UK, welcomes the teams two-pronged attack, and says that targeting both amyloid and tau could give more effective protection against the disease. Dr James Pickett, Head of Research at Alzheimers Society, meanwhile praises the team for taking innovative approach to solving problems associated with developing vaccines, including side-effects, but has warned the researchers to proceed with care as tests on mice do not fully replicate the brains of those with dementia.
Then theres the elephant in the room. Research into a vaccine using the immune system to target amyloid and taus carried out by Ireland-based firm Elan were forced to halt in 2002, after 15 trial patients experienced potentially dangerous swelling of the central nervous system. And Professor Christian Holscher in Biomedical and Life Sciences at Lancaster University believes that vaccinating against amyloids and taus is an approach that should be abandoned altogether. The vaccine theory has not shown any convincing effects so far, he says. The concept of using the immune system to treat Alzheimers disease is very dangerous, as it can induce auto-immune responses which are toxic.
Researchers have been attempting to use antibodies to clear beta-amyloids from the brain for over a decade, he says, with a recent trial by pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly showing only minor improvements in congintive tests but no improvements in daily living scores. Therefore, this approach has been deemed a failure. As a result of this, any claim to the contrary will have to present very convincing data. As for Professor Paul Morgan, Director of Systems Immunity Research Institute at Cardiff University, he doesnt dismiss vaccines entirely - but is wary. There is a long and tortuous history underlying attempts to use immunisation to reduce the burden of amyloid and or tau pathology in patients with Alzheimer's disease, he says.
The study - which uses a combination of selecting sites targeted by tau and amyloids and awakening the immune system is interesting and promising. But he says the results are at far too early a stage to have clinical significance of offer hope to patients. After all, he says, research papers hoping for results are all well and good, but at the end of the day the proof is in the pudding."
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Jeremy Hunts pledge to create a seven-day-week NHS will not be achievable for another twenty years, a leading expert has warned.
Professor Julian Bion, from the University of Birmingham who is leading a review into seven-day working, has said funding shortfalls mean the controversial scheme is unlikely to be achieved.
He said: Im convinced seven-day services cannot be achieved within current funding. There are huge gaps. I think were 20 years away from actually being able to achieve a seven-day service given the current challenges but I would love to be wrong.
Professor Bion added that patients who fall ill at weekends should not be put in deep freeze at the weekends to wait until services resume on Mondays and said he is reasonably confident that care is not as good at weekends which translates to less good outcomes for patients.
He has called for a greater focus on complication rates than on total mortality rates over weekends as a means of measuring outcomes.
Plans for a seven-day week NHS which have been championed by Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt have been controversial as the data used to cite that hospital deaths increase over weekends has been fiercely disputed.
UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 27 October 2022 98-year-old D-Day Veteran Bernard Morgan, whose story is among those featured on the giant poppy wall, during the launch of The Royal British Legion 2022 Poppy Appeal, at Hay's Galleria in central London PA UK news in pictures 26 October 2022 A meerkat explores a pumpkin in the enclosure at Wild Place, Bristol, where some of the animals are having pumpkin treats as part of their environmental enrichment PA UK news in pictures 25 October 2022 King Charles III welcomes Rishi Sunak during an audience at Buckingham Palace, where he invited the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party to become Prime Minister and form a new government PA UK news in pictures 24 October 2022 Rishi Sunak celebrates with Tory MPs outside the Conservative Campaign Headquarters after becoming the new leader of the Conservative Party Reuters UK news in pictures 23 October 2022 The Green Man at October Plenty, Borough Market's annual Autumn Harvest festival, in London, which returns for the first time post pandemic PA UK news in pictures 21 October 2022 Sculptor Peter McKenna puts the finishing touches to a pumpkin that will form part of the Planet A Hebden Bridge Pumpkin Trail in the West Yorkshire town PA UK news in pictures 20 October 2022 Britains Prime Minister Liz Truss delivers a speech outside of 10 Downing Street in central London to announce her resignation AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 19 October 2022 Salmon leap up Stainforth Force on the River Ribble in the Yorkshire Dales as they swim upriver to their spawning grounds during the annual Salmon migration PA UK news in pictures 18 October 2022 Just Stop Oil protesters continue their protest for a second day on the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, which links Kent and Essex and which remains closed for traffic, after it was scaled by two climbers from the group PA UK news in pictures 17 October 2022 Hundreds of students take part in the traditional Raisin Monday foam fight on St Salvator's Lower College Lawn at the University of St Andrews in Fife PA UK news in pictures 16 October 2022 A protester holds a placard during a march into central London at a demonstration by the climate change protest group Extinction Rebellion AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 15 October 2022 A member of the public drags an activist who is blocking the road during a "Just Stop Oil" protest, in London, Britain REUTERS UK news in pictures 14 October 2022 Germanys Womens double skulls during day one of the World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals at Saundersfoot beach, Pembrokeshire PA UK news in pictures 13 October 2022 Family and mourners arrive at St Michael's Church, in Creeslough, for the funeral mass of 49-year-old mother of four Martina Martin, who died following an explosion at the Applegreen service station in the village of Creeslough in Co Donegal on Friday PA UK news in pictures 12 October 2022 Motorists in Coventry pass trees showing autumnal colour PA UK news in pictures 11 October 2022 A woman and her dog in the the North Sea at Tynemouth Longsands beach before sunrise PA UK news in pictures 10 October 2022 Police officers remove a campaigner from a Just Stop Oil protest on The Mall, near Buckingham Palace, London PA UK news in pictures 9 October 2022 A drummer plays during the Diwali on the Square celebration, in Trafalgar Square, London PA UK news in pictures 8 October 2022 Timothee Chalamet attending the UK premiere of Bones and All during the BFI London Film Festival 2022 at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London PA UK news in pictures 7 October 2022 Two young male fallow deer lock antlers in Dublins Phoenix park as rutting season begins PA UK news in pictures 6 October 2022 The Princess of Wales during a cocktail making competition during a visit to Trademarket, a new outdoor street-food and retail market situated in Belfast city centre, as part of the royal visit to Northern Ireland PA UK news in pictures 5 October 2022 Greenpeace protesters interrupt Prime Minister Liz Truss as she delivers her keynote speech to the Conservative Party annual conference PA UK news in pictures 4 October 2022 Prime Minister Liz Truss and Britains Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng wearing hard hats and hi-vis jackets, visit a construction site for a medical innovation campus in Birmingham AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 3 October 2022 British artist Sam Cox, aka Mr Doodle, reveals the Doodle House, a twelve-room mansion at Tenterden, in Kent, which has been covered, inside and out in the artist's trademark monochrome, cartoonish hand-drawn doodles PA UK news in pictures 2 October 2022 Erling Haaland celebrates after scoring Manchester City's second goal against Manchester United at Etihad Stadium. Haaland went on to score a hattrick, his third of the season in the Premier League. City beat United 6-3. Manchester City FC/Getty UK news in pictures 1 October 2022 Protesters hold up flags and placards at a protest in London. A variety of protest groups including Enough is Enough, Don't Pay and Just Stop Oil all demonstrated on the day AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 30 September 2022 British Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has not been seen in days, leaves the back of Downing Street after a meeting with Office For Budget Responsibility following the release of her governments mini-budget Getty UK news in pictures 29 September 2022 The Virginia creeper foliage on the Tu Hwnt i'r Bont (Beyond the Bridge) Llanwrst, Conwy North Wales, has changed colour from green to red in at the start of Autumn. The building was built in 1480 as a residential dwelling but has been a tearoom for over 50 years PA UK news in pictures 28 September 2022 Criminal barristers from the Criminal Bar Association (CBA), demonstrates outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, as part of their ongoing pay row with the Government PA UK news in pictures 27 September 2022 David White, Garter King of Arms, poses with an envelope franked with the new cypher of King Charles III 'CIIIR', after it was printed in the Court Post Office at Buckingham Palace in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 26 September 2022 A gallery staff member poses next to a painting by Lucian Freud - Self-portrait (Fragment), 1956 - on show at a photocall for the Credit Suisse exhibition - Lucian Freud: New Perspectives at the National Gallery in London PA UK news in pictures 25 September 2022 Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer is interviewed by Laura Kuenssberg in Liverpool before the start of the Labour Party annual Conference which he opened with a tribute to Queen Elizabeth II and sang the national anthem PA UK news in pictures 24 September 2022 Handout photo issued by Buckingham Palace of the ledger stone at the King George VI Memorial Chapel, St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle PA UK news in pictures 23 September 2022 A climate change activist protests against UK private jets while lighting his right arm on fire during the Laver Cup tennis tournament at the O2 Arena in London EPA UK news in pictures 22 September 2022 Woody Woodmansey, Lee Bennett, Kevin Armstrong, Nick Moran and Clifford Slapper attend the unveiling of a stone for David Bowie on the Music Walk of Fame at Camden, north London PA UK news in pictures 21 September 2022 A flock of birds in the sky as the sun rises over Dungeness in Kent PA UK news in pictures 20 September 2022 Flowers which were laid by members of the public in tribute to Queen Elizabeth II at Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland are collected by the Hillsborough Gardening Team and volunteers to be replanted for those that can be saved or composted PA UK news in pictures 19 September 2022 The ceremonial procession of the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II travels down the long walk as it arrives at Windsor Castle for the committal service at St Georges Chapel AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 18 September 2022 A man stands among campers on The Mall ahead of the Queens funeral Reuters UK news in pictures 17 September 2022 Wolverhampton Wanderers Nathan Collins fouls Manchester Citys Jack Grealish leading to a red card. City went on to win the match at Molineux Stadium three goals to nil. Action Images/Reuters UK news in pictures 16 September 2022 Members of the public stand in the queue near Tower Bridge, and opposite the Tower of London, as they wait in line to pay their respects to the late Queen Elizabeth II, in London AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 15 September 2022 Members of the public in the queue on in Potters Fields Park, central London, as they wait to view Queen Elizabeth II lying in state ahead of her funeral on Monday PA UK news in pictures 14 September 2022 The first members of the public pay their respects as the vigil begins around the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Hall, London, where it will lie in state ahead of her funeral on Monday PA UK news in pictures 13 September 2022 Crowds cheer as King Charles III and Camilla, Queen Consort arrive for a visit to Hillsborough Castle Getty UK news in pictures 12 September 2022 Crowds line the Royal Mile, Edinburgh, as King Charles III joins a procession from the Palace of Holyroodhouse to St Giles Cathedral following the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II Katielee Arrowsmith/SWNS UK news in pictures 11 September 2022 Members of the Public pay their respects as the hearse carrying the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II, draped in the Royal Standard of Scotland, is driven through Ballater AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 10 September 2022 Britain's Prince William, Prince of Wales, Britain's Catherine, Princess of Wales, Britain's Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, Britain's Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, wave at well-wishers on the Long walk at Windsor Castle AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 9 September 2022 King Charles III and Camilla, Queen Consort wave after viewing floral tributes to the late Queen Elizabeth II outside Buckingham Palace Getty UK news in pictures 8 September 2022 A screen commemorating Britain's Queen Elizabeth II in Piccadilly Circus, London Britain EPA UK news in pictures 7 September 2022 Police officers stand guard after Animal Rebellion activists threw paint on the walls and road outside the Houses of Parliament in protest, in London, Britain Reuters
A report in May by the Public Accounts Committee suggested that the plans contain serious flaws and are completely uncosted. It accused the Department for Health of making no coherent attempt" to understand how staffing levels would be needed for the scheme.
However, the Department for Health has insisted a structure has been planned to support the proposals, saying there are clear plans to increase capacity in the future in order to deliver a safer, seven-day NHS.
With additional reporting by PA
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Parents who place blankets or muslin over their baby's pram in hot weather are putting their child at risk of overheating, according to researchers in Sweden.
The act of covering the pram instead of reducing the pram's temperature actually creates "furnace-like heat" inside.
Dr Svante Norgren, a paediatrician at a children's hospital in Stocklholm,Sweden told Svenska Dagbladet: "It gets extremely hot down in the pram, something like a thermos.
"There is also bad circulation of the air and it is hard to see the baby with a cover over the pram."
The newspaper did its own testing on the effects of the sun on a pram's temperature, leaving it in the midday sun between 11:30am and 1pm.
Without a cover it reached a temperature of 22 degrees Celsius, but when a thin cover was placed over the stroller for 30 minutes it soared to 34 degrees.
To understand how relatively intense this heat rise is, summer temperature in Sweden rarely reaches 30 degrees.
Weather: Where is the UK hotter than?
Health authorities in New South Wales, Australia, where temperature can rise above 40 degrees, advise parents: "An enclosed pram can get very hot; try to ensure that the air circulates around your baby by removing the back panel (if possible) or placing them in more open strollers."
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British voters, it turns out, cant actually remove their country from the European Union. Only MPs can do so.
Since the June 23 referendum, the debate has turned to whether new prime minister, Theresa May, can initiate Brexit without first seeking permission from Parliament.
The question has sparked what could turn into a wave of legal judicial reviews. The first one begins Tuesday.
1. Whats a judicial review?
Its a court proceeding to weigh the legality of how a government decision has been reached.
Judicial reviews provide one of the few mechanisms available for members of the public to hold the states most powerful officials to account. Only those with sufficient interest are able to bring a suit, and they must first obtain permission for their case to be heard.
2. Who brought this case?
Deir Dos Santos, a UK hairdresser described by his lawyer as just an ordinary guy, filed the first lawsuit seeking to slow Brexit by challenging the prime ministers right to start the exit without Parliament.
If his rights are going to be taken away, he wants it done in a proper and lawful manner, Dominic Chambers, Dos Santoss lawyer, said.
Crowdfunding campaign raises over 27,000 to prosecute 'dishonest Brexit politicians'
3. Whats at stake?
Either the prime minister or Parliament must invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty in order to trigger the UKs exit from the EU. Oliver Letwin, the minister overseeing the task force preparing for the exit negotiations before May appointed David Davis to head a new Brexit department, said its the prime ministers responsibility.
Other legal experts disagree, saying a matter of this importance must go through Parliament. One of Londons biggest law firms, Mishcon de Reya, has threatened a legal challenge if Parliament doesnt get a say.
The dispute could pit the judiciary against the power of the prime minister in a manner never seen before in British history.
4. Wont Brexit happen no matter what?
May has pledged to respect the will of the people and carry out Brexit (though shes in no rush).
So has Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition Labour Party. But before the June 23 vote, May and most members of Parliament advocated remaining in the EU.
If the UK continues to feel economic repercussions from its June 23 vote, who knows what could happen?
Should MPs vote against their constituents if they believe its ultimately in the national interest? At some point it could become relevant whether the prime minister or Parliament is in charge of pulling the trigger.
6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you Show all 6 1 /6 6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you 6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you More expensive foreign holidays The first practical effect of a vote to Leave is that the pound will be worth less abroad, meaning foreign holidays will cost us more nito100 6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you No immediate change in immigration status The Prime Minister will have to address other immediate concerns. He is likely to reassure nationals of other EU countries living in the UK that their status is unchanged. That is what the Leave campaign has said, so, even after the Brexit negotiations are complete, those who are already in the UK would be allowed to stay Getty 6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you Higher inflation A lower pound means that imports would become more expensive. This is likely to mean the return of inflation a phenomenon with which many of us are unfamiliar because prices have been stable for so long, rising at no more than about 2 per cent a year. The effect may probably not be particularly noticeable in the first few months. At first price rises would be confined to imported goods food and clothes being the most obvious but inflation has a tendency to spread and to gain its own momentum AFP/Getty Images 6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you Interest rates might rise The trouble with inflation is that the Bank of England has a legal obligation to keep it as close to 2 per cent a year as possible. If a fall in the pound threatens to push prices up faster than this, the Bank will raise interest rates. This acts against inflation in three ways. First, it makes the pound more attractive, because deposits in pounds will earn higher interest. Second, it reduces demand by putting up the cost of borrowing, and especially by taking larger mortgage payments out of the economy. Third, it makes it more expensive for businesses to borrow to expand output Getty 6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you Did somebody say recession? Mr Carney, the Treasury and a range of international economists have warned about this. Many Leave voters appear not to have believed them, or to think that they are exaggerating small, long-term effects. But there is no doubt that the Leave vote is a negative shock to the economy. This is because it changes expectations about the economys future performance. Even though Britain is not actually be leaving the EU for at least two years, companies and investors will start to move money out of Britain, or to scale back plans for expansion, because they are less confident about what would happen after 2018 AFP/Getty Images 6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you And we wouldnt even get our money back All this will be happening while the Prime Minister, whoever he or she is, is negotiating the terms of our future access to the EU single market. In the meantime, our trade with the EU would be unaffected, except that companies elsewhere in the EU may be less interested in buying from us or selling to us, expecting tariff barriers to go up in two years time. Whoever the Chancellor is, he or she may feel the need to bring in a new Budget Getty Images
5. Whats likely to happen?
In recent years, people challenging state actions via judicial reviews have prevailed just 1 or 2 per cent of the time. In one successful challenge, the Supreme Court overruled a decision by the attorney general and permitted the Guardian newspaper to obtain and publish letters written to lawmakers by Prince Charles.
But that case was small potatoes compared to the question of whether citizens will be able to use the courts to steer, delay and possibly derail the U.K.s departure from the EU.
Bloomberg
OSCE SMM says no evidence so far to support claims against its monitor
The OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) says there is no evidence at the moment to support the Russian Federal Security Service's claims that one of its monitors in Donbas is an agent of the SBU Security Service of Ukraine.
"The Mission takes such allegations seriously; however, at this moment we have no evidence to support these claims. As such, the SMM will not comment on these allegations at the moment, but is reviewing the situation," the OSCE SMM said in a statement, posted on Facebook on Monday evening.
The OSCE says the SMM is a civilian mission, with a mandate that does not include any intelligence gathering activity. The SMM aims to reduce tensions and facilitate dialogue between all the sides, to gather information and report on the security situation in the country and on the compliance or violation of the Minsk agreements on a daily basis. The OSCE SMM operates on the principles of transparency and impartiality.
"Any serious violation of the Code of Conduct, to which all mission members agree when they join the organization, leads to an immediate dismissal of the member of the mission. On rare occasions we have already taken such decisions, and if required in future we will do so again," the statement said.
Presently, the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine includes international monitors originating from more than 45 countries, as well as 305 national staff.
The Russian FSB earlier reported the exposure and detention on the territory of Russia of an SBU agent, Artem Shestakov, who worked as an interpreter for the OSCE SMM in Ukraine and allegedly collected intelligence information for the Ukrainian special services.
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UK supermarkets have come under fire after the farmers union lodged an official complaint over the misleading use of farm names.
The National Farmers Union (NFU) formally complained to Trading Standards over the use of fake farm branding by supermarkets on some food products.
It singled out Tesco and its seven made-up farm brands, which launched earlier this year.
The NFU claimed the fictitious brands misled consumers as it made them believe they were buying products farmed in the UK.
Three in five people who said they believed such products were definitely or probably British admitted that they would feel misled if they were informed that it came from overseas, according to a YouGov survey commissioned by the NFU.
In March, Tesco, the largest supermarket chain in the UK, was criticised for its new range of farm food as it was revealed all the farms named on the packaging were entirely made up.
Willow Farms whole chicken, Boswell Farms diced beef and Rosedene Farms blueberries were all found to come from manufacturers with no relation to the names on the packaging of the final product. Some of the foods were imported from overseas and given British names to make them sound local.
Meurig Raymond, NFU president, said the union is asking the Trading Standards Institute to look at whether fake farm branding complies with relevant legal requirements.
I have spoken to senior management at Tesco to highlight our members concerns about the use of these fake farm brands, Raymond said.
I urge all retailers to consider seriously the results of our survey which show that mixing imported product with British product under the same fictional farm name can be misleading to many of their customers, he added.
Raymond praised Aldi for its commitment to source its fake farm brand produce only from the UK by the end of March next year.
Stephen James NFU Cymru president called the practice unacceptable and said enough is enough.
Food and drink news Show all 35 1 /35 Food and drink news Food and drink news Healthy living makes us more inclined to binge, research suggests Gluten-free breads, dairy-free milks and other plant-based products have been some of the most favoured foods in British supermarkets this year. However, while were busy filling our shopping trolleys with gluten-free goodness, were also jamming it with junk food and alcohol, new research suggests Getty/iStock Food and drink news Growing list of Vegan celebs Making the switch to veganism is a major lifestyle choice, one that many claim can improve energy levels, lower the risk of cardiovascular disease and clear up any skin issues. Beyonce, Natalie Portman and Jessica Chastain are among the growing list of Hollywood stars who have eschewed animal products from their diets in recent years. Theres also been an increasing number of professional athletes who have gone vegan, such as boxing champions Mike Tyson and David Haye, thus debunking the myth that following a plant-based diet will leave you feeling weak and malnourished. AFP/Getty/NARAS/iHeartMedia Food and drink news McDonald's has announced the launch of a new vegan burger on its menu in Germany This will mark the first time the German franchise of the fast food chain has offered a vegan burger to its customers. The Big Vegan TS burger consists of a patty made from soy and wheat. It is served in a classic sesame seed bun, and contains salad, tomato, pickles and red onion. McDonald's Germany Food and drink news Drinking too many protein shakes could lead to an increased risk of obesity and a reduced lifespan, a new study has claimed Researchers from the University of Sydney's Charles Perkins Centre carried out an investigation to determine the impact excessive consumption of branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) has on the body. BCAA supplements are often consumed in the form of powder, which is then added to water to make a shake. Published in journal Nature Metabolism, the study found that while BCAAs help to build muscle, they can also negatively impact an individual's temperament, cause weight gain and lead to a shortened lifespan Getty Images/iStockphoto Food and drink news Britain consumes more chocolate than any other country Most people love chocolate but it turns out no one does more than the Brits with the average Brit found to have consumed 8.4 kg of chocolate in 2017, according to new data. Chocolate consumption around the world is on the rise, according to Mintel Global New Products Database (GNPD), which found that in the past year alone, Easter chocolate production has risen by 23 per cent Food and drink news 'Easter eggs should be banned for children under four' Dr Becky Spelman, chief psychologist at Harley Streets Private Therapy Clinic, is calling for Easter eggs to be banned for consumption for children under the age of four, claiming that giving them the opportunity to binge on chocolate so young will give them an unhealthy relationship with food later on. "This is a nightmare situation for parents of this generation as they have no idea how to teach their children to delay their response to cravings, she said, explaining that too many young kids binge on these chocolates because their parents dont know how to stop them. "Once a child starts overeating behaviour at a young age its very hard to turn things around for them in terms of food and their eating habits moving forward, leading to obesity from at very young age," she added PA Food and drink news Pineapple overtakes avocado as the UK's fastest-selling fruit According to Tesco, pineapple has overtaken avocado as the UKs fastest-selling fruit, with sales increasing by 15 per cent in 2017. In comparison, avocado sales rose by just under 10 per cent last year. The popular supermarket says the surge in popularity comes as shoppers buying the versatile fruit are beginning to use it as a main ingredient in everything from curries and barbecues, to juices and cocktails Getty Food and drink news Marks & Spencers launches stoneless avocados Rather than the result of genetic modification, the avocados are formed by an unpollinated avocado blossom. The fruit develops without a seed which in turns stops the growth, creating a small, seedless fruit. Whats more, the skin is actually edible, unlike a regular avocado. The flesh is much like that of a normal avocado - smooth and creamy, pale in colour and rich in flavour M&S Food and drink news Office teabags contain 17 times more germs than a toilet seat, reveals study The average bacterial reading of an office teabag was 3,785, in comparison to only 220 for a toilet seat. Other pieces of kitchen equipment also stacked up highly in their findings, with the bacterial readings averaging at 2,483 on kettle handles, 1,746 on the rim of a used mug and 1,592 on a fridge door handle Getty Images/iStockphoto Food and drink news New study shows drinking more coffee leads to a longer life There is good news and a final hope for coffee addicts and lovers. You will now be able to drink coffee for longer as new study shows its can lead to a prolonged life. Scientists showed that those who drank between two and four cups of coffee a day had 18% lower risk of death compared to non-coffee drinkers. PA Food and drink news Coke Zero is replaced with Coke Zero Sugar Coca-Cola is pulling the plug on its Coke Zero. The much loved drink will be replaced with a new improved taste. The move, backed with a 10 million campaign, is said to come from Coca-Cola supporting people to reduce their sugar intake. Coca-Cola want people make this move while not sacrificing sugary taste of Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola Food and drink news Starbucks introduce new avocado spread The avocado craze has grown from hipster brunch restaurants to Starbucks. Starbucks have introduced their new avocado spread earlier this year and it has the internet in debate. Some argue that it not a spread but guacamole while others question if there is any avocado in there at all. When buying the new spread you can also buy an optional toasted bagel. It is a must try for all avocado connoisseurs. Starbucks Food and drink news New Mars chocolate bar The iconic British chocolate bar is about to get its partner in crime. The new bar, named Goodness Knows, will replace the gooey caramel goodness of the mars bar with oats. It is said to be more like a Florentine biscuit with a thin dark chocolate bottom. While being moderately healthy Mars says that is has good intentions. One pack has 154 calories and will sell for about 90p. Mars Food and drink news Wine prices could increase because of Brexit Wine lovers across the UK might soon have to shell out close to a quarter more for their favourite tipple after Brexit, as a weaker pound and sluggish economy takes its toll, a new study shows Rex Food and drink news Chocolate may be good for the heart A new study, published in the British Medical Journal: Heart, found that moderate chocolate intake can be positively associated with lessening the risk of the heart arrhythmia condition Atrial Fibrillation Getty Images/iStockphoto Food and drink news Brits throw away 1.4 million bananas each year British families are throwing away 1.4 million bananas that are perfectly good to eat every day at cost of 80m a year, new figures have shown PA/Armin Weigel Food and drink news Rosemary sales spike over exam time There has been a surge a surge in sales of the herb rosemary after a recent study found it helps improve memory. According to high street health food chain Holland & Barrett, sales of the herb have increased by 187 per cent compared to the same time last year Getty Images/iStockphoto Food and drink news Gluten-free diets 'not recommended' for people without coeliac disease Avoiding wheat, barley and rye in the belief that a gluten-free diet brings health benefits may do more harm than good, according to a team of US nutrition and medicine experts Getty Images/iStockphoto Food and drink news Starbucks launches two new coffee-based drinks Starbucks is launching two new coffee-based drinks in the UK, as it strives to tap into consumers growing appetite for healthy beverages. The Cold Brew Vanilla sweet cream and the Cappuccino Freddo, will both be available in stores throughout the UK from the start of May Twitter/@SbuxCountyHall Food and drink news Cadburys Dairy Milk Tiffin is making a permanent comeback after 80 years The Cadbury Dairy Milk Tiffin, first produced in 1937, is making a permanent comeback to the UK. The raisin and biscuit-filled chocolate bar is being launched after a successful trial last summer saw 3 million chocolate treats at the cost of 1.49 for each 95g bar- purchased by nostalgic customers Cadburys Food and drink news Pizza restaurant makes worlds cheesiest 'Scottie's Pizza Parlor' in Portland Oregon has created the worlds cheesiest pizza using a total of 101 different cheese varieties. Facebook/Scottie's Pizza Parlor Food and drink news A pizza joint in Portland Oregon has created the worlds cheesiest pizza using a total of 101 different cheese varieties. Why not eating before a workout could be better for your health A study published in the American Journal of Physiology by researchers at the University of Bath found you might be likely to burn more fat if you have not eaten first Getty Images/iStockphoto Food and drink news New York restaurant named best in the world A New York restaurant where an average meal for two will cost $700 has been named the best in the world. Eleven Madison Park won the accolade for the first time after debuting on the list at number 50 in 2010. The restaurant was praised for a fun sense of fine-dining, blurring the line between the kitchen and the dining room Getty Images Food and drink news Why you crave bad food when youre tired Researchers at Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University in Chicago recently presented their results of a study looking into the effects of sleep deprivation upon high-calorific food consumption. Researchers found that those who were sleep-deprived had specifically enhanced brain activity to the food smells compared to when they had a good nights sleep Shutterstock Food and drink news Drinking wine engages more of your brain than solving maths problems Drinking wine is the ideal workout for your brain, engaging more parts of our grey matter than any other human behaviour, according to a leading neuroscientist. Dr Gordon Shepherd, from the Yale School of Medicine, said sniffing and analysing a wine before drinking it requires exquisite control of one of the biggest muscles in the body Getty Images/iStockphoto Food and drink news British dessert eating surges after people ditch healthy eating in February : In heartening news for anyone feeling guilty about quitting their New Year diet, it seems lots of us have given in to our sweet tooths once again. New data from nationwide food-delivery service Deliveroo reveals there was a surge in Brits ordering desserts in February compared to the first month of 2017 Getty Images/iStockphoto Food and drink news US congress debates definition of milk alternatives A new bill has been created that seeks to ban dairy alternatives from using the term milk. Titled the DAIRY PRIDE Act, the name is a tenuous acronym for defending against imitations and replacements of yogurt, milk, and cheese to promote regular intake of dairy every day. It argues that the dairy industry is struggling as a result of all the dairy-free alternatives on the market and the public are being duped too Getty Images Food and drink news Cadburys launches two new chocolate bars UK confectionary giant Cadbury has launched two new chocolate bars, hoping to lure those with a sweet tooth and perhaps help combat some of the challenges it faces from rising commodity prices and a post-Brexit slump in the value of the pound.The companys new products will be peanut butter and mint flavoured. They will be available in most major super markets as 120g bars, priced at 1.49, according to the company Cadburys Food and drink news You can now get a job as a professional chocolate eater The company responsible for some of your favourite chocolate brands think Cadbury, Milks, Prince and Oreo have officially announced an opening to join their team as a professional chocolate taster. The successful candidate will help them to test, perfect and launch new products all over the world. Getty Images/iStockphoto Food and drink news MSG additive used in Chinese food is actually good for you, scientist claims For years, weve been told MSG (the sodium salt of glutamic acid) - often associated with cheap Chinese takeaways - is awful for our health and to be avoided at all costs. But one scientist argues it should be used as a supersalt and encourages adding it to food. Getty Images/iStockphoto Food and drink news Lettuce prices are rising Not only are lettuces becoming an increasingly rare commodity in supermarkets, but prices for the leafy vegetables seem to be rising too. According to the weekly report from the Governments Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, a pair of Little Gem lettuces had an average market price of 0.86 in the week that ended on Friday, up from an average of 0.56 in the previous week thats an almost 54 per cent increase. Getty Images Food and drink news Do-It-Yourself restaurant To encourage more people to cook and eat together, IKEA has launched The Dining Club in Shoreditch a fully immersive Do-It-Yourself restaurant . Members of the public can book to host a brunch, lunch or dinner party for up to 20 friends and family. Supported by their very own sous chef and maitre de, the host and their guests will orchestrate an intimate dining experience where cooking together is celebrated and eating together is inspirational Mikael Buck / IKEA Food and drink news Ping Pong menu with a twist Gatwick Airport has teamed up with London dim sum restaurant Ping Pong to create a limited edition menu with a distinctly British twist; including a Full English Bao and Beef Wellington Puff, to celebrate the launch of the airports new route to Hong Kong Food and drink news Zizzi unveil the Maamgharita Unique pizza art has been created by Zizzi in celebration of the Queens 90th birthday. The pizza features the queen in an iconic pose illustrated with fresh and tasty Italian ingredients on a backdrop of the Union Jack Food and drink news Blue potatoes make a comeback Blue potatoes, once a staple part of British potato crops, are back on the menu thanks to a Cambridge scientist turned-organic farmer and Farmdrop, an online marketplace that lets people buy direct from local farms. Cambridge PhD graduate-turned farmer, Adrian Izzard has used traditional growing techniques at Wild Country Organics to produce the colourful spuds, packed with healthy cell-protecting anthocyanin, which had previously disappeared from UK plates when post-war farmers were pushed towards higher-yielding varieties
The union has called for clear guidelines for supermarkets on labelling the country of origin of their products.
Tesco has defended the brands, saying its customers were well aware that the supermarket was so big it could not possibly source all its products from individual farms.
A Tesco spokesperson said: Over the last 18 months we have been simplifying our ranges, launched Brand Guarantee and improved customer service.
However, we know customers want the convenience of getting all their shopping in one place.
These seven new brands, which are exclusive to Tesco, address our customers needs for quality fresh food, at very competitive prices in a single shop.
Despite the controversy Tesco has attributed its second straight quarter of sales growth in part to its fresh farm food range, which has proved popular with shoppers even though the products are named after farms that do not exist.
Our new fresh food brands are performing very well, with over two-thirds of our customers having bought products from the new range, chief executive Dave Lewis said in a statement accompanying the results.
By June, two-thirds of Tescos customers had tried the range, in line with Tescos expectation.
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Game of Thrones' fans will be required to to wait until the summer of 2017 to see the first episode of the seventh season.
Bosses of broadcaster HBO confirmed that instead of the traditional April air date, the show is being pushed back to summer 2017 to accommodate shooting schedules.
The cast and crew are set to return to Iceland for filming for the forthcoming series, a location that has not primarily been used since Jon Snow, played by Kit Harington, was 'north of the wall' with the wildlings, as well as Spain and Northern Ireland.
They also confirmed that the series will be shorter at seven episodes, instead of the usual 10 for the first time.
Casey Bloys, president of HBO programming, said in a statement: "Now that winter has arrived on Game of Thrones, executive producers David Benioff and D B Weiss felt that the storylines of the next season would be better served by starting production a little later than usual, when the weather is changing.
"Instead of the show's traditional spring debut, we're moving the debut to summer to accommodate the shooting schedule."
The eighth and final season is expected to follow in 2018.
In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Show all 34 1 /34 In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Ramsay Bolton Fed to the hounds by his ex-wife In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Tommen Baratheon Jumped out of a window In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Rickon Stark Shot by Ramsay with an arrow In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Grand Maester Pycelle Stabbed by little birds In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Loras Tyrell Wildfire In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Alliser Thorne Hung In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Olly Hung #F*ckOlly In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Walder Frey Ticked off the list In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Shaggydog Head cut off In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Summer Ripped apart by White Walkers In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 High Sparrow Wildfire In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 The Blackfish Killed off-screen In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Hodor Hold the door In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Trystane Martell Stabbed through the face by those damned Sand Snakes In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Leaf Blown up saving Bran In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Walda Frey and her little boy Fed to the hounds In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Balon Greyjoy Thrown off a bridge by his brother In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Lady Crane Fell off a chair In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Mace Tyrell Wildfire In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 The Waif Killed in the dark by Arya Stark In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Lothar Frey and Black Walder Rivers Fray pie In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Brother Lancel Lannister Stabbed once then blown up by Wildfire In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Lem Lemoncloak Hung by the Brotherhood Without Banners plus The Hound In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Brother Ray Hung by Leomoncloak and his gang In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Three-Eyed Raven Killed by the Nights King In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Margaery Tyrell Wildfire In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Khal Rhalko, Khal Brozho, Khal Qorro, Khal Forzho, Khal Moro Burnt by the Mother of Dragons In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Roose Bolton Stabbed in the chest by his own son In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Kevan Lannister Wildfire In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Smalljon Umber Beaten by Tormund In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Wun Weg Wun Dar Wun That Goddamn Ramsay again In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Osha Throat slit by Ramsay In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Doran Martell Stabbed in the hearth by Ellaria Sand In memoriam: Every major character who died in Game of Thrones season 6 Areo Hotah Stabbed in the spine by Tyene Sand
Game of Thrones picked up 23 Emmy nominations last week, the most of any show nominated.
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Confident and calm-tempered, Nicola Sturgeon takes her time when she speaks and looks her audience firmly in the eye. The Scottish First Minister, who was ranked the second most powerful woman in the UK by Forbes, is perceived by her supporters as the type of politician who congenitally instills trust in her supporters.
For this reason, Ms Sturgeon has consistently high personal popularity ratings. From her performances in the general election leadership debates to her most recent input into the Brexit debate, she has managed to establish herself as one of the most powerful women in British politics.
Here is a selection of the most formidable times Ms Sturgeon has stood up to Westminster and spoken her mind on her 46th birthday.
Brexit reactions in pictures Show all 10 1 /10 Brexit reactions in pictures Brexit reactions in pictures Supporters of the Stronger In campaign look at their phones after hearing results in the EU referendum at London's Royal Festival Hall AP Brexit reactions in pictures Leave supporters cheer results at a Leave.eu party after polling stations closed in the Referendum on the European Union in London Reuters Brexit reactions in pictures Mr Cameron announces his resignation to supporters Getty Brexit reactions in pictures Donald Tusk proposes that the 27 remaining EU member states start a wider reflection on the future of our union Getty Brexit reactions in pictures Ukip leader Nigel Farage greets his supporters on College Green in Westminster, after Britain voted to leave the European Union PA Brexit reactions in pictures Supporters of the Stronger In Campaign react as referendum results are announced today Getty Brexit reactions in pictures Boris Johnson leaves his home today to discover a crowd of waiting journalists and police officers Getty Brexit reactions in pictures Leave EU supporters celebrate as they watch the British EU Referendum results being televised at Millbank Tower in London Rex Brexit reactions in pictures Supporters of the Stronger In Campaign react as results of the EU referendum are announced at the Royal Festival Hall Reuters Brexit reactions in pictures Supporters of the Stronger In campaign react after hearing results in the EU referendum at London's Royal Festival Hall PA
Her promise to reform Westminster for ordinary people
Ms Sturgeon promised her party would reform the discredited Westminster system for ordinary people living across the UK. During her keynote address to the SNP's spring conference, she said it was time to abolish the House of Lords where members are paid 300 a day for just showing up.
As long as Scotland remains part of the Westminster system, we will be your allies in seeking to shake up and reform that outdated and discredited system once and for all, she said. Westminster needs to change. To be more responsive to the needs and demands of ordinary people, wherever they are in the UK.
Her allusion to Pig-Gate
SNP delegates went wild with applause after Ms Sturgeon accused the then Prime Minister Cameron of being pig-headed over his approach to Scotland following last years referendum. Her remark was perceived as an indirect reference to the widely publicised allegations that Cameron inserted a private part of his anatomy into a deads pig mouth during a university initiation ceremony.
The Prime Minister's attitude to Scotland betrays the worst characteristics of his government - arrogant, patrician and out of touch. Pig-headed some might say, Ms Sturgeon said.
Her take down of Boris Johnson during Brexit debate
Ms Sturgeon shot down the new Foreign Secretary's claim that Britain was sending 350m a week to the EU which would be better spent on "alleviating some of the problems in our NHS caused by uncontrolled immigration.
While participating in an ITV debate on the EU with the leading Brexit campaigner and current Foreign Secretary, Ms Sturgeon challenged his argument Britain should leave Europe. She said Mr Johnson had previously called for people "to be charged for using the NHS" and now he was "the defender of it".
"I am staggered that Boris Johnson is now standing here still defending this 350m a week figure. Its a scandal that is still emblazoned across the campaign bus because it is an absolute whopper."
"The statistics authority says so, the House of Commons select committee says so, everybody knows so. The contribution each of us makes to the EU every day is less than a pound, but what do we get for that money? We get freedom of travel, we get a single market of 500 million people, the chance to cooperate to keep us safer. These are the gains of being in the EU".
Her usage of the word "b******s"
Ms Sturgeon has described claims that the ascent of the SNP helped to contribute towards Cameron winning the 2015 general election as b*****.
Throughout the election campaign, the Conservatives argued Alex Salmond would influence a Labour-led administration if Ed Miliband was voted into power in an attempt to put people off voting for Labour.
When probed about the theory, Ms Sturgeon told Holyrood Magazine: Im not sure this a word I should use in an interview but its bollocks. Even if you try to unpack that argument, whats the logical conclusion that we shouldnt have stood? That Labour should have been given a free run? Im assuming thats not what theyre arguing."
Her criticism of George Osborne
Ms Sturgeon condemned George Osbornes announcement he would invest 500m in the Faslane navy base in a move that he says will secure 6,700 jobs on the site.
This is an arrogant decision by the Chancellor to try to pre-empt the parliaments decision on the replacement of Trident, she said.
It is also highly ironic. This is the same Chancellor who is slashing peoples tax credits and taking vital support away from disabled people. If he has 500 million to spend he would be better advised to spend it on health, education, giving young people the best start in life and reversing some of his cruel attacks on the most vulnerable people.
Her post-Brexit strength
Within four hours of the last European referendum ballots being counted, Ms Sturgeon gave a press conference at Bute House. She said a second independence referendum was highly likely following the result and said it was democratically unacceptable that Scotland was facing the prospect of leaving the EU against its will. Ms Sturgeon also said the people of Scotland saw their future as part of the European Union.
Sturgeon: We will begin to prepare legislation for a second independence referendum
It is, therefore, a statement of the obvious that a second referendum must be on the table, and it is on the table, she said at a news conference in Edinburgh.
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Ben Carson, the former brain surgeon who made his own run at the Republican nomination before dropping out, is telling delegates in Cleveland the whole transgender thing is absurd.
Addressing the Florida delegation in their hotel before the start of official business on Tuesday, Mr Carson even went so far as to suggest that a person deciding they want to transition from one gender to another is like someone waking up and deciding to change their race.
Recommended Read more Trump peddles fear and loathing and exploits private grief
Separately Mr Carson, who was given a walk through of the Quicken Loans Arena where the plenary sessions of the convention are taking place on Tuesday morning, told The Hill web site that the notion of someone even being transgender doesnt make any sense.
For someone to wake up and think that they belong to a different sex because they feel different that day is the same as if you woke up and said Im Afghani today because I saw a movie about that last night and even though my genetics might not indicate that, thats the way I feel, and if you say that Im not, then youre a racist, Mr Carson told the news site.
There has been fierce national debate about transgender rights in America this year, notably in the wake of the passage of a North Carolina law in the spring that bound schools and other institutions to oblige transgender people to use the bathrooms of the gender they were born with not the one they have since made the transition to.
The transgender community was more or less unknown to many Americans until the former Olympic medal winner Bruce Jenner announced last year that he was close to completing a transition to a woman and that he was to be known thereafter as Caitlyn Jenner. She is now a successful television personality and was featured as a woman on the cover of Vanity Fair.
Caitlyn Jenner (Larry Busacca/Getty Images)
You know, we look at this whole transgender thing. I got tell you, for thousands of years, mankind has known what a man is and what a woman is, Mr Carson mocked at the outset of his meeting with the Florida delegates, according to the Palm Beach Post.
Now all of a sudden we dont know any more. Now, is that the height of absurdity? Because today you feel like a woman, every though everything about you genetically says that youre a man or vice versa, he carried on.
Would that be the same as if you woke up tomorrow morning after seeing a movie about Afghanistan or reading some book and said, You know what? I am Afghanistan. I know I dont look that way. My ancestors came from SwedenBut I really am. And if you say Im not, youre racist. You know, I mean this is how absurd, this how absurd we have become.
Mr Carson, who was persuaded to make his failed run for president after drawing headlines for severely criticizing President Barack Obama to his face at a national prayer breakfast in 2014, reportedly drew several rounds of laughter as he made his remarks.
It is not the first time that the issue of transgender rights and bathroom access have seeped into discourse at the convention that opened in Cleveland on Monday and runs until Thursday.
On Monday evening retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and one-time Director of the Defence Intelligence Agency serving President Barack Obama, astonishingly tied the support of liberals for transgender rights to the countrys failure to take tough foreign policy stances and fight wars.
War is not about bathrooms, he cried. War is not about political correctness or words that are meaningless. War is about winning.
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Pictures of the UK's 10 most wanted alleged fraudsters have been released by police.
The City of London force and the National Crime Agency urged anyone with information about those on the list to get in touch.
Alex McKenzie, 33, from London, allegedly targeted victims using the gay social networking app Scruff, gaining their trust by claiming to work for MI6.
UK's most wanted alleged con-artists Show all 10 1 /10 UK's most wanted alleged con-artists UK's most wanted alleged con-artists Felix Rooney Felix Rooney, 35, is accused of conning a pensioner out of nearly 100,000 by lying that his roof needed urgent repairs PA UK's most wanted alleged con-artists Alex Mckenzie Alex McKenzie, 33, from London, allegedly targeted victims using the gay social networking app Scruff, gaining their trust by claiming to work for MI6 PA UK's most wanted alleged con-artists Sandeep Arora Bogus Bollywood film producer Sandeep Arora, 42, is accused of claiming millions in VAT and Film Tax rebates for movies that either did not exist or with which he had no involvement PA UK's most wanted alleged con-artists Bayo Lawrence Anoworin Bayo Lawrence Anoworin, 41, from Lagos, Nigeria, is wanted by Lincolnshire Police over an alleged scam that stole more than 12 million from NHS Trusts in the UK and Guernsey between January 2011 and July 2012 PA UK's most wanted alleged con-artists Faisal Butt Faisal Butt, 39, from Lahore, Pakistan, has been convicted in his absence of stealing hundreds of thousands of pounds from more than 100 bank accounts PA UK's most wanted alleged con-artists Alexia Thomas Self-styled "professor" Alexia Thomas, 43, is wanted for selling fake immigration documents that cost around 300 each, but were issued by organisations that did not exist PA UK's most wanted alleged con-artists Adam James Stagg Adam James Stagg, 29, is believed to be enjoying a life of luxury in the Philippines "fully aware" he is wanted by Avon and Somerset Police for allegedly conning victims out of a total of 20,000 for luxury watches that were never delivered PA UK's most wanted alleged con-artists Marius Lucian Anton Marius Lucian Anton, 31, is accused of using card skimming devices to steal and clone bank cards at supermarket cash machines PA UK's most wanted alleged con-artists Naeem Ahmed Naeem Ahmed, 44, from Smethwick, West Midlands, is accused of conning a string of mobile phone shops out of brand new handsets worth 40,000 by using stolen customer payment details PA UK's most wanted alleged con-artists Levi John Coyle Levi John Coyle, 36, from Colchester, Essex, was convicted while on the run for a 700,000 so-called "boiler room" scam PA
Wanted by Scotland Yard, he is accused of taking out credit cards, bank accounts, and loans in the names of two former lovers and the parent of one of his partners, defrauding them of a total of 300,000.
McKenzie, who uses the aliases Jaswant Singh and James McKenzie, is also suspected of pocketing 30,000 while he was working for the accounts department of "a large multinational company", City of London Police said. His alleged crimes were committed between November 2014 and October 2015 and police believe he is now in the United States, where he has overstayed his visa.
Detective Constable Suzanne Raftery said: "It is clear that McKenzie has very little conscience and he has left his victims both emotionally and financially devastated. The fact he had the audacity to defraud his two partners who believed they were in a loving relationship with him, illustrates the disdain that he has for his victims and their feelings.
"People in the UK may have information on McKenzie's whereabouts and I would urge those people to come forward so that more lives aren't destroyed. McKenzie has met both of his partners on gay dating apps and it is feared that he may target further victims in this way."
Anyone with information can call the Metropolitan Police on 020 7161 8321 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.
Bogus Bollywood film producer Sandeep Arora, 42, is accused of claiming millions in VAT and Film Tax rebates for movies that either did not exist or with which he had no involvement. He is wanted by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs over the evasion of more than 4.5m VAT and Film Tax.
Arora, from Beckton, east London, ran a production company with offices in central London between 2007 and 2011, and made VAT and Film Tax claims for movies called Billy the Beagle, London Dreams, Kuan Bola, Aagosh, Trapped and Kia the Dream Girl. He is known as Karan Arora in Bollywood circles, and is currently believed to be in India.
Anyone with information about where he is can call the Customs Confidential Hotline on 0800 595 0000 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.
Levi John Coyle, 36, from Colchester, Essex, was convicted while on the run for a 700,000 so-called "boiler room" scam. The conman sold fake shares, stealing the six-figure sum from unsuspecting investors between 2009 and 2010.
He cold-called victims to sell shares apparently at knockdown prices, or shares that were not available for sale to the public. Coyle was jailed for six years in his absence for conspiracy to defraud, fraud by by false representation and money laundering.
Joseph Ford from City of London Police said: "We are calling upon the public for their assistance in locating Coyle. He must accept the consequences of his crimes, face the courts and begin the jail term handed to him in his absence."
Anyone with information about where Coyle is can call City of London Police on 020 7601 2222 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.
Marius Lucian Anton, 31, is accused of using card skimming devices to steal and clone bank cards at supermarket cash machines. The Romanian, who has links to Northamptonshire and Corby, is wanted by Cheshire police for allegedly committing a string of fraud offences across the UK since 2012. He has not been found despite his photograph being circulated to all UK police forces.
Anyone with information can call Cheshire police on 01244 350 000 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.
Felix Rooney, 35, is accused of conning a pensioner out of nearly 100,000 by lying that his roof needed urgent repairs. The 72-year-old victim paid out the six-figure sum for the work on his home, which was later valued by Trading Standards to have a true cost of around 1,000.
Rooney, who is Irish and has scars on his face, has links to the West Midlands, Worcester and London and uses aliases including Michael Hannon and Martin Connors. Greater Manchester Police (GMP) believe he may have shaved his head and could still be committing crimes. He was jailed for six-and-a-half years in March 2011 after stealing money from elderly victims by getting into their homes claiming he was from the Water Board.
GMP advise anyone who sees Rooney not to approach him but to call police immediately. Anyone with information can call GMP on 0161 856 6860.
Adam James Stagg, 29, is believed to be enjoying a life of luxury in the Philippines "fully aware" he is wanted by Avon and Somerset Police for allegedly conning victims out of a total of 20,000 for luxury watches that were never delivered. Thought to be living in Manila, Stagg is accused of committing fraud between October 2013 and June 2014. It is alleged that he set up a string of companies trading from the Philippines offering customers in the UK deals on watches costing upwards of 100.
None of his 140 alleged victims received a watch and some claimed they were threatened when they tried to find out why.
Anyone with information can call Avon and Somerset Police on 01275 814 541 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.
Self-styled "professor" Alexia Thomas, 43, is wanted for selling fake immigration documents that cost around 300 each, but were issued by organisations that did not exist. The Nigerian is accused of helping set up companies that sold the documents, apparently provided by organisations such as "The Independent Diplomatic Commission" or "Commonwealth Liberation Party", that were later presented at court by unsuspecting victims applying for British citizenship.
Thomas used a string of aliases including Elizabeth or Lizzy with the surnames Henz; Ikuwe-Henz; Iheyen; Ikue-Henz; Ihenyue; Ikwue; Herz and Ihenyen, as well as the names Professor Thomas, Professor Summers, Martha Peterson and Alexia Bridget. She described herself as "Her Knowledgeable" on company literature.
The suspected fraudster's last known address was in Camden, north London, but she has lived in various different parts of the capital.
Faisal Butt, 39, from Lahore, Pakistan, has been convicted in his absence of stealing hundreds of thousands of pounds from more than 100 bank accounts. He was part of a criminal gang, that also included an insider at the bank, who opened joint bank accounts linked to existing customer accounts.
They were then able to transfer their victims' money into the joint accounts, reset security details and get credit cards. Butt was convicted of conspiracy to defraud at the Old Bailey in his absence after it is believed he fled to Pakistan.
Anyone with information can call the Dedicated Cheque and Plastic Crime Unit, run by Scotland Yard and the City of London Police, on 020 7709 6600.
Messi at tax fraud trial
Bayo Lawrence Anoworin, 41, from Lagos, Nigeria, is wanted by Lincolnshire Police over an alleged scam that stole more than 12m from NHS Trusts in the UK and Guernsey between January 2011 and July 2012.
He uses a string of fake identities including John Bay, Roland Martins, Wemio Adeyemi and Adeyemi Awonorin, and is accused of fraud offences and money laundering linked to a gang that targeted the trusts. Anoworin was arrested in Abbey Wood, south east London, in November 2012 and fled when he was released on bail. He has connections to Thamesmead, also south east London, and Chatham in Kent.
Anyone with information can call Lincolnshire Police on 01522 532222 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555111.
Naeem Ahmed, 44, from Smethwick, West Midlands, is accused of conning a string of mobile phone shops out of brand new handsets worth 40,000 by using stolen customer payment details. He was arrested in October 2014 after staff at a store in Portsmouth became suspicious, and was charged with 21 alleged fraud offences between June and October 2014 before he disappeared.
Ahmed got upgrades or was given new handsets at a number of stores in Portsmouth, Salisbury, Eastleigh, Andover, Bridgewater, Weston Super Mare, Taunton, Leeds, Dewsbury, Wakefield, Castleford, Newbury, Fareham, Southampton, Winchester, Bristol, Cardiff and Newport. He is believed to be in the West Midlands but police have not yet managed to track him down.
Anyone with information can call Hampshire Police on 101 quoting ref 44160261412 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.
PA
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The first-ever legal bid to force the UK to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece has been thrown out by the European Court of Human Rights.
The court ruled that because the alleged theft of the sculptures from the 2,500-year-old Parthenon temple took place more than 150 years before the UK signed up to the human rights convention, it did not have the power to consider the lawsuit.
Campaigners for the return of the sculptures pointed out that the court had not made a ruling on the merits of the case.
The marbles were taken from the temple by the Earl of Elgin in the 1800s and he then sold them to the British Government in 1816 after running into financial difficulties.
At the time, Greece was occupied by the Ottoman Empire. Lord Elgin obtained a firman, a legal document, that apparently allowed him to take some stones but some believe it did not entitle him to cut sculptures from the building.
The marbles are regarded as some of the finest sculptures ever created and the Parthenon, built by the democratic Athenians after victory over the Persian Empire, is arguably the most important monument in Europe.
The Greek Government was given extensive legal advice from lawyers Amal Clooney and Geoffrey Robertson, but appears to have decided against taking Britain to court.
Instead, the case against the UK was brought by the Athenians Association, a cultural group, after the British Government refused an offer last year by Unesco to mediate between Greece and Britain.
Recommended Read more Seven reasons to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece
The British Government and the British Museum, where about half the surviving Parthenon sculptures are on display, insist the Earl of Elgin acquired them legally.
In its ruling, which was sent to the Athenian Association last month, the European court said: The Court notes that the marbles were removed from Greece in the early 19th century.
In order to bring the matter within the temporal jurisdiction of the Court, the applicant has sought to rely on the refusal of the United Kingdom to enter into mediation with Greece concerning the return of the marbles and the continuing refusal to return the marbles.
However, it is clear from the nature of the applicants complaints that its underlying grievance is the allegedly unlawful removal of the marbles from Greece. The removal having occurred some 150 years before the Convention was drafted and ratified by the respondent state, the applicants complaints would appear to be inadmissible.
The judges also said the Athenians Association did not have any right to have the marbles returned to Greece.
Greece wants its treasured Elgin marbles back from the British
The Athenians Associations legal representative, Vassilis Sotiropoulos, said the case was a first step.
He claimed the judgement could actually help the Greek Government take legal action in the future.
Globally, this first statement of the European Court, historically the first court judgement, on the subject of the Parthenon Marbles highlights the points that Greece should focus on with particular attention in her recourse against the United Kingdom, Mr Sotiropoulos said.
This decision leaves open the possibility of a recourse submitted by Greece being proclaimed admissible, thus also indirectly offering precious expertise on how to handle the case henceforth.
Andrew George, of the British Association for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures, said the ruling did not affect the arguments in favour of sending the sculptures back.
Weve learned nothing from this. Theres been no test of the merits of the case, just that this is not the arena to resolve the justice or otherwise of the case, he said.
The UK Parliament effectively state-sanctioned the improper acquisition of the sculptures exactly 200 years ago this year.
But this doesnt make it a cause of pride for the British, nor does it make the act nor their continued retention either ethical or just.
On 10 July, a cross-party group of MPs launched a Bill to return the sculptures to Athens, where the Acropolis Museum was built specifically to house them within sight of the Parthenon.
The British Museum argues that it tells the story of cultural achievement throughout the world, from the dawn of human history over two million years ago until the present day.
The Parthenon Sculptures are a vital element in this interconnected world collection. They are a part of the worlds shared heritage and transcend political boundaries, it says.
The Acropolis Museum allows the Parthenon sculptures that are in Athens (approximately half of what survive from antiquity) to be appreciated against the backdrop of ancient Greek and Athenian history. The Parthenon sculptures in London are an important representation of ancient Athenian civilisation in the context of world history.
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The hottest day of the year has arrived, with expected highs of 33 degrees Celsius due to the mini-heatwave sweeping across the UK, beating temperatures in of Spain, Thailand and even Hawaii.
Despite the average summer temperature in the UK being around 21C for this time of year, Britain has been benefiting from warm air travelling over from France and Spain, pushing heat levels up dramatically to the point where the weather is better than many holiday destinations across the globe.
Today the UKs weather is better than in Athens, which is expected to reach highs of 31C, while Barcelona will only reach 29C and Istanbul is much cooler at 25C. Even temperatures in Thailand and parts of America will sit behind the UKs, with Bangkok expected to reach 32C today, while Las Vegas will only reach 28C and even Honolulu is two degrees cooler than the UK at 31C.
Heatwave hits UK Show all 9 1 /9 Heatwave hits UK Heatwave hits UK UK heatwave More revellers taking in the sun on Brighton beach Reuters Heatwave hits UK UK heatwave People cool off in a fountain outside the Southbank Centre Getty Heatwave hits UK UK heatwave A couple sunbathe on the promenade on a hot Summer day in Blackpool Reuters Heatwave hits UK UK heatwave It all got a bit too much for a few of those attending Wimbledon PA Heatwave hits UK UK heatwave Sunbathers enjoy the hot weather on the beach in Brighton PA Heatwave hits UK UK heatwave Londoner's take an early morning dip in the Serpentine Getty Heatwave hits UK UK heatwave A man relaxes in St. James Park in London Reuters Heatwave hits UK UK heatwave The crowds at Wimbledon seek shelter from the heat under umbrellas Getty Heatwave hits UK UK heatwave The fan is a more necessary accessory at this year's Wimbledon than most Getty
The sunshine is expected to turn to showers and thunderstorms by Wednesday however, with temperatures set to return to average by the weekend.
The Met Office has issued a yellow weather warning covering most of the UK bar London and the South East from Tuesday night into Wednesday evening, as heavy showers, thunderstorms, gusty winds and hail is forecasted.
A Met Office spokesperson said that some places could see around 30mm of rainfall in an hour or more than 50mm in the space of three hours.
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Boris Johnson failed to apologise for comparing the EU with Hitler at his first Brussels Summit as Foreign Secretary, his French counterpart has claimed.
Jean-Marc Ayrault, who called Mr Johnson a liar last week over his claims during the EU referendum, said he did not take the Hitler remarks personally.
The French Foreign Minister said: "No. He did not apologise. I did not feel it targeted me when he said that, nobody around the table did.
"Everyone knows what the EU is. Everyone knows, who discusses it reasonably, that the EU presents a great opportunity for freedom, democracy and for prosperity.
"So Boris Johnson, I would say, came to this council with some humility."
Mr Johnson caused widespread anger during the Brexit campaign when he compared the ambitions of the EU with those of Hitler.
Dutch foreign minister Bert Koenders said everyone was waiting to see if Mr Johnson still had the same views on the EU.
The spat came as Mr Johnson insisted the EU could remain a "docking station" for the UK after Brexit.
UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson Condemns Nice Attacks
The former Vote Leave frontman said: "The point I was making there is that we are very keen to see the EU develop and go forward and all we would say is that there are kind of docking stations and doorways open for further UK involvement down the track."
But in a sign of the tough negotiations ahead, Brussels warned that EU nationals in the UK must be treated with "dignity" as the UK Government continues to refuse to guarantee their status.
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A government lawyer has told the High Court in London that Britain will not invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty this year.
Lawyer Jason Coppel QC referred to statements made by Prime Minister Theresa May who has said the legislation should not be triggered this year.
However, he indicated that the Government's current position could change.
What is Article 50?
It follows Prime Minister Theresa May's announcement last week that Britain will not start the process of leaving the European Union until Scotlands position in negotiations is clear.
Ms May said after a meeting with Scotlands First Minister Nicola Sturgeon she would not formally start the process of leaving the bloc until there was a coherent UK approach to negotiations.
Scotlands very important to me. When I stood on the steps of Downing Street on Wednesday I made clear that I believe in the United Kingdom, Ms May said.
Ros Kellaway, head of Eversheds' EU Competition and Regulatory Group, said in a statement: "Although the situation is clearly fluid, this formal indication that the government is in no great rush to invoke Article 50 is welcome news for businesses.
"As things stand, we still don't have clarity on what Britain can expect from the terms of engagement with the EU once negotiations have begun, let alone what the wider parameters are.
"Businesses could be forgiven for being fearful of protracted Article 50 negotiations, but the reality is, a longer wait to get things right will be very much in their best interests, especially so given the staggeringly complex and multi-faceted nature of Brexit."
Brexit protest: Thousands march in London Show all 12 1 /12 Brexit protest: Thousands march in London Brexit protest: Thousands march in London A woman poses with a home-made European Union flag as Remain supporters gather on Park Lane in London to show their support for the EU in the wake of Brexit PA Brexit protest: Thousands march in London Remain supporters demonstrate in Parliament Square PA Brexit protest: Thousands march in London Tens of thousands of people gathered to protest the result of the EU referendum PA Brexit protest: Thousands march in London A majority of people in the capital voted to remain in the European Union Reuters Brexit protest: Thousands march in London Protesters chanted: What do we want to do? Stay in the EU PA Brexit protest: Thousands march in London The march follows a similar rally in Trafalgar Square that was cancelled due to heavy rain but which tens of thousands of people turned up to anyway Reuters Brexit protest: Thousands march in London Britain voted to leave the European Union in a referendum by 52 per cent to 48 per cent Reuters Brexit protest: Thousands march in London But support for the Leave campaign in urban areas and among young people was significantly lower Rex features Brexit protest: Thousands march in London Marchers gathered at Park Lane at 11am and marched towards Parliament Square PA Brexit protest: Thousands march in London Some protesters held up baguettes in a display of affection for our continental neighbours PA Brexit protest: Thousands march in London The disparity between different parts of the country has promoted a four million signature petition calling for a second referendum and even a renewed push for Scotland to cede from the UK PA Brexit protest: Thousands march in London The events organiser, Kings College graduate Kieran MacDermott, wrote: We can prevent Brexit by refusing to accept the referendum as the final say and take our finger off the self-destruct button" Reuters
A government must trigger the article by officially notifying the EU of its intention to leave. Then there is a two-year period in which the terms of the leavers exit are negotiated.
During this time Britain would no longer be able to take part in any EU decision-making, and any exit agreements must be approved by all 27 remaining EU nations and the European Parliament. Then after Britains formal exit, fresh negotiations can begin on any new trade deals.
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David Cameron took a seat on the second back row of the Commons' chamber for the first time in over a decade as Prime Minister Theresa May made her first speech at the despatch box during a parliamentary debate on the renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons programme.
The former Prime Minster was sitting in the backbenches on Monday as an MP for his Witney constituency after being replaced by Ms May on Wednesday.
The sight of Mr Cameron looking on from the backbenches for the first time in 11 years was described as "disconcerting" and a "shock" by some Twitter users.
According to the Sun's Tom Newton Dunn, Mr Cameron was seen looking at his iPhone as the new Prime Minster made her case for Trident on Monday.
While Sky News' Jon Craig saw Mr Cameron leave the Chamber during Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn's speech, adding "he doesn't have to listen any more".
Former Justice Secretary Michael Gove also made an appearance at the Commons as MP for Surrey Heath and made his first intervention from the backbenches.
Mr Gove was sacked as Justice Secretary during Ms Mays appointment of ministers to her new administration. He was eliminated from the Conservative party leadership contest in the second round of voting by backbench Tory MPs.
MPs will vote on whether to agree to spend up to around 30 billion renewing the four Trident submarines that are equipped with nuclear missiles and warheads on Monday.
Trident was originally bought from the USA by Margaret Thatcher as a last ditch defence in case the armies of the former Warsaw Pact, which was disbanded in 1989, overran Europe.
The decision to stage Monday's vote was made by Mr Cameron.
The investigation department of Kyiv's Solomyansky police station of the National Police has launched an investigation into the kidnapping of head of the electrification department at PJSC Ukrzaliznytsia railway company Valeriy Liudmirsky.
Information about the incident was included into the National Register of Pre-Trial Investigations under Part 2, Article 146 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (illegal deprivation of freedom or kidnapping).
The pre-trial investigation is under way.
Head of Ukrzaliznytsia's information policy and PR department Daniel Wachowski wrote on Facebook that the company's security department was closely working with the law-enforcement agencies to find the missing employee as soon as possible.
"According to preliminary assessment, we connect the kidnapping with professional activity. Electrification of the railways means multimillion contracts which attract companies with criminal ties," Wachowski wrote.
According to media reports, Liudmirsky was kidnapped while walking a dog near his house in Kyiv at nearly 21:10 Kyiv time on Monday. The dog was shot the police found five shot shells on the site.
Infrastructure Minister Volodymyr Omelyan in turn said he hoped that the police would be able to establish Liudmirsky's whereabouts soon after.
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Jeremy Corbyns popularity among Labour Party members has grown even more despite losing a no confidence vote by MPs heavily last month.
According to a Times/YouGov poll of Labour members, the party leader would beat leadership contest rivals Angela Eagle and Owen Smith by more than 30 points.
The majority of those surveyed think Mr Corbyn is doing well, at 55 per cent, an increase of four points in a fortnight, while the proportion of those who think he is doing badly has dropped by seven points to 41 per cent.
The awkward moment when Angela Eagle realised journalists had all left her leadership bid launch
The poll, taken from a sample of 1,019 Labour members who joined before the start of 2016 in line with party voting rules also found Mr Corbyn would receive 54 per cent of first preference votes.
Taken between Friday and Monday, 44 per cent said they would definitely vote for Mr Corbyn in September, up 8 per cent on a fortnight ago, with a further 13 per cent saying that they would probably vote for him. Forty per cent said that they would not vote for him.
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He would soundly beat Ms Eagle (21 per cent), who is facing a vote of no confidence in her own constituency, Wallasey, and fellow leadership contender Mr Smith (15 per cent). In a head-to-head contest, the Labour leader would beat Ms Eagle by 24 points, with 58 per cent of the vote. Mr Corbyn would beat Mr Smith by 22 points, taking 56 per cent.
There are around 375,000 members of the Labour Party, however more than 100,000 of them will not be eligible for the September vote, having registered since the beginning of 2016.
The Labour Partys MPs voted 172 to 40 against Mr Corbyns leadership in a secret ballot held earlier this week.
A ComRes poll for The Independent found one in three Labour voters think Theresa May would be a better Prime Minister than Jeremy Corbyn.
In pictures: Jeremy Corbyn reshuffle Show all 11 1 /11 In pictures: Jeremy Corbyn reshuffle In pictures: Jeremy Corbyn reshuffle Jonathan Reynolds,Shadow Railways Minister: RESIGNED He resigned as shadow railways minister in protest at the reasons for sacking Pat McFadden In pictures: Jeremy Corbyn reshuffle Kevan Jones, Shadow Defence Minister: RESIGNED He resigned as a shadow defence minister who strongly supports renewal of Trident. Has spoken out against Jeremy Corbyns leadership before and was also the centre of a row with Ken Livingstone after he said Jones might need some psychiatric help (Jones has previously spoken about his struggle with depression) In pictures: Jeremy Corbyn reshuffle Stephen Doughty, Shadow Foreign Minister: RESIGNED He quit as a shadow foreign minister in protest at the sacking of his colleague Pat McFadden as shadow Europe minister. He said he had looked at his own conscience and decided to step down In pictures: Jeremy Corbyn reshuffle Pat McFadden, Shadow Europe Minister: SACKED He was sacked as shadow Europe minister for "disloyalty" to leader Jeremy Corbyn In pictures: Jeremy Corbyn reshuffle Pat Glass, Shadow Europe Minister: SAFE Former junior shadow education minister Pat Glass replaced Pat McFadden as shadow Europe minister In pictures: Jeremy Corbyn reshuffle Emily Thornberry, Shadow Defence Secretary: SAFE She was promoted to shadow defence secretary. She is anti-Trident and therefore more in tune with Corbyns stance and replaces Maria Eagle, who was pro-Trident Getty In pictures: Jeremy Corbyn reshuffle Emma Lewell-Buck, Shadow Minister for Devolution and Local Government: SAFE Emma Lewell-Buck was promoted to shadow minister for devolution and local government In pictures: Jeremy Corbyn reshuffle Michael Dugher, Shadow Culture Secretary: SACKED Outspoken critic of Jeremy Corbyns leadership, has been sacked as shadow culture secretary for his "incompetence and disloyalty" In pictures: Jeremy Corbyn reshuffle Hilary Benn, Shadow Foreign Secretary: SAFE Hilary Benn remains as shadow foreign secretary, but Corbyns team has insisted his role now comes with new conditions that he must agree with Corbyn over foreign policy. Benn insists there are no new conditions attached to his job and insisted: "I haven't been muzzled. I'm going to be carrying on doing my job exactly as before In pictures: Jeremy Corbyn reshuffle Maria Eagle, Shadow Culture Secretary: SAFE Maria Eagle, moved from shadow defence to shadow culture secretary as part of Corbyns move to make his defence team match his anti-Trident views In pictures: Jeremy Corbyn reshuffle Andy Burnham, Shadow Home Secretary: SAFE Reports linked him to foreign secretary brief, but Corbyn appears to have backed down on sacking Hilary Benn. He does not see eye-to-eye with Corbyn on home affairs such as the Snoopers charter, but removing your shadow home secretary so soon after starting would have been a dangerous move by Corbyn
It also revealed the new Prime Minister out-polls the Labour leader among every age group for support.
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Nick Clegg is set to return to frontline politics as European spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats 14 months after resigning as party leader following a disastrous election result.
The former Deputy Prime Minister under the Conservative and Lib Dem coalition, has maintained a relatively low profile in Westminster since stepping down as leader after his party lost 49 MPs leaving them with just eight at the 2015 general election.
In his new role he will be expected to challenge his former Cabinet colleagues Theresa May and Liam Fox on their plans for Brexit. Mr Clegg will begin his role by publishing a series of papers outlining the dilemmas facing the UK in a range of areas including the trading relationship with the EU, university research funding and agriculture. When it comes to facing down Theresa May, said Lib Dem leader Tim Farron, Nick has been there and got the T-shirt.
Recommended Read more Nick Clegg gives his real opinion on his former Conservative allies
Mr Clegg said: Theresa May says Brexit means Brexit but no one actually know what that means. Will we be in the single market or cut from it, with all the implications that has for British jobs and our economy?
He added: With no meaningful opposition from the Labour party, no exit plan from the Government, Whitehall unprepared for the Brexit negotiations, and above all, Theresa Mays refusal to seek a mandate from the people for what is in effect a new government, there is a real risk that she and her Brexit ministers wont be subject to the scrutiny and accountability which voters deserve.
The former Lib Dem leader said that whatever your views on Brexit, it is in everyones interest to make sure what happens next is debated openly and scrutinised properly. Mr Farron, who earlier this week indicated that the calamitous environment of British politics presents a historic opportunity to build a new political party or alliance, added: There is no one better placed in British politics to hold the Government to account over Brexit than Nick.
Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Show all 27 1 /27 Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Andrea Leadsom Andrea Leadsom has been appointed Secretary for Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Priti Patel Priti Patel has been appointed International Development Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Alun Cairns Alun Cairns will stay on as Welsh Secretary Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Karen Bradley Karen Bradley is now Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Rex Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Greg Clark Greg Clark has been appointed Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? James Brokenshire James Brokenshire has been appointed as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Stephen Crabb Stephen Crabb has resigned as Work and Pensions Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Theresa Villiers Theresa Villiers will not return as Northern Ireland Secretary. She was reportedly offered a role by Theresa May, but turned it down, saying it was not one she felt could take on Getty Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Chris Grayling Chris Grayling has been appointed Transport Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Damien Green Damien Green has been appointed Work and Pensions Secretary Getty Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Liz Truss Liz Truss has been appointed Justice Secretary Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Patrick McLoughlin Patrick McLoughlin who was Transport Secretary has been appointed Tory Party chairman and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Justine Greening Justine Greening has been appointed as Education Secretary Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Gavin Williamson Gavin Williamson is to become the new Government Chief Whip Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Jeremy Hunt Jeremy Hunt will continue as Health Secretary Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Nicky Morgan Nicky Morgan lost her job as Education Secretary Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Michael Gove Michael Gove has been sacked as Justice Secretary Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? John Whittingdale John Whittingdale left his job as Culture Secretary EPA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Oliver Letwin Oliver Letwin, the Chancellor for the Duchy of Lancaster, has been sacked from his role in the cabinet PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Philip Hammond The former Foreign Secretary has been made Chancellor EPA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Boris Johnson Leading Brexit campaigner is given the role of Foreign Secretary Getty Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Amber Rudd Leading Remain campaigner takes Theresa May's old job of Home Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Michael Fallon Stays as Defence Secretary AP Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Liam Fox The former Defence Secretary is named as head of new Department for International Trade PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? David Davis The former shadow Home Secretary and leadership rival to David Cameron is named Secretary of State for Leaving the European Union - aka Brexit minister PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? George Osborne Gone as Chancellor - and fails to secure any new role in May's government GETTY Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? David Mundell The Conservative Party's only Scottish MP retains his role as Scottish Secretary Getty Images
He said: Now that Theresa Mays Brexit government is a reality, Ive asked Nick to take on a formal role in holding them to account. Over the next months I expect him to be the leading voice in this debate, taking them to task and flushing out what Brexit will really mean for Britain.
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Nicola Sturgeon has never claimed she had a veto over Brexit but will call for a second independence referendum if Scotlands place in the EU is not maintained, her spokesman has said.
It comes after the First Minister said Scotland is in a strong position when asked on Sunday whether she had the ability to block Britains exit from the European Union, in the wake of comments made by Theresa May after the pair met in Edinburgh.
We have never claimed to have had a veto either on the overall Brexit process or on the timing of Article 50 being triggered, a spokesperson for the First Minister told The Independent.
Recommended Read more The most formidable times Nicola Sturgeon stood up to Westminster
The First Minister has made it absolutely clear that we are intent on pursuing all options to maintain Scotlands place in the EU, and if it becomes clear that the best of only way of doing that is as an independent member state then the option of an independence referendum must be on the table.
A Downing Street source made clear that Ms May obviously didnt reference a veto on Friday when she said: I am very clear that I want the Scottish Government to be fully involved and I want to get the best possible deal for the whole of the United Kingdom.
Ive been very clear with the First Minister today that I want the Scottish Government to be fully engaged in our discussions, in our considerations, and I will listen to any options they bring forward.
Sturgeon: Scotland in 'strong position' to block Brexit
Asked by the BBCs Andrew Marr whether this meant Scotland had now effectively been given a veto on the UK leaving the EU, Scottish First Minister Ms Sturgeon said: That appears to be an interpretation that some people but on the Prime Ministers remarks. Certainly from what she said after the meeting that puts us in a very strong position.
It puts me in a strong position, of course it puts a responsibility on my shoulders to think through what the options are.
Ms Sturgeon has consistently said she will not allow the UK to take Scotland out of the EU against its wishes, the country having voted overwhelmingly to remain during last months referendum.
We are in uncharted territory and when you are in uncharted territory with basically a blank sheet of paper in front of you, you have an opportunity to think things that might have previously been unthinkable, she added.
Scotland did not vote for any of those consequences. We voted by a significant margin to avoid those consequences and stay in. That gives me a mandate to try to protect our relationship with the EU. If that is not possible within the UK well then I have been very clear that the option of a second independence referendum has to be on the table.
There are opportunities, she added. Things have changed fundamentally. There is a mood there and what I encountered in Brussels was a warmth, an openness and a great sympathy to the position that Scotland finds itself in.
Nobody was saying to me, and I certainly wasnt assuming, that it would be easy and there are significant challenges along the way. But there was a certain openness that the Scottish government has not found previously in Brussels."
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The SNPs Westminster leader has said a second Scottish independence referendum is "fast approaching" following Parliaments vote to renew Britains Trident nuclear weapons system.
MPs overwhelmingly backed the renewal of Britains nuclear deterrent in a Commons' vote on Monday evening, with 472 to 117 in favour of the motion.
The vote, supported with a majority of 355, supports the governments plans to replace the four Vanguard class submarines with four Successor submarines.
Recommended Read more MPs vote to renew Trident nuclear deterrent system
Fifty-eight of Parliament's 59 Scottish MPs voted against Trident renewal - with Scotland's only Tory MP, David Mundell, being the sole supporter.
In a debate on Monday, the SNP's Angus Robertson called Trident an immoral, obscene and redundant weapons system" and said the Scottish people were being ignored by the UK government.
He said the result exacerbates the "democratic deficit" in Scotland, coming just weeks after Scottish voters overwhelmingly backed membership of the EU but were outvoted by those in England and Wales.
"Only a few short weeks ago Scotland voted to remain within the European Union," said Mr Robertson.
"If Scotland is a nation, and Scotland is a nation, it is not a normal situation for the state to totally disregard the wishes of the people, and this Government has a democratic deficit in Scotland, and with today's vote on Trident it's going to get worse, not better.
Which countries have nuclear weapons? Show all 14 1 /14 Which countries have nuclear weapons? Which countries have nuclear weapons? USA Have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Russia Have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? UK Have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? France Have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? China Have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? India Say they have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Pakistan Say they have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? North Korea Say they have nuclear weapons EPA/Rodong Sinmun Which countries have nuclear weapons? Israel Believed to have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Belgium Nations hosting nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Germany Nations hosting nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Italy Nations hosting nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Netherlands Nations hosting nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Turkey Nations hosting nuclear weapons Getty
"It will be for the Scottish people to determine whether we are properly protected in Europe and better represented by a Government that we actually elect - at this rate, that day is fast approaching."
SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon has said she will hold another referendum if she believes it is the best way to protect Scotland's interests in Europe, but has said she will also consider other options.
Following the vote the SNP have called for the withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Scotland. Mr Robertson said in a statement: "The UK government must respect Scotlands clear decision against Trident renewal and remove these nuclear weapons of mass destruction from the Clyde.
"It would be democratically unacceptable if in the face of this clear opposition the UK government were to impose Trident nuclear weapons on the Clyde against Scotlands wishes."
Conservative MPs accused the SNP of disregarding the 13,000 Scottish jobs that unions say are dependent on the Trident fleet at HMNB Clyde, in Faslane on the west coast of Scotland.
They also questioned the SNP's support of nuclear-armed military alliance Nato, a policy they adopted following a U-turn ahead of the last independence referendum.
Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said: "The SNP ignores at least half of Scottish public opinion and is a party that is content to dispense with our deterrent, but happy to cower under an American nuclear Nato umbrella."
Ms Sturgeon earlier accused the UK Government of "playing games" over Trident, by calling the vote at a time of political disarray with Labour divided and the UK preparing for negotiations to leave the European Union.
Additional reporting by Press Association
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Theresa May has told her Cabinet ministers that politics is not a game and claimed that her Government will not be defined by Brexit, as she prepared for crucial meetings with European leaders in Berlin and Paris.
Ms May, who met with the Queen on Tuesday for the final stages of the formal swearing-in process as Britains new Prime Minister, told her ministers that her upcoming sessions in the European cities would be an opportunity for discussions about Brexit. But, she insisted, the Government will not be characterised by Britains exit from the European Union.
When I launched my leadership campaign I said that politics is not a game. The decisions that we take around this table affect peoples day-to-day lives and we must do the right thing and take the right decisions for the future of this country, she told ministers at their first Cabinet meeting. We have the challenge of Brexit and Brexit does mean Brexit and we are going to make a success of it and we will do that by forging a new role for the United Kingdom in the world but we wont be a Government thats defined just by Brexit. We will also be a Government defined by the social reform that we take.
Shortly after Wednesdays Prime Ministers Questions Ms May will travel to Berlin to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel and tomorrow she will meet President Francois Hollande in Paris. I am determined that Britain will make a success of leaving the European Union and thats why I have decided to visit Berlin and Paris so soon after taking office, Ms May said ahead of her visit. These visits will be an opportunity to forge a strong working relationship that we can build upon and which I hope to develop with more leaders across the European Union in the weeks and months ahead.
The new Prime Minister said she did not underestimate the challenge of negotiating Britains exit from the European Union and that she firmly believes being able to talk frankly and openly about the issues we face will be an important part of a successful negotiation. She said: I also want to deliver a very clear message about the importance we attach to our bilateral relationship with our European partners, not just now but also when we have left the European Union. These relationships have been vital in the past and they will be vital in the future as we continue to work together to keep our people safe and to support economic growth that benefits people across our countries.
May's first Cabinet meeting
But, crucially, Ms May is yet to outline what vision she has for Britain outside the EU. While she has previously hinted she wants to maintain access to the single market she has, so far, failed to address the issue of the free movement of people acceptance of which is considered essential by the 27 member states for access to the tariff-free market.
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Theresa May is set to tell members of her newly appointed Cabinet that everyone must play their role in making Britains exit from the European Union a success.
Despite around two-thirds of MPs publicly backing Remain during the EU referendum campaign, the Prime Minister, speaking ahead of her first Cabinet meeting, said: It will be the responsibility of everyone sitting around the Cabinet table to make Brexit work for Britain.
Ms May, who has finished appointing her government ministers, also reiterated that Brexit means Brexit and claimed were going to make a success of it.
Theresa May: Going to make success of Brexit
And it will also be their duty to deliver success on behalf of everyone in the UK, not just the privileged few. That is why social justice will be at the heart of my government, she added.
So we will not allow the country to be defined by Brexit, but instead will build the education, skills and social mobility to allow everyone to prosper from the opportunities of leaving the EU.
Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Show all 27 1 /27 Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Andrea Leadsom Andrea Leadsom has been appointed Secretary for Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Priti Patel Priti Patel has been appointed International Development Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Alun Cairns Alun Cairns will stay on as Welsh Secretary Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Karen Bradley Karen Bradley is now Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Rex Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Greg Clark Greg Clark has been appointed Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? James Brokenshire James Brokenshire has been appointed as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Stephen Crabb Stephen Crabb has resigned as Work and Pensions Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Theresa Villiers Theresa Villiers will not return as Northern Ireland Secretary. She was reportedly offered a role by Theresa May, but turned it down, saying it was not one she felt could take on Getty Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Chris Grayling Chris Grayling has been appointed Transport Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Damien Green Damien Green has been appointed Work and Pensions Secretary Getty Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Liz Truss Liz Truss has been appointed Justice Secretary Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Patrick McLoughlin Patrick McLoughlin who was Transport Secretary has been appointed Tory Party chairman and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Justine Greening Justine Greening has been appointed as Education Secretary Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Gavin Williamson Gavin Williamson is to become the new Government Chief Whip Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Jeremy Hunt Jeremy Hunt will continue as Health Secretary Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Nicky Morgan Nicky Morgan lost her job as Education Secretary Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Michael Gove Michael Gove has been sacked as Justice Secretary Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? John Whittingdale John Whittingdale left his job as Culture Secretary EPA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Oliver Letwin Oliver Letwin, the Chancellor for the Duchy of Lancaster, has been sacked from his role in the cabinet PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Philip Hammond The former Foreign Secretary has been made Chancellor EPA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Boris Johnson Leading Brexit campaigner is given the role of Foreign Secretary Getty Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Amber Rudd Leading Remain campaigner takes Theresa May's old job of Home Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Michael Fallon Stays as Defence Secretary AP Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Liam Fox The former Defence Secretary is named as head of new Department for International Trade PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? David Davis The former shadow Home Secretary and leadership rival to David Cameron is named Secretary of State for Leaving the European Union - aka Brexit minister PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? George Osborne Gone as Chancellor - and fails to secure any new role in May's government GETTY Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? David Mundell The Conservative Party's only Scottish MP retains his role as Scottish Secretary Getty Images
During the Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Ms May is expected to set out the priorities for the new government. She will afterwards host her first National Security Council session, featuring discussion surrounding the global threats facing the UK and the safety of British nationals overseas.
It comes after Ms May claimed she had very constructive talks with Wales First Minister, Carwyn Jones, during her visit there yesterday.
She was greeted by Mr Jones on the Senedd steps before heading into his office to discuss post-Brexit Britain and the uncertainty surrounding Tata's steelworks in Port Talbot.
Mrs May said: The Union is very important to me, and I'm pleased to visit Wales so early in my premiership. I've had a very constructive meeting with the First Minister and we've been talking about a number of issues including the United Kingdom leaving the EU.
"What I want to see is the best possible deal for the whole of the United Kingdom, and I want the Welsh Government to be involved in the discussions. That's why I am here.
Later in the week, Ms May is expected to hold her first face-to-face meetings with European leaders as Prime Minister, when she travels to Berlin and Paris.
Brexit is certain to be high on the agenda on Ms Mays first overseas trip as PM and talks with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande.
However, European leaders have previously warned there will be no informal negotiations before Article 50 is triggered.
It is usual for incoming premiers to make early visits to establish personal links with key European leaders, but this week's trip will be highly charged by the outcome of the 23 June referendum and the need to shape a new relationship between the UK and its neighbours on the continent.
The PM's government: full list of appointments
Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury and Minister for the Civil Service
Rt Hon Theresa May MP
HM Treasury
Chancellor of the Exchequer Rt Hon Philip Hammond MP
Chief Secretary to the Treasury Rt Hon David Gauke MP
Financial Secretary Jane Ellison MP
Economic Secretary Simon Kirby MP
Commercial Secretary Lord ONeill of Gatley
Home Office
Secretary of State for the Home Department Rt Hon Amber Rudd MP
Minister of State Brandon Lewis MP
Minister of State Ben Wallace MP
Minister of State Robert Goodwill MP
Minister of State Baroness Williams of Trafford
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Sarah Newton MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Baroness Shields OBE (jointly with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport)
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP
Minister of State Rt Hon Sir Alan Duncan MP
Minister of State Rt Hon Baroness Anelay of St Johns DBE (jointly with the Department for International Development)
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Tobias Ellwood MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Alok Sharma MP
Ministry of Defence
Secretary of State for Defence Rt Hon Michael Fallon MP
Minister of State Mike Penning MP
Minister of State Rt Hon Earl Howe (and Deputy Leader of the House of Lords)
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Mark Lancaster TD MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Harriett Baldwin MP
Ministry of Justice
Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP
Minister of State Sir Oliver Heald QC MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Sam Gyimah MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Phillip Lee MP
Department for Education
Secretary of State for Education, and Minister for Women and Equalities Rt Hon Justine Greening MP
Minister of State Jo Johnson MP (jointly with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy)
Minister of State Nick Gibb MP
Minister of State Edward Timpson MP
Minister of State Rt Hon Robert Halfon MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Lord Nash
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Caroline Dinenage MP
Department for Exiting the European Union
Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union Rt Hon David Davis MP
Minister of State Rt Hon David Jones MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Lord Bridges of Headley MBE
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Robin Walker MP
Department for International Trade
Secretary of State for International Trade, and President of the Board of Trade Rt Hon Liam Fox MP
Minister of State Lord Price CVO
Minister of State Rt Hon Greg Hands MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Mark Garnier MP
Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Rt Hon Greg Clark MP
Minister of State Jo Johnson MP (jointly with the Department for Education)
Minister of State Nick Hurd MP
Minister of State Baroness Neville-Rolfe DBE CMG
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Margot James MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Jesse Norman MP
Department of Health
Secretary of State for Health Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt MP
Minister of State Philip Dunne MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Nicola Blackwood MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State David Mowat MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Lord Prior of Brampton
Department for Work and Pensions
Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Rt Hon Damian Green MP
Minister of State Penny Mordaunt MP
Minister of State Damian Hinds MP
Minister of State Lord Freud
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Caroline Nokes MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Richard Harrington MP
Department for Transport
Secretary of State for Transport Rt Hon Chris Grayling MP
Minister of State Rt Hon John Hayes MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Paul Maynard MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Andrew Jones MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
Department for Communities and Local Government
Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government Rt Hon Sajid Javid MP
Minister of State Gavin Barwell MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Andrew Percy MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Marcus Jones MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth (jointly with the Wales Office)
Office of the Leader of the House of Commons
Lord President of the Council, and Leader of the House of Commons Rt Hon David Lidington MP
Parliamentary Secretary (Deputy Leader of the House of Commons) Michael Ellis MP (and Assistant Whip (paid))
Office of the Leader of the House of Lords
Lord Privy Seal, and Leader of the House of Lords Rt Hon Baroness Evans of Bowes Park
Deputy Leader of the House of Lords Rt Hon Earl Howe (and Minister of State at the Ministry of Defence)
Scotland Office
Secretary of State for Scotland Rt Hon David Mundell MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Lord Dunlop (jointly with the Northern Ireland Office)
Wales Office
Secretary of State for Wales Rt Hon Alun Cairns MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Guto Bebb MP (and Government Whip (paid))
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth (jointly with the Department for Communities and Local Government)
Northern Ireland Office
Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Rt Hon James Brokenshire MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Kris Hopkins MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Lord Dunlop (jointly with the Scotland Office)
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Rt Hon Andrea Leadsom MP
Minister of State George Eustice MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Therese Coffey MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Lord Gardiner of Kimble
Department for International Development
Secretary of State for International Development Rt Hon Priti Patel MP
Minister of State Rory Stewart OBE MP
Minister of State Rt Hon Baroness Anelay of St Johns DBE (jointly with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office)
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State James Wharton MP
Cabinet Office
Paymaster General, and Minister for the Cabinet Office Rt Hon Ben Gummer MP
Parliamentary Secretary Chris Skidmore MP
Department for Culture, Media and Sport
Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Rt Hon Karen Bradley MP
Minister of State Rt Hon Matt Hancock MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Tracey Crouch MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Rob Wilson MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Baroness Shields OBE (jointly with the Home Office)
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Lord Ashton of Hyde (and a Lord in Waiting (paid))
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (and Conservative Party Chair) Rt Hon Patrick McLoughlin MP
Law Officers
Attorney General Jeremy Wright MP
Solicitor General Robert Buckland MP
Advocate General for Scotland Lord Keen of Elie QC
Whips House of Commons
Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury (Chief Whip) Rt Hon Gavin Williamson MP
Treasurer of HM Household (Deputy Chief Whip) Rt Hon Anne Milton MP
Comptroller of HM Household (Government Whip) Mel Stride MP
Vice Chamberlain of HM Household (Government Whip) Julian Smith MP
Junior Lords of the Treasury
Government Whip (Lord Commissioner of HM Treasury) David Evennett MP
Government Whip (Lord Commissioner of HM Treasury) Guto Bebb MP (and a Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Wales Office)
Government Whip (Lord Commissioner of HM Treasury) Stephen Barclay MP
Government Whip (Lord Commissioner of HM Treasury) Guy Opperman MP
Government Whip (Lord Commissioner of HM Treasury) Robert Syms MP
Government Whip (Lord Commissioner of HM Treasury) Andrew Griffiths MP
Assistant Whips
Assistant Government Whip Jackie Doyle-Price MP
Assistant Government Whip Graham Stuart MP
Assistant Government Whip Heather Wheeler MP
Assistant Government Whip Chris Heaton-Harris MP
Assistant Government Whip Mark Spencer MP
Assistant Government Whip Christopher Pincher MP
Assistant Government Whip Steve Brine MP
Assistant Government Whip Michael Ellis MP (and a Parliamentary Secretary in the Office of the Leader of the Commons)
Whips House of Lords
Captain of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen at Arms (Lords Chief Whip) Rt Hon Lord Taylor of Holbeach CBE
Captain of The Queens Bodyguard of the Yeomen of the Guard (Deputy Chief Whip) Earl of Courtown
Baronesses and Lords in Waiting
Baroness in Waiting Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen
Baroness in Waiting Baroness Goldie DL
Lord in Waiting Lord Ashton of Hyde (and a Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport)
Lord in Waiting Viscount Younger of Leckie
Other appointments
Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen as spokesperson on Cabinet Office business in the House of Lords
Lord Keen of Elie QC as spokesperson on Ministry of Justice business in the House of Lords
Lord Younger of Leckie as spokesperson on Higher Education business in the House of Lords.
George Hollingbery MP as the Prime Ministers Parliamentary Private Secretary
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Theresa May is set to hold her first face-to-face meetings with European leaders as Prime Minister when she travels to Berlin and Paris later this week.
While it is usual for incoming premiers to make early visits to establish personal links with key European leaders, this week's trip will be highly charged by the outcome of the European Union referendum and the need to shape a new relationship between the UK and its neighbours on the continent.
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Shortly after Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday she will travel to Berlin to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel and on Thursday will meet President Francois Hollande at the Elysee Palace.
A Downing Street spokeswoman said: The Prime Minister will make her first overseas visits this week.
On Wednesday, following Prime Minister's Questions, she will travel to Berlin for a bilateral meeting and a working dinner with Chancellor Merkel. This will be an opportunity to discuss the bilateral relationship, co-operation on a range of global challenges, and of course how the UK and Germany can work together as the UK prepares to leave the EU.
Then on Thursday, the Prime Minister will visit France for a bilateral meeting with President Hollande at the Elysee. The talks are likely to cover similar issues as those in Berlin, as well as Thursday's attack in Nice and counter-terrorism co-operation.
It comes after Ms May met with Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP First Minister, for talks in Edinburgh last week. After a 45-minute meeting, Ms May ruled out a second referendum on Scottish independence, which Ms Sturgeon has described as highly likely after Scots voted to remain in the EU while the UK as a whole voted for Brexit.
As far as Im concerned, the Scottish people have had their vote, they voted in 2014 and a very clear message came through. Both the United Kingdom and the Scottish Government said they would abide by that, Ms May said.
Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Show all 27 1 /27 Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Andrea Leadsom Andrea Leadsom has been appointed Secretary for Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Priti Patel Priti Patel has been appointed International Development Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Alun Cairns Alun Cairns will stay on as Welsh Secretary Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Karen Bradley Karen Bradley is now Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Rex Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Greg Clark Greg Clark has been appointed Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? James Brokenshire James Brokenshire has been appointed as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Stephen Crabb Stephen Crabb has resigned as Work and Pensions Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Theresa Villiers Theresa Villiers will not return as Northern Ireland Secretary. She was reportedly offered a role by Theresa May, but turned it down, saying it was not one she felt could take on Getty Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Chris Grayling Chris Grayling has been appointed Transport Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Damien Green Damien Green has been appointed Work and Pensions Secretary Getty Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Liz Truss Liz Truss has been appointed Justice Secretary Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Patrick McLoughlin Patrick McLoughlin who was Transport Secretary has been appointed Tory Party chairman and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Justine Greening Justine Greening has been appointed as Education Secretary Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Gavin Williamson Gavin Williamson is to become the new Government Chief Whip Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Jeremy Hunt Jeremy Hunt will continue as Health Secretary Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Nicky Morgan Nicky Morgan lost her job as Education Secretary Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Michael Gove Michael Gove has been sacked as Justice Secretary Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? John Whittingdale John Whittingdale left his job as Culture Secretary EPA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Oliver Letwin Oliver Letwin, the Chancellor for the Duchy of Lancaster, has been sacked from his role in the cabinet PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Philip Hammond The former Foreign Secretary has been made Chancellor EPA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Boris Johnson Leading Brexit campaigner is given the role of Foreign Secretary Getty Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Amber Rudd Leading Remain campaigner takes Theresa May's old job of Home Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Michael Fallon Stays as Defence Secretary AP Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? Liam Fox The former Defence Secretary is named as head of new Department for International Trade PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? David Davis The former shadow Home Secretary and leadership rival to David Cameron is named Secretary of State for Leaving the European Union - aka Brexit minister PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? George Osborne Gone as Chancellor - and fails to secure any new role in May's government GETTY Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in and who's out? David Mundell The Conservative Party's only Scottish MP retains his role as Scottish Secretary Getty Images
And on Monday the Prime Minister was greeted by Mr Jones on the Senedd steps before heading into his office to discuss post-Brexit Britain and the uncertainty surrounding Tata's steelworks in Port Talbot.
Ms May said: The Union is very important to me, and I'm pleased to visit Wales so early in my premiership. I've had a very constructive meeting with the First Minister and we've been talking about a number of issues including the United Kingdom leaving the EU.
"What I want to see is the best possible deal for the whole of the United Kingdom, and I want the Welsh Government to be involved in the discussions. That's why I am here."
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MPs have overwhelmingly backed the renewal of Britains Trident nuclear weapons system, voting 472 to 117 in favour of the motion.
The vote, supported with a majority of 355, supports the governments plans to replace the four Vanguard class submarines with four Successor submarines.
Renewal of the continuous-at-sea deterrent is predicted to cost 31 billion, with a 10 billion contingency fund also set aside.
The vote was predicted to pass, with nearly all Conservatives backing the motion and the Labour Party divided on the issue.
Labour MPs were subject to a free vote, with leader Jeremy Corbyn declaring he would oppose the motion - a stance which led to strong criticism from some of his backbenchers.
Labour sources have said they believe 138 Labour MPs voted for the motion, 48 against, with 45 not present, meaning around 60 per cent of all Labour MPs voted with the government for Trident renewal.
It is understood 58 of Parliament's 59 Scottish MPs voted against Trident renewal. The SNP is now calling for the withdrawal of Nuclear weapons from Scotland.
A statement from Angus Robertson the SNP's Parliamentary Group Leader and spokesperson on the Constitution in the House of Commons said: The UK government must respect Scotlands clear decision against Trident renewal and remove these nuclear weapons of mass destruction from the Clyde.
It would be democratically unacceptable if in the face of this clear opposition the UK government were to impose Trident nuclear weapons on the Clyde against Scotlands wishes.
A debate on Monday lasting almost six hours saw Theresa May made her first despatch box appearance as Prime Minister in which she said it would be a "an act of gross irresponsibility" for the UK to scrap its nuclear weapons and accused opponents of the UKs Trident missile system of being "the first to defend the country's enemies".
Which countries have nuclear weapons? Show all 14 1 /14 Which countries have nuclear weapons? Which countries have nuclear weapons? USA Have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Russia Have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? UK Have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? France Have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? China Have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? India Say they have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Pakistan Say they have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? North Korea Say they have nuclear weapons EPA/Rodong Sinmun Which countries have nuclear weapons? Israel Believed to have nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Belgium Nations hosting nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Germany Nations hosting nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Italy Nations hosting nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Netherlands Nations hosting nuclear weapons Getty Which countries have nuclear weapons? Turkey Nations hosting nuclear weapons Getty
Despite former Prime Ministers avoiding answering the hypothetical question of whether they would ever press the nuclear button, Ms May declared without hesitation in the debate that she would order a nuclear strike to kill hundreds of thousands of people if she thought it was necessary.
Ms May was challenged by the SNPs George Kerevan, who asked: "Are you prepared to authorise a nuclear strike that could kill hundreds of thousands of men, women and children?
Ms May replied with one word: Yes.
Mr Corbyn questioned if the "weapons of mass destruction" act as a credible deterrent to the threats faced by the UK, adding he would not take a decision that "kills millions of innocent people" - a nod to his stance that he would not authorise the use of nuclear weapons.
However, Mr Corbyn's opposition was labelled "juvenile" and "narcissistic" by Jamie Reed, Labour MP for Copeland, who said shadow cabinet members who voted against Trident should resign and return to the backbenches because they would be voting against Labour Party policy.
Officially, Parliament was being asked to agree to spend up to around 30 billion renewing the four Trident submarines that are equipped with nuclear missiles and warheads. Every hour of the day or night, there is always one submarine patrolling the sea.
Trident was originally bought from the USA by Margaret Thatcher as a last ditch defence in case the armies of the former Warsaw Pact, which was disbanded in 1989, overran Europe.
Additional reporting from agencies
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A convicted burglar is suing a homeowner who shot him while he was attempting to break in to the house.
During the break-in, the alarm in the garage went off and the homeowner saw a man running away.
He opened fire on the man and was later convicted of criminal recklessness.
The thief, David Bailey, pleaded guilty to burglary.
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Two years after the incident, he has filed a lawsuit in Indiana against the homeowner, David McLaughlin.
My client thinks its outrageous and I tend to agree, said Mr McLaughlins attorney Brian Pierce, as reported by WXIN news.
You dont ordinarily expect someone to burglarize you and turn around and sue you for damages.
I think the claim is absurd. In Indiana, every homeowner has a right to defend their property and that may include using a firearm, added Mr Pierce.
The top 20 Britain's burglary hotspots Show all 20 1 /20 The top 20 Britain's burglary hotspots The top 20 Britain's burglary hotspots 20) MK46 Olney The top 20 Britain's burglary hotspots 19) RM11 Hornchurch, Emerson Park, Ardleigh Green The top 20 Britain's burglary hotspots 18) HA7 Stanmore, Queensbury, Belmont The top 20 Britain's burglary hotspots 17) IG3 Seven Kings, Goodmayes The top 20 Britain's burglary hotspots 16) LS5 Hawksworth, Kirkstall The top 20 Britain's burglary hotspots 15) M21 Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Barlow Moor The top 20 Britain's burglary hotspots 14) SW14 Mortlake district The top 20 Britain's burglary hotspots 13) SE24 Herne Hill and North Tulse Hill The top 20 Britain's burglary hotspots 12) W10 North Kensington district The top 20 Britain's burglary hotspots 11) B70 West Bromwich The top 20 Britain's burglary hotspots 10) TW11 Teddington The top 20 Britain's burglary hotspots 9) IG6 Barkingside, Hainault (south) The top 20 Britain's burglary hotspots 8) N11 New Southgate district The top 20 Britain's burglary hotspots 7) EN4 Hadley Wood, Cockfosters, East Barnet, New Barnet The top 20 Britain's burglary hotspots 6) TW5 Heston, Cranford (north), Osterley (west) The top 20 Britain's burglary hotspots 5) N20 Whetstone district The top 20 Britain's burglary hotspots 4) IG2 Gants Hill, Newbury Park, Aldborough Hatch The top 20 Britain's burglary hotspots 3) IG4 Redbridge The top 20 Britain's burglary hotspots 2) IG5 Clayhall The top 20 Britain's burglary hotspots 1) SE21 South Tulse Hill and Dulwich
According to court documents, As the plaintiff (Bailey) was running down the alley away from defendant's residence, the defendant (McLaughlin) continued to the public right-of-way (and off his property) and continued firing his weapon down the dark alley.
The document alleges that Mr Bailey was shot three times, and the third round hit him in the back of the arm, piercing an artery and causing permanent damage".
The plaintiff has alleged that Mr McLaughlin had no idea what he was firing at.
Mr Bailey has also claimed he never actually entered Mr McLaughlins home and is seeking an unspecified amount of damages.
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Donald Trumps motorcade has been involved in an accident on the first day of the Republican convention, according to campaign officials.
The accident comes as Republicans caused chaos on the convention floor, failing to force a roll call vote on changing the rules and to stop Mr Trump from clinching the nomination.
Mr Trump was not injured in the crash, said his spokesman, Paul Manafort.
The businessman was reportedly being driven to the airport in New York City with his wife, Melania Trump, on his way to Cleveland where he is due to speak Monday evening.
The presumptive Republican nominee is still in for a bumpy ride this week as many Republicans are dissatisfied with his likely leadership, and several prominent party members, including George W Bush, are skipping the event.
Some Republicans called out from the floor: "Shame!", while others chanted back: "We want Trump!"
Mr Trump's plane, nicknamed Trump Force One, had to make an emergency landing in February at Nashville International Airport as he was on his way to Arkansas after a rally in Iowa.
Donbas militants conducted 78 attacks on Ukrainian army positions on Monday, including by use of 122mm artillery and 120mm mortars, the press center of the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) headquarters wrote on Facebook on Tuesday morning.
"The enemy fired 122mm artillery systems near the village of Myronivsky and Pisky in Donetsk region. Besides, 120mm mortars were used near the villages of Mayorsk, Nyznye Lozove, Zaitseve, Luhanske and the town of Avdiyivka," it said.
According to the press center, 82mm mortars shelled Avdiyivka, the villages of Kamyanka, Pisky, Zaitseve, Troyitske, Opytne, and Nevelske. Grenade launchers, large-caliber machine-guns, an anti-aircraft gun and an infantry combat vehicle attacked Ukrainian army positions near Novhorodske, it said.
In the Mariupol sector, illegal armed formations opened 120mm mortar fire on Ukrainian army positions near the towns of Maryinka and Krasnohorivka, and the village of Starohnativka. Militants used 82mm mortars, grenade launchers and small arms in the village of Vodiane, and lobbed shells of grenade launchers, large-caliber machineguns and weapons of armored vehicles into Maryinka, the report said.
In the Luhansk sector, the enemy's 120mm mortars shelled Ukrainian army fortifications in the village of Krymske, Novo-Oleksandrivka and Troyitske, and 82mm mortars, grenade launchers and large-caliber machineguns were used near the village of Stanytsia Luhanska, the report said.
According to the press center, 34 out of the78 shelling incidents occurred in the Donetsk sector, 22 in the Mariupol sector, and 13 in the Luhansk sector.
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A Brazilian Jihadist group has pledged allegiance to Isis just weeks before the Olympic Games are due to take place in Rio de Janeiro.
According to extremist monitoring group SITE Intelligence, a channel on the Telegram app called Ansar al-Khilafah #Brazil has posted a message of support for Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Portuguese and Spanish versions of Isis's Nashir Telegram channel have also been released for the first time.
It is believed to be the first pledge of allegiance to the group, also known as Daesh and Islamic State, to come from South America.
US Secretary of State John Kerry told CNN on Sunday that recent terror attacks by Islamist extremists were a result of Isis being on the run.
He claimed Isis had lost 40 to 45 per cent of its territory in Iraq and Syria.
Analysts say such attacks are likely to continue, or even get worse, if Isis is driven underground.
These guys have all the energy and unpredictability of a populist movement, said Michael Hayden, a retired Air Force general who led the CIA from 2006 to 2009.
Isis has admitted they may be losing ground, but a long-time Isis operative claimed that they have been able to expand and have shifted some of our command, media and wealth structure to different countries.
We do have, every day, people reaching out and telling us they want to come to the caliphate, said the operative in an interview.
In pictures: Iraq battles to drive Isis out of Fallujah Show all 12 1 /12 In pictures: Iraq battles to drive Isis out of Fallujah In pictures: Iraq battles to drive Isis out of Fallujah Smoke rises after airstrikes by US-led coalition planes as Iraqi security forces advance against Islamic State extremists in Fallujah, June 15, 2016 AP In pictures: Iraq battles to drive Isis out of Fallujah Iraqi security forces advance during heavy fighting against Isis militants in Fallujah, Iraq, on 14 June AP In pictures: Iraq battles to drive Isis out of Fallujah Shia militia say that moving resources from Fallujah towards the area near Mosul was a 'betrayal' of the battle for the city GETTY In pictures: Iraq battles to drive Isis out of Fallujah Hospital sources said 18 bodies were recovered from the river over the weekend AP In pictures: Iraq battles to drive Isis out of Fallujah Up to 60,000 civilians were feared trapped in Fallujah at the start of the Iraqi operation AP In pictures: Iraq battles to drive Isis out of Fallujah Shia fighters hold an Isis flag in an operation east of Fallujah the terror group has lost ground in both Syria and Iraq AFP/Getty In pictures: Iraq battles to drive Isis out of Fallujah Shia fighters hold their weapons as they gather near Falluja, Iraq, June 4, 2016. Reuters In pictures: Iraq battles to drive Isis out of Fallujah Pro-government forces bid to take back ground from Isis in Fallujah MOADH AL-DULAIMI/AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Iraq battles to drive Isis out of Fallujah Smoke billows on the horizon as Iraqi military forces prepare for an offensive to retake the city AP In pictures: Iraq battles to drive Isis out of Fallujah A member of the Iraqi security forces fires artillery during clashes with Isis militants near Fallujah, Iraq, 29 May, 2016 Reuters In pictures: Iraq battles to drive Isis out of Fallujah Iraqi government forces fire a rocket near al-Sejar village, north-east of Fallujah, on May 26, 2016, as they take part in a major assault to retake the city from the Islamic State group AFP/Getty In pictures: Iraq battles to drive Isis out of Fallujah Shia fighters and Iraqi security forces advance towards Fallujah Thaier Al-Sudani/Reuters
But we tell them to stay in their countries and rather wait to do something there.
Some 7.5 million tickets to watch the Olympic Games are due to be sold, with over 500,000 tourists expected to arrive in Brazil.
Security measures at Brazils main airports were increased following Thursdays attacks in Nice, causing chaos as passengers waited in queues so long that dozens ended up missing their flights.
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A Kansas City police captain has been shot and killed.
Police have one suspect in custody and are on the lookout for another.
The Kansas City Star reported that police reponded to a disturbance call in a residential neighbourhood around 1.30pm local time.
A person reportedly told 911 operators that they were being shot at by multiple people in a vehicle.
Multiple suspects fled from the scene as law enforcement has surrounded the residential area.
Police captain David Melton was shot 30 minutes after the initial call, as he was driving towards the shooting suspects in his car.
He later died in hospital from his injuries, according to the AP.
According to his LinkedIn page, Mr Melton began to work as a police lieutenant in Wyandotte County Sheriff's office in November 1990, working for the Kansas Army National Guard and joining the Kansas City force as a patrol officer in 1999.
Rob Zerwekh/Twitter
Dozens of SWAT officers were reportedly on the scene. They cleared a woman and her children from the area after she came out of the house, her hands raised, and spoke with them.
Start prayers, police chief Terry Zeigler tweeted Tuesday afternoon, in response to the injured officer.
According to the Star, this is the second cop to be shot in Kansas City, Kansas, in 2016.
Detective Brad Lancaster, 39, was shot and killed on 9 May while assisting other officers on a suspicious person call. He had served on the force for 20 years.
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A Republican politician at the party convention was caught out on live television making comments that appeared similar to white supremacist ideology.
After being accused by Esquire writer Charles Pierce of filling up the convention hall with unhappy, dissatisfied white people, Republican congressman of Iowa, Steve King, responded that the whole white people business' does get a little tired.
Id ask you to go back through history and figure out, where have these contributions been made by these other categories of people that youre talking about," he said.
"Where did any other sub-group of people contribute more to civilization?"
MSNBC interviewer Chris Hayes asked: Than white people?"
Thanthan western civilization itself, thats rooted in western Europe, eastern Europe, and the United States of America, and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world, Mr King replied. Thats all of western civilization.
His comments come as the Republican convention kicks off this week, the same day that presumptive nominee Donald Trump and his wife Melania are set to speak.
Mr King was criticized last week after he told a local television station in Sioux City, Iowa, that he kept a Confederate flag on his desk.
He argued the flag had been sitting alongside an American and a Gadsden flag on his desk for a long, long time. He also said slavery was a small part of the Civil War.
Donald Trump's most controversial quotes Show all 14 1 /14 Donald Trump's most controversial quotes Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On Isis: "Some of the candidates, they went in and didnt know the air conditioner didnt work and sweated like dogs, and they didnt know the room was too big because they didnt have anybody there. How are they going to beat ISIS?" Getty Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On immigration: "I will build a great wall and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me and Ill build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words." Reuters Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On Free Trade: "Free trade is terrible. Free trade can be wonderful if you have smart people. But we have stupid people." PAUL J. RICHARDS | AFP | Getty Images Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On Mexicans: "When Mexico sends its people, theyre not sending their best. Theyre sending people that have lots of problems. Theyre bringing drugs. Theyre bringing crime. Theyre rapists." Getty Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On China: "I just sold an apartment for $15 million to somebody from China. Am I supposed to dislike them?... I love China. The biggest bank in the world is from China. You know where their United States headquarters is located? In this building, in Trump Tower." Getty Images Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On work: "If you're interested in 'balancing' work and pleasure, stop trying to balance them. Instead make your work more pleasurable." AP Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On success: "What separates the winners from the losers is how a person reacts to each new twist of fate." Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On life: "Everything in life is luck." AFP Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On ambition: "You have to think anyway, so why not think big?" Getty Images Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On his opponents: "Bush is totally in favour of Common Core. I don't see how he can possibly get the nomination. He's weak on immigration. He's in favour of Common Core. How the hell can you vote for this guy? You just can't do it." Reuters Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On Obamacare: "You have to be hit by a tractor, literally, a tractor, to use it, because the deductibles are so high. It's virtually useless. And remember the $5 billion web site?... I have so many web sites, I have them all over the place. I hire people, they do a web site. It costs me $3." Getty Images Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On Barack Obama: "Obama is going to be out playing golf. He might be on one of my courses. I would invite him. I have the best courses in the world. I have one right next to the White House." PA Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On himself: "Love him or hate him, Trump is a man who is certain about what he wants and sets out to get it, no holds barred. Women find his power almost as much of a turn-on as his money." Getty Images Donald Trump's most controversial quotes On America: "The American Dream is dead. But if I get elected president I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before and we will make America great again." GETTY
This is a free country and theres freedom of speech, he said. And, by the way, Id encourage people to go back and read the real history of the Civil War and find out what it was about. A small part of it was about slavery, but there was a big part of it that was about states rights, it was about people that defended their homeland and fought next to their neighbors and their family.
Mr King has previously come under fire for claiming in December that Muslims who follow Shariah law are incompatible with the United States constitution.
He also proposed an amendment in June to keep slave-turned-activist and abolitionist Harriet Tubman off the new 20 dollar bill, blaming liberal activism for causing further division amongst Americans.
The House Rules Committee prevented a vote, however, which could have thwarted the Treasurys plans.
Mr King could not be immediately reached for comment.
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The mother of a US foreign servicemen killed in the 2012 Benghazi attack was cheered by Republicans in Cleveland saying Hillary Clinton should be in stripes for lying about what happened.
I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son, a distressed and seemingly nervous Patricia Smith said at the first night of the partys convention in Ohio as she recounted losing her son, Sean Smith, one of four Americans killed in the assault.
Ms Smith, barely containing tears, was the first in a list of speakers at the Monday evening session that was partly dedicated to replaying the tragedy even though a recent Senate report absolved Ms Clinton, who was US Secretary of State at the time, of any wrongdoing.
The programme included a long appearance by Mark Geist and John Tiegen, who were part of Benghazi annex security team and were among the first Americans to get to the scene after the attack and later wrote a book about it, Thirteen Hours, that was later made into a film.
It was a theme designed also to highlight Donald Trumps promises to put America First in foreign policy and the assertion that recent terror attacks and other crises, including the failed coup in Turkey, are a result of Ms Clintons term as chief diplomat for President Barack Obama.
The fall-out from the attack, which also killed the US Ambassador in Libya, Christopher Stevens, included claims that Ms Clinton deliberately mischaracterised what turned out to have been a terror attack as a spontaneous response to a video released hours earlier that insulted Islam.
I saw Hillary Clinton at Seans coffin ceremony and she looked me in the eye and told me a video was responsible. since then I have repeatedly asked Hillary Clinton to explain to me the real reason why my son is dead, Ms Smith said. I am still waiting.
Shortly before finishing Ms Smith heard a voice in the throng of delegates saying Ms Clinton should be in prison. And departing from the speech that was prepared on the teleprompter, she looked down and said, That is right, Hillary for prison. She deserves to be in stripes.
Donald Trump is everything Hillary Clinton is not. He is blunt, direct, and strong. He speaks his mind and his heart, Ms Smith told a packed house of delegates in the Quicken Loans Arena. If Hillary Clinton cant give us the truth, why should we give her the presidency?
When the theme shifted later in the evening to the issue of immigration - and Mr Trumps vow to crack down on illegal immigration and build a wall on the Mexican border - video screens showed the brother and sister of a former soldier who was killed in 2014 patrolling the border in Arizona speaking from the same spot where he lost his life.
And introducing grieving mothers for political effect became a meme of the night. Also bought to the stage was another mother, Mary Mendoza, who spoke of losing her son, a police officer, to a man who she said was driving high on drugs, and drunk on alcohol, and who, she said, had come into the country illegally.
I had my son stolen from me by a manwho had no business being in this country, Ms Mendoza. My sons life was stolen at the hands of an illegal, its time we had an administration that cares more about Americans than about illegals. A vote for Hillary is putting all our childrens lives at risk, its time for Donald Trump.
Extolling the promise of stronger foreign leadership under Mr Trump, Mike McCaul, the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee in the House of Representatives, drew loud applause berating President Barack Obama's record. Are you safer than you were eight years ago? Is our military stronger? Is America still respected?, he asked, drawn chants of 'No! from delegates.
It's time to unify as a party...Donald will never allow terrorists to gain ground against America, he would shake the ground they walk on,, he added.
.
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Donald Trumps campaign chairman Paul Manafort has blamed the furore over an apparently plagiarised section of Melania Trumps convention speech on her husbands Democratic presidential rival, calling it another example of when Hillary Clinton is threatened by a female, the first thing she does is try to destroy that person.
What appeared on Monday evening to be an effective performance from Mr Trumps third wife turned into a PR disaster overnight, as it emerged that at least two paragraphs of her primetime speech to the Republican convention in Cleveland bore stark similarities to Michelle Obamas address to the Democratic convention in 2008.
Mr Manafort insisted Ms Trumps was a great speech, recalling its focus on her love for her husband and their family. Obviously Michelle Obama feels very similar sentiments towards her family, he said, adding: We dont believe theres anything in that speech that doesnt reflect [Ms Trumps] thinking.
Faulting the media for focusing on the two suspect paragraphs in a speech of more than 1,400 words, Mr Manafort suggested it was the Clinton campaign that had stoked the controversy. Buzzfeed reported that the 2008 speech was written by Sarah Hurwitz, a former speechwriter for Ms Clinton who now works as a special assistant to President Obama.
It is thought the first person to note the similarities between the two speeches was journalist Jarrett Hill.
Ms Trump, 46, had approached her husbands campaign asking to speak at the convention, Mr Manafort claimed on Tuesday, telling them she wanted the people of the United States to see the man I love. Without explicitly denying or admitting that the section in question had been borrowed from Ms Obama, Mr Manafort insisted Ms Trumps words were personal to her, adding: Words like care and compassion Those are not extraordinary words. They are normal words.
Mr Trump tweeted on Monday night that his wifes speech and demeanour were absolutely incredible.
In an interview with NBC before delivering her speech, Ms Trump said she had written it herself with as little help as possible. According to Mr Trumps senior communications adviser, Jason Miller, the Slovenian former model had a team of writers who took notes on her lifes inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking.
Ms Trump is known to be a reluctant political spouse, who has rarely surfaced on the campaign trail in recent months. That her most high-profile appearance to date should leave her mired in controversy will surely do little to encourage her to return to the stump. This is what we were so afraid of, Republican consultant Nicole Wallace told broadcaster MSNBC, even suggesting that the Trumps marriage is on the line over the incident.
Mr Manaforts predecessor Corey Lewandowski, who was fired from the campaign in June, suggested the person at fault ought to be fired, saying on Tuesday: If the staff did not do their job properly there should be accountability.
Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus appeared to agree with that sentiment, saying he would punish the writer responsible. Certainly I dont blame [Ms Trump] for anything, he told Bloomberg.
In her speech, Ms Trump said: From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life: that your word is your bond, and you do what you say and keep your promise. That you treat people with respect. They taught and showed me values and morals in their daily life.
That is a message that I continue to pass along to our son. And we need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow. Because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.
The excerpt closely resembled a portion of Ms Obamas 2008 DNC address, in which the future First Lady said: Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: like, you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond; that you do what you say youre going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect even if you dont know them and even if you dont agree with them.
And Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values and to pass them onto the next generation, because we want our children and all children in this nation to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work hard for them.
Commentators agreed that such a blatant oversight was unfathomable, even coming from the famously disorganised Trump campaign. Mr Obamas former chief speechwriter Jon Favreau told Buzzfeed he had no idea how the mistake might have occurred. A stray line or phrase could be a mistake. Two full paragraphs from the current First Lady is just incomprehensible, Mr Favreau said. I cant believe someone would do that to her.
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A woman in Minnesota has been accused of enslaving, beating and starving her nanny in a wealthy suburb outside St. Paul.
The unnamed 58-year-old nanny claims that Lili Huang, 35, beat and starved her for several months. Huang has since been charged with five felony counts related to human labor trafficking including false imprisonment and assault.
The nanny arrived in the US from Shanghai, China in late March, was forced to work 18 hours a day and did not receive any of her pay, which came to roughly $2 an hour, according to a press release by Washington Countys district attorney. The woman was found wandering the streets with two black eyes, broken ribs, broken sternum, officials said in the release.
According to the criminal complaint, Huang kept the victims passport and told her she wasnt allowed to leave the country after she was physically assaulted and said she wanted to return home. The nanny also claims that she weighed 120 pounds when she arrived in the states and that she now weighs 88 pounds after she was only given scraps of food to eat.
On several occasions, according to the complaint, Huang prevented the nanny from leaving the house, threatened to kill her with a knife, and beat the nanny in front of her own children.
Agents with the US Department of Homeland Security found a bag of hair under the nannys mattress, which the nanny said Huang had ripped from her head. She claims she hid the hair so Huang wouldnt force her to eat it.
Human labor trafficking is a crime that no one can believe exists in their community, Washington County prosecutor Pete Orput wrote in the release. However, it is here, it is being committed by some of our citizens, and it amounts to nothing less than slavery in the 21st century. We are determined, as part of this offices Major Prosecution unit, to attack this issue just as we have attacked sex trafficking of juveniles.
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A man has been arrested after he stabbed a woman and her three daughters at the Alps resort of Colombe in southern France.
Initial reports claimed the man had attacked them because he was upset they were wearing shorts and T-shirts, but a local prosecutor denied the claim.
"I wanted to quash the rumour currently doing the rounds because on no account did this man make such comments about the fact that the attack may have been motivated by the victims' dress code," Raphael Balland, prosecutor of Gap, said at a press conference.
The prosecutor also said the attack had no link to religious fundamentalism.
World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty
The man reportedly attacked the three girls on the terrace of their hcalat around 10am, before going to attack their mother inside.
The mother, 36, and two of her daughters aged 12 and 14 are being treated at the central hospital of Gap, close to the scene of the attack.
Her other daughter, an eight-year-old, was rushed to hospital in Grenoble with a punctured lung.
The attacker, a 37-year-old man from Morocco, was on holiday with his pregnant wife and two children, local media reports.
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Police have found a "hand painted Isis flag" in the room of the 17-year-old Afghan refugee who assaulted several passengers in Germany, the Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann has said.
About 20 people were injured, including two who are in a life-threatening condition, during the attack on train close to the city of Wurzburg in Bavaria on Monday night.
The attacker, who was later shot dead by police, reportedly shouted "Allahu Akbar" (God is great) during the incident. He had moved from a home for unaccompanied minor refugees to a foster family just weeks ago, and had lived in Germany for two years.
Mr Herrmann told ZDF Morning Magazine the perpetrator had acted alone.
According to the Federal Police about 25 to 30 people had been sitting in the regional of Treuchtlingen to Wurzburg.
Most victims were from China, visiting Germany as tourists.
Eyewitness Thomas Velten, who went to see what had happened after the train stopped, told the Main Post the carriage was "like a battlefield" with a large amount of blood.
Police said the attacker had used "blunt" and "slashing" weapons. These were said to have been an axe and a knife, according to local media.
In May, a 27-year-old German killed one person and injured several others in a similar knife attack at a railway station near Munich.
World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty
The suspect reportedly shouted Allahu Akbar (God is great) as he started stabbing passers-by in the town of Grafing, to the south-east of the German city.
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German police have shot and killed an Aghan teenager who attacked passengers on a train with an axe and a knife, in an incident which is likely to worsen the divide in public opinion in the country over the refugee crisis.
Witnesses described a train carriage that was left "like a battlefield" covered in blood after the unnamed 17-year-old injured four people, believed to be members of the same family originating from Hong Kong.
Police in Wurzburg, Bavaria said on their Facebook page that three of the victims suffered serious injuries and one was slightly injured. Another 14 people were being treated for shock.
And Bavaria's most senior security official, state interior minister Joachim Hermann, told ARD TV the attacker was understood to have travelled to Germany as an unaccompanied refugee minor.
Marcel Dirsus, a political analyst at Kiel University, told the BBC's Radio 4 that the incident was "bound to exacerbate anger" over the country's open door refugee policy.
In pictures: German train axe attack Show all 8 1 /8 In pictures: German train axe attack In pictures: German train axe attack Blood stains are seen on the regional train on which a man allegedly wielding an axe attacked passengers in Wuerzburg EPA In pictures: German train axe attack A patch of blood and the remains of bandaging material lie on a sidewalk near Wuerzburg EPA In pictures: German train axe attack The body of a 17-years-old attacker is carried to a hearse in Wuerzburg AP In pictures: German train axe attack Police officers search for evidence near Wuerzburg EPA In pictures: German train axe attack Police stand by the regional train on which a man wielding an axe attacked passengers in Wuerzburg EPA In pictures: German train axe attack Firefighters stand at a road block in Wuerzburg EPA In pictures: German train axe attack Rescuers gather on a road near railtracks in Wuerzburg after a man attacked train passengers with an axe AFP/Getty Images In pictures: German train axe attack German emergency services work in the area where a man with an axe attacked passengers on a train Reuters
He said: "This is a tragedy, but it is really a tragedy beyond the people who are directly affected, because this is a very contentious issue in Germany, the way we are dealing with refugees.
"And in a society that is already polarised over the issue, this is bound to exacerbate anger and division."
German officials did not identify the victims, but Hong Kong's immigration department said that among those injured in the attack were four members of a family of five from the territory.
The South China Morning Post newspaper reported that the family members hurt included the 62-year-old father, 58-year-old mother, 27-year-old daughter and her 31-year-old boyfriend.
A fifth family member, a 17-year-old son, was not hurt. The paper did not cite its source.
The department said it is working to provide assistance to the family but did give not give details of their injuries. Hong Kong's top official, Chief Executive Leung Chun-Ying, condemned the attack and extended his sympathies to the victims.
Germany last year registered over a million migrants entering the country, including more than 150,000 Afghans, but it was not immediately clear whether the suspect was among them or someone who had arrived in the country earlier.
Mr Herrmann said initial information was that the suspect had lived in the Wuerzburg area for some time, initially at a refugee facility in the town of Ochsenfurt and more recently with a foster family.
German emergency services work in the area where a man with an axe attacked passengers on a train (Reuters)
He said authorities were still investigating the motive of the attack and were looking into reports that the suspect had yelled out "an exclamation" during the rampage.
He was responding to reports that some witnesses had heard the suspect shout "Allahu Akbar" ("God Is Great") during the attack.
The regional train was on its way from the Bavarian town of Treuchtlingen to Wuerzburg, which is about 60 miles north-west of Nuremberg.
Eyewitness Thomas Velten, who went to see what had happened after the train stopped, told the Post the carriage was "like a battlefield" with a large amount of blood.
Local media reported that the suspect had been trying to flee the train when he was killed.
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A mother-of-two has been gored to death during a bull run in southern Spain.
Sofia Lopez Gonzalez, 47, was caught on the horn of a heifer causing a fatal injury to her abdomen. She died later in hospital
She had been leaning between the bars of a grill-covered doorway when the heifer charged, reports La Opinion de Murcia.
Ms Gonzalez attempted to pull back behind the grill but her backpack got caught in the barrier preventing her from escaping.
The fatal incident occured on the final bull run of the week-long Fiesta del Cristo del Rayo in the southern Spanish town of Moratalla.
Three days of morning were announced by Moratalla town hall.
Ms Gonzalez is the third death by goring during Spanish fiestas this summer, with a 28-year-old killed in Pedreguer erarlier this month and a 65-year-old being killed during a bull run in Zamora.
Two injured in bull run on second day in Pamplona
Matador Victor Barrio was gored to death on 9 July in Madrid, the first bullfighter to be killed in the ring for 30 years.
Representatives of the so-called separate districts in Donetsk region are not satisfied with Kyiv's prisoner-of-war swap proposals and demand the all-for-all format, claiming an "unreal" list of 600 people for exchange, Iryna Gerashchenko, Ukraine's representative in the Trilateral Contact Group's humanitarian subgroup and first deputy parliament speaker, has said.
"I've got a letter from the OSCE in the morning with an answer from the separate districts in Donetsk region and the so-called 'commissioner' on all our POW swap proposals. It says that they disagree with the Ukrainian side's proposals that 25 captives be released in exchange for 50 their people they requested and our proposal to return them eight "sappers" to free our hostages, and demand the all-for-all exchange," she wrote on Facebook on Tuesday morning.
Gerashchenko says that the other side submitted an "unreal" list of 600 people who they want to be returned half of them simply do not exit, "we don't know who and where these people are."
She says that the Ukrainian side is open to a compromise and ready to search for the people, but the Donetsk representatives discard all calls to "the logic, humanism and realism."
"This is what terrorists are. And so are all who are engaged in such victimization of Ukrainian hostages these are real Somali pirates wearing St. George ribbons [orange and black-striped ribbon used in Russia and Donbas as Russian World insignia].
As was reported earlier, a Trilateral Contact Group meeting on the settlement of the Donbas conflict in Minsk on July 13 yielded no response to the Ukrainian proposals as for POW swaps.
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Several Turkish navy ships are still unaccounted for, their commanders suspected to be among the plotters who sought to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Admiral Veysel Kosele, the commander of the Turkish navy, has not been heard from since the failed coup on Friday, a source told The Times.
It is currently unknown whether he was part of the coup or was tricked on to the boat after coup plotters told him there was a terrorist attack and then taken hostage, local media reports suggested.
In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Show all 17 1 /17 In pictures: Turkey coup attempt In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish President Erdogan attends the funeral service for victims of the thwarted coup in Istanbul at Fatih mosque on July 17, 2016 in Istanbul, Turkey Burak Kara/Getty Images In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Soldiers involved in the coup attempt surrender on Bosphorus bridge with their hands raised in Istanbul on 16 July, 2016 Gokhan Tan/Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt A civilian beats a soldier after troops involved in the coup surrendered on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey, 16 July, 2016 REUTERS/Murad Sezer In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Surrendered Turkish soldiers who were involved in the coup are beaten by a civilian Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Soliders involved in the coup attempt surrender on Bosphorus bridge Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wave flags as they capture a Turkish Army vehicle Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt People pose near a tank after troops involved in the coup surrendered on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey, 16 July, 2016 Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish soldiers block Istanbul's Bosphorus Brigde Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt A Turkish military stands guard near the Taksim Square in Istanbul Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Pierre Crom/Twitter In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish soldiers secure the area as supporters of Recep Tayyip Erdogan protest in Istanbul's Taksim square AP In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Murad Sezer/Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish soldiers detain police officers during a security shutdown of the Bosphorus Bridge Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish Army armoured personnel carriers in the main streets of Istanbul Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Chaos reigned in Istanbul as tanks drove through the streets EPA/TOLGA BOZOGLU In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan speaks to media in the resort town of Marmaris Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Supporters of President Erdogan celebrate in Ankara following the suppression of the attempted coup Reuters
The 14 missing ships were reportedly on active duty in either the Aegean or the Black Sea and have not tried to make contact with naval headquarters or report back to the port.
Recommended Read more Everything you need to know about the Turkey coup
It is suspected they may be heading to Greek ports. On Saturday, eight Turkish military officers took a helicopter to Greece to seek asylum.
Turkey's state-run news agency said courts have ordered 85 generals and admirals jailed pending trial over their roles in the botched coup attempt. Dozens of others are still being questioned.
Anadolu Agency said those formally arrested include former air force commander General Akin Ozturk, alleged to be the ringleader of the uprising, and General Adem Hududi, commander of Turkey's 2nd Army, which is in charge of countering possible threats to Turkey from Syria, Iran and Iraq.
Authorities have rounded up thousands alleged to have been involved in the coup, in which 208 government supporters and 24 coup plotters were killed. The government says Fethullah Gulen, a US-based Muslim cleric, was behind the coup.
Turkey failed coup: Thousands detained or dismissed
Thousands of officials suspected of links to him were purged from the judiciary and the Interior Ministry.
During the uprising, warplanes fired on government buildings and tanks rolled into the streets of major cities before the rebellion was put down by forces loyal to the government and pro-Erdogan civilians who took to the streets. The top brass did not support the coup.
EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said at a news conference with US Secretary of State John Kerry that the coup "is no excuse to take the country away from fundamental rights and the rule of law, and we will be extremely vigilant on that."
Mr Kerry said Turkey must "uphold the highest standards for the country's democratic institutions and the rule of law."
While he recognized the need to apprehend the coup plotters, he added: "We caution against a reach that goes beyond that."
Mostafa Minawi, director of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Initiative at Cornell University, called the failed coup "a gift for President Erdogan, given him all the justification he needs to implement further clamp down measures against any dissenters, in the process sinking Turkey deeper into authoritarianism."
Additional reporting by agencies
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President Erdogan has punished 18,000 people following a failed coup against him in Turkey.
Over 7,500 military personnel and judges have been detained after the attempted coup and another 10,000 civil servants, police officers and state governors are suspended.
Almost all of the major military stations have lost a commander following the crackdown.
The figures comes after Mr Erdogan vowed to purge the virus of his enemies from state institutions.
The numbers arrested from the military and navy mean one third of the countrys high ranking officers have been detained.
Senior military officers have started arriving in court after being charged with establishing an armed terrorist organisation, attempting to abolish the constitutional order and "intentional killing".
Another 100 senior officers have been charged with "high-treason" and may receive the death penalty.
Capital punishment has not been used in Turkey since 1984 and was outlawed in 2004, but Mr Erdogan's supporters have called for the penalty to be reinstated. Mr Erdogan said on Tuesday he was willing to bring it back if the people demand it.
The President dismissed claims by his critics that he was using the coup to crackdown on his enemies as libel.
He said: "I'd like to know what a crackdown by Tayyip Erdogan looks like... It's just libel," the BBC reports.
"If Tayyip Erdogan was an oppressive figure, he wouldn't have won 52 per cent of the vote at the presidential elections," he added.
In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Show all 17 1 /17 In pictures: Turkey coup attempt In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish President Erdogan attends the funeral service for victims of the thwarted coup in Istanbul at Fatih mosque on July 17, 2016 in Istanbul, Turkey Burak Kara/Getty Images In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Soldiers involved in the coup attempt surrender on Bosphorus bridge with their hands raised in Istanbul on 16 July, 2016 Gokhan Tan/Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt A civilian beats a soldier after troops involved in the coup surrendered on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey, 16 July, 2016 REUTERS/Murad Sezer In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Surrendered Turkish soldiers who were involved in the coup are beaten by a civilian Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Soliders involved in the coup attempt surrender on Bosphorus bridge Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wave flags as they capture a Turkish Army vehicle Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt People pose near a tank after troops involved in the coup surrendered on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey, 16 July, 2016 Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish soldiers block Istanbul's Bosphorus Brigde Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt A Turkish military stands guard near the Taksim Square in Istanbul Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Pierre Crom/Twitter In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish soldiers secure the area as supporters of Recep Tayyip Erdogan protest in Istanbul's Taksim square AP In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Murad Sezer/Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish soldiers detain police officers during a security shutdown of the Bosphorus Bridge Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish Army armoured personnel carriers in the main streets of Istanbul Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Chaos reigned in Istanbul as tanks drove through the streets EPA/TOLGA BOZOGLU In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan speaks to media in the resort town of Marmaris Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Supporters of President Erdogan celebrate in Ankara following the suppression of the attempted coup Reuters
Mr Erdogan blamed the uprising on his former ally Fethullah Gulen, the Islamic cleric who lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania in the United States.
He claimed the "Gulen group" had destroyed the armed forces and said Turkey would request Gulen be extradited.
Mr Gulen denies any involvement and several analysts have said they do not believe he is involved.
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WikiLeaks has claimed it will release documents on Turkeys political structure after the country was shook by a failed military coup.
According to the transparency organisation, it will release 500,000 unspecified documents and 300,000 emails it has called the Erdogan Emails on Tuesday.
Since announcing the leak, the anti-secrecy website said its servers were under sustained attack.
The organisation added it was uncertain of the source of the threat, but it vowed: We will prevail and publish.
WikiLeaks has indicated the documents will cause further controversy in a country that is already fiercely divided. On Friday evening, officers from sections the Turkish military blocked off roads and bridges in Ankara and Istanbul. More than 250 are dead after the attempted coup, with 100 of those killed soldiers taking part in it.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan has promised to purge the public bodies of the virus responsible for the revolt and refused to rule out the death penalty for those involved.
Many fear the failed coup is being used by Mr Erdogan to tighten his grip on the country. Judges and legal officials make up half of the 6,000 detained by the regime after the attempted coup.
John Kerry: Turkey coup could threaten country's Nato membership
The website has repeatedly stated its neutral position in relation to Mr Erdogans ruling party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), and said the leak "both helps and harms" them.
"Turks ask whether WikiLeaks is pro or anti-AKP. Neither. Our only position is that truth is the way forward, it said.
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The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. 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Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. 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The emails relating to Mr Erdogan apparently record conversations up until 7 July.
First announcing the leak on Twitter, the organisation said: "Get ready for a fight as we release 100,000+ docs on Turkey's political power structure". Now it claims 800,000 documents in total will be released.
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Protesters are descending on Parliament Square to demonstrate against the second reading of the controversial Higher Education and Research Bill which has been labelled dangerous by the National Union of Students (NUS).
Education activists, part of the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC) group which is organising the action on Tuesday, has called the Bill maybe the worst set of marketising reforms in the history of British university education.
The Bill is the first of its kind for a decade, and includes some of the biggest higher education (HE) reforms in recent years. Published by the Government in May - after being set out in the Queens Speech - it will enact the reforms in the recent white paper, including the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF).
Students and the wider HE community have been arguing against proposals to link TEF with an increase in tuition fees, a move which caused mass outrage with the sector disputing that students are already being saddled with too much debt, even more than their anglophone counterparts.
Calling on students, officers, education workers, and activists from across the country to join the emergency protest outside Parliament, NCAFC said: This Bill will usher in a fully marketised HE system, one where teaching will be measured on meaningless market metrics that will be used to raise fees even further, where students will be seen as nothing more than consumers, where universities will be forced to battle one another in a chaotic education market, and where the Government will drive public universities to go bust, then help for-profit companies take their place.
NCAFC has also appealed on eligible voters to support Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn because he is the only candidate with a consistent record of fighting for free education.
The University and College Union (UCU) has also called on the Government to scrap the Bill now that Prime Minister Theresa May has moved the universities and skills brief from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills to the Department for Education.
UCU general secretary, Sally Hunt, said: The extraordinary events of the last three weeks mean it is quite absurd to believe domestic politics can simply carry on regardless. The Bill was conceived in a pre-Brexit world and, whatever its merits or otherwise, its significance for HE is dwarfed by the implications of the UK leaving the EU. Now the universities and skills brief has been moved into a different government department, it is time to put the Bill to one side.
NUS has also said students are seriously worried about the Bill, and NUS vice president for HE, Sorana Vieru, said: Given the Bill outlines some of the most significant reforms to HE in over a decade, it is a crucial opportunity to halt such changes, especially amid an uncertain political climate caused by a restructure and Brexit negotiations.
We believe it is not in students interests to have to pay more to access excellent teaching, it is not in students interests to have a system based on competition, not collaboration, and it is for students to define their own interests and to have a seat at the decision-making tables.
An NUS spokesperson also told the Independent: NUS has profound concerns with the Bill which represents the wrong reforms at the worst possible time. We join with parliamentarians and many of those in the education sector in calling for the Government to pause and take stock of what the events of recent weeks mean for HE, and to think again.
Recommended Read more Student leaders meet Jo Johnson as Government plans to raise fees
The Government, however, has insisted the new legislation will give more young people the opportunity to access high-quality university education and boost life chances and opportunity for all. Universities Minister, Jo Johnson, said: Our universities are engines of economic growth and social mobility, but if we are to remain competitive and ensure a high-quality education remains open to all, we cannot stand still.
Making it easier for high-quality challenger institutions to start offering their own degrees will help drive up teaching quality, boost the economy, and extend aspiration and life chances for students from all backgrounds.
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Barcelona is a city filled with history, friendly locals, cosy shops and a buzzing nightlife scene. Many visitors are familiar with Las Ramblas, the tourist-filled street thats often the first port of call for new arrivals to the city. But to avoid pushy street vendors and get into the locals' favourite bars, we asked Spotted by Locals on-the-ground team to divulge their nightlife tips.
Boadas is a cocktail bar that is conveniently located close to Las Ramblas. Its Barcelonas oldest bar, dating back to 1933, and the bartenders dress in fancy tuxedos as they prepare some 60-odd cocktails. Seeing as the bartenders try to look their best in their fine clothes, you should also dress to impress.
Boadas is Barcelona's oldest bar (Joel Rapi)
Another Barcelona-oldie is Bar Pastis, which looks just as it did when it opened in 1947. Theres plenty of romance in the air here, according to local Bill, thanks to the intimate live gigs, such as tango, which are hosted most nights. And, as the name implies, Pastis serves its very own labelled absinthe and pastis, as well as beers and other French spirits.
Bar Pastis (Haarland Sinclair)
If youre more of a gin drinker, you cant go wrong at Rubi. They brew their own gin and offer delicious seasonal specialties. Local Ilse says: Rubi is a must-do on your Barcelona trip. But if its cocktails youre after, she recommends Milk, the younger sibling of the well-known Marmalade cocktail bar. It serves fantastic cosmopolitans and is a great option to start your evening out in Barcelona.
Rubi is a good choice for gin cocktails (Ilse de Ridder)
For cocktails with a view, Gerard Pinar suggests stopping by Baritimo. A chilled-out cocktail lounge located on the second floor of the Maremagnum shopping centre, it offers great views of the citys port. The bartenders take great care to prepare the best concoction for you and the extensive cocktail menu features both alcoholic and alcohol-free tipples, such as martinis, frozen cocktails, mojitos, G&Ts and milkshake cocktails.
The best street for a bar crawl is Carrer de Joaquin Costa, but after setting foot in Betty Fords, many locals have a hard time leaving to continue their crawl. Its small, with a mixed clientele, hipster style and laid-back atmosphere.
If youre looking to party with locals, theres a good chance youll find some kind of (unofficial) street party in Gracia. Its one of the most popular areas in the city where locals meet up to start their night out. The best point to start is at Sol Square, from where you can make your way through the surrounding streets, surrounded by happy locals, professional street music or the odd guitar player.
Gracia (Adria Garcia)
Spotted by Locals (spottedbylocals.com) is a series of apps and blogs available on iPhone and Android devices with up-to-date tips by locals in 60+ cities in Europe and North America
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Low Cost Holidays' collapse has left 140,000 customers with current or future bookings uncertain if their trips will proceed as planned. Snap shot: It looks ugly. If you are among those who have collectively paid more than 50m to this Spanish online travel agent, the chances are that your flights are safe. But regrettably there is a great deal of uncertainty about everything else, and you may have to pay again for hotels and ancillaries.
What was Low Cost Holidays?
An online travel agent (OTA) based on the Spanish island of Mallorca. It sold flights, accommodation, transfers and other travel elements to a largely British clientele.
Because customers were dealing with a foreign OTA, they have none of the rights that someone buying a proper package holiday in the UK would have. The terms and conditions of a typical OTA specify that the customers contract is with the supplier and not with the agent. And if any element of the trip goes awry, the customer is on their own.
What happened to the company?
It went bust on 15 July. A statement on the website says the directors wish to profusely apologise for the inconvenience and distress that this will cause to customers. They blame the recent and ongoing turbulent financial environment for the collapse. Up until that date, Low Cost Holidays was still taking in money, but evidently not enough to pay its liabilities.
What happens next?
To predict that, it helps to understand how the business was conducted. Travel is a highly cash positive industry: prospective holidaymakers pay large sums weeks or months before they travel. A typical pattern in the failure of travel firms is for earnings from new bookings to be used to pay off past liabilities, until the money runs out.
When Low Cost Holidays took money from the customer, flight tickets were generally paid for immediately. That is because of the business model used by budget airlines, where prices change frequently and increase close to departure: the only way to lock into promised prices is to pay at the time of booking.
For all other elements of a trip, though, Low Cost Holidays typically paid after the trip had been completed. So hotels, transfer firms and car-rental operators are unlikely to have received the money paid by the customer.
How much is at stake?
I estimate that the 140,000 customers affected by the collapse collectively have spent upwards of 50m on their holidays. Perhaps half of this has been passed on to the suppliers, almost all of it to airlines. The remaining 25m-plus is owed to a range of creditors, including hotels for past, present and future bookings.
Shouldnt holidaymakers money be ring-fenced?
Some travel companies pay customers cash into a trust account and do not access it until the trip is completed. But many do not, and Low Cost Holidays was one of them.
Im on holiday with the company. What are my rights?
Regrettably, probably nothing like the protection you would get from a proper package holiday. Lets start with the good news: it is very likely that your homeward flight is secure, because the fact that you got to your destination indicates the airline has been paid. For those who have yet to travel, the same applies.
But for other elements of a trip, it gets complicated and potentially expensive. Your accommodation provider has probably not been paid for your stay and will ask you to pay again before you leave. Likewise, any ancillaries such as transfers, will require payment before they agree to take you.
While you have a contract with each of these firms, the fact that they see no prospect of getting any money from Low Cost Holidays nullifies the arrangements you thought you had. If that sounds harsh, just remember that these companies will be very hard hit by the collapse, and are desperate to limit the damage.
Even if the flights are safe, I cant afford to pay again for accommodation. So can I just reclaim all the money Ive paid already, including flights?
Unfortunately not. Because you agreed to individual contracts with each of the suppliers - airline, hotel, etc - your flights are subject to the airlines terms. They are likely to be onerous in terms of getting a refund. You might end up getting only the tax element back, which will be a small proportion of what you originally paid. So even if you end up camping, it would be better to take those flights.
Assuming I can afford to pay again, who can I claim that money back from?
That is proving difficult to clarify, because of the Spanish domicile of the company and apparently contradictory assurances. Low Cost Holidays was a Spanish company which did not hold an Air Travel Organisers Licence (ATOL).
The statement from the administrators, Smith & Williamson, suggests you may be able to claim the amount back from the Balearics government (as regulator of the Spanish Travel Agency); your travel insurer; or your card issuer.
Whoever you intend to claim from, keep receipts for all your expenditure. The administrators also say: You should also register your claim at lowcosttravelspain@smith.williamson.co.uk
The Balearics government must have plenty of cash?
Yes, but it is not at all clear that the Govern de les illes Balears (caib.es) will meet the obligations of Low Cost Holidays.
At the time Low Cost Holidays migrated its base from Sussex to Mallorca in 2013, it promised customers that the move would bring significant benefits in financial protection. The director, Paul Evans, said: All bookings made through our website which includes at least a flight and accommodation should be regarded as package holidays in terms of consumer protection; thus increasing and enhancing the protection and security available to our customers.
But Andrew Haines, chief executive of the Civil Aviation Authority (which oversees the ATOL scheme), said at the time: If you book a holiday on lowcostholidays.com, you wont receive ATOL protection. In fact, our legal view is that you may not have any protection at all and even if you do, the protection the site claims to offer is extremely limited.
The Air Travel Reserve Fund, maintained by the CAA to pay for holiday-firm failures, is extremely rich at present, at over 100m, but it will not be used to refund Low Cost Holidays customers.
The only possible relevance of an ATOL would be in the rare case that a UK tour operator used the Low Cost Travel Group as a supplier for a package or flight-plus arrangement, typically by supplying accommodation. If you are in this position then you will have been given an ATOL/flight-plus certificate. In that case the tour operator is obliged to provide the holiday as booked or offer a full refund.
What about travel insurance or card cover?
Your travel insurance policy, if you have one, may or may not offer cover for the failure of a holiday firm. But most holidaymakers (including me) dont read the small print. Or they may opt for a cheap policy and wrongly assume all trips are covered by other consumer protection.
Probably your best chance of recovering some or all of your expenditure rests with the card company. If you paid with a credit card for an item costing 100 or more, then you may be covered by Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act. The card issuer is jointly liable with the supplier to provide what you paid for.
If you paid with a debit card, you have no such legal entitlement but many banks will provide a chargeback arrangement that has much the same effect. Talk to your card issuer - they will probably already have a policy in place for customers of Low Cost Holidays.
What about ABTA?
As a Spanish travel agent, Low Cost Holi days was not a member of ABTA, the UK travel association
How can I be sure of protection on future holiday bookings?
The best consumer protection is gained by booking a proper package holiday that is protected by the ATOL scheme.
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Midway through his exponentially angry speech - he looked fit to bust a blood vessel - Rudy Giuliani told Republicans at their convention on Monday night that he was sick and tired of the vicious, nasty campaign, against Donald Trump. The culprits, of course, were the media and also Hillary Clinton.
On the floor of the convention, they were lapping it up. Rudy! Rudy! they chanted as the former New York Mayor hogged the stage, describing an America cowering in fear amidst swirling violence, including violence against police. Only one man could save civilisation.
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The vast majority of Americans today do not feel safe, he roared. They fear for their children. They fear for themselves. They fear for police officers who are being targeted with a target on their back. He railed against Democrats for refusing to use the term radical Islamic terrorists and issued a chilling battle cry: You know who you are, and we are coming to get you.
The designated theme of Mondays session was Keep America Safe Again, a variation of the Make America Great Again tagline that has been Mr Trumps slogan from the day he declared. (Tuesdays session about the economy came under the rubric, Make America Work Again). To set it up, the Trump folks precisely needed to establish the premise that no one is safe today.
And that saw them descending further into the muck than ever before, peddling not just a dishonestly dystopian vision of this land but deliberately stoking popular fear and dread. And as they do it, they mean to stoke not just distrust but unbridled hatred of Ms Clinton. If theirs is not a campaign of nasty and vicious, it is by any measure one of fear and loathing.
It wasnt just Mr Giulianis speech, evoking mass fear with such ferocity it was a wonder anyone dared go out into the Cleveland night when the gavel fell at just past 11pm, and which completely disregarded, by the way, the statistical reality that crime continues to fall in America.
Nor was it only the fault of the last speaker, retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and one-time Director of the Defence Intelligence Agency serving President Barack Obama, who similarly summoned the imminent destruction of America by foreign enemies. Wake up America!, the General, who was briefly on Mr Trumps list of possible running mates, bellowed.
War is not about bathrooms, he added, suggesting that by supporting the rights of transgender people to use the facilities of their new identity, Democrats were putting the nation at risk. War is not about political correctness or words that are meaningless. War is about winning.
Far more egregious was the wheeling out of a succession of mothers and siblings who had lost loved ones either to violence committed by people identified as illegal immigrants or - most jarringly - at the hands of the extremists who burned down the US consular compound in Benghazi in September 2012 to help blacken Ms Clinton and Mr Obama and elevate Mr Trump.
Their grief was real and gripping, there is no arguing that. A woman called Mary Mendoza took the podium to describe with real anguish how her son, a police officer, was killed by a man who was not only high and drunk, but, more to the point apparently, was in the US illegally. But she concluded: A vote for Hillary is putting all our childrens lives at risk. Its time for Donald Trump.
Another mother told a not dissimilar story, which drew gasps of horror when she added that the man responsible for her sons death had come from Guatemala, as if that should explain everything. This was a raw moment, for sure, but it was also raw racism. Again the political implication was clear: it was the Obama-Clinton crew who had let him in.
This amounts to the unabashed exploitation of private peoples grief - and their understandable need to find explanations and impart blame - to a point that has no place in a national political convention. But the lines between acceptable and unacceptable seem irrelevant to a candidate, who, after all, has spoken openly about deporting all 11 million illegal immigrants, presumably rounding them in internment camps in the process, and profiling all Muslim Americans.
Pat Smith addressing the convention on Monday evening (AP)
Most striking was the time given to Pat Smith, whose son was one of the four Americans who perished in Benghazi. She not only said that Ms Clinton had effectively killed her son - this time disregarding the most recent bipartisan report from Congress that found no cause to assign blame to the then Secretary of State - and then said she should be behind bars. I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son, personally, she said. How could she do this to me?
At one point while Gen. Flynn was talking, some of the delegates close to this reporter on the floor started to chant, Lock her up! He responded from the stage: You're damn right. There's nothing wrong with that. Isnt there? Really? And he was in charge of Defense Intelligence.
Mr Giuliani, who as Mayor back in the time used to infuriate some Republicans with his actually progressive stances on things like gay marriage (he once appeared in drag at a political review night) is right to abhor campaigns that are vicious and nasty. But it was the campaign he has been such an enthusiastic spokesman for that he should have been talking about.
.
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Set against events that suggest a world tearing itself apart Brexit, the Bastille Day slaughter in Nice, a failed coup in Turkey, not to mention the racially charged revenge shootings of police in the US itself an American political convention, with its pre-packaged glitz and basic function as a four day party infomercial, seems a sideshow.
But the Republicans gathering in Cleveland this week is anything but a sideshow. In a narrow sense, it represents Donald Trumps best chance to create a semblance of unity within the party he has hijacked. Far more important, it may be the last opportunity for the businessman/showman to prove he is remotely fit to lead the most powerful country on earth.
Nothing he has done so far suggests that he is. Even the unveiling of his vice-presidential choice, Governor Mike Pence of Indiana, was a mess. Such occasions are second only to conventions themselves as stage setters for the final battle for the White House. Instead Mr Trump, as usual, spent most of the Pence roll-out talking about himself. The unintended message could not have been clearer: Mr Pence, who in six months could find himself the proverbial heartbeat from the presidency, was little more than the afterthought of a narcissist.
History does not repeat itself, Mark Twain said, but it rhymes and it is easy to draw parallels between Cleveland 2016 and Chicago 1968, site of the Democratic convention whose chaos symbolised the most traumatic year in recent American history. Ultimately Richard Nixon prevailed, with his appeal to the silent majority of his countrymen who craved a return only a return to normality.
There will be protests this week in Cleveland, but its streets will not resemble those of Chicago half a century ago when Mayor Richard Daleys police effectively declared war on demonstrators. And while two shootings of police officers within 10 days have set the US on edge, the mood is not comparable to 1968, riven by turmoil over Vietnam and shocked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.
Similarities exist nonetheless. Make America Safe Again is a theme of the convention, and Mr Trump, Nixon-like, presents himself as the law and order candidate. President Obama, he says, doesnt have a clue over how to respond to the crisis. The US, he maintains, is nothing more than a divided crime scene spinning out of control, desperate for the strong leadership that only he can provide.
It is more probable that such tactics from the already polarising Mr Trump will serve only to deepen Americas divisions. By the same token, the world beyond will be anything but re-assured. For the Republican Party, which has always advertised itself as tough on crime and tough on Americas enemies, security at home merges naturally with security abroad. But the Trump approach, an inchoate mix of nativism, militaristic bluster and protectionism, will merely rattle Americas allies while providing openings for rivals like Russia and China.
There is no sign Mr Trump has ever thought more seriously about foreign policy than he has about domestic issues like gun control and abortion. He speaks from the hip, ad-libbing and frequently contradicting himself within the space of a single week, even a single day.
A convention above all is a platform for the candidate, a showcase not only for himself but his policies. It requires planning and discipline, not to mention the teleprompters that Mr Trump so disparages. This week he has a last chance to redeem himself. But will he take it?
The omens are not good.
Environment Minister Simon Coveney said providing homes for people is the Government's number one priority
The Government has promised to only put homeless families in emergency hotel accommodation in very limited circumstances as it unveiled a radical plan to solve the unprecedented housing crisis.
Some 5.35 billion euro will be spent on 4 7,000 new social houses by 2021, and the number of homes being built each year will double to 25,000.
Another 1,500 rapid build social houses are planned, including 200 this year and 800 next year, and the Housing Agency is aiming to get 1,600 empty homes off banks, mortgage lenders and vulture funds.
The Rebuilding Ireland plan also includes 200m euro for councils to get large sites ready for developers to get on with building 15-20,000 homes. Up to 20 sites are being identified for this.
Other sites on state owned land are also being identified for 500 homes to be built by developers in 2017, increasing each year up to 1,000 homes by 2021.
The 84 proposals, some of which have deadlines, look to cut repossessions and improve rental contracts and bring in child, health, justice and welfare chiefs to help stem the flood of young and vulnerable people into homelessness.
It also includes plans for incentives to stop tenants being evicted even if a landlord sells up and for European models to be used to set rents close to market rates.
The proposals were outlined as more than 6,000 parents and children live in emergency homeless accommodation, and up to 130,000 people are on social housing waiting lists across the country.
Pat Doyle, chief executive of the P eter McVerry Trust, said the ideas showed a clear urgency to help young people and families at risk.
"The actions set out to support families will no doubt improve the situation of many households in hotel and B&B settings and we fully support efforts to phase out and ultimately eliminate the use of these types of accommodation within the homeless sector," he said.
The trust said money was now being ring-fenced to help it open accommodation specifically for young people leaving state care.
As the plan was unveiled, Focus Ireland said 72 families became homeless in Dublin in June - 502 families with 995 children were added to homeless lists in Dublin in the first six months of the year.
Director of advocacy Mike Allen said: "It is positive that the plan provides direction, but the litmus test will be when we see roofs over people's heads - be this through bricks and mortar of building social housing or by the taking the urgent steps required to provide a better private rented sector."
Focus Ireland said plans to tackle family homelessness fell far short and warned using rapid build homes could become permanent homes if left unchecked.
The Rebuilding Ireland plan also looks to expand Housing First by tripling tenancy targets in Dublin and extend it to other cities.
The Government also said the next budget will have proposals worked on with the Central Bank to make mortgages more accessible and affordable.
For families forced into emergency hotel accommodation it said they should be supported with breakfast and after school clubs for children, access to a creche for pre-school years and free school transport.
The Government also aims to spend 10m euro a year on the affordable rent scheme to put people up in at le ast 2,000 properties by 2018.
On building, three sites are to be found for at least 3,000 new homes from 2017-2021 in Dublin and other cities and 10m euro has been set aside for homes for people with disabilities and a pilot scheme for up to 60 homes for the elderly is planned for Dublin.
A new unit for pregnant homeless women will also be opened.
Analysis of the crisis-hit housing market showed there are 115 active housing sites in Greater Dublin.
The capital has planning permission in place for 26,886 homes, but less than one fifth of them are being built.
Environment Minister Simon Coveney said providing homes for people is the Government's number one priority.
"It's crucial that we move from words to actions immediately," he said.
"We may not have all the answers to address every issue right now but the actions, funding and structures that we are announcing today have the potential to make early and very substantial progress on the journey to fixing our broken housing sector."
Mr Coveney added: "While it's a huge challenge, it simply has to be done."
Taoiseach Enda Kenny said: " I am committed to ensuring that it results in us achieving our critical national ambition of ensuring that all our people have access to quality and affordable housing, either through their own endeavours or with the support of the State. "
Ruth Coppinger, Anti Austerity Alliance TD, said the plan marked the end of local authority housing as we know it.
"The plan is a landlords' and developers' manifesto," she said.
"As well as not proposing measures to curb their profiteering on rents, it defends and promotes their interests by continuing the use of the private sector as a substitute for public housing, alongside introducing a new range of tax breaks to incentivise landlords."
Sinn Fein's h ousing spokesman Eoin O Broin claimed the plan will only produce up to 6,000 social houses a year for six years.
"Minister Coveney is falling short of the Dail Housing and Homelessness Committee recommendations by 40%," he said.
Mr O Broin added: "The plan is particularly disappointing on the private rental sector where no specific actions are being proposed.
"Rather, the plan proposes relegating the issues of long-term reform of the private rental sector and issues of security of tenure and standards to some future date."
The German bank sees limits to Dublins ability to take on staff from Londons City
The UK's vote to pull out of the European Union will result in a "marked slowdown" in Irish economic growth, Deutsche Bank has warned.
And it said there were "limits" to Dublin's capacity to take on financial services firms from London that may be looking to shift some operations in the wake of the Brexit vote.
In a note to investors, Deutsche chief economist Mark Wall also warned that the referendum result could affect Ireland's housing sector, claiming higher uncertainty and tighter conditions would likely weaken housing demand.
"There are analysts predicting outright recession in the UK. Ireland is exposed to these risks," Deutsche said. "We expect Irish GDP growth to slow from 5pc this year to 2.9pc in 2017. This is a marked slowdown."
Deutsche also referred to the revision of Ireland's GDP rate last year from 7.8pc to an "eye catching" 26.3pc.
The surge was driven by the activities of Ireland's multinational sector, and has been dismissed by economists as a "meaningless" gauge of what is happening in the Irish economy.
It argues that a truer reflection are tax revenues, retail sales and employment growth.
Mr Wall said that one could be forgiven for thinking that Ireland could "easily shrug off its exposure to the UK" by looking at the GDP data. "This is too optimistic a point of view, in our opinion," Deutsche said.
Mr Wall described the GDP surge as "growth by acquisition", and a kind of growth more commonly associated with companies rather than sovereigns.
"It points to significant weakness with GDP as a statistic to broadly represent an economy's actual income on the one hand and as an official denominator within other policy relevant statistics on the other, like the fiscal deficit and public debt to GDP ratios," he said.
"The problem cannot go unaddressed by the Commission and Eurostat."
Deustche said a range of indicators suggest the domestic economy probably expanded by between 5pc and 6pc last year.
It warned that the Irish economy is exposed to Brexit through various channels, pointing out that about 40pc of exports from domestic firms go to the UK. These firms are responsible for more than 85pc of employment, the bank said.
"To the extent that a large negative shock to UK domestic demand hurts the Irish indigenous firms the most, the Irish employment base is significantly more exposed than the 14pc of exports implies."
Brexit could threaten Ireland's housing recovery.
The bank said housing demand could weaken further if Brexit threatens jobs, given that so many small firms in Ireland export to the UK. "Banks are likely to be even more cautious with their provision of mortgage finance and if incomes are under threat, the still elevated level of debt could suppress demand," Mr Wall said. Dublin's capacity to take advantage of the dislocation from London of financial services firms has "limits".
Mr Wall said that if the common travel area between Ireland and the UK can be retained, then Ireland will be an appealing destination for firms relocating elements of their business from London. But infrastructural gaps could hinder Dublin's ability to benefit, Deutsche suggests.
"A decision to relocate will depend on a range of factors. Commercially, the fit requires a range of other business services being available, from sufficiently well developed global accounting, tax, legal and business services industries.
"Non-commercially, it depends on factors such as availability of housing, school places, etc. Dublin's non-commercial capacity and infrastructure is suffering from under-investment after the financial crisis."
Deutsche also warned that political instability at home could also pose problems. And it said that an adverse finding from Europe in the Apple case "could affect attractiveness".
Seven Ukrainian servicemen were killed in action (KIA's) and another 14 were wounded in action (WIA's) in the hostilities in Donbas in the past 24 hours, Ukrainian Presidential Administration spokesman for Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) affairs Andriy Lysenko said.
"Seven Ukrainian servicemen were killed and 14 suffered injuries in hostilities in the past 24 hours," Lysenko told a press briefing in Kyiv on Tuesday.
The hostiles resumed attacks in the Luhansk sector, he said, adding that Popasna, Krymske and Stanytsia Luhanska were shelled in the past 24 hours. The enemy used mortars, grenade launchers and large-caliber machine-guns, he said.
The shelling of Horlivka, Zaitseve and Mayorsk continued in the Donetsk sector by use of heavy and light armaments, he said. A border checkpoint near Horlivka was shelled. Gunfire on Ukrainian army positions on the Svitlodarsk bulge intensified. Twenty mines were lobbed into areas near the town of Myronivske, where Ukrainian troops are stationed.
Attacks resumed on approaches to the ruined Donetsk airport.
The truce was breached 22 times in the Mariupol sector. Positions in Maryinka and Krasnohorivka were shelled by mortars and attacked by small arms. Shelling incidents were also observed in Novotroyitske, Starohnativka and Hnutove, Lysenko said.
Enda Kenny speaking to the media at the MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Donegal. Photo: North West Newspix
Taoiseach Enda Kenny has for the first time opened the door to a future referendum on Irish unity.
In a significant move, Mr Kenny called on the European Union to prepare for the prospect of Northern Ireland seeking to join the Republic.
The Fine Gael leader said a future border poll was now possible in light of the decision by Britain to leave the EU.
And Mr Kenny even likened it to West and East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
"The discussion and negotiations that take place over the next period should take into account the possibility, however far out it might be, that the clause in the Good Friday Agreement might be triggered," he said, "in that if there is a clear evidence of a majority of people wishing to leave the United Kingdom and join the Republic, that should be catered for in the discussions.
"Because if that possibility were to happen, you would have Northern Ireland wishing to leave the United Kingdom, not being a member of the European Union, and joining the Republic, which will be a member of the EU."
The Taoiseach made the remarks to reporters following his speech at the MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Donegal.
He alluded to the prospect of a border poll during off-script comments and agreed to clarify the remarks afterwards.
The Taoiseach told an audience that the North-South trade links were more important in terms of volume to the North, which would suggest an appetite for such a vote there.
Mr Kenny also suggested that the Common Travel Area had a "legal status" and officials were working to clarify this.
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He later said there had once been the view that it would "impossible" for Britain to leave the EU but this had now been thrown on its head. The Taoiseach said the matter of a border poll must now be considered in negotiations on Brexit.
"So in the same way as East Germany was dealt with when the wall came down, was able to be absorbed into West Germany and not to have to have to go through a torturous and long process of applying for membership of the European Union," the Taoiseach said.
"So when Northern Ireland voted to stay (in the EU), who knows what might happen in the time ahead? I am just making the point that these are the kinds of things that should be looked at in the broadest of ways in discussions that take place.
"People said it would be impossible that Britain would leave the European Union; that has taken place now."
He said discussions would take place about the "connections between the Republic and Northern Ireland, between Northern Ireland and the UK and the EU and our relationship with both" and "these are things that should be looked at in the context that they might happen in some time in the future".
The decision by Mr Kenny to throw open the prospect to a border poll will set him on a collision course with the DUP.
A fortnight ago, Mr Kenny was left humiliated after the Government's attempts to establish an all-island forum was shot down by First Minister and DUP leader Arlene Foster.
The newly appointed Secretary of State to Northern Ireland, James Brokenshire, has also ruled out a border poll.
Sinn Fein has embarked on a campaign to have such a vote, but Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin said a vote was unlikely in the near future.
Earlier, Mr Kenny said a second secretary-general in the Department of An Taoiseach would be appointed to deal with the Brexit talks.
Meanwhile, speaking in Brussels, Foreign Affairs Minister Charlie Flanagan insisted that Germany had not slapped down Ireland's bid for special treatment in Brexit negotiations.
"I'm satisfied that Ireland's position and the unique relationship within the EU... is fully appreciated by my European colleagues, including Angela Merkel," said Mr Flanagan.
The UK's decision to leave the EU has also thrown a spanner in the works
Maintaining the European Union's financial stability is the top priority following Britain's vote last month to leave the bloc, the European Commission's new financial regulatory chief said on Monday.
"Following the UK's decision to leave the EU, ensuring financial stability is our first priority," Valdis Dombrovkis said in a speech in which he laid out his priorities for dealing with the uncertainty stemming from the June 23 referendum and for overseeing banks and institutions in the EU.
Dombrovkis also discussed strengthening ties with the United States, noting that he was visiting the US capital on his first day in his new role.
"What my approach will be: Above all, continuity," he said.
Dombrovkis said he will continue the work of his predecessor, Jonathan Hill, on capital markets and reviewing regulations enacted after the 2007-2009 financial crisis.
He said he had met with his US counterparts, and they were establishing a forum to meet frequently and discuss regulatory cooperation. Through the forum, he will meet with the US Treasury secretary every year.
"This relationship can be driven further in both directions," he said. "We need to talk to each other more often, to clarify the scope of future rules and to ensure we understand impact of regulation on ground."
The major purpose of the forum is to identify potential problems at the early stage of the regulatory process, Dombrovkis said.
Dombrovkis also listed some of the European Commission's upcoming moves, including releasing a proposal for resolution of failing banks later this year and finalising the steps for implementing the Basel III banking rules.
He added that "in time" the EU will implement requirements for how much capital and long-term debt banks must have on hand so they can resolve a failure without government assistance, known as "Total Loss Absorbing Capacity."
He said he will also talk to members of the European Parliament about advancing a long-stalled proposal on bank structural reform.
The US-EU financial forum was generally greeted with optimism on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Association for Financial Markets in Europe said it has the potential to build upon current transatlantic cooperation, and that "more needs to be done to enhance international coordination and facilitate cross-border investment."
Meanwhile, the American Insurance Association said the forum "recognizes the need for discussions about the potential economic impacts of proposed rules."
Taoiseach Enda Kenny urged fellow European Union leaders on Monday not to impose harsh terms on Britain as punishment its vote to leave the bloc, warning such an approach could inflame anti-EU sentiment across the continent.
Britain's shock June 23 referendum "out" vote has sparked debate in Europe about how to prevent other members following suit, with some fearing a favorable deal for Britain could tempt others to leave.
But Mr Kenny said a punitive settlement for Britain could be equally destabilizing.
"Any perception that the UK is being punished for its democratic decision to exit the European Union will only further inflame the growing populist backlash against European integration," Kenny said in a speech to academics.
"It is in nobodys interests for the UK and the EU to have anything but the best possible future relations," he said, according to a transcript published by his office.
Ireland will cooperate closely with other member states anxious to see "a constructive and respectful outcome", he said.
The Irish Republic is keen to avoid restrictions on the free movement of goods or people arising from Brexit, fearing this would undermine Northern Ireland's peace process and damage trade across its border with the British province.
A majority of voters in Northern Ireland, as well as in Scotland, voted to remain in the EU, unlike much more populous England. As a whole, Britain voted by a 52 to 48 percent margin to leave the bloc.
Britain accounts for 16 percent of Ireland's exports, but this rockets up to 44 percent when foreign-owned firms operating out of Ireland are excluded.
Northern Ireland will represent the only land frontier between Britain and the EU once Britain leaves.
Theresa May, who replaced David Cameron as British prime minister last week, said on June 30 that details of future Irish border arrangements will hinge on the outcome of Brexit talks with Brussels. But she noted that there had been a common travel area with the Irish Republic since the 1920s.
New Ireland Assurance has been fined 650,000 by the Central Bank for breaches of the Consumer Protection Code.
The Central Bank said yesterday that the breaches relate to the provision of incomplete information to consumers regarding New Ireland's investment products, including the performance of those products.
The Central Bank also said that there were "systems and controls failures associated with the provision of information to consumers". The breaches occurred between July 1, 2012, and November 30, 2014, and the firm had accepted the breaches.
The Central Bank's director of enforcement, Derville Rowland, said regulated entities must have adequate systems and controls in place to ensure the provision of information.
"The Consumer Protection Code 2012 sets out the minimum standards the Central Bank expects regulated entities to comply with in their dealings with consumers. "Chapter 6 Provision 6.16 of the 2012 Code requires regulated entities to provide certain information to consumers on at least an annual basis to enable them to assess the performance of their investment products over the previous year," Ms Rowland said.
The senior Central Bank official said it is of paramount importance that consumers receive this information in a complete and transparent manner.
This, she said, was particularly important for longer-term investment products, to allow consumers to analyse the performance and value of their investments and to assess whether those investments are on track to meet their objectives. "As the firm was not providing all such information to consumers the Central Bank brought this enforcement action to protect consumers' interests," she added.
Ms Rowland said regulated entities must have adequate systems and controls in place regarding the provision of such information."
Independent TD Mick Wallace will be named today in 'Stubbs Gazette', the publication that tracks people who have defaulted on loans.
The gazette is best known for carrying details of debts registered with the courts.
It shows that a company called Promontoria (Aran) Ltd registered a 2m judgment against Mick Wallace in the High Court on July 6.
Registering a judgment can be the first step by a creditor in bankrupting a borrower if the debt is not repaid.
In the past, a bankrupt TD would automatically lose their seat in the Dail. However, those rules were relaxed in 2014, so there is no risk to Mr Wallace's seat, regardless of the debt.
Promontoria is owned by US funds giant Cerberus, the same fund that was at the centre of allegations made in the Dail by Mr Wallace in relation to the acquisition of Nama's 5.7bn Northern Ireland portfolio. The substance of those allegations is now subject to a number of investigations in the UK and the US.
Read more: Wallace: Fortress told me Nama NI sale 'horrifically uncompetitive'
Cerberus's Promontoria (Aran) Ltd bought the 2m Wallace debt from Ulster Bank last year. The loans are linked to M&J Wallace, one of Mr Wallace's pre-crash Dublin businesses, but are also understood to be backed by personal guarantees, leaving the TD liable if the business could not pay the debt. Last night, Mr Wallace told the Irish Independent that Cerberus had nothing to be gained financially by registering the judgment against him, given the scale of his other business debts.
"I haven't been able to second-guess what Cerberus are going to do," Mr Wallace said.
He said he was not currently considering options, such as bankruptcy, that could clear the debts.
"It (bankruptcy) is not on my agenda, I have my hands full, especially with Nama," he said.
When the loan case was before courts back in January, Mr Wallace resisted the application in the Commercial Court for summary judgment orders to be made against him.
His lawyers argued that Promontoria (Aran) Ltd, had not validly been assigned a 2.1m loan of M&J Wallace made to that company in 2009 by Ulster Bank, and therefore was not entitled to the judgment order.
He also wanted the process delayed until the outcome of a receivership of his M&J Wallace company, saying rising property values there would help with the recovery of the debts.
He is entitled to a full plenary hearing on those matters and the fund should be refused summary judgment orders, he maintains.
Workers without pensions would be automatically signed up to pay hundreds of euro a month into a new retirement fund scheme under new Government proposals.
Social Protection Minister Leo Varadkar told the Irish Independent that he hopes to have the details of a workplace pension saving scheme agreed by next year, although it may take up to 10 years to bring in legislation.
Workers will have the ability to opt out but it is hoped many will prefer to stay in.
Mr Varadkar said workers could put part of a pay rise - or former Universal Social Charge cash as it is phased out - into their retirement pot. The minister also said it "would make sense" that employers match employees' contributions under the scheme, although he did not want to prescribe what the final scheme would look like.
It is "an essential objective" of his to bring in a new, universal workplace retirement saving system for employees without supplementary pensions.
He said the current system where most people relied solely on the State pension in retirement was "unsustainable" and the Government had a duty to put a better system in place.
Experts calculate a typical 35-year-old worker would need to contribute more than 300 a month to provide a worthwhile pension.
Mr Varadkar said there was no plan to push the age at which people qualify for the State pension beyond 68.
He said that to deliver the new pension scheme there was a need to reform and simplify the pension landscape.
Read more: Workers without pensions automatically enrolled in new scheme under latest proposals
Pension savers' confidence had been "seriously damaged" and had to be repaired if reforms were to be successful.
He was speaking at the launch of a Pensions Authority report on reforming and simplifying the private pensions arena. Among its proposals are higher standards for trustees of workplace pension schemes, better information for members and a reduction in the number of pension savings vehicles.
Submissions are invited on the proposals from all interested parties by October 3.
The document notes that there are more than 160,000 occupational pension schemes. Ireland has more small and single-member schemes than any other country in Europe.
The report said it was concerned that small schemes had less bargaining power with service providers but large schemes were able to reduce costs. Mr Varadkar said many workers were "paying too much".
In addition, there are more than 180,000 individual and corporate trustees listed in the authority's records. The report says it is unrealistic "to expect a significant level of pension knowledge" in such a large group. It said it was "impractical" for the authority to supervise such a large number of schemes.
Mr Varadkar said 4pc to 5pc of the population are trustees. He said they had a wide variety of abilities and some were not meeting their members' needs. He also said there should be a minimum experience requirement before individuals could take up these roles.
Authority chairperson David Begg said changes to the system were needed so that savers better understood their pensions.
The High Court has accepted the US government as an interested "amicus" party to an ongoing case involving the Irish data protection authority and Facebook.
However, an application by IBEC and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties to be joined to the case was rejected. Other applications by US-based civil rights groups were also rejected.
The case has arisen after Irish Data Commissioner Helen Dixon said that her office has doubts over the legality of so-called "model contract clauses", data transfer instruments relied upon by many businesses in their transactions with US firms.
Ms Dixon, who is the primary European data regulator of the world's biggest social media and online firms, said that she will now refer the question to the High Court and the European Court of Justice.
Any decision to strike down model contract clauses down could leave thousands of European companies in limbo over their data transfers to the US despite last week's 'Privacy Shield' agreement between the EU and the US.
Last year, the ECJ struck down the 'Safe Harbour' treaty between the EU and US, on the grounds that it was insufficient to protect the data privacy of EU citizens. The new 'Privacy Shield' agreement aims to replace 'Safe Harbour' with tighter controls over European personal data.
The fact that the US government intervenes in this lawsuit shows that we hit them from a relevant angle," said Austrian privacy campaigner Max Schrems. "The US can largely ignore the political critique on US mass surveillance, but it cannot ignore the economic relevance of EU-US data flows."
In a separate development, the European Court Of Justices Advocate General, Henrik Saugmandsgaard, has said that bulk retention of data is only justified in cases of serious crime. However, he said that such data retention can be in accordance with EU states national laws.
The occupation forces in Donbas have more combat tanks available than Germany and the United Kingdom taken together, Ukraine's envoy to the Trilateral Contact Group's security subgroup, the first Security Service (SBU) chief of independent Ukraine Yevhen Marchuk has said.
"We know absolutely for sure that the other side has got 702 tanks of three modifications. These are modern tanks, ready for combat. There are more than 1,000 artillery systems of various systems there: cannon artillery, rocket-launching artillery, mortars, let alone other parameters. But these are the most important components of warfare that are, as a rule, related to offensive action or inflicting heavy losses onto the opposite side," he told Channel 5.
He also said that the militant army corps are under command of Russian professional military troops, including officers of the General Staff of the Russian Federation.
Marchuk estimates there are from 3,000 to 6,000 Russian professional servicemen in occupied Donbas.
"The two army corps created by Russia on these temporarily occupied territories these are about 32,000 36,000 Russian troops who are well trained. And from the commandant of the corps, their deputies and troop commanders all these are representatives of the Russian General Staff. This is between 3,000 to 6,000 career offers wearing no insignia, but they are professional Russian military men," he said.
Marchuk says that the Minsk talks and the Trilateral Contact Group on the settlement of the Donbas crisis are only tools of the Normandy Four [Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia], rather an independent instrument. "One should stress that the Minsk negotiations is a Normandy Four tool. As sometimes one can perceive it as something independent. It's not Minsk negotiators or the Trilateral Contact Group who decide but the leaders of the Normandy Four," he added.
Mario Draghi said the current slow-growth world of high savings, low investment and weaker productivity could be tackled with pro-growth policies such as more public spending
The European Central Bank (ECB) may run out of German bunds to purchase in its Quantitative Easing by the by the second quarter of 2017, according to a leading strategist at RBC.
That may force the ECB to redesign its QE programme over the medium term.
German bunds or Government bonds are viewed as a safe haven for investors seeking to mitigate risk amidst volatility on global stock markets. German bond yields are currently in negative territory, and this status may result in the ECB having to alter its strategy.
Peter Schaffrik, Chief European Macro Strategist at RBC Europe told Bloomberg that the ECB cant buy anything below 4 basis points. Even if they dont do something this week, I would expect them to look at something along these lines or otherwise they will be forced to effectively taper.
Mr Schaffrik went on to add that there could be unintended consequences resulting from a shortage of Bunds. He stated that the distortion of the Bund market into negative territory could cause problems for German and Northern European life assurance companies.
In addition, Mr Schraffik said that the ECBs focus on purchasing Bunds was serving to reduce possible stimulus effects in southern European states, which are the countries that need it the most.
Bank of America, the second-biggest US bank by assets, said second-quarter profit fell 21pc as the firm took an accounting charge and posted a decline in wealth-management revenue.
Net income dropped to $4.23bn, or 36 cents a share, from $5.13bn, or 43 cents, a year earlier, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based lender said yesterday. The average estimate of analysts surveyed by Bloomberg was for earnings per-share of 33 cents. Revenue fell 7.1pc to $20.4bn. Global wealth-management revenue fell 2.4pc to $4.5bn. The bank reaped $2.62bn from bond trading, a 22pc rise, and $1.09bn from equities, a 7.6pc drop.
Meanwhile, Wells Fargo will pay about 300m to acquire a new London headquarters enabling the US bank to increase its presence in the UK capital, according to two sources.
The building, known as 33 Central, is due to be completed in the third quarter of 2017.
The deal, just three weeks after Britain's vote to leave the EU, signals London real estate demand may be resilient even as some banks plan to move staff away. (Bloomberg)
Turkey's financial industry is under pressure after last weekend's attempted coup. It's too early to gauge the economic impact - but analysts are already warning of the threat of higher funding costs, currency volatility and loan losses to the country's banks. That spells trouble for the European banks that betted big on Turkey's growth prospects - and vindicate Citigroup's decision to quit at a loss in 2015.
On paper, Turkey should be an attractive market for overseas banks: its economy and population are growing, demand for lending is increasing and the country is on a path that could conceivably lead to European Union membership.
In practice, profit has proven elusive. In 2014, HSBC's Turkish unit made a bigger loss than any of the 46 banks in the country, according to Bloomberg News. Currency weakness has hit even the biggest players, such as Spain's BBVA, which last year wrote down its investment in Garanti - one of Turkey's top banks - by about 1.8bn due to the falling lira.
So far, most banks have held on to their Turkish operations. Demand for these assets is limited and the cost of a hurried exit has seemed high. In February, HSBC decided to keep its Turkish operation and shrink it after failing to find a buyer. Italy's UniCredit had been mulling a sale of its stake in Yapi Kredit Bank, Bloomberg News reported in May.
By contrast, BBVA has doubled down on the country, boosting its stake in Garanti to 39pc last year. But the after-effects of the failed coup may vindicate those that managed to back out of their Turkish bets, such as Citigroup.
It sold its stake in Akbank in stages after writing down the value of the holding by $1.2bn in 2012. (Bloomberg)
As Met Eireann predicted that today would be the hottest day of the year, we took to the streets of Dublin to see which weather presenter the nation most trusted and adored.
And Independent.ie can reveal that Martin King has the heart of the nation with his funny jokes, birthday shout-outs and dad jokes.
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I think he makes the weather more interesting than it should be. He has a good sense of humour, said Keith from Dublin.
Martin King is my favourite. Hes just so jolly and he comes across so well. You get the weather and you also get a personality with it, said Trisha from Stoneybatter.
He makes even the dullest days brighter, said Carmel from Tallaght.
Martin King is my favourite because he never wears ridiculous dresses at Christmas and his clothes fit him, said Cait from Limerick.
Evelyn Cusack was also very popular with the public.
No.1 Evelyn Cusack, said Mary from Limerick. She gives a very concise interesting description of the weather and I like the way she presents it with the facts but always with a bit of a twist of hopefulness that the weather will get better.
Evelyn has a great personality and she speaks fantastic, said William from Shankhill.
While Joanna Donnellys honest report on the weather last night helped grow her fanbase.
Yesterday she predicted that it would go to thirty degrees and she said she hadnt seen it in her personal career in the last five years. Her honesty should be awarded, said Mark Daly from Kerry.
Joanna Donnelly is my favourite. I like the way she signs off with a bit of a wink, said Mary from Galway.
Video of the Day
Jean Byrne also seemed to be quite popular - but not necessarily for her weather presenting.
I like the clothes she wears, said Laura from Meath.
Im a fan but not for her weather reporting. Shes very easy on the eye, she brightens up the weather, said a father in St. Stephens Green.
She looks lovely, shes very sexy, said Morris from Dublin.
So there you have it, while presenting Irelands weather might be an often dull job, our national weather presenters seem to have won over the hearts of our nation at least while the weather is good anyway!
Carrie Fisher told an audience of Star Wars fans that she gave her on-screen son Adam Driver a spanking when she met him for The Force Awakens.
Fisher, 59, played Princess Leia in the original movies. As General Leia in 2015's sequel, she has a grown-up son, Kylo Ren, played by Driver.
Unfortunately, Kylo turned to the dark side, following in his grandfather Darth Vader's footsteps.
Speaking at Star Wars Celebration in London, Fisher said Leia had been through a difficult time with her son and her partner, Han Solo (Harrison Ford).
She explained: "Han and I have a very, very volatile relationship, obviously, which leads to space divorce as you know. No, I don't think we are divorced, we're just estranged.
"Which is very rough, and we had a child, who turned out to be Hitler. Naughty Hitler. Well, you'd feel bad too if your son did all that, wouldn't you?
"But I did spank Adam when I first met him, so that felt good."
She added: "He's very tall so I don't think he was scared."
The actress added that she had enjoyed reuniting with Ford, 74 - but her favourite part of filming The Force Awakens was getting to shout at him again.
She said: "There was a little bit where I kind of yell at him. Not really yell, but it's fun to go back to the old days when we treated each other badly. That's always my favourite part, is treating Harrison badly."
Fisher told host Warwick Davis, who played an Ewok, that she was inseparable from her character.
" I'm always Princess Leia," she said, adding: "I am Leia and Leia is me."
The First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama is the latest household name to star in James Corden's Carpool Karaoke.
In tomorrow's show, James visits The White House for a very special Carpool Karaoke where Mrs Obama gets to "rock out" in the passenger seat of a car for the first time in seven and a half years.
Corden arrived at the White House for a 1.45pm tour when America's First Lady knocked on his door.
Mrs Obama hops in and proceeds to break out into a little Beyonce, doing hand motions for "All the Single Ladies".
"I don't really get to listen to music in my car... I've been in a car, maybe it was months ago, with my daughter who learned to drive. That was the only time in seven and a half years that I've been in the passenger seat listening to music, rocking out like this," she explained.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gives his thumb up as he walks off the stage with his wife Melania during the Republican National Convention. (AP Photo/John Locher)
Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump kisses his wife Melania Trump as he introduces her during first day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Melania Trump has been accused of lifting parts of Michelle Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention eight years ago.
The wife of the Republican presidential candidate gave her first major political speech on Monday when she addressed the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
Portraying her husband Donald as a talented and compassionate leader who would unify rather than divide the country if elected president, Mrs Trump described the values they shared.
"From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say," Mrs Trump said.
They were also values that Mrs Obama said she and her husband Barack shared eight years ago. "Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond," she said in Denver in 2008.
Melania Trump continued: "We need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow. Because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them."
Mrs Obama also spoke of setting "out to build lives guided by these values, and to pass them on to the next generation. Because we want our children -- and all children in this nation -- to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them."
Tommy Vietor, a former national security spokesman for President Barack Obama, said the comparison, first highlighted by Jarrett Hill on Twitter, was "pretty egregious."
"I doubt Melania intended to plagiariase FLOTUS, but her speechwriter has some explaining to do," he said on Twitter.
Mr Trump said he was "very proud" of his wife after her speech.
It was truly an honor to introduce my wife, Melania. Her speech and demeanor were absolutely incredible. Very proud! #GOPConvention Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) 19 July 2016
"It was truly an honour to introduce my wife, Melania. Her speech and demeanor were absolutely incredible. Very proud!" he tweeted.
Earlier, Mrs Trump had talked to NBC about the speech, saying: "I wrote it...with a little help as possible."
Video of the Day
The comparisons sparked a torrent of ridicule on social media, with the hashtag #FamousMelaniaTrumpQuotes quickly trending on Twitter.
Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
Demi Ryan (4) and Maya Courtney (4) from Crumlin in Dublin enjoy the weather on Sandymount beach. Photo: Damien Eagers
Temperatures are set to top 30C in parts of the country today but the heat will spark thunderstorms, some of them violent, forecasters say.
A warm blast of continental air yesterday brought some more respite from the grey skies which have been a feature of the disappointing summer weather so far.
The heat and sunny spells sent thousands of people to beaches across the country.
Sea fog did, however, spoil things in some places along the south and east coasts.
Solar UV Index for Tuesday:
High in all areas. Met Eireann (@MetEireann) July 19, 2016
The Coast Guard has appealed to sun-seekers to treat all waterways with respect as temperatures rise even further today, with midlands counties set to be the hottest.
Read More
Louise Heraghty from Met Eireann has said temperatures will drop by up to 10C again by tomorrow, after the brief blast of central European heat over Ireland.
But in the meantime, a yellow weather warning is in place. She also warned that today's high temperatures could spark thunderstorms.
"We are certainly looking at temperatures of 28C or 29C in the midlands for Tuesday and perhaps a few degrees higher than that," she said.
Read More
Ian Carruthers, from Irish Weather Online, issued a thunderstorm warning from 3pm today until noon tomorrow. He said that the continental air moving up from France this morning would bring some "highly unstable air" to Ireland.
Mr Carruthers explained: "These factors suggest super-cells are possible. Even with their isolated nature, likely threats will be gusts of up to 120kmph, large hail and even a tornado."
Read More
He said that the northwest was most likely to see a thunderstorm this afternoon.
Furthermore, he warned of a repeat system tonight or tomorrow in the Irish Sea which could affect the east of the country.
"Not everyone will see thunderstorm activity but where it does occur it will be severe at times," he added.
THERE have been calls for a new register of builders in order to get the cowboys out of the industry.
Director General of the Construction Industry of Ireland (CIF) Tom Parlon said on Tuesday there has been a lot of ills within the industry in the past, pointing to what he described as the poor and shoddy work by some developers.
Mr Parlon told the MacGill Summer School that a new register of buildings is required in order to police standards in construction.
Its the way of getting the cowboys out of the industry, he said.
Mr Parlon said the industry has been excluded from the formation of housing policy in recent years because of the blame it received for the economic collapse.
Also addressing the debate on housing, Dr Lorcan Sirr of Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) flagged the issue of housing obsolescence.
Dr Sirr said 6,400 houses become obsolete every year in Ireland, and that the problem is particularly serious in urban areas.
He said this can happen for a range of reasons, such as a family dispute or simply because people just cant be bothered to look after their properties.
This obsolescence is a serious issue around the country and its something we need to tackle, Dr Sirr said.
The housing expert said that estimates that we need 20,000-30,000 houses per year are two low.
He said he believes the level of need could be as high as 50,000 per year.
What we have failed to do over the years to account for all the houses falling out of use and falling out of stock, Dr Sirr told the debate.
A woman became her elderly neighbour's carer before stealing more than 41,000 from her and spending it on home improvements, clothes and holidays, a court has heard.
Laura Pennick (29), with an address in Bride Street, Dublin 8, pleaded guilty to the thefts totalling 41,935 from Marie McNally between January 2010 and December 2012.
Garda Colin Rourke told Dublin Circuit Criminal Court yesterday that Pennick, a single mother, befriended Ms McNally when she was living two doors away from her in Finglas.
She became Ms McNally's "unofficial carer" and started collecting her pension and paying her bills. She had access to Ms McNally's ATM cards and two bank accounts, including one which contained Ms McNally's inheritance from the sale of her late mother's house. Gda Rourke said Pennick made a number of withdrawals ranging from "very small amounts up to 600". She spent the money on "home improvements, fashion purchases, home furnishings, home appliances and holidays".
When questioned by gardai following Ms McNally's discovery of the loss, Pennick "said she had financial worries of her own and needed to do it", Gda Rourke said.
She has 29 previous convictions including five theft convictions, Gda Rourke said. One of the convictions was for the theft of 1,000 from her previous employer, JD Sports.
The court heard Ms McNally was extremely upset when she discovered the loss and her financial position was now "perilous". She did not wish to give a victim impact statement.
Damien Colgan SC, defending, said Pennick owed money at the time to "individuals" who made "real threats" against her. He said Pennick regretted her actions. Judge Melanie Greally adjourned the matter to allow for a probation services report. Pennick will be sentenced on November 7.
A candidate of the UKROP party, member of Volyn Regional Council, Iryna Konstankevych has won in the by-elections to the Ukrainian parliament in single mandate district No. 23 (with the center in the village of Manevychi, Volyn region).
With all ballots counted, she received 57.42% of the vote (44,123 votes). Candidate of the Batkivschyna Party Liudmyla Kyrda got 12.94% of the vote, representative of the Radical Party Serhiy Bula 8.71%, independent candidate Fedir Venislavsky 5.17%, the rest of the candidates scored less than 4%, the Central Election Commission reported on its website.
All in all, 18 candidates ran for parliament in district No. 23. The voter turnout was 48.8%.
Konstankevych is deputy chair of the charity foundation Ihor Palytsia Foundation "United Together."
The elections to district No. 23 were appointed in connection with the death of MP Ihor Yeremeyev, who was the co-owner of the Continuum group of companies, which owns WOG gas stations network and Kherson Oil Refinery.
A GAA star has been given a suspended sentence for stealing over 28,000 from a barrister to use for online shopping.
Dinah Loughlin (30) stole the money over a five year period as she was working as a legal secretary for Marguerite Bolger, a senior counsel specialising in employment law.
Dublin Circuit Criminal Court heard that during the period Loughlin undertook transcription work for other barristers. However she then used Ms Bolger's account to pay a stenography service to complete the work.
Other purchases included online shopping at Asos, River Island and Amazon. She also spent hundreds of euros on One for All gift-cards from an office supply website.
Loughlin, who plays inter-county camogie for Westmeath, has since repaid her former employer with money she and her partner were saving for a wedding. She also sold her car.
Loughlin of Kilbeggan, Westmeath pleaded guilty to twenty sample counts of theft at The Law Library, Dublin between 2009 and 2014.
The court heard Ms Bolger has taken a very benevolent view of the offending. The barrister only reported the matter to gardai for professional reasons and to ensure it never happened again, prosecuting counsel Anne Rowland SC said.
Judge Melanie Greally said Loughlin had breached the absolute and implicit trust of her employer even though she didn't seem to be under any financial pressures at the time. In mitigation the judge noted Loughlin's previous good character and her repayment of the money.
Judge Greally said Loughlin was perilously close to going to jail. She imposed a two year sentence, suspended for two years.
Garda Stephen Faulkner said that Ms Bolger trusted Loughlin with her credit cards and account details. The barrister would ask Loughlin to make personal purchases online on her behalf.
Sometimes Loughlin would be allowed use the accounts to make purchases for herself on the understanding she would repay Ms Bolger.
Ms Bolger had a good relationship with Loughlin and never checked these accounts. However in 2014 she was alerted to a strange transaction. When she asked her assistant about it, Loughlin assured her it was a mistake.
In August 2014 the barrister noticed another unauthorised payment to Clara's Closet, a clothes website. Loughlin again said it was a mistake but Ms Bolger decided to spend the weekend going through her various card and online accounts.
When the thefts were uncovered Loughlin was suspended. She claimed she had bought the items unintentionally because she was so used to using Ms Bolger's cards. She resigned a short time later via text message.
Most of the money went on online shopping but some of it was taken directly from the ATM. On one occasion Ms Bolger gave a 100 cheque to Loughlin's GAA club as a donation. Loughlin later rewrote the cheque figure to 500.
Loughlin also bought CDs, DVDs and an Ipod, as well as using Ms Bolger's account to pay for her motor tax. Gda Faulkner said she was very co-operative when arrested. He said he didn't think she would re-offend.
Defence counsel Oisin Clarke BL said Loughlin, who was named on the Camogie Association's 2014 Soaring Stars team, suffered great stress when the theft was uncovered. He said she always knew she was going to get caught.
Counsel said she and her partner were not wealthy and had now put their lives on hold to repay Ms Bolger
A freezing order on one of bank accounts of Console charity founder Paul Kelly and his wife Patricia has been lifted to enable them cash their 300 a week social welfare cheque.
Apart from 6,700 in another savings account, both of which are with Permanent TSB in Finglas, Dublin, the Kellys have no other cash assets, their solicitor James MacGuill told the High Court.
In an affidavit, Mr Kelly said there is an outstanding mortgage with EBS of around 428,000 on their family home at Alexandara Manor, Abbeylands, Clane, Co Kildare, which has an approximate value of 600,000.
There is also an outstanding 225,000 charge in favour of EBS on their original home at Whitethorn Grove, Celbridge, Co Kildare, which was turned into a Console office. Total monthly payments on these properties are 5,300.
As well as the two PTSB accounts, he has an account with AIB in Celbridge as well as two mortgage accounts with EBS.
There were four AIB accounts in Dame Street, Dublin, and another AIB account in Galway in which he held an interest and were related to Console as well as another account with Natwest in London and Bank of Ireland in Celbridge.
He also has two pension policies with New Ireland Assurance and in 2014, he says he transferred 37,500 from one of those policies to his wife so she could buy a horse called Ecapitola.
He says in 2014, he transferred a 2004 BMW 318CI to Console which he believed was used as a trade in for a Citroen C4.
In January 2015, on his daughter Robyn's 18th birthday, he and his wife gave her a 2013 Fiat 500 car worth around 10,000.
He also says he has an interest in ten companies related to Console, five of which are directly involved in suicide prevention and bereavement activities.
The other five are: Interior Art Design, Corporate Management Institute of Ireland Ltd (formerly Torigny), Human Resource Management Associates Ltd, Aspect Recruitment Consultant Ltd and Alexandra College of Higher Education Ltd.
His lawyer Mr MacGuill told the court Tuesday Mr Kelly and his wife were seeking access to the Finglas PTSB current account, which is overdrawn by 160, so they can cash their supplementary welfare cheques, of around 300 per week.
The court heard they needed 396 per week for expenses including for heat, light, food and transport.
The monthly mortgage repayments on their home and the Console premises can simply not be met, Mr MacGuill said.
The court heard Mr Kelly needed access to documentation held on Console's main computer in relation to payroll, which had been seized by the Director of Corporate Enforcement, so that a P45 could be generated in order to claim unemployment benefit.
Keith Farry BL, for Console, objected to the Kellys have access to the account with 6,700 in it because his client believes that money could only have come from Console.
Mr Farry also responded to an earlier request from the judge for more information from Console provisional liquidator, Tom Murray, about his (Murray's) "neutral stance" in relation to the Kellys' application to unfreeze the two PTSB accounts.
Mr Farry said the liquidator had written to the Kellys asking they meet with him but there had been "no engagement".
Mr Justice Gilligan said he was prepared to lift the freezing order in relation to the overdrawn PTSB current account to allow the Kellys cash their social welfare cheques and pay out expenses.
He was not prepared to unfreeze the PTSB savings account until they produced evidence as to where the money in it came from.
He adjourned the matter to July 28.
Earlier, the judge agreed to an application from counsel for Mr Kelly's sister, Joan McKenna, for the original temporary freezing orders against her be vacated after the court heard she has provided sworn statements saying her signature on companies office documentation, which registered her as a director of Console, had been forged.
The judge however refused an application that Ms McKenna be taken out of the proceedings as a defendant altogether.
A lawyer for the Kellys' son, Tim, who has been joined as a fourth defendant, consented to interim freezing orders obtained against him to be continued until the end of the month.
Calum hit his head in the fall, lacerating his face close to his right eye (Stock picture)
A 12-year-old schoolboy, who will be scarred for life after falling while attending a creche nine years ago, has been awarded 45,000 damages in the Circuit Civil Court.
Barrister Conor Kearney told the court that in July 2007 Calum Lawless was at the Happy Days Creche, Hansfield, Clonee, Dublin, when he fell on an uneven floor.
Mr Kearney said Calum hit his head in the fall, lacerating his face close to his right eye. Calum, who was three-years-old at the time, had been shocked and shaken.
The court heard that Calums wound had been bleeding heavily and he had been taken to the VHI Swiftcare Clinic at Dublin City University , Collins Avenue, Dublin.
Mr Kearney today told Judge James ODonohoe that Calum suffered a deep three-centimetre-long laceration, which was repaired with glue and steri-strips.
Calums eye, which had remained closed for one week, had been bruised for several weeks following the incident.
The court heard the wound had left a permanent two-centimetre scar on Calums face. Calum, through his mother Lorraine Lawless, of Ardlea, Dunshaughlin, Co Meath, sued Happys Days at Hansfield Company Ltd, with a registered address at Luttrellstown Lawn, Castleknock, Dublin, for negligence.
Mr Kearney told the court that the creche had accepted liability and had made a 45,000 settlement offer. Judge ODonohoe approved it.
The garda, who interviewed a woman accused of murdering a colleague, has been asked what he thought she meant when she said: I wanted it to stop.
The woman is charged with murdering the man by driving him into a harbour, where he drowned.
Gardai interviewed her on video tape a few months later, and portions of these interviews were played to the Central Criminal Court Tuesday morning on the tenth day of her trial.
Marta Herda of Pairc Na Saile, Emoclew Road, Arklow, Co Wicklow is charged with the murder of 31-year-old Csaba Orsos on March 26, 2013.
The 29-year-old Polish woman has pleaded not guilty to murdering the Hungarian at South Quay, Arklow.
They both worked at Brook Lodge Hotel in Aughrim and the trial heard that he was in love with her, but that she didnt feel the same way. She told gardai he had spent two years following her, phoning her and sending her text messages.
Both had been in Ms Herdas car when it went into the water that morning. Ms Herda escaped at the harbour but Mr Orsos body was found on a nearby beach later that day.
Detective Sergeant Fergus OBrien was cross examined by the defence this morning about the interviews that he had conducted with Ms Herda following her arrest in August 2013.
Hed asked if she had driven into the water deliberately. She said she hadnt. He asked why she had made the following statement to the gardai on the day of the incident: When I drove into the water, I wanted this all to stop.
She replied that she did want it all to stop and for him to leave her alone.
She wanted it to stop, all the phone calls and text messages she was getting, testified D Sgt OBrien.
She had told gardai that there was screaming in the car that morning and Giollaiosa O Lideadha SC, defending, suggested that she was describing what was happening in the car when she said she wanted it to stop.
I suppose, yes, its one interpretation, said the witness.
Mr O Lideadha suggested that she wasnt saying that she did this to stop the texts over the two years.
But, you think its open to that interpretation, said the barrister.
Yes, he replied, explaining that this was a five-minute segment out of nine hours of interviews.
Thats my interpretation. Im not saying Im right or wrong, continued the sergeant. Its for others to interpret.
The trial continues.
A man who blackmailed a 13-year-old girl from his community into having sex with him using a "compromising" photograph has been jailed for six years.
The Central Criminal Court heard that the photograph did not involve nudity and was not especially compromising but due to cultural differences it would have caused problems for the girl if her family had become aware of it.
The girl had sent the picture to a different man but the accused had got hold of it. The man (29), a foreign national who cannot be named to protect his victim's identity, pleaded guilty to three counts of defilement of the child on dates between September and November 2012.
Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy said the offences had a "squalidity" about them and noted that they had caused considerable difficulty for the young woman.
He was taking into account that the victim had failed to receive family support to the extent that one might have hoped.
The judge noted the accused man's guilty plea and that he was not likely to re-offend.
He imposed a two year sentence on each of the three counts and made the sentences consecutive, noting that if they had not been consecutive, the accused would have been punished for only one offence, despite repeating the wrongdoing.
A local garda told Kerida Naidoo SC, prosecuting, that the accused man had been a family friend and had become jealous when the girl got a boyfriend.
He came into possession of a "compromising" photograph of the girl that she had sent to someone else.
The garda said the accused man used the photograph to blackmail her into having sex by telling her that he would show it to her parents.
On three occasions, he arranged to pick her up from school and brought her up to the Dublin mountains, where he had sex with her.
The girl did not want to have sex and told him so.
He told her he would delete the image if she agreed to have sex. The matter was reported to gardai in December and the man was arrested.
Gardai preserve the scene at Seagull House on Rutland Avenue in Crumlin, Dublin, where Paul Curran was stabbed. Pic Collins Photos
A teenager charged with murder called out in court: "Tell my mam I love her."
Graham McEvoy (18) is accused of killing Paul Curran, who was fatally stabbed. He was remanded in custody for a week at Dublin District Court.
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The accused, with an address at Captain's Road, Crumlin, is charged with murdering Mr Curran at Seagull House, Rutland Street on July 16.
Mr Curran (24) died after he was stabbed in the stairwell of the complex on Saturday.
"Obviously, there is no application for bail, considering the charge," defence solicitor Michael Kelleher told Judge Michael Walsh.
A bail application on a murder charge can only be made in the High Court.
The IMO confirmed yesterday that one of its companies, the Irish Medical Educational Services, received the funding for projects to support and promote General Practice. (Stock photo)
A company operated by the country's main doctors' union got 2.7m in taxpayers money generated from funds from a controversial "drugs savings scheme", it has been confirmed.
The Irish Medical Organisation (IMO), which is funded by the subscriptions of more than 5,000 doctors, received the funds between 2001 and 2005 for various programmes to support GPs.
The Department of Health agreed the funding be paid using money saved from a scheme that incentivised GPs to be more cost effective in prescribing drugs to their patients in a bid to make savings.
The IMO confirmed yesterday that one of its companies, the Irish Medical Educational Services (IMES), received the funding for projects to support and promote General Practice.
It has recently paid back 126,000 to the HSE - although the funding ended in 2005.
The money was used by the union for information technology, the development of GP training programmes, rural practices and other services, according to documents obtained by RTE News.
However, it said that there was no value for money audit carried out to measure how the money was spent. Invoices also failed to provide the names of doctors or others who received payments from the funding.
A spokesman for the Irish Medical Organisation said that during 2011 and 2012 the company undertook projects in terms of training and developing models for general practice and both of these projects had been completed.
"The residual funds left in the company have been returned to the HSE as they had not been spent and all the initiatives had ceased," he added.
He said that "on an important point of information, the IMO confirms that no legal costs were incurred.
"No payments for legal costs were made by IMES between 2011 and 2013.
"The section heading in relevant accounts indicates that it covers costs described as - either or both - legal and professional costs.
"In the case of these accounts, the costs stated were professional to legal and they were in line with the objectives of supporting and promoting general practice."
The drugs savings scheme ended in 2005 with many questioning why doctors were incentivised to generate funds which could be invested in their own practices.
The report on Console in advance of a formal decision to wind it up said it was haphazardly run.
Console never paid the HSE for the salary of a senior health official who spent a year as chief executive of the charity on a form of secondment.
The official applied for the post of chief executive of Console when it was publicly advertised in 2008.
He opted for an arrangement where he continued to get his salary from the HSE.
Console should have reimbursed the HSE for the annual cost of employing the official but this was never paid.
The official, who was experienced in the area of mental health, returned to his job in the HSE after a year.
A spokesman for the HSE told the Irish Independent: "We are trying to establish the salary level which was involved."
The HSE is now unlikely to ever be paid at this stage as it would be down the list of creditors who will have to be graded by the liquidator for Console who was appointed last week.
The Public Accounts Committee was told on Friday that HSE investigators, who probed the finances of Console and discovered the founder Paul Kelly spent charity funds on her personal lifestyle, never interviewed the health official who was seconded for a year.
The appointment of the health official to run Console followed the commissioning of an external management consultant's report in 2007.
It advised on the type of structures that were needed if the charity was to be properly run and accountable.
After the health official left, Paul Kelly became the chief executive and is listed as getting a consultancy fee of around 90,000.
The report on Console, presented to the charity's board last week by interim chief executive David Hall, in advance of a formal decision to wind it up said it was haphazardly run.
Mr Kelly had no training in accountancy and there was no proper finance function.
It found there was no client management system in place covering the operation of counselling sessions.
"Therefore, the charity has no way of centrally managing counselling, understanding trends, planning for future demand or analysing usage of the resources and facilities it makes available.
"While paper records are available in individual centres and some documentation is available, on an ad-hoc basis, it is completely unsuitable for professional management."
He described the financial operation of the charity as "chaotic."
KYIV. July 19 (Interfax-Ukraine) Human rights activists have expressed concern about the lack of proper investigation of crimes committed since the beginning of the armed conflict in Donbas.
"Those responsible for committing numerous serious human rights violations on the uncontrolled by Ukrainian government territories continue their criminal activities without being brought to justice," Director of Kharkiv Human Rights Group Yevhen Zakharov told at Interfax-Ukraine News Agency press conference on Monday.
According to Zakharov, some of the crimes committed during the military operations in Donbas can reach an international level.
Human rights activists say that since the beginning of the conflict there has been a significant increase of killings and enforced disappearances, tortures and ill-treatment, illegal detentions and destruction of property, cases of sexual and gender-based crimes committed both against women and men, although such cases were not properly investigated up to the present day.
According to activists, the gaps in Ukrainian legislation, the issues with access to areas that are not controlled by the Ukrainian authorities, as well as lack of political will for proper investigation and prosecution of those responsible for these crimes, creates a situation in which the issues of these crimes will be considered by international institutions.
"Each of the offenses has been effectively documented, so that each crime could be investigated. And those who are guilty would be punished, the victims would receive adequate compensation and appropriate treatment ... The investigation must be conducted at both the national and international levels," Deputy Director of Kharkiv Human Rights Group Oleksandr Pavlichenko said.
Hospital patients are facing a growing threat from antibiotic-resistant bugs which are potentially life-threatening, a new report warned today.
The patient safety watchdog HIQA issued the warning in an analysis of how hospitals are controlling the use of antibiotics.
It found that while superbugs like MRSA and Clostridium Difficile rates have fallen in Ireland, other bugs which can cause a number of different infection types including urinary tract and bloodstream infection, and which may be more difficult to treat, are increasing.
Sean Egan HIQAs acting head of Healthcare Regulation said: A number of these Gram-negative bacteria are highly resistant, and are associated with serious infections, up to and including life-threatening sepsis.
Unlike MRSA, patients who carry these bacteria cannot be treated to eradicate them from their bodies. Antimicrobial prescribing and infection control practices in hospitals, and equally in community health and social care settings, needs to be of a high standard to fully address this emerging problem.
Therefore, the nature of this change requires a different, nationally coordinated response by the HSE and in particular be extended beyond acute hospitals into other non-acute residential and community care settings.
The report warned that while progress has been made in larger hospitals in implementing best practice in managing and using antibiotics, the level of progress identified varied across the country, with some smaller hospitals not having safe and sustainable measures in place to protect patients.
In addition, more effective national planning and coordination is required to ensure that the entire health system is as prepared as it can be for what is an increasing and serious challenge for health-care providers.
Resistance to antibiotics continues to increase in Ireland and internationally. In some instances, the level of antimicrobial resistance now being detected leaves clinical staff with a very limited choice of medicines that they can use to try to treat people.
Ensuring prudent antimicrobial usage, through antimicrobial stewardship, should be a priority across all health services to help to address this problem.
This review examined how well public acute hospitals implement antimicrobial stewardship best practice. We identified that a number of hospitals need urgent support from the national Health Service Executive (HSE) in this area, as they do not have an antimicrobial stewardship programme in place and lack specialized resources. This is a significant patient safety concern and should be reviewed as a matter of urgency by the HSE, said Mr Egan.
The report said a national plan to deal with these problems in Ireland has not been updated since 2001 and a new one is urgently needed.
This review found much commendable progress by highly committed front-line staff in advancing antimicrobial stewardship, but this has been hampered by the lack of an up-to-date national plan in this area.
There are pockets of excellence in some hospitals, yet others lag behind, and progress in non-acute settings such as nursing homes has been very limited. More needs to be done to ensure that good practice in this area becomes the routine norm.
Irish Rail is to hire temporary summer staff for the first time in a decade to cope with growing passenger numbers. Stock image
Irish Rail passengers have been warned to expect significant delays and overcrowding on Tuesday after an early morning train departed 30 minutes late.
Maynooth commuter services have been impacted following the delayed departure of the 7.55am train.
In a tweet from its official account, Irish Rail said that the delay was due to an earlier train failure down the track.
It added that commuters should prepare for capacity issues and that delays of at least 15 minutes are expected to continue throughout the day.
A holiday turned to tragedy when 21-year-old Alan Drennan died in controversial circumstances hours after arriving in Ibiza.
Here, his heartbroken father, Alan, who still weeps every day for his lost son, says friends and family will today mark the first anniversary of the death by dedicating a bench and releasing lanterns in his memory.
The heartbroken family of young Newtownabbey man Alan Drennan, who died a year ago today in controversial circumstances in Ibiza, are to hold a special memorial service this morning in tribute to their son, followed by a poignant lantern release tonight.
The 21-year-old's parents, Alan (56) and Verona (53), and his brothers, Lee (24) and 16-year-old Karl, will be joined by other family members and friends as they mark the first anniversary of Alan's death by dedicating three benches at the shore in Jordanstown.
Tonight, many who knew the well-loved young man are expected to gather again on the shorefront to release lanterns in tribute to him. Two trees are also to be planted in the area in tribute to the young mechanic.
A year on, it remains unclear how Alan died. Last night, his father revealed that an independent international organisation that specialises in investigating cases of police brutality abroad was looking into the circumstances.
Alan, a fun-loving, kind young man who was passionate about music, was found dead in his hotel room in Ibiza less than 24 hours after arriving there for a holiday.
Friends alleged that he was beaten by police when he was arrested on arrival following an incident on the flight to the Spanish island.
Despite investigations by local police and the PSNI, and two post-mortems in Spain and Dublin, the exact cause of death remains unknown.
Spanish police denied allegations of brutality, but a post-mortem in the Republic confirmed Alan had suffered injuries to his head.
While he welcomed the chance of an investigation, Alan's devastated dad said last night that nothing would bring his beloved son back.
The distraught father added that not a day had gone by in the past year without him shedding a tear.
He explained that the entire family were still struggling to find a way to carry on without Alan, and that the young man's mother had found the loss of her son unbearable.
"It has been a terrible year," Alan said. "You don't realise how precious something is until you lose it. I wouldn't wish what we are going through on anyone.
"Every single day, all you think about is that he is not here, that he is not with you. We miss him so much. It was my birthday in May, and it was the worst day of my life. I cried my heart out.
"Verona is in a terrible way, God love her. She just can't get her head around it at all. It is a terrible thing to be lying in bed at night listening to your wife crying, and yet there is nothing that you can do about it.
"I know that people say that time is a healer, but it isn't helping us. I shed a tear for Alan every single day and miss him every single day."
Around 600 mourners packed St Dorothea's Parish Church for Alan's funeral, including hundreds of friends of the young man. The turnout was testament to the regard in which he was held.
During the service, a moving tribute from Alan's brother, Lee, was read out by the Rev Nigel Kirkpatrick. It included the following heartfelt and touching sentiments: "The support has been phenomenal. One of the hardest things in life is losing a loved one, especially when they have been there throughout your whole life.
"I recently heard a speech that summed up my brother's legacy perfectly to me. Every man's heart one day beats its final beat, his lungs breathe their final breath and if what that man did in his life makes the blood pulse through the body of others and makes them believe deeper in something larger than life, then his essence, his spirit will be immortalised. That was my brother -he touched so many of you."
Alan said that, as a father, he has always believed in old-fashioned values and brought his boys up to have good manners. He added that while his son was fun-loving, he was also hugely caring and respectful.
Reinforcing the point, he told how his son had stopped to save a man's life just months before he himself died. "He was coming home from work on the Boucher Road in Belfast when he saw all these cars swerving on the West Link and he saw a man in the middle of the road," he explained.
"Alan stopped and brought him to the Royal Victoria Hospital. Apparently, he had been suffering from a diabetic fit. Alan came home and didn't tell anyone about it, but the next thing it was all over Facebook as the man appealed to try and find the Good Samaritan who helped him. That's the only reason we know about what he did that day.
"Alan was a wee raker and the joker in the pack, but he was also a sensible lad, and people would have come to him with their problems. There was no badness in him, and I am so proud of him."
Mr Drennan revealed that while his family had received the full report last December on the post-mortem carried out in Dublin, they could not bring themselves to read it.
He said that how Alan died was too much for the family to think about, although he did welcome the possibility of an investigation.
"My wife begged me not to open the results and we haven't," he told the Belfast Telegraph. "We know he had injuries, and we just can't deal with that right now.
"An independent body in England is looking at it for us, but it is not going to change anything. Hopefully, though, it will highlight what is going on over there, as no one deserves that."
Mr Drennan explained that Alan cancelled the holiday, before his friends persuaded him to change his mind at the last minute.
His 10 pals were all seated together at the front of the plane, while Alan was at the back because he had booked late.
On board the flight, the boys enjoyed a bit of a drink, and Alan was going back and forward to his friends up at the front of the plane.
His dad said: "There was a few drinks taken and a bit of craic, and when the plane landed the pilot asked everyone to remain seated and asked Alan to get off the plane on his own and to meet the police.
"They took him away and when he was released later that night he had injuries and told his friends the police had beaten him.
"We do have statements from two people he shared a taxi with who saw the state he was in. I just feel so bad that I wasn't there to protect him."
Police in Spain denied touching Alan, and the post-mortem conducted there indicated that the young man had died of organ failure.
Now, as his heartbroken parents continue to mourn his loss, they are focusing on creating a special memorial to their son.
Their local council is supplying three benches that will be dedicated today - one in memory of Alan, another, at his family's request, to be dedicated to the Kevin Bell Repatriation Trust that brought his body home, and the third for anyone who has lost a loved one.
Two trees and plaques will also be planted in November - one in memory of Alan and the other in memory of Kevin Bell.
The Kevin Bell Trust was set up by Newry man Colin Bell in memory of his son, Kevin (26), who died in a hit and run in New York in 2013.
To date, it has helped bring home the bodies of more than 70 Irish people who died overseas.
Mr Drennan also revealed that Alan's brothers and his friends had so far raised 13,000 for the trust.
He added: "We wanted a bench to remember Kevin as well. We will be holding a service to dedicate the benches at 11am and a prayer service tonight at 7.30pm, when we will also be letting lanterns off in memory of Alan.
"Even doing something like that kills you because he's not there. We just miss him so much."
Regina Doherty: I found it difficult to think that people would think I would be that two-faced, kind of Machiavellian type. Photo: Tom Burke
Fianna Fail is enjoying more power now than it would if it was in a minority Government, according to Fine Gael minister Regina Doherty.
The Government Chief Whip also claimed Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin "desperately" wants to become Taoiseach - but said she does not expect him to pull the plug on the current administration.
In a wide ranging interview yesterday, Ms Doherty opened up about being perceived as "two-faced" and "Machiavellian" after a radio interview in which she claimed Taoiseach Enda Kenny's refusal to spell out his exit strategy was causing confusion.
As the interview was taking place, there was uproar in the Dail at the failure by Ms Doherty to ensure there was a quorum.
Read more: Fianna Fail happy to let Kenny hobble on, but all that changes if box office Leo takes over
The Meath East TD described the interview to her local radio station LMFM as "extremely ill-advised", adding: "When he (Kenny) is ready to go, he'll let us know."
"Sometimes the conversation on a Friday morning seems more like a chat with your mate and I won't make that mistake again", Ms Doherty said of the interview with presenter Michael Reade.
"He (Kenny) knows there is no malice or intent and there isn't a chink in the support I have for him," Ms Doherty told reporters at the MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Donegal.
Mr Doherty said she was "upset" at the fact that many of her colleagues were angry at her over the comments.
"I found it difficult to think that people would think I would be that two-faced, kind of Machiavellian type, or have set him up. I would have rather people just think I was a dope." She added: "It bothered me people thought there was intent behind it because there wasn't."
Ms Doherty also spoke about the current arrangement between Fine Gael and Fianna Fail.
She suggested that Fianna Fail have more power now than if they did if they leading a minority Government.
Opportunity
"I think the situation suits Fianna Fail because it gives them an opportunity to regroup, it gives an opportunity for their new TDs to gain the experience they need, but also they do have power right now, and maybe more power right now than if they were in a minority government," Ms Doherty said.
"We need to think about their motives and not just assume their single motivation is going to be the polls and when they are in a position to cut and run they will cut and run. Because, if they cut and run at 30pc and we're on 26pc, what will the formation of the next government be?
"We could find ourselves right back on March 10 with a different leader, and I know Micheal desperately wants to be the Taoiseach and fair play to him, it's a great ambition for any politician to have. But I don't think it's as simple as waiting. In order to get a majority or have a partnership in government, there needs to be an awful lot more work done by Fianna Fail and their suitable partners before any decisions are made."
Ms Doherty said the "elephant in the room" remains the issue of Irish Water. She said she favours the re-introduction of a charging system.
"The elephant in the room in the water issue. I stood for the first time in my elected life and voted for a piece of legislation last week that I didn't agree with," she said referring to the legislation to suspend charges for nine months.
"That's the compromise. I would live and hope that when the commission reports back that we can have a different kind of conversation..."
A leading Unionist politician has described Taoiseach Enda Kenny's remarks about a potential border poll as "foolish" and "mischievous".
DUP MP Ian Paisley Jnr said the public in Northern Ireland from both nationalist and unionist counities have "no interest whatsoever" in a united Ireland.
Speaking on the 'News at One' on RTE radio, Mr Paisley said such calls for a referendum are motivated solely by causing "diversion".
He singled out Mr Kenny and Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adam, saying both leaderships are in crisis.
"I think we can dismiss it gently. We can recognise the fact there isn 't going to be a border poll, it's been dismissed by Her Majesty's government so we just have to move on from here and hope the Republic will continue to be a good neighbour," Mr Paisley said.
Mr Paisley was speaking just hours after Mr Kenny signalled the prospect of a referendum down the road.
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At the Magill Summer school on Monday, Mr Kenny called on the EU to prepare for such a possiblity.
But Mr Paisley said Mr Kenny is "foolishly" trying to use the Northern as "some kind of stick" in any future election.
He compared it to how the Spanish have treated Gibraltar and how the UK has used the Falklands.
Asked what he has to be fear in asking voters in the North whether they want to join the Republic, Mr Paisley said there isn't "an ability" or "capacity" to have a united Ireland.
There has been a clear softening in the Governments stance on the prospect of a border poll being staged.
Some 24 hours after Enda Kenny placed the issue firmly on the political agenda, Public Expenditure Minister Paschal Donohoe said the Taoiseach was merely laying out the mechanisms in the Good Friday Agreement.
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The Good Friday Agreement lays out the procedures by which a poll can be triggered in Northern Ireland. That's a matter for the communities of Northern Ireland and the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland," he said.
Speaking to reporters at the MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Mr Donohoe was asked about whether he personally favours the staging of a referendum on Irish Unity.
On a number of occasions, the Dublin Central TD said this was a matter for the North.
What the Taoiseach was re-emphasising were the clear mechanisms that were enshrined in the Good Friday Agreement, it is an internationally recognised treaty that was put together with huge commitment from all communities in Northern Ireland and the British and Irish government, Mr Donohoe said.
It is recognised in the Good Friday Agreement that if the Secretary of State of Northern Ireland recognises or believes that there is desire amongst the people of Northern Ireland to change their legal status then the mechanism is in place to trigger a poll and referendum within Northern Ireland and what the Taoiseach was saying last night was the need for the GFA to be recognised within any future agreement between the EU and the UK.
The clear softening in the Governments stance on the matter came just hours after a leading Unionist politician described Mr Kennys remarks as foolish and mischievous.
DUP MP Ian Paisley Jnr said the public in Northern Ireland from both nationalist and unionist counities have "no interest whatsoever" in a united Ireland.
Speaking on the 'News at One' on RTE radio, Mr Paisley said such calls for a referendum are motivated solely by causing "diversion".
He singled out Mr Kenny and Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adam, saying both leaderships are in crisis.
"I think we can dismiss it gently. We can recognise the fact there isn 't going to be a border poll, it's been dismissed by Her Majesty's government so we just have to move on from here and hope the Republic will continue to be a good neighbour," Mr Paisley said.
Meanwhile, Mr Donohoe described Mr Kenny as an experienced Taoiseach ,adding that he has his full support.
It is up to the Taoiseach, as I have said on a number of occasions, for him to determine at what point he no longer wants to lead Fine Gael.
JOHN Hennessy is unlike any other solicitor in Ireland - he has been the target of a murder attempt by organised crime gangs.
The Swords solicitor to murdered mother-of-two Baiba Saulite was viciously targeted by gangland thugs who tried to burn him and his partner to death in their own home.
In an exclusive podcast with Independent.ie, John revealed how Baiba's brutal murder turned his life upside down.
He also spoke of the ongoing Hutch/Kinahan feud, which he said he knew was reaching boiling point while the State was "asleep at the wheel".
"I want to live in a State where I am safe in my own home. Gangland Ireland is indiscriminate, they don't give a damn and that's why they have got to be stopped," he said.
Latvian mother Baiba Saulite was shot dead on the doorstep of her home in Swords on November 19, 2006.
John represented Baiba after he successfully forced an individual to return her sons into her care - after he kidnapped them in 2004 and sent them to live with his mother in Lebanon.
"It was a very difficult case. a particular individual on the other side was a very unpleasant character," said John.
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"The abduction of the kids - taken out of the jurisdiction - whilst the alleged abductor stayed Irelandthat fascinated me, it was kind of two fingers to the State.
"I just looked at this guy and thought that he doesn't give a damn. Individuals were able to elicit the help of gangland Ireland and didn't give a damn about the consequences."
John was approached by senior gardai in late 2005 and informed that his life was in danger.
"You can imagine for a soft professional like me, it really took me back I couldn't believe it.
"I didn't want to drop the case, that would be the completely wrong thing to do.
"I took the safety advice, checking to see if anybody is hanging around my routine and [put] cameras in the house," he said.
However, the extreme threat against his life was made clear when vicious thugs tried to brutally kill John and his partner.
As he slept, his Swords house was set alight and engulfed in a blaze within minutes.
"Fortunately I am a light sleeper, I woke up and the smoke alarm was going off. We had to get out of the house, downstairs was engulfed in smoke and we managed to get out the back door.
"This was attempted murder, I have no doubt about that.
"It was recorded as criminal damage, but I have no doubt it was an attempt on my life. I knew instantly, I had absolutely no doubt as to who did it.
"It was put to me at the time by friends that I might want to leave the country. There was no way I was going to do that, not at the hands of these animals who the State allowed to get so powerful that they do such atrocities," he said.
He believes gardai knew who carried out the deadly attack.
"The information was there, whether or not it was acted upon early enough, we will never know, and it is not something I have become obsessed about.
"It was an awful, terrible experience. We got through it and fixed up the house."
Just a year later, the beautiful mother was shot dead on a cold winter's night by a lone gunman on the doorstep of her rented house.
Immediately after the murder, John was provided with 24-hour armed protection by gardai, which he describes as "particularly intrusive and difficult".
John said the protection by the State took "a lot of getting used to" and that he wanted to escape from it.
"It was extremely difficult. It was enormously stressful - you're living on a day-to-day basis.
"It was costing the state a fortune, but it was all down to the power of gangland."
The experienced solicitor now believes the Government needs to take urgent action to resolve Dublin's gangland feud.
He also believes that somebody - either a politician or the garda commissioner - must take responsibility and be accountable for gangland crime.
boiling
"I knew from a couple of sources, a number of months beforehand, that this was going to happen, that the Kinahan-Hutch group thing was boiling over. Why the hell didn't the State know?
"The State was asleep at the wheel on so many different levels. We have got to look ahead as a State to the kind of country we want to live in.
"I feel it is almost incumbent upon me, it's important for me to convince people that we cannot have or accept this kind of thing going on.
"The State is the biggest guy in there, the State has to flex its muscles.
"The reality is they have the power to deal with this. We have legislation to beat the band. The laws are there, implement the laws and make sure the gardai are particularly motivated," he added.
There is absolutely no reason why pre-teens need to be engaged in online socialising of any kind.
Clinical psychologist David Coleman on why parents should be wary about allowing their children to have Snapchat.
Question: My daughter keeps asking can she get Snapchat on her iPod. She has just turned 11 and says that she's the only one in her class that doesn't have it (which is not the case). However, all her close friends have it and they keep asking her when she will get it too.
I'm just wary of giving in and letting her have it. I suppose my main problem with it is that I think she's too young to have access to social media.
My dilemma, though, is that I don't want her to feel left out either. What do you think about her having Snapchat at her age?
David replies: I think it is a really bad idea for her to get Snapchat. In fact, it is a really bad idea for her friends to have it too. There seems to be a cohort of parents who don't really think too much about the implications of their actions.
Letting their pre-teens slip into the world of social media, seems, to me, to be an example of careless parenting. Even with teenagers we need to be very conscious and thought-through in our decisions to allow them access to social media.
But with the pre-teens, there is absolutely no reason why they need to be engaged in online socialising of any kind.
Of course, if every parent said "no" definitively, and didn't cave in to the moans and whinges of their child regarding social media or internet access, we'd have no issue with pre-teens making demands for phones, Snapchat, Facebook messenger, WhatsApp and the rest.
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The slide happens early, though. When you have parents giving their toddlers the use of phones or tablets to watch cartoons, YouTube clips and so on, to keep them occupied, it is no wonder that those same children are the precocious social media users at age eight, nine, 10 or 11.
Parents need to be more thoughtful about engaging their young children rather than relying on a digital babysitter. When children are bored, they become creative. Boredom can be a good thing - we don't have to fill their every waking minute with some activity or distraction.
I believe that parents need a little more backbone. Your query is a good example of the dilemma that so many parents face, and of the uncertainty that many feel.
You have a clear opinion that you think your daughter is too young for Snapchat, and yet you are second-guessing yourself in case you do her some harm by being firm and authoritative about that opinion.
If you know what you think is best for your child, then go with your gut. Who cares what her friends are doing? What they do is the responsibility of their parents (at this age). What your daughter does is your responsibility.
If her friends are real friends then the strength of their relationship should be able to withstand the lack of a digital means of staying in touch.
Out of interest, I posed your dilemma to those folks that follow me on Facebook. In the space of about two hours, over 300 people had responded to say an overwhelming "No!" to the notion of giving an 11-year-old access to social media of any kind, and Snapchat in particular.
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The fact that Snapchat involves taking a picture, usually a selfie of some kind, and adding some text, makes it an attractive way for youngsters to communicate. In theory, the picture erases itself after a number of seconds, but in practice, the image can be screenshot if the recipient wants to keep the photo.
Teenagers use Snapchat to send naked pictures, or sexually suggestive pictures, of themselves to a friend, alongside the more innocent selfies and quick updates/chats.
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Some youngsters can feel under huge pressure to share these kinds of snaps, despite the fact that once they are shared, they are around, somewhere in cyberspace, forever, with the potential to be harmfully shared further.
Young children need to socialise face-to-face, not online.
Don't let your daughter's potential disappointment dissuade you from your own core view that she is just too young. She is just too young.
Let her wait until she is 13, or in secondary school. Then you can start the process of guiding her and supporting her in her social media world, but not until then.
Our daughter wants to make her Communion next year, but we are staunch non-believers. Help!
Q. Our seven-year-old daughter is not baptised, but goes to a Catholic school. We are not believers. The multi-denominational schools were oversubscribed when she started school so we put her into the Catholic school. We find that she talks about God, Jesus, says prayers and talks about Mass. She has already pleaded to make her Holy Communion with the rest of the class next year, but we are saying "no". Are we being selfish by not baptising her, even though that may make it hard for her to fit in? How can we help her live with our choices for her?
David replies: I could easily imagine that you are not alone in your struggle with balancing your own religious beliefs (or non-beliefs) with the religious beliefs that your child is learning in school.
I take it from your query that you would have much preferred a multi-denominational school, where no particular doctrine is taught. The choices we have to make, sometimes, as parents, are hard.
I wonder why you settled on a Catholic-ethos school as your second best? Is Catholicism the religion that you yourself have moved away from, or were you brought up with no particular religious faith?
How much influence did your school, and/or your parents, play in your decisions not to believe in a religious doctrine?
I ask these questions because I think the answers may guide you in your decisions in relation to your daughter.
If it is the case that you were brought up with a religious influence from your family and school that you later chose to question and reject, then you could feel confident to let your daughter make similar choices in due course. In other words, while school and family influences may be very significant when we are young, they don't have to be defining throughout our lives.
Just like you, your daughter may be able to absorb the Catholic ethos while she is a young child, even consciously joining the Catholic faith in order to make her Communion, and still, as she gets older, choose to question it and reject it.
However, I would imagine that if you and your husband's non-belief is because you were brought up that way, then you may find it more difficult to accept that your daughter may be absorbing a faith that you have never agreed with.
Perhaps you don't want to seem hypocritical by endorsing beliefs and doctrines that she is learning in school, which you don't agree with. But then, the responsibility to ensure that there is harmony between beliefs at home and school is yours.
By your choice of school, you have actually given her a mixed message. On the one hand, you don't believe in the Catholic teachings, but by sending her to a Catholic school, you are still endorsing those teachings.
I am all in favour of children fitting in, primarily, with the religious (or non-religious) views and beliefs of their parents. It is right that their parents most heavily influence children's perspectives.
But, as parents, we must then ensure that, as much as possible, the other influential environments that our children grow in, namely schools, also fit, or are congruent, with what we believe (or don't believe).
At her age, she is unlikely to have the capacity to challenge either your views or the school's views, and so it would be much easier for her if she had just one value and belief system to come to terms with.
I think, therefore, that you either need to let her conform fully to the religious doctrine of her school, even if it doesn't fit for you, confident in the knowledge that she will question it appropriately as she gets older, or you need to remove the pressure of that doctrine so that yours is the only belief system that she is exposed to.
If you truly hold to your own beliefs (or really can't accept the Catholic beliefs), then it would seem better for you to take her out of the Catholic school, home educate her temporarily if needs be, and then place her in a multi-denominational school when a place becomes available.
Sonia O'Sullivan, Vodafone CEO Anne O'Leary, and Vodafone employees Paul Foley and Sarah-Jane McGibney (wearing wetsuits), help launch the 2016 Vodafone Dublin City Triathlon which takes place on August 28 .Photo:Naoise Culhane
GPs regularly advise patients to exercise, but what if they gave them an actual physical activity prescription?
Instead of dishing out drugs, they could consider tailoring an exercise programme to the needs of an individual patient, giving them set targets to meet.
A study presented at a conference at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin tracked a group of patients who were given this exercise prescription.
A total of 368 patients (83pc) completed the six month follow-up.In the whole group, 270 patients (75pc) had increased their physical activity level.
And 153 patients (42pc) had moved from being inadequately to sufficiently physically active.
Significant improvements were shown in body mass index (BMI), waist circumference, systolic blood pressure, fasting plasma glucose, cholesterol and low density lipoprotein (LDL).
There were also positive signs in general health, vitality, social function, mental health, role limitation-physical/emotional, mental component summary and physical component summary.
The study, which related to patients in Sweden, suggested that significant benefits can emerge.
The effort overall was considered small and the budget was low.
BEIJING, July 18 -- China will overhaul its investment and financing system to stimulate market vitality amid the economic downturn, according to a document released Monday by the central authorities.
The government will cut red tape, improve supervision and encourage enterprises to invest, said a guideline jointly released by the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council.
China will enhance private investment management, reinforce public investment, diversify corporate financing channels and accelerate the transformation of government functions, the guideline said.
It also urged implementation of the measures.
The document marked the latest effort by the central authorities to solve entrenched funding difficulties for small companies and encourage better use of private capital.
Private investment increased only 2.8 percent in the first half of 2016, down from 3.9 percent growth in the first five months and 5.7 percent in the first quarter, official data showed.
Startups will see stronger financial support, while companies will be encouraged to raise funds through bond issuance, according to the document. Domestic firms and financial institutions will be granted easier access to foreign capital.
Controls on insurance capital will be relaxed to facilitate projects in infrastructure, livelihood and urbanization.
Additionally, China will launch pilots to allow financial institutions to hold corporate equities.
The government has started loosening its grip on investment and financing, with less investment subject to approval and more decision-making power in the hands of enterprises.
Elizabeth Lynch knows from personal experience what it means to get a second chance at life. She has also discovered that no matter how ill you become, there is always the possibility you will find your way back to good health.
Elizabeth grew up on Achill island, surrounded by natural beauty, and that no doubt influenced her decision to become an architect. Following her studies, she practised in London, New York, Tanzania and Kenya. She says that working on social housing in Africa was her most meaningful professional experience.
In 1996, Elizabeth returned to Ireland, and, four years later, she opened a practice in Castlebar, Co Mayo. She says homes are her main architectural interest, and she stresses the importance of building houses that can evolve with the ever-changing needs of the family. These days, Elizabeth's main occupation is caring for buildings owned by the Galway Mayo Institute of Technology (GMIT). She is married with two children, who are now 11 and 12 years old.
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About a year ago, Elizabeth faced one of the most frightening experiences of her life. It began innocently enough, with her feeling tired. But that wasn't unexpected, her mother had been in hospital, suffering from heart failure, for some time. Then Elizabeth noticed she was occasionally short of breath. So she went to her local medical practice, where asthma was suspected. When she didn't get any better, she returned, and was seen by a different doctor, who immediately diagnosed a problem with her heart. That night, Elizabeth got worse, so she called an ambulance, and was rushed to the local hospital. "They didn't have a cardiologist and couldn't stabilise me," she explains. By now, it had become clear that Elizabeth's life was in danger and that she needed to be rushed to Galway. But medical staff weren't convinced she would survive the journey. An anaesthetist helped assess the situation. "He was quite a funny man," she remembers. "He looked at the X-rays and said, 'If I were you, I'd jump in that ambulance.'" Given that Elizabeth is a 'glass half-full' kind of person, she took his advice and was soon on her way. She says the paramedics monitored her carefully, and were very reassuring. Nonetheless, she was stunned by the reception she got at the hospital in Galway.
"Even though it was the middle of the night, there was a whole cardiac team waiting for me," Elizabeth remembers. She was diagnosed with myocarditis, which is an inflammation of the myocardium, the middle layer of the heart. This is usually caused by a virus. Doctors had to break the devastating news that she was in a "very bad way". There was fluid around her heart, in her lungs and in the lining of other organs. Unbeknown to her, Elizabeth's immediate family was alerted, and began flying back to Ireland to say their "last goodbyes".
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She was immediately medicated and learned that if the drugs failed, she could end up on life support, needing transplants. It was a terrifying situation. But when she woke next morning, a medical miracle had occurred. "Unbelievably, the drugs they had given me managed to cause six litres of fluid to leave my body. I said it must be due to the fact that I was so young. But they said, 'No, the last person with this condition ended up on life support, while another one had died'. And both were even younger than me."
Later, when doctors asked her why she hadn't been alerted that something was amiss when she had put on weight (because of the build-up of fluid) she explained she had been so busy attending to her mother, while looking after her children and working, that she hadn't been eating properly. So a little extra weight was to be expected. No doubt Elizabeth's previous healthy lifestyle did stand her in good stead when it came to the crunch. She had always been active, especially during visits to Achill. And if further proof was needed, she was a member of the lifeboat crew on the island. "They check you out medically," Elizabeth explains. "The last thing they want is another distressed person on their hands during an emergency."
The upshot of all this was that, over time, and with excellent medical interventions, permanent damage to her heart was limited to just 10pc of the organ. "I seem to have made a good recovery," she says, smiling broadly. Elizabeth remained in the hospital's cardiac unit for three weeks. During that time, she watched people who were generally a good deal older than her, coming and going. Four days after her own discharge, her much-loved mother passed away. It was an exceedingly emotional time for everyone concerned. "A lot of it has to do with your attitude," says Elizabeth stoically. "I am a practical person. I had a funeral to organise. I did mum's make-up before we laid her out at home in Achill; of course, we had the family helping out too." In spite of all that was going on, Elizabeth's recovery continued to hold firm.
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Soon after her ordeal, her cardiologist recommended that Elizabeth should start exercising. And even though she had been used to long, strenuous, beach walks, she was advised to get a treadmill and to start at the beginning again.
"He wanted me to exercise gently at first, and to do so regularly, with no excuses, like the rain," Elizabeth explains. "So I went on DoneDeal and bought myself a treadmill, and like any good woman, I bought the gym gear too." She was also introduced to the Heart Failure Clinic in Galway, and is delighted to have the support and back-up it provides. "As the amount of drugs I am taking are reduced, they are guiding me through the process, explaining how it all works, step by step," says Elizabeth. They're constantly checking what is going on, and monitoring me."
She has the number of the clinic's chief heart-failure nurse in her mobile phone, and is comforted just knowing she can access help at any time. She is also full of praise for her GP, Edward King. "He is brilliant and continues to look after my father and me," she says.
Elizabeth urges everyone to take full responsibility for their health. "It doesn't matter how fit you feel," she says. "There's always the possibility something will get you. So be vigilant. I was lucky, because I had such an astute GP."
For more information about heart failure, see Croi.ie or heartbeat-trust.ie. This is an initiative of the Heart Failure Patient Alliance, a partnership between Croi, the West of Ireland Cardiac Foundation; and the Heartbeat Trust, a national heart-failure charity
The exterior of Gemma's house, which she finally bought after seeing it for sale on the internet.
The valances on all the beds are made of sacking. This upstairs bedroom has stunning views of the lake. It was here that Gemma realised that her father used to fish at the very spot on the lake which is visible from her top windows.
There's Indian sandstone on the floor throughout the ground floor, including in the bedrooms, which are all en suite.
Some of Gemma's collection of hats and walking sticks, both essential for the elements in this area. The curtains are made of sacking as Gemma wanted all the furnishings to be natural; they are all lined and interlocked.
Gemmas daughter, Julianna, also an artist, plays the piano when she visits; the stags' heads are her sons' trophies from a shoot in Scotland where the deer were being culled.
Gemma in the kitchen area of her open-plan home, which is full of light with its double-height ceiling and large expanses of glass. The painting over the doorway is by Gemma.
Gemma in the kitchen area of her open-plan home, which is full of light with its double-height ceiling and large expanses of glass. The painting over the doorway is by Gemma. Photo: Tony Gavin.
Gemma and Finn in the living room. The stone surfaces are softened with lots of sheepskins and rugs, and the neutral colours are enlivened by her own paintings. Gemma loves to meditate and, she says, Finn does too.
People talk a lot about their 'dream house', and the 'house of their dreams' but usually they just mean the house they'd like to have - rarely have they actually dreamed about it.
Artist, entrepreneur and yoga teacher Gemma Billington is different. There was a house in her dreams, a house that kept cropping up, and, yes, she does now live in it. "I had a recurring dream about a house. I must have dreamed about it five times over several years," Gemma recalls. "Each time in the dream, I was on a height, I was walking along a path, then I'd go round a bend and see this house overlooking water. My father was in the dream, too. He was always in the dream, him and a chest of drawers, and I couldn't close the drawers."
Gemma's main base is in Royal Bucklebury, in the Berkshire countryside in England - think Midsomer Murders turf - where she has lived for over 30 years; during that time, she has reared a family, trained as an artist and established a solid reputation for her paintings. She has also become a key member of the local farming and horsey set, so it never occurred to her that she would one day find the actual house of her dreams in Kerry.
However, she did love Kerry; she spent her early years there, and though she lived in many parts of Ireland before making a life for herself in England, she has always returned to the Kingdom.
Expand Close Gemma in the kitchen area of her open-plan home, which is full of light with its double-height ceiling and large expanses of glass. The painting over the doorway is by Gemma. / Facebook
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Whatsapp Gemma in the kitchen area of her open-plan home, which is full of light with its double-height ceiling and large expanses of glass. The painting over the doorway is by Gemma.
"I was born in Killorglin. I lived there until I was four, then we moved to Killarney. My father was a garda sergeant, and we moved every two-and-a-half years after that. We lived in Ballina, Co Mayo; then back to Kerry, to Caherciveen; then Gort in Galway," Gemma says in her wonderful Kerry accent, blended with British Home Counties' tones.
Then tragedy struck the family. "My mother died when I was 14. There were ten of us; the eldest was 27 and the youngest was eight, and my father retired and moved back to Killarney." The vivacious blonde recalls, "He never got over losing her. It was awful. It's only when you become a mother yourself that you realize the loss."
After her mother died, Gemma's father sent her back to Galway to boarding school, but she returned to Killarney as soon as she had done her Leaving Cert, and at 21 she married her first boyfriend. It's hardly surprising that it didn't last, and after 18 months, they split up. "Even though I knew it was the right thing to separate, it was the hardest decision to leave the marriage. And in those days, over 30 years ago, there was no way I could stay in Killarney, I was like a scarlet woman. People were talking about me, looking at me," the chatty artist explains.
Gemma went off to London and found secretarial work - she had worked as a secretary in a firm of architects in Kerry, so it was an easy transition to work with an accountancy company in London. She met another Kerry man called Johnny Byrne, but she was determined not to walk into marriage again. "When I was young, I used to say, 'I'm going to be a nun', and so when my first marriage ended, I thought, 'I'll join the missions'," she says, laughing. "I went to South Africa where my sister was living with her German husband. They had a food business there, and I used to help out, but you know what, I couldn't cope with apartheid. I thought it was so wrong. So I came back to London, and married Johnny."
They stayed together eight years and had two sons, William (now 32) and Nolan (30) both of whom work for Johnny's building company; and a daughter, Julianna, who is an artist like her mother.
Gemma and Johnny split up in 1990, and soon afterwards she met Tim, a farmer. "He only lived five or 10 minutes away from me, and I'd seen him at village things. They're very good in England at inviting you to meet the local single man, and I was invited to supper to meet him. Anyway, he pursued me, and we married in 1991," she says with a laugh.
Expand Close Gemmas daughter, Julianna, also an artist, plays the piano when she visits; the stags' heads are her sons' trophies from a shoot in Scotland where the deer were being culled. / Facebook
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Whatsapp Gemmas daughter, Julianna, also an artist, plays the piano when she visits; the stags' heads are her sons' trophies from a shoot in Scotland where the deer were being culled.
Tim had been widowed twice, and had four daughters, Victoria, Susie , Harriet and Felicity. The girls are older than Gemma's kids, but they all blended well, and the couple brought up them together. "I feel there's a time and place for everything and I feel Tim and I really needed each other at the time," Gemma says. "It was full-on with seven children, but they're super-duper girls. I get on really well with them. I love them."
Tim continued to farm for a time, and then the couple got into horses with brood mares. They've had some success with Rivireen, Kilreelig and Valentia. "We take our mares to the stallion and as soon as the mare has had a foal, she's straight off to the stallion again," Gemma explains. She adds that they keep some of the foals, and form syndicates with friends and neighbours and other interested groups.
Her great friends Mike and Carole Middleton were in one of their syndicates for a horse called Sohraab. "A well-known trainer called Hughie Morrison trains them for us," Gemma explains, adding that she also has a horse with her nephew in Mallow, Jim Culloty, who has ridden Gold Cup winners at Cheltenham three times.
While it's always been hard work with the farm and the combined families, Gemma, who's something of a dynamo, says she was always doing courses, and when her youngest started school, she studied for an art degree at Winchester College. She graduated in 2000, and from then on, art was her outlet. "I could drop Julianna to school, do my studies, and then, after my classes, I'd collect her from school," Gemma explains.
It wasn't always easy, and Tim, in particular, had a very hard time: first with illness himself, and then his daughter, Susie, died six years ago of a heart condition, leaving Tim, Susie's husband and three children bereft.
Throughout the years, both good and bad, Gemma kept painting, and she says it kept her sane. "I couldn't wait to paint, and all my inspiration comes from Kerry. My paintings are not of places, they're of the inner landscape. There is something about Kerry - it takes you out of the landscape and in, deep into the landscape," she says, trying to explain the meaning of her fabulous paintings, which are abstract.
Expand Close Gemma had the walls painted in Colourtrend's London Road. Gemmas builder made the lovely table, which is inset with local stone. / Facebook
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Whatsapp Gemma had the walls painted in Colourtrend's London Road. Gemmas builder made the lovely table, which is inset with local stone.
She goes on to explain her method: "I don't use brushes, I paint with my hands, and I meditate before I paint."
Gemma's painting led her back more and more to Kerry, and, some years ago, on one of her trips back, she happened on the house of her dreams, literally.
She had driven out to Caragh Lake with her friend Peig, and drove up the mountain. "We turned a bend and saw this house, and I said to Peig, 'That's my house'," Gemma recalls. "I went back to England, and later in the week, Peig called to see the owner, but he said, 'It's not on the market'. Eighteen months later, I was idling on the internet and saw it, 'My god, it's for sale'. That was four years ago last April."
When Gemma bought the house - a stone building, with massive expanses of glass, to take full advantage of the views of the surrounding lakes and mountains - it was a shell, and she decided to keep it fairly simple. There was no second floor at the time, and she opted not to add rooms over the main living space - which incorporates the kitchen, the dining area, and the living room - instead, keeping that area double height, with exposed beams. Off it, is a music room at one end, and two bedrooms and a utility area at the other end.
She added an upstairs bedroom and a stairs to access it, and then set about furnishing the whole house in a very particular way. "Skellig Rock had a big influence on the way I looked at it. Dwellings exist to protect us from the elements, and that's what I wanted - simple protection. So I kept everything natural. When I'm painting, I haven't a clue, one stroke leads to another, and it was the same with the house. I had a lovely builder and it all evolved; it was so easy, so stress-free," she notes.
The builder put in natural oak beams, panelling and units, and Indian sandstone on the floor. Gemma then put lots of sheepskins everywhere. Even the curtains are natural. "At the beginning, I had thought, 'no curtains', but I realised I'd need them for warmth.
"People suggested tartan might work, but I said, 'I'm not in Scotland'. Then I hit on the idea of sacking. It's used for sandbags for flooding in England, and I thought that would be perfect. It's cheap as chips, but of course lining and interlocking made them very expensive," she laughs.
Gemma also added a wonderful studio separate to the main house, just a few steps from her back door. She initially thought it would be her painting studio, but she has since had other ideas. "When I'm painting, I'd often ask myself, 'What am I trying to do?' I always thought I would create a healing space with my paintings. When I started painting, I wanted to make the world a more peaceful place, but then I realised the paintings are hanging in a gallery; that's not helping anyone."
It's something she's been ruminating about for years, and has finally come up with an answer: she wants to help people to heal. "I'm the seventh daughter of a seventh son. At least, I think I am. I am the seventh daughter, and I think my father was the seventh son. I said it to one of my family the other day, and she disagreed. I said, 'Don't spoil a good story, I've been dining out on it for years'."
Expand Close Gemma and Finn in the living room. The stone surfaces are softened with lots of sheepskins and rugs, and the neutral colours are enlivened by her own paintings. Gemma loves to meditate and, she says, Finn does too. / Facebook
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Whatsapp Gemma and Finn in the living room. The stone surfaces are softened with lots of sheepskins and rugs, and the neutral colours are enlivened by her own paintings. Gemma loves to meditate and, she says, Finn does too.
Though she explains her role as a healer in a light-hearted way, she is quite serious. "What I want to do is to create here a meditative space, and invite people to come to my studio to do meditation and mantras and chanting. I want to do workshops to awaken people's creativity," Gemma says.
The meditation and mantras are not a new thing; Gemma has been practising yoga for years, ever since her good friend Carole Middleton introduced her to kundalini yoga when the two couples, Tim and Gemma and Carole and Mike, were on holiday in Mustique.
"It's a yoga for everyday living. Let's say I've got a bit of an upset tummy, there would be a kriya, a set of exercises, for exactly that, to relieve your symptoms. There's the kirtan kriya, which is marvellous for relieving stress. There's a vibration for every part of the body, one for calming the heart, the liver. It sounds crazy, but it's not," she says. She gets up before sunrise every day to do her yoga. "I always wear white, I cover my head and I do the exercises for my bodies. We have 10 bodies," she explains.
Gemma also does gonging meditation - a sound therapy in which participants lie down and take in the hypnotic vibrations of Gemma's different gongs. Reiki is another passion, and she's off soon to Ibiza to train as a reiki master.
She also adores cooking wholesome meals - including her signature brown breads, full of seeds and nuts - and she loves to cosset people with her creations.
Between the gonging, the yoga, the reiki and the cooking, she plans to spend more time in Kerry running workshops in the beautiful surroundings of her stone home, which she feels she was led to by her father. "I remember one day looking out the top window at the lake, and I realised that was where he had fished," she says.
So that leaves just one piece of the dream unsolved - the drawers that wouldn't close. "I think at the time I was having the dreams, I was overburdened," she says. "Not any more."
For details of Gemma's one-day and half-day yoga courses and her one-to-one healing sessions, see gemmabillington.co.uk
Edited by Mary O'Sullivan.
Photography by Tony Gavin
Irish Water Safety has warned swimmers to beware of the dangerous Lions Mane jellyfish, which have been spotted in their numbers along Irelands east coast in recent days.
The jellyfishs sting is much stronger than those of other species found in Irish waters and can cause anaphylactic reactions in people who are allergic.
Expand Close The Lion's Mane jellyfish can reach a diameter of 2m, but are normally much smaller. They have 150 tentacles each and their colour ranges from deep red to yellow. Photo: IWS / Facebook
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Whatsapp The Lion's Mane jellyfish can reach a diameter of 2m, but are normally much smaller. They have 150 tentacles each and their colour ranges from deep red to yellow. Photo: IWS
John Leech of Irish Water Safety revealed that there is at least one hospitalisation in Ireland each year following a sting from a Lions Mane jellyfish and swimmers in Louth, Meath, Dublin, Wicklow and Wexford should be extremely vigilant.
Everyone who is swimming this week in beaches along the East coast should be conscious of these Lions Mane jellyfish, which have been brought in with the spring tide in their numbers, he said.
They have the potential to cause an anaphylactic reaction in someone who is stung, if they should be allergic, but much like a bee sting, you dont know until youve been stung.
We have seen a number of people hospitalised from this jellyfish and its sting is quite painful and different to other jellyfish found in Irish waters.
The sting from their tentacles may last for days after they have died, he said.
They should ease off in about five days when the tide goes out again, there will be fewer of them, he said.
Expand Close A Lion's Mane Jellyfish spotted in Bettystown / Facebook
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Whatsapp A Lion's Mane Jellyfish spotted in Bettystown
The Lions Mane jellyfish can have a diameter of up to 2 metres and has more than 150 tentacles. The creatures range in colour from deep red to yellow.
Meath County Council has issued warnings to swimmers in Bettystown after the creatures were spotted in the ocean yesterday.
Lions Mane Jellyfish have been found on the Bettystown beach in recent days, a statement said.
The council is advising all bathers to be extremely vigilant when visiting the beach as stings from these jellyfish can be very serious.
Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close Three year old Saoirse Gallagher with Alex [8] and Evie [5] Doyle from Cabra, cool down the water on Dublin's Dollymount Strand. Picture Credit : Frank Mc Grath 18/7/16 18/07/16 People out enjoying the good weather at Forty foot, Sandycove ,Dublin this afternoon..Pic Stephen Collins/Collins Photos 18/07/16 People out enjoying the good weather at Forty foot, Sandycove ,Dublin this afternoon..Pic Stephen Collins/Collins Photos 18/07/16 People out enjoying the good weather at Forty foot, Sandycove ,Dublin this afternoon..Pic Stephen Collins/Collins Photos 18/07/16 People out enjoying the good weather at Forty foot, Sandycove ,Dublin this afternoon..Pic Stephen Collins/Collins Photos 18/07/16Enjoying the good weather at Forty foot, Sandycove ,Dublin this afternoon..Pic Stephen Collins/Collins Photos 19/7/16 Kara Hinch, age 4 and Ryleigh Coulahan, age 3, Tallaght, enjoying the great weather at the Forty Foot in Sandycove, Dublin. Pictures:Arthur Carron 19/7/16 People enjoying the great weather at the Forty Foot in Sandycove, Dublin. Pictures:Arthur Carron 19/7/16 People enjoying the great weather at the Forty Foot in Sandycove, Dublin. Pictures:Arthur Carron 19/7/16 Eve Craven, age 5, and her brother Isaac, age 2, Killiney, enjoying the great weather at the Forty Foot in Sandycove, Dublin. Pictures:Arthur Carron Sun, Sea, Sand and an Ice Cream... Two and a half year old Callum Mulholland from Finglas cools down with and ice cream on Dublin's Dollymount Strand. Picture Credit : Frank Mc Grath 18/7/16 Ten year old Ella Troy jumps off the sandunes with Aidan [7] and Cian [6] Cullen from Santry, on Dublin's Dollymount Strand. Picture Credit : Frank Mc Grath 18/7/16 Demi Ryan, 4, from Crumlin enjoys the good weather on Sandymount beach in Dublin. Picture credit; Damien Eagers 18/7/2016 Demi Ryan, 4, left, and Maya Courtney, 4 from Crumlin enjoys the good weather on Sandymount beach in Dublin. Picture credit; Damien Eagers 18/7/2016 Tuesday 19 July 2016. Photo: Douglas O'Connor. Portmarnock Beach. Enjoying the sunshine: Ava Moran (3) Isabella Dodrill (7) Harry Moran (7) from Blanchardstown. Tuesday 19 July 2016. Photo: Douglas O'Connor. Portmarnock Beach. Enjoying the sunshine. Tuesday 19 July 2016. Photo: Douglas O'Connor. Portmarnock Beach. Enjoying the sunshine. Shay's Burger Van. Tuesday 19 July 2016. Photo: Douglas O'Connor. Portmarnock Beach. Enjoying the sunshine: Kate Spila from Maynooth with her son Adam (3) and her nephew Daniel Spila (4) / Facebook
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Whatsapp Three year old Saoirse Gallagher with Alex [8] and Evie [5] Doyle from Cabra, cool down the water on Dublin's Dollymount Strand. Picture Credit : Frank Mc Grath 18/7/16
Swimmers in Galway and Mayo need not think they are totally safe from a nasty sting from a Lions Mane either, as they have also been spotted on the West coast, albeit in much smaller numbers.
Meanwhile, the Irish Water Safety spokesperson also revealed that peeing on a jellyfish sting is an old wives tale and will not alleviate the pain.
If you get stung, you need to wash it with salt water and remove the tentacles as soon as you can. Place a dry cold pack against it. As with anything, if the pain does not die down or the sting appears particularly bad, seek medical attention and go to A&E, he said.
Taoiseach Enda Kenny chose the picturesque surroundings of Glenties to set in train a process that may eventually lead to one of the most defining moments in Irish history.
The choice of location is quite fitting given that Donegal shares a border with Derry that, as a result of Brexit, could once again be policed by soldiers in the near future.
Indeed, many of those present for Mr Kenny's speech yesterday in the Highlands Hotel yesterday have told their fears of a return to the dark old days when a hard border was in place.
However, nobody expected Mr Kenny to be so frank about a potential scenario that has now been firmly placed on the political agenda.
Mr Kenny gave no timeframe for any such a referendum and did not say whether two votes would be required - one in each jurisdiction.
In fact, one could easily draw the inference from his remarks that such a process - if it materialises at all - could be five, even 10 years down the line.
If that is the case, he won't be Taoiseach to steer his people towards embracing such an outcome.
While Mr Kenny's choice of location to float the idea of a border poll may have been ideal, the timing of his highly significant remarks will undoubtedly be questioned.
The Taoiseach has now opened a Pandora's Box of potentially seismic consequences for political relationships North and South.
And his decision to compare the prospect of re-unification to the absorption of East Germany into West Germany following the demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1989 is sure to stoke emotions.
Not only has the North's First Minister Arlene Foster already shot down the idea of a referendum to create a 32-county Republic, she has even shot down the idea of a so-called 'All Island forum'.
And any hopes held by nationalists that the new Secretary of State to Northern Ireland would be favourable towards discussing such a proposal were quickly dashed just hours after his appointment.
On the other hand, Mr Kenny is merely reflecting the new reality facing not only Ireland, but Europe as a whole. Nobody anticipated the decision by Britain to leave the EU. But it has shown that all scenarios need to be considered.
His call for the EU to examine the prospect of a border poll in any post-Brexit negotiations can be seen as a warning to London and Berlin that this issue cannot realistically be put on the back burner.
Nadia Forde says her grandmother Bernadette is a huge influence on her, and is 'the glue that holds the family together'. Photo: David Conachy
Nadia Forde's parents sadly broke up when she was eight years of age. She was initially shuttled between her two aunties - Cindy in Clontarf and Beverly in Leopardstown. Nadia and her brother Stephen eventually made a permanent home with their granny, Bernadette Paulozzi in Clontarf.
Nadia describes Bernadette as "the glue that holds the family together. I think every family member is always afraid of what 'Nana' might say ... We all hold her opinion in high regard. She's just been that one constant in my life since I've been born, so I guess that's why she's the pillar of my family and I think my brother and other family members would agree."
I had the pleasure of meeting Bernadette with Nadia during one fun evening in Dublin. Bernadette was quite the character, full of life, full of joie de vivre. "My nana leaves a huge impression on everyone," Nadia told me proudly.
"My dad re-married. And my mum was not in a position to look after us. My nana is a saint," Nadia also told me during an interview in the Bluebird Cafe on the King's Road in Chelsea in the summer of 2014.
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I ring Nadia in Japan and ask her what impression her nana has made on her, and more importantly, on her life.
"Just to fight," she says. "To keep going."
Does she owe her life to her nana?
"Yes. To the way my life is now - yes."
Earlier this year, Nadia relocated to Tokyo with her boyfriend, rugby player Dominic Day. "I'm just spending time in Japan with my boyfriend, that's all really," she says.
She says of Bernadette, "Maybe the best way to say it is my nan took over the responsibilities of raising me and my brother when I was eight years old."
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The model, who was born on May 3, 1989, in Dublin's Rotunda Hospital, laughs loudly down the phone from her new home in East Asia when I ask her if she would like to be a grandmother herself one day in the future. "Definitely, but I really like living day to day; I don't want to wish life away, but hopefully I will be a gran myself," she says.
The 27-year-old says that her nana has experienced a lot in the past 70 years. "Marriages, divorce - when it was really frowned upon in Ireland - she's also experienced losing her daughter," Nadia says, referring to her own mum Berenice (who passed away in June, 2015, after battling lymphoma cancer for several years). Bernadette's daughter dying before her, Nadia says, "goes against natural order of life. So that, in particular, has been a difficult thing to come to terms with." (Obviously this was tremendously difficult for Nadia to come to terms with as well.)
I ask Nadia to tell me about the day-to-day routine with her nana growing up. Did Bernadette make her breakfast, bring her to school, pick her up, make her tea, put her to bed etc?
"Oh yeah," exclaims Nadia," she used to burst into my room first thing in the morning singing at the top of her lungs! That was my alarm clock for school. She would leave for work, and I'd normally see her late afternoon when she'd come home. My aunty was heavily involved too, so she made a lot of our dinners."
So what kind of woman is Bernadette Paulozzi?
"She's loving, glamorous, fiercely protective, and stubborn," Nadia says. And she believes she has "definitely" inherited that quality from her.
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"She's sensitive yet she's pretty much the head of our family. She's also hilarious, even when she's not trying to be funny," Nadia says.
"She's honestly hilarious. She doesn't even try to be. Its just how she lives her life. My nana literally has no filter. She'll call me up to tell me if she didn't like my outfit that she might have seen a picture of me in, and when I'm home visiting her she sneaks into my suitcases and 'reorganises' it while throwing out the pieces that she hates!" Nadia laughs.
"By the way, she has no idea I'm onto her. I always quietly go to the garage; and low and behold there's the dress or top I was missing. She is fiercely protective of all her family and even of my friends, if she sees anything or reads anything I'm the one who needs to tell her it's all ok. I think she's starting to realise now how it works though."
Nadia's illustrious modelling career is all down to one woman. No prizes for guessing which.
"It's actually all because of my nana!" Nadia roars with delight down the blower from Japan. "We were shopping for my communion dress, so I was about seven years old. The lady who owned the shop asked my nan if I could be part of her photoshoot in her shop ads (store windows and a spread in Social and Personal magazine). My nana agreed and from that job I got an agency and that was it. I used to model a couple of times a year... all throughout school and then I signed with Assets at 16. It was a great way to pay for my singing and dance classes so I enjoyed modelling at that age. It was like playing dress-up," says Nadia, who went on to become one of Ireland's top models as well as appearing on ITV's I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! in November 2014, to say nothing of Nadia Goes To Hollywood on TV3 also that year.
Her modelling career aside, how large was her nana's influence on Nadia's life.
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"A huge influence. She pretty much raised me," Nadia continues, "so even now I find myself stopping mid sentence and just thinking, 'Jesus I've turned into my nana'. I wouldn't have it any other way, though.
"I've a few funny stories about nana," Nadia says. "Like the time I sang the national anthem at the Ireland game against Sweden. . ." Nadia recalls of September 2013, when she sang Amhran na bhFiann before the Ireland v Sweden game. "She turned up in a bright yellow jacket [Sweden colours] and she was sat next to the president [Michael D Higgins].. Not her finest fashion choice!
"But on a more serious note," Nadia adds, "my nana had raised her three kids and suddenly found herself raising me and my brother and we have pretty much taken up the last 25 years of her life. We have been her priority when she could've easily walked away from the responsibility. I don't think it ever even crossed her mind; she was just there, constantly." "Which," Nadia says, "is more than any child could ask for."
What has Nadia learned about life from her gran?
"One thing I've learnt from her is never give up, professionally or personally. My nana has experienced a lot of highs and lows in her life but she's never let it stop her. She just keeps going, keeps herself busy, learns the lesson and moves on. Sometimes when I reach moments in my life where I could choose to quit, she's the first one to tell me otherwise. Even if I haven't discussed anything with her, she'll call me and already know what's going on."
Dragons' Den star and mother-of-four Sarah Willingham insists on doing the housework and the school runs
Dragons' Den star Sarah Willingham has revealed she still does her own housework and insists on doing the school run.
The entrepreneur - who developed restaurant chain The Bombay Bicycle Club and was co-founder of The London Cocktail Club - said she needed to "feel normal as much as I can".
The mother-of-four told Radio Times: "I need to do my own shopping, I need to do my own ironing.
"I need to feel normal as much as I can. And I am fiercely normal.
"Anybody who reads this will probably think I'm bonkers but I need to cook in my kitchen, I need to pick the kids up.
"Between me and Michael (her husband Michael Toxvaerd) we do all the school runs.
"I'd give it all up before I gave up that."
Willingham joined the BBC Two television show last season.
She has recently finished filming her second series alongside her fellow Dragons, Peter Jones, Deborah Meaden, Nick Jenkins and Touker Suleyman.
The 42-year-old, who joined the panel at the same time as Suleyman and Jenkins, said she felt more comfortable in the den this time around.
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"Last year, people didn't know who we were so it was an uphill battle for all three of the newcomers," she said.
"This year I feel we got a fair shot at the good businesses and we won the ones we should have won.
"We had a good fair fight."
:: This week's Radio Times is on sale on Tuesday July 19.
Model Gracie OMahony pictured wearing a bespoke headpiece created out of Great Lengths Hair Extensions by Valerie Patterson from Cowboys and Angels in Dublin to launch Great Lengths sponsorship of the 'Most Creative Hat' category on Ladies Day at the Dublin Horse Show
Model Louise OReilly (centre), a new face at the Dundrum Town Centre Ladies Day at the RDS
With racing season in full swing, we want to give our readers the chance to mingle in style.
Independent Style has teamed up with Dundrum Town Centre to give five lucky readers a pair of tickets to attend Ladies Day at the Dublin Horse Show on Thursday, July 21.
For the second year running, Ireland's largest retail centre, is back as the title sponsor of Ladies Day and the winner will be walking away with a 10,000 voucher to stores at Dundrum Town Centre.
Top blogger and model Louise OReilly will be judging best dressed on the day.
To enter, follow us on Twitter at @Indo_Style_ and let us know your favourite store at Dundrum Town Centre.
Competition closes on Wednesday, July 20 and winners must be available to collect tickets at the RDS on arrival.
Only five winners will be chosen. Terms and conditions apply.
For more details of Ladies' Day, see dundrum.ie and dublinhorseshow.com.
Micheal and Laura on their wedding day. Photography by Michelle at Michelle BG Photography, visit michellebgphotography.com
About six years ago, Latvian native Laura was looking for a new adventure, when she made the move to Inis Mor off the Galway coastline.
She certainly found more than an adventure when she met Micheal there. An island native, Micheal wooed Laura with dinner in a local hotel before showing off his dancing skills over a few drinks in Joe Watty's bar.
Several years later, while holidaying in Dubai, Micheal popped the question as the pair took a walk on the beach beneath the Burj al Arab.
"I was so shocked when Micheal was on his knee in front of me with the ring that I actually went down on my two knees too!" says Laura.
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The pair had a Catholic ceremony in Barna, which was officiated by their friend, Father Ciaran Blake, before celebrating their marriage at the G Hotel.
"The second we walked into the G Hotel we knew it was the place for us. It was intimate, cool, and we had never been to a wedding in a place like it, so it felt unique," says Laura.
The couple decided on a lavender colour scheme for their big day - a perfect complement to the G Hotel's luxurious interiors. The bride found her dress in My Fair Lady boutique in Tullamore, and came across her bridesmaids dresses in a boutique in Dublin's St Stephen's Green Shopping Centre.
After all the preparations for their big day, Laura and Micheal jetted off to Dubai for two weeks to enjoy their honeymoon and relax.
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* Words by Dee Finnerty. Photography by Michelle BG Photography, see michellebgphotography.com. If you would like your wedding featured here, email weddings@independent.ie
As sun worshippers head to beaches across the country to bask in the glorious sunshine the top five warmest locations in Ireland today arent where youd expect.
Tuesday is expected to be the hottest day of the year with temperatures expected to reach up to 28 degrees inlands.
Here are the top five warmest spots:
Athlone Mullingar Thurles Carrick-on-Shannon Portlaoise
Sun worshippers are lucky to be in any of the five spots but Met Eireann predicts that the rest of the country will still experience the heat.
While inlands are the warmest, Dublin City Centre will be able to compete with the warmer spots, said Met Eireann.
So whether youre inland or along the coast it is sure to be a scorcher of a day.
Although today will be cloudier across the country, it is expected to remain dry and generally pleasant. There is a slight risk of the odd shower in north Leinster and Ulster later in the day but winds will remain light.
While today will be roasting Met Eireann predict it will be cooler but reasonable for the rest of the week.
"It will then turn to normal temperatures of between 17 and 21 degrees, which are still reasonable, said Met Eireann.
"The weather for the rest of the week will be more changeable with occasional showers, although it will remain dry and bright."
So enjoy the heat while you can and dont forget the sun cream!
It is an elaborate belt any modern fashionista would be proud of.
Engraved with dolphins and dogs, in fact it belonged to a middle aged later Roman soldier.
Archaeologists found the rare evidence near an important Roman road in Leicester.
The bronze belt plate is cast in the so-called 'chip-carved' style and would have been riveted to a wide leather belt or girdle with a thinner securing strap running through the buckle and ending with the strap end.
While it gave up 83 skeletons, the University of Leicester team were stunned to find one wearing the elaborate belt around his waist, in rare evidence of Late Roman official buried in the city.
Archaeologists from University of Leicester Archaeological Services made the find at Western Road in Leicester's West End.
Amongst the 83 skeletons recorded by the team, one burial is proving to be very exciting.
The simple grave in question had been dug into mudstone on the west bank of the River Soar, to the south-west of the Roman town close to the important road known as the Fosse Way.
The grave of Skeleton 23, thought to be a Late Roman soldier or civil servant. The belt buckle was found next to the right hip (circled).
Buried in grave 23was the remains of a middle-aged man wearing an elaborately decorated belt in a style that would have been worn by a Late Roman soldier or civil servant during the second half of the 4th century or the early 5th century AD.
The find, which is rare in Britain, was positioned at the waist of the skeleton and comprises a belt buckle, belt plate and strap end.
The belt's owner was aged between 36 and 45 when he died, the researchers said.
He had survived poor health in childhood to lead a comparatively fit adult life but at some point he had fractured his left forearm; an injury that had healed well but left his wrist weakened.
This type of injury is known as a 'parry fracture' and is typically caused by raising the arm to ward off a blow or a falling object.
The man had also damaged muscles in his upper right arm and shoulder.
The belt buckle is decorated with dolphin heads.
The strap end is decorated with crouching dogs on either side of its tapered end.
'It is cast in the so-called 'chip-carved' style decorated with interlocking spirals and would have been riveted to a wide leather belt or girdle with a thinner securing strap running through the buckle and ending with the strap end.'
The buckle is decorated with dolphin heads and the strap end is decorated with crouching dogs on either side of its tapered end.
Parallels for this belt set have been found in other Late Roman cemeteries, for example in London, Dorchester on Thames and Winchester, and at the shore fort on the opposite side of the English Channel at Oudenburg in Belgium.
Research shows that these belts were worn across north-eastern France, Belgium, and along the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire, running along the Rivers Rhine and Danube, where soldiers were stationed.
There is some contemporary pictorial evidence to suggest that this type, specifically, was worn by members of the Late Roman military and civilian elite and that the belts were important symbols of authority.
The recent discovery at Western Road is the first occurrence of such a complex belt set in Roman Leicester.
The belt's owner was aged between 36 and 45 when he died.
He had survived poor health in childhood to lead a comparatively fit adult life but at some point he had fractured his left forearm; an injury that had healed well but left his wrist weakened.
This type of injury is known as a 'parry fracture' and is typically caused by raising the arm to ward off a blow or a falling object.
The man had also damaged muscles in his upper right arm and shoulder.
Such injuries could possibly be caused by over-use, overextending the muscles with movements such as throwing and lifting.
Whilst it is difficult to identify exactly what caused these injuries, they are consistent with those a soldier might suffer and reinforce the theory that this man was either a member of the late Roman army or, perhaps following retirement, became an important local civil servant.
People are searched by police outside the court in Ankara (AP)
People wave Turkish flags as they gather in Taksim Square in Istanbul (AP)
The Turkish government has escalated its wide-ranging crackdown against people it claims have ties to plotters of last week's attempted coup, firing tens of thousands of public employees across the country.
The dismissals touched every aspect of government life.
Turkish media, in rapid-fire reports, said the Ministry of Education fired 15,200 people across the country; the Interior Ministry 8,777 employees; and Turkey's Board of Higher Education requested the resignation of 1,577 university deans - akin to dismissing them.
In addition, 257 people working at the office of the prime minister were dismissed and the Directorate of Religious Affairs announced it had sacked 492 staff including clerics, preachers and religious teachers. Turkey's Family and Social Policy Ministry said it dismissed 393 personnel.
The firings come on top of the roughly 9,000 people who have been detained by the government, including security personnel, judges, prosecutors, religious figures and others.
Turkey's state-run Anadolu news agency said courts have ordered 85 generals and admirals jailed pending trial over their suspected roles in the coup attempt. Dozens of others were still being questioned.
Orhun Gedik, a 22-year-student in Istanbul, protested the new purges, saying politics and education should not mix.
"A government should not decide the hiring and firing," he said. "This government doesn't want to listen to others."
Critics of the government were also targeted for their social media postings. At least two people were reportedly arrested for insulting Mr Erdogan on social media, while one also praised the coup.
The violence surrounding the Friday night coup attempt claimed the lives of 208 government supporters and 24 coup plotters, according to the government.
Turkey says Fethullah Gulen, a US-based Muslim cleric, was behind the coup and has demanded his extradition. Mr Gulen has denied any knowledge.
Ibrahim Kalin, a spokesman for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, blamed a "Gulenist clique within the Turkish army" for the attempted coup.
"There will be legal evidence collected in this investigation and we will present all of this to the Americans as part of our extradition request," he said.
"On the grounds of suspicion, he can be easily extradited. We would like to see cooperation from the US authorities on this issue.
Anadolu Agency said on Tuesday those formally arrested include former air force commander General Akin Ozturk, alleged to be the ringleader of the July 15 uprising, and General Adem Hududi, commander of Turkey's 2nd Army, which is in charge of countering possible threats to Turkey from Syria, Iran and Iraq.
Gen Ozturk has denied the allegation, saying he neither planned nor directed the failed military coup, according to the Anadolu Agency.
The agency said Mr Erdogan's Air Force adviser, Lieutenant Colonel Erkan Kivrak, had been detained at a hotel where he was on holiday in Turkey's southern province of Antalya. No reason was given for the detention.
A thousand pro-government demonstrators gathered for a rally in Istanbul on Tuesday, waving flags and chanting slogans and songs praising President Erdogan. The demonstrators amassed in the conservative district of Fatih and demanded the death penalty for those responsible for the failed coup.
"We are not leaving these squares," said Durhan Yilmiz, an Istanbul municipality worker. "(The) Turkish flag cannot be lowered."
Pro-democracy meetings and rallies have been held in all of the major cities of Turkey.
In a bid to calm markets roiled by the coup attempt, Turkey's central bank cut a key interest rate on Tuesday to shore up liquidity in the economy. The bank's Monetary Policy Committee said it has reduced its overnight marginal funding rate from 9% to 8.75%.
Mr Erdogan, meanwhile, made a series of televised appearances in which he disclosed dramatic details of his survival on the night of a failed coup and raised the prospect of reintroducing the death penalty to punish conspirators.
He told US broadcaster CNN that he narrowly escaped death after coup plotters stormed the resort town of Marmaris where he was on holiday.
"Had I stayed 10, 15 additional minutes, I would have been killed or I would have been taken," he said in the interview late on Monday.
The president and other officials have strongly suggested the government is considering reinstating the death penalty, a practice abolished in 2004 as part of Turkey's bid to join the European Union.
Several European officials have said such a move would be the end of Turkey's attempts to join.
Addressing hundreds of supporters outside his Istanbul residence early on Tuesday, Mr Erdogan responded to calls for the reintroduction of the death penalty with the simple statement: "You cannot put aside the people's demands."
"In a country where our youths are killed with tanks and bombs, if we stay silent, as political people we will be held responsible in the afterlife," Mr Erdogan said, pointing out that capital punishment exists around the world, including in the United States and China.
Turkey's deputy prime minister said dossiers containing details of Mr Gulen's activities have been sent to the US.
Numan Kurtulmus would not provide details about the files but said they include the past actions of the group that Mr Gulen leads. They may also include new evidence that has emerged from the current investigation. Mr Kurtulmus said an extradition request will follow.
Speaking to parliament, the chairman of the opposition Nationalist Movement Party, Devlet Bahceli, said his party would back legislation to reintroduce the death penalty if it was put forward by the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP.
"If the AKP is ready, we are in for the death penalty," Mr Bahceli said.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, meanwhile, reflected the triumphant mood of authorities. He said the July 15 victory over the plotters was "epic" and that no coup in the history of Turkey had been as brutal as the one that this government survived.
"The force of the tanks could not beat the force of the people," he said.
Mr Yildirim also lashed out at Europe, whose leaders have expressed concerns over the purges under way across Turkey's key state institutions.
"We thank our European friends for their support against the coup, however their sentences starting with 'but' did not please us at all," he said.
AP
An aerial view of a Maize Maze inspired by the new animated movie Finding Dory (Tulleys Maze)
A farmer has transformed his eight-acre field of maize plants into a giant piece of land art inspired by the new animated movie Finding Dory.
Stuart Beare's field at Tulleys Farm, near Turners Hill, West Sussex, has been cut into a maze of pathways stretching four miles.
When viewed from the air, people can recognise characters Dory and Nemo from the Finding Dory film, which is released in the UK later this month.
Mr Beare said: "My eight-year-old daughter Ella adores the Finding Nemo films, and when she heard the new Finding Dory film was due out this summer, she begged me to design a maize maze as tribute."
This is the 19th year that a maze has been created at Tulleys Farm. Previous designs have included a native American, an owl, a dinosaur and a sea monster.
The maze opens daily to visitors from July 23 to September 4, when the maize will be harvested.
Finding Dory is the sequel to the hit 2003 Pixar movie Finding Nemo, and stars Ellen DeGeneres as the forgetful fish in the title.
Five Indian men allegedly gang-raped a low-caste woman for the second time in three years to 'punish' her after she refused to drop charges against them for the initial crime. Thinkstock Images
Five Indian men allegedly gang-raped a low-caste woman for the second time in three years to "punish" her after she refused to drop charges against them for the initial crime.
The Dalit - or "untouchable" - student and her family had moved cities to escape the men who first allegedly assaulted her in Bhiwani in 2013. But the men, who remain at large, tracked her down and attacked her as she left her university campus in nearby Rohtak last Wednesday, she told police.
"I got scared seeing them. They forcefully pushed me inside the car. They were the same men who had raped me earlier," the victim, who is in her early 20s, said in a statement.
She passed out during the alleged assault before being abandoned by the men by the roadside. Passers-by found her lying unconscious with her clothes torn and took her to hospital.
The woman's family said the assault was an attempt to intimidate or punish her after they refused to accept an out-of-court settlement and ignored the men's "constant threats" against pursuing legal proceedings.
Only two of the five accused in the 2013 crime were ever arrested and even these men were released on bail. ( Daily Telegraph, London)
Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
German emergency services workers work in the area where a man with an axe attacked passengers on a train near the city of Wuerzburg, Germany early July 19, 2016. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach
Cameramen film at the scene where a man was shot dead by the police after attacking passengers on a train with an axe near the city of Wuerzburg, Germany July 19, 2016. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach
Blood is seen at the scene where a man with an axe attacked passengers on a train near the city of Wuerzburg, Germany, early July 19, 2016. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach
A cameraman films at the scene where a man was shot dead by the police after attacking passengers on a train with an axe near the city of Wuerzburg, Germany July 19, 2016. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach
German police cars move at the scene where a man with an axe attacked passengers on a train near the city of Wuerzburg, Germany July 19, 2016. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach
Blood stains and a rescue blanket are seen through the windows of a train in Wuerzburg, southern Germany, Monday evening, July 18, 2016 (Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/dpa via AP)
German emergency services workers work in the area where a man with an axe attacked passengers on a train near the city of Wuerzburg, Germany early July 19, 2016. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach
A firefighter stands at a road block in Wuerzburg, southern Germany, Monday evening July 18, 2016. A man attacked people in a train and injured more than a dozen. (Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/dpa via AP)
A hand-drawn Islamic State flag was found in the room of the 17-year-old Afghan refugee who attacked passengers on a train in southern Germany before being shot dead by police, the interior minister for the state of Bavaria said on Tuesday.
Speaking on German public television, Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said it was too early to speculate about the motives of the attacker, who had wielded an axe and a knife, and whether he was a member of an Islamist group or had become self-radicalised in recent times.
However, so-called 'Islamic State' have since claimed responsibility for the attack.
Herrmann said two of those injured in the attacks were in a critical condition. Several of the injured included members of a Chinese family, he said, without giving any further details.
The attack comes just days after a Tunisian delivery man ploughed a 19-tonne truck into crowds of Bastille Day revelers in the southern French city of Nice, killing 84.
It is likely to deepen worries about so-called "lone wolf" attacks in Europe and could put political pressure on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who welcomed hundreds of thousands of migrants to Germany over the past year.
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"The attacker appears to have been a 17-year-old Afghan who has been living in Ochsenfurt for some time," Herrmann said. "He suddenly attacked passengers with a knife and an axe, critically injuring several. Some of them may now be fighting for their lives."
Police spokesman Fabian Hench said four people had been severely wounded and a fourth slightly injured. Several others were treated for shock.
ATTAQUE ALLEMAGNE : Suivi - L'homme qui a attaque a la hache les passagers d'un train a Wurzburg a ete abattu. pic.twitter.com/0CsPkfL5ib Infos Francaises (@InfosFrancaises) July 18, 2016
The attacker fled the train when it halted at a station on the outskirts of Wuerzburg. Herrmann said the man had tried to attack police when he was confronted and had been shot dead.
German media, citing a spokesman for the Bavarian interior ministry, reported that the man had shouted "Allahu Akbar" (God is great) during the attack, but neither Herrmann nor Hench said they could confirm that.
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Unlike neighbours France and Belgium, Germany has not been the victim of a major attack by Islamic militants in recent years, although security officials say they have thwarted a large number of plots.
Germany welcomed roughly 1 million migrants in 2015, including thousands of unaccompanied minors. Many were fleeing war in countries like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
A toddler has died after falling from the seventh floor of a block of flats, police said.
The 18-month-old girl was declared dead at the scene in Great Hampton Row, in the Hockley area of Birmingham, shortly before noon on Monday.
West Midlands Police said on Tuesday that an investigation has been launched, with a spokeswoman saying: "The death is currently being treated as unexplained."
A West Midlands Ambulance Service spokesman said: "Crews arrived to find a girl who had fallen from a window.
"Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that nothing could be done to save her and she was confirmed dead at the scene."
A local shop owner, who did not want to be named, said: "I was inside my shop when I heard people shouting and screaming and heard the bad news.
"People are very, very sad - they are feeling it very bad. I don't know the family, they might have been new to the area.
"It is quite a close community, there are two big communities here - the Jamaican community and Somalian community, they have a good relationship with each other.
"From what I saw people are very sad from this incident."
Theresa May's efforts to forge a close relationship with Washington got off to a bumpy start as US secretary of state John Kerry appeared to bang his head on the door of Number 10.
Mr Kerry, visiting the new Prime Minister in Downing Street, posed for photographers before turning to enter the famous black door - unaware it had been partially shut behind him.
But there was no sign of discomfort inside Number 10 as Mr Kerry and Mrs May chatted ahead of their meeting.
Mr Kerry will also hold talks with his counterpart Boris Johnson during the visit to London as the Government attempts to shore up its global status following the Brexit vote.
It hopes the meeting will demonstrate that Washington still values the "special relationship" between the two countries after the European Union referendum result.
After that engagement, Mr Johnson is hosting talks on Syria with his counterparts from the US, Germany, France and Italy, along with EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini.
Mr Johnson will also attend a meeting with foreign ministers from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to discuss the conflict in Yemen.
Speaking ahead of the meetings, Mr Johnson said: "We must be more active, more engaged and more outward-looking, so I am delighted to have this early opportunity to welcome my international counterparts to London for important meetings on the conflicts in Syria and Yemen.
"I will be making clear my view that the suffering of the Syrian people will not end while Assad remains in power. The international community, including Russia, must be united on this."
Mr Johnson will travel to Washington DC on Thursday for talks on combating Islamic State.
Following the talks in Number 10, Mr Kerry said the Prime Minister was committed to a "calm, thoughtful, reasonable" way to deal with Brexit.
He said: "The Prime Minister and I had an excellent discussion and I'm very grateful to her for her restatement of the commitment to the very strong transatlantic partnership.
"We talked particularly about efforts to try to deal with counter-terrorism, the importance of our co-operation continuing.
"We also talked about Ukraine and Syria in particular.
"Most importantly we affirmed the imperative for the United States, Great Britain and the European community to work together to maximise the economic opportunity, minimise the disruption, deal with this in a way that has the wellbeing of the citizens of all of our countries and regions in mind in order to move our economies as fast as possible.
"I think the Prime Minister is very much committed to finding a calm, thoughtful, reasonable way forward that meets those needs.
"So I was encouraged by it and I look forward to conveying her very best wishes to the American people and President Obama."
German emergency services workers work in the area where a man with an axe attacked passengers on a train near the city of Wuerzburg, Germany. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach
A teenage Afghan migrant armed with an axe and a knife attacked passengers aboard a regional train in southern Germany on Monday night, injuring four people before he was shot and killed by police as he fled, authorities said.
Wuerzburg police said on their Facebook page that three of the victims suffered serious injuries and one was slightly injured. Another 14 people were being treated for shock.
Bavaria's top security official, state Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann, told Germany's ARD television that the attacker had been identified as a 17-year-old Afghan.
Germany last year registered more than 1 million migrants entering the country, including more than 150,000 Afghans.
Herrmann said authorities were still investigating the motive of the attack and were looking into reports that the suspect had yelled out "an exclamation" during the rampage. He was responding to reports witnesses had heard the suspect shout "Allahu Akbar" ("God Is Great") during the attack.
Members of the Turkish armed forces are escorted by police for their suspected involvement in Friday's attempted coup at the court house in Mugla. (Tolga Adanali/Depo Photos via AP)
Members of police special forces stand guard near a hotel during a security meeting in Istanbul. REUTERS/Murad Sezer
Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (C) and former Turkish president Abdullah Gul (R) look on after attending the funeral of a victim of the coup attempt in Istanbul. AFP/Getty Images
The sons of a police officer killed during the thwarted coup attend his funeral. REUTERS/Alkis Konstantinidis
Turkey was warned yesterday that it could face international isolation, including suspension from Nato, as world leaders told the country's authoritarian president not to overplay his hand after the failed coup.
Following a 'night of the long knives' that saw thousands arrested or dismissed from their posts on suspicion of involvement in the putsch, John Kerry, the US secretary of state, led calls from both the United States and the European Union for restraint.
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President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's widespread purge has reinforced worries in the West about democratic backsliding in Turkey.
Mr Kerry, speaking from Brussels, stressed that Nato had a requirement when it came to democracy and "will measure very carefully what is happening".
Scrutiny
"A lot of people have been arrested and arrested very quickly," he said, adding that "the level of vigilance and scrutiny is obviously going to be significant in the days ahead."
Turkey is already at odds with Washington over the extradition of the exiled Islamic cleric accused by Mr Erdogan's government of masterminding the coup.
Ankara has demanded that Fethullah Gulen, a longtime opponent of Mr Erdogan, who is living in Pennsylvania, be handed over for trial.
Mr Kerry said they must first provide evidence for their allegations, which Mr Gulen denies.
A decision to oust the country of almost 80 million from Nato would not be taken lightly.
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Turkey has the second-largest army in the security alliance and has a vital role in the war against Isil, as well as in stemming the tide of refugees.
EU officials also warned yesterday that talks on Turkey's bid to join the bloc would end if the country restored the death penalty, as Mr Erdogan has proposed to deal with the plotters.
Turkey has not executed anyone since 1984 and capital punishment was legally abolished in 2004 as part of its bid to join the Brussels club.
Johannes Hahn, the EU commissioner dealing with its long-stalled ascension bid, accused Mr Erdogan of having planned the purge of opponents before the coup, as part of a bid to consolidate power and "clean house".
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"The fact the [arrest warrant] lists were available already after the event indicates that this was prepared and at a certain moment should be used," he said.
Within hours of the revolt's failure on Friday night, which left 290 dead and 1,400 wounded, more than 6,000 members of the military were rounded up and detained.
Yesterday the government arrested a further 103 generals, dismissed 9,000 civil servants, 8,000 police officers, 30 of Turkey's 80 provincial governors, as well as a huge swathe of the judiciary that has at times blocked Mr Erdogan.
One third of all the country's military and navy generals and admirals have been detained and almost every major military unit across the country has lost a commander.
More than 100 high-ranking officers have so far been charged with "high treason" and face what might become a trial for their lives.
Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel added that the wave of arrests and the treatment of detainees ordered by the president - the first in Turkey to survive an armed challenge - was "a cause for great concern".
The military officials accused of masterminding the failed coup were yesterday paraded on camera with their hands bound and ordered to give their name and rank before being taken to be interrogated.
Mevlut Cavusoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, said the international criticism about the treatment of suspects amounted to support for the failed coup. "We strongly condemn and reject statements that imply that the principles of the rule of law could be violated and political opponents could be arbitrarily treated," he said.
Among them was "leading Gulenist" Akin Ozturk, head of the air force until 2015 and a member of the High Military Council.
A state-run media agency reported that he confessed to prosecutors to being one of the chief plotters.
However, a private broadcaster said Mr Ozturk, who has served as a military attache to Israel, claimed he had tried to stop the coup.
"I am not someone who has planned or directed the coup attempt that was carried out on July 15 and I don't know who did," he was cited as saying in his testimony.
He appeared dishevelled and had several injuries to his head and upper body, suggesting he had been roughly handled by police.
While the government has claimed the coup is over, there were signs yesterday that the rebellion had not been completely snuffed out.
Assailant
An unknown assailant shot the deputy mayor of Istanbul's Sisli district in the head, leaving him in a critical condition. In Ankara, Turkish security forces killed an armed attacker who shot at them from a vehicle outside the city's courthouse where suspects from the failed coup were appearing.
The political affiliation of the leaders of the coup is still unclear, though President Erdogan was quick to blame Mr Gulen's moderate Muslim 'Hizmet' movement, which his government commonly calls "the parallel state structure". The group has some support among the Anatolian middle class.
"No matter who they arrest now, they are all labelled as Gulenists," said Mahir Zeynalov, a commentator with the daily Turkish newspaper 'Zaman'.
"Most Gulen followers had already been purged from bureaucracy, judiciary and particularly from security apparatus," he said, suggesting the government was using the revolt as an excuse to eliminate all dissent. (Daily Telegraph, London)
Telegraph Media Group Limited [2022]
Taiwan park struggles to save "Queen's Head" rock from disintegration
TAIPEI, May 2, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Tourists visit Yehliu Geopark in New Taipei of southeast China's Taiwan, May 2, 2016. The geopark features stunning geological landscape formed by wave attack, rock weathering, earth movement and crustal movement, which make it a famous destination for tourists. (Xinhua/Wei Peiquan)
TAIPEI, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The fate of Queen's Head rock, at Yeliu Geopark on the north coast of Taiwan, remains uncertain as conservation work to protect it from marine erosion has proved unsuccessful.
The rock, which is said to resemble Queen Elizabeth I's profile, attracted about 3 million visitors in 2015.
The "neck" of the mushroom-shaped rock, which measures 126 centimeters in circumference at its narrowest part, by comparison in 2008 it was 138cm, according to Tang Helena, Neo-Space International Inc. assistant general manager, the organization that manages the geopark.
"In addition to being battered by sea water and wind, the fragile neck is at risk from typhoons and earthquakes," she said.
In the past decade a circle of stones was installed to prevent visitors from touching the sandstone formation, before 2006, this was a regular occurrence.
Meanwhile, the authorities are exploring modern systems to protect the natural formation. Options including introducing a glass cabinet and a steel rib were turned down as natural disasters like typhoons and earthquakes might bring unexpected damage to the formation, according to Tang.
In the last two years, the authorities have tried a new kind of nanotechnology paint, to slow erosion and strengthen the formation. The paint had been applied to one formation in the park as a test.
Although the paint worked well, the test area turned a shade of white, due to moisture generated from within the rock, making it standout among the other formations.
"The paint is a bit like cosmetics." Tang said, "which means the rock looks unnatural."
The result of the experiment does not bode well for some 180 mushroom-shaped rocks. "We are not giving up," said Tang, adding that the research will continue.
However, it is not all bad news for the park and visitors. On Jan. 20, 2010, one formation created a profile like a princess after a part of it broke off. The new landmark was named Cute Princess following an online poll.
Though, Queen's Head remains a top choice for visitors among the rocks, Cute Princess is gaining popularity, too.
Police officers stand beside a train in Wuerzburg after a 17-year-old Afghan armed with an axe and a knife attacked passengers (dpa/AP)
Police officers search for traces near the crime scene where a 17-year-old man from Afghanistan was shot (Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/dpa/AP)
A 17-year-old Afghan asylum seeker received word that a friend had died in his home country days before he went on a rampage with an axe and a knife on a German train, wounding five, investigators said.
He vowed in a note that he would "take revenge on these infidels".
The Islamic State (IS) group claimed responsibility for the Monday night attack, but authorities say so far they have found no direct links to the group and believe the suspect, whose name was not released, was self-radicalised.
German officials did not identify the victims, but Hong Kong's immigration department said that among those injured in the attack were four members of a family of five from the southern Chinese city. At least two of the five wounded were in a life-threatening condition.
Investigator Lothar Koehler said the teenager's motivation appeared to be Islamic extremism based upon a passage, found among various notes in his apartment, which read: "Pray for me that I can take revenge on these infidels and pray for me that I will go to heaven."
In the premeditated attack, the suspect boarded the regional train after 9pm near the Bavarian city of Wuerzburg with an axe and a knife concealed in a bag, according to Bamberg prosecutor Erik Ohlenschlager. He said that the suspect had learned on Saturday that a friend had died in Afghanistan, but did not immediately give more details about the possible link.
On the train, the suspect initially encountered an employee from the asylum shelter where he had lived until two weeks ago when he moved in with a foster family, and when she said something to him he did not respond but left for another train car, Mr Ohlenschlager said.
He then concealed himself in a bathroom, and armed himself with his weapons.
"Then, without warning, he attacked the passengers using great force on their bodies and their heads," Mr Ohlenschlager said.
In an emergency call from the train, the suspect could be heard in the background shouting "Allahu akbar," Arabic for "God is great," as he hacked and slashed.
Witnesses said the interior of the train was covered with blood and looked "like a slaughterhouse," the German news agency DPA reported. About 30 passengers were on the train at the time. More than a dozen were treated for shock.
After the train made an emergency stop, the suspect fled and a few hundred metres away encountered two women walking a dog. He attacked one from behind, saying "I'll finish you" as he hit her at least twice in the face with the axe.
Shortly after, he encountered a police SWAT team that had been in the area on another mission but had been redirected, jumping out at them from bushes, brandishing his axe. He was shot and killed.
Mr Ohlenschlager said that at least two victims were suffering from "acute life-threatening" wounds, including the woman attacked outside the train.
Though the IS group claimed responsibility through its Aamaq news agency and a hand-painted IS flag was found in the suspect's apartment, Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said the suspect's handwritten notes indicated he may have been self-radicalised and there was "no indication" he was directly connected to the group.
Aamaq released a video that purported to show the attacker, in which a young man waves a knife towards the camera and says: "I will behead you with these knives and break your necks with these axes."
In the video, the man also says in Pashto he is a soldier "of the Islamic State and will be carrying out an attack in Germany today".
Mr Ohlenschlager said investigators were aware of a video and are currently evaluating it to determine whether it was made by the suspect.
Mr Herrmann said people close to the attacker told investigators he had seemed like a calm person, not overtly religious or an extremist.
He said investigators were still looking into the evidence found in the teenager's room, saying it could be possible that the notes included a farewell letter to his father.
Hong Kong's top official, Chief Executive Leung Chun-Ying, condemned the attack and extended his sympathies to the victims and their families.
Mr Herrmann said it was a tragedy that a "family from Hong Kong comes here as tourists to visit Wuerzburg ... and then becomes victim on a train here in Bavaria in an attack conducted by an offender who came from Afghanistan and who was originally seeking shelter here".
DPA reported that the attacker wounded the 62-year-old father, the 58-year-old mother, their adult daughter and her boyfriend. The teenage son was not hurt. The father and the boyfriend had tried to defend the other family members.
The mayor of Wuerzburg condemned the attack.
"I'm shocked by this horrible act of violence," Christian Schuchardt said, adding that his thoughts were with the victims and other passengers "who have suffered severe injuries on their bodies and souls by this act of craziness".
AP
A man has been arrested over a stabbing in southern France
Authorities in southern France have detained a Moroccan man they said stabbed a woman and her three daughters at an Alps resort.
Jean-Marc Duprat, a deputy mayor for the town of Laragne-Monteglin in the Hautes-Alpes region, said the mother and her girls, aged eight, 12 and 14, were on holiday at a nearby resort when a man from a neighbouring apartment attacked them on Tuesday morning as they ate their breakfast.
All four were expected to recover, the deputy mayor said.
Mr Duprat initially said the man was upset that the girls were wearing shorts and T-shirts. He later said that did not appear to be the case and that the attacker's motive was not known.
"At this time, we don't have a firm answer," Raphael Balland, prosecutor for the region, told reporters.
Mr Balland said the attacker, who was on holiday with his wife and children, was brandishing an three-inch folding knife.
The youngest girl, who was the most gravely wounded, was out of danger following surgery at the hospital in Grenoble, Mr Duprat said. Her mother and her two sisters were recovering at the hospital in Gap, a town closer to where the violence occurred.
Laragne-Monteglin is 110 miles north-west of Nice, where a Tunisian man killed 84 people on July 14 by driving a truck through a holiday crowd on Bastille Day.
The July 14 carnage has deeply upset a country still reeling from the November 13 attacks in Paris, which killed 130 people, and a separate January 2015 Paris attack that targeted the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket.
Hours after the knife attack, gendarmes evacuated a hotel north of Avignon after a man armed with a knife barricaded himself in his room and refused to pay his bill.
An official close to the investigation said there were unconfirmed reports the man had been seen with a suspicious parcel with wires showing.
AP
People gather at the makeshift memorial to victims of the Nice truck attack (AP)
Tahar Mejri, centre, father of Kylan Mejri, is comforted by relatives at the ar-Rahma mosque in the eastern Nice suburb of Ariane (AP)
French President Francois Hollande defended his government's military actions against Islamic extremists as he vowed to continue the fight against terror.
But Mr Hollande acknowledged the actions are part of the reason for repeated attacks on his country.
Speaking during a visit to Portugal, the president said France is so often targeted because of its traditions of liberty and human rights.
He said it is also "because France is fighting against terrorism, against fundamentalism, against fanaticism".
Mr Hollande said France will continue its military operations abroad, which include air strikes in Iraq and Syria, anti-terrorism operations in Africa and special operations in Libya, adding: "It is our honour and our duty."
He also urged politicians to approve an extension to the state of emergency in place since the deadly attacks in Paris on November 13.
Earlier, two more suspects in the Bastille Day lorry attack that killed 84 people were transferred to French intelligence headquarters in Paris to face likely terrorism charges.
The July 14 attack occurred when Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove through crowds watching fireworks on Nice's famed Promenade des Anglais on the French Riviera before he was shot by police.
The two suspects are among six people who remain in custody, according to an official at the Paris prosecutor's office.
Back in Nice, signs of normal life returned to the promenade, with joggers and visitors enjoying the sunshine, and businesses reopening.
But elsewhere in the city the grief was still raw as families said farewell to their loved ones and some demanded to know from the authorities how security measures had failed to prevent a man from driving a truck through crowds of revellers.
At the ar-Rahma mosque in the eastern Nice suburb of Ariane, worshippers held prayers for three of those killed in Thursday's attack, including four-year-old Kylan Mejri and his mother Olfa Kalfallah, 31.
"What happened mustn't tear society apart," said Abdelkader Sadouni, a Muslim imam from Nice, who called for unity in the face of an attack that indiscriminately hit men, women and children, Christian and Muslims, residents and foreign tourists enjoying France's national day fireworks together.
Mourners rallied around Kylan's father, Tahar Mejri, who carried his son's plain white coffin out to a waiting hearse.
Holding photos of his son, Mr Mejri spoke of his grief and described the moment that he arrived on the promenade to find his wife dead and Kylan's scooter lying on the floor. He spent all night going from one hospital to another before learning that his son had not survived.
Mr Mejri said he plans to sue the authorities over what happened.
"A festival like that with nearly 33,000 and the promenade was open," he said. "There was no security."
AP
Melania Trump insists she's her own person. That's one thing the Slovenian-born former model, pictured, has made clear, even as she's stayed largely in the background as her husband's number-one fan.
So who is she? According to her official biography on the Republican National Committee's website, Ms Trump is an "aqua-eyed beauty" with "natural elegance" who has "a passion for the arts, architecture, design, fashion and beauty."
But most Americans probably know her better as Trump's third wife who is 24 years his junior and who once posed pregnant in a gold bikini on the steps of her husband's jet.
"I have my own mind," she told 'Harper's Bazaar' magazine in an interview published in January.
"I am my own person, and I think my husband likes that about me."
Ms Trump's prime-time speaking slot at the convention, her highest profile appearance to date, has given her a chance to tell Americans what type of first lady she would be - something that she's mostly steered clear of doing so far.
If Trump were to be elected president, Ms Trump would be the only first lady who is the third wife of a president and the first to be born and raised in a communist nation, according to Carl Anthony, historian at the National First Ladies' Library.
She wouldn't be the first model - Pat Nixon and Betty Ford had modelled too. And Louisa Adams, who was born in England, was the first president's wife to be born in another country.
Ms Trump remains a mystery to many. Dressed in high-fashion couture, even on the campaign trail, she has tried to stay out of the spotlight. But she briefly became an issue in the race in March, when an anti-Trump super PAC released an ad showing a risque photo of her from a GQ photo shoot, showing her handcuffed to a briefcase, lying on a fur blanket.
"Meet Melania Trump. Your next first lady," the ad said.
Trump responded by re-tweeting side-by-side images of Texas Senator Ted Cruz's wife, with an unflattering grimace, and Ms Trump in a gauzy, glamorous pose. Ms Trump (46) is often seen, but rarely heard. Instead of taking a leading public role, she has instead focused her time on the couple's 10-year-old son, Barron.
She didn't make her first appearance on the campaign trail until November, joining other family members on the stage at a rally. "Isn't he the best?" Ms Trump asked the crowd in heavily accented English. "He will be the best president ever. We love you!"
The glitter and glitz of being Donald Trump's wife, and joining him in the run for president, is a far cry from the sleepy southeastern industrial town of Sevnica, where she was born in 1970 as Melanija Knavs.
Her father, Viktor Knavs, was a car dealer while her mother, Amalija, worked in a textile factory. The family lived in an eight-storey building right next to their daughter's brightly painted primary school.
Then a part of Communist Yugoslavia, she grew up in apartment blocks overlooking smoking factory chimneys. She found an escape through modelling. At the age of 16, she took modelling jobs in Milan, Paris and other fashion hubs, She changed her name to Melania Knauss and settled in New York in 1996. Two years later, she met her future husband at a party in Manhattan.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his wife Melania at the Republican convention in Cleveland (AP)
Donald Trump is under pressure to steady his Republican convention after a chaotic start which saw a plagiarism charge and other unforced errors threaten to overshadow efforts by the party to unify behind him.
However, barring last-minute complications, the unorthodox billionaire will end the night as the Republican Party's official White House nominee.
This week's four-day convention is Mr Trump's highest-profile opportunity to convince voters that he is better suited for the presidency than Democrat Hillary Clinton.
But the rocky start raised fresh questions about his oversight of his campaign, which gives voters a window into how a candidate might handle the pressures of the presidency.
The plagiarism accusations centred on Monday night's well-received speech by Mr Trump's wife, Melania.
Two passages - each 30 words or longer - matched a 2008 Democratic convention address by Michelle Obama nearly word-for-word.
Mr Trump's campaign managed to keep the controversy alive on day two of the convention by insisting there was no evidence of plagiarism, while offering no explanation for how the strikingly similar passages appeared in Mrs Trump's address.
The matter consumed news coverage from Cleveland, obscuring Mrs Trump's broader efforts to portray her husband's softer side.
Democrat Hillary Clinton pounced on the row, saying the Republican gathering had so far been "surreal", comparing it to the classic fantasy film Wizard of Oz.
"When you pull back the curtain, it was just Donald Trump with nothing to offer to the American people," Mrs Clinton said during a speech in Las Vegas.
Top Trump adviser Paul Manafort said the matter had been "totally blown out of proportion".
"They're not even sentences. They're literally phrases. I was impressed somebody did their homework to think that that could be possibly done," he said.
Republican leaders hoping to leave Cleveland with a strong show of party unity also found themselves answering unwelcome questions. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said he "probably" would have sacked his own speech writers under similar circumstances and acknowledged the matter was a distraction.
Mr Manafort also affected Republicans' unity message by slamming Ohio governor John Kasich in his home state. He called Mr Kasich "petulant" and "embarrassing" for not endorsing Mr Trump or attending the convention, drawing quick condemnation from other party leaders worried about angering the popular governor of one of the most important election states.
It is unclear whether the controversy would have any bearing on how voters view Mr Trump, given the business tycoon has survived numerous politically perilous moments that might have doomed other candidates.
The centrepiece of the second day's programme will be the roll call vote making Mr Trump's nomination official - a once-unthinkable scenario for Republicans who spent months dismissing the real estate mogul as a mere sideshow.
Typically in both parties, the roll call is heavy with ceremonial flourishes, good cheer and mentions of the virtues of each state. This time, it is also another opportunity for discord to be heard.
Dissident delegates from several states plan to insist on abstaining or backing other candidates, according to Regina Thomson of Colorado, a leader of a group calling itself Free the Delegates.
Meanwhile, police broke up a couple of skirmishes between groups of demonstrators a few blocks from the Republican National Convention.
There was no immediate word on any arrests or injuries.
A scuffle broke out when conspiracy theorist and radio show host Alex Jones started speaking in Public Square. Police on bicycles pushed back a surging crowd, and Mr Jones was whisked away.
Minutes later, more officers on bicycles formed a line between an organisation supporting the Communist Party and a conservative religious group.
The crowds and the police presence were some of the largest and most raucous gatherings in Cleveland since the convention got under way on Monday.
AP
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls is flanked by security as he is jeered by the crowd
A poll showed just 33pc of respondents were confident in French national leaders' ability to fight terrorism.
This was down sharply from confidence levels of at least 50pc in the wake of two major attacks last year, according to the poll published in 'Le Figaro'.
Some of the crowd gathered in Nice yesterday chanted "resign, resign" at prime minister Manuel Valls.
Ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, who is competing in a November primary to decide the presidential candidate for France's centre-right parties, said that President Francois Hollande's government had failed to do all it could.
The People's Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force conducted a combat air patrol in the South China Sea recently, which will become a "regular" practice in the future, said a military spokesperson on Monday.
The PLA sent H-6K bombers and other aircraft including fighters, scouts and tankers to patrol islands and reefs including Huangyan Dao, said Shen Jinke, spokesman for the PLA Air Force.
During the mission, the aircraft carried out tasks including aerial scouting, air combat and island and reef patrol, fulfilling the patrol's objective, Shen said.
The Air Force aims to promote real combat training over the sea, improve combat abilities against various security threats and safeguard national sovereignty and security, according to the spokesperson.
"To effectively fulfill its mission, the air force will continue to conduct combat patrols on a regular basis in the South China Sea," he said.
Shen pointed out that the South China Sea Islands have been China's territory since ancient times, and China's rights and interests in relevant maritime areas should not be infringed upon.
"The PLA Air Force will firmly defend national sovereignty, security and maritime interests, safeguard regional peace and stability, and cope with various threats and challenges," he said.
French public prosecutor of Paris Francois Molins addresses a press conference about the truck attack that killed 84 in the city of Nice. AFP/Getty Images
Police in Nice have questioned a 73-year-old man described as the Bastille Day killer's "main lover" - as investigators described Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel as a "sex maniac" and "ultra-violent sadist", according to French reports.
The news came amid revelations that Bouhlel had displayed a "clear, recent interest in the radical jihadist movement", growing a beard only in the last eight days - after a previous life in which he drank alcohol and ate pork.
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Francois Molins, the French prosecutor, said the Tunisian, who killed 84 people when he ploughed into crowds on Nice's Promenade des Anglais after a late-night fireworks display last Thursday, had searched on the internet for information on terror attacks in Orlando and the Paris suburb of Magnanville, where two police officers were murdered last month.
Recent mobile and computer searches included images "linked to radical Islam" - from decapitations to chants.
He had also conducted numerous searches on road deaths with the proviso "sensitive viewers abstain" and one on a recent article in the 'Nice-Matin' newspaper about a motorist who "deliberately mowed into a restaurant terrace".
Mr Molins confirmed that the murderous act was clearly premeditated as Bouhlel, pictured inset, had visited the Promenade des Anglais in his truck in the two days leading up to the attack, taking photos.
There were unconfirmed claims by his uncle that he had been indoctrinated about two weeks ago by an Algerian member of Isil in Nice, who found him an "easy prey".
Dubbed a "soldier of Islam" by Isil, Bouhlel's mobile phone suggests he often used dating sites to pick up male and female lovers.
Police have already questioned several of these since the deadly attack, in particular, according to 'Le Parisien', a 73-year old man, which a source close to the investigation described as "his main lover".
Read more: Islamic State claim responsibility for Nice truck attack as French police arrest five
Read more: Killer with the George Clooney Hairstyle was a 'weird loner'
Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel's uncle, Sadok Bouhlel, said his nephew's family problems - he was estranged from his wife and three children - meant the Algerian extremist "found in Mohamed an easy prey for recruitment".
Meanwhile, France held a country-wide moment of silence yesterday to remember the victims, but mourning was punctured by anger and political division.
Crowds massed on the Riviera seafront in Nice booed the visiting Prime Minister Manuel Valls, whose Socialist government is coming under increasing criticism from the public and the conservative opposition for failing to prevent the Bastille Day carnage.
A total of 59 people remain in hospital after Thursday's attack, 29 of them in intensive care, out of 308 people injured overall.
A sign posted around town demonstrates a strong feeling of solidarity, calling for blood donations, stuffed animals for injured children and a plea to "unite against the crazy ones".
But bitterness is also close to the surface. President Francois Hollande's Socialist administration has come under blistering criticism from opposition conservatives after the attack.
Former president Nicolas Sarkozy accused the government of bad policies that he says failed to prevent three major attacks in the past 18 months.
"Everything that should have been done over the past 18 months was not done," Mr Sarkozy said on Sunday night. "We are in war, a total war. Our enemies have no taboos, no borders, no principles. So I will use strong words: It will be us or them."
He called for electronic bracelets for anyone suspected of potential radicalisation.
Seven people are in custody in the probe into the Nice attack. Three of the suspects were brought to French intelligence headquarters in Paris yesterday to face eventual terrorism charges, according to a security official.
At the home of one of the suspects, investigators found 11 telephones, cocaine and 2,600 in cash, according to a security official and the Paris prosecutor's office.
Ireland must "rally around France" in the wake of the devastating Bastille Day attacks in Nice, Foreign Affairs Minister Charlie Flanagan has said.
European Union foreign ministers were meeting for the first time yesterday following a turbulent week in Europe.
They discussed last Thursday's attack on the French Riviera, in which 84 people were killed, as well as the attempted military coup in Turkey at the weekend, which killed more than 200.
In response to the Nice attack, France called for extra help in running counter-terrorism missions in Africa and the Middle East, which Mr Flanagan said the government would consider supporting.
Commitment
"I believe that it's important that we rally around France and ensure that we all make a commitment towards securing our citizens within the European Union," the Foreign Affairs Minister said.
"I think consideration can be given towards further assistance in that regard."
But he also added that Ireland's neutrality - which is enshrined in a protocol to the EU's Lisbon Treaty - was "very much recognised by our European colleagues around the table".
Following the Paris attacks last November, France invoked a clause in the Lisbon Treaty which obliges EU countries to come to a fellow member state's aid if it experiences an "act of aggression on its territory".
The government pledged at the time to increase the number of Irish troops stationed in Mali as part of a UN-mandated EU training mission.
Mr Flanagan added that the matter would come up again when the French president Francois Hollande visits Ireland later this week.
US President Barack Obama wrote an open letter to the nation's law enforcement officers (AP)
US President Barack Obama has said the nation will get through the recent killings of police officers with the "love and empathy of public servants" like those targeted in recent days.
In an open letter to the nation's law enforcement officers, Mr Obama sought to reassure police, saying: "We have your backs."
The letter was released the day after two police officers and a sheriff's deputy were killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, after being ambushed by a lone gunman.
Baton Rouge is where police fatally shot Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old black man, outside a convenience store on July 5. Mr Sterling's death sparked nationwide protests.
The latest law enforcement deaths follow the July 7 sniper killings of five Dallas police officers as they guarded a peaceful protest.
Mr Obama has said nothing justifies attacks on law enforcement, a sentiment he reiterated in the two-page letter. The Fraternal Order of Police posted the president's letter on its social media sites.
Mr Obama wrote: "Any attack on police is an unjustified attack on all of us."
The letter comes as Mr Obama's critics accuse him of fostering a climate that has led to the intentional killing of police and other law enforcement officers.
Mr Obama telephoned the families of the Baton Rouge officers on Monday to offer his and the first lady's condolences.
He said in the letter: "We will get through this difficult time together.
"We will do it with the love and empathy of public servants like those we have lost in recent days.
"We will do it with the resilience of cities like Dallas that quickly came together to restore order and deepen unity and understanding.
"We will do it with the grace of loved ones who even in their grief have spoken out against vengeance toward police.
"We will do it with the good will of activists like those I have sat with in recent days, who have pledged to work together to reduce violence even as they voice their disappointments and fears."
He added: "Thank you for your courageous service. We have your backs."
AP
SHARE KEN RUINARD/INDEPENDENT MAIL Neil Moore of Indiana talks to Anderson city and county law enforcement agents about de-escalation and reality-based training at a seminar in the City Council chambers in downtown Anderson. KEN RUINARD/INDEPENDENT MAIL Anderson, state of South Carolina, and United States flags at half-staff in front of Anderson City Hall in response, Anderson Police Chief Jim Stewart said, to recent fatal shootings of officers in the United States. CONTRIBUTED PHOTO Leaders and children from First Presbyterian Church in Anderson gather to give a thank you poster and individual cards to members of the Anderson Police Department. KEN RUINARD/INDEPENDENT MAIL Anderson, state of South Carolina, and United States flags at half-staff in front of Anderson City Hall in response, Anderson Police Chief Jim Stewart said, to recent fatal shootings of officers in the United States.
By Mike Ellis of the Independent Mail
Gail Hayes' cousin, Greenville County Sheriff's Office Deputy Marcus Whitfield, was fatally shot in the line of duty in 1999.
Since then, Hayes, a Honea Path resident, has encouraged her children to pray every time they see a police officer.
Her children, now adults, today are teaching their children the same prayer: "Protect and keep them oh Lord as they protect and serve."
Saying the simple prayer is something they can do to help officers, Hayes said.
"I've had officers' wives ask me to pray for their husbands, and I'm honored to get the opportunity," she said.
The prayers help, said Robert Ayers, president of the Anderson-based Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 10.
While recent targeted shootings of officers in Dallas and Louisiana have upped the stakes, officers have long been aware of the dangers they face, said Ayers, a former Anderson police officer and former probation agent.
"Of course it's a concern," Ayers said. "By and large, our officers are young with families, and they need to be concerned; that's human nature. But we are blessed in Anderson County with tremendous support of our police officers."
Chris McFarlin is a former police officer in Arkansas and is program director of the Tri-County Technical College criminal justice associate degree track.
"There is such little respect and a lack of regard for those in public service, and now they face the threat of ambush," said McFarlin, who is also a Tri-County Tech faculty member.
Despite those headwinds, there are plenty of people eager to pick up the badge and no slowdown in the number of students looking to become officers, he said.
"It's a calling; people are drawn to it," McFarlin said. "The people in it nowadays are in it because they realize the need for public service. They are selfless and want to help others."
Lt. Sheila Cole of the Anderson County Sheriff's Office said deputies will continue to be vigilant and hope citizens will watch out as well.
"For us, it's business as usual," she said. "We'll still be out there."
In a break from FBI leadership training sessions, Anderson Police Chief Jim Stewart and several of his captains said Monday that the recent shootings of officers will change responses to at least some situations.
Officers will not be patrolling in pairs, as is happening in many larger cities. But officers in Anderson will be more cautious in cases when they may be in danger, Stewart said.
"I'm Catholic, so I pray every day," said Capt. Michael Bracone.
He said his wife and children worry about him, so he takes extra steps to stay safe.
Capt. Edward Aman said he doesn't see the same antagonism toward police in Anderson that he sees elsewhere.
"Locally it's just overwhelmingly supportive," he said. "It's a lot different locally."
Stewart and the captains said the praise for officers in Anderson has been overflowing in recent weeks. The law enforcement agents showed off stacks of supportive cards and listed churches and restaurants that have given free meals to officers in the last few weeks.
Lynn, a mother with two sons who work in law enforcement in the area, asked that her last name not be used so she could talk about her concerns for her sons without their permission.
She said people in the area have been strongly supportive of her sons, and other officers, before and after the recent shootings.
"Not necessarily my sons, but I know there are people who are re-evaluating why they are in law enforcement," Lynn said. "They're asking themselves: Am I doing it because it's a calling or because it's a job?"
Lynn said she hopes people simply tell officers they are appreciated.
"As the mom, I'll say our officers need to be overwhelmed (with support) and reminded that there are still more good people around here than there are evil people," she said.
Follow Mike Ellis on Twitter @MikeEllis_AIM
Residents and commuters in Starr are circulating a petition to try to keep open Rhody Farm Road. The road off S.C. 81 South in Starr remains passable, but is marked with signs indicating that it is closed.
By Nikie Mayo of the Independent Mail
A petition that aims to keep former Anderson County Councilman Eddie Moore from closing Rhody Farm Road was allegedly stolen from a Starr convenience store.
Lt. Sheila Cole of the Anderson County Sheriff's Office said the case remains under investigation and no one has been charged.
According to a deputy's incident report, the petition was taken Saturday morning from Redi-Mart Convenience Store on S.C. 81 South. The convenience store is less than a half-mile away from Rhody Farm Road.
Convenience store owner Prashant Patel told a deputy that he went to check the petition at about 9:30 a.m. Saturday and noticed it was missing from the front counter. When Patel had the chance, he went into his office and watched video surveillance of what happened.
According to a deputy's report, the video surveillance recorded a white Dodge Ram truck pulling into the store's parking lot at 9:12 a.m.
"From there, the video captures a heavyset white male wearing a red shirt and white shorts exit his vehicle and walk into the business," according to the deputy's report. "From there, the video captures the white male pick up a newspaper and begin walking to the front counter where the petition was still currently located. While at the front counter, the white male is seen picking up the petition, glancing at it, and then placing it in between the folded newspaper. He then purchases the newspaper and leaves the business immediately after."
Store employees and Ray Graham, who created the petition, all identified the man in the video footage, according to a deputy's report. The name they provided the investigator was redacted from the copy of the deputy's report provided to the Independent Mail.
In an interview, Graham declined to disclose the identity of the person in the video.
"There is an officer who is handling this, and I want to allow that officer to do their job," he said. "When the time is right to talk about this, I will."
Graham said at least 225 signatures were on the petition at the time it was taken.
The Independent Mail has filed a Freedom of Information request with the Sheriff's Office, seeking the video footage.
Drivers in Starr started the petition after learning Moore petitioned the South Carolina Department of Transportation to have Rhody Farm Road transferred to him. Signs indicating that the road is closed have been erected, but the road remains passable, and Moore cannot close it without permission from the court, according to officials with the state transportation department.
The "ROAD CLOSED" signs appeared shortly after Graham defeated Moore in a runoff for the Anderson County Council District 3 seat. Graham also defeated incumbent Councilman J. Mitchell Cole in a Republican primary, and will take his seat in January.
Moore has said in previous interviews that he sought the road transfer not for political motives, but because he was concerned about litter and the safety of his wife and property. Moore owns land on both sides of Rhody Farm Road, which is a connector that joins Agnew Road and S.C. 81 South. Moore could not be immediately reached Tuesday afternoon.
SHARE Helen Watson (left) and Raquel Lemrick are prepared to hike to the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro, which is at 19,710 feet, in Africa. . Helen Watson of Belton looks through a guide book with photos of campers on Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. Helen Watson of Belton holds her phone with a photo of a hiking farewell party cake. The cake was made to look like Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. Raquel Lemrick (left), a teacher at Honea Path Middle School, and Helen Watson of Honea Path Elementary School look over information material as they prepare to hike on Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa.
By Frances Parrish of the Independent Mail
Two Honea Path teachers are taking the trip of a lifetime to hike to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa.
Helen Watson, a teacher of students with special needs at Honea Path Elementary School, and Raquel Lemrick, a sixth-grade science teacher, are leaving today on their trip.
As they sat at Watson's kitchen table Monday morning talking about their gear, they made a pact to pull each other up to the summit of the mountain if necessary.
Watson looked at Lemrick and said, "I can't believe I'm doing this."
"I'm excited about our adventure," Lemrick said.
The six-day hike begins July 24, but before they set foot on the mountain, they plan to visit the Kilimanjaro Orphanage Center. They are bringing pens for the children and plan to read them the book "The Little Engine that Could," which Watson will bring with her.
The story is important to Watson, who has needed to learn to live with her dyslexia. When she was younger and learning to read, she would get frustrated with herself. But her mother would tell her the story of the little engine that could to encourage her to keep trying.
When she plans to reach the top of the mountain, she plans to be photographed with the book and her school T-shirt. The two teachers plan to document their trip, writing in journals and taking photographs of their trek to incorporate into their lesson plans.
The two didn't realize they would be making the trip when they went to listen to Macon Dunnagan speak about his travels to Mount Kilimanjaro in October 2015.
By the end of the presentation, they said they would take on the mountain.
They've been training for the trip since October by doing things such as going to the gym, running on the school track and hiking in the mountains.
Watson even flew to Flagstaff, Arizona, to hike Mount Humphrey as practice for hiking in higher altitudes and trying out all her equipment.
Mount Kilimanjaro is 19,710 feet high, and for the final part of their climb, the group will be walking for about 16 hours to reach the summit and back to one of the camps.
The two teachers are part of a group of 13 people from all over the United States going on the hike. Dunnagan who will be their guide, has hiked to the top of the mountain 38 times.
"Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro is the hardest mental and physical challenge you will ever do in you life," Dunnagan said. "A safari is a vacation. This is the farthest from a vacation."
Dunnagan said a hiker can lose between seven and 10 pounds on the hike. And the two teachers are prepared for altitude sickness and blistered feet.
"There is some danger to it," Watson said. "Whenever I get discouraged, I hear my mother's voice saying, 'I think I can.'"
Since December, the two teachers have been buying equipment for the hike. On the two tables in the front room of Watson's home Monday were a pair of hiking boots, a sleeping bag, several changes of clothes, socks, first aid kits and medicine for altitude sickness and headaches among other items.
As part of the trip, the teachers were told by the tour company to pack some comfort food. So, Lemrick packed peanut butter, and Watson packed some packets of instant grits.
Not only have they trained for months, they have also saved money. The teachers worked at the after school programs during the school year, and Watson also took out a loan to pay for the approximately $6,000 trip.
Watson, 58, joked about how hiking to the summit will make her a cool teacher.
"When you're over 25, students think you're old," Watson said. "Well this will make me a cool teacher. If I don't make it, it's still a story. It's not a failure, because I tried."
The group is taking the Rongai route, which approaches the mountain from the north and then descends on the southern side of the mountain.
Despite their nerves, the two friends joked about losing the weight and other scenarios for the trip. Even in light of the possible dangers, the two are game for the adventure.
"We're strong women. We've been through divorces, we've been single moms, and this is the next challenge up," said Lemrick, 52. "I think we're as ready as we'll ever be."
The two will return from their trip Aug. 4.
Follow Frances Parrish on Twitter @frances_AIM
MUNICH, July 18 -- Four passengers were wounded in an attack launched by a man with axe on a regional train near Wuerzburg in the southern German state of Bavaria on Monday night, local police have confirmed.
Among the four passengers, three were in critical condition while one suffered from minor injuries, German media Focus Online has reported, quoting police sources.
According to local media reports, the man who wounded the passengers was shot dead by police.
So far, the motive of the attack remains unclear.
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Sai Pallavi refused to accept the offer from Ajith`s new movie which is referred as Thala 57. The news creates a great shock among Thala fans. To avoid further rumours about this news her mother confirmed the news and explained the reason behind refusal of the offer. Sai has signed up the Telugu project with Sekhar Kammula. By the time the team approached her for Thala 57 it was too late for her to accept the offer. Initially, names of Kajal Aggarwal, Kriti Sanon and Ritwika Singh had referred for this role. It was even reported that Anushka Shetty was playing the female lead in the movie but now she is also not part of this film.
The movie was launched last week. Shoot will begin by the end of this month, and major parts featuring Ajith will be filmed first. As per reports, Ajith will take regular breaks during the shoots to make sure he would not strain himself a lot. The actor went through multiple surgeries in 2015 November. The filming is expected to commence in Bulgaria. Thala 57 will be directed by Siruthai Siva. This would be his third film with Ajith after Vedalam and Veeram. The film is funded by Sathya Jyothi Films and music by Anirudh Ravichander. The movie is expected to be released in April 2017.
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www.indiainfoline.com is part of the IIFL Group, a leading financial services player and a diversified NBFC. The site provides comprehensive and real time information on Indian corporates, sectors, financial markets and economy. On the site we feature industry and political leaders, entrepreneurs, and trend setters. The research, personal finance and market tutorial sections are widely followed by students, academia, corporates and investors among others.
US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whose followers Turkey blames for a failed coup, is shown in still image taken from video, speaks to journalists at his home in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania July 16, 2016. Gulen said democracy cannot be achieved through military action. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo)
ANKARA, July 18 -- As a faction of the Turkish armed forces involved in the coup attempt was deemed as loyal to U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, Turkey firmly demands extradition of the cleric, which may sour bilateral ties, local experts said Monday.
Turkey officially designated Gulen's religious movement as a terrorist group and has repeatedly asked his extradition from the U.S., but the latter says solid evidence is needed to back any extradition request for his alleged leadership of a terrorist organization.
Ankara may question its friendship with Washington if the U.S. fails to meet Turkey's demand, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Monday in a press conference after the first cabinet meeting following a failed coup attempt.
"We will be disappointed, even questioning our friendship may be brought to the agenda if our friends still insist for evidence while members of the organization that tried to destroy will of this elected government and a person who instructs it," Yildirim stated.
The prime minister also said there was no better evidence than the July 15 coup attempt for the extradition of Gulen.
The cleric, however, rejected all accusations that he was behind the coup attempt.
"I condemn, in the strongest terms, the attempted military coup in Turkey," he said in a written statement on Saturday.
Gulen has lived in self-imposed exile in the U.S. since 1999 when he fled Turkey amidst accusations of extremist Islamist activities.
Gulen, who leads from exile a movement called Hizmet, was once an ally of Turkish President Erdogan. But the alliance between the movement and Erdogan split after a corruption investigation in 2013 on the then-prime minister Erdogan and those under him.
Erdogan accuses Gulen of forming and heading a terrorist organization -- publicly dubbed as the "parallel structure" -- with the U.S.-based Muslim cleric's alleged sympathizers working in state institutions such as police and judiciary as insiders.
A dossier on Gulen case would be updated with the coup attempt and will be dispatched to Washington for his extradition, Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said on Sunday.
Tolga Tanis, a local daily Hurriyet columnist, believes that a crisis between Ankara and Washington will erupt over Gulen case after the coup attempt.
"From now on, Gulen issue would be the most important topic of the Turkish-American relations," Tanis said, adding that the issue would dominate discussions between officials of the two countries.
The U.S. officials announced Gulen's legal position as Lawful Permenant Resident, he said.
The issue may lead to a crisis in short term, but cooperation between two allies will be restored in mid and long term, Mehmet Yegin, Director of Center for American Studies of International Strategic Research Organization told Xinhua.
Yegin recalled claims by Turkish officials that the U.S. is behind the coup attempt, but said this allegation is not strong yet.
"The alliance between Turkey and the U.S. has faced many up and downs," he said, adding that both countries would in a way eliminate this problem.
"The U.S. administration has already expressed willingness to act whenever the Turkish government presented evidence. I don't think this issue would negatively influence other areas of cooperation between Turkey and the U.S.." Yegin said referring to ongoing efforts against the Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq.
Turkish Labor Minister Suleyman Soylu recently accused Washington of being behind the coup attempt.
"America is behind the coup. Some magazines published there were involved [in staging the coup] for the last couple of months," Soylu told private broadcaster Haberturk on Sunday, without specifying what publications they were.
The U.S. officials are prepared to work and discuss with their Turkish counterparts about the extradition of Gulen, the U.S. Ambassador to Ankara John Bass has said in a written statement on Monday, denying claims that Washington played a role in staging the coup attempt on July 15. Enditem
Old Time D.C., a nostalgia-filled Facebook page, recently stirred a distant memory that struck a chord, given current events.
Who remembers MPDs Officer Friendly? one poster asked last April, regarding D.C.s Metropolitan Police Department. More than 250 replies erupted.
I do, one person wrote. He warned us to be Safe Street Walkers and to look out for Stranger Danger.
Officer Friendly would use an easel to draw good lessons like, Look both ways, live more days, another participant wrote.
Officer Friendly shouldve never left the schools, wrote another.
Carlton Edwards then stopped the reminiscing with a pointed question: I remember we used to like the cops. WHAT HAPPENED?
Micah Xavier Johnsons July 7 sniper shootings of 14 Dallas policemen five of whom he killed capped days of debate and protest over the fatal police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. These incidents have highlighted the widely torn relationship between police and black communities.
Many aim to repair this damage. Others, such as Morehouse University professor and journalist Marc Lamont Hill, have suggested that a healthy relationship never existed. For a certain generation, however, Officer Friendly programs built trust between cops and young people.
The Chicago Police Department created the Officer Friendly program in 1966. Amid marches and demonstrations, it was designed to address anti-police sentiment and offer children a kinder, gentler face of law enforcement. Officer Friendly reached more than 10,000 children that year, according to period newspapers.
The Sears Roebuck Foundation soon sponsored the successful Chicago program and underwrote others in some 200 U.S. cities through 1986.
Thomas J. Loftus, Americas first Officer Friendly, died in 2015 at age 79. His widow, Patricia, remembers the three years he befriended local school kids.
In 1966, we had race riots, people not talking to cops, not liking the cops, she said. The Board of Education and the police department said, Wouldnt it be good to get into the schools and get the kids comfortable with the police department and learn how they can protect themselves from strangers and protect their families?
But since their 1960s through 80s heyday, most Officer Friendly programs have been abandoned or defunded. Among other replacement community-policing programs, school resource officers have moved into middle and high schools. By then, students are likelier to encounter police in conflict situations.
I remember Officer Friendly used to come from 1st to 4th grade, teaching us that the police were our friends, Chris Newman wrote on Old Time D.C. Then, in 5th grade, it went from I am your friend to I am not to be trifled with. That is a very jarring experience.
Americans over 40 might recall this program and its intent. But younger Americans only know Officer Friendly as a phrase, sometimes with conflicting definitions. Some equate Officer Friendly with numerous community-policing initiatives. Others use the phrase as a cynical synonym for zero-tolerance and increased militarization in law enforcement.
Even major police departments can be confused about Officer Friendly. Years of attrition and re-organization have erased institutional memories in many agencies.
Alice Kim, a D.C. Metropolitan Police Department spokesperson, reviewed photos and names of cops who served as Officer Friendly, to little effect. MPD does not have an Officer Friendly program running currently, and from my understanding, we have not in the past, either, Kim said.
Sears now owned by K-Mart also has left Officer Friendly behind. The retailer is no longer affiliated with the program and has no information to provide, said spokesman Brian Hanover.
Still, several small cities, including Wilmington, North Carolina; Jacksonville, Florida; and Green Bay, Wisconsin have maintained the program. Hampton, Virginias may be closest to the original.
Its been successful because of the relationships we build, said Hampton police spokesman Sgt. Brian Snyder. We find out whats happening in their neighborhoods and in their homes, from bullying to abuse, said Snyder, referring to students with whom Officers Friendly speak. They grow up remembering their encounters with us. If we can change the mind of a juvenile now, the city of Hampton will be a better place 10 years from now.
Fifty years after its start, Patricia Loftus still believes in the program. We have the same problem happening now, she said. No communication between police and the community. Kids associate the police with tragedy and accidents. I think they need it in schools again. Kids should be able to go to a cop and not be afraid.
Loftus may get her wish. As rampant street violence and high-profile police-abuse cases batter Chicago, Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson suggests several solutions to this crisis. Among them resurrecting Officer Friendly.
Baltimore-based attorney Jelani Murrain plans to transfer his hard-earned money to an institution of financial empowerment: A black-owned bank.
The fact that black people have dealt with financial discrimination is a matter of record, Murrain, a father of three young children, told Urban News Service.
Murrain, 38, said he and his wife decided last week to open an account with Atlantas Citizens Trust Bank.
A strong, vibrant black-owned bank will hopefully ensure black people have an alternative if faced with financial discrimination in the future, said Murrain, who drives to work one hour each way, every day, between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore.
A strong Citizens Trust Bank, of course, will provide better financial services to all people of Atlanta, not just black people, he said. The success of Citizens Trust is a win for the black community and the United States.
While Washingtons Industrial Bank is black-owned, Murrain prefers to invest in Citizens, since his father lives in Atlanta.
Murrain is not alone.
More than 8,000 people opened accounts at Citizens Trust between July 13 and 18, according to news accounts. New customers flooded the bank after hip-hop artist Killer Mike urged black residents to transfer their money there.
And officials at Houstons Unity National Bank say more than 700 new customers have opened accounts in the past week.
Its fantastic. Its a beautiful thing. Were blessed, said John Scroggins, president and CEO of Unity. Its been overwhelming. Scroggins said eight to 10 people open accounts in a typical week.
Scroggins said a local pastor told him he would withdraw his money from Chase Bank and hand Unity a check for $250,000.
Ive been in the lobby shaking hands and thanking customers, Scroggins said. He described them as African-American men and women professionals. One customer told me, The cause is worth the wait. The cause, Scroggins said, stemmed from recent, high-profile police shootings of black men.
But, he said, the cause quickly turned to a social consciousness about black empowerment and supporting black-owned businesses.
Scroggins said he plans to continue re-investing in the black community by approving more small-business loans.
The surge in new accounts at Citizens, Unity and other black-owned banks springs, in part, from civil-rights leaders who consistently have pleaded with black Americans to support black-owned financial institutions.
But this sudden interest in black-owned banks also coincides with black Americans protests against the police killings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile near Minneapolis.
So, aside from symbolism, what does money in a black-owned bank achieve for the black community that it doesnt deliver in a mainstream establishment?
Some black Americans believe that investing in a black bank will help circulate more money in the black community, revive crumbling neighborhoods, secure a black economic power base and enhance black customers chances of receiving small-business loans.
There were 21 black-owned banks in America with approximately $4.7 billion in assets in 2013, according to HBCU Money. But times have changed: There were 54 such banks in 1994, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation reports.
Murrain, however, said he likes the stability of Citizens Trust Bank, which was founded by five black businessmen in 1921. The nations third-largest African- American-owned banks assets exceed $350 million, according to published reports.
We are proud to celebrate 95 strong years of service to our customers and our community, says the banks website.
Meanwhile Patrice Gaines, 67, said she will follow her daughters lead.
Her daughter, Andrea Carter of Atlanta, 47, transferred her money to Citizens.
Gaines plans to open an account with black-owned, New Orleans-based Liberty Bank. It was founded in 1972 with assets of $2 million. Alden J. McDonald, Jr. has led Liberty since day one and has grown its holdings to $374 million, according to the banks website.
Andreas actions reminded me that I have a much longer view of this country and its history, said Gaines, a former Washingtonian who now lives in Lake Wylie, South Carolina.
She never saw U Street in Washington, D.C. when it was lively with black businesses, including a black bank, she said.
Gaines said she is proud to invest in Liberty Bank, which has opened branches in Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri and Texas.
There was a pride that came over me when I walked on U Street, Gaines said. So, maybe this time is the time when my daughter can experience a fraction of the pride I felt when I lived in a neighborhood surrounded by black-owned businesses, and I followed my mother into the black-owned bank to get money out of her account.
Several African-American celebrities also plan to open accounts with black-owned banks. Performers Usher, Killer Mike and Jermaine Dupri joined Citizens Trust Bank in February.
Meanwhile, Gaines focuses on the big picture.
My daughter has reminded me of the simple truth that our money can still be used as a tool of power to make a point, she said. Sometimes in a seemingly integrated business environment, we forget this. Its not lost on me that my daughter and a younger generation had to remind me of this.
If your employer asks you to work without clocking in, requests a percentage of your tips, refuses to pay overtime or misclassifies your work category to avoid payroll tax requirements, guess what? That company is stealing from you. The methods some employers will use to avoid paying employees is staggering. You dont go to work to have your employer steal from you. You did the work and deserve to be paid in full for your efforts. Its just that simple.
That is why my colleagues and I are taking the first step in addressing wage theft in our community. Your City-County Council is pro-business and we completely support economic development in our community. We also know that the far majority of businesses in Marion County are following the law than are not. We have wonderful businesses providing countless jobs and creating an employment and economic climate that is enhancing the quality of life for many of families. But we have a responsibility to ensure all employees are paid fairly, so we must tackle this issue head-on and leave no stone unturned to make sure our familys paychecks reflect what they have earned, down to the very last cent.
Soon your Indianapolis City-County Council will vote on Proposal 248, which will provide us with a means to recover any incentives that may have been awarded to companys working on city contracts if they are found to have committed wage theft or payroll fraud. The proposal will also require anyone wishing to do business with the city to provide a sworn statement of any known payroll fraud or wage theft within a three-year time period prior to being awarded a contract.
We have a responsibility to ensure employees who are working on City-funded projects are paid in compliance with all federal, state, and local laws. Wage theft of any sort, including but not limited to failing to properly pay employees for work performed, paying less than minimum wage, failing to pay overtime, and paying cash without keeping appropriate records is illegal and will not be tolerated.
Now you think that a city like ours would not need this sort of law. After all, were in Indiana, the Crossroads of America, famously known for our Hoosier Hospitality. Wage theft in Indianapolis that isnt possible, surely that happens somewhere else. Unfortunately, this isnt the case. In a study conducted in 2009 by the National Employment Law Project, researchers found of the 4,500 low-wage workers surveyed, 60 percent had been shorted by their employers an average of $51 per week. And, if you multiply that $51 by the number of weeks in a year, that gives you a total of $2,634 in stolen wages.
Imagine if someone took that money out of your household and no one could or no one would do anything about it. You would be upset and rightfully so.
Proposal 248 holds us accountable and provides a means for monitoring this situation. Wage theft affects thousands of employees in our city and it doesnt discriminate. It can be found in any industry that you can imagine and it doesnt matter what the size of the company might be. While its primary target is always the same low-income families all of us could become victims. Your City-County Council is taking a stand by implementing a law to protect those being paid by city contractors, we invite the entire community join us in our efforts.
Wage theft is a crime. Are you a victim?
From councilors:
President Maggie A. Lewis
Councilor Jared Evans
Councilor David Ray
Councilor Leroy Robinson
Sometimes, animals understand pain better than humans do. When a human and an animal connect, an inseparable bond is created between them which exceeds even the bond that humans share.
Animal therapy works wonders on physical and mental disabilities. Especially dog therapy, which makes victims forget their pain when dogs play with them. Here are some pictures from around the world that show you just how wonderfully animal therapy works.
1. A handicapped girl holds a ball to her forehead during a session of equine-assisted therapy at the Mounted Police Unit in Mexico City
Image Credit: Reuters
2. Multiple sclerosis patient Sue Sutton (L) embraces Dare, a two-legged Sheltie dog used in therapy for disabled people in Denver
Image Credit: Reuters
3. 10-year-old Carissa Boulden kisses her pet horse Princess as it stands on her bed at her family home in Sydney
Image Credit: Reuters
4. Peruvian Ety Napadenschi, who is eight months pregnant, is touched by a dolphin named Wayra during therapy for pregnant women at a hotel in Lima
Image Credit: Reuters
5. An autistic child reacts while sitting on a horse during the Horse Therapy Special Children program at the Mounted Police Sub-Division in Bangkok
Image Credit: Reuters
6. A girl touches a dolphin during a dolphin therapy session at the Nemo Dolphinarium in Kiev
Image Credit: Reuters
7. An employee of the International Medical Leech Centre demonstrates with a leech on her face in the village of Udelnaya, some 30 km (18.6 miles) from Moscow
Image Credit: Reuters
8. Patient Rayssa plays with Troia, a therapeutically trained dog, during a therapy session at Hospital Infantil Sabara in Sao Paulo
Image Credit: Reuters
9. A handicapped member of the 'Sin Limites' (without limits) Charreria team is helped by volunteers during a practice at Lienzo Charro in Guadalajara
Image Credit: Reuters
10. Mixed terrier Eddie plays with owner Anneleise Smillie at an elderly care centre in Hong Kong
Image Credit: Reuters
11. Leonardo Araujo, 12, swims with a "Boto Cor-de-Rosa" (Pink River Dolphin) during a Bototerapia (pink dolphin therapy) session in the Negro River in Novo Airao city, northern Brazil. The therapy involves swimming with the "Boto Cor-de-Rosa" (Pink River Dolphin), in the belief that the ultrasonic waves emitted by the dolphin will help cure a range of health problems, according to physiotherapist and Bototerapia creator Igor Simoes. Araujo, who could not walk before the treatment, says his physical capabilities and self esteem have improved greatly since the therapy.
Image Credit: Reuters
Image Credit: Reuters
13. Geovany Gonzalez, with cerebral palsy, lies on top of Fiona, a therapeutically trained dog, during a therapy session at the Colitas Foundation in Panama City
Image Credit: Reuters
14. A patient at a rehabilitation hospital hugs a nine-year-old yellow Sapsaree named Ssoidol, used as a therapy dog, in Yeongcheon, South Korea
Image Credit: Reuters
15. Private First Class Ronnie Berryman from 4th Platoon, Daggery Company of the 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment sits with Captain Katie Kopp as he pets therapy dog Hank during Hank's visit to Combat Outpost Nangalam in the Pech River Valley of Afghanistan's Kunar Province
Image Credit: Reuters
16. Members of the " Ranetka " private family club take a medical-cosmetic massage using the Achatina fulica snail, also known as the Giant African land snail, at the club in Russia's Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk
Image Credit: Reuters
17. A sea lion named Neron jumps through a ring past a girl affected by a neurobehavioral developmental disorder and her therapist during an Animal-Assisted Therapy (AAT) at the Rio Safari Park in the eastern Spanish town of Elche.
Image Credit: Reuters
18. An Indonesian bee-sting therapist is helped by his colleague as he covers himself with live honeybees in Jakarta. Although the therapy is scientifically unproven and needs more studying, the popularity of bee-sting therapy, the use of bee venom from live stinging bees to treat chronic pain, is on the rise.
Image Credit: Reuters
19. A tourist enjoys the fishing spa at a shopping mall in the eastern beach town of Pattaya. The Garra Rufa fish is used to eat the dead of humans - they suck the dead skin from the feet and have been known to help with skin conditions such as psoriasis and eczema.
Image Credit: Reuters
bollywoodlife
After his recent 'rape remark' controversy, looks like Salman Khan has landed himself in yet another soup. The Sultan actor recently got into a heated argument with airport authorities in Mumbai, after he missed his flight to Delhi.
Bhai was supposed to fly off to Delhi from Mumbai with Vistara Airlines, but he reached airport 15 minutes late. And because of being late, Salman was not allowed to board the flight. In fact, it's also being reported that Salman reached the office on time but decided to chill at the airports VIP lounge a while longer despite multiple boarding announcements. And as a result, he was denied boarding the flight.
Of course, this left Salman fuming and he got into a heated argument with the authorities, but in the end he wasn't allowed to take the flight. Reportedly, in the middle of the argument, the 50-year-old actor burst into laughter considering the absurdity of the situation. Well, at least it's good to see even stars being treated like regular people!
The commander of the People's Liberation Army Navy Wu Shengli and visiting US Chief of Naval Operations John Richardson meet in Beijing for maritime safety issues on Monday, July 18, 2016. [Photo: CCTV News]
The commander of the People's Liberation Army Navy Wu Shengli has stressed that China and the United States have key roles in ensuring peace and stability in the South China Sea, and cooperation between the navies of the two countries is "the only correct option."
Wu made the remarks on Monday while meeting with his U.S. counterpart Admiral John Richardson and his delegation to discuss maritime security.
Describing the current security situation in waters around China as "complicated and sensitive" and noting the escalating South China Sea issue, Wu said Richardson's visit will be beneficial for the two countries to strengthen communication, promote trust, resolve doubts and avoid misjudgments.
"We will never sacrifice our sovereignty and interests in the South China Sea," Wu said, stressing that it is China's "core interest" and concerns the foundation of the Party's governance, the country's security and stability and the Chinese nation's basic interests.
Wu said that China will not recede over territorial sovereignty or fear any military provocation, which the Chinese navy is fully prepared to cope with.
"We will never stop our construction on the Nansha Islands halfway... the Nansha Islands are China's inherent territory, and our necessary construction on the islands is reasonable, justified and lawful," Wu said.
He stressed that "no matter what country or person applies pressure," China will push forward and complete island construction as planned.
According to Wu, China will never be caught off guard, and the number of its defense facilities is completely determined by the number of threats it faces.
Wu vowed that China will never give up its efforts to solve the South China Sea issue peacefully, despite "many negative factors at present," but also warned that "any attempt to force China to give in through flexing military muscles will only have the opposite effect."
Wu expressed his hope that the two countries' air and maritime forces fully follow the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea and the Rules of Behavior for the Safety of Air and Maritime Encounters to avoid strategic misjudgment or exchange of fire, and to jointly ensure the peace and stability of the South China Sea.
Wu called on the two sides to promote strategic mutual trust, seek common ground, expand the scope of cooperation and create new momentum for China and the United States to develop a new type of major-power relations between the two countries.
ABVP leader N Susheel Kumar and others have been booked for allegedly assaulting an M Phil student, days after students groups clashed in Hyderabad University over the "Kashmir situation", the recent attack on Burhan Wani and other terrorists in the Valley.
Facebook.com
The M Phil student, Amol Singh, claimed that the attackers mistook him for a Kashmiri.
Police also booked Mr Singh after Mr Kumar, accused of abetting the suicide of Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula on the campus in January, alleged in his cross complaint that Mr Singh had attacked them. They knocked me down and started punching on my face and stomach and hitting on my knees. My friends and I tried to run away into the hostel and they chased us, Singh told the Hindustan Times.
ABVP representatives said that students raised slogans in support of slain Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist commander Burhan Wani.
Gachibowli police have booked Mr Kumar and 30 others under sections 324 (voluntarily causing hurt by dangerous weapons or means), 341 (wrongful restraint) and 506 (criminal intimidation) of Indian Penal Code after Mr Singh alleged that some ABVP students "brutally" attacked him on Saturday evening, a senior police officer told Press Trust of India today.
Similarly, based on a complaint lodged by Mr Kumar, a counter case has been registered against Mr Singh with Miyapur Police under sections 323 (voluntarily causing hurt) and other relevant sections of IPC, he said, adding that both the cases are under investigation.
BCCL
On July 16 evening, a scuffle had broken out between two groups of students after a meeting was conducted to "condemn" the police action against protesters in Jammu and Kashmir, at the shopping complex on the varsity campus.
In his complaint, Mr Singh alleged that Mr Kumar and others rained punches and kicks on him on the campus after mistaking him for a Kashmiri student while he was returning after attending the meeting. Mr Singh had claimed that he was attacked again near a hospital.
In a counter complaint, Mr Kumar accused Mr Singh and his friends of assaulting him and other ABVP members. Mr Kumar alleged that the group of students raised separatists slogans after the meeting on "Kashmir issue" following which they objected to it.
Facebook.com
"The university has received complaints from students groups and (that) laid down procedures will be followed in dealing with the same," University Pro Vice-Chancellor 1 and official spokesperson Professor Vipin Srivastava said.
Meanwhile, in a related development, the Joint Action Committee for Social Justice (UoH), which is spearheading the protests over Vemula's death, today condemned the "assault" on Singh.
"In this incident, the nexus of ABVP with (Vice Chancellor) Appa Rao Podile-led HCU administration is clearly visible. N Susheel Kumar and Podile Appa Rao are amongst the prime accused in the SC&ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act and abetment to suicide of Rohith Vemula and harassment of four other dalit research scholars," the JAC stated in a release.
Army on Tuesday ordered an inquiry into the firing incident at Qazigund in Anantang district of Kashmir in which three persons were killed and six others injured.
BCCL/representative image
"An inquiry has been ordered into the incident," a defence spokesman said here.
He said Army will provide all possible assistance to the bereaved families and to those injured in the "unfortunate" incident on Monday.
"The Army deeply regrets, the unfortunate loss of life in the incident at Churat, Qazigund where the troops were forced to open fire yesterday when a large mob turned violent, resorting to heavy stone pelting and attempted to snatch weapons from the soldiers," the spokesman said.
BCCL/representative image
The Army also appealed to the people to maintain peace and refrain from attacking security forces or their vehicles.
"Army today appealed to the people to maintain peace and refrain from attacking security forces or their vehicles or establishments thus creating situations where the security forces are left with no option but to retaliate in self defence," the spokesman added.
BCCL/representative image
A police spokesman said a security force party while removing a road blockade at Churaht, Qazigund came under heavy stone pelting by miscreants from two sides.
"Some miscreants tried to snatch weapons from them and tried to set ablaze the vehicles. Despite repeated warnings, the mob did not disperse and army fired in self defence in an effort to move out from the spot," the spokesman said.
The incident took the death toll in the Valley to 43, in the wake of the protests after an army operation successfully took down Hizbul terrorist Burhan Wani. Districts across J&K have been put under curfew, and there are ongoing minor skirmishes between locals and security forces that sees stone pelting and retaliatory non-lethal firing. Police and paramilitary personnel have stepped up security operations, and a strike announced by seperatists till July 22 has paralysed life here.
The sixth additional district and sessions court judge DT Puttarangaswami, on Monday, convicted Anand, a resident of Belthangady to two years, two months (rigorous imprisonment) and a fine of Rs 10,000 under section 307 (attempt to murder) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
BCCL/representative image
Speaking to Bangalore Mirror, public prosecutor Judith OM Crasta said Anand was about 22 years when he met the victim, who was about 19 years old. The convict, an orphan, was residing at his maternal aunt's house and gradually moved into the victim's house.
BCCL/representative image
Anand promised the girl marriage and on March 3, 2014, he had 'forceful' sex with her. Later, on several occasions he allegedly continued the relationship and she became pregnant. When she started pestering him for a marriage, he called her to Uppinagady on the pretext of taking her to the doctor to abort the child. On Sept 8, 2014, he took her on his motorcycle towards Kodimbala of Kadaba police station limits. When they reached a bridge near Kumardhara river, he allegedly pretended like the bike needed repair.
unsplash-freestocks.org/representative image
It was about 7.30 pm and it was raining. The victim was engrossed watching the water when the accused came from behind and pushed her into the river. She was about six months pregnant but she swam about two kilometres and found a small tree in the middle of the river.
She climbed this and spent the whole night there. Though she cried for help, there was nobody to help her in the night. The next day, two fishermen on a coracle heard her crying and rushed to rescue her. She was later shifted to a hospital in Kadaba. On Sept 9, a complaint was lodged and Anand was arrested the next day. The mobile phone of the victim was seized from his possession.
unsplash-Christoffer Engstrom/representative image
The court examined 23 witnesses, including the two persons who rescued the victim, and doctors. The victim had also given evidence. After her examination, Anand again approached her near the court, and promised her marriage. In the cross examination, she stated that the sexual relationship was consensual. The court thus acquitted the accused under section 376 (rape charges). But for pushing her into the river, the charges were proved.
In addition to 26 months of rigorous imprisonment, the court has imposed a fine of Rs 10,000 of which Rs 8,000 goes to the victim. The victim eventually delivered a baby boy.
A woman has mortgaged her 'mangalsutra' to construct a toilet in her house at Barahkhanna village in Bihar's Sasaram.
facebook-Look and Book/representative image
Phool Kumari took the step after she failed to raise adequate money by working as a cook at a local primary school as her farm labourer husband's income is meagre, the local panchayat said.
She also braved the opposition of male members of her family while mortgaging her 'mangalsutra' to arrange the required money, they said.
BCCL/representative image
"On Wednesday, I and other district administration officials could participate in the inauguration of construction work for a toilet at Kumari's house in the presence of her husband and father-in-law," said Rohtas District Magistrate Animesh Kumar Parashar.
BCCL/representative image
The woman was made brand ambassador of the total sanitation programme in the district to inspire others, the District Magistrate said.
"We will ensure that the toilet is constructed within 10 days," he said.
Since the attacks in Dhaka on June 22, Indian Islamic preacher Zakir Naik has been in trouble for his alleged preaching that provoke or instigate violence.
BCCL
There are several instances as well where Zakir Naik has allegedly misquoted Quran. Islamic scholars claim that there are several clerics who misquote the holy text which results in maligning the image of Islam in the eyes of the non-Islamic world.
Some of alleged lies preached by Zakir Naik are
1. Suicide Bombing are legitimate.
BCCL
Zakir Naik has said that suicide bombing and killings of infidels is legitimate. However, after being lambasted for being an inspiration for Dhaka attackers, Naik took a U-turn and declared suicide bombing haraam.
"I challenge you to show me any unedited answer of mine where I have not condemned suicide bombing of the kind that is happening," he said. Clearly, he does not categorically condemn all kinds of suicide bombing, but only the suicide bombing of the kind that is happening. Is there any other kind of the suicide bombings that extremists undertake Mr. Naik?
2. Quran allows Muslims to have sex with female slaves.
BCCL
Zakir Naik allegedly misinterpreted Quran by saying that Muslims can have sex with female slaves. The same ideology is propagated by ISIS and buying and selling of female sex slaves by IS fighters is rampant in areas under their control.
Ghulam Rasool Dehlvi in one of his articles in First Post has condemned Naik for misinterpreting Quran. "Zakir Naik went some steps ahead on his Peace TV. He did not only misinterpret the references from the holy Quran and hadith, but also coined quite new, nefarious and pernicious religious underpinnings in some of his speeches spewing venom," wrote Dehlvi.
3. Bible has pornography, teaches how to rape and even gang-rape.
BCCL
Among the many objectionable statements about other religions, he allegedly insulted Christianity by saying: 'Bible has pornography, teaches how to rape and how to even gang-rape.'
4. Islam is the only true religion.
BCCL
Most of the Muslim clerics, even those who don't misinterpret Quran are accused of this and they often ridicule other religion and doubt their sanctity. Naik is also one in that long list. He once said: "We (Muslims) know for sure that only Islam is the true religion in the eyes of God. therefore we do not allow propagation of any other religion."
5. Child marriage.
Child marriage is already a big problem in India, and when somebody tries to give it religious legitimacy, the battle against such menaces get difficult. Zakir Naik too gave legitimacy to child marriage by misinterpreting Quran and sharia. He said that if the boy and girl have attained puberty, there is no harm in marrying them. "The only requirement for marriage in Islamic Sharia is that girl and boy both must attain the age of puberty that can occur at age 12, 11 or even 10," said Naik in one of his speeches.
Less than two months ago, India was crying out for respite from the heat of the summer and the lack of water. Images of farmers sitting on parched fields and women ferrying water for miles were commonplace. In stark contrast, villagers of India are now dreading water. The rising water levels of rivers across the country are presenting a fresh set of problems.
Following a rainy weekend, the first of this monsoon, the river Ganga is already flowing too close to the flood levels. Talking to TOI, SDO, Irrigation Department, Ravindra Singh, said, "The Ganga is flowing with 1.40 lakh cusec water at present. About 1.70 lakh cusec water has also been released on Sunday from Haridwar. That will reach here by late on Sunday night. We have informed all villagers living on the banks of the Ganga."
PTI
The situation seems equally grim along the banks of the Yamuna. Haridev Kamboj, an executive engineer at Jagadhari, confirmed that the river could pose a threat if incessant rains continued in Yamunanagar district. "Normally, we get 450mm rain in the entire season. But according to meteorological officials, the rains have already touched 383mm so far. Now, the initial spell may not disturb Delhi. But certainly, the continuous rainfall along with rainfall in the hills may spell trouble," he said.
The MET has warned of an intense monsoon this year.
EPA
During the summer crisis, the state governments had worked on improving water bodies around rivers to help storing the excess rainwater for the next season. However, all does not seem well with Andhra Pradesh where these man-made reservoirs are also threatening to overflow with the excess water. Almatti, linked the river Godavari to store its spillover water, is at its seams.
Other water bodies of the south, connected to the Cauvery and Krishna seem to have a similar predicament.
AFP
The Brahmaputra has already flooded parts of Assam and the situation continues to be grim. The government has arranged for several camps to provide relief material but the relentless rains are making relief activities difficult.
The Brahmaputra is flowing above danger level in the areas of Jorhat and Dhubri, while the tributaries - Dikhow, Dhansiri, Jai Bharali, Puthimari and Sankosh are also flooding. The combined effect of the rivers has affected 238 villages so far and 15,000 hectares of farmland.
Five ISIS suspects who were chargesheeted on Monday by the National Investigation Agency were learning bomb making on various social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, and Trillian (a free instant messenger).
nationalinterest.org
The federal anti-terror organisation, in its report, told a Delhi court that photos and videos of former members of Indian Mujahideen - Anwar Bhatkal and Bada Sajid, who died fighting for the ISIS - were used to tempt recruits to plot Ardh Kambh attack in Haridwar.
Their plan included attacking strategic locations in Delhi as well.
ibtimes
Five men have been taken into judicial custody namely Mohd Azeemushan, Mohd Osama, Akhlakur Rehman alias Akhlaq, Meraj alias Monu and Mohsin Ibrahim Sayyed. The sixth suspect is currently on the run and is believed to be employed by the ISIS in Syria.
The NIA said that Rehman used the Trillian ID "wafabhai 7861" to chat with Yusuf-Al-Hindi who used the name "gummnambhai".
technobuffalo
Azeemushan, Rehman, Meraj and Osama also constantly kept in touch with one another using other platforms such as Skype and Surespot.
The men hatched their scheme in Landhaura near Haridwar which led them to survey the Ardh Kumbh site on January 18 so that they could plant improvised explosive devices (IED).
The NIA also recovered various videos that showed Muslim clerics delivering motivational speeches on Jihadi literature, faith, blood-letting, hatred and lessons on bomb making using Diwali firecrackers, alarm clocks, and matchsticks.
Protesting the attack on four youth last week in Gujarat for alleged cow slaughter a group of dalits have been admitted in hospital after they consumed poison in an effort to commit suicide.
Dalits held protest rallies in major towns including in Gondal, where five members of the community consumed pesticide while two members consumed it in another town Jamkandorana town.
The protest turned violent on Monday night after the protesters set fire to two state owned buses.
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They also dumped a truckload of cow carcasses in front of the collector's office in Surendranagar district and are refusing to bury them until action is taken against those who were seen publicly flogging four dalits accused cow slaughter.
Twitter
Meanwhile Gujarat Chief Minister Anandiben Patel has ordered a CID probe into the incident.
Gujarat CM @anandibenpatel orders CID probe into assault on Dalits for allegedly killing a #cow at #Una last week pic.twitter.com/jG1iWYXn6V All India Radio News (@airnewsalerts) July 19, 2016
She has announced setting up of a special court and appointing a special public prosecutor in the case and declared that the chargesheet will be filed within 60 days.
Last week a shocking video had emerged showing four dalit youths being beaten up by a cow protection group.
They were accused of cow slaughter, a charge which the victims have refused. They say they were only skinning a dead cow before deposing it, which is their traditional job. Three men including some Shiv Sena members were arrested in connection with the incident.
In a heartening development, the United Nations Patron of Oceans Lewis Pugh and his team will visit Mumbai's Versova beach next month to support an initiative by residents which he says is a "biggest beach clean-up in history''.
Rerters
On Friday, Pugh who is currently working on creating a series of Marine Protected Areas around Antarctica, confirmed his forthcoming visit. He told the TOI, "Yes, I will be coming to Mumbai on August 6-7 to support the Versova Beach clean up.'' "It's incredible for a number of reasons. First, it is certainly the biggest beach clean-up in history. I understand it has been going on for over 40 weeks. Second, because it's a local initiative, not a government one.''
BCCL
In an email response to TOI from South Africa, he said, "The residents are in effect saying we, the public, will not allow our environment to be destroyed any further.'' The Versova beach clean up began as a dream by two local residents, a lawyer Afroz Shah and another enthusiast, last year. An active mission, the Versova Resident Volunteers (VRV) roped in civic administration to help with machines and tractors, man power to clear the beach of piles of plastic and filth. Working weekends, the group rid the beach of over 1 million kilograms of litter.
BCCL
As Pugh, says, "Most importantly, this movement has the potential to inspire residents in other cities in India, and around the world, to start similar projects. They are showing what can be done with a vision, passion and determination.'' "I am so looking forward to joining Afroz and his team."
Lewis Pugh was appointed UN patron of the oceans in 2013. A frequent swimmer across vulnerable ecosystems to draw attention to their plight, he is a leading figure in efforts to protect the oceans. He is the only person to have completed a long distance swim in every ocean of the world, and has pioneered more swims around famous landmarks than any other swimmer in history. In 2010 Pugh even swam across a glacial lake on Mt Everest to draw attention to the melting glaciers in the Himalayas.
Also Read: The Ocean Might Be Throwing Up Trash On The Pristine Beaches Of Hong Kong
In Gujarat, a state which is battling to improve its dubious sex ratio, a hospital have come up with an innovative incentive for having a girl child.
EPA/ Representative Image
Ahmedabad-based Sindhu Hospital now offer a full waiver of hospital charges to couples if their newborn is a girl child.
Mahadev Lohana, managing director of Sindhu Hospital said the decision was taken after observing couples preference for a male child.
"For years, we observed that majority of women who got admitted for delivery hoped and prayed for a boy. Sweets would be distributed on birth of a male child but a girl's arrival would be met with stoic acceptance. The trust decided it was time to celebrate arrival of a daughter."
BCCL/ Representative Image
Not just the waiver of charges, the hospital also throws a party to celebrate every girl child birth, Lohan added.
"The country and every community needs to celebrate birth of a girl. Even in Sindhi samaj, there are nearly 850 girls per 1,000 boys. This has to change."
BCCL/ Representative Image
According to the hospital some 150 couples have already registered in the hospital, they will be eligible to avail the offer if the deliver a girl child.
The hospital's efforts seem to be yielding results, many now want a girl child in their family.
"There is no girl born in our family since past 35 years. I am praying I get a baby girl," Komal Reddy, one of the women registered with the hospital told The Times of India.
Medicare Hospital Foundation Trust
It is not just the Sindhu Hospital that is fighting to save the girl child. A hospital in Pune has been doing the same for years, delivering over 430 girl children so far.
Former Turkish Air Force Commander General Akin Ozturk has confessed to planning the foiled coup.
A total of 103 generals and admirals have been detained for questioning across Turkey over the failed coup.
The country's state news agency Anadolu reports that 41 of them have been jailed pending trial.
Meanwhile, the Turkish authorities have launched an investigation into the coup-related Incirlik Air Base in the country's southeastern province of Adana.
Accompanied by police teams, two deputy chief prosecutors and five chief public prosecutors from Adana started to search the air base, where a tanker plane had taken off to refuel at least one F-16 jet piloted by the coup soldiers.
The base, which houses nuclear weapons, is currently used by U.S.-led NATO forces to strike IS targets.
Delhi is increasingly becoming unsafe for women and no matter how loudly one screams this fact out loud from the rooftops, the situation is nowhere near getting any better.
In a fresh incident, an entrepreneur Priyanka Gusain became the target of a lecherous driver employed with Ola Cabs.
voanews
So while commuting with the driver, Priyanka was taken aback when the man video-taped her without her knowledge. In her Facebook note that she posted on Ola Cabs's timelines, Priyanka wrote:
"As the cab moved on for the destination, I went about checking my emails and answering some important work related phone calls. However, I sensed something extremely strange about the cab driver. His body posture was defensive and he would constantly look at me in the rear view mirror. Not knowing whether to trust my gut feeling, I discounted it as my brain telling me to be cautious.
Facebook
"Moments later, my attention was pulled towards a phone which was neatly placed at an angle on his hand which allowed the aforementioned driver to very easily and comfortably record the happenings in the cab.
"It was then that it hit me; he might have been recording a video. I did not realise this initially but the moment I sat in his car, his phone's front camera was fixed in my direction.
livemint
I asked him to pull over and confiscated his phone. What I saw left me shocked. There it was, a video of me, all of me. My every gesture, movement, each word uttered was recorded on his phone. Never in my life did I ever feel this violated.
Imagine, had I not known, some random stranger would have been walking around with a video of me in his phone, in his pocket, meant to be shared or something.
In what I thought was my privacy and the comfort for which I paid, I was violated. I handed the guy over to the police because tomorrow CV such videos may fail to satisfy what he seek.
The policeman told me something frankly 'madam, ye choot jayega, it's a bailable offense'. The driver is probably out right now, driving some girl somewhere and violating her in ways the law does not seem to recognize."
Ola Cabs replied to Priyanka's post, apologising and assuring her that action against the driver would be taken.
Following which the driver was put behind bars and was soon terminated from his employment with Ola Cabs. While the cab company's swift action is commendable, such incidents need to stop altogether if we are to make Delhi a safe capital for its women.
At least 10 paramilitary commandos of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) COBRA battalion were killed, and five injured in a blast triggered by Naxals in Bihar's Aurangabad.
ANI
The CRPF team had come under attack during a combing operation which was launched on Monday in Dumari Nala forest area on the border of Gaya and Aurangabad districts, 172 km south of Patna.
Google Maps
The blast was carried out by around 21 improvised explosive devices, killing eight CRPF personnel on the spot, two others died while being taken to hospital, a senior official said.
"While eight personnel were killed on the spot, two others succumbed to their injuries when they were being evacuated."
CRPF commandos injured in Gaya Naxal encounter brought to A N Memorial Magadh Medical College (earlier visuals) pic.twitter.com/D6c8qDzM9g ANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2016
The CRPF which launched a counteroffensive have reportedly killed at least three maoists.
They also recovered some arms including an AK-47 rifle, INSAS rifle and under barrel grenade launcher from the site. The operation is still continuing, and six additional teams of CRPF have been sent to the area.
With the amount of tragedy and horror in the news today, random acts of kindness and integrity gleam through like gold. And it was gold, worth lakhs, and a bundle of other valuables that an ordinary chai seller returned to its rightful owners after they left it behind.
Meet India's Most Honest Man. Jaipur Rickshaw Puller Returns Rs 1.17 Lakh He Found On The Road! He's 26.
A woman tea vendor on Sunday handed over to police a bag containing 45 sovereigns of gold jewellery worth around 9.5 lakh, two cellphones and Rs. 10,000 she had found near her shop on the Marina.
BCCL/Represenatational image
The valuables were handed over to the family of Tondiarpet resident Anwar Khan. Amudha, the 28-year-old Chepauk resident who found the bag, won fulsome praise from east zone joint commissioner of police Manoharan and deputy commissioner V Balakrishnan.
"The sense of satisfaction and appreciation I received from the police after handing over the valuables to the owner are worth more than anything else," Amudha said later. She said she knew what people losing such large amounts of gold jewellery underwent. "I hail from a poor family and I can understand their suffering," she said.
BCCL/Represenatational image
Police said Anwar Khan had come to the Marina along with a group of relatives who had arrived in the city from Rameswaram. After taking in the sights at a lot of places in the city, Khan and the others decided to go to the famous sands in the evening.
Also read: Honest Indian Finds Rs.90,000 On The Road, Returns It To The Police
After spending a lot of time enjoying the sights and sounds on the beach, the family decided to go home and got into a car. As he was about to start the car, Anwar Khan realised that the bag containing the jewellery the family was carrying was missing.
Xuan Che/flickr.com
A sense of panic set in and all of them fanned out on the sands, searching for it in the darkness. Finally, accepting the fact that someone may have taken the bag, the family lodged a complaint with the Anna Square police. As they were waiting at the station, Amudha arrived with the bag. She was on her way home from the beach after locking her tiny shop when she found the bag.
If You Thought Honest Politicians Are Extinct, Here Are 5 Honest Men Who Will Prove You Wrong!
German Police have shot dead a 17-year-old Afghan refugee in southern city of Wuerzburg, after he attacked several passengers on a train using an axe.
AP
At least three of the victims suffered serious injuries, police spokesman said adding that another 14 people were being treated for shock.
The attack happened on a local train which runs between Treuchlingen and Wuerzburg in Bavaria late on Monday night.
Twitter
Twitter
Twitter
State Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann, told Germany's ARD television that the attacker had been identified as a 17-year-old unaccompanied Afghan refugee who came to the country sometime back.
He lived with a foster family for the last two weeks. Before that he had been housed at the Kolping-Heim refugee center.
Authorities are also looking into the motives of the attack, even though there are some reports of eyewitness claiming that the attacker was shouting "Allahu Akbar".
AP
If the report is confirmed, this would represent the most significant Islamist attack in Germany since a Kosovar gunman killed two American servicemen in 2011.
Germany last year registered more than 1 million migrants entering the country, including more than 150,000 Afghans.
Were excited to announce that indmin.com is now part of fastmarkets.com.
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PAOK sold the 25-year-old international to Zenit Saint Petersburg for 3.5 euros, eleven times the amount of money they had spent to buy him two years ago, and his sale is actually the first important one during owner Ivan Savvidis' era. However, SDNA
SINGAPORE, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The biased award rendered by an arbitral tribunal in the South China Sea arbitration has no binding force as the ad hoc tribunal violated international law principles and standards, an expert said here on Monday.
Sienho Yee, chief expert at the Institute of Boundary and Ocean Studies of Wuhan University, said the arbitral tribunal adopted an excessively expansive interpretation of the jurisdictional grant, played a game of words, and distorted the text of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
The wrongful exercise by the tribunal did a substantial damage to the international rule of law, he said, adding that it had failed to consider and respect the limitations imposed by UNCLOS and China's intents and purposes in invoking its explicit right under the convention to exclude disputes concerning maritime delimitation and historic titles.
"It is manifestly clear that the tribunal abuses its power and as a result the award is null and avoid," he told Xinhua during a think tank seminar on South China Sea and regional cooperation and development.
Yee also pointed out that the arbitral award was not generally accepted, so they would be with no binding force.
"The large number of states supporting China's positions seems to show that the decisions of the tribunal are not generally acceptable and therefore are without binding force," he said.
The Chinese government said the ad hoc arbitral tribunal established at the unilateral request of the Philippines has no jurisdiction over relevant submissions, and the award rendered by it is null and void with no binding force.
The tribunal had exemplified the philosophy of "the end justifies the means" by excessively expansive interpretation of the jurisdictional grant and the sweeping final award, in a bid to exhibit its determination to settle any dispute that may exist in its view, while disregarding any other issues such as respect for the sovereignty of the states involved, said Yee.
"The danger of this philosophy to the effectiveness and legitimacy of the international legal system, international rule of law and the world order at large is clear, and we must guard against this danger," he said.
How Extrajudicial Executions Became "War" Policy in Washington
By Rebecca Gordon and Tom Engelhardt
July 18, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - " Tom Dispatch " - Strangely, amid the spike in racial tensions after the killing of two black men by police in Louisiana and Minnesota, and of five white police officers by a black sharpshooter in Dallas, one American reality has gone unmentioned. The U.S. has been fighting wars declared, half-declared, and undeclared for almost 15 years and, distant as they are, theyve been coming home in all sorts of barely noted ways. In the years in which the U.S. has up-armored globally, the country has also seen an arms race developing on the domestic front. As vets have returned from their Iraq and Afghan tours of duty, striking numbers of them have gone into police work at a time when American weaponry, vehicles, and military equipment including, for instance, MRAPs (mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles) have poured off Americas distant battlefields and, via the Pentagon, into police departments nationwide. And while the police were militarizing, gun companies have been marketing battlefield-style assault rifles to Americans by the millions, at the very moment when it has become ever more possible for citizens to carry weapons of every sort in a concealed or open fashion in public.
The result in Dallas: Micah Johnson, a disturbed Army Reserves veteran, who spent a tour of duty in Afghanistan and practiced military tactics in his backyard, armed with an SKS semi-automatic assault rifle, wearing full body armor, and angry over police killings of black civilians, took out those five white officers. One of them was a Navy vet who had served three tours of duty in Iraq and another a former Marine who had trained local police for DynCorp, a private contractor, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, civilian protesters, also armed with assault rifles (quite legal in the streets of Dallas), scattered as the first shots rang out and were, in some cases, taken in by the police as suspects. And at least two unarmed protesters were wounded by Johnson. (Think of that, in his terms, as collateral damage.) In the end, he would be killed by a Remotec Andros F5 robot, built by weapons-maker Northrop Grumman, carrying a pound of C4 plastic explosive, and typical of robots that police departments now possess.
In other words, this incident was capped by the first use of deadly force by a drone in the United States. Consider that a war-comes-home upping of the ante. Already, reports the Defense One website, makers of military-grade robots a burgeoning field for the Pentagon are imagining other ways to employ such armed bots not only on our distant battlefields but at home in a future in which they will be useful, cheap, and ubiquitous, and capable of Tasing as well as killing.
Of course, among the many things that have also come home from the countrys wars, Predator and Reaper drones are now flying over the homeland on missions for the Pentagon, not to mention the FBI, the Border Patrol, and other domestic agencies. So the future stage is set. Once youve used any kind of drone in the U.S. to kill by remote control, its only logical given some future extreme situation to extend that use to the skies and so consider firing a missile at some U.S. target, as the CIA and the Air Force have been doing regularly for years in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. And of course, in our domestic arms race, with small drones commercially available to anyone and the first of them armed (no matter the rudimentary nature of that armament), its not hard to imagine a future Micah Johnson, white or black, using one of them sooner or later. After all, Johnson was already talking about planting IEDs (the term for insurgent roadside bombs in our war zones) and a flying IED is a relatively modest step from there.
So, welcome to the home front, folks. And speaking of drones, its worth giving a little thought to what might, in fact, still come home, to the sort of example that two administrations have set by turning the president into an assassin-in-chief and regularly creating law for themselves when it comes to the targeting of distant peoples. In that light, TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon considers Americas Trojan Horse technology of death and just what it may someday smuggle into the homeland. ~ Tom
The Trojan Drone
An Illegal Military Strategy Disguised as Technological Advance
By Rebecca Gordon
Think of it as the Trojan Drone, the ultimate techno-weapon of American warfare in these years, a single remotely operated plane sent to take out a single key figure. Its a shiny video game for grown ups a Mortal Kombat or Call of Duty where the animated enemies bleed real blood. Just like the giant wooden horse the Greeks convinced the Trojans to bring inside their gates, however, the drone carries something deadly in its belly: a new and illegal military strategy disguised as an impressive piece of technology.
The technical advances embodied in drone technology distract us from a more fundamental change in military strategy. However it is achieved whether through conventional air strikes, cruise missiles fired from ships, or by drone the United States has now embraced extrajudicial executions on foreign soil. Successive administrations have implemented this momentous change with little public discussion. And most of the discussion weve had has focused more on the new instrument (drone technology) than on its purpose (assassination). Its a case of the means justifying the end. The drones work so well that it must be all right to kill people with them.
The Rise of the Drones
The Bush administration launched the assassination program in October 2001 in Afghanistan, expanded it in 2002 to Yemen, and went from there. Under Obama, with an actual White House kill list, the use of drones has again expanded, this time nine-fold, with growing numbers of attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia, as well as in the Afghan, Iraqi, and Syrian war zones.
Theres an obvious appeal to a technology that allows pilots for the CIA, Joint Special Operations Command, or the Air Force to sit safely in front of video screens in Nevada or elsewhere in the U.S., while killing people half a world away. This is especially true for a president running a global war with a public that does not easily accept American casualties and a Congress that prefers not to be responsible for war and peace decision-making. Drone assassinations have allowed President Obama to spread the war on terror to ever more places (even as he quietly retired that phrase), without U.S. casualties or congressional oversight and approval.
One problem has, however, dogged the drone program from the beginning: just like conventional air strikes, remotely targeted missiles and bombs tend to kill the wrong people. Over the last seven years, the count of civilians killed by drones has been mounting. Actual figures are hard to come by, although a number of nongovernmental organizations and journalists have done a good job of collating information from a variety of sources and offering reasonable estimates.
Analysis from all these sources suggests that there are at least three reasons why civilians die in such attacks.
1. The intelligence information on the individual targeted is often wrong. He isnt where they think he is, or he isnt even who they think he is. For example, in 2014 a British human rights organization, Reprieve, compiled data on drone strikes that targeted specific individuals in Yemen and Pakistan. According to the Guardian, Reprieves work
indicates that even when operators target specific individuals the most focused effort of what Barack Obama calls targeted killing they kill vastly more people than their targets, often needing to strike multiple times. Attempts to kill 41 men resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,147 people, as of 24 November [2014].
Some of these men were reported in the media as killed multiple times. Even if they didnt die in the first, second, and in some cases third attempts, other people certainly did. Reprieve also reports one particularly egregious case of mistaken identity:
Someone with the same name as a terror suspect on the Obama administrations kill list was killed on the third attempt by U.S. drones. His brother was captured, interrogated, and encouraged to tell the Americans what they want to hear: that they had in fact killed the right person.
2. There isnt even a named target. The CIA has long based drone assassination targeting for many missions not on direct intelligence about a particular individual, but on what it calls the signature of possible terrorist activity (that is, the behavior or look of people below). Such signature strikes target unidentified individuals based on some suspicious activity, usually picked up through drone surveillance. Such a signature can be as ill defined as a gathering of men, teenaged to middle-aged, traveling in convoys or carrying weapons in countries where many men may be armed. Unfortunately, while such a gathering may indeed indicate some kind of military activity, it may also describe a rural wedding in, say, Yemen, involving driving in convoy from the grooms town to the brides, accompanied sometimes by celebratory gunfire.
Not everyone in the government is convinced that signature strikes are a good idea. In 2012, the New York Times reported this joke at the State Department: When the C.I.A. sees three guys doing jumping jacks, the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp.
The fact that signature strikes continue to this day suggests that Secretary of State John Kerry was not entirely truthful when, in 2013, he said at a BBC forum: The only people that we fire a drone at are confirmed terrorist targets at the highest level after a great deal of vetting that takes a long period of time. We dont just fire a drone at somebody and think theyre a terrorist.
3. They were in the way, and so became collateral damage. This is the term military theorists regularly use to describe human beings or civilian infrastructure unavoidably destroyed in an attack on a legitimate military target. Of course, a drone operators understanding of the term unavoidable may be different from that of a woman who has just lost three of her four sons as they were returning home from shopping for supplies to celebrate Eid-al-Fitr, the end of the holy month of Ramadan.
In addition, drone strikes dont just kill people, including women and children; they also destroy buildings and other property. For example, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism says that, in Pakistan, more than 60% of all strikes target domestic buildings peoples houses. In other words, collateral damage often refers to the destruction of the homes of any survivors of a drone attack.
Not surprisingly, people dont like living in terror of deadly missiles screaming out of a clear blue sky. Many observers have argued that terrorist organizations have used widespread fear and anger over drone attacks as a recruiting tool. Al-Qaeda and ISIS appear to offer Pakistanis, Yemenis, and others an alternative to simply waiting for an attack they cant prevent. The CIA itself recognized the counterproductive potential of drone killings, which they call HVT [High Value Target] operations. A leaked July 2009 CIA report on Best Practices in Counter-Insurgency outlines the issues:
Potential negative effects of HVT operations include increasing the level of insurgent support, causing a government to neglect other aspects of its counterinsurgency strategy, altering insurgent strategy or organization in ways that favor the insurgents, strengthening an armed groups bond with the population, radicalizing an insurgent groups remaining leaders, creating a vacuum into which more radical groups can enter, and escalating or deescalating a conflict in ways that favor the insurgents.
So there are long-term strategic problems with targeted killings by drone. In addition, drones may help spread and intensify terror movements and insurgencies, rather than destroying them or their leaderships. Often, as Andrew Cockburn has made clear in his book Kill Chain, the successors to leaders assassinated by drone turn out to be younger, more effective, and more brutal.
There is, however, another problem with this sort of warfare. Such killings at least when they take place outside a declared war zone are almost certainly illegal; that is, they are murders, plain and simple.
Targeted Killing Is Murder
In my household we have a rule: were not allowed to kill something just because were afraid of it. This has saved the lives of countless spiders and other creatures sporting (in my view at least) too many legs.
Whatever your view on arachnids, should it really be permissible to kill people simply because we are afraid of them? After all, thats what these drone assassinations are extrajudicial executions of people someone believes we should be afraid of. It is easier to see an illegal execution for what it is when the killer is not separated from the target by thousands of miles and a video screen. Drone technology is really a Trojan Horse, a distracting, glitzy means of smuggling an illegal and immoral tactic into the heart of U.S. foreign relations.
Not all killing is illegal, of course. There are situations in which both international and U.S. laws permit killing. One of these is self-defense; another is war. However, a war waged against a tactic (terrorism), or even more vaguely, against an emotion (terror) is only metaphorically a war. Under international law, real wars, in which it is legal to kill the enemy, involve sustained combat between organized military forces.
Outside of the fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now possibly Syria (where Congress has arguably never even declared war), the war on terror is not a war at all. It is instead a conflict with an ever-expanding list of targets, no defined geographical boundaries, and no foreseeable endpoint. It is a campaign against any conceivable potential U.S. enemy, fought in fits and starts in many countries on several continents. It involves ongoing covert operations largely hidden from everyone except its targets. As an undertaking, it lacks the regular, sustained conflict between armies that characterizes war in the legal sense. Such operations fit another category far better: assassination, illegal at least since President Jimmy Carters Executive Order 12036, which stated, No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.
Nor is the Middle East the only region where the United States is using targeted killing outside a shooting war. The U.S. military also deploys drones in parts of Africa. In fact, President Obamas nominee to head U.S. Africa Command, Marine Lieutenant General Thomas Waldhauser, recently told Senator Lindsay Graham that he thinks he should be free to order drone killings on his own authority.
So much for war and war. What about self-defense? At every stage of the war on terror, Washington has claimed self-defense. That was the explanation for rounding up hundreds of Muslims living in the U.S. immediately after the attacks of 9/11, torturing some of them, and holding them incommunicado for months in a Brooklyn, New York, jail. It was the excuse offered for beginning torture programs in CIA black sites and at Guantanamo. It was the reason the U.S. gave for invading Afghanistan, and later for invading Iraq before, as Bush administration representatives and the president himself kept saying, the smoking gun of Saddam Husseins supposed weapons of mass destruction turned into a mushroom cloud over, presumably, some American city.
And self-defense has been the Justice Departments rationale for targeted killing as well. In a November 2011 paper prepared by that department for the White House, its author (identity unknown) outlined the necessary conditions to make a targeted killing legal:
(1) an informed, high-level official of the U.S. government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States;
(2) capture is infeasible, and the United States continues to monitor whether capture becomes feasible; and
(3) the operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.
That would seem to rule out most U.S. targeted killings. Few of their targets were people on the verge of a violent attack on the United States or U.S. soldiers in the field. Ah, but in the through-the-looking-glass logic of the Obama Justice Department, imminent turns out not to mean imminent in the sense that something is about to happen. As that document explains: The condition that an operational leader present an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.
It turns out that the threat from any operational leader is always imminent, because with respect to al-Qaeda leaders who are continually planning attacks, the United States is likely to have only a limited window of opportunity within which to defend Americans. In other words, once a person has been identified as an al-Qaeda or allied group leader, he is by definition continually planning attacks, always represents an imminent danger, and so is a legitimate target. Q.E.D.
In fact, few enough of these targeted killings, including the signature ones can be defended as instances of self-defense. We should call them what they really are: extrajudicial executions.
The U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions has agreed with this view. In his 2013 report to the General Assembly, Christof Heyns noted that international human rights law guarantees a right to life. This right is enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and given legal force in, among other treaties, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the United States is a party. There certainly are legal limits to the right to life, including in countries that have the death penalty the states right to execute a person after a legitimate trial. To execute someone without a trial, however, is an extrajudicial killing and a human rights crime.
Obama Comes Clean
By the middle of President Obamas second term in office, criticism of this extrajudicial killing program, and especially of the civilian deaths involved, had mushroomed. So, in May 2013, at least 11 years after the program was launched, the president announced a shift in drone strategy, telling an audience at the National Defense University that the U.S. would engage in targeted killings of al-Qaeda militants only when there was a near-certainty that no civilians would be injured. He added that he was planning to make the drone program more transparent than it had been and to transfer most of its operations from the CIA to the Pentagon.
In the two years since, little of this has happened. Although Obama has continued the job of personally approving drone targets, the CIA still runs much of the program.
On July 1st, he did finally take a step towards providing greater transparency. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a report stating that, outside of more conventional war zones like those in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, U.S. airstrikes have killed 64 to 116 civilian bystanders and about 2,500 members of terrorist groups. These estimates are, in fact, quite a bit lower than those supplied by the various groups that track such killings. Note as well that, legally speaking, not only the collateral damage victims, but all those that Americans identified as members of terrorist groups died via illegal, extrajudicial executions.
The document fulfills one of the requirements of a newly issued executive order, which, among other things, requires the government to release a report by May 1st of each year containing information about the number of strikes undertaken by the U.S. Government against terrorist targets outside areas of active hostilities [i.e., outside genuine war zones] for the previous calendar year.
Attached to the executive order was a fact sheet, which noted that one goal of the new executive order is to set standards for other nations to follow. How happy would the United States really be if other nations decided that they had the right to kill anyone who scares them? How would the United States react if Syrian President Bashar al-Assad decided to take out a U.S. general or two, on the grounds that, since the U.S. is supporting forces that seek to depose him, those generals are (as the Fact Sheet puts it) targetable in the exercise of national self-defense?
Some critics of the Obama drone program have welcomed the executive order, which does include a new emphasis on protecting civilians. But the larger effect of the order is to make the practice of illegal assassination a permanent feature of U.S. policy. It assumes that we can expect an annual murder toll announcement for years to come. No future is contemplated in which the United States will not be raining death from the sky on people who cannot defend themselves. The drones will continue to fly, but the Trojan Drones work is complete.
Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches philosophy at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of Mainstreaming Torture and most recently of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. She can be contacted at www.mainstreamingtorture.org.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Next Time Theyll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardts latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World .
The Saudis Did 9/11
That's What The 28 Pages Tell Us By Justin Raimondo July 18, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - " Antiwar " - News reports about the recently released 28 pages of the Joint Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks are typically dismissive: this is nothing new, its just circumstantial evidence, and theres no smoking gun. Yet given what the report actually says and these news accounts are remarkably sparse when it comes to verbatim quotes its hard to fathom what would constitute a smoking gun. To begin with, lets start with whats not in these pages: there are numerous redactions. And they are rather odd. When one expects to read the words CIA or FBI, instead we get a blacked-out word. Entire paragraphs are redacted often at crucial points. So its reasonable to assume that, if there is a smoking gun, its contained in the portions were not allowed to see. Presumably the members of Congress with access to the document prior to its release who have been telling us that it changes their entire conception of the 9/11 attacks and our relationship with the Saudis read the unredacted version. Which points to the conclusion that the omissions left out crucial information perhaps including the vaunted smoking gun. In any case, what we have access to makes more than just a substantial case: it shows that the Saudi government including top officials, such as then Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and other members of the royal family financed and actively aided the hijackers prior to September 11, 2001. Support for at least two of the hijackers when they arrived in the US was extended by three key individuals: Omar al-Bayoumi Bayoumi was clearly a Saudi intelligence agent: the FBI all but identifies him as such. His salary was paid for by companies directly owned and operated by the Saudi government, although he apparently rarely showed up for work. He was directly subsidized by the wife of then Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar, and these subsidies were substantially increased when the hijackers arrived in the US. It was Bayoumi who hovered over two of the hijackers Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Midhar as soon as they arrived in the United States. He got them an apartment, co-signed the rental agreement, chauffeured them around and helped them obtain information on flight schools.
Osama Bassnan This individual, who, according to the report, has many ties to the Saudi government, boasted to an informant that he did more for the two hijackers than Bayoumi. He was certainly in a position to do so, since he lived directly across the street from them in San Diego. The FBI characterized him as an extremist and supporter of Osama bin Laden: like Bayoumi, his longtime associate with whom he was in constant communication at the time of the hijackers American sojourn Bassnan was subsidized by the Saudi royal family, and specifically Prince Bandar and his wife. A search of Basnans apartment turned up indications that he had cashiers checks amounting to $574,000. Bandars wifes account had a standing arrangement to send monthly checks to Basans wife for nursing services. There is no evidence that such services were ever performed. The suppressed 28 pages cite direct payments from Prince Bandar to Basnan: On at least one occasion, Bassnan received a check directly from Prince Bandars account. Accordion to the FBI, on May 14, 1998, Bassnan cashed a check from Bandar in the amount of $515,000. Bassnans wife also received at least one check directly from Bandar She also received one additional check froth Bandars wife, which she cashed on January 8,1998 for 510,000.
Shayk Fahah al-Thumairy He was a diplomat at the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles and imam of the King Fahad mosque, which is a focal point of Muslim-Saudi activity in the area. US intelligence avers that initial indications are that al-Thumairy may have had a physical or financial connection to al-Hamzi and al-Midhar. Both attended the King Fahad mosque. Thumairy was interviewed by US law enforcement after fleeing to Saudi Arabia, and denied having any contact with the two hijackers in spite of evidence that he was in telephonic contact with them. This, he asserted, was an attempt to smear him. The two hijackers had extensive contacts with Saudi naval officers in the United States, according to telephone records. And when Abu Zubaydah, one of the 9/11 conspirators, was captured in Pakistan, they found the phone number of a Colorado company that managed the affairs of the Colorado residence of the Saudi Ambassador. Prince Bandar is practically the star of the suppressed 28 pages no wonder the Bush administration, which had close ties to him, fought so hard to keep this secret. The 28 pages also reveal that an individual name redacted associated with al-Qaeda and the hijackers sneaked into the US, avoiding Customs agents and the INS due to the fact that he was traveling with a member of the Saudi royal family. We are also told that Another Saudi national with close ties to the Saudi Royal Family, [redacted], is the subject of FBI counterterrorism investigations and reportedly was checking security at the United States southwest border in 1999 and discussing the possibility of infiltrating individuals into the United States. The Saudi governments financial and operational ties to at least two of the 9/11 hijackers are myriad, and largely substantiated. Furthermore, although some of these links as detailed in the 28 pages are tentative, its important to remember that this report was written in 2002, and that the intelligence community was strongly admonished to follow up because lawmakers deemed the lack of investigation into the Saudi connection unacceptable. So what did they find out in the fourteen years after that admonition was delivered? Inquiring minds want to know. Prince Bandar went on to become head of Saudi intelligence: his personal relationship with the Bush family is well-known, and his access to US government officials and his powerful influence in Washington makes his starring role in the nurturing of the two hijackers into a gun that, while not quite smoking, is exuding vapors of a highly suggestive nature. Circumstantial evidence? Perhaps but people have been convicted of murder on the basis of such evidence, and, in this case, there is such a preponderance of evidence that a guilty verdict is unavoidable. It would not be stretching the evidence to bluntly state that the suppressed 28 pages of the Joint Inquiry report on the 9/11 terrorist attacks places agents of the Saudi government at the epicenter of the plot. In short, theres no two ways about it: the Saudis did 9/11. Why did our government cover up this shocking evidence for so long? The reason is because they had no desire to retaliate against the real perpetrators of 9/11. Instead, as we now know, they were determined to pin the blame on Saddam Hussein: indeed, the Bush administration pressed this talking point relentlessly, until it was forced to backtrack. We attacked Iraq, in the words of neocon grise eminence and top Bush administration official Paul Wolfowitz, because it was doable. A years long neoconservative campaign to target Iraq gained new impetus in the wake of 9/11, and the administration and its journalistic camarilla pushed the lie that Iraq was behind the attack. The evidence that the Saudis were involved had to be suppressed because the Bush administrations war plans depended on it. Now that we know the truth, what do we do about it? To begin with, if any other government had connections to a terrorist attack on the US of this nature, their capital wouldve been a smoking ruin. Im not suggesting we do that, but at the very least the Saudis must be made to pay a high price for their complicity, starting with a moratorium on all US aid and arms sales to the Kingdom. We imposed trade sanctions on Russia for far less. Cutting off the Saudis from the US banking system should put a crimp in their extensive international network of terror-financing and money-laundering. And I know its too much to expect a public statement from our President pointing out that a US ally aided and abetted those who murdered over 3,000 people on 9/11, but I can dream, cant I? The Saudis arent our allies: as the 28 pages make all too clear, they are our deadly enemies. And they ought to be treated as such. Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].
Would Turkey Be Justified in Kidnapping or Drone-Killing the Turkish Cleric in Pennsylvania? By Glenn Greenwald July 18, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - " The Intercept " - Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan places the blame for this weekends failed coup attempt on an Islamic preacher and one-time ally, Fethullah Gulen (above), who now resides in Pennsylvania with a green card. Erdogan is demanding the U.S. extradite Gulen, citing prior extraditions by the Turkish government of terror suspects demanded by the U.S.: Now were saying deliver this guy whos on our terrorist list to us. Erdogan has been requesting Gulens extradition from the U.S. for at least two years, on the ground that he has been subverting the Turkish government while harbored by the U.S. Thus far, the U.S. is refusing, with Secretary of State John Kerry demanding of Turkey: Give us the evidence, show us the evidence. We need a solid legal foundation that meets the standard of extradition. In light of the presence on U.S. soil of someone the Turkish government regards as a terrorist and a direct threat to its national security, would Turkey be justified in dispatching a weaponized drone over Pennsylvania to find and kill Gulen if the U.S. continues to refuse to turn him over, or sending covert operatives to kidnap him? That was the question posed yesterday by Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor of Guantanamos military commissions who resigned in protest over the use of torture-obtained evidence: If Fethullah Gulen is considered a threat to Erdogan & Turkey's gov't doesn't Turkey have a right to drone strike him in Pennsylvania? @CNN Col. Morris Davis (@ColMorrisDavis) July 16, 2016 That question, of course, is raised by the fact that the U.S. has spent many years now doing exactly this: employing various means including but not limited to drones to abduct and kill people in multiple countries whom it has unilaterally decided (with no legal process) are terrorists or who otherwise are alleged to pose a threat to its national security. Since it cannot possibly be the case that the U.S. possesses legal rights that no other country can claim right? the question naturally arises whether Turkey would be entitled to abduct or kill someone it regards as a terrorist when the U.S. is harboring him and refuses to turn him over. The only viable objection to Turkeys assertion of this authority would be to claim that the U.S. limits its operations to places where lawlessness prevails, something that is not true of Pennsylvania. But this is an inaccurate description of the U.S.s asserted entitlement. In fact, after 9/11, the U.S. threatened Afghanistan with bombing and invasion unless the Taliban government immediately turned over Osama bin Laden, and the Talibans answer was strikingly similar to what the U.S. just told Turkey about Gulen: The ruling Taliban of Afghanistan today further complicated the status of Osama bin Laden and rejected the ultimatum of the United States that he and his lieutenants be handed over to answer for their suspected role in last weeks terrorist attacks in the United States. The Talibans ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, said at a news conference in Islamabad, Our position in this regard is that if the Americans have evidence, they should produce it. If they can prove their allegations, he said, we are ready for a trial of Osama bin Laden. Asked again whether Mr. bin Laden would be surrendered, the ambassador replied, Without evidence, no. The U.S. refused to provide any such evidence These demands are not open to negotiation or discussion, said President George W. Bush at the time and the U.S. bombing and invasion of Afghanistan began two weeks thereafter, and continues to this day, 15 years later. The justification there was not that the Taliban were incapable of arresting and extraditing bin Laden, but rather that they refused to do so without evidence of his guilt being provided and some legal/judicial action invoked. Nor are such U.S. actions against individual terror suspects confined to countries where lawlessness prevails. In 2003, the CIA kidnapped a cleric from the streets of Milan, Italy, and shipped him to Egypt to be tortured (CIA agents involved have been prosecuted in Italy, though the U.S. government has vehemently defended them). In 2004, the U.S. abducted a German citizen in Macedonia, flew him to Afghanistan, tortured and drugged him, then unceremoniously dumped him back on the street when it realized he was innocent; but the U.S. has refused ever since to compensate him or even apologize, leaving his life in complete shambles. The U.S. has repeatedly killed people in Pakistan with drones and other attacks, including strikes when it had no idea who it was killing, and also stormed a compound in Abbottabad where the Pakistani government has full reign in order to kill Osama bin Laden in 2010. U.S. drone kills of terror suspects (including its own citizens) are extremely popular among Americans, including (in the age of Obama) those who self-identify as liberal Democrats. Yet its virtually certain that Americans across the ideological spectrum would explode in nationalistic outrage if Turkey actually did the same thing in Pennsylvania; indeed, the consequences for Turkey if it dared to do so are hard to overstate. Thats American Exceptionalism in its purest embodiment: The U.S. is not subject to the same rules and laws as other nations, but instead is entitled to assert power and punishment that is unique to itself, grounded in its superior status. Indeed, so ingrained is this pathology that the mere suggestion that the U.S. should be subject to the same laws and rules as everyone else inevitably provokes indignant accusations that the person is guilty of the greatest sin: comparing the United States of America to the lesser, inferior governments and countries of the world.
Behind The CIA Desperate Turkey Coup Attempt By F. William Engdahl July 18, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - " NEO " - On the evening of July 15, a group of Turkish army officers announced that they had staged a military coup detat and had assumed control of the country. They claimed that Erdogan was in a desperate flight for his life and that they were now in the process of restoring order. The only problem for those army officers and their sponsors far away in Langley, Virginia and Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania where Turkish political operator, Fetullah Gulen, hides in exile under CIA protectionis that they did not succeed. Behind the coup attempt is a far more dramatic story of the huge geopolitical shift that the often unpredictable political survivor, President (still) Recep Erdogan, was in the midst of making when Gulens loyalists made their desperate, now apparently failed coup attempt. What follows is a series of Q&A remarks to the background of the dramatic events unfolding in a pivotal part of the geopolitical order. Q: How would you comment on the events of Friday to Saturday evening, when the army carried out a coup? Are these events were predictable? WE: The coup was a reaction to the recent dramatic geopolitical shift of Erdogan. It was instigated by networks in Turkey loyal to the CIA. It clearly was a desperate move, ill-prepared. Q: What do you think are the real reasons for such a move of the army? WE: This was a network of officers inside the Army loyal to the Fetullah Gulen Movement. Gulen is a 100% CIA controlled asset. He even lives since years in exile in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania having gotten safe passage and a green card by former top CIA people like Graham Fuller and the former US Ambassador to Ankara. Gulen has been a decades-long mad project of the CIA to weaponize political Islam as an instrument of regime change. Recall that in 2013 there were mass protests against Erdogan in Istanbul and elsewhere. That was when Gulen, who previously had made a deal with Erdogans AK Party, broke and criticized Erdogan as a tyrant in the Gulen-controlled media such as Zaman. Since then Erdogan has been moving to root out his internal most dangerous adversary, Gulen and friends, including raids on Zaman and other Gulen-controlled media. This is not about a battle between the White Knight and Evil Knievel. It is about power pure in Turkish politics. If you are interested in the details of the Gulen CIA project I urge readers to look in my book, The Lost Hegemon (German: Amerikas Heilige Krieg). Q: Do you think these events in Turkey could lead to civil war, as interpreted by some commentators? WE: I doubt that. The Gulen Movement in the past two years has been severely reduced in influence by Erdogan and his head of intelligencepurges etc. The traditional so-called Ataturk Army as State Guardian is long gone since the 1980s. What is interesting to watch now will be the foreign policy of Erdogan: Rapprochement with Russia, reopening talks on the Russia Turkish Stream gas pipeline to the Greek border. The simultaneous Erdogan rapprochement with Netanyahu. And most critical, Erdogans apparent agreement, part of Putins demands for resumption of ties, that Turkey cease efforts to topple Assad by covertly backing DAESH or other terrorists in Syria and training them in Turkey, selling their oil on the black market. This is a huge geopolitical defeat for Obama, probably the most incompetent President in American history (even though he has some serious competition for the title from George W. Bush and Clinton). Q: Do you believe that in this way Erdogan indeed be overthrown? WE: Not likely as it now looks. Even in the early hours when Erdogan was able to tell media that it was a Gulen coup try, I was convinced Gulen would fail. Today, July 16, it seems he has failed. The CIA has egg on its face and Obama and NATO try to cover it up by their warm embrace of the democratically elected Erdogan (sic!). They cared not that in Ukraine when the CIA ran the Maidan Square coup in February 2014, that Viktor Yanukovic was the democratically elected president of Ukraine. Look at the mess Washington made there in their effort to provoke a split between Russia and the EU. Q: How should we interpret the information alleged that Erdogan sought asylum in Germany, and do you think that Germany would not approve? WE: There are many wild rumors. I have no information on that. Q: How do you put the United States and Russia in relation to recent events? WE: It should be clear from what I have said that Washington was behind the coup as their impotent reaction to the major Erdogan geopolitical shift since June, when he fired Davotoglu as Prime Minister and named loyalist Binali Yldrm. At that point Erdogan simultaneously turned away from the Washington anti-Assad strategy in Syria and towards Israel (who is in a sharp geopolitical conflict with Washington these days), towards Russia and now, even towards Assad in Syria. Q: What impact on developments has the fact that Turkey is a member of NATO? WE: This is difficult to assess. Washington desperately needs Turkey in NATO for its global strategy, especially in controlling oil flows of the Middle East, and now its natural gas. This is why the moment it was clear the coup would fail, Obama and company embraced their friend Erdogan. Its called damage control in intelligence parlance. Q: Do you believe that it is good for Turkey that Erdogan and the current government is removed in this way, rather than in the elections? WE: By the time I am writing this, it appears he is firmly still in power, perhaps more than before. Q: How do you think the events in Turkey may affect the European Union? WE: The EU is in the process of dissolving as a project. It was always a monstrous idea, encouraged in the 1950s by Churchill, by the early CIA and their European friends like Monnet, in order for the US better to control Europe. That was obvious when President Obama made his brazen intervention into British politics to tell the British not to exit the EU. The European Union is a monstrous top-down faceless bureaucracy, unelected, unanswerable to the people, sitting in Brussels next to NATO headquarters. Brexit started the dissolution. It will now go rather fast now is my feeling. Perhaps Hungary will be next if the CIA is not able to do a color revolution against Orban before their October referendum on Huexit. France? Marie Le Pens supporters and millions of French are fed up with dictates from Brussels. Look at the recent criminal decision, despite huge scientific evidence that glyphosate, the widest-used weed killer in the EU, is carcinogenic, to ignore all health and safety evidence even of EU governments, and arbitrarily re-approve it for 18 more months of poisoning of the food and the population. This is not what the people of Europe or anywhere deserve from their civil servants. Q: How do you think the events in Turkey may affect the migrant crisis, and do you expect the reopening of so-called Balkan route for refugees? WE: Its too early to say. If Erdogan and Assad, brokered by Putin and Russia, and perhaps some cooperation from Israel, manage to make true peace in Syria, the refugee flow from the war could cease. People want to return home, rebuild their lives in their own country. F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine New Eastern Outlook
Wide Purges After Stage-Managed Coup Will Cripple Turkey
By Moon Of Alabama
July 18, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - " Moon Of Alabama " - As fake evidence now gets sorted out from the real stuff considerable evidence emerges that the coup in Turkey was either completely staged or at least a controlled provocation as a prelude to large, well planned purges.
While some junior officers involved in the coup may have believe that it was for real, Erdogan and his power apparatus knew that the coup was coming and had everything under control. One wonders how those juniors were deceived and what provoked them into their hasty, amateurish, hapless attempt. Did some allegedly upcoming investigation spook them?
Erdogan admitted today an TV that he knew the coup was coming:
7:47 PM - 17 Jul 2016 Mahir Zeynalov @MahirZeynalov Erdogan acknowledges they knew about a "military activity" at least 7-10 hours before the coup vid 9:34am 18 Jul 2016 Borzou Daragahi @borzou Turkey official: "Gulenists in military under investigation for some time. Group acted out of emergency when realized under investigation"
These "Gulenist" were more likely those nationalist Kemalist seculars which the New York Times now labels "extreme".
That the coup was expected explains why Erdogan left his vacation hotel in Marmaris hours before soldiers showed up to arrest him:
9:12 PM - 15 Jul 2016 (((Garrett Khoury))) @KhouryGarrett #Turkey: Erdogan confirms coup forces surrounded his hotel in Marmaris...4 hours after he had left. That's a special sort of ineptitude.
It also explains why two F-16 fighter jets, allegedly part of the coup, had Erdogan's plane in sight but did not take it down:
"At least two F-16s harassed Erdogan's plane while it was in the air and en route to Istanbul. They locked their radars on his plane and on two other F-16s protecting him," a former military officer with knowledge of the events told Reuters. "Why they didn't fire is a mystery," he said.
These pilots were not real partakers of the coup. They must have had orders not to shoot. Flight radar data showed Erodgan's plane circling in a holding pattern south west of Istanbul for hours. It would have been very easy eliminate him.
From the same Reuters piece:
The former military officer said the coup plotters appeared to have launched their attempt prematurely because they realized they were under surveillance, something corroborated by other officials in Ankara.
Colonel Pat Lang, who for years worked as U.S. military intelligence official in Turkey, contacted old acquaintances:
I am assured by Turkish sources that Erdogan and senior officers he had appointed manipulated low level plotting to create a "coup" that could be defeated easily leading to his consolidation of power.
There is precedence for such a coup in Turkey's history:
The Auspicious Incident (or Event) (Turkish: (in Istanbul) Vaka-i Hayriye "Fortunate Event"; (in Balkans) Vaka-i Serriyye, "Unfortunate Incident") was the forced disbandment of the centuries-old Janissary corps by Sultan Mahmud II on 15 June 1826. Most of the 135,000 Janissaries revolted against Mahmud II, and after the rebellion was suppressed, its leaders killed, and many members exiled or imprisoned, the Janissary corps was disbanded and replaced with a more modern military force.
...
Historians suggest that Mahmud II purposely incited the revolt and have described it as the sultan's "coup against the Janissaries".
This coup is Erdogan's Reichstagsfire, the alleged torching of the German parliament building in February 1933 which was used by Hitler to purge communists and other enemies of his rule.
The stage-managed coup is now followed by a real one in which Erdogan takes down all presumed enemies.
Within hours after the coup against Erdogan 2,750 judges were relieved. Hundreds of judges, including supreme court judges selected by Erdogan's AKP predecessor Gul, were imprisoned. Last night 7,899 police and 631 gendarme officers were relieved of duty and their weapons confiscated. 30 governors and 47 local governors have been suspended. The Higher Education Board announced an upcoming "cleaning" at schools and universities. Twenty independent Turkish news sites have been closed. Businessmen and bankers not in line with Erdogan are next. The lists used for these wide purges must have been prepared well ahead of the coup.
3,000 soldiers, conscripts ordered to take part in the coup but also many high officers were imprisoned. These include 103 generals and admirals, many of whom had not taken part in the coup but explicitly spoke out against it. More high officers were relieved of duty. All major units of the Turkish military have lost some of their top commanders. Captured soldiers were humiliated by police special forces, the most loyal to Erdogan. They had to undress and were shown cowering on the ground. Pictures of these humiliations were widely distributed. This will break moral on all military levels!
The move against the military is reminiscent of Stalin's purge of officers in the Soviet military in 1937-41. The Soviet military disaster in the Soviet-Finish winter war of 1939 and the incredibly high losses in the first years of the fight against the Germans and their allies were the result of these purges. The Turkish military, the second biggest of NATO, is now an empty hull and will no longer be able to launch any consistent, larger operation.
Erdogan has asked his followers to stay in the streets for a whole week to "defend the state". The purges are not over.
One might argue that this coup and Erdogan's purges, will give him independence in foreign policy and will allow him to move out of the U.S./NATO realm towards Russia, China and Iran. Erodgan's people accuse the U.S. of being behind the coup. The threat of blocking Incirlik air base, the center of U.S. operations in Syria, against Russia's southern flank and the main storage area for U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in the Middle East, will cower Washington and prevent any outright "western" measures against him.
The Turkish state is now crippled. The experience and knowledge of all those people purged now is irreplaceable. Any unexpected event, military or civil, will be met with confused and disordered responses. Despite Erdogan's current success hubris will take its toll and Erdogan's triumph will soon be followed by a deep fall.
What are the real friends Turkey under Erdogan has left in the international field? Some toothless Muslim Brotherhood leaders and the dictators of Qatar are the only ones I can think of. Without international goodwill left anywhere Turkey's economy will soon be in ever deeper trouble. The problem of radical Islamists, incited by Erdogan to fight against the Syrian people, will come back to bite Turkey. Erdogan may have believed that such radical forces are controllable. He will become another sorcerer's apprentice to learn that they never are.
These extreme Jhadis Erdogan imported and supplied in Syria are also the reason why we all should be happy that the coup did not by any chance succeed. Would Erdogan have been killed, civil war on the streets of Turkey would have been inevitable. Heavily armed Islamist would have attack the army and other government forces. Various ethnic and religious groups would be fighting each other. The war by radical proxies in neighboring Syria and Iraq would have come back home to Turkey just like the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan came home to Pakistan.
What's Special About the US-Israel Relationship? By Marwan Bishara
July 19, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - " Al Jazeera " - If you must read Dennis Ross' Doomed to Succeed: The US-Israel-Relationship from Truman to Obama, take some sedatives because you are doomed to scream in agony. A survey of seven decades of US diplomacy towards Israel, the book is a reflection of the author's own mindset as much as it is about the mindset of those who manage, nurture and protect the "special relationship" between the United States and Israel. And it's nauseating. Ross doesn't hold back. After serving four decades in successive US administrations, he is clearly eager to set the record straight, not only about Washington's approach to Israel, but about his unshaken loyalty to the "Jewish State". Like Colonel Nathan Jessup in A Few Good Men, Dennis the menace is eager to reveal his role on behalf of Israel, and the book is just a way of leading him to his desired destination. It surpasses his last book The Missing Peace, to reveal not only his personal experiences but also his inner thinking. It is hypocritical and avowedly one-sided. Three objectives The book is set up to demonstrate three main points: 1 Israel is always right. 2 It follows that the US is right only when it sides with Israel, and also defends its belligerence, and rewards it for its aggression and obstruction. 3 American leaders don't learn from the lessons of their predecessors who repeatedly, naively and erroneously give weight to Arab positions on Israel, when according to Ross, Palestine is not the Arabs' priority. This is no surprise coming from Ross. After all, he is the head of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee's auxiliary think-tank, The Washington Institute for Near East Studies, and co-chairman of the Iran Task Force of the warmongering Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a group that promotes relations between the US and Israeli militaries and has been critical of the Obama administration's nuclear negotiations with Iran. Ross reviews the record of each administration's dealings with Israel to prove the above points, and when the record doesn't support his claim, he distorts it through acrobatic selectivity and subjective interpretations. What is shocking is how far he has gone to prove his point. Ross reviews the record of each administration's dealings with Israel to prove the above points, and when the record doesn't support his claim, he distorts it through acrobatic selectivity and subjective interpretations. For example, when President Jimmy Carter accuses Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin of deceiving him, Ross insinuates that Carter misrepresents the record, or at best has a poor memory. When President Ronald Reagan accuses Begin of lying to him, Ross makes the case for "lost in translation"; the president simply misunderstood the Israeli premier. Remember, Israel is always right and its leaders are holier than thou. So when Begin's successor, the obstinate, obstructionist and deceiving Yitzhak Shamir lies even more, Ross dances around the issue to show that Reagan was perhaps harsh in his interpretation. Likewise, when President George HW Bush is angered by a lying Shamir, who is widely known to have done everything in his power to torpedo the convening of the 1991 Madrid International Peace Conference, Ross explains how the Bush administration didn't appreciate the Israeli psyche. Insensitive to fragile Israel This line of reasoning is prolific throughout the book: America just doesn't understand the complexity of Israel's political psychology and is therefore inconsiderate to its needs. Apparently this applies to Eisenhower, Nixon, Carter and Bush Senior And it also applies to Clinton and Netanyahu, as well as Obama and Netanyahu. While they have proved supportive of Israel, they just don't know how to babysit the insecure state. But Ross is comfortable recalling how American leaders have mistrusted the Palestinians because in his eyes Yasser Arafat was the ultimate liar - the missing piece in Ross's equation of peace. No attempt at contextualising or interpreting the psyche of the Palestinians who have been dispossessed and occupied for decades. Like any book that recounts diplomatic history without the necessary wider strategic context, Doomed to Succeed is doomed to fail in explaining the contradictions between rhetoric and policy. When Ross does contextualise, he is deliberately selective, and notably to push for a dubious point he is making. Considerate to the undeserving Arabs For example, Ross argues that the Arabs have generally got their way with Washington's leaders at Israel's expense. He claims Washington sold the Arabs sophisticated weapons despite Israel's objections, while the US repeatedly denied Israel weapons they asked for, jeopardising Israel's security. The delusional Ross doesn't see how regional hostility to US complicity with Israel has been a constant rallying cause for violent extremist groups. Nowhere does he explains how, thanks to its European and American backers, Israel has defeated and rolled back its Arab enemies in each and every war. Or, that the US suspended arms only when Israel used US weapons offensively in contradiction to the conditions of their sale. Or for that matter, that the Arabs buy these expensive weapons, while Israel pockets them. In one astounding case, Ross recalls how during a National Security Council debate on providing Israel with more sophisticated weapons, one official said that the timing wasn't right (Israel was being bad again) and besides, it already had enough weapons to defeat all its Arab neighbours combined. But Ross, Israel's knight in shining armour, wouldn't have any of it. Furious at his colleague's logic, he reprimanded him for not understanding the Arabs or for that matter, deterrence! Basically, to deter the Arabs you must make it clear that you can obliterate them beyond defeat, and to scare them shitless in the process, in order to ensure they make no demands. No such deterrence of Israel is needed even though it basically initiated most of the wars with the exception of the 1973 war when the Arabs tried to roll back Israel's 1967 gains. (I realise this point will draw counter arguments, but I shall leave that for another day.) At any rate, I honestly don't have the nerves or the patience to comb through all of Ross' falsehoods, distortions and spins point by point. So flagrant are his claims, refuting them here requires the kind of language that is not publishable. The strategic assets In short, it is true that a number of Arab leaders did look for US protection and help in curbing the aggression of its client state, Israel. And yes, Israel was eager to be America's regional and strategic asset but only on its own terms. At the end of the day, Israel created far more trouble for the US in the Middle East than it provided solutions and opportunities. Consequently, the US created greater trouble for the region. Ariel Sharon's reoccupation of the West Bank in 2002 and Bush's War in Iraq in 2003 are good examples of the Israelification of US policy in the region. No, not everything can or should be blamed on the US, Israel or their complicity in the Middle East region. But judging from the opinion polls, including the so-called friendly states, the majority of the Arab public, have consistently seen the US and Israel (perhaps less so during the Obama administration) to be the leading menace to regional stability and security. The delusional Ross doesn't see how regional hostility to US complicity with Israel has been a constant rallying cause for violent extremist groups. And that official policy might reflect the narrow interests of the ruling elites, much of today's problems in the Middle East are caused by neglecting the Arab public opinion. Thanks to Israel, The US' "strategic asset", and to Israel's own strategic assets in Washington, the likes of Ross and his Zionist pals who have influenced and eventually come to dominate US policy-thinking towards the Middle East beginning with Ronald Reagan, the US-Israel relationship has been elevated to new highs. And why ultimately, for those same reasons, it is doomed to backfire against both. That is unless other voices, Jewish and other, continue to rise and advance, as did Bernie Sanders and his supporters in recent months. We should all take comfort in the fact that the influence of these moderates within the American establishment and the Jewish community, while modest is also growing. Marwan Bishara is the senior political analyst at Al Jazeera. Follow him on Facebook.
Donald Trump and the Revolt of the Proles
By Mike Whitney For the past 25 years, the center-left has told the bottom 60% of the income distribution in their countries the following story: Globalization is good for you. Its awesome. Its really great. Were going to sign these trade agreements. Dont worry, there will be compensation. Youll be fine. Youll all end up as computer programmers. Itll be fantastic. And, by the way, we dont really care because were all going to move to the middle because thats where the voters are, and theyre the ones with the money, and theyre the only ones we really care aboutand you basically take the bottom 30% of the income distribution and you say, We dont care what happens to you. Youre now something to be policed. Youre now something that has to have its behavior changed. Were going to nudge you into better parts Its a very paternal, patronizing relationship. This is no longer the warm embrace of social democracy, arm in arm in solidarity with the working classes. They are to policed and excluded in their housing estates, so you can feel safe in your neighborhoods and private schools. So once this has evolved over 20 years, you have this revolt, not just against Brexit. Its not about the EU. Its about the elites. Its about the 1%. Its about the fact that your parties, have sold you down the river. (Excerpt from Mark Blyths Brexit on YouTube) July 19, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - " Counterpunch " - Liberals and progressives love to point across the aisle and accuse their opponents of racism, misogyny and xenophobia, but thats not what the Trump campaign is all about. And thats not what Brexit was about. While its true that anti-immigrant sentiment is on the rise in Europe and the US, the hostility has less to do with race than it does jobs and wages. In other words, Brexit is a revolt against a free trade regime in which all the benefits have accrued to the uber-rich while everyone else has seen their incomes slide, their futures dim and their standard of living plunge. As Vincent Bevins of the Los Angeles Times said: Both Brexit and Trumpism are the very, very wrong answers to legitimate questions that urban elites have refused to ask for thirty yearssince the 1980s the elites in rich countries have overplayed their hand, taking all the gains for themselves and just covering their ears when anyone else talks, and now they are watching in horror as voters revolt. Fake liberals like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton have been big proponents of free trade and thus contributed greatly to this groundswell revolution against condescending elites and technocrats whose ultimate goal is to level the playing field so that workers in the developed countries compete nose to nose with underpaid wage slaves in China, Vietnam and across Asia. As Blyth says in the YouTube piece: Because the long run effect of the euro is going to be to drive western European wages down to eastern European levels. Bingo. More and more people know that this this is the real objective of free trade, to lower wages and crush organized labor in order to boost profits. And this is why the media has been unable to undermine public support from Brexit or Trump, because the issues impact working people and their standard of living DIRECTLY. The majority of voters now believe that these elite-backed policies are destructive to their interests and a threat to their survival. Thats why they remain indifferent to the medias charges of racism. Elites understand whats going on. They know they got too greedy and went overboard. They also know the public is mad as hell and want blood which is why the markets have gone crazy. Investors have driven safe haven bonds into record territory which signals the big money guys are terrified of the changes that the election could bring. What does that tell you? Check this out from Fortune magazine: Wealthy US investors are hoarding record cash balances out of fear that US presidential election will wreak havoc on their retirement accounts a senior USB Group AG executive said Although the US stock market hit a new high this week, many clients would rather sit on the sidelines than risk the kind of losses they faced in 2008, he said A UBS survey of 2,200 high net worth investors found that 84% of them think the election will have a significant impact on their financial health, McCann said, citing a report to be released later in July. (Wealthy are hoarding cash out of fear of what the election will bring, Fortune) So moneybags investors think that theres going to be a day of reckoning and that all the anti-free trade, protectionist rhetoric emerging from the various campaigns is going to weigh on the markets? It sure looks that way, and some would say that that day has already arrived. This is from the World Socialist Web Site: A report issued by the GTA on Wednesday said the term slowdown created the impression that, while it is losing momentum, world trade is still growing and one countrys exports do not come at the expense of others. These rosy impressions should be set aside because its analysis revealed that world export volume reached a plateau at the beginning of 2015. World trade was not only slowing down, but not growing at all. The report warned that a negative feedback loop could develop where zero trade growth fuelled the resort to ever-more protectionist measures, leading to a further decline in trade. While the report did not draw out the implications of its warning, they are clear. It was such a feedback loop that developed in the 1930s, intensifying the Great Depression and ultimately leading to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.
(Global trade stagnates amid wave of protectionism, Nick Beams, World Socialist Web Site) Global trade has already been hammered by misguided central bank policies that merely try to steal export-share by weakening the currency. (The race to the bottom) But now we are embarking a period of strong economic nationalism which threatens to break up the Eurozone, intensify the call for protective tariffs on foreign-manufactured goods, and launch a full-blown trade war on China. And its all a reaction to the way that free trade was rigged to benefit the 1 percent alone. Elites can only blame themselves. Heres how Glenn Greenwald summed it up in a recent article at The Intercept: Brexit.could have been a positive development. But that would require that elitesreact to the shock of this repudiation by spending some time reflecting on their own flaws, analyzing what they have done to contribute to such mass outrage and deprivation, in order to engage in course correction Instead of acknowledging and addressing the fundamental flaws within themselves, they are devoting their energies to demonizing the victims of their corruption, all in order to de-legitimize those grievances and thus relieve themselves of responsibility to meaningfully address them. That reaction only serves to bolster, if not vindicate, the animating perceptions that these elite institutions are hopelessly self-interested, toxic, and destructive and thus cannot be reformed but rather must be destroyed. That, in turn, only ensures that there will be many more Brexits, and Trumps, in our collective future. (Brexit is only the latest proof of the insularity and failure of western establishment institutions, Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept) Western elites were shocked by Brexit, shocked that all their fear mongering and finger-wagging amounted to nothing. The same is true in the US, where the medias daily attacks on Trump have failed to erode his base of support at all, in fact, they may have added to it. Why is that? Why has the medias repudiation of Trump only increased his popularity and strengthened the resolve of his supporters? Has the media lost its power to influence or is something else going on? The media hasnt lost its power, its just that personal experience is more powerful than propaganda. What personal experience are we talking about? Economic insecurity. Brexit was about economic insecurity. The Trump phenom is about economic insecurity. The rise of left and right-wing groups across Europe and the US is about economic insecurity. This isnt about ideology, its about reality; the reality of not knowing if youre ever going to be able to retire or put your kids through school or make your house payment or scrape by until payday. The reality of muddling by in an economy where the prospects for survival look worse with every passing day. Thats the reality that made Trump possible, and thats what this election is about, economic insecurity. Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.
Erdogan Has Whip Hand And Knows It By Finian Cunningham July 19, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - " Sputnik " - This consolidation of power is raising tensions with the US and European Union, with concerns that the presidents resort to repression will bring his Western partners into disrepute. The West may be vexed by Erdogans truculence, but the strategic importance of his regime for both the US-led NATO military alliance and the EU suggest that they will turn a blind to his excesses even if those excesses involve further violation of democratic rights. Washingtons NATO agenda of encircling, undermining Russia; and the EUs desperate need to halt the influx of refugees mean that Erdogan knows he can crackdown at will. The West may mouth misgivings, but in the end their priority concerns have little to do with international law or democratic rights. And the savvy Erdogan knows that. There are reports that Erdogan private jet was nearly blown out of the skies by F-16 fighter jets flown by coup-plotters. Such reports lend Erdogan heroic kudos and greater license to crackdown on opponents. With thousands of police, army and judiciary imprisoned or purged, Erdogan is even hinting that he wants bloody retribution by recalling the death penalty that had been abolished in 2004. They will pay a high price for this treason, declared Erdogan amid furious scenes at funerals for hundreds of his supporters killed during the botched uprising over the weekend. One of the reasons why Turkey abandoned the death penalty was to appease EU concerns over capital punishment. Washington and the European Union are urging restraint by the Turkish authorities. US President Barack Obama called on the Erdogan government to act within the law. While French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said that restoring order should not mean a blank cheque for repression. Relations between Washington and Ankara have badly frayed after top politicians in Erdogans ruling AK party accused the US of having a role in the weekends uprising. The claim was angrily denied by US Secretary of State John Kerry, who said it was utterly false and harmful to bilateral relations. Erdogans supporters accuse the exiled Turkish Islamist cleric Fethullah Gulen of fomenting the coup by military officers. Since Gulen is based in the US, this has fueled suspicions that Washington may have had a hand. Ankara is demanding that the US extradites the Islamic scholar. For his part, Gulen has denied any connection to the plot and condemned it. The exiled imam, who was formerly an ally of Erdogan, has made the counter-accusation that the Turkish president covertly staged the debacle in order to justify his seizure of state powers. The speculation that Erdogans regime was itself involved in facilitating the coup fits in with Erdogan longterm project of arrogating executive powers as president, turning what is nominally a secular parliamentary state into an Islamist authoritarian theocracy. Erdogan has long had a rocky relation with his countrys military. His brand of Sunni Islamist politics is disdained by many within the armed services who see it as undermining the secular nature of the modern Turkish state, as set up by Kemal Ataturk in the 1920s. Whereas Ataturk abolished the Ottoman caliphate, Erdogan appears determined to restore it. Erdogans meddling in Syrias conflict has also tarnished Turkeys international reputation because of evidence that the Ankara government has colluded with Islamist terror groups to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. While Western leaders have cautioned Erdogan against a heavy crackdown in the aftermath of the attempted putsch, they nevertheless moved to roundly bolster his government during the upheaval at the weekend. Washington and the European Union deplored the coup and backed the democratically elected government of Erdogan. NATOs civilian chief Jens Stoltenberg also issued his support for Erdogans administration and described Turkey as a key ally. Turkey is not just some lawless, obscure country where coups might be expected to break out like rashes. It is a key member of NATO housing some 90 American nuclear weapons at the Incirlik airbase and is a prospective member of the European Union. NATO is supposedly charged with maintaining global security, and its cohesiveness is vital for Washingtons attempt to isolate Russia, while the Nobel-prize-winning EU is hailed as a beacon of democracy, human rights and rule of law. Since the Second World War, however, Turkey has seen at least five military coups: in 1960, 1971, 1980, 1993 and 1997. The latest uprising at the weekend is the sixth over a 70-year period. Thats almost one every decade, a record of ignominy you would think Western powers would shun. For the EU, Turkey has emerged as a crucial partner because of its assigned role in stemming the flow of refugees to Europe. Earlier this year, the EU and Turkey signed a landmark deal in which Ankara would receive 6 billion from Brussels for repatriating tens of thousands of refugees who have fled from warring Syria to southern Europe. The arrangement has sparked controversy among human rights groups who claim that it violates international asylum laws. The EU-Turkey pact has been strenuously pushed by European Council President Donald Tusk and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The influx of refugees into the EU over the past year one million to Germany alone has unleashed a political backlash from anti-EU parties, and has stoked bitter tensions among member states over border controls. Not surprisingly, Tusk and Merkel were most vocal among international figures in calling for restoration of order in Turkey. If Erdogans ruling AKP were to be overthrown the EU has much to lose, with up to three million Syrian refugees currently being held back from Europe by Turkey. As Erdogan tightens his autocratic grip on power in the name of national security, Washington, NATO and the EUs political priorities of maintaining this important ally will mean that a blind eye is turned to his excesses. There may be tensions and frictions, but ultimately the Western powers are relying on Erdogans strong-arm regime. Erdogan first came to power in 2002 as the prime minster of the elected AKP government. He then became president in 2014 and has since steadily centralized the powers of the presidency, undermining the parliament. Erdogans crackdown on the Kurdish minority and draconian suppression of independent media have alarmed human rights groups and the European parliament. But both Washington and Brussels dont rock the boat too much lest they lose Erdogans cooperation on their strategic priorities. The irony here is that the latest military coup against Erdogan was claimed to be motivated by returning Turkey to secular parliamentary rule, as opposed to Erdogans sultan complex of imposing an Islamist theocracy. Erdogans ascent to power since 2002 can be viewed as an ongoing coup against the countrys secular constitution. But still for all practical purposes, Washington, the EU and NATO remain oblivious to Erdogans autocratic rule. Instead, these supposed bastions of Western democracy and rule of law have sought to whitewash his regime. The real priorities of the EU and US-led NATO as demonstrated by their indulgence towards Erdogans regime reveal that their supposed adherence to democratic principles is nothing but a cynical pretense.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang will have a round-table meeting on Friday with the chiefs of the main international economic and financial institutions, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson announced on Monday.
They will discuss economic growth, structural reform, employment, finance and trade, Lu Kang said.
The financial leaders include World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde, World Trade Organization Director General Roberto Azevedo, International Labor Organization Director General Guy Ryder, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Secretary-general Angel Gurria, and Financial Stability Board Chairman Mark Carney.
The Police Are Victimized By Their Training By Paul Craig Roberts July 19, 2016 " Information Clearing House " -It is too early to know if the shooting of police in Dallas and Baton Rouge are the beginnings of acts of retribution against police for their wanton murders of citizens. The saying is that what goes around, comes around. If police murders of citizens have provoked retribution, police and those who train them need to be honest and recognize that they have brought it upon themselves. Killings by police have gone on too long. The killings are too gratuitous, and the police have largely escaped accountability for actions that, if committed by private citizens, would result in life imprisonment or the death penalty. There has been no accountability, because the police unions and the white community rush to the defense of the police. In rare instances when prosecutors bring charges, as in the case of Freddie Gray, the police are not convicted. Presstitutes treat killings by police as acts of racism, and that is the way the public sees them. This infuriates black communities even more as the indifference of whites to the murders is regarded as racist acceptance of the murder of black people. In actual fact, police kill more whites than blacks, and often black police are involved in the killings of blacks. For example, of the six police responsible for Freddie Grays death, three are black. http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/18/us/brian-rice-freddie-gray-verdict/index.html The different attitude between whites and blacks to killings by police is explained by the fact that whites assume that police seldom, if ever, behave inappropriately, whereas blacks have witnessed many killings by police and subsequent lack of concern by white communities other than concern that blacks will riot in protest. To blacks it looks like racism. To whites it looks like justice. As I reported, killings and violent abuse of the public by the police can be explained by the change in their training. The police or many of them are being trained to react as a military occupying a hostile population. An occupying force is taught to protect itself, not the public. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/07/11/police-murder-because-they-are-trained-to-murder-paul-craig-roberts/ This training works for the Israeli army occupying Palestine, but it does not work on the streets and in the homes of the United States. The Israeli methods have clearly failed for the American public and, if Dallas and Baton Rouge are the beginning stages of retribution, also for the police. Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West , How America Was Lost , and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order . See also Make it illegal to send American police to Israel for training. : Having our police trained by an illegal brutal occupation force that has a history of crimes against humanity is a contributing factor in police reacting to law abiding people as if they are an enemy combatant. Needs 99,931 signatures by August 8, 2016 to get a response from the White House
CIA Rebels Behead Kid And Other U.S. Successes in Syria
By Moon Of Alabama July 19, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - " Moon Of Alabama " - The U.S. "regime change" operation in Syria recently tallied up some major successes. The Syrian Democratic Force, a U.S. sponsored group of mostly Syrian Kurds, is besieging the Islamic State held eastern city of Manbij. According to the UN's Human Rights commissioner 70,000 civilians in Manbij are cut off from all supplies. We have yet to hear calls for an immediate breaking of the siege or for enforced air drops of supplies to these people. Where are all the R2P fans in the Obama administration and all the well paid Syrian opposition propaganda groups on this? That the U.S. has managed to avoid any questions about this siege is surely a success. Instead of delivering food the U.S. did some different air drops on Marjib: At least 56 civilians were killed on Tuesday in air strikes north of the besieged Islamic State-held city of Manbij in northern Syria, and residents said they believed the attack was carried out by U.S.-led warplanes, a monitoring group said. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the dead included 11 children, and that dozens more people were wounded. The CIA finances a long list of proxies in Syria to fight the Syrian government and the millions of people its protects. It has delivered high powered TOW anti-tank weapons to many of these groups: The groups that the CIA currently allows munitions to be shared with are: ... Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement, (Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki)... According to the BBC Foreign News producer Riam Dalati it is a group of these Nour al-Din al-Zenki "moderate rebels" who yesterday captured a Palestinian boy of some 8. 10, maybe 12 years, taunted him and accused him of fighting on the Syrian government's side. The boy had no uniform on and had medical infusion tubes in his right arm. The CIA supported "moderate rebels" then behead the boy with a knife right on the back of that red pickup truck. There are photos and videos of the child alive as well as video of the beheading. The Zinki group, like its CIA supporters, was already known for torturing people. This shows again that the Obama administration has "done nothing", or at least not enough, to help these democratic forces in Syria. If these moderate people would have received more weapons, they could have used something better than a rusty knife to slaughter the boy. Indeed the group blames the "international community" for such behavior of its members. The Obama administration has done its best to shield not only the above "moderates but also al-Qaeda in Syria, aka Jabhat al Nusra, from attacks by the Syrian and Russian forces. U.S. supported "moderate rebels", like the friendly folks above, mixed with al-Qaeda fighters and the U.S. insisted that thereby both are under its ceasefire agreement with Russian forces. Obviously the U.S. has long considered al-Qaeda in Syria to be some local problem that could be used to further "regime change" but would never become a danger for the U.S. itself or its interests. The Russians insist that the group is a legitimate target and rejected new disguised U.S. attempts to shield it. Something happened though that suddenly let the Obama administration -here Secretary of State Kerry- change tact: "The fact is that Nusrah is plotting against countries in the world. What happened in Nice last night could just as well have come from Nusrah or wherever it came from as any other entity, because thats what they do." The fact that the Nice attack followed a script published in an al-Qaeda pamphlet might have helped to finally stop the nefarious schemes of those administration circles who nurtured the group. But again this only happened after some messy incident. Not once has the administration refrained from supporting the most brutal radicals, in Afghanistan, in Libya ,in Syria and elsewhere, until these came back to bite. It seems to have taken a "success" of 80+ killed people in Nice to move the U.S. away from supporting al-Qaeda. Without al-Qaeda's ruthless fighters the CIA supported "moderate rebels" have no chance to win the war against the Syrian government. The U.S. is starting to follow the Russian script and will attack al-Qaeda and other like groups in Syria. The "regime change by force" project is thereby, for now, practically dead. Turkey is moving away from its nefarious role in Syria and is making friends again with the Syrian allies Russia and Iran. This will give additional impetus to the administration's silent retreat from its "regime change" project.
Governor Adams Oshiomhole of Edo State has denied the claim by a Chieftain of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Chief Tony Anenih that he (Oshiomhole) marginalised the Esan people in the state.
Anenih, a former chairman, Board of Trustees (BoT) of the PDP, had at a flag off of his partys campaign for Edo Central Senatorial District, which held at Uromi, at the weekend, alleged that Oshiomhole had consistently marginalized the Esan people.
According to the PDP stalwart, the governor refused to pay N300 million counterpart fund for Ugbalo Water project which he (Anenih) had used his influence to secure the sum of N1.2 billion from the federal government.
But reacting to Anenihs claim yesterday, Special Adviser to Governor Oshiomhole on Political Matters, Chief Charles Idahosa, described it as a misrepresentation of facts, saying rather it was the former PDP BoT chairman who marginalized his own people.
It was very interesting seeing Chief Anenih speaking at the rally in Uromi. I was very impressed because I got worried because he did not speak when they flagged off at the state level but I thank God for his good health, he said.
The political adviser, however, expressed dismay that Anenih came out as a local government leader of the PDP, to attack the All Progressives Congress, APC, and Governor Oshiomhole, by claiming marginalization of Esan people.
But looking at the facts on ground, Idahosa said it was Anenih who marginalized his own people because when he was the Alpha and Omega, and the Mr Fix it of Nigeria politics, he refused to make an Esan man governor. Because he wanted to be a lone star, he did not want any competitor so that people will worship him.
He continued: When a graceful in-law of the Esan people, in the person of President Obasanjo, wanted to compensate his people, he gave the governorship seat to Prof. Osariemen Osunbor, Anenih refused because he wanted Ugbesia.
Immediately the Appeal Court sacked Osunbor, who is an Esan man, Anenih went into partnership with Oshiomhole and gave him four commissioners after celebrating Osunbors sack with Champagne.
When he wanted to go to his old tricks, he found a hard nut to crack in Oshiomhole; they fell out and Oshiomhole sacked his four commissioners and that was the end of PDP in Edo State, Mr. Idahosa added.
Governor Ayodele Fayose has been accused by the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Ekiti State of allegedly spending the states money to settle his legal wrangle with EFCC. INFORMATION NIGERIA has put together 5 interesting things to note from the statement by the partys Publicity Secretary, Taiwo Olatunbosun.
1.He said that the APC gathered from a reliable source that a warrant for the payment of N22 million being the cost of chartered aircraft that flew Ozekhome twice from Lagos to Akure was issued and the money released almost immediately by the office of the Accountant General.
2.He noted that the N22 million is outside of the legal fee, which has been reportedly paid to Ozekhome by the state government, to pursue a personal matter for the governor whose private account was frozen.
3.The APC stated that Fayose is fond of using state funds for his personal affairs as it is the case with his latest matter with the EFCC, the same way he has been spending states money on adverts in several newspapers to abuse President Muhammadu Buhari.
4.Olatunbosun said that Fayose has taken corrupt practices in government to a ridiculous height by renting out his personal house in Abuja to the State Government to be used as Abuja Government House for eight years at N50 million per annum, even though Ekiti State Government has a befitting guest house and hotel called the NANET SUITES in the Federal capital.
5.Lastly, the party said that Fayose and his counsel should be reminded that it is a financial crime to use state funds for personal matters and we wish to invite the EFCC to quiz the state Accountant General and the Cabinet Office over this abuse of office and flagrant violation of financial regulations
Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar yesterday was at the national secretariat of the All Progressives Congress, APC, in Abuja, where he held a closed door meeting with the national chairman, Chief John Odigie-Oyegun and other officials of the governing party.
The former vice president, who was accompanied on the visit by his state governor, Jibrilla Bindow, was received by Mr. Odigie-Oyegun.
Although details of the meeting was not made public, it was learnt that Mr. Abubakar urged the partys leadership to address deepening crisis.
Competent sources said the Turakin Adamawa, who has deliberately stayed away from the national secretariat of the APC, used the occasion of Mondays visit to feel the pulse of the leadership on some national issues affecting the integrity of the party.
A source close to the meeting said, You know it very well that Atiku had not been at the secretariat for a very long time. He was here partly to see how the APC will rise up and find solution to the protracted misunderstanding between the Presidency and the National Assembly.
In deed, he was worried by the happenings in the Senate, occasioned by the trial of the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, as well as the last weeks untoward happenings in the Senate. This is all I can say, the source, who does not want to be named, said.
Another source said he wanted the APC leadership to live up to its biddings of calling any member to order, especially on matters that affect the integrity of the party.
To greater extent, the APC is still living like an opposition instead of a ruling party, there is deepening crisis and serious leaders must talk, Nigerians are complaining, he said.
The fight between Senator Dino Melaye and Senator Remi Tinubu is a serious minus to the APC as a party, we cant continue living in denial that the APC house is not in order and Nigerians are watching, he added.
President Muhammadu Buhari has appealed to discerning Nigerians to ignore orchestrated attempts to sully the integrity of ministers and other senior government officials, who he said are being painted with the brush of corruption without any concrete evidence.
The president was reacting to reports, particularly by online media, that the immediate past Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and Minister of State for Petroleum, Dr Ibe Kachikwu, is being investigated over crude oil swap deals and gas lifting during his tenure at the head of NNPC.
President Buhari, in a statement by his Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina, appealed for decent and civilized comments, particularly when it has to do with the integrity of those who are serving the country.
Terrible and unfounded comments about other peoples integrity are not good. We are not going to spare anybody who soils his hands, but people should please wait till such individuals are indicted, the president said.
He also reaffirmed his administrations commitment to probity, accountability and integrity, promising that transparency remained a watchword, which would never be trifled with.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on Monday in Benin, released a list of 19 political parties that would participate in the Sept. 10 governorship election in Edo State.
The list signed by INECs Head of Legal Services, Mathew Ugwuocha, also contained the names of candidates being fielded by the parties.
The list contains 19 male governorship candidates, 15 male running mates and four female running mates.
Expectedly, the commission did not recognize the candidate that emerged as the flag bearer of the Ali Modu Sheriff faction of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Matthew Iduoriyekemwen.
The governorship candidates with female running mates are Thompson Osadolor, KOWA; Adviser Nowamagbe, UPP; Ishaka Ofemile, AA and Ukonga Frank, NNPP.
The running mates are Nancy Ewemade, AA; Florence Okundaye, KOWA; Okosun Davis, UPP and Emodogo Eweha, NNPP.
Other governorship candidates include Osagie Ize-Iyamu, PDP, with John Yakubu as running mate and Godwin Obaseki, APC, with Philip Shaibu, a member of the House of Representatives, as running mate.
(NAN)
The embattled former deputy governor of Osun State, Senator Iyiola Omisore, has welcomed the reported directive of President Muhammadu Buhari that the case of the slain former Attorney General of the Federation, Bola Ige, be revisited, saying he is confident that his name will be cleared at the end of the investigation.
Mr. Ige, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, and Minister of Justice under the then Olusegun Obasanjo administration, was shot dead in his bedroom, in Bodija, Ibadan, on the night of December 23, 2001 by suspected assassins.
Mr. Omisore, who is currently in EFCC custody for corruption charges, was a key suspect in the case and was detained for months as the Obasanjo administration tried to no avail to apprehend the killers.
A national daily yesterday quoted credible sources as saying that Mr. Buhari had also directed the acting Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, to investigate the killing of the ex-Deputy National Chairman, South-South, of the Peoples Democratic Party, Aminasoari Dikibo.
Mr. Dikibo was returning to his base from Abuja after a meeting when he was ambushed by suspected hired killers as he arrived Delta State. He was killed near Asaba, the state capital on October 22, 2004.
The deaths were some of the high profile political killings that took place under the Obasanjo administration between 1999 and 2007.
Omisore, who won election into the Senate on the platform of the PDP while in detention in connection with the assassination of Ige, described the decision of the Federal Government to revisit the killing of the former Minister of Justice and Dikibo as a good and a welcome development.
He, however, urged the FG to extend its search towards unraveling the killers of late Funso Williams and Oduayo Olagbaju.
Mr. Omisore also advised the government and the acting IGP to widen the scope of their investigation to all areas, rather than limiting themselves to a particular area or section.
I am particularly happy that fresh investigation will further exonerate me and others who were wrongfully framed up, suffered untold hardship before we were finally acquitted and discharged by the court, Omisore said in a statement by his media aide, Diran Odeyemi, on Tuesday.
I pray that God will expose all the people and whoever is connected to all the killings under investigation while I wish the new IG the best of luck in the task, he added.
Unknown gunmen on Monday shot and killed Mr. Lawrence Agaie, the paramount ruler of Bokkos in Plateau State.
Also killed were the traditional rulers police orderly, Insp. Sunday Wuyah, his wife and his son, Shagari.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the monarch was returning to Bokkos after visiting his farm in Sha District, when he was attacked.
The Spokesman of the Special Task Force in Plateau, Capt. Ikedichi Iweha, confirmed the incident, adding that the corpses had been deposited at an undisclosed hospital in Jos, the state capital.
Iweka said a woman who was shot, but did not die, had been taken to a hospital in Bokkos.
He said that no arrests had been made in connection with the killing.
The king of Abala community in Obingwa council, Abia State, Eze Paul Ekwenye, has called on Gov. Okezie Ikpeazu to help save his community from Fulani herdsmen who has invaded their farm lands since five days ago terrorizing the residents.
In an interview with Vanguard Newspaper, The monarch said herdsmen numbering 10 with over 200 cows attacked some women in their farms, as well as traders from Akwa Ibom state who were on their way to the Orie market in the community.
The traditional ruler bemoaned that his people would soon be hit with starvation as they no longer have access to their farms, he however, appealed to the state government to deploy security agents to the community which is a border town with Akwa Ibom State.
Eze Ekwenye said, For five days now, Fulani herdsmen invaded our farm lands; they attacked women who went to their farm. Traders from Akwa Ibom state who were on their way to our Orie market said to me that they were also attacked.
Some of the women said the herdsmen were shooting guns. We invited the Police, but the herdsmen ran away and came back when the Police left. There is tension in this community; every resident is afraid of his life and property.
They have used their cows to destroy our crops. This is the way they invaded Ukpabi Nimbo community in Enugu state and killed people. We dont want to be killed in our home. So, we are appealing to Gov. Okezie Ikpeazu to deploy security agents to help secure Abala community.
The Community Village Head Council Chairman, Ndubuisi Sampson, disclosed that most residents have fled their homes and are now taking refuge at the Ezes palace while others have relocated to their relations in neighbouring communities.
He also explained that he had warned the community vigilance group not to take laws into their hands
Commander of the Chinese Navy, Admiral Wu Shengli (right), points out the layout of the Chinese Navy Headquarters to Admiral John Richardson, US chief of naval operations, during a welcoming ceremony in Beijingon Monday. NG HAN GUAN / REUTERS
China's naval chief told a visiting US Navy officer on Monday that Beijing "will never give up halfway" the construction of its islands in the South China Sea.
Admiral Wu Shengli, commander of the People's Liberation Army Navy, also told Admiral John Richardson, US chief of naval operations, that the Chinese Navy has made "sufficient preparations" to deal with any sovereignty infringement or provocation.
Despite negative factors, Beijing is still willing to peacefully resolve disputes via negotiations and "manage and control crisis through rules and mechanisms", Wu said.
Washington has militarily pressured Beijing this year by sending military ships and planes to approach or intrude on Chinese territorial space in the South China Sea.
Wu said any attempt to intimidate China by flexing military muscle "will only backfire".
Beijing will "advance and complete island and reef construction as planned", no matter which country or individual pressures China to do otherwise, and "the level of our defense on these islands and reefs depends on the threats facing us", Wu said.
Richardson began his first visit to China on Sunday and will stay until Wednesday.
He told Wu in Beijing on Monday that he is ready to join hands in boosting trust and friendship to achieve lasting development of ties between the two navies, militaries and countries.
Fan Jishe, a US researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the US "has played a negative role in the South China Sea disputes, and its proactive engagement in the Asia-Pacific region has aggravated conflicts".
Zuo Xiying, an international studies specialist at Renmin University of China, said the South China Sea has become the forefront of China-US competition, and "it would be a good thing if they reinforce strategic communication and formulate more rules accepted by both".
Su Ge, president of the China Institute of International Studies, told the World Peace Forum in Beijing over the weekend that "although cooperation between Beijing and Washington cannot end all the issues in the world, not a single major issue could be resolved if the two sides walk into full-scale confrontation".
On Monday, Chinese Air Force spokesman Shen Jinke said the PLA Air Force recently conducted a combat readiness patrol in the South China Sea, including sending its H-6K bombers to patrol around Huangyan Island.
Such combat readiness patrols in the South China Sea "will continue on a regular basis", Shen said.
Meanwhile, a navigationalert issued on Monday at the website of China's MaritimeSafety Administration said military activities will be conducted from Tuesday to Thursday in designated waters in the South China Sea.
The alert gave coordinates to define the designated area in which entry by other vessels will be prohibited. The area is southeast of Hainan Island.
The Senate President, Bukola Saraki, yesterday, re-affirmed his commitment to the ruling All Progressive Party (APC), as he said he remain loyal to the party.
The senator said this in a statement released by his Special Assistant on new media, Bamikole Omishore, at the 10th Abuja Housing show, themed: Expanding Access To Affordable Housing In Africa.
The Senate and the National Assembly as a whole believe very strongly that we must make a difference in the housing sector, he said.
He noted that the Senate has commenced the review processes of several laws affecting property rights and access housing in the country, thereby charging organizers of the Summit to take a further step by forwarding a document of laws requiring amendments to the National Assembly.
According to the Senate President, the review of the National Housing Fund Act is on-going and would be completed before the end of the year.
Saraki however, explained that the President Muhammadu Buharis led administration would redeem its electoral promises to Nigerians while also assuring that the APC government is committed to the social welfare of the people.
The national caretaker chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Senator Ahmed Makarfi, has called for an end to insulting criticism of the All Progressives Congress-led federal government.
Makarfi said rather than insult the government of the day as it continues to fail daily, the PDP should lead the way by offering better alternative.
The caretaker chairman made this position known via his Twitter handle on Tuesday.
https://twitter.com/SenMakarfi/status/755288932577865728
https://twitter.com/SenMakarfi/status/755283574035779585
A judicial commission of inquiry set up by the Kaduna state government announced that it had presented its report last week.
The panel was set up to investigate the killing of 349 Shiites on December 12 and 14 after they had blocked the convoy of the Chief of Army Staff in Kaduna.
The original incident where the Army Chiefs convoy was attacked took place on December 12. Two days later, soldiers poured into the Shiite headquarters and killed hundreds without provocation.
Although the report of the panel has not been made public, our sources report that the panel indicted the General Officer Commanding of the 1st Division of the Army, Major General Adeniyi Oyebade.
Major General Adeniyi Oyebade was said to have authorized the attacks without approval from a chain of command.
The commission of inquiry also mentioned several other top military officials and recommended that they face criminal charges for their role on the massacre.
The Army has claimed that only seven Shiites were killed for an assassination attempt on the Chief of Staff, a claim which has since been proved to be false.
The leader of the Shiite sect, El Zakzaky who was arrested seven months ago remains in custody.
Lagos State Governor, Mr. Akinwunmi Ambode has, over the weekend, disclosed that his administration would in the next few weeks revamp and upgrade health facilities in the State with the injection of about N10 billion to procure critical modern medical equipment.
The Governor, who spoke during the commissioning of the New Critical Care Unit of the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH) at Ikeja, through the Secretary to the State Government, Mr. Olatunji Bello, said the injection will assist and complement ongoing efforts at increasing bed spaces in the facilities at the grassroots level.
The three tiers of medical care will continue to receive our attention in order to have a healthy population that will be in position to create wealth for our state. Let me assure you all that our administration will continue to be motivated to make live more livable and comfortable for the residents, he said
He reiterated the commitment of the administration to the task of reversing the trend of overseas medical tourism in favour of local medical tourism through the provision of the right and conducive atmosphere for qualitative Medicare in the State.
Our Government is strongly committed to the establishment of a world class Medical Park at the site of the old School of Nursing in Ikoyi. We are determined to deliver this through Public Private Partnership.
Governor Ambode said the new Critical Care Unit would complement the capacity of the existing Intensive Care Unit (ICU) established over 10 years ago, adding that the combined capacities of the two facilities will enhance the status of the State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH).
Ultimately, this new facility will save, from our nation scarce foreign exchange, of about $3bn which are spent annually on foreign medical tourism, the Governor said.
He also used the opportunity to appreciate the state medical personnel for their commitment to quality service delivery to the people, enjoining them to always remember their Hippocratic Oath in dealing with the public.
Speaking earlier, the Commissioner for Health, Dr. Jide Idris said the present administration has committed enormous resources to the health sector for the provision of qualitative health care delivery to the people.
He therefore enjoined the staff of the Critical Care Unit (CCU) to work as a team in order to take good care of patients and maintain the world class medical equipment.
The Chief Medical Director of LASUTH, Prof Wale Oke in his welcome address, said the Critical Care Unit (CCU) and the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) are special departments that cater for patients with severe and life threatening illness and injuries which require constant support from specialists to ensure normal body functions.
Acting Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Ibrahim Magu, yesterday called on religious leaders to use their platforms to preach against corruption.
He said religion is a veritable means of tackling corruption and other social vices in the country.
Magu made the call while receiving members of the Inter-Faith Anti-Corruption Advisory Committee (IAAC), who were at the commissions headquarters in Abuja to brief him on their activities.
He said: Every religion abhors corruption. Therefore, there is the need for us to use religion as a platform to reach out to people to shun corruption in all its ramifications.
The EFCC boss also called for synergy between the committee, EFCC and the Presidential Advisory Committee against Corruption (PACAC), to effectively use religion as a platform in preaching against the ills of corruption.
IAACs Chairman, Prof Ishaq Oloyede, commended Magu for the renewed vigour deployed by the commission in tackling corruption despite daunting challenges.
One thing that will not go unnoticed is the contribution you have made, God will sincerely record it for you, Oloyede prayed.
He called on the commission to produce more copies of the Inter-Faith Anti-Corruption Preaching and Teaching Manual, to ensure adequate circulation to stakeholders.
Other members of the committee are Archbishop John Praise (Secretary), Imam Ahmad Abdulrahman, Alhaji Abubakar Inaboya, Pastor Cletus Alu and Husseini Yusuf Mabera.
Everyone is talking about the Republican Convention and its for all of the wrong reasons!
Republican candidate, Donald Trump began his quest to woo more republican stalwarts to his side as his wife, Melania Trump delivered her speech yesterday.
Unfortunately, Melania Trump is now being accused of plagiarizing parts of her speech from none other than Michelle Obamas 2008 Democratic convention speech!
Weirdly, Melania Trump said just before the speech, I wrote itwith a little help as possible.
The senator representing Lagos Central on the platform of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Mrs. Oluremi Tinubu, on Monday wrote to the Acting Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, requesting increased police protection because her life is in danger.
In a petition dated July 18 and addressed to Mr. Idris, the senator asked the police boss to grant her protection to avoid being killed.
Mrs. Tinubu made the request on the heels of her widely reported spat with her colleague, Senator Dino Melaye (APC, Kogi West), during an executive session of the Senate last week Tuesday.
The wife of the national leader of the APC, who said that she would have ignored her encounter with Melaye, alleged that since the senator had between 2007 and 2011, while in the House of Representatives, engaged in fisticuffs with his colleagues that led to his untimely death, she no longer feels safe.
The Kogi senator was alleged to have threatened to beat up his female colleague and impregnate her after she purportedly called him a dog and a thug.
Senator Melaye, however, denied threatening to beat up or impregnate his colleague.
This position was disputed by Senator Tinubu in her petition to the acting IGP as she said he wanted to assault me.
According to her, but for the timely intervention of a number of senators, Mr. Melaye would have in her words, unleashed physical attack on me.
Her petition read: I am Senator Oluremi Tinubu, representing the Lagos Central Senatorial District of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
During proceedings of the Senate on Tuesday, July 14, 2016, I had cause to contribute to a matter of national importance. Apparently dissatisfied with my contributions, Senator Dino Melaye threw caution to the wind and resorted to vulgar abuse of my person and wanted to assault me.
The timely intervention of a number of colleagues prevented Senator Melaye from unleashing physical attack on me. However, as the leadership of the Senate did not call him to order in the circumstance, he proceeded to threaten my life without any provocation whatsoever.
In view of Senator Melayes antecedent, particularly, in the House of Representatives where a brawl led by him had led to the untimely death of a member, I have decided not to ignore his threat to my life. Therefore, Im compelled to urge you to use your good offices to provide me with adequate security.
Please accept the assurances of my highest regards and esteem.
The Nigerian Army disclosed on Monday that 249 Boko Haram suspects had been released after being cleared by the Chief of Army Staff. The Army was unable to provide evidence to link them to the terror group and it remains curious why there was no no information before now that the Army was holding them.
Although the Army did not disclose how long they had been held, reports indicate that the detainees consisted 69 men, 46 women and 34 children.
The spokesman of the Sani Usmani has disclosed that each of them would now be given N3,000 as compensation for being held.
The Nigerian Army has been accused severally of crimes and the Federal Government has said it will investigate claims from Amnesty international that soldiers were involved in torturing suspects.
Punch
Vanguard
THE lawmaker representing Lagos Central Senatorial District in the Senate, Senator Remi Tinubu, has petitioned the acting Inspector-General of Police, requesting for police protection over alleged threats to her life by Senator Dino Melaye.
The Sun
The dreaded militant group, Niger Delta Avengers (NDA), has dispatched a hand-written letter to President Muhammadu Buhari at the Aso Rock Villa.
Thisday
Senate President Bukola Saraki monday restated his loyalty to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and reiterated his belief that the President Muhammadu Buhari administration would redeem the electoral promises it made during the 2015 general election.
Daily Times
Former Senior Special Assistant on Public Affairs to ex-President Goodluck Jonathan, Dr. Doyin Okupe, said former National Security Adviser, Col. Sambo Dasuki (rtd.), gave him N100 million on the instruction of Jonathan.
Guardian
Daily Trust
The national caretaker committee of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), led by Senator Ahmed Makarfi, has called on President Muhammadu Buhari not to interfere with the September 10 governorship election in Edo State.
The Nation
The Executive Secretary of National Universities Commission (NUC), Professor Julius Okojie, has disclosed that some Nigerian students studying in foreign countries are seeking transfer to Nigerian universities.
Okojie, who spoke during an interactive session with newsmen at the weekend, in Abuja, said some parents and students had also realised that some universities abroad which their children were attending were substandard and that in some cases, they offered unapproved programmes.
He added that the request to transfer home was further heightened by the scarcity of the foreign exchange.
His words: It is not only the cost of school fees alone, but also the quality of the programmes. Some of these courses are not approved. And some of them know that the institutions they are attending are not approved.
Yes, our children are coming back. Some of the private universities they attend are not even approved, some of them in Ghana. Lots of parents have been spending money on school fees. Parents have been coming to me to ask for transfer for their children from all over the world.
And Nigerian students are falling victim of discrimination; there was a case where a Nigerian student who was thrown from the seventh floor. Even the laws are not friendly in some countries like South Africa and India. The attraction of working outside the country by our lecturers has reduced, he said.
Okojie, however, urged tertiary institutions in the country to look inward in order to generate income.
If we are waiting every year for government to fund universities, we cant get anywhere. There is the need to look inward. This would help in our research work. We want to appeal to our people to help our institutions; in United Kingdom and other developed nations, people donate to their alma mater, he said.
Source: Dailypost
SINGAPORE, July 18 -- Zhao Qizheng, former minister of China's State Council Information Office, said here Monday that going back to negotiations is the only way out for the disputes in the South China Seaand that the arbitration unilaterally initiated by the Aquino III administration will not impede the progress of China-ASEANcooperation.
Zhao made the remarks while delivering a keynote speech at the Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development held in Singapore.
Zhao expounded China's solemn position of non-acceptance and non-recognition of the award issued by the ad hoc tribunal handling the South China Sea arbitration and reaffirmed China's territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests in the South China Sea.
"Going back to negotiations is the only way out for the disputes in the South China Sea," said Zhao.
"China will stick to the dual-track approach, namely relevant disputes should be settled properly through negotiations and consultations by states directly concerned, and China and the ASEAN countries should work together to uphold peace and stability in the South China Sea."
Organized by the Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the seminar attracted more than 20 experts from academic institutes in China and Southeast Asian countries, including Thailand, Cambodia and Malaysia.
The seminar focuses on three main topics, namely settlement mechanism of maritime disputes, solutions to the disputes of South China Sea as well as South China Sea and regional cooperation and development.
The final award issued by the ad hoc arbitral tribunal on July 12 unilaterally initiated by the former Philippine government, denying China's long-standing historical rights in the South China Sea. In response, China issued two statements, a White Paper to make its position clear.
The White Paper reiterated China's position of solving disputes through negotiations and consultations and managing differences through rules and mechanisms, saying "China endeavors to achieve win-win outcomes through mutually beneficial cooperation, and is committed to making the South China Sea a sea of peace, cooperation and friendship."
Nigerias opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) seems to be making massive changes in its strategy. Facing a leadership crisis that has dragged on for months, PDPs social media presence and stance has been criticized for being unfocused and unprofessional.
It might be long overdue but PDP is now restrategising and has tendered an apology to Nigerians for contributing to the now toxic political space.
1. We have noticed, with a growing sense of dismay, the level of toxicity that pervades the political space with respect to 1/2 PDP Nigeria (@PdpNigeria) July 19, 2016
2. This toxicity, some of which finds expression in discussions across social media platforms, has reached the level where bridges are1/3 PDP Nigeria (@PdpNigeria) July 19, 2016
being burnt, personal relationships are being strained & an unnecessary tension fills what should ordinarily be patriotic & 2/3 PDP Nigeria (@PdpNigeria) July 19, 2016
enlightening conversations on how to move the nation forward. 3/3 PDP Nigeria (@PdpNigeria) July 19, 2016
3. We are dismayed that this tension has reached the level where the finer points of our national conversation are drowned out in 1/2 PDP Nigeria (@PdpNigeria) July 19, 2016
shouts & screams across the political divide. 2/2 PDP Nigeria (@PdpNigeria) July 19, 2016
4. We accept responsibility and apologise for whatever role we have played in reaching this level of toxicity. PDP Nigeria (@PdpNigeria) July 19, 2016
5. Henceforth, we commit to focusing only on the issues and proffering cogent & competent solutions to the issues facing the nation. PDP Nigeria (@PdpNigeria) July 19, 2016
6. We urge our supporters and the believers in the ability of our party to provide these solutions to henceforth show more restraint1/2 PDP Nigeria (@PdpNigeria) July 19, 2016
& maturity as we point out the many obvious flaws of this administration and proffer solutions & alternatives to their many failures. PDP Nigeria (@PdpNigeria) July 19, 2016
Factional National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party, Sen. Ali Modu Sheriff, has said that he will not relinquish his claim to the leadership of the party.
He said his rival, who is the Chairman of the partys National Caretaker Committee, Sen. Ahmed Makarfi, must resign before peace would return to the troubled party.
Sheriff spoke in Abuja on Monday when he hosted a delegation of the party from Abia State.
He said it was true that a meeting was held in Abuja last week Tuesday on how to bring all warring factions in the party together.
Unfortunately, he said the meeting could not agree with the most important aspect of his conditions.
Apart from the resignation of Makarfi, Sheriff said that he (sheriff) must be allowed to nominate the chairman and 10 others into the new convention committee.
He said he was ready to accept another 10 members for the committee from the Makarfi group.
The former governor said these were the demands he made at a meeting held with leaders of the party, including Markafi last Tuesday at the Taraba State Governors Lodge, Abuja.
Sheriff also said that he told those at the meeting that the proposed national convention should not hold in Port Harcourt, but in Abuja.
He said these were the conditions he said should be met before he would speak to members of his National Working Committee.
These members, he added, would be persuaded to resign and present themselves again for election and if they so wish, give-up their offices in the interest of the party.
According to sheriff, People are very interested in our party and how the impasse will be settled, before the Port Harcourt convention was aborted by a court order.
The Senate Minority Leader and immediate past Akwa Ibom State Governor, Godswill Akpabio, has restated his loyalty to the Peoples Democratic Party.
Mr. Akpabio, who was reacting to rumours of his impending defecting to the APC, said he was not going anywhere.
Speaking through his media aide, Anietie Ekong on Monday, Senator Akpabio said he was aware of the rumours of that he was planning to cross carpet and join the governing APC, but stressed that the false news was being peddled by APC propagandists.
Some online media platforms reported that the PDP, especially senators elected on its platform, were becoming suspicious of the former Akwa Ibom governor, after they got wind of his purported secret visit to the national leader of the APC, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu.
But Akpabio insisted that he was working with other PDP leaders to ensure that the party became formidable again, adding that he could not be participating in solution-seeking meetings of his party, while planning to defect to APC.
The disputed national chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Senator Ali Modu Sheriff, has called for the dissolution of the Senator Ahmed Makarfi-led caretaker committee as a condition for truce.
He also rejected the choice of Port Harcourt as venue of the partys August 17 rescheduled National Convention.
The May 21 convention, which was disputed, was held in Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital.
Sheriff tabled these and other demands as conditions for him to stop laying claim to the national chairmanship position of the PDP.
He told reporters yesterday that he had made it clear to Governors Darius Ishaku (Taraba) and Ibrahim Dankwabo (Gombe) that the caretaker committee was an aberration to the PDP constitution.
He spoke when he received a delegation of PDP supporters from 17 local government areas of Abia State, who visited him in Abuja.
Speaking further on his conditions, Sheriff asked to be allowed to nominate 10 people that will work closely with 10 others that would be nominated by Makarfi, to form the convention committee.
He insisted that the convention should hold in Abuja.
Flanked by his deputy, Dr. Cairo Ojougboh; a former governor of Imo State, Chief Ikedi Ohakim and a new entrant into the group, Barr. Jimoh Ibrahim, as well as Senator Hope Uzodimma, the former Borno State governor noted that unless the conditions he gave were accepted, he would sit tight as national chairman of the party till 2018.
He dismissed claims that he was the problem with the PDP, saying the crisis in the party was being fuelled by some persons who regard the PDP as their personal property.
He vowed to resist such persons, saying if you dont stand on the truth, the end result will be destruction.
Sheriff said: People are very interested in our party and how the crisis will be settled before the Port Harcourt convention, which was aborted by a court order.
Yes, we met and issues were discussed but all the issues I put forward to them was for the Makarfi caretaker committee to resign.
Since it is (committee) an aberration as far as our party constitution is concern. I told them that I am not ready to be a permanent chairman but I want the party to be placed in proper stead.
If he resigns tomorrow, I will ask the members of my National Working Committee (NWC) whose tenure will expire in 2018, including myself to resign.
Then, we will set up a convention committee in Abuja and put respected members and leader at the wards as members of the committee.
In that convention, I will give away my mandate that does not expire until 2018 and I remain the national chairman of this party until 2018.
If the leaders of our party felt that we can find a solution without exhausting the pending court processes, then I am open to a political solution.
The leader of the Abia delegation, Mr. Chidi Nwosu, called on Sheriff to look into the flawed congresses in Abia with the view to correcting the anomalies.
Mr. Nwosu said the congresses were conducted by a few powerful men, who sat in their hotel rooms and picked the delegates.
Students of the Petroleum Training Institute (PTI), Effurun, Delta State -are all filled with praised and thanks to God for saving them from this tragic accident.
According to reports, the students were on their way to their base after an inconclusive National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) convention in Gombe state. The injured are currently receiving treatment at the Teaching hospital in Bauchi state.
Source: National Helm
The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has called for the abolition of security vote for the president and governors in the country.
The NLC President, Comrade Ayuba Wabba, who made the call on Tuesday in Abuja, noted that security vote had become a conduit for siphoning public funds.
The issue of security vote is another form of corruption; in fact, there was a particular state which took N1 billion in one month as security vote, he said.
It is an avenue for corruption. In good governance, all monies spent by government are budgeted and transparently applied.
That is what happens in other spheres; so for our sake, the issue of security vote should be done away with.
All monies to be spent should be transparently budgeted for, including the so-called security vote, so that it can be tracked, to prevent corruption.
Also, Mr. Wabba called for the removal of the immunity clause from the constitution, to enable the president, his deputy, governors and their deputies be prosecuted for criminal offences.
He noted that such political leaders in other parts of the world do not enjoy immunity against criminal prosecution, adding that Nigeria should not be an exception.
The NLC president said that immunity was hindering the fight against corruption and decried a situation whereby political office holders could not be prosecuted for criminal offence.
He said, Even after they leave office, they use their influence and resources they have accumulated to frustrate prosecution.
I have seen cases that lasted for eight to 14 years and were inconclusive. Some of these cases outlived the life of the administration that started the probe, due to this particular challenge.
There are some cases that started before the administration of former President Olusegun Obansajo till now, it is still ongoing.
Mr. Wabba said that nobody should be given immunity against criminal prosecution while in office.
He, therefore, stressed the need to review the constitution to address loopholes that gave room for some political leaders to steal the commonwealth. (NAN)
The Rivers State Police Commissioner, Mr Musa Kimo, has cautioned fulani herdsmen in the state against walking about with AK47 rifles, saying it is criminal and any one caught will be treated as such.
The Commissioner said this at a Town Hall meeting he convened yesterday at the Police officers mess in Port Harcourt to enhance relationship between hersdmen and communities in the state.
Mr Kimo said, the programme was to improve the relationship between the police and the people and added that there has been no crisis witnessed between herdsmen and communities in the state.
I cannot confirm any arrest, but it is possible that there are arrests in some other commands. Certainly, it is unlawful for herdsmen to carry AK 47 rifles. Anyone seen would be arrested. Let us know that herdsmen and other persons who carry arms are nothing but criminals, the Police chief said.
Present at the meeting were members of the various security agencies and some leaders of the herdsmen.
The Nigeria Police Force has arrested the alleged murderers of late Olalekan Ogunranti, Managing Director, Todays prints Ltd.
The late Olalekan Ogunranti was kidnapped on May 16, 2016 by some unknown gunmen in Osun State.
However, with the slow pace of the investigation, the Inspector-General of Police, Ag.IGP Ibrahim Idris NPM, mni on assumption of office ordered the Intelligence Response Team (IRT) of the IGPs Monitoring Unit to take over the matter and ensure the arrest of the culprits in record time.
The Intelligence Response Team swung into action using all the technical resources of the Force available to them for the arrest of five prime suspects.
These include:-
1. Asimiyu Agboola
2. Adesina Meyidan
3. Ramoni Afolabi
4. Akeem Akorede
5. Coker Daniel
Coker Daniel, one of the suspects and a 32 year old graduate, in his confessional statement led IRT operatives to Ibukun River in Ibukun local government area of Osun state where the mutilated body of the late Olalekan Ogunranti was recovered and deposited at LAUTECH Oshogbo as other suspects were arrested in Lagos and Ondo States respectively.
All suspects confessed they kidnapped, killed and mutilated the body of the late Olalekan Ogunranti to stop him from disturbing them of huge sums of money they duped the deceased.
The Inspector-General of Police, Ag, IGP Ibrahim Idris said the arrest of these murderers is a glaring evidence of the proactive nature of the Nigeria Police Force in the new dispensation, assuring Nigerians that the Nigeria Police will always ensure the security of lives and property.
From left Right when viewing the Pictures:
1. Akeem Akorede aka Jaruf 32yrs,
2. Ramoni Afolabi 37yrs,
3. Asimiyu Agboola Aka Ijaya 37yrs (Gang leader),
4. Adesina Muyideen Aka Shina 27yrs,
5. Also, the 5th Suspect in the Single picture is Daniel Coker 32yrs.
Source: JTown Connect
Governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers State has kicked against the recent posting of police officers in the country by the acting Inspector General of Police (IGP), Ibrahim Idris.
The governor said he had informed the acting IGP of the posting of officers allegedly used by politicians to compromise the state security, back to the state.
Governor Wike, who was addressing medical practitioners at the Government House, Port Harcourt yesterday, warned that should Mr. Idris fail to address his concerns, he would be forced to make a state broadcast naming the said officers and the ignominious roles they played in compromising the security of the state.
He particularly mentioned a senior police officer, who was indicted for aiding kidnappers and cultists in the state but had been posted back in what he alleged was a current attempt at frustrating the security architecture of the state.
Wike said the officer in question was posted out of the state in March 2016.
Splice Machine, the relational SQL database system that uses Hadoop and Spark to provide high-speed results, is now available in an open source edition.
Version 2.0 of Splice Machine added Spark to speed up OLAP-style workloads while still processing conventional OLTP workloads with HBase. The open source version, distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, supplies both engines and most of Splice Machine's other features, including Apache Kafka streaming support. However, it omits a few enterprise-level options like encryption, Kerberos support, column-level access control, and backup/restore functionality.
Splice Machine is going open source for two reasons. First, to get into the hands of developers, letting them migrate data to it, test it on their own hardware or in the cloud, then upgrade to the full version if it fits the bill. Motive No. 2, as is the case with any open source project, is to allow those developers to contribute back to the project if they're inclined.
The first motive is more relevant here. Originally, Splice Machine was offered in a free-to-use edition minus some enterprise features. The open source version provides a less ambiguous way to offer a freebie, as there's less fear a user will casually violate the license agreement by enabling the wrong item (see: Oracle). Going open source also helps defray criticisms about Splice Machine as a proprietary black box, which InfoWorld's Andy Oliver hinted at in his original 2014 discussion of the database.
Splice Machine CEO Monte Zweben stated in an email that "[e]nterprises are now increasingly committed to open source technologies because they are less locked in to individual companies and able to tap a wider community of resources dedicated to the technology. We have learned that the first steps towards building community are to remove friction and to be transparent."
Aside from downloading the bits and deploying them locally, users can try out Splice Machine via a "sandbox" -- a cloud-hosted instance that runs on AWS and allows a developer to spin up a Splice Machine cluster for testing.
Despite employing Hadoop and Spark under the hood, Splice Machine's main selling points are about its scale-out functionality, with Hadoop and Spark as convenient bonuses for those who want to use them directly. The introduction of the open source version doesn't change that emphasis, although it remove any licensing or usage ambiguities that a company might face if it wants to deploy Splice Machine on a trial basis.
Going open source doesn't guarantee increase uptake, though, since the biggest obstacle faced by Splice Machine has typically been getting a foothold in a market where incumbent solutions are hard to break away from. That said, Splice Machine offers consultancy services to aid migrations, although only in conjunction with the enterprise product.
[This article was edited to add comment from Splice Machine CEO.]
Citing a survey from the Xinhua News Agency, a Peoples Daily article has unmasked Shunji Yanai as a manipulator behind the null South China Sea arbitration.
Shunji Yanai (Photo: www.itlos.org)
Published on Monday, the article names Yanai, a Japanese diplomat and former president of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), played a key role in the case. He appointed four of the five-member arbitral tribunal on the South China Sea case, the fifth appointed by the Philippines.
Yanai appointed the four members because China did not agree to the arbitration.
Rightist, hawkish, pro-American, unfriendly to China...these are the labels people often associate with Yanai, the article said. His closeness to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is also no secret. Such an academic and political background also speaks for his political inclination during his tenure in the ITLOS.
Coming from a diplomatic family, Yanai entered the Japanese Foreign Ministry upon graduation in 1961, where he was involved in sensitive projects related to the Diaoyu Islands and the Japan-US security alliance.
But in 2001, he left the Foreign Ministry along with three other officials amid a series of embezzlement scandals within the ministry.
However Yanai, on recommendation of Japan despite his tainted record, became a judge of the ITLOS in 2005 and president of the organization from 2011 to 2014.
After the Philippines unilaterally initiated the arbitration case against China in 2013, a five-member arbitral tribunal was created by Yanai, the then president of the ITLOS.
The Basic Principles on the Independence of the Judiciary, adopted by the UN to better maintain justice, stipulated that the extra-judicial activities conducted by the judges and arbitrators should not contradict their work or impede the judicial process.
However, Yanai also served as a mastermind of the Japanese government on military actions and security policies when he worked for the ITLOS.
With close ties to Abe, Yunai served as chairman of an expert panel advising the prime minister on security laws. In May 2014, his panel presented a report to Abe, advising to revise the country's constitution and lift the ban on Japan sending its military overseas.
As a result, Japan, in 2015, ended its 70 years of pacifism by enacting controversial security laws that allow for Japan to dispatch troops overseas to engage in armed conflict.
As conflicts between China and Japan over the sovereignty and delimitation of the Diaoyu Islands increased in recent years, Yanai advocated to lift the ban on Japan sending its military overseas and expanding the Japan-US military alliance to gain a military edge.
Given the maritime conflicts and historical issues between China and Japan, as well as Yanai's political leanings, he is not the right person to engage in the South China Sea issue. Also, it is not surprising that Yanai generally chose arbitrators that were biased against China.
In addition, the Basic Principles on the Independence of the Judiciary also clarify that in exercising rights, judges shall always conduct themselves in such a manner as to preserve the dignity of their office and the impartiality and independence of the judiciary.
However, Yanai has a clear political position as a rightist. During his term on the private panel, he repeatedly told Japanese media that the country has not given up its right to collective self-defense as prescribed in their constitution.
In a program by the Japan Broadcasting Corporation, he also asked Japan to resort to the Japan-US Security Treaty for security assurance, claiming that the UN is useless in this regard, thus exposing his double-sided nature.
"From the results of the arbitration, people can see that it was conducted by a bunch of people who knew very little about South China Sea issues," said Motofumi Asai, a former official of the Japanese Foreign Ministry in charge of China affairs and a former colleague of Yanai.
"The arbitration was obviously conducted in accordance to the will of the Abe administration," he said.
All these facts prove that Yanais political background and leaning run counter to the Basic Principles on the Independence of the Judiciary. Yanais tribunal was flawed in both justice and validity from the very first day of its establishment, the article concluded.
Updating software is important, but it's the third-party add-ons that get servers pwned. No component -- theme, plugin, or module -- is too small.
Canonical, the commercial vendor behind Ubuntu Linux, has disclosed a security breach where an unknown adversary accessed the database powering the Ubuntu support forums and obtained usernames, passwords, and IP addresses of two million users. Canonical used vBulletin, a popular web forum software, and while it appears the core installation was regularly updated, some add-ons were not.
The attacker gained access via a SQL injection vulnerability in Forum Runner, a vBulletin add-on. The flaw had already been fixed in a newer version of Forum Runner, but the team had not updated the add-on at the time of the attack.
"Deeper investigation revealed that there was a known SQL injection vulnerability in the Forum Runner add-on in the forums which had not yet been patched. The attacker had the ability to inject certain formatted SQL to the forums database on the forums database servers," Jane Sibler, CEO of Canonical, wrote in the security advisory posted on the Ubuntu website.
Using popular software frees administrators up from supporting custom code. If a software package covers the features the organization is looking for, and a third-party team has put together a module that extends the application with extra functionality, then there's no reason to write a brand-new application from scratch.
That convenience comes with a cost, though. A single vulnerability in the application would affect a larger number of users; the more popular the software, the bigger the victim pool.
Keeping software updated sounds so simple, but as recent attacks show, there are many applications that are running vulnerable software. The Ubuntu forums aren't the only sites affected. Just last month, attackers hit VerticalScope, which operates online communities and forums, and stole credentials for 40 million users by exploiting outdated vBulletin software. It's believed that whoever stole the legal documents as part of the Panama Papers breach exploited vulnerabilities in an unpatched version of Drupal.
Missing an outdated plugin is unfortunate, but there's a good security lesson here. Though the attacker was able to inject formatted SQL into the forums database and read from any table, the security team believes only the user table was accessed. Even though the user table contained passwords, they were stored as MD5 hashes and not plain-text strings.
More important, the passwords had been encrypted with per-user cryptographic salt, making the hashes more difficult for attackers to decode. While it's good practice to change passwords after a breach and never reuse them on other sites, since Canonical relied on Ubuntu Single Sign On for logins and used a random salt, the attackers are less likely to gain access to individual user passwords -- not impossible, but harder.
Canonical also responded promptly, as it was notified on July 14 by a member of the Ubuntu Forums Council that someone was claiming to have a copy of the forums database. The information security team took the site down after confirming the breach, took all the forums servers and "wiped them clean and rebuilt them from the ground up." This way, the team ensured any code the attacker may have left behind was removed.
All updates for vBulletin has been applied, and "we've improved our monitoring of vBulletin to ensure that security patches are applied promptly," Silber wrote.
The attacker was not able to access the code for the Ubuntu operating system, the update mechanism, or any of the code repositories. This is critical, since if someone had tampered with the code in the repositories, that would affect anyone who had recently used the update mechanism. A similar situation arose earlier in the year when Linux Mint discovered someone had tampered with the software ISO on its servers.
Silber said the security team believes the attacker was not able to escalate beyond remote SQL read access to gain remote SQL write access, shell access to the Forums database, shell access to the Forums servers, or to any other Canonical or Ubuntu services. The company has reset all system and database passwords as precaution, and installed ModSecurity, an open source WAF (web application firewall).
Configuring a WAF lets administrators limit the risks of potential SQL injection attacks even if the underlying application has the vulnerability. Even if there's another application with a SQL injection vulnerability, a properly configured WAF can potentially prevent an attacker trying to exploit the flaw, buying administrators some time to catch up on their patching program.
Website administrators should always make sure to keep their content management systems up to date, including all third-party add-ons, themes, and components. Other defensive layers, such as deploying and configuring WAF, ensuring proper password hygiene, and using correct permission and privilege levels help prevent attacks from causing more damage. A defender simply needs to make a single mistake to let an attacker in, but if there are other traps and alarms in place, the attacker won't be able to do much even inside.
Backup and recovery: Ah, IT's very own sewer service. You manage huge libraries of tapes, babysit backup reports, and test recoveries both weekly and at random. And yet, with all of that, do you ever feel confident in your organization's backup scheme? Are you ever totally satisfied with how backups are performed?
Well, the cloud has come to the rescue again with a surprisingly good solution, at least for shops that use a lot of Windows, Exchange, SharePoint and SQL Server. It's the Microsoft Azure Backup Service.
But I won't bury the lede: The Azure Backup Service is a fast, efficient and very cost-effective way to bring an additional layer of disaster recovery protection to your organization. It brings the best of the cloud -- when you as the IT person can simply say, "Handle this for me and don't bother me with the details of storage, blobs, geographical redundancy, ordering new tapes, running out of quota, and anything else" -- without it costing an arm and a leg or giving up some required level of functionality.
RFD-TV Interview: Grain and Livestock Markets Blue Line Futures - 1 hour ago Will the South American weather be the catalyst, or will the US Dollar take the cake? Oliver Sloup, Vice President of Blue Line Futures, explains the grain markets to RFD TV.
Hogs Fall Triple Digits on Thursday Barchart - Thu Oct 27, 4:48PM CDT Front month lean hog futures worked lower on Thursday with Dec futures getting within 20c of a limit drop on the days low. Dec hogs ultimately closed down by $3.37, with $0.87 to $2.85 losses in the... HEZ22 : 85.125s (-3.81%) HEJ23 : 92.125s (-2.18%) KMZ22 : 95.775s (-0.98%)
Cotton Weakens Triple Digits Barchart - Thu Oct 27, 4:48PM CDT Cotton futures closed off their lows by ~20 points, but were still down by 142 to 271 at the bell. The ($DXY) was higher on Thursday after a GDP growth of 2.6% for Q3. Cotton export sales were 68,437... $DXY : 110.56 (+0.90%) CTZ22 : 75.11s (-3.48%) CTH23 : 74.81s (-3.32%) CTK23 : 74.53s (-2.89%)
Wheats End Red on Thursday Barchart - Thu Oct 27, 4:48PM CDT The KC HRW futures market pulled back on Thursday and closed with 5 1/2 to 8 3/4 cent losses despite improved export sales. CBT futures ended the day firmer with losses limited to 2 cents in the front... ZWZ22 : 838-4s (-0.24%) ZWH23 : 858-0s (-0.17%) ZWPAES.CM : 7.7193 (-0.26%) KEZ22 : 932-2s (-0.90%) KEPAWS.CM : 8.9049 (-0.94%) MWZ22 : 950-4s (-0.16%)
Cattle Close Red on Thursday Barchart - Thu Oct 27, 4:48PM CDT The ($DXY) strengthened on Thursday after a positive GDP growth reported at 2.6% for Q3. Cattle futures spent the day in a tighter $0.95 range, but ultimately settled with 5 to 32 cent losses. December... $DXY : 110.56 (+0.90%) LEV22 : 151.400s (-0.03%) LEZ22 : 153.425s (-0.10%) LEG23 : 156.850s (-0.11%) GFV22 : 175.975s (-0.26%) GFX22 : 178.125s (-0.39%)
Fractionally Indifferent Soybean Trade Barchart - Thu Oct 27, 4:48PM CDT The soybean futures market stayed in a 16c/bu range (Jan), from -4c to +12c, but ultimately settled with a fractionally mixed board. New crop prices were weaker on the day. Meal futures rallied on Thursday,... ZSX22 : 1382-2s (unch) ZSPAUS.CM : 13.4145 (+0.29%) ZSF23 : 1393-4s (unch) ZSH23 : 1402-0s (unch)
Corn Weakens on Thursday Barchart - Thu Oct 27, 4:48PM CDT Corn futures fell by 1 3/4 to 3 cents in the front months on Thursday. The Fed announced real GDP grew by 2.6% in Q3, and the ($DXY) recovered rallying back to $110.453. The weekly Export Sales report... $DXY : 110.56 (+0.90%) ZCZ22 : 682-2s (-0.40%) ZCPAUS.CM : 6.7296 (-0.47%) ZCH23 : 687-6s (-0.40%) ZCK23 : 687-0s (-0.43%)
3 High Yield Dividend Champions To Buy Now Sure Dividend - Thu Oct 27, 4:39PM CDT The Dividend Champions have increased their dividends for over 25 years. These 3 Dividend Champions also have high yields above 5%.
Close your eyes for a moment and try to forget the agony of South Sudan or the carnage in Congo or the bloodletting in the Central African Republic.
Focus instead on a few statistics. From 2000 to 2008, Africas real GDP increased by nearly 5 percent each year, which was about twice the pace of economic growth in the 1980s and 1990s. Economic expansion during that time wasnt restricted to a few industries or sectors, it was widespread. Agriculture, manufacturing, resource extraction, retailall areas saw growth. For nearly a decade, Africas rate of return on foreign investment was higher than any other developing region in the world, the continent home to some of the fastest national economies to be found anywhere.
Savvy investors werent the only ones spotting Africas potentialfoundations and major donors took notice, as well. They've been making grants on a historic level dedicated to solving a whole host of pressing global health and development challenges. Meanwhile, social investors have created a growing tide of impact investments in Africa toward a wide diversity of causes including solar power, clean water, more affordable tampons and more.
According to a Foundation Center study, U.S. foundation giving toward Africa grew at "more than twice the rate of overall international giving between 2002 and 2012. Africa-focused foundation grant dollars jumped more than 400 percent, from $288.8 million to nearly $1.5 billion... Africa accounted for 25 percent of international grant dollars in 2012, up from 14 percent in 2002."
The Gates Foundation is a key driver of these increases. Since 2008, Gates has awarded nearly 1,400 sub-Saharan Africa grants worth billions of dollars. The foundation works in over 45 African countries while maintaining an unobtrusive presence, with just three offices located in Ethiopia, Nigeria and South Africa. Incidentally, those three countries are where the foundation dedicates most of its resources.
Gates is pretty well known for its work combating diseases like polio and malaria in Africa. Its also one of the few global funders working to reduce the burden of neglected tropical diseases in least-developed countries. But according to the foundations Africa team director, Dr. Ayo Ajayi, the foundation's ...work in Africa is much more far-reaching than combating diseases.
Related:Behind the Gates Foundations Research War Room in the Fight Against Neglected Infectious Diseases.
The Gates Foundation also dedicates significant resources to family health and hygiene, recently awarding a $2.8 million grant to Marie Stopes International to support its work expanding family planning choices for women in Senegal, Niger and Burkina Faso. The foundation is also a big player in the advancement of Africas agricultural sector, paying special attention to small holder farmers. Last year, Gates awarded $260 million in grants to benefit Africas farmers and pastoralists.
More recently, Gates made headlines with a commitment of $5 billion over the next five years to combat diseases, and to grow and sustain economic progress further. Upon the announcement, Bill Gates said, We continue to spend the majority of our money on health-related issues, so tuberculosis, HIV, diarrhea, pneumoniaall the things that affect kids under the age of five. The foundation is maintaining that focus, as an estimated two-thirds of the $5 billion is reportedly dedicated to health matters.
The Gates Foundation may be the biggest player in the field, but its far from the only funder working to help Africa become healthier and more prosperous. The Ford Foundation has long worked in Africa, with offices in Johannesburg, Lagos and Nairobi, and that work continues after the foundation's recent reorganization. In 2012, it was the No. 2 U.S. funder in Africa after Gates, making some $60 million in grants. The Open Society Foundations also has a big presence in Africa, with four main offices around the continent and eight satellite offices. It gave $24 million toward Africa in 2012. The giant Hewlett Foundation also funds heavily here, as does the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation. Packard, MacArthur, Carnegie, and Omidyar have been African funders over the past decade, too. The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation has long worked in South Africa. The Helmsley Charitable Trust is among the relative newcomers to Africa, as we've reported.
Related:Behind This Mega Funder's Give in Ethiopia is a New Push to Help Africa's Most Vulnerable Children
Meanwhile, the Rockefeller Foundation continues its historic commitment to Africa, which has taken different forms over time. Right now, Rockefeller focuses its funding in African health, agriculture, employment and gender equity. In the health area, Rockefeller doesnt necessarily seek to prevent, treat or eradicate disease like malaria or polio. Instead, it aims to incentivize individuals, communities and governments to address the breadth of variables that contribute to healthy societies. The foundations agricultural work supports projects to increase farmer wealth, crop yields and boost nutritional value.
Related: Now the Good News on Coca-Colas Giving: Millions for Water, Women, and Well-Being
Rockefeller also places a good deal of emphasis on helping African young people find work, mainly through impact sourcing. Over the years, the foundation has invested millions of dollars into its Digital Jobs Africa program, focusing on the intersection of Africas youth population and information communication technology (ICT). Basically, Digital Jobs Africa seeks to grow the jobs available to young workers by tapping into the sourcing needs of global companies, which have an ever-increasing demand for workers with the skills to handle scut work like data management, content editing and low-end transcription.
Related: How Rockefeller Aims to Harness Globalization to Lift Young Workers in Africa
Of course, it's no secret that any number of name-brand foundations are investing in Africa. Perhaps more intriguing are the other funders we've been tracking that give big but are less well known.
For example, we've written a lot about what the Howard Buffett Foundation is doing in Africa. It was the fifth-largest U.S. funder on the continent in 2012, with giving of $24 million. Recent years have seen an even bigger flow of funding as the value of Berkshire Hathaway shares, which power the foundation, have risen. The foundation's ambitious projects include a half-billion dollar commitment to improve agriculture in Rwanda and the building of hydro-electric plants in the Great Lakes region, with Howard Buffett seeing electricity and the economic growth it brings as a key to stabilizing that region.
Related: Which Big Funder is Coming to Congos Rescue?
Then there is the Coca-Cola Foundation, which gives extensively in Africa. It channels some funding to diseases such as HIV/AIDS, but its more interested in projects that have to do with water, womens empowerment, education, and youth development. Last year, the foundation reported that it had awarded over $26 million in grants toward these efforts, with around $9 million funding water-related projects; $12 million toward youth development and education ventures; and $2.3 million toward womens empowerment causes.
Related:
Another big funder doing some heavy lifting in Africa, as we report often, is The MasterCard Foundation. This funder has been working in Africa for some time now, but its been noticeably upping its funding game in recent years. Not long ago, the foundation introduced its $50 million Fund for Rural Prosperity, which seeks to end the poverty cycle for more than 1 million of Africas rural poor by improving their access to financial products and services.
Related: The MasterCard Foundation Continues to Up its Funding Game in Africa
The foundations Scholars Program, which provides access to quality secondary and university educations for smart but poor young people, is another major funding point. The $500 million education initiative launched in 2012 focuses its funding attentions on Africa, but does operate in other developing countries as well.
In addition to education access and economic security, The MasterCard Foundation also has a hand in increasing access to financial services, particularly for people living in rural Africa.
There are plenty of other funders that are paying attention to Africa in some form or fashion. For example, the Citi and MetLife foundations are dedicated to financial inclusion. A great many smaller foundations and major donors back work on the continent. Too many to name.
And just as a reality check, Africa still has a long, long way to go.
Take Angola, for example. According to Legatums Prosperity Report, the countrys economy ranks 18thacross the entire continent, yet the gap between the country's actual prosperity and expected prosperity based on its wealth sits at -35.7 percent. Its much of the same story for Chad, which ranks 6th economically and -26.9 when it comes to prosperity.
Whats more, a report by New World Health indicated that the number of Africas high-net-worth individuals has been on the uptick, but the number of people living in abject poverty is also on the rise. World Bank data shows that from 2010 to 2011 the number of people living on less than a $1.25 increased from 411 million to nearly 416 million.
Despite Africas widespread growth over the past 10 to 15 years, many regions remain mired in conflict and deeply entrenched global health and development challenges like high burdens of disease, generational poverty, government corruption, and rampant human rights violations.
Still, the continent is rising, and philanthropy is playing a key role.
Experts and industry leaders from China and the United States attend the 9th US-China Green Energy Summit in Santa Clara, California, July 15, 2016. (Photo by Xue Yujie)
San Francisco, July. 18 For some time now, the U.S. and China, being the two largest economies in the world, have been of one mind in taking global leadership by agreeing on efforts to achieve their respective carbon emissions goals, said Mike Honda, U.S. Congressman & Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee at the 9th US-China Green Energy Summit in Santa Clara, California on Friday.
The United States has committed to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 26% to 28% below the 2005 level by 2025, and to make best efforts to reduce emissions by 28%. Similarly, China announced the intent to peak carbon emissions around 2030 and to double its share of zero-carbon energy to 20 percent. In order to meet the challenges presented by this vision, Honda said, We need to continue investing in research, and continue encouraging cross-sector coordination.
U.S. and China are two of the largest economies in the world, and also two of the worlds largest energy consumers. Two countries nabbed the top two spots on energy production capacities and investment volumes in the world. Luo Linquan, Consul General of the Peoples Republic of China in San Francisco, said that the above facts show vast space and prospects of the cooperation between US and China.
I have had the privilege of observing the progress China has made in the electricity grid since my first meeting here in 1980, and I have a real appreciation for what the collaboration between teams from our two countries can accomplish, Robert E. Larson, President of the US-China Green Energy Council told Peoples Daily Online.
Wusaid in his keynote speech that one of the most important things is to identify the common interests between the US and China, then we focus on that and move ahead.
Im very impressed with the ability of China to be open in innovation. I am convinced that there is a real openness on many levels in China to think about innovation, Dian Grueneich, Senior Research Fellow at Stanford University PEEC and Hoover Institution told Peoples Daily Online.
According to Grueneich, comparing to China, innovation in the United States is sometimes more difficult because it has entered its mature stage. In China I think that with the openness, theres still a learning curve in cultural aspects of how to balance out disruption in technology and at the same time developing its rules of law and market, said Grueneich.
At the US-China Green Energy Roundtable Forum on July 14, experts from over 30 technology firms and organizations in US, China and Europe shared their visions and insights on four specific topics from Renewable Energy and Global Energy Internet, Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data, New Technology Vehicles and Energy Markets, and Silicon Valley Innovation and Smart City. Participants were asked to address the questions from the security and privacy concern of the IoT users to the gaps in technology to enable Demand Side Management of New Energy Vehicles.
The 2016 Summit on Developing Energy Internets to Combat Climate Change brought together government officials from China and US with industry leaders in the Electric Power, Renewable Energy, Information Technology and Internet Infrastructure. Steven Chu, Nobel Laureate and Former US Secretary of Energy also attended the summit.
Update 4/24/18 Giesbrecht was denied bail on Friday and will remain in custody until her appeal can be heard, according to the source. In his decision, Manitoba Court of Appeal Justice Michel Monnin noted the case is unprecedented and Giesbrecht was found guilty of serious crimes. He was also concerned about her request to live at home if she were granted bail.
Giesbrechts lawyer argued that his clients sentence was harsh and she should be granted bail while awaiting the appeal. The court stated the sentence was reasonable and the grounds for appeal are frivolous, the source reported.
2/7/17 A judge has convicted Andrea Giesbrecht on six counts of concealing the body of a dead child. Provincial court judge Murray Thompson ruled Giesbrecht purposefully hid her pregnancies and delivery of the infants. Though the defense argued the woman put the bodies in the self-storage unit to keep them, Thompson said failing to pay rent and registering the unit under her maiden name with an incorrect address indicated otherwise, according to the source.
All of her actions lead to one conclusion: that Giesbrecht was aware that these children were likely to have been born alive and she wished to conceal the fact of their birth, Thompson said in his ruling.
The judge also said Giesbrecht understood pregnancy and delivering babies because she had two children born in hospitals. She also had 10 legal abortions, the source reported.
Giesbrecht wasnt charged with killing the children. Though Thompson said the infants were likely born alive, medical experts couldnt determine their causes of death. Some of the bodies were badly decomposed when they were discovered, according to the source.
Each of the six counts of concealment carries a maximum sentence of two years in jail.
7/19/16 The trial of Andrea Giesbrecht, the woman accused of concealing the remains of six infants in a U-Haul self-storage unit, has resumed after a two-month hiatus due to scheduling conflicts. Giesbrechts son, whose name is being withheld due to a publication ban, testified on Monday that he didnt recall seeing his mother pregnant or notice changes in her weight, according to sources.
Before Giesbrecht's son took the witness stand, her husband and the boys father, Jeremy Giesbrecht, held up proceedings for about 10 minutes while arguing with prosecutors. We have a right not to answer your questions," he said before leaving the courtroom.
A forensic biologist testified in April that the child remains have been linked to DNA found on a soiled sanitary napkin found in the Giesbrecht home. Jeremy Giesbrecht was also determined to be the biological father of the infants, sources reported. Two medical experts previously testified that some, and perhaps all, of the babies were likely born alive.
Giesbrechts son testified his parents had a rocky relationship and sometimes separated. Women who visited the house sometimes had to use the bathroom in the master bedroom due to plumbing issues in the guest bathroom, he said. When asked if his father ever had girlfriends stay at the house, the son said, Not that I know of.
The court also heard testimony from Karen Bodoano, operations manager with Sentinel Self Storage. Bodoano testified Andrea Giesbrecht had rented a unit from 1999 to 2008 and was frequently late with payments. She rented from Sentinel a second time in 2010.
When asked by defense attorney Greg Brodsky if she had ever seen the contents of Giesbrechts unit, Bodoano confirmed she had. "It was an anomaly that there was few items in the storage unit, so it stood out," Bodoano said. "I saw two totes with their lids, and I saw a pail on the right-hand side of them."
The description resembles the plastic bins and pails found inside the U-Haul unit, sources reported.
Bodoano also testified Giesbrecht had told Sentinel employees she needed the unit to store items she couldn't keep at home, such as jewelry.
Jeremy Giesbrecht is expected to testify later this week.
10/22/14 Police have arrested a woman in connection with the discovery of six infant corpses found this week in a self-storage unit in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Andrea Giesbrecht, 40, has been charged with six counts of concealing a child's body, with additional charges possible upon autopsy results, according to police. Employees at the U-Haul Moving & Storage facility at 175 McPhillips St. found the bodies on Monday while inspecting the unit after Giesbrecht defaulted on rent payments, according to news sources.
Police said forensic examination confirmed six bodies were found, after officials initially believed the remains amounted to three or four, according to Winnipeg police spokesman Const. Eric Hofley. Court documents indicate the bodies were stored sometime between March 7 and Oct. 20, according to the Winnipeg Free Press.
Autopsies will be performed to determine the causes of death, but Hofley indicated the results could take months. Forensic work is also being conducted to determine if the infants were related and their relation, if any, to Giesbrecht. Investigators believe all six of the babies were newborns. No other suspects are being considered, but Hofley said that could change as the investigation continues.
"U-Haul team members made a disturbing discovery when taking inventory of a delinquent storage locker on Monday, said Razmin Mansoub, marketing company president for U-Haul Co. of Central Canada in a released statement. They immediately contacted law enforcement, who believed the locker contained human remains. U-Haul is deeply shocked and saddened by this discovery."
The state of the remains is what caught the attention of facility employees when they inspected Giesbrechts unit, Hofley said. U-Haul will continue to cooperate with the police investigation, Mansoub said.
Giesbrecht, who also goes by Andrea Naworynski, was also charged with breach of a probation order stemming from fraud charges issued in 2012. Her attorney, Greg Brodsky, is expected to be in court on Thursday to try to set a bail-hearing date, the Winnipeg Free Press reported.
Anyone with information regarding the case is encouraged to contact police at 204.986.3296 or via Crime Stoppers at 204.786. 8477.
Sources:
Canoe.com, Winnipeg Woman Guilty of Hiding 6 Dead Babies in Storage Locker
CBC News, After Husband's Public Outburst, Andrea Giesbrecht's Son Testifies He Never Saw His Mother Pregnant
Clearwater Times, Bail Denied for Woman Who Kept Remains of 6 infants in Storage Locker
CTV Winnipeg, Police Investigation Finds Bodies of 6 Babies in Storage Locker, One Woman in Custody
Global News, Andrea Giesbrechtas Son Testifies in Dead Babies Case; Husband Yells at Lawyers
Winnipeg Free Press, Woman Arrested After 6 Dead Infants Found in Storage Locker
Breckenridge Mini Storage, a self-storage facility in Breckenridge, Colo., will host an auction on behalf of the Summit County, Colo., Sheriffs Office on July 29 in which it will sell off 1,600 items seized from an outdoor-products retailer. A court order allowed the items to be taken from 123 Mountain, a retail operation that collapsed amid numerous vendor lawsuits and complaints from customers, according to the source.
The auction at 156 County Road 450 will include high-end outdoor gear including avalanche airbag backpacks, climbing equipment, clothing, footwear and skis. The products will be sold in bulk, meaning bidders must buy the entire inventory. The minimum bid is $31,530.62, and all buyers must register in advance with the sheriffs office, the source reported.
123 Mountain faced more than a dozen lawsuits from various vendors and received nearly 140 consumer complaints at the Better Business Bureau. Owners Anna Sofia and Olivier Goumas were accused of selling items online they didnt actually carry among other questionable business practices. When credit-card companies stopped processing the retailers transactions, the company allegedly told customers their cards were declined and took payments via cash, check or wire transfer, according to the source.
The couple closed retail stores in Copper Mountain Village, Frisco and Lakewood, Colo. The auction merchandise comes from the Frisco location.
Web developer Greg Gantzer, who created the retailers website, was among the first to sue the company. He is hoping the auction will help recoup $60,000 he says Olivier Goumas owes him. He would take money and services, but he just didnt like to ever pay people, Gantzer told the source.
Gantzer obtained the court order allowing him to seize the inventory. It took the Web developer and a team of 10 people 16 hours to remove the items.
Olivier Goumas was present during the seizure, but the couple has since disappeared, the source reported. He gave me a sideways glance, but that was it, Gantzer said. He knew he was done.
Breckenridge Mini Storage has served Summit County since 1976.
@ProStockTour Riverside_NS Antigonish, NS- July 16, 2018) After many attempts and heartbreaking losses Donald Chisholm (Antigonish, NS) finally made it to Victory Lane at the IWK 250 presented by Steve Lewis Auto Body, taking home the John W. Chisholm Memorial Cup. Chisholm has been to Victory Lane five times during his career at his home track of Riverside International Speedway but the prestigious IWK 250 and Memorial Cup named after his Father had eluded him until tonight.
Craig Slaunwhite (Terence Bay, NS) gave chase until the checkers flew but came up just short taking second place. Two-time NASCAR Camping World Truck Series Champion Matt Crafton (Tulare, CA) had his best IWK 250 finish to date coming home third. Ron MacGillivray 150 winner Dylan Blenkhorn (Truro, NS) and Darren MacKinnon (Charlottetown, PE) completed the top five.
Competition got underway with five Atlantic Tiltload Heat Races for the 35 competitors vying to make the 31 car field. Heat races were won by Cole Butcher (Porters Lake, NS), Jeff Fultz (Troutman, NC), Greg Proude (Springvale, PE), Donald Chisholm and George Koszkulics (New Glasgow, NS). John Rankin (St. Martins, NB) won the Atlantic Tiltload B Feature.
The Exide Batteries Rookie of the Race went to Nevin Scott (Marshfield, PE). The King Freight Lines Future Winner Award was won by Jarrett Butcher (Porters Lake, NS) who finished ninth. Chisholm pocketed the Linde Most Laps Led Award, pacing the field for 231 of the 250 circuits.
The Parts for Trucks Pro Stock Tour is in action next weekend for the Irving Oil Blending & Packaging 150 at Petty International Raceway, located just outside on Moncton NB, Visit www.maritimeprostocktour.com for complete event details and coverage.
About Steve Lewis Auto Body:
Steve Lewis Auto Body is located on Beech Street in Sydney. The company is in their 38th year of business and proud to support many community and charitable efforts, including over a 15-year involvement with the IWK. Call them at 902.539.2848.
About the Parts for Trucks Pro Stock Tour:
The Parts for Trucks Pro Stock Tour (PST) is considered the highest level of stock car racing in Canada. The Tour is recognized in the industry as one of the healthiest stock car racing series in North America. PST visits five tracks throughout the Maritimes during its May through September season. The Parts for Trucks Pro Stock Tour is owned and operated by Maritime Pro Stock Tour Limited. For more information, call our administration office at 902.481.2531 or click www.maritimeprostocktour.com . You can also follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/prostocktour and like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/prostocktour
Media Contact:
Tara Foster
902.429.4069 office
902.488.0809 mobile
Media@maritimeprostocktour.com
Mergers and acquisitions in the insurance industry are set to continue, according to global expert MergerMarket.In their latest M&A trend report, the global advisory firm noted that deals have held pace over the first half of the year with 32 deals worth US$8.049bn, compared with 23 deals worth of US$8.074bn in the first half of 2015.This shows that there were more smaller deals value comparing to 2015, although the amount of the deals were higher, Deviana Chuo, head of FIG sector at Mergermarket told Insurance Business.We think that the trend will still continue, the deal value could be decreased comparing to previous years.Chuo noted that the trend of insurance M&As will continue as more businesses push their footprint into emerging markets.There will be more insurance M&A in the future, as the insurance companies still need to expand its business coverage, Chuo said.The insurance penetration, mainly in emerging countries are still low, so it will be good opportunities for the global companies.Besides, insurance companies also need to develop its business model, beyond the traditional way of growth. Insurance companies itself could expand or acquire fintech businesses, in order to upgrade digitalisation and IT support systems.In Australia, Brexit, the upcoming US election and the recently concluded Federal election saw a mild tendency to put certain deals on hold, although the M&A space still continued to produce an heathy number of deals, Davide Schiappapietra, bureau chief Australia & New Zealand at Mergermarket told Insurance Business.Schiappapietra noted that several insurance-related assets are currently on the market which could pique Asian interest.In Australia there is a number of insurance-related assets that are, or potentially will be, on the market available for potential buyers, Schiappapietra continued.An example is ClearView wealth, a listed financial services business with operations in the insurance space, whose 53% owner Crescent Capital Partners is looking to exit, with reportedly insurance companies from Japan, South Korea and China as buyers. Other recent examples of insurance-related assets for sale, according to reports, are Munich Re s Great Lakes Australia and ANZs wealth management and life insurance businesses.RELATED ARTICLES:
The Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) has advised Aussies who intend to make a claim in relation to the weekends failed military coup in Turkey to review their travel insurance.Rob Whelan, ICA CEO, said claims arising from riots, wars, rebellions, civil unrest, or military insurrections were commonly excluded in travel insurance policies.The attempted coup doesnt void travel insurance policies, and policyholders in Turkey will still be able to lodge claims for a wide range of losses that are unrelated to the uprising," Whelan said.Each travel insurer has different terms and conditions. Travellers should review their policy document to check its inclusions and exclusions, and contact their insurer if they have questions.Whelan has also advised Aussies in Turkey to monitor local media to avoid disruptions and trouble. In a statement, he said that the Australian governments official travel advice for Turkey has remained largely unchanged:The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trades Smartraveller website continues to advise Australians to exercise a high degree of caution in Turkey overall, and reconsider their need to travel to Istanbul and Ankara.Turkeys main airports have now reopened, while hotels and other tourism infrastructure continue to operate.Australians who were planning to depart for Turkey imminently should contact their travel and accommodation providers if they wish to seek a refund, credit, or alternative travel arrangements, advised Whelan.
Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary National Indemnity Co. is acquiring Medical Liability Mutual Insurance Co. of New York for an undisclosed price.
The deal comes as the insurer completes its conversation from a mutual company to a stock insurer.
The insurer is the largest underwriter of medical professional liability insurance in New York. MMLMIC reported $1.8 billion in policyholders surplus as of Dec. 31, 2015.
The deal will close in the 2017 third quarter, pending the usual closing conditions and regulatory approval processes. MLMC disclosed the news in a lengthy press release posted on its web site.
Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, quoted in the release, called MLMIC a gem of a company that has protected New Yorks physicians, mid-level providers, hospitals and dentists like no other for over 40 years. He said the acquisition will help boost the insurers capacity to serve these and other policyholders for many years to come.
Once the deal is completed, each owner of an eligible MLMIC policy will be entitled to receive a proportionate share of all of the cash consideration paid by National Indemnity Co.
MLMIC President Robert Menotti said the acquisition will allow MLMIC to expand.
MLMIC will be able to expand its offerings, with more customized policy limits, with more customized policy limits, risk-sharing features and services to groups, facilities and other large accounts, Menotti said in a letter to policyholders quoted in the press release.
Menotti added that Berkshire Hathaway is also committed to keeping MLMICs culture and approach.
Berkshire Hathaway values our operations, board, staff and endorsed partners, Menotti said. Most importantly, Berkshire Hathaway is committed to MLMICs future success and its ongoing dedication to serving policyholders.
In 2012, Berkshire Hathaways medical professional liability insurance unit, Medical Protective Co., purchased New Jersey-based Princeton Insurance Co., a professional liability insurer for healthcare providers, which was previously owned by Medical Liability Mutual Insurance Co.
Berkshire Hathaway had acquired Medical Protective Corp. from GE for $825 million in 2005.
More recently, last July, Berkshire Hathaways MedPro Group agreed to acquire Oklahoma healthcare liability insurer PLICO Inc., which is owned by the Oklahoma State Medical Association.
Topics Carriers New York Medical Professional Liability
Takata Corp., the air-bag supplier behind the industrys largest ever recall, routinely manipulated results of air-bag inflator tests reported to Honda Motor Co., according to an ongoing audit commissioned by the parts maker and its biggest customer.
Takata engineers removed some test results to artificially reduce variability in air-bag inflator performance, Brian ONeill, a former Insurance Institute for Highway Safety president, said in a phone interview. Takata and Honda jointly hired ONeill to begin the audit in late October, days before Honda first announced findings of data manipulation.
We have found examples of what I would call selective editing, where they have left out results not because they were bad results, but because the results that remained were better, said ONeill, whose hiring hasnt previously been reported. We found evidence that the report that went to Honda was a shorter version of the original version, and it was a prettier shortened version.
Findings of pervasive data manipulation and misrepresentations to carmakers could complicate Takatas efforts to restructure and secure potential buyers following the biggest safety crisis in the auto industrys history. Takata needs its customers backing to help weather costs of recalls that may exceed 100 million air bags worldwide.
Entirely Inexcusable
The results of the audit will factor in Hondas investigation into whether it should recall some additional Takata inflators, Chris Martin, a spokesman for the automaker, said by e-mail. The company has already said no new Honda or Acura models under development will be equipped with Takata-supplied inflators.
Takata has previously acknowledged and deeply regrets issues related to the integrity of Takatas inflator validation testing and reporting of test results to its customers, said Jared Levy, a spokesman for the company. These issues are totally incompatible with Takatas engineering standards and protocols and entirely inexcusable.
Takata fell as much as 4.8 percent Tuesday and closed down 2 percent in Tokyo trading. The shares have lost 69 percent of their value during the last year, valuing the company at about 32.1 billion yen ($303 million).
Mincey Lawsuit
In one instance, Takatas manipulation of air-bag inflator test results in 2000 emerged last year as part of a lawsuit against the company on behalf of Patricia Mincey, a Florida woman who became a ventilator-dependent quadriplegic following a low-speed collision in her 2001 Honda Civic. Honda recalled the vehicle four days after the incident in June 2014. Mincey died earlier this year.
Before Takata agreed to settle the Mincey lawsuit last week, several current and former engineers said in depositions that the company also altered and misrepresented test data in reports to Toyota Motor Corp., Nissan Motor Co. and General Motors Co.
Brian Mayville, a Takata engineering manager, said during a deposition taken in November that select reports were not properly represented to Toyota and GM.
Nissan Report
Kevin Fitzgerald, an engineer who left Takata in 2014, said he witnessed alteration of test reporting when working on an inflator for Nissan in 2005. During his deposition in February, Fitzgerald said he reported data misrepresentation by fellow engineer Shinichi Tanaka to managers and the companys lawyers. After telling Fitzgerald corrective action would be taken, the company made Tanaka his boss, he said.
Takata didnt respond to requests for comment on Fitzgeralds deposition and didnt answer whether Tanaka still worked for the company or was available for comment.
Toyota is evaluating the situation, spokesman Itsuki Kurosu said, declining to comment further. Nissan spokesman Nick Maxfield said the company doesnt comment on matters related to ongoing litigation. GM is closely monitoring the Takata inflator situation using internal and third-party experts, spokesman Tom Wilkinson said.
Buyer Search
The latest revelations come amid attempts by Takata and its adviser, Lazard Ltd., to find buyers for the company. The company has contacted as many as 20 possible bidders, people familiar with the matter have said. Its open to a sale to a private equity partner, a parts supplier or a combination, said the people, who asked not to be named because the matter is private.
As many as 15 deaths, including 10 in the U.S., have been linked to defective Takata air-bag inflators that rupture and spray plastic and metal shards at drivers and passengers. Ruptures also have resulted in more than 100 serious injuries, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The audit ONeill is conducting on behalf of Honda and Takata initially focused on air-bag inflators the company validated in North American for vehicles in the region, he said. Honda hasnt been provided final results of this phase, which is nearing completion, said Martin, the automakers spokesman.
The next phase for ONeill and his team is to review more data pertaining to worldwide Takata inflators for Honda vehicles. Once they receive the data, this phase of the audit may take two to three months, he said.
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Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.
Khazanah Nasional Bhd., the $27 billion Malaysian sovereign fund, is weighing a bid for control of the insurance operations of billionaire Quek Leng Chans Hong Leong Financial Group Bhd., people with knowledge of the matter said.
Khazanah is considering an offer for Hong Leong Financials 70 percent stake in Hong Leong Assurance Bhd. and its 65 percent holding in Hong Leong MSIG Takaful Bhd., according to the people. A bid could be valued at about 3.2 billion ringgit ($799 million), one of the people said, asking not to be identified as the information is private.
Any purchase would add to $10.3 billion of insurance acquisitions in Southeast Asia in the past five years, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Khazanah said in 2014 its seeking more insurance investments in Asia, which would add to holdings in domestic companies including some of the biggest banks, power producers and wireless operators.
Hong Leong Financials shareholders will immediately get a windfall if the deal is done, James Lau, a Kuala Lumpur-based investment director at Pheim Asset Management Asia Sdn., said by phone Tuesday. For Khazanah, it probably sees the purchase as a good opportunity to invest in a profitable business.
Shares of Hong Leong Financial rose 0.9 percent, the most in more than a week, to 15.20 ringgit at 4:38 p.m. Tuesday in Kuala Lumpur. The benchmark FTSE Bursa Malaysia KLCI Index declined 0.1 percent.
Islamic Products
Hong Leong Financial said last month that Malaysias central bank had no objection to it starting talks with certain parties on the sale of its stakes in the two insurance units. Quek, who is chairman of Hong Leong Financial, ranks as Malaysias fifth richest person with a net worth of $4.3 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
A representative for Khazanah declined to comment. Tan Kong Khoon, the chief executive officer of Hong Leong Financial, didnt immediately answer a call to his office seeking comment.
Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd., the Canadian investment firm led by Prem Watsa, said last month it will buy 80 percent of Indonesian financial group PT Paninvests non-life insurance unit for $161 million, according to the Bloomberg-compiled data. Hong Kong billionaire Richard Lis FWD Group agreed in June to acquire the Vietnamese life insurance arm of Great Eastern Holdings Ltd. for S$48.2 million ($35.7 million).
Japans Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Co. bought 30 percent of Hong Leong Assurance in 2010, before adding a 35 percent stake the next year in Hong Leong MSIG, which offers Islamic insurance products.
Khazanah investments had a net asset value of 109 billion ringgit at the end of December, compared with 110.7 billion ringgit a year earlier, according to the fund. It partnered with Sun Life Financial Inc. in 2013 to buy control of an insurance venture between Aviva Plc and CIMB Group Holdings Bhd. for 1.8 billion ringgit. The same year, Khazanah agreed to purchase 90 percent of Turkish insurer Acibadem Saglik ve Hayat Sigorta AS for $252 million.
Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.
XL Catlin has established a new Reinsurance Unit focused on providing facultative and treaty reinsurance across Africa.
Leading the team is Alex St James who has been appointed as head of Africa for XL Catlins Reinsurance operations. Additionally, XL Catlin has appointed Matthew Gillies as an actuarial underwriter. Both St James and Gillies will be based in London.
Africa is a varied and complex collection of frontier and developing markets, generally rich in resources and increasingly home to international companies, said David Watson, XL Catlins chief executive, EMEA, Reinsurance.
Traditionally there has been a lack of insurance penetration across the continent, but this is changing and we believe we have a part to play as reinsurance capacity will further drive the development and growth of the primary insurance market, Watson said.
St James joins XL Catlin from One Re Ltd., in which he was instrumental in gaining UK regulatory approval for and bringing that company to the market in 2015. St James brings with him over 20 years experience in the industry. Prior to joining One Re Ltd., he fulfilled a variety of senior managerial roles in underwriting and has previously worked across Africa with the Global Alliance group of companies, most notably in Mozambique, Angola and Ghana. He holds a B.Eng (Hons) degree and is a Portuguese speaker.
Gillies also joins XL Catlin from One Re Ltd. Prior to joining One Re he fulfilled the role of graduate pricing analyst at Covea Insurance. Gillies is currently finishing his actuarial qualifications, with significant expertise in capital modeling, risk management, Solvency II, pricing and investments. He also holds a BSc in Mathematics from the University of Durham.
Source: XL Catlin
Topics Reinsurance AXA XL
DuPont Co. and Dow Chemical Co. must tell shareholders before next weeks merger vote that they may face exposure to costly potential damages from claims that a chemical used to make Teflon caused cancer and other ailments, community activists told the companies.
While DuPont is the named target of the 3,500 lawsuits filed by people living near a Teflon plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia, the company has claimed that Chemours Co., a spinoff it created last year, is required to pay any damages. Chemours indicated last week that it may fight efforts to force payment, saying it retains legal defenses to DuPonts claims of indemnification.
DuPont and Dow should tell shareholders before they vote July 20 on the $59 billion merger that the combined companies could end up getting stuck with the bill, Action Fund Network and Keep Your Promises DuPont wrote. The merger partners must also share updated federal guidance on how much of the Teflon chemical people can safely be exposed to and the potential liability at 19 polluted sites, the activists wrote in a letter published in DuPont regulatory filing Friday.
The undisclosed items are substantial, material liabilities that DuPont faces as a result of its decades-long contamination caused by PFOA, which Dow shareholders stand to inherit, the groups said in the letter, referring to perfluorooctanoic acid.
Required Disclosures
DuPont said in the filing that it has disclosed all the information necessary under federal law. The Wilmington, Delaware-based company remains committed to fulfilling all our legal and environmental obligations as it relates to PFOA, spokesman Dan Turner said in an e-mail.
Representatives of Chemours and Dow didnt respond to requests for comment.
Potential payments related to health claims from exposure to the Teflon chemical could reach $1.9 billion, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. DuPont last week was ordered by an Ohio jury to to pay more than $5.5 million to a man who developed testicular cancer after drinking water polluted with PFOA. It was the sixth case to be resolved, with 40 more scheduled for next year.
It makes sense that Chemours would try to break the indemnification clause in last years separation agreement because the potential liability is the biggest drag on the stock price, said Christopher Perrella, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. While shares advanced earlier this year, theyre down 57 percent since debuting in June 2015.
Probably Tenuous
The legal argument is probably tenuous, but where there is a will, there is a way, Perrella said by phone. It may be hard for Chemours to get out from under it unless they go bankrupt.
According to the activists letter, in addition to already disclosed potential cleanup costs at 174 polluted sites, which could total $900 million, there are another 19 sites. The groups also cited a lack of disclosure about a May 16 report from the Environmental Protection Agency that lowered the amount of PFOA viewed as acceptable in drinking water, saying the change could spark more lawsuits similar to those in Ohio and West Virginia.
The companies may face additional PFOA lawsuits in the Netherlands, the groups said.
The U.S. case is In re Du Pont de Nemours and Company C-8 Personal Injury Litigation, 13-md-2433, U.S. District Court, Southern District of Ohio (Columbus).
Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.
Topics Mergers & Acquisitions Pollution Ohio Chemicals
Chinese ride-hailing service giant Didi Chuxing has created more than 3.88 million jobs in 17 provinces as of May, and more than 500,000 workers who were laid off from their jobs in the steel and coal industries have found employment through the platform, according to a recent report from Didi Chuxing.
The report, issued on July 18, was based on responses from 40,320 questionnaires. The questionnaires were administered to Didi Chuxing drivers in 30 cities, including cities in Shanxi, Sichuan and Heilongjiang provinces, where the economy used to revolve around steel and coal, according to thepaper.cn.
Some 311,000 Didi Chuxing drivers had experience in the coal industry before switching professions, while 219,000 had experience in the steel industry. Another 179,000 drivers used to be in the army.
The percentage of Didi drivers originally from the steel and coal industries in Shanxi, Sichuan and Heilongjiang provinces was 28.5, 24.8 and 20.3 percent respectively, accounting for 7.8 percent of the total population working in tertiary industries in those provinces, thepaper.cn reported.
Some 85.4 percent of the drivers work part-time, while another 14.6 percent quit their jobs to work full-time for Didi Chuxing. Over 40 percent said they joined Didi Chuxing to earn more money so they could better support their families, while another 11.2 percent said they became Didi drivers because they were worried about losing their original jobs.
I used to work underground in a coal mine. It feels safer driving for Didi, and I have more free time now. I also come into contact with a greater variety of people, said Guo Gaofeng, a part-time Didi driver in central Chinas Henan province, to a reporter from Peoples Daily Online.
China has vowed to cut between 100 and 150 million tons of crude steel production within five years, as well as 500 million tons of coal production in three to five years. The cuts would take jobs from some 500,000 workers in the steel industry and 1.3 million in the coal industry, thepaper.cn reported.
Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance (BHSI) reported that it has expanded into Transactional Liability Insurance in the U.S. and Canada and named Robert Underhill as senior vice president, head of Transactional Liability.
The company also appointed Dan Crosby as vice president, Transactional Liability, and Amy Bowman and Michael Brooks as assistant vice presidents.
BHSI is underwriting Representations & Warranties Insurance and other coverages for the risks and uncertainties in corporate transactions. It offers both primary and excess coverage.
We look forward to continuing to expand our market presence and our team with Roberts experience and leadership at the forefront. said Dan Fortin, head of Executive and Professional Lines, BHSI.
Underhill joins BHSI with 15 years of experience in the financial and insurance industries. He was most recently a partner at Locke Lord, where he focused on insurance mergers and acquisitions, insurance linked securities, reinsurance and other insurance transactional and regulatory matters. He also held executive roles focused on insurance-related risks at Fortress Investment Group, Credit Suisse and American International Group. He is based in BHSIs office in New York.
Crosby was most recently vice president and underwriting leader, Transactional Liability, at QBE Americas. Before that, he had 10 years of experience as a mergers and acquisitions associate at several law firms including most recently, DLA Piper. He is based in BHSIs office in New York.
Bowman joined BHSI as counsel in the legal department in 2014, after serving in various legal roles at AIG for more than seven years. She began her career as a securities associate with Bressler, Amery, & Ross. She is based in BHSIs office in Boston.
Brooks was most recently an associate at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP, where he had 10 years of corporate mergers and acquisitions experience. He is based in BHSIs office in New York.
Source: BHSI
Topics New York
Insurance companies and private hospitals are facing off in Houston over how much to charge patients for out-of-network surgeries and procedures.
According to the Houston Chronicle at least a dozen lawsuits have been filed in Houston in recent years over what insurers allege is an incorrect practice: private hospitals offering patients lower rates that compete with in-network facilities by billing the insurance company more.
Insurers have in some cases responded by refusing to pay the claims, leading to lawsuits and protracted battles that often dont have a clear resolution.
In one lawsuit, the insurer Aetna refused to pay for surgeries at the private North Cypress Medical Center over a fee dispute.
The medical center is physician-owned and does not participate in any insurance networks, according to the newspaper. But when Aetna officials noticed a spike in patient claims from the hospital, it found that patients were being charged what they would have paid at an in-network facility while Aetna was being billed at prices higher than it would typically pay to an in-network provider.
When Aetna started to reject claims made by North Cypress, the hospital sued and accused the insurer of blacklisting it. Aetna counter-sued with allegations that North Cypress doctors had inflated charges and used its emergency room to admit patients for non-emergency procedures.
Neither side received a clear victory. Aetna didnt get $225 million in refunds it sought from North Cypress, and a jury said the hospital wasnt entitled to higher reimbursement rates from Aetna.
Such disputes are closely watched in a health care industry that remains in upheaval and where managed care in which insurers draw contracts limiting patients to certain doctors or hospitals is being emphasized by many advocates as a way of keeping down costs.
The model gets wrecked if the provider says were not going to charge you any money and well just get our money from the insurance company, said Seth Chandler, a professor of insurance law at the University of Houston.
Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Topics Carriers
Takata Corp. agreed to settle a lawsuit in Florida with the estate of a driver of a Honda Civic who claimed to have been left a quadriplegic because of a dangerous airbag in the vehicle. Terms of the settlement werent disclosed.
Takata has been sued by drivers and passengers claiming its air bags caused shrapnel injuries. Others, including Patricia Mincey, the Honda Civic driver, contend the dangerous nature of the propellant in the bags can cause excessive-force deployments, often in low-speed collisions. Takata has settled most of the shrapnel cases but had contested the excessive force claims, according to court records reviewed by Bloomberg.
Lawyers met in chambers for about half an hour with Florida Circuit Judge James Daniel in Jacksonville on Friday before emerging to say the case had been resolved. A trial had been scheduled to start next month.
The family is happy that they can move on, Ted Leopold, the lead lawyer for Minceys family, told reporters. Mincey died in April.
Stephen Krigbaum and Eric Eisnaugle, lawyers representing Takata, breezed by reporters saying only its a beautiful day.
The resolution means Takata Chief Executive Officer Shigehisa Takada wont have to answer lawyers questions under oath in a deposition.
Leopold, who had been pressing to question Takada, said that doesnt mean he wont be deposed in other cases.
Settlement negotiations began in the past couple of days and Leopold said he wasnt expecting an agreement on Friday morning, but he wasnt surprised.
Ive been doing this a long time, he said. Nothing surprises me.
Honda, which also had been sued, reached a confidential settlement earlier.
The case is Mincey v. American Honda Motor Co., 15CA000377 Div CV-E, Circuit Court, Duval County, Florida (Jacksonville).
Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.
Topics Lawsuits Florida Personal Auto
The Centers for Disease Control is assisting in the investigation of a case of Zika in a Utah resident who is a family contact of the elderly Utah resident who died in late June.
The deceased patient had traveled to an area with Zika and lab tests showed he had uniquely high amounts of virus more than 100,000 times higher than seen in other samples of infected people in his blood, according to the CDC.
Laboratories in Utah and at the CDC reported evidence of Zika infection in both Utah residents.
State and local public health disease control specialists, along with the CDC, say they are investigating how the second resident became infected. The investigation reportedly includes additional interviews with and laboratory testing of family members and health care workers who may have had contact with the person who died and trapping mosquitoes and assessing the risk of local spread by mosquitoes.
A CDC emergency response team is in Utah at the request of the Utah Department of Health. The team includes experts in infection control, virology, mosquito control, disease investigation and health communications, according to the CDC.
The new case in Utah is a surprise, showing that we still have more to learn about Zika, Erin Staples, the CDCs medical epidemiologist on the ground in Utah, said in a statement. Fortunately, the patient recovered quickly, and from what we have seen with more than 1,300 travel-associated cases of Zika in the continental United States and Hawaii, non-sexual spread from one person to another does not appear to be common.
As of July 13, 1,306 cases of Zika have been reported in the continental U.S. and Hawaii, none of which have been the result of local spread by mosquitoes. These cases include 14 believed to be the result of sexual transmission and one that was the result of a laboratory exposure, according to the CDC.
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Even six years after the Panama Papers leaked a confidential list of offshore accounts held by the global elite, tax morality is still very much on the table.
The Chinese government has approved the use of a Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccine, and the vaccine is expected to be available by the beginning of 2017, according to a report by Guancha.
GlaxoSmithKline PLC (GSK), a British healthcare company, made the announcement that its HPV vaccine, Cervarix, has been approved for use in Chinese mainland by China's State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA). GSK said Cervarix is registered in the Chinese mainland for use in girls and women between 9 and 25 years of age, and that the vaccine is administered in three doses.
HPV is one of the most common sexually transmitted infections worldwide. It is also the second most common cause of cancer among women between the ages of 15 and 44 in China. Official figures show that there are 130,000 new cases of HPV diagnosed in China every year, accounting for more than 28 percent of the world total. Some forms of the infection cause genital warts, but the high-risk form of the disease can lead to cervical cancer.
The price of the vaccine in Chinese mainland is expected to be lower than in Hong Kong, where it is already available. In the past, since commercial use of the vaccine wasn't approved in the mainland, many Chinese citizens travelled to Hong Kong to get vaccinated there.
Un ottobre da sogno per Antonio Conte: lex ct della Nazionale italiana, attualmente alla guida del Chelsea, nelle ultime quattro gare di Premier League ha collezionato solo successi, conditi da 11 reti segnate e addirittura nessuna incassata. Numeri da record che non sono certo passati inosservati alla Federazione inglese, la quale ha conferito al tecnico leccese lambito premio di Manager del mese.
Unavventura oltremanica iniziata in sordina, quella di Conte, pur a fronte di tre vittorie nelle prime tre gare di campionato. A far vacillare, anche se solo per un momento, le certezze del patron del club londinese, Roman Abramovich, i risultati conseguiti tra la 4a e la 6a giornata, coincisi con un pareggio sul campo dello Swansea City e, soprattutto, con le due pesanti sconfitte subite dal Liverpool, sul terreno casalingo di Stamford Bridge, e dallArsenal. In particolare, la debacle interna coi Reds, aveva irritato non poco il numero uno russo, poiche occorsa proprio nel giorno della sua 250esima partita da presidente della societa.
Come detto, solo un momento. Dopo lincontro dellEmirates, il tecnico salentino cambia modulo, adottando un piu equilibrato 3-4-3 e inserendo elementi di corsa come lo spagnolo Pedro. Una svolta totale perche, di li in poi, il Chelsea inanellera solo e soltanto vittorie: 2 gol allHull City e al Southampton in trasferta, 3 ai campioni dInghilterra del Leicester e 4 allo United in casa, con un meraviglioso numero zero nella casella delle reti subite. Un fantastico poker, ottenuto tra l1 e il 29 ottobre. Un cambio di marcia sbalorditivo, confermato dal 5 a 0 rifilato ai toffees dellEverton nel primo match di novembre, e una scalata che, man mano, ha portato i blues al secondo posto in classifica, a soli 2 punti dal Liverpool capolista.
E allora, non poteva mancare il riconoscimento di migliore allenatore del mese, ottenuto surclassando tecnici del calibro di Jurgen Klopp (Liverpool), Arsene Wenger (Arsenal) e Mark Hughes (Southampton). Tanta, ovviamente, la soddisfazione: E un grande onore e voglio condividerlo con i giocatori e con la societa ha dichiarato Conte sul sito ufficiale della Premier League -. E la prima volta che lavoro in un altro Paese, con una cultura diversa, e portare la propria filosofia non e facile, ma ora sono contento di questa scelta.
A completare la festa, la premiazione del fantasista belga, Eden Hazard, come miglior giocatore di ottobre. Due risultati importanti per il club, ottimo incentivo per la rincorsa al trono dei campioni, occupato dal Leicester di Ranieri. Il prossimo appuntamento per l11 di Conte sara al Riverside Stadium, tana del Middlesborough neopromosso. Il tempo di festeggiare e gia finito.
San Simone, apostolo e martire, nasce a Cana in Palestina, e muore a Pella (Armenia) o Suanir (Persia) nel 107. Vita Sono poche e controverse le...
A broker often needs to make a snap decision to buy, sell, or hold a stock. There's no time to consult stock analysts, interview management, or read lengthy research reports. But a quick glance at some key information can lead to a good decision made under pressure. Say a company just released a press release about its quarterly report. Skip over the filler and look for some of these key facts.
Key Takeaways Look for growing sales and whether the growth suggests longevity versus the reflection of a one-time boon.
Improving margins is usually a sign that a company is well-managed, but don't automatically dismiss a firm with deteriorating margins, as it could reflect that the company is launching a new product or expanding.
Take a look at the quarterly and full-year guidance on future earnings and note how that guidance meets or misses Wall Street's expectations; then, scour the language for subtleties and implications.
Consider whether a company's stock buyback program reflects management's confidence, or is essentially a PR move to impress investors and Wall Street.
Consider companies that are developing products that look to capture the zeitgeist, or that are about to introduce products that are highly anticipated.
Look at the stock chart for the last year and last five years, note seasonal variations and what the stock trend is, before making a potential move.
Increasing Sales
Check to see if the company is growing its sales and, if so, whether the sales growth is sustainable or related to a one-time event.
In addition to checking the sales numbers, you'll have to skim through the entire press release in order to see what management said about the quarter. The numbers plus the comments can tell you if the company experienced growth or just got a windfall.
In general, smaller companies, those in the $100 million to $1 billion sales range, should grow around 10% annually. Larger companies should be growing by at least 3% a year to be of interest.
Lastly, compare a company's growth in sales not only from last year but from the last quarter. If quarterly sales showed an upward trend, it's usually another good sign.
1:39 Tips For When To Buy, Sell Or Hold
Barring more in-depth research options, an investor can find out a great deal about a company's value and whether its stock is worth buying by reading press releases and quarterly profit reports.
Improving Margins
A company's margins generally improve or deteriorate depending on how well it is managed. If the sales line is going up but costs are going up faster, something is going on.
It's not necessarily bad news. It could be that the company is entering a new business, launching a new product, or expanding its footprint. Amazon, for example, infuriated investors for years by investing heavily in warehouses coast-to-coast. That infrastructure spending finally started paying off.
On the other hand, it could mean that the company is just doing a poor job of managing its expenses. The management's discussion of the quarterly results can help assess the situation.
The Guidance
Many companies offer Wall Street some sort of guidance on future earnings, and it's nearly always important. How "the Street" reacts to the news is equally important.
That is, the company's guidance for the next quarter may be better or worse than Wall Street analysts are expecting. And those expectations will move the stock price up or down, at least short-term.
Delving a bit deeper into the psychology behind earnings guidance, if a company raises its guidance for the current quarter but downplays expectations beyond that, the stock will probably sell-off. If a company reduces its estimates for the current quarter but raises its full-year estimate then the stock will probably take off.
As a rule of thumb, keep your eye on the long term. Most of the time, Wall Street will overlook a short-term stumble if it is convinced that there is an upwards catalyst on the horizon.
Stock Buyback Programs
When a company uses its cash to buy back its own stock, it's usually a good sign that management believes the stock is undervalued. Repurchase programs will probably be mentioned in the company press release.
That said, management may have other motives. It may want to reduce the total share count in the public domain in order to improve financial ratios or boost earnings, thus making the company more attractive to the analyst community. It may be a public relations ploy to get investors to think the stock is worth more.
Share repurchase programs should be a sign that better times are ahead for the company.
In general, you want to see the total number of outstanding shares staying the same or falling, perhaps as a result of a repurchase program. That means future earnings are spread across fewer shares, making earnings per share higher. As shares outstanding increases, earnings are divided among a larger pool of investors and become diluted, decreasing your potential for profit.
New Products
It's virtually impossible to predict whether a new product will be a winner or not. But it's a big mistake to overlook the stocks of the companies that make them.
New products often garner the most attention from consumers and investors. This often helps move the share price higher in the near term. And the company has probably spent a huge amount of money on R&D and promotions as it positions itself to take in a whole lot of money.
Consider, for example, Apple's release of the iPod in 2001. Initially, some investors and analysts were skeptical that the company could deliver meaningful revenues from the device. As it turned out, that device propelled Apple's growth throughout the decade.
Of course, new products don't always turn out to be cash cows for the companies that produce them, but if you get in on a good one early, there's a dramatic potential for profit.
The Subtleties of Language
As you read the press release, consider your impression of what occurred in the quarter. Management might have talked up the company's many "opportunities" and relished its past growth. Or it might have outlined the many "challenges" facing the company. Management might identify potential catalysts for the business, such as new products or acquisition candidates.
In any case, that language can be as important as the earnings guidance numbers.
The language used in these press releases is very deliberate. It is reviewed by many eyes in the public relations and legal departments. An upbeat report is an especially good sign, while a report containing muted language should be viewed with suspicion.
Reports that are overly upbeat should be viewed with caution as well. If a company fails to deliver what it has previously promised or falls short of its future expectations, the stock is likely to be clobbered no matter what management says.
Technical Indicators
Finally, look at the stock chart for the last year and last five years.
Are there seasonal variations in the stock price? You may find it routinely trades higher or lower in certain seasons.
Determine the trend this stock is trading in: Is the stock trading above or below its 50-day and 200-day moving averages? Is it a thinly traded stock, or does it trade millions of shares per day? Has the volume recently increased or decreased? A decreasing volume could be a sign of less interest in the shares, which could cause a decline in the share price. Increases are generally favorable if the underlying fundamentals are solid, meaning the company has solid growth opportunities and is well-capitalized.
Taking a big picture, or 10,000-foot view of a company, allows you to consider the external factors that could keep the stock from thriving.
The 10,000-Foot View
Beyond the press release, consider the macro trends that might impact the stock. Rising interest rates, higher taxes, or consumer behavior may have an impact on the stock. Other external factors, such as an industry-wide downturn, might affect the company. These considerations can be as important as the fundamentals and technical indicators.
For example, consider Continental Airlines in 2006. The company was in fairly good shape, but higher fuel costs and a number of bankruptcies within the airline industry seemed to be holding the stock back. Continental expected to substantially grow its earnings over the next year, but the sector outlook seemed dismal. Continental merged with United Airlines in 2010.
The Bottom Line
By necessity, investors and their brokers often need to analyze companies on the fly and make snap decisions to buy, sell, or hold. Zeroing in on the key information helps them avoid a rash decision.
Of course, to trade or invest you would need a broker. If you don't already have one and are considering which broker to choose, do some research so that you can find a broker to fit your needs.
The annual impact of leaving the EU on the UK after 15 years (difference from being in the EU) EEA Negotiated bilateral agreement WTO GDP level central -3.8% -6.2% -7.5% GDP level -3.4% to -4.3% -4.6% to -7.8% -5.4% to -9.5% GDP per capita central* -1,100 -1,800 -2,100 GDP per capita* -1,000 to -1,200 -1,300 to -2,200 -1,500 to -2,700 GPD per household central* -2,600 -4,300 -5,200 GDP per household* -2,400 to -2,900 -3,200 to -5,400 -3,700 to -6,600 Net impact on receipts -20 billion -36 billion -45 billion
*Expressed in terms of 2015 GDP in 2015 prices, rounded to the nearest 100
Adapted from HM Treasury analysis: the long-term economic impact of EU membership and the alternatives, April 2016.
Leave supporters discounted such economic projections under the label "Project Fear." A pro-Brexit outfit associated with the U.K. Independence Party, which was founded to oppose EU membership, responded by saying that the Treasury's "worst-case scenario of 4,300 per household is a bargain-basement price for the restoration of national independence and safe, secure borders."
Although Leavers stressed issues of national pride, safety, and sovereignty, they also mustered economic arguments. For example, Boris Johnson said on the eve of the vote, "EU politicians would be banging down the door for a trade deal" the day after the vote, in light of their "commercial interests." Labor Leave, the pro-Brexit Labour group, co-authored a report with a group of economists in September 2017 that forecasted a 7% boost to annual GDP, with the largest gains going to the lowest earners.
Vote Leave, the official pro-Brexit campaign, topped the "Why Vote Leave" page on its website with the claim that the U.K. could save 350 million per week: "We can spend our money on our priorities like the NHS [National Health Service], schools, and housing."
In May 2016, the U.K. Statistics Authority, an independent public body, said the figure was gross rather than net, which was "misleading and undermines trust in official statistics." A mid-June poll by Ipsos MORI, however, found that 47% of the country believed the claim. The day after the referendum, Nigel Farage, who co-founded UKIP and led it until that November, disavowed the figure and said that he was not closely associated with Vote Leave. May also declined to confirm Vote Leave's NHS promises since taking office.
Brexit Economic Response
Though Britain officially left the EU, 2020 was a transition and implementation period. Trade and customs continued during that time, so there wasn't much on a day-to-day basis that seemed different to U.K. residents. Even so, the decision to leave the EU had an effect on Britain's economy.
The country's GDP growth slowed down to around 1.4% in 2018 from 1.9% in both 2017 and 2016 as business investment slumped. The IMF predicted that the country's economy would grow at 1.3% in 2019 and 1.4% in 2020. The Bank of England cut its growth forecast for 2019 to 1.2%, the lowest since the financial crisis.
The U.K. unemployment rate hit a 44-year low at 3.9% in the three months to January 2019. Experts attribute this to employers preferring to retain workers instead of investing in new major projects.
In 2018, the pound clawed back the losses it suffered after the Brexit vote but reacted negatively as the likelihood of a no-deal Brexit increased. The currency could rally if a soft Brexit deal is passed or Brexit is delayed.
While the fall in the value of the pound helped exporters, the higher price of imports was passed onto consumers and had a significant impact on the annual inflation rate. CPI inflation hit 3.1% in the 12 months leading up to November 2017, a near six-year high that well exceeded the Bank of England's 2% target. Inflation eventually began to fall in 2018 with the decline in oil and gas prices and was at 1.8% in January 2019.
A July 2017 report by the House of Lords cited evidence that U.K. businesses would have to raise wages to attract native-born workers following Brexit, which is "likely to lead to higher prices for consumers."
International trade was expected to fall due to Brexit, even with the possibility of a raft of free trade deals. Dr. Monique Ebell, former associate research director at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, forecasted a -22% reduction in total U.K. goods and services trade if EU membership was replaced by a free trade agreement.
Other free trade agreements were not predicted to pick up the slack. In fact, Ebell saw a pact with the BRIICS (Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China, and South Africa) boosting total trade by 2.2% while a pact with the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand was expected to do slightly better, at 2.6%.
"The single market is a very deep and comprehensive trade agreement aimed at reducing non-tariff barriers," Ebell wrote in January 2017, "while most non-EU [free trade agreements] seem to be quite ineffective at reducing the non-tariff barriers that are important for services trade."
June 2017 General Election
On April 18, May called for a snap election to be held on June 8, despite previous promises not to hold one until 2020. Polling at the time suggested May would expand on her slim Parliamentary majority of 330 seats (there are 650 seats in the Commons). Labor gained rapidly in the polls, however, aided by an embarrassing Tory flip-flop on a proposal for estates to fund end-of-life care.
The Conservatives lost their majority, winning 318 seats to Labor's 262. The Scottish National Party won 35, with other parties taking 35. The resulting hung Parliament cast doubts on May's mandate to negotiate Brexit and led the leaders of Labor and the Liberal Democrats to call on May to resign.
Speaking in front of the prime minister's residence at 10 Downing Street, May batted away calls for her to leave her post, saying, "It is clear that only the Conservative and Unionist Party"the Tories' official name"has the legitimacy and ability to provide that certainty by commanding a majority in the House of Commons." The Conservatives struck a deal with the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, which won 10 seats, to form a coalition. The party is little known outside of Northern Ireland, judging by a wave of curious Google searches that caused the DUP's site to crash.
May presented the election as a chance for the Conservatives to solidify their mandate and strengthen their negotiating position with Brussels. But this backfired.
"The election served to diffuse, not concentrate political power, especially with regards to Brexit," wrote Sky News political correspondent Lewis Goodall. "Ever since election night, Brussels hasn't just been dealing with Number 10 but in effect, the House of Commons too."
In the wake of the election, many expected the government's Brexit position to soften, and they were right. May released a Brexit white paper in July 2018 that mentioned an "association agreement" and a free-trade area for goods with the EU. David Davis resigned as Brexit secretary and Boris Johnson resigned as Foreign Secretary in protest.
But the election also increased the possibility of a no-deal Brexit. The Financial Times predicted that the result made May more vulnerable to pressure from Euroskeptics and her coalition partners. We saw this play out with the Irish backstop tussle.
With her position weakened, May struggled to unite her party behind her deal and keep control of Brexit.
Scotland's Independence Referendum
Politicians in Scotland pushed for a second independence referendum in the wake of the Brexit vote, but the results of the June 8, 2017 election cast a pall over their efforts. The Scottish National Party lost 21 seats in the Westminster Parliament, and on June 27, 2017, Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said her government at Holyrood would "reset" its timetable on independence to focus on delivering a "soft Brexit."
Not one Scottish local area voted to leave the EU, according to the U.K.'s Electoral Commission, though Moray came close at 49.9%. The country as a whole rejected the referendum by 62.0% to 38.0%. But because Scotland only contains 8.4% of the U.K.'s population, its vote to Remain (along with that of Northern Ireland, which accounts for just 2.9% of the U.K.'s population) was vastly outweighed by support for Brexit in England and Wales.
Scotland joined England and Wales to form Great Britain in 1707, and the relationship has been tumultuous at times. The SNP, which was founded in the 1930s, had just six of 650 seats in Westminster in 2010. The following year, however, it formed a majority government in the devolved Scottish Parliament at Holyrood, partly owing to its promise to hold a referendum on Scottish independence.
2014 Scottish Independence Referendum
That referendum, held in 2014, saw the pro-independence side lose with 44.7% of the vote; turnout was 84.6%. Far from putting the independence issue to rest, though, the vote fired up nationalist support. The SNP won 56 of 59 Scottish seats at Westminster the following year, overtaking the Lib Dems to become the third-largest party in the U.K. overall. Britain's electoral map suddenly showed a glaring divide between England and Wales, which was dominated by Tory blue with the occasional patch of Labour red, and all-yellow Scotland.
When Britain voted to leave the EU, Scotland fulminated. A combination of rising nationalism and strong support for Europe led almost immediately to calls for a new independence referendum. When the Supreme Court ruled on Nov. 3, 2017, that devolved national assemblies such as Scotland's parliament cannot veto Brexit, the demands grew louder.
On March 13 that year, Sturgeon called for a second referendum to be held in the autumn of 2018 or spring of 2019. Holyrood backed her by a vote of 69 to 59 on March 28, the day before May's government triggered Article 50.
Sturgeon's preferred timing was significant since the two-year countdown initiated by Article 50 ended in the spring of 2019 when the politics surrounding Brexit could be particularly volatile.
What Would Independence Look Like?
Scotland's economic situation also raised questions about its hypothetical future as an independent country. The crash in the oil price has dealt a blow to government finances. In May 2014, it forecast 20152016 tax receipts from North Sea drilling of 3.4 billion to 9 billion but collected 60 million, less than 1% of the forecasts' midpoint.
In reality, these figures were hypothetical, since Scotland's finances are not fully devolved, but the estimates were based on the country's geographical share of North Sea drilling, so they illustrate what it might expect as an independent nation.
The debate over what currency an independent Scotland would use was revived. Former SNP leader Alex Salmond, who was Scotland's First Minister until Nov. 2014, told The Financial Times that the country could abandon the pound and introduce its own currency, allowing it to float freely or pegging it to sterling. He ruled out joining the euro, but others contended that it would be required for Scotland to join the EU. Another possibility would be to use the pound, which would mean forfeiting control over monetary policy.
Upsides for Some
On the other hand, a weak currency that floats on global markets can be a boon to U.K. producers who export goods. Industries that rely heavily on exports could actually see some benefit.
In 2015, the top 10 exports from the U.K. were (in USD):
Machines, engines, pumps: US$63.9 billion (13.9% of total exports) Gems, precious metals: $53 billion (11.5%) Vehicles: $50.7 billion (11%) Pharmaceuticals: $36 billion (7.8%) Oil: $33.2 billion (7.2%) Electronic equipment: $29 billion (6.3%) Aircraft, spacecraft: $18.9 billion (4.1%) Medical and technical equipment: $18.4 billion (4%) Organic chemicals: $14 billion (3%) Plastics: $11.8 billion (2.6%)
Some sectors were prepared to benefit from the exit. Multinationals listed on the FTSE 100 saw earnings rise as a result of a soft pound. A weak currency was also a boon to the tourism, energy, and service industries.
In May 2016, the State Bank of India (SBIN.NS), India's largest commercial bank, suggested that Brexit would benefit India economically. While leaving the Eurozone meant that the U.K. no longer had unfettered access to Europe's single market, it would allow for more focus on trade with India. India would also have more wiggle room if the U.K. was no longer under European trade rules and regulations.
UK-EU Trade After Brexit
May advocated a "hard" Brexit. By that, she meant that Britain should leave the EU's single market and customs union, then negotiate a trade deal to govern their future relationship. These negotiations would have been conducted during a transition period once a divorce deal was ratified.
The Conservatives' poor showing in the June 2017 snap election called popular support for a hard Brexit into question. Many in the press speculated that the government could take a softer line. The Brexit White Paper released in July 2018 revealed plans for a softer Brexit. It was too soft for many MPs belonging to her party and too audacious for the EU.
The White Paper said the government planned to leave the EU single market and customs union. However, it proposed the creation of a free trade area for goods which would "avoid the need for customs and regulatory checks at the border and mean that businesses would not need to complete costly customs declarations. And it would enable products to only undergo one set of approvals and authorizations in either market, before being sold in both." This meant the U.K. would follow EU single market rules when it comes to goods.
The White Paper acknowledged that a borderless customs arrangement with the EUone that allowed the U.K. to negotiate free trade agreements with third countrieswas "broader in scope than any other that exists between the EU and a third country."
The government was correct that there was no example of this kind of relationship in Europe today. The four broad precedents that existed were the EU's relationship with Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and WTO members.
The Norway Model: Join the EEA
The first option was for the U.K. to join Norway, Iceland, and Lichtenstein in the European Economic Area (EEA), which provides access to the EU's single market for most goods and services (agriculture and fisheries are excluded). At the same time, the EEA is outside the customs union, so Britain could have entered into trade deals with non-EU countries.
But the arrangement was hardly a win-win. The U.K. would be bound by some EU laws while losing its ability to influence those laws through the country's European Council and European Parliament voting rights. In September 2017, May called this arrangement an unacceptable "loss of democratic control."
David Davis expressed interest in the Norway model in response to a question he received at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington. "It's something we've thought about but it's not at the top of our list." He was referring specifically to the European Free Trade Association, which like the EEA offers access to the single market, but not the customs union.
EFTA was once a large organization, but most of its members left to join the EU. Today, it comprises Norway, Iceland, Lichtenstein, and Switzerland; all but Switzerland are also members of the EEA.
The Switzerland Model
Switzerland's relationship with the EU, which is governed by around 20 major bilateral pacts with the bloc, is broadly similar to the EEA arrangement. Along with these three, Switzerland is a member of the European Free Trade Association. Switzerland helped set up the EEA, but its people rejected membership in a 1992 referendum.
The country allows the free movement of people and is a member of the passport-free Schengen Area. It is subject to many single market rules, without having much say in making them. It is outside the customs union, allowing it to negotiate free trade agreements with third countries; usually, but not always, it has negotiated alongside the EEA countries. Switzerland has access to the single market for goods (with the exception of agriculture), but not services (with the exception of insurance). It pays a modest amount into the EU's budget.
Brexit supporters who wanted to "take back control" wouldn't have embraced the concessions the Swiss made on immigration, budget payments, and single market rules. The EU would probably not have wanted a relationship modeled on the Swiss example, either: Switzerland's membership in EFTA but not the EEA, Schengen but not the EU, is a messy product of the complex history of European integration andwhat elsea referendum.
The Canada Model: A Free Trade Agreement
A third option was to negotiate a free trade agreement with the EU along the lines of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, a pact the EU finalized but didn't fully ratify with Canada. The most obvious problem with this approach is that the U.K. had only two years from the triggering of Article 50 to negotiate such a deal. The EU refused to discuss a future trading relationship until December of that year at the earliest.
To give a sense of how tight that timetable is, CETA negotiations began in 2009 and concluded in 2014. But just over half of the EU's 28 national parliaments actually ratified the deal. Persuading the rest could take years. Even subnational legislatures can stand in the way of a deal: the Walloon regional parliament, which represents fewer than four million mainly French-speaking Belgians, single-handedly blocked CETA for a few days in 2016.
In order to extend the two-year deadline for leaving the EU, Britain needed unanimous approval from the EU. Several U.K. politicians, including Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond, stressed the need for a transitional deal of a few years so that (among other reasons) Britain could negotiate EU and third-country trade deals. But this notion was met with resistance from hard-line Brexiteers.
Problems with a CETA-Style Agreement
In some ways, comparing Britain's situation to Canada's is misleading. Canada already enjoys free trade with the U.S. through the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which was built on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This means that a trade deal with the EU was not as crucial as it is for the U.K. Canada's and Britain's economies are also very different: CETA does not include financial services, one of Britain's biggest exports to the EU.
Speaking in Florence in Sept. 2017, May said the U.K. and EU "can do so much better" than a CETA-style trade agreement, since they were beginning from the "unprecedented position" of sharing a body of rules and regulations. She did not elaborate on what "much better" looked like, besides calling on both parties to be "creative as well as practical."
Monique Ebell, formerly of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research stressed that even with an agreement in place, non-tariff barriers were likely to be a significant drag on Britain's trade with the EU. She expected total U.K. foreign tradenot just flows to and from the EUunder an EU-U.K. trade pact. She reasoned that free-trade deals do not generally handle services trade well. Services are a major component of Britain's international trade; the country enjoys a trade surplus in that segment, which is not the case for goods.
Free trade deals also struggle to rein in non-tariff barriers. Admittedly Britain and the EU started from a unified regulatory scheme, but divergences would only multiply post-Brexit.
WTO: Go It Alone
You want out? You're out. If Britain and the EU weren't able to come to an agreement about their relationship, they would have had to revert to WTO terms. But this default solution wouldn't have been straightforward either. Since Britain is currently a WTO member through the EU, it will have to split tariff schedules with the bloc and divvy out liabilities arising from ongoing trade disputes. This work has already begun.
Trading with the EU on WTO terms was the "no-deal" scenario the Conservative government presented as an acceptable fallback, though most observers see this as a negotiating tactic. In July 2017, U.K. Secretary of State for International Trade Liam Fox said, "People talk about the WTO as if it would be the end of the world. But they forget that is how they currently trade with the United States, with China, with Japan, with India, with the Gulf, and our trading relationship is strong and healthy."
But for certain industries, the EU's external tariff would have hit hard: Britain exports 77% of the cars it manufactures, and 58% of these go to Europe. The EU levies 10% tariffs on imported cars. Monique Ebell of the NIESR estimated that leaving the EU single market would reduce overall U.K. goods and services tradenot just that with the EUby 2230%.
Nor would the U.K. only be giving up its trade arrangements with the EU: under any of the scenarios above, it would probably have lost the trade agreements the bloc struck with 63 third countries, as well as progress in negotiating other deals. Replacing these and adding new ones would have been an uncertain prospect. In a September 2017 interview with Politico, Trade Secretary Liam Fox said his office, which was formed in July 2016, turned away some third countries looking to negotiate free trade deals because it lacked the capacity to negotiate.
Fox wanted to roll the terms of existing EU trade deals over into new agreements, but some countries were unwilling to give Britain (66 million people, $2.6 trillion GDP) the same terms as the EU (excluding Britain, around 440 million people, $13.9 trillion GDP).
Negotiations with third countries are technically not allowed while Britain remains an EU member, but even so informal talks have begun, particularly with the U.S.
Impact on the U.S.
Companies in the U.S. across a wide variety of sectors have made large investments in the U.K. over many years. In fact, American corporations have derived 9% of global foreign affiliate profit from the United Kingdom since 2000. In 2014 alone, U.S. companies invested a total of $588 billion into Britain. The U.S. also hires a lot of Brits, making U.S. companies one of the U.K.'s largest job markets. The output of U.S. affiliates in the United Kingdom was $153 billion in 2013. The United Kingdom plays a vital role in corporate America's global infrastructure from assets under management (AUM), international sales, and research and development (R&D) advancements.
American companies have viewed Britain as a strategic gateway to other countries in the European Union. Brexit will jeopardize the affiliate earnings and stock prices of many companies strategically aligned with the United Kingdom, which may see them reconsider their operations with U.K. and European Union members.
American companies and investors that have exposure to European banks and credit markets may be affected by credit risk. European banks may have to replace $123 billion in securities depending on how the exit unfolds. Furthermore, U.K. debt may not be included in European banks' emergency cash reserves, creating liquidity problems. European asset-backed securities have been in decline since 2007. This decline is likely to intensify now that Britain has chosen to leave.
Who's Next to Leave the EU?
Political wrangling over Europe is not limited to Britain. Most EU members have strong euroskeptic movements that, while they have so far struggled to win power at the national level, heavily influence the tenor of national politics. In a few countries, there is a chance that such movements could secure referendums on EU membership.
In May 2016, global research firm IPSOS released a report showing that a majority of respondents in Italy and France believe their countries should hold a referendum on EU membership.
Italy
The fragile Italian banking sector has driven a wedge between the EU and the Italian government, which provided bailout funds to save mom-and-pop bondholders from being "bailed-in," as EU rules stipulate. The government abandoned its 2019 budget when the EU threatened it with sanctions. It lowered its planned budget deficit from 2.5% of GDP to 2.04%.
Matteo Salvini, the far-right head of Italy's Northern League and the country's deputy prime minister, called for a referendum on EU membership hours after the Brexit vote, saying, "This vote was a slap in the face for all those who say that Europe is their own business and Italians don't have to meddle with that."
The Northern League has an ally in the populist Five Star Movement, whose founder, former comedian Beppe Grillo, called for a referendum on Italy's membership in the eurothough not the EU. The two parties formed a coalition government in 2018 and made Giuseppe Conte prime minister. Conte ruled out the possibility of "Italexit" in 2018 during the budget standoff.
France
Marine Le Pen, the leader of France's euroskeptic National Front, hailed the Brexit vote as a win for nationalism and sovereignty across Europe: "Like a lot of French people, I'm very happy that the U.K. people held on and made the right choice. What we thought was impossible yesterday has now become possible." She lost the French presidential election to Emmanuel Macron in May 2017, gaining just 33.9% of votes.
Macron has warned that the demand for "Frexit" will grow if the EU does not see reforms. According to a February 2019 IFOP poll, 40% of French citizens want the country to leave the EU. Frexit is also one of the demands of the yellow vest protesters.
When Did Britain Officially Leave the European Union? Britain officially left the EU on Jan. 31, 2020, at 11 p.m. GMT. The move came after a referendum voted in favor of Brexit on June 23, 2016.
What Were the Reasons Behind Brexit? There were many reasons why Britain voted to leave the European Union. But some of the main issues behind Brexit included a rise in nationalism, immigration, political autonomy, and the economy. The Leave side garnered almost 52% of the votes while the Remain side received about 48% of the vote.
How Many Countries Are Part of the EU Post-Brexit? Britain's departure from the European Union left 27 member states. They are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden,
The Bottom Line
The European Union was established in November 1993 with the Maastricht Treaty. The original members included Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Fifteen other countries would gain membership in the union. Rising nationalist sentiment, coupled with concerns over the economy and British sovereignty led the majority of voters in the U.K. to leave the EU. Britain left the union at the end of January 2020 in what is commonly called Brexit. But the move didn't come without challenges. It required two years of negotiating a deal and a year-long transition period before everything became final.
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Vancouver - July 19, 2016 (Investorideas.com Newswire) SilverCrest Metals Inc. (TSXV: $SIL.V) ("SilverCrest" or the "Company") is pleased to announce an update on the underground rehabilitation program with additional assay results from underground channel sampling at its Las Chispas Project ("Las Chispas") located in Sonora, Mexico . Las Chispas is in a historic silver-gold mining district which presently hosts two nearby precious metal producers. Historic information indicates that only three veins of the fourteen historically reported veins at Las Chispas have had documented production, which occurred between 1880 and 1930. SilverCrest's initial focus is on these three veins; the Las Chispas, William Tell and Babicanora. To the Company's knowledge, none of the known veins have ever been drilled. For more information, please refer to our website at www.silvercrestmetals.com.
N. Eric Fier , CPG, P.Eng, President & CEO remarked, "It is very encouraging to receive additional high grade results from our ongoing underground channel sampling program at Las Chispas as we continue to gain further access to historic workings. Our onsite team has safely ascended to the historic 300 level** of the Las Chispas vein with subsequent ongoing mapping and sampling. Our channel sample results on the 300 and 400 levels are showing multiple grades of plus 1 kilogram per tonne silver and up to 2.2 kilograms per tonne silver equivalent*. We are experiencing minimal challenges in accessing and rehabilitating the underground workings. Rehabilitation mainly consists of the removal and stockpiling of historic backfill material along with safely constructing ladders and bridges. We are currently surface drilling based on the expanded Phase I program with ongoing compilation of all our drill data and integration with underground results."
Underground Rehabilitation Update
The Company continues to systemically collect channel samples at intervals of two to three metres along strike length as new areas and levels are being explored. In its news release dated June 9, 2016 , the Company disclosed that it had gained access to the historic 400 level and reported results from nine initial samples. Since then, the Company has collected a total of 327 additional channel samples from multiple levels as reported below. Sampling locations and widths are restricted to historic workings which may only represent part of the mineralized vein, stockwork, or breccia. The location, true thickness and extent of mineralization is indeterminate until adequate drilling is completed.
The most significant composited sample results for this release average 1.5 metres wide at 2.4 grams per tonne ("gpt") gold and 331.0 gpt silver, or 508.0 gpt silver equivalent (AgEq*, uncut, undiluted) over a continuous 35 metre strike length in an unmined area of breccia on the 400 level (see attached Figure and Photo). Also noteworthy is an average of 1.1 metres wide at 1.55 gpt gold and 334.9 gpt silver, or 450.9 gpt AgEq over a semi-continuous 90 metre strike length on the 300 level. From initial mapping, a majority of the 330 level appears to be in the hangingwall of the vein with the vein undulating in (high grade) and out (low grade) of the underground workings. Ongoing drilling will help test the true thickness and grade of mineralization in this area.
The following table summarizes the 20 most significant un-composited assay results (uncut, undiluted) from various levels of the Las Chispas vein only;
All assays were completed by ALS Chemex in Hermosillo, Mexico , and North Vancouver, BC.
The Company is reviewing the possibility of a controlling, cross-cutting, high grade structural corridor at the Las Chispas vein which is potentially 500 metres in length and a minimum of 300 metres in depth (see attached Figure).
To gain access to underground workings, backfill material is being removed from historical drifts and stopes. This material is being sampled, assayed, and stockpiled for potential future processing. To date, 43 representative grab samples have been collected from backfill material for Las Chispas vein and William Tell vein. Average grade of these samples is 2.45 gpt gold, 239.0 gpt silver, or 423.0 gpt AgEq with grades up to 42.20 gpt Au and 1,920.0 gpt Ag or 5,085.0 gpt AgEq.
To date, approximately 3.5 kilometres of underground workings have been accessed with an additional 8 kilometres to be explored over the next several months. Ongoing research into previously documented information and field work on Las Chispas has been responsible for the increase in known historic underground workings from six kilometres, as previously announced on June 9, 2016, to 11.5 kilometres. The Company intends to continue with the underground rehabilitation program and reporting results for the remainder of 2016.
Drilling Update
The Company is nearing completion of its Phase I surface drill program having drilled 19 core holes with a total of approximately 5,600 metres to date. Sixteen holes have been drilled in the Las Chispas and William Tell veins, and three holes in the adjacent Babicanora area. Upon receipt of core assays, the Company will compile and integrate the drill results with the underground information, which the Company expects to start announcing in August 2016. Based on positive Phase I surface drilling results, the Company will propose a Phase II surface drill program.
With permitting near completion, the planned 2,000 metre underground drill program should commence in late Q3 or early Q4 2016. The underground drill program will focus on delineation of a potential bulk sample and infill drilling in preparation for the initial Las Chispas resource estimation.
The Qualified Person under National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects for this news release is N. Eric Fier, CPG, P.Eng, and President and CEO for SilverCrest, who has reviewed and approved its contents.
ABOUT SILVERCREST METALS INC.
SilverCrest is a Canadian precious metals exploration company headquartered in Vancouver, BC, that is focused on new discoveries, value-added acquisitions and targeting production in Mexico's historic precious metal districts. The Company is led by a proven management team in all aspects of the precious metal mining sector, including the pioneering of a responsible "phased approach" business model taking projects through discovery, finance, on time and on budget construction, and production with subsequent increased value to shareholders.
FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS
This news release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation. These include, without limitation, statements with respect to: the strategic plans, timing and expectations for the Company's exploration, rehabilitation and drilling programs of the Las Chispas Project, including initial extraction program for bulk sample testing; information with respect to high grade areas and size of veins projected from underground sampling results; and the accessibility of future mining at the Las Chispas Project. Such forwardlooking statements or information are based on a number of assumptions, which may prove to be incorrect. Assumptions have been made regarding, among other things: the conditions in general economic and financial markets; availability of skilled labour; timing and amount of expenditures related to rehabilitation and drilling programs; and effects of regulation by governmental agencies. The actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements as a result of risk factors including: the timing and content of work programs; results of exploration activities; the interpretation of drilling results and other geological data; receipt, maintenance and security of permits and mineral property titles; environmental and other regulatory risks; project cost overruns or unanticipated costs and expenses; and general market and industry conditions. Forward-looking statements are based on the expectations and opinions of the Company's management on the date the statements are made. The assumptions used in the preparation of such statements, although considered reasonable at the time of preparation, may prove to be imprecise and, as such, readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date the statements were made. The Company undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements included in this news release if these beliefs, estimates and opinions or other circumstances should change, except as otherwise required by applicable law.
N. Eric Fier , CPG, P.Eng
President & CEO
SilverCrest Metals Inc.
Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
SOURCE SilverCrest Metals Inc.
Contact:
SilverCrest Metals Inc.
Fred Cooper, Investor Relations
Telephone: +1 (604) 694-1730
Fax: +1 (604) 694-1761
Toll Free: 1-866-691-1730 (Canada & USA)
Email: info@silvercrestmetals.com
Website: www.silvercrestmetals.com
570 Granville Street, Suite 501, Vancouver, British Columbia V6C 3P1
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Additional info regarding BC Residents and global Investors: Effective September 15 2008 - all BC investors should review all OTC and Pink sheet listed companies for adherence in new disclosure filings and filing appropriate documents with Sedar. Read for more info: http://www.bcsc.bc.ca/release.aspx?id=6894. Global investors must adhere to regulations of each country.
SINGAPORE, July 19 -- Zhao Qizheng, dean of the school of journalism at the Renmin University of China, said here Tuesday that it is hoped that China and the Philippinescould restart bilateral negotiations, and the negotiations should move step by step.
Zhao, who is also former minister of China's State Council Information Office, made the remarks at the media briefing after the Think Tank Seminar on South China Seaand Regional Cooperation and Development held here on Monday.
Highlighting that China and the Philippines share lots of common interests, Zhao said that there are also contradictions and conflicts both countries face.
The conflict between China and the Philippines over the South China Sea has been decades, and the problem is difficult to solve in the near future, Zhao said, adding that the best way is to start with problems that are easy to reach agreements, before moving to more complex issues.
"China and Philippines can temporarily put aside differences, and discuss issues of joint exploration first,"Zhao said.
"Joint developments are very broad, including resources, fisheries, maritime rescue, meteorologic data exchange as well as disaster relief at sea. We should move step by step."
Li Guoqiang, deputy director of the Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), said that China's door to dialogue has always been open, and bilateral negotiations and peaceful settlement of disputes are always welcomed.
The government of former Philippine President Benigno S. Aquino III filed the arbitration against China in 2013, despite the agreement his country had reached with China on resolving disputes in the South China Sea through bilateral negotiations. Since then, China-Philippines relations have been severely deteriorated.
However, current Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has expressed readiness and willingness to hold bilateral talks with China, saying that he is planning to send envoy to China to restart negotiations.
Li said that he hopes the South China Sea issue would be properly re-pulled back on the track of diplomatic negotiations on the basis of mutual respect and joint consultation.
He stressed that if China and Philippines decide to restart diplomatic mechanism, under no circumstances should the South China Sea arbitration be used as reference.
Organized by the Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the one-day seminar attracted more than 20 experts from academic institutes in China and Southeast Asian countries, including Thailand, Cambodia and Malaysia.
A status yellow, high temperature warning has been issued across Ireland as temperatures were set to climb to over 86F (30C) on Tuesday. In fact, the weather has been so good that a BBC weatherman asked that Stormont decree the hottest day of the year national holiday.
Like the rest of the country temperatures in Northern Ireland have been on the up since before the weekend. With Ireland having so few hot summer spells, weatherman Barra Best made an appeal to the Northern Irish government to officially name July 19 a national holiday, for one day only.
Sadly, the temperatures will start to drop on Tuesday evening when thunderstorms, some of them violent, are predicted. Weather forecaster, Louise Heraghty from Met Eireann (Irelands meteorological services) said temperatures will drop by up to 50F (10C) by Wednesday.
However, until then theres a yellow weather warning in place. Heraghty said "We are certainly looking at temperatures of 28C or 29C in the midlands for Tuesday and perhaps a few degrees higher than that.
We don't see this very often! Clear skies across the UK with some cloud lingering for #Scotland #hottestdayoftheyear pic.twitter.com/DrT80YwWBa Met Office (@metoffice) July 19, 201
Did someone say HOTTEST DAY OF THE YEAR!? Nice one Ireland!#98fmBigBreakfast pic.twitter.com/86LvOXbG9X 98FM (@98FM) July 19, 2016
The hot spell, which saw Ireland have one of the best weekends of warm weather so far this year, has seen thousands of people headed to the beaches around the country. Around the country 132 beaches are staffed with lifeguards however, the Coast Guard also appealed to sun bathers to treat all waterways with respect.Having basked in the warm weather from Europe for the past few days Ireland will now be receiving an influx of air moving up from France, which according to Ian Carruthers from Irish Weather Online is highly unstable and will mean thunderstorms.
He told the Irish Independent These factors suggest super-cells are possible. Even with their isolated nature, likely threats will be gusts of up to 120kmph, large hail and even a tornado."
Most of the thunderstorms are predicted for late Tuesday afternoon.
Carruthers said Not everyone will see thunderstorm activity but where it does occur it will be severe at times.
Yes the weather in Ireland caused this to happen to my phone pic.twitter.com/iW3VVwPyn4 John Hegarty (@hegarty89) July 19, 2016
Thundershowers will give way to milder and humid conditions overnight. Looking ahead to towards the weekend Ireland will see outbreaks of rain spreading east on Thursday with dry spells on Friday. More persistent rain is expected on Saturday, clearing later in the day.
New York's first paperboy was a young Irish lad named Barney Flaherty.
Each September we celebrate National Newspaper Carrier Day - a holiday in honor of America's first paperboy, ten-year-old Barney Flaherty, as well as every newspaper carrier today.
The unsung Irish-American media pioneer was hired in New York City on September 4, 1833, by Benjamin Day, the publisher of the New York Sun.
The Museum of the City of New York released the following photo from their extensive archives in September 2012, captioned: "Today in 1833, a 10-year-old boy named Barney Flaherty became the first newsboy after responding to an ad in the New York Sun. Newsboys became a prominent fixture in New York City life well into the 20th century. This fellow below was photographed ca. 1890 by Jacob Riis."
His only job requirement was to show Day that he was able to throw a newspaper into the bushes.
Read more: Nearly 300,000 Irish children transported from New York to rural America
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Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams has repeated his call for a referendum on a united Ireland in light of the Brexit fallout, saying the UK's controversial vote means there is a "timeframe there" to make a decision on the border within four years, writes Fiachra O Cionnaith, political reporter.
The opposition TD made the claim after both Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin said they believe a border vote is now a prospect due to the decision by Britain to leave the EU.
Speaking at the MacGill summer school in the Glenties, Co Donegal, on Sunday Mr Martin said the situation was now a prospect.
While saying the issue was still a number of years away, the Fianna Fail leader said the Brexit vote - and crucially the fact Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU - means the issue needs to be discussed, with practical matters such as merging two different health and taxation systems prioritised.
On Monday Taoiseach Enda Kenny went further, saying any post-Brexit talks should include a discussion on a united Ireland.
"The discussions and negotiations that take place over the next period should take into account the possibility, however far out it might be, that the clause in the Good Friday Agreement might be triggered.
"In the same way as East Germany was dealt with when the wall came down, and was able to be absorbed into West Germany and not have to go through a torturous and long process of applying for membership of the European Union," Mr Kenny said.
The Taoiseach's comments have been seen as an attempt to force the hand of leading EU nations such as Germany to give Ireland a special post-Brexit deal which would allow Ireland to continue our common travel area with Britain and to ensure there is no hard border with Northern Ireland - issues which appeared to be ruled out by German chancellor Angela Merkel in a Berlin meeting last week.
However, speaking to reporters in Leinster House today, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams (pictured) said the comments from both Mr Kenny and Mr Martin mean a referendum on a united Ireland is now on the agenda - with the post-Brexit vote's system for Britain leaving the EU meaning such a decision could be made within four years.
"The British decision to leave it [the EU] could take two years to negotiate out, and then another two years to negotiate an agreement [between Britain and the EU], so there is a time frame there.
"I would like to see a border poll yesterday, but the Taoiseach's language was qualified in so far as he said it won't happen for some time, but he's embraced the concept and will make that part of the Brexit negotiations and that's good," Mr Adams said.
The Sinn Fein leader said he does not know what is behind Fine Gael and Fianna Fail's "change of heart" on the issue, but said he welcomed the move from "outright rejection to embrace".
Asked how a referendum could be brought forward when the new Northern Ireland secretary James Brokenshire has already ruled it out, he added: "Sometimes secretaries of state on their first day can be very, very short sighted.
"The technical trigger for this [a referendum] is the secretary of state, of course, but that was never going to be his or her decision, that is a decision for his and her governments. It was always above the pay scale of the secretary of state."
'Pathetic and deliberately mischievous'
Meanwhile, comments by Enda Kenny raising the prospect of a future vote on Irish unity were branded pathetic and deliberately mischievous by senior unionist Ian Paisley Jnr, the Press Association reports..
Mr Paisley said he "expected better" from Taoiseach Enda Kenny after Mr Kenny said EU/UK negotiations should factor in the possibility that a border poll could be held in years to come.
Referring to recent intense scrutiny of Mr Kenny's role as leader of the minority government, the DUP MP said the Taoiseach's time would be better served concentrating on his own future.
"It's quite pathetic - one would have expected better from him," said Mr Paisley.
"The Taoiseach is being deliberately mischievous...Enda should really be concentrating on his own future because we all know that he'll be lucky if he's still Taoiseach in 18 months.
"He's trying to 'out-green' Fianna Fail for electoral gain, that's all they are about."
He added: "There's not going to be a border poll, that's the bottom line."
Former singing priest Tony Walsh has been jailed for seven and half years for raping a boy three times, once with a crucifix.
Anthony Walsh (aged 62) committed the offence at a time when the maximum penalty for this offence, then legally termed indecent assault, was two years.
However, today Judge Elma Sheahan used her discretion to impose consecutive sentences.
The Criminal Law (Rape) Amendment 1990 increased the maximum penalty for sexually assaulting a child under 17 to 14 years.
He forced the child to have sex twice, once in the parochial house in his parish and on another occasion in a tunnel under the Phoenix Park. He also used a crucifix to rape the boy.
Walsh told the jury during the trial at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court last month that he never knew the boy and said he never assaulted him.
Walsh, formerly of North Circular Road, Dublin had pleaded not guilty to five counts of indecently assaulting the boy on dates between January 1980 and December 1982.
The boy was aged between 10 and 13 years old at the time of the abuse.
Read: Read More: Former 'singing' priest who claimed 'we are all victims' is convicted of abusing boy five times
Following a three-day trial, the jury of two women and 10 men returned verdicts of guilty on all counts after approximately one hour of deliberations.
Garda Tara Corrigan told Fiona McGowan BL, prosecuting, at a sentence hearing earlier this month, that Walsh has 17 previous convictions, from 1995 to 2015, for indecently assaulting young boys and two girls.
Walsh fought two trials and pleaded guilty to the other offences. He is currently serving a sentence and is not due for release until 2021.
Judge Sheahan had adjourned the case having heard evidence.
She said today that the rape charges were the most grave and warranted the maximum penalty of two years.
She imposed a further 15 months on the two remaining indecent assault charges and ordered that all of the sentences should run consecutively.
Judge Sheahan said she would reduce the total sentence of eight and half years by one year having taken into account the totality of the prison sentence served and to be served by Walsh.
She backdated the sentence to Walsh's conviction last month meaning he is now due for release in June 2023.
The judge said Walsh's abuse of the victim had long-lasting consequences for the man in his childhood and into his adolescence and adulthood which had plagued his life to date.
She said the accused had violated his position of trust in a grievous way and it was difficult to find any mitigating factors considering that he ran a full and complete defence of denial.
There is no indication that he accepts the jury's verdict and he has shown no expression of remorse, Judge Sheahan said.
During the trial, Walsh told the jury that his offending in relation to children started in 1980 and continued to 1986.
He said a number of the children told their families what was happening and he was called in by the Archbishop in 1986.
He said he was sent for six months treatment in the UK and on his return home he was made a hospital chaplain.
He said he first came to garda attention in 1995 in relation to one incident.
In 1997 he pleaded guilty to offences involving five boys in the period 1980 to 1986. Asked why he pleaded, Walsh replied because I was guilty.
He was sent to prison for 10 years initially and this was reduced to six years on appeal. He was released in 2002.
In 2010 he pleaded guilty in two further cases and not guilty in one case but was convicted by a jury.
In 2013 he pleaded guilty to two more cases. Walsh said that in 2015 he was convicted by a jury in relation to the sexual abuse of a girl.
He said that in 2002, four months after his release like a bolt out of the blue he was featured on the TV program Cardinal Sins.
I was stunned because I had served my time he told the court.
There was no re-offending whatsoever and suddenly I was back into the law and the courts.
Ciaran OLoughlin SC, defending, submitted at the earlier sentence hearing that, as the victim had made a statement to gardai in April 2011, these offences could have been dealt with the same time as Walshs most recent case in 2015.
He suggested to Judge Sheahan that there was a likelihood that the judge would have imposed a concurrent term and not extended Walshs term of imprisonment if this happened.
SINGAPORE, July 19 -- "Although the Chinese government has dismissed the ill-founded arbitration unilaterally initiated by the Aquino III administration, China remains open to the Philippines, and disputes in South China Seashouldn't hamper China-ASEANrelations," Zhao Qizheng, former minister of China's State Council Information Office, said here on Tuesday.
Zhao made such remarks at the Media Briefing on South China Sea following Monday's Think Tank Seminar on South China Sea and Regional Cooperation and Development held in Singapore.
Zhao said China fully understand that ASEAN countries have common interests on the whole, and each country in the region has its own interests. China and ASEAN should maintain friendly exchanges, as well as friendly relations.
"Although the Chinese government has dismissed the ill-founded arbitration unilaterally initiated by the Aquino III administration, China remains open to the Philippines, and disputes in South China Sea shouldn't hamper China-ASEAN relations," Zhao stressed.
The former minister said the development of China-ASEAN relations should be based on common interests. China and ASEAN countries could deepen political communications, strengthen economic interactions as well as enhance cultural exchanges in the future.
Li Guoqiang, deputy director of Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, echoed with Zhao's view.
Li said ASEAN is the priority of China's diplomacy with neighboring countries, the two sides have enjoyed friendly relations in various fields. China supports the integrity of ASEAN, and China is willing to cooperate with a united ASEAN.
As for the award issued by the ad hoc arbitral tribunal, Li said that China's position has been made very clear, and he expected ASEAN countries can understand China's position, while making the related parties back to negotiation table.
"Disputes in the South China Sea isn't an issue between China and ASEAN, and the disputes should be and only can be solved by negotiations between the claimants," Li added.
Li also stressed that China and ASEAN should work together to maintain peace and stability in the region. "China can only play one part, the two sides need to join hands and move towards each other to secure peace and stability."
Organized by the Institute of Chinese Borderland Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the one-day seminar attracted more than 20 experts from academic institutes in China and Southeast Asian countries, including Thailand, Cambodia and Malaysia.
Police in the North are set to beef-up resources dedicated to tackling paramilitary-linked criminality as part of a Stormont action plan to finally eradicate the terror groups.
The strategy also includes a pledge from the Irish and UK governments to "consult to consider" new short-term weapon decommissioning mechanisms, if the requirement arises in the future.
The prioritisation of PSNI funding to build investigative capacity for paramilitary criminality and the potential of spending more on community policing are among measures outlined in the powersharing executive's blueprint for tackling paramilitarism.
The 22 page document is the administration's response to an independent panel report that recommended actions required to put an end to terrorist organisations.
The panel was set up as part of the landmark Fresh Start political agreement struck between the Democratic Unionists, Sinn Fein and the Irish and UK governments last year. The accord resolved a political crisis sparked by a murder linked to the Provisional IRA.
The panel, which made 43 recommendations, said paramilitary activity had greatly reduced over the course of the peace process, with the main groups remaining on ceasefire, but some members and former members continued to engage in violence, intimidation and other crime.
Six weeks after the report was published, the Stormont Executive has now revealed a five-year action plan to implement the recommendations. The steps will be supported by 50m (59.42m), jointly funded by Stormont and the UK government.
The strategy will see:
The Irish and UK governments setting up an Independent Reporting Commission (IRC) to monitor progress in ending paramilitarism
Initiatives to prevent young people being drawn into paramilitarism
Review of police protocols for engaging with paramilitaries
Dedicated restorative justice fund and potential centre of excellence
Reform of trial committal proceedings
Review of use of bail, to examine concerns people charged with terror offences are being released from custody too often
Mechanisms to allow prosecutors to challenges certain terror linked sentences
Amendment of employment regulations to remove some obstacles preventing former paramilitaries finding work
Improving former paramilitaries' access to financial services, adoption and travel advice
Steps to expedite process of obtaining US travel visa for former paramilitaries
Review of separated prison regime for those charged with terror offences
Address educational under-achievement in areas where paramilitaries remain strong
Steps to reduce segregation in housing and education
The Norths First Minister Arlene Foster, Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness and Justice Minister Claire Sugden said the action plan was a "challenging and ambitious" programme of work.
In a joint statement they said: "Delivering this action plan requires recognition of the excellent work under way in communities to support and complete the transition away from paramilitarism. It will require partnership working across the Executive and with the UK and Irish Governments, law enforcement agencies, the public, private and voluntary and community sectors, and importantly, with local communities."
The Union of Students in Ireland is calling on the Government to change the law to protect victims of revenge porn.
It has also urged young people to respect the privacy and dignity of anyone they are intimate with.
Gardai have an extremely limited scope to act on revenge porn, said USI President Annie Hoey.
Annie Hoey
While there is very strong legislation and consequences for child victims, there isnt much legal protection for adult victims.
In terms of privacy and public safety, Irish law is absolutely clear and protective for child victims who have been harassed, bullied or engaged with in a sexual manner either in conversation or physically, and the distribution of images of a paedophilic nature; but when adults have their privacy violated online and become the subject of shared intimate photos or footage, their legal protection is much weaker.
USI is against any type of non-consensual footage being shared on any platform. We are urging the government to take action and change the law to protect the victims of revenge porn.
Read: Read More: Revenge porn 'makes you feel you've lost control of your life', says victim
USI said revenge porn is not a copyright issue, as the sharer might be the owner of the content so copyright violation doesnt apply.
Annie Hoey said even if the content is destroyed in its original source, social media sharing just takes one click and things can go viral in seconds and spiral out of control almost immediately.
We are urging students and young people to respect the privacy and dignity of anyone they are intimate with. Revenge porn is a disgusting violation of trust and privacy. Hoey said.
Those who contribute to this violation include the hacker, the hosting website, users who view the content, people who share the content and news reports that tell you where to find it.
The UK's press regulator has received more than 300 complaints about remarks by The Sun columnist Kelvin MacKenzie criticising Channel 4 News for using a journalist wearing a hijab to present a report on the Nice massacre.
The Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) said the complaints, which still have to be assessed, have related to accuracy, harassment and discrimination.
Mr MacKenzie, a former editor of the newspaper, had questioned whether it was right that Fatima Manji, a journalist who wears the traditional Muslim head covering, should have been allowed to appear on screen during Friday's Channel 4 News programme.
Stating that he could "hardly believe my eyes" Mr MacKenzie asked in his Monday column: "Was it appropriate for her to be on camera when there had been yet another shocking slaughter by a Muslim?"
French-Tunisian father-of-three Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove a hired lorry through crowds gathered on the the Promenade des Anglais in Nice to celebrate Bastille Day on Thursday. He killed 84 people and injured dozens more before he was shot dead by police.
In a statement Channel 4 News said: "The comments published in The Sun today by Mr MacKenzie are offensive, completely unacceptable, and arguably tantamount to inciting religious and even racial hatred.
"It is wrong to suggest that a qualified journalist should be barred from reporting on a particular story or present on a specific day because of their faith.
"Fatima Manji is an award-winning journalist. We are proud that she is part of our team and will receive, as ever, our full support in the wake of his comments."
Former Conservative Party chairman and foreign minister Baroness Warsi wrote to The Sun's editor in chief Tony Gallagher, branding it a "divisive column".
In the letter, which she shared on Twitter, Baroness Warsi wrote: "Just as politicians should carry the responsibility for xenophobic and toxic campaigning that divides communities so journalists should be held accountable for 'shock jock' writing which simply perpetuates stereotypes, demonises and attempts to hold a whole community accountable for the actions of an individual."
A spokesman for The Sun said it was making "no comment" on the issue.
Mr MacKenzie is a former editor of the newspaper when it published a front page which criticised victims of the Hillsborough disaster.
The Sun want's you to BeLeave? Umm remember the truth about Hillsborough? #DontBuyTheSun pic.twitter.com/MVghbyM0oz Brexit Watch #BrexitWatch (@ukvoteremain) June 14, 2016
The newspaper has recently published an online article by Muslim writer Anila Baig.
She reflected on Mr MacKenzie's article which suggested the broadcaster had been deliberately provocative in putting Ms Manji in front of the camera on the day of the Nice attack.
Ms Baig described Ms Manji as "a professional who has been working for the programme for four years, not someone dragged in off the street just because she's wearing a scarf on her head".
Her article states: "The fact that Fatima can present a news bulletin and also wears a headscarf shows how great Britain is."
Donald Trumps wife has been accused of plagiarising a 2008 speech made by Michelle Obama when she spoke to the US Republican National Convention last night.
The tycoon was introducing his wife Melania, who made her highest-profile appearance of the presidential campaign so far as she assured voters that her husband will unite a divided nation.
Delegates in Cleveland, Ohio were gushing about the speech, with John Salm, from Virginia, saying: "I think she's going to be a great asset. She's just magnificent. Honestly she reminds me of Jackie Kennedy."
"I think everybody fell in love with her tonight," said Deedee Kelly, from Omaha, Nebraska. "She seemed to talk from her heart, she really did."
In Mrs Trump's speech, she said: "From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise, that you treat people with respect. They taught and showed me values and morals in their daily life."
In Mrs Obama's 2008 speech in Denver, Colorado, she said: "And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: like, you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond, that you do what you say you're going to do, that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them and even if you don't agree with them."
Another passage with notable similarities that followed two sentences later in Mrs Trump's speech addressed her attempts to instil those values in her son.
"We need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow," Mrs Trump said. "Because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them."
In the First Lady's 2008 speech, she said: "Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values and to pass them onto the next generation, because we want our children - and all children in this nation - to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work hard for them."
"I'd like to thank two of my speech writers, Copy and Paste, for their help in preparing my remarks" #FamousMelaniaTrumpQuotes Jim Stilwell (@JimmyHack) July 19, 2016
"I'm so proud of my husband Barack." #FamousMelaniaTrumpQuotes bleustreak (@bleustreak) July 19, 2016
The Trump campaign today responded in a statement that said her "immigrant experience and love for America shone through in her speech", and did not mention Mrs Obama.
"In writing her beautiful speech, Melania's team of writers took notes on her life's inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking," Trump spokesman Jason Miller said.
White House officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In an interview with NBC News taped ahead of her convention appearance and posted online early Tuesday, Mrs Trump said of her speech: "I wrote it", adding that she had "a little help".
Her star turn on the opening night of the convention captivated a Republican crowd that had rarely heard from her during her husband's bruising White House campaign.
Mr Trump emerged from the shadows to declare to cheers: "We're going to win, we're going to win so big."
He introduced "my wife, an amazing mother, an incredible woman" and returned to the stage after her speech to kiss her and lead the cheers of the crowd.
The Slovenian-born former model, 24 years his junior, presented a softer and gentler Donald Trump during her 10-minute speech.
The 46-year-old did not dwell on her humble upbringing in an industrial town in what was then a part of communist Yugoslavia, but she spoke of her family, her sister Ines, her "elegant and hardworking mother Amalia," and her father Viktor, who "instilled in me a passion for business and travel".
Donald Trump has previously praised speeches by Michelle Obama.
The speech came after Republican divisions had erupted on the convention floor earlier after party officials adopted rules by a shouted voice vote as anti-Trump forces seeking to derail his nomination responded with loud and angry chants.
Outside the building, hundreds of Trump supporters and opponents held rival rallies half-a-mile apart, with Cleveland Police reporting there had been no violence, or damage to property.
Mrs Trump's appearance was a sharp contrast to most of the night's other speakers, who painted a bleak picture of an American future that they said only her husband can correct.
A parade of speakers told emotional stories about loved ones killed while serving in the military or at the hands of people in the United States illegally.
They cast the difficult times as a direct result of weak leadership by President Barack Obama and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who spent four years in the administration.
"Who would trust Hillary Clinton to protect them? I wouldn't," former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said in one of the night's most fiery addresses.
Rudy Giuliani says he is 'sick and tired' of the defamation of @realDonaldTrump #RNCinCLE https://t.co/xBvbS7Iejs Sky News Australia (@SkyNewsAust) July 19, 2016
Many of the party's past and future stars were missing from the event, underscoring the concerns Republican leaders have with closely aligning themselves with Mr Trump.
That left him with an eclectic array of supporters, including Happy Days actor Scott Baio and Willie Robertson, star of the reality TV series Duck Dynasty, who took the stage with an American flag bandanna wrapped around his head.
PSG was established two years ago via the merger of established PR firms Pembroke Communications and Slattery Communications.
PSGs existing senior management team, including chief executive Mick OKeeffe and executive chairman Padraig Slattery, will continue in their roles.
They will report to Charles Watson, chairman of Teneo International, who will join the PSG board.
Brendan Murphy, who heads Teneos Irish operations, will become vice chairman of PSG.
Speaking yesterday, Mr Kelly said the move further strengthens Teneos capabilities in Ireland and across Europe.
Ireland is a critical market for many multinational corporations today, and a great place to invest in the current volatile post-Brexit environment, said Mr Kelly.
The addition of PSG provides our clients with access to additional world-class expertise and capabilities.
PSG chief Mick OKeeffe said his company has created a new structure for Irish communications firms, while Teneo has created a new global consultancy model.
We believe the enlarged consulting platform this will bring us will be of enormous benefit both to our clients and our team and gives us a massive competitive advantage, he added.
The bank suggests turning the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) into the regions leading fiscal authority with competences encompassing those currently carried out by the European Commission and the European Central Bank.
It also wants a change in the terms of new government debt issues to allow easier restructuring and a maturity extension should the country enter an aid programme.
With consensus lacking for a fiscal and political European union, the regions economic framework must be strengthened within existing treaties, the Bundesbank said in its monthly bulletin yesterday.
Further reforms should aim at anchoring a stability-oriented fiscal policy in member states, limiting systemic contagion effects as much as possible and strengthening financial stability overall.
The Frankfurt-based central bank suggested that the ESM, whose competences are currently largely limited to issuing debt to finance loans to eurozone member states, could take the lead in assessing economic prospects, debt sustainability and financial needs of a country asking for a bailout.
Those tasks have so far rested with the so-called troika of European Commission, ECB, and International Monetary Fund.
The ESM would also oversee any aid programme and negotiate between the government and creditors if a restructuring is unavoidable.
The Bundesbank also suggested terms for newly issued bonds that would automatically extend their maturities for the duration of an assistance programme without triggering a credit event.
The ESMs firepower would be increased and bailout programmes could be smaller in size.
ARM Holdings, which Japanese internet giant SoftBank, has agreed to buy for 24.3bn (29bn), is the worlds biggest designer of these semiconductors.
Founded in 1990 in Cambridge, and today employing about 4,000 people, the company focuses on small, low-power devices, while industry leader Intel leads in desktop and laptop personal computers.
The market moved in ARMs favour as mobile phones began to proliferate.
Now its designs are in more than 95% of the worlds smartphones including every iPhone and Samsung Galaxy product accounting for an estimated total of 45% of ARMs sales.
Televisions, medical equipment, cars, and internet-connected home appliances also use its designs.
The ubiquity of ARMs chips, and its related patent portfolio, led SoftBank to offer such a large sum for the company. However, unlike Intel, ARM does not actually manufacture semiconductors.
Instead, it licences its designs to companies such as Samsung, which own the fabrication plants required to manufacture the parts.
The business strategy is immensely lucrative, freeing the company of the costly job of building such plants. In 2015, the company earned 339.7m, on sales of 968.3m.
Designing chips is time-intensive, technically challenging work. ARM has excelled as a designer-for-hire, creating systems for other companies to plug into their devices.
Even so, it is being challenged because of plateauing demand for smartphones, impacting ARM customers such as Apple.
Selling to SoftBank may give the company a longer runway to build products for emerging technologies, including future automobiles.
Softbank chairman Masayoshi Son sees ARMs future in being inside the legion of products that are becoming internet-connected, from street lamps to air conditioners, washing machines to drones so-called internet of things devices.
The UK currency also advanced against the euro as Bank of England policy maker Martin Weale said firmer evidence was needed on the impact of Brexit before the central bank considered additional stimulus.
The pound surged last week after the Bank of England left policy unchanged.
That decision had surprised markets, where futures contracts had largely priced in a rate cut.
The ARM deal may confound some traders who were expecting Brexit would deter new investment and further undermine the pound.
The currency was also supported in recent days by the appointment of Theresa May as the UKs prime minister, removing uncertainty as to who would lead Britain through its EU departure.
Sterling was the best performer among its Group-of-10 peers yesterday.
Its a $32bn (28.9bn) purchase market participants tend to front-run M&A movements, said Marshall Gittler, the head of investment research at FXPrimus Europe in Limassol, Cyprus.
This is a huge amount of money that is obviously going to flow into the UK, he said.
The pound climbed 0.8% to $1.3296 in late trading in London, adding to last weeks 1.8% gain, its best since March.
Sterling appreciated 0.4% to 83.31p against the euro.
However, analysts remain pessimistic on the pound, predicting it will fall more than 4% to $1.27 by year-end.
Even with the appointment of Ms May and her cabinet, the outcome of negotiations for exiting the EU is far from certain.
Reports this week from June and July will signal how the economy performed around the time of the Brexit vote.
Mr Weale more or less wants to see incoming data thats actually an indication of the economy during the Brexit process, said Manuel Oliveri, a currency strategist at Credit Agricoles corporate and investment-banking in London.
That should leave the currency quite sensitive to incoming data releases, he said.
SoftBank is offering a 43% premium to Fridays closing price in the Japanese companys biggest deal ever.
An illustration shows a young man visiting online gambling site. [Illustration: daily.cnnb.com.cn]
Cyberspace Administration of China has ordered an investigation into complaints regarding Baidu, China's search engine giant.
Chinese netizens have recently complained about the Internet giant's late-night promotion of gambling sites.
The company previously responded to the complaints, claiming it was the gambling sites themselves that were breaking the rules and unilaterally initiating illegal marketing.
The Internet giant published a statement via its official weibo account saying that the gambling sites in question opened accounts on Baidu's subordinate online marketing service, e.baidu.com at the end of April.
Baidu also said it had reported the case to the police, and collection of evidence for an investigation was underway.
Futures declined as much as 2.3% in New York, erasing gains triggered by the attempted coup on Friday.
Oil tankers are loading and unloading at Turkeys ports and supplies are arriving in ships and pipelines from neighbouring countries, an energy ministry official said on Sunday, asking not to be identified in line with ministry rules.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered reprisals for the attempt to oust him.
Oils decline after gains on Friday is a response to the knowledge that the pipelines continue to flow through the country, which is a main carrier of crude to Western markets, Bart Melek, head of global commodity strategy at TD Securities in Toronto, said.
At this point, theres very little indication that this is going to change, so the market will continue to respond to broad supply-demand fundamentals, he added.
Brent for September settlement declined 94c, or about 2%, to $46.67 (42.15) a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange. The global benchmark crude traded at a premium of $1.04 to the equivalent contract for West Texas Intermediate.
WTI crude for August delivery fell 82c to $45.13 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange in New York. The contract had closed 0.6% higher at $45.95 a barrel on Friday.
The Turkish Straits, including the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, are one of the worlds major chokepoints for seaborne crude, with about 2.9m barrels of oil passing through daily in 2013, the latest year of available data from the US Energy Information Administration.
No cargoes have been halted since large tankers were barred from sailing in the Bosphorus waterway near Istanbul for several hours on Saturday, a port agent said.
The country is also home to pipelines that transport crude and condensate from nations including Iraq and Azerbaijan to the port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean Sea in southern Turkey.
BP, operator of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline from Azerbaijan via Georgia, confirmed that oil was flowing uninterrupted.
The unsuccessful uprising within Turkeys military has, however, dashed hopes of reviving travel bookings for what remains of the peak mid-year travel season, following a 10% decline in visitors to the country in the first quarter of this year.
The number of international visitors to Turkey is expected to decline 5.2% this year to 32.9m, according to Euromonitor International.
Shares in Bank of Ireland, AIB, and Permanent TSB were hit hard as sterling slumped against the euro in the wake of the vote.
The focus has now extended beyond the slumping value of sterling to whether economic conditions in the UK will worsen.
The market continues to try to get a grip on the likely washback on the banks and the economy here from the UK decision to leave the EU.
All three major Irish lenders are due to issue earnings reports next week, and markets will also be watching for what some of the UKs largest banks have to say about their prospects when they too report their first-half results.
Emer Lang at Davy Stockbrokers said the banks here will be quizzed on what has happened since June 23 and whether any potential hit will be confined to sterling, or whether they expect demand for loans in the UK to slow.
Any withering of loans demand would send out signals about the wider implications for a slowing of the UK economy.
Although clawing back some losses, Bank of Ireland shares have fallen 30% since the referendum, and are now down almost 45% this year.
Permanent TSB shares yesterday rose slightly.
The shares have, however, dropped 57% this year amid concerns about whether it will be forced to follow the large mortgage cuts announced by rivals.
Thinly traded AIB shares have risen almost 2% since the UK referendum.
Davy reiterated that Bank of Irelands plans to resume dividend payments and how it will deal with the Brexit uncertainty will be under the spotlight.
The broker in recent weeks reduced its forecast for the proportion of earnings the bank will likely pay out in dividends and predicts continuing Brexit-driven pressure on its pension deficit in the near term.
Bank of Ireland has long said it plans to resume paying dividends based on this years earnings.
It will likely report lower levels of bad-loan costs, while, given the high degree of uncertainty post Brexit, outlook comments particularly regarding managements ambition to re-instate dividends and its strategy for the UK business will be closely scrutinised and will arguably be the key area of focus on July 29 [results day], Davy said in research published yesterday.
AIB, which reports its first-half earnings on July 28, will likely report improvements in its net interest margin and in new lending, while its UK operations will come under scrutiny following the referendum result, especially given the notable contribution 30% to 2015 lending activity, the broker said.
AIBs pension deficit could stall capital growth at the bank, it said.
Meanwhile, at Permanent TSB, Davy said its first-half results, on July 27, will show an underlying improvement at the lender.
The effects of the Brexit vote will play a role in future months, with the sale of the CHL loan book in the UK to be delayed to the middle of 2018, the broker predicts.
The outlook post-Brexit is likely to be a key focus on results day, said Davy.
In particular, Brexit has heightened the uncertainty in relation to the EU-mandated deleveraging both timing and price a necessary hurdle on the path to sustainability.
An incident on OConnell Street involving a bus left her bruised on the cobblestones, and in further danger if left uncared for. She wishes to thank some very helpful locals who helped her onto the nearby footpath to safety.
Martha from the Mojave Desert in California was like any tourist from the States visiting the Emerald Isle. Possessing a giddy excitement and a quintessential urge to photograph every sinew of the Forty Shades of Green, her camera and phone decided to pack in whilst visiting Clonmacnoise. Did we mention she was a tourist?
I don't have any pictures of myself in Dublin because my camera and cell phone both died at Clonmacnoise. I was taking pictures there and watched the batteries die before my eyes. It took ten days to get a charge on my cell phone so I could at least use that for a few pictures before we left!
One of Martha's many snaps from Clonmacnoise
Trips to Clonmacnoise and Newgrange preceded her travels to the capital. Im sure her cameras battery was delighted!
I have to say that Newgrange is the most amazing place in the universe.
Friday, 3rd June was the trip to Dublin. A bus from Kells took her and her sister into downtown Dublin. Ah, America.
The bus was late in arriving and a rush down OConnell Street for a noon bus tour ensued.
America mode was still very much on Marthas mind as her sister dashed across OConnell Streets hectoring midday vehicle activity.
After her sister rushed across the street, Martha followed,
I have to admit that I somehow forgot that vehicles move on the left side of the road so when my sister dashed out into the road, I dashed behind her, looked to my left, was secure in the knowledge that the road to my left was wide open.
"At that point, I heard a honk on my right and saw a green, massive, racing bus coming down on me
"I realized that I couldnt reach the other side so I spun around, stepped forward, and slammed onto the cobblestone street.
"Then I saw the back wheels of the bus and knew in my mind that the tires were going to crush me. I balled up my feet and legs and that is all that I can remember except for a womans face in front of me asking if I was okay. I wasnt.
Badly bruised and dazed, she was helped to her feet and carried to the nearby footpath by two men. A woman held her bags as she attempted to gather and compose herself.
Teary-eyed and flustered, she didnt get a chance to thank the three life-saving locals for their altruistic endeavours. Thats when she reached out to us.
The two men held me up, the wonderful woman held my bags and handed them to me, and I struggled to get my breath. One of the men said, You take care of yourself, and through my tears I nodded.
"Then as fast as the evil bus whizzed past me, these kind, wonderful strangers were gone. I was never able to thank them for saving my life. I owe them my life and I mean that very literally.
Martha has an affinity to Ireland. Maybe not the usual "distant digging within the family tree to find an Irish relative" affinity, but more so a lure via her sisters trips to Ireland at least once a year from the mid-70s onwards.
During this period, the first trip to Ireland her sister took was as an exchange student helping to excavate Newgrange but she had only returned there once since the exchange in 1975.
This time round Marthas sister asked would she accompany her to Ireland for a Newgrange trip and to check out the sites and scenes of the 1916 Commemoration. Martha duly obliged and looked forward to her third trip to our little island.
Martha's injuries from the incident
On returning home, Martha received MRI scans this past week on her injuries. They showed no breaks or fractures but severe bruising on both knees to the bone and on the right leg to the bone along with some lateral ligament damage which could take up to a year to heal.
Hopefully, with this piece, we can find the three OConnell-Street heroes who showed sheer solidarity to come to someones aid when in dire need.
We wish Martha the very best in her recovery and hopefully the next trip to Ireland will leave her unscathed.
The package includes a 350m conditional adjustment aid measure to be implemented by member states from which Ireland will receive 11.1m and a 150m EU-wide measure to support voluntary reduction in milk production.
Agriculture Minister Michael Creed welcomed the Commissions two-pronged approach to dealing with the issue.
He said Irelands views in relation to supply management are well known.
It did not want the package to be focused exclusively on production discipline, although there were strong demands for that from some member states.
The fact that 70% of the package has been directed to adjustment aid was very welcome, he said.
In relation to the use of these funds, he said he had argued strongly that the maximum possible flexibility needs to be given to members states.
While we still await full details, which we will examine closely, the flexibility indicated by the Commissioner to provide liquidity support to farmers is welcome, Mr Creed said.
He added he was pleased the Commission had responded to demands from Ireland and others by extending public intervention for skimmed milk powder and private storage aid schemes to February 2017.
The package also includes provision for advance payment of key farm support payments up to 70% of direct payments and 85% for area-based rural development programme payments from October 16.
Contactless payments allow customers pay with their cards without entering a PIN.
Latest consumer research shows that 54% of debit and credit card owners use a contactless card when paying for goods and services.
The cap on contactless payments doubled last October, from 15 to 30, but a survey just published by BOI Payment Acceptance found that 11.33 is the average contactless payment.
Even though spending remains on the low side, 42% would like to see the 30 limit on contactless payments increased.
However, there needs to be greater promotion of the payment system with 45% unable to correctly identify the current limit.
Doubling the cap on spending in last years budget was part of a government plan to move Ireland into a cashless society.
The survey of 1,000 consumers, conducted by Amarach Research, found that time-saving is the biggest advantage of using contactless payments, with 58% of people saying it is quick.
Other benefits of using the system, according to the consumers, include safety, lower bank charges, and the convenience of not having to carry cash.
Almost six out of ten (57%) use contactless payments at least once a week, with 45% using the system a few times a week or more.
Using contactless payments is more common among 25-44-year-olds even though one in three do not know what the contactless symbol on their card means.
Almost one in four (38%) people said their card could not be used to make contactless payments, while more than one in four (28%) never thought of using it.
The top five items bought using contactless payments are food and groceries (75%), fuel (23%), alcohol (21%), clothes and shoes (21%), and newspapers and magazines (17%).
The survey found that debit cards are twice as common as credit cards, with 88% owning a debit card and 43% owning a credit card.
The vast majority of people aged between 35 and 44 are most likely (91%) to own a debit card, while the over-55s are most likely to own a credit card (59%).
BOI Payment acceptance is a payments technology alliance between Bank of Ireland and EVO Payments International.
BOI Payment Acceptance general manager Brian Cleary said there are more than 3m contactless debit or credit cards in Ireland and usage is growing rapidly.
Mr Cleary said contactless transactions now account for between 25% and 50% of all sales, depending on the sector.
Despite almost 40% of those surveyed claiming not to carry a contactless card, in reality, approximately 90% of all debit cards in Ireland are now contactless, he said.
Mr Cleary said the survey shows that one of the key steps in increasing contactless payments is to raise consumer awareness of the technology and its benefits.
Currently, over 45,000 Irish businesses offer contactless payment facilities and contactless is very quickly becoming the norm for consumers and businesses alike.
Mr Cleary said an accelerated reduction in cash transactions is expected over the next five years as businesses realise the advantages of using contactless cards instead of cash.
Mr Kenny has also promised to further strengthen Irelands lucrative corporate tax rate and hinted at reducing personal taxes.
The upcoming budget will be shaped by the challenges posed by Brexit, Mr Kenny said, adding that a second secretary general will be appointed to his department to specifically deal with Britains exit from Europe.
At the MacGill Summer School last night, Mr Kenny said a vote on whether the North should join the Republic should be considered during Brexit talks.
Mr Kenny said: If there is a clear evidence of a majority of people wishing to leave the United Kingdom and join the Republic, then that should be catered for in the discussions that take place.
The discussions and negotiations that take place over the next period should take into account the possibility, however far out it might be, that the clause in the Good Friday Agreement might be triggered.
Comparing the situation to the Berlin Wall, he suggested that the North would be able to stay in the EU if it voted to unite with Ireland.
In the same way as East Germany was dealt with when the wall came down, and was able to be absorbed into West Germany, and not to have to have to go through a torturous and long process of applying for membership of the European Union, he said.
People said it would be impossible that Britain would leave the European Union, and that has taken place now by virtue of the Brexit referendum.
So in the context of discussions that will take place about the future, about the connections between the republic and Northern Ireland, between Northern Ireland and the UK and the EU, and our relationship with both, these are things that should be looked at in the context of that they might happen in some time in the future.
News: 4
BEIJING, July 19 -- China's northern coast will experience a storm surge from Tuesday evening to Wednesday, said China's National Marine Environmental Forecasting Center.
The center issued yellow warnings, third in the four-color warning system, for the ports of Qinhuangdao and Jingtang in north China's Hebei Province and blue warnings to other coast regions in Tianjin, Hebei and Liaoning.
The elevation may range from 50 to 150 cm and the peak is likely to arrive on Wednesday afternoon, the center statement said.
Meanwhile, waves measuring three to four meters will occur in the northern part of the Bohai Sea and Yellow Sea.
Several popular summer resorts along the coast have attracted a large crowd of tourists. The center urged them to stay away from the shore.
John Byrne, aged 28, of Stonebridge Avenue, Hartstown, Dublin, pleaded guilty to using a car without the owners consent and recklessly damaging it at the M3 motorway in Damastown on February 3, 2015.
Dublin Circuit Criminal Court heard yesterday that a Mercedes worth over 50,000 was stolen in Charlemont estate off Griffith Avenue, Dublin at about 4.30am on February 3. A short time later, the car was spotted by gardai travelling along the M3 motorway near the Navan Road and a pursuit was initiated.
The Project Arts Centre in Dublin's Temple Bar has received complaints about a 'Repeal the 8th' mural on the front wall of its premises.
The mural, by well-known street artist Maser, is in reference to abortion and repealing the Eight Amendment of the Irish Constitution. The 1983 constitutional amendment acknowledges the right to life of the unborn, equating it with the mothers right to life.
Maser's mural was commissioned by HunReal Issues, a new Irish website, aimed at making current affairs accessible to all. The mural was unveiled on July 8.
"We asked Maser to do a shareable graphic to put up on Facebook. He's very generous so he then said: 'if you find me a wall I'll paint it on the wall'," said Andrea Horan, who founded HunReal Issues alongside Snapchat star James Kavanagh.
"I started thinking about possible walls and places that would be open to being brave. I got on to Cian O'Brien (artistic director of the Project Arts Centre). I know they like to push boundaries with artists and their work. So this conversation-starting mural was something he was interested in," she added.
However, the Project Arts Centre began receiving complaints about the mural, since its unveiling 12 days ago.
"The complaints were about the content of the work and from people who felt we were using tax payers money inappropriately, but we didn't use any taxpayers money.
"Maser paid for all the art supplies himself and we are a private organisation limited by guarantee that's in receipt of State funding as well as private funding.
"There were no complaints from official bodies, they were from members of the public," Mr O'Brien told the Irish Examiner.
He explained his board stood by the decision to place the mural on the building and the artwork was in line with the centre's ethos.
"We follow the principle enshrined in the Arts Act 2003, of curatorial independence. I figured we would get some complaints.
"It's an important issue that needs to be talked about, that's what art should do, the idea that art should be neutral, I don't agree with that," Mr O'Brien said.
Ms Horan also said that she wanted to start a conversation, through the mural, and make people feel comfortable discussing abortion, regardless of their position on the issue.
"I wanted to make feminism accessible, where you didn't have to be academic to engage.
"With HunReal, we wanted to open the issues up to people who aren't necessarily engaged in politics and currents affairs and to make something they wanted to engage in," she said.
County engineer David Keane yesterday confirmed that contractors GMC had been appointed for a nine-month project, and work was expected to begin shortly on some schemes.
Priority, he said, was going to mains replacement in Newtownshandrum, Crookstown, Bantry/Kealkil and East Ferry, near Midleton.
He told a Northern Committee meeting in Mallow that the overall scheme had been approved by Irish Water, which oversees all water and sewerage contracts.
Councillors welcomed the news, saying that for many years residents had suffered from regular water outages, due to breaks in ageing mains pipes.
Cllr Tim Collins said he had raised the issue of Newtownshandrums water woes many years ago, describing the existing supply as an absolute disaster.
Its certainly good news for the people living there, Cllr Kay Dawson said of Mr Keanes hope that the contractor would start work in Newtownshandrum within three months.
The meeting also heard that Irish Water was looking for an alternative water supply for parts of Kilworth.
Dozens of householders complained that a previously proposed scheme would supply hard water and that this would damage household appliances, such as washing machines, boilers, and kettles.
Residents were against a new supply being routed from Downing bridge, which was already connected to a number of houses in the area and was being blamed for hard-water damage.
Councillors Frank OFlynn and Noel McCarthy said residents had threatened to sink their own wells, rather than be supplied with water from Downing bridge.
Mr Keane said Irish Water was aware of local concerns and was considering a supply from Macroney.
Meanwhile, both councillors also raised concern that 2.4kms of mains piping replacement needed for Kildorrery was not on the replacement programme. Cllr OFlynn said funding was put in place three years ago, by the Department of the Environment, for the Kildorrery project and asked what had happened to the funding.
Mr Keane said Irish Water was considering building a new reservoir in the village, before any water-mains replacement works could be undertaken, but could not give a timeframe for completion.
Compliance & Risks, based at the Eastgate Industrial Estate in Little Island and currently employing 56, said the jobs will be created over next three years.
Most of the jobs will be based at its Cork headquarters, across the areas of research, software development, client support, sales, and account management.
The company says its now in an aggressive development phase and the new jobs will support its growth within the technology, consumer goods, retail, industrial goods, and life sciences sectors.
Joe Skulski, the companys chief executive, said they had worked hard to establish themselves as a key regulatory service provider which works with many of the worlds top companies.
As an Irish company, we are delighted to create these 50 jobs which will facilitate our rapid expansion over the coming years. These jobs will strengthen our ability to deliver value, quality and innovation to our clients.
Company chairman Jim Costello said Cork was its global operations centre and he was looking forward to continuing to build on Compliance & Risks existing talented team.
It has a great product set and is already successful in its targeted and growing global marketplace.
Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government Simon Coveney said he was delighted an indigenous Irish company was creating more jobs.
This company is a perfect example of whats great about this country, with their highly skilled legal team, combined with innovative technology creating value for blue chip clients for nearly 15 years.
By further strengthening its workforce and in particular its global operations centre in Cork, the company is poised to continue its successful growth trajectory.
The Enterprise Ireland chief executive, Julie Sinnamon, said that her organisation was proud to be associated with an exciting phase in Compliance & Risks development.
Since yesterday, householders have to pay 12, up from 8 per lift, for the black bin (non-recyclable waste), and 7, up from 4 per lift, for the green bin (recyclables).
Affected customers were notified of the price hike by text over the weekend and were advised to top up by a minimum of 22, up from 20, to ensure no interruptions to service.
The Anti Austerity Alliance TD for Cork North Central, Mick Barry, said the price increase appear to fly in the face of the announcement by Environment Minister Simon Coveney that bin charges were to be frozen for a 12-month period.
Mr Barry said Country Clean needed to clarify its position immediately and he called on customers of the company not to hand over money above and beyond what they have been paying for the last year.
Country Clean, which provides a service to approximately 60,000 households mainly in Cork City and county, defended the price hikes yesterday, blaming its waiver system.
In a statement, the company said that it had continued to operate a waiver system (for personal hardship cases) at its own expense for five years after taking on local authority customers. However, there has been a reduction on the waiver provided, because, the company said, the presentation rate of pay-by-lift customers has dropped substantially over time (not putting out bins as often).
However, if pay-by-lift customers want to avoid the increases, they are quite welcome to change over to the flat rate system where there is no increase to charges as agreed with the minister, a spokesperson for Country Clean said.
Country Clean owner Dave ORegan told the Irish Examiner yesterday that very few of its customers, approximately 1,100 householders, are on its pay-by-lift system.
Housing Minister Simon Coveney will unveil the Governments long-term housing strategy which intends to address the housing crisis, homelessness, and rising rents.
Rapid-build housing using modern technology will deliver 1,500 units by the end of 2018, as part of the strategy. These units will go towards homelessness and have a shelf-life of 50 to 60 years.
The rapid builds will be actual houses and not modular units.
Social housing waiting lists will also be tackled through a 70m fund given to the Housing Agency to buy mainly vacant units from banks or investment firms. These units will then be sold on to local authorities and housing bodies, such as Cluid and Threshold. The money that comes back will be recycled, say officials, and go back into the general fund to continue buying up units for social housing. It is anticipated that up 1,600 units could be delivered by 2020.
The two initiatives will be announced today by Mr Coveney and Taoiseach Enda Kenny as they unveil the Governments much-anticipated housing strategy.
The strategy will also outline:
A help-to-buy grant for first time buyers, which will involve tax repayments to purchasers;
Plans to protect tenants when their accommodation is sold to other companies;
Initiatives to help meet Mr Coveneys target of delivering 25,000 housing units a year;
A special infrastructure fund to help build roads and bridges to facilitate developments;
A review of the rental sector later this year on how to protect tenants and address high rates.
The possibility of fast-tracking planning for large scale developments;
Free public transport for parents and children living in emergency accommodation.
The Programme for Government pledges to build 25,000 housing units a year by 2020. But Mr Coveney has said the amount will need to be higher, possibly up to 35,000, to make up for the deficit over the last decade.
He has said that building close to 25,000 a year in two years time is possible.
Currently, there is planning permission for 27,000 houses but there is enough zoned land around Dublin for 88,000 units. Nonetheless, only 4,400 units are in construction. The cost of building is the reason for the huge differences.
Other initiatives expected to be announced today to include incentives for developers to build more units and quicker.
In an interview with the Irish Examiner earlier this year, Mr Coveney said: I need to find ways of facilitating the building of significantly more houses than are being planned or delivered as soon as possible.
The minister also outlined emergency measures, including the buying up of unused state agency land banks to help build thousands of units. It is unclear if this will be included in the strategy.
It is expected that the first-time buyers grant will be considered as part of Octobers budget. There were warnings yesterday, though, that any top-ups given to buyers must not indirectly result in house and apartment prices rising further.
The Government, though, are especially keen to utilise vacant units for social housing. Last weeks census figures showed there are almost 200,000 vacant homes across the State. This represents almost 10% cent of the total housing stock.
Meanwhile, Labour has called for rents to be linked to the consumer price index and for a levy penalising developers hoarding land to be brought in quicker.
Launching its own housing plan yesterday, the party proposed broadening the remit of Nama into a housing agency.
The calls from the think-tank group came as it launched its pre-budget submission yesterday.
The group said capital funds need to be found to address the lack of social housing, and to fail to do so as a society would be very fundamentally flawed.
Mr Healy said Housing Minister Simon Coveney and the Government were only pretending they were going to deal with the scale of the reality, unless they plan to consider large investments from EU funds and off-balance-sheet options.
Ireland should apply for funding under the EU Structural Reform clause of the Growth and Stability Pact to tackle the housing crisis, said the SJI.
Short-term capital grants, which could be up to 1bn for Ireland, are available for countries to invest in infrastructure if it will save them money in the long term.
Mr Healy claimed the resource is ready-made for the Irish social housing crisis but that the Government has not examined it.
Dr Healy suggested the Government could set up a body to invest in social housing, off the States financial books. This special housing vehicle would be similar to Nama and be able to borrow money without Ireland falling foul of tight EU controls on State spending.
The resistance to taking the tough decisions to secure more funding for social housing was down to politicians who dont know the reality of the lives of people who are on waiting lists, said Dr Healy.
SJI said Ireland needs to put resources into social housing and rural broadband before tax cuts to the well-off and concessions to Brexit refugees from London.
The Governments focus on potential professional Brexit refugees moving to Dublin from London over the 90,000 families on the social housing waiting list would be very misplaced, it said.
SJIs proposals on tax include committing multi-nationals to paying at least 6% on profits declared in Ireland, and to look into seeking back-payments on previous underpaid tax returns.
The Irish Examiner understands that a formal announcement on the agreement is expected this week and is projected to yield savings for the State in the region of 785m.
The Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association, the Department of Health and the Health Service Executive are believed to be finalising the deal.
It has been reported the deal will, for the first time, result in a yearly downward only realignment of medicines.
The will be alignment price cut every August over the next four years and the basket of countries for price-setting will be expanded from nine to 14.
Medicine prices have been based on the average across Austria, Denmark, Belgium, France, Finland, Germany, Britain, Denmark and Spain. In future, Greece, Portugal, Sweden, Luxembourg and Italy will be included in any new pricing structure.
It is understood the new deal contains a clause that protects the drug companies from a drop in the value of sterling.
When talks between the IPHA and the State failed to reach an agreement earlier this year, the Government threatened legislation in a bid to bring the parties back to the table.
The Irish Pharmacy Union said it wanted to be given reasonable notice of the price reductions so they were not left holding stocks of medicines purchased at the old, higher prices.
It also warned that some patients might experience a disruption in the supply of their drugs because pharmacists could not get them at the new lower prices.
The IPU said a previous minister for health gave a commitment to the IPU that it would receive a minimum of two weeks notice of reimbursement price changes.
With no minister based in Kerry, a county council meeting in Tralee yesterday heard a call for the intervention of Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin in the saga over the Macroom- Ballyvourney bypass.
Kerry was without clout, the meeting was told.
Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII) officials told a Cork County Council delegation last week that while the Macroom road was in the Capital Investment Plan (2016-21), funding had not been allocated.
Mayor of Killarney Brendan Cronin, an Independent, said: It is quite clear that we, as a county, have no clout; we have no ministers, we have no say at the cabinet table. The only option is to join colleagues across the border in Cork.
Tralees Labour mayor Terry OBrien referred to the lack of a bypass at Adare and said Kerry was blocked at both main approaches.
Independent Killarney councillor Donal Grady appealed to Mr Martin to intervene and ensure the bypass went ahead. Fianna Fail are in government as much as Fine Gael, he claimed.
Independent councillor Michael Cahill said the campaign for the Macroom bypass had been going on for a quarter of a century.
The line of attack should be a joint venture between Cork County Council and ourselves, he said.
In a reference to Fine Gael TD Brendan Griffin, who campaigned on the bypass, Mr Gleeson said: A few months ago, pre-election, the side of the N22 was littered with posters saying the Macroom bypass was imminent.
The posters have gone, the election has gone, and only the hypocrisy persists. There is more to politics than deposing party leaders.
Meanwhile, in a letter to Kerry County Council chief executive Moira Murrell, TII regional manager Paul Moran said the N22 road scheme was still included in the Capital Investment Plan and we anticipate this will facilitate commencement of construction of the scheme in 2020.
Kevin Murphy, aged 40, of 38 Ardcarraig, Carrigaline, Co Cork, yesterday pleaded guilty to breaching a barring order by sending Deirdre Scannell a text message in the early hours of December 21 last.
Insp Fergal Foley said at Cork District Court that Ms Scannell and her sister went out socially on that night and she arrived home after 3am to receive a number of texts from her ex-husband.
The texts suggested Mr Murphy appeared to have known where Ms Scannell had been earlier in the night.
Insp Foley said some of the texts referred to ongoing domestic matters between the two parties. One of the texts, the subject of the charge, contained the words: You will regret everything.
Mr Murphy pleaded guilty to breaching a barring order by sending that particular text.
He had assault convictions but his solicitor Eddie Burke stressed they related to 14 years ago.
Mr Burke said the incident occurred at Christmas time and the defendant had been out drinking before he sent the text. He sent this stupid text. He was very apologetic through the course of interview by gardai, Mr Burke said.
Furthermore, the defendant had since given up drink and gone to Bruree, Co Limerick, for residential treatment for his drink problem and related aftercare.
Mr Burke said the domestic issues at the heart of the case were now being addressed through the proper channels by the defendant.
The solicitor asked the judge to consider not recording a conviction against the defendant for breaching a barring order.
I would be anxious that he would not be tainted with a conviction.
Judge Olann Kelleher adjourned the case until September and remarked: I find the facts proved. If he stays out of trouble I will see what I can do.
File photo of Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway.
Hailed as "the world's most profitable high-speed rail," the Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway has never disclosed specific numbers when it comes to earnings. However, a reporter from National Business Daily found in a document released by a railway shareholder on July 18 that in 2015, the gross revenue of the railway was 23.4 billion yuan, and the net profit was 6.6 billion yuan.
Although Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway has never disclosed its profit data to the public, the railway authority has said that it is the only profitable high-speed rail in China in the past five years.
A bond prospectus released in July by Tianjin Railway Construction Co. Ltd, a shareholder of Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway, shows that the total assets of the company amount to 181.5 billion yuan, with the total liabilities coming to 50.4 billion yuan. The total owners equity is 131.2 billion yuan, and the asset-liability ratio is 27.7 percent. In 2015, the gross revenue of Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway was 23.4 billion yuan, the total operating cost was 16.7 billion, the total profit was 6.7 billion and the net profit was 6.6 billion.
It is worth noting that, according to data released by the China Railway Corporation, Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway transported 24 million passengers in only its first six months of operation. In 2015, the route accommodated 130 million passengers. Based on this data, Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway earned a profit of about 50 yuan from each passenger in 2015.
A video of her garda interviews were played to the Central Criminal Court yesterday on the ninth day of her trial.
Marta Herda, aged 29, of Pairc Na Saile, Emoclew Road, Arklow, Co Wicklow, is charged with the murder of 31-year-old Csaba Orsos on March 26, 2013.
The Polish woman has pleaded not guilty to murdering the Hungarian at South Quay, Arklow.
They both worked at Brook Lodge Hotel in Aughrim and the trial heard that he was in love with her, but she did not feel the same.
Both had been in Ms Herdas car when it went into the water that morning. Ms Herda escaped but Mr Orsos body was found on a nearby beach later that day.
Detective Sgt Fergus OBrien was being cross-examined by the defence yesterday about the interviews that he had conducted with Ms Herda following her arrest in August 2013.
He agreed that not all of what she had said, which could be seen on the videos, had made it into the gardais handwritten memos. Segments of the videos were then played at the request of the defence.
If I would see him in the water, I was hoping I would try to save him, she said.
But my friend said: Dont even think of this. It is good that it didnt happen because then you would die to-gether.
She explained that her friend thought that he would have pulled her down.
She said that she was constantly thinking of what she should have done.
If I had driven a different way, she suggested.
She was asked what sort of person the deceased was.
I dont know if he was a good person or a bad person, she replied. For me, he was like a good-hearted person. However, she said she was afraid of him too.
He had a few personalities, she said.
She was asked if he was a nuisance. Yes, she replied.
She was asked if he was a pest.
Yes, she replied. He said he will prove to the whole world how much he loves me. She said she had never had a sexual relationship with him.
I said: I could never be with someone like you because you would lock me somewhere, she said.
The trial continues.
The 46-year-old victim said she feared she was going to be murdered in front of her four-year-old son after seeing the absolute determination of her husband to kill her.
She made the remarks during the sentence hearing of her husband who was convicted last June at the Central Criminal Court of raping and threatening to kill his wife over a three-month period after refusing to accept their marriage was over.
It was only the third conviction of rape within a marriage since marital rape was made illegal in 1990.
The 42-year-old man had his barrister read a letter of apology to the court for the hammer attack but made no reference to the rape or other charges.
Padraig Dwyer, defending, said his client was judged to be at a low risk of committing future violence and was ashamed of his actions.
Mary Rose Gearty, prosecuting, contested this, saying the accused had made phone calls from prison to his wife which showed he does not have a positive attitude towards her.
He will be sentenced on July 25.
In June at the Central Criminal Court, a jury convicted him of raping his wife in their home in May 2014, and of threatening to cut her face. He was also convicted of threatening to kill the woman the next day.
He had already pleaded guilty to attempting to cause serious harm to the woman and of assaulting her mother on August 7, 2014, during the hammer attack outside the mothers Dublin home.
The victims ordeal began at the start of 2014 when she told her husband of nine years she wanted a separation. Their marriage had been under strain. The man was jealous of the womans successful career and believed she was not spending enough time at home. He was also unhappy she was still breast-feeding their child up to two years of age.
On May 25, 2014, they were arguing when he picked up a carving knife and threatened to cut her face open. He then told her right, upstairs.
He raped her in the spare bedroom while telling her to open her eyes.
Shortly afterward she obtained a barring order, and the man rang her at her parents home and told her she was dead.
One day in early June, he followed her to her workplace and their sons creche and said next time he would bring a hammer.
On August 6 he rang her at home and said he was going to end things tonight. The next day he showed up at her parents house demanding to see their son. The woman and her mother refused to let him in. He said he had a present for the boy in his car and returned with a hammer.
He attacked both women.
A passer-by set his dog on the accused who swung the hammer at them. This man then chased the accused away and gardai found him nearby hiding behind a jeep.
Mr Dwyer said his client will find prison very difficult as a foreigner far away from his family. He said the accused was going through a depressive episode at the time and suffered by being separated from his son.
Malak Kuzbary Thawley, of Brusna Cottages, Blackrock, Co Dublin died on May 8 2016 at the National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street, Dublin.
A short inquest into the womans death opened at Dublin Coroners Court before Coroner Dr Myra Cullinane.
The womans husband, Alan Thawley was not present in court but was represented by Senior Counsel Liam Reidy. Dr Rhona Mahony, Master of the National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street sat in the public gallery.
Ms Thawley, a teacher, was originaly from Syria and was expecting her first baby with her husband, Alan Thawley. She was seven weeks pregnant when a scan identified an ectopic pregnancy.
The inquest heard that Dr Charles Goh identified the womans body to Garda James Verner of Pearse St Garda Station on May 9 2016. A post mortem was carried out the following day, May 10, by Consultant Pathologist Dr Thomas Crotty at St Vincents Hospital.
Dr Crotty gave the cause of death as a tear in the abdomen during the course of laparoscopic therapy due to an ectopic pregnancy in the right fallopian tube.
The court heard that an internal inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the womans death was commenced by the hospital in early June and is ongoing. Mr Reidy said the stated purpose of this internal inquiry was to establish the facts, identify systems failures within the hospital and make recommendations to prevent any identifiable future risk.
The National Maternity Hospital set up its own internal inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death with the stated purpose to identify systems failure within the hospital, Mr Reidy said.
The report is now at draft final stage, Mr Reidy said and Mr Thawley has requested all documentation from the hospital that the inquiry has generated to date but this had been refused.
We have been denied access to that, Mr Reidy said. He asked that all information submitted to the Coroners Court in relation to the case be made available to his client.
Barrister Simon Mills, for the hospital, said he did not accept that characterisation of matters.
The investigation is ongoing, Mr Mills said.
Adjourning the inquest for further mention until October 24, the coroner conveyed her condolences to Mr Thawley.
The National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) is finalising proposals on the time given to different subject areas at primary level. A key consideration has been the patrons time allocated within the school day, which current guidelines recommend should include half an hour for religion, or two-and-a-half hours a week.
The NCCA also has to weigh up the additional time, required since 2011, to be dedicated to literacy and numeracy, as well as evidence of overload while competing interests seek placement for time in the school day.
We will be proposing the direction we think we should be heading in, which is very different to where we currently are, said an NCCA spokesperson.
The council will publish its proposals in the autumn, and its final advice is likely to be made to Education Minister Richard Bruton before the end of this year.
The work has coincided with the NCCAs development of a curriculum for a new primary school subject, education about religious beliefs and ethics. It received a significant response to consultation on the topic earlier this year, reflecting levels of public interest previously highlighted by the 2012 report of the Forum of Patronage and Pluralism in the primary sector.
Although not intended to replace existing religious education in schools, a focus will be to ensure children whose parents withdraw them from religious instruction in denominational schools can still opt to learn about religion and belief at school.
The wider review of subject times is in line with a requirement in the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategy. Pupils are currently taught for nearly an hour a day in numeracy, up from just over half an hour before 2011.
The time dedicated to literacy rose to 90 minutes a day, and the impact of both increases has seen targets being met much earlier than planned and new testing being developed.
Of eight countries whose primary curriculums were examined to assist the NCCAs considerations, half had no provision for religious education. England, Wales, and Northern Ireland allow parents to withdraw children from religious education and collective worship activities, while the North has a mostly Christian common core syllabus but also teaches about morality education and other world religions.
In France, on the other hand, the secular nature of the education system is stressed and the wearing or carrying of religious symbols is banned in schools.
Meanwhile, a project led by multi-denominational schools patron Educate Together has been awarded 284,000 in EU funding to design an online course in ethical education for teachers in four countries. It plans to promote innovative practices in schools, build teacher confidence in the area, and raise awareness of ethical education as an inclusive approach to education for pluralist democracies.
Whats going on with Lowcostholidays?
Lowcostholidays was a UK budget travel agent. It relocated its headquarters to Spain in 2013, and had staff in London, Poland, and Switzerland. Its subsidiary, Lowcostbeds, only booked accommodation. Last Friday, Lowcostholidays announced that it was ceasing trade immediately, and placed into receivership.
Ive booked with lowcostholidays, what now?
Companies selling package holidays online in Ireland are regulated by the Commission for Aviation Regulation (CAR). As part of that, CAR operates a bonding scheme to cover customers in case an agent goes bust. Thats the good news.
Whats the bad news?
The bad news is that your cover will depend on what you booked. The CAR bond covers package holidays flights and accommodation. What it doesnt cover, however, is accommodation only. So if you, or your travel agent, booked a package deal through Lowcostholidays, you should be able to reclaim your costs by going to www.aviationreg.ie and filling out the form there.
However, if you yourself booked accommodation through Lowcostbeds, you will not have recourse to claim money back via the bond. If you went to a travel agent, and they booked your accommodation via Lowcostbeds, they should be able to cover you.
Ive paid Lowcostbeds for accommodation, the hotel said they never got the payment what do I do?
If youre not covered by the bond as explained above, but paid by credit or debit card, get onto your bank. They will start a chargeback, whereby they refund the money customers paid to Lowcostholidays because they failed to deliver the service promised.
What else should I check?
If you paid for a package deal, theres a strong chance they paid the airline for your flights already. Check with the airline to see if you are booked, and then check the hotel you were due to stay in for your reservation. That booking may still be in place, but unpaid. It is up to you then either go ahead with the holiday plans, pay again for accommodation and then seek to reclaim what you paid Lowcostholidays for the hotel from the CAR, or cancel the trip and claim back the cost of the holiday.
Im already abroad on the holiday I booked with Lowcostholidays. What does this mean for me?
Your flights should be fine, but you may get a nasty surprise when you go to check out. The hotel may not have been paid and you may be required to stump up.
Im not booked with Lowcostholidays, but I want to avoid such a thing happening to me in future what can I do?
There are a few options you can take to cover yourself. The most obvious is travel insurance. Prices can start from as little 20 per person so it makes sense to shop around. While you hopefully wont need it, itll provide peace of mind.
Secondly, booking via your debit or credit card will give you the opportunity to ask your bank to do a chargeback if needed. For more on chargeback, see www.consumerhelp.ie/chargeback. Thirdly, travel agents are bonded and insured for such eventualities something worth bearing in mind.
Finally, if looking to book a package deal yourself through a website, consult the CAR to ensure the company is bonded.
Sean McEniff, Irelands longest-serving politician, said in a statement through his solicitors that he emphatically and unconditionally denies that he was the politician who allegedly contacted the Gardai in Ballyshannon at the time of the disappearance of Mary Boyle.
The statement from the Fianna Fail county councillor, who has served on local authorities for 55 years, including Bundoran town council and Donegal County Council, added: He has no knowledge of such a call other than what he has heard recently on what was contained in the video Mary Boyle, The Untold Story.
Mr McEniff is satisfied that the two former Gardai interviewed as part of the video have recently clarified, that at the time of the disappearance or in the investigation that followed, neither were aware of any such alleged phonecall and that there was no impediment from their superiors in the investigation as a result.
The solicitors said the statement was being issued at Mr McEniffs request, in relation to the rumour and innuendo surrounding a Youtube video published recently on the internet, Mary Boyle, The Untold Story.
Mr McEniff said: The disappearance of Mary Boyle has been a tragedy for the Boyle family and they are deeply affected by it.
The Gardai have conducted detailed and extensive investigations that are continuing and should be co-operated with by everyone.
The statement said Mr McEniff supported the call for a Commission Of Investigation to be set up to investigate all aspects of the disappearance of Mary Boyle.
It added he had taken legal advice in relation to the defamatory comments made both directly and by innuendo and will take such steps as are necessary to protect his reputation.
Some of the comments and statements that have been made are false, malicious and damaging to Mr McEniff.
He will not be making any further public statement and the matter will be dealt with through his solicitors, he statement added.
Although Mr McEniff was not named on the video, there has been widespread speculation in south Donegal he was the politician which the video claimed made a call to a senior garda which resulted in the main suspect not being arrested in six-year-old Marys disappearance near her grandparents home at Cashelard, Ballyshannon, 39 years ago.
Already, one of the gardai in the video, retired Sgt Martin Collins, said there was neither political or State interference in the inquiry.
He said alleged phonecall comments emanated from the hearsay of a station orderly who would not have been an investigating officer in the girls case. He was emphatic there was no cover-up by gardai, at any rank.
He said the real cover-up into Marys disappearance and presumed murder, involves an individual or individuals who were still withholding information.
Meanwhile, up to 500 people marched in Ballyshannon on Saturday last seeking justice for Mary Boyle and living relatives.
A Garda cold case team is due in Ballyshannon soon to investigate the 1977 disappearance near the Donegal-Fermanagh border.
Harry Clifton was charged with eight counts contrary to the Misuse of Drugs Act and one count of endangerment contrary to the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Persons Act.
Garda Daniel McEnery arrested Mr Clifton, aged 29, with an address at 11 St Finbarrs Place, Probys Quay, Cork, and charged him with all nine counts yesterday.
The charge under the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act states that on January 18 at 11 St Finbarrs Place, he intentionally or recklessly engaged in conduct, that he allegedly sold N-bomb to another person purporting the drug to be less potent than 2CB, which created a substantial risk of death or serious harm to another person.
The drugs charges relate to the following date, January 19, where he is accused of having four kinds of drugs for his own use and having each of them for the purpose of sale or supply. The drugs referred to in the eight charges are cannabis, the drug colloquially known as N-bomb, MDMA, and DMT.
Inspector John Deasy said that the DPP had directed trial by indictment so there would have to be a book of evidence prepared. There was no objection to the accused being remanded on bail.
Judge Leo Malone adjourned the case until September 15 to allow time for preparation and service of a book of evidence.
Last week, a man and a woman were arrested, charged and released on bail on charges arising out of this investigation.
Ruairi Maher, aged 22, of 12 Ballycurrane, Thurles, Co Tipperary, and Jessica OConnor, aged 20, of Rosebank House, Ballyhar, Killarney, Co Kerry ,were both charged with conspiring with another to possess a controlled drug for the purpose of sale or supply to another in Cork City on January 18 and that the drug was colloquially known as N-bomb.
The separate cases against them were also put back until September 15 at Cork District Court to allow time for preparation and service of books of evidence.
It is anticipated that all three cases will be sent forward ultimately for trial by judge and jury on a date to be set at the October sessions of Cork Circuit Criminal Court.
Alex Ryan, aged 18, from Liscahane, Millstreet, Co Cork, died on January 23. Last week, Cork Coroners Court heard that the teenager died after consuming the synthetic drug known as N-bomb.
Laura Pennick, aged 29, with an address in Bride St, Dublin 8, pleaded guilty to the thefts totalling 41,935 from Marie McNally between January 2010 and December 2012.
Garda Colin Rourke told Dublin Circuit Criminal Court yesterday that Pennick befriended Ms McNally when she was living two doors from her in Finglas.
Pennick became Ms McNallys unofficial carer and started collecting her pension and paying her bills. She had access to Ms McNallys ATM cards and two bank accounts, including one which contained Ms McNallys inheritance from the sale of her late mothers house.
Gda Rourke said Pennick made a number of withdrawals ranging from very small amounts up to 600. She spent the money on home improvements, fashion purchases, home furnishings, home appliances and holidays, the court heard.
When questioned by gardai after Ms McNallys discovery of the loss, Pennick said she had financial worries of her own and needed to do it, Gda Rourke said.
She has 29 previous convictions including five theft convictions, Gda Rourke said. One of the convictions was for the theft of 1,000 from her previous employer, JD Sports, he said.
The court heard Ms McNally was extremely upset when she discovered the loss and her financial position was now perilous. She did not wish to give a victim impact statement.
Damien Colgan, defending, said Pennick owed money at the time to individuals who made real threats against her.
He said Pennick regretted her actions and had told gardai that if there was any way she could repay the money, she would. She had 3,900 to give Ms McNally as a token of her remorse, he added.
Judge Melanie Greally adjourned the matter to allow for a probation services report.
This is a serious offence involving a serious breach of trust and the accused has a history of dishonesty, Judge Greally said.
Pennick will be sentenced on November 7.
The Commission for Aviation Regulation (CAR) said customers seeking refunds should gather as much documentation relating to their booking as possible to expedite the claim process.
Really its related to the speed with which they [customers] can get the evidence together to back-up their claim and present it to the commission, and well work on that as quickly as we can, said David Hodnett, CAR director of legal affairs.
Speaking on RTEs Morning Ireland, Mr Hodnett said the claims process will take weeks to months, but warned that customers will not be receiving their money this week or next week.
He also confirmed that the CAR bond only applies to customers who bought a package holiday from Lowcostholidays, and not those who bought accommodation only from the group.
The commission bond only covers customers of Lowcostholidays.ie who booked overseas travel and accommodation with that travel agent. Thats the customers to whom the bond is directed and restricted, said Mr Hodnett. It does not extend to customers of other lowcost travel group companies, such as the company that allows people just to buy the bed alone abroad.
The commission has published a form on its website for Lowcostholiday customers seeking to claim back their costs. It is available on www.aviationreg.ie.
The collapse of Lowcostholidays has caused considerable inconvenience for thousands of customers who have yet to go on their holidays, with many weighing up whether to avail of the holiday and pay again for their accommodation, or to cancel the trip completely.
In most instances, the flights associated with package deals sold by the company were paid for immediately; however, the hotels have yet to receive any payment.
Many holiday-goers are now left to decide if they will avail of the paid-for flights and pay a second time for the hotel before claiming back the costs, or cancelling their entire trip.
Fiona Naughton from Cobh, Co Cork, had been looking forward to a family holiday in Spain with her partner and two sons, aged three and two months.
They had booked their trip to Torremolinos with Lowcostholidays just three weeks ago, and only discovered the company had gone bust when they received an email from their airport transfer firm informing them their booking had been cancelled.
We have our flights paid for with Ryanair, but when we called the hotel they said that they hadnt been paid, Ms Naughton said.
She said the accommodation will cost them a further 1,200 to 1,300 on top of what they had already paid Lowcostholidays, and they are looking into how to recover the costs they paid to the now defunct operator.
Obviously with the new baby we were looking forward to going away, and for our three-year-old it was supposed to be his first trip away since he was one, but its not working out very well, she said of the difficulties caused by the operator going into administration.
ARE WE on the brink of fascism? Is there a growing belief in the world that only highly authoritarian leaders can solve the problems we face? Is the rise, again, of nationalism inexorable? Are they all going to be the consequences of terrorism and the cause of more terrorism?
I had just left a wonderful reception at the French embassy in Dublin when the news of the latest terrorist attack in Nice began to break. It seemed half the population of Dublin had turned out to help the French ambassador and his family celebrate Bastille Day. It was a glorious evening, and the friendship and hospitality of the embassy was unsurpassed. The ambassador spoke warmly about the solidarity between the people of France and Ireland at its most evident in the wake of the Paris attacks last November.
In a way, that made it all the more shocking to turn on the news when we all got home and start to hear about the numbers of people who had been killed on the Promenade des Anglais. At first the numbers were small, and then they began to grow. At first it seemed like a terrible accident, and all too quickly it became clear that this was mass murder.
There is something indescribable about families out walking, in one of the safest pedestrian areas you can imagine, and being mown down in this way. The loss of children and parents, all doing what children and parents do, doesnt bear thinking about.
But in some ways the most awful dimension of this incident is the fact that we now know its possible for anyone anywhere, with sufficient motivation, to rent a vehicle and turn it into a weapon of mass destruction. No guns or bombs are necessary, just a drivers licence and a set of keys.
French Prime Minister jeered ahead of minute's silence for Nice attack victims https://t.co/Es4jBSWOE7 pic.twitter.com/B8x3fBybxf Irish Examiner (@irishexaminer) July 18, 2016
The world as a whole needs to acknowledge the failure of intelligence. Despite all the technology available, despite what were shown on television about the capacity of counter-terrorist agencies to spy on all of us, it seems clear that some of the most basic requirements the need to share information effectively, for instance are missing. In the wake of many of the terrorist attacks weve seen, it has emerged that someone somewhere knew something about the perpetrators, but nobody seemed to know enough to prevent carnage.
More fundamentally, the world is responding to extremism by becoming more extreme. Fear is breeding fear. People are increasing turning to ideas and people they think can keep them safe.
Brexit was many things. But it was driven in large part by nationalism, a belief that controlling borders was the key to safety in economic and cultural terms. If we can keep the other out, that will protect our jobs and keep our children safe.
The rhetoric now emerging in Britain is about a country thats ready, once again, to take its place among the nations of the Earth. But the Brexit decision was, at its heart, a decision to leave, not to join, a decision to abandon responsibility and not embrace it.
Its of little comfort to know that most of the Brexit leaders, who ran a campaign of fear from the start, have now walked off the pitch. It remains to be seen if those who have picked up the reins have any of the capacity necessary to begin to undo that damage. In or out of Europe is no longer the point the point is a divided nation, where some of the most corrosive nationalist instincts have the capacity to eat away at democracy.
I read an interesting article last week which referred, among other things, to an American scholar called Elaine Kamarck. She is a long-time student of, and participant in, American elections she will be a super-delegate at the Democratic convention. In the article I read, she is quoted as saying (in a book called Why Presidents Fail) that successful presidential leadership occurs when the president is able to put together and balance three sets of skills: Policy, communication, and implementation.
France observes minute's silence in memory of Nice attacks; books of condolence open in Ir https://t.co/DOO45QKPWC pic.twitter.com/YAYWSlTUCK Irish Examiner (@irishexaminer) July 18, 2016
Assuming one accepts that they are the only three ingredients necessary, this week the Republican Party will nominate someone who has never shown the slightest interest in policy, whose idea of communication is based entirely on soundbites full of spite, and who has never implemented anything that doesnt reflect his own interest.
If he gets elected, he will probably go down in history as one of the worst American presidents there has ever been. But along the way America will become ever more divided, and the tendency towards extreme solutions ever more pronounced. Studies have been done in the US which suggest that Donald Trumps greatest appeal lies among those who hanker after authoritarian government.
Strong men, it seems, are the only answer to the worlds woes no matter how irresponsible and unprepared they are. As unlikely as it may seem, there is the possibility that sooner or later, a trial of strength between Trump and Vladimir Putin might be the beginning of disaster for us all.
Hopefully that will never happen, but all the signs are that we are witnessing a massive global failure of politics. The attempted coup in Turkey, and the likely reaction of a highly authoritarian leader to it, are just the latest challenges to democracy that we all face.
And we do all face them. Democracy is like the water from your kitchen tap. You take it for granted but you never realise how often you go to that tap until the water is turned off.
Perhaps most depressing in all of this is the complete and abject failure of social democracy. Trying to understand whats going on in the British Labour Party, for instance, is like trying to understand why there is so much hatred within a family. Whatever the outcome of its leadership election, its hard to see how Labour can avoid a serious and potentially fatal split.
Much of the uncertainty in the world, much of the search for authoritarian responses, has inequality at its heart. The concentration of power and wealth in fewer and fewer hands, the development of materialism and consumerism, the race towards xenophobic responses to economic and cultural challenges these are all corrosive and frightening aspects of the world we live in now.
In my lifetime, social democracy was one of the bulwarks against trends like this. Great European social democratic leaders held the line in favour of greater equality and social justice. In the heyday of social democracy, policy and legislation that favoured greater equality were the battles worth fighting.
Even in recent times, the social democratic instinct has enabled gay rights and equal marriage to take hold. But in the face of rampant extremism, social democracy, it seems, has nothing to say.
And when social democracy goes silent, when it can think of nothing to do except turn inward, when it lacks personalities and voices that are prepared to lead, the last defence against fascism begins to disappear.
It has happened before, and it can happen again.
Yesterday morning, an American man named Fei Zheming boarded a plane from Beijing to Chongqing for the sole purpose of sampling Chongqing xiaomian, the numbing-hot noodle dish that is a specialty in Chongqing.
Before making the trip, Fei contacted Li Jieping, a Chongqing xiaomian enthusiast. Fei asked Li to act as a tour guide during his four-day tasting trip. He hoped Li could help him to explore Chongqing's food culture.
With Li as their guide, Fei and his girlfriend went to a noodle restaurant. Fei spoke fluent Chinese, asking the restaurant staff about the name of each condiment, making notes and taking pictures as he observed the whole cooking process.
Fei came to China two years ago, and now does research about Chinese social policies in Beijing. In his free time, he devotes himself to exploring Chinese dishes and expanding his knowledge of Chinese cuisine.
Fei said that he now plans to write an article about Chongqing xiaomian and the culture behind it. He hopes to get it published in an American magazine. Fei had his first taste of the special dish in Beijing at the end of 2014, and he fell in love immediately. He has wanted to travel to Chongqing ever since learning that it is the origin place of his beloved xiaomian.
When Mitt Romney ran for president four years ago, his estimated $250m (225m) fortune was turned into a liability by Democrats, who painted the ex-Bain Capital chief as out of touch with Americans struggling to recover from the recession.
Four years later, Donald Trumps much bigger pile of money is a central character of his campaign.
And far from seeing it as a liability, the candidate flaunts it.
Im the most successful person ever to run for president, the billionaire businessman brags, noting that hes really rich.
On the stump, he vows to make our country rich again.
Mr Trump will officially become his partys nominee at this weeks Republican convention, powered by white, working-class voters drawn to his populist message.
The billionaire lives an opulent life on Manhattans Fifth Avenue, worlds away from the day-to-day reality of most supporters.
Yet many believe he understands their problems. Some dub him the blue-collar billionaire.
You might say because he lives in the ivory tower, he doesnt see what people are doing down below.
He honestly does, said Claude Thompson, 59, a Trump supporter who lives in Fresno, California.
Mr Thompson, who runs a property maintenance business, cited Mr Trumps employment of people through his companies as proof of his working-class connections.
He knows that these people are blue-collar people, theyre middle income... so he understands America, he said.
The difference between the perception of Mr Trumps and Mr Romneys money, Trump supporters say, comes down to attitude.
While some felt Mr Romney tried to downplay his wealth, Mr Trump has embraced it at times even mocking Mr Romneys smaller net worth.
Mr Trump jets around the country on his private plane. His campaign has doubled as a tour of his gilded properties, from Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan to the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach.
Trumps like, screw it, you know? Im rich, I dont care, said Aspen Trevino of Carrollton, Texas. He flaunts it.
Mr Trevino, 25, views Mr Trump, who was given the reins of his fathers multi-million dollar real estate business in 1974, as someone to look up to.
He makes it the America Dream, so people will say: I can do that. I want to follow a president that I can look up to, said Mr Trevino.
As the campaign moves toward the general election, Democrats have begun to paint Mr Trump as an out-of-touch billionaire trampling the little guy to build his fortune.
Among Democrats evidence: contractors and vendors who suffered during company bankruptcies when Mr Trump emerged just fine. Whether the reputation sticks remains to be seen.
The British filmmaker has directed three movies in another blockbuster spy franchise the Jason Bourne series, starring US actor Matt Damon in the title role but insisted he is not interested in tackling one of 007s big screen outings.
He told Radio Times: Id never make a Bond movie.
Look, Im not trying to play one off against the other. And you cant not respect the Bond franchise for its longevity.
"But the truth is that, in a world thats increasingly divided between us and them, Bond is always working for them, the state. Whereas Bourne is definitively working for us, the people.
And everything you can do with the character the attitude to power stems from that difference.
Greengrass, 60, said he once met with James Bond producer Barbara Broccoli.
I respect their franchise, he said. But Im a Bourne guy.
Greengrass directed Damon in The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), having taken over from Doug Liman who was at the helm of the first film, 2002s The Bourne Identity.
He did not direct The Bourne Legacy in 2012, but has now returned to the franchise for the fifth film, Jason Bourne. Greengrass admitted he was not sure he should go back to the series.
Initially, I was the Eeyore of it, he said.
I was saying: Why would we do another one? Matt said that there was an audience that was desperate for it. And I said: Yeah, but theyll be the first to complain if we make a bad one. But, in the end, its lucky to have such a keen audience and there is something to be said for trying to please them.
From the beginning, Mr Trump has created nothing but headaches for Mr Ryan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the nations top Republican, as he tries to marshal his fractured party behind the bombastic billionaire.
Mr Ryan has always been reluctant to support Mr Trump, and openly criticised the candidates proposed ban on Muslims entering the US. Hes also called other remarks by the candidate an example of textbook racism.
Nevertheless, for the sake of party unity, Mr Ryan eventually decided to back Mr Trump, whom he essentially sees as a Trojan Horse who would push the Republican congressional agenda once in the White House.
However, Mr Ryans stance has diminished his standing among some in the party.
At a CNN political event last week, for example, a Republican voter rounded on him, questioning how he could morally support a candidate who is openly racist and has made Islamophobic statements.
If things go badly for Mr Trump in his battle against Democrat Hillary Clinton, Mr Ryan may end up with neither a Republican president nor a Republican Congress because polls show that not alone could Mr Trump lose the election to Ms Clinton, but he could also doom the partys candidates in the House and the Senate elections.
Then the blame game will start and Mr Ryan will be slap bang in the middle of it, potentially fighting for his political life.
At 46, however, he should have time to regroup and, in the process, boost his own presidential ambitions.
Indeed, many in the party have made no secret of the fact that they would have much preferred him as their presidential candidate this year rather than Mr Trump.
He is a Tea Party favourite and has all the right conservative credentials.
He is also a strong media performer in pushing the Republican agenda. He is a harsh critic of some of Americas anti-poverty programmes.
In 2012, when he was Mitt Romney vice presidential running mate, he said that the network of programmes for the American poor made people not want to work.
Then there was the story he told of a boy who did not want his free school lunch because it left him with a full stomach and an empty soul.
The Washington Post said the story was untrue. It had apparently been lifted from a memoir, The Invisible Thread, about a friendship between a middle-aged white woman and a black boy she befriended on the streets of New York.
The remark provoked a scathing attack on Mr Ryan by New York Times columnist Timothy Egan, who said Ryans Irish roots and his awareness of the Famine meant he should know better.
But he hasnt learned anything, said Mr Egan. His great-great-grandfather had fled to America. But the Republican congressman was wagging his finger at the famished.
As a youth, however, Mr Ryan himself benefited from Americas fragile social security net. When he was 16 he found his 55-year- old father lying dead in bed after a heart attack.
After his fathers death, Mr Ryan received social security benefits until his 18th birthday, which were saved for his college education. He also helped to care for his grandmother, who had Alzheimers, while his mother commuted to college.
Mr Ryans Irish roots go back to Graiguenamanagh in Co Kilkenny, which the family has visited. He has been honoured by the American Ireland Fund and is seen as supportive of immigration reform that could help thousands of Irish illegals.
Self-employed tiler James Warnock, 56, evaded justice for strangling 17-year-old Yiannoulla Yianni in her own home, just half a mile from where he lived in north London.
Police cracked the case by matching his DNA to the crime scene last year, after Warnock was caught by an undercover officer sharing indecent pictures of children on the internet.
The divorced father of two, who was still living in the local community, claimed he had a secret affair with Ms Yianni, even though the teenager was brought up in a traditional Greek Cypriot family and had never had a boyfriend.
A jury at the Old Bailey took just over two hours to convict Warnock, and Recorder of London Nicholas Hilliard QC jailed him for life with a minimum of 25 years for murder.
The judge said Ms Yianni had endured a terrifying ordeal at knifepoint and was killed in a way that was cruel, brutal and without mercy.
Warnock was also sentenced to 20 years for rape and a range of terms of between four years and five months after admitting six counts of distributing indecent images in 2013, all to run concurrently.
Warnock made no reaction as he was sent down.
The murder had shocked the nation and led to high-profile police appeals, with detectives travelling as far afield as Australia in their search for the killer.
Her brothers and sister, who had sat through the distressing trial, broke down in tears as they finally saw Ms Yiannis killer brought to justice.
USA: An aspiring nun who was told she couldnt enter a convent until her student loan debt was paid off has used an online appeal to get the money.
Alida Taylor, 28, was accepted to join the Sisters of Life in New York City in September.
The Clifton, New Jersey, woman started a GoFundMe page late last month, hoping to get $12,000 to pay down her student loans. She surpassed her goal, raising more than $22,000.
In an update on the crowdfunding page, Taylor said the extra money will be used for a vocation fund for Casa Guadalupe, a house of prayer and discernment for Catholic women, where Taylor is currently staying.
She told WCBS in New York that The Lord when its his will, he always provides, and I just trust him.
Poke trap
USA:
Police in New Hampshires largest city have got the Pokemon Go bug, trying to lure fugitives with the popular app.
A post on the Manchester Police Department Facebook page announces that police recently detected one of the more rare Pokemon characters a Charizard in the booking area. The post invites those whose names appear on a list linked to the post to be one of the lucky ones to come capture the Charizard.
The list includes the names of the more than 500 fugitives on the departments wanted persons round-up. Sgt Eric Knight said the post has yet to net an arrest, but has proved popular with its Facebook followers.
Lost game
ENGLAND:
A Pokemon Go player called 999 to tell police that someone had stolen their Pokemon.
The gaming fan contacted Gloucestershire Police as an emergency while using the hugely popular app on the day after its UK launch. Police gave the player words of advice on when it is appropriate to call 999.
Nottinghamshire Police also said it has received seven calls in the past week relating to suspicious activity, when in each of the cases it was just gamers playing Pokemon Go.
Royal curry
ENGLAND:
Prince Charles thought he had spilt some curry down his crisp white shirt thanks to a joke from his wife.
The Prince had lifted up a spoon of rogan josh curry to smell the rich aroma when the Duchess of Cornwall made the wisecrack at his expense. Charles looked surprised and looked down at his shirt but quickly realised Camilla was having him on.
She made the joke as the Royal couple began the first day of a three-day annual tour to Devon and Cornwall celebrating local food and drink and the regions stage and screen talent.
Turtle delay
USA:
Mother Nature is delaying some travellers at New Yorks JFK airport but the weather has nothing to do with it.
Nearly 400 diamondback terrapin turtles have laid eggs and built nests in the area around the airport, and some have been spotted wandering into the paths of planes preparing to take off.
The turtles normal habitat is the nearby Jamaica Bay salt marshes, but they also feel at home in the sand along the airport perimeter. When they are spotted near planes, they are rounded up with flights held up while they returned to safety.
Getting the hump
USA:
A dead humpback whale that keeps washing up on the Southern California coast after being towed out to sea is proving to be a headache for beach officials.
A construction crew in Encinitas tried cutting up the rotting carcass on Sunday but work was halted when part of a forklift snapped off.
Marine Safety Captain Larry Giles told The San Diego Union-Tribune that lifeguards covered the 22-ton whale with sand to try to ease the stench.
Officials believe the carcass that came ashore on Saturday at Grandview Beach is the now-infamous whale dubbed Wally.
Wally was first towed away after washing up in Los Angeles County before the Fourth of July weekend. The carcass was towed three more times after drifting back toward shore.
Storing up
ENGLAND:
Shoppers were trapped in a car park for more than three hours as they attempted to leave a newly-opened Ikea store.
Frustrated customers were left beeping their horns as they struggled to get out of the multi-storey car park of the superstore in Reading.
One man joked it was easier to leave Europe than the Ikea Reading car park.
Rory Firth, 40, told the Press Association: It was just bedlam. We were stuck for about an hour but a lot of people were stuck for upwards of three hours.
The father-of-two, from Maidenhead, Berkshire, said it was a real nightmare.
Stacey Barber, 22, from Hampshire, said the three-hour delay had ruined her days shopping. We were stuck for three hours and we only went to return something. We didnt get home till 6 so all the shops were shut and missed out on a whole afternoon.
Ms Barber added that staff handed out bottles of water but had no idea what they were doing.
Paul Paulie Curran, aged 24, died after he was stabbed at Seagull House on Rutland Avenue in Crumlin at around 4pm on Saturday. He was rushed to St Jamess Hospital where he was pronounced dead a short time later.
The scene was preserved for a technical examination and on Sunday 18-year-old Graham McEvoy was arrested and detained for questioning.
Mr McEvoy, who has an address at Captains Road in Crumlin, was brought before Judge Michael Walsh at Dublin District Court yesterday charged with the murder of Mr Curran.
Det Sergeant Danny Kelly, of Sundrive Road Garda Station, told Judge Walsh the charge was put to the youth at 12.53am on Monday. Det Sergeant Kelly said in reply to the charge after caution, he made no comment.
He applied for a remand in custody. Defence solicitor Michael Kelleher said that due to the to the nature of the charge, a bail application could not be made.
Judge Walsh remanded Mr McEvoy in custody to appear again in one week.
Bail in a murder case can only be granted by the High Court.
Dressed in a white polo shirt, black tracksuit bottoms, and white runners, the youth remained silent for most of the proceedings.
However, as he was escorted from the courtroom he turned to a man in the public gallery and gave the thumbs-up while saying I love yous; tell my ma I love her.
An 18-year-old woman, who had also been detained in relation to the investigation, was released without charge yesterday morning and a file will be prepared for the DPP.
The ambush killings of police officers earlier this month in Dallas and in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, over the weekend have raised tensions in Cleveland, with the president of the police union asking Ohio governor John Kasich to suspend the law allowing gun owners to carry firearms in plain sight.
Mr Kasich responded that he does not have that authority.
While there was a large police presence downtown and near the convention site, just a few dozen officers on bikes stood watch before the start of the rally being staged along the Cuyahoga River.
Mr Trumps backers who brought guns said they simply wanted to exercise their rights.
You dont see Trump supporters doing anything that is extreme, said Josh Clark, of Erie, Pennsylvania. Its more of a peaceful get-together.
There did not appear to be any anti-Trump demonstrators at the rally site.
Joel Ameigh, of Hershey, Pennsylvania, who had a Smith and Wesson handgun strapped to his belt, said he is not necessarily a Trump backer but wanted to hear from the speakers at the America First rally sponsored by Citizens for Trump.
Were not here to be dangerous people, said Mr Ameigh.
Were not here to intimidate anyone. There are laws against that sort of thing, he said.
Republicans kicked off their convention to nominate Mr Trump as their White House candidate, while dissident delegates make a last-ditch attempt to deny the front-runner.
True to form, Mr Trump himself provided the first surprise of the week, announcing he was going to the Cleveland convention later last evening to introduce his wife Melania on the first night of speeches.
I will be there, he said. I want to watch. It is going to be very exciting.
It is an earlier-than-expected arrival for a man who has shown little interest in tradition with his nominating show.
However, the next three days will undeniably be Mr Trumps moment a week at the pinnacle of American politics that few could have imagined when the New York billionaire entered the race a year ago.
The line-up of speakers is aimed at showing off the man behind the mogul, his advisers said.
Several family members and friends are expected to speak of his character and reveal a side of Mr Trump that Americans may not know.
Many party leaders and rising stars have steered clear of Cleveland, wary of being linked to the nominee, while others seem intent on keeping a distance.
When House Speaker Paul Ryan spoke to Wisconsin delegates yesterday, he made no mention of Mr Trump.
Mr Kasich, a vanquished Trump rival, plans several public appearances but will not be stepping inside the convention.
Top Trump adviser Paul Manafort called Mr Kasichs behaviour petulant and embarrassing.
However, the first act yesterday was a last-gasp effort to stop Mr Trump from sealing the deal.
Delegates were due to vote on the rules that will govern the convention week, and insurgent delegates circulated a petition trying to force a state-by-state vote a move that could disrupt floor proceedings even if they fail.
Mr Trumps opponents want to change a rule that requires delegates to vote for the candidate to whom they are committed after state primaries and caucuses.
Mr Trumps nomination is essentially automatic under the current rules, because he has far more than the 1,237 delegates required to win.
Meanwhile, New Jersey governor Chris Christie says that he is relieved Mr Trump chose a governor to be his running mate and that we dont need another big mouth from Congress.
Mr Christie and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich were runners-up to Indiana governor Mike Pence in Trumps vice presidential search.
Mr Christie did not mention Mr Gingrich when making the big mouth comment.
Mr Christie told reporters that he was disappointed he was not chosen, but has no discontent.
Britains vote to leave the European Union is certain to be high on the agenda for Ms Mays talks with German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Francois Hollande on her first overseas trip as prime minister.
It is usual for incoming premiers to make early visits to establish personal links with key European leaders, but this weeks trip will be highly charged by the outcome of the June 23 referendum and the need to shape a new relationship between the UK and its neighbours on the continent.
The state-run Anadolu news agency said a total of 8,777 employees attached to the interior ministry were dismissed, including 30 governors, 52 civil service inspectors, and 16 legal advisers, while other media reports said police and military police officers and coast guards were also removed from duty.
The government blamed Fridays failed coup which it says left 208 government supporters and 24 plotters dead on backers of a US-based Muslim cleric who has become president Recep Tayyip Erdogans chief rival.
The situation creates a sticky diplomatic situation Turkey is a Nato member and key Western ally in the fight against Islamic State (IS), but the EU and US have expressed alarm about its response to the coup.
Even before the weekend chaos, Turkey had been wracked by political turmoil that critics blamed on Mr Erdogans increasingly heavy-handed rule.
He has shaken up the government, cracked down on dissent, restricted the media, and renewed fighting with Kurdish rebels.
Turkish prime minister Binali Yildirim said a total of 7,543 people had been detained since Friday, including 6,030 military personnel.
According to Anadolu, prosecutors entered Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey, which is key to the US-led campaign against IS.
A Turkish brigadier general at the base has already been detained for his alleged role in the coup, and news reports say refuelling aircraft that took off from the base helped keep F-16s used by the plotters up in the air.
Though government officials offered reassurances that life has returned to normal, warplanes patrolled Turkeys skies in a sign that authorities fear the threat is not yet over.
Anadolu said Mr Erdogan ordered the overnight patrol by F-16s for the control of the airspace and security after a faction of the military attempted a coup.
The swift rounding up of judges and others after the failed coup ndicated the government had prepared a list beforehand, sid the EU commissioner dealing with Turkeys membership bid, Johannes Hahn.
It looks at least as if something has been prepared. The lists are available, which indicates it was prepared and to be used at a certain stage, Mr Hahn said.
Im very concerned. It is exactly what we feared.
The rebellion, which saw warplanes firing on key government installations and tanks rolling into major cities, was quashed by loyal government forces and masses of civilians who took to the streets. The countrys top military brass did not support the coup.
Mr Yildirims voice cracked and he wept as he spoke with reporters after a cabinet meeting and repeated a question his grandson had put to him: Why are they killing people?
Turkish prosecutors began questioning 27 generals and admirals. Anadolu reported the group includes former air force commander General Akin Ozturk, who has been described as the ringleader of the foiled coup.
Gen Ozturk, who was still on active duty and has now been detained, has denied he was involved and insists he worked to quell the uprising in statements to Turkish media.
The government moved swiftly in the wake of the coup to shore up its power and remove those perceived as enemies.
Yesterday, security forces continued raiding military facilities in search of suspected plotters. In addition to Incirlik, they searched the Air Force Academy premises and residences in Istanbul, Anadolu reported. It was not clear if any arrests were made.
The crackdown targeted not only generals and soldiers, but a wide swath of the judiciary that has sometimes blocked Mr Erdogan, raising fears the effort to oust him will push Turkey further into authoritarian rule.
Former manager Sam Allardyce was among 13 people, including England striker Andy Carroll, who allegedly paid out a total of 7,310 to Stephen Ackerman in December 2014 .
Mr Ackerman, of Loughton, Essex, pleaded not guilty in March and yesterday denied six further counts of fraud amounting to about 54,730 at Snaresbrook Crown Court, east London.
Tourism in Shanghai has been booming lately. In 2015, revenue from tourism earned the city 350 trillion yuan ($52.2 trillion), representing a 2 percent increase from 2014.
American tourists visiting the city are a large and growing portion of the recent boom, and with Shanghai Disneyland's 2016 opening, their numbers are unlikely to decrease any time soon.
Chinas 144-hour visa-exempt transit policy also adds to the draw, making it easier for citizens from 51 countries--including the U.S.--to enjoy a brief visit to the Middle Kingdom. At the same time, the U.S., and particularly New York City, consistently tops the list of destinations for Chinese tourists traveling abroad.
For that reason, on July 14, the Shanghai Tourism Association and its New York City counterpart signed an official, two-year tourism partnership agreement. Yang Jingsong, head of the Shanghai Tourism Association, and Fred Dixon, CEO of NYC & Company, signed the agreement and gave a brief press conference at Shanghais Peninsula Hotel.
2016 is the China-U.S. Tourism Year, Yang explained at the press conference, which makes this years partnership between Shanghai and New York particularly significant. Yang went on to say that he hoped for opportunities to establish more such partnerships in the future.
Dixon echoed Yangs sentiments, saying, The Chinese tourism market is extremely important to New York City. We hope to take advantage of the wonderful opportunities afforded by the China-U.S. Tourism Year and this partnership to welcome more visitors from Shanghai to New York City.
It was also announced at the press conference that Chinese pianist Lang Lang will be the first official NYC Cultural Tourism Ambassador, in addition to his current role as a United Nations Messenger of Peace.
Having said in the past that he views New York City as his adoptive home, Lang Lang released a statement describing how honored he is to hold the new position. New York City motivates and encourages me every day, the pianist said. Im looking forward to spending the next year promoting NYC around the world.
Lifestyle Ten Things to Do in Rangoon This Week (July 19)
A poetry festival, a trivia night, a film festival and art exhibitionsall in Rangoon this week, as picked by The Irrawaddy.
The Irrawaddy picks 10 interesting events happening in Rangoon this week.
Monsoon Poetry Festival
The inaugural Monsoon Poetry Festival features readings and performances by 26 poets and performance artists from all over Burma plus a number of poetry chapbooks. Maung Sangkha, a poet who was imprisoned for defamation against the former president, organized the festival. The admission fee is 3,000 kyats.
Where: Yangon Diocesan Office [Anglican Church], near Pegu Club bus stop, between the Russian Embassy & Sein Gay Har Shopping Mall
When: Saturday, July 22, 5pm to 9pm
Job Fair
The 9th job fair organized the weekly job advertising medium Opportunity Journal will be held at Tatmadaw Hall in conjunction with talks from scholars and HR consultants about entrepreneurship and management.
Where: Tatmadaw Hall, U Wisara Road, Tel: 09-777277978, 09-73121754
When: Friday, July 22 to Sunday, July 24, 9am to 5pm
Micro Film Contest Promotion Show
The second annual Myanmar Youth Micro Film Contest will be held at Myanmar Plaza. Shows run between 1pm and 7pm.
Where: Myanmar Plaza, Kabar Aye Pagoda Road
When: Saturday, July 23, 1pm to 7pm
Trivia Night at Fathers Office
These bi-monthly trivia nights are held on the first and third Wednesday of every month. With changing categories that include historical places, pop culture, geography and more, there is sure to be a topic for everyone. Test your skills against Rangoons most nerdy residents as you and your team compete for trivia glory and a 30,000 kyats prize. Call to secure your seats.
Where: Fathers Office, 291 Bo Aung Kyaw Street, Botahtaung Tsp., Tel: 09-450218080
When: Wednesday July 20, 7:30pm to 10pm
Scion Exhibition
A group exhibition showcases more than 70 paintings by approximately 20 artists, with prices for work ranging between US$100 and $1,000.
Where: Lokanat Gallery, 62 Pansodan Street, 1st Floor, Kyauktada Tsp., Tel. 095-1382-269
When: Thursday, July 21 to Monday, July 25
Cloud 31 Gallery Show
In commemoration of the 69th Martyrs Day anniversary, three artists stage an exhibition entitled Unforgotten, featuring 27 paintings and an installation. All paintings are priced at $150.
Where: Cloud 31 Art Gallery, No.49/51, First floor, 31st street, between Merchant Street and Mahabandoola Street
When: Tuesday, July 19 to Thursday, July 21
Story of the Memo Showcase
Artist Ohn Khine Zin will display 20 of his works at his third solo show at Cloud 31 Gallery. Prices range from $150 to $500.
Where: Cloud 31 Art Gallery, No.49/51, First floor, 31st Street between Merchant Street and Mahabandoola Street.
When: Saturday, July 23 to Wednesday, July 27
Rain Exhibition in Golden Valley
A group exhibition, featuring 40 artists and more than 200 paintings, will be held at Golden Valley Gallery.
Where: Golden Valley Art Center, No. 54/D, Golden Valley, Bahan Tsp., Tel: 01-513621
When: Saturday, July 23 to Saturday, July 30
Artists and Artisans Exhibition
A group showcase of more than 18 artists will be held at Bogyoke Market, featuring over 50 paintings priced between $300 and $2,000. Twenty percent of the revenue raised will be donated to See Sar Yeik Home for Aged and Ailing Persons.
Where: Myanmar Artists and Artisans Association, Bogyoke Market
When: Thursday, July 21 to Sunday, July 24
Dramatic Performance Troop
In recognition of Martyrs Day on July 19, a dramatic performance troop, led by Po Chit and other artists, will stage a drama titled I am Aung San at the National Museum. Ticket prices range from 5,000 to 20,000 kyats with a 50 percent discount for students.
Where: National Theater, Myoma Kyaung Street
When: Monday, July 18 and Tuesday, July 19, 7:30pm
Martyrs Day Openly Commemorated by Thousands Nationwide
From Rangoons Secretariat to the streets of Mandalay, the public pays respect to Aung San and his colleagues 69 years after their assassination.
RANGOON Burma Army Chief Snr-Gen Min Aung Hlaings attendance at the annual commemoration of Martyrs Day in Rangoon on Tuesday generated hope for restoring relationships in the war-torn country, said representatives from the countrys ruling party, the National League for Democracy (NLD).
Its a good sign for national reconciliation, said Nyan Win, one of the partys central executive committee members.
Min Aung Hlaing was the first army chief to join the annual Martyrs Day ceremony since after the student-led uprisings of 1988. Proceedings were held at the Martyrs Mausoleum to honor independence hero Gen Aung San and his eight colleagues, all of whom were assassinated 69 years ago on July 19.
The senior-generals presence at the event coincides with efforts by NLD party head and national de-facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi to coax Burmas powerful military to cooperate within a renewed peace process; the Burmese army has been engaged in conflict with ethnic and other non-state armed groups since shortly after the countrys independence from Britain in 1948.
Aside from his appearance at the mausoleum, the army chief also visited Suu Kyis residence on Tuesday to join a Buddhist merit-making ceremony for the martyrs, reportedly becoming the first-ever army chief to attend an event hosted by Suu Kyi, who is the late Aung Sans daughter. Also in attendance were former parliamentary speaker Shwe Mann, NLD patron Tin Oo, and the countrys vice president Myint Swe, and Cabinet members.
Tin Oo described the army chiefs appearance at Suu Kyis residence as strange, yet said it signified a possible good sign for Burmese politics.
Some saw Min Aung Hlaings attendance at the Martyrs Day ceremony as a sign that top leaders within the Burmese military are shifting away from the tendency of their predecessors to understate and even ignore Aung Sans role in history. Even though he founded the army in which they serve, military leaders have been known to downplay the importance of Martyrs Day, but with an Aung San Suu Kyi-led government now in power, it appears this practice has come to an end.
The Secretariat: A Piece of History
For the first time in several years, downtown Rangoons Secretariat buildingthe site of Aung San and his colleagues assassinationhosted an official commemorative ceremony as part of Tuesdays proceedings. Rangoon Mayor Maung Maung Soe and executive members of the citys development committee bowed in silence to honor the nine fallen men.
Gen Aung San and the martyrs sacrificed many things for the sake of this country without taking anything back, said Than Myint Aung, one of the members of the Yangon City Development Committees executive board and the co-founder of the civil society group Free Funeral Service Society (FFSS).
We all are now benefiting from what they have done, and the public and our future generations need to be aware of that, she added.
On Tuesday, thousands of people crowded the Secretariat to mark the mournful occasion. Hnin Oo Wai, a 28-year-old mother of two, was among them.
She told The Irrawaddy that she brought her childrenaged eight and fiveto explain the significance of the day and to teach them about the martyrs, whose work and memory she felt had been neglected for decades.
My kids have known who Gen Aung San is and who Amay [mother] Suu is since they learned how to speak, Hnin Oo Wai said. But this building is one of the pieces of historical evidence which can prove that Gen Aung San is our independence hero, she added.
As the clock approached 10:37 a.m. on Tuesday, the moment when the martyrs were gunned down, the mornings sunny weather disappeared and the sky cracked open to release a flood of rain.
Under the downpour, visitors bowed in silence in the Secretariats courtyard. The activities of the city were halted for one minute as sirens blared and vehicles honked their horns to acknowledge the anniversary of the tragedy.
Official Commemorations Held Nationwide
A separate state-level Martyrs Day ceremony was held at the Martyrs Mausoleum in Rangoons Bahan Township. Joining the commemoration were State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi, Snr-Gen Min Aung Hlaing, vice president Myint Swe, speakers of the Parliament, Cabinet members, and surviving family members of Aung Sans eight assassinated colleagues.
Thousands of visitors gathered at the mausoleum to pay their respects at the location where the martyrs are interred. Authorities demanded that the crowds queue systematically in order to enter the site, while civil society groups and members of the Red Cross Society stood by in case of an emergency.
Events were also held throughout Rangoon, at Bogyoke Aung San Museum and Bogyoke Park, where thousands more visitors showed up at the venues to participate in the proceedings.
Martyrs Day was commemorated in Burmas capital of Naypyidaw and in other cities across the countrys 14 states and divisions.
In Mandalay, an official ceremony was led by Chief Minister Zaw Myint Maung and other military and government officials, including representatives from the Chinese and Indian consular offices.
This ceremony is not only to show our respect to the late martyrs, but to tell our [younger] generations about the spirit of the martyrs, and to take examples from those who worked hard for the good of the country without taking any profit or personal benefits, the Chief Minister told reporters before the ceremony.
On the streets of Mandalay, people carrying national flags at half-mast, as well as wreaths and flower arrangements, headed toward the commemorative grounds to honor Aung San and his fallen colleagues.
It was a touching scene to see that we can now commemorate our late leaders more freely than before. We need to keep in mind that only commemorating them today is not enough to show how much we love them, said Hsu Ngat, well-known local author in Mandalay.
President Htin Kyaw, who was not present at the ceremony in Rangoons mausoleum, made offerings to monks in Naypyidaw, along with the first lady Su Su Lwin and other government senior figures, partaking in the Buddhist practice of sharing merit with those who have passed away.
(Reporting by Zarni Mann in Mandalay and Tin Htet Paing and Tun Tun in Rangoon)
Tuesday, July 19th, 2016 (10:49 am) - Score 558
The Advocate General for the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has said that the UK Governments Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIP), which is a temporary precursor to the new Internet spying Investigatory Powers Bill (IPBill), may be compatible with EU law.. with strict safeguards.
The DRIP Act was rushed into law in 2014 after the previous Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA), which enabled the security services to snoop on telecoms and Internet services, was declared invalid by the European Court of Justice (here and here) because it breached the fundamental right to respect for private life and the fundamental right to the protection of personal data.
Under the plan DRIPA would exist as temporary legislation in order to keep the old RIPA law alive and it would expire at the end of 2016 (details), which is when the Government hoped to replace it with their new and much more extensive Investigatory Powers Bill (here).
However two ministers, David Davis MP (Conservative) and Tom Watson MP (Labour), opposed the apparent attempt to circumvent the ECJ ruling (DRIP was effectively RIPA with a few tweaks) and subsequently joined with civil rights groups in order to launch a Judicial Review of the law.
Last year the Divisional Court agreed that EU law requires an independent approval to access a persons communications data, which was based off an earlier judgement in the Digital Rights Ireland case. The court initially advised that the following issues be resolved and then adopted into the DRIPA law by March 2016 (here).
Divisional Court Findings Sections 1 and 2 of DRIPA: * Both fail to provide clear and precise rules to ensure data is only accessed for the purpose of preventing and detecting serious offences, or for conducting criminal prosecutions relating to such offences. * Access to data is not authorised by a court or independent body, whose decision could limit access to and use of the data to what is strictly necessary. The ruling observed that: The need for that approval to be by a judge or official wholly independent of the force or body making the application should not, provided the person responsible is properly trained or experienced, be particularly cumbersome.
The ruling could have made it difficult for the security services to conduct blanket surveillance of all citizens and it required more than a small change to the temporary legislation. Naturally the Government was concerned about this and lodged an appeal, which ended up questioning whether or not a past judgement in the Digital Rights Ireland case could be used as a basis for deciding the Judicial Review. The Court of Appeal then referred the issue back to the CJEU for clarification.
Court of Appeal Summary (20th Nov 2015) In these circumstances we have come to the conclusion that we should refer the following questions to the CJEU: (1) Did the CJEU in Digital Rights Ireland intend to lay down mandatory requirements of EU law with which the national legislation of Member States must comply? (2) Did the CJEU in Digital Rights Ireland intend to expand the effect of Articles 7 and/or 8, EU Charter beyond the effect of Article 8 ECHR as established in the jurisprudence of the ECtHR? We consider that the answers to these questions of EU law are not clear and are necessary in order for us to give judgement in these proceedings. For the reasons set out above, we exercise our discretion in favour of making a reference to the CJEU.
Today the CJEUs Advocate General gave his NON-BINDING opinion on the legal challenge to DRIPA and, in a blow to the case, ruled that a general obligation to retain data may be compatible with EU law. However he also added that this would need to satisfy strict requirements and it is for the UKs own national court system to determine whether those are being satisfied or not.
Henrik Saugmandsgaard e, CJEU Advocate General, said: First, the general obligation to retain data and the accompanying guarantees must be laid down by legislative or regulatory measures possessing the characteristics of accessibility, foreseeability and adequate protection against arbitrary interference. Secondly, the obligation must respect the essence of the right to respect for private life and the right to the protection of personal data laid down by the Charter. Thirdly, the Advocate General notes that EU law requires that any interference with the fundamental rights should be in the pursuit of an objective in the general interest. He considers that solely the fight against serious crime is an objective in the general interest that is capable of justifying a general obligation to retain data, whereas combating ordinary offences and the smooth conduct of proceedings other than criminal proceedings are not. Fourthly, the general obligation to retain data must be strictly necessary to the fight against serious crime, which means that no other measure or combination of measures could be as effective while at the same time interfering to a lesser extent with fundamental rights. Furthermore, the Advocate General points out that that obligation must respect the conditions set out in the judgment in Digital Rights Ireland as regards access to the data, the period of retention and the protection and security of the data, in order to limit the interference with the fundamental rights to what is strictly necessary. Finally, the general obligation to retain data must be proportionate, within a democratic society, to the objective of the fight against serious crime, which means that the serious risks engendered by that obligation within a democratic society must not be disproportionate to the advantages it offers in the fight against serious crime.
The opinion carries with it a lot of weight and appears to support the calls for DRIP to only focus on serious crime, which is something that the UK courts will have to factor as that was the purpose of the whole exercise. On the other hand its by no means the knock-out blow that David Davis and Tom Watson might have originally hoped to achieve.
Mind you David Davis has this week withdrawn from the case, which is hardly surprising because he was recently appointed by new Prime Minister, Theresa May, to become the new Secretary of State for Brexit. Yes, the very person who he fought so valiantly against over DRIP has now appointed him to a role for leaving the EU, fun times indeed.
Jim Killock, Executive Director of Open Rights Group, said: The Advocate General has stated that data retention should only be used in the fight against serious crime, yet in the UK there are more than half a million requests for communications data each year. These do not only come from police but also local councils and government departments. It is difficult to see how the Government can claim that these organisations are investigating serious crimes. The Opinion calls for strict safeguards yet in the UK, there is currently no judicial authorisation in the UK police, local authorities and government departments can get internal sign off to access data. If the IP Bill is passed, data will be able to be analysed without a warrant through an intrusive tool known as the request filter. It may be too late to end data retention under DRIPA, which expires at the end of the year, but the Government has the opportunity to ensure that the IP Bill complies with EU law. In particular, they should end the extension of mass data retention proposed in the Bill, which would see the UK become one of the only democracies to record its citizens web browsing history and provide a police search engine to scour it.
At this point some might be wondering whether or not the vote to leave the EU will make all of this irrelevant and grant the UK Government free region to do as it pleases, although in order for the UK to continue doing business / sharing data with the EU then we might still have to sign-up to much of the same legislation. In any case that is still a few years away.
However perhaps the biggest question is over what impact this might have on the forthcoming IPBill, which proposes to go a lot further than DRIP. The Government may yet seek to reduce any conflict by stiffening its safeguards, but well have to wait and see. One way or another, DRIP comes to an end this year.
UPDATE 4:51pm
The ISPA UK Chair, James Blessing, said: The Opinion of the Advocate General, whilst non-binding, raises serious questions about UK data retention legislation. It calls into question some aspects of the Investigatory Powers Bill and ISPA therefore calls on the Home Office needs to ensure the legal framework around data retention is fully compliant with the final court judgement. It is vital to give industry certainty on what the rules are, maintain user confidence in online services and avoid another round of lengthy legal proceedings.
Tuesday, July 19th, 2016 (8:53 am) - Score 1,474
The cross-party Culture, Media and Sport Committee inquiry into the coverage and performance of superfast broadband in the United Kingdom has today published its outcome, which heavily criticises BT for over-reliance on its old copper network, significantly under investing in Openreach and their lack of ambition towards rolling out ultrafast FTTP/H services.
According to the Establishing world-class connectivity throughout the UK (PDF 1,4MB) report, the UK is currently doing well in comparison to similar EU countries on superfast broadband deployment (i.e. good coverage, take-up and low prices). But in the same breath it warns that BTs over-reliance on Openreachs copper access network, and its supposed lack of ambition for driving fibre to the premises across the country, could result in a hard-to-solve digital divide beyond 2020.
Dido Harding, CEO of UK ISP Talk Talk, said: This report puts beyond doubt the need for radical reform of Openreach. MPs have concluded that Openreach is not fit for purpose and is letting Britain down. As Ofcom considers how to improve Britains broadband, it should feel emboldened to know it has cross-party political support to be radical. BTs broken promises risk creating a two-tier digital Britain, with millions of homes and businesses denied fast, reliable broadband. Britain needs an independent Openreach, freed from the shackles of BT and able to invest in world-class technology for the whole country, not just parts of it. After years of suffering, customers deserve nothing less.
At present the existing 1.7bn (public funding) Broadband Delivery UK programme and related projects have already helped to make fixed line super-fast broadband (24Mbps+) speeds available to 90% of premises (here) and a second phase will take this to 95% by 2017/18 and possibly 97% by 2019. The vast majority of this state-aid supported work involves contracts with BT, which has predominantly been deploying its cheaper up to 80Mbps Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC / VDSL) technology.
On top of that BT (Openreach) and Virgin Media are separately working, via commercial investment, to expand their latest hybrid-fibre (G.fast and DOCSIS 3.0/3.1) ultrafast (100-300Mbps+) connections to around 60%+ of the UK by 2020, which is mostly focused on the easy low hanging fruit of urban and suburban areas. In keeping with that both BT and Virgin have very recently pledged to do more Gigabit-capable pure fibre optic FTTP/H broadband (here and here).
Lest we not forget the FTTP/H trials from TalkTalk and Sky Broadband, as well as the commitment from alternative network ISPs like Gigaclear, B4RN, Hyperoptic and Cityfibre plus many more. All of those are working to expand pure fibre optic connectivity to more premises, but todays report suggests that this may not be good enough and more must still be done.
Meanwhile the strategy for closing the final 3% gap, which is partly dependent upon the new EU State Aid agreement (details here), is not yet concrete and seems to depend upon the introduction of a legally-binding 10Mbps for all Universal Service Obligation (USO) for 2020 (here and here). The new report supports the USO, but warns that it must be designed to incentivise investment, without creating consumer detriment or overly inhibiting take-up and could be raised to 30Mbps by 2022.
However its clear that most of the criticism is being firmly directed at BTs feet, with a strong focus upon the groups network access division (Openreach). The committee also recommends that Ofcom must keep the option of splitting BT from Openreach firmly on the table (Strategic Review), in case they dont improve. Ofcom are due to publish a final statement on this within the next few weeks.
Inquiry Statement The Committee says BT has exploited its position to make strategic decisions that favour the Groups priorities and interests and is likely to have sacrificed shareholder value and customer benefit as a result. Capital investment in Openreach has been broadly flat since 2009 until this year, and quality of service remains poor. The Committee is demanding that BT invest significantly more in Openreach, and allow Openreach much more autonomy over what it invests, when and where. It supports Ofcoms plans for establishing greater separation between Openreach and BT Group, but makes clear that if BT fails to offer the reforms and investment assurances necessary to satisfy our concerns, Ofcom should move to enforce full separation of Openreach. In the Committees judgement, Ofcom has not placed enough emphasis in the past on improving Openreashs quality of service: it says the prospect of stiffer penalties should also encourage BT to voluntarily invest more in infrastructure.
As usual the committee has published a long list of recommendations alongside its report, although the short summary of those is as follows. We should point out that the report talks a lot about bringing superfast broadband to the final 5% of the UK, although its widely expected that BDUK will now reach 97% coverage and so really its the final 3% that matters most.
Key Recommendations Openreach * The lack of transparency in BT Openreachs costs and deployment plans in relation to the BDUK programme has stifled local competition and thwarted other network providers planning. * BT has allowed service quality levels to remain low at Openreach in recent years = from an arguably low base while investment in Openreach has been flat. Ofcom was slow to introduce minimum service standards with financial penalties for Openreach, some nine years after its creation. * The shortfall in investment in Openreach could potentially be hundreds of millions of pounds a year. It arises because BT appears to be deliberately investing in higher-risk, higher-return assets such as media properties, and not investing in profitable lower risk infrastructure and services through Openreach. * BT Group is exploiting the position of vertical integration to make strategic decisions that favour the Groups priorities and interests, at the expense of its access infrastructure business. Its current structure allows it to use Openreachs utility-type assets to cross-subsidise riskier activities elsewhere in the Group, while significantly under-investing in the access infrastructure and services on which a large part of the public rely. Ofcom * Ofcoms charge control regime has kept a downward pressure on prices, so that the UKs communications prices are among the lowest compared with similar EU countries. But this mechanism has not been successful in holding Openreach to an adequate quality of service; and it is an open question how effective overall it has been in stimulating investment in Openreachs infrastructure. Reaching the final five percent * For those households and businesses in the final five percent there will need to be judicious deployments of interim technology solutions to provide improved connectivity to those households and businesses which currently have little or no coverage. * The challenge of reaching the final five per cent is likely to demand the active and willing co-operation of local communities wherever possible. BDUK will need to offer guidance and support in key areas such as: choosing the right technology solutions, raising finance, stimulating demand and minimising other costs of provision. Expanding the USO * That there is a compelling case for expanding the current USO (Universal Service Obligation) for telephony and dial-up internet to cover broadband, given the vital role it plays in peoples lives. The report notes that the need for an increase in the USO minimum download speed to 30Mbps by 2022 is entirely foreseeable, and the Government should be making active plans for this eventuality, although it supports a 10Mbps USO for now because there is no advantage in setting the USO too high before the right infrastructure exists to deliver it. On top of that it warns that a higher specification would force industry to pass on the extra cost to consumers as well as in higher charges. * Ideally, the USO must be designed so as not to impose too great a burden on industry: to incentivise investment, without creating consumer detriment or overly inhibiting take-up. The committee sees BT has being able to do most of the heavy lifting here (e.g. Long Reach VDSL / FTTC), but it also warns that a balance must be struck in order to prevent the USO becoming a tool that would support a monopoly position and thus discourage investment from alternative networks.
No doubt BT would argue, exactly as it did yesterday (here), that theyve already made big improvements to their customer service and have continued to invest in new broadband infrastructure. In fairness, its worth considering that the roll-out of their fibre broadband (FTTC/P) services actually began in 2009, which also occurred during one of the UKs worst recessions.
A BT Group Spokesperson told ISPreview.co.uk: We are disappointed to be criticised for having invested more than 1bn a year in infrastructure when the UK was emerging from recession and rival companies invested little. As the report acknowledges BTs investment has made the UK a broadband leader among the major economies in Europe. Todays report is in any case largely historic given Openreach investment is 30 percent higher than it was two years ago and it will grow again this year. We are already pumping in hundreds of millions of pounds of extra money and we have also committed to invest a further six billion pounds over the next three years. We agree that service levels have to improve and yesterday we announced that we are making significant progress in this area. Thousands of engineers have been recruited and we are fixing repairs and installing new lines quicker than before. We are in discussions with Ofcom about increasing the autonomy of Openreach and are hopeful that a settlement is possible that will meet the concerns of the committee. Separating Openreach from BT would lead to less investment, not more, and would fatally undermine the aims of the committee.
The full 101-page report covers a lot of different areas and appears to represent a reasonably balanced study of the market, which in many ways mirrors the initial outcome of Ofcoms Strategic Review from earlier this year. Never the less it remains to be seen how much of what they recommend will actually be accepted into future policy and regulation, but the pressure on BT has clearly been turned up a few notches.
The committee itself were sadly unable to cover a number of significant consumer issues, not least with regards to misleading up to speeds (broadband advertising), as well as the standard of customer service from ISPs and how the recent Brexit vote (leaving the EU) could affect the EU laws for telecoms, Internet, broadcasting and transmission services (e.g. the position over roaming mobile charges).
In keeping with the above issues, the committee has proposed to return to these during autumn 2016 by holding one-off evidence sessions to look at a variety of specific areas.
UPDATE 11:39am
A comment from Cityfibre has just come in.
Mark Collins, Cityfibres Director of Strategy, said: We welcome this mornings report from the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. Exposing BTs underinvestment in UK digital infrastructure is long overdue. CityFibre has campaigned the need of sustainable competition to Openreach and significant further investment in fibre infrastructure. As this report highlights, Openreachs legacy networks are not able to meet the requirements and demands of businesses, local government and consumers. Competitive investment in fit-for-purpose fibre infrastructure is now critical, and this need must be recognised and supported by both the Government and Ofcom. Ofcoms historical desire to regulate to lowest prices and devalue infrastructure investments must be curtailed. We need a regulatory and policy environment that underpins the building of new digital networks across the UK. A restructured Openreach will continue to have an important role to play in the future, but it cannot, and should not, anchor the entire UK broadband infrastructure alone its poor performance is testament to this. Todays report recognises the need to foster a competitive environment where the role of alternative network providers are encouraged and supported to ensure the UKs digital infrastructure is capable of meeting current and future demands.
UPDATE 1:10pm
The ISPA has responded to express its belief that a mixture of technologies, supported by highly targeted public funding is the best way to meet the challenge of connecting the final 5%. The Committee recommends limiting the burden of a USO on industry, thus the ISPA says that it should be supported via public funding rather than an industry levy (tax).
However the ISPA also believes that the Committee could have gone further, such as by calling for reform of the VOAs fibre-tax and wayleave agreements that add time and cost to deployments of vital infrastructure. In fairness, the Governments new Digital Economy Bill does hint at improvements to wayleaves through changes to the Electronic Communications Code.
James Blessing, ISPA Chair, said: ISPA members have invested hugely in bringing superfast broadband to the vast majority of the country utilising a variety of technologies and we re-iterate our call for the new Government to spell out its vision for broadband. ISPA supports the objectives of a USO, but given the socio-economic benefits of broadband we feel public funding should be considered as the fairest option.
UPDATE 3:12pm
Now its Gigaclears turn and its not in the form of a normal comment, so well format it differently.
Tuesday, July 19th, 2016 (11:26 am) - Score 1,103
UK ISP Sky Broadband has mirrored TalkTalks recent move (here) by nudging Ofcom into launching a second parallel probe of Openreachs (BT) Special Fault Investigation (SFI) engineer service and Time Related Charges (TRC), with both questioning whether such charges are being correctly applied.
Disputes over how much Openreach charges for engineer related work and the way that it applies those charges are of course nothing new to these pages, with ISPs sometimes complaining that they can end up being asked to foot the bill for Openreach to find and fix faults that exist within its own network; amongst other gripes (delays, other billing errors etc.).
In keeping with that Ofcom recently opened a related investigation after TalkTalk complained that the charges being applied to them between 1st April 2011 and 30th June 2014 were not cost-orientated and were thus inconsistent with BTs basis of charges obligations in relation to these services.
Funnily enough Sky Broadbands complaint is almost identical, except for covering a much longer period between 1st January 2009 and 30th June 2014.
Ofcom Statement This dispute concerns allegations by Sky that BTs TRC and SFI charges in relation to local loop unbundling (LLU) and wholesale line rental (WLR) services, in the period between 1 January 2009 and 30 June 2014 (the relevant period) were not cost-orientated and were therefore inconsistent with BTs basis of charges obligations under SMP conditions imposed by Ofcom in successive reviews of the markets for wholesale local access services and wholesale fixed analogue exchange line services since 2003. Ofcom recognises that, on the face of the referral, there appears to be a dispute between the parties that commercial negotiations have failed to resolve. In resolving disputes, Ofcom must act in a manner which is consistent with both Ofcoms general duties under section 3 of the Act, and pursuant to section 4(1)(c) of the Act, the six Community requirements set out in section 4 of the Act which give effect, amongst other things, to Article 8 of the Framework Directive.
Ofcom stopped taking feedback for TalkTalks complaint on 16th June 2016, although any stakeholders / ISPs interested in the outcome of Skys separate dispute have until 29th July 2016 to respond. Should the regulator find against BTOpenreach then the operator could be forced to repay any incorrectly levelled amounts.
An Openreach Spokesperson told ISPreview.co.uk: This is a detailed and complex pricing issue which couldnt be resolved commercially. Ofcom hasnt endorsed Skys case, but the regulator is legally obliged to investigate issues like this and well engage fully in that process.
The timing of todays dispute, which comes on the same day as a damning new report of BTs national broadband progress and infrastructure is published (here), cant be ignored. The regulator may perhaps be hoping that the added pressure is enough to encourage Openreach into making a bigger concession towards their Strategic Review demands.
Tuesday, July 19th, 2016 (1:35 pm) - Score 734
Cable operator Virgin Media Business has announced that their on-going 3bn Project Lighting network expansion will aim to connect tens of thousands more businesses to their ultrafast 300Mbps broadband platform, starting with 9,500 premises at two business parks in Andover, Hampshire.
At present the expansion project seeks to extend Virgins hybrid-fibre DOCSIS based broadband network to reach an additional 4 million premises by 2019 (i.e. 60-65% of the United Kingdom) and more than 1 million of those will also be catered for via pure fibre optic FTTP lines.
So far most of this work has focused on residential premises via Virgin Media, but Virgin has also promised to target underserved business parks and office blocks that exist within easy reach of its existing network. As a result some 9,500 businesses will, over the next 6 months, be covered on two of Andovers key business parks (Portway and Walworth). Many more will follow.
Mike Smith, Director at VMB, said: Too many business parks and office blocks are stuck in the analogue age and business tenants are suffering as a result. With our ultrafast network we can make a big impact to thousands of businesses across the country.
Apparently the initial roll-out has won support from the Test Valley Borough Council, as well as local businesses, which had typically accessed download speeds of just 5Mbps. VMB is currently home to more than 36,000 business customers, most of them small and medium enterprises, and theyre clearly looking to grow that side of their operations.
A house in Shanghai was recently purchased at the unit price of 344,900 yuan ($51,486) per square meter, China Economic Net reported on Tuesday. Analysts said that the deal sets a new record for the highest transaction price in the Chinese real estate market. The total price of the 700-square-meter house was 242 million yuan.
Information released by global real estate services provider Savills shows that the house was in a highly desirable residential community in Shanghai. The community is surrounded by many schools and commercial areas. Even so, the selling price set a record high in Shanghai's real estate market, and some analysts believe it to be the highest ever in China.
In the first half of 2016, a total of 682 houses in Shanghai were sold at unit prices of over 100,000 yuan per square meter, according to statistics from a real estate consultant firm. This is a dramatic rise compared to 195 houses sold at that price level in 2015.
An insider disclosed that with more and more deluxe houses selling at such high price points, the rigid housing demands of younger people will be increasingly harder to meet.
How to Promote Yourself on the Job
Most of what Ive learned about leadership can be traced back to my time in the U.S. Air Force, when I was flying as a crew member on reconnaissance missions toward the end of the Vietnam War. In something of a twist of fate all these years later, everything I had learned was encapsulated and crystallized in one interview last week, when I had the honor of speaking with retired Air Force Col. Lee Ellis.
Ellis was a fighter pilot whose plane was shot down over North Vietnam in 1967, and who spent the next five years as a prisoner of war. He learned a lot about leadership, too, and he went on to become a leadership consultant and author. His book, Leading with Honor: Leadership Lessons from the Hanoi Hilton, which came out in 2012, was widely acclaimed as one of the best books on leadership ever written. When his forthcoming book, Engage with Honor: Building a Culture of Courageous Accountability, is released in September, theres every likelihood that it will be equally well received.
I opened the interview by asking Ellis what he sees as the one essential leadership characteristic thats most lacking in corporate America today. He said clearly, its courage:
People will tell you that they have a good character, and what that really means is, I know what the right thing to do is. But it doesnt mean theyre going to do it, because fear and greed will take them out we see this all the time. Greed relates to an insecurity that deep down is probably a fear that if they mess up, theyre dead in the water. And theres this pride of, I have to look good. I am good, because I wouldnt be the leader if I wasnt really good. Therefore, because Im the leader, and Im really good, I cant make mistakes I cant show weakness to anybody.
A lot of people are terrified of showing weakness and vulnerability. That was what was so good about our leaders in the POW camp they could not help but be vulnerable. They were beaten and tortured they had to be vulnerable. They couldnt say, I always win, I never give in, because everybody knew they could make you do whatever they wanted you to do.
So fears, insecurities, and doubts cause people to cover up when they make mistakes. Instead of making a mistake, and correcting it to get back on course, which is what I recommend in my book, because were all going to make mistakes, people say, Oh gosh, I cant let anybody find out that I made a mistake. In todays world, you know its going to be in the headlines. Well, youve got to be ready to take that, and say, I made a mistake, and move on. Without courage, youll never be able to live honorably.
I asked Ellis what had compelled him to write Engage with Honor after having written Leading with Honor, and at what point he realized that there was more he needed to share. He said it had become clear to him that accountability is a huge issue in companies, and one in which his advice is routinely sought. He encapsulated that advice this way:
First of all, we have to start with ourselves, because were the only ones we really have control over, for the most part. As we lead ourselves, and start holding ourselves accountable to what it is that we say we believe and what we stand for, that sets the example, and gives us the credibility to hold others accountable. So as a leader, I have to be willing to face that test, and if I fail, I have to be courageous and confident enough to admit that I havent lived up to my commitments, and be vulnerable and transparent about that.
The irony is that that doesnt make us look weaker it makes us look stronger. People are afraid to do that, because theyre afraid that other people will see them as weak. But in reality, when somebody is doing his best to walk the talk, and then makes a mistake, and quickly says, I messed up, that gives people confidence that you are a person whos paying attention, and that youre working hard to be an honorable person and an accountable person. And it sets the example for others that you do everything you can to keep your word, but if you reach a point where you just cant and we all run into that sometimes then you let somebody know. It takes a lot of courage; it takes a strong character; and it takes a real commitment.
The next step, Ellis said, is to provide clarity to others:
You cant hold people accountable for things that are not really clear. So it starts at the 100,000-ft. level by clarifying mission, vision, values. The leadership has to determine that for the organization, and then has to clearly communicate it, all the way to the lowest level. Because if the people at the lower levels dont understand that, theyre going to require a lot more supervision and time to manage them. Sometimes theyre not going to be aligned you want alignment, so the people at the lowest level who are doing the work are aligned in the mission, vision, and values with the people at the highest level who are making the big decisions.
That alignment is so important, and it requires clarity at all levels. Clarity at the 50,000-ft. level would be about professional standards. If youre an engineer, what are the professional standards? What are the organizational standards? And then all the way down to the job itself, having clarity about what the expectations are. What should a successful outcome look like?
Ellis also shared his thoughts on a range of other leadership issues, including the generational and gender-related dimensions of leadership. Ill cover those in a forthcoming post.
A contributing writer on IT management and career topics with IT Business Edge since 2009, Don Tennant began his technology journalism career in 1990 in Hong Kong, where he served as editor of the Hong Kong edition of Computerworld. After returning to the U.S. in 2000, he became Editor in Chief of the U.S. edition of Computerworld, and later assumed the editorial directorship of Computerworld and InfoWorld. Don was presented with the 2007 Timothy White Award for Editorial Integrity by American Business Media, and he is a recipient of the Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for editorial excellence in news coverage. Follow him on Twitter @dontennant.
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NASA is now in a deep dilemma finding another possible source of fuel for its deep space explorations as Plutonium-238 runs out of supply. The agency's space missions are powered by the elements being used in its instruments that are sent into outer species for exploration.
Unfortunately, the available naturally occurring Plutonium-238 vanished millions of years ago. The material used since the 1970's has been a by-product of nuclear weapon processing.
Plutonium-238 is an element of choice for powering up devices and equipment for out space because of its practical characteristics. It can be carried by machine explorers in small amounts without compromising the availability of power supply to operate them.
NASA may have other possible sources of power but they are usually impractical to use. According to an article published by Indian Express, solar cells cannot be trusted with their minute amount of energy production. Chemical batteries do not usually have enough capacity for long missions. On the other hand, nuclear fission reactors are too bulky and heavy for space explorations.
The best thing about Plutonium-238 is that it can sustain power supply for several years as with the case of the explorers sent out in 1977. According to a report in Wired, the Voyager 1 prolonged its five-year mission to explore Saturn and Jupiter by still having been able to send information and data up to 2025.
The power supplies of the aircraft were only composed of three batteries with Plutonium-238. Since then, deep space exploration instruments have been powered by the same element.
Nuclear chemist Steve Johnson from the Idaho National Laboratory laments that there is only enough Plutonium-238 to last a few years. The total depletion of the element could lead to a halt in NASA's various deep space missions unless a new power source element is discovered and used.
Things are just getting exciting for Season 2 of "One Punch Man." The most-awaited series has created some buzz over the last few weeks.
There are some who trusts it will debut within the year however there are a few who anticipate its delay. The good news though is that the second season of the series is in the works. According to Murata Yusuke, the director of "One Punch Man," the series are being worked since the first quarter of 2016. Though, it could take some time for this to be released.
A lot has been speculating what would be the next turn of events for Saitama after winning the fight against Lord Boros. Season 2 will cover events that are rumored to revolve around the "Hero Hunter" arc. This would prove to be more thrilling than the previous season given that it would welcome Saitama's most prevailing nemesis, Garou.
Apart from this, it is anticipated there would be escalated strain between Saitama and Amai Mask. There could be some new opponents he would need to face in this season.
If these are all rumored to be true, it could be proper as well to name the first episode of season 2: the 'The Strongest Hero' - which sounds fitting given the turn of events. There is a chance as well that Saitama may not be the strongest hero but a villain.
It has not yet been determined when "One Punch Man" Season 2 will take place. There has been no announcement until now when it will grace the televisions again. However, it is deemed to premier on the last quarter of 2016.
Last Monday, Yahoo Inc. posted a huge loss in profit, possibly affecting any buyer to their business. Since the announcement, there is still no potential buyer up to this day.
Yahoo is now having a harder time acquiring a buyer for their internet business that has statistically been slowing down. Just last Monday, Yahoo announced its earnings fell by 19 percent in the second quarter.
Ever since Yahoo has appointed a new CEO, Marissa Mayer, this has been the company's sixth decline in the span of seven periods. Mayer was appointed as Yahoo's CEO just four years ago and its loss already increased to $439 million. The company's expenses rose to 40 percent due to Tumblr, which Yahoo bought back in 2013 for $1 billion, according to Wall Street Journal.
However, despite the charge caused by Tumblr, Yahoo's costs could still have risen to 9 percent. In spite of this, Yahoo has reported a $60 million rise in revenue due to its core internet business. There have been potential buyers eyeing Yahoo. One of them is Verizon, a huge telecom business that recently bought AOL as well.
Another potential buyer is are AT&T and its partnership with the funders of Quicken Loans, Dan Gilbert and Warren Buffett. Reports say that Yahoo could possibly announce a buyer already by the end of this month, as reported by BBC News.
Yahoo's CEO, Mayer, initially planned a spin-off for Yahoo last year however the board decided on selling it instead. Hence, she kept focus on increasing the company's growth and lowering its cost. This resulted to the company cutting its' global workforce by 15 percent.
It has been years since Yahoo's future has been put on a spotlight. Despite the visible loss in profit, Mayer still made progress in keeping the company standing. However, the company is still about to be bought already soon.
Just two weeks before the expected launch on the market of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7, a new batch of leaked photos suggest some very interesting features.
According to GSM Arena, the upcoming Samsung phablet will come with a dual-curved display. In some newly leaked photos from the case maker VRS can be seen that the stylus' top end seems to be a similar design to the one on the current Samsung Note 5 model.
The photos also seem to confirm the presence of the USB Type-C port. If this is to be confirmed, then the Samsung Galaxy Note7 will become the first smartphone designed and produced by the South Korean tech giant to sport the next standard port design. In the spring, the Korean company took the conservative approach for the Galaxy S7 and stuck with microUSB 2.0.
The British publication Express also reports that the Galaxy Note 7 is set to feature the most useful tools from the Samsung's top line of smartphones. According to leaked photos, the upcoming flagship mobile device will feature an always-on display. Users will be able to see notification, date and time even when the device is turned off.
The Dutch website TechTastic, shows photos of what appears to be a working Note 7 with the always-on display. The leaked photos suggest that the phone will come with a low-light AMOLED 5.7-inch curved Quad-HD display.
This will allow users to keep up to date with important data and notifications without consuming much battery life. Samsung has included a similar in previous flagship smartphones, such as the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge.
Based on previous reports, tech analysts are expecting the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 to be powered by either Samsung's own Exynos octa-core processor or Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 821 processor. The upcoming smartphone will come with as much as 128 GB storage and 6 GB of RAM. The device will also will have a built-in iris-scanner that will allow for biometric unlocking, providing extra security.
Nintendo stock prices doubled as of July 19 due largely to the popularity of Pokemon Go. The mobile app game is now available in more than 30 countries.
Nintendo stocks in the Japanese stock exchange gained around 14 percent this week, according to Reuters. In just seven trading days the company has more than doubled its market capital. Nintendo is now worth around almost $43 billion. That astonishing increase started only when Pokemon Go went online in America.
The surge of Pokemon Go players also caused the instant popularity of Nintendo stocks among investors. Okasan Securities spokesperson Takashi Oba said that this the first time he witnessed a quick change of fortune in short span of time.
A single share of Nintendo is now worth almost $300 as of July 19. Barely two weeks ago, the price was only half that much. Nintendo stocks were the most traded share on Tuesday. It comprised around 25 percent of all traded stocks that day. Total turnover of Nintendo stocks on July 19 amounted to almost $66 billion.
Nintendo and developer Niantic Labs were surprised by the widespread popularity of Pokemon Go. There are talks that other famous Nintendo characters will also be included in future mobile apps and augmented reality games. Excitement is also building up over the upcoming release of the NX console.
An anonymous Japanese fund manager said that Nintendo is now being looked upon as augmented reality related company. This helped increased its value to investors who are now scrambling to acquire stocks of companies that develop Virtual reality or augmented reality products.
The manager also said that the profits that Nintendo is getting from Pokemon Go estimated to be around $471 million which makes the current Nintendo stock price quite reasonable. Nintendo however, surpassed Sony on July 19 in terms of market capitalization, according to Bloomberg.
Android was reportedly ditched by United States Special Forces in favor of Apple's iPhone 6. The reason for the switch is due to Android's usual "freezing" compared to the iPhone 6 which has "smoother" performance.
The Android device the U.S. commandos are using is possibly the Samsung smartphone according to Tech Insider. The complaint about the Android device is the need for frequent restart especially when it's being used to operate a number of the Army's military apps.
A highly dependable smartphone is a vital tool that can mean a mission's success or failure and life or death situations. The U.S. Army has then decided that it needed a better smartphone than the one they are currently using. A test was conducted in order to pit the Android with the iPhone 6.
When the U.S. military decided to use the iPhone 6, the results were far better, according to DoD Buzz. One of the Army apps involves the splitting of the smartphone's screen. The Special Operations Command or SOC tested the Android and iOS involving a drone travelling to its target. The iPhone or rather its graphics were far superior to that of the Android.
The U.S. Special Forces did not release the specs of the Android device that was tested against the iPhone 6. There was an earlier report however, that American military has adopted the Samsung Galaxy Note for its special operation apps.
Some observers theorized that SOC may have tested an outdated Galaxy Note against the current iPhone model. They pointed out that the current Samsung Galaxy Note 5 or other Android devices have more powerful chips than iPhone 6.
The U.S. military have been using smartphones for various missions including intelligence gathering, reconnaissance and surveillance. Smartphone technology has been advancing by leaps and bounds which makes them a viable and important means of communication for soldiers in the field.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19
Trend:
Armenian armed forces have 11 times violated the ceasefire on the line of contact of the Azerbaijani and Armenian troops over the past 24 hours, said Azerbaijans Defense Ministry July 19.
Armenian army was using large-caliber machine guns.
Armenian armed forces, stationed in the Chinari village of Armenias Berd district and on nameless heights of the Krasnoselsk district opened fire at Azerbaijani positions located in the Aghbulag village of Azerbaijans Tovuz district and on nameless heights of the Gadabay district.
Azerbaijani troops also underwent fire from the positions located near the Marzili village of the Aghdam district and on nameless heights of the Goranboy and Khojavand districts.
The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations.
Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
Listed Australian online and mobile marketing solutions provider, Tech Mpire, has inked an agreement with Silicon Valley advertising technology company Track Revenue to offer use of Track Revenue software to its network of affiliates.
Under the deal, Track Revenues Mpire Plan will provide Tech Mpires affiliates with extra functionality designed to improve conversion rates of online media buying.
Tech Mpire (ASX:TMP) chief marketing officer, Jeff Botnick, says affiliates who meet the conditions of the offer, will not be charged for the use of the software, and both existing and new Tech Mpire affiliates will be eligible, providing they meet a minimum monthly earnings threshold for every month they utilise Track Revenues platform.
According to Botnick, by implementing a minimum earnings threshold, the company anticipates increased volumes of activity from existing affiliates that might habitually distribute their activity over multiple competing networks.
Reaching the right audience, with the right ads is fundamental to the success of our affiliates. Leveraging Track Revenue software for free, our affiliates will be able to further optimise their traffic, and improve conversion rates, to take their performance to the next level.
The extra functionality afforded by this arrangement, makes our network even more attractive to affiliates and demonstrates our commitment to helping our already stellar network, improve further.
Track Revenue chief executive Nelson Cheung says the partnership with Tech Mpire has evolved out of the "mutual goal shared by Mpire Network and Track Revenue, to contribute to sustainable growth in the performance industry, helping our clients constantly adapt and improve".
"Mpires commitment to this goal is demonstrated in its willingness to provide tools, such as our powerful media buying software, to its affiliates. We are excited to welcome the quality affiliates that Mpire are nurturing onto our platform to help them optimise their traffic and drive conversions.
Reports are emerging of increasing theft of smartphones from Pokemon GO players and selling of Pokemon accounts a level 21 player's account can earn US$600.
According to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) and other sources, high-powered players can sell their accounts via eBay or Craigslist, offering casual players a head start with more Pokemon, PokeStops, and in-game resources.
According to the level 21 player, he had invested about 15 hours in collecting Pokemon and the US$600 was not too bad a return better than he could make by driving for Uber.
Selling Pokemon accounts is not illegal stealing (mugging) Pokemon players to get their phone is.
Three students were robbed by a 15-year-old wielding a knife yesterday. Then there was a report of beacons being used to lure Pokemoners to deserted spots. Add that to countless articles on stealing smartphones from users for what Pokemon and in-game items they contain makes this the new black.
One victim called 911 only to be told it was not an appropriate use of the emergency service.
Pokemon update
On 15 July, a quick search revealed 32 million articles about Pokemon. Today it is 345 million a 10-fold increase.
Pokemon GO is a phenomenon within days of release it had outranked Spotify, Netflix, Twitter, Pandora, Tinder, and more as the most used Android app. It was the most tweeted subject over the past week and eclipsed the search word "porn" within seven days of release.
Pokemon players are averaging 43 minutes per day burning 1500-1800 calories and that is a great thing.
On the negative side depending if you are a user or a telco is the massive amount of data being consumed and the huge spike in power banks sold as GPS is a massive battery drain.
Speculation is largely on how long the fad will last with ill-informed commentators likening it to the Yo-Yo craze of the 70s.
Well, the good news is that it has marketing might behind it, and Pokemon Sun and Moon will be released in November. It apparently is Pokemons take on Hawaii and will also support at least nine languages, and the Chinese market is expected to be the biggest user. Crossover from Pokemon Go will be encouraged via something called a Pokemon Bank that allows transfer of Pokemon and resources to the new game.
One highly cited site is Bulbapedia a wiki for Pokemon established in 2005 and now a repository for nearly 30,000 articles on Pokemon.
Console gaming is far from dead despite Microsoft including high levels of Xbox support in Windows 10. The new Xbox One S, 4K is coming.
Microsoft have announced the new Xbox One S will be released on 2 August in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, UK and the US.. It will be released in additional markets later this year.
There will be a 500GB version at US$299, 1TB at US$349 and 2TB at US$399 (confirmed at $549). The good news is that all Xbox One games, accessories, and Xbox Live services will work with the new Xbox One S.
The unit is 40% smaller than Xbox; comes in robotic white; has a Blu-ray player; 4K UHD video streaming; high dynamic range (HDR) support; clients for Netflix, Amazon and more; IR Blaster; USB 3.0; and integrated power.
The new controller (included) has Bluetooth connectivity and will work with the Xbox One S, Windows 10 computers, and phones. Additional controllers cost US$59.99.
Gone is the dedicated Kinect port it now works via USB and adaptors are available to support existing Kinect Sensors. The adaptor is free for existing Kinect owners.
A strong appeal may be the 4K, 3820x2160, 60Hz, HDR support, HDMI 2.0a, and Blu-ray player it may end up as a low-cost 4K media server as it can apparently upscale video to 4K too. Being Windows 10-based and having USB it may support USB Digital TV tuners as well (subject to software and drivers).
Microsoft has not released details of the system on a chip (it will be an AMD APU) or memory (probably 8GB), but it supports DirectX12 and other Windows 10 video and gaming standards. It should also support any USB-based VR headset and Hololens (subject to drivers). Nor have they advised the Wi-Fi standard (would have to be AC dual-band) or if there is an Ethernet connection.
The 2TB model will initially be available via EB Games and at the Microsoft Online Store and Flagship store at Sydneys Pitt Street Mall.
International research company IDC is predicting sales of over 100 million fitness trackers in 2016 not bad for a category created less than two years ago. Security is sadly lacking on most, and the results will concern many users.
According to research from independent security institute AV-Test GmbH covering seven popular fitness wearables and the iOS-based Apple Watch, top of the class for good security were the Microsoft Band 2 and Pebble Time offering very few opportunities for compromise. A detailed report is here.
It follows tests on nine other reasonably current fitness trackers last year. The latest report tests the Apple Watch, Basis Peak, Microsoft Band 2, Pebble Time, Mobile Action Q-Band, Runtastic Moment Elite, Xiaomi MiBand and Striiv Fusion.
The devices were assessed on 10 criteria divided into three areas: tracker, application, and online communication, outlined in the graphic below.
While Microsoft Band 2 can be used on Windows 10 Mobile, Android, and iOS, its dedicated operating system gives it amongst the best security with:
no external visibility after pairing;
it is the only one that generates a new MAC address each time it connects;
it will only pair to one trusted device at a time;
it has pairing authentication; and
data collected is reasonably tamper-proof.
Pebble Time also uses its own Pebble OS, and it links to iOS and Android smartphones. It shared most of the Band's security except generating a new MAC address. Pebble pipped the Band in secure online communication.
Apple Watch got good results all round, but researchers found that while it used encrypted data transmission they could read some of the information including lines of text with the geo data (location) of the user right down to the street address! As part of all tests, a standard root certificate was installed. That opened many connections to monitoring enabling users access to the data, and they could tamper with it.
The lowest graded security device was the Striv Fusion scoring an 80% risk factor with Xiaomi and Runtastic Elite not far behind.
The 2016 test shows significant improvements in security over 2015 where seven of the nine tested failed similar security tests.
The tests also showed up the vast difference between the tested fitness bands. Microsoft Band had 12 sensor/features bar Wi-Fi and a magnetometer. The majority only have a multi-axis accelerometer (pedometer) and some have a heart rate tracker.
Comment
AV-Test took a rigorous scientific approach that may be overkill in the real world. Nevertheless, it exposed too many flaws on five of the eight fitness trackers/smartwatches that could easily lead to personally identifiable information being stolen by determined hackers. The test portends the attention that needs to be paid to wearables as a matter of priority.
Fortunately, most of the issues are software-related, and manufacturers can fix these through firmware updates.
Symantec has an excellent 38-page report titled How safe is your quantified self here.
Header image courtesy Symantec.
Who ever heard of an action camera with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 650 processor, built-in LTE connectivity, video at up to 120fps, native clients for YouTube, and more?
Enter LGs latest Friend the Action CAM LTE, is an IP67 dust, sand and water-resistant, ruggedised camera. It comes with an action mount and is compatible with other popular action camera mounts. Having the power of an average smartphone inside means so much more processing power, especially to stabilise and smooth out moving action shots like careering down a mountain bike trail with a camera mounted on your helmet. It weighs only 99g.
It features extra-large 1.55pixels and a large 1/2.3, 12MP sensor (f/stop unknown but likely to be f/2.0 or less). It will shoot 4K video @ 30fps, HD @ 30 or 60fps and 720p @120fps.
Images and videos shot with LG Action CAMLTE can be downloaded and saved on paired smartphones via the Action CAM LTE app available on Google Play. The camera can record up to three hours of Full HD video. It can also function as a CCTV camera for home monitoring with images and videos saved to users smartphones.
LG and Qualcomm Technologies have worked closely together, and we are delighted that LG is extending the Snapdragon relationship, adding the LG Action CAM LTE to the existing 360 CAM and of course the amazing G5 itself, said Anthony Murray, senior vice-president and general manager, IoT, Qualcomm Technologies International.
LG Action CAM LTE offers a new and exciting experience with unparalleled features and innovation, said Juno Cho, president of LG Electronics and Mobile Communications Company. We are committed to developing a range of new Friends for LG G5 as well as LG premium smartphones in the pipeline.
Earlier this year, LG organised developer conferences in South Korea and the United States and distributed an SDK to encourage the development of LG Friends as well as sponsoring a competition to attract the best Friends ideas.
Price and availability will be announced locally.
Key Specifications:
Printer vendor Oki says its new C650 printer is "is smaller than any colour LED and laser printer with listed print speeds of more than
The world's arguably richest man Elon Musk wants the US military to pay for the ongoing costs incurred by the Ukraine's use of the Starlink
The largest contingent ever of Australian students have returned from the Houston Association for Space and Science Education (HASSE) Space School in the US.
iVicon Australia assisted 138 Australian students to spend their school holidays learning from NASAs finest. It was part of iVicons international study programme, in association with HASSE and NASA, designed to empower youth to develop their critical thinking skills through experimental learning.
Covering all facets of space exploration, science, and engineering, students experienced first-hand what its like to join the ranks of world-renowned astronauts, scientists, and flight commanders through mission simulation training and problem-based learning activities.
David Sunton, general manager of iVicon Australia and New Zealand, said giving students the opportunity to learn practical science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education beyond the classroom is integral to the space programme.
By integrating STEM subjects as an enabler for learning, the programme helps foster creativity, motivation to innovate, leadership skills, and the ability to problem solve in challenging situations, says Sunton.
Students who participated were on-site at NASA where they attended lectures and tutorials given by former NASA astronauts, engineers, and leading space physicists. Students also explored geology, learned energy production and even spent time in a cell lab investigating cellular biology.
Students also visited the US Space and Rocket Centre in Huntsville and engaged in astronaut training, space shuttle missions, and rocket construction together with launch, teamwork, and leadership training exercises.
These types of hands-on learning experiences are essential for broadening the capabilities and mindsets of students while preparing them for the changing Australian job landscape, added Sunton.
He believes all schools and educational systems should be shifting from traditional learning models and investing in the uptake of STEM subjects to improve Australias prospects of economic growth.
Our society is continuously evolving with the emergence of new digital economies, technologies, and industries. To keep up with our global counterparts, STEM subjects should be recognised for their value to society and embedded into the curriculum as an investment into Australias future, says Sunton.
Its about providing young adults with a platform to dream big and giving them the tools to succeed, no matter what aspirations they have. That's fundamental to the development of tomorrow.
A meeting with 26 students to be sent to Petkim, Turkey for an internship and their parents was held at Baku Higher Oil School (BHOS).
Welcoming the attendees Elmar Gasimov, Rector of BHOS extended his congratulations and wished success to the students getting an opportunity to take an internship at Petkim. The Rector underlined that students were annually sent for an internship at various companies including SOCAR structures and production units, international companies working in Azerbaijan, as well as Petkim, Turkey with the view to facilitate enrichment of their theoretical knowledge with practical skills.
Emphasizing that the students were lucky to get an opportunity to work at such a well-recognized company as Petkim, Mr. Gasimov brought to the parents attention that their children would be able to be closely familiarized with the operations of various technological equipment, devices, technological processes, as well as the control and management systems working together with experienced engineers.
He also said that the internship would help the students to enrich their academic knowledge with the practical skills acquired at Petkim thus facilitating their further development as highly qualified specialists.
The welcoming speech was then followed by the discussions where the Rector responded to various questions raised by the parents.
I should be noted that since the last year, based on the agreement reached between BHOS and Petkim, the BHOS students get an opportunity to take an internship at Petkim annually during the summer time. This year, the total duration of the programme will last from Jul.18 to Aug.29.
QUTs Creative Enterprise Australia (CEA) has been selected by US virtual reality start-up, TimeLooper, as its debut APAC base.
The tourism-focused virtual reality (VR) platform, TimeLooper, recently won a $50,000 grant from Hot DesQ to extend its operations to Queensland, following its participation in New Yorks TechCrunch Disrupt event in May.
It is the first international start-up to benefit from the Queensland governments Advance Queensland Hot DesQ initiative. TimeLooper selected CEA from the 13 Queensland government-approved hosts due to its network strength in the creative tech communities, its link to Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and the facilities available through its extensive networks. To date, CEA has supported more than 500 creative industry businesses on site, including raising more than $60 million in capital.
CEA will host TimeLooper for six months, helping the team to connect to the local start-up networks; provide access to mentors and its onsite co-working space (The Coterie); offer business advice; access to its incubator masterclass programme; exposure at its conference Creative3; and other levels of support required to accelerate growth of the platform.
The chief executive of QUT Creative Enterprise Australia, Anna Rooke, said: We are thrilled that TimeLooper has selected CEA as its inaugural Australian host. We are passionate about supporting start-ups in the creative tech space and are excited to help accelerate its development and growth in the APAC market.
Creative tech is contributing hugely to economies overseas, so were looking forward to leveraging the skills and network that TimeLooper will, in return, bring to Queensland, and indeed Australia, through its work in our market.
The TimeLooper platform enables users to experience and re-live unforgettable moments in history through their smartphones in 3D reality such as the 1940 London Blitz. The app is proving to be an ideal travel companion for tourists visiting landmarks around the world, transporting them back through time, from the Great Fire of London to the V-J Day kiss in Times Square.
Commenting on the relocation to Queensland, the chief operating officer of TimeLooper, Andrew Feinberg, said: When considering expansion beyond London and New York, we sought a market with a robust tourism ecosystem, rich pool of talent, and proximity to the booming APAC region.
Queensland provides each of the above in abundance, and the Hot DesQ programme does a wonderful job of bringing the pieces together in an attractive manner. Advance Queensland has clearly done its homework in developing a highly compelling value proposition for emerging companies.
Commenting on the first international start-up to arrive in Queensland via the $8 million Hot DesQ programme, Innovation Minister, Leeanne Enoch, welcomed TimeLooper to the #StartupState.
TimeLoopers tourism focus makes them an ideal first recipient of a Hot DesQ grant, Enoch said. Hot DesQ is designed to attract established start-ups from across the country and around the globe to Queensland to develop their ideas at one of 13 locations right around the state.
The companys arrival in Queensland will provide wonderful collaborative opportunities for the states tourism sector and this innovative company will inject exciting new talent into Queenslands dynamic start-up culture.
The Hot DesQ initiative is part of the $405 million whole-of-government Advance Queensland agenda providing a suite of programmes to support the growth of start-ups and business, and increase innovation activity and venture capital investment.
This Australian-first Hot DesQ programme is modelled on successful international programmes such as Start-up Chile, which has been running since 2010, and the French Tech Ticket launched just last year.
Applications for the programme are open until 31 July to international start-ups via www.HotDesQ.com.au
(L-R): Prash Lagisetti (TimeLooper), Professor Carol Dickenson (senior deputy vice-chancellor of QUT), Minister Leeanne Enoch (Advance Queensland), Andrew Feinberg (TimeLooper), and Anna Rooke (chief executive of CEA)
Residents of Tasmanias west coast are still expecting the National Broadband Network to be delivered to the region over a fibre-to-the-node network, rather than via a fibre-to-the premises (FttP) network favoured by some, but are awaiting final confirmation from the federal government that it will honour its election commitment to an FttN rollout.
While NBN Co itself has said residents in the region will get FttN because the rollout is done at the behest of the current federal government and the current federal government's policy is to move to fibre-to-the-node", the government has still not actually re-confirmed what it said prior to, and during, the election.
NBN Tasmania corporate affairs manager Russell Kelly was restating the government policy on NBN for the north-west region in an interview on Tuesday with ABC Radio in Hobart.
But, the government is still to restate, post-election, its position on FttN.
FttP for the west coast region, however, has never been part of government policy, and this is unlikely to change.
And, as ABC Hobart radio reported on Monday, West Coast mayor Phil Vickers said that while FttP would be a better fix for all those people that got to have fibre-to-the-node, it was still better technology than the satellite so even if we have to wait until 2018 to have that connected it's worth the wait".
The government promised during the election it would spend $18.5 million connecting premises in Queenstown, Rosebery, Zeehan and Strahan to the NBN with fibre-to-the-node.
And, in a post-election speech, Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull did say the government would pursue all of its election policies.
The governments commitment to FttN followed vigorous opposition and concern voiced by residents and businesses on Tassies west coast region to the original plan to deliver the NBN over its SkyMuster satellite service.
Businesses, in particular, were concerned that network speeds delivered by the satellite service would be inadequate to meet their needs.
NBN Co announced on Monday the network rollout had hit a major construction milestone with over half of Tasmanian homes and premises now able to connect to services over the NBN.
The company said that a major construction surge this year and the recent launch of the SkyMuster satellite service had together pushed Tasmania over the milestone.
According to Kelly, the construction effort in Tasmania is at its highest activity level of the build so far. We are connecting more premises than ever before, and doing it more quickly than ever.
Most communities in Tasmania will see some form of activity from the nbn during 2016.
In a statement issued on Monday, NBN Cosaid that as of 30 June, 162,472 premises in Tasmania could connect to services over the NBN network across all technology platforms.
The availability of SkyMuster satellite services has put another 17,000 Tasmanian premises on the NBN network map. Taken together it means that around 58% of the NBN network is finished in Tasmania, with the remainder now either in planning or active construction, the statement said.
So far, 77,810 Tasmanian premises have (actually) connected to services over the NBN network a 96% growth on the same time last year.
Android Nougat (7.0) is coming real soon now. The final preview build, Developer eview 5, has just been released. You can get the latest build for recent Nexus devices here.
So whats new in the latest release? According to a post by David Burke (Vof Engineering) on the Android Developers Blog, youll find the follow four major items:
System images for Nexus other preview devices
An emulator that you can use for doing the final testing of your apps to make sure theyre ready
The final N As (A level 24) latest system behaviors UI
The latest bug fixes optimizations across the system in preinstalled apps
Of course, youll also find a few bugs, so we wouldnt recommend installing this on your main everyday phone or tablet.
There is no official release date for the final release of Android Nougat, but we expect that system images over-the-air updates for supported Nexus devices will probably be released by the end of September.
Read all about Android Nougat
ndering whats coming to your phones when they get the Android Nougat update? You can start with this gallery showing some of the latest features in the preview.
Then, stop by this list of features from I/O; it gives you a good idea of what to expect out of s latest OS.
Too much for you? How about a quick tour of our 5 favorite features.
nt to try it out yourself on your Nexus phone or tablet? Its still in beta, there may be some problems, but you can easily install the public beta.
Its summertime, which means you may not be keeping up with all the news in the busy cloud computing industry.
Last week there were a handful of announcements that flew somewhat under the radar, but have important implications for this market.
Congress considers moving Federal IT to the cloud
Theres a movement afoot in Congress to encourage more government workloads to migrate to cloud computing platforms, according to GovInfoSecurity.com. A bill named Move IT Act aims to sure up cybersecurity defenses and upgrade legacy infrastructure systems while making it easier for federal agencies to use cloud computing services.
The move could be a significant one for the industry. Having the blessing of Congress, or even better for the industry a mandate, will only help to hasten the move of government workloads to the cloud. Providers are already priming their clouds for these workloads. Amazon Web Services has a whole region of its cloud dedicated to federal government and other related workloads named GovCloud. Microsoft has a similar Azure Government offering.
Amazon acquisition of Cloud9
Its not too frequent that Amazon makes an acquisition in the cloud computing market, but last week the company purchased Cloud9, a startup that makes an integrated development environment (IDE) platform. The move is interesting for a number of reasons:
-It shows Amazons willingness to do M&A to support its IaaS business.
-It signals AWSs desire to position its IaaS as an application development platform
-As one of my Twitter followers pointed out to me, the acquisition is particularly interesting considering a recent survey by Morgan Stanley of CIOs. More respondents said they expect to use Microsoft Azure over AWS in three years. While CIOs may be more interested in using Azure, AWs may be trying to keep developer momentum on their side.
Microsofts big win in cloud data
Microsoft won a significant legal battle in the cloud last week when a U.S. Appeals court ruled that the company does not have to hand over emails stored on a server in Ireland. U.S. Search warrants, the court ruled, do not apply to data stored solely outside of the country.
Other cloud storage providers applauded the decision. Panzuras CMO Barry Phillips said the ruling was inevitable while CTERA issued a statement saying that customers who want to ensure their cloud data cannot be handed over in a subpoena need to use strong encryption methods and hold the keys themselves.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19
Trend:
Broadcasting of ANS Broadcasting Media Company has been suspended for one month, said Azerbaijans National Council for Television and Radio July 19.
The National Council for Television and Radio had a meeting on July 18.
The Council adopted a decision to suspend the broadcasting of ANS from 18:30 (UTC/GMT +4 hours) July 18 for a period of one month and to file a lawsuit to the court for withdrawing its license dated Oct. 25, 2013.
This decision was made given the appeal of the Prosecutor Generals Office, dated July 18, 2016, as well as the requirements of the articles 11, 23 and 32 of the law On the Television and Radio Broadcasting, in order to prevent the provocation aimed at undermining the strategic cooperation relations between Turkey and Azerbaijan and not to allow the open propaganda of terrorism.
Earlier, Azerbaijans President Ilham Aliyev unequivocally assessed the latest developments in Turkey as a coup attempt, a heinous crime against Turkeys statehood, Turkish people, their will and choice.
President Aliyev noted that Azerbaijan stands by Turkish state and people, fully supports the Turkish government democratically elected by the citizens and gave necessary instructions to Azerbaijans relevant bodies in connection with this.
Despite the repeated warnings, ANS continued its activities on promulgating terrorism.
Turkeys government bodies and embassy appealed to Azerbaijans state structures, expressed deep concern over the issue and asked to take relevant measures.
According to the Article 11 of Azerbaijans Law on the Television and Radio Broadcasting, the Azerbaijani state executes a control to prevent the propaganda of terrorism, violence, cruelty, discrimination on ethnic, racial and religious grounds through television and radio.
The operation of a TV or a radio broadcaster can be temporarily suspended if it supports open calls for overthrowing the state system by using violence, infringement on the states integrity and the countrys security, escalating national, racial and religious hostility, riots and terrorism, or if it deliberately creates conditions for voicing such calls.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19
By Elchin Mehdiyev Trend:
Court will decide on the future of ANS Broadcasting Media Company, Nushiravan Maharramli, head of Azerbaijans National Council for Television and Radio, told Trend July 19.
From now on, this issue is in the competence of the judicial authorities, he said. We have appealed to the court and it will make a decision.
Broadcasting of ANS Broadcasting Media Company was suspended for one month, said the National Council for Television and Radio July 19.
The Council adopted a decision to suspend the broadcasting of ANS from 18:30 (UTC/GMT +4 hours) July 18 for a period of one month and to file a lawsuit to the court for withdrawing its license dated Oct. 25, 2013.
The decision was made given the appeal of the Prosecutor Generals Office, dated July 18, 2016, as well as the requirements of the articles 11, 23 and 32 of the law On the Television and Radio Broadcasting, in order to prevent the provocation aimed at undermining the strategic cooperation relations between Turkey and Azerbaijan and not to allow the open propaganda of terrorism.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19
By Elena Kosolapova Trend:
As part of the working visit to the Peoples Republic of China, the CEO of NAC Kazatomprom JSC Askar Zhumagaliyev met with the CEO of CITIC GROUP Corporation Chang Zhenming.
The heads of the companies discussed the issues of further implementation of joint Kazakhstan China projects as well as attraction of investments to the nuclear sector of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Kazatomprom said.
During the visit to the PRC, Zhumagaliyev met also with the Chairman of the Board of China National Nuclear Corporation Sun Qin and the Director General of CITIC GROUP Corporation in the Republic of Kazakhstan Sun Yang, the message said.
According to the message, the parties discussed a number of issues of mutually beneficial cooperation in the field of atomic power development. Particularly, such issues as natural uranium transit from Kazakhstan through the territory of China, fuel pellets supplies to China, joint uranium mining, conversion plant construction in the Republic of Kazakhstan, application of nuclear technologies in medicine were considered.
Participants noted that they are interested in a mutually beneficial long-term and strategic partnership, the message said.
According to the message, Zhumagaliyev met also with the Director General of China General Nuclear Power Corporation Zhang Shanmin. The parties discussed different issues of bilateral cooperation and highly appreciated the efforts on mutually beneficial cooperation.
Earlier, NAC Kazatomprom JSC and Chinese CGNPC signed the agreement of commercial terms for design and construction of FA production plant in Kazakhstan.
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Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19
By Azad Hasanli Trend:
Assets of the State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan (SOFAZ) increased by 4.6 percent and amounted to $35.1 billion (1.5631 AZN/USD on July 19) as of July 1, 2016, as compared to $33.57 billion in early 2016, SOFAZ said in a report.
SOFAZs revenues totaled almost four billion Azerbaijani manats during the H1 2016, and expenditures were almost 2.256 billion manats.
During the period, revenues from implementation of oil and gas contracts amounted to 3.689 billion manats, including revenues from the sale of profit oil and gas 3.68 billion manats, from transit operations 8.8 million manats and bonus payments 0.1 million manats.
SOFAZs revenues in the reporting period from the management of its own funds totaled 301.5 million manats, says the report.
Transfers by SOFAZ to the state budget amounted to 1.76 billion manats.
The expenditures on measures to improve the social and domestic situation of refugees and IDPs were 55.2 million manats, the expenditures for financing the project for reconstruction of the Samur-Absheron irrigation system totaled 19.6 million manats.
Meanwhile, 9.2 million manats were spent on the education of Azerbaijani students abroad as part of the 2007-2015 state program. Moreover, 35.3 million manats were directed to finance the project for construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway.
SOFAZs expenditures to finance the states share in the Southern Gas Corridor, created as part of the TANAP and TAP projects for Azerbaijani gas supplies to Europe, were 241.9 million manats in H1 2016.
The expenditures to finance Azerbaijans share in the Star Refinerys construction project totaled 127 million manats.
The costs of managing the SOFAZ amounted to 8.5 million manats in H1 2016.
SOFAZs non-budget revenues from rate difference in H1 2016 totaled 65.4 million manats.
SOFAZ was established in 1999 with assets of $271 million.
Based on SOFAZs regulations, its funds may be used for construction and reconstruction of strategically important infrastructure facilities, as well as solving important national problems.
SOFAZs main goals include: accumulation of resources and placement of the SOFAZ assets abroad to minimize the negative effect on the economy, the prevention of Dutch disease to some extent, securing the accumulation of funds for future generations and the support of current social and economic processes in Azerbaijan.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19
By Anvar Mammadov Trend:
The first meeting of the Azerbaijan-Vietnam Intergovernmental Commission for Economic, Trade, Scientific and Technical Cooperation will be held in October in Vietnam, said Azerbaijans Energy Ministry in a message.
Preparation for the event was discussed during a meeting between Azerbaijans Energy Minister Natig Aliyev, who is co-chair of the commission from the Azerbaijani side, and Azerbaijans Ambassador to Vietnam Anar Imanov.
The sides discussed the existing potential for cooperation between the two countries in economy, trade and investments.
Imanov said the memorandum of understanding, signed by Azerbaijans state oil company SOCAR and Vietnam Oil and Gas Group Petrovietnam, contributes to the development of energy cooperation between the two countries.
The ambassador pointed to the importance of holding the meeting of the Azerbaijan-Vietnam intergovernmental commission in order to ensure the access of Azerbaijans oil equipment to Vietnamese market, the participation of Azerbaijani construction companies in infrastructure projects in Vietnam, and the bilateral cooperation in the fields of agriculture and tourism.
Natig Aliyev, in turn, noted that the Vietnamese market is attractive for the export of Azerbaijans non-oil products.
Moreover, there is great potential for cooperation between the two countries on alternative and renewable energy sources, added the minister.
Trade turnover between Azerbaijan and Vietnam totaled $17.53 million in H1 2016, which is 4.6 times more than in the same period of 2015, according to Azerbaijans State Customs Committee.
By of the
No politician in Wisconsin is as all-in for Donald Trump as Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr.
Clarke, who is set to speak Monday night at the Republican National Convention, has said he will "do everything I can" to get Trump elected president in November.
Clarke -- who runs as a Democrat but talks and acts like a Republican -- was unequivocal in his support of Trump in a recent email exchange with local conservatives, which included some local leaders of the Never Trump movement. The emails were passed along by one of the recipients.
"Anyone who thinks Trump will wreck the GOP is delusional," Clarke wrote. "The donor class and party elites wrecked the party over the last quarter century. They are out of touch with the base.
"Trump voters are tired of being ruled by the Koch Brothers and George Will-types. Elitists. Even Charles Krauthammer has come around to the reality that talk of denying Trump is crazy talk by deniers."
Clarke wasn't done.
"We're thru and we aren't coming back," he wrote -- without clarifying who the "we" are. "GOP neverTrumpers do not get this. A new majority is forming in the GOP. The Fat Cats are going to be purged."
The fourth-term sheriff was also one of the few to come to Trump's defense when the presumptive GOP presidential nominee suggested that a federal judge overseeing a lawsuit against Trump University is biased because he is "Mexican."
The claim prompted House Speaker Paul Ryan and others to suggest the criticism was racist.
But in a June podcast, Clarke said there was nothing unusual about calling out U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was born in Indiana, for his Mexican heritage. Clarke said neither he nor the president was born in Africa, yet they are referred to as African-Americans.
We do it every day with Barack Obama, the first African-American president, Clarke said on his show "The People's Sheriff," which airs weekly on The Blaze. Were pointing out his ethnicity.
To me, Barack Obama is the 44th president of the United States, Clarke continued. I mean I look at myself. I refer to myself as an American first, and I happen to be black.
Clarke then pointed out that Mexican is a nationality or country of origin, not a race. The sheriff said it didn't bother him that people describe themselves as Gernan-American or African-American.
"But dont tell me that its OK if people want to use it to their advantage when it suits them, and then when someone else points out, Hey, youre a Mexican-American, or, 'youre a Mexican, that theyre going to get offended by it, that it now becomes a slur?" Clarke said. "You must be kidding me.
In an email, Clarke spokeswoman Fran McLaughlin said the sheriff wasn't necessarily disagreeing with Ryan on this issue.
"The sheriff said to listen to (the podcast) again," McLaughlin wrote. "He explained his point clearly. He usually does. The sheriff says there is no right or wrong on Speaker Ryan's take here; there are different schools of thought."
Not surprisingly, Democratic leaders were busy Monday attacking Clarke for being a faux Democrat.
This is an individual who is fairly unhinged in his philosophical outlook and also has no credibility, Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said. So its not surprising that thats someone who the Republicans would put on their stage.
Earlier this year, Clarke posted a Twitter meme comparing Wasserman Schultz to Medusa, the snake-haired beast from Greek mythology.
Debbie Wasserman Shultz has been reunited with her long lost twin sister. Awaiting DNA confirmation. pic.twitter.com/KDeBQjO2Ms David A. Clarke, Jr. (@SheriffClarke) May 25, 2016
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By of the
Cleveland Appearing before Wisconsins GOP delegates Tuesday morning, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch singled out vice presidential pick Mike Pence of Indiana for praise, referred several times to the top of the ticket this fall, but did not mention Donald Trump by name.
Talking to reporters afterward, Kleefisch played down the omission.
She also said her decision to give up her delegate seat at the GOP convention was not political, citing scheduling issues. While no longer serving as a delegate, Kleefisch is spending three days here, before returning to Wisconsin for an event in Beloit on Thursday. She said much of her time in Cleveland is being taken up with duties as chairman of the Republican Lieutenant Governors Association.
This was kind of a scheduling thing that got reported in perhaps the least appropriate way, she said.
Im going to vote for the ticket. Im a Republican, said Kleefisch, who described her position as, never Hillary, never Hillary, never Hillary.
Asked if she is excited about having Trump as the nominee, she told reporters:
I am excited about winning the White House back and I think regardless of who came out of the convention, we were going to end up supporting that person whether it was a man or a woman, whether it was a businessman or a politician. Were excited about the Trump-Pence ticket because the Trump-Pence ticket is going to beat the Clinton-and-whoever-else ticket.
House Speaker Paul Ryan described Trump Monday as not my kind of conservative (though Ryan said there was room in the party for different kinds of conservatives).
Asked by a reporter whether Trump is her kind of conservative, Kleefisch said, I dont know that Donald Trump is necessarily as conservative on some types of policy as a lot of us in Wisconsin are.
She singled out global trade, citing Wisconsins dependence on exports. Trump has been a sharp critic of international trade deals.
We want to make sure that not only is Donald Trump going to be an effective leader on economic policy but that Mike Pence can play a very important role as almost like a COO to Donald Trumps chairman of the board," she said.
Kleefisch also downplayed plagiarism allegations involving the speech given Monday night by Trump's wife, Melania, which bore similarities to the speech given by Michelle Obama at the 2008 Democratic convention.
"Out of the 35 minutes, there were a couple of similarities and the similarities were that she had hopes and dreams for the children of America, that she believed in her husband and his belief in this country," he said. "Well, I would hope that anyone who would be future first lady of the United States would say things like that I thought Melania Trump did a terrific job.
All Politics Blog From Milwaukee, Madison and beyond, a daily dose of political news and glimpses behind the scenes SHARE
By of the
Cleveland -- Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. told GOP delegates here that they should leave this convention with a single goal, to defeat Mrs. Bill Clinton.
Clarke, who spoke to the full convention last night, was greeted with applause when he walked into the hotel meeting room where Wisconsin delegates were gathered for breakfast Tuesday morning.
The sheriff, who runs as a Democrat but is conservative in his politics, described himself here as somewhat of a political orphan and thanked Republicans for taking me in.
Alluding to the recent shootings of police officers, Clarke said: Im on a mission right now to defend the American police officer. You all know what has happened The American law enforcement officer is under attack. The American law enforcement officers character, service, sacrifice, commitment has been maligned and mischaracterized by some very powerful forces in the country these are subversives that are doing this.
Clarke added, I saw somebody had an article the other day that said, If theres a war on cops, there will be no winners. And I said, you wanna bet?
Clarke said he initially turned down an invitation from the Trump campaign to speak at the convention but changed his mind because of the stakes in the election.
The sheriff also suggested Republicans shouldnt be discouraged about the US Senate race in Wisconsin, where Democrat Russ Feingold has consistently led in the polls against incumbent Republican Ron Johnson.
I still believe that we can re-elect Ron Johnson I dont pay attention to the polls, said Clarke, who said if he uses the machinery that got other Republicans elected in the state in recent years, Johnson will be returned to Washington.
Paul Shipes (left) purchases a new amateur radio from 49-year employee Paul Szczerbinski at Amateur Electronic Supply on Tuesday. Credit: Mark Hoffman
SHARE Amateur Electronic Supply is closing this month, but Ham Radio Outlet plans to open a store in the building sometime in late August. Mark Hoffman Old license plates customized with customers call signs hang on the wall at Amateur Electronic Supply, 5710 W. Good Hope Road. AES is closing its doors on July 27 after almost six decades in business. Mark Hoffman
By of the
Among ham radio operators, it's known as the candy store.
Amateur Electronic Supply sells radios, antennas and equipment that help hams connect with other hams throughout the world. It opened in Milwaukee in the late 1950s, attracted amateur radio enthusiasts from throughout the Midwest and eventually spawned stores in Cleveland, Orlando, Fla., and Las Vegas.
Ham radio clubs meet at the store at 5710 W. Good Hope Road in Milwaukee, aspiring ham radio operators take their FCC licensing tests there and enthusiasts stop in to pick up a part or carpool from Chicago or Dubuque, Iowa, to check out the latest radios. Dozens of license plates sporting ham radio call signs sent by customers hang on the walls.
Now AES is closing its doors after almost six decades in business, and the stunned ham radio community is reeling.
"It's certainly a blow to the local amateur radio community. Not everybody has a local store they can go to," said Dave DeFebo, historian of the Milwaukee Radio Amateurs' Club which has 100 members.
"But probably one of the things that did them in is that a lot of people will use the internet and find the best price, especially with the more expensive things, and people get crazy about paying sales tax," said DeFebo, whose call sign is WB9BWP.
At one time, AES was the largest amateur radio supply company in the U.S. Now, it's second behind Ham Radio Outlet. When AES owner Phil Majerus earlier this month announced his decision to shutter the business, Ham Radio Outlet agreed to hire some AES staff members and open an outlet in Milwaukee in the AES facility.
So when the AES store closes July 27, it will be gutted and turned into a Ham Radio Outlet.
"I'm excited hams will still have a place. They can still come here on a Saturday afternoon if they need a connector to complete their antenna project," said AES national sales manager Tom Pachner, who runs the Milwaukee store. "People were panicked when they heard we were closing."
The new Ham Radio Outlet will open in late August no specific date has been set and feature a new interior with more of an interactive experience. Instead of equipment behind counters, all radios will be hooked up and operational so customers can try them, Pachner said.
The business was started by Terry Sterman, a Fond du Lac teenager and electronics enthusiast whose father owned a radio store. Sterman, who died in 1999, opened a shop in Milwaukee in 1957. At swap meets, called ham fests, Sterman collected contact information of fellow enthusiasts and sent out catalogs. Soon amateur radio operators began flocking to the store, which became a hub for Milwaukee's ham radio community a group that will celebrate its centennial next year.
"Fifty-nine years of business that started in Wisconsin is hard to see go. They were the leader in sales for amateur radio equipment for quite a few years, and they have had a nationwide impact," said David Schank, Milwaukee Radio Amateurs' Club president whose call sign is KA9WXN. "On Facebook right now, the (comments) you're seeing is a lot of regret. People are sad to see it go."
Schank noted that the number of ham radio operators in the U.S. roughly 736,000 is at an all-time high, according to the American Radio Relay League, the national organization of U.S. amateur radio. That's due in part to easier testing requirements to obtain an FCC license for ham radio operators.
"Dropping Morse code was huge," said Pachner, because folks no longer are required to translate a minimum of five words per minute in Morse code.
Pachner thinks the growth in ham radio is also based on a growing passion for community service following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks when amateur radio operators were able to communicate and help coordinate emergency response while it was difficult to make cellphone calls. Often the first reports of disasters, such as the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, are reported by ham radio operators.
The cost to get started in the hobby can range from a couple hundred dollars for used equipment to thousands, with the average price of a new radio around $1,000, said DeFebo.
There have been rumors within the local ham community about the No. 1 retailer moving in to Milwaukee, and Schank was happy to hear Ham Radio Outlet will take over the AES store so amateur radio enthusiasts will still have a place to go to buy equipment and gather for meetings and license tests.
A few years after opening in Milwaukee, AES began selling equipment via mail order, publishing catalogs and offering used radios for sale in its store for people starting out in the hobby.
Mirroring the seismic change in online retail throughout the world, it morphed into selling its wares online and eventually stopped printing catalogs. Store shelves loaded with used radios and parts disappeared as more people migrated to eBay and other online forums to get rid of used gear.
But the shop remained relevant as a brick-and-mortar place for ham radio enthusiasts to test new radios and equipment before buying. Its annual spring open house drew 1,200 people in its heyday several years ago. The last open house held in April drew more than 600 ham radio enthusiasts, said Pachner, whose call sign is W9TJP.
Milwaukee club member Dan Workenaour, call sign N9ASA, said ordering radios and equipment online is much different from testing them in advance. He read a glowing online review of a radio but when he checked out the model at AES he didn't like the feel of the radio's controls and ultimately didn't buy it.
"Not having the ability to play with the equipment means you really have to scrutinize online literature and reviews," Workenaour wrote in an email.
Childrens Hospital of Wisconsins new Midtown Clinic at 5433 W. Fond du Lac Ave. in Milwaukee will be the providers largest clinic in the city, serving an area with few pediatricians and many children. Credit: Childrens Hospital of Wisconsin
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By of the
Children's Hospital of Wisconsin's Midtown Clinic opened Monday at 5433 W. Fond du Lac Ave. in Milwaukee.
The 20,000-square-foot clinic in an area with few pediatricians and a large population of children will be Children's Hospital's largest in Milwaukee.
It replaces the Downtown Health Center at 1020 N. 12th St. on the campus of Aurora Sinai Medical Center.
The new clinic's staff will include eight full-time and seven part-time doctors as well as nurse practitioners, a psychologist and medical students.
The staff also will include community health navigators, whose varied tasks include home visits and helping patients get access to needed services, and clinical navigators, who help coordinate care.
The dentists and staff at Children's Hospital's North Avenue Dental Clinic at 5019 W. North Ave. are scheduled to move to the Midtown Clinic in September.
Children's Hospital's dental clinic at its Downtown Health Center will remain in its current location.
The health system moved its Child Protection Center and some psychiatry services from the Downtown Health Center to the new Sojourner Family Peace Center on W. Walnut St. earlier this year.
Children's Hospital plans to hold an open house at the Midtown Clinic from 2 to 6 p.m., on Aug. 15.
The health system's other Milwaukee clinics include Good Hope Pediatrics, 7720 W. Good Hope Road, and a clinic at 2561 N. 29th St. adjacent to the Next Door Foundation.
Children's Hospital which has opened several large clinics in Milwaukee suburbs in recent years also has clinics at the Northside YMCA, 1350 W. North Ave.; and COA Goldin Center, 2320 W. Burleigh St., managed in partnership with Marquette University College of Nursing; and an urgent care clinic at the Sixteenth Street Community Health Center, 1032 S. Cesar Chavez Drive.
By of the
For the second time within the past three weeks, a Common Council committee is recommending Development Commissioner Rocky Marcoux be confirmed for his fourth term under Mayor Tom Barrett.
Tuesday's 3-0 vote, with two abstentions, by the Zoning, Neighborhoods and Development Committee occurred after the full council voted on July 6 to send Marcoux's proposed confirmation back to the panel for reconsideration.
The committee had voted 4-0, with one abstention, on June 28 to recommend another four-year term for Marcoux. He's served in the position since 2004.
The full council, however, voted 7-6 against reconfirming him. The council again meets on July 26.
Voting against Marcoux at the July 6 council meeting were Aldermen Jose Perez, Chantia Lewis, Robert Bauman, Tony Zielinski, Ashanti Hamilton, Khalif Rainey and Mark Borkowski.
Aldermen Russell Stamper II, James Bohl, Michael Murphy, Nik Kovac, Terry Witkowski and Cavalier Johnson voted to reappoint him. Aldermen Robert Donovan and Milele Coggs abstained.
At Tuesday's committee meeting, Stamper, Bohl and Kovac voted to support Marcoux. Coggs and Rainey abstained, but both said they would meet again with Marcoux before the full council votes again next week.
The vote came after Marcoux addressed the committee. He again defended his record, both for promoting projects throughout Milwaukee and for hiring a diverse workforce at the Department of City Development.
He also said department officials would do a better job of working with council members.
"I understand the feelings among some members that we have not been as responsive as we should be," Marcoux said.
Marcoux acknowledged that some of his decisions have faced opposition.
"I do not make decisions based on trades. I do not make decisions based on pressure," he said. "I sometimes make the wrong decision. But, ultimately, it is not done with anything but integrity."
Opponents, led by Zielinski, say Marcoux has focused too much on downtown development and not enough on Milwaukee's other neighborhoods.
Supporters have questioned that claim, citing developments in such areas as the Menomonee Valley, Walker's Point and portions of Milwaukee's north side.
Indeed, in responding to a question from Coggs about reducing unemployment among black men, Marcoux mentioned the city's redevelopment of the former A.O. Smith/Tower Automotive site into Century City Business Park.
Marcoux supporters who spoke at the committee meeting included Ricardo Diaz, former city development commissioner and executive director of the United Community Center; Sharon Adams, co-founder of Walnut Way Conservation Corp.; Ingeteam Inc. Chief Executive Officer Aitor Sotes; Lafayette Crump, chief operating officer at Prism Technical, and developer Kalan Haywood, founder of Vangard Group.
Meanwhile, Zielinski faulted Marcoux for his efforts in 2009 to attract a Boston-based battery manufacturer to Milwaukee.
However, Jim Paetsch, vice president of corporate expansion and attraction at Milwaukee 7, the regional economic development group, blamed Zielinski for that failed campaign.
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Mortgage lending is scarce in Milwaukee neighborhoods where African-Americans are the majority, a problem that hampers the ability of blacks to build wealth and further concentrates segregation and poverty, a study released Tuesday by a national advocacy group says.
The National Community Reinvestment Coalition looked into mortgage lending and found what it called "an extensive mortgage lending imbalance in Milwaukee, with mortgage credit distribution skewed heavily toward majority white neighborhoods."
"Within the city of Milwaukee, the race of the neighborhood is a significant variable associated with the amount of mortgage loan activity," the NCRC report stated.
Looking at data from 2014, the study found that while whites represented 70% of the four-county population, whites received 81% of loans. African-Americans, representing 16% of the population, received only 4% of loans, the study reported.
Across both the city and the four-county area, the level of owner occupancy and the median family income were significantly correlated with lending activity, the study said. However, in the city of Milwaukee, the areas with a higher percentage of white residents also had "a higher likelihood of seeing mortgage activity," according to the study.
John Taylor, president and chief executive of the Washington D.C.-based NCRC, said that after the economy collapsed nine years ago, lending became more restrictive.
"It is just difficult in general for working-class people to get any types of loans," Taylor said in an interview. "It's time for the industry to come back because, especially in communities of color, homeownership is the number one way that anybody who is working class including people of color are able to begin to build wealth and to acquire equity."
The NCRC, which also looked at mortgage lending in St. Louis and Minneapolis in the report, said it is calling for strong enforcement and expansion of the federal Community Reinvestment Act, and the preservation and strengthening of affordable housing goals in the secondary mortgage market.
Community Reinvestment Act rules require banks to make loans and have a presence in economically stressed areas of communities where they do business.
Last year, the biggest bank headquartered in Wisconsin Green Bay's Associated Bank agreed to finance $200 million in mortgage loans over three years as part of a federal racial discrimination complaint. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development had accused Associated of disproportionately denying loan applications of African-Americans and Hispanics from 2008 through 2010. Taylor said the NCRC has met with Associated Bank.
"I thought they were pretty attentive in terms of wanting to really listen to what needs to be done," Taylor said.
Michael Semmann, executive vice president and chief operations officer of the Wisconsin Bankers Association, who viewed the NCRC report, said Tuesday that all banks headquartered in Wisconsin except one a bank not based in metro Milwaukee have "outstanding" or "satisfactory" compliance ratings by regulators for their CRA efforts.
Semmann also said calling for new rules when 30% of Congress' post-recession financial regulation reform rules haven't even been written or finalized yet "seems a little premature."
Among other findings of the NCRC study was that Milwaukee bank branches are clustered along transportation routes leading to the suburbs or along Lake Michigan, giving predominantly minority neighborhoods less access to bank branches.
Semmann said branches are located on main roads simply for better access for all customers.
"Banks, from our perspective, are our neighborhoods' best hope, so we want to encourage good performance and support it and promote it any way we can always though, safe and sound lending. That's what communities need," Taylor said.
He added, "We disdain banks that don't try to be fair in their distribution of products and services, and we disdain banks that discriminate upon grounds that are illegal and inappropriate."
NCRC, formed in 1990, is an association of more than 600 community-based organizations whose goal is to promote access to basic banking services, including credit and savings, and affordable housing and job development.
The new Portillo's restaurant at 17685 W. Blue Mound Road in Brookfield opens today. It's the first location in Wisconsin. Credit: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
By of the
As a citizen of Wisconsin, its practically your birthright to sneer about anything associated with Chicago.
Except the food. And when it comes to Windy City specialties like Italian beef sandwiches and hot dogs, Portillo's is one of Chicago's finest.
Today, the beloved 44-restaurant chain will open its first location in Wisconsin, at 17685 W. Blue Mound Road in Brookfield. Lunch is served starting at 10:30 a.m., and the restaurant closes at 10:30 p.m., as will be the case every Monday through Thursday. On Fridays and Saturdays, it closes at 11 p.m.; Sundays it closes at 10 p.m.
If you get the Italian beef sandwich, a bit of advice: load it with peppers, and get that sucker dipped.
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Sheboygan Authorities have recovered the bodies of two men who were swept off South Pier by high waves on Lake Michigan Sunday.
Adam LaLuzerne of Sturgeon Bay and Kurt Ahonen of Green Bay had been missing since 4 p.m. Sunday when they and another man were thrown into the water as they attempted to walk on the Sheboygan breakwall while 4- to 5-foot waves were breaking over it.
A prayer vigil was held for LaLuzerne and Ahonen Monday night at Corpus Christi Catholic Church in Sturgeon Bay.
The second body was recovered about 7 p.m. Sheboygan County Sheriff's Department Lt. Jason Lierman said the department would not release the names of either victim until Tuesday morning. However, LaLuzerne and Ahonen have been identified by friends and by the church.
Sheboygan County Sheriff Todd Priebe said recovery teams used sonar to locate the missing men, but strong currents hindered the search.
Priebe said the men were part of a group of five college-aged friends who were visiting the lakefront Sunday afternoon.
One remained on shore while the others walked onto South Pier in an attempt to talk with two fishermen further out on the pier, he said.
LaLuzerne, Ahonen and Dylan Abeyta of Sturgeon Bay were swept off the breakwall and into the Sheboygan harbor as they attempted to return to shore. The fourth person had been lagging behind and ran for help.
Abeyta was rescued and sent to a hospital.
Abeyta, a 22-year-old Sturgeon Bay resident, told USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin he spent about 30 minutes in the water before the U.S. Coast Guard arrived.
Abeyta said he and his friends decided to walk out on the breakwall after seeing the fisherman at the end of the pier.
"We thought if they could make it, we could make it," he said.
Gina Guarnieri, a photographer who witnessed the incident, said she saw the four men walking on the breakwall when the first one, Abeyta, was swept in by a wave.
She said the others were swept into the water by another wave, while a fourth man ran back to shore to call for help.
Abeyta said the men in the water quickly became separated.
"I wasn't with them very long. The brief moment that I was we tried to tell each other to just stay afloat," Abeyta said. "I tried to get closer to them but the current was too strong."
The fourth friend, Jeremy Wheat of Sturgeon Bay made it to a call box and got word to the U.S. Coast Guard, Abeyta said.
Meanwhile, Abeyta continued to be pulled out further into the lake.
"I was hoping for a miracle. When I was by myself, I couldn't see where I was," he said.
His mother, Kay Abeyta, praised Wheat's actions.
"He was so helpful with giving accurate and precise information that they were able to get there as quickly as they could," she said.
Authorities said the fishermen were also swept off the breakwall while the rescue effort was taking place. They were rescued by volunteer firemen and returned to shore unharmed.
U.S. Coast Guard officials said a total of 10 people were reported to have been thrown into the lake by the waves Sunday.
Abeyta said he and LaLuzerne had been friends since second grade at Corpus Christi School in Sturgeon Bay. They both graduated from St. Norbert College in De Pere in May.
Abeyta said there is a moral to what happened to him.
"You shouldn't take life for granted and even though you feel like you are on top of the world, you never know what's going to happen," he said.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19
By Maksim Tsurkov Trend:
Undersecretary of State in the Polish Economic Development Ministry Radoslaw Domagalski-Labedzki will visit Baku on Sept. 25-26, said Polands Ambassador to Azerbaijan Marek Calka.
Calka made the remarks at a meeting with Azerbaijans Energy Minister Natig Aliyev, read a message from Azerbaijani Energy Ministry.
A delegation of Entrepreneurs Organization, led by Radoslaw Domagalski-Labedzki, will visit Baku on Sept. 25-26, said the ambassador, adding that the two countries entrepreneurs will meet to define concrete steps on priority directions of cooperation.
The ambassador noted that the formation of a new transportation system in Azerbaijan creates new opportunities for cooperation between the two countries.
Calka also made a number of proposals both on the organization of the upcoming meeting and on the 7th meeting of the Azerbaijan-Poland Intergovernmental Commission on Economic Cooperation, scheduled for late 2016.
Natig Aliyev, in turn, noted that Azerbaijan will provide the necessary support in this regard.
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Follow the author on Twitter: @MaksimTsurkov
Brookfield pediatric neurologist Tarif Backdash examines 8-year-old Sandy Al Mekdad who has a congenital defect known as tethered spinal cord in March at the Zaatari refuge camp in Jordan about 15 miles from the Syrian border. Credit: Mark Hoffman
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These are the tragic facts after five and a half years of brutal civil war in Syria: 470,000 dead, according to the Syrian Center for Policy Research and 4.8 million refugees, according to the United Nations, most of them spread across five nearby nations and North Africa.
The Syrian children, especially, have borne a heavy burden. Half of the displaced are under the age of 18, and many of them need medical help. Many bear the brutal psychological scars from years of barrel bombs and other terrors: One in four may be at risk of developing mental illness, according to the UN.
In a nation torn asunder by dictator Bashar al-Assad and terrorist groups, an entire generation is at risk, and the United States should be doing more to help.
Over the past five years, just over 7,000 Syrian refugees have entered the U.S. more than half of them since the first of this year, the Journal Sentinel's Mark Johnson reports. From 2011 to 2013, only 109 Syrians were allowed to come here compared with more than 41,000 Iraqi refugees.
The government should expedite the process for the Syrians and allow more of them to come into the U.S. With concerns growing over terrorism after recent attacks, U.S. officials need to be prudent. But, as Claudena Skran, a professor at Lawrence University, told Johnson, "Refugees are the most screened group coming into the United States. They pose very little security threat. The real security risk is leaving people on their own in refugee camps. The real risk is not doing anything."
Tarif Bakdash would agree with that. Bakdash, a Syrian by birth who worked at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin and the Medical College of Wisconsin, led a medical mission to the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, where Johnson and photographer Mark Hoffman told his story as part of a reporting project supported by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.
We spoke with Bakdash earlier this week and asked him what the U.S. government should do to help. His answer: Start with the kids.
"If you don't help these kids, guess what's going to happen? They are going to be stuck over there and ISIS will see this as beautiful, fertile soil to recruit for the future," Bakdash said.
Conditions inside Syria often are desperate for medical personnel. Bakdash tries to help embattled doctors over Skype or the messaging service Viber but there is only so much he can do. Medical facilities are frequent targets; more than 700 medical personnel have been killed, Physicians for Human Rights reports, according to Johnson.
Bakdash supports what he calls a "shuttle of hope," in which sick and wounded children would be brought to the United States for treatment and then returned. As it stands now, this isn't possible, he says, but it should be.
"This is a better way to fight radical thinking," Bakdash told us. "We are a great nation. We want to help."
"We should show the world who we are," he said.
It would be the right thing to do and it would demonstrate American values to a new generation of Syrians. It's time for Americans to do more.
Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. salutes the crowd prior to delivering a speech on the first day of the Republican National Convention. Clarke received a large ovation Monday. Credit: Getty Images
By of the
Cleveland In a speech on "Law and Order" night at the GOP convention, Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. lauded Donald Trump "as the steadfast leader our nation needs."
The uniformed Clarke was greeted with a large ovation and began his brief remarks by saying, "I would like to make something very clear: Blue Lives Matter!"
The sheriff alluded to the recent killings of five police officers in Dallas and three in Baton Rouge, and tersely criticized the group "Black Lives Matter."
But reflecting the sensitivity at a political convention of the issues of race and policing, Clarke's remarks were far more subdued and restrained than other comments he has made in public and in the media on the subject.
In a combative appearance on CNN Sunday night, Clarke blamed Black Lives Matter for the recent shootings of police officers, saying, "This anti-cop sentiment from this hateful ideology called Black Lives Matter has fueled this rage against the American police officer."
Clarke has blamed President Barack Obama for fueling anti-police sentiment by saying blacks receive disparate treatment from law enforcement.
The sheriff, who runs as a Democrat but is a popular guest on conservative TV and radio shows, defended the law enforcement community in his speech.
"American law enforcement officers understand that race is and has been a heated issue in our country. Most appreciate the vital need for thoroughness and transparency in pursuit of the greater good in their actions, and in their investigations," he said.
Clarke said of Trump that "he has consistently and constantly raised his voice not only in defense of the character of the American police officer, but the need for all people to feel they are being treated fairly and respectfully by law enforcement."
In a state where few prominent Republicans backed Trump during the primaries, Clarke was the highest-profile public official to come out early and energetically for the New York businessman.
Trump himself has cast blame in broad and sometimes cryptic terms on Obama for the recent shootings, saying on Twitter Sunday: "How many law enforcement and people have to die because of a lack of leadership in our country? We demand law and order."
Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan struck a different tone at an appearance here Monday. Asked by a reporter about arguments that political leaders are to blame for the spate of shootings, Ryan said:
"The last thing leaders should be doing is that, is starting to blame other people for this ... Let's just stop doing that. Who cares who said what in the past? ... Why don't we dial down the rhetoric, calm ourselves down and start to listen to one another?"
Asked about whether Trump's rhetoric on the issue has been divisive, Ryan said: "Everybody's been saying divisive things these days, and I think we should try to kind of chill, calm down and change our tone going forward."
U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson speaks during at the Republican National Convention. Credit: Robert Deutsch-USA TODAY NETWORK
By of the
Cleveland After weeks of saying he wouldn't attend the Republican National Convention, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson plunged into the political extravaganza Tuesday, endorsing GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and giving a tough, prime-time talk on national security.
It was a high-wire, political balancing act for Johnson, who faces Democrat Russ Feingold in a difficult re-election fight in the fall. Wisconsin hasn't voted Republican for president since 1984, and GOP voters repudiated Trump in this year's presidential primary.
"I think Donald Trump will actually tackle the big problems, as opposed to President (Barack) Obama, who right after he got re-elected was already kicking that can down the road," Johnson said in an afternoon conversation hosted by USA TODAY.
Asked if he would endorse Trump, Johnson said: "I'm going to be voting for him. I want to see Donald Trump win versus Hillary Clinton."
When pressed, Johnson added: "Don't worry about the words. I'm going to do everything I can to help him win. Sounds like an endorsement to me."
At night while speaking to the GOP delegates, Johnson laid into Feingold and presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
Johnson zeroed in on his confrontation with Clinton about the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. Four Americans were killed, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
Johnson's questioning at a 2013 Senate hearing produced an exasperated response from Clinton, then secretary of state, who said: "What difference, at this point, does it make?"
"I am the guy who got under her skin and provoked that infamous response from Hillary Clinton by asking a pretty simple question: 'Why didn't you just pick up the phone and call the survivors?'" Johnson said.
Using a refrain of, "It made a difference," Johnson talked of a Yazidi woman "captured and brutalized by ISIS barbarians," and others caught in terror attacks in Brussels; Istanbul; San Bernadino, Calif.; Orlando, Fla.; and Nice, France.
Johnson also sought to link Clinton with Feingold.
"In Wisconsin, I'm running against Russ Feingold, a man who even after 9-11, was the only senator against giving law enforcement the tools they need to help stop international terror," Johnson said. "During his 18-year Senate career, he also voted against authorizing our military 11 separate times. Now he's asking Wisconsinites to give him a fourth term just as Hillary Clinton is asking America to give her Obama's third term.
"The world is simply too dangerous to elect either of them."
The speech echoed a hard-hitting television ad that the Johnson campaign suspended in the wake of last week's terror attack in Nice, but which returned to the air Tuesday with narration by Johnson added.
On Monday, Feingold launched an ad that outlined his plan to take on the Islamic State.
In response to Johnson's speech, Feingold spokesman Michael Tyler said: "Senator Johnson failed to take responsibility for his failure as chairman of the homeland security committee and finally present a real plan to keep Americans safe. Sadly, Senator Johnson is far more obsessed with pointing fingers like a typical Washington politician than in actually owning up to his own failed record."
Tyler added that Johnson "showed that he isn't interested in protecting the national and economic security of Wisconsinites, he's far more interested in protecting Donald Trump and his fellow Washington Republicans."
In a conference call Tuesday, Democrats criticized Johnson's decision to speak to the convention.
"There's no question he's panicking," Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said of Johnson's newest ad. "What's troubling is that Johnson is ready to put the safety of our country into the hands of a reality TV star, and as a mayor of a major American city I can tell you that there are real threats. The fear mongering that we're hearing from Senator Johnson doesn't address those threats."
"We kind of feel a little left out, we kind of feel forgotten that Senator Johnson way out there in Washington forgets about us," Bayfield Mayor Gordon Ringberg said.
Also Tuesday, it was learned that one of the big players in Johnson's election bid made a shift in ad strategy.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee was due to go up with ads in August and September in Wisconsin. Now, it appears the group is planning its air campaign to begin in October, matching the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
"Our investment in Wisconsin is not changing, just the timing," NRSC spokeswoman Alleigh Marre said. "We are simply moving the buy to mirror the DSCC's. We don't discuss with the press exactly where and what we are spending our resources on."
The Koch-brothers linked Freedom Partners super PAC has a $1.3 million ad reservation in the state from August to October.
Craig Gilbert reported from Cleveland and Bill Glauber reported from Milwaukee.
By of the
Paring back the state's voter ID law four months before the presidential election, a federal judge ruled Tuesday that Wisconsin voters without photo identification can cast ballots by swearing to their identity.
The decision by U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman in Milwaukee creates a pathway for voters with difficulties getting IDs who have been unable to cast ballots under the state's 2011 voter ID law.
"Although most voters in Wisconsin either possess qualifying ID or can easily obtain one, a safety net is needed for those voters who cannot obtain qualifying ID with reasonable effort," Adelman wrote in his 44-page decision.
The judge issued his preliminary order because he found that those arguing for a pathway for some voter without IDs were "very likely" to succeed.
The ruling will allow voters to use affidavits instead of IDs to vote in the Nov. 8 presidential election. But this new system will not be in place for the Aug. 9 primary for congressional and state legislative races because Adelman determined election officials needed more time to implement it.
Adelman, a former Democratic state senator, was appointed to the federal bench by President Bill Clinton.
Sean Young, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who represented those bringing the legal challenge, praised the decision.
"Wisconsin's voter ID law has been a mistake from day one. This ruling is a strong rebuke of the state's efforts to limit access to the ballot box. It means that a fail-safe will be in place in November for voters who have had difficulty obtaining ID," said Young.
Republican state Attorney General Brad Schimel said he was disappointed with the ruling but did not say if he would appeal it.
"We will decide the next course of action after Wisconsin Department of Justice attorneys have had time to fully review and analyze the court's decision," Schimel said in a statement.
Tuesday's ruling marks the latest chapter in the saga over voter ID in Wisconsin, which was approved by Gov. Scott Walker and GOP lawmakers five years ago. The law was blocked for years by court decisions but took effect last year after overcoming those initial challenges.
Adelman in 2014 ruled that the voter ID law was unconstitutional, but that decision was overturned on appeal. The case has stayed alive on narrower grounds as the two sides have argued over whether there should be a way for some voters to cast ballots even if they don't have IDs.
A separate lawsuit in federal court in Madison is seeking to show that Republicans adopted voter ID and other laws over the past five years with the goal of benefiting their party and making it harder for minorities to vote.
That lawsuit by two liberal groups, One Wisconsin Institute and Citizen Action of Wisconsin Education Fund, also challenges limits on early voting, a requirement that voters establish residency 28 days before voting, the elimination of straight-ticket voting and other changes to voting rules approved since 2011.
U.S. District Judge James Peterson is expected to rule in that case soon. At closing arguments last month, he said there were few clear guidelines for how to rule on parts of a challenge to Wisconsin's voting rules and also questioned how much of an effect the state's voter ID law has had on elections.
In Tuesday's decision, Adelman wrote he was trying to prevent disenfranchising "voters who cannot obtain ID no matter how hard they try," though his ruling would apply to a larger class of voters.
Those who don't have IDs will be able to vote by going to polling places and signing forms saying they can't easily get IDs. The system is to be available to anyone who, to get an ID, "would have to do more than retrieve a birth certificate and related documents from his or her desk drawer and make a single trip to the (Division of Motor Vehicles)."
That would include those who don't have birth certificates, have mistakes on their birth certificates or have health problems that prevent them from traveling to DMV centers. Voters themselves will determine whether getting an ID would require more than a reasonable effort.
Adelman's decision described instances in which those who don't have IDs were caught in a bureaucratic limbo.
One was directed by DMV officials to track down adoption papers and court papers from Tennessee. Another was told to request a name change through the federal Social Security Administration. A third voter over three months had to speak with a DMV investigator nine times, make two trips to a DMV center and call other agencies to locate documents.
This spring, Walker's administration made changes to how it handles requests for IDs for those who have the most difficulty in getting them because they lack birth certificates or have trouble getting copies of them. That new system provides people with temporary documents that would allow them to vote.
But Adelman found that system did not go far enough, saying bureaucratic mistakes were inevitable and that they would disenfranchise some eligible voters.
The decision could provide the first big test for Wisconsin's newly created state Elections Commission, composed of three Democrats and three Republicans.
Republican lawmakers created the commission to replace the state Government Accountability Board, a group of six former judges that has been responsible for running elections for the last eight years.
The Elections Commission will be responsible for making sure local election clerks print blank affidavits and have them available at each polling place. The commission will also be responsible for making sure the public knows about the ability to vote by affidavit if they don't have IDs.
Commission spokesman Reid Magney said the agency would consult with the state Department of Justice to ensure it complies with the court order. He said he expected the ruling to affect a relatively small number of voters.
The decision by Adelman and the forthcoming one by Peterson could easily wind up before the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, which has been equally divided when it comes to the voter ID law.
A panel of three judges from that court upheld Wisconsin's voter ID law in September 2014 reversing Adelman's ruling that year that found the law was unconstitutional.
The case then went to the full appeals court, which split 5-5 on whether the law should be overturned. That left in place the panel's decision that upheld the law.
After that, the case returned to Adelman as voters bringing the case argued for creating a system to vote by affidavit.
Adelman initially ruled against them in October 2015, but a panel of the 7th Circuit opened the door in April for such a system. All three judges on that panel were appointed by Republican presidents.
Paddlers approach the Chippewa River in Dunn County on land the Department of Natural Resources is planning to purchase from Xcel Energy. Credit: Credit: Xcel Energy
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By of the
A sprawling river bottom in western Wisconsin that was the site of a contentious plan for a nuclear power plant could soon be owned by the state.
The Natural Resources Board will be asked to approve the purchase of 990 acres along the Lower Chippewa River in Dunn County, southwest of Eau Claire, at its meeting on Aug. 3 in Ashland.
The Department of Natural Resources would pay $2,080,155 for the property, which is owned by Xcel Energy, the Minneapolis-based utility that has a large service area in the region.
The property includes a portion of the Chippewa River trail and 18,000 feet of shoreline on the south side of the river.
Located in a floodplain, the property can be hard to access at certain times of the year. In the spring and fall, the Chippewa Valley Motor Car Association uses the scaled-down locomotives and cars to transport sightseers through remote areas.
Douglas J. Haag, real estate manager for the DNR, said Xcel approached the agency about a year ago and asked whether it would be interested in buying some of the 4,400 acres.
Sarah Schwartz, a land manager for the utility, said the company decided to divest the property as part of an evaluation of all of its assets. She said Xcel has been working with the DNR on management of the property.
"This really stood out as a win for both parties," she said. "It keeps the recreational opportunities for the public, and we wanted to make sure it got in the right hands."
Xcel wants to sell the rest of the land but has no timetable, Schwartz said.
After plans for the $1.3 billion nuclear power plant collapsed, Xcel still held out plans to build a coal-fired plant on the property. By 2006, the company decided not to construct a plant on the property.
"We're thrilled about the purchase," said Elanor Wolf, president of the Lower Chippewa River Alliance. "We don't have to worry about it being developed. It's great bird habitat. There's no development on that stretch of the river."
The Eastern Massasauga rattlesnake, a state endangered species, is on the property. The river has populations of paddlefish, a state threatened species.
Haag said the region is home to several fishing and hunting groups The land is close to other public properties and is within the boundaries of the state master plan for the Lower Chippewa River State Natural Area.
The ever-shifting sandbars and islands of the river have long attracted recreational users, but today mask the controversy that reverberated there in the 1970s.
Northern States Power Co., the former corporate name of Xcel, proposed building the Tyrone nuclear power plant on the site.
It was one of three nuclear proposals the others were Koshkonong on Lake Koshkonong in Jefferson County and Haven on Lake Michigan in Sheboygan County that were never constructed in Wisconsin.
The Tyrone plant was named after a town founded in 1856 during the logging boom, according to the Durand School District. Most residents eventually moved away. The local population thinned more when Northern States Power began buying out property owners, sometimes using eminent domain.
The Tyrone plan prompted riverfront protests and legislative hearings in Madison. Opponents fought it on environmental grounds, and supporters touted the construction jobs and claims of lower electricity costs.
The state Public Service Commission rejected construction plans in 1979 on a 2-1 vote three weeks before the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania.
A combination of rising costs and growing public opposition defeated Tyrone and the other nuclear ventures.
'This is the right time to exhale': David Stearns ends seven-year run
The 37-year-old cited a desire to spend more time with family in stepping back to an advisory role, but the New York Mets are sure to be interested.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19
By Anvar Mammadov Trend:
Azerbaijan and Afghanistan discussed the creation of joint enterprises to produce food products, said Azerbaijani Economy Ministry in a message.
The discussions were held during the meeting of Azerbaijans Economy Minister Shahin Mustafayev with Afghanistans Ambassador to Baku Mohammad Taqi Khalili.
Economic cooperation between the two countries and other issues of mutual interest were also discussed during the meeting. It was noted that there is great potential for cooperation in transportation, logistics, agriculture, trade and other fields between Afghanistan and Azerbaijan.
The parties also exchanged views on construction of a cement plant in Afghanistan and the joint production of cotton.
Trade turnover between Azerbaijan and Afghanistan was $23.47 million in H1 2016, according to Azerbaijans State Customs Committee, and the entire amount accounted for the export of Azerbaijani goods to Afghanistan.
By of the
A Dane County judge has ruled the Department of Natural Resources can't backtrack from an earlier decision and must proceed with imposing environmental protections on a large dairy farm expansion.
The ruling is the most recent example where the regulatory authority of the DNR has been called into question. The judge said the agency in this case had the power to place limits on farmers to protect public waters.
The issue is far from settled, and in this instance the owners of the farm say they might appeal the ruling.
The court decision is the latest development in a dispute over plans by Kinnard Farms to expand dairy operations by thousands of cows in Kewaunee County, where groundwater contamination has fanned tensions between farmers and non-farmers.
Dane County Circuit Judge John W. Markson ruled last week the DNR must require Kinnard to install groundwater monitoring equipment and place a cap on the number of cattle the farm could keep. Both requirements are aimed at protecting groundwater.
The cattle population has grown sharply in the county a region prone to thin soils and fractured bedrock. The mix has led to polluted wells, with environmentalists and others blaming excessive manure spreading. Farming interests have suggested in some cases that other causes are to blame.
The case dates back to March 2012 when Kinnard sought permission from the DNR to expand its herd. Environmental groups and others challenged the expansion.
A state administrative law judge ruled the farm could expand, but said the DNR must require monitoring and a maximum limit on cows. Administrative Law Judge Jeffrey Boldt noted that "many members of the public were deeply upset about what could only be described as a crisis with respect to groundwater quality in the area."
Kinnard appealed, and in November 2014, DNR Secretary Cathy Stepp denied the appeal.
Eight months later, and "for reasons that remain obscure," Markson wrote, the DNR in August 2015 asked the state Justice Department whether the agency had the authority to impose such limits on farms because of a 2011 law, Act 21, that says state agencies can't dictate requirements on parties unless the power is spelled out in law.
One day later, the Justice Department issued a legal opinion saying the DNR does not have such authority. In September 2015, the DNR announced it was granting Kinnard a permit. The farm said it would grow from 4,000 to 6,700 milking cows.
This spring, the Justice Department used similar reasoning to advise the DNR it could not consider the effect of multiple wells on streams and lakes when reviewing permits for new high-capacity wells. Farms again were at the center of the dispute.
Both opinions by Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel to a GOP-led DNR raised questions.
"This continued attempt ... to limit the DNR's power is not based on law," Elizabeth Wheeler, an attorney for Clean Wisconsin, said Monday.
Markson said Act 21 must be interpreted in conjunction with other laws that give the DNR the power to govern waste water. He said Stepp's decision to reverse herself was "untimely and beyond her authority, " adding "our administrative process (does) not allow an agency to change its mind on a whim or for political purposes."
The DNR said it was reviewing the decision and consulting with the Justice Department.
Kinnard said in a statement: "Unfortunately, our family farm finds itself in the middle of a process that was created by the (DNR) making the wrong decision in the first place. This case is ultimately about the scope of DNR's legal authority and not our farm."
Tess M.M. White in October. Her family agreed to end the legal fight over her remains. Credit: Submitted photo
SHARE Tiffany Simmons Wisconsin Department of Corrections Shanta D. Pearson Wisconsin Department of Corrections
By of the
A pregnant West Allis woman who was kidnapped, killed and left to burn in a South Dakota bean field more than two months ago may finally be laid to rest.
Tess M.M. White's Native American spirit has been in limbo since her Ojibwe funeral was interrupted after three days of a fire vigil, and right before her planned burial at the Bad River Band reservation near Ashland last month.
On behalf of her estranged father, who is jailed in Shawano County, White's half sister had obtained a court order from Milwaukee County stating that she had the authority to make different funeral arrangements for White.
That side of the family wanted White buried in the Forest County Potawatomi tradition, on tribal land near Crandon. White was an enrolled member of the tribe.
Another judge had issued an emergency order last week to halt any more transport or funeral services for White's remains until a full hearing Tuesday on whether a tribal judge's grant of emergency guardianship to White's maternal grandmother, who arranged the Ojibwe service, took precedent.
But over the weekend, the two sides of the family reached an agreement to dismiss the grandmother's objections to the Milwaukee County probate court proceeding, and that the grandmother, Janice Madosh-Smart, would take responsibility for the burial of White and her fetus.
Circuit Judge David Borowski signed off on the agreement Tuesday and canceled the scheduled hearing.
Madosh-Smart said she expects White's casket to return to the Bad River reservation for final interment in a couple of days.
"I hope this will help people move on," she said.
White, 25, was last seen by her aunt in West Allis on May 4, when she left with some acquaintances, Tiffany Simmons and Shanta Pearson. After White and Simmons argued and fought, White was tied up in the back of a pickup, and later suffocated and strangled by Simmons, according to criminal charges filed against her and Pearson, who told police they were using drugs much of the time.
The couple drove White's remains through Minnesota to South Dakota, where they set them on fire. Farmers discovered the grisly scene May 17, but White wasn't positively identified until more than a week later.
A few days before the remains were found, Simmons and Pearson had been stopped while driving in Colorado and arrested because there was a warrant out for Pearson's arrest in connection to a May 6 bank robbery in Milwaukee.
Simmons is charged with first degree intentional homicide, hiding a corpse and kidnapping. Pearson is charged with felony murder, hiding a corpse and bank robbery. Both are being held on $500,000 bail.
Christopher Davis (left) was shot and killed Feb. 24 by Walworth County Sheriff's Deputy Juan Ortiz (right) during what authorities have called a drug investigation. Credit: Journal Sentinel files
By of the
Elkhorn The Walworth County district attorney informed the family of 21-year-old Christopher Davis on Tuesday that a sheriff's deputy would not be charged in his fatal shooting, according to the family's attorney.
District Attorney Daniel A. Necci met with the family at the courthouse in Elkhorn.
Davis, 21, of Milwaukee, was fatally shot by Walworth County Sheriff's Deputy Juan Ortiz on Feb. 24 while sitting in the front passenger seat of a Pontiac Bonneville in the parking lot of Roma's Ristorante and Lounge in the Town of East Troy.
According to the investigative report by the state Department of Justice, Ortiz fired at the car as the driver attempted to flee a staged drug purchase and sped in the direction of officers.
"I believe that Deputy Ortiz's actions were privileged as acts of defense of himself or others," Necci wrote in a letter to Sheriff Kurt Picknell.
"I believe that there is no other logical conclusion that can be drawn from the evidence other than that Deputy Ortiz was attempting to prevent himself from being attacked with potentially deadly force and, therefore, Deputy Ortiz was justified in using deadly force in response," Necci wrote.
No video footage of the shooting was recorded, Neeci said Tuesday.
On the day of the shooting, Ortiz was assisting Village of East Troy police in the drug investigation, which included a planned undercover cocaine purchase in the restaurant parking lot.
According to the investigative report, Roberto Juarez Nieves told authorities that he, Davis and driver Jose Lara planned to exchange drugs in the parking lot on the afternoon of Feb. 24.
Ortiz, along with East Troy police officers Craig Knox and Jeff Price and Walworth County sheriff's Deputy Matthew Weber, were dispatched to the restaurant on a tip that Juarez Nieves planned to facilitate a drug deal.
Seeing squad cars, Juarez Nieves told Lara to leave the scene because Juarez Nieves was on probation for cocaine possession.
The car drove in reverse toward Knox, forward toward Price and then toward Ortiz. All pointed their guns, but only Ortiz fired, according to the report.
A police chase reaching speeds upward of 100 mph ensued, entering Waukesha County and ending with a crash with a Walworth County squad car near Durham Place and Hidden Creek Drive in Muskego.
Lara and Juarez Nieves ran from the car and were later taken into custody. Davis was taken to Froedtert Hospital in Wauwatosa, where he died. The Waukesha County medical examiner's office found that Davis died from a gunshot wound to the head.
For the Davis family and its supporters, the meeting with the district attorney ended months of waiting for the details of what led up to his death.
Davis had graduated from Hamilton High School in Milwaukee and had overcome scoliosis. He was engaged to be married.
Maria Hamilton, whose son Dontre Hamilton was shot and killed by a Milwaukee police officer in 2014, said from Elkhorn that she may bring up the Davis case as well as that of Jay Anderson, who was shot and killed by a Wauwatosa police officer last month, when she speaks at the Democratic National Convention next week.
"Once again, we have two families who are brokenhearted," she said.
Dontre Hamilton, 31, was killed April 30, 2014, in Red Arrow Park by then-Milwaukee police officer Christopher Manney. Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn fired Manney for his actions leading up to the shooting, but not for his use of force. Manney later received approval for duty disability retirement.
In the Davis case, Ortiz had been placed on administrative duty following the incident and has now been restored to full duty.
Lara, 31, was charged with conspiracy to manufacture or deliver cocaine and attempting to flee or elude an officer. Juarez Nieves has not been charged.
Hannah Schwarz reported from Elkhorn and Jessie Bekker reported from Milwaukee.
07/18/2016
Joseph Scott Morgan with HLN's Nancy Grace.
Joseph Scott Morgan, JSU distinguished scholar of applied forensics, was one of only two Americans to present at the Centre for Death and Societys annual international conference held recently at the University of Bath in England. He presented The Therapeutic Memoir: A Practitioners Story of Surviving a Career of Investigating Death in the American Deep South.
While in the United Kingdom, Morgan had a personal meeting with the director of the University of Baths Centre for Death and Society the only center of its kind in the world to discuss a potential collaboration to study the coroner systems of the UK and the USA from an international perspective. Issues such as governmental structure, function, and qualification were discussed with an eye towards common research interest of both JSU and the University of Bath.
Morgan also traveled to London to discuss possible collaborative exchange and training between JSU and the University College of Londons Centre for the Forensic Sciences. Some specific areas of interest explored were gunshot residue testing, diatom/soil analysis, on-scene qualitative drug analysis, crime scene processing and reconstruction.
Before coming to JSU, Morgan was one of the Souths leading crime scene investigators, working in New Orleans and Atlanta. He has provided expert analysis on the Nancy Grace Show on Headlines News more than 50 times over the past year.
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Maan News Agency |
BETHLEHEM (Maan) Israeli opposition leader Isaac Herzog warned of what he called growing hatred and racism in Israel encouraged by right-wing politicians, adding that it could pave the way for further deadly violence, Hebrew-language news site NRG reported on Monday.
We are on the verge of an uprising of hatred, racism, darkness and upcoming killings and assassination based on the overwhelming internal hatred here, NRG quoted Herzog as saying during a speech at a Zionist Camp parliamentary bloc session on Monday.
We hear hatred at every turn, whether it is directed towards women by military rabbis, by Ashkenazi Jews against Sephardi Jews and Mizrahi Jews against Ashkenazis, from military school rabbis towards homosexuals, or between Arabs and Jews, the Labor Party leader added, notably in reference to the recent appointment of Eyal Karim, who has implicitly justified the rape of women in times of war, as the new chief rabbi of the Israeli army.
Herzog went on to blame the current Israeli government, which he said has encouraged the growing right-wing discourse in Israeli society.
This way the seeds of the uprising of hatred are planted, which will lead to a civil war. This hatred is being carried out by the full support and cover of those in the government, Herzog said.
(Likud MK) Miri Regev will shed tears, (Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu will write a post on Facebook, and (Minister of Education) Naftali Bennett will call for self-assessment, but they will be the ones indicted this time, Herzog added.
Whoever heads this government remains silent about the uprising of hatred, without working against it, ending it, taking steps against its leaders, or preventing those behind it from receiving funding.
They have forgotten that protecting the weak is a major condition of being Jewish, in addition to tolerance and protecting democracy, values and morals. It seems that Netanyahu has forgotten the meaning of being Jewish, Herzog said.
Earlier this month, Herzog denounced the passage of legislation requiring that Israeli NGOs reveal the sources of their public foreign funding a law which has been denounced as an attack on left-wing Israeli organizations working to denounce Israeli occupation practices against Palestinians.
At the time, Herzog slammed the law for symbolizing the budding fascism that is rising and flourishing in Israeli society.
Via Maan News Agency
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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) |
Rep. Steve King objected to a comment during a cable news discussion at MSNBC that this will be the last election dominated by old white people.
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) offered an unusual defense of the racial homogeneity of his party during a panel on MSNBC Monday evening. The group, led by Chris Hayes, was discussing the first day of the Republican national convention and Donald Trumps history of racially-loaded comments and behavior. King told Hayes that he thought Trump had modified his behavior in that regard, but Esquires Charlie Pierce said he didnt see much diversity reflected in the gathering itself. If youre really optimistic, you can say that this is the last time that old white people will command the Republican Partys attention, its platform, its public face, Pierce said. That hall is wired, he continued. That hall is wired by loud, unhappy, dissatisfied white people. King objected. This old white people business does get a little tired, Charlie, King said. Id ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that youre talking about, where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization? Than white people? Hayes asked, clearly amazed. Than, than Western civilization itself, King replied. Its rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world. Thats all of Western civilization.
There are lots of basic things wrong with Kings statement, even just starting with his category of whiteness. Whiteness is not natural it is an invented category. Were Irish white? A lot of English didnt think so. Whites rioted against Greek immigrants to the US. White supremacists still argue over whether to let in Italian-Americans. Me, I dont want to be called white and I decline that categorization whenever the government or other people with questionnaires will let me. The Appalachian side of my family probably has some Melungeon to it and some of us arent all that white.
As for civilization, there are lots of kinds. Archeologists were shocked to discover that African villagers did sophisticated iron-working around the time of Jesus, even though they didnt have big cities or other infrastructure. They were just good at smithing and the technology needed for it.
If by civilization is meant urban society with high rates of literacy, scientific and technological innovation, role specialization and division of labor, and high levels of collective government, then northern European Christians did not invent it.
Iraq, Iran, India, China and Egypt did. The Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Elamites, Persians, Indians, Chinese and the Pharaohs of Egypt had civilization for thousands of years while Celts in Britain were painting themselves blue and doing hunting and gathering in the wastes.
Sanskrit gave us our numbers, otherwise wed be doing long division of IX into XXVI. The Arabs and Iranians at the court of the Abbasid caliphate added the zero, and invented algebra and algorithms (named for al-Khwarizmi, an Iranian Muslim mathematician). Omar Khayyam, an Iranian, pioneered using geometry to solve algebraic problems. Muslims gave us the latteen sail and a whole host of other key inventions. Chinese science in the Song period (late medieval) was so far ahead of the rest of the world that others probably did not catch up until 1750 or so. Ancient Indian astronomers were likewise way ahead of their peers in Europe of the day.
As for Christianity, while it could not be proved to cause the fall of the Roman Empire in the 400s of the common era, it is certainly the case that Greece and the Roman republic were huge successes when pagan, but went into a tailspin only a century after Constantine imposed a Middle Eastern monotheism on the empire. There doesnt seem to be a connection between Christianity and civilization. There were some negatives. Christian know-nothingism of the Tertullian sort put paid to high philosophizing in Western Europe for centuries, with deep damage to science and innovation. Abbasid caliph Haroun al-Rashid was debating Aristotle at court while Charlemagne, lord of a few muddy villages compared to the splendors of Baghdad, was desperately trying to learn to write his name.
Western Europeans and North Americans got slightly ahead of the rest of the world with regard to gross domestic product and scientific innovation from about 1750, but this should not be exaggerated. Even as the people at the center of an empire, most Portuguese were poor, and likely poorer than the Indians they hoped to rule. It certainly had nothing at all to to with Christianity. Some of it was the ghost acreage of slavery and colonialism, which produced economic cream for white society beyond subsistence that got invested and had a multiplier effect.
But there is another critique of what King said, which is that our model of civilization may be very damaging. It is after all a high-carbon enterprise that produces masses of pollution. It may have endangered our species with its carbon emissions. A less civlized life like that of pre-European Native Americans would certainly have been in greater harmony with the environment.
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CNNs Alisyn Camerota and Chris Cuomo slam Steve King for opposing Harriet Tubman
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VANCOUVER, July 19, 2016 /CNW/ - Camino Minerals Corporation ("Camino" or the "Company") (COR: TSX-V), is pleased to announce the signing of the final agreement with Minas Andinas SA (the "Vendor"), pursuant to which Camino can acquire through a wholly owned subsidiary, Camino Resources SAC, a 100% interest in the Los Chapitos project. The property has been expanded by the Company and now consists of 10 claims, totaling 5,000 hectares (12,300 acres), and is located 15 kilometers north of the coastal city of Chala, Department of Arequipa, Peru.
Los Chapitos, is located in the Peruvian Iron Oxide Copper Gold belt (IOCG), and hosts two separate mineralized trends. On the western side of the property, small scale mining was active in the 1940's and 50's which produced high grade copper oxide mineralization from the Atajo Zone. These historical surface workings define a strike length of at least 400 meters. The Company completed two chip sample lines across the middle of the zone which returned a length weighted average of 2.10% copper and 9.4 gpt silver, over 38 meters, and 1.57% copper and 3.5 gpt silver across 64 meters. The Atajo Zone is open along strike and at depth.
Approximately six kilometers to the east are numerous zones which outcrop along a 2.5 kilometer trend, of which the Adriana and Katty zones were sampled extensively by the vendor. The Adriana Zone is exposed over an area measuring 75 meters by 150 meters, with historical sampling averaging 1.40% copper and 16 gpt silver. The Company completed a chip sample line over the middle of the zone which returned a length weighted average grade of 1.42% copper and 28.7 gpt silver across 58 meters. The Katty Zone lies along trend about 1 kilometer to the southeast, measures 50 meters by 125 meters, and has historical sampling which averaged 2.10% copper and 16 gpt silver. Spot chip sampling by the Company supports the historical values. Both the Adriana and Katty Zones are open in all directions and at depth.
Los Chapitos is covered by rolling hills with elevations between 500 masl and 1250 masl. It is crossed by numerous gravel roads and trails which connect back to the Pan American Highway near the cities of Chala and Tanaka. Regionally, the project is located along the major Treinta Libras structural lineament, which hosts the Mina Justa IOCG deposit 100 kilometers to the northwest. Mina Justa is reported to contain a resource of 374 million tonnes averaging 0.71% copper and 9.0 gpt silver. A presentation on the Los Chapitos project is available on the Company website at www.caminominerals.com.
Over the coming months, the field crews will complete additional chip and trench sampling to better define the known zones. The Company has engaged an environmental consultant to prepare the necessary documentation for submission of a drill permit application.
Under the terms of the agreement, Camino has the right to earn 100% interest in the Project, subject to a 1.5% Net Smelter Royalty ("NSR), by making staged option payments and issuing common shares of Camino as follows:
Date for Option Payment Amount
USD Shares On execution of the option agreement (the "Effective Date") $50,000 50,000 12 months after Effective Date $75,000 75,000 24 months after Effective Date $100,000 100,000 36 months after Effective Date $125,000 125,000 48 months after Effective Date $150,000 150,000 Total $500,000 500,000
The 1.5% NSR is payable up to a maximum of US$10 million. Camino retains the first right of offer to purchase the NSR. Advance royalty payments of US$500,000 will be payable for each 500 million pounds of copper equivalent ("CuEQ") incremental increase in Measured and Indicated resources. For the purposes of this agreement, CuEQ will be based on the contained pounds of copper, contained ounces of gold and silver, and the LME closing spot price on the date of release of each resource.
The TSX Venture Exchange accepted for filing the Letter of Intent dated June 17, 2016 and the first option payment has been made.
Kenneth C. McNaughton , M.A.Sc., P.Eng., is the Qualified Person (QP) responsible for the Los Chapitos project.
About Camino Minerals Corporation
Camino is a discovery-oriented mineral exploration company. The Company is focused on the acquisition and development of high grade copper and precious metal projects. For more information, please refer to Camino's website at www.caminominerals.com
Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements and Information
This News Release contains "forward-looking information" and "forward looking statements" within the meaning of applicable Canadian and United States securities legislation. Statements contained herein that are not based on historical or current fact, including without limitation statements containing the words "anticipates," "believes," "may," "continues," "estimates," "expects," and "will" and words of similar import, constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.
Forward-looking information may include, but is not limited to, information with respect to our planned exploration activities, the adequacy of our financial resources, the estimation of mineral reserves and resources, the results of future exploration and drilling. Wherever possible, words such as "plans", "expects", "projects", "assumes", "budget", "strategy", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "targets" and similar expressions or statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved, or the negative forms of any of these terms and similar expressions, have been used to identify forward-looking statements and information.
Forward-looking information is subject to a variety of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking information, including, without limitation, those risks identified in the Company's annual disclosure materials, filed with the securities regulatory authorities in Canada and available at www.sedar.com. Readers are encouraged to read these materials. Prospective investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information.
Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
SOURCE Camino Minerals Corporation
Toronto, Canada / TheNewswire / July 19, 2016 - Savary Gold Corp. (TSX-V: SCA) ("Savary" or the "Company") is pleased to announce drill results for the recently completed drill program on the Karankasso JV Project in south western Burkina Faso. As at year end 2015, the Karankasso JV Project was approximately 66.3% owned by Savary and 33.7% owned by Sarama Resources Limited ("Sarama").
A total of 43 holes totalling 6,578.5 metres were completed over a period of 2.5 months. A summary of select results are presented below (see Figure 1 for locations).
1.34 g/t gold over 11.6 metres at S-Nosa Zone - New drill discovery
3.82 g/t gold over 13.0 metres at Karangosso Zone
1.73 g/t gold over 28.0 metres at Karangosso Zone
10.20 g/t gold over 1 metre at Karangosso Zone
0.77 g/t gold over 11 metres at Karangosso Zone
3.98 g/t gold over 7 metres at Karangosso Zone
1.32 g/t gold over 7 metres at Karangosso Zone
1.46 g/t gold over 7 metres at Karangosso Zone
2.77 g/t gold over 6 metres at NWQV Zone - New drill discovery
3.05 g/t gold over 4 metres at Diosso South Zone
12.24 g/t gold over 4 metres at Splay 2 Zone - New drill discovery
9.75 g/t gold over 7 metres at Splay 2 Zone - New drill discovery
3.00 g/t gold over 4 metres at Kueredougou West Zone
2.62 g/t gold over 2 metres at Bilenkulu Zone - New drill discovery
"This drill program has successfully extended the gold mineralization along strike at the Karangosso, Kueredougou West Trend, Diosso South and Kueredougou West Zones, and, in the case of the Karangosso Zone, also to depth" stated Don Dudek, President and CEO of Savary.Mr. Duduk further noted that " Management is encouraged by the results and believes they indicate significant potential to increase the mineral resources at each of the zones while the geophysical surveys continue to support our view that the mineralized trends continue beyond the current drilling. Planning has already begun to fill in the drill gaps to be able to add to the current mineral resource estimates and determine if the new zones can be developed into stand alone deposits."
Click Image To View Full Size
Figure 1 Karankasso JV Project - Locations of Significant 2016 Drill Intercepts
Approximately 79% of the drilling was completed over the known zones with a goal to extend the zones along strike, and at the Karangosso Zone, to depth as well. Both core and RC drilling were completed during the drill program with nine core holes totalling 1,528.5 metres of drilling completed before the RC drill program was initiated. The core and RC holes were drilled at inclinations of -45 and -50 degrees, respectively. Overall, approximately 25% of the drilling was completed proximal to the Karangosso inferred mineral resource estimate. A summary of assay composites are presented in Table 1, located at the end of this news release.
Drilling down-plunge of the Karangosso Zone returned the best hole of the program to date with an intercept of 3.82 g/t gold over 13.0 metres core length in hole DH-16-07, followed closely by hole DH-16-09, located 100 metres to the north, that returned 1.73 g/t gold over 28.0 metres core length. Both of these holes tested 55 metres and 40 metres, respectively, below the resource pit limit, the base of which was previously constrained by the lack of drilling. Drilling also extended the Karangosso Zone for approximately 600 metres north of the resource pit limit with the furthest north hole, a 350 metre step-out intersecting a narrow interval that returned 1.15 g/t gold over 1 metre. Drilling was not successful in extending the zone to the south, however, additional drilling is required in this area.
Four, wide-spaced drill holes were drilled to test the strike extent of the Diosso South Zone. These holes tested the trend of the Diosso South Zone from 900 metres to the south of the Zone to 270 metres to the north of the Zone. All holes intersected gold mineralization with the two holes to the north of the zone returning the best intercepts at 3.05 g/t gold over 4 metres in hole RC-16-19 and 1.81 g/t gold over 1 metre in hole RC-16-20. These two holes, along with a historic hole, a further 220 metres to the north, that returned an intercept of 5.92 g/t gold over 3 metres, now indicate that the Diosso South Zone mineralization can be traced for approximately 2,200 metres from a resource modelled strike of approximately 850 metres. Additional drilling will be required before an updated resource estimate can be completed.
Drilling tested the Kueredougou West Trend Zone along a three kilometre strike with the longest step-out being 1,400 metres to the north. The hole furthest to the north, RC-16-21, intersected 0.91 g/t gold over 5 metres and 1.03 g/t gold over 5 metres. The hole furthest to the south, a 775 metre step-out, did not intersect any significant values, but, is suspected as having overshot the target. In total, mineralization has been traced along the Kueredougou West Trend Zone by drilling for approximately 2,250 metres. The resource modelled zone is only 450 metres long to date.
Three holes were drilled to test the south strike extension of the Kueredougou West Zone with all holes intersecting gold mineralization along a 440 metre strike. The best hole, RC-16-27, intersected 3.00 g/t gold over 4.0 metres. This hole was drilled approximately 45 metres vertically below an existing intercept that returned 1.98 g/t gold over 3 metres. These few holes extend the mineralization at the Kueredougou West Zone to the south by another 22% to 2,440 metres from 2,000 metres.
New drill discoveries were made at the NWQV, Splay 2, S-Nosa and Bilenkulu Zones during this drill program with the best results coming from the Splay 2 zone.
Hole RC-16-23, which tested the Splay 2 artisanal mining occurrence, returned intercepts of 12.24 g/t gold over 4 metres and 9.75 g/t gold over 7 metres. These two intercepts are 13 metres apart down-hole with the initial intercept correlating to the historic artisanal workings. This hole may be related to the same mineralized trend which returned an intercept of 1.04 g/t gold over 7.0 metres, located approximately 440 metres to the south-southwest.
A single hole, which tested the NWQV occurrence, returned an intercept of 2.77 g/t gold over 7.0 metres. Previous grab samples from this area returned assays of up to 13.5 g/t gold. This target area lies at the northern end of a 20 kilometre long gold-in-soil anomalous Serakoro 1 West trend where the geological trend rotates from northerly to northeast with a potential link to the Karangosso Zone area, some four kilometres to the northeast. A 1,200 metre long induced potential ("IP") geophysical conductivity anomaly is coincident with this zone, which lies at the western edge of a multi-kilometre long IP chargeability anomaly. This Zone lies on the southern edge of a river flood plain, a large area of coincident laterite cover and at the northern edge of the Serakoro 1 West IP geophysical survey block.
Two holes were drilled to test the Bilenkulu Zone, located approximately 1,200 metres west of the Kueredougou West Zone with the northernmost hole returning 2.62 g/t gold over 2 metres. This zone is hosted by felsic volcanics and lies on the southern edge of a 700 metre wide laterite hill. Artisanal workings at the northern edge of the hill suggest that this mineralized trend extends further to the north.
Two holes were also drilled at the S-Nosa Zone where previous grab samples returned up to 22.80 g/t gold. The first hole into the zone returned an intercept of 1.34 g/t gold over 11.6 metres. The second hole, drilled approximately 1,200 metres to the northeast, into what is believed to be the same target intersected 1.52 g/t gold over 2.0 metres.
QA/QC Comments
Savary's procedures for handling reverse circulation drill chips comprise initial riffle splitting of the rock chips from one metre drill length samples into approximately 2.5 kilogram samples, as well as description and logging into a database. A duplicate 2.5 kilogram sample, prepared at the same time as the assay sample, is kept as a reference for each sample. NQ-size, core assay samples are first logged into a database and then are sawn in half with half of the core submitted for analyses; the length of the core samples depends on logged geological controls with samples varying from 0.3 metres to 2.0 metres in length. Assay standards, sample duplicates and assay blanks were inserted sequentially every 5 to 14 samples resulting in an assay standard inserted every 29 to 34 samples. This sampling procedure was periodically reviewed by Savary's President and CEO, and the Company QP, Don Dudek, P. Geo. All assay samples were collected at site by Actlabs staff from Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. All assay samples were collected at site by Actlabs staff from Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Sample preparation and fire assays were performed by Actlabs, based in Ouagadougou. Each sample was dried, crushed to 90% passing 2 mm and then split to ~250-300g by riffle splitter. The 250-300g, 2 mm split was pulverized to 95% passing 106 ?m. Fifty grams of the pulverized material was analysed for gold via fire assay with an atomic absorption spectroscopy (AAS) finish. Actlabs operates according to ISO 17025 standards and institutes a full Quality Assurance/Quality Control (QA/QC) program consisting of insertion of blanks, standard reference material, repeats and reject splits which in total account for up to 25% of all determinations conducted.
About Savary Gold
Savary Gold is a Canadian exploration company which, along with partner Sarama Resources Limited, is focused on exploring and developing the Karankasso Gold Project in Burkina Faso. The Project properties lie within the Birimian age, Hounde Greenstone Belt, which hosts Semafo's Mana mine and additional gold deposits that are presently subject to production decisions and extensive exploration efforts (including Endeavour Mining's Hounde Project, Roxgold's Yaramoko Project, Orezone's Bondi Project and Sarama's/Acacia's South Hounde Project, which is adjacent to Savary Gold's property). The Project contains an Inferred open pit constrained mineral resource estimate of 9.16 million tonnes grading 2.28 g/t gold (Savary news release November 24, 2015). For additional information please visit our website at www.savarygold.com.
Don Dudek, P.Geo., President and CEO of the Company and a qualified person under National Instrument 43-101, has reviewed and approved the scientific and technical information in this press release.
SAVARY GOLD CORP.
On behalf of the Board
"Don Dudek"
President & Chief Executive Officer
For more information, please contact:
Don Dudek, President and CEO
T: 647-259-2097
E: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ; www.savarygold.com
Cautionary Notes
Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
This news release may contain forward-looking statements. These statements include statements regarding the details of the potential value growth of the JV, the upside of the property, the drill program, the company's exploration plans and the timing of results, the focus on existing drill targets and new targets. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially because of factors discussed in the management discussion and analysis section of our interim and most recent annual financial statement or other reports and filings with the TSX Venture Exchange and applicable Canadian securities regulations. We do not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by applicable laws.
Table 1 - 2016 Drill Results Summary Hole From (m) To (m) Width* (m) Assay g/t Au Zone/Target HE-DH-16-01 95.40 95.75 0.35 1.13 DH HE-DH-16-01 125.65 126.00 0.35 0.60 DH HE-DH-16-02 NSV DH HE-DH-16-03 NSV Nosa HE-DH-16-04 59.75 71.30 11.55 1.34 S-Nosa HE-DH-16-04 99.86 100.70 0.84 0.85 S-Nosa HE-DH-16-04 150.35 151.15 1.32 1.40 S-Nosa HE-DH-16-05 157.95 160.09 2.14 1.12 Karangosso HE-DH-16-05 211.00 212.23 1.23 7.11 Karangosso HE-DH-16-08 49.85 50.65 0.80 1.05 Karangosso HE-DH-16-07 61.70 63.00 1.30 0.86 Karangosso HE-DH-16-07 261.85 263.50 1.65 1.15 Karangosso HE-DH-16-07 270.10 283.10 13.00 3.82 Karangosso HE-DH-16-09 71 74 3.00 1.14 Karangosso HE-DH-16-09 97.50 99.00 1.50 0.77 Karangosso HE-DH-16-09 106.50 108.00 1.50 0.55 Karangosso HE-DH-16-09 125.00 129.00 4.00 0.71 Karangosso HE-DH-16-09 135.25 135.70 0.45 7.34 Karangosso HE-DH-16-09 140.00 168.00 28.00 1.73 Karangosso incl 159.35 167.00 7.65 3.13 Karangosso HE-DH-16-09 174.35 177.25 2.90 1.47 Karangosso HE-DH-16-09 204 205.7 1.70 3.57 Karangosso HE-RC-16-01 35 36 1 0.711 Karangosso HE-RC-16-01 62 63 1 1.84 Karangosso HE-RC-16-02 NSV Karangosso HE-RC-16-03 61 62 1 1.24 Karangosso HE-RC-16-03 97 106 9 0.70 Karangosso HE-RC-16-03 121 122 1 0.69 Karangosso HE-RC-16-04 82 83 1 10.20 Karangosso HE-RC-16-04 102 103 1 0.64 Karangosso HE-RC-16-05 120 121 1 1.15 Karangosso HE-RC-16-06 92 94 2 0.98 Karangosso HE-RC-16-06 110 121 11 0.77 Karangosso HE-RC-16-07 94 96 2 1.11 Karangosso HE-RC-16-07 108 116 7 3.98 Karangosso HE-RC-16-07 121 122 1 0.72 Karangosso HE-RC-16-07 125 126 1 0.71 Karangosso HE-RC-16-08 10 11 1 1.57 Karangosso HE-RC-16-08 41 43 2 1.03 Karangosso HE-RC-16-08 55 58 3 1.34 Karangosso HE-RC-16-08 76 83 7 1.32 Karangosso HE-RC-16-08 99 104 5 0.36 Karangosso HE-RC-16-09 NSV Karangosso HE-RC-16-10 NSV Karangosso HE-RC-16-11 NSV New target HE-RC-16-12 89 95 6 2.77 NWQV HE-RC-16-12 166 167 1 1.56 NWQV HE-RC-16-13 NSV Kueredougou West Trend HE-RC-16-14 38 44 6 0.29 Diosso South Zone incl 41 42 1 0.55 Diosso South Zone HE-RC-16-14 74 75 1 0.92 Diosso South Zone HE-RC-16-14 151 152 1 1.24 Diosso South Zone HE-RC-16-14 165 166 1 0.61 Diosso South Zone HE-RC-16-14 170 171 1 0.90 Diosso South Zone HE-RC-16-14 173 174 1 1.45 Diosso South Zone HE-RC-16-15 80 82 2 1.93 Diosso South Zone HE-RC-16-16 179 182 3 0.19 Kueredougou West Trend HE-RC-16-17 102 106 4 0.59 Kueredougou West Trend HE-RC-16-17 121 123 2 0.72 Kueredougou West Trend HE-RC-16-18 72 73 1 0.84 Kueredougou West Trend HE-RC-16-19 34 38 4 3.05 Diosso South Zone HE-RC-16-19 120 121 1 0.51 Diosso South Zone HE-RC-16-19 174 175 1 0.55 Diosso South Zone HE-RC-16-20 39 40 1 1.81 Diosso South Zone HE-RC-16-20 89 91 2 0.59 Diosso South Zone HE-RC-16-21 22 27 5 0.91 Kueredougou West Trend HE-RC-16-21 86 89 3 1.03 Kueredougou West Trend HE-RC-16-22 124 125 1 0.58 Karangosso Zone HE-RC-16-22 136 143 7 1.46 Karangosso Zone HE-RC-16-23 43 44 1 2.34 Splay 2 Zone HE-RC-16-23 68 72 4 12.24 Splay 2 Zone HE-RC-16-23 85 92 7 9.75 Splay 2 Zone HE-RC-16-24 NSV Splay 1 target HE-RC-16-25 43 46 3 1.98 Kueredougou West Zone HE-RC-16-25 49 50 1 1.68 Kueredougou West Zone HE-RC-16-26 45 47 2 1.38 Kueredougou West Zone HE-RC-16-27 30 32 2 0.79 Kueredougou West Zone HE-RC-16-27 102 106 4 3.00 Kueredougou West Zone HE-RC-16-27 139 141 2 0.98 Kueredougou West Zone HE-RC-16-27 172 175 3 0.91 Kueredougou West Zone HE-RC-16-28 16 17 1 1.65 Bilenkulu HE-RC-16-28 87 88 1 0.58 Bilenkulu HE-RC-16-28 97 99 2 2.62 Bilenkulu HE-RC-16-29 NSV Bilenkulu HE-RC-16-30 42 46 4 0.88 Nosa HE-RC-16-30 95 96 1 0.84 Nosa HE-RC-16-31 74 76 2 1.52 S-Nosa HE-RC-16-32 NSV New target HE-RC-16-33 75 76 1 0.63 New target HE-RC-16-34 NSV New target
* true widths are estimated at 70% to 90% of drilled widths
Copyright (c) 2016 TheNewswire - All rights reserved.
WEST KELOWNA, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - July 19, 2016) - COLORADO RESOURCES LTD. (TSX VENTURE:CXO) ("Colorado" or the "Company") announces the drilling progress at the Inel Zone on the KSP Property under option with Seabridge Gold Inc.
Since drilling commenced on June 19, 2016 a total of 37 drillholes (5,000 m) have been completed at Inel. The drillholes have begun to test a 0.15 square kilometre area (10%) of the 1.5 square kilometre Inel gold in soil anomaly (averaging 1.27 g/t Au).
Results have been received from the first 8 drillholes at Inel, approximately 20% of the drilling completed to date in the first 5,000 m phase. Significant results from these first 8 drillholes are noted in the following table:
Inel 2016 Drilling - Significant Gold Results Hole ID Hole Length (m) From (m) To (m) Interval (m) Au (g/t) Ag (g/t) Zn (%) INDDH16-001 105 72.0 83.0 11.0 6.12 45.74 2.18 including 79.0 82.0 3.0 8.60 37.37 4.36 INDDH16-002 162 122.4 128.0 5.6 6.27 2.79 0.02 including 124.0 126.0 2.0 15.65 5.00 0.01 INDDH-003 129 31.0 33.0 2.0 18.70 2.40 0.14 and 103.0 111.0 8.0 9.99 14.25 0.12 including 103.0 105.0 2.0 24.10 35.60 0.09 INDDH16-004 165 58.0 59.0 1.0 10.20 20.70 2.60 and 117.0 118.0 1.0 15.70 33.30 2.75 INDDH16-005 150 143.0 143.7 0.7 13.65 91.10 0.59 INDDH16-006 150 25.6 31.0 5.4 5.70 10.11 1.53 including 25.6 27.0 1.4 13.70 24.00 3.16 INDDH16-007 99 30.0 31.0 1.0 5.57 4.60 1.14 INDDH16-008 150 52.0 54.0 2.0 8.70 11.90 0.81
Adam Travis President and CEO of Colorado states: "What an incredible first month we have had up at KSP getting a jump start on the exploration season with one drill rig completing 5,000 m in 37 drillholes in just 30 days of drilling. All our employees and contractors are to be commended for some of the highest and safest productivity I have seen in my 30 year career. Results are starting to come in from the laboratory and already our first few holes are showing some very impressive assay results over 400 m of strike attesting to the strength of this large open ended and robust system, which we have barely scratched the surface of. We started work almost a month ahead of other explorers in the area so that we have lots of exploration season left to follow up on these very encouraging early results. With sufficient working capital on hand, we plan to keep drilling and are well on our way to earning majority control of one of British Columbia's best exploration projects".
Qualified Person
Greg Dawson P.Geo, the Company's Vice President of Exploration is the Qualified Person ("QP") as defined by National Instrument 43-101 that has reviewed and approved the technical content of this news release.
QA/QC Statement
The 2016 samples were analyzed by ALS Minerals of Vancouver, British Columbia. Base metal assays were first determined using the ME-ICP61 method, which reports results as parts per million (ppm). Any samples containing greater than 10,000 ppm zinc were analyzed by the Zn-OG62 method, which reports results as percent. Any samples containing greater than 100 ppm silver were analyzed by the Ag-OG62 method, which reports results as ppm. The gold assays were determined using the Au-ICP21 fire assay method which reports results in ppm and are equivalent to grams per tonne (g/t). Any samples returning greater than 10 ppm gold were analyzed by the Au-GRA21 fire assay method with a gravimetric finish. The analytical results were verified with the application of industry standard Quality Control and Quality Assurance (QA-QC) procedures.
For more information on the KSP Project the reader is directed to the Company's website at www.coloradoresources.com.
About Colorado
Colorado Resources Ltd. is currently engaged in the business of mineral exploration for the purpose of acquiring and advancing mineral properties located in British Columbia and is also seeking opportunities in Southwest USA and Latin America.
Colorado's current exploration focus is to continue to advance: the KSP property currently under option with Seabridge Gold Inc., located 15 km's along strike to the southeast of the past producing Snip Mine*; its 100% owned Kingpin property; its 100% owned North ROK property, located 15 km's northwest of the Red Chris* mine development, both located in northern central British Columbia.
ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF COLORADO RESOURCES LTD.
Adam Travis, President and Chief Executive Officer
Cautionary Note
*This news release may contain information about adjacent properties on which Colorado has no right to explore or mine. Readers are cautioned that mineral deposits on adjacent properties are not indicative of mineral deposits on the Company's properties.
Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements
Certain statements contained in this news release, constitute "forward-looking information" as such term is used in applicable Canadian securities laws. Forward-looking information is based on plans, expectations and estimates of management at the date the information is provided and is subject to certain factors and assumptions, including: that the Company's financial condition and development plans do not change as a result of unforeseen events, that the Company obtains required regulatory approvals, that the Company continues to maintain a good relationship with the local project communities. Forward-looking information is subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause plans, estimates and actual results to vary materially from those projected in such forward-looking information. Factors that could cause the forward-looking information in this news release to change or to be inaccurate include, but are not limited to, the risk that any of the assumptions referred to prove not to be valid or reliable, which could result in delays, or cessation in planned work, that the Company's financial condition and development plans change, delays in regulatory approval, risks associated with the interpretation of data, the geology, grade and continuity of mineral deposits, the possibility that results will not be consistent with the Company's expectations, as well as the other risks and uncertainties applicable to mineral exploration and development activities and to the Company as set forth in the Company's Management's Discussion and Analysis reports filed under the Company's profile at www.sedar.com. There can be no assurance that any forward-looking information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, the reader should not place any undue reliance on forward-looking information or statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking information or statements, other than as required by applicable law.
Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
Amnesty International (AI) [advocacy website] published a new report [text, PDF] on Monday claiming that Iranian authorities have been denying adequate medical coverage to political prisoners and prisoners of conscience. AI claims that Iran is putting these prisoners at grave risk of death, permanent disability and other irreversible damage to their health because of their actions. The group alleges that the Iranian authorities deny health care as an intentional act of cruelty intended to intimidate, punish or humiliate political prisoners, or to extract forced confessions or statements of repentance from them. The report details 18 cases [AI news release] of prisoners who have been denied such care. It was also uncovered that women prisoners are sometimes denied medical treatment because it is deemed inappropriate for a male doctor to treat them.
The treatment of prisoners and prisoner rights are disputed and criticized throughout the world. In October 2015 the UN issued the Revised Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners [JURIST report] to improve the treatment of prisoners throughout the world. Earlier in October the European Court of Justice ruled [JURIST report] that a convicted murderer could be banned from voting because the ban is proportionate to the offense. In August former Iranian prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi was acquitted of murder charges [JURIST report] relating to the 2009 killing of three prisoners [JURIST report] which he oversaw. The prisoners were detained in 2009 for protesting against former President Mahmoud Ahmedinejads disputed re-election an issue that drew significant global criticism aimed not only at Irans government, but also the treatment of those arrested following the election.
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, July 19
By Huseyn Hasanov Trend:
Turkmenistan and Germany discussed the further development of bilateral relations in political, trade and economic spheres at the intergovernmental level, Turkmen Foreign Ministry said in a message July 19.
The discussions were held during the meeting at the Turkmen Foreign Ministry with Germanys newly appointed Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador to Turkmenistan Margaret Maria Jubber, who has presented copies of her credentials.
Speaking about confidential and mutually beneficial relations between Turkmenistan and Germany, the two sides noted with satisfaction the active and multilevel political dialogue, which is held on a regular basis.
Transportation, infrastructure, technology and healthcare spheres were mentioned among the areas of mutual interest for cooperation.
Over the recent years, trade turnover between the two countries increased by 11 percent. More than 60 business entities with German capital opened their branches and representative offices in Turkmenistan.
Turkmenistan is interested in attracting largest capital and high technologies from Germany.
[JURIST] An advisory board to the African Union (AU) on Saturday accused the International Criminal Court (ICC) [official websites] of narrowly focusing its investigations on African government leaders since its inception in 2002. Last April, AU members ordered [VOA report] the Economic Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC) [official website] to evaluate their ties to the ICC amidst growing concerns that ICC is inherently biased against them. The ECOSOCC now condemns the ICC, accusing the court of favoring the UN and EU nations that strongly support it. The board pointed to the fact that nine out of the ICCs 10 active investigations are based in Africa. The ECOSOCC has therefore recommended that AU members should quit the ICC should lawmakers follow through with a proposed amendment allowing the prosecution and arrest of African heads of state. Opponents of the recommendation have voiced concerns that quitting the ICC would increase the risk of human rights violations. Human Rights Watch (HRW) [advocacy website] also stated that giving African leaders immunity would defeat the purpose of the ICCs creation. While the ECOSOCC does not officially speak for AU members, African nations continued to discuss the ICC during the AU summit taking place over the weekend.
An ICC matter of current concern has been an ongoing case against ex-Congolese military leader Jean-Pierre Bemba [JURIST news archive]. Last month the ICC sentenced Bemba to 18 years in jail after finding him guilty [JURIST reports] for crimes against humanity and war crimes stemming from his involvement in the conflict in the Central African Republic in 2002 and 2003. In September Bemba pleaded not guilty to charges of interfering with the administration of justice after he and four members of his legal team were ordered to stand trial [JURIST reports] on those charges. In October 2014 ICC Trial Chamber III delayed the closing statements [JURIST report] in the case against Bemba so that it could hear additional witness testimony after the defense requested to testify about alleged collusion between prosecution witnesses. In November 2013 four persons were arrested on charges of falsifying evidence [JURIST report] in connection with the trial of Jean-Pierre Bemba Bembas defense lawyers opened their case before the ICC in August 2012.
The European Court of Justice [official website] on Tuesday found [decision text] that a European Commission [official website] rule generally requiring a so-called bail-in for banks receiving state aid is consistent with EU law. The Commissions Banking Communication [text, PDF], issued in July 2013, provides that shareholders and subordinated creditors must share the burden of a struggling banks financial shortfall prior to any state aid being authorized. In the context of a challenge to Slovenias response to capital shortfalls at five of the countrys banks in 2013, the ECJ found that the Commission can require that losses be absorbed by holders of equity as a precondition to public money being made available to shore up a banks finances. The court also noted that the Banking Communication contains safeguards that empower the Commission to suspend the requirement in the exercise its broad discretion when considering a particular Member States proposed action. Although the decision was prompted by Slovenias state aid to banks, the ruling is seen to have implications for the banking crisis [Vox report] in Italy, where the common practice of individuals holding junior debt in banks has made the bail-in [Economist backgrounder] provisions potentially troublesome.
This is the latest development in the ongoing issue of financial stability in the EU. In June, Germanys Federal Constitution Court ruled [JURIST report] that an unlimited bond-buying program created by the European Central Bank [official website] complies with German law. In January 2015 EU Advocate General Cruz Villalon gave legal support [JURIST report] to the ECB program as an attempt to remedy the financial crisis in the Eurozone. In September 2014 the EU parliament approved [JURIST report] a new bank supervisory mechanism. Last November the ECJ ruled [JURIST report] that the Eurozones permanent bailout fund, the European Stability Mechanism, is in line with European law. The ruling came following several member states own courts finding the ESM constitutional under their own laws, including Estonia and Germany [JURIST reports]. That June the European Commission [official website] announced [JURIST report] a proposal that would address the problems of bailing out large banks with public funds during financial crises in the future.
A Kenyan court on Monday approved charges [Nairobi Times report] against four police officers for the murder of human rights lawyer Willie Kimani. The bodies of Kimani, his client Josphat Mwenda, and their taxi driver Joseph Muiruri showed [The Star report] signs of torture when they were discovered earlier this month.The International Justice Mission (IJM) [advocacy website], Kimanis employer, has stated [The Star report] that it believes there are more perpetrators involved in the deaths. The four officers from Kenyas Administration Police [official website] have denied [Daily Nation report] the charges. The accused are set [Capital News report] to appear in court on August 16 to apply for bail, giving the prosecution a month to prepare statements from 45 witnesses.
The murders have outraged the international and domestic communities and have added to the list of police abuses in recent months. Earlier this week, US Democrats in Congress called [JURIST report] for hearings in the wake of police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, two black men. This month, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released [JURIST report] a report saying extrajudicial killings by police threaten the over-all security in Rio de Janeiro ahead of the summer Olympics. A statement by 34 international human rights organizations condemned [AI report] the murders and hundreds have taken to the streets of Nairobi to protest [JURIST report] extrajudicial killings in the capital. Western governments who provide financial support to Kenya have also expressed their concern over the murders and are urging the country to reform and comply with international human rights standards.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced [press release] on Monday that he plans to propose a law providing for additional punishment for crimes against law enforcement officers. The proposed Police Protection Act (PPA) would extend hate crime protections to law enforcement officers, organize a campaign to educate young Texans on the value law enforcement officers bring to their communities and increase criminal penalties for any crime in which the victim is a law enforcement officer even if the crime would not otherwise qualify as a hate crime. Abbott used assault with bodily injury as an example of a crime subject to the proposed enhancements, from the current third degree felony to a second degree felony under the proposal.
The Governors announcement comes amid a national conversation about police use of force, particularly against black citizens, and subsequent retaliation. This week, Texas Senator John Cornyn introduced [WP report] legislation that would elevate the penalties for killing, conspire to kill, or attempting to kill officers and judges. Last week, North Carolinas Governor Pat McCory signed [JURIST report] into law a bill providing that police camera footage, including body camera footage, is not a matter of public record and proscribes the procedure for release of footage. Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards signed a Blue Lives Matter bill that also raises the penalties [JURIST report] for crimes against police officers. Some have criticized the measures as being redundant since many laws already raise the penalties for crimes against police officers. Kami N. Chavis from Wake Forest University School of Law discussed [JURIST Commentary report] the recent proposals to add police officers to hate crime statutes last week. In June, Jessica Henry of Montclair State University discussed [JURIST Commentary report] the recent additions to Louisianas hate crime legislation.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan [official website] stated Monday that he would approve reinstating the death penalty [CNN report] so long as the measure had sufficient support in the Grand National Assembly [official website, in Turkish]. The death penalty was abolished over a decade ago in Turkey, but Erdogan asserted [RTE News report] that the Turkish people want the death penalty for those involved in last weekends failed military coup [CNN backgrounder]. Erdogan also announced he will request the extradition of cleric Fethullah Gulen [advocacy website], whom Erdogan alleges orchestrated the coup attempt, from the United States. US Secretary of State John Kerry [official website] stated that Turkey must provide genuine evidence [statement] that withstands scrutiny if it wishes to request Gulens extradition. European Union (EU) High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini [official website] has also weighed in on the Erdogans announcement, saying that no country can become an EU member state if it introduces the death penalty. German Chancellor Angela Merkel [official website] also expressed concern over Turkeys response to the coup attempt, adding [statement, in German] that capital punishment is incompatible with the objectives of the EU.
Capital punishment [JURIST op-ed] remains a controversial issue in the US and worldwide. In May a spokesperson for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights condemned [JURIST report] Iranian authorities for the sentencing of Nargis Mohammadi, an anti-death penalty activist. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad Al Hussein welcomed [JURIST report] the measures being taken by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to prevent the use of its drugs in state-sponsored execution by lethal injection. UN human rights experts expressed [JURIST report] grave concern earlier that month over Belarus death penalty practices after reports surfaced that a man was executed while his case was before the UN Human Rights Committee.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19
By Azad Hasanli Trend:
The State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan (SOFAZ) sold $50 million to 29 banks through an auction held by the Central Bank of Azerbaijan (CBA), SOFAZ said July 19.
As of July 1, 2016, SOFAZ's assets increased by 4.6 percent and amounted to $35.1 billion as compared to $33.57 billion in early 2016.
SOFAZ will continue selling foreign currency through auctions in 2016. The foreign currency is sold as part of SOFAZ's transfers to the Azerbaijani state budget, which are envisaged to stand at 7.615 billion Azerbaijani manats in 2016.
SOFAZ was established in 1999 with assets of $271 million.
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Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19
By Elena Kosolapova - Trend:
Kazakhstans Aktobe rail and structural steel mill plans to manufacture around 100,000 tons of rail products, said the countrys Development Bank which has financed the project for the mills construction.
Over 70 percent of this volume will be used to cover the needs of Kazakhstan railways, while its 30 percent will be exported to neighboring countries, according to the banks message.
It is planned to export 13,000 tons of products to Uzbekistan, 5,000 tons to Tajikistan and Belarus each, 4,700 tons to Georgia and 1,000 tons to Kyrgyzstan, said the bank.
The mill manufactured 8,000 tons of rail products from early 2016 to July 7 and 6,500 tons of this volume worth 1.3 billion tenges (339 tenges = $1) was shipped to the domestic market.
It is planned to produce large-size structural shapes at the mill in 2017.
After starting to operate at full design capacity in 2018, the plant will produce a total of 430,000 tons of rolled products, including 200,000 tons of thermostrengthened lengthy (up to 120 meters) rails for high-speed lines.
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Follow the author on Twitter: @E_Kosolapova
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19
By Azad Hasanli Trend:
Another round of talks on Azerbaijan's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) started in Geneva, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry told Trend July 19.
According to the ministry, at the negotiations the Azerbaijani delegation is headed by Deputy Foreign Minister Mahmud Mammad-Guliyev.
Earlier, in an interview with Trend, Chidu Osakwe, director of the WTO office of accession, said the changes taking place in the Azerbaijani economy, the ongoing reforms, in particular in agriculture, will be discussed at the meeting.
Osakwe said meetings are planned to be held between representatives of Azerbaijan and the WTO member states, and the Azerbaijani side will respond to the questions submitted at a meeting in 2015.
He said the meeting participants will inquire into Azerbaijans ability to support the economy given low oil prices and whether Baku has an economic development strategic plan in such a situation.
To date, Norway, Russia and Saudi Arabia have expressed intention to hold bilateral talks with Azerbaijan on the issue, but it is not ruled out that the number of such countries will increase, Mammad-Guliyev told Trend earlier.
Azerbaijan has had an observer status at the WTO since 1997. A working party on Azerbaijan was established on July 16, 1997, at the organization.
Azerbaijan began negotiations with WTO member states in 2004. Currently, the country negotiates with 19 countries.
As of today, Azerbaijan has completed the negotiations and has signed protocols with Turkey, Oman, the UAE, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan.
The country is at the stage of signing protocols with China and Moldova.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19
By Elena Kosolapova - Trend:
Kazakhstan will give priority to eight export-oriented sectors in five spheres as part of the second five-year plan of industrialization (2015-2019), said the countrys Minister of Investment and Development Jenis Kasymbek.
He made the remarks during a government meeting July 19.
The minister pointed out that these sectors include ferrous and nonferrous metallurgy, oil refining, petrochemicals and agrochemicals, food production, automotive and electrical engineering.
Additional support instruments such as infrastructure for concrete projects, long-term leasing and lending through the Development Bank of Kazakhstan will be offered for these sectors.
Earlier, as part of the second five-year plan of industrialization, it was planned to give priority to the development of 14 sectors in six spheres.
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Follow the author on Twitter: @E_Kosolapova
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, July 19
By Huseyn Hasanov Trend:
Deputy head of Turkmenistans Turkmenneftegazstroy state oil and gas construction concern Atakuli Tatov was appointed acting head of the concern, read a decree signed by Turkmenistans President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov.
The subdivisions of the state concern are engaged in construction of oil and gas pipelines and development of oil and gas fields, reconstruction of oil processing facilities, as well as construction of reservoirs in Turkmenistan.
Turkmenneftegazstroy has implemented the project for construction of the East-West pipeline the longest pipeline stretching in the countrys territory.
The pipeline was commissioned in December 2015.
Moreover, the state concern started to construct the Turkmen section of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline in December 2015.
Turkmenistan ranks fourth in the world in terms of the volume of its natural gas reserves.
Currently, the country exports gas to Chinese and Iranian markets.
After Spaniards experienced the shortest term of office ever seen in the history of Spanish democracy (a mere 111 days), which brought an end to the PP-PSOE two-party predominance experienced since the 1978 Constitution, the people returned once again to the polls this past 26 June, with the hope of putting together a government which would change the countrys direction.
The proven lack of a sufficient majority and the fear of a third round of elections, even during the election campaign, has forced a debate over possible pacts that may arise after the vote.
In the aftermath of UK voters victory in favour of leaving the EU, many thought that this milestone might work in favour of traditional parties. The fear of political uncertainty and negative economic and social consequences would perhaps lead hundreds of voters into the arms of PP and PSOE. And so it was.
The fear of political uncertainty and negative economic and social consequences would perhaps lead hundreds of voters into the arms of PP and PSOE. And so it was.
Unlike the past elections of 20 December, 2015, the various different pre-election polls did not augur a promising post-election scenario. The inability of the leaders of the various political parties to reach any agreement that would unlock the possibility of forming a government; the increase in the cases of corruption within PP, even involving one of their ministers; discrepancies within Podemos about the leadership of the party and its union with Izquierda Unida; and the internal rifts within PSOE all contributed to a sense of fatigue in Spanish society, coupled with the fear of this translating into a high rate of abstention.
Nevertheless, the elections of 26 June and 20 December produced slightly different results. PP once again ranked as the most voted political force, gaining new seats but without reaching a sufficient number to govern alone (137 seats 14 more than 20 December). Podemos and Ciudadanos lost ground (Unidos-Podemos: 71 seats as opposed to the 69 achieved by Podemos alone at the 20 December elections; Ciudadanos: 32 seats against 40 won in December). The PSOE positioned itself as second-in-line, avoiding any swiping away of votes from Unidos-Podemos. The comfort of remaining the first force on the left only served to slightly disguise the worst result in the partys history (85 seats against the 90 it obtained in December).
Coalitions are necessary. The question is: What agreement the parties will finally manage to cook up?
Against this backdrop, coalitions are therefore necessary. The question is: What agreement the parties will finally manage to cook up? There are several scenarios coming into focus:
-PP, Ciudadanos, PNV and Coalicion Canaria. This is the first option that many speculated might occur. PP and Ciudadanos would gain 169 seats but would be 7 seats short which they could win if they sealed a deal with the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) (5 seats) and Coalicion Canaria (1 seat). Even still, they would be one seat short.
-PP and PSOE as a grand coalition. Together they provide 222 seats (PP-PSOE) or 254, if they were joined by Ciudadanos. However, Pedro Sanchez and Albert Rivera have torpedoed this option.
PP in a minority government, with the abstention of PSOE in the second round after rejection in the first. Given the antagonism towards a third election, no one dares to totally reject limited abstention from PSOE, which would give some seats to PP to govern in the minority along with other parties, provided they accept some Socialist demands.
The urgency to reach a stable government is of the utmost, given the delicate situation faced by Spain, not only within the country (unemployment, Catalonia against the backdrop of the new Brexit landscape and Scotland) but also on the European front, such as Brussels penalty for breaching the deficit regulations and the new fiscal targets; the UKs exit from the EU; escalating populism in Europe; or the emerging threats and risks suffered by Europes southern neighbours, as discussed at the recent NATO summit in Warsaw on 8 and 9 July. The last thing that Spain needs is a third round of elections, nor can it afford another 111 days with no government.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19
By Aygun Badalova Trend:
The Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) project, which envisages the transportation of Azerbaijani gas to Europe, remains US governments priority, Amos Hochstein, the US Department of State special envoy and coordinator for international energy affairs, said in an interview with Greek news website Ekathimerini.
Ive spent much more time on this one project than any other project Ive ever worked on. Even though there are no American companies in that project, we have still made this a US government priority. Thats why I was here in Thessaloniki for the groundbreaking of TAP, Hochstein said.
He added that the US made so much progress in the relations between Greece and Bulgaria, and the US is working hard with the EU to make the Interconnector Greece-Bulgaria (IGB) a reality.
TAP project envisages transportation of gas from the Stage 2 of development of Azerbaijans Shah Deniz gas and condensate field to the EU countries.
The 870-kilometer pipeline will be connected to the Trans Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP) on the Turkish-Greek border, run through Greece, Albania and the Adriatic Sea, before coming ashore in Italy's south.
TAPs shareholding is comprised of BP (20 percent), SOCAR (20 percent), Snam S.p.A. (20 percent), Fluxys (19 percent), Enagas (16 percent) and Axpo (5 percent).
A ceremony marking the beginning of TAPs construction was held May 17 in Thessaloniki, Greece.
IGB, which is expected to be connected to TAP, will allow Bulgaria to receive Azerbaijani gas. In early December 2015, Bulgaria and Greece signed a final investment decision on the IGB project. The initial capacity of the 182-kilometer pipeline will be three billion cubic meters of gas.
By Mahmood Khaghani for Trend
The Caspian Sea is the largest enclosed body of water by area and the resources to be found around, in and under the Caspian Sea have been disputed for millennia. The issues under dispute were magnified by the discovery of Caspian energy resources and made many times more complex by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of new independent littoral Caspian states.
The Need for Caspian Cooperation
Experts and diplomats gathered last week in the Kazakh capital, Astana to continue work aimed at agreeing a convention in respect of the Caspian Seas legal status. The difficulties begin with the subject as to whether or not the Caspian Sea is actually the world's largest lake or a full-fledged sea subject to maritime law.
On Wednesday, July 13, during the ministerial meeting, Iran's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mohammad Javad Zarif observed: Sustainable peace and security in the Caspian Sea [region] is of fundamental significance to regional governments and nations.
According to news media, he went on to say that the Iranian view is that "transparency, peaceful use of the sea and avoiding an arms race" will ensure peace and stability in the region.
UK/Iranian Energy Cooperation
In parallel to this diplomatic Caspian initiative, and a year on from the successful Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreement, Irans Energy Minister Hamid Chitchian was leading a delegation on a three day visit to a London in turmoil as UK political leadership experienced a rapid and fundamental change after the UK population voted to leave the European Union.
The delegation was focused on energy cooperation with a particular focus on renewable energy and water, since the subject of inefficiencies in water use is closely linked to inefficiencies and wastage of increasingly valuable carbon fuels such as oil and gas.
On the very same day, July 14, that Theresa May replaced David Cameron as UK Prime Minister, the delegation was hosted in a launch event by a group of Scottish (UK) academic and industry representatives organised by Petro Scotland. This event followed the initial launch of the Caspian Energy Grid initiative on June 20 in Tehran in cooperation with Iran Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines & Agriculture (ICCIMA - private sector) Education & Research Institute and the Research Institute for Energy Management and Planning (RIEMP public and academic sector).
Having already signed an MOU with Irans northern neighbours, aimed at establishing a North-South Energy Corridor for exporting electricity from the Caspian region via Iran, the energy minister welcomed the Caspian Energy Grid initiative. Indeed, earlier in his visit he had outlined Irans plan to tender its first utility-scale renewable-energy projects by end 2016.
This marks the commencement of a green power build out requiring up to $12 billion of investment to complete and it is further reported that Iran aims to install 5 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity in the next five years and an additional 2.5 gigawatts by 2030. Chitchian was reported as saying, Were not going to use the money from oil in that sector at all, and all the investment will be done by the private sector, including local and foreign companies.
Mohammad Hassan Habibollahzadeh, Irans UK charge daffaires, also participated at the Petro Scotland seminar and was reported by Bloomberg as saying: Foreign direct investment dried up during the sanctions but it is already starting to flow. Many companies have signed agreements during the last few months. Electricity is considered to be one of the most important sectors.
What is the Caspian Energy Grid?
According to news media reports, most of Irans power plants are over 40 years old and need to be renovated and re-powered. The government therefore plans to invest around $50 billion in its electricity system in the next seven years. The Caspian Energy Grid is best seen as a 'start-up' public/private enterprise, the aim of which is to develop networked physical and financial energy infrastructure throughout and connected to the Caspian region.
Initial research and development now underway commenced with the planning and design phase, which will lead to the implementation phase.
Initial research work in Iran will be carried out by the Research Institute for Energy Management & Planning (RIEMP) with partner academic institutions, while initial development work will be led by Petro Scotland and partners in collaboration with the Education & Research Institute of ICCIMA.
Planning & Design Phase
Research
RIEMP will establish, lead and coordinate a research network the domestic Iranian hub of international Institute for Resource Resilience - of all Iranian research institutions working towards an overall organising principle of least resource cost through eco innovation.
The first preparatory phase of research comprises comprehensive spatial analyses of Iran's capacity and use of natural resources. This will provide initial benchmarks against which progress towards resource resilience may be assessed.
The second element will be to identify and classify completed, ongoing and proposed research which is relevant to resource resilience. Classification of energy and resource use will be into themes and research methods, processes and innovations, which will enable energy and resource use to be minimised.
Dr Colin Cunningham the founder of the Scottish Environmental Technology Network (SETN), comprising all Scottish universities with an interest in Zero Waste and the Circular Economy, brought to the seminar his proposal to establish an international Institute for Resource Resilience (IRR).
Petro Scotland is working with Dr Cunningham who recently outlined IRR Eco Innovation in Moscow to begin IRR via bilateral Iranian/UK academic links. Initial IRR research themes include carbon-fuelled electricity generation and use; renewable energy and water use; resource efficient transport use; resource efficient building designs and materials; bio-chemicals to replace petrochemicals; Circular Economy/Zero Waste; spatial planning and architecture; research into behaviour; and low carbon energy network system design.
Initial preparatory review and reports will be expected within six months: so for instance it is planned to present initial research reports under the Water/Power theme to a Caspian Energy Grid Summit in December 2016 in Tehran.
Development
In parallel to the initial research phase, Petro Scotland will implement a development program of pilot concepts. In view of the expertise and focus of the delegates on renewable energy and water, a presentation was made by Charlie Paton, the inventor of the simple but radical Seawater Greenhouse concept. This has been prototyped in Tenerife (Spain), Oman and Australia, and will soon commence the Somalian pilot scheme for which he won an Energy Globe award, which was presented in Tehran by Chitchian in January 2016.
Petro Scotland will identify and procure international partners willing and able to provide any necessary financing and funding which cannot be originated domestically within Iran or in the Caspian region, and will develop the necessary market architecture and design; legal structures/protocols and instruments. Public/Private workshops will be organized with the specific purpose of mobilizing projects as an outcome of the event.
Initial Investment
Energy Minister Chitchian noted that early stage investment necessary for any Public/Private initiative will by definition come from the public sector. However, subsequent implementation will principally be financed and funded by the Iranian and international private sectors, while early stage Eco Innovation research funding will be directed to the membership of the proposed IRR.
The Caspian Energy Grid initiative can commence at the earliest by funding through the public sector to mobilize what is in effect a 'start-up' public/private enterprise, which will be a physical and financial energy network and hub for regional energy (electricity) trade. The physical energy network and hub concerns energy flow across many categories; gas to electricity; water to renewable and so on.
The financial energy network will direct financial flows necessary to finance and fund the Caspian Energy Grid infrastructure, which will enable regional transition to a low carbon economy.
Where is the Caspian Energy Grid?
To the North via the Caspian Sea region (North/South Energy Corridor);
To the South via the Persian Gulf;
To the West via the Black and Mediterranean Seas, to Europe and Africa;
To the East via Energy Silk Roads to China and India.
How?
The key organizing principle of the Caspian Energy Grid concept is to achieve energy efficiency and energy economy resilience through the Least Carbon Fuel Cost Principle - that is to say that for any given use of electricity, heat/cooling and power the use of oil and gas will be minimized. The Caspian Energy Grid will be financed and funded by energy swaps and prepay energy credits which are complementary to existing finance capital and which align the interests of market participants through sharing risk and reward.
Why?
There will be two key outcomes from the Caspian Energy Grid: empowerment, as renewable energy generation distributed throughout Iran reduces carbon fuel use, and efficiency, which is ever more profitable as fuel prices increase.
Who?
The Caspian Energy Grid will pool the expertise, talent and innovation of the academic/ public and private sectors through the creation of the networked international Institute for Resource Resilience (IRR) initially linking the UK and Iran.
Mahmood Khaghani, now retired, has over 33 years of work experience at senior international positions of Iran's petroleum industry, including the head of the Oil Ministry's Caspian Sea and Central Asia Department, as well as business development and joint ventures advisor of Iran's North Drilling Company. He was also the director for energy, minerals and environment at the ECO Secretariat in 1996-2000.
GRAND ISLAND Lindsey Koepke's first job with the Nebraska State Fair was a temporary, three-month internship.
Now, more a decade later, Koepke remains connected to the Nebraska State Fair through her job as executive director of the 1868 Foundation.
Koepke said that her intern job which included running games and activities in the Family Fun Center was to end shortly after the conclusion of that year's Nebraska State Fair. "I went through the fair and I just knew I had to be a part of this. I love this place. So, I just kept showing up for work. They never gave me an end date. I just kept coming to work because I wanted to be part of the Nebraska State Fair."
Her temporary internship turned into a year-round job as the fair's special events coordinator. When the executive director of the 1868 Foundation resigned, she became part of a team that took on the foundation's work on an interim basis.
Koepke's duties included handling the donor letters, sending out the annual appeal and thank-you letters, mailing tickets and getting to know donors. "At that moment I realized I wanted to be part of the 1868 Foundation," she said. "These folks are incredible, they are passionate, they genuinely care about their state fair I did too, that's what I want to do."
Koepke said she applied for the executive director job and was hired 10 years ago in January. That meant she was part of the transition of the State Fair from Grand Island to Lincoln. She noted that passage of Amendment 4 campaign, which allocated a portion of lottery proceeds to the State Fair, as an important development.
The fair needed an upgrade in facilities, which is something that could have happened in either Lincoln or Grand Island. Another need was to boost attendance.
Koepke said that from her perspective, a good portion of the attendance when the fair was in Lincoln was people who came out for the midway and carnival. With the move to Grand Island, people continue to come out for the midway and carnival. In addition, many more people are interested in getting into the livestock and other exhibition buildings and seeing the 4-H entries and open class exhibits.
"Clearly, out here, we have a much different clientele: Families who come out and cover every corner of the fairgounds, not just an afternoon on the midway rides. Even my aunt who lives in here in town enters seven, eight, 10 different flower entries in the open class exhibits."
Koepke said moving the state fair from Lincoln to Grand Island was traumatic for many people. "That was one thing we kept hearing with people talked about the relocation of the fair. Well, what about my history with the fair?' We heard time and time again how as kids, folks would come to the fair, they would eat their lunch under the same tree and We're not going to have those memories anymore when the fair moves.' So people were understandably upset with that."
Koepke said backers of the move would respond that "Grand Island is wonderful; the facilities are going to be incredible. It's time we rebuild and have people start creating new legacies with the State Fair."
With the move, the 1868 Foundation added three board members from the Grand Island area: Jay Vavricek, Ken Staab and Jayne Mann. Koepke noted that the foundation already had a few donors from Grand Island, but there still was untapped potential. That trio was also on the committee that raised money to relocate the Nebraska State Fair to Grand Island.
Following the relocation, there was one immediately important piece of business. "We wanted to know who stepped up to the plate to help raise those funds to help relocate the fair. Those folks needed a big thank you. They needed to be respected by the state fair and the foundation. We needed to come up to them and say, Thank you. Look at what you have done for the Nebraska State Fair."
Perhaps one reason Koepke so loves the fair is that she grew up on a farm and remains a small town girl at heart. She lives in Hickman, 15 miles south of Lincoln. Koepke "offices in Lincoln" and travels to Grand Island about two times a week, sometimes more.
Koepke said she and her husband have a 5-year-old son. As a former farm girl, that partly explains why they live in Hickman. Koepke said they wanted their son to grow up near family, noting she has nephews who live "just two houses down" from their home "so they (her son and nephews) get to spend quite a bit of time together."
Hickman also has strong 4-H groups, while the Norris school district has a very strong FFA program. Because of those programs, Koepke said, she is always getting comments from Hickman area residents about their State Fair experiences.
Jayne Mann of Aurora, chairman of the board for the 1868 Foundation, praised the work that Koepke has done as executive director. Just as the Nebraska State Fair has been reinvigorated with the move, so has the foundation, which Mann said was operating at a lower level. Koepke said many people did not even know that the Nebraska State Fair had a foundation connected to it. The move was an opportunity to make people aware of the 1868 Foundation, which takes its name from the first Nebraska State Fair in 1868.
Mann praised Koepke for her attention to detail. She noted that whenever the foundation board wants something done, Koepke accomplishes it. At the same time, Mann said, Koepke is a self-starter.
With the move to Grand Island, the 1868 Foundation has taken on bigger and bigger projects. One was raising money to put the heating, ventilation and air conditioning system into the Fonner Park concourse. Mann noted that by far the biggest capital project is the Thompson Foods Company Open Air Equine Arena. She said Koepke worked with a grant writer on successful applications to get money from other foundations. That moved the foundation into new territory.
Koepke agreed, noting the foundation has never had a project as large as the arena project. She said it was thrilling to have The Thompson Foods Company say, "I believe so much in what you're doing, I want to put my name on that facility."
The 1868 Foundation has board members living in Urbandale, Iowa, Omaha, Lincoln, Aurora, Albion, Grand Island and Imperial. Koepke said she and the foundation board would like to expand board membership to every corner of the state. She noted the 11 days in Grand Island is a "state" fair, which means people can feel pride in it no matter where they live. Koepke said people can have the same feeling that Hickman residents do about the fair and that she herself has whenever she visits Grand Island.
"The first year the Nebraska State Fair was here, I was seven months pregnant and I bought a paver that said, Baby Koepke,'" she said. During the fair, "I come out here and look at it and think about what was going on and what was going through my brain at that moment, the first year the fair was in Grand Island."
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19
By Aygun Badalova Trend:
Russia backed Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project, as it is currently configured, doesnt support the goal of the EU and doesnt support energy security in Europe, Amos Hochstein, the US Department of State special envoy and coordinator for international energy affairs, said in an interview with Greek news website Ekathimerini.
You have two halves of Europe. You have one half that is dependent on one supplier of energy and doesnt have a free market in energy, and another half that already does have that. Building Nord Stream 2 at the moment will keep that imbalance for the next several decades, Hochstein said.
The European Commission has to address the concerns that are raised by member states, which have really good reasons to be worried, Hochstein believes.
It would also have a terribly negative impact on Ukraine and Slovakia, who rely on the transit fees for a significant part of their budget. Just to take that away overnight would be quite dramatic and have a big impact not only economically but also politically on Ukraine and Slovakia, he said.
Hochstein added that what the US can do is to ensure that they have a policy that no country can do a project that would have such a negative impact on the energy security of the EU or the economic viability of the Union.
The Nord Stream 2 projects includes the construction of two lines of the offshore gas pipeline with a total capacity of 55 billion cubic meters of gas a year from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea, in addition to the existing two lines.
The project is to be implemented by the engineering company New European Pipeline AG. The stakes of partners in Nord Stream 2 AG will be distributed as follows: Gazprom will hold 50 percent, while BASF, E.ON, Engie, OMV and Shell will own 10 percent each.
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Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19
By Maksim Tsurkov Trend:
Azerbaijans state oil company SOCAR and Romanias state-owned company Transgaz agreed to step up cooperation in the natural gas transportation, SOCAR said in a message July 19.
The two sides signed a memorandum of understanding during a meeting of SOCAR President Rovnag Abdullayev with Romanian delegation that included the member of the European Parliament Ramona Nicole Manescu, Transgaz Board Chairman Ion Sterian and Director for the Division of European Funds and International Relations Octavian Ciprian Alic.
The memorandum of understanding (MOU) between SOCAR and Transgaz envisages strengthening cooperation in the gas transportation, studying opportunities to use Romanias potential in the gas transit and distribution at the expense of gas supplies from Azerbaijan, the Caspian region and other promising directions, jointly studying the possibilities of cooperation in the supply and trading of natural gas and liquefied natural gas (LNG) in the Romanian market on the basis of long-term contracts and spot trading as part of the AGRI (Azerbaijan-Georgia-Romania Interconnector) project, says the message.
The MOU will also give an opportunity to deepen cooperation between the two countries companies and to expand their activities in the gas market of Southeast Europe and the Balkan region.
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Follow the author on Twitter: @MaksimTsurkov
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19
By Elena Kosolapova Trend: Turkish-Russian cooperation seems to intensify, but implementation of the Turkish Stream project in the current political environment is unlikely, Marco Giuli, an energy issues analyst at the Brussels-based European Policy Centre told Trend July 19.
The expert noted that tightening of domestic policy in Turkey after the failed coup attempt seems to point in the direction of worsening its relations with the West.
Meanwhile, Russia is keeping a very low profile, not joining the US and Europe in the criticism of Turkish governments steps in aftermath of the failed coup attempt and is silently considering how the situation can turn to its advantage.
Russia does normally profit from the isolation of third countries in the Middle East, offering them transactional partnerships when they find themselves at odds with the West, Giuli said.
The expert believes that the forthcoming meeting between Russian and Turkish presidents Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which was agreed by them in a phone talk, should be read in this light.
As such, we might hear again about Turkish Stream perhaps on a lower scale. However, when the patterns of amity and enmity are this unstable as the recent Russia-Turkey relationship demonstrated large, expensive, and long-term projects such as Turkish Stream are normally not in an ideal political environment, Giuli said.
He also noted that Russias external energy priority is now the expansion of Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project, whilst a revival of Russian-Turkey friendship does not automatically mean that Turkey intends to increase even more its gas import dependency on Russia.
In any case, it is more likely that the current rapprochement will restart energy cooperation (i.e. in the Akkuyu nuclear power plant in Turkey) and normalize trade relations, the expert said.
The Turkish Stream project was suspended due to sharp deterioration of relations between Moscow and Ankara after the incident involving the downing of the Russian air bomber in November 2015.
After normalization of the bilateral relations in June, Russian Gazprom spokesman, Sergey Kupriyanov, said that Gazprom is "open for a dialogue" on the Turkish Stream project.
Edited by EA
Follow the author on Twitter: @E_Kosolapova
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, July 19
By Huseyn Hasanov Trend:
Cairo has hosted Turkmenistan-Egypt consultations between the two countries foreign ministries at the level of deputy foreign ministers, read a message from Turkmenistans Foreign Ministry.
During the consultations, the parties exchanged views on the prospects for further developing the partnership in various spheres of bilateral cooperation.
Pointing to the positive dynamics of political cooperation, the meeting participants emphasized the role of trusting relationship between Turkmen and Egyptian presidents.
During the discussions on the prospects for further intensifying Turkmenistan-Egypt relations in trade and economic sphere, the parties focused on increasing the export of finished products.
They paid special attention to expanding the relations in energy sphere and processing sector of chemical industry. The parties named medicine and pharmaceutical industry as the spheres of mutual interest.
Tashkent, Uzbekistan, July 19
By Demir Azizov Trend:
Uzbek Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyoyev sent a letter to his Tajik counterpart Kohir Rasulzoda July 19, the Uzbek Foreign Ministry said in a message.
In his letter, Mirziyoyev expressed the Uzbek sides concern over the information on the conclusion of a framework agreement between the government of Tajikistan and Salini Impregilo company for the construction of the Rogun hydropower plant.
"We consider it necessary to once again draw your attention to the fact that the exploration on the construction site, comprehensive international assessment of the project, carried out under the auspices of the World Bank (WB), confirmed that the construction of the Rogun hydropower plant is associated with the huge threats to the entire Central Asian region, the letter said.
According to the letter, the WB refused to finance the construction of the Rogun hydropower plant realizing the enormous technological, environmental, social and economic risks in the project.
According to the document, the Rogun plant construction project was worked out in the 1970s. The project needs reconsidering in accordance with modern requirements and experience.
Moreover, the Uzbek side has every reason to believe that the Tajik leadership can solve difficult problems with the countrys energy supply through the construction of small and medium hydropower plants, by using numerous rivers and water resources in the territory of the country, the letter said.
Industry 4.0, cloud computing and social media make obvious that information and communication technologies are developing at an incredible pace. How all this affects the economy, society and individuals is part of the research alliance Digitization: Transformation of socio-economic processes, ForDigital in short, of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the University of Mannheim. The aim is to better understand the mechanisms of digital transformation and create innovative information and communication technology solutions. The initiative funded by the Baden-Wurttemberg Ministry of Science, Research, and the Arts (MWK) brings together scientists of both institutions and other partners. ForDigital officially started with a kick-off event on July 5, 2016.
Digitization offers new diverse opportunities for economy and society, and for our professional and private lives. In order to fully reach the potential of digitization, it has to be researched and shaped from different perspectives. In ForDigital, the partners combine social, economic and technological research questions in an ideal way," says Professor Oliver Kraft, Vice President for Research at KIT. Professor Rosemarie Tracy, Prorector for Research, Equal Opportunities and Young Researchers at the University of Mannheim explains: The purpose of the joint research is to produce high-quality publications, strengthen the areas of expertise of both institutions and support young researchers.
The research alliance examines both risks and opportunities. An unlimited offer of real-time information and increasing flexibility through modern information and communication technologies are among the major advantages of digitization. At the same time, we must recognize challenges and potential risks, says Alexander Madche, business informatics professor and spokesman for the alliance from KIT. Professor Armin Heinzl, spokesman from the University of Mannheim, adds: With the alliance we would like to facilitate the transition from the analog to the digital world for companies and society, without disregarding fundamental phenomena such as privacy, data security and technostress. Further spokesmen for the alliance are Professor Christof Weinhardt of KIT and Professor Florian Stahl of the University of Mannheim.
A key issue for ForDigital is the digital transformation of the economy. This includes digital infrastructures, and the digitization of business processes, products and services. The focus will also be on individuals and society, for instance the potential and changes with regard to health and well-being, the generation of positive user experiences, legal aspects, and economic and social consequences.
With the scientific exchange between all institutions, ForDigital wants to lay the foundation for long-term cooperation and efficient research in the region. The aim of the research alliance is also to acquire external funds across locations. Associated partners of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the University of Mannheim are the Center for European Economic Research (ZEW), the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (GESIS), the Central Institute of Mental Health (ZI), the FIZ Karlsruhe Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure, the FZI Research Center for Information Technology and the Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation (IOSB).
ForDigital is an open research platform. In addition to the researchers included in the application, it is generally possible for all scientists from KIT and the University of Mannheim as well as the associated research institutions to submit cooperation suggestions across locations.
The MWK supports ForDigital with 300,000 per year, over the course of three years. The partners contribute a total of 200,000 each year and add infrastructure.
Link to the project page: http://www.fordigital.org/
Distinguished, research-oriented, international: The University of Mannheim is one of the leading universities in Germany. The University's profile is shaped by its unique blend of renowned Economic and Social Sciences that are linked to excellent Humanities and Cultural Sciences, Law, Mathematics and Informatics.
For further information, please contact:
Liane Weitert, Head of Communication and Business Cooperation, University of Mannheim, Business School, Phone: +49 621 181-3657, presse does-not-exist.bwl uni-mannheim de
Being The Research University in the Helmholtz Association, KIT creates and imparts knowledge for the society and the environment. It is the objective to make significant contributions to the global challenges in the fields of energy, mobility, and information. For this, about 9,800 employees cooperate in a broad range of disciplines in natural sciences, engineering sciences, economics, and the humanities and social sciences. KIT prepares its 22,300 students for responsible tasks in society, industry, and science by offering research-based study programs. Innovation efforts at KIT build a bridge between important scientific findings and their application for the benefit of society, economic prosperity, and the preservation of our natural basis of life. KIT is one of the German universities of excellence.
Thanks to the simultaneous translation system developed at KIT, foreign students can follow German lectures more easily (picture: Sandra Gottisheim, KIT)
Information technologies have fundamentally changed human communication in the past 25 years, and have brought the world closer together. Even so, it continues to be important to overcome barriers physical borders, different languages and cultures, and a lack of medical care and education. On July 14 and 15, the symposium titled Building Bridges Breaking Barriers will present the latest developments in language and translation technologies, medical applications, neural networks, multimodal interfaces, dialog processing, and intelligent interaction with machines and robots at Baden-Baden Kurhaus. The interACT research network is celebrating its 25th birthday with the symposium. It was founded by the then University of Karlsruhe, now the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), and the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh, USA.
Leading scientists from around the world and representatives from industry and politics will talk about the current state of research, as well as scientific breakthroughs and their implementation and specific application.
One of the topics covered at the symposium is automatic translation, one of the main areas of research of Alexander Waibel, a professor at KIT and CMU, and the director of interACT. Whether it's the automatic translation of lectures for foreign students, support for translators at the European Parliament, or the translation of telephone calls, the possible applications are virtually limitless. The topic will be looked at from various angles in short presentations and panel discussions. An exhibition featuring live demonstrations provides the option for attendees to try out technologies (see Language/Translation Technology and Interpretation sections in the program below).
You will find the detailed program of the symposium at: www.interact25.org.
The international center for Advanced Communication Technologies (interACT)
The task of interACT is to develop advanced communication technologies, robotics and artificial intelligence. Starting off as an informal collaboration between two partners, it has now grown into a center with partners which are among the leading information technology institutions worldwide:
- Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany
- Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA
- National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Nara, Japan
- Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan
- Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China
- University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA
- Italian Institute of Technology, Genoa, Italy
- Institute of Science and Technology, Nara, Japan
Being The Research University in the Helmholtz Association, KIT creates and imparts knowledge for the society and the environment. It is the objective to make significant contributions to the global challenges in the fields of energy, mobility, and information. For this, about 9,800 employees cooperate in a broad range of disciplines in natural sciences, engineering sciences, economics, and the humanities and social sciences. KIT prepares its 22,300 students for responsible tasks in society, industry, and science by offering research-based study programs. Innovation efforts at KIT build a bridge between important scientific findings and their application for the benefit of society, economic prosperity, and the preservation of our natural basis of life. KIT is one of the German universities of excellence.
Gold has been consolidating but should benefit whenever risk appetite in other markets weakens again, particularly with global bond yields so low, says TD Securities. The metal fell last week amid very robust long liquidation by speculators, TDS says. With equity markets surging, following the promises to hike central-bank liquidity and monetary stimulus, and the U.S. economy once again showing respectable economic data, the drivers behind the recent gold rally are now fading and entering consolidation mode, TDS says. But since global yields will very likely (remain) near record lows, gold should once again move materially higher on the first signs showing a reduction in risk appetite and lower equity valuations.
By Allen Sykora of Kitco News; asykora@kitco.com
Citi: Silver Price Rally Appears To Be Stalling
Citi Research is cautious about silver in the second half even though the metal has been an outperformer so far this year. The year-to-date silver price rally already appears to be stalling, despite breaching record net length of 85K lots on Comex, Citi says. Struggling beyond $20/oz, performance anxiety and profit taking ahead of the summer holiday season may deter money managers from adding fresh longs. The bank adds that silver is a pseudo-industrial metal, driven in equal parts by gold prices and industrial-demand factors, both supportive so far this year.
By Allen Sykora of Kitco News; asykora@kitco.com
HSBC: Indias Gold Imports Remain Soft
India's gold imports remain soft, which could cap rallies in the metal, says HSBC. Data from the Ministry of Trade show that Indias official May gold imports fell 39% year-on-year to $1.21 billion. Volume figures are not yet available but looked at in USD (U.S. dollar) terms, gold imports remain weak, HSBC says. The lack of strong gold import demand in such an import gold-consuming nation as India figures heavily in our view that while gold is likely to track higher in the medium to longer term, the lack of physical demand will help put a cap on the rally.
By Allen Sykora of Kitco News; asykora@kitco.com
Commerzbank: Platinum Wage Talks Orderly So Far
There is little fresh news but at least platinum-mining negotiations appear to be orderly so far in the key producing nation of South Africa, says Commerzbank. Roughly three-fourths of the global platinum-mining supply comes from the country, meaning the talks will be closely watched by platinum traders. The ongoing negotiations on a new collective agreement in the platinum industry, which began in South Africa last week, appear to be proceeding in an orderly fashion, Commerzbank says. So far there have been no strikes. Having said that, little is yet known about the progress being made in the talks. At the end of last week, the mineral resources minister had called upon unions and mining companies to reach agreement as quickly as possible.
By Allen Sykora of Kitco News; asykora@kitco.com
SHARE Darren Chotiner
By Andrew Binion of the Kitsap Sun
EAST BREMERTON One of the two women accusing an East Bremerton doctor of unwanted sexual contact said she felt paralyzed last month when the doctor who had been treating her for three years began touching her inappropriately.
The woman told Bremerton police that she had gone to Dr. Darren M. Chotiner, 46, for a note after missing work due to an injury from a fall. The woman said she ended the massage by pulling away from Chotiner and saying, Were done, according to court documents detailing the alleged assaults by the Peninsula Community Health Services physician. Chotiners response, according to the documents, was to tell the woman that he did not want to be fired and that he liked his job. He said he would call the visit a massage, therapeutic.
Bremerton police served a second-degree rape arrest warrant on Chotiner Tuesday morning at the Wheaton Way Medical Clinic, where he has worked since July 2011. The warrant was based on the allegations from the two women who each said on two instances Chotiner touched them inappropriately and made advances. The charge of second-degree rape has an element that specially addresses health care providers who have engaged in intercourse with patients.
Chotiner had been restricted by his employer, Peninsula Community Health Services, from performing certain sensitive evaluations of women without another person present, but the two women accusing him of the unwanted contact were complaining of back pain and other similar injuries. Peninsula Community Health Services had not received the complaints investigated by Bremerton police, but CEO Barbara Malich said the organization takes such complaints against its employees seriously and would have pursued them if it had been notified.
Absolutely, Malich said.
After Chotiners name and the charges were published, Bremerton police said at least one other potential victim has come forward.
These are victims, and we need to take care of victims, they were violated, Sgt. Kevin Crane said. They had complete trust and faith in their medical providers, and that trust and faith was violated. They are victims in every sense of the word.
Chotiner, licensed to practice in Washington in 2007 and listed as a family medicine specialist, graduated from the University of Nevada Medical School in Reno in 2005. He completed his residency at Valley Medical Center in Renton. He can refer patients to Harrison Medical Center but has no other affiliation with the hospital, said Harrison spokeswoman Jacquie Goodwill.
At present, Chotiner still is employed at Peninsula Community Health Services, but administrators are evaluating his status. He was booked into jail and held on $50,000 bail.
We are looking at all our options, Malich said.
The primary concern we have, the reason we exist, is to provide a safe and quality experience for patients, Malich said, noting that the allegations have not been proven in court. If that has failed, its horrible.
The restriction on seeing female patients began after Chotiner was accused of engaging in a long kiss with a female patient in October 2011, shortly after starting with the clinic. The state Department of Health and Chotiner agreed to ethics and boundary training and a restriction that an assistant be present for evaluations of women. The restriction was lifted in December 2012. However, Malich said, the clinic kept a similar restriction in place, prohibiting Chotiner from conducting evaluations of female patients presenting in sensitive way without an assistant present.
We have maintained that, Malich said. She said police and state Department of Health officials spent part of Tuesday interviewing staff at the clinic.
The two women alleging the unwanted sexual contact each said it occurred during two evaluations or treatments. One woman, who contacted Bremerton police directly Nov. 18, said the incidents occurred in October and again in November. The second woman contacted the state Department of Health. She said the contacts occurred in May or June, and again in September. During the second incident, the woman said part of the unwanted sexual contact lasted 30 minutes.
Crane said the fact that the two complaints were made independent of the other, and another victim might have come forward, strengthens the case.
Two victims who dont know each other and have no association lends a lot of creditability to the allegations, Crane said. They build on each other.
Crane said despite the sensitivity of the case, investigators wanted to move quickly.
There was a little more urgency in this case, he said, adding that it is extremely rare for police to pursue doctors accused of sexually assaulting patients. We didnt know, but we assumed he was continuing to see female patients.
Investigators can develop a case on their own, arrest a suspect and then forward reports to prosecutors who then present the case to a judge for review. In this instance, detectives developed their case while working with prosecutors and brought it first to a judge. District Court Judge Jeff Jahns reviewed the documents and issued an arrest warrant, effectively finding probable cause for the charge of second-degree rape.
Were dealing with a medical professional, and we now have the backing of the court, which has confirmed our findings, Crane said. By obtaining an arrest warrant, Crane said it reduces speculation about the accusations. Its a sensitive investigation.
Chotiner was not listed on the Kitsap Jail roster Tuesday evening. He is expected to appear in court Wednesday afternoon. Those with information about Chotiner can call Bremerton Police Detective Crystal Gray at 360-473-5485.
Carolyn J. Yaschur | Kitsap Sun The Confederate infantry fends off the Union soldiers during Saturday's Civil War reenactment in Port Gamble.
SHARE Carolyn J. Yaschur | Kitsap Sun The Confederate infantry fends off the Union soldiers during a Saturday Civil War reenactment in Port Gamble. Carolyn J. Yaschur | Kitsap Sun Anita O'Sullivan of Arlington helps her daughter Kari insert a hat pin into her hat during Saturday's Civil War reenactment in Port Gamble. Carolyn J. Yaschur | Kitsap Sun The Confederate infantry fends off the Union soldiers during Saturday's Civil War reenactment in Port Gamble. Carolyn J. Yaschur | Kitsap Sun Confederate soldier Derek Van Dusen of Everett catches a nap in between battles during Saturday's Civil War reenactment in Port Gamble.
By Andrew Binion of the Kitsap Sun
PORT GAMBLE
The U.S. Civil War has been called the war that pitted brother against brother.
But for two Port Orchard families, the war that once divided families is bringing them together.
While reenacting battle scenes, one family wears the blue of the Union, and the other dons the gray of the Confederacy. But the families say the events bring history lessons to life that are enthralling equally to boys and girls as they are to moms and dads.
And on Saturday, as canons boomed and scattered rifle reports rattled through the village of Port Gamble, history came alive when soldiers squared off for the third year in a row. The event is one of four programs the Washington Civil War Association puts on across the state.
But before the rifle volleys, cavalry charges and outflanking maneuvers, families sat around their tents, chatting, napping, nibbling at lunch. Family time.
Among them were the Surowiecs.
Dave Surowiec sat on the ground loading black powder and Cream of Wheat shots with help from his 9-year-old daughter, Megan. (The Cream of Wheat helps keep the powder packed).
Surowiec first thought the idea of dressing up in period garb and fighting make-believe battles was as a bit corny.
Then the husband and father of three attended a Civil War recreation event. He saw children running around in bare feet, people riding horses, adults sitting around campsites -- and he came away a believer.
"That is heck-of-fun, good-family stuff," Surowiec said.
When he isn't working as a construction superintendent for a Seattle firm, he's a first sergeant in the 43rd Virginia Cavalry. That's part of Mosby's Rangers, a group of irregulars that effectively practiced a predecessor of guerrilla warfare on Union troops.
For Megan, who wears period dress -- like her mom, aunt, uncle and cousins -- the best part of the pageantry and explosions is the camping and traveling.
"You get to go places," she said.
Megan's older brother and sister were unable to attend Saturday, but have in the past.
Within slingshot distance is a Union camp, bedecked with a mast and riggings meant to simulate the USS Tahoma, a part of the U.S. fleet that helped evacuate Union sympathizers from Florida.
Though wearing the uniform of a U.S. Marine sergeant circa 1864, Howard Struve is known better to his acquaintances as an associate at a Bremerton architectural firm.
A board member of the Washington Civil War Association and event coordinator, he first started attending the reenactments with his son, Josiah. But over the years the rest of the family started joining up.
Now he and his wife, Pattie -- plus three of their five children -- are regulars.
"There's a little bit of everything for everybody," he said.
Beyond the history lessons, son Josiah has an interest in period musical instruments. He plays the mandolin, among others.
"It's really worked," said Pattie Struve, a "refugee" on the USS Tahoma.
Although most of the combatants are men, there are some women and girls who bear arms. Daughter Kari, 15, doubles as "Private Hank" when she wants to join the fight.
Shooting the guns in the most fun, she said.
Josiah, 16, plays the bass drum in the drum and bugle corps.
"We're, like, really into it," said Elisa Struve, 19, who spent Thursday night with her mom sewing authentic men's undergarments.
"Or drawers, as they are actually called," Pattie Struve said.
Painstaking attention to detail takes work -- money in some cases -- and is part of the fun. That extends to how husband and wife address each other, Pattie Struve said, noting that husbands and wives did not call each other by their first names in public.
Howard Struve said about 500 members of the group showed up to the fight, and the spectacle usually attracts thousands more.
Port Gamble was built in 1853, which makes it an authentic location for the event, Howard Struve said, who is credited with bringing the Battle for Port Gamble to Kitsap County.
"It was pretty much an easy sell to the club," he said.
By Andrew Binion of the Kitsap Sun
PORT ORCHARD After deliberating for about a half-day Monday, a jury found a former Bremerton School District volunteer guilty of sexually assaulting five girls.
Stephen Jabs, 53, shook his head as Kitsap Superior Court Judge Kevin Hull read the lengthy verdict forms. Jabs was convicted of 10 felonies: five counts of first-degree rape of a child and five counts of first-degree child molestation.
Jabs had baby-sat multiple girls at his Seabeck house where the assaults were alleged to have occurred and took the stand to deny he sexually assaulted the girls, contradicting testimony from some of the victims who described him assaulting them.
A family member of one of the girls was present for the verdict.
"There is nothing that will undo the damage he has done," Jeannie Screws wrote in a statement. "He will not have the opportunity to do it to another child; for that we are grateful. Now we will work toward helping the family members heal."
Jabs' attorney, Tim Healy, declined to comment on the verdict but said he anticipates Jabs will appeal. Senior Deputy Prosecutor Cami Lewis was not immediately available for comment.
Jabs is scheduled to be sentenced Sept. 16.
The jury of 11 men and one woman understood the gravity of their task, said jury foreman Kent Salisbury, of Bainbridge Island. Salisbury emphasized that jurors were aware of the consequences Jabs would face if they convicted him, as well as the potential risk of letting a man accused of repeatedly sexually assaulting children go free in the community.
He described the deliberations as intense.
Though defendants in criminal trials cannot be compelled to testify, Jabs took the stand to deny the allegations against him.
Salisbury said there was not one specific piece of evidence in the three-week trial that swayed the jury, but noted that Jabs' testimony was not effective at convincing jurors that he did not assault the children.
"I don't know if his lawyer advised him on that or not, but he was not credible in light of the other evidence presented," Salisbury said.
Regarding the testimony of the children, Salisbury said only, "Heartbreak."
In addition to the felony charges of rape of a child and child molestation, the jury also convicted Jabs of communication with a minor for immoral purposes, a gross misdemeanor.
Jabs volunteered at Crownhill Elementary School and West Hills STEM Academy for a "couple of years," according to a statement from the Bremerton School District, which dismissed him after his arrest. No assaults were alleged to have occurred at the schools.
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By Kitsap Sun Staff
BANGOR The final environmental-impact statement for the pier extension at Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor has been completed and is available for public review.
The project would bring Bangor into compliance with Department of Defense directives to protect Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines from threats, according to the Navy. Construction would begin in August and end in August 2018.
The Navy hopes to extend the existing 500-foot-long pier by 540 feet. The longer pier would provide additional berthing for maintenance of homeported and visiting submarines, such as the USS Seawolf and USS Connecticut that are based in Bremerton. The project isn't funded and therefore a construction schedule hasn't been determined.
The impact statement can be viewed at www.nbkeis.com/lwi and at the Sylvan Way, Poulsbo and Silverdale libraries. Comments can be mailed to Naval Facilities Engineering Command Northwest, Attention Dr. Robert Senner, LWI/SPE EIS Project Manager, 1101 Tautog Circle, Suite 203, Silverdale, WA 98315-1101.
The Herald reports:
Property investors will need a 40 per cent deposit under tough new restrictions revealed today.
The new rules are being urgently introduced in an attempt to put a lid on New Zealands spiralling property prices.
Reserve Bank Governor Graeme Wheeler has outlined the new rules this morning, and told banks they will be expected to act immediately.
The new loan-to-value ratios (LVRs) would take effect on September 1, but the Reserve Bank wants banks to observe the spirit of the new restrictions in the lead-up to the new policy.
Stuff reports:
Cheaper bus fares, slower speed limits, free Wi-Fi and a renewed push for light rail in Wellington are among the election carrots being dangled by the regions Green Party local body candidates. Party-affliated councillors from across the region have revealed what will the top of their agenda if re-elected in October. Greater Wellington regional councillors Paul Bruce and Sue Kedgley said they would push for a 25 per cent discount on off-peak bus fares as well as a 50 per cent off-peak discount for students. Kedgley said introducing light rail in Wellington and replacing the citys polluting, noisy diesel buses with modern electric buses within a decade would also be a top priority.
A previous story from 2013 reported:
The cost of a light rail system for Wellington has skyrocketed to nearly a billion dollars, with Mayor Celia Wade-Brown now conceding it looks unrealistic in the near future. A detailed business case for light rail between Wellington Railway Station and Kilbirnie was made public for the first time today. It put the cost of building the network at $940 million, largely because it would require its own tunnel through Mt Victoria.
This is the problem with the Greens. They never let reality get in the way of their ideas.
Rational people would say sure wed love light rail but the cost is unaffordable. Their fantasy would cost $10,000 per household.
Even worse the light rail proposal would produce very low level of benefits, compared to a bus rapid transit system. The benefit cost ratio for light rail is a minuscule 0.05 or a benefit of $1 for every $20 spent.
This is what the Greens are demanding for Wellington. Spend $1 billion to get a benefit of $50 million. Per household that is take $10,000 per household and get a benefit of $500 back!
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Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19
By Farhad Daneshvar Trend:
Iran has gained access to $400 million in frozen assets in a bank in Azerbaijan, an Iranian envoy said.
Irans Ambassador to Azerbaijan Mohsen Pak Ayeen has said that after the implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, aka nuclear deal), International Bank of Azerbaijan unblocked Islamic Republics frozen assets, Fars news agency reported.
The assets belonged to the Naftiran Intertrade Company (NICO) and the Central Bank of Iran, the envoy added.
Pak Ayeen further noted that bilateral ties between Baku and Tehran, particularly economic ties have improved following the implementation of the JCPOA.
The nuclear deal has also contributed to settling legal disagreements between Iranian and Azerbaijani traders, the ambassador added.
Elaborating on friendly ties between Tehran and Baku, Pak Ayeen announced that Azerbaijan is likely to ease visa requirements for Iranian citizens within the next couple of months.
Speaking about President Hassan Rouhanis upcoming visit to Baku for trilateral talks with Azerbaijani and Russian counterparts, the ambassador voiced Irans readiness to help settling the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations.
Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19
By Khalid Kazimov Trend:
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has criticized United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moons recent report on the implementation of a Security Council resolution endorsing last Julys nuclear deal between Iran and worlds major powers.
Zarif said that Ban Ki-moons report was prepared based on incomplete information and the secretary-general lacks detailed information about the procedure of the nuclear talks, Fars news agency reported July 19.
Referring to allegations against Iran on exporting arms to Iraq, Zarif said that Iran will continue its policies on fighting against terrorism and the issue of sending arms to Iraq is not related to the nuclear deal.
Earlier on July 7, Reuters quoted a confidential report by the secretary-general as saying that Iran's ballistic missile launches were not consistent with the constructive spirit of the JCPOA.
The US and Russia have also criticized Ban Ki-moon for overstepping his mandate in the report.
Shenandoah, IA (51601)
Today
A shower is possible early. Some clouds. Low near 35F. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph..
Tonight
A shower is possible early. Some clouds. Low near 35F. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19
Trend:
The gunmen, who have seized a police station in Yerevan, are ready to respond to the demands of the Armenian National Security Service until 19:00 (GMT+4), Alek Enigomshyan, a member of the Founding Parliament radical opposition movement, told reporters July 19, Novosti-Armenia reported.
An armed group seized the headquarters of the police and interior troops in Erebuni, Yerevan, July 17, demanding the release of the participant of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, coordinator of the oppositional Armenian civil initiative Founding Parliament Zhirayr Sefilyan.
I directly participate in the negotiations between the Armenian National Security Service and the Founding Parliament radical opposition movement, Enigomshyan said.
However, he refused to disclose the demands put forward by the Armenian National Security Service to the people seizing the building.
Enigomshyan added that after reaching preliminary agreements, as well as statements made by members of the gang about the readiness to consider the authorities proposals, mobile phones were taken from all people in the police station.
"It is impossible to negotiate in such conditions, he said. If the connection is not restored in the building within half an hour, we will assume that the authorities will unilaterally terminate the negotiations."
SHARE Americas Test Kitchen/Special to the News Sentinel Grilled eggplant like that featured above does not have to be spongy. The thickness of the eggplant is what's most important for optimal texture and flavor. America's Test Kitchen found that 1/4-inch thick is perfect for optimal flavor.
By Bill Daley, Chicago Tribune (TNS)
Authors seem intent on proving yet again that outdoor cooking is more than slapping meat patties on a hot grill. They're reaching around the world for recipes, flavors and inspiration. Reverse-seared steaks, smoked deviled eggs and homemade bacon are among the hot topics; lamb and mutton are getting encouraging nudges; and the grill and/or smoker is being used for almost everything, from first course to dessert. Do-it-yourselfers get help, too, as books offer master recipes on, say, curing bacon or making sausage and then offer recipes to use these products.
So, crack open a cold one, find some shade and break out these outdoor cookbooks for some delicious summer reading and cooking.
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"Master of the Grill"
By the Editors at America's Test Kitchen
America's Test Kitchen, $29.95
This book boasts that it offers 692 recipes, ratings, tips and techniques for every ability level. No, I didn't count. Each is numbered, a graphically appealing device that also poses an unspoken challenge: Just how many can you check off in one summer? Start with "The Basics," then move to "The Easy Upgrades" and "The Serious Projects" (among the latter, grilling steaks over a chimney starter). As you go, you'll move from "Great Backyard Burgers" (No. 1) to "Preparing Lobster for the Grill" (No. 692). An authoritative "Why this Recipe Works" paragraph kicks off each recipe. Instructions for charcoal and gas grills are included in the recipes, followed, where appropriate, by variations you can try. No-nonsense color photographs help tell the story.
The following recipes are from the "Master of the Grill" cookbook by the Editors at America's Test Kitchen.
Grilled Eggplant with Yogurt Sauce
Yields 6 to 8 servings
INGREDIENTS
6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
5 garlic cloves, minced
1/8 teaspoon red pepper flakes or 1/4 teaspoon for spicier dish
1/2 cup plain whole-milk yogurt
3 tablespoons minced fresh mint
1 teaspoon grated lemon zest plus 2 teaspoons juice
1 teaspoon ground cumin
Salt and pepper
2 pounds eggplant, sliced into -inch-thick rounds
DIRECTIONS
1 Microwave oil, garlic, and pepper flakes in bowl until garlic is golden and crisp, about 2 minutes. Strain oil through fine-mesh strainer into clean bowl; reserve oil and crispy garlic mixture separately.
2 Combine 1 tablespoon strained garlic oil, yogurt, mint, lemon zest and juice, cumin, and 1/4 teaspoon salt in bowl; set aside. Brush eggplant thoroughly with remaining garlic oil and season with salt and pepper.
3 For a charcoal grill: Open bottom vent completely. Light large chimney starter three-quarters filled with charcoal briquettes (4 1/2 quarts). When top coals are partially covered with ash, pour evenly over grill. Set cooking grate in place, cover, and open lid vent completely. Heat grill until hot, about 5 minutes. For a gas grill: Turn all burners to high, cover, and heat grill until hot, about 15 minutes. Turn all burners to medium-high.
4 Clean and oil cooking grate. Place half of eggplant on grill. Cook (covered if using gas), turning as needed, until browned and tender, 8 to 10 minutes. Transfer to platter and repeat with remaining eggplant. Before serving, drizzle with yogurt sauce and sprinkle with crispy garlic mixture.
Note: The biggest challenge when preparing eggplant in any form is excess moisture; often it has to be salted before being cooked to draw out its juices. Grilling is an ideal method for cooking eggplant because there's no need to draw out moisture before cooking. The moisture will vaporize or fall through the cooking grate. The eggplant browns and crisps beautifully on the grill. To get grilled eggplant that isn't leathery or spongy, the size of the slice is crucial; we cut 1/4-inch-thick slices to produce a charred exterior and tender flesh.
Grilled Thick-Cut Bone-In Pork Chops
Yields 4 servings
INGREDIENTS
Salt and pepper
4 (12-ounce) bone-in pork rib or center-cut chops, 11/2 inches thick, trimmed
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
1 teaspoon minced fresh chives
teaspoon Dijon mustard
teaspoon grated lemon zest
DIRECTIONS
1 Dissolve 3 tablespoons salt in 1 quarts cold water in large container. Submerge pork in brine, cover, and refrigerate for 1 hour. If the pork you're using is enhanced (injected with a salt solution), skip the brining and season the chops with salt and pepper.
2 Remove pork from brine, pat dry with paper towels, and cut slits about 2 inches apart through fat around each chop. Season with pepper. Mix butter, chives, mustard, and lemon zest in bowl and refrigerate until firm, about 15 minutes. (Chive butter can be refrigerated, covered, for up to 24 hours.)
3 For a charcoal grill: Open bottom vent completely. Light large chimney starter filled with charcoal briquettes (6 quarts). When top coals are partially covered with ash, pour two-thirds evenly over half of grill, then pour remaining coals over other half of grill. Set cooking grate in place, cover, and open lid vent completely. Heat grill until hot, about 5 minutes.For a gas grill: Turn all burners to high, cover, and heat grill until hot, about 15 minutes. Leave primary burner on high and turn other burner(s) to medium-low.
4 Clean and oil cooking grate. Place chops on hotter side of grill. Cook (covered if using gas), until browned, about 3 minutes per side. Slide chops to cooler side of grill and cook until meat registers 145 degrees, 7 to 9 minutes, flipping halfway through grilling. Transfer chops to platter and top with chilled chive butter. Tent with aluminum foil and let rest for 5 to 10 minutes. Serve.
Note: Brining the chops will keep the meat juicy. (We don't brine thin chops because the extra moisture would slow down the browning.) A two-step cooking method over our two-level grill fire ensured a charred exterior and slightly pink interior. We seared the chops over high heat and finished them over moderate heat so they could slowly come up to the ideal 145 degrees. For a simple way to flavor the meat in the few minutes between grilling and serving, we topped the grilled chops with a zesty chive, mustard, and lemon butter.
n
Scotch bonnet peppers are the chilies of choice in Caribbean cooking, lending a fiery bite to sauces and marinades. Pureed with sugar, scallions and warm spices, the yellow-red pepper pods are an essential ingredient in jerk chicken, one of the best-known Jamaican dishes to have been exported from the island.
This dish comes from Weber's terrific "New American Barbecue" by Jamie Purviance, who suggests cooking the chicken "low and slow" over handfuls of apple or pimento wood chips to achieve a smoky tenderness. (I used a gas grill and no wood.) I served it with cilantro-lime rice and roasted bell peppers.
Scotch bonnets are among the hottest chilies on the market, so handle them with care: wear gloves to avoid burning your skin or be sure to scrub your hands, knife and cutting board really well after they've touched the peppers. If you can't find Scotch bonnets, substitute habanero peppers.
JERK CHICKEN
Ingredients
For marinade
1 Scotch bonnet or habanero chili pepper, seeded and coarsely chopped
6 large scallions (white and light green parts only), coarsely chopped
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 tablespoons tamari
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
2 tablespoons ground allspice
2 tablespoons packed light brown sugar
1 tablespoon peeled, minced fresh ginger
1 tablespoon coarsely chopped fresh thyme leaves
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 garlic cloves, coarsely chopped
For chicken
1 whole chicken, cut into 6 pieces
1 lime, cut into wedges
Directions
1 In blender, combine marinade ingredients. Puree marinade, stopping to scrape down the inside of jar as needed and add a little water if it is too thick.
2 Place cut-up chicken in a 13-by-9-inch glass or ceramic baking dish. Pour marinade over chicken and use tongs to turn and coat the meat. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate at least 4 hours or up to 18 hours, turning the chicken occasionally.
3 Prepare grill for direct and indirect cooking over medium-low heat (350 to 400 degrees).
4 Remove chicken from dish, letting any excess marinade drip back into the dish. Transfer marinade and juices in the dish to a small bowl, cover and refrigerate.
5 Grill chicken, skin side up, over indirect medium-low heat, with the lid closed, for 45 minutes. Turn chicken over and baste with some of the reserved marinade. Continue grilling until juices run clear and meat is no longer pink at the bone, 30 to 50 minutes longer, occasionally basting with the reserved marinade until the last 20 minutes of grilling. Discard any remaining marinade.
6 If desired, to crisp and brown the skin, during the last 2 to 4 minutes grill the chicken, skin side down, over direct medium-low heat, turning once. Remove from grill and let rest for 3 to 5 minutes.
7 Cut leg pieces in half at the joint, and cut the breast pieces crosswise in half. Serve warm with a squeeze of lime on top.
Source: "Weber's New American Barbecue: A Modern Spin on the Classics" by Jamie Purviance (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, May 2016, $24.99)
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Other grilling and outdoor cooking books include:
"Around the Fire" by Greg Denton and Gabrielle Quinonez Denton with Stacy Adimando (Ten Speed Press, $35). Everyone needs a cookbook to dream by. This book from the chefs/owners of Ox Restaurant in Portland, Ore., is mine this summer. Ox offers "Argentine-style grilling with a Pacific Northwest approach," the book says. Grilling is at the center of the book, with three chapters devoted to meat, seafood and vegetables, but there are also salads, cold seafood, desserts and cocktails. Grilling fans looking beyond the obvious will find, among other choices, lamb heart, wild halibut on the bone, roasted spaghetti squash and turkey butt a conversation starter if there ever was one. The writing is clear and the passion for fire cooking strong, and there's a good grilling how-to chapter to get you started.
"Meathead: The Science of Great Barbecue and Grilling" by Meathead Goldwyn with Greg Blonder (Rux Martin, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $35). Meathead Goldwyn's myth-busting in his eponymous book has surely raised some eyebrows and, maybe, some voices. But Goldwyn, editor of the website AmazingRibs.com, knows his stuff and is willing to share. He spends so much time on the whys and how-tos (it's not at all boring, trust me) that the recipes don't begin until halfway into the book. They cover the bases, from barbecue sauces (Goldwyn's explanation of regional Carolina styles is particularly useful) to Baja fish tacos to an American steakhouse steak burger so juicy he serves it in a bowl. Only one outdoor cooking book this summer? Make it "Meathead."
"Project Smoke" by Steven Raichlen (Workman Publishing, $22.95). A companion book to the public television series, "Steven Raichlen's Project Smoke," this work seeks to prove that "all barbecue is smoked, but not all smoked foods are barbecue." So, you'll find the usual suspects, like brisket, ribs and ham, as well as more unusual items like gazpacho, flan and ice (the cubes will melt during the smoking, yes, but you refreeze them). Raichlen even offers ideas for adding smoky flavor when you don't have a smoker choices range from liquid smoke to bacon to chipotle peppers. Raichlen's book is very practical, with useful information on grills and smokers, notes on the various woods best for smoking and ideas for flavoring your food before, during and after smoking.
"Smoking Meat" by Will Fleischman (DK, $19.95). Will Fleischman's book promises to "perfect the art of cooking with smoke" and the Texas pitmaster laudably sets out to help you do just that with very clearly written and sharply photographed instructions to smoking meat on all sorts of equipment. He outlines the pluses and minuses and troubleshoots common problems. He recommends tools, offers a glossary of barbecue terms, provides safety tips. The book contains more than 50 clearly written recipes for beef, pork, poultry, seafood, game and lamb. (Fleischman is keen on lamb necks.) A very useful and graphic touch is found in the info rail at the top of each recipe; at a glance you can see what the recipe's protein is, preferred wood for smoking, times for prep, cooking and resting, and servings.
"The Smoking Bacon & Hog Cookbook" by Bill Gillespie with Tim O'Keefe (Page Street Publishing, $21.99). "The Whole Pig & Nothing But the Pig BBQ Recipes" is the subtitle for this fun book, which goes whole hog over pig. It contains not only the how-to for a bacon weave reason enough to buy it, I say but recipes for a bacon weave breakfast burrito and bacon weave quesadilla. You'll learn to cure your own bacon, smoke ribs, jazz up a ready-to-cook ham and cook a whole hog outdoors. Some recipes need a smoker; others can be made on a backyard grill. There are enough recipes, I think, to work with any one type of outdoor cooker, but don't be surprised if you're suddenly hungry for a second (or third) piece of equipment to fully enjoy this book.
Mary Constantine of the News Sentinel and Gretchen McKay of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette contributed to this story.
State Rep. Joe Armstrong, with his wife, LeTonia, leaves the Howard H. Baker Jr. Federal Courthouse on Friday, June 19, 2015, after an initial hearing on charges of tax evasion and fraud. At left is attorney Gregory Isaacs. (ADAM LAU/NEWS SENTINEL)
By Jamie Satterfield of the Knoxville News Sentinel
Betrayed by his accountant and business buddy already, state Rep. Joe Armstrong is crying foul over yet another loyalist being added to the government's witness list in his upcoming tax evasion trial his wife.
In a motion filed Monday in U.S. District Court, the veteran lawmaker seeks to block Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Atchley Jr. from calling his wife, LeTonia Armstrong, as a witness against him in his Aug. 2 trial on charges of conspiracy to defraud the IRS and tax evasion. The pair wed in 1993.
"Joseph Armstrong intends to invoke the marital communications privilege at the trial of this matter," defense attorney Gregory P. Isaacs wrote.
Unlike his longtime accountant and his business partner in the cigarette tax stamp deal at the heart of the tax evasion case both of whom secretly recorded Armstrong and are key witnesses against him Armstrong's wife will not willingly lend the government a hand, Isaacs wrote.
"Additionally, upon information and belief, LeTonia Armstrong will be asserting both the adverse testimonial and the confidential communications privileges with respect to testimony related to Joseph Armstrong at trial," the motion stated.
There is no law barring a spouse from testifying, but courts have long recognized two rights, known as "privileges," involving spousal testimony. The first is known as the marital communications privilege, designed to protect marital confidences shared between spouses. Under that privilege, anything Joe Armstrong said to his wife in confidence about the tax stamp deal would be off-limits although the government can challenge whether the communication was, in fact, meant to be confidential.
The second is known as the adverse testimonial privilege. It can be invoked only by the spouse who is being summoned to testify. That privilege holds that forcing a spouse to spill the beans on a partner does irreparable damage to the marriage. If LeTonia Armstrong chose to give adverse testimony against her husband, he could not use that particular privilege to stop her.
Atchley has not yet responded to the motion. For his part in the run-up to trial, Atchley seeks approval to file under seal some sort of document he doesn't label it. His only justification for seeking a sealing order is that the document contains "sensitive material." Senior U.S. District Judge Thomas Phillips has not yet weighed in on the request.
Armstrong lobbied fellow legislators in 2007 to pass a hike in the 20-cent cigarette tax stamp price. He had floated a similar proposal in 2006, but the effort failed. Then-Gov. Phil Bredesen took up the cause in January 2007, arguing a higher cigarette tax would boost the price of cigarettes and therefore cut down on underage smoking.
While pushing for the hike in the Legislature, Armstrong allegedly cut a deal with Tru Wholesale co-owner Roger Cox to buy 42 rolls of stamps at the 2006 price. Armstrong wanted to borrow money from BankEast for the deal but was barred from doing so as a member of the bank's board. He enlisted longtime Knox County school board member and veteran Knoxville government employee Sam Anderson to actually file for the loan, with Anderson getting a cut of the profits from the tax stamp deal.
Anderson has not been charged, and it is not yet clear whether he is on the government's witness list. BankEast later went bust because of questionable loans.
When the Legislature voted to approve a 42-cent hike, Tru Wholesale began selling the stamps the Knoxville-based firm had hoarded, including those bought by Armstrong and Anderson, court records alleged.
In 2008, Armstrong's Kentucky accountant, Charles Marshall Stivers, agreed to funnel money from Tru Wholesale to Armstrong and Anderson through his company and helped Armstrong cloak that money as repayment of a loan on his taxes, according to a plea agreement filed in Stivers' case.
Criminal investigators with the IRS confronted Stivers in 2013, and he agreed to help them gather evidence against Armstrong. Stivers' plea agreement contains direct quotes attributed to Armstrong.
Cox also agreed to snitch on Armstrong and recorded chats between the two, in one of which Cox suggests he once bribed Armstrong in another matter. Armstrong did not acknowledge the statement, nor did he deny it. Isaacs seeks to block Atchley from using that recording at trial.
Only cigarette manufacturers and wholesalers are allowed to buy the stamps and then sell them to retailers, who cannot buy them directly from the state. A cigarette stamp attesting a tax payment to the state must be affixed to each pack sold. Because Cox was a wholesaler, he committed no crime in the deal with Armstrong and is not charged.
Armstrong was paid as a consultant by Cox to lobby Congress on another cigarette tax stamp issue around the same time as the Tennessee tax hike was making its way through the state Legislature.
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By News Sentinel Staff
A 49-year-old man was shot and wounded by Scott County Sheriff's Office deputies when they attempted to serve a warrant on him at his home, according to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.
The shooting victim, identified as Arthur E. Letner, was airlifted to the University of Tennessee Medical Center with nonlife-threatening injuries, TBI spokeswoman Leslie Earhart said.
Letner remained hospitalized Tuesday afternoon, Earhart said.
The shooting was reported just after 5 p.m. Monday on the 800 block of Letner Road in Helenwood, Tenn.
No other injuries were reported.
Authorities have not specified how many deputies were involved, the nature of the warrant or other details surrounding the incident.
The TBI has been asked to investigate the shooting at the request of the 8th Judicial District Attorney General's office.
More details as they develop online and in Wednesday's News Sentinel.
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By Bob Fowler of the Knoxville News Sentinel
CLINTON An innovative proposal to fund the startup of a three-year program to pay for computer tablets for all students in the Anderson County school system has passed final muster, and it also translates into financial windfalls for the Oak Ridge and Clinton school systems.
The move keeps the county property tax for the fiscal year that started July 1 unchanged and provides $155,494 and $32,413, respectively, for Oak Ridge and Clinton schools.
"It's one of the most positive things I've been involved with in my 20 years on (county) commission," said Myron Iwanski, chairman of the county's finance and budget committees. "I think it is a major step forward for our school systems."
He said the computer tablets will ultimately result in a better trained workforce "that's more computer-savvy."
"Only a few times in a career do we have an opportunity to make 'life-changing' decisions for our students, our educators and our community at large," Johanna Whitley, director of the county schools system's technology program, wrote in an email congratulating commissioners for their decision.
Commissioners have approved shifting 2.8 cents of property taxes, and the county school system has chipped in $150,000 from its budget to fund the first year of the effort. All told, county schools will receive $400,105 to pay for the initial year of what's dubbed the "one-to-one" effort.
Part of the money the equivalent of 2 cents in property tax revenue or $316,000 has been shifted from a program to allocate money for purchases of land deemed suitable for industrial development. Iwanski said about $900,000 has already been set aside for such properties, which have heretofore proven difficult to find and buy. The search for suitable land continues unabated, he said.
The unexpected revenue for Oak Ridge and Clinton schools will speed up Oak Ridge's one-to-one program. The tiny Clinton School District already has a similar program, and its new revenue can be used for other technology purchases.
Iwanski said the school systems have agreed to sign memos that the windfalls are "one-time money" so it doesn't affect state maintenance of effort funding requirements, and the Tennessee Department of Education has approved the plan.
Funding formulas for the last two years of the program will be determined later. An expected surge in sales tax revenue in coming years from the startup of the Main Street Oak Ridge redevelopment program should provide one option, Iwanski said during Monday's commission meeting.
Knoxville Mayor Madeline Rogero and Knox County Mayor Tim Burchett bump fists after the E-911 Board of Directors unanimously approved a new digital radio system Tuesday, July 19 2016, at the E-911 Center. An $8.7 million contract with Motorola Solutions was approved to conclude a three-year process.
(PAUL EFIRD/NEWS SENTINEL)
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By News Sentinel Staff
KNOXVILLE Three years after beginning the process to obtain a new digital radio system, the Knox County E-911 Board of Directors on Tuesday unanimously approved an $8.7 million contract with Motorola Solutions.
The vote ends a lengthy ordeal that stuck emergency responders with an outdated system for years longer than expected. The decision was fraught with complications, including accusations of back-door discussions.
"I think this has been more thoroughly vetted than anything I've been involved with as sheriff," Knox County Sheriff Jimmy "J.J." Jones said.
Jones said the biggest advantage is not the hardware itself, but the capability of having a regional system that allows direct communication among various agencies during a crisis.
"We'll be able to turn a button and all be able to talk to each other," the sheriff said.
But it took years to get to Tuesday's vote.
In December 2013, Motorola's proposal for Knox County's E-911 Center radio system was deemed nonresponsive for emergency agencies' needs. An evaluation committee found Motorola's proposal as the weakest of three submissions.
A few months before that report, former Knoxville Police Department communications supervisor Scott Tidwell joined Motorola's East Tennessee sales staff. He has petitioned the county's E-911 officials to stay with Motorola.
After the 2013 nonresponsive effort from Motorola, the county's bidding process was restarted.
In January 2015, the county's procurement office gave Harris Corp. a $7.4 million bid recommendation. Law enforcement officials, including Sheriff Jimmy "J.J." Jones and Knox County Commissioner Brad Anders, also a KPD lieutenant, questioned the selection process. Knoxville Police Chief David Rausch and Jones worked privately to thwart giving the contract to Harris.
Local political consultants were hired by Harris. The other bidder, Tait, hired its own. Members of the E-911 board, the community and emergency responders pointed fingers. Some suggested the process was imbalanced to favor Harris. Others said law enforcement in particular wanted to stay with Motorola.
A consultant was hired in April to make an independent report on the E-911 system, for almost $40,000. In November the report recommended Harris. The E-911 board ignored the consultant it hired.
Eventually the E-911 board chose to form a users committee to select how to proceed, shed upgrading the county's current system and instead join a regional system that relies on Motorola equipment.
Jones especially preferred Motorola equipment. He suggested Knox County partner with the Tennessee Valley Regional Communications System, which is equipped with Motorola.
On Tuesday staying with Motorola became a certainty with the 10-0-1 vote. Dr. Russell Frazier, an E-911 board member and chief of the Knoxville Volunteer Emergency Rescue Squad, was absent.
"The public's gonna have a good system that's going to keep us safe. And the user committee (process) works," said Knox County Mayor Tim Burchett, an E-911 board member. "There's (been) a lot of friction and because of that I think we got a better product."
Motorola critics repeatedly have referenced potential hidden costs and change orders that boost the price of a system significantly beyond the original contract. Burchett said he was confident that Knox County Procurement Director Hugh Holt had reviewed the contract carefully.
Holt said the $7 million in savings over the state contract came about through "aggressive negotiating" and that Motorola honored discounts on equipment purchases even though the company's June 30 deadline to sign a contract had passed.
Motorola, like other radio providers, has state contracts offering discounts on radios, programming and system equipment.
Holt said if he bought Knox County's new system under the state contract, the cost would have been $13,051,459, with another $3.7 million required for equipment and programming to join the regional system.
Under discounts negotiated by Holt and Jay Garrison, procurement coordinator, the radio system costs will total $7.3 million. The seven-year maintenance contract, which includes system upgrades and ensures daily operation of the system, added $1.4 million to the contract, Holt said.
Holt said installation of the digital system will take 14-15 months. Each of Knox County's five radio sites will be examined to ensure towers are capable of holding new equipment.
There are no monetary damages in the contract for missed deadlines, but Holt said no payments will be made to Motorola until installation milestones are reached. In addition, Holt structured the payment schedule to withhold money until the system is completed.
"I'm holding back 25 percent of the contract until the system is online and accepted," he said.
Alan Bull, interim executive director of the E-911 Center, said questions about the Motorola system's ability to meet the needs of emergency agencies have been answered. The Users Committee had submitted questions to Motorola and requested clarification on some items before approving the system.
Joining the regional radio system will be an incremental process, Bull said, and he said Tuesday a lot of training will be needed.
"It's not just a matter of flipping a switch," he said.
As Knox County radios join the regional system, emergency agencies will pay $42.80 annually to Chattanooga for each radio. Chattanooga oversees operation of the regional system that also is governed by a five-member executive committee. Knox County has about 4,800 radios on its system.
The new digital system will replace the analog system installed in 1985 by Motorola. That system is outdated and hard to repair because of a lack of replacement parts.
More details as they develop online and in Wednesday's News Sentinel.
Tennessee Department of Transportation
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By Bob Fowler of the Knoxville News Sentinel
CLINTON Opposition is building to proposed changes to a 2.6-mile stretch of Clinton Highway that would convert the road from a four-lane to a two-lane highway with a passing lane and a continuous center turn lane.
Petitions asking the Tennessee Department of Transportation to discard the scheme are circulating in the Claxton community, and hundreds of signatures have already been obtained, Anderson County Commissioner Chuck Fritts said during Monday's commission meeting.
"It shows the citizens are very deeply concerned over this," he said Tuesday. "They want to make sure their voice is heard."
Another commissioner, Steve Mead, on Monday questioned whether reducing the roadway to two lanes would be sufficient to handle rush-hour traffic. Fritts said most of the residents attending the meeting were there to show their opposition to the state's proposal.
TDOT officials in a recent public hearing defended the planned work, costing an estimated $900,000, and said the revisions could adequately handle the traffic volume. TDOT came up with the plan in response to safety concerns about the stretch of roadway from its intersection with Edgemoor Road to the Knox County line.
Records show 10 fatal wrecks and 11 crashes with serious injury on the highway between 2006 and 2015, according to TDOT. The roadway includes several curves as it ascends to the Knox County line. TDOT's proposal calls for resurfacing and then redoing lane markings for dedicated passing areas and a center turn lane, along with paved, 7-foot wide roadside shoulders.
Fritts said residents against the TDOT plan are asking for a "time out" and a review of the plans. He said officials will meet with residents at 5:30 p.m. Aug. 11 in the courthouse.
Marigail Mullin, CEO of YWCA Knoxville, on Tuesday morning in Oak Ridge discusses plans for the nonprofit's new initiative to help domestic violence victims in Anderson County. (BOB FOWLER/NEWS SENTINEL)
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By Bob Fowler of the Knoxville News Sentinel
OAK RIDGE YWCA Knoxville is branching out, launching an Anderson County program to begin addressing the needs of the county's domestic violence victims.
Officials with the nonprofit announced the effort Tuesday morning.
It's titled "Safer and Stronger: Anderson County Domestic Violence Initiative."
Through a pair of grants, the social-service agency is funding a full-time victim advocate and a part-time, bilingual employee who will be serving members of the Hispanic community.
The county currently doesn't have any such support for domestic violence victims, said Marigail Mullin, YWCA Knoxville CEO.
The victim advocates will accompany domestic violence victims to court, help fill out orders of protection, conduct assessments and refer victims to available resources. Weekly support groups in English and Spanish will be offered, along with educational events.
The YWCA through one grant is also creating a brief survey to "gather the kinds of information that will help plan activities and services that better respond to the needs of domestic violence victims," according to a news release.
Members of the community and service providers in Anderson County will be asked to share their experiences.
Nationally, one in four children will witness domestic violence in their lifetime, Maggie McNally, director of women's services, told attendees at Tuesday's announcement.
One in three women has been a victim, and one in six pregnant women will experience domestic violence. "Those are staggering statistics," McNally said.
For more information, contact her at 865-523-6126.
Former state Sen. Stacey Campfield, shown here in 2013 in Nashville, says he is concerned about Gov. Bill Haslam's lack of support for presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump. (AP Photo/Erik Schelzig)
By Joel Ebert, USA TODAY NETWORK Tennessee
CLEVELAND A Tennessee delegate known for making controversial remarks is concerned about Gov. Bill Haslam's lack of support for presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump.
"A lot of (delegates) have said that they are let down with Bill Haslam by him not helping out Donald Trump he's practically supporting Hillary Clinton," former state Sen. Stacey Campfield told The Tennessean on Monday at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
Haslam has on occasion been critical of Trump. In June, the Knoxville Republican called recent attacks by Trump on GOP governors "not helpful."
The governor has also said Trump's comments about federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel, which many have said are racist remarks, were "indefensible."
Although Campfield's said he is concerned about Haslam's support of Trump, at least two other Trump delegates disagreed with such criticism.
Robert Duvall, former Metro Nashville councilman and Trump delegate, said he's heard some people ask about why Haslam hasn't been more vocal in his support for the real estate mogul, especially after the governor met with the presumptive nominee.
However, Duvall believes the governor is ready to support Trump.
"I was with Bill earlier today, and he seemed to be OK. And if you listened to what he had to say, while he didn't sit here and (say) Trump by name, I felt like he was saying it's time to get behind our candidate. Whether it's half-hearted or not, I don't know how gung-ho you're going to be."
James Eaton, a Trump delegate from Williamson County, said he believes that Haslam is simply waiting until the presidential candidate officially becomes the Republican nominee.
"There's a lot of people in the Republican Party that will not say I'm supporting Trump but once he's nominated they'll support him," he said.
Duvall said he expects Haslam to eventually donate to Trump. If he doesn't, and Trump wins Tennessee as expected, Duvall believes it could make any future political ambitions of the term-limited governor much more difficult.
"It could be Haslam stays out of the race, but I think that could be political suicide in Tennessee if he wanted to run for any office," Duvall said.
"That would make it hard for him to build the coalition he needs to even win a primary. I think Bill's smarter than that."
Campfield, who served in the Tennessee General Assembly from 2004 to 2014, has frequently made headlines in the past, for saying controversial remarks.
In 2012, he made national news by blaming AIDS on a gay airline pilot having sex with monkeys and saying the disease is "virtually impossible" to contract during heterosexual intercourse, according to Tennessean archives. Days later, after a Knoxville restaurant owner ordered him out of her establishment, Campfield responded by writing a blog in which he compared himself to civil-rights movement demonstrators.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump flash two thumbs up as he introduces his wife, Melania, during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Monday, July 18, 2016. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
By The Tennessean, USA TODAY NETWORK Tennessee
Live Blog Republican National Convention
Dispatches from the Republican National Convention in Cleveland:
12:45 p.m. Nashville's Ayla Brown is set to perform the national anthem on Thursday before Donald Trump's nomination and speech. She is a based in Music City and is the daughter of former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown.
Ive sung the anthem thousands of times in my singing career, she said in an interview. Mostly for sports, a lot of them have been for political events, but this will be one of the biggest stages of my performing career. Its a surreal moment.
9:00 a.m. Arkansas Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin spoke to the Tennessee delegation this morning over breakfast, which featured a spread that includes scrambled eggs, potatoes, sausage, bacon, biscuits and gravy and grits.
Griffin, who talked about his Tennessee connections, discussed presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, Benghazi and her emails.
At the end of the day, despite not being indicted or not being charged, almost everything she said about the email server was a lie, he said. When caught, she just lied.
Prior to Griffin taking the microphone, Tennessee GOP chairman Ryan Haynes kick-started the day before turning it over to state Sen. Bill Ketron for a prayer. Beth Campbell, the new national committeewoman, led the pledge of allegiance. After that, U.S. Sen. Bob Corker took over, who said he liked Melania Trumps speech she and Donald Trump were hit with criticism and accusations of plagiarism due to similarities with Michelle Obama's convention speech in 2008.
Todays agenda for the Tennessee delegation includes a charter boat cruise on Lake Erie. The convention does not officially convene until 5:30 p.m. but we will have more updates throughout the day.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19
Trend:
The talks on resolving the situation in connection with the gunmen, who have seized a police station in Yerevan, are underway, said Alek Enigomshyan, a member of the Founding Parliament radical opposition movement, RIA Novosti reported July 19.
Enigomshyan is a mediator between the gunmen and the authorities.
An armed group seized the headquarters of the police and interior troops in Erebuni, Yerevan, July 17, demanding the release of the participant of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, coordinator of the oppositional Armenian civil initiative Founding Parliament Zhirayr Sefilyan.
I was assured by the Armenian National Security Service that the negotiations were not broken off, Enigomshyan told reporters.
Enigomshyan stressed that at present, it is necessary to avoid actions aggravating the situation and increasing tension.
State Rep. Jeremy Durham treated many women working in the Legislative Plaza as potential sexual conquests, relentlessly and brazenly making unwelcome sexual advances toward them , according to an investigative report released last week by Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery III.
The report also depicts a culture in the Capitol of fear and intimidation so pervasive that no one, including at least 10 legislators present during inappropriate encounters initiated by Durham, filed official complaints about his misbehavior. As House majority whip, Durham wielded considerable power, which for years allowed him to escape scrutiny.
According to the report, the married Williamson County Republican sent inappropriate text messages and made unwanted sexual advances to legislative staff members, interns and lobbyists, and conducted a brief affair with a 20-year-old college student that began with an alcohol-fueled tryst in his office. On more than one occasion he implied to lobbyists he would vote for bills their clients supported in exchange for favors.
The report chronicles Durham's shameful behavior from 2012, when he was first elected, to the beginning of this year. Investigators uncovered interactions with 22 women ranging from unwelcome flirting to sexual contact.
For the most part, the women deflected his comments or made up excuses not to meet him outside work. Lobbyists either refused to work with him or would go to his office only if accompanied by a colleague. Staffers told investigators they feared for their jobs if they reported him and lobbyists said they feared for their bills.
Those fears were justified. A female lawmaker who described herself as Durham's "best friend" fired a female staff member after she became the target of Durham's attention. A male lobbyist told a female colleague that putting up with a male legislator's advances was part of a female lobbyist's job.
Durham's behavior was well known in the Legislative Plaza for years, according to the witnesses. The report refers to 10 legislators, none of them identified by name, who were present during some of the encounters or were told about them. Other than some cursory inquiries by one lawmaker, nothing was done. The director of legislative administration spoke to Durham about the "rumors" last year, but the discussion did not curtail his behavior.
Durham's arrogance has continued unabated after the release of the report. Durham did not consent to an interview with investigators, and then had the audacity to criticize the report as unfair. He has suspended his re-election campaign but has not resigned his seat. The House committee that asked for the investigation took no action, leaving it to Williamson County voters to decide. They should repudiate him at the polls.
That Durham could make sexual advances toward so many women for nearly four years without drawing some sort of rebuke is troubling. Only media reports of his actions, first reported by The Tennessean, prompted disciplinary action. A new sexual harassment policy is now in place, but policies are meaningless if not enforced. The Capitol's culture must change as well.
2,600 acres added to key recreational area
JULY 19, 2016 at 12:51 p.m.
Overlooking the historic Scott's Gulf - Image courtesy of Chuck Sutherland.
SPARTA, TN -- The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (TWRA) and The Land Trust for Tennessee are celebrating the permanent protection of 2,600 acres within the historical Scotts Gulf.
The newly conserved property, located in White and Van Buren Counties, connects tens of thousands of acres of public recreation land in the area including Bridgestone-Firestone Centennial Wilderness Wildlife Management Area (WMA), Virgin Falls State Natural Area, Fall Creek Falls State Park, Lost Creek State Natural Area and Bledsoe State Forest. The property also provides habitat for several rare and endangered species including three federally listed species of bats as well as fish, mussels and plants.
The Scotts Gulf region of the Cumberland Plateau is a rugged, scenic area of the state. The State of Tennessee has been working diligently over the past decade to conserve its biological resources and beauty. Much of Scotts Gulf is located within the 10,000 acre Bridgestone-Firestone Centennial Wilderness a TWRA wildlife management area with waterfalls, 26 miles of hiking trails, overlooks of the Caney Fork River Gorge, public hunting access and primitive campgrounds.
Bobby & Joy Cunningham chose to share their land with Tennesseans for generations to come.
North Korea fired three ballistic missiles early on Tuesday into the sea off its east coast that had a range of between 500 and 600 kilometers (300 and 360 miles), South Korea's military said, Reuters reported.
The missiles were launched towards east from an area in the North's western region called Hwangju from 5:45 a.m. local time (2045 GMT Monday) to 6:40 a.m., the South's military said.
"The ballistic missiles flight went from 500 kilometers to 600 kilometers, which is a distance far enough to strike all of South Korea including Busan," the South's military said in a statement.
Busan is a South Korean port city in the south.
North Korea has test-fired a series of ballistic missiles in recent months including an intermediate-range missile in June and a submarine-launched missile this month.
Tuesday's launch came days after South Korea and the United States announced a final decision this month to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) anti-missile system in the South to counter threats from the North.
North Korea's military has threatened to retaliate against the deployment of the system with a "physical response" once its location and time of installation were decided.
China has also sharply criticized the decision as a move that will destabilize the security balance in the region.
By Jhoo Dong-chan
Workers at Hyundai Motor and Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) will stage three concurrent strikes this week. They also plan to stage a joint rally Wednesday, the first of its kind in 23 years when the two largest trade unions struggled for better wages in 1993.
Unionized workers at Hyundai Motor plan to launch a partial strike today where daytime and nighttime workers will rally for two hours each.
The daytime workers will then stage a four-hour rally Wednesday while the nighttime workers will do the same the following day.
On Friday, the daytime workers are expected to demonstrate for six hours while the night shift will stage a full strike for the whole day.
Also, they won't work overtime starting Tuesday, a union official said.
The union has demanded a 7.2 percent rise in the basic monthly wage and performance pay, totaling 30 percent of the automaker's 2015 net profit, while the company is pushing to freeze wages, revamp the wage structure and expand the so-called "peak wage system."
Last week, workers at Hyundai Motor Union voted to strike, with 77 percent of 48,806 union members approving of the action.
Likewise, unionized workers at HHI are expected to stage rallies on the same days, except Thursday.
Workers at HHI headquarters will stage a rally for three hours starting 2 p.m. today, while all workers will strike for four hours Wednesday and seven hours Friday.
They also voted last week on whether to go on strike, with 60 percent of 15,326 unionized workers approving the decision.
Both unions' rallies today will be held in the same place at the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) Ulsan Chapter headquarters, seeking mutual support.
The authorities plan to take severe measures against any unlawful action.
Especially, they will pay extra attention to the two unions' joint strike, Thursday, a police official said.
Business circles and Ulsan residents voiced deep concerns about the series of strikes.
"The companies are treated like the workers' enemies," said an Ulsan city official.
"The real enemies are foreign companies, against which the companies and workers should cooperate to fight back in the global market."
It would be a severe blow to HHI's efforts for normalization if the unionized workers decide to join Hyundai Motor workers in a walkout. Creditors of the embattled shipbuilder demanded the union's cooperation as one of the baseline conditions for the shipbuilder's restructuring plan.
HHI announced a self-rescue plan that includes asset sales and a cut in the workforce to save 3.5 trillion won. Under the shipbuilder's self-rescue plan, temporarily approved by its creditors and led by KEB-Hana Bank, it will sell stock investments and noncore assets and cut its workforce, which will reduce its debt-to-equity ratio to below 100 percent by 2018.
By Choi Sung-jin
Last year, Korea recorded its lowest plant ratio -- capacity utilization ratio of power plants -- since 2000. In particular, more than half of LNG combined cycle thermal power plants, which produce relatively less fine dusts, sat idle.
According to a statistical report released by the state-run Korea Electric Power Corp. (KEOCO) Monday, the nation's plant ratio stood at 61.7 percent last year, down 2.2 percentage points from 2014. That means nearly four out of every 10 power stations remained closed, industry officials said.
The plant ratio was 62.2 percent in 2000 and had risen to peak at 73.9 percent in 2011. It has since fallen by 4.6 percentage points a year on average to hit its lowest last year.
By energy source, the plant ratio of LNG (liquefied natural gas) combined cycle thermal stations, which pollute the environment relatively less, showed the steepest drop, from 67 percent in 2014 to 40.3 percent last year, the report said.
On the other hand, the plant ratio of coal-fired power stations, the main culprits of fine dust, did not fall much, from 93.6 percent to 90.1 percent over the cited period. That ratio of nuclear power plants rose from 75.5 percent to 85.3 percent.
These statistics show that KEPCO buys electricity mainly from stations with lower generation costs, such as coal and nuclear power plants, pushing up their plant ratios to 90 percent. For the same reason, the state utility avoids buying power from integrated gasification combined cycle power stations, pulling down their plant ratios to the 40 percent range.
By energy source, KEPCO paid the lowest price of 62.61 won per 1 kWh to nuclear power plants, followed by 71.14 won to bituminous coal plants, 105.99 won to wind plants, 107.78 won to anthracite coal plants, 153.84 won for solar plants and 169.49 won to LNG plants. The generation cost of LNG plants is more than twice that of nuclear and coal plants.
According to the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy basic power demand and supply plan, of the 53 coal plants, the government will shut down 10 that have been operating for 30 years or more by 2025 while replacing environmental facilities or increasing emission-controlling equipment at the remaining ones, to keep its promise to reduce greenhouse gases by 37 percent in business as usual terms by 2030.
However, the Korean government plans to build 20 more coal plants by 2029. Government officials will apply far stricter emission standards on the newly built coal plants to reduce 24 percent of fine dusts (6,600 tons), 16 percent of sulfur oxides (11,000 tons) and 57 percent of nitrogen oxides (58,000 tons) from 2015 in BAU terms, by 2030.
But experts say the government plan runs squarely counter to global trends.
The 10 coal plants scheduled for shutdowns are small ones with generation capacity of 200,000 to 500,000 kW while the 20 being built are large ones with capacity of 500,000 to 1 million kW. The combined capacity of 18,100 MW for the 20 new coal plants is about six times larger than the 3,345 MW of the old plants, they said.
Lotte Homeshopping CEO Kang Hyun-gu answers reporters' questions in front of the Seoul Central District Prosecutor's Office in Seocho-gu, southern Seoul, July 12. The prosecution summoned him once again the following day, and filed an arrest warrant for him on July 14. The court, however, dismissed the prosecution's request. / Yonhap
By Jhoo Dong-chan
An arrest warrant for Lotte Homeshopping CEO Kang Hyun-gu has been dismissed by the court, hinting at an uneasy path ahead for the prosecutors' investigation of Lotte Group.
The Seoul Central District Court announced Tuesday it has dismissed the request of the Seoul Central District Prosecutor's Office, saying, "After reviewing the current progress of the investigation, the court doesn't acknowledge the need or reason for arrest at this point."
If the court approved the prosecutors' request, Kang would have been the first CEO of a Lotte Group affiliate to face arrest in the ongoing corruption case.
The 56-year-old CEO is suspected of a number of irregularities associated with the corruption investigation, including destruction of evidence, violating the Broadcasting Act, embezzlement and breach of trust under the Act on Aggravated Punishment in specific economic crimes.
Kang allegedly created a 900 million won ($794,000) slush fund and caused 8 billion won in damages to the company.
He is also suspected of submitting false reports on a number of executives and employees and bribing Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning officials in 2014 when Lotte Homeshopping sought to renew its business broadcasting license for another three years.
The prosecution said it has secured evidence that Kang created the slush fund to give kickbacks to a ministry official in a bid to renew its broadcasting license. He also allegedly directed company officials to destroy evidence when prosecutors raided Lotte offices.
Investigators found Kang used nine different cell phones under false identities and secured the phone logs.
The prosecution summoned Kang twice last week, filing an arrest warrant with the court on July 14.
Due to the court's decision, however, the prosecution will need to take a detour in their investigation of the alleged bribery case.
Lotte Group, which has expanded its operations in Korea and Japan, has been the center of a series of scandals since last year, including a succession struggle between Shin Dong-bin and his older brother for managerial control.
Unionized workers at Hyundai Motor, South Korea's top automaker, are set to walk off the job for four hours on Tuesday demanding a pay raise and better working conditions.
Last week, a majority of the automaker's some 48,000 unionized workers voted for a strike as their talks with the company's management over a wage increase and other issues ruptured.
Their partial walkout will be staged for four hours from 1 p.m. later in the day, and the workers will also put down their tools for four hours a day on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
Hyundai Motor estimates some 40 billion won ($35 million) a day in production losses due to the partial strike.
Also, employees at Hyundai Heavy Industries, a major shipyard in the country, will stage a strike for four hours on Tuesday, demanding that the company's tough restructuring move, including a cut in workforce, be scrapped.
Their partial walkout will also take place on Wednesday and Friday.
Workers at the two companies will hold a joint strike on Wednesday in Ulsan, where their factories are located.
Hyundai Motor has been facing increased competition at home and abroad, losing presence in the domestic market in particular.
Hyundai Heavy is one of three local shipbuilders struggling with severe financial strain since the 2008 global economic crisis that sent new orders tumbling amid a glut of vessels and tougher competition from Chinese rivals.
The country's top three shipyards suffered a combined operating loss of 8.5 trillion won ($7.4 billion) last year due largely to increased costs stemming from a delay in the construction of offshore facilities and an industry-wide slump, with Daewoo Shipbuilding alone posting a 5.5 trillion won loss.
The shipbuilders have recently drawn up sweeping self-rescue programs worth 10.35 trillion won in a desperate bid to overcome a protracted slump and mounting losses.
Meanwhile, the country's business circle urged the labor sector to scrap the planned strike as their moves are politically motivated.
"On the surface, they claim that their strike is a result of the failure of wage negotiations, but their moves are aimed at nullifying government policies and restructuring moves," said the Korea Employers Federation.
In regards to the joint strike by workers at shipyards, the federation claimed their salaries are higher than in other segments, and their planned walkout cannot be justified. (Yonhap)
KEB Hana Bank employees provide consulting services for foreign workers at a branch in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province, Sunday. About 300 workers from China, Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia among others are offered a wide range of services from job consulting to health checkups at the outlet. / Courtesy of KEB Hana
By Kim Jae-won
A Thai worker in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province, was in trouble after his company went bankrupt a week ago. He had no idea how to find a new employer, but KEB Hana Bank connected him with consulting services at the state foreign workforce employment center.
The bank declined to offer the worker's full identification to protect customer information.
On Sunday, the lender offered tailored services for foreign workers including job consulting, pension services, employment insurance and financial services at its Ansan Central branch, in cooperation with related government and private agencies.
An Indonesian employee also dropped by the branch to ask about his insurance and pension payments as he is set to return to his home country after working here for four years.
Representatives from Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance and the National Pension Service told him how much he would be paid and the process for claiming them. Foreign workers are obliged to buy employment insurance while working in Korea, and are refunded the insurance payments when they leave the country.
"We received much positive feedback from foreign workers," said Kim Sang-bong, a manager at the lender's foreign exchange business department, who was in charge of the event. "We plan to offer similar services in other cities, such as Daegu and Gimhae, where many foreign workers live."
Kim said that the wide range of services benefited about 300 foreign workers from neighboring Asian countries such as China, Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia who visited the branch. He added that the bank provided shuttle buses from Ansan Station to the bank.
Ansan is home of some 60,000 foreign residents, one of the country's largest populations of non-Koreans. Most of them work at small factories in the industrial city, located some 50 kilometers southwest of Seoul.
KEB Hana said that it hosted the event as part of its strategy to reach out to foreign residents, offering them not only financial services but also solutions for other aspects of life. The bank plans to expand such services to marriage migrants.
Market watchers said they made note of KEB Hana's efforts to draw foreign workers, considering the country is entering an era of low growth and low interest. Analysts said that local lenders need to enforce their globalization strategies to find new revenue sources outside the country. They said that attracting foreign workers within the country may provide business experience and skills for their global operations.
KEB Hana is the nation's most globalized lender with a wide network covering 24 countries on five continents.
A scene from the film "Train to Busan" / Courtesy of NEW
By Yun Suh-young
When it comes to zombies, only a handful of movies have dealt with the theme in Korean film history. It is usually dealt with in cult films and considered a cult genre more so in Korea than in Western films.
Much of the reason for this is attributed to the unfamiliarity with the Western-born concept of the walking dead who can infect living people and turn them into the similar creatures. Koreans are more familiar with ghosts especially the stereotypical ones clad in white with long black hair.
Director Yeon Sang-ho, in that regard, is a pioneer in the Korean film industry in taking the genre into mainstream commercial cinema. And he's looking toward garnering 10 million viewers, a barometer for being a blockbuster film.
"The fact that Yeon made a film with a theme that could be very unfamiliar to Korean audiences is extremely fascinating. That is the part that I like the most about this film," said actor Gong Yoo, who plays one of the lead roles in the film "Train to Busan" to be released July 20, as a fund manager dad who tries to protect his young daughter from the zombies.
In fact, as a first-timer to action films, director Yeon does a respectable job in producing his first on-set, commercial film featuring real actors. For an animator who had only produced satirical animation films such as "The Fake" (2013) or "The King of Pigs" (2011), the production of this film was a big challenge as well as a big change in style. His melancholic and sarcastic views of society heavily embedded in his previous films are nowhere to be seen in his new one strategically aimed to be a blockbuster. Rather, the zombie film is clad with action, heroism and an emphasis on the importance of family.
The movie is set inside a KTX train heading to Busan. One abnormal passenger with peculiar behavior boards the train at the last minute and she starts attacking the people on the train one by one, turning them into zombies. Once bitten, the infected people begin twitching and suddenly become aggressive and start biting other people. In order to avoid getting bitten by zombies, the uninfected fight for their lives hiding and running toward safe compartments until they reach Busan, which is claimed to be safe from the virus that causes "zombification."
While watching the film, those who have seen director Bong Joon-ho's preceding apocalyptic train action thriller "Snowpiercer" will find themselves recalling that movie, while others will be reminded of the American zombie flick "World War Z" featuring Brad Pitt with aggressive and excessively active zombies running about, unlike the stereotypical drooping and lifeless figures.
Featuring elements similar to both films, it sounds as if "Train to Busan" would be double the fun, which it isn't. It seems to be lacking a little bit of everything, from thrills, intensity, speed and humor. As much as the plot involves a lot of action fighting sequences between uninfected humans and zombies the film is not as gripping or intense as it could have been. Zombies are not exactly scary (perhaps they're not meant to be), the speed of the train is not sensed, and the few scenes which carry some humor could have had more edge to them. If the film is lacking in thrills, it could have added more humor in between scenes.
The ending is almost like a deja-vu from another film, which viewers will know when they see it.
Yeon does manage to send out a strong message about family values and protecting our loved ones because, he says, that is something he believes "humanity can leave to our next generation." This is the reason why he set Gong Yoo's character as fund manager a job most representative of capitalism and turns him into a heroic dad.
While kudos go out to Yeon for walking the un-trodden path, the success of this movie will be left to the audience.
Actor Lee Jong-suk, left, and actress Han Hyo-joo pose for a photo during a press conference at the MBC headquarters in Seoul, Monday. / Yonhap
By Park Jin-hai
At a time when the star-studded "Uncontrollably Fond" on KBS is suffering from an unexpected fall in viewership, MBC aims to take the crown with the new romantic thriller "W," which will premiere Wednesday.
Starring actor Lee Jong-suk and actress Han Hyo-joo, "W" deals with crossing over from the real world to a world of another dimension. Actress Han, who plays the role of Doctor Oh Yeon-ju in the real world, meets actor Lee, who plays an Olympic gold medalist and media mogul Kang Chul in the webtoon world called "W" and both find life's purpose.
Song Jae-jung, who wrote the sci-fi romance drama "Nine: Nine Time Travels" and won big acclaim for his original story plot, scripted "W," and Jung Dae-yoon, whose earlier jobs included the romantic comedy "She Was Pretty," joined as director.
The 16-episode drama is based on a reader falling into the cartoon world and falling in love with the cartoon character. And the character realizes that he is a virtual cartoon character and not real, the cartoon character then goes beyond the control of the cartoonist.
Actress Han, who returns to the small screen six years after the period drama "Dong Yi" (2010), says the script is the reason she joined the drama.
"I've been away from drama for a long time. So I thought that if I were to do a drama again, it has to be a dramatic one and W is the one," said Han during a press conference at MBC headquarters in central Seoul, Monday. "When I finished reading the first chapter of the script, I couldn't wait to see what came next. The drama's genre is also very unique."
Lee, who has become a hallyu star by starring in successive hit dramas, including "Pinocchio" and "I Can Hear Your Voice," agrees. "Any actor who has seen the script would have wanted to be a part of it. It's a script that you only get once in a life time."
Director Song says it's a story of a man and a woman who discover their raison d'etre while living in different dimensions in Seoul in 2016, "There's suspense, horror, comedy and romance."
"W" will premiere on Wednesday at 10 p.m.
Korea's Foreign Ministry will remove a "sexist expression" from the country's passports. / Courtesy of Twitter
By Lee Jin-a
The Foreign Ministry will remove an English expression, "him (her)," from the first page of its passport after a college student suggested that the word "her" in brackets discriminated against women.
According to Korea's SBS News, the student, surnamed Kim, suggested that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs should drop the words because they were gender-discriminating.
"There are many words that can replace the expression such as citizen,' national,' and holder'," said Kim, 24, whose gender remains unidentified.
"The U.S. does not include him' or her' in its passport and Britain uses the word bearer' instead."
The Foreign Ministry has accepted Kim's suggestion, agreeing that the words could be misinterpreted.
"We decided to drop the words because we found they are barely used in foreign passports," said the ministry. "We will change the wording soon."
SBS reported that the changed passports would be issued from next year.
The FBI is working to determine if Gavin Long had any help when he killed three law enforcement officials in Louisiana, the bureau said Monday, Anadolu reported.
"We are committing all resources to identify co-conspirators or facilitators, FBI's special agent Jeff Sallet said during a press conference.
The 29-year-old Long was identified by authorities as the alleged shooter in the attack Sunday in Baton Rouge.
The former Iraq war Marine sergeant managed to wound three other officers before being shot dead by police, according to authorities. One officer remains in critical condition.
"Were confident this was the only shooter at the scene," Louisiana State Police Superintendent Col. Mike Edmonson said Monday. "His intentions were accurate and they were all aimed at law enforcement officers."
Describing the shooting as ''chilling in its sheer brutality," Edmonson said "these officers were intentionally targeted and assassinated."
Police Chief Carl Dabadie said the shooter ''was not going to stop here.
"After he was finished here I have no doubt he was heading to our headquarters, and he was going to take more lives,'' he said. ''Our 'militarized tactics,' as they're being called, saved lives here. That shot that our S.W.A.T. team made was a hell of a shot."
Following attempts to quell protests against police brutality across the U.S. in recent years, police departments have faced greater public scrutiny from the minority communities that complain of law enforcement using military weapons against residents.
President Barack Obama on Monday ordered all flags on federal buildings to be flown at half-mast. They had already been in that position to honor the victims of a terror attack in France last that killed at least 84 victims.
The shooting Sunday comes amid rising tension between law enforcement and the black community in the city and less than two weeks after the controversial shooting on July 5 of Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old black man, by two white police officers in Baton Rouge that helped spark nationwide protests.
Hours before Monday's press conference in Louisiana, a judge in Baltimore, Maryland, handed down a not guilty ruling in a case against the highest-ranking officer on trial of a black man who died in police custody after suffering a spinal injury.
Judge Barry Williams cleared Lt. Brian Rice, of involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment and misconduct in office in connection with the arrest and death of Freddie Gray last year in the city.
Shortly after the verdict was announced, the White House said it expects individuals who might have concerns with the court's decision to "register those concerns peacefully, apparently attempting to mitigate any potentially violent reactions to the verdict as tensions run high from a string of police killings of black men by police officers.
By Lee Kyung-min
Representatives of the nation's two umbrella unions and opposition lawmakers have called for revisions to the law about the minimum wage setting process, criticizing the current system for lacking transparency.
Members of the Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU) and the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), and the lawmakers vowed, Tuesday, to continue the fight against what they claim is a process heavily-influenced by the government.
The move comes three days after the Minimum Wage Commission set next year's hourly minimum wage at 6,470 won through a vote which those representing labor boycotted.
They demanded an overhaul of the current appointing system of a 27-member commission under the Ministry of Labor and Employment, in which nine members each represent labor, management and the public sector. The public sector members are comprised of professors and researchers of labor issues.
"The nine public sector members, ostensibly representing public interests, are appointed by the government and are virtually incapable of speaking against the current conservative administration's agenda," Rep. Lee Jeong-mi of the minor opposition Justice Party said during a press conference at the National Assembly.
"Those nine members should be recommended jointly by labor and management, free from government influence-peddling," she added.
While currently the public sector members suggest a range of increasing the rate when the labor and management sides fail to narrow their opinion gap, Lee proposed that the Assembly establish a law to help guarantee a minimum rate of increase, based on committee discussions.
The unions and the lawmakers also demanded that commission meeting minutes be recorded and preserved in order to make the discussions transparent so that members' remarks could be put under public scrutiny.
"Nothing about the commission meeting is open for the public record right now. The whole process that decides the life of 5 million workers subject to receiving minimum wage should be made public," it added.
Meanwhile, nine commission members representing labor offered their resignations immediately after the press conference in protest against the newly-set wage. According to regulations, they can resign through a procedure that requires the consent from other members.
Regarding the resignation offer, the Korea Employers Federation said that labor seeks a political solution rather than negotiations. "During the commission talks, the labor representatives never suggested a compromise but maintained their 10,000 won position. The commission's purpose is to decide a wage through discussions and negotiations," it said in a statement.
Residents of Seongju Country, North Gyeongsang Province, listen to an interpellation session on the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system at the National Assembly, Tuesday. They have protested the government's selection of their town as the location of a THAAD battery. / Yonhap
By Yi Whan-woo
China is not likely to "retaliate" against South Korea concerning the latter's decision to allow the U.S. military to deploy a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery here, Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn said Tuesday.
"Relations between South Korea and China have become highly sophisticated. We believe that economic retaliation is not on China's mind," Hwang said during an interpellation session at the National Assembly. "Concerns over China's retaliation will not be realized."
Citing his visit to Beijing last month, Hwang also said he "fully explained" to Chinese leaders what led Seoul to its agreement with Washington, July 8, to deploy the THAAD battery here.
Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se echoed Hwang's view, saying "China has not mentioned or hinted at any economic and military sanctions at the governmental level."
Defense Minister Han Min-koo also defended the decision, saying the THAAD battery is necessary to counter North Korea's nuclear threats.
Ruling and opposition parties convened the interpellation session amid growing concerns that China, South Korea's largest trading partner, may take punitive measures against the THAAD deployment. The session will last until today.
China has been claiming that THAAD's long-range radar can be used to spy on its military activities despite repeated assurances from the U.S. that it is aimed only at deterring North Korea's military threats.
Hwang said the establishment of THAAD is inevitable considering North Korea's fourth nuclear test in January and a cycle of test-firing of short-, medium- and long-range ballistic missiles afterwards.
"Such provocations were not witnessed in the past, meaning Pyongyang's threats are growing against our national security," he said. "It is the government's responsibility to take all possible measures to protect the country and its people."
Meanwhile, Hwang turned down a call to put THAAD-related issues to a parliamentary vote, saying "deploying THAAD does not require parliamentary endorsement."
He said the decision to set up the THAAD was made in line with Article 4 of the mutual defense treaty between the two allies. The article states that Seoul grants and Washington accepts "the right to dispose United States land, air and sea forces in and about the territory of the Republic of Korea as determined by mutual agreement."
The session was led by 13 lawmakers from the ruling Saenuri Party, and three opposition parties the Minjoo Party of Korea (MPK), People's Party and Justice Party.
Residents from Seongju, North Gyeongsang Province, were also invited to watch the session. They protested against the defense ministry's announcement last week to set up THAAD in their town amid rumors over health and environmental risks associated with electromagnetic radiation emitted from THAAD's radar.
During a Cabinet meeting early Tuesday, Hwang pledged to come up with measures to develop Seongju amid concerns that THAAD will deal a blow to its economy.
Parties divided
The opposition parties have been against THAAD deployment as well as the government's choice of Seongju as the THAAD location.
In a party meeting, Tuesday, Saenuri Party floor leader Rep. Chung Jin-suk warned of a widening rift in society over THAAD-related disputes.
He called for the government's "active response" to prevent political division while asking the opposition parties for support in bringing THAAD here.
"It will be the Kim Jong-un regime that will benefit if conflicts over THAAD continue," Chung said. "The government and the ruling party should join hands to defend national interests."
The MPK still insisted on the possible row between South Korea and China and also between Russia causing trouble.
The People's Party launched an anti-THAAD campaign on YouTube. It also vowed to stage a speech against it which will run for three straight days beginning Thursday.
"The existence of THAAD can result in a new Cold War involving the regional powers, said Rep. Kim Young-ho of the MPK.
Won Hye-young, also from the MPK, claimed that the conservative Park Geun-hye administration has been accusing the Seongju residents of "anti-government activities."
"Such an accusation reflects the government's authoritarian view that its people are merely subjects to control," he said.
By Choi Sung-jin
Korea Broadcasting System (KBS) is in internal turmoil -- yet again -- because of an alleged "reporting guideline sent from above," about the deployment of an up-to-date U.S. missile defense system in Korea.
According to the trade union of the state broadcaster, an editorial writer was transferred to a sinecure after KBS President Koh Dae-young expressed his displeasure with the former's analysis of the hot-potato issue of deploying a Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, system in a southeastern county.
The union quoted the broadcaster's chief editorial writer as saying, "I was told by the president that the editorial was little different from ones in China's state broadcasters, and that there should be no differing voices as far as the national security is concerned," after attending a staff meeting that Koh chaired.
Another editorial writer also allegedly received a warning in relation to his writing on THAAD and was told by the managing editor about his position change.
The chief editorial writer, however, later denied the unionized journalists' allegations. "I have never mentioned about the company president's displeasure with these editorials," he said in a statement. "It's a regret that the union issued an announcement without clearly verifying what happened."
After the KBS chief voiced complaints about editorials, a former admiral, who doubles as a guest editorial writer, wrote a piece supporting the introduction of the U.S. missile shield here, unlike the previous editorials that mentioned the opposition of China and Russia and called for the government to make prudent decisions.
"It is an infringement on the independence of reporting and a violation of the broadcasting laws that the company president took issue with news and editorials," the union said.
Earlier, KBS transferred a reporter from Incheon to Jeju Province. The reporter, who joined the state broadcaster in 2009, contributed to a newspaper published by the Journalists Association of Korea, expressing his and his colleagues' dissatisfaction with the KBS's silence about alleged intervention by Cheong Wa Dae in its reporting.
He was referring to the request -- i.e. demand -- from Lee Jung-hyun, a former chief press secretary to President Park Geun-hye, that the public broadcaster play down the news about the chief executive's incomprehensible activities during the first seven "golden" hours of the Sewol ferry sinking in May 2014.
A KBS official denied all these allegations by the union and young reporters. "The company president's remarks just emphasized the need to air cautious and objective reporting as a public broadcaster," he said. "The transfers of editorial writers and a reporter were according to the need for personnel management."
By Jun Ji-hye
The military has begun a project to upgrade the Patriot air defense system to better protect Seoul and its surrounding area from threats from North Korea's short-range ballistic missiles, officials said Tuesday.
The goal of the project is to upgrade the Patriot Advanced Capability (PAC) 2 system deployed at units in the capital and its surrounding area to the PAC-3 version by 2022.
The move comes amid concerns that Seoul will be left out of the coverage range of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery to be set up in Seongju, North Gyeongsang Province next year.
The metropolitan area is home to more than 40 percent of the nation's 51.6 million people and major areas include the capital city, the western port city of Incheon and Gyeonggi Province.
As the first step, the military is currently working on upgrading the PAC-2 system deployed at a unit in Gangwon Province to the PAC-3 version.
"Once the upgrade in Gangwon Province is completed in 2018, the military will move the upgraded system to a unit in the Seoul metropolitan area," said a military official, asking not to be named. "Then, the old system will be moved to a unit in Gangwon Province."
The official noted that the upgraded version will be moved to the Seoul metropolitan area after the upgrade work is done in the non-Seoul metropolitan area in order to minimize a possible vacuum of the nation's military strength.
The combat-proven PAC-3 missile is a high velocity "hit-to-kill" interceptor that destroys incoming ballistic and cruise missiles, and hostile aircraft by direct impact. The PAC-2 uses a blast-fragmentation proximity warhead that sends debris from an exploded missile into the target.
When the Ministry of National Defense announced on July 8 that Seoul and Washington will deploy a THAAD unit in Seongju, the ministry said it will speed up upgrading the PAC low-altitude missile defense system as the capital area is beyond the THAAD's coverage range.
The THAAD interceptor has an effective range of 200 kilometers, while Seongju is located 210 kilometers southeast of Seoul.
"If the North fires a Scud missile toward Seoul, the PAC system is more appropriate for protecting the capital as the missile's flight altitude would be low, and the flight time would be short," said Yoo Jeh-seung deputy minister for policy at the defense ministry.
Defense Minister Han Min-koo said on July 10 that the THAAD battery will provide a layered defensive shield along with the PAC system.
THAAD is capable of intercepting incoming missiles at high altitudes of up to 150 kilometers, while the PAC-3 system is capable of shooting them down at low altitudes of 30 kilometers, according to officials.
Pyongyang's fifth nuclear test may be imminent
By Jun Ji-hye
North Korea fired three short-range ballistic missiles early Tuesday morning in an apparent show of protest against the planned deployment of a U.S. anti-missile battery in South Korea, according to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).
The latest in a series of tests come amid increasing signs that Pyongyang may conduct a fifth nuclear test very soon possible this or next week. Increased nuclear-related activities at the Punggye-ri nuclear site have been detected by the intelligence authorities of South Korea and the United States.
The South Korean military warned that the North is likely to increase military provocations in the coming weeks.
The allies announced their decision on July 8 to deploy a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery in South Korea next year to defend the country from the North's evolving nuclear and ballistic missile threats.
The three missiles, believed to be Scuds or Nodongs, were fired between 5:45 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. from Hwangju, North Hwanghae Province, with two missiles flying about 500 to 600 kilometers before landing in the East Sea, the JCS said.
It added that details about the other one still need to be analyzed as its trajectory appeared to have been unclear. A source noted on condition of anonymity that one missile could have exploded in the air or crashed soon after launch.
The U.S. Strategic Command also confirmed the missile launch, saying that the first two missiles were believed to be Scuds, while the third was a Nodong.
"Two missiles flew about 500 to 600 kilometers, far enough to strike any targets in all of South Korea including the far southern port city of Busan," said JCS spokesman Col. Jeon Ha-kyu.
"We believe that the launch was related to a warning from the North's General Staff of the Korean People's Army. We take the launch as an armed protest from the North," he said.
On July 11, Pyongyang warned that it would make "merciless" retaliatory strikes against Seoul and Washington from the moment the THAAD location was selected. The allies announced Seongju, North Gyeongsang Province, as the location for THAAD, July 13.
A military official said, asking not to be named, that the North was likely to use Scud missiles to strike Seongju, and that the South will establish a layered defensive shield along with the THAAD and the Patriot Advanced Capability (PAC) low-altitude missile defense system to destroy them.
THAAD is capable of intercepting incoming missiles at high-altitudes at ranges up to 200 kilometers, while the PAC-3 system has a maximum range of 30 kilometers, he added.
The latest launches from the North come after it test-fired a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM), July 9.
The JCS strongly commended them, saying they were a provocative action that severely threatened national security and people's safety in the South.
"We are closely watching any military moves from the North and are fully prepared for additional provocations," the JCS said.
The North's Scud has a range of 300 to 500 kilometers, while the Nodong has a range of 1,300 kilometers. Scuds are capable of striking the entire Korean Peninsula, while the Nodong can hit targets on the Japanese mainland and Okinawa.
With regard to the possibility of an additional nuclear test by the North, the Ministry of National Defense said that the repressive state is ready to go ahead with such a test at anytime if its leadership determines it should do so.
Cheong Seong-chang, senior fellow at the Sejong Institute, told reporters, "The North probably believes that stronger sanctions would not be imposed even if it pushes ahead with an additional nuclear test as China and Russia are opposed to Seoul and Washington's decision to deploy a THAAD battery here."
The top foreign policy adviser to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump blasted the free trade pact with South Korea again on Monday, calling it a "mistake" that more than doubled American trade deficits with the Asian country.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), who oversees Trump's foreign policy team, has expressed deeply negative views of free trade deals, often using the pact with South Korea as an example to make the case the administration of President Barack Obama duped the country into supporting deals that turned out to be bad for the U.S.
"I supported most of the trade deals. I supported the Korean -- when the last big one. I supported the China deal. I think they were now mistakes," Sessions said on MSNBC. "The data came in. It was not anything close to what they promised."
"In Korea, they promised -- when Obama signed it and I voted for it -- that we would increase exports to Korea by $10 billion a year. It was $30 million in increase last year, four years later. Whereas their imports to us were $15 billion increase. The trade deficit is more than double," the senator said.
Sessions said that the U.S. is a trading nation and he believes in trade, but stressed that the U.S. shouldn't allow its trading partners "to cheat, to manipulate the currency manipulation and other things that take jobs unfairly."
He also said that Trump can show "we've had bad trade deals and how things are not working well."
Trump has also been critical of free trade.
In an economic policy speech early this month, the billionaire real-estate tycoon claimed that the free trade deal with South Korea enlarged U.S. trade deficits and cost American jobs. He called the pact, which has been in effect since 2012 and is considered a symbol of the economic alliance between the two countries, "a job-killing deal."
Trump also vowed to pull out of the yet-to-be-ratified, 12-nation Trans Pacific Partnership if elected president. He also said he would immediately renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement to get a better deal, and withdraw from the deal unless Canada and Mexico agree to a renegotiation.
These negative views have reinforced concern that Trump could seek a renegotiation of the deal with Korea.
Walid Phares, another foreign policy adviser to Trump, said in an interview with Yonhap New Agency in May that Trump wants to go back to "ground zero" with regard to the trade deal.
These claims run counter to the view of the International Trade Commission (ITC) that the Korea deal has been good for American interests.
In a report late last month, the ITC said that the agreement with Korea is estimated to have improved bilateral merchandise trade balances by $15.8 billion last year. That means that had it not been for the deal, the U.S. trade deficits would have been larger. (Yonhap)
President Park Geun-hye and H.E. Ambassador Fabien Penone.
By H.E. Fabien Penone
Today is Bastille Day, the French National Day. The friendship between France and Korea goes back to 130 years.
We are celebrating this anniversary with the Year of France in Korea. More than 200 events will be organized from March to end-December. They will show a creative France and will cover all fields.
Bilateral relations are at their best. President Francois Hollande came to Korea on a state visit in November last year, and President Park Geun-hye made a state visit to France in June 2016.
Business is expanding. There are about 200 French companies in Korea, representing more than 28,000 local jobs.
Thanks in large part to the EUKorea FTA, trade between France and Korea has recorded a 50 percent increase in the past ten years, reaching $9 billion in 2015. Frances investments in Korea represent $4 billion.
We are also developing new partnerships in the high-tech sector. A French Tech Hub was inaugurated in Seoul in March 2016 to foster cooperation between our startups. There are also new initiatives in innovative industries, such as autonomous vehicles and e-health.
The friendship between our two countries also relies on people-to-people exchange.
We want to bring the number of Korean students in France from 6500 in 2015 to 10 000 in 2020. During the same period, we will make our best to increase the number of French students in Korea from 1000 to 3000 and more. We are also supporting cooperation between local governments.
Finally, tourism is a high priority. We encourage Korean people to visit France and discover Paris and regional destinations.
For us, the France-Korea Year 2015-2016 provides a unique opportunity to initiate long-term projects between our two countries and people.
Happy Bastille Day!
Tripartite MoU signing. David-Pierre Jalicon, Chairman, FKCCI, Jean-Paul Vermes, Chairman, CCIP-IdF, Park Yong-maan, Chairman, KCCI.
On June 1986, 20 French entrepreneurs launched the French Business Association in Korea with the aim of federating and providing assistance to all French companies wishing to develop in Korea. In 1991, the Chamber, which gathered, then, 91 affiliates, opened its membership to Korean and non-French Companies, thus truly becoming a bilateral chamber. Ever since, its community has steadily grown in number and diversity.
Nowadays, FKCCI, which celebrates, this year, its 30th anniversary, boasts a vibrant community strong of a recordhigh number of 348 members, up by over 32% compared to 2014. It is the 4th foreign Chamber in Korea and has become a well-established and recognized institution and interlocutor by Korean and French authorities, media and corporate groups alike.
FKCCI has built on this momentum but has always remained true to it its original mission: to promote bilateral exchanges between the French and Korean business communities; to represent, connect and assist its business community.
Striving to open as many doors as possible for its members, the FKCCI continues to sign cooperation agreements with key partners. For instance, it signed a MoU with the city of Daegu and the French Embassy on April 11, 2016. And, on July the 2nd, the chairmen of the French Korean Chamber of Commerce, the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Paris Ile-de- France signed an agreement to foster increased collaboration for the mutual benefit of their respective member companies.
Fueled by this spirit of fraternity, the FKCCI is proud and happy to bring together French and Koreans for a wonderful and festive Bastille Day reception. Join us tonight to celebrate the French National Day and the longstanding relationship between France and Korea, from 7pm onwards at the Floating Islands on the bank of the Han River! Everyone is welcome!
French Korean Chamber of Commerce and Industry www.fkcci.com
By Dominique Boutter
The celebration of the 130th anniversary of the diplomatic relations between France and Korea, and the numerous events of all kind organized on this occasion in both countries, represent a unique occasion to develop even more the business relations between our two nations.
On this Bastille Day 2016, Business France, the public agency supporting the international development of the French economy, would like to extend a warm salute to all French and Korean businessmen in Korea, and to wish them a year of great opportunities, growth and prosperity.
During this special year, Business France has been working hard to enhance the relations between French and Korean companies, trying to promote business partnerships in many sectors.
On the trade side, France is the 3rd commercial partner of Korea in the European Union, and Business France accompanies around 350 French companies every year to discover the Korean market.
This year, we gave special emphasis to consumer goods (fashion and beauty products), wine and food, especially French deli meat called charcuterie, to French Tech emerging sectors that are really booming like Internet related technologies, financial technologies, medical technologies, robotics, but also to more traditional industrial equipment or services for the energy, shipyards, industrial construction, automotive or aerospace sector.
On the foreign investment side, France ranks 2nd in Europe and 5th in the world and remains the main destination in Europe for industrial investment. France offers already a great business environment in terms of infrastructures, high level education, R&D, among others.
The French Government is progressively improving the competitiveness of France through specific measures of tax relief and a new Employment Law. Korean Investments to France are increasing, mostly for European headquarters, R&D centers, Logistic bases,.
During this year, Business France has also been developing specific communication on French Tech and especially French creativity, through the Creative France campaign that was launched in 10 major partner countries of France including Korea. On Bastille Day, we will also celebrate the creativity of French entrepreneurs who develop their activity in Korea.
Last but not least, Business France also took the opportunity of the France-Korea year to sign MOUs with the French Korean Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FKCCI) and with its Korean counterpart KOTRA, in order to facilitate even more business relations between our two countries. Please do not hesitate to contact us at seoul@businessfrance.fr.
By John Redmond
An Australian tradition, "Christmas in July" will be held at the Australia Centre of the Australian Embassy, Friday.
This year, the host of the event, the Australian Chamber of Commerce in Korea (AustCham Korea), will also use the occasion to thank and say farewell to its patron, Australian Ambassador Bill Paterson, who will depart from Korea at the end of August.
The evening will include food, drinks and a raffle.
All money raised will be donated to the Jeon Jin Sang Clinic and Hospice, which provides medical services to the underprivileged.
Raffle prizes include a Singapore Airlines return ticket to Australia, accommodation, meal vouchers for Millennium Hilton and Four Seasons, a selection of Australian wines and gym membership.
Formed over 20 years ago, the 250-member AustCham Korea presents both Australian and Korean businesses and aims to promote Australian businesses in Korea through providing information, connections and representation.
"Christmas in July" celebrations are celebrated by many countries in the Southern Hemisphere including Australia, South Africa, Samoa and Argentina in order to celebrate Christmas in winter.
The event will be from 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. and costs 25,000 won for members and 35,000 won for nonmembers.
Please RSVP as soon as possible to secure your place. Payment can be made by bank transfer or at the door.
The Australia Centre is on the 18th floor of the Kyobo Building.
For more information, visit austchamkorea.org, email admin@austchamkorea.org or call (02) 766-9590.
The UK will not begin its formal divorce from the European Union by invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty in 2016, a government lawyer told the High Court on July 19, Reuters reported.
Lawyer Jason Coppell referred to statements made by Prime Minister Theresa May who has said article 50 should not be triggered this year.
However, he indicated that the government's current position could change.
By Choi Sung-jin
Poor fellow! The past two weeks or so must have seemed like two decades for Na Hyang-wook.
Na, former chief of the Education Ministry's policy planning bureau, has become the most dissed person in Korea since the fateful dinner he hosted for two journalists from the vernacular daily Kyunghyang Shinmun.
Does he deserve all the criticisms and denunciations that have been heaped on him or was he just a victim of scoop-hungry, falsehearted reporters, as many officials and even some media people seem to think? Let's go back to July 7.
During the dinner, a tipsy Na told the reporters, "Korea needs to solidify the caste system." At first, the journalists laughed away the comment, thinking it a bad joke. Then Na reiterated his remark, with a quip from the 2015 film, "Inside Men," in which a character says, "The people are like dogs and pigs and should be treated as such. It's just enough to feed them and keep them alive."
What did Na do wrong exactly? He just thought aloud, perhaps too loud, what the elite bureaucrats, judges, prosecutors, politicians and corporate executives have long known as the truth. That most Koreans, especially the younger generations, call their country "Hell Joseon," a reference to the hellish version of the medieval feudal kingdom, means the general public, too, already know they can hardly break out of the modern day caste system built on power and money and inheritance from ancestors.
Asked whom he meant by "the people," Na said he referred to the "99 percent" (as in 99 vs. 1). He made only two minor mistakes there: first, Na forgot the journalists in front of him were not from one of the three large conservative dailies whose members could belong to the 1 percent but from a small progressive paper where reporters may regard themselves closer to the 99 percent. Second, he set the portions of the scope of dogs and pigs too wide. Had Na made the percentage of elite and beasts at 50 to 50, or at least 30 to 70, a far smaller number of pigs and dogs might have bitten him.
The Kyunghyang reporters should be blamed for being too tenacious instead.
They must have known Na's character from what he had said thus far and stopped there. But they went ahead with testing his patience by asking whether or not he could think the 19-year-old part-time worker who was hit and killed by a train while repairing a screen door at a Seoul subway station in May as one of his own children. Not only did Na say "no" but also called those who said yes "hypocrites." Honesty should be the first and foremost virtue of an education official. When the reporters asked whether this administration thinks it necessary to try to narrow the social gap, Na got even more frank, saying, "How can all Koreans be the same while they start from different lines? There is a thing called reality, you know."
Again Na did little wrong except for most faithfully representing the administration he works for. This is the government that secretly decides on the location for deploying the latest U.S. missile defense system with potentially fatal environmental hazards without saying a word about it to the residents beforehand, let alone discussing it with them. Could it be possible unless the power elite regards people as dogs and pigs that they have only to feed and keep alive? Also officials sided with employers who say workers can, and should, live with 1.07 million won ($941) a month, just enough to subsist but not daring to meet friends or dates under the pretext of making the nation more competitive but actually for the purpose of making the rich richer, through numerous collusions among themselves.
People have complained and wondered why the nation's education system increasingly exhausts students and keeps their parents more and more financially pinched. The 47-year-old education official showed that the people in charge want "the dogs and pigs" not to try to become the 1 percent by making exams more and more difficult and sending private tutoring costs sky high. Someone should tell the people the cold truth, however cruel it might be. Na seemed to suit the role best, given that he would not revoke or revise his remarks when the reporters gave him opportunities to do so later, a prisoner of conscience of sorts. Even at a parliamentary hearing where Na admitted he committed a deadly sin, he seemed to be unaware of exactly what he did wrong.
Na's conviction was so strong that he even went as far as to misrepresent foreign examples. Na described the United States as an ideal country of the caste system where black people and Latinos dare not enter into politics but remain content with being fed and kept alive. I just hope President Barack Obama and onetime Republican presidential hopefuls, including Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, have not heard him. This small mistake was no problem at all, however, as he was just an education official, not a diplomat.
Na did wrong for the 1 percent because he broke loose the secret shared only among them but he did good for the 99 percent because he reminded the dogs and pigs of where they stand now and provoked them to try to change it.
Koreans have long called utterly useless and immoral people "bastards worse than dogs and pigs." Thanks to Na, Korean voters will likely try to elect a leader who can weed out officials who belong to the 1 percent but are worse than dogs and pigs next year. If he or she fails to do so, the people may feel like overthrowing the entire establishment.
By all appearances, Na deserves huge thanks from the people. As to the Kyunghyang reporters, they just did what they should do. Had they looked it over as just the gaffe of a drunken official, they must be called in other names than journalists. Alas, the 1 percent fired Na Tuesday, sending him back to the world of 99 percent.
Choi Sung-jin is The Korea Times' senior writer. Contact him at choisj@ktimes.com.
Local production of Hyundai Motor cars has halved over the past decade. Hyundai Motor, which forms the world's fifth-largest automotive group with its affiliate Kia Motors, produced only 36 percent of its motor vehicles at home in the first half of this year, compared with 72.7 percent in 2005.
There are many reasons for the automaker's deep cut in domestic production, but that's primarily because top management has decided to relocate production lines abroad because of labor unrest, which usually results in high wage increases.
Against this gloomy backdrop, unionized workers at Hyundai Motor launched a partial strike Tuesday with their counterparts from Hyundai Heavy Industries. Workers of the two firms will also hold a rally Wednesday and Friday in the southeastern industrial city of Ulsan where both companies have their biggest plants. It is the first time in 23 years that workers in the two companies have staged industrial action simultaneously.
Hyundai Motor's union demands a 152,050 won ($133) wage increase and a performance-based bonus amounting to 30 percent of last year's net profit. Hyundai Heavy's workers demand the right to recommend an outside director, in addition to a monthly pay increase of 96,712 won.
Unions are able to go on a strike only if they undergo due procedures, but it's questionable if now is the time for them to walk out.
First of all, it's difficult to predict at the moment how severe the shock from Britain's exit from the European Union will be amid the prolonged global economic slump. Domestically, political and economic uncertainties are running deep following the April 13 general election.
Hyundai Motor has suffered drops in operating profit for eight consecutive quarters in the face of tougher competition both at home and abroad. Hyundai Heavy has been forced to shed thousands of jobs as part of government-led restructuring of the nation's once-mighty shipbuilding industry.
More importantly, subcontractors of the two companies have no other alternative but to suffer production losses from the strikes. This will inevitably deal a fatal blow to the already ailing regional economy in Ulsan and its nearby areas.
It's long past time for Korea to come up with fundamental solutions to put the brakes on strikes that trouble manufacturing giants there almost every year. The first step would be for both labor and management to restore trust, sharing the belief that job losses arising from the relocation of factories overseas will cause irreparable damage to the economy for a long time.
Scientific, objective explanation needed to quell rumors
The government's efforts to convince Seongju residents of the safety of U.S. missile interceptors have not been enough to assuage their firm opposition to the deployment of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery in their town.
Although belated, Seoul and Washington have been expanding media activities with the aim to ensure the public of THAAD's safety. The defense ministry held a briefing with newsroom chiefs of the southeastern Yeongnam region, Monday, to explain major issues relating to THAAD deployment. On the same day, the Korean media was visiting the site of an advanced anti-ballistic missile battery in Guam. This was the first time the U.S. allowed foreign media to access a THAAD battery at the Andersen Air Force Base on Northern Guam.
During the Korean media's tour, U.S. officials stressed that every effort will be made to ensure that the THAAD battery in Korea will be operated safely. But even after such a rare media event, Seongju's anti-THAAD movement is getting fiercer as concerns still remain over adverse health effects from the electronic pulses from the radar that comes with the system and potential harm to their fruit produce. The fact that similar systems in the U.S., Japan, or Guam are not situated in a populous inland area as Seongju, a town of 50,000, have added to the residents' anger.
In light of the increasing threat from North Korea, many Koreans support the government's decision to deploy THAAD. A Gallup survey published July 15 showed that 50 percent of the respondents were in favor of THAAD deployment. But the government's lack of communication has fueled public worries, and rumors about the health and environment hazards linked to the THAAD system.
The Park Geun-hye administration should make every effort to address the complaints of Seongju from here onwards. It should meet regularly with the residents through briefings to properly hear their concerns and reflect them in their countermeasures to support the residents after THAAD deployment. Even in Japan, protests about the hazards of THAAD system are ongoing despite a meticulous advance review before deploying a AN/TPY-2 X-band radar used to detect incoming targets at the Kyogamisaki military base in Kyoto in 2014. In June, more than 300 protesters complained of the noise level and other issues in front of the base.
Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn knelt down when meeting with the administrative chief of Sejongju last week, but his visit only turned into a violent scene. This should not discourage the government from making consistent efforts to convince the residents with sincere explanations and specific countermeasures that are acceptable to them.
The government also needs to provide more scientific explanation that the THAAD system will not pose threats to the Seongju resident's safety and livelihoods. For this, an objective and meticulous environmental report is crucial as the government has yet to provide concrete proof that there will not be safety issues 20 to 30 years down the road.
Dankook University President Chang Ho-sung, third from left, hosts an opening ceremony for the Software Design Convergent Center on its Jukjeon campus in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, Tuesday. Rep. You Seung-hee of the main opposition Minjoo Party of Korea, second from left, and Yongin Mayor Jung Chan-min, second from right, participated in the ceremony. / Courtesy of Dankook University
By Chung Hyun-chae
Dankook University held an opening ceremony for the Software Design Convergent Center on its Jukjeon campus in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, Tuesday.
"I hope our students will become creative talents who can innovate in a free atmosphere at the SW Design Convergent Center," Dankook University President Chang Ho-sung said.
"We aim to cultivate creative talent inspired by the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs," said university spokesman Kim Nam-phil.
The university launched the center in May in cooperation with SAP, IBM, SK Telecom and Yongin municipal authorities. The Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning also provided financial support for the establishment of the center.
Dankook and the three global companies signed agreements on nurturing great talent during the opening ceremony.
Under the accord, the university and the companies will jointly develop innovative educational programs, create high value-added jobs and exchange information and manpower.
Design thinking is a solution-focused thinking method breaking away from fixed ideas. This is usually conducted in groups or teams rather than individually to encourage collective intellect.
D.school of Stanford University and i.school of the University of Tokyo are leading design thinking. D.school focuses on industries by collaborating with global companies to launch new products and services, while i.school tries to apply design thinking methods to public research for the common good.
"We will develop Korean-type design thinking combining the two schools' good points," Kim Tae-hyeong, director of the SW Design Convergent Center, told The Korea Times.
As part of helping students put design thinking to practical use, Dankook encouraged the graduate school's data science master's students in April to participate in a contest where five teams from six universities competed to activate a flower festival in Bucheon, Gyeonggi Province, and they won the competition.
The center has also been trying to promote public interest. Dankook faculty and students attended a workshop organized by the i.school last month.
"We practiced coming up with ideas and solving real problems such as illegal banners in Yongin while conducting a field investigation in Tokyo with i.school researchers and students," said a workshop participant.
Dankook and IBM signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to establish the company's Bluemix Garage, a research space where students can explore new ideas and start their own businesses, in the center.
The Software Design Convergent Center also has a space in which students can experience augmented reality, receiving help from Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC), a U.S.-based computer software company specializing in augmented reality technology.
"We expect our students to be able to conduct a real technology demonstration of the prototypes they made at the space," said spokesman Kim said.
Recently augmented reality technology has been spotlighted, taking advantage of the popularity of the Pokemon Go, a free-to-play location-based augmented reality mobile game developed by Niantic, a startup company which was started as a Google in-house venture.
Hancom Chairman Lee Sang-chul shares his corporate vision in a press conference at the Lotte City Hotel on Jeju Island, Friday. / Courtesy of Hancom
By Lee Min-hyung
JEJU Hancom has unveiled its ambitious plan to generate more than 100 billion won ($87.98 million) in sales this year, by increasing its market share against industry leader Microsoft.
"Hancom is the only company to have survived the fierce office software battle against Microsoft," Hancom Chairman Lee Sang-chul said in a press conference at Lotte City Hotel in Jeju City on this southern island, Friday.
The Hancom chief acknowledged that it may be very tough to achieve dominance in the global office software market, in which Microsoft holds a 90.8 percent market share.
On a global basis, Adobe is the second-largest player in the office software industry with a 3.8 percent share, followed by Google Docs with 2.6 percent. Hancom holds 0.4 percent of the global share.
But Hancom is a stronger player in the local office software market where it has a 28.7 percent share, while Microsoft holds a still-whopping 71.3 percent share.
"We have identified five key overseas markets South America, the Middle East, Russia, China and India," he said. "We are still optimistic over our global business, and will be more aggressive in our expansion strategy by building a sustainable software ecosystem."
The company also unveiled its short-term goal for the plan.
Lee Won-phil, president of Hancom, said: "We plan to reach a 51-percent local market share, and will make all-out efforts to achieve five percent in the global office software market."
As part of its overseas expansion drive, the company recently established an R&D center in India. The company said it plans to secure 20 percent of developers from the emerging economic powerhouse.
The company chairman also stressed that it only identifies Microsoft as its sole rival.
Chairman Lee said: "We don't see local software companies including TmaxSoft as our rival, but identify them as companions in the same industry."
"Our sole rival is Microsoft, as some 30 office software companies have failed to compete with Hancom and Microsoft for the past few decades," he said. "We plan to find ways to diversify our revenue streams into various sectors including mobile ecosystems."
The company says it is now in talks with some leading overseas firms over the revenue-diversification project.
The company plans to launch an e-book platform by partnering with one of China's largest IT giants, and tap into emerging markets including China, Africa and other regions which have weak software infrastructure.
By Kim Yoo-chul
SK hynix said Tuesday that it will overhaul its salary system for company employees at manufacturing lines to stay productive amid challenging market circumstances.
"SK hynix is introducing various incentive systems for wages to remain adaptive in the face of growing challenges to the firm's key businesses," the SK Group affiliate said in a statement.
The company said it will fix the details of its new salary system after thorough discussions with representatives of its union. But it added the new measure intended to do more than cut fixed costs.
Out of the estimated 22,000 employees of SK hynix in Korea, about 12,000 will be affected by the new system, excluding 10,000 in administrative positions.
"Basically, an employee whose given tasks exceed management's expectations and targets will get more incentives than those who've been less productive, said the memory chip manufacturer. "The annual salary difference will be up to 10 percent between employees."
Since last year, SK's management has teamed up with its union to seek out measures for improving efficiency and lifting employee productivity at its domestic manufacturing facilities.
SK hynix operates massive DRAM plants in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province, while it produces NAND flash memory chips at facilities in Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province.
SK hynix's plan is considered a rare move, as most manufacturing companies in Korea maintain a distinct hierarchy for employees, each of which comes with a prescribed title.
But the plan has been in line with Seoul's initiatives to encourage companies to offer more job openings, as more flexibility in the labor market is expected to help boost productivity, which has slowed markedly since 2012.
Employees at SK hynix had been receiving their paychecks on a seniority-based structure. Employees with more experience have so far been paid more than newer employees despite any special skills and individual performance.
Too ambitious?
But it remains to be seen whether SK's move to kill the hierarchy system for salaries will pay off as the new system will make senior employees feel inferior.
"Because employees working at manufacturing facilities don't need much creativity, it seems likely that the new salary system will disempower employees. Seniority was one reason why SK hynix can move quickly and achieve good production yields," said one employee at the company's Icheon plant by telephone.
SK hynix, however, said the new system will give employees a "can-do spirit" and encourage them to "do more" with a greater sense of labor flexibility.
With the wage overhaul, SK hynix said it also plans to simplify its eight-tier ranking system down to five and expand programs to help its employees remain competitive in the wake of growing threats from Chinese companies.
"Employees at SK's manufacturing facilities could learn about core technologies required in each manufacturing process via educational kits. The company will also operate a role model system, helping junior employees to learn technology knowhow from senior employees," said company spokesman Kim Jae-soon, adding SK hynix will pay additional benefits to employees serving as role models.
For greater job security, SK hynix agreed with the labor union to introduce preemptive measures protecting its employees from sudden layoffs.
"SK hynix won't turn its back on employees as we will accelerate efforts to defend the best interests of our employees," said the spokesman.
For example, the Asian Financial Crisis of the late 1990s shook things up as layoffs changed the relationship between company management and unions.
So did increasing competition from new entrants in the memory chip sector that SK hynix has long been considered the sector leader, prompting it to evolve, said Kim.
By Park Si-soo
Powerful bombs struck the Brussels airport and one of the city's subway stations Tuesday (local time), killing at least 31 people and wounding dozens.
Belgium raised its terror alert to the highest level, diverting planes and trains and ordering people to stay where they were. Airports across Europe immediately tightened security.
The two airport blasts, at least one of which was blamed on a suicide bomber, left behind a chaotic scene of splattered blood in the departure lounge as windows were blown out, ceilings collapsed and travelers streamed out of the smoky building, according to Associated Press.
About an hour later, another bomb exploded on a rush-hour subway train near the European Union headquarters. Terrified passengers had to evacuate through darkened tunnels to safety.
"What we feared has happened," Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel told reporters. "In this time of tragedy, this black moment for our country, I appeal to everyone to remain calm but also to show solidarity."
The U.S. Republican Party opened its national convention Monday to officially nominate Donald Trump as its standard-bearer for the November presidential election as the party remains deeply divided over his candidacy.
The four-day convention in Cleveland, Ohio, will culminate with a Trump speech accepting the nomination on Thursday. His nomination comes amid persisting questions about whether the combative candidate will be able to put the badly divided party together.
Underlining the division, high-profile Republicans are skipping the convention, including former Presidents George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush, former Republican presidential nominees Mitt Romney and John McCain, as well as John Kasich, the governor of the state hosting the convention.
During the convention, about 60 people will take the podium to make speeches in support of Trump, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former presidential primary rivals Sen. Ted Cruz and Ben Carson.
The party will also unveil its new policy platform and formally select Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as Trump's vice presidential running mate. Trump named Pence as his pick Friday.
Pence, 57, is known as a staunch conservative and a member of the conservative Tea Party movement. A veteran politician with a dozen years as a House lawmaker before becoming governor in 2013, Pence could also strengthen Trump's connections to Congress and the party.
Trump's Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, is scheduled to be nominated at the Democratic National Convention set for July 25-28 in Philadelphia.
Clinton is expected to name her vice presidential pick later this week. Leading candidates include Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. (Yonhap)
A Brazilian judge briefly blocked Facebook Inc's WhatsApp messaging service on Tuesday for failing to cooperate in a criminal investigation, before the nation's top court overturned the measure in the third such incident since December.
Federal Supreme Court President Ricardo Lewandowski said in a decision that it seemed "scarcely reasonable or proportional" for a judge in Rio de Janeiro state to have ordered the indefinite suspension of the messaging app until it revealed encrypted messages pertaining to a confidential case.
Still, the criminal judge left some 100 million Brazilian users without access to the messaging app for hours on Tuesday afternoon, showing the vast and unpredictable discretionary power of Brazil's lower courts.
WhatsApp stood by its defense that messages sent over the app are not stored on its servers and cannot be turned over to the courts. Co-founder and Chief Executive Jan Koum even took to Facebook to vent his frustration with the recurring legal issues in Brazil.
"It's shocking that less than two months after Brazilian people and lawmakers loudly rejected blocks of services like Whatsapp, history is repeating itself," he posted.
The office of Brazil's attorney general reiterated its position that judges who suspend WhatsApp are incorrectly interpreting a 2014 law meant to update the legal framework for the internet.
Still, that guidance has not stopped judges frustrated with the modern limits of wiretaps in drug-trafficking investigations from going after the service and even briefly jailing a senior Facebook executive in March.
"As we've said in the past, we cannot share information we don't have access to," said a WhatsApp spokesperson in a public statement.
The National Security Council will convene Wednesday in the aftermath of a failed coup attempt, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Tuesday, Anadolu reported.
"Our government is in an important preparation and hopefully we will convene the National Security Council on Wednesday, he told a crowd gathered outside his Istanbul residence in the Kisikli neighborhood.
Following the meetings, the Council of Ministers will gather and announce an important decision, he said. I will not tell you now," he added.
"We will hopefully overcome this process one way or another. Now, efforts are going on in a very good way, he said.
At least 208 people, including members of the security forces and civilians, were martyred in Istanbul and Ankara and nearly 1,500 others wounded as they protested against Fridays attempted coup in which helicopter gunships and jet fighters targeted public institutions and anti-putsch protesters.
The Turkish government says the failed military overthrow was organized by followers of U.S.-based preacher Fetullah Gulen, who is accused of a long-running campaign to overthrow the state through supporters within Turkish institutions, particularly the military, police and judiciary, forming the parallel state.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday strongly rejected claims that a recent coup attempt was staged, Anadolu reported.
"Unfortunately, that is only misinformation. How can you plan such a thing? How can you allow so many civilians to lose their lives? How can human conscience allow that? That is beyond possible," Erdogan said during an interview with CNN international.
"Tayyip Erdogan and his friends, his colleagues would be the first ones to reject that kind of idea. We risk our lives for the people," he added.
Erdogan said those who tried to overthrow the government triggered the idea. "This Fetullah terrorist organization has now received the biggest hit they have ever," he said.
The attempted takeover is alleged to have been organized by followers of Fetullah Gulen -- a U.S.-based cleric in self-exile -- who is accused of a long-standing campaign to overthrow the government through supporters within the Turkish state, particularly the military, police and judiciary.
Erdogan said he has raised the issue of Gulens extradition with the U.S. president.
"I had previously made this request to [Barack] Obama, just orally, Erdogan said. But, this week our written formal request will also be conveyed to the U.S. and also to a number of Western countries and African countries. We will be sending those requests formally."
Asked about the possibility that Washington would refuse to extradite Gulen, Erdogans response suggests a similar stance going forward so long as he is the leader of Turkey. "First, we have to submit our formal request. We will ask for extradition. If there is no positive response to that formal request, if there is ever anyone criminal in the eyes of the U.S. and if they are going to ask for their extradition, as the president of the country I will not allow that, he said.
Regardless of who the U.S. requested Turkey hand over, Ankara has complied, Erdogan said, adding that because there is a mutual agreement for extraditing criminals, there should be reciprocity.
"Even if he [Gulen] is a citizen of the U.S., the U.S. should not keep such a terrorist," Erdogan said.
At pro-government rallies in Turkey this weekend following the failed coup, demands were made for the restoration of capital punishment for coup plotters whose actions caused the loss of 208 lives and injured almost 1,500 others.
"This issue now can be taken to the agenda of the parliament and it can be discussed there. We previously abolished it, but we can always go back and re-introduce it," Erdogan said.
"There is a clear crime of treason. Your request [Turkish people] can never be ignored by our government. But the leaders have to come together and discuss it. If they accept to discuss it, then as the president I will approve any decision that comes out of the parliament.
Erdogan said he was with his wife, son-in-law and grandchildren on vacation in Marmaris, southwest of Turkey when the attempted putsch occurred.
"I was informed that in Istanbul and Ankara and some other places there was some kind of movement that was going on. We decided to move out," he said.
"There is also the operation in Marmaris against me and two of my close bodyguards were martyred, they were killed. If I stayed 10 or 15 more minutes there, I would have been killed or captured."
From the time he landed at Istanbuls Ataturk Airport, F-16 jets began flying above his plane, Erdogan said.
Asked if at that moment did he think he was no longer the president of Turkey, Erdogan said it was never a consideration. "I did not have the idea cross my mind because I was with my colleagues and we never had that concern, never had trouble in thoughts."
Turkey has come under criticism for what some perceive as a crackdown on the free press there. Erdogan posed a question to those who voice those claims.
"If some people keep saying that press is not still free in Turkey, then I want to say this. There has been a coup attempt in Turkey. There are people siding with the coup plotters. There are also media outlets that have been against the coup attempt, he said.
So, my question is that against the media that supported the coup, will the Turkish justice judicial system not take any steps? Of course it will. Why? Because if you are going to suppress the attempt, then those who are siding with the attempt should be taken to the right place, exposed to right type of treatment because otherwise the citizens, the people, would be deceived via misinformation, he added.
"The people itself brought me to this position if I do not do anything they will hold me accountable when the time comes."
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19
Trend:
Air traffic between Ukraine and Turkey has been fully resumed, and flights are being carried out on a regular basis, RIA Novosti quoted Ukraines Minister of Infrastructure Volodymyr Omelyan as saying.
After the military coup attempt in Turkey, a number of Ukraines air carriers announced about cancellation and postponement of flights to Turkeys Istanbul on July 16.
On July 15 evening, Turkish authorities said a military coup attempt took place in the country.
Meanwhile, a group of servicemen announced about transition of power to them.
However, the rebelling servicemen started to surrender July 16 and Turkish authorities said the coup attempt failed.
More than 200 people have been killed in Turkey as a result of the coup attempt.
Details added (first version posted on 11:56)
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19
Trend:
Two Turkish pilots who shot down the Russian Su-24 in 2015 were taken into custody, Bloomberg reports citing a senior Turkish official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
It was reported earlier that at least one of the pilots responsible for downing of the Russian jet took part in the last week's failed coup attempt in Turkey.
On July 15 evening, Turkish authorities said a military coup attempt took place in the country.
Meanwhile, a group of servicemen announced about transition of power to them.
However, the rebelling servicemen started to surrender July 16 and Turkish authorities said the coup attempt failed.
More than 200 people have been killed in Turkey as a result of the coup attempt.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19
Trend:
Head of the Turkish oppositional Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), Devlet Bahceli has condemned the citizens lynching the servicemen who participated in the coup attempt in the country, the Haber7 newspaper reported July 19.
He said nationalism and democracy are unified against any coup threat.
A military coup wont resolve problems. Turkish people have long ago made a decision regarding the way of changing the government through democratic means, added Bahceli.
He pointed out that MHP will support the ruling Justice and Development Party if it expresses readiness to vote for reinstating the death penalty in Turkey.
On July 15 evening, Turkish authorities said a military coup attempt took place in the country.
Meanwhile, a group of servicemen announced about transition of power to them.
However, the rebelling servicemen started to surrender July 16 and Turkish authorities said the coup attempt failed.
Over 200 people have been killed in Turkey as a result of the coup attempt.
An Istanbul court has remanded a total of 278 people in custody early Tuesday over their alleged connections with Friday's deadly coup attempt, Anadolu Agency reported.
The suspects, including 13 high-ranking military officers and soldiers, have been charged with crime against government and being members of an armed terrorist organization.
According to Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor's Office, over 900 detained suspects are still being interrogated.
According to Turkey's Penal Code Article 309, any person found guilty of these charges "will be punished with heavy life imprisonment.
The deadly coup attempt occurred late on Friday when rogue elements of the Turkish military tried to overthrow the country's democratically elected government.
At least 208 people, including members of the security forces and civilians, were martyred in Istanbul and Ankara and nearly 1,500 others wounded as they protested against the coup.
The government has said the attempted coup was organized by followers of U.S.-based preacher Fetullah Gulen, who is accused of a long-running campaign to overthrow the state through supporters within the Turkish state, particularly the military, police and judiciary, forming the so-called parallel state.
At least two police officers were killed and five others were injured on Tuesday in an attack by a group of terrorists in northern Turkey, Daily Sabah reported.
A terrorist group attacked police officers on duty at a checkpoint at the entrance of the Macka district of Trabzon province.
Trabzon Governor Yucel Yavuz stated that a civilian was also wounded in the attack.
Gendarmerie forces joined efforts to track down terrorists who escaped to the woods near the clash site.
PRESS RELEASE
War over 28 Pages Red Hot. Time To Strike!
July 18, 2016 (EIRNS)With the Saudi role in 9/11 attacks now fully out in the open with the release of the 28 pages (now being called the 29 pages), the fight on the policy level continues, with the Bush-Cheney-Obama faction furiously trying to minimize their significance. No one is fooled.
This morning, two articles on AntiWar.com both put the Saudis back in the crosshairs. First, Kristen Breitweiserwho somehow discovered an extra page in the report and titles her piece "29 Pages Revealed: Corruption, Crime, Cover-up of 9/11" puts the fight in its proper context, noting that, in 2002, "President Bush did not want the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia investigated... President Bush wanted to go to war in Iraqnot Saudi Arabia. So, 29 full pages that said Saudi and Bandar instead of Hussein and Iraq was a huge problem."
And, she notes, Bush got help from the highest places, notably from the FBI:
"It is well documented that the Joint Inquiry received enormous push-back against its investigation into the Saudis. In fact, former FBI Director Mueller acknowledges that much of the information implicating the Saudis that the Inquiry investigators ultimately uncovered was unknown to him. Why does Mueller say this? Mostly because Mueller and other FBI officials had purposely tried to keep any incriminating information specifically surrounding the Saudis out of the Inquirys investigative hands. To repeat, there was a concerted effort by the FBI and the Bush Administration to keep incriminating Saudi evidence out of the Inquirys investigation. And for the exception of the 29 full pages, they succeeded in their effort."
Breitweiser then takes on the establishment apologists, saying,
"To be clear, the 9/11 Commission [which, the apolgists claim, investigated the Joint Congressional Inquiry reports 28 pages and found the Saudi claims to be inconclusive] did NOT fully investigate the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Staff Director Philip Zelikow blocked any investigation into the Saudis. Zelikow even went so far as to fire an investigator who had been brought over from the Joint Inquiry to specifically follow-up on the Saudi leads and information uncovered in the Joint Inquiry. I will repeat: the investigator was fired. In addition, Zelikow rewrote the 9/11 Commissions entire section regarding the Saudis and their connection to the 9/11 attacks. Former 9/11 Commissioners John Lehman, Bob Kerrey, and Tim Roemer have all acknowledged that the Saudis were not adequately investigated by the 9/11 Commission."
Congress will return to session just before the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and more action is to be expected now that the Saudi and British roles are there to be investigated.
PRESS RELEASE
Funding of Chinas Belt and Road Projects Estimated at $1.2 Trillion
July 18, 2016 (EIRNS)Funding for infrastructure projects along the routes defined by Chinas One Belt, One Road initiative could reach an estimated $1.2 trillion, according to the www.joc.com website today. Rajiv Biswas, IHS Chief Economist for the Asia-Pacific region, told joc.com that in terms of committed funds, "the scale looks vast."
Lenders include the new Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the Silk Road Fund, and many Chinese commercial banks and financial institutions. The AIIBs initial capital commitment was for $100 billion, but joc.com estimates that its "financial firepower" will likely be much larger than that, given the multiplicity of projects contemplated under the One Belt, One Road initiative.
These include a network of overland road and rail routes, oil and natural gas pipelines, and other infrastructure projects, stretching from Xian in Central China, through Central Asia, and extending as far as Moscow, Rotterdam, and Venice. A network of planned port and other coastal infrastructure projects extending from South and Southeast Asia to East Africa and the northern Mediterranean, is also part of the One Belt, One Road project, joc.com explains.
Clearly struck by the magnitude of the One Belt, One Road perspective, The Financial Times today publishes maps from its own report, "The New Trade Routes: Silk Road Corridor," depicting the key infrastructure projects along the New Silk Road. The City of London financial daily notes that even before China announced its One Belt, One Road project, it had already begun to redraw the energy map of the region, building oil and gas pipelines. Of the two maps shown, the first indicates routes for trans-Asian railway corridors, existing and planned gas and oil pipelines, and power lines. The second map shows transport and energy projects either underway or planned for the Central Asian region.
PRESS RELEASE
War Party Goes Berzerk Again Against Germanys Foreign Minister Steinmeier
July 18, 2016 (EIRNS)German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier did it again: In an interview with Bild am Sonntag yesterday, he warned against continuing with the "saber rattling" escalation against Russia which would only provoke counter-escalation on the Russian side and cause things to "easily get out of control" at some point. He also said that the sanctions against Russia were not intended to be there forever, that progress on the Minsk II process would make lifting sanctions possible.
This immediately embarrassed Norbert Rottgen, chairman of the Bundestag foreign relations committee, who declared that calling NATO measures into question and discussing the sanctions were "just the most wrong thing to do at this time."
After Melania Trump gave the keynote speech at the Republican National Convention Monday night, charges of plagiarism swiftly followed. Several sentences of her speech hewed closely to the speech given by Michelle Obama at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.
Its still to be determined whether this was a case of plagiarism, a speechwriters goof or simple coincidence. But in the past, plagiarism has gotten writers and politicians in hot water. In 1988, then-Sen. Joe Biden was accused of lifting parts of a campaign speech from British politician Neil Kinnock. The controversy helped kill Bidens run for president that year.
Let that be a warning to politicians and writers who might think that they can get away with lifting words from someone else. Here are some of the biggest recent cases.
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1. Stephen Ambrose. The late journalist and historian failed to attribute quotes properly in several of his books. Ambrose, who died of cancer shortly after the accusations were made public, offered a meek defense, writing, The people will judge. The reading public will decide whether my books are fraudulent and react accordingly.
2. Ben Carson. Last year, Ben Carson, the surgeon and former Republican presidential candidate, was forced to apologize after it was revealed that his book America the Beautiful contained plagiarized passages from several sources, including a website called SocialismSucks.net.
3. Molly Ivins. The late liberal columnist, considered one of Texas most incisive political commentators, was accused of plagiarism by conservative humorist Florence King. King wrote that she wished she could challenge Ivins to a duel over the lifted passages; Ivins responded with an apology (and some profanity).
4. Alex Haley. The author of the novel Roots settled a lawsuit brought against him by writer Harold Courlander, who alleged Haley had lifted several pages from Courlanders novel The African. The evidence was clear enough that Haley agreed to pay Courlander $650,000 and issue a public apology.
5. Doris Kearns Goodwin. In 2002, several publications reported that the popular historian had plagiarized other writers in her books The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys and the Pulitzer Prize-winning No Ordinary Time. Goodwin claimed that it wasnt plagiarism because she didnt intend to mislead anyone, saying, You know, at the time the book was written, it absolutely required intent to deceive in order to be plagiarism. And no one is claiming that. No one is claiming that there was any intent.
6. Jonah Lehrer. In 2012, the author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist was accused of stealing from multiple sources and fabricating Bob Dylan quotes in his book Imagine, which was pulled from shelves. Lehrer returned this month with A Book About Love, reviewed Sunday in the L.A. Times
In case you missed the speeches, heres how close they are. A section of Melania Trumps speech reads: From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life. That your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise. That you treat people with respect.
Michelle Obamas 2008 speech read in part: Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say youre going to do, that you treat people with dignity and respect .
Donald Trumps campaign manager, Paul Manafort, defended the wife of presumptive Republican presidential nominee and denied her speech was plagiarized. Theres no cribbing of Michelle Obamas speech, he told CNN. These are common words and values. To think that she would be cribbing Michelle Obamas words is crazy.
ALSO:
Melania Trumps RNC speech is strikingly similar to Michelle Obamas 2008 convention speech
Trumps campaign manager calls plagiarism accusations absurd and blames Hillary Clinton
Donald Trump should read Robert Frosts poem Mending Wall
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim criticized the acts of violence committed against the military personnel involved in Friday's failed coup attempt, Anadolu Agency reported.
Yildirim's remarks came Tuesday at a joint news conference following a meeting with Kemal Kilicdaroglu, chairman of the main opposition Republican Peoples Party, CHP, in Ankara.
Turkey is a state of law. Everything will be made right within law, and wrongdoers [putschists] will be surrendered to justice.
"Nobody can resort to physical violence, and seek revenge. This is totally unacceptable in a state of law, Yildirim said, adding that such agitators should be responded to in the necessary manner.
The premier went on to say that the necessary intervention was being made regarding the videos of such acts circulating on social media, and all unlawful acts would be responded to in the harshest manner.
Today is the day we need to boost unity and brotherhood, he said.
Kilicdaroglu said he shared Yildirim's concerns about such acts.
I especially made it clear that the acts of violence committed only against the privates and petty officers who were just following orders -- were not justified and must be investigated.
"It is our duty to release the tension in the society, the opposition party leader said.
The meeting at the Cankaya Palace, which was held upon Kilicdaroglus request over a phone call Monday, lasted about 50 minutes.
Yildirim is later scheduled to meet with the Nationalist Movement Party chairman Devlet Bahceli.
The deadly coup attempt occurred late on Friday when rogue elements of the Turkish military tried to overthrow the country's democratically elected government.
At least 208 people, including members of the security forces and civilians, were martyred in Istanbul and Ankara and nearly 1,500 others wounded as they protested against the coup.
The government has said the attempted coup was organized by followers of U.S.-based preacher Fetullah Gulen, who is accused of a long-running campaign to overthrow the state through supporters within the Turkish state, particularly the military, police and judiciary, forming the so-called parallel state.
Companies working on self-driving cars need to focus on safety we want people who start a trip to finish it, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx announced Tuesday, saying his department will issue new guidelines on the vehicles this summer.
Autonomous doesnt mean perfect, he told attendees at an industry conference in San Francisco. We need industry to take the safety aspects of this very seriously.
Foxxs remarks come in the wake of Mays fatal crash involving a Tesla Model S sedan being used in semi-autonomous autopilot mode. The car crashed into a truck that the autopilot feature did not sense, killing the cars driver.
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The Transportation Department has been working with Google, BMW, General Motors and other companies developing driverless and partly autonomous cars to adapt existing safety rules to the new technologies.
But Foxx said its time to move beyond existing safety rules.
Although vague about the guidelines, Foxx hinted that they involve pre-market approval steps for autonomous car technology. Given industry concerns about regulation hampering innovation, Foxx promised that the approach would be flexible, with a lot of input from businesses, drivers and technology experts.
We need clear lines of responsibility between industry, government and consumers, he said.
Autonomous cars have great potential to improve safety, he said, but clear rules and guidelines are needed to assure safety and boost would-be buyers confidence.
He said his department also would create a federal advisory committee to help plan how to approach autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence more generally and work with states to come up with standard approaches to regulation.
After the fatal crash in May, Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk noted that owners are told that they must remain alert and keep their hands on the steering wheel, even when using the autopilot feature.
Foxx, however, said it must be assumed that some drivers will push the limits of what the manufacturer intends. Distractions that can be reasonably foreseen must be considered for safetys sake.
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The Trump campaigns fundraising record thus far is nothing to brag about. But legal authorities have begun noticing that by choosing a sitting governor, Indianas Mike Pence, as his running mate, Donald Trump has probably shut down any hope of big contributions from Wall Street.
That has nothing to do with the investment communitys political sentiment for or against Pence. Its all about the Security and Exchange Commissions 2010 pay-to-play regulations governing political donations by investment advisors.
We are concerned that contributions may be used ... as the cover for what is much like a bribe. Securities and Exchange Commission
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As Viveca Novak of OpenSecrets.org observes, theyre forbidden to make more than minimal contributions to any public official in a position to influence the selection of an investment advisor to a government entity. As Indiana governor, Pence is deemed to have influence over the selection of investment advisors to Indiana public pension funds such as the Indiana Public Retirement System, which had about $29.9 billion in assets at the end of 2015.
The penalties for violating the rule are draconian: the loss of any existing contracts with the subject funds, and a ban on new contracts for a two-year time-out, starting with the date of the donation. The stricture applies to investment firms executives and political action committees, as well as employees involved in soliciting business from government agencies and those employees supervisors. It means that most hedge funds and private equity firms their PACs, their executives, their fund managers and probably their investor relations staff cant give to the ticket, Novak writes.
The rules would have applied to donors to at least one other official vetted for the ticket by the Trump campaign: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
The pay-to-play rules were imposed after a spate of scandals in which political donations were traded for investment management deals with pension funds. The SECs commentary on the rules states candidly that we are concerned that contributions may be used as the cover for what is much like a bribe a payment that accrues to the private advantage of the official and is intended to induce him to exercise his discretion in the donors favor.
The SEC defines a contribution as almost anything of value, even a loan or advance, though not volunteer time. The de minimus exemption is $350 for a contribution by a donor eligible to vote for the candidate, and $250 for anyone else.
Thats a big difference from the standard limits for donations to political campaigns. Under federal law, individuals this year can contribute up to $2,700 to each candidate or candidate committee, $5,000 to each PAC, $10,000 total to state, district and local party committees and $33,400 to national party committees.
While donors can argue in some of these cases that theyre not contributing directly to a public official, Wall Street firms have been extremely gun-shy about the rules. Major firms require that political donations by covered employees be vetted in advance by compliance teams, and have tended to shy away from any donations that might even smell like a violation.
The rules have been a headache for campaigns almost since they were imposed. In 2012 they put a crimp in Texas Gov. Rick Perrys presidential fundraising, and were said to have played a role in the Mitt Romney campaigns rejection of Christie as running mate. Even though neither the Romney nor Obama campaigns that year featured a sitting governor on the ticket, both struggled to clarify the rules for potential investment industry donors so they wouldnt be inordinately discouraged.
Keep up to date with Michael Hiltzik. Follow @hiltzikm on Twitter, see his Facebook page, or email michael.hiltzik@latimes.com.
Return to Michael Hiltziks blog.
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The official-looking letter from Congressional Monitor gets right to the point: The United States Congress is currently debating the vital issues of immigration reform, veterans healthcare and government spending levels.
It instructs recipients to fill out the accompanying survey so that the Democratic and Republican leadership of both houses of Congress know your position on these important issues.
The letter apparently is being sent to homes throughout Southern California if not nationwide. Ive heard from a number of people asking if the survey is legit. I too received the letter a few days ago and have spent way too much time since then trying to figure out what Congressional Monitor is all about.
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All I have to show for my efforts is a grudging respect for how well these guys have masked their trail. And a warning to others who may be tempted to make their voices heard to Congress via this mailer: Dont.
Its not a real survey. This is very likely a list-building exercise. Jack Pitney, professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College
Its not a real survey, said Jack Pitney, a professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College who studies political polling. This is very likely a list-building exercise.
That is, it looks like an attempt by someone to gather nuggets of information from consumers that can be sold to marketers, or possibly scammers.
The biggest red flag, Pitney said, is a request at the bottom of the survey for recipients to divulge their home, cell and work numbers.
That may be the main thing theyre after, he said. Phone numbers are valuable.
Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University social psychologist who specializes in polling techniques, agreed that the goal of the survey doesnt appear to be informing congressional leaders.
The questionnaire is too badly written for that, he said. On the other hand, theres a big market for selling peoples phone numbers, especially if theyre not listed.
See the most-read stories in Business this hour
The survey has seven questions. Most are benign, such as Do you favor tax incentives to encourage domestic energy production? The most suspicious question is this one:
In light of the recent televised gun violence do you think Congress should:
(A) Let the states and communities decide what action is best
(B) Ban high-capacity magazines
(C) Increase mental health care and treatment of mental illness
(D) Do nothing
Notably lacking among those choices is gun control. Ammo control, yes, but not the actual firearm.
Congressional Monitors website offers few clues. Its decidedly amateurish, built using WordPress, which is free publishing software favored by bloggers. Theres no privacy policy. No phone number. An email I sent to the site went unanswered.
The site says that survey results go to a collection center, are data entered and then sent to the leadership of both houses of Congress, and also used for various marketing research purposes.
That last bit, of course, opens the door wide to all manner of privacy problems.
The address on Congressional Monitors cover letter is a Washington, D.C., post office box. The postage-paid envelope for returning the survey is addressed to a post office box in Virginia. The website provides a Washington, D.C., street address as Congressional Monitors address of record.
Bizapedia says thats the address of Corporation Service Co., which acts as a registered agent for Congressional Monitor and numerous other businesses that may not want exposure to sunlight. No one at Corporation Service Co. returned my call. Congressional Monitor uses a separate agent for its website registration.
However, some digging revealed that the address is also home to the offices of Berman & Co., a Washington PR firm known for creating sneaky front groups that look like grassroots organizations but actually represent the interests of corporate clients.
I wrote last year about the so-called Center for Consumer Freedom, which purports to be devoted to promoting personal responsibility and protecting consumer choices but in reality does the bidding of the restaurant and beverage industries, among others. Its run by Berman & Co.
Nope, not us, James Bowers, senior vice president of Berman & Co., said when I asked if his shop was behind Congressional Monitor. I believe him. Whatever else you want to say about the Berman crew, they stand behind their work.
After looking at the survey and Congressional Monitors website, Bowers said the production value and questions were too slapdash for a serious effort at influencing peoples thinking whats known in political marketing as push polling.
Anyone who knows us would see that this is below our standards, he said.
By the way, dont confuse the survey with a Congressional Monitor website run by the Institute for Palestine Studies. The institutes site tracks every legislative initiative introduced in the U.S. Congress that mentions Palestine or Israel or has bearing on the Arab-Israeli conflict. A spokesman said theres no connection.
Bowers guess is that the survey represents a clumsy attempt by someone to gather just enough data from consumers to be of interest to marketers and to then sell the information at bargain-basement prices.
The questions about energy, for example, they could help identify people who might be supportive of energy companies, he said. And its definitely a thing that theyre asking for phone numbers.
If nothing else, the fact that whoevers behind Congressional Monitor has worked so hard to stay hidden speaks for itself.
I asked each expert I spoke with what people should do if they get one of these surveys in the mail.
Their answers were unanimous: Throw it away.
David Lazarus column runs Tuesdays and Fridays. He also can be seen daily on KTLA-TV Channel 5 and followed on Twitter @Davidlaz. Send your tips or feedback to david.lazarus@latimes.com.
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Hyperloop Technologies Inc. is seeking at least $250 million in damages from four former high-ranking employees who the company says tried to incite rebellion within the Los Angeles start-up.
Now referring to itself as Hyperloop One, the firm says then-Chief Technology Officer Brogan BamBrogan and his fellow conspirators knew their days at the company were numbered because of poor performance or erratic and misogynistic behavior, according to documents submitted Tuesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
In an attempt at taking control before being shoved out the door, the group launched a failed coup attempt and then tried to form a competitor, the documents say. BamBrogan went as far as registering the Internet address hyperlooptoo.com.
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Hyperloop One attorneys describe BamBrogan as being in a Gang of Four with William Mulholland, vice president of finance; Knut Sauer, vice president of business development; and assistant general counsel David Pendergast. Theyre accused of breaching employment contracts, along with their duty of loyalty to the company.
The filing counters a lawsuit the four men brought against the company last week seeking to get their jobs back. They say Hyperloop One pushed them out after they complained about the firms top investors breaching their fiduciary duty. They asserted that investors friends and family had been overpaid for company work, including a public relations consultant whose salary was boosted while dating Executive Chairman Shervin Pishevar.
The company says those controversial decisions were justified. The PR firm, for one, charged the standard rate rather than a discounted one as it took on more responsibilities and Hyperloop One got more cash.
The dueling lawsuits accuse the rival sides of greed and spewing falsehoods allegations that have left a sour mood among the more than 150 employees left at Hyperloop Ones gray brick headquarters in an industrial yard along the Los Angeles River.
The start-up is racing to develop a system for thrusting levitating pods of people and freight through tubes with minimum air resistance. No projects are set, but studies are underway about potential routes. For example, a report this month promoted by Hyperloop One suggests a $20-billion project could carry people through the Baltic Sea between Stockholm and Helsinki, Finland, or about 300 miles, in 28 minutes.
Most concrete is a goal to demonstrate a test system in the Nevada desert in December. Plans remain on track and the company is stronger than ever, said Orin Snyder, an attorney for the company whos previously fended off or settled co-founder lawsuits against tech clients Facebook, Square and Yik Yak.
Chief Executive Rob Lloyd and other officials had grievances against each of the eventual plaintiffs, Snyder wrote. The group disputes the assertions, saying they never received negative evaluations.
Though Pishevar hand-picked BamBrogan as his top-choice co-founder, it turned out that the former SpaceX rocket engine designer was below average, the counter-suit states. When Lloyd arrived last fall, he stripped BamBrogan of engineering management. BamBrogan instead focused on attending conferences and talking to business partners. He had just four direct reports while the top engineer, Josh Giegel, led a team of 70.
BamBrogan still had problems though. He repeatedly antagonized female partners, vendors, and employees with brazen sexism, the counter-complaint says. He refused to work with at least one consultant who was a female. In another case, he screamed at a female colleague, punched a wall and then stormed outside to loudly smash beer bottles in anger, the court record says.
BamBrogan also allegedly didnt safeguard the companys intellectual property. He shared an idea with a corrugated box company that was a Hyperloop One supplier without signing a confidentiality agreement, and that vendor went on to to file a related patent, the filing says.
The company contends he showed up to the office drunk, with the scent of liquor on his breath, an allegation he denies.
Pendergast came across as rude during contract negotiations with business partners, the filing says. Adding to concerns, the company alleges that recent fundraising efforts appeared disorganized because of sloppiness on the part of Pendergast and Mulholland, who lacked experience dealing with investors abroad.
Sauer was dismissive and unprofessional in meetings with partners and consultants, and he charged $3,500 worth of flights for his children to the corporate credit card enough to get on Lloyds bad side, according to the countersuit.
As management frustrations apparently festered, the group bonded over what it considered inappropriate behavior, including the nepotism and unfair treatment of employees, the suit said. They penned their concerns with seven other colleagues in leadership roles on the eve of Memorial Day weekend.
Chief among the desires was a power shift from Pishevar to themselves, the countersuit said. Under their plan, employee shareholders would have voting control. What attorneys for the company say was problematic was that the gang sought to make the company look bad externally to gain leverage internally.
Pendergast told investors throughout Asia that the company wouldnt generate returns and BamBrogan attempted to spook investors in Russia, the company alleges. They tried to solicit other employees to join them on a rival venture, with BamBrogan offering to put up $250,000 in personal funds, the lawsuit adds. (BamBrogan said Tuesday he registered hyperlooptoo.com as a joke, prompted by another employee.)
By mid-June, the conspirators were asked to get on board or leave, the countersuit says. They left, though the company says it continued to pay BamBrogan and Mulholland until last week while trying to amicably close the door on the saga.
The company describes the lawsuit as a growing pain, though its one that could drag on. A hearing date hasnt been set.
For workers, the so-called coup attempt is bringing some positive changes. Hyperloop One committed to setting aside 20% of the companys stock for employees, up from 15%. It created two new board seats. And it has agreed to remove clawback provisions that allow the company to buy back shares unilaterally.
paresh.dave@latimes.com
Twitter: @peard33
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4:45 p.m.: This article was updated with additional information from the lawsuit and reporting.
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In 1929, photographer Edward Weston made a portrait of his friend Peter Krasnow, 43, a painter and sculptor whose studio in Atwater Village was not far from Westons own in the Glendale area then known as Tropico.
Krasnow had painted his portrait a few years earlier, portraying the camera artist as a kind of techno-wizard shrouded in a dramatic cape, positioned before a flat, stylized modern landscape in the style of Westons close and influential friend, painter Henrietta Shore. Weston returned the favor: His picture goes to the heart of Krasnows thinking as an artist.
The portrait hangs at the entry to Peter Krasnow: Maverick Modernist, a modest yet thoroughly engaging retrospective exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum. Krasnow, seated on a low rock, is set against a hill, the absence of a horizon flattening the pictorial perspective.
Dressed in what appears to be an equestrian outfit complete with buckled leather shin guards, Krasnows figure fills the frame. Hes a man of action now restrained, resting his head in his right hand, elbow balanced on his knee.
Krasnows pose is world-weary, melancholic. (Does the 1929 date, shuddering harbinger of boom-and-bust economic collapse, have anything to do with it?) Yet the artists prominently positioned hands, marked by gracefully elongated fingers, speak a kind of pictorial sign language.
One hand reaches across to steady the other, which is raised to his brow to shield one eye in shadowed darkness while letting the other gaze out into the world. Weston shows a bleak Krasnow looking simultaneously outward and inward, one eye cast on the visible world and the other on his unseen inner being. The exquisite photograph evokes a Modernist impulse, which animated his friends art.
Peter Krasnow, Edward Henry Weston, 1925, oil on canvas (Laguna Art Museum) (Test)
Peter Krasnow: Maverick Modernist is the second show this season to unfold the career of a significant Los Angeles artist who is underknown. (The other was Februarys Helen Lundeberg: A Retrospective.) Organized by guest curator Michael Duncan and accompanied by a fine catalog with essays by Duncan and art historian Susan Ehrlich, it represents the continuing relevance of a laudable mission for the small seaside museum.
And Laguna is singularly equipped for the Krasnow task. The artist was notoriously hesitant to sell his work, preferring to remain aloof from arts commercial hurly-burly. In 2000, his estate made a bequest to LAM of 147 paintings, 57 sculptures and around 600 works on paper.
The gift included an undisclosed sum of money to prepare an exhibition and catalog. The current show, which also draws on other Krasnow works from the LAM collection as well as loans, has finally accomplished the task.
Underknown barely begins to describe Krasnow.
Since his death at 92 in 1979, a few years after retrospectives at the Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park and the Skirball Museum, his work has been largely invisible, save for periodic shows at the stalwart Tobey C. Moss Gallery in Hollywood. (Most were in the 1980s.) As with his art market aversion, thats partly the way Krasnow wanted it. Time and again throughout his life, he turned away whenever acclaim or success came to call.
Most dramatically, following a very well received 1931 museum exhibition at San Franciscos Palace of the Legion of Honor, Krasnow and his wife, Rose, promptly closed their L.A. house and decamped to a small farming village in rural France, where they lived on a shoestring for the next three years. Its as if he was certain that no one would be able to find him there.
Installation view of Peter Krasnow: Maverick Modernist at Laguna Art Museum. ( Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times) (Test)
The Laguna show is loosely organized according to these breaks in the artists trajectory, breaks that were typically accompanied by a shift in his work. Returning from France to Los Angeles, for instance, Krasnow mostly stopped painting to focus on carving totemic wooden sculptures.
Their abstract shape is partly dictated by the trees natural growth pattern and partly by the artists piecing together of multiple blocks of wood. The formal dialogue between nature and culture passed from his paintings, such as the Weston portrait, into sculptures that bear no visual resemblance.
The sculptures are sometimes likened to Brancusis work. For both artists, the sculpture and its base are inseparable, their considered forms physically connecting art to the world. They perform a precarious balancing act between symbolic figurative associations and abstraction derived from the inherent qualities of materials in space.
But Krasnows sculptures are more like vertical puzzles. Individual sculptural units are carefully carved, then stacked and locked together as they reach upward from the ground. A distinctly spiritual dimension marks the union of material naturalism and figurative allusion.
A shift in his art came again when World War II darkened the globe and it includes a surprise.
The new work, which evolved over the next 30 years, is driven by fierce color. Krasnow returned to painting, feeling he had done all he could with carved wood sculpture. His bright pastels and vivid candy hues pink, turquoise, violet, baby blue, lime are finally unlike anything in art before.
The new paintings didnt continue the focused portraits or bleak Social Realist subjects of working class and immigrant strife that he had made before. Instead, patterned abstraction was the new motif often geometric, sometimes derived from symbolic sources such as the Hebrew alphabet and occasionally alluding to nature.
Like the organic forms in Krasnows sculptures, the abstract shapes in his paintings lock together in a unified, balanced whole. And pure color straight from the tube, unmixed and unblended is everywhere, creating exuberant, even celebratory rhythms.
Given the trauma of the war years, the eruption of such colorful exuberance seems counterintuitive. Which may be the point: In the face of death, rejoice in life.
Peter Krasnow, Portrait of a Woman, 1919, oil on canvas (Laguna Art Museum) (Test)
The abstractions recall elements of Kandinskys late paintings of the 1930s and early 1940s. Krasnow would have known the work through his friendship with Galka Scheyer, the emigre German American art dealer who promoted Kandinskys work in Los Angeles. Its as if he picked up a spiritual thread and wove it through blazing California light.
Yet perhaps the most direct connection is with Krasnows own early work. Born and raised in small-town Ukraine, he fled the murderous pogroms that flourished in the years around the Russian Revolution, landing in America in 1907. (His birth name was Feivish Reisberg, randomly changed by the immigration office.) He bounced around from Boston to Chicago to New York, before heading to L.A.
In the shows first room, a formal 1919 wedding portrait sets a festively attired woman before a richly patterned Eastern European or Central Asian textile, perhaps a hand-embroidered suzani. Imagine the picture without the figure, just the patterned network of circles, squares and organic shapes of the cloth. Krasnows vibrant abstract paintings from the final decades of his life offer up those traditional patterns of celebratory ritual revised, remade and reinvented in a thoroughly modern idiom.
------------
Peter Krasnow: Maverick Modernist
Where: Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach
When: Through Sept. 25. Closed Wednesdays.
Info: (949) 494-8971, www.lagunaartmuseum.org
christopher.knight@latimes.com
Twitter: @KnightLAT
Roger Ailes appears to be close to leaving his post as chairman and chief executive of Fox News in the wake of sexual harassment charges made against him.
Fox News parent 21st Century Fox issued a statement late Tuesday that said Ailes is still employed by the company. Roger is at work, the statement said. The review is ongoing. And the only agreement that is in place is his existing employment agreement.
However, a person close to several of the personalities at Fox News believed it was a matter of time before Ailes steps down.
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Word had circulated among TV news industry business that Bill Shine, a longtime lieutenant of Ailes, has returned to New York from Cleveland where Fox News is covering the Republican National Convention. Shine is considered a leading candidate to step in for Ailes.
Ailes imminent departure comes two weeks after former anchor Gretchen Carlson filed a lawsuit accusing him of sexual harassment and retaliation for her complaining about a hostile work environment.
His exit would be a stunning sudden end to the career of one of the most powerful executives in the media business who left a major impact on the television landscape.
After Carlsons suit was filed, 21st Century Fox brought in a law firm to review her allegations and talked with other employees about Ailes behavior. The review led to reports that others gave accounts of alleged sexual harassment by Ailes.
Ailes has denied all of the allegations made against him. Ailes attorney Susan Estrich also issued a statement rebutting a report that Fox News Channels star anchor Megyn Kelly had given an account of being sexually harassed by Ailes early in her 12-year career at the company.
Roger Ailes has never sexually harassed Megyn Kelly, Estrich said. In fact, he has spent much of the last decade promoting and helping her to achieve the stardom she earned, for which she has repeatedly and publicly thanked him.
Twitter: @SteveBattaglio
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Kim Kardashians hard-core video attack on Taylor Swift on Sunday, while full of drama, wasnt born in a vacuum. That master stroke was more than seven years in the making, in a saga started by Kanye West steamrolling Swift at an awards show in 2009.
These three cant seem to let it go, so why should we? Heres a timeline of the feud between Ms. Swift and Mr. West, with an assist from Ms. Kardashian West and a cameo by President Obama.
Because Yeezy and TSwift are Just. That. Important.
Sept. 13, 2009: In the beginning, there was drama
It was the day of MTVs Video Music Awards in 2009. West drank a half a bottle of Hennessy, hes said. Beyonce did not win the female video award for Single Ladies. Taylor Swift did win, for You Belong to Me. West was not pleased, but when Swifts name was announced it was only her second VMA nomination and the first of six Moonman wins total as of 2015 he took it up a notch.
Then only 19 years old and accepting her first Moonman trophy, Swift was interrupted when West stormed the stage, took over the microphone and went on a tear about how Beyonce had gotten screwed.
"Yo Taylor, I'm really happy for you, I'ma let you finish, he said, but Beyonce has one of the best videos of all time. One of the best videos of all time!" He was met by a wave of boos and flipped off the audience as he belatedly returned to his seat.
Oh yeah, Beyonce did take home the bigger award, for video of the year, a category in which she was competing against West, and for which Taylor was not even nominated. As she accepted her award, Queen Bey invited TSwift back on stage as she accepted the honor and she let Swift finish.
"Maybe we can try this again," Swift said, drawing a laugh. She proceeded to thank the people who helped her on her award-winning video effort.
Later on Sept. 13: West launches his apology tour
West took to his blog after the show and promised to apologize to Swift in person the next day.
Im sooooo sorry to Taylor Swift and her fans and her mom, he wrote (via MTV News), pretty much in all caps, but thats too visually exhausting to see here. I spoke to her mother right after and she said the same thing my mother wouldve said. She is very talented! I like the lyrics about being a cheerleader and shes in the bleachers! Im in the wrong for going on stage and taking away from her moment!
Beyonces video was the best of this decade!!!! Im sorry to my fans if I let you guys down!!!! Im sorry to my friends at MTV, he continued.
But it was one of those apologies that came with an explanation. And those explanations typically have the effect of completely undercutting the sincerity of the sorry.
Welcome to the real world!!!!, West said. Everybody wanna booooo me but Im a fan of real pop culture!!! No disrespect but we watchin the show at the crib right now cause ... well you know!!!! Im still happy for Taylor!!!! Boooyaaawwww!!!! You are very very talented!!! I gave my awards to Outkast when they deserved it over me ... Thats what it is!!!!!!! Im not crazy yall, Im just real. Sorry for that!!! I really feel bad for Taylor and Im sincerely sorry!!! Much respect!!!!!
Sept. 14, 2009: Kanye West tells Jay Leno he's ashamed of himself
On The Tonight Show, Kanye West took a too-long-for-TV pause to compose himself after Jay Leno asked him what his late mother Donda West died in 2007 would think of his VMAs outburst.
"Obviously, I deal with hurt, and so many celebrities, they never take the time off, and I never took the time off, really," West told Leno. "I've really never taken the time off. It's been music after music and tour after tour. And I'm just ashamed my hurt caused someone else hurt."
Sept. 16, 2009: President Obama calls West a jackass
We include this only because its a hoot on so many levels.
Sept. 4, 2010: West apologizes to Swift again, via Twitter
West unleashed a series of tweets over the course of a couple of hours, nearly a year after his original faux pas.
When I woke up from the crazy nightmare I looked in the mirror and said GROW UP KANYE I take responsibility for my actions, he said in one. He said he had written a song for her, and added, If she wont take it then Ill perform it for her.
"With new found humility who am I to run on stage? I would never ever again in a million years do that. Sorry to let you down," he said in another.
The tweets were eventually deleted.
Sept. 13, 2010: Swift and West at the MTV VMAs, Part 2
What a difference a year makes. First, a barefoot Swift performed the tune Innocent.
Her lyrics? Here are a few: "Youll have new Septembers/ Every one of us has messed up too / Lost your balance on a tightrope/ It's never too late to get it back."
West closed the show with Runaway.
His lyrics? Um, here are some where he wasnt calling himself a piece of you-know-what: "Yeah I always find somethin' wrong / You been puttin' up wit' my ... just way too long / I'm so gifted at findin' what I don't like the most / So I think it's time for us to have a toast."
Sept. 13, 2010: West swears off awards shows
On The Ellen DeGeneres Show, West shared details of his self-imposed exile, which included time in Japan (to get away from paparazzi) and then Rome, then Hawaii.
"Just for your whole world to completely crash from a moment of sincerity, or alcohol, or whatever it is ... I feel like in some ways I'm a soldier of culture, and I realize that no one wants that to be my job, and I'll never go on stage again. I'm never sitting in an award show again. But will I feel convicted about things that really meant stuff to culture, that constantly get denied for years and years and years?
Im sorry, I will. I cannot lie about it in order to sell records.
DeGeneres suggested that he never say never, because hes too important to stay away from award shows.
May 3, 2011: West and Swift cross paths at the Met Gala
Its all good. A low-five is exchanged.
June 6, 2013: West says maybe he wasn't sorry at all
Wait, maybe its not all good?
"I dont have one regret," West said in an interview with the New York Times. "If anyones reading this waiting for some type of full-on, flat apology for anything, they should just stop reading right now."
That whole apology tour after interrupting Swifts acceptance speech? That was him succumbing to peer pressure, he said.
May 2014: Kardashian and West get married
It was the day West said, I do, to his most loyal ally. She shows up again later in this saga, dont worry.
Nov. 24, 2014: West seems maybe not so sorry?
At a release party for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, West discussed what he did after he said in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 that President George W. Bush didnt care about black people a comment he said was misinterpreted.
"That's not exactly what I wanted to say, I was emotional. That was not exactly how I wanted to word it, he said.
Taylor never came to my defense in any interview and rode the wave and rode it and rode it. Kanye West
But I rode it. I rode it. Just as Taylor never came to my defense in any interview and rode the wave and rode it and rode it. That's the way that I rode the wave with the Bush comment. It's not about popular opinion."
Wait, did he just say she used what he did to get famous herself? Yeah, he kinda did.
Aug. 31, 2015: Swift presents MTV's Video Vanguard award to West
West and Swift were reunited onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards intentionally when she presented him with the big-deal Video Vanguard award. In his acceptance speech, he thanked her for being so gracious to him and pondered whether he would have done things differently in 2009 if hed had a daughter at the time.
You know how many times MTV ran that footage again? he said. 'Cause it got them more ratings? You know how many times they announced Taylor was going to give me the award 'cause it got them more ratings? Listen to the kids, bro! I still don't understand awards shows. I don't understand how they get five people who worked their entire life ... sold records, sold concert tickets to come stand on the carpet and for the first time in they life be judged on the chopping block and have the opportunity to be considered a loser! I don't understand it, bruh!
He also announced he would run for president in 2020.
Sept. 4, 2015: West sends Swift flowers, which she shares on Instagram
Feb. 11, 2016: West releases 'The Life of Pablo' https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/698145869720371200
The Life of Pablo includes Famous. And Taylor was not pleased by the lyric talking about her.
"I did not diss Taylor Swift and Ive never dissed her" West tweeted. "First thing is Im an artist and as an artist I will express how I feel with no censorship." He also said his wife approved of what he said in the song.
Swifts brother Austin Swift publicly discarded his Yeezy shoes in protest.
June 16, 2016: Kardashian West tells GQ that Swift knew; Swift says leave me alone (Test)
She totally approved that, an annoyed Kardashian West told GQ, talking about the Famous lyric. She totally knew that that was coming out. She wanted to all of a sudden act like she didn't. I swear, my husband gets so much ... for things [when] he really was doing proper protocol and even called to get it approved, Kardashian West said. What rapper would call a girl that he was rapping a line about to get approval?
Taylor "totally gave the OK," Kardashian West continued. "Rick Rubin was there. So many respected people in the music business heard that [conversation] and knew. I mean, he's called me a bitch in his songs. That's just, like, what they say. I never once think, [gasping] What a derogatory word! How dare he? Not in a million years. I don't know why she just, you know, flipped all of a sudden. It was funny because [on the call with West, Swift] said, When I get on the Grammy red carpet, all the media is going to think that I'm so against this, and I'll just laugh and say, The joke's on you, guys. I was in on it the whole time. And I'm like, wait, but [in] your Grammy speech, you completely dissed my husband just to play the victim again.
She also say that there "maybe" was a letter to West from an attorney saying, "Don't ever let that footage out. Destroy it."
Swift promptly told Kardashian West to leave her alone already, in a statement admitting that she and West had talked once but maintaining that thered been no mention of any planned name-calling.
Taylor cannot understand why Kanye West, and now Kim Kardashian, will not just leave her alone. Statement from Team Swift
Taylor does not hold anything against Kim Kardashian, as she recognizes the pressure Kim must be under and that she is only repeating what she has been told by Kanye West," the statement said (via CNN). "However, that does not change the fact that much of what Kim is saying is incorrect. Kanye West and Taylor only spoke once on the phone in January of 2016 and they have never spoken since. Taylor has never denied that conversation took place.
The statement continued: "It was on that phone call that Kanye West also asked her to release the song on her Twitter account, which she declined to do. Kanye West never told Taylor he was going to use the term 'that b**ch' in referencing her. A song cannot be approved if it was never heard. Kanye West never played the song for Taylor Swift. Taylor heard it for the first time when everyone else did and was humiliated. Kim Kardashian's claim that Taylor and her team were aware [of the lyrics] is not true, and Taylor cannot understand why Kanye West, and now Kim Kardashian, will not just leave her alone."
June 27, 2016: Lena Dunham trashes Swift's treatment in West's 'Famous' video
I know that there's a hipper or cooler reaction to have than the one I'm currently having, Lena Dunham said of Wests Famous video, which includes a wax figure of Swift lying nude next to West, who has Kardashian West nude on his other side and various high-profile celebrities in similar states of sleep and undress. But guess what? I don't have a hip cool reaction, because seeing a woman I love like Taylor Swift ( that one hurt to look at, I couldn't look), a woman I admire like Rihanna or Anna, reduced to a pair of waxy breasts made by some special effects guy in the Valley, it makes me feel sad and unsafe and worried for the teenage girls who watch this and may not understand that grainy roving camera as the stuff of snuff films.
July 2016: Kardashian West talks about why she slammed Swift to GQ
In a promotional clip for the July 17, 2016, episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, Kardashian West talked to sister Kourtney Kardashian about what she told GQ and why she did it.
I just felt like I wanted to defend him , said Kardashian West. By saying she hadnt known about the lyric, Swift had found another way to play the victim, she continued. It definitely got her a lot of attention the first time. West shouldn't be punished for the VMAs incident "still, to this day, she said.
Kardashian West said she just didn't care anymore, and would "do whatever" to protect her husband, because enough already. The incident at the 2009 VMAs hadnt been a personal attack on Swift.
"We all know that 'Single Ladies' was the biggest song of the year. , Kardashian West said. I'm just speaking the truth."
July 17, 2016: Kardashian West posts video of West talking to Swift
After that "KUWTK" episode aired, Kardashian West teased on Twitter to her Snapchat account, where she'd posted heavily edited video of West calling Swift and discussing the "I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex" lyric.
In it, Swift appeared happy about being consulted and said shed be happy to tell interviewers that she knew about the song in advance. "'Joke's on you,'" she said she'd tell anyone who asked. "'We're friends.'"
Based on Swifts follow-up statement, nobodys anybodys friend anymore.
That moment when Kanye West secretly records your phone call, then Kim posts it on the Internet. Taylor Swift on Instagram
"Where is the video of Kanye telling me he was going to call me 'that bitch' in his song? It doesn't exist because it never happened," Swift said in a statement that night.
"He promised to play the song for me, but he never did. While I wanted to be supportive of Kanye on the phone call, you cannot 'approve' a song you haven't heard, she continued.
"Being falsely painted as a liar when I was never given the full story or played any part of the song is character assassination. I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative, one that I have never asked to be a part of, since 2009."
Follow Christie DZurilla on Twitter @theCDZ.
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UPDATES:
3:45 p.m.: A previous version of this article misstated the date that Kardashian West posted video of West talking to Swift. It was July 17, not June 17.
A couple of months after he left The Late Show in May 2015, David Letterman appeared onstage in San Antonio as the guest of Steve Martin and Martin Short in their A Very Stupid Conversation With Music.
I retired and I had no regrets, he said. None. I was happy. I was complacent. I was satisfied. I was content. And then a couple of days ago, Donald Trump said he was running for president. I have made the biggest mistake of my life, ladies and gentlemen.
Retiring from The Daily Show that August, Jon Stewart was asked more than once whether there wasnt some element of regret in leaving the stage at the moment this Moby Dick of comedy subjects was bearing into view. The assumption was there could be no greater joy for a comedian than to skewer such a tempting, juicy subject.
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This May, on his podcast The Axe Files, former Obama advisor David Axelrod asked Stewart, Do you wake up ever and say to yourself that this was some kind of big celestial joke on you that you announce your retirement from The Daily Show, and I see when you did, you said it didnt appear that there was going to be anything wildly different about this election year.... Hows that working for you now?
With Stephen Colbert, who moved into Lettermans seat in September, there was the question of whether in leaving The Colbert Report, and his conservative-pundit ironic alter ego, he also was somehow abandoning his audience, shirking his duty to topical humor at a crucial moment in history.
One of the reasons I stopped the old show is that I had a sense where the country is, Colbert said on Face the Nation. I think people dont really want constant divisiveness. I really dont think they want that. And thats what I was aping. And I thought, Ah, I cant really drink that cup anymore. Cause I dont think people really want to hear it.
And yet here we are on the verge of Donald Trump being named the Republican Partys official candidate for the office of president of the United States. And not only is Colbert broadcasting live every night of the convention here called the 2016 Trumpublican Donational Conventrump Starring Donald Trump as the Republican Party* (*May Contain Traces of Republican) in order to comment on the days proceedings and to be the very first one to announce THE MOMENT America becomes great again, but he corralled his old alter ego, and Stewart, his old Daily Show boss, to help him do it.
If you dont share their feeling that you dont recognize your country anymore, trust me, if Trump wins, you will. Stephen Colbert
There is a fine line between the ridiculous and the horrifying, and we need comics to walk it, for the sake of our own mental health. For some portion of the country the portion that delights in hearing Trump described as an Angry creamsicle, human-toupee hybrid, decomposing jack-o-lantern or an orange manatee, as he was Monday night Mondays Late Show would have served as a tonic after a convention night arranged around the theme Make America Safe Again. Save for Melania Trumps appearance, it was a program long very long on anger, grief, fear and aggression; another portion of the country, finding the convention quite different, and quite to their liking and Colbert, not wont have watched at all.
Colbert began with a razzmatazz opening production, which included scenes shot in Cleveland before coming home to New Yorks Ed Sullivan Theater. It might have been titled Christmas in July (it mixed patriotic themes with Santa hats), rhymed Lincoln with drinkin, and included a couplet about RNC Chairman Reince Priebus huffing paint to ease the pain. A Trump-themed monologue, more whimsical than pointed, followed.
Then to the teased and bruited main business. Flummoxed beyond comprehension by the impending Trump nomination, Colbert set off to find Stewart, living in a cabin in the woods a nice piece of prop-department handicraft. I know that you and your beard are very busy these days, said Colbert, asking for his help; Stewart demurred. An elaborate buildup led to the news that Trump would be the candidate, followed by a spit take, followed by Stewarts fetching the Colbert Report Colbert.
Hello, friend, pundit Colbert told his unaltered ego. Im sorry I cant help you. Jon and I are very happy living off the grid, making jerky and canning our own urine for the end times. But informed that Trump was the nominee (spit take number two), Colbert Report Stephen took the Late Show stage, arriving in a chariot pulled by shirtless Uncle Sams in flag-striped boxers, while women in Greek gowns strewed rose petals in his way.
Hello nation, he began. Did you miss me? By the sound of the response, yes. To address the brave new world of American democrace-me, he brought out the old Colbert Report feature The Word, whose theme was Trumpiness. Playing both sides of the question to an unambiguous end, as was that characters special power, he declared the Trump candidacy an emotional megaphone for voters full of rage at government that achieves nothing, adding, if you dont share their feeling that you dont recognize your country anymore, trust me, if Trump wins, you will.
Although it was fine to see Colbert Report Stephen back again one assumes we have not seen the last of him this week, nor, Colbert teased, of Stewart even better was a tour of the convention hall Colbert conducted in person as the blue-wigged, stuffed-weasel-carrying Hungry For Power Games character, Caesar Flickerman. Flickerman is also a character in The Hunger Games.
Welcome to the arena, citizens, he said, so grand it could almost hold Donald Trumps entire head. The red carpet of course is here to hide the rivers of blood that will eventually flow down from the cornucopia. He pointed out the seat being held for Chris Christie to have the best possible view of the end of his career, joked with a Telemundo reporter about walls and shouted to up to the NBC press booth, Chuck Todd! Have Matt Lauer washed and brought to my tent! My weasel wants to make love to your goatee!
Finally, he was escorted from the podium cellphone footage of this had made its way onto the Internet the day before saying, I know Im not supposed to be up here, but lets be honest, neither is Donald Trump.
robert.lloyd@latimes.com
On Twitter @LATimesTVLloyd
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If you didnt travel to Florida for Miami Swim Week, then get a seat for the Los Angeles version. Returning for its second year, L.A. Swim Week actually its only a one-day event will paddle into the Skirball Cultural Center on Tuesday, and organizers are hoping the style event makes a splash on and off the runway.
The day-long event will feature a pop-up shop with 20 brands selling swimwear and beauty products. An 8 p.m. fashion show is set with models who will wear swimwear from 10 designers.
The meaning [of the event] is to bring together designers of different cultures, said Connie Borja, executive producer of the event.
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She moved to L.A. from Colombia 25 years ago and got her start in the fashion industry when she began designing baby clothes in 2003.
Eight years ago, Borja mentioned the idea for the swimwear event to Elizabeth Zoraida Cardoza, who oversees marketing for L.A. Swim Week.
She had this idea, and for it to come from concept to fruition, she has had to do a lot of sacrifices, a lot of networking in a different language in multiple languages, Cardoza said.
Borja said she ultimately created the event, in part, to be a showcase for her swimwear line called Amour.
Swim Week is about beauty and passion and sex appeal and health, Cardoza said, adding, Its really describing what I think California was to [Borja].
Cardoza said future plans include expanding Swim Week to show lingerie and sportswear.
Last year, about 550 people came to Swim Week, and Borja said she expects the audience number to grow to 600 to 800 people this year.
Tickets for the pop-up shop and the platinum-level seating for the fashion show are sold out. As of this afternoon, $30 general admission tickets for the fashion show were available online.
L.A. Swim Week 2016s pop-up shop is open from 11:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday. There will be a red carpet event from 6:15 to 7:30 p.m. and a fashion show from 8 to 10:30 p.m. at Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd.
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan spent a career honing an image as one of Washingtons most serious, likable and wonkish Republicans.
At a recent fundraising dinner, he dazzled finance industry leaders by sparring for more than an hour over the intricacies of monetary policy.
He used his leadership position this year to turn the House into an incubator for GOP policies on poverty and taxes. During the mudslinging Republican primary, he implored presidential candidates to raise our gaze.
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Yet on Tuesday night, Ryan found himself presiding over a presidential convention that nominated a Republican nominee who could not be more different in style and substance from the 46-year old Wisconsin congressman.
As Ryan conceded just days ago, Donald Trump is not my kind of conservative. He previously called Trumps attack on an American-born judge of Mexican descent the textbook definition of racism.
From reality TV stars to Donald Trumps wife, catch up quick on the opening day of the GOP convention. More coverage at latimes.com/trailguide
And only after a very public hand-wringing did the 2012 vice presidential nominee reluctantly agree to endorse Trump with a logic that only a debate champ might appreciate: he called it a binary choice of either supporting Trump despite misgivings, or helping Democrat Hillary Clinton.
In a convention speech Tuesday night, Ryan tried again to bring his party together, focusing largely on the risk of electing Clinton rather than the promise of Trump, whom he scarcely mentioned.
Democracy is a series of choices, he said. We Republicans have made ours. Have we had our arguments this year? Sure we have.
But he characterized the internal disputes as a promising sign of life and energy inside the party and said the time had come to unify.
This year of surprises and dramatic turns can end in the finest possible way when America elects a conservative governing majority, he told delegates. So what do you that say we unite this party, at this crucial moment when unity is everything?
Ryan still faces an uphill battle for the rest of the week: Can he unify a fractured Republican convention boycotted by most of the partys biggest names and inject some of his own traditional GOP policy prescriptions into an inexperienced, unpredictable and often hostile presidential campaign whose positions sometimes contradict long-standing Republican ideology?
The task is a risky one for Ryan. While he may succeed in holding the party together, helping to elevate Trumps White House bid, it could come at the expense of the core GOP principles that have been Ryans lifes work.
At stake is not only Ryans brand as the keeper of conservative ideology of Washington, but also the future of the Republican Party. His differences with Trump over trade, immigration and the treatment of Muslims and other minorities are stark.
The partys at a real inflection moment and the outcome is not clear, said David Winston, a Republican pollster and strategist aligned with House Republicans. One of the things that Ryan is trying to do is at least have something some clear policy direction here that Republicans can use thats a structure for maintaining the Republican coalition at least at the congressional level.
Foremost for Ryan is protecting his Republican majority in Congress, including the biggest House majority in generations, as lawmakers face voters this fall in the Trump era.
To that end, the speaker has been working feverishly to raise funds which is why he appeared before the financial industry donors recently and provide lawmakers with an alternative platform to run their campaigns.
Even before Trump became the nominee, the speaker turned the House majority into a think tank on Capitol Hill, doing what he does best churning out a GOP agenda, Better Way, that offers policies on taxes, healthcare, poverty and other issues lawmakers can discuss with voters back home.
The hope is the platform gives Republicans something to talk about instead of having to react to the latest outburst or Tweet-storm from Trump.
His instincts are right always bring it back to ideas, always bring it back to providing people a vision for how to make America better, said Kevin Madden, a former aide to Romney and previous Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio).
He may not be successful in having the presidential nominee stick to that playbook, but he can have impact on the overall environment Republicans are going to run in and putting ideas front and center.
On Tuesday, Ryan showcased his ideas. We offer a better way for America, with ideas that actually work. A reformed tax code that rewards free enterprise, instead of just enterprising lobbyists. A reformed healthcare system that operates by free choice, instead of by force, and doesnt leave you answering to cold, clueless bureaucrats. A commitment to building a 21st-Century military and to giving our veterans the care they were promised, the care that they have earned.
The speaker is popular among rank-and-file lawmakers who appreciate his willingness to take center stage at a time when many of them prefer to avoid tough questions.
But as the convention opened Monday, Ryan notably skipped presiding over the conventions first day when a raucous floor flight erupted in opposition to Trumps nomination. Ryans schedule had been set earlier, aides said, but his absence enabled him to avoid taking sides in the messy showdown.
Its not fun, said Michael Steel, a former top aide to Boehner and Trump rival Jeb Bush.
This was the year that a reform-minded conservative presidential nominee, against an incredibly flawed Democratic nominee, had a chance of winning the White House, Steel said, adding the speakers job is to help his fellow Republicans win races, regardless who is at the top of the ticket.
The speaker and his staff have helped adroitly with that, under the circumstances.
lisa.mascaro@latimes.com
Twitter: @LisaMascaro
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UPDATES:
6:30 p.m.: This story was updated after Ryans convention speech.
This story was originally published at 6:50 a.m.
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yldrm and opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) chairman Kemal Klcdaroglu underscored the need to preserve the unity of Turkey following the failed coup attempt which took place on July 15, Daily Sabah reported.
Speaking after a meeting in Ankara, Prime Minister Yldrm thanked CHP chairman Kemal Klcdaroglu for his support against the coup.
He said that it is not acceptable to seek revenge in a state governed by the rule of law.
"Everything will be resolved under the framework of law" the PM said and warned people against provocateurs who urge them to seek revenge, saying "a wrong cannot be justified by another wrong."
"The political will has persisted and democracy has won" Yldrm said.
The prime minister continued by saying that the people who took to the streets were of great assistance to ensure the vicious coup attempt failed.
CHP Chairman Klcdaroglu said that the society has been through a 'serious trauma' and that it is necessary to normalize as soon as possible.
On July 15, a small military junta linked to the Gulenist Terror Organization (FETO) attempted to topple the democratically elected government in Turkey and bring martial law. The attempt was prevented by military troops loyal to the government, along with police units and millions of Turkish citizens in favor of democracy. 208 people, consisting of mostly civilians, have been killed by pro-coup soldiers, while over 1,400 people were injured. Turkey's opposition parties have united against the coup attempt, condemning it in the harshest terms and underscoring their determination to preserve democracy and rule of law in Turkey.
Ready for Day 4? Find our coverage here As Day 4 of the Republican National Convention begins, were posting news and analysis over here. Below youll find our news feed from the first three days of events in Cleveland. Read More Facebook
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Mike Pence stuck to the script on an off-script night By Melanie Mason Indiana Gov. Mike Pence hit all the standard notes for a high-profile political address Wednesday night: introducing himself to unfamiliar voters, extolling his running mate and making an explicit appeal to independent and Democratic voters. That typical approach has been in short supply at the GOP nominating confab in Cleveland, with its outsized focus on base-pleasing issues like Benghazi and speakers whose anti-Hillary Clinton rhetoric is matched only by the audiences preferred chant of Lock her up! Adding to the unreality was Sen. Ted Cruzs non-endorsement of Donald Trump just an hour before Pence took the stage, prompting a chaotic backlash from attendees. But Pence appeared unfazed by the clamor, smoothly delivering a recitation of Trumps attributes and promising a capable team to win the White House in November. Facebook
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California delegate mad at Ted Cruz By Michael Finnegan Donald Trump supporter Michael Der Manouel, a California delegate from Fresno, is not happy with Sen. Ted Cruz. Everybody believed he was building to a point in his speech where he would endorse Donald Trump, and he couldnt bring himself to do it, and the convention expressed its displeasure, Der Manouel told The Times. He couldnt bring himself to do what Reagan did in 76, and its very disappointing, he said. Were going to move forward without all of these guys who reneged on their endorsement pledge. Were going to move forward without them. Facebook
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A dark star named Ted Cruz blots out the sun for Mike Pence By Robin Abcarian It wasnt supposed to be like this. The third night of the convention was supposed to belong to Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, Donald Trumps running mate. No one anticipated that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, giving a surprisingly restrained speech, would nevertheless fail to endorse Trump, infuriating convention delegates. To those listening, please, dont stay home in November, said Cruz, in his typically languid debaters cadence. If you love our country, and love your children as much as I know you do, stand, and speak, and vote your conscience; vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution. Thats when the booing began, the Twitter volume went to 11 and, it seemed, no one could speak of anything else. Lost in the noise: Pences perfectly serviceable speech. Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence blows a kiss to his wife as he speaks during the third day of the Republican convention. (Mary Altaffer / Associated Press) Facebook
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Retired astronaut Eileen Collins skips over line endorsing Trump in prime-time speech By Christine Mai-Duc In her Wednesday night convention speech, retired astronaut Eileen Collins lamented the fact that the last time the U.S. launched astronauts on American soil was more than five years ago, imploring leaders to do better than that. She called for leadership that will make Americas space program first again, but skipped a line in her prepared remarks that would have endorsed newly-minted Republican nominee Donald Trump. She said she wanted to keep not political. She also passed up an opportunity to slam Obama for space program cuts. It was weird. Laura Keeney (@LauraKeeney) July 21, 2016 Earlier this week, Collins told Mashable that her speech was not meant to be political. This is a chance I could not pass up: We can raise awareness of how the U.S. human space program has slowed over the years, Collins said in a statement to the website. Facebook
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FBI may have resumed controversial checkups on Cleveland-area activists, legal group says By James Queally Federal Bureau of Investigation agents may have knocked on the doors of several Cleveland-area activists Wednesday morning, resuming a controversial checkup practice that put the local civil rights community on edge in the weeks leading up to the Republican National Convention, a legal advocacy group said. In a statement issued Wednesday night, the Ohio chapter of the National Lawyers Guild alleged the FBI conducted a series of raids and may have entered a home without a warrant, continuing a practice that disturbed local demonstrators earlier this summer. Its been a consistent theme throughout all of these visits that law enforcement are looking for links and relationships among activists or people known to be activists around the Cleveland area and around the state of Ohio and also in some other locations outside of the state, said Jacqueline Greene, co-coordinator of the guild. Ultimately theyre on an information-fishing expedition. The purpose of these visits is to intimidate and chill First Amendment expression. National activists with Black Lives Matter and Campaign Zero have also said they received unnerving visits from the FBI in the weeks leading up to the nominating conventions, according to the Washington Post. Greene said her office had also reviewed video that appeared to show FBI agents and officers entering a home without consent. Asked about the incident Wednesday night, Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams said he was not sure if his officers were involved in any door knocks, as some are on loan to the local FBI office. He said he generally supports the tactic. Were not accusing them of anything, Williams said. Were going around and talking to them. The FBI said earlier this year that the visits were simply about ensuring safety during the convention, but local organizers have criticized the tactic as intimidation. FBI spokeswoman Vicki Anderson said the FBI and police officers from Elyria, a Cleveland suburb, conducted interviews this week in response to investigative leads. The occupants were interviewed outside the residence and no arrests were made, Anderson said in an e-mail to The Times. Law enforcement will continue to respond to investigative leads to ensure the security of the RNC. 9:10 p.m. Updated with a response from the FBI in Cleveland. Facebook
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Gingrich immediately tries to mend the Cruz rift at Republican convention By Seema Mehta Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich sought Wednesday night to get the Republican National Convention back on track after disharmony erupted in full, prime-time view when delegates booed Sen. Ted Cruz for declining to endorse nominee Donald Trump. Veering from his prepared remarks, Gingrich told the thousands of delegates and guests that they had misunderstood Cruz when he urged Americans to vote your conscience. Gingrich said that Cruz had actually urged voters to abide by their conscience and vote any candidate who will uphold the Constitution. In the presidential contest, Trump is the only candidate who would do so, Gingrich said. So to paraphrase Ted Cruz, if you want to protect the Constitution of the United States the only possible candidate this fall is the Trump-Pence Republican ticket, he said. Gingrich, whom Trump passed over as his running mate, also hailed Trump for being generous in allowing his GOP primary rivals to speak without requiring an endorsement. Facebook
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Watch Marco Rubios message to Republican delegates Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) speaks in a video address played at the Republican National Convention. Facebook
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Ted Cruz to delegates: Vote your conscience By Seema Mehta Please, dont stay home in November, Ted Cruz said to convention-goers. If you love our country and if you love your children as much as I know you do, stand, and speak, and vote your conscience, vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution. Delegates chanted at him to endorse Donald Trump, and the phrase vote your conscience appeared to infuriate the crowd. Anti-Trump forces had unsuccessfully sought to make rules changes that would have unbound delegates and allowed them to vote their conscience. The lack of endorsement by Cruz, who mentioned Trumps name only once, was not surprising. Read More Facebook
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Gov. Scott Walker -- a Trump critic, then backer, then skeptic -- got the party memo on GOP unity By Lisa Mascaro @ScottWalker hanging in the Digital Loft at the @GOPconvention. #RNCinCLE pic.twitter.com/JUqjfqeTYO GOP Convention (@GOPconvention) July 21, 2016 When Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker addressed the Republican convention Wednesday, it was as if a memo had gone out from party headquarters that the time had come to step up the effort to unify the party behind Donald Trump. The first two nights of the convention had resulted in start-and-stop progress. Lots of pro-Trump voices. Few new converts. Convention crowds that began to thin toward the end of the evening. Walker, in some ways, was a prime messenger, thanks to his own discomfort over Trump. If Walker -- a onetime Trump rival, who endorsed Trump only to walk it back later -- could vote for the ticket, so could so many other Republicans who preferred someone else. The former presidential hopeful argued his case the way so many Republicans are doing it not so much a vote for Trump as a vote for the alternative to Democrat Hillary Clinton. He made a point of not just naming Trump but also including the vice presidential nominee, Mike Pence, who many believe will help persuade conservatives who are cool to Trump to fall in line with the GOP ticket. Hillary Clinton is the ultimate liberal Washington insider. If she were any more on the inside, shed be in prison, Walker said. America deserves better than Hillary Clinton, he said. That is why we need to support Donald Trump and Mike Pence to be the next president and vice president. Let me be clear: A vote for anyone other than Donald Trump in November is a vote for Hillary Clinton, he said. The speech was full of Walkers sensible Midwestern passion, and it roused the crowd. After House Speaker Paul D. Ryans address the night before, it was among the few speeches that gave prime time the feel of a traditional convention otherwise filled with B-list actors and Trumps business allies. Walker may have lost his chance to be the one onstage as the GOP nominee. But on Wednesday, he did his part to salvage the Republican Party in the age of Trump. Watch the full speech: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker speaks at the Republican National Convention. Facebook
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Mike Pence can bring it in a speech when he needs to By Javier Panzar Indiana Gov. Mike Pence is giving the biggest speech of his life tonight. If you are looking for a preview of what the man can do to a crowd it helps to look at the speech he gave to the Family Research Council Values Voter Summit in September 2010. Pence, then a congressman, was so well received he won the straw poll there, beating out former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and eventual 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Speaking shortly before Republicans won back a majority in Congress, Pence jabbed at then-speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and promised the crowd not to compromise with Democrats. I am here to say House Republicans are back in the fight and they are back in the fight for conservative values on Capitol Hill, he told a rapturous crowd. The crowd ate up the Republican red meat Pence offered throughout about the nation being trapped in bondage to big government. But Pence also managed to maintained a light touch. He put the crowd in stitches, joking that while MSNBC said Republicans would win just a couple of seats in the House, Fox News said Republicans will win all 435 seats in the Congress. Pence used one of his common lines -- I am a conservative but I am not in a bad mood about it. -- that he has repeated on television since Trump selected him as his running mate. Pence also flashed his socially conservative bonafides that made him attractive to a Trump campaign looking to broaden its appeal to the right wing. Dont ask, dont tell must remain the policy of the United States Armed Forces, he said. Watch: Facebook
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Watch: Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham tells those with bruised egos its time to support Trump It was a speech to fire people up, and included marching orders. We should all, even all you boys with wounded feelings and bruised egos, and we love you, we love you, but you must honor your pledge to support Donald Trump now, Laura Ingraham told delegates at the convention. Watch the full speech: Laura Ingraham, conservative commentator, speaks at the Republican National Convention. Facebook
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The hot and cold relationship between Scott Walker and Donald Trump By Kurtis Lee His support of Donald Trump has fluctuated in recent months. Ahead of his states April primary, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker endorsed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who at the time was seen as the strongest candidate to derail Trumps quest to become the Republican nominee. Trumps response? He said that countries like Mexico and China had taken jobs away from Wisconsin and that immigrants in the country illegally were burdening the states taxpayers. Trump blamed it on a lack of leadership by Walker, whose own presidential bid last year faltered after only a few months. I wouldnt do this, except that he endorsed this guy Cruz, and Cruz would be a terrible president, Trump told Wisconsin Republicans at the time. But the effort to assail Walker, who is popular among Republicans in his state after staving off a 2012 recall spearheaded by Democrats, was not a formula for victory. Trump ended up losing to Cruz in the primary by 13 percentage points. As Trump has mended some relationships with establishment figures, the one with Walker remains complicated. Though the governor plans to make clear in his speech Wednesday night his support for Trump over Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, hes wavered in his applause of the billionaire businessman. During an interview with a local Wisconsin television station last month, Walker, who had initially said he would support the GOP nominee, backtracked. Alex and I with our great friend Mike Pence! #RNCinCLE pic.twitter.com/VS5r5rFuF1 Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) July 20, 2016 Its just sad in America that we have such poor choices right now, Walker said, a direct jab at Trump and Clinton. Walkers comments came on the heels of Trumps inflammatory statements about a Latino judge overseeing a fraud lawsuit against the now-defunct Trump University. Yet in recent weeks, Walker has not been as vocal in his criticisms of Trump. In fact, after Trump announced the selection of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence last week as his running mate, Walker offered plaudits. The Mike Pence decision this week to me is a sign that this is somebody who is actually thinking about how to govern, Walker said of Trump in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. For Walker, who some political observers believe is eyeing another presidential run in 2020, it was a step toward unity. Facebook
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17 arrested at flag-burning protest outside RNC; observers dispute police account By James Queally (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) Cleveland police arrested 17 people on suspicion of assaulting officers and failure to disperse after a U.S. flag was set on fire outside the Republican National Convention on Wednesday afternoon, but legal observers are disputing the police narrative of the incident. Police Chief Calvin Williams said two people have been booked on charges of felony assault after they pushed and punched police who were trying to extinguish the fire outside the entrance to the Quicken Loans Arena on Wednesday. Fifteen other protesters face various misdemeanor charges, including failure to disperse, he said. Police had no plans to stop Revolutionary Communist Party members from burning the flag, which is a legal but controversial form of protest, and Williams said officers only moved in because several protesters clothes caught on fire. But Jocelyn Rosnick, co-coordinator of the Ohio Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, said 10 legal observers on the scene did not see any of the protesters clothes aflame and contended that no dispersal order was given. She also noted that officers are required to give multiple dispersal orders before making arrests. Flag burning as a means of speech is protected. It has been argued in a number of court cases all the way up to the Supreme Court, Rosnick said. Officers moved in seconds after the flag caught fire. One could be heard yelling, Youre on fire, stupid at a protester as he sprayed a fire extinguisher. A Times reporter who was standing feet away from officers when the flag was set on fire did not hear a dispersal order, however. All 17 people arrested were adults involved in the protest. Williams said police were only at the scene to prevent clashes between members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which organized the flag-burning protest, and counter groups who had come to stop them, including Bikers 4 Trump. There were people on the corner that were basically saying, Why are you guys doing this? and the whole area got kind of amped up, the chief said. A city police officer and an Ohio state trooper were treated for minor injuries at the scene. None of the protesters whose clothes police said caught fire required medical treatment for burns, Williams said. Facebook
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Potential Trump Cabinet pick Harold Hamm makes convention debut By Javier Panzar Harold Hamm of Continental Resources, says climate change is not a problem, its Islamic terrorism, in his speech to the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland on July 20. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) On Wednesday Reuters reported that Donald Trump will consider Harold Hamm, chief executive officer of oil and gas giant Continental Resources, as Energy secretary should he become president. In 2012 Hamm chaired Republican nominee Mitt Romneys Energy Policy Advisory Group, attacked President Obamas policies on oil and gave almost $1 million to a super PAC supporting Romney, according to Politico. Hamm isnt new to politics. Reuters reported that in 2009 Hamm formed a lobbying group to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline, fearing it would flood his companys territory with Canadian oil. But Hamm dropped his opposition after the pipelines operator agreed to add an extension that would pick up his companys oil and take it to refineries, according to the report. Hamm backed Trump in April. He is someone who is not beholden to special interests and has the fortitude to make tough decisions, he said at the time. With a slew of onerous regulations now threatening to cripple American business, the next president of the United States must have the courage, determination and intelligence to disrupt politics as usual. Facebook
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Band at RNC goes patriotic, then plays antiwar song By Colleen Shalby Country singer Chris Janson joined G.E. Smiths house band on stage tonight at the Republican National Convention. Janson was in the middle of playing his band LoCashs song Love this Life when he stopped to address the delegates dancing on the floor. Let me hear you if youre proud to be from the U.S.A.! Then he broke from his band to play the chorus from Born in the U.S.A. Chants of U-S-A followed. Bruce Springsteens 1984 hit is often deemed a patriotic song, despite its antiwar origins. The song is a criticism of the Vietnam War and the U.S. government, and if you know it, youll recognize the lyrics that surround the catchy chorus: I had a brother at Khe Sahn
Fighting off the Viet Cong
Theyre still there, hes all gone Heres the playlist (so far) from the convention. Facebook
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Eileen Collins, the first female U.S. space shuttle commander, urges investments in space exploration at RNC By Christine Mai-Duc In her speech Wednesday night at the GOP convention, astronaut Eileen Collins urged investments to make Americas space program first again. Collins herself has seen a few firsts in her career. She was the first female pilot of an American space shuttle, and in 1999 became the first woman commander of a U.S. shuttle mission. Before becoming an astronaut, Collins was a career military pilot and trained at Vance Air Force Base in Oklahoma. She also worked as an instructor pilot at Travis Air Force Base in California from 1983 to 1985. She was picked for the astronaut program after attending pilot school at Edwards Air Force Base. Shes also terrified of roller coasters. Facebook
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Florida Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi was questioned over Trump donation By Javier Panzar Florida Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, who will speak at the Republican National Convention Wednesday, has drawn scrutiny for soliciting a political campaign contribution from Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump when her office was considering joining an investigation into Trump University. The Associated Press reported last month that a Trump family foundation gave a $25,000 donation to a political group supporting Bondis reelection after she solicited the contribution. The donation alone appeared to be a violation of rules governing political activities by charities. The timing of the contribution also raised questions: The check arrived four days after Bondi said her office was considering joining a New York state probe of Trump University. Her office declined to join the suit against Trump after the check came in, citing insufficient grounds to proceed. The news made waves because Trump has been open about what he expects when he makes political contributions. I give to everybody, he said in an debate last August. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And thats a broken system. Bondi was highlighted in a 2014 New York Times investigation that uncovered lobbyist spending on meals, trips and other contributions for several state attorneys general. Facebook
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The architecture of the convention stage By Christopher Hawthorne In Cleveland, the stagecraft is sleek, anodyne and less traditional. There are no Obama-style Greek columns for Donald Trump. Nor has he revived the domestic architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright the way Mitt Romney did during the 2012 GOP convention in Tampa, Fla. Instead the set is a shotgun marriage of Star Trek and Macbook modern, with perhaps a touch in the rounded stairs, lighted from below of Art Deco. A dark oval stage is flanked by a pair of canted silver walls, between which hang several giant video boards. The goal seems to be a series of smooth surfaces to which none of the more direct ad hominem verbal attacks or accusations of plagiarism might stick a slate that can be wiped clean whenever a change in tone or direction is wanted. Call it Teflon minimalism. For those of us watching on phones, tablets and television screens, this gap between the nostalgic and often aggressive rhetoric of the speeches and the sleek, vague futurism of the set design has been among the conventions most striking elements. Read More Facebook
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Trump business associate Phil Ruffin takes the stage next By Javier Panzar At the Republican National Convention, many of the speakers have something in common: They arent politicians. Instead, they are friends or business associates of nominee Donald Trump. Take Wednesday night speaker Phil Ruffin. The billionaire owns the Treasure Island Resort & Casino in Las Vegas and worked with Trump to develop the Trump International Hotel. Ruffin has developed properties across the U.S., including in California. He was on hand when Trump was campaigning in Las Vegas this February. Trump's Las Vegas supporters gathering for rally at the Treasure Island casino of Trump biz partner Phil Ruffin pic.twitter.com/Q5VWpxjbfW Michael Finnegan (@finneganLAT) June 18, 2016 He has also stumped for Trump in his native Kansas. Hes a brilliant businessman, one of the best Ive ever seen, Ruffin told members of the Wichita Pachyderm Club in downtown Wichita, according to the Wichita Eagle. If he ever offers you a partnership, take the deal. Right now hes offering a partnership for the country: Trump and the country. He would do a great job. Hed make a great president. Facebook
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Conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham chides John Kasich ahead of prime-time speaking slot By Christine Mai-Duc Conservative radio talk show host Laura Ingraham is expected to address the need to restore respect across all levels of society in a night themed Make America First Again. Ingraham, who said she would not choose between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump during the primaries, has taken to rallying conservatives behind Trump in recent days. On Twitter, shes criticized Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who dropped out of the race in May, for not attending the convention in his home state. How incredibly short-sighted & self-absorbed for John Kasich not to attend the RNC. What did he accomplish by skipping? Zippo. Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) July 19, 2016 Hey @JohnKasich, you can have my speaking slot tonight. Endorse Trump. Put America first. No one agrees on all issues. We need you. Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) July 20, 2016 It won't help Cruz or GOP if the story coming out after his speech tonight is that he didn't endorse Trump. He's smarter than that. Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) July 20, 2016 Ingraham told the New York Times in May that the anti-Trump effort within the Republican Party was a little juvenile. There are a lot of purists out there who, if they dont get everything checked off on their little bucket list, then they say take your pail and go home, she told the newspaper. Come to the real world. How original. I address this level of disrespect in my speech tonight. Tune in--8:10pET! https://t.co/dZgtmV5CsL Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) July 20, 2016 On Twitter, Ingraham cited a flag-burning protest and subsequent arrests outside the convention hall Wednesday, saying shed address this level of disrespect in her prime-time remarks. Facebook
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Obama praises Florida Gov. Rick Scott. Tonight, Scott will bash him at the Republican convention. By Noah Bierman The White House released a long statement Wednesday afternoon praising Florida Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, for responding to a suspected case of Zika. The statement recounted a phone call between the two men earlier in the day in which Obama touted an additional $5.6 million being sent to Florida from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: The president recognized Floridas strong record of responding aggressively to local outbreaks of mosquito-borne viruses like Zika, and offered federal support and technical assistance. It was a nice bipartisan moment, expressing how state and federal officials can make government work across party lines. Right? Well, heres an excerpt of the speech Scott plans to deliver at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night. Today, America is in terrible, world-record-high debt. Our economy is not growing. Our jobs are going overseas. We have allowed our military to decay, and we project weakness on the international stage. Washington grows while the rest of America struggles. The Democrats have not led us to a crossroads; they have led us to a cliff. Facebook
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California delegation afflicted by norovirus: Heres what it does By Melissa Healy At least a dozen GOP staffers from Californias delegation to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland are experiencing vomiting, cramps and diarrhea, and the dreaded norovirus is being blamed for their gastrointestinal misery. Erie County Health Department officials have been called to the scene of the delegations quarters at the Kalahari Resort in Sandusky, Ohio, about 60 miles from the convention site, and have collected fecal samples to confirm the diagnosis. Norovirus is the most common cause of diarrheal episodes globally and one of the leading causes of food-borne disease outbreaks in the United States. Treated with rest and fluids, its symptoms of severe gastroenteritis generally wane after two or three days. But it claims the lives of 212,000 annually worldwide, mostly children and the elderly living in low- and middle-income countries. Read More Facebook
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Man who burned flag outside Republican convention has done it before, group claims By James Queally Police officers arrest protesters from the Revolutionary Communist Party as they try to burn a flag. #RNCinCLE pic.twitter.com/GGimuzX6he Marcus Yam (@yamphoto) July 20, 2016 The man who set fire to an American flag outside the Republican National Convention on Wednesday, touching off a struggle between police and protesters, did the same thing outside the convention in 1984, according to a statement issued by the group that organized the protest. The Revolutionary Communist Party has claimed Gregory Lee Johnson was the man who lit the flag on fire about 4 p.m. outside Quicken Loans Arena. Johnson was the plaintiff in a 1989 Supreme Court case that invalidated restrictions that criminalized burning flags in the U.S., the group said. Johnson also burned a flag outside the GOP convention in Dallas in 1984, according to the statement. Several people were arrested as police used fire extinguishers and pepper spray to stop the protest just seconds after the flag was scorched. The Revolutionary Communist Party had announced the protest earlier in the week, drawing the attention of a number of groups attempting to stop them. A dozen protesters emerged from a tightly packed crowd near Quicken Loans Arena, donning black T-shirts bearing the groups name and chanting America Was Never Great before setting fire to the flag. At least six people were seen being led away by police in zip-tie handcuffs. In its statement, the Revolutionary Communist Party said 14 people were arrested. On Wednesday evening, the Cleveland Police Department said 17 arrests were made. Two officers sustained minor injuries, police said. 17 arrests total:
Charges include Felonious Assault on Police Officer, failure to disperse and resisting arrest. Cleveland Police (@CLEpolice) July 20, 2016 Facebook
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The ghost of Richard Nixon is haunting the GOP convention By Mickey Edwards It has been a long time since Richard Milhous Nixon has found such love. Law and order, the mantra that elected Nixon president in 1968, has become a central focus of Donald Trumps convention. In the midst of Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter and All Lives Matter, dueling but not incompatible perspectives, varying in emphasis but capable of being reconciled, comes the ghost of Nixon, in the form of Trump, rallying what he hopes are majorities to shout down and shut up the voices of grievance. Like Nixon, Trump is a modern-day incarnation of poor besotted Thomas Hobbes, railing against a world he thought a bleak and forlorn home to a multitude whose lives were nasty, brutish and short. Donald Trump, bless his soul, is standing firm against the darkness. His anger makes Trump grate again. Read More Facebook
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With his double-aerial arrival, Donald Trump reminds the media whos in control By Melanie Mason (AFP/Getty Images) Donald Trump, newly minted as the Republican presidential nominee, was about to land on the shores of Lake Erie in a helicopter and nobody knew where to look. Journalists, penned in on a field near the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, pointed their cameras in all directions, making sure they had every possible angle. Unlike the raucous rallies filled with fans that have propelled his candidacy, Trumps arrival in Cleveland, advertised as closed to the public, was all about his media horde a relationship that has been rancorous, but undeniably mutually beneficial. The elaborately staged proceedings left no question as to who was calling the shots. Every time a helicopter passed, heads snapped skyward. But fears that Trump would somehow sneak past were unfounded. As his private jet swooped past, the blaring soundtrack suddenly switched from the Rolling Stones to the operatic swells of Puccinis Nessun Dorma. But where to look next? From the south, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, Trumps running mate, strolled in, flanked by family. Overhead, from the east, a Trump-branded helicopter circled and then reversed course. With each new sight of an aircraft, a Trump family member, the man himself the media gaggle dutifully pivoted to capture it. They shot photos and videos. They tweeted and Periscoped. They looked up and down, turned left and right the collective herky-jerky dance of covering the quintessential cable news candidate. Finally, Trump emerged from the chopper, greeted Pence and strode to a grassy field, family in tow. He spoke uncharacteristically briefly. No questions, no news made. But no matter. The double-aerial landing got wall-to-wall coverage on television, Trump reinforced his reputation for showmanship, and the news media got another chance to practice the choreography of covering Trump. Facebook
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The Trump kids, making their national political debut, soften their fathers sharp edges By Robin Abcarian From left, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump and Tiffany Trump on the convention floor (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times) The four eldest children of Donald J. Trump have become the unlikely stars of the show in Cleveland. Its not even really what they have said or will say; its simply who they are. Their father can be uncouth; they are refined. He can be a bully; they are unfailingly polite. He often rambles and digresses; they stick to their scripts. In this, they are following the recent tradition of other candidates children, including Mitt Romneys five sons, and Chelsea Clinton. In two presidential campaigns, 2008 and 2012, the Romney brothers job was to humanize a father who struck some as robotic and rehearsed. In 2008, Clinton was selling her mother as more capable and experienced than her upstart opponent, Barack Obama. Like her mom, Chelsea was a bit rigid on the trail, but she was poised. When college students asked her about Monica Lewinsky, she replied, I do not think that is any of your business. (Contrast those political offspring to a star of the 2008 presidential campaign, Megan McCain, then a free-spirited 23-year-old who posted photos of herself jumping on hotel beds as she blogged about life on the trail, complete with music playlists.) In an impressive national debut Tuesday night, 22-year-old Tiffany Trump, Donald Trumps daughter with second wife Marla Maples, shared a couple of meager anecdotes about her father. Read More Facebook
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Multiple arrests apparently made after demonstrators burn flag outside GOP convention By James Queally Outside #RNCinCLe a group of protesters tried to burn two flags; riot police moved in to arrest at least 8 people. pic.twitter.com/WRPf7UdluF Carolyn Cole (@Carolyn_Cole) July 20, 2016 Warning: Graphic images and language. A dozen people changed into T-shirts bearing the Revolutionary Communist Party name shortly after 4 p.m. Wednesday afternoon. The group set a flag on fire after chanting America Was Never Great, before Cleveland police officers moved in with a fire extinguisher. Youre on fire, stupid, one police officer yelled as he moved in on the group. To the east of the convention entrance, several protestors chanted, Whats the problem? The whole damn system. Several people were seen wrestling with police, and a few were led away in zip-tie handcuffs, with at least six moved to a police transport van. Jocelyn Rosnick, executive director of the Ohio chapter of the National Lawyers Guild told the Times up to 20 arrests may have been made, though the Cleveland Police Department has not confirmed the number. The protest was announced earlier in the week. Firefighters were on the scene and Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams reported that the entrance to the Republican National Convention had been shut down by police before it was later reopened. The police department reported at least two officers were assaulted. Two officers assaulted. Minor injuries. Cleveland Police (@CLEpolice) July 20, 2016 Things getting physical pic.twitter.com/tKz8HGuzIY James Queally (@JamesQueallyLAT) July 20, 2016 Flag was set on fire. Cops used pepper spray to break it up. Melee erupted #RNCinCLE pic.twitter.com/K6MGSjKI7L James Queally (@JamesQueallyLAT) July 20, 2016 Crowd members were split over the incident. Its freedom of speech. Its the purest form of free speech, said Martha Conrad, an attorney from Chicago who said she would offer to represent those arrested. Its disrespectful. People fought and died for that flag, countered Jeff Jagels, 15, of Dayton. The scene has been tense for at least an hour. Minutes before the protest, a religious group that had been spotted around Cleveland earlier in the week said it could burn a gay pride flag instead of the American flag. And a U.S. Marine carrying an American flag was swarmed by media and later escorted away by police after cameras circled him. Bikers 4 Trump got down here but after flag caught fire #RNCinCLE pic.twitter.com/vjZU9txqJD James Queally (@JamesQueallyLAT) July 20, 2016 Riot gear is out but things have calmed. Arrestees still chanting against police #RNC2016 pic.twitter.com/PSWSQvR9sP James Queally (@JamesQueallyLAT) July 20, 2016 Facebook
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Dog owners get the chance to express a political preference Facebook
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There have been a grand total of three arrests at RNC protests so far By Matt Pearce A sign outside Cleveland Municipal Courtroom D says NO LO TERING. The I has fallen off, sadly. Is there anyone here scheduled for a protection order hearing? a court worker asked the young men and women waiting in the rather soviet hallway. Nope. This morning, a group of activists sat outside Courtroom D, not loitering, but awaiting judgment. Municipal court is maybe the closest thing protesters have to a stern church: hard benches, rules that cannot be broken and a rather stiff penalty for skipping attendance. Jails and municipal courts often form the crucial backstage to all the protests you see on Twitter and TV, the place where the system takes in arrested activists, parks them behind bars and then spits them out after a fine, or, more rarely, jail time. Read More Facebook
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Loyal supporters cheer Ted Cruz and boo as Donald Trumps plane flies overhead By Seema Mehta Now on the stage: Ted and Heidi Cruz. pic.twitter.com/HPx8NoBT8v Teddy Schleifer (@teddyschleifer) July 20, 2016 Hours before Ted Cruz was to address the Republican National Convention, the second-place finisher in the nomination contest gave no indication he would endorse GOP nominee Donald Trump. In an amazing campaign field of 17 talented, dynamic candidates, we beat 15 of those candidates. We just didnt beat 16, Cruz told hundreds of supporters gathered at a riverside restaurant on Wednesday. Just then, Trumps plane flew overhead as the nominee returned to Cleveland ahead of the conventions third night. The crowd booed and Cruz laughed. That was pretty well-orchestrated, he joked, before continuing. Let me say to the men and women here, I dont know what the future is going to hold. What I do know is everyone has an obligation to follow our consciences, to speak the truth, and the truth is unchanging, to defend liberty. Theres a lot of talk about unity, he said. The way to see unity is for us to unite behind shared principles. Cruz pointed to his campaigns accomplishments in the 2016 campaign: winning nearly 8 million votes, 12 states and nearly 600 delegates; raising 1.8 million donations; and amassing 326,000 volunteers. All of which could lay the groundwork for a future presidential campaign, which was clearly the hope of many of the supporters. As Cruz was talking, a man yelled, Gods not done with you yet! and the crowd chanted 2020! 2020! 2020! Facebook
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Trump flies back into Cleveland for a campaign rally (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times) Donald Trump ultimately landed at his Cleveland rally on a similarly styled Trump helicopter. He was greeted by vice presidential pick Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, Pences wife and his own adult children. Pence will speak at the convention tonight, and Trump is scheduled to join him on stage. Facebook
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Paul Ryan manages to endorse Trump without praising him in the slightest By Barton Swaim Paul Ryans speech to the Republican National Convention was far and away the best thus far. That must be because Ryan had an actual purpose a purpose, I mean, other than to spout a few platitudes in the hope that no one would remember you had once praised Donald Trump on television. (That was manifestly the case with Sens. Tom Cotton and Roger Wicker, among others, on the conventions first night.) Ryans purpose was to recommend Trumps candidacy without in any way praising the candidate, or, in other words, to endorse Trump in the abstract without praising the man indeed, almost without mentioning him at all. Read More Facebook
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California GOP is optimistic norovirus outbreak among staff at convention is contained By Seema Mehta California GOP officials said Wednesday they were optimistic a highly contagious virus that led to the quarantine of at least a dozen staff members was contained. Weve had no new outbreaks for the last 24 hours, which makes me feel like all of our efforts to fight it have worked, executive director Cynthia Bryant told the delegation at its breakfast meeting. So knock on wood and say a prayer. The staff members had come down with what was confirmed to be norovirus, which causes stomach pain, nausea, vomiting, fever and diarrhea. They could not leave their hotel rooms until they had been symptom-free for 24 hours. The affliction is generally short-lived but can be dangerous and even fatal, especially for the elderly and the young. Erie County health officials have been involved in testing for and monitoring the outbreak. The 550-member delegation was warned of the outbreak by the state GOP early Tuesday and advised to avoid shaking hands with others, to wash hands frequently, to avoid sharing food and to not use the delegation buses if they had any symptoms. No delegates, alternates or guests had reported any signs of the virus, Bryant said. Facebook
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Ann Coulter warns California Republicans the nation could turn into California By Seema Mehta Conservative author and TV personality Ann Coulter warned California Republicans on Wednesday that the nation could become like California if Donald Trump is not elected president in the fall. Trumps slogan is make America great again. Hillarys slogan is make America California without the nice beaches, without the good stuff, Ann Coulter told the states delegates at a breakfast meeting. Youre always ahead of the curve, Coulter said. You sent us two of our greatest presidents, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. And now a Republican cant get elected statewide in California. That is because of immigration. This is why Trumps campaign is absolutely crucial. Coulter, who was applauded by the Californians, contended the influx of immigrants over the past four decades had given Democrats an edge, and that the Republican establishment betrayed its base of supporters on immigration and trade issues. We all know there are certain flaws with our candidate, she said, laughing. Its not like we looked around the country and said, I know who we need to run. Lets get a reality TV star who has never held elected office. No. Hes the only one who will speak for Americans. . @AnnCoulter says she hasn't watched a minute of #RNCinCLE , is only here 'about town' pic.twitter.com/AwXUtEZ77p David Siders (@davidsiders) July 20, 2016 Earlier, Omarosa Manigault, Trumps newly named director of African American outreach, told the crowd that Trump had changed her life by casting her in the first season of The Apprentice. Donald Trump really in that first season taught America that we can work hard, that we can accomplish whatever we put our minds to, and most importantly, sometimes folks arent going to like you, she said. Facebook
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Speechwriter takes fall for Melania Trumps plagiarism, says her offer to quit was refused By Mark Z. Barabak Social media lit up Monday night as some on Twitter pointed out that Melania Trumps prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention sounded strikingly similar to Michelle Obamas 2008 convention speech. The in-house staff writer did it. After more than two days of evasion, denials and contradictory explanations, the Trump campaign released a statement Wednesday to whom it may concern ascribing the plagiarized passages in Melanie Trumps convention speech to a scribe working for his corporate operation. In working with Melania Trump on her recent first lady speech, we discussed many people who inspired her and messages she wanted to share with the American people, said Meredith McIver, who described herself as a longtime and admirer of the Trump family. A person she always liked is Michelle Obama. By McIvers account, Melania Trump read her some passages from Obamas speech at the 2008 Democratic convention and they inadvertently made their way into the final draft that she delivered Monday at the GOPs gathering in Cleveland. This was my mistake and I feel terrible for the chaos I have caused Melania and the Trumps, as well as Mrs. Obama, McIver said. No harm was meant. She said she offered her resignation to Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, as well as his family, but it was rejected. Mr. Trump told me that people make innocent mistakes and that we learn and grow these experiences. McIvers account was one of several explanations offered by the Trump campaign and its representatives, including denial that any plagiarism had taken place. Before the controversy erupted, Melania told NBC she had written virtually the entire speech by herself. Far from laying the matter to rest, the statement reignited the issue, which overshadowed the convention for a second straight day and sparked a new round of finger-pointing at Trumps barebones political operation and its repeated stumbles. NEW: Melania staffer falls on sword, says campaign rejected her resignation pic.twitter.com/6ZgfX2cEXQ Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) July 20, 2016 Facebook
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Government should favor the hard-working middle, not protected minorities, Donald Trump Jr. says By David Lauter The government needs to do more for the hardworking men and women who built the great nation we live in, not members of minority groups who have status as a protected class, Donald Trump Jr. said Wednesday. The Republican presidential nominees eldest son, whose speech at the GOP convention Tuesday drew praise, also criticized his fathers detractors within the party. Some delegates who opposed Trump during Tuesdays roll call look like idiots, Trump Jr. said. I dont think anyone would ever accuse us of being appeasers of the opposition, Trump said of his family. Still, he agreed that his fathers decision to pick Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate was, to some extent, an effort to placate restive conservatives within the party. Describing a vice presidential selection process in which he and his siblings Eric and Ivanka served as chief advisors to his father, Trump said that they had chosen Pence over former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie mostly because it made sense to have someone to counterbalance my father. We dont need two Donald Trumps up there, he said, referring to the outsize personalities that his father, Gingrich and Christie share. Speaking to a large crowd at a breakfast sponsored by the Wall Street Journal, the younger Trump said he has thought about following his fathers path into politics, although not until his five children are older. Id love to be able to do it, he said. He described himself, jokingly, as a Fifth Avenue redneck, referring to his love of guns and the outdoors, and he made clear that he shares some of the views and blunt expressions that have distanced his father from minority voters. Responding to a question about the rise of identity politics on the political left, Trump said that the hardworking men and women who built the great nation we live in, theyre the only people who arent protected anymore; theyre the middle class. Currently, he said, the government benefits people who can show theyre one-sixty-fourth of some protected class. That has to stop, he said, adding that members of the middle class are the people we actually have to start catering to. Those are the people that are forgotten. We have to take care of the problems we have, but we also cant forget the people who built this nation. The hardworking middle, who pay taxes, the middle class. Facebook
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Donald Trump on Melania Trump plagiarism fuss: All press is good press Facebook
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Heres whats on tap for Day 3 of the Republican National Convention By Melanie Mason Were halfway through the four-day GOP convention in Cleveland and after last nights festivities, its official: Donald Trump is the Republican nominee for president. Tonight, well hear from Trumps pick for his running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence. Also slated to speak are several of Trumps primary foes, including at least one who still harbors future presidential ambitions. Here are the highlights of tonights schedule of speakers: Gov. Mike Pence, the Republican vice presidential nominee.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, one of Trumps fiercest primary rivals
Other 2016 runners-up: Florida Sen. Marco Rubio (appearing via video) and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker
Trumps son Eric
Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker who was a finalist for Trumps VP pick 8:51 a.m.: An earlier version of this post incorrectly listed Ivana Trump as a speaker. Facebook
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Brexits Nigel Farage says some of Donald Trumps ideas are pretty out there By Lisa Mascaro Why is Nigel Farage at #RNCinCLE? He says GOP is asking: If #Brexit could reach "beer drinker" voters... how do we? pic.twitter.com/jVVerYlhB7 Lisa Mascaro (@LisaMascaro) July 20, 2016 Turns out that even the leader of Brexit finds Donald Trump a bit too much for British political sensibilities. Nigel Farage, the brash former leader of the United Kingdoms Independence Party, is visiting the GOP convention in Cleveland, and marveled Wednesday at the tone of the American political debate. Some of Donald Trumps comments are pretty out there, said Farage, the chief proponent of Britains divisive campaign to exit the European Union. To say that you would ban all Muslims coming into America ... I can see what hes trying to do; hes trying to reach voters who feel frustrated and, perhaps, a little bit scared, Farage said at a breakfast hosted by the McClatchy news organization in Cleveland. Occasionally, the style of it, it makes even me wince a little bit. The British politician, whose Brexit campaign is often compared to the outsider revolt underway in Republican politics this election year, said hes not about to tell Americans how to vote. Though its no surprise his politics align with Republicans, who invited him to Cleveland, Farage is no fan of President Obama. Its a big mistake for foreign politicians to tell people how to vote, he said, referring to Obama, weeks before the vote, laying out the consequences from the U.S. view if Britain voted to leave the EU. Obama came to the United Kingdom during the Brexit debate. He came to our county. He was rude to us; he told us what we should do, and he led to a big Brexit bounce. He added, Although I have to say, I wouldnt vote for Hillary if you paid me. There is that sense of entitlement, he said about Clinton. Farage is a bit of a political tourist making his way through the GOP convention and U.S. politics. And even the leader of the Brexit campaign that shocked the world had the capacity to be surprised by what he saw in Cleveland particularly the protests outside the hall. It was interesting seeing some of the language displayed on those protest cards in particular on subjects around gay marriage, etc. which in the United Kingdom would be hate crimes, he said. There were some big cultural differences. Facebook
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Donald Trump really, really wants to win California By Melanie Mason House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, asked on Wednesday what its like to meet with Donald Trump, described the GOP presidential nominee as inquisitive. And theres one question Trump asks again and again. Every time he meets with me, he asks me...'Can I win California? said McCarthy, a Republican from Bakersfield, at an event hosted by Politicos Playbook. McCarthy said he replies: Well, I dont think so. Its pretty difficult. Thats an understatement. California is one of the deepest blue states in the country. It hasnt backed a Republican for the White House since George H.W. Bush won in 1988. The Trump team insists theyll play well in Democratic-friendly terrain like Connecticut, Oregon and New Jersey, and that Trump will campaign in blue states. That has made veteran GOP strategists worry the Trump campaign will pull resources from pivotal swing states like Ohio, Florida and Colorado. But McCarthy put a positive spin on Trumps preoccupation with California, saying it illustrates the businessmans pluck. Hes probably the most confident person I ever met, McCarthy said. I like people who are willing to take a risk. McCarthy likened Trump to Californias own mold-breaking politician -- the Governator. During his gubernatorial run, Arnold Schwarzenegger had the biggest rallies youve ever seen, McCarthy said, noting both Trump and the former California governor would play the same song at their events: Twisted Sisters Were Not Gonna Take It. Both celebrities-turned-politicians were tapping into the frustration that nothing was happening for many Americans, McCarthy said. Fittingly, McCarthy noted, Schwarzenegger -- who endorsed Ohio Gov. John Kasich during the Republican primaries -- is taking over Trumps storied The Apprentice franchise on TV. Facebook
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Ben Carson explains how he draws a line from Hillary Clinton to, yes, Lucifer By megan.garvey@latimes.com Ben Carson explains linking Hillary Clinton to Lucifer in his #GOPConvention speech https://t.co/FdJfzaRI9I https://t.co/zwsTHyhMqz CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) July 20, 2016 Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson expounded Wednesday on a rather unusual claim he made during his GOP convention speech that Hillary Clinton has ties to Lucifer. Yes, the devil. Carson, himself a former candidate who now backs GOP nominee Donald Trump, laid out an elaborate thesis during his prime-time address Tuesday that began with Clintons study of Saul Alinsky, a community organizer who advocated disruptive tactics to bring about change. His methods were the subject of Clintons college thesis. We all have people who are our mentors; we all have people we admire, Carson said on CNNs New Day. As a college student at Wellesley, she was on a first-name basis with Saul Alinsky. In Alinskys book Rules for Radicals, he employs Lucifer as a rhetorical tool to make a provocative point. The first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom Lucifer, Alinsky wrote. The book was published in 1971, two years after Clinton wrote her thesis at Wellesley, Theres Only the Fight: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model. Carson suggested Alinskys ideas still shape Clintons thinking. Its very interesting how it uses controlled anarchy in order to change us from a democratic republic to a socialist society, Carson said of Alinskys book. Facebook
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Analysis: Anger and optimism vie for dominance in the Republican Party By Cathleen Decker Donald Trump won the Republican presidential nomination by harnessing the dour mood of GOP voters put off by the nations political class. Now, as he turns to the general election, he faces the challenge of incorporating something he has mostly omitted to this point an overarching, positive vision for the nation. His best opportunity to date will come during his Thursday night convention address. Hillary Clinton will have the same opportunity and the same demand one week later. For Trump and his fellow Republicans, crafting an appealing argument requires a deft touch. They must persuade even parts of the country that have benefited under President Obama that what they say would be his third term under Clinton would be untenable. That requires a heavy dose of negativity. But history suggests that shifting gears toward an upbeat message is also a necessity. Read More Facebook
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Down-ballot Republicans whod like to network in Cleveland are instead navigating the Trump effect on the GOP By Lisa Mascaro Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) (Alex Brandon / Associated Press)) Republican Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio spent this week building houses with Habitat for Humanity, motivating young campaign volunteers and kayaking with wounded veterans on the Cuyahoga River. Sen. Marco Rubio was home in Florida, stumping for votes before investigating mold contamination in a federal courthouse in Pensacola. And Sen. Kelly Ayotte was busy in New Hampshire fighting the scourge of opiate addiction crushing the state. As the Republican Party gathers in Cleveland to nominate Donald Trump as their candidate for president, some key lawmakers are steering clear of the GOP convention. Read More Facebook
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Second night of RNC is suffused with anti-Clinton message By Mary McNamara On Tuesday, the theme of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland was Make America Work Again but the subtext was We Hate Hillary Clinton. Once again the festivities were fueled by the festering personal rage that unites so many disparate groups in reality television, and once again the evening sparkled with oratorical oddities. The president of Ultimate Fighting Championship spoke, as did a professional golfer and former Celebrity Apprentice contestant and yet another cast member of The Bold and Beautiful, as well as some of Trumps children. On Tuesday, however, the lineup also included several of the GOP luminaries who did not decide to skip the convention altogether. Read More Facebook
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Are you signed up for Essential Politics? By Christina Bellantoni We hope youre enjoying our convention liveblog this week. If youre coming to us for the first time or are a loyal reader, you may not know that we have a daily politics newsletter. The email blast is free and rounds up the important political stories of the day, both at the national level and here in California. And we try to have a little fun with it, too. Heres todays. You can sign up here to get Essential Politics in your inbox Monday through Friday. Read More Facebook
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Day 2 of the convention in less than 3 minutes By Christina Bellantoni Relive the highlights of the second night of the Republican National Convention. Ray Whitehouse and Cleon Arrey present the evening in less than 3 minutes: Facebook
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Chris Christies Hillary Clinton show at the RNC, the supercut By Jessica Roy New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie spoke forcefully Tuesday night about Hillary Clintons record. Though the nights theme was Make America Work Again, Christie chose to focus on the presumptive Democratic nominee, putting her on trial for the audience. They responded favorably, chanting, Lock her up! Lock her up! Watch: Facebook
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Watch: Ben Carson tries to link Hillary Clinton to Lucifer (Carolyn Cole/ Los Angeles Times ) Are we going to elect someone as president who has as their role model somebody who acknowledges Lucifer? Think about that. Dr. Ben Carson speaking at the Republican National Convention Facebook
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Vice President Biden was tweeting Republican National Convention videos. Heres why. By Colleen Shalby Anyone who follows the @VPLive account associated with Vice President Joe Bidens travels might have been surprised this evening when it started tweeting videos tagged with the Republican National Convention hashtag #RNCinCLE. Several went out. The tweets were quickly deleted, but the vice presidents account did not offer an explanation. A Twitter spokesperson told The Times that the tweets were accidentally sent by someone in Cleveland -- a mishap due to a technical error. Twitter had previously worked with the @VPBidenLive account during Bidens Cancer Moonshot Summit in June, using whats called Twitter mirrors. The devices are essentially iPads that allow people to take and send photos through Twitter using an official hashtag. Theyve been used during the Oscars, MLB All-Star game and political events. The Biden account was not properly logged out today, and thats how these @GOPConvention tweets ended up on the official vice presidential feed. Its not because Biden was hanging out with actor Tim Daly and Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina, who once shouted You lie! at President Obama. The Twitter spokesperson says the Biden team knows about the situation. Mike Memoli contributed to this report. Facebook
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Social media explodes with more Trump plagiarism allegations By Javier Panzar Another day, another speech by a member of the Trump family and another round of plagiarism charges coursing through social media. The Daily Shows Twitter account seemed to pounce first when it pointed out lines from Donald Trump Jr.'s speech that seemed to be identical to words first used in a May article by F.H. Buckley in The American Conservative called Trump vs. the New Class. Within 45 minutes The Daily Shows tweet had been retweeted 9,900 times. pic.twitter.com/QEftnTTwy3 The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) July 20, 2016 In his speech, Donald Trumps son said: Our schools use to be an elevator to the middle class, now theyre stalled on the ground floor. Theyre like Soviet-era department stores that are run for the benefit of the clerks and not the customers, for the teachers and the administrators and not the students. From Buckleys article: What should be an elevator to the upper class is stalled on the ground floor. Part of the fault for this may be laid at the feet of the systems entrenched interests: the teachers unions and the higher-education professoriate. Our schools and universities are like the old Soviet department stores whose mission was to serve the interests of the sales clerks and not the customers. The relevant part of Trumps speech begins at the eight-minute mark here: In response, Buckley took to Twitter to defend the younger Donald Trump, saying the speech wasnt stealing. He later told Business Insider he was, in fact, a writer for the convention speech. Except it wasn't stealing... Frank Buckley (@fbuckley) July 20, 2016 View Twitter post James Fallows, former chief speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, responded to the hubbub on Twitter and in a piece for The Atlantic: You dont recycle, without attribution, things youve written and let someone else present them as his or her own words, Fallows wrote. At least I havent done it myself or previously known of people doing this. On the recycling issue re DJT Jrs speech tonight, my initial take https://t.co/PWZdi4IvmP item by me James Fallows (@JamesFallows) July 20, 2016 Facebook
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Watch: Donald Trump Jr. hails father as mentor and best friend (Robyn Beck/Associated Press ) Donald Jr. gave a stirring speech Tuesday night that sparked immediate speculation about his own political future. The younger Trumps address was far more detailed than the traditional policy speeches his father usually delivers. In addition, Trump Jr. spoke of my father, my mentor, my best friend, Donald Trump as a businessman who hung out with guys on the construction sites, pouring concrete and hanging Sheetrock. Watch: Facebook
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How has the labor force really been doing since the Great Recession? By Priya Krishnakumar The theme of the second night of the Republican National Convention is Make America Work Again. In June, the U.S. economy added 287,000 jobs, the highest increase in job growth in eight months. The unemployment rate has declined steadily since reaching a high of 10% in October 2009, becoming 4.9% in June. It increased slightly from a 4.7% unemployment rate in May. Participation in the labor force is down overall since 2008 but has remained between 62% and 63% since 2014. Still, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito used Tuesday night to go after presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on the U.S. workforce. We know [Clinton] will double down on an economic agenda thats led to the lowest workforce participation in decades, she said. Facebook
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Shelley Moore Capito goes after Hillary Clinton on coal (Steve Helber / Associated Press) Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-West Va.) assailed Hillary Clinton during her prime time speech at the Republican National Convention on Tuesday night, alluding to the former secretary of States comments earlier this year about putting coal miners out of work. Since 2001, use of coal has gradually declined, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Still, the issue of coal is important to many voters in the country. In May, The Times Michael Finnegan explored the clash between Donald Trump and Clinton over coal. Read More Facebook
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All about Kimberlin Brown, the soap star-turned-California avocado farmer who is closing Tuesdays GOP convention By Christine Mai-Duc (Earl Gibson III / WireImage) The Republican National Convention lineup has featured several television stars, and tonight soap opera actress Kimberlin Brown will close out the festivities on Day 2. Brown, 55, hop-scotched between roles on shows including General Hospital, Port Charles and One Life to Live. Best known for her role as daytime villain Sheila Carter on The Young and the Restless, Brown later joined The Bold and the Beautiful. View Instagram post More recently, Brown has hosted a Design Network show called Dramatic Designs in which she helps homeowners with interior design projects. The GOP convention website describes Brown as a small business owner, and she and her husband own an avocado farm in Southern California. It doesnt appear either of them have contributed to federal or state political campaigns in the past. Facebook
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UFCs Dana White says Trump will fight for this country By Lance Pugmire UFC President Dana White spoke in support of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Tuesday at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, telling the supportive crowd, Donald Trump is a fighter and I know he will fight for this country. White recounted how after his close friend and former UFC Chairman Lorenzo Fertitta purchased the company in 2001 for $2 million, Trump was supportive of staging UFC fights at his property in Atlantic City. Tuesday, the deep appreciation for that early support was noted in Whites speech, which began minutes after House Speaker Paul D. Ryan confirmed Trump as the Republican nominee. Im sure most of you are wondering, What are you doing here? White said. I am not a politician. I am a fight promoter. But I was blown away and honored to be invited here tonight and I wanted to show up and tell you about my friend, Donald Trump the Donald Trump that I know. Read More Facebook
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Unifying a party against Clinton, not for Trump By Doyle McManus The view from inside the hall: The first half of Tuesday evenings program has been, to borrow a Trumpism, strangely low-energy. House Speaker Paul Ryan formally declared Trump and Pence the nominees to brief cheers from a partly empty floor. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell got booed, twice. Even a brief video appearance by Trump himself drew only moderate enthusiasm. But, to be fair, this was always going to be the least exciting program for the mostly pro-Trump delegates: a parade of congressional leaders, most of whom endorsed Trump only reluctantly. The evenings theme was supposed to be GOP plans to create jobs -- Make America Work Again -- but most speakers barely touched on it. Instead, most of them, from McConnell to Ryan, focused on criticizing Hillary Clinton. The Clinton years are way over; 2016 is the year America moves on, Ryan said. McConnell drew a lusty cheer when he promised that the Senate will continue to block Obamas attempt to fill Scalias seat on the Supreme Court. That honor will go to President Donald Trump next year, he said. Ryan finally roused the pro-Trump crowd to its feet with as close to a full-throated endorsement of the nominee as hes given. Whaddya say we unify this party? he said. Lets win this thing. And Christie drew ecstatic cheers -- plus chants of Lock Her Up! and Guilty! -- when he presented what he said was the prosecutors case against Hillary Rodham Clinton. Facebook
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Majority Leader Kevin McCarthys priorities: Congress, then Trump By Lisa Mascaro @kevinomccarthy hanging in the Digital Loft at the @GOPconvention. #RNCinCLE pic.twitter.com/mWkgOfM8yd GOP Convention (@GOPconvention) July 20, 2016 House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy backs Donald Trump, but he hasnt been anywhere near the forefront of the Trump movement. A speaking role at the Republican convention was not a role he was initially expecting to have. That might help explain why he barely mentioned Trump, now the GOP nominee, in his prime-time address. I have good news in just 112 days its over, said the Republican from Bakersfield. We have listened and you have told us enough. House Republicans have other issues on their minds, namely preserving their majority in Congress, particularly with an unpopular nominee at the top of the GOP ticket. McCarthy is a powerhouse fundraiser and political strategist working on that goal. Together, by electing a Republican Congress, Donald Trump and Mike Pence, we can build a better America. Congress. Trump. In that order. Facebook
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Donald Trumps most ardent supporters his kids set to address convention By Kurtis Lee (Patrick Semansky / Associated Press) Among Donald Trumps most trusted advisers are his children. And on Tuesday night, Donald Trump Jr. and Tiffany Trump are taking the stage at the Republican National Convention to address the nation, offering insights into the man who just became the official nominee of the Republican Party. Ivanka and Eric Trump are also set to speak at the convention later in the week. The elder Trump frequently boasts about his children on the campaign trail appreciation they plan to reciprocate in their convention addresses. These wont be typical child-of-candidate speeches, Donald Trump Jr., 38, told the Wall Street Journal. We will talk about him as a father, but I dont foresee a lot of the joking and the fluff we have grown so accustomed to from prior conventions. View Instagram post While the Republican nominee criss-crosses the country speaking to supporters, Donald Trump Jr., Eric and Ivanka run his real estate company. Ivanka Trump, 34, who will speak at the convention on Thursday night, has, according to her father, overseen the conversion of the Old Post Office building in Washington, D.C., into a high-end hotel. Its scheduled for completion this fall. Tiffany Trump, 22, the Republican nominees youngest daughter, recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania where she majored in sociology and urban studies. Facebook
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Why is it so hard for the Trump campaign to admit that Melania cribbed Michelle Obamas words? By Robin Abcarian We hold this truth to be self-evident, that Melania Trump borrowed thoughts and words from Michelle Obamas 2008 convention speech Monday night. No, wait. It is a truth universally acknowledged that when Melania Trump uttered words that sounded exactly like Michelle Obamas words, she didnt do her husband any favors. Hey, did I just plagiarize the Declaration of Independence and the opening sentence of Jane Austens Pride and Prejudice? Nope. Those words are so famous, so cliched even, that they dont need to be attributed because everyone knows who wrote them. But what about lifting less famous turns of phrase? What about what happened Monday night, after a guy named Jarrett Hill, who has a YouTube channel on home design, noticed that Melania Trumps convention speech sounded an awful lot like the one delivered by Michelle Obama in Denver in 2008? He noted that two passages in particular used parallel language to describe parallel thoughts. Did Melania Trump or her speechwriters do something wrong? Did borrowing Obamas words cross the line? Or was it all just an embarrassing coincidence? Read More Facebook
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Watch: Top congressional leaders speaking at convention have one thing in mind: Keeping Congress in GOP control Three top congressional leaders addressed convention delegates Tuesday in prime time. They offered different messages, but all pushed a similar goal -- keeping Republicans in control of Congress. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy have less to worry about given large GOP majorities. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnells party is in real jeopardy of losing the chamber this fall. Listen to how each man framed the contest as a need to shore up their ranks. And consider the message Sen. Roger Wicker, who leads the Republican Senate campaign arm, telegraphed yesterday at the convention: When Donald Trump is elected president he will determine the future of the Supreme Court and he will lead our troops as commander in chief.... He and Vice President Mike Pence will need a Republican Senate to get that job done. Sen. Roger Wicker, who leads the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, talks about how Donald Trump would work with Congress. Facebook
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Its official: Trump will appear all four nights By Christina Bellantoni Donald Trump appeared briefly on screen to address convention delegates tonight, marking the second evening in a row hes been a presence at the party. He told the crowd hell join his vice presidential nominee Mike Pence Wednesday night, and of course hell formally give an acceptance speech Thursday night. That means convention-goers will get four nights of Trump in a row. Facebook
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Trump sends message to GOP convention: We have to go all the way By Lisa Mascaro .@realDonaldTrump: "This is going to be a leadership... that puts the American people 1st." #RNCinCLE #gopconventionhttps://t.co/YSrHfP190b Fox News (@FoxNews) July 20, 2016 Donald Trump just cant stay away from his convention. From New York, he sent a video message Tuesday shortly after delegates delivered him the GOP nomination. Today has been a very, very special day, watching my children put me over the top, he said. Getting the partys nomination, Ill never forget it. Its something I will never, ever forget. But the convention in Cleveland is just the start, he said. This is a movement, but we have to go all the way. Most importantly were going to make America great again. Facebook
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Senate GOP Leader McConnell warms to Trump, hits Hillary Clintons tortured relationship with the truth By Lisa Mascaro Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is known as a skilled tactician, if a cautious politician. But on Tuesday, the Kentucky Republican showed the punch he packs behind the Southern pleasantries and penchant for home-state bourbon. Ladies and gentlemen, Ive been around a while.
And Ive been around the Clintons more than anybody should ever have to, McConnell opened. A couple years ago, Bill and Hillary camped out in my state telling anybody whod listen why they ought to vote against me, he said. Tonight Im here to return the favor. McConnell has long wanted the position he now holds as the Senate majority leader, and he once famously said his goal was to make President Obama a one-term president. Ive had my differences with Barack Obama, but l will give him this: At least he was upfront about his plans to move America to the left, he said. Not Hillary. Clinton, he said, has a tortured relationship with the truth. He said: I am here to tell you Hillary Clinton will say anything, do anything and be anything to get elected president. And we cannot allow it. McConnell was initially slow to warm to Donald Trump, but once it was clear Trump would become the nominee he cautiously embraced him. With Donald Trump in the White House, Senate Republicans will build on the work weve done, he said. Not McConnells first choice for the GOP nominee, but the one hes ready to negotiate with. Facebook
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As NRAs Chris Cox speaks, some context for U.S. deaths by firearm assault By Kyle Kim Chris Cox of the NRA went after Hillary Clinton as someone who would not protect the 2nd Amendment if she is elected president. He kept his remarks brief, focusing more on the type of Supreme Court justice Clinton would appoint than specific claims about gun violence. Heres some context for the topic. Violent gun deaths in the United States have hovered between 10,000 to 13,000 over the last 15 years. Facebook
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Heres the shortlist of 11 conservative judges Trump said he could nominate to the Supreme Court By Christine Mai-Duc (Tony Gutierrez / Associated Press) In his speech before the convention Tuesday night, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke of the importance of Republicans winning the White House in November, particularly as it relates to Supreme Court nominees. Let us put justices on the Supreme Court who cherish our Constitution, McConnell said. In May, Donald Trump released a list of 11 judges he might pick as Supreme Court nominees. They are: Steven Colloton: An Iowa judge appointed by President George W. Bush in 2003. He previously worked as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa and was a clerk for former Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
An Iowa judge appointed by President George W. Bush in 2003. He previously worked as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa and was a clerk for former Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Allison Eid: A Colorado Supreme Court justice since 2006 and former solicitor general for the state of Colorado who clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas.
A Colorado Supreme Court justice since 2006 and former solicitor general for the state of Colorado who clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas. Raymond Gruender: Appointed in 2004 to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in Missouri by President George W. Bush. A former federal prosecutor in Missouri.
Appointed in 2004 to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in Missouri by President George W. Bush. A former federal prosecutor in Missouri. Thomas Hardiman: A federal judge on the 3rd Circuit of Pennsylvania who was appointed by Bush in 2003. Hardiman, the first in his family to attend college, graduated from Notre Dame University.
A federal judge on the 3rd Circuit of Pennsylvania who was appointed by Bush in 2003. Hardiman, the first in his family to attend college, graduated from Notre Dame University. Raymond Kethledge: A Michigan federal appellate judge for the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. Appointed by Bush before his departure from office in 2008. Kethledge was previously in private practice and worked as a corporate attorney.
A Michigan federal appellate judge for the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. Appointed by Bush before his departure from office in 2008. Kethledge was previously in private practice and worked as a corporate attorney. Joan Larsen: Sits on the Michigan Supreme Court and was a professor at the University of Michigan School of Law. She clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, whose death has left a vacancy on the Supreme Court.
Sits on the Michigan Supreme Court and was a professor at the University of Michigan School of Law. She clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, whose death has left a vacancy on the Supreme Court. Thomas Lee: A justice on the Utah Supreme Court since 2010 and a former faculty member at Brigham Young University Law School. Son of former Reagan-era Solicitor Gen. Rex Lee and brother of Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah).
A justice on the Utah Supreme Court since 2010 and a former faculty member at Brigham Young University Law School. Son of former Reagan-era Solicitor Gen. Rex Lee and brother of Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah). William Pryor: A Bush appointee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Alabama. Took Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions place as state attorney general when he entered the Senate.
A Bush appointee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Alabama. Took Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions place as state attorney general when he entered the Senate. David Stras: A justice on the Minnesota Supreme Court since 2010. Previously worked as a legal scholar at the University of Minnesota Law School and clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas.
Diane Sykes : A federal appellate judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th District, appointed by George W. Bush in 2004. A former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice.
Don Willett: A justice on the Texas Supreme Court since 2005 who was appointed by Gov. Rick Perry. Willett has publicly mocked Trump on Twitter in recent months. Facebook
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Former U.S. Atty. Gen. Michael Mukasey has called for charges against Hillary Clinton By Javier Panzar U.S. Attorney General Mike Mukasey speaks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC on April 23, 2008. Mukasey spoke on on combating the growing threat of international organized crime. (Nicholas Kamm / AFP / Getty Images) Former U.S. attorney general and Republican National Convention speaker Michael Mukasey has not been shy about criticizing Hillary Clinton. Last year, George W. Bushs former top lawyer said that if Hillary Clinton was convicted of destroying government records by erasing emails from her private server, she couldnt legally run for president. He eventually walked those comments back. But this year he wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal saying criminal charges against her were justified. Facebook
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House Speaker Paul Ryan announces tally for Trump Paul Ryan announces Trump has been selected as the GOP nominee #GOPConvention #RNCinCLE https://t.co/KjpeNheq0X https://t.co/1lQZ9dTw0L CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) July 20, 2016 House Speaker Paul D. Ryan announces the tally: 1,725 Trump 475 Cruz 120 Kasich 114 Rubio 7 Carson 3 Bush 2 Paul The chair announces that Donald J. Trump, having received a majority of these votes entitled to be cast at the convention, has been selected as the Republican Party nominee for president of the United States. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan as convention chair Facebook
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Mood uneven in convention hall as the GOP nominates Trump By Seema Mehta (Win McNamee / Getty Images) The mood was celebratory, but also subdued and uneven, around the Republican National Convention as Donald Trump became the partys official nominee Tuesday evening, a reflection of how divisive this years primary contest became. Keiko Orall of Massachusetts, an incoming member of the Republican National Committee, described the feeling as hopeful. People are really excited to do something different, she said. Orall said full acceptance of Trump by the GOP establishment was going to take some time, but predicted the party would be united in November because of the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency. Theres a binary choice, she said. And theres a long game in the Supreme Court. New Yorkers were jubilant as their vote pushed their native son over the 1,237 delegates needed to claim the nomination. Congratulations, Dad we love you! Donald Trump Jr. shouted as the band began playing New York, New York. Among some delegations, the mood was sour. When Ohio cast its 66 votes for its governor, John Kasich, some near the delegation booed and flashed their thumbs down. Many of its delegates left once Trump was named the nominee. Utahs state rules dictate that it can only vote for a candidate who is put into contention, yet tried to cast its 40 votes for Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Delegates said they were informed only just before the vote that they could not cast their votes for Cruz, even though he won the states caucus decisively. Chris Herrod, a mortgage officer from Provo, said it felt like a ham-fisted push for party unity. Utahans have been slow to come around to Trump. Were trying to get behind Trump. We obviously dont want Hillary, Herrod said. But, he added: Its a lot harder when theres a spear at our back. He said several delegates had told him they wouldnt have spent the money to travel to the convention if they had known they would not be able to vote for Cruz. Im not a Never Trump person, he said. I just believe in the process. The Alaska delegation was displeased when party rules dictated that all their votes be given to Trump, and demanded a poll of its vote. Party leaders halted the dispute by saying Alaska was among the states that didnt allow votes to be cast for candidates who have dropped out of the race. Others appeared to have put their differences aside. As Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick announced his delegations votes, he called primary winner Cruz our dear friend and our favorite son as he announced he had won 104 votes, compared with 48 for Trump, whom Patrick described as our new friend and our latest adopted favorite son. The California delegation a 100% pro-Trump delegation since the state primary took place after the contest was decided was seated in the front row and among the most enthusiastic in the room. We are rock-solid for Trump, said Shirley Husar, a delegate from Pasadena who announced Californias vote. Facebook
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Dana White said he wasnt a political guy. Now he is speaking at the RNC By Javier Panzar UFC President Dana White may seem like an unconventional choice to speak at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland: Just last December he told Yahoo Sports, Im not a political guy, at all, not a little bit. So what is he doing here? He told TMZ this week the speech will be about my relationship with Trump and the Trump that I know. That makes sense given that the nights theme is about the economy and that White has spoken about Trumps early support of the ultimate fighting league in the past. Donald Trump was the first one to have us come out at the Trump Taj Mahal, he told TMZ. Not only did we host the events there, but he actually showed up and supported the events. Youll never hear me say a negative thing about Donald Trump. Facebook
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Get your groove on to the music of the Republican National Convention Facebook
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Mike Pence nominated for GOP vice president Some know Mike Pence as congressman. Others know him as governor. But back home, most call him Mike. Indiana Lt. Gov. Eric Holcomb on Gov. Mike Pence as vice presidential nominee Facebook
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Trump tweets on becoming GOP presidential nominee Such a great honor to be the Republican Nominee for President of the United States. I will work hard and never let you down! AMERICA FIRST! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2016 Facebook
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Alaska contests the way its votes were counted at RNC and roll call vote pauses House band plays while RNC polls Alaska delegates after the state said their vote was improperly recorded. #RNCinCLE Seema (@LATSeema) July 20, 2016 After a brief dust-up over the roll call votes of Alaska, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus took the stage to explain the procedure. Initially, all of Alaskas delegates went to Donald Trump. However, Alaska state rules have a provision that notes that when a presidential candidate drops out, those delegates remain with that candidate. Alaskas vote would have been 12 Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, 11 Trump and five for Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. The discrepancy was eventually alleviated with all delegates going to Trump. Chairman of Alaska's Rep party said he doesn't know why 28 delegates went @realDonaldTrump but "it's going to be corrected in record" @ktva Emily Carlson (@emilyreporting) July 19, 2016 Facebook
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Donald Trump Jr. announced the votes to send his dad over the top By Lisa Mascaro Donald Trump Jr. announces New York's votes, putting his father over the top #GOPConvention https://t.co/4eFzMqhZI3 https://t.co/eVhTTogNvU CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) July 19, 2016 I have the incredible honor of not only being a part of the ride thats been this election process and to watch, as a small fly on the wall, what my father has done in creating this movement because its not a campaign anymore, its a movement -- speaking to real Americans, giving them a voice again. Its my honor to be able to throw Donald Trump over the top in the delegate count tonight.... Congratulations, Dad, we love you. Donald J. Trump Jr. at GOP convention Facebook
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Rowdy protest outside RNC ends peacefully after police threaten arrests By James Queally (Marcus Ya
Aug. 25, 2016, 10:40 a.m. Reporting from imperial beach, Calif.
We made it, Oregon to Mexico, along an 1,100-mile beach The drive began at the Oregon border. It ended five weeks later at the Mexican border. Where I almost got arrested. OK, thats an exaggeration. When photographer Allen Schaben and I got to the border of Tijuana and Imperial Beach, the party was much better on the Mexican side. Families were in the water and on the sand, a Mariachi band played, and the whole scene was rather festive compared with two people strolling quietly on the Imperial Beach side. I thought briefly about defecting. One man stood at the fence on the Tijuana side, so I walked up to say hello. I asked why he wasnt swimming and he said he didnt have a bathing suit, then he stuck his hand through the fence to shake my hand. A Border Patrol agent sped toward me in an SUV and yelled for me to stand back from the fence. I hesitated, because what was the big deal? But then I noticed a sign warning against contact or the passing of narcotics through the fence, etc. So I stepped back from the fence because I didnt know if Id be able to write my last road trip columns from a jail cell. Im going to wrap up the series on Sunday, but that wont be the end of my coverage of the California Coastal Commission on the 40th anniversary of the Coastal Act. Theres lots to keep an eye on. Legislation to ban private meetings between commissioners and developers could move forward later today. A vote has been delayed on the controversial proposal for a desalination plant in Huntington Beach, a project that doesnt make a lot of sense in my opinion but has big money backing it. The ever-controversial Newport Banning Ranch project -- a massive hotel/housing development on the last undeveloped plot of privately owned coastal property in Southern California -- will be up for a vote in early September. And the City Council election in Pismo Beach has gotten very interesting because Erik Howell, a councilman and coastal commissioner who ticked off Pismo residents by supporting a development that will block ocean views, now has challengers in his reelection campaign. Howell, if youve forgotten, accepted a $1,000 campaign donation from the domestic partner and business colleague of the lobbyist who represents the Pismo development. If he loses his council seat, he loses his Coastal Commission seat too. So stay tuned. The Coastal Commission will have a new director soon, a new chair and at least two new commissioners, and we need to watch closely because whats at stake is the greatest 1,100-mile coast in the world.
10:25 A.M. reporting from san diego
Lawmaker who led 72 coastal preservation bike ride from San Francisco to San Diego still has Schwinn that delivered win Former senator James Mills, 89, stands with the bike he rode from Sacramento to San Diego in 1972 to promote Prop 20, which created the Coastal Commission and led to the Coastal Act. The photo was taken overlooking the San Diego skyline from Mills Coronado apartment Wednesday. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) The bike. I wanted to see the bike, and meet its owner. Arriving in San Diego meant our coastal trek from Oregon to Mexico was coming to an end, and it meant that it was finally time to pay a visit to Jim Mills. Mills, a state legislator from 1962 to 1981, was Senate president pro tempore in 1972 when he decided to support Proposition 20, the coastal preservation act. Without it, conservationists feared, coastal development would run amok, Highway 1 would be widened, and a string of nuclear power plants would spring up on some of the greatest beach fronts in the world. But there wasnt much money to fight Prop. 20s foes, said Mills, who had grown up wading in La Jolla Cove and has a deep appreciation of the states greatest natural resource. So in September 1972, he hopped aboard his canary yellow Schwinn Super Sport and led a bike rally from San Francisco to San Diego. The number of riders swelled at times, Mills said, and bikers were greeted each evening by locals serving plenty of carbs. We ate a lot of weenies and beans, and spaghetti too, he said. He recalled PG&E executives following the cyclists in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac, doing their own spin on Prop. 20. The bike rally drew lots of publicity, Mills said, and whether it made the difference is anyones guess. But Prop. 20 won 55% of the vote and led in 1976 to the Coastal Act that to this day protects the coast for the benefit of fragile marine and land habitats and the enjoyment of everyone. Mills was 45 when he rode down the coast, and 89 now. He greeted me and photographer Allen Schaben at his Coronado condo and said he hasnt done any riding lately, but hes doing a lot of writing. Mills has written several books and is working on another. He leads us down to the basement, and there it is. The dusty, canary yellow Schwinn that Mills rode in 1972, and for many years after the Prop. 20 campaign. He was an avid cyclist. Mills also kept the helmet he wore in 1972. We took the bike upstairs, where Mills put on his helmet and posed next to the bike that is a piece of California history. The Coastal Act has done a great deal of good over the years, Mills said, and the cause is no less important now than it was when he rode south from San Francisco. We need to preserve the coast for the benefit of future generations, he said, and I thank him for his contribution.
Aug. 21, 2016, 10:50 p.m. Reporting from the Mexican border
Steve Lopez reflects back on his 1,100 mile trek down the California coast
6:57 P.M. Sometimes the sausage is good enough to eat Two things will happen soon. The last column from my 1,100 mile road trip down the California coast will be done. And the reform bill banning private communications between California Coastal Commissioners and developers, as well as others, could finally emerge from the factory. As Ive been saying, Hannah-Beth Jacksons bill sailed through the Senate and should have done the same in the Assembly, but it got pushed off into a dark corner after a very fishy report claimed that reform costs money. The thing has come back to life, though, with amendments that arent as bad as the original amendments. I dont see why we need the amendments at all, or why the wrangling has to take place behind closed doors and out of public view. While I was thinking about that, a reader emailed me a clever idea about how to keep coastal commissioners honest -- make them strap on body cameras, like cops. I like it, and why not do the same with legislators, so we can all see whats going on? Having said all this, though, Im hearing from supporters of Jacksons bill that they think theres actually a chance the legislation is going to be OK, once all the cooks are done tweaking the recipe. Sausage is full of awful stuff, but just about all of it is good on the grill. So as much fun as Ive had telling you to ping Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, @Rendon63rd, and Appropriations Chair Lorena Gonzalez, @LorenaAD80, and ask what gives, maybe we should try another approach. Im told that Rendon, Gonzalez and other Assembly leaders have done some decent work rescuing this much-needed bill from the trash. So go ahead and tweet them again, and tell them youre encouraged, and still watching -- to the extent thats possible -- and counting on them to do whats necessary to get the bill to Gov. Jerry Brown, which is when the real fun will begin.
8:46 A.M. When it comes to coastal protection, why does state Assembly have such a problem with transparency? The need to clean up the way the California Coastal Commission operates was obvious. Commissioners meet privately with developers more than with any other group, by far. They have repeatedly failed to fully explain the nature of those meetings, and have even failed to report them on occasion. State Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara) penned a bill to ban such meetings. It cleared the Senate and bounced over to the Assembly, which nearly killed it, but finally decided this week to merely beat it to a pulp. The toothless mess that emerged from the Assembly Appropriations Committee this week would allow private meetings to continue under certain circumstances, and now Sen. Jackson has the task of trying to put some punch back into her bill. And heres the irony: We dont know which Assembly members, or higher powers, conspired to water down Jacksons bill because there is no transparency in the process. You cant peer through a window into the sausage factory. These amendments were hammered out privately. One can guess that the development lobby and labor groups did not like Jacksons reform bill because it would get in the way of a process that gives an advantage to those who want to build on the coast. One can even guess that the Brown administration shares their view. But we dont know, because a bill to shine a light on important decision-making got pummeled in a dark room, and the perps left no fingerprints. See Dan Weikels story at latimes.com. Ive sent in a request for an explanation to Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Paramount). He has appointing authority for four coastal commissioners and itd be nice to hear what he thinks about the handiwork by his Appropriations Committee. If youd like to ping him or Appropriations Chair Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego) to ask what happened, try @Rendon63rd and @LorenaAD80. Or you can drop a line to The Silent One @JerryBrownGov, but Ive tried, and despite months of turmoil and controversy on the 40th anniversary of the Coastal Act he signed into law, the governor doesnt want to be disturbed.
7:36 A.M. Summer is in the rear-view mirror, end of journey just down the road The tide splashes up on the beach at sunset on a warm summer evening at Windansea Beach in La Jolla. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) Carlsbad. Leucadia. Encinitas. Cardiff. Solana. Del Mar. Summer is disappearing in my rear-view mirror. Week Five of my trip from Oregon to Mexico will be over in just a few days, 1,100 miles after it began. Photographer Allen Schaben is farther down the road, waiting for me in San Diego. Soon well stand at the Mexican border and reflect on a deeper love of the California coast, a greater appreciation of the Coastal Act on the 40-year anniversary of protections that became law. Ill wish Id had a week to spend in places where I only had an hour or two. Ill thank the people we met along the way, and tell others well take up their offer the next time through. Californians are passionate about their coast. Theyre closely watching those in public office whose job is to protect fisheries and dunes, to limit development and maximize access. Ive got one eye on Sacramento myself. On legislative reforms that would serve all Californians. On coastal commissioners, some of whom seem to have forgotten their purpose. Im pulling into San Diego, where the air is warm, the water blue, Mexico in the near distance.
4:14 P.M. La Jolla The palm fronds of a palapa reveal a surfer, a couple and children taking in a warm summer sunset at Windansea Beach in La Jolla. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
1:07 P.M. newport beach
Watts in a name? Find Amp-le answers in Newport Beach On Pacific Coast Highway in Newport Beach. (Steve Lopez / Los Angeles Times) Im driving south on the Pacific Coast Highway and spot the sign. The boat name of the week, it says, is Watt A Man. Thats not a mistake. This is the headquarters for Duffy, which makes the electric boats that are part of the culture in the Newport harbor. Many years ago, I wrote a column about a day of hobnobbing and bar-hopping, by boat, with local residents. I also wrote, at the time, about boat owners trying to out-do each other with clever names for the battery-powered boats. One of my favorites was Salt n Battery. So what are some of the newer ones? I walk into the office, and salesman Jim Drayton says one of the best ones this summer was Amp-ly Endowed. Not bad. Tyler Duffield, of the Duffy family, shows me a list with a few more recent winners. Your name here. (Steve Lopez / Los Angeles Times) Its a Ohm Run. Watt the Hey. Watta Yacht. Going back through the years, some of the better names include: Current Affair. Carry Us Ohm Watts the Hurry. Shock Cousteau. Ohmer Simpson. Knots and Volts. I could go on, but why dont you, instead? Send me your best names. Its not as easy as it looks, Duffield said. Its usually the hardest part, he says. Someone comes in and orders a boat, and they get the colors and everything figured out, and the last thing to do is come up with a name before the boat leaves the factory. Yeah, Its a Duff Life out here, where people are Ohm on the Watter, but It Is Watt It Is.
9:13 A.M. Going under in Laguna Beach A snorkeler looks for fish at Crescent Bay in Laguna Beach (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) Garibaldi swim and feed on rocks at Crescent Bay in Laguna Beach. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
2:41 P.M. Catching waves in Huntington Beach
10:53 A.M. On our way toward Mexico A view of the beach through a telescope at Pacific City, a new 31-acre mixed-use development in Huntington Beach, also known as Surf City U.S.A. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) The site of the proposed Banning Ranch development now before the California Coastal Commission. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) The tide rolls in at twilight at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station located on the border of San Diego County and San Clemente. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
4:52 P.M. Laguna Beach
4:45 P.M. Laguna Beach
12:51 P.M. Dana Point A pod of dolphins leaps out of the water with a view of south Laguna Beach in the background on Aug. 12, 2016. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
10:37 P.M. sacramento
Profiles in courage: Legislators soften Coastal Commission reform, leave no fingerprints A perfectly sensible bill to clean up the way California coastal commissioners do business has been getting the waterboard treatment. First, Santa Barbara Sen. Hannah-Beth Jacksons SB 1190 was submerged by a ludicrous report claiming it would cost too much money to prohibit private conversations between developers and commissioners. Then it was tossed overboard and dragged like chum. Then on Thursday, legislators pulled SB 1190 back into the boat so badly decomposed its barely recognizable. As my colleague Dan Weikel reports at latimes.com, five amendments gutted the good intentions. The most egregious one allows commissioners to meet privately with developers during on-site visits. This comes just weeks after reports that Coastal Commission Chairman Steve Kinsey met twice with developers of the massive Newport Banning Ranch development and failed to properly report those confabs. Environmental groups, however, would not be able to have such meetings in the bills current form. On my best day, I could not have come up with a more Alice in Wonderland outcome. Details were still emerging, and it wasnt clear which legislators were responsible for the hatchet job, or whether they caved in to political, development or union pressure, or all three. No fingerprints on the body, in other words. Three environmentalists I checked with were livid, and understandably so. Stay tuned for updates on the autopsy, and dont stop letting @JerryBrownGov know how you feel about whats happening to coastal preservation on his watch. #SaveYourCoast
7:46 A.M. Sunset at Crystal Cove Beach Cottages Children run along the beach at twilight near the Crystal Cove Beach Cottages. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) The sun sets over the Crystal Cove Beach Cottages in Newport Beach. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) Isabella, 9, and Holden, 7, roast marshmallows over a beach fire with their parents, Steve and Amy Knuff, of Aliso Viejo at twilight at Crystal Cove Beach Cottages. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) Incoming tide rolls onto the beach at twilight at Crystal Cove Beach Cottages. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
1:29 P.M. Column: Fighting for the California coast from a tiny office in her kitchen nook Susan Jordan, who created and runs the California Coastal Protection Network, is seen in her Santa Barbara office. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) If you were a coastal conservation activist in California, with 1,100 miles of shoreline to look after, how would you even decide where to begin? Theres always a battle somewhere, and let me give you just a couple of examples from one tiny section of the coast. Moss Landing is in the news again this week as the Surfrider Foundation and other activists try to stop Cemex, an international sand mining company, from trucking away the beach as it has done for decades, causing erosion that has begun to set off lots of alarms. Read more
8:49 A.M. Hermosa Beach
Remember when you could spend a night at a California beach motel for less than a weeks pay? A third-generation motel owner in this seaside town tells me he gets an offer, about every other day, from someone who wants to buy his property, bulldoze it and rebuild. But hes hanging on because three generations of families have been staying at his low-budget, no-frills motel since the 1960s, and he doesnt want to end those summer vacation traditions. Elsewhere on the California coast, motels and hotels have been bought out by chains and developers, driving up the cost of affordable family vacations. Look for my column on the Hermosa Beach motel in the coming days. And if you know of good low-budget beach lodging, or if youve seen your motel go from cheap to chic, drop me a line at steve.lopez@latimes.com Over the next two days, photographer Allen Schaben and I will be in Hermosa and Huntington Beach, reporting on the proposed desalination plant there. And, by the way, we should find out in the next day or two whether legislation banning private meetings between coastal commissioners and developers is released from legislative prison and put up for a vote in the state Assembly. Theres still time to weigh in at #SaveYourCoast and be sure to give a poke to @JerryBrownGov and Assemblywoman, Lorena Gonzalez @LorenaAD80. Read more
The Metrolink commuter railroad on Monday unveiled the first of 40 clean-air locomotives that will replace its aging fleet of diesel engines in an effort to reduce harmful exhaust emissions across the region.
The so-called Tier 4 locomotives, which cost about $280 million, are the cleanest available in the nation and designed to emit up to 85% less air pollution than the older engines Metrolink has had in service.
Rail officials also say the state-of-the-art vehicles, built by Electro-Motive Diesel in Illinois, are fuel efficient and have dramatically more horsepower than conventional engines, allowing trains to pull more cars.
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This is quite a piece of equipment, said Art Leahy, Metrolinks chief executive, during ceremonies at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. We will get more horsepower, less fuel consumption and lower emissions.
Metrolink, which has 512 miles of track and serves six Southern California counties, is the first passenger railroad in the country to put Tier 4 engines into service. Officials say three will go into operation this year. The rest will be phased in by 2018.
Im hopeful that air quality will improve if the engines do what they say they will do. Grove Pashley of Northeast Los Angeles Residents for Clean Air
Equipped with catalytic converters and a fluid that filters exhaust, the engines are expected to slash emissions of nitrogen oxide and particulates well below the levels of older engines.
According to the South Coast Air Quality Management District, each locomotive will emit up to 12 fewer tons of nitrogen oxide a year while the reduction in particulates will be about a third of a ton.
Nitrogen oxide and particulates, which are minute pieces of exhaust, can penetrate deeply into the lungs and contribute to respiratory illness and aggravate heart disease.
Last year, the federal government required that rebuilt locomotives and new engines purchased by passenger and freight railroads must reduce nitrogen oxide emissions by 80% and particulates by 90%.
Transitioning to cleaner fleets is vital to reaching our clean air goals, said Wayne Nastri, acting executive officer of the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which has committed $111 million to purchase the Tier 4 engines. Metrolink riders and the entire region will benefit from this enhancement.
Concerns about air pollution from Metrolink engines and facilities have been raised by local residents, particularly in Elysian Valley, where the railroads Central Maintenance Facility is located next to the Los Angeles River.
Im hopeful that air quality will improve if the engines do what they say they will do, said Grove Pashley of Northeast Los Angeles Residents for Clean Air, which has pushed for health studies of neighborhoods near the maintenance yard.
The locomotives also are part of broader program to improve customer service and rebuild ridership that has been lost since 2008.
It includes replacing faulty ticket vending machines, adding trains to the schedule, studying lower fares and reducing train delays caused by mechanical problems.
Rail officials say Tier 4 engines are necessary because the number of breakdowns in Metrolinks aging fleet has grown steadily for several years.
Many of the railroads locomotives were built in the early 1990s and have traveled more than a million miles each. In addition, Metrolink has deferred costly overhauls, opting instead for reactive maintenance when mechanical problems arise.
In contrast, the new Tier 4s have up to 1,700 more horsepower, use up to 8% less fuel per mile, have longer service lives and are more reliable than rebuilt engines.
The added power will allow trains to climb grades faster and haul more passengers, which could ease crowding on the busiest Metrolink lines. In addition, the new engines are easier to repair because their modular components can be replaced quickly.
Metrolink is the first passenger railroad in the nation to procure these locomotives. This is a great achievement, said Raymond Tellis, a Federal Transit Administration official in Los Angeles. We hope other railroads in the nation will emulate this.
In addition to the commitment from the air quality management district, funding for the Tier 4 locomotives has come from the Federal Transit Administration, the California Department of Transportation, the California High Speed Rail Authority and transportation authorities in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties.
dan.weikel@latimes.com
Twitter: @LADeadline16
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When Gov. Jerry Brown signed off on the states final budget plan, which gave California State University about 60% of the additional funding that administrators said they needed for the 2016-2017 fiscal year, university officials had to make tough allocation decisions and downsized certain priorities, such as student enrollment.
The new spending plan will be presented Tuesday to the Board of Trustees in Long Beach, where the governing board will also get a first look at this years proposed salaries for Cal States top officials.
For the record: A previous version of this article said the average four-year graduation rate for the Cal State system is about 17%. That number was 19% as of April, university officials said.
The final budget agreement gave Cal State an additional $154 million from the state general fund raising total state support for the university system to $3.2 billion. Brown also allocated a one-time funding boost of $87 million toward specific purposes this budget year, which began July 1.
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Cal State, the nations largest public university system, is dependent on state general funds to cover about half its operating costs. Tuition and fees cover the rest.
Some changes to this years expenditure plan include:
Increasing student enrollment: The Board of Trustees requested an additional $110 million for enrollment growth enough to fund roughly 12,600 new students. The final state budget plan allocated an additional $57.4 million, which will allow the system to accept about 6,100 new students.
This issue will continue to be a sticking point for Cal State. Although enrollment throughout the system has increased by about 20,000 since 2008, officials have not been able to make room for everyone who wants to attend a Cal State school. The system last fall had to turn away about 30,000 applicants who fulfilled all admission requirements, Chancellor Timothy P. White told the Times earlier this year.
Infrastructure maintenance: Cal State has a backlog of buildings that are in need of repair or replacement maintenance work totaling about $2.6 billion and growing by $150 million each year, officials said. Trustees requested an additional $25 million each year in the state budget for these needs, but policymakers did not include this in the final budget plan. Instead, the state provided a one-time boost of $35 million earmarked for this years most urgent infrastructure needs.
Improving graduation rates: The university requested an additional $50 million to improve graduation rates, such as providing more hands-on academic advisers. In its final budget plan, the state allocated $10.2 million as well as a one-time appropriation of roughly $15 million toward improving degree completion. An additional one-time boost of $35 million is expected in the fall once university officials have updated goals and plans to improve graduation rates.
Brown has been sharply critical of Cal States performance: Across the country, the average four-year graduation rate for public universities is about 34%. Across the Cal State system, the average is about 19%.
White said he wants to raise that rate to 24% by 2025. University officials on Tuesday will update the trustees on their progress toward that goal.
Officials are also expected to present their 2016-2017 salary recommendations for the chancellor, campus presidents and other top officials. Executive compensation has been a thorny issue in the past: The system took heat in 2011 when trustees approved a $100,000 increase in compensation for the incoming San Diego State president as it increased annual student tuition by 12%. The next year, Cal State adopted a policy that froze compensation paid with state funds while allowing a 10% increase paid with private donations. In November 2015, in a move to quell criticism and controversy, the trustees voted to eliminate the use of private funds to supplement salaries.
Officials had long argued that restricting compensation puts the system at a disadvantage when trying to attract the most qualified candidates. This took on greater urgency earlier this year when the Chico, Channel Islands, San Jose, Sonoma and Stanislaus campuses were searching to replace outgoing presidents.
The five new presidents, all women, were named in recent months and reflect Whites push for more diversity in hiring. Eleven women now serve as Cal State presidents more than at any period in the 23-campus systems history and will sit together for the first time at Tuesdays meeting. The five new campus leaders took office July 1.
The trustees will also hear public comments from students on possible tuition increases, homelessness and a number of other long-running concerns weighing the system, according to the group Students for Quality Education. Initial findings of a recent study commissioned by White found that about 1 in 10 of Cal States 460,000 students are homeless, and 1 in 5 do not have steady access to enough food.
University officials and the trustees are scheduled to meet Tuesday from 9:45 a.m. to 4:15 p.m., and the meetings are open to the public. A live stream of the open sessions can also be viewed here.
Follow @RosannaXia on Twitter for more higher education news.
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Last week, Playboy model Dani Mathers took a photo of a nude woman in a locker room shower at an LA Fitness gym and posted it on Snapchat with the caption, If I cant unsee this then you cant either.
Mathers immediately faced the wrath of critics on social media who accused her of fat shaming, violating the womans privacy and worse. Mathers apologized, but that has done little to quell the storm.
The Los Angeles Police Department has launched a criminal investigation into the matter and is looking for the woman whom Mathers photographed.
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Legal experts said that in the era of social media and smartphones, prosecutors are increasingly grappling with cases in which people have aspects of their personal life unwittingly exposed on social media.
The person appears to have an expectation of privacy in the gym shower, said Dmitry Gorin, a former prosecutor who represented several clients in voyeurism criminal cases.
LAPD Capt. Andrew Neiman said the department received a report of an illegal distribution of the image last week from LA Fitness.
On Friday, LA Fitness responded to Mathers action by permanently revoking her membership at all of its health clubs.
Her behavior is appalling and puts every member at risk of losing their privacy, said Jill Greuling, the companys executive vice president of operations. The company would not say at which gym the incident occurred.
Our written rules are very clear: Cellphone usage and photography are prohibited in the locker rooms, Greuling said. This is not only our rule, but common decency.
Mathers issued an apology on Snapchat and she apparently deleted her Twitter and Instagram accounts.
That was absolutely wrong and not what I meant to do, she said. I know that body-shaming is wrong. That is not the type of person I am.
She said the photo was meant to be sent as a private message but was posted publicly.
State law prohibits recording and photographing someone in a private setting in which they have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Such a crime is a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail.
Although Mathers attorney might argue she didnt mean to post the photo publicly, Gorin said her comments could be used to show her motive for taking the photo in the first place.
Prominent defense attorney Lou Shapiro noted that images posted on Snapchat are temporary and are automatically deleted after 24 hours. Still, he said, a judge could take a dim view of the action and really want to see her punished.
For now, detectives on the LAPDs West Los Angeles station are piecing together the facts.
As of Monday, they were still looking for the woman photographed in the locker room.
Without a victim, we cant go forward, LAPD spokeswoman Officer Jenny Houser said.
veronica.rocha@latimes.com
richard.winton@latimes.com
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Josiah Payne struggled in Kansas City, bouncing from job to job and from apartment to apartment.
He packed up and headed to Los Angeles two years ago, carrying with him the well-trodden transplant dream of becoming an actor, musician something. But in just four months of living in the city, he got arrested and lost his job and apartment. Like nearly 47,000 down-and-out people in Los Angeles County, he found himself living on the streets.
Then, a few months ago, Payne beheld the stretch of curbside merchants mostly immigrants from Mexico and Central America selling jeans, jewelry, fruit, bacon-wrapped hot dogs and seemingly everything in between across from gritty MacArthur Park. The 27-year-old decided to join them in their common but illegal trade.
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Johnny Mayo, 44, who is homeless, shows a dart board that he hopes to sell as a sidewalk vendor in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times )
He took his merchandise from a rusty shopping cart and laid it out on a white bed sheet: old sneakers with dirt-crusted creases, but also nearly new Nikes that he was selling for $5; a dusty coffee machine, brake cables for bicycles, random adapters, and sweaters and T-shirts.
Its just another hustle. When Im in a pinch, Ill come here, Payne said from near the Metro Red Line station. You cant do stuff like this out there in Kansas City. You cant just find stuff and have a garage sale out in the street. But here, they sort of just let it go down. Its pretty cool.
Payne is part of a group of transient and homeless people mostly white or black who have taken a page from Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan and other Latin American vendors in Westlake, one of the most densely crowded neighborhoods in L.A. At times the immigrant vendors buy things from the homeless ones either out of pity or because they can sell them for slightly more.
Kevin Sippi Moran, 49, center, in black baseball cap, sells his wares to a crowd of sidewalk shoppers along Alvarado Street in the Westlake neighborhood. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times )
They saw we make money and they wanted to do the same, said Rosa Hernandez, 55, a street vendor for three years. Its not a bad thing, theyre just trying to earn a peso or a dollar in this case.
Johnny Mayo, 44, a homeless man with thin, short dreadlocks and a raspy voice, fills a red shopping cart with knickknacks, making between $30 to $50 a day peddling $1 used T-shirts and shoes. He struggles to stand because of a severe fungus infection on his feet. Sometimes he uses money he makes to buy weed or crack to smoke.
Lisa Pelti, 52, a homeless woman with short, curly black hair and a weathered face, arrived in Los Angeles from Sacramento about a year ago. A former computer engineer, Pelti lost her job and home during the 2008 recession. After wandering the city, she came across the street vendors near MacArthur Park.
Louis Price, 56, homeless for 16 years, gives a customer change after selling her one of the items that he sells along Alvarado Street in Westlake. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times )
She noticed how the immigrant vendors made their sales and four months ago decided to give it a try. While some homeless people dumpster-dived to get some of their merchandise, Pelti scoured sidewalk curbs and went through donation boxes.
I know what sells here, she said with a smile.
Using a small, white curtain rod as a walking cane, Louis Price, 56, said he has been homeless for 16 years after being in and out of prison. He said hed walked around downtown L.A. selling anything he could find to make a quick buck for food. But that changed when he decided to do what other homeless people were doing in the MacArthur Park area.
On a recent afternoon, Price sold womens underwear, toothpaste, a small bottle of Rogaine and two condoms apparently unused, but outside of the box, like cigarettes. He was selling plants; one delicately encased only by a glob of soil and two small succulents in tiny green pots.
A sheriffs deputy has homeless street vendors pack up their wares along Alvarado Street in Westlake. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times )
Im flat broke and I want to get a sandwich, and if I do this I can do that, he said. This helps take the pressure off.
Whether the peddler is homeless or not, the street peddling is illegal and subject to occasional crackdowns. On a recent Wednesday, deputies went up and down the area, ordering the mostly homeless vendors gathered near the Red Line part of the L.A. County Sheriffs jurisdiction that they needed to leave. Most of the other vendors sell their wares across the sidewalk, in the LAPDs jurisdiction.
Lt. Henry Saucedo, who oversees patrolling of the Metro Red Line stations, said deputies are regularly clearing out vendors from the Metro property. By looking at surveillance cameras, Saucedo said he can quickly dispatch deputies.
Kevin Sippi Moran, 49, right, packs up his wares after being told to do so by sheriffs deputies. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times )
Ive sent deputies out there to clean it up and within minutes theyre right back at it again, he said, adding that the deputies also have to deal with other issues such as shootings, stabbings and drug sales. Its a difficult task to police that area.
In the 1990s, a street vending district was created in MacArthur Park to address the issue but that decision was later scuttled because the permit fees were considered too high by some vendors and there was no enforcement of unpermitted sellers.
But recently, the LAPDs enforcement against street vendors in MacArthur Park seemed to relax, allowing them to sell without getting ticketed as long as they didnt block sidewalks or sold illicit merchandise.
Johnny Mayo, 44, and his girlfriend, Loyalty, 34, rest in their encampment next to shopping carts filled with found items that they plan to sell. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times )
The looser enforcement had a ripple effect: more homeless people started selling, and vendors from other parts of the county made their way to the MacArthur Park area on weekends and competed with local vendors, who concede that the situation can look chaotic.
They drink, they smoke, sometimes they do drugs, Fanni Cordova, 62, a street vendor for four years, said of some of the homeless merchants. It doesnt look good.
Sometimes we dont mind having the police come by, she added, winking. Other vendors complain that the homeless dealers sell things so cheaply that it undercuts their prices.
Using a sharpie to darken the stripes of a zebra painting, Kevin Sippi Moran, 49, a homeless artist, said his low prices benefit other street vendors, who buy things from him so they can sell them for more money. He said that in MacArthur Park theres a buyer for everything.
Most vendors here hold back to get the price they want, but not me, I just sell, Moran said.
Tall, with long auburn hair tied in a ponytail and a thick beard, Payne has published his own book of poetry. Like in some of my poems, Im trying to flee to the West! he wrote before coming to L.A.
After things did not work out as planned, he decided to emulate the entrepreneurial spirit of the immigrants selling things in MacArthur Park. When he cant find a place to stay, Payne lives on the streets in Koreatown. Most days, he said, he makes $30 to $50.
Thirty dollars, when you dont have to pay rent or bills, turns into $60 compared to people who have a minimum wage job and ... then rent cuts that in half or whatever, Payne reasoned. So if I make the money and dont have to pay rent or bills or any of those things, its sufficient.
Other homeless people have taken notice. Sitting in a Target shopping cart, Carol Banks, 53, said she wants to give up prostitution. Maybe selling wares like the street vendors will help her do that, she said.
Im going to do it, Banks said. Im going to sell water and Gatorade at Venice Beach. Its better than being a prostitute.
ruben.vives@latimes.com
For more Southern California news, follow @latvives on Twitter.
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When labor unions and community groups teamed up to back a November affordable housing ballot measure, their plans drew a predictable set of opponents.
The ballot measure, called Build Better L.A., would impose new requirements for affordable housing on real estate developers who seek to build projects bigger than city rules ordinarily allow. Business groups such as the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce said the proposal would end up making it harder and costlier to build needed housing, pointing to labor requirements they said would favor unions.
Now the Build Better L.A. initiative has a new and unexpected foe: tenant activists.
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At a Tuesday news conference, the L.A. Tenants Union railed against the ballot proposal, arguing that it would fuel luxury housing rather than truly affordable apartments. Renters hoisted signs that read Affordable for Who? outside a Hollywood apartment building that is targeted for demolition to make way for a bigger project that would include restaurants, shops and hundreds of housing units. Activists said more renters would face displacement if the new measure is passed, despite promises to protect affordable housing.
Build Better L.A. is expediting displacement in our communities and we need to protect the tenants who are going to be affected, said tenant union member Elizabeth Blaney.
The proposed rules would require some developments that seek zoning changes or amendments to the city general plan to either provide affordable housing or pay additional fees, according to an analysis by City Atty. Mike Feuer. Building projects funded by the citys Affordable Housing Trust Fund would also have to follow new hiring and wage requirements.
Feuer also noted that the proposal would limit L.A.s ability to restrict amendments to the general plan a city document that guides development for real estate developments that meet affordable housing, transit and labor requirements.
The L.A. Tenants Union argued that wording would make it easier and faster to build new, more expensive developments without providing enough housing for the poor and displaced. Tenants ejected to make way for such developments would not have a guaranteed right to return, the group said.
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We dont want to accept breadcrumbs that are being thrown at us, Blaney said.
Backers of Build Better L.A. say the concerns are unfounded. Laura Raymond, campaign director for the Alliance for Community Transit-Los Angeles, argued that Build Better L.A. would not take away any city discretion over big projects. She said the wording that had worried the tenant activists was meant to address any future restrictions on general plan amendments, not alter the existing process.
The proposed measure has had firm support from several other groups that represent renters, including Strategic Actions for a Just Economy and the Coalition for Economic Survival. Larry Gross, executive director of the coalition, said that tenants dont have a guaranteed right to return except in specific circumstances something that the measure would not change and that the new requirements would help protect affordable housing.
Big developments can be built either way, Gross said. Without the housing and labor requirements imposed by Build Better L.A., theyre doing it anyway and were not getting these things.
Tuesdays event was held jointly with the Yucca-Argyle Tenants Assn., whose members raised concerns about how displaced tenants would fare if their Hollywood building is torn down. Sejal Patel, who has lived in the building for five years, said she earned too much to qualify for affordable housing but couldnt afford the planned new units either.
Bob Champion, whose company is developing the new project, said Tuesday that the firm plans to replace all of the affordable units that exist in the building and offer them to the current tenants. Like the tenants, he opposes Build Better L.A. but said his worry was that it would destroy jobs for building companies that arent unionized.
The L.A. Tenants Union, a newer player on the political scene, formed last year as renters across the city reeled from evictions and displacement. Its concerns about luxury development echo similar arguments raised by backers of the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative, another upcoming ballot measure that targets bigger developments. That measure would restrict mega developments and curb the ability of city lawmakers to alter planning rules for individual projects.
Members of the L.A. Tenants Union said it has not yet taken a position on the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative, which backers now aim to put on the ballot in March. Sasha Ali, a tenant at the Argyle Avenue building, has spoken publicly at a Neighborhood Integrity Initiative event but said she and the Argyle tenant group had not endorsed it either.
Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.
emily.alpert@latimes.com
Twitter: @LATimesEmily
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A Bay Area father died after jumping into a tide pool in Oahu to rescue his drowning 6-year-old daughter who had been swept away by a wave over the weekend, Hawaii officials said.
The pair were identified Tuesday as Berkeley residents Mark Hornor, 46, and his daughter Mina.
On Saturday morning, a large wave washed Mina off the rocks along the Makapuu Tide Pools in Oahu while her two older sisters and father were nearby. Her father jumped into the turbulent seas after her.
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We know that the conditions were rough. It was very choppy out there, said Shayne Enright, a spokeswoman for the Honolulu Emergency Services Department. It was very windy and the surf was coming in from different directions.
A high surf advisory was in effect at the time and the tide pool area was unguarded, she said.
The family was in the tide pools alone and the mother was elsewhere on the island when Mina was swept out to sea, Enright said. Witnesses who happened upon the panicked scene called 911 and lifeguards on jet skis had fished out the father and daughter within about 10 minutes, she said.
But they were too late. Lifeguards performed CPR until the two were rushed to the hospital, where they were pronounced dead.
Mark Hornor was an avid surfer and cyclist who was familiar with the local waters, his family told KHNL-TV.
He jumped in to save her, its all true, Hornors brother, Matthew Hornor, told the station. I dont think he wanted to come back empty-handed.
Lifeguard officials mourned the deaths in a post on Facebook on Monday night.
As lifeguards, you go to work every day not knowing what hand you will be dealt. Some days everything goes for the best, but there are days where you find yourself living a nightmare. This was one of those days that impact all of us. Our continued thoughts and prayers are with the loved ones of this father and child, the post said.
The last drownings at the Makapuu Tide Pools were in 2011 and also involved a father and daughter, Enright said.
joseph.serna@latimes.com
Twitter: @JosephSerna
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More than 200 firefighters battled a brush fire that broke out Tuesday afternoon and swiftly spread to 18 acres, authorities said.
The blaze was reported about 3 p.m. near the northbound 101 Freeway and Cahuenga Boulevard, according to Margaret Stewart, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Fire Department.
The grass fire tore through moderate brush on a hillside near the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre and pushed toward San Marcos Drive, a ribbon of homes in one of the citys most exclusive neighborhoods. The blaze sent a plume of smoke that was visible in Los Angeles, Burbank and surrounding communities.
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Aerial teams scooped water from the Hollywood Reservoir and dumped it on the flames.
Residents along Holly Drive were under a voluntary evacuation order, Stewart said.
As of 6 p.m., the blaze was 50% contained and fire officials estimated that crews would need several hours to fully contain the flames.
No homes were damaged and no injuries were reported, Stewart said. Its unclear what sparked the fire.
Downed power lines were also reported in the area. Motorists were warned to be prepared for delays in the Cahuenga Pass.
The northbound lanes of Cahuenga Boulevard were closed at Odin Street, and commuters were advised to take Highland Avenue to the 101 Freeway. The exit and entry ramps to the northbound 101 Freeway were also closed until further notice, according to the California Highway Patrol.
The National Weather Service reported that the area around the fire saw southeast winds gusting to 5 mph and a temperature of 86 degrees.
This article will be updated.
For more news in California, follow @MattHjourno.
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UPDATES:
6:05 p.m.: This article was updated with additional details on the size of the fire.
4:35 p.m.: This article was updated with additional details on local weather conditions and a voluntary evacuation order.
4:15 p.m.: This article was updated with the size of the fire.
4:00 p.m.: This article was updated with additional details.
This article was originally published at 3:45 p.m.
The family of a 19-year-old man fatally shot by two undercover California Highway Patrol officers this month in Fullerton has filed a legal claim against the agency and the state, saying the teen posed no immediate threat to the officers and was unarmed.
In the claim filed Tuesday, the familys attorney said Pedro Villanueva was among dozens at a late-night Santa Fe Springs sideshow on July 3 where truck drivers were performing dangerous burnouts, all while undercover CHP officers monitored the area. The officers were part of a task force investigating illegal street racing and driving events during the long holiday weekend.
As officers closed in, Villanueva fled in a red Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck. Officers in an unmarked car followed him for about five miles into a dead-end street in Fullerton, where Villanueva made a U-turn and drove toward officers.
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Officers opened fire and he died at the scene. Villanuevas 18-year-old passenger, Francisco Orozco, was wounded but survived.
The officers never had an objectively reasonable basis to shoot Pedro Villanueva, the claim said. At no time before the shooting did the undercover officers call and wait for uniformed officers as backup. At no time did the undercover officers use nonlethal force to detain Mr. Villanueva.
The only basis the undercover officers had for following Villanueva was that he attended the sideshow, said Paul R. Kiesel, one of the attorneys representing the family. At most, he said, the officers could have issued a ticket.
Villanueva and Orozco feared for their lives because they did not know who was chasing them, Kiesel said, adding that law enforcement has never been so brazen in their exercise of deadly force.
It wasnt until the bullets stopped that they realized they were police, he said. They were unarmed. They had Fiji water in the center console.
Many law enforcement agencies, including the Los Angeles and New York police departments, prohibit officers from shooting at moving vehicles unless those inside are attempting to use another form of deadly force against the officers, such as shooting at them. Most of those agencies direct officers to try to get out of the way of the moving vehicle. The CHP, however, is among the departments that allow officers to use deadly force to stop the commission of an assault with a deadly weapon, including situations in which a moving vehicle is considered the weapon.
Kiesel also filed a claim against the CHP on Orozcos behalf, arguing that the passenger posed no threat when he was shot in the arm.
The officers who opened fire have not been identified. CHP officials previously said it was not clear if Villanueva knew he was being followed by police officers. The unmarked car was not outfitted with a dashboard camera because the officers were working undercover.
The CHP said it is deferring public statements about the shooting to the Fullerton Police Department, which declined to comment.
In a statement released by Kiesel, Orozco said a black car followed and chased him and Villanueva from the Santa Fe Springs Swap Meet to the cul-de-sac where officers opened fire.
They never once used a siren, a loud speaker or provided any warning whatsoever before they started shooting, he said of the officers. They never identified themselves as law enforcement until after they stopped shooting.
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The shooting prompted anger on some social media sites associated with truck enthusiasts. Last week, authorities arrested a 17-year-old friend of Villanuevas who was accused in court records of making a threat against the officers who opened fire. The teen told The Times his comments had been misunderstood.
At a news conference late Tuesday morning, Villanuevas parents called for justice and answers about why their son was shot. Pedro, they said, was a good boy.
We have no words, said Villanuevas brother, Armando, 21. Theres nothing we can say.
The brothers shared a lot of dreams together, he said. They worked together at the family restaurant, Villanueva Mexican Grill, and had hoped to one day open a branch of their own.
His parents wept as he spoke.
The red pickup truck, Villanueva said, was part of the family business. He and his brother would use the Silverado during catering events. The truck was registered in their fathers name.
We had lots of wishes, Villanueva said.
Dressed in black and shrouded in a veil, Hortencia Sainz sobbed in her seat.
I miss my son, she said.
Her husband rubbed her shoulders as she stifled a whimper.
Times staff writer James Queally contributed to this report.
sarah.parvini@latimes.com
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Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yldrm said on Tuesday that Turkey submitted the file to officially request Fethullah Gulen's extradition from the United States, while he underscored that Turkey knows who the perpetrators are behind the July 15 coup attempt, Daily Sabah reported.
Speaking at his party's parliamentary group meeting for the first time since the failed coup attempt, Yldrm said that when terrorists attacked the U.S. on 9/11, there was no proof to request terrorists, and urged the U.S. to return Gulen.
"Do not protect this traitor any more, for this has no benefit for you, humanity nor Islam"he added.
He also underscored that Turkey has concrete proof showing Gulen's crimes.
Fethullah Gulen, who is accused of leading the Gulenist Terror Organization (FETO) currently resides in Pennsylvania, United States. His followers are already standing trial in separate cases, but Gulen, 75, refuses to testify in Turkish courts or return to Turkey. The fugitive imam also faces lawsuits brought by Ankara in the United States after Turkey hired a law firm for the legal process in that country.
A self-proclaimed clairvoyant who was charged with killing a man and firing nearly 40 shots at law enforcement during a standoff in the Central Coast died this weekend while awaiting trial, authorities said Monday.
Nicole Honait Luxor was arrested Nov. 15, 2015. While being held on suspicion of murder, she had significant medical issues from a terminal illness, according to the San Luis Obispo County Sheriffs Department. After being hospitalized July 1, Luxor, 62, died Saturday, sheriffs officials said.
Luxor was arrested after a 34-year-old ranch hand, Benjamin Derrel Terra, was found dead from a gunshot wound at her ranch in rural Paso Robles.
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After San Luis Obispo County sheriffs deputies arrived at the ranch on Nov. 14, 2015, on a report of assault, Luxor barricaded herself and waged a standoff lasting about nine hours. During the standoff, she fired more than three dozen gunshots at deputies, sheriffs officials said.
She surrendered after SWAT deputies fired tear gas into her home.
Luxor was charged with one count of murder and 36 counts of attempted murder for the shots directed toward deputies. She pleaded not guilty and was held in lieu of $1-million bail.
Terras father, Derel Terra, told the San Luis Obispo Tribune that his son was a commercial fisherman who had been working at Luxors ranch.
On her website, Luxor stated that she had studied metaphysics and psychology since the age of 14, and she claimed to have used her visionary clairvoyant ability to decipher celestial records from the database of planetary locations at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge. She also ran a bed-and-breakfast and trained horses, according to her website.
For more news in California, follow @MattHjourno.
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The former top attorney for Los Angeles County has filed a second lawsuit against the county and his former clients, the Board of Supervisors, alleging that he was ousted for trying to prevent misconduct by the board.
In particular, former county counsel Mark Saladino alleged that he was targeted by Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas for refusing to steer contracts to the supervisors political supporters and because Saladino was seen as being close to one of Ridley-Thomass political enemies.
Saladino, who had previously served as county treasurer and tax collector, was appointed county counsel in September 2014, with Ridley-Thomas casting the lone dissenting vote. A few months later, two of the supervisors who had voted to put Saladino in the position Zev Yaroslavsky and Gloria Molina retired and were replaced by Hilda Solis and Sheila Kuehl. The former county chief executive, William T Fujioka, who had recommended Saladino for the position, also retired.
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In June 2015, Saladino abruptly stepped down as county counsel and took a position as third in command in the Department of Treasurer and Tax Collector, which he previously headed.
In a wrongful termination lawsuit filed Friday and a previous lawsuit filed in May seeking a court order to have him reinstated as county counsel Saladino alleged that the county supervisors forced him out of the top attorney job and into the lower-ranking position.
In the new lawsuit, Saladino alleged that he had come into conflict with the board over his attempts to make sure they followed the states open meetings law and other statutes. They also clashed, Saladino alleged, over cases in which the board pressured him to represent their interests over those of other county officials, including the elected sheriff and district attorney.
Louis Skip Miller, a private attorney representing the county in the case, said in an emailed statement, There is no merit to these accusations; theyre all sour grapes. The Board of Supervisors lost confidence in Mr. Saladino as its lawyer, and so decided to change counsel as any client has the right to do.
The suit cited examples of clashes between Saladino and all five supervisors, including Michael D. Antonovich and Don Knabe over his refusal to present biased legal information to other board members in a lawsuit over the placement of a Christian cross on the county seal and with Solis and Kuehl over an attempt to direct the sheriff to exclude federal immigration agents from the county jails.
But it alleged that Ridley-Thomas, in particular, had waged a campaign against Saladino.
The suit alleges that Ridley-Thomas had harbored ill-will toward Mr. Saladino since 2009, when Saladino was still treasurer and tax collector. At that time, the suit alleged, Ridley-Thomas pressured Mr. Saladino to procure professional services from a political supporter of Supervisor Ridley-Thomas who was unqualified to provide the services in question.
Kenneth F. Spencer, an attorney representing Saladino, said the political supporter in question was Napoleon Brandford, who was a partner with the firm Siebert Brandford Shank & Co. The firm was providing underwriting services to the county at the time as a co-manager, he said, but was pushing for a promotion to the rank of senior managing underwriter, which would have meant a large increase in his firms total compensation. He said Saladino refused to promote the firm.
The complaint also alleged that Ridley-Thomas had targeted Saladino because he was supported by and had worked closely with Fujioka, with whom Ridley-Thomas had been feuding for several years.
The lawsuit also claims that Saladino had refused a directive from Ridley-Thomas to take actions which would violate his professional and ethical obligations, after the district attorneys office investigated the use of county resources to convert Ridley-Thomas garage into a home office. It did not say what those actions were.
Spencer declined to elaborate, citing attorney-client privilege between Saladino and the county.
Ridley-Thomas could not be reached for comment Monday.
Saladino argued that his ouster reflects the Boards continued politicization over managing and administering essential county services and operations and that managers who oppose supervisors actions will be pushed aside, abused, or terminated, even if the opposition is correct or well-founded.
In both lawsuits, Saladino argues that the board violated the Ralph M. Brown Act, the states open meeting law, by failing to report the decision to terminate him, which was made in a closed-door meeting.
The county has argued in court filings that he was not terminated and that Saladino signed an agreement saying his transfer to the new position was voluntary and that he would not sue the county over it.
Upon stepping down as county counsel, Saladino initially kept his salary of $288,915, according to documents filed with the lawsuit, but beginning in November, it was reduced to $219,000.
According to the suit, Saladino went on disability leave in September and this month was approved for disability retirement.
abby.sewell@latimes.com
Twitter: @sewella
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The former girlfriend of a U.S. marshal pretended to be his pregnant wife and placed rape fantasy ads on Craigslist, causing the wife to be attacked, prosecutors said Monday.
Michelle Suzanne Hadley, 29, of Ontario has been charged with 10 felonies, including stalking, making threats, assault and attempted forcible rape, according to the Orange County district attorneys office. Prosecutors said she also violated a restraining order and committed a crime while out on bail for another offense.
Prosecutors said Hadley stalked and threatened the wife of her ex-boyfriend, whom she dated for two years before his marriage.
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Posing as the federal agents pregnant wife, authorities said, Hadley went on Craigslist in June and advertised that she wanted to engage in rape fantasies. She sent photographs of her former boyfriends wife to men and gave them details about the victims daily routine, prosecutors said.
Hadley is accused of telling the responders that the victim wanted the responders to have forcible sexual intercourse with her, even if she screamed or resisted, the district attorneys office said.
Then men started showing up at the victims home, officials said. Prosecutors said they intended to rape her. One of the men allegedly went to the victims home and attacked her. The man fled before police arrived.
On June 24, Anaheim police arrested Hadley, who was released on $100,000 bail.
But prosecutors said Hadley continued to pose as the victim on Craigslist and sent emails threatening the lives of the victim and her unborn child. She used different computers and servers to send the emails and avoid police detection in an effort to circumvent a restraining order prohibiting her from contacting the victim.
Anaheim police arrested Hadley again on July 14.
If convicted of the charges, Hadley faces up to life in state prison. Her bail was set at $1 million.
veronica.rocha@latimes.com
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Southern Californias powerful water supplier has completed the $175-million purchase of five islands in the heart of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the ecologically sensitive region thats a key source of water for the Southland.
The top attorney for the Metropolitan Water District said in a memo Monday that the agency had finalized the purchase of the islands from Delta Wetlands Properties.
The purchase comes less than a week after the state Supreme Court lifted an order that had barred the water agency from buying the islands. The order was imposed after San Joaquin County, other local governments and environmental groups sued to block the sale of the islands.
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Metropolitan is a wholesaler that uses water from Northern California as well as the Colorado River to supply more than two dozen cities and water agencies, including Los Angeles.
The water district has said the land may be used during the construction of the proposed delta tunnel system, a controversial $15-billion project that would divert Sacramento River water through tunnels directly to pumping plants in the southern delta. Two of the islands are in the path of the tunnels; the MWDs ownership would end the need for eminent domain battles.
An MWD spokeswoman told The Times last week that the agency has yet to put forth a project for the land.
The acquisition of the land from Delta Wetlands Properties, a subsidiary of the Swiss insurance company Zurich Insurance Group, has generated division since it was proposed in 2015. The MWD board approved the deal in March on a 54% to 41% vote, with no votes from representatives of Los Angeles, Santa Monica and the San Diego County Water Authority.
Opponents of the sale filed suits claiming breach of contract or arguing that the water agency should have filed an environmental impact report. Attorneys for San Joaquin County and the environmental group Food and Water Watch blasted the water agency for sidestepping the California Environmental Quality Act, according to court papers.
The Supreme Court order from last week did not dismiss any litigation but cleared the way for the MWD to buy the islands while fighting the legal challenges. The litigation against the MWD is expected to continue for several months or years.
Times staff writers Bettina Boxall and Matt Stevens contributed to this report.
For more news in California, follow @MattHjourno.
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Citing his concerns over copycat violence, Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck detailed Monday the steps the LAPD has taken to better protect officers after what he described as a cowardly attack of assassination on police in Baton Rouge.
Although there have been no specific threats to officers in Los Angeles, Beck told reporters Monday that the LAPD would keep the precautionary measures in place indefinitely.
We will closely monitor what is going on in the rest of the country, Beck said, a black mourning band covering his badge. I am concerned that people that are inspired by the division and polarization that is occurring over this issue may take up arms against the Police Department.
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After the shooting in Baton Rouge on Sunday, Beck said, the LAPD boosted resources to back up the patrol officers who handle calls across the city.
More police helicopters are flying to provide information to the officers on the ground. The departments entire Metropolitan Division about 500 officers known for their elite training has been pulled off crime suppression details to protect officers responding to calls. Those 911 calls are also being vetted to make sure that we are not responding to false calls in order to lure officers in for ambush, Beck said.
Beck sent a video to his officers Sunday, saying he wanted to make sure that officers were as safe as we can be. Watch your back, he said. Watch each other.
The chief said Monday that hes also visited different LAPD stations to talk to the rank-and-file. The departments psychologists are doing the same, he added.
I find them to be as we all are a little bit bewildered, Beck said.
Law enforcement officials across the country have been rattled by Sundays shooting in Louisiana, which left three officers dead and came a little more than a week after a deadly sniper attack on police in Dallas. The shootings occurred amid flaring tensions over race and policing, heightened by two high-profile police shootings that killed black men in Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights, Minn.
Beck said he was stunned when he learned of the latest violence in Baton Rouge.
The events in Dallas were not only professionally vexing but emotionally taxing, Beck said. To see that happen again, to see the absolutely senseless act against men and women who were trying desperately to keep a community safe, is very distressing.
In his remarks to reporters Monday, Beck again touched on themes that have emerged in his recent comments about the violence across the country. He called for a stronger dialogue, the need to bring different sides together to talk about how to prevent violence as a whole.
Those police officers in Dallas, those police officers in Baton Rouge had nothing to do with the incidents that have caused so much friction, he said. This is a time for empathy. This is a time to understand that everybody has legitimate concerns that need to be addressed but dont address those things through violence.
kate.mather@latimes.com
Follow me on Twitter: @katemather
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A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge denied a motion to drop charges of felony child abuse and falsifying public records against four social workers related to the torture and death of 8-year-old Gabriel Fernandez.
Stefanie Rodriguez, 31, Patricia Clement, 65, Kevin Bom, 37, and Gregory Merritt, 60, were arraigned Monday, after Judge M.L. Villar denied a defense motion that claimed there was insufficient legal basis for the charges.
They were each charged in April with one felony count of child abuse and one felony count of falsifying public records. No pleas were made.
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The childs mother, Pearl Fernandez, and her then-boyfriend, Isauro Aguirre, face a separate trial on capital murder charges.
The former Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services child protective workers were present in court and sat together with their attorneys.
Clement, a former nun and chaplain in the countys juvenile detention centers, declined to comment, as did Rodriguez, Bom and Merritt.
Los Angeles County prosecutors allege that the four minimized the injuries that Gabriel suffered and allowed him to remain at home with his mother and Aguirre where the abuse continued.
Lance M. Filer, Rodriguezs attorney, said his client should not be held accountable for the independent actions of criminals.
Everyone is surprised that the county has brought these charges, he said. Everyone is confident that when all the evidence is presented that my client will be cleared.
The arraignment comes three years after Gabriels death on March 24, 2013. The boy suffered a cracked skull, three broken ribs, burns and bruises. He had BB pellets embedded in his lung and groin, and two teeth were knocked out of his mouth.
Fernandez and Aguirre allegedly tortured the boy for eight months, according to prosecutors, forcing him to eat his own vomit and cat feces, locking him in a cupboard to sleep in and hitting him with a small bat.
A Facebook page, Gabriels Justice, was created a day after his death, dedicated to supporting Gabriel and raising awareness of child abuse.
Founder Amanda Nevares was in court Monday with other supporters.
The fact of the matter is these four people have absolutely no sense of responsibility, she said. None.
The next hearing for the four workers is scheduled for Aug. 25.
alexia.fernandez@latimes.com
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David H. Horowitz, a longtime Oscar publicist who helped broker public appearances for Bill Clinton, died Sunday at his home in Los Angeles, said friend and colleague Carl Samrock. He was 86.
Horowitz was a publicist for various Hollywood celebrities, but was known particularly for his Academy Awards campaigns.
He worked on behalf of such winning films as Dances With Wolves, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, which not only swept the awards but broke new ground as a sci-fi fantasy epic best-picture winner in 2004.
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Horowitz broke similar conventions with The Fugitive, an Oscar outlier that did not win but succeeded in getting a surprise nomination.
He spread interest in films through chatter and word-of-mouth.
Called one of the publicity industrys top veterans by the Los Angeles Times in 2003, Horowitz excelled at low-key, naturalistic campaigns, said Samrock.
He spread interest in films through chatter and word-of-mouth. He would toss a casual mention into conversations. His pitches were as simple as Ive seen this movie. Its great, Samrock recalled.
Horowitz had a long-standing interest in left-leaning politics, and occasionally combined his political and professional interests. One such occasion was when he helped arrange for his longtime client Barbra Streisand to perform at the Hollywood Bowl in 1968 to benefit the Southern Christian Leadership Conference after Martin Luther King Jr.s assassination.
Horowitz also did work on behalf of Native American causes, and was active with Peace Now, a group seeking a politically negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
And when the Clinton presidential campaign needed to repair the candidates image after a long-winded appearance in 1988, they turned to Horowitz to float the idea to late-night host Johnny Carson.
Clintons subsequent appearance on Carsons show playing the saxophone was a good night for the candidate, producer and Clinton backer Harry Thomason later told PBS. Horowitz also reminisced about Clintons subsequent saxophone performance on The Arsenio Hall Show four years later, in which the publicist said he played a similar role, Samrock said.
Horowitzs career included stints with Rogers & Cowan, Kirk Douglas Bryna Productions, and as vice president of publicity at TriStar Pictures. During the 1970s, he was head of publicity for the film division at Warner Bros. and later a television vice president there.
Horowitz was born July 21, 1929, in New York City. He came to Los Angeles as a child and graduated from University High School. He went to UCLA as a premed student, but his interests shifted after a summer job with an advertising agency. He started his show business career as a cameraman for KERO-TV in Bakersfield.
He is survived by his wife, Lynn, whom he married in 1959.
jill.leovy@latimes.com
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In the leafy neighborhood where he lived on the south side of Kansas City, Mo., Gavin Eugene Long would speed down 77th Terrace on his bicycle, a former Marine sergeant who stayed in shape and never seemed to bother anybody.
That is how neighbors remembered him here on the predominantly black side of the city.
Im telling you, there was nothing unusual about him, said Terrence Horad, 38, whose house sits two doors down from the turquoise bungalow where Long lived. Nothing confrontational. He was just an average guy.
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But the neighbors didnt really know him.
The Long who killed three police officers and wounded three others in Baton Rouge, La., on Sunday lived online.
In YouTube videos, he espoused black separatism and advocated violence against white oppressors, including police who killed black men. From a studio presumably in Kansas City, he produced podcasts that became increasingly militant in calls for blacks to rise up against an unjust society.
Its a time for peace, but its a time for war, and most of the times when you want peace, you got to go to war, he said in one of his videos discussing black separatist movements.
He went by Cosmo Setepenra online and ran a blog ConvoswithCosmo.Com in which one post might discuss vegetarianism and the next the inferiority of white people, a subject he also explored in three rambling, self-published books.
Now that he is dead killed by police minutes after the rampage he carried out on his 29th birthday much of what is known about Long comes from his vast online trail, where he fashioned himself as a lifestyle guru and activist with fans who were aching to know his life story.
As racial tensions escalated nationwide with the police shootings of black men this month in Louisiana and Minnesota, and the killings of five police officers in Dallas, Longs messages grew more pointed.
Im not gonna harp on that, you know, with a brother killing the police, Long said in a video uploaded the day after the Dallas shootings. You get what Im saying?
Its justice, he said. In the same video, he seemed to hint at his own plans: If anything happens to me dont affiliate me with anybody.
Two days later, he posted a video in which he claimed to be in Dallas. Everyone in this room got a purpose, it shows him shouting to at black men in a barber shop. Just figure it out!
Long traveled to Baton Rouge in a white Chevy Malibu he rented in Kansas City, investigators said, and he stayed in the area several days as he plotted his attack.
The Long who lived online emerged from what seemed like a normal path in life.
He grew up in Kansas City, graduated from high school in 2005 and joined the Marines. He wanted to earn money for college and see the world, he said in a podcast. He served five years, including two deployments to Iraq.
Records show he served as a data network specialist and received a medal for good conduct.
On July 25, 2009, records show, Long married Aireyona Osha Hill at Pilgrim Chapel, a historic Kansas City wedding venue. They had no children and divorced within two years, at which time Long had a monthly income of $500, according to the filing.
By then, Long had left the military with an honorable discharge and started college. He received an associates degree in General Studies at Central Texas College, studied for two semesters at Clark Atlanta University and attended the University of Alabama for a semester.
One class he took in Atlanta was United States, Africa and the World, where he earned an A. Meanwhile, he received Cs in algebra and intermediate Spanish, a university official said.
Long halted his studies after having a spiritual revelation in which he gave away all of his material possessions and traveled to Rwanda, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Egypt, he wrote on his website.
After returning to Kansas City in 2015, he launched his Twitter and social media accounts. Online, he praised organizations such as Deacons for Defense and Justice, an armed black self-defense group formed in the 1960s.
In May 2015, Long submitted papers in a Jackson County, Mo., court claiming allegiance to the United Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah Muur Nation. The sovereign citizenry groups core tenet is that followers are descendants of ancient ones who are black and lived in North America tens of thousands of years before white Europeans.
Members believe they are above government laws, dismiss governments as operating illegally and say they do not have to pay taxes or respect law enforcement officials, said Ryan Lenz of the Southern Poverty Law Centers Intelligence Project.
The documents Long filed amount to meaningless paperwork but are customary among sovereign citizens groups, Lenz said.
A man in the driveway of the Oak Park neighborhood address listed for Longs ex-wife confirmed Monday that Hill lived in the house, which is about a 20-minute drive north of Longs residence. A woman at the house declined to speak and told a reporter to leave her property, using an expletive.
In addition to posting on his own sites, Long apparently made frequent contributions to other forums. On one website, a user named Cosmo Setepenra complained about government surveillance.
He also appeared to follow at least one online radio show hosted by Lance Scurv, who said he featured a Cosmo Setepenra on his radio show this year in a long conversation about nutrition and health. They stayed in touch, talking on the phone every now and then.
Scurv, who is based in Orlando, Fla., said Cosmo spoke from a phone number with a Kansas City area code. He seemed to be like a guy in transition, Scurv said. But he never expressed rage like there was something brewing.
On July 9, Scurv posted an email that Cosmo asked him to share on his Facebook group.
It began: I just want everyone to know that if anything may happen to me or with me ... The post went on to reference YouTube videos about the police shooting of Alton Sterling and standing up when you know you are right.
Scurv said he barely read the email, but shared it because he helps pass along social media updates for everyone who comes on his show, which discusses current events and activism.
Near the end of the post, Long offered a message to readers: You will win this war not with your actions, but with your responses to their actions.
On Sunday, at the house where Long lived in Kansas City, a man brandishing a gun warned reporters to leave.
Unless you have a warrant, get off my property! a woman at the house yelled to dozens of reporters gathered out front the next day.
Horad, like other neighbors willing to talk about Long, said he was struggling to reconcile Long the killer with Long the man on a bicycle: What is almost dream-like about all this is that you never know what it could be that would push someone you know like a neighbor right over the edge.
Special correspondent Jenny Jarvie in Atlanta contributed to this report.
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With three acquittals and a hung jury in the trials of Baltimore police officers charged in the arrest and death of Freddie Gray, prosecutors face steep hurdles to winning convictions in the three remaining cases, legal experts said.
Circuit Judge Barry G. Williams, who cleared Lt. Brian Rice of all charges Monday, sent a strong message that the states attorneys office lacks the evidence to prove the officers conduct was criminal, observers said.
The state is not simply 0-for-4, said defense attorney Warren Brown, who is not involved in the cases but has observed the proceedings. Theyre 0-for-24 when you add up all the charges that the judge or jury considered through the course of four trials.
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Rice was the fourth of six officers charged in the case to go to trial, and the third to be acquitted by Williams. Another officers trial ended with a hung jury and mistrial.
Prosecutors alleged that Rice, the highest ranking officer of the six charged, had caused Grays death by failing to secure him with a seat belt in the back of the police van where Gray suffered severe spinal cord injuries last year. Gray, 25, died a week after his arrest. His death sparked widespread protests against police brutality.
Rice, 42, was found not guilty of involuntary manslaughter, misconduct in office and reckless endangerment.
The judge has said over and over and over again [that the evidence] falls short of convincing him beyond a reasonable doubt that the officers are criminally culpable, Brown said.
That doesnt necessarily mean prosecutors should drop the remaining cases, one expert said.
University of Maryland law professor Douglas Colbert said the trials are sending a message to police. Prosecutors should adapt their strategy based on Williams latest ruling and keep going, he said.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys are barred from speaking publicly about the cases because of a gag order imposed by Williams.
Officer Garrett Miller is the next officer scheduled to be tried. Millers case is fraught with new challenges for prosecutors: Because Miller was compelled to testify under immunity at the trial of Officer Edward Nero, a new team of prosecutors was appointed to handle his case.
An elected official cannot fall to the public pressure being placed by the police union and others. Douglas Colbert, University of Maryland law professor
It would be irresponsible not to continue prosecution as long as our elected official believes that theres evidence to satisfy the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, Colbert said, referring to Baltimore States Atty. Marilyn J. Mosby. An elected official cannot fall to the public pressure being placed by the police union and others.
Before his trial, the court will hold a hearing at which prosecutors will have to prove that they were not exposed to any of Millers testimony in the Rice case. During the process in which prosecutors lobbied to compel Miller to testify, Williams, the Maryland attorney generals office and the Court of Appeals all said prosecutors face a high bar at such a hearing.
Officer William Porter also was compelled to testify, and his retrial also will require such a hearing, known as a Kastigar hearing. The third officer who still has pending charges is Sgt. Alicia White.
Millers case focuses on Grays initial detention and arrest. Nero was already acquitted for his role in arresting Gray, and prosecutors dropped a charge against Rice related to that aspect of the case.
See the most-read stories this hour
Williams left some room for prosecutors in Millers trial, finding that Nero did not participate directly in the arrest without rejecting prosecutors argument that the detention was illegal. Still, he skeptically questioned prosecutors during closing arguments of Neros trial.
David Jaros, a University of Baltimore law professor who has been observing the trials, said prosecutors best hope might be if Miller made an incriminating comment in his statement to investigators.
This is a hard case, Jaros said. There are reasons to have doubts about what happened.
But Jaros said people watching the cases shouldnt interpret Williams verdicts as absolving the officers of wrongdoing.
The judge made it clear that just because you made a mistake someone may have done something that was very wrong, that was very inappropriate but that doesnt necessarily make it a crime, Jaros said.
If you do something that is grossly unreasonable, but youre not aware of the risk youre taking, youre not being grossly criminally negligent, even though youre being negligent, he said.
Williams repeatedly emphasized Monday that there was a difference between civil negligence finding that the officers conduct caused Grays death and criminal liability determining that their conduct had been so reckless, with results that could have been anticipated, that they should be convicted of a crime.
David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who studies racial profiling and police misconduct, said that while he is strongly sympathetic that police ought to be held accountable for wrongdoing, prosecutors have proceeded with a legally dicey case.
The American legal system is very reluctant to hold anybody, not just these police officers but anybody, criminally responsible for not doing something, Harris said. Criminal law is not always the best tool available. Many times it feels like it should be, when there has been a parade of injustices over so many years. But any given case depends on its facts and evidence.
Fenton writes for the Baltimore Sun.
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Before the Republican National Convention began Monday, the volatile mix of Donald Trump, planned street protests and Ohios open-carry gun laws raised fears of clashes in Cleveland.
But aside from a raucous rock concert and a shouting match in a downtown park, the first day of the convention passed with few arrests and no violence.
Cleveland police reported two arrests connected to demonstrations Sunday and Monday as of 6 p.m., but one involved a warrant unconnected to the convention.
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At one point Monday afternoon, a band of religious activists began to confront anti-Trump protesters. Police on bicycles quickly moved between them and prevented anything beyond a screaming match.
Earlier, Alex Jones, a far-right conspiracy theorist, led a large pro-Trump crowd in chants of Hillary for Prison! on the banks of the Cuyahoga River.
The two largest protests downtown saw several hundred people loudly denouncing the presumptive Republican nominee, as well as poverty and police brutality. Police said both protests ended peacefully.
So far at least, activists on both sides of the political spectrum seem more interested in message than melee.
Our focus is not about trying to be louder than the next person, said Devin Rodgers, 27, of Cleveland as men in military fatigues shouted profanities at the anti-Trump demonstrators with whom he was marching. Its about trying to show people who we are and get them to understand where we come from.
Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams said officers broke up several minor clashes Monday, but none resulted in arrests or violence.
We just wanted to make sure we got in there before anything got out of hand, Williams said.
A few prohibited items, including a small knife and a slingshot, were seized from people trying to enter secured areas near the convention center and Quicken Loans Arena, Williams said.
Despite concerns about Ohios open-carry laws, especially after a gunman shot and killed three police officers Sunday in Baton Rouge, La., few weapons were visible along protest routes Monday.
Instead, confrontations relied on rhetoric. At midafternoon, half a dozen men, some wearing military fatigues, collided in a park with a swarm of anti-Trump protesters who had just finished a march.
Bullhorn in hand, their leader began chiding the anti-Trump protesters, hurling slurs against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. The demonstrators drowned him out with a Black Lives Matter chant.
Police quickly separated the two groups, and no one was arrested.
Sara Flounders, a New Jersey resident in her late 60s, said she was happy to see groups unite against what she described as Trumps exclusionary message.
There is a real racist mobilization that is going on in this nation and its important to put a stop to it, she said.
Follow Pearce and Queally on Twitter: @mattdpearce, @JamesQueallyLAT
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Turkish police on Tuesday detained Lieutenant Colonel Erkan Kvrak, military aide of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in southern Antalya province, Daily Sabah reported.
According to reports, Kvrak was hiding at a hotel with a fake ID in the southern resort town.
On July 15, a small military junta linked to the Gulenist Terror Organization (FETO) attempted to topple the democratically elected government in Turkey and bring martial law. The attempt was prevented by military troops loyal to the government, along with police units and millions of Turkish citizens in favor of democracy. 208 people, consisting of mostly civilians, have been killed by pro-coup soldiers, while over 1,400 people were injured. Turkey's opposition parties have united against the coup attempt, condemning it in the harshest terms and underscoring their determination to preserve democracy and rule of law in Turkey.
Concluding a long legal climb to cleaner air, the federal government Monday announced a record $425-million settlement with two oil refiners that is expected to reduce pollution emissions in the West by almost 43,000 tons annually.
The Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency said the agreement with subsidiaries of Tesoro Corp. of San Antonio and Par Hawaii Refining resolves accusations of Clean Air Act violations against the two corporations.
This settlement will reduce emissions in six separate states and ultimately result in cleaner air, said Dennis McLerran, EPA Region 10 director.
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The deal, years in the making, includes a civil penalty. But most of the settlement money - $403 million - is to be spent by the corporations to remedy the ongoing pollution they are accused of creating.
A consent decree with the refiners was filed in federal court in Texas on Monday, along with a civil complaint. After a 30-day public comment period, a judge will be asked to approve the decree.
If for some reason it is rejected, the Justice Department can proceed with the civil litigation, said Assistant Atty. Gen. John Cruden, who specializes in environmental cases.
The affected refineries are located in Martinez, Calif., and Anacortes, Wash., and at sites in Alaska, Hawaii, North Dakota and Utah.
Keith Casey, Tesoros executive vice president for operations, said in a statement that the company was pleased with the agreement, which will help Tesoro further improve our environmental performance.
The settlement figure was a record for refiners, Cruden said. The Clean Air Act violations by the companies were expansive, including leaks of polluted compounds and violations involving repair work and flaring (burning off excess hydrocarbons), he said.
The so-called fugitive emissions can cause eye, nose and throat irritations for nearby residents and eventually lead to liver, kidney and central nervous system damage.
Cruden and other officials who spoke at a news conference on Seattles waterfront said there would be an immediate effect on community health from the agreement, particularly among asthma sufferers. But any changes will come only after the refiners have installed new pollution-control equipment.
Tesoro will also spend about $12 million on environmental projects in local communities and pay a $10.45 million civil penalty.
Noting the jets passing overhead, freight trucks lining up at nearby shipping piers and a mammoth container ship being pushed by tugs into a berth, Mark Asmundson, executive director of the Northwest Clean Air Agency, said refineries are crucial, critical, to our way of life.
But so is the effect they have on our health, he added.
You can treat water, Asmundson said, you cant treat the air we breathe. Thats why settlements such as this are necessary if corporations are to be prevented from fouling the air in the first place, he said.
Tesoro will also contribute $1 million to replace old diesel school buses with natural-gas buses in Contra Costa County, where the city of Martinez is located.
An officer with the Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department died Tuesday after he was shot in his car as he approached people matching the description of suspects in an earlier shooting.
Capt. Robert Melton was brought to the University of Kansas Hospital just before 2:30 p.m. local time, but resuscitation efforts did not work, trauma surgeon James Howard said at a Tuesday afternoon news conference.
Theres a lot of pain and brokenness in our community and our nation right now, and we just want to ask everyone to be prayerful and thoughtful right now, Mayor Mark Holland of the Unified Government of Wyandotte County said.
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Melton had responded to a report of a person being shot at by several people in a vehicle. When he and other officers arrived on the scene, the three or four occupants of the car jumped out and ran away, police said in a news release.
About a half-hour after the initial call, Melton saw people who matched the suspects descriptions about 20 blocks from the original scene and pulled up to them, police spokesman Tom Tomasic said. Before he could get out of his car, he was shot multiple times.
Meltons car was in the middle of the street with glass and blood all around it, police spokesman Cameron Morgan said.
A second suspect was taken into custody later, and police were looking for at least one more person.
Tuesdays shooting was the second of a Kansas City, Kansas, police officer since early May, when a detective was shot and killed near Kansas Speedway.
Authorities said another news conference in the Melton shooting is planned for Wednesday morning.
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Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19
Trend:
Turkey will do its best to extradite Fethullah Gulen, who is considered to be organizer of the coup attempt, from the US, the Turkish presidential administration told Trend July 19.
On July 15 evening, Turkish authorities said a military coup attempt took place in the country.
Meanwhile, a group of servicemen announced about transition of power to them.
However, the rebelling servicemen started to surrender July 16 and Turkish authorities said the coup attempt failed.
According to the latest reports, over 200 people have been killed as a result of the coup attempt.
Following the coup attempt, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged the US to extradite Gulen, who is considered to be involved in the attempt.
According to the administration, the coup attempt shows that Turkey was facing the threat of a terrorist attack.
"The fight against Gulens movement still remains one of Turkeys main priorities," the administration said.
The administration also stressed that if the US is a strategic partner of Turkey, it must extradite Gulen to Turkey.
"At the US request, Turkey repeatedly extradited terrorists to the US, so that the US must take this into account, the administration said. Moreover, there is an agreement on extradition between the US and Turkey, which was signed in June 1979 and entered into force in 1981."
The administration added that the extradition of Gulen will greatly weaken the terrorist organization, which is hostile to the interests of the Turkish people.
The coup attempt is betraying the state and the people of Turkey, the presidential administration said.
The force of the military equipment failed to break the will of people," the administration added.
The White House said on Tuesday that an official request has been submitted by Turkey for the extradition of Fetullah Gulen, accused of masterminding the July 15 coup attempt, and that the U.S. administration is ready to provide all necessary assistance for the coup investigation.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said U.S. President Barack Obama and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan discussed the status of U.S.-based Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen.
Earnest said the Turkish government had filed materials in electronic form with the U.S. government, which U.S. officials were reviewing. He said any extradition request from Turkey, once submitted, would be evaluated under the terms of a treaty between the two countries.
Turkey requested the U.S. to temporarily detain Gulen, shortly after Prime Minister Binali Yldrm announced that Turkey has submitted four dossiers asking for his extradition.
On July 15, a small military junta linked to the Gulenist Terror Organization (FETO) attempted to topple the democratically elected government in Turkey and bring martial law. The attempt was prevented by military troops loyal to the government, along with police units and millions of Turkish citizens in favor of democracy. 208 people, consisting of mostly civilians, have been killed by pro-coup soldiers, while over 1,400 people were injured. Turkey's opposition parties have united against the coup attempt, condemning it in the harshest terms and underscoring their determination to preserve democracy and the rule of law in Turkey.
Turkey took the illegal activities of the Gulen Movement to the international platform in the U.S. last year.
The activities and operations of the Gulen Movement in the U.S. and Turkey have been scrutinized by a number of American media outlets that question the movement's motives, opacity and why the U.S. government is providing refuge to Gulen, who is currently facing numerous charges in his native Turkey, including treason and an extradition request.
Good morning. It is Tuesday, July 19. Police descended on a San Mateo neighborhood after receiving reports of a mountain lion in the area. Residents were told to shelter in place, but it was all for naught. The ferocious puma turned out to be a regular house cat. Heres what else is happening in the Golden State:
TOP STORIES
Sun and moon could trigger quake
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The gravitational tug between the sun and moon can trigger a special kind of earthquake on the San Andreas fault. Its kind of crazy, right? That the moon, when its pulling in the same direction that the fault is slipping, causes the fault to slip more and faster, said Nicholas van der Elst, a U.S. Geological Survey geophysicist. Los Angeles Times
Back to the drawing board
A federal judge rejected a plea deal Monday that would have allowed former L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca to serve six months in prison for lying to authorities. U.S. District Court Judge Percy Anderson said the punishment would trivialize the seriousness of the offenses. That leaves Baca with three options go ahead with sentencing, withdraw his guilty plea, or negotiate a new deal with prosecutors that would include more prison time. Los Angeles Times
Airbnb as tax collector
Airbnb will start collecting taxes from its hosts in Los Angeles, which could result in millions of dollars a year for the city government. The city has struggled with how to collect lodging taxes from property owners who rent out their rooms and homes for short-term stays. Airbnb will facilitate that process beginning next month. Los Angeles Times
STORIES TO WATCH TODAY
-- The Los Angeles Police Commission will meet in closed session to discuss officer-involved shootings.
-- Well be following the second day of the Republican National Convention.
Readers, we always love hearing from you. You can keep up with Alice and Shelby during the day on Twitter. Follow @TheCityMaven and @ShelbyGrad.
L.A. AT LARGE
Old is new again: Japanese newsstands are selling a 1976 magazine all about life in Los Angeles. Its hard to capture the feeling now, but then, it was just all so different. We had seen running in the Olympics, but seeing jogging in real life was completely strange, said Yoshihisa Kinameri, who was editor of the inaugural issue of Popeye. Los Angeles Times
Cost of doing business: Panns, the classic Googie-style diner near LAX, will stop serving dinner. Owner Jim Poulos says the cost of complying with the citys new minimum wage law killed service after 3 p.m. And its not just because he has to pay his employees more; Poulos notes that his suppliers have raised prices. Its been a huge hit. How else is the restaurant industry supposed to deal with it? he said. LAist
Understanding each other: A black writer uses her experiences growing up in Los Angeles to describe white privilege to her friends. Nobody is mad at you for being white. Nobody. Just like nobody should be mad at me for being black. Good Black News
Animal waste: Why its so hard to get dead whales off Southern California beaches and keep them off. Daily Breeze
POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT
Wrongful termination? The former top attorney for Los Angeles County is suing the county and its Board of Supervisors for allegedly ousting him when he tried to prevent misconduct by the board. Mark Saladino says he was targeted by Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas for refusing to direct contracts to the politicians supporters. Ridley-Thomas was not immediately available to respond to the lawsuit. Los Angeles Times
Down in front: California is a blue state, but its delegates have some of the best seats in the house at the Republican Party Convention in Cleveland. Thats because all of the states 172 delegates are for presumptive nominee Donald Trump. Organizers believe that putting the Golden States delegates near the front of the stage will help show party unity. Los Angeles Times
Forty years ago: Columnist George Skelton remembers the 1976 convention when a rebel Californian nearly wrested the partys nomination from a powerful sitting president. Los Angeles Times
CRIME AND COURTS
Personal experience: Cheryl Dorsey is in a unique position to comment on the Black Lives Matter movement, police shootings and the recent attacks of officers. Shes African American, the mother of four sons and a 20-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department. Dorsey was the kind of cop who absolutely loved her job but had conflicts with colleagues and bosses because of her gender, her race, her attitude and the LAPDs infamous crony culture, writes columnist Robin Abcarian. Los Angeles Times
Sad discovery: Firefighters responded to a brush fire Sunday in the Angeles National Forest, but when they got there, they found a charred body inside of a car. The body was so badly burned the Coroners Office will need to do DNA testing to identify the victim. CBS Los Angeles
Youre (not) on camera: Not much has changed six months after it was revealed that the BART system is equipped with decoy cameras. New cameras wont be installed until late 2017. It just takes a lot of time to custom install a camera system on custom-built train cars that are decades old, said BART spokesman Taylor Huckaby. KQED
Big break: An investigator for the Los Angeles City Attorneys Office is looking to pay-to-play television acting auditions. Its illegal to exchange money for the prospect of employment in California. The Hollywood Reporter
EDUCATION
More cases: The number of children with autism in Californias public school systems has increased sevenfold since 2001. Thats about 97,000 students. Officials say the jump can be attributed to better screenings, a broader definition of the autism spectrum and more children being born with the condition. Sacramento Bee
New chancellor: Eloy Ortiz Oakley is the new chancellor for the states community college system. He is the first Latino to hold that position for the 113-college system. In Oakley we see a change agent someone whose relentless focus on student success will help more students obtain certificates and degrees or transfer to four-year institutions on time, said Board President Geoffrey L. Baum. Los Angeles Times
DROUGHT AND CLIMATE
Water funds: Heres the latest round in the $16-billion plan to construct tunnels that will bring water from the Delta to Southern California. The issue is a misunderstanding over an East Bay water suppliers payments for the project. Mercury News
Harnessing the sun: The California Independent System Operator reached a milestone last week: It managed enough solar energy to power 2 million homes. The state produces about half of the solar industrys megawatts in the U.S. Sacramento Bee
CALIFORNIA CULTURE
And hes off: Columnist Steve Lopez is driving the coastline from Oregon to Mexico to mark the 40th anniversary of the California Coastal Act. The challenge now is to preserve whats left and to demand that coastal commissioners remain faithful to the letter and spirit of the Coastal Act during a year of tumult, controversy, legislative reform and political drama, with developments big and small up for consideration, Lopez writes. Los Angeles Times
Brain games: At UCSF, researchers have designed computer games to strengthen the mental abilities of patients with schizophrenia. Hallucinations and delusions may be the public face of schizophrenia, but the hidden cognitive symptoms make it very hard for people with the condition to live satisfying, productive lives. BuzzFeed
Never work with animals: Does your dog know how to surf? He or she could appear on a Rose Parade float in January for the Lucy Pet Foundation. Auditions will be held on Friday in Oakland. SFist
CALIFORNIA ALMANAC
San Diego will start the day with low clouds and ultimately reach a high of 78 degrees. Los Angeles will be 85 with some sun. Riverside will be sunny and hot at 98 degrees. It will be sunny and 86 in Sacramento. San Francisco will have low clouds as temperatures reach a high of 66.
AND FINALLY
Todays California Memory comes from Patric Barry:
I was invited to a lunch in Huntington Beach 1977 where the speaker was Ronald Reagan. I knew little about him other than hed been an actor and California governor. He gave what we now know as The Speech, but what a delivery. Mr. Reagan held the audience in his hand. I was glued, and attended to every word. Ever since I held Mr. Reagan in great esteem never have I heard a speaker like him his sincerity, his passion. It was amazing to be present. He gave his speech and quickly left with his security detail. The room was stunned. Applause, yes, but the audience was overwhelmed by the strength of his speech and his delivery. Usually people resort to chat after a speaker finished, but this day the audience was stunned by his strength. Ive since visited the Reagan Museum and it was a special visit for me the reverence of visiting his crypt.
If you have a memory or story about the Golden State, share it with us. Send us an email to let us know what you love or fondly remember about our state. (Please keep your story to 100 words.)
Please let us know what we can do to make this newsletter more useful to you. Send comments, complaints and ideas to Alice Walton or Shelby Grad.
The failure of an attempted military coup in Turkey, a NATO member and a key ally of the United States, was a welcome victory for democracy in a region with too little of it. But as he exults in the defeat of the plotters, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan seems to be using the rebellion as a pretext for suppressing lawful dissent and purging the bureaucracy of his political opponents. That is a dangerous course.
Its understandable that Erdogan would arrest participants in last Fridays uprising by the so-called Peace at Home Council, a group of military officers that claimed to be rescuing the country from Erdogans oppression. But the dragnet has swept up a ridiculously large number of people in Turkeys employ. The government has detained thousands of military officers and has suspended 3,000 members of the judiciary and 9,000 officials in the interior ministry.
Officials acknowledged that the names of many of those being detained were taken from a list drawn up before the attempted coup as part of an investigation into the influence of Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, a former Erdogan ally who now lives in exile in the United States.
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Erdogan blames Gulen and his Hizmet movement for the attempted coup, and he has called on President Obama to either arrest Fethullah Gulen or return him to Turkey. Appropriately, Secretary of State John F. Kerry said that the U.S. would consider a request for Gulens extradition only if Turkey offered legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny. So far, such evidence hasnt been produced.
The U.S. criticized the attempted coup as it was unfolding, with Obama calling on all parties to support the democratically elected government of Turkey. Nevertheless, the U.S. long has expressed concerns about a drift toward authoritarianism in Turkey. In its most recent report on human rights in that country, the State Department cited interference with freedom of the news media including the arrest of 30 journalists, at least some of whom worked at publications critical of Erdogan and an overly broad application of anti-terror laws, resulting in politically motivated investigations and court verdicts.
The failed coup mustnt become a license for further repression. On Monday, Kerry pointedly reminded Turkey that the treaty that created the NATO alliance commits member states to respect principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law. Federica Mogherini, the head of foreign affairs for the European Union, which Turkey aspires to join, stressed the importance of the rule of law prevailing in that country.
The U.S. and its allies depend on Turkey, and not only as a member of the NATO alliance. The U.S. Air Force has used the air base in Incirlik to launch air strikes against Islamic State. But Turkey also benefits from its association with Europe and the U.S. That relationship will become more strained if Erdogan undermines the democracy he claims to represent.
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Can a state be both the target of Islamist extremists and responsible for their actions? The attacks on July 4 in three Saudi Arabian cities, almost certainly perpetrated by adherents of Islamic State, have once again raised this question for drive-by analysts. They point out that the official interpretation of Islam in Saudi Arabia, which outsiders refer to as Wahhabism and Saudis refer to as Salafism, shares many elements with extremist ideology. Then they argue that Saudi efforts to proselytize Salafism played a role in the development of the global jihadist movement, and that the Saudis thus bear a special responsibility to rein in their support for Muslim institutions outside their borders and to moderate their practice of Islam at home. The implication is that if the Saudis would only change their behavior, the threat represented by the radicals would be greatly reduced.
This understanding of the relationship between the official Islam of Saudi Arabia and the contemporary Salafi jihadist movement, represented by Islamic State and Al Qaeda, misses as many important facts as it highlights.
It is undoubtedly true that Saudi Arabia, since the 1960s, has built a set of institutions and networks to spread its puritanical, narrow-minded views on appropriate religious practice, as well as intolerance of other religions or other interpretations of Islam. With the oil revolution of the 1970s, the Saudis had enormous resources to support that effort. In the 1980s, the Saudis (along with the United States) supported a campaign in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union that both they and Washington were happy to call a jihad.
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At that point, the Saudis lost control of global Salafism, if they ever really had it.
Saudi Wahhabism is profoundly quietist politically. It calls on Muslims to obey their rulers, as long as those rulers implement Islam, however imperfectly, in their society. (That is not particularly surprising for a state religion.) The success of the jihad in Afghanistan, however, lent a revolutionary political content to global Salafism for some of its adherents, like Osama bin Laden, which soon became a direct threat to the Saudi regime and all other Muslim governments around the world.
What had been a largely apolitical phenomenon of Muslims emulating Saudi Wahhabism in their personal lives became, for part of the global Salafi movement, an element of their political identity. Some continued on the path of violence, joining or sympathizing with Al Qaeda and then Islamic State. Others, including activists in Saudi Arabia, eschewed violence but criticized their governments for drifting away from the true Islam. Still other Salafis entered the democratic political sphere, winning parliamentary seats in Kuwait, Bahrain, Egypt and elsewhere.
Salafism morphed into a religious movement with a number of political manifestations, only one of which was the blend of social conservatism and political quietism represented by the official Saudi variant.
The more immediate task is to convince those attracted to Salafism that the violent path is, as the Saudi clerics say, deviant.
This means that leaning on the Saudis to become less Wahhabi is unlikely to have much effect on jihadist movements like Al Qaeda and Islamic State. They and their followers look to other sources of political and doctrinal inspiration, not the official Saudi clerics. The jihadist groups draw some of their adherents from Saudi Arabia, but the vast majority of Saudi Muslims, including the vast majority of Saudi Wahhabis, reject these groups. Saudi Wahhabism can be a path toward jihadism, but it is hardly the only one. Tunisia, probably the most secular state in the Arab world and the one relative success story of the Arab Spring, has sent more jihadists to Syria than has Saudi Arabia. The Europeans and Americans attracted by the propaganda of Islamic State did not grow up in the milieu of official Saudi Wahhabism.
Global Salafism is now unmoored from its Saudi origins.
Saudi Arabia still has a role to play in the campaign against Islamic State and Al Qaeda. Much like it did against Al Qaeda in the mid-2000s, it needs to crush whatever incipient Islamic State movement exists within its borders. It needs to police the funding and recruitment networks through which radical organizations raise money and recruit manpower in the country. Saudi-American intelligence cooperation on this issue is extensive and productive, but Washington should not hesitate to call out Riyadh if it detects any slipping. The Saudis need to concentrate more of their newly active military force against Al Qaeda and Islamic State in Yemen.
The Saudis can also contribute to the ideological fight against Salafi jihadism, but not in the way most Western liberals think. The admonition for tolerance has much to recommend it as Saudi leaders think long term, but the more immediate task is to convince those attracted to Salafism that the violent path is, as the Saudi clerics say, deviant. Liberal reforms in Saudi Arabia are not going to convince pious Salafis that their interpretation of Islam is incorrect. Rather, the Saudis have to redouble their efforts to use the domestic and international institutions of Islam that they created and funded to convince believers that Salafi Islam itself prohibits the acts of violence perpetrated in its name.
F. Gregory Gause III is professor of International Affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service of Texas A&M University. He wrote about Saudi-American intelligence cooperation for the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs.
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Baku, Azerbaijan, July 19
Trend:
All military equipment, including aircrafts, ships and helicopters, are under the control of the Turkish Armed Forces, Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmush said in an interview with local TV channel.
According to him, the information that the Turkish Armed Forces' equipment remained under the control of the putschists is misinformation.
On July 15 evening, Turkish authorities said a military coup attempt took place in the country.
Meanwhile, a group of servicemen announced about transition of power to them.
However, the rebelling servicemen started to surrender July 16 and Turkish authorities said the coup attempt failed.
Over 200 people have been killed in Turkey as a result of the coup attempt.
Americans viewing the recent failed coup attempt in Turkey as some exotic foreign news story -- the latest, violent yet hardly unusual political development to occur in a region constantly beset by turmoil -- should pause to consider that the prospect of similar instability would not be unfathomable in this country if Donald Trump were to win the presidency.
Trump is the most brazenly authoritarian figure to secure the nomination of a major American political party. He expresses his support for all manner of strongmen, and his campaign manager, Paul Manafort, has actually worked for one: former Ukrainian president and Vladimir Putin ally Viktor Yanukovich. At the Republican National Convention here Monday, Manafort put some of the tricks he learned overseas as a dictator whisperer to good use, employing underhanded tactics to avoid a roll call vote on the conventions rules package and quietly removing language from the party platform expressing support for Ukraines democratic aspirations.
Throughout the campaign, Trump has repeatedly bragged about ordering soldiers to commit war crimes, and has dismissed the possibility that he would face any resistance. They wont refuse, he told Fox News Bret Baierearlier this year. Theyre not gonna refuse me. Believe me. When Baier insisted that such orders are illegal, Trump replied, Im a leader. Ive always been a leader. Ive never had any problem leading people. If I say do it, theyre going to do it.
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Oh really? Blimpish swagger might fly within the patriarchal confines of a family business, a criminal operation (the distinction is sometimes blurred) or a dictatorship. It does not, however, work in a liberal democracy, legally grounded by a written constitution, each branch restrained by separation of powers.
Try to imagine, then, a situation in which Trump commanded our military to do something stupid, illegal or irrational. Something so dangerous that it put the lives of Americans and the security of the country at stake. (Trumps former rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Marco Rubio, said the United States could not trust the nuclear codes to an erratic individual.) Faced with opposition from his military brass, Trump would perhaps reconsider and back down. But what if he didnt?
Blimpish swagger might fly within the patriarchal confines of a family business...or a dictatorship. It does not work, however, in a liberal democracy.
In that case, our military men and women, who swear to uphold the Constitution and a civilian chain of command, would be forced to choose between obeying the law and serving the wishes of someone who has explicitly expressed his utter lack of respect for it.
They might well choose the former.
I would be incredibly concerned if a President Trump governed in a way that was consistent with the language that candidate Trump expressed during the campaign, retired Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, who served as head of the CIA and the National Security Agency under President George W. Bush, said in response to Trumps autocratic ruminations. Asked by TV host Bill Maher what would happen if Trump told American soldiers to kill the families of terrorists, as he has promised to do, Hayden replied, If he were to order that once in government, the American armed forces would refuse to act.
You are required not to follow an unlawful order, Hayden added. That would be in violation of all the international laws of armed conflict.
Previously, in those rare situations when irreconcilable disagreements have arisen between Americas civilian and military leadership, it is the latter who were ultimately deemed out of line. This was the case when President Truman acrimoniously fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur after he publicly criticized Truman for denying him permission to bomb China in the midst of the Korean War. Though MacArthur returned to the United States with a heros welcome, Trumans decision endures as one of the most important in the history of American civil-military relations.
Trump could pull a reverse-Truman, firing a general who refused to bomb.
If this scenario sounds implausible, consider that Trump has normalized so many once-outrageous things -- from open racism to blatant lying. Needless to say, such dystopian situations are unimaginable under a President Hillary Clinton, who, whatever her faults, would never contemplate ordering a bombing run or -- heaven forbid -- a nuclear strike on a country just because its leader slighted her small hands at a summit. Rubio might detest her, but he cannot honestly say that Clinton, a former secretary of State, should not be trusted with the nations nuclear codes.
Trump is not only patently unfit to be president, but a danger to America and the world. Voters must stop him before the military has to.
James Kirchick is a fellow with the Foreign Policy Initiative. His book, The End of Europe, is forthcoming from Yale University Press.
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Ive always had a tender spot for people accused of plagiarism. I suspect its easier to plagiarize a passage inadvertently than most people think. When I write a longer piece, or sometimes even a shorter one, I might take several pages of notes, and those notes consist both of my thoughts on the subject and what others have written. An ordinary way to take notes, I assume. If youre not diligent about placing quotation marks around passages drawn from others, though, you run the risk of mistaking one of them for your own, especially if you put the project aside for a month or two, then come back to it.
So far I havent gone into print with anybody elses words. At least as far as I know.
In any case, I imagine something like that happened to Melania Trump, whose Monday night Republican convention speech bore a striking resemblance to Michelle Obamas 2008 Democratic convention speech. Perhaps a speechwriter used Michelle Obamas speech as a kind of model, then passed it around to some careless colleagues, and somewhere in the process Obamas speech was treated as the draft itself.
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Its not as if the earlier speech was especially memorable: It sounds like typical wife-of-the-nominee boilerplate. Any aspiring first lady at any point in American history could have said the same thing, more or less, and struck the right note for the occasion.
Besides, most of the Monday night convention speeches sounded vaguely plagiarized. With only two or three exceptions, the speakers seemed unusually reliant on routine political verbiage. Their sentiments sounded borrowed, their tone tentative and self-conscious almost as if they felt they shouldnt be there at all.
Maybe Im projecting. I know I would be embarrassed to stand before millions of people and pretend to believe that Donald Trump will make a fine president. (Or to write a speech for someone pretending the same.) But in a few cases, Im sure I detected a tendency to spout a few effusive cliches and get off the stage.
Social media lit up Monday night as some on Twitter pointed out that Melania Trumps prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention sounded strikingly similar to Michelle Obamas 2008 convention speech.
A speech by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss), for example, consisted of nothing but political platitudes from beginning to end. I dont know that Ive ever heard a speech so unoriginal. Here are just the first few sentences:
You know theres a reason that Make America Great Again has resonated with so many people this year. Its difficult to see greatness when youre working harder for less. Its difficult to see greatness when Washington is picking winners and losers. Its difficult to see greatness when you feel your voice isnt being heard. For the past eight years, weve seen the economy sputter and stall. Weve seen the president ignore the Constitution. And weve watched instability fester around the world. Americans deserve to see greatness again because we live in the greatest nation the world has ever known. Our nominee, Donald Trump, believes we can do better, that Americans can do better. Hillary Clinton offers four more years of the same failed and tired policies that voters rejected when Republicans won the Senate majority in 2014.
It goes on at some length, in just that way. Commonplace phrases pile on top of each other like sandbags. Theres nothing precisely wrong with the passage. Apart from the riffs about greatness and the names Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the passage might have been lifted from any speech at any GOP convention during any Democratic administration in the last 30 years. It was as if Wicker asked a speech-writing machine to give him the least interesting and least controversial product it could manage for the occasion.
The sheer blandness of this language may foreshadow the GOPs fall presidential campaign. Were going to say these things cause we have to, Republicans seem to be telling us, but dont listen to anything we say, and please make it end soon.
Barton Swaim was a speechwriter for South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford. He is the author of The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics.
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ALSO
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To the editor: In his critique of where the two major candidates stand on terrorism, Doyle McManus fails to note that Donald Trump has recanted his views on torture and the killing of terrorists families (acknowledging their illegality). He refuses to accept that Trump is at least partially right regarding challenges in the vetting process of refugees. (After Nice, its official: The campaigns about fear, Opinion, July 17)
On the other hand, he conveniently excuses presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clintons dropping poll numbers on this issue as part of a general slump. There is also no mention of the Obama administrations foreign policy failures, which former Secretary of State Clinton has been a definitive part of.
There is only one word I can think of to describe the veracity of McManuss analysis, and it comes from the Trump lexicon: Sad!
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Lucas Klein, Claremont
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To the editor: I agree that keeping families safe will be a key factor in the election.
Trumps toughness is obviously aimed at those who are already afraid their country is escaping from them and want it back. Logic does not matter to these voters. The easy solution is to ban Muslims and other refugees, ignoring the fact that perpetrators of these terrorist attacks are citizens of western countries, as is the case of Frances recent tragedies.
Closing our borders, as Trump advocates, is not the solution. Eradicating terrorism is a long-term effort involving patience as well as the isolation and elimination of those preaching violence around the globe. Carpet bombing areas where terrorists may be hiding will mean the death of innocent civilians and expand the conflict, which is what Islamic State really wants.
Domenico Maceri, San Luis Obispo
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To the editor: The explanation for why portions of Melania Trumps speech delivered at Monday nights Republican National Convention bore such a striking resemblance to the speech delivered eight years prior by Michelle Obama is so obvious.
With some assistance from the fictional Doc Brown, Michelle Obama must have traveled forward in time and it was she who actually plagiarized the speech given by Melania Trump, not the other way around.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista) should to convene a congressional investigation to locate the secret parking location of the DeLorean.
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John Trask, Thousand Oaks
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To the editor: As a lifelong Democrat, I have to ask the following question, since the Republican Party bills itself as the law-and-order party.
Do you think that Rep. Paul Ryan, the Republican speaker of the House, will ask the FBI to investigate Crooked Melania Trump for plagiarism?
David M. Galfold, Palmdale
..
To the editor: I heard excerpts from Melania Trumps and Michelle Obamas speeches played, one after the other. While it is likely true that each of them were taught to work hard, keep your word, respect others, those are all the usual core values taught by parents to children.
Given that Melania Trump probably did not write her own speech, her speechwriters parents apparently missed thou shalt not steal.
Michele Hart-Rico, Los Angeles
..
To the editor: Melania Trump, in her dull, prosaic, unremarkable speech on the opening night of the Republican National Convention, announced that her husband intends to represent all the people, not just some of the people, enumerating all as consisting of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hispanics, African Americans, Asians, the poor, and the middle class.
She pointedly left out the LGBT community, the one group to which the GOP party platform is overtly, proudly hostile, the sole and exclusive group of its fellow citizens whose rights and newly attained status of equality the party loftily states its intention to rescind and reverse.
Why, oh why is there any such thing as a Republican gay person?
Bruce Burroughs, Sherman Oaks
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At least a dozen California GOP staff members at the Republican National Convention have been quarantined in their hotel rooms after becoming ill with what appears to be a highly contagious norovirus, also known as the cruise-ship virus, according to officials from both the California GOP and local health agencies.
It looks like norovirus, said Pete Schade, the Erie County health commissioner. His department collected fecal samples from the afflicted staffers Tuesday morning and planned to take them to a state lab in the afternoon.
As soon as we know a little bit more about what were dealing with for sure, well have a better way of dealing with future precautions.
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The 550-member delegation was warned of the outbreak by state GOP officials in an email at 2:40 a.m. Tuesday. They were advised to avoid shaking hands with others, to wash hands frequently, to avoid sharing food and to not use the delegation buses to the convention if they have any symptoms all difficult rules to follow at a political convention.
From reality TV stars to Donald Trumps wife, catch up quick on the opening day of the GOP convention. More coverage at latimes.com/trailguide
Martin Emigh, a delegate and rancher from Solano County, said he was hopeful that a previous bout would mean he was immune to the virus.
Thats my biggest hope right now, said the 53-year-old. I had norovirus last winter. It was horrible. It will put you down.
But Im not going to weaken. Weve got to make America great again, Emigh said, invoking presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trumps campaign slogan.
The stomach bug, which has gained notoriety in recent years for making hundreds of people ill aboard cruise ships, typically occurs in crowded settings such as daycare centers and nursing homes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It affects 19 million to 21 million people in the United States annually.
Live updates from the Republican National Convention
The symptoms stomach pain, nausea, vomiting, fever and diarrhea are generally short-lived but can be dangerous, and even fatal, especially among the elderly and the very young.
The delegation is housed at the Kalahari Resort, an African-themed hotel connected to the nations largest water park in Sandusky, Ohio, 60 miles from the convention in Cleveland. Officials with the hotel, who first alerted the county health department about the outbreak, did not respond to a request for comment.
Its probably in the air, a state party official, who refused to be named discussing the outbreak, said outside of the delegations breakfast Tuesday morning. Were basically in a cruise ship.
Schade said he believed the virus was first contracted in California by an infant who traveled with one of the staff members to the convention.
State party officials realized they had a problem over the weekend and quarantined more than a third of their staff as they become ill. Meals, electrolyte-replacement drinks and Gatorade were delivered to the rooms of the sick people, who were released from quarantine once they had been symptom-free for 24 hours.
A couple of the staff members went to a local hospital to receive intravenous fluids.
No delegates, alternates or guests have reported becoming infected, but the risks are high. The staff members who became ill were in constant contact with the delegation, from filling the goodie bags they received upon check-in to handing out convention credentials every morning.
Over the weekend, staffers were seen frequently using small bottles of hand sanitizer. By Monday night, large towers of hand sanitizer had been placed throughout the delegations section of the hotel.
seema.mehta@latimes.com
For the latest on national and California politics, follow @LATSeema on Twitter.
MORE ON GOP CONVENTION
Day 1 of Trumps convention: Scattered in message, unruly in delivery
Where Californias GOP delegation ranks: a hotel at a water park 60 miles from the convention
Shouting matches, plagiarism claims: Is the GOP conventions theme Make America Reality TV Again?
The California Republicans at the GOP convention are staying so far from Cleveland that they might as well be in, well, California.
Theyre such an afterthought that where theyre sleeping, Cleveland radio stations turn to static. They need a law enforcement motorcade to escort them to events on time. Even their hotel, an African-themed resort attached to the nations largest indoor water park, has the feel of National Lampoons Vacation rather than a major political event.
California may serve as the source of hundreds of millions of campaign dollars and have the biggest delegation in the GOP, but as Republicans convene to nominate Donald Trump in the most unusual convention in decades, the states delegates are consigned to second-class status. They were assigned lodging nearly 60 miles from downtown Cleveland, farther than any other states delegation, thanks to a combination of the irrelevance of deep-blue California in the presidential election and the difficulty of securing space for the 550 delegates, alternates and their guests when hotel rooms are at a premium.
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The worse our registration gets in California, the further away they move us, said Charles Moran, a delegate from Los Angeles, as he sipped a glass of wine after arriving this weekend in Sandusky at the delegation hotel, dotted with sculptures of wild animals.
Most are trying to make the best of it, noting that they are far from the protests expected in downtown Cleveland, and are instead staying along the shores of Lake Erie in a town that draws families to its famed amusement parks.
The California delegation was relegated nearly 60 miles from downtown Cleveland. Their hotel, located in Sandusky, Ohio, is an African-themed resort. (Annie Yu / Los Angeles Times )
Were basically in the resort part of northeastern Ohio, said Brandon Gesicki, a delegate from Carmel who attended college in Ohio.
Though the destination is a far cry from 17-Mile Drive, state party Chairman Jim Brulte urged delegates to take advantage of the hotels amenities.
I intend to take on all comers in the cannon-ball contest, he told them.
The handful of hotels in or near Cleveland that could house and feed such a large group were given to states such as solidly red Texas, the home of nomination runner-up Sen. Ted Cruz; New York, home to presumptive nominee Donald Trump; perennial battleground Ohio; and Wisconsin, where RNC Chairman Reince Priebus hails from.
Though delegates say they understand, the distance and the accompanying ignominies can sting. In 2012, the group was housed on a barrier island in Florida that was nearly cut off from the continental U.S. when Hurricane Isaac barreled ashore.
The convention that year was in Tampa, about 40 minutes from the delegation hotel in St. Pete Beach. But the transportation system the RNC set up to move delegates around the area left Californians stuck on buses for more than three hours.
Furious delegates flooded the lobby bar once they finally made it back to the hotel, recalled Kathy Tavoularis, who planned convention logistics for the state party that year.
I just remember saying, Drink? Can I buy you a drink? Lets drown your sorrows. I have a tab, I have a tab, said Tavoularis, who is an alternate delegate this year.
It wasnt always this way. In the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was president, the California delegation stayed in luxurious and conveniently located hotels, such as the Anatole in Dallas. In 2000, the delegation was originally going to be housed far outside of the Philadelphia convention site until a close California friend of then-nominee George W. Bush intervened and had it moved closer.
No such luck has prevailed in recent years.
Beyond the drive time, this years hotel at the Kalahari Resort creates additional hurdles for attending the cocktail parties, movie screenings and policy panels put on by various groups outside of the convention, themselves a key attraction for the party faithful who gather just once every four years. Lining up notable speakers over breakfast at the delegation hotel, a staple of national political conventions, is a challenge because prospective guests eschew the long travel times.
The state party, which was initially assured the delegation would be housed within 30 miles of Cleveland, worked hard to gain some concessions once it learned that delegates would be in Sandusky, including the motorcade through three counties, said state GOP executive director Cynthia Bryant.
Most notably, the delegation was awarded prime front-row seating inside the convention hall. This was also a strategic move by Trumps campaign to ensure that the images broadcast from the convention floor show unity, a crucial goal that has eluded Republicans amid Trumps divisive candidacy. Because Californias primary was held after he clinched the nomination, all of Californias delegates are full-throated Trump supporters.
At the Kalahari, the state party set up a separate registration and lounge area so that delegates can avoid the main entrance, which teemed with vacationing Midwesterners clad in bathing suits and vendors hawking T-shirts, stuffed giraffes and candy apples.
The lobby, it really is like a carnival or a fair, Bryant said. The separate delegate entrance, decorated with bunting and a large floral California flag, makes it more special for them.
As in years past, VIPs such as major donor Peter Thiel and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy are staying closer to the action. Other delegates said privately that they had rented homes closer to the city, or had arranged to crash in friends spare hotel beds for a night or two to avoid the commute.
Anna Bryson, an alternate delegate from Orange County, and her husband, Bill Evers, said they planned on checking out the water park, which features numerous tall slides, a lazy river and an enormous wave pool where delegates can take surfing lessons.
There was a limit, though.
You dont really go from Dana Point to Sandusky to learn to surf, Evers said.
seema.mehta@latimes.com
For the latest on national and California politics, follow @LATSeema on Twitter.
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We hold this truth to be self-evident, that Melania Trump borrowed thoughts and words from Michelle Obamas 2008 convention speech Monday night.
No, wait.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that when Melania Trump uttered words that sounded exactly like Michelle Obamas words, she didnt do her husband any favors.
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Hey, did I just plagiarize the Declaration of Independence and the opening sentence of Jane Austens Pride and Prejudice?
Nope.
Those words are so famous, so cliched even, that they dont need to be attributed because everyone knows who wrote them.
But what about lifting less famous turns of phrase?
What about what happened Monday night, after a guy named Jarrett Hill, who has a YouTube channel on home design, noticed that Melania Trumps convention speech sounded an awful lot like the one delivered by Michelle Obama in Denver in 2008?
He noted that two passages in particular used parallel language to describe parallel thoughts.
Did Melania Trump or her speechwriters do something wrong? Did borrowing Obamas words cross the line? Or was it all just an embarrassing coincidence?
Watching snippets of the two speeches side by side and theyve been playing everywhere all day its very hard to conclude that Trumps choice of language was simple coincidence.
Social media lit up Monday night as some on Twitter pointed out that Melania Trumps prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention sounded strikingly similar to Michelle Obamas 2008 convention speech.
Anyone can spout generalities about being raised right by upstanding parents, about wanting the best for Americas children. Those are familiar tropes in political speeches.
But when Trump used the same syntax to express thoughts that Obama used in the same context (political nominating convention, spouse of candidate introducing herself to the nation), she left herself open to charges that she had helped herself to something that wasnt hers.
Just how bad was it?
If there is one constant in political speech writing, former George W. Bush White House speechwriter Elise Jordan wrote in Time, its that 99% of speech-writing mistakes are process mistakes, not nefarious cheating.
Robert Reich, a former Clinton administration secretary of Labor and professor of public policy at UC Berkeley, said the flap was a distraction. He had tweeted, tongue in cheek, that he was fine with Trumps speech.
I not only hope she plagiarized all of Michelle Obama, but that Donald Trump plagiarizes Barack Obamas 2008 acceptance speech, and that perish the thought if Donald Trump is president, I hope he plagiarizes most of the Obama Administration.
Joking aside, Reich said he doubted that Melania Trump wrote her own speech, as she intimated to NBCs Matt Lauer the other day. Its very, very rare in public life that people write their own speeches.
Every college student is taught that plagiarism is a capital offense. But plagiarism in politics is a much different animal, Reich said. If I had a student who plagiarized, that would be a very serious offense, possibly resulting in expulsion. But politicians who use speechwriters are in a different world.
What Melania Trump did is not nearly as egregious as the plagiarism that helped force Joe Biden out of the 1988 presidential race. (Biden didnt just steal Welsh Labor leader Neil Kinnocks words, he practically purloined his life story.)
Nor is it quite as minor as then-presidential candidate Barack Obamas use of his friend Deval Patricks words in 2008. Patrick, the Massachusetts governor, was a friend with whom Obama swapped ideas; Patrick said he did not consider it an act of theft.
A simple acknowledgement of a mistake, and an apology, even an insincere one, would probably have tamped down the conversations that are overshadowing the second day of the Republican National Convention.
After all, Melania Trump has a reservoir of good will to call upon. Everyone knows she is not a polished public speaker. Certainly, she is used to being in the public eye that was her job as a model but she is has little campaign experience and does not appear comfortable behind the microphone. She is as reticent as her husband is outgoing. People get that.
By far the simplest way of handling it is to say that she had a speechwriter and the speechwriter must have lifted parts from successful speeches, said Reich. Thats not a defense or justification, but its an explanation.
Unfortunately, the adamant denials from Trump campaign officials and surrogates are not just verging on odd, but have elevated what might have been a fleeting faux pas to a story with staying power.
While many high profile Republicans RNC Chairman Reince Preibus, political operative Roger Stone, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito acknowledged that someone should be held accountable for an obvious error, many others dug in or lashed out.
In its first official response to questions about Melania Trumps speech, the Trump campaign sent this statement to reporters, from its spokesman Jason Miller: In writing her beautiful speech, Melanias team of writers took notes on her lifes inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking. Melanias immigrant experience and love for America shone through in her speech, which made it such a success.
Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort told reporters in Cleveland Tuesday that the issue has been totally blown out of proportion. He also implicated Trumps Democratic rival. I mean, this is, once again, an example of when a woman threatens Hillary Clinton, how she seeks out to demean her and take her down.
When Matt Lauer asked New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie whether, as a former prosecutor, he could make a case for plagiarism, Christie replied: Not when 93% of the speech is completely different from Michelle Obamas speech. They expressed some common thoughts.
Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson had a similar take. These are values Republican values by the way of hard work, determination, family values, dedication and respect. And thats Melania Trump. And this concept that Michelle Obama invented the English language is absurd.
Anyway, like I always say, this political season is the best of times and the worst of times. Know what I mean?
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After a series of procedural roadblocks stopped a rogue band of delegates who were seeking to block Donald Trumps nomination, Ron Kaufman, a Republican stalwart, taunted them as a failure from the start.
One thing is clear, said Kaufman, co-chairman of the panel that wrote the rules for this years convention. Never Trump never was.
Not quite.
Only hours after Kaufmans derisive verdict, the renegades struck back, delivering a noisy rebuke to Trump on the convention floor and underscoring the lingering discontent that some Republicans harbor toward their presumptive nominee.
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Their quixotic efforts to deny Trump the nomination were squelched Monday afternoon, but not before they landed an embarrassing jab to a party looking to project unity after a divisive primary.
The ruckus centered on whats normally the driest of pro forma votes: approval of the convention rules.
Typically, delegates eagerly move past the parliamentary procedure to reach the pomp and circumstance of a presidential nomination. This time, however, the rules vote turned dramatic.
The rules package, approved last week by a panel stacked with Trump loyalists, included a requirement that delegates vote according to the results of the primary or caucus in their states.
That rule would prevent what the anti-Trump forces were calling a conscience vote by delegates who wanted to choose someone else, despite Trumps primary victories. The change they backed, allowing delegates to not be bound by the primaries, would have imperiled Trumps otherwise easy path to the nomination.
When party officials brought the rules to the floor for approval, the insurgents tried to force a roll call vote. The maneuver was a long shot but threatened a prolonged display of dissent within the party, marring opening-night festivities.
Party officials and the Trump campaign swiftly crushed the insurgents, twisting the arms of delegates to back off.
It was a very small, embittered group that refuses to stand down I think we put away the nonsense, said Tim Clark, director of the Trump campaign in California. We had to stamp it out one more time so we could go about the business of electing Donald Trump.
When the rules were deemed adopted by voice vote, with no accommodation for a roll call, the convention erupted into boos and jeers from the anti-Trump faction, as well as chants of free the vote.
Trump supporters countered with cheers of their own: USA! USA!
The rowdy spectacle opened the convention on discordant note, interfering with the Trump campaigns effort to convey a party undivided in its resolve to defeat Hillary Clinton.
Anti-Trump delegates called the heavy-handed procedural move emblematic of a presidential campaign that has shown little desire to soothe intra-party relationships.
They havent been interested in reconciliation. Theyve been interested in crushing the opposition, said Randy Corporon, a Colorado delegate who counts himself in the Free the Delegates movement.
Success for the movement was always improbable. Many delegates, even those personally queasy about the grandiose real estate mogul, were disinclined to overturn the will of the more than 13 million primary voters who cast ballots for Trump.
The rules of the RNC prevailed over the chaos created by a few, said Bruce Ash, a delegate from Arizona. Democracy is a messy thing, he added, but grass-roots voters will was expressed by the delegates.
After the brouhaha, Kaufman dismissed the uprising as insignificant, compared to the tumult some predicted during this unruly primary season.
Four months ago, it was going to be an open, contested convention and real chaos, said Kaufman, who predicted there would be more discord at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia next week.
But Kendal Unruh, a leader in the delegate mutiny, said the resistance ran deeper than naysayers would admit.
Im not alone here. I wasnt the one screaming roll call vote. I wasnt the only one screaming point of order, said Unruh, a schoolteacher from Colorado. Theres an awful lot of support on this floor.
That abiding resistance may spill over into the general election, she said, warning that Trump would be unable to win over holdouts like her.
Not after behavior like this, she said. Not after hes shown us that were not wanted, and not after hes said that he can win without us.
melanie.mason@latimes.com
michael.finnegan@latimes.com
noah.bierman@latimes.com
Follow @melmason, @finneganLAT and @noahbierman on Twitter for the latest in national politics.
Republican stalwarts just blocked the last big push to stop Donald Trumps nomination
Never Trump forces converge on Cleveland for last stand over partys nomination
With free the delegates rallying cry, upstarts seek to block Trump nomination in Cleveland
Im Christina Bellantoni, here with your Essential Politics guide to the Republican National Convention. Tonights theme is Make America Work Again.
If Day 1 was any indicator, were in for a wild ride all week. Lets get started.
For the next two weeks, well be doing this a little different because we know time is short and youve got a convention to watch. (Catch up quick with this video.) For Day 2, well have you covered, with a gavel-to-gavel livestream that will go live here at 2:30 p.m. Pacific. and robust live coverage round-the-clock on Trail Guide. Dont miss a moment.
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The big to-do about Day 1 surfaced soon after it adjourned for the night, as it became clear that headliner Melania Trumps prime-time speech was strikingly similar to Michelle Obamas 2008 Democratic convention address, using several of the same word-for-word phrases.
Javier Panzar reports each woman said she and her husband were raised to work hard for what you want in life, instilled with values like your word is your bond and the only limit to achieving dreams is your willingness to work for them. The late-night news lit up social media.
See the two speeches side-by-side and watch Melania Trumps full speech here. (Heres the campaigns head-scratching response.)
Another talker for the 550 California delegates in Cleveland is that they are staying so far from Cleveland that they might as well be in, well, California. Its hard out there for Republicans from a state where they are far outnumbered by Democrats.
Seema Mehta details how even their hotel, an African-themed resort attached to the nations largest indoor water park, has the feel of National Lampoons Vacation rather than a major political event.
Any other year, a vote to adopt the convention rules would be a little-noticed procedural move. But this is 2016, which means even the most arcane parliamentary steps hold the potential for mayhem. Melanie Mason, Michael Finnegan and Noah Bierman report on how anti-Trump delegates delivered a noisy rebuke over rules on the convention floor. Their efforts were unsuccessful, but they still managed to land an embarrassing jab at the GOP, which is desperately seeking to project a united front. See the video as the floor erupts in chaos.
Those three pieces serve as good primers for the day. Ill present the best of the rest with a series of headlines.
YOUR GUIDE TO CONVENTION CONTEXT
With a mix of putdowns and silence Donald Trump who? Republicans open their national convention.
As their convention opens, Republicans are racing to unite behind their candidate.
YOUR GUIDE TO CONVENTION SPEECHES
Day One of the convention in less than 3 minutes.
Meet some of the interesting speakers at the convention.
A county sheriff pits police against the Black Lives Matter movement.
Watch Rudy Giulianis full speech.
Watch Gen. Michael Flynns full speech.
YOUR CONVENTION BINGO CARD
From funny hats to Benghazi mentions, we have you covered.
YOUR CONVENTION PROTEST GUIDE
I hope to God I dont have to use it, says a man who brought a gun to a Cleveland Donald Trump rally.
Early RNC protests are largely peaceful with only two arrests.
Despite fears, initial street protests are mild at the GOP convention.
Heat, sweat and paranoia in Cleveland: Reporter Matt Pearces diary from outside the GOP convention.
Again, well cover every twist and turn this week and next in Trail Guide. Make sure to follow @latimespolitics if you like your news by 140 characters.
WATCH THE CONVENTIONS WITH THE L.A. TIMES
Join me, Sacramento bureau chief John Myers and columnist Robin Abcarian at free convention watch parties on Thursday and again on July 28 in downtown Los Angeles. The events will run from 6 to 9 p.m. Pacific. RSVP here.
TODAYS ESSENTIALS
Keep an eye on our Essential Politics news feed for some major developments in Californias U.S. Senate race this morning.
Gearing up for a big fight over a ballot measure that would raise cigarette taxes by $2 a pack, tobacco companies dropped nearly $17 million into a campaign against the measure, Proposition 56.
Who will win the November election? Give our Electoral College map a spin.
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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan discussed the extradition of Fetullah Gulen from the U.S. during a telephone call with President Barack Obama on Tuesday, the White House said, Anadolu agency reported.
The president made clear to President Erdogan that the United States doesnt support terrorists and doesnt support individuals who conspired to overthrow a democratically elected government, according to White House spokesman Josh Earnest.
He said Obama reiterated once again the strong commitment of the United States to the democratically elected civilian government of Turkey and commended the Turkish peoples effort in defending the government and repelling the coup last week.
Materials related to the extradition of the cleric who lives in self-imposed exile in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania were submitted to U.S. authorities by the Turkish government in electronic form, according to Earnest.
The Justice Department and other U.S. agencies are now reviewing the documents and will take action in accordance with a decades-long treaty between the two countries with respect to the extradition of criminals, the White House said.
Your eyes may be more sensitive than you ever thought possible.
In a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications, researchers report that our warm, wet, multicellular eyes have evolved such a high level of sensitivity that they can, on occasion, detect a single photon aimed at the retina.
Even the most sophisticated man-made devices require a cool, temperature-controlled environment to achieve the same feat.
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A single photon is the the smallest particle that light is made of, and it is extremely hard to see.
Its not like a dim flash of light or anything like that, said Alipasha Vaziri, a quantum physicist at Rockefeller University in New York City and the senior author on the paper. Its more a feeling of seeing something rather than really seeing it.
He described it, poetically, as being at the threshold of imagination.
If youve ever looked at a faint star in the night sky and one second you see it but the next second you dont its kind of like that, he said.
See the most-read stories in Science this hour
Previous studies dating back to the 1940s have shown that the human eye can detect as few as five to seven photons. But whether a single photon would be detectable proved elusive.
Although scientists were able to create light sources that produced an average of one photon at a time, they couldnt know for sure whether one, two, three or zero photons were released each time the light source was fired.
To solve this problem, Vaziris team used a process known a spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) in which a high-energy photon decays spontaneously in a crystal into two lower energetic photons. One of these photons is directed to a subjects eye while the other is sent to a detector. If the detector notes a photon, then the researchers know the other half of the pair had to be sent to the observer.
The study group was extremely small. There were only three participants -- all male and all in their 20s. They all had excellent eyesight, although one subject had his contact lenses to thank for that.
Before the experiment began, each participant sat in a completely dark room for about 40 minutes to make sure his eyes were fully adapted to the dark. His head was held in place with a headrest and a bite bar to ensure that when the photon was released it would be directed at the most sensitive part of his retina.
When the subject felt ready he triggered the start of the experiment by pressing a button. Soon he would hear two acoustical signals separated by one second. Afterwards, he was asked to indicate which signal he thought was accompanied by a photon and which one was a blank. Finally, he had to rate how confident he was in his choice on a three point scale.
Vaziri said the strategy of forcing the participants to make a choice even when they werent sure it was right helped push the subjects to maximum sensitivity.
It was key for the results of the study, he said.
Producing a single photon or any number of defined states of light is not easy. Only recently researchers, mainly working in the field of quantum optics and quantum information, have been able to generate such light states more routinely, Vaziri said. The setup requires special crystals and high-efficiency detectors, but even then the production rate of single photons is quite low.
In this case of 30,767 trials, only 2,420 were single-photon events, the authors wrote. However, those blank trials served as a control, allowing the authors to determine if the subjects were biased; for example, if they were more likely to think the second signal was accompanied by a photon. It also provided valuable information on participants default confidence levels, Vaziri said.
The researchers report that the subjects were able to correctly determine when a photon had been fired 51.6% of the time, which may not sound that impressive, but is statistically significant.
If it was really random guessing, there would be no way to explain this result, Vaziri said.
In addition, when the subjects expressed high confidence that they had seen a photon, they were right 60% of the time.
The authors also found that the observers were more likely to correctly detect a single photon when they had been exposed to another photon within the past 10 seconds.
Although they do not know what mechanism would cause this fleeting increase of sensitivity, Vaziri speculated that it could have an evolutionary advantage.
If you are dealing with really dim conditions and you see one photon, seeing another shortly afterwards would help your visual system recognize that it really is a light source, he said.
He added that while his group did not know just how sensitive the human eye could be before they started this research, it makes sense that our eyes have evolved to spot even the tiniest bit of light.
People dont realize it, but if you are in nature, far from any city, on a moonless night and under a starry sky, the ambient light can get to the level of a single photon, he said. In those conditions, the difference between being able to see a little better to escape predators could have an evolutionary effect.
deborah.netburn@latimes.com
Do you love science? I do! Follow me @DeborahNetburn and like Los Angeles Times Science & Health on Facebook.
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Dozens of police officers and firefighters over the last several months have been breaking through doors, rescuing hostages and practicing crisis negotiations at a number of soon-to-be demolished properties in Burbanks Media District.
Before construction crews tear down blocks of apartment buildings, single-family homes, office buildings and a church to make way for Talaria at Burbank, a 241-unit luxury apartment complex on top of a Whole Foods market, local law enforcement and fire agencies have been using the now-vacant buildings for training.
Police and fire officials said its a unique opportunity for agencies accustomed to training in the same buildings over and over.
For us to be able to utilize realistic settings is a big deal, said Los Angeles Police Officer Howard Ng, who was one of roughly 30 Los Angeles Special Weapons and Tactics Unit officers who trained at the site free of charge over the last several weeks. Officers practiced door breaching, as well as exercises simulating searches for armed suspects and hostage rescues.
We probably couldve spent a whole month to two months in there, Ng said.
Burbanks SWAT team also trained twice this month, practicing breaching exercises and tactical responses to barricaded suspects and hostage situations.
Its a built-up little area which affords a lot more realism than, say, the one structure they have at the range that they train on all the time, said Burbank Police Capt. Denis Cremins, adding that different room configurations and surroundings are much more consistent with an actual call-out. The closer you practice to the real thing, the better youre going to perform in a real scenario.
Developer Michael Cusumano said hes offered similar training opportunities in the past on different properties slated for demolition.
Its not very often you get multiple blocks of vacant buildings, Cusumano said. We feel its a part of our community obligation to cooperate with those agencies whenever we can. If we can do anything that provides them better training opportunities, then were happy to do it.
Once crews remove the asbestos from the properties, Burbank firefighters who have done some training at the site will go back to practice more invasive exercises, including practicing forcible entry by cutting through walls, and using charged hose lines while smoke machines simulate poor visibility.
Its as real-life as you could get, said Burbank Fire Chief Tom Lenahan. We are always looking for opportunities like this.
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Alene Tchekmedyian, alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com
Twitter: @atcheck
Counselors who advise students in academics or assist them with personal challenges at Burbanks three middle schools made a plea to Burbank Unified officials recently when they asked to be relieved of also supervising students during lunch.
The dual role that middle school counselors carry has led some to take on disciplinarian roles they do not want because it could stifle their relationships with students, according to Luther Burbank Middle School Counselor Traci Fellman.
NEWSLETTER: Stay up to date with whats going on in the 818 >>
Fellman spoke on behalf of several counselors during a March 17 school board meeting, asking that middle school counselors no longer oversee students during lunch.
Much of our time during supervision is spent correcting behavior, disciplining students, pestering them to clean up after themselves, and teenagers do not view adults who constantly harp on their behavior as a safe harbor when times are tough, she said.
The adolescent brain just does not work that way, she added. Being viewed as disciplinarians by our students actually hampers the development of caring, nurturing, supportive relationships that we attempt to foster with our students during their time in middle school.
Instead, students could visit a counselor in their office during lunch, and parents could also drop by during the lunch break, Fellman said. Currently, students must visit counselors during their class times.
Unlike counselors at middle schools, high school counselors are not required to do lunch supervision, according to an agreement in their contract which was reached a few years ago, said Les Cohen, a Burroughs High School counselor.
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When high school counselors first became available to meet with students during lunch, Cohen said he doubted many would stop by his office during that time, but he said he keeps busy during lunch because students do drop in to talk to him.
Really, I was skeptical about it in the beginning. I didnt think kids were going to come in at lunch, he said. I have found that a lot of kids come in at lunch time. Some of those kids fall into a particular niche where theyre kids who are either high achieving who dont want to miss a class to come in, and theyre busy; they have to leave right after school. Or, they are at-risk kids who are embarrassed to ask a teacher to come in during class time... If I send for them during class, they wont show up, because they dont want to stand out, and they come in at lunch.
Social studies teacher Barry Sarna, who is also the middle school director for the Burbank Teachers Assn., said he has been advocating for middle school counselors to be relieved of lunch supervision for a year, in part because he said that in meeting with middle school counselors, they unanimously said that no counseling seems to happen at lunch time during supervision.
He estimated that the cost to hire two part-time campus aides to supervise students during lunch at each of the three middle schools would be about $6,400 per year.
After hearing several counselors and teachers discuss the issue, Burbank Unified Supt. Matt Hill said he was sure the school district could address their concerns.
I heard loud and clear the need of the counselors and the other teachers supporting the counselors tonight can we find a solution to resolve that for our middle schools? There is a financial impact, but Im very confident that we can work through that, he said.
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Kelly Corrigan, kelly.corrigan@latimes.com
Twitter: @kellymcorrigan
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The Newport Beach City Council decided Tuesday night to sharply reduce annual fees related to harbor moorings, ending a years-long debate between city leaders and boaters.
The City Council voted 5 to 2 to reduce the cost of offshore moorings from $55.43 per foot of a boat to $35 per foot. The council also voted to reduce the fees for onshore moorings to $17.50 per foot of a boat down from the previous rate of $27.21 per foot.
Onshore moorings are typically less expensive because they are intended for smaller vessels, according to city staff.
The cost and availability of moorings, which are considered to be a more affordable way for people to take advantage of boating in Newport Beach than marinas, has been a hotly debated topic among boaters for more than five years in Newport Beach.
This is akin to a type of slum lord, Councilman Marshall Duffy Duffield said, noting a perceived lack of amenities for mooring holders. You dont go there to reap higher profits and moneys. The product youre looking at is akin to a slum apartment. Were lucky to get $35 a foot.
In a controversial vote in 2010, the council decided to nearly triple the cost of mooring fees, which had not been increased since 1996. The move, which infuriated boaters, came three years after an Orange County Grand Jury investigation determined that the city was allegedly mismanaging the mooring process and that the moorings on public tidelands werent readily available to the public under the city system.
Among the specific findings, the grand jury said the city hadnt assessed the moorings fair market value since the mid-1990s.
At that time, the council voted to peg moorings at 14% of the average Newport marina rent, which raised the fee incrementally over five years from about $20 per foot of a boat to about $55 per foot. That increased the annual mooring cost for a 40-foot boat from about $800 to about $2,200.
We ask that the council decides tonight that enough is enough and choose to move forward, said Carter Ford, Newport Mooring Assn. member. Its really bad for everyone as we see it not to get this done tonight.
The process of beginning to reduce mooring fees began in February 2015, when the council cut the cost of residential pier fees and also tasked the Harbor Commission with assessing harbor moorings.
After several months of public meetings, where topics such as cost, transfer rules and other issues were robustly discussed with officials and mooring holders, the Harbor Commission recommended the council more than halve the citys annual permit fee for offshore moorings from $55.43 per foot of a boat to $25 per foot. Some council members at the time said they would be more comfortable with the offshore mooring rate around $35 per foot.
Money collected from mooring fees is placed in the tidelands fund, which pays for capital improvement projects inside the harbor, according to city staff. City leaders have identified bulkhead repairs and sealing, harbor pier and gangway maintenance, dredging projects and sea wall repairs as some of the projects that money in the tidelands fund could begin to cover this year.
Harbor Resources Manager Chris Miller estimates that the lower fees will cause a $700,000 annual reduction to the tidelands fund.
Councilmen Keith Curry and Ed Selich voted against the fee reduction, pointing to a letter received last week from the State Lands Commission, which has jurisdiction over land held by the state of California, that raised concerns about the appraisal conducted by Netzer and Associates. City staff used the appraisal to base their recommendation to the council.
Sheri Pemberton, chief of the external affairs division for the State Lands Commission, wrote in the letter that based on our review the appraisal lacks important supporting discussion and analysis in a number of areas, which may affect the determination of fair market rent.
Pemberton went on to ask the city to defer the issue to a later meeting.
We are putting ourselves at risk, Curry said. We are at risk of the State Lands Commission coming in and setting fees in a way that I dont think anyone would like.
Bruxie, a waffle sandwich shop at 279 E. 17th St. in Costa Mesa, closed for good Wednesday after about two years in business.
While Bruxie Costa Mesa has developed a special bond with the local community, earlier this year we made a business decision to sell our location on 17th Street and relocate our team members to our nearby restaurants in Irvine and Huntington Beach, Bruxie founders Dean Simon and Kelly Mullarney said in a statement. We thank our loyal Costa Mesa supporters and look forward to serving them at one our other nearby locations in Orange County.
In addition to Irvine and Huntington Beach, the chain has Orange County locations in Orange and Brea and is expanding to Santa Monica, San Diego and Las Vegas.
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Modere opens new marketing center in Newport Beach
Modere, which offers beauty, personal care, health, wellness and household products, opened a marketing center last week in Newport Beach.
The new center is at the Koll Center on MacArthur Boulevard.
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Rockwood Capital invests in South Coast Collection
Real estate investment management firm Rockwood Capital is investing $120 million in Costa Mesas South Coast Collection shopping center.
SOCOs 300,000-square-foot property features more than 75 storefronts and restaurants. The center also offers weekly farmers markets and an array of monthly events.
Joel Mayer, managing director at Rockwood, said the investment will enhance the property so the shopping center is among the preeminent lifestyle centers in Southern California.
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Hoag Hospital named in top 50 for cardiovascular services
Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach has been named one of the nations top 50 cardiovascular hospitals by Truven Health Analytics, a healthcare data firm.
The hospital is one of two California medical centers to make the list.
The list recognizes hospitals that outperformed their peers in inpatient and extended care, clinical process, efficiency and cost for heart attacks, heart failure, percutaneous coronary intervention and coronary artery bypass graft surgery, according to a news release.
The 17th annual review looked at more than a thousand hospitals that provide medical and surgical treatment for heart disease, the release said.
Daily Pilot staff
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the Common Defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
These are the words of the Preamble, or introduction, to our present Constitution, which is the basis of the legal system of our nation. During and after the Revolutionary War, we were under the guiding law of the Articles of Confederation. This was merely a loose union or confederation of the states without a coordinating federal government.
It did not provide for enough authority to enforce decisions or coordination among the states. For example, it did not provide for a common currency, for ways to raise money, for ways to enforce decisions or for ways to negotiate with foreign governments. The 13 states were in constant disagreement and competition with each other. They found it hard to pull together to work for the common good of all. The Founding Fathers realized that a new kind of government was needed, where a federal government could coordinate the needs of the 13 states, but allow them to maintain their individual autonomy.
There was much discussion about how to achieve this during the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia, when representatives from the 13 states quietly convened to remedy the pitfalls that they saw resulted from a national government that was too weak and inefficient.
The preamble of the Constitution thus states the goal and purpose of our government: 1) to insure domestic tranquility, 2) provide for the common defense, 3) promote the general welfare of all, and 4) secure the blessings of liberty so people could go about their business of being productive and creating their own lives as they wished.
The federal government was thus given the distinct powers of declaring war, raising an armed forces, regulating interstate and foreign trade, admitting new states, establishing foreign policy and creating laws to carry out the delegated powers.
The states were to retain jurisdiction over everything else, which included establishing schools, running local governments, conducting elections, regulating business within the state, creating marriage laws and providing for the public safety. Concern over the delicate balance of power between the states and the federal government resulted in Amendment IX and Amendment X of the Bill of Rights, which guaranteed that duties not specifically delegated to the federal government were reserved to the states.
In the Constitution, the executive branch is given authority to execute the laws passed by Congress. While he has the power to veto any laws, Congress can override a veto by two-thirds vote. The executive is also the commander in chief. Finally, the president can be tried and impeached if he abuses and oversteps his power. The Constitution provides checks and balances on the executive power. Thus powers of the Executive branch are limited and defined.
The legislative branch is divided into two parts: The Senate is composed of two representatives from each state, and the House of Representatives consists of a proportional representation based on population. There is a total of 435 representatives in the House.
The job of Congress is to make laws, regulate both foreign and interstate commerce, levy taxes and duties, pay debts, borrow money on credit, establish a rule for naturalization of citizenship, provide for a unified currency, coin money, establish a Post Office and post roads, promote science and useful acts by securing rights of inventors and authors with a Patent Office, declare war, make rules concerning captures on land and sea, raise and support armies, maintain a navy, call forth a militia, confirm presidential appointments, make laws, and suppress insurrections and repel invasions.
The judicial branch was to be set up by Congress and judges would be appointed for life with the advise and consent of the Senate. In Article VI, the Constitution is declared to be the supreme law of the land and is intended to be the benchmark by which all other laws are to be judged, and they are to be in accordance with the Constitution.
The Revolutionary War produced a new and different way of thinking. Our new government was to derive its just power from the consent of the governed and not from a despotic king or an oligarchy of the powerful who ruled for their own benefit. After 10 years of fumbling along, the Founding Fathers had to rethink and redesign how our government would operate.
Fortunately, they were well-read men of the Enlightenment, and they also had the practical experiences of governing in the Colonial governments and in the new United States of America. They knew what worked and what didnt. They believed in the freedoms they had fought for. With careful and thoughtful deliberation, they devised a new government which would secure the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for the people. This new government would give the people themselves control over their destiny.
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Newport Beach resident SHERRY MARRON has a doctorate in American studies. She has taught at the University of Connecticut and Orange Coast College.
Trial began Monday in a lawsuit filed by a woman who alleges the mechanic who broke into her home and sexually assaulted her got her address from the Newport Beach Mercedes-Benz dealership where he worked.
Travis Dewayne Batten, 34, is serving a 107-year prison sentence for two separate attacks on Orange County women in their homes, including the 2005 assault on Karen Sommers, a nurse practitioner who lived in Newport Beach.
Sommers alleges that Battens employer, Fletcher Jones Motorcars, bore some responsibility for the assault. Her lawsuit claims Batten used the dealerships computer system to look up Sommers address so he could rape her.
He knew what he wanted and he knew where to go to get it, Sommers attorney Christopher Rudd said Monday during his opening statement.
The Daily Pilot usually does not publish the names of victims of sexual crimes. But in Sommers case, she came forward with her allegations publicly.
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In 2013, Sommers filed a civil lawsuit in Orange County Superior Court against Fletcher Jones, seeking unspecified damages.
On Monday, as Rudd outlined the case against Fletcher Jones, he told jurors theyll hear testimony from a former mechanic that he or any of his co-workers in the shop could access a customers name, phone number and address while a vehicle was in for repairs.
Did they need that to do an oil change on a car? Rudd said.
The dealerships measures for protecting such information amounted to Swiss cheese, according to Rudd.
Sommers bought a car from Fletcher Jones in 2004 and regularly had it serviced there, according to her lawsuit.
In 2005, Rudd said, Sommers returned home from a gym to find a masked man in her Back Bay apartment.
Rudd said the man, later identified as Batten, used duct tape to restrain Sommers, dragged her to a bedroom and began tearing her clothes off.
Sommers fought back, Rudd said, and after Batten punched her on the head hard enough to break his hand, he fled but not before warning Sommers that he would come back to kill her.
The evidence will show Fletcher Jones didnt do this to Miss Sommers, Rudd said, but he added, They allowed it to happen because they carelessly handled her personal information.
Sommers doctor is expected to testify that the attack left her with post-traumatic stress disorder.
She became a terrified, sleepless recluse, Rudd said.
Speaking to the jury after Rudd, Fletcher Jones attorney Karl Lindegren foreshadowed how the defense may try to poke holes in the theory that Batten targeted Sommers.
Batten, Lindegren said, never worked on Sommers car and theres no evidence that the two interacted at the dealership.
He said Batten got into Sommers home through an unlocked door and may have been trying to steal from the apartment, not lie in wait for her.
When Sommers arrived home from the gym, Lindegren said, she saw he was as surprised as she was and said things like, No ones supposed to be here. I got a bum tip.
Lindegren also questioned whether someones phone number and address are indeed private information. He said Sommers was listed in the phone book in 2004, though her name was misspelled in the entry.
He contended that Fletcher Jones carefully guards truly sensitive information like customers financial data by keeping it on a separate computer system that mechanics cant access.
Lindegren said jurors will see that Fletcher Jones carefully vets its employees.
Batten passed criminal background checks and drug tests when he originally applied for a job at the dealership in 2000 and when he returned in 2010 after briefly working elsewhere, according to Lindegren. Batten was arrested in the Sommers case in 2011.
People thought he was a nice guy, Lindegren said. They were mistaken.
But the fault, he told jurors, lies with Batten, not Fletcher Jones.
They shouldnt be held responsible because one guy did a very bad thing, Lindegren said.
If jurors decide Fletcher Jones is at fault, they will have to determine how much Sommers should get in compensation.
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Jeremiah Dobruck, jeremiah.dobruck2@latimes.com
Twitter: @jeremiahdobruck
He should not be allowed to serve
Jeff Herdman is an appointed Civil Service member running for City Council. If he wanted to run, he should have resigned from the Civil Service Commission last July. This is analogous to the states revolving-door ordinance prohibiting retired council members from lobbying the city for one year to prevent conflicts of interest.
Herdmans lame argument asserts that council members receive reimbursement not a salary for their services. Trying to get out of his conundrum, Herdman says he wont take the council salary, if elected.
City Council members are clearly employees of the city; they receive a W-2 documenting salary. Council members are also categorized on the citys website as employees.
If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, its probably a duck. Council members are city employees, and Herdman is ineligible to sit as a councilman in the unlikely event that he is elected.
Bob McCaffrey
Balboa Island
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FOR THE RECORD
July 20, 4:23 p.m.: An earlier version of this letter initially stated that Section 710 was added to the City Charter in 2012 to avoid conflicts involving the Civil Service Board. In fact, that section was part of the original City Charter. In addition, the letter made reference to the citys revolving-door policy prohibiting retired council members from lobbying the city for one year prior to prevent conflicts of interest. The city policy, in fact, is rooted in state law.
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He should be allowed to serve
I find it hard to believe that Newport Beach City Clerk Leilani Brown has decided to deny the voters in Newport Beachs District 5 the opportunity to vote for the most-qualified candidate in the upcoming city council election.
Her arbitrary ruling that candidate Jeff Herdmans position on a city advisory board disqualifies from serving on the council until a year after he leaves that board may put an end to his candidacy, thus denying voters the opportunity to elect an honest and qualified candidate who is not part of the Bob McCaffrey Machine.
Why is the McCaffrey Machine so afraid of Herdman? Herdman cannot be bought and he will always put the interests of the voters first. Herdman is beholden to no one. He has no secret agenda or conflicts of interest. The voters, and not the city clerk, should decide this City Council election.
Jeffrey S. Lloyd
Los Angeles
Georgia and Turkey agreed to support extending of the strategic partnership during the first meeting of the Strategic Cooperation Council between the two countries in Ankara, the Georgian government press office said Tuesday, Sputnik News reported.
On Tuesday, the one-day High Level Strategic Cooperation Council between Georgia and Turkey kicked off with the participation of Georgian Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili and his Turkish counterpart Binali Yildirim, as well as the two countries' cabinet members.
"At the end of the meeting the parties expressed readiness to support extending of the strategic partnership between the countries," the press service said in a statement.
According to the statement, the strategic partnership was agreed to be increased in the field of trade and economy, as well as transportation and energy, with numerous bilateral agreements signed in those areas.
The decision to establish the High Level Strategic Cooperation Council between Georgia and Turkey was announced in December 2014, when Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu paid an official visit to his Georgian counterpart Tamar Beruchashvili.
Karim Madani has spent his life in a rough section of Nice, where many immigrants from North Africa grow up with diminished dreams and limited opportunities a world away from the glamorous Mediterranean shoreline.
But Madani, who was walking his 8-year-old daughter home Monday in the low-rent, high-rise section of Nice, started to get excited when asked about his nationality in a country increasingly riven by divisions after a terror attack that killed 84 people on Bastille Day last week.
Im French, Im entirely French, I was born in Nice 38 years ago and have lived here my whole life but people still look at me and see an Arab, said Madani, whose parents immigrated from Algeria four decades ago. I can barely speak Algerian and the last time I was there on vacation four years ago everyone called me French. But here everyone sees me as Arab and some even think Arab terrorist.
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Madani said it was never easy being Arab in France because of a lingering prejudice, but that the attack by a Tunisian immigrant last week was bound to make things more difficult for people like him, whose roots are in Frances former North African colonies.
To make things worse, the attacker who drove a truck through the holiday crowd, 31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, some time ago had lived around the corner in the same downtrodden banlieue, or outlying low-rent neighborhood.
Bouhlel, who was shot and killed by police during the attack, was one of about 600,000 Tunisians in France.
The immigrant-dominated quarter of North Nice is only about four miles inland from the Mediterranean and the Promenade des Anglais where Bouhlel caused so much death and destruction. But it feels like a parallel universe far removed from the sea, the pebble-stone beaches, the posh shops, fancy restaurants and glamour that has made Frances fifth largest city one of the worlds most famous tourist destinations.
High-rise tenement buildings are strewn out along the hillside and represent a stark contrast to the Old Town charms of the 19th century buildings that line the streets in the center of town. Hardly a tourist strays into North Nice and the streetcar connecting the quarter to the city center generally empties out long before the last stop at what is in every sense of the word -- the end of the line: North Nice.
Pictures of the yellow high-rise nearby where Bouhlel had previously lived with his wife and children have been shown over and over again on French television. Reminding the country of the origins of the perpetrators in two other major terror attacks, those TV images have reinforced a notion among some French that immigrants from North African countries are not really part of France.
This part of town has always been a bit cut off and different, I dont really understand why its like that, said Yassine Asouali, a 33-year-old from Morocco who moved to France 13 years ago to study information technology. He said he lives in a suburb east of Nice.
Whereas luxury cars with license plates from Italy, Monaco, Switzerland, Germany and France are seen cruising up and down the Promenade des Anglais along the coast, there are mostly small battered and broken cars in the parking spaces in North Nice.
Kamel Meziane, a 46-year-old who came to France from Algeria 13 years ago, said he was sickened by Thursdays deadly terror attack and that he was confident that most French people would differentiate between a relatively small number of radicals and the larger population of law-abiding immigrants.
The nation paused for a moment of silence Monday to mourn the victims of the attack. In some cases people booed or jeered political leaders, a display of frustration at a moment of national grieving.
We absolutely deplore whats happened, said Meziane, who works in a small computer repair shop in the former abattoir, or slaughterhouse, section closer to the center of Nice near the rail station. Its absolutely horrible and no one has any understanding for such a radical.
He said the ethnically mixed neighborhood that is only about one mile inland from the Mediterranean shoreline has been a bastion of tolerance as long as he has lived there even though anti-Muslim sentiment in the province surrounding Nice has been rising in recent years, especially after a series of major terror attacks began 18 months ago.
Likewise, Sara Mira, who grew up in North Nice, was confident that France would not be divided. Mira, who was working in an Old Town convenience store and plans to start studying law in September, said she had been crying all weekend because her 13-year-old sisters best friend was killed in last weeks attack.
There are some small-minded people who will think that because the attack came from a Tunisian that every Muslim is a potential threat like that, said Mira, 18, whose mother is from Tunisia and her father from France. Most people in France have an open-enough mind to differentiate.
Kirschbaum is a special correspondent.
A teenage Afghan refugee who terrorized passengers aboard a suburban commuter train in a knife-and-ax rampage left behind a note vowing revenge against infidels, German investigators said Tuesday after the latest attack on European soil claimed by Islamic State.
The assault, carried out by a 17-year-old bakers apprentice who had arrived in Germany little more than a year ago, came amid growing debate over the security repercussions of an unprecedented influx of migrants and refugees, many from war-ravaged Syria.
Even as civil libertarians and rights activists cautioned against unfairly tarring those fleeing war and persecution in their homelands, right-wing politicians across the continent have seized on such attacks as proof that it is impossible to safely assimilate so many newcomers.
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A video disseminated by the Islamic State-affiliated Amaq News Agency purported to show the young assailant before the attack Monday night aboard a regional train outside the normally placid Bavarian city of Wuerzburg. In it, he boasted that he was a soldier of the caliphate.
German officials were working to determine whether the youth with pimples and a scraggly beard in the video was in fact the attacker, who apparently concealed his weapons in a bag before bursting from a restroom on the train and hacking away at those around him.
Police shot him dead when he confronted them as he tried to flee the scene after the train came to an emergency halt.
Citing privacy issues, German authorities did not identify the five wounded by name, but officials in Hong Kong said that they included four members of the same family, and that two were in grave condition.
Authorities did not identify the assailant by his full name because he was a minor, instead referring to him using only the initials R.A., but the video introduced him as Muhammad Riyad.
The attack rattled nerves across Europe, coming only four days after a Tunisian-born deliveryman barreled a 19-ton truck through crowds celebrating Bastille Day in the French Riviera resort city of Nice, killing at least 84 people and injuring more than 200 others.
Islamic State also claimed responsibility for that attack, and French officials said even in the absence of any direct link to the group, signs pointed to a swift radicalization on the part of the assailant, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel. He was described by neighbors as a drinker and womanizer who had not followed the harsh religious tenets espoused by Islamic State.
The attack in Nice, which spurred intense criticism of French President Francois Hollande and the French security establishment, also prompted hand-wringing over the difficulty of staving off assaults by lone attackers who might have been inspired by radical ideology, even if not trained or directed by a particular group.
Recent surveys have documented rising fears in Europe over immigration and security. The refugee crisis and the threat of terrorism are very much related to one another in the minds of many Europeans, the Pew Research Center wrote in a report released this month.
In eight of the 10 European nations surveyed, half or more respondents believed incoming refugees increased the likelihood of terrorism, according to the Pew report. It notes, however, that anxiety tended to be the highest in countries that had taken in relatively few newcomers, such as Hungary.
Germany absorbed more than 1 million arrivals last year, with the influx largely driven by Syrias bloody, multi-sided conflict, but the newcomers also included about 150,000 Afghans.
Public sentiment in Germany initially backed Chancellor Angela Merkel in welcoming them, but support has since waned considerably, especially after a wave of New Years Eve sexual assaults against women in the city of Cologne and other locales.
By some accounts, the train attacker had appeared to be settling into a new life. After requesting asylum, he received a temporary residence permit this year, German media reported, and was placed in a foster home just weeks ago, after spending his initial months in a group residence for unaccompanied minors.
Having secured an apprenticeship in a bakery, he was seeking a spot in a job-training program, the German news agency DPA reported. That hopeful-seeming trajectory was a sharp contrast to the furious diatribe in the video that Islamic State distributed, which appeared to have been self-recorded by smartphone.
I will fight you so long as I have a vein that beats, and I will slaughter you with this knife, and I will cut your necks with axes, God permitting, says the youth in the video, speaking in Pashto, one of Afghanistans two main languages.
Specific clues as to the motive were slow to emerge. German news reports quoted a state prosecutor, Erik Ohlenschlager, as telling reporters that the suspect had learned over the weekend of a friends death in his homeland.
A spokesman for Bavarias criminal investigations bureau, Lothar Koehler, said a note found in the attackers room read: Pray for me that I will attain revenge on these infidels.
Witnesses told police that after someone pulled the emergency cord, the assailant jumped off the train attacking and seriously injuring a female pedestrian he encountered before police spotted him.
DPA cited a witness as saying that in the attacks aftermath, the trains blood-covered interior resembled a slaughterhouse.
Times staff writer King reported from Washington and special correspondent Bulos from Amman, Jordan.
ALSO
In France, a moment of silence for Nice victims and outbursts of anger at officials
Turkey fires nearly 9,000 people, detains thousands more after foiled coup
After Nice bloodshed, France asks, Why the children?
UPDATES:
4:05 p.m.: Updated with additional background and context.
10:02 a.m: Updated throughout with Times reporting.
4:33 a.m. Updated with additional background and comments from German and Hong Kong officials.
This article was originally posted at 1:50 a.m.
Airstrikes on Islamic State-held villages in northern Syria killed at least 56 civilians Tuesday as intense fighting was underway between the militants and U.S-backed fighters, Syrian opposition activists and the extremist group said.
Residents in the area blamed the U.S.-led coalition for the strikes that targeted two villages, Tokhar and Hoshariyeh, which are controlled by Islamic State, activists said. The villages are near the Islamic State stronghold of Manbij, a town that members of the predominantly Kurdish U.S.-backed Syria Democratic Forces have been trying to capture in a weeks-long offensive.
The death toll from the airstrikes, which coincided with a wide ground offensive by the extremists against Syria democratic fighters, ranged between 56 and 200. If it is confirmed that 200 people were killed, it would be the deadliest strike by the U.S.-led coalition since it began its military campaign against Islamic State in Syria almost two years ago.
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Conflicting numbers in the aftermath of attacks are not uncommon in Syria. There also were conflicting reports on where the civilians were killed, with some groups reporting that a school housing refugees was hit and others saying that people were struck as they fled the violence.
An international human rights group said the U.S.-led coalition, which has been carrying out airstrikes against Islamic State in Syria since September 2014, must increase its efforts to prevent civilian deaths and investigate possible violations of international humanitarian law.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 56 civilians, including 11 children, were killed in the strikes on the villages, which also wounded dozens. Another activist group, the Local Coordination Committees, said 90 people, mostly families, were killed.
The Islamic State-linked Amaq news agency said that 160 civilians mostly women and children were killed in Tokhar alone, in a series of purportedly American airstrikes around dawn Tuesday, while a Facebook page for activists in the area put the death toll at more than 200.
The reports and the disparate casualty tolls could not be independently confirmed because the area is inaccessible to independent media.
Col. Christopher Garver, spokesman for the U.S.-led military coalition in Baghdad, confirmed that warplanes recently conducted airstrikes near Manbij and that there had been allegations of civilian casualties.
If the information supporting the allegation is determined to be credible, we will then determine the next appropriate step, he said. We take all measures during the targeting process to avoid or minimize civilian casualties or collateral damage and to comply with the principles of the law of armed conflict.
The Pentagons total official civilian death toll from coalition airstrikes stands at 41 since the Obama administration launched its air war against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria nearly two years ago. However, human rights and humanitarian aid groups insist that the Pentagon has vastly underestimated the number of civilians killed or wounded.
A spokesman for the U.S.-backed Syria Democratic Forces, Sherfan Darwish, said the numbers are exaggerated, adding that the coalition targeted gatherings of the Islamic State group who were in the village, killing large numbers of militants. He said the extremist group quickly buried its dead and claimed many civilians were killed.
Postings on a Facebook page show images of bodies, including those of children, being placed in a collective grave, purportedly in the village of Tokhar. One photograph shows a man carrying the lifeless body of a child covered with dust, while another shows a child, partly covered by a blanket, lying in a grave.
The photographs appeared genuine and corresponded to other Associated Press reporting of the events depicted. Tuesdays casualties follow similar airstrikes on the Islamic State-held town of Manbij on Monday, when at least 15 civilians were reportedly killed.
The London-based rights group Amnesty International said in a statement Tuesday that since June, more than 100 civilians have been killed in suspected attacks by the U.S.-led coalition in the Manbij area.
There must be a prompt, independent and transparent investigation to determine what happened, who was responsible, and how to avoid further needless loss of civilian life, said Magdalena Mughrabi, interim deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa programme at Amnesty, following the airstrikes on Tokhar.
Anyone responsible for violations of international humanitarian law must be brought to justice, and victims and their families should receive full reparation, Mughrabi said.
The statement said Amnesty International has reviewed available information on dozens of suspected coalition airstrikes and found that in the majority of cases in which civilian casualties have been credibly reported, the coalition has dismissed the claims.
The terror attacks you havent heard about
It added that Amnesty International will be seeking clarification from the U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, about a series of other airstrikes causing civilian casualties that appear to have violated international humanitarian law.
CENTCOM said the coalition conducted 18 strikes Monday and destroyed 13 Islamic State fighting positions, seven Islamic State vehicles and two car bombs near Manbij.
The Manbij area has seen intense battles between Islamic State extremists and the Kurdish-led fighters, who have been advancing under the cover of intense airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition.
If Manbij is captured by the U.S.-backed fighters, it will be the biggest strategic defeat for Islamic State in Syria since July 2015, when the extremist group lost the border town of Tal Abyad. In neighboring Iraq, meanwhile, Islamic State has been beaten back on several fronts, with Iraqi forces, aided by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes, having retaken the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah in western Anbar province.
Times staff writer W.J. Hennigan contributed to this report.
ALSO
Islamic State claims responsibility for German train ax attack
Chinese tourists are killed in Taiwan after tour bus bursts in flames
In France, a moment of silence for Nice victims and outbursts of anger at officials
UPDATES:
12:20 p.m.: This article has been updated with comment from a U.S.-led military coalition spokesman.
This article was originally published at 12:10 p.m.
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A California church is now offering sanctuary to area residents facing the threat of deportation.
As part of their relief effort, the University Lutheran Chapel of Berkeley (ULC) has also unveiled a newly created apartment where it plans to house refuge seekers.
ULC leaders recently held a press and ritual blessing to make their efforts public. Orchestrated by the East Bay Interfaith Immigration Coalition, the plan is supported by more than a dozen local congregations.
Berkeley Supports Efforts
In addition, the effort also has the blessing of the City of Berkeley, which just last month passed a resolution in support of sanctuary efforts for refugees and migrants.
"Today is a day of victory for compassion and a day of victory for courage," said Councilman Kriss Worthington, who spearheaded the city's efforts. "Most importantly, it is a victory for common sense."
Later, Worthington blasted what he deemed a never before seen level of attack on immigrants that have been highlighted by increased Immigration Customs and Enforcement raids all over the country.
"It's a deportation dragnet that is scooping up and deporting people unceremoniously, and often illegally," he said. "Berkeley is saying 'enough is enough."'
Meanwhile, the new digs were created by ULC officials converting office space in its building. Leaders have particularly expressed grave concerns for those who would be separating from their families by now being exiled.
Trump on Immigration
"We live in perilous times when national leaders advocate openly about building walls and barring whole populations from entry into the U.S.," said Pastor Jeff Johnson, making reference to possibility of some immigrants being deported back to volatile situations in their homeland and the potential election of presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, who is on record in asserting he plans to deport millions if he is elected.
"It is a time of increased xenophobia, where refugees are derided, scapegoated and blamed," he added. "For communities of faith, action in the present moment is imperative."
Berkeley's resolutions binds the city to supporting organizations like ULC and prohibits all city employees from engaging in or assisting in the arrest of any individuals who offer such assistance.
Desperate to bolster his sagging numbers with Latino voters, Donald Trump is set to soon embark on a "Hispanic engagement tour."
Appearing on a recent Fox News show, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus acknowledged Trump's struggles with Latino voters, which have been largely fueled by his vow to deport millions of immigrants and build a wall along the Mexican border.
"We have a long way to go," said Priebus. "Donald Trump is committed to making that happen."
That may be easier said than done.
Trump Latino Support at Historic low
A new NBC News/ Wall Street Journal/Telemundo poll finds just 14 percent of Hispanics back Trump in a head-to-head battle against Hillary Clinton, with 82 percent of Latinos insisting they have an unfavorable view of the presumptive GOP nominee.
By comparison, only 25 percent of Latinos insist they have a negative view of Clinton and in election's past GOP candidates Mitt Romney, John McCain and George W. Bush all averaged 33 percent of the Latino vote.
Not helping matters where the current candidate is concerned is the GOP's recent move to adopt his border wall as a rung of the party's platform.
During a recent subcommittee hearing, GOP leaders successfully campaigned, handed out to delegates slated to be on hand for this month's party convention in Cleveland, changed to read, "That is why we support building a wall along our southern border and protect if all ports of entry."
Trump's Hardline Stance on Immigration
Trump marked the launch of his campaign by blasting Mexican as criminals and drug dealers. Since then, the party's presumptive nominee has also vowed to have Mexico foot the bill for the wall he plans to erect if he is elected.
Still, Priebus sought to assure Latino voters Trump understands their concerns and the GOP is "the party of the open door, tone, rhetoric, spirit - all of those things matter."
Priebus mentioned such diverse states as Nevada and Florida as states he's convinced Trump can come to do well in.
Added top Trump aide Paul Manafort: "We are not isolating our campaign to just segments of the population. We're going to be focusing on all of society."
Back in the early 1900s, Republicans consistently drew as much as 30 percent of the black vote, but nowadays that figure has dwindled to the single digits.
Given all Trump's fiery rhetoric, many now worry the GOP is on the verge of suffering a similar long-term fate with Latino voters.
Chinese media may be contributing to China's slowing economy. (Photo : Getty Images)
China's slowing economy may be worsening due to the Chinese journalists' murky "red envelope" tradition that promotes information gap, a foreign media noted.
According to the Irish Times, China's corporate debt records are not improving at all and have even been seen to get on the worse side with the technological advancement of the red envelope journalism.
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The outlet explained that with some Chinese journalists now available for hire via an Uber-like app that connects business owners and the media professionals, red envelope journalism may contribute more on the information gap of the country.
Information Gap
The Chinese government offers loans to businesses in order to promote the businessman-mentality contrary to the employee-mindset in its people.
Since not all citizens can afford becoming an entrepreneur, loans are offered to the next potential Jack Ma of the country.
China's information on the businesses who file for loans are determinant on whether or not they get a bite of the country's financial resources.
But therein lies the problem, says the Irish Times. Apparently, the government considers information from the journalists in the country to see if the business is stable enough to not waste the people's tax money.
This means that the decision-making capability of the Chinese government is stained with red envelope journalism where members of the media are given a certain amount of money to cultivate positive feelings in their articles.
What is more disturbing about this is that a mobile app developer decided to take advantage of this "tradition" by creating an app that would make such transactions easier.
Uber-Like Red Envelope App
"Zhao Jizhe" or "Find a Journalist" in Chinese is a mobile application designed to act as "an intellectual community platform where media professionals help entrepreneurs."
According to the Wall Street Journal, this is the app that helps businessmen contact journalists and pay them for promotional articles guised as regular news to promote their company.
WSJ said that like the cab-hailing app, Zhao Jizhe allows users to choose a journalist that would suit their needs.
"Similar to how users of the ride-hailing app can choose to go with a normal sedan or more luxurious cars, Zhao Jizhe offers services tailored to companies of all sizes and needs. For as little as 1,000 yuan, or roughly $150, Zhao Jizhe can get the company an ordinary writer, and publicity on one publication is guaranteed," said the outlet citing the app's description.
Because of this, many businesses are able to freshen up their company's reputation which certainly has many different advantages particularly in terms of financial funding.
Will the Brexit benefit or worsen the Chinese economy? Analysts shared varying opinions. (Photo : Getty Images)
The United Kingdom's surprising leave from the European Union (EU), more popularly known as the "Brexit," has a clear effect on China's economy as the world continues to monitor the expected "domino effect" of the incident.
Tackling the effects of the Brexit and China's economic slowdown on the Bitcoin prices, Coin Desk cited economists who suggested that the Chinese economy is expected to falter primarily because of the Brexit.
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Meanwhile, other experts note that the "Brexit Britain" is expected to strike a deal with China in terms of free trade now that they are free of restrictions from the European Union.
Brexit's Effects on China
Talking to Coin Desk, Avalon Advisors LLC senior economist and portfolio strategist Sam Rines said that the Brexit poses "a tremendous risk to the Chinese economy" since the Middle Kingdom has significant trade relationships with both Brexit Britain and the EU.
Rines and West Virginia University international business professor Usha Haley both noted that the Brexit may not be good for China's escalating problem in corporate debt.
"China has about $2.4tn of corporate debt at risk of default, leading to a very worrisome global financial future," Haley said, while Rines noted that should the Brexit slowdown EU economy, it would definitely mean nothing good for China.
Haley further noted that with the Brexit, China has lost its biggest supporter of free trade within the EU which can affect its economy considering the domino effect.
"In broader economic terms, with Brexit, China has lost a strong supporter for its free-market status within the EU," she explained. "Chinese investments in the U.K. made to access the single European market look less attractive and some foreign investment will be put on hold."
Britain's Free Trade with China
Meanwhile, Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation's Xing Houyan told Express U.K. that the Brexit would definitely force China and the U.K. to "make a trade treaty."
Former Waitrose executive Lord Price noted that such treaty could "create a second Elizabethan golden age."
"The first Golden Age was based on peace, prosperity, new trading markets and a flourishing of the arts," he added. "There's also a prospect for striking new deals with Canada, New Zealand and Australia, which could form the beginning of a Commonwealth trading pact."
Talking to the attendees of the Hong Kong chamber of commerce, Price also recalled the long-running trade relationship between the Eastern and Western nations.
"And to the opportunities in the East, where for centuries British merchants have traded with China for tea, white gold and porcelain, as well as with Japan, South Korea and other Asian nations," he said.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte plans to send former president Fidel Ramos to start diplomatic talks with China over territorial dispute. (Photo : Getty Images/Jes Aznar)
Reports say that China and the Philippines are expected to engage in bilateral talks about the South China Sea maritime disputes following the release of the international ruling on an arbitration case covering the matter.
According to the South China Morning Post, Beijing and Manila are poised to talk it out with the new Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte expressing his intent to send ex-President Fidel Ramos to China to discuss peaceful resolutions regarding the issue.
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Last week, Duterte expressed his request for Ramos to act as the country's representative in bilateral talks with China regarding the South China Sea.
"War is not an option. So what's the other side? Peaceful talks. I cannot give you the wherewithal now. I want to consult many people including President Ramos," Duterte said as quoted by the GMA News Network.
According to Duterte, he does not want to risk having the South China Sea closed to traders and shippers because it would cause a problem for the country's economy.
Duterte chose Ramos to act as a liaison for the country because he "maintained good relations with Chinese leaders over the years even after his term ended in 1998," GMA said.
While Ramos has not accepted nor rejected the Philippine President's request, he appears to be reluctant to go, saying: "This is not to show disrespect to the President of the Philippines but you have to consider my increasing age."
Ramos further added that he had "bigger commitments in terms of peace in the world and sustainable development."
The Asia Times believes that Duterte's idea to send Ramos to China is a "sensible move" considering that he had the necessary negotiation skills that brought back peace to Mindanao after the two-decade-long war between the government and militant members of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF).
Meanwhile, China expressed their openness to settling the dispute once and for all via peaceful talks.
"The door to settling the issue through dialogue and negotiation has never been closed," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang stated.
With Typhoon Nepartak, China has experienced the worst flood since 1998. (Photo : Getty Images)
Three Chinese officials were suspended for delivering poor response to Typhoon Nepartak, which caused huge casualties in the eastern province of Fujian, state-run Xinhua News Agency reported.
The authorities sacked include Huang Shiyang, deputy Party chief and the acting Minqing County government head; Lin Yuanhui, the Party chief of Bandong town; and Zhan Qiaoying, the town's deputy Party chief.
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Data from the city government noted that as of Sunday afternoon, the typhoon has claimed the lives of at least 83 people and has left 19 others missing in Fuzhou, the provincial capital.
It was also reported that more than 200,000 people from Fuzhou's five counties and districts were affected by the typhoon.
Authorities also revealed that the total cost of direct economic losses has already surpasses 7.1 billion yuan ($ 1.1 billion).
One of the worst-hit areas was Minqing County, where about one-third of its whole population was immensely affected.
The Xinhua article stated that 11 of its towns and townships saw a cut-off in their power as well as telecommunication services.
The death toll in the region has reached 73, while 17 more were reported missing.
Typhoon Nepartak, which has previously damaged China's neighboring regions, made landfall in the Fujian Province on July 9.
Though the typhoon, the first to hit this year, had weakened into a tropical storm during its landing in the province, the state media noted that the officials' "inadequate response" has led to the significant amount of losses.
As of writing, the provincial government has already earmarked a total of 170 million yuan worth of relief fund to be doled out in disaster-hit locations.
Regarded as the typhoon that brought the worst flood experience in China since 1998, Nepartak has killed up to 230 people in the country overall.
China intensifies crackdown on anti-government activists. (Photo : Getty Images)
Chinese authorities will be prosecuting prominent human rights activist and lawyer Zhou Shifeng, according to a statement released last Tuesday.
Zhou has been secretly detained since last year. He was rounded up together with other lawyers, legal associates and rights advocates because they were accused of abusing court proceedings. Zhou's legal group was said to organize protests to get international attention.
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There are about 25 individuals in the legal group that are either detained or missing.
Chinese police informed Zhou's family over the weekend that the prosecution will charge the lawyer with "subverting state power." According to Liu Xiaoyuan, Zhou's colleague, he might be imprisoned for a decade.
A researcher for the Chinese Human Rights Watch, Maya Wang, said, "This kind of political crime, reserved for political parties in the past, is now used on a wider range of civil society actors, showing how much space has for activism has shrunk under Xi's reign in just three years."
Zhou is the director of Beijing Fengrui Law Firm and has been under government crackdown since July last year.
Another human rights lawyer, Shang Baojun, said that Zhou's previous legal representatives have been replaced by government-appointed lawyers.
According to Chinese law, the prosecution is still due in two months.
"To be honest, we don't know anything more about his case than you do," Shang said.
Three other lawyers, Hu Shigen, Zhai Yanmin and Gou Hongguo, are facing the same predicament.
Official legal newspaper Legal Daily published commentaries on Zhou's legal battle. The paper said that Zhou has "become the leverage the West uses in its political contest with China."
The government has not released any comment or statement.
Bethlehem Township residents demanded Monday night that someone be held accountable for a 10-year-old community center that needs $2.7 million of repairs.
The community center needs major repairs.
The $10 million Farmersville Road facility has been plagued by water, humidity and infiltration issues that's prompted the township to have two engineering firms review the issues.
Entech Engineering was hired in February to get at the root of the problems, develop solutions, calculate cost estimates and rank the issues in area of importance. The report identified $2.7 million in possible renovations and highlighted $2 million in top-priority repairs.
Commissioners reviewed the report in an April closed door meeting and it was presented to a group of residents Monday night.
The township plans to move forward with 15 high priority items, largely focused on the indoor pool, estimated to cost $1.57 million. Officials hope to fund the work with a 2014 $10 million line of credit, which may need to be extended for the project.
Commissioners voted to modify their agreement with Entech on Monday night to cover some additional repairs, which the firm will start designing. Entech will be paid $116,325 for phase one of the work. The township hopes to bid the project in the winter and complete construction in the summer of 2017.
Residents hammered the board to pursue legal action against the project's original architect and builder. It was designed by Kimmel-Bogrette Architecture and built by CC Inc. That's the same architecture firm that designed the $5.7 million Forks Township public works building that's been plagued by shoddy construction. Gordon H. Baver Inc. constructed it in 2012.
Resident Rod Law said the Entech review shows obvious design and construction issues and he asked why there is no legal recourse.
Township solicitor James Broughal said he's not sure that there is no recourse, but it might be more trouble than it is worth.
"It would be a difficult task in light of the cost," Broughal said.
The township entered into a settlement and release agreement with the community center builder in 2005-06, he said adding he was not the solicitor, so he doesn't know the terms. He added that commissioners have not authorized him to research legal action.
The board might have some legal recourse against the architect, a firm the township still owes a six-figure bill, Broughal said. No one knew the exact cost of the outstanding bill.
"Construction litigation is extremely expensive," Broughal said, adding there's no guarantee the township would win.
Residents that spoke Monday pushed the township to have a full handle on the scope of work needed and develop a long-term plan. They worry that the repairs are going to necessitate another tax increase.
This year, the township raised taxes by 18.4 percent after many years of no increase.
About 15 to 25 percent of township residents use the community center, said Melissa Shafer, township manager. Membership fees cover the daily operating costs but do not cover the $725,000 annual mortgage.
Resident George Olson said he doesn't want his taxes to rise to cover the center and suggested membership fees should rise to cover the cost. He questioned if the board is considering selling the center.
Commissioner Malissa Davis said she thinks the situation is a crying shame but the township can either tear the center down, sell it or make the repairs. She wants to keep it open as it is a community asset.
"I think it does a lot of things that an L.A. Fitness does not do," Davis said.
Commissioner Thomas Nolan said the township hasn't raised taxes to pay for the center.
"It's all supposition," he said.
"I'm sick and tired of politicians telling me what to do with my money," Olson said to applause.
Resident Craig Storrs said the community center repairs, like a deteriorating roof, are safety issues. There seems to be negligence, he said, and he questioned the efficacy of the township's own inspectors if they didn't flag these problems.
"We were in a rush to build it but nobody was watching what was going on," resident Barry Roth said.
Sara K. Satullo may be reached at ssatullo@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @sarasatullo and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
$175K in damage done to Bethlehem public housing; resident charged, police say
The Bethlehem Housing Authority's Litzenberger House (Kurt Bresswein | For lehighvalleylive.com)
A Bethlehem man who caused $175,000 in water damage doesn't remember putting the stopper in the kitchen sink and leaving water running inside his Bethlehem public housing apartment, his attorney said Tuesday.
After causing the water damage June 15, police found 56-year-old Steven Koehler outside with no shirt or shoes on, "digging like a dog" in a dirty area with bushes, according to defense attorney James Connell.
Koehler told police he was doing a "land blessing" as he looked up at the sun, held out his arms and crossed his feet as if he were crucified, police said. He doesn't remember doing that either, Connell said.
Koehler pleaded guilty Tuesday to two counts of criminal mischief and agreed to pay back $550 in restitution. The rest of the damage is covered by insurance, according to Northampton County Assistant District Attorney Mark Spross.
Koehler was sentenced to two years of probation Tuesday by Senior Judge Leonard Zito.
Koehler turned on the water at 4 a.m. in his eighth-floor apartment at 225 E. Fourth St., the Litzenberger House, which is owned by the Bethlehem Housing Authority.
The water ran for four hours, damaging every apartment below it in some way. Damage included bubbling paint on the walls and ceilings, damaged light fixtures, shorted-out electrical panels and ruined furniture and carpeting, police said. Some tenants had to relocate during repairs.
Connell said Koehler was rejected from the mental health court program. He was discharged from the U.S. Army 20 years ago. He left the housing project shortly after the incident and lives in a group home, Connell said.
Zito ordered Koehler to keep up his mental health treatment as part of his sentence.
Rudy Miller may be reached at rmiller@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @RudyMillerLV. Find Easton area news on Facebook.
A local pastor hopes dialogue can prevent Easton's troubles with gun violence from getting worse.
Pastor Phillip Davis is opening Greater Shiloh Church to the community on Wednesday for the forum from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Two forums will run simultaneously for adults and youths.
Members of the Easton Police Department attend a prayer service at Greater Shiloh Church in Easton on Sunday, July 17, 2016. (Photo courtesy Greater Shiloh Church).
"It's just to help foster relationships between the police and the community and talk about solutions," Davis said.
He said six officers, including three church members, attended a similar event Sunday, which included an emotional tribute to the city's police force. It came as the congregation was learning of that day's police-related violence in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
The forums follow a prayer walk earlier this month.
Davis said police and the community need to work together to end gun violence.
"We're really trying to make sure that the Easton community has an opportunity to dialogue, communicate and make sure we're not moving down the path of Ferguson, (Missouri)" Davis said, referring to the shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer in that community.
Davis said he met earlier this month with Easton Mayor Sal Panto Jr., Easton Area School District Superintendent John Reinhart, Police Chief Carl Scalzo and City Councilman Ken Brown. He expects all of them to attend the event Wednesday.
"We're hoping that folks from around the community come as well as the church community," Davis said.
Rudy Miller may be reached at rmiller@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @RudyMillerLV. Find Easton area news on Facebook.
A Wilson Borough woman serving time for assault failed to return as scheduled Monday to a Northampton County Prison facility.
Adrienne Ann Dalie (Courtesy photo | For lehighvalleylive.com)
Adrienne A. Dalie, 25, was originally arrested in May 2015, accused of raising a butcher knife and grabbing the shoulder of her then-45-year-old fiance.
She pleaded guilty to simple assault and was sentenced last Aug. 6 to between 45 days and 18 months in prison.
Dalie had twice violated parole and been ordered initially to undergo an evaluation for anger management and mental health and, subsequently, to undergo drug and alcohol evaluation and treatment, court records say.
She was last seen leaving the prison's community corrections facility at 135 S. Union St. for work release and was reported missing as of 5:24 p.m. Monday, according to the prison.
Dalie is described as black, standing 5 feet 2 inches tall and weighing 155 pounds with black hair and brown eyes. She has tattoos on the back of both hands, reading "Camry" on her left and "Aeryce" on her right.
Dalie was living in the 1500 block of Liberty Street at the time of the assault. No one was reported injured.
Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Easton resident Suzanne Billman Bradford said she's tried everything to stop birds from leaving droppings on her back deck.
The resident of 1045 W. Berwick St. said she's talked to city officials, the Northampton County district attorney and a district judge to try to persuade her neighbor to move more than a dozen bird feeders away from the property line to discourage them from leaving droppings on her property.
She admits she resorted to shooting at the feeders with a pellet gun and playing music at high volume, but neither tactic worked.
After she discussed the problem with lehighvalleylive.com, her neighbor counter-attacked by posting signs on his fence.
The signs say "no hunting" with the word "birds" written underneath. They went up a day or two after the story ran July 7. The neighbor also posted a "no trespassing" sign on the gate to the fence.
Bradford said the problem cropped up after the feeders went up May 17. She said birds "dive bomb" her dogs and the droppings make her unable to use her pool or porch.
She said she offered to pay for a broken window after the pellet gun incident. Her neighbor responded by putting up more bird feeders along the property line. The neighbor, Steve Shivone, hasn't responded to letters left seeking comment.
Easton Mayor Sal Panto Jr. said a city health official inspected the property and found no violations. Bradford said a city official came back July 14 and again found no violations.
Bradford said she's tried discouraging the birds by putting up small mirrors, reflective strips of plastic, a fake owl and wind chimes. She chopped down a tree and cut most of the top off another to discourage birds from nesting there.
"I tried everything," she said.
While Shivone did not press charges after the pellet gun incident, he did press charges after Bradford violated the city noise ordinance on June 3 by blasting rock music to scare away birds.
She will appear in district court on Wednesday to answer to that charge.
Rudy Miller may be reached at rmiller@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @RudyMillerLV. Find Easton area news on Facebook.
A Slatington man is accused of driving drunk, leading to a crash in Washington Township that killed one of his passengers.
Nicole Marie Gruber died following the Feb. 19 crash on Rextown Road, south of Mountain Road.
Joshua Moser, 25, of Slatington, was arrested Tuesday and charged with homicide by vehicle while DUI, homicide by vehicle, involuntary manslaughter, two counts each of DUI and reckless endangerment, as well as three traffic summary violations.
Moser, of the 1500 block of Fernwood Road, was released on $200,000 unsecured bail. An attorney had not yet entered an appearance for him.
Pennsylvania State Police said Moser was driving his BMW the night of the crash, after drinking at The Shack in Slatington. Gruber and Clark Knoblauch were passengers in the vehicle, troopers said.
Prosecutors said the BMW was traveling northbound on Rextown Road when Moser lost control on a curve, and the car hit an embankment and then a tree stump.
The BMW rolled over, landing on its roof on a property, troopers said.
Gruber was ejected during the crash; troopers said medical personnel found her a few feet away from the road, unresponsive in the grass. Gruber was flown by helicopter to St. Luke's University Hospital in Fountain Hill, where she was pronounced dead.
Knoblauch and Moser were taken to Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest for treatment. A blood sample was taken from Moser, and his blood-alcohol was 0.15 percent, troopers said.
Sarah Cassi may be reached at scassi@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @SarahCassi. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Northampton County's district attorney blasted the Pennsylvania Bar Association on Tuesday for supporting a young killer's attempt to have his life sentence overthrown.
Qu'eed Batts, of Phillipsburg, was sentenced to life without parole for the 2006 murder of Clarence "C.J." Edwards in Easton.
His sentence was thrown out because he was only 14 at the time of the murder, but the sentence was later re-instated by a Northampton County judge who felt the crime merited the time.
But Batts won a new appeal in April on the same grounds due to a precedent-setting U.S. Supreme Court case.
Morganelli fired off an angry letter Tuesday at the Pennsylvania Bar Association for filing a legal brief in the case in favor of resentencing Batts.
He wrote that the "PBA has now become an advocate for a criminal defendant who murdered a person in cold blood as initiation for gang membership."
State bar association member Thomas G. Wilkinson Jr. said his association's position focuses on the constitutionality of the issue. He said the association has a stake in the constitutional application of the law, as the state has more juveniles sentenced to life in prison than any other state.
"The PBA does not view the legal issue presented as a 'political' matter, but rather an important question arising under the U.S. Constitution where the state Supreme Court is bound to follow the U.S. Supreme Court's interpretation," Wilkinson wrote in an email, later adding, "The association did not assert or suggest that Mr. Batts or any other juvenile who was convicted and sentenced for a serious crime should not serve an appropriate amount of time in incarceration."
Pennsylvania's Supreme Court found that life without parole shouldn't be imposed on minors as a common practice. The court will consider on the appeal whether Morganelli should have to prove this is an "uncommon" case warranting life without parole.
The court will also consider whether Batts should have the same due process rights as an adult death penalty defendant. Prosecutors have a higher burden to prove the death penalty is warranted than just proving the defendant committed murder.
The Pennsylvania Bar Association filed an "amicus," or friend of the court brief to join the case. Filing similar briefs were the state district attorneys association, the Children's Advocacy Network and Youth Sentencing and Reentry Project and the state criminal defense lawyers association.
Morganelli wrote that the state bar association should address issues most lawyers can agree on, such as finding a good deal on malpractice insurance.
He said he won't join the organization and won't pay dues of his staff members.
The "PBA is a very liberal, left-leaning organization that turns off thousands and thousands of lawyers when it involves itself in political issues pressing forward a liberal agenda under the falsity that it is most representative of lawyers in the state," Morganelli wrote.
Rudy Miller may be reached at rmiller@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @RudyMillerLV. Find Easton area news on Facebook.
Drought caused by global warming. (Photo : Facebook)
American space agency NASA has an urgent warning to make - the Amazon is at its driest form and at an increased risk of nasty wildfire this season. This is the result of the conditions created by the strong El Nino effect that warmed the Pacific waters in 2015 and early 2016.
According to a report released by NASA, Amazon is currently in its driest form than it has even been at the start of the dry season since the year 2002. That indicates that the rainforest is at a significantly increased risk of wildfire in 2016.
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These are the findings of the Amazon fire forecast that uses a combination of climate observations and active fire detections made by NASA satellites each year to figure out the severity of wildfire. This time, the scientists have predicted that the Brazilian states of Para, Amazonas and Mato Grosso are at the highest risk of devastating wildfire.
Severe drought conditions at the start of the dry season have set the stage for extreme fire risk in 2016 across the southern Amazon," NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center scientist Doug Morton said in the report.
The forecast made by NASA further explains how the wildfire risk for July to October of 2016 exceeds the risk that was predicted in the years 2005 and 2010. These two years represent the time when the regions experienced severe drought the last time as devastating wildfires swept across large regions of the rainforest.
Another indicator of the upcoming calamity, according to NASA, is the fact that there have more fires in the Amazon forest until June 2016 than in any of the previous years. This is an indicative of the risk that the massive rainforest faces in terms of potentially rough wildfire season.
The model based on which NASA has made the prediction has been developed by a team of researchers at the University of California, Irvine (UC-Irvine). The model focuses on the link between fire activity and the sea surface temperatures.
In the past, higher sea surface temperature because of the El Nino effect across the tropical Pacific Ocean has shifted rainfall from the Amazon. As a result, the risk of fire during the dry months has increased significantly.
The following video talks about the Amazon rainforest drought:
The first day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland wasn't hurting for drama. After an expected fight over the rules -- followed by a walkout by the Colorado delegation -- it became apparent there would be no "brokering" of the process to contest Donald Trump's grip on the nomination.
Most of the the speeches, including one by Pat Smith -- whose son was killed in the embassy attack in Libya -- seemed to unite the crowd in unanimous disdain for Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Melania Trump's speech about her husband's personal side and his qualifications for the presidency was well-received. Afterward, it generated questions of whether some passages had been lifted from Michelle Obama's convention address in 2008.
What do you think? Were there any surprises in the first day of the convention? Did the opening day procedural votes and speeches set the stage for a triumphant coming-together of the party behind Trump -- or just confirm the doubts of many Republicans who refuse to support him?
Have a say in our informal poll, and feel free to elaborate on your vote in the comments section.
Fr Eoin Casey celebrated his first Mass as a Dominican priest in a packed Holy Trinity Church, Rathdowney at 12 noon last Sunday.
Flanked by members of the Dominican Order, as well as his uncle Fr Martin Casey, Fr Martin Delaney PP Rathdowney and Fr Jackie Robinson, PP Borris-in-Ossory, the 28-year old returned to his native parish following his ordination on Saturday.
He was one of eight members of the Dominican Order ordained on Saturday at Saint Saviour's Dominican Church at Dominick Street, Dublin.
The ordaining prelate was Archbishop Robert Rivas, O.P., a native of Trinidad.
Among the attendance on both days were Eoin's parents, Assumpta and John, brother Martin, family, neighbours and friends.
Taking special place in Rathdowney on Sunday was Eoin's 95-year old grandmother, who travelled from her native Causeway, in north Kerry to see her grandson and and the second member of her family ordained a priest.
Opening the Mass on Sunday, Fr Martin Delaney PP noted that it had been 41-years since a member of the Rathdowney parish had been ordained. On that occasion it was Michael John Campion, who is currently based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
In his homily Fr John Harris OP, Regent of Studies for the Dominicans in Ireland, recalled how Eoin told him of his intention to become a priest at a Youth 2000 gathering in Cairns, Australia in 2008.
Eoin subsequently joined the Dominicans at the age of 21, after briefly causing Fr Harris some anxiety when he initially told him he would also consult with his Diocesan Bishop.
Fr Harris paid tribute to Eoin and his family, and wished him well in his ministry.
Speaking towards the end of the ceremony, Fr Eoin traced his own journey to the priesthood and the people and places that had played a part in it.
He highlighted the influence of his family and his parents John and Assumpta, his uncle and neighbours and friends throughout his life.
He had known three grandparents in his life, and he paid special mention to his one surviving grandmother who had the privilege of attending his first Mass.
He also thanked Fr John Harris and his fellow Dominicans. Fr Martin Delaney PP was thanked for his work, particularly in organising the Faithfest festival which took place in the Rathdowney parish in the run up to Eoin's ordination.
Eoin also thanked the Rathdowney choir and Vincent Crowley who provided music for the Mass.
Following Mass, members of the public were invited to come forward for an individual blessing, and this concluded around 4pm.
Speaking afterwards, Eoin's father, John Casey thanked everyone for their attendance and recalled Eoin's departure from college to enter the priesthood.
His uncle, Fr Martin, a well known hurler in his day in Wexford, wished his nephew well in his ministry.
Fr Eoin will commence his life as priest in Newbridge.
Although relatively unheard of in the UK political system, bipartisanship is the idea of two opposing sides finding common ground and compromising in key areas. This form of politics was commonly found in the US political system which featured the Republicans and Democrats working together on political and social reforms to benefit the country, before there was such polarisation in American politics.
The prime example of bipartisanship in the UK was the 2010 coalition government. This coalition was the illustration of two parties being able to work collaboratively on policy agreements. Essentially it could be argued that the most effective accountability and scrutiny was provided inside the government itself with two contrasting parties having to agree on policy before it was passed.
With this in mind I feel that its time for an era of unity and bipartisanship in the political system. With division sparked massively in the UK as a result of the EU Referendum there is a need for cross party agreement and progression more than ever on multiple key areas such as the NHS, terrorism and Brexit.
The foremost example here would be the NHS. In light of a clear crisis of our health service all parties need to be around the table to help negotiate and protect something almost everyone in the UK is reliable on. Jeremy Hunt has clearly lost the confidence of junior doctors and therefore I do feel that bipartisan/cross party reform is the key to a strong solution to a growing problem. The NHS itself was founded upon the basis of cooperation between William Beveridge, the Prime Minister at the time Clement Attlee and Aneurin Bevan. To save the present day NHS I feel this kind of agreement needs to happen, cross party policy seems a logical response to benefit the long standing service.
Moreover another key issue that invites bipartisanship is terrorism; in the face of such dark times a united UK politically can bring effective opposition to the horrible acts of terror that are occurring around the world. All parties should be willing to unite and put forward a progressive case to try and beat terrorism and extremism in any and every way. This would involve all parties putting forward what can be done in terms of counter terrorism with a completely open debate proposing legislation that the government can get behind.
Real unity and togetherness is needed more than ever. However with the Labour Party having deep problems with unity it brings into question how this can be done. The Liberal Democrats stand and platform to stay in Europe, while conversely Theresa Mays government and UKIP aim to lead us out. Its clear that the issue of Europe will always be divisive. Furthermore it could be argued that the idea of multiple parties agreeing on any issue is challenging because bipartisanship can only thrive in a healthy two party system, which the UK currently does not have.
In one of Britains darkest periods Theresa Mays new government needs to be willing to reach across the aisle in an attempt to move forward and work together on specific issues in a troublesome time both globally and at home. Though while in theory the idea of British bipartisanship, cooperation and unity across the board sounds enticing, the UK political parties are far too polarised across the ideological spectrum for cooperation in multiple different political areas, but they may be able to achieve some agreement over two or three significant policy areas.
* Mark Henderson is the pseudonym for a member who wishes to remain anonymous for professional reasons. His identity is known to the Lib Dem Voice team.
Its been a tough few weeks for all of us who believe in the European ideals of cooperation, openness and trade between nations. But as if the referendum result was not bad enough, the aftermath has left the UK the laughing stock of the world. First there was the resignation and disappearance of many of those who led the Leave campaign and the shameless disowning of key pledges on the NHS and immigration. Then last week a number of leading Tory Brexiteers were elevated by Theresa May to the highest offices of the state.
We have seen Brexit Minister David Davis pledging to create a free trade area ten times larger than the EU, which would be 1.5 times the size of the entire world economy. Unless hes counting on a boost in interplanetary trade, even the most optimistic Brexiteer will struggle to explain how that could be achieved. And now we have Andrea Leadsom, who once had to ask if climate change was real, in charge of protecting our environment and facing the unenviable task of explaining to UK farmers how they will be able to thrive post-Brexit.
Yet of all the changes in government that Theresa May has made, the most ridiculous of all was to give the Foreign and Commonwealth office to Boris Johnson. A man who has made a career out of inventing myths and making jokes is now to be our trusted envoy to the world. The first response has been one of disbelief, from the Americans who see him as a joke and the French foreign minister who declared Boris to be a liar with his back against the wall. Yet gradually our close allies are waking up to the absurd reality of Brexit Britain. At a stroke, this new Conservative government has reduced our international standing to that of a banana republic.
There was never a more urgent time for a moderate, internationalist party with a clear commitment to fixing our broken politics and protecting the environment. Thankfully, the Liberal Democrats are still out fighting, recruiting new members, winning by-elections and sending out a clear and optimistic message that another future for our country is possible.
* Catherine Bearder is a Liberal Democrat MEP for the South East and Leader of the European Parliament Liberal Democrat Group.
Yesterday the House of Commons voted 472-177 in favour of the like for like replacement of Trident.
While much coverage has focussed on the split in the Labour Party, which voted 141-48 against its leader, to renew, Liberal Democrats, who are also reviewing policy on nuclear weapons, voted 7-0 not to renew like for like.
I just voted against like for like replacement of Trident. @libdems are multilateralist & this is our chance to step down the nuclear ladder Tim Farron (@timfarron) July 18, 2016
The 177 includes unilateral disarmers, and multilateralists who want to take a step away from the maximal deterrent that a continuously at sea submarine represents.
Liberal Democrat policy, agreed last year at conference is to vote against trident renewal at the Main Gate and a working group has been established with a remit to consider the implications of both a non-nuclear defence posture, and of a reduced nuclear deterrent. Previously policy was for a reduced submarine-based ballistic missile deterrent. It is not clear (see page 45) what status that policy now has.
A good guide to the reduced deterrent options can be found in the Center Forum publication Retiring Trident (pdf) by Toby Fenwick, which recommends an aircraft-delivered free-fall capability at a considerable cash saving even with very significant gains in conventional capability delivered in support.
On the critical question of whether a reduced deterrent will be effective, Fenwick observes
Insistence on very high confidence of a successful UK strike is problematic because as we have already seen, it is unnecessary to deter an aggressor state by leaving the defender with a little or no hope
of preventing unacceptable loss. Very high confidence is therefore a gold-plated requirement overmatch, and should be replaced with the requirement that a potential aggressor has a low certainty that they will be able to prevent unacceptable loss.
In other words a deterrent will be effective if an aggressor believes they very probably wont survive, and it is not necessary to make them almost certain they wont survive. For me this is the central question can a reduced deterrent support an effective and reasonable military doctrine?
The other option, besides, renewal and reduction, would be unilateral nuclear disarmament. This has significant support in both Labour and the Liberal Democrats, though not sufficient to make party policy in either. This brings us to Jeremy Corbyns speech yesterday, reported in the Guardian as follows:
Corbyn said the UK should follow other countries such as South Africa, Libya, Ukraine, Argentina, Brazil and Kazakhstan, which have shown they are serious about disarmament by giving up their nuclear programmes.
The example of Ukraine seems particularly ill-chosen, though it is doubtful that Ukraines deterrent was ever sufficiently independent. What he actually said (from Hansard) is
At the end of the cold war, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons, although they were under the control of the former Soviet Union and, latterly, of Russia. Kazakhstan did the same, which helped to bring about a central Asia nuclear weapons-free zone.
For me, peace and stability is more important than a nuclear weapons-free zone. If you like Central Asia so much, why dont you go and live there?
* Joe Otten was the candidate for Sheffield Heeley in June 2017 and Doncaster North in December 2019 and is a councillor in Sheffield.
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Chengdu's health officials are intensifying their campaign to detect more cases of abnormal behavior at an earlier stage. (Photo : Getty Images)
Health officials of Chengdu in the southwestern Sichuan province urge its local residents to report any signs of people's abnormal behavior by introducing a reward system, a Global Times article noted.
The health bureau of its Shuangliu district is offering a reward worth 50 yuan (U.S.$7.50) to any informant who will provide tip-offs on people with tendency to have mental illnesses.
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An additional 300 yuan will be given should the person reported will be diagnosed with mental health issues.The announcement was released via the bureau's official Sina Weibo account on Thursday.
To help residents identify an abnormal behavior, the authorities also released a list for reference. The roster includes brawling, speaking loudly to oneself, being undressed in public areas, not attending work or school without reason, harming oneself or threatening to commit suicide.
According to Feng Changfu, the bureau's Party Chief, the move eyes to intensify the group's campaign to detect more cases of mental illness as early as possible.
Patients with abnormal behavior will be provided with proper treatment and national subsidies.
The bureau further clarified that the informers are required to sign an agreement of confidentiality once they received their reward.
Nonetheless, some contested that the new mental illness reporting is illegal as it violates people's privacy.
"It is ridiculous and self-contradictory. How could you protect patients' privacy while encouraging their neighbors to report them?," Zhang Zanning, a law expert at Southeast University in East China's Jiangsu Province, shared.
Zhang also emphasized that the list of abnormal behaviors released by the health bureau is not necessarily effective in recognizing a mental illness.
The expert noted that mental illness is "difficult to diagnose due to a lack of quantitative criteria," Global Times wrote.
Netizens also expressed concern on the list, saying that it is too vague. A number of people also shared that they are worried about being wrongly identified as mentally ill based on the released criteria.
THE Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has rejected a request to address a local council meeting over Irish Cements plans for its Mungret facility.
Irish Cement currently has an application before the EPA to switch from burning fossil fuels to incinerating tyres at extreme temperatures.
The proposals have proven to be controversial, with many local residents expressing concerns over the impact this practice will have on the environment. Two public meetings have taken place, each drawing around 100 people.
And at last months metropolitan district meeting, members called on the EPA to address the local authority on how it assesses applications for change of process, and its environmental monitoring of cement production.
However, a letter from the office of the director general of the EPA reads: The agency will not be able to attend such a meeting in Limerick.
Instead, the agency pointed Limerick councillors in the direction of its web site.
Cllr Cian Prendiville, Anti-Austerity Alliance, urged the EPA to reconsider the invitation, saying: There are important questions people want answers to about how the EPA monitors and regulates companies responsible for major emissions, such as the proposed waste and tyre burning at Irish Cement in Mungret.
He added there are concerns at the light touch regulation by the EPA to some companies.
Meanwhile, it has also emerged the council has failed to yet make a submission to the EPA on the controversial scheme, something described as an abdication of responsibility by the council by Labours Joe Leddin.
He added: The failure at this late stage by the council to prepare a submission is extremely worrying and questionable given the huge levels of anxiety and concern that exists throughout the wider Mungret, Raheen and Dooradoyle area.
Cllr Leddin said the positive work in bringing new schools to the old Mungret College site is being overshadowed by the plans by Irish Cement.
It was Cllr Prendiville who asked whether the council had yet made a submission to the EPA about its emissions licence, and whether members will be consulted on its contents before it is submitted.
In a written reply, senior executive officer Ger Dillon wrote: The council is currently considering whether to prepare a submission to the EPA. No decision has been taken as yet as to whether the council will make a submission.
He added: We will facilitate members of council by providing any information or clarifications sought in relation to any submission ultimately prepared or any information or clarification sought by the members to facilitate any possible submission.
Irish Cements application for Limerick is currently on hold, having initially agreed to halve the amount of alternative fuels it is planning to burn to 90,000 tonnes.
This came after a public outcry against the original proposals, which will see tyres and other materials being burnt at up to 1,400 degrees celsius.
The move will create 40 construction jobs, and secure the future of the 80 staff working on site.
Surf's up for new Limerick-based company Trailwhisper, a surfing business which aims to build the biggest online community for surfers while also improving the process of planning a surfing trip in foreign countries.
The business was set up by German native Andreas Schwarz and Norwegian co-founder Eirik Andre Nilsen, who met when they both studied a masters degree in international entrepreneurship at the University of Limerick.
According to Andreas, the inspiration behind the idea came from the pain of finding all of the information" needed about an area, in order to plan a successful surfing trip.
Speaking about the business, he said: "We're building the biggest online community for surfers, who want to get inspiration and to inspire other people to travel to surf spots all over the world.
"Currently, we are talking to surfers, photographers, travel bloggers and outdoor enthusiasts."
He also said that he expects the business will bring a boost in tourism for the Limerick area. "More people will come to surf in Ireland now. Limerick is the perfect origin for trips along the coast and we hope to get more people starting their trips in Limerick," he explained.
Limerick, he said, is a gateway to the all of the great surf spots along the Wild Atlantic Way, which he claims is "the next huge thing in Europe" for the surfing community.
The company became a reality for Andreas and Eirik when their idea recently came top at the Start Up Weekend Limerick. One of the judges at the weekend, Kieran Normoyle, said: "Trailwhisper were the overall winners of Startup Weekend Limerick. The guys have a tremendous passion for surfing, which came through in the Pitch.
The pair are currently working with the Nexus Innovation Centre to try to develop their business further. The next big event for Trailwhisper is the Web Summit in Lisbon in November, which according to Andreas, is "the biggest convention for start-ups" in the world.
COUNCIL boss Conn Murray has made contact with Galway City Council over how Limerick can take advantage of its designation as European Capital of Culture.
After Limerick missed out on the prestigious European title, Mr Murray believes there is an excellent opportunity to take advantage of the fact it is going to the City of the Tribes as it is so close to the Treaty City.
And he will present ideas to council members in September on how Limerick can march forward to 2020.
He said: We must work with Galway and I have already made contact in that regard to complement and take whatever advantage of opportunity presents itself from having a European Capital of Culture less than an hour away from us.
In the hours after Limerick missed out on the prize estimated to be worth over 170m Mr Murray confirmed he was in contact with his counterpart in Galway, Brendan McGrath, over how the cities can co-operate.
2020 is still coming. We have an enormous amount of work done. we have enormous support which is important to us. With that level of enthusiasm, I think we must take advantage of 2020. There is an excellent opportunity which presents itself to Limerick, Mr Murray added.
Mayor Kieran OHanlon agreed, saying: The torch is lighting for Limerick and no judgement is ever going to quench that.
Meanwhile, councillors have called for the street party which greeted the European Capital of Culture judges on their visit to Limerick to be made an annual event.
Calls were also made for the events planned for the year to still go ahead, to make Limerick the alternative capital of culture.
And there has been criticism of the judging team for taking the easy option by recommending the City of the Tribes.
Labour councillor Joe Leddin said: The street party has proven that where you put on a schedule of events and activities encompassing a wide variety of things from street performing arts, to food stalls and creative activities, people will respond.
And they responded in their thousands last Tuesday. This is a legacy of the 2020 journey, and we should now seriously consider in collaboration with the business sector an annual street festival.
Fine Gaels Daniel Butler, who volunteered at the party, said: Something I noticed was this new confidence the city has. This cannot be lost. Nine years ago, I do not think we would be feeling as confident of winning.
Speaking at an economic strategic policy committee meeting in the hours after the decision to award the Capital of Culture to Galway, it was noted that, unlike Limerick, the business community there pay a percentage of their rates to a fund to develop tourism and the arts.
The local authority cannot be the only ones carrying the can, Cllr Leddin said, There is huge economic potential if we emulate what has happened in Galway.
Sinn Fein councillor Seighin O Ceallaigh said: We need to revise the list of events for 2020 to see what we can do.
We should keep the budget there, and make Limerick the alternative capital of culture.
Fine Gael councillor Stephen Keary said awarding the European Capital of Culture designation to Galway is like rubbing butter to a fat pigs behind, with the implication the city did not really need it.
Brian Thompson, St Marys AID, who sits on the economic committee agreed, saying: Galway was a predictable and easy choice for the judges.
He added Limerick has a rough edge in terms of art, but: I do not think the selectors were really that interested in this.
Health Officials Expect Active West Nile Season (Photo : Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Mosquitoes in some areas of Weld County are carrying West Nile Virus but there were no reported human cases at this moment. In Dallas County however, a resident has been diagnosed with the infection.
The mosquitoes found in traps set in Kersey, LaSalle, Greeley/Evans and the Idaho Creek area of Longmont have tested positive with West Nile Virus. While there are no human cases reported, health officials of the Weld County's Public Health and Environment are warning the residents to protect themselves from mosquito bites.
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According to Deb Adamson, environmental health supervisor at the Weld County Health Department, the result shows that the virus is now in the county for the rest of the summer. The health department is now monitoring the Culex mosquitoes which are carrying the virus.
They have recommended to drain all the stagnant water and made the residents aware that these mosquitoes are active at dusk and dawn to prevent the spread of the infection. They have also encouraged people to wear long sleeves and pants and use insect repellents with DEET, Denver Post reported.
Meanwhile, Dallas County Health and Human Services (DCHHS) department reported that a resident has been diagnosed with West Nile fever. It is the county's third confirmed case of the infection for this year's season. The identity of the patient was not released.
The DCHHS said that the first human case of the West Nile Virus in the county was reported in June which involves an Irving resident. Tarrant County health officials on the other hand, confirmed their first human West Nile infection case for this year's season on Wednesday as reported by NBC.
It takes 14 days for the West Nile virus symptoms to appear. Initial symptoms include headache, fever, nausea and vomiting, rash and muscle aches and weakness. However, most infected people do not show any symptom. If any of the symptoms shows, it is recommended to see a doctor immediately.
There is no medication to cure or a vaccine to prevent the infection at this moment. Less than one percent of the infected people were reported to develop a serious, sometime fatal neurological illness.
Muslim preachers can modify the pre-written script or improvise until the decision of implementing state-issued sermons officially comes into effect
Egypt's government said it would not backtrack on its controversial decision to standardise sermons at Friday prayers, adding that scripted sermons would only be a "guideline" until a final endorsement of the move.
The endowments ministry announced last week that Muslim preachers would be required to read from a pre-written script during the weekly sermon at Friday prayers.
The move, which is meant to tighten control on religious discourse and combat extremist views, sparked an outcry among many clerics who say scripted sermons would waste imam's talents and fail to cater to different communities.
But despite the opposition, Endowments Minister Mohamed Mokhtar Gomaa said on Monday the decision is irrevocable, adding that pre-written sermons the government started to issue would only run as a "guideline" to preachers until a final endorsement by a committee of statehired scholars.
"Until now we are working within the framework of guiding sermons," the minister told a meeting of top scholars on Monday.
"So far, the imam can modify the script -- within the subject matter -- add facts, re-write it or read it if he is convinced with it."
The government already started to post weekly sermons on its website a few weeks ago.
Gomaa said that the ministry would take a "more serious" step every week towards implementing state-issued sermons, a move he says is aimed at "improving the form and performance of sermons" and crushing radical ideas.
Gomaa said the government will prepare 54 sermons covering 52 weeks in addition to religious holidays, and that there will be a long-term plan to write 270 sermons to cover five years.
He said that until the decision is brought into effect, improvising clerics would be required to deliver sermons that are 20-minutes-long as a maximum. Since 2014, the ministry has been setting the topics for weekly sermons delivered during Friday prayers across the country.
The latest move was part of the government's effort to stop the use of mosques as a platform for political groups and to clamp down on extremist views that authorities said were being spread by preachers supporting former president Mohamed Morsi's now-banned Muslim Brotherhood group and its ultraconservative allies.
It comes against the backdrop of calls by President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi to reform "religious discourse."
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Shawkan, 28, is a freelance photojournalist who was arrested in August 2013 while covering the violent dispersal of the the Rabaa Al-Adawiya sit-in in Cairo
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) named on Tuesday detained Egyptian journalist Mahmoud Abou-Zeid, widely known as Shawkan, as one of four recipients of the Press Freedom Awards, CPJ said on its website.
Shawkan, 28, is a freelance photojournalist who was arrested in August 2013 while covering the violent dispersal of the Rabaa Al-Adawiya sit-in in Cairo, where supporters of president Mohamed Morsi protested his ouster.
Since his arrest, detention periods have been routinely renewed for Shawkan without setting a clear date for the trial.
The trial was eventually set for December 2015, but no verdict has been issued yet.
Shawkan's lawyers have repeatedly called for his release on medical grounds saying he lacks essential treatment for Hepatitis C inside Tora prison, where he is held.
The Egyptian government has repeatedly denied it imprisons journalists or reporters for their work, arguing that all those jailed have been charged with or convicted of criminal offences.
In a handwritten letter in April 2015 posted on his official support group on Facebook, Shawkan wrote: "I am neither a supporter nor an opponent of anybody. I don't care about anything except my professional work as a photojournalist."
I dont know what is going on, the letter had read, I have been left here to rot without any logic.
Other recipients of the award are Malini Subramaniam from India, Can Dundar from Turkey, and Oscar Martinez from El Salvador.
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Both Egypt and Ethiopia have expressed a willingness to begin technical studies on the impact of the dam on downstream countries based on a cooperation agreement signed last year in Khartoum
Egypts President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi has called for boosting mutual ties with Ethiopia reaffirming the importance of an agreement on sharing Nile river waters.
During his talks with Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn on the sidelines of an African summit in Kegali, El-Sisi stressed that Cairo is keen to bolster Egyptian-Ethiopian relations, adding that his country would continue to provide technical and development assistance to Addis Ababa, his office said in a statement on Monday.
A giant hydroelectric dam project Ethiopia is building has been the source of contention between Cairo and Addis Ababa. Egypt, which relies almost exclusively on the Nile for farming and drinking water, fears the dam would significantly diminish its share of the river's water.
During the talks on Monday, both sides agreed to begin technical studies on the dam's hydrological and environmental impacts on downstream countries in order to "reach agreement on the rules of filing and operating" the dam, presidency spokesman Alaa Youssef said in the statement.
The statement added that the technical studies would be based on a cooperation agreement signed last year in Khartoum on the sharing of Nile waters and Ethiopia's Grand Renaissance Dam.
Ethiopia's Prime Minister stressed during the discussions that "the Renaissance dam should benefit all sides and should not be a source of dispute."
The principles in the March 2015 agreement include giving priority to downstream countries for electricity generated by the dam and providing compensation for damages, Egyptian Irrigation Minister Hossam Al-Moghazi said.
Signatories to the agreement pledged to protect the interests of downstream countries when the dam's reservoir is filled.
Ethiopia began diverting the Blue Nile in May 2013 to build the 6,000 MW dam which will be Africa's largest when completed in 2017.
In several rounds of talks, Ethiopia has maintained the project will have no effect on Sudan and Egypt downstream.
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The country's grand mufti says extremists exploit laws that could restrict the freedom of Muslims to spread their radical views
Related IS group claims responsibility for train attack in Germany
Egypt's Grand Imam, one of the worlds highest Sunni Muslim authorities, has urged western countries to review laws and regulations that may affect the freedom of Muslims after a train attack in Germany was claimed by the Islamic State group.
Shawki Allam, the country's official interpreter of Islamic law, condemned on Tuesday the attack as "inhumane" and said such violence "tarnishes the image of Islam which calls for tolerance and coexistence."
Allam urged the West to help Muslim communities "integrate into society" and to revise "laws and decisions that could tighten Muslim's freedom."
He says such matters are exploited by extremists to spread their radical views "under the claim that western countries are hostile to Islam and Muslims."
A 17-year-old Afghan refugee assaulted passengers on a train in southern Germany with an axe and knife late on Monday, injuring at least five people in an attack which the Islamic State group claimed hours later.
Allam said that Islam prohibits "terrorising people or assaulting them no matter what their denomination is."
His remarks were part of a statement carried by Dar Al-Ifta, the main authority responsible for issuing religious edicts.
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Egyptian president Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi inspected early Tuesday the third stage of a housing project in Moqattam constructed as part of continued government efforts by to combat informal settlements, state owned MENA agency reported.
El-Sisi stressed on the necessity of the completion of all planned projects within the deadline while listening to a detailed explanation of the project's ongoing construction from the engineers and supervisors responsible for construction, MENA noted.
The third stage of the project includes the construction of 1680 housing units -- out of a total of 7440 units -- within a year for an overall cost of EGP 950 million, which is subject to increase.
The Al-Asmarat Residential Complex project broke ground after a promise by the Egyptian president last May that he will oversee efforts to rehouse all those living in unsafe informal settlements to new flats within the next three years.
In May, El-Sisi inaugurated the first and second stages of the new Taheya Masr-funded developmental housing project, which is committed to eradicate 'dangerous slums' in poor areas of Doueyka, Establ Antar, and Ezbet Khair Allah and accommodate those in areas deemed unsafe.
The two stages of the project, which include 11,000 units, come with an estimated pricetag of EGP 1.5 billion.
El-Sisi was accompanied Tuesday by the head of the armed forces engineering authority, Kamel El-Wazeer, and others before departing to attend the graduation ceremony of the Police Academy class of 2016 at the Academy HQ in New Cairo.
The phenomena of informal settlements first rose to attention in 2008 following the collapse of a rock face on the edge of Moqattam that led to the deaths of tens and the injury of scores living in the Doueyka area, and reminded people of the urgency of addressing housing challenges.
According to a governmental report in recent years, informal settlements in Egypt constitute around 40 percent of urban areas around Egypt.
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Egypts prosecutor-general Nabil Sadek is set to travel to Moscow next week to brief Russian officials on the latest investigations into the deadly October crash of a Russian airliner over Egypts Sinai.
According to an official statement by Egypts civil aviation ministry on Tuesday, Egypts Civil Aviation Minister Sherif Fathy stressed to Russian Transport Minister Maxim Sokolov during a Monday meeting that the countrys top prosecutor will present an update of the criminal investigations conducted by the general prosecution over the crash that killed all 224 people on board.
On Sunday, the Egyptian minister travelled to Moscow for a three-day visit to discuss resuming direct flights between Egypt and Russia.
In the immediate aftermath of the crash, Russia suspended direct flights to and from all Egyptian airports over security concerns, classifying the plane crash as a terrorist attack.
The United Kingdom and Germany also suspended flights to Sharm El-Sheikh airport.
An affiliate of the Islamic State group in Sinai claimed responsibility for the attack,
In earlier statements to media, the Russian transport minister said that air service will resume after Egypt fully ensures security at airports.
Egypt had said it has fulfilled 85 percent of Russias demands regarding aviation safety and was now expecting steps to be taken by the Russian side towards resuming flights.
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Sunday's attack in Minya followed May violence in which Christian houses were set ablaze and a woman was paraded naked through the streets
Anger is mounting amongst Minya's Copts after two incidents of sectarian violence, Bishop Macarius of Minya said in statements he made to Ahram Arabic website on Tuesday.
"Anger is mounting and authorities are taking steps too late," the Coptic Bishop warned.
"Consolations are not enough," he added when commenting on the statement made by Egypt's Grand Mufti Shawky Allam, who called on citizens to practice 'self-restraint'.
On Sunday, families of two priests in the Tahna El-Jabal village were attacked by assailants wielding knives and batons killing a 27-year-old man and injuring three others, including a woman.
According to eyewitnesses, the attack started as an argument between young Muslim men and Christian children over right of way on the narrow streets of the village. The disputing parties then involved the families of the Christian children, including the son of the local church's pastor.
In May, Muslim villagers set ablaze seven Christian homes and assaulted a Christian man's elderly mother, parading her naked in public. The assault in in Minya's El-Karm village was sparked by rumours that the man was having an illicit relationship with a Muslim woman.
Incidences of sectarian violence have frequently been reported over the past years. Christians, who make up about 10 percent of Egypt's population of 90 million, have long complained of discrimination and sectarian attacks in the predominantly Sunni Muslim country.
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Ethiopia's relationship with Egypt and Sudan is not confined to just to issues relating to Nile water rights, Ethiopian Ambassador to Egypt said in an Egyptian TV interview Monday.
In an interview with the private TV station Al-Nahar, Ambassador Mahmoud Dreier said that the relationship between the three countries was "bigger than that," and that the relationships, some of the oldest in Africa, could be a set model for relationships throughout the continent.
The Grand Renaissance Dam (GRD), giant hydroelectric dam project undertaken by Ethiopia, has been the source of contention between Cairo and Addis Ababa. Egypt, which relies almost exclusively on the Nile for farming and drinking water, fears the dam would significantly diminish its share of the river's water.
The interview with the Ethiopian ambassador came only hours after Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi and Ethiopian PM Hailemariam Desalegn agreed during the sidelines of the African Union summit in Rwanda's Kijali to begin technical studies on the dam's hydrological and environmental impact on downstream countries in order to "reach agreement on the rules of filing and operating."
"The truth is we have interests, Egypt has interests, and Sudan has interests. We are reviewing how to create a harmony in mutual interests," Dreier said.
The ambassador said the construction of the GRD was in a "very developed" stage, noting that the construction of the $4 billion dam is slated for completion in 2017.
"What was left in construction is very little. It's nearly done," he added.
He denounced alleged attempts by the Egyptian media to report untruthful news about the dam, adding that such outlets portrayed the dam as a "devil".
The ambassador said that this was due to the such outlets' "ignorance" of Ethiopia and its historical 90-year diplomatic relationship with Egypt.
He added that the current series of discussions being held were not about whether the dam will be built or not, adding that the studies underway -- which will take 11 to 12 months to complete -- are related to the effects of the dam.
Dreier said that talks between the technical committees of involved countries were being held in a manner that portrays a good relationship between the concerned officials.
The ambassador then stressed that the dam was "Ethiopian, built by Ethiopians, and would be administered by Ethiopians," when asked by the presenter on whether a "foreign side" was going to be involved in the management of the dam.
Dreier also discussed Ethiopia's relationship with Israel following Israeli PM Benjamen Netanyahu controversial visit to Addis Ababa earlier this month, saying that the relationship was not a "secretive" one.
Israel launched a $13-million aid package to strengthen economic ties and cooperation with African countries, including Ethiopia, with a pledge to also provide certain African states with training in "domestic security".
Dreier, however, stressed that Ethiopia doesn't insinuate Israel with its relationship with Egypt.
According to the Ethiopian envoy, a sixth summit on a "presidential level" between Egypt and Ethiopia would be held in the coming months. He added that the summit will be hosted by Egypt, yet declined to mention when the summit was to take place.
Although Egypt has repeatedly expressed concern over the dam's possible effect on the country, Ethiopia insists it will not negatively affect Egypt's share of Nile water.
In December 2015, President El-Sisi addressed the public saying that there is no reason to worry about the dam and that the matter would be resolved.
"I totally understand the concern of Egyptians as water is a matter of life or death," El-Sisi added.
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Egypt officially nominated Tuesday evening former minister of family and population Moshira Khattab for the position of Director General of the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), MENA news agency reported.
The announcement was made at the Egyptian Museum in downtown Cairo during the cultural dialogue event Egypt, UNESCO and International Cultural Issues attended by prime minister Sherif Ismail and foreign minister Sameh Shoukry as well other ministers and prominent figures in Egyptian society.
In statements to the media, Shoukry revealed that African countries have agreed to support the Egyptian candidate in her bid to become the next UNSECO Director General when Irina Bokova's term ends next year.
A former ambassador and minister, Moshira Khattab graduated from the Faculty of Economics and Political Science at Cairo University in 1967.
She joined the ministry of foreign affairs to start her diplomatic career in 1968 before becoming Egypt's ambassador in Czechoslovakia from 1990 to 1995 and later Egypt's ambassador in South Africa from 1995 to 1999.
Moshira Khattab then became an aide to the foreign minister.
In 2002, she was appointed as the secretary general of the National Council for Childhood & Motherhood and in 2010 she was appointed to the short-lived ministry of family and population.
The former ambassador is not the first Egyptian to run for the UNESCO's position. In 2009, Egypt nominated former minister of culture Farouk Hosni to the position but failed due to previous statements about Israeli books that sparked accusations of anti-semitism.
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An 1868 drawing of the former prison for witches, St Mary's Chapel, after it was restored to religious use.
An iron ring set in the stone pillar of a 15th-century chapel in the Scottish city of Aberdeen may not look like much, but historians say it could be a direct link to a dark chapter in the citys past the trial and execution of 23 women and one man accused of witchcraft during Aberdeen's "Great Witch Hunt" in 1597.
"I was skeptical, to be honest the ring is not all that spectacular, but it is actually quite genuine," said Arthur Winfield, project leader for the OpenSpace Trust in the United Kingdom, which is restoring the chapel as part of a community-based redevelopment of the East Kirk sanctuary at the historic Kirk of St Nicholas, in central Aberdeen.
Winfield told Live Science that two places within the kirk (the Lowland Scots word for "church") had been equipped as a prison for witches snared in the Aberdeen witch hunt: the stone-vaulted chapel of St Mary, and the tall steeple of the kirk, which was at that time the tallest structure in the city. [See more photos of the "witch prison" in the Scottish church]
Winfield said that neither location would have been warm in the winter of 1597, when those accused of witchcraft awaited trail, and likely their execution: "In the winter nowadays, the temperature gets down to 3 degrees [Celsius] in St Mary's Chapel, and I guess it would be even colder up in the spire."
Witch hunting in Scotland in the 16th century was not carried out by mobs with pitchforks, but by royal commissions at the orders of the king. As a result, Aberdeens city archives today hold meticulous original records of the witch trials and executions in 1597, including payments to a local blacksmith for the iron rings and shackles installed to imprison accused witches at the Kirk of St Nicholas.
The city records also detail the costs for the rope, wood and tar later used to burn the convicted witches at the stake, at Castle Hill and Heading Hill in Aberdeen, before large crowds of onlookers. As a small mercy, most of the condemned were strangled to death before their bodies were burned, according to the University of Edinburghs online Survey of Scottish Witchcraft.
The Great Witch Hunt
Chris Croly, a historian at the University of Aberdeen, told Live Science that Aberdeens Great Witch Hunt of 1597 was one phase of a wave of witch persecutions across Scotland sparked by the witchcraft laws of King James VI of Scotland (who became James I of England in 1603).
"It is often said that Aberdeen burned more witches than anywhere else that may not be entirely accurate, but what is absolutely accurate is that Aberdeen has the best civic records of witch burning in Scotland, and so it can appear that way," Croly told Live Science.
He said the wave of witchcraft persecutions that began in Europe in the 15th century and reached Scotland in the 1590s, continued into the Americas in the 17th century and led to the infamous witch trials at Salem in Massachusetts in 1692 and 1693. [Black Magic: 6 Infamous Witch Trials in History]
Many Protestant and Catholic authorities at the time were united in a belief that witchcraft was the result of witches "communing with the devil" and that biblical scripture justified their execution. "That's how this wave can sweep through both Protestant and Catholic countries," Croly said.
One the most famous cases of the 1597 witch trials in Aberdeen involved two members of one family. The mother, Jane Wishart, was convicted of 18 counts of witchcraft, including casting spells that caused illness in her neighbors; inducing a mysterious brown dog to attack her son-in-law after an argument; and dismembering a corpse that hung on a gallows, to provide the ingredients for her magic.
Wishart's son, Thomas Leyis, was also convicted of heading a coven of witches that had danced with the devil at midnight in Aberdeen's fish market area. Both mother and son were strangled and burned, and the city records note that it cost "3 pounds, 13 shillings and 4 pence" to provide enough peat, tar and wood for Leyis pyre.
Buried beneath the kirk
In 2006 and 2007, the East Kirk of St Nicholas was the scene of a major archeological excavation before restoration work could be done to develop the former church as a community center. The redevelopment effort is known as the "Mither Kirk Project," from the Lowland Scots words for "mother church."
No remains of the accused witches were found at the site, and Croly noted that they would have been buried elsewhere, on "unhallowed ground." But the excavations had provided archaeologists with an extraordinary look at the lives of the people of the city from the 11th to the 18th centuries, he said.
Over the course of the excavation, the remains of more than 2,000 people, including 1,000 entire skeletons, were disinterred from grave sites that lay under the floor of the East Kirk, said Croly, who was Aberdeens city historian at the time of the excavations, and worked closely with city archaeologists on the project. [8 Grisly Archaeological Discoveries]
Most of the bodies were buried before the 1560s, when the Protestant Reformation in Scotland forbade burials inside churches, but the practice was profitable and continued in a small way until the 18th century, he said.
The excavations had also found evidence of earlier church buildings beneath the existing kirk that dated to the 11th century, and the graves of nine babies that had been laid out together in an arc near an 11th-century wall possibly the victims of an epidemic of disease, Croly said.
Now that archaeological tests on the bodies from the kirk have been completed, the Mither Kirk Project plans to hold a ceremony later this year to reinter the bodies in a vault beneath the current floor level.
At a later date, the former "prison for witches" in St Mary's Chapel will be redeveloped as a "contemplative space," said Arthur Winfield, the project leader for the OpenSpace Trust. "That space will be kept as an area of peace and tranquility essentially, it is going to be respected for the chapel that it was, and will be again," he said.
Original article on Live Science.
The sight of an animal that can take to the air often inspires envy and numerous forms of imitation in humans.
This is especially true for the types of birds that exhibit extreme abilities, soaring to fantastic heights many thousands of feet above the ground, where the cold and lack of oxygen would challenge humans' ability to survive.
The highest flyer of all Ruppell's griffon vulture, native to central Africa was confirmed to cruise at 37,000 feet (11,278 meters) after one collided with an airplane at that altitude, as reported in 1974 in the journal The Wilson Bulletin.
Many bird species live in habitats that are over 13,123 feet (4,000 m) above sea level, and others routinely fly to altitudes of approximately 10,000 to 13,000 feet (3,000 to 4,000 m), especially when they're migrating, said Graham Scott, an assistant professor of biology at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada.
A number of bird species cruise at altitudes even higher than that, wrote Scott in a 2011 study published in the Journal of Experimental Biology. Scott studies how vertebrates animals with backbones perform in physically challenging environments.
According to Scott, birds as small as sparrows and hummingbirds in the Alpine region can be found at altitudes of 16,404 feet (5,000 m), while massive Andean condors glide on air currents at heights of 18,044 feet (5,500 m). Mallard ducks are known to reach altitudes of 21,000 feet (6,401 m), and Central Asia's bar-headed geese have been directly tracked at 23,917 feet (7,290 m). [Video: Secrets of the High-Flying Bar-Headed Goose]
Up, up and away
Somehow, these high flyers can exert themselves at exceptional altitudes. But what allows them to navigate the air up there? While these birds vary in size, they have one thing in common: a longer wingspan relative to their bodies, compared with birds that fly lower.
"That's something we consistently see," Scott said. "Longer wings are better for generating lift to keep the body aloft."
But it takes more than longer wings to navigate high altitudes, which come with enormous physical trials, Scott added.
"The first big challenge is that the air gets less dense," he said. "As they go higher, they have to flap harder to stay aloft, so their metabolic demands increase. The oxygen levels become more limited. At high altitudes, it gets colder, and they need to keep their bodies warm. And the air gets drier they're more likely to lose water from breathing and evaporation, and be thirsty."
So what keeps these high fliers going? There are certainly physical adaptations that allow birds to reach exceptional heights, said Charles Bishop, a senior lecturer in zoology at the School of Biological Sciences at Bangor University in the United Kingdom.
Bishop, who studies high-flying bar-headed geese, told Live Science in an email that the geese do not appear to suffer from altitude sickness or from cerebral or pulmonary edema, "so that, unlike humans they do not feel ill when at high altitude."
The geese also hyperventilate to increase their oxygen intake while flying. This rapid breathing makes their blood more alkaline, a change that in humans affects circulation to the brain (which is why hyperventilating makes people feel dizzy or faint).
But geese are very tolerant of high pH (alkaline conditions), Bishop explained, so blood flow to the animals' brains and bodies remains healthy.
"Finally, the hemoglobin in their blood has quite a high affinity for oxygen binding," Bishop told Live Science. "Again, this maximizes oxygen uptake." [Quest for Survival: Photos of Incredible Animal Migrations]
"A roller-coaster strategy"
And part of the birds' secret could simply be not staying up high for too long.
According to Bishop, bar-headed geese use "a roller-coaster strategy" during their long migrations, which can span 1,243 to 3,107 miles (2,000 to 5,000 kilometers), covered in flight periods that last from 5 to 200 hours.
"As they cross the Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau, the birds typically range in altitude from 4,000 m [16,404 feet] to 5,500 m [18,044 feet], with the odd excursion to just over 6,000 m [19,685 feet]," Bishop said.
In fact, he added, 98 percent of the direct observations of the geese's altitude occurred below 18,044 feet (5,500 m).
"Whenever the geese had to travel over a high obstacle, they would come down immediately afterwards," Bishop said.
And flying higher may actually provide birds with better conditions for long hauls, Scott suggested. Migratory flights at higher altitudes mean exposure to fewer predators, while tail winds can help the birds fly with less effort and cooler temperatures may keep the animals from overheating, he added.
Original article on Live Science.
Steppe herders believed to have been among the founders of the European civilization may have also been the first pot dealers, says a new study into the history of cannabis.
Called the Yamnaya, these nomads entered Europe about 5,000 years ago from the eastern Steppe region, in today's Ukraine and Russia. According to the research, they brought with them metallurgy, herding skills and possibly the Indo-European languages.
They were also responsible for the first, transcontinental trade of cannabis some 5,000 years ago.
The conclusion comes from a systematic review of archaeological and paleo-environmental records of cannabis fibres, pollen and achene across Europe and East Asia.
RELATED: Hemp Walls Saved India's Ancient Ellora Caves
Carried out by researchers from the German Archaeological Institute and the Free University of Berlin, the study determined the herb was not first used and domesticated somewhere in China or Central Asia, as it has been often assumed.
On the contrary, it was used in Europe and East Asia at almost exactly the same time between 11,500 and 10,200 years ago.
"Cannabis seems to have grown as a component of natural vegetation across Eurasia from the early Holocene," Tengwen Long and Mayke Wagner at German Archaeological Institute, Pavel Tarasov at the Free University of Berlin, and colleagues wrote in the journal Vegetation History and Archaeobotany.
People discovered the plant's versatility, using it as a medicine, food source, raw fiber material for ropes and textiles and even exploiting its mind-bending properties.
However, while in western Eurasia humans made a regular use of the herb down the millennia, there are relatively scarce archaeological records for an early use of cannabis achene in East Asia.
Things changed at the dawn of the Bronze Age, about 5000 years ago. A marked increase in records shows the use of cannabis intensified in East Asia at that time.
Such increase "might be associated with the establishment of a trans-Eurasian exchange-migration network through the steppe zone," the researchers said.
RELATED: Did Shakespeare Inhale? Pipes from Garden Held Cannabis
The Yamnaya and their neighbors such as the Botai, who might have domesticated wild horses and were able to travel vast distances across the relatively flat steppe region, began a transcontinental trade network even stretching to the Hexi Corridor region. This route in Gansu province of China would become part of the Silk Road several millennia later.
"Cannabis's multiple usability might have made it an ideal candidate for being a 'cash crop before cash', a plant that is cultivated primarily for exchange purpose," Tengwen Long, a paleontologist at German Archaeological Institute and the Free University of Berlin, told Discovery News.
Carbonized achenes and signs of cannabis burning found at archaeological sites suggest the Yamnaya brought the practice of cannabis smoking with them as they spread across Eurasia, although they may have inhaled the smoke only during rituals.
RELATED: Does Legal Pot Make Roads Less Safe?
"However, the value of cannabis should not be overly emphasized, as in the Bronze Age the exchange certainly did not confine to this plant," Long said.
"Bronze objects, technologies, staple food crops such as millets, wheat, and barley, horses, and pandemic diseases were all possibly parts of the story," he added.
The researchers noted that more data, especially from the Eurasian steppe zone, is needed.
"There are a lot of unaddressed questions awaiting scientists to answer in terms of the long history of cannabis and the Bronze Age Eurasian connections," Long said.
Original article on Discovery News.
Indonesia's most wanted Muslim extremist, Santoso, has been killed in a firefight with security forces, police confirmed Tuesday, ending a lengthy hunt for the Islamic State (IS) group supporter.
"It's definitely Santoso," Central Sulawesi police chief Rudy Sufahriadi told AFP, after a process to identify the militant's body. He was killed in a clash on Monday on central Sulawesi island.
"I have hunted him and I have arrested him before, we have asked people and we have sent people (to identify the body) who fought with him and went on jihad with him," Sufahriadi said.
"They have confirmed it was him."
His death is a major victory for Indonesian authorities who had pursued the extremist for five years, sending thousands of security forces to search for him and his band of a few dozen followers in their remote jungle hideouts.
His group carried out a string of deadly attacks on domestic security forces and was known for training militants from around the archipelago. In 2014 he pledged allegiance to IS and earlier this year was placed on a list of global terrorists by the United States.
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Britain will not begin its formal divorce from the European Union by invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty this year, a government lawyer told the High Court on Tuesday.
Lawyer Jason Coppell referred to statements made by Prime Minister Theresa May who has said article 50 should not be triggered this year.
However, he indicated that the government's current position could change.
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A man was tortured to death in Pakistan for an affair with a married woman, police said Tuesday, a rare case of a male falling victim to a so-called "honour killing".
The murder came days after social media starlet Qandeel Baloch was strangled to death by her brother who said he was "not embarrassed" to have killed her, reigniting calls for action against the crime.
Hundreds of women are murdered by relatives in the conservative Muslim nation each year on the pretext of defending what is seen as family honour, but it is unusual for the victim to be a man.
The latest incident happened in the impoverished central district of Dera Ghazi Khan on Monday, police said.
Allah Ditta, 24, was stabbed multiple times by a group of five men after they spotted him in the village of the woman he was allegedly having an affair with.
A local police official said Ditta began the relationship when he was working for the woman's brother-in-law, and that she ran away with him in May but returned home two weeks later after the village council intervened.
Ditta's arms were cut off as were his lips and nose, the official said.
District police chief Ata Muhammad Khan confirmed the incident: "The victim was taken to hospital where he died."
He added it appeared to be an honour killing and that police were now searching for the suspects. The woman was not harmed.
The killing of Baloch has triggered fresh calls for legislation to amend Pakistan's criminal code which allows murderers to avoid jail by seeking forgiveness from a victim's relatives -- a convenient means of escape particularly in honour cases.
The phenomenon of honour killings was examined in an Oscar-winning documentary by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy called "A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness".
The film was hailed by Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who in February vowed to push through anti-honour killing legislation, but no action has been taken since then.
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Releases
In this section of the Lockheed Martin Newsroom, you'll find our news releases. The releases are listed in chronological order and are archived by year.
Leg. Spencer to Pokemon Go Users: "If You Gotta Catch 'Em All" Be Smart While Doing It
Tech & Science, Family & Parenting, Local News, National & World News, Press Releases
By Long Island News & PR Published: July 19 2016
Suffolk County Legislator William R. Spencer, M.D. informs residents of potential dangers associated with the app and offer tips and best practices to stay safe while exploring.
Since the app officially launched on July 6th, there have been numerous reports of accidents and crimes which have resulted in distracted and vulnerable players being hurt or taken advantage of by unscrupulous individuals.
Centerport, NY - July 18, 23016 - It seems that everywhere you go recently someone is talking about Pokemon GO, a new virtual scavenger hunt mobile app that allows players, young and old, to find and catch Pokemon characters in the real world. With this new craze seemingly taking over neighborhoods across the United States, Suffolk County Legislator William R. Spencer, M.D. would like to inform residents of potential dangers associated with the app and offer tips and best practices to stay safe while exploring.
This app is motivating residents to get out and be active, which is a wonderful and much needed thing. But it is concerning that we have seen this come at the cost of the safety of some users, said Legislator Spencer. Remember to always play smart by being aware of your surroundings and use common sense safety measures to avoid precarious situations.
Already since the app officially launched on July 6th, there have been numerous reports of accidents and crimes which have resulted in distracted and vulnerable players being hurt or taken advantage of by unscrupulous individuals. Players are traveling across miles, and even into unknown and unsafe places to catch their favorite characters. Before using the app, its important to make safety your first priority and take precautions to prevent injury or worse.
General Things to Be Aware of Before Venturing Out:
Always remember its just a game and that you are playing in the real world.
Plan your route, and let a family member or friend know where you will be going and when you will return.
Be mindful that at this time anyone can download and play Pokemon GO. Criminals and predators have used the game to lure unsuspecting players into dangerous situations. Children should play with a parent or guardian.
Prepare for the elements. Since you will be outside playing and it is July, make sure you stay hydrated, are wearing appropriate summer clothing, proper shoes, sunblock and a hat.
Manage your battery life. Your phone is your primary communication device in the community. Be sure that you phone is fully charged when you go out, and that you have a phone charger/charging cord or portable battery charger with you so you can have it handy during times of extended gameplay.
Manage your data usage. This app goes through data like crazy, so you must be wary of reaching your limit and incurring extra fees or having your data cut off before the end your usage cycle. The app also takes up a large amount of storage space on your phone.
Manage In-App Purchases: Players can spend real money to enhance their gameplay by purchasing pokecoins a form of in-game currency which can be used for power-ups and other incentives. These purchases can add up, ranging in cost from$0.99 to $99.99. If your child is playing, change your app setting so your credit card is not linked to their account, and in-app purchases are not available.
Tips For When You're Playing
Play in pairs or as a group in well-lit areas to ensure your safety.
Pay attention to the people around you. Dont interact with strangers.
Remain alert at all times and stay aware of your surroundings.
Do not drive or ride a bike, skateboard, hoverboard or other device while using the app.
Do not go onto private property or go to areas you usually would not if you weren't playing Pokemon GO. This could be considered TRESPASSING.
Do not go into places where it may be considered inappropriate and even disrespectful to play - i.e. a cemetery, a memorial site, the police station, a funeral home.
Keep an eye on your stuff. You may find yourself in areas where there are a lot of people. Thieves may target players who are consumed in the game.
It isnt advised to play the game at night, but if you are planning to do so, make sure you wear bright and reflective clothing so you are visible.
If the police stop you for suspicious behavior, understand that community concerns are more important than your gameplay concerns. Be willing to listen and calmly explain what you are doing.
Protecting Your Privacy:
Crime, Press Releases
By Long Island News & PR Published: July 19 2016
The Fourth Squad reports the details of a Grand Larceny which occurred on Monday, July 18, 2016 at 3:45 PM in Woodmere.
Detectives ask anyone with information about this crime to contact Nassau County Crime Stoppers at 1-800-244-TIPS. Al l callers will remain anonymous.
Woodmere, NY - July 19, 2016 - The Fourth Squad reports the details of a Grand Larceny which occurred on Monday, July 18, 2016 at 3:45 PM in Woodmere.
According to detectives, a male victim, 25, was driving northbound on Broadway when he observed a black Jeep behind him and turns on red lights. The victim pulled his vehicle over and was approached by a male Hispanic, 30s, 6 tall and stated that he was a police officer. The subject removed the victim out of his auto and had him remove his belongings and place on trunk. The subject took the victims wallet which contained an undisclosed amount of US currency and had the victim return to his car. As the victim was entering his vehicle he saw the Jeep make a U-turn and flee southbound on Broadway.
Detectives ask anyone with information about this crime to contact Nassau County Crime Stoppers at 1-800-244-TIPS. Al l callers will remain anonymous.
Local News, Crime, Press Releases
By Long Island News & PR Published: July 19 2016
DA Attorney Thomas Spota joined by law enforcement officials affiliated with the East End Drug Task Force will announce the dismantling of two drug distribution networks.
Exhibits at the news conference will include kilograms of heroin and cocaine, firearms, and traps devised by drug dealers to hide cocaine, heroin and, in one instance, $95,000 in cash found by investigators hidden in a trap in a vehicles front seat console, and a trap in an aquarium stand found in an alleged dealers house.
Riverhead, NY - July 18, 2016 - Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota joined by law enforcement officials affiliated with the East End Drug Task Force will announce in Riverhead the dismantling of two drug distribution networks; one dealing heroin, the other cocaine, in eastern Suffolk County. The news conference will begin at 11:30 am on Tuesday, July 19, 2016 in the law library on the fifth floor of the criminal courthouse.
Fourteen people have been arrested and arraigned thus far, including three members of the Bloods street gang. More arrests are expected. Multiple kilograms of cocaine and heroin have been seized during the execution of more than one dozen search warrants.
Exhibits at the news conference will include kilograms of heroin and cocaine, firearms, and traps devised by drug dealers to hide cocaine, heroin and, in one instance, $95,000 in cash found by investigators hidden in a trap in a vehicles front seat console, and a trap in an aquarium stand found in an alleged dealers house.
One dealer made a weekly purchase of a kilo of cocaine in New York City to sell to street dealers who in turn sold cocaine to users in East Hampton, Riverhead, Southampton and Southold Towns. The heroin network was run by local members of the Bloods street gang. Both drug distribution networks operated on the east end primarily in the towns of Riverhead and Southampton but also included cocaine and heroin street sales in the Brookhaven Town communities of Port Jefferson, Mt. Sinai, Sound Beach, Mastic, Shirley, and the Moriches area.
The East End Drug Task Force is a multi-jurisdictional drug enforcement unit funded by the office of Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota. The task force includes detectives, police officers and law enforcement personnel from the New York State Police, Suffolk County Police Department, Suffolk County Sheriffs Office, Suffolk County Department of Probation, Southampton Town Police Department, Riverhead Police Department, East Hampton Town Police Department, Southampton Village Police Department, Southold Town Police Department, DEA, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Suffolk County District Attorney Investigators.
Local News, Press Releases
By Long Island News & PR Published: July 19 2016
Suffolk County Police Marine Bureau officers rescued a man from the Great South Bay last night.
The Suffolk Police Marine Bureau reminds anyone heading out on the water to wear a personal flotation device, check the weather forecast beforehand, and head for safety well before bad weather arrives.
Great River, NY - July 19, 2016 - Suffolk County Police Marine Bureau officers rescued a man from the Great South Bay last night.
Donald Roth was windsurfing in the bay south of Hecksher State Park in Great River when a line of thunderstorms rolled across the water.
A witness on shore saw Roth, 56, of Washington Township, New Jersey, get knocked off of his windsurfing board by high winds and waves. The caller then lost sight of him and called 911. New York State Park Police received the call and notified the Suffolk Police Marine Bureau and US Coast Guard.
As the squall line moved through, wind gusts of 60 miles per hour were observed at US Coast Guard Station Fire Island. Responding police officers encountered breaking waves of 4-5 feet on the bay.
Marine Bureau Officers Keith Magliola and Daniel Smith aboard Marine Kilo responded to the area and began a systematic search for Roth. The US Coast Guard also dispatched a 29-foot rescue boat from Station Fire Island that also participated in the search. After about 20 minutes, Officers Magliola and Smith located Roth in the water off Nicoll Point, clinging to his windsurfer, with only his head out of the water. He was wearing a wetsuit and helmet, but no life jacket.
Officers transported Roth to the Hecksher State Park boat basin in Great River, where he was met by NY State Park Police, who transported him back to his vehicle. Roth was uninjured and did not require medical attention.
The Suffolk Police Marine Bureau reminds anyone heading out on the water to wear a personal flotation device, check the weather forecast beforehand, and head for safety well before bad weather arrives.
Looking to stay up to date about all of the news stories and local headlines that are important to Long Islanders? We've rounded up the top coverage for all of the important topics from multiple sources around Long Island, so you can be sure you've got the most recent update on the top stories for Long Island. Have an idea for a news story? Email us at news@longisland.com
Columnists Press Releases
US Republicans have adopted their party's platform, a conservative policy guide for the coming years that tilts some traditional positions like free trade toward White House hopeful Donald Trump's vision for America.
The 2016 Republican platform was ratified by delegates at the Republican National Convention, where Trump is expected to accept his party's nomination for president on Thursday.
The nonbinding, 58-page document enshrined traditional Republican values like limited constitutional government and strong national defense, and highlighted stark differences between the party's policy positions and those of President Barack Obama's administration and presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
"This is the most conservative platform in modern history," religious right activist David Barton said Monday on conservative radio.
But language in the text, while meant to reflect the balance of party ideology, signaled its adherence to previous orthodoxy rather than a forward-looking embrace of globalization.
It also reprized key talking points of Trump's inflammatory campaign.
Here are a few highlights:
The ability to sell and purchase goods around the world unencumbered by high tariffs and restrictions has been a Republican gold standard, but Trump's protectionism, including his opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, upended that bedrock principle.
"We need better negotiated trade agreements that put America first," the platform states. "When those agreements do not adequately protect US interests, US sovereignty or when they are violated with impunity, they must be rejected.
"We're going to build a wall," Trump says at virtually ever campaign rally. His call to boost security along the southern US border with Mexico resonates with Americans fearful that undocumented workers will take US jobs.
The platform supports Trump's position, saying "the border wall must cover the entirety of the southern border and must be sufficient to stop both vehicular and pedestrian traffic."
It also seeks to impose "special scrutiny" on foreigners seeking to enter the US from "terror-sponsoring" countries -- an echo of Trump's campaign call to bar Muslims from entering the United States.
After June's attack on a gay nightclub in Florida, Trump cast himself as a defender of the community, but the Republican Party as a whole remains uneasy on questions of LGBT rights and continues to oppose same-sex marriage.
The platform enshrined its support for the "natural" family unit and opposition to abortion rights, pushing further to the right than Trump.
It also expressed backing for allowing parents to "determine the proper medical treatment and therapy for their minor children," which some interpret as conversion therapy for gay youths.
And it pushed back strongly against administration policy that upholds transgender people's rights to use the bathroom of the gender which with they identify.
"Their edict to the states concerning restrooms, locker rooms, and other facilities is at once illegal, dangerous, and ignores privacy issues," the platform states.
The platform also branded pornography "a public health crisis that is destroying the lives of millions."
In 2012, the platform committee only denounced child pornography.
Many Republicans dispute the existence of climate change and President Barack Obama's environmental policies, which toughened rules on power-plant emissions.
The platform denounced his focus on climate change, declaring it "far from this nation's most pressing national security issue."
It also decried what they called Obama's "war on coal," stating that the Democratic Party "does not understand that coal is an abundant, clean" and affordable energy resource.
In 2012, the platform only declared coal to be "low-cost and abundant."
It expressed support for hydraulic fracking and said it backs all forms of domestic energy "without subsidies."
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A Coptic Orthodox cleric in Egypt's Minya governorate has said a sectarian attack in a village there on Sunday killed one person and wounded three others.
Bishop Makarious of Minya said in a brief statement Sunday that the families of two priests in the Tahna El-Jabal village were attacked by assailants wielding knives and batons, killing a 27-year-old man and injuring three others, including a woman.
The cleric did not elaborate on the reasons behind the violence, but local media reports suggest the fighting resulted from an argument between Muslim and Christian children over priority to pass through the street.
Emad Nabil, a local lawyer, was quoted in a Christian forum as saying that police had arrested four suspects in relation to the attack.
Al-Azhar, the country's top Sunni Muslim authority, called on both sides to resort to law and not to provide the opportunity for "malicious" attempts "to sow discord and ignite sectarian strife."
The prestigious Muslim body said a delegation from the Family House, a group of Muslim and Christian leaders that promotes peaceful coexistence, was sent to the village to help settle the matter.
Christians, who make up about 10 percent of Egypt's population of 90 million, have long complained of discrimination and sectarian attacks in the predominantly Sunni Muslim country.
In May, Muslim villagers set ablaze seven Christian homes and assaulted a Christian man's elderly mother, parading her naked in public. The assault in in Minya's El-Karm village was sparked by rumours that the man was having an illicit relationship with a Muslim woman.
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Egypt's education minister announced on Monday that the results of final year exams for secondary students, called Thanaweya Amma, are expected by the middle of next week.
In a press conference in the ministry's headquarters, Minister of Education El-Hilali El-Sherbini said that the ministry has not decided on a certain day to release the results, instead adding that they were expecting the results next week.
"We called on the exam graders and checkers to take highest degrees of caution and deliberation so students and parents would be reassured," he said.
El-Sherbini also announced the success rates of some of the subjects, with 95% of students passing the Arabic Language exan, 84.7% passing English Level One and 98.3% passing the Second Foreign Language French or German exams.
The minister added that 95.5% of students passed the Geography exam and 90.7% passed Philosophy, adding that 88.7% were able to pass the Psychology exam.
In sciences subjects, the minister noted that 87% of students passed the Biology exam while 80.3% passed Chemistry and 77.6% in Physics.
In maths-related subjects, 88.7% of students passed the Pure Math exam and 90.6% passed the Applied Math exam.
Around 600,000 students sat for the exams this year.
Violations
The education minister also discussed the violations that took place during examinations and procedures undergone by the education ministry, interior ministry and telecommunications ministry so that a repeat of this year's exam leaks will not occur in the future.
El-Sherbini said that during the exams the ministry observed an increase in the possession of mobile phones and electronic devices used for cheating in exam rooms.
According to the minister, the ministry voided 662 exam papers in for one of the subjects due to cheating , while 333 other cases were cancelled for cheating. Ninety-five were referred to general prosecution.
The minister pointed out that for the first time in the history of the Thanaweya Amma exams, eye glasses and watches with wireless technology were used for cheating, adding that some students surgically implanted ear pieces to aid in their cheating attempts.
El-Sherbini has been under fire and students called for his dismissal during the June examination period after a number of exams were leaked.
In June, hundreds of high school students protested in downtown Cairo against the education ministrys decision to cancel or postpone the exams after earlier versions were leaked. The students were dispersed by the police using tear gas.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi said following the leaks that they would not be repeated next year, adding that the country was currently reconsidering the system of high school exams.
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With the recent Ebola epidemic in West Africa reviving interest in the first outbreak of the virus 40 years ago, a new report highlighting the lessons learned from the smaller, more quickly contained 1976 outbreak has been published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.
The article was co-authored by scientists involved in investigating the first outbreak, including lead author Dr Joel Breman of the Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health, and Professor Peter Piot and Professor David Heymann from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
The first known outbreak occurred in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). In the new report the authors write that the "key to diagnosis in 1976 was the relatively quick clinical recognition of a severe, possibly new disease by national authoritiesa International notification and specimen provision occurred within five weeks from onset of the first cases; this did not occur in the 2013-2016 epidemic, when the delay was over three months."
The report also gives a timeline of events during the first outbreak and sets out the roles the experts played.
Local Zairean, Belgian and French doctors and health officials were the first to see and assess patients in Yambuku, Zaire. Blood specimens from a sick Belgian nun who had contracted the virus were sent to the laboratory of microbiology at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, where Piot worked as a research fellow together with Guido Van der Groen.
The ITM team were the first to isolate and observe the virus, which resembled the Marburg virus. The laboratory of Karl Johnson at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identified and recognised that this was a new, unknown virus that fulfilled the criteria for discovery of a new virus.
Peter Piot, Director of the School, and David Heymann, Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, were part of the team that went to Zaire to investigate the first outbreak of Ebola, visiting the affected communities in order to discover how the virus was transmitted. At that time, Heymann was a medical epidemiologist in sub-Saharan Africa, on assignment from CDC. It was in Zaire that Karl Johnson suggested naming the new virus after a river (the Ebola river was chosen), rather than the Yambuku village, so as not to stigmatise the community.
Peter Piot said: "It was a privilege to be part of the team that worked on the first Ebola outbreak and to have played a role in its discovery. Our work helped shaped the world's knowledge of what was an unknown but deadly virus, something we can all be proud of.
"Reflecting on the 1976 outbreak offers clues to mistakes made during the most recent epidemic. For instance, even though there was less technology 40 years ago specimens of the virus were available two months faster than during the recent epidemic."
The authors say more extensive preparations, including improved screening capabilities, are needed to detect and manage future outbreaks promptly. Primary prevention through strengthened prediction models, detection, response, control mechanisms, and international cooperation and coordination are essential for all countries in Africa and elsewhere where Ebola and new and re-emergent pathogens are sure to surface again.
Peter Piot said: "There is no doubt that Ebola will return. We need to react more quickly, urgently develop an effective vaccine, and strengthen 'on the ground' local health systems to improve detection and containment of the virus."
In total, there were 318 cases of Ebola in 1976 and 280 deaths in an outbreak that lasted less than 11 weeks. In the recent West Africa outbreak, there were 11,310 deaths out of nearly 29,000 cases, and the epidemic lasted more than two years -- almost 10 times as long as in 1976. The death rate in 1976 - 88% - was much higher than in the recent outbreak in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone - around 50%.
During the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa, Professor Piot advised governments and international agencies on the response and was Chair of the World Health Organization (WHO) Ebola Science Committee. He also chaired the Harvard Global Health Institute and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Independent Panel on the Global Response to Ebola, published in November 2015, which put forward 10 major reform proposals to prevent future such catastrophes.
David Heymann worked on two subsequent Ebola outbreaks in 1977 and 1995. He was involved in the recent Ebola response and was also an author on the Harvard-London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine report. He is currently Chair of WHO's Emergency Committee on Zika virus.
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Joel G. Breman, David L. Heymann, Graham Lloyd, Joseph B. McCormick. Malonga Miatudila, Frederick A. Murphy, Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfun, Peter Piot, Jean-FranAois Ruppol, Pierre Sureau, Guido van der Groen, Karl M. Johnson. Discovery and Description of Ebola Zaire Virus in 1976 and Relevance to the West African Epidemic During 2013-2016. Journal of Infectious Diseases. DOI: 10.1093/infdis/jiw207
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The annual number of new HIV infections worldwide has barely declined over the past ten years, according to a major new analysis from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study, published in The Lancet HIV. Although the number of new infections has decreased since a peak of 3.3 million per year in 1997, the figure has stayed relatively level at around 2.5 million per year since 2005.
The findings, which are being launched at the International Aids Conference in Durban, show that between 1997-2005 the annual incidence of HIV fell by 2.7% each year, but that slowed to an average of just 0.7% from 2005 - 2015. In the past decade 74 countries including Egypt, Pakistan, Mexico, Russia and the Philippines, have even seen an increase in age-standardised rates of new infections.
The GBD study features more than 1,700 collaborators across 124 countries - including London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine experts -- and is co-ordinated by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, Seattle. It is the largest and most comprehensive study measuring epidemiological levels and trends worldwide.
The number of people living with HIV has been increasing steadily from 28 million in 2000 to around 39 million in 2015, largely due to the expansion of antiretroviral therapy (ART). The increase in the proportion of people living with HIV who are on ART (which has risen by 32.2% for men and 38.9% for women in the past decade) has also contributed to a decline in annual deaths from HIV/AIDS. The number of annual deaths fell by 0.6 million, from a peak of 1.8 million in 2005 to 1.2 million in 2015.
However, progress on HIV mortality has varied between regions and countries. For example, in sub-Saharan Africa, the scale-up of ART and other interventions have led to large declines in HIV-related deaths, while in many countries in Northern Africa and the Middle-East (such as Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco), there has been very little progress.
The GBD analysis showed that in 2015, three-quarters of new HIV infections (1.8 million) were in sub-Saharan Africa. Outside of Africa, south Asia accounted for 8.5% (212,500), southeast Asia for 4.7% (117,500), and east Asia for 2.3% (57,500).
Commenting on the research, Director of the School Professor Peter Piot, who was the founding executive director of UNAIDS, said: "This study shows that the AIDS epidemic is not over by any means and that HIV/AIDS remains one of the biggest public health threats of our time. The continuing high rate of over 2 million new HIV infections per year represents a collective failure which must be addressed through intensified prevention efforts and continued investment in HIV vaccine research."
Despite improvements in mortality and treatment numbers, many countries will struggle to reach the 90-90-90 targets set by the global community for the year 2020. These set out that 90% of everyone living with HIV will know their HIV status; 90% of those diagnosed with HIV will receive ART; 90% of people receiving ART will have viral suppression (when ART reduces an individual's viral load to an undetectable level).
Director of IHME, Prof Christopher Murray, said: "Development assistance for HIV/AIDS is stagnating and health resources in many low-income countries are expected to plateau over the next 15 years. Therefore, a massive scale-up of efforts from governments and international agencies will be required to meet the estimated $36 billion needed every year to realise the goal of ending AIDS by 2030, along with better detection and treatment programmes and improving the affordability of antiretroviral drugs."
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The second imported wheat deal in 2016 comes amid legal action against corruption in domestic wheat procurement
Egypt purchased Saturday an additional 300,000 tons of imported wheat in a public tender on a free-on-board basis with a separate freight offer, the General Authority for Supply Commodities (GASC) said on its website.
The state grain buyer GASC said the cargos are expected to be shipped from 21 to 30 August, giving a breakdown of the second imported wheat deal in 2016 as follows:
120,000 tons of Romanian wheat from Amerroba at $174.33 per ton.
60,000 tons of Romanian wheat from Cerialcom at $174.99 per ton.
60,000 tons of Russian wheat from Aston at $175.05 per ton.
60,000 tons of Russian wheat from Louis Dreyfus at $176.25 per ton.
Last week, GASC announced the purchase of 180,000 tons of Ukrainian and Russian wheat with an average price of $173.03 per ton.
The wheat tender comes after the Egyptian government decided to allow up to 0.05 percent ergot, a common grains fungus, in imported wheat shipments.
International firms will check the purchased wheat in ports prior to shipment to Egypt, to ensure adherence to international standards, Al-Ahram Arabic news website reported, citing GASC vice chairman Ahmed Youssef.
Youssef said that a technical committee, comprised of a number of Egyptian ministries, excluding the Ministry of Supply to ensure impartiality, will also check the wheat upon arrival to Egyptian ports.
Egypt has enough strategic reserves of the commodity to last until mid-January 2017, Minister of Supply Khaled Hanafi said last month.
Egypt has procured five million tons of domestic wheat, around 25 percent more than the targeted amount for this year.
On Thursday, Egypt's general prosecutor ordered the detention of silo owners involved in local wheat procurement corruption, as well as members of the governmental committee tasked with receiving the wheat.
According to a statement from his office, top prosecutor Nabil Sadek also imposed a travel ban on the defendants who face charges of "seizing public funds, forging official documents, and undermining the Egyptian economy and the national security of the country."
The statement by the general prosecutor's office referred to investigations conducted by the public funds prosecutor that revealed that local wheat procured by the government in documents was never delivered.
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Focussing on the health of prisoners is vital in order to control HIV and tuberculosis (TB) epidemics globally, according to a major six-part Series published in The Lancet on HIV and related infections in prisoner populations. The findings, which are being presented at the International AIDS Conference in Durban, demonstrate that the mass imprisonment of drug users has led to far higher levels of HIV, TB and hepatitis B and C among prisoners than found in the general population.
It is estimated that worldwide, 56-90% of people who inject drugs will be imprisoned at some point. The Series highlights that levels of HIV infection are 20 times higher among prisoners in western Europe than the civilian population (4.2% vs 0.2%). In most areas of the world HIV infection rates are higher in female inmates than male inmates. While most prisoners are men, women and girls are the fastest growing imprisoned group worldwide.
New estimates in the Series predict that up to half of all new HIV infections over the next 15 years in eastern Europe will stem from increased HIV transmission risk among inmates, and imprisonment could be responsible for three-quarters of new tuberculosis infections among people who inject drugs.
The risk is not isolated to prisons, with around 10.2 million people imprisoned worldwide at any given time and an estimated 30 million passing through prison systems annually, undiagnosed and untreated infections can spread to communities when prisoners return home. This movement can also cause interruptions to treatments, which poses a risk to former prisoners and their communities.
Martin McKee, Professor of European Public Health at the School, who was a co-author on the Series, said: "This Series shows that prisons and other detention facilities play an important role in the AIDS epidemic. Yet there are still far too many gaps in our knowledge of what is happening in prisons, especially in low and middle income countries. This has consequences for not only prisoners but also staff and the population at large.
"Crucially, our study shows the importance of reducing the number of drug users in prisons and providing opioid substitution therapy for those who are incarcerated as key parts of the struggle against AIDS."
Prisons and detention centres have become hubs for infection spread due to high rates of injecting drug use in some settings, lack of access to condoms, unhygienic conditions and overcrowding.
Evidence published in the Series shows that countries can lower infectious disease transmissions by scaling up harm reduction and treatment strategies in prisons, such as opioid agonist therapy (OAT) - a form of substitution therapy to help users reduce drug use, antiretroviral therapy (ART), sterile needle and syringe exchange and condom distribution. While these interventions have proven successful when applied, the programmes are severely underfunded and impeded by rules in both high and low income countries. For example, only 43 countries offer OAT and less than 1% of prisoners worldwide who need the treatment actually receive it.
Prof Martin McKee co-authored Series paper one, which investigated the global burden of HIV, hepatitis and TB in prisoners and detainees. Modelling conducted in the paper suggests that the most effective way to control and even reduce the incidence of infection in prisoners and wider communities is to reduce the mass incarceration of people who inject drugs. Reducing the number of prisoners who inject drugs by 25% could see a 7-15% drop in new cases of HIV in the drug-injecting prison population after five years. The paper also suggests that by scaling up OAT to those in need, a quarter of new HIV cases in this population could be prevented.
In their accompanying Comment, Prof McKee and colleagues call for urgent reform. They write that "The Nelson Mandela Rules provide benchmarks to achieve meaningful reform in access to health care for those detained. We can, and should, do better to reduce both the numbers of those incarcerated and the length of their sentences, and to improve prevention, treatment, and post-release linkage to care for prison-associated infectious diseases. Meeting community standards of care in correctional settings, especially in low-income and middle-income countries, will require political will, financial investment, and support from medical and humanitarian organisations across the globe, but it can and must be done. Global control of HIV, viral hepatitis, and tuberculosis will not be achieved without addressing the unmet health needs of prisoners."
Publication:
HIV and related infections in prisoners, The Lancet, July 2016
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6 of the World's Best Photo Tours
6 of the Worlds Best Photo Tours:
I have seen a significant increase in travelers who are interested in photography as quality equipment has become more affordable and social media has become more prevalent, said Lauren Hefferon, Founder of Travel Vision Journeys , a new company offering active photo adventures to destinations like Peru, Brazil, Maine and Patagonia. Unlike most travel options, photography tours allow for a slow, deep dive into the spirit of a place. It expands the sensory experience as guests move more leisurely, but with greater intimacy and intensity I call it mindful travel.1. Iceland Northern Lights Photo Tour - The northern lights are one of the most elusive and unpredictable attractions of Iceland, and this trip is all about trying to find them with Big Chill Adventures co-founder and professional photographer Mindy Cambiar. Statistically, the best time to see the Aurora is near the equinox, when the air is cold and clear. So, Big Chill Adventures chose March for a dedicated photography tour. Guests will need extreme cold weather gear on this six-day tour, as they will spend the evenings outside and sometimes stay up all night in the cold. Other highlights include dogsledding on the Langjokull Icecap, whale watching, visiting geothermal pools and geologic formations of a recent lava flow, and more. Prices start at $3,750.2. Ancient Inca Photo Tour This Peru photography tour offers a sensory immersion into three of the most stunning and culturally intriguing destinations in South AmericaCusco, the Imperial City of the Incas, the pristine and awe-inspiring landscapes and villages of the Sacred Valley and finally the majestic Machu Picchu, one of the most coveted and beloved places in the world. For lovers of landscapes, colorful cultures and extraordinary culinary experiences, this Travel Vision Journeys tour has it all. Prices start at $5,700.3.- Fly into a remote polar bear cabin camp set along the coast of Hudson Bay for an almost private polar bear viewing and photography experience like none other. Join Adventure Life on this unique opportunity to photograph one of the worlds most magnificent predators from ground level in the Canadian Arctic. This is not just a polar bear trip its an immersive experience in the land of the polar bears, the Inuit people and the intricacies of the tundra. This program gets you as close to polar bears in their natural environment as possible. Prices start at $7,995.4. Patagonia Myths, Mountains and Mammals - Join renowned South American photographer and nature documentary filmmaker, Ossian Lindholm, on this nine-day Travel Vision Photo Journeys exclusivea Patagonian hiking and photo tour that ranges from Argentinas spectacular Los Glaciares National Park to Chiles renowned Torres Del Paine National Park. Wildlife abounds as reclusive pumas, guanacos, the Darwin fox, and soaring condors are just some of the many highlights. Prices start at $6,900.5. South Georgia Cruise & Photography Symposium - Journey to the jewels of the South Atlantic Ocean on this 17-day South Georgia cruise and photography symposium with Adventure Life. Incredibly remote and wild, the islands are home to an abundance of wildlife. Called 'the most staggering wildlife show on earth,' the islands delight their guests with pristine landscape and ultimate photography opportunities. This unique itinerary offers travelers seven full days exploring the islands - almost double the time traditionally spent in South Georgia. Prices start at $10,395.6. Luxury East Africa Photo Safari - Days will be filled in a photographers paradise with breathtaking vistas, abundant wildlife and endless plains. Experience the Great migration of a half million wildebeest and about 200,000 zebras and 500,000 Thomsons gazelle on this Frontiers International Travel tour with celebrated photographers and guides Barry & Cathy Beck. Bask in the beauty of tree-climbing lions and more. This very special itinerary includes the Ngorongoro Crater, the Serengeti, the Masai Mara and one of the most eagerly awaited and avidly observed wildlife spectacles on earth the annual Great Migration. It features four world-class camps Kenyas Kichwa Tembo Masai Mara Tented Camp, Tanzanias Serengeti Under Canvas, Lake Manyara Tree Lodge, and architecturally spectacular, the Ngorongoro Crater Lodge. Prices start at $19,985.
Brooks Lake Lodge Announces Jackson Hole Fall Arts Festival Day Out
The 100-year-old historic lodge and exclusive resort experience is located in the Shoshone National Forest, a short drive from Jackson Hole, Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone National Park. Brooks Lake Lodge created the new four-night Jackson Hole Fall Arts Festival Day Out package, offered Sept. 7-11, 2016, to provide guests with a fun day in town to visit the renowned Jackson Hole Fall Arts Festival and Western Design Conference while still taking advantage of the remote scenic beauty and outdoor activities of a Brooks Lake Lodge & Spa stay.The Jackson Hole Fall Arts Festival Day Out package includes Brooks Lake Lodge accommodations, meals, activities and spa accessplus round-trip transportation to Jackson Hole on Friday, Sept. 9, with tickets to the Western Design Conference. Rates for the Sept. 7-11, 2016, four-night all-inclusive package start at $2,133 per person including transportation from the lodge to and from Jackson on Friday, Sept. 9, ticket to the Western Design Conference, all taxes and resort fees.A signature event of the Jackson Hole Fall Arts Festival, the Western Design Conference Exhibit + Sale (WDC) presents one-of-a-kind Western-inspired functional art that reflects a high degree of sophistication, creativity and craftsmanship often with an innovative use of distinctly Western materials. Art lovers and collectors will find a variety of unique handmade furnishings, accessories, fashions and jewelry on display and for sale, with the opportunity to meet and talk with the 130 juried artists for a deeper understanding of the influences and processes that went into creating the pieces.Now in its 32nd year, the Jackson Hole Fall Arts Festival takes over the town of Jackson during one of its most beautiful times of year, with the surrounding mountains ablaze in color. On Sept. 9, more than 30 of the town's internationally known art galleries open their doors to showcase magnificent art with food and wine for the much-anticipated Palates and Palettes Gallery Walk, one of the festival's most popular events.Brooks Lake Lodge & Spa, a 100-year-old historic guest ranch near Jackson Hole, Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone National Park, sits at 9,200 feet above sea level one mile from the North American Continental Divide, with views of the Pinnacle Buttes, Austin's Peak and Brooks Mountain. Surrounded by mountains, evergreen forests, wildlife and alpine Brooks Lake, the exclusive, all-inclusive Wyoming Rocky Mountain resort offers five-star service, luxury accommodations and gourmet dining. The new separate spa facility was built with Western Craftsman-style detailing to complement the historic lodge. A dude ranch by summer and ski and snowmobile haven in the winter, the lodge provides year-round activities for outdoor enthusiasts. All-inclusive rates include lodging, meals, activities and spa access. For additional information and reservations visit www.brookslake.com or call 866.213.4022.
UK Export Finance, the UK's export credit agency, is committed to funding trade deals with Egypt worth up to GBP 500 million, and has GBP 2.5 billion of financing available for projects in Egypt, according to a British embassy press release on Sunday.
The UK's trade envoy to Egypt, Jeffrey Donaldson MP, and UK Export Finance CEO Louis Taylor, arrived in Cairo on Sunday to meet with Egyptian officials and businessmen for talks on bilateral trade, the statement said.
The delegation will look at projects such as the Suez Canal Economic Zone, the Tahrir Petrochemicals project in Sokhna, and Smart Village in Alexandria.
"Taylor comes to Egypt with the promise that UK Export Finance can underwrite prospective UK-Egyptian trade deals with up to GBP 500 million in financing or insurance, money that could directly help the Egyptian government or businesses gain access to world-class good and services provided by British companies," the statement read.
UK Export Finance (UKEF) provides financing and insurance for British companies doing business overseas to make sure they get paid by importers.
"The UK is a global leader in many of the sectors for which Egypt has greatest demand, including transport and infrastructure, and UKEF can help Egyptian buyers access UK goods and services through its innovative, flexible and competitive financing terms, Taylor said.
The meetings will include with Prime Minister Sherif Ismail, Trade and Industry Minister Tarek Kabil, Military Production Minister Mohamed El-Assar, Investment Minister Dalia Khorshid and Petroleum Minister Tarek El-Molla.
London has created a new Ministry of International Trade to expand global commercial ties for the UK as it exits the European Union in the coming years, according to the statement.
"The past few months have seen many enquiries from British companies wishing to do business in Egypt and their interest highlights the significant opportunities that are available across a range of Egyptian commercial sectors," Donaldson said.
The volume of trade between Egypt and the UK is over GBP 1.5 billion, UK ambassador to Egypt John Casson said. British investments represent 40 percent of Egypt's foreign direct investment inflows.
Britain's interest is in helping Egypt build a strong, dynamic economy that provides jobs and opportunities for all Egyptians," Casson said.
"We are proud to be Egypt's biggest investor and of our trade worth over 1.5 billion per year. But we are hungry for more and to seize the opportunities that Brexit will give us to forge new opportunities," Casson added.
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A simple idea I would like to offer those responsible for implementing economic policy: uncertainty and opacity are the bane of investment, employment, and economic development.
What investors need above all is a clear understanding of the policies and programs the government intends to implement. Various economic actors will make their own calculations and assessments and will be able to deal with variables and adjust to changing conditions - including price fluctuations, tax hikes, or changes in supply and demand conditionsbut only if the state allows them to understand its policies and apprises them of its intentions and directions.
Undoubtedly Egypt is experiencing tough economic times and the country needs major resources we dont have. But even amid scarce resources and capacities, the state can present a clearly delineated economic vision and a realistic, pragmatic program. It can involve society in what it intends to do, accept revision, criticism, and correction. None of this requires resources, loans, or foreign grants. It just means honoring the Egyptian saying "honesty is the best policy".
This observation is occasioned by the ongoing contradictory, inconsistent stances and statements coming from economic officials. Taken together, they do not indicate a coherent, coordinated economic policy that can be monitored or engaged with, or constitute a foundation on which to build expectations.
Ill give some examples. First, the Ministry of Investment announced its intention to offer some equity in some state-owned enterprises to the public. But meanwhile the Ministry of Public Sector Businesses, the body with core competence, stated that the sale of state assets is not currently on the table.
Second there is the uncertainty surrounding talks and a potential agreement between Egypt and the IMF. Is a deal in the works, as some officials say, or is it not an option, as other state officials claim? If an agreement is imminent, shouldnt its outlines be discussed in public, so the announcement doesnt come as a happy surprise for some and a less happy one for others?
The third example is that of tax policy, specifically the value added tax, currently being discussed in parliament while the final rate continues to be a mystery, as are the items the VAT would cover.
The same ambiguity exists to varying degrees in numerous aspects of economic policy, from the foreign exchange policy, and the capital gains tax on listed securities, to the future of export subsidies, financing for megaprojects, and funding the growing public debt.
Perhaps the reason is concern at the reaction if the public is informed of coming price or tax increases or other costs. In that case, the state may need to reassess its opinion of the public and its capacity to bear hardship. Despite the extremely difficult economic and security conditions of recent years, Egyptians have been prepared for more sacrifice, understanding of the difficulties and forgiving of many mistakes. I think the public has the right to be a partner and enjoy the states trust, instead of being a bystander whose reactions the authorities fear.
Or maybe there really is something to hide. That would be a bigger problem. The government has a serious legal responsibility to disclose its policies and programs as required by the constitution. And the parliament has the responsibility not only to debate the budget and laws put before it, but also to monitor their implementation and the achievement of their goals.
And if the reason is neither lack of trust in the people or sensitive information, but that there is no economic policy or that it is disputed among state parties themselves, then that would be the biggest problem of all.
*The writer holds a PhD in financial law from the London School of Economics. He is former deputy prime minister, former chairman of the Egyptian Financial Supervisory Authority and former chairman of the General Authority for Investment. This article was published in Arabic in El-Shorouq newspaper on Monday, 18 July.
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South Africas R&D tax incentive scheme reviewed
South Africa offers a 150% tax deduction on expenditure, plus an accelerated depreciation deduction for capital expenditure, on research and development (R&D) activities in the country. The scheme was introduced in 2006 and is reviewed annually to see whether it delivers on certain objectives such as attracting R&D investment into the country.
This month the government endorsed the 2014/15 report on the scheme. This report is not yet public but a spokesperson from the Department of Science and Technology (DST) told Managing IP that the figures in the report are the same as those published in the 2013/14 report.
This is because we have not updated the count for IP outputs. We are starting a process for impact evaluation of the incentive which will provide us with a detailed account of the IP impact, the spokesperson explained. All the reports on the scheme are published here.
According to the governments press release, R6 billion ($413 million) was claimed by 876 companies between November 2006 and February 2015. The scheme supported around R33.3 billion ($2 billion) worth of R&D expenditure during this period.
Some of the companies that participated in the scheme reported, among other results: (a) 765 scientific publications; (b) 1,267 total granted and pending patents; and (c) 111 total number of other forms of IP created.
Based on the 2013/14 report we understand that the patent figures cover both local and international patent applications. The top five industries in terms of R&D expenditure were: (a) manufacturing, (b) financial intermediation, (c) real estate and business services, (d) transport, storage and communication and (e) mining and quarrying. The report also identified electrotechnical and ICT, aerospace and defence, advanced materials and nuclear as four key sectors for long-term development.
The DST, however, says the 2014/15 report highlights certain aspects of the scheme (for example delays in the approval process) that need to be improved. The government has initiated legislation to relax the rules and allow taxpayers to reopen assessments and claim approved R&D expenditure that they incurred during that year.
This has been included in the 2016 Draft Tax Laws Amendment Bill (see page 25), which is now open for public comments until August 8 2016.
IP Consultative Framework established in South Africa
From the same governments press release we also learn that the DSTs IP Consultative Framework (IPCF) has been approved. The purpose of the IPCF is to enhance the engagement between government and stakeholders towards the development of South Africas IP Policy.
The government said it will ensure that the IP policy respects property rights as enshrined in the Constitution while striking appropriate balances with public interest and responds to South Africas unique innovation and development dynamics.
In an article law firm Spoor & Fisher said: South Africas IP policy remains delayed, but it would appear that the consultative process is beginning again. We are encouraged by the Governments commitment to respect IP rights while striking appropriate balances with public interest, and hope that the IP policy will be finalised without much more delay.
South Africa: AdWord bidding isnt unfair
South Africas Supreme Court of Appeal has confirmed that a claimant cannot invoke a special kind of unfair competition law termed leaning on to prevent a competitor from bidding on its unregistered trade mark as a Google AdWord keyword. Delivering the judgment of the Court in Cochrane Steel Products (Pty) Ltd v M-Systems Group, Judge Ponnan said: Our courts have generally declined to come to the aid of an applicant complaining that a rival trader has used its trade name for its own commercial purposes unless that applicant can establish that the rival trader is using its trade mark or trade name in a manner likely to deceive or confuse members of the public.
The judge added: For imitation is the lifeblood of competition and the bare imitation of anothers product without more is permitted. The Court made it clear that the policy behind this is to prevent the creation of impermissible monopolies.
On the claim of passing off, the Courts view was that the appellant did not demonstrate that the way the advertisement is displayed gives rise to likelihood of confusion. For more see our analysis of the High Court decision in 2014 here and this case note by law firm Adams & Adams.
Deadlock on GIs and disclosure proposals
WTO members failed to reach agreement on document TN/C/W/52 at a special session of the TRIPs Council this month. According to the chairperson of the TRIPs Council (Trade Negotiation Committee) Dacio Castillo: "The delegations attending the consultations largely reiterated known positions and did not offer suggestions on how to move forward. Most delegations who spoke said that they were still in reflection mode and were not in a position to make concrete suggestions as to next steps at this stage.
The document contains proposals by a number of members for three issues to be included in the Doha Work Programme negotiations. They are: (a) a register open to geographical indications for wines and spirits (GI); (b) a mandatory requirement for the disclosure of the country source of genetic resources and/or traditional knowledge; and (c) extension of GIs to cover all products beyond wines and spirits.
Switzerland, the EU and the US hope common ground can be reached after the summer break.
TRIPs Protocol secures 76 members
Papua New Guinea is the latest country to deposit its instrument of acceptance for the 2005 Protocol amending the TRIPs Agreement.
The Protocol enhances the TRIPs flexibilities to make it easier for WTO members to import and export generic medicines made under compulsory licences. This development brings the number of acceptances to 76.
The amendment will enter into force when two thirds, 109 as of today, of the WTO members have ratified the Protocol. The deadline to reach this milestone is December 31 2017. Until then, members have to rely on the existing 2003 waiver to facilitate access to medicines. This is a topic of discussion at UNCTADs conference in Nairobi this month.
India and others criticise EUs goods in transit regime
At a TRIPs Council meeting last month Brazil, India, South Africa, China and Indonesia expressed concerns over the new EU trade mark regime dealing with goods in transit. They say it could hinder shipment of legitimate goods - an argument made by the Dutch delegation before the Council of the EU last year. India says it violates various provisions of the TRIPs Agreement. The EU defended the criticisms from the five countries arguing that there are safeguards in its new regime.
During the meeting the chairperson also urged WTO members to engage in more informal discussions on meeting agenda. Ambassador Modest Jonathan Mero believes such talks would encourage an open and stimulating discussion in which delegates would not feel compelled to be limited to simply putting well-known positions on record.
MPP signs patent licence deal
The Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) has signed manufacturing licences with Aurobindo, Desano, Emcure, Hetero Labs, Laurus Labs, Lupin and Zydus Cadila to produce generic versions of drugs used for the treatment of HIV and hepatitis C. MPP is a UN-backed organisation which serves as a brokerage entity between patent owners and manufacturers of generic drugs for certain diseases in low and middle-income countries.
These new sub-licences will secure greater volumes of low-cost medicines for people living with HIV and hepatitis C in low- and middle-income countries, said Greg Perry, MPPs Executive Director. We look forward to working with the companies to speed delivery of these treatments to those most in need of better medical options, he added. For more information click here.
Draft Regulations for Arusha Protocol
Experts from ARIPO member states met last month to review the draft Regulations for the Implementation of the Arusha Protocol.
We understand civil society organisations such as the African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB), African Seed Trade Association (AFSTA) and Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) took part in the review.
This follows the ARIPO director generals call last year for all stakeholders to get involved. Further fine-tuning is required before the final draft can be presented for adoption at the 40th session of the Administrative Council.
Kenya is the latest African country to accede to the UPOV Convention.
INTA comes to Africa in September
INTA will be holding its first conference in Africa for many years on September 1 to 2 2016. The conference will be held in Cape Town, South Africa. The theme of the conference is Building Africa with Brands. For more information including registration click here.
Also on the blog in the past week were:
Africa IP news round-up (July 2016)
Guest post: A smoother road thanks to TM5 harmonisation efforts
Has the PTAB peaked already?
Users of Madrid System warned about problems
ASEAN and more in our bumper mid-year issue
Weve also posted the following articles in the past week (log in via subscription or free trial):
Patent litigation trends in Russia
Federal Circuits en banc MedCo ruling clarifies on-sale bar
Interview: Nakeena Taylor of Pandora, corporate counsel, Pandora
PTAB grants motion to amend ContentGuard patent in Google/Apple CBM
Data: PTAB petitioners, patent owners and law firms in 2016s first half ranked
The Marrakesh Treaty comes into force what impact will it have?
PTAB grants attorneys fees for first time, to RPX
Apple pays $25m to settle Network-1 patent litigation
Physical markets can be forced to stop sales of fakes - CJEU
Nokia and Samsung expand cross licence
Nokia and Samsung have expanded their patent cross license agreement to cover certain additional patent portfolios of both parties. Nokias deal with Samsung was previously extended in 2013. Compensation related to that agreement was determined by arbitration between the two companies announced in February this year.
The agreement expands access for each company to patented technologies of the other. Nokia said the agreement reinforces Nokia's leadership in technologies for the programmable world, and expects a positive impact to the net sales of Nokia Technologies starting from the third quarter of 2016. As a result of the expanded agreement, Nokia Technologies' annualized net sales related to patent and brand licensing is expected to grow to a run rate of approximately 950 million by the end of 2016, said Nokia in a statement.
As noted by Fortune, since 2013 Nokia has bought out Siemens stake in joint venture Nokia Siemens Networks and bought Alcatel-Lucent. This added 3,700 patent families from the Siemens deal and 17,500 patent families from Alcatel-Lucent to the 9,900 patent families held by Nokia Technologies.
"With intellectual property portfolios from Nokia Technologies, Nokia Networks and Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia has a wealth of technologies relevant to mobile devices and beyond," said Ramzi Haidamus, president of Nokia Technologies in the Nokia statement. "We welcome this expanded agreement with Samsung which recognizes the strength of our assets, and we continue to pursue new licensing opportunities across a number of diverse industries."
Professors call for venue reform
A letter signed by 45 professors has been sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee supporting patent venue reform.
Changes to the venue rules are necessary and urgent to address the significant problem of forum shopping in patent litigation cases, said the letter.
The professors noted that the Eastern District of Texas is home to nearly half of all US district court patent cases, with one judge handling 1,686 of the cases filed in the district in 2015 or two-thirds of the patent cases in the district.
If all of those cases were to go to trial, that single judge would have to complete four to five trials every day of the year (including weekends) not counting any time for motions or other hearings. The burden of this overwhelming number of cases leads, unsurprisingly, to a high reversal rate on appeal, said the letter.The Federal Circuit affirmed 39% of the decisions from the Eastern District of Texas in 2015.
It is imperative that Congress address patent venue reform to return basic fairness, rationality, and balance to patent law, said the letter. Specifically, venue reform that treats plaintiffs and defendants equally by requiring a substantive connection to the venue on the part of at least one party is critical to ensure fairness and uniformity in patent law.
Last week, Senator Jeff Flake (right) slammed patent trolls while advocating for the VENUE Act, which only has two co-sponsors.
Patents are an important part of our economy and are vital to promoting innovation and spurring growth. However, the health of the patent system is at risk, Observer quoted Senator Flake as saying. Specifically, there is an ever-increasing problem of frivolous patent lawsuits brought by non-practicing entities, also known as patent trolls.
Adidas puts foot down
Patent disputes appear to be increasingly afoot in the sneaker industry. Adidas recently sued Skechers in the District of Oregon, claiming its patented technology of a Springblade shoe has been infringed, reports Forbes.
Skechers Mega Flex shoe shares similarities with Adidas Springblade shoe, released in 2013.
Both have turned blades on the bottom designed to propel runners forward.
Nike earlier this year also sued Skechers for allegedly copying sneaker designs. Skechers took the fight to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, filing eight petitions challenging Nikes design patents.
Adidas also recently filed three petitions challenging Nike patents.
A first for Guangzhou IP Court
Guangzhou IP Court, as of December 31 2015
Number of cases accepted Number of cases closed Adjudicated Mediated Decision issued Civil case
1st instance 2,880 720 139 554 2nd instance 2,033 298 69 1,091 Retrial 7 N/A N/A 7 Other 1 N/A N/A 1 Administrative case 1st instance 15 7 N/A 4 2nd instance 4 3 N/A N/A Total 4,940 1,528 208 1,657 Source: Jiaquan IP Law
The Guangzhou IP Court in China has issued what is believed to be its first preliminary injunction in a patent infringement case.
According to The Fashion Law, the court ordered Guangzhou Wentan Trading to cease making and selling nine models of Louboutin lipstick that the luxury fashion brand claimed infringed its design patents for lipstick cases.
The Guangzhou IP Court was established in December 2014, and is one of three IP courts in China, along with Beijing and Shanghai.
According to an update from Jiaquan IP Law, the court has had a high number of IP cases, with 4,940 cases accepted by the end of 2015, with 3,393 of those cases closed.
More than 200 of the cases had a party from Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan or foreign countries, with 83 of those cases involving US entities while a couple of cases involve British, French and Japanese entities, according to Jiaquan IP Law.
Yahoos serious severity issues
Yahoo may struggle to sell its patent portfolio, according to a recent report. A survey by TurboPatent estimated that 44% of its patents have high severity issues, reports Fortune.
TurboPatent analysed 1,757 Yahoo patents and 896 patent applications in the Excalibur portfolio.
TurboPatent's analysis found Yahoo!'s Excalibur patent portfolio contains a much higher percentage of potentially worthless patents than the average patent portfolio, said the company in a statement. In contrast, it said roughly 30% of the average patent portfolio of large corporations is worthless. An executive summary of the report can be viewed here.
Yahoo today revealed a $440 million loss in the second quarter, according to the BBC.
The patents behind Pokemon Go
It has been impossible to avoid stories about Pokemon Go in the past week. Inevitably, there is an IP angle. In a blog post, Envision IP analysed Nintendos patent portfolio to see how it is protecting the technologies powering games such as Pokemon Go.
According to Envision IP, Nintendo owns more than 70 US patents and has 37 pending related to augmented, mixed and virtual reality hardware and software. Globally, it owns more than 180 patents and published applications related to these types of patents. These patents include aspects such as three-dimensional data processing, displaying immersive scenes, creating virtual spaces, motion and movement sensors for portable devices, eye tracking and visual data overlays.
The company owns almost 1,200 active in-force US patents as a whole, up from about 1,000 in 2013.
While Nintendo continues to re-invent itself with innovative offerings like Pokemon Go, the company has done a good job in obtaining patent protection for its proprietary technologies, concluded Envision IP. Many of its technologies related to immersive display processing and hardware for devices which enable true augmented experiences for users are similar to those technologies found in non-gaming applications of wearable devices and AR glasses.
Berlin : German police have shot dead a 17-year-old Afghan refugee after he attacked train passengers with an axe and a knife, seriously wounding three people in what one official said was a "probable" Islamist attack. Several other people were also injured in the assault on a regional train near the southern city of Wuerzburg, police said, adding that the teenager was killed as he tried to flee. Joachim Herrmann, the interior minister of Bavaria state, said the assailant had arrived as an unaccompanied minor in Germany and was living nearby Ochsenfurt. "It is quite probable that this was an Islamist attack," said a ministry spokesman, adding that the attacker had shouted "Allahu akbar" (God is greatest).
The attack happened around 9:15 pm (1915 GMT) last night on the train, which runs between Treuchlingen and Wuerzburg in Bavaria. "Shortly after arriving at Wuerzburg, a man attacked passengers with an axe and a knife," a police spokesman said. "Three people have been seriously injured and several others lightly injured." Fourteen people were treated for shock. He added: "The perpetrator was able to leave the train, police left in pursuit and as part of this pursuit, they shot the attacker and killed him." There were no further details on the circumstances of the teenager's death.
Germany had thus far escaped the kind of large-scale jihadist attacks seen in the southern French city of Nice last week, in which 31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel used a truck to mow down people leaving a Bastille Day fireworks display, killing 84 people in an attack claimed by Islamic State. In May in Germany, a mentally unstable 27-year-old man carried out a knife attack on a regional train in the south, killing one person and injuring three others. Early reports suggested he had yelled "Allahu akbar" but police later said there was no evidence pointing to a religious motive. He is being held in a psychiatric hospital. Germany let in a record nearly 1.1 million asylum seekers last year, with Syrians the largest group followed by Afghans fleeing ongoing turmoil and poverty in their country.
PTI
Thiruvananthapuram: The Kerala government on Tuesday informed the High Court that senior lawyer MK Damodaran won't take over the legal adviser post of Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan. Though a circular was issued regarding his post, he did not accept it.
The court was considering a petition filed by BJP State President Kummanam Rajasekharan questioning the appointment of senior counsel MK Damodaran as CM's legal adviser. However, Damodaran took the decision even before the consideration of the petition.
Damodaran's appearance for cases against the state government had kicked up a row with many criticizing Chief Minister and the legal adviser. Not just the opposition, the CPI also had expressed strong dissent over the Chief Minister's legal adviser appearing in court for government's opponents
Maersk Line, the world's largest container shipping company, told its clients on Tuesday it will set the maximum freight rate from Far East Asia to Europe at $1,250 per 20-foot container (TEU) as of August 1, down by $200 from the previous month's comparable rate.
The set rate, which applies to all kinds of freight, will not necessarily go through as the shipper is often forced to accept far lower rates because there are too many vessels available to ship goods.
The lower rate comes after Maersk Line and 13 other competitors agreed with EU antitrust regulators to make their pricing practices more transparent.
Last week data from the Shanghai Containerized Freight Index showed rates for transporting containers from ports in Asia to Northern Europe had fallen 17 percent to $776 per TEU.
(Reporting by Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen)
(Beijing) An increasing number of state-owned enterprises are trying to inject profitable financial service subsidiaries into money-losing, publicly listed entities a strategy that's raised eyebrows in Beijing as a possible setback for the government's ongoing SOE reform efforts.
Based on a Caixin analysis of state media reports and company documents, at least six companies in the steel, mining and shipbuilding industries announced plans to acquire financial assets from state-backed parents between January and July.
Most of these companies have been disappointing shareholders for years by operating in the red and, more recently, coming under fire as targets of a government campaign to cut capacity in output-bloated industries.
SOEs that inject financial assets into money-losing entities can rescue struggling businesses and finance downsizing initiatives, which often require expensive factory closings and layoffs, said Wang Zilong, investment banking general manager at China International Capital Corp. (CICC), an investment bank. An injection can also improve a company's financing options, he said.
Asset restructuring has thus been seen as a low-cost way to trim overcapacity and weed out weak companies, Wang added.
But market analysts say the government's strict rules for publicly listed financial firms may pose challenges for SOEs with restructuring plans. They note that the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) in June released a draft of proposed guidelines that would tighten regulator control of asset restructurings through shell company takeovers.
The guidelines are designed to curb speculation surrounding shell companies and backdoor listings. It's unclear when the new rulebook might take effect.
Regulators want to know "whether companies can really cut overcapacity through (asset) restructuring," said a central government official who declined to be identified. If these companies only want to boost stock prices by injecting valuable assets into a money-loser, the official said, the SOE reform project aimed at making state-owned companies more efficient and improving their finances will be dealt a serious blow.
But Wang said SOEs can safely and successfully inject financial assets into their listed units. Such a move can improve access to capital, reduce overcapacity, and give strong players the support they need to launch mergers and acquisitions.
Several analysts interviewed by Caixin said companies with a financial services injection goal should pay close attention to cutting inefficiencies after a restructuring. And the capital raised during a restructuring should be used to finance plant closures, they said.
Minmetals Wins
As of July 18, regulators had approved only one restructuring initiative: an asset reshuffling that improved the bottom line for the state-owned mining and minerals processing conglomerate China Minmetals Corp.
CSRC and the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission gave two thumbs up after Minmetals' battery and electrical components producer Kingray New Materials Science & Technology in May revealed a plan to buy the parent's financial subsidiary, Minmetals Capital Holdings, for about 18 billion yuan.
Shanghai-listed Kingray reported losing 370 million yuan in 2015 and 28 million yuan the previous year, according to company reports. Because it suffered two, consecutive years of losses, the company was required under stock market rules to warn investors of a possible delisting.
The takeover of Minmetals Capital was part of a plan to revive Kingray and prevent a delisting.
Minmetals Capital said it earned about 2 billion yuan last year, up 50 percent year-on-year, through its leasing, futures trading, securities trading and asset management businesses. It also reported about 29 billion yuan worth of assets.
By acquiring Minmetals Capital as well as its subsidiaries, Kingray became a financial services company with a sideline business in battery and electrical components production. The sideline's future is unclear.
The deal did not change Minmetals' control of Kingray, so CSRC could not apply its new rule on shell company-related backdoor listings. The rule does not let companies raise funds by buying a listed shell company and issuing shares.
Nevertheless, in the wake of the takeover, Kingray said it planned to raise 15 billion yuan from private investors to support the restructuring and provide its new financial businesses supplementary capital.
A source close to Minmetals who asked not to be named said the conglomerate plans to use Kingray as a financial platform for channeling capital into its mining businesses and other subsidiaries.
One month before the Kingray deal, Jiangsu Guoxin Investment Group's shipbuilding subsidiary Sainty Marine Corp. Ltd. proposed buying the parent's trust business and some coal-fired power plant assets for 21 billion yuan. Sainty Marine is listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange but is on the verge of delisting after years of losses.
Regulators have yet to decide whether to approve Sainty Marine's proposed asset restructuring. The company is currently adjusting its proposal in hopes of winning government approval, state media reported.
Yet some restructuring plans have already failed.
One recent loser was state-owned steelmaker Baosteel Group's subsidiary Shaogang Iron and Steel, whose plan to acquire the parent's financial services subsidiary flopped, apparently in the face of city government opposition.
Shaogang said in January it planned to sell its steel business in Shaoguan, a city in southern Guangdong Province, and buy Baosteel's trust and securities businesses, including Hwabao Securities and Hwabao Trust for an undisclosed amount. Five months later, citing concerns over the deal's cost, complexity and regulatory uncertainties, the company dropped the plan.
Shenzhen-listed Shaogang reported a 231 million yuan loss for the first quarter 2016 and more than 20 billion yuan in liabilities by the end of March, Caixin learned from sources close to the company.
"There is no way the company can repay its debts," said a source.
The source said the Shaoguan government had opposed the restructuring plan because it called for steel factory layoffs.
(Rewritten by Han Wei)
While U.S. ports have been busy, overall the beginning of the shipping season has been slower than anticipated.
Although the overall cargo numbers remain down when compared to the same time frame last year, in June we were above the five-year average, said Betty Sutton, Administrator of the Saint Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation. Imports arriving in the Great Lakes Seaway System kept longshoremen busy during the month of June. About 45 ships arrived from 19 different countries with high value cargo like windmill components, machinery, aluminum ingots, steel, sugar, and general cargo. Prior to leaving the System, vessels loaded export cargos that consisted of wheat, corn, soybeans, potash and general cargo loaded in containers.
New shipments of intermodal cranes helped drive Junes maritime port cargo numbers above the same period last year, said Port of Indiana-Burns Harbor Port Director Rick Heimann. Weve had multiple large cranes and containers of crane components arrive by ship from Europe that will be used to handle containers in multiple intermodal yards around the Midwest. June cargo volumes were also helped by new outbound shipments of recycled rubber and strong volumes of bulk commodities for use in the steel-making process by ArcelorMittal.
Both steel and agricultural products continued to move at a strong pace through the Port of Milwaukee in June, said Paul Vornholt, port director of the Port of Milwaukee. Additionally, the Port has just completed reconstruction and upgrades on two Class 1 rail lines serving port tenants and terminals. In partnership with the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, the Port invested nearly $3 million on this project which will maximize our multi-modal connections and make it easier for our customers to move their products through the Seaway.
In June, the Port of Oswego received one shipment of aluminum totaling 10,500 metric tons, said Zelko Kirincich, executive director and CEO. It was delivered by a McKeil Marine barge bound for the Novelis plant for use in the automotive sector. We expect to see more activity at the Port in July and August, added Kirincich.
The St. Lawrence Seaway reported that year-to-date cargo shipments for the period March 21 to June 30 were 9.9 million metric tons, down 7.69 percent over the same period in 2015. The dry bulk category was down nearly 8 percent but cement, potash and scrap metal were in the positive column at 10, 28, and 88 percent respectively. Iron ore was down 18 percent; coal was down almost 17 percent. While the general cargo category was down 8 percent, steel was up 108 percent and other general cargo was up 131 percent.
The Baltic Exchange's main sea freight index, tracking rates for ships carrying dry bulk commodities, fell on Tuesday on weaker capesize vessel rates.
The overall index, which factors in rates for capesize, panamax, supramax and handysize shipping vessels, was down 2 points, or 0.27 percent, at 746 points.
The capesize index fell 30 points, or 2.95 percent, to 986 points.
Average daily earnings for capesizes, which typically transport 150,000-tonne cargoes such as iron ore and coal, were down $223 at $7,258.
The panamax index was up 5 points, or 0.57 percent, at 879 points.
Average daily earnings for panamaxes, which usually carry coal or grain cargoes of about 60,000 to 70,000 tonnes, increased $40 to $7,027.
Among smaller vessels, the supramax index rose 3 points to 700 points, while the handysize index rose 5 points to 371 points.
Reporting by Harshith Aranya and Karen Rodrigues
DNV GL adds to its service offering offers in the field of electrical measurement for renewable energy producers with a mobile test laboratory for carrying out Over Voltage Ride Through (OVRT) tests.
The first measurements have now been successfully started for a major German wind turbine manufacturer at the North German wind turbine test facility Janneby. Further projects have already been commissioned by some well-known turbine manufacturers. The test unit is designed for use in the medium voltage grid, implementing the topology suggested in the relevant standards.
In Germany the latest regulations specify that all local energy suppliers must comply with the Over Voltage Ride Through requirements. As the measurements are very time-consuming, taking between eight and twelve weeks, this only has to be demonstrated on the prototype for efficiency reasons.
OVRT tests are an important component of prototype certification according to national and international standards for the integration of local feed-in suppliers into the network. In the event of a temporary overvoltage on the grid, their generating units must be able to withstand this and stabilise the voltage with reactive power. The mobile test unit simulates this over-voltage in the distribution grid. The entire generation unit is confronted with this overvoltage in order to be certain that no critical components are overlooked and functionality is ensured.
DNV GL developed the mobile test unit for the consistent demonstration of compliance with these requirements. It is installed in three sea containers so that it can be used in almost every project type, both in the field or in the laboratory.
Volker Kohne, Head of Department Measurements at DNV GL Energy says: As the development of new wind turbines is expected to continue in the coming years, the demand for test units that can be employed flexibly will continue to increase. I am delighted that, following an intensive development period, the ORVT test station has now been successfully put into operation and is well received by turbine manufacturers.
DNV GL has had nine Under Voltage Ride Through test units in operation since 2003. These formed the technical basis for the new test method. The deployment of the test units is coordinated from the site at Kaiser-Wilhelm-Koog, Germany.
In addition to wind turbine manufacturers and grid operators, the service will in future also be aimed at manufacturers of other decentralised generation units.
With the successful commissioning of the test unit and the associated inclusion of the OVRT tests in its portfolio of services, DNV GL continues to expand its position as one of the leading testing laboratories in the field of renewable energy.
Defence and security company Saab has been awarded a contract from the Curacao Ports Authority to install the latest version of Saabs KleinPort for the Authoritys new Harbor Management System.
Curacao Ports will be using KleinPort to manage its multi-harbor operations. System functionality includes the scheduling of vessel traffic and services, the dispatch of pilots and tugs, the recording of cargo data, full tariff billing and provision of comprehensive management reporting.
Curacao Ports required a new harbor management system that also met the needs of its tug subsidiary, KTK. We had a number of specific requirements including vessel scheduling at the different harbors on the island as well as mobile access for tugs, pilot boats and pilots. In addition, accounts for the port and tug company had to be segregated for invoicing and reporting. The proven KleinPort product was able to deliver all of our required functionality and Saab provided very effective best practices guidance as a result of their years of experience in the industry, said Urvin Inocente, IT Manager, Curacao Ports Authority.
KleinPort is one of the most advanced port management information systems available today and is expected to significantly increase the efficiency of the harbors, says Anders Carp, head of business unit Traffic Management within Saab business area Surveillance.
The Curacao Ports Authority (CPA) manages all of Curacaos ports. CPA owns the container and cruise terminal, most of the wharves and properties adjacent to the harbor, which are leased to private operators. CPA also coordinates pilotage and regulates all vessel movements in the ports. Moreover, CPA is responsible for commercial development of the ports and for overseas promotion. KleinPort is a product of the Maritime Traffic Management product area of Saab, a provider of Maritime Enterprise Software.
RINA recently awarded Carnival Maritime GmbH ISO 14001 and BS OHSAS 18001 certificates.
Now the Carnival Maritime office in Hamburg as well as 26 ships in Carnival Maritimes fleet have been awarded environmental management ISO 14001 and occupational health and safety management BS OHSAS 18001 certifications. The certified fleet includes Costa and AIDA ships.
Initially only ships belonging to Costa Crociere were included in RINA Services scope of work. This was then expanded to include AIDA Cruises ships, in order to incorporate best practice across both fleets.
Not only do these new certifications make Costa Groups fleet greener and safer, but also more cost effective. RINA Services was invaluable to us during the execution of this project. We were confident that they could easily adapt to certify our newest ships as well. We have an integrated fleet that allows us to put sustainability and safety management at the heart of our business said Lars Ljoen, Managing Director Carnival Maritime GmbH.
The certifications were presented by Michele Francioni, CEO, RINA Services to Lars Ljoen, Managing Director Carnival Maritime at a ceremony in July.
RINA Group, the parent company of RINA Services, opened a new office in Germany, Hamburg earlier this year to support its German clients with new specialist expertise, including Asset Integrity Management and Technology Qualification.
A Lake Assault fireboat, owned and operated by the Lake Vermilion Fire Brigade, provided support for wildland firefighting efforts during the Foss Lake wildfire near Ely, Minn. earlier this spring.
The 33-foot craft was used to haul up to 20-person crews, and their canoes and equipment to staging areas to fight the blaze. The fire, located approximately 10 miles west of Ely, Minnesota in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW), consumed a total of 936 acres and was contained and controlled on June 2nd.
Providing support to wildland firefighting efforts on shore is an important role for the fireboats we build, said Chad DuMars, Lake Assault Boats vice president of operations. We are very proud that organizations like the Lake Vermilion Fire Brigade are here to help protect structures and vital natural resources such as the BWCAW, and that our boats play an important role in the brigades mission.
Don Potter is the Lake Vermilion Fire Brigade president and operations chief. We often assist the Forest Service, DNR, County Rescue Squads, and municipalities and go wherever were needed; were extremely reasonable and have state-of-the-art equipment. Last year, in the same area, we were responsible for structure protection during a prescribed burn. We did a lot of pretreating of fuels, using our boats large roof monitor and spraying the shoreline. We also quickly extinguished a spot fire that was caused by firebrands flying across the lake.
The landing craft style boat with a ten-and-a-half foot beam features twin 300 hp outboards that can reach speeds of up to 50 mph. The fireboat is equipped with a 1600 gpm water pump, a 300 hp V8 pump engine, and three discharges including a high flow monitor and water cannon.
When supporting wildland firefighting operations, the Lake Assault fireboat can fill up tanker apparatus that are stationed on shore. We serve as a water supply resource, and thats a tremendous benefit to firefighters because we can fill a tanker in a hurry, added Potter. Were like a floating fire hydrant.
Lake Vermilion Fire Brigade has two Lake Assault Boats in its fleet, and also owns a 25-foot airboat used primarily for ice rescues. Both of our boats were designed over the course of many meetings with an expert team from Lake Assault; their people are fantastic, said Potter. Theyre a very talented group and it's a quality product. The thing about Lake Assault is that they can make just about anything.
Hapag-Lloyd AG (Hapag-Lloyd) and United Arab Shipping Company S.A.G. (UASC) have signed a Business Combination Agreement (BCA) to merge both companies, subject to the necessary regulatory and contractual approvals.
Besides the Business Combination Agreement (BCA) between the two companies, the controlling shareholders, namely CSAV Germany Container Holding GmbH, HGV Hamburger Gesellschaft fur Vermogens- und Beteiligungsmanagement mbH and Kuhne Maritime GmbH on the side of Hapag-Lloyd, and Qatar Holding LLC on behalf of the State of Qatar and The Public Investment Fund of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on the side of UASC, have assumed certain commitments with regard to the merger and the future equity funding of the company in a separate agreement, the so-called Shareholders Support Agreement (SSA).
In that agreement some of the controlling shareholders of either side have committed to backstop a cash capital increase in the amount of USD 400 million planned by way of a rights issue within 6 months after the closing of the transaction.
Following the integration, the new Hapag-Lloyd will rank among the five largest container shipping lines in the world, with 237 vessels and a total transport capacity of around 1.6 million TEU, an annual transport volume of 10 million TEU and a combined turnover of approximately USD 12 billion.
The combined company will remain a registered and stock listed company in Germany with its head office in Hamburg. CSAV, HGV (City of Hamburg) and Kuhne Maritime will remain controlling shareholders of Hapag-Lloyd.
The majority shareholders of UASC, Qatar Holding LLC (QH) and The Public Investment Fund of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (PIF), will become new key shareholders of Hapag-Lloyd holding 14 per cent (QH) and 10 per cent (PIF) respectively.
This strategic merger makes a lot of sense for both carriers as we are able to combine UASCs emerging global presence and young and highly efficient fleet with Hapag-Lloyds broad, diversified market coverage and strong customer base. Furthermore it will give the new Hapag-Lloyd access to Ultra Large Container Vessels, said Rolf Habben Jansen, CEO of Hapag-Lloyd, upon signing the agreement.
He added: After the successful integration of CSAV which was concluded mid of 2015 this transaction with UASC is another historic milestone for Hapag-Lloyd. The merger reinforces our position as a top 5 and one of the largest truly global carriers in liner shipping.
The combined company will have a global, diversified trade portfolio, with leading product offerings in the major East-West and North-South trades. In addition, it will leverage on UASCs solid presence in Middle Eastern markets and trades, with a commitment to further strengthening this presence by establishing a fifth Hapag-Lloyd Regional Center in Dubai.
With this merger, we are embarking on an exciting new phase of UASCs growth, said Jorn Hinge, President and CEO of UASC. Leveraging on UASCs heritage in the Middle East as well as our recent growth in other markets, the combined company will provide customers with valuable expertise and very efficient service offerings in all major trade lanes and markets around the world, he added.
The fleet of the combined company will consist of 237 ships including UASCs six recently received 18,800 TEU ships, known for their superior eco-efficiency credentials, as well as eleven newly built 15,000 TEU ships, the last of which will be delivered soon.
With an average age of 6.6 years and average size of 6,600 TEU the combined company will have one of the most modern and efficient vessel fleets in the industry.
The company will be the key player in the new THE Alliance consisting of Hanjin, Hapag-Lloyd, K-Line, Mitsui O.S.K Lines, Nippon Yusen Kaisha and Yang Ming. THE Alliance is scheduled to begin operation in April 2017 and will cover all East-West trade lanes including Asia-Middle East/Arabian Gulf and Red Sea.
Hapag-Lloyd and UASC now take the next step to further consolidate and shape the liner shipping industry. The new transaction is strengthening not only our market position, but also our service portfolio. The merger will create annual net synergies of at least 400 million US Dollars and save a significant amount of capital expenditure for the company, commented Michael Behrendt, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Hapag-Lloyd.
The unanimous approval by the Extraordinary General Assembly of UASCs shareholders and the Supervisory Board of Hapag-Lloyd demonstrate the strong support by all key shareholders of both companies and their continuous commitment to liner shipping.
At the Annual General Meeting scheduled for August, the shareholders of Hapag-Lloyd will be asked to approve an authorized capital allowing for the implementation of the Business Combination.
During its 40-year history, UASC has grown from a regional carrier to become a truly global one with comprehensive coverage of the main trade lanes and a state-of-the-art fleet, stated Dr. Nabeel Al-Amudi, Chairman of the Board of Directors of UASC. We are very proud of UASCs achievements over the years that paved the way for such a remarkable deal, he added.
Following regulatory and contractual approvals, the merger is expected to be completed by the end of 2016. Until then, UASC and Hapag-Lloyd will continue to operate as stand-alone companies. Each company will also operate in its own alliance as currently structured until the end of March 2017, after which THE Alliance will commence operations.
Missiles flew far enough to reach any part of S.Korea.
North Korea fired three ballistic missiles on Tuesday which flew between 500 and 600 km (300-360 miles) into the sea off its east coast, South Korea's military said, the latest in a series of provocative moves by the isolated country.
The U.S. military said it detected launches of what it believed were two Scud missiles and one Rodong, a home-grown missile based on Soviet-era Scud technology.
North Korea has fired both types numerous times in recent years, an indication that unlike recent launches that were seen as efforts by the North to improve its missile capability, Tuesday's were meant as a show of force.
"This smells political rather than technical to me," said Melissa Hanham, a senior research associate at the U.S.-based Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, California.
"I think the number and distance of the missiles lets them remind the ROK (Republic of Korea) of what they are up against," she said, referring to South Korea by its official name.
North Korea and the rich, democratic South are technically still at war because their 1950-53 conflict ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty. The North regularly threatens to destroy the Japan, South Korea and the South's main ally, the United States.
The launches came nearly a week after South Korea and the United States chose a site in the South to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) anti-missile system to counter threats from the North, which had prompted Pyongyang to threaten a "physical response".
"Our assessment is that it was done as a show of force," a South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff official said at a briefing.
The missiles were launched from an area in the North's western region called Hwangju between 5:45 a.m. South Korea time (2045 GMT Monday) and 6:40 a.m., the South's military said, an indication that the North was confident they would not crash on its own territory.
"The ballistic missiles' flight went from 500 km to 600 km, which is a distance far enough to strike all of South Korea, including Busan," the South's military said in a statement.
Busan is a South Korean port city in the south.
North Korea has test-fired a series of ballistic missiles in recent months, in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions, including intermediate-range missiles in June and a submarine-launched missile this month.
"In addition to the basic goal of enhancing missile units' readiness to fight, it might be a way of reminding their southern neighbours that the site chosen for a THAAD battery in South Korea is within reach," Joshua Pollack, editor of the U.S.-based Nonproliferation Review, said of Tuesday's launches.
South Korea announced last week the THAAD system would be deployed in the southeastern county of Seongju.
In addition to the decision to base a THAAD system in South Korea, the United States recently angered North Korea by blacklisting its leader Kim Jong Un for human rights abuses.
"The threat to our national security is growing very quickly in a short period of time," South Korean Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn told parliament on Tuesday.
BOMBS, MISSILES AND SANCTIONS
North Korea conducted its fourth test of a nuclear device in January, and activity at its nuclear test site has increased recently, according to media reports in South Korea and Japan citing government officials, as well as a report by Washington-based North Korea monitoring project 38 North.
Following the latest nuclear test and a February space rocket launch that was widely viewed as a missile test in disguise, the U.N. Security Council imposed tough new resolutions that further isolate North Korea.
While China supported tougher sanctions against its neighbour and ally North Korea, it has sharply criticized the decision to base a THAAD battery in South Korea, saying the move would destabilize the security balance in the region.
"The situation on the Korean peninsula is severe and complex and all sides should avoid any actions that raise tensions," China's foreign ministry said, echoing previous statements.
Japan denounced the launches.
"The latest launch is a breach of the UN Security Council resolution and is extremely hazardous to shipping and aircraft and we have strongly protested," the Japanese government said in a statement.
By Jack Kim and James Pearson
More containership capacity is being demolished than ever before, including old-design ships made redundant by the new Panama Canal. Drewry checks if this end the current capacity surplus?
Now is not a good time to own an old containership. Drewrys Container Forecaster (June 2016) found that, for the first time, 450,000teu of containership capacity is expected to be scrapped in just one year, as the containership sector recognises that there are far too many ships chasing too little cargo.
Based on an average size of 3,000teu for ships which are being scrapped, this means that about 150 mainly old and medium-sized containerships will be pulled out of the market or out of temporary idle positions and sent to the scrapyard in 2016.
In 2015, demolitions were less than half this level. The surge in demolitions started in 4Q 2015, has continued since and looks set to reach 450,000teu by the end of 2016, an even higher annual total than the 444,000 teu scrapped in 2013. (For disclosure, Drewry consultants have advised some owners and investors to scrap their containerships in recent years, but we have no ownership links with shipowners and have an independent view).
In the first three months of 2016 alone, some 14 Panamax ships were scrapped and many of these are German owned and previously leased out on the charter market. These owners have felt the force of the charter rate downturn more than most others.
Younger vessels are being scrapped. These included recently the 6,479teu DS Kingdom (15 years old), owned by DS Schiffahrts. Two other young ships of 6,350 teu (built 2002) MOL Precision and MOL Promise were also scrapped.
Containerships are normally depreciated over 25 years, so scrapping a 15-year-old vessel implies a write-off of nearly 40% (the owner also gets some cash for the steel from the demolition yard to offset part of the loss).
Furthermore, the opening of the new Panama Canal in June has created a surplus of old Panamax ships of around 4,500 teu. This size and design of ship previously one of the workhorses of the containership industry has essentially been made redundant. More Panamax vessels will surely head for the scrapyards of South Asia, as their owners or charterers replace them by newer and more efficient 8,000teu+ ships.
Removing 450,000teu of capacity this year, however, accounts for just 2% of the current 20-million-teu-strong global fleet of containerships. This will only make a dent into the over-capacity built during the 2010-15 period, which saw 4.5 million teu in capacity added to the industry globally at a time of slowing demand.
For charter owners with older containerships on their books, the choice is between chartering out ships at historically low (and loss-making) levels, or paying for idling costs until a hoped-for shipping market recovery happens, or scrapping the vessels. More will decide that scrapping is the least bad of the three options. Expect ship scrapyards to be busy for the remainder of the year.
The opening of the new Panama Canal, a widening gap between ocean transport supply and demand and the fear of continuing losses among charter owners are three compelling factors behind the current surge in boxship demolitions. Although necessary, ship demolitions will not be enough to bring the container sector back into balance unless owners also refrain from ordering many new vessels.
Seacat Freedom, the latest addition to Seacat Services 12-strong fleet, has been dispatched to DONG Energys Race Bank offshore wind project following the boats official naming ceremony at Seawork 2016.
The deployment comes as part of the two year, 4-workboat crew transfer deal secured by Seacat Services in April to support DONG Energys operation off the UKs East coast.
Construction at Race Bank will require the highest possible levels of reliability and work boat availability in order to fully commission all 91 turbines by 2018. Across the sector, as developments take place in rougher and deeper waters the requirements placed on support vessels are increasing.
The newly completed Seacat Freedom builds on Seacat Services class-leading credentials in providing the highest standard in offshore crew transfer, enabling safe, rapid, and comfortable transfer of technicians and equipment in the toughest of environments.
Seacat Freedom was built on the Isle of Wight and her high-tech design is testament to the standards of service that Seacat provides. With the offshore wind construction market set to increase significantly through 2017, demand for Seacat Services already fully chartered fleet looks set to increase.
Seacat Freedom is a fine addition to our fleet and we have no doubts about her ability to continue to deliver the high standards of reliability and service our clients have come to know and respect said Ian Baylis, Managing Director, Seacat Services.
The continued demand for our support vessels demonstrates the important role which the UK maritime sector plays in large offshore projects both regionally and internationally.
CMA CGM Group announced the launch of two new weekly services, EPIC 1 and EPIC 2, between the Arab Gulf, Pakistan, North West India and North Europe.
The current Epic service will make room for the two new weekly services.
EPIC 1 offering a direct connection between North Europe and Pakistan North West India. In partnership with MSC and UASC, the rotation will be as follows:
Mundra King Abdullah Gioia Tauro Tanger Southampton Rotterdam Antwerp Felixstowe Dunkirk - Le Havre King Abdullah Djibouti Port Qasim Nhava Sheva Hazira Mundra
EPIC 2 offering a direct connection beetween North Europe and United Arab Emirates, Pakistan and North West India. In partenership with HAPAG LLOYD and HAMBURG SUD, the rotation will be as follows:
Mundra Jeddah Cagliari Tanger Hamburg Antwerp London Tanger Cagliari- Jeddah Khor Fakkan - Jebel Ali Port Qasim Nhava Sheva - Mundra
The ship operators on both services allow CMA CGM to increase its departure frequency between the Indian subcontinent and North Europe, and enrich its ports coverage.
These optimizations strengthens the services quality with:
An improvement of port coverage:
In India with the addition of a weekly call in HAZIRA.
In the United Kingdom with three weekly calls ( Southampton and Felixstowe on EPIC 1, London Gateway on EPIC 2).
An improvement of transit times from India:
Directors of major commercial ports in the Great Lakes region called on Congress to end years of regulatory chaos surrounding ballast water management.
In a joint letter issued late yesterday, 14 port directors urged the Senate Armed Services Committee to include ballast regulatory reform in the final version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Known as the Vessel Incidental Discharge Act (VIDA), these regulatory reforms were included in the House-passed NDAA, but not the Senate-passed version. Currently, a House-Senate conference committee is working to hammer-out a final version of the legislation.
When not fully loaded, cargo ships must take on water (ballast) to maintain their stability. Ballast pumped onboard in one port may inadvertently contain aquatic organisms that are then released when the ballast is discharged in another port. In this regard, ships can be a vector for the movement of non-native species. To protect the environment, Great Lakes ports support regulations to require ocean-going vessels to install ballast water treatment systems to filter and clean the water prior to discharge. Because commercial vessels operate between states and nations, a federal approach to this issue makes most sense for the environment and economy.
"In the Great Lakes region, two federal agencies and seven of eight states have their own ballast water discharge regulations. Some of these rules are harmonized and some are not. The resulting chaos has negatively impacted shipping," explained Steve Fisher, Executive Director of the American Great Lakes Ports Association.
Paul LaMarre, Director of the Port of Monroe, commented " Michigan's ballast water discharge rules are different than both federal rules and those of neighboring states. Since their implementation in 2007, they have discouraged commerce at Michigan ports. Not a single vessel operator has attempted to comply, but rather, have avoided doing business in the state. While Michigan's rules intend to protect the Great Lakes, instead they simply push ship discharges to the ports of neighboring states in shared waters."
Will Friedman, Executive Director of the Port of Cleveland, added "State ballast water rules are up for reissuance in 2018 which raises concern. While Ohio's rules are harmonized with federal rules, our commerce must pass through other states where we have no control. In 2008 New York threatened Ohio's trade by proposing onerous ballast regulations for ships simply passing through New York on the St. Lawrence Seaway."
The regulatory reforms contained in the House-passed defense bill would consolidate all ballast water regulation in the U.S. Coast Guard, while providing for the same level of environmental protection as exists today. The legislation provides for upgrading environmental standards should technology be available in the future.
SENER has launched an update of its FORAN shipbuilding CAD/CAM/CAE system.
Version V80R1.0, which was launched onto the market when FORAN celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2015, was a revolutionary change. A year later, version V80R2.0 has added significant features such as a new geometric core and the ability to manage a series of ships (Applicability), in addition to other improvements in all of its disciplines.
Developing the concept of managing a series of ships has been demanded by the market for some time, especially in the military field. In FORAN, ships in the same series have shared characteristics, and modifications can be made to a single ship, to several ships or to the entire series. Meanwhile, a ship can also be taken out of a series and handled as an independent ship.
With respect to the change in the geometric core, FORAN now uses Open CASCADE (OCCT) technology, which makes it possible to represent analytical surfaces, making it significantly easier to define corrugated bulkheads, a notable improvement in the design and production processes.
In the surface definition module (FSURF), new types of entities can now be defined for creating surfaces and hulls. These entities are grouped into basic entities (spheres, cones, cylinders, etc.) and analytical entities (extruding entities, revolving entities, etc.). When combined with the analytical features of the FHULL hull structure module, these new functionalities in FSURF mean that FORAN can now be used for defining full offshore structures.
The structure standard management module (FNORM) now includes a new corrugated bulkhead standard. A new work method has also been added to the FHULL structure module for defining analytical surfaces. This is in addition to the existing functionalities for defining internal structures and the structures of shell and decks, which allow users to generate cylinders, cones, extruding or curved surfaces, and corrugated dividers based on a previously defined pattern. The geometry of the plates that are developed is calculated when the information is saved, while profiles can be created following the surfaces curvature.
On top of this, the automatic nesting module in FORAN now has a new multi-pass method for generating parametric bevels. The new version also allows for standardized bevels or margins to be added to the auxiliary structure. In the FBUILDS build strategy module, the calculation of welding contacts has now been optimized.
Two new entities have been added to the machinery & outfitting and electrical modules, together with the zone and service concept: service line and service-line routing, which deal with the line segment in a specific zone, with both of them applied to pipe lines, ventilation ducts and cable trays. These new concepts will make design tasks easier by making it possible to block a single distributor (an entire service or a routing zone) instead of an entire zone. This will also provide additional advantages: on one hand making it possible to make modifications to a series of ships at a more basic level, while on the other hand optimizing management in PLM (Product Lifecycle Management tools) with a new concept called a line operator. All of these improvements can be applied in the machinery & outfitting and electrical definition modules, in both 2D and 3D diagrams.
In the electrical solution, the FBCABLE module improves how cable end accessories are managed, especially multipolar connectors, and it also optimizes the watertight penetrations for a single cable passing through a bulkhead or a terminal box. Being able to access the connector catalog will now provide a simpler way to conduct searches, with the ability to filter by connector type, style and number of contacts.
Lastly, the integration of FORAN with PLM tools should also be noted, which even though it was already extremely advanced, is nevertheless improved in each new version of FORAN. In this version, of particular note is the ability to manage line entities, as noted above, together with the possibility of alternatively viewing material lists, and a new utility for configuring data-modeling maps with the goal of optimizing configuration tasks. This functionality now includes multiple selection, a directory and file selector, and the ability to drag and drop. Several improvements have also been made to the JT file-generation mechanisms, both in the export field and for publishing scenarios in PLM. The new features give users greater control over which information is imported or exported. All of this, when combined with the synchronization of the maturity information of the FORAN model from PLM (which provides a highly intuitive way to view maturity statuses in different colors) makes integration extremely useful.
This new version of FORAN is one result of this constant commitment, providing a highly effective solution to the problems and difficulties that arise in all of the design and production phases for ships and offshore structures.
Likelihood of Organized Disruption at GOP Convention
The anticipated and long awaited political theater of the political conventions is upon us. The Republican gala has special expectation. The Donald will make a real show out of this high tension wire walk across the political divide of GOP careerist party stalwarts. Those populist upstart activists that raise the participation impact of new primary voters are invading the clandestine chambers of the privileged establishment. The never Trump movement will have their last gasp, but the surreptitious NeoCon insiders will not go away. Their covert choice is still Hillary Clinton.
However, the Trump camp maintains a strong sentiment towards the most sacred canon that neoconservatives demand. The pro Israel insertion in the 2016 Republican platform is most disturbing. As reported in, GOP Strengthens Israel Platform Following Free Beacon Expose, the influence of Zionists in the Trump vision for the party cannot be understated.
Republican Party leaders reinserted key pro-Israel language into its 2016 platform on Monday following an exclusive Free Beacon report late last week describing efforts by certain elements of the GOP in 2012 to weaken language pertaining to the Jewish state.
The GOP decided to reinsert language describing Jerusalem as Israels undivided capital and remove language advocating in favor of Palestine, according to reports on the final 2016 platform language.
Will this shift in the GOP platform forge a working alliance with the AIPAC invested Neocons? The battle over foreign policy appointments will ultimately determine if Trump is the real deal or if his New York City roots and family intermarriage has placed a fundamental blind spot on his world view. If you see former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, brought onboard, you will know that the Trump ship of state will take on bilge toxic water.
Is the well publicized Dump Trump effort, nothing more than a diversion to keep and protect the same discredit foreign policy that operates under a phony two party system, where there is no real difference?
On the surface, the evidence that those within the inner circle of never Trump, who will not attend the convention or withhold their support and contributions for the Trump campaign, will continue to work behind the scenes to sabotage the Republican standard-bearer. So much for the pledge, from several of the primary candidates, made during the GOP debates.
It should be crystal clear that the corporatist controlled Republican careerists, who publically oppose Trump break ranks over the fraudulent trade agreements, which have destroyed the middle class. Since this is the overriding rupture in establishment unity, the coordinated opposition to Trumps genuine America First trade policy will persist.
While the internal commotion may not be broadcasted from the convention floor, the chaos that is planned from paid thugs, who practice anarchy, awaits a violent conflict. These agitators have no positive ideology, reform program or respect for individual constitutional rights.
Last month Breitbart provided this account, Dozens of Leftist Groups Plan RNC Protest Coalition and list these groups in detail. The leftist website Fight Back! News is promoting a list of about 40 groups planning to protest at Julys Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
Now if the intention was to actually protest and advocate a solemn political viewpoint, the system must protect their constitutional right to assemble. Notwithstanding, is there any sensible observer, who reasonably believe that legitimate dissent is the intention of this roving gang operation to roam the streets outside the Quicken Loans Arena?
Brothers and sisters, Cleveland is no 1968 Chicago. No Viet Nam demonstration against an immoral war in 2016. Yet the social warrior fanatics are posed to crack heads and spill blood. Hospitals Gird for Presidential Nominating Conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia forecast the worst. The Republican National Convention is coming to town next week, and Dr. Robert Wyllie is ready with a binder 6 inches thick, crammed full of plans for dealing with any potential medical emergency.
Now before the bleeding heart limousine liberals get their underpants in a knot, the pack of disruptors will face a weakened law and order thin blue line. And if that peace keeping contingent need back up, the Bikers for Trump to Patrol Cleveland During RNC Convention, will patrol the perimeter.
Bikers for Trump organizer Chris Cox told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview. Weve seen how these paid agitators have thrown eggs and gotten violent at other Trump events around the country and were not going to put up with it.
Cox emphasized that Bikers for Trump werent looking for trouble at the convention. Veterans are the backbone of the biker community, Cox continued. We are patriots and unlike Black Lives Matter and the other leftist idiots, we love our cops. You wont find one biker in Cleveland jumping on cars, lighting fires, or doing any of the other stupid things weve gotten used to seeing on TV the last few months.
Egg throwing is the least to worry about. New Black Panthers plan armed protest at Republican convention in Cleveland suggests that Cleveland could become a battleground on more than one level.
The chairman of the New Black Panther Party has announced plans for an armed protest at the Republican convention next week in Cleveland, according to Reuters.
Officials in Ohio have said it will be legal for armed demonstrators to gather outside the convention at the Quicken Loans Arena under the states open carry laws, Reuters reported.
The groups announcement came just five days after lone gunman Micah Xavier Johnson killed five police officers at a Black Lives Matter rally in Dallas. The Peoples New Black Panther Party, a black nationalist group, said Johnson had attended several of their meetings in Dallas.
This potential confrontation is one of the most prophesized main stream media pronouncements, which probably means that either a false flag is planned or that the armed protesting new age national guard will just be met with flower power.
More likely, a new Kent State may come about not because troops fired the first shot, but that some preprogrammed assassin targeted the Trump convention. Of course the choir of lunatics will blame the Republican nominee for being the cause of such violence.
Will disgruntled and sore loser, Ohio Governor John Kasich call out the real National Guard if conditions warrant or will he go on vacation from the convention and let the Democrat controlled Cleveland city government manage the planned riot?
Radical Democrats Target RNC Convention With Planned Riots, Cleveland Unprepared offers a bleak scenario.
Previously reported in the article titled Protests and Preparations, thousands of Black Lives Matter, Revolutionary Communist Party, Workers World Party and La Raza protestors intend to Shut Down the RNC Convention at the Quicken Loans Arena and interdict (and prevent if they can) the nomination of Mr. Donald Trump as the Republican Party Presidential Nominee. Convention activities are scheduled not only at the main Quicken Loans Arena, but also in over 40 separate meeting facilities, restaurants and private clubs in the downtown Cleveland area.
The City of Cleveland had originally planned to field 4,000 uniformed officers with the assistance of Cincinnati, Denver, Greensboro and many other cities. This force has now dwindled to less than 1,000 with most of the major supporting cities pulling out. In their original plan, the city anticipated marches and protests of up to 20,000 people.
As of today, the city is anticipating greater than 100,000 anti-Trump protesters with upwards of 10,000 being bused in from Chicago.
This is a formula for bedlam.
Now that Trump has picked Governor Mike Pence as his Vice President selection, Republican conservatives should be relieved. Nonetheless, if the Trump ticket was to win in November by some miracle, he could actually be elevated to the POTUS if the domestic terrorist get their way and eliminate Donald J. Trump.
The international finance establishment is the money changers of the Bible. Their globalism system of world dominance must destroy what little that is left of a free and independent America. Using the brain dead recruits of the progressive perpetual protestors to deflect public anger away from the real overseers of controlled political governance is the standard game plan for the uber elites.
While Trump has adopted some destructive foreign policy positions, he is the only potential opposition to the most destructive establishment policies. Republicans had a chance to support Ron Paul in the 2012 election cycle and refused to dump Mitt Romney, the hand pick corporatist, who is still a tool of the globalists.
With the strong likelihood that Cleveland is gearing up for a bloodbath, the Libertarian purists need to rethink their stubbornness to theory and engage in the real world. All these varied forces deployed against Trump, indicates that a slight glimmer of resistance to the corrupt order might come out of this election.
The warts that Trump has, most notably considering Israel as an ally is undeniable. A true America First government would never put a foreign nation above the best interests of our own country. And yet, only a intractable ideologue would refuse voting for Trump.
SARTRE
Source: http://www.batr.org/totalitariancollectivism/071916.html
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The Peak Oil Paradox Revisited
Its been a while since we posted an article by our friend Euan Mearns, who was active at The Oil Drum at the same time Nicole and I were. Is it really 11 years ago that started, and almost 9 since we left? You know the drill: we departed because they didnt want us to cover finance, which we said was the more immediate crisis, yada yada. Euan stayed on for longer, and the once unequalled Oil Drum is no more.
On one of our long tours, which were based around Nicoles brilliant public speaking engagements, we went to see Euan in Scotland, he teaches at Aberdeen University. I think it was 2011?! An honor. Anyway, always a friend.
And theres ono-one I can think of whod be better at explaining the Peak Oil Paradox in todays context. So heres a good friend of the Automatic Earth, Euan Mearns:
Euan Mearns: Back in the mid-noughties the peak oil meme gained significant traction in part due to The Oil Drum blog where I played a prominent role. Sharply rising oil price, OPEC spare capacity falling below 2 Mbpd and the decline of the North Sea were definite signs of scarcity and many believed that peak oil was at hand and the world as we knew it was about to end. Forecasts of oil production crashing in the coming months were ten a penny. And yet between 2008, when the oil price peaked, and 2015, global crude+condensate+NGL (C+C+NGL) production has risen by 8.85 Mbpd to 91.67 Mbpd. That is by over 10%. Peak oilers need to admit they were wrong then. Or were they?
Introduction
It is useful to begin with a look at what peak oil was all about. This definition from Wikipedia is as good as any:
Peak oil, an event based on M. King Hubberts theory, is the point in time when the maximum rate of extraction of petroleum is reached, after which it is expected to enter terminal decline. Peak oil theory is based on the observed rise, peak, fall, and depletion of aggregate production rate in oil fields over time.
Those who engaged in the debate can be divided into two broad classes of individual: 1) those who wanted to try and understand oil resources, reserves, production and depletion rates based on a myriad of data sets and analysis techniques with a view to predicting when peak oil may occur and 2) those who speculated about the consequences of peak oil upon society. Such speculation normally warned of dire consequences of a world running short of transport fuel and affordable energy leading to resource wars and general mayhem. And none of this ever came to pass unless we want to link mayhem in Iraq*, Syria, Yemen, Sudan and Nigeria to high food prices and hence peak oil. In which case we may also want to link the European migrant crisis and Brexit to the same.
[* One needs to recall that GWI was precipitated over Kuwait stealing oil from Iraq, from a shared field on the Kuwait-Iraq border, leading to the Iraqi invasion of 1991.]
The peak oil debate on The Oil Drum was a lightning conductor for doomers of every flavour peak oil doom (broadened to resource depletion doom), economic doom and environmental doom being the three main courses on the menu. The discussion was eventually hijacked by Greens and Green thinkers, who, not content with waiting for doomsday to happen, set about manufacturing arguments and data to hasten the day. For example, fossil fuel scarcity has morphed into stranded fossil fuel reserves that cannot be burned because of the CO2 produced, accompanied by recommendations to divest fossil fuel companies from public portfolios. Somewhat surprisingly, these ideas have gained traction in The United Nations, The European Union and Academia.
It is not my intention to dig too deeply into the past. Firmly belonging to the group of data analysts, in this post I want to take a look at two different data sets to explore where peak oil stands today. Is it dead and buried forever, or is it lurking in the shadows, waiting to derail the global economy again?
The USA and Hubberts Peak
The USA once was the poster child of peak oil. The Peak Oil theory was first formulated there by M. King Hubbert who in 1956 famously forecast that US production would peak around 1970 and thereafter enter an era of never-ending decline (Figure 1). Hubberts original paper is well worth a read.
Figure 1 From Hubberts 1956 paper shows the peak and fall in US production for ultimate recovery of 150 and 200 billion barrels. The 200 billion barrel model shows a peak of 8.2 Mbpd around 1970 that proved to be uncannily accurate.
Looking to Figure 2 we see that Hubberts prediction almost came true. US production did indeed peak in 1970 at 9.64 Mbpd while Hubberts forecast was a little lower at 8.2 Mbpd. The post-peak decline was interrupted by the discovery of oil on the N slope of Alaska and opening of the Aleyska pipeline in 1977 that was not considered in Hubberts work. Herein lies one of the key weaknesses of using Hubberts methodology. One needs to take into account known unknowns. We know for sure that unexpected discoveries and unexpected technology developments will occur, its just we dont know, what, when and how big.
Figure 2 In red, US crude oil production from the EIA shows progressive growth from 1900 to 1970. The oil industry believed this growth would continue forever and was somewhat aghast when M. King Hubbert warned the party may end in 1970 which it duly did. The discovery of oil in Alaska created a shoulder on the decline curve. But apart from that, Hubberts forecast remained good until 2008 when the shale drillers and frackers went to work. Hubberts 1970 peak was matched by crude oil in 2015 and exceeded by C+C+NGL that same year.
Following the secondary Alaska peak of 8.97 Mbpd (crude oil) in 1985, production continued to decline and reached a low of 5 Mbpd (crude oil) in 2008. But since then, the rest is history. The shale drillers and frackers went to work producing an astonishing turnaround that most peak oil commentators, including me, would never have dreamt was possible.
Before going on to contemplate the consequences of the shale revolution, I want to dwell for a moment on the production and drilling activity in the period 1955 to 1990. 1955 to 1970 we see that total rigs* declined from 2683 to 1027. At the same time crude oil production grew from 6.8 to 9.6 Mbpd. It was in 1956 that Hubbert made his forecast and in the years that followed, US production grew by 41% while drilling rigs declined by 62%. No wonder the industry scoffed at Hubbert.
[* Note that Baker Hughes archive pre-1987 does not break out oil and gas rigs from the total.]
But then post 1970, as production went into reverse, the drilling industry went into top gear, with operational rigs rising sharply to a peak of 3974 in 1981. But to no avail, production in the contiguous 48 states (excluding Alaska) continued to plunge no matter how hard the oil and its drilling industry tried to avert it. Hubbert must surely have been proven right, and his methodology must surely be applicable not only to the US but to the World stage?
The oil price crash of 1981 put paid to the drilling frenzy with rig count returning to the sub-1000 unit baseline where it would remain until the turn of the century. The bear market in oil ended in 1998 and by the year 2000, the US drilling industry went back to work, drilling conventional vertical wells at first but with horizontal drilling of shale kicking in around 2004/05. Production would turn around in 2009.
Those who would speak out against peak oil in the mid-noughties, like Daniel Yergin and Mike Lynch, would argue that high price would result in greater drilling activity and technical innovation that would drive production to whatever level society demanded. They would also point out that new oil provinces would be found, allowing the resource base to grow. And they too must surely have been proved to be correct.
But there is a sting in the tail of this success story since drilling and producing from shale is expensive, it is dependent upon high price to succeed. But over-production of LTO has led to the price collapse, starving the shale drilling industry of cash flow and ability to borrow, leading to widespread bankruptcy. In fact informed commentators like Art Berman and Rune Likvern have long maintained that the shale industry has never turned a profit and has survived via a rising mountain of never ending debt. Economists will argue, however, that improved technology and efficiency will reduce costs and make shale competitive with other sources of oil and energy. We shall see.
Herein lies a serious conundrum for the oil industry and OECD economies. They may be able to run on shale oil (and gas) for a while at least, but the industry cannot function properly within current market conditions. Either prices need to be set at a level where a profit can be made, or production capped to protect price and market share. This of course would stifle innovation and is not likely to happen until there are queues at gas stations.
2008-2015 Winners and Losers
BP report oil production data for 54 countries / areas including 5 other categories that make up the balance of small producers in any region. I have deducted 2008 production (barrels per day) from 2015 production and sorted the data on the size of this difference. The data are plotted in Figure 3.
Figure 3 The oil production winners to the left and losers to the right, 2008 to 2015. The USA is the clear winner while Libya is the clear loser. About half of the countries show very little change. Click chart for a large readable version.
What we see is that production increased in 27 countries and decreased in the other 27 countries. One thing we can say is that despite prolonged record-high oil price, production still fell in half of the worlds producing countries. We can also see that in about half of these countries any rise or fall was barely significant and it is only in a handful of countries at either end of the spectrum where significant gains and losses were registered. Lets take a closer look at these.
Figure 4 The top ten winners, 2008 to 2015.
The first thing to observe from Figure 4 is that the USA and Canada combined contributed 7.096 Mbpd of the 8.852 Mbpd gain 2008-2015. That is to say that unconventional light tight oil (LTO) production from the USA and LTO plus tar sands production from Canada make up 80% of the global gain in oil production (C+C+NGL). Iraq returning to market in the aftermath of the 2003 war makes up 18%. In other words expensive unconventional oil + Iraq makes up virtually all of the gains although concise allocation of gains and losses is rather more complex than that. Saudi Arabia, Russia, The UAE, Brazil, China, Qatar and Colombia have all registered real gains (5.258 Mbpd) that have been partly cancelled by production losses elsewhere.
Figure 5 The top ten losers, 2008 to 2015.
Looking to the losers (Figure 5) we see that Libya, Iran, Syria, Sudan and Yemen contribute 2.828 Mbpd of lost production that may be attributed to war, civil unrest or sanctions. I am not going to include Venezuela and Algeria with this group and will instead attribute declines in these countries (0.979 Mbpd) to natural reservoir depletion, although a slow down in OECD technical assistance in these countries may have exacerbated this situation. That leaves the UK, Mexico and Norway as the three large OECD producers that register a significant decline (1.687 Mbpd) attributed to natural declines in mature offshore provinces. Let me try to summarise these trends in a balance sheet:
Figure 6 The winner and loser balance sheet.
We see that these 20 countries account for 8.463 Mbpd net gain compared with the global figure of 8.85 Mbpd. We are capturing the bulk of the data and the main trends. In summary:
Unconventional LTO and tar sands + 7.096 Mbpd
Net conventional gains + 2.592 Mbpd
Net conflict losses -1.225 Mbpd
The sobering point here for the oil industry and society to grasp is that during 8 years when the oil price was mainly over $100/bbl, only 2.592 Mbpd of conventional production was added. That is about 3.1%. Global conventional oil production was all but static. And the question to ask now is what will happen in the aftermath of the oil price crash?
One lesson from recent history is that the oil industry and oil production had substantial momentum. It is nearly two years since the price crash, and while global production is now falling slowly it remains in surplus compared with demand. This has given the industry plenty time to cut staff, drilling activity and to delay or cancel projects that depend upon high price. In a post-mature province like the North Sea, the current crisis will also hasten decommissioning. It seems highly likely that momentum on the down leg will be replaced by inertia on the up leg with a diminished industry unwilling to jump back on the band wagon when price finally climbs back towards $100 / bbl, which it surely will do one day in the not too distant future.
For many years I pinned my colours to peak oil occurring in the window 20123 years. Noting that the near-term peak was 97.08 Mbpd on July 15 2015 it is time to dust off that opinion (Figure 7). The decline since the July 2015 peak is of the order 2% per annum (excluding the Fort McMurray impact). It seems reasonable to presume that this decline may continue for another two years, or even longer. That would leave global production at around 92 Mbpd mid 2018. It is nigh impossible to predict what will happen, especially in a world over run by political and economic uncertainty. Another major spike in oil price seems plausible and this could perhaps destabilise certain economies, banks and currencies. Should this occur, another price collapse will follow, and its not clear that production will ever recover to the July 2015 peak. Much will depend upon the future of the US shale industry and whether or not drilling for shale oil and gas gains traction in other countries.
Figure 7 The chart shows in blue global total liquids production (C+C+NGL+refinery gains+biofuels) according to the Energy Information Agency (EIA). The near term peak was 97.08 Mbpd in July 2015. The decline since then, excluding the Fort McMurray wild fire impact, is of the order 2% per annum. In the current low price environment, it is difficult to see anything arresting this decline before the end of next year. In fact, decline may accelerate and go on beyond the end of 2017. The dashed line shows the demand trajectory and scheduled balancing of supply and demand by the end of this year. By the end of next year the supply deficit could be of the order 3 Mbpd which on an annualised basis would result in a stock draw of 1.1 billion barrels. But remember, forecasts are ten a penny
Concluding Thoughts
M. King Hubberts forecast for US oil production and the methodology it was based on has been proven to be sound when applied to conventional oil pools in the USA. When decline takes hold in any basin or province, it is extremely difficult to reverse even with a period of sustained high price and the best seismic imaging and drilling technology in the world. On this basis we can surmise that global conventional oil production will peak one day with unpredictable consequences for the global economy and humanity. It is just possible that the near term peak in production of 97.08 Mbpd in July 2015 may turn out to be the all-time high. Economists who argued that scarcity would lead to higher price that in turn would lead to higher drilling activity and innovation have also been proven to be correct. Much will depend upon Mans ability to continue to innovate and to reduce the cost of drilling for LTO in order to turn a profit at todays price levels. If the shale industry is unable to turn a profit then it will surely perish without State intervention in the market. But from 2008 to 2015, oil production actually fell in 27 of 54 countries despite record high price. Thus, while peak oil critics have been proven right in North America they have been proven wrong in half of the Worlds producing countries. Should the shale industry perish, then it becomes highly likely that Mankind will face severe liquid fuel shortages in the years ahead. The future will then depend upon substitution and our ability to innovate within other areas of the energy sector.
By Raul Ilargi Meijer
Website: http://theautomaticearth.com (provides unique analysis of economics, finance, politics and social dynamics in the context of Complexity Theory) 2016 Copyright Raul I Meijer - All Rights Reserved Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors.
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In this article Benjamin Curry goes to the roots of the revolutionary history of the Iraqi people which is far from the barbarism which it is often labelled with by the bourgeois media today.
Since the 2003 invasions of Iraq and the liquidation of the Baathist state, US and British imperialism have opened a Pandoras Box in Iraq. Estimates suggest more than a million people were killed in the invasion and subsequent occupation, which have achieved nothing. Even from the cynical point of view of the furtherance of US imperialist interests, they now find themselves weakened and not strengthened. Far from bringing democracy and freedom, they have brought misery, barbarism and sectarianism. In the name of fighting terror the short-sighted strategists of imperialism threw the door wide-open to the Jihadist cutthroats they claimed to be fighting, including the Frankensteins monster of the Islamic State, which captured Iraqs second city of Mosul in 2014 without the least resistance.
This atrocious exhibition of sectarian mayhem is from start to finish the creation of foreign imperialism. The point must be underlined and underlined again that the genuine traditions of the Iraqi working class and peasantry are progressive, secular and communistic in nature. Nothing better demonstrates this fact than the history of the revolution of 1958-59. For a time in the late 50s and early 60s Iraq became the key theatre of struggle in one of the most significant dramas in modern history.
Whilst the revolution ultimately went down to defeat and paved the way for the vicious dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party, culpability for this defeat, as we shall see, lies squarely at the door of the Stalinist leaders of the Communist Party and owes nothing to any lack of conscious understanding or fighting spirit on the part of the workers and oppressed masses of Iraq. The consequences of that defeat, that continue to be felt down to the present day, sharply illustrate Rosa Luxemburgs words: that the choice before humanity today is one of socialism or barbarism.
The Development of Capitalism and the British Conquest of Iraq
The lines recognised today as the borders of modern Iraq are remarkable for their geometric regularity extending for hundreds of miles without deviation. These borders bare testament to the wholly artificial creation of modern Iraq as a nation state 100 years ago. In 1914 Britain and France plunged headlong into war against their rising rival, Germany. Before the war was concluded - which was principally fought for the defence of their colonial possessions - the two old powers had eyed the prospect of acquiring new territories from the remnants of the decaying Ottoman Empire. In 1916 the British and French drew up the notorious Sykes-Picot agreement to partition the Arab peoples into new states that would become the spheres of influence of one or other of the imperialist partners. France would take much of what is now Lebanon and Syria, and the British would take Jordan, Palestine and the three Ottoman wilayat (governorates) of Mosul, Basrah and Baghdad what we know today as Iraq.
Prior to their direct occupation, the British capitalist class had already developed deep interests in Iraq. Until the industrial revolution in Europe, Iraq had suffered a long period of decline stretching back centuries, from the fall of the Abbasid Empire. Patriarchal, tribal relations had grown in strength as the radiating power of the urban centres weakened.
The growth of European capitalism, however, threw this process into reverse. The Ottoman Empire, resting on pre-capitalist methods of production, was forced to modernise and centralise its state apparatus so as to compete with its more advanced European neighbours.
Moreover, European trade had the effect of reviving urban centres, not only as military-bureaucratic centres, but also as commercial hubs. The advent of steam navigation along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the laying of telegraph and railway lines tremendously boosted commerce and particularly trade with the British. With the growth of the modern state the old patriarchal tribal relations lost much of their relevance, whilst the penetration of capitalist relations pitched tribesmen against one another with opposing class interests. The late arrival of capitalism in Iraq and the deforming influence of foreign powers however, meant that this process of change was not a simple one capable of leading to the formation of a modern, industrialised and democratic nation-state but one which combined new forms with the conservation and strengthening of pre-capitalist forms. The pressure of the advanced capitalist countries like Britain generated not only strong centralising tendencies but also powerful centrifugal forces in the Ottoman Empire. In the early days of the expansion of its power across the region Britain rested first on the Mamluk dynasty in Iraq and then leant once more on the Sultan to crush the Mamluks in 1831, holding the Empire together.
In the cities the old artisanal methods of production were destroyed by cheap British goods. The famed spinners of Mosul, after which muslin cloth takes its name, were driven under by cheap imports from Lancashires mills. The British also brought wholly new methods of trade and transportation. The region had enjoyed a vibrant commerce according to the old methods of migratory caravans, tribal exchange and sailing stretches of river. However, with the arrival of joint-stock companies, steam navigation, and the erection of new borders dividing old trade routes after the British conquest, the old mercantile tribes and classes either integrated themselves as intermediaries of British trade, went under or else eked out a miserable existence.
With the way cleared, Iraqi capitalism was from the start based on British capital. Of the highest valued members of the Baghdad Chamber of Commerce in 1938 more than half were British, British-American or British-French companies. Only one Arab Muslim concern existed among the list, and almost all Iraqi-owned companies were British dependent mercantile companies of one type or other(1). However, the foreign capital invested in Iraq bore no proportion to the super-profits that were extracted. From 1950-1958 for instance, Imperial Chemical Industries made a total profit of over 1,500,000 dinars on a capital investment of just 3,000 dinars(2). Such figures bear out the parasitic character of Iraqi capitalism from its very inception.
In the countryside the penetration of the world market switched the axis of Iraqi agriculture from subsistence farming to production for the world market. Hungry bellies at home were placed in direct competition with food speculators abroad, causing prices of foodstuffs to skyrocket. The profit motive spurred the land hunger of the landlords and forced the process of disintegrating the communal tribal landholdings. Whilst this process began under Ottoman rule, it was consummated under the British occupation. Through the land laws imposed by the British in the 20s, agricultural lands which were nominally the domain of this or that tribe were converted into the direct private property of the sheikh (or agha in Kurdish regions) as head of the tribe. Vast tracts were concentrated in the hands of the sheikhs who more often than not converted their tribesmen into little more than serfs. As old sheikhly titles were dusted off or discovered, all manner of half-forgotten rights and duties were revived as the new landlord caste extracted every kind of tithe and corvee labour owed to them by the peasants.
Thus the British, at a time when old tribal relations were disintegrating, tremendously revived them on a semi-feudal basis. It was on this foundation, on the most backward and antiquated elements in Iraqi society, that British imperialism based its support. The colonial regime was erected on classical lines of divide and rule: not only between Kurd and Arab, Shia and Sunni, tribe versus tribe, but also playing off the monarchy and regular army with the sheikhs and their armed retainers.
Iraqi agriculture in particular came to suffer from both the worst elements of capitalism and feudalism. Land ownership became tremendously concentrated in the hands of a few, 49 families owning 16.8% of the land in 1958. The landlord class for their part had no interest in the application of science and machinery to agriculture they could enrich themselves far more easily by means of land grabbing and squeezing the peasantry. On the other hand where capitalist methods did make themselves felt it was in the blind anarchy of individual competition. The uneven application of water pumps to irrigation by enterprising capitalists-turned-landlords led to droughts in some areas and flooding in others. Meanwhile British management of river flow concerned itself with navigation for the purpose of commerce first and irrigation second: thus leading to the destruction of arable land, the ruining of harvests, the silting-up of irrigation canals and the salination of previously fertile soils (3).
We can see then how capitalism developed in Iraq in an extremely uneven and unbalanced manner. Antiquated technology persisted alongside the most modern machinery; peasants suffered under the yoke of feudal relations whilst a modern proletariat was being forged in the cities; and the most advanced ideas developed alongside time honoured prejudices. Such a combination made for the most acute social conflict as capitalist exploitation was compounded by tribal-feudal privileges, by national oppression and by the police methods of the British-backed Hashemite dynasty.
Perhaps few things better demonstrate the brutality and the unbalanced nature of Iraqi capitalism than the manner in which the RAF and British mechanised infantry were used to suppress poorly armed, tribal peoples in the Revolution of 1920. What began as the first urban revolt against the newly established British mandate with its centre in Baghdad, sweeping all classes and all sects into its maelstrom, became converted into an armed tribal uprising in the countryside. The working class was as yet too numerically small to lead the revolt and the urban bourgeoisie were both too weak and too interlaced with imperialism to represent an effective opposition. Leadership thus fell to the old caste of sheikhs and sayyeds. The events of 1920 were at the same time the first national, anti-imperialist uprising in Iraq's history and a last show of vigour by the dying tribal order.
Inevitably, with such a disconnected, tribal character, the revolution went down to defeat. The British put down the revolt with extreme brutality that bears comparison with the White Terrors unleashed in Eastern Europe. As a matter of cost saving, the British developed what they termed aerial policing to deal with rebellious populations; that is, indiscriminate bombardment of villages and towns to establish order. Whole villages were razed to the ground in order to quell uprisings. In one instance British commanders gave orders to raze every single town and village along 100km of a tributary of the Euphrates (4). In the annals of British imperialist atrocities those carried out in Iraq, of whom Winston Churchill was the main architect, deserve to be remembered for their particular barbarity.
Despite the defeat of the 1920 revolution in its attempt to oust the British, its psychological impact was particularly significant. It laid down a tradition of revolutionary struggle cutting across sectarian lines and left a deep impression on a generation of youth. The founder of the first Marxist study circle in Iraq, al-Rahhal; and Yussuf Salman Yussuf (Fahd) who lead the Communist Party from modest beginnings to its emergence as a serious force in the 40s; both attested to the tremendous impression the Revolution left on their youthful minds. It is to the particular conditions that prevailed at the inception of Iraqs Communist Party, the traditional party of the Iraqi working class, that we now turn our attention.
The Beginnings of the Communist Party of Iraq
Youssif "Fahd" Salman Youssif - Photo: Public DomainThe history of the development of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) is intimately tied with the growth and development of the Iraqi working class. We have seen how the penetration of the world market, the growth of capitalist relations and the intervention of British imperialism had drastic and contradictory effects on the fabric of Iraqi society. The most important result of this process was the burgeoning growth of the working class. Huge numbers of peasants streamed into the urban centres in their attempts to escape the dislocation, poverty and distress that prevailed in rural areas.
In the 36 year period from 1922 to 1958 the population of Mosul increased 2.5 times over, whilst the population of Basrah tripled. In the same period the population of Baghdad quadrupled from 200,000 to 800,000. The oil boom in particular served to significantly increase the size and weight of the industrial working class. In 1926 there were only 13,140 workers occupied in industries employing more than 100 people. By 1954 that had increased to over 65,000, with another 80,000 workers employed in light industries (5). By the 1940s and 50s, the period in which the ICP became a mass party in Iraq, the working class was emerging as the decisive factor in all major social and political movements.
These formative years of the Iraqi working class and of the Iraqi Communist Party were also dark days of bureaucratic counter-revolution and Stalinist terror in the country of the October Revolution, a fact that would leave a deep imprint on the young party. In 1927, when the first Communist study circles were being formed in Iraq, Stalinist gangsters were engaged in hounding Trotskys followers in Russia. The same process of degeneration which had begun in the Russian Communist Party spread throughout the Communist International, which was in the early stages of being converted from a lever for world proletarian revolution into its greatest obstacle.
In a cruelly ironic twist, the perceived connection that the Comintern retained with the dazzling achievements of the October Revolution allowed it to not only hold but strengthen its influence among the most advanced layers of workers and peasants; particularly in the colonial and semi-colonial world. This was the case also in Iraq where from the late 20's and into the early 30's communist study circles began emerging that would lay the groundwork for the formation of a Communist Party.
The Stalinist bureaucracy, driven by their own short-term interests, conducted a bewildering series of shifts to the left and to the right in this period. To crush Trotsky and the Russian Left Opposition - which represented the genuinely proletarian and revolutionary heart of the Bolshevik Party - the bureaucracy first leant sharply to the right, allying itself with the rising class of wealthy peasants. When the kulaks began to flex their muscles and to challenge the power of the state bureaucracy however, the Stalinists were thrown into alarm and made an insane gyration to the left. The kulaks were suddenly subject to the policy of forced collectivisation and the Soviet Union was plunged into famine.
Internationally these twists and turns were accompanied by similar gyrations in the policy of the Communist International, which reacted empirically to world events rather than anticipating them. In 1935, the year that the Iraqi Communist Party was formed, the Comintern began another sharp turn to the right; having burnt their fingers in Germany with an ultra-left policy that split the workers' movement just at the point at which workers unity was most desperately needed in the face of an ascendant Nazi Party.
The new policy dictated that Communist Parties around the world must form the broadest possible coalitions against fascism through the formation of popular fronts, which should also include those progressive elements of the national bourgeoisie. In practice this meant restraining the proletariat in one country after another from going beyond the limits of bourgeois democracy so as not to scare the liberal bourgeoisie. Arming the various national Communist Parties with a correct theoretical outlook however had very little to do with this policy; rather the Stalinists were less concerned with the progress of the world revolution and more concerned with ingratiating themselves with the British and French governments so as to quietly secure their own borders.
The new policy fundamentally rested on the myth that in the period of capitalism's imperialist decay there as yet existed a progressive wing of the bourgeoisie. In reality this was a theoretical aberration that had little to do with Marxism but which would have the most devastating practical consequences. In Iraq this policy necessarily meant imposing a dogmatic caricature of Marxism upon the young Communist movement, whereby history is mechanically divided into stages. As the advanced capitalist countries went through a period of democratic revolutions which cemented the rule of the bourgeoisie before conditions could mature for socialism; accordingly so must Iraq. Whilst it is indisputable that the tasks of the Iraqi revolution were primarily bourgeois in nature (the creation of a democratic republic; national liberation; rights for national minorities; land reform, etc.), the Iraqi bourgeois and petty bourgeois, being themselves wedded through a thousand strings to imperialism and precapitalist modes of production, were incapable of playing a progressive role in this struggle.
On the one hand the Iraqi national bourgeoisie were wholly dependent on their position with respect to foreign mainly British and later American capital. The imperialist powers for their part, as we have seen, had not only accustomed themselves to the existence of semi-feudal relics in Iraq but thoroughly depended on their perpetuation. Furthermore, unlike in England in 1642 or France in 1789, the pre-revolutionary working class in Iraq emerged as a powerful independent factor in events with a clear consciousness of its own interests. The Iraqi national bourgeoisie had good reason to fear this new factor and as such could be guaranteed to play only a counter-revolutionary role in events. The insistence of the Stalinists then that the ICP must channel the working class into supporting the progressive bourgeoisie in reality meant subordinating the working class to a chimera. Such a policy could only, and indeed would, spell disaster for the Communist movement.
At this point an important distinction must be made between the rank and file cadres of the ICP and its Stalinist leadership. As we shall see, the ranks of the ICP constituted the bravest and most self-sacrificing elements of Iraqi society and the true flower of the Iraqi working class. It is also important to distinguish between the ICPs leadership influenced by the ideas of Stalinism emanating from Moscow and the Stalinist bureaucracy itself in the Kremlin. Whereas the latter could deal in the fortunes of the ICP like so much small change from a position of perfect safety; there is no doubt that the former deeply and sincerely held their communist convictions and in many instances would make the ultimate sacrifice for their errors in the tragedy that unfolded.
Whilst the Iraqi Communist Party had numerous connections with the Stalinist Comintern, even from its earliest days, it is hard to know the degree to which this or that mistake in those days was attributable to naivety or to cynical manipulation by the Stalinists. Whilst the young party made many mistakes what stands out, in spite of this, is how the party for the most part had an instinctively correct grasp of the tasks that it faced. In the party paper, The Peoples Struggle, we read the following, fundamentally correct, demands in 1935:
The expulsion of the imperialists; the granting of freedom to the people, of complete independence to the Kurds, and of their cultural rights... to all of Iraqs minorities;
The distribution of land to the peasantry;
The abolition of all debts and land-mortgages...;
The seizure of all properties belonging to the imperialists the banks, the oilfields, and the railway works among others and the expropriation of the vast agricultural estates;
The concentration of power in the hands of the workers and peasants; and
The launching without delay of the social revolution in all other areas of life and the liberation of the people from manifold subjections.(7)
On this basis of linking the "bourgeois" tasks of the revolution (land reform, national rights, the struggle against imperialism etc.) to the task of expropriating the imperialist ruling class and bringing the working class to power the success of the Iraqi revolution could have been assured. Whilst the formula of the "concentration of power in the hands of the workers and peasants" failed to recognise the leading role of the working class in particular, it nevertheless represented a far superior programme to those issued under the clearer influence of Moscow at a later date.
Hardly had the ICP been formed however than Iraq was plunged into a crisis, which would put to the test the policy of supporting the "progressive" bourgeoisie; whilst at the same time bringing to the fore the subjective role of players within the state, and particularly of certain echelons of the officer corp. The combined and uneven character of capitalist development in Iraq not only had a distorting effect on the economic base of society but also upon the state apparatus itself, which now intervened in a peculiar role.
The State and the Crisis of 1936-1941
Nuri Al-Said - Photo: Public DomainFrom the occupation of Iraq following the First World War until their departure in 1932, the British succeeded in enmeshing themselves in a series of contradictions in their attempts to build a reliable state apparatus. Whilst trained Iraqi forces were needed to uphold private property, the social basis of capitalism and landlordism, embodied in the newly propertied landlord-sheikhs, mallaks and the monarchy, represented only the thinnest social stratum. Furthermore, the ignorant and narrow-minded ruling elite had neither the experience nor the inclination to involve themselves in state-building. The few reliable pairs of hands that the British could find, such as Nuri al-Said who occupied the position of Prime Minister eight times from the 30s until the revolution of 1958, were little more than undisguised, self-serving cynics who earned the deserved odium of the majority of the population.
It wasn't uncommon therefore for individuals from other class backgrounds, particularly from modest middle class families, to ascend the ranks of the officer corp. With the crisis in society reaching agonising proportions with distress on the land, backwardness in all quarters and the nation humiliated before British imperialism the younger officers tended to view the ruling class and its representatives at the head of the state who had adapted to this situation, with well deserved contempt. This state of affairs, which prevailed across the dependent colonial and semi-colonial nations and particularly in the newly partitioned Arab nations, lead to increasing restiveness within the armies, which became hotbeds of conspiracies and plots.
In an attempt to forestall any threat from this quarter, and to limit the power of the monarch, the British undertook a policy of hobbling the standing army from the earliest period of their mandate. Against the central apparatus of the state the British played off the sheikh's bands of personally loyal retainers, granting self-governance to these gangs and creating a scourge for the peasantry. Following the British departure from Iraq however, the king cut out his own course and launched a policy of conscription and expansion of the army, which now stepped forward with its own opinions on how to extract Iraq from its backwardness.
General Bakr Sidqi - Photo: Public DomainOn 29th October 1936 Iraq was plunged into a period of disequilibrium when armed regiments loyal to the nationalist officer, General Bakr Sidqi, entered Baghdad. Presented with a fait acompli, the king, who had nationalist inclinations of his own, accepted Sidqis dismissal of the old government. Meanwhile, sensing the anti-British mood that surrounded the coup, the closest collaborator of British imperialism, Nuri al-Said, fled the scene.
Despite the fact that Bakr Sidqi had few liberal, democratic or anti-imperialist credentials indeed Sidqi had been well favoured by the British for his role in butchering restive Shia tribesmen the liberal bourgeoisie around al-Ahali newspaper immediately pinned their colours to Sidqis mast and were rewarded with a clutch of ministries in the new government. The ICP, in line with its "stageist" approach of subordinating its struggle to the methods of the liberal bourgeoisie, also gave its full support to Sidqi as a supposed representative of the "progressive bourgeoisie".
The policy of the ICP from 1936-41 anticipated in a farcical manner the tragic policy that Communist Parties across the region would conduct in the 1950's. Unlike the Nasserist coup of 1952 in Egypt and the revolutionary events that accompanied the coup in Iraq in July 1958, the 1936 events were met with little popular enthusiasm. The support that the ICP rendered Sidqi was duly rewarded when the general launched a blistering ideological attack on the Communist Party. By early 1937 the liberal opposition - having served their purpose of providing Sidqi with a democratic, reforming mask - were also cast aside.(8)
With tumult and disarray within the state, the working class now took its signal to push itself through the cracks that were opening up within the ruling class. In late March 1937 a wave of strike action swept Iraq, the first of its kind. From the ports to the railway workshops to the oil industry; the Iraqi working class gave its first indication of the beginning of an awakening, and it moved not under the leadership of any other class but under its own impulses and direction principally that of the Communist Party.
The end for Sidqi came on 11 August 1937 when he fell under the bullets of an assassin. This did not settle the crisis in the regime however. On 4th April 1938 King Ghazi who had been a thorn in the side of the British due to his sympathetic attitude towards the nationalist officers and his agitation for unification with Kuwait died in mysterious circumstances, most likely at the hands of the British. He was succeeded by his son, Faisal II, who would reign as King of Iraq until the 1958 revolution. Being still a boy his uncle, Abdul Ilah, a faithful ally of the British took the reigns as regent and soon Nuri al-Said himself was returned to power with the assistance of a further coup. British interests seemed firmly back in the saddle but the nationalist officers, who remained in their positions, had other ideas.
In 1941 a group of four nationalist officers availed themselves of the discontent with the rule of Nuri and the regent, and the conditions of the World War, to depose the pair. Whereas Nasser would, after his 1952 coup in Egypt, use the classical Bonapartist method of resting upon the mass movement to cut a semi-independent course, Iraq's officers could rest on no such movement and so instead looked towards Hitler and German imperialism as an alternative point of support. The regime however was doomed to a short lived existence. The British undertook to reoccupy Iraq, depose the nationalist officers and reinstate Nuri and the regent, ushering a new period of occupation that would last until well into the 1940's.
Iraq was once more under the jackboot of British imperialism. The army was again reduced and conscription brought to an end as the British reasserted their control. The contradictions that riddled the Iraqi state were far from diminished however. The monarchy emerged from the crisis more undermined than ever and a dangerous precedent had been set for a new generation of officers to intervene in the national political scene.
More importantly however, the period beginning in the early 40's saw class antagonisms in Iraq heated to boiling point and all of this would reflect itself in continuing discontent in the ranks of the armed forces. The exploitation of the countrys newfound oil wealth propelled an economic boom in the 40's which enriched a thin stratum of the population whilst the general conditions for the majority continued to decline. The main effect of the oil boom for ordinary people was the influx of huge amounts of money into circulation and the resultant inflation of prices.
With no Chinese wall isolating the army from the rest of society, the moods of the different classes inevitably found their reflection with splits in the armed bodies of the state as well as the penetration of revolutionary parties into the ranks. The results of galloping inflation on the lives of soldiers and their families were only compounded by the British policy of reigning in the state, the net result being the creation of a parlous state of affairs that produced an ideal ground for the spread of revolutionary and conspiratorial ideas.
In the cities the migration of peasants continued to swell the ranks of the reserve army of labour, whose pressure combined with inflation to bear down on wages. Ironically the source of Iraqs huge natural wealth became the fount of further impoverishment and oppression for the masses. Economic distress was coupled with humiliation by the British dictatorship. With few moments of reprieve during the course of the democratic British occupation, the period was one of repression and clandestinity for worker and peasant activists.
The Wathbah and its results
The simmering discontent within society inevitably began to express itself with the growth of strikes, protests and political agitation of all hues picking up from the mid-40s. For a brief period of months the British experimented with the legalisation of trade unions and workers' organisations. However, this only led to the working class immediately going on the offensive with huge strikes in Basrah's port and the railway workshops in the environs of Baghdad. Far from taming or channelling the mood of discontent building up in the depths of society, legality only served to reveal the full extent of Communist influence in fierce outbursts; with the Schalchiyyah railway workshops of Baghdad now emerging as a major center of Iraqi communism - similar to the role the Putilov works in Petersburg played for Russian revolutionaries 30 years before.
In panic the imperialists quickly clamped down and once more illegalised the unions. Communists were swept up in a wave of repression, hundreds of political prisoners being left to languish in Kut jail including the party's general secretary, Fahd. The British imperialists and their Iraqi agents could see the storm clouds coalescing on the horizon and set upon reaffirming the 1930 Anglo-Iraq Treaty, which granted the British unlimited rights to intervene in Iraqs affairs as a bulwark against revolution. To ease the way for the treaty the hated British stooge, Nuri al-Said, stepped aside as prime minister and gave way to Salih Jabr in early 1947; the two travelling to England to begin negotiations in December of that year. The masses were not about to be deceived by a slight shuffling at the top of the pack however, and the negotiations served to blow sparks onto the bone-dry tinderbox of Iraqi society.
Unwitting of the scale of the events they were about to usher in, the bourgeois nationalist Independence Party took the initiative in calling the first demonstrations. On 5th January 1948 they called for student protests against the secret negotiations. Intending to march from Baghdad Law School to the royal palace, the students were met by mounted police and live ammunition. Many were injured. On the 6th January a new demonstration was called, this time in protest at the police repressions and drawing in students from all the opposition parties, including other bourgeois nationalist parties and the ICPs student wing. (10)
It was clear that the embers of protest, now lit, were waiting for the next gust to burst into flames. On 16th January the humiliating results of the treaty were made public and events began moving at lightning speed. Under the initiative of a Communist-organised front of opposition parties, a three day student strike and continuous demonstrations took place. The mobilisations peaked with a huge march on 20th January. Now the working class threw its tremendous social weight onto the scales. Students were accompanied by railway workers, the proletarian hard core of the ICP, and thousands of impoverished mud hut dwellers from the periphery of the city. Police fired once more with live rounds into the crowd. Students fell dead; more still were murdered at the hospital where they attempted to accompany their fallen comrades to the morgue.
Suddenly anger turned to rage before evening the streets were streaming with vast numbers of Baghdadi workers and youth, and at the head of every throng were Communists. The ruling class immediately took fright and on 21st January the kings regent renounced the treaty in order to diffuse the movement. The bourgeois nationalists, up to this point actively involved in the demonstrations, similarly took fright when presented face to face with the stirring masses. The Independence Party, whose actions had ironically initiated the events, declared that their aims were met with the repudiation of the treaty by the regent and called for protests to end. The left nationalists of the National Democratic Party (the successor to al-Ahali) continued to verbally call for the resignation of the government of Salih Jabr but in practice they too urged for calm and a cessation of protests.
The Iraqi national bourgeois were weak and dependent upon British imperialism from their very inception and it ought to come as no surprise that in the decisive moments they acted with utter cowardice and fled the field. They entered the streets in the early days of the Wathbah with the intention not of overthrowing the government but of frightening the regime and imperialism with the prospect of unrest so as to receive concessionary crumbs from their table. However, at the first show of strength by the working class, and when confronted with the tasks of a genuine social revolution they immediately pulled back and cowered behind the monarchy and imperialism.
The movement shrugged off the flight of its fair-weather friends and continued to gather momentum. The only ones willing to fight through to the end were the workers lead by the Communists, and behind them all classes of the urban and rural poor, and the lower layers of the middle classes. These forces, in themselves, were more than sufficient to bring down the regime and establish a revolutionary government. This lesson was now being learnt by thousands of individuals, not through books but through the school of revolution itself.
Within the ranks of the Communist Party the most farsighted cadres were rapidly drawing the conclusion that the task of leading the Iraqi revolution fell to the working class alone, and that this meant the seizure of power by the Communist Party, not only without the assistance of but directly against the bourgeois nationalist parties. On 1st February 1948, days after the peak of the movement, an internal ICP circular entitled The Essence of Our Movement for Independence denounced the politically and economically weak national bourgeoisie who were disposed to come to terms with the imperialists at the expense of the masses out of fear of the growing over of the democratic into the socialist revolution (11).
These remarks precisely expressed the actual situation of the Iraqi revolution. Had these correct theses been taken to their logical conclusion the ICP would have been politically equipped for the historic tasks now upon the party. However, the Menshevik-Stalinist position of the leadership of the ICP continued to prevail. As the principal tasks of the revolution were bourgeois-democratic (repudiation of the imperialist treaty, democratic elections, land reform and so on) the ICP leadership persisted in the false conclusion that the leading role in the revolution must therefore be taken up by the national bourgeoisie, and that the ICP ought therefore to seek out an alliance with the bourgeois nationalist parties at any cost.
On 23rd January huge demonstrations were convoked by the Communist Party. New, more radical slogans began to be heard that went far beyond scrapping the Treaty and the miserably low horizons of the bourgeois democrats: For a peoples revolution!, Long live the unity of the workers and students! and Long Live the Republic!(12) The Communist leaders however repudiated these slogans as the work of provocateurs and limited their demands in an attempt to bring the bourgeois democrats back on board. They were not fighting for Communism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, or even a Republic, they insisted; they only wanted the repudiation of the treaty, a free, democratic environment and the formation of a democratic government of all the patriotic parties; including the very same parties that had withdrawn from the struggle and opposed it in the preceding days!
The problem was that despite all the moderation of the Communist leaders, the national bourgeois could see the force that stood behind them: the workers and poor. Any revolution which achieved genuine democracy could do so only by the revolutionary action of this class and, just as the aforementioned internal ICP circular explained, it could not be assured that these classes would not go on to expropriate the bourgeoisie themselves. On 26th January, upon the return of Nuri al-Said and Salih Jabr from England, the people again surged onto the street. That night protesters were met with machine gun fire as the government resolved on ending the unrest. The ICP called for demonstrations across Baghdad the morning after and were met by huge, seething crowds. Two crowds coalesced on opposite sides of the Tigris: on the West huge numbers of students and railway workers; on the East thousands of poor mud hut dwellers. The police set up sniper nests and brought in armoured units to keep the two demonstrations from merging and becoming an uncontrollable mass. Whilst the throngs in the West were hemmed into a city square, the crowds in the East made a tremendous surge across the Mamum bridge in an attempt to link up with their comrades on the other side of the river. The police mercilessly opened fire across the bridge and dozens began to fall. Shortly after the demonstrators in the West broke out the police cordon and were met by the same armoured units that had massacred the people minutes earlier. Again they opened fire and dozens more fell. 300-400 people fell dead that day on Mamum bridge. (13)
Facing the magnitude of their crimes and the furious, mourning crowd, the police took flight in panic. Salih Jabr, sensing mortal danger, fled for his life to England. The regime now stood in mid-air and power lay in the street. All it would have taken would have been for the conscious and organised revolutionary masses to declare themselves as the power and the regime would have been powerless to resist. However the ICP completely rejected the perspective of taking power alone. Had the party put forward a clear and decisive plan for taking power it would rapidly gain the necessary support to organise a successful insurrection. Powerless to repress the movement further, the regime was now prepared to make any concession necessary simply to retain power. The regent now brought in Muhammed al-Sadr to form a government, a leader of the 1920 revolution and a perceived reformer, with the hope of deceiving the masses and calming them down.
Whilst the leaders of the ICP remained incarcerated in Kut prison, the party began rapidly expanding its activities in the wake of the revolutionary upturn. The student movement continued to simmer; strikes broke out among the most important layers of workers in the railways, ports and oil pumps (14); in the provinces agrarian revolt broke out here and there; and everywhere streams of workers joined the Communist Party's organisations.
However, as must occur if the class struggle is not fought to a decisive victory, the momentum of the revolutionary movement ebbed and the ruling class - having waited in the aisles - now impatiently sought their revenge. After just six months, the government of al-Sadr was dismissed and Nuri al-Said was brought back to the premiership to complete the job of crushing the embers of revolution. As the Arab-Israel war broke out the militarisation of Iraq gave ample scope for the ruling class to begin clamping down on its domestic enemies.
In this job the Stalinist bureaucracy now gave tremendous assistance to the triumphant reaction: despite the historical anti-Semitism of Stalin and the ruling clique in Moscow, the Soviets now gave criminal support to the partition of Palestine in an attempt to wheedle their way into the diplomatic good books of the newborn state of Israel. The ICP were given orders to adopt the same party line. This meant that, the last shred of sympathy that the non-Communist masses had for the ICP evaporated. This served to divide and diffuse the revolutionary movement sufficiently that the counter-revolution could turn the situation to their bloody advantage.
Everywhere communists were rounded up; police spies broke up every Communist organisation of significance; in Kut prison communists were quietly murdered; and Fahd and two of his comrades were retried and sentenced to death. This time the sentences were carried out and the bodies of the condemned men were strung up publically in the city squares of Baghdad as a direct message to the poor and working classes.
At first glance the defeat of the revolution opened up the most pessimistic perspective. All of the democratic gains of the revolution were undone and once again the counter-revolution had established itself firmly in power. Furthermore the Communist Party was in disarray, dispersed and crumbling; its historic leaders were either dead, in exile or in prison. However, as the saying goes, history wastes nothing. The Wathbah or The Leap as it came to be known, represented a decisive turning point in Iraqs history. Although the Hashemite monarchy survived the revolutionary shock of 1948, the last drop of moral authority had completely evaporated from the regime and whilst the ICP was initially shattered by the triumphant counter-revolution, the bonds between the masses and the Communist Party as their organised expression were now sealed in blood.
The Communist Partys punishment
Youssif Salman Youssif - Comrade Fahd - Photo: Public DomainAll of the efforts of the regime to exorcise the spectre of communism from Iraq were doomed to failure from the beginning, irrespective of how many cells were broken up or how many cadres were arrested or murdered. The fact is that it was Iraqi conditions that fed the growth of the Communist Party. This was fully revealed in each upturn in the class struggle and each revolutionary explosion that developed in the period of the 50's, each of which tended to begin where the Wathbah left off. The first of these explosions came in 1952 with the Intifadah, during which the Communist Party once more shrugged aside all other parties and emerged clearly as the leader of the poor, the working class and the youth.
However, in the early 50's a new "leftist" tone emerged in the propaganda of the party. As is so often the case, ultra-leftism was the punishment that the ICP had to suffer for its earlier opportunist mistakes and in the early 1950's an amateurish left emerged in the leadership of the party lead by the new general secretary, Hamid Uthman. Turning away from the old policy of compromise with the national bourgeoisie, which had brought disaster on the head of the party, the leadership of the ICP looked around for an alternative and like many Communist Parties during this period found an apparently more "radical" alternative in Maoist China.
In point of fact however, Mao's China represented no real alternative to the line dictated by Moscow. On the one hand Mao too had held to the Stalinist "stageist" approach and believed that China would have to pass through 100 years of capitalist development before the socialist transformation of Chinese society could seriously be placed on the agenda. It was only unconsciously, as it were, that the Maoists came to expropriate capitalism after the flight of the Kuomintang and with them the majority of the national bourgeoisie to Taiwan.
Nevertheless, the apparently uncompromising attitude of the Red Army who had expropriated the ruling class in a "People's Revolution" looked like a plausible alternative to a Communist Party reeling from a defeat that had been compounded by its earlier opportunism. In the conditions in Iraq however, with its increasingly combative working class and labour movement, a turn to a peasant "people's war" and direct, immediate confrontation with the state could only spell disaster for the party.
When the party leadership ordered party cadres to enter the streets in opposition to the Baghdad Pact of 1955 and to engage in continuous running battles in the street, without a concomitant mass movement, the results were predictably disastrous for the party.(16) Had an opposition to the Stalinist-Menshevik line of collaboration with the national bourgeoisie existed in the early 50s that based itself on a return to the traditions of genuine Marxism, as represented by the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky, it may well have been possible to politically rearm the party in this period. As it was, the disaster created by the ultra-lefts only served to swing the party once more into the arms of Stalinist opportunism. (17)
The Shifting Balance of Power in the Middle East
One of the most important outcomes of the Second World War was the emergence of a new balance of forces on a world scale. The old powers of Britain and France were now in sharp decline, with the United States filling the vacuum as the dominant imperialist power on a world scale. With the emergence of Israel in the region, all these fluctuations had the most destabilising impact on social and political relations throughout the Middle East. At the same time Stalinism emerged immensely strengthened and appeared as a serious alternative to imperialist subjugation.
In 1952 the crisis in Egypt, one of the most industrialised and populous countries of the region, found its expression in the Free Officers' coup against the British-backed Farouk monarchy. The populist, nationalist rhetoric of the coup struck a deep chord and unleashed a mass wave of enthusiasm. With the mass movement on the street pushing the Free Officers to the left it was the leftward-moving and self-proclaimed Pan-Arabist, Gamal Abdul Nasser, who came to the fore with his ideas of Arab unity and an increasingly brazen defiance of British imperialism.
Increasingly the Nasser regime turned in the direction of the Soviet Union for political and military support and, basing himself on the popular mood of the mass of workers and poor, nationalised much of the property of the imperialist powers. In Syria too the regime began facing in the direction of the USSR and by the 1960s even went as far as completely expropriating the ruling class and creating the first planned economy in the Middle East, albeit on a bureaucratic and Stalinist basis.
In 1956 things reached crisis point when Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal. The British and French, imagining that they could strike a quick blow against Nasser and remove a thorn in their side, quickly occupied the Suez Canal Zone but were forced into a hasty retreat by the Americans. The British were completely humiliated but so too were all the powers of the Baghdad Pact, which constituted the Anglo-American "sphere of influence", with Iraq at its centre. Nasser however emerged tremendously strengthened. When a union with Syria was declared in early 1958, and the United Arab Republic (UAR) was formed, the move was met with huge popular enthusiasm across the Arab world as the beginning of a much yearned for socialist unification of the Arab peoples.
The reality, of course, was more complicated. Whilst resting on the mass movement to deliver blows against the imperialists, Nasser never completely broke with capitalism. Meanwhile his regime operated along classical Bonapartist lines, with Communists and trade unionists frequently subject to brutal police repression. The unification with Syria meanwhile was seen on the Egyptian side as a means to expand the market for Egyptian goods; and on the Syrian side as a chance to liquidate all political opposition within the country, and particularly the mass Syrian Communist Party. (18)
Nevertheless these tumultuous events throughout the region had a tremendous effect within Iraq and added to the explosive cocktail that was developing. This was also the case within the army. Since 1952 cells of Free Officers, directly modelled on those in Egypt, began to take form, beginning among the most proletarian section of the military, the engineering divisions. The events in 1956 tremendously quickened the spread of conspiratorial cells within the middle layers of the officer corp and by 1958 the conspirators were waiting for the opportune moment to strike.
The July Revolution
Abdul Salam Aref - Photo: Public DomainOn the morning of 14th July 1958, after a tense and sleepless night, Colonel Abdul Salam Aref led a division of troops on a march towards Baghdad. His orders were to march onward to the Jordanian border, a maneuver that would necessarily involve passing through the capital. Upon arriving in Baghdad a little after 4am however, the units swiftly moved into action and occupied the key tactical positions in the city including the radio exchange, key ministries and the royal palace. In the confusion that reigned, the royal family was mowed down by the machine gun fire of a nationalist officer only vaguely aware of the nature of the unfolding events. Nuri al-Said briefly fled but was later found and killed. The radio now announced to the world what had happened: Iraq was officially a Republic, it had been liberated from imperialism by the revolutionary officers and the people were called upon to support the armed forces!
The response of the people was overwhelming and quickly caused jitters among the instigators of the coup. By mid-morning hundreds of thousands of workers, peasants, slum dwellers, housewives, students, government clerks and rank and file soldiers flooded the streets. What had begun was no mere repeat of 1941 this was the start of a genuine revolution. If, as Trotsky explained, a revolution can be defined as one of those exceptional periods in human history when the mass of ordinary people begin to take their destiny into their own hands, then this was the start of a revolutionary process that would extend and continue to unfold over several years. First in numbers, energy and standing among the organised forces that mingled with the crowds was the ICP. Workers, peasants, women, students and young people flooded into its organisations.
In the early days of the July regime, the mass outbreak of euphoria that accompanied the fall of the hated monarchy masked the heterogeneity of the officers that had now been thrust to a position of power. The weakness and internal division of the new regime however soon came to the fore and centered on a conflict between the two key conspirators of the 14th July overthrow; Brigadier Abdul Karim Qaseem, now at the head of the government and the armed forces; and his second-in-command, Colonel Aref.
To the extent that any ideology can be said to have given a semblance of unity to the Free Officer movement in Iraq prior to the July Revolution it was fundamentally the same ideology that motivated the officers involved in the 1952 coup in Egypt and the initiators of the 1941 coup in Iraq; namely nationalism and in particular the outlook of Pan-Arabism. It is worth now making a brief detour to consider the nature of "Pan-Arabism" as an ideology and the role that it played in the revolutionary period that opened up from July 1958.
Pan-Arabism, the Communist Party and Dual Power
Like any nationalism, Pan-Arabism was by its very nature capable of encompassing not only divergent but outright antagonistic social forces. The first "Pan-Arab" ideas to emerge under the Ottoman Empire were of a distinctly reactionary character. They were the reserve of semi-feudal, semi-tribal elements and asserted the autonomy of the relatively more backward Arab regions from the Turkish metropolis with its liberal ideas. The leaders of the "Arab Revolt" against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, which included the future king of Iraq, Faisal I, were of this character, and proved to be little more than pawns in the calculations of British imperialism.
However with the growth of capitalism across the post-partition Arab nations in the 20's, 30's and 40's, Pan-Arab nationalism took on a changed class content. The old social classes continued to clothe themselves in the garb of Pan-Arabism: we see for instance the attempts of King Ghazi to "unify" Iraq and Kuwait in the 1930's; the "union" between the Jordanian and Iraqi monarchies in 1958, prior to the July Revolution; and the anti-Zionist demagoguery of the semi-feudal classes across the entire region. This became increasingly difficult to take seriously as the masses saw past the facade to the imperialist masters pulling the strings in the background.
The new social classes instead began to give "Pan-Arab" ideas their own content. For certain layers of the poorest and most oppressed classes of the Arab countries, Pan-Arabism meant taking a stand against imperialist partition. The unification of the Arab nations represented an initial step towards genuine socialist internationalism for the working masses and it is for this reason that Abdul Gammal Nasser was so well loved among the Egyptian poor. In the first hand bills produced by the Iraqi Communist Party we also see a strong strand of Pan-Arabism and there is no reason to assume that these expressed anything other than the genuine feelings, unguided and as yet immature, of Iraq's first communists.
The loose idealist notion of a singular Arab people rising above class distinctions however tended to fit in best with the interests and outlook of the urban petty bourgeoisie. The Free Officers, drawn as they were for the most part from the Sunni Arab layers of the middle class, took a natural affinity to these ideas; as did the Ba'ath Party, which drew its first cadres from the students and middle class intelligentsia. Caught between the struggle of the bourgeoisie and international imperialism on the one hand and the proletariat on the other, the appeal to a super-historical "Arab spirit" and the utopian idea of unifying the whole "Arab people" in the interests of all (i.e. in the interests of the petty bourgeoisie) resonated powerfully.
When tested in power however, the idea of Pan-Arab unity on the basis of capitalism proved to be a utopia and the Free Officer regime proved weak and riven with tensions. On the one hand the urban petty bourgeoisie as a class is unable to play an independent class role and must eventually find itself being dragged in the trail of the capitalist class or else must look towards the working class. In conditions of intense class struggle such as those unleashed post-July 1958, the possibility of any middle course was even further reduced. Furthermore, on the basis of imperialism we see how the national capitalist classes of each nation (and their bosses, the major imperialist powers) have antagonistic interests that rule out their union.
When we add to this the intense personal rivalries that existed among the Free Officers, with many officers feeling that they had been cheated of positions of power by Qaseem and Aref who had thrust themselves to the forefront as the events of the July Revolution unfolded, a crisis and a split became inevitable. It was under these circumstances that Aref, the junior of the two leading Free Officers, began touring the country, powerfully agitating for immediate union with the UAR in speeches that took on a fiery, quasi-socialist character that reflected and resonated with the genuine sympathies of the masses:
"Henceforth there shall be no feudalism, no rich and no poor, no disparities and no classes. You are all God's creatures!" ... "This republic is your republic, a popular, patriotic, socialist republic... Rejoice, therefore O peasant, rejoice O worker, rejoice O son of the country!"(19)
Qaseem meanwhile increasingly became the focus of the "Iraqist" wing within the regime and began posing as a moderate defender of private property. Viewing with increasing anxiety the rising challenge posed by Aref, Qaseem began looking around for other social forces on which to rest, and in typical Bonapartist fashion was inclined to rest on the support of the ICP to bring to heel the nationalist officers around Aref.
The Communist Party for its part had reason to hold the pan-Arab "socialism" of Aref, and the Ba'ath Party which swung behind him, in deep suspicion. The example of Syrias unification with Egypt had shown how socialist and pan-Arab rhetoric could be used as a cover for the brutal repression of Communists and Aref's language by no means precluded his becoming an unwitting tool of the counter-revolution. However, this by no means implied that Qaseem was any less reactionary.
Shaken by the threat posed by Aref, Qaseem gave his support to the arming of ICP members into Peoples Resistance units and gave license to an open demonstration of force by the Communist Party. The ICP took the opportunity and on 6th August 1958 500,000 people flooded the streets of Baghdad behind the banner of the ICP.
Qaseem, politically moderate and known for his personal modesty, might have seemed an unlikely candidate for a political strongman in whose hands all the power of state would now concentrate itself. Aref meanwhile was a pious yet fiery and passionate individual with genuine sympathy for the poor - perhaps an unlikely figure behind whom the forces of counter-revolution might attempt to unify. And yet events were taking on a logic that was beyond the control of either man and gave the clash between the two a far deeper significance.
For the ruling class the most important task was now one of crushing the revolutionary movement and in particular of breaking the ICP. The tendency of Qaseem to seek protection from his rivals in support from the ICP was thus completely intolerable. The ruling class was inclined to throw its lot in with any party or group of officers which now came into opposition to his rule - including the socialist Aref and, of course, the Baath Party.
Towards the end of 1958 and the beginning of 1959 the Communist Party and its affiliated organisations underwent an explosive growth. Communist led trade unions, womens organisations, student unions, Peace Partisan committees, peasant committees and Communist militia units now drew around them hundreds of thousands of supporters. A situation of dual power where the old state persists through inertia alongside the growth of a new power, in this case around the working class and the Communist Party now became an established fact. Batatu relates how in late 1958 an ambassador of the UAR complained he could not travel more than 3 km in Baghdad without being stopped nine times by patrolling units of the Peoples Resistance(20). In workplaces and government ministries too, Committees for the Defence of the Republic were springing up and establishing de facto workers control(21).
Rather than use the splits now developing in the state and their burgeoning influence among the poor and working classes to prepare the seizure of power, the ICP continued along the path that flowed logically from its stageist theoretical outlook. On the understanding that the initial tasks of the July Revolution were national democratic in character, and the false conclusion that it must therefore be lead by the national bourgeoisie, the ICP declared Qaseem to be the representative of the progressive wing of the bourgeois and raised the slogan of full support for the "sole leader" Qaseem. Meanwhile Aref was denounced as a dangerous ultra-leftist whose position threatened to split the "progressive" forces in Iraq(22).
In reality however, there was no progressive bourgeoisie in Iraq for Qaseem to rest on. Qaseem's power represented a careful balancing act between the classes. Such a tightrope act was only made possible on account of the temporary stalemate that the revolution had established.
On the one hand the forces of counter-revolution now arraying behind the nationalist officers (the sheikhs, landlords, merchants and capitalists) were unable to deal a decisive blow against the revolution on account of the overwhelming strength of the ICP. On the other hand the working class and poor peasants were unable to seize power as they were being held back from the task by their leadership.
By temporarily leaning on the ICP, Qaseem easily dealt heavy blows against Aref and the nationalist officers. In November Aref was arrested and in December an attempted nationalist coup unraveled. In March 1959 a more serious attempt to seize power was carried out by officers in Mosul. The lines of division brought out in sharp relief how the nationalist officers had fallen to the position of an open tool of counter-revolution. All the forces interested in the defeat of the revolution gathered behind the coup: local merchants, landlords and sheikhs found themselves on the same side as the middle class officers; the Ba'ath Party found an ally in the Muslim Brotherhood; and internationally Anglo-American imperialism and the UAR both pinned their hopes on the conspirators. On the other side of the barricades stood the workers, peasants, rank and file soldiers, and the Communist Party.
Once more, the plot was smashed by the revolutionary mass of peasants, workers and urban poor. Having got wind of the plot, the Communist Party organised a mass demonstration of 200,000 Peace Partisans through the city in the days prior to the coup. As the plot began to unfold it found itself checked at every turn by the bitter resistance of the masses. Ultimately the coup collapsed amid a violent scramble between revolution and counter-revolution.
In his classic, "The Old Social Classes of Iraq", Batatu describes the scenes thus: "no matter how one apportions the responsibility [for the violence], one cannot help feeling [...] that at the root of much of the aggressiveness in the days of March at Mosul was a common fear to which all the sides of the conflict seem to have succumbed: the fear that failure at that crucial historical point might well entail destruction at the hands of their adversaries." That is to say, despite the ICP's attempts to smooth over the contradictions between the possessing classes and the working classes, each were now locked in a mortal struggle and civil war loomed. Mosul gave a foretaste of the orgy of violence that the ruling class would unleash were they to gain the upper hand.
May Day 1959 - The High Tide of the Revolution
1958 revolution in Iraq - Photo: Public domainWith the counter-revolution now badly beaten, the initiative lay wholly with the ICP with May Day 1959 marking the high point of their power. One million people (out of a total population of just 5 million) now marched behind the banner of the Communist Party. Alongside a huge presence from the People's Resistance militia, the Peace Partisans and numerous Communist-led mass organisations, the demonstration also revealed the extent of the party's infiltration into the army. No fewer than 15 blocs on the demonstration were made of delegations from the army, the air force and even the police. In the air force support for the Communists ran particularly high, with almost every pilot being either an ICP member or else a sympathiser. Even by comparison with other revolutions in history, the degree of ICP penetration into the state ran exceptionally deep.
On few occasions have revolutionary parties succeeded in not only winning a large part of the ranks of the armed forces but of also capturing significant officer positions. Communist sympathisers now occupied commanding positions in the 1st Division, the 2nd Division, the 20th Brigade of the 3rd Division, the 6th Armoured Brigade and four tank regiments, among others and the total number of senior Communist officers now outnumbered the number of officers aligned to the Free Officer movement at its decisive moment in July 1958(23). With such crushing strength not only could a transfer of power been effected, but the overwhelming balance of forces in favour of the revolution meant that it could have been achieved in a relatively peaceful manner.
The conquest of power was far from the horizons of the ICP leaders however who limited themselves to petitioning Qaseem for ministerial portfolios in the government. Qaseem though refused and the ICP was now faced with a stark choice. Despite trying to dodge the question of power, it now posed itself point blank: either the party must acquiesce to Qaseem's refusal or else it must seize power on its own initiative. The whole past policy of the ICP now stood as an obstacle to bold action: if it chose to seize power into its own hands now it would have to contend with the illusions that the party itself had sown in Qaseem among the masses.
Such a sharp turn would doubtless have involved risks, but with a bold agitation in favour of an Iraqi October, the huge reserves of support that the ICP enjoyed would surely have guaranteed its victory. A Socialist Workers' and Peasants' Republic of Iraq based upon collective ownership of the land and the big businesses would have shone like a beacon across the Middle East and the world. The Soviet bureaucracy however saw such an outcome as a nightmare scenario, and in the debate that took place it was the Moscow bureaucracy which swung the decision.
Arguing from the point of view of their own narrow geopolitical interests, the Stalinists were more concerned with preserving friendly relations with other regimes in the region which they understood would be implacably hostile to a Socialist Republic of Iraq. The USSR made explicit that in the case of such a seizure of power there would be no attempt to come to the assistance of the Iraqi Communists by Russian forces. All history has shown however and particularly the history of the Arab world that a revolution in Iraq would not remain confined within the limits of that country but would have found points of support across the entire region. The Arab Spring of 2011 showed how revolutions have no respect for national boundaries much less artificially imposed colonial boundaries and in practice tend to spread like wildfire.
The Reaction and the Ba'ath Party
Aref and Qasim - Photo: Public DomainIndecision and weakness at key historical junctures almost invariably bears a heavy cost for any revolutionary party. Having let slip a key opportunity to seize power, each new event now rebounded against the ICP. In July 1959, on the event of the anniversary of the July Revolution a deadly clash occurred between Kurds and Turkmen in the city of Kirkuk. Blame was cast on the ICP in psychological preparation for an onslaught against the party. After a period of hesitation the party eventually condemned the violence but then went one further and subjected itself to public humiliation.
In the name of conducting an "orderly retreat" the party now publicly recanted its previously stringent demand for a role in the government. Qaseem, moving with the prevailing wind, took the opportunity to lean from the left foot to the right in order to deal blows against the party. Communists occupying senior civil service or military positions were removed and an edict was issued ordering the disarmament of the People's Resistance. To prove its loyalty to the government the party now took a disastrous step that would leave it completely defenceless in the face of reaction: it declared that it was freezing activity within the army. Such displays of weakness did little to change Qaseem's course however.
After a botched attempt by the Ba'ath party to assassinate Qaseem on 7th October 1959 the fortunes of the ICP received a temporary fillip. Such tactics of individual terror illustrated that the forces of reaction as yet had no serious social base and would take some time yet to become consolidated. Rather it was from the state itself that the most significant blows continued to be struck against the ICP. Starting with the removal of the ICP's license whilst Qaseem was still coalescing in his hospital bed, the government began fixing elections against the Communists in the unions and the mass organisations, and shut down the most implacably pro-Communist organisations. The landlords and capitalists, interpreting the passivity of the ICP as a sign of weakness, were now emboldened to go on to the offensive.
In Mosul, with the ICP now only semi-legal, the fundamentalist Islamic Party was given legal license and a "Black Terror" was unleashed against the workers a tradition that reactionary forces have revived today. Fatwahs were issued by the clergy and material rewards of 10 dinars per head were offered by local merchants to encourage the murder of communist activists(25). Nationalists and lumpen gangsters threw themselves into the orgy of violence that left hundreds of communists dead and thousands wounded. Across the country Baath party thugs and organised criminal elements backed by local elites took on with gusto the role of auxiliaries in assisting the disarmament of the ICP and the Peoples Resistance.
It is important to note that until the 1960's some months after the point of inflection of the revolution the membership of the main party of reaction, the Ba'ath party, was extremely low numbering little more than a few hundred members in the whole country. This fact is indicative of a historical law that operates in the upward curve of all revolutions: that in the first instance the petty bourgeoisie tends to look towards the working class and its organisations, in this case the ICP, to solve its problems.
The element of time, however, does not favour revolutions, which are tremendous devourers of human energy, and the longer the impasse persisted the more the conjuncture of forces tended to favour the counter-revolution until such point as a tipping point was reached. The failure of the ICP to capitalise on a historic opportunity to seize power frustrated the unstable middle classes. Several years of chaos and heavy sacrifices had not led to any tangible concessions for the middle classes who yearned for stability and a resolution. Having seen the vacillation of the ICP, they were no longer impressed by it and looked elsewhere for a strong leadership. A section of these layers now shifted its hopes towards the Ba'ath party, which through its bold policy of street confrontations appeared to represent a far more action-inclined and decisive political alternative.
By late 1962 Qaseem's balancing act had unravelled to the favour of the counter-revolution. Under the cover of a Ba'ath organised student strike beginning at the end of that year, a coup was launched on 8th February 1963. Key ICP strongholds were targeted in the attack, including the grounding of the Communist-majority air fleet. Taken by surprise Qaseem held a council with his key supporters in the military at which the Communists urged him to arm the masses now streaming into the streets from the working class districts. Qaseem refused however and the ICP was at last forced to look upon his role with sober senses. The party dropped any reference to Qaseem from its proclamations and appealed to the masses to come to arms, but it was too late.(26)
The masses were now disarmed and completely miseducated and continued raising the old ICP slogan of full support for "the sole leader Qaseem," whilst Qaseem himself directly impeded the arming of the people. Only here and there were communists able to acquire weapons by storming police stations. In the words of the party's First Secretary, ar-Radi, the party had become "like the revolver of one of the comrades, which, being unoiled and uncleaned, had rested and no longer fired."(27)
In acts of tragically doomed bravery, the masses threw themselves unarmed at tanks and machine guns and were mown down. After begging Aref, his former comrade, to spare his life Qaseem surrendered on 9th February and was quickly dispatched by firing squad. The fighting however raged on through to the 10th in Baghdad, with the hardcore of the Communist Party putting up a fierce resistance to the very end. It wasn't until the 12th that the rebels were able to extend their control to Basrah.
The ICP had pulled back from the opportunity to seize power in part to avoid civil war but this was precisely what was now upon the party. In the months following the Ba'athist coup a one sided civil war was unleashed against communists, the working class and the revolutionary peasantry. To the same degree that the pendulum had swung in favour of the revolution, it now swung sharply towards counter-revolution in a bloodletting that left the post-Wathbah repression in the shade. According to the King of Jordan (himself a CIA agent) arrests were conducted on the basis of pre-prepared lists supplied by US intelligence agencies. To the thousands killed in the coup itself was now added the wholesale torture and massacre of thousands more.
The Unfinished Revolution
The defeat of the Revolution of 1958-63 represents one of the most tragic episodes of 20th Century history. Properly speaking it is impossible to speak of the July Revolution as the "Iraqi" Revolution. Rather it formed one link in the chain that was the huge revolutionary wave of the Colonial Revolution, which involved hundreds of millions of people in its tremendous sweep.
The stakes could not have been higher. A victory for the Iraqi working class would have struck a catastrophic blow against imperialism that would have provided a launch pad for ejecting imperialism from the entire region. Victory over capitalism and feudalism in Iraq would have sounded the death knell for the reactionary regimes across the Middle East. Defeat however has reaped a bitter harvest for the people of the entire region that continues to be felt to this day. Imperialist meddling, war, poverty, sectarian violence and national oppression, all of which should have been buried long ago, have taken on horrific proportions.
The sole responsibility for this defeat lies at the feet of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow whose spineless betrayal stood in sharp relief to the bravery and heroism of Iraqs workers and poor. The theoretical cloak for this betrayal was provided by the Stalinist theory of revolution by stages, which insists on tying the workers' movement to the "progressive" wing of the bourgeoisie. However, the Iraqi bourgeoisie was reactionary from its very inception and at every key juncture, as we have seen, played the most deplorable role.
In casting around for a representative of the non-existent progressive bourgeois the ICP settled on the person of Qaseem. The reforms carried out by his government (arming the Peoples Resistance, breaking up the biggest estates, investment in social programs, etc.) seemed to justify this approach. In reality however, these concessions were wrung under the pressure of the revolutionary masses who at any moment threatened to completely overwhelm the regime.
Qaseems policy was not based upon any progressive bourgeois class, which was implacably counter-revolutionary, but on a balancing act between the classes - what Marxists refer to as Bonapartism. By leaning first on the workers and peasants and then the capitalists and landlords Qaseem was able to deal blows against threats to his power proceeding from both directions. Ultimately however his power rested on the social base of rotten Iraqi capitalism.
Under rapidly alternating conditions of revolution and counter-revolution such a balancing act is like walking a tightrope whilst being buffeted in all directions by fierce winds. The consolidation of a democratic regime was ultimately impossible without a genuinely revolutionary class definitely seizing power and dealing a decisive blow against the counter-revolution. Only the seizure of power by the working class, at the head of the mass of poor peasants, the urban poor and the lower layers of the middle class, could have laid the basis for such an outcome.
With the ICP paralysed by its own Stalinist outlook, the only other possible outcome was the victory of the counter-revolution. This now played itself out over the course of years, leading to the destruction of the Communist Party and the consolidation of the brutal Saddam Hussein dictatorship. The collapse of Stalinism has created an effective vacuum at the head of the working class. This is true not only in Iraq but across the entire Arab world, which was once home to some of the worlds most powerful Communist movements. Such a vacuum must be filled and, as we can see today, the danger exists that all manner of accidental elements such as the religious clerics may succeed for a time in filling this gap.
Seemingly the task is now one of beginning from scratch. As we have said once before, however: history wastes nothing. The 1958 revolution laid down a revolutionary, secular and communistic tradition that remains within living memory. If the modern Iraqi working class can rediscover those traditions on a higher level today, freed from the distortions of Stalinism, then no force on Earth will be able stop it. Today the working class of Iraq stands infinitely stronger than it did in the 50's and 60's. In 1957 the urban population represented 38.9% of the population, whereas today that figure stands at 69.5% - a figure which does not give a full picture of the increased specific weight of the proletariat as a class within Iraqi society.
Under the contradictions of capitalism building up on a world scale today, and the particularly acute expression that these find in Iraq, a new generation is growing up. For this generation power cuts, crumbling infrastructure, collapsing services, joblessness, poverty and terrorism are daily plagues. The ruling class meanwhile has long ceased to take society forward. They are synonymous with greed, privatisation, corruption, sectarianism, incompetence and parasitism. The conditions in Iraq today cry out for the socialist reorganisation of society. The contradictions will permit no other solution. Sooner or later the young generation will be forced to take the revolutionary road once again. If a genuine Communist Party basing itself on the real traditions of Bolshevism can be built in time, its victory shall be guaranteed. In the words of Marx commenting on France's June Insurrection of 1848:
Proletarian revolutions [...] criticise themselves constantly; constantly interrupt themselves in their own course; come back to what seems to have been accomplished, in order to start over anew; scorn with cruel thoroughness the half measures, weaknesses and paltriness of their first attempts; seem to throw down their adversary only in order to enable him to draw fresh strength from the earth, and again, to rise up against them in more gigantic stature; constantly recoil in fear before the undefined monster magnitude of their own objectsuntil finally that situation is created which renders all retreat impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out:
'Hic Rhodus, hic salta!' (Here is the rose, dance here!) (28)
1Batatu H The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq p244, tables 9-3 and 9-4.
2ibid p267
3ibid p175
4Peter Lieb, 2012, Suppressing insurgencies in comparison: the Germans in the Ukraine, 1918, and the British in Mesopotamia, 1920, Small Wars and Insurgencies 23:4-5, pp637-647
5Batatu H p35
7ibid p437
7ibid p437
8ibid p443
9ibid p30
10ibid p548
11ibid p562
12ibid p553
13ibid p555
14ibid p559
15ibid p669
16ibid 688
17ibid p709
19Batatu H p833
20ibid p857
21ibid p892
22ibid p834
23Alexander A, "Political opportunities and collective action in the Iraqi revolution 1958-59", International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies V2 No.2, p256
24Batatu H p927
25ibid p951
26ibid p979
27ibid p980
28Marx, The Eighteenth Bumaire of Louis Bonaparte
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Vincent Salemi Jr., owner of Salemi Appliance on Boston Road in Springfield, seen here with kitchen appliances in his showroom. Salemi down't mind not having tax-free weekend this year because it took a month's worth of business and concentrated it on one day.
(JIM KINNEY/ THE REPUBLICAN)
SPRINGFIELD -- Customers browsing the refrigerators at Salemi Appliance in Springfield frowned Tuesday when they learned that there would be no Massachusetts sales tax holiday this year.
But it didn't send them home. Instead, they kept moving from model to model in the showroom checking out the placement of this ice dispenser or that vegetable crisper.
Their host, store owner Vincent Salemi Jr., commiserated over the loss of the tax-free weekend, but doesn't think the state's decision to forgo the 2016 tax holiday will hurt his business.
"It was always a consumer-driven event," Salemi said. "The moment the state announced when the tax holiday would be, business would drop right off. Then we'd do half a million dollars of business for tax free. Then we wouldn't do any business for another two weeks. You would think you'd done all this business for tax free, but when you looked at the end of the month, it really wasn't any different."
Having all that business at the same time also made it hard to wait on customers, Salemi said. The store isn't open on Sundays, so all its tax-free business would happen in one day. The paperwork alone was a killer.
'When we tried to open on a Sunday for tax-free, we did very little business," he said.
On Monday, Massachusetts lawmakers announced there would be no tax holiday this summer for the first time since the recession-plagued 2009. The state Legislature enacted tax-free weekends annually in 2004 through 2008 then again from 2010 to 2015.
During a tax holiday, the state's 6.25 percent sales tax is suspended on most purchases of less than $2,500.
While popular with consumers, the tax holidays cost the state about $26 million in revenue. Legislators determined that wasn't sustainable in a tight budget year.
Dan D'Arcy, president All Power of Granby, said he will miss the tax holiday at his outdoor power equipment dealership.
"The tax free weekend gave us a great boost right in the middle of vacation season, which slow for us," D'Arcy said. "We did very well with snowblowers, generators, chain saws, weed trimmers and small lawn tractors."
The $2,500 limit meant that consumers still paid tax on bigger tractors and more expensive pieces of equipment. Also, the tax holiday never applied to things that have to be registered -- like boats and motorcycles -- so buyers always paid tax on those, he said.
Gary Okun, owner of Beautiful Rooms furniture store in West Springfield, will also miss the tax holiday.
Its impact, he said, is largely psychological. He knows that advertising a 6.25 percent off sale wouldn't draw in too many customers. But advertise that the 6.25 percent sales tax doesn't apply?
"Gee, it's tax free, let's get it," Okun said. "It's like your getting one over on the government."
August can be a slow month in the furniture business, he said.
The state is also giving up revenue by not having a tax holiday, Okun said. He pointed out all the spending on advertising, hiring of extra sales and delivery help that won't happen.
"Think of all that payroll tax," he said. "Think of all that fuel for the trucks."
Connecticut will have its tax-free week Aug. 21 to Aug. 27. But the Nutmeg State is lifting its 6.35 percent only on clothing and footwear.
SPRINGFIELD -- Springfield gun maker Smith & Wesson announced Monday that it will buy its knife-making partner Taylor Brands for $85 million.
Founded in 1975 and based in Tennessee, Taylor Brands owns and produces Schrade, Old Timer, Uncle Henry and Imperial branded products. Taylor Brands also manufactures knives and one type of outdoor camp ax under the Smith & Wesson brand name through a licensing agreement.
Taylor Brands manufactures its products in China.
Smith & Wesson told investors earlier this year that it would try and diversify its business by expanding into what it calls accessories -- things like knives, axes, tools, gunsmithing supplies and camping and outdoors equipment.
In 2014, Smith & Wesson bought Battenfeld Technologies, a seller of gunsmithing supplies and shooting and hunting accessories, for $130.5 million. Battenfeld was rolled into Smith & Wesson's accessories division
James Debney, president and CEO of Smith & Wesson, said in a press release:
"Taylor Brands provides us with an ideal opportunity to further deliver on an important element of our strategic plan, which is to grow our accessories division by expanding into adjacent and complementary markets. ...
"Taylor Brands has delivered solid growth as well as gross margins that are aligned with those in our existing accessories division. We believe that these newly added product lines will benefit synergistically from the product innovation, distribution network and efficient sourcing model that have contributed to the success of our accessories division under the leadership of its president, Jim Gianladis.
"Today's announcement moves us closer to our vision, which is to become the leading provider of quality products for the shooting, hunting, and rugged outdoor enthusiast."
Morgan Taylor, president of Taylor Brands, said:
"We are proud that the company my family founded in 1975 has grown to become a leading and highly regarded knife and tool provider. We look forward to achieving our next level of growth and continuing to serve our loyal customers as part of Smith & Wesson and with the benefit of Battenfeld Technologies' extensive distribution network and product development processes."
Taylor Brands had $39 million in revenue in the last year.
Smith & Wesson has 1,758 full-time employees, most of them at its sprawling factory and headquarters on Roosevelt Avenue. The company was founded in 1852 by Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson. Smith and Wesson established the company in what today is Springfield's South End.
The Smith & Wesson story stretches through the Old West to the present day. They made guns for the Imperial Army of the Russian Tsar. And Smith & Wesson made guns for the allies in both World Wars.
Clint Eastwood made the Smith & Wesson Model 29 revolver famous as "the most powerful handgun in the world."
Smith & Wesson's stock, SWHC on the New York Stock Exchange, traded Monday at $28.78 a share, up 43 cents on the day.
Smith & Wesson has a market capitalization -- the total dollar market value of all its outstanding shares -- of $1.61 billion.
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Megadeth
(File Photo)
Veteran metal band Megadeth has announced plans for a fall tour that will include a stops in Worcester and Connecticut.
The band will play the DCU Center on Oct. 12 and Mohegan Sun Arena on Oct. 13.
The shows are part of the band's "Dystopia" world tour in support of its current album of the same name.
Tickets for the concerts are on sale beginning Saturday, July 23 at 10 a.m. through all Ticketmaster outlets and locations including ticketmaster.com and by phone at (800) 745-3000.
Megadeth debuted 30 years ago and has sold 38 million albums while landing 11 Grammy nominations.
Roger Ailes
FOX News president Roger Ailes
(AP file photo)
Top executives at 21st Century Fox have decided to remove Fox News president Roger Ailes following a sexual harassment lawsuit by former host Gretchen Carlson, according to two media outlets.
Two sources briefed on a sexual-harassment investigation of Ailes told New York Magazine that his 20-year tenure was coming to a close. After reviewing the initial findings of a probe by a New York law firm, 21st Century Fox CEO James Murdoch is said to be arguing that Ailes should be presented with a choice to resign or face being fired this week. However, his brother, Lachlan Murdoch, and their father, Rupert, both co-chairmen of 21st Century Fox, believe no action should be taken until after the GOP convention this week. Another source confirmed that all three are in agreement that Ailes must go.
The magazine reported that the interviews are now being conducted at law firm Paul, Weiss's offices because of concerns that the FOX News offices could be bugged. The lawyers are seeking to interview former female employees of FOX News in addition to current staff. They are also looking into the appropriateness of Ailes's pressuring employees to speak out on his behalf, against his accuser.
Deadline said it confirmed the effort at 21st Century Fox to "sideline" Ailes.
In response to the reports, a spokesman for 21st Century Fox stated, "This matter is not yet resolved and the review is not concluded."
In an eight-page lawsuit filed on July 6 with the Superior Court of New Jersey, Carlson alleged that she was removed from "Fox & Friends" in 2013 after she complained about behavior by co-host Steve Doocy, and was moved to an afternoon program as a way to diminish her presence at FOX News. She also alleged she was subsequently propositioned sexually by Ailes, who had called her a "man hater," who needed to "get along with the boys." She claimed Ailes' decision to end her career at FOX News on June 23 was retaliatory.
Ailes has denied the allegations.
Since then, six other women, including former Republican National Committee field adviser Kellie Boyle, 54, and former model Marsha Callahan, 73, have claimed improper incidents involving Ailes.
Updated at 10:35 p.m. on Monday, July 18, 2016 to note that the investigation includes police trying to determine whether all of the weapons seized from the 37 Upland Road home of a man with whom police had a six-hour standoff last week were licensed or owned by the man.
HOLYOKE -- The trip wire pulled across a doorway turned out to be a false alarm, but police otherwise seized seven guns, a crossbow, knives and boxes of ammunition from the 37 Upland Road home where a military veteran forced a six-hour standoff last week, police said tonight.
Police are continuing to investigate the incident and it was unclear if the 26-year-old man would face criminal charges. Because of that, Police Chief James M. Neiswanger has declined to release the man's name, Lt. James Albert said.
"We're completing our investigation. It's ongoing. We will send that to the district attorney's office," Albert said in a phone interview.
Despite no charges having been filed since the standoff, which began just after 7 p.m. Thursday and ended just before 1 a.m. Friday, "That doesn't mean he's not" going to be charged in the incident, he said.
Police disarmed the man with beanbag rounds when he emerged from the house with a rifle slung over his body. Other than the beanbag rounds, Albert said, "No police weapons were fired in any way."
Holyoke police secured the scene and the Massachusetts State Police Stop Team negotiated with the man. Police surrounded the property, he said.
The man fired one round from the pistol from the home's back deck in the dark during the standoff, the shell for which police recovered. No officers or police vehicles were hit by the gunshot. It was unclear if he had a specific target or fired into the air as the slug wasn't found, he said.
"It's hard to say where he was shooting at. It was in the dark. We found the shell," he said.
As relations between police and the public have turned deadly in recent days in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Dallas, Texas, and Falcon Heights, Minnesota, Albert praised the work of Holyoke and state police in the standoff, which played out over six muggy hours.
"You can imagine the restraint these officers showed....These officers did a tremendous job of ending this situation the way they did. They were professional," Albert said.
Neiswanger said after the standoff with the armed man that an ambulance took him to the hospital for evaluation. Albert said that as of tonight the man was receiving medical treatment but he declined to say where.
All weapons have been removed from the house, he said.
A state police negotiator communicated with the man, whom he identified as "Dale," during the standoff by cell phone and later over a loudspeaker. The negotiator's remarks from the loudspeaker could be heard at Upland Road and Homestead Avenue, where police kept media members and bystanders during the standoff.
Police during the standoff described the man as distraught and Neiswanger said he possibly suffers from post traumatic stress disorder.
The man told police during the standoff that in addition to guns, he had explosives. State police swept the home after the incident and while a trip wire had been strung across at least one doorway, the wire wasn't connected to a bomb or weapon of any kind, Albert said.
A discharged round from a firearm other than the pistol also was found in the basement of the home, he said.
Weapons taken from the house were a Remington 308 bolt-action rifle (bolt-action means the rifle has a breech that is opened by turning a bolt and sliding it back), five, .22-caliber hunting rifles, a Taurus semi-automatic pistol, a hunting crossbow, two surival knives and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, he said.
It was unclear if all of the weapons had been licensed or if all were owned by the man involved in the standoff, said Albert, noting that is part of the ongoing investigation.
"Several are old with no serial numbers which occurs in old rifles. I cannot say at this time," Albert said in an email.
Records online from the Holyoke Board of Assessors show that 37 Upland Road is owned by Anthony W. Dominguez with Jacqueline T. Dominguez listed as co-owner. The colonial-style house was built about 1960 and the property is valued at $317,900, records show.
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Northampton district court building.
(Republican file photo)
NORTHAMPTON -- A Huntington man accused of dealing drugs allegedly threatened to shoot members of law enforcement or anyone else who approached him as he hunkered behind a shed holding a shotgun, according to court documents.
James C. Clark, 23, pleaded not guilty in Northampton District Court Monday to charges of possession of cocaine with the intent to distribute, possession of a class B drug with the intent to distribute, possession of a firearm while committing a felony, carrying a firearm without a license and threatening to commit a crime, documents said.
A family member of Clark's called Massachusetts State Police on Sunday and told troopers that Clark -- who police say has a known history of violent crime-- was threatening to shoot anyone who came near him, "especially members of law enforcement," reports said.
Police said Clark was hiding behind a shed on his family's property, holding a shotgun. When troopers arrived, Clark was allegedly walking from the shed to the house, then back to the shed again.
Troopers were eventually able to coax Clark out of his home and arrest him without any major confrontation, court documents said. In reports, police noted that Clark has been accused of several violent crimes in the past, including assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and assaulting police.
Clark is under investigation by the Huntington Police Department for possession of a stolen firearm, and has been known to carry weapons in the past, police reports said.
While Clark was being taken to jail, troopers at his family's property found a backpack behind the shed where Clark had been hiding, reports said. The bag allegedly contained a scale, a mason jar filled with several twisted bags of cocaine, a prescription bottle of Suboxone, a solution known to "cut" narcotics and empty baggies, according to police.
Clark allegedly made several threats to police while they conducted cell checks in the jail, and said he would kill one of the officers when he got out, reports said.
Clark also pleaded not guilty to all charges in two other cases Monday that involved traffic violations and receiving stolen property, according to documents. Witnesses in those cases alleged that Clark is a heroin and cocaine dealer in the area, reports said.
Clark was released on his own recognizance. He is due back in court on Aug. 5.
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Amherst police called to Puffer's Pond to stop people from jumping off the cliffs.
(Republican file)
AMHERST -- On another hot weekend, Amherst police were called to Puffer's Pond for parking problems and people jumping off the cliffs.
Police were called to the pond just before 7 p.m. Saturday to help clear people from the cliffs. The police department made an announcement on its public address system telling people to stop jumping, and the area was cleared, according to a police report.
There is fencing in the area, but it does not prevent people from jumping, police said.
Jumping from the cliffs is not allowed. Neither are alcohol, dogs on the beach and trespassing on the dam.
At about 2 p.m. Sunday, police were called to the pond for another report that people wouldn't stop jumping, but police found the jumpers gone by the time they arrived.
Four hours later, police responded to reports of poor traffic conditions with only single lane passage because cars were parked on both sides of State Street. Four vehicles were cited.
Earlier this summer, temporary Town Manager Peter Hechenbleikner said town officials have not met this year to talk about problems at the pond, which he said were fewer this year than in the past.
Still, police are repeatedly called to the pond for one issue or another.
Earlier this summer there was a call involving topless women and someone else having a bad LSD trip.
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7-19-17 -- Easthampton -- Investigators continue to determine the cause of a Monday night house fire that heavily damaged a Davis Street home. A resident of the home, located at 22-24 Davis St., was taken to the hospital for evaluation, Fire Chief David Mottor said.
(WESTERN MASS NEWS)
EASTHAMPTON -- Investigators continue to determine the cause of a Monday night house fire that heavily damaged a Davis Street home.
A resident of the home, located at 22-24 Davis St., was taken to the hospital for evaluation, according to a post on the Easthampton Fire Department's Facebook page that was written by Fire Chief David Mottor..
The blaze, reported shortly after 11:15 p.m. is not considered suspicious.
First arriving crews reported heavy fire from a front bedroom extending up the exterior to the roof. The home suffered heavy damage estimated to be $100,000.
Firefighters from Northampton, Southampton, Westhampton, Holyoke, Westfield, South Hadley Fire District #1, Amherst and Westover Air Reserve Base in Chicopee provided mutual aid.
Pioneer Valley Ambulance and American Medical Response also responded.
State trooper assigned to the state Fire Marshal's office are assisting with the investigation.
The American Red Cross is assisting those displaced.
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Police officers in Dorchester earned praise for their "incredible restraint" Monday when they were confronted by a man carrying this replica handgun. July 19, 2016.
(Courtesy: Boston Police Dept.)
BOSTON - Police officers in Dorchester earned praise for their "incredible restraint" Monday when they were confronted by a man with a replica handgun.
Police Commissioner William Evans said he's "thankful everyone involved in this incident is going home safe, especially my officers."
Officers responded to reports of a man with a gun on Howe Street just before midnight. Police said they found 53-year-old William Gallop sitting in a chair in a driveway, yelling derogatory remarks about police. As officers approached him, Gallop allegedly pointed a replica handgun at them.
Police said the officers drew their guns and ordered Gallop to drop his weapon. One officer reached out and knocked it out of his hand before wrestling Gallop to the ground.
Officers also recovered a pair of nunchucks that were hanging from the chair, along with two bags of a substance believed to be marijuana.
Gallop is charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and unlawfully carrying nunchucks.
During the booking process, police allege that Gallop threatened to blow up the officers' houses and the police department. He also allegedly threatened to shoot police.
"This is what police are faced with on a daily basis," said Evans. "These officers used incredible restraint when faced with threats and a very real-looking replica revolver."
CHICOPEE -- When three teenagers started knocking on the door of a ranch house in the Fairview section of the city Saturday afternoon, the homeowners thought they were trying to break into their house.
Instead, the three teens were going to pick up another friend and went to the wrong house. Their mistake left the youngest of the three, Dylan Francisco, 15, dead of a gunshot wound and the homeowner facing a murder charge.
Jeffrey Lovell, 42, an employee with Big Y, was arraigned in Chicopee District Court Monday. During the hearing, which lasted less than five minutes, he ordered held without bail, and his case was continued to Aug. 19.
Court records were redacted to remove the victim's name but detail the events that led to Francisco's death.
Police were initially called to Lovell's home at 120 Boucher Circle shortly before 1 p.m. with a report of a breaking and entering. When they arrived they found Francisco, a Comprehensive High School student, lying on the ground with a gunshot wound to the right side of his chest, court records show.
Police and Chicopee firefighters administered medical treatment and rushed the teenager to Baystate Medical Center by ambulance. He died about eight hours later.
After Francisco was taken to the hospital, Chicopee Police detectives with Massachusetts State Police detectives assigned to Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni's office interviewed Lovell to ask what happened.
Lovell said he was woken by his wife, who said two people were banging on the door and were trying to break into their house.
The three teens had been drinking earlier and headed over to another friend's house, but were confused while walking in the neighborhood and went to the wrong house and knocked on the door, said James Leydon, spokesman for Gulluni.
"Mr. Lovell then gained access to his secured, loaded firearm from his bedroom safe," a police officer's report in the court records states.
Lovell said he then walked into the kitchen and looked out the window to see a teenager walking from his back yard toward the side door, which is located under the carport. The teenager started knocking on the glass of the locked door and said something Lovell could not understand, records say.
"Mr. Lovell told this party to 'get the f--k out' and 'stay the f--k out.' As the ... party continued to bang on the door Mr. Lovell stated that the window broke at which time Mr. Lovell raised his loaded S & W (Smith & Wesson) firearm and shot one round through the glass of the door," the police report states.
The door has three windows lined up vertically. The top window broke when the boy was knocking on it, said James Leydon, spokesman for Gulluni.
"Mr. Lovell stated he aimed towards the ... torso. After firing the weapon, Mr. Lovell then looked out of the kitchen door and saw the individual lying on the ground at the bottom of the stairs and the ... individual was moaning," the police report states.
Francisco, of Springfield, was with two other Comprehensive High School students, a 16-year-old boy and a girl who had just finished her senior year. Court records did not explain what happened to them during the shooting, but police said they were not injured.
When police arrived, they found no evidence that the victim entered the home, court records said.
"Mr. Lovell also indicated that the victim never entered his residence," the police report says.
Francisco was a quiet but sociable teenager who had made plenty of friends in his first year in high school and did well in his classes, Comprehensive High School Principal Derek Morrison said.
He leaves a number of family members, including his mother Heather Francisco, step-father Steven Beauregard and three younger siblings, Damien and Desiree Francisco and Anthony Beauregard.
"He was always respectful," Morrison said. "It is an absolute waste."
ET-Southwick Public Library
1/17/02- Southwick-
SOUTHWICK - Friends of the Southwick Public Library are looking for carfters, artisans and producers of local agriculture to participate in the group's October Craft Fair to be held Oct. 15.
Crafters of handmade pottery, fine art, items made of fabrics, yarns, leather, paper, stone, concrete, soap, wood, metal or other material are invited to apply. Growers and producers of local farm products are also encouraged to apply.
Applications and rules can be downloaded from www.southwicklibrary.info or picked up at the Library at 95 Feeding Hills Road, Agawam Library at 750 Cooper St., Agawam, Southwick Town Hall on College highway or by email to southwickpat@comcast.net.
Updates will be posted online at www.southwicklibrary.info and on Facebook at Friends of the Southwick Public Library. They will also be available by calling Pat McMahon at 569-6531.
The Craft Fair will be held Oct. 15 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Southwick Town Hall, 454 College Highway. Rental space is available both inside and outside.
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Springfield Bishop Mitchell Rozanski received a handshake and personal greeting from Pope Francis during the pope's mid-day prayer with bishops from around the country at St. Matthew's Cathedral in Washington, D.C
(SUBMITTED)
SPRINGFIELD - A Western Massachusetts delegation intends to be present in Brzegi, Poland when Pope Francis celebrates Mass July 31 for an expected crowd of 2 million people.
The Most Rev. Mitchell T. Rozanski, bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Springfield, is leading the delegation of 69 area participants who are taking part in World Youth Day.
Since its origins in a youth gathering at the Vatican in 1984, the gathering has grown to a six-day event that is being held July 26 through 31 in and around the southern Polish city of Krakow. Francis is expected to attend from July 27 through July 31.
Mark Dupont, diocesan spokesman, said the area delegation includes 46 young adults, 10 seminarians, five priests and eight adult leaders who will depart from Mary Mother of Hope Church, 840 Page Blvd., on Friday, July 22, after a 4 p.m. Mass at the parish.
Dupont said the group will remain in Poland through Aug. 4 to visit other sites, including Auschwitz, the Nazi's largest concentration camp complex, located about 37 miles outside Krakow, where the 1.1 million murdered included some 960,000 Jews and 74,000 Poles. Rozanski, who is the diocese's first bishop of Polish heritage, has visited Poland previously, but the trip marks his first participation in WYD.
Instituted under the papacy of now St. John Paul II, the gathering is held yearly at either the international or diocesan level and is aimed at those 16 to 35 years of age.
This is the 31st WYD; the 13th on the international level.
The first WYD on an international level was held in 1987 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Francis' native country, with the theme, "Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you."
The theme of this year's gathering, "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy," reflects the fact it is taking place during the year-long Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy which Francis inaugurated in December to promote forgiveness and reconciliation.
Some 85 U.S. bishops are scheduled to attend WYD.
Other international WYD gatherings have taken place in Santiago de Compostela, Spain (1989); Czestochowa, Poland (1991); Denver, Colo. (1993); Manila, Philippines (1995); Paris, France (1997); Rome, Italy, for the Millennium Jubilee (2000); Toronto, Canada (2002); Cologne, Germany (2005); Sydney, Australia (2008); Madrid, Spain (2011); and Rio de Janiero, Brazil (2013).
As the researchers and advocates with the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy will tell you, humans are at little risk from great white sharks, despite the beach jitters that "Jaws" has inspired since its release 41 years ago.
Seals, however, have reason to worry.
The Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, a Cape Cod-based group which educates the public about sharks, published photos on its Facebook page of a great white shark eating a seal off the Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge in Chatham.
Taken from the air by spotter pilot Wayne Davis, the photos show a red cloud billowing under the waves, with a shark swimming nearby.
Great white populations near Cape Cod have rebounded in recent years. In 2012, 34 white sharks were tagged off the Cape, according to the state's Executive Office of Environmental Affairs. In 2015, the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy identified 120 individual Great Whites in the same region, after cataloging 68 the year before.
Great whites flock to Chatham waters due to the large seal colony near Monomoy Island, according to the conservancy.
Despite the growing population, shark attacks on humans are still rare. There have been two shark attacks off Massachusetts waters since the year 2000, according to the incident database compiled by the Global Shark Attack File. Neither were fatal; the last deadly shark attack in the state occurred in 1936.
On Saturday, two Massachusetts beaches were evacuated after a fisherman spotted a great white shark.
Note: The video above contains profanity.
The Amtrak Vermonter
A woman was struck and killed by a southbound Amtrak Vermonter train in Brattleboro on July 15, 2016.
(By reivax from Washington, DC, USA - Northbound Amtrak, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17566011)
BRATTLEBORO -- Brattleboro police have identified a woman struck and killed by an Amtrak train on July 15 as Susan L. Collins, 57, with no place of residence given.
Brattleboro police and fire departments and Rescue, Inc. responded at approximately 1:25 p.m. Friday after receiving a report that a southbound passenger train had struck a person just south of the North Bridge, which crosses the West River.
After a "trespasser on the tracks" was struck, the #55 train's operator activated its emergency brakes, an Amtrak spokesman told the Brattleboro Reformer. Emergency responders found the body of a woman on the tracks about halfway between the bridge and Walnut Street in Brattleboro.
The Amtrak Vermonter train was delayed and remained on scene for several hours. None of the crew members nor 83 passengers were injured. The body was taken to the state Medical Examiner's Office for autopsy. Authorities said no foul play is suspected.
Anyone with information is asked to call Detective Erik Johnson at (802) 257-7950.
power outage photo
Power is out to 2,800 customers in Northampton and is not due back on until 9:45 p.m.
(file photo)
SPRINGFIELD -- The lights are back on for thousands of city residents following a power outage Monday evening.
More than 4,000 were without power around 10 p.m., an Eversource outage map showed Monday evening. Power was restored to all overnight.
The believed cause of the outages was equipment failure on Bryant and Clinton Streets in Springfield, Eversource spokesperson Pat Bandzes told 22News.
The electrical malfunction caused traffic lights at "The X" intersection in Forest Park to only flash Monday evening around 5 p.m., causing traffic backups.
Summer storms hit Massachusetts with winds as high as 60 miles per hour Monday evening, causing downed trees and power lines in Berkshire, Franklin and Worcester counties.
More than 600 people in Franklin County lost power during the storm.
"We had widespread damage in Franklin County," Eversource spokesperson Priscilla Ress told The Recorder. "Everything from limbs on wires to wires down."
Plastic Bags
Easthampton is considering a ban on point-of-sale single-use plastic bags. A public forum is set for Wednesday evening.
(AP/Richard Drew)
EASTHAMPTON -- Public debate around a proposed ban on single-use plastic bags will continue Wednesday at a forum hosted by the City Council Ordinance Committee.
The July 20 forum will start at 6 p.m. on the second floor of the Municipal Building at 50 Payson Ave. Members of the public are invited to attend and participate.
A range of public opinion was expressed at a public hearing in May. Some said the bags should go because they pollute waterways, get stuck in trees, clog storm drains, don't biodegrade, and are difficult to recycle.
Others, including Greater Easthampton Chamber of Commerce director Maureen Belliveau, said banning the bags could place an undue burden upon small businesses. "We must be sensitive to implementation," she said.
Aristide Daniele, owner of Nini's Italian restaurant, said he would rather see incentives for doing the right thing, than punishments for violating a complicated ordinance. "Keep it simple," he said. "We are trying to move in a green direction, but it's all about finding the right products."
Easthampton teen Molly Finch was one of several to speak against the bags, saying convenience should not trump environmental responsibility.
Some at the forum spoke up for Big E's Supermarket, which uses more durable "Eco Hippo" plastic bags.
The proposal was introduced earlier this year by Councilor Tamara Smith. Smith noted that Easthampton won "Green Community" status from the state in 2010. She said 32 Massachusetts communities have enacted some sort of plastic bag ordinance.
"It's a timely social issue, so we're not the guinea pig," she said. "We need something that will work for Easthampton....We want to hear peoples' hopes and concerns."
In May, the Massachusetts Senate approved a plastic bag ban as part of its fiscal 2017 budget. The ban would prohibit certain stores from providing a single-use carryout bag to a customer. The stores could sell reusable or recycled paper bags, with a 10 cent charge. The ban would apply to stores of 3,000 square feet or larger or at least three locations "under the same ownership or brand name within the commonwealth."
In Northampton, where a ban on single-use plastic bag began on Jan. 1, businesses may apply for a hardship deferment. A plastic plastic bag ban in Amherst will go into effect in 2017. Greenfield has also enacted a plastic bag ordinance.
If you go:
What: Public Forum on Plastic Bag Ban
Where: Easthampton Municipal Building, 50 Payson Ave.
When: Wednesday, July 20, 6 p.m.
One year ago this month, a Springfield District Court judge saw a man he had recently sentenced to a year in the House of Correction stand in front of him in handcuffs because he had allegedly been selling drugs again. It was less than three months after his conviction.
According to The Republican article at the time, Judge William Boyle became even more incensed when he learned that Ishmael "Kiko" Delgado, now 31, of Springfield, had spent 14 days incarcerated before being allowed out on the Hampden County Sheriff Department's Day Reporting Program.
Ismael Delgado
"One year equals two weeks? So if I want to give him a month what do I do - sentence him to two years?," Boyle said in the courtroom.
Usually, one year doesn't equal two weeks. But as officials in local sheriff's departments and the state Department of Correction will tell you, there are many different ways to serve a sentence. When an inmate is going to a day reporting program, on work release, living at a sober house or even on house arrest, they are still considered to be in custody, serving their sentence.
Another thing that might not be intuitive is that a sentence often doesn't end up being anywhere near as long as the number of years uttered by a judge at sentencing. An obvious example is that a sentence of life with a possibility of parole means a possible release date 15 years later.
But for other inmates whose crimes do not come with a mandatory minimum sentence or statutory requirements, they can generally seek parole after serving between one-third and two-thirds of their sentences. The timing depends on how their sentences were handed down, whether they are serving in state prison or a county facility, and whether they've earned "good time" during their stay.
So how are judges supposed to know what the sentences mean when they are giving them out?
"You have it in the back of your mind that someone could get out in half that time, but sometimes, they don't," said Thomas T. Merrigan, a retired district and appellate court judge who now litigates as a partner in the Boston-based firm Sweeney Merrigan Law LLC.
A judge has to consider how much weight, to put on the possible date when someone could be paroled or out on a pre-release program, knowing neither are a sure thing.
"Sentences have parole-eligible standards and judges aren't really privy to those, and parole is discretionary," he said.
Given that, he said, he doesn't think he would be that surprised to see someone before him when his or her sentence is technically not up yet. He couldn't recall a specific time during his 12 years on the bench.
Thomas Merrigan
And in addition to the complicated conditions to be granted parole, judges can never know whether overcrowding at a facility could lead those in charge to give someone a GPS anklet and put them on house arrest.
In the case of Delgado, whose case is still pending in Hampden Superior Court, officials said the fact that he spent only two weeks locked up is an anomaly. And even though it was a very rare occurrence, Assistant Superintendent Paul Hegarty said the department has since decided to institute a rule that no one can be out on the program unless they've served two months in a county facility.
"That hadn't been a policy, but we kind of learned from that," he said.
Local and state officials responsible said that while those who commit new crimes or try to escape while they are in pre-release programs make headlines whenever they get arrested, the programs are overwhelmingly successful and do not endanger the community because participants are carefully selected with public safety in mind.
"The program has proven it can provide for public safety and this is our number one concern," he said. "Since the inception of our Day Reporting program we have had over 9,000 participants go through our program and have an extremely low number of problems in the community."
Evidence shows that the programs better prepare inmates for life on the outside, said Richard McCarthy, a spokesman for the Hampden County Sheriff's Department.
"The least level of security a person is on, the lower their chance of coming back," he said. "That's true in corrections anywhere."
Usually consistent, sometimes 'shocking'
Bertha D. Josephson served as a superior court judge from 1992 until January, when she retired. She said that generally, after the state passed so-called Truth in Sentencing law in 1994, what people actually served compared to what they were sentenced to is "pretty consistent."
Retiried Superior Court Judge Bertha Josephson
But there are still those rare occasions when judges learn about the inconsistent cases.
She recalled years ago, sentencing a man to a year in the House of Correction.
"He was back in front of me within two weeks. I said, 'what is he doing here?'" Josephson said in a phone interview. "It's shocking to a judge to think a person you thought you sentenced has been out."
But unless a person reoffends or violates a term of probation, a judge isn't likely to know anything about how a person is serving his or her sentence. That's how the system is supposed to work.
She said she thinks it is appropriate for the Department of Correction and sheriffs to determine where prisoners go, and while the two-week incarceration surprised her, "I respected that the sheriff had the responsibility and ability to determine how to treat their prisoners."
"Judges have a lot of guidance and information to be able to set sentenced they think is appropriate within the parameters," Josephson said. "After that, we pretty much have to leave it up to the people in those agencies."
Josephson said that before the Truth in Sentencing Law, "it used to be a much, much vaster difference between what you were sentenced to and what you would serve."
Parole eligibility for state prisoners used to be one-third of the lower end of the range or two-thirds if one was a violent offender. Now, a prisoner's earliest parole eligibility date, if he or she has the maximum amount of "earned good time," is two-thirds of the lower end of the range. Those without good time can't be paroled until they reach the lower number of the range.
Another variant before the 1994 change was called the "Concord sentence." Those sentenced to a sentence at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Concord of one to six years were eligible to get out at six months, she said, while those who got six to 12 years could get out after a year.
"You would see these enormous sentences," she said, but people would end up serving months.
Josephson said that judges could specify at sentencing that they were sending the defendant to Concord, a prison known since its birth in 1878 as a reformatory.
She said judges would send prisoners to Concord if they wanted to give a first-time offender or someone else a chance to serve a short sentence while still having the possibility of a long sentence if they messed up. They may only serve six months, but if a person out on parole commits a new crime or another violation, he or she could serve the full sentence.
When can state prisoners get out?
An inmate at any state prison is eligible for parole when he or she serves the bottom number of his or her sentence range. However, if an inmate earns the maximum amount of "earned good time," he or she could get out after serving two-thirds of the lower number in the sentence range.
That's because inmates can earn up to 10 days of good time per month, according to Christopher Fallon, a spokesman for the Department of Correction. The department is responsible for the state's prisons.
There are some exceptions. Inmates who are convicted of crimes that have mandatory minimums or statutory restrictions cannot be paroled before serving those minimum terms. Also, those who were sentenced before 1994, when judges were first required to give sentence ranges, can be paroled after serving two-thirds of their sentences.
Some cannot be paroled at all. A judge who wants to eliminate the possibility of parole can impose a sentence of, for example, seven years to seven years and a day.
Fallon said inmates earn good time for "successful participation in approved activities," including classes and trainings. They can also earn "boost time" for doing an activity for at least six months and then passing a competency test or going before a panel to prove their competency in the subject matter. Those housed at the pre-release "Prison Camp" at MCI-Plymouth can also get 2.5 days of good time for every 30 days.
Prisoners can only be outside the walls before their parole date if they qualify for a work release program or are transferred to a county facility close to the end of their sentence and get put into one of the local pre-release programs.
The state's pre-release program allows the least dangerous offenders who are within 18 months of their earliest release date to take a bus to a job and then return to the prison immediately after each shift. Sex offenders are among the prisoners who are ineligible for the program.
There are restrictions and spot checks at work, Fallon said, but the vast majority do not violate the rules. For the first three months of 2016, of the 244 inmates in the pre-release custody, 19 failed to abide by those restrictions and lost their place in the program. That's about 8 percent.
Prisoners can go to a county House of Correction as part of the state's Step-Down Initiative. It aims to help inmates transition better at the end of their sentence (usually 16-24 months left) by sending them to county jails where they can take advantage of re-entry programs in the communities where they will eventually be released, Fallon said.
Less frequently, state prisoners are allowed to serve much longer pieces of their sentences in county facilities. Sometimes it is based on the recommendation of the sentencing judge.
The Department of Corrections and the county sheriff's department jointly decide whether to let someone in the Step-down Initative out on GPS monitoring, according to Fallon.
When can county inmates get out?
House of Correction inmates are eligible for parole after serving half of their sentences. But like state prisoners, they're also able to earn up to 10 days per month off their sentence by participating in programs and classes specially recommended for them.
That means an inmate could serve one-third of the sentence he or she was given by a judge. For example, if someone has a two-year sentence and is eligible for parole at one year, they could move up their parole date to just over eight months. Those sentenced to 60 days or less are not eligible for good time.
"Many, including victims, can be surprised if people are out earlier than they thought," said Patrick Cahillane, assistant superintendent of the Hampshire County Jail and House of Corrections.
Members of the public may also be surprised to hear or see a convict is back on the street sooner than they expected simply because part of their sentence was technically being served if he or she was in jail while awaiting trial. Some people get credit for serving a weekend in jail, others don't make bail and wait two years for trial, and that time comes off the end of their sentence.
Discussing the Hampshire County House of Correction's evaluation process, Cahillane said it has in the past always taken more than 14 days for an inmate to be out on a pre-release program.
"I can't think of a case where someone would be sent right to a bracelet program," he said. It could happen, he said, perhaps if someone was incarcerated but was critically ill. Usually the classification process that would even qualify someone for a pre-release program includes multiple evaluations, generally weeks apart.
Cahillane said that only 18 inmates were approved for the GPS monitoring program that allowed them to live at treatment facilities or at a home that has been approved by staff. They are generally in the last 60 to 90 days of their sentence, he said, although it can sometimes be longer.
One of the facilities they can transition to is the Bridge to the Future House, a residence on nearby Grove Street that has housed 84 people over the last 18 months. Inmates are supervised there and wear a GPS anklet when they go to jobs, school, meetings for substance abuse or other approved activities.
Cahillane said that the evaluation process is designed to minimize the risk that someone commits a new crime or gets into other trouble on the outside. Usually, it succeeds.
"If you put a person out and they're a public safety risk, you have a responsibility for that," he said.
Hegarty said that in Hampden County, the issues considered before an inmate can go into the Day Reporting Program go beyond the inmate's criminal and disciplinary record. Staff go through police reports looking for any violent behavior or past restraining orders. "We do not take sex offenders, arsonists or more violent offenders," he said.
Usually, he said, people end up in the program when they are six to seven months away from their earliest release date.
While Hegarty said Delgado's two-week incarceration is unusually short, he was actually right in that range when he was put into the program. He was six months away from his earliest parole date, since that is half of his year-long sentence.
Hegarty said that since the two-month incarceration prerequisite was instituted after Delgado's arrest, only one person has gone to the program in that short of a span as two months. Thirteen of the 35 who are currently in it were sentenced to six months or less.
And while there will always be those calling for convicts to serve longer sentences, McCarthy said that houses of correction are not looking for ways to keep inmates in longer. They want to reform inmates and prevent recidivism - something pre-release programs are proven to do.
"Re-entry has become a big thing in criminal justice," he said. "The ultimate goal is less crime in the community," he said.
Freshwater mussels
The brook floater mussel (left) plays an important role in river ecosystems, but is endangered in Massachusetts. The Connecticut River Watershed Council has launched a restoration program and will be working with trained citizen scientists.
(U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service/Wikimedia Commons)
GREENFIELD -- Freshwater mussel conservation in several Connecticut River tributaries will get a boost thanks to a state grant.
On Monday the Baker-Polito administration awarded the Connecticut River Watershed Council $40,512 to help restore endangered brook floater mussels to four streams.
The bottom-dwelling mollusks help maintain water quality through a process of non-stop filtration. Scientists say the mussels, which have a lifecycle relationship with fish, are very sensitive to increases in water temperature and respond poorly to stream disruption and low-oxygen conditions.
"Freshwater mussels are an incredibly important part of a healthy riverine ecosystem, and unfortunately they are a species in trouble," said Andrew Fisk, executive director of the non-profit watershed council, which protects the Connecticut River basin in four states.
He said there is "very exciting work underway to culture mussels in a hatchery and then use these mussels to repopulate rivers and streams where we know they can flourish."
The grant will support habitat assessments, hatchery propagation, and community involvement and education. Mussel propagation and reintroduction has been successful in Mid-Atlantic states, but this will be the first project of its kind in New England.
Trained citizen scientists will work alongside state, federal, and University researchers to implement the program. Volunteers will join professionals from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, MassWildlife, and the University of Massachusetts to help collect and analyze environmental data and take part in the restoration work.
Fisk said citizen scientists are already collecting bacteria data, nutrient data, monitoring river herring runs, and surveying and removing invasive aquatic plants within the Connecticut River basin. The plan is to increase the volunteer program.
"When the public is engaged in real and meaningful scientific inquiry and restoration activities, it strengthens their commitment to stewarding these public trust resources, and increases environmental and scientific understanding and acceptance," said Fisk.
On Monday, 10 grants totaling $310,877 were awarded across the state to projects to protect and restore rivers, watersheds, wildlife and aquatic habitats. Funding for the Massachusetts Environmental Trust is raised through the sale of environmental license plates: the Right Whale Tail, the Leaping Brook Trout and the Blackstone Valley Mill.
Founded in 1988 as part of the Boston Harbor cleanup, the trust has awarded more than $20 million in grants to organizations statewide that protect and enhance the state's water resources. It is governed by a nine-member board of trustees appointed by the Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs.
"Our coasts, rivers, and wetlands make Massachusetts a beautiful place to live and visit and these grants will continue to improve these incredible natural resources," said Governor Charlie Baker in a statement.
Senate President Stan Rosenberg thanked the Baker administration and said restoring ecological systems "will provide much needed balance to our rivers and streams for endangered species to flourish."
The University of Montana seeks an innovative higher education technology leader for the position of Assistant Chief Information Officer for Central Computing Services (ACIO), a senior position within UMs Information Technology Organization. The position reports to the Chief Information Officer (CIO), who in turn reports to the President of the University.
The ACIO leads a group of IT professionals from within the Central Computing Services unit of Information Technology, and occasionally other staff, on a project basis, from other areas within the university community.
Full Info: https://university-montana-hr.silkroad.com/epostings/index.cfm?fuseaction=app.jobinfo&jobid=1563&company_id=16254&version=1&source=ONLINE&jobOwner=992276&aid=1#1563
Clintons New College Compact proposes to eliminate tuition at in-state public colleges for students with family incomes of $125,000 or less, as well as at community colleges. Heres what this plan could mean for you.
By Anna Helhoski, NerdWallet
Full Story: http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Saving-Money/2016/0717/What-Clinton-s-college-affordability-plan-could-mean-for-you
The University of Montana will welcome new students to Missoula Aug. 24-Sept. 2 with a slate of welcome events and activities.
UMs Week of Welcome kicks off Aug. 24 with Move-In Crew volunteers helping new students move their belongings into the residence halls on campus. Members of the public are invited to volunteer, along with UM faculty and staff, between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 24, and Saturday, Aug. 27. Volunteers who donate two or more hours on the Move-in Crew will receive a free meal in the Food Zoo and a T-shirt. Volunteers must register online at https://umt.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0CCLm1N28R3Eegd by Tuesday, July 26, in order to ensure they receive a correctly sized T-shirt.
Full Story: http://news.umt.edu/2016/07/071416welc.php
Merck Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Merck KGaA Germany, mark an International Day of the Girl Child through their Educating Linda program, which supports girl education (#yesforGirl Education) and ending child marriage (#EndChildMarriage) through helping young girls who are unprivileged but brilliant to continue their education.
Senator, Dr. Rasha Kelej, CEO of Merck Foundation and also an Executive Director of the song expressed, We at Merck Foundation mark Girl Child Day every day through our continuous efforts with our partners, African First ladies to implement Educating Linda program in their countries, which is a part of our More Than a Mother campaign. I strongly believe that an educated girl will lead a healthy life, save lives, build a stronger family, earn a better income, make informed choices, empower her community, lift her country and reduce inequalities. However, it has been seen that many girls drop out of the school due to many challenges such as: lack of necessities such as fees and uniforms. Therefore, as a part of Educating Linda program, in partnership with the African First Ladies who are also the Ambassadors of Merck Foundation More Than a Mother campaign we have contributed to the future of 1000s of girls by providing with scholarships and essential school items in many African countries.
Moreover, I am very happy and excited to share that to mark this important day, H.E. CLAR MARIE WEAH, The First Lady of Liberia, also the Ambassador of Merck Foundation More Than a Mother, distributed essential school items to over 450 school-going girls in Liberia. The items were provided by Merck Foundation as a part of our Educating Linda project. More will be distributed in the near future, moreover we will provide scholarships to 20 unprivileged but brilliant Liberian girls to continue their school education. added Senator Rasha Kelej.
As a part of Educating Linda Program, Merck Foundation in partnership with the African First Ladies has provided scholarships for young girls in many countries like Burundi, Central African Republic, DRC, Ghana, The Gambia, Malawi, Namibia, Nigeria, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Merck Foundation has also provided 3,000 sets of essential school items for girls schools in many countries like Angola, Burundi, Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, The Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Malawi, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, and Zambia. Each of the recipients gets a set containing 1 Ruler, 3 Pencils, 2 Erasers, 1 Sharpener, 1 Pen, 6 Color Pencils, 1 Triangular Ruler, 1 Protractor, and 1 Fabric Bag.
Senator, Dr. Rasha Kelej further emphasized, In partnership with the African First Ladies, we have been building healthcare capacity through providing training to healthcare providers in many medical specialties. More than 1470 medical graduates have benefitted from this program so far. I am very proud that out of these over 650 are female medical graduates. This is close to 50% of the total beneficiaries, which is a great milestone for us.
Moreover, we have emphasized on the importance of supporting girl education through Our Africa by Merck Foundation, a pan-African Tv program broadcasting across the continent and available on our social media.
Merck Foundation has also announced the MARS Awards to appreciate and recognize Best African Women Researchers and Best Young African Researcher. The aim is to empower women and young African researchers, advance their research capacity and promote their contribution to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics).
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Pravind Jugnauth a repondu a cinq question lors du Prime Ministers Question Time lors de la seance parlementaire du 9 Juillet 2019.
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Chicken will be the best-positioned protein due to its low price position in times of pressure on consumer spending power but rises in production costs and the long-term impact of COVID-19 threaten to disrupt the sector, according to Rabobank.
by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, July 18, 2016
Searches and purchases on mobile devices continue to climb, per Google, but only about half of the devices in an Internet-connected home are mobile. While smartphones make up 37% of connected devices in the home, desktops comprise 28% and tablets, 17%, according to the data. Smart TVs took 3%; DVR and set-top boxes, 2%; and Internet Blue-ray players, 1%, per recent data.
More than half of the Internet-connected devices in my home are mobile, but an eMarketer note published Monday citing comScore data points out that for most households this is not quite the case.
The norm drops to half of connected devices are mobile, according to eMarketer. Citing numbers from a June 2016 study from comScore, which tracked more than 3,600 U.S. households with Wi-Fi routers from December 2015 to March 2016.
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How much mobile activity does the Internet see every 10 seconds? A whole heck of a lot, according to one report, which tries to make a point by counting down the real-time growth of mobile usage data, from Google searches to Facebook posts. The marketing infographic based loosely on various sources of recent stats tries to demonstrate the amount of mobile use in 10 seconds.
Those catching up about the news for the day on Facebook, Twitter and other social media channels typically do so from a mobile device. Nearly 80% of social media time is now spent on mobile devices, and that number jumps to 96% for Millennials when consuming news, while 36% of them seek the news exclusively through their smartphone devices only, per comScore.
Although I'm at the tail end of the Baby Boomers, I start my day on a smartphone reading the news and checking email before switching to a laptop after my first cup of tea. A separate study from comScore says that those between the age of 18 and 34 consume most of their news on a mobile device.
In fact, in the past three years, news audiences have grown 66% on mobile, although there are just 57% additional mobile Internet users overall, per comScore. "Several categories within News/Information are soaring at even faster rates, such as digital Newspapers, which has more than doubled its mobile audience the last three years, and Politics, whose mobile readership has grown to more than 6x what it was in 2013," according to the study.
Mobile use might be rising, but 15% of financial institutions still don't have a mobile app. In Future of Finance: The Mobile Money Report, Episerver analyzed the mobile capabilities of 20 U.S. financial services companies. Although comScore notes that half of devices in the home are mobile, Episerver's study found only 68% of financial providers benchmarked provided Android tablet apps, and 62% provided iPad apps. Several of these were simply stretched versions of the smartphone apps.
Vice, Monday, July 18, 2016 2:14 PM
A new startup from Mexico wants to help people say goodbye to their loved ones after death via email. Phoenix lets you write emails that are delivered after you die. The platform is connected to Gmail and requires people to check in annually. If you don't check in after a year, your farewell messages will be sent.
Read the whole story at Vice
by Tanya Gazdik , July 19, 2016
Mitsubishi Motors North America has released the interactive portion of its campaign that introduces the tech-loaded Mirage G4.
The effort, from the automakers lead agency 180LA, includes a dual-screen, interactive experience in which drivers use their phone and laptop together to test the 2017 Mitsubishi Mirage G4.
The Mitsubishi Mirage hatchback and Mirage G4 sedan are the first in its price class to offer Apple CarPlay support and Android Auto. The car, with a base price of $13,000, went on sale last month.
Mitsubishi is letting site visitors connect their smartphones to take control of the Mirage G4 on a mysterious and sleek midnight racing track.
After entering a unique URL, the user takes control of an interactive film, using intuitive kinetic gestures to move the car through various scenes. Features like the rearview camera, turning radius, Hill Start Assist and MPG are highlighted. At the conclusion, the driver is assigned a personality type (such as Wallet Watcher, Learners Permit or Mirage Master), and also gets a highlight reel of their performance in the form of a shareable GIF.
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We wanted to relook at the way feature demos are done, says Karan Dang, digital creative director, 180/LA. Since the cars come with full smartphone connectivity, it made sense to demo these features in an interactive second screen experience.
The campaigns target is a younger Millennial buyer who is attracted to the Mirage G4 not only for its price and low gas mileage, but technology like Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, he says.
They are well researched and increasingly reliant on digital touchpoints to gather information," Dang says. "The Night Drive experience allows our audience to virtually experience the key features of the G4 prior to coming to the dealership.
The effort aims to drive buyers consideration, he says.
Mitsubishi has an incredible brand heritage, and is known for innovations in engineering and fuel efficiency, Dang says. While awareness of the Mitsubishi brand is strong, we are currently one of the smallest automotive brands in the U.S.
The industry is seeing a dramatic rise in digital touch points throughout the automotive customer journey, and a decline in dealer visits.
To help bridge the gap from awareness to consideration, experiences like Night Drive give auto buyers a chance to experience key features of the Mirage G4 prior to heading to the dealership, Dang says.
by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, July 18, 2016
Like a broken record, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer opened the company's second-quarter earnings call Monday with a caveat that there is no news to report on the forthcoming sale of the company's core business assets, which includes search.
The remaining bidders are expected to include Verizon Communications, Dan Gilbert financed in part by Warren Buffett, and private-equity firm TPG, among others.
While Mayer did not delve into Yahoo's forthcoming sale, but she did confirm search partnerships with Apple, Bing, Google, Mozilla, and Oracle, among others. "We anticipate that much of the innovation in search will occur in what we call mobile assistance," she said, adding that Yahoo this quarter launched early tests of "conversational interfaces, personal assistance and real-time answers."
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Yahoo reported that revenue has risen 5% to $1.3 billion. Display revenue and search revenue fell overall. The impact related to its Microsoft search partnership added $252 million to revenue, otherwise GAAP revenue would have been $1,055 million, down 15% from Q2 2015.
Revenue from Yahoo's financial metric called Mavens -- which tracks mobile, video, native and social ads -- rose 26% to $504 million. That compares with 6.8% in the first quarter, and 60% in the second quarter of 2015.
Ad agency Merkle said Yahoo began boosting its use of Google Shopping Ads in mid-March, while reducing the number of Bing Product Ads it serves. Yahoo.com accounted for nearly 40% of clicks on Bing Product Ads early in the first quarter. That rate suddenly dropped to roughly 25% in late March -- about the time Yahoo reported making the eleventh amendment to the Microsoft search agreement, which includes the change in revenue presentation.
Yahoo reported that the eleventh amendment took effect in the U.S., Canada and Europe on April 1, 2016 and in its remaining markets other than Taiwan and Hong Kong on June 1, 2016.
During the second quarter of 2016, Merkle reported that Bing Product Ad volume fell year-over-year for the second quarter for the first time since the formats launch. Simultaneously, share of Google product listing ad (PLA) traffic produced by Google search partners on desktop rose from 3% to start the year to 14% in June.
Google desktop text ads have also seen partner share rise from 14% to start the year to 17% at the end of the second quarter -- the highest rate it has been in the last 18 months, after steady declines until mid-March.
By comparison, Google search ads command 25% higher cost-per-click than Bing and Yahoo ads, per Merkle.
by Philip Rosenstein , Staff Writer, July 19, 2016
For most, the first day and night of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland lived up to expectations. For others, the event gave insight into the major themes we can expect the Republican Party and Donald Trump to harp on throughout the presidential campaign.
The many speakers on day one covered a range of topics, mostly falling under either terrorism and security, immigration or veterans affairs. All were interspersed with attempts to buffer the image created by the extreme and divisive rhetoric we have seen thus far from the presumptive GOP nominee.
The day session saw a flurry of anti-Trump delegates attempt to derail the convention. The Colorado and Maine delegations walked out when the convention chair refused to hold a roll call vote on the proposed rules written last week by the rules committee.
The disarray of the afternoon quickly fell out of mind as the night session got started, and the decibels rose from the podium and crowd.
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As expected, a major theme was a visceral aversion to Hillary Clinton and the policies of President Barack Obama. Most emotional was a deeply sorrowful speech by Pat Smith, the mother of Sean Smith, who died in Benghazi on September 11, 2012.
Words that will surely work as fodder for the remainder of the presidential campaign: I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son.
The Clinton bashing continued from there, a clear sign Republicans understand that central to their success in November will be a continuous barrage of anti-Clinton rhetoric.
Former Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a registered Democrat and former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency under President Obama, lobbed cannon fire at Clinton, postulating that if he had done 10% of what Clinton did as Secretary of State hed be in jail today.
CNN political commentator Van Jones touched on a theme that has elevated Donald Trump to this point, explaining that the convention felt like a borderline hate-fest.
Between shouts of "USA, USA" or "Trump, Trump," an absurdly excitable Rudy Giuliani, a well delivered, if partly plagiarized speech from Melania Trump (who lifted lines from a 2008 Michelle Obama speech) and the colorful outfits sported by the Texas and Guam delegations, day one ensured those looking for a show were not disappointed.
by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, July 19, 2016
Costa Rica is the happiest place on earth. The least-happy place on earth? That would be Botswana.
At least, those are the results according to the criteria measured by the Happy Planet Index. The index is a measure of three factors, life expectancy, experienced well being, and ecological footprint. Western nations tend to do very well on the first two measures, but suck at the third. The index is looking for balance: being happy without raping and pillaging the earth. Here in North America, we still have a ways to go in that department.
In another study -- the 2015 UNs World Happiness Report -- a different weighting of factors treated the Western world a little better. When we tip the balance towards individual happiness and away from the environment and sustainability, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Finland and Canada topped the rankings. Apparently, snow is good for the soul. At the bottom of the list were Benin, Afghanistan, Togo, Syria and Burundi (its hard to believe anywhere scored worse than Syria. Mental note: Stroke Burundi off my travel bucket list).
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In 1971, the 4th Dragon King of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, was so enamored with the idea of happiness as a goal that he introduced a new measure of a nations worth: Gross National Happiness. He believed that the Western worlds obsession with materialism represented by Gross National Product shouldnt be the sole measure of progress. Things like sustainable development, care for the environment, good governance and preservation of culture deserved to be measured as well. In the 45 years since the idea of Gross National Happiness was first floated by his Royal Dragonship, its been slow to take, but perhaps its time has come. By the way, in the UN survey, Bhutan was in the middle of the pack for happiness, ranking 84th out of 157 countries.
Happiness should be important to companies as well. Theres even an investment fund that invests exclusively in companies with happy employees. But happiness can be an elusive goal, especially when we try to wrestle it to the ground in the way of a hard performance metric in a corporate environment. What exactly are we measuring when we measure happiness? And whose happiness are we measuring? Our customers? Our shareholders? Our employees? All of the above?
Lets single out employees. Companies like Zappos and Southwest Airlines have tried to make employee happiness a metric that matters. But what makes an employee happy? Perhaps we can find a clue in a recent survey from Ypulse that asked Millennials which companies theyd most like to work at. The top 10 answers were:
1. Google
2. Apple
3. Disney
4. Non-profit/charity
5. School/community/university
6. Hospital
7. U.S. government
8. Myself/my own company
9. Amazon
10. FBI/CIA
Its an interesting list. Its not the list youd expect from a generation that simply wants to get rich quick. You dont work at a hospital or the FBI if you want to make big bucks. This is a list that comes from people who want to make a difference. They want meaning. In the words of Steve Jobs, they want to put a ding in the universe.
I get that. I recently discovered just how hard happiness is to pin down. After selling my company, I was fortunate enough to achieve financial independence and retire at 51. I should have been deliriously happy, right? Well, I wasnt suicidal by any means, but I would say my level of happiness actually decreased after I tried retirement. I was at the other end of my career path from Millennials, but meaning remained just as important to me.
In a study of retirement satisfaction published in the Journal of Financial Counselling and Planning, Sarah Arsebedo and Martin Seay found that psychologist Martin Seligmans positive psychological attributes, referred to as PERMA (positive emotions, engagement, [family] relationships, meaning and accomplishment) -- dont go away when we retire. These things are necessary to happiness. For men in particular -- and increasingly so with women -- we rely on our jobs to provide many of these. This was certainly true for me.
Its good were paying more attention to happiness. But its also important that we understand what were talking about when we refer to happiness. It has little to do with monetary measures of success. Whether were talking nations, corporations or employees, it turns out that happiness means a sense of interconnectedness, contribution and personal values. It means living beyond ourselves and leaving some footprint that wont fade when we no longer walk this earth.
Ultimately, it means doing stuff that matters.
by Wayne Friedman , July 19, 2016
Media companies Discovery Communications and Walt Disney look to promising stock market upsides. Conversely, Viacom will be one of the weakest, according to one analyst.
Brexit issues aside, Brian Wieser, senior research analyst at Pivotal Research Group, says in the short term, ownership by Discovery Communications of networks in Europe will provide significant opportunity.
Wieser believes Discovery provides big value versus current pricing for its networks -- something pay TV providers will want to keep.
He believes the decision of the U.K. to leave the European Union wont amount to much for Discovery: Its unlikely to have more than several percentage points of deceleration for Discoverys advertising business over the next couple of years.
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In the long run, Walt Disney will be the fast-growing media company. This will come from its success with theme parks and licensing of consumer products.
Right behind Disney in growth will be Time Warner and Fox, both of which have strong global pay TV businesses and more pricing leverage with global pay TV providers.
Viacom will be the slowest grower in the long term, due to its tougher future in continuing to reach younger audiences.
Wieser also says CBS is constrained primarily by its domestic skew. He believe it and Discovery, in the long-term, will have lower growth expectations. For Discovery, he says the company will be limited by its absence of must-have content.
by Tobi Elkin @tobielkin, July 19, 2016
Amsterdam-based ClickDealer and MobAir on Tuesday announced the formation of Global Digital Marketing Group (GDM Group), a digital performance marketing company offering brands mobile monetization, user acquisition, media buying, analytics, and video advertising services.
GDM Group says it hopes to improve the way in which marketers connect with audiences by offering more precise targeting capabilities, access to new channels, better campaign monetization, and user acquisition.
Both ClickDealer and MobAir will remain independent under the umbrella of the GDM Group.
Amsterdam-based ClickDealer specializes in cost-per-action (CPA) campaigns for brands such as Aliexpress, Baidu, and Booking.com. MobAir offers a mobile app marketing platform that allows app developers to promote and monetize their products and focuses on a non-intrusive experience.
GDM Group has global advertiser and publisher clients that have challenges specific to their geographies. There are a lot of companies in Europe that struggle to fulfill their business goals because of geographical limitations. They cant reach an international audience and scale their business accordingly, simply because they dont have the capabilities to engage customers worldwide. Thats the main issue for which GDM Group solves, Dmitry Atamanyuk, CEO, GDM Group, told Real-Time Daily via email.
by Philip Rosenstein , July 19, 2016
Twitter was abuzz on Monday with the 2016 Republican convention.
From 1 p.m. on July 18, to 1:30 a.m. July 19, around 80% of all digital content engagement around the GOP convention mentioned Donald Trump, according to U.S. only Twitter data gathered by marketing tech company Amobee Brand Intelligence.
Melania Trump was mentioned in about 20% of those tweets and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who gave a particularly expressive and fear-mongering speech, earned 7% of tweets about the convention.
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Overall, within the time frame specified, there were 1.28 million tweets that contained #RNCinCLE, 170K that tagged #GOPconvention, and #RNC2016 was tweeted 79K times.
There were 1.13 million tweets about Donald Trump, but sentiment around the candidate remained more negative (21%) than positive (16%), 63% of the tweets were considered neutral by Amobee.
While Trump clearly had strong support at the convention, real-time viewers from around the country were not convinced, at least considering what we can extrapolate from Twitter sentiment data.
The first day of the Republican convention took aim at Hillary Clinton.
The presumptive Democratic nominee, who will be in Philadelphia next week for her own convention, was mentioned in 168K tweets. Sentiment around Clinton was 19% negative and 10% positive, not surprising, considering the tone and rhetoric yesterday in Cleveland.
Melania Trump, however, despite being accusesd of lifting passages from Michelle Obamas 2008 convention speech, was viewed favorably on Twitter. While a majority 64% of tweets were neutral, 21% of the tweets about Melania Trump were positive with 15% expressing negative sentiment.
The issue of plagiarism nevertheless made a mark on Twitter, by 4 a.m. ET, there were 259K tweets with the #FamousMelaniaTrumpQuotes tag. Further, 29% of all digital content engagement around Melania Trump was related to Michelle Obama.
Beyond the realm of politics, Stephen Colbert saw a meteoric rise in Twitter engagement between July 18 and 19. His saw a 421% increase in engagement when compared to the period between July 16 and 17.
The Daily Caller, Tuesday, July 19, 2016 2:36 PM
The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Defense seeking the full release of emails from Secretary of Defense Ash Carters personal email account. The news paper has asked the administration to turn over work-related emails that he sent from his personal account. The DOD released more than 1,300 pages of emails after the news was exposed, however the majority of the emails were redacted. The Times is hoping the lawsuit will unearth the emails in their complete form.
Read the whole story at The Daily Caller
by Sarah Mahoney @mahoney_sarah, July 19, 2016
Major retailers, teeing up against the looming back-to-school season, are looking to add their own branded twist for shoppers. Kohls and JCPenney just unveiled marketing plans centered on bargains, deals and worthy causes. And Macys is hoping to work fashion trends, focusing on playful 1990s-era throwbacks.
Kohls just announced its marketing campaign, themed The School Year Starts Here, is meant to celebrate the incredible feeling kids have when they put on outfits they love, giving them the confidence they need to succeed in school. It says broadcast integrations, including The Today Show, Telemundo and Univision, will help kids put together the perfect first-day outfit. And a social media campaign, with the hashtag #BigPlans, is designed to start aspirational conversations about the school year.
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The Menomonee Falls, Wis.-based store says it plans to donate at least $250,000 and up to $1 million to AdoptAClassroom.org, with shoppers boosting the contribution by sharing first-day-of-school snaps with a #KohlsClassroomDonation hashtag, triggering a $5 gift.
JCPenney also just tipped its hand about back-to-school, and says it will kick it all off July 24 with the theme So You. So Worth It. With a redesigned shopping app and expanded ship-to-store options, our marketing campaign and promotions will be aimed squarely at the modern American mom, who will be planning multiple shopping trips to take advantage of great savings, must-have styles and convenient digital experiences that make JCPenney worth shopping the entire back-to-school season, says Mary Beth West, chief customer and marketing officer for JCPenney, in its announcement.
But its preceding the back-to-school launch with an intense pre-promotion, called Power Penney Days, with many items priced at $3, $5, $7 and $9, and many Buy one, get one for a penny deals. Then in the days just before launch, it plans to hand out envelopes full of coupons to shoppers, offering $10 off purchases. And haircuts in the salon are priced at $10.
Macys is hoping to get shoppers to channel their inner Back Street Boys or Janet Jackson with plenty of 90s throwbacks, right down to grunge plaid, distressed denim, overalls and chukka boots. And its celebrating with in-store events throughout August, including styling tips, photo booths, beauty makeovers DJs.
An alternative to hip replacement surgery may be in sight. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers reveal how it may be possible to use a patients own stem cells to grow new cartilage in the shape of a hip joint.
Share on Pinterest Researchers describe how they could use a patients own stem cells to grow new cartilage that covers a 3-D scaffold molded to the shape of their hip joint.
Image credit: Guilak Laboratory
Furthermore, the team including researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, MO says it is possible to program the newly grown cartilage to release anti-inflammatory molecules, which could stave off the return of arthritis the most common cause of hip pain.
According to the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), osteoarthritis is the primary cause of hip joint damage that requires hip replacement surgery, causing severe pain and disability.
Hip replacement surgery, also known as arthroplasty, involves surgically removing the diseased part of the hip and replacing it with new, prosthetic parts. Each year in the United States, more than 332,000 hip replacement surgeries are performed.
While effective, study co-author Farshid Guilak, Ph.D., a professor of orthopedic surgery at Washington University, and colleagues note that doctors are wary about hip replacement surgery in patients under the age of 50.
They explain that hip prosthetics usually last less than 20 years, so it is likely that younger patients will one day require a second hip replacement. Replacing a worn prosthetic hip joint is complex, and it can increase patients risk of infection and cause damage to the surrounding bone.
As such, there is a need for an alternative to hip replacement surgery, and Guilak and colleagues believe they may have found one.
Dr. Beach to Give Nonsmoking Beaches Additional Point in Competition 2016
It is time to find out the best beaches! After 25 years of ranking beaches, professor Stephen Leatherman of Florida International University, famously known as "Dr. Beach" is starting his list of best beaches over from scratch in 2016. This ...
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The ICCARRE project headed by Professor Jacques Leibowitch (Infectious Diseases Department, Hopital Raymond Poincare, Garches, France) yielded encouraging results in patients whose treatment was reduced to 5 and then to 4 days a week, or even less for some patients (, 2015).To confirm these observations, in 2014 the ANRS started a prospective, multicenter, non-randomized trial (ANRS 162-4D) run by Professor Christian Perronne (Hopital Raymond Poincare, Garches, France) in which patients received the same anti-retroviral treatment regimen over 48 weeks. The aim was to assess whether treatment taken on 4 consecutive days a week by HIV-positive patients would keep plasma viral load below 50 copies/mL. The 100 patients had been taking triple anti-retroviral therapy for an average of 5 years and their viral load had been undetectable for 4 years. Their combination therapy comprised 2 nucleoside analogs plus a non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor or a protease inhibitor.The results presented in Durban are encouraging. After 48 weeks, 96% of patients were still on the 4 days a week regimen and had a viral load below 50 copies/mL. Only three patients had a detectable viral load at weeks 4, 12, and 40 (respectively, 785, 124, and 969 copies/mL). In these patients, viral load dropped below the detection threshold upon return to the 7 days a week treatment regimen, without appearance of resistance. One patient dropped out of the study at week 4.These data were completed by a concomitant analysis of treatment adherence in a subgroup of patients using self-report questionnaires, assays of blood drug levels, and counting of drug doses taken using electronic pillboxes. Dr Pierre de Truchis noted that "The analysis of treatment adherence showed that the 4 times a week regimen was well adhered to and accepted by the patients. In over 90% of cases, drug intake matched the prescription."This innovative strategy now needs to be confirmed in a randomized trial comparing two groups of patients. This is the aim of ANRS QUATUOR, a trial which will be conducted in more patients over a longer period using more recent antiretrovirals such as integrase inhibitors, which are now the mainstay of treatment. Of 640 patients recruited in several hospital centers, half will receive treatment 4 days a week and the other half 7 days a week, for 48 weeks. If similar results are noted in the two groups, all patients will be put on the 4 times a week regimen for a further 48 weeks. The aim is to show that the 4 times a week regimen is not inferior to the everyday regimen, ie, the efficacy is the same and the patients on treatment 4 days a week experience additional benefits (fewer side effects, better adherence...).Professor Jean-Francois Delfraissy, Director of ANRS, observed that "These results encourage us to pursue our aims of improving the quality of life on treatment and meeting a strong demand from some patients for a lower drug burden." Should the 4 days a week regimen now be recommended in everyday practice? "Only a randomized trial will be able to approve this strategy," says Professor Delfraissy. Current international recommendations stipulate that continuous treatment should be initiated as soon as possible after discovering positive HIV serostatus, regardless of CD4 cell count.Source: Eurekalert
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Roy, a noted Penn State materials scientist who died in 2010, coauthored a 1988 paper in the journalwith Komarneni describing the selective uptake of cesium (137Cs), a radioactive contaminant that was widely dispersed through the environment in the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident. The material they used to make what they called a cesium ion sieve was a natural mica that they processed though low-temperature leaching to make a structure that was ideal for the exchange and chemical immobilization of cesium at room temperature."With nuclear waste solutions, you have so many species, the most dangerous of which are cesium and strontium," said Komarneni. "At that time we mostly worked on cesium. None of the naturally occurring materials were very good at strontium uptake."Komarneni continued his work on cesium, this time with Della Roy, the wife of Rustum and an expert on cement. The material they studied was tobermorite, a phase that forms when zeolites interact with cement. At that time, there was interest in disposing of radioactive materials by mixing it with clay and depositing it in deep boreholes in the earth, which were then filled in with a mixture of backfill materials and cement. However, when the clays interacted with cement and formed the tobermorite phase, the cesium was released into the environment.Komarneni and Della Roy developed a synthetic tobermorite in which the silicon atoms were substituted out with aluminum atoms. This material turned out to be a much better cesium exchange material and much more stable in cement. They also published their results in the journal Science."Then our sights turned to strontium uptake, because that was not yet possible until we began," Komarneni recalled.They based this new research on a novel material called brittle micas discovered by a group in Spain. Komarneni was excited by the Spanish researchers' paper because he realized the special structure of their brittle mica could be used as a potential strontium selective material."The material they had made was not very good for exchange applications because they were in large flakes, and that meant diffusion took forever. The flakes were large enough to determine the structure, but too large to be useful," he said.Their synthesis method also resulted in minute quantities of material.Komarneni, Rustum Roy, and William Paulus, the latter Komarneni's MS student now at General Motors, developed a synthesis method that could be easily scaled up and that produced small particles of Na-4-mica that selectively exchanged strontium ions and locked them up in holes at room temperature."We made the almost perfect material and characterized it thoroughly," Komarneni said. "Then we studied many ions to get clues about the mechanism of ion exchange. We discovered that this material is extremely selective for copper, strontium, barium, and radium. This was the beginning of our work on synthetic clays."They published their findings in the journalFive years after the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that caused the partial meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, more than 10 million bags of contaminated topsoil sit in radioactive pyramids scattered across the landscape. Contaminated water flows through the radioactive ground into the ocean or is captured and stored on the power plant site until some method of disposal can be figured out. In a paper published inin 2001 titled 'Superselective clay for radium uptake', Komarneni and collaborators Paulus, and Naofumi Kozai of the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute tested a variety of synthetic micas and natural clays to determine their capacity to exchange radium and fix it for disposal. They tested the materials in a solution containing a million times more sodium than radium and found that their synthetic micas were highly selective for radium. They had the results analyzed using radioactive radium in a Japanese facility by a former student of Komarneni who had returned to Japan. Their materials were by far the best at taking up radium, Komarneni said.They also proposed their clays for water systems in Wisconsin that had problems with radium, but no one took it up.The same material was applied to copper-contaminated soils in Chile. Copper, too, is toxic in large quantities, and Chile has the largest copper mines in the world. Heavy metals accumulate in plants, and in animal and human tissue and are known to be carcinogenic. In 2005, Komarneni's student, Jason Stuckey, along with Chilean researcher Alexander Neaman, field tested their clay on contaminated soil near copper mines. They mixed the clay with the copper contaminated soil, and the clay soaked the copper out of the clay and fixed it in place, resulting in soil in which crops could grow without taking up copper and clean ground water.A legacy of the nuclear weapons industry in the U.S., the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State contains 53 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste, 25 million cubic feet of solid radioactive waste, and 200 square miles of contaminated groundwater. In April 2016, a serious leak was discovered in one of the 177 underground tanks containing the waste. Although no waste leaked into the environment, the failure of the tank was alarming, as the Hanford site is near the Columbia River. Already, one million gallons of liquid waste has leaked into the ground, threatening fish, wildlife, and Native American habitat.The Hanford site is in the midst of the largest environmental clean-up in the U.S., a project that has been ongoing for 25 years and is expected to continue for decades more. The same material was tested by Komarneni and colleagues at Hanford with actual well water contaminated with radioactive radium, and they compared the clay with the best commercial materials available at Hanford. Their results showed that Komarneni's clay was superior to existing commercial materials by four to five times and could be used to help clean up the Hanford site, Komarneni believes."After Fukushima, we got interested again in cesium, because the most volatile contaminant in radioactive materials is cesium," he said. "And that spread a couple of hundred kilometers across Japan. Strontium is not so volatile, so it is closer to the accident site."Recently, Komarneni's group discovered a new material, tin phosphate, which has excellent cesium uptake properties, especially in the highly acidic solutions that were used to extract cesium from contaminated soils of Fukushima. The Japanese government has begun using a commercially available synthetic zeolite-like material called crystalline silico-titanate invented by researchers at Sandia National Lab and Texas A&M University in the '90s and licensed to a division of Honeywell to remediate the site.Komarneni, Wenyan Huang, a visiting scholar from China, and others tested their tin phosphate material against silico-titanate and found tin phosphate was far better at cesium uptake. Those findings were published in 2015 in"The idea is somebody will have to produce this. We don't have any commercial product. We showed clearly that our material is better. The higher the acidity the better our material performs, because it is stable under highly acidic conditions," Komarneni said.There are big problems with soil and water pollution around the world, but especially in the developing countries, including India and China. For example, in China there is heavy metal contamination in many locations from unregulated industry. There are some 459 so-called cancer villages spread across almost every province in the country, in which large clusters of cancer deaths occur. Cancer rates overall have increased by 80 percent over the past three decades, attributed to air pollution in cities and the pollution of rivers and lakes in the countryside. In India, heavy metals such as lead, cadmium, and chromium have been found in the groundwater of 113 districts."In China, there is also dye pollution in rivers. We are working on all of those things," Komarneni said. "For example, we are working on photocatalytic decomposition. We are developing materials that can be used for destroying these organic chemicals in dyes using only visible light."Most heavy metals are cations, meaning they have a positive charge. Many materials are available to remove cations, he said, because they are easier to take up through ion exchange. Anions, or negatively charged ions, are much more difficult to deal with. Anions are very mobile in soil, air, and water; many toxic species are anions.One example of a toxic anion is chromium or its anion chromate. Chromate is a product of leather tanning, where it is used to dilapidate hides, and is commonly used in several other industrial processes. Chromate and chromium poisoning is a wide-spread problem in many developing countries. Tanneries in Nepal, Bangladesh, and India, where many tanneries are found, dump their industrial wastes directly into rivers where they can leak into soil and groundwater. People also drink and swim in the polluted waterways and use the water for washing and cooking. Some 17 million people are estimated to be at risk."For chromate, we are developing ion exchange materials for removal from drinking water and waste water," Komarneni said.They have also developed what they call clay organic nanocomposites that can be used for the removal of anions like chromate, arsenite, arsenate, and especially perchlorate.Perchlorate is made up of one chlorine atom bonded to four oxygen atoms. Perchlorate affects the thyroid gland, causes endocrine disruption, and is a likely carcinogen. Used in explosive materials and rocket fuel as a propellant, perchlorate pollution has been found in Lake Mead in Nevada and in the Colorado River, the water resources for a large part of the Southwest.Perchlorate is a major issue in Redlands, CA, where an underground plume of contaminated groundwater has affected the drinking water supply and closed water wells. The soil is contaminated with perchlorates from decades of pollution by a defense contractor making rocket fuel."There they are using surfactant-loaded activated carbon to treat drinking water," Komarneni said. "They have columns of activated carbon and they percolate water through them to remove perchlorate."However, this method has drawbacks, because there is not a strong chemical bond to lock the anions in, and some of the perchlorate can leach out into the water along with the surfactants. Instead of that method, Komarneni is proposing to use clay organic complexes, which can also remove the perchlorate successfully while also locking it up inside the clay structure."We are developing these cost effective materials that can also be used for water treatment or wastewater treatment," Komarneni said.Komarneni is at a loss to understand why his discoveries have not been taken up by the U.S. government, which funded most of his research, or other governments he has tried to interest, including Japan and China."A government official of Jordan asked me to provide them with a pound or two, but we don't make large amounts. I don't understand why the Japanese didn't take this up. They already make synthetic clays for things like cosmetics. They could do it easily," he said."No, it shouldn't be expensive. Natural clays can be used very easily to make synthetic clays," he said. "Unless I start a company myself, I doubt this will ever go out of the lab."Source: Newswise
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"This equates to 27,600 hospitalisations each year caused by diabetic foot disease in Australia, which puts diabetic foot disease easily in the top 20 causes of hospitalisation in Australia." He said this amounted to an annual direct cost to Australia for hospitalisation alone of $350 million. "This figure is much higher than we previously thought and is still very much a conservative estimate, because this cost only relates to patients admitted because of their diabetic foot disease in public hospitals," he said.Mr Lazzarini said diabetic foot disease didn't stop with hospitalisation and that it also causes 4,400 amputations and nearly 1,700 deaths in Australia each year. "If diabetic foot disease is left untreated it can quite easily result in hospitalisation, amputation and even death," he said."Unfortunately, we also found that people hospitalised because of diabetic foot disease had rarely received the recommended multi-disciplinary foot care needed to properly treat their disease in the year prior to their hospitalisation. This seems to confirm our thoughts that people with diabetic foot disease that do not see a multi-disciplinary foot disease team are more likely to end up in hospital."However, Mr Lazzarini offers a message of hope: early prevention. "We know from our previous research in Australia that when people with diabetic foot disease receive this recommended multi-disciplinary foot care we can prevent around half of the hospitalisations, amputations and costs that would have occurred without this care. Diabetic foot disease is a readily preventable disease if diagnosed and treated early."Mr Lazzarini, and a national expert team from Diabetic Foot Australia, are advocating for a national multi-disciplinary approach this National Diabetes Week to help end avoidable hospitalisation and amputation from diabetic foot disease."Our study, and similar research from Europe and the US, firstly recommends everyone with diabetes presenting to a hospital needs to have their feet screened for diabetic foot disease. This would help identify nearly everyone who presents to an Australian hospital that needs treatment for this disease but doesn't necessarily know it."Secondly, everyone who is found to have diabetic foot disease needs to be seen by a multi-disciplinary foot disease team both in and out of hospital. In the UK they are up in arms that 20% of their hospitals do not have these teams. We estimate only 20% of our hospitals in Australia actually have these teams and this needs to significantly improve."Thirdly, people with diabetes need to see their GP or podiatrist at least every year for a foot screen. Unfortunately, people with diabetes can lose feeling in their feet and left unchecked diabetic foot disease can develop in the form of sores, infections and poor circulation. We know that about 50 per cent of the over one million Australians with diabetes have a foot screen each year. This means we don't know if diabetic foot disease has affected the other 50 per cent and sometimes it's too late when we do. If we can pick up diabetic foot disease early and refer people to these multi-disciplinary foot teams we can prevent thousands of hospitalisations, amputations and even deaths."We know these simple preventative measures can save our hospital system millions and millions of dollars each year, but most importantly, change the lives of thousands of Australians with diabetes by empowering them to keep both their feet firmly on the ground and out of hospital."Diabetic Glenn Wilson from Albany Creek knows only too well the value of early intervention.Having lost every toe on his left foot and one on his right some years ago, Mr Wilson is keen to raise awareness of the need for diabetics to keep their diabetes under control. "You have to be on your toes to keep your toes," he said."You can only keep your diabetes under control if you are having regular check-ups with your GP and your podiatrist, self-check for any injuries or abnormalities, a feeling of heat in the foot which can indicate infection even though you might not be able to see it, and check your blood sugar levels daily."All this information wasn't available when I first had diabetes but people now have the knowledge and knowledge is power." Mr Wilson said people needed to be aware of the need to act quickly when they spotted a problem."When I saw an infection on my foot a while ago and couldn't get an appointment with my GP I came to the QUT Podiatry Clinic and was able to have a script prepared so I could receive the antibiotics I needed," he said. Mr Wilson said the cost to the health system was really just a fraction of the overall cost to society."There are so many things that people take for granted that I can no longer do. For example, walking on the beach and being able to feel sand between your toes, hiking in nature, riding a bike. I can't even ride an exercise bike because I have no feeling in either foot," he said.Source: Eurekalert
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In tests in a mouse model of macular degeneration, drugs that are already on the market prevented damage to the cells that sustain the light-sensitive cells in the eyes."These studies raise the possibility of treatments that could slow or prevent macular degeneration," says Lakkaraju.Lakkaraju explains that macular degeneration starts with injury to the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE). The RPE, a single layer of cells beneath the rods and cones at the back of the eye, performs many functions essential for healthy vision. The damage starts with a disturbance of immune proteins called complement, which normally kill disease-causing organisms by boring holes in their cell membranes."The light-detecting cells in the retina are totally dependent on the RPE for survival," says Lakkaraju, "but the RPE cells are not replaced through the lifespan. So we asked, 'What are the innate protective mechanisms that keep the RPE healthy, and how do they go awry in macular degeneration?'"In a study performed with colleagues Li Xuan Tan and Kimberly Toops, Lakkaraju focused on two protective mechanisms: the protein CD59, which regulates complement activity when attached to the outside of RPE cells; and lysosomes, spherical structures that plug pores created by the complement attack (a function that Lakkaraju''s team first detected in the RPE).Together, they offer an in-depth defense, Lakkaraju says."CD59 prevents the final step of attack that forms the pore," Lakkaraju says. "Once a pore forms, the cell can move a lysosome to close it."If the complement attack is not defeated, the opening in the RPE cell membrane allows the entry of calcium ions, which spark a long-term, low-grade inflammation that inhibits both protective mechanisms, creating a vicious cycle of destruction.The inflammation in the RPE damages mitochondria, structures that process energy inside all cells. This could eventually lead to a decline or death of the photoreceptor cells, once they are deprived of their essential housekeepers. The result is the loss of central, high-resolution vision.Lakkaraju pursued her research in RPE cells isolated from pig eyes, and in mice that lack a protein - a deficiency that causes an inherited form of macular degeneration called Stargardt disease.Crucially, her study identified an enzyme that is activated by excess cholesterol in the RPE, which neutralizes both protective mechanisms, and found that drugs used to treat depression neutralized that enzyme and restored the protection - and the health of RPE cells - in the mouse model.Epidemiological studies by Ronald and Barbara Klein, also at the UW-Madison Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences in the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, have linked long-term use of some of the same drugs with a decreased susceptibility to macular degeneration.The drugs that helped restore protections in the RPE were chosen for their ability to remove excess cholesterol or inhibit aSMase, an enzyme involved in the toxic process, Lakkaraju says."There are several FDA-approved drugs that inhibit aSMase. We found that the antidepressant desipramine, administered to mice in their drinking water, restored CD59 on the cell surface, decreased reactive oxygen species, and prevented mitochondrial fragmentation."My lab is interested in the earliest stages of macular degeneration, because we cannot reverse the loss of RPE and photoreceptors," Lakkaraju says. A patent application for the idea of preventing macular degeneration by blocking aSMase has been filed by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.Given the likely increase in macular degeneration among an aging population, and the current lack of alternatives, "we hope a pharmaceutical company will license this process and start the necessary preclinical and clinical trials," Lakkaraju says. "The epidemiological data are there, and now we have fairly convincing mouse data. The safety profiles of these drugs have been documented for decades. There is certainly no guarantee of success, but we need a way to prevent macular degeneration. I am realistic, but hopeful, that better knowledge of this disease process could be the key."Source: Newswise
In recent weeks, officials in the Gulf have lashed out at Sheikh Yousuf Al-Qaradawi, head of the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS) and a prominent spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), for fatwas he issued in the past permitting suicide operations. The accusations came on the wake of the July 4, 2016 suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia. The first to voice the accusations was UAE Foreign Minister 'Abdallah bin Zayed, who, in two tweets, blamed Al-Qaradawi for suicide attacks and called to hold him to account for his role in encouraging them. Responding to this on his own Twitter account, Al-Qaradawi called bin Zayed a "devil" but refrained from addressing the accusations themselves. It should be noted that after Twitter twice removed Al-Qaradawi's response he reposted it on his Facebook page. [1]
Bin Zayed's comments were echoed by two other Gulf officials: Bahraini Foreign Minister Khalid bin Ahmed Aal Khalifa and UAE State Minister for Foreign Affairs Dr. Mohammed Gargash. Several articles in the Gulf press joined the attack on Al-Qaradawi, calling him "the Mufti of Suicide" and "the Sheikh of Fitna," and some Egyptian papers known from their anti-MB position also published articles against him.
The accusations against Al-Qaradawi sparked a heated debate on social media. As evidence for their validity, users pointed to a video from 2012 in which the sheikh justified suicide operations in Syria. Asked whether it was permissible to carry out a martyrdom operation against regime loyalists even if civilians may be harmed as a result, Al-Qaradawi said that this was allowed as long as the group (that carried out the attack) deemed it necessary.[2]
This is not the first time that various Arab media, especially those opposing the MB, have blamed this movement - and Al-Qaradawi as one of its prominent ideologues - for ISIS's violence in the Arab world.[3] In fact, Egypt and some other Arab countries have designated the MB a terrorist organization. However, this is the first time official Gulf elements have fingered Al-Qaradawi as responsible for ISIS's terrorism and for suicide operations. This may stem from their desire to rebuff Western claims that the source of Sunni extremism is the Wahhabi stream, dominant in Saudi Arabia, and shift the blame to the MB, which is regarded by many in the West as a more moderate Islamic movement.
It should be noted that even prior to 2012 Al-Qaradawi sanctioned suicide operations, especially in Palestine. In 2001 he responded to a fatwa by then-Saudi mufti 'Abd Al-'Aziz bin 'Abdallah Aal Al-Sheikh that forbade suicide operations even against an army occupying Muslim land. Al-Qaradawi stated in reply to this fatwa that operations by Muslim suicide bombers were a legitimate form of resistance, "heroic acts of martyrdom and sacrifice," and one of the noblest kinds of jihad for the sake of Allah. He clarified: "These operations are the furthest [thing] from suicide and the ones who carry them out are not suicides by any measure. A suicide is someone who kills himself for selfish reasons, while one who sacrifices himself [a fida'i] does this for the sake of his religion and ummah. [He] fights the enemies of Allah using a new weapon that God has placed in the hands of the oppressed as a means of resisting the tyranny of the strong and the haughty."[4] As stated, in 2012 Al-Qaradawi permitted suicide operations in Syria provided that "the group [carrying out the attack]" deems it necessary, without explaining exactly what this means. In 2015, after he was accused of sanctioning suicide operations in Egypt following the ouster of president Muhammad Mursi, Al-Qaradawi's office issued a statement meant to clarify his stance on this issue. It said that, in his book Fiqh Al-Jihad from 2009 the sheikh had clearly stated that he permitted suicide operations only in Palestine and nowhere else. The statement clarified further that, now that the Palestinians had obtained sophisticated weapons, suicide operations were no longer valid even in Palestine.[5] However, Al-Qaradawi's fatwas sanctioning suicide operations are still interpreted in some Muslim circles as a blanket permission for attacks of this kind. It should also be stressed that these fatwas still appear on his website.
This report will review the recent accusations against Al-Qaradawi.
Gulf Officials: The MB, Headed By Al-Qaradawi, Are To Blame For Suicide Attacks
On July 4, 2016, several hours after the series of attacks in Saudi Arabia, UAE Foreign Minister 'Abdallah bin Zayed tweeted: "We should hold to account those who incited and permitted to kill people and [to perpetrate] the suicide attacks." In a later tweet he explicitly pointed the finger at Al-Qaradawi: "Do you remember that [the former Saudi mufti], the honorable sheikh ['Abd Al-'Aziz] bin Bazz, forbade suicide attacks? Do you remember that the MB's mufti, [Yousuf] Al-Qaradawi, permitted them?"[6]
Bin Zayed's tweet
Responding to this, Al-Qaradawi called Bin Zayed a "devil," saying: "Enjoin what is right and avoid the ignorant [Koran 7:199]. We ask Allah to protect us from the evil of the devils when the latter are released from their chains."[7]
Al-Qaradawi's post on Facebook
Other gulf officials supported bin Zayed's position. UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Dr. Mohammed Gargash, tweeted: "Those who justified suicide attacks and issued fatwas [permitting them] are responsible for the current situation. Thousands of innocent people have died because of [their craving] for influence and power which is disguised as religion." He added: "These people must take responsibility for the chaos and violence that they helped to ignite... The MB's historical affinity for violence and bloodshed is documented and known..."[8]
Two days later, Bahraini Foreign Minister Khalid bin Ahmed Aal Khalifa likewise responded to Al-Qaradawi's reply and supported his UAE counterpart, tweeting: "The devils who were unchained are those who tried to destroy the heart of the [Muslim] ummah and its strongest fortress. Now they are blaming the righteous leaders for their own faults."[9]
Khalid Aal Khalifa's tweet
Articles In Gulf Press: Al-Qaradawi And His Ilk Prefer To Sacrifice Other People's Sons On The Altar Of Their Bloody Struggles; 'The Suicide Belts [Al-Qaradawi Permitted In His] Fatwas Have Come Back To Harm The Muslims Themselves'
Articles blaming Al-Qaradawi for suicide attacks also appeared in the Gulf press. The London-based Saudi daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat published an article titled "Al-Qaradawi Refuses to End the Affair of His Fatwas Permitting Suicide Attacks" which presented examples, some of them groundless, of Al-Qaradawi's support for such attacks. The article said: "Al-Qaradawi has called on Muslims throughout the world - from Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Senegal, Pakistan, India, Somalia, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan - to become 'martyrs'...[10] In previous fatwas, Al-Qaradawi ruled that [the attackers] 'must verify that there are people in the target area' [chosen for] the suicide attack and that they are 'of the descendants of the apes and pigs [i.e., Jews],' and prior to this he encouraged Palestinians to blow themselves up, claiming that this was a type of jihad. He said: 'If the Western world has atom bombs, we have human bombs,' namely the suicide bombers who carry out his fatwas."[11]
Muhammad Al-Hamadi, editor of the UAE daily Al-Ittihad, harshly criticized Al-Qaradawi in an article titled "The Mufti of Suicide [Attacks]," in which he called upon the sheikh "to declare his new and different position" on suicide attacks and "to renounce his fatwa [permitting them] and not to insult the Muslims' intelligence as is his custom..." He added: "Because of this fatwa, which [Al-Qaradawi] never recanted and never asked to erase from YouTube or from any other site, he is responsible for the crime of the suicide bombers and [for the death of] the innocent Muslim and non-Muslim victims of these suicide operations. Why all this anger about [Bin Bazz's] tweet that reminded us who encourages suicide [attacks] and who opposes them?!"[12]
Al-Hamadi's article
In an editorial titled "The Sheikh of Fitna," the UAE daily Al-Bayan called not to suffice with condemning the planners and perpetrators of the attacks, but to address "the source of the disease, [namely those] who provide backing for the attacks by presenting them... as sacred deaths." It added: "Were it not for these fatwas that incite the youth, the terror organizations would not have [managed to] capture so many of them and play with their minds... Right in front of us we [see] the fatwas of the Sheikh of Fitna, Yousuf Al-Qaradawi, that justify suicide and suicide bombings... He and his ilk are personally responsible for starting these wars. They issue fatwas and play with the heads of the simple folk, while [they themselves] enjoy great wealth and live in luxury. They prefer to sacrifice other people's sons on the altar of their bloody struggles... It is no longer possible to remain silent and suffice with half solutions while ignoring the bitter facts. We must stand as one against this darkness and against those who nurture it with ideas, money, weapons or with fatwas manufactured in the laboratories of black death... Islam must be liberated from those who have hijacked it..."[13]
The Al-Bayan editorial
Khaled Al-Ghanami, a columnist for the Saudi daily Al-Sharq, wrote: "Sheikh 'Abdallah bin Zayed is perfectly right to blame Al-Qaradawi... The suicide belts [Al-Qaradawi] permitted in fatwas from the 1990s have come back to harm the Muslims and have [even] reached the mosque in Al-Madina and the Prophet's tomb... Fatwas permitting suicide attacks will come back to harm the Muslims and will be used against them."[14]
Accusations against Al-Qaradawi were reiterated following the July 14, 2016 Nice terrorist attack, which the sheikh later condemned.[15] Several hours after the attack, Muhammad Aal Al-Sheikh, a columnist for the Saudi Al-Jazirah daily, tweeted: "The one who perpetrated this shocking and bloody act - is he a liberal or a secularist, or is he one of the manufacturers and supporters of the 'martyrdom' fallacy which is associated with Al-Qaradawi and which has blackened his name? May Allah soon gladden us with [Al-Qaradhawi's] death."[16]
Muhammad Aah Al-Sheikh's tweet
In his Al-Jazirah column, Aal Al-Sheikh came out against Western commentators who claim that Wahhabi Saudi clerics are the ones responsible for suicide attacks, while the true culprits, in his opinion, are MB clerics, especially Al-Qaradawi. He wrote: "As long as we fail to pursue the jurisprudents who have ruled in favor of suicide [attacks] and the sources [of these attacks], [as long as] we keep silent over [what they say], treat them politely and ignore them, [as long as] we condemn terror [but] fear to point the finger at those who invented the terrorist weapon of suicide [attacks], we will continue to be trapped in a vicious circle. Yousuf Al-Qaradawi, the MB mufti, was the first to rule that [suicide] was a form of jihad and to call it 'martyrdom' in order to entice mentally deranged youths [to carry out such operations]... The system of takfiri terrorism includes [three components]: the sheikh who issues fatwas, namely Al-Qaradawi; the sheikh who speaks of the [wide-]eyed beauties of Paradise, and a madman who carries out the attack..." He added: "What angers me is that the one who incites to perform the crime [of suicide] is Al-Qaradawi, who is an MB sheikh to the core... [But] Westerners, especially French commentators, attribute the sanctioning of suicide [attacks] to 'Wahhabi' jurists... and this, even though Saudi Arabia's chief clerics oppose the statements in favor of suicide that constitute the terrorists' main weapon these days [and which] emanate from the MB..."[17]
Claims In Egypt: Most Suicide Operations In Muslim World Rely On Al-Qaradawi's Fatwas
Unsurprisingly, accusations against Al-Qaradawi were also voiced in Egypt, whose current regime is virulently opposed to the MB. The Al-Yawm Al-Sabi' daily noted that, following the recent bombings in Saudi Arabia, a video was circulated on Facebook in which Al-Qaradawi permitted suicide operations. The daily stated that "most suicide attacks recently carried out in Arab capitals are based on a fatwa by Yousuf Al-Qaradawi in which he allowed groups to decide whether to carry out suicide attacks..."[18]
Al-Azhar sheikh Rasmi 'Aglan urged Al-Qaradawi to "come out today, not tomorrow, and say the truth, for he is the one who [issued] militant and controversial fatwas... Whenever a cleric tells the terrorists that their operations and [their] killing and violence are forbidden, they immediately answer: 'It is Al-Qaradawi who said [this is allowed]."[19]
Al-Qaradawi's Supporters Come Out In His Defense
Some of Al-Qaradawi's supporters rallied to defend him. According to a report, Kuwaiti preacher and Islamic scholar Tareq Al-Suwaidan tweeted: "Small politicians should speak politely when addressing great clerics."[20]
Dr. 'Azzam Al-Tamimi, the former head of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought in the UK, who is known for his ties with Al-Qaradawi, wrote that the UAE foreign minister's attack on the sheikh stemmed from his frustration at the change in Saudi Arabia's policy towards the MB, which was reflected in the warm welcome extended by the Saudi king to Al-Qaradawi when he made his historic visit to the kingdom several weeks ago.[21]
Endnotes:
[1] Facebook.com/alqaradawy, July 6, 2016.
Following the failed July 15-16, 2016 military coup in Turkey, an editorial in Pakistan's leading Urdu newspaper Roznama Ummat expressed the view that Turkey and Pakistan are important pillars of the Muslim world.
Roznama Ummat, which is published from Karachi, Hyderabad, Peshawar and Rawalpindi, is a strong supporter of the Pakistani military and of the Afghan Taliban groups supported by the military. Ideologically, Roznama Ummat favors all Islamist and jihadi organizations that are not opposed to the idea of Pakistan.
Its editorial, titled "The Failed Coup in Turkey - the [Coup] Leader in America" - insinuating that the U.S. had backed the failed coup - described all countries that in its view had favored the coup as the "Party of Satans."
Following are excerpts from the editorial:
"Turkey And Pakistan Are Two Countries Of The Muslim World That Are A Thorn In The Eye Of All The Oppressor Forces Of The East And The West - And The North And The South"
"Turkey and Pakistan are two countries of the Muslim world that are a thorn in the eye of all the oppressor forces of the East and the West, and the North and the South. The establishment of Pakistan itself came about based on the Islamic ideology; when it became an atomic power despite all domestic and external obstacles, it became totally intolerable to the Satanic powers [i.e. the West].
"India conducted its first atomic explosion in 1974, but the great powers took no action against it [Editor's note: The U.S. imposed sanctions against India]. But when it once again tried to hold Pakistan in awe by conducting five atomic explosions in 1998, then Pakistan immediately equalized the record with India by conducting six atomic explosions simultaneously; the world accepted that Pakistan's atomic capability was far superior to that of India. On the eve of the Pakistani atomic explosions, the great powers, especially America, said, while trying to stop it, that if it did not desist they would cause such an Armageddon that it would go back to the Stone Age.
"All praise be to Allah that even today Pakistan is intact; instead of the Stone Age, it is about to enter the rank of the developed nations. All pressures, threats, and conspiracies [aimed at undermining Pakistan and Turkey] are still going on. A non-religious system remained in place for a long time in Turkey, ever since Kamal Ataturk - so much so that even the azaan [call to prayer] in Arabic and purdah [veiling] for women was banned. Drinking of wine, naked dancing, and every type of obscenity born of the West was promoted in [Turkish] society, and the military and the judiciary played an important role in it.
"No Islamist party was permitted in the so-called elections [in Turkey]. Therefore, organizations and people who wanted an Islamic system in the country changed the names of the parties and sought to participate in the elections, which was foiled. But the people's spirit and clamour ultimately bore fruit, and in 2003 the Justice and Development Party reached the parliament of power with a winning majority, and its leader, [Recep] Tayyip Erdogan took power. Through economic and social reforms, his government put the country on the path of development, and people witnessed an era of prosperity, leading to the establishment of the Justice and Development Party government in the subsequent two elections as well.
"Under the leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey is riding new stages of development. [But] apparently, this situation is unacceptable to the oppressor forces [i.e. the great powers]. Therefore, there have been three coup attempts so far against his government. Besides that, conspiracies are underway to cause instability in the country by orchestrating suicide attacks. The strong government of the Justice and Development Party has made all these efforts and conspiracies fail so far."
"The News Of Coup Was Celebrated In The Syrian Capital, Damascus... Remember That The Government Of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad Has Killed Hundreds Of Thousands Of Its Own Citizens"
"On Friday [July 15], a group of Turkish military [generals] once again attempted to seize power. It tried to gain control of all vital installations, including the government-run TV channel in Istanbul and Ankara, with the help of tanks. But hundreds of thousands of people turned out in streets across the entire country following an appeal by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ali bin Yaldram. The police too strongly resisted the rebels, and, ultimately the military group's coup failed.
"The accomplishment of the restoration of the Islam-loving government and democracy achieved by the Turkish people by bravely and valiantly sacrificing some lives is extremely inspiring for the Islamic movements worldwide, and for the common people fighting for the Islamic system [in other countries]. The role played by other soldiers, police, and people in crushing the military coup [in Turkey] is worthy of emulation by other democracies, especially in Muslim countries.
"At the time of the coup, President Tayyip Erdogan was holidaying at a coastal spot. But hearing of it, he arrived in Istanbul early Saturday morning, and appeared on television among the crowd of people outside the airport. As per one estimate, 170 people were killed during the [coup] conspiracy against the government, among them 104 rebel soldiers; there are reports of 1,500 wounded. Some 3,000 rebel soldiers and their supporters have been arrested.
"Thanking their people for crushing the coup, the Turkish president and the prime minister have clarified that this is the time for the military and other institutions of Turkey to be purged of all dirty elements and negative forces. An interesting aspect and lesson of this coup is that the majority of the rebel soldiers immediately surrendered their arms before the people, and also immediately abandoned the tanks they had ridden to launch the coup. Several countries, including America and Pakistan, rejoiced over the coup's failure. However, the arrival of the news of coup was celebrated in the Syrian capital, Damascus. Remember that the government of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad has killed hundreds of thousands of its own citizens.
"Prior to this, the oppressor forces [i.e. the great powers] succeeded in establishing a military government in Egypt by overturning the elected government of President Muhammad Morsi. In Iraq too, uncertainty and instability prevails since the U.S. attacks [in 2003]. Recently, Saudi Arabia too was targeted by terrorism. Among this news, it cannot be overlooked that the coup in Turkey was attempted by followers of the so-called religious leader Fethullah Gulen, who himself resides in America.
"In the time to come, Pakistan and Turkey have the capability to become the fortresses of Islam. Therefore, the Party of Satans' [great powers'] attack on them is understandable. Muslims need to be always ready to confront them and to remain united."
Source: Roznama Ummat (Pakistan), July 17, 2016.
Rajnikanth is more than just a superstar. The man is a cult. He doesnt have fans; he has followers. With his new movie, Kabali all set to release on July 22, it is being anticipated that a lot many office-goers are going to fall sick on Friday and go to watch the first show on the first day.
Gemini Film Circuit
So, companies have devised the best way to avoid these fake sick leavesdeclare an official holiday. Opus, a structural solutions start-up, is one company that has declared a holiday for its employees to "avoid sick leaves, mobile switch-offs and mass bunks. Whats more, the company is also going to arrange for the movie tickets for its 48 employees!
Another start-up, Fyndus, is also giving its employees reason to be happy. Vinoth Sudaroli, vice-president, India Operations of Fyndus, told TOI, We didn't want to get a pile of leave applications from our employees and hence we have declared a holiday on Friday.
The unlucky majority that is not getting leave from work to watch the movie is leaving no stone unturned to watch dear thalaivas movie. Some have even started a petition to request the Tamil Nadu government to declare an official holiday on Friday. The petition says: We humbly request our CM Jayalalithaa to declare Friday as a public holiday, which will enable people to watch the movie in comfort, without the hassle of taking leave.
The movie, however, has been leaked online falling prey to piracy. Authorities have been instructed to remove all unauthorized links. The free tickets being provided by companies are also an effort to discourage piracy.
What is suddenly happening to all the bosses in the world?! Some time back we told you about this UK-based firm that gave its employees half a day off every Monday to watch the latest Game of Thrones episode. And recently, it was Dan Price, CEO of Gravity Payments, who raised the minimum salary of his employees to $70,000!
Okay bye, gotta convince boss that I too am a Thalaiva fan and need a holiday.
CASS CITY - Proponents of wind energy in the Thumb held the final of four community conversations Monday night and a majority who attended left in favor of wind turbines.
Wind Works Michigan touted benefits to the tax base and local economy, farmland preservation, and stable farm income as reasons why wind energy is good for rural communities.
Gratiot County is looked at as a national model for wind farm planning, said Donald Schurr, president of Greater Gratiot Development, Inc.
Wind is, from my perspective in a rural area, its bringing opportunities for the community to have wealth opportunities, he told a crowd of about 50 people during the two and a half hour meeting who were both for and against the renewable energy source.
Of those in the audience that participated in polls throughout the presentation, 44 percent were strongly in favor of wind turbines, and 28 percent strongly opposed them. The remainder of the audience was neutral.
Audience members were given a clicker to vote on a variety of wind-related questions.
Other issues presented included how wind turbines affect property values, state, county and local zoning issues, environmental factors and decommissioning the turbines.
The study cited by pro-wind officials that said there is a chance that wind farms may increase property values was challenged by members of the audience.
There were also representatives present from DTE and 5 Lakes Energy of Lansing, a consultant on clean energy public policy.
North Korea's worst concentration camp is a reeducation center where women who escaped to China are subjected to the most brutal treatment, NGO Good Friends said Monday.
The Jeungsan Reeducation Center in South Pyongan Province has a reputation for cruelty and the saying goes that even healthy people leave as cripples. The facility was turned into a reeducation center after the regime revised the criminal law in 2004.
Before the law was revised, North Korea had four kinds of detention centers -- reeducation, education, confinement and labor training camps in descending order of severity.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il himself is said to have turned the center into a kind of "Papillon" prison island, giving instructions that every prisoner's year there should feel like 10.
The camp has since 1999 been used to detain female defectors. The North tightened controls for fear of regime collapse amid the famine of the 1990s, which sent many fleeing hunger and starvation. China regularly cooperated in the atrocity by sending refugees back to the North. Short of space at political camps, the regime started to put women in the Jeungsan camp.
Hundreds of female inmates reportedly suffer malnutrition there, and two or three die every day. Their bodies are wrapped in plastic and buried in mass graves. One former inmate who was detained there in 2004 said that other inmates who saw mass graves with piles of human bones and bodies came away with permanent psychological scars.
A former official of the Ministry of Public Security who defected said, "The Jeungsan Reeducation Center is notorious because many more inmates die there than at any other concentration camp due to the unbearably hard labor and malnutrition."
Jeungsan consists of 10 divisions, each of which is made up of seven to 10 groups. Each group normally has 40 to 50 inmates. A relatively healthy inmate is chosen as a capo who controls other inmates under the supervision of security guards. Those caught attempting to escape or committing infractions there are not publicly executed as at other political prison camps but are tortured or killed out of sight.
Despite Flipping in Surf 4 Times in a Year, Marines Say New ACV Is the Future of Amphibious Warfare
Some Marine veterans familiar with the vehicle and its operations have worried about the reliability of the ACV.
The U.S. Defense Department drew up orders for the evacuation of military dependents from the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey as the attempted military coup got underway Friday night but abandoned them as the insurrection quickly collapsed, Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said Monday.
While not confirming the presence of nuclear weapons at Incirlik, Cook also said steps had been taken to boost security for "special weapons" at the base shared with the Turkish Air Force to "keep everything safe, and we're going to continue to do that. As a matter of policy, we don't discuss strategic assets."
Arms control groups have long maintained that the U.S. stores nuclear weapons at Incirlik and other NATO bases in Europe. Last September, the Russian Foreign Ministry charged that the U.S. was upgrading B-61 nuclear bombs stored "not just in Germany, but also in Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, and Turkey."
At the time, Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said at a briefing that the U.S. has long deployed nuclear weapons overseas but "we neither confirm nor deny their presence at any specific location."
At a Pentagon briefing, Cook said about 100 military dependents remain in Turkey following the evacuations last September of about 600 military families in the aftermath of the terror attacks on the Brussels airport and metro.
Cook also clarified the number of military personnel in Turkey, most of them at Incirlik with the 39th Air Base Wing. Previous estimates had put the number at 1,500 or 2,000, but he said there were currently more than 3,000 military personnel in Turkey.
Since the coup failed, there were no immediate plans now to evacuate the dependents, Cook said. "Force protection is job one for us and will continue to be, but we are confident that the measures we have in place and support we're receiving from the Turkish government" were adequate for the moment, he said.
Military personnel have long been restricted to base at Incirlik. Force Protection Level Delta, the military's highest, has been in effect there since the attempted coup. Delta level means that either a terrorist attack has just taken place in the immediate vicinity or "intelligence has been received that terrorist action against a specific location or person is imminent," according to military guidelines.
Flight operations against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria were continuing out of Incirlik after a brief closure of the Turkish airspace by the Turkish military that was lifted Sunday, but commercial power to Incirlik was still cut off, Cook said. He said the base was operating off internal power from generators and "we will adjust accordingly" if the commercial power does not come back on soon.
Cook said that Defense Secretary Ashton Carter has not yet been in contact with his Turkish counterpart, Defense Minister Fikri Isik, since the attempted coup, and it was not clear whether Isik would be attending the meetings at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Wednesday of defense ministers from NATO allies and partners in the anti-ISIS coalition on the next steps in the campaign against the terror group. Turkish representatives were expected to attend.
-- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.
One of the three police officers gunned down Sunday in Baton Rouge was a veteran of both the Army and Marine Corps, a service spokeswoman said.
Matthew Lane Gerald, 41, enlisted in the Marine Corps in New Orleans and served four years in the service from 1994 to 1998. He worked as a food service specialist and achieved the rank of corporal, according to information provided by a spokeswoman for the service.
While in the Marines, Gerald served in duty assignments in San Diego; Camp Pendleton, California; Camp Lejeune, North Carolina; and Twentynine Palms, California. He received the Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal and the National Defense Service Medal
Several years later, Gerald entered in the Army, serving from 2002 to 2009, including three tours of duty in Iraq. He repaired UH-60 Black Hawk utility helicopters and achieved the rank of specialist. He spent most of his time in the Army with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment at Fort Hood, according to the documents.
While in the Army, he received numerous awards, including four Air Medals, the Meritorious Unit Commendation, three Army Good Conduct Medals, the National Defense Service Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, the Iraq Campaign Medal with two campaign stars, Army Service Ribbon with two Overseas Service Ribbons and the Combat Action Badge.
Friends remembered him as an energetic, loving father of two children, according to news reports. He had been serving as an officer in the Baton Rouge Police Department for less than a year when he was killed, according to the department. He was assigned to the Uniform Patrol Bureau.
"After three tours, not a scratch on him. Comes back home, chooses a job to serve others, and this is what our society does?" his friend Nick Lambert, who served with Gerald in the Army, told The Washington Post. "It's a coward's way to make a statement."
Police say Gerald and the two other officers were shot by Gavin Long, who was also a former Marine who spent time in Iraq and was discharged at the rank of sergeant in 2010. The shooting came just days after an Army veteran who spent time in Afghanistan shot and killed five police officers in Dallas. Both gunmen, who were black, were killed by law enforcement officials.
The shootings perpetrated by black assailants with military backgrounds were seen as retaliatory violence in the wake of high-profile deaths of unarmed black men killed by police.
A spokesman for the Defense Department on Monday downplayed the military experience of the shooters.
-- Brendan McGarry can be reached at brendan.mcgarry@military.com. Follow him on Twitter at @Brendan_McGarry.
The mother of one of the Americans killed in the 2012 attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi said she blamed the presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for the tragedy.
Patricia Smith, the mother of Sean Smith, the U.S. foreign service information management officer who was among four Americans killed in the attacks, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, spoke Monday at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
"I blame Hillary Clinton personally," she said. "She lied to me and then called me a liar," she added amid loud boos from the crowd.
Clinton has defended her response to the incident.
"You know, look, I feel a great deal of sympathy for the families of the four brave Americans that we lost at Benghazi. And I certainly cant even imagine the grief that she has for losing her son," Clinton said during a debate in March, referring to Smith. "But shes wrong. Shes absolutely wrong."
The convention that will endorse Donald Trump as the party's presidential nominee opened Monday on a "Make America Safe Again" theme labeling President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as weak on national security at home and abroad.
The message from numerous speakers repeatedly cited the September 2012 attacks on Benghazi that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, but was deliberately short on the specifics of what Trump as commander-in-chief would do to change course.
Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort said Sunday that the convention would avoid specifics while helping the public "better understand the breadth" of Trump and pointing out "'the failed policies of the Obama and Clinton administration.'"
The preview from the Republican National Committee set the tone for Monday: "From attacks on our own soil and overseas to the tragedy in Benghazi, the policies of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have left us vulnerable.
"Our immigration system is broken, leaving our country open to security threats and the negative consequences of illegal immigration. A Donald Trump administration will listen to and learn from our nation's heroes who have put themselves in harm's way and pursue a national security strategy and foreign policy that will strengthen our military and make America safe again," the RNC statement said.
In addition to Smith, speakers on the first day included Marine Corps veterans John Tiegen and Mark Geist, who were security contractors involved in the fight at a CIA annex about a mile from the Benghazi consulate.
Geist and Tiegen were depicted in the film "13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi," directed by Michael Bay. Geist and Tiegen maintain that they and other security contractors were given an order to "stand down" by a CIA officer when they sought to come to the rescue in Benghazi. The CIA officer later told The Washington Post that a stand down order never was given.
Others speaking at the evening session included military veterans such as Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst, a National Guard lieutenant colonel who led a combat combat support battalion in Iraq, and Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke, a 22-year Navy SEAL who led special operations personnel in Iraq.
In the afternoon session, Republican Sens. John Barasso of and Pat Roberts of Kansas pressed the message.
"The men and women of America's military remain the world's best," Barasso said, but "they have been shortchanged in numbers, equipment and benefits" by Obama.
Roberts, a Marine Corps veteran who described himself as the "senior Marine in Congress, said that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats "have made our world and our country less safe." He added that Clinton "failed to protect American lives in Benghazi."
--Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.
A bipartisan group of senators on Tuesday sought to revive a proposal to make it easier for veterans to upgrade "bad paper" discharges wrongly handed down for behavior resulting from PTSD or sexual trauma.
The group of eight lawmakers led by Sen. Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat and former lieutenant commander in the Navy Reserve, urged inclusion of the proposal before the House-Senate conference committee that is struggling to pass the National Defense Authorization Act for the Defense Department's 2017 budget.
In a letter to Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Rhode Island's Sen. Jack Reed, the ranking Democrat on the panel, the Senate group said the proposed amendment to the NDAA "is a necessary step forward to ensure that certain veterans suffering from mental traumas such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or traumatic brain injury (TBI) have access to earned benefits.
"The need for this liberal consideration standard remains all too clear as the number of returning Post-9/11 veterans continues to increase," the letter said. The letter cited an estimate suggesting that discharges for misconduct are 11 times more likely after a PTSD diagnosis.
The proposed amendment would also apply to former service members who were diagnosed with personality disorders and discharged from the military as a result of trauma from sexual assaults.
The Senate had previously passed the proposed amendment, but it was not included in the House version of the bill that is now before the conference committee.
In addition to Peters, the senators signing the letter were Democrats Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, Barbara Boxer of California, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and Republicans Steve Daines of Montana, Mark Kirk of Illinois and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.
The letter said, "A less than honorable discharge, or bad paper discharge, is often given for instances of minor misconduct such as being late to formation and missing appointments -- behavior often seen in those suffering from PTSD, TBI, and other trauma-related conditions."
Discharges less than honorable, such as general discharges or bad-conduct discharges, make service members ineligible for benefits such as GI Bill education benefits and Veterans Affairs home loans.
The proposed amendment has broad support from veterans service organizations, including the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, the Disabled American Veterans, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, and others.
In 2014, then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel gave policy guidance to the Military Department Boards for Correction of Military/Naval Records (BCM/NR) to give "liberal consideration" in examining petitions for upgrades to evidence that PTSD may have contributed to the misconduct leading to a less than honorable discharge.
In their letter, the senators said they were attempting to put into law the guidance in the Hagel memo. The letter also cited a recent investigation by the National Journal showing that about 318,000, or 13 percent of all Post-9/11 veterans, have separated with a less than honorable discharge.
-- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.
Nearly two-thirds of North Korean children under 10, or some 2.2 million, suffer from growth disorders related to malnutrition and 18,000 of them are so undernourished that their life is at risk, according to a study.
Hwang Na-mi, a researcher at the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs in Seoul, published her findings in the March issue of the journal Health and Welfare Forum on Sunday. She analyzed a nutrition assessment conducted in the North by the UNICEF in cooperation with the North's Central Statistics Bureau in 2004 and 2009.
According to the study, 2.2 million or 61.7 percent of the North's 3.55 million children under 10 were underweight, chronically malnourished with stunted growth, or acutely undernourished with a frail physique. Some numbers overlap.
Some 320,000 or 18.8 percent of children aged 0-4 years were underweight, and 430,000 or 23.1 percent of those aged 5-9. Five-year-old North Korean boys weighed less than 14.1 kg and girls less than 13.7 kg on average, about 4 kg lighter than their South Korean peers.
Some 1.23 million or 34.7 percent of children under nine showed stunted growth for their age due to malnutrition. Some 210,000 or 6 percent were frailly built and underweight for their height as a result of acute malnutrition.
Conditions varied widely between regions. In Ryanggang Province, which has no proper food rations and suffers from a lack of farmland, a massive 82.1 percent of children were undernourished, nearly double the percentage in the capital Pyongyang (43.5 percent). Next came South Hamgyong, North Hamgyong, and Chagang provinces.
"The health of North Korean children has improved thanks to food aid from the international community, but most of them are still undernourished," Hwang said. "Some 0.5 percent of the North's entire child population are at a high risk of dying of diseases like tuberculosis, pneumonia or diarrhea because their immune system is so weak due to extreme malnutrition."
The Orioles announced today that they have placed left fielder Hyun Soo Kim on the 15-day disabled list, retroactive to July 11, with a strained hamstring. In his place, the club has selected the contract of outfielder Julio Borbon from Double-A Bowie and designated outfielder Henry Urrutia for assignment. Roch Kubatko of MASNsports.com first reported that Urrutia was to be designated for assignment.
[Related: Updated Baltimore Orioles Depth Chart]
The 29-year-old Urrutia received a $779K signing bonus when inking a minor league contract with the Orioles out of Cuba back in 2012 and has appeared in parts of big league seasons, hitting .272/.287/.337 in 94 plate appearances. Urrutia was an accomplished hitter in Cubas Serie Nacional, with a career line of .350/.426/.517, but hes never tapped into that power with the Orioles organization. His work at the Triple-A level has yielded a .284 average and .333 OBP, but hes slugged a timid .383 in that time (957 plate appearances).
Kim, 28, has come a long way since reportedly refusing a minors assignment in Spring Training. The Os have brought him along slowly and the results have been excellent, as the man nicknamed the Hitting Machine in Korea has lived up to that billing with a .329/.410/.454 batting line in 173 trips to the plate. With that type of production, the Os, who are clinging to a 1.5 game lead in the AL East, will hope that his absence is brief in nature.
The 30-year-old Borbon once looked like a potential catalyst atop the Rangers lineup but hasnt appeared in the Majors since 2013. Hes a career .272/.318/.347 hitter in the bigs and has delivered a .289/.353/.373 slash with 20 stolen bases in 83 games for Baltimores Double-A affiliate this season.
The Rangers are receiving a ton of calls expressing interest in infielder Jurickson Profar, according to MLB.coms T.R. Sullivan. Texas appears to be weighing whether it truly wants to part with the 23-year-old, but Sullivan hints that its at least a possibility in the right scenario.
Among the suitors, the Rays appear to stand out with interest. Tampa Bay has several potential starting pitching trade pieces that could be a fit, though Sullivan suggests that the Rangers may not value pitchers like Jake Odorizzi, Matt Moore, and Drew Smyly highly enough to give up Profar.
Rotation help continues to stand out as the biggest need for Texas, though as Sullivan notes its also possible to imagine Profar being packaged in a deal for a catcher. That might be Jonathan Lucroy, he says, or perhaps an alternative backstop who matches Profar in terms of control and upside though it isnt easy to come up with any clear examples of such a player who might be available.
The real question underlying the decision for the Rangers, perhaps, is how to value Profar both in general and with regard to roster fit. He only has three more years of control left, all via arbitration, because his prior injuries occurred when he was on the major league roster. And the team does have big-dollar shortstop Elvis Andrus around for the foreseeable future.
Still, its possible that Texas could view Profar as worthy of handling regular shortstop duties as soon as 2016, per the report. In that case, Andrus would likely move into the sort of utility role that Profar currently fills.
The Rangers have several other plausible trade pieces that it could utilize instead of Profar. Chief among them, perhaps, is slugger Joey Gallo. Like Profar, he seems ready to contribute at the major league level, but has veterans ahead of him on the depth chart. And similarly, he could be viewed as somewhat expendable with Adrian Beltre now locked up at third base for another two years or as an important future piece, given that he could step in at first base with Mitch Moreland departing.
What seems most clear from the report is that Texas wont be moving Profar for anything short of a high-quality asset. Thats plenty understandable given his top-flight pedigree and .318/.366/.455 batting line in 142 plate appearances this year. The long-term health of his shoulder remains a concern, and the relatively short timeline of control limits his upside, but the Rangers surely have little reason to deal him if they arent able to get an impact player in return.
North Korea is secretly moving political prisoners out of its most notorious concentration camp in Yodok, in apparent preparation for a PR exercise showing that conditions are not as bad as reported, a source claimed.
"The regime is transferring the inmates one by one during the night so that their movement can't be detected by satellites," the source said Monday.
The regime aims to show the camp to foreigners looking like little more than a collective farm, the source added. "The regime will probably send farmers to the political prison camp to do the labor there," the source said.
North Korea has recently admitted the existence of "reform through labor" camps in response to a damning UN human rights report.
The inmates of the Yodok camp are being moved to several other prison camps, the source added. Between 35,000 and 50,000 political prisoners have been held at Yodok, in remote North Hamgyong Province, at different times.
Actress Kim Soo-hyun, known as Claudia Kim in the U.S., has been cast in the Hollywood film "The Dark Tower" slated for release sometime next year, her management agency said on Friday.
Kim will co-star alongside Matthew McConaughey in the science-fantasy film.
The adaptation of Stephen King's series of horror novels with the same name started shooting early this year and will be released sometime around February next year.
Kim is currently appearing in the TV series "Monster" here, so she has had to travel back and forth between Korea and South Africa to work on both projects.
Since her debut in the Hollywood blockbuster "Avengers: Age of Ultron" last year, Kim has appeared in a couple of projects including an American sci-fi film "Equals" and a Web series, "Marco Polo."
Actor Lee Jin-wook, the chiseled star of several soaps including "I Need Romance 2," is the latest celebrity to be accused of rape.
Police on Friday said a woman in her 30s alleged she and Lee (35) had dinner at her home at around 7 p.m. on July 12. The actor left, only to return around midnight to rape her.
The two were "close acquaintances," police said, though it is not clear whether that means they had been dating.
The woman reported the incident to police the following day and underwent tests.
Police have sent the woman's underwear away for DNA analysis.
The actor's agency denied the allegations and filed a defamation complaint against the woman.
Prime Minister Binali Yilidirim said Monday 7,543 people have been detained and 2,745 members of the judiciary suspended. He also said 1,500 officials in the Finance Ministry and 8,777 Interior Ministry officials have been suspended.
They warn that moves to restore the death penalty to allow for the executions of the coup organizers or moves to imprison ethnic Kurdish lawmakers recently stripped of immunity will prompt the European Parliament to decide to halt the deal that rewards Turkey financially for stemming the refugee and migrant flow.
European leaders are warning that repression will further roil relations with the West and could doom a deal they struck with Erdogan earlier this year that has helped to limit the migration crisis impacting the European continent.
Failure to rethink his divide-and-rule governing style, they warn, risks greater political and social strife, and erosion of the rule of law.
As Turkish authorities cast the net far and wide to scoop up those they suspect of participating or colluding in Friday's failed coup, opposition politicians, as well as foreign leaders, are urging President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to show magnanimity and set aside his autocratic instincts in his response to the unsuccessful putsch.
Purge Vowed
On Sunday, Erdogan vowed to purge state bodies of the "virus" that caused the coup, and signs are his crackdown includes not only coup participants, but perceived enemies as well, warn diplomats and analysts.
The country's main opposition party, the Republican People's Party (CHP), Monday warned Erdogan not to launch a witch hunt, arguing it was the erosion of democracy under his presidency that gave rise to the coup attempt.
"Plotters and all their affiliates should give account before the courts within the legal order," the CHP said, "Investigations should not be seen as an opportunity for revenge and purging."
Observers question how and when the lists of those to be detained or suspended were drawn up, especially when it comes to the civilians who were not directly participating in the armed rebellion on Friday.
EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini is among those suspicious of the arrests and purges already carried out, arguing it looks like the lists were drawn up before the coup was launched.
Speaking Monday in Brussels, she warned the Turkish government that it must protect the rule of law as it responds to the failed coup. "We are the ones saying today rule of law has to be protected in the country; there is no excuse for any steps that take the country away from that."
The magnitude and speed of the unfolding purge is lending credence to the fear some of the plotters reportedly had that the Erdogan government was planning in the coming days and weeks to carry out a large cleansing of perceived foes in the bureaucracy and judiciary, as well as a major reorganization of military commanders.
'Sloppy and Uncoordinated'
Those fears are what triggered the launch of the coup Friday, suspects Metin Gurcan, an independent security analyst and former adviser to the Turkish military. "Had there not been a coup attempt July 15, there would have been massive detentions on July 16-17," argues Gurcan.
"The plotters learned of this plan and launched their sloppy and uncoordinated attempt hastily. In other words, the coup attempt that was planned for a future date was moved up," he writes on the Al Monitor news-site.
Gurcan maintains the military clique behind the coup consisted of officers with ties to the movement of Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, now in self-imposed exile in the United States, other officers motivated either by a determination to save or boost their military careers, and commanders dedicated to the secular values of the army and angry with the direction Erdogan has been taking the country.
"The involvement of a large number of the judiciary and even Erdogan's own military aide suggests that opposition to him is deep and widespread within the country's institutions," says Afzal Ashraf, an analyst at the Royal United Services Institute.
"How President Erdogan responds to his victory over the coup conspirators and what he does to address the widespread grievances they attempted to harness will determine how Turkey moves forward, he says. Erdogan can gain much political advantage by introducing more openness in public debate and adopting a less regal style in his trappings of power," he told VOA.
In an interview with CBS' 60 Minutes broadcast Sunday night, Trump answered a question about the state of the world with an answer that is a likely preview of criticisms that will be directed this week at President Barack Obama and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
Speakers include the former governor of the border state of Texas, Rick Perry; the mother of an American killed in Benghazi, Libya; several immigration reform advocates; former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani; and Trump's wife, Melania.
Security is to be the focus of the first day of the convention, along with immigration.
There was a heavy police presence on the streets, with officers from other states joining their colleagues in Cleveland. The deadly truck attack in France and the ambush killings of five police officers earlier this month in Dallas and three more in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, over the past weekend have heightened fears of bloodshed in Cleveland.
In anticipation of that nomination, several hundred Donald Trump supporters and opponents held rallies a kilometer apart as the four-day Republican National Convention opened Monday in the northern city of Cleveland, Ohio.
By the end of this week, the Republican Party will have officially nominated Donald Trump as its presidential candidate and presented its opening shot in the general election race that culminates with U.S. voters making their choice November 8.
'We Need Strength'
"We need strength," Trump said. "Obama's weak, Hillary's weak. And part of it is, a big part of it, we need law and order. We need strong borders."
Trump has proposed building a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border, as well as banning Muslims from entering the country. He softened slightly on the Muslim ban in Sunday's interview, suggesting he would focus more on people's country of origin.
"There are territories and terror states and terror nations that we're not gonna allow the people to come into our country. And we're gonna have a thing called 'extreme vetting,'" he said.
Trump has repeatedly said he opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, while also pointing to Clinton's vote in the U.S. Senate backing the war. Trump's running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, also voted to support the war while a member of the House of Representatives.
"I don't care," Trump said when asked about Pence's vote. "It's a long time ago. And he voted that way and they were also misled. A lot of information was given to people."
He said he does not give the same leeway to Clinton for her vote.
Not True Conservatives
Johanna Bulein, a Trump supporter who traveled to Cleveland from the state of Tennessee, said those who do not support Trump are not "true conservatives."
"They are traitors as far as I am concerned," she told VOA. "They either get behind him, or they get the hell out of the way."
Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the pacifist group Code Pink, said the group was in Cleveland protesting Trump because of his "racist rhetoric" and "the kind of hate and fear that he's been propagating."
"We think it's very dangerous for this country," she told VOA. "We think it's not the kind of country we want to live in, nor the way we want to relate to the people around the world."
Presidential Nomination
Trump will accept the nomination Thursday after besting 16 other candidates during the primary election season.
Republican Party chairman Reince Priebus said Sunday he believes Trump's acceptance speech will give voters a chance to view him as a plausible leader.
While some leaders, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, are giving addresses at the convention, others such as former presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, and former presidential nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney are not attending the event.
Democratic Convention
Clinton will accept the Democratic nomination at the party's convention next week in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Three new polls released Sunday show Clinton leading Trump. The ABC News/Washington Post poll put Clinton ahead 47 to 43 percent, while NBC News and The Wall Street Journal pegged the race at 46-41 and CNN/ORC International at 49-42.
Myanma Insurance will raise its premium rate for third-party automobile cover from the start of August, along with its maximum level of compensation, its managing director said yesterday.
Every registered car in Myanmar must have third-party insurance, which is the basic level of cover required by the Road Transport Administration Department (RTAD). It protects the driver against damages caused to other vehicles or individuals in the case of an accident.
Annual premium rates for basic insurance range from K2000 to K10,000 depending on the vehicle type, said managing director U Aye Min Thein. From the start of August, they will rise to between K5000 and K15,000.
Rates depend on engine power and the weight of the vehicle. Normally car owners only have to pay K2000 per year, while the rate for trucks is divided into eight different categories, said U Aye Min Thein.
From next month, he said, there will only be three categories: small, medium and large vehicles.
We will raise the premium rate and increase compensation. If somebody dies in an accident after August 1 we will pay K1 million, and offer up to K800,000 for injuries.
This is double the amount offered at the moment. For now, Myanma Insurance pays K500,000 in case of death and up to K400,000 for injuries, depending on the severity of the case.
We have 73 different categories for injuries and offer compensation accordingly. The maximum level of compensation can be claimed for eye injuries, U Aye Min Thein said.
The government sets the laws for third-party insurance, to compensate victims involved in traffic accidents. Myanma Insurance is responsible for carrying out government policy and aims to help the public.
In addition to third-party cover, Myanma Insurance offers comprehensive insurance, which covers both parties in case of an accident. However, this is much more expensive if a vehicle is worth K10 million, it costs about K100,000 per year.
U Aye Min Thein defended the decision to raise rates, saying, Although the rate has risen, car owners will benefit. When accidents happen and the driver cannot pay compensation, at least Myanma Insurance can help the victim, he said.
The state-owned insurer, which held a monopoly on the market for decades, stands to receive a significant income bump, as more than 5 million vehicles are registered with the RTAD and will have to pay higher annual rates.
In 2012 the previous government opened up the market to private local companies. Since then private insurers have watched their businesses grow, but progress in developing the market has been slower than expected, and companies still face restrictions on the kinds of insurance they can offer and the size of the policies.
Myanmar has formed an alliance with six other sugar-producing countries in the region, with a view to improving cooperation and boosting trade, in preparation for the ASEAN Economic Community, which aims to create a single market for capital, goods, labour and services.
Seven countries Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam signed the deal in Bangkok on July 16. The alliance will initially extend for two years, chaired by Thailand.
Thailand encouraged us to form the alliance. Although Cambodia and Malaysia do not have their own sugar associations, sugar companies attended the signing ceremony as representatives, said U Win Htay, deputy chair of the Myanmar Sugar and Sugar-Related Products Merchants and Manufacturers Association.
His association is putting the finishing touches to a draft of the long-awaited Sugar Act, which has been revised with recommendations from industry figures. Once complete, the draft act will be submitted to parliament through the Ministry of Agriculture.
It aims to create policies that support the sugar industry and help factories to survive increasing competition from overseas.
It includes elements taken from Thailands Cane and Sugar Act of 1984, including revenue-sharing between farmers and millers, the creation of an industry board, and emergency funds for millers and farmers to cushion against price shocks or weather events.
Trading on the Yangon Stock Exchange may have slumped, but the countrys new bourse is still heading in the right direction, according to a YSX official.
When First Myanmar Investment (FMI) became the first firm to list on the YSX back in March it sparked a deluge of trading, with hundreds of thousands of shares changing hands in a single day.
But trading volumes have since dropped sharply, and the appearance of a second firm in May Myanmar Thilawa SEZ Holding failed to spark the same frenzy that welcomed FMI.
The value of daily traded volumes has dropped since then, but YSX adviser Kensuke Yazu says the country should be proud of its new bourse nonetheless.
In June, daily traded volumes on the YSX averaged around US$250,000 more than 20 times the daily average on the exchanges in nearby Lao and Cambodia, he said.
The absolute number of shares traded on the Lao and Cambodia exchanges over June, however, was still higher than on the YSX.
Even though trading volumes have decreased due to lower interest among the general public we can say Myanmars stock market is on the right path, Mr Yazu said.
Efficient stock markets take time to build, and do not emerge in months or even years, he added.
This is a long journey, he said, adding that it would take securities firms to bring in new companies with strong businesses and corporate governance to broaden the range of listed companies.
Myanmar Citizens Bank is expected to become the third firm to list on the YSX. A bank official said he hoped the listing would take place before the companys general meeting at the end of this month, but admitted it was possible that the listing would be delayed until after the meeting.
Mr Yazu said MCB was still in the listing examination process, and could not comment on timing.
Fair regulatory practice together with more education and information for companies and investors will also help the new exchange, he said.
He said amending the Myanmar Companies Act is an essential step toward allowing foreign investors on to the YSX, although this would require the exchange to monitor the percentage of shares held by foreign buyers.
Two months into a city-wide suspension on high-rise construction, some Yangon developers faced with frozen projects are telling their workers to seek employment elsewhere.
Yangon authorities halted hundreds of high-rise projects in May, over 60 of which had received a construction permit from the previous Yangon Region government.
The subsequent review to make sure the projects comply with draft zoning plans has dragged on, and the first round of results on the first 12 of the 64 projects to have received a permit before being frozen only appeared last week.
Many developers, meanwhile, are still paying staff including foreign experts required for complex high-rise construction despite work having stopped.
One developer whose firm had started work on a 27-storey project in Ahlone township, which is now under review, said his monthly expenses for workers foreign and domestic runs to around K100 million.
This is on top of the interest on bank loans his firm took out to fund the project, he added.
We have around 300 workers digging foundations, he said. Even when the work stopped we paid their salaries.
The construction firm also provides dormitories for labourers, and with the ban on construction still in effect the situation has become untenable.
Weve told them to look for new work, he said. But as other construction sites have also been stopped theyll find it hard.
U Myo Myint, managing director at MKT Construction, which has over 30 construction projects around Myanmar, said his firm is still paying workers salaries on projects where construction had been stopped.
Were paying salaries to staff, workers and foreign experts as much as we can, he said.
Workers hired on longer-term contracts have been allowed to leave if they want, or to work on other MKT construction projects, he added.
The company has enough funds from its wider operations to keep paying salaries on frozen projects for around six months, U Myo Myint said.
He said MKT Construction is also still paying sub-contractors that were hired to work on a range of tasks from water and electric systems to porcelain finishing and stair railings.
U Kyaw Kyaw Naing from i-Green Construction said his company could keep paying its workers salaries for another three months, but no longer. The company had already told the workers that salaries would not continue past 12 weeks, but it would be hard for workers to find new work during the rainy reason amid the city-wide suspension, he said.
i-Green is building a 12.5-storey project called Sein Lae Aung Condominium on Sein Lae May Yeikthar Road one of the 12 buildings already reviewed.
Developers have criticised the review, which they say has left workers without wages, damaged businesses and put the construction industry under great pressure.
They also complain the review lacks transparency, because the criteria for the review have not been made public.
U Khin Shwe, chair of Zaykabar Company and a patron of the Myanmar Construction Entrepreneurs Association, told The Myanmar Times that a list of construction industry grievances from workers and developers alike would be drawn up and submitted to the Yangon Region and Union governments.
After the judgement was handed down on the first 12 buildings, U Khin Shwe thinks the other 52 so will face similar instructions.
Everyone has suffered, but the main issue is that workers will soon be jobless, he said, adding that he has told the developers of buildings under review to submit reports on their losses to him at a meeting, which he would then take to the government.
Translation by Khine Thazin Han
The Myanmar Computer Federation has applied to develop a 300-acre ICT park in Yangons eastern Thanlyin township, which it hopes will rival the successful MICT Park in Hlaing township.
The organisation, which claims more than 10,000 members, applied for the project in May 2015, but it was not approved. MCF president U Khun Oo said he hopes the current government will look on the scheme more favourably.
We tried to get permission last year for the ICT zone, but we were impeded. Now we are trying very hard to get permission from the new government, he told The Myanmar Times. He said the project will begin quickly once it has received government approval.
The MCF has already bought a 300-acre site in Thanlyin, a developing township across the Bago River from downtown Yangon, which is also home to Thilawa Port, the largest port in the country, and to Myanmars first special economic zone.
Local and foreign investors will be invited to cooperate in the project, which will include a business zone, a training centre, a call centre and a software centre, U Khun Oo said.
U Zaw Min Oo, MCF secretary general, told The Myanmar Times last year that the project would create job opportunities and encourage the sharing of ideas around technology.
Breaking its traditional silence on the South China Sea dispute, Myanmar released its first public statement about the spat on July 13, following an international tribunals ruling in the Philippines favour.
Myanmar is not a claimant in the dispute, but during its turn as ASEAN chair in 2014 it oversaw a tougher line on China than under the previous, more subservient chair Cambodia. During a foreign ministers meeting in 2014, ASEAN issued a statement of serious concerns over heightening tensions in the dispute. China responded by pledging diplomatic support, and by a showing a willingness to spread cash, among its allies in ASEAN.
For Myanmar, the maritime dispute has served as a minor sticking point as it charts its course between contending powers China and the US, while also trying to avoid alienating other ASEAN member states.
Until its unprecedented public statement on the issue, Myanmar has not deviated from the ASEAN party line of non-interference and consensus, signing on to guileless joint statements.
The diplomatic turn on the maritime feud comes as the countrys new leader grapples with Myanmars own problems and disputes with China, and seeks to reposition foreign affairs under the democratically elected administration.
In its July 13 statement on the award of the arbitral tribunal, Myanmar urged all parties to exercise restraint and to refrain from threats or use of force. It added that despite Chinas refuting of the verdict, Myanmar is committed to the principle of rule of law, including in the conduct of foreign relations throughout the international community.
Myanmar will continue to work with ASEAN member states and China for the full and effective implementation, based on consensus, of the DOC [Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea] and early conclusion of the COC [code of conduct], said the statement.
U Than Soe Naing, a political analyst, said the statement was one of the most forward-looking among ASEAN states reactions to the ruling. He added that if Myanmar had not released such a statement, the image of democracy within ASEAN would lose credibility.
This was very good diplomacy, he said. Myanmar could affect the acceptance of the outcome despite not being a claimant country.
He added that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi faces a tough time ahead in helping steer ASEAN through the repercussions of this South China Sea decision. The state counsellor was asked last month to lead future ASEAN joint meetings, giving Myanmar a pivotal position on the issue as the verdict is implemented.
U Aung Myo Myint, spokesperson of the ASEAN department under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said Myanmar is prioritising a diplomatic handling of developments in the South China Sea.
We are standing by our existing foreign policy with all countries, he said.
Yun Sun, a senior associate with the Stimson Center for China-Myanmar relations, argued that Myanmar has yet to take a clear side on the dispute however.
It is very safe to call for the observation of the DOC and trying to stay neutral is a quite good and safe position to have within the ASEAN, she said.
Later this week, the 49th ASEAN Foreign Ministers Meeting (AMM) will convene in Laos and will deliberate how to strengthen the ASEAN community. If ASEAN is going to issue a joint communique on the tribunals verdict, it would most likely proceed from these meetings. The agenda is currently dominated by the ASEAN Political-Security Community Blueprint 2025, and the ASEAN Inter-governmental Commission on Human Rights, however, making such a statement unlikely.
We will not be able to discuss the South China Sea dispute at the AMM meeting. Myanmar, as well as the Lady, will be sustaining peaceful relations with all during the meeting, said spokesperson U Aung Myo Myint, referring to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.
The state counsellor called this weeks landmark meetings with ethnic armed group leaders family-like, but a press conference with a United Nationalities Federal Council delegation yesterday revealed a different picture: At least one of the armed groups leaders left the talks dissatisfied.
Khu Oo Reh, general secretary of the UNFC, a bloc of nine ethnic armed groups, said he was displeased with remarks made by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.
According to him, the state counsellor told UNFC leaders that they should consider what they can offer rather than what they want to demand.
She said, You can demand everything you like. But, I do not guarantee every demand will be met. She previously said that people should consider what they can offer for peace rather than what they want to obtain from it, Khu Oo Reh said at a press conference held yesterday, becoming emotional as he described the exchange.
Look at the states inhabited by the ethnic people. We have lost almost everything, he said. In this situation, what do they want from us? What do we still have left to offer?
We do not have demands and offers. Everyone has a responsibility to make the country more developed and peaceful. This is the equality that we have been demanding for decades, he said.
The anger was not expressed during the time-limited talks with the state counsellor, and Khu Oo Reh added that he did not want to create tension during the meeting.
Earlier in the press conference, he said that the UNFC delegation represented seven armed ethnic groups. When The Myanmar Times asked why two armed ethnic groups were missing from his count, he backtracked, and said the bloc includes nine members. The withdrawal of two UNFC members, ethnic Kokang and Palaung armed groups, was previously refused.
When asked about the only partial inclusivity of the upcoming 21st-century Panglong Conference, and the likely absence of some UNFC member groups including the three allies fighting in Kokang, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, the Taang National Liberation Army and the Arakan Army he said the Tatmadaw had made it difficult for everyone to participate.
We should question the military offensives on the other side of these armed ethnic groups. If the Tatmadaw halts its military offensive against them, then they would not fight back, Khu Oo Reh told reporters yesterday.
The senior UNFC leaders urged the government to find ways to include representatives of armed ethnic groups with whom it has not held separate talks yet. Such groups include the Arakan National Council, the Wa National Organisation and the Lahu Democratic Union, which do not have standing armies, as well as the three Kokang allies.
We think that there should be a formal understanding between the government and the armed groups before proceeding to reviewing the [peace talk] framework and the 21st-century Panglong Conference, he said. We urge the government to foster an agreement guaranteeing the participation of all groups.
Government peace negotiators have invited UNFC members to attend the framework review scheduled for the first week of August. However, only the Union Peace Dialogue Joint Committee has the decision-making power to change the framework, which will determine the shape of the political dialogue.
As we were not there during the drafting of the framework, we have to ask by what means some groups can participate in the review of the framework dialogue without signing the nationwide ceasefire agreement. We would also like to know what status will be offered to the groups, Khu Oo Reh said.
The previous government excluded armed groups engaged in ongoing offensives from the NCA last October. Inclusion of the Kokang, Arakan and Taang groups in the upcoming conference remains an open question.
The state counsellor yesterday said that it was important for us to have the rule of law. Without the rule of law, there cannot be peace. We can have a strong and good constitution only if we have the rule of law and peace, Khu Oo Reh said.
The charter was drafted by the former junta and was ratified in 2008. President U Htin Kyaw in his inaugural address to the nation in March said that the new government would prioritise reforming the constitution. But Speaker U Win Myint said in June that constitutional amendments are on the backburner until peace and national reconciliation are achieved.
The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) has blamed the government for the continued arrest and detention of activists under undemocratic legislation that threatens freedom of expression and peaceful assembly.
About 82 political prisoners remain behind bars, according to the AAPP. An estimated 203 individuals have been charged for politically motivated actions and are awaiting trial, the association added.
U Bo Kyi, joint secretary of the association, told The Myanmar Times that political prisoners advocates feel the new government is not handling the issue effectively and believe the Ministry of Home Affairs should not be directly involved in freeing remaining prisoners of conscience.
Although the government is making a lot of changes, the political prisoners issue has not changed yet, he said.
The Ministry of Home Affairs, under whose jurisdiction both the nations police force and prisons system fall, is controlled by the military.
Though the new National League for Democracy government offered several amnesties during its first month in office by AAPPs count, 235 political prisoners were released arrests on politically motivated charges have continued.
According to the AAPPs monthly report released in June, 112 civilians were arrested by military and ethnic armed groups, 48 of whom were subsequently released while 18 were sentenced.
Former political prisoners are also demanding new policies related to political prisoners, including that the NLD government move to define the term.
Last year, a group of former political prisoners drafted a definition for political prisoner, based on discussions with legal experts, activists, other former political prisoners and members of political parties.
However, in June, during a regular session of the Pyithu Hluttaw, the militarily appointed deputy home affairs minister, Major General Aung Soe, claimed that trying to define the term would violate the constitution.
U Tun Kyi, a member of the Former Political Prisoners Society (FPPS), said yesterday that the Ministry of Home Affairs has consistently opposed defining the term.
We would like to see a definition of political prisoners within the context of the NLD government because the government was born out of opposition and political prisoners, he said. Most of the cabinet members are former political prisoners, including the state counsellor [Daw Aung San Suu Kyi].
According to the definition proposed last year, a political prisoner would include anyone arrested, detained or imprisoned for direct or indirect involvement in activities aimed at promoting freedom, equality, human rights or the rights of citizens, including ethnic minorities. Peaceful anti-government protests are expressly included as among these activities under the definition.
Nearly a week after losing a historic case over its territorial claims in the South China Sea, China is closing off part of the region for military drills this week.
Beijing's maritime administration issued a warning Monday that an area located southeast of the island province of Hainan would be off limits between Tuesday and Thursday.
The United Nations' Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague dismissed Beijing's claim of virtual sovereignty over the nearly 3.5 million sq. km South China Sea in a ruling last Tuesday. The decision was a response to a complaint filed by the Philippines in 2013 over China's aggressive actions on the Scarborough Shoal, a reef located about 225 km off the Philippine coast.
After its first 100 days, what does the government intend to do, and how much has it already done?
There has been plenty of criticism, both at home and abroad. While observers seem willing to give the still-new administration time to overcome the decades-long legacy of corruption, repression and mismanagement by the former military regime, there is also a feeling that the National League for Democracy had plenty of time to plan for office, and its overwhelming majority in both houses of parliament, coupled with its great popularity in the country and the support it receives from overseas should have translated into more effective, immediate action, even at this early stage.
The media have established a list of important issues where President U Htin Kyaws administration might be expected to make its mark: the future of China-backed projects, agriculture and land rights, government-military relations, issues in Rakhine State, the drug trade, cleaning up the jade industry, rebooting the stalled peace process, health sector reform, central bank growth and deficit, fighting corruption and graft.
But where U Thein Seins Union Solidarity and Development Party government lacked the confidence of the people, its National League for Democracy successor could be facing the opposite problem of unrealistic expectations, and popular impatience.
The NLD-backed government is already credited with releasing political prisoners as well as students and others awaiting trial for alleged offences arising from their opposition to the National Education Law. The instruction to civil servants not to accept gifts worth more than K25,000 (US$20) is also seen as a step toward fighting corruption. On the other hand, the new administration seems to have fumbled initial attempts to cut down on betel consumption, and is being blamed for lapses in electricity supply.
The announcement of the 100-day campaign should have been a chance to evaluate the progress made by the government in meeting set goals. However, success in that effort is far from clear, observers say.
Ko May Aye, a leader of the 88 Generation Student Group, said, I understand that the NLD will need more than a few weeks to solve problems that have developed over the past 50 years. But they did have time to set forth clear policies. Perhaps they have delayed doing so because of the need to build good relations with the Tatmadaw. But this delay is not good for the country.
U Soe Tun, deputy chair of the Union of Myanmar Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry (UMFCCI), said he had seen no economic improvement so far, adding that most business owners did not care about the 100-day initiative, but they do want to see clear policies implemented in every sector over the next five years.
I dont understand the delay. In most democracies, the winning party announces its policies before the election, he said. What are they going to do about energy, banking and automobiles? Where should we invest? We dont know yet.
Given Daw Aung San Suu Kyis background as a democracy icon, perhaps the most telling criticism has been over the governments human rights record, particularly in Rakhine State. Both local and international human rights advocates have been demanding action.
The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and the Alternative ASEAN Network on Burma have released a joint statement criticising the government for failing to make an impact on human rights during its first few months in office.
The two organisations called on the government to establish a national human rights agenda and immediately address key issues of concern such as constitutional and legislative reform, ratification of core international human rights treaties, releasing political prisoners, abandoning anti-Rohingya policies and restrictions, cracking down on anti-Muslim violence and hate speech, removing military impunity for human rights violations, advancing womens rights, protecting freedom of opinion and expression, and working closely with the UN rights monitoring office.
Voxpop: 100 days later: What has changed?
Despite a promise from President U Htin Kyaw made during his first Union address to revise the constitution, no action has been taken to do so. Speaker U Win Myint told the media in May that the government can begin to address constitutional reform only after national peace and reconciliation are achieved.
Parliament has abolished the 1975 State Protection Act. But some repressive laws used to arbitrarily detain or prosecute activists, human rights advocates, and members of ethnic and religious minorities are still in force. The Peaceful Assembly and Demonstration Law, the Ward and Village Tract Administration Law and the four so-called race and religion protection laws have been criticised by external observers who have called for their abolition.
The Legal Affairs and Special Issues Commission led by former Speaker Thura U Shwe Mann was set up to revise existing legislation and propose abolition or revision. Doubt surrounds its performance so far, however.
Weve reviewed 397 existing laws. But it might complicate matters to say which laws we are recommending to be abolished or revised, said commission member U Zaw Myint Pe, adding that the responsibility for such changes lay with the relevant ministry.
Changes to the Peaceful Assembly Law, and the Ward and Village Tract Administration Law, and the race and religion legislation cannot be made without the permission of the Ministry of Home Affairs, which is under the control of military Commander-in-Chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing. U Zaw Myint Pe said he was not authorised to say whether or not the review commission had received instructions from the government to review any of these laws.
Vice chair of the Human Rights Commission U Sit Myaing said the commission had received fewer letters of complaint than under the previous government, but the commission had not changed its working methods.
We used to receive about 300 complaints a month, but now we only get about 100, mostly related to land-grabs, he said. We continue to work as normal, and the new government supports us just as the last government did.
U Sit Myaing said the commission still faced difficulties in investigating complaints about Tatmadaw-related cases that had occurred in conflict zones because of security problems.
However, the commission has conducted human rights awareness training for high-ranking military officers in Nay Pyi Taw, Kalaw, Bahtoo and Thandaunggyi. Thats new. We werent able to do that under the previous government, he said.
Recently, the Shan Human Rights Foundation Burma presented the government with evidence, including maps, photos and witness testimony, and demanded action against soldiers accused of killing seven villagers in Mong Yaw, Shan State, in June. The government also came under pressure to take action following the outbreaks of mob violence against the Muslim community in Lone Khin, Bago Region. Nobody has been arrested.
Nor has much progress been visible in Rakhine State, despite attempts to recognise the status of the Muslim minority there.
Declining to comment on Rakhine State, U Sit Myaing said the commission was encouraging the government to sign more international human rights conventions and launch more awareness campaigns.
U Kyaw Min, chair of the Democracy and Human Rights Party and an elected MP in the suppressed 1990 election, questioned whether the NLD and its leader were really concerned about human rights.
Because of the lack of rule of law in this state, the rights of the Muslim community have been violated even more than under the last government. Their lands have been occupied by civil servants. We expected much from the NLD government, but have received nothing, he said.
Referring to the governments attempt to rename self-identifying Rohingya as the Muslim community in Rakhine State, U Kyaw Min said, We dont much care about the terminology as long as we get equal rights.
For their part, ethnic Rakhine communities have accused the NLD of promoting disunity with the term Buddhists in Rakhine State. Rakhine National Party MP Daw Khin Saw Wai said, The government has done nothing for us in the first 100 days. We understand that no government can do much in so short a time. But they cannot build a true democracy by creating disunity among ethnic minorities.
Both sides say the government should negotiate with key leaders of both communities.
If the government wants a solution, they should ask leaders like Dr Aye Maung and influential Muslim leaders to discuss with them how to solve the problems, said U Kyaw Min. We wont refuse to negotiate within the framework of the law, as we respect the rule of law, said Daw Khin Saw Wai.
One big step forward would be ending armed conflict. The government has taken steps to launch the 21st-century Panglong Conference to open discussions with ethnic leaders, even as fighting continues in Shan, Kachin and Rakine states.
Colonel Sai La, a spokesperson for the Restoration Council of Shan State, said, We recognise that the government has made efforts toward peace, by announcing that it would invite armed ethnic groups to participate in the peace process and in the political dialogue. This represents a good chance.
Aware of the mounting criticism, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has asked the international community to give her government more time, and NLD MPs insist they are doing their best to meet peoples needs.
We did make some progress in the 100 days, said NLD MP Daw Khin San Hlaing.
Compared to the last government, when she was also an MP, government officials are more willing to cooperate with MPs on regional development projects, she said. This is an important change for us. We cant work successfully in our constituencies without government cooperation, she said.
She asked people to be patient. We cant do anything without the support of the people. We promised we would do our best for the people and the country, she added.
The World Heritage Committee will postpone a decision about the designation of a Thai national park that Myanmar officials say is actually located, in part, in their country.
Thai state media wrote this week that the delay was due to the fact that negotiations between the two countries are ongoing, but according to AFP the meetings, which were held in Istanbul, Turkey, were suspended on July 16 before the issue of the Thai national park would have been addressed. The suspension came after members of the military failed to overthrow the Turkish government in an attempted coup the night before.
The Myanmar Times reached out to UNESCO, the UN culture agency of which the World Heritage Committee is a part, for clarification on the delayed decision, but did not hear back by press time.
Thai state media reported that the decision will be delayed until at least October, when the committee will meet again in Paris.
The Kaeng Krachen Forest Complex, which borders Tanintharyi Region, has been up for UNESCOs prestigious World Heritage Site designation since 2011, but Myanmar officials claim that 34 percent of the land proposed is actually in Myanmar.
Thailand will have to postpone the consideration of this agenda to the next session to take place in Paris instead, as a discussion between Thailand and Myanmar is still underway without clear conclusion regarding the forest complex, as Myanmar is concerned on the issue of border demarcation, Thailands state media said on July 17.
Thailands permanent delegate to UNESCO, Sihasak Phuangketkeow, told Thai state media that concerns from local communities and tribal groups have been addressed.
He stressed Thailand has been communicating with Myanmar that the registration of Kaeng Krachan Forest Complex as a natural World Heritage Site will not affect border demarcation, the state media release said, but the postponement is to ensure that the issue is not rushed and for the convenience of both sides.
In June, Myanmar officials wrote letters to UNESCO and Thai officials challenging the designation.
If that map shown by Thailand is approved, land from the Myanmar side will be taken, U Kyaw Zaw, director of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation, told The Myanmar Times in June, so we officially object.
Fruit farmers whose land was seized more than 35 years ago to build a prison say its time they got their property back.
They say that of the 180 acres (72 hectares) seized by the Htone Bo Prisons Department in 1980, 100 was left unused. But now that land, in Patheingyi township, Mandalay Region, has been rented out to other farmers for an annual rent of about K6 million, they say.
If nothing is done to restore their land, they pledge to take to the streets in protest.
We were never allowed to work on our land after they seized it. We wrote to the last government several times about this, but nothing was done, said farmer U Kyaw Moe Than yesterday.
Now weve also written to the new government. If we dont get a solution within a month, we plan to stage a protest.
Representatives of the 50 farmers told a press conference on July 14 that about 100 acres of the seized land had now been rented out to other farmers, who paid about K6 million a year in rent.
We used to grow plums and mangos there. We were paid K25 per plum tree and K75 per mango tree, but we never received compensation for the land, said farmer U Aung Myint.
The farmers have taken up their case with the Mandalay Region chief minister, the agriculture ministry and the Committee for Re-scrutinising Seized Farmlands and Other Lands.
Translation by Zar Zar Soe
In what seems likely to be a concerted and protracted charm offensive, China has been inviting hundreds of Myanmar opinion-formers to improve understanding on their part of Chinas intentions. China is telling Myanmar that it knows Myanmar has changed, and that Chinas attitude has changed too.
The long-term goal appears to be to recalibrate Chinas relationship with an increasingly democratic neighbour that has suddenly acquired a global range of other options, many of them very attractive.
According to the State Council Information Office of the Chinese foreign ministry, Beijing has invited more than 100 journalists, government officials and members of parliament to visit the country, as well as 100 students to study in China.
Wang Xiaofeng, director of the foreign ministrys Public Diplomacy Office, told The Myanmar Times that his country sought peaceful and prosperous relations with its southern neighbour.
China wants Myanmar to understand that we can make money together, he said, stressing his governments policy of non-intervention in internal affairs. That was the message given by Foreign Minister Wang Yi to his counterpart, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, when he visited Nay Pyi Taw last April, he said.
We agreed to solve issues amicably and through friendly relations, said Mr Wang after the meeting.
The central problem is that despite, or perhaps because of, Chinas extensive investments in Myanmar during the term of the last government and before, many Myanmar people do not have a warm opinion of their giant northern neighbour.
Under the military regime, an isolated Myanmar became economically dependent on Chinese support as the United States and Europe applied sanctions. But now, a popular and democratic government in Nay Pyi Taw has the chance to diversify its international political, diplomatic, economic, social and cultural relationships with Japan, the US, the EU, and other countries to offset its dependence upon China.
U Than Soe Naing, a political analyst, said efforts at the highest levels to improve Chinas image in Myanmar were still bedevilled by long-running issues like the Myitsone dam and the Letpadaung copper mine project. But any readjustment of the relationship with China has to be managed with great care.
Last week, China celebrated its 25 years of ties with ASEAN in Jakarta. However, amid territorial disputes in the South China Sea with various ASEAN members, relations with the regional group are not particularly good.
Paul Chambers, director of research for the Institute of South East Asian Affairs, told The Myanmar Times that China needed to demonstrate its good intent through a public display of concern for the health and human rights of the Myanmar people and environment. It could not risk looking like either a bully or a patron.
China must realise that Myanmar is no longer an international pariah state that is dependent upon Chinas patronage. In fact, China relies upon Myanmar in the sense that China possesses enormous economic interests in Myanmar, he said.
A political analyst of ASEAN, who requested anonymity, said China also had to proceed with care in forging a new relationship with Nay Pyi Taw, even as it sought to promote Myanmars industrialisation.
If China wants to resume the stalled Myitsone dam project, it has to look to its relations with ordinary Myanmar people, said the analyst.
Wang Xiaofeng of the foreign ministry said, We will not interfere in Myanmars internal affairs. But we will try to help. Myanmar has water supplies and needs to use them. Together, we can make money.
Huang Youyi, executive vice president of the Translators Association of China and former vice president of China International Publishing Group, told The Myanmar Times that China and Myanmar should focus more on bilateral economic links, with China showing respect for Myanmar as a neighbour and close partner.
I think we both stand to gain if we understand each others culture better. We have a lot to learn from Myanmar. We must find a way of seeking development without changing our culture, he said.
He called on both countries to work together to resolve the question of the Myitsone dam project, suspended by then-president U Thein Sein in 2011 amid great popular support.
If we manage to talk through a solution, we will both benefit. The most important thing is that two countries and two peoples can work together for their mutual benefit, he said.
Yan Myo Thein, an analyst of Myanmar-Chinese relations, said the Myitsone project was one of the key problems for the new government in terms of balancing its relations with China while retaining popular support.
However, China might feel they have more important projects in Myanmar, like the Kyaukphyu-Kunming road and rail project, he added.
Yun Sun, a senior associate on China-Myanmar relations with the Washington-based Stimson Center, said China had made efforts to improve relations with local communities through better corporate social responsibility programs, better public relations campaigns and more benefit-sharing with local residents in areas where it was pursuing projects approved by the previous government.
China was also diversifying its relations with different political forces in Myanmar, investing more cautiously and carefully, building better relations with the Myanmar people, and contributing to local development through CSR and foreign aid. She said it would be wrong to assume that China was still following the old policies that it had pursued in Myanmar under the military government.
The fate of the Myitsone dam is still in doubt. The Myanmar government has not announced the permanent cancellation of the project, leaving room and time for negotiation. While talks are still proceeding, it is expected that cancellation would require Myanmar to pay a high cost in compensation.
I think its wrong to just assume that all Myanmar public opinion is against China and Chinese projects, said Ms Yun. If the projects are in the interests of the Myanmar people, why should they oppose them? This requires China to be fairer and more willing to share benefits, but it also requires the Myanmar government to educate its public. I have no doubt that the National League for Democracy government will safeguard Myanmars national interests in bargaining with China, she said.
Pyinmana township elders have donated K13 million (US$11,000) to have a statue of independence hero Bogyoke Aung San refurbished in time for Martyrs Day this week, U Than Soe Aung, a Pyithu Hluttaw representative for the township, told The Myanmar Times.
They will hand the bronze statue, which is nearly 70 years old, over to the townships City Development Committee when the work is complete.
It is on land owned by the committee, U Than Soe Aung said. Subsequently, they will maintain it.
The donors have yet to tile the area in Bogyoke Aung San Statue Park around the statue, which was cast in 1948-49. The park was later opened in a ceremony on January 4, Myanmars Independence Day, in 1969.
U Khin Maung Zaw from Shwechi ward in Nay Pyi Taws Pyinmana township urged visitors today and in future to be more careful about not straying from the parks pathway, noting that some plants had been crushed by people.
If people lack discipline, our effort to renovate the statue will be for nothing. To protect the beauty of the park in the long term, residents need to have discipline, he said.
An unveiling ceremony for the refurbished statue is planned for 8am today at the park in Pyinmana township.
Members of the ruling National League for Democracy and opposition Union Solidarity and Development Party will lay wreaths at the 15-minute ceremony commemorating the 69th anniversary of Martyrs Day, said U Than Soe Aung, an NLD member.
NLD, USDP, the student union from Yezin Agricultural University and five other organizations have applied for permission to lay wreaths on Martyrs Day, he said.
Nay Pyi Taw Council chair U Myo Aung will also attend the event.
Martyrs Day commemorates the July 19, 1947, assassination of Bogyoke Aung San State Counsellor and NLD leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyis father and several other leaders of Myanmars pre-independence interim government.
Translation by Thiri Min Htun and Zar Zar Soe
After drawn out negotiations, 85 workers from a recently shuttered garment factory in Yangons Hlaing Tharyar township received part of their severance compensation yesterday, following their second protest staged over the weekend.
Laws require factory owners to pay their workers an additional sum of money if they decide to suddenly close up shop. The Hla Won Htet Tha factory closed on June 25, and while the owner paid his workers their back wages in early July, he was taking longer than the staff felt was acceptable to hand over the closing compensation.
I am not satisfied with the factory officials, said Ma Win Win Soe, the workers leader at the factory. Although they promised us the [severance] compensation, they didnt bring enough money. But we finally agreed to take some and get the rest on July 20 because our workers need money urgently for their daily lives.
Because factory officials brought less money than was required, the townships Labour Relations Department had to spend all of yesterday mediating negotiations. Finally, workers agreed to take the outstanding compensation on July 20, according to U Khin Maung Cho, director of the department.
Now, factory officials have to pay another K5 million [US$4265], he said. I made the contract between them. If factory officials fail to pay again, we will take action against the factory.
Labour officials added that they will close a case, which was sent to the Yangon Regional Arbitration Council, after the factory has paid all money owed to workers under the contract.
I am still waiting to get over K800,000, said labour leader Ma Zinmar Swe, who put in over three years of service at the factory. Now, each worker is owed K50,000. We protested twice to get this unpaid compensation.
Factory officials declined to comment when contact by The Myanmar Times.
Hla Won Htet Tha garment factory is owned by a Korean national. It opened in 2013.
Two people were killed and at least 25 others injured when an express bus veered off the Yangon-Mandalay highway en route to Taungoo on July 15. The accident took place at about 10pm in Kyauktaga township, Bago Region.
The Myochaung village police station has opened an investigation into the driver and conductor of the Sae Taman express bus. State media reported yesterday that the two men fled the scene of the accident and that 34 people were injured, while a Myochaung police official told The Myanmar Times that 25 were hurt.
Today was the funeral for the two women who died in the bus accident, the official from the Myochaung police station said yesterday. The 25 injured have been hospitalised at a Yangon hospital and Phyu Hospital. We have filed a case under section 202 of the penal code [an obstruction of justice charge] against the driver.
The bus rolled down off the roadside. One woman died on the spot and another woman died at Myochaung Hospital, said the official.
The bus departed from Yangons Aung Mingalar bus terminal at 7pm and crashed on the approach to mile post No 98.
Facebook user Ko Zaw Moe said first responders struggled to extract the body of the niece of a friend, one of the fatalities, from the wreckage.
I feel very sorry for my friends niece and sorrier for her young baby who has been left alone One monk was transferred to Yangon Hospital and the rest of the passengers have safely returned to their homes, he wrote on his Facebook page.
The highway linking Myanmars two biggest cities is notorious for motor vehicle accidents, many of them deadly.
We are making traffic checks to ensure safety for cars travelling on the highway, said the official from the Myochaung police station.
ranslation by Zar Zar Soe
They make unreasonable demands. They think change happens overnight. They refuse to negotiate with the government. They hijacked the student protests (or was it vice versa?).
Thats the impression Ive gotten from reading media coverage of the National Network for Education Reform (NNER) and their opposition to the National Education Law (NEL) over the past several years. As an anthropologist of education whos been studying Myanmar for years, Ive followed this issue with interest.
But its been hard to piece together. If the National League for Democracys Education Network was originally a member organisation of the NNER, why didnt the NLD openly support student protests against the NEL in 2015? Why was membership in the NLD and the NNER considered such a conflict of interest that education expert U Thein Lwin was required to resign from the NLD executive committee because he advised the All Burma Federation of Student Unions (ABFSU) when they were constructing their 11 demands for reforming the NEL?
The NLD government has now released most of the students who had been imprisoned during the protests in Letpadan, so why did ABFSU leader Ma Phyoe Phyoe Aung say she would continue to protest the NEL? The NLD and the ABFSU share the symbol of the fighting peacock; shouldnt that mean their ideology and goals are aligned?
Even more puzzlingly, the NNER and the government (both previous and current) say they want many of the same things, including decentralisation, mother tongue-based education and rights for student unions. So why cant they get along?
On a recent visit to Myanmar, I discovered that the confusion was not only mine. I spoke with friends involved in education in the country who originally supported the NNER, but felt alienated by what they considered extreme tactics. I talked to university students who admired the protesters bravery and celebrated their release, but couldnt support their 11 demands. It seemed that many people who would naturally sympathise with the NNER had run out of goodwill.
I found myself moving into this camp as well. Despite the fact that I had collaborated with U Thein Lwin for years on teacher training projects on the Thai-Myanmar border, I had a hard time understanding what the NNER was trying to achieve.
Then I had the chance to talk with some NNER members, including Ma Phyoe Phyoe Aung, and I gained some new insight into the situation.
First, the NNER clarified that they do not aim to set education policies for the country. They agree that this is parliaments job. But since both the previous and current governments announced their intentions to make the process of education reform participatory, NNER members have tried to avail themselves of this opportunity.
Unfortunately, the process has not gone smoothly. Whether that is because the NNER was recalcitrant, or because the government was only seeking a rubber stamp from civil society on policies it had already made, is difficult to know without having been present at the meetings.
It seems that the government worked hard to convince the public of the prior view. Statement such as Improvements will be gradual or in a democratic country, we cannot hope that all of our demands will be met create the impression that the NNER expects revolutionary change overnight. However, as far as they explained to me, they accept that the pace of change should be slow. They just want the steps in the process to align with the stated goal.
For instance, the NEL supposedly aims at decentralisation. As the NNER has pointed out, the National Education Commission seems to be a step in the opposite direction. Moreover, some aspects of the reforms already under way reinforce the current administrative structures.
Take curriculum reform. In a federal model, the central government would set curriculum standards, while states would choose or develop textbooks and teaching methods to help students meet those standards. Yet the Ministry of Education has planned that several INGOs will revise textbooks for the entire nation, and the kindergarten set has already been rolled out.
Therefore, I can understand the NNERs objections. Yet I also see why the government would hesitate to decentralise. One worry I had about a federal educational model was that Myanmar would end up as an amalgamation of eight small dictatorships. Just because authority is decentralised to the state level doesnt mean local schools or teachers would have autonomy.
The NNERs response to this concern is school-based management, which includes parents, students, teachers, administrators, and local and state officials working together, checking and balancing each others power, in order to meet national curriculum standards. This model, which would be a significant change from the current system and is much more democratic than what exists in most of the world, could make it less likely that an authoritarian principal, a vocal special interest group or an incompetent rector could sabotage reform at the local level.
Another concern is that the 11 demands are unrealistic for instance, that the government should spend 20 percent of its budget on education (this is the UN-recommended figure, but few countries manage it). As commentators have pointed out, the quality of education is more important than the amount of money spent on it. But I was interested to learn the NNERs rationale: The U Thein Sein government claimed that the money spent on education, through various ministries, already added up to more than 20pc. When such creative methods of accounting are being used, I can understand aiming high and hoping that a small portion of the budget actually reaches schools.
Regardless of the exact figures used, it is clear that implementing the NNERs ideas would cost a great deal of money and encounter significant challenges in implementation. But at least their model genuinely aims toward democratising education, instead of merely paying lip service to this goal. This transition presents a once-in-generations opportunity to reform the education system. No wonder NNER activists are so passionate that it should move however slowly in the right direction.
So what does Ma Phyoe Phyoe Aung mean when she says she will continue protesting the NEL? Clearly, she is not talking any more about marching and chanting slogans in the street. In fact, she and her colleagues are pursuing more constructive forms of dissent.
They are creating an institute where young people can study freely and share their ideas openly. They are planning a reconciliation exchange, in which youths from Yangon and Mandalay travel to ethnic minority areas to work on issues of common interest. In short, even while pushing for reform of the education system, they are working outside of that system in order to fulfil some of the functions that it is currently unable to. These are acts of great imagination and profound hope.
Therefore, it is discouraging to learn that the government has stopped inviting the NNER to education-related activities for instance, the seminar on alternative education that was recently held in Nay Pyi Taw. Even if a dialogue were opened, the NNER would be negotiating with many of the same people they clashed with under the U Thein Sein government building trust would be challenging.
The government may have reasons I dont understand for keeping on existing staff, or for shutting out the NNER. Im sure the NNER is prone to the same difficulties that any large network of people with diverse interests would be inconsistency, personality conflicts, miscommunications. But exclusion of the NELs main critics seems counterproductive to creating a law that can be successfully implemented.
As an outsider, I wouldnt claim to know what is best for the countrys future. But I do think the NNER is raising important questions about the overall goals of the education reform process, and it seems they have more work to do in explaining the significance of those questions to the general public. Democracy doesnt mean citizens get everything they want, but it also doesnt mean the government gets the final word.
Rosalie Metro is an adjunct professor in the College of Education at the University of Missouri-Columbia, USA. She has been conducting research on Myanmar since 2000.
[July 19, 2016] University of Florida Cybersecurity Team Turns to Tektronix to Outfit Electronics Security Lab
BEAVERTON, Ore., July 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Tektronix, a leading worldwide provider of measurement solutions, today announced that the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity Research (FICS Research) at the University of Florida Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering will outfit its electronics research lab with an extensive range of state-of-the-art Tektronix test equipment. The instrumentation, ranging from mixed domain oscilloscopes to spectrum and logic analyzers, will advance the institute's research in Internet of Things (IoT) security, supply chain security, side channel analysis, physical tampering, reverse engineering, trust verification, forensics, failure analysis, and counterfeit detection. New cybersecurity solutions will be tested and courses and curriculum developed for students based on the capabilities of the equipment. FICS Research turned to Tektronix for its instrumentation needs based in part on the company's reputation as an industry leader and previous experience working with Tektronix equipment. As part of the partnership, Tektronix is making a substantial gift to the FICS Research program to supplement the purchased equipment which together has enabled the University of Florida to fully outfit its cbersecurity lab.
"With the Internet of Things all the objects in our lives are going to be connected through the Internet and communicating with one another. This could represent a major security risk," said Dr. Domenic Forte, Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UF. "We are ethically hacking into devices and using vulnerabilities as feedback to create design automation tools and modules that boost security. Mixed domain oscilloscopes from Tektronix that can view RF, digital and analog signals will be extremely beneficial to these and other security research efforts and we are extremely grateful to Tektronix for their generous support and world-class test solutions." Among the ways FICS will look for security vulnerabilities is to gain access to internal nodes of chips using focused ion beam (FIB) and scanning electron microscope (SEM) systems, obtained through partnership with TESCAN. After the FIBs and SEMs are used to create access, Tektronix oscilloscopes and signal generators will be used to measure internal nodes and inject signals for deeper analysis beyond what's possible through the chip input/output pins alone.
FICS Research was established to be the nation's premier multidisciplinary research institute in the advancement of cyber security as a basis for long-term partnership and collaboration among industry, academe, and government. FICS Research is one of a few institutions in the country that provides expertise in all aspects of cybersecurity and assurance including hardware, network, mobile, big data, IoT, applied crypto, social sciences, law, and more. The Tektronix test equipment supplied to FICS Research offers the performance and versatility to help support the institute's far-reaching mission. Researchers will be able to capture and analyze fast signals with an MSO70404C high-performance real-time oscilloscope or a DSA8300 sampling oscilloscope. An MDO3102 mixed domain oscilloscope is ideal for investigating wireless-enabled IoT devices along with a pair of RSA5000 series spectrum analyzers. Other equipment includes a TLA series logic analyzer, a PA1000 power analyzer, digital multi-meters, and arbitrary function generators. "FICS Research is playing an important role in making all types of computing devices more secure and more resistant to tampering. True cyber security requires a holistic view encompassing both hardware and software," said Ray Merckling, vice president Americas Sales at Tektronix. "As there is strong alignment with our vision for advancing computer technology for the benefit of all, we are excited to support this program with our state-of-the-art electronics test solutions." Wondering what else Tektronix is up to? Check out the Tektronix Bandwidth Banter blog and stay up to date on the latest news from Tektronix on Twitter and Facebook. About Tektronix Headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon, Tektronix delivers innovative, precise and easy-to-operate test, measurement and monitoring solutions that solve problems, unlock insights and drive discovery. Tektronix has been at the forefront of the digital age for over 70 years. Join us on the journey of innovation at TEK.COM. Tektronix is a registered trademark of Tektronix, Inc. All other trade names referenced are the service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160125/325847LOGO To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/university-of-florida-cybersecurity-team-turns-to-tektronix-to-outfit-electronics-security-lab-300300042.html SOURCE Tektronix, Inc.
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The U.S. opened a Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense battery in Guam to Korean journalists on Monday to allay fears here over the harmful effects of the weapons system to be stationed in southern Korea.
A Korean military officer demonstrated that the electromagnetic waves emitted by the radar at Site Armadillo in northwestern Guam, 1.6 km away from the battery reached a maximum of 0.0007 watt per sq.m, just 0.007 percent of the 10 watts per sq.m permitted under Korean law.
"This is a level that you encounter everywhere in your daily life," the officer said.
The move came at the request of the Korean government, which is battling growing protests from locals.
19.07.2016 LISTEN
At some point or another, most of us develop some celebrity crush, even the stars themselves! While it's no surprise when you hear famous people saying that they have a crush on some of the celebrities, when they were younger, there are quite a few stars out there who have harbored feelings for less obvious choices.
www.nanakesse24.com , today brings you; whos your biggest Ghanaian celebrity crush? And do you have a dream of marrying a celebrity? Some lucky fans actually married their celebrity crush and I ask; can this happen to our top Ghanaian celebrities getting married to their fans who have crushed on them?
I know it sounds impossible and you might be thinking, theres no way youd be dating your celebrity crush but you shouldnt give up. When I say a celebrity, I mean top movie stars, top musicians, top sport personalities and prominent politician or clergys. We featured Ghanaian top celebrities like; H.E. President John Dramani Mahama, Rev. Mensah Otabil, Sarkodie, Samini, Yvonne Nelson, Jackie Appiah, John Dumelo, Michael Essien, Asamoah Gyan, Stonebwoy, Bridget Otoo, Abeiku Santana, Prince David-Osei, M.anifest, EL, Joselyn Dumas, Nana Addo Danquah, Bisa Kdei, Becca, Efya, Fuse ODG, Van Vicker, Okyeame Kwame, Mzvee, D-Black and many more..
In this campaign we decided to add your celebrity crush Instagram or Twitter (alternative) handle and their favorite hash tag to get easy to reach and interact with them.
It's any obsessive fan's dream to marry their ultimate celebrity crush. As I said it sounds impossible, but the idea that an ordinary fan can get together with their idol isn't pure fantasy. And lucky for some of the fans who had the opportunity to marry their crushed celebrities; certified Hollywood crazy person Nicolas Cage met fan Alice Kim in 2004, when he dined at the restaurant that she worked at. They hit it off, and were married several months later. Comedian and producer Conan O'Brien felt for his now-wife Liza Powel when he saw her in the audience during a taping of his talk show. They wed in 2002. And actually many of the Hollywood stars have married regular people who were longtime fans of their work.
Look at how many people were disappointed when Canadian actor, musician Ryan Gosling had a baby with Eva Mendes, despite the fact that there was no chance they would have ended up with him even if he wasn't having a baby Esmeralda Amada Gosling. And just ending of April this year Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes reportedly had a second baby girl, Amada Lee Gosling.
A fan can comment on how handsome or beautiful his or her celebrity crush is, and some even decorated their rooms with posters in their beloved's likeness or simply admired the objects of their desire onscreen.
Well, the CEO of www.nanakesse24.com biggest Ghanaian celebrity crush was then cute and sexy actress Helena Asante but now TV3 News anchor Bridget Otoo.lol.
Whos your biggest Ghanaian celebrity crush?
Lets get trending on social media by hash tagging #NK24CC
Scroll down to check out some featured celebrities crush photos.
Abeikusantana[1]
Becca[1]
Bisakdei-cc
Bridgetotoo
Edem-cc
Efya[1]
Essien[1]
Epixode-cc
El-cc
Fuzeodg-cc
Irenelogan-cc
Johndumelo[1]
Kalybos
Joselyndumas[1]
Julietibrahim[1]
Mensaotabil
Keche-cc
Mahama[1]
Manifest-cc
Nanaaddo[2]
Naaashorkor[1]
Mzvee
Okyeamekwame-cc
Pappykojo-cc
Princedavido
Samini[1]
Sarkodie-cc
Shattawale[1]
Stonebwoy-cc
Trigmatic-cc
Vanvicker[1]
Vvip-cc
Wiyaala
Airtel Premier, the sub brand of Airtel Ghana that caters to the telecommunication and lifestyle needs of high value customers and Master Keyboardist and music expert Alfred Addaquay over the weekend thrilled patrons with a mind-blowing treat at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Ridge Accra.
The master organist and music expert known as the One Man Orchestra due to his versatility and creativity performed an array of pieces from renowned local and foreign composers including Messiah by George Frideric Handel much to the amazement of world renowned musicologist and composer, Prof. J.H Nketsia, Gender and Social Protection Minister, Nana Oye Lither and a host of other dignitaries at the auditorium on the night.
Speaking about the show and what customers and patrons should expect, Head of Customer Experience at Airtel Ghana Frank Gyan said We partnered one of Ghanas finest performers to provide an exceptional experience to our Premier customers and classical music patrons as we promised. At Airtel we believe in providing consummate telecom and lifestyle solutions for our customers. We know from our engagement with our high value customers that most of them are classical music enthusiasts hence our decision to partner Addaquay to entertain them with the finest performance.
On his part, Addaquaye, the Classical music expert said, I deeply appreciate the effort Airtel Ghana is making to promote classical music in Ghana. I thank the Smartphone Network for the partnership and I hope patrons enjoyed the performance.
In 2006, Addaquaye who was then 20, composed, arranged and recorded a first of its kind in Ghana Oratorio comprising of 32 classical songs which he named "Laudate" and had the first live performance of his "Laudate" at the auditorium of the University of Cape Coast in March that year where the premiere lasted two hours. Since then he has performed both locally and internationally to highly excited audiences who gave him standing ovations.
An Oratorio is a large musical work, which contains a succession of choruses, arias (solos), duets and recitatives with orchestral accompaniment. It is also a musical drama in which the choruses and duets serve as commentary while the narrator's recitative relates the story and connects one piece with another.
Airtel is Ghanas telecommunications innovations and digital space leader. Addaquaye, the classic music icon has in his repertoire a lot of compositions in the vein of Gospel, Highlife, Christmas Carols and Anthems.
About Bharti Airtel
Bharti Airtel Limited is a leading global telecommunications company with operations in 19 countries across Asia and Africa. Headquartered in New Delhi, India, the company ranks amongst the top 3 mobile service providers globally in terms of subscribers. In India, the company's product offerings include 2G, 3G and 4G wireless services, mobile commerce, fixed line services, high speed DSL broadband, IPTV, DTH, enterprise services including national & international long distance services to carriers. In the rest of the geographies, it offers 2G, 3G and 4G wireless services and mobile commerce. Bharti Airtel had over 353 millioncustomers across its operations at the end of January 2016. To know more please visit, www.airtel.com
About Airtel in Africa
Airtel is driven by the vision of providing affordable and innovative mobile services to all. Airtel has 16 operations in Africa: Burkina Faso, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Madagascar, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. Airtel International is a Bharti Airtel company. For more information, please visit www.airtel.com , or like the Airtel Ghana Facebook page via www.facebook.com/airtelgh or follow us on Twitter via the handle @airtelghana.
Sales at Korea's duty-free shops surpassed W5 trillion for the first time in the first half of this year largely thanks to increasing foreign visitor numbers.
The Korea Customs Service said on Monday that duty-free sales stood at W5.77 trillion in the first six months, up 20.1 percent from the same period of last year.
Local customers accounted for 57.1 percent of total shoppers, but their individual spending was $103 on average, only a third of what each foreign visitor spent ($345).
The number of foreign visitors to Korea rose 21 percent on-year to 8.1 million in the first half.
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Johannesburg (AFP) - Two South African brothers were remanded in custody Tuesday over allegations they plotted to attack the US embassy and Jewish institutions, as well as planning to join the Islamic State group.
The arrests of 23-year-old twins Brandon-Lee and Tony-Lee Thulsie earlier this month were the first in South Africa relating to alleged IS membership.
"Both the defence and the state were not ready to proceed, hence the trial was postponed until July 25," National Prosecuting Authority spokeswoman Phindi Louw told reporters outside Johannesburg magistrates' court.
"We have reasonable and probable cause to believe that an offence was committed."
Police last week said the pair were suspected of planning to bomb the US embassy in Pretoria as well as unspecified Jewish facilities.
They are also alleged to have attempted to travel to Syria to join IS.
The brothers waved to family members in court after the short hearing.
The United States and Britain warned last month of the possibility of imminent attacks by jihadist extremists in South Africa's major cities.
Muslims account for 1.5 percent of South Africa's 53 million people. The country has so far been spared the jihadist attacks that have struck several other countries on the continent.
Monday, July 18, 2016
Folks, we have been monitoring happenings in Turkey since the attempted coup by a segment of the military to oust President Recep T. Erdogan from office and the aftermath with about 6,000 people supposedly connected with the coup attempt being detained so far. And 8,000 police officers have also been suspended on suspicion of being part of the coup attempt. Meantime, Gen Akin Ozturk, a former air force commander has denied being a ringleader of Friday's attempted military coup in Turkey. (See http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36829574).
I have taken a keen interest in this happening in Turkey to the extent that it has huge implications for global politics in many senses, especially within the context of Turkey's own internal situation and the country's relations with the United States, the European Union, and other parts of the world (including Ghana, which the Turkish President visited recently after the Ghanaian President had already visited Turkey in pursuit of partnership for mutual economic benefits).
We are not leaving out happenings in Syria too. Of course, Turkey's stance on the Syrian crisis is obvious. So is its turn-around to repair relations with Israel.
Now, here is the nub. The Turkish President hasn't had things going his way, especially with what led to the resignation of the Prime Minister (his closest ally over the years). There is really something terrible shaking the Turkish Establishment that the coup attempt underlines.
But there are complications too. After many anti-Erdogan demonstrations in the recent past and the fact that opposition against Erdogan is still vibrant, could some conspiracy theory be advanced that the coup attempt was masterminded by Erdogan himself to give him ample elbow room to clamp down on his opponents?
The quick pointing of accusing fingers at the Turkish cleric (Fethullah Gullen) residing in Pennsylvania in the United States as the mastermind of the failed military action cannot be glossed over. The Turkish authorities have been insistent that the coup attempt was hatched by Gullen and his forces, a charge that Gullen has dismissed.
Turkey is asking the US to deport Gullen to Turkey to face justice, but the US won't so easily budge. As John Kerry has just said, the procedure for such an extradition hasn't been set in motion. The US cannot just extradite Gullen to Turkey. The legal processes are complicated and need to be followed before the US can act on Turkey's demand.
What does it all mean for the Turkish-US relations, especially in the context of the Coalition Forces' involvement in the fight against the Islamic State terrorists?
Careful not to fall into Turkey's trap, the US has already condemned the coup attempt as an affront to Turkey's democracy. President Obama quickly denounced the coup attempt; but is that denunciation enough to bolster the Turkish government's confidence in the US administration's attitude toward Turkey? Suspicion still reigns high, especially if the US doesn't bow to Turkey's pressure to extradite Gullen.
So, where does it take the matter? First, the US is providing a safe haven for someone considered by Turkey (at least, in the light of the failed military coup) as its worst nemesis. In the same breath, the US is condemning the failed military coup that the Turkish government blames Gullen for but won't easily release Gullen to his blood-hounds just because he has been accused of masterminding the destabilization effort. Credibility problems galore here!!
Behind everything, though, is the aspect that has to do with suspicion that the Turkish President might have adroitly manipulated the situation to clamp down on his opponents. Far-fetched though this angle may be, it can't be dismissed just like that, especially if one considers how Erdogan has moved from one level to the other in the pursuit of his political aspirations. He came to public notice as the Prime Minister of Turkey only to ascend the throne as the President after some manouevres. His trusted right-hand man stepped into his shoes as the Prime Minister only to lose out after a conflict of interest situation.
Erdogan has a huge apparatus for sustaining his political interests. Probably to emerge as the modern-day Ataturk? Who knows? But must he tear up his own country in the process?
Using the failed coup as a trump-card, he is fast moving to purge the system of those likely to be identified as his ardent opponents. If he succeeds in neutralizing them, he will have a "blank cheque" to do in Turkey as his political ambitions will dictate. Such is the thinking of those who want to read deeper meanings into the happenings in Turkey.
Considering Erdogan's loud call to his supporters to take to the streets to support him---and their quick positive response to placard him as the chosen leader of Turkey---it is not out-of-place to say that Erdogan has something up his sleeves.
What does he expect those not supporting him to do? To take the streets too and be crushed? They will know better how not to put their necks in the noose, meaning that they can pull the plug from other angles to worsen the situation in the country.
No matter how the situation pans out or how it ramifies, it is clear that the happenings in Turkey will have a huge impact on global politics. That is why those of us not directly associated with the way Turkey is positioned in world affairs have to weigh in. After all, it's all about democracy (the rule of the people by the people through the power of their voting at polls to choose their leaders) and military putsch (the ability of those with the monopoly over the instrument of violence to take over the administration without recourse to the will of voters).
The point is that if the military could attempt overthrowing a democracy in Turkey in this 21st century when military intervention in politics is unspeakably repulsive, what lesson does it teach others elsewhere?
Surely, there must be something fundamentally wrong happening under Erdogan to provoke the military action to topple his administration. We don't know what the grievances are or the very architects of the destabilization effort. No specific names of military officers mentioned, no reference to their agenda; but certainly, something happened to shake up the Turkish system.
Now, Erdogan has the trump-card to play; but to what effect, especially with the move to purge the military and the judiciary of supposed anti-Erdogan elements? Indeed, Turkey has a lot to do to regain its composure and bearing. We will continue monitoring the situation as it unfolds.
After all, the mere fact that a system is touted as democratic doesn't mean that it is, indeed, democratic (serving the needs of its people). Even in democracy, some kind of tyranny reigns supreme!!
I shall return
19.07.2016 LISTEN
I have never been a subscriber to conspiracy theories. In fact I have debunked on so many counts conspiracy theories ranging from Americas complicity in September 11 attacks, to Tupac Shakur faking his own death, to Buharis alleged sponsorship of Boko Haram, and Jonathans involvement in state sponsored Terrorism. However, I dont just discard these theories out rightly but after careful analysis of the facts, precedence and antecedents of the principal actors, employing logic and reasoning to objectively come to my conclusions.
Many names have been mentioned on who the possible sponsors of Boko Haram are, from retired generals who were former heads of government, to business moguls whos motive to destabilize the Country are still not clear, to external sponsors and collaborators. I however, tried to analyze a situation in this write up on Mallam Nasir El-rufais alleged back role in the massacre of over 300 Shiite Muslims, the unfounded rumors, arm-chair speculations and the hokum of religious bigots and soothsayers. This is not my one Kobo, nor is it a product of my wanton imagination. This in fact will reveal itself soon.
In 2015, the El-Rufais government was embroiled in a controversy of Zaria Massacre Saturday, 12 December, allege massacre by the Nigeria Army on the Shia Muslim Community of Zaria, Kaduna. An allegation which the government has up till this moment failed to prove its innocence. The Army claimed that it has responded to the Shia followers attempt to assassinate the Nigerias Chief of Army Staff, Tukur Buratai. But this claim has been strongly rejected by the Islamic Movement and several human rights organizations who argue that the attack was pre-meditated.
As 347 were killed by army and buried in secret in collaboration with Kaduna State Government. The government of the new Jonathan in Kaduna has disclosed what happened to the remains of the Shiite members killed during the Black Saturday, Shiites/Nigerian Army clash in Zaria. In the government submission to the Kangaroo Judicial Commission of Inquiry on Monday, April 11, the Secretary to the State Government (SSG), Balarabe Lawal, disclosed that 347 persons were killed in that ugly incident. According to the Kaduna state government, the burial of the victims was done in secret under the joint supervision of the state officials and about 40 men of the Nigerian army, led by an officer in the rank of a major.
The following week El-Rufai held a press briefing, He said the Shiites were killed because they were stubborn and their refusal to leave the road when the Army Chief wanted to pass.
Question is the Army Chief worth more than 347 livess wasted? It is believed that the sect have been having such procession for several years over two decades, without report of having killed anyone during such outings.
I can now imagine Zaria city, a citadel of learning where many Professors, Doctors, and several other professionals and students usually encounter traffic Go Slow several times, years, during the sects procession, without cause for alarm, are lesser humans to the Nigerian Army Chief right!
A statement he has refused to withdraw hitherto. He still maintains that the attack was carried on the behalf of the president. That was El-Rufai our new Jonathan in 2015 carrying out a state sponsored terrorism in order to whip public sentiments. If the supposedly humble and docile guy was able to execute such carnage, it goes a long way in discerning the true depth of the mans character. A Diabolically Cunning Fox. (The Commissions Arrangee Report Now Tagged SECRET REPORT ) CLUELESS LOL
Fast forward to 2016, in the build up to #El-RufaiDestroysKaduna! That fox has grown bolder in guile and stature. The truth of the matter is, Development is Haram to Emperor El-rufai, one year gone with no tangible project to show, demolition of citizens houses is the brain child of these misguided, clueless, extremist and fundamentalists, who was allowed to grow not because the Kaduna State Law Makers nor the National Assembly lacked the capacity or reason to crush his agenda, but because a few people stand to gain economically and politically from his cluelessness.
Ask yourself why the fight with him and Senator Shehu Sani has survived through these long? is it that the APC Government lacks the man power or resources to fully intervene and re-orientate the self serving governor, by letting him know its about the People and not the love of oneself? The answer is a resounding NO! http://kadunanewsonline.com The fact is he was allowed to bully and suppress the population and to deliberately make them keep mute, so as not to ask questions as regards the accidental governor and his cosmetics style of governance at the detriment of the poor. A plan which obviously back fired when he tried to demolish Gbagyi Villa, the people stood up and resisted his self serving agenda. We are being ruled by a government of opportunists who see every venture of power as avenue to dictatorship.
My summation; no matter the gimmicks employed by the El-Rufias administration to create an atmosphere of confusion, no Kaduna Citizen should ever resort to violence. Our constitution is sacred and cannot be undermined. This is a change era. The power of the people is bigger than both El-Rufai and the seat he occupies, we must resist the temptation no matter the level of provocation to use violence, because that is exactly what the small man that has held our great State hostage wants. We must embark on a non-violent movement as we look up to 2019. There is a palpable desire for change in governance in Kaduna State. Even El-rufai and his cohorts feel it, they sense it, smell it, and even fear it. APC has provided Nigerians the platform for that change. It is what the majority of the masses want. Never in Nigerias history has the common man being this politically active. For us, it is a simple message to our politicians that power lies ultimately with the people, and enough is enough. There must be accountability and performance in government. Any persons or individual that cannot abide by these simple principles must be voted out of office.
Comr. Happiness Okoka
A Humanist, Political Psychologist, Public Affairs Analyst, cum Cyber Activist
GMNPA, PGDE, CompTIA+ Certified, Member Unijos ITIP.
Sec Gen: Youth Renaissance Initiative Against Social Ills Nigeria (YOURISIN)
Tel: +234 8024034549
Twitter:@Apier7
Facebook: [email protected]
Electoral Commission recruits in Tamale in the ongoing provisional voters register exhibition exercise, have reiterated their threat to boycott the ongoing exercise on Wednesday if their allowances are not adjusted upwards.
They declared their stance in protest against the GHc30 given to them as allowances after undergoing a three-day intensive capacity building workshop ahead of the exercise
According to them, their colleagues in other districts within the Northern Region received GHc60 cedis for the same workshop.
Also, they claimed their colleagues in other regions have been promised GHc720 contrary to the GHc400 they will receive at the end of the 21-days exercise.
The intended boycott if activated on Wednesday, will affect voters in Tamale central, Tamale north and Tamale south constituencies.
When Citi News visited some of the exhibition centres, the angry EC recruits were busy at post, but insisted no amount of persuasion will convince them except an increment of the allowances.
The verification officer at the Tamale central mosque exhibition centre B, Abdul Karim Ibrahim, said 532 names were on the register.
According to him, only seven multiple registrants are captured on the register without a single record of an NHIS card registrant.
The verification officer in charge of the Tamale central mosque exhibition centre A, Is-Hak Mohammed Mansuru, said 537 names are on the register.
As at 10:30 am on day one of the exercise, only 31 voters had been verified at the two exhibition centres.
By: Abdul Karim Naatogmah/citifmonline.com/Ghana
His Excellency Lt. Gen. Joseph Henry Smith (Rtd) on Monday June 20, 2016 presented his Letters of Credence as Ghanas First High Commissioner to Belize to the Acting Governor General of Belize, H.E. Carlos Perdomo at Belize House in Belmopan.
Ambassador Smith presented his Open Letters to the Minister for Natural Resources and Immigration, Senator Godwin Hulse, who stood in for Hon. Wilfred Elrington, Minister for Foreign Affairs who had travelled out of the country.
H.E Lt. Gen. Smith (Rtd) also had a meeting with the Prime Minister, Rt. Hon. Dean Oliver Barrow. They spoke on the need to deepen bilateral co-operation.
While in Belize, Ambassador Smith paid a courtesy call on H.E. Jose Prieto Cintado, the Cuban Ambassador to Belize, at his residence. The meeting touched on bilateral relations in various fields such as the promotion of human rights, democracy, peace, security and the eradication of poverty.
The High Commissioner met with the Ghanaian community in Belize on Tuesday, 21st June, 2016 at the residence of one Mr Freddy Mansu, a coordinator of the Ghanaian community in Belize.
During the meeting, Ambassador Smith expressed the Missions desire to work closely with the Ghanaian Community in promoting the welfare of all Ghanaians in Belize and also harnessing support from them for national development effort.
19.07.2016 LISTEN
A civil society organisation PROJECT KWAHU in collaboration with the Okwahuman United of North America has donated reading materials running into thousands of Ghana cedis to the Nkawkaw municipal Library. This follows an appeal made by the librarian for assistance to restock the facility which was put up during the erstwhile Kuffuor era by the former mp Seth Agyei Baah but has since seen little maintenance.
The donated books, which are on various disciplines like the social sciences, banking, law, accounting, economics, ICT, women issues, children's books etc were presented to the Municipal Coordinating Director Mr. Kenneth Osman at a colorful event last Thursday at the municipal assembly office. The coordinator was full of praise for the two organisations and appealed to well-meaning Kwahu natives and businesses to invest in the education sector since it is the key to development.
The books were ceremonially handed over to the Kwahu West Director of Education Mrs. Barichisu Adams under who's direct watch the education of the municipality falls. Mrs. Adams was equally elated and asked for more collaborative efforts between the government and private organisations like Project Kwahu and the Okwawuman United of North America in promoting education. She further promised to ensure the books are put to good use.
Representatives of PROJECT KWAHU and Okwahuman United in North America gave the assurance that it would continue to assist in the education and other sectors of Kwahu, adding they have plans to organise a SPELLING COMPETITION for schools in the Nkawkaw metro and Kwahu areas to inculcate the habit of reading and learning in students.
Mr. Patrick, a rep of the municipal Librarian, thanked the donors for the kind gesture and appealed for computers and accessories for the libraries ICT lab which is underutilised due to lack of accessories.
Mrs Adams In Turn Handed Over To The Rep Of The Municipal Librarian
Nana Akuffo Addo the Presidential Candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) was recently reported on a campaign trail at Madina, Accra as saying that as President he would not steal Ghanas monies or collect bribes. The obvious implication in what Akuffo Addo told his audience at Madina is that President Mahama the sitting President has stolen state funds and collected bribes without providing any evidence of such claims.
Incidentally, this claim of Akuffo Addo by extension also implies that Atta Mills, J.A Kuffour and J.J Rawlings were all stealing state funds and collecting bribes when they occupied the seat of the Presidency at various times.Such irresponsible and unsubstantiated attacks on the Presidency portray Akuffo Addo as very desperate and lacking of substance in his campaign messages as he crisscrosses the country. So much so that he has resorted to insults and unsubstantiated allegations of stealing, bribery and corruption as one of his main campaign message.
The problem with such campaign rhetoric is that it impliedly raises the issue of the credibility of Akuffo Addo himself and his fitness and reliability for the office of President of the Republic of Ghana. This is because Akuffo Addo has offered no specific instances of stealing, bribery or corruption against President Mahama to back his claims. It appears therefore that Akuffo Addo is only interested in throwing mud at President Mahama and the presidency to denigrate the presidency and to create a holier than thou perception of himself to Ghanaians. Worst still, he has also encouraged his followers to tow the same line of unfounded and unsubstantiated rumours of stealing and corruption against President Mahama as a campaign strategy, without any regard for its consequencies.
The pertinent question to ask is whether it is enough to make general claims of stealing, bribery or corruption against the President without offering any specific instances of such claims to make them credible. Should Akuffo Addo rather not offer credible leadership by refraining from peddling unsubstantiated allegations against President Mahama and the Presidency, especially since such conduct denigrates the office of the Presidency? What is the impact of peddling falsehoods on the President and the integrity of the office of the Presidency and Ghana in general? These and various other related issues should engage our political debate going forward..
The challenge to Akuffo Addo therefore is to go beyond mere unsubstantiated allegations of stealing against the President to offer specific instances of stealing, corruption and bribery against President Mahama in order for Ghanaians to take him seriously. Some related instances of unfounded allegations that have been made by Akuffo Addo and some of his followers are as follows
A claim that the sum of USD$10Million was used to purchase diaries at the Presidency which turned out to be false. Allegations of inflated project costs even after such projects have gone through Parliamentary scrutiny and approval. The Ford Expedition gift allegation which was falsely branded as bribery by certain NPP elements against evidence that the vehicle was rather donated to the state and never personally used by the President. Claims by Dr. Bawumia of fraud in the compilation of voters register which were substantially discredited as false due to his inability to furnish genuine proof of his claims when subjected to strict proof. Even the 10% of documents that he presented to support this serious claim were subsequently discredited as fabricated to a large extent.
In essence, the strategy to peddle rumors and falsehood for political mileage is fast losing credibility in Ghanas emerging democracy. Politicians who employ such methods and strategies should therefore revise their notes and realize that Ghanaians are wide awake, and are very much interested in truth in Ghanas politics.
In a related context the strategy of issuing promises to Ghanaians to solicit their votes should also be subject to strict scrutiny. For instance the recent promise of Akuffo Addo to establish a factory in each district of Ghana should therefore be examined for its credibility with pertinent questions as follows:
In all of the eight years of President Kuffours government, in which Akuffo Addo was a member, how many factories were established in Ghana? In all of President Rawlings 19 years in government how many factories were established in Ghana by the government? What feasibility studies and research has Akuffo Addo performed in all districts in Ghana to determine the viability of this policy? How are those factories going to be funded even if possible? Is it from Government funds? What is the time frame for setting up these factories? Where in the world can Akuffo Addo point to the existence of a factory in each district of a country?
Akuffo Addo should refrain from taking Ghanaians for granted and think through his promises as he churns them out, because he would be called upon to defend these promises and in the process be made to defend his credibility.
A political strategy based on false allegations and wild promises is a sure recipe for disaster for Akuffo Addo in this years elections. Such a strategy rather exposes him as not a credible alternative to President Mahama. Sincerity, honesty and well thought out plans and policies aimed to solving problems confronting Ghanaians would rather enhance his credibility in the eyes of Ghanaians. Anything short of this would rather spell doom for him in election 2016.
God bless our Homeland Ghana.
Mensah Dekportor (Germany)
Email: [email protected]
The Unemployed Graduates Association of Ghana (UGAG) has accessed the performance of the president and his commitment and interventions to unemployment within the last years and we can confidently say that the president has no clue or is simply not concerned about the challenges the youth face.
Ghana lacks development although it has a total land size of 238,535 km measuring approximately 25.9 million hectares. A total of 135,965 km2 (representing 57%) is suitable for agricultural purposes. But this government has failed to invest hugely in agriculture which has the potential of changing the destiny of this country and putting it back on the right track. Since independence, agriculture has been a major contributor to our GDP. It is widely viewed as a powerful tool for reducing global poverty and can raise more income among poor people than any other sector. The sector can create over 300,000 direct and indirect jobs annually. The government has however failed to continue the industrialisation drive started by our forefathers in the direction they started it.
UGAG is not affiliated to any political party; however, we are committed to support initiatives that will benefit the youth of this nation. As such, we have come to a perfect realisation that one district one factory is feasible and would benefit our nation greatly. The amount we lose to corruption annually and payment of unnecessary judgement debt is enough to make one factory one district feasible. Blessed with natural resources across all ten regions and fairly distributed district by district should be enough conviction and motivation. Research has also proven that with a minimum of between $1 million - $2.5 million we can set up a district base factory. If we can loan millions of dollars to construct roads which is a good project but will not yield much direct returns like a business will do, why cant we loan to create businesses that will yield much returns to pay debt?
It may not take a year, neither will it take the first term of any government but it is possible within the next decade. This approach is simple and needs dedication and competent management. Simply put, a cow rearing community will simply need a meat factory or a milk factory, a cassava cultivating community will need a starch factory or gari factory. A sugar cane growing community will need a sugar factory. A pig rearing community will need a pig meat factory. A maize growing community will need a kenkey factory with the modern approach to distribute food to companies or maize bear factory. A forest community will obviously need a wood factory and a bamboo community will need a toothpick factory and so on and on. With this idea in mind and availability of raw materials and dedication to making it a reality, and support from GRATIS and other local manufacturing companies, we can create millions of jobs within the next decade at the same time showing commitment to other sectors of the economy which has the potential of creating jobs and abiding by good principles.
During the last elections, the president claimed his government had created thousands of jobs through LESDEP, GYEEDA, Youth in Agriculture, MASLOC, the creation of new district assemblies, etc. The Ministry of Communication earlier this year issued a statement that government has created over 400,000 jobs. In the midst of all this self-glorification, the World Bank reported that over 48% of the youth between the ages of 15-24 are unemployed, not to mention those within the age bracket of 25-60.
We however question if those interventions were the right and appropriate ones, and whether they were carried out correctly. Where are the jobs government created through development projects when the projects have long been completed? Where are the jobs created through LESDEP and Better Ghana Health Management all subsidiaries of the Jospong Group of Companies and the jobs created through RLG, a subsidiary of the AGAMS Group which the government proudly boasted of and associated itself with during the last election? Today, these companies owe us more than we benefitted from them. Where are the jobs created through Youth in Road Maintenance? How many people has YES assisted through the GH10 Million Fund? Until recently where are the first beneficiaries of Youth in Community Policing? The beneficiaries of Youth in Fire Maintenance?
Ghana turns 60 next year and blessed with many natural resources yet we continue to struggle and have failed to take up bold initiatives. We have suffered for long. A country blessed with so much but that does little with its resources. We continue to borrow and swim in a pool of debts. The current leadership is comfortable with what they have done while the masses continue to cry for help. We rely on loans and donor support with tight conditions to survive. But in the midst of all these challenges, party foot soldiers are resourced to defend the government at all levels. The future of our dear country does not seem bright.
The first term of His Excellency John Dramani Mahama as president of the Republic of Ghana has seen more promises to finding solution to unemployment than any other government in the fourth republic. Yet the government's approach to solving unemployment has utterly failed. The system is ineffective and it needs to change through a revolution by supporting the growth or small businesses, huge investment in agriculture among others.
The government must be proactive, and the youth ought to stand up and fight for a better future like our political leaders of today fought during their youthful days. We cannot afford to fail in this struggle which will bring economic transformation.
From where we stand, the Unemployed Graduates Association of Ghana is ready to take up initiatives that will put government on its toes. We cannot afford to wait till an election year for government to fulfil its promises on job creation through some interventions which may not last but at the same time largely limited to party footsoldiers. We will arise and demand for what rightfully belong to us.
Signed:
Desmond Bress-Biney
President
Unemployed Graduates Association of Ghana (UGAG)
0243765958/0244910226
[email protected]
Competition in the market place brings about innovation, quality, lowers the price of goods and services, and addresses unfair trading practices like price fixing, cartels and abuse of dominance in the market place. It is very important to ensure that industries operating in the country do so efficiently and innovatively since this does not only lead to the production of quality goods but also allow consumers to get value for money. This was expressed by Hon. Nanja Sanja, the deputy Chairman for the Parliamentary Select Committee on Trade, Industry and Tourism.
Honourable Nanja Sanja made this comment during a sensitization and capacity building for members of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Trade, Industry and Tourism at the Parliament House.
Honourable Sanja added that Parliament is willing to collaborate with the executive to see to the passage of the National Competition Bill and tasked the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MOTI) to initiate the process of sponsoring the National Competition Bill.
Hon. Sanja lauded CUTS for championing the advocacy for a competition law and policy in Ghana and also for taking the necessary steps to ensure that both consumers and producers are well educated on the need for such the law. He expressed his profound gratitude on behalf of the Committee and the leadership of Ghanas Parliament for sensitize the relevant stakeholders on the importance and benefits of a competition policy and law to Ghana.
Honourable Abudu Nelson was of the view that Ghana needs a competition law and policy to bring about innovation, and healthy competition amongst businesses in the country. He stressed that the law should ensure to protect consumers from the anti-competitive practices such as price-fixing, cartelization and monopoly.
Mr. Appiah Adomako, CUTS Centre Coordinator, in his presentation pointed out that in a market economy; competition is a process whereby firms fight against each other for securing consumers for their products. He explained that there are three components of Competition Reforms- enabling government policies, promoting competition, and the implementation of regulatory frameworks and effective enforcement of National Competition Law. He mentioned that there are nine principles of competition policy, which when observed in the institutionalizing of a competition regime would ensure that a nations economy is being driven at its optimal level.
He added that the Protection Against Unfair Competition Act, 2000 (Act 589) which was enacted with the aim to promote competition in key economic sectors in the country is however not comprehensive and hence unable to regulate properly the anti-competitive behaviors that are creating social lose to both consumers and producers and also inefficiencies in the Ghanaian market. This therefore reveals that Ghana must not only aim to pass a competition law but must ensure that the law passed is very comprehensive and adopted to suite both the national and regional business culture.
Hon. Gifty Twumasi Ampofo, a member of the Committee stressed the need for Ghana to balance between competition and the protection of local industries from big multinationals. She stressed the importance for CUTS to advocate thoroughly for the effective implementation of the competition law in Ghana to ensure that local industries are protected and their capacity developed by the government.
The capacity building and the sensitization meeting took place at the Parliament House and was well attended by the Hon. Members of Parliament of the Trade, Industry and Tourism Committee. The meeting took place under the aegis of the CREW Project with support from the DFID and GIZ.
The CREW Project is being implemented in four countries namely, Ghana, Zambia, India and the Philippines with the focal research sectors being the staple food and the bus transport sector. The CREW Project aims to develop an approach, which will help in assessing the benefits of competition reforms on consumers and producers in these two sectors.
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19.07.2016 LISTEN
The NPP UK Branch Executive and Fundraising Planning Committee wishes to inform all party members, sympathisers and Ghanaians in the UK that the Annual Branch Fundraising Dinner and Dance on Saturday 23rd July 2016, has due to circumstances beyond our control, been rescheduled to take place on FRIDAY 29TH JULY 2016.
The venue, Princes and Princess Banqueting Suite Princes Road Edmonton N18 and time 7pm to 2am remain the same. Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, NPP Vice Presidential Candidate, Mrs. Rebecca Akufo-Addo, wife of Presidential Candidate and Otiko Djaba, National Women Organiser will all attend and grace the Fundraising Dinner and Dance as Special Guests.
All tickets already purchased for 23rd July 2016 remain VALID for the new date. Tickets for 29th July event are available and on sale in all leading Ghanaian shops in the UK and from designated vendors. For vendors' contact and further information please contact the following numbers : 07944052623, 07947300384, 07956389917,
07958044551, 07983302369, and 07737557525.
We deeply regret any inconvenience this postponement has caused.
Thank you very much for your patience, understanding ,and continuous support.
Signed:
Richard Diedong Dombo
1st Vice Chairman (for and behalf of NPP UK Branch Executive and Fundraising Event Planning Committee).
Accra. 19th July, 2016 Odebrecht Engineering & Construction International, a global organization of Brazilian origin with over 72 years experience and expertise in construction and engineering has won the U.S.-based Engineering News-Records Award of Merit in the Airport/Port and Power/Industrial Categories of the 2016 Annual Global Best Projects Competition, with its Nacala International Airport construction in Nacala, Mozambique and the Etileno XXI, located in Nanchital, Veracruz, Mexico.
In Ghana, Odebrecht is constructing the Lots Five and Six of the Eastern Corridor Road in Northern Ghana.
Mr. Scott Blair, Regions Editor, ENR California explained: Its my pleasure to announce the winners of ENRs 4th annual Global Best Projects competition. The contest joins ENRs successful regional and national U.S. competitions in identifying and honoring the project teams behind outstanding design and construction efforts of the past year. Industry veterans selected 23 projects hailing from 15 different countries and five continents as outstanding examples of the risks and rewards, and the hurdles of designing and building internationally.
Criteria for the Awards Selection include: safety performance, innovations, challenges, design and construction quality, diversity of global project teams, benefit to the local community and the local construction industry.
According to Danilo Trinchao, in charge of People, Planning and Finance at Odebrecht in Ghana; The Nacala Airport Project is the only construction project awarded in the Sub-Saharan Africa region. The Award is a recognition to the efforts and dedication of the Odebrecht teams that managed to stay focused on the projects key goals and to overcome a series of challenges with cohesion, competence and creativity. This allows us to deliver projects with innovative solutions and an excellent balance of quality, safety and performance, while improving the livelihood of people and society through job creation, knowledge transfer and economic activities, as we are doing in Ghana, on the Eastern Corridor Road project.
Of the 23 selected projects globally, two are from Odebrecht: the Ethylene XXI Petrochemical Complex Project in Mexico in the Industrial category, andNacala International Airport in Mozambique in the Airport category. The Ethylene XXI Project has already garnered other international awards. In 2015, it won the DuPont Global Safety Award with the highest score ever in the awards history.
A call for a probe into a sex-for-job allegation made by Assin Central MP, Kennedy Agyapong, against Mrs Charlotte Osei, Chairperson of the Electoral Commission, is a useless advocacy, human rights lawyer Francis Xavier Sosu has said.
According to Mr Sosu, the allegation was bogus, has no basis, and the lawmaker has no proof of it.
What is there to be investigated? Its a very useless call, Mr Sosu told Prince Minkah on Class91.3FMs Executive Breakfast Show (EBS) on Tuesday July 19.
Mr Agyapong has been heavily criticised for the allegation but that notwithstanding, the opposition New Patriotic Partys Womens Organiser, Otiko Afisa Djaba, recently told journalists that there was the need for the Bureau of National Investigations and parliament to go into the allegation, since Mrs Osei could be compromised by the president, as far as the forthcoming general elections are concerned, if, indeed, there had been any sexual relationship between her and Mr Mahama in the past as alleged.
Ms Djabas call has been sharply criticised as pathetic by the second vice chairman of the Convention Peoples Party (CPP), Mrs Susan Adu Amankwah.
Didi Akinyelure
19.07.2016 LISTEN
Today, the BBC announced that the business journalist and presenter, Didi Akinyelure, has been awarded the second BBC World News Komla Dumor Award.
Didi - a Nigerian with a passion for telling African stories - began her career in the financial sector before moving to journalism in 2011. Today, Didi produces and presents a business show for CNBC, which is watched across the continent. She is experienced in business reporting, having anchored CNBC Africa's daily show Open Exchange from West Africa for over three years. Didi is passionate about social entrepreneurs and has covered several stories about those who are transforming the African business landscape.
Akinyelure joined CNBC Africa in Lagos in 2013, where she is an anchor for prime time news. She has reported hard-hitting business stories from across Western Africa. She also created, produces and presents a weekly segment called 'Entrepreneur of the Week', which aims to inspire small and medium sized enterprises in Africa. Prior to beginning her journalism career in 2011, Didi worked in asset management.
Joining the BBC News teams in London, Didi will begin a three month placement in September. This placement provides the opportunity to gain skills and experience by attending a course with the BBC Academy , and working with teams across BBC News on TV, radio and online, reaching the BBCs audiences of 348 million across the world each week. She will also have the opportunity to travel to a country in Africa, with a top BBC producer, to report on a story for a global audience.
Didi said, I am completely overwhelmed and excited to win this prestigious award. I am honoured that the BBC chose me out of hundreds of applicants. Komla Dumor was someone I admired. He told the African story with so much passion for the continent, giving a balanced view and inspiring so many. You could tell that he loved what he did every single day and, I hope with this opportunity, I can continue Komlas great work.
Didi impressed the judges with her enthusiasm and tenacity in getting to the heart of a story, and helping audiences make sense of some of Africas complex issues. Her passion for telling Africas diverse stories and challenging preconceived stereotypes reflect Komlas own devotion to the continent and, as part of his legacy, Didi will be able to share her enthusiasm with the BBCs global audience.
Josephine Hazeley, Deputy Editor for BBC Africa, said, We were looking for a journalist who has the passion, pride and eloquence that Komla Dumor possessed someone who would be able to follow in his footsteps by telling compelling African stories. Didi particularly excels in telling business stories, which was an area Komla was also passionate about. Komlas death was a huge loss to everyone at the BBC, and especially the Focus on Africa team, so were really pleased to have found a worthy winner of the award that we established in his name.
Nancy Kacungira, last years winner of the BBC World News Komla Dumor Award said: The past year has been an incredible journey for me from being told Id won the award to training with BBC Academy; from learning from some of the worlds best journalists to working for the BBC. Im sure Didi will find the experience exceptionally rewarding, and I hope we can both continue Komlas great work.
The award was set up in honour of presenter Komla Dumor who passed away in January 2014 and aims to continue Komlas legacy by celebrating African journalism and finding exceptional talent. The judging panel included Anna Williams, Editor BBC World News; Josephine Hazeley, Deputy Editor for BBC Africa, and Ory Okolloh, director of investments for Omidyar Network's Governance & Citizen Engagement initiative in Africa.
There are two runners up for the award: Olive Burrows and Trevor Ombija, both of whom are Kenyan.
19.07.2016 LISTEN
I sat at my study table and turned my swivel chair towards the wide glass window, which overlooked Holmes field. It was a cold winter morning and Cambridge looked beautiful. My gaze was fixed on one of Cambridges cute squirrels but my thoughts were not at all with the squirrel.
I mulled over how successful and easy my life in the United States was going to be. With my thoughts, I was designing my own American Dream. So, cuddled in my heated blanket, I was convincing myself that my chance of living the American dream was no pie in the sky.
Only a couple of weeks back, I had submitted my application for the New York Job Fair for foreign trained lawyers. I earnestly prayed in my heart that I would secure an Associate position with one of the three (3) magic-circle law firms I had applied to. And yet, just a few months back I would respond with a smile on my face and a deep feeling of pride I am going back to Ghana almost immediately. The continent needs me whenever the question what I would do after the course was asked. Really wishing I could respond with the question: do you think everyone wants to live in the US?
I was jostled back to reality by the beeping of my i-phone 5s that had a cute Harvard Law school key card holder attached to the back. It was a Facebook notification. My friend who now calls himself Sid Griffths (he used to be called Kwaku Frimpong) had just put up a post. I checked it. It read: education if it means anything should not take people away from the land; but instil in them even more respect for it.
The gods and ancestors of the land had sent Sid to me. My first reaction was to ignore the post. I have respect for the land but am just not returning. I convinced myself that I had to be pragmatic I need not merely survive; I had to be very successfully financially and reach out to my family and friends. America, the land of opportunities does hold more and better opportunities. I am not going back to dumsor (power outages) I concluded.
So, I decided to have a full American breakfast with a friend, listen to my favourite genre of music-country- and go out to Cambridges malls and parks, all to remind me of what I would miss should I return to my birth land. It was an exercise in futility! As a child clings to a mothers breast, the quote from Wangari Maathais Unbowed clung to my mind feeding my thoughts for the most part of this January 17th winter Sunday.
As much as I agreed with the quote and as much as it haunted me many days after January 17th; I had made up my mind - returning to dumsor was not an option. One could still have respect for the land and not be physically present, I thought. I would influence the Africa agenda from the international scene, I would say to myself.
In the end, I boarded a BA flight and returned to Ghana -primarily because of personal commitments and obligations (as they say, a mans (in this case a womans word) is her bond) but perhaps also because this quote was still flirting with my mind.
When the BA flight smoothly descended on Accra, I peered out the tiny windows of the aircraft. As I saw the citys lights, which are not as breathtaking as the lights of New York City at night, I felt this wave of emotions and tears trickled down my eyes for the land of my birth.
Thankfully, I didnt have to worry about stares as I had no immediate seat neighbours. I remember asking myself what I was crying about. I had no answers. That was when it dawned on me how much I love my country with all its faults and harsh conditions, I love Ghana still. By Wangaris standard, my education means something - I still have respect (and love) for the land of my birth. The gods had indeed sent Sid to post that quote.
Wangari may not have used land to mean the land of ones birth. As an environmental advocate, Wangari may have used land in the literal sense. Or perhaps she intended the pun. Wangari may or may not have used away from the land to mean physical absence from the land.
To my literary mind away from the land could mean being overly comfortable in a foreign land as to forget about the land of ones birth and not doing anything or doing very little to improve it. Whatever it is, this single quote is a reminder of the essence of our training in foreign lands.
So, for all my country and continent men and women who have been privileged to get the opportunity to study abroad, I judge you not if you decide not to return. With so much opportunity and prospects of a much more comfortable and high quality of life, I can understand your reasons.
Influence the Ghanaian and the Africa agenda even away from home for education if it means anything should not take people away from the land; but instil in them even more respect for it.
Author:
Joan Selorm Tsorhe, BSC. Mpill. LL.B. (Ghana); LL.M. (Harvard)
Coordination and cooperation among agencies in the justice sector is a critical success factor in the implementation of the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, otherwise known as the Nelson Mandela Rules.
This was the major resolution reached yesterday, 18 July 2016 after the discussion of the Nelson Mandela Rules with scores of Prison Officers drawn from the five prison facilities, including the female medium security prison, in Lagos State, as part of activities marking the 2016 Nelson Mandela International Day in Nigeria.
Organised by the United Nations Information Centre (UNIC) Lagos in collaboration with the South African Consulate General, the Nigeria Prisons Service (NPS) and the United Nations Association of Nigeria (UNAN), the dialogue generated a lot of interrogations and contributions by the Prison Officers who noted that operational cooperation amongst the Police, the Prisons, the Judiciary and the Bar needed to be improved for any meaningful implementation of the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (Nelson Mandela Rules).
According to the participants, the rules which were presented by the Head of United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Lagos Office, Mr Glen Prichard, would require an enabling environment and improved political will to implement in Nigeria.
Earlier, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Mr Ban Ki-moon has urged everyone to be inspired by Nelson Mandela as a lifelong example of someone who never ceased working to build a better world for all.
He made this call in his Nelson Mandela International Day message presented by the Director of the United Nations Information Centre, Mr Ronald Kayanja. We remember a man of quiet dignity and towering achievement who worked to build a better world for all, the Secretary General said.
Welcoming the participants, the Controller of Prisons, Lagos State Command, Mr Olumide Tinuoye expressed the gratitude of the Nigeria Prisons Service to the United Nations for the training on the Nelson Mandela Rules. He observed that the Nigerian Prison Officers were reputed for their professionalism and retreatment of prisoners with dignity. However, he added that more capacity building initiatives would be welcomed by his Command.
The Representative of the South African Consulate General, Mr Darkey Africa in his opening remarks said, we want to thank all the United Nations member states for renaming these rules after Nelson Mandela in 2015. He stressed that the rules were therefore a testimony of his respect for human dignity and the fact that no person is irredeemable.
In his presentation, the Human Rights Adviser to the United Nations Country Team (UNCT) Nigeria, Dr Martin Ejidike called for more frequent visits of the Chief Judge to the prisons to see how awaiting trials inmates, who constitute 72% of total inmates could be freed.
The Executive Director of Crime Victims Foundation, Barrister Gloria Egbuji, in her remarks, observed that the discussion of the Nelson Mandela Rules could not be complete without the gate keepers who are the police.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), has announced that Nigerian presenter, Didi Akinyelure, has been awarded the second BBC World News Komla Dumor Award.
Didi Akinyelure, who is described by the BBC as a journalist with a passion for telling African stories, started her career outside the media; beginning in the financial sector.
Didi has risen through the ranks since her move to journalism in 2011, and today she hosts and produces a business show for CNBC, which is watched across the continent.
She is experienced in business reporting, having anchored CNBC Africas daily show 'Open Exchange' from West Africa for over three years. Didi is passionate about social entrepreneurs and has covered several stories about those who are transforming the African business landscape, the statement from the BBC said.
Akinyelure joined CNBC Africa in Lagos in 2013, where she is an anchor for prime time news. She has reported hard-hitting business stories from across Western Africa. She also created, produces and presents a weekly segment called Entrepreneur of the Week, which aims to inspire small and medium sized enterprises in Africa. Prior to beginning her journalism career in 2011, Didi worked in asset management.
Didi Akinyelure will now join the BBCs News team in London and begin a three-month placement from September this year
This placement provides the opportunity to gain skills and experience by attending a course with the BBC Academy, and working with teams across BBC News on TV, radio and online, reaching the BBC's audiences of 348 million across the world each week. She will also have the opportunity to travel to a country in Africa, with a top BBC producer, to report on a story for a global audience.
Didi spoke to the BBC following the announcement on Tuesday and expressed her admiration for the Corporation and late Ghanaian news anchor Komla Dumor.
I am completely overwhelmed and excited to win this prestigious award. I am honoured that the BBC chose me out of hundreds of applicants. Komla Dumor was someone I admired. He told the African story with so much passion for the continent, giving a balanced view and inspiring so many. You could tell that he loved what he did every single day and, I hope with this opportunity, I can continue Komla's great work, she said.
Didi impressed the judges with her enthusiasm and tenacity in getting to the heart of a story, and helping her audience make sense of some of Africa's complex issues. Her passion for telling Africa's diverse stories and challenging preconceived stereotypes reflect Komla's own devotion to the continent and, as part of his legacy, Didi will be able to share her enthusiasm with the BBC's global audience, said the BBCs statement
The Deputy Editor for BBC Africa, Josephine Hazeley, said that Didi exemplified the attributes Komla was known for.
We were looking for a journalist who has the passion, pride and eloquence that Komla Dumor possessed someone who would be able to follow in his footsteps by telling compelling African stories. Didi particularly excels in telling business stories, which was an area Komla was also passionate about. Komla's death was a huge loss to everyone at the BBC, and especially the Focus on Africa team, so we're really pleased to have found a worthy winner of the award that we established in his name,she said.
The first winner of the award, Nancy Kacungira, said: The past year has been an incredible journey for me from being told I'd won the award to training with BBC Academy; from learning from some of the world's best journalists to working for the BBC. I'm sure Didi will find the experience exceptionally rewarding, and I hope we can both continue Komla's great work.
The award was set up in honour of presenter Komla Dumor who passed away in January 2014, and aims to continue Komla's legacy by celebrating African journalism and finding exceptional talent. The judging panel included Anna Williams, Editor BBC World News; Josephine Hazeley, Deputy Editor for BBC Africa, and Ory Okolloh, director of investments for Omidyar Networks Governance & Citizen Engagement initiative in Africa.
There are two runners up for the award: Olive Burrows and Trevor Ombija, both of whom are Kenyan.
By: citifmonline.com/Ghana
The Secretary-General welcomes the historic decision taken today by the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the African Union (AU), setting out concrete steps towards self-reliance, particularly in relation to the AU's peace and security budget. He notes with interest the innovative funding arrangements aimed at providing the AU, via the Peace Fund, with increased financial means to address the peace and security challenges facing the continent.
The Secretary-General commends the African Heads of State and Government, the leadership of the AU, in particular Commission Chairperson Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, and the AU High Representative for the Peace Fund, Donald Kaberuka, for their active engagement in fulfilling the commitment to finance 25 per cent of the AU peace and security agenda well ahead of the initial objective of 2020.
Mindful that a strong partnership requires strong partners, the Secretary-General looks forward to the implementation of this additional step towards the further consolidation of the United Nations-AU partnership. He urges Member States to give urgent consideration to this initiative.
Authorities in South Sudan should immediately and unconditionally release South Sudanese journalist Alfred Taban, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Taban, editor-in-chief of the independent English-language daily Juba Monitor (www.JubaMonitor.com), has been held without charge since July 16, according to colleagues and media reports (http://APO.af/QLRvZk).
Anna Nimiriano, the paper's editorial director who was summoned to security headquarters on July 16 alongside Taban, told reporters (http://APO.af/QLRvZk) that members of the National Security Service said that a column Taban published the previous day was incitement. Taban has not been charged, Nimiriano told reporters.
"We urge South Sudanese authorities to release Alfred Taban immediately and allow the Juba Monitor to publish freely," said CPJ Africa Program Coordinator Angela Quintal. "It is unacceptable that Taban is in jail for publishing his view of current events, which is the media's role."
Nimiriano said that officials from the National Security Service called her early on July 16 to say they were looking for both her and Taban. When the two editors arrived at the security service headquarters in Juba, Taban was immediately detained, Nimiriano told the Sudan Tribune (http://APO.af/tRAXpk). Nimiriano said she was neither questioned nor held, but was asked to leave without her colleague, Radio Tamazuj reported (http://APO.af/tRAXpk).
Authorities also ordered editors at the paper to stop publishing, according to media reports (http://APO.af/tRAXpk).. CPJ was unable to determine the details of the order forcing Juba Monitor to cease publishing. The newspaper announced (http://APO.af/jmrXjA) on its website that it would resume publication tomorrow, but provided no further details.
The day before his arrest, Taban published a column calling on President Salva Kiir and Vice-President Riek Machar to step down from power for failing to improve the security situation in the capital Juba, reports said. The column came in the wake of unrest. Dozens of people were killed and thousands have been uprooted from their homes in a renewed round of fighting between supporters of Kiir and Machar on July 11, according to reports (http://APO.af/P050bt). The power struggle between the president and vice-president set off a civil war in 2013 (http://APO.af/tP7Khj). After a peace deal was signed (http://APO.af/e6K9iq) in December 2015, Machar recently returned to his role (http://APO.af/7qpxbQ).
CPJ has reported on efforts by the government in South Sudan to muzzle the press this year, including the beating (http://APO.af/QBLMaU) and arrest of journalists and the closure (http://apo.af/5mxpnT) of several newspapers.
A local policy think-tank has commended the Turks for their efforts in preventing a coup on Friday and has called on the ongoing 27th Ordinary Session of African Union Assembly to declare solidarity with the citizens of Turkey and government.
In a press statement Sunday, the Strategic Thinkers Network (STRANEK) urged the "Turkish government vis-a-vis the leadership of the country to see this as an opportune time to clean up the security and strengthen it."
"A successful overthrow of democratically elected Mr. Erdogan, in the candid view of STRANEK, would have marked another thunderous shift in the Middle East, five years after the Arab uprising erupted and plunged Syria, Turkeys southern neighbor into civil war," the statement said.
Below is the statement
Strategic Thinkers Network (STRANEK) commends Turkey viz. the citizens and government for a tour de force with regard to preventing a coup as well as bastardising the plotters and allies of the coup.
Even though a faction of armed forces strafed the headquarters of Turkish intelligence and parliament in the capital, Ankara and others seized a major bridge in Istanbul, they did not triumph in the long run.
According to sources, 161 people were killed including many civilians, after a faction of the armed forces tried to seize power using tanks and attack helicopters.
Regardless, the coup proved futile.
Amid the avalanche of events that has occurred with respect to the attempted coup, we urge the Turkish government vis a vis the leadership of the country to see this as an opportune time to clean up the security and strengthen it.
We, however, applaud government for rounding up 2,839 people ranging from foot soldiers to senior officers including those who had formed the backbone of the rebellion as indeed, it indicates that the government of Turkey has the unpleasant situation under control.
A successful overthrow of democratically elected Mr. Erdogan, in the candid view of STRANEK, would have marked another thunderous shift in the Middle East, five years after the Arab uprising erupted and plunged Syria, Turkeys southern neighbor into civil war.
This is not the wish of STRANEK, a policy and good governance thinks tank that focuses on economic and social issues as well.
We also urge African Union (AU) to use the ongoing 27th Ordinary Session of African Union Assembly, Heads of State and Government to declare solidarity with the citizens of Turkey and government.
We wish to draw Government of Ghana's attention to the happenings in Turkey as we prepare for the 2016 elections and make a clarion call that the security services especially the military stays neutral to hold the tenets of our democracy.
Reiteratively, Strategic Thinkers Network (STRANEK) shows solidarity with the people of Turkey and elected government as this marks as part of a dawn of action with respect to the condemnation of an attempted coup.
Parabolically,we must speak out against wrong no matter where in the world it is perpetuated. An attack on democracy in Turkey is an attack on civilisation and must not have a place in the 21st century.
SIGNED
NII TETTEY TETTEH
(EXECUTIVE MEMBER)
Story by Ghana| Myjoyonline.com
19.07.2016 LISTEN
NPP Yells And Cites GBC Radio & TV; Erection Of Over 400 Billboards
By Pascal Kafu Abotsi
The opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) is worried that President Mahama is hiding under his 'Accounting to the People Tour jingle to campaign with the tax payers money, a move which has compelled the NPP to accuse the ruling party of abuse of incumbency.
According to the NPP, during President Mahamas tour of the 10 regions of the country, over 400 billboards had been mounted, in addition to the branding of public buses and live broadcasts on Ghana Television (GTV) and its radio stations, all at the expense of the taxpayer.
Footage of President Mahamas visit to Yendi, for instance, shows a trail of over 40 heavy duty land cruisers. All these expenses and the NHIS remains underfunded and unpaid feeding grant for schools in the North keep our schools closed, Nana Akomea, Director of Communication said in a statement copied to The Chronicle.
The NPP expressed shock at the behaviour of the ruling party, because it once decried the abuse of incumbency in political campaigning when it occupied the reins of government, but is now deeply involved in it.
The elephant family also observed that, even though the President claimed he was not on a campaign tour, he begged for the votes of the people wherever he went, a situation they described as insincerity and lies from President Mahama and the NDC.
Citing cases to back his claim that the umbrella family was actually campaigning, Nana Akomea mentioned President Mahamas address to the people of Nyanoa-Kwaobaah on Thursday February 4, 2016, where he demanded to be given a second term so he could start putting money in their pockets.
On Tuesday April 12, 2016, he told the people at Atimpoku, Apeguso and Bosso in the Eastern region that those who had attained the age of 18 years should register when the voters register was opened, in order to ensure that they exercise their franchise to retain the NDC in power to continue the transformational agenda he said.
He also stated that on 28th June, President Mahama told a crowd in his Ashanti Regional tour that he deserved a second term, a statement he repeated the following day.
On July 14th 2016, he further recalled, while addressing the Chiefs and people of the Mamprugu Traditional Area, President Mahama repeated his demand for a second term and went on to admonish them to ignore their kinsman, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, who is the running mate of the NPP flag bearer, Nana Addo Danquah Akufo Addo and vote massively for him, President Mahama.
Nana Akomea added that, demands by President Mahama to be retained, given a second chance or voted for again, had been repeated throughout his tours nationwide, the NPP then asked: So the question is why the President can not admit that he is campaigning?
It also demanded to know, Why does the NDC lie to Ghanaians that the president is not campaigning but is only accounting to the people? Why is this blatant lie being told so often to the people of Ghana? What does President Mahama and the NDC lose if they tell Ghanaians the truth?
The National Womens Organizer of the Opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), Otiko Djaba has renewed the debate over allegations that Charlotte Osei was appointed the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission (EC) after granting sexual favours to the appointing authority.
The allegation, which was first made by the Assin Central NPP MP, Kennedy Agyapong, was widely condemned as an attack on women.
But the NPP National Womens Organizer in a Citi News interview said the claims are worth investigating because the Honorable MP could not have been peddling untruths.
We need to focus on why he said it because he is not an ordinary person. He is a member of our legislature. He should not be condemned outright but we should find out if there is any merit in what he said or notFor the sake of our country, for the sake of democracy, for the sake of peace and transparency in the election. There is no smoke without fire and this Honorable man will not come and make that statement with no reason.
Hanna Tetteh, Oye Lithur condemn attacks on Charlotte Osei
There have been several calls on the NPP MP to apologize for the scathing attack on Charlotte Osei.
Foreign Affairs Minister and Member of Parliament for the Awutu Senya West Constituency, Hanna Tetteh, as well as the Minister for Gender and Social Protection, Oye Lithur condemned what they called unsubstantiated allegations and sometimes 'vicious personal attacks', targeted at the EC Chair.
Charlotte Osei's beauty enough to re-brand EC Adu-Asare
A former National Democratic Congress (NDC) Member of Parliament for the Adentan Constituency, and now a Presidential staffer, Kojo Adu-Asare, in April 2016, suggested that, the EC does not need any re-branding since the beauty of its chairperson; Charlotte Osei can take care of such issues.
This new logo is not necessary, Charlotte, your beauty alone is re-branding, but what will give the EC credibility is your ability to conduct a credible election he added. Mr. Adu-Asare made the comment on Accra based Asempa FM's Ekosii Sen programme, when the issue about the EC logo came up for discussion.
His comment was deemed by critics as sexist and inappropriate.
By: Marian Ansah/citifmonline.com/Ghana
Follow @EfeAnsah
19.07.2016 LISTEN
The ordour might have been so offensive. As New Patriotic Party executives with their foot soldiers at Konongo aided by local security agents open investigations into the circumstances leading to the smearing of human excreta on the walls and floors of the newly refurbished head office of the local constituency office, suspicion has already turned on the main rivals of the NPP, in next November polls.
Such is the mistrust between the two main political parties that the election in November, which is merely allowing Ghanaians to choose their new leaders, is turning ugly countrywide.
Day in and day out, messages calling for peace before, during and after elections, are drummed out through various information outlets inviting Ghanaians not to misbehave as we enter the home stretch of the four- year cycle towards the vote. It looks like there are some elements within our political set up who have decided to turn deaf ears to the plea.
Like most civil members of society, The Chronicle is appalled by the development at the NPP constituent office at Konongo. Of all political offences in the rule-book, pouring of human excreta on dwellings used by political opponents, must rank among the most foul of offences.
At this point in time, it is inadvisable to point accusing fingers; especially when those who carried out this misdeeds have not been identifies. What we do know is that More than 20 years ago, agents responding to prompting from state officials poured truck loads of human excreta on the offices of The Chronicle, The Guide at the Time and the Free Press.
Prof. Kwamena Ahwoi, who was Minister of Local Government and Rural Development at the time defended what came to be called 'shit bombing' in local parlance, as people's rejoinder to articles written by these newspapers. What was ever in doubt was that all the newspapers 'shit-bombed' were all critics of the Rawlings regime at the time.
The posture of the minister made many neutral observers to conclude that the 'shit bombing' had the blessing of the government. As we ponder over who might have carried out the misdeeds in Konongo, tongues are already wagging. What has added juicy bids to the many versions of the same story doing round in town is that Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, Presidential Candidate of the NPP, was on his way to town and that one of his major functions planned for the day, was the commissioning of the constituency office.
Obviously, the perpetrators of the heinous act intended to disrupt the Nana Addo function. It is unfortunate; but it is beginning to look like in this country, some sections of the security services could not be trusted to do an honest job when those under investigation clothe themselves in the colours of the ruling National Democratic Congress.
The other day, the nation's leading security apparatus, the Bureau of National Investigation, stooped so low that the agency in charge of local and external security of state, issued a statement stating that officials of BNI had interrogated the pro-NDC 'Montie' duo, who had been summoned to appear before the Supreme Court to purge themselves of contempt charges.
In other words, the BNI clearly showed its colours as a pro-NDC security apparatus. It is with this experience in mind that The Chronicle laments that this nation might not be able to apprehend those who carried out the Konongo 'shit-bombing.'
Even then, this paper calls for restraint on the part of the grieving NPP supporters in the Konongo North Constituency. It is painful to reflect on how the new-look head office of the local branch was desecrated. But time, the ultimate healer would work out its magic.
The perpetrators might not be apprehended now. But however long it takes, long arm of the law would get at them. We urge the NPP to use the experience at Konongo to build bridges in its own ranks for the bigger battle ahead. As the Presidential Candidate of the party, Nana Akufo-Addo used to admonish, the Battle is the Lord's.' We rest our case!
Once upon a time, it would have been unimaginable for any Ghanaian to ask whether cocoa had been a blessing or a curse to his country.
For when I was growing up in the green forest area of the Eastern Region, where a good percentage of Ghana's cocoa is grown, it was generally assumed that cocoa was an unmitigated blessing unto us.
This facile acceptance of cocoa as the gift of Mother Nature to Ghana, is one of the travesties in our national life. For the existence of a cocoa industry in Ghana is entirely due to the diligent work of men and women!
Cocoa is not even native to Ghana, but was brought to us from another West African country Equatorial Guinea by a Ghanaian called Tetteh Quarshie. He was a blacksmith, who had gone there to practice his trade, which, then as now, knew no international boundaries.
Spanish explorers had come across or as the now discredited Eurocentric view of history would have us believe, discovered cocoa in Central America and had brought some to their then colony, Equatorial Guinea, to cultivate. They used the beans for making a beverage and also, for creating chocolate. This was how the Aztecs and other Latin American peoples had used cocoa for thousands of years before they were conquered by the Spaniards. (At the time Tetteh Quarshie went there, however, Equatorial Guinea had passed from Spanish to Portuguese rule.)
Tetteh Quarshie had to smuggle his cocoa from the Equatorial Guinea island of Fernando Po, because the Portuguese had commercialised the crop and didn't want any competitors in its production. He took his cocoa to Mampong-Akwapim, where he planted the first beans in 1879.
Tetteh Quarshie's experiment was successful, and when the people of the area heard that cocoa was being purchased by Europeans, they went to him to buy seeds to go and plant. In just two decades, cocoa had spread through Ghana's forest regions. The first exports were shipped to Europe around 1908.
Volumes exported were 20,000 metric tonnes in 1908;
41,000 metric tonnes by 1911. Exports peaked at 213,000 metric tonnes in the 1930s. The Government of the Gold Coast regarded cocoa as a godsend, because the farmers could not export it direct to Europe but needed the intervention of European firms, who organised the crop's purchase from the farmers and then shipped it abroad. To be permitted to do this, the foreign companies had to surrender part of their receipts from the crop as export duty to the Government. Very soon, cocoa export duty was fetching the Government no less than 60% of national revenue, and and nearly 75% of foreign exchange earnings.
In global terms, Ghana's production hovered around 40% of total world output until about 1980, when Ghana was overtaken as the largest producer in the world by her neighbour, the-Ivory Coast.
So, if Ghana had been benefiting so handsomely from cocoa production, how could cocoa ever be considered as a curse to her?
The answer is that cocoa has created an almost permanent tension between the cocoa farmers of Ghana and their successive Governments. From the beginning of the industry, Governmental intervention has prevented the farmers from maximising their earnings from the crop they produce. Under colonial rule, foreign merchants were the only people allowed to buy farmers' produce and transport it to chocolate factories in Europe and America. None of the value added that accrued to cocoa as it was manufactured into expensive chocolates, reached the farmers. Additionally (as noted above) a sizable export duty was creamed off the purchase price by the Government. The farmer just became a sitting duck, or to mix metaphors a goose that laid golden eggs.
The farmers were obliged to accept whatever price the overseas merchants decided that raw cocoa was worth.
And no matter how tint that was, the Government creamed off a chunk of it.
The farmers regarded this situation as so unsatisfactory bad that as early as 1924, they embarked on the first of several cocoa holdups, during which they refused to sell any cocoa to the cocoa merchants.
Many farmers underwent the traumatic experience of having to burntheir cocoa beans because they had been stored for so long unsold that they had become mouldy and thereby unsalable.
Despite the futility and humiliation that characterised the 1924 boycott, the farmers felt so cheated that they again embarked on another boycott in the crop season of 1930-1931. And once more in 1937-38!
But all these boycotts failed to move the cocoa merchants. That was when the idea that cocoa might be a curse to Ghana began to gain ground. Why a curse? A curse because you used your labour and your land top cultivate the cocoa crop.
You also used labour to harvest the crop, dry it in the sun )without allowing rainfall to ever wet the beans, as they would be ruined if they got wet. And yet you never knew exactly how much you would get for the crop! Until the cocoa-purchase price was announced in Accra!
The maintenance of this system whereby the Government and the foreign cocoa merchants held all the cards was certainly was one of the planks that antagonised the farmers against Ghana's first African Government Ghana formed by Dr Kwame Nkrumah, as Leader of government Business, in 1951. Dr Nkrumah was obliged to use a British Minister of Finance, and he soon found out that the country's budget was so intricately dependent on the price paid to cocoa farmers that he could not drastically alter the price even if he wanted to.
Her had been making anti-colonial speeches during the political rallies he held before being imprisoned, and the cocoa farmers had assumed that he would dismantle the system akin to economic slavery under which they operated. But even after K A Gbedemah had become the Minister of Finance, the system was not dismantled. Indeed, the Government began to raid, to finance development projects, the funds accumulated by the Cocoa Marketing Board as reserves that were ostensibly meant to augment the price paid to farmers, if and when the world price of cocoa fell too low!
Instead, Dr Nkrumah resorted to the use of words to solve the problem, For instance, he fixed the cocoa price at a certain level, and promised that he would not change the price even if the world price went down. Unfortunately for him, the world price actually went up after he had fixed the price! The farmers thereupon demanded that he pay them the difference between the fixed price and the new world price. He did not.
So, eventually, Dr Nkrumah, who had been regarded as a hero by the farmers whilst he was leading the national political campaign against the British, became as guilty in the eyes of the cocoa farmers of cheating them just as the British did.
By 1954, Dr Nkrumah was facing a widespread revolt by cocoa farmers in Ashanti and the Eastern Region, which was seized upon by his political opponents as the main plank of the party they formed to oppose the CPP: the National Liberation Movement (NLM). So, cocoa was largely the cause of the first major split in the Ghanaian nationalist front.
It is easy to see that Ghana has never quite recovered from that initial political schism, if truth be told. Therefore cocoa curse number one is the division of our nationalist front that once submerged, to a very large extent. the ethnic and class divisions that dogged Ghanaian society. You only have to read some of the rants on the Say It Loud section ofGhanaweb to realise how deep and nasty these social divisions have become. Unconsciously the ranters are railing against the perceived cheating carried out by those charged with administering our nation's resources. And since cocoa money forms a large part of the Government revenue that's being filched cocoa has to be placed at the centre of the issues that threaten our national unity.
(To be continued)
Pro-Mahama groups in the governing National Democratic Congress continue to mount pressure on the leadership of the party to sever ties with the partys Founder, former President Jerry John Rawlings, describing him as a traitor, a tribalist and a liability to the party.
They are particularly angry with Mr Rawlings for seeking to tag President Mahamas government with corruption, while endorsing Nana Akufo-Addo, Presidential Candidate of the New Patriotic Party, as an incorruptible person with the ability to fight the canker.
In his recent interview with the Nigerian media, Mr Rawlings expressed fears about the chances of the NDC in the upcoming elections, citing the massive corruption that has engulfed the Mahama government. He added the NPP was fortunate to have a leader who is not known for messing around with material things.
Following this, the Social Democratic Forum of the National Democratic Congress has descended heavily on the former president, describing him as a traitor, a tribalist and a liability who has lost his mind.
The sooner we disassociate ourselves from this loose cannon, the better, the group urged the leadership of the NDC in a statement signed by its spokespersons, Manan Mustapha and Alhassan Issahaku.
The call comes just a couple of days after another group, Friends of Atta Mills, who are working for the re-election bid of President Mahama, asked the leadership of the party to sack their Founder.
The group believes the conduct of Mr Rawlings could spell doom for the governing party, ahead of this years elections.
Spokesperson for the group, Gabriel Agah, accused the former president of making utterances calculated to scuttle President Mahama's and NDC's re-election bid.
It's becoming too much of him. Whenever he speaks and mention the names of President Mills and Mahama, he mentions corruption and makes wild allegations against them without any evidence," Mr Agah lamented.
Members of the Social Democratic Forum share the position of their colleagues, claiming that the supposed barrage of attacks from the former president is targeted at derailing the third term bid of the party.
They even claim Mr Rawlings is being motivated in his attacks by his ethnic hatred for President Mahama, who he is a northerner.
The fact that Rawlings not only overthrew Ghanas first Northern president, but visited upon him various humiliations and indignities after his departure, is telling. He seems to have a pathological dislike of Northerners. His constant unjustified criticism of President Mahama no doubt stems from this animus. It can thus be concluded the (sic) Rawlings is an incorrigible tribalist, the group said in a statement signed by Manan Mustapha and Alhassan Issahaku, the spokespersons.
The statement added: Rawlings constant carping from the sidelines is the sign of a man in desperate straits. A yesterdays man who has been reduced to irrelevance in national discourse, cutting a lonely, sad and desperate figure, one whose glory days of yore are a distant memory; a man who increasingly resorts to barbs and vitriol at the party he gave birth to and the man who now leads it. It is a sad state of affairs and does not befit a former leader of our great party, let alone erstwhile head of state.
The statement said Mr Rawlings endorsement of Nana Akufo-Addo as an incorruptible leader was an attempt to seek favour with the enemy.
This is treachery and disloyalty of the highest order. Since his departure from the highest office, Rawlings has shown that his loyalty is only to himself and his ego. He has constantly criticised every NDC president, belittling them at every opportunity, the group added.
The statement from the group further questioned the moral authority of the ex-president to talk about corruption and tribal politics.
Was it not he who, in office, surrounded himself with a cabal of advisors and ministers from his own ethnic group? Was it not he who cemented the NDCs support base in the Volta Region to the exclusion of other regions? Yet Rawlings has the brass-neck to denounce tribalism, castigating our own people for stating facts the group said.
The group also accused former President of fanning the Dagbon crises, after he had allegedly lied to Ghanaians he had a tape that would bring the truth concerning the Ya Na murder, adding that he took advantage of Northerners during his term as president, only to neglect them later.
The Presidential Candidate of the All Peoples Congress (APC), Hassan Ayariga, says the worsening economic situation in the country could be attributed to the poor leadership of the two dominant parties.
During a courtesy call on the chiefs and people of Christian Village near Achimota to climax his five-day 'Come on Board' tour in Accra, he said the economy was retrogressing and the hardships kept worsening due to voting for the two parties; the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP).
Mr Ayariga and his team began the tour at Dome through Dodowa to Abokobi and Adentan. They also visited Ayikuma in the Shai Osudoku District.
He said: The NPP and the NDC alone cannot manage this country, when political parties win power it does not mean they should not listen to others. Everybody should be brought on board to help towards the development of the country.
The main problem of this country is bad leadership and the winner takes all mentality. If the NPP wins, everything is in the hands of the party and so is the NDC with total disregard for any other party.
One should either belong to these parties before they will listen to you even if you have the solution.
Mr. Ayariga said under the leadership of the APC, various sectors of the economy would receive a major boost and the widespread poverty would reduced by utilizing the abundant resources the country was endowed with.
Health, education, employment have not received any major achievement for so many years. We move from one country to the other begging to improve on these sectors whiles resources are available here. Our party's vision is to improve the well-being of everybody in the country making use of these resources, he said.
The APC used the occasion to introduce the executives and the parliamentary candidate for the Okaikoi North Constituency, Mr Joseph Akoto Lamptey, to the chiefs and elders at the Christian Village.
Mr. Ayariga mentioned that chieftaincy, as one of the important institutions of the state, should be considered as a partner in development adding that the idea that chiefs should refrain from politics should be looked at again.
At Asofan in the Trobo Constituency, Mr. Ayariga appealed to the chiefs and people to vote for the APC as the only party to address the widespread hardships of the country, particularly youth unemployment.
Look around and you will find poverty all around, a lot of the youth are not in any gainful employment. We are going to tackle this head-on by creating job opportunities for the youth, he said.
Mr. Ayariga touched on agriculture as one of the sectors that the party would give priority to describing the various policies by past and present governments as inadequate to address the challenges the sector was confronted with.
Both the NPP and NDC have done little in agriculture. We are always importing food products from outside. What are we doing to ensure that we have enough food in the country,'' he said.
He appealed to Muslim youths not to allow any political party to use them to foment violence but must rather be agents of peace in their respective communities before, during and after the election.
The Chief of Asofan, Nii Sei-Anertey Abbey, commended the APC for the respect accorded the chiefs by visiting them in its quest to occupy the highest office of the land and prayed that it achieved its goals.
19.07.2016 LISTEN
By Pascal Kafu Abotsi & Maame Agyei Agyeiwaa
Alistair Tairo Nelson, one of the Accra-based Montie FM panellists, whose way of courting the attention of the leadership of the ruling government was to boastfully threaten the lives of judges who refuse to dissociate themselves from the Abu Ramadan Vs Electoral Commission legal battle, shocked the Supreme Court yesterday, when he ridiculously blamed a disease known to him only Kpokpogbligbli- for his contemptuous comments.
He told a surprised 5-member panel, presided over by Justice Sophia Akuffo, when he appeared before the judges to explain why he and two others should not be committed to prison for scandalising the court, defying and lowering the authority of the court and bringing the authority of the court into disrepute, that the disease was unknown and that, when attacked, it took over a person's body and controlled what they did and said.
The panellist was perhaps taking a cue from Lawyer Ayikoi Otoo, whose plea to the same court linked the despicable comments by former General Secretary of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Kwadwo Owusu Afriyie and Hopeson Adorye, also of the NPP, against judges during the 2012 election petition hearing, to the influence of gbeshie which led to their discharge.
Some weeks ago, while on air, Alistair and a co-panellist, Godwin Ako Gunn, threw caution to the winds and made frightening statements against the members of the bench, which included: Today you want to sit there and use your left hands to point at things to destroy this nation, we know your homes. Mugabe, the High Court judges, I can stand at one junction and tell you where all of them live, or most of the influential ones live.
Following the threat, a Ghanaian citizen, Richard Asante Yeboah, instituted the contempt proceedings against the duo and the host of the programme, Salifu Maase, popularly called Mugabe. The proceedings were expected to start on the 12th of July, but because they were not served in time, the case was adjourned to the 18th of July.
They three supposedly brave men expressed remorse and pleaded with the court to tamper justice with mercy. Mugabe, who many thought was ready for prison sentence after claiming he was no better than the likes of Tsatsu Tsikata, who had been there, when he was summoned, said he regretted his comments and consequently, rendered an apology to the judges.
Although doubtful, he explained that his producer on the day of the programme, was taken ill, which meant that there was no one in the studio of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) platform, to put him on his toes.
Despite pleas from counsel of the contemnors to prevent the tape from being played due to its shameful and embarrassing contents, it was done in the interest of justice, as posited by the presiding judge. Counsel for the host of the programme was Nana Agyei Ampofo, while that of Alistair and Godwin Gunn was George Loh.
The owners of the station, Harry Zakour, Edward Addo, Kwasi Attuah and Kwakye Bram Larbi, who were also cited for contempt, were represented by Nana Ato Dadzie.
The court adjourned the case to 27th July, after the contemnors had been found guilty of scandalizing the court, defying and lowering the authority of the court and bringing the authority of the court into disrepute.
International Scientists have expressed concern about what they say is limited resources for agricultural research in Ghana which they say threatens the countrys food security.
They are meanwhile commending Nigeria for taking agricultural research and implementation serious.
The scientists have been speaking at the congress of the International Federation of Agric Journalists in Germany where it came to fore that less that 0.3 percent of Ghana's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is expended on agriculture annually.
This is considered to be one of the lowest in Africa, meanwhile, countries with higher GDP's including Africa like Nigeria are spending almost 2 percent of their GDP on research.
Ghanaian senior researcher at the University of Bonn, Germany, Dr Justice Tambo has called on government to sit up.
"For example, in Nigeria, they have developed a lot of innovations in the agricultural sector like using of fertilizer seedling because formerly the former minister was a researcher, so he facilitated the process," Dr Tambo said.
He said in the case of Ghana, there is limited support for research in the Agric sector because the results from researches are not utilised and "when they are used, it is only to a limited extent not so much."
Dr Tambo speaking to Joy News' Joseph Opoku Gakpo at a forum on Agricultural Sustainability at the Center for Development Studies in Bonn warned that Ghana's food security is at risk if nothing changes in Ghana's approach to agricultural research.
"The foods we import are produced by few countries so if there is any crisis, there will be starvation, uprising and other consequences on the country.
Chairwoman of the German Guild of Agric Journalist, Dr Katherina Seuser, called on stakeholders to do more to preserve agricultural resources even in the light of intensified agricultural production.
Story by Ghana| Myjoyonline.com
19.07.2016 LISTEN
The international arena can be more complicated than most people may think. In November, 2015 one of the strangest things in international politics happened with Turkey shooting down a Russian warplane en route Syria. This phenomenon is strange giving the fact that troubled Syria which borders Turkey in the south portends danger to the countrys territory. The Russians and Turks are known to have kept friendly relations in time past. It is the first time a Russian aircraft has crashed in Syria since Moscow launched air strikes against opponents of President Bashar al-Assad earlier in September.
The Recep Tayyip Erdogans regime in Ankara (the Turkish capital) appears to be struggling with domestic challenges already; a battle with mighty Russia and a strong ally may look to like a poor calculation in times like this. But President Erdogan is a smart politician who knows how to distract his people from their present economic challenges!
Was the President looking for favour with the West by bombing down the Russian plane? I say this because, the US has long considered Turkey a major ally in the region, and its Incirlik air base in the southeast part of the country is essential to US-led NATO missions in Syria and Iraq. The site also houses US nuclear tactical weapons. Then what is the sense of Erdogans actions against Russians.
With the Russians sure to reciprocate the Turkish gesture not after insulting President Putins large ego, the economic effect of a trade embargo will soon bite harder. This is because Russia is Turkeys second trading partner after Germany. The former Soviet Republic is the main import source for the Turkish economy. Imports from Russia account for about 13% of overall imports. Whereas Russian tourists visiting Turkey as of 1999 was below 500 thousand, this figure reached 2.4 billion in 2007. Turkey has become the most preferred holiday destination for Russians. The number of Turkish tourists visiting Russia is also rapidly growing and reached about 200 thousand. This places Turkey in a precarious position should Moscow strike.
On Friday July 15, 2016 the world received the shocking news of a failed coup attempt in Turkey. That came few days after the Islamic State claimed responsibility for attacks on Istanbul Airport. Not this again!
On receiving the news, a friend of mine, who is a well-known pro-Biafra (a group calling for separation of former Eastern Region away from Nigeria) campaigner called to buy me a drink. I queried the reason for that knowing that my friend, Ikechi, is not known to be that generous to buy me a drink just for the fun of it. He told me how happy he was on hearing of that the patriotic Turkish army took over from dictator Erdogan. He is happy that such event will propel some patriotic soldiers to save us from Buharis dictatorship. He dropped the call after I told him I was so tired that night.
In parenthesis, Ikechi went into jubilation when the result of the recent British referendum went in favour of the Leave campaigners under the nickname Brexit. He told me that will be enough justification for Biafra to leave Nigeria. I politely informed him that both phenomena are not the same. I told him how Morocco left the African Union (then known as OAU) in 1984 without any consequences. I told him that Moroccas exit from the AU is what can be compared to Britain leaving the European Union (EU). Whether he agrees with me, is another issue altogether.
The Turkish coup is one of the strangest in recent history. Though there are obvious justifications for at least a change of government in Ankara, every box of how not to plan a coup was ticked in the Turkish coup. The disenchantments of the people against the government were not properly articulated into a political action. The coup looked likely to fail, even with the coup plotters military strength, or their support inside the military. They failed to make it seem like they were going to succeed. The ability to shape perceptions of success, often through media, is crucial in coups. People tend to support a coup if they think it is going to succeed.
This was the missing link in Fridays coup in Turkey!
There are striking similarities between Turkey and Nigeria. Both countries have past experiences of military rule. While Turkey can boast of nationalist soldiers like Mustafa Kemal Ataturk who will shun all tribal sentiments and institute strong economic reforms; Nigeria has had to battle with corrupt and power-hungry generals whose only mandate is gratifying their inordinate desires. To buttress this point, there have been several rumours of a possible military coup in Nigeria in recent time. From the sections these are coming, one can see the patriotism in those hailing the imaginary coup. Perhaps the media and the opposition need to learn how to and how not to play politics in Nigeria using Turkey example because military coups are no longer fashionable, as the Turkish recent experience clearly show.
Olalekan Waheed ADIGUN is a political risk analyst and independent political strategist for wide range of individuals, organisations and campaigns. He is based in Lagos, Nigeria. His write-ups can be viewed on his website http://olalekanadigun.com/ Tel: +2348136502040, +2347081901080
Email: [email protected], [email protected]
Follow me on Twitter @adgorwell
The defeated parliamentary candidate for the Nkwanta South Constituency of the Volta Region says he is unperturbed by the loss that ended his 18 year reign as an MP.
According to Gershon Gbediameh, his years of experience over the years will come to play as he will support the winning candidate and the NDC as a party towards the general elections.
''I am still the MP from now till January 2017 and I will play my role as a member of parliament in that capacity and it is not only when I am in that seat as an MP that I will do work but I will do whatever I can do to bring development to the district through different channels because of my contacts''
The NDC primary over the weekend saw one Geoffrey Kini win by over 7000 votes to Mr Gbediameh's 591 votes. Speaking in an interview with CitiNews, Gershon Gbediameh said he will use his remaining time in office to help develop the Nkwanta South constituency.
''We have about 17 communities in the whole constituency who are yet to be connected to the national grid and fortunately they have been captured in the 1033 communities that are to be hooked to the national grid''
He tells Citi News the fast paced development in Nkwanta South will go a long way to end the movement of residents from the constituency to the capital. Geoffery Gbediameh also expressed his appreciation to the constituents for keeping faith with him since 1997.
By: Lorrencia Nkrumah/citifmonline.com/Ghana
Durban (South Africa) (AFP) - Promising results from an early safety trial with a potential HIV vaccine have paved the way for a major new study, researchers announced at the International AIDS Conference in Durban on Tuesday.
An 18-month trial with a candidate vaccine dubbed HVTN100 drew on 252 participants at six sites in South Africa, one of the countries hardest-hit by an epidemic that has claimed more than 30 million lives worldwide since the 1980s.
The participants fell within a low-risk category for contracting the sexually-transmitted virus, the researchers said.
The trial cleared a key hurdle in the long, three-phase process to test new drugs. In this early phase, the main point is to assess safety, not efficacy.
"We wanted to see if this vaccine candidate is safe in a South African population and if it is tolerable," Kathy Mngadi, principal investigator at one of the research sites, explained to AFP.
The team also looked for antibodies signalling that the body's immune system was responding to the vaccine.
The trial built on the foundations laid by a groundbreaking trial conducted in Thailand in 2009, which yielded the world's first partially effective vaccine, dubbed RV144.
While hailed as a breakthrough, the effect of the Thai course decreased with time, dropping from 60 percent after one year to 31.2 percent after three-and-a-half years.
"RV144 set us on this journey of hope, but also showed us what we still need to learn and accomplish in this field," said Fatima Laher, co-chair of the HVTN100 trial.
- Next step -
All the study criteria "were met unequivocally and, in many instances, the HVTN100 outcomes exceeded both our own criteria," added trial protocol chair Linda-Gail Bekker.
The next phase of the trial, dubbed HVTN702, will kick off in November with the recruitment of 5,400 South African men and women aged between 18 to 25 at high risk of contracting HIV.
People are divided into risk categories through criteria that includes their sexual activity.
"We hope to have results in five years, and it is going to be a very exciting five years for all of us because it is the result of many, many years of hard work," said Glenda Gray, HVTN Africa programme director.
A fully effective vaccine is still a long way off, she cautioned.
But recent studies have shown that even a partially effective blocker could have a huge impact if rolled out on a large scale.
Some two-and-a-half million people are still becoming infected with HIV every year, according to a new study published on Tuesday, even as drugs have slashed the death rate and virus-carriers live ever longer on anti-retroviral treatment.
While the quest for a cure continues, many view a vaccine as the best hope for stemming new infections.
Larry Corey, principal investigator for the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, a publicly-funded international project, said vaccines were barely mentioned the last time the conference was held in Durban some 16 years ago.
"It's really gratifying now to see how far we've come scientifically," he said.
Last year, billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates, who spends millions of dollars on AIDS drug development, said he hoped for an HIV vaccine within a decade, as a cure seems less likely.
Abuadi can be found in the Adaklu District. It is one of the 46 newly created Districts in 2012. Its administrative capital is at Adaklu-Waya.
According to the 2010 Population and Housing Census District Analytical Report, 80 percent of households in the district are engaged in agriculture. Important tourist attractions include the beautiful Adaklu Mountain.
However, the village faces a threat of destruction from the operations of a quarry site located in the town. The serenity of the village has been severely compromised. Sleep has become elusive for most of the residents. The all-day long activities of the quarry will not give them respite.
Comfort Adanu is one of the residents badly hit by the operations of the quarry site. She laments the noise it generates and the risk it poses to her and other residents. She explains, It is difficult to sleep at night. When they blast the rocks, it shakes the building.
We complain every day about the phenomenon but the authorities are not heeding to our calls. They do not rest, the other day around 10pm; eleven trucks used the road behind my house. They work till 5am in the morning. Our children are at risk. Efo Elikems child was nearly killed the other time. His motor had a head-on collision with one of the quarry trucks.
Anane Gbogbo is also a resident of Abuadi, he is distraught because the traditional authorities are unwilling to crack the whip on the operators of the quarry. He revealed that the inhabitants of the community had a meeting with some of the traditional authorities but that did not yield any result.
Our chiefs are aware. We had a meeting and told them about the disturbing situation and how the cars disturb at night. We resolved to create some roadblocks to make it difficult for the cars to ply the route. One of our chiefs gave an order for the roadblocks to be removed at night.
The town folks were very angry that their concerns were disregarded. Our chiefs are not doing anything to salvage the situation
Residents of the area want the owners of the quarry to construct a new road to their site. They complain that the dust from the quarry has become unbearable.
Apart from the noise and air pollution caused by the blasting of the rocks, the attendant effects of the risks the quarry poses to residents are inescapable.
The brownish corrugated roofing sheets in Abuadi are proof of the remnants of a village badly affected by unbridled quarry activities. For operators of the site, they mean and understand business.
They are not budged by the unending whining by residents. They operate from dusk to dawn. Residents are agitated that traditional authorities are not doing much to rescue the situation.
The buildings in Adaklu-Abuadi are deteriorating by the minute. Visible cracks and gaping holes have become conspicuous features of the structures here. Attempts to speak to the traditional authorities proved futile.
This is a Citizen Journalist report by Joseph Phanuel from Adaklu with support from StarGhana.
As part of efforts to reach out to the people of Ashaiman in the Greater Accra Region with the leadership of care and concern, the NDC Parliamentary Candidate for the Ashaiman Constituency, Ernest Norgbey, has donated 13 large-sized medicated paints, antibiotics and disinfectants to the Ashaiman Policlinic.
According to Mr Norgbey, the donation was borne out of a media report that said mosquitoes and bedbugs have taken over the hospital.
Mr. Norgbey during the presentation noted that, he was worried upon hearing the news item since he believed the problem could be solved.
I was extremely worried when I heard the news item in the media that the Ashaiman Polyclinic had been overtaken by bedbugs and mosquitoes. Having heard the news item, I quickly mobilized myself to assist them address the unfortunate challenge.
Mr. Ernest Norgbey, a passionate philanthropist who has extended a hand of help to many individuals and institutions, said the Ashaiman Polyclinic is a facility that takes care of thousands of patients in Ashaiman and its environs, and is high on his priority list of projects that would receive urgent attention should he assume office as the Member of Parliament.
Mr. Norgbey, who was taken round on a tour of the facility, noted that he would lobby for the expansion of the Polyclinic and the improvement of facilities to ensure that the people of Ashaiman receive nothing but the best in healthcare delivery.
Having been taken on a tour of the facility, I must say a lot still needs to be done to give a facelift to this Polyclinic despite the fact that the Assembly and the incumbent Member of Parliament have all supported in uplifting it to its current state. When I am elected the Member of Parliament, I will ensure the Ashaiman Polyclinic is highly resourced to be able to cater for the number of cases that overwhelms it on daily basis.
Mr. Norgbey however was quick to add that, currently Parliament has passed a loan facility of 13.5 million export credit loan which will be used to finance the construction of some five 30-bed capacity Polyclinics, of which the Ashaiman Polyclinic has been chosen as a beneficiary.
I know my government the NDC is doing enough for the people of Ashaiman hence the move to secure a loan facility to expand this Polyclinic among others within the Greater Accra Region.
Mr. Norgbey in addition also promised to provide professional painters to paint the facility with the donated paints.
Receiving the items on behalf of the management, the Administrator of the Ashaiman Polyclinic, Nurudeen Isaaka Iddrissu, promised to put them to good use.
We are grateful for this gesture because Ashaiman is a densely populated community and we have a lot of needs so donations like this go a long way to help us solve some of our problems.
He appealed to other philanthropists to come to the aid of the Polyclinic, as a lot needs to be done in ensuring quality health delivery for the people of Ashaiman.
By: Elvis Washington/citifmonline.com/Ghana
The New Patriotic Party (NPP) in the Northern Region has accused the Regional Minister, Abdullah Abubakari, of ordering a machete attack on a supporter of the party.
Northern Regional Secretary of the NPP, Sule Salifu, says the party has picked up intelligence that a close relative of the Minister carried out the machete attack and also run over the NPP supporter with a vehicle.
The NPP on Tuesday held a press conference where they accused the NDC in the Northern Region of stockpiling arms to cause mayhem during the upcoming elections this year.
The party also said Mr Abdullah has formed a vigilante group which he uses to terrorise members of the opposition parties in the constituency.
Speaking on Top Story on Joy FM Tuesday, Mr Salifu alleged further that the Mr Abdullah is using his influence to prevent the arrest of perpetrators of the machete attacks.
He said one Mustafa Zakaria, who is alleged to be a direct brother to the Minister attacked the NPP supporters.
The NPP in the Northern Region is holding the Northern Regional Minister strictly and accountable to the incidents of brutalities in Walewale, he said.
Joy News correspondents in the Northern Region say there was chaos on Saturday in the Walewale township when some supporters of the NDC and the NPP clashed, attacking each other with sharp objects and stones following a misunderstanding over the use of a particular road by one of the parties.
Reports say both parties had organized a function simultaneously in the township a while the pro-NPP youth group 'Bawumia Youth for Change' was having a campaign launch, the NDC was also outdooring its youth group called 'Zaadeeya youth group'.
In a sharp rebuttal, the Northern Regional Minister, Abdullah Abubakari, also told Top Story that the allegations against him are unfounded and are calculated to tarnish his image.
He said he has only been told that his cousin, not his brother, is involved in Saturday's clashes.
Story by Ghana | Myjoyonline.com | GN
The Ghana Police Service has rejected claims that it has revived its consideration of a social media shutdown in the country on election day to curtail irresponsible reports that could disrupt the process.
The Communications Director of the Police, Cephas Arthur, said that the police were only considering a social media blackout as a last resort as part of security measures ahead of the elections.
Several media outlets earlier today [Tuesday], reported that the Inspector General of Police (IGP), John Kudalor, had reiterated his stance on a social media shutdown in the country.
According to the reports, John Kudalor, who was in the Eastern Region to assess the level of preparedness of the Police command in the region, had stated that he stood by his initial comments to ban social media
However, Cephas Arthur, insists that the police had not decided to shut down social media and that the IGPs comments had been misinterpreted.
He stated that the IGP was only recounting his initial comments which has caused so much controversy.
It's unfortunate that what transpired has been reported the way it is. The IGP was on his regional tour to check the preparedness of his men for the election. As part of the activities, the IGP met the entire police populace in the Eastern Region. The IGP gave an opportunity to the media to ask questions on his maiden visit to the Eastern Region. The IGP was asked about his comments on the social media and whether he had changed his opinion.
The IGP then narrated what had happened previously, and said that should all remedies fail and the only option to keep our nation as one whole was to shut social media for the 7 or 8 hours that we are voting, he will do so. He will recommend it. The whole thing is tentative so it's not as if the IGP has a down and taken the decision to shut down social media in this election, Cephas Arthur said on Eyewitness News on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, the project lead of Ghana Decides, a social media project by Blogging Ghana, Kinna Likimani, has urged the police service to rise to the challenge presented by social media and not take the easy way out by just shutting it down.
DSP Cephas Arthur
She called on the service to improve its presence on social media as that would enable them to counteract the activities of trolls and troublemakers.
The police themselves need to be on social media. The very first time a Ghanaian citizen entered social media, the police needed to be there. The use of social media goes beyond elections. Our constitution gives us a right to free press and other media. People use social media for all sorts of good things in their lives. It promotes citizen engagement and freedom of speech.
Media has grown in the world. The more advanced we become, the more ways we find as humanity to use media. We are calling for the police to come on board and help us build capacity in dealing with social media, the same way we built capacity in dealing with radio. A blanket ban on social media doesn't make people feel secure about being Ghanaians, she said.
Well shut down social media if
The police chief had stated that, his outfit was considering shutting down social media services in the country on election day as the abuse of social media platforms by both political parties and ordinary Ghanaians has often created unnecessary tension in the country.
He believed that given the strain that preparations towards the elections have put on the country's security apparatus, it would be unwise to ignore the potential of social media as an incendiary point for violence.
At one stage I said that if it becomes critical on the eve and also on the election day, we shall block all social media as other countries have done. We're thinking about it, John Kudalor said at the time.
Social media shutdown a threat to democracy
The IGPs comments generated widespread criticism from the general public who felt such an action would represent suppression of freedom of speech.
Several bodies including the Centre for Democratic Development (CDD), the Alliance for Accountable Governance, BloggingGhana, and PenPlusBytes criticized the Police Chiefs words describing the idea as undemocratic.
The United Nations also waded into the debate, stating that it would be opposed to any move to block social media services in the country.
The special representative of the United Nations (UN) Secretary General for West Africa and the Sahel, Mohammed Ibn Chambas said: I should say without hesitation that from a UN point of view, we would be obviously averse to any steps that will amount to restricting the democratic space, particularly any steps that will be taken to restrict the freedom of expression.
No social media black out
The Communications Director of the Police, Supt. Cephas Arthur, had earlier clarified the services position on the controversial consideration to ban social media.
According to him, the ban was only one of the alternatives under consideration, but the Police will not shutdown social media on election day.
He assured Ghanaians the IGPs comments were on the spur of the moment and a social media ban was not being considered
The IGP used the word alternatives but it looks as if nobody heard the other alternatives that he mentioned because nobody is discussing that. This was not part of his speech. It was a kind of off the top of his head answer. Let us not be alarmed. The IGP is not about to block social media on election day and we are going to have our social media, Cephas Arthur said.
By: Edwin Kwakofi/citifmonline.com/Ghana
Defeated National Democratic Congress (NDC) Member of Parliament (MP) of the Chiana-Paga has blamed his defeat on the partys General Secretarys failure to disqualify his opponent.
According to Abuga Pele, although his opponent Rudolf Amenga-Etego failed to meet the deadline for submission, Johnson Aseidu Nketia still went ahead to vet him and passed him to contest.
Legal practitioner, Rudolf Amenga-Etego kicked out the former Ghana Youth Employment and Entrepreneurial Development Agency (GYEEDA) boss from the NDC ticket by a margin of less than 200 votes.
He polled 4,337 votes to beat Peles 4,177 votes out of the total 9,749 votes cast.
Abuga Pele and Rudolf Amenga-Etego
But Mr Pele who is standing trial for causing financial loss to the state has challenged his defeat.
He said his supporters noticed many many mistakes on the pink sheet used to collate results. According to him, 17 votes recorded on a pink sheet were later found to have been rather 117 votes.
On another, instead of 138 votes, 102 votes were recorded on the sheet, he claimed on Joy FMs Newsnite program Tuesday.
Despite these claims, Mr Pele refused to blame the EC these mistakes.
It was squarely the manipulation of insiders in the party, he indicated. According to him, a lot of things went wrong from day one of the process for elections.
In the first instance, the parliamentary primaries first slated for November 2015 was suddenly postponed three days to the voting date, Saturday, June, 18.
He believes the postponement was to allow his opponent to mobilize some resources because they had realized there were going to lose the election Saturday.
According to Mr Pele, his opponent struggled to raise the money needed to file his nominations and only managed to do so three days after the deadline.
But this was not enough for the party to reject his application. At vetting, Asiedu Nketia brushed away concerns about his application indicating that not having money should not be an obstacle, he alleged.
Explaining the defeat further, he said days before the elections suddenly a lot of money was pumped into the system.
Suddenly, everywhere people were asked to go and vote and they were paid GH50 cedis he alleged.
With his loss, Abuga Pele revealed that there is pressure on him to go independent. But he wants time to carefully consider his options.
"I have not decided what to do I have not decided to go independent, Mr Pele said.
Abuga Pele in smock
He said if after exhausting measures to address issues related to his defeat fails he may have to give in to pressure to go solo. If they insist I go independent then I have to go, he said.
Mr Pele last lost out to the NPPs Allowe Leo Kabah in 2008 after an NDC aspirant split the partys vote by going independent. He snatched the seat back in 2012. If he goes independent, analyst predicts that the NDC will lose the seat.
Abuga Pele has always believed the party is scheming against him after he was charged following scandalous revelations at the youth employment agency, GYEEDA which he headed until he resigned in 2012.
Abuga Pele has accused the party of using him as a scapegoat in the GYEEDA trial which is still ongoing.
Story by Ghana|myjoyonline.com|EA
Accra, July 18, GNA - UK based eBSI Export Academy is hoping to offer more opportunities to Ghanaians to acquire specialised knowledge in the area of International Trade and Digital Marketing with the appointment of a representative in Ghana.
The institution believes this should provide relief to many people working in customs, exports and imports sector, trade finance as well as banking, who have difficulty finding appropriate certified courses to build their knowledge in this area.
The Country Manager of eBSI Export Academy in Ghana, Francis Yaw Tontoh, said the courses are targeted largely at workers seeking to enhance their knowledge and become experts in these areas.
He said the online course provides flexibility for workers who need this knowledge, adding that a 50 percent discount was being allowed to mark the new relationship between eBSI Export Academy and Ghana.
eBSI is a leading Online Trade Training Academy based in Ireland with thousands of graduates in over 70 countries around the world.
eBSI Export Academy specialises in the delivery of Certified International Trade and Trade Finance programmes leading to certification from the Institute of Export UK.
Programmes offered include Trade & Finance, Shipping and Supply Chain and some of the courses are Export Market Operations, Trade and Customs Practice and eBusiness for International Trade.
Others are IOSCM Freight Transport, IOSCM Manufacturing courses and IOSCM Shipping courses.
Mr Tontoh said there is the need to boost the practical and technical knowledge delivery programmes in international trade, its related courses as well as digital marketing in Ghana.
He, therefore, explained that the eBSI courses were going to be very relevant to Ghana.
He said the courses were also suitable for students who are looking for a career in International Trade Financing with financial institutions, shipping companies or with export and import companies.
He said with the emergence of the oil and gas industry as well as the expansion of the country's sea ports, the country will require expertise in these areas.
Mr Tontoh said having a representative here in Ghana means that Ghanaians who enroll could also have an immediate correspondent as far as their training is concerned and invited interested people to take advantage of the opportunity that eBSI Export Academy offers.
GNA
Eugene Baffoe-Bonnie (left) speaking at the symposium. Seated (second left) is William Tevie and other dignitaries
Board Chairman of the National Communications Authority (NCA), Eugene Baffoe-Bonnie has called for the enactment of new telecommunications regulations and the amendment of old ones in order to meet the growing Information Communication Technology (ICT) needs of inhabitants of rural areas in Ghana.
Mr. Baffoe-Bonnie made the call on Monday in Accra at the opening ceremony of the 20th anniversary symposium of NCA.
Stakeholders and leaders in the world of information and communication technologies (ICT) from countries like US, Nigeria, Benin, Peru, Australia, among others, attended the opening ceremony, which took place at the La Palm Beach Hotel.
The top challenges facing the NCA are a growing technology gap between urban and rural communities and outdated regulations that have pained ICT companies, according to Mr. Baffoe-Bonnie.
The main objective of the symposium was therefore to collaborate on ways the NCA could keep its regulations up to date with changing trends in ICT to address the industry's challenges.
According to Mr. Baffoe-Bonnie, It is unacceptable that many rural communities in Ghana lack reliable, affordable access to ICT.
For a developing country such as Ghana, the ICT road is very important, as it fills in the gaps for our rural communities where we lack relevant infrastructure such as the needed number of medical staff, teachers, banking facilities and other businesses, he said.
Through relevant policies and strategies, the NCA can be empowered to regulate communication between medical personnel in the rural areas and the urban areas, he said.
Mr Baffoe-Bonnie also pointed out that some ICT companies have expressed frustration over NCA regulations that have caused them to lose profits.
Rightly so they (ICT companies) are complaining of loss of revenue and at the same time consumers are overjoyed with the opportunities these services provide them.
He said that the NCA is responsible for finding a balance between the needs of companies and the ability of customers to afford and have access to their services.
In all of this, the regulator cannot be overemphasized, as we will have to ensure that all stakeholders, especially the investors and the end users of the communications services, are fairly treated through appropriate regulatory interventions, he said.
The symposium, which runs until Tuesday evening, will see speeches from other regulators and industry leaders from countries like Peru, United Kingdom, Nigeria and Australia, as well as representatives from the International Telecommunications Union and Tigo, one of Ghana's main telecommunication companies.
Mr Baffoe-Bonnie said that such international collaboration will ensure that NCA regulations remain consistent with global standards.
NCA Director General, William Tevie said that such technologies are increasingly essential towards national prosperity.
BY Derek Maiolo & Melvin Tarlue
A leader consumed with envy is not happy because of his diseased soul. The soul of such a person is defective and the person is unwell. Envious people live their lives as though they were on a crusade against their own personal happiness. Envy is a feeling of discontent or covetousness with regard to another's advantages, success and possessions. They do not want to be happy! They only want to focus on the existence of another.
Three Things You Must Know about Envy
Envy is a negative personal trait that destroys a person from within.
A sound heart is the life of the flesh: but ENVY THE ROTTENNESS OF THE BONES.
Proverbs 14:30
The Scripture calls it rottenness of the bones. Envious people are destroyed from within. They may have everything but are focused on what others have and what others are doing. Envious people are not content. They may look happy on the outside but their hearts are thinking about what others have and what others are doing.
To an envious person, happiness is not about what another person has or does not have. They may live in the most beautiful castle, but once the person they fear is smiling in a grass hut somewhere else, they are not happy.
Accept your lot and focus on what God has done for you. Your envy is self-destructive and the cruelty of your envy is eating you up.
Envy is a negative personal trait that is as cruel as the grave
. JEALOUSY IS CRUEL AS THE GRAVE: the coals thereof are the coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.
Songs of Solomon 8:6
Anyone who has attended a funeral of a young person cut down in the prime of his life will understand the meaning of the phrase, as cruel as the grave. Attending the funeral of young fathers, mothers and friends only leaves you with desperate feelings of pain.
It is distressing just to watch grieving families torn apart by death: loved ones are wrenched away from those that depend on them. The meaninglessness of their lives and the hopelessness of their situation cannot be counselled away. A great desolation falls on those left behind and a gnawing and persisting pain consumes them. Can there be anything as cruel as the grave? Jealousy is indeed a very evil thing!
Envy is a negative personal trait whose evil effects are worse than anger and cruelty combined.
Wrath is cruel, and anger is outrageous; BUT WHO IS ABLE TO STAND BEFORE ENVY?
Proverbs 27:4
What can be worse than cruelty? Remember that Jesus Christ was crucified because of envy (Mark 15:10). Envy is worse than cruelty because it is a mindless force that drives an individual to eliminate another without mercy or good reason. Envy is a monster that I pray you will not have to contend with.
The Greedy Man and the Envious Man
A greedy man and an envious man met up with a great king who was pleased with them for their good works.
The king said to them, I desire to reward you for your efforts in the kingdom. One of you may ask something of me and I will give it to him, provided I give twice as much to the other.
The envious person did not want to ask first for he was envious of his companion who would receive twice as much. The greedy man also did not want to ask first since he wanted everything that was to be had.
Finally the greedy man pressed the envious man to be the first to make the request. The greedy man was happy that at last he had won over the envious man and would have twice as much of the reward that was coming to the envious man.
The two men got ready to see the king and presented themselves before the throne to make their request.
The envious man spoke as agreed and said, O great king we are thankful for your generosity and kindness towards us. Please pluck out one of my eyes. This shall be a sufficient reward for the rest of my life.
The greedy man could not believe his ears! I am going to lose both of my eyes, he wailed. Why was I so greedy? Why did I want twice as much? Why did I trust my life to an envious and cruel man?
The envious man in his cruelty wanted the two eyes of the greedy man to be taken out to punish him for getting twice as much. The envious man was prepared to lose one eye so that his enemy would be blind. What kind of mindless and senseless wickedness is this?
Indeed, the cruelty of the envious is more than the grave! Be careful, dear leader, Jesus Christ was crucified because of envy!
For he knew that the chief priests had delivered him for envy.
Mark 15:10
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business 4G data pack price cut to boost telcos' revenue: UBS AG Telecom stocks have been under pressure lately as industry majors Airtel and Idea announced a major price cut for their data plans, ahead of Reliance Jio's launch on August 15.
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interview EoW attaches assets of Jignesh Shah-founded FTIL The Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of Mumbai police on Tuesday attached assets of Financial Technologies India Ltd (FTIL), under the Maharashtra Protection of Interest of Depositors Act (MPID) Act.
Day after day, he equipped and unloaded inactive F-16 Falcons and A-10C Thunderbolt IIs with munitions in the sweltering South Georgia heat at Moody Air Force Base, Ga.
For 12 years, U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Rusty Harrell, former inactive 68th Fighter Squadron and 347th Operations Support Squadron armament systems technician, enviously watched pilots aviate the skies. As his desire to fly increased, he wondered if he would ever get the chance to be a pilot.
Fortunately, with his coworkers and close friends support and advice, the Slocomb, Ala., native decided to stop wondering and traded in his Battle Dress Uniform for a civilian pilot flight suit.
I envied the pilots because I longed to be like them so bad, but didnt have the time to pursue an active-duty career and fly at the same time, said Harrell. As this burning desire continued each year, I discussed the possibilities of my future plan to my coworkers and close friends. Fortunately, they supported my decision to separate and wanted me to pursue my dream.
When I finally found the courage to commit to my decision of separating from the Air Force, I knew I was going to be giving up some things that I had worked toward, Harrell added. However, the experiences that I had encountered gave me wisdom and [structured discipline] that Ill always appreciate. There were a lot of positive things I took with me when I became a licensed pilot.
After separating, Harrell enjoyed a multitude of corporate flying opportunities. However, he missed the military camaraderie and ended his 12-year hiatus by reenlisting into the Air Force Reserves. As a member of the 476th Fighter Groups aircraft armament section, he was a major contributor, according to Chief Master Sgt. Roy Close, 476th Maintenance Squadron superintendent.
After being a huge helping hand for the aircraft armament section for several years, there was a need for a career assistance advisor in 2014, said Close. Harrell volunteered for the special duty and has since managed all the re-enlistments, extensions and Air Force Specialty bonuses for the [476th Fighter Group].
In the past years, he has [extensively] assisted approximately 75 members over Unit Training Assembly [reserve] weekends to fulfill their career progression which has been a huge impact for the unit and were happy to have him, Close added.
Now, as the 476th Fighter Groups career assistance advisor, Harrell provides that same support and guidance that helped navigate his career path to approximately 240 Airmen.
I advise members on the best way to obtain their goals, said Harrell. I try to get to know the Airmen and ask questions to make them consider their career decisions in a thought provoking perspective for their [immediate and distant future.]
Although my role is to ensure we maintain mission-effectiveness by keeping a healthily manned unit, persuading Airmen to stay in isnt my goal, but rather showing the benefits of continued service while helping reassure they know what they want to accomplish and are committed to their decisions, added Harrell.
Harrell advises Airmen on career decisions as they face upcoming extensions, bonus applications and expiring enlistments. Harrell says he is happy to make a difference in the lives of his Airmen as he continues his Flying Tiger legacy.
I was a Flying Tiger during my first assignment and now have come back in full circle to hopefully retire as one as well, said Harrell. Its fascinating that as I continue my legacy, Im attempting to help Airmen further embrace their Flying Tiger heritage. I love what I do and I want to pursue my military obligation as long as Im physically able to and take care of my [family.]
Once Harrell completes his military obligation, he plans to continue being a medical evacuation pilot at a local airport, servicing emergency ambulatory transports across the Southeastern United States.
July 19, 2016
CIA Rebels Behead Kid And Other U.S. Successes in Syria
The U.S. "regime change" operation in Syria recently tallied up some major successes.
The Syrian Democratic Force, a U.S. sponsored group of mostly Syrian Kurds, is besieging the Islamic State held eastern city of Manbij. According to the UN's Human Rights commissioner 70,000 civilians in Manbij are cut off from all supplies. We have yet to hear calls for an immediate breaking of the siege or for enforced air drops of supplies to these people. Where are all the R2P fans in the Obama administration and all the well paid Syrian opposition propaganda groups on this? That the U.S. has managed to avoid any questions about this siege is surely a success.
Instead of delivering food the U.S. did some different air drops on Marjib:
At least 56 civilians were killed on Tuesday in air strikes north of the besieged Islamic State-held city of Manbij in northern Syria, and residents said they believed the attack was carried out by U.S.-led warplanes, a monitoring group said. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the dead included 11 children, and that dozens more people were wounded.
The CIA finances a long list of proxies in Syria to fight the Syrian government and the millions of people its protects. It has delivered high powered TOW anti-tank weapons to many of these groups:
The groups that the CIA currently allows munitions to be shared with are: ... Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement, (Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki)...
According to the BBC Foreign News producer Riam Dalati it is a group of these Nour al-Din al-Zenki "moderate rebels" who yesterday captured a Palestinian boy of some 8. 10, maybe 12 years, taunted him and accused him of fighting on the Syrian government's side. The boy had no uniform on and had medical infusion tubes in his right arm.
The CIA supported "moderate rebels" then behead the boy with a knife right on the back of that red pickup truck. There are photos and videos of the child alive as well as video of the beheading. The Zinki group, like its CIA supporters, was already known for torturing people.
This shows again that the Obama administration has "done nothing", or at least not enough, to help these democratic forces in Syria. If these moderate people would have received more weapons, they could have used something better than a rusty knife to slaughter the boy (/sarcasm). Indeed the group blames the "international community" for such behavior of its members.
The Obama administration has done its best to shield not only the above "moderates but also al-Qaeda in Syria, aka Jabhat al Nusra, from attacks by the Syrian and Russian forces. U.S. supported "moderate rebels", like the friendly folks above, mixed with al-Qaeda fighters and the U.S. insisted that thereby both are under its ceasefire agreement with Russian forces. Obviously the U.S. has long considered al-Qaeda in Syria to be some local problem that could be used to further "regime change" but would never become a danger for the U.S. itself or its interests. The Russians insist that the group is a legitimate target and rejected new disguised U.S. attempts to shield it.
Something happened though that suddenly let the Obama administration -here Secretary of State Kerry- change tact:
"The fact is that Nusrah is plotting against countries in the world. What happened in Nice last night could just as well have come from Nusrah or wherever it came from as any other entity, because thats what they do."
The fact that the Nice attack followed a script published in an al-Qaeda pamphlet might have helped to finally stop the nefarious schemes of those administration circles who nurtured the group. But again this only happened after some messy incident. Not once has the administration refrained from supporting the most brutal radicals, in Afghanistan, in Libya ,in Syria and elsewhere, until these came back to bite. It seems to have taken a "success" of 80+ killed people in Nice to move the U.S. away from supporting al-Qaeda.
Without al-Qaeda's ruthless fighters the CIA supported "moderate rebels" have no chance to win the war against the Syrian government. The U.S. is starting to follow the Russian script and will attack al-Qaeda and other like groups in Syria. The "regime change by force" project is thereby, for now, practically dead. Turkey is moving away from its nefarious role in Syria and is making friends again with the Syrian allies Russia and Iran. This will give additional impetus to the administration's silent retreat from its "regime change" project.
Posted by b on July 19, 2016 at 16:14 UTC | Permalink
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July 19, 2016
Failed Coup Hastens Change In Turkey's Foreign Policy
The after-coup purges in Turkey continue. The Erdogan administration is firing any public servant who might, just might, not agree with its policies. Today the education ministry suspended 15,200 teachers and education workers. The licenses of 21,000 teacher at private schools were revoked. The Higher Education Commission asked 1577 university deans to resign. The Religious Affairs Directorate sacked 492 personnel, including imams and muftis. The Turkish Prime Ministry sacked 257 of its personnel in the post-coup crackdown. The Turkish secret service M.I.T suspended some 130 of its spies. In total nearly 50,000 people have been suspended, fired or detained by now. Most of these had nothing to do with the botched military coup against the government.
These losses of knowledge and experience, and the fear of those who for now stay, will take some toll on the functioning of the Turkish government and its security services. Turkey will turn inward while Erdogan will use his current popularity to remake the society in his image.
The expansive Turkish plans and projects in Syria and in Iraq will be cut back. Signs of this were already evident before the coup was launched and defeated. (Indeed some suggested that these changes were a reason for the coup.) The coup will reinforce and hasten the changes in Turkey's foreign policy.
Turkey pulled back the military forces it had illegally stationed in Bashiqa near Mosul in Iraq. Earlier the Iraqi government as well as Russia had protested against these forces on Iraqi ground but to no avail. Now they silently retreat. The Iranian agency FARS, though not always reliable, reported yesterday that all Turkish agents in Aleppo province in Syria were called back to Turkey. During the coup event something curious happened to one important person:
The top counter-terrorism official responsible for Turkeys campaign against Islamic State did go to a meeting at the presidential palace in Ankara. He was later found with his hands tied behind his back, shot in the neck, according to a senior official.
Someone used the coup trouble to off the top Turkish ISIS contact. How very convenient. This is the only reported casualty at the presidential palace I have heard of. Who might have had an interest in removing this witness of Turkish relations with ISIS? Could this be some "cleaning the record" before making nice again with Syria and its allies? There is a second data-point that might have such a motive. The Erdogan government is now accusing "Gulenists" for the trouble with Russia and claims that the pilot who shot down a Russian jet also took part in the coup. Another person that stands in the way of better relations with Russia is thereby now imprisoned and moved out of the diplomatic picture.
Russia as well as Iran have loudly supported the Erdogan government against the coup plotters. Erdogan replied in kind:
Sam Tamiz @SamTamiz In Rouhani's call to Erdogan yesterday, Erdogan said #Turkey committed to 'join hands' with #Iran & #Russia to resolve regional conflicts
In early August Erdogan and Putin will meet in persons. All these little dots point to a new direction in Turkish foreign policies. This is one of the Three western worries about Turkey namely "Turkeys ideological drift away from the West."
The former Turkish colonel Hasan Atilla Ugur, in talk with an Iranian news site, claimed that the coup was launched by the CIA directed Gulenists to prevent such change in Turkish foreign policy and the move towards Iran and Russia. (The preacher Fetullah Gulen, accused of orchestrating the coup, is known to be extremely anti-Iran.)
A trusted mouthpiece of Erdoagn, the somewhat lunatic chief editor of YeniSafak, Ibrahim Karagul, accuses the U.S. of attempting to murder Erdogan:
I am saying it loud and clear: The U.S. administration directly planned to kill the president of the Republic of Turkey and implemented this plan. The operation aimed at martyring President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Marmaris was activated through Gulen's terrorists, the assassination team. I repeat: The attack aimed at martyring Erdogan was planned by the U.S., in the U.S., directly through Gulen's terrorists and the instructions were given by them. The Grand National Assembly of Turkey was bombed by a schizophrenic under U.S. protection. Bombing the people's Parliament is declaring war against the people. This attack, like no other in history, was made by the terrorists of a man protected by the U.S.
That Erdogan turns away from "west" and towards Iran and Russia does not yet mean peace for Syria. It will take a while for Erdogan to fully come around. It will be difficult and take months to neutralize all the fanatic proxy forces Turkey introduced to the battlefield. There will be resistance in Turkey against leaving Syria alone. Some of the Syrian "moderate rebels" will turn their wrath against Turkey itself as the Islamic State has already done. The U.S. will of course also continue to intervene no matter what. Over all though this change of attitude in Ankara is welcome news for Damascus.
If Erdogan wants to leave the western realm and gain support from his eastern neighbors he will have to pay a price. Peace in Syria is the one part of it on which Iran, Russia and China will insist.
There will be a Turkish National Security Council meeting on Wednesday after which a big announcement will be made. What might it be? Will Turkey leave NATO or will the move be of lesser significance?
Posted by b on July 19, 2016 at 18:20 UTC | Permalink
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The FTSE 100 closed at an 11-month high yesterday, boosted by a share price surge of tech company ARM Holdings (ARM) after its agreement on a 24.3 billion cash takeover deal by Japans SoftBank Group.
The blue-chip index, which made up of UKs largest 100 companies, ended 0.4% higher at 6695.42 on Monday. The surging share price of ARM holdings, which designs chips used in smartphones and other connected devices, is the main driver of the index rout. ARM closes at 44% higher to 1714.21p on Monday.
ARM said the takeover is a "great deal for the UK" as its suitor pledged to double the company's UK workforce and keep the firm at its Cambridge headquarters.
This would be the largest ever Asian investment into the UK. Big vote of confidence in British business, Philip Hammond said on his Twitter account on Monday morning.
It was reported that Masayoshi Son, chairman and chief executive of the Japanese Softbank group, said the deal highlighted his vote of confidence in the British economy following a Brexit vote in June.
Morningstar analysts view this deal favourably for ARM shareholders, as the offer price implies a 43% premium relative to ARMs most recent closing share price.
Is it Time to Crystallise Gains?
The FTSE 100 has been in recovery mode over the past few weeks following an initial fall after Britain voted to leave the EU on June 23. The FTSE 100 is up 9.9% so far this year. However, ongoing challenges and uncertainties following a Brexit vote could drive further market volatility. But the recent rally does mean that some companies in the FTSE 100 are trading above their fair market value; this may be an opportunity to use gains to invest in other less-pricey stocks.
Morningstar analysts assign stocks with star ratings that can help investors determine whether a particular stock or company is overvalued. If a stock has a one-star or two-star rating, that means Morningstar equity analysts think the shares are overvalued, and the share price could drop in the future.
There are currently three UK stocks that Morningstar equity analysts rate one star, and we highlight them along with Morningstar analyst research. They are all within the mining sector.
3 Overvalued UK Mining Stocks
Rio Tinto (RIO) is the worlds lowest-cost iron ore miner and it was one of the few miners that are profitable throughout the commodity cycle, said Morningstar equity analyst Mathew Hodge. The stock has gained 29.4% year to date. However, as Rio Tintos large iron ore expansions coincided with the peak of China boom, its returns are likely to remain below the cost of capital over the long term, Hodge said.
As a commodity producer, Rio Tinto is a price taker, not a price maker. The companys lack of pricing power is aggravated by the volatile and cyclical nature of commodity prices, said Hodge.
Another global mining giant Anglo American (AAL) was also on the list of one-star overvalued stocks by Morningstar analysts.
Anglo has significant exposure to copper, coal, and iron ore, but it is unique in its significant platinum output, which accounts for roughly 40% of the annual global supply. The companys huge platinum business should benefit from rising household incomes that bolster Chinese demand for automobiles and jewellery, which are categories that collectively account for 84% of platinum and palladium use in China, Morningstar analyst David Wang said.
He explained as China rebalances away from infrastructure and construction-led growth, long-lagging Anglo American will find itself better positioned than most diversified peers. The stock gains 199.4% year to date.
However, persistent problems over labour unrest, periodic calls for nationalisation, and electricity in South Africa, which have weighed on its profits in recent years, cast doubts over future profits and Anglo's rights to those profits. While Anglo has taken steps to improve its financial position by slashing capital expenditures and suspending the dividend, profitability at many of its mines will remain challenged, Wang said.
Royal Dutch Shell (RDSB) is also rated by Morningstar analysts as an overvalued stock. The stock is up 37% year to date. In the current market environment of high costs and low oil prices, Shell faces extremely challenged operating conditions where cash flows are way below capital spending and dividends, and new investment is not value-creative, Morningstar analyst Stephen Simko said. He added that Shell's oil and gas production involves operating in politically unstable regions where leaders or members of its population can be hostile toward Western energy firms.
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Distressed Sales Expected to Return to Pre-Crisis Share in 2017
CoreLogic has cut back the timeline under which it expects to see distressed properties return to the share of sales that prevailed prior to the housing crisis. Its report on distressed sales for April now anticipates that, at the current rate of decline those sales will be back to about 2 percent of all home sales by mid-2017. In previous reports it had predicted that level would be achieved by mid-2018.
Distressed properties accounted for 8.8 percent of home sales in April, down 3 percentage points from April 2015 and 1.7 percentage points from March. REO sales made up 5.7 percent of home sales during the month with short sales making up the balance.
Sales of REO were down 2.4 points from a year earlier to the lowest share for any April since 2007. The short sales share fell below 4 percent in mid-2014 and has remained in the 3-4 percent range since then.
The April share was off the peak of REO sales by 22.2 points. Distressed sales had a 32.4 percent share of the home sale market at the peak in January 2009 with sales of REO accounting for 27.9 percent of total sales. Distressed properties are usually sold at a discount so tend to put downward pressure on home prices.
CoreLogic said distressed sales shares fell in all but seven states. The highest share was in Maryland at 19.5 percent followed by Connecticut (18.6 percent), Michigan (18.1 percent), Florida (16.4 percent) and Illinois (16.3 percent).
Florida had a 5.3 percentage point drop in its distressed sales share from a year earlier, the largest decline of any state while California has declined furthest from its peak, falling 60.1 percentage points from January 2009's 67.5 percent share. Oil states continued to see year-over-year declines in their distressed sales shares with Texas down 1.3 percentage points and Oklahoma and North Dakota both dipping by 0.2 percentage point. North Dakota in fact had the smallest distressed sales share in the nation at 2.4 percent.
Of the 25 largest Core Based Statistical Areas (CBSAs) based on mortgage loan count, the Baltimore area had the largest share of distressed sales at 19.5 percent, followed by Chicago (18.5 percent), Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater. (17.9 percent), Orlando (17.5 percent) and Newark (15.7 percent). Three of the largest 25 CBSAs had year-over-year increases in their distressed sales share: Nassau-Suffolk Counties in New York was up 1 point; Cambridge-Newton-Framingham, Massachusetts rose 0.8 percentage points and Newark gained 0.7 point.
Vendor Updates; Events and Training; Secondary Marketing Activity Picking Up
Summer time barbecues, time in the sun, fun on the water unless youre in Michigan and you believe that rivers flow in circles and one spends three days on it!
Switching gears to the markets, by now most everyone knows about BREXIT, in which the UK decided to leave the EU. This set off waves in global financial markets and raised concerns that the turmoil could lead to a global recession that would trip up the U.S. economy as well. Wells Fargo believes that these fears are somewhat overblown as they relate to the U.S. economy. Wells Fargo's economists do believe, however, that the move will lead to slower growth in the U.S. during the second half of the year. Brexit will not create any direct problems, but it brings up some indirect problems such as slower growth throughout Europe and around the world which would reduce U.S. exports, and U.S. economic policy uncertainty leading to our businesses being more cautious, therefore less expansion, purchasing of new equipment, and less hiring of additional workers.
For all the gloom, the U.S economy still looks pretty solid. The third release of first quarter GDP was stronger than expected, particularly gross 10% domestic income (GDI), which rose at a 2.9 percent annualized rate. This is far better than the rest of the world.
I went to Chili's recently, and to my dismay, they had changed their $20 dinner for 2 to a $22 dinner for 2. I mention this because I went in not knowing that according to Comerica Economic weekly, the consumer prices for June went up 0.2%. However, on $20 that should only be a 40 cent increase in the meal price... the nerve! On to other news, U.S. data released last week was mostly positive, adding to expectations for a rebound in real GDP growth. This data combined with the rally in U.S. equities diminishes two lingering fears: the fear of a sudden downturn in U.S. job growth, and the fear of a spillover from BREXIT. Instead, they see the economy picking up momentum. The Producer Price Index went up 0.5% in June with a push coming from petroleum products. Retail sales increased by 0.6%, beating expectations. Industrial production also beat expectations, increasing 0.6%. The National Federation of Independent Business Small Business Optimism index increased by 0.7 points in June to 94.5, the third monthly gain.
Fannie Mae turned some heads yesterday by setting up to sell debt without government backing. In this case it is a $1.3 billion credit-risk transfer (CRT) deal, expected to price today. It is secured by more than 180,000 mortgages totaling $42.2 billion, according to a Kroll Bond Rating Agency pre-sale report.
Not wanting to be left behind, JP Morgan Chase is out there with a new security as well - about 10% of its new $2.65 billion pool of Chase home loans (Chase Mortgage Trust 2016-2; 55% conforming and 45% non-conforming). The bank is retaining the bulk of the deal and offering only around $270 million of securities for sale. And FirstKey Mortgage also began pre-marketing a new mortgage bond - a rated $975 million securitization of re-performing loans.
Banks have been very happy sitting on their mortgages, especially those originated through their own retail channel and especially jumbo loans. Not only is the income decent, but the cross-selling opportunities good, AND why pay the cost of securitizing the loans? Analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch said recently they expect to see only $51 billion of private RMBS (residential mortgage-backed security) issuance this year, down from $60.4 billion in 2015.
Of course the demand by investors in the secondary markets determines the pricing for borrowers in the primary markets, and yesterday U.S. Treasuries didn't do much, and what they did was attributed to the "unwinding" of the Turkish coup-based rally. And the announcement of the mega-corporate new issue from Teva Pharmaceutical which was expected to total $15 billion across six tranches which threw off the supply/demand equation somewhat.
Today for unabashed excitement we had the June Building Permits and Housing Starts figures: +1.5% and +4.8%, respectively, much stronger than expected. We closed Monday with the yield on the 10-year sitting around 1.59%, and after the housing figures we're at 1.56% with agency MBS a shade better.
Upcoming training & events
Are you going to be at Western Secondary in San Francisco next week? "If you are, come visit Model Match at The SQUARE on Wednesday the 27th from 8:00 - 8:50 am, we will be speaking on the topic of how to Grow Production Organically: The Model Match Process. Model Match is an innovative technology platform that supports individual and team hiring goals for companies in the Mortgage and Financial Services Industries. We cracked the code to enable your leadership, management, and business development teams to recruit and retain stronger and more productive production talent (individuals and teams). We have pioneered the Science and also train in the Art to organically recruit and retain production. Through proprietary work flows and processes, we help you define your ideal "Model Match." This is coupled with training to unify the messaging and communication of Value Propositions to be better equipped with a clear and consistent message when it comes to recruiting. Our clients have been able to organize and execute more effectively with our disciplined approach to production recruiting. To learn more you can request a demo. If you are going to be at Western Secondary and would like to meet up, reach out to Steve Rennie to coordinate.
MBA Education's FHA Multifamily Underwriting Training Program is the most extensive and rigorous curriculum of its kind in the Industry. It is designed to set the standard for skills required by multifamily underwriters in the field of FHA lending. If you ready to take your training to the next level, Apply today or visit online to learn more. MBA Education is accepting applications for participation in the FHA MAP program.
California Mortgage Association has upcoming Seminars providing content-rich educational information relating to the mortgage industry and private lending. The next seminar is July 28th and 29th in San Diego. Additional information can be found on the CMA website.
On 8/2 Colorado's CoAMP will host a one-hour webinar featuring Greg Plunkett with Credit Plus. This webinar will cover everything you need to know about Fannie's new Trending Credit Data.
If you're in California, Summer CAMP 2016 will be held at Napa's Westin Verasa. Summer CAMP 2016 provides attendees the opportunity to meet exclusive vendors and learn from the best in the business. Registration opens on-site on Sunday August 7. The Expo Courtyard opens Monday, August 8 and closes Tuesday August 9. Keynotes and break-out sessions also take place Monday, August 8-Tuesday, August 9.
Get ready to inspire your team on August 12th at the CMLA's Developmental Leadership Forum in Colorado. Deadline to participate is Friday, August 5th.
Save the date for California MBA's 21st Annual Western States Loan Servicing Conference, August 14 - 16 in San Diego. Sneak peek details can be seen on the California MBA website.
The Mortgage Collaborative's Summer Lender Member Conference will take place August 21-23 at the Four Seasons Hotel & Resort in Denver, CO. The conference will feature a powerful agenda filled with presentations from top industry leaders, relevant educational breakout tracks, and a series of peer-to peer networking sessions and events. For more information, contact Rich Swerbinsky.
In light of increased and more sophisticated cyber threats, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) has developed an assessment tool to help companies understand, mitigate and manage potential cyber threats. Join the MBA and leading cybersecurity experts for an interactive conversation on how to successfully implement and use the tool for your unique business needs. Register now for FFIEC Cybersecurity Assessment Tool Deep-Dive Workshop September 27 in Los Angeles.
Vendor news of note? It never stops, especially as the reliance upon vendors continues to increase.
In vendor news, Alight Inc. announced that Evergreen Home Loans and First Guaranty Mortgage Corporation (FGMC) have selected the Alight Mortgage Lending platform to streamline branch interaction, support volume goals and increase productivity. Alight Mortgage Lending is the mortgage industry's only platform for real-time multiple scenario analysis. Alight connects to a lender's general ledger and loan origination systems and to capital markets providers to feed data directly into firm financials. Management can run limitless numbers of scenarios and see them ripple through the entire value chain to P&L, balance sheet and cash flow to then make decisions based on an informed, forward view of enterprise financials and operational metrics.
And STRATMOR is pleased to introduce STRATMOR Insights, a free monthly Report that will provide interesting, data-driven articles delivering insights from STRATMOR's mortgage industry surveys, programs and consulting experience. The articles in the report are filled with excerpts and charts from STRATMOR's proprietary mortgage industry research - and provide valuable information to help identify and benefit from the latest trends. The featured article for the July report is a piece written by STRATMOR Group Senior Partner Garth Graham and takes a fresh look at the evolution and outlook for the Digital Mortgage. To view and download the July Report, Click Here. If, you would like to receive STRATMOR Insights, on an ongoing basis, Click Here to Register.
Recently Secure Insight was named by National Mortgage Professional Magazine as one of the top "Visionary Technology Organizations" in the mortgage industry. SSI popularized the phrase "vetting" in the industry and was the first company back in 2012 (then known as Secure Settlements) to develop and manage a process to evaluate and monitor settlement agents for risk. Company CEO Andrew Liput said that SSI will be launching "version 2.1" of its vetting tool sometime this quarter which he claims will include technology enhancements incorporating first-to-market vendor evaluation concepts not previously available from any other vendor management firm. The company also expects that its database will surpass 50,000 settlement agent records by 12/31 which Liput believes is "critical mass" that allows the SSI database to be viewed as an industry utility.
Jobs and Announcements
Michigan Mutual, Inc., an agency direct/seller/servicer/issuer based in Port Huron, Michigan, and much more astute than those involved in the story above, is thrilled about the continued growth and success of its Wholesale teams in California and all across the U.S. Michigan Mutual is currently seeking Wholesale Account Executives to join their sales teams in California, Washington, the upper Midwest and Southeast regions. If you are a capable mortgage professional seeking an opportunity to join a thriving company with a positive culture, strong corporate values, and a clear vision for the future, please contact Director of Wholesale Lending Al Crisanty (916-761-1624) or Karley Warwick. You may also visit MM's careers page to complete an application.
On the retail side, "If you're a producing branch manager or mortgage loan originator, you know that the more loans you close, the better. Assurance Financial has built a reputation for closing loans on time. Our operations staff supports you and your MLO team so you can focus on originating new loans, rather than worrying about closing your pipeline. Assurance is expanding throughout the Southeast and Southwest and looking to hire branch managers and MLOs in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. For more information, contact Paul Peters, CMB at 225-239-7948 or visit Assurance.
On the Ops side of things, Indecomm Global Services, a leading provider of mortgage technology, training, and outsourcing services is seeking experienced Underwriters. Clients include prominent top tier, mid-tier lenders, and regional lenders as well as title and settlement companies. The underwriter will review regulatory compliance with disclosures, validate data used by an automated underwriting system to decision loans, and perform a comprehensive review of the appraisal report. The underwriter will determine if the loan meets underwriting guidelines, product guidelines, investor requirements and eligibility requirements. Interested candidates should send their resume to HR Manager Candy Mechels.
The Massachusetts MBA spread the word that Karl "Chip" Case passed away. He was recipient of the MMBA Lifetime Achievement award, and was Professor Emeritus at Wellesley College. He was also a founding partner of the Case Shiller Index of home prices, and was well-known both regionally and nationally for his pioneering research on the housing market.
A bomb threat led to the evacuation of Nationstar Mortgages corporate headquarters Monday.About 900 employees work at the Coppell, Texas, headquarters, which was vacant for about two hours Monday in the wake of the threat, according to a HousingWire report. A company spokesperson told HousingWire that the threat was not made against Nationstar itself, but a building near the company headquarters.Kelly Ann Doherty, Nationstars senior vice president of corporate communications, told HousingWire that the company was notified by Dallas police that a bomb threat had been made against a building in the vicinity.At the police departments request and in the best interest of our employees safety we closed that facility, she said.According to HousingWire, the company headquarters was evacuated around 8 a.m. Central time, and the all clear was given around 10 a.m. At that time, Nationstar employees returned to work.
Thanks to the shale revolution, the U.S. has plenty of natural gas of its own. All along the eastern seaboard, a chain of import terminals built when the country expected to get its fuel from abroad now lie idle.
Except one.
For reasons that have to do with environmental politics and geology, New England is bucking the trend. Three or four times a month, a police helicopter escorts giant ships through Boston Harbor, as they deliver liquefied natural gas from Trinidad to a terminal on the Mystic River.
Why buy from the Caribbean when so much cheap gas is pumped out of Pennsylvania and Ohio? One objection is the new pipelines needed to bring it to New England. The Northeast is famously cold in winter, and it sits on beds of granite that make underground fuel storage a problem, so gas and power prices typically spike way above the rest of the country when there's a freeze.
But using shale gas to cut the bills means a longer-term commitment to fossil fuels, and any proposed pipeline route triggers local objections: it will leave a scar along the Catskill Mountains or pose a safety risk to residential neighborhoods. That's the dilemma that has given Engie SA's import facility near Boston, unlike all its peers, a new lease on life.
"We've been competing with pipelines since we opened," Carol Churchill, a spokeswoman for the French utility in Massachusetts, said by phone. Once the gas arrives in Boston, some of it goes straight to an adjacent Exelon Corp. power station and the rest is transported via existing pipes or by truck. "It doesn't make sense to build a pipeline to satisfy demand for 30 to 40 days a year," Churchill says.
That argument has seen off a few potential rivals. Kinder Morgan Inc. scrapped its proposed $3.3 billion Northeast Energy Direct project in April after failing to sign up enough customers. The Constitution Pipeline, intended to bring Marcellus gas from Pennsylvania, has been held up because New York denied a water permit amid concern about contamination of the city's supply.
Solution or stopgap?
Instead, New England relies on tankers like the BW GDF Suez Everett, a regular visitor, whose logbook reflects the surge in Yankee demand. It used to roam the world's seas, putting in at places like Singapore, Nigeria and Yemen; this year, it's been plying a straight shuttle between Trinidad, where it loads up with LNG, and Boston.
Engie's terminal there looked like it was sliding into disuse a couple of years ago, but now it's taking in more cargoes than at any time since 2012. It supplied 11 percent of New England's gas in January, according to Energy Department and Bloomberg data.
To pipeline-builders, that's a stopgap not a solution. They point out that New England, like other parts of the U.S., has a growing appetite for natural gas in homes and power plants, as dirtier fossil fuels like coal and oil are phased out. Gas-fired plants are providing more than half of the Northeast's power supply this month, up from 15 percent in 2000.
Spectra Energy Corp., based in Houston, is months away from completing an expansion of existing pipes in the northeastern region that's still drawing protests: Former Vice President Al Gore's daughter Karenna was among 23 people arrested at a digging site last month. And Spectra has a more ambitious project lined up. Access Northeast would bring 925 million cubic feet of Pennsylvanian gas a day enough to generate as much power as five nuclear reactors. It could save New Englanders $2.5 billion a year on electricity and gas bills, the company says.
Richard Kruse, Spectra's vice president of regulatory affairs, acknowledges that there's now a "coordinated nationwide effort in opposition to natural gas." But he says there's no way around the need for new pipelines in the Northeast: Even if the region opts to remain dependent on the more expensive fuel carried in by the tankers, it still has to be distributed.
Winter prices
"If people want to rely on LNG imports and you want reliability, you are going to have to make additional investments to deliver that gas," Kruse said. "The market has grown and that market needs gas in the winter."
It's during New England winters that the argument becomes acute. When the polar vortex plunged half the country into an Arctic chill in 2014, prices everywhere surged but nowhere as much as the Northeast. That January, spot gas in New England reached a record of almost $80 per million British thermal units, or 15 times the price of Marcellus gas at the same time. Even in a normal winter, the region pays extra. Gas for delivery next January via Spectra's New England network currently costs about $8.46 per million Btu, compared with $3.16 for Pennsylvanian shale gas.
"The population up there has to pay exorbitant power bills, and the number one reason for that is that local gas, indigenous to the U.S., 300 miles away, the cheapest in the world, can't get up there," said Robert Christensen, an analyst with Drexel Hamilton LLC in New York. "It's sinful."
Environmentalists say pipelines are expensive too, though that's usually not the main objection. Building more of them "would lock us into decades of infrastructure for fossil fuels and crowd out the opportunity for clean energy," said Kelly Martin, deputy director of the Sierra Club's Beyond Dirty Fuels campaign.
Alternative power sources like wind and solar energy are getting cheaper, so energy companies should make do with the existing pipelines as the country transitions, Martin says. She acknowledges that the system needs to be able to cope with surges in demand, but says that's best handled by investing in more efficient energy use installing new light bulbs or home appliances that use less power and what the industry calls "demand response": offering customers incentives to cut their consumption at times when the grid is under the most strain.
Insurance policy
Industry analysts say it's risky to leave small margins at crunch times. Pipelines provide one kind of insurance policy, ensuring there's always spare capacity. There are other ways to avoid shortages. The past two winters, the New England grid has been offering generators incentives to stockpile LNG.
So long as the debate rages, there's likely to be a role for Engie's Boston terminal and its tanker-loads of Trinidadian gas. They're no cleaner to burn than the shale alternative, and certainly not cheaper. But they do offer a way to boost supplies at times of maximum demand like icy New England winters without making new long-term commitments to fossil fuels.
"We bring LNG to satisfy that peaking need," Engie's Churchill said. "It's worked since 1971."
Fernando Edwardo Corral Jr., 30, was arrested at approximately 10:30 p.m. on July 15 on charges of aggravated sexual assault of a child, a first-degree felony, and indecency with a child by sexual contact, a second-degree felony.
Helen Flores Jimenez, 50, was arrested at approximately 5:06 p.m. on July 16 on a charge of theft of property with at least two prior convictions, a state jail felony.
Joseph Jacob Sauceda, 32, was arrested at approximately 4 p.m. on July 16 on a charge of possession of cocaine, a third-degree felony.
Keely Ann Klein, 28, was arrested at approximately 3 p.m. on July 17 on a charge of possession of methamphetamine, a third-degree felony.
Maribel Mendoza Muro, 36, was arrested at approximately 2:35 a.m. on July 17 on the charge of aggravated robbery, a first-degree offense.
Jesse David Navarrette, 25, was arrested at approximately 10 p.m. on July 17 on a charge of possession of methamphetamine, a state jail felony.
Victor Duran Sing, 36, was arrested at approximately 8 a.m. on July 17 on a charge of possession of cocaine, a third-degree felony.
Daniel Isaiha Howell, 31, was arrested at approximately 5:30 p.m. on July 17 on a charge of criminal mischief (warrant), a state jail felony.
Dominique Xzdrian Krumnow, 23, was arrested at approximately 8:07 a.m. on July 17 on a charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, a second-degree felony.
Juan Diaz Gomez, 30, was arrested at approximately 12:40 a.m. on July 18 on a charge of possession of cocaine, a state jail felony.
Hector Alfredo Garza, 20, was arrested at approximately 4 a.m. on July 18 on a charge of possession of methamphetamine, a state jail felony.
Note: No places of residence were reported.
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Source: Odessa Police Department
The largest red state of them all is effectively sitting on the sidelines as Republicans begin their national convention in Cleveland.
Texas holds 38 electoral votes. This presidential election cycle started with four Republican candidates with strong ties to the state. Former Gov. Rick Perry, U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush were all reared in the state and at least partly schooled here. Theyve got fundraising networks in Texas, and Perry and Cruz have won statewide elections here.
You might think, even with those guys out of the race, that the winner or the Republican Party would be seeking their counsel or their influence. Its true that Perry has been pulling for Donald Trump ever since Cruz left the race. And Cruz, who hasnt hitched his wagon to the nominee, will have a speaking part in Cleveland.
If theres a courtship going on here, its an odd one. Just look at where the Texas delegation is seated in the back and off to the side.
Why would the Republicans court their biggest electoral prize anyhow? The state is basically in the bag. Texas hasnt voted for a Democrat in a presidential election since 1976, and only the Watergate scandal and the backlash against a Republican president broke a red streak that actually began in 1968 the year Lyndon Johnson didnt seek re-election.
Six of the seven presidential ballots after that 1976 race had a Texan named Bush in either the first or second spot. The Republicans won with them on the ballot, and with them off of it.
When it came time to pick a running mate, Trump ignored the state. No need to court Texas voters; everyone assumes theyll vote for the GOP candidate, no matter who it is. Cruz or Perry might have helped sew up some factions where Trump is weak, but he decided on Indiana Gov. Mike Pence for that.
Texas is an essential piece of a Republican win. On the other hand are some wistful Democrats who imagine what a lock they would have on national politics if Texas could be flipped to their side.
It would be expensive to win, however, even though it has proved to be cheap to hold. National Republican campaigns dont have to advertise here, which is great for them since Texas is big and expensive. And Democrats cant afford to advertise here; their money is better spent in swing states where their chances are better.
If theres a courtship going on here, its an odd one.
That leaves Texas off to the side, a political wallflower at the presidential dance. Only three Texans have been named as speakers at the convention: Cruz, U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, and former Navy Seal Marcus Luttrell.
Cruz could easily make a splash in Ohio. He was the last candidate with a big following to leave the race for the Republican nomination and one of the most prominent conservatives withholding a Trump endorsement.
But this doesnt feel like a convention with a lot of Texas seasoning, like past conventions where Bushes and people from their political circles were sitting at the head table.
If political conventions featured financial players like they feature orators, that might be flipped. Texans are hugely important on the financial side of these races even if the voters arent being fed and watered. Those quieter Texans are, as usual, all over the race; early reports are that Trump raised $7.8 million on a Texas finance swing last month, for instance.
Texas could have a more visible presence later in the month, when the Democrats meet in Philadelphia: Well know when they announce their speaker lineup. Its a cheap way no advertising costs! to make a play for Texas voters, just in case something politically seismic is coming in November.
Maybe, maybe not. The state itself seems to have landed in the same position as its candidates: Also ran.
We probably shouldnt feel bad. California isnt getting much love, either. Its the single biggest pot of electoral votes. While it hasnt been as consistent in its politics as Texas, the Golden State is solidly in the blue column.
Its easy to take the big states for granted this year: Consistency has made them unworthy of much attention.
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The Texas Tribune is a nonpartisan, nonprofit media organization that informs Texans and engages with them - about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
It has been a remarkable few weeks around the world.
Britain voted to leave the European Union. China rejected an international courts ruling on the South China Sea dispute. A truck rammed into a crowd in Nice, France, killing 84 people, in an attack for which the Islamic State subsequently claimed responsibility. And, to top it all off, a coup attempt in Turkey during the weekend has reignited debate about the countrys continued membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Given all these developments, many are wondering how presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump would handle such events if he became president. Trump is a businessman with no real political record. It has becoming increasingly clear that Trump views the world very differently than the U.S. foreign policy establishment.
And, perhaps more importantly, so do his supporters.
A poll from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs released Monday contrasts the views of Trumps core supporters and Republicans who wanted another candidate to win their partys nomination. It reveals a remarkable divergence of opinion about the world and Americas place in it among supporters of the same party.
When looking at the difference in opinions between those who name Trump as their top choice for president (31 percent) and those who name a different candidate (65 percent), a few themes stand out. First, almost 70 percent of supporters of other potential candidates said they favored the United States playing an active role in world affairs, but only 55 percent of core Trump supporters agreed.
Trump supporters are also more likely to question foreign policy orthodoxy, with only 34 percent saying that maintaining existing alliances is a very effective way to achieve U.S. foreign policy goals.
That pattern continues with regard to NATO, one of the worlds longest-lasting and most important military alliances. Only around four in 10 core Trump supporters say that NATO is essential to U.S. security vs. 61 percent of those who favored other candidates.
These concerns are reflected in ideas about trade, too. Only half of core Trump supporters say globalization is good for the country, while 62 percent of those who preferred other candidates do. Trump supporters are also more concerned about protecting American jobs (86 percent deem it very important, compared with 72 percent of other Republicans), and less than half (47 percent) supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, as opposed to 58 percent of supporters of other candidates, the poll found.
Attitudes to immigration also diverge. Almost seven out of 10 core Trump supporters say legal immigration should be decreased, compared with 45 percent of other Republicans. Trump backers are also more than 20 percentage points less likely to express a favorable view of Middle Eastern and Mexican immigrants currently in the United States and a whopping 93 percent favor building a wall on the border with Mexico, vs. 72 percent of other Republicans.
Core Trump supporters are more likely to say that controlling the flow of refugees and migrants will be effective in countering terrorist attacks; 86 percent believe this, compared with 74 percent of other Republicans.
And they are also more likely to say that the use of torture can be effective.
The poll was conducted between June 10 and June 27, with a national sample of 2,061 adults. The Chicago Council on Global Affairs says the margin of error varies between plus 2.2 and plus 3.5 points depending on the question.
CLEVELAND (AP) Donald Trump's campaign on Tuesday tried to brush off charges of plagiarism and recover quickly from an unforced stumble as he advanced within steps of officially seizing the Republican nomination for president.
Accusations that Trump's wife, Melania Trump, had lifted portions of her Monday night speech from Michelle Obama's 2008 convention address consumed the conversation on Day 2 of the Republican National Convention.
Trump's campaign and allies described the controversy as a meaningless distraction, but offered no explanation for why two passages in the speeches each 30 words or longer matched nearly word-for-word.
"This is totally blown out of proportion," Trump adviser Paul Manafort told The Associated Press. "They're not even sentences. They're literally phrases. I was impressed somebody did their homework to think that that could be possibly done."
The dustup came at an inconvenient moment. Barring a last-minute jolt to the proceedings, the New York businessman is hours away from a roll call vote that will make official something the political establishment once deemed impossible. "His quest will finally come to an end," Manafort said. "It will have happened."
The campaign had hoped to relish the moment, having quieted persistent worries about its competence and pushed past raucous party divisions. The plagiarism question ensures neither worry will be far behind.
As the convention opened Monday, the Cleveland arena resembled the convention-floor battles of old as aggrieved anti-Trump Republicans protested the adoption by voice vote of rules aimed at quashing an already flailing effort to deny him the prize. Instead of a manicured message of unity, viewers saw the fractured face of a party still coming to grips with the polarizing man of the moment.
But to borrow the parlance of Trump the businessman, the deal should be sealed Tuesday night.
That's when the roll call of states is to unfold, delivering the delegates to make him the standard-bearer after a rollicking primary season that saw him vanquish 16 rivals. Typically in both parties, the roll call is heavy with ceremonial flourishes, good cheer and puffery about the virtues of each state. This time, it's also another opportunity for discord to be heard.
Dissident delegates from several states planned to insist on abstaining or backing other candidates, Regina Thomson of Colorado, a leader of a group calling itself Free the Delegates. Their position, she said, is that "I'm not here to be a rubber stamp or a pawn."
On Monday, the floor flight gave way to a lineup of hard-edged, prime-time speeches in which Republicans painted a grim picture of the country's future and an evener darker view of Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Speakers accused Clinton of lying, "putting all of our children's lives at risk," and threatening the nation's security. When delegates chanted "Lock her up!" retired Gen. Michael Flynn responded from the podium: "You're damn right. There's nothing wrong with that."
With a rock-star entrance, Trump changed the tone and introduced his wife, Melania. She traced her own life story, coming to America from Slovenia, and painted a softer, more rounded portrait of her husband than the hard-nosed, insult-throwing candidate voters have seen at every turn. She praised his "simple goodness" and his loyalty to and love of family while noting the "drama" that comes with Trump in politics.
"If you want someone to fight for you and your country, I can assure you, he is the guy," Mrs. Trump told delegates.
Her speech contained several striking resemblances to Michele Obama's. For example, when she said her parents taught her "that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise, that you treat people with respect."
Obama, in her 2008 speech, said she was raised to believe that "you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond, that you do what you say you're going to do, that you treat people with dignity and respect."
Other sections of Mrs. Trump's Trump speech also tracked closely with Obama's remarks.
The campaign said Monday night's speech was written by a "team of writers" who had spoken with Mrs. Trump about her life experiences and included fragments that reflected her thinking. The White House declined to comment Tuesday morning, but was expected to answer questions about the similarities later in the day.
Mrs. Trump's speech was part of a four-day campaign to show the softer side of the tough-talking showman. On Tuesday night, two of his children will pick up where she left off. Tiffany Trump, his 22-year-old daughter from his marriage to Marla Maples, and Donald Trump Jr., his eldest son and an executive vice president at The Trump Organization, will take the podium.
Former GOP presidents, the home-state governor and other top Republicans have skipped Trump's convention, but Tuesday's bill highlights some establishment support.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie planned to address the convention along with Sen. Steve Daines, who had earlier planned to go fly-fishing in Montana.
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An inmate who worked in the kitchen area of the French Robertson Unit 10 miles northeast of Abilene killed correctional officer Mari Johnson, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice alleged in a statement Monday.
Inmate Dillion Gage Compton, 21, who worked in the prison's kitchen area, attacked Johnson when she entered a storage area, according to the department. Johnson, 55, was found unresponsive early Saturday and later pronounced dead.
Compton is serving a 25-year prison sentence related to a 2011 conviction in Dallas County of aggravated sexual assault of a child under the age of 14, according to the agency.
Following the attack on Johnson, Compton was transferred from the Robertson Unit, a maximum security, all-male facility, to "an undisclosed maximum-security TDCJ unit," according to the agency.
Investigators with the department's inspector general's office are continuing to gather evidence in Johnson's death, and plan to eventually present their findings to the Jones County district attorney's office. The office is investigating the incident as a homicide.
Johnson's death comes almost exactly a year after rookie prison guard Timothy Davison, 47, was beaten to death by an inmate inside the Barry B. Telford Unit in New Boston in northeastern Texas.
Davison was escorting Billy Joel Tracy, 37, on the morning of July 15 when the handcuffed inmate freed one hand from his restraints and began beating the officer. After pulling him to the ground, Tracy began beating Davison with a two-foot "pry bar" tool that guards carry to unlock the small meal tray openings in cell doors.
In 2007, correctional officer Susan Canfield, 59, was killed during an escape attempt at the Wynne Unit in Huntsville.
Gov. Greg Abbott on Saturday afternoon issued a statement in which he said the state of Texas was mourning for Johnson, saying that she "was senselessly murdered."
Abbott added, "Texas will ensure the perpetrator receives swift justice, and TDCJ has been instructed to take all necessary measures to enhance the safety of their staff to prevent such tragedies."
GALVESTON, Texas (AP) Authorities say a motorcyclist has been charged with intoxication manslaughter after fatally striking a 4-year-old boy playing on the side of the road in Southeast Texas.
Capt. Mike Benevides of the Galveston County sheriff's office says witnesses told investigators the boy was playing with a toy truck when he was struck Sunday evening in the Bacliff community, located northwest of Galveston. Benavides says 37-year-old Justin James Forsyth is accused of driving on the wrong side of the road when he struck the child.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) Residents along the U.S.-Mexico border are feeling ignored in the midst of a U.S. presidential election in which immigration, border security and a proposed wall are being hotly debated, a poll released Monday suggests.
A Cronkite News-Univision News-Dallas Morning News border poll found a majority of urban residents surveyed on both sides of the border are against the building of a wall between the two countries and believe the campaign's tone is damaging relations.
Residents feel Democrats and Republicans are ignoring their concerns and aren't proposing solutions to help their economies or combat drug trafficking and human smuggling, journalists who gathered reaction to the poll found.
According to the poll, 86 percent of border residents in Mexico and 72 percent of those questioned in the U.S. were against building a wall.
The economy/jobs and crime/drugs tied at 37 percent each for the most important issue for border residents, the poll found.
The poll surveyed 1,427 residents in 14 border sister cities to assess attitudes and opinions on the local economy, immigration and border security. It was conducted in April and May.
The majority of interviews were done in Spanish on both sides of the border, and the margin of error was 2.6 percent.
Michael Baselice, president and CEO of Baselice & Associates Inc., the Texas-based public research opinion firm that conducted the survey, said he didn't believe the predominance of Spanish speakers who participated in the survey skewed the results. He said around the same percentage of Spanish speakers were surveyed in a similar border poll in 2001.
Baselice said residents on the U.S. sides were randomly chosen and surveyed by telephone. Residents in Mexico were randomly selected from targeted neighborhoods in certain cities and surveyed face-to-face, he said.
Among the questions asked: "Should the U.S. build a wall between Mexico and the U.S. in an effort to secure the border?" And "Please describe in your own words the three most important issues or problems facing you and your family."
The survey comes as Donald Trump prepares to accept the GOP presidential nomination. While earning praise from some conservatives, Trump has drawn scrutiny from immigration activists and others for promising to build a wall and deport immigrants who are in the country illegally.
New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican and the nation's only Latina governor, has denounced Trump for some of his comments about Mexican immigrants and said she strongly opposes a wall.
The two-term governor has worked for years with her counterparts south of the border to build an international economic hub in the region. A border wall would hurt trade and not get to the root causes of illegal immigration and drug trafficking, she has said.
Many residents expressed concerns over security but want to be better connected to the other side of the border, said Alfredo Corchado, a former Dallas Morning News Mexico City bureau chief who now serves as an editor on the Borderlands desk at Cronkite News.
"And walls are not going to do that," Corchado said.
Angela Kocherga, director of the Borderlands Bureau of Cronkite News, said the residents surveyed already live in areas with border fences.
"(The wall) is too simplistic a solution," she said. "They aren't asking for open borders, but they are asking for real solutions, real thoughtful approaches to the issues along the border."
The survey included seven pairs of sister cities along the border, from California/Baja California to Arizona/Sonora and Texas/Tamaulipas.
Each summer high school students from across the country come to the Michigan Tech campus to study a variety of disciplines in the Summer Youth Programs (SYP). Recently four students from Pakistan made the long trip to Houghton and were pleased with what they found.
The cities of Islamabad, Pakistan, and Houghton, Michigan are worlds apartabout 6,730 miles from each other. Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan has a population of about two million, is considered one of the oldest cities in Asia. It has a humid, subtropical climate.
Houghton, on the other hand, has a population under eight thousand, was founded in the 1800s and averages nearly two hundred inches of snow annually.
When four students from the Roots International Schools in Islamabad and their chaperone participated in one of the week-long Summer Youth Programs (SYP) at Michigan Technological University last week, it wasnt population or climate differences the students were talking about, but the fantastic educational experience.
This was a great opportunity for me, said Laraib Akhtar, who enrolled in the geological engineering program. The classes I took will help me a lot in my future. We dont often get an opportunity like this (in Pakistan). This was a great chance to explore our future, she said.
The students who traveled to Tech were among more than 300 from the Roots International Schools participating in camps and internships throughout the world this summer.
Accompanying the four students was Shamaila Idress, a counselor for the school whose daughter Maheen Faraz participated as well. She said the Roots school seeks out opportunities such as SYP, at the urging of the schools CEO Walid Mushtaq.
Its important to our CEO that our students experience expansion, exposure, critical thinking and open mindedness, she explained.
This was the first trip to America for all of the Pakistani visitors, who were impressed with the splendor of the Keweenaw.
Its so green here. And so beautiful, Akhtar said.
Faraz, the youngest of the group, enrolled in the digital photography program and found abundant subject material.
From Left, Maheen Faraz, Hanana Anwar, chaperone Shamaila Idress, Shazil Rasool and Laraib Akhtar are seen July 14 on the campus of Michigan Tech. The students from Pakistan attending Summer Youth Programs.
Ive enjoyed everything, said Faraz, who has yet to choose a definite career path. Ive learned so much, and Im kind of enjoying whatever Ive seen. I really like the scenery here.
Hanana Anwar, on the other hand, is very specific about her education and career path. My majors will be law and psychology, with my career goal to go into the foreign service, she said.
Anwar enrolled in Psychology in the Real World, and she couldnt be happier with her experience.
This is a very good place for me to be, she said. The teachers are awesome, and they give all they have.
Idress, who is not only a counselor at the Roots International School, but publishes the schools newsletter, said she arranges all the summer activities. She said the visit to Michigan Tech by the students came about because of connections between Houghton and Islamabad.
Our CEO has been involved with Michigan Tech for some time, she said. This was a result of that relationship, and it has been very successful.
The only male in the group, Shazil Rasool, participated in geological engineering, and like his classmate Akhtar, has plans to become a geological engineer. He said he knew as soon as he started activities that he was in the right place.
I knew this was what I wanted for my future. This university gave me such a good opportunity.
"This is a very good place for me to be. The teachers are awesome and they give all they have." Hanana Anwar
Rasool said he wanted to go to Michigan Techs Summer Youth Program the moment he heard about it, back in Pakistan. He said the experience exceeded his expectations.
The facilities here impressed me; they were beyond what I expected. I enjoyed the group activities, I learned many things from working in groups.
Amanda McConnon, assistant director for Michigan Techs Center for Pre-college Outreach, said the presence of international students at SYP adds a special aspect to an already amazing experience.
We appreciate the international students for making the long journey to attend our Summer Youth Programs, she said. Their presence adds to all the students experiences at camp, and we are always excited to welcome them to Michigan Tech.
While their visit to Michigan Tech ended over the weekend, for the students from Pakistan and their chaperone, their American adventure will continue a bit longer.
Idress said from Houghton the group planned to split, with some heading to Washington, DC, and others to California, where a trip to Disneyland is on tap. They will reunite in New York before heading back to Islamabad in August.
Michigan Technological University is a public research university founded in 1885 in Houghton, Michigan, and is home to more than 7,000 students from 55 countries around the world. Consistently ranked among the best universities in the country for return on investment, Michigans flagship technological university offers more than 120 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in science and technology, engineering, computing, forestry, business and economics, health professions, humanities, mathematics, social sciences, and the arts. The rural campus is situated just miles from Lake Superior in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, offering year-round opportunities for outdoor adventure.
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Daniel Perez, SCC photo taken 6-22-2016 View Photos
Jamestown, CA An inmate who walked away from his minimum-security dorm near Jamestown eight nights ago is now back in custody.
According to Sierra Conservation Center (SCC) spokesperson Chris Acosta, on Monday shortly before noon, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) special service unit agents apprehended 34-year-old Daniel Perez in the Rosemead area of Los Angeles County and took him into custody without incident.
Perez, who had been convicted for first-degree burglary, had served the bulk of a 12-year term and was assigned to SCCs Baseline Camp. As previously reported here, he was last seen during a 10:30 p.m. routine security check on July 10. Acosta states that the inmate will shortly be heading back to SCC, where he will be placed into administration segregation, pending further actions.
Sharing a few of the next steps, Acosta says that Perez is now being interrogated by special service unit officials at the California Institution for Men in Chino. It is quite a lengthy process that they will go through, to ask him questions to see how he got from Tuolumne County to Los Angeles County, Acosta remarks.
Perez was previously scheduled for release in November 2019. Once back in the Mother Lode, Acosta adds, [Perez] will be taken to the Tuolumne County District Attorneys Office for prosecution on escape charges [which commonly generates] usually two to three years added to the sentence for escaping from an institution and that would be without giving us any further problems.
Boris Johnson says UK not abandoning leading role in Europe
2016-07-19 11:27
Britain's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson listens to Spain's Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo (L) during an European Union foreign ministers meeting in Brussels, Belgium, July 18, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]
BRUSSELS - Britain's newly appointed Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson here on Monday said Britain was not going to be abandoning its leading role in European cooperation participation.
He made the remarks as he arrived for a European Union (EU) foreign ministers meeting.
"We have to give effect to the will of the people and leave the EU. But in no sense does that mean we are leaving Europe," he stressed.
Johnson noted he had had a "very good conversation" Sunday night with EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini and "she agreed very much that that was a role Britain should continue to play."
"Clearly, when you look at the discussion on the table this morning over the horrific events in Nice and Turkey, where we have to work very closely together, you can see the importance of that," he said.
"We will ensure that we coordinate our response to terror. On Turkey, I think it's very important, in view of the failed coup, that we see restraint and moderation on all sides and that's what I will be calling for," said Johnson.
Former London mayor and leading "Leave" campaigner in the lead-up to the Brexit referendum, Johnson was made foreign secretary by new British Prime Minister Theresa May last Wednesday.
Thousands of bikers rolled into Cleveland on Monday for the Republican National Convention.
The "Bikers for Trump" rally started with a prayer for police.
Ronald Pittman and Bernadette Luke rode in from Milton, Florida. The Panhandle residents support Donald Trump on trade. Pittman said bad trade deals have hurt his trucking business.
I owned a large trucking company in Florida, when the North American Free Trade Agreement came in to be, Pittman said.
Pittman said his trucking business was hurt by the trade agreement that heavily regulated U.S. truckers and favored Mexican trucking companies.
"I had 15 trucks when I retired, he said. My road use tax was almost $7,000 a year per truck. The Mexican trucks were not enforced with that tax. The Mexican trucks put a lot of truckers out of business. They're still doing it."
Ronald Pittman, from Milton, Florida, said bad trade deals hurt his trucking business.
It's frustration like this which Trump is counting on in the Rust Belt: blue-collar workers, including Democrats, fed up with watching factories close, feeling left behind in a global economy. Steel mills and coal mines are shut down in Ohio and into battleground Pennsyvannia.
I've seen that firsthand, Luke said. My ex-husband was a coal miner. They shut the mines down. All of these people were affected by it."
Bikers for Trump is a confederation of motorcycle enthusiasts estimated at 70,000 strong nationwide.
Police in Daytona Beach are on high alert after one of their patrol cars that had been parked at an Islamic center was fire-bombed over the weekend, with a note found at the scene that read, "Black Lives Matter."
Daytona Beach Police car fire-bombed
Note found at scene read, 'Black Lives Matter'
Note used expletives to describe police
No one was hurt
The empty cop car had been stationed at the Islamic Center of Daytona Beach following the Pulse shooting, because the center's visitors and imam had received several threats against their safety.
Law enforcement routinely patroled the area. But an unidentified person or persons bombed the car with a Molotov cocktail early Sunday just before 2:30 a.m., while police were not present.
"This is no doubt the new norm that we in law enforcement are going to confront, because I don't, in my opinion, forsee this ending," Police Chief Michael Chitwood said Monday during a news conference.
No one was hurt during the incident, but Chitwood is concerned violence could increase.
Shortly after the fire bomb, police were monitoring a Facebook post that called for a rebirth of the Black Panther Party in Daytona Beach.
Chitwood told News 13 that his officers are on high alert but stressed their priority is the safety and security of the community. He said for now, the department is making sure to work with the community, teaming up when handling suspicious calls to reduce risk.
Carrigan Holloman lives near the Islamic Center of Daytona Beach, and had hoped the presence of the police car would deter crime in the area. He said he was shocked by this level of violence.
"It's wrong to take it out on the cops," Holloman said. "Sure, black lives matter, because all lives matter."
The only hint to a motive was a note left near the car saying, "Black Lives Matter." The note refered to police using expletives.
For investigators, its meaning is clear: The message was a threat against law enforcement.
"You aren't going to stop someone who is hell-bent on destruction and doesn't want to be part of mainstream society," Chitwood said. "We have to find out who they are and stamp them out. And by 'we,' I don't mean just the police. I mean all of us in this community."
Now, investigators are combing through surveillance video from the area, and the state fire marshal's office is investigating.
The car is too badly damaged to be fixable. It will have to be replaced, possibly costing the city upward of $30,000.
Daytona Beach Police are asking anyone with information about this cop-car fire-bomb incident to contact the department immediately.
(Frank Cymerman, staff)
Thousands of protesters have descended on the Republican National Convention to rally against Donald Trump.
Protesters blocked streets and chanted for change in downtown Cleveland on Monday.
Several of the protests are happening this week, several blocks from the arena and delegates.
Taina Pantoja, 19, came from Tampa to rally against the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
I am Latina, and I experience racism almost every day of my life, and I understand that the Republican agenda is racist, she said.
The University of South Florida student joined a large crowd concerned about Trumps plans to build a wall on the Mexican border and deport illegal immigrants.
Protesters say they're worried about gay rights under a Trump presidency. One college student wore a shirt with the words: "We are Pulse." He wants more protections for the LGBT community.
I feel like its abhorrent our safe spaces are now militarized, said Cameron Childers, a student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. I find it terrifying and sad that my mother asked me not to go to any gay clubs for fear for my safety.
Amnesty International representatives, with gas masks, came to monitor the protest. And a large "peace team" group, draped in yellow, arrived to keep the calm.
There has been a lot of hate speech, a lot of vitriolic speech, and so were here," said Kim Redigan with the peace team. "When we wear these yellow vests, we are nonpartisan, and were simply here to create a climate of peace for people.
Police were also present to make sure the protest didnt turn violent.
But no matter the threat, Pantoja said she wouldnt want to be anywhere but here.
I feel that its important that we come out regardless, because we need to stand strong when were having oppressive forces pushed against us, Pantoja said.
Some protesters, while upset with Trump, are also not fans of Clinton. Some plan to also protest next week at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
14th International Conference on the Short Story in English kicks off in Shanghai
By:Ding Yulan | From:english.eastday.com | 2016-07-13 12:34
Shanghai July 13 A reading party of short stories was opening to public at Minsheng Art Museum last night at 7:00. Five world famous short story writers shared with Shanghai citizens by reading their works.The reading party was the prelude of 14th International Conference on the Short Story in English (ICSSE), which is held from July 13 to July 16 at East China Normal University (ECNU). The theme of the conference is: Influence and Confluence in the Short Story: East and West.This will be the first Asian venue for the conference. Over 200 famous writers and scholars from nearly 20 countries will take part in the conference, of which 110 are Chinese and 90 are foreigners. The important writers attending yesterdays reading included Clark Blaise Canadian-American author of 20 books, director of the International Writing Program at Concordia University of Iowa, founder of graduate writing program at Concordia University in Montreal, Robert Olen Butler author of 16 novels and 6 volumes of short stories, 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, Gish Jen whose stories appeared four times in The Best American Short Stories, Bharati Mukherjee author of 8 novels and two collections of short stories and Li Yiyun author of two collections of short stories, Grantas best American novelist under 35. Other important writers includes Billy OCallaghan, Yu Hua, Bi Feiyu, Su Tong, Fang Fang, Li Er, Zhao Mei, Xu kun, Sun Ganlu, Lu Nei, etc.The 14th ICSSE is held by Shanghai Press & Publication Administration, Shanghai Writers Association and East China Normal University. The conference will bring writers of fiction in English (Irish, British, American, Canadian, Australian, Caribbean, South-African, Indian, Sri Lankan, Indonesian, etc.) and writers who have had their work translated into English together with scholars of the short story, and all will join in reading sessions, roundtable discussions and panels, including ones devoted to translation.The 14th International Conference on the Short Story in English will also host a number of sessions, both in the more traditional format (with presentation of papers) and in other formats involving performance, dance, art, films, etc., having in mind that the form of the short story is not necessarily confined to the limits of the written page but may open up to manifold fields of expression.
After a long and contentious meeting, the Brevard County School Board voted 3-2 Tuesday afternoon to include the words "sexual orientation and gender identity" in its anti-discrimination policy.
Brevard Schools to add LGBT protections to anti-discrimination policy
Harassment based on 'sexual orientation, gender identity' to be banned
Florida law doesn't require the language in policy
It feels incredible. All the kids will finally be protected," said Cyndi Sweet, the mother of an LGBT student. "They were the most bullied, and I feel like they can finally move forward and tell people theyre being bullied.
Hundreds packed the meeting in Viera, and more than 70 signed up to speak for and against changing the school system's policy. Proponents wanted to include the words "sexual orientation and gender identity," but opponents said the policy works the way it is.
"Your policy should address bullying for all students, not just a select group," one speaker at the meeting said.
School Board policy currently prohibits harassment against students, teachers and employees based on race, color, ethnicity, national origin and more. It also states the same for sex but proponents of the LGBT community want the policy also to include sexual orientation, transgender status or gender identity.
I have shed tears. I have been drained emotionally, lost a lot of sleep and gone way outside my comfort zone, but it was completely worth it to get it passed, Brevard student Rowan Craig said.
Astronaut High teacher Dan Desousa, a two-time teacher of the year in Brevard, urged the School Board to make the change.
"I ask you today, if you vote 'no,' then you look at me sitting here, and tell your employees that you do not want to protect me," Desousa said.
Opponents of the change expressed concerns over transgender students using the bathroom or locker room of their choice.
Florida law does not require the School Board to change the policy's language.
"I'm proud of who I am. I've been this way my entire life," Desousa said.
There are 14 Florida school districts that have adopted a similar policy.
Moving can be stressful and expensive, especially if youre moving out of state. Ken and Denise Diefendorf found that out first hand, during their recent move from Ohio to Florida.
It was hard. Very hard, Denise Diefendorf said, sitting in their new apartment in Pinellas Park.
I dont like to be misled, Ken Diefendorf added, Its just not a good way to make a move, especially clear across the country.
Stressful Move
Ken Diefendorf hired Agility Van Lines out of Ft. Lauderdale, but a Chicago company, theyd never heard of, showed up on moving day, instead.
I just couldnt believe someone else was coming to pick our furniture up. Thats not who I hired, Ken Diefendorf said, still exasperated.
Making matters worse, his belongings were taken to a Chicago warehouse for storage, instead of to the destination in Florida, as he was told they would be.
They told us theyre coming up here with a semi-truck, theyre gonna load our furniture, and bring it to Florida. No problem, Ken Diefendorf said.
When they pulled out I said, Well, looks like we just paid somebody to steal our stuff, Denise Diefendorf said, half laughing and half serious.
Fueling their fear, the company couldnt tell them when their things would arrive in Florida, despite an agreed upon delivery window.
Every time I tried to get some information, all they would say is, No worries, Ken. Everything is gonna be okay. Your stuffs gonna be there. Dont worry. Dont
worry. Well, its not your stuff! he said in frustration.
The Diefendorfs were told to track the shipment online at MovingClaims.net.
I tried to do that, Ken Diefendorf said, and there was nothing there.
Anxiety Grows
They bought a blow up air mattress and a small table and chairs and waited.
The designated delivery window from June 21 to June 26 came and went. No delivery.
They worried most about the sentimental things.
Family pictures, our grandchildrens pictures, videos of births. Those are things you cant replace, said Denise Diefendorf.
Finally, after checking every day, MovingClaims.net showed their shipment left Chicago. Six days late, much to their relief, their belongings were delivered.
I was mad, but excited at the same time. Our stuffs finally here! Were finally gonna have a home again, Ken Diefendorf said.
When the items were delivered several things were damaged like chipped furniture, broken china and a couple of broken lamps. A ladder was also missing. The Diefendorfs have now submitted a claim for those items and the delivery delay.
Companys Explanation
Agility has been in business for just over a year and has several online complaints. Consumer Wise called the company. The owner, Shane Young, apologized for the Diefendorfs problems and said he would do what he can to make it right.
Im sorry theyre not happy with the service, Young said. Ill see to it to make sure they get compensation.
He explained the company uses sub-contractors to do moves for them when needed.
Its relatively common to have agents who act on our behalf, especially in the summer when it gets busy, he said.
Ken Diefendorf says no one told him that. Young could not explain why the customer was not told a sub-contractor might be used to make their move.
As for showing up six days late, Young again apologized and said, Its a very volatile industry. Many factors can cause delays out of our control.
Young did reach out to the Diefendorfs after Consumer Wise called and indicated to the couple that he would make sure their claim is resolved.
Its very difficult to weed through the good companies and the bad companies, Young acknowledged, but he said Agility is a good company. We had to use an agent for the move, but he made a good choice.
The Diefendorfs did hear from Agility's owner after Consumer Wise called. They say Young offered them $500 in compensation for the delay, damaged items, and lost ladder. They agreed and hope to get a check in the mail.
Research the Company
One of the most important things you can do to protect yourself is to research a moving company online before you use them. To do business in Florida, a mover must register with the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services and must carry insurance for loss or damage to your belongings. Also, if youre moving in or out of state check to make sure the company is registered with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA).
Find out how long a company has been in business. Be aware that a newer company will have less of a track record.
Check to see whether there are lots of complaints against the company online, through the FMCSA and websites like Google Reviews and Yelp. One bad review might not be a fair indication, but several complaints are a red flag.
Tips to Protect Yourself
To help protect yourself when moving:
Research the company online. Make sure it is registered with the state and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration if its an out of state move.
Always get three written estimates in person. Not over the phone.
Make sure its a binding estimate, so they cant jack up the price later.
Ask about insurance coverage for broken or lost items and delays.
Avoid companies that require cash only transactions
Heres a check list on what to look for when hiring a moving company, and here are tips from the Florida Attorney General on how to protect yourself.
Unresolved Complaints
If you cant resolve a dispute with a moving company or are not satisfied, you can file a complaint with several entities, including:
Niraj Antani, a 25-year-old state representative from Dayton, Ohio, stood in front of a group of 58 high school students from across the country (New York, California, New Jersey, Florida and Guam, just to name a few) and talked about the struggles of being a millennial in public office.
4 high school students from Florida spending the week in Cleveland
The students will hear from politicians, aides and other leaders
The group is part of the Junior State of America
He is often the target of age-related jokes.
"Every day, there is someone who calls me a baby," Antani told the students sitting at rows of tables inside a conference room at the Wolstein Center. "When I speak around in my district ... someone will make the joke that (they) have socks older than (me)."
But, it's the younger generation including the high school students in the room on Tuesday that are the future of the political landscape and the United States.
"Politics is my passion because I care about the future of our nation," said Blake Barclay, an incoming high school junior from Pensacola. "This is how you change it. This isn't another way. "It just bothers me that many young people don't understand the implications of what's happening now and how it will affect the future."
Politics is in Barclay's blood. His aunt ran for office, his uncle was a lobbyist and his parents are involved in politics, too.
Barclay arrived in Cleveland on Sunday and will be there through the weeklong Republican National Convention. The students from across the country will spend much of the week listening to many guest speakers, including politicians, aides and other speakers. They are also hoping to visit Quicken Loans Arena to take in the sights and sounds of the convention.
Barclay said he wants to "provide logical perspectives" on various social issues because he wants to "show that there is reasoning behind social values."
He also admitted that Donald Trump wasnt his first or his second choice, but he will support him.
"I will support him because I will support my party," Barclay said.
Meeting with a small group of Orange Avenue business owners, Sen. Marco Rubio said Tuesday that a portion of the One Orlando fund be given to the small shops affected by the Pulse shooting.
Rubio had private meetings with Orange Avenue business owners
Shops lost money during weeks after Pulse attack due to road closures
Rubio met with the small group, which was impacted by road closures and detours along the roadway while it was shut down during the investigation.
He thinks part of the more than $17 million in the city's fund set up to help victims, survivors and their families should also go to businesses near Pulse, because he says they are secondary victims.
My hope is that once we ensure that all of the direct victims are fully compensated that there are funds available, there would be a method by which businesses who faced closure and economic losses may also be a part of it, Rubio said.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and several other high profile conservatives made it known they would not be in attendance at the Republican Convention this year. Rubio, who stopped by Orlando on Tuesday, will be a part of the festivities though.
Meanwhile, some small shop owners dont feel comfortable taking on any new debt to make ends meet, either. Kenneth Feinberg, who is overseeing the One Orlando fund, thinks that's a sensible idea if enough funds are available.
The junior senator will be delivering a video address to the delegates at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night.
Shanghai recognizes regional HQs of 94 firms
From:TouchShanghai | 2016-07-15 16:07
Shanghai, July 15- The city has recognized the regional headquarters of the first group of 94 homegrown and foreign trading companies as the city continued its efforts to build itself into an international trading center.
The regional headquarters of the trading companies are the main force to drive Shanghais construction of a world-class trading center, said Shang Yuying, chairwoman of the Shanghai Commission of Commerce.
The recognition is an important way to expand their influence and further attract trading companies to gather in Shanghai.
The 94 homegrown and foreign companies are engaged in wholesale and retail, international trading, logistics and warehouse, and trading platform operation.
Ouyeel Co, Baosteels e-commerce platform, Shangtex Holding Co, Juneyao Airlines, Johnson & Johnson Medical (China) Ltd and LOreal China are among the 94 companies.
In 2015, they generated an aggregate 4.3 trillion yuan (US$643 billion) in transactions, taking up one third of the citys total trade.
Facing an overheated housing market and simmering community tensions, the Alameda City Council will decide Tuesday whether to put a second rent-control measure in front of local voters in November.
Alamedas quaint charm, bay-side location and good schools have proved to be big draws for newcomers and developers, and have placed the island city of 75,000 residents in the center of a debate raging all over the Bay Area.
The question is what role the government should play in moderating rents, and until Monday, city voters were poised to weigh in on as many as three competing measures. However, a landlord-backed initiative to eliminate rent protections failed to garner adequate signatures, officials said.
A pro-renter initiative that would establish strict rent control in Alameda and ban no-cause evictions was approved for the November ballot two weeks ago. Now, the City Council is debating whether to place the current city ordinance which features more modest controls on the ballot alongside the renters measure.
With the official word that the rent-control initiative will be on the ballot, I think its imperative for the City Council to ... let the voters know we have a middle-of-the-road option for handling the crisis, said Councilman Tony Daysog.
But advocates for rent control worry that if the city ordinance is on the ballot, it will confuse voters. Councilwoman Marilyn Ashcraft also expressed concern, saying the ordinance had not yet proved to be effective.
Were still collecting data, Ashcraft said. By not putting the ordinance on the ballot to be etched in stone, we give ourselves and the community time to make changes.
In March, the City Council enacted an ordinance restricting landlords to one rent increase per year and requiring that any bump exceeding 5 percent be reviewed by an ad-hoc committee. But neither renters nor landlords who say such controls are an unfair response to a housing shortage have been satisfied.
The renters measure, sponsored by the Alameda Renters Coalition, would cap annual increases at 65 percent of the change in the Consumer Price Index for the previous year. It would also create a five-member rent control board to enforce the regulations. If passed, the restrictions would be subject to the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, a state law that exempts housing units built after 1995 from local rent control.
This is for the woman who had to constantly move all around Alameda because the rent was getting too high, said Jay Feria, an 18-year-old who helped gather signatures for the renters measure. This is for the person who wasnt able to sign the petition because he was already pushed out of Alameda.
Skyrocketing rents
The landlords measure was thwarted Monday when the Alameda County Registrar of Voters determined the petitions signatures could not be verified by a random sampling. The measure would have prohibited rent restrictions and repealed portions of the city ordinance limiting the number of times rent can be raised in a year.
Alameda rents have skyrocketed from an average of $1,412 to $2,152 per month from 2011 to 2015, according to a city-commissioned study. In April and May, 21 renters came to the city to contest landlords attempts to raise rent an average of 12.4 percent, officials said. The cases were settled with an average increase of 7.9 percent.
The November election will help determine the fate of Alameda residents such as Rommel Laguardia, who has lived in the Bay View Apartments in Alameda with his family for nearly six years.
Laguardia lives in a one-bedroom unit that costs $1,100 a month with his wife and three children. He has been out of work since he lost his job as an attendant at an Oakland airport parking lot in 2013, so he and his wife rely on her salary as a nurse. Their 15-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter shared a bunk bed in the living room, while their 4-year-old daughter sleeps with them in the bedroom.
Laguardia was one of about 32 tenants who faced the prospect of finding another home after a new owner purchased the Bay View Apartments last fall and then moved for a mass eviction. The action came just days after the Alameda City Council enacted an emergency moratorium banning no-cause evictions, but created a loophole that exempted landlords doing major renovations.
Public outcry led the council to close the loophole and save the Bay View tenants from immediate displacement, but Laguardia and others say they still fear they will lose their homes; the citys ordinance permits some no-cause evictions if the owner provides relocation fees.
Its hard to wake up in the morning not knowing what is going to happen, Laguardia said. You can go to Pittsburg, or somewhere north I guess, but that is something that we are not planning to do.
Limited supply
Matt Sridhar, the owner of the Bay View Apartments, said he doesnt believe either the city ordinance or the renters initiative will effectively stall rising rents.
There are all these antigrowth policies (in Alameda), but no one ever seems to address the supply side, Sridhar said. What they think will work is telling landlords not to raise rent like its going to help, and its not going to help.
Libby Rainey is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: lrainey@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rainey_l
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Hundreds of tearful, silent mourners gathered at UC Berkeleys Sproul Plaza on Monday afternoon to honor the memory of a 20-year-old student killed in last weeks terrorist attack in Nice, France.
Nick Leslie, an environmental sciences junior, was one of at least 84 people killed when a truck drove through a crowd celebrating Bastille Day on Thursday night in the seaside French city.
The vigil began with a moment of silence for Leslie, among 85 Cal students attending European Innovation Academy, a four-week-long program that helps students develop startup ideas.
By a cruel twist of fate, it was only two weeks ago that we gathered on this same site to mourn 18-year-old Berkeley sophomore Tarishi Jain, a victim of, of course, the other terrorist attack that captured our hearts, our emotions in Dhaka, Bangladesh, UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks told the crowd. Now the loss of Nick Leslie multiplies beyond our imagination our sorrows and our sense of loss.
MORE UC Berkeley student Nick Leslie confirmed dead in Nice attack
Jain, a native of India, was killed after armed militants took dozens of people hostage July 1 in the capital of Bangladesh.
Friends and classmates shared their memories of Leslie, a member of Phi Gamma Delta.
James Manriquez, a fraternity brother, read a letter from Fisher Johnson, the UC Berkeley chapters president and one of Leslies best friends.
We were brothers. Since the third grade, I had called you my friend. ... Theres an old German proverb that reads, When you lose a friend, it is like losing a limb, the letter read. Indeed many of us hurt more now than we ever have before. But I hope that instead it feels as if we have gained an extra limb to reach for more with.
Jenna Lyons is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jlyons@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JennaJourno
A yearlong digital training course for Irish high school teachers started in 2014. A fund to help European news outlets adapt to the Web popped up in 2015. And in March, a virtual reality exhibition began at a Belgian museum to showcase a Renaissance painter.
All these projects are designed to support European culture and education, helping the region embrace the fast-changing online world. And all are financed by Google.
Google has been staging a full-court press in Europe to finance everything from startup offices to YouTube-sponsored music concerts, trying to remake its image in the region as it battles a mounting list of regulatory woes.
Those efforts represent a campaign of soft lobbying where instead of, or alongside, paying registered lobbyists to argue its case in the corridors of power, a company looks to change the minds of the public at large. In Googles case, experts say, its push to sponsor digital skills training, museum exhibitions and other programs equates to an almost unprecedented effort by a U.S. tech company to change the perceptions of Europeans, many of whom still see it as an American interloper that does not play by the rules.
Googles soft lobbying efforts are by no means unique, and have filled a funding gap that governments and European rivals are unwilling, or incapable, of matching.
But the company is expanding its campaign, earmarking about $450 million from 2015 to 2017 based on Googles public filings and industry estimates of its activities to revamp its reputation with Europeans and, more important, the regions policymakers who have the power to issue fines totaling billions of dollars.
We can do a better job about listening to peoples questions and concerns, said Matt Brittin, a former British Olympic rower who took over running Googles operations across Europe, the Middle East and Africa in 2015, partly to improve relations with European officials, residents and corporate rivals.
Googles programs are important for our partners, for us and for the countries where we work, he added.
Googles European regulatory problems have gone from bad to worse. They range from charges that it broke antitrust rules including a third round announced last week to investigations into allegations of tax shortfalls amounting to more than $1 billion. Google also faces accusations that it does not fully protect Europeans privacy rights online. The company rejects all the claims.
Big spending
Even before its recent charm offensive, it was one of the largest spenders on direct lobbying in Brussels, home to most of its European regulatory headaches.
Its spending on political lobbying in Brussels tripled to as much as $4.2 million in 2014, according to the latest figures available in the EUs voluntary transparency register, which may not include all of the companys lobbying efforts. That places it among the top 10 for such spending in Europe, but is a far cry from the approximately $17 million that Google spent in Washington during the same period.
Critics and industry watchers say the Mountain View companys foray into cultural and economic spending, whose increase roughly coincided with Europes first set of antitrust charges in early 2015, is designed to win over skeptics, who worry that Google has too much control over how Europeans gain access to digital services.
Theres an offensive by Google to present itself as a friendly force, said Ramon Tremosa, a Spanish member of the European Parliament and a vocal opponent of the search giants regional dominance. There has been a major change in the last two years. Theres no doubt about that.
Googles efforts have largely concentrated on European arts, education and culture; it has even offered some spending to its critics. And almost no group has been as active in lobbying against Google as Europes powerful publishers.
Many, including Axel Springer of Germany and Rupert Murdochs News Corp., have vocally campaigned for laws to force Google to pay content producers when it uses their material on its European aggregation sites.
Grants for publishers
Yet this year, Google awarded the first grants from a newly created $167 million fund for European publishers to help them adapt to the digital world. The goal, says Madhav Chinnappa, the Google executive running the program, is to give newspapers, magazine publishers and startups the financial freedom to try new ways to connect with online consumers.
The company is also tapping into a more friendly audience: Europes tech community.
From London to Madrid, it has built, or invested in, so-called co-working spaces open-plan offices where eager developers in their 20s can meet to swap ideas and, potentially, start new businesses. These buildings have helped to connect the U.S. company with Europes fast-growing tech hubs, says Frederic Oru, international director of Numa, a startup incubator in Paris that has received Google funding.
To push its tech credibility, Google will spend more than $75 million by years end to train roughly 3 million Europeans in digital skills like e-commerce and online marketing, an important goal for European policymakers, who are trying to create a digital single market to jump-start economic growth.
In Dublin, home to Googles European headquarters, that has involved a one-year course in software coding for teachers. Participants in the class, run by Trinity College Dublin, have been invited to the companys glass-fronted offices on the banks of the Liffey River to learn directly from Google staff members.
Museums skeptical
Museums still regularly question Googles motives. Institutions also have raised concerns about who controls the copyright of the masterpieces (Google says all rights remain with the institutions).
The tech giant has often picked museums with a digital connection. That includes the restoration of Bletchley Park, a museum on the outskirts of London that housed British code breakers during World War II and that helped spur the creation of modern-day computers.
Yet Sue Hughes, a retired elementary-school teacher who recently visited the museum made famous in the recent movie The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch remained ambivalent.
Thats typical of Americans, she said when asked about a large poster at the entrance to Bletchley Park highlighting Googles financial support.
Its like they used to say in the war, she added. U.S. companies like Google are oversexed, overpaid and over here.
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With a splashy new Power Rangers movie starring Bryan Cranston in the works for 2017, what better time to ring up San Antonios claim to Power Ranger fame?
Steve Cardenas, who attended both Lee and Clark high schools, graduating from the latter in 1992, was eager to chat not only about his years on the kid series but his feelings about Hollywoods reboot.
After all, Cardenas, who played Red Ranger Rocky DeSantos, the first Latino member of the evil-battling sextet, still spends a good chunk of his life at superhero and sci-fi conventions, including one just around the corner right here in his hometown.
Hell meet fans and sign autographs at Texas Comicon 2016, which will be July 29-31 at the San Antonio Event Center, 8111 Meadow Leaf Drive.
Though two decades away from his years of playing Rocky on seasons two and three of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers TV series, Cardenas, 42, said he never tires of the topic.
Its a good thing, considering he spends some 40 weekends out of the year hanging with fans of the 1993-95 franchise.
I sit at a table all day and people come up to me and tell me how awesome I am and ask me for my autograph. What can get old about that? Cardenas, who lives in West Hollywood, said in a phone chat.
It also has allowed him to visit places he may not have seen otherwise Australia, England, Canada, Mexico, Brazil and more. This week, his destination is the craziest of U.S. Comic Cons: San Diegos. After that, he heads to San Antonio, where hell reconnect with family and maybe stop by his favorite Mexican restaurant, Mi Tierra.
San Antonio always will hold a warm place in his heart, Cardenas said. Thats where I grew up and found myself.
The Virginia native, who spent most of his childhood in Idaho, explained that he was socially awkward in middle school and was bullied. But all that changed after moving to the Alamo City at the age of 12. What made the difference? Martial arts classes, he said.
That helped my confidence. I learned how to interact with people better; I carried myself differently and also learned how to defend myself.
The training also prepared him for the most dramatic of life-changers, getting cast as the red Power Ranger.
He learned from the radio that a kind of cattle call was being held in Dallas. He went, and to his surprise, considering he had no acting background, he leaped to the next phase: an audition in Los Angeles.
I was 20 but looked younger, he said.
He was cast as the new Red Ranger, replacing Austin St. John, who appeared in the first season. Cardenas made 120 episodes, starred in the first movie and appeared briefly in the second, Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie, where his character was injured.
That led to his early retirement from acting and a new career. He scooped up all kinds of martial arts honors and focused on teaching jiu-jitsu.
One thing he really appreciated about the Rangers was their diversity.
I think the intention was to show people of all ethnicities could get along, he said, adding that his character largely reflected his own background as a Latino with six siblings who grew up in a single-parent household. Although his face disappeared under a mask and helmet when trouble struck, there also were many scenes, a la Peter Parker and Spider-Man, when the characters would walk around high school as regular students.
To this day, he said, I still get recognized on the street, at the grocery store or at a bar getting a beer, he said.
Why does he think Power Rangers made such an impact, and still resonates with fans?
If youre a 4 or 5 year old, and suddenly, on the screen comes loud rock music, then explosions, a big lightning bolt, you see all these flashy colors, people doing martial arts, robots and aliens, all mixed in one half-hour thats bound to make a huge impression, he said.
What kept kids watching were the teens teamwork and the fact they had to overcoming different adversities.
He predicts fandom for the franchise will get even more intense now that a new Power Rangers movie is getting so much buzz. It features a whole new set of unknowns as the title characters but also two Hollywood names: Breaking Bad star Cranston as galactic sage Zordon the mentor of the Rangers and Elizabeth Banks (The Hunger Games) as villain Rita Repulsa.
Im happy and proud that the Rangers will live on, Cardenas said.
Its also cool Cranston is involved, he added, since one of the actors early jobs was voicing characters in the original series.
But will the new film retain the campy feel of the 90s show and movies? In a recent Huffington Post chat, Cranston indicated it would be darker and as different a reimagining as the Batman television series (is to) the Batman movie series.
You cant compare those two, Cranston added, nor can you compare the movie version of the Power Rangers to that television series. Its unrecognizable for the most part.
Cardenas said he understands that a darker look and improved special effects are in keeping with todays sensibilities, but he hopes the dialogue still has cheesy stuff in it. Thats part of the charm. I hope they find a good balance.
Incidentally, if you subscribe to Netflix, its easy to get a refresher course in the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Seasons one through three are currently available on the streaming service.
Jeanne Jakles column appears Wednesdays and Sundays in mySA, and she writes online at mySA.com/Jakle. Email her at jjakle@express-news.net.
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UPDATE, 3:10 p.m.: BOSTON We learned something interesting during Bruce Bochy's daily pregame talk. He was not aware the British won the Battle of Bunker Hill. He learned that while walking the Freedom Trail in 93-degree heat on the off day.
Hunter Pence and Joe Panik hope to make tracks on their own freedom trail Tuesday night in their desire to escape the disabled list.
Both are expected to play five innings during Sacramento's doubleheader at New Orleans after their rehabs were slowed by a rain postponement Monday. Panik is in the lineup for the opener. Pence isn't.
Pence's five innings would come with an asterisk. The Triple-A training staff will monitor him closely in light of his setback Saturday, when he left his first rehab game with discomfort in the area of his hamstring surgery.
Monday's rainout could spoil Panik's plan to return for this weekend's series at Yankee Stadium. The Giants want him to play at least three games - five innings, then seven, then nine. That nine-inning game would come Thursday in New Orleans.
If the Giants choose to have Panik play a fourth game in the minors, then rest him a day, they might just decide to activate him when they return to San Francisco on Monday.
Bochy, asked if New York was still possible for Panik, said, "It's possible. It didn't help he couldn't play yesterday."
*****
The last time Madison Bumgarner pitched in an American League park, at Oakland, he batted for himself and the Giants had no designated hitter. Bochy does not see that happening when Bumgarner pitches at Yankee Stadium on Friday.
For one thing, the Giants are facing a right-hander (Masahiro Tanaka), not a lefty like in Oakland. Also, the Giants' bench is deeper now and the weather is supposed to be hot Friday night. Bochy would prefer Bumgarner rest as much as possible when he is not pitching.
Bochy expects one of his left-handed subs to be the DH.
Buster Posey likely will DH in Boston on Wednesday.
*****
We had the pleasure Tuesday afternoon of speaking with Luis Tiant, who won 229 games in the majors, mostly in Boston, over a 19-year career. More important, Johnny Cueto talked to Tiant in the dugout for a long time.
Cueto's exaggerated windup twist was patterned after Tiant's, and the 75-year-old native of Cuba offered Cueto advice. Tiant noted that when Cueto goes back in his "rocking chair" motion he almost always throws a fastball, so hitters will sit on the pitch.
Tiant also noted that Cueto gets those fastballs up in the zone. He told the Giant to mix his pitches when he does the rocking chair and practice throwing all of his pitches from that motion to ensure they come from the same arm slot.
ORIGINAL POST: Checking in from Fenway Park, where the Giants will try to break their three-game losing streak against the first winning team they will play since June 12.
The Red Sox not only have a winning record, they hit the snot out of the ball, so Jake Peavys challenge will be great as he takes the Fenway mound for the first time since he helped the Sox win the 2013 World Series.
Check back here for pregame news. The lineup is below. Jarrett Parker gets the first crack at DH in the three-game series against righty Rick Porcello.
I can share one little tidbit about Hunter Pence. I understand that he will go through the regular pregame routine at New Orleans before a decision is made on playing for Sacramento, three days after he had to leave his first rehab game with discomfort in his right-hamstring area.
The decision for Monday night was made for Pence, by the atmosphere. The River Cats game was rained out.
The Giants lineup:
Span CF
Pagan LF
Belt 1B
Posey C
Crawford SS
Parker DH
Gillaspie 3B
Williamson RF
Pena 2B
Devout fishing enthusiasts might know R.D. Hull as someone who revolutionized life on water. Now architecture fans are getting to know him for what he built on land.
The late Texas native, who's said to have envisioned the world's first spincast reel, commissioned Tulsa-based architect Cecil Stanfield to create a fishing-reel-shaped house on the northeast side of Tulsa in 1970. Hull a former watchmaker who went on to be inducted into the Sporting Goods Hall of Fame had relocated to Oklahoma when he found a manufacturer for his reel design. In 1966, Zebco Fishing moved into its Tulsa headquarters, where the company is still based. (Story continues below.)
ALBANY A city man charged with the stabbing murder of 29-year-old Timothy Sprigs in the South End last summer will face 20 years in prison under a plea bargain reached Tuesday.
Nevin Roberts, 30, admitted to first-degree degree manslaughter for stabbing Sprigs, known as "Mez," in the chest at 67 Broad St., where Roberts lived, on July 11, 2015 about 10:25 p.m..
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CLEVELAND The cheap seats traditionally belong to Connecticut at national GOP affairs.
But not in this wacky political season, the year of Donald Trump.
You wont find Texas or any other red state for that matter at the front of the hall at this years Republican National Convention. Not even the host bellwether state of Ohio.
Some of the most coveted real estate on the floor of Quicken Loans Arena belongs to the GOP continent from Connecticut, albeit to stage left. Nevermind that the Constitution State hasnt elected a Republican to statewide office or Congress in a decade.
They said in San Diego they were behind a pole, Jeff Ferraro, a Trump delegate from Stamford, said of the 1996 convention for Bob Dole.
Connecticut is not used to having a front row seat in a sea of ten-gallon hats and elephant ties. So when a few holdout delegates part of the Never Trump movement tried unsuccesslly to stage a last-minute coup Monday on the convention floor, members of the state GOP found themselves in the thick of the action.
It was a madhouse all up here with the camera and press, said J.R. Romano, Connecticuts Republican Party chairman.
Connecticuts most recognizable delegate almost got caught in the media scrum.
We had to shield Linda (McMahon), Romano said of the former WWE chief executive officer from Greenwich.
The Committee on Arrangements determines floor position for each convention. Among the groups members is state Rep. John Frey, of Ridgefield, who was also named one of three convention sergeant-at-arms. The job involves maintaining order in the convention hall, no small task, but one with apparent perks. Frey is on the Republican National Committee as well.
Our delegation is thrilled, Romano said.
Immediately to the right of Connecticut is New York, where the entrance of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani Monday night caused quite the stir. In the media scrum, Romano was forced to duck out of the way of a photojournalists camera lens.
What a difference four years makes for Connecticut, which was tucked toward the back of the floor for the GOP convention in Tampa, Fla., for Mitt Romney.
Everybodys gotta have a turn, Ferraro said. It should be Connecticut.
neil.vigdor@scni.com; 203-625-4436; http://twitter.com/gettinviggy
Troy
A 34-year-old Rensselaer man was sentenced Monday to 8 years in prison for drug possession, District Attorney Joel Abelove said Tuesday.
Alexander Luciano of 1466 Fourth St. was convicted of two felony counts of fourth-degree criminal possession of a controlled substance at a June trial in Rensselaer County Court.
Judge Debra Young sentenced Luciano to concurrent prison terms for the two drug charges as well as three years of post-release supervision.
Troy and Rensselaer police arrested Luciano on April 24, 2015, at his home. Officers found 6.27 grams of heroin, 3.8 grams of MDMA, a large marijuana growing operation, $12,270 in cash and other drug-related paraphernalia.
It was Luciano's third conviction in a drug case.
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NEWTOWN - Officials will unveil the new Sandy Hook Elementary School to the media at the end of the month.
Residents can expect to see the first images of the $50 million school shortly after the press conference, planned for mid-morning, July 29.
We are very grateful to the taxpayers of Connecticut for giving our town the funding to build this school, said Newtown First Selectman Pat Llodra in a prepared statement Tuesday. Our goal was to create a place of community and learning, a place that would honor those we lost and allow those who were left behind the chance to move forward.
The school, scheduled to open in the fall, replaces the old Sandy Hook Elementary School, which was demolished following the 2012 massacre of 26 first-graders and educators.
The plan is to give returning students and teachers their space to get used to the building without outside interference.
Sandy Hook will have a quiet, respectful, and appropriate opening as teachers and students return to the new school year, said schools Superintendent Joseph Erardi in a prepared statement.
The transition to the new school needs to be as seamless as possible for the children, Erardi said. That is why we are setting up this day ... asking everyone to give us the space we need to allow high quality teaching and learning when we return for our first day of school.
CLEVELAND As Connecticut goes, so goes the nation?
From the quintessential bellwether of Ohio, Donald Trumps campaign manager said Tuesday that his home state of Connecticut is ripe for the picking by the presumptive Republican nominee in November.
New Britain native Paul Manafort told a GOP contingent from the Nutmeg State that the Democratic stronghold is key to Trumps general election strategy take away home field advantage for Hillary Clinton.
Yes, Connecticut is in play, said Manafort, who made a cameo during a breakfast for his home state delegation at the Courtyard Cleveland University Circle. Its in play because the citizens of Connecticut are tired of the same things the people of the country, the United States, are tired of, which is bad leadership.
Trumps campaign has trumpeted several recent polls showing Clinton with a single-digit lead over the real estate tycoon in Connecticut, including a June 29 Quinnipiac University poll that gave the former secretary of state a two-point edge.
But Democrats, who have carried the state in every presidential election since 1992, scoffed at Manaforts declaration.
They've been saying this for months, and just like everything from the Trump campaign, it has no basis in fact or reality, said Leigh Appleby, a state Democratic Party spokesman. We are fully confident that the people of Connecticut will reject Donald Trump and the racist, hateful policies for which he stands.
Manafort took a swipe at Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, a loyal Clinton surrogate, without mentioning the Democrat by name.
Youve got a governor who feels its OK to destroy the state, its OK to try and make decisions for the citizens that people dont want, Manafort said. Theyre the wrong decisions on top of it. We have the same problem in Washington, and, as a result, not just Connecticut, (but) Pennsylvania, Michigan, Oregon, states like this that are never in play are going to be in play in 2016.
Malloy spokesman Devon Puglia mocked the Manafort-led Trump campaign over a plagiarism flap involving Melania Trump, who addressed delegates Monday night at the convention.
Interesting that he made the time considering hes the head of a campaign with so much chaos and organizational dysfunction that it rivals a Game of Thrones episode, Puglia said. What' next on his schedule...running tonights speech through anti-plagiarism software? This guy cant even do a four-day convention without epic screw ups the question is whether Trump pulls the plug on Manafort by the end of the week.
Members of the GOP, often an afterthought at national conventions, gushed over the attention from Manafort and the Trump campaign.
The Trump victory goes through Connecticut, said Benjamin Proto, a delegate from Stratford and Trump organizer.
neil.vigdor@scni.com; 203-625-4436; http://twitter.com/gettinviggy
NEW CANAANAt 10:15 p.m. on Sunday, July 10, police were summoned to Smith Ridge Road. Upon arrival, the officers found Michael Holland, 34, in a driveway, allegedly attempting to enter the home.
When the officers questioned the man, Holland became belligerent, requiring officers to restrain him. He was arrested for resisting arrest and disorderly conduct and was brought to police headquarters.
NORWALK Half of the boat slips at Oyster Bend Marina, an almost perennial inclusion in Norwalks tax sales, were auctioned off Monday for $3,000 each.
That marks a turnaround from the citys past two tax sales where only nine of the 52 slips were sold amid concerns about their relationship to Oyster Bend Marina & Condominiums, which has documented environmental contamination.
Norwalk Tax Collector Lisa Biagiarelli, while reading the sale rules, cautioned bidders about potential environmental cleanup costs but she added that one need not own a condominium at the complex to bid on a boat slip.
These marina slip units were formerly known as restricted marina slips of a condominium, Biagiarelli said. These units can be deeded over through tax sale and will no longer be subject to the restraints on alienation that characterized them in prior tax sales. You do not have to be an owner of a residential unit in the same condominium unit to bid on these boat slips any longer.
However, counsel for the association has claimed that these units carry no parking rights, Biagiarelli added.
Bidding for the boat slips was held at the end of Norwalks 2016 tax sale, which drew nearly 100 people to Norwalk Concert Hall on Monday afternoon. When the sale ended, 27 of the 52 boats slips owned by East Greyrock or Greyrock at Oysterbend at 10 Platt St. were sold. One slip was sold to Kevin Kovtun of Norwalk, 12 slips were sold to Dennis Brandt Nye of Norwalk, and 14 slips were sold to Marine Unit Norwalk, LLC, according to Biagiarellis office.
East Greyrock and Greyrock at Oysterbend have six months to square up with Biagiarellis office to redeem the slips.
Biagiarelli said the 27 boat slips were sold for $3,000 each the amount of the bid deposit. Her office plans to offer the remaining 25 slips at a later date for the same amount.
Within three days, the tax collector will announce the time and place when the adjourned sale of those marina slip units will be reconvened and they will again be offered for sale, Biagiarelli wrote in a statement Tuesday announcing the tax sale preliminary results. Potential bidders are advised to watch the city of Norwalk website for details on the adjourned sale.
Jerry Effren, principal with the Greyrock Cos., which owns Oyster Bend Marina & Condominiums, attended Mondays tax sale. He could not be reached for comment Tuesday afternoon.
The property at which the marina and condominiums are located was home in the late 1960s to Norwalk Barrel Co., which cleaned and recycled industrial drums containing hazardous materials. It has been the subject of a cleanup plan being overseen by the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.
The city holds the tax sales to get delinquent taxpayers to pay up beforehand rather than risk their properties being auctioned. Biagiarellis office collected $3.6 million in advance of Mondays auction and another $648,988 at the auction itself.
In addition to the boat slips, an additional 16 properties went to the auction block. Of those, the city took three, including Dog Island, for lack of bidders.
The tax sale results will be finalized once the city receives final payment on all bids. The high bidders have until Friday at 3 p.m. to finalize those payments or forfeit their deposits.
Mondays sale did not transfer ownership of the tax sale properties. The current owners have six months to redeem their properties by paying delinquent taxes and interest fees.
The Improved Benevolent Protective Order of Elks redeemed its property at 92 Lexington Ave. by paying the Tax Collectors Office on Tuesday morning.
This morning, representatives for the property owner came to the tax collectors office and paid to the City the amount of the minimum bid, and tendered to the city a check for $75, payable to the bidder, representing 1.5% interest on the $5,000 bid deposit that was given at the tax sale toward this property, Biagiarelli said in an email Tuesday. They were given a certificate of satisfaction memorializing the transaction.
She said the payment effectively removed the 92 Lexington Avenue property from the tax sale as the taxes due are now paid.
Biagiarelli said representatives of the Elks organization exchanged pleasantries and had a good conversation with herself and with Delinquent Tax Collector Cynthia Haith.
Representatives of the Elks organization attempted to make a payment as the tax sale got underway Monday afternoon. The city rejected the payment, saying the Tax Collectors Office had closed at 2 p.m. to prepare for the tax sale.
Kevin Johnson, New England State/Eastern Canada president of the Elks organization, said Tuesday that the group paid the bill for 92 Lexington Ave. on Tuesday morning. He added that the payment was $6,000 more than the amount they were quoted Monday.
Johnson said the Elks organization stood ready with a $27,000 check Monday afternoon, but the city required a payment of $33,000 on Tuesday morning.
The money should have been accepted yesterday because the entire staff that works at the Tax Collectors office was still working, Johnson said. They just moved from one part of the building to another. They were collecting money, they had their computers there to take it.
According to Biagiarellis office, the delinquent tax bill for the property at 92 Lexington Ave. was $33,747.
The property at 94 Lexington Ave., which is also owned by the Elks organization, was auctioned for $165,000. Its delinquent tax bill totaled $44,874, according to Biagiarellis office.
Johnson said the Elks group plans to redeem that property, also.
BAD AXE A Harbor Beach man is facing up to 15 years behind prison bars after he admitted to inappropriately touching a 12-year-old girl and exchanging sexual pictures with her.
Austin David Holmes, 22, was charged with criminal sexual conduct-second degree and attempted possession of child sexually abusive material stemming from a three-month incident in late-October through early-January.
A mother of two is accused of stuffing her 3-year-old and 5-year-old into the trunk of a Corvette while driving with a friend.
Jessica Reger, 29, of Hanover, Pennsylvania, was pulled over last week after someone called police claiming the mother had put her children into the trunk, according to the York Dispatch. Reger was in the passenger seat when police opened the trunk to find the two kids inside.
Over the span of 20 years, Ive probably written more than 100 op-ed articles that have been published. If theres a magazine or newspaper or website that takes guest commentary and opinion pieces, my words have more than likely been in it.
Related: For a Company to Rise Above the Rest, the CEO Must Engage on Social Media
An op-ed is a great way to establish or build credibility as a leader and influencer in your field or community. Its also a virtually unrivaled way to move conversations or debates in ways that favor your views or interests.
But partly because op-ed space is so valuable, its not easy to get. Doing an op-ed right requires offering an argument editors want and writing it with solid preparation and discipline. In my time working with business, political and social leaders to get attention for their issues and ideas, Ive developed three rules to assess whether what someone has have is op-ed worthy.
So, before you spend the time to write and, heaven forbid, pitch, something that wont work, check these three rules to see if your op-ed that will work or, alternatively, be more appropriate for a Facebook post.
1. Are you an unquestioned expert or have a unique voice?
Do others recognize your contribution or standing? Would everyone recognize your expertise based on your experience in this area? Have you been there and done that?
This doesnt mean that youre an expert in everything -- it means you're an expert in what youre writing about. If youre a retired four-star general writing about military preparedness, yes. If youre the same four-star general arguing that pepper does not belong on gourmet salads, no.
To weigh in about pepper and salads, youd better be a chef who owns a few restaurants or have written the definitive book on pepper.
Unique voices also work. You can be a refugee and comment on immigration policy or a local police officer writing about keeping the peace in Iraq. You dont need to be an expert on either Iraq or immigration policy to have something interesting to say on these subjects -- your personal experiences can substitute for academic credentials or career standing.
Related: The Venerable Press Release Remains the Cornerstone of Public Relations
2. Is yours an original idea?
This one is the toughest because truly unique ideas are rare. But ask yourself, has anyone said this before or shared this thought? Check. Do some research.
This works especially well for proposing solutions to problems. Have a better way to get people to recycle? A cure for a disease? If you have a really good, novel or ground-breaking idea, your background or expertise wont matter and if you can explain your idea well, an outlet that covers that subject is likely to publish it.
A note of caution, though. If your solution to the problem you identify is your business model, that will likely be seen as (and likely is) self-promotion. Editors are exceptionally unlikely to publish op-eds around self-interested answers even if they are unique. If youll profit based on the solution youre suggesting, think twice.
3. Are you making a minority point or picking a fight?
You dont have to be unquestioned expert or have an original idea if youre on the minority or seldom voiced side of an issue and can make a good argument. If youre not a climate scientist or other expert scientist offering a solution, your op-ed on why global climate change is bad isnt going anywhere.
If, however, you can credibly argue that climate change is a blessing in disguise, youre on to something, op-ed-wise.
Picking a fight also works. Want to share evidence that your police chief is wrong about an issue or your congressional representative's view is backwards? Cite studies and examples and youll also be on to something. But if youre going there, be direct. Point the finger.
Hitting just one of these op-ed rules is good, but getting two or even three into your op-ed is even better. If, for example, youre a retired general writing to oppose the U.S. presidents plan for policing in Iraq, and you want to offer a brand new approach, you've got the trifecta of op-eds.
Related: 5 Big Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make With Their PR Efforts
So before you sit down to write your 600 words on whatevers on your mind, badger editors and inevitably get frustrated, see how many of these three rules youre following.
Related:
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Christopher Soloya Jr., a 30-year-old convicted sex offender with ties to a Houston-area gang, has been listed as one of Texas' most wanted sex offenders.
Soloya was arrested by Houston Police in June 2007 for burglarizing an apartment with the intent to sexually assault a female inside. He was later convicted of burglary of a habitation with intent to commit another felony, sentenced to jail and required to register as a sex offender for life, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety.
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Dominique Green expected confidence and trust from his friends and his girlfriend, but those loyalties were not maintained, a prosecutor said on the first day of testimony in Greens capital murder trial.
Green, 39, also known as Alley Cat, is accused of killing Reynaldo Guerrero Jr., 33, who was shot to death Dec. 3, 2014. He is the first of four defendants in the case to be tried.
Police found Guerrero face down in the back seat of his Jeep Grand Cherokee when they responded to a call about a shooting in the 200 block of Corliss Avenue on the East Side.
Prosecutors displayed photos of Guerrero, shot in the upper torso three times, his hands bound behind his back with black plastic zip ties. Another photograph showed blood spattered on an open right passenger door, and a pool of it on the street below.
Loose lips sink ships, special prosecutor Geoff Barr told jurors in his opening statement. He said Green was known to sell drugs on Dorie Street and Corliss Avenue, and that night was looking to make some money.
Barr told the jury that Green took the life of Reynaldo Guerrero Jr. Why? For dope a little bit of marijuana. He said Green also took a large stereo speaker from Guerrero's vehicle and gave it to a friend.
Though Barr acknowledged there was no DNA evidence, nor a weapon linking Green to the incident, he said witnesses and phone records would tie him to the crime.
Barr said Michael Ramos, a friend of Guerrero's, told police that he introduced the men because each sold marijuana, and that he attempted to broker a drug deal between the two.
Ramos testified that the last time he saw Guerrero, he was in a trap house in the 300 block of Dorie Street, and that Guerrero had a hood over his head, with someone pointing a gun at him. Ramos said he left and did not know what transpired next.
I didnt know what they did to him, said Ramos, who added Green told him what to say to police and that he feared Green would kill him or his family.
Ramos, initially charged with capital murder in the case, testified before a grand jury and was indicted on an aggravated robbery charge instead.
Defense attorney Richard Langlois attempted to discredit his statements to the grand jury and on the stand Tuesday because Ramos had lied in earlier statements to police.
In his opening statement, Langlois told jurors witnesses would provide a much different story than the one Barr outlined. Ramos, a friend of both Green's and the victim, gave three conflicting statements about what happened that night, Langlois said, and finally cut a deal with the District Attorney's Office.
Ramos is not credible, Langlois said. He is the murderer and wants to put it on my client.
If found guilty, Green faces life in prison without parole. Prosecutors are not seeking the death penalty.
State District Judge Sid Harle appointed special prosecutors from the Texas Attorney Generals Office because Bexar County District Attorney Nicholas Nico LaHood recused his office from the case due to a potential confict stemming from when LaHood was a defense attorney.
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A federal jury here found Marciano Chano Millan Vasquez, an accused Zetas boss, guilty of all 10 counts of the drug-related charges against him Tuesday.
Millan was accused of drug conspiracy and killing while engaged in drug trafficking and faces life in prison. Prosecutors and witnesses said he was a regional leader for the cartel in the Mexican border city of Piedras Negras, and had worked with other cartel leaders to bribe politicians and kill scores of people in the Mexican state of Coahuila to protect its business of smuggling drugs into the United States.
It is the defendant who aided the Zetas in their reign of terror in Piedras Negras, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Galdo had told jurors in closing arguments hours earlier. They turned that city and Acuna into a drug state, a safe havein in which they could operate.
Defense attorney Jaime Cavazos said prosecutors lacked physical evidence tying his client to any crimes. Instead, he said, the government relied on convicted drug defendants who were testifying to get reduced sentences.
Dont buy these stories, Cavazos said. Theyre inconsistent with who these people are. They never told the truth Theyre here to get something.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Russell Leachman said federal agents were able to produce phone tolls and other physical evidence tying Millan Vasquez to drug seizures in Texas and a police informant who was killed in Mexico.
He closed his argument asking jurors to think about the testimony of one witness, who said he watched as Millan used an axe to dismember a 6-year-old girl in front of her screaming parents during a Zetas purge that had killed more than 300 people across Coahuila.
I want you to think about her being pinned down by grown men and her parents watching their own child have limbs being hacked from her own body, Leachman said. The only solace these people had was to look down maybe try to pray, and what did he do? Grab their heads and make them watch their daughter suffer.
jbuch@express-news.net
Twitter: @jlbuch
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AUSTIN, Texas (AP) Activists and educators on Monday called a Mexican-American studies textbook proposed for use across Texas biased and poorly researched and argued that its contents are especially offensive in a state where a majority of public school students are Hispanic.
A battle over the high school text is shaping up to become the latest ideological clash for the Republican-controlled Texas Board of Education. Its members have long waged high-profile debates over the teaching of evolution, climate change and Christianity's influence on America's Founding Fathers to more than 5.2 million public school students statewide.
Democrats, who are outnumbered 10-5 on the board, pushed unsuccessfully two years ago to create a full Mexican-American studies program. Instead, publishers were asked to submit textbooks on a variety of ethnic studies topics that the board could consider for use beginning in the 2017-2018 academic year.
RELATED: New Texas textbooks downplay slavery in the Civil War
Texas got one submission: Virginia-based publisher Momentum Instruction offered a textbook titled "Mexican American Heritage." But the book is now being decried as racist and inaccurate by many of the same advocates who had wanted a broader Mexican-American studies course.
"What we have now is a deeply flawed and a deeply offensive textbook," Celina Moreno, an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said at a news conference in the lobby of the Texas Education Agency, where the board meets.
Moreno and other activists are part of the new Responsible Ethnic Studies Text Coalition, which scrutinized the proposed textbooks and detailed what it described as "multiple factual errors." The coalition said those included suggesting that Mexican culture promotes laziness, linking Mexican-Americans to immigrants who are not in the country legally, and characterizing leaders of the Chicano movement that advanced Mexican-American civil rights in the 1960s and '70s as adopting "a revolutionary narrative that opposed Western civilization and wanted to destroy this society."
"Industrialists were very driven, competitive men," the textbook says, according to excerpts. "In contrast, Mexican laborers were not reared to put in a full day's work so vigorously. There was a cultural attitude of 'manana,' or 'tomorrow.'"
A phone number for Momentum Instruction rang unanswered Monday. The liberal watchdog group Texas Freedom Network says the textbook publisher is controlled by Cynthia Dunbar, a former Texas Board of Education member who has advocated for state curriculum standards downplaying the constitutional separation of church and state.
Hispanics now make up 52 percent of Texas public school students, with most being Mexican-Americans.
The education board plans to vote in November on whether to approve the "Mexican American Heritage" textbook. Texas' more than 1,000 school districts don't have to use board-sanctioned classroom materials, but most do.
RELATED: 12 books banned or challenged in Texas schools during 2014-15 school year
As a result, Texas has an outsized influence on school textbooks nationally. Its market is so large that edits made by publishers to meet the state's curriculum standards can wind up altering content in textbooks sold elsewhere.
David Bradley, a social conservative and veteran Board of Education member, said Monday that activists who forced Texas to solicit proposed ethnic studies textbooks are now angry with the results.
"You ought to be careful what you ask for. You got it," Bradley, a Republican from Beaumont, said in a phone interview.
He said Texas should focus on basics like reading, writing and math before worrying about more specialized courses.
"I'm Italian, Irish and French," Bradley said. "And I feel like I'm being discriminated against when we only have an exclusive minority studies program in Texas."
Dates and times have been set for registration of students who will be attending the new Veterans Memorial High School in August.
Signups are set for 9 a.m. to noon and 1-4 p.m. July 25-28 and Aug. 1-4 at the school at 7618 Evans Road, just north of FM 2252. Evening registration is set for two dates only: 6-8 p.m. July 28 and Aug. 2.
Required documents: Proof of residence (utility bill, mortgage or lease contract); parent/guardians drivers license; students certified birth certificate; students Social Security card; additional proof of adults relationship (guardianship papers, court order divorce decree, etc.); immunization record and 2015-16 report card or transcript.
Judson schools offer summer meals
Judson ISD is participating in the Summer Food Service Program, providing meals to all eligible children at no charge.
To be eligible to receive free meals at a residential or non-residential camp, children must meet the income guidelines for reduced-price meals in the National School Lunch Program. Children who are part of households that receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and other such benefits are eligible to receive free meals.
Meals will be served at several campuses in the Judson school district: Converse, Crestview, Ed Franz, Masters, Millers Point and Spring Meadows elementary schools; and Kirby and Woodlake Hills middle schools. Breakfast, lunch and snacks served through Friday, Aug. 5, depending on the location. Serving times vary. For more information, call 210-945-5100.
Live Oak
Citizens Police Academy taking applications
The Live Oak Police Department is accepting applications for its 2016 Citizens Police Academy. The 12-week course starts on Aug. 25.
The program allows residents to learn about law enforcement efforts in the community. Applicants must be 18 years or older. Applications are available at www.liveoaktx.net and at the Justice Center, 8022 Shin Oak. For more information, call 210-945-1700.
Children can sign up for academy
The Live Oak Police Department and the Live Oak Citizens Assisting Police are sponsoring a Junior Citizens Police Academy July 25-29.
The program is open to 50 children ages 9 to 12. It will run Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
The program will teach the kids about how the police department and fire department in Live Oak operate. For more information, call 210-844-2773.
North East ISD
Three NEISD schools part of Summer Food Program
Three North East Independent School District schools will be Summer Food Service Program sites, offering free lunch to children 18 and under at various summer dates.
Meals will be provided at no charge to all school-age children, regardless of race, color, sex or national origin.
Sites and serving times are:
Montgomery Elementary, 7047 Montgomery Drive: Breakfast, 7:30-8:30 a.m.; lunch, 10:30 a.m.-1 p.m. Serving days are Monday-Thursday, through July 21.
Molly Pruitt Library, Roosevelt High School, 5110 Walzem Road: Lunch, noon-1 p.m. Monday-Thursday, through July 28.
San Antonio
Archdiocese schedules
town hall meetings
The Archdiocese of San Antonio will host town hall meetings in July to help plan expected growth in the next 25 years.
Information collected will assist in a study conducted by the Steiner Group, based in Omaha, Nebraska, and the archdiocese development office. While the archdiocese serves more than 750,000 parishioners, in 2028, that number is expected to reach 1 million.
Town halls are planned:
6 p.m. Tuesday, July 26, at St. Luke Church, 4603 Manitou Drive;
6:30 p.m. Wednesday, July 27, at St. Anthony Mary Claret, 6150 Roft Road
Schertz
Inmon to cast ballot at GOP convention
Schertz resident Gary Inmon is in Cleveland this week to cast his delegate vote at the Republican National Convention.
Inmon, president of the Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City ISD board of trustees, is the No. 1 delegate from Congressional District 35. Prior to his departure, Inmon said he is legally obligated to cast my vote for Ted Cruz for the first two ballots.
Inmon arrived in Cleveland on July 17 for the four-day convention. He said each morning starts with a Texas breakfast and meeting.
Business sessions follow in the afternoon inside the Quicken Loans Arena before the nightly speeches on the arenas big stage.
Selma
Selma to unveil work
on Harrison House
The city of Selma is ready to unveil the new and improved Harrison House during an Aug. 10 grand opening of the John S. Harrison City Park and Historic Site.
Steve Jones, development manager, said the $1.2 million spent on the project has brought the Harrison property and its surroundings to the point that the city will soon be able to take reservations for reunions, weddings,and other special events in the restored home, first built in 1852. The 13-acre property was first settled by John and Martha Harrison in 1852. Its listed as a State Archaeological Landmark, and the house is listed on the National Registry of Historic Places.
The August opening of the complex represents the completion of the second in a four-phase development process, with the park portion having opened in April 2015. Phase three involves a hike-and-bike trail connecting Harrison Park with the existing Stage Stop Park, and the final stage is development of the remaining four acres.
The Aug. 20 grand opening is set for 9:30 a.m., followed by a tour of the grounds. For more, contact Jones at 210-643-3862.
Compiled by staff
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Emilee Hurst was a Judson High School Galaxies dance team member. She was a Sunday school teacher with Grace Community Church. She was an assistant dance instructor at Mary Lous School of Dance.
When her life ended in a murder-suicide in April, just weeks before her high school graduation, a community reeled. Classmates, families and friends were in shock and struggled with trying to make sense of it all.
On July 16, some sense emerged in the form of the Legacy1 project, an event to help the Childrens Hunger Fund pack 2,000 boxes of food for delivery to needy families in the San Antonio community.
More than 400 volunteers showed up at Judson High School to help pack the boxes of nonperishables, all in the name of their friend, classmate and fellow church member, Emilee Hurst.
Nate Williams, Grace Community Churchs community life director, said he was astounded by the turnout.
I expect a quarter of the crowd. I would have been happy with about half this number. Were very honored to be a part of this, Williams said. Its a really exciting day for the community, its a really exciting day for the high school and for our friends and everyone involved.
Within days of Hursts death, Legacy1 was born.
We wanted to do a project in her honor, to celebrate the life that she lived, the legacy she lived, he said. Today, the community has come together with Grace Community Church. Childrens Hunger Fund, Air 1 (97.7 FM radio) is here, students and faculty from Judson High School are here, Walmart employees are here. We are coming together to do something good, to push back against the evil and pain thats in the world.
Steve Huerta, senior resource development coordinator with the Childrens Hunger Fund, said the 2,000 food boxes that volunteers packed would provide a family of four with a weeks worth of meals.
There was conversation through the Legacy1 project. There were four things that were important to Emilee: her church, her community, her school and she loved serving children. So, this is just a perfect mesh of all four, in the partnership with us, Huerta said.
He, like Williams, was pleased with the turnout.
Regan Stanton was one of Emilees best friends. She and many of her classmates wore pink Long Live Emilee T-shirts, a rallying cry since her death.
I live every day for her. I am going to continue my career in dance for her. Just everything I do is for her, Stanton said, adding she first met Hurst in the fourth grade, though their friendship did not blossom until middle school. After that, she said, they were inseparable.
We did everything together. Theres not anything we didnt do together, she said. I have seen so many people I didnt expect to show up. I see a lot of people from Judson, and from our graduating class. When I walked through the doors, I was just blown away. I am just so thankful that all of these people are here.
Lanie Pile also wore her pink T-shirt and was proud to be on hand. The lead dance instructor at Mary Lous, she also attended church with Hurst and knew first-hand of her love of children.
I started with Emilee when she was in the eighth grade and on into high school. She was a ballerina, so she took ballet classes with us, Pile said.
Today, this means the world to me because I loved Emilee. She was one of my treasured students. She was my one senior this year. She helped me personally a lot, as she was my assistant for my pre-school classes, she added.
Pile said many families involved in dance at the studio turned out to volunteer.
Emilee also went to my church, and Nate came to me with this idea for Legacy1, and I said absolutely, how can we help? Pile said. Anything you need, we will send volunteers and promote it and we would absolutely be a part of it. So weve been behind it since day one.
Williams said the church plans an annual event in Hursts name.
This event didnt even exist a month and a half ago, Williams said. We came up with the idea, we came up with the vision, and so we began raising funds. Were still working to meet our goal, which is $20,000, and were at about $13,000.
The Legacy1 project at www.legacy1.org is open to other community groups and organizations as well.
Our hope is that Legacy1 is going to become a rallying hub for the community through projects like this, to leave a legacy of their own, he said. If there are other organizations that want to do something under the banner of Legacy1, we absolutely would love to connect with them and do that.
We only have one life, and we want to make sure we live it in a good way, he added.
jflinn@express-news.net
The Cibolo City Council debated changes to an ordinance restricting alcohol sales after midnight at a July 12 meeting, and decided to postpone that decision until August.
The ordinance in question, No. 57, dates back to 1973 and requires establishments who want to serve alcohol between midnight and 2 a.m. to apply for late-hour permits.
The problem is, said Mayor Allen Dunn, no one has applied for a late-hour permit in the past 43 years because there is no formal application process. To make matters more complicated, the city currently cant enforce the revoking of a theoretical permit that it issued in the first place.
Weve made it clear that time is of the essence here, said Dunn. Whatever we decide to put in place, we need to be very careful.
That decision, unlike the law, is simple, according to District 4 Councilman James Doty, Jr.
We either update the current ordinance to bring it into the modern day to allow this stuff, or we dont, Doty Jr. said.
Repealing the law could potentially eliminate businesses ability to sell alcohol after midnight, while updating the ordinance to allow for alcohol sales until 2 a.m. would bring Cibolo in line with the nearby cities of Schertz and Kirby, according to Police Chief Gary Cox.
While the ordinance realistically affects only six businesses inside city limits, Cox cautioned that any extension could have a taxing effect on his police force.
In my 26 years of experience, (extended hours) do create extra demands, Cox said. Any given night, well have about four officers patrolling but if someone gets a DWI, that takes one of my officers off the streets for four to five hours of processing (the suspect), and another officer has to stay and arrange for the vehicle to be towed.
District 3 Councilwoman Marchell Camp-Gebhardt also urged city staff to consider limits on the days when the new ordinance would be in effect, noting that inaction now that businesses are aware of the ordinances structural flaws could potentially result in abuse.
Its all or nothing. Thats the point, she explained. As it stands now, if we (grant a permit), the city is taking a chance they will be open until 2 a.m., seven days a week.
jgerlach@express-news.net
Schertz City Council has turned down a Austin developers request to change its comprehensive land plan, turning away a planned $18.8 million multi-family development they had previously supported.
After more than 20 residents weighed in on the issue at councils July 12 meeting most of them fervently against it the council rejected a request to change the designation of six acres at the southeast corner of Interstate 35 and FM 2252 from highway commercial to commercial campus by a four-to-one vote.
A vote on the land plan amendment was necessary before addressing a proposed rezoning ordinance allowing development of a three-story affordable housing apartment complex on the site. That proposed zoning change also was rejected.
The votes prompted cheers from the crowd of more than 100 residents in the council chambers, many sporting white T-shirts with the word rezoning surrounded by a red circle and split by a red bar.
Saigebrook Development of Austin first approached the council in January, asking for official city support for the project in order to apply to the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program (LIHTC), the largest federal program for affordable housing designed for seniors, single-parent families and lower income tenants. The council gave its unanimous support Jan. 26.
Avanti Canyon, as the project was called, would include 96 one-, two- and three-bedroom units, 218 parking spaces, amenities such as meeting rooms, extension of water and sewer lines to encourage nearby business development and nearly two acres fronting I-35 for retail or low-rise office space, councilmen were told. Developers added they were currently negotiating with businesses to occupy that reserved land.
Although the Schertz Planning and Zoning Commission unanimously rejected the project on June 8 and 22, and city staff recommended against changing the comprehensive development plan, the depth of community opposition came as a surprise, said Megan Lasch, Saigebrook Development project manager.
Jacobson and Lasch told the council the developer mailed more than 700 fliers about the project to nearby residents in June and held two public meetings. One of those sessions attracted nine people, he said. The second saw only one.
It all came down to the affordable (housing issue), Lasch said. We tried to inform all concerned, but they basically just said no.
That answer was evident during the councils public hearing on the change in the citys master plan. Of 21 residents who spoke, only three thought the apartments were a good idea.
Attorney Gary Inmon, president of the Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City Independent School Board, told the council he was not against affordable housing or welcoming additional students to his schools. The problem he had, he said, was economic. The change in land designation, he said, would decrease potential commercial development, reducing property tax revenues, the school districts only source of funding.
Theres a limited amount of property around I-35, Inmon said. For us, the worst case is going from high-dollar commercial and returning it to residential and then high-density residential.
Mayor Michael Carpenter said the property was part of an overall plan. Land on both sides of I-35 stretching north almost to New Braunfels was annexed in 1981 to promote business development, he noted. It is my experience and my personal belief that the burden of getting zoning changed is on the developer, that and the desires of residents and Planning and Zoning, Carpenter said.
While the Saigebrook project was declared dead, it seems likely the issues it sparked will not go away. The states third-ranked project awarded over $1.33 million in federal tax credits to develop affordable housing is The Preserve at Wiederstein. It is proposed for the southwest corner of Wiederstein Road and FM 3009 in Schertz.
That project was scheduled to go before the citys planning and zoning commission July 13 and should be presented for a council vote within a few weeks.
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Donald Trump, famed reality star and presumptive Republican nominee for president, emerged from an Ohio stage in a cloud of fog backlit by blue lights, appearing to only be a shadow. As "We Are the Champions" by Queen blared, Trump appeared clapping and smiling to a sea of fans.
No, this was not a concert, or the opening night of a WWE pay-per-view. This was the 2016 Republican National Convention and, in true Trump fashion, it was all about Trump. At least for a brief moment.
As tradition goes, Melania Trump, the wife of the presumptive nominee, addressed the RNC in Ohio Monday night.
RELATED: Social media reacts to Melania Trump's speech at GOP convention
Donald Trump said, "We're going to win, we're going to win so big," before introducing the "next first lady of the United States."
After months behind-the-scenes, away from the public eye, it was finally Melania Trump's turn to shine meant to highlight the accomplishments of her husband of 18 years and discuss who she would be as a first lady. And everything was fine she discussed her husband's kindness, her up-bringing in Slovenia, her immigration to the United States and how she felt when she became a U.S. citizen in 2006.
Shortly after she finished her roughly 10-minute address, Huffington Post reporter Jarrett Hill was the among the first to realize Melania Trump's speech sounded familiar.
RELATED: Melania Trump's Republican National Convention Speech similar to Michelle Obama's
Melania Trump's speech contained two passages that match nearly word-for-word the speech that first lady Michelle Obama delivered in 2008 at the Democratic National Convention.
The passages in question focus on lessons that Melania Trump said she learned from her parents and the relevance of their lessons in her experience as a mother. They came near the beginning of her speech, which was otherwise distinct from the address that Michelle Obama gave when her husband, then-Sen. Barack Obama, was being nominated for president.
In Melania Trump's speech in Cleveland, she said: "From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise, that you treat people with respect. They taught and showed me values and morals in their daily life." In Michelle Obama's 2008 speech in Denver, she said: "And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: like, you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond, that you do what you say you're going to do, that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them and even if you don't agree with them."
Hill tweeted out the nearly identical passages and the Trump campaign quickly responded saying, "In writing her beautiful speech, Melania's team of writers took notes on her life's inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking," in a news release.
In an interview with NBC News taped ahead of her convention appearance and posted online early Tuesday, Melania Trump said of her speech, "I wrote it." She added that she had "a little help."
RELATED: Oops: 'White elevators' draw criticism, get replaced at the Republican National Convention in Ohio
Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign chair and convention manager, said on CNN Tuesday the themes of Melania Trump's speech are "personal to her, but personal to a lot of people" and that she didn't put anything in her address that didn't "reflect her thinking."
"We're talking about words like compassion, love of family, respect," he said. "These are not words that are unique words, that belong to the Obamas."
He went on to suggest presumptive Democratic nominee for president Hillary Clinton was the first to hone in the alleged plagiarism.
"Just another example that when Hillary Clinton is threatened by a female, the first thing she does is try to destroy the person," he said.
He told the Associated Press the entire situation "is totally blow out of proportion," but agrees with RNC Chairman Reince Priebus' remark that he would probably fire anyone responsible for plagiarizing.
As the former model's mishap played out on television networks, the hashtag "#FamousMelaniaTrumpQuotes" exploded on Twitter Tuesday morning. Famous quotes like "Chewie, we're home" from Star Wars and "Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation..." from former President Abraham Lincoln's famous Gettysburg Address were retweeted hundreds of times mocking the possible first lady's speech.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
kbradshaw@express-news.net
Twitter: @kbrad5
VIDEO Soferul care nu a oprit la semnalele agentilor si a fugit lovind doua masini a fost gasit: Pe cat de zmeu este pe retelele de socializare, pe atat de las a fost cand a fost oprit de Rutiera
A beloved City of San Antonio employee who overcame numerous obstacles to raise her daughter, and who later helped local politicians such as Howard Peak and Phil Hardberger during their mayoral campaigns, Charlotte Morris didnt let much get in her way.
Anybody who knew my mom knew she was larger than life, her daughter Kelly Morris said. Beautiful and glamorous; I always wanted to share my mom because she was outrageous fun.
Morris died June 7, just a few days shy of her 81st birthday.
Morris was about 4 when her father died, leaving her mother to care for three children, including an infant.
Unable to support the family on her salary as a laundress, her mother was forced to place Morris and her brother with St. Peter-St. Josephs Orphanage, where the children were separated by gender.
It was an experience Morris never forgot.
She was completely alone, Kelly Morris said. It really damaged her.
Returning to her mother at about 12, Morris later attended Providence High School, dropping out to marry a boy from her neighborhood at 16.
Coping with various problems in their marriage, the couple divorced a few years later, leaving Morris to raise her daughter as a single mother while working at what was then Groos National Bank of San Antonio, where she was head of new accounts.
More Information Charlotte Morris Born: June 10, 1935, San Antonio Died: June 7, 2016, San Antonio Preceded by: Parents Mabel Pearce and Thomas Robert Rogers; a brother. Survived by: Daughter Kelly Morris; a sister; nieces and nephews. Services: Morris requested that no public services be held. See More Collapse
Turning to alcohol when the stress of her life became overwhelming, Morris was eventually admitted to the state hospital for treatment, where she started her struggle for sobriety.
After her release from the hospital, Morris attended Alcoholic Anonymous meetings at the now-defunct facility The Haven, often accompanied by her daughter.
I wanted to stay with my mom, Kelly Morris said. Thats where wed spend Friday nights.
Volunteering at the facility, Morris did everything from making coffee to collecting dues, often answering the call of people who were in crisis, again taking her daughter with her.
She gave a damn, Kelly Morris said. She gave a damn about everybody.
Losing her job at the bank when she was admitted to the state hospital, Morris was hired by the city, working in the department of economic and employment development, where her upbeat attitude gained her many friends.
Morris was especially taken with Henry Cisneros, later volunteering to work on his mayoral campaign.
Charlotte always was that person who was essential behind the scenes, Cisneros said. She inspired me in how much confidence she had in my race; it was a wonderful thing to have someone so positive around.
mheidbrink@express-news.net
For a few years, the third week of July was the appointed time for those searching how to love and not hate, to nurture and not destroy, to visit Sweet Auburn.
Hundreds of adults and high school students from across the United States and beyond came to Atlantas historic Sweet Auburn District for the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Changes Workshop on Nonviolence.
The workshop, like the King Center, was created by Coretta Scott King to continue her husbands legacy of teaching the philosophy of nonviolence as a way of life and social change.
This wasnt a gathering for theoretical musings but a week of engagement for teachers, administrators, law enforcement officials, community organizers and students to explore ways to use nonviolence to overcome the very real problems in their communities and personal lives.
Many who came were initially resistant to the introspection and candor that were asked. Many werent used to imagining the lives of others and learning histories different from theirs, all necessary if walls were to be torn down and community created.
But always at weeks end, in the closing ceremony in Ebenezer Baptist Church, there would be young and old participants whod speak about how their minds and hearts had been opened by difficult and painful conversations theyd not had before. Many would take what they learned back home in service to their communities.
Sunday, the third week of July this year, was punctuated by gunfire that killed three Baton Rouge police officers. This after Dallas, Minnesota, Baton Rouge (again), Orlando and more had already been added to our nations atlas of datelines of violence.
Montrell Jackson, one of the slain Baton Rouge officers, wrote a Facebook post July 8 describing the tension of being an African-American policeman.
In uniform I get nasty hateful looks and out of uniform some consider me a threat.
He also wrote, These are trying times. Please dont let hate infect your heart.
We are overwhelmed and weary of the recurring violence, but we shouldnt be surprised.
Violence has marked our country and our world, our history and our species.
Mans cruelty to each other is not new but, as Officer Jackson understood, neither is our capacity to change nor our ability to choose love, communication and understanding over hate, retaliation and revenge.
We decide if we slur, lie about and cast aspersions against those who are different from us in any way.
Its our choice if we defame and attack someone because of the color of his skin or the uniform she wears.
We choose if were to be our brothers and sisters keepers instead of their tormenters or silent accomplices in their suffering.
King called nonviolence love in action.
We dont have to like each other, but we should love humanity enough to respect and protect each others humanity.
The third week in July used to be an appointed time in Atlanta to make a commitment to nonviolence and to the difficult, open and painful conversations that are necessary to understand each other a little better, love each other a little more, and do right by each other a little more often.
If were serious about confronting the cycle of hate and violence, we need more appointed times for open and painful conversations that are followed by acting upon what we learned.
And we better learn.
Cary Clack is a San Antonio writer.
STAMFORD A Good Samaritan tackled a Bridgeport man before he could hit his girlfriend with a chunk of concrete during a drunken feud Monday night in a downtown park, police said.
Sgt. Chris Weed said police were called to Latham Park about 11:15 p.m. for a report of a man assaulting a woman.
Officers found a 6-foot Norwalk man, 25, holding down 5-foot-7 Jonathan Rosario, 31, of Bridgeport.
Rosarios 34-year-old Stamford girlfriend told police they were having drinks at The Brickhouse Bar and Grill on Bedford Street when she told her boyfriend he was getting too drunk, Weed said. She said Rosario became angry and the two started arguing, Weed said.
The two left the bar and Rosario took the womans phone and threw it into the sewer, Weed said.
The woman said Rosario chased her as she ran across the street to Latham Park, Weed said.
Rosario picked up a big chunk of concrete and was about to hit the woman with it when a passerby tackled him, Weed said.
Weed said Rosario was uncooperative and would not allow police to photograph him or take his fingerprints.
Rosario was charged with attempted first-degree assault, third-degree assault and breach of peace.
jnickerson@scni.com
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Four islands in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and a chunk of a fifth are now officially the property of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, district officials announced Monday.
The giant water district, which represents 26 agencies in Southern California, completed a $175 million deal to purchase 20,369 acres of land in the delta, a transaction that some conservationists believe is a blatant water grab by one of the worlds largest and most powerful water agencies.
Today, all actions required to close escrow were met, escrow closed and the documents conveying title were recorded, said a memo from the districts legal counsel to the 37-member board of directors Monday. The transaction is complete and Metropolitan now owns these properties.
The land includes Webb Tract, Bacon Island, Bouldin Island, most of Holland Tract and a portion of Chipps Island, in Contra Costa, San Joaquin and Solano counties. Owning the islands is expected to give the district more leverage in the bitter battle for delta water.
Two of the islands Bouldin and Bacon are directly in the proposed path of Gov. Jerry Browns controversial $15.5 billion twin-tunnels project, which would divert supplies from the Sacramento River southward, including to farms and many of the 19 million residents of Southern California who get their water from the mammoth district.
The district, the most influential supporter of the governors plan, has not specifically stated what it plans to do with the islands, but owning them certainly alleviates issues of right of way and other complications standing in the way of tunnel construction.
The transaction comes four days after the state Supreme Court rejected a legal challenge by San Joaquin County, one of four failed attempts by environmental groups and local political leaders to block the sale.
It was a major blow to conservation groups, which have compared the pending sale to the movie Chinatown, the 1974 Roman Polanski film about deceptive tactics used by Los Angeles interests in 1937 to secure water rights to the Owens Valley, east of the Sierra.
The land was sold to Metropolitan by Delta Wetlands Properties, a subsidiary of insurance giant Zurich. Delta Wetlands had obtained approval to build reservoirs and flood Bacon Island and Webb Tract, which are below sea level, and convert Bouldin Island and Holland Tract to wildlife habitat. Metropolitan officials have said, however, that they have no interest in using the islands, which are protected by levees, as reservoirs.
Peter Fimrite is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: pfimrite@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @pfimrite
In a partnership with the City of Boerne, The Lookout Group has constructed Boernes first reclaimed-water tank rising 150 feet above the master-planned community of Esperanza on Texas Highway 46.
Towering high above the tree line, the green tank with its logos representing the collaborative work between the city and the developer is visible from miles away. The tank holds approximately 400,000 gallons of treated wastewater that will be used for landscape irrigation. Not only will this save 240 million gallons of potable water per year for the residents of Boerne, it will be sold to the residents of Esperanza at a substantial discount compared to potable water.
The retailers threat to ban the use of Visa cards at its Canadian stores is underway.
MONTREAL Walmart's threat to ban the use of Visa cards at its Canadian stores began on Monday in the northwestern Ontario city of Thunder Bay, the Huffington Post reports.
Walmart Canada announced on June 11 that it will stop accepting Visa credit cards. Following an evaluation of credit card transaction fees in Canada and the rest of the world, we have concluded the fees applied to Visa credit card purchases remain unacceptably high, said the retailer in a statement.
To ensure we are taking care of our customers best interests and delivering on our promise of saving customers money, we constantly work to reduce our operating costs, including credit card fees. Unfortunately, Visa and Walmart have been unable to agree on an acceptable fee for Visa transactions. As a result we will no longer accept Visa in our stores across Canada, starting with our stores in Thunder Bay, on July 18, 2016. This change will then be rolled out in phases across the country, the statement read.
The news source writes that Walmart remains optimistic that an agreement will be reached with Visa, while the card company says Walmart is using consumers as pawns. Additionally, Walmart says it pays more than $100 million in fees annually to the card companies. In response, Visa said it offered Walmart one of the lowest rates of any merchant in Canada.
The Retail Council of Canada (RCC) is pushing for a permanent regulatory solution to high interchange fees paid by Canadian merchants, urging all members of Parliament to support legislation, Bill C-236, that seeks to empower the minister of finance to cap interchange rates like countries such as Australia, Switzerland and Israel have done.
There are no Goliaths involved on the merchant side in this second story, Bill C-236 having been inspired by the Quebec convenience stores association and supported by the 46,000-plus storefronts represented by the Retail Council of Canada, wrote RCC President and CEO Diane Brisebois, in a recent op-ed. What these two stories have in common is a rising merchant frustration with the level of credit card fees known as interchange fees.
The latest NACS Convenience Matters podcast explores the Renewable Fuel Standard and how retailers, consumers and other market participants have been affected.
ALEXANDRIA, Va. Mandates require ethanol to be blended into transportation fuels, and today 10% of all gas sold is actually ethanol. Whats next with both mandates and consumer demand for ethanol?
In the latest NACS Convenience Matters podcast, program co-hosts Jeff Lenard, NACS vice president of strategic industry initiatives, and John Eichberger, executive director of the Fuels Institute, talk to Paige Anderson, NACS director of government relations, about the status of renewable fuels on the episode How Does the Renewable Fuel Standard Affect Me? The program can be downloaded on iTunes by searching for Convenience Matters. Its also available at nacsonline.com/podcasts.
The Renewable Fuel Standard, otherwise known as the RFS, has been around for more than a decade. But the idea of using renewable fuels like ethanol has been around since the first automobile in the 1880s, which actually was fueled by ethanol. Today, ethanol comprises about 10% of the total fuel sold in the United States, but there are some changes coming that will affect both retailers and their customers.
As policymakers examine the RFS, its critical for retailers and their customers to understand the implications of any changes and how these changes could affect their operations, Lenard said.
A new podcast will be released every week, focusing on topics related to convenience stores.
As weve discussed previously, the creaky code base in large banks is a systemic risk. Major banks run their transactions on mainframes, and significant portions of the software is both ancient and customized. Since at least the mid 1990s, these banks have had major projects to migrate off their legacy code. Although it is hard to prove a negative, I am highly confident no one has succeeded. Why? It would be such a spectacular accomplishment (and would still be very costly) that any bank that had succeeded would have broadcast its accomplishment.
A recent article in Medium, Interviewing my mother, a mainframe COBOL programmer, gives a sense of why the problem is so intractable. Ive excerpted key sections and encourage you to read it in full (the other parts of the article have detail on database sizes and organization which experts will find informative). The mother works at a bank now known as Nordea, which has about $700 billion in assets. Contrast that with JP Morgan, which has roughly $2.4 trillion in assets, and massive derivatives clearing operation on top of that.
From the article:
This position is the most important one in the bank, at least from a technical standpoint. If, lets say, my mother and everyone on her team would quit their job, the bank would go under within a matter of weeks if theyre lucky. They have a rotation of people on her team being available 24/7. I remember when I was younger and she had to take a taxi to work in the middle of the night on a Sunday to fix a dead-lock problem. COBOL
is not a fancy programming language like your functional Haskell or concurrent Golang its an imperative, procedural language and since 2002, object-oriented. Theres nothing wrong with the language itself, the problem is that barely anyone knows it at least not in the context of mainframe programming. My mother is the next youngest person on her team, and shes born 1964, and the youngest person being 2 years younger. Since almost all of the largest banks in the world runs on IBM Mainframe with COBOL as the primary programming language, this is a global issue. The smaller banks however are better off which usually runs something like Java without mainframes. Banking systems are also extremely advanced. A personal bank account differs a lot from a business bank account, and there are at least 50 different types of bank accounts for each of them. And in Nordeas case, they also have the Swedish government accounts, which are different from both personal and business accounts. I think they have the Finnish government accounts and maybe a portion of Denmarks as well, which differs too.
Clive provided more corroborating information via e-mail:
Did you read what the most highlighted section in the piece had become: There are programs that are decades old that nobody even knows what they do and the person who wrote it is long gone. At my TBTF, I heard only last week theres a routine in COBOL which is something to do with payments. It was written in the late 60s. What it does is fairly easily discernible from the code, but what is a complete unknown is what upstream or downstream dependencies there might be for this module. It may be being invoked directly. Or its output may be being checked. Or it could have become an elaborate subroutine for another process. No-one really knows. So there it stays, untouched, undecommissionable. If it was a lower priority system it might be possible to experiment a bit and remove it, see what happens. But if it brought down payments or, worse, didnt bring down payment but corrupted the processing of payments in some subtle but damaging way, the losses could run into hundreds of millions. If there was a lot more money available, we could suspend the module in dev and see what happens. But Weve only got three or four proper feature-complete dev regions and these are all permanently tied up with other, urgent, projects/changes/fixes. Therefore you cant tie them up for weeks (or more likely months) doing month-end, quarter-end and year-end simulations. Weve got a fair few more other development systems, but these are not complete with all the interfaces, so are only suitable for unit testing which means you cant do the sort of end-to-end testing needed to really get under the hood of this routine. Simplest, then, to leave it sitting there. Like one of the monoliths in 2001, a beguiling mystery. A couple of years ago, there was a big programme started to decommission a load of legacy systems. No-one can think of any system which has actually been decommissioned. At the C-suite level, the drive for bodyshopification continues unrelentingly take experienced, knowledgeable but expensive subject matter experts, shovel them out and get in someone (maybe two or even three different people, it doesnt seem to matter) at 1/3rd the cost in India, the Philippines, Poland, it really doesnt bother anyone at all where, instead. All they need to do is have a months handover and get a link to a SharePoint site with the documentation and off they go. The churn is immense, these resources are rarely there for more than a year, and never there for more than two. Oh, and every so often, the whole outsourcer gets the heave-ho to be replaced by another outsourcer who can cut the day rate by a few pounds here or there. No, it doesnt feel like it will end well. But the plates keep spinning in the air for now, so nothing is going to change in the meantime
On one of our earlier discussions of bank IT risk, a knowledgeable reader said (and I wish I could locate the comment) that the reason banks havent migrated off the legacy code is that the idea stops dead when management realizes that it will take three years of their profits to get it done. And thats before you get to the fact that massive cost overruns in IT projects are routine, and 80% of large IT projects fail.
Its inconceivable that regulators are not aware of this ticking time bomb, and yet are not forcing banks to act. When this all blows up is anyones guess, but a train wreck is inevitable, if nothing else due to the members of the mission-critical teams that baby this ancient code retiring and dying.
As readers may recall, Italy has been trying with no success to get the ECB and European banking authorities to allow it to rescue its banks. Unlike banks in most other European countries, Italys got sick the old fashioned way: by lending to businesses in its own market, and then having the loans go bad, in large measure to how lousy the post-crisis economy has been.
New Euronzone-wide banking rules took effect in January. They require bank bail-ins as the remedy for sick banks, with only narrow exceptions. Bail-in means wiping out shareholders, and then wiping out bondholders and converting bondholders to equity holders to the degree that you now have a bank with a decent equity cushion.
That might sound sensible, except in Italy, many banks defrauded depositors by persuading them to buy bonds that are junior enough to put them first in line in a bail-in, by telling them those bonds were just as good as deposits. So bail-ins would hurt and potentially wipe out a lot of retail savers. That would not only damage the economy in a serious way, but it would also create political havoc. Premier Matteo Renzi is already at risk of losing to Beppe Grillos Five Star movement in elections this fall. Bail-ins would seal his fate. Five Star has vowed a referendum on exiting the Eurozone. Given that the currency union has become an economic hairshirt for Italy, a referendum is seen as having good odds of passing
One would think the foregoing would motivate the Eurocrats to cut Italy some slack, and Renzi has made several cases as to why Italy should get a waiver. Commentators at the Financial Times are sympathetic. From an article last week:
Wriggle room was an issue much debated by investors in Europes banks this week: can Italy use as much as 40bn of public money to help its banks when the aim, if not the fine print, of EU rules is that it should not? The question is pressing because Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the worlds oldest bank, may fall short when regulators this month assess its ability to withstand losses. Estimates for how much capital is needed range from 3bn to 6bn, after finding a buyer for perhaps 20bn of loans gone bad.. A cascade of problems could follow from the knock to confidence in the Italian financial system. The prospect of merging strong banks with weaker ones could fade. Retail investors, who the International Monetary Fund estimates own a third of the 600bn of bonds issued by Italys banks, may panic at the prospect of losses.
Yet the authorities have ignored Renzis pleas. But has the European Court of Justice given Italy a reprieve? From Reuters (hat tip Richard Smith):
European Union member states are not obliged to make shareholders and junior creditors pay before intervening to rescue a bank, the EU top court said on Tuesday. EU rules imposing losses on bank creditors before a bank bailout were considered legal by the Luxembourg-based European Court of Justice in its ruling over a Slovenian banking rescue. However, the rules are not binding on member states, the court said in its ruling that slightly limits the European Commissions antitrust powers amid talks for an Italian banking bailout. The court said that burden-sharing by shareholders and subordinated debt holders was not a precondition for granting state aid to a troubled lender.
I need to turn in and have yet to see commentary elsewhere. Please provide links in comments if you do. Thanks!
Update: It looks at if Reuters, which was out first with the story, got it wrong. From Marc Chandler (hat tip Michael S):
The European Court of Justice upheld the principle of making creditors bear the burden for investment in banks that sour before government funds can be used. Italian banks are particularly sensitive to the ruling, which cannot be appealed because the European Banking Authority and European Central Bank stress tests on July 29 are expected to show that some Italian banks are under-capitalized.
One of my colleagues, an attorney who regularly reads ECJ and similar rulings, says they are much more difficult to parse than US decisions. Not only are they usually written in a more convoluted manner, but the ruling is seldom in English, and the official translations to English are often not very good. So she didnt find the Reuters muff to be all that surprising.
By Adam Hudson. Originally published at TeleSur
Not everyone who goes through traffic court is there for drunk driving or other dangerous behavior. Many are there for simply being too poor.
Before a Minnesota police officer fatally shot him, 32-year-old Black man Philando Castile was pulled over 31 times and slapped with 63 traffic charges. Several municipalities, like Ferguson, Missouri, have debtors prisons that target and keep working-class people of color in a perpetual cycle of debt to finance their courts. California cities are no exception. A report by the civil legal aid group Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area (LCCR) shows that rates of drivers license suspensions due to unpaid traffic fines are significantly higher for Blacks and Latinos, particularly those in lower-income neighborhoods.
If someone fails to appear (FTA) in court for a traffic violation or fails to pay (FTP) an infraction ticket or drives with a suspended license, they are committing a misdemeanor in California. This can occur even if the license suspension results from inability to pay a fine. California law allows police to arrest, book, and jail people for traffic court warrants or the criminal misdemeanor offense of driving with a suspended license when those people cannot afford to pay a ticket fine.
Conviction can lead to six months in jail, several years of probation, and exorbitant fees. Once those infractions are in traffic court, huge fees are tacked on. The fees include state penalty assessment, conviction assessment, and others. These fees can increase a US$100 fine to US$490 or, if the first payment deadline is missed, as high as US$815. In looking at zip code and county data, the LCCR report reveals significant correlations between household income, race, and rates of license suspensions.
According to the report, Of the zip codes with suspension rates higher than the average, 92 percent have household income levels lower than the average. Moreover, most zip codes with Black populations above 20 percent have a license suspension rate above the average.
Mapping data from Los Angeles and San Francisco Counties show that license suspension rates and arrests for FTA/FTP and driving with a suspended license are far higher in neighborhoods with larger Black and Latino populations, higher poverty rates, and lower household income. Blacks and Latinos are disproportionately arrested for driving with a suspended license and failure to appear in court or pay a traffic fine.
From 2013 to 2015, Los Angeles Sheriffs Department made 4,391 FTA/FTP arrests and 19,108 arrests for driving with a suspended license. African-Americans 9.2 percent of LAs population made up 32.5 percent of FTA/FTP arrests and 33 percent of suspended license arrests; Latinos 48.4 percent of the citys population made up 55.2 percent of FTA/FTP arrests and 52.2 percent of suspended license arrests; while whites 26.8 percent of the population constituted 12.3 percent of FTA/FTP arrests and 14.8 percent in suspended license arrests.
During the same period, in the City and County of San Francisco, the Sheriffs Department made 855 FTA/FTP arrests and 9,312 suspended license arrests. Whites 41.2 percent of San Franciscos population made up 22.7 percent of FTA/FTP arrests and 39.7 percent of driving with a suspended license arrests; while Blacks barely 6 percent of the citys population constituted 48.7 percent of FTA/FTP arrests and 45.4 percent suspended license arrests.
In both Los Angeles and San Francisco, whites arrested throughout the city, while Blacks and Latinos are typically arrested in impoverished, low-income neighborhoods. This intense, racialized policing exists despite there being no documented difference in driving behavior between whites and nonwhites. Rather, implicit and explicit racial biases clearly play a role in who is stopped, according to the report. Studies have shown that whites and many Americans, associate Black people with criminality and perceive them to be more violent and criminal than other races.
The story of Velia Duenas, a 25-year-old Latina single mother of two daughters currently living between Bakersfield and Los Angeles, reveals how this system damages a persons life. As a teenager, Duenas racked up four to five truancy tickets, mostly for skipping school. Duenas, her single mother, and three siblings struggled to survive on welfare. Her mother offered to pay her tickets. However, Duenas did not want her mother to pay for her mistakes so she refused her help. Duenas tried to pay her tickets through a payment plan but the juvenile center wanted her to pay a lump sum per ticket.
Her tickets range from US$200 to $845 each, which means it would take US$1,000 to US$1,500 to pay off all the citations she racked up as a minor. Because of the unpaid tickets she got as a minor, Duenas is unable to get a drivers license. She explained, When I hit 17, when I actually started to get behind the wheel, I went to the DMV, tried to get a drivers license, tried to fill it out. I wasnt able to because of what I owed for my juvenile record.
As a result, her license was put on hold and she was never able to take the test. On top of the hold, her license was suspended due to the number of times police caught her driving without a license. The hold from her juvenile record is lifted but what is holding Duenas back are four to five unpaid traffic tickets for driving with a suspended license. Since Duenas cannot afford to pay those traffic tickets, she had no choice but go to jail. Of the four to five tickets she got, she served jail time for three of them. She recently spent 39 days in jail for driving with a suspended license.
Jail was horrible, said Duenas. I was always grew up saying to myself that I would never step foot in there [jail] because of my father being there, growing up, in and out. To be in there for such a minor issue, I felt like I was going crazy. I mean, it sucks. It was depressing for me. Legally, traffic court defendants have the right to use economic hardship and inability to pay as a defense for not paying a ticket, which she used. However, the judge rebuked her, arguing that if she can pay for a cell phone then she can afford to pay her exorbitant tickets.
Even though Duenas step-father, a truck driver, offered to get her a truck driving job alongside him, she cant because she does not have a license. This is among the many obstacles placed on a persons life if their license is suspended. Not having a drivers license makes it difficult to go to work or run necessary errands. In areas where public transportation is almost nil such as Bakersfield, where Velia sometimes lives that can be next to impossible if one does not have access to a car.
Plus, many jobs and job-training programs require that employees have drivers licenses to obtain full time, steady employment. Some private employers screen out applicants who do not have drivers licenses. Dana Isaac, the Thurgood Marshall Fellow at ICCR whose work focuses on traffic courts and license suspensions, told AlterNet that many tickets that go through traffic court are not just for minor driving violations but also quality-of-life citations.
These can include offenses for jaywalking, for littering, for riding public transportation without a transfer depending on who issues the ticket, a lot of camping, which we see with a lot of homeless clients. It really involves a lot of issues and tickets that can be issued essentially as poverty offenses, she explained. San Franciscos sit-lie ordinance prohibits sitting or lying down on a public sidewalk, which effectively criminalizes homeless people for sleeping in public. Therefore, not everyone who goes through traffic court is there for drunk driving or other dangerous behavior. Many are there for just being too poor.
For 90 years, lightbulbs were designed to burn out. Now thats coming to LED bulbs. BoingBoing (Dr. Kevin)
A Bizarre New Zika Infection in Utah Atlantic (resilc)
Abort, Retry, Fail Billionaire Bill Gates Opines, Sans Evidence, on the Efficacy of Hepatitis C Treatment? Health Care Renewal
Brexit
Germanys Central Bank Urges Reforms to Euro Area Governance Wall Street Journal
Italy rescues Veneto Banca after EU bailout plea fails Financial Times
EU Approves $166 Billion Liquidity Guarantee for Italy Banks Bloomberg. Not to a substitute for bailouts
Independent report: The Seven Errors of IMF in Greek Program Keep Talking Greece
China?
Turkey
Syraqistan
Misinvoicing of commodities costs billions to developing world Financial Times
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
2016
Voters deserve responsible nationalism not reflex globalism Larry Summers, Defend Democracy. The neoliberals are getting nervous.
There Will Be No Second American Revolution: The Futility of an Armed Revolt Rutherford Institute (Chuck L). As we and quite a few members of the commentariat have been saying for some time
BARTENDERS have a more dangerous job than cops h/t @VanguardVivian pic.twitter.com/AgYaf49aKm @ninjaeconomics
Perus Elections May Signal Whats Ahead for the United States in November Nation (Sid S)
Ailes future in the balance at Fox News Financial Times
Anthem-Cigna Deal: Seeking Merger Approval, Anthem Makes Major Donations To State Political Groups David Sirota, International Business Times
Honeywell Internal Email Shows Airplane Boom Time Over, More Layoffs Coming Michael Shedlock
Why Central Banks and Markets Are Getting Out of Sync Wall Street Journal (margarita). The whole premise that central banks should be attentive to financial markets, which was Greenspans fixation, is what got us into this mess.
Class Warfare
Antidote du jour. Margarita: Peacocks are mascots for the Slovak spa town of Piestany.
See yesterdays Links and Antidote du Jour here.
Minimalist swimming microrobots (Nanowerk News) When scaling down robots to the micrometer scale for tiny tasks such as incising tissue and puncturing retinal veins, minimalism is key. To make smaller, simpler microrobots, researchers at Drexel University have developed a fabrication method which utilizes the minimum geometric requirements for fluid motion -- consisting of just two conjoined microparticles coated with bits of magnetic debris.
When a microrobot is exposed to an external magnetic field -- the offboard power source, given the difficulty in shrinking batteries to the size of bacteria -- it begins to spin and move in a manner similar to bacterial flagella, courtesy of the iron oxide debris.
"Such simple microswimmers circumvent the technical limitations of fabrication technologies, which effectively allow for a focus on the functionalization of microswimmers," said MinJun Kim, a professor in the Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics Department at Drexel University in Philadelphia. "Furthermore, the use of particles to create these microswimmers will synergize well with other micro- and nanoparticle based technologies such as nanoparticle drug delivery systems."
This is a trajectory of a microswimmer displaying a circle pattern. (Image: Kim/Drexel)
Kim and his colleagues discuss their work this week in Applied Physics Letters ("Fabrication and control of simple low Reynolds number microswimmers"). Previous work for the researchers had included a paper on the minimal geometrical requirements to fabricate microswimmers that operate at low Reynolds numbers, a ratio of forces that determines the degree of turbulence for fluids and objects under flow conditions.
At low Reynolds numbers, Kim said, inertial forces become negligible, and viscous forces become dominant. This rules out reciprocal motion -- such as the way a fish uses their fins -- so the microswimmers must rely on nonreciprocal motion similar to that of bacterial flagella, in which rotational motion is converted to translational motion.
The researchers fabricated their particle-based microswimmers through chemical conjugation and magnetic self-assembly. To bind the four micrometer-wide magnetic beads into pairs, Kim and his colleagues prepared two batches separately coated with avidin and biotin proteins, which create one of the strongest naturally found non-covalent bonds. They then exposed these conjoined pairs to one-micrometer iron oxide flakes, which became magnetically adhered to the microsphere surfaces.
This stands in contrast to many existing methods of fabrication in which microrobots are fabricated using specialized chemistry and lithography methods, some of which involve molds and elastomeric materials.
After fabrication, the researchers placed samples of the microswimmers inside a simple chamber fabricated from PDMS, a common silicon-based organic polymer. The chamber was then placed inside an electromagnetic coil system that was mounted onto a microscope with external controls to manipulate the strength, rotation frequency and direction of the magnetic field. These allowed for control over the swimming motion, speed and heading direction of the microswimmers.
"Our results demonstrated successful control over the microswimmers' swimming speed and direction," Kim said. "The significance of the results is the demonstration that such extremely simple microswimmers can be fully controllable at low Reynolds number."
Gas sensors 'see' through soil to analyze microbial interactions
(Nanowerk News) Rice University researchers have developed gas biosensors to "see" into soil and allow them to follow the behavior of the microbial communities within.
In a study in the American Chemical Society's journal Environmental Science and Technology ("Volatile gas production by methyl halide transferase: an in situ reporter of microbial gene expression in soil"), the Rice team described using genetically engineered bacteria that release methyl halide gases to monitor microbial gene expression in soil samples in the lab.
Scientists have created programmed bacteria that serve as gas sensors to help them "see" into soil and learn about the behavior of the microbial communities within. When the engineered bacterium receives genetic information from another bacterium, it releases a gas to "report" the transaction. (Image: Jonathan Silberg and Shelly Cheng/Rice University)(
The bacteria are programmed using synthetic biology to release gas to report when they exchange DNA through horizontal gene transfer, the process by which organisms share genetic traits without a parent-to-child relationship. The biosensors allow researchers to monitor such processes in real time without having to actually see into or disturb a lab soil sample.
The Rice researchers expect their technique will serve the same purpose for environmental scientists that fluorescent reporter proteins serve for biochemists who track protein expression and other processes in biological systems.
The work by the Rice labs of biogeochemist Caroline Masiello, biochemist Jonathan Silberg, microbiologist George Bennett and lead author Hsiao-Ying (Shelly) Cheng, a Rice graduate student, is the first product of a $1 million grant by the W.M. Keck Foundation to develop gas-releasing microbial sensors.
"This paper describes a new tool to study how microbes trade genetic material in the environment," said Masiello, a professor of Earth science.
"We care about this because the process of horizontal gene transfer controls a lot of things that are important to humans either because they're good -- it's how rhizobia trade the genes they need to fix nitrogen and support plant growth -- or they're bad -- it's how bacteria trade antibiotic resistance in soils," she said. "It's been much more challenging in the past to construct models of this dynamic process in real soils and to study how horizontal gene exchange varies across soil types. We've created a new set of tools that makes that possible."
The researchers expect scientists will use gas biosensors in the lab to study nitrogen fixing in agriculture, antibiotic exchange in wastewater treatment, gene transfer in conditions where nutrients are scarce and the relationship between gene expression in soil and the release of greenhouse gases.
"There are other technologies that will build on this," said Silberg, an associate professor of biochemistry and cell biology. "The idea of using gases opens up most anything that's genetically encoded. However, we do need to improve technologies for some of the subtler kinds of questions."
He said releasing and sensing methyl halide gas represented an easy proof of concept. "Now we want higher-resolution information about other types of biological events by creating more sophisticated genetic programs using synthetic biology," Silberg said.
They expect they will soon be able to test agricultural soil samples to help fine-tune crop growth through more efficient watering and fertilizer use. "How can agriculture get this extra level of efficiency without the waste? Lots of people are coming to that, and there are lots of ways to do it," he said. "We're trying to build high-tech tools that allow us to understand mechanisms to make reliable predictions. That's the long game with these tools."
The researchers emphasized that these are tools for soil studies within lab environments. The synthetic microbes are destroyed once the results are obtained.
The Rice lab tested soil samples from the National Science Foundation's Kellogg Biological Station Long-Term Ecological Research Site in Michigan after adding Escherichia coli bacteria programmed to release gas upon transfer of their DNA to another microbe. Signals from the gas were up to 10,000 times the lab's detection limit.
Exploring superconducting properties of 3-D printed parts
(Nanowerk News) 3-D printing is revolutionizing many areas of manufacturing and science. In particular, 3-D printing of metals has found novel applications in fields as diverse as customized medical implants, jet engine bearings and rapid prototyping for the automotive industry.
While many techniques can be used for 3-D printing with metals, most rely on computer-controlled melting or sintering of a metal alloy powder by a laser or electron beam. The mechanical properties of parts produced by this method have been well studied, but not enough attention has focused on their electrical properties.
Now in a paper appearing this week on the cover of the journal Applied Physics Letters ("A 3D printed superconducting aluminium microwave cavity"), a team of University of Melbourne and University of Western Australia researchers report creating a resonant microwave cavity that they 3-D printed via an aluminum-silicon alloy (Al-12Si). It exhibits superconductivity when cooled below the critical temperature of aluminum (1.2 Kelvin).
This is the selective laser melting process in action. (Image: Tim Sercombe/University of Western Australia)
"Conductivity is a measure of how easily an electrical current flows through a material, while 'superconductivity' is this measure taken to its extreme," explained Professor Michael Tobar, University of Western Australia node director of the Center for Engineered Quantum Systems. "It's an effect observed within a number of materials, characterized by the complete vanishing of any resistance to the flow of electrical current when cooled below a certain temperature."
Superconducting cavities are useful for numerous areas of physics -- from quantum physics to particle accelerators. But designing superconducting cavities is becoming more complex, often involving nonstandard geometries and arrays of resonators, which makes conventional machining more challenging.
So two groups at the University of Western Australia -- one led by Professor Tim Sercombe, an expert in materials and 3-D printing, and the other led by Tobar, an expert in engineered quantum systems and novel cavity designs -- combined their expertise and launched a pilot study to explore the superconducting properties of 3-D printed parts.
"The physics of superconductivity is well understood, and it has been known for decades that aluminum exhibits superconductivity," Tobar said. "But the 3-D printing process relies on aluminum that's far from pure and it undergoes several processes -- atomization, laser melting, furnace annealing, etc. So we wanted to explore whether a range of known superconducting metals could successfully be 3-D printed and retain their desirable electrical property."
A process known as "selective laser melting" (SLM) tends to produce a finished material with a very small grain and, for a number of metals, the critical temperature at which superconductivity occurs can be strongly linked to grain size.
"Materials such as lanthanum, molybdenum, and niobium all respond differently," Tobar said. "Grain size has been observed to both increase and decrease this critical temperature. Superconductors with high critical temperatures are particularly interesting, so this 3-D printing process may have some advantage in reducing grain size. The SLM process may also enable rapid testing of new alloys with varying percentages of elements that haven't been measured before."
Beyond measuring the superconductivity, the group wanted to show that they could do something potentially useful with this technique so they decided to 3-D print a resonant microwave cavity.
"Using a device called a 'vector network analyzer,' we excited electromagnetic modes of resonance at microwave frequencies inside the cavity and measured its quality factor, aka 'Q'. This is a measure of how long injected microwaves are stored within the cavity before being lost. It's directly related to the surface resistance of the cavity walls," he explained.
Through measurements of the Q-factor, the researchers were able to indirectly determine this resistance and show that the material becomes superconducting at 1.2 Kelvin.
This result was "surprising, given the very large concentration of nonsuperconducting silicon within the alloy," Tobar noted. "It may open new possibilities for printing novel cavity configurations."
The team's results are immediately useful -- people can now craft a variety of components based on their work.
"Because superconductors expel magnetic fields, magnetic shielding can be printed for experiments," Tobar said. "Also, any cavity experiment requiring a Q-factor on the order of 1 million can benefit from this technology."
For technologies requiring much sharper line-widths and higher Q-factors, according to Tobar, starting materials such as high-purity niobium powder may be ideal.
"There is relatively little in the literature regarding 3-D printed superconductors, so further work must be done to determine more appropriate materials and how to improve the surface finish and resistance of the parts -- possibly via heat treatment or chemical polishing/etching," he added.
Next steps? The team wants to attempt 3-D printing cavities with highly pure niobium powder.
'It just flipped': Busch details final season with Joe Gibbs Racing in 'Race for the Championship' In the latest episode of USA Network's "Race for the Championship," Busch describes the change at JGR and is introduced with a new team.
Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, said to be a contender for Hillary Clinton's running mate, was found by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel to have violated a law prohibiting federal employees from engaging in political activity while working in their official capacity.
Castro committed the violation of what's known as the Hatch Act during a Yahoo News interview with Katie Couric, during which he praised Clinton's experience and said he believed Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was unfit for office, the OSC said on Monday.
While Castro preceded his comments with the disclaimer that "taking off my HUD hat for a second and just speaking individually," the interview was taped at his department's television studio and bracketed by a discussion of official departmental policies.
"Despite his efforts to clarify that he was speaking only for himself and not as a HUD official when answering political questions, Secretary Castro's statements impermissibly mixed his personal political views with official government agency business," the independent federal agency said in its report on the incident.
Castro said in a letter to the OSC that he "acknowledged" he had made an "inadvertent" error in the incident.
The agency didn't disclose who made the initial complaint about Castro's interview that prompted the investigation. The OSC report will be forwarded to President Obama.
White House spokeswoman Jennifer Friedman said Castro had taken full responsibility "for ensuring that such errors do not occur again."
"The secretary takes the Hatch Act very seriously and he has committed to taking steps to ensure understanding and compliance with the Hatch Act throughout the Department of Housing and Urban Development," Friedman said in an emailed statement.
Obama is not expected to take additional action since Castro has acknowledged the error.
Republicans are likely to seize on the incident in the days before Clinton is expected to announce her vice presidential selection. Castro, a 41-year-old Latino who previously served as mayor of San Antonio, met with Clinton last week at her home in Washington as the presumptive Democratic nominee is wrapping up her search for a running mate before the party's convention next week. He previously has campaigned with the former secretary of state.
Castro is the second Cabinet secretary to be found in violation of the Hatch Act during the Obama administration. Former Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius ran afoul of the rule in 2012 when she told attendees at a Human Rights Campaign gala in North Carolina that re-electing Obama was "hugely important."
Although House Republicans urged Sebelius to resign, White House spokesman Eric Schultz said at the time that the administration was satisfied that she had rectified the situation by repaying the trip costs.
The White House has forbidden Cabinet members from addressing the party convention to avoid appearances that the administration is mixing politics with official duties in a closely fought campaign to choose Obama's successor.
The White House decided to make the move "to send a signal about the primacy of the Obama administration's responsibility to manage the government and serve the American people," Friedman said.
Think the $1.9 billion "house" mortgage securitization that JPMorgan completed in April was big?
The next one is even bigger $2.645 billion to be exact.
Chase Mortgage Trust 2016-2 is another transaction that does an end-run around Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Though private-label, meaning it is not guaranteed by the government, more than half of the loans used as collateral, or 55%, could have been sold to one of the government-sponsored enterprises. The remaining 45% are just as safe, but too large to qualify.
As with the April transaction, JPMorgan will hold on to the bulk of bonds to be issued; it is retaining the most senior tranches, and selling most of the riskier pieces to investors. The underlying assets would remain on JPMorgan's balance sheet, but investors would eat most of the losses if large numbers of borrowers fell behind on payments.
The transaction is just one way that large banks are responding to the rising cost of mortgage insurance provided by Fannie and Freddie, which still dominate the market for mortgage finance nearly a decade after the financial crisis. By selling bonds backed by conforming loans, JPMorgan is paying capital markets investors, rather than the GSEs, to assume the risk of default.
Like the April deal, this one relies on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.'s 2010 safe harbor rule, which isolates the loans from JPMorgan's creditors should the bank fail. That's important because of a 2009 change in accounting rules; loans originated and serviced by banks are now treated as though they are still on a company's books, even after they are sold to a special purpose vehicle for securitization.
All of the 7,361 loans used as collateral were originated either by Chase or one of its correspondents. All are 30-year fixed-rate mortgage loans seasoned roughly 13 months. The weighted average FICO score is 771, the weighted average loan-to-value ratio 77.6% and nearly 100% are owner occupied.
Moreover the collateral pool has what Fitch describes as "modest" 26.5% exposure to California, a high-cost market that tends to heavily represented in private-label securitizations, which since the financial crisis have been backed almost exclusively by jumbo loans.
Fitch has assigned a preliminary AAA to both the senior and super senior tranches, which benefit from 15% and 10.25% credit enhancement, respectively. In its presale report, the ratings agency notes that these levels are more than enough to offset the impact of expected losses on the collateral to senior noteholders. The additional credit enhancement is necessary because of structural features of the deal. For example, the servicer will not advance principal and interest to noteholders should borrowers miss payments. Also, fees to incent services are borne by all noteholders, and not just the junior noteholders.
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Even many organic salad dressing manufacturers now use toxic ingredients
Any unfermented soybean oil, organic or not, destroys your health
Want a healthy option for dressings?
(NaturalNews) The organic food industry in America is about a $30 billion dollar business right now, but as a fair estimate, a fourth of that money is spent by Americans who assume everything organic is healthy, and the price for that assumption could be cancer and Alzheimer's disease.Go ahead, pile it on. Make that big salad, with delicious, fresh, crisp organic lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, cucumbers and olives, and you'll be treating your body to the perfect meal, chock full of vitamins, minerals and healthy-cell promoting nutrition. Maybe you even shop for your fresh veggies at your local farmer's market, and that's really smart, because most local farmers avoid using chemical pesticides and herbicides, and they don't use Monsanto's evil bio-engineered seeds that contain health-destroying bug-killer and weed-killer genes. You're cruising along the perfect path for disease prevention and organ cleansing. You probably feel great after that big salad, and have lots of energy, creativity and drive for doing all the things you love doing. So, what's the ONE ingredient you need to avoid that could actually ruin your entire healthy organic salad? Answer: toxic salad dressing, including even many of the "organic" options. How so?Just because something is organic doesmean it's good for you. Canola, for starters, is made from rapeseed oil, which is toxic to all animals, including humans. Canola oil, or "low acid Canadian oil," is simply rapeseed oil with less toxic acid content that meets absurd FDA guidelines. Although the "USDA certified organic" label means no pesticides are added to food, it does not mean the food is not toxic or doesn't contain heavy metal toxins . Canola oil is usually the first ingredient in most thick, creamy salad dressings nowadays, even those that bear the organic label. This means that that salad dressing bottle contains more canola oil than any other ingredient. How much do you pile on your salad ? Three, four, five tablespoons? How about at the salad bar at your favorite restaurants?Did you think there was a canola plant, like corn, soy or sunflower? There is not. Manufacturers use hexane, a vapor component of gasoline, to process rapeseed oil. So, how is this organic ? Good question. Rapeseed stinks. If you smelled it, you wouldeat it, but rapeseed oil is bleached, deodorized and then cooked at high heat to remove the awful odor. The omega-3 fatty acids of processed canola oil are transformed during this deodorizing process into trans-fatty acids. The reason why canola is particularly unsuitable for consumption is that it contains a very long-chain fatty acid called erucic acid, which is associated with fibroid heart lesions. See what's happening to your organic salad? It's being absolutely ruined by the dressing you pour on it.Just since the year 2000, U.S. food manufacturers have introduced over 3,000 soy-based foods, many of which are labeled "certified organic." Yet, unfermented soy, which is the typical kind in salad dressings , screws up the balance of human estrogen and testosterone. Wonder why so many Americans get breast tumors and testicular cancer? Unfermented soy! Any soy that is unfermented, whether organic or not, is linked to immune-system malfunctions, thyroid dysfunction and cognitive decline. Mountains of research from health studies reveal infant abnormalities, kidney stones and food allergies related to unfermented soy consumption. In fact,was fit to eat until the discovery of fermentation techniques during the Chou Dynasty. Anyone eating unfermented soy would suffer from eating anti-nutrient toxins that block the enzymes humans need for protein digestion. Plus, organic soy "protein" may be causing you chronic deficiencies in amino acid uptake, and that's at just two tablespoons a day. How much is going on your salad? Your pancreas could be enlarged right now thanks to soy.Try Cindy's Kitchen of Brockton featuring two dozen delicious healthy flavors of organic, non-GMO. It's time to keep that organic salad healthy! Nobody wants to read an article about toxic food that doesn't offer healthy solutions to the problem, so here you go! You have no excuses now. Some fan favorites include Vinaigrette Mediterranean style, Coconut and Lime, Mango-Coconut-Pepper, Sun Dried Tomato and Lemon Tahini. Say goodbye to soy and canola, and say hello to delicious and healthy. And don't forget, growing your own organic vegetables for that salad is always the best option!
Hoping to avoid postpartum depression
Growing interest in natural births in the wild
Hospitals breeding grounds for infections
(NaturalNews) A woman living in Australia was so determined to avoid spending time in the hospital, that she actually gave birth in a rainforest stream When she was pregnant with her fourth child at age 39, doctors told Simone Thurber that her pregnancy would be high-risk. She says she decided to follow her gut and shun the unwelcoming hospital environment in favor of giving birth the way women have for thousands of years outside in nature.Thurber says she is not "a hippy drippy mum," but she did not want her child to be born surrounded by beeping machines and the overall cold atmosphere found in a hospital. She points out that women have been giving birth out in the wild for many thousands of years. A birth in nature had long been her dream, and her partner Nick supported the idea. Thurber is a trained doula and birthing therapist , making her better prepared than most to deal with any issues that might have cropped up in the process.The couple lived in Melbourne at the time, but they headed for a friend's house in the Daintree Rainforest area for the big day. The beach was her first choice, but a jellyfish infestation made that a poor option, so instead she found a stream nearby.Her labor ended up taking longer than expected, but she eventually gave birth to a very healthy girl on a foam mat near the stream. Two hours later, she had birthed the placenta. She used part of it to make a smoothie and buried the rest by the stream in keeping with an aboriginal tradition of "giving back to the land."Thurber suffered from postpartum depression after all of her previous three births, and this method really made a difference, leaving her feeling not only awake and energized, but empowered by the fact that she had successfully given birth to a healthy child. She said the process was draining but freeing.The birth was captured on video, and it has now been viewed 52 million times on YouTube. Thurber is quick to warn people to discuss this option with their doctor or doula first; she was highly trained and had a lot of experience with giving birth . Now aged 43 and living in Park City, Utah, Thurber's experience was the inspiration for the TV series. Although she has not had any involvement with the show personally, its popularity indicates a growing interest in the ultimate in natural births.Although giving birth in the wild does carry some risks and might seem an incomprehensible choice to some, it is easy to see why she was so determined to avoid hospitals. According to the CDC , 648,000 people acquire infections in hospitals every year, and 75,000 of them die. That's actually double the number of people who die in car crashes every year. Newborns are particularly susceptible ; a study released in 2009 showed that superbug infections had increased by more than 300 percent during the previous ten years in hospital neonatal intensive care units (NICUs).A big part of the appeal of an outdoor birth for Thurber was being in nature. Spending time outdoors can provide incomparable relaxation, but for those of us who do not have access to a house in the rainforest, an ultrasonic essential oil diffuser can help freshen the air naturally with essential oils that can boost your breathing or help you to relax. This is a great way to enjoy some of the benefits of nature when spending time outside simply isn't feasible.(Photo credit: Earth Birth Method/Simone Thurber)
Tagging and tracking
Forty-seven adult male (second calendar year and older) Common Cuckoos Cuculus canorus canorus were tagged in Britain between 2011 and 2014, in nine geographically well-spread areas. These areas contrasted in recent local cuckoo breeding population change according to two independent data sets and represented a range of habitat types and therefore distinct communities of cuckoo hosts (Supplementary Tables 1 and 2). The tagging was licensed by the Special Marks Technical Panel operating on behalf of the British Trust for Ornithology and the UK Governments Home Office, and was carried out in accordance with their ethical guidelines. Birds were caught using mist-netting, sound lures (recordings of male and female cuckoo vocalizations) and a dummy (stuffed female Common Cuckoo) placed on a pole. Each individual was fitted with a PTT-100 from Microwave Telemetry weighing <5 g as a backpack using 2 mm diameter flat-braided nylon cord22. No birds weighing <115 g were tagged and the tags weighed 3.84.2% of the birds body weight on tagging. Each tag was programmed for a transmission duty cycle of 10 h on and 48 h off, to allow the battery to charge via the solar panel. With the exceptions of PTTs 115,586, 115,590, 115,599 and 121,791, tags deployed from 2013 were additionally programmed to transmit whenever the battery was close to fully charged but otherwise adhered to the scheduled duty cycle, providing extra positions when weather conditions were favourable.
Satellite data
Locations of the PTTs were obtained from the ARGOS system33. All data were Kalman filtered before locations being received, with the exception of data received before May 2012 from the five PTTs deployed in 2011. Mirror image locations were removed using the Douglas filter facility in Movebank and checked visually. These sometimes occurred even with Kalman filtering for the first location after the bird had moved a considerable distance from its previous position, but were easily identified based on subsequent locations. Analysis was carried out using a data set produced by selecting the best-quality location per duty cycle using Movebank method 1 (based on location class, error radii and number of messages), from a pool including locations for which the reliability could be assessed (classes 1, 2 and 3) and all other locations passing a plausibility filter based on speed-on movement or mutual validation via proximity (Movebank Douglas filter options: Method DAR; keeplc=1, mxred=10, minrate=120, ratecoef=25, minoffh=11 and rankmeth=1).
Mortality
All birds from which transmissions were lost were initially assumed to have died. Some studies7 have been able to prove bird death in some instances through additional observations such as finding the corpse using final GPS coordinates but this is not possible here due to the lower accuracy of Doppler PTTs. As tagged birds are not colour marked and are rarely seen in the field, proving tag failure through field observations of birds after tracking has ceased is not possible. Some cases of tag failure are therefore likely to be included in the mortality rates for each route. Battery degradation through prolonged habitat-mediated shading resulting in charge depletion is the most probable cause of tag failure according to the manufacturer. It is not clear how probable is this during deployment as the tag enters sleep mode requiring minimal power to protect the battery when the charge drops below a threshold. Background rates of tag failure in the absence of shading are estimated to be very low, around 1% in the initial 12 months after deployment (Paul Howey, Microwave Telemetry Inc., personal communication). Although rates of failure are unlikely to differ between the two routes at any point of the annual cycle, the greater chance of poor tag charge leading to loss of contact with a bird in the forest zone south of 6N, where canopy cover is higher, means it could disproportionately affect apparent survival of birds after the Sahara crossing. Apparent survival was therefore calculated (1) up to completion of the Sahara crossing, (2) from that point until arrival at the stopover location of minimum latitude and (3) from there until arrival back in the United Kingdom. This was to prevent any tag failures during the second period differentially impacting apparent survival of birds from the route with higher survival in earlier periods.
In some cases, evidence in support of mortality comes from the following: (1) tag remaining stationary for a prolonged period, especially in inhospitable terrain (for example, open desert) or non-seasonal locations (for example, throughout into the winter in Europe); (2) data from the tags temperature sensor indicating that it is no longer being buffered from diurnal environmental fluctuations by the birds body temperature. In both cases, the caveat is that the tag could have become detached from the live bird but this is extremely unlikely with the harness design used. In almost all cases in which contact with a tag is permanently lost (even when, for example, temperature information already indicates that the bird is dead), there is a short period where charge lowers, presumably due to the tag resting in a position where limited sunlight is reaching the solar panels. Longer periods of declining charge could, however, indicate technical failure of the tag. To account for the cases where lost contact is most likely to be indicative of tag technical failure, we therefore repeated the analysis excluding those instances where no further locations were received after a prolonged period of declining tag charge and there was no evidence in support of mortality before this. This resulted in the exclusion of two cases (one West and one East) from the stage up to completion of the Sahara crossing and one case (East) for the stage between completion of the Sahara crossing and arrival at the minimum latitude stopover/position occupied at midwinter. Remaining cases were those where there was either evidence that the bird had died or when contact was lost after no or only a short period of low or declining battery charge.
Migration metrics
Southwards migration routes and stopover areas were identified using all transmission either until transmissions stopped or until each bird reached its most southerly stopover (see below for definition of stopover), which was usually also the position occupied at mid-winter. After excluding journeys by five birds, which were lost to tracking before they reached southern Europe, 56 journeys by all birds were classified into either West or East migrating groups based on whether they left Europe via either Iberia or from Italy and eastwards. Individuals that were lost to tracking in southern Europe were classified according to the longitude of their final stopover location, as at this latitude the distributions of East and West birds that were tracked into Africa were discontinuous with the exception of one outlying bird and none of the birds classified by this method was close to the overlap. Stopovers were defined as periods when best locations from two or more consecutive scheduled transmission periods were within 50 km of each other, meaning the minimum duration of stopovers considered is 3 days. Stopovers of this duration could be missed if the best locations from the relevant duty cycles were away from the stopover location, or if there were no reliable locations from one duty cycle. Stopover duration was calculated by assuming that a bird arrived on the first day and departed on the last day that it was detected at a stopover location and hence are minima. Tags often showed gradually depleting battery charge during a stopover but in most cases charged and began transmitting on exposure to sunlight when a bird moved to a new location. Exceptions were therefore made when no locations were received for one or more transmission cycles before a bird was detected at a new location, in which case the bird was assumed to have remained at the previous stopover location until the day the last missed location was expected. Key migration events were defined as follows: departure from the breeding grounds was assumed to have occurred on the day before the first location more than 50 km away from it. Completion of the Sahara crossing was the day of the first location in the first stopover south of the Sahara. Completion of migration was the first day at the stopover with minimum latitude. Migration distance was the total distance moved between best locations per cycle, excluding movements within stopovers (that is, those <50 km), from departure until the completion of migration. Duration of migration was the number of days between the assumed day of departure and the first location at the minimum latitude stopover, which, in the majority of cases, was also the location occupied at midwinter. Migration speed was the total distance travelled divided by the duration. Number of stopovers was the number of stopover sites occupied before arrival at the most southerly location. Migration metrics were calculated: (a) to arrival in the first stopover south of the Sahara, the major barrier crossed during migration; and (b) to arrival at the most southerly stopover area occupied, for all individuals that completed the relevant migrations. The direction of the Sahara crossing was calculated (a) by taking the average of the bearings from the previous best of duty cycle position to all locations during active migration, which fell in Africa north of 15 N, or to the most northerly position below 15 N if there were none to the north, excluding positions in the Atlas mountains and the adjacent coast as suitable stopover locations exist there and (b) by calculating the bearing between the final pre- and first post-Sahara crossing stopover.
Statistical analyses
Analyses were undertaken using GLMMs in Proc Glimmix in SAS 9.2. Relationships between routes in migration metrics and apparent survival were modelled as a function of migration direction using Gaussian and binomial response distributions, respectively. Year and individual*region (region being tagging area) were initially included as random factors to account for dependencies with year and tagging area, and pseudo-replication due to the inclusion of repeated journeys from the same individual. Random factors were removed if their covariance parameter was zero. The LSMeans function was used to output estimates of each variable for each route. Differences in key stopover and wintering locations were additionally modelled using average latitude, average longitude and latitude*longitude as predictor variables with route as a binomial response variable. Results presented are marginal effects for the model with lowest pseudo-akaike information criteria (AIC). Models for the first stopover after the Sahara crossing failed to converge so the latitude and longitude for this stopover were tested separately.
Local breeding population change around each tagging location was calculated by buffering all 10 km UK national grid squares in which a cuckoo was trapped for tagging by two 10 km2 (that is, producing a minimum of 50 km2 centred on a 10 km in which a cuckoo was tagged) and averaging population changes across all selected 10 km2 for each of the nine tagging localities. Indexes of population change for each 10 km2 were available from two completely independent data sets: the Bird Atlas 200711 (ref. 15) and the BTO/RSPB/JNCC BBS16.
For the Bird Atlas, change in abundance was the standardized arithmetic difference between the abundance in 198891 and 200811. Abundance was calculated as the proportion of surveyed 2 km Atlas squares (39,936 were surveyed in 198891 and 45,374 in 200711 across Britain and Ireland) falling in each 10 km that were occupied by cuckoos15. For BBS, abundance for each 1 km2 was produced by modelling counts from surveyed 1 km2 for 199496 and 200709 (between 1,501 and 3,018 survey squares each year) with respect to landcover, northing, easting, elevation and including a smoothing term in a GAM16. The results were them condensed to give abundance values at the 10 km2 level and change was calculated as the estimated abundance index for 200709 minus the estimated abundance index in 199496.
The two population change data sets are completely independent. The change index from the Atlas is, however, far more robust and spatially precise than the change from BBS, because it is based on an order-of-magnitude greater number of data points, with no interpolation or spatial smoothing such as used in the BBS data set, with more field survey effort underlying each data point. As such, it is far more appropriate to determine local population changes.
Relationships between local breeding population change and migration direction were then modelled using events/trials logistics regressions with each tagging locality as a case, number migrating east as the numerator and total number tagged as the denominator on the dependent variable and average breeding population change index as the explanatory variable. Each bird is therefore represented as a single migration direction, irrespective of how many journeys it was tracked over. In the single instance in which a bird used different routes on consecutive journeys (see Supplementary Fig. 1) a classification of 0.5 was given to each route. A habitat variable classifying each tagging locality as upland or lowland was subsequently added to test whether relationships remained when controlling for this division. The altitudinal distribution of vegetation types differs greatly across the tagging locations due to geographical climatic variation; thus, upland was defined as areas in which the surrounding landscapes were predominantly mires, wet heaths and acid grassland.
Data availability
The authors declare that the data supporting the findings of this study are available in Supplementary Tables 16.
The successful orbit entry of the Juno spacecraft in Jupiter marked a milestone for NASA and now that the mission has officially started, what could be the next move for the agency?
NASA says it will sail at full speed in terms of Solar System exploration.
NASA is currently preparing to take in-depth and close-up images of Jupiter on Aug. 27 and while waiting, the agency announced that it intends to keep the momentum going to sail full speed with its Solar System exploration programs. The question regarding "how we came to be, where we are going and whether we are alone in the universe" are the fundamental issues NASA's quests aim to answer.
"Juno is the latest example of the extraordinary science we have to look forward to right in our own solar system," NASA Planetary Division Director Jim Green said in a press release. "There are many uncharted, promising worlds and objects we are eager to explore with our current and future missions," Green added.
The future is looking bright for NASA. Aside from Juno's mission, the agency is set to build the next Mars Rover to launch in 2020. While other missions have been ordered to study interesting moons like lo and Europa that potentially hold the key to life such as liquid ocean beneath icy surfaces.
The new James Webb Space Telescope (Webb Telescope) will also be launched in 2018; it is capable of observing faint objects in the universe and the Earth's neighboring planets and moons within the Solar System.
"Webb's angular and spectral resolution will allow us to observe these targets with unprecedented sensitivity and even follow geologic activity,on" a NASA official said in a statement.
Meanwhile, the Cassini spacecraft is simultaneously exploring Saturn, its rings and moons and is providing valuable data vital in the study of the planet. It was launched in 2004 and is nearing the final phase of its mission in 2017. The most exciting part is about to unfold when Cassini completes 22 dives through the gap between Saturn's ring and its outer atmosphere dubbed as the Grand Finale. NASA is expecting to gather "profound" scientific insights from this exciting phase of the mission.
On the edge of the Solar System, the New Horizons mission was granted an extension to explore a mysterious object in the Kuiper Belt. Last July 14, NASA celebrated the first year anniversary of Pluto flyby that has provided tons of significant discoveries on the dwarf planet.
Other missions are happening all at the same time, like the Dawn mission investigating asteroids and the OSIRIS-REx that is expected to carry sample materials back to Earth from space in 2023.
NASA is also as close to sending first manned crew to Mars and has approved nine planetary missions for the fiscal years 2017 and 2018 depending on available resources.
There's a huge black mass growing on the surface of the Sun and NASA is closely monitoring its behavior.
Don't panic, but a giant hole just formed in the sun https://t.co/JIWLMeVFFK pic.twitter.com/G03WcJ4FwQ Huffington Post (@HuffingtonPost) July 13, 2016
The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) first detected the giant spot and it was the same equipment that managed to identify the growth of the dark hole on the surface of the Sun. But despite its alarming look, NASA scientists said there's nothing to worry about.
The spot is called a Coronal hole and it occurs quite often in different sizes. These dark spots are caused by magnetic fields that arch away from different areas in the corona. The areas are thinner due to the lower gas and energy levels. The temperature on the Sun's surface also plays a role in this phenomenon.
"Coronal holes are low-density regions of the sun's atmosphere, known as the corona. Because they contain little solar material, they have lower temperatures and thus appear much darker than their surroundings," a NASA official said in a statement.
Coronal holes are a normal occurrence in the Sun and no matter how massive it appears, scientists confirmed that it shouldn't be feared. The coronal holes can last for months, according to RT.
According to NASA, there are various solar activities than can be observed on the surface of the Sun including solar flares, coronal mass ejections, high-speed solar wind and solar energetic particles that are all influenced by the Sun's magnetic field.
But despite being a habitual solar activity, the growing giant hole can also cause some disruption to satellite and radio communications to Earth.
To capture the solar activity on the surface of the Sun, SDO uses ultraviolet light enabling scientists to clearly scrutinize and understand the behavior of the Sun. The SDO was launch to understand solar activities that can influence the life here on Earth. The SDO is also working towards a "predictive capability" when it comes to solar activities since the Earth depends on the Sun for life.
A SpaceX cargo ship sent to the International Space Station (ISS) also contained a DNA sequencer, NASA said.
NASA authorities said that the device was sent into orbit, along with other items for the crew, to help astronauts monitor their own health.
The Biomolecule Sequencers, which were developed by UK-based Oxford Nanopore Technologies, are designed to determine whether DNA sequencing is possible in microgravity. Moreover, the devices could identify microbes and detect potential causes of illnesses.
Interestingly, the sequencers could also possibly detect life elsewhere outside Earth, NASA said in a press release.
"Each commercial resupply flight to the space station is a significant event. Everything, from the science to the spare hardware and crew supplies, is vital for sustaining our mission," Kirk Shireman, NASA's ISS program manager, said in a statement.
"With equipment to enable novel experiments never attempted before in space, and an international docking adapter vital to the future of U.S. commercial crew spacecraft, we're thrilled this Dragon has successfully taken flight."
The sequencer, which is called miniON, is only about 9.5cm long and weighs 120 grams, compared to their microwave-sized counterparts on Earth. According to Sarah Wallace, a microbiologist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, this device could also help researchers conduct experiments on "extreme and bizarre" samples from space.
"In the past, we've had visible fungi growing on the ISS, and we want to know what that fungi is," Wallace said in a report by News.com Australia.
"Is it benign or something to be concerned about? Knowing what it is, the microbiologists can recommend what to do to deal with the issue."
The device reveals the order of chemical building blocks along a strand of DNA. This sequence contains the hereditary information that is passed from one generation of organisms to the next.
The sequencer, which is also being used by over 1,000 scientists in 30 countries, could also theoretically help astronauts detect life on other planets real-time. However, scientists said that further developments are required for this application to be a reality.
According to scientists, the DNA sequencer will remain on board for possible further use, which includes identifying the off-chance of an infectious outbreak.
Arthritis-fighting stem cells may eliminate the need for joint replacement surgeries, scientists said.
Scientists from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Cytex Therapeutics, Inc. in Durham, North Carolina discovered a new technique of repairing damaged joints by programming stem cells to grow new cartilage on a hip joint.
Moreover, through gene therapy, scientists also enabled the new cartilage to release anti-inflammatory molecules when activated by a drug.
The researchers said that by using a patient's own cells to repair a damaged joint, the new technique could eliminate the need for extensive joint-replacement surgeries in the future.
"Replacing a failed prosthetic joint is a difficult surgery. We've developed a way to resurface an arthritic joint using a patient's own stem cells to grow new cartilage, combined with gene therapy to release anti-inflammatory molecules to keep arthritis at bay," study author Farshid Guilak said in a statement published by International Business Times.
"Our hope is to prevent, or at least delay, a standard metal and plastic prosthetic joint replacement," Guilak added.
According to the researchers, the new technique could be ready for human trials within the next three to five years, and may also work with other joints, such as the knees.
In the study, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Guilak and his team designed a method that involves extracting stem cells from a patient's fat and seeding on an external woven scaffold, which is designed to fit over the ball of the patient's joint. The stem cells are coaxed to turn into cartilage cells and are then spread throughout the woven scaffold over a period of six weeks, Live Science reports.
According to the scientists, the plan is to remove the worn-out cartilage from the ball of the joint and replace it with a "living joint" to resurface the hip. The method makes sure the bone of the hip remains intact unlike the standard metal and plastic prosthetics, Guilak said.
The technique will soon be tested in animals, the scientists said.
Bill Nye, "The Science Guy", visited the controversial Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Cincinnati and was surprised by what he saw, calling the exhibit an eye-catching attraction but is more troubling and disturbing than he originally thought.
The Ark Encounter is a 51-foot attraction that was built based on the biblical story of a man commanded by God to build an ark to save his family and a pair of each animal from a great flood set to wash up the impurities of the world.
Nye was an invited guest at the Ark Encounter, which opens its doors to visitors in last July 7, 2016. However, Nye was surprised on what he had observed in the gigantic attraction. He described the Ark Encounter as an "eye-catching attraction" but the whole experience turns out to be "much more troubling and disturbing" than he thought it would be.
On the third deck (of the ark), every single science exhibit is absolutely wrong," Nye told NBC News. "Not just misleading, but wrong."
Nye was given a personal tour of the 120,000-square foot exhibit by the founder of the Answers in Genesis himself, Ken Ham. Ham noted in his Facebook post that the tour with the Science Guy almost turned into a two hour debate as they walk past through the three deck exhibits of the Ark Encounter.
"Numerous children, teens, and adults swarmed around us as we passionately interacted as the audience grew. There were thousands of visitors at the Ark Encounter again today and a large group of them had a unique opportunity I'm sure they will never forget. Bill challenged me about the content of many of our exhibits, and I challenged him about what he claimed and what he believed," Ham explained in a report from Christian Post.
The ark features an exhibit of dinosaurs, which is strongly argued by Nye. Bill Nye has been known to be in strong opposition of the idea that humans and dinosaurs have lived together and that the Earth is only 6,000 years old.
While many of us would be dead terrified at the sight of an alligator lurking around, this man is fighting the authorities just to keep one at home.
Meet David Van Buren, whom reports say is asking Florida wildlife officials to allow him to keep his pet gator in his custody.
Though extremely unusual, this is not the first time he had to plead to authorities to keep the gator. Fox News reported that the state took the gator away from him in 1994, but got the reptile back when the judge ruled in his favor.
The alligator named Gwendolyn has been Van Buren's pet since he was nine years old, reported United Press International. Gwendolyn is actually a male gator, but Van Buren mistakenly identified him as a female when he first found him.
Gwendolyn has been occupying Van Buren's Coconut Grove backyard for 47 years. But he also enjoys staying indoors, too.
"Once he was in the house, he didn't want to leave. I think it took us like three weeks to get him to go back outside. He was on the couch all the time, or in the bathtub," Van Buren told Fox 13 News.
Florida Man Feeds Pet Alligator Pizza and Chocolate Chip Cookieshttps://t.co/fnHl3oeHGf pic.twitter.com/Ws7nSnNEnA IconicVideos.biz (@IconicVideosBiz) July 17, 2016
The 13-foot gator is unlike any gator in Florida. Instead of having an appetite for raw meat, Gwendolyn actually enjoys pizza and chocolate chip cookies. Van Buren said Gwendolyn poses no harm to anyone and will do whatever it takes to keep him.
Just a pizza eating pet alligator. Look at that cutie! ^^ pic.twitter.com/I6nrPNnSTv KaiDragon (@StripyDragon) July 19, 2016
Authorities claim that Gwendolyn could not be kept in Van Buren's custody anymore because his property is already too small for the size of the reptile. Unless Van Buren expands his home, the state authorities will insist on taking the gator away.
Previous research revealed that gators, as much as any reptiles, are incapable of creating bonds with humans. But debunking this notion is the case of Gilberto "Chito" Shedden, a Costa Rican fisherman who developed an unbelievable bond with Pocho, a five-meter long crocodile that weighs up to half a ton.
The story of the unlikely pair has been featured by National Geographic. The documentary showed how Pocho is capable of doing tricks with Chito, such as rolling on his belly and making affectionate poses together. Chito is the only man known to tame a crocodile.
Unfortunately, Pocho died in 2011. Since then, no story similar to Pocho's has been known.
It's general knowledge that the immune system defends the body against harmful pathogens, but it appears that it has another, quite unexpected function - influencing a person's social behavior. This recent finding adds to a growing body of research on the ways in which the immune system shapes human behaviors and mental processes.
A study in Nature by a joint team of researchers from the University of Virginia School of Medicine and the University of Massachusetts Medical School presents evidence that the immune system can produce what one might call a "social molecule" that promotes interactivity with others. This suggests that some cases of social dysfunctionality may be linked to problems in the immune system.
Until recently, most people have assumed that the brain and the immune system work in isolation from one another, but it is now know that this is not the case. As Genetic Engineering News (GEN) notes, "a team of scientists based at the University of Virginia Health System established just a year ago that meningeal vessels directly link the brain with the lymphatic system."
GEN reports co-lead author Jonathan Kipnis of UVA's Department of Neuroscience saying, "not only are we showing that they are closely interacting, but some of our behavior traits might have evolved because of our immune response to pathogens... Part of our personality may actually be dictated by the immune system."
Research into the intriguing linkage between the immune system and the brain has previously turned up evidence suggesting that the immune system can inform spatial learning and memory formation. Kipnis and his team have been investigating its influence upon pro-social behavior.
Their research centered in on a cell-signaling molecule generated by T lymphocytes. Known as interferon gamma, it is a cytokine - a protein that "talks" to other cells to get them to perform certain actions.
The team examined the interferon gamma response in mice, finding evidence of a strong interaction between social behavior and cytokine-driven activity. They were able to demonstrate that inhibitory neurons release GABA in response to interferon gamma - which is generally an indication of more positive mood and less social anxiety.
In a meta-analysis, they also found that organisms as diverse as zebrafish, flies, mice and rats showed an interferon gamma response during pro-social interactions. Applying a genetic modification that blocked the "social molecule" in mice resulted in unnaturally hyperactive neuronal activity associated with less social behavior. This suggests that the immune system facilitates sociability, and when it malfunctions, there is a corresponding downswing in social personality.
The study results raise the possibility that defects of the immune system can bring about maladaptive social behaviors, which in severe cases may be classifiable as psychiatric disorders. The researchers are calling for further investigation, suggesting that this area of study may lead to a better understanding of conditions such as autism.
What would you do if you have $300,000 in the bank? Buy a new car or a beach property? How about getting yourself the world's most expensive pet fish?
The Asian arowana is hailed as the world's most expensive and coveted pet fish, but it is also one of the world's most endangered species.
What is Asian arowana?
Asian arowana (Scleropages formosus), sometimes referred to as the dragon fish, is a bony-tongued fish of ancient lineage. They are mostly found in the lakes, deep parts of swamps and rivers and flooded forests of Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. They can grow up to 36 inches
Why do people want them in captivity?
Since the 1970s, Asian arowana has been a highly valued species in the international aquarium trade. They are considered in some Asian cultures to bring good luck. Aside from its cultural value, the fish is incredibly beautiful. Unlike any other fish, it possesses green, golden and red color variations.
How rampant is illegal Asian arowana trade?
In an attempt to share the riveting story of the world's most coveted fish, Emily Voigt wrote a book titled "Dragon Behind the Glass: A True Story of Power, Obsession and the World's Most Coveted Fish." She describes the thriving Asian arowana business in black market, with one fis priced at $150,000 to 300,000. Sold by the hundreds of thousands each year, these Asian arowanas are bred in high-security farms in Southeast Asia.
What is its current status?
Most of their population is in captivity, making them rare in their natural habitat. The Asian Arowana has been classified as an endangered species in the IUCN Red List.
The New York Post reported that while it cannot be legally brought into the United States as a pet, a black market that sells this species thrives from New York to Los Angeles.
Donald Trump has reached out to a former contestant on his NBC show "The Apprentice" to help his campaign make inroads in the African-American community, where the GOP candidate suffers overwhelmingly negatively poll numbers.
Omarosa Manigault, who was dubbed by Jet magazine the "woman America loved to hate" on the show's first season in 2004 and has since become a campaign surrogate for Trump, announced Monday on MSNBC that she was appointed the director of African-American outreach for the Trump campaign.
A July Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows Trump has zero percent support from the African American communities in Pennsylvania and Ohio, Manigult's home state. The poll shows Hillary Clinton as having 88 percent support among African American voters in Ohio and 91 percent in Pennsylvania.
Still, Manigult said her reality is that she is surrounded by African-Americans who support Trump's vision.
"I just spent an amazing weekend with African-Americans for Trump, about 300 of them," she said. "I'm just wondering who they called, because those numbers would be flawed according to the people who have come out to support at an amazing faith based service yesterday, with African Americans who support Donald Trump."
Speaking as the Republican National Convention began, the former reality TV star said Trump will help improve the economic conditions of the country's African-American communities.
Manigault spotlighted her hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, where she said the local African-American community is experiencing its highest rate of unemployment after seven years of a Democratic White House.
Asked why she thinks Trump has the temperament to lead the country, especially as the nation struggles to heal racial divisiveness, Manigault said she knows he can be an effective leader as president after knowing him for 13 years.
"I know his heart, I know the person that he is," she said. "I know what he can do in this roll to lead this country to a better better place."
Manigault was fired after the ninth week of "The Apprentice." She later appeared on other reality shows including "Fear Factor" on NBC and "Girls Behaving Badly" on Oxygen. She also returned to compete in "Celebrity Apprentice" and "Celebrity Apprentice All-Stars."
The wait was worth more than $500 million for the owners of a winning Powerball ticket purchased at a Southern California convenience store.
Marvin and Mae Acosta stepped forward Tuesday -- six months after the drawing -- to claim the $528 million prize, the largest in California Lottery history and part of a U.S. record jackpot that gripped the nation during a series of high-stakes drawings in January. Their ticket was one of three winners in the Jan. 13 drawing for the $1.6 billion jackpot, the largest in U.S. history.
The Acostas bought the ticket at a 7-Eleven in Chino Hills, where customers celebrated the historic win with store employees. The couple declined interview requests, but released a statement in which they called the prize a "rare gift."
"We are thankful and blessed for the rare gift that has been placed in our care," the Acostas said in a statement. "We have engaged a team of advisors to educate and guide us through this process so that we can be good stewards of these new resources. While many decisions are still to be made, we have committed nearly all of this new resource to a Trust and to charities that are important to us. While we are very grateful for the wonderful wishes and encouragement weve received, it is not our intention to become public figures, and we ask for and appreciate privacy going forward. Thank you."
The record U.S. prize drawing in January sent hopefuls scrambling to lottery ticket retailers. In California, players purchased about $386 million worth of Powerball tickets during the historic run of drawings.
The Acostas matched all six winning numbers -- 4-8-19-27-34 and the Powerball number 10. They selected the cash option amount of $327.8 million before federal taxes.
California Lottery officials said the Acostas put together a team of legal and financial advisors during the past six months after reading the lottery's Winner's Handbook.
The 7-Eleven retailer received a bonus of $1 million for selling the winning ticket.
Hundreds of people crowded the store after learning about the winning ticket, cheering and chanting, "Chino Hills! Chino Hills!" in celebration of the city about 35 miles east of Los Angeles.
Two other winning tickets were sold in Florida and Tennessee.
An Oakland, California, company dedicated to rooting out plagiarism was hopping on Tuesday, hours after Melania Trump's speech to the Republican National Convention raised questions about what it took from Michelle Obama's speech in 2008.
Turnitin spokesman Chris Harrick popped both speeches into his company's anti-plagiarism algorithm at NBC Bay Area's request and found that six percent of Trump's speech to the convention on Monday in Cleveland, matched the first lady's eight years ago. Trump used 63 words that matched Obama's, and of those, 23 were "cloned" in the same exact sequence from the 2008 speech, the text analysis company found.
"I won't answer what percentage counts as plagiarism or not," Harrick said, "but our mission is to show that writing with integrity matters."
Melania Trumps speech at the Republican National Convention contained two passages that match nearly word-for-word the speech given by Michelle Obama in 2008 at the Democratic National Convention.
Comparisons of the two speeches flooded the news and social media near midnight, as the convention drew to a close, on Monday. On Tuesday, members of the Trump team defended Trump or, like campaign manager Paul Manafort, denied there was any plagiarism at all.
Trying to tamp down the controversy, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said on NBC's "Today" show that "93 percent of the speech is completely different" from the speech Obama delivered at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. He did not explain how he arrived at the 93 percent figure, though it was remarkably similar to the Turnitin analysis.
To put Monday's incident in context, Harrick gave this example: Say a student were asked to turn in a 1,000-word poem and wrote every word herself, except for the first line of "To be or not to be, that is the question?" Isn't that cheating? Harrick asked rhetorically.
That said, scientists often use the exact same words to explain something because those are the only words that can be used to describe a phenomenon like genome sequencing, Harrick said. His company has even come up with a plagiarism spectrum, from "cloning" exact words and phrases to "find and replacing" words, which Trump did, to retweeting without sourcing.
Journalists weren't the only ones wanting to see the similarities between the two speeches. Harrick said he estimates "hundreds" of his company's clients, mostly professors and universities, were using the algorithm to see the same thing on Tuesday.
Turnitin.com
Turnitin's computer program found that Trump copied about two dozen words word-for-word from Obama's speech eight years ago.
Trump said on Monday: ..and we need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow. Because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them."
Obama said in 2008: "...and pass them on to the next generation. Because we want our children and all children in this nation to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them."
There were other incidents in which Trump's speech kept some of the same wording as Obama's.
Harrick said this is the biggest question of plagiarism Turnitin has ever been asked to decipher since the company was founded in 1998. And Harrick said the company is hoping take this 15 minutes of a teachable moment to impress what copying can do to prevent people from doing it in the future.
"Think for yourself," he said. "Or you'll run into problems down the road."
Avid wine drinkers could see a shade other than white and red in their glasses by the end of the year.
Currently only available in Spain, blue indigo wine will soon land in the hands of Americans, a representative from Gik Live told NBC Chicago. The company hopes to have the product in the U.S. by October.
Blue Nun wine from Gik Live, dubbed the "world's first blue wine," aims to be a "radically different product" that is "sweeter and easier to drink," according to the company.
The 11.5 percent alcohol wine is a blend of red and white grapes. The blue boozy beverage is formed by adding organic indigo and anthocyanin pigments, which come from the skin of the grapes.
According to the companys website, the idea of blue wine stems from the colors representation of movement, innovation and infinity as well as an association with flow and change.
"Gik is born for fun," the website reads. "To shake things up a little bit and see what happens. To create something new. Something different."
Master Sommelier Alpana Singh, owner of Seven Lions Chicago restaurant, said the idea behind the wine sounds like an interesting marketing gimmick.
I have never seen wine that color, Singh said. Ive been doing this for over 20 years and I dont know anyone [whos] mentioned blue wine.
Singh said wine can be made any color just by adding the pigmentation to it.
With rose wine, the pinkish color is created when juicing red grapes soak with the grape skins for a short period of time. Singh said that if the wine is simply red or white and color is added to is, it is not as unique as if a particular grape variety gave off the color. Still, she notes that blue wine could make for a fun conversation piece.
I think anything that delights your customers and adds to [the] experience and makes it a memorable and fun to do, why not? Singh said.
Regardless of the process of creating the blue wine, Singh believes people will fuss over it.
Its so far from the spectrum of what you would consider wine to be, Singh said.
The American Red Cross issued an emergency call for blood and platelets this week, urging all eligible donors to give now to replenish an extremely low summer blood supply.
Right now, blood products are being distributed to hospitals faster than donations are coming in, which is why we are making this emergency request for donations, Neil Tosuntikool, donor recruitment director of the Red Cross Northern California Services Region, said in a statement on Monday. Donations are urgently needed now to meet the needs of hospital patients in the coming days and weeks. If youve thought about giving blood and helping to save lives, now is the time to do it. Its the blood donations on the shelves that help save lives when an emergency occurs.
The Red Cross in Washington, D.C. made the same plea on July 5, saying that it was hard to collect blood over the Fourth of July weekend. At that time, the Red Cross said Blood donations have fallen short of hospital needs for the past few months, resulting in about 39,000 fewer donations than whats needed.
At the same time, the Sacramento Bee noted that BloodSource, which collects blood from Merced to Chico and distributes it to about 100 California hospitals, put out the critical appeal on July 5, asking for more blood, to alleviate a supply shortage aggravated by the ongoing Zika epidemic in Latin America.
Visitors to the U.S. territory as well as to Zika-hit countries, such as Brazil, Mexico and Cuba, are barred from donating blood within about a month of returning to the U.S.
An openly lesbian senior pastor of San Francisco's Glide Memorial Church has been elected a bishop of the United Methodist Church, which raises concerns among the church's leadership, according to officials with Glide and the United Methodist Council of Bishops.
Rev. Karen Oliveto was elected to the post July 15 at a meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona, of the church's Western Jurisdiction, which consists of eight regions in the western United States.
"This is a major victory for humanity!" Glide's co-founder and Minister of Liberation Rev. Cecil Williams said in a statement.
"Glide has been fighting for unconditional love and acceptance in the church and for the rights of all people regardless of religion, race, gender, sexual orientation, immigration status and others in marginalized and poor communities for over 53 years. This is an historic moment and truly the affirmation of love and justice."
Oliveto is the first United Methodist clergywoman to be a lead pastor of one of the 100 largest United Methodist Churches.
"I keep looking around to see who's around me," Oliveto said with a laugh. "Because it must be somebody else."
Glide has about 11,000 members, according to Glide officials.
Glide's Executive Director Rita Shimmin said she believes Glide is about creating a beloved community where everyone is included.
"Her election is a sign we're closer to realizing that beloved community," Shimmin said.
But Council of Bishops President Bruce Ough said in an address to the church that the election raises concerns and questions about church polity and unity, though church laws exist to resolve even complex issues such as this.
The church currently bans openly gay individuals from serving as ordained ministers, but the final decision lies with each region. Oliveto's election shows that not everyone agrees with the ban.
"For years, I withheld my name from the episcopacy because I didn't want to harm the church," she said.
Bishop Bruce Ough, president of the Council of Bishops said technically the judicial council could overturn the decision.
"It appears to be a violation of our current book of discipline, our current church law," Ough said. "There's been no formal complaint brought against her at this point. So that's why she been able to move forward in this election process."
Church officials are forming a commission to help members to navigate the future of the church.
Oliveto's last day at Glide Memorial is Aug. 14. She officially starts her job as bishop on Sept. 1.
A 63-year-old Vallejo woman is facing eviction after speaking out about a severe rat infestation at her home and neighborhood.
The eviction notice from Becky Pearson's landlord comes less than 24 hours after she spoke to NBC Bay Area about the pest problem. The eviction notice tells Pearson she must catch up on her rent in three days or move out.
"I've been here 18 years. This is unbelievable," Pearson said. "It's retaliation, obviously."
Pearson acknowledges she stopped paying some of the rent because the landlord was not doing her part to help get rid of the rats or make other needed repairs.
"When you own property you're supposed to take care of it. She hasn't done that," Pearson said.
The landlord, who did not want to be identified, told NBC Bay Area the eviction process was already in the works because Pearson is behind on her rent. She insists it is not in retaliation.
The landlord also said she had an agreement with Pearson that any repairs were the tenant's responsibility.
Bob Stalker with the Legal Services of Northern California, a non-profit organization that provides legal aid to Solano County residents, said he is troubled by the situation. Stalker said landlords must maintain livable conditions.
"They have to make repairs when necessary," Stalker said. "They have to remove pests if there's a pest infestation."
Inspectors with the County's Environmental Health Department came out to survey property immediately following NBC Bay Area's report on Friday. They said there is a definite problem that the landlord is responsible for.
Meanwhile, Pearson does not want to move. She just wants to get rid of the rats.
"I just want my house to be livable and to be able to live here without fearing if I open up a drawer, a rat is going to pop out of it," Pearson said.
Santa Clara County sheriffs deputies eradicated an illegal marijuana grow, arrested a suspect and seized a stolen assault rifle from a University of California, Santa Cruz property on Friday.
In all, deputies were able to remove 4,700 plants and recover a firearm that had been stolen from Sacramento and was loaded with steel rip rounds, Sgt. James Jensen said.
Officials flew over the grow in a helicopter and spotted the illegal activity from the air, he said.
"Its a different color green, plus all the garbage laid out, so our deputies were able to see it and they responded and were able to get the marijuana out," Jensen said. "Its a safety issue for those who walk through the property."
The sheriffs Marijuana Eradication Team has conducted five other such operations this year and has seized more than 28,350 marijuana plants, with an estimated street value of $33 million, according to police. The investigations targeted illegal grows that violate state laws about the use and possession of medicinal marijuana, police said.
Suspects use local, state and UC Santa Cruz property for marijuana grow, according to Jensen.
"Its horrible damage," he said. "They take the water. Marijuana needs a lot of water to grow and all the fertilizer and pollution, and they leave their garbage there."
People with information about illegal marijuana grows can call (408) 808-4420.
Neighbors reported black smoke rising from Glen Cove Elementary School in Vallejo early Tuesday morning. Firefighters arrived to find a play structure on fire.
A little before 6 a.m., multiple reports of structure fire at glen cove elementary school, said Vallejo Fire Department Battalion Chief Cliff Campbell.
Crews from two fire engines put out the flames in seconds, and no one was injured. However, about half of the jungle gym will have to be replaced. The fire melted rubber, plastic and aluminum, making the structure unsafe.
Meanwhile, Vallejo Unified School District operations crews have boarded up a section of the play structure to make sure kids stay safe until they can rebuild.
It makes me angry. Probably some larger, older kids destroying a little kids play area. This is stuff my grandkids play on, operations manager Butch Crane said.
Crane says arson investigators found no signs of an accelerant on scene, and do not know the cause of the fire.
This is the second suspicious playground fire in Vallejo in two years. Another one occurred in May of 2014 at Loma Vista Elementary School.
Crews hope to have Glen Coves playground rebuilt by the start of school, which is in a month. Crane says it will cost thousands to replace.
The woman egged at a Donald Trump rally in San Jose, and who is now suing the city, is a featured guest at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
Tim Clark, Trumps Californias director, introduced Rachel Casey on Saturday night, telling the crowd that the 29-year-old who moved back to Florida after getting covered in goo at a wild rally in downtown San Jose was tough as nails. Clark added: It took a hundred protesters, and they couldnt take her out. We asked her to come join us in Cleveland because she certainly earned it, right?
Tina Hillstrom of Beverly Hills, who founded California's "RealWomen4Trump" about six months ago, was there and found Casey to be much more "soft spoken" than Clark described. "She's a hero," Hillstrom told NBC Bay Area by phone on Tuesday from Cleveland. "Why are people egging her and shoving her? Black lives matter, but no one else's does?"
Casey has refused several requests for interviews with NBC Bay Area, the first media outlet to identify her by name after her photo of having egg run down her face went viral. Photographs also capture her flipping off the crowd of people, many of them holding Mexico's flag, before she was smacked with the eggs at the June 2 rally in downtown San Jose. [[382002081, C]]
Last week, Casey, a physical therapist, filed suit against San Jose, the mayor and the police department alleging her civil rights were violated stemming from that rally, along with 13 other plaintiffs. The 44-page suit claims the police did nothing to stop the violence at the rally where the plaintiffs suffered concussions, broken noses and harassment.
Juan Hernandez
Juan Hernandez, 39, of San Jose, a rehabilitation counselor in Santa Clara County, is another plaintiff and a Republican delegate in Cleveland now attending the convention in Cleveland. Hernandez told NBC Bay Area in an interview that his nose was broken and he suffered two black eyes when anti-Trump protesters attacked him and a friend. On Tuesday, he said that he's there to support Trump, mostly for his strict immigration policies, and to be a Republican spokesman for California. He's talked a lot with Casey, and said he thought it was awful that she was egged at the rally. "How she reacted was survival mode," he said. "She was assaulted and bullied."
Anti-Donald Trump Protesters Get Raucous in San Jose
Shortly after the rally, Hernandez said he was invited to the RNC by Harmeet Dhillon, the vice chair for the party in California and the lawyer now representing him and Casey in the anti-San Jose suit.
Reached by phone on Tuesday, Dhillon said shes enjoying herself immensely, so much that she isnt sleeping enough.
But other than that, so far, so good, Dhillon said, adding that she was especially impressed with Meliana Trumps speech, not wanting to comment on whether portions were lifted from Michelle Obamas speech in 2008.
I thought it was great, Dhillon said. The delivery was good. I would have said the same things about my husband. My overall impression was that she was a poised, classy lady who has been with her husband for 18 years.
A UC Berkeley student suffered minor injuries and several others were terrified in a BB or pellet gun shooting that occurred on campus early Monday morning, according to UC Berkeley police.
Around 12:20 a.m., a group of eight students was sitting and standing on the steps of the school's International House building at the corner of Piedmont Avenue and Bancroft Way, police said.
The group noticed a person standing across the street holding what appeared to be a gun. The suspect then began shooting toward the building, causing the students to run inside, according to police.
One of the students, a 19-year-old from Egypt who did not want to give his name, was a little shaken by the incident.
"I thought it was fireworks or something, but then I looked and saw a guy with a gun; he had it in both hands," the student said. "The faces of the people running toward us were really scared. ... You start to panic."
Police said about six to 15 shots shattered glass on the building and left one student with a flesh wound near his eye.
After a preliminary investigation, officers determined the gun used was possibly a pellet or BB gun. Witnesses also told police a second male suspect may have been in the area setting off fireworks.
Officers searched the area but were unable to find the suspects, according to police. They say the suspects are putting themselves and others in danger because when officers respond to reports of shots fired and see someone holding a gun, they're going to presume it's a genuine firearm.
"Prior to coming here, I was a bit worried about the whole gun thing," the Egyptian student said. "Now, knowing something happened where I'm staying is terrifying."
The first suspect who shot at the group was described as a black male about 6 feet tall wearing a dark gray or black hooded sweatshirt and black pants. The second suspect was described as a black male wearing a blue hooded sweatshirt, police said.
Around the same time, a similar incident occurred at the nearby intersection of Channing Way and Ellsworth Street, according to Berkeley police spokesman Sgt. Andrew Frankel.
In that incident, a person in a car shot at another person, striking them in the back, possibly with a BB or pellet gun, police said.
The victim declined medical attention, according to Frankel.
The suspect in that shooting was described as a black man about 6 feet tall who was wearing a red hooded sweatshirt and drove a white four-door vehicle, Frankel said.
FactCheck.org is a non-partisan non-profit organization that will hold candidates and key figures accountable during the 2016 presidential campaign.FactCheck.org will check facts of of speeches, advertisements and more for NBC.
Donald Trump introduced Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate July 16, but, in doing so, oversold Indianas economic performance under Pence:
Trump praised Pence for reducing the states unemployment rate, which has declined by 3.4 percentage points since January 2013. But that tracked the national average, which dropped 3.3 percentage points during that time.
Trump said it was very unusual that Indiana has added 147,000 private-sector jobs. Not really. Florida (12.7 percent) and Utah (12.4 percent), for example, grew jobs at twice the rate of Indiana (5.9 percent). In fact, Indianas rate lagged behind 20 states and the District of Columbia.
Trump praised Pence for balancing the state budget. Can you imagine a balanced budget, Trump marveled. But Indiana is legally required to balance the budget, as are all states except Vermont.
Trump said Indiana has an AAA bond rating. But that has been true since July 2008 nearly five years before Pence took office. He also said very few states have that, when, in fact, 15 states do.
Trump correctly said that Indianas labor force has increased by more than 186,000 people under Pence. But he suggested that that was unusual, saying it is going down, down, down in other states. The labor force has gone up in 41 states.
As the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Trump introduced his running mate to voters at a July 16 campaign event in New York. Pence has been Indianas governor since Jan. 14, 2013, and the economy in Indiana, and elsewhere in the country, has improved since then, as the country slowly recovered from the Great Recession, which lasted from December 2007 to June 2009.
At the event, Trump read from a list of Indianas economic statistics, which his campaign later emailed to the media. (He starts speaking about Pence at 20 minutes into the C-Span video.) The statistics he cited were accurate. But, in some cases, the businessman embellished the stats with his commentary.
Unemployment Rate
Trump said the primary reason for selecting Pence was the decline in his states unemployment rate, which Trump said dropped to less than 5 percent this year. Thats close to accurate. As of May, the states rate was 5 percent down from 8.4 percent in January 2013, when Pence became governor, as Trump said. Thats a drop of 3.4 percentage points, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
However, Indianas unemployment rate has roughly tracked the national average. During that same time, the national unemployment rate declined from 8 percent to 4.7 percent a drop of 3.3 percentage points, according to BLS.
Private Sector Growth
Trump also praised Pence for adding private sector jobs. Private sector job growth is up by more than 147,000 jobs since 2013, Trump said. Thats, like, very unusual.
Its not unusual at all.
Indiana has added 147,800 jobs since 2013, according to BLS. But 18 other states added more jobs. Predictably, larger states such as California (1.3 million) and Texas (840,000) had larger gains, but so did states with smaller populations, such as South Carolina (152,000) and Oregon (157,000).
More importantly, Indianas private-sector job growth rate the percent change in the states number of private-sector jobs lagged behind 20 states and the District of Columbia, according to FactCheck.org's analysis of BLS data.
Indianas job growth rate was 5.9 percent. Florida led the way with a 12.7 percent increase, followed by Utah (12.4 percent) and Oregon (11.5 percent).
Balanced Budgets
Trump also praised Pence for balancing the state budget, suggesting that it was unusual. But it is not at all unusual at the state level because of constitutional and legal requirements.
"Trump, July 16: Governor Pence balanced the budget can you imagine a balanced budget? Our budget is so out of whack in this country we dont know what we are doing. Were going to owe very soon $21 trillion dollars. He balanced the budget. They dont know what that means."
Like nearly all states, Indiana is legally required to balance the budget. All the states except Vermont have a legal requirement of a balanced budget, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Indianas Bond Rating
Trump also touted Indianas bond rating. Its also rated triple A their bonds, are rated triple A. Very few states have that, Trump said.
Indiana does have a AAA bond rating, but that has been the case since July 18, 2008, according to Standard & Poors latest History of U.S. State Ratings. Thats nearly five years before Pence took office.
As of July 11, 2016, 14 other states currently have AAA ratings, so Trump exaggerates when he says that very few states have that. They are: Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming. Thats nearly one third of all states.
Indianas Labor Force
Trump correctly said that Indianas labor force has increased by more than 186,000 people under Pence. But then he suggested that it was unusual for a state to see an increase in its labor force, based on his experience campaigning in other states.
"Trump, July 16: Since January 2013, Indianas labor force has increased by more than 186,000 jobs. You have to understand Ive gone around to all these states Ive gone to all of them and every time I have statisticians, and I say, Give me the stats on a state, and its always bad. Down, down, down. Down 40 percent, 50 percent, 60 percent in some cases. Heres somebody where its gone up."
Indiana has seen an above average increase in its labor force. The addition of 186,527 people in the states labor force since January 2013 represents a 5.9 percent increase, according to BLS. FactCheck.org's analysis shows that only six states and the District of Columbia have seen greater growth rates, with Delaware (8.9 percent) leading the way.
However, to imply that no other state has seen an increase or that they have seen steep decreases is wrong.
A total of 41 states and the District of Columbia have all seen increases in their labor force. Nine states have seen decreases. They are Virginia, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Alaska, Vermont, Wyoming, West Virginia, Maine and Kentucky.
Trump is hardly the first to overstate economic achievements. We have written numerous such stories over the years. He is just the latest to do so.
FactCheck.org is a non-partisan non-profit organization that will hold candidates and key figures accountable during the 2016 presidential campaign. FactCheck.org will check facts of of speeches, advertisements and more for NBC.
In advance of the Republican National Convention, which begins July 18 in Cleveland, FactCheck.org presents a wrap-up of some of the more egregious falsehoods from Donald Trump, who is set to accept his partys nomination for president later this week.
FactCheck.org focused on claims most relevant for the general election and those that Trump has repeated, or that could likely be repeated by him or others this week. For more on each statement, follow the links to our full stories. And all of their articles on Trump can be found here.
Claims About Clinton
Trump repeatedly has claimed in stump speeches and interviews that Hillary Clinton is going to raise your taxes very substantially. But almost all of the tax increases she has proposed would apply to the top 10 percent of taxpayers, according to analyses by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center and pro-business Tax Foundation. [T]he bottom 95 percent of taxpayers would see little or no change in their taxes, the TPC said.
Trump on Clintons Tax Plans, June 28
Trump told a group of evangelical Christian leaders that theres nothing out there about Clintons religion. Thats false. Her religious practice as a Methodist has been well-documented in news reports, by Clinton herself and even in a book. In fact, we know enough about Hillarys faith that I was able to write a 334-page book titled God and Hillary Clinton way back in 2007, author Paul Kengor, executive director of the Center for Vision & Values at the conservative Grove City College, told us in an email.
We Know Plenty About Clintons Religion, June 22
Trump falsely claimed that U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens was left helpless to die as Hillary Clinton soundly slept in her bed. In an NBC interview, Trump later acknowledged he had no evidence to support his claim, saying, who knows if she was sleeping she might have been sleeping. Two emails from Clinton show that she was awake after she knew of Stevens death from the 2012 attack in Benghazi.
He also wrongly said Clinton would end virtually all immigration enforcement and thus create totally open borders for the United States. She supported the 2013 Senate immigration bill that would have created a path to citizenship for those in the country illegally, but also would have invested in border security. Clintons campaign website says she would focus enforcement resources on detaining and deporting those individuals who pose a violent threat to public safety.
Trumps Attack on Clintons Character, June 22
Trump distorted Clintons gun control plan, claiming she wants to take your guns away and abolish the Second Amendment. She proposes restrictions, including a ban on semi-automatic assault weapons, but doesnt call for a ban on all guns. Clinton also calls for expanded background checks. She has talked repeatedly about the need to respect the constitutional rights of responsible gun owners.
Trump Distorts Clintons Gun Stance, May 10
Trump claimed that Hillary Clinton received a classified intelligence report stating that the Obama administration was actively supporting Al Qaeda in Iraq, the terrorist group that became the Islamic State. Michael Morell, the deputy director and acting director of the CIA from 2010 to 2013, who also served under the Bush administration, called Trumps claim an old conspiracy theory that has no place in our public discourse.
Trumps ISIS Conspiracy Theory, June 16
Foreign Policy and Trade
Trump has repeatedly claimed that he opposed the Iraq War before it began on March 19, 2003, but theres no evidence of that. In a February debate, Trump claimed, I said it loud and clear, Youll destabilize the Middle East,' and in a September 2015 debate he said he could provide 25 different stories to prove his opposition. More recently, in June, Trump told CNN, I think there is evidence. I will see if I can get it. But his campaign has yet to produce one such example, and we couldnt find any. In fact, Trump in September 2002 told radio shock jock Howard Stern, Yeah, I guess so, when asked if he supported going to war with Iraq. It wasnt until a few months after the war began that Trump expressed concern about the war and, at that time, it was about the cost of the war, not the stability of the region.
Donald Trump and the Iraq War, Feb. 19
In a June interview on CNN, Trump wrongly claimed that Iran is taking over the oil in Iraq. Experts told us Iran doesnt control any Iraqi oil fields. Iraqs oil is still the property of the people of Iraq, said Jim Krane, a fellow at the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University and an expert in geopolitical aspects of energy. In fact, Iraq produced and exported a record amount of crude oil last year.
Trump Wrong on Iraqi Oil, June 7
In a late April speech on foreign policy, Trump claimed that now ISIS is making millions and millions of dollars a week selling Libya oil. Claudia Gazzini, a senior analyst for Libya with the International Crisis Group, told us theres no evidence of that. Gazzini said that the Islamic States strategy thus far has largely been to disrupt oil operations in Libya rather than to try and make a profit off of them. (Syria is a different story: In December, the State Department estimated ISIS was making $500 million a year on oil from fields it controlled in Syria.)
Trumps Foreign Policy Speech, April 28
Early in his campaign, Trump got two facts wrong about birthright citizenship a provision of the 14th Amendment that grants citizenship to babies born in the United States even if their parent or parents are living illegally in the country. Trump claimed Mexico doesnt have a policy like that, but indeed it does. Mexico currently has a system that is nearly identical to that of the United States, Emilio Kouri, director of the Katz Center for Mexican Studies at the University of Chicago, told us. What we call birthright citizenship, their constitution calls nationality.
Trump also said birthright citizenship is the biggest magnet for illegal immigration. Actually, research shows the biggest magnet is economic opportunity, or jobs. Estimates on the number of immigrants in the U.S. illegally also reflect the economy, with the number rising or falling along with shifting economic conditions.
Trump on Birthright Citizenship, Aug. 25, 2015
Trumps Immigration Plan, Aug. 20, 2015
Trump said he got to know Russian President Vladimir Putin very well because we were both on 60 Minutes, we were stablemates, and we did very well that night. Both men were interviewed for the Sept. 27, 2015, episode, but separately, in different countries Putin in Moscow and Trump in his Manhattan penthouse. Trump also has claimed repeatedly that Putin had called him a genius. Russian language experts told us in May that Putin used a word meaning colorful or bright, depending on the translation. Putin clarified in June that he called Trump flamboyant.
Trump vs. Fiorina: Who Knows Putin Best? Nov. 11, 2015
Putin Did Not Call Trump a Genius' May 6
On trade, Trump has continuously exaggerated the U.S. trade deficit with China, saying its $505 billion. Its not the trade deficit with China was $367 billion for 2015. Trumps figure is close to the $532 billion net trade deficit with all countries. He also has repeatedly, and falsely, said that the U.S. has a negative trade balance with every country with which it does business. The U.S. has positive trade balances with Brazil, Netherlands, Belgium, Singapore, Australia and Argentina, among others.
FactChecking the 11th GOP Debate, March 4
Trump has called the North American Free Trade Agreement Bill Clintons disastrous and totally disastrous NAFTA and said that Clinton signed it and it was his baby. Actually, the agreement was negotiated and signed by President George H.W. Bush. President Clinton later signed the bill enabling NAFTA in 1993, but it took Republican congressional support to get the legislation to his desk.
Trumps Attack on Clintons Character, June 22
Groundhog Friday, July 1
Trump also claimed that NAFTA literally emptied our states of our manufacturing and our jobs, but economic studies say NAFTAs net impact on U.S. jobs has been small. A 2015 report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, for instance, called the net impact relatively modest, noting that it was difficult to gauge the overall impact due to other economic factors.
Trumps Foreign Policy Speech, April 28
Refugees
Trump has made several false claims about Syrian refugees. Nearly 5 million Syrians have been displaced by the civil war that began in March 2011, . The Obama administration plans to accept up to 10,000 this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.
Trump suggested in a radio interview in November that the federal government sends Syrian refugees to states with Republican governors, saying, They send them to the Republicans, not to the Democrats, you know, because they know the problems. But the government doesnt place refugees nongovernmental agencies, such as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, do, basing the decision on family ties or employment. The idea that theres some sort of conspiracy here [to relocate based on the politics of a state], thats just not the case, Matthew Soerens, a spokesman for World Relief, an evangelical organization that also resettles the refugees, told us. The stats didnt back-up Trump, either: We found on average, states with Republican governors had just over 41 Syrian refugees each, and states with Democratic governors had just over 36.
Facts about the Syrian Refugees, Nov. 23, 2015
Trump has said that Syrian refugees are entering the U.S. with no documentation and no paperwork. Some may lack paperwork, but the head of the refugee affairs division of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services told Congress that in general they have many, many documents. The State Department says the process to admit a refugee to the U.S. takes 18 to 24 months on average.
Donald Trump on Orlando Shooting, June 14
In a January debate, he also said the Syrian refugees were mostly strong, powerful men, but at the time, most registered with the United Nations were female (50.7 percent) and males under the age of 12 (20 percent). That breakdown largely holds:Figures as of July 4 say women are 49.7 percent and males under 12 are 20.2 percent.
FactChecking the Sixth Republican Debate, Jan. 15
Muslims
It may be his best-known falsehood: In a Nov. 21 speech in Alabama, Trump claimed that he saw on TV thousands and thousands of people in New Jersey cheering the fall of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. A day later, he again said he saw this and emphasized that in New Jersey, you have large Arab populations. But theres no evidence of such a widespread celebration, or related TV footage. In fact, news organizations in New Jersey and New York tried to track down rumors of celebrations at the time and came up empty. Trump then doubled down on the claim, demanding an apology and citing as support a Washington Post story about an alleged celebration that was unattributed and unverified, and not televised.
Trump, Carson on 9/11 Celebrations,' Nov. 24, 2015
In March, Trump wrongly claimed that a Pew Research Center survey found that 27 percent, could be 35 percent of the worlds Muslims would go to war against the U.S. The Pew Research Center told us it had conducted no survey that asks such a question, and experts we consulted didnt know of any such survey, either.
Trumps False Muslim Claim, March 16
Pew Research Center surveys prove another Trump claim wrong: He said that assimilation among Muslim immigrants in the U.S. is pretty close to nonexistent. But Pew concluded in 2011 based on detailed phone interviews with more than 1,000 U.S. Muslims that Muslim Americans appear to be highly assimilated.
Trumps Baseless Assimilation Claim, June 17
After the mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub in June, Trump said many people thought the shooter, Omar Mateen, was a whack job, but they didnt report him. Not true. Mateens co-workers in 2013 reported that he boasted of having terrorist ties, and the FBI opened a 10-month investigation. Also, a week after Trump made his claim, a Muslim friend of Mateen stepped forward to say he had reported Mateen to the FBI in 2014.
Theres also no evidence for Trumps claim about Muslims being complicit in the Dec. 2, 2015, shooting in San Bernardino, California. He said that many people, including neighbors of the shooters, saw bombs all over the floor of the couples apartment, but declined to report it because of concerns about racial profiling. One friend of a neighbor said the neighbor noticed a lot of packages arriving at the house, and that the couple had been doing a lot of work in their garage and the neighbor didnt report it due to racial profiling concerns.
Donald Trump on Orlando Shooting, June 14
Domestic Policy
Trump claimed that his tax plan, unveiled Sept. 28, is revenue neutral, but tax experts say thats not the case not by a long shot. Even when the pro-business Tax Foundation assumed the tax cuts in the plan would promote economic growth, it estimated that federal revenues would be reduced by more than $10 trillion over 10 years.
Is Trumps Tax Plan Revenue Neutral? Oct. 1, 2015
Trump said he heard the unemployment rate was really 42 percent. Its nowhere close to that. The unemployment rate was 4.9 percent when Trump made the claim in February, and it still is today. Trumps figure would include retirees, teenagers, stay-at-home parents and anyone else who doesnt need or want to work. If Trump wanted to include part-time workers wanting full-time work and those who have given up looking for a job but had searched for one in the past year, he could use 9.9 percent for the unemployed and underemployed rate.
Trump Wildly Inflates Unemployment, Feb. 10
Trump claimed the government could save hundreds of billions of dollars in waste through negotiating prescription drug prices. But Medicare, which isnt allowed to negotiate drug prices now, spent well under that an estimated $77 billion total on its prescription drug program in 2015. When Fox News Chris Wallace pointed out during a debate that Medicares drug spending was well under the $300 billion a year savings figure Trump had cited in the past, Trump said he was talking about saving through negotiation throughout the economy. But Trump had claimed several times that he could save $300 billion a year through negotiating drug prices. That would be the total amount spent on retail prescriptions, by the government, insurers and consumers in 2014.
FactChecking the 11th GOP Debate, March 4
In California in June, Trump suggested there is no drought in the state, because it has plenty of water. California is in its fifth year of a severe hot drought, so named by scientists for both the dry and high temperature conditions that are made more likely by global warming. Trump also said water was being shoved out to sea to protect a certain kind of three-inch fish. Officials primarily release water from reservoirs to prevent salt water from contaminating agricultural and urban fresh water supplies.
Trumps Dubious Drought Claims, June 9
Trump was wrong when he called Common Core education through Washington, D.C. and said the education standards had been taken over by the federal government. The standards for what children in grades K-12 should know in math and English were developed by state officials, and curriculum is still controlled at the state and local school level. As for the federal government, federal money has been used to develop standardized tests for Common Core, and the Obama administration gave states that voluntarily adopted the standards advantages in competing for education grants. Thats far from a federal takeover.
FactChecking the 12th GOP Debate, March 11
In late November, Trump retweeted a bogus graphic purporting to show homicide data delineated by race. He told Fox News the graphic came from sources that are very credible, but nearly every number in the graphic is wrong. Among the gross inaccuracies: The graphic said 81 percent of white murder victims were killed by blacks; the real figure is 14.8 percent, according to the FBIs Uniform Crime Reports data for 2014.
Trump Retweets Bogus Crime Graphic, Nov. 23
Trump on Trump
Trump claimed that he predicted Osama bin Laden in his 2000 book, The America We Deserve, saying I said in that book that we better be careful with this guy named Osama bin Laden and that the U.S. better take him out. There are no such passages in the book. The lone mention of bin Laden in the book refers to him escaping a U.S. jetfighter attack in August 1998, ordered by President Clinton in response to bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that month.
Trumps bin Laden Prediction' Dec. 2, 2015
Unlike many other 2016 presidential candidates, Trump has not released his tax returns and claimed theres nothing to learn from them. But experts told us theres plenty of information to glean from a candidates tax returns, including sources of income, effective tax rates, charitable giving habits, conflicts of interest and more. Every major party nominee since the late 1970s has released tax returns before Election Day.
Trumps Tax Returns, May 12
The Better Business Bureau rating for Trump University was a D- in 2010, a fact the BBB confirmed in a statement. That was the last year the school accepted new students. But Trump repeatedly insisted it got an A rating, even posting a video to YouTube in which he holds up a sheet of paper with an A rating. That meaningless rating was for The Trump Entrepreneur Initiative, which was launched in 2010 when Trump University had to change its name since it wasnt a licensed university. The BBB reviews are based on the last three years of complaints and information, so the A rating would have been from 2014, years after the school stopped taking new students.
Trump Universitys D- Rating, March 8
Trump said he started his business career with only $1 million from his father. That undervalues his fathers contributions, which included considerable financial and political clout, Gwenda Blair, author of The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders, told us. Fred Trump co-guaranteed a construction loan and lent millions on another occasion, Blair said.
FactChecking the 11th GOP Debate, March 4
Trump claimed Ford changed its plans to build new manufacturing facilities in Mexico because of his criticism of the deal on the campaign trail, which included the threat of putting a high import tax on the company. But Ford said it hadnt changed its plans at all. One of Trumps tweets pointed to a story on a separate deal, credited to Ohio Gov. John Kasich and dating to 2011, to move some production from Mexico to Ohio.
Trumps Bogus Boast on Ford, Oct. 26, 2015
As the Republican National Convention gets underway Monday at Clevelands Quicken Loans Arena, protesters from Chicago are demonstrating for a variety of causes despite an unprecedented police presence.
Cleveland police Deputy Chief Ed Tomba, who is in charge of convention security, told NBC 5 that law enforcement is prepared for the convention.
Were not jittery, Tomba said. This is what we do."
Streets around the arena are heavily barricaded with metal fencing and visitors entering the arenas perimeter are subject to searches from officers and bomb sniffing dogs.
Andy Thayer, a longtime anti-war activist from Chicago, downplayed the threat of violence at the convention.
They try to frighten people away from exercising their First Amendment rights, Thayer told NBC 5. The police do it with their ridiculously expensive barricades and cops in all this gear.
A total of 45 states have sent law enforcement to Cleveland for the convention. Officers walk in groups of six or eight as demonstrators leave the designated protest sites to make their way closer to the convention site.
Among the protesters is Father Jose Landaverde, who walked from Chicago to Cleveland for the convention. The trip, which took 27 days, found the Back of the Yards pastor stopping at local churches along the way. The pastor is pushing for immigration reform and hopes to appeal to Republican delegates.
We have to be part of the movement, Landaverde, who has been an activist for 20 years, told NBC 5. Ive been arrested like 20 times.
We need to build a hope for those without a hope, Landaverde added.
Additionally, protesters demonstrating against presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump arent particularly supporting his Democratic counterpart Hillary Clinton.
If youre truly interested in social justice, youll be in the streets, particularly in Philadelphia, because theres a lot of very angry Bernie Sanders supporters who are disgusted hes trying to lead everyone back to the Democratic Party, Thayer said.
Meanwhile, Trump supporters are also holding rallies outside the arena. This includes groups who think Trump will take on ISIS and support veterans. Trump is scheduled to accept the Republican nomination during a speech Thursday night on the convention floor.
Two people were killed and at least 12 others, including a 14-year-old boy, were wounded in shootings Monday on the South and West sides.
A teenager was fatally shot Monday night in the West Garfield Park neighborhood on the West Side.
Officers responding about 9:25 p.m. to a call of a person shot in the 4400 block of West West End found 17-year-old Darrell Peden lying in the street with gunshot wounds to the torso, according to Chicago Police and the Cook County medical examiners office.
Peden, who lived in the 4600 block of West West End, was taken to Stroger Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 10:10 p.m., authorities said.
About 9:25 p.m., a 17-year-old boy was fatally shot in the West Garfield Park neighborhood on the West Side, police said.
Officers responding to a call of a person shot in the 4400 block of West West End found the 17-year-old lying in the street with multiple gunshot wounds to the torso, police said.
He was taken to Stroger Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, police said. The medical examiners office could not immediately confirm the fatality Tuesday morning.
The 14-year-old boy was wounded in a Roseland neighborhood shooting on the Far South Side.
The boy was standing on the sidewalk in the first block of West 112th Street at 10:38 p.m. when another male opened fire from a gangway nearby, police said. He suffered a gunshot wound to the left buttock and was taken to Comer Childrens Hospital, where his condition was stabilized.
Most recently, two people were shot on the Dan Ryan Expressway on the South Side. At 11:59 p.m., the two males were in a vehicle in the northbound lanes of I-90/94 near 63rd Street when they were shot, according to Illinois State Police. The vehicle came to a stop near 59th Street. Both victims were taken to Stroger Hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. Their ages were not immediately known.
At 11:12 p.m., a 22-year-old man was shot in the West Englewood neighborhood on the South Side. He was standing in the 6000 block of South Wolcott when he heard gunfire and realized hed been shot in the right leg, police said. The man took himself to Holy Cross Hospital, where his condition was stabilized.
Less than 10 minutes earlier, a person was shot in the Rosemoor neighborhood on the South Side. The male, whose age was not known, was shot in the left shoulder at 11:05 p.m. in the 9700 block of South Prairie, police said. He walked into Roseland Community Hospital, but his condition was unknown.
About 10:45 p.m., a man was shot during a robbery in the North Lawndale neighborhood on the West Side. The 27-year-old was sitting in a vehicle parked in the 3800 block of West Fillmore when two males walked up and announced a robbery, police said. As he was attempting to drive away, the man was shot in the left arm and right hand. He drove to the 1200 block of South Troy, where authorities were notified and he was subsequently taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where his condition was stabilized. Police said the man is a documented gang member.
Earlier Monday night, an 18-year-old man was wounded in a Lawndale neighborhood shooting on the Southwest Side. He was standing on a front porch at 9:22 p.m. in the 1900 block of South Hamlin when he heard gunfire and realized hed been shot in the abdomen and arms, police said. He was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where his condition was stabilized.
About 8:50 p.m., a 20-year-old man was outside in the Back of the Yards neighborhoods 4400 block of South Wolcott when a male got out of a black sedan and shot him in the head, police said. He was taken in critical condition to Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn.
A 22-year-old man was wounded shortly after 7 p.m. in another Roseland neighborhood shooting. He was walking in the 10700 block of South Calumet when a vehicle pulled up and someone inside opened fire, police said. The vehicle then sped off northbound on Calumet. The man was taken to Christ Medical Center, where his condition was stabilized.
Monday afternoon, a man was shot in the South Chicago neighborhood. The 20-year-old was in an alley in the 8000 block of South Essex about 2:45 p.m. when two males approached him and one fired shots, police said. He was shot in the leg and took himself to South Shore Hospital, where his condition stabilized.
Less than 90 minutes earlier, a man suffered a graze wound in a shooting in the West Pullman neighborhood on the Far South Side. The shooting happened at 1:23 p.m. in the 12400 block of South Yale, police said. The victim, whose age wasnt immediately available, suffered a graze wound to the head and was in good condition at the scene, police said. Additional information was not available.
Mondays first shooting happened about 1 p.m. in Roseland. Officers responded to a call of shots fired in the 200 block of West 110th Street and learned someone was shooting from a gray car, police said. A 24-year-old man was shot in the left arm and was driven by friends to Roseland Community Hospital, where he was listed in critical condition.
Two people were killed when a wrong-way driver slammed into another car Tuesday morning in northwest suburban Rolling Meadows, police said.
The violent collision happened around 4:10 a.m. in the northbound lanes of Route 53 just south of Euclid Avenue, according to Illinois State Police. Authorities said a driver of a yellow vehicle was traveling south in the northbound lanes of the roadway when it hit two other vehicles, including a white taxi.
Two people died in the crash, police said. They were identified as the driver of the vehicle traveling the wrong way, 21-year-old Zachary Sipe of Mount Prospect, and the driver of the taxi, 64-year-old Peter Wierzbicki of Lisle. Sipe was pronounced dead at Northwest Community Hospital shortly after the crash and Wierzbicki died at the scene, according to the Cook County Medical Examiner's office.
"Oh my god it's hard to talk about. It's so scary. It could've been me," said witness Amanda Vavra. "I was heading north and a taxi cab had just passed me and about two minutes after it passed me, that was the car that had gotten struck."
American Taxi Dispatch confirmed Wierzbicki was a driver for the company, but was not working at the time of the crash and did not have any passengers in the vehicle.
"I'm assuming he was going fishing because that's what the guy does all the time," said Joe Zayed with American Taxi in Mount Prospect. "He's an avid fisherman."
Coworkers described Wierzbicki as a loving family man.
"He is a person that, again, came to our office always friendly, always smiling," Zayed said. "Everyone in the office knows him.. knew him. It's a sad day for us. It really is."
Additional information was not immediately available as the investigation into the accident continued.
By 7 a.m., northbound traffic was still being detoured off Route 53 at Kirchoff Road.
"One of the other guys that stopped with me, I said, 'Here I am nervous about being late for work and these people just died,'" said Vavra. "He said, 'Yeah, it could've been us.'"
Two teenagers were shot while in a car on the Dan Ryan expressway overnight on Chicagos South Side.
Illinois State Police said the juvenile men were traveling in the northbound lanes of I-90/I-94 in a black Chevrolet just before midnight when shots were fired.
The driver of the vehicle managed to make it off the ramp at 59th Street, according to police, before stopping to call for help.
Both victims were transported to Cook Countys Stroger Hospital with non-life threatening injuries.
No one is in custody as the investigation into the incident is ongoing.
The shooting marks the 16th expressway shooting in Illinois so far this year, according to state police, after a total of 37 in 2015.
When Bryan Ellul captured dramatic footage of a Metra train slamming into a truck in a Chicago suburb, he knew he could have been filming a tragic moment. But Ellul is instead being hailed a hero because just moments before he hit record, he helped pull the driver to safety.
"I had no other reaction but to go and help," Ellul said. "No other thought crossed my mind."
Around 7:30 p.m. Friday, Ellul and other witnesses rushed to the scene where a truck was stalled, unmoving as the train approached the intersection in suburban New Lenox, close to the towns Metra station.
"I dont know what kind of condition he was in, we didnt know," he said. "We all approached knowing that there was a vehicle on the railroad tracks and something needed to happen."
Ellul and other good Samaritans ran to the truck and pulled the driver out, the sound of the approaching train echoing in the distance.
"We pulled the gentleman from the vehicle and gave him to medic and we could see the train coming at that point," he recalled.
Metra said the train that hit the vehicle was an equipment train and had no passengers on board. It remains unclear why or how the driver became stuck on the tracks, but Ellul said hes just happy witnesses were able to save his life.
"Some complete strangers saw somebody that needed help and we all stopped to help somebody we didnt know," he said.
The driver's identity and his condition were not immediately known Monday.
A gang member has been sentenced to 90 years in prison for the murder of a 17-year-old pregnant girl in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood on the Southwest Side nearly five years ago.
Timothy Jones, 23, was previously convicted of first-degree murder and aggravated discharge of a firearm, according to the Cook County states attorneys office.
On Aug. 16, 2011, Jones, a member of the Rockwell Boys gang, was in REC City territory when he saw the girl and her male friend walking in the 3000 block of West 64th Street, prosecutors said.
Jones approached the two and fired twice at the man, who was a rival gang member, prosecutors said. He was not hit and ran away, so Jones opened fire on the girl.
Charinez Jefferson, 17, was shot in the foot, ankle, thigh, buttock, chest and neck, prosecutors said. She was taken to Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, where doctors were able to deliver her baby after emergency surgery. Jefferson died immediately after the baby was born.
The infant remains on a ventilator and is fully incapacitated, prosecutors said. Doctors indicate the childs condition is unlikely to improve.
Judge Nicholas Ford sentenced Jones to 90 years in prison.
A portion of a Stamford, Connecticut park that was severely damaged by Superstorm Sandy nearly four years ago has finally reopened.
Mayor Kevin Martin reopened the southern point of the seven-acre Kosciuszko Park in Stamford on Monday after a more than $286,000 renovation project. The city got a $120,000 relief award from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The project included restoration and re-pavement of about 700 feet of the walking path and reinforcement of the embankment at the waterfront park.
A portion of the path used by walkers and cyclists collapsed into the harbor after strong waves caused erosion during the 2012 storm.
City engineer Lou Casolo told the Stamford Advocate (http://bit.ly/2a5H12P) the park is now better able to withstand extreme weather.
A Yale University dining hall employee who destroyed a stained-glass window depicting slaves in a cotton field last month has accepted his job back after discussions with the university, according to his attorney.
After appearing in court, Corey Menafee, a 38-year-old dining hall employee who is black, admitted that he probably shouldn't have broken the window last month, but found the image disturbing.
An image was brought to my attention and I destroyed that image. I probably shouldnt have, but I did, he said outside court last week. "It was a disturbing image of what appeared to be two slaves -- a male and a female -- carrying baskets to a cotton field."
After the incident occurred, Yale University officials asked the state not to pursue criminal charges against Menafee for breaking the window, which was inside Calhoun College.
The college was named for former Vice President John C. Calhoun, an ardent defender of slavery during the 19th century and the name has been the subject of protests by students who want it changed.
Yale also released a statement, saying Menafee expressed deep remorse for smashing the window and would be allowed to return to a position in a different setting after serving a five-week unpaid suspension going back to June 21, when he resigned.
We are willing to take these unusual steps given the unique circumstances of this matter, and it is now up to Mr. Menafee whether he wishes to return to Yale, the school said in a statement on Monday.
On Wednesday, Menafee's attorney, Patricia Kane, said her client "is delighted to accept Yale's offer."
Menafee will be back at work for his 11 a.m. shift on Monday, Kane said.
Menafee was in court earlier this month to face a felony charge of criminal mischief and a misdemeanor reckless endangerment charge. Kane said Menafee will appear in court again on July 26, but she expects the criminal charges to be dropped.
What to Know A crane being used in the construction of the new Tappan Zee Bridge crashed onto the current span at about noon on Tuesday.
Two drivers and a worker were hurt, though their injuries were all considered minor
The bridge was closed for hours after the collapse
A large crane being used to construct the new Tappan Zee Bridge collapsed Tuesday, blocking all lanes for hours on the span it is replacing, closing the traffic artery for hours and injuring four people.
Most lanes were open for the Wednesday morning commute, but transportation officials were warning drivers to plan for extra delays after the boom of the crane toppled over into traffic Tuesday.
No cars were hit in the mishap and there were no serious injuries. Five people sustained minor injuries.
"Miraculously, there were no serious injuries," said New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. "If you said to me that a boom could fall across the Tappan Zee Bridge at noon, not hit a car ... I would not believe it."
See transit alternatives to the Tappan Zee Bridge
Gov. Cuomo said the crane, being used in the construction of the new Tappan riverbede, was operating a vibratory hammer to drive pilings into the riversbed when it fell across the 90-foot, seven-lane width of the old bridge.
State police said that at least one car was hit by debris, sparking a small wreck. Three people had injuries from a two-car fender-bender, and a worker on a barge suffered bruises.
It was initially reported that a crane operator was thrown into the water as the machinery fell; Cuomo later said that that was not the case.
Jeff Loughlin, business manager of Local 137 International Union of Operating Engineers, which represents the crane operator, said the operator has been tested for alcohol and drug use, which is routine. Loughlin said he has a clean safety record and has been a crane operator for more than 20 years.
Chopper 4 over the scene showed the red splintered remains of the crane boom crashed atop two lanes of traffic on the bridge, with debris strewn all over the roadway. Part of the boom caved in an outer concrete barrier of the bridge. Footage from traffic cameras in the area showed severe traffic buildup.
Cuomo said Tuesday afternoon the machine was one of 28 cranes operating on the bridge. Officials said they do not believe the wind was a factor in the collapse and no cause has been determined.
"We were very very fortunate the situation wasn't worse," Cuomo said. "This could've been a real tragedy and we could've had a real loss of life."
Michael Matza was driving southbound on the bridge when the crane came down. He said it collapsed right in front of him.
"One more second and I would've been under that crane," said Matza, who drives a truck across the span every day for work. "I was driving propane. I could only imagine what kind of mess that would've been."
"You really don't have time to think," Matza, a married father of three kids, aged 15, 12 and 3, said. "Just looking around it's really amazing no one else got hurt."
Nicholas D'Emealio, of Irvington, was in a vehicle about three football fields away from the crane, toward the center of the 3.1-mile-long bridge between Westchester and Rockland counties, when he heard a bang and his driver slammed on the brakes.
"It shook the whole bridge," he said. "At first I thought the bridge was collapsing because this is not a good bridge."
The Tappan Zee Bridge crosses the Hudson River at one of its widest points and connects South Nyack and Tarrytown about 25 miles north of midtown Manhattan. The crossing carries about 138,000 vehicles per day and is vital to the trucking industry.
The new Tappan Zee Bridge has been under construction for three years and is expected to be completed by 2018 at an expected cost of $3.9 billion. It is being built alongside the original, seven-lane Tappan Zee span, which dates to 1955. Cuomo said he didn't believe the collapse would affect the project's timetable.
The bridge has been inspected three times since 2014, including two times that year, according to Tappan Zee Constructors, LLC. The inspections in 2014 stemmed from two serious violations relating to protecting workers from falling. One violation was settled and another was changed to "other than serious," the company says. An initial fine of $10,000 was reduced to $6,600 and the case was closed in June 2015.
The third inspection was in response to a safety-related complaint in December 2014, the company said. No violations came from it and the case was closed.
At the Oak Street Grove in West Haven, Marenna Amusements is setting up carnival rides and attractions a week earlier than expected.
"I want to build a kiddie land down in this area where the cove is," owner George Marenna Jr. told West Haven Mayor Ed OBrien.
The company based in Orange is set to supply the attractions for the Savin Rock Festival at the end of the month.
Now, the company has agreed to put on an extra four days of fun this weekend to support West Haven Police Officer Mike Doyles recovery at a Wallingford rehabilitation center.
"Thats the challenge you take when youre in the business if you love it," Marenna Jr. said of getting ready for this show on short notice.
After taking a call from Mayor OBrien, Marenna Jr. quickly rearranged the companys calendar and cancelled a carnival next weekend in New York.
"Everybody from the marrenas, to our building department to any inspections we needed," OBrien said. "We expedited to get this done."
The police department is also selling a t-shirt in support of Doyle.
"It says code 20, which is officer needs assistance," OBrien said.
The shirt also displays his police badge, motorcycle officer wings and the shield of Captain America, his favorite superhero.
"The best part of the story is hes really improving faster than they thought," OBrien said.
This Friday the mayor says all West Haven City employees will wear the Officer Doyle t-shirts to work.
In addition to donations for the officers family, other proceeds from this weekends carnival will support WHEAT, the West Haven feeding assistance program for the less fortunate.
Willimantic Police arrested a local man wanted in Maine who is accused of a drug-related kidnapping and robbery.
Sherman Stigler, 31, is accused of breaking into a home on Fox Run Road in Falmouth, Maine with another man, assaulting the resident and forcing him to withdraw money from a bank, according to police in Falmouth, Maine.
They have a warrant charging Stigler with robbery, larceny, aggravated criminal trespass, kidnapping, burglary and assault.
Willimantic police charged him as a fugitive from justice and said he will be arraigned Tuesday in Danielson Superior Court, where he will also face an extradition hearing.
The city of Lewisville will spray for mosquitoes after a 3rd person has been diagnosed with Zika virus in Denton County, county public health department officials say.
The Denton County Public Health Department did not provide any identifying information about patient other than that the person resides in Lewisville and that the case was contracted during a recent visit to Nicaragua.
"This third case shows on ongoing risk when traveling abroad," said Dr. Matt Richardson, Director of Public Health. "Taking precautions to avoid mosquito bites remains very important. Pregnant women or women planning to become pregnant should consider delaying travel to affected countries with active Zika transmission."
Still, no known Zika cases have been transmitted locally by mosquitoes, local health officials confirm -- all local cases have been imported with the exception of one case in Dallas County that is believed to have been spread by sexual contact.
"In an abundance of caution, and an attempt to combat Aedes mosquitos, crews from Vector Disease Control International, a private company hired by the City of Lewisville, will conduct mosquito spraying/fogging in the areas closely surrounding the infected resident's house. This spraying/fogging will be conducted using backpack sprayers and, weather permitting, will happen Thursday, July 21, 6-8 p.m."
The case is the first for the city of Lewisville.
Zika virus is spread to people primarily through the bite of an infected Aedes species mosquito, a known aggressive daytime biter. Common symptoms of Zika virus include fever, rash, joint pain and conjunctivitis (red eyes). The illness is usually mild with symptoms lasting several days to a week, though there can be profound impact to a developing fetus should the mother contract the virus.
There is no medication to treat Zika virus and there is no vaccine; the best prevention is to avoid mosquitoes and sexual contact with infected people. The recommendations for avoiding the Zika virus are the same for avoiding West Nile virus.
How to Protect Yourself From Mosquito Bites
Dress in long sleeves, pants when outside: For extra protection, spray thin clothing with repellent.
in long sleeves, pants when outside: For extra protection, spray thin clothing with repellent. DEET : Make sure this ingredient is in your insect repellent.
: Make sure this ingredient is in your insect repellent. Drain standing water in your yard and neighborhood: Mosquitoes can develop in any water stagnant for more than three days.
It has been recommended in the past that to avoid mosquito bites you should avoid being outdoors during Dusk and Dawn (the 4 Ds). While this is true for mosquitoes that commonly carry the West Nile virus, other types of mosquitoes that are more likely to carry Zika, dengue and chikungunya are active during the day. When outdoors, no matter what time of day, adjust your dress accordingly and wear insect repellent containing DEET, picaridin or oil of lemon eucalyptus as your first line of defense against insect bites.
The man shot by police in Louisiana after they say he killed three Baton Rouge officers Sunday morning was in Dallas earlier this month, promoting a book and talking about resistance, according to witnesses and the suspect's own social media posts.
Gavin Long, of Kansas City, Missouri, visited three Dallas barber shops on July 10 and posted shirt cam video he recorded of those visits on Twitter. In the barber shops he avoided talk of violence and offered free books he had written under the pen name "Cosmo Setepenra," according to witnesses at the barber shops.
"He was so aggressive. He stood in the middle of my barber shop and it was like, 'Who gave you the mic?' And I'm trying to figure out how who's going to shut this man up," said Chanattra Long, who owns the His and Her's Barber Shop in the Wynnewood Village Shopping Center.
The book, called "The Cosmo Way," promotes healthy living.
"When he came in, it was about the book. Then it was about money. Then it was out the door. That was it. It was brief," said barber Bryan Davis. "There is absolutely nothing that you could pick out of the conversation that would tell you he was radical."
In a YouTube video Long said he posted from a Dallas hotel room on July 10, Long speaks about revolution.
"Zero have been successful just from protesting. It has never worked. And it never will. You got to fight back. That's the only way a bully knows. He doesn't know words. He can't understand words, I promise you," Long says in the video. "You're in a world that's ran by devils. Get this through your head right now. Devils run this. They don't understand words."
Long also visited the Classics Barber Shop on South Polk Street on July 10. A Twitter video was posted of the visit there. Neighbors watching it Monday wondered if he was looking for trouble in Dallas that day, too.
"It's just like they were just scoping, just to see, was it a policeman in here? See what somebody's saying so he would shoot them? You never know," neighbor Jennifer Warren said.
Warren said she is proud that her son wants to be a Dallas police officer but worried about harm that might come his way.
NBC News obtained an email Long sent from Dallas to a dozen people questioning whether the shooting of five Dallas police officers July 7 was staged.
In the email written under his pen name of Cosmos Setepenra, Long tells the group that "about four hours before the [Dallas shooting] event happened, I had made the decision.that I was coming to Dallas and was also gonna tour the south. Now that I'm here, there are a lot of people saying the police shooting was likely staged." Long goes on to say, "We are awakening a little bit more and more everyday and the demons are very afraid. Only a hit dog hollers."
There is no evidence Long was involved in the Dallas shootings. Authorities are still investigating all of the facts surrounding the Dallas and Baton Rouge cases.
No one ever wants to see lights and sirens in the rear view mirror, but the timing couldn't have been better for a pregnant Granbury woman.
Deputy constable Mark Diebold, who was trying to slow the couple down, ended up helping deliver their baby.
"I've not even come close to being by a birth that happened on a traffic stop," he said.
Diebold was on his way to work when he says an SUV blew past him on U.S. 377 in Benbrook. He turned on his lights and sirens to slow down the driver, he said.
"I knew I was speeding," said Granbury resident Caleb Hall.
But Hall had a good reason why. They were rushing to the hospital because his wife, Destiny Hall, was in labor.
"We pulled up to the stop light at the same time, and I was able to roll my window down and just say 'Hey, she's having this baby, we got to get to the hospital,'" Caleb Hall recalled.
The baby couldn't wait.
"As soon as my water broke, I could feel her coming out," Destiny Hall said.
Less than a minute later, in the closest parking lot they could find, Diebold helped deliver their baby girl in the front seat of the family's SUV.
"She started crying and we both were ecstatic, jumping, screaming, 'The baby's here!,'" Diebold said. "It was a wonderful experience. It was one I'll never forget."
Diebold visited Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital in Fort Worth Monday, where Destiny Hall and the baby were taken after the delivery.
"This kind of brings back down to why most of us became police officers, to help people for things like this," Diebold said. "This really reaffirmed my job for me."
Though it isn't the birth she pictured, Destiny Hall said, "It's better than I pictured it."
The family is still trying to choose a name for their daughter. They say they had a name picked out but want to find a better one that fits the unusual way she came into the world.
Nearly two weeks after it was the site of the final standoff between Dallas police SWAT and the man suspected of killing five officers and wounding nine others, El Centro College is due to reopen.
College President Dr. Jose Adames said Tuesday that the school will be open for teachers and administrators on Wednesday and students will be allowed to return on Thursday.
On July 7, Micah Xavier Johnson was killed by an explosive delivered by a motorized robot while he was holed up inside second-story room.
On Tuesday, El Centro Police Chief Joseph Hannigan led an explanatory tour of how it all unfolded.
For the first time since the attack that killed five officers and wounded 11 others, Dallas El Centro College will open its doors to the community.
Johnson started his shooting spree outside the college on Lamar Street, having ditched his vehicle on the street minutes before. He fired at officers there.
He then used the exterior columns of the building to advance or retreat, as police returned fire.
Hannigan suspects Johnson was trying to escape after the first volley of gunfire, but he was surprised by the volume and intensity of officers' return gunfire, and unable to get away.
Watch as El Centro Police Chief Joseph Hannigan leads an explanatory tour of how the shootout with Micah Xavier Johnson unfolded at the downtown Dallas campus.
He eventually shot his way into the El Centro building. By that time he had killed three Dallas police officers and DART Officer Brent Thompson.
Johnson by that time was wounded and bleeding. Hannigan said investigators aren't sure if he was wounded from being shot or from exploding glass from broken windows.
Johnson ran to a stairwell about 10 feet away, and advanced up to the second floor.
He then went through the school's library, firing hundreds of rounds at officers below along Elm Street. He shot out the windows of the 7-Eleven store on Elm Street.
The Dallas Morning News Jeff Mosier joins NBC 5 to discuss El Centro Colleges recovery after the July 7 protest shooting.
He kept firing from the library, and then moved down the hallway and kept firing at officers below. From the second floor, Johnson shot and killed Dallas police Sgt. Michael Smith.
The chief said there were about 60 students in the building at the time Johnson advanced onto the second floor. Most of those students were on the seventh and eighth floors, and also the first floor.
"The very first thing I had to do was help figure out if there was four shooters or one. If there's one, is he contained? Can we move students around him and get them out? And once that intelligence started coming in, he realized we could secure a stairway at the other end of the building and get the students trapped in here out to safety," Hannigan said.
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Hannigan says Johnson "fired indiscriminately" at officers below, shooting at "anything with a badge he could see moving below."
"We were going to pin him down sooner or later. He knew that. He knew we were coming after him. Dallas P.D. were coming after him. He knew not to stay in one place too long. I don't know if it's intentional that he barricaded himself in that zone or if it was an accident, but that's what happened," Hannigan said.
Eventually the shooter moved down a long hallway next to the library. It dead-ends to a small room used to store computer servers and wiring.
That's where Johnson was stuck, and that's where an hours-long shootout and negotiation took place, before police brought in a robot to end Johnson's life.
"This was a dead-end for him. There was a locked door here, the doorway. There was no getting around. He knew this side was covered and that side was covered. Nowhere for him to go really," Hannigan said.
"How many shots were fired here?" asked NBC 5.
"Right here I'd say a couple hundred rounds. There were bullet marks everywhere. This was the hot spot. These are all bullet holes. These are all bullet strikes," Hannigan said.
The chief said even though Johnson couldn't escape that alcove, police are convinced he would've killed more officers if SWAT advanced down that narrow hallway.
"I was at the command post at the main floor. I was aware of what was about to happen. I thought it was brilliant. There was no way this could have come to a conclusion by regular means. Their [SWAT]'s responsibility was to stop the killing, and if he was allowed to move out of this spot, more people would have died. It's a responsibility taken very seriously. If he got out of this area he would kill again," the chief said.
Hannigan said Johnson previously took classes at Richland College, a different community college that's part of the Dallas County Community College District. But as a student, he would have been granted access if he wanted to enter the downtown Dallas El Centro campus.
The chief said "we can't be 100-percent sure" but investigators are "pretty positive" at some point Johnson had been in that building and was familiar with its general layout. In fact, it's possible he had been inside the building in the days before his assault to scope it out.
School president Dr. Jose Adames said there will be extra security and grief counselors on hand when students return to the El Centro campus.
"We will never forget what happened. We will memorialize this, but we will not be defined by this," Adames said.
Administrators will commission an artist to create a sculpture that displays the sacrifice and commitment of the city's law enforcement.
"We will also put the five names of the officers on a plaque outside of the building," Adames said.
As the community of Baton Rouge tries to wrap its head around the deadly shooting of three law enforcement officers, and what happened in the weeks leading up to it, people are also trying to find a way forward.
There were songs and active prayers for peace at a community service Monday evening in Baton Rouge.
"Our city is divided, our state is divided, our country is divided," the pastor at Full Gospel United Pentecostal Church told the congregation. "Bring us together, oh God."
At the place where Baton Rouge police officers and sheriff's deputies were shot, there were people coming by with flowers and cards and flags. A memorial grew through the day Monday, and those who came to visit it paused, prayed, and hugged one another.
"I spent a lot of time in Dallas praying with officer from all over the country," said Millville Police Chaplin Bob Ossler. "They won't tell you, but most of those officers cried."
And there were heavy hearts at a local diner. One of the officers who was shot, Montrell Jackson, was a regular customer.
"Oh, it was devastating," said Jennifer Ator. "He was always welcoming to people and very friendly and made everyone feel special when he was here."
Officer Jackson was at the diner Sunday morning with a group of officers. Ator said they left 30 minutes before what would be Jackson's last call.
"His presence will be missed for sure," Ator said. "This is a hard time for Baton Rouge."
Crews are working to put out a series of spot fires that broke out just off Interstate 15, near the border between San Diego County and Riverside County.
The spot fires stem from a brush fire in unincorporated Temecula County that broke out around 1:56 p.m. Monday.
Crews on scene found six to seven spots fires spread along the northbound shoulder of Intersatte 15 when they arrived on scene. Three of those fires spread 20 feet by 20 feet.
A Sig alert has been issued for I-15 northbound just south of State Route 79 in Riverside County. The number four lane will be closed for several hours as crews work.
Heavy traffic has been reported from SR-76 to SR-79.
Additional units are heading to the Temecula Creek Inn for structure protection. In NBC 7 San Diego viewer video, thick smoke and flames could be seen rising above the nearby gold course.
Cal Fire Riverside, Cal Fire San Diego and California Highway Patrol (CHP) officers are responding.
No other information was immediately available.
Check back for updates on this breaking news story.
Firefighters battled a brush fire in the Hollywood Hills from the air and the ground on Tuesday as summer temperatures climbed above 90 degrees.
The fire was reported just after 3 p.m. near the northbound Hollywood (101) Freeway and the Cahuenga Boulevard exit, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department.
The fire was burning in an uninhabited area near the Hollywood Reservoir. It burned nearly 20 acres.
Downed power lines in the area were also creating a hazard, said Margaret Stewart, a department spokeswoman.
LA city and LA County fire departments used helicopters to drop water on the flames from above and crews used hoses and picks on the ground.
LA Department of Water and Power crews responded to assess the downed power lines but there were not power outages, said Kim Hughes, a DWP spokeswoman.
No injuries were reported.
Los Angeles police were investigating a former Playboy Playmate of the Year Saturday for alleged "illegal distribution" of a photo she took and shared on Snapchat of a naked woman in a Playa Vista gym locker room, a police spokesman said.
Dani Mathers faced widespread criticism after she shared the photo on Snapchat with the caption: "If I can't unsee this then you can't either." In the photo, the woman's face is turned away from the camera. Mathers also posted a selfie along with the naked photo, in which she has one hand over mouth as if to stifle a laugh.
She later apologized, saying the post was meant to be a private message, and deleted her social media accounts. Detectives were investigating after the LAPD received a report of "illegal distribution" of the image, police Capt. Andrew Neiman said.
Mathers, 29, is the 2015 Playboy Playmate of the Year. She took the image at an LA Fitness gym on Lincoln Boulevard in Playa Vista.
The backlash on social media was immediate, and Mathers was banned from all LA Fitness locations.
"Her behavior is appalling and puts every member at risk of losing their privacy," said Jill Greuling, the company's executive vice president of operations, in a statement to NBC4 Southern California. "Her membership has been permanently revoked, at all of our health clubs, and law enforcement has been notified. Our written rules are very clear: Cellphone usage and photography are prohibited in the locker rooms. This is not only our rule, but common decency."
Tess Holliday, an LA-based plus size model, posted a Twitter message that read, "Dani Mathers it must be nice to be so perfect that you feel like you can publicly shame other bodies. Please educate yourself."
@DaniMathers it must be nice to be so perfect that you feel like you can publicly shame other bodies. Please educate yourself. Tess Holliday (@Tess_Holliday) July 14, 2016
One of Mathers' followers zinged her on social media with a post that read, "@DaniMathers your ugliness cannot be unseen now."
These were followed by a host of Twitter messages from others slamming the model for her behavior.
Mathers posted a string of apologies, claiming she was new to Snapchat and uploaded the image by mistake.
"I want to acknowledge my post from snapchat earlier. There is no excuse...I understand fully the magnitude of this post and I have hurt a lot of people, women. Body shaming is not okay and is nothing to joke about...," she said on Twitter, before deleting her account.
"This was meant to be a part of a private conversation that never should have happened. There are no words to describe how deeply sorry I am for hurting and offending you all. Women make my world go around. I surround myself with women and I completely understand the magnitude of this post.
"Please, please know this mistake has truly made me realize that something that can seem silly in a private conversation isn't unnecessary... Should never make light of another woman's naked body. I'm sorry for what I did... I need to take some time to myself now to reflect on why I did this horrible thing. Goodnight."
Mathers has since deleted her Snapchat and Twitter accounts.
The Associated Press and City News Service contributed to this report.
Parents of little leaguers in a Southern California city are outraged that thieves would target their clubhouse to loot an air conditioner, a cash register, two coffee machines and a speaker system.
Thieves broke into the Upland American Little League snack bar and office in a city park sometime between July 6 and 11.
"It feels like someone came in my home and stole my kid's piggy bank," said Andrew Decker, a parent and board member of the club.
Nancy Lizama, a mother who has worked regularly at the snack bar for four years, was crushed.
"I didn't want to go in and see it because I knew I would just break down in tears," she said.
The cops are investigating the case, but investigators have little to go on, said Upland Police Department Lt. Cliff Matthews.
"It's really sad because they don't have a lot of spare money," he said.
Parents have raised more than $2,000 as of Tuesday to help recover the money lost from the heist. The league serves nearly 300 boys and girls and is run by parent volunteers.
Decker said league parents are hoping to raise enough money to cover the damages and install roll-up shutters and security cameras.
The break-in was discovered July 11, when the team's board members arrived for a meeting. Photos show drawers and cabinets ripped open and supplies strewn around.
Police believe the break-in took place after July 6 when league officials had last entered the building after their last game.
Police ask that anyone with information call police dispatch at (909)-946-7624.
A teenage pilot from Compton arrived home in Southern California on Monday, capping a flight across the nation in preparation for what he hopes will be a record-setting around-the-world trip.
Isaiah Cooper, 16, touched down at Compton airport after a roughly two-week flight around the country, becoming the youngest African American pilot to complete the cross-country flight. A flight instructor accompanied him.
Cooper's 8,000-mile flight was not without difficulty. Bad weather forced him to make a hard landing that heavily damaged his original plane in Wyoming.
"He was able to execute the emergency procedures flawlessly, got it on the road, landed, didn't damage the houses, the schools, the construction crew, nothing. I mean, he got out of that thing safely," said flight instructor Robin Petgrave.
But Cooper has a much larger goal. He hopes next year to become the youngest black pilot to fly around the world solo. He will be 18 years old when he takes off on the planned flight.
The Guinness World Record is held by Matt Guthmiller of South Dakota,
who was 19 when he circumnavigated the globe on his own in 2014, ending his
voyage at Gillespie Field in El Cajon.
On a GoFundMe page, Cooper wrote that he began attending the youth
aviation program at Tomorrow's Aeronautical Museum in Compton when he was 5, but he dropped out when he began spending time "with the wrong crowd" and doing "seriously self-destructive things."
He said he hopes his attempt to break a world record will inspire other kids to turn their lives around and work to achieve their goals.
"There's a higher power that's always there trying to have you focused so whatever you want to do, you can do it. Just put your mind to it," Cooper said.
City News Service contributed to this report.
The ghostwriter behind Donald Trump's best-selling 1987 book, "The Art of the Deal," now says he regrets the way he presented the real estate mogul after spending many months with him as they wrote the book, according to a new interview in The New Yorker.
The book helped propel Trump to national prominence and cement his image as a brilliant businessman. But Tony Schwartz, the former journalist with unparalleled access to Trump nearly 30 years ago, says he is terrified by the possibility of a Trump presidency.
"I put lipstick on a pig," he said in the New Yorker interview, published online Sunday. "I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is."
"I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization."
Trump, who became the improbable front-runner in the Republican primaries, flew to Cleveland for the Republican National Convention Monday, to be his coronation as the party's presidential nominee.
Throughout his campaign, Trump has touted "The Art of the Deal" as proof of his toughness and negotiating finesse, the evidence behind his oft-repeated argument that he can make the best deals for the country.
Schwartz told The New Yorker he wrote most of the book and romanticized both Trump's personality and business savvy, making him appear to be driven by a love of deal making, rather than financial gain.
In the interview, Schwartz said if he were to write "The Art of the Deal" today, he would title it, "The Sociopath."
Trump also spoke to The New Yorker for the story, saying Schwartz was probably speaking out "for the publicity" and calling him disloyal.
"He owes a lot to me. I helped him when he didn't have two cents in his pocket. It's great disloyalty. I guess he thinks it's good for him-but he'll find out it's not good for him," Trump said in the article.
The family of a Cutler Bay woman found dead last month at a storage facility is making a passionate plea for someone to help in the hunt for those responsible.
54-year-old Laura Cunis body was found at the Public Storage facility she managed and lived at off Marlin Road and SW 106th Street.
A woman living with Cuni at the time called police when the victim didnt come after closing the facility at 6 PM on June 23rd. Her body was found in the back of the office the next morning.
"The life she lived did not merit the death she received, said the victims niece, Diana Delgado.
A $28,000 reward is currently being offered for information that leads to the arrests of those responsible. Anyone with tips can call Miami-Dade CrimeStoppers at 305-471-TIPS.
KSRTC will set up a group booking system for devotees coming in groups to book a bus. This way, they will be able to journey together. A group must be 40 members.
The furor over whether parts of Monday night's speech by Donald Trump's wife may have been lifted was all the talk during Day 2 of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland Tuesday.
NBC 6 spoke with some members of the Florida Delegation, who think it's much ado about nothing and are saying move on. Most delegates basically said it's all about values that any woman would have and want for their kids.
"She was trying to give a nice wife speech from a mother's heart and she's being attacked," Florida delegate Mitzi Prater said. "I believe she did well, she did a good job for what she was doing."
"God bless that these are values as Americans' we hold dear to us. This is what we work and hope for that our children will grow up to have a better life," Palm Beach delegate Robin Bernstein said.
The Trump campaign put out a statement that pretty much denies that anything was plagiarized. They say they were the personal thoughts of Melania Trump.
"I don't think it's even worth to be talking about it. I think there were some who wanted her to fail and she didn't fail so the next thing is to kinda break it down but come on, she just said what any of us would say, pretty much," delegate Chris Pate said. "I don't see how you could say she copied Mrs. Obama."
A professional flutist going for a spin in the Pacific on a paddle board was bumped by a humpback whale last week.
But Viviana Guzman, 52, of Montara, California, said she wasnt scared at all. In fact, she said she thinks the juvenile mammal was more scared of her, as she was standing atop of a paddleboard, her plastic flute tucked in her wetsuit.
It just really caught me by surprise, Guzman said on Monday, en route to her native Chile to perform in one of the 80 or so concerts shes asked to play in each year. I do this all the time, but this one came just a little closer.
She shot some of the video with a GoPro attached to her chest, while her friend took a second video with a GoPro attached to her head. The two go out regularly to swim, paddleboard and whale watch near the Miramar Beach Restaurant in Half Moon Bay, which is where they spotted the whale last Thursday or Friday. Since Guzman is a flute player, she also always brings her instrument.
Guzman said she started coming to this beach last year, and has continually been seeing the whales coming closer and closer to shore.
As a flutist, she thought she would cool to bring her music and a plastic version of her beloved instrument out to the sea to play for the giant creatures, Pied Piper-style.
The video also shows a whale diving under Guzman's paddle board as she played the flute.
I felt maybe they would like it, she said. Its kinda fun.
Music on Guzman's video is from her song "Native Soul."
A gas station clerk has been fired after a Miramar Police officer said he was refused service on the same day three officers were killed in an ambush in Baton Rouge.
According to the report released by Miramar Police, the uniformed officer was at the Sunoco station at 1700 S. Douglas Road Sunday afternoon when he tried to guy a Gatorade.
The officer said he was approached by a clerk who asked why they arrested his "boy," the report said. "Ya'll got my boy in the back of that car outside the gas station," the clerk said, according to the report. The officer responded that the person was arrested but he couldn't give more information.
When the officer went to pay for the drink the clerk was behind the register but refused to ring him up multiple times and said "you know why," the report said.
"Get out of my way, I need to attend to customers," the clerk told the officer, according to the report. The officer stepped to the side so the customers could pay but when they were done, the clerk again refused to ring up the officer, the report said.
The clerk refused to give his name to the officer, who asked why he was being refused service.
"Because I don't have to, that's why," the clerk said, according to the report.
Broward County PBA President Jeff Marano initially called for a national boycott of Sunoco following the incident but later called off the boycott.
"On a day when three officers are slain in Baton Rouge, La., and a fourth is fighting for his life, how can anyone deny service to a uniformed police officer?" Marano said in a statement.
Sunoco released a statement Monday that said the store is independently owned and operated, and apologizing for the way the officer was treated.
"The actions described by the police officer are unacceptable and are not something that Sunoco would tolerate at any station bearing the Sunoco brand. After investigating the circumstances in conjunction with the local owner-operator, the employee was terminated. We apologize to the officer involved, and to all law enforcement officers who were understandably offended by this incident," Sunoco's statement said. "The nations police officers are a precious resource, and Sunoco welcomes them in our stores as customers and protectors of our community every day."
What to Know A total of 37 migrants from Cuba landed Monday evening about 20 miles east of Key West.
Over three dozen migrants from Cuba made it to America thanks to the help of one boater in the Florida Keys.
The 39 men, women and children landed on the ocean side of Lower Sugarloaf Key, about 20 miles east of Key West, around 6:15 PM. Crews from Monroe Country Fire Rescue responded to calls of their arrival.
The group was reportedly dropped off by a boat that left the scene shortly after they had all touched shore. Four of the migrants, including one pregnant woman and a 4-year-old girl, were taken to the hospital for treatment after experiencing dehydration.
The rest of the migrants were transferred to U.S. Border Patrol agents and will now wait to be processed to stay in the United States under the wet foot, dry foot policy regarding those who flee from Cuba.
A New Jersey police department and its SWAT team swarmed a trampoline park to surprise a special fan Friday.
Six-year-old Christopher Layton waas celebrating his birthday at the Skyzone trampoline park in Lakewood when police officers and SWAT members began streaming into the gym, suited up and bearing gifts.
"Happy birthday, buddy!" one of the officers greets the surprised boy, who then shakes each of his visitor's hands.
Christopher got to check out an armored SWAT vehicle, received police swag and badges, and even got a special SWAT-themed cake as officers sang "happy birthday" to him.
Lt. Greg Staffordsmith told The Asbury Park Press that Christopher's babysitter had reached out to the department to tell them how much he loves SWAT.
"She told us he has a SWAT uniform and goes out to help us catch the bad guys," Staffordsmith told The Asbury Park Press.
The department's new police chief, Gregory Meyer, planned the event. Staffordsmith said most of the officers who attended the party were off duty and went just to surprise him.
Christopher's mother, Kristen Layton, told NBC 4 New York, "We are so overhwhelmed with the love, support and generosity of Lakewood Police and SWAT team."
Parks officials closed the beach near the pier on Coney Island Tuesday out of an abundance of caution after aquarium authorities say sharks were spotted just off shore there for much of the morning.
Parks officials did not say anything about a shark, but Jon Dohlin, director of the New York Aquarium, said several had been spotted in the waters off the popular beach. NYPD aviation and harbor units were scouring the area.
Rohini Dey, founder & owner of Vermilion, and Izabela Wojcik, director of House Programming for The James Beard Foundation, sat down with Roseanne Colletti to tell us more about the women in culinary leadership program and cook-off.
Beachgoer Lucien Zayak recorded video of dorsal fins breaking the water.
"Suddenly we saw them -- I saw at least four, but it seemes there were much more than that," he told NBC 4 New York.
City parks workers approached people on the beach "and asked everyone to get out of the water because there were sharks," Zayak said.
The Coney Island beach was reopened to swimmers by mid-afternoon.
[NATL] Unbelievable Animal Stories: Dog Befriends Abandoned Baby Giraffe
Dohlin said there are about 25 species of sharks in New York and it's "impossible" to identify the species of sharks based on images and video, but they appear to be harmless basking sharks, which pose no threat to humans. Basking sharks can grow up to more than 20 feet long. Dohlin said he believes the sharks are coming close to shore for feeding.
"Let's face it, 25 species -- every time you go swimming, you're swimming with sharks," he said. "But that goes to show how innocuous and harmless they are."
Dohlin believes the shark visit Tuesday morning is likely due to clearner waters.
"There's a lot of good momentum that's going on in conservation, and we should be thankful for that and see this as a success," he said.
Sharks were also spotted off Monmouth Beach in New Jersey Tuesday. Beach police caught a school of sharks a few yards offshore, just north of the town's beach club.
Police said there was no one swimming in the water at the time.
While sharks have been spotted singly or in pairs a few times this summer, there have been no sightings of schools of the fish like the one in Monmouth Beach.
Police on Long Island are looking for a robber who pretended to be a cop as he pulled over a driver using flashing red lights Monday afternoon.
The impersonator struck on Broadway and Willow in residential Woodmere, using flashing lights on his black Jeep Cherokee to pull over the victim, Nassau police said.
The impersonator convinced the 25-year-old victim to get out of the car and put his wallet and other belongings on the trunk, police said. He then took off with the money.
Neighbors were stunned someone would be so bold.
"I've lived here for 25 years, and there's a lot of police that go up and down the street so I believe that would be legitimate," said neighbor Laurie Kreager.
"We all trust police. I grew up, as a little girl, you run to the policeman if you have a problem, and if you don't know who the policemen are, you're in trouble," she said.
The fake cop is described as being in his 30s and about 5 feet tall.
Nassau police say drivers can take safety measure if they're pulled over by someone in an unmarked car. They should turn on flashers and drive to a well-lit, safe location; call 911 and tell them an unmarked car is trying to pull them over; ask the officer for his or her name, rank and ID; and if they're still unsure, stay in the car and request a marked vehicle.
Air travelers heading to LaGuardia Airport won't be able to park their vehicles from Tuesdays through Thursdays until Labor Day weekend, the Port Authority says.
Because of ongoing construction projects at the Queens airport, all parking lots at LaGuardia are expected to reach capacity early every Tuesday and remain full until late every Thursday until early September.
Travelers on those days should use ground transportation that doesn't require parking.
Private parking is available off site, and drivers can find a list of independent operators at laguardiaairport.com. Real-time parking updates can be found here.
More LaGuardia Airport travel advisories can be found here.
After a crane collapse closed all lanes of traffic on the Tappan Zee Bridge Tuesday afternoon, a number of travel alternatives were released for commuters and others who travel the span every day.
Customers who transfer to the Tappan Zee Express bus service from Metro North trains are encouraged to stay on Hudson Line trains until Ossining, where they can transfer to the Haverstraw-Ossining Ferry.
A shuttle bus from the Haverstraw Ferry landing will bring customers to the Palisades Center Park and Ride, Palisades Center Stores, Nanuet, Spring, Valley, Airmont and Suffern, according to the bus systems website.
Tappan Zee Express customers who need service to the Nyacks should transfer to the Transport of Rockland bus number 59 at the Palisades Center Stores, the company advises.
And customers who live in White Plains are advised to ride the number 13 BeeLine bus from TransCenter to Ossining, where they can connect with the ferry to Haverstraw.
The Metro North-operated ferries will cross-honor Tappen Zee Express bus tickets for the remainder of the day, the MTA said in a statement.
For drivers, the New York State Thruway Authority has issued a traffic detour for all drivers traveling on I-87/I-287.
Drivers going south are being diverted off exit 12 and northbound motorists are being diverted off at exit 8, the New York Thruway Authority said in a statement.
Motorists can use the George Washington Bridge to cross the Hudson River south of the Tappan Zee and the Bear Mountain Bridge to cross the river to the north.
Planned closure of the lower-level lanes on the George Washington Bridge Tuesday night was suspended to alleviate traffic, the Port Authority said in a statement.
Hillary Clinton said Monday she had met with the family of Philando Castile, the 32-year-old cafeteria worker who was shot and killed by a cop during a traffic stop in a St. Paul, Minnesota, suburb.
She described them as courageous, NBC News reported, and told the American Federation of Teachers convention in Minneapolis that the country had been "confronted with tragedy too many times recently."
"We cannot let this madness continue," she said. "This violence cannot stand."
She also praised the work of police officers in keeping communities safe, turning to the ambush killings of cops in Dallas, Texas and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
A New Jersey mother of three was stabbed to death -- allegedly by her husband -- while the couple's three children were asleep inside the family's Pennsville home.
Police and EMS were sent to the couple's home on N. Broadway around 5:30 a.m. Tuesday after getting a call about a cardiac arrest. They found Ceema Singh's body on the kitchen floor with multiple stab wounds.
Her husband, 46-year-old Nitin Singh, was standing in the room, police said, and taken into custody.
The couple was having marital problems, according to investigators when Ceema Singh died.Their children, ages 15, 6 and 5 were asleep in the apartment at the time, Pennsville's police chief said, adding the children did not witness the crime.
Child protective services took custody of the children and were working with members of the family's church to keep the kids together, possibly with a church member.
Police said the husband made the 911 call, but did not admit to any wrongdoing.
Officials said Singh was taken to the Salem County Correctional Facility, held on one million cash bail. He faces first degree murder, aggravated assault and weapons charges.
A serial predator is on the loose in Philadelphia's Kensington neighborhood, and police on Tuesday said he may be to blame for the violent killing of a woman found naked and stabbed to death on a street corner over the weekend.
Police confirmed Tuesday afternoon that they're looking for a man captured by surveillance cameras traveling on a bike in the neighborhood in connection with non-fatal attacks on at least two women in Kensington. Investigators said they have reason to believe the man might also be responsible for killing a 35-year-old woman in Kensington late Saturday night by beating her with a brick and stabbing her in the neck.
Police said both women in the non-fatal attacks and the woman killed Saturday night were working as prostitutes in the neighborhood at the time they were attacked. Kensington has long been a hotbed for prostitution, drug use and sales and crime.
In Saturday night's killing, police said the victim was in a rear alley behind Cumberland Street near Jasper shortly after 11 p.m. when she was beaten and stabbed. She managed to stumble about a block, screaming for help, before collapsing near Jasper and Letterly streets, where she died.
"She was bloody from head to toe," Police Capt. Robert Ritchie said the night of the killing. Police described a gruesome scene indicating the level of violence inflicted on the woman, with a blood trail stretching for a city block.
Police are investigating after a naked woman was found dead on a Kensington street corner overnight. Police say the woman was stabbed in an alley, and then ran around to the corner of Jasper and Letterly streets, where she collapsed.
Police described the suspected killer as a man in his 30s or 40s who has a full mustache and beard. They said he rode a black and blue bicycle and matches the description of the man wanted in the two violent non-fatal attacks on women.
Kensington served as the backdrop to the infamous "Kensington Strangler" killings in 2010, when Antonio Rodriguez went on a serial killing spree, raping and murdering at least three women in the neighborhood in a two-month span 2010. Rodriguez is serving life in prison.
Tipsters should contact police at 215-686-3334 or text a tip to PPD TIP (773 847).
A judge has set a March trial for a man charged with fatally ambushing a state police trooper near a rural barracks in eastern Pennsylvania.
The order by Pike County Judge Gregory Chelak also says an out-of-county jury will be picked to hear the case of 33-year-old Eric Frein.
Frein is charged with shooting and killing Cpl. Bryon Dickson II and wounding another trooper outside the Blooming Grove barracks in September 2014. [[281109012, C]]
He led police on a tense 48-day manhunt before U.S. marshals caught him about 30 miles from the shooting scene. Frein has pleaded not guilty.
Court documents say Frein spoke of wanting to start a revolution in a letter to his parents and called Dickson's slaying an "assassination" during a police interview.
Friends and family are mourning a local business owner, chamber of commerce president, US Navy veteran and retired Philadelphia police officer who died from a flesh-eating bacterial infection.
Jerome Rodio passed away Thursday at the age of 75. The Chester County Press reports Rodio was on a fishing trip in the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland when he suffered a scratch on his arm while helping someone pull in crabs.
A rare, flesh-eating bacterial infection then entered his body. He was taken to the University of Maryland Hospital where he passed away.
A visitation and funeral service will be held for Rodio at the Stella Maris Church on 2901 S. 10th Street in Philadelphia Wednesday, starting at 10 a.m.
Rodio, who is originally from Camden, New Jersey but lived in West Grove, Pennsylvania prior to his death, was a US Navy veteran and retired Philadelphia police officer. He then started his own used furniture, antique and collectible business in South Jersey for 25 years before adding a location to Oxford, Pennsylvania in 2009. Rodio also served as the President of the Board of the Oxford Area Chamber of Commerce.
Friends told the Chester County Press Rodio was heavily involved in the Oxford community, volunteering at events, recruiting new businesses to the town and regularly attending borough council meetings.
Jerome was many, many things to this community but what sticks with me the most is that he was a positive force, Sue Cole, the interim executive director of Oxford Area Chamber of Commerce, told the Chester County Press. You could feel his constant presence of keeping people on point, bringing light to those things that needed light to be brought to themall while being respectful and keeping compassion for community members at the forefront.
The Westmoreland County coroner says a 17-year-old Pennsylvania girl found dead on the day she was supposed to graduate from high school accidentally overdosed on a combination of prescription drugs.
Laura Elizabeth Hoover had no heroin or illegal drugs in her system, the coroner said. Investigators refused to list the drugs that killed her.
Hoover was a senior at Burrell High School, about 25 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, when her body was found in a car that came to rest against a tree in a neighboring township about 1 a.m. May 26.
"Laura was a deep thinker with a creative spirit and liked to travel. Last year she traveled to India where she was a volunteer in community service with children," her obituary reads. "She had visited New York City, Hawaii, and loved snow boarding in the mountains, caring for animals as a true vegan, the outdoors and was a creative artist and art admirer. With her love of children, she could be thought of as a professional volunteer."
An autopsy uncovered no sign Hoover was injured when the vehicle apparently drifted off the road.
Toxicology results from her autopsy were released Monday.
Allegheny Township police are investigating the source of the drugs and say that person could still be charged.
Hundreds of workers and their supporters protested in front of Philadelphia International airport Tuesday, in a fight for better pay and benefits.
The demonstration outside of Terminal A included baggage handlers, cabin cleaners and wheelchair attendants who work for PrimeFlight Prospect and McGinn Security. They carried a sign which read, Respect Black Workers.
Workers want a minimum wage of $15 an hour and they want a union.[[387480681,C]]
They also argue that the airport workforce is made up primarily of African-Americans and African immigrants who "live in poverty," according to a news release organizers issued before the protest.
"Last year alone the airlines raked in more than $23 billion in profits. Meanwhile, Philadelphia remains the worst city for deep poverty in Americawith black Philadelphians twice as likely to live in poverty as whites," according to the Service Employees International Union.[[387480331,C]]
Every time she hears of someone injured or killed in a crash on Philadelphia's Roosevelt Boulevard, Latanya Byrd's heart breaks all over again.
It was three years ago this week that her niece, Samara Banks, and three of Banks' four sons died on the Boulevard when a drag-racing driver plowed into them as they crossed near 2nd Street.
Banks and her three boys, ages 9 months, 23 months and 4 years, were among 36 pedestrians struck by cars that year on the Boulevard, and among 13 people who died on the road that year. With an average of three people injured in some kind of crashes on the Boulevard every day, Byrd and the rest of Banks' family are dogged by daily reminders of the deadly road that took their loved ones.
"My stomach just turns. I really just feel sick anytime I hear Boulevard, crash, death," Byrd said Tuesday morning as she stood along the Boulevard near Adams Avenue, a few blocks from where Banks and her sons died. Byrd joined local lawmakers and advocates along the Boulevard for a news conference as state Rep. John Taylor and City Councilman Al Taubenberger called for legislation to create a pilot program for speed cameras along the highway.
"It's so difficult. So many lives have been lost," Byrd said. She said Banks' surviving son, who narrowly avoided being hit the night his entire family died in an instant, went through therapy and is doing as well as can be expected. He's 8 years old now.
The crosswalk where Banks and the boys were struck, which previously did not have a light, has since been named Banks Way for the family. A traffic light was installed after the crash.
Taylor said the speed-camera law he's introducing would create a pilot program for cameras that log speed and automatically send a ticket to drivers who exceed 11 mph above the speed limit. The limit on most of the Boulevard is 40 mph. Officials said the initial proposal calls for a $150 fine for speeders, but that advocates from the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, who have consulted on the legislation, suggested a sliding scale of increasing fines.
The cameras would work similarly to several red-light cameras installed in the last several years along the Boulevard, and would target the same area stretching from 9th Street in Hunting Park to the Bucks County line. According to PennDOT, the Boulevard served as the scene for 61 traffic-related deaths from 2011 to 2015 -- an average of one a month -- and 4,670 more injuries in the same span, or about three people injured per day on average.
Of the crashes in the last five years, 159 have involved vehicles striking pedestrians. Just last month, 17-year-old Markaylah Jackson died crossing the Boulevard at Adams Avenue late one night after leaving work. The driver of the van that struck her took off, leaving her to die on the pavement. She would have graduated high school the next day.
At one point during Tuesday's news conference, the sound of screeching brakes cut the air along the 12-lane highway.
There is a push to make the Roosevelt Boulevard in Northeast Philadelphia safer by adding automated speed cameras, drivers speeding would automatically receive tickets.
AAA Mid-Atlantic also supported the legislation, saying that a poll of area motorists showed that 52 percent supported the use of speed cameras, but more than half of those polled also reported that they recently drove in excess of 15 mph over the speed limit.
"Many people believe these crashes are inevitable," Jana Tidwell, of AAA Mid-Atlantic, said. "We're here to tell you that these crashes are preventable."
Officials said studies of red-light cameras showed that they work, with violation numbers decreasing as people become aware the cameras are there. They expect the same would happen with speed cameras. Like red-light cameras, speed camera violations would carry only a fine and not license points.
Taylor vowed to see the measure's passage through, as he and Taubenberger both rejected any arguments around the cameras being a violation of civil liberties.
"Maybe they ought to see what we see," Taubenberger said. "Maybe we should publish all the pictures of people who die here. That would [them] up."
The driver responsible for Markaylah Jackson's death has not come forward or been located. If you have any information on the incident, contact Philadelphia Police's Accident Investigation officers at 215-685-3180.
All throughout the 1920s, a little girl named Ruby Gilliam handed out campaign flyers for her father and brothers, who were "always running for something."
The youngest of eight children raised in the mountains of rural Kentucky said she started the campaign work when she was 3. Ninety years later, Gilliam is still in politics.
"None of them ever won," she said of her father and brothers. "At least we tried."
All these years later, Gilliam is on the winning side. The 93-year-old Ohioan will be the oldest Hillary Clinton delegate at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia -- if not the oldest delegate overall.
Gilliam won't be the only nonagenarian at the DNC. A 90-year-old woman, Felicia Kahn, of New Orleans, is also making the trip as a Clinton delegate.
"I finally made it," Gilliam said in a phone interview Tuesday from her home in Carroll County, chuckling at the idea of being the oldest delegate. "I've been trying to reach that mark."
Gilliam is taking a six-hour bus ride with other members of the Ohio delegation, and though she is legally blind, she said she's in good health.
"I'm very active and haven't slowed down," said Gilliam, who will turn 94 in November. "I'm one of those women, if the music starts, I dance. I'll tell you this: I'm a young 93."
The DNC in Philadelphia will be her eighth convention in a row. Her first was the 1988 convention in Atlanta when Michael Dukakis was nominated. Dukakis went on to lose to former President George H.W. Bush in the general election.
This time around, Gilliam has a more optimistic feeling about the candidate she will cast her vote for when ballots are cast at the Wells Fargo Center July 26 -- Hillary Clinton.
"I'm looking for Hillary to be nominated and then looking forward to attending her inauguration," she said.
Like Gilliam, Felicia Kahn, the 90-year-old from Louisiana, has a long history of attending Democratic National Conventions.
Kahn, who tweets often about politics, posted a picture to social media earlier this month showing her being honored by New Orleans City Council on her 90th birthday.
She has been involved in politics and community activism for eight decades, getting her start with the League of Women Voters, after graduating from Newcomb College in 1948. She spent 20 years with the influential organization.
By the time I got to the 1970s, it was a really interesting time because it was the first time I got involved in the womens movement. I moved to the Democratic Party because on the League of Womens Rights boards, I couldnt get involved with candidates, she said.
Her first convention was 1976 when Jimmy Carter was nominated and eventually went on to win. Philadelphia will mark her 10th, though she didnt attend a few as a delegate.
Both women said theyve waited a long time for the chance to cast a vote for a female presidential candidate.
I was a Hillary delegate eight years ago, so I feel very strong for Hillary and I feel absolute we have a woman with experience, Kahn said.
After Gilliam gets off the bus and Kahn arrives via a flight to Washington D.C. and a car ride from there with her son, both will begin the task of nominating a candidate. Kahn said DNC officials have pressed the importance of arriving on time each day to the Wells Fargo Center: 3 p.m. Monday and 4 p.m. Tuesday. The first ballots will be cast Tuesday, she said.
Then, of course, there are the daily delegation breakfasts and the evening soirees.
There will be plenty of cocktails, Gilliam said. Not that any of us would drink. Well, not me, anyway. Liquor and I dont agree.
A 17-year-old was wounded in a drive-by shooting near Belmont Park in Mission Beach overnight when a passenger in another vehicle opened fire, police said.
According to the San Diego Police Department (SDPD), the victim was with three other young men traveling in a Honda Civic around 1:30 a.m. near the beachfront amusement park in the 1300 block of West Mission Bay Drive.
A teal colored vehicle possible a Chrysler 300 or Dodge Charger passed the group in the Honda on the left and a passenger in that vehicle fired a gun out of the window.
The round pierced the rear drivers side door of the Honda, striking a 17-year-old passenger in the hip, police said.
The shooting suspects car then fled the area, and was last seen taking the Sunset Cliffs Boulevard off-ramp from West Mission Bay Drive. The SDPD said the shooter was wearing a fitted red hat, but a more detailed description was not immediately released.
After the shooting, the group in the Honda drove a few miles to Mission Valley Resort off Hotel Circle South in Mission Valley where they called police for help.
The victim was taken to a local hospital and is expected to survive. No other injuries were reported.
The drive-by shooting is under investigation. As of 7:30 a.m. Tuesday, no arrests had been made.
NBC 7 spoke with locals and visitors in Mission Beach Tuesday who said the shooting is concerning, especially in an area that is filled with people daily.
"It's very discomforting," Tierrasanta resident Pam Lamarsh told NBC 7. "You feel unsafe in any place today -- to even go grocery shopping. You never know what's going to happen."
Phoenix resident Franki Leonard is on vacation in San Diego for two weeks and said it's frightening to hear of an incident like this happening in the beach community. Her children are teenagers.
"It makes me nervous to have my kids out now," said Leonard. "Now I'm afraid."
Its called Civic San Diego, a nonprofit with a big say about how San Diego will look in the future.
A critic of the agency is telling NBC 7 that its become a municipal mess." Murtaza Baxamusa, who served on the board for two years, believes that the agency acts like a zombie entity doing what it wants, when it wants, with no accountability.
Baxamusa says he filed a lawsuit to bring attention to the agencies failings.
Civic San Diego was created by current Chamber of Commerce President and former Mayor Jerry Sanders in 2011 to replace the citys redevelopment agency.
Its sole client is the City of San Diego and the agency puts in play millions of dollars in redevelopment funds. Its announced goals were to streamline the development process, attract developers to underserved communities like Encanto and City Heights and approve downtown redevelopment projects.
The streamlined efficiency comes with a high price. according to the lawsuit, which alleges a loss of public discourse and due process.
Its not working, according to Baxamusa and his attorney Steven Coopersmith, because the city is both the sole client and sole member of Civic San Diego.
Coopersmith says its a very very odd conjunction of public and private interests. The lawsuit lays out an explanation of the conflict, board members are also permitted to serve on the board of for-profit subsidiaries which means, Coopersmith says significant conflicts of interest exist or could arise."
What troubled Baxamusa were requests made for additional information or documents on Civic San Diego practices, including questions about a series of closed door sessions by the administration.
He felt he had a fiduciary duty to provide oversight of agency practices but his inquiries went nowhere.
Instead he got a request for him to sign a letter of confidentiality
Two months earlier, NBC 7 was tipped off by a former San Diego city official to look closer at the workings of the nonprofit, specifically the repeated closed door sessions involving the agencies top management team.
The allegation was the agency was hiding something and they didnt want the public to be aware of it.
To find out more, NBC 7 filed California Public Records Act requests with Civic San Diego. Here are those requests and the responses. You will see that most of the information supplied were the agendas of the board meetings. These agendas dont require a public records request and are easily accessible. Note in the agendas the numerous times there were closed sessions to evaluate the top two administrators in the agency.
In our experience of reporting on local government, we had never seen an example like this, numerous closed door sessions used to evaluate the performance of the same two employees.
Click here to read the CPRAs sent by NBC 7 and the responses received.
As to Baxamusa having to sign a confidentiality statement: This took me by surprise, he told us. Baxamusa sits on a number of nonprofit boards and is director of planning and development for the San Diego County Building and Construction Trades Council Family Housing Corporation.
He told us: Ive never come across a situation where Ive been told I needed to sign a confidentially agreement."
Murtaza Baxamusa refused to sign, and on June 22, received a notice from the mayors office that he was not being reappointed to the board.
NBC 7 reporter Wendy Fry contacted 14 officials and board members at the federal, state and local level. She asked whether they had heard of making trustees of a public agency board sign a confidentiality agreement on board documents for a closed-session item.
Every response received was along the lines of the response we got from State Senator Marty Block who in his career as a public servant had served on a number of government boards.
Said the Senator in a text message to Fry: Never heard of it. Never asked to do it. She added that it was outside of his personal experience, so he didnt know how unusual it might be."
Attorney Terry Francke has expertise with open government issues. He is general counsel for Calaware and an acknowledged expert on Californias Brown Act.
When asked about the confidentiality document that Baxamusa was told to sign, he said: Such confidentiality agreements requested of directors are not that unusual in the for-profit corporate world, especially if triggered by and concerning specific corporate records.
He added: Civic San Diego, however, is an entity subject to the California Public Records Act, and therefore its my belief that information cannot be protected by a nondisclosure agreement unless it is exempt from disclosure under the CPRA.
The lawsuit asks for an injunction to stop Civic San Diego from the illegal expenditure of public funds. The argument says Baxamusa is simply for a development corporation that has such an enormous power over permitting large projects I feel there should be greater oversight by the city And our elected officials."
Officials arrested a woman in City Heights Tuesday morning after a suspicious fire sparked at an apartment, forcing several families -- including her own -- out of their homes and sending a child to the hospital.
The San Diego Fire-Rescue Department (SDFD) said the blaze broke out just before 3:30 a.m. at a two-story apartment complex in the 3800 block of Van Dyke Avenue.
Dozens of residents were evacuated and two families were displaced, including five adults and three children, as multiple fire engines battled the flames.
Firefighters knocked down the blaze within 15 minutes.
SDFD officials said one child suffered smoke inhalation and was taken to Rady Childrens Hospital for treatment. Four other residents were evaluated by medics at the scene. Red Cross arrived at the complex to help the displaced families find temporary housing.
Officials said one woman was detained in connection with the fire. That woman, now identified as Della Swygert, 56, was ultimately arrested on suspicion of setting fire to an inhabited structure.
Arson investigators were at the scene for several hours collecting evidence, trying to determine the cause. Fire officials deemed the blaze suspicious after witnesses reported they heard people arguing just before the flames sparked.
NBC 7 spoke with Swygert's son at the scene who said his mother allegedly started the fire. He said she once started a fire at another apartment in which they lived and said she needs help, as her actions are putting everyone around her in danger.
Isaiah said his mother has been dealing with mental health issues for the past three years and had been getting help until recently.
"I want to get her help. She can't be living with us like that," the suspect's son, Isaiah Swygert, told NBC 7.
Isaiah and his father were among the displaced Tuesday. He said they would be staying at a motel until they are allowed to return to their home.
Swygert was booked into Las Colinas Detention and Reentry Facility and is scheduled to appear in court Thursday.
No further details were released, including details on the motive behind the suspected arson.
The loyal pit bull who stood guard over her owner after a Prince George's County fire finally has a home of her own. Now the woman who helped Precious find her happy ending is hoping her story changes the way some people look at her breed.
Precious made headlines last December for her act of devotion. The protective dog with big brown eyes guarded her owner after a fire broke out at their Landover Hills, Maryland, home.
But after the fire, Precious and her puppy, Molly, were sent to an animal shelter because of the county's ban on their breed. A placement with their owner's sister also ended soon after it began.
The family was able to re-home Molly, but Precious was left without a family. That's when Jessica Stuby and her organization, Babes 4 Bullies, stepped in to help.
Precious suffered from smoke inhalation as a result of the fire and also had fleas. So Stuby nursed her back to health before finding her a home.
"She did great," Stuby said. "We waited for her to be done with her meds."
Precious was adopted in mid-February and is now enjoying life with her new family.
She quickly adjusted to her home, claiming a spot on the family couch with a dog who looks remarkably like her. Stuby shared a picture on Facebook of the new "brother and sister" snuggled together back in April.
"She's healthy and sweet and awesome," Stuby said.
But Stuby hopes Precious' story will help change the ban that took her from her original owner.
"She's a great little dog, which is why it's so ashame we have these bans," Stuby said. "I just can't imagine her being put down just because shes's pit bull."
Stuby says over 70 percent of the dogs she's helped since her group was created in 2010 had to be rehomed because of a county or building breed ban.
In Prince George's County, residents are not allowed to "own, keep or harbor a pit bull terrier," according to a county code. Illegal pit bulls can be impounded, and their owners can face fines of up to $1,000 or up to six months in prison.
Stuby says requiring owners to get liability insurance could be a good alternative to a ban.
"The problem is not usually the animal in the home. It's the people in the home," Stuby said.
The body of the man who jumped into the Potomac River this weekend to retrieve a fishing rod has been found, police said Tuesday morning.
Bniamin Adel Rastkheez, 31, died after he jumped off his boat near Piscataway Park about 5 p.m. Sunday and was caught in the current, Maryland Natural Resources Police said.
The Falls Church, Virginia, resident was on the water in a 16-foot Stingray motorboat with two friends when a fishing rod went overboard. Rastkheez went to retrieve it and then tried to get back to the boat.
But the current was too strong, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.
Rastkheez disappeared after his friends were unable to help him. He was not wearing a life jacket, police said.
The Coast Guard and police from multiple jurisdictions used seven boats and a helicopter to search for Rastkheez. Police said Monday that they believed he had drowned.
The calm surface of the Potomac can hide dangerous currents, officials warn.
Baltimore-Washington Parkway is partially closed Tuesday night after a road worker using a lawn tractor was hit by a car ahead of the evening rush hour, officials say.
Northbound lanes are closed starting at Riverdale Road (MD-410), about 5 miles south of the Capital Beltway, U.S. Park Police said. Traffic is delayed for miles, video shot from Chopper4 shows.
The worker hit about 3:45 p.m. was rushed to a hospital with life-threatening injuries.
Northbound traffic is deing diverted onto Riverdale Road.
The closure is expected to last for hours, a National Park Service spokeswoman said.
Investigators have not determined whether the car that hit the worker left the roadway, the park service said in an update.
U.S. Park Police are investigating.
Stay with News4 for more details on this developing story.
A former senior official at the National Security Agency has been sentenced to 20 years for killing his adopted 3-year-old on in 2013.
Brian Patrick O'Callaghan, 38, of Damascus, Maryland, will have all but 12 years of his sentence suspended and will also get credit for time served, according to the decision handed down by Judge John Debelius. He pleaded guilty to first-degree child abuse resulting in death for the death of his son, Hyunsu, in 2014.
Investigators said the little boy, who was adopted from South Korea in October 2013, had impact trauma on his body, as well as internal bleeding when he died.
O'Callaghan said as he was helping give Hyunsu a shower Jan. 31, 2014, the boy slipped in the bathtub, falling backward and hitting his shoulder. The next afternoon, O'Callaghan said, Hyunsu was unresponsive after a nap and had mucus coming from his nose.
O'Callaghan said he took Hyunsu to a Germantown emergency room several hours later, where he was deemed to be in critical condition and possibly brain dead. Hyunsu died two days later.
Doctors said he suffered head trauma, for which O'Callaghan couldn't provide an explanation, according to charging documents. The child's skull was fractured and his brain was bleeding.
An obituary posted on the website of the Frederick News-Post gave the boy's full name as Madoc Hyeonsu O'Callaghan and said he was born in South Korea. He was described in the obituary as a "smiling, content, and loving son and brother."
"He loved his dogs, his big brother, Aidan, and anything his parents made for him to eat. He wasn't dealt the simplest hand in life, but he found something to love in it every day," the obituary said.
At a hearing shortly after O'Callaghan's arrest, his attorney said O'Callaghan was a Marine veteran who had been involved in the rescue of Army POW Jessica Lynch. O'Callaghan served in the Marine Corps from 1997 through 2004 as sergeant.
According to his service record, O'Callaghan was deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom for nine months in 2003 and served in Al-Wasit Province, An Nasiriyah and Al Kut. OCallaghan returned home with post-traumatic stress disorder.
As the roll call vote to nominate Donald Trump as the Republican candidate began Tuesday night, the seats of the Virginia delegation were empty when a statement was read against the actions of the party leaders on the previous day.
News4's Chris Lawrence said he was told the delegates were "in a meeting" and planned to support Trump. The delegates said they were at a meeting off-site and arrived late to the arena.
In addition, the District of Columbia delegation announced their 19 delegates should be split, 10 for U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and nine for Ohio Gov. John Kasich. But according to GOP rules, all delegate votes were counted for the presumptive nominee.
Both Maryland and Virginia, who returned to the floor, later cast their delegate votes for Trump.
The votes came a day after GOP leaders approved rules for the convention over furious objections. Anti-Trump delegates had tried to force a state-by-state roll call vote on the rules, which to their dismay require delegates to vote for a nominee based on their state primaries and caucuses.
Despite what initially appeared to be a successful attempt to force a full vote, Republican leaders proceeded with a quick voice vote, and Trump's team declared the "dump Trump" movement vanquished.
Ken Cuccinelli, the former attorney general of Virginia and one of the state's delegates, flung his credentials on the floor after the announcement Monday night.
"Look, I am proud of Virginia Republicans here today," he said to NBC News. "We stood together as a majority for the rule of law. I wish the RNC had followed the lead of its first commonwealth, the commonwealth of Virginia. It's really a sad day for them."
The Colorado delegation walked out of the proceedings on Monday. There have been indications they and other states may attempt to make a statement of protest during Tuesdays roll call nomination vote.
This story has been updated from an earlier version.
Melania Trump was the keynote speaker at the opening night of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. Here is her speech, as prepared.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
You have all been very kind to Donald and me, to our young son Barron, and to our whole family.
It's a very nice welcome and we're excited to be with you at this historic convention.
I am so proud of your choice for President of the United States, my husband, Donald J. Trump.
And I can assure you, he is moved by this great honor.
The 2016 Republican primaries were fierce and started with many candidates, 17 to be exact, and I know that Donald agrees with me when I mention how talented all of them are.
They deserve respect and gratitude from all of us.
However, when it comes to my husband, I will say that I am definitely biased, and for good reason.
I have been with Donald for 18 years and I have been aware of his love for this country since we first met.
He never had a hidden agenda when it comes to his patriotism, because, like me, he loves this country so much.
I was born in Slovenia, a small, beautiful and then communist country in Central Europe.
My sister Ines, who is an incredible woman and a friend, and I were raised by my wonderful parents.
My elegant and hard-working mother Amalia introduced me to fashion and beauty.
My father Viktor instilled in me a passion for business and travel.
Their integrity, compassion and intelligence reflect to this day on me and for my love of family and America.
From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life: that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise; that you treat people with respect.
They taught and showed me values and morals in their daily life.
That is a lesson that I continue to pass along to our son, and we need to pass those lessons on to the many generation to follow.
Because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.
I am fortunate for my heritage, but also for where it has brought me today.
I travelled the world while working hard in the incredible arena of fashion.
After living and working in Milan and Paris, I arrived in New York City twenty years ago, and I saw both the joys and the hardships of daily life.
On July 28th, 2006, I was very proud to become a citizen of the United States -- the greatest privilege on planet Earth.
I cannot, or will not, take the freedoms this country offers for granted.
But these freedoms have come with a price so many times.
The sacrifices made by our veterans are reminders to us of this.
I would like to take this moment to recognize an amazing veteran, the great Senator Bob Dole.
And let us thank all of our veterans in the arena today, and those across our great country.
We are all truly blessed to be here.
That will never change.
I can tell you with certainty that my husband has been concerned about our country for as long as I have known him.
With all of my heart, I know that he will make a great and lasting difference.
Donald has a deep and unbounding determination and a never-give-up attitude.
I have seen him fight for years to get a project done or even started and he does not give up!
If you want someone to fight for you and your country, I can assure you, he is the 'guy'.
He will never, ever, give up.
And, most importantly, he will never, ever, let you down.
Donald is, and always has been, an amazing leader.
Now, he will go to work for you.
His achievements speak for themselves, and his performance throughout the primary campaign proved that he knows how to win.
He also knows how to remain focused on improving our country on keeping it safe and secure.
He is tough when he has to be but he is also kind and fair and caring.
This kindness is not always noted, but it is there for all to see.
That is one reason I fell in love with him to begin with.
Donald is intensely loyal.
To family, friends, employees, country.
He has the utmost respect for his parents, Mary and Fred, to his sisters Maryanne and Elizabeth, to his brother Robert and to the memory of his late brother Fred.
His children have been cared for and mentored to the extent that even his adversaries admit they are an amazing testament to who he is as a man and a father.
There is a great deal of love in the Trump family.
That is our bond, and that is our strength.
Yes, Donald thinks big, which is especially important when considering the presidency of the United States.
No room for small thinking.
No room for small results.
Donald gets things done.
Our country is underperforming and needs new leadership.
Leadership is also what the world needs.
Donald wants our country to move forward in the most positive of ways.
Everyone wants change.
Donald is the only one that can deliver it.
We should not be satisfied with stagnation.
Donald wants prosperity for all Americans.
We need new programs to help the poor and opportunities to challenge the young.
There has to be a plan for growth only then will fairness result.
My husband's experience exemplifies growth and the successful passage of opportunity to the next generation.
His success indicates inclusion rather than division.
My husband offers a new direction, welcoming change, prosperity and greater cooperation among peoples and nations.
Donald intends to represent all the people, not just some of the people.
That includes Christians and Jews and Muslims, it includes Hispanics and African-Americans and Asians, and the poor and the middle class.
Throughout his career, Donald has successfully worked with people of many faiths and with many nations.
Like no one else, I have seen the talent, the energy, the tenacity, the resourceful mind and the simple goodness of heart that God gave Donald Trump.
Now is the time to use those gifts as never before, for purposes far greater than ever before.
And he will do this better than anyone else can... and it won't even be close.
Everything depends on it, for our cause and for our country.
People are counting on him all the millions of you who have touched us so much with your kindness and your confidence.
You have turned this unlikely campaign into a movement that is still gaining in strength and number.
The primary season, and its toughness, is behind us.
Let's all come together in a national campaign like no other!
The race will be hard-fought, all the way to November.
There will be good times and hard times and unexpected turns it would not be a Trump contest without excitement and drama.
But through it all, my husband will remain focused on only one thing: this beautiful country, that he loves so much.
If I am honored to serve as first lady, I will use that wonderful privilege to try to help people in our country who need it the most.
One of the many causes dear to my heart is helping children and women.
You judge a society by how it treats its citizens.
We must do our best to ensure that every child can live in comfort and security, with the best possible education.
As citizens of this great nation, it is kindness, love and compassion for each other that will bring us together and keep us together.
These are the values Donald and I will bring to the White House.
My husband is ready to lead this great nation.
He is ready to fight, every day, to give our children the better future they deserve.
Ladies and gentlemen, Donald J. Trump is ready to serve and lead this country as the next opresident of the United States.
Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.
The Duchess of Cambridge's younger sister Pippa Middleton and hedge fund manager James Matthews have announced their engagement.
The couple confirmed rumors in a statement to Britain's Press Association on Tuesday, saying they planned to marry next year. The statement comes as Middleton appeared in photographs with a diamond engagement ring on her left hand as she left her London home.
[NATL-ARCHIVED] Royal Family Photos
Matthews got down on one knee while they were visiting the picturesque Lake District and proposed to the 32-year-old Middleton.
Her elder sister, the former Kate Middleton, and Prince William said they were "absolutely delighted" by the news, Kensington Palace said.
"They make a wonderful couple and we wish them every happiness together," said her father, Michael Middleton.
Middleton played a prominent role in the 2011 royal wedding of her older sister Kate and Prince William at Westminster Abbey in London, a wedding that was seen live by a worldwide television audience.
[NATL] Wardrobe Watch: Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge
A Massachusetts man has been charged in connection with a police-involved shooting over the weekend.
The Middlesex county district attorney says 27-year-old Michael Clark of Tyngsborough faces multiple charges, including assault with intent to murder, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, assault and battery of a police officer negligent driving and receiving a stolen vehicle.
Clark was allegedly spotted by Tyngsborough police in a Buick LeSabre stolen from the Lowell General Hospital parking lot Saturday evening after driving back from Nashua, New Hampshire, to use the owner of the stolen vehicle's credit cards, and a police pursuit ensued from Route 3 in Tyngsborough to Sully's Ice Cream Stand on Graniteville Road in Chelmsford.
A Chelmsford police sergeant approached the suspect's Buick, which ended up backing up and dragging the officer several yards, according to investigators.
The DA says that a Tyngsborough police officer feared for the Chelmsford sergeant's life, and shot the suspect twice to get him to stop the car.
Clark was taken to BMC via medical helicopter, and the Chelmsford was treated for non-life threatening injuries at a local hospital and was later released.
The DA says Clark will be arraigned Tuesday afternoon from his hospital bed at Boston Medical Center.
The Tyngsborough police officer who shot Clark is currently on administrative leave.
The investigation is ongoing.
A junior police academy underway this week in Northfield, Vermont, aims to build bridges between officers and young community members.
"Being proactive about this is going to help this community in the long run," said Officer Dan Withrow of the Northfield Police Department, who heads up the junior academy. "These kids, if they see us, they're not going to run away."
That goal has taken on added priority in this somber summer for law enforcement around the country. Recent weeks have seen the killings of black men by police officers in Louisiana and Minnesota. Later, violence targeting police left five officers and two civilians dead in Dallas. This weekend, three more officers were killed in Baton Rouge, with several others injured. Another officer in Milwaukee was shot several times on a call.
"I think police are very courageous and brave for their line of work," said Emily van Dyke, 12, a participant in the junior police academy. "The police officers always want to help. I don't think they'd be a police officer if they didn't want to."
On Monday, Withrow showed the middle schoolers how a roadside sobriety test works, using special goggles that mimic drunkenness.
The three-year old academy, run in conjunction with an after-school and summer learning program in Northfield, is about strengthening relationships between police and the town.
"It's a really bad situation," said Edward Smith, 11, describing recent cases of violence against police. "The police need to know that someone's going to trust them."
That trust, which goes both ways, is what the Northfield officers are looking to build, Withrow said.
"So that we don't have anybody who hates the police and wants to kill them," 12-year-old Colin Demasi observed of what can result from more respect between police departments and communities they serve. "You have to respect each other, because if you don't, we're going to have problems."
Throughout the week-long academy, cadets are scheduled to meet with officers from several local departments, as well as the Vermont State Police. The curriculum includes both serious topics, like human rights, and more fun, hands-on activities, such as demonstrations of how to take someone's fingerprints.
"It makes our job a lot easier while also creating a nice bond," Withrow said of the long-term value of developing better relationship with young people in the community. "We don't want them to scared of us, we want them to approach us and say, "Hey Officer Dan, can I talk to you?'"
This year, the junior police academy has 28 participants, Withrow said, making it the summer program's largest enrollment yet.
A Massachusetts man with ties to a jail house gang was arraigned in court on Tuesday for the brutal attack of a Salem woman, and police say they believe the attack may have been set up by an angry ex-boyfriend from behind bars.
Authorities said that Peter Turco, 39, showed up at the apartment of Sarah Turner, 28, and asked for a glass of water. When Turner let him in, Turco allegedly started ranting about her ex-boyfriend being unhappy with her before viciously attacking her.
A doctor determined that some type of edged weapon was used in the alleged assault, causing Turner a broken jaw in two places, a broken orbital bone, and blood in her right eye. The beating was so severe that doctors say she may lose sight in one of her eyes.
Authorities said Turner's boyfriend is still serving time at Middleton Jail for robbery. Both men joined the "Crazy white Boyz" gang inside, and Turco was just released days before the alleged attack.
Shannon Turner, who was in court for Turco's arraignment, said she expected him to be charged with more than just assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, mayhem, and home invasion.
"I am appalled by the fact when they started listing the charges that they did not list attempted murder," Shannon Turner said.
She said her sister moved on from her ex and is now focused on recovery.
"I still have a little sister and that's one of the most important things," Shannon Turner said.
Turco's will be back in court sometime in August.
In the meantime, family and friends Sarah Turner are trying to raise money for her multiple surgeries ahead and have set up a gofundme page. A fundraiser event will also be held on Saturday, July 23, at 7 p.m. at Salem Common Historic District on North Washington Square.
A Boston teen accused in the stabbing murder of another teen earlier this year is expected to be arraigned in court Tuesday.
Amari Pope, 16, has been charged with second degree murder in the death of Deon Hopkins and misleading police investigators.
Prosecutors say Pope admitted to the attack on Columbia Road in Dorchester after Hopkins allegedly got into a verbal back-and-forth with Pope's girlfriend back in February.
Investigators say Hopkins ran across the street to a market where he collapsed from his injuries.
Hopkins was rushed to Boston Medical Center but he died of a stab wound to his heart, just five weeks shy of his 16th birthday.
Prosecutors said Pope has a lengthy juvenile record including unarmed robbery, assault and battery, and cutting off a GPS monitoring bracelet.
Pope has been held without bail since his arrest.
The U.S. Coast Guard is looking for a possible missing kayaker in the water near Cohasset, Massachusetts.
A local fishing vessel found an adrift kayak offshore near Cohasset and informed authorities Tuesday afternoon. Authorities do not have sufficient information about kayak owners and launched a search in case somebody is in trouble.
A Motor Lifeboat crew and a MH-60 Jayhawk aircrew are searching in the water near Cohasset and Scituate.
Anybody with information is asked to contact Coast Guard Sector Boston Command Center at (617) 223-3201.
Two people have been found guilty in connection with the so-called Snapchat rape case in Massachusetts.
A jury found Rashad Deihim, 21, of Saugus guilty on all charges, including assault with intent to commit rape, attempted rape, assault and battery, kidnapping and posing a child in a state of nudity.
Kailyn Bonia, 20, was also found guilty on all counts except for posing a child in a state of nudity.
According the Essex DA's office, the judge revoked Deihim's bail and ordered him into custody.
Then teens themselves when they were initially charged, Deihim and Bonia were on trial for sexually assaulting a teen girl, then filming it and sharing it on social media in September 2014.
The prosecution argued that because the victim, who was 16 at the time, was under the influence of drugs and alcohol, she was too intoxicated to consent.
The jury, which deliberated for about a day, had to contemplate the alleged victim's state of mind, since she first told police the sex was consensual.
Two others have already pleaded out in connection with this case, including a teenager who admitted to recording the Snapchat video.
Alok Sharma says he's honoured to be chosen
THE MP for Reading West, Alok Sharma, has landed a ministerial role in Prime Minister Theresa May's new government.
Mr Sharma has been appointed Under Secretary of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office with responsibility for Asia and the Pacific.
He said: I am honoured to have been appointed by the Prime Minister as Minister for Asia & the Pacific, hugely important parts of the world that are crucial for the UKs prosperity and security. Britain is a truly great country and I will work tirelessly to ensure we continue to thrive and prosper on the world stage.
I look forward to working closely with my new colleagues and my counterparts across Asia & the Pacific, with a particular focus on strengthening commercial ties, increasing investment opportunities in both directions and promoting human rights in the region.
Mr Sharma's constituency covers the West Berkshire wards of Calcot, Pangbourne, Purley-on-Thames, Theale and Tilehurst and the MP said he would continue his local work.
Locally in Reading I will of course continue to hold regular public meetings and surgeries for my constituents and champion campaigns and support businesses and volunteer groups and charities as I done over the past six years.
Spare Change: Hard-working farmer Louis Escobar was one of a kind
Louie performed the kind of job most try to avoid. And he did it with little, if any, complaint.
Reporter
Tim Mitchell is a reporter at The News-Gazette. His email is tmitchel@news-gazette.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@mitchell6).
Columnist
Tom Kacich is a columnist and the author of Tom's Mailbag at The News-Gazette. His column appears Sundays. His email is tkacich@news-gazette.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@tkacich).
Reporter/Columnist
Julie Wurth is a reporter covering the University of Illinois at The News-Gazette. Her email is jwurth@news-gazette.com, and you can follow her on Twitter (@jawurth).
One of Editor & Publishers 10 That Do It Right 2021
insights from industry Omar Hassan Head of Professional Services for Vision Express
NHS Optometry Advisor,
Derbyshire & Nottinghamshire Area Team
Are all sunglasses made to an equal standard in terms of blocking all harmful UV rays?
All sunglasses that carry the CE mark block all UV rays, particularly if they're marked with the UV 400 label. People need to be careful that they buy sunglasses from reputable retailers, because sunglasses bought at street markets or on the beach may not carry those CE marks and may not provide the full protection element from UV light.
Whats the difference between UVA and UVB and do sunglasses need to filter both in order to keep eyes safe?
Ideally, yes. Normal lenses would filter some element of UV light.
UV light is the wavelength of light from the sun that is outside of the normal visible spectrum. That light is split into three levels: A, B, and C. Most of the C level is filtered by the ozone layer, so it doesn't really reach the earths surface, whereas UVA and UVB does. UVA is the longer wavelength and UVB is the shorter one.
In simplistic terms, UVA is what tans your skin and UVB is what gives you sunburn. Both wavelengths can obviously penetrate the eye, which can cause some issues. In most cases, wearing sunglasses would provide you full protection from both UV light wavelengths.
What damage can wearing tinted lenses with no protection cause to your eyes?
Clear glasses give you some level of UV protection, but just not to the full wavelength. If they're tinted, those also provide some element of protection, but not full protection. Since eyes need to be protected from the full range of UV absorption, if you are going to wear sunglasses, you may as well make sure that they provide full protection rather than partial protection.
The actual damage that occurs in the eyes involves a combination of things. Excessive absorption of UV light tends to accelerate cataract growth. It can also cause damage to the macula at the back of the eye, which can cause problems with vision.
Overexposure to direct sunlight can also cause problems with the front of the eye, leading to irritation and a burning sensation. Protection from UV light is absolutely paramount.
What are your top tips for choosing safe sunglasses?
Firstly, people should make sure they have an eye examination because if you just buy sunglasses off the shelf, without an eye examination, you would be unaware of what other issues there could be with your eyes.
It's always worthwhile to have a routine eye exam at least every two years. Following that, depending on whatever the power of the eye is, as determined by the eye examination, then the appropriate prescription sunglasses can be recommended.
That, along with the reassurance that prescription sunglasses from an optical retailer would have the full UV protection, would mean you could be in the safe knowledge that you're as protected as much as you can be from UV light, to avoid and to slow down the progress of any UV related conditions.
We take great care when we are out in the sun in terms of using sun blocks and skin lotions, but we don't have the same sort of safety in mind when we are looking after our eyes.
Whos most at risk from sun damage? Does the color of your eyes make any difference?
There is some evidence to suggest that individuals with light colored eyes, such as blue or green, are more susceptible to absorbing more UV light because there is a lack of the pigment there would be in darker eyes.
In essence, everyone should be protecting their eyes with sunglasses and not just in the summer. Even in the winter, there's a lot of UV light about, so it should be an item of spectacle wear that we use more often.
What eye diseases are linked to UV exposure? Can these lead to vision loss?
Yes, absolutely. If they're left unattended or not addressed, then eventually, most of the conditions caused by UV light can cause issues.
One of the main ones is the accelerated growth of cataracts. Cataracts occur in most individuals, but it's the growth acceleration that's the issue. Rather than a person noticing cataracts at age 55 or 60, if a lot of UV light is absorbed throughout their lifetime and in early life, then cataracts can have an effect at a younger age. Cataracts essentially give you more of a misty, foggy vision over a period of time, although that can be easily treated.
Secondly, you may have problems with the back of your eye, in the retina and the macula. That's where the critical visual process takes place, with light being transferred into nerve signals and sent to the brain to help you actually view the images you're seeing. Any UV light damage to the skin or the retina at that point can cause some significant problems, which are a bit more difficult to treat. Those are the main problems right now.
How often should you have eye examinations?
At least every two years. There are some groups of individuals that should have an eye examination far more frequently than that, but the golden rule is every two years, unless it's recommended earlier by your optometrist.
Is it true that wearing sunglasses can help reduce the symptoms of hay fever?
There have been some suggestions of that, but it may be due to individuals wearing large, wrap-around sunglasses. That may have the effect of reducing the contact pollen makes with the eyes, rather than any hay fever relief being due to the filtration effect of the actual lenses.
Do you need to wear sunglasses all year round to protect your eyes? How do you know when you should wear them?
I think as a general rule, if it's daylight outside, then you should wear sunglasses, whether it's winter or summer. I think most of us are aware that there is UV light in the summer, but there's quite a bit of UV light about in the winter months as well, so it's quite crucial that sunglasses are worn in most daylight hours.
Where can readers find more information?
There's a wealth of information on the internet. One very good consumer website is lookafteryoureyes.org, which is hosted by the College of Optometrists. The Vision Express website also provides some information about eye health.
However, ultimately, the best piece of advice you could get that would be specific to you, would be following an eye examination with your optometrist. That's where an eye examination comes into its own because rather than giving generic information, we can examine your eyes, assess their health, and give specific information about how to make best use of your eyes and how to take care of them.
I think it's probably not prudent just to be reliant on sunglasses, without ever having an eye examination. An eye examination is a useful assessment to understand as much as possible about the health of the eyes and it can also give an indication as to a persons general state of health.
About Omar Hassan
Omar graduated from the University of Bradford in 1999. He is currently Head of Professional Services for Vision Express and is an Optometry Advisor for NHS for Derbyshire & Nottinghamshire Area Team, where he is involved in clinical governance and commissioning eyecare services.
He has practiced as a locum in the Yorkshire area with various multiples and as a Domiciliary Optometrist. The College of Optometrists is the professional, scientific and examining body for optometry in the UK, and Omar has been a Council Member for Yorkshire and Humber, where he sat on its DOCET and Research Committee. Previously he has been actively involved in the College's Audit & Disciplinary committees.
CSIRO partner Oventus Medical Ltd has today listed on the Australian Securities Exchange raising $12m.
CSIRO partner and manufacturer of 3D-printed titanium sleep apnoea devices, Oventus, lists on ASX with fully subscribed IPO.
Oventus, who manufacture sleep apnoea devices, has invested heavily in R&D with CSIRO over the past two and a half years, helping to hone their production process and grow their business.
The Brisbane-based company first approached CSIRO in 2014 when dentist Chris Hart had the idea for a mouthguard with airways that would assist airflow bypass the sleep apnoea sufferers airway obstructions including from the tongue, soft palate and nose.
Dr Hart asked CSIRO if they could 3D-print the device from titanium.
The result was an initial prototype which has since successfully completed clinical trials and been named the O 2 Vent.
In April this year, the device received FDA clearance opening up the US market for the company.
The O 2 Vent is a customisable mouthpiece which is 3D-printed to the precise dimensions of a patients mouth, ensuring optimal airflow during sleep, reducing the effects of snoring and sleep apnoea.
Oventus Founder Dr Hart said CSIRO provided the opportunity to access new 3D-printing technologies through their Lab22 facility.
"This allowed us to explore new and innovative manufacturing techniques with a reduced investment risk, Dr Hart said.
Using 3D-printing to manufacture the O 2 Vent sleep apnoea devices offered us huge advantages over traditional manufacturing methods including speed and cost.
"This partnership has made us globally competitive," he said.
Oventus is hoping O 2 Vent will disrupt the multi-billion dollar market for sleep apnoea solutions.
The US Sleep Foundation estimates that 37 million Americans regularly suffer from snoring.
The global sleep disorder market is estimated to be worth $50 billion annually.
An estimated one million Australians suffer from sleep apnoea.
The original prototype was made in CSIROs Lab 22 Innovation Centre in Victoria using an Arcam 3D-printer.
CSIROs Mr Stefan Gulizia said the idea of designing and 3D-printing completely customised mouthpieces seemed revolutionary at the time.
It has been exciting helping Oventus progress this novel idea to a manufactured product and seeing the success of the company as it lists on the ASX today, Mr Gulizia said.
Lab 22 is one of Australias leading facilities for metal additive manufacturing and has assisted in world-first medical breakthroughs including 3D printed body parts for patients in Australia and in Europe.
Women who took part in ASPIRE, a trial that found a vaginal ring containing an antiretroviral (ARV) drug called dapivirine was safe and helped protect against HIV, will soon be offered the opportunity to use the ring as part of a new study called HOPE. The first of HOPE's sites opened just today, at the Medical Research Council of South Africa's Verulam clinical research site in KwaZulu-Natal. Other South African sites, and sites in Malawi, Uganda and Zimbabwe, will open in the coming weeks or months as in-country approvals are received and other requirements are met.
HOPE (HIV Open-label Prevention Extension, or MTN-025) will build on the results of ASPIRE by gathering additional information on the ring's safety, how women use the ring knowing that it can help reduce their risk of HIV and the relationship between adherence and HIV protection.
The study also seeks to understand why the ring may work well as an HIV prevention strategy for some women but not for others. The dapivirine ring is meant to be used for a month at a time, and women can insert and remove it themselves. But this may not be for everyone, acknowledge the researchers from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded Microbicide Trials Network (MTN) who conducted ASPIRE and will run the HOPE study. For this reason, former ASPIRE participants may enroll in HOPE even if they do not wish to use the ring.
ASPIRE (A Study to Prevent Infection with a Ring for Extended Use, or MTN-020) involved 2,629 women ages 18-45 from Malawi, Uganda, South Africa and Zimbabwe and was conducted between August 2012 and June 2015 in parallel with a second Phase III trial, The Ring Study, led by the International Partnership for Microbicides (IPM). IPM developed the dapivirine ring and is the ring's regulatory sponsor.
Primary results of both studies were reported earlier this year. Across both studies, HIV risk was reduced by about one-third, meaning that one in three women who might have acquired HIV did not. In ASPIRE, there were 27 percent fewer women who acquired HIV in the group assigned to use the dapivirine ring than in the group who used a placebo ring with no active drug. HIV risk was reduced by more than half among participants older than 21, who also appeared to use the ring most consistently.
New results from exploratory analyses of data from ASPIRE reported today at The International Conference on AIDS (AIDS 2016) in Durban suggest even higher levels of protection can be achieved with regular and consistent use. Among women who appeared to use the ring most regularly, HIV risk was cut by more than half across all analyses, and in some, by 75 percent or more.
"The timing of these results could not be more perfect. The goal of HOPE is to offer women a product shown to be safe and able to provide some protection against HIV. When we were conducting ASPIRE, we did not know whether the ring would be effective for HIV prevention. Knowing the results of ASPIRE, it will be a totally new conversation with women in HOPE," said Jared Baeten, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Washington, who led the ASPIRE study with Thesla Palanee-Phillips, Ph.D., M.Sc., of the Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Institute, Johannesburg, South Africa. "That we, as a field, are in a place to be able to offer women a product specifically designed for them is truly a significant milestone in HIV prevention."
Drs. Baeten and Palanee-Phillips will also be leading the HOPE study, together with Nyaradzo Mgodi, MBChB, MMed, from the University of Zimbabwe-University of California San Francisco in Harare.
In other open-label extension studies that followed Phase III trials of oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), adherence to product use increased, and as a result, those studies were able to demonstrate the approach was more effective than in the original Phase III trials. Whether this will hold true for the dapivirine ring in HOPE remains to be seen.
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Unlike a Phase III clinical trial, there is no placebo group in an open-label study. In HOPE, all women, if they choose, receive the monthly dapivirine ring. Other aspects of the study are designed to help move toward a more "real world" delivery model. For instance, visits will be monthly for the first three months, and then quarterly thereafter. And while staff will counsel participants on the importance of adherence, they will also want women to feel empowered to make their own choices and to be open about the reasons they may or may not want to or be able to use the ring.
"It requires a whole new shift in mindset," explained Dr. Palanee-Phillips. "In ASPIRE, we counseled participants on the importance of adherence so we could establish whether the ring was safe and effective. If women didn't use their assigned rings in ASPIRE, we would not have been able to answer these critical questions. In HOPE, with the information we now have, we want women to understand that the importance of adherence is not about the trial, but about their own, individual protection."
"We want nothing more than for women in sub-Saharan Africa, and of course the world over, to have a means to be protected. While we are excited about the ring, it may not be the right approach for some women. Maybe they would prefer oral PrEP, or perhaps other approaches we are investigating, like long-acting injectables. It's really about giving women choices," added Dr. Mgodi.
Women will be able to stay in HOPE for about a year after they enroll. The study is expected to be completed by early 2018. A similar open-label extension trial for former participants of The Ring Study, called DREAM, is expected to begin soon at sites in South Africa and Uganda.
Both the HOPE and the DREAM open-label studies will be taking place at the same time that IPM is compiling comprehensive data on dapivirine and the ring, including findings from ASPIRE and The Ring Study, and from several smaller supporting studies, into an extensive dossier it expects to submit to regulators in 2017. If granted, the first regulatory approvals could be received as soon as 2018, within the same timeframe that results of both HOPE and DREAM may be available.
Vaginal rings are flexible products that fit high up inside the vagina where they release a medication slowly over time. The monthly ring tested in ASPIRE and The Ring Study, and offered to women in the HOPE and DREAM studies, contains an ARV drug, dapivirine, as a way to provide women potentially longer-acting protection against HIV.
Women account for nearly 60 percent of adults with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, where unprotected heterosexual sex is the primary driver of the epidemic. Despite advances in preventing HIV, women - young women, especially - still face disproportionate risk, and a number of current prevention options, including oral PrEP, may not be accessible to or practical for many women. Ideally, women should be able to have choices when it comes to protecting themselves against HIV because no one approach will be right for all women, nor be right at all times in their lives.
Toward this end, MTN is planning a study (MTN-034/IPM 045) that will evaluate how adolescent girls and young women use the monthly dapivirine vaginal ring and Truvada as daily PrEP, and their preferences for either or both approaches. The study will also examine whether certain biological or physiological factors affect how the active drugs are taken up in the body. MTN-034/IPM 045 will help to better understand the factors that may have contributed to the ring not being effective among those ages 18-21 in ASPIRE. The study, which is expected to launch early 2017, will enroll approximately 300 girls and young women ages 16-21 at five trial sites in Kenya, South Africa and Zimbabwe.
There are no differences in growth, body composition or breast milk intake among HIV-negative infants, whether born to HIV-positive or HIV-negative mothers, an IAEA-supported research project in Kenya has found.
The study, carried out under an IAEA Doctoral Coordinated Research Project (CRP), used the isotopic deuterium dilution technique (see box) to assess breast milk intake and body composition of infants at six weeks and six months of age. These indicators were compared between infants of HIV-positive mothers and those of HIV-negative mothers.
We found that maternal HIV status does not influence growth, body composition or breast milk intake of HIV-uninfected children, said Shadrack Oiye, the doctoral researcher who worked on this project, now a faculty member at Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology in Kenya.
Exclusive breastfeeding
The study also showed that infants born to HIV-positive mothers were more likely to receive exclusive breastfeeding than those born to HIV-negative mothers.
This was likely due to heightened counselling efforts to support HIV-infected mothers, said Victor Owino, an IAEA nutrition scientist, who had served as the chief scientific investigator of the project and primary supervisor of the doctoral research before joining the IAEA. This implies that counselling and breastfeeding support should be expanded to include all women regardless of HIV status.
Because they are objective, nuclear techniques are more likely to deliver reliable results than other techniques, such us reliance on human recall.
We were able to demonstrate that exclusive breastfeeding rates were likely to be overestimated if assessment was based on maternal recall, Owino said. Nuclear techniques could, therefore, be used to confirm breastfeeding practices as reported by mothers, especially if accurate tracking of global targets on breastfeeding is to be achieved.
The project was a collaboration between the IAEA and the University of Nairobi, the Technical University of Kenya, the Kenya Medical Research Institute, the National Council for Science, Technology and Innovation as well as the Nutricia Foundation. It took place at the Maternal and Child Health Clinic of Siaya County Referral Hospital in Western Kenya, where 75 HIV-positive and 68 HIV-negative mothers with HIV-uninfected infants were recruited with their infants.
The study is a contribution to the IAEAs efforts to help Member States address the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Similar earlier studies include a 1997-2000 Zimbabwe study, which compared the growth of HIV-exposed and HIV-unexposed children. It found that HIV-exposed children, regardless of HIV status, were more prone to retarded growth than HIV-unexposed children. However, the study took place before the advent of modern HIV suppression medication given to both mothers and infants. Also, both HIV-negative and HIV-positive mothers in the Kenya study received recommendations on breastfeeding.
Modern HIV-suppression drugs have greatly reduced the chances of HIV-infected mothers transmitting the virus to their infants through breastfeeding.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there were approximately 36.7 million people living with HIV at the end of 2015. Sub-Saharan Africa remains the region that is mostly affected, where the people living with HIV account for nearly 70% of HIV-infected people worldwide.
THE SCIENCE:
Measuring body composition with isotope techniques
Deuterium is a non-radioactive isotope of hydrogen that is given orally as deuterium oxide. After mixing with body water, it is eliminated from the body in urine, saliva, sweat and human milk.
Looked at simply, a persons body weight comprises: fat mass (FM) and fat free mass (FFM). FFM is composed of mainly water with some proteins and minerals. It is assumed that FM has no water. Total body water can be measured by isotope dilution so the FM can be calculated. FM is used as a proxy indicator for the risk of obesity. Here is how:
A person drinks an accurately weighed amount of water labelled with deuterium (2H 2 O) or oxygen-18 (H 2 18O), stable isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen.
The labelled water mixes with the water in their body. After a few hours the isotope is evenly spread throughout the body water, which can be sampled in the form of saliva or urine.
The enrichment of deuterium or oxygen-18 in saliva or urine is measured.
Total body water is calculated from the measured isotope enrichment and the weight and enrichment of the labelled water consumed. From this we can estimate the FFM.
The hydration of the FFM changes with age. In new-born babies the FFM is 80 per cent water, but by the time they are adults it has reduced to 73 per cent. FFM is calculated using an appropriate hydration factor.
The fat mass is the difference between body weight and fat-free mass. The results can be expressed as a percentage of body weight.
The War on Drugs, mass incarceration of drug users, and the failure to provide proven harm reduction and treatment strategies has led to high levels of HIV, tuberculosis, and hepatitis B and C infection among prisonersfar higher than in the general population. With an estimated 30 million people passing in and out of prisons every year, prisoners will be key to controlling HIV and tuberculosis epidemics worldwide, according to a major six-part Series on HIV and related infections in prisoners, published in The Lancet and being presented at the International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa.
Prisons can act as incubators of tuberculosis, hepatitis C, and HIV and the high level of mobility between prison and the community means that the health of prisoners should be a major public-health concern. Yet, screening and treatment for infectious diseases are rarely made available to inmates, and only around 10% of people who use drugs worldwide are being reached by treatment programmes, says lead author of the Series and President of the International AIDS Society Professor Chris Beyrer, John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, USA. The most effective way of controlling infection in prisoners and the wider community is to reduce mass imprisonment of injecting drug users.
High prevalence of HIV among prisoners
Worldwide, between 56% and 90% of people who inject drugs will be incarcerated at some point. In parts of Europe, over a third of inmates inject drugs (38%), in Australia (55%) it is more than half. This is in stark contrast with injecting drug use the general population (0.3% in EU and 0.2% in Australia).
Data presented in the Series show that with growing numbers of injecting drug users in prison, the prevalence of infectious diseases has also increased. For example:
Levels of HIV infection are 20 times higher among prisoners in western Europe than the civilian population (4.2% vs 0.2%), and around three times higher among prisoners in eastern and southern Africa (15.6% vs 4.7%) and north America (1.3% vs. 0.3%).
While most prisoners are men, women and girls are the fastest growing imprisoned group worldwide, and in most regions of the world, levels of HV infection are higher in female inmates than male prisoners including eastern Europe and central Asia (22% vs 8.5%).
High rates of hepatitis C are also seen among prisoners, with 1 in 6 inmates in parts of Europe and the USA carrying hepatitis C virus.
Prevalence of active tuberculosis is higher in prisons than the general population in all settings. One study demonstrated that prevalence was 40 times higher in one prison in Brazil than the general population.
Moreover, new estimates produced for the Series suggest that up to half of all new HIV infections over the next 15 years in eastern Europe will stem from increased HIV transmission risk among inmates who inject drugs; and imprisonment could be responsible for three-quarters of new tuberculosis infections among people who inject drugs, and around 6% of all yearly tuberculosis infections.
High rates of injecting drug use in some settings, lack of access to condoms, unsanitary conditions, and gross overcrowding have made prisons and detention centers high risk environments for spread of these infections. Almost half of countries in sub-Saharan Africa report that prisons are at 150% capacity or higher. Increased frequency and duration of imprisonment increase individual risk for these infections, particularly HIV and tuberculosis.
But these health issues do not remain confined to prisons. With around 10.2 million people imprisoned worldwide at any given time (nearly 2.2 million in the USA alone), and an estimated 30 million passing in and out of prison each year, substantial numbers of undiagnosed and untreated infections in prison can spread to the community when prisoners return home. Treatment interruptions upon release threaten former prisoners and their communities.
Unmet health needs in prisons
The Series brings together a wealth of evidence to show that countries can reduce and even reverse infectious disease transmission by scaling up proven harm reduction and treatment strategies in prisons like opioid agonist therapy (OAT), antiretroviral therapy (ART), hepatitis B vaccination, condom distribution, and sterile needle and syringe exchange.
Modelling conducted for the Series suggests that reducing mass incarceration of people who use drugs, in this case lowering the number of prisoners who inject drugs by 25%, could result in a 715% drop in new cases of HIV among injecting drug users in the community over 5 years. Similarly, scaling up OAT (eg, methadone and buprenorphine) to all those in need in prison, and after release, could prevent over a quarter (28%) of new HIV cases in people who inject drugs in just 5 years.
Although such interventions have proved successful in prisons and are required by international human rights law, they are severely underfunded and are often impeded by discrimination and restrictive prison rules in all countriesboth in high- and low- income countries. The fact that in many countries, prison health services are isolated from national public health programmes and the ministry of health has exacerbated the issue.
The authors reviewed six of the fifteen key interventions for the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases in prisons recommended by WHO/UNOCD: information (education, communication), counselling and testing, sterile needle exchange, OAT, condom provision, and ART. Yet, globally, only eight countries (Moldova, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Germany, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland) provide all six interventions.
In 2014, only 43 countries offered OAT in at least one prison and less than 1% of prisoners worldwide who need it actually receive this treatment. In western Europe, only a third (10 of 29) of surveyed countries reported hepatitis C screening programmes for prisoners; and in 2012, ART was available to prisoners in just 43 countries worldwide.
But, several countries have achieved success. For example, in Iran, where more than 60% of prisoners are incarcerated for drug-related crimes, HIV prevalence among injecting drug users in prisons reduced from 18.2% in 2003 to 2.3% in 2007 due to a combination of voluntary HIV testing, OST, condoms, and needle and syringe exchange programmes.
Urgent reform to drug laws and prison healthcare needed
The response to the HIV, tuberculosis, and hepatitis epidemics in prisons has been slow and piecemeal, and the majority of governments continue to ignore the strategic importance of prison health care to public health, says Professor Beyrer. Most strategies for dealing with infectious diseases in prisons focus on a zero-tolerance approach to drug users. The fact that infection rates are still climbing confirms that this approach does not work.
He adds:
Reforming laws and policies that criminalise drug use and sexual behaviours will be crucial to reducing prison populations that put large numbers at risk of potentially life-threatening infections, and which can be more effectively prevented and treated in community settings. Non-violent drug-offenders, especially women, should be offered treatment as an alternative.
The authors make several recommendations to improve access to health care for prisonersleading with the urgent need to recognise the contribution of prison health to health inequalities, and to make prison health a priority by convincing governments that health policy must be based on the best available evidence. Other recommendations include addressing the fundamental right of prisoners to a minimum standard of health care at least equivalent to the wider community; and to increase cooperation and coordination between criminal justice and public health systems.
In an accompanying Comment, Series authors Professor Chris Beyer, Professor Adeeba Kamarulzaman from the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Professor Martin McKee from London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, London, UK as well as co-authors from The Lancet HIV in Prisoners Group call for urgent reform. They write, The Nelson Mandela Rules provide benchmarks to achieve meaningful reform in access to health care for those detained. We can, and should, do better to reduce both the numbers of those incarcerated and the length of their sentences, and to improve prevention, treatment, and post-release linkage to care for prison-associated infectious diseases. Meeting community standards of care in correctional settings, especially in low-income and middle-income countries, will require political will, financial investment, and support from medical and humanitarian organisations across the globe, but it can and must be done. Global control of HIV, viral hepatitis, and tuberculosis will not be achieved without addressing the unmet health needs of prisoners.
In a Comment introducing the Series, Dr Pam Das, Senior Executive Editor and Dr Richard Horton, Editor-in-Chief at The Lancet say:
Breast cancer treatments are usually painful, time consuming and aggressive, which leads to long term hospitalization, medical staff and high economic expenses.
To fight this problem there is a new subcutaneous treatment option for HER2 cancer, which are those tumors that produce an excess in HER2 protein and represent a 20 per cent of the cases.
This new Trastuzumab subcutaneous line reduces pain and increases the survival chances of the patients, even those women that are in metastasis phase, which means that the cancer has moved to other areas.
The traditional Trastuzumab treatment uses an intravenous line and requires the doctor to determine a dose based on the patients weight, which occasionally causes the waste of medicine because the administered amount is less than the one existing in the vials, producing economic loss for both the health institution and the patient.
Furthermore, the administration time is from three to four hours, a situation that is solved with the subcutaneous treatment thanks to the fixed dose that only requires five minutes of placement.
This new method eliminates the pain of placement and it requires fewer members of the medical staff for its administration, which reduces economic expenses.
Doctor Laura Torrecillas, Medical Oncologist assigned to Oncology Services of Centro Medico Nacional 20 de noviembre of ISSSTE, stated that "a patient who is treated with a therapy whose benefits in quality and life expectancy add to a lesser time in administration and less aggressiveness, is a patient who will attach more to her treatment".
Since April this year, subcutaneous Trastuzumab is on the list of the essential medicines and the inputs catalogue of the health system.
In Mexico, according to Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Geografia (INEGI), during 2014, 29 new cases were diagnosed by every 100 thousand women over 20 years old with breast cancer, and this is the main cause of death by cancer in women in our country.
About this, doctor Juan Pablo Benitez, medical manager of Oncology of Roche, explained that for 15 years the Trastuzumab had been the standard medication treatment for HER2 breast cancer due to its effectiveness, but this new option offers more advantages.
He explained that in 2012 the results of the clinical study HannaH were published, in which it was demonstrated the effectiveness and safety of the subcutaneous Trastuzumab in the treatment of HER2-positive breast cancer.
"Based on the results of this study, the Comision Federal para la Proteccion contra Riesgos Sanitarios (Cofepris) granted sanitary registration to the subcutaneous Trastuzumab in 2015".
The UKs largest not-for-profit healthcare provider Nuffield Health has as part of its wider investment programme improved its breast screening service with a technology refresh which includes six systems from Siemens Healthineers. The MAMMOMAT Inspiration mammography systems are in action at a range of Nuffield Health sites including Woking, Derby, Leicester, Oxford, Cardiff and Hereford. Research shows that 1 life is saved for every 200 women* that are screened therefore Nuffield Health puts a strong focus on making it an experience that women feel comfortable with to reduce anxiety and encourage appointment uptake.
Nuffield Health improves its breast screening service for women across the UK. [Left to right] Sue Oliver, Professional Head of Mammography at Nuffield Health; Lisa Hind, Team Leader and Receptionist; Julie Little, Lead Oncology Nurse; Alison Bain, Matron; Sue Mozley, Deputy Radiology Manager; Glenda Bwema, Radiology Manager and Agness Tembo; Mammographer at Nuffield Health Derby Hospital
Sue Oliver, Professional Head of Mammography and Laser Safety at Nuffield Health comments:
Going for a breast screening test can be a daunting experience. The patient is at the heart of everything we do therefore we endeavour to make it as much of a comfortable experience as possible. The MAMMOMAT Inspirations have had a significant impact on the way we screen patients as the design ensures maximum patient comfort. Some of the Nuffield Health hospitals have also opted for mood lighting on the systems, which has helped patients to relax during appointments and put their mind at ease.
The MAMMOMAT Inspiration systems feature Opdose technology which automatically selects the best possible anode/filter combination and the optimum dose for the individual breast characteristics. The Nuffield Health hospitals have also benefitted from workflow efficiencies following the switch from analogue to digital systems, along with a rapid turnaround time between patients due to instant image acquisition. The systems are True 3D Breast Tomosynthesis ready, the industrys widest angle of 50 for enhanced diagnostic capabilities that significantly improves the early detection rate of breast cancer.
Glenda Bwema, Hospital Radiology Manager at Nuffield Health Derby Hospital adds:
The key benefit of the MAMMOMAT Inspiration for staff at Nuffield Health is that images can be seen straight away, helping to streamline workflow and improve patient throughput. Our Consultant Radiologists find the image quality is fantastic and tailored to their requirementsThe staff commented on the ease of use and how the compression paddles are very easy to fit, which has been useful for when we have an influx of patients.
Vince Golledge, Head of Corporate Sales at Siemens Healthineers comments:
Breast screening is essential for identifying the early stages of breast cancer, which if caught early, is easier to treat. According to Cancer Research, breast screenings reduce the number of deaths from breast cancer by around 1,300 a year in the UK. Nuffield Health is dedicated in providing the best breast screening service to its patients and the MAMMOMAT Inspiration systems are helping to facilitate this by producing high quality images in a comfortable environment for the patient.
Siemens Healthineers is one of the worlds largest suppliers of technology to the healthcare industry and a leader in medical imaging, laboratory diagnostics and healthcare IT. All supported by a comprehensive portfolio of clinical consulting, training, and services available across the globe and tailored to customers needs.
Water supply contamination has become a global issue, affecting communities in both the United States and around the world. Exposure to environmental toxins - such as arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead and other heavy metals - early in life via contaminated water or other sources can have long-term health consequences as children grow. Investigators at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Harvard Program in Therapeutic Sciences at Harvard Medical School have assessed environmental exposure to multiple toxins in children living in a region of Mexico with a high incidence of chronic kidney disease, especially among young adults. Not only did the team detect high levels of the arsenic and chromium in urine samples from the children, they also were able to detect elevated levels of KIM-1, a biomarker that is being studied as an early sign of kidney injury. The team's findings are published this week in Environmental Research.
"Until now, no one has studied these children - an especially vulnerable population - to determine their risk of exposure and possible measures of kidney dysfunction," said senior author Vishal Vaidya, PhD, a principal investigator at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. "KIM-1 may be an early warning sign of exposure, suggesting that something may be beginning to go wrong in the epithelial cells in the kidneys of these children. Many questions remain to be answered: we don't know if this effect might be reversible, we don't know if there are other kidney toxic contaminants such as uranium present as well. Because we don't have follow-up data from these children we also don't know the long-term consequences of this exposure. But this does give us our first insights into this population at a young age."
The team found exceedingly high levels of arsenic and chromium in urine samples collected from 107 children living in the north-central region of Mexico - levels that were even higher than exposure limits set for adults. When the team measured traditional biomarkers of kidney function - such as those measured at a routine physical exam - they did not find elevated levels of these markers. However, more sensitive and specific biomarkers of kidney injury recently qualified by the FDA for use in preclinical studies, including Kidney Injury Molecule-1 (KIM-1), were elevated in the children. (KIM-1 was first discovered by paper co-author Joseph Bonventre, MD, PhD, chief of the Renal Unit and director of the Bioengineering Division at BWH.)
"For the first time, we've been able to evaluate and assess an early warning sign of kidney injury - one that may give us the ability to act in advance before there is irreversible harm," said first author Mariana Cardenas-Gonzalez, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Vaidya lab. "This may be a problem that can be solved by reducing exposure, but first we need to understand how such high levels of these toxins are winding up in the urine of these children."
The research team also tested water samples from the children's tap water, identifying contaminated drinking supply as the likely source of arsenic. The source of chromium, however, remains unknown. Chromium exposure can come from contaminated air, soil, water, food or tobacco products and further studies will be needed to identify which source or sources may be responsible for the children's elevated levels.
In addition to the unknown route of exposure, other questions remain to be answered about the short-term and long-term consequences of elevated levels of these toxins in children and whether reducing exposure may reduce risk of injury. Cardenas-Gonzalez, who is currently in the process of accepting a role as a principal investigator at a university in Mexico that will begin this fall, plans to return to Villa de Reyes county in San Luis Potosi, Mexico to continue to follow the children over time.
Scientists have captured atomic level snapshots showing how one key enzyme modifies a protein involved in turning genes on or off inside cells. Understanding this process-which is particularly important when cells are first taking on specialized identities such as nerve cells, muscle, skin, and so on-helps explain how complex organisms can arise from a finite number of genes. The research, published in Nature Chemical Biology, also identifies links between defects in this particular enzyme and certain cancers, potentially pointing to new targets for anticancer drugs.
"Our work describes the structure and function of an important enzyme called Rumi, which adds a glucose molecule to several signaling proteins to modify their activities," said the study's lead author, Huilin Li, a biologist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University. "One of these target proteins, called Notch, is the major receptor that controls the development of multicellular organisms. It plays an important role in how cells sense their neighbors and, by controlling gene expression, determines which cells should develop into different types and how much they should grow-like a master controller."
Notch is also known to be a tumor suppressor. But its action is far more complicated than a simple on and off switch. It's a protein chain that spans the cell membrane with complicated 3D folding-including 36 repeating "beads on a necklace" folds that can each be modified in different ways to affect the protein's overall function.
"We wanted to understand the Notch structure upon different types of modification," said Li, who collaborated with Robert Haltiwanger and Hideyuki Takeuchi, biochemists at Stony Brook University at the time of the experiment who are now at the University of Georgia.
Picking up on recent discoveries that the Notch-modifying enzyme known as Rumi is necessary for animal development and that various mutants of Rumi are linked with a form of skin hyperpigmentation known as Dowling-Degos disease (made by scientists at the Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Bonn, Germany), Li's group became focused on this particular enzyme. Studying the Rumi-Notch interaction at the molecular level might help scientists understand the disease mechanisms, and could even lead to the design of drugs to combat these diseases.
Background knowledge directs precision study
Prior to the current study, the scientists already knew that Rumi modifies Notch by adding glucose molecules to the protein. There are other examples of proteins modified by other simple sugars, but Rumi is the first enzyme known to specifically add glucose.
Previous research had also revealed that the first glucoses added by Rumi are essential for Notch signaling. "Without the glucose molecules, Notch cannot take on the right 3D folding to mature into a functional receptor, and therefore cannot function," said Li.
"Also, because Notch is known to be a tumor suppressor, the essential role of Rumi in Notch activation suggests that Rumi could be a tumor-suppressor as well. If a chemical biologist wants to design drugs that affect this process, he or she would need to know the mechanism of the complex enzyme reactions," said Li.
"We set out to do just that-to find out what features in the Notch protein Rumi is looking for and how it puts a sugar (glucose) on it. "
Details of the enzyme-protein interaction
Li's team studied samples of a fruit-fly derived version of Rumi in complex with a Notch "surrogate"-a human protein with a Notch-like fold-that were provided by Haltiwanger.
"It was very hard to get sufficient samples," said Hongjun Yu, a postdoctoral scientist working with Li and the first author of the paper, noting that the proteins make very small crystals with a hard to solve structure. But eventually, using intensely bright beams of x-rays at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) at Brookhaven and the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory-both DOE Office of Science User Facilities-they gathered sufficient data on the arrangement of the proteins' atoms. They averaged data from multiple crystals to generate stronger signals, and used computers to reconstruct 3D images of how the Rumi and Notch pieces fit together.
The scientists found that Rumi recognizes a six-amino-acid sequence on many of the 36 repeat folds of Notch. A water-repelling patch with a separate recognition sequence was also essential to the interaction. When Rumi binds, the six-amino-acid "signature" sequence that accepts the glucose molecule fits very precisely into the active site on Rumi in a classic "lock-and-key" manner. "Adding to or taking away even one amino acid from this signature sequence would make it impossible for the proteins to join in such a manner, which would prevent the glucose from being added," Yu said.
These studies revealed how the cancer-linked mutations to Rumi alter key structural components that render Rumi inactive. "Our study suggests that mutated forms of Rumi could be the cause of cancers because these mutant enzymes are unable to modify Notch. This, for the first time, links Rumi defects with cancers," Li said. The scientists emphasize, however, that other complex modifications to Notch likely also play a role.
"We are now looking at the details of the study to determine what the biomedical impact of our new understanding might be," said Li. This includes thinking about whether drugs might be developed to affect the behavior of Notch by targeting specific sites on Rumi.
With a goal of treating worn, arthritic hips without extensive surgery to replace them, scientists have programmed stem cells to grow new cartilage on a 3-D template shaped like the ball of a hip joint. What's more, using gene therapy, they have activated the new cartilage to release anti-inflammatory molecules to fend off a return of arthritis.
The technique, demonstrated in a collaborative effort between Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Cytex Therapeutics Inc. in Durham, N.C., is described July 18 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The discovery one day may provide an alternative to hip-replacement surgery, particularly in younger patients. Doctors are reluctant to perform such operations in patients under age 50 because prosthetic joints typically last for less than 20 years. A second joint-replacement surgery to remove a worn prosthetic can destroy bone and put patients at risk for infection.
"Replacing a failed prosthetic joint is a difficult surgery," said Farshid Guilak, PhD, a professor of orthopedic surgery at Washington University. "We've developed a way to resurface an arthritic joint using a patient's own stem cells to grow new cartilage, combined with gene therapy to release anti-inflammatory molecules to keep arthritis at bay. Our hope is to prevent, or at least delay, a standard metal and plastic prosthetic joint replacement."
The technique uses a 3-D, biodegradable synthetic scaffold that Guilak and his team developed. The scaffold, molded into the precise shape of a patient's joint, is covered with cartilage made from the patient's own stem cells taken from fat beneath the skin. The scaffold then can be implanted onto the surface of an arthritic hip, for example. Resurfacing the hip joint with "living" tissue is designed to ease arthritis pain, and delay or even eliminate the need for joint-replacement surgery in some patients.
Additionally, by inserting a gene into the newly grown cartilage and activating it with a drug, the gene can orchestrate the release of anti-inflammatory molecules to fight a return of arthritis, which usually is what triggers such joint problems in the first place.
"When there is inflammation, we can give a patient a simple drug, which activates the gene we've implanted, to lower inflammation in the joint," said Guilak, also a professor of developmental biology and of biomedical engineering. "We can stop giving the drug at any time, which turns off the gene."
That gene therapy is important, he explained, because when levels of inflammatory molecules rise in a joint, the cartilage is destroyed and pain increases. By adding gene therapy to the stem cell and scaffold technique, Guilak and his colleagues believe it will be possible to coax patients' joints to fend off arthritis and function better for a longer time.
The 3-D scaffold is built using a weaving pattern that gives the device the structure and properties of normal cartilage. Franklin Moutos, PhD, vice president of technology development at Cytex, explained that the unique structure is the result of approximately 600 biodegradable fiber bundles woven together to create a high-performance fabric that can function like normal cartilage.
"As evidence of this, the woven implants are strong enough to withstand loads up to 10 times a patient's body weight, which is typically what our joints must bear when we exercise," Moutos said.
Currently, there are about 30 million Americans who have diagnoses of osteoarthritis, and data suggest that the incidence of osteoarthritis is on the rise. That number includes many younger patients ages 40 to 65 who have limited treatment options because conservative approaches haven't worked and they are not yet candidates for total joint replacement because of their ages.
Bradley Estes, PhD, vice president of research and development at Cytex, noted, "We envision in the future that this population of younger patients may be ideal candidates for this type of biological joint replacement."
Guilak, who also is the director of research at Shriners Hospitals for Children St. Louis, and co-director of the Washington University Center of Regenerative Medicine, has been collaborating with Cytex on this research. The scientists have tested various aspects of the tissue engineering in cell culture, and some customized implants already are being tested in laboratory animals. He said if all goes well, such devices could be ready for safety testing in humans in three to five years.
Patients suffering from liver cirrhosis often die of life-threatening bacterial infections. In these patients the immune cells are unable to eliminate the bacterial infections. Scientist at the University of Bonn and TU Munich have now discovered that type I IFN released by immune cells due to increased migration of gut bacteria into the cirrhotic liver incapacitate the immune system. Based on their findings, such life-threatening infections can be contained by strengthening the immune response alone -- without antibiotics. The results have now appeared in the journal Gut.
Each year, about 170,000 people die of complications of hepatic cirrhosis in Europe. Frequent causes of the widespread disease include alcohol abuse, fatty liver hepatitis, and chronic viral hepatitis. Liver cirrhosis develops gradually over a period of years and decades. Liver cells die and get replaced by connective tissue. The scar tissue blocks the flow of blood through the liver leading to increased pressure in the blood vessels in the intestine and thus to the leakage of intestinal bacteria, which reach the liver via the blood.
"About one-third of the fatal cases of hepatic cirrhosis are attributable to bacterial infections", says Prof. Dr. Jonel Trebicka, from the Department of Internal Medicine in the University Hospital Bonn, who is participating in the study and has been studying liver cirrhosis for many years. It has long been known that patients with hepatic cirrhosis have impaired immunity. The exact causes were largely unknown. The team of Dr. Zeinab Abdullah at the Institute for Experimental Immunology in the University Hospital Bonn and Prof. Dr. Percy Knolle from the Institute of Molecular Immunology in the Technical University Munich, together with colleagues from the Department of Internal Medicine, LIMES-Institute in the University of Bonn and the RWTH University Hospital Aachen has now discovered the processes behind the attenuation of the immune system.
Collapse of the immune function of the macrophages
In mice suffering from liver cirrhosis, the scientist observed a sustained production of Type-1 interferon in response to the intestinal bacteria by immune cells responsible for defense against infection, namely macrophages and monocytes in the liver. When these immune cells were then infected by a small number of the pathogenic bacteria, Listeria, the production of Type-1 interferon massively increased. As a consequence, the immune-regulatory factor interleukin-10 was release, which led to a defect in the anti-bacterial functions of the macrophages and thus to a fatal course of infections.
The scientists also performed these studies on human monocytes from the blood of cirrhosis patients. Dr. Zeinab Abdullah, a group leader at the Institute for Experimental Immunology in the University hospital Bonn said: "Following infection with pathogenic bacteria, we also observed highly elevated production of Type-1 interferon and interleukin-10 by monocytes from cirrhosis patients". "Our results identify the blind spot of the immune system that is responsible for the failure of the immune response to bacterial infections".
Approaches for new diagnoses and therapies
Further experiments identified new therapeutic options: Mice that are unable to produce Type-1 interferon were protected against Listeria infection despite the migration of the gut bacteria into the liver, because their immune cells didn't produce high levels of Type-1 interferon and IL-10 after Listeria infection. "The groundbreaking finding of our study is that we might be now able to treat a life-threatening bacterial infection without antibiotics, simply by strengthening the immune response", says Prof. Dr. Percy Knolle of TU Munich. According to the researchers, this give rise to hope for new therapeutic options. "When the formation of Type-1 interferon in the liver cells is blocked by suitable substances, there is a prospect of reinvigorating the immune system", adds Professor Knolle. However, this very promising approach must first be confirmed in clinical studies.
Source: University of Bonn
Patna: At least 10 Central Reserve Police Force commandos belonging to its elite COBRA battalion were killed and five others injured in a Maoist IED blast in the jungles of Bihar's Aurangabad district, officials said.
The jawans of the COBRA unit were ambushed in the IED blast after which an encounter started on Monday afternoon between the two resulting in the killing of three Maoists by late night, they said.
"While eight personnel were killed on the spot, two others succumbed to their injuries when they were being evacuated," a senior official said.
The incident was reported from Chakarbanda-Dumarinala forests of the said district, bordering Gaya.
Some arms and ammunition, including an AK-47 rifle, INSAS rifle and under barrel grenade launcher were also recovered from the site.
Officials said five other personnel were critically injured in the fierce gunbattle that ensued after the IED blast.
The jawans belonged to the 205th COBRA battalion and were deployed in the state for conducting anti-Maoist operations.
This is one of the biggest casualties of the elite COBRA unit which has been raised by the CRPF for undertaking special jungle warfare operations.
Addition reinforcements of the state police and CRPF have reached the spot and a search operation has been launched.
Beijing: China on Monday said that it hoped that the situation in Kashmir will be "handled properly" and "relevant parties" will address the issue peacefully through dialogue.
"China has taken note of relevant reports. We are equally concerned about the casualties in the clash, and hope that relevant incident will be handled properly," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said in his remarks posted on the Foreign Ministry website.
"The Kashmir issue is left over from history. China holds a consistent stance and hopes relevant parties will address the issue peacefully through dialogue," he said in response to a question on the recent Kashmir unrest.
It is a rare move of China commenting on the developments relating to Jammu and Kashmir.
The standard line followed by China in recent years on issues relating to Kashmir was that it is an issue between India and Pakistan left over from history and should be properly handled by the two sides through dialogue and consultation.
The rare comments on the situation in Kashmir came in the wake of killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani.
Violent protests have rocked Kashmir since July 9 following killing of Wani and two of his associates in an encounter with security forces.
Seven Dalit men have attempted suicide in Gujarat's Rajkot district to protest a brutal assault on members of their community for allegedly killing a cow.
Five of them -- Rajesh Parmar, Ramesh Pardhi, Jagdish Rathod, Bharat Solanki and Anil Maghad -- tried to end their lives by drinking poison near Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar's statue in market area of Gondal town.
Two others, Kishor Solanki (30) and Amrit Parmar (25), tried to commit suicide at Jamkandorna in the district. All seven men are now being treated at a hospital in Gondal.
Police said the five men in Gondal managed to consume a poisonous substance despite security personnel being present after they had threatened to take such a step.
"They were protesting the brutal assault on fellow Dalit youths in Una town of Gir Somnath district," Inspector Vijay Chaudhary said.
The incident has snowballed into a major political issue for the Gujarat government, which announced a probe by the CID (crime) into public thrashing and stripping of Dalits and also offered compensation to victims.
Police have arrested nine persons, while four policemen, including an inspector, have been suspended for dereliction of duty. The authorities also paid Rs one lakh each to the victims.
Chief Minister Anandiben Patel announced that a designated court will be set up to expedite the trial and chargesheet will be submitted within 60 days.
The issue came to light when a video, purportedly showing the persons being beaten up with iron rods and sticks, went viral on Whatsapp and Facebook. In the video, some people are seen chained to a car while the accused are seen thrashing them.
Sources said the video was recorded by Pramod Giri Goswami, president of Shiv Sena unit in Gir Somnath district and head of the local cow vigilante group.
The victims, who are from Una town of Gir Somnath district, said they had bought a dead cow and was skinning the carcass when the cow vigilantes accused them of cow slaughter.
They said the assailants did not heed their pleas and started beating them up with iron pipes and sticks. After stripping and thrashing them, they were tied to an SUV and taken to the village.
Mumbai: Jaidev Thackeray, the son of the late Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray, on Monday told the Bombay High Court that he had tried to maintain cordial relations with his brother Uddhav, particularly in the last few years, but the latter was unresponsive.
Jaidev has challenged before the High Court Thackeray's will of December 2011, which bequeaths a substantial part of the estate to Uddhav and does not give Jaidev anything.
"We have not met or talked to each other since the petition was filed. Uddhav does not return my phone calls or reply to my text messages though I have tried to keep our relations cordial," he said during a cross-examination by Uddhav's lawyer Rohit Kapadia before Justice Gautam Patel.
Being unwell, Jaidev appeared in a wheelchair and replied to all the 53 questions put to him while seated.
The cross-examination focused on his two statements in an affidavit. Jaidev has said that his father, Bal Thackeray, once told him that Uddhav handed him a set of documents and he signed them. Jaidev has also contended that his father had told him that he wanted to give him a share in the family property.
During cross-examination, Jaidev said he had not discussed these (alleged) facts with Uddhav, because his father did not want any discord between the brothers.
Asked why he did not find out what documents Uddhav had given to his father to sign, Jaidev said Bal Thackeray had said he did not want a discord between the brothers, so he (Jaidev) did not pursue the matter.
Replying to a question as to why he left `Matoshree', the Thackeray residence, to never return, Jaidev, whose relations with his father were strained, said it was due to an incident in the family which he would not like to talk about now or even in future. This incident had nothing to do with his father, he added.
The cross-examination would continue tomorrow.
According to Jaidev, Bal Thackeray was of "unsound mind" and was influenced by Uddhav when he signed the will on December 13, 2011.
Thackeray passed away in November 2012.
The HC had earlier asked both the parties to resolve the dispute through discussion, but it did not work out.
The court had earlier examined witnesses F D'Souza, Bal Thackeray's personal physician Dr Jalil Parkar and Shiv Sena leader Anil Parab.
D'Souza told the court that Thackeray senior had made several wills. He prepared and executed his first will in 1997, and thereafter eight or nine wills were executed, the final one in 2011.
Union Home minister Rajnath Singh on Tuesday told Firstpost.com that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's J&K policy is no different from Former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee's efforts to provide a healing touch.On being asked if the humane touch was missing in Modi's approach in dealing with the current unrest, Singh said,"Prime Minister Narendra Modis government is just a continuum of Vajpayee's. Both Vajpayeeji and Modiji belong to the same ideology and the same party. How can there be any difference? We follow the same humane approach now that we did then."Rajnath also defended J&K CM Mehbooba Mufti and said it was "unfair" to criticise her as the job the CM is not to be on the spot during trouble."I have been a chief minister myself and know that the job of the head of government is not to be on the spot. Crisis management does not mean being at trouble spots, that is the job of the law enforcement agencies," Singh told Firstpost.comSingh also defended Indian Islam and said that he was fully "convinced that syncretism is its essential feature" and it believes in "tolerance and brotherhood" and only some "misguided youth" are getting attracted to the "pernicious ideology".
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that if a convict is awarded multiple life imprisonment then they shall run concurrently and not consecutively.
A five-judge Constitution bench headed by Chief Justice TS Thakur delivered its verdict on a range of legal questions including whether a convict can be asked to undergo more than one life term in a case or cases.
The bench also comprising Justices FMI Kalifulla, AK Sikri, SA Bobde and R Banumati held that the trial courts and the high courts can award a term sentence along with life imprisonment simultaneously in a case where the convict may be asked to first undergo term sentence and then the life sentence.
The judgement came on a batch of petitions including the one filed by A Muthuramalingam on award of sentence in a case and whether they would run concurrently or consecutively.
Kanpur: A carpenter in Kanpur claims to be running from pillar to post to get a loan sanctioned under Prime Minister Employment Generation Programme (PMEGP) in spite of the Prime Minister's personal recommendations.
Sandeep Soni, a resident of Barra area, claims it took him three-and-a-half years to inscribe all the 18 episodes and 706 shlokas of Bhagavad Gita on 32 wooden sheets.
He claims on March 8, he had shown his work to Prime Minister Narendra Modi who had not only praised it but also uploaded his photo with Sandip on Twitter.
The Prime Minister had also assured to help Sandip who told him of his wish to start a factory where he would train unemployed youth in the craft, claims the carpenter.
Subsequently, he met an official at the Prime Minister's Office who explained the procedure of obtaining loans under PMEGP.
Five days later, he got a call from a National Small Industries Corporation (NSIC) official in Kanpur who asked him to prepare a project report.
On July 14, the bank sanctioned a loan of Rs 25 lakh to him but there was no mention of PMEGP on the document. As a result, NSIC officials refused to grant him the subsidy, claims Sandip.
When contacted, NSIC officials said the bank was the authority concerned. Bank officials said they were looking into the matter.
Fadnavis said the state government will ask court to hang the guilty.
I appeal to people in the state to stop venting their ire over the issue," he said.
He said Pune Police Commissioner Rashmi Shukla will be directed to meet the victim's kin and talk to villagers.
Over 90 per cent of crimes against women involve known persons, he noted.
: As his government faced a fierce attack over the brutal gangrape and murder of a girl inAhmednagar, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on Monday said death penalty would be sought for the guilty."Only after hanging will the right message go in the state," Fadnavis told the state Assembly."This is a very serious crime. DNA evidence is scientific evidence and will help in conviction. A five-memberteam, including forensic experts, will help bring the case to charge sheet level in next 4 to 6 days," he said, replying toa discussion on the issue in the Lower House."We will also ensure there are no adjournments in the the case," he said.The brutal gangrape and murder of the girl had rocked both the houses of Maharashtra Legislature yesterday as itsmonsoon session got underway and a debate on the issue was held today in the Lower House.The crime had sparked protests across the state, with people taking to the streets demanding action against the accused, while Congress demanded the resignation of the CM on moral grounds."It is difficult to believe that someone could indulge in an act which is worse than that of a dog," he said.Referring to criticism by opposition that police action against the accused came late, Fadnavis said, "It isnot factual that there was delay in police action.""All three accused have been arrested. Action will also be taken against the fourth accused," he said, adding that the CID will probe if Jitendra Shinde, an accused, had a role in an old murder case."Guardian minister and senior police officials visited the village. I could not visit as I was away in Russia,"Fadnavis said.The Chief Minister said the rate of conviction in such crimes, which was 8 per cent, has reached 21 per cent.The Kopardi rape has blackened the face of Maharashtra, Fadnavis said."We will bring in a legislation providing 10 years jail sentence for those involved in illicit liquor cases. Policeofficials will be held responsible and action taken against them for illicit liquor in their area," he added
New Delhi: Reserve Bank of India Governor is appointed by Prime Minister's Office (PMO) on recommendation of Finance Minister, Parliament was informed on Tuesday.
"Whereas the appointment of Governor, RBI, is approved by Prime Minister's Office on the recommendation of Finance Minister," Minister of State for Finance Santosh Kumar Gangwar said in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha.
To a separate query, Gangwar said Appointment Committee of Cabinet (ACC) guidelines for appointment of Deputy Governors are still the same, but the composition of the search committee has been changed.
"Now, a search committee, namely Financial Sector Regulatory Appointment Search Committee (FSRASC) has been constituted with the approval of ACC. The committee will recommend names for appointment of Chairperson and Members of financial sector regulatory bodies, including those of the Governor and Deputy Governors," the minister said.
Deputy Governors are appointed on the basis of ACC-approved guidelines, which stipulate that the search committee constituted for the purpose will recommend the person to be appointed as a Deputy Governor.
Gangwar said section 8(1)(a) of the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934, provides that there shall be one Governor and not more than four Deputy Governors to be appointed by the Central government on the central board of RBI.
Sources in the Finance Ministry said the government is close to picking a successor of Raghuram Rajan, who has announced his decision not to seek a second term after his current term comes to an end on September 4.
Chandigarh: Two out of five men accused of raping a Dalit girl in Rohtak have reportedly been arrested on Tuesday.
On the context of rest of three accused, police sources said, "During investigation we have found that Investigation shows 3 out of the 5 accused were not in Rohtak at the time of crime."
One of them even produced CCTV footage to prove that he was in Bhiwani at the time of incident and nothing to do with the rape case.
On Monday, the 21-year-old Dalit girl was allegedly gangraped second time by five persons in Rohtak district, with two of the accused also involved in the first assault on her three years ago in Bhiwani, police said on Monday.
Her family alleged that she was gangraped by the men as they did not withdraw the rape case against them. Police said two accused in the rape incident in Bhiwani were arrested in 2013. However, they were out on bail but.
New Delhi: Nine disqualified Congress MLAs of Uttarakhand on Tuesday moved a fresh plea in the Supreme Court seeking its nod for participating in the assembly session commencing from July 21.
The lawmakers including Kunwar Pranav Singh Champion, in their fresh plea in a pending appeal, referred to the recent apex court judgement in the Arunachal Pradesh case in support of their petition that they cannot be disqualified by the speaker facing resolution for removal.
The Nainital High Court had upheld the decision of the Assembly speaker Govind Singh Kunjwal to disqualify Champion and others including former Chief Minister Vijay Bahuguna and two sets of appeal are pending in the apex court against the disqualification.
Referring to para 175 of the landmark verdict of the Supreme Court, re-installing the Congress government in Arunachal Pradesh, the MLAs have said that Article 179 (c) of the constitution disentitles the speaker against whom a resolution for removal is pending from disqualifying any member of the House.
The five-judge constitution bench headed by Justice J S Khehar had said, "We are satisfied, that the words 'passed by a majority of all the then members of the Assembly', would prohibit the Speaker from going ahead with disqualification proceedings under the Tenth Schedule, as the same would negate the effect of the words 'all the then members', after the disqualification of one or more MLAs from the House.
"The words "all the then members", demonstrate an expression of definiteness. Any change in the strength and composition of the Assembly, by disqualifying sitting MLAs, for the period during which the notice of resolution for the removal of the Speaker (or the Deputy Speaker) is pending, would conflict with the express mandate of Article 179(c), requiring all "the then members" to determine the right of the Speaker to continue."
Relying on the observation, the disqualified MLAs have sought setting aside of Speaker's March 27, 2016 decision to disqualify them.
Alternatively, they have sought permission to take part in the assembly session starting from July 21. The Harish Rawat government had won the floor test ordered by the apex court on May 10 in which the rebels were barred from casting their vote.
The usual political spats in Parliament literally took a serious turn on Tuesday when Trinamool Congress MP Mohammed Nadeem Ul Haq demanded a ban on spitting in public places.
During Question Hour Haq wanted to know from Health Minister JP Nadda whether the government proposed to include an anti-spitting day in the calendar to raise awareness on the issue.
Bollywood actor Anubhav Mohanty also joined in the demand for tough measures, while linking the entire problem with the consumption of tobacco.
Nominated member and senior SC lawyer KTS Tulsi expressed concern over the "great Indian spit" which he claimed was the cause of large number of tuberculosis cases being detected in India. "Spit-and-run should not be tolerated and offenders should be made to wield the broom and do a clean-up act," he said.
CPM MP CP Narayanan asked the Health Minister to take a leaf of his home-state Kerala. "There is empirical evidence to suggest that measures taken by the state government has helped check the spread of communicable diseases," he added.
Some of the MPs even wanted the anti-spitting drive be made part of the Swachch Bharat campaign.
Nadda in his reply assured the members that his ministry will heed their demands and suggestions. The government, he said, has issued an advisory and states like Goa, West Bengal and Kerala have already taken measures to curb the menace.
Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi is unlikely to apologise for his defamatory remarks against the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, sources said on Tuesday.Earlier in the day, the Supreme Court rapped the Gandhi scion for his remarks asking him to either apologise or face trial in the case. "If you won't apologise, you will have to face trial," the court said pulling up the Congress leader for his remarks."We have held it may be historically correct but the fact or the statement has to meet the test of public good. You can't make collective denunciation," a Bench comprising Justices Dipak Misra and RF Nariman said.The Bench said that "freedom is not crippled or curbed. What is curbed is freedom of speech. What the writers, politicians, critics or antagonists say, you must have great magnitude to swallow".Welcoming the order, RSS All India Prachar Pramukh Dr Manmohan Vaidya said, "Congress for long has been spreading such baseless canards about the RSS. The SC ruling/observation today exposes Congress's design to defame the RSS."The bench questioned the speech made by Rahul and wondered "why he made a speech quoting wrong historical fact".The apex court said that they have applied their mind and Rahul will have to face the trial in the case."What we have to see is the petitioner's allegations come under Section 499 (defamation) of IPC or not. Judgement is already there. You have to face trial, if you don't express regret," the Bench said.It also said "the purpose of law is not to convert people into litigants. Purpose of law is that people obey law. Peace and harmony should prevail rather than chaos."Senior advocate Harin Raval, appearing for Rahul, said whatever was said in the speech was on the basis of government records and on the basis of decision of Punjab and Haryana High Court and he was not referring to RSS directly.The Bench after perusing the judgement of Punjab and Haryana High Court, said it only says that Nathuram Godse was an RSS worker and added that Godse killed Gandhi and RSS killed Mahatma Gandhi are two different things."You have gone a way ahead and you can't make collective denunciation," it said.Justice Misra said that "history is the greatest enemy of privacy. Over the years, attempts have been made to enter into the lives of historically eminent personalities to give a new dimension."Raval then sought an adjournment for two weeks saying senior advocate Kapil Sibal will argue in the matter and he is not available today and also sought a liberty to file rejoinder.The bench, however, refused the request for adjournment and posted the matter for July 27 and said that no further adjournment will be granted in the case.While addressing a public rally at Sonale in Bhiwandi on March 6, 2015 Rahul had alleged it was "RSS people" who had killed Mahatma Gandhi."RSS people killed Gandhiji and today their people (BJP) talk of him...They opposed Sardar Patel and Gandhiji," he had said.
After Steve Hemmerstoffer who is the editor of the the popular leak website NowhereElse, posted a picture of the three versions of iPhone 7's front panel , showing us that the iPhone 7 Plus and the 7 Pro looked quite similar, the website now has posted a picture of the back panels of the new iPhones.The new leaked images on Weibo suggest a dual-camera system on the Apple iPhone 7 Pro. While the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus feature a single camera lens system, the iPhone 7 Pro will come with a two lens system. This also means that Apple might use a more powerful image sensor on the iPhoen 7 Pro and the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus might just get the same image sensor that is seen on the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. We have seen phones like the LG 3D Max and the HTC M8 use a dual camera system before and now Apple is all set to enter this territory.Apple's iPhone has already proven in the past against it's rivals in the camera department. If we assumes that these leaked images are real, Apple might have something surprising in store for everyone with the iPhone 7 Pro in 2016.Apple is all set to launch the iPhone 7 at their September 2016 launch event and it's the most anticipated smartphone this year. Leaks and rumours also suggest that the iPhone 7 will come with a QHD or a 4K display along with 3GB RAM and a hexa-core processor.Read what to expect from the iPhone 7 here
Beijing: Personal information of at least 388 Chinese HIV patients has been allegedly leaked in a fraud in which individuals had called them up posing as governmental officials, state-run media reported on Tuesday.
"A total of 388 persons have received scam calls in 31 provinces," Bai Hua, the head of Baihualin National Alliance, a nongovernmental organisation that aims to provide assistance to people living with HIV, said.
China's health officials have also complained to police about the alleged leak, which the World Health Organisation and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS on Monday termed as a violation of the fundamental right to patient confidentiality.
The Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention said on Sunday it has received tip-offs from many HIV-positive persons that they received several scam calls from people posing as governmental officials and suspected their personal information had been divulged, Global Times reported.
"Some HIV-positive persons told me that the scammers knew their names, addresses, the time when they were diagnosed, even the special disease control centre and the doctors who prescribed them medicines," Bai said, adding the leak not only threatens patients' personal lives, but also damages trust between health authorities and patients.
The centre said it has alerted police and encrypted the information because it is illegal to disclose the personal information - including the names, addresses and names of family members - of people living with HIV without their permission.
A total of four persons have been defrauded of between 700 yuan (USD 104) and 6,700 yuan by the fraudulent officials, who promised the patients they would receive 6,800 yuan in subsidies after paying an initial commission charge, Bai said.
Istanbul: Turkey has sacked almost 9,000 officials in its relentless crackdown against suspected coup plotters, authorities have said, as the former air force chief denied masterminding the weekend's failed putsch.
With Western allies expressing alarm over fears Ankara that could reinstate the death penalty in response to Friday's dramatic coup bid, General Akin Ozturk appeared in court, looking haggard and with his ear bandaged.
"I am not the person who planned or led the coup. Who planned it and directed it I do not know," state-run news agency Anadolu quoted him as saying in his statement to prosecutors.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has vowed to wipe out the "virus" of the putschists, whose attempted power grab left more than 300 people dead.
But the United States, European Union and United Nations have sternly warned him against excessive retribution as authorities round up the alleged perpetrators.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman denounced "revolting scenes of caprice and revenge against soldiers on the streets" after disturbing pictures emerged of the treatment of some detained suspects.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said over 7,500 people have been detained, including 103 generals and admirals, over the coup bid which Erdogan has blamed on his arch-foe, the US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen.
The interior ministry said almost 9,000 people, including almost 8,000 police but also municipal governors and other officials, had also been dismissed in a widening purge.
Earlier on Sunday, special Istanbul anti-terror police units raided the prestigious air force military academy, detaining four suspects, Anadolu reported.
Authorities have also detained General Mehmet Disli, who conducted the operation to capture chief-of-staff Hulusi Akar during the coup, an official said.
Erdogan has urged citizens to remain on the streets even after the defeat of the coup attempt, in what the authorities describe as a "vigil" for democracy.
Public servants' annual leave has meanwhile been cancelled until further notice.
With Turkey's big cities still on edge, Turkish security forces killed an armed attacker who shot at them from a vehicle outside the Ankara courthouse where suspected coup plotters were appearing before judges.
Western leaders have pushed Turkey to follow the rule of law as the massive retaliatory purge adds to existing concerns about human rights and democracy in the strategic NATO country.
"We also urge the government of Turkey to uphold the highest standards of respect for the nation's democratic institutions," US Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters after talks with EU foreign ministers.
Cleveland (US): Describing India as a "geopolitical ally" of the US, the Republican platform has urged New Delhi to protect all its religious communities from violence and discrimination and also called for securing nuclear arsenal of Pakistan.
"India is our geopolitical ally and a strategic trading partner. The dynamism of its people and the endurance of their democratic institutions are earning their country a position of leadership not only in Asia but throughout the world," the Republican platform released by the party after its formal approval stated.
"For all of India's religious communities, we urge protection against violence and discrimination," it said while noting the contributions made by the citizens of Indian ancestry to the US.
The Republican platform or the party election manifesto said conflicts in the Middle East have created special political and military challenges for the people of Pakistan.
"Our working relationship is necessary, though sometimes difficult, benefit to both, and we look towards the strengthening of historic ties that have frayed under the weight of international conflict," it said.
"This process cannot progress as long as any citizen of Pakistan can be punished for helping the war on terror. Pakistanis, Afghans, and Americans have a common interest in ridding the region of the Taliban and securing Pakistan's nuclear arsenal," said the document.
Calling for mutual trust for progress of the region, it said, "A Republican president will work with all regional leaders to restore mutual trust while insisting upon progress against corruption and the narcotic trade that fuels insurgency".
The 2012 Republican platform had welcomed a stronger relationship with the world's largest democracy both economically and culturally, as well as in matters of national security.
"We hereby affirm and declare that India is our geopolitical ally and a strategic trading partner. We encourage India to permit greater foreign investment and trade. We urge protection for adherents of all India's religions," it said.
In 2012, the Republican platform had also said that it expects the Pakistan government to sever any connection between its security and intelligence forces and the insurgents.
"No Pakistani citizen should be punished for helping the United States against the terrorists," it added.
CLEVELAND Some members and guests of the Virginia delegation to the Republican National Convention expressed support this morning for Melania Trump, wife of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, amid plagiarism allegations about her address Monday night.
Thirteen people were arrested Monday evening after a group of protesters shut down rush-hour traffic on Interstate 95 south of the Belvidere Street exit.
The demonstration, which began shortly before 6 p.m. in the southbound lanes, was in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, according to a news release from the group.
The group of about 30 protesters held signs one of which read White silence is violence while shouting, Black lives matter, and No justice, no peace, no racist police."
The news release said the protesters emphasized the crisis faced by black trans women and black women in Virginia, especially at the hands of the police.
By 6:20 p.m., Richmond police were on the scene and after two warnings to move from the road to the grass, several protesters were in handcuffs.
Those who refused to exit the interstate were charged with being pedestrians on a highway and for impeding the flow of traffic. Thirteen protesters were arrested and transported by two police vans to the Richmond City Justice Center for processing.
Those who chose to move stood along Belvidere continuing to protest.
One woman in handcuffs shouted Black lives matter from the street below, while those on the sidewalk above echoed her chants.
In the release, which protesters handed out along Belvidere Street, the group cited several black trans women they said had gone missing or were killed, adding, As in the rest of the country and the rest of the world, Virginia does too little to love and protect black trans women from harm.
The group also cited several people killed by police.
We support the national Black Lives Matter movements demands to disarm the police, divest from prisons, and ensure safe and clean housing for black communities, the release said.
The protest was organized by a group out of Charlottesville via social media, said protester Nqobile Mthethwa.
As an ally and a white person, its important to take action. Im a supporter in ending racism and police brutality, said protester Noah Goodwin.
The town of Bedford has applied to more than double the size of its enterprise zone and make the incentive program available to more businesses.
Under the proposal, boundaries would be expanded from about 240 acres to 630 acres and include Industrial Avenue, as well as parts of U.S. 460 West on the north and south side and the Harmony Town Center near the U.S. Army Reserve Center.
The Bedford Town Council unanimously agreed last week to ask the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) to approve the expansion.
Mayor Bob Wandrei said the enterprise zone is an area created to give business owners incentives to fix up their buildings. The Virginia Enterprise Zone program is a partnership between state and local government that encourages job creation and private investment through grant-based incentives, town council documents state.
What were trying to do there are certain areas that have buildings that have fallen into disrepair and we want to offer owners incentives to fix up their buildings to make them more useful, he said.
Council Member Bob Carson said the program will increase the number of businesses eligible for funding, something he said should have been done a while ago.
We are doing things now that will promote growth and industry, he said. There were some areas outside [the zone] we couldnt help promote but now we can.
Vice Mayor Steve Rush said the point of the program is to entice existing manufacturing facilities to expand by adding new jobs or new machinery.
Amanda Love, DHCD public relations director, said the competitive program is a sought-after economic development tool.
The town does not have the funds to expand the zone; it has to be approved by DHCD because they award the money, Rush said. We are just coat-tailing the enterprise zone by adding an additional incentive.
A business must spend at least $100,000 and can then receive a percentage back from the state agency, Rush said.
Love said the town doesnt have to pay to apply for the designation; it only needs to show a plan of what it is offering in terms of incentives.
Kim Snow, manager of technical communications and administration at Fostek Corporation in Bedford, said the company applied and received the Real Property Investment Grant and the Job Creation Grant in 2012 for the first time.
According to the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development website, the investment grant is based on qualified investments made to commercial, industrial and mixed-use buildings or facilities within the boundaries of the enterprise zone.
She said Fostek reapplied this year and received both grants again.
Its very advantageous, she said. The only thing Id say to anyone who is going to participate is to follow all of the requirements. Once youve done it, youll get some experience under your belt.
Carson said he thinks all the moves the council is making are directed toward the growth of the town to attract new businesses and provide a better environment for them.
Everything we are doing is to promote Bedford as a destination for businesses as well for people to live, he said. Most of the decisions we have been making for the last year or so, Ive seen it toward that end to make Bedford a destination.
Jordan Snelling, the administrator for the states enterprise zone program, said there are very precise boundaries with the zones and DHCD does allow many localities to alter the boundaries.
Snelling said DHCD tracks the state incentives and how much is being used by the localities.
They have to submit an annual report including what kind of marketing theyre using and how much activity they are getting and how many jobs and businesses are being created, she said.
Generally, Bedford is not the most active zone, but she said it still brings in new businesses every year and is not dormant by any means.
The zone runs along the railroad track and includes some of downtown, Wandrei said.
Under DHCD guidelines, the town is authorized to administer a zone of up to 640 acres in the area.
Within the region Lynchburg, has two enterprise zones and Roanoke has one.
Anna Bentson, assistant director for economic development in Lynchburg, said the enterprise zone program has allowed the city to support the expansion and recruitment of major manufacturers and small business.
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US: We See
No Signs
Putin Will
Use Dirty Bomb
(Newser) India's goal to increase its forest cover to 235 million acres in the next 15 years has gotten a big boost. On July 11, more than 800,000 people in Uttar Pradesh state planted nearly 50 million saplings in 24 hours in a bid to set a new Guinness world record, Popular Science reports. The figure has yet to be certified, as National Geographic notes, but if it is, it will trounce the previous record of 847,275 trees set by Pakistan in 2013. India has reserved more than $6.2 billion for tree-planting initiatives in all of its 29 states, the AP reports. The effort stems from commitments made at the 2015 climate change summit in Paris. The world has realized that serious efforts are needed to reduce carbon emissions to mitigate the effects of global climate change, says one official from Uttar Pradesh.
India has had much deforestation in recent centuries due to demand for firewood and the creation of pastures and development space. Eighth-grader Shashwat Rai planted a fig species known locally as a peepal. "I've read in a book that this tree releases maximum oxygen," he tells the AP. "There is so much pollution in the city, we need trees that produce oxygen." A tree planted, however, is not necessarily a tree gained. According to reports, up to 40% of the saplings will die. Forestry workers will use aerial photographs to keep watch over the trees. As for young Rai, he says he'll check his tree often, adding, "I don't want this plant to die." India's not the only country getting in on the tree-planting action, per National Geographic: African nations say they will reforest nearly 250 million acres by 2030. (This is the most dangerous tree in the US.)
(Newser) A federal judge has ruled in Bill Cosby's favor, Vanity Fair reports, saying he can sue a woman accusing him of sexual assault for breach of contract. In the "mixed ruling," US District Judge Eduardo Robreno said the disgraced actor can move forward with a lawsuit against Andrea Constand based on a pair of 2014 tweets and an interview she did with the Toronto Sun, per the Hollywood Reporter. However, People reports, Robreno found that Cosby could not sue Constand based on her having talked to police about an alleged 2004 sexual assault, which led to Cosby's arrest. Cosby has argued that Constand violated a 2006 settlement agreement. With regard to speaking to police, the judge said confidentiality cannot be enforced because it would preclude people from providing information about alleged crimes.
As for the tweets"I won't go away, there is a lot more I will say" and "It's not that everybody just forgot about it, truth is nobody cared"Constand contends they did not violate confidentiality provisions because they didn't name Cosby. But, writes Robreno, "a statement can be a reference to an individual or situation even if it does not explicitly say so." He adds, "Whether the tweets were in fact references to Cosbyand, if so, whether Constand breached the CSA by tweeting themare questions to be answered at a later stage." The judge also gave Cosby the green light to sue Constand's attorneys for releasing a decade-old deposition, in which Cosby admits to giving women drugs to facilitate having sex with them, E! reports. The attorneys, however, say they had no part in the release of the information. Finally, Cosby is permitted to sue the National Enquirer for releasing portions of the depositions. (Read more Bill Cosby stories.)
(Newser) A teenage Afghan migrant armed with an ax and a knife attacked passengers aboard a regional train in southern Germany on Monday night, injuring four people before he was shot and killed by police as he fled, authorities said. Wuerzburg police said on their Facebook page that three of the victims suffered serious injuries and one was slightly injured. Another 14 people were being treated for shock, the AP reports. Bavaria's top security official, state Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann, told Germany's ARD television that the attacker had been identified as a 17-year-old Afghan.
Herrmann said initial information was that the suspect came to Germany as an unaccompanied minor and had lived in the Wuerzburg area for some time, initially at a refugee facility in the town of Ochsenfurt and more recently with a foster family. He said authorities were still investigating the motive of the attack and were looking into reports that the suspect had yelled out "an exclamation" during the rampage. He was responding to reports that some witnesses had heard the suspect shout "Allahu Akbar" ("God Is Great") during the attack. The train was on its way from the Bavarian town of Treuchtlingen to Wuerzburg, which is about 60 miles northwest of Nuremberg. (Read more Germany stories.)
(Newser) After his young daughter had been married off, 45-year-old Mohammad Azam struck a deal with his new in-laws: He'd marry the cousin of his daughter's husband. But the marriage deal went sour and Azam's pregnant 14-year-old daughter, Zarah, ended up paying the price, tortured and burned to death by her own in-laws in a so-called "honor killing," CBS News and the AP report. Zarah died Saturday, and Azam has since made his way to Kabul to seek justice for his daughter because he's not hopeful he'll find it in Ghor province, where her immolation took place, the Sun notes. "The culprits should be brought to justice, my daughter's blood must not go in vain," he tells the AP.
Azam had reportedly been promised the cousin's hand in marriage as payment for construction work he had done. Zarah's in-laws then pulled back on the deal when another man offered more money for the cousin, but Azam eloped with her anyway, leading the in-laws to seek revenge. The AP notes that the practice of "baad"giving women away to pay off debtsis against the law; Azam himself could face legal trouble for giving his daughter away. Honor killings are likewise illegal, though a 2014 New York Times article noted that tribal law often trumps civil law, with fathers lording "absolute power" over their daughters until they're married offwith or without their permission, at any age, and often to settle some sort of debt. (A Pakistani fashion model was also a victim of an "honor killing," at the hands of her own brother.)
(Newser) The suburban St. Louis police officer shot in the neck during a traffic stop on July 8 is paralyzed from the neck down and on a ventilator, unable to breathe on his own, says Ballwin Police Chief Kevin Scott. Michael Flamion is, however, "very alert," able to move his head, mouth words, and "make sounds, and his wife knows every word he says," Scott tells the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In a press conference Monday, he added Flamion would've died had he not received help from paramedics and a witness who called 911 and performed CPR. Two other passers-by, including a nurse, also stopped to help him. "A nurse drove by and she told my wife to get a towel, so she ran in and grabbed a pillowcase that's on our stairwell, ran back out and put it on his neck and stopped the bleeding," a man says, per CBS News.
Some $237,000 has been raised for Flamion, who will require "extensive long-term care" for "catastrophic" spinal cord damage, Scott says. "I've heard the word 'severed,' but there will have to be additional analysis after the swelling goes down," he adds. A day after five police officers were killed in Dallas, Flamion, 31, was shot in the left side of his neck around 11am as he walked back to his patrol car to do a records check during a stop in Ballwin. Officers say the suspectwho had a history of gun-related crimes and possibly hoped to avoid being caught with a gunfired shots as Flamion's back was turned, then fled to nearby Manchester, where he was arrested. Antonio Taylor, 31, is charged with first-degree assault of a law enforcement officer, armed criminal action, and unlawful possession of a weapon. (Read more St. Louis stories.)
(Newser) "To this day, I dont know why a computer guy like Sean was sent to Benghazi," Republican National Convention speaker Patricia Smith told the crowd in Cleveland on Monday night. What she does know: Who is to blame for the death of her son, one of four to die in the 2012 Benghazi attack, the Guardian reports. "I blame Hillary Clinton personally ... Personally!" She explained that in the last conversation she had with Sean, the day before his death, he expressed misgivings about the lack of consulate security.
"Hillary Clinton is a woman, a mother, and a grandmother of two. I am a woman, a mother, and a grandmother of two. How could she do this to me? How could she do this to any American family?" Smith continued, to cheers, "Donald Trump is everything Hillary Clinton is not. He is blunt, direct, and strong. And when it comes to the threat posed by radical Islamic terrorism, he will not hesitate to kill the terrorists who threaten American lives. He will make America stronger, not weaker." Pointing to an audience member, she said, "That's right! Hillary for prison. She deserves to be in stripes." (Read more Republican National Convention stories.)
(Newser) A correctional officer and an inmate are dead following an altercation at a Pennsylvania prison. It happened Monday night at Luzerne County Correctional Facility in Wilkes-Barre, which is currently on lockdown, the AP reports. Luzerne County Manager David Pedri tells the Times Leader that the dead inmate is 27-year-old Tracy Gilliam, who he believes was in prison for failing to register as a sex offender. Pedri says the guard's family has asked for his name not to be released. "This guard went to work today believing that he would be coming home," he says. "And sadly, that didn't happen." Pedri says authorities will do all they can to make sure a "sad and tragic" incident like this doesn't happen again. State police and the county DA are investigating. (Read more Pennsylvania stories.)
(Newser) Turkey's state-run news agency says courts have ordered 85 generals and admirals jailed pending trial over their roles in a botched coup attempt. Dozens of others are still being questioned, the AP reports. Anadolu Agency said Tuesday that those formally arrested include former air force commander Gen. Akin Ozturk, alleged to be the ringleader of the July 15 uprising, and Gen. Adem Huduti, commander of Turkey's Second Army, which is in charge of countering possible threats to Turkey from Syria, Iran, and Iraq. Authorities have rounded up thousands alleged to have been involved in the coup, in which at least 208 government supporters and 24 coup plotters were killed. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has refused to rule out bringing back the death penalty.
The purging of thousands of alleged coup plotters raised tensions Monday between Turkey and the West, with US and European officials urging restraint while Ankara insisted that Washington extradite an exile accused of orchestrating the plot, the AP reports. As Western officials expressed alarm at the rapid roundup of so many by their key NATO ally, Turkish government officials explained that the plotters in the military had been under investigation and launched their ill-planned operation out of panic. The government claimed the swift move against so many reflected the prior investigation of those with links to moderate cleric Fethullah Gulen, a former Erdogan ally who lives in exile in Saylorsburg, Pa. (Erdogan's plane had "trouble in the air" during the coup attempt.)
(Newser) Authorities say they've found an Islamic State flag in the home of the 17-year-old Afghan migrant shot dead Monday after slashing five people in Germany. The hand-painted flag was found in the teen's room in his foster home in Ochsenfurt, where he had only lived for two weeks, along with a text in Pashtun showing the migrant may have been "self-radicalized," says Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann. An ISIS-linked news agency describes the teen as an ISIS "fighter" who "carried out the operation in answer to the calls to target the countries of the coalition fighting the Islamic State," per the BBC. People who knew the teenwho arrived in Germany about two years agosay he was calm and quiet, visiting a mosque "on special occasions," but never showed signs of radical behavior.
Meanwhile, authorities say four victims of the attack are from Hong Kong, though it doesn't appear they were targeted for that reason. The South China Morning Post identifies the injured as a 62-year-old man; his 58-year-old wife; their 27-year-old daughter; and her boyfriend, 31. A source tells the paper that the menboth of whom are critically injuredtried to protect the women. Another witness adds the train compartment "looked like a slaughterhouse." Herrmann says the suspectwhom a witness reported hearing shout "Allahu Akbar"fled the train in the town of Heiligenfeld, attacked a local woman, then tried to assault police before he was killed, reports Reuters. Though migrants arriving in Germany have dwindled recently, the BBC notes the attack brought out "racist and xenophobic comments against asylum seekers" on Twitter. (Read more Germany stories.)
(Newser) A man and woman got closer to Niagara Falls than they probably ever wanted on Sunday. The US Coast Guard was called in to rescue the pair from Buffalo after their boat became disabled and drifted "very close" to the Canadian side of the falls, reports the Niagara Gazette. An anchor was used to keep the vessel in place as officials lowered the Niagara River water level to ground the boat. Within minutes, however, the anchor failed, leaving only a section of engine holding the boat in place.
Air crews with Erie County Air One made multiple attempts to reach the boatersages 45 and 42but had difficulty with high winds, so a Coast Guard helicopter was called in. Before it arrived, however, a New York State Park Police boat was able to reach the vessel and the boaters were safely removed. The entire rescue took about two and a half hours, reports CBS News. (Want to feel closer to the falls? Try this new zip line.)
(Newser) Yu Jianchun has never seen Good Will Hunting, and maybe he doesn't need to. CNN reports the 33-year-old Chinese migrant worker is living part of its plot. Yu attended a vocational school rather than college, and he's never taken advanced math"I barely have any knowledge about calculus or geometry," he saysand yet mathematicians say the employee of a package delivery company has come up with a "more efficient" way to identify Carmichael numbers, or pseudoprimes. The Washington Post explains that these "odd" and "infrequent" numbers can pass some of the tests used to determine if a number is prime (that is, only divisible by 1 or itself). But they aren't: Carmichael numbers have at least three positive prime factors; 561, the first and smallest of 15 such numbers found by RD Carmichael in 1910, is the product of 3 x 11 x 17.
China Daily reports Yu spent eight years working on Carmichael formulas and tried to contact math professors via email and in-person visits to universities. Professor Cai Tianxin of Zhejiang University was impressed by the work, replied, and invited Yu to present his proof at a June 13 lecture. Yu describes himself as so nervous he "wrote wrong numbers on the blackboard." Cai now plans to include Yu's "very imaginative solution" in his latest book, and that's not all Cai is doing for Yu: He told the man's story to Ling Lanfang, president of Silk Road Holding Group. Impressed, Ling has offered Yu what China Daily reports is a "statistics-related position" that Ling says would "give him better development for a career and also more time for furthering his interest and talent in mathematics." (Another study found that genuine prime numbers just got a little stranger.)
(Newser) Two allegedly drunk Canadian pilots were arrested Monday at Glasgow Airport just before taking to the skies with hundreds of passengers in tow, Glasgow Live reports. According to CBC, the flight crew noticed there was something off about the pilots and went to authorities. "We saw five policemen get onto the plane and we thought, 'There's a problem,'" one passenger says. The 250 or so passengers on board the Scotland-to-Canada flight were told there were "operational reasons" for the delay, the BBC reports.
Pilots Jean-Francois Perreault, 39, and Imran Zafar Syed, 37, were arrested on suspicion of violating the Railway and Transportation Safety Act of 2003. If convicted of being drunk prior to a flight, they face up to two years in prison. The airline, Air Transat, apologized and provided vouchers to passengers, who had their flight delayed until Tuesday. (Read more weird crimes stories.)
(Newser) A father died trying to rescue his drowning daughter Saturday in Hawaii, CBS News reports. Six-year-old Mina Hornor of Berkeley, California, was walking along the rocks at the Makapuu Tide Pools on Oahu when she fell in the ocean. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser says she was knocked into the water by a wave. Her father, 46-year-old Mark Hornor, jumped in to save her. They were pulled further out to sea by a series of rogue waves, according to Hawaii News Now. By the time lifeguards on jet skis got to them, they were unresponsive. They died after being transported to the hospital.
Hornor's brother says Hornor was an experienced surfer and in good physical shape. "He jumped in and tried to save her," Matthew Hornor tells Hawaii News Now. "I don't think he wanted to come back empty handed." Another father and daughter drowned at the Makapuu Tide Pools in 2011, and authorities warn people to be careful in the area. On Saturday, there was a high-surf advisory and a lot of wind. On a day like today, it wasn't for families down there," a government spokesperson says. (Read more drowning stories.)
(Newser) Ohio's Wright State University was scheduled to host the first presidential debate of the general election Sept. 26until it announced Tuesday it wouldn't be doing that. This has been a very difficult decision to make but I am confident that it is the right one, Politico quotes WSU president David Hopkins as saying. According to Dayton Daily News, Hopkins cited rising costs and security as reasons for pulling out. It was originally expected to cost WSU $3.5 million to host the debate, but that had increased to more than $8 million recently. That price increase comes at a time when WSU is already planning more than $27 million in budget cuts. Given the financial issues the university is grappling with, from the start this seemed like a kind of dubious proposition, faculty union president Martin Kich says.
Security was also becoming an issue for WSU. Over the last few weeks we have had a growing concern over what it would take to guarantee the safety and security of our campus," Politico quotes Hopkins as saying. Unlike private universities that have hosted debates in the past, WSU couldn't legally close its campus to the public during the debate, making security more difficult. WSU will probably lose at least some of the $2.5 million it has already put toward hosting the debate. I really wanted this experience for our students, the Daily News quotes Hopkins as saying. The debate will now be held at New York's Hofstra University, which hosted a presidential debate in 2012 and had agreed to be a backup this year, CNN reports. The other two scheduled presidential debates will take place at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. (Read more presidential debate stories.)
(Newser) Mysterious radio broadcasts out of North Korea are raising Cold War concerns in South Korea, the AP reports. A woman read a string of meaningless numbers on North Korean state radio for two minutes on June 24. It happened again last Friday; this time for 14 minutes. Popular Mechanics gives an example of what this sounded like: "On page 459, question number 35, on page 913, question number 55, on page 134..." and so forth. The woman on the radio says the numbers are "review assignments in physics" or "practice assignments in mathematic lessons." But what they really sound like are the secret messages North Korea used to send to its spies in South Korea during the Cold War.
While some in South Korea believe North Korea is once again using the radio to pass missions along to its spies, experts aren't so sure. North Korea stopped using this method in 2000 with the advent of the internet and newer, better methods of hiding messages. It would be odd for North Korea to go back to an outdated system that South Korea already knows about. Plus, broadcasting these kinds of messages immediately alerts everyone that you're doing something shady. If it really is espionage activity, its pretty old school," writes Matt Novak at Gizmodo. "But I guess thats how North Korea operates these days anyway. Experts think it's possible the strange numbers are just North Korea's attempt at psychological warfare. The country is currently upset with South Korea for hosting a US missile defense system. (It's not that happy with the White House, either.)
The Daily News-Miner encourages residents to make themselves heard through the Opinion pages. Readers' letters and columns also appear online at newsminer.com. Contact the editor with questions at letters@newsminer.com or call 459-7574.
Mumbai:
A special CBI court hearing the sensational Sheena Bora murder case today extended till August 1 the judicial custody of key accused Indrani Mukerjea, her husband and Peter Mukerjea and her former husband Sanjeev Khanna.
All the accused were produced before special CBI judge H S Mahajan. Meanwhile, in its order passed on Saturday on the application filed by Peter, the court named a secret witness and directed the central agency to take care of the witness safety and security.
Peter had sought the statement of the secret witness that was submitted to the court by the CBI. In that order, the court also directed the CBI to file copies of the statement of witness to the accused, but also asked it to delete one of the paragraphs before it is given.
The central investigative agency in its supplementary charge sheet filed in February, had submitted a statement of the unnamed witness in a sealed cover.
The CBI had said that they are not revealing the identity or the statement of the witness as investigation was going on. In the past, the special court had given copies of Indranis former driver Shyamwar Rais confession to the co-accused Khanna and others on the Bombay High Court directive.
Rai was the first accused to be arrested in the case in August 2015, taking the lid off the murder, after he was picked up in connection with an arms case. The trial court recently allowed Rai to turn approver in the case and become a prosecution witness.
Indrani, Khanna and Rai had allegedly strangled Sheena (24), Indranis daughter from an earlier relationship, inside a car in April 2012. Sheenas body was found in a forest in Raigad. The crime, which came to light in August last year, is allegedly linked to certain financial dealings.
The trio was arrested in August last year, while Peter was arrested in November. According to CBI, Peter was part of the murder conspiracy.
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Patna :
At least ten CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force) commandos belonging to its elite COBRA battalion were killed in a Naxal IED (Improvised Explosive Device) blast in the jungles of Bihar's Aurangabad district.
The jawans belonged to the 205th COBRA battalion and were deployed in the state for conducting anti-naxal operations.
This is one of the biggest casualties of the elite COBRA unit which has been raised by the CRPF for undertaking special jungle warfare operations.
The martyred CRPF men have been identified as -
1. Head Constables Anil Kumar Singh, a resident of Buxar in Bihar
2. K Opendra Singh of Thoubal, Manipur
3. Constables Sinod Kumar of Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh
4. Ramesh Kumar from Hoshiarpur in Punjab
5. Diwakar Kumar from Khagariya in Bihar
6. Polash Mondal from South Denajpur in West Bengal
7. Deepak Ghosh of Nadia in West Bengal
8. Manoj Kumar of Betul in Madhya Pradesh
9. Harvender Panwar of Muzaffarnagar in UP
10. Ravi Kumar from Siwan in Bihar
Officials said five other personnel also were critically injured in the fierce gun battle that ensued after the IED blast.
The jawans of the COBRA unit were ambushed in the IED blast after which an encounter started on afternoon between the two resulting in the killing of three naxals by late night, they said.
"While eight personnel were killed on the spot, two others succumbed to their injuries when they were being evacuated," a senior official said.
The incident was reported from Chakarbanda-Dumarinala forests of the said district, bordering Gaya.
Some arms and ammunition, including an AK-47 rifle, INSAS rifle and under barrel grenade launcher were also recovered from the site.
Addition reinforcements of the state police and CRPF have reached the spot and a search operation has been launched.
CRPF Director General K Durga Prasad and other senior officers are expected to visit the ambush site .
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Berlin:
German police have shot dead a 17-year-old Afghan refugee after he attacked train passengers with an axe and a knife, seriously wounding three people in what one official said was a probable Islamist attack.
Several other people were also injured in the assault on a regional train near the southern city of Wuerzburg, police said, adding that the teenager was killed as he tried to flee.
Joachim Herrmann, the interior minister of Bavaria State, said the assailant had arrived as an unaccompanied minor in Germany and was living nearby Ochsenfurt. It is quite probable that this was an Islamist attack, said a ministry spokesman, adding that the attacker had shouted Allahu akbar (God is greatest).
The attack happened around 9:15 pm (1915 GMT) last night on the train, which runs between Treuchlingen and Wuerzburg in Bavaria.
Shortly after arriving at Wuerzburg, a man attacked passengers with an axe and a knife, a police spokesman said. Three people have been seriously injured and several others lightly injured. Fourteen people were treated for shock. He added: The perpetrator was able to leave the train, police left in pursuit and as part of this pursuit, they shot the attacker and killed him.
There were no further details on the circumstances of the teenagers death. Germany had thus far escaped the kind of large-scale jihadist attacks seen in the southern French city of Nice last week, in which 31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel used a truck to mow down people leaving a Bastille Day fireworks display, killing 84 people in an attack claimed by Islamic State.
In May in Germany, a mentally unstable 27-year-old man carried out a knife attack on a regional train in the south, killing one person and injuring three others. Early reports suggested he had yelled Allahu akbar but police later said there was no evidence pointing to a religious motive. He is being held in a psychiatric hospital.
Germany let in a record nearly 1.1 million asylum seekers last year, with Syrians the largest group followed by Afghans fleeing ongoing turmoil and poverty in their country. The number of refugees arriving in Germany has fallen sharply as a result of the closure of the Balkans migration route and an EU deal with Turkey to stem the flow.
In April, May and June, the number was around 16,000 each month, less than a fifth of the tally seen at the start of the year, according to official figures. Bavaria is governed by the Christian Social Union (CSU), sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkels conservative Christian Democrats.
The CSU has been loudly critical of Merkels welcoming stance toward asylum seekers, a split that threatened the unity of the ruling coalition in Berlin and sent the governments approval ratings plunging
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New Delhi :
The Supreme Court today slammed Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi, who blamed RSS for assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. The top court observed he should not have resorted to collective denunciation of an organisation and asked him to either apologise or face trial.
We have held it may be historically correct but the fact or the statement has to meet the test of public good. You cant make collective denunciation, a bench comprising Justices Dipak Misra and R F Nariman said.
The bench said that freedom is not crippled or curbed. What is curbed is freedom of speech. What the writers, politicians, critics or antagonists say, you must have great magnitude to swallow.
The bench questioned the speech made by Rahul and wondered why he made a speech quoting wrong historical fact.
The apex court said that they have applied their mind and Rahul Gandhi will have to face the trial in the case.
What we have to see is the petitioners allegations come under Section 499 (defamation) of IPC or not. Judgement is already there. You have to face trial, if you dont express regret, the bench said.
It also said the purpose of law is not to convert people into litigants. Purpose of law is that people obey law. Peace and harmony should prevail rather than chaos.
Senior advocate Harin Raval, appearing for Rahul, said whatever was said in the speech was on the basis of government records and on the basis of decision of Punjab and Haryana High Court and he was not referring to RSS directly.
The bench after perusing the judgement of Punjab and Haryana High Court, said it only says that Nathuram Godse was an RSS worker and added that Godse killed Gandhi and RSS killed Gandhi are two different things.
You have gone a way ahead and you cant make collective denunciation, it said.
Justice Misra said that history is the greatest enemy of privacy. Over the years, attempts have been made to enter into the lives of historically eminent personalities to give a new dimension.
While quoting the recent order in a petition filed by DMDK leader and actor A Vijayakanth challenging the cases lodged against him and others in which the apex court has issued notice to Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa, the bench said criticism of government is one thing and criticism of historical figure is another thing.
The bench, however, refused the request for adjournment and posted the matter for July 27 and said that no further adjournment will be granted in the case.
Rahul had earlier moved the Supreme Court in May last year for quashing the criminal defamation case lodged against him for his comments. The case is pending before a magisterial court in Bhiwandi in Maharashtras Thane district.
The apex court had granted interim stay on the proceedings of the case before the magisterial court.
Rahul had earlier refused to accept the apex courts suggestion to express regret over his statement allegedly blaming RSS for Mahatma Gandhis assassination to close the defamation case against him, saying he will contest it.
The penal provisions make defamation an offence punishable by up to a two-year jail term.
It was alleged by Rajesh Kunte, secretary of Bhiwandi unit of RSS, that Rahul told an election rally at Sonale on March 6, 2015 that RSS people killed Gandhiji.
He has said the Congress leader had sought to tarnish the reputation of the Sangh through his speech.
Following the complaint, the magistrates court had initiated proceedings and issued notice to Rahul directing him to appear before it. Rahul was summoned to appear before the trial court on January 6, this year.
The Congress leader then approached the High Court seeking exemption from appearance and quashing of the complaint.
The prosecution had opposed the petition and argued that Rahul can plead his case and lead evidence during trial before the magistrate.
The High Court had dismissed the petition and refused to grant stay on its order. It had allowed the Congress leader time to appeal against its order in the Supreme Court. He had moved the Supreme Court in May last year for quashing the criminal case lodged against him for his comments.
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Lahore:
Police probing the murder of Pakistani social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch have made the State plaintiff in the case, making it impossible for her family from pardoning the killers, including her brother who has confessed to have strangulated her for honour.
According to Capital Police Officer (CPO) Azhar Akram, Section 311 have been added to the FIR, meaning qisas or pardoning cannot take place.
With the state becoming the plaintiff, Qandeels father would not be able to forgive his son Muhammad Waseem and other suspects for his daughters murder if at any point he decided to do so, the CPO was quoted as saying by the Express Tribune yesterday.
Akram also said police were investigating all others who were in contact with the model before she was murdered, including her parents.
The 26-year-old actor-cum-model was killed in central district of Multan on July 15 allegedly by Waseem, who has confessed to have administered a sedative to her before strangulating her to death for the honour of the family.
Waseem said he killed his sister due to her social media activities, which included a series of risque video posts with prominent cleric Mufti Qavi.
A report in The Dawn said two sections - Sections 311 and 305 of the Pakistan Penal Code - had been added to the FIR, a move which Advocate Balak Shair Khosa said was a welcome step.
There cannot be an agreement (after this). Now that they have added these sections to the FIR, the victims family cannot forgive the killers as the state has become a complainant. It will be taken as a murder against the state, Khosa was quoted as saying in the report.
Earlier, Qandeels father, Muhammad Azeem, had lodged the FIR and named his two sons for killing her in Multan where she had come from Karachi to live with her parents on the occasion of Eid.
The latest development comes after Qandeels mother claimed Mufti Qavi, who was suspended from top religious body Ruet-e-Hilal Committee in the controversy following Qandeels video posts with him, had provoked her son into murdering her daughter.
Police has announced the cleric would be included in the murder investigation of Qandeel besides her another brother, Aslam Shaheen.
The honour-killing has sent shockwaves across the country and triggered an outpouring of grief on social media for Qandeel.
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Wuerzburg:
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility today for its first attack in Germany, an axe and knife assault on a train carried out by a 17-year-old Afghan refugee.
German authorities said they had found a hand-painted IS flag among the belongings of the asylum seeker, who seriously injured four members of a family of tourists from Hong Kong in his rampage. The teenage assailant was killed as he tried to flee.
The perpetrator of the stabbing attack in Germany was one of the fighters of the Islamic State, the IS-linked Amaq news agency said.
The assault on a regional train near the southern city of Wuerzburg late Monday left two of the victims critically hurt, said Joachim Herrmann, the interior minister of Bavaria state.
We hope that those who were gravely injured make it, Herrmann told ZDF public television.
Germany has thus far escaped the kind of large-scale jihadist attack seen in the southern French city of Nice last week, in which 31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel used a truck to mow down 84 people. That attack was also claimed by IS.
The terrifying assault in Bavaria is likely to revive a heated national debate about integrating migrants and refugees after a record influx last year.
The assailant had arrived as an unaccompanied minor in Germany about two years ago and had been staying with a foster family in the region for the last two weeks, Herrmann said.
It is quite probable that this was an Islamist attack, said a ministry spokesman hours after the attack, adding that the assailant was heard shouting Allahu akbar (God is greatest).
However, he stressed that the investigation was ongoing and that the teenager appeared to have acted alone.
We must determine what the motive was and to what extent he really belonged to the Islamist scene or self-radicalised very recently, Herrmann said, adding that the assailant had no criminal record in Germany.
The assault happened around 9:15 pm (local time) on the train which runs between the town of Treuchtlingen and Wuerzburg in Bavaria.
An eyewitness who lives next to the railway station told DPA news agency that the train, which had been carrying around 25 people, looked like a slaughterhouse with blood covering the floor.
The man, who declined to give his name, said he saw people crawl from the carriage and ask for a first-aid kit as other victims lay on the floor inside.
The perpetrator was able to leave the train, police left in pursuit and as part of this pursuit, they shot the attacker and killed him, a police spokesman said.
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Rajkot:
A head constable was today killed after a mob attacked police with stones, prompting security personnel to lob tear gas shells to disperse them in Amreli town even as protests by Dalits against the brutal assault on fellow community members for allegedly skinning a cow at Una last week spread to several parts of Gujarat.
Head Constable with local crime branch Pankaj Amreli was injured in stone-pelting in Amreli. He died during treatment at Rajkot hospital. Ten other persons including protesters and policemen have been injured, police said. Today, three youths attempted to kill themselves by consuming poison at their residential society in Batwa town in Junagadh district.
After seven Dalit youths attempted suicide at Gondal and Jamkandorna in Rajkot district against the assault yesterday, several incidents of damage to state transport buses and of road blockades were reported from different parts of Saurashtra region across Junagadh, Jamnagar, Rajkot and Amreli districts since late last night.
While a bus was torched in Dhoraji town of Rajkot district and several others damaged, protestors allegedly vandalised sheds for Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS) in Rajkot late last night, police said.
Dinesh Parmar (21), Dinesh Vegra (23) and Rasik Vinjura (40) gathered at Ambedkar Nagar society and consumed poison to protest against the beating (of Dalit youths in Una). We rushed them to Junagadh civil hospital for treatment, police said, adding their condition is stable.
Hundreds of protesters gathered at Chital road locality in Amreli town this morning and started hurling stones at police who in turn fired two teargas shells to disperse them. In Surendranagar, agitators blocked a highway by putting carcass of a cow in the middle of the road, police said.
In the wake of the tense situation, the state road transport department today suspended bus services from Porbandar and other parts as protesters continued to block roads.
Some persons hurled stones at Ahmedabad-Veraval train as it was entering Rajkot, injuring an assistant driver last night, police said today.
There was a report of BRTS buses being ransacked by the community members as several public transport vehicles were also ransacked, DCP, Rajkot, Karanraj Vaghela said. He said that situation is under control and no untoward incident has taken place in Rajkot today.
Chief Minister Anandiben Patel had yesterday ordered a CID probe into the alleged assault on Dalit community members at Una in Gir-Somnath district and also announced setting up a special court for speedy trial of the case.
The incident, wherein Dalit youths were paraded and flogged for allegedly skinning a dead cow, caused nation-wide outrage after its video went viral. The victims contention was that they were skinning a dead cow and had not killed it.
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New Delhi :
Pakistan has violated the ceasefire along the Line of Control and the International Border 16 times since March, the Rajya Sabha was informed today.
As per the details given by Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar in a written reply, the maximum violations was along the LoC which saw 14 such incidents. Appropriate retaliation to the violations, as required, has been carried out by Indian Army/BSF, he said.
In addition, all violations of ceasefire are taken up with Pakistan authorities at the appropriate level through the established mechanism of hotlines, flag meetings as well as weekly talks between the Directorate Generals of Military Operations of the two countries, he said.
Parrikar said that diplomatically, India has repeatedly emphasised, including at the highest level, the need for Pakistan to uphold the sanctity of the LoC and the International Border in Jammu and Kashmir as its obligations emanating from the Simla Agreement and the Lahore Declaration.
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Kochi:
A teenager who was declared brain-dead following a road accident gave life to a 27-year-old woman suffering from a rare disease as his heart was successfully transplanted in her after being transported from Thiruvananthapuram by a Naval Air Ambulance here today. A team of doctors at the Lisie Hospital here claimed that they have successfully transplanted the heart in Sandhya of Thrissur who was suffering from a rare heart disease.
"Surgery is a success," a hospital spokesperson said after the five-hour-long transplantation surgery.
Vishal, 15, from Mukkola in Thiruvananthapuram, had suffered severe head injury after he was hit by a speeding car on July 16, when he was his way school. He was admitted to Thiruvananthapuram Government Medical College where he was declared brain dead last evening.
When officials in Kerala government's Mrithasanjeevani, Kerala Network of Organ Sharing, contacted members of Vishal's family, they agreed to donate his organs, including heart, liver and kidneys.
While his heart was brought to Kochi hospital, kidneys were donated to two patients at Thiruvananthapuram Medical College.
Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan intervened to arrange the Naval air ambulance to transport the organs to ensure that they reach the recipients in time.
Ernakulam District Collector MG Rajamanickyam yesterday forwarded a request to Headquarters, Southern Naval Command (HQSNC) for transportation of the harvested heart from Thiruvananthapuram to Kochi via air. Accordingly, four doctors of Lisie Hospital were airlifted by an IN Dornier from INS Garuda to Thiruvananthapuram at 6.30 AM today.
The medical team along with the harvested heart returned to INS Garuda, Kochi around 1 PM.
New Delhi :
Expressing disappointment over Home Minister Rajnath Singhs remarks on the Arunachal Pradesh episode in Lok Sabha, Congress today said BJP did not reflect any sense of regret and tried to wash its hands off the constitutional crisis it had created despite talks of cooperative federalism.
The party has sought a short duration discussion on the Arunachal Pradesh issue and expressed hope that BJP will display greater responsibility and accountability.
In the reply of the Home Minister, we found that BJP tried to obfuscate the responsibility to distract the attention of the people and almost tried to wash its hands off the constitutional crisis it had created, Congress spokesman Gaurav Gogoi said.
He said the reply of the Home Minister seemed to indicate that the BJP had nothing to do with these developments but how can it deny the role of the then Arunachal Pradesh Governor and, in case of Uttarakhand, party General Secretarys? Can the role of allurements to various MLAs of the Congress Party be denied by the BJP? he asked.
The Home Minister has indicated that BJP was yet to absorb the implications of the Supreme Court verdict. It seems they are still deluded by power and feel they can use unconstitutional methods without being held accountable to people of Uttarakhand, Arunachal Pradesh and states where BJP is still undertaking attempts to destabilise democratically elected governments, the Congress leader said.
Gogoi said while the Supreme Court has held BJP guilty of constitutional overreach, yet, instead of owning accountability, despite talk of cooperative federalism, we saw no sense of moral regret today in the remarks of the Home Minister and it is deeply disappointing and at the same time deeply disturbing.
He said, We had hoped that we would get an assurance that in the future, the BJP will not employ such unconstitutional methods.
Hoping that in the coming days, there will be a broader discussion in the Lok Sabha on this issue, he said, We have submitted a request for a short duration discussion under Rule 193. We hope that given a second chance, the BJP will show far greater responsibility and accountability than what it has shown today.
Gogoi alleged the Arunachal Pradesh Governor misused his constitutional position. This subversion of constitutional positions to further BJPs political agenda is what the Congress party is terming a systematic pattern to destabilise the Indian democracy, he said.
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New Delhi :
It seems troubles are unfolding for Salman one after the other, just after his rape remark Bhai was denied boarding a flight for being late.
He was supposed to fly off to Delhi from Mumbai with Vistara Airlines, but he reached airport 15 minutes late. If reports are to be believed, Salman reached the office on time but decided to chill at the airports VIP lounge a while longer despite multiple boarding announcements.
As a result he was denied boarding the flight. After which Salman got into a heated argument with airport authorities in Mumbai.
Well, such incidents are rare to find as stars hardly get to see the treatment common man gets. But this time it was Salman Khan.
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Game of social network giants to battle over youngsters
VietNamNet Bridge In an era when virtual space takes the throne, everyones activities can become public common property. As youngsters today find that Facebook is no longer a safe sanctuary for their privacy, the need to seek out other applications such as Snapchat is at full throttle.
Illustrative image -- File photo
Up to now, Facebook has been the baron who ruled over the cyber space world. Its power overshadowed other social networks like Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram. Yet, since Snapchat started raids into this world, users have been drawn towards the multi-purpose application.
Snapchat is a funny image messaging and multimedia mobile application initially released in September 2011 by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown. It is used to share photos, short videos, texts and drawings.
The app is free to download and it is free to send messages and videos, both of which will "self destruct" a few seconds after the person you sent them to has viewed them.
The official statistics from Snapchat itself say the app has over 100 million active users all over the globe. Most of them are youngsters; and about 30 per cent of them have moved in from Facebook to avoid their parents monitoring activities.
The reason for that is simple. Previously, the number of parents using Facebook was reported as extremely low. Now, 75 per cent of parents are able to use the social network. With only a few simple clicks, they can see what their children are doing, where they are, who they are hanging out with, and much more.
The more open the social network becomes, the more features it is likely to offer various types of users. Facebooks interface is getting more friendly after years of development, making it easy for parents to access.
However, for new territory like Snapchat, the learning curve is at a completely different level.
Even young people find it hard to use the Snapchat app the very first time. A 19-year-old reader of Zing News, Tran Ngoc Khanh, said its function keys and how to manipulate it were quite complicated for beginners.
Sooner or later, this app will be popular in Viet Nam. There is an undeniable truth that Snapchat might be harder to use than Facebook, but once you get used to it, you can not imagine how useful it is.
Khanh has accounts on both Facebook and Snapchat, and her mum Vu Thi Suong said Snapchat was like a maths exam for her to handle.
One fine morning I accidentally grabbed my daughters phone when she was away and saw a message for her on this weird app called Snapchat, quickchat or something. A few minutes later, as I looked for it again to question her, the message had totally disappeared, she complained to me.
I may take Khanhs side entirely, as a recent online survey showed the number of people using Snapchat video globally has picked up 2 billion more views than for videos on Facebook, with 9,000 shares on Snapchat in comparison with 2,200 shares on Facebook. In the category of young users, Snapchat also beats its blue rival with 85 per cent of its users being under 35 compared to Facebooks 65 per cent.
That seems correct to my cousin Dao Minh Phuongs mother. From a zero to a hero of the technology kingdom, she gave me a more logical reason why parents found Snapchat a mission impossible.
Maybe adults quitting Facebook and turning to Snapchat is just a dream, and these naughty kids will always know it best. While on Facebook and Twitter, we can follow the news and even do shopping online as much as we like. What can we do with Snapchat? Send a selfie to our friends or the kids with a cute emoticon? Or have a confidential chat with our soul mates? This is definitely not what we will do at our age, she cried.
And so, my little friends can now be at ease making a fuss in their own territories. They no longer have to fear their parents sneaking a look at their messages when theyve been given bad grades or are sharing girlfriend, boyfriend things.
Some teenagers may not get too excited with this young app. A high school student remarked, Snapchat cannot save anything in its memory. For a person who cannot remember anything like me, this one is like instant noodles. Besides, I am too slow to perceive any information like images, messages, or videos, while many of my friends edit their selfies so fast I cannot even see a thing.
In the case of my younger brother, an Internet bookworm, whether Snapchat can overthrow Facebook or not is an unpredictable matter for the future.
We cannot be certain of anything. I have it installed on my phone, but no more. This app is even harder to use than Instagram, not to mention Facebook. Until Snapchat can reach down to the common level like its preceding brothers I dont think it will be very popular in Viet Nam. Most of my friends even prefer Instagram more, due to its diversified store and friendly interface.
While this particular social network battle is still burning here, I recommend you have Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or whatever apps you like on your phone, as long as they bring you a little fun, even just for a few minutes. Who knows if the next app will sweep you off your seat soon and make you forget all of the above!
VNS
People in Greater Danbury are obtaining gun permits at a faster rate than they did in 2013, when permit applications spiked across Connecticut in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shootings.
An analysis of new pistol permits issued over the last 51/2 years by Hearst Connecticut Media suggests if the 2016 trend continues, 1,875 new gun permits will be issued in Danbury and seven surrounding towns, an increase of 30 percent over the regions high-water mark in 2013.
Observers say people who until recently had no need for a gun are suddenly reserving the right to own one for two main reasons:
They are concerned they will lose their right to protect themselves if federal lawmakers succeed in passing gun control legislation.
They are concerned about the governments ability to protect them in the wake of terrorism and mass shootings.
There is a lot of truth to that, said Bethel Police Chief Jeffrey Finch, whose town has seen more gun permits issued in the first six months of this year than in all of 2013. People I know who couldnt be bothered with guns before now want to get an AR-15, because they think their right to buy one is going to be taken away.
Statewide numbers tell a similar story. So far this year, 16,000 people have received pistol permits, compared to 25,000 in all of 2013.
Without a doubt, we saw a dramatic increase in 2013 after the events of Dec. 14, 2012, and we are seeing it spike again this year, said Newtown Police Chief James Viadero, referring to the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012.
People say Chief, I would just like to have a gun in the home for personal protection, and you have to admit they do have a legitimate concern, Viadero said. You had the event at the Pulse in Orlando and then Dallas happened last week, and now you wake up and see what just happened in France.
Viadero was referring to the 49 people slain in June in Orlando, Fla., the five police officers shot to death on July 7 in Dallas, and the terrorist attack last week that killed at least 84 people in southern France.
Observers said more people decide to get gun permits after a terrible crime for the same reason gun sales increase after mass-casualty events.
Its a national trend that gun sales and permit applications spike after a mass shooting hits the news, and Bethel is part of that trend, said Matt Knickerbocker, Bethels top elected leader. People think Oh no, this is going to be the event that makes Congress restrict guns, so I better get one now.
Bethel is the most dramatic example of a larger trend across the state in a year where terrorism and domestic gun violence have been prominent and divisive topics in the presidential primaries.
Bethel issued 77 permits in 2012, which was average for the town. That number spiked to 122 permits in 2013 following the deaths of 26 first-graders and educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School and the intense debate about gun control that resulted. In 2016, the town has surpassed that number, issuing 123 gun permits, with six months left in the year.
Bethel is a microcosm of the rest of the state and indicative of the realization by Connecticut residents that the police are not going to be everywhere to protect you, said Scott Wilson, president of the 23,500-member Connecticut Citizens Defense League, a Second Amendment advocacy group, which has added about 2,000 members since the beginning of the year. So, every day, you see more ordinary people who have never owned a gun starting to realize they need to be responsible for taking action for their own safety.
A gun industry spokeswoman said the surge in gun permits is part of a national trend, although national permit numbers were not immediately available.
We are seeing all over the country, Americans exercising their Second Amendment rights because they see the government cannot always be there, said NRA spokeswoman Catherine Mortensen. From the San Bernardino shooting in December to the Orlando shooting last month, Americans want to protect and defend themselves, and that is part of what you are seeing in Connecticut.
Security questions
The irony about the widespread spike in gun permits is that it comes at a time when serious crime is in decline.
Locally, Ridgefield consistently ranks as Connecticuts safest town, and Danbury has one of the lowest crime rates in the state.
But many people in greater Danbury are apparently feeling less safe.
Crime is down, yes, but perception can be every bit as serious as the facts, Finch said. The government still tells us that they are taking care of everything, but nobody believes that anymore.
Shooting instructors, such as William Reed, said popular perception is a powerful influence on peoples actions when it comes to gun permits.
It goes up and down based on what is going on in the world. You have these mass shootings, and nobody wants Hillary (Clinton) to win because they think she is going to take away their guns, said Reed, an NRA-certified instructor with homes in Stonington and Bethel. After the Paris attacks happened, we had a huge increase in permits because people were afraid.
Reed was referring to the terrorist attacks in Paris in mid-November that killed 130 people. He predicted Greater Danbury would see more permit applications in the fall with the approach of the November presidential election.
A local police chief said he expected the rise in permits to continue.
Last month, we had 21 new applications come in, said Monroe Police Chief John Salvatore, president of the Connecticut Police Chiefs Association, whose town issued 97 permits in 2012. We are seeing about three times as many permits this year, and it does seem to be connected to the national discussion about restricting access to firearms.
Knickerbocker said he has seen several people he knows make the conversion from non-gun owners to permit holders recently in the name of personal security.
But he challenged the assumption that more guns in citizens hands enhances a communitys safety.
I am finishing a masters degree in public administration, and there is no research that supports that argument, Knickerbocker said. But there is a massive amount of scholarly research that equates more guns in society with higher rates of death, and strong evidence that shows states with stricter gun laws have lower death rates.
The president of a Ridgefield shooting range said he has nothing against expanded background checks and other modest forms of gun control, but others are suspicious of it.
We are generally going to see a spike in gun permits in an election year, and this year obviously guns are a hot topic, said Rob Power, president of the Ramapoo Rifle and Revolver Club. I have talked to a couple of students recently who have told me, Im getting this (permit) now while I can, because I just dont know what is going to happen.
rryser@newstimes.com; 203-731-3342
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Esperance
What caused a small plane to crash and kill three on board and critically injure another is now a question for investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board and State Police.
Three bodies were removed from the wreckage and transported to Albany Medical Center Hospital after the crash of the Piper PA-28 on Sunday near Hogan Airport in Schoharie County.
A fourth male passenger was flown to Albany Med and then transferred to the Westchester Medical Center burn unit, Schoharie County Sheriff Anthony Desmond said.
The sheriff said the plane took off from the airstrip and was airborne for about 1,000 feet before crashing southwest of the airport in a wooded, swampy area.
FAA spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen says the aircraft crashed around 6:45 p.m. Saturday and was destroyed by fire.
Millicent Hoidal, an NTSB investigator-in-charge, arrived at the airport and documented damage to the aircraft and marks made on the ground and interviewed two witnesses.
Hoidal, who in the past worked as an investigator in Anchorage, Alaska, said she hopes to move the wreckage from its swampy resting place to a more secure environment.
The NTSB is charged by Congress with investigating every civil aviation accident in the United States. It will release a report in seven to 10 days, a spokesman said.
Desmond said he did not know the identities of the victims, but said they were apparently traveling back to Connecticut.
The airstrip on the Schoharie/Montgomery county line is listed as being owned by Tim Hogan, who has addresses near the airstrip and in Bedford Hills, Westchester County.
No information was immediately available about who the plane was registered to.
jlawrence@timesunion.com 518-454-5467
According to The 2015 Global Accelerator Report, accelerator programs are launching every year in all regions throughout the globe. However, it's found its foothold in the U.S. and Canada.
In 2005, Paul Graham launched Y Combinator (YC), setting forth an entirely new business model known as the startup accelerator. YC provided housing for young startups in exchange for a stake in equity. The principle of the idea was that their investments would later generate profit through successful startup exits, and in turn create more capital to re-invest in even more startups.
In 2015, more than $90 million was invested in the U.S. and Canada by 111 accelerators into 2,968 startups. More than one-third, or $35 million, was invested in more than 900 startups in California, particularly in Silicon Valley.
New York invested the second largest amount, totaling $8.7 million in 398 startups, followed by Texas with an investment of $6 million in 197 startups. Hawaii came in fourth place among top investments with $5.6 million funneled into 42 startups. British Columbia rounds out the top five in terms of total investments with $4.6 million invested in 206 startups.
Between 2007 and 2012, the U.S. and Canada experienced a period of substantial growth in the accelerator industry. With a brief exception in 2010 during the wake of the financial crisis, a greater number of accelerator programs launched every year. Even after the industrys regional peak in 2012, the industry still grows by double digits every year.
Compared to global trends, the region has stayed ahead of the curve. Most other regions around the globe showed a peak growth rate in 2014 or later. In 2015, more than half of the newly launched accelerator programs were focused on specific niche markets, including health, food and neuroscience.
Related: Why the Number of Accelerators Is Accelerating
Approximately two-thirds of accelerators in U.S. are for-profit ventures. The opposite is true for Canada. Unlike for-profit accelerators, non-profit programs generally do not take equity, and they tend to focus on industries with a specific public benefit, such as health and education. Non-profit programs may also focus on providing new opportunities for minority groups, and they may be either privately or publicly funded.
Approximately nine percent of accelerator programs in the U.S. and Canada are completely publicly funded while another 27 percent are funded through public-private partnerships.
Public funding typically comes in the form of government grants and subsidies and are indicative of governments seeing innovation as a key factor for maintaining economic competition and taking action to foster it within their borders.
Private funding usually comes from high net worth individuals, angel groups and other private investors, seeking a return on investment through acquisitions, IPOs or other positive exits.
Related: Every Startup Gains From An Incubator or Accelerator
Traditionally, most accelerator programs are modeled to earn revenue through startup exits. Yet a global trend is occurring where more accelerator programs have implemented or plan to implement alternative revenue strategies, including corporate sponsorships, corporate partnerships, hosting events, charging fees for mentorship and housing and other similar strategies.
In the U.S. and Canada, 65 percent of accelerators report a long-term strategy (more than 12 months) to rely on the exit model. Yet in order to cover expenses within the short-term, 87 percent reported plans to increase their revenue through alternative models: 9 percent through mentorship fees, 17 percent through office space fees, 18 percent through event fees; 55 percent through corporate sponsorships and 32 percent through corporate partnerships.
Corporate partnerships, which include running acceleration programs in tandem or on behalf of corporations, as well as corporate sponsorship, have become a dominant new source of funding.
Roughly 40 percent of accelerators reported that they plan to use corporate sponsorships and partnerships to generate revenue for the long-term. It is likely that the relationship between accelerators and corporations will grow significantly. Globally, there is a growing number of corporations - both large and mid-sized -- that are looking at startups as a source of innovation to help improve operational efficiency.
Related: 5 Times You Should Rethink Joining an Accelerator
Accelerators in the U.S. and Canada also have unique predictions in what startup industry the next big idea will occur.
According to the report, there is a higher interest in investing in startups over the next 12 months that are focused on big data analytics (71 percent), Internet of Things (68 percent), SaaS (67 percent) and mobile apps (63 percent). The least favored startup categories were in cleantech (26 percent) and real estate (24 percent). Accelerators around the globe are focused on similar industries with Internet of Things and big data attracting prominent interest globally.
The U.S. and Canada accelerator industry stands out among the other regions examined in Gust and Fundacitys Global Accelerator Report 2015 for early growth, global strength and more recent maturation.
As expected, the regions investment on a global scale is greater than any other region. However, the innovation is not limited to Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley, Route 128 Corridor in Boston or North Carolinas research triangle.
There is a substantial accelerator presence in Utah, Minnesota, Maryland and Hawaii. Similar to a global trend, the region also displays a shift from the traditional exit-focused model of the first accelerator programs to a more diversified business model.
The region also demonstrates a heavy reliance on corporate sponsorships and partnerships and a strong interest in continuing the practice well into the future. And while the rest of the world quickly catches up, the U.S. will continue to be a key player in shaping the future of the accelerator industry and its role in sparking global technological innovation.
Related:
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TORONTO, July 19, 2016 /CNW/ - Canadian governments need an affordable blueprint to drive their green tech goals, according to a new report from the C.D. Howe Institute. In "A Blueprint for Going Green: The Best Policy Mix for Promoting Low-Emissions Technology," author David Popp draws on international evidence to produce recommendations for the efficient development of green energy technology.
Governments across Canada are examining policies to promote low greenhouse gas emissions technology. Ontario's Climate Change Action Plan includes up to $375 million of research and development (R&D) support for low-emissions technologies with billions more on technology adoption. Alberta's government is proposing a carbon tax, with much of the revenues devoted to supporting low-emission technology. Ottawa's policies include a $2 billion Low Carbon Economy Trust to support projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, with this type of significant investment from Canadian governments, public funds need to be used effectively in order to minimize waste.
"With plans in the works for expanding alternative energy research budgets, prudent planning is essential," says Popp. "Efforts to further the development of green energy technologies require both additional research dollars and policy support to create demand for new technologies," he adds.
Research on the effectiveness of policies to promote low-emission energy technologies, such as wind and solar energy, suggests three lessons in particular for Canada's green tech blueprint. They are:
Create demand with carbon prices - Supporting technology development means not only investing in new technologies but also creating demand for clean technologies in the broader economy, through carbon pricing. Fund tech development that is not yet cost effective - Governments should direct their own research and development to non-commercial research rather than crowding out applied research that private companies might do. Canada cannot go it alone - Just as Canadian oil producers sell to a global market, so alternative energy producers must also pay attention to global markets.
New and improved low-emission energy technologies will be vital to meet Canada's pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent compared to 2005 levels by 2030. "With the significant investment we are starting to see from Canadian governments, it is crucial that green tech development be done in an effective and cost-efficient manner in order to minimize waste of public funds," the author concludes.
For the report go to: https://www.cdhowe.org/public-policy-research/blueprint-going-green-best-policy-mix-promoting-low-emissions-technology
The C.D. Howe Institute is an independent not-for-profit research institute whose mission is to raise living standards by fostering economically sound public policies. Widely considered to be Canada's most influential think tank, the Institute is a trusted source of essential policy intelligence, distinguished by research that is nonpartisan, evidence-based and subject to definitive expert review.
SOURCE C.D. Howe Institute
For further information: David Popp, Professor of Public Administration and International Affairs at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University; or Benjamin Dachis Associate Director, Research, C.D Howe Institute; 416-865-1904, or email: [email protected]
SOUTH AMERICA RECEIVES AID FROM CHARITY ORGANIZATION IN AFRICA
LAGOS, Nigeria, July 19, 2016 /CNW/ - On April 16th 2016, the nation, Ecuador was hit by a colossal earthquake of magnitude 7.8. The severity of the disaster reverberated throughout the entire country, leaving at least 500 dead and 27,500 injured. Moved by the plight of Ecuadorians, T.B. Joshua - Founder of Emmanuel TV - sent a relief team to Esmeraldas Province, Ecuador and dispatched a Boeing 727 Cargo Plane, which contained 20 tons of relief hygiene materials, perishable, and non-perishable food stuff.
(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160718/390379 )
(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160718/390380 )
(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160718/390381 )
(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160718/390382 )
Upon arrival, the relief and aid supplies were received by representatives of the Minister of Defense on behalf of the people of Ecuador. The Armed Forces of Ecuador loaded the aid into army trucks and transported to the Emmanuel TV Operations Center, situated close to Esmeraldas City. The supplies were offloaded, repackaged, and distributed to various shelter camps in the Esmeraldas Province.
The Emmanuel TV Team also extended its relief efforts to a remote village, Chachi de San Salvador, which had also been gravely affected by the quake in the areas of access to clean water and the destruction of its local school. In response to this particular community's needs, the Team supplied the community with equipment that converts river and unclean water into potable water. The Team is also undergoing a school construction project - at a cost of US$262,000 - to rebuild the entire school complex that was destroyed. The reconstructed school will provide learning facilities for 350 students.
The people of Ecuador, as well as its Government, continue to express their gratitude for the Emmanuel TV Ecuador Relief efforts. A grateful beneficiary, from the Chachi community, said: "This is the first aid we have received from another country". The relief efforts have aided over 5,000 Ecuadorians, totaling over half a million US Dollars.
About Emmanuel TV
Emmanuel TV is an international TV Station and NGO, headquartered in Lagos, Nigeria. It was founded by T.B. Joshua, a philanthropist, who has been responding to individual and societal needs across the world. Emmanuel TV has been providing food aid to poor communities in Colorado, USA; promoting women's rights by providing funds to widows to start small businesses; building a school in Lahore, Pakistan and granting international scholarships - these are among a fraction of its practices. Such humanitarian endeavors are its strides to achieving the international community's Sustainable Development Goals.
To find out more, click here.
SOURCE Emmanuel TV
Official Arrival in Their New Habitat
MONTREAL, July 19, 2016 /CNW Telbec/ - Montreal Space for Life invites media representatives to see the official arrival of the lynx kittens, along with their mother, in the Laurentian Maple Forest ecosystem. Be the first to meet them and watch them exploring their new surroundings.
Two lynx kittens were born on the night of May 1516 at the Biodome. This event, relatively rare for Canada lynx in zoos, was part of the Species Survival Plan of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) in the US. The lynx at the Biodome play a valuable role in helping to maintain the genetic diversity of the captive population.
Starting Wednesday, visitors will be able to watch the lynx kittens exploring their new playground, under their mother's watchful eye. The little balls of energy are sure to have fun climbing the trees and scampering around the rocks in their habitat.
Come get a close-up look at the new kids on the block at the Biodome!
WHERE: Montreal Biodome/Montreal Space for Life
Viau metro station
Parking ($): 3000, rue Viau (outdoor lot)
3200, rue Viau (indoor lot)
WHEN: Wednesday, July 20, at 9 a.m.
The lynx will officially be brought into the habitat at 9:15 a.m.
WHAT: Photo/video shoot
Experts available for interviews
SOURCE Ville de Montreal - Biodome de Montreal
For further information: Karine Jalbert, Communications Co-ordinator, 514 872-1453, [email protected]; Marie-Joelle Filion, Communications Co-ordinator, 514 868-4840, [email protected]
TORONTO, July 19, 2016 /CNW/ - ProMIS Neurosciences ("ProMIS" or the "Company"), a company focused on the discovery and development of precision treatments for neurodegenerative diseases, today announced that it has initiated a program to identify novel therapeutic targets on neurotoxic strains of the protein TDP43, implicated in the development of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis ("ALS") and frontotemporal dementia ("FTD").
"ProMIS will apply its proprietary computational algorithms, supplemented by other methods pioneered by ProMIS scientists, to identify specific therapeutic targets on misfolded TDP43," said ProMIS Chief Science Officer, Dr. Neil Cashman. "Our goal is to specifically target misfolded TDP43 without disrupting the critical role that normally-folded TDP43 plays in cell biology. ProMIS plans to validate the monoclonal antibodies we develop against misfolded TDP43 in diseased human tissue, and then select the ideal candidates to progress to drug development."
TDP43 is present in every cell, and in addition to participating in the expression and processing of genetic material, TDP43 plays a critical role in the response of cells to oxidative stress. In ALS, FTD and other neurodegenerative diseases however, TDP43 can lose its normal function, forming intracellular aggregates of misfolded TDP43 that disrupt cellular energy generation and normal aging-related protein degradation.
ProMIS will host a webinar on Wednesday, July 20th at 1:00 PM ET to discuss the Company's recent progress, followed by Q&A session with Dr. Elliot Goldstein, ProMIS' CEO, and Dr. Neil Cashman, ProMIS' CSO. Participants can register for the webinar at:
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/8889008727741875969
About ProMIS Neurosciences, Inc.
The mission of ProMIS Neurosciences is to discover and develop precision medicine therapeutics for effective treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, in particular Alzheimer's disease and ALS.
ProMIS Neurosciences' proprietary target discovery engine is based on the use of two, complementary techniques. The Company applies its thermodynamic, computational discovery platformsProMIS and Collective Coordinates to predict novel targets known as Disease Specific Epitopes (DSEs) on the molecular surface of misfolded proteins. Using this unique "precision medicine" approach, ProMIS Neurosciences is developing novel antibody therapeutics and specific companion diagnostics for Alzheimer's disease and ALS. The company has also developed two proprietary technologies to specifically identify very low levels of misfolded proteins in a biological sample. In addition, ProMIS Neurosciences owns a portfolio of therapeutic and diagnostic patents relating to misfolded SOD1 in ALS, and currently has three preclinical monoclonal antibody therapeutics against this target.
The TSX has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
The information in this release may contain certain forward-looking information. Such information involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those implied by statements herein, and therefore these statements should not be read as guarantees of future performance or results. All forward-looking statements are based on the Company's current beliefs as well as assumptions made by and information currently available to it as well as other factors. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this press release. Due to risks and uncertainties, including the risks and uncertainties identified by the Company in its public securities filings, actual events may differ materially from current expectations. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
For further information please consult the Company's website at:
www.promisneurosciences.com
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SOURCE ProMIS Neurosciences Inc.
For further information: NATIONAL Equicom: Michael Moore: [email protected]; Abby Garfunkel: [email protected]; or contact Dr. Elliot Goldstein, President and Chief Executive Officer, ProMIS Neurosciences Inc., Tel. 415 341-5783, [email protected]
There are striking similarities between Turkey and Nigeria. Both countries have past experiences of military rule. While Turkey can boast of nationalist soldiers like Mustafa Kemal Ataturk who will shun all tribal sentiments and institute strong economic reforms; Nigeria has had to battle with corrupt and power-hungry generals whose only mandate is gratifying their inordinate desires. To buttress this point, there have been several rumours of a possible military coup in Nigeria in recent time. From the sections these are coming, one can see the patriotism in those hailing the imaginary coup. Perhaps the media and the opposition need to learn how to and how not to play politics in Nigeria using Turkey example because military coups are no longer fashionable, as the Turkish recent experience clearly show.
The All Progressives Congress (APC) in Ekiti State has accused Governor Ayodele Fayose of allegedly spending the states money to prosecut...
The All Progressives Congress (APC) in Ekiti State has accused Governor Ayodele Fayose of allegedly spending the states money to prosecute his legal matter with EFCC.Publicity Secretary, Taiwo Olatunbosun, said in statement in Ado-Ekiti that the party was in possession of fact that the N22m spent to charter airplane that conveyed his lawyer, Mike Ozekhome from Lagos to Akure airport was allegedly taken from the states treasury. EFCC had frozen the governors account about a month ago over alleged fraudulent diversion of arms cash from the office of the former National Security Adviser, Col Sambo Dasuki, to finance Fayoses election.About N1.21b of the cash was traced to the governors accounts and those of his friends and family, including Abiodun Agbele.Fayose denied collecting money from Dasuki for his election, claiming that his election was financed by Zenith Bank, which has since denied the charge.EFCC subsequently froze Fayoses accounts, forcing him to take the anti-graft agency to court for acting illegally in freezing his accounts.But APC has kicked against the governor for allegedly drawing from the state finances to hire a lawyer to prosecute the case in court. Olatunbosun alleged that Fayoses lawyer, Mike Ozekhome, had flown from Lagos to Akure, Ondo State capital, twice since the beginning of the case, all at the expense of the state government.We gathered from a reliable source that a warrant for the payment of N22 million being the cost of chartered aircraft that flew Ozekhome twice from Lagos to Akure was issued and the money released almost immediately by the office of the Accountant General.The N22 million is outside of the legal fee, which has been reportedly paid to Ozekhome by the state government, to pursue a personal matter for the governor whose private account was frozen.Fayose is fond of using state funds for his personal affairs as it is the case with his latest matter with the EFCC, the same way he has been spending states money on adverts in several newspapers to abuse President Muhammadu Buhari, Olatunbosun explained.He accused Fayose of appropriating the states funds as his personal money, citing IGR cash balances allegedly kept in secret accounts that were only known to the governor.Fayose has taken corrupt practices in government to a ridiculous height by renting out his personal house in Abuja to the State Government to be used as Abuja Government House for eight years at N50 million per annum, even though Ekiti State Government has a befitting guest house and hotel called the NANET SUITES in the Federal capital.Fayose and his counsel should be reminded that it is a financial crime to use state funds for personal matters and we wish to invite the EFCC to quiz the state Accountant General and the Cabinet Office over this abuse of office and flagrant violation of financial regulations, he concluded.
A group known as the United Niger Delta Energy Development Security Strategy, UNDEDSS, has given out suggestions that will help bring to a...
A group known as the United Niger Delta Energy Development Security Strategy, UNDEDSS, has given out suggestions that will help bring to an end the rampaging crises in the Niger Delta region.UNDEDSS maintained that for the lingering crises in the oil producing region to be brought to a halt, President Muhammadu Buhari must personally chair the dialogue team and also appoint credible Special Adviser from the region.The group in a statement by its Secretary General, Tony Iprinye Uranta urged the Buhari-led Federal Government to adopt the holistic 2009 Amnesty Dynamics former President, Umar Yaradua deployed in putting an end to the agitation in the region.According to the group, the Federal Government should re-establish the Niger Delta Committee/Council that operated five sub-Committees with the aim of addressing arms agitation in the region.The statement reads, UNDEDSS and other leading stakeholders in the region have tirelessly interfaced with very senior members of this Administration and given them a detailed template the President should deploy now to resolve this growing insecurity in the region, which is negatively impacting all of Nigeria.In the light of of the conflicting statements being made by too many putative representatives of both the region and the Federal Government, it is necessary, however, to state that the Niger Delta is not going to know sustainable peace via the coterie of so-called Contact Groups or Committees! And, that there cannot be any reliable dialogue, between the FGN and the region, without a commitment to Justice and Equity by President Buhari himself.UNDEDSS also stressed that the Federal Government should also adopt the 2008 Niger Delta Technical Committees Report.The statement further advised the Federal Government that in a bid to reassure the people of Niger Delta of its sincere commitment to Justice and Equity, it should effect the release of ten secondary school children and others detained as prisoners-of-war for many weeks since the militarys invasion of Gbaramatu Kingdom.The return of Symbols of Gbaramatu traditional worship; and, most importantly, President Buhari addressing the nation to announce that he would personally lead the revival of the 2009 template premised on a Niger Delta Development Committee under his direct supervision, plus grant free passage to all stakeholders he is ready to directly dialogue with.
President Muhammadu Buhari since inception into his administration in May 2015 has shown preference for some State governors.
President Muhammadu Buhari since inception into his administration in May 2015 has shown preference for some State governors.However, factors responsible for this are unexplainable why an individual likes one person and does not feel comfortable with another person.Here are 7 governors we feel the Nigerian president has preference for:Governor Amosun is one of President Buhari's favourite state governors. Apart from his (Buhari) visit to Ogun state to mark the 40th Anniversary of the state to the cancellation of Lagos trip to honour Governor Ibikunle Amosun at the Presidential Villa, Abuja shows a greater concern that the president knows his people.Apart from anointing the candidacy of the Governor Nasir Elrufai, the President has visited Kaduna state as part of the few states the President has visited in the country since inception of his administration.El-rufai few months ago said President Muhammadu Buhari forced him to contest last years governorship election.He was quoted as saying that without the encouragement he received from Buhari, who was then the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress ( APC ), he would not have won the election.It was President Muhammadu Buhari that forced me to contest for the governorship race of Kaduna state in revenge for persuading him to run the presidential race, he was quoted as saying.President Buhari and Masari were presidential and governorship candidates under the defunct Congress for Progressives Change (CPC) respectively in 2011.Also Katsina is the home state of the president, Buhari will never joke with the person leading the state, especially when the president and such a person have the same political ideology and also are in the same political camp.President Muhammadu Buhari has on several occasions commended the works of Prof. Ben Ayade of Cross River especially during the inspection of the superhighway being constructed by the governor.The Governor of Cross River State, Senator Ben Ayade, recently justified his seeming closeness to President Muhammadu Buhari despite belonging to different political parties.At a point, he was accused by his political party has been closed to the Presidency.Either by an act of commission or omission, the Cross River governor is today considered as one of the few among the PDP governors who enjoys a cordial working relationship with President BuhariGovernor Shettima should be nicknamed the governor with nine lives. The simple reason for this is because the governor has weathered the storm of Boko Haram insurgency for at least five years. His never-say-die attitude deserves applause by all and sundry.During Buharis electioneering campaign, he stated that Borno is one of his topmost priorities. Indeed, the president has kept to his words by challenging the Nigerian troops to decimate insurgency in the state.President Buhari has visited Borno many times and has assured the governor severally he will always stand by him in order to return the state to its glorious days before terrorism crippled all aspects of life there.Governor Yari is the chairman of Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF).Governor Abdulaziz Yari of Zamfara state Yari could be said to be one of the right hand men of Buhari among all the Northern governors during and after the 2015 general elections.President Buhari trusts the Zamfara state governor that he chose his state as one of the very few he has visited in the month of July. The president did not just go on sight-seeing in the Northwest state; he commissioned some massive road projects there.Governor Ajimobi is also of the the close ally of President Buhari. He has on a several occasions traveled with the presidency to foreign trips and events.He was also part of the defunct ANPP with President Buhari.
An FCT High Court on Tuesday fixed the ruling of the bail application of Abiodun Agbele, an aide to Gov. Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti, till Jul...
An FCT High Court on Tuesday fixed the ruling of the bail application of Abiodun Agbele, an aide to Gov. Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti, till July 21.Agbele was arraigned by Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC) for alleged money laundering of N1.2 billion from the Office of the National Security Adviser.The judge, Justice Olukayode Adeniyi, adjourned ruling earlier fixed for Tuesday after a closed door meeting with both counsel in the matter.Agbeles counsel, Chief Mike Ozekhome (SAN), had challenged the breach of his clients fundamental human rights by the EFCC. Ozekhome told the court that the application, dated July 11 was supported by 33-paragraph affidavit, and another nine paragraph affidavit of urgency.He said that EFCC operatives had detained his client since June 27, and prayed the court to award N500 million as compensation for his unlawful detention. Ozekhome argued that EFCC did mention Agbele to have paid the said money into his own account but rather he paid the money into peoples account.He made a submission that it was wrong practice by EFCC to detain suspects before beginning to look for evidence or commence investigation. EFCC got a warrant of remand on June 30 from a Magistrate Court in Lagos pursuant to Section 293 of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act of Lagos.He said that they should have arraigned him within 48 hours as stipulated by Section 35 (5) of the 1999 Constitution (as amended). The counsel said that Section 35(5) was inconsistent with Section 293 of the ACJA because the constitution was superior.He said that Agbele was granted administrative bail with stringent conditions and EFCC renewed his detention after the given grace period of 14 days lapsed. Ozekhome, therefore, urged the court to grant him bail on self-recognition or on liberal terms since his client had not been proven guilty.But EFCCs counsel, Mr Andrew Akoja, while opposing the bail application, argued that the issue of breach of fundamental rights did not arise at all.Akoja said he had filed a 31-paragraph counter affidavit stating why Agbele should be detained. While he admitted that the Magistrate court might be an inferior court to the Federal High court, the statute has bestowed power on that court.He, therefore, urged the court not to grant bail to the applicant, arguing that before now, the treasonable offence was perceived to be the highest offence in the country, but now corruption is the highest.Akoja further argued that the court lacked jurisdiction to entertain the matter since the alleged offence was not committed within Abuja Magisterial District.
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFFC) has released pictures of one Akinade Tofunmi, a suspected automated teller machine (AT...
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFFC) has released pictures of one Akinade Tofunmi, a suspected automated teller machine (ATM) fraudster who deviously withdrew N3 million from the account of one of her victims within 24 hours.Warning Nigerians to be wary of fraudsters who are currently on the loose, the anti-graft agency said its Ibadan zonal office is on the trail of Tofunmi.It appealed to members of the public to be on the lookout for the suspect in order to prevent her from defrauding more people.HOW SHE WORKSThe EFCC said one of the methods employed by the suspect is to politely approach people having difficulties using the ATM and offer to help them, only to dupe them in the end.According to the agency, Tofunmi operates late in the night when all bank transactions have closed and preferably over the weekend when her prospective victims may not be able to alert the bank authorities.The Ibadan zonal office of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) is on the trail of a suspected ATM fraudster, who goes by the name Akinade Tofunmi. Her trade in stock is identity theft. Her duty post is any ATM Point and Point of Sales (POS) machines across the country, the agency said in a Facebook post.However, she does not work during the official hours of the week, rather she operates late in the night. In her last operation, within twenty four hours; this fraudster who operates with the identity of her victims succeeded to have raked in about three million (N3m) within 24 hours.FAKE KINDNESSThe agency said she operated last on June 3 in Ibadan, disclosing that a woman simply identified as Alhaja was Tofunmis victim.Dateline was Friday, June 3rd, 2016, at about the close of work. A woman simply identified as Alhaja and her husband who was waiting in the car wanted to use an ATM somewhere in Ibadan, Oyo State, when Tofunmi noticed that the woman limps, the agency said.Pretending to be polite and cultured, she offered to assist her with the transaction on the ATM. Unaware of the intention behind the pious approach, she gave the fraudster her ATM card and divulged her PIN.Smartly, the fraudster quickly checked the balance in the account which had one million, seven hundred and forty nine thousand, twenty six naira and seven kobo (N1, 749, 026. 07). After the intended withdrawal of N20, 000:00, the fraudster swapped the card and gave Alhaja a fake ATM card. Oblivious of the swap, she left with her husband.Shortly before midnight, the fraudster started the harvest of her booty. She withdrew one hundred and thirty thousand naira. Having exceeded the daily withdrawing limit for that day, she waited for a few minutes to the following day which was a Saturday. Shortly after midnight, she made another rounds of withdrawals to the tune of one hundred and fifty thousand naira which was also the daily limit for that day. However, Alhaja and her husband had no one to run or call that night to save the situation when the debit alerts started coming in torrent.A BIKE RIDER AS UNWITTING ACCOMPLICETofunmi reportedly went to a night club, where she met her next victim an unsuspecting bike operator, who is currently in EFCC custody.The agency said it is possible that the suspect had fled to Ilorin, Kwara state capital; it appealed to the public to watch out for Tofunmi.EFCC said it had also received disturbing reports of similar nature from Port Harcourt, Rivers state capital.In a desperate need of where and how to empty the balance in the account, she went to a night club where she met a motorcycle transporter, popularly known as Okada whom she approached for a help. Her decoy was that she had enough money in her account but could not access it having exceeded her daily withdrawal limit, the agency said.She showed the bike man her balance and pleaded with him to give her his ATM card, account details and PIN for a quick teller transfer from her (Alhajas) account to the bike mans account. With that, she has been able to secure some of Alhajas money in the bike mans account thereby stealing the identity of the unsuspecting bike man.ROPING IN AN HOTELAt the early hours of that Saturday morning, she asked the bike man to take her to a hotel with an intention to further steal the identity of the hotelier for another movement of the money. At the hotel reception while paying for her accommodation which was N10, 000 (Ten thousand naira) for one night, she deliberately credited the hotels account with one hundred and one thousand naira (N101, 000) feigning a mistake and demanded a refund of ninety-one thousand naira (N91, 000) balance of an overpayment. This was also done with Alhajas ATM card through the POS machine at the Hotel.To further conceal her identity, she provided fake personal details in the hotel and gave the hotel the bike mans account detail when the hotel management requested for an account to deposit the refund.All these happened on Saturday; hence, Alhaja and her husband are still in dilemma with no help in sight to stop the transactions in the account. By Sunday, Alhajas money had moved to the fraudster both in cash and through transfer to the bike mans account domiciled in the same bank.All these while, the fraudster was in possession of both Alhaja the first victim and the bike man, the second victims ATM cards. Later the following day, Monday, the bike man could no longer reach the fraudster on phone; he (the bike man) then went to the bank to request for another ATM card. It was later discovered in the bank that part of Alhajas money was transferred to the bike mans account. He was arrested by the bank and hes now helping the EFCC operatives to track down the fraudster.A NATIONALLY-ACCLAIMED FRAUDSTEREFCC said its investigations had revealed that this same fraudster had stolen the identities of other victims earlier and had absconded to Ilorin, Kwara State.Instances of Tofunmis nefarious activities have also been spotted in other parts of the country, particularly Port Harcourt City. The Commission is hereby seeking the cooperation and support of public spirited members of the society to please help unveil the identity of this fraudster, it said, adding that her face, though with different disguises, is on display for anyone who knows her to please contact any of our offices across the six geopolitical zones and Abuja. She must be apprehended, who knows the next victim?
Senator Godswill Akpabio, has reacted to rumours stating that he will be defecting from the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP to the All Progr...
Senator Godswill Akpabio, has reacted to rumours stating that he will be defecting from the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP to the All Progressives Congress, APC.The rumours started after the Minority leader visited National leader of the APC, Bola Tinubu.Speaking to reporters, the governor's media aide, Anietie Ekong said his boss remains loyal to the PDP. He said he is aware of the rumours about his move to APC but stressed that the reports were being spread by APC propagandists.
Senate President Abubakar Bukola Saraki, on Monday restated his loyalty to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). He also reiterat...
Senate President Abubakar Bukola Saraki, on Monday restated his loyalty to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).He also reiterated his belief that the President Muhammadu Buharis government will redeem its electoral promises made during the 2015 general elections.Saraki spoke at the 10th Abuja Housing Show where top government officials and prominent stakeholders in the housing sector brainstormed on the theme: Expanding access to affordable Housing in Africa.This is contained in a statement by Special Assistant to the Senate President on New Media, Bamikole Omishore.It said that Saraki who acknowledged the presence of the APC National Organizing Secretary, Senator Osita Izunaso who kick-started discussions at the summit, the Senate President assured that the APC government is unwaveringly committed to the social welfare of the people while re-affirming his unalloyed loyalty to the party.Saraki said, The Senate and the National Assembly as a whole believe very strongly that we must make a difference in the housing sector.It said that Saraki who reacted to observations that the existing housing laws needed amendment charged the organizers of the Summit to take a further step by forwarding a document of laws requiring amendments to the National Assembly.He noted that the Senate has commenced the review processes of several laws affecting property rights and access housing in the country.According to the Senate President, the review of the National Housing Fund Act is on-going and would be completed before the end of the year.It quoted Izunaso as saying that housing deficit in the country is pegged at 17million housing units.Izunaso said As at today, only 10 per cent of those who dream to own a house in the country can afford it, as against the 92 per cent house owners in Singapore.The central objective of the Summit, however, is to come up with feasible strategies on how to end the problem of homelessness in Nigeria. .Other personalities at the Summit include the representative of the Speaker of House of Reps, the Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Raji Fashola, Kano State Governor, Dr. Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, Turkish Ambassador to Nigeria, Hakan Cakl, TUC President, Comrade Bobboi Kaigama, among other investors.
Former Osun State deputy governor, Senator Christopher Iyiola Omisore, on Tuesday said he was happy with the decision of the Federal Gov...
Former Osun State deputy governor, Senator Christopher Iyiola Omisore, on Tuesday said he was happy with the decision of the Federal Government to re-open the case files of the gruesome murder of the former Minister of Justice and Attoney-General of the Fedration, Chief Bola Ige and the late National Deputy Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party, Chief Aminosari Dokubo.He described the revisit of the cases as good and welcome.In a statement by his Media Director, Diran Odeyemi, he, however, urged the FG to extend its search to unveiling the killers of late Lagos Peoples Democratic Party leader, Funso Williams, and late member of the Osun State House of Assembly, Odunayo Olagbaju.He also advised the FG and the acting Inspector-General of Police, Mr. Ibrahim Idris, to widen the scope of their investigation rather than limiting themselves to a particular area or section.Omisore said: I am particularly happy that fresh investigation will further exonerate me and others who were wrongfully framed up, suffered untold hardship before we were finally discharged and acquitted by the court.
The General Officer Commanding the Nigerian Armys 1st Division, Adeniyi Oyebade, a major general, authorized last Decembers military ope...
The General Officer Commanding the Nigerian Armys 1st Division, Adeniyi Oyebade, a major general, authorized last Decembers military operation that massacred at least 347 members of the Shia Muslim group in Zaria, and should be prosecuted, a judicial commission of inquiry into the killings, has said in its final report.According to PremiumTimes, the commission of inquiry, set up by the Kaduna State government has indicted Mr. Oyebade and other senior army officers for the attack.The panels report was submitted to Governor Nasir el-Rufai on Friday, but its details are yet to be made public.The killings drew worldwide condemnations, and several investigative reports said hundreds of people were killed by government troops and secretly buried in a mass grave in Zaria, Kaduna State.Premium Times
Afenifere Renewal Group (ARG), a socio-political organisation in the south-west, has condemned the abduction of the Oniba of Iba, Oba Gori...
Afenifere Renewal Group (ARG), a socio-political organisation in the south-west, has condemned the abduction of the Oniba of Iba, Oba Goriola Oseni, and two other residents of Iba.Suspected Niger Delta militants had on Saturday, invaded the palace of the monarch in Iba local council development area of Lagos state and kidnapped him after shooting one of his wives and killing a guard.Olawale Oshun, chairman of the group , in a statement released Monday evening, said, ARG view the monarchs kidnap as a sacrilege and violation of Yoruba mores and values.We note that kidnapping and violent crime have for a while become the scourge of residents close to shoreline of Southwest states.ARG submit that security is at best a proactive concern and at its worst a reactive one. Consequently, the existing security framework in Nigeria, being largely reactive and unduly centralised, has never been efficient and reliable to support the policing of large parts of Nigeria in general or Southwest region in particular.The ARG also used the opportunity to advocate for state and community policing while calling on the six south-west governors to formulate an acceptable security policy for the region.One of the reasons the ARG has consistently been advocating the institution of state policing in conformity with federalism principles is the escalating crime rate despite the sacrificial funding of the centralised police force by respective state governments.We believe that security will be more efficient if state governments dedicate their resources to funding state and community policing in their respective jurisdictions.How worse should things get for Yoruba people and states before our governors realize the imperative need to work around the constitutional impediment on state policing and also, in spite of partisan bends, collaborate with one another to ensure that the security and wellbeing of their people are paid paramount attention.Is there any reason today why the six Southwest governors, and that of any other contiguous state willing to work with them, cannot come together urgently to evolve an acceptable security policy for their people?Yoruba people are waiting, and we hope that the complete desecration of our values and mores will not precede the precept of collaboration.
Atiku Abubakar, Former Vice President, yesterday held a closed door meeting with the national chairman and other officials of the APC at t...
Atiku Abubakar, Former Vice President, yesterday held a closed door meeting with the national chairman and other officials of the APC at the national headquarters of the party in Abuja where he urged them to address deepening crisis.Competent sources told newsmen that Atiku was at the APC national headquarters to rob minds with the leadership on how to address some national issues affecting the integrity of the party.A source close to the meeting said, You know it very well that Atiku had not been at the secretariat for a very long time. He was here partly to see how the APC will rise up and find solution to the protracted misunderstanding between the Presidency and the National Assembly.In deed, he was worried by the happenings in the Senate, occasioned by the trial of the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, as well as the last weeks untoward happenings in the Senate. This is all I can say, the source, who does not want to named, said.Another source said Atiku wanted the APC leadership to live up to its biddings of calling any member to order, especially on matters that affect the integrity of the party.To greater extent, the APC is still living like an opposition instead of a ruling party, there is deepening crisis and serious leaders must talk, Nigerians are complaining, he said.The fight between Senator Dino Melaye and Senator Remi Tinubu is a serious minus to the APC as a party, we cant continue living in denial that the APC house is not in order and Nigerians are watching, he added.Atiku, who was accompanied by Adamawa State Governor Muhammad Bindow Jibrilla, to the APC secretariat, was received by the national chairman of the party, Chief John Odigie-Oyegun.
Senator Dino Melaye has alleged that Senator Remi Tinubu has released N75 million to sponsor a protest against him. He made the allegati...
A civil rights movement, Committee for the Defence of Women's Rights, has uncovered a plan by the wife of a former governor of Lagos State and chairman, Senate Committee on Women Affairs, Mrs. Oluremi Tinubu to sponsor a protest against Senator Dino Melaye this coming Wednesday in Abuja.
The organisation said she has released N75 million to Lagos State APC Woman Leader, Mrs. Kemi Nelson through one of her sisters simply identified as Funlola. The National President of CDWR, Prof. Taibat Majekodunmi, made the revelation in a statement issued on Monday in Abuja. Already, the protesters have stormed Abuja and have booked for 300 rooms in many Hotels in hotels in Abuja. She said, "We have it on good authority that N75 million has been released by Senator Okuremi Tinubu to Mrs. Kemi Nelson through Mrs. Tinubu's sister called Funlola.
The money is to organise a protest in Abuja on Wednesday against the chairman, Denate Committee on the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Dino Melaye, with 1,000 protesters from Lagos. "The protesters have booked for 300 rooms in some in hotels in Abuja. Why did she not organise a protest against the hardship of Nigerian women and widows.
As we speak, Alade market in Ogba area of Lagos has been destroyed and all the women rendered shopless. Oluremi Tinubu did not organise protest about that. "Against the provisions of the constitution of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Kemi Nelson doubles at the State APC Women leader in Lagos and also the zonal women leader of APC in the South West. This will show her greediness and why the Tinubu dynasty has taken over Lagos.
"Women were killed in Kano and Abuja and Mrs. Tinubu is the chairman, Senate Committee on Women Affairs. She did not organise protest over these killings. Mrs. Tinubu has not protested against the skyrocketed price of tomatoes in the market. In the same vein, kerosine is now over N200 per litre and she didn't organised any protest to that effect.
"Instead, she has taken advantage of the prevailing poverty in the land to hire hungry women in the land to partake in an unproductive protest against Dino Melaye. Women like Funmilayo Ransome Kuti, Hajiya Gambosa Sawaba, Sarah Jubril, fought for woman race without attacking any man. Mrs.Oluremi Tinubu should emulate the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Indira Ghandhi, Benazir Bhutto and our own dear Dora Akunyili.
"You can imagine what N75 million will do in the lives of widows and hungry Nigerian women.
We dare Mrs. Tinubu to go ahead with her planned N75 million protest in Abuja. We will also mobilise Nigerian women against this ostentatious display of wealth while the average Nigerian women wallow in abject poverty."
Senator Dino Melaye has alleged that Senator Remi Tinubu has released N75 million to sponsor a protest against him. He made the allegation in a post on his Facebook wall yesterday night.He wrote;
President of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Wabba Ayuba has called for the abolition of security vote for the president and governors ...
President of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Wabba Ayuba has called for the abolition of security vote for the president and governors in the country.He also called for the removal of the immunity clause from the constitution, saying the clause aids corruption.Ayuba said political leaders in other parts of the world do not enjoy immunity against criminal prosecution, adding that Nigeria should not be an exception.The issue of security vote is another form of corruption; in fact, there was a particular state which took N1 billion in one month as security vote, he told NAN in an interview.It is an avenue for corruption. In good governance, all monies spent by government are budgeted and transparently applied. That is what happens in other spheres; so for our sake, the issue of security vote should be done away with.All monies to be spent should be transparently budget for, including the so-called security vote, so that it can be tracked to prevent corruption.On immunity, he said: Nobody should be given immunity against criminal prosecution while in office.Even after they leave office, they use their influence and resources they have accumulated to frustrate prosecution.I have seen cases that lasted for eight to 14 years and were inconclusive. Some of these cases outlived the life of the administration that started the probe, due to this particular challenge.There are some cases that started before the administration of former President Olusegun Obansajo; till now, it is still ongoing.
The Nigerian senate on Tuesday met with Godwin Emefiele, governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), and Kemi Adeosun, minister of fina...
The Nigerian senate on Tuesday met with Godwin Emefiele, governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), and Kemi Adeosun, minister of finance, over the state of the economy.The leadership of the senate met with Emefiele and Adeosun behind closed doors to discuss the fiscal and monetary policies of the Nigerian economy.Senate President Bukola Saraki said the team discussed diversification of the local economy and the new foreign exchange regime.More details soon
ATLANTIC CITY -- Rescuers on personal watercrafts saved a 21-year-old woman from drowning in the ocean off Atlantic City on Monday evening, according to a report.
A 21-year-old woman is in critical condition after nearly drowning off Atlantic City on Monday evening. (Andrew Mills | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)
The woman was unconscious but had a pulse when she was located near a jetty 10 minutes after disappearing while swimming at the Rhode Island Avenue beach, PressofAtlanticCity.com reported.
She is in critical condition at AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center, the report said. The woman's sister was hospitalized with a broken leg after running onto the jetty.
Lifeguards had gone off duty minutes before a 911 call was placed at 6:08 p.m. A severe thunderstorm approaching the area made the rescue more challenging for emergency responders, the report said.
The woman arrived in the United States several weeks ago from Pakistan, the report said.
Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JeffSGoldman. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
NEWARK -- Police on Friday arrested a Paterson man who allegedly robbed a Saddle Brook store in May.
Adelbert Makle, 39, of Paterson. (Bergen County Prosecutor's Office)
Adelbert Makle, 39, robbed the 7-Eleven on Market Street in Saddle Brook on May 10, Acting Bergen County Prosecutor Gurbir S. Grewal said.
Makle threatened a worker with a knife and demanded money, Grewal said. The worker and another employee fled while Makle tried to open the cash register.
He fled the store shortly after, Grewal said.
The Bergen County Prosecutor's Office and Saddle Brook Police Department identified Makle as the robber after a two-month investigation, Grewal said.
Police located and arrested Makle in Newark on Friday. He was charged with armed robbery, possession of a weapon for unlawful purpose, possession of a weapon and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
He was sent to Bergen County Jail in lieu of $300,000 bail.
Myles Ma may be reached at mma@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MylesMaNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
LITTLE FERRY -- A Teaneck man was charged with two counts of attempted murder in connection with two shootings in Englewood, Acting Bergen County Prosecutor Gurbir S. Grewal said.
Jamal Robinson, 45, of Teaneck. (Bergen County Prosecutor's Office)
Police arrested Jamal "Mally" Robinson, 45, on Monday in Little Ferry.
Detectives identified Robinson as the suspect in two shootings, Grewal said. The first, on July 5, a man was shot in the lower leg as he left a home on Howland Avenue in Englewood.
The man was house-sitting for a friend. When he left, a man with a ski mask and gun--allegedly Robinson--approached and asked to "hand it over," Grewal said.
The man said he had no money and turned away. Robinson shot him in the lower leg and took his phone, about $120 in cash and car keys, Grewal said.
On July 7, a man was dropped off at the front door of the Englewood Police Department. He had a gunshot wound to his arm.
Detectives found a blood trail in the rear yard of a house on Orange Street.
The Bergen County Sheriff's Department analyzed shell casings from both shootings. An investigation led detectives to suspect Robinson, Grewal said.
Officers from the prosecutor's office, the Bergen County Regional SWAT Team and Englewood Police Department arrested Robinson in Little Ferry. He was charged with two counts of attempted murder, one count of armed robbery, two counts of possession of a weapon for unlawful purpose, two counts of unlawful possession of a weapon and two counts of certain persons not to possess weapons.
Robinson was sent to Bergen County Jail in lieu of $1 million bail. His arraignment is scheduled for July 27.
Myles Ma may be reached at mma@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MylesMaNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
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Seagulls and pigeons on the boardwalk in Atlantic City.
(Noah K. Murray/The Star-Ledger)
One New Jersey shore town is apparently fed up with its beach bums feeding the seagulls and has issued a warning that a crackdown based a longstanding penalty is coming.
Ocean City officials have announced officers will strictly enforce local laws this summer prohibiting the feed of seagulls and other wildlife -- an infraction that can come with a fine up to $500 and 90 days in jail.
"The Ocean City Police Department in recent years has taken a 'be nice, be kind' approach when it comes to minor infractions related to the beach and boardwalk," Mayor Jay A. Gillian wrote on the city's website on Friday. "They try to issue only warnings. That will change."
The city plans to launch an educational campaign for residents, and Police Chief Chad Callahan will record a message for tourists, which will be played on the boardwalk and posted on social media.
Gillian said the ordinance is "for the health and safety of both animals and humans."
"We've had an increasing number of complaints this summer as the emboldened birds try to take food from people on the beach and boardwalk," he said.
Craig McCarthy may be reached at CMcCarthy@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @createcraig. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
A 29-year-old man has been arrested and charged for allegedly throwing a large rock at a patrol car in Pennsylvania and then attacking a police officer, officials said.
Eric Watson, 29, fired the rock at the cruiser around 2 p.m. on Monday as the vehicle was traveling on East Lincoln Highway in Coatesville, Pa., a town about 40 miles west of Philadelphia. Watson "walked off the sidewalk from in front of the Coatesville Library and intentionally threw a large rock" at the car, according to a police statement.
Police posted a dashcam video of the rock throwing incident to social media on Monday.
16071897 ***IMMEDIATE RELEASE*** On Monday, July 18th 2016 at 1:50 pm, Officer Jared Davis was on patrol in a marked police vehicle. Officer Davis was traveling west bound in the 500 block of East Lincoln Hwy, when the Defendant, Eric Watson (29 YO NH/B/M of the 800 blk of E.Chestnut St Coatesville, PA) walked off the sidewalk from in front of the Coatesville Library and intentionally threw a large rock at Officer Davis' vehicle, shattering the windshield. Officer Davis exited the patrol vehicle and the Defendant attacked him by attempting to strike him in the head with same rock. Officer Davis attempted to arrest the Defendant, but he resisted arrest until backup officers arrived on scene and took him to the ground. A Coatesville City officer suffered a chest injury "broken sternum" during the altercation as a result of the Defendant's actions. The Defendant was charged with aggravated assault on a police officer, institutional vandalism, resisting arrest, and related crimes. The Defendant, Eric Watson was video arraigned at City of Coatesville Police Department before the Honorable Judge Analisa Sondergaard of District Court 15-4-01 and he will be remanded to the Chester County Prison in leu of $100,000 cash bail. MVR footage from Officer Davis' police vehicle. #CPDPressRelease Posted by City of Coatesville Police Department on Monday, July 18, 2016
After Coatesville police officer Jared Davis pulled over and exited the vehicle, Watson tried to hit Davis in the head with the same rock he had thrown at the cruiser, the statement said.
Davis was not injured but another officer called to the scene to help arrest Watson suffered a broken sternum, police said. The name of that officer was not released.
Watson, of Coatesville, Pa., has been charged with aggravated assault, resisting arrest and other crimes, court records show. He is being held in county jail on $100,000 bail.
Online court records do not yet list an attorney for Watson.
Erin O'Neill may be reached at eoneill@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @LedgerErin. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
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The federal government plans to pour $125 million into the fight against a mysterious disease that has ravaged corals in Florida and much of the Caribbean, and now poses a dire threat to the treasured reefs off the Louisiana and Texas coasts.
WASHINGTON (AP) The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol has issued a subpoena to Donald Trump. The nine-member panel sent a letter to the former president's lawyers on Friday, demanding his testimony under oath by mid-November and outlining a series of corresponding documents. The decision by lawmakers to exercise their subpoena power comes a week after the committee made its final case against the former president, who they say is the "central cause" of the multi-part effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It remains unclear how Trump and his legal team will respond to the subpoena, if at all.
#KBO Heroes reach brink of Korean Series after rallying past Twins Powered by back-to-back home runs in the seventh inning, the Kiwoom Heroes defeated the LG Twins 6-4 on Thursday to move within a victory of reaching the South Korean baseball cham...
Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences The Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences is the oldest and largest school at Northwestern. Undergraduate and graduate students study a liberal arts curriculum that encompasses the natural sciences and mathematics, the social sciences, the humanities, fine arts and interdisciplinary areas of study. Visit the Weinberg website.
School of Communication The School of Communication deals with every aspect of communication and its role in human interaction and culture through majors that include communication studies, theater, performance studies and more. Visit the School of Communication website.
School of Education & Social Policy The School of Education and Social Policy prepares students to shape and improve their communities. It offers four courses of study: human development and psychological services, learning and organizational change, secondary teaching and social policy. Visit the School of Education and Social Policy website.
McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Science Northwestern has reshaped engineering education through a curriculum that focuses on creativity, teamwork, and innovative design. Visit the McCormick website.
The Graduate School The Graduate School collaborates with the schools of Arts and Sciences, Communication, Continuing Studies, Education and Social Policy, Engineering, Law, Management, Medicine and Music to offer the master's and doctoral degrees in more than 70 disciplines. Visit the Graduate School website.
Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications As a recognized leader in educating journalists and communicators, Medill teaches its students techniques specific to news and information industries: magazine, newspaper/online, broadcast, or marketing communications. A certificate in integrated marketing communications is also available. Visit the Medill website.
Northwestern Pritzker School of Law Northwestern Pritzker School of Law goes beyond the basics of legal reasoning; students are prepared perform multiple roles over the course of long careers. In addition to the JD program, it offers a joint JD-PhD program with the Graduate School; a JD-MBA program with Kellogg School of Management; and a one-year Master of Science in Law degree for STEM graduates and professionals. Visit the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law website.
Kellogg School of Management Students at the Kellogg School of Management learn the science of management and the art of leadership. Programs include both a full and part-time MBA, executive MBA, PhD options, two undergraduate certificates, as well as additional non-degree executive education opportunities. Visit the Kellogg website.
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Sun King, Indianas second largest craft brewery after Three Floyds, announced this week it will distribute to supermarkets and convenience stores across the state, including in the Region.
Three Floyds and Indianapolis-based Sun King had to team up last year to get state lawmakers to update antiquated brewing laws so they could distribute more of their craft beers throughout the state. The craft breweries had been capped at selling 30,000 barrels a year of craft beer in Indiana but now can sell up to 90,000 barrels annually in their home state.
Valparaiso-based Indiana Beverage has been distributing Sun King in a number of stores locally since March. Sun King had been available in northern Indiana until 2014, when it restricted distribution to its home base of Central Indiana because of the outdated state law.
Indianapolis-based Sun King is now selling four-packs of 16-ounce cans which will soon come in new box packaging at liquor stores throughout the state. It will make 12-ounce cans of Sunlight Cream Ale and Wee Mac Scottish Ale available statewide at grocery stores starting on July 25.
Three Floyds sells its beer in Kentucky, Ohio, Wisconsin and Illinois, especially the Chicago market, but was looking to boost distribution in Indiana to keep up with demand. Some of its beers, like the popular Zombie Dust, are notoriously hard to find and vanish off stores shelves almost as soon as they're delivered.
The Munster brewery has been able to distribute more of its product across Indiana under the updated law.
Sun King has been making a push in Northwest Indiana, including with a special tapping at Catch 22 in Merrillville last week.
"Since barrel one, we have always believed in brewing beer that has exceptional quality, flavor and consistency, said Dave Colt, co-founder and head brewer at Sun King.
The brewery uses new technology such as centrifuge and canning processes that ensure its beers taste just as delicious and freshly tapped as if it were refrigerated, Colt said.
VALPARAISO Bond was reduced Tuesday for a 33-year-old Valparaiso man charged with attempted murder.
Porter Superior Court Judge Roger Bradford reduced the bond from $500,000 cash to $50,000 surety and $5,000 cash for Lee Glover Jr., who is accused of shooting a man July 1 following an argument over money.
Glover's attorney, Russell Brown, told the judge that Glover's incarceration is posing a significant financial burden for his wife, three children and one step-child.
While Glover has prior misdemeanor convictions from seven to eight years ago for having a handgun without a license and disorderly conduct, he did successfully complete probation in those cases, Brown said.
Glover has lived in Valparaiso since 2005 and in Michigan City prior to that, meaning he has ties to the area and is not a flight risk, Brown said. He also poses no threat to the community if released considering these allegations are "not indicative of his character."
The victim in the case told police Glover shot him after he collected the belongings of a mutual friend at her request. A disagreement broke out over how much he should be paid for the effort. The shooting occurred early in the morning outside the victim's home in the 400 block of Union Street in Valparaiso.
Glover is accused of shooting a 12-gauge shotgun twice, missing the first time and striking the other man the second time. The victim was taken to Porter Regional Hospital and later to Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Illinois.
Porter County Chief Deputy Prosecutor Matt Frost said Glover's request for a bond of $5,000 was "woefully low."
Had Glover had better aim and succeeded in the allegations against him, he would not be eligible for bond at all, Frost said, referring to the terms of a murder charge.
The arguments of financial burden are not a consideration under the law, Frost said. And the argument that Glover has a history of following court orders is "tenuous at best."
Considering Glover is facing between 20 and 40 years if convicted of this offense, he poses a risk of fleeing the state if released on bond, Frost said.
LAKE STATION The Lake Station Community Schools board rejected the superintendent's recommendation for a new assistant principal at Edison Junior Senior High School and instead named a board member as the new assistant.
Mike Stills, who has been on the School Board since 2011, will become the new assistant principal on Tuesday. He has a two-year contract and will earn $79,000 a year.
Stills will work under new Principal Christine Pepa, who moved up when Principal Bruce Bush retired.
Lake Station School Board President Jim Vanderlin said the board believed it needed someone who knows the community and can promote it.
"Mr. Stills lives in the community and he has a principal's license and a superintendent's license," he said. "The other gentleman had only been a principal for a short time, I think it was about six months. We felt that Mr. Stills was a better choice."
Stills recused himself from the vote July 12, however, he has not yet submitted his resignation as a board member. Indiana law does not allow him to do both.
Vanderlin said the resignation should be coming shortly.
"His employment starts at the end of July. After we get that, we'll have 30 days to choose a replacement," Vanderlin said.
Stills, whose second term began in 2015, has two years left on his four-year term. It will end in 2018.
Stills could not be reached for comment.
Lake Station Superintendent Tom Cripliver said Stills was an applicant for the position, and one of the finalists, but he recommended Jeff Hamstra to the School Board based on a committee that reviewed all of the applicants and felt Hamstra, who worked at Kankakee Valley High School and most recently Munster High, was the most qualified. Although Stills has his administrative licenses, he formerly worked as a science teacher at Merrillville High.
Cripliver reiterated Vanderlin's comments saying, "the board felt we needed someone who knows our community and can support the fine individual, Christine Pepa, who we moved up from assistant principal to principal."
INDIANAPOLIS A state administrative rule change required for alcohol to be sold in a renovated pavilion at Indiana Dunes State Park has cleared its first hurdle.
The Indiana Natural Resources Commission unanimously gave preliminary approval Tuesday to the revised rule that permits alcohol in the pavilion, a potential adjacent banquet center and up to 100 feet into the parking lot.
Under the proposed rule, alcohol still would be prohibited on the beach and all other areas of the 2,182-acre park along Lake Michigan in Porter County.
"Dunes will continue to have the most stringent alcohol restrictions of any property managed by Indiana DNR (Department of Natural Resources)," said Dan Bortner, director of state parks.
The pending rule change now goes to the governor's Office of Management and Budget for review of its financial impact on the state a process likely to take two to six months.
Once evaluated by OMB, it will return to the Natural Resources Commission for a final public hearing prior to a vote on adoption.
Norman Hellmers, of Valparaiso, speaking on behalf of Dunes Action!, a group opposed to alcohol in the park, urged the committee to short-circuit that process by refusing to even preliminarily accept the rule.
He warned that alcohol at the Dunes will lead to a return of the bad old days where gangs ran rampant throughout the park.
"There are not masses of people saying we want this. People are saying we don't want this," Hellmers said. "10,000 people have signed petitions against alcohol and against the banquet center."
But Heather Ennis, president of the Northwest Indiana Forum, an economic development association, said plenty of Region residents and businesses want to see the long-abandoned pavilion used for restaurants and as a wedding reception venue.
"The changing of this rule will open up more opportunity for people to interact with our beaches, get to know our communities, to stay a little bit longer and perhaps spend some of their dollars in Northwest Indiana creating a destination," Ennis said.
The rule change process is separate from DNR obtaining Indiana Alcohol and Tobacco Commission approval for vendors to sell beer, wine and liquor in nine state parks, including Dunes.
John Davis, deputy DNR director, said the agency plans to apply for those permits in August or September.
A new state law mandates the ATC issue "state park" alcohol permits to DNR, upon request, and without being subject to local review or approval, after the Porter County Alcoholic Beverage Commission twice denied Pavilion Partners, the company renovating the Dunes pavilion, the alcohol sales permit it said is needed to run a successful operation.
CALUMET CITY Keith Bogdanovich was on patrol earlier this month when he spotted children shouting information about a car wash in the 200 block of 156th Street.
Bogdanovich, a patrolman for Calumet City Police Department, was in the middle of a busy shift on July 8, but he decided to stop to get his car washed.
"As I'm driving past the first set of kids, I'm thinking with all the crazy things going on ... maybe I should go over here and talk to some of these kids and connect with the people I'm working for," he said.
Latina Roberts, a single mother of eight children, said her children thought of the idea of having a car wash to raise funds for the family to move.
Bogdanovich posted photos about the interaction on Facebook, which as of this week had garnered more than 6,000 likes and more than 2,000 shares.
The interaction happened as the country continues to reel from a violent month that has reignited debate about the intersection of race and policing.
Bogdanovich said the children appeared excited to see him stop. They asked him questions about his police equipment.
Roberts said she and her children were happy the officer stopped at their car wash, regardless of how people feel about law enforcement.
"It's about the individual," she said. "He stopped and helped, and he actually came back and brought his partner to the car wash."
Roberts, who identifies as African-American, said the interaction was a way to show her children that, "not all officers are bad."
The family has lived in Calumet City for about three years, and she said they haven't had any negative interaction with officers. Roberts said officers in other cities have come off as rude.
Though the family is originally from the Chicago area, they were having the car wash to raise funds to move to Georgia where they previously lived.
"We know that we can have it better there," she said. "We've had struggles here, the bills are hard."
The family has been scrambling to raise funds after they used their savings to pay for funeral expenses for Roberts' father who died a couple weeks ago.
As of Monday, the family had raised enough money from the car washes and a GoFundMe Page, gofundme.com/2925e8s, to pay for a moving truck. She is hoping to raise money to cover the gas to make the trip to Jonesboro, Georgia, which is south of Atlanta.
For Bogdanovich, the car wash was a way for him to have an interaction with the community that was in contrast to the recent news involving officers.
"A lot of our interactions are people at their worst times -- people that are getting hurt, people who are fighting with loved ones," he said. "This was a positive interaction, and it made me feel really, really good. It made me feel like me stopping here, that's all worth it."
HAMMOND A Hammond man died after the motorcycle he was operating went out of control and crashed into a wall of the Aldi grocery store at 7925 Indianapolis Blvd. shortly after 9 p.m. Monday.
According to the crash report, the motorcycle was traveling north in the parking lot of Aldi and Planet Fitness when it went out of control, crashed into a curb, slid on the sidewalk and crashed into the store's wall. Police said witnesses reported the driver had just left Planet Fitness and was traveling on the motorcycle at what appeared to be a high speed when he lost control.
When Claire Brennecke learned from her priest about a chance to travel to Europe and meet young Catholics from around the world, she decided she wanted to attend World Youth Day.
I wanted to grow in my faith, said Claire, 17, of Valparaiso.
When she told her mother that she wanted to be a part of World Youth Day in Krakow, Poland, the pair began to contemplate going.
I thought it would be a great experience for us to go together, said Megan Brennecke, who had chaperoned smaller mission trips.
The group of 82, 55 of those being under the age of 35, will leave Thursday for Rome. The pilgrimage is being coordinated through the Diocese of Gary Office for Youth & Young Adults .
Both Bishop Donald Hying and Bishop Emeritus Dale Melczek will accompany the group.
You have no idea what youre getting yourselves into, said Bishop Donald Hying during a Mass Monday night to celebrate the trip.
Representatives from 15 different churches in the Region will travel as part of the group. A group of seminarians will travel with them as well.
Marc Vargas 16, of Calumet City, had been invited to participate in the trip and is looking forward to learning more about himself.
I had heard of Youth Day and I have had people tell me their experience at it, and I thought why not try it, Vargas said.
Before the start of World Youth Day, the group will spend time in Rome and Assisi seeing sites of religious significance. Then they will tour the concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and see more in Krakow.
I love to travel and I also love my religion so it was a combination of the two, and I thought it would be a great chance to grow deeper in my faith, said Grace Tam, 16, of Valparaiso.
For World Youth Day, the group will walk 10 miles to a site for an overnight vigil, a camp out, and a morning Mass led by Pope Francis on July 30-31.
Many of the young people going are excited about getting to see the pontiff and be in his presence.
Ive been to the Vatican, and that was very exciting but I didnt get to see the pope, said Natalie Nowesnick, 18, of Merrillville.
Most of the pilgrims are looking forward to the event as a whole and learning more about their faith.
Its so beautiful to see so many people together, united for one reason, said Brooke Fowler, 23, of Highland.
EAST CHICAGO A 17-year-old Gary girl last seen leaving the Carmelite Home of East Chicago on Monday night with an infant possibly in need of medical attention could be headed to Illinois, police said.
The infant was recently released from the hospital, requires medical treatment every four hours and may need hospitalization if she does not receive it, East Chicago police Lt. Marguerite Wilder said Tuesday.*
A second woman also was seen with the mother and child leaving the East Chicago home about 10:50 p.m. Monday.
The two missing girls have been identified as Danara Gillespie, 17, a Gary resident who is the mother of the 8-month-old infant, and Nakesha Jackson, 16, of East Chicago. Gillespies daughter is named London.
Staff at the facility at 4840 Grasselli Ave. said they heard the back doors suddenly open and the two teenagers run out of the building with a small infant in their hands. Staff members ran after them, but were unable to catch them. They reported seeing the girls get into an unidentified vehicle.
Police said they were told Jackson is eight months pregnant and ready to give birth.
Anyone with information about the two missing girls is asked to call Detective Justin Orange at (219) 391-8318 or contact jorange@eastchicago.com.
* Editor's note: A story Wednesday about two teens missing with an infant contained incorrect information. East Chicago police are investigating. The Times regrets the error.
INDIANAPOLIS Indiana hunters donated more than 1,300 deer to charity groups to feed the hungry during the 2015-2016 season.
Indiana conservation officers announced the final tally last week. That's more than 67,300 pounds of venison that were ground into 2-pound packages of burger and donated to food banks.
The donations were made through the Sportmen's Benevolent Fund and coordinated by Hoosiers Feeding the Hungry, Indiana Farmers and Hunters Feeding the Hungry and the Dubois County Sportmen's Club.
The fund began in 2008 and started receiving public funding in 2013. Hunters received a state grant that permits them to coordinate with licensed deer processors.
As the Republican National Convention kicked off in Cleveland on Monday, protestors spoke out against the Republican Party outside Trump Tower in Manhattan.
A "Stop the Hate, Stop the Guns" rally was organized by a coalition of LGBT activist organizations and gun control advocates.
They said the GOP platform denies non-heterosexual people their basic rights, and that Republicans in Congress are crafting anti-gay legislation.
They also accuse Republicans of being mouthpieces for the National Rifle Association (NRA).
"We're sick and tired hearing thoughts and prayers from Republican politicians after every new wave of gun violence," said Mark Milano of Queer Nation.
"We demand that you enact gun control legislation, that you enact gay-friendly legislation, and that you stop the racist comments, and we're not going to stop until they take action, and stop giving us empty words," Milano continued.
More than 100 protestors participated in the march up Fifth Avenue to Central Park South.
They also staged a "die-in" outside the Plaza Hotel.
Delegates who opposed them appeared to have the advantage. And they responded with their own noisy shouts of U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
But after several minutes of confusion, and a couple of musical interludes by the band to kill time, the anti-Trump delegates appeared to have been stymied.
When the chairman called for a voice vote on whether to have a roll call vote, he ruled that the no votes prevailed.
Initially, there appeared to be at least nine states in which a majority of delegates agreed to the roll call vote, meeting the threshold of seven required under party rules. But faced with the possibility of a runaway start to the convention, the Trump campaign and Republican National Committee staff members working the floor went into overdrive to get delegates to withdraw their support.
Stamping the rebellion out was a show of organizational muscle and discipline by the Trump campaign and the party, which had teams of aides scurrying around the arena as they tried to flip votes. They wore ear pieces and carried stacks of affidavits that they circulated to delegates as they pressured them to withdraw their support for the roll call vote.
When it came to the auto bailouts, Mr. Trump was also in opposition to Mr. Pence: I think the government should stand behind them 100 percent, he told Fox News. You cannot lose the auto companies. Theyre great. They make wonderful products.
The various differences between Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence have been well documented over the last several days. But even a cursory examination of Mr. Pences stances on business and his relationship with industry shows that the presidential and vice-presidential candidates may be out of step.
Most of Mr. Pences donors over the years have been far from Mr. Trumps friends. Indeed, Mr. Pences biggest donor has been the Club for Growth, a political action committee focused on economic growth that has long supported Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
The Club for Growths president, David McIntosh, said of Mr. Trump: Donald Trump is a great entertainer and developer, but his ideas of what to do as president wont grow the economy. He is not a serious Republican candidate. Mr. Trump fired back, claiming the group sought to extort him for a donation.
Mr. Pence has also long been supported by the billionaire Koch brothers. Mr. Trump, on the other hand, has thus far been unable to persuade the family to support him, at one point saying of Charles Koch, You have a lot of people that need him, and I dont need him at all. Mr. Koch, a longtime Republican donor who has expressed dismay by Mr. Trumps candidacy, has said that its possible Mrs. Clinton would be a better candidate. (The Kochs are unlikely to support the Trump candidacy even with Mr. Pence on the ticket.)
As governor of Indiana, Mr. Pence signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a law that was widely seen as anti-gay because it effectively gave businesses the right to turn away customers based on their religion, and, in turn, their sexual orientation. An outcry from the business community particularly in Silicon Valley, including Apple followed. Mr. Pence later watered the law down.
Mr. Trump has long argued that he is a friend to the gays, at one point suggesting that a North Carolina law passed earlier this year that prevented transgender people from using bathrooms of their gender identity a law that was also heavily criticized by the business community was wrong. You leave it the way it is, he said. In the same interview, he said Caitlyn Jenner could choose whatever bathroom she wanted in Trump Tower. (She took him up on his offer.) Still, Mr. Trump is against gay marriage.
DETROIT Despite praising automakers for recent gains in fuel economy, two federal agencies said on Monday that surging consumer demand for pickups and sport utility vehicles made it unlikely that the industry could meet the governments ambitious projections a decade from now.
If fuel prices remain low, and trucks continue to outsell cars, the industry will probably not meet the goal of 54.5 miles per gallon as a fleetwide average by 2025, but will probably come in at only about 50 miles a gallon, according to a report by the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency.
The report issued on Monday was termed a draft by administration officials, and included input from the California Air Resources Board, as well as the two federal agencies.
That lower fuel economy number would translate into higher levels of carbon dioxide emissions, which environmentalists say would make global climate change worse and undercut efforts to curtail greenhouse gases agreed to by the Obama administration in last years Paris climate accord.
LONDON When it comes to fashion, how far would you go to show your appreciation of your favorite celebrity?
Millions of fans choose to dress like their idols. Others buy outfits from the multitude of clothing lines or cosmetic ranges endorsed or designed by Hollywood stars. But would you could you ever wear a leather jacket or carry a handbag containing their DNA?
The Central Saint Martins graduate Tina Gorjanc believes that advances in tissue-engineering technology could create a highly lucrative and hitherto untapped niche within the luxury market. Last month, she unveiled Pure Human, a range of leather prototypes that she theorizes could be grown from DNA extracted from hair samples of the fashion designer Alexander McQueen.
Pure Human is a critical design project that also highlights the major legal loopholes around the protection of biological information, particularly in Great Britain, Ms. Gorjanc said at her end-of-year show.
4. Theres some hilarious stories here about her psychotherapy (she was an early adopter, starting in 1944), her sex life (she counted 178 lovers before marriage), her legendary cheapness (Joan Rivers, once spotting Brown struggling with many bags at a bus stop, rolled down her window and shouted: Helen, calm down and take a cab! Your husband made Jaws!).
5. He had served as attorney general for fewer than four years and as senator from the state of New York for three and a half. His campaign for the presidency lasted only two and a half months.
6. Jakob Nielsen, editor of the online edition of Politiken, an influential left-leaning newspaper, said the proximity of the years given in some of the multiple-choice questions seemed calculated to stump test-takers. For example, one question asks if the life span of the Danish composer Carl Nielsen was 1865 to 1931, 1870 to 1940 or 1892 to 1965? (The first is correct.)
7. One impact of Justice Scalias absence may remain less visible, although no less important: the projects that died with him, the opportunities to shift the law in his desired direction foregone because of the loss of a plausible shot at a majority opinion.
8. His profile was so low that early on a police officer asked him for identification when he tried to enter City Hall. But woe to whomever defied him or reneged on a commitment.
9. Mr. Ailes denied the charges, and said that the disappointingly low ratings for Ms. Carlsons show was the reason she was let go.
10. But Mr. Trump exalted in the vote in a trip to Scotland a day after the ballots were cast last week, and he drew parallels between the nationalist forces that drove it and the presidential race in the United States.
At home, some family members and friends avoid certain subjects around him, just as he avoids some subjects with his fellow officers.
Talking to relatives can be agonizing.
Lt. Zsakhiem James, who has been a police officer in Camden, N.J., for 23 years, drove to Dallas with four other officers to pay their respects, only to return to the news of the Baton Rouge ambush.
He said his mother asked him on Monday, How do you still do the job? She was referring to his safety, but the inquiry was freighted with deeper questions. How do you put the uniform on and still go out after seeing all the things youve seen as a black man and everything thats going on in the world and still do your job, and do your job right? Lieutenant James said.
He was bracing for similar questions at a family reunion. I feel a sense of loss, but as a police officer, before I cast judgment, I wait for the full information to come out, Lieutenant James said. And they look at me and say, Arent you outraged? And I say Im outraged at the loss of a life; and what they dont understand is that the loss of any life at the hands of a police officer reflects on all police officers.
Just as Twitter has helped nurture and sustain the protest movement, many officers have taken to Facebook to voice their own sentiments on the criticism shaking their profession, if only to their family and friends.
In some cases, posts intended as private exchanges, like the one by Officer Jackson, have been thrust into the public sphere as sympathetic friends seek to show the world just how misunderstood black officers feel and just how frustrated they are with other police officers, and with some people in the black community.
After the death of Alton B. Sterling in Baton Rouge this month, Nakia Jones, a police officer in Warrensville Heights, a Cleveland suburb, denounced racism among some of her colleagues and tearfully begged black people to put these guns down, because were killing each other.
Amid reignited fears about lead poisoning nationwide, the key to identifying solutions could lie in the common city pigeon.
A study published on Monday in the journal Chemosphere found that Manhattan neighborhoods that had many children with elevated blood lead levels also had pigeons with elevated lead. The research suggests that scientists may be able to use the birds to predict lead contamination in the environment.
The principal author of the study, Rebecca Calisi, who was an assistant biology professor at Barnard College when the research was conducted, examined data on 825 pigeons from various neighborhoods from 2010 to 2015. Dr. Calisi found that elevated lead levels in pigeons from Greenwich Village and SoHo, for example, correlated positively with elevated lead levels in children in those neighborhoods, as identified by New York Citys health department.
The link indicates that pigeons could be used to detect areas of pollution across the country, particularly in urban areas.
Lawyers for a gold trader from Turkey who has been charged in New York with conspiracy to violate the United States sanctions on Iran asked a judge on Monday to dismiss the indictment, calling the case a prosecutorial overreach of the first order.
It is as unprecedented as it is problematic, lawyers for the trader, Reza Zarrab, wrote.
Mr. Zarrab, 32, had been accused by prosecutors of facilitating millions of dollars in transactions on behalf of Iran and other sanctioned entities through the use of front companies and false documentation. He also faces charges of conspiracies to commit money laundering and bank fraud.
But Mr. Zarrabs lawyers, in a motion filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, said the United States sanctions laws are limited to U.S. persons and exports from the U.S.
Just the day before, a friend and I crossed paths in the grocery store and spoke of our shared exhaustion. The past two weeks have left us feeling so exposed. While we knew that the investigation into Mr. Sterlings death would lead to more scrutiny for our community, we discussed the need to reclaim some sense of normalcy. Our conversation reflected what I am sure is a broadly shared sentiment: We were ready to move into the next phase of the healing and rebuilding process.
My wife always jokes that I think I know everyone in Baton Rouge. Shes not completely off. Growing up as a fourth-generation resident of the city, I have always felt that way. My grandparents went to high school with my friends grandparents. Our parents went to school together as well. Mine is a common story. Baton Rouge has always been an insular community with few natives leaving and few outsiders moving in. That has changed somewhat as the city has grown rapidly in recent decades. Baton Rouge is now the anchor for a metropolitan region with more than 800,000 residents. Were almost as big as our iconic sister city to the south, New Orleans. But we still have a relatively close-knit feel. Thats why I feel like I know everyone, and thats why the past two weeks have been so hard.
I know members of the Sterling family. Yesterday, I learned that I have friends who were close to our slain police officers. Like so many in this community, I wrestle with the political and human dimensions of this moment. The tragic loss of Officers Jackson, Gerald and Garafola so close to Mr. Sterlings death and the ensuing protests understandably present an existential dilemma for some. They see the pursuit of justice in one killing as antithetical to maintaining respect for law enforcement. They wrongly blame those calling for justice for Mr. Sterling for the killings of our police officers.
In these difficult times, we must reject these false choices. Acknowledging that black life has historically been devalued does not inherently devalue the lives of others. Advocating for more and better community policing can happen in a manner that doesnt marginalize law enforcement. Bearing witness to the legacy of racial division in our community does not undermine the necessary steps toward progress. It is possible to deplore and mourn the conditions surrounding the death of Mr. Sterling and those of Officers Jackson, Gerald and Garafola. We can oppose unnecessary, excessive force just as zealously as we oppose violence against the police.
IT was clear the shooter had some training.
When the news was breaking from Dallas, before we knew who he was, or even that there was only one shooter and not three or four, military veterans watched the horror unfolding on our computer screens along with the rest of America. And to our disgust, we recognized a few things.
Veterans on Twitter noted his use of cover and concealment, that he was slicing the pie, that in one assault captured on camera he followed standard tactics for a close ambush, which are, as the Washington Post reporter and Marine veteran Thomas Gibbons-Neff noted, to establish fire superiority and assault through the objective. Other vets chimed in: This guy knew something about how to use his weapon. And we were all left with a sickening feeling: He could be one of ours.
It turned out he was he had deployed to Afghanistan as a mason and carpenter. Now, in Baton Rouge, La., we have a second shooter of police officers, this one an Iraq veteran, though again, not one who had seen combat, but a former data network specialist. Both of these men were part of our veterans community, attacking another community we have always identified with: the police.
In Iraq, I knew so many Marines with plans of joining their local police force back home it was almost comical, and the reserve units around New York City are chock-full of officers from the police force there. I was once caught going well above the speed limit and the officer who pulled me over saw the Marine Corps sticker on the back of my car. He didnt ask me if I knew how fast I was going; he wanted to know if Id been to Iraq. Yeah, I just got back, I said. How is it over there? he asked me, a little nervous. Im in a reserve unit, and were deploying next year.
For all the disruption and damage that Donald Trump has meant for Republicans, the partys statement of its views in its newly written convention platform rivals him for shock value. Platforms are traditionally written by and for the party faithful and largely ignored by everyone else. But this year, the Republicans are putting out an agenda that demands notice.
It is as though, rather than trying to reconcile Mr. Trumps heretical views with conservative orthodoxy, the writers of the platform simply opted to go with the most extreme version of every position. Tailored to Mr. Trumps impulsive bluster, this document lays bare just how much the G.O.P. is driven by a regressive, extremist inner core.
Mr. Trumps anti-Muslim phobia and fantasy wall across the Mexican border are front and center, along with his protectionist views, which deny long-held positions of the party. No less alarming is a raft of planks that ideologues pushed through to banish any notion of moderation and present-day reality from the partys credo.
These killers might frame their actions as responses to police shootings of civilians. But their actions were shaped by specific experiences and states of mind that predisposed them to kill. The anguish and trauma surrounding cases of police brutality offered a backdrop against which they could express their particular pathologies.
The killer in Dallas, Micah Johnson, was an Army veteran of the war in Afghanistan and was clearly in need of mental health treatment. The Baton Rouge killer, Gavin Long, a former Marine, had claimed allegiance to a sovereign citizen group, an antigovernment organization that sees itself as exempt from state and federal authority.
The sovereign citizen movement has origins in the violent, racist, anti-tax platform advanced by the infamous Posse Comitatus that promoted conspiracy theories about the government. The posse has since faded, but its successors have flourished, benefiting from virulent antigovernment rhetoric that has been used by the extreme right in the Republican Party for decades.
The groups rely on the internet for recruitment, appealing directly to people who share a hatred of the government and have been involved in real estate scams and other crimes.
Does anybody else have the sense that Donald Trump is slipping off the rails? His speeches have always had a rambling, free association quality, but a couple of the recent ones have, as the Republican political consultant Mike Murphy put it, passed from the category of rant to the category of full on drunk wedding toast.
Trumps verbal style has always been distinct. He doesnt really speak in sentences or paragraphs. His speeches are punctuated by five- or six-word jabs that are sort of strung together by connections that can only be understood through chaos theory: They want the wall I dominated with the evangelicals I won in a landslide We cant be the stupid people anymore.
Occasionally Trump will attempt a sentence longer than eight words, but no matter what subject he starts the sentence with, by the end he has been pulled over to the subject of himself. Heres an example from the Mike Pence announcement speech: So one of the primary reasons I chose Mike was I looked at Indiana, and I won Indiana big. Theres sort of a gravitational narcissistic pull that takes command whenever he attempts to utter a compound thought.
Trump has also always been a little engine fueled by wounded pride. For example, writing in BuzzFeed, McKay Coppins recalls the fusillade of abuse he received from Trump after writing an unflattering profile (he called Mar-a-Lago a nice, if slightly dated, hotel).
THE Virginia Supreme Court will hear arguments on Tuesday in a lawsuit that aims to strip the right to vote from more than 206,000 people, including one in five African-American adults in the state. If state lawmakers win, they will keep Virginia trapped in a shameful part of history: when former Confederate states passed felon disenfranchisement laws after Reconstruction to suppress black political power.
Under Virginias Constitution, a person with a single felony offense cant vote unless the governor restores his or her voting rights. Virginias 1870 Constitution, passed during Reconstruction, banned voting by all felons. Then, delegates to Virginias 1902 constitutional convention adopted expanded voting restrictions, adding requirements for poll taxes and a literacy test.
They were not shy about their intentions. Virginias new constitution would eliminate the darkey as a political factor, explained Carter Glass, a convention delegate and, later as a United States senator, an author of the Glass-Steagall banking law. Their goal was to ensure complete supremacy of the white race in the affairs of government.
Mr. Smiths demand also interferes with continuing law enforcement proceedings by New York and Massachusetts state attorneys general who acting under their own state laws have commenced investigations into Exxon Mobils potentially fraudulent actions. (Mr. Smith has sent similar subpoenas to the other environmental organizations and funders as well as the offices of the attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts.)
Image Lamar Smith walking past reporters after a House Republican Conference meeting in 2014. Credit... Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Associated Press
The controversy began last summer, when our organization published a report documenting deception about climate science by Exxon Mobil, other leading fossil fuel companies and industry trade groups. Since that time, two teams of investigative reporters have uncovered further corroborating evidence that for decades, Exxon Mobils own scientists warned the company of the dangers of carbon emissions at the same time the company was aggressively promoting a very different message in public and to its investors about climate science. As a result of these revelations, the state attorneys general in New York and Massachusetts commenced their investigations into Exxon Mobil.
Mr. Smith, joined by members of Congress, claims that our organization, the other groups and the state attorneys general have engaged in a conspiracy to deprive Exxon Mobil of its First Amendment right to debate the science of climate change and to chill the work of scientists. This is simply nonsense. Exxon Mobils scientists are not being targeted for investigation, and no one is intimidating them to keep them from performing their work. Instead, the investigations center on whether Exxon Mobil misled the public and its own investors when it publicly disparaged, played down or even dismissed outright the growing evidence (from its own scientists and others) that burning fossil fuels causes irrevocable harm to the planet.
Disseminating false information to help sell a product finds no protection in the First Amendment. Imagine if it did: Tobacco companies could get away with saying cigarettes are safe; car companies could deny manufacturing defects that endanger drivers; and pharmaceutical companies could mislead consumers about the efficacy of drugs all by cloaking themselves in the First Amendment. Fortunately, courts have repeatedly rejected such arguments.
Beyond its lack of a factual or legal basis, Mr. Smiths subpoena sets a dangerous precedent because it violates our constitutional rights. Mr. Smiths demand is directed exclusively at the fact that our organization shared information about climate science and Exxon Mobils public statements with state attorneys general. But bringing this information to the attention of government officials and urging them to take action is explicitly protected by the First Amendment. The subpoena also infringes on our rights of association, in that it demands that we divulge our private communications with other advocacy groups and funders.
The successes of the LARC program, now seven years old, have been widely reported. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends LARCs strongly, even for never-pregnant adolescents. The American Academy of Pediatrics calls them the first-line contraceptive choice for teenagers who dont choose abstinence. Yet other states are getting off to a slow start in replicating the program.
The Association of State and Territorial Health Officials is trying to speed the process. The organization runs a working group that brings together officials from states seeking to provide LARCs to women who have just given birth. In 2014 the working group included officials from six states, and last year seven more states joined.
The challenges illustrate how difficult it is to spread new medical practices. Larry Wolk, executive director and chief medical officer of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, has on occasion worn an IUD as a pin, so he can show people how small and light it is. Lots of people remember the Dalkon Shield of the 1970s and the injury and infertility it caused. The new IUDs are different. This isnt your mothers IUD, Wolk likes to say.
Image Dr. Wolk occasionally wears an IUD as a pin, to show its size. Credit... Theo Stroomer for The New York Times
But just because something is safe doesnt mean people know its safe. Were seeing theres a lot of education needed, said Lisa Waddell, the community health and prevention chief program officer at the health officials association. Many young women havent heard of LARCs, and some who have believe they are not reversible (they are, usually instantly), or are painful to use (insertion of an IUD is painful, but it cant be felt afterward). Waddell says the best remedy is word of mouth from women who are happy with their birth control.
Health workers must use care when talking about LARCs, as with other forms of birth control. America has a sorry history of coercing young minority women into sterilization or birth control. Some state legislators have talked about making birth control a requirement for welfare, for example. That comes from a thoughtful article in The Nation by Dani McClain; it discusses why past coercion has made some women wary of LARCs, and the importance of information without pressure.
Any explanation, of course, requires a visit, and this can be a challenge. The biggest barrier is access to care, said Amy Crockett, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at the Greenville Health System in South Carolina and clinical lead for the Birth Outcomes Initiative, a state government program. She said that LARCs could sometimes be a two-appointment procedure. With a prescription for birth control pills, patients can go out and fill it. With a LARC, if we dont have one in the office that day, the patient has to come back.
The photographer Gregory Crewdson likes to start his day with a long swim. For most of the year, he resigns himself to pools in Brooklyn, New Haven and Great Barrington, Mass. But come June, its finally warm enough to swim at his preferred spot: Upper Goose Pond, a lake in the Berkshires not far from where he spent summers growing up. Accessible via a tranquil, wooded stretch of the Appalachian Trail, the lake is a secluded spot and the hike to get there has become part of a summer ritual for Crewdson and his partner, Juliane Hiam. After his requisite morning cup of coffee from Fuel, a local coffee shop in Great Barrington that Crewdson has frequented for the past 20 years, the pair sets off for the trailhead.
On the trek up to the lake, Crewdson and Hiam discuss work and logistics they go through emails and jot down ideas for his meticulously staged photographs. An intensely visual thinker, Crewdson isnt fond of writing, so Hiam transcribes notes on her iPhone, doing her best not to trip over roots along the way. When they reach the lake, Crewdson ducks behind a nearby shed to change into his swim trunks, and puts in his nose plug the most important piece, he says, laughing, before wading in.
Crewdsons tableau photographs are incredibly detailed; every prop and aspect of the set is painstakingly selected and arranged. So its not a coincidence that he prefers to keep the details of his day-to-day life as simple as possible. This is part of the appeal of swimming: The water provides a space where he can think about his work with minimal distraction. The ideal is when youre finally in a place where you feel like you could keep swimming forever, he says. Once youre in that state, you can really start thinking about ideas. Its not even conscious. An image will just come up in my mind, and then well discuss it on the way down.
Crewdson grew up in Park Slope, spending summers with his family at a log cabin in Becket, Mass. and has always felt a strong connection to the small-town scenery of his youth. Hes been shooting his uncanny, quotidian scenes in Western Massachusetts towns, including Pittsfield, North Adams and Lee, for three decades.
SAN FRANCISCO As Yahoo accepted the final bids for its core business on Monday, the internet company revealed just how badly that business was deteriorating.
Yahoo said that its revenue in the second quarter fell 15 percent, after excluding accounting adjustments, and its operating profit fell 64 percent.
Yahoo also acknowledged that Tumblr its biggest acquisition under its current chief executive, Marissa Mayer was now worth only one-third of the $1.1 billion that Yahoo paid for it in 2013.
But investors were not focused on the quarterly numbers or Yahoos vast overpayment for Tumblr. They were far more interested in whether Yahoos web, email, news and other businesses will finally be sold and at what price.
The black-clad man in Baton Rouge, La., barely bothered to conceal that he was heavily armed and looking for trouble, rounding corners in a ready-to-fire-stance, pointing a military-style weapon and prompting a 911 call of a dude with a rifle, behaving ominously. He ignored the easiest prey, the scores of civilians around him, hunting only people in uniform methodically, mercilessly, even as they lay wounded on the pavement.
Over the course of just a few chaotic minutes on Sunday morning, Gavin Long, acting alone and apparently calling on his military training, ran from building to building, turning a busy commercial street in Baton Rouge into a battleground stretching some 400 yards. In a scene that officials described in detail for the first time at a news conference on Monday, after piecing it together from multiple video recordings and witness accounts, Mr. Long, 29, killed three law enforcement officers and wounded several others before a police sniper fatally shot him.
Col. Michael D. Edmonson, the superintendent of the Louisiana State Police, several times described the gunman as moving tactically from place to place, looking for targets and choosing vantage points. Watching the videos, he said, is chilling in the sheer brutality of the shooter.
The videos show that at least twice before the shooting began, Mr. Long tried to approach an officer but failed, the officer apparently leaving the scene without knowing the lethal danger he was in, officials said. And they captured moments of heroism, including a sheriffs deputy running to try to help a fallen officer and being killed.
Many military veterans thought they were making strides in recent years to overcome the Rambo narrative the idea that all veterans come home as mentally scarred ticking time bombs, waiting to explode. But with the revelation that both gunmen implicated in fatal ambushes of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, La., were young military veterans, they say they fear a big step backward.
Neither of the gunmen had combat experience, according to military records, and there is no evidence they suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, which the public often associates with the potential for violence. But veterans groups worry that negative stereotypes will nonetheless spread, keeping employers from hiring veterans and hindering an already tough transition from military to civilian life.
People see these guys were veterans and they make the leap that all veterans are killers with PTSD that are going to blow at a moments notice, said Phillip Carter, an Iraq war veteran who studies the interaction between veterans and society for the Center for a New American Security. That message is very harmful.
There is no data that suggests veterans as a whole are more likely to commit crimes. In fact, a number of veterans have noted that while both gunmen had served in the military, so had four of the eight officers who were killed, said Paul Rieckhoff, the founder and chief executive officer of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.
WASHINGTON The Obama administration on Monday asked the Supreme Court to take the unusual step of reconsidering a major immigration decision once a full nine-member court can hear the case.
Last month, the court deadlocked in the case, a challenge to President Obamas plan to spare millions of unauthorized immigrants from deportation and to allow them to work lawfully in the United States. That left in place an appeals court ruling that had blocked the program.
The Supreme Court has been short-handed since Justice Antonin Scalia died in February, and it may remain so for some time. The 4-to-4 tie in the case, United States v. Texas, No. 15-674, set no precedent, and the court did not disclose how the justices had voted.
But the presidents emphasis on those who hope to follow him into the White House was revealing. As he enters the last six months of his term, Mr. Obama has been talking to his advisers about the burdens his successor will bear in consoling bereaved families and settling the nerves of the nation after another mass shooting. If Americans cannot find a way to stop this cycle of violence and Mr. Obama predicted on Sunday that there would be another killer who would seek to divide people the next president will have to double as a national grief counselor.
With the Republican and Democratic conventions likely to dominate news coverage for the next two weeks, Mr. Obama also recognizes that the power of his words is diminishing. For months now, he has seen how the campaign has stirred up such vitriolic anti-Washington sentiment that it has all but drowned out his appeal for coolheaded debate or common-sense solutions.
It makes it extremely difficult for him to change minds or compel action, however rational that action may seem, said Robert Dallek, the historian who has written books about Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan. The distractions of the current political campaign, at some level, make his words superfluous.
Superfluous, perhaps, but still necessary: Mr. Obama has spoken more than a dozen times after mass shootings. On Sunday, after the ambush of police officers in Baton Rouge, the White House issued a statement from the president. A few hours later, it notified the news media that he would appear in the briefing room at 4:30 p.m., soon after the governor of Louisiana and other state and local officials spoke to reporters in Baton Rouge.
For Mr. Obama, it was the seventh time in 10 days that he had appeared before cameras after an outbreak of violence. The string of shootings had in fact consumed most of his time. The president spent part of a flight to Europe fine-tuning his remarks in response to a pair of earlier shootings, in Baton Rouge and Minnesota, before speaking to reporters after landing in Warsaw. The next morning, he spoke again after the shootings in Dallas, and then a third time at the end of a NATO summit meeting.
[02:09 - 02:29] The choice we make in 1968 will determine not only the future of America but the future of peace and freedom in the world for the last third of the Twentieth Century. ALEX SOT: The conditions in the country are really different than they were in 1968, but where the parallels arise are you have this presidential candidate drumming home these themes about social disorder, of the United States as a country under attack, at home and abroad. [02:30 - 03:04] As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame. We hear sirens in the night. 9:25 David Clarke Jr. I want to talk with you about something important, indeed, a concept that five law enforcement officers were murdered and nine more were wounded for earlier this month in Dallas, and for which three more were murdered yesterday in Baton Rouge: that is the importance of Making America Safe Again We see Americans dying on distant battlefields abroad. We see Americans hating each other; fighting each other; killing each other at home. 9:16PM: MCCAUL: We need to end sanctuary cities...keep dangerous people out of our country...and SECURE our borders. And as we see and hear these things, millions of Americans cry out in anguish. Did we come all this way for this? ALEX SOT: Part of the reason this is at the forefronts of peoples minds is just whats been in the news lately. That you have seen the killings of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, that youve seen violence in a number of cities. What Trump identified at the very beginning of this campaign was this hunger within the Republican base for almost a strongman figure. [05:01 - 05:12] America is in trouble today not because her people have failed but because her leaders have failed. And what America needs are leaders to match the greatness of her people. 9:17PM MCCAUL: This did not happen by accident, it happened by design. It is the work of Barack Obama... and the architect of his failed foreign policy, Hillary Clinton. 9:48 TOM COTTON: Our warriors and their families dont ask for much. But there are a few things wed like. A commander-in-chief who speaks of winning wars and not merely ending wars, calls the enemy by its name, and draws red lines carefully, but enforces them ruthlessly. [08:49 - 09:09] For five years hardly a day has gone by when we havent read or heard a report of the American flag being spit on; an embassy being stoned; a library being burned; or an ambassador being insulted some place in the world. And each incident reduced respect for the United States until the ultimate insult inevitably occurred. 9:48 TOM COTTON: Our warriors and their families dont ask for much. But there are a few things wed like. A commander-in-chief who speaks of winning wars and not merely ending wars, calls the enemy by its name, and draws red lines carefully, but enforces them ruthlessly. ALEX SOT: Trump has said in a recent interview that he sees nixon as someone who understood some fundamental things about the country. That people were looking for order in the midst of disorder. 10:10 GUILIANI: In the last seven months, there have been five major Islamic extremist terrorists attacks on us and our allies. We must not be afraid to define our enemy; It is Islamic extremist terrorism. [13:25 - 14:00] We shall re-establish freedom from fear in America so that America can take the lead in re-establishing freedom from fear in the world. And to those who say that law and order is the code word for racism, there and here is a reply: Our goal is justice for every American. 9:26pm David Clarke Jr. I see this every day, at street level where many Americans increasingly have an uneasiness about the ability of their families to live safely in these troubling times. This transcends race, religion, ethnicity, gender, age, and lifestyle. [09:35 - 09:58] America is a great nation. And it is time we started to act like a great nation around the world. MICHAEL FLYNN And, with Donald Trump in the White House, WE...WILL...MAKE...AMERICA... GREAT... AGAIN!
CLEVELAND As Hillary Clinton prepares to announce her running mate later this week, the political calculations have suddenly changed.
Had Donald J. Trump chosen a woman or a minority as his vice-presidential candidate, Mrs. Clinton would have faced pressure from liberals to make her own bold choice. If Mr. Trump had picked a fiery raconteur like Newt Gingrich or Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, two of his finalists, the decision would have given Mrs. Clinton pause about putting a young fresh face on the debate stage this fall rather than an attack dog, according to several Clinton campaign advisers. And if the Republican No. 2 was from a critical swing state, the electoral map might have loomed larger in her considerations.
Instead, Mr. Trump picked Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana a button-down, deeply conservative white man from a Republican-leaning state whose record appeals strongly to his partys base.
By choosing someone so conventional, Mr. Trump has made it easier for Mrs. Clinton to follow suit with an unadventurous pick of her own, like Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia or Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, a former governor of Iowa. She could send Housing Secretary Julian Castro out to debate Mr. Pence without fearing a blowout. Or she could pick Labor Secretary Thomas Perez, who is from the reliably Democratic state of Maryland.
CLEVELAND Rancor and hard-edged attacks dominated the start of the Republican National Convention on Monday as speakers branded Hillary Clinton as a liar who deserved to be in prison and two African-American Republicans ridiculed the Black Lives Matter movement.
The divisive day even swept up the presumptive nominee, Donald J. Trump. Renegade delegates forced a floor fight in an effort to embarrass him, and his top aide called Ohios governor petulant for not endorsing Mr. Trump.
The House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, who is the chairman of the convention, also distanced himself from Mr. Trumps approach to racial unrest and from one of his signature proposals.
The unusual jousting among Republicans at their own convention gave way to more traditional, fiery speeches aimed at Democratic leaders, Mrs. Clinton and President Obama. The most impassioned remarks came from former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, who described an America plagued by crime and violence and repeatedly praised police officers for keeping families safe without regard to race.
Follow our latest Day 2 coverage of the Republican National Convention.
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Welcome to the prime-time lineup for Day 1 of the Republican National Convention. Melania Trump, Donald J. Trumps wife, was the featured speaker tonight. She was among a series of celebrities, politicians and former military officers whose jobs were to describe how Mr. Trump will keep America safe again.
Here are the highlights and our fact checks (you can also watch live video and check out our real-time analysis):
Ms. Trump was introduced by none other than her husband, who appeared in silhouette and then walked onto the stage to Queens We Are The Champions. Ms. Trump praised him as an amazing leader who thinks big and will never give up. She predicted he would beat Hillary Clinton, and said it would not be a Trump contest without excitement and drama.
If she were able to serve as first lady, Ms. Trump promised to help people in our country who need it the most. She said she would focus on women and children, and in particular making sure that children have the education they deserve. It is kindness, love and compassion for each other that will bring us together and keep us together, she said. (Later, it was discovered that parts of Ms. Trumps speech had strikingly similarities to one given by Michelle Obama in 2008 to Democrats.)
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Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, repeatedly brought the crowd to its feet. He said Americans do not feel safe, and thanked the police for the dangerous job they do. When they come to save your life, they dont ask if you are black or white. They just come to save you, he said.
Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, questioned the historical contributions of nonwhite subgroups during an appearance on MSNBC on Monday, igniting swift backlash online.
Mr. King spoke during a panel discussion, led by the MSNBC host Chris Hayes, about the racial makeup of the Republican Party on the first day of the partys convention.
If youre really optimistic, you can say this was the last time that old white people would command the Republican Partys attention, its platform, its public face, Charles P. Pierce, a writer at large at Esquire magazine, said during the panel discussion.
Robert B. Morgan, a former United States senator from North Carolina whose votes for treaties to turn the Panama Canal over to Panama in 1978 cost him his seat after only one term, died on Saturday at his home in Buies Creek, N.C. He was 90.
His death was confirmed by Carroll Leggett, his former chief of staff.
Mr. Morgan was a moderate Democrat whose Senate voting record was ranked higher by the American Conservative Union than by the liberal Americans for Democratic Action. But his votes on the Panama Canal were his undoing. As he sought re-election in 1980, his Republican challenger, John P. East, attacked him on the issue throughout the campaign, largely through television commercials.
Mr. Easts campaign was run by allies of Senator Jesse Helms, the states senior Republican and an intense foe of giving up the canal, and the attacks were sometimes personal. In one ad, Mr. Helms questioned Mr. Morgans Christian faith.
Mr. Easts victory, by only 10,401 votes out of more than 900,000 cast, was one of at least five Senate elections that turned on the issue of the Panama Canal and helped give President Ronald Reagan the first Republican majority in the Senate since 1955 as he entered office, having turned back Jimmy Carters bid for re-election. The Republican votes in the Senate were a critical element in Mr. Reagans legislative successes.
SEOUL, South Korea North Korea fired three ballistic missiles on Tuesday, six days after South Korea revealed the location in the South where the United States planned to deploy an advanced missile defense system.
The three projectiles took off from Hwangju, south of Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, on Tuesday, between 5:45 a.m. and 6:40 a.m., and flew 310 to 370 miles before falling into the sea off the eastern coast of the North, the South Korean military said in a statement.
South Korean officials said the projectiles were believed to be Scud-type short-range ballistic missiles. North Korea has been banned from developing ballistic missiles under United Nations Security Council resolutions.
The ranges of the missiles launched on Tuesday were enough to cover most of South Korea, including Seongju, a town where the United States and South Korea have agreed to deploy the so-called Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, or Thaad, missile system.
The Gagosian Gallery, one of the most successful art dealerships in the world, failed to pay New York State sales tax on hundreds of art transactions over a decade, according to Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York State attorney general, who on Tuesday announced an agreement to collect $4.28 million in back taxes, interest and penalties from the business.
Those who evade art taxes potentially deprive the state of millions of dollars, Mr. Schneiderman said, and ordinary New Yorkers are stuck footing the bill.
Investigators found that the gallerys affiliate in California, Pre-War Art Inc., sold and shipped nearly $40 million worth of art to customers in New York from 2005 to 2015 and should have paid sales tax on those sales, according to the attorney generals office. The investigators said that a substantial nexus exists between the gallery and the California company. Larry Gagosian, the gallerys founder, is president of Pre-War as well as president of companies that control the rest of the gallerys operations, and Pre-War maintained an active bank account in New York.
The investigation, which found no evidence of criminal activity, also concluded that the gallery failed to pay tax on the sale of other works in New York that were shipped out of state from 2012 to 2015. Mr. Schneiderman said that state law requires sales tax to be paid when possession of a good is transferred to a buyer within New York State and that the gallery, in handing over art to shipping companies that were not common carriers like FedEx or the United States Postal Service, was legally transferring possession to the buyer at that point.
This was not the way Jeb Bush would have entered a room.
After a night of dire, doomsaying, death-ridden speeches, Donald J. Trump strode into the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on Monday night to the tune of Queens We Are the Champions. He was bathed from behind by celestial light, like a star child from Close Encounters of the Third Kind or an avenging angel or, well, a reality-TV host.
It was not restrained. It was not subtle. It was the visual moment when Mr. Trump hung his shiny golden T on the Republican Party, imposing his brand, tone and aesthetic on his newly acquired property.
The first night of Mr. Trumps convention was not the radical Hollywood rethinking of the speech-video-speech convention format that you might have expected from a candidate who, last year, was firing Ian Ziering on NBCs The Celebrity Apprentice for copying La Cucaracha in an advertising jingle.
It was not entirely smooth or well organized, either, and it somehow managed to culminate in charges of plagiarism over a section of the showcase speech by Mr. Trumps wife, Melania, about the value of hard work.
Making a Murderer, the true-crime documentary series that became an unexpected sensation for Netflix at the end of 2015, will return for new episodes revisiting the cases of Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey, the streaming service announced on Tuesday.
Directed by the filmmakers Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, Making a Murderer told the story of Mr. Avery, a Wisconsin man, who, having served 18 years in prison for a sexual assault, was exonerated for that crime. After his release in 2003, Mr. Avery was charged in 2005 and convicted in 2007 of the murder of a woman, Teresa Halbach. Mr. Averys nephew Mr. Dassey was also convicted as an accessory in that murder.
Over 10 episodes, the first season of Making a Murderer recounted Mr. Averys life and, using courtroom footage and interviews with prosecutors, defense attorneys, law enforcement officers and family members, raised questions about the fairness of the murder investigation, Mr. Dasseys interrogation and his and Mr. Averys trials.
Released quietly last December, the series, like HBOs nonfiction program The Jinx and the podcast Serial, became a word-of-mouth true-crime phenomenon, renewing public interest in Mr. Averys story. Making a Murderer also drew criticism from Wisconsin prosecutors who say its one-sided and omits crucial information used to convict Mr. Avery.
Monsanto, the American maker of genetically modified crop seeds, on Tuesday rejected a revised takeover bid by Bayer of Germany as too cheap, an expected move that prolongs the bidding contest for the company.
In response, Bayer said it was disappointed but that it was looking forward to continued dialogue with Monsanto.
The rejection signals that Bayer, which is seeking to create a one-stop shop for farmers during a wave of mergers in the agriculture business, will have to work even harder to try to consummate a deal.
In a short statement, Monsanto said that its board viewed Bayers new takeover bid of $125 a share in cash, up from an initial $122 a share, as financially inadequate and insufficient to ensure deal certainty. Bayer revealed its first bid in May and offered the revised deal earlier this month.
Attacking big banks is as American as apple pie. But its a new entry on this years Republican menu.
In a convention surprise, the Republicans inserted a plank in the party platform calling for the restoration of a Depression-era law, the Glass-Steagall Act, that separated commercial and investment banking.
The law was repealed in 1999 during the Clinton administration, with bipartisan support, at the behest of the big banks, which said they needed to combine their investment and commercial functions in order to compete on the global stage.
It didnt turn out so well, of course.
The world endured a severe financial crisis and global recession, and big multiservice banks like Citigroup, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase received government funds. Subsequently, investment banks like Goldman Sachs, which also received a bailout, took on commercial banking, adding to the entanglement of investment and commercial functions.
BRUSSELS The European Unions antitrust chief imposed a record fine of 2.9 billion euros, or $3.2 billion, on a group of truck makers on Tuesday, part of a trend toward steeper penalties for competition violations in the 28-nation bloc.
The fine was for price-fixing and operating a secretive system aimed at delaying the installation of pollution-curbing exhaust pipes and engines. Less than a week ago, the European Commission, the blocs executive arm, announced a new round of antitrust charges against Google, on suspicion that some of the companys advertising products had restricted consumer choice.
We have, today, put down a marker by imposing record fines for a serious infringement, Margrethe Vestager, the European Unions competition commissioner, said in a statement. For 14 years, they colluded on the pricing and on passing on the costs for meeting environmental standards to customers. This is also a clear message to companies that cartels are not accepted.
The announcement brings more bad news for Volkswagen, which has been embroiled in a diesel emissions scandal that began in the United States, and which recently set aside $14.7 billion to compensate customers there for having installed software that made its vehicles seem less polluting than they were.
Three attorneys general on Tuesday directly challenged Volkswagens defense over its emissions deception, calling the decision to thwart pollution tests an orchestrated fraud that lasted more than a decade, involved dozens of engineers and managers and reached deep into the companys boardroom.
The accusations, leveled in lawsuits by New York, Massachusetts and Maryland, contradict Volkswagens portrayal of the deception, representing a new threat to the carmakers finances, reputation and management. For the first time, the suits connected Volkswagens chief executive, Matthias Muller, to the scandal, saying he was aware of a 2006 decision to not outfit Audi vehicles with equipment needed to meet American clean-air standards.
Volkswagen, which admitted late last year to equipping 11 million vehicles worldwide with software to cheat emissions tests, has maintained that the deception was limited to a small group of people. The company has said top management was not aware of the cheating software, known as a defeat device.
But the New York civil complaint, drawing on internal Volkswagen documents, emails and witness statements, depicts a corporate culture that allowed a willful and systematic scheme of cheating. The evidence paints the most detailed picture yet about how the deception unfolded and who was responsible.
Headliner
Pondicheri This is the first out-of-town foray for a popular Indian restaurant in Houston, and it will start by serving breakfast, lunch and snacks. The wide-ranging pan-Indian menu includes stuffed parathas and rotis, cooling chaat salads and curries. Customers place orders at a counter, and the food is delivered to their tables. Dinner, which will not begin until mid-August, will be more formal, with full waiter service. The owner is Anita Jaisinghani. The pastry chef is Ashley Dickson, who infuses items like madeleines with exotic spices, and the sommelier is Rajat Parr, who has assembled a global list of wines, most of which you may not find elsewhere. The decor is simple, highlighting an original tile floor, with bare tables and a very long bar. Its a big bar, said Ajna Jai, Ms. Jaisinghanis daughter. Were from Texas. (Opens Monday): 15 West 27th Street, 646-878-4375, pondichericafe.com.
Opening
Fifty This is the first restaurant for Alex Kingman, a 27-year-old business school graduate whose family owns the building. The slightly triangular room, which used to house Commerce, is plainer now, with dark tables, slanted mirrors and many fewer Art Deco touches. Original tiles remain. The chef, Luis Jaramillo, is a native of Ecuador; his menu is American but occasionally shows a South American inflection (Wednesday): 50 Commerce Street (Barrow Street), 212-524-4104.
Ladybird Ravi DeRossi opens this vegetable tapas bar serving quinoa croquetas, a gazpacho trio and inventive charcuterie like beet chorizo, mushroom pate and smoked carrots. The chef is Daphne Cheng, who oversees the menu at his Mother of Pearl. The restaurant will donate 10 percent of the proceeds to Mr. DeRossis Beast Foundation to prevent cruelty to animals. (Thursday): 127 Macdougal Street (West Third Street), 212-475-2246, ladybirdny.com.
SAN FRANCISCO By avoiding originality, In Situ is the most original new restaurant in the country.
The restaurant opened a month ago inside the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in a space off the lobby that was built during the museums transformative recent expansion. Inside, the chef, Corey Lee, faithfully replicates dishes dreamed up by Sean Brock, Alice Waters and other innovators. None of the recipes are his own.
As one of the managers told a group of people interested in renting out the restaurant for the night when I ate there this month, The easiest way to understand this restaurant is as an art installation. Strangely enough, they didnt appear frightened by that statement. Even more strangely, it makes some kind of sense once you eat at In Situ.
Mr. Lees concept for once, the industry jargon is apt sidesteps some basic assumptions about what chefs are supposed to do. In Situs closest peer in this regard is probably Next, the Chicago restaurant founded by Grant Achatz that inhabits a new period and style of cooking every four months. Each chef, of course, has another restaurant that works as a showpiece for his own expressive temperament. For Mr. Achatz, that is Alinea. For Mr. Lee, it is Benu, a short walk from In Situ, where he offers some of the most exquisitely varied and controlled tasting menus Ive ever had; his cooking there runs variations on Chinese, Korean and Japanese dishes that are possible only because he seems to understand each one so thoroughly.
There are more famous chefs in the United States, but few whose technical mastery is as deeply respected in the business. I couldnt have more faith in anyone than Corey Lee, in terms of execution, the chef Wylie Dufresne said.
Melania Trumps speech at the Republican National Convention on Monday evening may have had a striking similarity to some parts of Michelle Obamas address at the 2008 Democratic convention, but in one aspect, at least, her appearance was original: her clothes.
Unlike pretty much every would-be first lady, Ms. Trump wore a dress not by an American label, but by Roksanda Ilincic, a Serbian-born designer based in London.
Women undergoing in vitro fertilization have long worried that the procedure could raise their risk for breast cancer.
After all, the treatment requires temporarily increasing levels of certain sex hormones to five or 10 times the normal. Two of those hormones, estrogen and progesterone, can affect the course of certain kinds of breast cancer.
A series of studies over the past decade suggested that these former patients may have little to worry about. Experts remained cautious, however, because women who had undergone I.V.F. in the 1980s had not yet reached menopause by the time of the research.
But the largest, most comprehensive study to date, published Tuesday, provides further reassurance: It finds no increased risk among women who have undergone I.V.F.
In the ambitious business of New York bridge building, it has been a tragic consequence of the work: More than 20 people, including the bridges lead engineer, lost their lives during the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. As workers raised the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in the 1960s, three people paid the ultimate price. And during construction of the original Tappan Zee Bridge in the 1950s, a worker fell to his death.
But when a large crane being used to construct what will eventually be the aging Tappan Zees replacement came toppling down on Tuesday, landing squarely across the roadway, something astounding happened: Nobody died.
This was nothing short of a miracle, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said at an afternoon news conference in Tarrytown at the base of the bridge, citing the lack of serious injuries from the accident.
At least four people received minor injuries in the collapse, including three motorists who were trying to avoid the crane, officials said. A construction worker was also injured, officials said.
There is the Colson Patisserie, the mayors favorite morning stop; the S & S Cleaners; the nearby Brooklyn Public Library branch where Mr. de Blasio votes; the Little Purity Diner; and Bar Toto, where he has held meetings and made fund-raising calls.
The uniqueness of the mayors routine has been noted since his early days in office, before he and his family moved to Gracie Mansion from their Park Slope home. But close observation by a reporter for The New York Times, who is a fellow member of the Y.M.C.A., reveals it to be more rigid, lengthy and leisurely than previously known.
During a recent week, Mr. de Blasio did not miss a single workout hitting the gym each and every weekday, usually leaving the mansion around 8 a.m. or a bit later.
He texts and emails on his phone. He stretches. He reads sheets of paper and watches television news. He once appeared to be reviewing a speech or a policy brief.
No City Hall staff members came to speak with him nor did any other friends or associates. His wife, Chirlane McCray, accompanied him to the gym on two days, though they mostly worked out separately.
To the Editor:
In Trump and U.S. Chamber of Commerce Pull No Punches (Business Day, July 12), the chamber describes itself as a $250 million operation that represents American businesses of all sizes.
The chambers oft-repeated claim to represent small businesses and mom and pop shops is central to its legitimacy as a voice for American business writ large. But a 2014 Public Citizen report found that just 64 donors provided more than half its contributions, and 1,500 donors provided 94 percent of its contributions. Such a narrow and deep-pocketed donor base suggests that the chamber is in fact a voice for Big Business.
Indeed, Thomas J. Donohue, the chambers president, has admitted as much, having written that small businesses provide the foot soldiers, and often the political cover, for issues big companies want pursued.
As your article rightly points out, Mr. Donohue has turned the chamber into a political lobbying machine, pushing an agenda primarily tailored to the needs of a few deep-pocketed industries.
To the Editor:
Re Saudi Enforcer Shares Doubts, and Pays Price (Secrets of the Kingdom series, front page, July 11):
That most Saudis consider Wahhabism to be moderate Islam may not be as surprising as it seems when one considers that American leaders for years considered Saudi Arabia, along with other Persian Gulf monarchies, to be moderate Arab states, and the news media routinely echoed this terminology.
For example, when Ronald Reagan won the right to sell advanced weapon systems to the Saudis, he stated that it would both protect our economic lifeline in the Middle East and win favor among moderate Arab nations. The New York Times observed that the administration sought to persuade moderate Arabs, particularly the Saudis and the Jordanians, to support the United States on other critical issues.
Unfortunately, too often American leaders have defined as moderate those Middle Eastern countries important to us economically or militarily, regardless of their human rights records.
ROBERT SHAFFER
Shippensburg, Pa.
The writer teaches U.S. diplomatic history at Shippensburg University.
France, however, remains resolutely universalist and claims it still has both the desire and the power to enforce inclusion. Yet its assimilationist ambitions are increasingly at odds with everyday reality, and this growing gap is a source of pervasive distress.
And so the strength the weight of Frances national identity has become a problem. It only heightens the discontent of young people with foreign origins, especially North Africans or their descendants, all the more so because the Maghrebs decolonization occurred in pain and humiliation: When France withdrew from Algeria, it left behind hundreds of thousands dead and created scars in the collective unconscious that remain to this day. British decolonization seems almost painless in comparison.
Certainly, Britons and Germans also express fears about immigration and Islam. Such concerns help explain Brexit. Acts of sexual harassment in Cologne around the new year, apparently committed by immigrants, sparked a heated debate in Germany (and beyond). But both Britain and Germany give non-local minorities ample leeway to publicly express and practice their religious and communal preferences.
France insists in the name of republicanism that religion should remain a strictly private affair. An ideological nation par excellence, it focuses on symbolic issues like wearing headscarves or holding collective prayers in public places. But restricting such practices causes wounds that go much deeper than the prohibitions themselves: It allows Islamists to exaggerate the implications and accuse France of Islamophobia. In fact, France is no more Islamophobic than its neighbors; its just more frontal in the way it handles Islam in the public sphere.
French-style integration has had some successes. Most notable among them is a high rate of mixed marriages. The French public school system, by helping uplift the lower classes and, therefore, many children of North African parents, has also been a tool of integration (although lately it has seemed less effective). Sometimes precisely because they have faced prejudice in the job market, which has long been stifled by unemployment, children of immigrants have found refuge in state institutions like the army and the police, which recruit through anonymous competitive exams.
Although France has managed to integrate many immigrants and their descendants, those it has left on the sidelines are more embittered than their British or German peers, and many feel insulted in their Muslim or Arab identity. Laicite, Frances staunch version of secularism, is so inflexible it can appear to rob them of dignity. An additional factor is Frances muscular foreign policy, which seems to target mostly Muslim countries, such as Libya, Syria and Mali.
Frances model of integration is generous in its principles but too rigid in its practice. The realities of French society today call for a more pragmatic and flexible approach, with fewer ideological diktats and less anxiety about plurality. France isnt what it used to be, and its time it came to terms with that idea.
LONDON There is a genteel savagery to the British prime ministerial system. If you blinked last week, youd have missed David Camerons exit and the arrival in No. 10 Downing Street of Theresa May. No period of transition separates one regime from the other, allowing the nation to acclimatize to its new head of government. One prime minister is hustled out No. 10, and another is hustled in.
Though British politics has grown increasingly presidential, ever more focused on the personality of the prime minister, its system remains parliamentary, and the party that commands a majority in the House of Commons chooses the prime minister. Last week, Mr. Cameron was driven out by his defeat in the European Union referendum, only 13 months after winning a general election. The slender majority of parliamentary seats that he achieved as leader of the Conservative Party is inherited by his successor, Ms. May. In theory at least, the mandate belongs to a party, not a person.
The new prime minister was the home secretary for Mr. Camerons entire six-year term. Throughout, she positioned herself discreetly for a run at the top job, occasionally raising her profile with a speech that ranged outside her regular policy portfolio. She not only wooed the partys right wing with pledges to cut back immigration, but also courted the modernizers who believe that the party must reach beyond its base with her commitments to same-sex marriage and racial equality.
After the Brexit vote, the news media and the Conservative Party were all prepared for a battle between George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, and Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London. In the event, neither entered the race, which Ms. May won with ease.
The warming in the first half of this year extended across all parts of the planet except for most of Antarctica, Dr. Schmidt said.
Warming was especially strong in the Arctic, where it had an effect on sea ice coverage.
Walt Meier, a scientist at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center, said that the geographical extent of the Arctic ice so far this year was the lowest for any half-year since satellite record-keeping began in 1979, largely because warm temperatures caused melting to begin as much as two months earlier than usual.
Its been an extreme beginning to the year for sea ice, he said. It is not yet clear if this year will exceed the record for the lowest sea-ice extent, set in 2012, because most of the melting takes place later in the summer.
Warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius has special significance because at the Paris climate treaty in December, the world agreed to aim to limit the increase in average global temperatures to that amount above preindustrial levels.
Dr. Schmidt said that the Paris target referred to sustained temperatures over the long term.
I certainly would not say that we have now gotten to that initial Paris number and are going to stay there, he said. But I think its fair to say that we are dancing with that lower target.
Yet earlier this year, Google awarded the first grants from a newly created $167 million fund for European publishers to help them adapt to the digital world. The goal, says Madhav Chinnappa, the Google executive running the program, is to give newspapers, magazine publishers and start-ups the financial freedom to try new ways to connect with online consumers. (The International New York Times took part in a previous Google-backed fund for French publishers.)
Euronews, a pan-regional broadcaster based in France, has received more than $500,000 to test 360-degree news videos, and aims to produce broadcasts by the end of the year.
Of course, Google has its own agenda to show to Europes political powers that they arent bad guys, said Michael Peters, chief executive of Euronews. But this gives organizations like ours the chance to do these types of projects. It wouldnt have happened without Google.
The Silicon Valley company is also tapping into a more friendly audience: Europes tech community.
From London to Madrid, it has built, or invested in, so-called co-working spaces open-plan offices where eager 20-something developers can meet to swap ideas and, potentially, start new businesses. These buildings have helped to connect the American company with Europes fast-growing tech hubs, says Frederic Oru, international director of Numa, a start-up incubator in Paris that has received Google funding.
To push its tech credibility, Google will spend more than $75 million by year-end to train roughly two million Europeans in digital skills like e-commerce and online marketing (often based on the companys own advertising products), an important goal for European policy makers, who are trying to create a digital single market to jump-start economic growth.
In Dublin, home to Googles European headquarters, that has involved a one-year course in software coding for local teachers. Participants in the class, run by Trinity College Dublin, have been invited to the companys glass-fronted offices on the shores of the Liffey River to learn directly from Google staff members.
Im so confident now that I can teach my students anything and they can just run with it, said Helen OKelly, 38, a former Microsoft employee who retrained to become an I.T. teacher.
RIO DE JANEIRO For months, authorities in Brazil have sought access to digital data from WhatsApp to aid in criminal investigations. WhatsApp has repeatedly resisted the requests.
On Tuesday, the same clash erupted again, for the third time in less than a year. A Brazilian judge in a state criminal court in Duque de Caxias, in Rio de Janeiro, ordered a nationwide shutdown of WhatsApp after the popular messaging service, which is owned by Facebook, did not turn over user data requested by authorities as part of a criminal investigation. A few hours later, Brazils Supreme Court overturned the order.
Despite the brevity of the episode, the case is part of a broader debate worldwide about when law enforcement officials and governments should have access to the digital data kept by tech companies. Many of the companies, like Apple and Microsoft, have said they are unwilling to turn over such data to authorities because doing so would infringe on the privacy rights of their customers. But authorities have argued that they need the data for security reasons.
In Brazil, WhatsApp faced two previous shutdowns one last December, and another in May for not turning over digital information. Both of those bans were also quickly overturned on appeal by higher court judges. In March, a Facebook executive was briefly taken into custody for refusing to comply with similar orders to turn over information from WhatsApp.
CHEYENNE, Wyo. Matt Mead, the governor of Wyoming, the nations leading coal-producing state, fiercely opposes President Obamas climate change regulations, which could shutter hundreds of coal plants and deeply wound his state, one of 27 that are suing to block the plan.
Nevertheless, Mr. Mead, a Republican, has ordered his top environmental officials to prepare to comply with the presidents effort, known as the Clean Power Plan to prepare for a future in which Mr. Obamas climate change rules prevail and the countrys coal market is nearly frozen. Wyoming is one of at least 20 states that are moving forward with efforts to comply with the rules or to analyze alternative plans. Several of these states are also suing to stop the rules, according to experts who track state climate change policy.
Obviously were suing and going to fight, Mr. Mead, a former United States attorney for Wyoming, said in an interview in his office here. But from my court experience, I know you have to prepare not to win.
Mr. Obamas ambitious climate change plan is in legal limbo. The Supreme Court has ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to halt the plan until after the states lawsuit is resolved. The case will go before a federal court in September, but it is widely expected to be appealed to the Supreme Court and may not be decided until 2018.
CLEVELAND Amid the balloons and parties, speeches and spectacle, one faction of the Republican Party is almost invisible at the national convention this week: the Bush family network.
Representatives of the last Republican White House are effectively in exile from presidential politics these days, dispirited by their partys embrace of Donald J. Trump, the nominee, and feeling betrayed by former friends who are backing him.
As Mr. Trump was nominated, former President George W. Bush planned to be on his Crawford, Tex., ranch, painting and bike riding. His former secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, was to be in her Stanford University office working on a new book about democracy, and former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida would, he wrote in a terse email, be working in Miami.
They are hardly the only ones staying away. An email sent to alumni of Mr. Bushs administration this month listing those former Bush officials going to Cleveland was notable mostly because of who was not included: no former cabinet officials or members of the White House senior staff.
Follow our latest Day 2 coverage of the Republican National Convention.
Thunderstorms passed over Cleveland early Monday morning, but they reappeared Monday night inside Quicken Loans Arena, where the first night of Donald J. Trumps coronation struck a dark and foreboding tone unmatched by any convention in recent history. Our takeaways:
Were in grave danger
The lineup of speakers presented a United States in danger, threatened from abroad and from within, a once-proud nation on the very brink of chaos and dystopia. Six of the speakers were military veterans, including Marcus Luttrell, the celebrated former Navy SEAL, who bluntly warned that the enemy is here. A half-dozen more were relatives of Americans murdered by foreign terrorists or illegal immigrants threats to the nations safety and cohesion that often mingle in the Trump worldview. Another was the former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who likened the country to a circa-1980s New York in need of a strong hand. There is no next election, Mr. Giuliani warned. This is it!
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky sometimes struggles to work up much enthusiasm for Donald J. Trump. But he can definitely get excited about the opportunity to trash Hillary Clinton.
In his appearance at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on Tuesday as one of several members of Congress scheduled to speak, Mr. McConnell, the majority leader, is expected to slam the presumptive Democratic nominee.
A campaign aide to Mr. McConnell said the senator would focus on what he saw as Mrs. Clintons record of failed policies and a willingness to do anything to get elected. He will argue that the case for casting a presidential vote is an easy one, particularly given the Republican desire to maintain the conservative tilt of the Supreme Court. He will also touch on one of his favorite topics: that the Senate, controlled by Republicans, is much more productive than it was under a Democratic majority.
While some Republican senators in tough re-election fights have decided to pass on the party convention, there is still a fairly strong contingent in town. Joining Mr. McConnell in speaking on Tuesday will be Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who is in a tough re-election battle. Others joined Mr. McConnell at events with campaign donors Sunday night and Monday afternoon.
As the Republican nominee for president, Donald J. Trump has said little about what he would do on education.
The subject follows The Establishment, Political Correctness and Unifying the Nation among the issues on his campaign website. Mr. Trump says only generally that he is a tremendous believer in education and that he wants to end the Common Core. (Its an absolute disaster.)
For his running mate, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, education has been a signature issue and a contentious one.
As a congressman, he was one of just two dozen Republicans to vote against the No Child Left Behind act championed by President George W. Bush. Mr. Pence said he was concerned about federal intrusion into what had been a state and local issue. He has largely hewed to Republican ideas of more school choice and a smaller federal role in education. But he has also alienated some members of his own party, who said Mr. Pence paid more attention to politics than to policy.
NEW DELHI Bangladesh, reeling from a sudden intensification of terrorism this summer, has begun an urgent search for men suspected of building an Islamic State presence in the country and recruiting young Bangladeshis to fight in Syria and Iraq.
Bangladeshs government has maintained that the escalating attacks there were the work of domestic terrorists supported by domestic patrons, and it has dismissed claims of responsibility from groups like the Islamic State and Al Qaeda.
But a list of 10 high-value suspects that was released this month, after the harrowing siege of a restaurant in Dhaka, tells another story.
The list includes three Bangladeshi expatriates longtime residents of Canada, Australia and Japan who have long been sought by the police and suspected of setting up training and recruitment pipelines for the Islamic State. A fourth man on the list vanished last year after telling his brother he planned to fight for the Islamic State in Iraq, the police said.
The academy did not respond to an email requesting comment, and telephone calls went unanswered.
I protest, Mr. Du said by phone on Tuesday from his home in Beijing. Im angry.
The journals printers had also stopped accepting copy, he said. So were paralyzed, he said.
As a cadre, a Communist Party member, I absolutely cant understand this. It resembles methods used in the Cultural Revolution, said Mr. Du, who once oversaw the General Administration of Press and Publication, a state regulatory agency. Does this mean that we, the Communist Party, want another Cultural Revolution?
Yanhuang Chunqiu, whose name roughly means Chinese Annals, was founded in 1991 and has carried articles advocating political change and examining delicate issues in Chinese Communist history. Its departures from the official party narrative have landed it in trouble before.
A Defiant Tone: At the opening of Chinas Communist Party congress, President Xi Jinping At the opening of Chinas Communist Party congress, President Xi Jinping defended his hard-line reign , presenting himself as a leader focused on securing the countrys rise amid global threats.
Moving Backward: A decade ago, many of Chinas political, business and intellectual elites hoped that Mr. Xi would usher in openness and reform. Today, some of them believe A decade ago, many of Chinas political, business and intellectual elites hoped that Mr. Xi would usher in openness and reform. Today, some of them believe he has created a totalitarian state
Lonely at the Top: As Chinas most powerful female politician prepares for retirement, few other women can hope to As Chinas most powerful female politician prepares for retirement, few other women can hope to make it to the upper echelons of Chinese politics
In 2008, it published a series of articles extolling the achievements of Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party general secretary who fell from power in 1989 because he opposed the use of military force to crush the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. Jiang Zemin, who succeeded Mr. Zhao as party chief, pressed for Mr. Dus removal from the journal, but he was able to retain the position with the support of other retired party officials who favored a more liberal political system.
In an interview in 2009, Mr. Du said, I am old enough and tough enough that if there is any pressure from the government, I can hold on here.
ROHTAK, India Police officers in northern India on Tuesday arrested three men suspected of kidnapping and raping a 20-year-old college student last week, allegedly targeting her a second time as punishment for accusing them of raping her before.
The men were among a group of five accused of assaulting the woman three years ago. Two of the three men arrested on Tuesday had been the only ones charged in the 2013 rape case and were out on bail when the second assault is said to have occurred, according to K.P. Singh, the director general of police in the northern Indian state of Haryana.
The shocking nature of the allegations drew politicians and activists to the local police station and the hospital where the woman was being treated. Some excoriated the police for waiting six days to make an arrest.
Investigators said they were waiting for forensic evidence to determine whether the woman had been raped a second time.
MANILA The Supreme Court of the Philippines dismissed corruption charges on Tuesday against a former president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, and ordered her release from a Manila hospital where she has been detained since 2012. Her lawyer said she was likely to be freed on Wednesday.
The court, voting 11 to 4, ruled that there was insufficient evidence to bring a case against Mrs. Arroyo in connection with the misuse of 366 million pesos in lottery funds during her administration, worth about $8.8 million at the time of her arrest.
Lawyers for Mrs. Arroyo contended that prosecutors did not prove that the mishandled funds went to her. She had been charged with plunder, which disqualified her for bail, but her lawyers said a spinal problem made her eligible for humanitarian release as she awaited trial.
Mrs. Arroyo, 69, is the daughter of a former president of the Philippines, Diosdado P. Macapagal. She attended Georgetown University at the same time as Bill Clinton, the former United States president, and was a popular senator before being elected vice president in 1998.
In a city and country eager to modernize and redevelop its inner cities, urban villages like Baishizhou are seen by government officials as dirty and backward. Instead, they aim to build gleaming new residential and commercial districts to reflect Shenzhens rise.
These new developments would uproot longtime residents who have faced the threat of demolition for years. Baishizhou is in a central district of Shenzhen long valued for its potential for commercial redevelopment. Plans to remake the area began in 2005, and in 2014 Shenzhen officials marked part of Baishizhou for redevelopment. A factory and office complex in central Baishizhou, the Shahe Industrial District, was slated to be razed at the end of April.
The factory remains, and new delays have stalled plans to tear it down.
It will happen, sooner or later, says Wu Zhengui, 62, a migrant from Zhejiang Province. He has been selling shoes for 14 years out of a storefront on the eastern edge of the Shahe complex, where stores up and down the blocks advertise demolition sales.
HONG KONG Protests against the South China Sea ruling by a tribunal in The Hague broke out in several Chinese cities on Monday, with people targeting KFC outlets as a symbol of United States interests.
Last week, the tribunal ruled in favor of the Philippines in its case against China, rejecting Beijings claims to historic rights in the South China Sea. Many in China accused the United States of pushing the Philippines to pursue the case.
KFC outlets in about a dozen cities, including Hangzhou, in Zhejiang Province; Changsha, in Hunan Province; and Yangzhou, in Jiangsu Province, were targeted by protests and calls for a boycott on Monday, according to a report from Sohu News, a Chinese online news outlet. But the campaign was far smaller than previous nationalist boycotts, and state media outlets warned protesters to avoid any illegal behavior.
There have been no major protests outside embassies in Beijing. The Philippine Embassy in particular was protected by plainclothes and uniformed police officers after the tribunals ruling last week.
SOUNDBITE (English) Boris Johnson, British Foreign Secretary: Clearly, as I have been saying repeatedly over the last few weeks, on our relations with the European Union, we have to give effect to the will of the people, but that does not mean in any sense leaving Europe, that would be - Europe, that word properly understood - that would be geographically, historically, culturally, intellectually, emotionally impossible. After we have completed our extrication from the treaties of the European Union, after the negotiations, what I want to see, and I believe on this you and I are at one, John (addressing US Secretary of State John Kerry), is more Britain abroad, more of the UK presence on the world stage. SOUNDBITE (English) John Kerry, US Secretary of State: I have returned to London today to reaffirm ourselves, the special and unbreakable ties between the United States and the United Kingdom. And these are more than words, folks, I dont want to just say them, they are not just words of diplomacy, they really arent. This is a genuine expression of a feeling of friendship and it is built up over years and years of common sacrifice, common endeavour, common interest, common values that have been shared consistently between us. I think that it is clear that no shift in administrations, and I am speaking for us either, in either of our countries, is going to alter or undermine the bonds that we have. SOUNDBITE (English) John Kerry, US Secretary of State: So the fact is that the United States of America depends on a strong United Kingdom. We mean united. And it depends also on an engaged United Kingdom, there is occasion after occasion in my tenure as Secretary of State where the presence of the United Kingdom and the involvement of your Foreign Secretary - whether it was William Hague with whom I first began, or whether it was then Philip Hammond - we have consistently been able to work together to do things that have made a difference to the safety of people on this planet. And that is particularly pronounced in the Iran nuclear agreement and in the climate change agreement we reached in Paris. As I said in Brussels, we also depend on a close relationship with the European Union. And as Britain and the EU begin negotiating the new terms of their partnership, America is rooting for and will do all we can to try to encourage and assist in the development of the smoothest possible transition and a highly integrated and collaborative UK-EU relationship.
LONDON Rebellious lawmakers in Britains opposition Labour Party agreed on Tuesday on a single candidate to challenge their leader, Jeremy Corbyn, intensifying a bitter struggle to oust the left-wing party boss after months of internal feuding.
Owen Smith, who used to speak for the party on welfare issues, emerged as the challenger to Mr. Corbyn after winning a contest for support among Labour deputies prompting his rival, Angela Eagle, to withdraw from the race.
Mr. Corbyn has refused to stand aside despite losing a no-confidence motion among Labour lawmakers and suffering the resignation of the majority of his senior team in Parliament.
Although Labour is now embroiled in the biggest crisis in its recent history, Mr. Corbyn may well retain the leadership, which will be decided by party members and supporters in a vote in September.
WURZBURG, Germany Over the weekend, an Afghan teenager who had arrived as a refugee last year told confidants in Germany that he had lost a close friend in Afghanistan, but who had been killed, and how and where, remained unclear.
The news seemed to unhinge the 17-year-old, who had been specially selected for foster care because he seemed to be adjusting well to his new life in Germany. His foster family noticed that the normally quiet young man appeared agitated and that he spent a lot of time on his phone.
But when he told them on Monday that he was going out for a bike ride and might be gone for a while, they had no inkling that he had left armed with an ax and a knife, determined to carry out a brutal attack in the name of the Islamic State.
Hours later, five people were hospitalized two of them critically after the teenager slashed them about the head and torso on a passenger train, shouting Allahu akbar, or God is great. The Afghan teenager, whom officials did not identify, then fled and attacked a woman walking her dog before he was cornered and killed by the German police.
NICE, France When a Tunisian man drove a truck down a crowded street in Nice last week in an attack claimed by the Islamic State, more than one-third of the people he killed were Muslim, the head of a regional Islamic association said on Tuesday.
Kawthar Ben Salem, a spokeswoman for the Union of Muslims of the Alpes-Maritimes, said that Muslim funerals were being held for at least 30 of those who died during the Bastille Day attack, including men, women and children.
The Paris prosecutors office, which handles terrorism investigations, said on Tuesday that all 84 people killed in the attack had been formally identified, meaning that the number of Muslim fatalities may be even higher. The number of people who were wounded was also raised, to 308 people.
The attack occurred after a fireworks display, as the Tunisian man, identified as Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, drove a cargo truck around a barrier and accelerated as people were slowly beginning to leave the beach area. The truck plowed into the crowds, tacking from one side of the road to the other. The road had been closed to vehicular traffic for the display.
MOSCOW Russias main domestic intelligence service raided the Moscow headquarters of an investigative agency on Tuesday, in a rare sign of dysfunction in the countrys domestic security services.
The raid, recalling the rivalries and infighting of the immediate post-Soviet period, played out on a main street in the capital, New Arbat, and ended with arrests of three senior prosecutors.
Agents of the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., the main successor to the Soviet K.G.B., searched the offices of the Investigative Committee, the powerful branch of the prosecutors office that deals with politically hued crimes.
The raid was all the more baffling because the two agencies are generally viewed as operating in lock step to repress political dissent, crack down on organized crime and pursue other high-profile cases in the capital.
ISTANBUL The Turkish authorities extended their purge of state institutions on Tuesday, suspending more than 15,000 employees of the education ministry for suspected links to a failed military coup last week.
Shortly after the suspensions were announced, the High Education Board ordered the resignation of more than 1,500 deans from universities across the country and revoked the licenses of 21,000 teachers, Turkish officials said.
By Tuesday night, the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had either purged or detained nearly 35,000 members of the military, security forces and judiciary in an effort to remove from the government bureaucracy and political-class loyalists of Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric whom the government has accused of orchestrating Fridays coup attempt.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim likened Mr. Gulens followers to a parallel terrorist organization.
JERUSALEM The Israeli Parliament passed contentious legislation early Wednesday that enables the suspension or ouster of members accused of racial incitement or of supporting armed struggle against Israel. Critics said it was intended to target Arab legislators and harmed democratic principles like freedom of expression.
The legislation, which was approved by a vote of 62 to 47, with several members absent, after a stormy debate, requires the support of 90 out of the Parliaments 120 lawmakers to oust someone. Setting such a process in motion requires the votes of 70 lawmakers, including 10 from the opposition, which makes the process difficult to carry out. Lawmakers voted out of Parliament would be able to appeal to the Supreme Court.
But the law has added to the sense that Israels conservative government is pushing populist and questionable measures that some opposition politicians have called discriminatory and even indicative of budding fascism.
It comes less than two weeks after the Parliament, known as the Knesset, approved another bill that stirred heated internal debate and drew criticism from the Obama administration and the European Union: the so-called transparency law, which requires nongovernmental organizations that receive more than half their financing from foreign governments to disclose donors identities in their publications, advertising and meetings with public officials.
Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben are often criticized as racist brand ambassadors, but theres a corporate mascot popping up all over the world who makes their alleged sins looks small: Adolf Hitler.
Like characters in the Mel Brooks film The Producers, business owners from Belgium to Taiwan to the Gaza Strip have taken to using the Nazi dictators name and visage to sell shampoo, fried chicken, jeans, space heaters and more. In Gaza, the sellers of Hitler jeans even put knives in their mannequins hands last fall to celebrate the wave of Palestinians who were stabbing Israeli Jews; the knives were quickly removed.
The Anti-Defamation League has been tracking and protesting the promotional use of Hitler by commercial businesses for more than a decade. Here are some examples of what they found.
THE NORDIC THEORY OF EVERYTHING
In Search of a Better Life
By Anu Partanen
418 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99.
Every expatriate has stories about the moments he or she feels most foreign. When I first arrived in America I could not understand the concept of a co-payment. I have health insurance, I insisted, several times, to a receptionist who nonetheless expected me to fork over a 20. I had never in my life paid cash at a doctors office. In Canada, where Im from, you show a card, and thats the end of it. I thought private insurance would be like that, at least procedurally. A decade later, Im not sure about the function of a co-payment, other than as a reminder that when it comes to health care, you will be nickel-and-dimed until you draw your last breath.
Surprises like these pile up over time when you live in a country that isnt your own. The Finnish journalist Anu Partanen clearly had a few stories to tell. In her new book, The Nordic Theory of Everything, her pose is one of constant surprise. She is shocked by the health care system. She is perplexed by Americans who classify their parents as their best friends. She is astonished by the marriage debate. She is flabbergasted by how much the allocation of parental responsibility still goes to the mother.
Each of these jolts, Partanen tells you over the course of the book, only made her more convinced that Finland had gotten things right. She turns her experiences, and those of her friends, into an exploration of the different policy choices each country has made. She points out that Finns get 10 months of parental leave split between the mother and father, subsidized day care and subsidized health care. She presents the statistics showcasing the great results of such state support: According to a 2013 Unicef study, Finlands child poverty rate is less than 5 percent, compared with 25 percent for American children.
But these wry liberals, smoking beneath the bleachers, unwittingly started a fire that engulfed the entire movement. By the early 90s, the term was reduced to an abbreviation and inflated into a right-wing boogeyman. This time, the joke was on liberalism itself. Rush Limbaughs 1993 book, See, I Told You So, included a satirical politically correct liberal lexicon. The new P.C. exaggerated the excesses of the left, condemning it as hopelessly insular and divided from the rest of the country by its narrow concerns. It made liberals into an other, one that spoke its own esoteric language.
And others pose a threat. The right-wing rhetoric around P.C. has always made use of martial metaphors the P.C. police, the feminazis that Limbaugh popularized and their modern equivalent, social justice warriors with a sly wink. These were, after all, sissy liberals engaged in stultifying cultural squabbles. But now Trump has deepened the insinuation, framing political correctness as a kind of fifth-column tendency, an actual danger to America. In his campaign, P.C. is no longer just a joke, or a slick rhetorical tool for riling the base. Its the shrewd recognition of a dark aspect of white American psychology: That many experience being told not to use certain words as a kind of violence. For people who live free of the threat of police brutality and racist aggression, simply being called racist is a wounding personal attack. As one Trump supporter complained to BuzzFeed, every other ethnicity gets a free card to say whatever they want and be completely accepted. But whenever I and many other people that might be sympathetic to the larger group of people say something, automatically its racist. Its hypocritical and its wrong.
Trump channels the anger and humiliation of having your language scrutinized and reverses its flow, vocalizing any forbidden idea that comes into his head. Conservative politicians have typically railed against political correctness but found that actually spewing offensive speech is politically damaging. The dog whistle was the preferred mode of right-wing discourse: When the segregationist George Wallace ran for president, he scaled back his racial rhetoric and instead spoke of infringements of states rights. Ronald Reagan raged at strapping young bucks and welfare queens. But if these candidates sneaked meat scraps under the table to satiate the partys nativist contingent, Trump serves it a steak, bloody. He calls Mexicans rapists and Muslims terrorists. This blunt outspokenness is the premise of Trumps favorite joke setup, which he repurposed most recently at a May rally: Im not going to say it, because Im not allowed to say it, because I want to be politically correct. So I refuse to say that I cannot stand her Hillary Clinton screaming into the microphone all the time.
Trump often lifts his speech straight from the bottom to the top. He sources his campaign materials from Reddit threads and white-nationalist Twitter accounts. The anti-Semitic digital graphic that attacked corrupt Clinton with images of money piles and a Star of David originated from a Twitter user whose bio read: Comedian: Probably offend you if you are Liberal, Politically Correct, Feminist, Democrat or Piers Morgan.
If the attacks in Nice, Brussels and Paris have you thinking about travel insurance, youre not alone.
Industry experts say that consumer interest in terrorism and trip cancellation coverage has spiked after each attack.
Since Brussels, really, weve seen that number growing and growing, said Rachael Taft, a spokeswoman for Squaremouth.com, a travel insurance comparison site. So its definitely top of mind.
After the attacks in Paris and Brussels, Squaremouth.com saw more travelers purchasing trip cancellation policies and searching specifically for terrorism coverage, especially for popular European destinations. The company said that the number of customers searching for terrorism coverage increased by an average of 167 percent in the month after each of the attacks. Also in the month after each attack, Squaremouth.coms trip cancellation sales were 19 percent higher than in the same period the previous year.
CLEVELAND Donnie Pastard had done this before, so many times, but the steps just didnt come as easily as they did decades ago, when her legs were powerful and her heart was filled with hope.
So, on Monday, in her flat black shoes, the 67-year-old drifted to the Cleveland sidewalk and found refuge under a large, leafy tree. She stood still as several hundred protesters streamed past, in the middle of Payne Avenue, chanting into the late, fading afternoon sun and perspiring in the humidity of an Ohio summer day.
Pastard is part of a broad world of veteran protesters converging on Cleveland this week, offering various counterpoints to the applause lines delivered inside the Quicken Loans Arena.
They are protesting several things; blacks being killed by police, poverty created by corporate greed, the pressing need for equal rights. But the target of much of their ire is Donald Trump, who is coming to the city this week to formally accept the Republican presidential nominee at the partys convention.
Pastard said Trump evokes memories of the 1960s, when she was growing up in Alabama under pro-segregationist Gov. George Wallace and his racist rhetoric. She said Trumps stereotyping undocumented immigrants from Mexico as rapists, calling for bans on Muslims coming to the United States and sexist comments against women gave her no choice but to march again.
Im surprised Im still out here all these years later, she said. But I feel I have to be.
HOSTILE TERRITORY
The Cleveland where Pastard and others are protesting isnt politically friendly to Trump.
The Republican National Convention is taking place in a county that voted for President Barack Obama by about 40 points over Mitt Romney. According to the Census data, Cleveland is 53.3 percent black. There are some precincts in Cleveland where Romney didnt get a single vote.
Its also a city that has been home to one of the most famous police officer-involved shootings of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old African American boy who died in 2014 when Cleveland Police officers mistakenly thought his toy pellet gun was real.
Under the shadow of Alton Sterling being killed by police in Baton Rouge on July 5, and Philando Castile being killed by police in Minnesota on July 6, and the shooting deaths of 10 police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge on July 7 and July 17 respectively, racial tensions here and around the nation are high.
The Black Lives Matter movement has spurred marches and protests for the convention. And, with police on edge, Cleveland this week is getting extra law enforcement support from Texas, Michigan, California, Utah and Wisconsin.
The protests, as of early evening on Monday, have been loud but non-violent. Charles R. See, a 71-year-old Cleveland native, said protests should be modeled after Martin Luther Kings mandate of non-violence.
Note that I didnt say peaceful protests, he said. No justice, no peace. But they should be non-violent. And Dr. King would decry the violence today if he were around.
See would know. He marched with King when the city elected is first African-American mayor on Nov. 7, 1967.
HISTORY OF PROTEST
King came to Cleveland several times, including his anti-Vietnam War speech in 1967. It was also that year See came to see him and, inspired, worked to get Carl Stokes elected as the first black mayor of Cleveland in 1967.
He said he cried when King was assassinated, just a year later.
I was at home having dinner with my wife when it flashed on the news on TV, See said. We were heartbroken. We were stunned. We were deflated. I remember thinking he was the most eloquent voice who could say what needed to be said and America was listening to him.
I wondered who would listen after that.
See, dressed in dapper in slacks, sport coat, and a yellow shirt and brimmed hat, watched protestors Monday as they walked down 45th Street. He is glad Trump and the convention are in town he figured it would bring some economic impact to the area. But he isnt going to vote for Trump, and doesnt like his message.
He smiled as the band Prophets of Rage, featuring rapper Chuck D, spit out lyrics that demanded justice and equality backed by a loud electric guitar and rhythmic bass.
Theres several Kings out there now, See said. Theyre heading movements like Black Lives Matter. Theyre on social media pushing for change. Theyre doing the work.
STILL MARCHING
Diane Howard stood in the field and got ready to march, too.
Still the same, she said.
The 66-year-old has been marching for civil rights since she was 15. Then it was for womens rights and, later, protesting the poor treatment of Vietnam veterans when they came home.
From behind her glasses shes worn glasses since she was 10 her eyes moisten at the mention of King and her belief that African Americans havent had a national leader of that stature since him.
I dont know why, she said. I ask myself that all the time.
She clutched her poster that read Housing is a real solution and said the rally and march that began at the Lutheran Metropolitan Ministry, Monday, focused on poverty, was something that was in direct opposition to the focus of the Republican National Convention.
And, more specifically, Trump.
He has no compassion or empathy, she said. He doesnt care about poor people. He doesnt care about me.
Howard had six grown children two of whom died as adults and said she wished Trump and those who support him would try to understand her better. Because, she said, if they dont try to understand, she said shell have to keep marching.
Howard wanted to join hundreds of others in the street, where the protestors would ultimately march about 2.5 miles. It would be non-violent. Police in heavy gear rode bicycles keeping a slow pace on either side of the marchers and watched closely.
Along the route, people ducked out from porches and took smart phone pictures. Store employees watched from inside air conditioned buildings.
Its what I need to do, Howard said. Its what Im going to keep on doing as long as God keeps me walking.
I might need a walker or a cane but Ill be out there.
Jean Perry left the GOP and joined the Democratic Party as part of her support for Barack Obama in 2008. She voted to reelect him in 2012.
But shes a Republican again. And shes an enthusiastic alternate delegate for Donald Trump.
Im a flipper, the African American from Baldwin Hills said unabashedly. Barack Obama was right for his time. He broke a ceiling. I believe Donald Trump is right for this time.
The appeal across usual party lines is what many Trump backers say will carry their candidate to victory in November. Perry represents that type of voter someone who is not locked in permanently with a party but rather responds to individual candidates.
Hes willing to say what other people are thinking but wont say, said Perry, 69, a retired elementary school teacher who also was the first black reporter at New Yorks Daily News in the 1970s. Hes voicing my thoughts.
Because of the times and the economy I dont think weve ever recovered from the recession we need a business person. We need somebody who can bring back jobs.
She said Trump could bring in experts to advise him in areas hes not intimate with, and said she hoped he would place a renewed emphasis on vocational education, since not everyone is well suited for college.
As for Obamas two terms leading the country, Perry wouldnt say whether or not she was satisfied with the job hes done.
I dont believe in looking back and analyzing, she said.
A resident who sued to have Fullerton elect leaders from geographic areas is not happy with the map that will accompany a public vote in November on making the change to district elections and has gone back to court to ask a judge to start the mapping process over.
The motion filed says the map chosen last month by the City Council is illegal, inappropriate and does not comply with the settlement agreement the city reached with Vivian Jaramillo, who sued Fullerton in 2014 for violating the California Voting Rights Act of 2001. The city reached an agreement to put before voters a ballot measure that, if approved, would do away with at-large voting in favor of by-district elections.
The settlement required the city to involve the community in the mapping process. The City Council held a series of public hearings and community meetings before approving a map.
Attorney Kevin Shenkman, who represents Jaramillo, said the map strategically set boundaries around the residences of City Council incumbents so they would not have to run against each other, divided downtown Fullerton between the five districts when the downtown is a community of interest and created no district where a minority group made up a majority of the voters.
But City Attorney Kimberly Barlow said the map abides by the law and adheres to the 2014 settlement agreement.
A court hearing is scheduled for 1:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Santa Ana central courthouse.
Weve made efforts with the city to try to avoid the issues, to work on a resolution, an agreeable map, Shenkman said. But all of our efforts have been rebuffed.
Dividing districts by where incumbents live is permissible by law as long as boundaries do not violate the federal Voting Rights Act, Barlow said.
District 1 of the approved map is 48.4 percent Asian-American, according to a 2013 survey. That number falls within the surveys margin for error, Barlow said, and is indistinguishable from 50 percent which constitutes a majority.
Latinos make up a large portion, but not quite the majority, in two other proposed districts, including District 5, which currently has no representative on the council. That seat would be on the 2018 ballot if voters approve district elections in November.
Council members Jan Flory and Doug Chaffee live in District 2, but have said they wont seek re-election when their terms expire.
Mayor Jennifer Fitzgerald lives in District 1, Greg Sebourn in District 3 and Bruce Whitaker in District 4.
The legal motion said splitting downtown Fullerton Shenkman called it a like community among five voting districts is a violation of the California Elections Code.
What that does in Fullerton is dilute the voice of downtown residents and probably increases the influence of downtown businesses, he said. With voting districts, whats important is the voters. Businesses dont vote; people vote.
Barlow agreed that the downtown area is a community of interest, but said theres nothing in the law that says a city has to keep a downtown area or some specific area together because supposedly everyone in it is the same.
And I dont think thats true for Fullerton.
Shenkman said the goal of the motion filed last month is to put a legal, appropriate and compliant map alongside the November ballot measure.
If the court agrees, new maps must be submitted to the Orange County Registrar by Aug. 12.
If the court rules in favor of the city, the already approved map will remain on the ballot.
Shenkman said no matter the map, district elections would better represent Fullerton voters than the current at-large system where citizens all vote for the five council members. Under the settlement agreement the city would be required to draw a new district map in 2021, he said.
On the whole, district elections are whats important, Shenkman said If we can get it with a better map, thats what well do. If not, lets not let perfection be the enemy of the good and adopt district-based elections nonetheless.
Contact the writer: 714-796-7724 or bwhitehead@ocregister.com
An Aliso Viejo man has pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges after acting as a sales manager in a multi-million-dollar mortgage modification program.
Charles Wayne Farris, 55, as part of a plea agreement, admitted to taking part in a scheme that defrauded more than 1,500 people out of about $9 million, the Department of Justice said.
Farris is the second person to plead guilty to the fraud, allegedly carried out by the Rodis Law Group, which later changed its name to Americas Law Group. Ronald Rodis previously pleaded guilty to a felony conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud.
A third man, Bryan DAntonio, is awaiting trial on nine counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
According to prosecutors, both Rodis Law and Americas Law used nationwide radio advertisements to portray themselves as a team of experienced attorneys that could negotiated lower-interests rates or principal balances.
Actually, prosecutors say, the businesses were simply telemarketing operations that routinely lied to clients. Only Rodis was a lawyer.
Farris admitted to supervising dozens of the telemarketers who authorities say used lies and false promises to defraud clients desperate to lower bills.
The defendants in this case preyed upon vulnerable homeowners facing the loss of their home and callously took advantage of what hope they had left, said Deirdre L. Fike, assistant director in charge of the FBIs Los Angeles Field Office, in a statement last week.
Paid advertisements can lend a veneer of credibility to any scam, and I would encourage anyone considering paying fees up front for services to be skeptical before handing over hard-earned money, Fike said.
Contact the writer: semery@ocregister.com
LOS ANGELES California Senate candidate Kamala Harris was endorsed Tuesday by President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, further strengthening her front-runner status in a November contest with fellow Democrat Loretta Sanchez.
Beyond the benefit of having the presidents blessing in a state with a strong Democratic tilt, Obamas endorsement could open a new pipeline of national campaign dollars for Harris. The biggest boost could come later, when voters tune in around Election Day, with TV advertising reinforcing the White House endorsement.
In a statement, the president called Harris a lifelong courtroom prosecutor with only one client: the people of the state of California.
Kamalas experience has taught her that if youre going to give everybody a fair shot, youve got to take on the special interests that too often stand in the way of progress, Obama said.
For Sanchez, the dual endorsements represent a blow for a candidate trying to make up ground after finishing 21 points behind Harris in the June primary.
Sanchez said in a statement that she was disappointed in Obama for picking sides in a race between two Democrats and argued that Harris lacked the experience needed in the Senate.
I believe that California voters are deeply concerned about the entrenched political establishment which has failed to work for them. Yet, it has been clear for some time that the same political establishment would rather have a coronation instead of an election for Californias next U.S. senator, Sanchez said.
The contest represents a historic first in California two minority women, both Democrats, in a runoff to replace retiring Sen. Barbara Boxer.
The matchup marks the first time since voters started electing senators a century ago that Republicans will be absent from Californias general election ballot for the Senate. Under California election rules, only two candidates the top vote-getters advance to the November election, regardless of party affiliation.
Harris earlier established herself as the favorite of the Democratic establishment, winning the state party endorsement and snagging the support of Gov. Jerry Brown and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a star of the partys liberal wing.
With Republicans shut out of the race, and much of the Democratic establishment behind Harris, Sanchezs chances could hinge on stitching together an unusual coalition of Hispanics, Republicans, and moderate Democrats and independents.
Harris recently reported raising about $2.8 million in the second quarter of the year, compared to just over $600,000 for Sanchez. The congresswoman had $919,000 in the bank, compared to $2.7 million cash on hand for Harris, a 3-1 margin.
Obama occasionally wades into state-level politics and the endorsements were not a surprise. Harris and the president have been friends and political allies for years. In 2013, Obama apologized to her after telling a group of wealthy donors in California that she is the best-looking attorney general.
Biden said in the statement that the Senate needs people like her leaders who will always fight to make a difference and who never forget where they come from.
Sanchezs sharply worded statement marked a break in what has been a mostly low-key campaign.
She argued that Harris couldnt match her two decades of experience in national security in Congress, had seen crime rates increase on her watch and was exaggerating her record in office.
Her record on helping victims of the mortgage crises showed few results for victims. She entered a settlement with the big banks that she said would help keep hundreds of thousands of Californians to stay in their homes. In fact, just a small fraction of people got any meaningful relief, Sanchez said.
That criticism clashed with the presidents statement, which said Harris fought the big banks that took advantage of homeowners across the country and she won.
If elected this fall, Harris, the daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica, would become the first Indian woman to hold a Senate seat and the second black woman elected to the Senate. Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley Braun in 1992 became the first elected black woman in the Senate and served one term.
Sanchez, if elected, could become one of the first Latinas to hold a U.S. Senate seat. Catherine Cortez Masto, who is also Hispanic, is the Democratic candidate for outgoing Sen. Harry Reids seat in Nevada.
As fellow Democrats, Harris and Sanchez hold similar positions on many issues, including abortion rights and immigration reform.
What does the Republican Party stand for in this presidential election year?
As the party holds its national convention in Cleveland this week, many Americans may be asking that question including, perhaps, a lot of Republican leaders and activists.
What has the Grand Old Party represented historically, when you think back to the candidates it has nominated and the positions it has espoused in recent elections?
How has that changed now that the GOP is nominating Donald Trump, a different kind of candidate with different ideas about how to govern?
What does Trumps selection of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his vice presidential running mate say?
Republicans official platform is said to be more conservative than in the past on social issues. It supports policies defending traditional man-woman marriage, backing some states restrictions on transgender peoples use of public restrooms, and opposing abortion without exceptions. It supports Trumps call for building a wall along the border with Mexico.
Is the party changing for the better? Are Republican candidates more likely to win this year? Are they more likely to get your vote?
Email your letters to letters@ocregister.com. Please provide your name, city of residence and phone number (phone numbers will not be published). Letters of about 150 words will be given preference. Letters will be edited for length, grammar and clarity.
Surf instructor Richard Dagampat tried to warn two students, both from North Dakota, that the ocean off Doheny State Beach was too warm for wetsuits.
But they insisted and wore the thick neoprene anyway until they couldnt stand it.
After about 20 minutes of paddling, they said, Can we take them off? We are burning up, Dagampat said.
The water isnt that warm every day, but after two summers of sometimes strange El Nino-fueled conditions, the ocean in Orange County this summer remains warmer than normal. Last week, ocean temperatures off San Clemente reached the mid-70s, about 10 degrees higher than normal for mid-July. Typically, ocean temperatures peak in August and September.
On the one hand, its pleasant. Why buy a ticket to Hawaii or drive down to Baja when Orange Countys water feels like the tropics. Surfers are shedding their wetsuits, or in surfer slang, trunking it.
At the same time, its an environmental oddity.
The El Nino pattern heating up our ocean has been a semi-regular visitor to this region far longer than the phrase global warming has been around. But this particular El Nino now in its third summer is more profound, and sticking around longer, than previous El Ninos. Just as hurricanes have become more frequent and more severe, this El Nino might be as big and gnarly as it is because of climate change.
Whatever the cause, the high ocean temperatures are changing the definition of normal when it comes to the fish, mammals and birds that live in and near Orange County.
The weather around here is getting more tropical, said Tom Southern, a captain on Capt. Daves Dolphin and Whale Safari, who for 15 years has taken people on boats to check out ocean creatures.
Earlier last week, three Brydes whales were spotted off Laguna Beach and Newport Beach. There are only an estimated 20 or so Brydes Whales in the entire Northern Pacific, he said. Last year, three showed up and stuck around Orange County. Before that, Southern could recall only a single local Brydes Whale sighting over the past decade.
The Brydes whales that Southern and his passengers saw each in the 40- to 50-foot range were zooming down the coast, chasing sardines, going about 7 knots off the coast of Laguna Beach.
Byrdes whales were again spotted by a Dana Wharf Whale Watching boat on July 13, and captain Calvin Cooper reported spotting an oddity in the air, a frigatebird usually found in the tropics.
Its pretty rare up here, Cooper said.
The early spike in water temperatures has people wondering if the ocean this summer will reach last years peak of almost 80 degrees. They also wonder if this is the new normal.
Dana Wharf manager Donna Kalez said fishermen are buzzing about recent dorado catch, courtesy of the warm water. Usually, when dorado reach as far north as Orange County, they get here in August and September. A typical water temperature for dorado is 74 degrees.
Another sport fish causing a buzz is an unusual number of bluefin tuna, which are biting in deeper waters. But they can require several hours to haul out of the ocean, so Kalez said many boats have been chasing dorado.
This is early, but the water is perfect for it, Kalez said. Were really excited.
Cooper said a 150-pound striped marlin, a tropical fish usually found here closer to September, was caught on July 14.
National Weather Service meteorologist Mark Moede said the warm water is likely attributed to the lack of upwelling in recent weeks, and a general lack of northwest winds pushing down from Point Conception to Southern California. That usually brings cooler water to the surface.
Instead, Southern California has had the opposite a south wind that circulates water from the south. It could be a small element of El Ninos lingering affects, he said.
The ocean is even warmer in San Diego, where Mission Beach was clocking 75 last week. San Clemente Pier was at about 73 degrees, when Newport was a tad cooler at about 70.
Moede said we can expect summer waters to stay toasty.
I wouldnt be surprised if it lasted all the way through the summertime, he said.
Another change in the climate making Orange County seem more like the tropics is lightning showing up with tropical storms. A year ago, in July, beaches from San Clemente to Seal Beach had to evacuate during a lightning storm. That weather pattern is so rare here that local lifeguards had to consult with counterparts on the East Coast for a protocol on how to deal with such events.
Dagampat said surfers once could feel confident about predicting ocean temperatures. Now, even with online weather tools and modern technology, its tougher for the average surfer to know when to pack a wetsuit or plan for trunks only.
Never has it been so unpredictable, said Dagampat, who started surfing decades ago while growing up in Hawaii.
In the meantime, hell trunk it.
And the two North Dakota visitors? They got a souvenir to take home after trunking it during their surf session.
You are going to get the gift of surfing for a few weeks: the sunburn and the rash, Dagampat said.
Youll remember the time you spent in the water.
Contact the writer: lconnelly@ocregister.com
At the peak of the housing crash, RealtyTracs monthly foreclosure report became a staple of national newscasts, broadcasting the scope of defaulting homeowners.
Now, with foreclosures all but extinct, the Irvine firm is rebranding itself as a go-to source for market data on virtually every real estate parcel in America, the company announced today.
The new name for the RealtyTrac parent company: Attom Data Solutions.
Weve rebranded the company to make it as clear as we can were not just a foreclosure data business anymore, Chief Executive Rob Barber said. Were not abandoning the RealtyTrac brand, the RealtyTrac website or the RealtyTrac product at all. But behind RealtyTrac is a new brand.
RealtyTrac is the latest in a series of rebrandings by foreclosure data and service firms that became popular during a crisis that saw 6.3 million U.S. homes foreclosed.
ForeclosureRadar renamed itself PropertyRadar in May 2013. And in January, Irvine-based Auction.com which handled foreclosure sales for bank-owned properties rebranded itself as TenX in a bid to expand home auctions to non-distressed properties.
The change comes four years after the company acquired another website, Homefacts, and its database. And it comes two years after RealtyTrac was licensed to get CoreLogic tax, deed and mortgage data under a Federal Trade Commission settlement allowing CoreLogic to buy competitor DataQuick.
The company said it spent six months overhauling its data warehouse to create a single source of information on 150 million U.S. parcels, covering 99 percent of the population.
Historically, the 20-year-old firm had been selling property information to subscribers seeking to invest in foreclosures.
Since its 2014 expansion, its moved beyond selling to consumers and now seeks a range of business clients. Among them, Barber said, real estate search portals for multiple listing services and real estate brokerages, big data firms, marketing firms and universities.
Data include property taxes, deeds, mortgages, school rankings, sex offenders, environmental risks, natural hazards and other neighborhood characteristics all mapped to a unique identity number for each property.
You have all that information linked, Barber said.
Company officials declined to release revenue figures, saying the company is profitable but that its financials are private.
But the big question: Why rebrand instead of sticking with the old RealtyTrac name?
We got a lot of information from the marketplace that confirmed that (the RealtyTrac name) is closely linked with foreclosures, Barber said.
Contact the writer: 714-796-7734 or jcollins@ocregister.com
BRIDGEPORT, Conn. A Santa Ana man has been sentenced to prison for a mortgage loan modification scheme that defrauded homeowners in Connecticut and other states.
Connecticut U.S. Attorney Deirdre Daily says 33-year-old Aria Maleki of Santa Ana was sentenced Monday in federal court in Bridgeport to nine years in prison. Maleki pleaded guilty March 22 to conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud.
Prosecutors say Maleki and others operated a series of California-based companies that falsely purported to provide home mortgage loan modifications and other debt relief services in exchange for upfront fees ranging from about $2,500 to $4,300.
Prosecutors say more than 1,000 homeowners suffered losses totaling more than $3 million through the scheme.
Daily thanked federal and state law enforcement partners in New England, New Jersey, California and Oklahoma for investigating.
ISTANBUL The Turkish governments crackdown after a military coup attempt widened into a sweeping purge Monday, cutting a swath through the security services and reaching deep into the wider government bureaucracy and political and business classes.
The numbers of those detained or dismissed were stunning: nearly 18,000 in all, including 6,000 military, almost 9,000 police, as many as 3,000 judges, 30 governors and one-third of all generals and admirals, as well as President Recep Tayyip Erdogans own military attache.
The magnitude of the backlash by Erdogan suggested that the depth of support for the coup was far deeper than it initially appeared or that the president was using the opportunity to root out all perceived adversaries, or both.
As hopes faded that Erdogan would try to use the moment to unite the country, instead taking a security-first approach, Western allies began to express alarm at what looked like score settling. On Monday in Brussels, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and the European Unions top diplomat, Federica Mogherini, urged Turkey a member of NATO and a candidate for membership in the EU to show restraint and preserve the rule of law.
Obviously, NATO also has a requirement with respect to democracy, and NATO will indeed measure very carefully what is happening, Kerry said. And my hope is that Turkey is going to move in ways that do respect what they have said to me many times is the bedrock of their country.
But Erdogan stuck with a single-minded determination to punish anyone deemed disloyal. It was not clear how the state would function with so many crucial posts suddenly left vacant and with paranoia and finger-pointing rampant.
The government suspended vacations for the countrys 3 million civil servants, an effort, it seemed, to make sure the machinery of the state did not halt.
As the purge accelerated Monday, the government was targeting followers of the cleric Fethullah Gulen, a former ally turned rival who lives in exile in Pennsylvania, and whom Erdogan has blamed for trying to topple the government.
A senior Turkish official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with government protocol, said that members of the Gulen movement in the military had been under investigation for some time, and that the group had pushed forward the coup conspiracy out of a sense of emergency when members realized that they might face prosecution.
The suspended judges, the senior official said, were allied with the military faction behind the coup. And like others, the official said, they were on lists of suspected enemies compiled by the government before the coup took place.
Turkish officials have acknowledged that the number of people rounded up was likely much greater than the roll of conspirators. But they maintain that it is necessary to prevent more attacks against civilians and government buildings, especially when some perpetrators are at large.
In Ankara, closed-door hearings were held for some of the accused plotters.
Three attorneys general on Tuesday directly challenged Volkswagens defense over its emissions deception, calling the decision to thwart pollution tests an orchestrated fraud that lasted more than a decade, involved dozens of engineers and managers and reached deep into the companys boardroom.
The accusations, leveled in lawsuits by New York, Maryland and Massachusetts, contradict Volkswagens portrayal of the deception, representing a new threat to the carmakers finances, reputation and management. For the first time, the suits connected Volkswagens chief executive, Matthias Mueller, to the scandal, saying he was aware of a 2006 decision to not outfit Audi vehicles with equipment needed to meet U.S. clean-air standards.
Volkswagen, which admitted late last year to equipping 11 million vehicles worldwide with software to cheat emissions tests, has maintained that the deception was limited to a small group of people. The company has said top management was not aware of the cheating software, known as a defeat device.
But the New York civil complaint, drawing on internal Volkswagen documents, emails and witness statements, depicts a corporate culture that allowed a willful and systematic scheme of cheating. The evidence paints the most detailed picture yet about how the deception unfolded and who was responsible.
The suits identified six different defeat devices, saying the deception was an iterative process that started with an Audi model. They described the device as a cost-saving measure, because meeting U.S. emissions standards would have required an overhaul of the vehicles. The suits stopped short of accusing Mueller of having specific knowledge of the devices.
At the time of the 2006 decision, Mueller was head of project management at Audi, Volkswagens luxury car division. He became chief executive of Volkswagen in September, replacing Martin Winterkorn, who resigned days after the Environmental Protection Agency accused the company of the diesel deception that month.
The idea that this level of fraud could take place and involve so many people at such high levels of a major international corporation is appalling, Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York attorney general, said at a news conference in New York, describing what he called a cunningly cynical fraud at the heart of this scandal.
He was joined by the attorney general for Massachusetts, Maura Healey. The suits claim that the company made false statements to regulators and broke laws requiring cars to have approved pollution control systems
Mueller and Winterkorn have previously denied any involvement in the wrongdoing. There is no credible evidence to support the allegation regarding Matthias Mueller, a Volkswagen spokeswoman, Jeannine Ginivan, said in an emailed statement. It does not bear scrutiny.
The potential blowback for Volkswagen could be costly.
The company last month agreed to pay nearly $15 billion, a record, to settle claims in the United States by Volkswagen owners and regulators. But the settlement did not resolve what penalties might be imposed on Volkswagen, leaving room for additional suits.
Volkswagen, the companys spokeswoman said, was already discussing a comprehensive resolution that would settle environmental issues nationwide and had already addressed many of the accusations with federal authorities. It is regrettable that some states have decided to sue for environmental claims now, she said.
The complaints break the silence that prevailed in Germany and the United States about the genesis of the scandal and who was involved.
The New York complaint claims that more than two dozen Volkswagen engineers and managers were involved in the deception, including Wolfgang Hatz, the former head of engine and transmission development at Volkswagen and Audi; Ulrich Hackenberg, the former head of development for Audi; and Heinz-Jakob Neusser, the former head of development for the Volkswagen brand. While several executives have been identified by the media, German prosecutors, because of the countrys strict privacy laws, have named only one suspect, Winterkorn.
While scrutiny has focused on the Volkswagen brand, the use of defeat devices was pioneered by Audi, according to the complaint. Engineers at Audi developed a way to eliminate the clattering sound that diesel engines tend to make after starting. But the solution increased pollution to impermissible levels.
So Audi in 2004 programmed its diesels in Europe to turn off the noise reduction technology when software recognized that the cars were undergoing emissions tests, the complaint said. The defeat device was euphemistically labeled the acoustic function. The same software was later adapted for a new generation of diesel motors that could not meet U.S. emissions standards.
The New York complaint is the first to explicitly present evidence that top managers, at the very least, were aware of the engineering problems that led to the use of defeat devices.
According to the New York suit, Mueller and Winterkorn were informed in 2006 that Audis with 3-liter diesel engines needed additional equipment to meet U.S. standards. Specifically, they needed a larger tank to hold the chemical solution used to neutralize nitrogen oxide emissions in the exhaust.
But Volkswagen and Audi, the complaint said, did not want to spend the money necessary to redesign the cars. Instead, the company decided to deploy defeat devices. Both Winterkorn and Mueller held senior positions at the Audi unit at the time.
In early 2014, engineers at West Virginia University published a study in which two unidentified diesel cars were found to have emitted up to 40 times as much pollution on highways as they did under laboratory conditions. Inside Volkswagen, there was widespread alarm, the complaint said.
After it became clear that the cars in the study were Volkswagens a 2012 Jetta and a 2013 Passat company engineers in the United States were bombarded with requests for information by senior managers, including a management board member, Christian Klingler. He has since left Volkswagen for reasons the company said were not related to the scandal.
Over the next 17 months, Volkswagen embarked on a campaign to mislead and confuse regulators and the public, according to the complaint. In a conference call with California regulators in October 2014, Volkswagen officials cited phony technical explanations for high emissions, the suit said.
After learning in May 2015 that California regulators planned to conduct more thorough tests of Volkswagen diesels, executives emails began to reflect desperation and panic, the complaint said. One executive, facing questions from suspicious California officials, wrote to co-workers, Come up with the story, please!
This is an example of a company that not only engaged in deception and fraud on a brazen scale but covered up that deception, Healey, the Massachusetts attorney general, said at the news conference. The conduct reflects a corporate culture that had no regard for the law, no respect for the American people and no regard for the environment or peoples health.
Re: Huntington Beach desalination plant a matter of environmental justice [Opinion, July 15]: I am not a Latino, but I certainly agree with Dave Rodriguez about the need for ocean water desalination for all who live in California. As Mr. Rodriquez stated, and we all are well aware, California is in the midst of the worst drought in history.
If this state continues to invite people to move here by allowing the construction of the huge condo and apartment complexes, as well as more homes and office buildings, it can at least provide enough water and electricity for them to live and operate without having to cut back and ration. Obviously, this can be done we live next door to the largest source of water in the world, the Pacific Ocean. It took 10 to 15 years to get the permits for the Carlsbad desalination plant to begin operation and it is obvious that the Coastal Commission is dragging its feet on the Huntington Beach plant. Much of the Coastal Commissions objections to the coastal desalination plants are cost and environmental concerns. Those concerns are understandable, but they should not override the needs of the people.
Steve Vallely
Mission Viejo
Dave Rodriguez claims that environmental justice requires the proposed Huntington Beach desalination plant. He fails to mention how everyones water bill would skyrocket if Poseidons extravagantly expensive water became part of the county water supply. That, of course, would hurt the poor. He also fails to mention the destruction that the Poseidon project would cause to our ocean and air, and that the toxin boron would be added to our water supply. So wheres the environmental justice in that?
The League of United Latin American Citizens has been fooled into an unholy alliance with Poseidon a company seeking 50 years of corporate welfare with a contract that would require the Orange County Water District to buy all the water and be paid for by the unwitting ratepayers.
Marinka Horack
Huntington Beach
I believe my civil rights, as an Italian, are being violated by the Coastal Commission delaying the Huntington Beach desalination plant. Does this strike anyone else as a silly argument for building the plant? Mr. Rodriguez had plenty of good reasons in his article. That was not one of them. This is more divisive politics.
James Haynes
Irvine
SANTA ANA Trial began Monday for a woman accusing Fletcher Jones Motorcars of letting a mechanic who later assaulted her gain access to her address via the Newport Beach dealerships computer system.
The dealership, meanwhile, maintains that it took various precautions and was not responsible for the attack.
Attorney Christopher Rudd said his client, then a 40-year-old nurse practitioner, was attacked by an intruder in her Newport Beach home on the night of May 20, 2005. It is the Registers policy to not name sexual assault victims.
The attacker hogtied her with duct tape, but the woman fought him off before he could rape her and the man fled with a broken hand, Rudd said. The case remained unsolved for years.
She couldnt feel safe anywhere because she didnt know where her attacker was, Rudd told the Orange County Superior Court jury. She went to bed every single night utterly terrified.
Police got a break in 2011 when Travis Dewayne Batten was linked through DNA to the attack and the rape of a 21-year-old Irvine college student. He was arrested on his way to work at Fletcher Jones.
In 2014, Batten was convicted and sentenced to 107 years in prison.
Rudd said the woman had purchased a Mercedes Benz at the dealership in 2003 and had it serviced there frequently.
He knew what he wanted, and he knew what she looked like, Rudd said.
Rudd said the Fletcher Jones computer system was carelessly designed to give employees easy access to customers personal information. He said a former employee will testify that other employees would frequently look up the personal information of celebrities and attractive women who came into the dealership.
Batten, he said, easily found the womans information through a Swiss cheese system.
The bottom line is Fletcher Jones voluntarily took a duty when it said it would keep her information private, Rudd said.
While its heart goes out to the woman, Fletcher Jones was not at fault, said the dealerships attorney, Karl Lindegren.
Lindegren said Batten was hired in 2000 after passing a drug test and criminal background check. He was known for being friendly and courteous with clients.
There wasnt one thing in his employment to suggest that he was someone who would do something bad, he said, adding that Batten never worked on the womans car and had no prior contact with her.
Fletcher Jones has about 100 mechanics, with about 700 customers going through the business every day.
Lindegren said Fletcher Jones uses the same system used by other dealerships. Its mechanics do not have access to the computer system, he said.
The repair orders have the customers name, an address provided by the customer and a contact number on the paper form, in part to help verify the proper owners get their vehicles back.
Lindegren said the womans address and phone number are not considered private information and could be found in the phone book in 2004.
(Fletcher Jones) employees worked very hard to have the best employees, he said. They shouldnt be held responsible because one guy did a very bad thing.
The woman is seeking an unspecified amount in damages.
Contact the writer: kpuente@ocregister.com, 714-834-3773
For hundreds of years, fishermen in Taiwan have been catching sardines with the help of fiery stick held over the edge of a boat. The fish are so attracted to the light that they jump out of the water and into the nets of the fishermen.
Fire fishing is as simple as it is mesmerizing. Fishing boats head out to sea during the night, and light up a bamboo stick covered with sulfuric soil at one end to create a bright flame. The sulfur dissolves in the water and the gas produced then flashes with fire. Drawn to the light spectacle, sardines jump out of the water by the hundreds at a time and end up in the fishermens nets. Sulfuric fire fishing was developed during the period of Japanese Rule and is now practiced only in the Jinshan sulfur harbor.
There were once over 300 boats practicing fire fishing in Taiwan, but according to the local fishermens association in Jinshan District, north of Taipei, that number has dwindled to just three. A six-hour fishing session under the night sky can yield between three and four tons of sardines per boat, and the Taiwanese government even subsidizes the practice. On a really good night, a team of fishermen can earn up to $4,500, so why is this fascinating tradition dying?
Unfortunately, sardine season only lasts three months, from May to July, and despite government efforts to keep the tradition alive and promote it as a tourist attraction, young people dont seem very impressed. The age of remaining fire fishermen averages at around 60 years old, and with no new blood in sight, the future of this fascinating tradition doesnt look very bright.
Zheng Zhi-ming, a professor of religious studies at Fu Jen Catholic University, says that using sulfuric fire to catch fish in the northeast region of Taiwan was common two or three decades ago, but the rapid improvement of fishing equipment combined with the exodus of youths from fishing villages have led to the decline of a tradition that was once considered one of the eight must-see attractions in Jinshan.
Photos just dont do this amazing tradition justice, but luckily YouTube user Kenny Chen shot this amazing video of fire fishermen practicing their trade in Jinshan. Enjoy!
Photos: NPC Fishery/Facebook
Sources: Reuters, The News Lens
Total Lubricants, represented by their Irish distributor partner Finol Oils Ltd. are confirmed as a headline sponsor for CQMS17 - Irelands construction and quarry machinery show.
This landmark event which takes place on April 21st and 22nd 2017 at Molloys Quarry Tinnycross, Tullamore, Co Offaly is a hub of innovation and new technology and is also backed by AIB Finance and Leasing.
Following the resounding success of Irelands Construction and Quarry Machinery Show in 2015, there is a considerable appetite for CQMS17 which will have 35% more exhibition space and will occupy 100,000 square meters with up to 200 exhibitors, 2 live demonstration zones, a new machinery launch zone, factory visits, the world famous JCB Dancing Diggers and an exciting air show for visitors. Up to 8,000 visitors are expected with a large overseas delegation.
This demonstrative show, supported by the Construction Industry Federation, will bring together the industry leaders in construction and quarrying with a showcase of some 70million worth of new machinery on offer in Ireland. The show will offer buyers and sellers an opportunity to see live demonstrations with latest machinery from manufacturers and a unique opportunity for international buyers to do factory visits. Among the confirmed exhibitors are JCB, Kubota UK, Geith International, Topcon, Jim Macadam Equipment/Case, Sandvik, CDE Global, Whelan Planthire, Renault Trucks Ireland, Rockbreakers, Tesab, MacHale Plant Sales, Whelan Plant Sales/HHIE and many more.
Simon McGarrigle from Finol Oils Ltd said, We are delighted to support the CQMS17 as the official distributor of Total Lubricants in Ireland. We feel it is a good fit for our business as a leading approved lubricants supplier to the industry in Ireland with the full range of Total Lubricants dedicated to the construction & public works industry, and it offer us a method of supporting the industry. Totals Lubricants are amongst the most advanced lubricants available on the market and as the industry grows here again we can offer users in the industry a method of reducing their costs through the use of Totals most advanced Fuel Economy Lubricants which can also help to reduce machinery fuel usage. We are looking forward to working with all the team at CQMS17 in providing an innovative and exciting event.
Irelands economy is growing at an accelerated pace and all indications are pointing to the construction sector outperforming initial estimates for 2016 and even more so in 2017. The construction sector accounted for approximately 6.9% of GNP in 2014 and is expected to reach a value of 12.5 billion or 7.5 per cent of GNP in 2016. Irish construction activity is increasing at the fastest pace in nearly 16 years. It has now increased every month for the last two-and-a-half years and the rate of job creation is increasing at the fastest pace since October 2014. See www.machinerymoversmagazine. ie/cqms
While the population in the county rose in the last five years, the initial results of the census estimate that the net migration for Offaly between 2011 and 2016 was -1,924 persons.
The total change in the population between censuses is the combined effect of natural increase and net migration - a measure of the movements of persons into and out of the State.
The natural increase in Offaly (births minus deaths per 1,000 people) was estimated at 3,240 people. The actual increase per the Census figures was 1,316 which leaves the estimate for net migration at -1,924 persons.
Nationally, the natural increase in the population is estimated at 198,282 giving an estimated net migration of -28,558 for the state.
Net migration on a county basis varied widely across the state with most counties experiencing net outward migration while a small number (such as Dublin and Cork) witnessed net inward movements. Net migration for Offaly is estimated at -1,924 persons.
Brendan Murphy, Statistician at the Central Statistics Office (CSO), explained that The preliminary count is based on a clerical summary of each enumeration area compiled by the 4,663 enumerators. These counts have been returned to the CSO in advance of the census forms and the results published today are based on this information. The enumerators did an excellent job getting their summaries back to us, which allows us to prepare these early results of the census. Wed like to thank the entire census field staff for all their hard work and perseverance over the course of the census field campaign.
We like to publish these preliminary figures while the thought of completing the census form is fresh in peoples minds. Additionally this data is available to immediately assist with public planning, he said.
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Nas, Fabolous, Talib Kweli Honor Legends At Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival William Ketchum III is a journalist who covers music, pop culture, film/TV, race,
Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival 2016 photos by Elijah C. Watson for Okayplayer.
After three days of conferences, forums and side events, the 12th Annual Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival closed another successful year with a finale concert that featured a trio of New York City icons showing off their own legacies while paying homage to other New York greats before them.
The first performer of note was Rapsody, who used her set to reveal good news for her longtime supporters: a new deal with Jay Zs Roc Nation marketing + management company. She and a live band paid homage to legends like A Tribe Called Quest and Prince. Embedded within that ATCQ tribute medley were songs like Check The Rhime and Electric Relaxation, and she flipped Princes If I Was Your Girlfriend into a freestyle. She then performed Anderson .Paaks Without You, dedicating the song to a male fan she called on stage. Rapsody was followed by Masego, a young Virginia artist who has fittingly described his music as Trap House Jazz; he deftly switched between blowing notes through a saxophone, rapping and scat singing.
The next headliner was Brooklyn-bred rap veteran, Talib Kweli. He paid tribute to Tribe, rapping his lyrics to Black Stars Knowledge of Self over the beat to Check The Rhime as the audience withstood the rain to rock out with their fellow Brooklynite. In another notably Brooklyn moment, Talib welcomed Buckshot, Masta Ace and Special Ed to perform Crooklyn, satisfying the audience by reuniting the Crooklyn Dodgers supergroup. He also brought Rapsody back on stage to perform some of their collaborations together. Near the end of his set he performed the fan favorite, Get By, and honored the life of J Dilla by playing a string of his instrumentals.
Fabolous continued the momentum for the home borough, having thousands of fans chant whooo hooo as he rocked his 2001 hit Youngn. Other highlights from his set include bringing Dyme-A-Duzin onstage for their remix of That Chicken, and Fabolous performing his remix of Desiigners Panda. The latter move confused the of-age hip-hop heads, but the youngns wildly dabbed in approval. Fab relied on his lady-luring radio songs like Into You and You Be Killin Em; but real rap heads were rewarded with performances of Brooklyn and Breathe, along with a surprise Smif-N-Wessun guest appearance for their remix of Mary J. Bliges I Love You. Fab doesnt get the acknowledgment that he deserves, but his Saturday set was a testament to his talent and longevity.
By the end of the night, the legendary Nas closed out the festival for summer sixteen. Gods Son has about a dozen albums under his name, but his magnum opus will always be Illmatic and he gave the fans exactly what they wanted, energetically running through gems like The World Is Yours, If I Ruled The World, and N.Y. State of Mind, along with later favorites like Made You Look and One Mic, which he dedicated to Alton Sterling. His performance was backed by the New Orleans band The Soul Rebels, who added some new flavors to Nass extensive catalog.
Festival season always has a lot of competition, but the Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival 16 continued to prove its worth with another show that showcased some of the best that New York City has to offer.
FRANKLIN, NEBRASKA Patients seeking treatment at Center Creek Counseling will find a new tool at their disposal horses.
Chastity Ingram offers equine-assisted psychotherapy to treat a variety of mental health issues at the clinic, which she opened in January 2011 to serve patients in Franklin, Nebraska; Alma, Nebraska; and Phillipsburg, Kansas. She said the EAP techniques dont require patients to know anything about horses.
Its all on the ground. Theres no riding involved, so we never put kids on the horses, Ingram said.
Ingrams career started in 1997 when she worked at a mental health center. She later worked at Kearney Public Schools as a social worker before working as a therapist in 2001. She started offering EAP at the clinic in July 2014.
She became aware of the alternative form of psychotherapy through the Equine Assisted Growth and Learning Association, or EAGALA. She and Shayne Runnion work together as trained mental health professionals and equine specialists, and are both certified through EAGALA.
Ingram always had a love of horses but was unsure about integrating horses into her work. After seeing equine therapy in action at an ethics training in Omaha, she made the leap.
During EAP sessions, Ingram works with Runnion and her father, Rex Harmon, also a mental health professional and certified equine specialist.
I focus mainly on the horses and their behavior and the safety of the participants. The horse is different from the office setting. Here, theyre up and moving around with the animals. People seem to enjoy that, Harmon said.
Runnion joined Center Creek Counseling in October 2015. She said she had always been interested in a nontraditional career.
I didnt want to be stuck in an office my whole life, but I wanted to be a therapist. So I was all about mixing my hobby and my work, Runnion said, adding that she was skeptical about the therapy at first.
Ingram describes EAP as a way for clients to become aware of their own behavior or a frustrating situation in their own life. A typical session includes one mental health specialist and one equine specialist.
Runnion said there is often an ongoing conversation between the mental health specialist and equine specialist about the reactions each observes from both horses and patients.
The sessions generally begin with some information about safety provided by Harmon. Ingram may use a tilting bridge, cones and foam swim noodles for patients to build obstacle courses. She may also instruct the patient to lead the horse from one end of the arena to the other.
Ingram said EAP is a good alternative for adults and kids who may not benefit from traditional talk therapy.
Weve had a lot of good luck with kids with autism and ADHD. For example, kids with ADHD have a lot of problems with impulse control. Its real easy when youre not in the moment to talk about what you should have done but here they have to put it into practice. If they dont, the horse gives them feedback immediately, said Ingram.
She said one horse reacted to a hyperactive child by going to a different area of the arena until the child was able to calm down.
Ingram compares the horses to mirrors, allowing patients to see their own feelings.
I had a gal come one time who was terribly depressed. She had a lot of health problems going on and just didnt have a lot of energy, Ingram said. At one point during the session she sat down in the dirt. One by one, each of the four horses came down and laid down around her. They dont usually lay down next to people. They can really pick up on a persons energy, Ingram said.
There are groups for children ranging in age from 5-12 years old, and groups for teenage girls and boys. Group sessions may include playing a game such as Simon Says with horses.
Some patients have sought out EAP because traditional talk therapy hasnt worked for them. Teenage patients may resist talk therapy, and other youths, especially those with ADHD and autism, may be unable to sit still for long times.
Runnion enjoys seeing patients build self-confidence.
Some people love the opportunity to work with animals, especially a large animal. This alone helps build confidence, said Runnion.
Programs are also offered to families and couples. Ingram offers Equine Assisted Learning during these sessions, focusing on helping to develop better relationships or teamwork skills. EAL may be used for a marriage enrichment program or even a girls retreat.
Patients can find contact information for Ingram and Runnion at the clinics website, centercreekcouseling.com.
FREMONT Experts in how meat and poultry operations affect rural America told Fremont-area residents Monday to expect air quality problems and big changes to the fabric of their community if Costco builds its proposed chicken processing plant.
About 125 people attended a town hall meeting planned by several groups opposing the plant, which would process chicken sold at Costco, the warehouse retailer.
In the Woodcliff Lakes community center south of Fremont, overlooking a channel of the Platte River downstream from the proposed plant, residents posed questions about how the plant would affect property values and how it would operate.
Residents said the discussion reinforced their concerns, many of which have already been aired at a series of city meetings this summer. The Fremont City Council in recent weeks has voted to annex the farmland where the plant would be built and to declare it blighted, clearing the way for tax-increment financing.
Before I come out here, I was against it, but now Im scared, said Russ Callaway. He said comments from civil engineer Kathy Martin about nitrogen generated in poultry litter worried him. Martin, an
Oklahoma-based consultant with experience in environmental permitting, estimated the amount of nitrogen generated by the regional operation to be 8 million pounds a year, about a third of which could end up in the air as ammonia in poultry barn exhaust.
Martin was joined by Don Stull, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Kansas, who has studied the impact of meat and poultry processing plants on the communities where they locate.
He advised residents to consider how the plant and its workers might strain the communitys resources, including health care, education and other services.
Unless economic development results in improved quality of life, it can actually be detrimental to community development, he said. Jobs, like lunches, are rarely free.
Some Fremont elected officials attended the meeting but did not address the crowd. Representatives of Costco, plant operator Lincoln Premium Poultry and the Greater Fremont Development Council were informed of the event, but none appeared to attend.
Costco and Georgia-based Lincoln Premium Poultry have said that they are taking pains to make sure the Nebraska project will be state of the art, with fair pay, and will not have some of the problems that plague the poultry industry, such as contracts that put poultry farmers at a disadvantage.
Some residents remain skeptical.
Martin said meetings like Monday nights are a good venue to raise questions.
This is what you should be doing, Martin said.
Contact the writer: 402-444-1336, barbara.soderlin@owh.com
A highly anticipated report by U.S. regulators buttresses calls for staying the course on fuel economy targets that automakers say are unworkable and want eased.
Based on current trends, the average car would get between 50 and 52.6 miles per gallon by 2025, falling short of the original projection of 54.5, according to the draft technical assessment released Monday by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration and the California Air Resources Board.
However, the report said that automakers can draw on an array of technologies to satisfy the target and that it will cost less than expected.
The draft report supports that the administrations fuel economy program can continue to incentivize innovation and reduce fuel consumption while also ensuring that consumers can continue to choose the vehicles they want to drive, National Highway Traffic Safety Administrator Mark Rosekind said in a press release.
The document lays the foundation for next years midterm review of the standards, which are set to become progressively tougher by 2025 and will be especially challenging for the big pickups on which Detroit automakers depend.
Although President Barack Obamas successor will have significant discretion over the requirements, the technical document provides a hint into the EPAs thinking about how achievable the standards are and suggests regulators could adopt a stay-the-course approach during next years evaluation.
Battle lines formed quickly around the governments assessment, which was based on real-world tests and hundreds of thousands of computer simulations of vehicles using a wide variety of technologies.
Given changes in the market landscape, it will be a daunting challenge to meet the very aggressive requirements of the 2022-25 federal fuel economy and greenhouse gas rule, said Wade Newton, a spokesman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a Washington, D.C.-based lobbying group for major automakers including General Motors, Ford, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles Toyota, and Volkswagen. Absent a vigorous commitment to focus on marketplace realities, excessive regulatory costs could impact both consumers and the employees who produce these vehicles.
The assessment triggers a 60-day public comment period, with the technical report and the feedback guiding regulators as they make decisions next year on the final fuel economy and carbon dioxide emission requirements for 2022 through 2025.
The document estimates that automakers will spend about $1,100 per vehicle for new technologies required to meet the targets, such as 10-speed transmissions close to the governments $1,070-per-vehicle projection four years ago.
The industry has excelled in complying during the first three years of the program, said William Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies. The lead time that the rule provides is a technological eternity. The 2022-2025 standards are entirely feasible.
The railroad industry is facing a new challenge just as customer demand for freight hauling appears to be showing signs of life after almost two years in the doldrums.
The issue: safety. A derailment in Oregon last month by a Union Pacific train carrying crude oil again has focused public attention on that aspect of freight hauling, renewing a long-standing industry debate about braking systems. And the main industry safety regulator, the Federal Railroad Administration, last week held hearings on the contentious issue of reducing crew size from two to one on the nations freight trains.
It all comes amid some heartening developments for an industry that has been stricken by slumping commodity prices (lower production and lower shipping demand), a strong dollar internationally (lower exports and transcontinental freight) and weak manufacturing (low shipments of finished goods): Volumes of goods shipped still arent up, but at least they arent falling as fast.
Last week, the Association of American Railroads reported that year-to-date shipments were down 7.7 percent from a year earlier.
While down is down, it is an improvement. It was the first time in many weeks that year-to-date volume declines were less than 8 percent.
The health of the rail industry is a significant concern in Omaha, home to Union Pacific, the second-largest by ton-miles and employer of 8,000 Nebraskans. U.P. trails only Texas-based BNSF Railway, owned by Omahas Berkshire Hathaway and an employer of 5,000 Nebraskans. Union Pacific is scheduled to report second-quarter earnings Thursday.
Wall Street analysts expect the company to report earnings per share of $1.17, down from the $1.38 a share the company reported a year earlier, according to Bloomberg. Net income is forecast by Wall Street at $972 million, down from $1.2 billion a year earlier, with revenue estimated at $4.8 billion, down from $5.4 billion in the second quarter of 2015.
Although things appear not to be deteriorating as fast as they were, Union Pacific looks to be headed for a sixth straight quarter of declining freight shipments. Reports the company has filed with the railroad association through July 9 show volumes down 10 percent versus a year ago.
Union Pacific executives declined to comment for this article.
There is the chance of a surprise on the earnings front. Last week, another Class I railroad, Florida-based CSX, reported second-quarter earnings of 47 cents a share, beating estimates by three cents a share.
Earnings have a chance of being OK, but the year-over-year comparisons are pretty easy, said Matt Troy, an independent rail-industry analyst in New York. But the evidence still points to a pretty lackluster situation, still well below what we were seeing in 2006 and 2007.
Meanwhile, the rail industry is grappling with some contentious safety challenges, highlighted last month when a U.P. train carrying crude oil derailed and caught fire along the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest. It was the first major oil train incident in about a year but reignited the debate over hauling crude by rail.
The governor of Oregon and one of its U.S. senators last month asked for a moratorium on oil trains through the state (no such action has been taken), and Federal Railroad Administrator Sarah Feinberg said advanced electric brakes would have helped.
The current system using compressed air to apply brakes to train wheels dates to the 19th century, Feinberg said. Electronic braking systems were tested in the 1990s but havent been adopted, said John Risch, national legislative director for the United Transportation Union who spent 30 years with BNSF, including as an engineer. That is despite working faster than air brakes, which suffer from a reaction time lag as compressed air is distributed throughout a long string of cars, a lag of up to two minutes.
They are the greatest safety advancement I have seen in my years in the industry, said Risch, who had a chance to test them in the 1990s. They apply braking power twice as fast, at least.
The Association of American Railroads says that a current advanced technology called electronically controlled pneumatic brakes, or ECP, will not provide significant safety benefits and is technology that does not prevent derailments, according to spokesman Ed Greenberg.
The freight rail industry has experimented with electro-pneumatic brakes in working environments and have found them to be unreliable, said Greenberg, who maintains that the industry continues to investigate advanced train braking systems using a variety of technologies.
Union Pacific, one of seven large freight railroads operating in the Untied States, concurs with AAR. The railroad said after the Mosier, Oregon, oil-train derailment in response to World-Herald inquiries that electronically controlled pneumatic braking technology has yet to meet service reliability standards, including during tests by the railroad.
The train involved in the Mosier accident was equipped with distributed power, which has a braking capacity very similar to ECP, a company spokeswoman said. It is speculative to suggest that ECP brakes would have prevented cars from derailing or prevented a tank car puncture, and we plan to reach out to the FRA to understand the modeling system used to come to its conclusion that electric brakes would have helped.
Union Pacific also said in the aftermath of the derailment that the rail fastening system cited by regulators as contributing to the accident has an outstanding history of safety and reliability. The railroad said it is enhancing its regular track inspection program.
As for Union Pacifics overall safety record, it has improved dramatically over the years. From 2005 through 2015, reportable rail equipment incidents, which include derailments, fell by a quarter, to 2.42 per million train miles traveled. Industrywide, the derailment rate on the countrys 140,000-mile mainline network reached an all-time low in 2015, down 25 percent compared with 2010 and down 58 percent compared with 2000.
Now, the issue of crew size has emerged. The industry has mobilized to urge the Federal Railroad Administration to withdraw a proposed rule that would require two people at all times on the nations freight trains. That typically consists of a conductor and an engineer.
For the freight rail industry, there is no greater priority than safety, but there are no data supporting this proposed rule and it will provide no safety benefit to railroads, their employees or the public, said Edward Hamberger, president of the railroad association, in his testimony to the Federal Railroad Administration last week. With no data showing that one-person operations compromise safety, there is no basis other than anecdotal storytelling for enacting a general prohibition on crew size reductions.
Not everyone agrees. One voice of opposition is Railroad Workers United, a caucus of rail workers from various unions. In an editorial last year in its newsletter, the group said, We must put the rail carriers on notice that when they next make a push for single-employee train crews, that they are in for a knock-down, drag-out, all-out fight.
The debate over crew size comes as Union Pacific and its peers are investing billions in a federally mandated safety system called Positive Train Control. It is an array of sensors and wireless communication devices that can stop or slow a train under certain conditions. The price tag is expected to approach $11 billion for the whole industry. Union Pacific said in its annual report last year it spent $400 million on the project, mandated by Congress.
Logan Purk, a transportation industry analyst for wealth adviser Edward Jones who follows U.P., said railroads have been heavily investing in their networks since the disastrous winter of 2013, when snarled traffic kept freight backed up for months. Many of the improvements to the rails also improve safety, he said.
And with PTC, I dont really see much more they can do, Purk said.
Investors are warming back up to the industry. The Standard & Poors transportation index, of which Union Pacific is a member, has risen about 10 percent in the past three months. U.P. shares are up about 20 percent year-to-date. (BNSF is wholly owned by Berkshire Hathaway, and doesnt have shares. Its second-quarter earnings and volumes are expected to be reported along with the parent companys next month.)
Perhaps more telling, some large investors are seeing a bargain in the shares of Union Pacific. Among the 10 largest shareholders, eight of them reported increasing their stake in Union Pacific as of March 31, according to Bloomberg, including a massive 12-million share purchase by San Francisco mutual fund Dodge & Cox.
Berkshire Hathaway Inc. owns the Omaha World-Herald.
Contact the writer: 402-444-3197, russell.hubbard@owh.com
COUNCIL BLUFFS A Council Bluffs man has been sent to prison after pleading guilty to sexually abusing two girls.
Kevin Snethen, 55, pleaded guilty to two amended sexual abuse charges Monday at the Pottawattamie County Courthouse.
Joseph Reedy, Snethens attorney, said his client pleaded guilty because he didnt want to face eight sexual abuse charges at trial. As part of the plea bargain, six charges were dropped and two charges were lowered from Class B felonies to Class C.
Snethen was sentenced to up to 10 years in prison on both charges, with the sentences set to run at the same time. Snethen will also not be able to contact the victims or their families for the next five years. The families can ask for an extension after the five years end.
Additionally, Snethen, once released, will have to register as a sex offender and will remain on parole for the rest of his life.
A mother of one of the victims spoke to the court during the plea and sentencing hearing. After the mother spoke, Fourth Judicial District Judge Susan Christensen said she wished she could do more for the victims and their families, which included running the two sentences one after the other, but Christensen followed the terms of the plea agreement between Reedy and Assistant Pottawattamie County Attorney Shelly Sudmann.
According to the arrest affidavit, Snethen reportedly performed sexual acts with two minors under age 12 in and around his Council Bluffs home. The final alleged incident happened in late May.
Snethen will begin his sentence at Iowa Medical and Classification Center in Coralville.
LINCOLN State Corrections Director Scott Frakes on Tuesday announced two initiatives to address a staff culture survey a month ago that found low morale and low job satisfaction among corrections officers.
The initiatives include a pilot project that will allow some staff to work 12-hour shifts at the Tecumseh State Prison, which has been plagued with staff shortages and excessive overtime costs.
A second pilot project, at the Nebraska State Penitentiary, will involve shifting staff supervisory duties away from lieutenants and onto assistant shift sergeants.
Frakes also used a meeting with reporters Tuesday to provide updates on two issues: overcrowding and a recent prison escape.
The corrections director said that a security audit has been completed of all 10 state prisons in the wake of the June 10 escape of two inmates, in a laundry basket, from the Lincoln Correctional Center.
Frakes said that procedural errors, like those that allowed the recent escape, were found and addressed at other institutions. Perimeter fencing at some prisons, while still functional, is outdated and may need to be upgraded, he said.
Frakes also announced plans to build a 100-bed dormitory at the Community Corrections Center in Lincoln to house low-custody inmates until a more permanent, 148-bed expansion is completed in 2019.
This spring, the Legislature gave the Corrections Department an extra $1.8 million to explore options for temporary or modular housing for work-release inmates to replace a program that is housing state inmates in county jails across the state. Lawmakers said the state needed the extra housing to avoid a civil rights lawsuits over overcrowding of state prisons, which now hold about 1,900 more inmates than their design capacity.
Frakes said the dormitory would be a very industrial building, made of precast concrete and with exposed duct work, that could be ready for use by the fall 2017. He said the building could be easily converted for other uses, such as vocational education, once the planned $26 million expansion at the community corrections facility is completed.
Frakes was hired by Gov. Pete Ricketts 17 months ago to change the culture of Nebraskas Corrections Department, which has been plagued by prison overcrowding, miscalculation of hundreds of release dates of inmates, and high staff turnover and mandatory overtime.
On Tuesday, he said that the pilot projects should be in place by this fall and were a direct response to requests from staff in the culture survey. Both projects, he said, should increase morale and decrease overtime costs and turnover.
But the leader of the state employees union said Tuesday that the union would block the 12-hour shift proposal until Frakes talked to the union and addressed some of their concerns.
Mike Marvin of the Nebraska Association of Public Employees, which represents corrections officers, said that the union contract requires Frakes to negotiate such changes, but he hasnt talked to the union.
Heres an opportunity to work on something he wants and something we want, Marvin said. Specifically, he said the union has concerns about how female-only posts for officers are handled at the states prison for women in York.
Frakes said that in Washington State, where he worked for three decades before coming to Nebraska, there was a waiting list of officers wanting to work 12-hour shifts.
He said hell work with staff at Tecumseh to provide a mix of 12- and 8-hour shifts, but that in general, the 12-hour shifts let workers work fewer days per week, providing more time to be with families or to work second jobs, and come with at least one weekend day off a week.
Ive seen it. I know it works, he said of 12-hour shifts.
Many staff at Tecumseh have already been working 12-hour shifts in the months following the Mothers Day Riot in 2015. But Frakes said its time to move away from the emergency work schedule to a more permanent arrangement.
A new 12-hour shift arrangement would require four hours of overtime per worker every two weeks, he said, instead of the current eight hours of overtime a week.
The pilot project at the State Penitentiary is designed to get managers more engaged in the employees they supervise to create a more healthy management system, according to Frakes.
Right now, he said, some lieutenants supervise more than 50 corrections officers and other security staff, which is about twice the amount considered to be ideal. The new shift supervisors will get slight pay raises because their responsibilities are increasing, he said.
The culture survey completed last month found that employees were dissatisfied with their pay, didnt think top bosses listen to their concerns, and believed that the Corrections Department has been neglected.
Officials have said that the salary issues must be resolved through collective bargaining with the state employee union. But Frakes said Tuesday hes confident that at least some of the pay issues will be resolved in those talks, which begin later this year.
Contact the writer: 402-473-9584, paul.hammel@owh.com
Park rangers arrested a woman Monday afternoon after she entered Lake Manawa and took off her clothing in front of them, according to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.
A video of the 36-year-old womans arrest, shared widely on social media, shows her cursing and spitting at officers as they subdue her at the state park on the south side of Council Bluffs.
The park rangers went to the beach after a bystander called authorities, concerned about what would happen if she drove away with the two kindergarten-age children who were with her. They found her sitting by the water, the two kids wading in front of her, said Kevin Baskins, spokesman for the department.
The woman then entered the water and disrobed, and officers told her to return to shore. When she refused, they entered the water and removed her. The video shows the struggle as they try to get her under control.
The woman was arrested on suspicion of public intoxication, disorderly conduct, interference with official acts, assaulting a police officer, indecent exposure, and child endangerment. Council Bluffs police officers assisted the park rangers.
After she was taken to the Pottawattamie County Jail, she repeatedly banged her head on the door of her cell and was taken to a hospital, where she continued to be combative before being returned to jail, Baskins said.
Both of the children are 5 years old. One was returned to a parent, the other placed in protective custody.
Kaleb Cohee, a former student in the Fremont-Mills Community School District, died Sunday due to injuries sustained from a dirt bike accident July 6.
Superintendent Christopher Herrick said grief counseling will be available for classmates, staff members and friends of Kalebs on Tuesday from 9 a.m. to noon.
A benefit fund has been set up with Glenwood State Bank in Tabor and Glenwood for the family.
Our hearts, thoughts, and prayers are with the Cohee family and friends during this difficult time, Herrick said in a statement.
Herrick added that Kaleb was an eighth-grader and was visiting family in the Tabor area after his family had moved to California last year.
On Facebook, Kalebs father, Rob Cohee, said an accident on Kalebs dirt bike resulted in significant brain injury. Kaleb was transported by Tabor Rescue and then taken by medical helicotper to the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Cohee said.
The Tabor team on the ground, while volunteers, were the utmost professionals in an incredibly difficult situation. The (following) outpouring of love from a community weve since moved from is simply overwhelming and we will never be able to thank you enough, Rob Cohee said on Facebook.
GRAND ISLAND, Neb. Lindsey Koepkes first job with the Nebraska State Fair was a three-month internship.
Now, more than a decade later, Koepke remains connected to the Nebraska State Fair through her job as executive director of the 1868 Foundation, the main fundraising arm for the fair.
Koepke said that her intern job, which included running games and activities in the Family Fun Center, was to end shortly after the conclusion of that years Nebraska State Fair.
I went through the fair and I just knew I had to be a part of this. I love this place. So I just kept showing up for work. They never gave me an end date. I just kept coming to work because I wanted to be part of the Nebraska State Fair.
Her temporary internship turned into a year-round job as the fairs special events coordinator. When the executive director of the 1868 Foundation resigned, she became part of a team that took on the foundations work on an interim basis.
Koepkes duties included handling the donor letters, sending out the annual appeal and thank-you letters, mailing tickets and getting to know donors.
At that moment I realized I wanted to be part of the 1868 Foundation, she said. These folks are incredible, they are passionate, they genuinely care about their State Fair. I did, too; thats what I want to do.
Koepke said she applied for the executive director job and was hired 10 years ago in January. That meant she was part of the transition of the State Fair from Lincoln to Grand Island in 2010.
The fair needed an upgrade in facilities, which is something that could have happened in either Lincoln or Grand Island. Another need was to boost attendance.
Koepke said that from her perspective, a good portion of the attendance when the fair was in Lincoln was people who came out for the midway and carnival.
With the move to Grand Island, more people are also interested in getting into the livestock and other exhibition buildings and seeing the 4-H entries and open class exhibits.
Clearly out here we have a much different clientele: families who come out and cover every corner of the fairgrounds, not just an afternoon on the midway rides.
Koepke said moving the State Fair from Lincoln to Grand Island was traumatic for many people.
We heard time and time again how, as kids, folks would come to the fair, they would eat their lunch under the same tree, and Were not going to have those memories anymore when the fair moves. So people were understandably upset with that, she said.
Koepke said backers of the move would respond that Grand Island is wonderful; the facilities are going to be incredible. Its time we rebuild and have people start creating new legacies with the State Fair.
With the move, the 1868 Foundation added three board members from the Grand Island area: Jay Vavricek, Ken Staab and Jayne Mann. Koepke said that the foundation already had a few donors from Grand Island, but there still was untapped potential. Those three people were also on the committee that raised money to relocate the fair to Grand Island.
Perhaps one reason Koepke so loves the fair is that she grew up on a farm and remains a small-town girl at heart. She lives in Hickman, 15 miles south of Lincoln. Koepke offices in Lincoln and travels to Grand Island about two times a week, sometimes more.
Koepke said she and her husband have a 5-year-old son. Koepke said that they wanted their son to grow up near family, noting that she has nephews who live just two houses down from their home.
Hickman also has strong 4-H groups, while the Norris school district has a very strong FFA program. Because of those programs, Koepke said, she is always getting comments from Hickman-area residents about their State Fair experiences.
Jayne Mann of Aurora, chairwoman of the board for the 1868 Foundation, praised the work that Koepke has done as executive director. Just as the Nebraska State Fair has been reinvigorated with the move, so has the foundation.
Koepke said that many people did not even know that the Nebraska State Fair had a foundation connected with it. The move was an opportunity to make people aware of the 1868 Foundation, which takes its name from the first Nebraska State Fair, in 1868.
Mann praised Koepke for her attention to detail. She said that whenever the foundation board wants something done, Koepke accomplishes it.
With the move to Grand Island, the 1868 Foundation has taken on bigger projects. One was raising money to put the heating, ventilation and air conditioning system into the Fonner Park concourse.
Mann said that by far the biggest capital project is the Thompson Foods Co. Open Air Equine Arena. She said Koepke worked with a grant writer on successful applications to get money from other foundations. That moved the foundation into new territory.
Koepke said that she and the foundation board would like to expand board membership to every corner of the state. She said that the 11 days in Grand Island is a state fair, which means people can feel pride in it no matter where they live. Koepke said people can have the same feeling that Hickman residents do about the fair and that she herself has whenever she visits Grand Island.
The first year the Nebraska State Fair was here I was seven months pregnant and I bought a paver that said Baby Koepke, she said. During the fair, I come out here and look at it and think about what was going on and what was going through my brain at that moment, the first year the fair was in Grand Island.
A couple who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to attempt to illegally obtain wildlife say they should have known better in dealing with a firm tied to Nebraska's largest known case of poaching.
CLEVELAND Iowas delegation was in the thick of a rules fight Monday that briefly threw the Republican National Convention into chaos.
As party leaders sought a quick voice vote on the latest version of the rules, some delegates objected loudly.
Roll call vote! Roll call vote! shouted Cecil Stinemetz of Urbandale and others, joining a cacophony of competing voices inside the arena.
The dissenters appeared to be in the minority, albeit a sizable one. Their noisy opposition included delegates who are firmly opposed to Donald Trump, as well as those who wanted the rules to include stronger language pushing states to hold closed primaries that dont allow Democrats and independents to influence the outcome.
In the end, no roll call vote was held, and the rules were adopted.
But not before party officials had to scramble on the floor to dissuade renegade delegates from insisting on the roll call vote, which could have been messy and embarrassing.
Its a work in progress, Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad told The World-Herald at one point, watching as his son Eric Branstad, who is the Iowa director for the Trump campaign, and top Iowa GOP officials frantically conferred at the back of the convention hall.
Initially, at least nine states had submitted a majority of signatures from their delegations, which met the threshold to require a roll call vote.
Stinemetz said he and his allies had rounded up 17 signers from Iowas 30-delegate group to join states demanding a roll call vote. But delegates who signed said they were pressured to withdraw their names, and eventually Iowa and a few other states no longer had a majority of signatures.
Gov. Branstad said his son and others pointed out to Iowa signers that their actions could negatively affect the state. We didnt want to jeopardize our first-in-the-nation status and I think there were some people that didnt realize how important this was, and once that got explained to them they withdrew, he said.
Cascades of boos followed the announcement that the threshold for a roll call vote hadnt been met.
I wonder how many broken arms there are, Stinemetz said.
This party is top-down, not bottom-up, complained Adam Motzko of Sioux City, who wanted a roll call vote.
It was a bit of pandemonium. Those favoring a roll call vote screamed and chanted. Others tried to drown them out by chanting Trump or loudly singing God Bless America.
Because delegation leaders were out of their seats strategizing and a few others left the floor, rumors spread across social media that the Iowa delegation had staged a walkout.
But Iowa GOP Chairman Jeff Kaufmann later stressed to reporters that that did not happen.
He also said talk of potential danger to Iowas first-in-the-nation status was internal and not a threat from national leaders or the Trump campaign.
I just know intuitively, he said, we cannot be one of those states that are out there doing that.
Gov. Branstad rejected the notion that the scene would hurt the GOPs effort to put a good face on the convention.
But some Iowa delegates were clearly upset.
The house always wins, said David Chung, a delegate from Cedar Rapids, who had wanted a roll call vote.
Chung said he wasnt trying to unbind delegates from voting for Trump. While he had supported Ted Cruz in the past, hes now behind Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee.
But he wanted the rules to recommend to states that they hold closed primaries in the future, and he said the convention should be governed in a way that gives power to the delegates not party bigwigs.
The Nebraska delegation was not part of the mini-revolt.
I polled our delegates we were 36 to zero in favor of the rules, Nebraska National Committeeman J.L Spray told The World-Herald. They dont want chaos.
Scene on floor earlier with Iowans asking for roll call pic.twitter.com/eCbvbkdNyE Joseph Morton (@MortonOWH) July 18, 2016
CLEVELAND Sen. Joni Ernst delivered a rhetorical broadside Monday against Hillary Clinton at the Republican National Convention.
Hillary Clinton cannot be trusted, Ernst said. Her judgment and character are not suited to be sitting in the most powerful office in the world.
It was a big moment for the Iowa Republican, dimmed somewhat by the fact that the program was so far behind schedule that Ernst took the stage more than a half-hour later than scheduled, pushing her out of prime time.
Many of the delegates already had hit the exits. The rows upon rows of empty chairs stole some of the energy from the speech.
Still, the Iowa delegation gave their freshman senator a rousing welcome, cheering and applauding as some of the delegates still on the floor waved signs that read Veterans for Trump.
Ernst set up her speech talking about her own background, from her Iowa farm girl childhood to how she became a soldier.
She told the story of an agricultural exchange program that sent her to the Soviet Union where the Ukrainians were more interested in talking about freedom than farming.
The retired Iowa Army National Guard lieutenant colonel cited her 23 years of military service, including 14 months as a company commander during Operation Iraqi Freedom in Kuwait and southern Iraq.
She said that Americans and their allies overseas are worried about a lack of U.S. leadership.
Theres a void in the world: a deficit that cannot be filled by others, she said. Our country and the world of which we are a part simply cannot afford four more years of this lack of leadership under Hillary Clinton.
Ernst ran through the litany of GOP critiques of how Clinton, a former secretary of state, and President Barack Obama have handled foreign policy. She said those policies have failed to stop the expansion of terrorism around the globe. She also criticized Clintons support of the Iran nuclear deal, saying that it endangers Americas friends in the region, particularly Israel.
Ernst also took aim at Clinton for her email troubles, saying she jeopardized Americans safety by setting up her own server and lying about it.
She has proven time and time again that she is entirely unfit to serve as our nations commander-in-chief, Ernst said.
Iowa Democratic Party Chairwoman Andy McGuire issued a statement defending Clinton and taking issue with Ernsts speech.
Tonight, Joni Ernst urged Iowans to support Donald Trump, a man who is temperamentally unfit to be commander in chief of the United States of America, and whose foreign policy ideas are reckless, erratic, and contradict our fundamental values, McGuire said.
Ernst opted to wrap up her speech with a statement that quickly received attention online, given Trumps reputation for self-promotion.
With Hillary Clinton, its always about her: It should be about you. Donald Trump is focused on you, Ernst said. He gave a voice to a movement of millions of Americans who are tired of politics as usual. I know as president he will work tirelessly to keep our nation safe.
Speaking to reporters earlier in the day, Ernst was asked about the possibility that she would take a position in a Trump administration. She said she would look to engage with the administration on national security issues but has no desire to give up her day job.
Im staying in the U.S. Senate, she said.
CLEVELAND Every time the Iowa or Nebraska delegates board a bus to go to the Republican National Convention, an armed guard in a bulletproof vest sits in the front seat.
As they rumble into downtown Cleveland, the delegates buses pass streets barricaded by snowplows, heavy equipment and police cruisers. Along the way, they go through a police checkpoint to ensure that nothing is amiss.
In Cleveland, there are law enforcement officers of every stripe and variety on every street corner, including FBI, Secret Service and State Patrol officers. They are everywhere. If delegates walk down the street, a squadron of officers on bicycles may roll by. If delegates look up, they will see officers perched on top of tall buildings.
Ive never seen so many police officers in one place in my lifetime, said Nancy McCabe, a Nebraska delegate from Omaha.
With fears of violent protests and the recent high-profile police shootings in Baton Rouge and Dallas, security is clearly a top priority at this weeks convention. There is a sense among delegates that this convention poses a few more safety risks than past conventions, but almost everyone said they felt safe.
There is so much more security here than at conventions in the past. There has been a lot of violence all over the country, and weve seen a fair number of protests that turned violent. I certainly hope that doesnt happen here, said Nebraska Treasurer Don Stenberg, who is attending his fourth GOP national convention as a state delegate.
Delegates told stories of how their family and friends urged them to be safe before they left for Cleveland. One woman urged Rod Edwards, a political consultant from Omaha, to always be aware of his surroundings and to check for exits.
Everyone seems to think were at a high level of risk here, but I feel incredibly safe, Edwards said. The security weve seen is just incredible.
Security at national political conventions has been steadily increasing. Former Omaha Mayor Hal Daub remembers attending conventions in the 1970s and 1980s where the security checkpoints were light enough that delegates went in and out of the convention center with ease. It was also a time when delegates were allowed to bring in their own political signs.
Today, it could take up to 30 minutes for a delegate to get through airport-style security and into the convention hall and thats after a typical hourlong commute. Homemade signs are forbidden, as are a whole host of other items, such as umbrellas, flashlights, fruit, whistles and unopened envelopes.
For the first time this year, journalists had to request clearance from the Secret Service.
And the days when delegates and others could freely roam the arena and the surrounding perimeter are gone. Every delegate, reporter, volunteer and Republican staff member has credentials that allow access only to certain areas.
In the early conventions, you could walk anywhere. You didnt have the fences and the corridors. It was pretty much unrestricted, said Daub, who is attending his 11th convention.
No one, however, is complaining. Almost all the delegates said they appreciate everything thats being done to ensure their safety, even if that means they have to take off their shoes and encounter the occasional bomb-sniffing dog.
With the state of affairs of the nation, I was pretty happy to see (the dogs), said Keith Trullinger, 48, a consultant for ADP from Waukee, Iowa.
Security at a convention is a mammoth undertaking, partly because of the size of the crowd and partly because delegates are dispersed around the city. For example, the Nebraska and Iowa delegations are staying in suburban hotels about 15 miles from downtown Cleveland.
The RNC reserved about 16,000 hotel rooms, 500 apartments and 1,100 dorm rooms for delegates, staff members, volunteers, journalists and others.
In all, about 50,000 people are expected to attend the convention, including protesters.
Protesters are not easy to find. In fact, its fair to say many delegates may go home on Friday without ever seeing or hearing a protester. Thats because protesters are restricted to specific sites. They are not allowed inside the safety perimeter that surrounds the arena or near the area where delegates get off their buses.
On Monday afternoon, one anti-Trump protest kicked off about seven blocks from the arena. About 100 to 150 people shouted anti-Trump slogans before the protest came to a peaceful end near the security perimeter.
Meanwhile, at a nearby park, another group of anti-Trump protesters held a small rally attended by a few dozen people. A man with what appeared to be an assault rifle on his back sauntered through the park, creating a stir. A group of Indiana State Patrol troopers who came to assist with security here said the man was not violating any state law.
U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, said protesters should remain peaceful because it is a better way to get their message across. Demonstrate peacefully, because if theres violence, were not listening to the message, she said.
Several Iowa and Nebraska delegates said they remembered tight security at past conventions.
Security was pretty tight in 2008, but I have a sense that its going to be even tighter this time because there are some things that have changed in eight years, recalled Chelle Adkins, 40, a mortgage processor and alternate delegate from Cedar Falls, Iowa.
She said her family and friends had expressed enough concern that they spent some time this past week going over contingency plans and points of contact in case anything happened.
One Iowa delegate noted that this years convention still may be safer than one he attended decades ago in Miami Beach.
That 1968 GOP gathering came shortly after the Democratic National Convention in Chicago was marked by riots. Republicans and others werent taking any chances that year, recalled Richard Rogers, 66, a retired pilot from West Des Moines.
We had Marines flying around in helicopters with gunners in the doorway, he said. We had riflemen posted on rooftops.
Contact the writer: 402-444-1309, robynn.tysver@owh.com
CLEVELAND Republicans opened their national convention here Monday night by weaving savage attacks on Hillary Clinton into testimonials to Donald Trumps compassion, strength and readiness to be commander in chief in the face of terrorist attacks on the homeland and around the world.
After the Republican National Convention got off to a chaotic start because of an afternoon procedural skirmish, Trump made a splashy debut on the convention stage to introduce his wife, Melania, whose speech was a highlight of an otherwise uneven evening.
I have been with Donald for 18 years, and I have been aware of his love for this country since we first met, she said. He never had a hidden agenda when it comes to his patriotism because, like me, he loves his country very much.
But minutes after she finished, the Quicken Loans Arena began emptying out as retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn delivered a rambling and unfocused speech that dragged on for nearly half an hour.
The result: Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, poised to deliver a breakout performance, could not take the stage until well after prime time and addressed a mostly empty arena.
The Trumps were the stars of Monday nights show, however. Donald walked onto the convention stage in silhouette to Queens anthem, We Are the Champions.
Were going to win so big, the candidate vowed, as he introduced his wife, Melania, for her keynote address.
A former fashion model born in Slovenia, Melania Trump has shied away from public speaking. Monday night, she spoke with composure and movingly talked about her husbands love of family and country.
Donald thinks big, which is especially important when considering the presidency of the United States, she said. No room for small thinking. No room for small results. Donald gets things done.
Melania Trump sought to broaden her husbands appeal to the general population, including groups that have been outright hostile to his candidacy, saying that love binds their family and that together they would bring compassion to the White House.
Donald intends to represent all the people, not just some of the people, she said. That includes Christians and Jews and Muslims. It includes Hispanics and African-Americans and Asians and the poor and the middle class.
Late Monday, reports surfaced pointing out that a portion of Melania Trumps speech appeared to mirror Michelle Obamas speech about Barack Obama at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.
After Melanias speech, Donald Trump returned to the stage, kissed his wife and pointed at her with his signature gesture, as if to show her off to the roaring crowd.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani gave one of the nights most impassioned addresses, strongly defending Trump, whom he has known for decades.
What I did for New York, Donald Trump will do for America, said Giuliani, who steered his city through the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Many of the earlier speakers delivered hard-edged remarks seemingly designed to play to Trumps base supporters. A trio of speakers railed against undocumented immigrants whom they repeatedly called illegal aliens for killing their loved ones and argued that only Trump could keep the country safe.
Others who took the stage in prime time here in Cleveland aimed at Clinton.
Patricia Smith, whose son Sean died in the 2012 terrorist attacks on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, reduced convention delegates to tears with an emotional address about her sons death. I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son, she said. She pointed out a delegate holding up a Hillary for Prison sign and said, Thats right Hillary for prison. She deserves to be in stripes.
Smith served as the moving opening act in a series of presentations about Clintons handling of the Benghazi attacks, the subject of many congressional and other investigations. Giuliani accused her of dereliction of duty in Benghazi.
The focus on national security and immigration comes at a perilous time. Recent terrorist attacks in the United States and abroad, coupled with police shootings in Dallas and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, have created fear and worry.
CLEVELAND Donald Trump's presidential campaign came under new scrutiny Tuesday after it became apparent that part of Melania Trump's primetime address Monday night at the Republican National Convention bore conspicuous similarities to a speech delivered by first lady Michelle Obama in 2008 at the Democratic convention.
The plagiarism charges have cast a shadow over Trump and his campaign on the second day of the convention here in Cleveland, where Republicans are making the case to a skeptical country that the celebrity billionaire the most unconventional major-party standard-bearer in modern history could be a credible and steadfast leader at a time of terrorist threats abroad and senseless tragedies at home.
"In writing her beautiful speech, Melania's team of writers took notes on her life's inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking," wrote senior communications advisor Jason Miller in a statement Tuesday morning. "Melania's immigrant experience and love for America shone through in her speech, which made it such a success."
Melania Trump had previously indicated that she wrote the speech herself.
On Tuesday morning, Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort denied that there had been any plagiarism, despite clear similarities between the two speeches. Some parts of the speeches appeared to be the same, word for word.
"There's no cribbing of Michelle Obama's speech. These were common words and values that she cares about, her family, things like that," Manafort said on CNN's "New Day" Tuesday morning. "She was speaking in front of 35 million people last night, she knew that, to think that she would be cribbing Michelle Obama's words is crazy."
He added that he does not believe "Trump feels that there's anything to fire someone about" during an interview on CBS.
Melania Trump, an immigrant from Slovenia and a former fashion model, has been a glamorous but generally silent presence at her husband's side. Her remarks were seen as an opportunity to soften the image of her husband, whose bombastic style and penchant for feuds has at times emerged as a political liability.
"From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise, that you treat people with respect," Melania said, in one part of the speech now being scrutinized. "(W)e want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them."
Her dislike of and discomfort with public speaking are well known, making her well-received address a high moment of the night. She has rarely appeared on the campaign trail and does not often speak to the press.
The controversy is yet another distraction as Trump attempts to unite his party.
The convention marks a critical moment for Trump. Having built a fortune through savvy branding, he now undertakes a project more ambitious than any of the glittering buildings that bear his name: constructing a new image for himself, without extinguishing the authenticity that has drawn tens of millions of disaffected Americans to his rallying cry to "make America great again."
That slogan encapsulates Trump's promises to restore the economy, seal the borders and keep terrorism at bay. Among his more divisive proposals for doing so are building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and enacting a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country.
The first night of the four-day Republican National Convention was spent largely playing to the party's divided base. It was heavy with attacks on Hillary Clinton, who is set to accept the Democratic presidential nomination next week in Philadelphia, as well as themes of identity and anger.
A particularly emotional moment Monday night came in a speech by Patricia Smith, whose son Sean was one of four Americans who died in the 2012 attacks on a U.S. outpost in Benghazi, Libya, while Clinton was secretary of state.
Although a GOP-run investigation that ended this year found no evidence of specific wrongdoing by Clinton, Republicans have made it an article of faith that she mishandled security and attempted to mislead the country about the terrorist nature of the assault.
"For all of this loss, for all of this grief, for all of the (victims) of the tragedy Benghazi has brought upon America, I blame Hillary Clinton," Smith said. "I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son."
As she was speaking, Trump was doing a television interview with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, an unusual counter-programming move that may have drawn many viewers away from what was happening on the convention stage.
Monday's opening defied many of the norms and expectations surrounding these quadrennial party gatherings, which in the television era have devolved into infomercials, devoid of any real suspense or intrigue but guaranteed to draw large audiences.
Breaking with the tradition that a nominee usually does not appear in the convention hall until the night of his acceptance speech, Donald Trump took the stage briefly to introduce his wife. He was lit in silhouette as the sound system played the song "We Are the Champions" by the British rock band Queen.
Afterward, her husband returned to the stage and gave her a kiss.
With their departure, the hall began emptying, even though there were more speakers. The audience's exit did not deter retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who continued to speak for nearly half an hour.
One celebrity speaker Monday was "Duck Dynasty" star Willie Robertson. "If you're an average American who feels like you've been forgotten," he said, "Donald Trump will have your back."
In winning the party's nomination, Donald Trump vanquished not only his 16 primary rivals but also the GOP's traditionally supreme establishment. And as he rarely misses an opportunity to remind, he received more than 13 million votes more than any Republican nominee in history.
Trump not only has refused to toe the line of GOP orthodoxy, he has aggressively repudiated it on a host of what were considered inviolable conservative principles, from his skepticism of free trade to his criticism of the Iraq War.
Many Republicans now fear that with a standard-bearer whose negative poll ratings are higher than those of any previous candidate to top a major-party ticket, they are headed for an electoral debacle in the fall.
The party is hungry to win back the White House after eight years of the Democratic presidency of Barack Obama, and against a Democratic opponent they consider beatable.
Clinton's negative poll ratings, while not as high as Trump's, are significant. In surveys, most Americans consistently say they do not consider her honest and trustworthy. Her reputation has taken an additional beating amid the controversy over her use of a private email account while she was secretary of state.
Actor Scott Baio, best remembered for his role on the late-1970s sitcom "Happy Days," described the former first lady, senator from New York and secretary of state as "a woman who somehow feels that she is entitled to the presidency."
"Hillary Clinton wants to be president for Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump wants to be president for all of us," Baio said. "Let's make America great again, but let's make America America again."
One priority for Republicans is unifying a party that has been bitterly divided over Trump and his candidacy. But the convention opened with a spasm of procedural chaos in which hundreds of rebellious delegates staged one last, futile effort to stop Trump, roiling what is normally a rote procedure to approve party rules. The technical details became a proxy for their larger effort to put one final speed bump between Trump and the nomination.
Trump's campaign argues that the disturbing events of the past few weeks at home and abroad will strengthen the candidate's case in the general election.
With the anger and restiveness voters already feel, "you put on top of that current events, and it creates even more angst and opportunity" for a tough, blunt candidate such as Trump, campaign chairman Paul Manafort said at a breakfast with reporters hosted by Bloomberg News. The theme of the first night, "Make America Safe Again," was selected a month and a half ago, but it carries more resonance now, Manafort added.
Speaker after speaker including a number of people of color sounded the theme that "blue lives matter," in response to the killings of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, and as a rebuke to the Black Lives Matter protest movement, which rose from controversies involving police shootings of African American men.
"When they come to save your life, they don't ask if you are black or white. They just come to save you," former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani said of police.
"What happened to 'There's no black America, there's no white America, there's just America'? What happened to it? Where did it go?" Giuliani added, echoing a line that Obama, then an Illinois state senator, used in the 2004 Democratic convention speech that made him a political star.
"What I did for New York, Donald Trump will do for America," said Giuliani, whose leadership of his city after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, led him to be dubbed "America's mayor."
Smith, whose son died in Benghazi, was not the only speaker to frame her personal grief in political terms, as a result of failed leadership by a Democratic administration in Washington.
A trio of speakers railed against undocumented immigrants whom they repeatedly called "illegal aliens" for killing their loved ones and argued that only Trump could keep the country safe.
"My son's life was stolen at the hands of an illegal alien," said Mary Ann Mendoza, mother of fallen police Sgt. Brandon Mendoza. "It's time we had an administration that cares more about Americans than about illegals. A vote for Hillary is putting all our children's lives at risk."
Security forces taken by surprise by Naxals in Bihar
Aurangabad
oi-Vicky
Aurangabad, July 19: Investigations being conducted into the naxal attack at Aurangabad, Bihar in which 10 Cobra Commandos lost their lives, point towards a surprise element. The naxals were completely prepared for the attack, but the commandos were taken completely by surprise which is also an indicator of an intelligence failure.
The attack came when the commandos were in fact carrying out an operation against the naxals. In a massive encounter that took place late on Monday, 10 Cobra commandos were martyred in the forest area of Dumari Nala.
The naxals carried out the attacks in large numbers and had even spread a large amount of Improvised Explosives Devices (IEDs) to which the commandos had fallen prey. The commandos however managed to kill three naxals.
IEDs planted, Naxals waited
Going by the investigations that are taking place, it appears as though it was a surprise attack. There were a large number of naxals who were waiting for the party.
They had planned this well in advance and the manner in which the IEDs were spread across in large numbers is an indicator of the same.
The casualties among the naxals too would have been high. However, since they had planned it well in advance, they managed to take away the injured naxals to safe spots but the security forces were not immediately able to provide support to the injured due to bad weather. Heavy drains hampered the operations to a great deal.
Bihar's Director General of Police says that the probe is on. "We got reports about the large spread of IEDs at the site of the encounter," he also added. This is so far the biggest casualties that the COBRA unit has faced so far.
OneIndia News
Jayalalithaa, Salman Khan cases have given judiciary a bad name: Justice Santosh Hegde
Bengaluru
oi-Vicky
Bengaluru, July 19: Pendency in courts is a major issue and there are millions of litigants who suffer due to this. However, when it comes to high profile cases such as the J Jayalalithaa disproportionate assets case or the Salman Khan hit-and-run, they are taken out of turn and disposed off in no time.
Justice Santhosh Hegde, former judge of the Supreme Court feels that the Salman Khan and Jayalalithaa cases have given the judiciary a bad name.
He tells OneIndia that he in no way is questioning the judgment or the final outcome, but only the speed at which theese cases were taken out of turn and disposed off. "Does this happen because these are cases of the high and mighty," Justice Hegde questions.
Need to be fair while taking up cases
Justice Hegde says that there are so many cases that are pending in the court. Both the Supreme Court and the High Court should not be taking up cases out of turn.
"No one case is more important than the other. In the Jayalalithaa disproportionate assets case, it was taken up both in the High Court and the Supreme Court out of turn and even disposed off," he says. (In the Jayalalithaa case, the arguments have concluded and verdict has been reserved).
"Even in the Salman Khan hit-and-run case, the matter was taken up so quickly by the Bombay High Court and disposed off. Why? Were there no other cases pending. What about those appeals pending for years? Are they less important," the former judge of the Supreme Court asks.
"Let us be fair to all cases and not decide on taking cases out of turn just because it involves the high and mighty or rich and famous. I have made this point several times in the past. Recently when the appeal in the Salman Khan case came up before the Supreme Court, they said it will not be taken out of turn. That should be the approach and I really laud the Supreme Court for it as it needs to hear all other pending cases which were filed before this one," Justice Hegde also points out.
Pendency in judiciary
"Everyday one speaks about pendency in the judiciary. It is a major issue no doubt and the vacancies need to be filled up. There is a back log of cases because there is a shortage of judges and they are unable to complete the back log. Now the posts are not being filled up because of confrontation between the judiciary and the government," Justice Hegde says.
He further points out that there should be timely appointments to the judiciary. "Delays always benefit one party and this automatically leads to frivolous litigation. I think we need to follow the American system where there is a trial and then an appellate court," he said.
The Supreme Court in America only deals with a larger question of law in America.
"While the confrontation between the government and the judiciary is leading to the delay as there are not enough judges, courts on the other hand should stop encouraging adjournments. All pleadings should be completed between the parties before they come to the court," says Justice Hegde.
"The court should start proceedings from the stage of framing of issues. I feel that this confrontation should end. Both should sit across the table and speak to iron out the differences," Justice Hegde notes.
OneIndia News
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Story first published: Tuesday, July 19, 2016, 11:38 [IST]
Yahoo sees USD 440 mn loss, 'progress' on strategic review
Business
oi-PTI
San Francisco, July 19: Yahoo said its loss in the second quarter widened to USD 440 million from USD 22 million a year earlier, while offering no definitive news on efforts to sell its core Internet business.
"Our board has made great progress on strategic alternatives," chief executive Marissa Mayer said in a statement that contained no clues on a widely speculated bidding process for the key assets of the faded Internet star.
Revenue rose slightly to USD 1.3 billion from USD 1.24 billion a year earlier, the company said.
The results reflected its "lowest cost structure and headcount in a decade," Mayer said. "We continue to make solid progress against our 2016 plan. Through disciplined expense management and focused execution, we delivered Q2 results that met guidance across the board and in some areas exceeded it."
But Yahoo's future is far from certain, amid intense speculation about efforts to sell its main assets. The company has been pursuing its strategic review amid pressure from shareholders to salvage what is left of a company that was once a leader in the online space but has been overtaken by Google and Facebook.
In April, Yahoo averted a proxy battle for control of the company with a compromise that added four new board members, including a hedge fund chief who has been critical of management. The deal was reached with Starboard Value, which had launched a bid to replace the entire board of the Internet giant.
We continue to make solid progress against our 2016 plan, says Mayer
Yahoo has not commented on any specific bidders for the core business, but much of the speculation centres around Verizon, the telecom giant which recently acquired another faded Internet star, AOL.
In February, Yahoo said it was cutting 15 per cent of its workforce and narrowing its focus as it explored "strategic alternatives." Mayer has simultaneously been working to revive growth and made priorities of what she refers to as "Mavens" -- mobile, video, native advertising and social media.
According to the research firm eMarketer, Yahoo will earn just 1.5 per cent of net digital ad revenues worldwide this year, down from 2.1 per cent in 2015. The company is not only losing share of the market, but is also raking in fewer ad dollars in absolute terms, according to the research firm.
BGC analyst Colin Gillis said in a research note last week that Yahoo's core assets would be sold for relatively little. "We expect any offer in the range of USD 5-plus billion should be accepted by the Yahoo board to bring the process to a close," he said. "We expect bids may land in the USD 6 billion-plus range... Yahoo is over in our eyes."
PTI
Tuesday is now No Meeting Day in Haryana and officers to be with people on Friday
Who said what after Navjot Singh Sidhu's resignation from BJP
Chandigarh
oi-Preeti Panwar
Chandigarh, July 19: Once the BJP's best-known face Navjot Singh Sidhu in Punjab, who was off late sideleined by the party and was not on cordial terms with its ruling ally Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) resigned from the saffron party on Monday, July 18.
His resignation did not come as a surprise for many in the political circle, as many were aware of the fact that Sidhu wasn't happy with the way, the BJP was treating him.
The resignation of 52-year-old Sidhu, who was nominated as the Rajya Sabha MP on April 22, was accepted by Chairman Hamid Ansari with immediate effect.
[BJP leader Navjot Singh Sidhu resigns from Rajya Sabha]
Immediately after his parting ways with the BJP and that too at the time when Punjab is all set to face assembly elections next year, lot of reactions poured from various parties. Let's have a look on who said what:
Navjot Kaur Sidhu- "I think Sidhu has very clearly suggested what he is going to do and in the coming days let him come out with this (his future plans). He has said that he wants to serve Punjab and there is no choice except serving from Aam Aadmi Party. It is understood that if he has quit the Rajya Sabha, he has quit BJP. There is no question of his going back, he has never gone back on his words. He wants to serve Punjab. And he will serve the state."
Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal- "Sidhu joins whichever party. But nobody likes Dalbadloo (turncoat)."
Punjab Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal- "Resignation of Navjot Singh Sidhu from Rajya Sabha would have no impact on the SAD-BJP alliance and on the Assembly poll results in the state."
AAP chief & Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal- "People can give their right hand for an RS (Rajya Sabha) seat. Ever seen a sitting RS MP resigning to save his state? I salute Sidhu ji for his courage."
Punjab BJP president Vijay Sampla- "Navjot Singh Sidhu and his wife Navjot Kaur Sidhu are free to make their decision and they can go wherever they want to. There is not going to be any effect on the party. Sidhu did not enter Punjab for four years. Whether the party was not functioning?"
Punjab Congress chief Amarinder Singh- "Pushed to the wall by the Akalis and his own party, the BJP, maintaining a conniving silence, Sidhu was left with little option other than resigning."
AAP's Punjab state convener Sucha Singh Chhotepur- "Appreciate Navjot Sidhu and Dr. Navjot Kaur Sidhu Move, looking forward for their Welcome to @AAPPunjab2017 @AamAadmiParty @DrDrnavjotsidhu. Navjot Singh Sidhu is most welcomed to join @AamAadmiParty @sherryontopp @AAPPunjab2017."
AAP leader Sanjay Singh- "We welcome the resignation of Sidhu from the Rajya Sabha. It is a bold move."
People can give their rt hand for an RS seat. Ever seen a sitting RS MP resigning to save his state? I salute Sidhu ji for his courage Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) July 18, 2016
Navjot Singh Sidhu on quitting as BJP's Member of Parliament: 'In war of right or wrong, you can't afford to be neutral' Ashish Khetan (@AashishKhetan) July 18, 2016
Navjot Singh Sidhu is most welcomed to join @AamAadmiParty @sherryontopp @AAPPunjab2017 . Sucha Singh Chotepur (@SChotepur) July 18, 2016
Navjot Singh Sidhu ji & his wife are on Kapil Sharma's show..And Mr Sidhu didn't let his wife complete even a single sentence..What a LEGEND Paresh Rawal (@Babu_Bhaiyaa) July 2, 2016
People with no base, rejected by public are coming together to join "Party of Opportunists": Harsimrat Kaur Badal pic.twitter.com/7xFKT4fBV3 ANI (@ANI_news) July 19, 2016
OneIndia News
Activists to meet Prez, demand withdrawal of Land Bill
India
oi-PTI
Ahmedabad, July 18: Demanding withdrawal of the controversial bill seeking to amend the Land Acquisition Act of 2013, a group of activists today announced they would be start a pan-India movement against forced land acquisition.
The announcement was made here today on the last day of a national convention of public movements related to land rights, held under the aegis of 'Bhumi Adhikar Andolan'.
Addressing a press conference after the convention ended, former MP from West Bengal and general secretary of All India Kisan Sabha, Hannan Mollah, claimed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's agricultural policies were the "worst" since the Independence.
"After a long struggle, the new Land Acquisition Act was legislated in 2013, which had some pro-farmer elements, such as prior consent, Social Impact Assessment and safeguards for food security. However, after assuming power, Modi-led government tried to amend it through the bill and through ordinance, so that benefits can be extended to corporates," said Mollah.
"The ordinance to amend the Act was promulgated thrice. Due to the widespread protests it was not promulgated for the fourth time. Withdrawal of the amendment Bill from Parliament is still pending, which is a matter of concern. So on August 10, we will meet the President and urge him to do the needful," Mollah said.
The convention saw participation of around 500 activists, including the Narmada Bachao Andolan leader Medha Patkar.
"Unless the bill is withdrawn, the Act of 2013 will not come into force. State governments are also not implementing it and grabbing lakhs of acres of land without giving fair compensation," alleged Mollah.
"It was decided in the convention that we will launch a movement in each state against such anti-farmer policies. We will also tell people that the so called Gujarat model of development is a myth, the people here are fighting against the government which takes their land and give it to corporates," said Mollah.
PTI
APJ Abdul Kalam felt spending money on statues was a big crime
India
oi-Oneindia
By Anantha Krishnan M
Rameswaram, July 19: The decision to install a 7-feet-long bronze statue of APJ Abdul Kalam at Pei Karumbu in Rameswaram seems to have gone against the wishes of former President. While House of Kalam chose not to react openly, some family members, friends and close aides of Kalam felt that the move would send wrong signals to his followers.
As reported by OneIndia earlier, the foundation stone for Kalam Memorial will be laid on July 27, the first death anniversary of former President, at Pei Karumbu. A host of central and state ministers are expected to land at this temple town to kick-start the memorial work, delayed by nearly a year now.
Speaking to OneIndia on Tuesday, a family insider said that House of Kalam is upset with the way the memorial matter has been handled in the last one year.
"The family members are not happy. They are upset, but have preferred to be silent. They feel let down by the sad state of affairs of the kabar (burial site). The fencing by DRDO around the memorial has come as relief to thatha (APJM Marakaiyar, Kalam's 100-year-old elder brother)," says a family friend.
According to him, the family feels left out with government representatives not officially involving them on any of the memorial activities.
"Everyone wants the family for photographs only. In the last one year, the family had to deal with many unforeseen events in their efforts to keep Kalam's name intact. His name has been misused by many in the last one year, including his digital assets. The family is not excited about a bronze statue, but they are happy for the memorial work which is finally set to begin," says the man who is part of the Kalam Arcade.
On Tuesday, the officials were seen overseeing the statue installation work with the concrete base and pillars already up. DRDO plans to have a replica of the statue erected at the Missile Complex in Hyderabad last year.
Ex-Prez felt statue money should be used for aiding the poor
According to a close aide of Kalam, the former President hated the statue culture all through his life.
"He was opposed to unveiling any statues. By denying such requests, he invited the displeasure of many," he says. He recalled an incident to explain Kalam's displeasure on spending money on non-productive purposes.
"A rich business delegation from Bangalore requested him to unveil the statue of Mahatma Gandhi in 2013. Kalam politely regretted when they met him at the Raj Bhavan. He advised them instead to use the money for the betterment of the downtrodden. He even gave them some suggestions. He felt spending money on statues was a big crime," he said.
Sardar Patel statue: Abdul Kalam rejected Modi's request
According to another aide, Narendra Modi as the Chief Minister of Gujarat, was keen to have Kalam for the foundation stone laying ceremony of the Sardar Patel's statue on October 31, 2013.
Kalam is said to have regretted Modi's written request. Modi also met him (Kalam) at a function in Ahmedabad hoping to convince him.
"But Kalam stuck to his principles. Even after returning from Ahmedabad, there was pressure on him to accept the request. But he did not budge. However, their relationship was never the same after this incident," he said refusing to get into the details.
Interestingly, Rameswaram is abuzz with rumours of Modi visiting Kalam's kabar on July 27. However, government officials have no confirmation of the said visit.
Meanwhile, the online petition started by Marakaiyar and later managed by Kalam's well-wishers, has crossed over a lakh of signatures. The silent campaign -- #Justice4GuruKalam - is aimed at getting government attention for a decent memorial at Rameswaram.
(The writer is Consulting Editor (Defence) with OneIndia. He tweets @writetake.)
Aviation Ministry seeks Rs 4,650 crore to revive 50 airports
India
oi-PTI
New Delhi, Jul 19: Ministry of Civil Aviation has sought a budgetary provision of Rs 4,650 crore to revive 50 un-served and under-served airports and airstrips as it looks to boost regional air connectivity in the country.
The expenses related to 32 Airports Authority of India (AAI) owned aerodromes, where there were no aircraft movements, stood at nearly Rs 15 crore last financial year, according to Minister of State for Civil Aviation Jayant Sinha.
Under the new civil aviation policy, the ministry has put in place provision for promoting regional connectivity by way of reviving unserved and under-served airports and airstrips.
"In order to implement the scheme, a proposal has been submitted to the Ministry of Finance for making a budgetary provision of Rs 4,650 crore (approximately) to revive a total of 50 such airports/airstrips," Sinha said in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha.
"The scheme is to be implemented over a period of three years." As part of the Regional Connectivity Scheme (RCS), the government plans to provide viability gap funding which would be financed through the Regional Connectivity Fund.
The ministry expects to finalise RCS by August after receiving stakeholder comments on the draft. According to Sinha, the selection of cities under RCS would be "demand driven", depending on firm demand for airline operators and where the state government agrees to provide various concessions as envisaged in the civil aviation policy.
There are 394 unserved and 16 under-served airports in the country. "No aircraft movement takes place at 32 airports out of 125 airports, including civil enclaves belonging to Airports Authority of India (AAI)," Sinha said in a separate written reply.
Development and upgradation of airports is a continuous process and is undertaken by AAI depending on traffic demand, commercial viability and socio-economic considerations, among other factors.
PTI
Bengaluru: Now, a lady cop attempts suicide
India
oi-Shreyas
Bengaluru, July 19: A lady police sub-inspector in Bengaluru today attempted to commit suicide. Roopa Tambad attached to the Vijaynagar police station in Bengaluru is said to have consumed dart (fever) tablets. She is currently being treated in a hospital.
This incident comes barely two weeks after deputy superintendent of police. M K Ganapathy committed suicide. The reasons behind the actions of Roopa are still unclear.
While some sources maintain that she had attempted suicide due to harassment, no source that OneIndia spoke with confirmed the same. "We are still probing the incident," an officer informed.
It was only two weeks back that Ganapathy had committed suicide alleging harassment. This incident also led to the resignation of minister K J George who was blamed by Ganapathy.
Alleged altercation in station
According to sources in the department, Roopa allegedly had an altercation with a woman who arrived at the station to lodge a complaint. The woman and Roopa said to have exchanged words as the lady officer refused to file a complaint.
However a senior officer in the station interjected to pacify the heated situation and this allegedly upset Roopa. It is said that Roopa even called her husband before leaving the station.
Besides Roopa has allegedly shouted "I will also take Ganapathy's path. You all need to learn a lesson", sources stressed.
OneIndia News
Coast Guard seizes suspected boat from Myanmar
India
oi-Oneindia
By OneIndia Defence Bureau
Bengaluru, July 19: The Indian Coast Guard (ICG) apprehended a boat from Myanmar moving around Andamans late on Monday night. The boat was seized after two hours of chase by ICG ships.
According to officials, two ICG ships - Rajkamal and Bhikaji Cama - spotted the boat while they were on a routine patrol of the Northern Group of Islands.
"The boat did not respond to the maritime communication procedures and hence we grew suspicious over its presence," an ICG official told OneIndia on Tuesday.
The boat was finally seized from Narcondum, which is a small volcanic island in Andaman sea. The boat did not bear any country's flag nor had any registration number.
"Repeated warnings by the ICG ships on loud hailer and VHF sets were ignored by the ship. We had to fire warning shots across the bow of the boat to bring it to a halt," an official said.
The boat is suspected to be involved in human trafficking. 11 crew members and a large number of clothing belonging to men and women were also seized.
All the 11 were Myanmarese nationals and they did not carry any passports. The boat is currently being escorted to Port Blair for further investigation.
OneIndia News
Former Himachal CM Virbhadra Singh to be cremated at Rampur on July 10 at 3 pm
Delhi High Court seeks ED's reply on Virbhadra's plea not to take action
India
oi-PTI
New Delhi, Jul 19: Delhi High Court on Tuesday sought the response of ED on a plea filed by Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh seeking a direction to the agency not to take any coercive step against him in the wake of the arrest of an LIC agent in an alleged money laundering case.
Justice Vipin Sanghi issued notice to the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and asked it to file a reply on Singh's plea by July 29, the next date of hearing.
In his plea, Singh has said he apprehended that ED might arrest him on the basis of alleged disclosure statement of insurance agent Anand Chauhan, who was recently arrested from Chandigarh in connection with the case.
Chauhan was arrested by ED under provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) as he was allegedly not cooperating with the investigating officer of the case. The probe agency had alleged that Singh, while serving as Union Steel Minister, had invested huge amounts in purchasing LIC policies in his and his family members' names through Chauhan.
Singh's separate plea seeking quashing of the money laundering proceedings is also pending before the high court and would come up for hearing on July 29. ED had earlier termed as "premature" the plea filed by Singh and others seeking quashing of the money laundering proceedings.
It had said the plea seeking stay on the proceedings was "not maintainable" as the inquiry into the matter was in a preliminary stage. ED had last year lodged a money laundering case against Singh and others under the PMLA after taking cognisance of a criminal complaint filed by CBI in this regard.
CBI had lodged a separate disproportionate assets case against Singh and others alleging that he and his family members had amassed wealth of Rs 6.1 crore between 2009 and 2011 disproportionate to the known sources of income.
Earlier, CBI had moved Delhi High Court after the Supreme Court transferred its plea seeking vacation of the Himachal Pradesh High Court's interim order restraining it from arresting, interrogating or filing a charge sheet against Virbhadra.
PTI
Registrations for CEED, UCEED 2023 to commence in October: All the details here
Govt moves bill to change Bombay, Madras, Calcutta HCs names
India
oi-PTI
New Delhi, Jul 19: Seeking to rename Bombay, Madras and Calcutta high courts to reflect the change in the names of cities they are located in, government today moved a bill in the Lok Sabha, a day after Calcutta High Court judges unanimously rejected such a proposal.
Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad introduced the High Courts (Alteration of Names) Bill which, once passed by Parliament, will replace Bombay, Madras and Calcutta with Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata respectively in the names of corresponding high courts.
"The high courts were named after the cities in which they were located. Consequence to the changes in the names of these cities, there has been demands for change in the names... It is appropriate and logical that the names of these high courts are also changed as per the request of the state governments," the bill says.
"It will also fulfil the aspirations of the people of the states concerned," it says. Earlier, judges of Calcutta High Court had unanimously declined to accept the Centre's proposal for renaming it as Kolkata High Court and communicated the view of the full court to the Union Law Ministry.
When the Cabinet had approved the bill earlier this month, it had proposed changes in the names of Bombay and Chennai high courts only.
The Calcutta High Court has the distinction of being the first high court and one of the three chartered high courts to be set up in India, along with the high courts of Bombay, Madras. It was formally opened on July 1, 1862.
Earlier, the government had planned to vest the President with powers to rename a high court in consultation with the Governor, the Chief Minister and the Chief Justice of that state.
But the idea had been shelved. The government now plans to consider such demands of change in name on a case-by-case basis, sources said.
PTI
HC dismisses woman's bail plea in hit-and-run case
India
oi-PTI
Chennai, Jul 18: The Madras High Court today dismissed the bail plea of a woman, who allegedly mowed down a 45-year-old man while driving her luxury Audi car in the city earlier this month.
Dismissing the bail plea of Aiswarya Wilton, Justice S Vaidyanathan in his order said "Section 185(a) of the Motor Vehicles Act is very clear that Breath Analyser Test (BAT) is an immediate way of detecting consumption of alcohol.
The judge said the presence of alcohol in the blood of the accused exceeded the permissible limit. Noting that Aiswarya was not entitled for bail, the Judge said "If the petitioner is let out on bail, there is every possibility of her threatening the witnesses and hampering the investigation."
On the early morning of July 2, Aiswarya had allegedly mowed down Munusamy, a carpenter, while speeding in her car at Rajiv Gandhi Salai, killing him on the spot.
The public gave her a chase and managed to intercept the car. She was arrested and remanded in judicial custody the same day for alleged offences of rash driving and culpable homicide not amounting to murder under IPC sections read with Sec 185 (drunken driving) of the Motor Vehicles Act.
Aiswarya first approached the High Court on July 5 for bail. The petition was disposed of giving her liberty to approach the lower court first. After the Principal Sessions Court dismissed her bail plea on July 14, she approached the High Court again.
PTI
Kanhaiya does not appear to hamper probe in sedition case: HC
India
oi-PTI
New Delhi, Jul 19: JNUSU President Kanhaiya Kumar does not appear to hamper probe in the sedition case, the Delhi High Court today said and wanted to know from police whether there was any circumstance which requires cancellation of the interim bail granted to him.
"When your investigation is going on smoothly, what is there which requires his (Kanhaiya's) bail cancellation? He is not hampering the ongoing investigation," Justice P S Teji asked advocate Shailendra Babbar who was appointed as special public prosecutor (SPP) for representing Delhi Police in the matter.
Responding to the court's query, Babbar said there was no application by the police seeking cancellation of the bail.
"We are not asking for it (bail cancellation)," he said during the hearing in which private persons have filed pleas seeking cancellation of six months interim bail granted to Kanhaiya on the ground that his speech after his release from Tihar Jail in March was "anti-national" and he had violated the bail conditions.
Kanhaiya, who was granted interim bail on March 2 by the high court, is facing sedition charge in connection with an event at JNU on February 9 where anti-national slogans were allegedly raised and Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru was hailed as a 'martyr'.
During the hearing today, the court also pulled up police for not filing its reply on the petitions after the SPP said that they had filed a status report in the matter. "It is a reply in the form of a status report," he said. To this, the judge said, "I want a reply not a status report.
Last time it was made clear that you have to file a reply and not a status report". When the court said that it would hear the matter after the police filed its reply, advocate R P Luthra, appearing for one of the petitioners, said, "What is the purpose of hearing this petition if the period of six months bail will be over.
This plea is for cancellation of bail". The court said if he would argue the matter then it would pass an order. When the petitioner's counsel said that he would argue the matter, the judge said, "Let them (police) file a reply".
"You cannot teach the court how court should function," the judge said and posted the matter for hearing on August 9. The court also disagreed with the contention of SPP who said that since Kanhaiya has been named as a respondent in the plea, he should also be heard.
PTI
Kashmir unrest to Assam floods: Mainland India conveniently ignores the rest
India
oi-Oneindia
By Maitreyee Boruah
Bengaluru, July 19: In an upscale coffee parlour in India's IT hub Bengaluru, two men-a Kashmiri and an Assamese-decided to enjoy their Espresso together on Sunday evening. This is how the meeting unfolded.
27-year-old Ashraf Ali (name changed on request), is a native of Kathua in Kashmir and is working in an IT firm in Bengaluru for the last two years. Sanjib Bordoloi (30) from Guwahati in Assam is a friend of Ashraf and works as a freelance photographer in the city.
They had met almost a year back and since then have become close buddies. They often meet and discuss what they say 'they can't talk openly about'. On Sunday, both the friends while enjoying their coffee and sandwiches once again lamented the fact that how conveniently the "mainland India" ignores the plight of Kashmir and Northeast India.
The importance of Kashmir and Northeast India in the collective conscience of India can be gauged by the treatment these places get in the mainstream newspapers. If you have scanned through the popular national English dailies on Sunday (July 17), in all probability you have not read any Assam-related news on the front-page of these newspapers.
As regards to Kashmir, most of the front-page had a brief about the ongoing crisis in the Valley.
Assam is reeling under massive floods. Reports say flood situation in Assam is critical. Around two lakh people have been affected by the floods in six districts of the state.
"Have you seen any news about Assam floods on the TV channels?" Sanjib asked. "When Chennai was reeling under floods last year, there was so much attention. Hundreds of people die in floods in my state every year. Nobody cares, not even the successive state governments. If we talk about our problems, we are called as crybabies," he added.
"I am a Kashmiri and a practicing Muslim. I am a well-educated man. I have a decent paying job and have no criminal record. However, it took me almost seven months to get a rented place in Bengaluru. My colleagues and friends told me to hide my identity to help me get a place of my choice. I can't lie about my identity. Nobody can erase my truth," said Ashraf.
Like Ashraf's truth, nobody can deny the real facts about Kashmir. Curfew remained in force in the Valley and life was paralysed for the ninth day on Sunday. Violent protests have rocked Kashmir since July 9 following the death of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani and two of his associates in an encounter with security forces a day earlier.
"In the ensuing clashes with security forces, 39 persons including a cop have been killed, while 3,160 persons including 1,500 security force personnel have been injured," stated a PTI report.
Ashraf is struggling hard to connect with his family and friends back home due to the breakdown of cellphone networks across Kashmir. There is no internet access in Kashmir after the Jammu and Kashmir government suspended internet services.
The government has also asked the cable TV operators in the Valley to stop their services. And in an unprecedented move, for the first time in Kashmir, newspaper presses were raided by the government on Saturday (July 16).
"I have not spoken to my mother for the last two days. I have managed to speak to my sister, who stays in Delhi. My sister told me my parents are very scared," he said.
Ashraf said with the media gag in Kashmir, the Valley was under total siege. "How could the government muzzle the voices of its own people? If thousands of people are protesting on the streets and are dying everyday there is a reason behind it. The wound of Kashmir is severe. The government needs to heal it with a dialogue, not suppress the voices of its own people," he added.
What troubles Ashraf and Sanjib the most is the "shrill tone of jingoism" that has taken over the current Kashmir discourse. Both the men confessed that they don't openly express their opinions as in the past they have been labelled as "terrorists" and "anti-nationals".
"If we don't speak the language of the ruling parties at the Centre and the states, we are labelled as terrorists and anti-nationals. The situation is fearsome. So, we don't talk much," said Sanjib.
On Sunday, probably these two men-who call themselves aliens in their own homeland--expressed themselves openly because of the coffee or the lovely weather of the city.
OneIndia News
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Story first published: Tuesday, July 19, 2016, 15:07 [IST]
Accession Day: Valley lights up on this day when J&K became part of India
In India terror down by 34%, civilian deaths by 90% since Art 370 scrapped: Shah
Kashmir violence: CM calls all-party meet on Thursday
India
oi-Jagriti
Srinagar, July 19: Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti has called an all party meeting here on Thursday to discuss the prevailing situation in the Kshmir Valley.
Invitation has been extended to all political parties including PDP, BJP, National Conference, Congress, CPI(M), CPI, National Panthers Party, Democratic Party Nationalist, Peoples Democratic Front and others to discuss the prevailing situation and ways to restore normalcy in the state.
Curfew was imposed in the valley on July 9 to control large scale violence after killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander, Burhan Wani.
Burhan Wani killing: Here is what he did before his death
His death led to wide spread protests in which more than 40 people have been died in Jammu and Kashmir.
Wani was killed along with two other terrorists on July 8 in an encounter at Bumdoora village of Kokernag in Jammu and Kashmir by a joint team of police and Army.
OneIndia News
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Story first published: Tuesday, July 19, 2016, 13:58 [IST]
Man booked for rape of 12-year-old after video of injured girl surfaces on internet
Kopardi rape: Munde hits out at 'delayed' media coverage
India
oi-PTI
Mumbai, Jul 19: Leader of Opposition in Maharashtra Legislative Council, Dhananjay Munde today accused media of "ignoring" the brutal gangrape-cum-murder of a minor girl in Ahmednagar district even though the 'rape' analogy of Bollywood actor Salman Khan hogged the limelight.
"Media ignored the incident for the first two to three days and gave it no coverage. If Salman Khan says something on rape, it immediately becomes breaking news.
But, this girl was not as famous as Salman. Which may be (the reason) why the media initially did not give coverage to it (the incident)," he said in the Upper House during a debate on the Kopardi gangrape-cum-murder incident.
A 15-year-old girl was allegedly raped and killed by three men at Kopardi village in Karjat taluka in Ahmednagar district last week.
The incident had sparked a massive outrage. Munde said like the media, none of the elected representatives from the region, including ministers, besides police officers or district collector spoke a word on the incident for the first two days.
BJP minister Ram Shinde represents Karjat-Jamkhed Assembly constituency in Ahmednagar district as an MLA.
Munde also attacked Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis for not visiting the family of the deceased. "When we mistakenly showed a cabinet minister's photo with a person who we thought was an accused, the CM was quick to rebut us with the correct picture of the accused.
If he had shown same swiftness in visiting the family of the victim, he would have been appreciated," the NCP leader said.
Munde challenged the government to complete the trial in the case within four months and to ensure that the accused get capital punishment.
"Only then will we believe that you (the BJP) have the courage to run this government," he said.
Fadnavis had yesterday told the Legislative Assembly that the case will be heard in a fast track court.
Meanwhile, Congress leader Narayan Rane, who also took part in the discussion, said that by showing the pictures of the accused, Fadnavis has violated the provisions of the Evidence Act.
PTI
5-year-old dies after being attacked by pack of dogs in MP
MP govt signs MoU with CII to attract investors
India
oi-PTI
Bhopal, Jul 19: With an aim to promote 'Make in Madhya Pradesh' as a brand to attract investment, an pact was signed between the state Trade and Investment Facilitation Corporation (MPTRIFAC) and Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) here.
The agreement was inked yesterday by TRIFAC MD D P Ahuja and CII Regional Director (Western Region) Swagata Mukherjee in the presence of Commerce, Industries and Employment Minister Rajendra Shukla, a Public Relation Department official said today.
The aim of the MoU is to project the state in a planned manner through its branding in the country and world to attract investment. Under the pact, CII will be the national partner with MPTRIFAC.
The MOU has the provisions under which CII would collaborate with state government's priority areas which include preparation of a strategy to attract domestic and foreign investment in the state, motivate world's prestigious industrial houses to set up their units in the state and improvement in Ease-of-Doing Business, focus sectors and state's policies.
MP govt woos Japanese investors
The CII would undertake investment promotion at national and international level for the state under 'Make in Madhya Pradesh' campaign, the official said.
"It would establish image of Madhya Pradesh as a pioneer business and investment destination at national and international level. Moreover, in tandem with MPTRIFAC, CII would also hold events endorsed by TRIFAC in regard to Global Investors Summit-2016," the official added.
PTI
Navjot Kaur Sidhu denies reports of her resigning from BJP
India
oi-Oneindia
By Oneindia Staff Writer
Chandigarh, July 19: Are the Sidhus now a divided family or is it merely good running between the wickets on the Punjab political pitch? A day after Navjot Singh Sidhu resigned from the Rajya Sabha, and effectively from the BJP, his wife Navjot Kaur Sidhu said she had not parted company with the party. The BJP had nominated a sulking Sidhu to the Upper House only three months ago.
Sidhu is said to be angling to become the Aam Aadmi Party's chief ministerial candidate in Punjab, where elections are due next year.
The Sidhus were expected to join the Aam Aadmi Party ( AAP) after being reportedly upset with BJP's alliance Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) in Punjab.
According to reports, Navjot Kaur said: "I have not resigned from BJP". When asked about her husband's resignation, she said: "Its understood that he has resigned from the party."
"When he (Navjot Singh Sidhu) has resigned from Rajya Sabha, it only has one meaning that he has resigned from BJP as well,"she added.
"He has clear vision. He wants to serve Punjab, he wasn't ready for any other option besides Punjab," Navjot Kaur said.
On Monday, Navjot Singh Sidhu, who was nominated by the BJP in April, announced his resignation saying: "in the war of right or wrong, you can't afford to be neutral".
Though a formal announcement regarding them joining the AAP is yet to be made, there seems little doubt that the Navjot Singh Sidhu is set to join the party ahead of the Assembly elections in Punjab next year.
OneIndia News
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Story first published: Tuesday, July 19, 2016, 12:30 [IST]
Delhi-NCR likely to choke in the coming days
'Red light on, gaadi off' postponed as LG hasn't given nod: Delhi Minister
Seized SUV stolen from outside police station in Delhi
India
oi-PTI
New Delhi, July 18: An SUV seized by police during a raid on illegal liquor smugglers was stolen from outside the Ranhola police station in West Delhi.
The SUV and a large quantity of illegal liquor was seized and an alleged liquor smuggler Amit was caught in a raid by Excise department and cops from Ranhola police station on July 16, a police officer said today.
The vehicle which parked outside the police station was stolen by someone while the cops were busy keeping the seized liquor in Malkhana of the police station, he said.
A case has been registered and efforts are being made to identify the vehicle lifter through CCTV footage, the officer added.
PTI
For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications
Story first published: Tuesday, July 19, 2016, 10:28 [IST]
Attacker in Nice showed 'clear interest' in radical Islam
International
oi-PTI
Nice, Jul 18: The truck driver who killed 84 people in the French city of Nice showed a "clear, recent interest" in radical Islam, the Paris prosecutor said today, confirming the attack was "premeditated".
The investigation showed Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel had trawled the internet for information on a terror attack in the US city of Orlando and on the killing of a police couple in a Paris suburb last month, Francois Molins said. A search of his computer also found violent images "linked to radical Islam", he told a press conference in Paris.
However, he said no clear link had been established between the father of three and the Islamic State group which claimed the Bastille Day carnage. The revelations came on the third day of mourning over the grisly attack, which saw Bouhlel use a 19-tonne truck to mow down crowds leaving a Bastille Day fireworks display in the French Riviera city.
A sea of people thronged the seafront promenade in Nice where the attack took place for an emotional minute's silence. Similar ceremonies were held across the country, accompanied by the ringing of church bells. But in a sign of the anger and bitterness gripping France after its third major terror attack in 18 months, Prime Minister Manual Valls was booed as he arrived and left Nice for the tribute.
Valls dismissed the jeers and calls for him to resign as "disgraceful", saying they reflected the "attitude of a minority" in the city run by the opposition Republicans party. Molins said the investigation confirmed the attack was "premeditated", and said 13 victims had yet to be identified.
Photographs found on the attacker's mobile phone showed he staked out the promenade in the days before he struck, he added. Molins painted a picture of a non-practising Muslim who ate pork, drank, took drugs and had an "unbridled sexual activity".
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve defended the government efforts to halt terror attacks, calling for "dignity and truth" from critical opposition politicians as the national mood sours further nine months ahead of the next presidential election.
The Nice attack came eight months after IS jihadists killed 130 people across Paris, and 18 months after three days of terror at the Charlie Hebdo weekly and a Jewish supermarket killed 17.
Former president and main opposition leader Nicolas Sarkozy said yesterday that "everything that should have been done the past 18 months was not done".
"We are at war, outright war. So I will use strong words: it will be us or them," he said. While previous attacks saw grand displays of national unity, there was no semblance of cohesion after the Nice massacre, with Sarkozy joining a long line of opposition politicians who have accused the government of not doing enough to protect the French. Cazeneuve described the bitter debate as "shameful".
AFP
Berlin: Afghan teen attacks passengers on train, shot dead
International
oi-Pallavi Sengupta
Berlin, July 19: Passengers of a regional train in southern Germany were attacked by an Afghan migrant, armed with axe and a knife on Monday night. Four people were injured before he was shot dead by the police as he fled.
According to the Wuerzburg police (on their Facebook page), three of the injured were critical and one had minor injuries. Another 14 people were treated for shock.
State Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann, who is Bavaria's top security official, said that the attacker had been identified as a 17-year old Afghan.
Last year, Germany had registered more than a million migrants entering the country. Out of which, 150,000 were Afghans. It is, however, not clear whether the suspect was one of them or someone who was in the country for a long time.
According to sources, it was revealed that the teen came to Germany as an unaccompanied minor and had lived in the Wuerzburg area for some time. He was initially living in a refugee facility in the town of Ochsenfurt. It is also said that he had a foster family.
While authorities were still investigating the matter, they also considered that the teen had exclaimed "Allahu Akbar" ("God is Great") while attacking the passengers. The train was on its way from the Bavarian town of Treuchtlingen to Wuerzburg.
OneIndia News
US Navy tries to recover jet that fell into South China Sea
China makes clear its plan to shut parts of South China Sea between July 19-21
International
oi-Shubham Ghosh
Beijing, July 19: China on Monday (July 18) said in a statement that it would close a part of the South China Sea between Tuesday (July 19) and Thursday (July 21) for military exercises, EFE news reported.
The announcement came almost a week after The Hague's Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) ruled over the region's territorial disputes in favour of the Philippines.
Beijing's statement spelled out the details of the shut down but did not speak on the type of exercises of the reason behind the drills.
China's manouvres coincided with the visit of John Richardson, Chief of US Naval Operations, to China less than a week after the tribunal said China has no historical rights over the resources in many parts of the disputed region which it claims, the IANS reported.
Beijing rejected the ruling at once, saying it was "null and void" and inaugurated two airports in the disputed reefs in the South China Sea area. It also warned of setting up an air defence zone in the region, the IANS said.
The Philippines, however, reacted cautiously to the ruling of July 12 with its new president, Rodrigo Duterte, taking initiatives for bilateral talks on the matter, something Beijing had proposed.
The sovereignty of a number of islands on the resources-rich South China Sea are being contested by countries like Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and Taiwan---besides China and the Philippines. The sea is also a busy route through which 30 per cent of the global trade si conducted.
Oneindia News
[With agency inputs]
Even if not contesting 2020 polls, Hillary Clinton will not be entirely out of scene
Hillary Clinton says Julian Assange must 'answer for what he has done'
Donald Trump a threat to American democracy: Hillary Clinton
International
oi-PTI
Cleveland, July 19: Donald Trump is unfit to become the US president as he "demeans" women, plays coy with "white supremacists" and is a "threat" to American democracy, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has alleged. [Melania Trump addresses Day 1 of Cleveland Convention]
Addressing the NAACP National Convention in Cincinnati, Ohio, the State which is hosting the Republican convention, Clinton said the Republican party, which once was a party of Abraham Lincoln, has become a Trump entity. [Melania 'plagiarises' Michelle Obama's 2008 convention speech: Report]
"This man is the nominee of the Party of Lincoln. And we are watching it become the Party of Trump. And thats not just a huge loss to our democracy ? it is a threat to our democracy. By now, we've heard a lot of troubling things about Donald Trump but that ones shocking," Clinton, 68, said.
"It all adds up to an undeniable conclusion: I dont care if youre a Democrat, a Republican, an Independent ? Donald Trump cannot become President of the United States. And thats why weve got to work together to get out the vote this fall," she said on Monday.
The four-day Republican convention kicked off on Monday and Trump would formally be coroneted as the partys presidential nominee on Thursday.
Clinton slams Trump over divisiveness and rhetoric
Clinton used the occasion to slam Trump for his divisive policies and rhetoric.
"Donald Trump led the movement to de-legitimize our first black president, trumpeting the so-called birther movement. Donald Trump plays coy with white supremacists," Clinton said.
'Trump demeans women'
"Donald insults Mexican immigrants, even an American judge born of Mexican heritage. Donald Trump demeans women. Donald Trump wants to ban an entire religion from entering our country," she alleged.
Noting that Trump loves to talk to the press, Clinton said the first time the billionaire tycoon was quoted in The New York Times was in 1973 when the Justice Department went after his company for refusing to rent apartments to African Americans.
"It was one of the largest federal cases of its kind at the time. And when federal investigators spoke with Trumps employees, they said they were instructed to mark rental applications from black people with a C. A C for colored," she said.
Hillary condemned police shootings also
Clinton also forcefully condemned the recent police shootings.
She reiterated the pressing need to support law enforcement officers, reform criminal justice system and pass common sense gun laws to keep communities and police officers safe.
Describing this as a critical election for the nation, Clinton urged her supporters to come out and vote in the November general elections.
She also announced a nationwide voter mobilisation goal to register and commit to vote more than 3 million voters to be a part of this campaign.
In the kickoff week alone, Hillary for America and the state Democratic coordinated campaigns will host more than 500 registration or commit to vote events across the country.
PTI
Indian student stabbed to death in US; compatriot suspected
International
oi-Shubham Ghosh
Austin (US), July 19: An Indian student from Hyderabad was allegedly stabbed to death by his room-mate in Austin, the United States, on Monday (July 18) midnight.
The deceased was identified as Sankeerth while the accused is Sai Sandeep Goud. The latter is residing in the US as an employee.
The police were questioning Goud over the matter.
Sankeerth was enrolled in a Master of Science programme in the US. Goud checked into the former's room a fortnight ago after a consultency helped him get an accomodation there. Two more students resided in the same room. One of them said that Sankeerth had a quarrel with Goud but could not explain the reason for the argument that eventually led to Sankeerth's death.
Sankeerth, who hailed from Kachiguda in Hyderabad, went to the US two years ago on an H1B visa which he had received through a draw system.
Oneindia News
Malcolm Turnbull sworn in as Australian prime minister yet again
International
oi-Shubham Ghosh
Canberra, July 19: Malcolm Turnbull was sworn in as the prime minister of Australia on Tuesday (July 19) for the second term following a narrow election victory on July 2. Turnbull's Liberal/National coalition got 76 seats and had potentially one more in the 150-seat House of Representatives, the AFP said.
The victory for the multi-millionaire former banker, however, was not very convincing and questions were being raised over whether he could govern successfully.
The 62-year-old was sworn in at the Government House in Canberra by Governor General Peter Cosgrove, the representative of Queen Elizabeth II in Australia and continued with the same team of ministers with which he went to the election.
"We are committed to three years of strong, stable economic leadership so we can provide both the economic security and the national security that Australians expect and deserve," Turnbull had said on Monday ahead of his swearing in ceremony, the PTI reported.
"We will be judged in 2019 by the Australian people as to whether we have delivered on the plans and the programs and the investments that we have promised and set out and described in the lead up to the election."
"My team will now get on with the job of governing - constructively working and engaging with the other parties in the Parliament, to deliver a strong and secure future - the strong economic leadership that Australians expect and will get from my government," he said, as per the PTI.
Oneindia News
[With PTI inputs]
Pak committing atrocities against people in PoK, will have to bear consequences: Rajnath Singh
Pakistan: 40 political parties to collect 'terror fund' for Kashmir
International
oi-Pallavi Sengupta
Islamabad, July 19: 40 political parties and hard line religious groups, some branded as terrorist organizations, will be staging a protest rally from Lahore to Islamabad. The rally has been organised to protest the unrest in Indian Kashmir.
The rally is likely to seek support from the Pakistani establishment for the 'liberation of Kashmit' in India. Pakistan has declared July 19 as Kashmir Solidarity Day.
Protests had erupted in Indian-administered Kashmir after the shooting of a well-known militant leader-Burhan Wani. These protests took a violent turn when a police post was set alight and a military airbase was targetted. Some 800 extra troops were sent to restore order.
[Read: Why killing Hizbul terrorist Burhan Wani was "absolutely" necessary]
OneIndia News
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Story first published: Tuesday, July 19, 2016, 9:09 [IST]
UK PM cites rising N-threat, seeks continuity of nuclear deterrent
International
pti-PTI
London, July 19: Prime Minister Theresa May warned on Tuesday (July 19) that the threat from nuclear weapons was increasing as she pressed MPs to approve the replacement of the ageing submarines that carry Britain's nuclear arsenal.
In her first address to the House of Commons since taking office last week following the EU referendum, May said it would be an "act of gross irresponsibility" to abandon the nuclear deterrent.
The MPs will vote today evening on whether to approve the construction of four new submarines to carry the Trident missile system and their nuclear warheads, at a cost of 41 billion (49 billion euros, USD 54 billion).
The motion is almost certain to pass, as many Labour lawmakers are expected to back the Conservative government despite the opposition of their leader Jeremy Corbyn, and members of the Scottish National Party (SNP).
May cited Russian aggression and the nuclear ambitions of North Korea as proof that "the nuclear threat has not gone away, if anything it has increased".
"It is impossible to say for certain that no extreme threats will emerge in the next 30 or 40 years to threaten our security and way of life," she said.
"And it would be an act of gross irresponsibility to lose the ability to meet such threats by discarding the ultimate insurance against those risks in the future." Britain is one of only three nuclear-armed NATO nations, along with the United States and France.
It has had a continuous at-sea deterrent since 1969, meaning that a submarine -- equipped with up to 40 nuclear warheads -- is always deployed somewhere in the oceans.
PTI
Cases can be transferred out of J&K: SC says in landmark verdict
New Delhi
oi-Vicky
New Delhi, July 19: In a landmark verdict the Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that it has the power to transfer a case out of Jammu and Kashmir. A Bench headed by Chief Justice TS Thakur held that right to access justice is a fundamental right while also adding that it is a part of right to life.
The Bench further went on to state that it is the fundamental rights of citizens that gives the courts the power to transfer cases from one state to another.
A convict cannot be handed two life terms, says Supreme Court
The case being heard by the Bench pertained to whether cases could be transferred out of Jammu and Kashmir as the state enjoyed special status.
The right to transfer cases
In a divorce case, the plea of a separated woman for the transfer of her case from Jammu and Kashmir to Ludhiana was opposed. It was contended that she could not seek a transfer of the case from Jammu.
The advocate argued that the marriage had taken place in Jammu and hence the case ought to be fought under the state laws.
He also contended that the case would be fought under the laws governing Jammu and Kashmir. "No other state or national law can be applicable as J&K enjoyed special status," it was further contended.
The case had gone up before several Benches, which had initially held that since Jammu and Kashmir had its own constitution, separate criminal and civil laws; the case cannot be transferred out of the state. The Benches then referred to the matter to a larger bench of the Supreme Court.
Before the constitutional bench, the government of India contended that the Supreme Court did have the powers to transfer cases in the trial courts of Jammu and Kashmir despite the state enjoying special status.
The Supreme Court has an extraordinary power under Article 142 which enables it to pass any order to ensure complete justice, the government had contended.
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A 17 yr old Afghan refugee went on a bloody rampage after boarding a train in Germany. He attacked people with the axe and knife that left four people badly injured. The incident happened on Monday night in a commuter train near the southern German city of Wurzburg. He was later shot dead by the Germany police.
The Indian Coast Guard (ICG) apprehended a boat from Myanmar moving around Andamans late on Monday night. The boat was seized from Narcondum, which is a small volcanic island in Andaman sea. The boat did not bear any country's flag nor had any registration number. The boat is suspected to be involved in human trafficking. 11 crew members and a large number of clothing belonging to men and women were also seized.
North Korea on Tuesday test fired 3 ballistic missiles into the eastern sea as an apparent protest of South Korea's deployment of the US missile defense system. Two of them flew about 500 to 600 kilometers (310 to 375 miles), displaying a sufficient range to reach entire South Korea.
Twist in the 72 virgins tale: Kerala youth brainwashed into Jihad with new promise
Thiruvananthapuram
oi-Vicky
Thiruvananthapuram, July 19: Islamist terror preachers have often lured youth into terrorism by promising Jihadi martyrs the services of 72 virgins in heaven. Now, it seems, youth in Kerala are being beckoned by the barbaric ISIS with a new promise.
Take the case of Mohammad Marwan, a Kerala youth suspected to have joined the ISIS. He has moved past the 72 virgins temptation. Instead, he believes that if he dies a martyr, he will be able to buy tickets to heaven for 70 people.
Terror attacks inspired in Syria and made elsewhere in the world
Marwan, a resident of Kerala, is one of the many who have gone missing from the state and is believed to have joined the ISIS.
In a message to his family, which is now being probed by the police and intelligence bureau, he says "I have unfinished work. How can I sit in the comfort of my home when Muslims are being killed. How can I enjoy life when my brothers and sisters are being persecuted... It is my duty to fight so that my community is protected".
Investigations on
Investigators in Kerala are currently studying two messages that have been sent by missing youth to their family members. While the text message of Marwan is under probe, the cops are also looking into a voice message sent by another person called Dr Ijaz.
These messages are similar in nature, sources in the probe team said. "We are looking into both. Our priority is to track down the youth".
Investigators are also working on leads with Iran as it was suspected that the missing youth may have landed in that country before making their way to Iraq and Syria.
Both Ijaz and Marwan claim in their messages that it was 'self-realisation', not radicalisation, that led them to this path. Both say in their messages that they will return only after their "job is complete" and ask family members not to be saddened by their departure.
"If we die, we become martyrs and that means we can recommend 70 persons to go to heaven," both their messages said.
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Islamic State says German train attacker one of its fighters Updated: 2016-07-19 09:13 (Agencies)
Rescuers gather on a road near railtracks in Wuerzburg southern Germany on July 18, 2016 after a man attacked train passengers with an axe. German police killed the man after he attacked passengers on a train with an axe and a knife, seriously wounding three people. [Photo/VCG]
Islamic State claimed responsibility on Tuesday for an attack by an axe-wielding Afghan refugee on a German train, according to its online Amaq news agency.
"The perpetrator of the stabbing attack in Germany was one of the fighters of the Islamic State and carried out the operation in answer to the calls to target the countries of the coalition fighting the Islamic State," the statement said.
The 17-year-old attacker wielding an axe and a knife attacked passengers on a train in southern Germany on Monday evening, severely wounding four, before he was shot dead by police, the interior minister for the state of Bavaria said.
Speaking on German public television, Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said it was too early to speculate about the motives of the attacker, who he said was believed to have been living in a home for unaccompanied minors in Ochsenfurt, near the city of Wuerzburg.
The attack comes just days after a Tunisian delivery man ploughed a 19-tonne truck into crowds of Bastille Day revelers in the southern French city of Nice, killing 84.
It is likely to deepen worries about so-called "lone wolf" attacks in Europe and could put political pressure on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who welcomed hundreds of thousands of migrants to Germany over the past year.
"The attacker appears to have been a 17-year-old Afghan who has been living in Ochsenfurt for some time," Herrmann said. "He suddenly attacked passengers with a knife and an axe, critically injuring several. Some of them may now be fighting for their lives."
Police spokesman Fabian Hench said four people had been severely wounded and a fourth slightly injured. Several others were treated for shock.
The attacker fled the train when it halted at a station on the outskirts of Wuerzburg. Herrmann said the man had tried to attack police when he was confronted and had been shot dead.
German media, citing a spokesman for the Bavarian interior ministry, reported that the man had shouted "Allahu Akbar" (God is great) during the attack, but neither Herrmann nor Hench said they could confirm that.
"There are witnesses that suggest there may be an Islamic background to this but that is far from clear at this point," Herrmann said.
Unlike neighbours France and Belgium, Germany has not been the victim of a major attack by Islamic militants in recent years, although security officials say they have thwarted a large number of plots.
Germany welcomed roughly 1 million migrants in 2015, including thousands of unaccompanied minors. Many were fleeing war in countries like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Melania Trump convention speech similar to Michelle Obama's from 2008 Updated: 2016-07-19 17:13 (Agencies)
Melania Trump, wife of Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump, waves as she arrives to speak at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, US July 18, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]
CLEVELAND - Aspiring first lady Melania Trump's speech at the Republican National Convention on Monday contained a section strikingly similar to that delivered at the Democratic convention in 2008 by the woman she hopes to succeed in the role.
A Trump campaign official suggested the similarity to Michelle Obama's speech may have been the result of an error by her team of speech writers.
"My parents impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise; that you treat people with respect," Melania, the wife of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, told the convention in Cleveland.
"They taught me to show the values and morals in my daily life. That is the lesson that I continue to pass along to our son."
"And we need to pass those lessons on to the many generations to follow, because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them."
That small section of Melania Trump's roughly 15-minute speech, a highlight of the opening day of the convention, was similar to part of Michelle Obama's speech in 2008 in support of her husband Barack Obama.
"And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you're going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect," Michelle Obama said in her speech.
"...And Barack Obama and I set out to build lives guided by these values, and pass them on to the next generations," she added.
"Because we want our children, and all children in this nation, to know that the only limit to the height of your achievement is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them."
Before Monday's speech, Melania, a Slovenian-born jewelry designer and former model, told NBC's Matt Lauer: "I wrote it... with as little help as possible."
A spokesman for the Trump campaign called the speech a success, but suggested her writers may have mistakenly injected some borrowed language.
"In writing her beautiful speech, Melania's team of writers took notes on her life's inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking," Jason Miller, Trump's senior communications advisor, said in a statement.
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Benedicte Gravrand, Opalesque London:
According to Eurekahedges July 2016 report, European hedge funds have a short life-span and are using fees to beat the competition. But the majority are still small in size and domiciled offshore.
The share of European smaller sized hedge funds (less than $100m) accounted for 53% of the industry in 2008, increased to 65% in 2011, and has declined since to 57%. Large-sized hedge funds overseeing more than $500m have a share of roughly 15% in 2016 - a slight increase from their share in 2011 (10%).
"While it is possible that some smaller sized hedge funds break into the next AuM bracket, it is also likely that smaller sized hedge funds exited the industry altogether," comments the Singapore-based data provider. "With the Eurozone crisis and challenges in the trading sphere, small sized hedge funds face difficulty both in raising their asset base and in protecting their current capital. Conserving capital is much more difficult for smaller-sized hedge funds especially when exposed to large unexpected market moves."
Eurekahedges data found that European active funds have a median track record of 7.9 years while obsolete funds have a track record of 4.1 years.
"While the competition for a limited pool of investors has resulted in lower average fees offered by new entrants, the market presence of larger and well-established hedge funds is a challenge for new hedge funds as well since their presence acts like a 'barrie......................
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Opalesque Industry Update - New York Life has appointed Tatsuo Mizutori as the head of office for the newly-opened Japan branch of New York Life Investment Management Asia Limited. The Japan branch is currently seeking to obtain the business registrations and licenses that will be needed to permit the office to serve the needs of institutional clients in Japan. New York Life Investment Management is a leading global asset management firm with a growing global footprint and approximately $285 billion in assets under management as of March 31, 2016. As head of the Japan office, Mr. Mizutori will be responsible for building NYLIMs business in Japan, and overseeing all activities of the Japan branch. He has more than 30 years of experience in working with both Japanese and U.S. firms in the Japanese asset management market. Mizutori-san is an incredibly talented executive and we are excited to have someone of his caliber and experience leading our expansion in Japan, said John Grady, NYLIM International vice chairman and director, New York Life Investment Management Asia. Prior to joining NYLIM, Mr. Mizutori was the chief portfolio manager of the advisory fund management department at Nomura Asset Management Co., Ltd., responsible for the investment advisory business for institutional clients. Previous to his role at Nomura Asset Management, he was managing director at Nomura Fund Research and Technologies Co., Ltd., where he led the multi-asset management department, in charge of institutional clients for its investment advisory business. Before that he worked for Russell Investments Japan Co. Ltd., where he served as director of Financial Institutions. Mr. Mizutori was also president and business leader for the Japan office of Mercer Global Investments, starting their operations in Japan in September 2005. He joined the investment consulting business of Mercer in 1997 and became the business leader of Investment Consulting, Japan. He has also held investment management roles with Nippon Credit Bank, and NCB Investment Management Co. Ltd. Mr. Mizutori holds both a CFA and CMA designation and is a graduate of Keio University. This is a time when Japanese investors are looking for new investment solutions. As one of the worlds most respected financial institutions, New York Life Investment Management is well positioned to bring its successful multi-investment advisory approach and first class investment capabilities and solutions to investors, Mr. Mizutori said. As part of a triple-A rated parent in New York Life, a mutual company with a long history in the investments business, once we obtain the business registration, I expect our offering to attract strong interest from Japanese clients. In addition, another veteran of the Japan financial industry, Noriko Kawamoto, joined New York Life in March 2016 and is responsible for the marketing activities for the Japan branch.
Reprinted from WSWS
Gavin Long, 29, was named as the man behind the shooting of three police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana
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For the second time in 10 days, a gunman has opened fire on police in an American city, causing mass casualties. Sunday's attack took place in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with three police officers shot to death and three wounded, one severely.
The gunman, 29-year-old Gavin Long from Kansas City, Missouri was an African-American ex-Marine. He was shot to death at the scene of the attack. He was reportedly masked, dressed in black and armed with a long gun when he ambushed the police in the parking lot of a convenience store.
Two of the murdered policemen were Baton Rouge city officers, while the third was a sheriff's deputy from East Baton Rouge Parish (county). As of this writing, only one of the three officers had been identified: 32-year-old Montrell Jackson, himself an African-American, a 10-year veteran of the Baton Rouge police and the new father of a two-month-old boy.
The other two police victims were identified only by their ages, pending notification of next of kin: a 41-year-old Baton Rouge policeman who had been on the force only a year, and a 45-year-old East Baton Rouge sheriff's deputy.
Very little information has yet been released by police about the circumstances of the shooting, which followed a 911 call at 8:45 a.m. reporting a gunman outside the convenience store. It is not clear who placed that call, whether it was part of a deliberate ambush, or what happened when the first police officers arrived and encountered Long.
The ambush site is a little more than a mile from the headquarters of the Louisiana State Police and five miles from the store where Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old black man, was shot to death by Baton Rouge police July 6. There have been numerous protests against the killing of Sterling since then, which have been brutally attacked by local police and sheriffs' deputies.
As in the case of the July 7 killing of five police officers in Dallas, Texas, the Baton Rouge gunman was a former soldier and veteran of US wars in the Middle East. Long, who turned 29 on the day of the shootings, was in the Marines from 2005 to 2010 and served a tour of duty in Iraq. He reportedly engaged in counter-terrorist operations, for which he was awarded a medal and rose to the rank of sergeant.
There were numerous conflicting and largely unverified reports about Long's political views and motivation. NBC News reported that he had ties to an ultra-right group known as the Sovereign Citizens, who reject most government authority. The Wall Street Journal reported a connection to an otherwise unheard-of "New Freedom Group," which it described as "anti-government."
Reports based on postings of videos by Long on YouTube indicated that he was a former member of the Nation of Islam and espoused black nationalist views, and that he had traveled to Dallas after the police killings there, before moving on to Baton Rouge.
Whatever the specific motivation of the attack, political or otherwise, the murderous assault on individual policemen is completely reactionary. It does not "avenge" the killing of Alton Sterling. Such acts politically disorient the working class and youth, and serve to strengthen the forces of police violence and repression directed against working people of all races.
This is demonstrated by the political reaction that followed, as Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, President Obama and the two main candidates to succeed him, Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton, all issued statements calling for even more resources to strengthen the police.
Edwards, a Democrat elected last year, called the killings "unspeakable and unjustified" and vowed that "every resource available to the state of Louisiana will be used to ensure the perpetrators are brought swiftly to justice." He said the FBI and federal Department of Justice had pledged whatever aid was required to bolster the Baton Rouge police.
Obama called the shooter a coward, adding, "For the second time in two weeks, police officers who put their lives on the line for ours every day were doing their job when they were killed in a cowardly and reprehensible assault. These are attacks on public servants, on the rule of law, and on civilized society, and they have to stop."
Trump sought to connect the killing to Islamic terrorism, although the killer was a Marine veteran of the US military intervention in Iraq. "We are trying to fight ISIS, and now our own people are killing our police," he said. "Our country is divided and out of control. The world is watching." He added, "We demand law and order."
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Reprinted from To The Point Analyses
For one thing, it suggests that there are a wide array of community-related projects that are underfunded or simply not funded at all by public monies. These include various forms of medical research; local arts, including orchestras, theaters, and museums; parks and wildlife causes; animal shelters and rescue services; various sorts of poor-relief organizations such as the Salvation Army and Good Will; civil and human rights groups; women's shelters; and volunteer fire companies. The list seems endless.
In the U.S. this process of charitable solicitation has become a big business. There is an article in the 14 July 2016 New York Review of Books entitled "The Undermining of American Charity." According to the article, the "second most popular charity" in the U.S., in terms of donated dollars, is Fidelity Charitable, a branch of Fidelity Investments that acts as a "middleman" between "individual client accounts" and the charities they wish to support. Fidelity holds the money and, of course, "manages" it for profit until the clients instruct the firm how to distribute the funds.
Fidelity can also help the donor save on taxes by timing out donations. The charges and fees for all this make these "donor advised funds" money makers for "big finance." The authors of the NYRB essay don't like this turn of events. They feel that too much of the charitable funds are being "hoarded" by such institutions as Fidelity in order to maximize profits. Charities end up with less.
This conclusion is based on a commonsense social democratic point of view -- one that assumes that the collective (working through government) has a responsibility to support activities that reflect important community interests. This is, ultimately, one of the purposes of government. Most of the charities soliciting funds through the U.S. Mail would fit into this category of activities.
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A review of Fernando Faura's The Polka-Dot File: on the Robert F. Kennedy Killing
By Edward Curtin
Dare To Fail
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Reprinted from Global Research, 7/15/16
There is a vast literature on the CIA-directed assassination of President John Kennedy. Most Americans have long rejected the Warren Commission's findings and have accepted that there was a conspiracy. There is much less research on the assassination of JFK's brother, Senator Robert Kennedy, and, if asked, far fewer people would say it was a conspiracy and a cover-up. They may not even know the alleged assassin's name.
But the assassination of Robert Kennedy did involve a conspiracy and a cover-up. There is abundant evidence that the accused, Sirhan Sirhan, who was standing 1-3 feet in front of Kennedy when he was shot and who has been languishing in prison since June 5, 1968, did not kill RFK. And there is overwhelming evidence that there was at least a second shooter who shot Kennedy from the rear. The autopsy concluded that Kennedy was shot four times from the rear exclusively (three entering his body) and that the fatal shot was fired upward at a 45 degree angle from 1-3 inches behind his right ear. Sirhan's handgun held 8 bullets. Visual and acoustical evidence shows that up to 13 shots were fired. Thus Sirhan could not have been the killer.
A Reporter's Investigation
The Polka Dot File by Fernando Faura is the latest in a small but growing number of books to make that case, and more. It is a powerful, fascinating, and down-to-earth chronicle -- never before told -- of an investigative reporter's dogged search for the facts of the case from day one.
It is a very important book for understanding the assassination of RFK.
It reads like an Elmore Leonard detective story, albeit less literary, but more engrossing because of its profound importance. For like the killing of JFK, Malcolm X and MLK, the killing of Robert Kennedy echoes down the years, and in many ways signified the end of progressive hope and the ascendency of the national-security-warfare state that reigns today.
Faura's account of his step-by-step investigation is of vital importance in understanding the murder of RFK. For unlike other works on the case, he was there from the start, pursuing and interviewing key witnesses and interacting, at first in good faith, with the LAPD and FBI, who were lying, stealing (his tape-recorded interview of a key witness, John Fahey), and intimidating witnesses.
In fact, those agencies were running steps behind Faura, and were afraid he would discover and reveal truths they wanted hidden. Although he was a seasoned and skeptical reporter, this book is also the tale of his education into the mendacity of government agencies whose ostensible job is to solve crimes rather than cover-up their involvement in them.
He eventually discovers that "the FBI and the LAPD, as well as other investigating agencies involved with national security, had deliberately and methodically misled and defrauded the American populace at large."
Faura, an old-school reporter nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for another series of articles, is a very reliable investigator who instills confidence with his thoroughness, logic, and use of documentary sources. Reading his methodical and fair-minded account -- including extensive verbatim interviews -- I am surprised he could have waited so long to give us the full story. Why he did, and what propelled him to finally write The Polka Dot File, is interesting in itself. It involves a fascinating and tantalizing theory on why RFK was killed, and by whom. But that must be saved for last.
The Assassination
First the essentials: In 1968 Senator Robert Kennedy was running as an anti-war candidate for the Democratic nomination for President. On June 4, 1968, two months to the day since Martin Luther King had been assassinated by a government conspiracy in Memphis, he won the California primary that all but assured him of the nomination. After addressing his followers in the Embassy Ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, at a few minutes past midnight he was proceeding to a press conference through the kitchen pantry when he was shot and killed.
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There are other ways to increase per-capita incomes, of course, but they are limited. Leaders can put more people to work and compel them to work harder. But how far can you push people? Maybe an additional 10 percent, and then what? They can extract more raw materials (ores, lumber, etc.), assuming they are available, but there are limits to how much can be obtained and used. They can put more land under cultivation, but that too is limited by peoples' appetites. As an alternative, we must produces more and better goods and services for own people and for producing goods and services for trade with foreigners.
This requires large amounts of money ("capital"), which cannot be accumulated at home because that requires technology. It's a vicious cycle -- technology depends on capital, which depends on technology, etc. Thus, an initial loan or grant of "seed money" is required. Such loans, as we have seen from World Bank, IMF, and WTO efforts. There is an complex interplay of economy and polity, that produce known, effects, success of capital.
Poor transportation facilities must devote much of the acquired capital to improving it. This was done in the formative years in the US Otherwise, supplies cannot reach producers and products cannot reach customers cheaply enough to be bought by those with modest incomes. Even within countries with relatively few mountains and many waterways, such as in the US, the government of which has spent enormous sums of money, effort to reduce the inequalities of location, the poorest people today are located in mountainous, waterless regions. In the US, the state counties located in the Appalachian, Rocky, and Ozark mountains are the poorest. In contrast, those counties located in watered plains are the richest. Scanning the U.N. list from top to bottom, the only rich country that has too many mountains and too few navigable waterways is Switzerland.
We are talking here not only of innovative scientists and engineers -- but technicians, the people who must know enough math and science to make small decisions involving the operation of increasingly complex machinery. With a few exceptions, like China, Philippines, Indonesia, India, and some South American countries, the educational systems are abysmally antiquated.
On the other hand, those countries that prefer to spend time and education on religion matters cannot expect to enjoy high per-capita incomes unless they are among the fortunate few that sit above precious petroleum, gold or diamonds.
Furthermore, economies all over the globe, from small utopias (New Harmony, Lanark, Oneida in the US) to colossal nations (Russia, China), with very few exceptions, have given up on their attempts to establish societies because equality and incentive economy.
Friday brought news that highlighted how our long-time counterterrorism strategies have created alliances and outcomes destroying world order and peace. First came the release of the 29 pages from a joint congressional inquiry on Saudi Arabian involvement in 9-11. Completed in December 2002, it preceded the Iraq War by less than three months. It became available to the public with some redactions on Friday: even as other competing news included the upcoming Republican Convention, Congress' seven-week recess, and an attempted Turkish coup. Hillary Clinton redirected attention away from foreign policy also by saying she will introduce an amendment to overturn Citizens United. But though neither party wants to examine the report and the Turkish situation, critical questions (numbered below) should be asked of all aspiring presidents to avoid continuing our record of foreign-policy disasters.
SAUDI SUPPORT FOR 9-11
The 29 pages are a fascinating read that seem to provide incontrovertible evidence of significant ties. They tie Saudi government officers (and others at high levels of government) to the 9-11 hijackers, who had minimal English skills and exposure to the US. It calls the gap in US intelligence coverage "unacceptable." The oil-rich kingdom's support for terrorism was ignored, it says, because the Saudi Arabia was considered America's "ally."
The report ties the highest levels of the Saudi government to major money laundering and financing, and government representatives to ground help for driver's licenses, housing, and flight-school access. The US has responded by quoting the September 11 Commission Report published a year and half later, saying they found no evidence the "Saudi government as an institution, or senior Saudi officials individually funded" Al Qaeda -- an opening so big one could fly an airliner through it. Even so, that commission was under extreme pressure that they say prevented them from fully investigating the Saudi role. Additionally, Staff Director Philip Zelikow fired an investigator into the Saudi role. Finally, the US faced major obstruction by the Saudis, as cited in the Inquiry report.
1. Is Saudi Arabia or has it been a State Sponsor of Terrorism? 2. Should we not have a line-by-line rebuttal of each link made within the report?
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THE IRAQ WAR AND RESULTING GLOBAL CHAOS
3. Would publishing this information on Saudi Arabia -- from whom 15 of the 19 hijackers originated -- have stopped the Iraq invasion?
This is a critical -- if unanswerable -- question. The American-championed and -led invasion -- with a smattering of outside help -- has led to millions of deaths, destabilized the Middle East, led to millions of refugees across Europe and the Middle East, contributed to the rise of European right-wing parties across Europe, to major terror attacks, and to Britain's vote to exit the European Union. That's heavy lifting for one unjustified invasion, especially one in which "Mission Accomplished" was declared by President George W. Bush after just two months.
A quick review: Almost 1000 false statements -- notably claiming Iraq had links to al Qaeda or was trying to get "weapons of mass destruction" -- were made by President George W. Bush and seven other top administration officials to sell the Iraq War in the two years following 9-11. Those deceptive actions led to 72 percent of Americans supporting the war, and redirected blame from the nation most responsible (and most highlighted in the congressional inquiry).
The costs have been enormous. An estimated 100,000 Iraqi civilians lost their lives in the first 18 months of the Iraq invasion due to airstrikes. The Iraqi death toll was estimated as 650,000 in October 2006, with an almost 4 million of the 25 million citizens becoming either internally displaced or refugees. The US equivalent -- scaled for population -- would be 8 million Americans dying and 30 million fleeing their homes. Syria was destabilized by the flow of extremists and arms provided by the United States: an estimated $25 billion was spent arming and training the Iraqi security forces and army, with hundreds of thousands of rifles and pistols unaccounted for, as well as Humvees, pickup trucks, tanks and other equipment. Reportedly then arms were smuggled to Syrian rebels through Libya in a CIA operation to arm Syrian rebels, with subsequent arming of extremist groups al Nusra and al Qaeda becoming "unavoidable." Syria has been massively devastated (the visuals are shattering), along with Iraq and other nations. About 10 million Syrians alone have been displaced, with half fleeing their country in what has driven the largest refugee crisis since World War II. The world has failed to come anywhere close to full funding of their humanitarian needs and providing for their resettlement. The refugee crisis has overwhelmed neighboring and accessible nations, promoting the rise of the right-wing across Europe and contributing to Brexit.
4. How could a hankering for access to oil and hegemonic power have led to such chaos and suffering? (This is not fully rhetorical as we've never come to terms with it.) 5. How will we investigate our role and provide accountability, which even recently released British Chilcot Report falls short of, although it does far more than mimic our focus on "intelligence failures?"
ACCOUNTABILITY AND ARMS FOR THE SAUDIS
Of course, a recent move toward accountability has taken a crazy course as the US and Saudi governments seek to protect the poor Saudis from the families of 9-11 victims(!). Recently a bill passed the US Senate unanimously (unheard of for something so substantive) to make it easier for families of the 9-11 victims to sue the Saudi government. Yet President Obama is threatening to veto it and working with Republican House leaders to prevent its passage. The Saudis, in turn, are threatening to dump US assets, should it pass. If the Saudis have no involvement, as both nations claim, then why these extraordinary measures?
Or for would-be presidents: 6. Is the threat of selling off US treasuries terrorism? 7. What is your position on the bill? 8. Will you press for a vote on it, and when and how?
This comes also after the largest-ever US arms deal with Saudi Arabia, even as the Saudis export Wahhabism abroad, spending far more than the Russians ever did. The leading Democratic nominee once recognized this: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote "donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide." She went on: "More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups."
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Big Data startup Knoyd is launching a data science bootcamp disrupting the training and hiring of data scientists
Big Data startup Knoyd aims to disrupt the process of training and hiring data scientists by launching BaseCamp, an innovative data science bootcamp. BaseCamp will allow prospective data scientists to learn and train on real companies problems and will prepare them for an exciting data science career.The first cohort of 8-10 participants will start in Vienna, on 9th of January 2017. During eight full-time weeks, participants will get well versed in all the necessary skills to become a valuable part of any data science team: programming (R, Python, or Spark), data engineering (databases, APIs), machine learning, and business aspects of data science. They will also be able to show their skills to the potential future employer, while working on their project. BaseCamp will be receiving applications for the first batch until the 31st of August 2016, then the evaluation process will begin.Being located in Vienna, Austria, it is the first program of its kind in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), providing easier access to data science for both the individuals and the companies there. Being originally from Slovakia, we have experienced first hand, how difficult it can be to make it into the field of data science from our region. I have also experienced how difficult and expensive it is to find a self-sufficient junior data scientist for your company. These things should really not be that difficult. Lukas Toma, CEO. The charm of Vienna, its rich history, culture, and vibrant business environment promise a great cultural experience on top.MarketDue to the rapid increase in data volumes the offer of data science jobs is continually growing. According to IBM, 2.5 quintillion (1018) bytes of data are created daily, of which 90% were produced in the last two years alone. By 2018, the demand for data scientists is predicted to exceed supply by about 50 to 60% (McKinsey study). Techcrunch declares that all current educational programs, including online platforms, existing university programs, and bootcamps combined will not be able to supply enough data scientists.VisionThe market provides a huge opportunity and that is why Vienna is only the beginning. The teams vision is that after several cohorts, when BaseCamp is well established in Vienna, they will launch in other cities across the globe. The next batch may start in Asia - or why not in South America? Sooner or later data scientists will be needed everywhere where business is done. But for the moment, our primary focus stays in Vienna and on the first batch. says Juraj Kapasny, CSO.CompetitionAlthough there are quite a few data science bootcamps in the US, the European market lags behind. The closest data science training programs are in London, Dublin, Berlin, and Turin. East of Berlin, there are none yet. And the current data science training programs typically insist on a past data science or coding experience. However, Lukas and Juraj realized that previous knowledge and experience are not the most essential preconditions for becoming a data scientist. They in fact believe that almost anyone can become one, as long as they have the right mix of analytical thinking, domain expertise, ability to pose the right questions, and of course a willingness to learn.Moreover, the participants of other data science bootcamps mostly learn on toy projects, which are often far from emulating the real world data science challenges. We want our participants to learn directly on the problems of real companies, including deadlines, presentations, and discussing business requirements. This is the only way to effectively learn how to do data science in a business setting. says Juraj.About KnoydKnoyd was founded in Slovakia, in 2015, by Lukas Toma and Juraj Kapasny. They provide customized and affordable data science solutions for businesses of any size and help them leverage their data and create the competitive edge. Before founding their own consulting company, Lukas was among the first data scientists in the German startup Kreditech and has later founded the data science department at the Austrian startup Ulmon (CityMaps2Go). Juraj, on the other hand, was a member ofthe data science department at Teradata Austria, where he gained hands-on experience from projects for big corporations such as Vodafone and Saudi Telecom. At the moment, they are working on challenging projects for clients such as Finaccel, Localization Guru, Kreditech, etc.I am fond of BaseCamp because in my experience what you know (models, methods, theories) is less important than how you know it, and what differentiates people is the ability to thrive off the beaten track. When you work at the forefront, on real and pressing issues, you do science and invention the old way - one (big) part a good foundation as an anchor, one part a vision of what's possible to make you stubborn, and one part intuition for welding together disparate knowledge into a solution. Having previously worked with Knoyd guys personally, I am absolutely confident they are the right people to guide people there - and there's precious few guides after. says Liuben Siarov, SVP Data Science - Risk at Kreditech Holding GmbH.BaseCamp is currently looking for partners. To become a BaseCamp partner, companies can choose from three basic options. Choosing the first option, the company will have their data-related problem solved by a BaseCamp participant. In case the company is satisfied with the solution, nothing stands in a way of hiring the person that delivered it. Second option is to pre-select a preferred candidate from the pool of applicants and provide them with a scholarship in exchange for future work commitment. The last option is to have a current employee trained into a data science rock star. The main advantage of all three scenarios is a premium access to data science talent. Besides, after graduating from BaseCamp, the fresh data scientists will already have all the necessary skills and insights into companys business. They can immediately start working for the company, without the need for costly and time-consuming on-boarding.Knoyd was founded in Slovakia, in 2015, by Lukas Toma and Juraj Kapasny. They provide customized and affordable data science solutions for businesses of any size and help them leverage their data and create the competitive edge. Before founding their own consulting company, Lukas was among the first data scientists in the German startup Kreditech and has later founded the data science department at the Austrian startup Ulmon (CityMaps2Go). Juraj, on the other hand, was a member ofthe data science department at Teradata Austria, where he gained hands-on experience from projects for big corporations such as Vodafone and Saudi Telecom. At the moment, they are working on challenging projects for clients such as Finaccel, Localization Guru, Kreditech, etc.- Knoyd- Skolska 313/13, Rajecke Teplice, 01313, Slovakia- Barbora Sutarikova barbora@knoyd.com
Dental Equipment Market worth 7.52 Billion USD by 2021
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The Report "Dental Equipment Market by Product (Dental Radiology Equipment, Digital Sensors, Dental Lasers, Diode Lasers, Dental Chairs, CAD/CAM, Dental Handpieces, Casting Machines ) & by End User (Hospitals and Clinics, Dental Laboratories)- Global Forecast to 2021", that analyzes and studies the major market drivers, restraints, and opportunities in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Rest of the World.Browse 240 market data Tables and 41 Figures spread through 231 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Dental Equipment Market"Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report.The dental equipment market witnessed healthy growth during the last decade and is expected to register CAGR of 4.9% between 2016 and 2021, to reach USD 7.52 Billion by 2021. Growth in this market can primarily be attributed to factors such as the rapid growth in aging population, increasing demand for cosmetic dentistry, and growing incidence of dental caries and other periodontal diseases.The dental equipment market is segmented based on products, end users, and regions. On the basis of products, the market is split into dental diagnostic equipment, dental therapeutic equipment, and general equipment.Download the Sample Pages@The diagnostic dental equipment segment covers extraoral radiology equipment, intraoral radiology equipment, and hybrid units. The therapeutic dental equipment segment covers dental lasers while the general equipment segment covers casting machines, instrument delivery systems, ceramic furnaces, electrosurgical systems, CAD/CAM systems, dental chairs, dental light cure equipment, and dental handpieces.Based on end users, the dental equipment market is segmented into hospitals and clinics, dental laboratories, and other end users. On the basis of geography, the dental equipment market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Rest of the World (Latin America and Middle East & Africa).In 2015, the general equipment segment accounted for the largest share of the global dental equipment product segment. The growing adoption of CAD/CAM systems (that aid simplification of procedures, increase patient comfort, and reduces procedure time) is a key driver in this market segment. The general equipment segment is also expected to register the highest CAGR during the forecast period.Download the PDF Brochure@Europe held the largest share in the dental equipment market owing to the favorable reimbursement scenario, increasing government expenditure on healthcare, and growth in geriatric population. On the other hand, the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region is expected to register the highest growth rate during the forecast period, due to less stringent regulations, growing demand for dental procedures, and growing dental tourism.Danaher Corporation (U.S.), Planmeca OY (Finland), Dentsply Sirona (U.S.), and Carestream Health, Inc. (U.S.) held a major share of the dental equipment market. The companies majorly focused on strategies such as expansions, partnerships, and new product launches to sustain their positions in the market. Other key players in the global dental equipment market include A-dec Inc. (U.S.), AMD LASERS (U.S.), Biolase, Inc. (U.S.), Ivoclar Vivadent AG (Liechtenstein), Midmark Corporation (U.S.), and 3M (U.S.).About MarketsandMarketsMarketsandMarkets is the largest market research firm worldwide in terms of annually published premium market research reports. Serving 1700 global fortune enterprises with more than 1200 premium studies in a year, M&M is catering to multitude of clients across 8 different industrial verticals. We specialize in consulting assignments and business research across high growth markets, cutting edge technologies and newer applications. Our 850 fulltime analyst and SMEs at MarketsandMarkets are tracking global high growth markets following the "Growth Engagement Model GEM". The GEM aims at proactive collaboration with the clients to identify new opportunities, identify most important customers, write "Attack, avoid and defend" strategies, identify sources of incremental revenues for both the company and its competitors.M&Ms flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "RT" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets. The new included chapters on Methodology and Benchmarking presented with high quality analytical infographics in our reports gives complete visibility of how the numbers have been arrived and defend the accuracy of the numbers.We at MarketsandMarkets are inspired to help our clients grow by providing apt business insight with our huge market intelligence repository.Contact:Mr. RohanUnit No. 802, 8th Floor,Tower - 7, Magarpatta City SEZ,Hadapsar, Pune 411013,Maharashtra, India.Tel: +1-888-6006-441.
Surging Demand for Eco-friendly Textiles to Propel Global Cellulose Fibers Market
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High demand for biodegradable, environment-friendly, versatile, and cost-effective materials from end-use industries is a key factor that stimulates demand from the global cellulose fibers market. The production of man-made fibers involves the industrial processing of wood pulp derived from botanical sources. The manufacturing of cellulose fibers entails chemical and mechanical processing of wood pulp. Acetate, viscose, and triacetate are the different variants of rayon, a man-made cellulose fiber, which are used extensively across several industry verticals.With rising global concerns pertaining to carbon emissions, excessive oil dependence, and fuel sustainability, the demand for cellulose fibers is anticipated to surge substantially. Industry trends indicate that the global market for textiles will focus greatly on biodegradable, eco-friendly, and skin-friendly fabrics. This is a key factor that will propel the global cellulose fibers market in the years to come.Download And Get FREE Sample PDF File Of Cellulose Fibers Market :Acetate Fiber: Most Widely Used Cellulose FiberThe global cellulose fibers market is segmented on the basis of applications and geography. On the basis of application, the cellulose fibers market is segmented into clothing, spun yarn, fabrics, and others including tapes, sealants, and adhesives. The other end-use industries for this market are carpet production and the paper industry. With demand exceeding 50% of the total, clothing is the largest end-use segment of the global cellulose fibers market. This segment is anticipated to expand rapidly in the forthcoming years. Also, the segment for spun yarn is anticipated to expand at a 7.3% CAGR between 2012 and 2018. Viscose, corn fibers, tencel, lyocell, modal, and rayon are the different forms in which cellulose fibers are applied in industries.Being a fast-drying material, acetate fiber is mostly applied in the manufacturing of fabrics, apparel, clothes, and cigarette filters. The apparel industry uses rayon, since it is a highly absorbent material. Rayon and its variants are also used for producing home furnishings such as carpets and curtains.Asia Pacific: Regional Leader in the Global Cellulose Fibers MarketGeographically, the global cellulose fibers market is segmented into Asia Pacific, North America, Europe, and Rest of the World. Asia Pacific dominated the global cellulose fibers market in 2011 with a market share of 45.3%. It is anticipated that the Asia Pacific cellulose fibers market will grow rapidly from 2012 to 2018, at an 8.1% CAGR.The expanding textile markets in India and China drive the Asia Pacific cellulose fibers market. Europe and North America are mature markets for cellulose fibers and will therefore grow at a comparatively slower rate than the Asia Pacific market. Apart from the growing textiles industry, factors such as eco-friendly qualities of man-made cellulose fibers and abundant availability of raw materials are the other factors that drive the global cellulose fibers market.What Restricts the Growth of the Cellulose Fibers Market?The production of premium quality fibers and greater use of cellulose fibers in place of cotton will present several market growth opportunities in the forthcoming years. Forestry policies and volatile wood pulp prices are factors that will hinder the growth of the cellulose fibers market. More stringent regulatory standards owing to heightened environmental concerns also have an adverse impact on the production cost of cellulose fibers, restricting market growth.High industrial consumption of cellulose fibers in place of petrochemical fibers is a key factor fuelling the overall market for cellulose fibers. Fluctuating prices of wood pulp being a major problem in this market, there is a shift of focus towards producing cellulose fibers from renewable sources.Thai Rayon, Daicel Corporation, Grasim Industries Limited, PT. Indo-Bharat Rayon, Aoyang, Shandong Helon Textile Sci. & Tech. Co., Ltd., KelheimFibres, Fulida, TangShanSanyou, Lenzing AG, and Sateri are a few prominent companies operating in the global cellulose fibers market.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.TMRs data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With extensive research and analysis capabilities, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques to develop distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.ContactTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Visit Blog :
Speak to Inspire 2- The Transformative Power of Communication
For immediate releaseSpeak to inspire 2The Transformative Power of CommunicationAUROVILLE, TN, INDIA - Auroville Retreat presents an another innovative retreat named Speak to Inspire 2 through which one can be connected to the world in an effective way. Subtle differences in the quality of personal communication have the power to transform the reality because words, the tone of voice and body language immediately affect the mode of communication through which a person can be judged.Speak to Inspire 2 requires no previous experience and will benefit participants of all skill levels. However, as the program builds on processes introduced in Speak to Inspire 1, the introductory session is recommended as a preparation for the advanced session. Participants are strongly encouraged to experience both courses in sequence to achieve maximum benefit.Speak to Inspire 2 takes the fundamental form of personal communication established in Speak to Inspire 1 begins an exploration of how we as individuals can apply our communicative power to achieve defined results and objectives. Speak to Inspire 2 follows Speak to Inspire 1 and builds on concepts and processes introduced in Speak to Inspire 1. While Speak to Inspire 1 is not required as a pre-requisite for participation in Speak to Inspire 2, to achieve the highest possible results it is highly recommended to participate in both experiences in sequence.This will take place in Auroville, a place of unending education and an experiment in human unity. Auroville has won international acclaim for its efforts in social and environmental sustainability and has developed innovative techniques in bodywork & healing. Auroville is an international community with over 2000 people from around 50 different countries.ScheduleSaturday 24th September:09:00 to 09:30: Registration and Introduction09:30 to 11:00: Accessing the Centre - Relaxation and Awareness of Breath11:00 to 11:30: Tea break11:30 to 13:00: Liberate Inner Power - Removing Obstacles to Expression13:00 to 14:30: Lunch14:30 to 16:00: Communicate to transform - Objective-based Body language and Vocal Techniques16:00 to 16:30: Tea break16:30 to 17:00: Feedback and closureFounded in 2010, Auroville Consulting is a business unit of the non-profit organization Auroville Foundation, set up in 1991 by Government of India.We provide strategic planning, design and monitoring services for corporate and government initiatives to realize ecologically and socially responsible habitats and campus development. We care about cultural and natural diversity, human well-being and a healthy and prosperous ecosystem that supports all life on this planet. Using an interdisciplinary approach we are capable of dealing with complexity, a dynamic environment and of viewing the same challenge from multiple perspectives.We have the following expertise, strategic planning and project management, integrated planning, sustainable water management, ecological landscaping, urban agriculture, sustainable architecture & design, energy conservation and efficiency, energy master planning, capacity training and communication design.Auroville RetreatA project of Auroville ConsultingSaracon, Kottakarai, Irumbai postAuroville, Tamil Nadu 605101, IndiaTel: +91 (0413) 2622571Cell: +91 (0) 9843948288Email: info@aurovilleretreat.org
Pharmaceutical Pipeline Industry Assessment - Innovation Tracking Factbook 2016 | Recent Survey
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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Innovation Tracking Factbook 2016 - An Assessment of the Pharmaceutical Pipeline" to its huge collection of research reports.Innovation Tracking Factbook 2016: An Assessment of the Pharmaceutical Pipeline is a comprehensive, granular analysis of the 20,756 products currently in the pharmaceutical industry pipeline, from the Discovery stage through to Pre-registration and split into therapy areas and key indications. This pipeline is also benchmarked against its size across each segment in 2015, and an assessment of the level of first-in-class innovation is provided. In addition, a detailed contextual analysis of the key drivers of this pipeline is provided, in addition to an assessment of companies present in the pipeline and historical deal value and volume.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Innovation, particularly the development of new products, is a crucial element of the pharmaceutical industry. The market is highly research-intensive, being deeply reliant on a high level of R&D investment and a strong product pipeline to maintain growth and ensure long-term revenue generation. Without successful innovation, which can be broadly defined as the market launch of novel therapeutic molecules that cost-effectively treat or cure diseases, the industry would face a substantial long-term decline in revenue.A particular focus of this report is placed on analysis of the development of innovative drugs, specifically first-in-class innovation. Over recent decades, in addition to an increase in the yearly number of new chemical entity approvals by the FDA, the number and proportion of these approvals that were first-in-class at the time of approval have also increased. The proportion of first-in-class approvals has increased steadily each year since 1994, with the exception of the years 20052008, when the proportion was relatively high.ScopeWhat is the current size and composition of the pharmaceutical industry pipeline and how has it changed since Q1 2015? What can we learn from this?The largest therapy area, by a substantial margin, is oncology, and, with growth in the pipeline sizes for all major oncology indications since Q1 2015, this trend appears set to continue. Why is this the case?What is the overall advantage for companies including first-in-class product developments in their pipeline portfolio, rather than opting for better-characterized established molecular targets?What factors have been driving the increasing number of first-in-class product approvals over recent decades?What strategies have companies typically been pursuing with their pipeline portfolio, in terms of how diverse, specialized or innovative they have been? Specifically, what strategies have the top 25 pharmaceutical companies been following?What key discernible trends have appeared in the strategic consolidations landscape in the past decade and which disease areas have been most active?Reasons To BuyThis report will allow you to:Achieve an up-to-date understanding of the landscape of the overall pharmaceutical pipeline, on both a broad and granular level; this also provides a highly accessible reference which is useful in any pharmaceutical strategic decision making processBenchmark key therapy areas and indications in terms of the number of pipeline products and level of innovation, and assess ones own strategic positioning against this backdropUnderstand the contemporary role and importance of radical and incremental innovation within the various disease areas and indicationsMake key decisions about the role of innovation within ones own pipeline portfolioMake an Enquiry of this report @About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.Mr. NachiketState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @
Ceramic Polymer: UV-resistant coating for Germanys longest whitewater course at the Tropical Islands
Finished project with an effective 3-layer-concept
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Tropical Islands is the biggest tropical swimming resort in Europe with exceptional waterparks, attractions and accommodations. Recently, Germanys longest whitewater course, the Wild-Water-River was opened in their outdoor area AMAZONIA. For the effective protection against UV-radiation, weathering and abrasion the coating systems from Ceramic Polymer were applied on the 250 m long concrete channel.The Tropical Islands Dome is 360 m long, 210 m wide und 107 m high. The biggest structural supporting hall worldwide used to be in former times a hangar for airships; now it is an impressive bathing and wellness complex. The Wild-Water-River is the central highlight of the new created 35.000 sqm large outdoor area. Water temperatures of 31C (88F) ensure an all-season bathing pleasure.The company ISDW GmbH, applied the products from Ceramic Polymer for the coating of the concrete channel. Thereby, the bright blue Wild-Water-River is long-term protected against environmental influences.Technical DetailsProject: Coating of concrete channel, surface 1,300 sqm, length 250 mProduct Primer: CP-SYNTHOFLOOR 8010Coating Product: PROGUARD CN 200Product Topcoat: PROGUARD 169 (PTC)Product requirements: excellent abrasion resistance, stability against UV-radiation, weathering and chlorineApplication of the coating: ISDW GmbH, Mittenwalde/GermanyFrom rough concrete to a smooth surfaceThe treatment of the concrete channel was an extensive, three-month project for the company ISDW. First the large site had to be encased, then the whole surface was grit blasted. The concrete was prepared with the primer CP-SYNTOFLOOR 8010. This product could also be mixed with quartz sand and used as leveling filler for concrete damages and formwork edges.Now test runs with flowing water were carried out and monitored. ISDW achieved the required changes regarding flow velocity and water course by building mortar setups. Subsequently the whole surface was smoothed.After grinding the area was coated with the protection product PROGUARD CN 200. In addition to the topcoat, this interlayer prevents from severe abrasion damages; due to the strong water stream high abrasion resistance of the coating products is essential for this application.The topcoat PROGUARD 169 (PTC) gives the Wild-Water-River beside long-term protection to chlorine, UV-radiation, weathering and abrasion a supremely nice appearance. Moreover, the nonporous, satin-gloss surface provides an excellent color stability.The Ceramic Polymer GmbH produces high-quality, solvent-free protective coatings for different kinds of industries. Due to the integration of microscopic ceramic and other special particles, coating systems with outstanding physical properties such as excellent chemical resistances, high temperature stabilities and extreme abrasion resistances are generated.The Ceramic Polymer coatings are applied directly on the blasted substrate (e.g. steel, stainless steel, concrete) without the previous use of a primer. In this way extreme adhesion is achieved.The scopes of the Ceramic Polymer coatings are for instance all kinds of storage tanks, pipelines or process vessels for the oil & gas industry as well as different maritime constructions, waste water or drinking water applications.Ceramic Polymer GmbHStephanie WuenschDaimlerring 9DE-32289 Roedinghausen / Germany+49 (0)5223-96276-0swu@ceramic-polymer.de
Phycocyanin Market 2016 - Global Industry Size, Trends, Growth, Share and Forecast by 2021
Phycocyanin
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Global Phycocyanin Industry 2016The report provides a basic overview of Phycocyanin industry including definitions, applications and industry chain structure. Global market analysis and Chinese domestic market analysis are provided with a focus on history, developments, trends and competitive landscape of the market. A comparison between the international and Chinese situation is also offered.Global Phycocyanin Industry Research Report 2016 also focuses on development policies and plans for the industry as well as a consideration of a cost structure analysis. Capacity production, market share analysis, import and export consumption and price cost production value gross margins are discussed.Browse Full Report with TOC @A key feature of this report is it focus on major industry players, providing an overview, product specification, product capacity, production price and contact information for Global Top15 companies. This enables end users to gain a comprehensive insight into the structure of the international and Chinese Phycocyanin industry. Development proposals and the feasibility of new investments are also analyzed. Companies and individuals interested in the structure and value of the Phycocyanin industry should consult this report for guidance and direction.The report begins with a brief overview of the Global Phycocyanin market and then moves on to evaluate the key trends of the market. The key trends shaping the dynamics of the Global Phycocyanin market have been scrutinized along with the related current events, which is impacting the market. Drivers, restraints, opportunities, and threats of the Global Phycocyanin market have been analyzed in the report. Moreover, the key segments and the sub-segments that constitutes the market is also explained in the report.Get Free Sample @Table of ContentsChapter One Phycocyanin Industry Overview1.1 Phycocyanin Definition(Product Picture and Specifications)1.2 Phycocyanin Classification and Application1.3 Phycocyanin Industry Chain Structure1.4 Phycocyanin Industry Overview1.5 Phycocyanin Industry History1.6 Phycocyanin Industry Competitive Landscape1.7 Phycocyanin Industry International and China Development ComparisonChapter Two Phycocyanin Market Data Analysis2.1 2016 Global Key Manufacturers Phycocyanin Price List2.2 2016 Global Key Manufacturers Phycocyanin Gross Margin List2.3 2016 Global Key Manufacturers Phycocyanin Capacity and Market Share List2.4 2016 Global Key Manufacturers Phycocyanin Production and Market Share List2.5 2016 Global Key Manufacturers Phycocyanin Production Value and Market Share ListChapter Three Phycocyanin Technical Data Analysis3.1 2016 Global Key Manufacturers Phycocyanin Product Quality List3.2 2016 Global Key Manufacturers Phycocyanin Product Line Capacity and Commercial Production Date3.3 2016 Manufacturing Base(Factory) Global Regional Distribution3.4 2016 Global Key Manufacturers Phycocyanin R&D Status and Technology Sources3.5 2016 Global Key Manufacturers Phycocyanin Equipment Investment and Performance3.6 2016 Global Key Manufacturers Phycocyanin Raw Materials Sources AnalysisChapter Four Phycocyanin Government Policy and News4.1 Government Related Policy Analysis4.2 Industry News Analysis4.3 Phycocyanin Industry Development TrendAbout Us:MarketResearchStore.com is a single destination for all the industry, company and country reports. We feature large repository of latest industry reports, leading and niche company profiles, and market statistics released by reputed private publishers and public organizations.Contact US:Joel JohnSuite #8138, 3422 SW 15 Street,Deerfield Beach, Florida 33442United StatesToll Free: +1-855-465-4651 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-386-310-3803
Global Child Safety Seats Market Outlook 2016-2021
Child Safety Seats
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Global Child Safety Seats Industry 2016The Global Child Safety Seats Industry report gives a comprehensive account of the Global Child Safety Seats market. Details such as the size, key players, segmentation, SWOT analysis, most influential trends, and business environment of the market are mentioned in this report. Furthermore, this report features tables and figures that render a clear perspective of the Child Safety Seats market. The report features an up-to-date data on key companies product details, revenue figures, and sales. Furthermore, the details also gives the Global Child Safety Seats market revenue and its forecasts. The business model strategies of the key firms in the Child Safety Seats market are also included. Key strengths, weaknesses, and threats shaping the leading players in the market have also been included in this research report.The report gives a detailed overview of the key segments in the market. The fastest and slowest growing market segments are covered in this report. The key emerging opportunities of the fastest growing Global Child Safety Seats market segments are also covered in this report. Each segments and sub-segments market size, share, and forecast are available in this report. Additionally, the region-wise segmentation and the trends driving the leading geographical region and the emerging region has been presented in this report.Get Complete Report with TOC :The study on the Global Child Safety Seats market also features a history of the tactical mergers, acquisitions, collaborations, and partnerships activity in the market. Valuable recommendations by senior analysts about investing strategically in research and development can help new entrants or established players penetrate the emerging sectors in the Child Safety Seats market. Investors will gain a clear insight on the dominant players in this industry and their future forecasts. Furthermore, readers will get a clear perspective on the high demand and the unmet needs of consumers that will enhance the growth of this market.Table of ContentChapter One Child Safety Seats Industry Overview1.1 Child Safety Seats Definition1.1.1 Child Safety Seats Definition1.1.2 Product Specifications1.2 Child Safety Seats Classification1.3 Child Safety Seats Application Field1.4 Child Safety Seats Industry Chain Structure1.5 Child Safety Seats Industry Regional Overview1.6 Child Safety Seats Industry Policy Analysis1.7 Child Safety Seats Industry Related Companies Contact InformationGet Sample Copy of Report @About Us:QYResearch Group is a single destination for all the industry, company and country reports. QYResearch Group also carries the capability to assist you with your customized market research requirements including in-depth market surveys, primary interviews, competitive landscaping, and company profiles. We feature large repository of latest industry reports, leading and niche company profiles, and market statistics. QYResearch Group is the comprehensive collection of market intelligence products and services available on air.Contact US:Joel John3422 SW 15 Street, Suit #8138,Deerfield Beach, Florida 33442,United StatesTel: +1-386-310-3803GMT Tel: +49-322 210 92714USA/Canada Toll Free No. 1-855-465-4651
Prepared Dry-Foods Market - Global Industry Analysis, Market Size, Share, Trends, Analysis, Growth and Forecast 2016 - 2024
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Prepared Dry-Foods are the preserved food that is done by removing the water content from the food and are made shelf stable by inhibiting the micro-organism growth in them. The dry foods come in different varieties and require high-end equipment and modern technology.Interpret a Competitive outlook Analysis Report with free PDF Brochure:The market for Prepared Dry-Food products is segmented by types as Dehydrated potatoes, Dry diners Pasta, Mexican food, Pizza products, Rice mixes and others. Other category includes dry mixes such as oriental food and ethnic specialties. Dehydrated potatoes account for the largest market share as it comes in variety of shapes and forms, apart from this it is used to prepare numerous dishes. Mexican food (dry) consists of Mexican shells, tortillas and dinners. Pizza products include pizza pie and crusts mix.The market can also be segmented geographically into North America, APAC, Europe and RoW regions.The key drivers of this market include increased demand for easy to prepare quick food in households as well in food service industry. Longer shelf life and easy handling are some of the unique features of prepared dry food. It differs from frozen food as it is not necessarily be stored in low temperatures which makes them easy to supply and store. Some of the restraining factors could be transparency in food manufacturing and government regulations on labeling and food supply chain.The Prepared Dry-Food market globally is expected to growth with a single digit CAGR from 2013 to 2019. There is a significant increase in the Prepared Dry-Food products market because of its low prices and convenience.Some of the players in the Prepared Dry-Food market are Oregon Freeze Dry, Inc., European Freeze Dry, ConAgra Foods Inc., McCain Foods Limited, Joseph's Pasta Company and Agrofert Holding, a.s. among others.The report offers a comprehensive evaluation of the market. It does so via in-depth qualitative insights, historical data, and verifiable projections about market size. The projections featured in the report have been derived using proven research methodologies and assumptions. By doing so, the research report serves as a repository of analysis and information for every facet of the market, including but not limited to: Regional markets, technology, types, and applications.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Each TMR syndicated research report covers a different sector - such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, TMRs syndicated reports strive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Get Ensured for Quality Performance with BPO Service Company (Josoft Technologies)
http://www.josoftech.com
Josoft Technologies, IndiaIn today's competitive business milieu, you must have every possible advantage to make your business growing. Inbound call center projects and services play an important function to turn the probable customers into the valued clients.Inbound call center companies in Lucknow is dedicated to handle a large chunk of incoming calls and they do function as a customer service department and give additional room of your business. Inbound call center services involve giving answers to any of the queries customers do have regarding the products/ services and many more.If you have a well-organized inbound customer support center, you will not be having any risk of losing your valuable clients. Josoft is one of the best bpo service company lucknow which is well-established and of good repute outsourcing company. Josoft technologies work as IT Business Outsourcing which enables yo u to work efficiently and effectively to pick up the pace for every solution and delivery.By offering pioneering services which are held liable to increases the productivity and enhance the quality of client communications it delivers maximum level of support and customer satisfaction. They have gained excellence in offering an increased level of customer satisfaction to the clients.They do ensure to attempt giving quality performance at every step and at all times whether it is for gaining the productivity via calls, or by offering the best customer satisfaction. Their professional experience has taught that the success of outsourcing firm is the direct result of business goals.Most of the inbound call center companies in lucknow works in union with the organizations which range from small businesses to large companies and making thriving partnerships. Consequently, it would definitely give in lucrative results and success to every partner who is associated with them. They are always here to extend support the client and run the commitments of the organization in order to satisfy the clients and exceed their expectations.They do offer a noteworthy cut-throat advantage as they have a dedicated and seasoned team to achieve their goals having an untroubled and complete assurance to the quality and systematic determination to create the most favourable condition which in turn leads to the definite success.Josoft as a BPO service company lucknow, has grown with a quick speed in present times, as most of the companies harmonize to the statement that by Business Process (BPO) outsourcing company. This will indeed result into better productivity and the success in terms of annual profit rise.Inbound call center companies in lucknow and the BPOs are supplementary activities for almost business and all of the commercial activities all across the globe. Inbound call center project undertake Inbound and outbound telemarketing services that are at affordable cost and they have their major focus on the quality. Therefore, to provide a well-organized and competent core responsibilities by satisfying the clients through calls, on behalf of the particular firm.Contact:E-mail us at: info@josoftech.comCall us at: +91 9026209005Website:BPOs handle the inbound customer service operations of multiple organizations Worldwide.1-B Nanak Arcade 85-A Hind NagarL.D.A Colony, Opposite Shivalik School,Lucknow - 226012
Metalized Pet Bottles Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2016 - 2024
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Plastic constitutes over 30% of the global packaging market, with rigid plastic accounting about 17% of the overall market. Contemporary market requirements for better and innovative ways of packaging has been the biggest concern for the product manufacturing companies. To have a competitive edge in the market, every manufacturers are looking forward to new, innovative means of packaging that are appealing and receptive to consumers. Manufacturers dealing in personal care and cosmetics products, especially, identified need for a new technique of packaging -where the glass and plastic bottles can be replaced for better customer service. Propelled by the market need, the packaging industry responded with introduction of metalized pet bottles packaging system. Metalized pet bottles have a metallic coating on the outer surface of the bottles, manufactured by evaporating a thin layer of metal onto the plastic surface. As per requirement the metalized pet bottles are available in different shape, size and color. Aluminum is most widely used material for metalizing pet bottles. Metalized pet bottle packaging is widely sought after because of its long shelf life, durability, thermal insulation, reflective and scratch resistant nature. Metalized pet bottles are made opaque to protect light sensitive products from UV and other radiations.Metalized Pet Bottles: Market DynamicsMetalized pet bottle is gaining popularity among manufacturers, looking low-cost but quality packaging bottles. Mounting demand for personal care and cosmetic products globally, is the key driving factor accelerating growth of metalized pet bottles packaging market. The sales of metalized pet bottles packaging is also fueled by the increasing consumption of beverage products. Meanwhile the perfume and antiperspirant industry aids in driving significant demand in the metalized pet bottles packaging market. Increase in sales of cosmetics, antiperspirant, personal care and beverage products worldwide will significantly stimulate the demand for the metalized pet bottles, creating robust $ opportunity over the forecast period. However, capital intensive nature of metalized pet bottles packaging machines and presence of other economical plastic packaging are the limiting factors for the metalized pet bottles packaging market. Furthermore, stagnant economic growth in some of the prospective developing regions is expected to affect consumer confidence which in turn will affect consumer goods sales and in turn could hamper growth of global metalized pet bottles market.Get Free Sample Report Copy at :Metalized Pet Bottles Market: Regional outlookIn terms of geography, the global metalized pet bottles packaging market has been divided in to seven key regions including North America, Latin America, East Europe, West Europe, Asia-Pacific excluding Japan, Japan and Middle East & Africa. The Asia-Pacific metalized pet bottles packaging market revenue contribution to the global metalized pet bottles packaging market is expected to be the maximum by the end of forecast period owing to increased demand of metalized pet bottles packaging food and beverage industry. North America and Europe are expected to create significant opportunities for metalized pet bottles packaging manufacturers owing to increased demand for metalized pet bottles packaging in personal care and health care applications. The demand for metalized pet bottles for packaging consumer goods in developing economies such as Brazil, Mexico in Latin America, due to higher consumer spending pattern, will drive the revenue sales of metalized pet bottles packaging, in the region. Factors such as increasing urbanization, better life style, along with greater purchasing power parity are expected to foster the demand of metalized pet bottles packaging in the Middle East and African regions.Metalized Pet Bottles Market: Key playersSome of the key players in this industry are TricorBraun Inc, O.BERK COMPANY, LLC, Pet Power, Packaging Connections, Amcor, Novelis, Polyplex, etc.About TMRTMR is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.Contact TMR90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:
Forgiveness Leads To Improved Physical, Mental And Spiritual Health States Kristi Burchfiel, Author Of 'Piecing Together Forgiveness'
Christian author Kristi Burchfiel
http://www.kristiburchfiel.com
In a recent offering on the Inc.com website, an article written by Justin Bariso cited a study that appeared in the Journal of Health Psychology. In that study it was shown that forgiveness - of self and others - reduced the effect of stress, which improved physical and mental health.Loren Toussaint of Luther College authored the study and, as mentioned in the Inc. article, in an interview in Time Magazine he stated that, ". . . Forgiveness takes that bad connection between stress and mental illness and makes it zero."In the same article, Karen Swartz, M. D,. of Johns Hopkins Hospital was quoted as saying, "There is an enormous physical burden to being hurt and disappointed."An article on the Mayo Clinic website entitled "Forgiveness: letting go of grudges and bitterness" mentions a number of health benefits related to forgiveness, among them "lower blood pressure, fewer symptoms of depression, stronger immune system and improved heart health."Forgiveness, of self and others, can thereby provide real benefits across the physical, the mental and the spiritual arenas. Can the simple act of forgiveness really improve the condition of one's mind, body and soul that much?Kristi Burchfiel, author of 'Piecing Together Forgiveness: A Study Of Philemon' believes it can do all of this and much more. In her latest book, readers will learn not only the principles of forgiveness, but also how they can be applied to impact one's life and relationships. Readers will find answers and see how to piece together a beautiful picture of Godly forgiveness."God created us to be relational; we are meant to be in relationships with other people, friends, loved ones, even God Himself," Burchfiel explains. Because of this, its no surprise that broken relationships that have resulted in grudges and bitterness will have serious physical and mental consequences. Forgiveness, at its core, is about restoring relationships. When we are able to forgive others and to be forgiven, we are taking steps to restore the relationships that God has given us in our lives. Burchfiel continues, We need forgiveness to restore our relationship with God first and foremost. Then, as we forgive others, we experience the medical benefits for ourselves, as well as the potential for restored relationships with others.Kristi writes applicable Bible Studies. Her other works include Without Regrets: A Study Of Ecclesiastes, The Decay Within: A Study of Amos, and an ebook series entitled The Daily Devotional Series, which includes eleven devotionals covering multiple books in the Bible including Genesis, John, Psalm and the New Testament. Several years ago, God led Kristi Burchfiel through some difficult times in her personal life. Only by studying and applying the truths found in the Bible did she find the answers she needed to get her life back on track. She now works daily to continue putting those truths into practice. She is passionate about studying the Bible and invites others to share in the peace of God through the truths found in Gods word. As a Christian devotional author, she believes in living in the world while living out the Word."Just knowing the word of God is not enough," Burchfiel said, "we must live it out.In addition to writing Christian devotionals, Kristi speaks on a variety of different topics including sections from her Bible study books, devotionals, life lessons, personal testimony and the book publishing process. She has been the keynote speaker for women's conferences, led workshops during all day events, and delivered the message in worship services and Sunday School classes. She has also spoken with literacy groups and has appeared numerous times in interviews for websites, radio, and television. She also provides an online devotional for the day and other Bible tools.Kristi Burchfiel is available for media interviews and speaking engagements. She can be reached using the information below, or by email at k_burchfiel@yahoo.com. More information is available at her website. All Kristis books, Christian devotionals, Bible studies for men and women and ebooks are available at Amazon.com and at her website.Kristi Burchfiel grew up in Valley Center, Kansas and received her Bachelors and Masters degrees from Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee, Oklahoma. She and her husband, D Burchfiel have been married for 18 years. She resides in Wichita Kansas where D is the Campus Pastor of Summit Church.PO Box 1613Shallotte, NC 28459
ePrivacy Extends the Inspections Scope of the ePrivacyseal to the New GDPR and Publishes Free GDPR App
general data protection regulation, app, gdpr, certification, privacy
http://www.eprivacy.eu/en/news/pressemitteilung/
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/eprivacy-gdpr/id1130377120?mt=8
www.eprivacy.eu
ePrivacy GmbH has integrated the new General Data Protection Regulation, published in May 2016 and operative in May 2018, into the criteria catalogue of the ePrivacyseal. Furthermore, the free app ePrivacy GDPR brings the law text on smartphones.Hamburg, 19 July 2016.Only a couple of weeks after the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) entered into force, the independent consulting company ePrivacy has brought two data protection seals to market which include the new EU legislation. The seals ePrivacyseal DE (based on German law) and ePrivacyseal EU (based on EU law) are developed on the basis of the companys existing seals. But the criteria catalogues for the certification have been adapted to the GDPR. Thus, they already guarantee compliance with the law which will be applicable in all EU member states from 25 May 2018 on.Furthermore, ePrivacy offers the audit GDPR ready for clients who are currently certified, but wish to know if they will comply with the new European data protection laws as well.The new ePrivacy application ePrivacy GDPR makes it possible to have a quick look into the legislative text even in a meeting or on the go. The app shows the whole GDPR in English and German offline, structured by sections and articles. The free app is available in iTunes since 3 July 2016 (initially for iOS only).Prof. Dr. Christoph Bauer, CEO of ePrivacy, gives reasons for the rapid changeover to the GDPR: We would like to help companies as quickly as possible to adjust to the new EU legislation. Compliance with the General Regulation which applies throughout Europe not only guarantees security for companies and users, but strengthens the European Digital Single Market. Previously, the legislation concerning digital companies differed a lot between the European countries an obstacle for international companies which operate across state borders. From May 2018 the EU data protection legislation will be standardised.In the digital industry, the new GDPR raised uncertainty. The negotiations by the Trilogue of the European Commission, Parliament and Council were not open to the public. Some interpretations and possible applications of the new Regulation remain open.The legal and technical experts from ePrivacy have been working on the GDPR-compliant criteria catalogues since summer 2015. They actively shaped the interpretation of the EU laws in expert groups, association activities and lectures. Since April 2016, ePrivacy carries out workshops helping companies to become compliant with the GDPR.Prof. Dr. Christoph Bauer: The early adjustment to the GDPR by Privacy by Design and Privacy by Default saves costs of later changes and offers a lasting competitive advantage due to good data protection. By this means, companies gain the confidence of its customers and users. Data protections becomes established as a market standard for digital products and problem awareness rises.Users benefit from the new ePrivacyseals as well: Privacy notices are often extensive and difficult to understand. They do not get clearer in the light of changing legislation. Recognised seals instead show at a glance, that the users personal rights are protected across all European national borders. To assure maximum transparency, ePrivacy publishes its criteria catalogues, the awarded seals and the list of accredited legal and technical auditors on its website.Pictures and logos for editorial use:Link to the app:About ePrivacyePrivacy advises and supports companies in the digital economy in Germany and Europe in all questions and challenges of data protection. As an independent service provider, ePrivacy certifies companies and products with the ePrivacyseal and applications with the ePrivacyApp seal for good data protection. Since its foundation, ePrivacy has awarded around 130 privacy seals.Prof. Dr. Christoph Bauer, managing partner of ePrivacy, works out solutions for companies together with a team of IT engineers and lawyers. The experts from ePrivacy are accredited auditors by the ULD (Landesdatenschutzzentrum Kiel), members of the working group Mobile Security of the IT-Gipfel and certification providers of the IAB Europe OBA Framework (voluntary self-regulation guidelines for the online advertising industry in cooperation with the EU).More information onePrivacy GmbHProf. Dr. Christoph BauerGroe Bleichen 21A20354 HamburgGermanyTelephone: +49 40 609 451 810Email: presse@eprivacy.eu
MeisterTask Launches IFTTT Channel to Connect With 300+ Tools And Services
MeisterTask today announced its integration with IFTTT, the popular web-service that aggregates more than 300 tools and services, and enables users to connect them with simple If this than that and Do recipes. Recipes involving MeisterTask help users work more consistently and save time with every created task.MeisterTask can be set up to trigger actions in other apps as well as being used to perform actions itself when triggered by other tools. Currently supported triggers include new tasks being created in a specific section or project as well as tasks being assigned to the user. When used as an action, MeisterTask automatically creates new tasks in the section of the users choice.The launch of our IFTTT channel is a big milestone for us as it provides our users with a simple but powerful way to integrate MeisterTask into their personal workflow, says MeisterLabs Managing Director Till Vollmer. There are dozens of great applications for MeisterTask recipes in all fields from marketing to development and even personal projects. Bloggers for instance can turn tasks automatically into WordPress articles; marketers can create follow-up tasks after theyve uploaded a video to YouTube; busy managers can create new tasks with a single tap on their smartphone using IFTTTs Do button; and sales executives can turn tasks into new Google Calendar events. The possibilities are almost endless.MeisterTask aims to combine the most beautiful and simple user interface with powerful productivity features. Its integration with IFTTT follows a line of other partnerships with tools such as Zapier, Slack, Zendesk and GitHub, to name just a few. Various task automation options are also available directly within MeisterTask in the form of bulk and section actions, and more are being added regularly.About MeisterTaskNamed one of the best apps of 2015 by both Apples App Store and Googles Chrome Web Store, MeisterTask is an intuitive web-based collaboration tool that ups the standard in efficientand even enjoyabletask management. Using MeisterTask, teams organize and manage tasks in a gorgeous, customizable environment that perfectly adapts to their workflow and automates recurring steps. Free apps for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac are also available.MeisterTask is being developed by MeisterLabs, the company behind the award-winning brainstorming tool MindMeister. An integration between MindMeister and MeisterTask enables users to turn their brainstorms directly into agile project boards.Raphaela BrandnerMarketing & PRValentin-Linhof-Strasse 881829 MunichGermanyTel +49 (0)89 1213 5359press@mindmeister.com
Over-the-top communications services Industry Emerging monetization paths Research Report
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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Over-the-top communications services: Emerging monetization paths" to its huge collection of research reports.Over the top (OTT) messaging leaders are rapidly evolving their key mobile messaging application interfaces to new voice and video communications, with revenue dilution implications for carriers worldwide. The progress made in mobile IP voice and video in the past year alone from key OTT players such as Facebook and Google is a clear indication of heightened mobile communications competitive pressure from these new players in 2016 and beyond. OTT players are transforming their communications apps into rich media platforms that serve as social networking hubs, offering a number of media services. Apps built on top of messaging enable users to solve broad problems. Messaging becomes a hub for consuming content and making transactions. Still, we argue that OTT communications providers need partnerships with carriers, to garner scale and differentiation.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Key FindingsThe strategy of most, if not all, OTT messaging providers is to gain scale first and then monetize. All communications OTT apps with global aspirations are in a race to become the biggest platform in order to attract developers, which in turn should add more value to an offering.OTT players are transforming their communications apps into rich media platforms that serve as social networking hubs, offering a number of media services. Apps built on top of messaging enable users to solve broad problems. Messaging becomes a hub for consuming content and making transactions.LINE Messenger and WeChat are the few OTT communications players to demonstrate revenue. They can serve as a blueprints for other players.Messaging apps have significantly eroded carriers' revenue from previous cash generators such as SMS services. The threat to carriers is increasing with the migration of voice calls from carriers to VoIP providers such as Skype and WhatsApp.WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger represent the most disruptive OTT communications players in the market. Monetization could be highly disruptive.A number of partnership opportunities are emerging as carriers are growing convinced that they can generate revenue from OTT communications. The challenge lies in business tie-ups and infrastructure capabilities.SynopsisOver-the-top communications services: Emerging monetization paths offers an analysis of the state of the OTT communications market, the market drivers, and a number of company initiatives that highlight how market players are moving toward monetization. We highlight a number of monetization strategies and case studies employed by the world's largest OTT communications players. We also look at how carriers are impacted by OTT communications providers and how they can partner with key players to drive revenue. We conclude with recommendations for OTT companies and carriers.The Report is structured as follows:Section 1: Market context. This section provides an overview of the OTT communications providers along with the competitive landscape and recent acquisitions and investments in OTT messaging app market. It also provides details on key OTT communications features and information on these communications apps are now evolving into powerful digital platforms.Section 2: Emerging monetization strategies. Here we explore the various monetization strategies adopted by the major OTT communications companies globally.Section 3: OTT communications case studies. The report includes six case studies: Facebook Messenger, Line, Viber, WeChat, Snapchat and WhatsApp. Each case study offers detailed analysis of the trajectory and approach taken by OTT service providers for generating revenues along with the progress made in recent years.Section 4: Key findings and recommendations. We conclude with a summary of our findings on the emerging monetization paths adopted by various OTT service providers around the world, as well as specific recommendations for network carriers and OTT service providers looking to increase their revenue and develop partnerships in the OTT arena.Reasons To BuyAssess revenue models for OTT communications services and learn what works and what doesn't.Learn effective strategies for minimizing the adverse impact of OTT communications services on mobile carrier businessExamine the business case for OTT/carrier partnershipsMake an Enquiry of this report @About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.Mr. NachiketState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @
Low Power Wide Area Internet of Things Industry Analysis, Growth, Trend, Forecasts and MNO Approaches
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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Low Power Wide Area Internet of Things: Market Forecasts and MNO Approaches" to its huge collection of research reports.Low power wide area (LPWA) IoT technologies in unlicensed spectrum are growing in coverage and adoption, while standardized technologies for use in licensed spectrum are to become available later this year. The benefits of low cost, low power and broad coverage (including indoor) address a wide range of different application requirements which cellular, short range wireless and other connectivity options cannot match. Therefore growth is forecast to be very high. A number of proprietary LPWA technologies are available today, with deployments widening. We see that there are three key contenders emerging: SIGFOX, LoRa and RPMA, each of which enjoys different advantages and disadvantages in terms of capability, industry support, business model, degree of coverage and level of adoption. 3GPP LPWA standards, notably LTE-M and NB-IoT, will be finalized by mid-2016, and the first products are expected by the end of 2016To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Key FindingsLPWA technologies provide significant improvements in terms of power consumption, coverage and pricing over cellular and other M2M connectivity technologies, and as a result we expect to see strong adoption in coming years. Between 2015 and 2020, we forecast that cellular M2M connections will grow from 310m to 715m and LPWA M2M connections will grow from 20m to over 860m.Smart meters will, by some margin, be the largest application with 45% of total LPWA connections in 2020. Industrial/financial applications will be the second largest, followed by consumer electronics, a broad category where we expect very high growth rates around 2020. Smart city applications, notably intelligent lighting/parking and smart buildings, are forecast to account for 12% of total LPWA connections in 2020. The adoption of LPWA in land vehicle-based applications is expected to be limited.North America is initially the largest LPWA region, largely because of the adoption of RPMA devices in predominantly private networks. LoRa and SIGFOX networks are also being rolled out in US. Western Europe is expected to become the largest region in terms of LPWA connections in 2017, but Asia Pacific will overtake it in the following year and by 2020 the latter is expected to represent nearly 46% of the total.Deployment of LPWA networks is expected to be much slower in developing markets, where the focus on M2M overall is much more limited. Africa & Middle East, Central & Eastern Europe and Latin America are expected to account for just 14% of LPWA global connections in 2020.Mobile network operators are following a number of different approaches, depending on local market conditions, market maturity, degree of international exposure, market position and degree of focus on M2M. Most operators are waiting for 3GPP standard LPWA technologies to be ratified and commercialized. Some operators are backing a range of LPWA technologies, either because they operate across diverse markets which have different needs or for opportunistic reasons, combined with local competition.SynopsisLow Power Wide Area Internet of Things: Market Forecasts and MNO Approaches report provides a detailed overview of the LPWA networks and forecasts globally. It offers a deep quantitative and qualitative insight into the LPWA key trends, evaluating near-term opportunities and assessing risk factors, based on extensive research findings byPyramid Research and consists of the following sections.M2M and IoT Definitions and Overview: It provides a brief overview of M2M and IoT definitions, mapping of M2M applications and a comparison of M2M v/s cellular connections on a regional basis.LPWA Technology Overview: This section provides a comparative overview of the LWPA wrt to other prevalent traditional cellular technologies.Unlicensed LPWA Provider Profiles: It includes the profiles of LPWA providers like SIGFOX, LoRa Alliance, Weightless, Ingenu and their LWPA offerings and deployment details.LPWA Technology Assessment: This section provides a comparative overview of LWPA providers and its impact on cellular technology (2G) and various comparisons across the six application categories as specified by Pyramid Research.MNO Approaches to LPWA: The various approaches and intent of the MNOs for deployment, support and reselling of the LWPA network services.M2M and LPWA Market Forecasts: This provides a detailed forecasts of LWPA technology and cellular M2M connections and revenues across key regions and M2M application categories as classified by Pyramid Research for the period 2014-2020.MNO LPWA Case Studies: This section highlights the LWPA deployment case studies by select telcos like KPN, Bouygues, Swisscom, Orange, AT&T and Telefonica and provides an overview of their M2M and IoT offerings and their approach towards adoption of LWPA technologies.Key Findings and Recommendations: The report concludes with key findings and a set of recommendations for MNOs, vendors and for unlicensed LPWA service network operators (SNOs).Reasons To BuyThis report helps executives gain understanding of the different LPWA IoT technologies and adoption trends across various geographies and industry verticals.The LPWA IoT competitive landscape is given extra attention, enabling MNOs, vendors and unlicensed LPWA Service Network Operators (SNOs) to gain the insight they need.The broad but detailed LPWA IoT perspective will enable MNOs, vendors and unlicensed LPWA Service Network Operators (SNOs) to succeed in LWPA deployment across various regions.The report brings several case studies that showcase the main approaches major mobile network operators (MNOs) are following regarding LPWA IoT technologies.The report is designed for an executive-level audience, boasting presentation quality that allows it to be turned into presentable material immediately.Make an Enquiry of this report @About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.Mr. NachiketState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @
New White Paper Explains 10 Reasons You MUST Consider Pattern-Aware Programming
https://www.postsharp.net/product/white-papers
http://www.postsharp.net/blog/post/White-Paper-Webinar-10-Reasons-You-MUST-Consider-Pattern-Aware-Programming
Developers spend up to 20% of their time writing repetitive code that machines could generate more reliably. A new white paper issued by PostSharp Technologies explores the problem of duplicated source code that stems from manual implementation of patterns and proposes pattern-aware compiler extensions that add support for patterns into mainstream programming languages.Todays software engineers are trained to think in terms of patterns. However, conventional programming languages miss the concept of patterns so developers are forced to implement patterns by hand, spending up to 20% of their time writing repetitive code known as boilerplate. The white paper, "10 Reasons You Must Consider Pattern-Aware Programming" explores the problem of duplication in source code and suggests pattern-aware programming to eradicate boilerplate and reduce codebase by 5% to 25% with an average 19x return on investment.The document provides insight into: the problem of manual implementation of patterns, resulting in boilerplate code the cost of boilerplate for companies existing technologies for pattern automation the key reasons to consider pattern-aware compiler extensionsCEO of PostSharp Technologies, Gael Fraiteur, commented: We believe that companies need to understand the cost of boilerplate code and more importantly, explore the ways to decrease the repetitive code and make their developers more productive.More than 50,000 developers and over 1,000 companies including more than 10% of Fortune 500 companies such as Microsoft, Intel, Bank of America, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Phillips, NetApp, Siemens and Oracle use pattern-aware programming to reduce their maintenance and development costs.We've been able to consolidate and vastly simplify our code, making it more readable and maintainable. It's allowed us to more consistently leverage code throughout the code base without having to continually rewrite the same functionality over and over again, says Mike Lawton, Manager of Software Engineering at DaProSystems Inc.The white paper was written for CTOs, software architects and senior developers in software-driven organizationsspecifically in financial, insurance, healthcare, energy and IT industries that typically write a lot of repetitive code.To download a complimentary copy of the white paper, visitAdditionally, PostSharp Technologies is hosting a webinar that will cover the white paper topics. For more information and to register for the webinar, visitAbout PostSharp TechnologiesThe white paper was created by PostSharp Technologies, creators of the #1 pattern-aware compiler extension for C# and VB.PostSharp started as an open-source project in 2004 and due to its popularity, it soon became a commercial product trusted by over 50,000 developers worldwide and over 1,000 leading corporations. More than 10% of all Fortune 500 companies including Microsoft, Intel, Bank of America, Phillips, NetApp, BP, Comcast, Volkswagen, Hitachi, Deutsche Bank, Bosch, Siemens and Oracle rely on PostSharp to reduce their development and maintenance costs.With over a decade experience in boilerplate reduction, PostSharp is now the #1 best-selling pattern-aware extension to C# and VB and the only commercially-supported development tool for .NET.The white paper was created by PostSharp Technologies, creators of the #1 pattern-aware compiler extension for C# and VB.PostSharp started as an open-source project in 2004 and due to its popularity, it soon became a commercial product trusted by over 50,000 developers worldwide and over 1,000 leading corporations. More than 10% of all Fortune 500 companies including Microsoft, Intel, Bank of America, Phillips, NetApp, BP, Comcast, Volkswagen, Hitachi, Deutsche Bank, Bosch, Siemens and Oracle rely on PostSharp to reduce their development and maintenance costs.With over a decade experience in boilerplate reduction, PostSharp is now the #1 best-selling pattern-aware extension to C# and VB and the only commercially-supported development tool for .NET.PostSharp TechnologiesNamesti 14 rijna 1307/2150 00 PragueCzech Republic
Geeks on Wheels has launched a new remote support service called Geeks Remote Support.
Geeks on Wheels have launched Geeks Remote Support
Press ReleaseGeeks on Wheels has launched a new remote support service called Geeks Remote Support. We are extremely excited about the new service offering which focuses on supporting business and domestic users remotely across the UK, without the need for an on-site engineer. Geeks on Wheels will continue to provide support on wheels to businesses in the London and Sussex area. However, if you need a quick fix why not call us and try out our remote service for as little as 15.00.We have noticed an increased demand for instant IT support. Technology is a daily part of our lives and therefore immediate assistance is sometimes necessary. The new Geeks Remote Support service allows our Geeks to connect to Windows or Apple Mac PCs and resolve issues, at a greatly reduced cost compared to an on-site engineer. The service has proven very efficient and cost effective for our existing Geeks on Wheels customers. As long as you have a stable internet connection, we can help.Geeks Remote Support not only provides instant computer help; we also provide basic computer training via remote support.Our Geeks can connect to your computer and fix any problems you have, while you sit back and watch. You are always in control of the session and can disconnect at any time and we cannot regain access without your permission.Home IT support pricing 15.00 for 15 minutes 30.00 for 30 minutes 60.00 for 60 minutesBusiness IT support pricing 45.00 for 30 minutes 75.00 for 60 minutes7-day satisfaction guaranteeGeeks Remote Support is a subsidiary company of the award winning Geeks on Wheels London Ltd who have been servicing the domestic and business markets since 2004. If there is an issue with the service you received or the problem has not been fixed, call us within seven days and we will resolve the issue again free of charge. Still not satisfied? Call us within seven days and we will provide a FULL REFUND no questions asked.Geeks Remote Support provides professional remote support to home and business users across the UK and English speaking countries.Geeks Remote Support707 Finchley High Road Business Centre, London, Finchley, N12 0BTPhone: 0203 637 6370Email: geeks@geeksremotesupport.com
Increased Demand for Better-For-You Options to be Addressed at Food and Beverage Marketing Conference
www.q1productions.com/foodmarketing
Macro Trends, Clean Label Initiatives, E-Commerce Among Topics to be Discussed(Chicago) The food and beverage industry has seen a steady increase in the popularity of healthier options and subsequently, companies must build their marketing strategies to appeal to the demand. At the Leveraging Consumer Health Demands in Food and Beverage Marketing Conference, marketing professionals will have the opportunity to discuss the latest trends in the better-for-you category, strategies for packaging and labeling, e-commerce sales, and much more. The conference takes place November 3-4, 2016 in Chicago, Illinois.Small, medium, and large companies will be represented at the conference. Distinguished presenters will share insights from a wealth of experience, including David DeSouza of Revolution Foods (formerly of Kellogg Co. and Kashi Co.), Eric Christianson of Perdue Farms, and Peter Spenuzza of Rise Bar. The open-floor format of sessions and panels will offer conference delegates a chance to share ideas and ask questions throughout the conference.The conference agenda delves into a variety of in-depth topics concerning the food and beverage marketing industry today. Presenters and delegates will have opportunities to discuss strategies for using consumer research, trends in the better-for-you category, growth in the gluten-free sector, and much more. Delegates are encourages to network with peers throughout the conference.For more information on the Leveraging Consumer Health Demands in Food and Beverage Marketing Conference, please visitor email marketing@q1productions.com. Follow the conference on Twitter @Q1Productions, #Q1FoodMktg.About the OrganizerQ1 Productions designs and develops webinars, training courses, conference programs and forums aimed at specifically targeted audiences throughout highly regulated industries in order to provide strategic learning and timely program content. Through a highly structured production process focused on research calls with end-users and key stakeholders in the industry, our team is able to understand the immediate business concerns of todays leading executives. Whether focusing on new or pending legislative and health policy issues or enhanced technologies or processes that will drive efficiency, our programs provide solutions to the urgent educational and information needs of our attendees.500 N. Dearborn Suite 500Chicago IL 60654
Global EMC Filter Market forecast to 2020: report on key insights, industry drivers, market overview
Global EMC Filter Market 2016
http://www.marketintelreports.com/report/QYR10706/global-emc-filter-industry-2016-market-research-reportn
http://www.marketintelreports.com/pdfdownload.php?id=qyr10706
www.marketintelreports.com
The Global EMC Filter Industry 2016 Market Research Report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the EMC Filter industry.Firstly, the report provides a basic overview of the industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. The EMC Filter market analysis is provided for the international market including development history, competitive landscape analysis, and major regions development status.Check Complete Report @Secondly, development policies and plans are discussed as well as manufacturing processes and cost structures. This report also states import/export, supply and consumption figures as well as cost, price, revenue and gross margin by regions (United States, EU, China and Japan), and other regions can be added.Get Sample Brochure of the Report @Then, the report focuses on global major leading industry players with information such as company profiles, product picture and specification, capacity, production, price, cost, revenue and contact information. Upstream raw materials, equipment and downstream consumers analysis is also carried out. Whats more, the EMC Filter industry development trends and marketing channels are analyzed.Finally, the feasibility of new investment projects is assessed, and overall research conclusions are offered.In a word, the report provides major statistics on the state of the industry and is a valuable source of guidance and direction for companies and individuals interested in the market.About us:MarketIntelReports (MIR) aim to empower our clients to successfully manage and outperform in their business decisions, we do this by providing Premium Market Intelligence, Strategic Insights and Databases from a range of Global Publishers.A group of industry veterans who are well experienced in reputed international consulting firms after identifying the sourcing needs of MNCs for market intelligence, have together started this business savior MarketIntelReports.MIR intends to be a one-stop shop with an intuitive design, exhaustive database, expert assistance, secure cart checkout and data privacy integrated. It curates the list of reports, publishers and studies to ensure that the database is constantly updated to dynamically meet the targeted, specific needs of our clients.MarketIntelReports currently has more than 10,000 plus titles and 35+ publishers on our platform and growing consistently to fill the Global Intelligence Demand Supply Gap. We cover more than 15 industry verticals being: Automotive, Electronics, Manufacturing, Pharmaceuticals, Healthcare, Chemicals, Building & Construction, Agriculture, Food & Beverages, Banking & Finance, Media and Government, Public Sector Studies.Contact us:Mayur SSales Manager2711 Centerville Road, Suite 400,Wilmington,Delaware,19808United Statessales@marketintelreports.comTelephone: 1-302-261-5343
The company Sancor GmbH in Hohenzell/Austria was established in 2007 and is specialized in restoration of built-in pipework systems. The Owner Mr. Veren Nenov and his competent team use the Promotec-system from the Swiss enterprise Promotec Service GmbH successfully, which is a unique and patented procedure for the cleaning and coating of defective pipes without extensive and costly replacing. First of all, corroded and calcified pipes of steel and copper
The gold rush is over.
Back in 2011, when we set off on our first best new food cart survey, chefs were still ditching high-end kitchens for cramped carts, hoping to ride the growing cart wave toward some kind of recognition. Some found they were ditching low pay and long hours for lower pay and longer hours. That didn't stop them.
This year, while searching for new and unusual carts at every far-flung pod -- a real-world version of Pokemon Go -- we found plenty of amazing carts, from Portland's first taste of Burmese cuisine to great Honduran fried chicken to the city's best new Reuben, smoked brisket and cheeseburger. But we found a healthy sense of reality, too. Food carts are no longer the fastest track to a restaurant. That's what pop-ups are for.
In June, chef Andrew Mace left his perch at Le Pigeon to open a seafood-focused food cart. We had his Maritime earmarked for a spot on this list. But one week after opening, the cart shut for good. Mace moved Maritime inside the nearby Han Oak, turning his short-lived cart into a pop-up.
Despite all this, 2015-16 has been one of our favorite food cart classes yet, a testament to the passion and dedication of our many cart owners.
As always, we set out to visit every cart that opened in the city over the past year and change, then determine the 10 best. As always, remember that carts change locations, close early or close entirely all the time. Check online or call before visiting.
-- Michael Russell and Samantha Bakall
10. Burmasphere
Like many of us, Tommy Schopp fell in love with the cuisine of Myanmar in San Francisco, where Burma Superstar and its imitators are as popular as Pok Pok and its ilk are here in Portland. After two years of research, Schopp manages to ably replicate the cuisine, a blend of ingredients and flavors that vaguely echoes its Southeast Asian neighbors, including Thailand, India and China. You'll find subtle curries, fried chickpea fritters and Myanmar's national dish, lahpet thok, a mandala of a salad with fermented tea leaves, shredded cabbage, tomato, cucumber and various seeds. At Burmasphere, the tea leaves dress the salad, rather than sitting as an element all their own, but the flavor is spot-on. -- MR
625 N.E. Killingsworth, burmasphere.com
9. Paper Bag Pizza
It's more than a catchy name. Meander through the crowds at Southeast Portland's Tidbit food cart pod at the right time and you'll catch Tom Daly, former executive chef at Pastaworks who co-owns the cart with wife Emily Goodman, shaving a blizzard of cheese over a blistered pie before sliding the whole thing into a paper bag. Here at this former Pyro Pizza cart, pies arrive 11 inches in diameter, with a bubbly crust blackened and chewy and local farm veggies, house-made pancetta and sausage arranged over the top. Build your own pie or order one of their four seasonal combos, which most recently included one topped with tomato sauce with guanciale, garlic scapes, onions, capers, breadcrumbs and Parmigiano. -- SB
2880 S.E. Division St., 971-300-7833, paperbagpizza.com
8. Lardo's pop-up cart
Some nights, the royal blue cart parked outside the Southeast Portland Lardo will be dark. On others, you'll notice a chalkboard resting outside and a line of people winding up to the window. If you've been a fan of Lardo since its early days, that cart might look familiar -- it's where Rick Gencarelli launched his mini-sandwich empire five years ago. Today it plays host to dozens of pop-ups, from proper Hawaiian shave ice to Chicago-style Italian beef sandwiches, all summer long. For Gencarelli, who sold the cart when he opened his brick-and-mortar restaurant, only to buy it back two years ago, the cart has been a way for him to pay it forward. "Maybe it'll help someone else get started," he said. -- SB
1212 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd., 503-234-7786, lardosandwiches.com
7. The Wild Hunt
This winning follow-up from Viking Soul Food owners and former Nostrana chefs Megan Walhood and Jeremy Daniels serves technique-driven bar snacks from a repurposed bus parked outside Teutonic Wine Company's new Southeast Portland tasting room. The purple pickled eggs are colored with juice left over from Viking Soul Food's surkal, the sweet-and-sour purple cabbage, and filled with pepper aioli and salmon roe. There's a saffron-tinted cabbage-potato chowder, and the creamy mac-and-cheese comes topped with seared triangles of blood sausage. All that, and the name is drawn from the spectral horde that roams through the European forest, snatching up onlookers and depositing them several miles away. Skal! -- MR
3303 S.E. 20th Ave., 971-282-2181, thewildhuntpdx.com
Pickled eggs with roe at The Wild Hunt.
6. Merendero Estela
Keep your eyes peeled for the tangerine-colored cart on Southeast 82nd Avenue for one of the Pacific Northwest's few tastes of Honduran food. Start with a baleada, a long flour tortilla folded gently over refried beans and salty crumbled cheese; the tortillas have been browned on the inside, so when you take a bite, you start with the pillowy exterior before reaching a subtle crunch. There are char-grilled slices of carne asada and deep-fried pork chops, but the chicken, with its big whorls of crunch, pickled onions, carrots and passel of fried green banana chips, is the dish that can't be missed. -- MR
7129 S.E. 82nd Ave., 503-757-4702
5. Jook Joint
This shaded cart, sandwiched between Sam's Saj and Wolf & Bears at downtown Portland's 10th and Alder pod, serves bowls of jook, or Cantonese-style rice porridge, with your choice of smoked meat. If you go, order a round of coconut-corn hush puppies, some Taiwanese-inspired seared pork belly bao and a bowl of that creamy jook with some slow-smoked Texas-style brisket. For congree purists, Jook Joint's fully loaded bowls, which come with a meat, a medium egg, cilantro and too many fried won-ton slivers, could fall on the wrong side of fusion. But that would overlook the craft behind each individual ingredient, from the cart-made togarashi flakes sprinkled on that egg to the brisket rub accented cleverly with Sichuan peppercorn. -- MR
On Southwest 10th Avenue between Alder and Washington streets, Jook Joint (Facebook)
4. Pastrami Zombie
Anyone who makes the annual pilgrimage down to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has probably already visited Sammich, Melissa McMillan's all-scratch Ashland sandwich shop. Earlier this year, Sammich birthed Pastrami Zombie, a gray-and-green Portland food cart dedicated to -- you guessed it -- pastrami, specifically a brined-and-smoked Montreal-style brisket. It goes great on a sandwich and better as a burger topping, but it's best with Swiss cheese, Russian dressing and slaw in what is already one of Portland's top Reubens. Brave the blue-awning-topped window, where the trash-talking can reach Chicago-esque levels, to try the latest contestant in Portland's neverending battle for sandwich supremacy. -- MR
In the small pod next to Pollo Norte, 5429 N.E. 42nd Ave., 541-301-2197, facebook.com/pastramizombie
The Reuben at Pastrami Zombie.
3. Burger Stevens
Gun to our head, the simple cheeseburger on a humble Franz bun at this baby blue Hillsdale food cart might be our favorite burger in town. Here in the shadow Wilson High School, former Los Angeles private chef Don Salamone crisps fast-food-style French fries and sears a chuck-brisket blend until the orange cheese melds with the meat, placing each small-ish patty on a golden-griddled bun with soft lettuce, tomato, onion and just the right amount of crinkle-cut pickles. Stick around for the creamy soft serve, either in a cone or as a berry sundae, as Wilson High School's volleyball team orders from a nearby taco cart. America is still great. -- MR
6238 S.W. Capitol Hwy., 971-279-7252, burgerstevens.com
2. Straits Kitchen
Nyonya cuisine, the centuries-old food of Malaysia's Chinese immigrant communities, combines Southeastern Chinese culinary traditions with Malaysian techniques and spices. In practice, that looks like the chef Angeline Ong's laksa lemak, a deep orange bowl of coconut milk curry dotted with chile oil, tender chicken and a few sprigs of cilantro. Some days, the curry is milkshake-thick; on others, a nest of thin rice noodles acts like a sponge, delivering curry straight to your cerebral cortex. You'll want to fill your table with inche kabin, the dark meat chicken bites, deep-fried Brussels sprouts, slicked in a tangy salty soy-lime sauce or the rati babi, a banh mi-ish sandwich with cinnamon- and galangal-spiced pulled pork, chile sauce and turmeric-pickled cucumbers. The sandwich has a more modern layer of fusion, and that's fine too. -- MR
1122 S.E. Tacoma St., 971-325-7323, straitskitchenpdx.com
The signature dish at Sellwood's Straits Kitchen, laksa lemak.
Our 2016 Cart of the Year: Matt's BBQ
Born in Long Island, trained in Australia, Matt Vicedomini might be the last person you'd expect to smoke true Texas-style brisket. But visit Matt's BBQ, a vintage cart parked in a pawn shop parking lot, and you'll come away convinced. Vicedomini, typically found in a T-shirt, shorts and a ballcap from the Gem, the Down Under restaurant where he first caught the barbecue bug, smokes brisket, ribs, pulled pork, chicken and jalapeno-cheddar sausages that snap open to an ooze of melted cheese. Stop by before the lunch rush and he might be spritzing big beef ribs under the hood of his new, 8-foot-long smoker, an addition built to anticipate future a rush of future customers. In true Texas barbecue style, the highlight is the brisket, particularly the fatty deckel, juicy near the liquefaction point, with a deep black bark that, on the best days, adds a subtle, salty crunch. -- MR
4709 N.E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., 516-314-4739, facebook.com/mattsbbqpdx
MHCC Board members
Mt. Hood Community College Board Member James Zordich (left), Board Chair Susie Jones (center) and MHCC President Debra Derr listen to Board Member George "Sonny" Yellott talk about "illegal immigration" on Wednesday, July 13, 2016.
(Andrew Theen/The Oregonian)
Mt. Hood Community College's president and board chair issued a statement Monday in response to controversial comments made by George "Sonny" Yellott at a meeting last week and an offensive picture of President Obama posted on Yellott's Facebook page this month.
"At our last Board of Directors meeting certain statements were made that presented ideas that were not aligned with our mission, vision or values," MHCC President Debra Derr and board Chair Susie Jones said in a statement sent to students and supporters. "To continue to be accessible, positive and responsive to the communities we serve, we must and will live by the values we share."
Later Monday evening, Mt. Hood's board also issued a public notice about an emergency executive session of the board to be held Tuesday night. The topic: "To consider the dismissal or disciplining of, or to hear complaints or charges brought against, a public officer, employee, staff member or individual agent who does not request an open hearing."
During a meeting last week when the board was expected to debrief regarding a failed $125 million bond, Yellott ranted about illegal immigrants and handed out literature to his colleagues about Brexit and a controversial business tax headed to the Oregon ballot this fall.
George "Sonny" Yellott was elected to the Mt. Hood Community College board in 2013 for a four-year term.
Yellott also shared a picture earlier this month on his personal Facebook page that depicts President Barack Obama with a noose around his neck and the text, "the making of a national holiday." Yellott, who is running for the Oregon House of Representatives as a Republican, has since deleted the picture.
The Oregon House Republicans condemned Yellott and asked for him to apologize for the image and pull out of the race on Monday.
The community college's leaders didn't specifically address the photo in its statement, but a spokesman confirmed the remarks were a response to the immigration remarks and the offensive photo.
"While every member of the board has the right to express his or her opinion, no one board member can render opinions for the entire board. Please remember, our Board of Directors consists of 7 elected officials. Individually, a board member's opinion is his or her own and does not reflect the opinion of the Board or the College, its faculty, staff and administration," the leaders said.
Here's the full statement:
Mt. Hood Community College is representative of the communities we serve. Our values clearly state, Per Board Policy 1020, that we will cultivate environments that celebrate and support diverse communities, peoples, backgrounds and points of view. We are inclusive and respectful. As an institutional of higher learning we welcome the sharing of ideas and constructive and robust discussion. To have discussions to explore issues our communities must know they are welcome and safe to share those ideas.
At our last Board of Directors meeting certain statements were made that presented ideas that were not aligned with our mission, vision or values. To continue to be accessible, positive and responsive to the communities we serve, we must and will live by the values we share.
The MHCC Board Chair and I have discussed the best way the Board, as a single entity, can support the values of the College. While every member of the board has the right to express his or her opinion, no one board member can render opinions for the entire board. Please remember, our Board of Directors consists of 7 elected officials. Individually, a board member's opinion is his or her own and does not reflect the opinion of the Board or the College, its faculty, staff and administration.
I am proud of the efforts and actions of our College to encourage and support access, inclusion and equity.
With Regards,
Dr. Debbie Derr Susie Jones
MHCC President MHCC Board Chair
1trump.JPG
In this July 11, 2016 photo, Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump listens to a question during an interview after a rally in Virginia Beach, Va.
(The Associated Press)
By Albert R. Hunt
The tensions at the 2016 Republican National Convention aren't like those typically seen at the party's divided gatherings: Teddy Roosevelt challenging the hierarchy in 1912; or the moderates versus conservatives, Dwight Eisenhower against Robert Taft in 1952, or 12 years later, Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller, then Ronald Reagan taking on President Gerald Ford in 1976.
Republicans meet in Cleveland on Monday to anoint their presidential nominee amid deep schisms: Never have so many of the party's prominent governors, senators, House members and, most conspicuously, former presidents and presidential candidates, avoided the quadrennial forum. But ideology is secondary.
Donald Trump, the presumed nominee, has rolled over the party's right-wing activists, mainstream moderates and policy-centric lawmakers such as House Speaker Paul Ryan or Utah Sen. Mike Lee.
The discussion among Republicans in Cleveland and around the country is about the future of party: Is this election an aberration, or could Republicans go the way of the Whigs a century and a half ago?
Even if Trump turns out to be a unique phenomenon, one reality strikes analysts: "There is a real gap between Republican voters and Republican leaders," notes Alan Abramowitz, a political science at Emory University who specializes in political parties.
The two finalists for the nomination, Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, were the most vehement -- at times vitriolic --in denouncing party leaders. As the convention begins, relations between the party's nominee and its most prominent leader, House Speaker Ryan, remain fraught with tension.
It's not clear how this will play out. "The big question confronting the American system after this election is: Will there be an open conservative Republican Party and a left-of-center collectivist Democratic Party or also a right-wing authoritarian party?" says Vin Weber, a top Republican strategist and former congressman. (The hope that Trump's selection of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate signaled a new turn and tone was undercut by the back-of-the-hand, almost insulting, way the nominee introduced his vice-presidential candidate.)
Some argue that the problem could become even more acute if Trump wins the presidency and then tries to reshape the party in his mold: protectionist, anti-immigration, isolationist, more populist on economics and only selectively supportive of Wall Street and financial markets. If so, how much pushback would there be from Republican traditionalists and movement conservatives?
"It would be four years of upsetting the apple cart most every day," says Fred Davis, a Republican strategist.
If Trump loses -- which many Republicans expect, despite narrowing poll numbers -- the dynamics change but may be equally complicated.
The party's longstanding consensus about cutting spending, taxes and regulation -- and the veneration of Reagan, who left office more than a quarter-century ago -- has run its course. Can Ryan and a handful of policy-centric senators help craft a new agenda that will appeal to the rank and file?
That not only is substantively difficult but a political challenge, too.
"The dirty little secret is that a lot of members of Congress have little interest in policy," laments Kate O'Beirne, a conservative policy advocate.
Alternatively, Cruz, who is already planning for post-Trump Republican politics, embraces elements of the billionaire's message while shaping it to better energize the right wing.
Some political scientists such as Abramowitz and Charles O. Jones, a longtime student of the Republican Party, say this season may be an exception, pointing to Republican strength in Congress and state houses around the country: "Take Trump out of it and you've got a strong party," Jones says.
Weber isn't sure they're right but sees their case: "If Trump loses, the party probably can adjust like after Goldwater," he says. "Trade protectionism and immigration-bashing will be very challenging, but we can rebuild, maybe adjust constituencies a little. Then we could come back powerfully in the 2018 midterm elections."
By Rich Lowry
In the past two weeks, the "war on police" has gone from a metaphor to a reality, with eight officers killed in targeted attacks in Dallas and Baton Rouge.
The country hasn't seen anything like it since the early 1970s, when a lunatic fringe of the left undertook a violent campaign against law enforcement.
Today's spate of anti-police violence isn't remotely as organizationally or ideologically coherent, but it is more lethal. The Black Liberation Army, a homicidal splinter group of the Black Panthers, never killed more than two cops in one operation, and its body count over the course of about two years was only slightly higher than what we've seen just this month.
Vanity Fair writer Bryan Burrough recounts the history in his exceptional book "Days of Rage." He dismisses as a myth the popular idea that the left's violent underground was motivated primarily by opposition to the Vietnam War. "Every single underground group of the 1970s," Burrough writes (excepting the Puerto Rican FALN), "was concerned first and foremost with the struggle of blacks against police brutality, racism, and government repression."
Black militancy had the most allure, or as a radical lawyer told Burrough, "Everything started with the Black Panthers. The whole thrill of being with them."
Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee gave black militancy a jump-start with his famous speech in Mississippi in 1966 declaring, "The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin' us is to take over. We been saying freedom for six years and we ain't got nothin'. What we gonna start sayin' now is Black Power!"
Carmichael's activities in Mississippi spawned various Black Panther groups, the most important in Oakland, California, led by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. They became a sensation with their gun-toting antics and bristling confrontations with police, although they would be outflanked by their "information minister," Eldridge Cleaver, a convicted rapist, who called for "A black liberation army! An army of angry niggas!"
Killing cops quickly moved from a rhetorical pose -- the Black Panther newspaper gave us the phrase "Off the Pig" -- to an actual imperative. The Weather Underground targeted police in a series of -- thankfully -- relatively ineffectual bombings. It was the Black Liberation Army, an underground force spawned in the poisonous split between Newton and Cleaver, that took up the mission with a deadly seriousness.
From 1971 to 1973, the BLA attacked police in San Francisco, North Carolina, Atlanta and New York. In the space of a couple of days in May 1971, it shot four cops in New York, killing two. It carried out a particularly gruesome murder in the East Village in January 1972, ambushing two officers from behind and shooting them to bits when they fell to the ground. All told, the group killed roughly 10 police officers before it was hunted down and broken up.
Obviously, nothing like the BLA exists today. There isn't an anti-police underground with safe houses, mandatory readings in Mao and a funding apparatus built on armed robbery. The cop killers in Dallas and Baton Rouge were, to borrow a phrase from international terrorism, "lone wolves." But the logic of the Baton Rouge shooter as he explained it on YouTube -- the police are a predatory, occupying force that must be resisted violently -- is exactly the same as the BLA's.
The United States has experienced an extraordinary period of social peace dating from the Rodney King riot in 1992 -- more than 50 dead and $1 billion in damages -- to today. The recent unrest in Ferguson and Baltimore can't be compared with that five-day conflagration, or the urban riots of the 1960s. But order is always a fragile thing, dependent on the sense of the legitimacy of our institutions.
With the police under a withering moral and intellectual assault, politicized assassinations of cops, which a few weeks ago would have seemed a relic of the 1970s, are back.
Rich Lowry can be reached via e-mail: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com
(c) 2016 by King Features Syndicate
Ryan Payne, who led tactical training for the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation and is accused of organizing "armed protection'' in a 2014 standoff with federal officers in Nevada, faces a recommended 12 years in prison under plea deals fashioned in both states.
On Tuesday, Payne, 32, entered a guilty plea to the federal charge of conspiracy in Oregon.
Prosecutors have recommended a sentence of three years and five months for Payne's participation in the the Jan. 2 refuge takeover. It would run concurrently with the sentence he'll face in Nevada, Assistant U.S. Attorney Craig Gabriel said. The second Oregon count of possession of firearms in a federal facility will be dismissed at sentencing.
Under an offer pending in the Nevada case, Payne would plead guilty to three charges, including the use and carrying of a firearm in a crime of violence -- a count that brings a mandatory minimum sentence of seven years. Prosecutors there are recommending a 12-year sentence, but Payne could argue for seven years, according to prosecutors and his lawyers.
The Nevada indictment stems from what authorities have described as the "massive armed assault'' by rancher Cliven Bundy and his co-defendants to thwart federal officers who tried to corral about 400 cattle near the Bundy ranch in April 2014.
With out-of-custody co-defendants Jason Patrick, Jon Ritzheimer and Shawna Cox watching from the courtroom's gallery in Portland, Payne pleaded guilty in the refuge case before U.S. District Judge Anna J. Brown.
Gabriel said Payne, 32, a U.S. Army veteran, accompanied Ammon Bundy to Harney County in November and December to meet with Sheriff Dave Ward and present their "redress of grievances.''
Prosecutors alleged in a criminal complaint that the two urged the sheriff to protect Burns-area ranchers Dwight Hammond Jr. and son Steven Hammond from returning to prison on federal arson charges. They both told the sheriff that if the Hammonds spent one more day in jail, there would be "extreme civil unrest,'' the complaint said.
In January, Payne took on a leadership role, coordinating armed guards and providing tactical training of guards during the armed takeover of the bird sanctuary outside Burns, Gabriel said.
On Jan. 26, Payne was riding in the front passenger seat of Robert "LaVoy" Finicum's Dodge Ram truck when state police and FBI agents stopped the pickup as they were traveling on U.S. 395 to a community meeting in John Day.
The prosecutor pointed out that Payne immediately got out of the truck and surrendered to police at the initial stop before Finicum drove further and was fatally shot at a police roadblock.
When Payne was taken into custody, he was armed with a handgun, Gabriel said.
"Mr. Payne complied with law enforcement orders as others did not,'' he said.
Payne's defense lawyer Rich Federico described the Nevada offer as a "contemplated agreement.'' The offer is on the table, he said.
Payne said his decision to plead is based on weighing the pros and cons of going to trial.
"His exposure in Nevada is massive,'' Gabriel noted in court.
Asked if he faced any pressure to take the plea, Payne paused briefly before answering, "No, other than I would say continued detainment which lends a realism to what the future would hold for the rest of my life if I did not take a plea.''
As the judge read the plea petition that Payne signed, he objected to the wording of the charge he was pleading guilty to, specifically that he conspired to impede federal employees at the wildlife refuge through "intimidation, threats and force.'' He had the judge change the "and force" to "or force,'' which the prosecution accepted.
Federico said Payne considers his right to bear arms "sacred,'' and before the refuge takeover, carrying firearms "was part of his regular routine and habit.'' It wasn't as if he suddenly showed up at the refuge and brought a gun, Federico said.
Under the deal, Payne won't be allowed to possess any guns or ammunition. This is his first criminal conviction, he told the court.
Judge Brown asked Payne to describe to the court what he did that makes him guilty.
Payne said he made his first adult decision at age 17 when he decided to join the Army and swore to uphold the U.S. Constitution.
He said he traveled to Harney County also "to uphold and defend the Constitution.''
"In pursuing that, I have come to understand that folks who work for the government perceive my actions as threatening or intimidating,'' Payne said. "I understand myself to be guilty of the charge I am charged with.''
Brown questioned him further on whether he impeded federal officers from doing their work at the refuge?
"As it has been presented to me, I understand that I did , your honor,'' he said.
Payne is expected to be transferred at some time to Nevada to enter guilty pleas and be sentenced there before returning to Oregon to face sentencing, Gabriel said.
Payne is an Iraq War veteran who served in an Army long-range surveillance unit. He has two children and lives in Montana.
He was indicted in Nevada on charges of conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to impede and injure a federal officer, assault on a federal officer, threatening federal law enforcement, four counts of using a firearm in a crime of violence, obstruction of justice and extortion. The indictment alleges he participated in the 2014 standoff near the Bundy ranch in Bunkerville, Nevada.
If convicted in the Nevada case of four counts of using a firearm in a crime of violence, Payne could face the minimum mandatory sentence of seven years, plus 25-year consecutive sentences for each additional crime of violence conviction.
A tentative sentencing date for the refuge case was set for Nov. 18.
Before Tuesday's hearing started, co-defendant Ritzheimer, who sat in the second row of the gallery, asked other attendees sitting in front of him if they were Payne's family. They said no, and asked him, "Are you?''
"Yes,'' Ritzheimer said, smiling and added, "Not by blood.''
Patrick, who was just released from custody last week and faces trial in September, said it was hard for him to watch Payne's plea hearing.
"What I see is a good man compelled to lie because of the conditions they're in,'' Patrick said. "He's an honorable man, so it's disappointing to see that.''
Payne is the eighth defendant to plead guilty to conspiracy among the 26 people indicted on the charge in the refuge occupation. A ninth defendant, Travis Cox, is expected to enter a guilty plea Wednesday.
-- Maxine Bernstein
mbernstein@oregonian.com
503-221-8212
@maxoregonian
The U.S. News Short List, separate from our overall rankings, is a regular series that magnifies individual data points in hopes of providing students and parents a way to find which undergraduate or graduate programs excel or have room to grow in specific areas. Be sure to explore The Short List: College, The Short List: Grad School and The Short List: Online Programs to find data that matter to you in your college or grad school search.
A few years of law school can easily lead to enough debt to last a decade.
With tuition and fees often running at $30,000 per year or more, many students take out loans. Among the 183 ranked law schools that submitted debt data to U.S. News, the average debt for 2015 graduates who borrowed was $112,748.
Schools vary when it comes to how much they dole out in scholarships, grants or financial aid. And at some institutions, students graduate with relatively minimal debt.
[Find outhow ready you are to pay for law school.]
At the University of Hawaii--Manoa, the average debt for 2015 graduates who borrowed was $54,988. Alumni from the school had the lowest average debt among their peers from the 183 institutions that submitted data to U.S. News in an annual survey.
Three schools are new to the list of law schools where graduates have low debt: University of South Dakota, Georgia State University and Liberty University in Virginia.
[Considerthese 10 ways to get financially ready for law school.]
Of the 10 schools where graduates borrowed the least, the average debt was $62,735.
Graduates from the class of 2015 who borrowed to attend the Thomas Jefferson School of Law had the most debt, on average: $172,726.
Choose [a cost-efficient law school.]
Below are the 10 schools where 2015 graduates who borrowed for law school had the least debt. Unranked schools, which did not meet certain criteria required by U.S. News to be numerically ranked, were not considered for this report.
School
(name) (state) Average
debt load, class of 2015 U.S.
News law school rank University of Hawaii--Manoa (Richardson) $54,988 92 (tie) University of South Dakota $57,170 143 North Carolina Central University $57,924 RNP* University of Nebraska--Lincoln $58,744 57 (tie) Brigham Young University (Clark) (UT) $62,423 38 (tie) University of Arkansas--Fayetteville $64,901 86 (tie) Georgia State University $66,637 57 (tie) University of Tennessee--Knoxville $66,939 65 (tie) Liberty University (VA) $68,667 RNP University of Arkansas--Little Rock (Bowen) $68,960 136 (tie)
*RNP denotes an institution that is ranked in the bottom one-fourth of all law schools. U.S. News calculates a rank for the school but has decided not to publish it.
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Don't see your school in the top 10? Access the U.S. News Law School Compass to find debt data, complete rankings and much more. School officials can access historical data and rankings, including of peer institutions, via U.S. News Academic Insights.
U.S. News surveyed 205 schools for our 2015 survey of law programs. Schools self-reported myriad data regarding their academic programs and the makeup of their student body, among other areas, making U.S. News' data the most accurate and detailed collection of college facts and figures of its kind. While U.S. News uses much of this survey data to rank schools for our annual Best Law Schools rankings, the data can also be useful when examined on a smaller scale. U.S. News will now produce lists of data, separate from the overall rankings, meant to provide students and parents a means to find which schools excel, or have room to grow, in specific areas that are important to them. While the data come from the schools themselves, these lists are not related to, and have no influence over, U.S. News' rankings of Best Colleges, Best Graduate Schools or Best Online Programs. The debt data above are correct as of July 19, 2016.
More From US News & World Report
U.S. Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Midland, says he will endorse Republican candidate Donald Trump for president.
Across the country, we have seen Republican governors balance budgets, reduce burdens on hardworking American families and create an environment for small and growing businesses to thrive. In Michigan, this leadership has led to an unemployment rate that is now below the national average after years of lagging behind, Moolenaar said in a news release. We need this same leadership in Washington.
According to Moolenaar, we must envision a better way for our country.
We already know what happens when Secretary (Hillary) Clinton and Democrats are in charge, Moolenaar said. ISIS is disregarded and threats are realized in San Bernardino, Orlando and around the world. At work, Americans see their paychecks stagnate and the economy experiences anemic growth.
I look forward to working with a Republican president on important proposals that will reform taxes and health care, reduce regulatory burdens and rebuild trust between the federal government and the American people. I have always said I would support the Republican nominee for president of the United States and for these reasons, I endorse Donald Trump for president, Moolenaar said in the news release.
The Republican National Convention started Monday in Cleveland and ends Thursday.
In the March 8 primary, more than 33 percent of Midland County voters supported then-candidate Ted Cruz. More than 27 percent opted for Donald Trump.
The Democratic National Convention is scheduled to begin next week in Philadelphia. Nearly 59 percent of Midland County voters in the March primary sided with former candidate Bernie Sanders and about 40 percent with Hillary Clinton.
The general election is Nov. 8.
Bay Citys Tall Ship Celebration will return to the region from July 14 to July 17.
The Bay City site has won the coveted Port of the Year award from Tall Ships America three times, more than any other host community in all of North America. Event organizers have been busy wrapping up details for the sixth event in 15 years.
The only official host port in Michigan for the Tall Ships Challenge Great Lakes, Bay City event organizers are hoping their efforts will bring home the title once again.
Nine companies have signed on to join presenting sponsor Dow Corning Corp. as major ship sponsors: The Dow Chemical Co., FirstMerit Bank (also as Citizens Bank), MLive Media Group, St. Marys of Michigan, Independent Bank, Wildfire Credit Union, Consumers Energy, McLaren Bay Region and Chemical Bank.
The companies and organizations that have agreed to invest in Tall Ship Celebration recognize the importance of the event to our community and our region, said Kathy Czerwinski, chair of the Tall Ship Celebration Board of Directors. Representing the state of Michigan to the tall ship fleet, the other Great Lakes states and the more than 100,000 people from around the world who are expected to attend is a humbling and daunting task. It would not be possible without the strategic investment of our sponsors.
On July 14, 12 vessels will sail up the Saginaw River to downtown Bay City. Ten will remain dockside and will be available for touring July 15 through July 17. Bay Citys own tall ships, Appledore IV and V, will provide sail away trips. With appearance fees ranging from $12,000 to $45,000, the cost to secure the 2016 fleet is expected to be about $215,000.
New to the Great Lakes and the Bay City event are El Galeon Andalucia, a 160-foot replica of a 16th-17th century
Spanish galleon; Draken Harald Harfagre, a 115-foot. replica of a traditional Viking long boat; and When and If, an 83- foot schooner built for General George S. Patton in 1939.
Returning vessels include the Pride of Baltimore II, a 157-foot Baltimore clipper, and Madeline, a 95-foot gaff topsail schooner from Traverse City, perennial favorites at every Bay City event since 2001. The Flagship Niagara is a 198-foot brig from Erie, Pa., that appeared at the Bay City festival in 2006 and 2013; Denis Sullivan is a 137-foot 3-masted schooner from Milwaukee, Wisc., that appeared in 2010 and 2013; and Mist of Avalon is a 100-foot 2-masted gaff schooner that hasnt appeared since 2003.
Negotiations are ongoing to secure two additional vessels.
The Tall Ships Challenge is a series of races and rallies produced annually by Tall Ships America, a nonprofit membership organization based in Newport, R.I. The event rotates among the east and west coast of the United States and the Great Lakes.
Tall Ship Celebration: Bay City hosts the fleet when it visits the Great Lakes; Bay City has been the only official host port in the state of Michigan since 2006.
BaySail, a non-profit educational organization that owns and operates the tall ships Appledore IV and V, is producing the 2016 maritime festival on behalf of the Tall Ship Celebration Board of Directors.
For more information about Tall Ship Celebration or BaySail, contact Shirley Roberts by phone at (989) 895-5193, by email at Shirleyr@baysailbaycity.org, or visit the following websites: www.tallshipcelebration.com or www.baysailbaycity.org.
Three outdoor learning environments at the new Central Park Elementary School will feature walls honoring Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs and others who made their mark in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), said the president and CEO of the Midland Area Community Foundation.
The three walls, which will be integrated into the play and learning areas, will provide a way for interested parties to contribute to the distinctive new school, and donations will be matched on a 2-to-1 basis by the foundation, Sharon Mortensen told the Midland Public Schools Board of Education Monday night.
The goal is to raise $50,000 from the public, to be matched up to $100,000 (by the foundation), she said. The foundation would like to raise the funds by the end of the year.
Mortensen said the foundation is donating an additional $50,000 to the new school, now under construction and scheduled to open for the 2017-18 school year.
The Join famous names in STEM campaign also will honor astronaut Mae Jemison, mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci, rocket fuel scientist Mary Sherman Morgan and microbiologist Hattie Alexander. Each side of a wall will feature information about one of the STEM names, and also will feature donor recognition for anyone who gives $50 or more, Mortensen said.
The individuals were selected with the help of MPS staff, and were chosen to really embrace the education that children will be receiving, she said.
Those who donate $1,000 or more will be able to choose on which of the walls their names will appear. Donations can be made in honor of or in memory of an individual.
The MACF president presented an artists rendering of a wall honoring Einstein. The design shows a bench beside the wall, and spaces for donors names. Mortensen said the design details arent finalized.
This is a work in progress, she said, adding that the walls will be pieces of art.
Board Treasurer Jerry Wasserman praised the plan and suggested that students who attended the school formerly at the site which began as a high school and later was a middle school might want to contribute.
Central grads or their families can be part of (Centrals) new life, Mortensen added.
A donation page already is up at the foundation website: www.midlandfoundation.org/stem-donation-page
MPS Superintendent Michael Sharrow later told board members that Mortensen has taken a key role in the project.
Sharon has embraced this and taken off with it, adding that she has worked with the STEM school architect on bench design.
The superintendent noted that the district website now has photos and video drone footage of construction progress at the new school: https://new.midlandps.org/facilities-updates-2.
Also at Mondays meeting, Sharrow said the hiring of 46 to 48 new teachers is nearly complete. The first nine new teachers were approved at the meeting as part of the boards consent agenda, and Sharrow said more new teachers will be on the agenda for approval at the Aug. 15 meeting.
Also approved as part of the boards consent agenda was the purchase, using bond funds, of two new 65-passenger wheelchair-lift buses. The purchase order for $180,882 will be issued to the low bidder, Capital City Bus Sales of Lansing. The board also approved a purchase order for $15,700 to be issued to Great Lakes Recreation of Zeeland for relocating play equipment from the site of the former Parkdale Elementary School to Plymouth Elementary School.
Sharrow also told members that 2016 MPS graduates were offered more than $16.5 million in scholarships. A list of recipients of 17 local scholarships can be found at the MPS website: http://bit.ly/29SfGiM.
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The Midland City Council had some questions and concerns to share after an update on the Downtown Midland Streetscape Redevelopment project at Mondays regular meeting.
SmithGroupJJR Project Manager Bob Doyle gave a similar presentation to the Downtown Development Authority board last week, and gave his teams recommendations on five key areas of the streetscape process. Diane Brown Wilhelm, Ward 4, was not present at the meeting.
Those recommendations included changing Ashman and Rodd streets into two-way roads; the removal of all three signals on Main Street at Ashman, McDonald and Rodd; converting 2.5 blocks of Main Street, between Gordon and Rodd, to parallel parking; establishing a new tree pattern downtown with new planters; and festival-style, curb-less blocks along Main Street.
To learn more about the recommendations, go to http://bit.ly/29R7dvb.
SmithGroupJJR, along with MKSK and DLZ of Michigan, have conducted multiple public input sessions and presentations with local stakeholders, including downtown business owners and property owners, and have worked over the past few weeks on a streetscape concept design plan as part of a contract agreement with the DDA.
The people of Midland have really shown up and with great enthusiasm, given input on this community process, Doyle said.
He presented reasons for the project recommendations, and included more detail on parking, which Doyle said people are generally satisfied with in downtown Midland.
Council and public feedback
Steve Arnosky, Ward 3, asked if any residents specifically suggested the change to two-way traffic on Ashman and Rodd.
It wasnt brought forward by residents at the first input session, Doyle said, but was a topic of discussion at the second meeting in order to see how residents reacted to the idea. The recommendation was made as a result of a traffic study and best design practices used around the country, he said.
Since the spread of support is quite broad and not distinctly headed in one director, we then believe the best answer is to fall upon best practices of downtowns, Doyle said, adding that his team often heard anecdotally just how many motorists are confused by the one-ways.
Marty Wazbinski, Ward 5, was concerned about the removal of traffic signals along Main, and asked for more information about the safety considerations of pedestrians in the area.
As for parking, Doyle said about 70 percent of the people surveyed indicated a change in design was fine, but you didnt really get a consensus of what that was.
The reason we did is that weve come down to how much space do you have to use on the sidewalk and how we balance out the need to maintain parking downtown with peoples very strong desire to make the sidewalk more interesting, more focused on commercial use and event use, Doyle said.
Handicap parking was also brought up by Mayor Maureen Donker, Ward 2. The draft plan includes parallel parking spaces that are larger than normal spaces, Doyle said, that will be easier for people to get in and out of and offer some sidewalk flexibility.
Tom Adams, Ward 1, shared that he has received some comments from residents of Riverside Place, who want to know if pavers will be used in future sidewalk designs. Some of the pavers have heaved up from the sidewalk, and have poses a tripping hazard to pedestrians.
That was a concern also voiced at the project designers meeting with Riverside residents, Doyle said, and one solution being considered is using colored concrete pavement instead of brick pavers.
There are a fair number of older people in Midland who use downtown, I think thats smart, Adams said about the concrete idea.
At least two people voiced their opinions of the streetscape draft plan at the city council meeting, and spoke in favor of the project.
One of the owners of Imagine That!, Ann Ward, thanked the city council and DDA for considering the project and encouraged them to take a closer look at the parking and festival-style block designs to make sure it works for all residents using the downtown district at any time of year.
I hope that the parallel-parking is not set in stone yet, Ward said. Lets be careful before we make that step.
Chelsea Rowley works for Momentum Midland and has served on event committees for Riverdays and the Winter Village. She said people in Midland are looking for more week-day events and ways to enjoy their downtown.
People are looking for places to gather, Rowley said.
Pilot area not going forward
Some of the first streetscape discussions revolved around a pilot design area around the H Residence, which is reaching the end stages of construction. That will not be the case, said Selina Tisdale, community affairs director for the City of Midland, at the city council meeting.
We were really hoping to be able to apply the design yet this fall to that location, Tisdale said.
It soon became clear that idea would not work out, and Tisdale said it was not advantageous to do the pilot design area this year. Instead, the corner of Ashman and Main in front of the H Residence will be open to pedestrians in the fall and have some temporary concrete for passersby.
Residents will have an opportunity to view the draft plans up close and provide more feedback at a July 27 meeting, at 6 p.m. at City Hall, 333 W. Ellsworth St. The final design plan is expected to come before the DDA board and the city council in mid-August, with construction that could take place as early as May 2017.
"One, two, three...five, six, seven...I see seven chutes," said an Air Force combat controller with the 353rd Special Operations Group, radioing back to the aircrew in the MC-130J Commando II that all jumpers were accounted for.
The jumpers followed the lowest man to the ground and in about seven minutes, one after another, they landed in soft grass on the hilly Kalakaua Range of the Pohakuloa Training Area.
The 353rd SOG pulled off a multi-aircraft, joint airborne operation 15 days into Rim of the Pacific, or RIMPAC 2016, in civilian airspace.
In three hours, the last of seven passes left 63 service members representing all four branches' special operations assets in the U.S. Armed Forces on the ground and mission complete. A year of planning and hundreds of man hours of coordination culminated in Air Force Special Operations Command leading the joint operation that included members of Naval Special Warfare, Air Force Air Combat Command, Army Special Forces, Marine Special Operations Command and III Marine Expeditionary Force.
"Crisis and time constraints often go hand in hand with one another," said the 353rd SOG RIMPAC mission commander. "And when crisis calls, there is little time to form those critical relationships among partner units that we need to enable successful mission execution--whatever and wherever it may be."
By investing in their joint relationships, SOF bolstered their ability to provide responsive aid in a time of need to the Pacific theater. Their collaborative relationship maximizes their agility and minimizes the time needed to respond to a contingency. The adaptable force formed within the SOF community makes success in an unpredictable environment achievable.
"Habitual training and forming relationships across Special Operations Command Pacific and III Marine Expeditionary Force maneuver units will only increase our ability to answer the call when it comes," the mission commander said.
As a combat controller directed air traffic in and out of the restricted air space, joint SOF showcased the ability to work together in a complex environment. The airborne operations provided special operations teams an opportunity to practice expeditionary access into a denied or hostile area.
The operation encompassed four services, seven commands, more than 150 service members, three air assets, and a 775-acre drop zone. Historically, bringing a diverse SOF team together like this is not accomplished often, but the benefits to strengthening the interoperability between special operations and conventional forces will be vital to the U.S. Pacific Command's operational success.
"What airborne operations provide aside from non-standard infiltration proficiency is the opportunity to work with one another when the risk is heightened," the mission commander said. "Training together during risky operations solidify our trust in one another. That trust is imperative when the order comes for us to quickly integrate and execute real world problem sets."
As a result of taking the time to train together, SOF becomes better than they were yesterday, learning from lessons experienced in a controlled training environment.
Twenty-six nations, more than 40 ships and submarines, over 200 aircraft, and 25,000 plus personnel are participating in RIMPAC, operating in and around the Hawaiian Islands and Southern California. As the world's largest international maritime exercise, RIMPAC provides a unique training opportunity that helps participants foster and sustain the cooperative relationships that are critical to ensuring the safety and security of sea lanes across the world's oceans. RIMPAC 2016 is the 25th iteration of the exercise that dates back to 1971.
BLOOMINGTON Bloomington police said a suicidal man barricaded himself in a house Tuesday morning, but he surrendered to authorities about an hour after the incident began.
The man, who police said was armed, was taken into custody after the situation in the 400 block of North Lee Street ended peacefully. Police said he was struck in the torso with a less lethal projectile that prevented any permanent injury. No other injuries were reported.
Another person, who is acquainted with the man, was allowed to leave the residence while police were talking to the resident to get him to leave the home peacefully.
Several guns were located inside the man's residence, said BPD.
The man was taken to a local hospital; no charges have been filed in the case.
Police lifted a blockade of several streets in an area of North Lee Street after the incident ended about 8 a.m., around an hour after they began evacuating residents in the area.
One of the residents, John Radcliffe, told The Pantagraph an officer knocked on his door at 6:55 a.m. Tuesday and told him to leave his apartment building at 501 N. Lee St. Other residents also were told to leave, he said.
Radcliffe said he was told the person barricaded in the house, at the corner of Lee and Market streets, had a weapon "and he won't come out."
The house is located "two houses down" from the apartment building, said Radcliffe.
Corina Thompson, who also lives in the area, said police knocked on her door around 7 a.m., but didnt tell her much.
They just said that we had to stop what we were doing and leave, she said. I have to get to work, but my work uniform and everything is inside.
A neighbor, Cheonta Henry, said police kept bystanders a couple of blocks away.
In todays world, I guess you cant be too careful and I would rather them be safe than sorry, she said.
Police rerouted traffic around the area and officers asked people to avoid the area.
BPD's Crisis Negotiation Unit, SWAT team, and officers from Illinois State Police, the Normal Police Department, and McLean County Sheriff's Department also responded to the scene.
Words come cheap when there's little action, and the people of Central Illinois will pay the price when the state fails to reach an agreement to keep open the Clinton and Quad Cities nuclear power plants.
The plants, owned by Exelon Corp., are scheduled to close next year in Clinton and a year later in the Quad Cities. The company says the plants lose money and, to remain open, Exelon needs a financial incentive plan for low-carbon-emission energy production that would include nuclear power.
Under an Exelon proposal, the money could come via a surcharge on the electric bills of Ameren Illinois customers.
Incentives already are in place for wind and solar power industries. Opponents of the Exelon plan said it's unfair to Ameren customers, who would pay for a program but not benefit from Exelon-generated power.
At stake in Clinton and Central Illinois are about 700 direct jobs, another 1,200 support jobs, 50 percent of DeWitt County's tax base and more than $13 million in local tax revenue to Pantagraph-area schools and local governments.
Last week, several Central Illinois legislators provided an update that was long on empathetic words and short on actual ideas.
"Time is a factor," said state Rep. Bill Mitchell, R-Forsyth.
"We'll do everything we can to keep the good-paying jobs in Clinton, said state Rep. Dan Brady, R-Bloomington.
If the plant shuts down, it would have beyond a devastating impact, said House Minority Leader Jim Durkin, R-Western Springs.
Time is indeed a factor: When a company decides to close a nuclear plant, it must first inform the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which Exelon has done. That notification is followed by a short window in which the company can withdraw its plan; otherwise, the plant closing moves forward.
Durkin said Gov. Bruce Rauner is continuing to talk with Exelon, along with environmental groups, advocates of alternative energy and the coal power industry. If Rauner can produce a successful proposal, Durkin believes legislators would return to Springfield early in order to approve incentive legislation.
Unfortunately, the current crop of Illinois political leaders don't have a good track record at moving quickly, or taking action that benefits anyone other than themselves. As we said in June, the Exelon situation required legislators and interest groups to work out a compromise that was possible if the interested political parties had put the appropriate amount of time and energy into the process. Instead, they piddled around and at best came up with a short-term solution to a long-term budget problem.
South African President Nelson Mandela once said that education is the "most powerful" tool that "can change the world." So, is this why the world's education systems are so obsessed with academic excellence?
Today, the pressure of school has undeniably intensified and one of the reasons cited is the fact that education systems have become "obsessed" with the dogmatic concept of academic success. Unfortunately, as educational institutions push the pressure of achieving "high levels of academic excellence" on children, it's taking a toll on their mental health as they become more vulnerable to depression and anxiety.
How The Pressures On Academic Excellence Trigger Anxiety And Depression On Kids
In the United States, standardized testing as a criterion for achievement has been a constant topic of debate. As a matter of fact, parents have been blatantly questioning the significance of numerous state-mandated standardized tests while some have kept their children from taking the exams, Today reveals.
The standardized tests are also sparking issues in Australian education systems. According to ABC News, "Beautiful Failures: How the Quest for Success is Harming Our Kids" author and Guardian Australia journalist Lucy Clark revealed that these standard markers are not beneficial to children, instead it's making kids anxious and depressed.
Clark also stressed how the pressures to achieve academic excellence outweighed the joys and excitement of education. She also pointed out how stress and mental health took away the kids' adolescence.
What Is Wrong In The Australian Education System?
After Clark wrote an article about the pressure her daughter experienced in school, which has been shared on Facebook 26,000 times, Clark realized that a lot of teens were also suffering from the same dilemma. That's why, she bravely enumerated the reasons why the Australian education system appears to be flawed.
"There is too much focus on academic outcomes and a very narrow view of success with a one-size-fits-all approach that negates individuality," Clark told ABC News. "There is too much testing and too much competition, and too much comparison between kids. The whole system is geared towards achieving better outcomes rather than getting kids to love learning, and consequently there is a hierarchy of pressure, with kids right at the bottom. There are a whole lot of structural problems too."
Why The National Assessment Program In Literacy And Numeracy An 'Instrument Of Torture' For Kids
Clark also explained why she thinks the National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy is a "blunt political tool and instrument of torture" for parents, teachers and children, noting the system's inclination to rank kids for "particular criticism. She also added that the focus of education emboldens children to be "ego-oriented" and not "task-oriented or learning-oriented," The Australian reports.
Why Education Reform Is Needed
Many experts have called for an education reform for decades. But according to Clark, education revolution is much needed now than ever as the pressure on children have become worse and for her, reform should be more about valuing the child as a whole, as well as "broadening the ideas of success."
For an excerpt of Clark's "Beautiful Failures," check out Mammamia. Meanwhile, do you think the pressures in school are harming children? Share your thoughts below and follow Parent Herald for more news and updates.
Ever since Kate Middleton gave birth to Princess Charlotte last summer, there have been relentless reports claiming that the Duchess of Cambridge is pregnant with her third child. As a matter of fact, previous reports speculated that royal couple Prince William and Duchess Kate were expecting twins.
Kate Middleton's Pregnancy Rumors
Kate Middleton's pregnancy rumors have been resurrected again after Life & Style run a story this week, reporting that the much-talked about royal couple was expecting their third heir. According to a royal insider, the royal family was thrilled over Duchess Kate's alleged pregnancy with a due date set on Christmas.
"She is due on Christmas. Kate and William are overjoyed," a source told Life & Style, Hollywood Life quotes. "They don't mind whether No. 3 is a boy or a girl. They already have one of each, so they just want their next child to be healthy."
Kate Middleton's Pregnancy Speculations Debunked
Even though a pregnancy will definitely be a good news for the royal family, Gossip Cop quickly debunked Kate Middleton's pregnancy rumors. In fact, the celebrity news site firmly said that the reports about Duchess Kate's third pregnancy were untrue.
Gossip Cop also slammed Life & Style for fabricating Kate Middleton's pregnancy, not to mention their claims on Prince William's wife's baby bump. Gossip Cop also cited the magazine's April cover story about 34-year-old Duchess Kate being pregnant with twins as evidence that the recent pregnancy claims were false.
Why Kate Middleton Is Not Pregnant
As Gossip Cop debunked Kate Middleton's pregnancy rumors, Inquisitr reported that the Duchess of Cambridge seems far from looking pregnant. The online news site noted that Duchess Kate appears to have a "vibrant health" unlike her previous pregnancies in which she suffered from severe morning sickness.
In addition, Kate Middleton was also seen out in the public on several occasions with husband Prince William and children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte. The mom-of-two was also seen sailing earlier this week, not to mention her trip to a SAS base over the weekend.
Ellen DeGeneres Wants To Hang Out With Cousin Kate Middleton
In other Kate Middleton-related news, Ellen DeGeneres reportedly wanted to hang out with her cousin Duchess Kate. Yes, you read it right! DeGeneres and the Duchess of Cambridge are related. In fact, DeGeneres is the Kate's 15th cousin through their common ancestor Sir Thomas Fairfax, Hello! magazine learns.
"Everyone thinks I'm joking, but I'm not," DeGeneres told the Daily Mail. "So, if we're related, we should start hanging out together."
Do you think Kate Middleton is pregnant? Share your thoughts below and follow Parent Herald for more news and updates.
New research from Mommy Nearest reveals overwhelming unrest from parents
NEW YORK - New research from Mommy Nearest, a tech-enabled media company for millennial parents, has uncovered that only nine percent of women with children under the age of 18 feel as if their employer provides enough support to them as working mothers. With parental leave policies being a topic of debate across the country, this overwhelming lack of support indicates that there is still a lot of work to be done and that current policies for new parents just aren't satisfactory.
The study, conducted with third party research firm YouGov, revealed that not only are working mothers unsatisfied with the parental benefits provided by their employers, but also that new parents are turning to technology to help fill the gap in the absence of support from their employers.
Additional key findings include:
Employers aren't flexible . Just fifteen percent of working mothers feel their employers provides enough flexibility
. Just fifteen percent of working mothers feel their employers provides enough flexibility No leave, no employee. Forty-two percent of women with children under 18 are unlikely to take a job that doesn't have paid parental leave
Forty-two percent of women with children under 18 are unlikely to take a job that doesn't have paid parental leave It's quitting time. One in eight (13%) noted they had to leave their job permanently to take care of their child
One in eight (13%) noted they had to leave their job permanently to take care of their child Separation anxiety is high. Over a quarter (27%) of working mothers are concerned about leaving their child at daycare while they're at work
Over a quarter (27%) of working mothers are concerned about leaving their child at daycare while they're at work Technology is an increasingly emerging solution. Half of women with children under the age of 18 said that they use technology to support their role as a working mother
Half of women with children under the age of 18 said that they use technology to support their role as a working mother Thirty-one percent of women with children who utilize technology as a working mother use video chat services like FaceTime or Skype for things like talking to their kids when they cannot be home
Over a quarter (26%) of women who utilize technology as a working mother are finding time-saving solutions in on-demand apps like Uber, Peapod and Amazon Prime
One in six (17%) use parenting apps like Mommy Nearest as a informational resource at home and on the go
"The United States is far behind when it comes to sufficient parental leave benefits-in fact, they're one of four countries in the world that lacks a federal standard for paid time off for new parents. While, as a nation we may not have control over the speed at which the government fixes this problem, corporate America does have an opportunity to provide a more immediate and sustainable solution to this very clear and addressable problem," said Joshua Milstein, CEO of Mommy Nearest. "Companies can offer solutions for working parents to provide work from home benefits, flexible work shift programs, company-sponsored childcare-among others. As the CEO of a parenting company, I believe these benefits should be a given for new parents-no parent should ever feel their company isn't offering adequate support."
Research Methodology
Mommy Nearest commissioned YouGov PLC-a third party professional research and consulting organization-to poll the views of a representative sample of 3,738 Americans, 678 of which are mothers with children under the age of 18. Fieldwork was undertaken between May 31 and June 3, 2016. The survey was carried out online.
About Mommy Nearest
Mommy Nearest is a tech-enabled media company for millennial parents. Their award-winning Mommy Nearest mobile app, which launched in 2013, is the most widely-used geo-based app for discovering family-friendly places nationwide. Additionally, Mommy Nearest has more than 80 writers who produce both national and local content in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Bay Area, Boston, Philadelphia, Houston and Washington D.C. Mommy Nearest's mission is helping parents spend less time searching and more time doing what matters most: enjoying quality time with their children.
For more information, please visit www.mommynearest.com and download the app for iOS or Android.
Ben Higgins is taking another big challenge and this time it won't be on the small screens. According to new reports, the "Bachelor" star is set to join the political race in Colorado.
Ben Higgins To Run For Colorado State House
Parent Herald previously reported that the "Bachelor" couple, Ben Higgins and Lauren Bushnell will be returning to the small screens for their new reality show, "Ben and Lauren: Happily Ever After." The said show will document their wedding plans and other plans for their future, which may include Ben Higgins' journey into the Colorado State House.
Per KDVR, Lauren Bushnell's fiance is a Republican and will take on incumbent Democrat Dan Pabon in District 4. As for Pabon, he is open to working with anyone who is interested in supporting the democratic process.
"I look forward to discussing the important issues facing Coloradans including raising the minimum wage, gun safety, women's reproductive healthcare, and affordable housing. I welcome anyone to participate in the democratic process," Pabon said.
Meanwhile, Higgins has not given any statement regarding his run for office at the time. But the "Bachelor" fans can expect this to be featured in his upcoming reality show with Lauren Bushnell.
Chad Johnson Is The Next 'Bachelor'
Meanwhile, according to Reality Steve, JoJo Fletcher chose Jordan Rodgers for "The Bachelorette" Season 12. However, there are rumors that he is a major player and has no plans in marrying Fletcher at all.
On the other hand, when Glamour asked Lauren Bushnell for a front-runner in the "Bachelorette" he named Chad Johnson but as rumors suggest he was short of convincing Fletcher that they were meant for each other.
No worries for Chad Johnson though as he may return to be the next "Bachelor" per Inquisitr. It is still not confirmed though but the report stressed that it would be fun watching Chan's spinoff if he is still single by then.
Do you want Chad Johnson to be the next bachelor? What do you think of Ben Higgins' plan to run for Colorado State House? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.
Oh no! Is Kate Middleton a victim of bullying? Well, it seems that way after Prince Harry's former ladylove Chelsy Davy reportedly betrayed the Duchess by hanging out with another of Harry's exes - Cressida Bonas. What's really interesting was the claim that Davy and Bonas mocked Kate over her "loveless" marital life with Prince William.
As you can remember, there have been reports in the past claiming that Kate Middleton has aversions towards Cressida Bonas. All thanks to Bonas' half-sister Isabella Calthorpe, who happened to be Prince William's ex and first choice in marriage.
Chelsy Davy And Cressida Bonas Vs. Kate Middleton
It has also been previously reported that due to Bonas' connection to Calthorpe, Kate Middleton reportedly tried her best efforts to stop Prince Harry from marrying her. But recently, it seemed that Bonas is gaining an upper hand when she united with Chelsy Davy.
In fact, Bonas and Davy even partied together at the Serpentine Summer Party, the event where they reportedly mocked Kate Middleton's "loveless marriage." According to Celeb Dirty Laundry, two of Prince Harry's exes were seen laughing together and the friendly banter was reportedly an attempt to get back on Duchess Kate.
Kate Middleton Feels Betrayed
It's already a given fact that Kate Middleton prefers Chelsy Davy to be Prince Harry's girlfriend. That's why, Davy's friendly banter towards Bonas made the 34-year-old Duchess feel betrayed. So, do you think Kate will now stop pushing Harry to reconcile with Davy? Or will the Duchess push her sister Pippa to marry Harry?
Prince Harry Refusing To Marry?
Meanwhile, Kate Middleton and Prince William are reportedly worried about Prince Harry's commitment issues. But a royal insider revealed that Harry's refusal to marry was due to his sister-in-law, Duchess Kate.
"He's just too commitment phobic and William worries he's got Kate on a pedestal and no one can come close," a source claimed, as per The Hollywood Gossip.
Prince Harry And Pippa Middleton?
Prince Harry is reportedly having a difficult time finding a ladylove because of Kate Middleton, The Stir notes. But if he looks up to Kate that much, won't he consider dating the Duchess' younger sister Pippa Middleton? Unfortunately, Pippa is currently happy in her relationship with 40-year-old James Matthews.
Do you think Chelsy Davy and Cressida Bonas mocked Kate Middleton's marriage to Prince William? Share your thoughts below and follow Parent Herald for more news and updates.
There is never a right time to have a baby. Trust me; I have four of them, and if anyone knows how it's just never the right time, it's me. For my husband and I, there were a number of concerns with having a baby. The first was that we were married very young. We were 21 and 22 at the time. We wanted to spend more time together just the two of us before we had any kids. when we were celebrating my 24th birthday in Hawaii, my husband then decided he was ready and asked me if I was also ready. Long story short, I was pregnant a few months later and we welcomed our first daughter a few months after our fourth wedding anniversary. The biggest concern, however, is always financial. Kids are expensive. We all know that.
When it came time to welcome our second daughter, we had a number of concerns. Is it the right time, is it too soon, is there enough age difference between them? There is three years between our girls, and we thought that was perfect. One was out of diapers and much more affordable with the other was born, so the cost factor was good for us. We'd have years between buying cars and paying for college classes, so we felt comfortable. When we decided to try for baby number three we waited the same amount of time as we had with baby number two.
What we did not expect was to find out 18 weeks into my pregnancy that we were having the little boy we'd been hoping for and a little girl. We had no idea I was pregnant with twins. Since I'm naturally so small, we thought that my baby bump was huge because there's nowhere else for it to go and because it was my third pregnancy. Things changed big time back then. We were stressed. How will we take care of two newborns at once? What will happen to our lives as we know them? How will we pay for them to go to college and drive and do all those things? We were worried.
Fortunately, God's plan is always bigger than our plan, and he always makes things work out in our favor. We prayed about it, and we were blessed in so many ways. One of our favorite being that our twins are the easiest babies you'll ever meet. They've been on the same sleep schedule since they were less than a month old, which means we've never not gotten full nights of sleep, which makes the rest of life seem so much simpler.
The cost of having a baby is astronomical, but it's not as bad as you might think. The cost of having two babies, however, is so much more than you might ever imagine. When you bring them home and suddenly have four little mouths to feed, and little feet to dress, it becomes so much more expensive. That's why I recommend that you have your financial plan in order before you get pregnant. There are some hidden expenses in there we did not see the first time around, and I think that they are a great idea for anyone to have before they welcome their first baby.
Save for your OB's fee
What we did not know is that our OB would charge us a separate fee from the hospital when we got pregnant. We had no idea the first time around that we'd have to pay her $2,500 out of pocket on the first appointment we had for our pregnancy to cover all my appointments, one ultrasound and her fee for delivery. The hospital then charges far more to insurance afterward. Know that your OB will charge you a fee upfront, and ask what it is before you get pregnant so you have time to prepare. It will depend on your insurance, so be prepared to hand over that information.
Additional Ultrasounds
When we were pregnant with our second baby, we'd already suffered two miscarriages and a number of concerns during my pregnancy. For that reason alone, our doctor wanted to perform an ultrasound most every single time we went into her office. Since my insurance and her fee covered one, we were good there. However, we then had to pay almost $150 every time we had another because they weren't covered under her fee (that's after insurance, for the record). We had the same issue when we had the twins since we had two and multiple ultrasounds were necessary to keep an eye on their rate of growth and development.
Formula
When we welcomed our twins, we knew we'd spend a lot on formula. I did nurse all my babies, but my body natural dries itself out no matter what we do, what our lactation consultant helps us with, how healthy I eat....nothing helps. After 6-8 weeks, I wake up one morning and there is just nothing there anymore.
I'm disappointed, but fine with that since we do have healthy, smart, intelligent babies. However, we also had to supplement almost right away because I also never had much milk no matter what we did. We were prepared for that with baby number two and the twins after going through it with our first daughter. However, we were not prepared to give birth to a 3-pound baby and a 5-pound baby who would both need hi-calorie formula that can only be ordered by the pharmacist and costs twice as much, even with insurance, as regular formula. That's not inexpensive in itself, and we had to babies to feed for three months with it.
What I'm saying is that you can plan and prepare financially for a baby all you want, but there are always hidden costs in there somewhere. Perhaps my stories might help you prepare a bit more since you just never know what might be coming when you give birth to your own little ones.
The original article is from http://www.shebudgets.com
"The Blacklist" Season 4 will reunite Liz Keen (Megan Boone) and Red Reddington (James Spader). Whether against a common enemy,who might be Alexander Kirk (Ulrich Thomsen), "The Blacklist" Season 3 finale will find resolution. At best "The Blacklist" Season 4 premiere will give Liz Keen the support of Red Reddington and the Post Office team once more.
The events of "The Blacklist" Season 3 finale had been a long time coming for Liz Keen and Red Reddington as reported on Parent Herald. Mostly "The Blacklist" series designed a strange surrogate father type of interaction between Liz Keen and Red Reddington.
However, "The Blacklist" series is anything but black and white and so is the connection between Liz Keen and Red Reddington. Part of the breakdown between Liz Keen and Red Reddington are the secrets between them that the new mom means to keep digging in "The Blacklist" Season 4.
Before Liz Keen gets back to uncovering her identity, "The Blacklist" Season 4 must first take her out of the clutches of abductor Alexander Kirk. Still Alexander Kirk or Constantine Rostova is the actual father of Liz Keen and so may be the ally she needs to make Red Reddington reveal his secrets in "The Blacklist" Season 4.
Change seems to be the theme for "The Blacklist" Season 4. Not only will Liz Keen assert independence from Red Reddington but Tom (Ryan Eggold), who stars in "The Blacklist" Redemption" may ease out of Season 4.
In "The Blacklist" Season 3 finale, Tom and daughter Agnes went missing. How "The Blacklist" Season 4 develops the plot from there and how Ryan Eggold begins in "The Blacklist: Redemption" would be interesting to see.
Even with a Ryan Eggold exit, Carter Matt proposes that Liz Keen and Red Reddington will team up once more in "The Blacklist" Season 4. Betrayal notwithstanding, the ties that bind would be much thicker for Liz Keen and Red Reddington as "The Blacklist" Season 4 would prove.
"The Blacklist" Season 4 premiere airs on Sept 22 on NBC. Is Alexander Kirk or Red Reddington the real villain in "The Blacklist" Season 4 for whom Liz Keen should watch out?
Hollywood July 19, 2016---The organizers of the upcoming HollyShorts Film Festival sponsored by BITPIX announced today that the esteemed Actress, Director and Producer Jennifer Morrison (ABC'sOnce Upon A Time) will be honored with the 2016 HollyShorts Trailblazer Award presented by Women in Film at the 12 Annual Festival. She will accept the Award during the festival's opening night celebration.
Morrison most recently launched her own production company Apartment 3C Productions with several high profile projects in the pipeline. At HollyShorts along with the honor, she will also showcase her new 10-minute short film Wild Wild Horses, which she directed and stars. The short film is scored to the debut EP, 'Ordinary Life', from the rock band, Wild Wild Horses. The film also stars Rose McIver (iZombie) and Geoff Stults (7th Heaven). The short captures the tension of a couple who are haunted by a 'ghost' of their past. Wild Wild Horses (the band) will also headline HollyShorts' opening night celebration with a special performance for attendees.
Previous HollyShorts honorees include: The Russo Brothers, Eli Roth, David Lynch, Joe Carnahan, Matthew Modine, Bill Plympton among others. HollyShorts 2016 runs August 11-20 at the TCL Chinese Theater and surrounding locations in Hollywood. The organizers will be unveiling the entire opening night lineup in the coming weeks along with the official selections, which will feature over 400 short films from around the world. For a limited time festival access passes are now available for half off the regular price and can be purchased by visiting Bitpxtv.com.
The first film under Morrison's new company is the indie feature that she directed and produced is Sun Dogs, which just wrapped principal photography. The film is written by Anthony Tambakis and will star Michael Angarano, Melissa Benoist, Allison Janney and Ed O'Neill. Morrison will return this fall as the star of ABC's hit drama series Once Upon a Time as 'Emma Swan,' a woman with a troubled past who is drawn into a small town in Maine where the magic of Fairy Tales becomes real.
"We are delighted to present Jennifer Morrison with the 2016 HollyShorts Trailblazer Award in partnership with Women in Film," commented festival co-founders and organizers Daniel Sol and Theo Dumont. "She's truly the triple threat---an extremely talented filmmaker, actress and producer and we look forward to the premiere of her short on the big screen during our opening night celebration. We are also thrilled to have Wild Wild Horses a tremendous band perform live for our attendees who are coming to Hollywood from all parts of the globe. It's going to be a night to remember for years to come!"
During her 2015 hiatus from Once Upon a Time, Morrison filmed and co-produced the fantasy epic, Albion: The Enchanted Stallion, in Bulgaria. The film is directed by Castille Landon and will be released this summer. Morrison's first foray into directing was with her first short film, Warning Labels, which screened at HollyShorts and imagined a world wherein everyone wears a warning label with their deepest secret. Warning Labels first premiered in the short film program at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2015.
Last year, Morrison wrapped the horror film, Amityville: The Awakening, with Jennifer Jason Leigh. This next installment of the Amityville series is directed by Franck Khalfoun and will be released by The Weinstein Company in January 2016. Morrison also filmed the Greg Mclean directed The Darkness aka 6 Miranda Drive opposite Kevin Bacon, last May, which was released by Blumhouse Productions. The horror thriller follows a family returning from a vacation with a fear-feeding supernatural presence tailing them.
In 2013, Morrison was seen in the independent film adaptation of Neil LeBute's Some Girl(s). Some Girl(s) followed a man set on making amends with his ex-girlfriends on the eve of his wedding. Morrison co-starred opposite Adam Brody as his first ex-girlfriend, 'Sam,' the former high school sweetheart he was afraid to settle down with. Some Girl(s) is directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer and LaBute adapted the script as well as produced the film. The film premiered at SXSW and also stars Emily Watson, Kristen Bell and Zoe Kazan and was released simultaneously in theaters and on Vimeo's new On Demand platform on June 28th, 2013.
Also adept at television, Morrison is best known for her work as 'Dr. Allison Cameron' on Fox's critically acclaimed drama, House. The show was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series in 2009 as well as a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series in 2009, 2008, 2007 & 2006 and a Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series - Drama in 2008. Morrison was nominated for a 2008 WIN Award for Outstanding Actress Drama Series for House. She also had a notable recurring guest appearance on the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother as 'Zooey,' a love interest of 'Ted,' played by Josh Radnor. Other film credits include J.J. Abrams' film Star Trek, wherein she played 'Winona Kirk', 'Captain James Kirk's' mother; the 20thCentury Fox film Mr. and Mrs. Smith, with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie; Dreamworks' Surviving Christmas starring Ben Affleck and Christina Applegate; and the independent film Flourish which she starred in and produced.
About Wild Wild Horses
Not all studio musicians were meant to stay in the booth. Boasting a diverse set of musical backgrounds, the four members of Wild Wild Horses have collectively worked with almost every major indie-pop artist in the past half-a-decade. Yet, not content with staying behind-the-scenes, frontman Jack Edwards had a different vision-a vision to make his own name, out of the shadow of others. Originally from Kent, England, Jack signed with LA-based Buskin Records in August 2014. As the sole founding member and songwriter, Jack returned to London to form his dream team. Finding studio musicians of a similar pedigree, Wild Wild Horses came to include Brit-ish-born Billy Adamson (Jess Glynne, Amy Winehouse) and Jonathan Harvey (Mika, Elle King) on bass, with the American Gregory Rogove (Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Latin Grammy Winner) on percussions. Named after the eponymous Rolling Stones song, Wild Wild Horses compose stirring alternative pop-rock tracks. With subtle electronic interjections mixing into the band's powerful, catchy riffs, their music carries the vibrant beat of today while aspiring to the lofty heights of the classics.
About HollyShorts
HollyShorts Film Festival is an annual short film festival showcasing the best and brightest short films from around the globe. HollyShorts is devoted to the advancement of filmmakers through a various screenings, film labs, conferences and networking events. The HollyShorts Film festival showcases the top short films produced 40 minutes or less. Categories include Short Animation, Short Live Action, Short Documentary, Music Video, Webisode, Commercials, Youth Film and Digital Microbudget.
The hit HBO series "Game of Thrones" continued to disappoint fans as aside from the fact that it has been confirmed to run for only seven episodes this season 7, it has been announced that the release for the next installment has been pushed back for next summer.
Vox reported that "Game of Thrones" usually debuts its next season around April but there have been some major changes as they have moved Season 7's release by summer 2017.
HBO Confirms 'Game of Thrones' Season 7 Will Have Only 7 Episodes
In the past months, HBO also said that one of the two final seasons will be shortened before the series comes to an end and the confirmation came about "Game of Thrones" Season 7 being shortened to only seven episodes instead of the usual 10.
All of the previous episodes of "Game of Thrones" had 10 episodes each. It remains unclear if some storylines will be cut or all will still be presented based on the book but at a possible faster pace or a shortened version of the story.
'Game of Thrones' Season 7 to be Shot in Northern Ireland, Spain, Iceland
"Game of Thrones" Season 7 will reportedly be shot in three locations namely Iceland, Northern Ireland, and Spain. The show will begin its production this summer and continue filming through fall.
It has been years since the "Game of Thrones" team shot in Iceland as they have only shot most of the North of the Wall scenes there as well as when Jon Snow was embedded with the Wildlings camp.
Accordingly, there has been a significant delay in the release of the much anticipated "Game of Thrones" Season 7 despite the shorter number of episodes to film due to the weather. Executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss felt that the storylines for the next season will be better captured if the filming started later since winter will be depicted in "Game of Thrones" Season 7.
'Game of Thrones' Nabs Numerous Emmy Nominations
More on "Game of Thrones" Season 7, the show recently nabbed 23 Emmy nominations. One of the nominations the show is under is Outstanding Best Drama Series.
The main directors for "Game of Thrones" Season 7 also directed the past episodes. Some of them returning are Alan Taylor, Mark Mylod, and Jeremy Podeswa. A new director will be coming in and has been identified as Matt Shakman.
The West Virginia lawmaker Michael Folk is on fire after a controversial tweet calling for Hillary Clinton's execution. Although Folk didn't really mean what he tweeted it was too late because he has to face the consequences of his irresponsible post.
Michael Folk Tweets About Hillary Clinton's Execution
Last Sunda, Michael Folk tweeted against the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and call for Hillary Clinton's execution for her alleged misdemeanor. "@Hillary Clinton You should be tried for treason, murder, and crimes against the US Constitution...then hung on the Mall in Washington, DC," Folk tweeted per CBC.
The controversial post calling for Hillary Clinton's execution has been deleted but Josh Charles posted a screenshot of it. Check it out below.
For those asking, here's the screenshot of @MichaelFolk34's now deleted tweet. Here you go: cc: @united pic.twitter.com/UBvBYQSTvr Josh Charles (@MrJoshCharles) July 17, 2016
Many find the Republican delegate's post against the Democratic front-runner offensive and threatening. In an interview, Folk said that he still want Hillary Clinton to go on trial but not necessarily be executed. "It could have been said a little bit better," Folk said regretting about his post. "I regret the tone, and the second part of that tweet. The biggest misconception is that for some reason, everybody thinks I made a death threat, which I did not. Clearly it was not that."
United Airlines Suspends Michael Folk
According to Bloomberg, Michael Folk is also a pilot at United Airlines but the airline has suspended him following his scandalous post. "This pilot has been removed from flying pending our investigation," United Airlines tweeted. "We are appalled by his threatening comments."
Were appalled by comments advocating harm to anyone. They do not represent United & were looking into the matter. https://t.co/TchV8CC8YK United (@united) July 17, 2016
Not only did Folk lose his right to fly with United Airlines, the West Virginia Democratic Party is also calling him to resign. "Not only are Delegate Folk's words concerning, they are disturbing," Belina Biafore said. "Folk's actions should deem him as unfit to serve."
What do you think of Folk's tweet? Do you agree that his post is threatening? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.
Zika is a current global concern as the virus has already reached four continents in the world: Asia, Africa, Pacific Islands, and America. Some say that it will be among the biggest threat for humanity if not solved at the soonest possible time. As the health concern escalates,the funding has not yet been approved by congress.
People has come to hate both the Republicans and Democrats for making the decision too long while many cases add up to the list of the Zika victims. Nonetheless, arguments will come up to show that there are bigger things than Zika. Some would squabble that Sex problems in the society is bigger than Zika. People have unprotected sex and may contract Zika or HIV or STD and other diseases. In contrast, some would fight that Zika is a larger problem even greater than Ebola. In Saudi Arabia, Dengue is bigger than Zika. And in some regions like Rio, security much bigger of a threat than Zika.
Zika has become widespread but there are other greater problems around the world. Nonetheless, we cannot just ignore the immediacy of the need for the Zika rescue. It is therefore not an easy job for Congress to decide to release the funding since they will also reckon with the other major needs and issues in the US such as emerging diseases like obesity, diabetes, HIV, and cancer.
It has been reported that President Barack Obama has asked Congress for more than $1.8 billion to fund Zika studies to fight cases domestically and internationally. This amount will be used for testing and surveillance so that potential outbreak will be destroyed. The research should yield to the production of vaccine needed to fight Zika. Everyone is waiting for the decision of Congress.
Zika virus may bring stain to humanity in the future that many would not see today. Let's pray for the world leaders who are in the challenge for making the decision in addressing the containment of the spreading virus.
Jill Escher is stumped on why she has two children with autism. A self-described "autism science junkie," Escher scoured through numerous research materials to know more about the developmental condition and now, she has a theory about what might lead developing fetuses into autism.
Escher's theory goes back to the early days of her conception, Spectrum News reported. According to Escher, her mother took six hormones in 1965 while she was pregnant with her to avoid miscarriage. Those hormones included synthetic corticosteroids, progestins, and estrogens, and was taken by her mother in the first seven months of her pregnancy.
Escher posts that the hormones her mother took didn't appear to have damaged her when she was born, but it negatively affected the DNA in her eggs. Decades later, Escher was the one to give birth and her damaged eggs due to her mother's intake of hormones which she believes played a role in her children's autism diagnoses.
Autism Experts Speak Up About Escher's Theory
Both of Escher's children, Jonny and Sophie, were diagnosed with autism when they were very young. Now 17 and 10, respectively, the siblings don't speak and did not display the intellectual abilities of toddlers when they were younger.
Escher said that both of her pregnancies were ordinary and had no complications. Escher and her husband's families don't have histories of autism and other developmental or psychiatric disorders.
Autism researchers said Escher's idea shouldn't be ignored, and studies should be conducted to test her hypothesis. Reproductive and developmental biologists that Escher contacted said they don't know of any studies that examined the effects of hormones on developing eggs or sperm. They told Escher however about a research that studied how hormone-like chemicals such as pesticides and plasticizers affected rodents' germ cells.
Germ Cells
Germ cells can be affected by food that a pregnant woman eats as well. These germ cells could merge with egg cells and sperm, and may be part of a fetus' DNA later on.
Some experts, however, are doubtful that chemicals affect germ cells that much. Lisa Chadwick, a health scientist administrator at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina, said germ cells being exposed to chemicals don't necessarily mean that it would sustain serious damages like high autism risk.
Mark Zylka, an associate professor of cell biology and physiology at the University of North Carolina, said it's possible that chemicals cause mutations in the germ cells. However, the odds of those mutations specifically hitting and damaging an autism gene are low.
Around 3 million people in the U.S. are in the autism spectrum disorder, Autism Speaks noted. The condition is four to five times more common in boys than girls.
While the rest of the world embraces new approaches to parenting, Matt Allen, 33, and his wife Adele Allen, 32, from Brighton, UK won't go mainstream style of parenting. The couple upholds a non-conventional and an all-natural approach to rearing their kids, Ulysses, 5, and Ostara, 1.
According to a report on Click2Houston, the couple strongly rejects the use of modern medicine and decides not to send their children to a mainstream school. In as much as Adele and Matt turn down both traditional schooling and modern medicine, they firmly encourage full-term breastfeeding. And to cure infections, Adele surprisingly squirts breast milk in her kids' eyes, which is a common form of treatment in some countries.
Matt and Adele are firm in their belief of raising their adorable kids through "Off-Grid Parenting" as cited on The Sun. "Off-Grid Parenting" is a parenting style that shuns a number of the conventional ways brought by modern-day society.
Adele, a writer, had her two kids by Lotus birth, which refers to the process where the placenta and umbilical cords were not removed surgically at birth, but instead were carried until they naturally dropped off.
When Adele got pregnant with her son, their very controversial methods became totally natural to them. "Off-grid is moving towards self sustainability and being a bit more free range and less institutionalized," she said. She even gave birth to both her children with no medical intervention and with only Matt by her side.
For Adele, the very thought of giving birth in a hospital just did not appeal to her for a number of reasons. "Also, the interventions I think can be gently nudged on you when you are in a very vulnerable state," she said.
For most people, carrying a placenta in a cool bag after birth may seem unheard of, but such is only normal for Adele. And to hide the smell of the placenta, she would scatter salt and rose petals. "In my knowledge, it's perfectly safe and it worked beautifully for us. I don't know of any known cases where it's gone wrong," she said.
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Reuters is reporting that a Brazilian judge ordered wireless phone carriers to block access to Facebook Inc's WhatsApp indefinitely, starting on Tuesday, the third such incident against the popular phone messaging app in eight months. The decision by Judge Daniela Barbosa Assuncao de Souza in the southeastern state of Rio de Janeiro applies to Brazil's five wireless carriers. The reason for the order was not known due to legal secrecy in an ongoing case, and will only be lifted once Facebook surrenders data, Souza's office said.
What data? According to The Next Web, it's about WhatsApp refusing to comply with a court order to reveal user information in a crime investigation.
The last time WhatsApp was shut down it caused 100 million users to have to use an alternative service.
Last week Senator John McCain rebuked Apple's CEO for declining to Testify at their encryption hearing. McCain noted that the Committee "has subpoena power" that could compel them to testify on why their encryption systems on newer smartphones are not accessible to law enforcement operating under court orders.
Is the Brazilian case the beginning of a crackdown on technology companies disregarding current laws around the world? It's beginning to look that way. McCain indicated at the hearing last week, the second on cyber encryption that he's called, that he was leaning toward passing legislation rather than establishing a commission to study the issue.
Is Apple's CEO hoping that the November election will kill off McCain's committee hearings on this matter and the need to testify? Let's hope not because McCain just might decide to use the committee's "subpoena power" to force the issue and ratchet up the drama unnecessarily. The ball is in Cook's court, but not for long.
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A news report out of Tehran late yesterday noted that in an ultimatum, Iranian officials asked Apple to either officially register in Iran or have its products banned. The Tasnim News Agency quoted the director of Iran's anti-smuggling office as having said on Sunday that "If Apple will not register an official representative in Iran within the next few days, all iPhones will be collected from the market."
For anti-smuggling purposes Iran has started a project, running under the president's office, to ban smuggled mobile phones. The scheme, which will start later this week, will require all new mobile phones to be registered with Iran's telecommunications user database. Any that are not will not be able to be used.
The office announced that former users of iPhones and other smuggled phones are excluded from this project.
Although it said that the project has received the cooperation of mobile operators, customs and the union of mobile phone sellers, some IT activists are criticizing the decision to potentially ban iPhones.
The head of the Tehran IT union told Tasnim News on Monday that "Collecting 40 million smartphones/mobile phones including iPhones will not be easy" while expressing concerns over the potential hacking of the telecommunications database.
About Making Comments on our Site: Patently Apple reserves the right to post, dismiss or edit any comments.
In doing research for an earlier post on race and policing, I came upon a bizarre piece of conspiracy mongering a conservative website, the American Observer. The article in question was posted last November. Check it out:
The FBIs own current (November 2015) list of most wanted murder suspects in the US . . . contains 71 suspectsof which only six are actually white, as can be seen from their mugshots. Some 51 of the remaining suspects are nonwhite Hispanics. Nonetheless, the FBI has classified all 51 of these people as white. (The remainder are correctly classified as black.) . . . The deliberate misclassification is done with the express purpose of boosting the number of crimes which the FBI ascribes to its white category. This is done because the federal statisticians are aware that if they correctly identified these Hispanics as nonwhite, then it would be impossible for even the controlled media to hide the overwhelming nonwhite crime plague.
Thats right, The New Observer argues that the FBI is classifying wanted Hispanic criminals as white in order to hide the overwhelming nonwhite crime plague. This claim is bizarre. Last week I took my children to a new doctor. In filling out all of the forms, I had to put down the childrens race. I marked white and then, in the very next question, I had to specify Hispanic or non-Hispanic. Do you know why? I didnt until a few years ago, when I assisted with a class on immigration history. Legally and according to the U.S. government, Hispanics are classified as white. In other words, its not just in crime statistics, as the author of the above quoted American Observer article seems to think. The classification of Hispanics as white occurs across the board. Why is this, you ask? Because of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, of course.
The year was 1848 and the Mexican government was signing a peace treaty with the U.S., bringing an end to the Mexican-American War. As part of the agreement, Mexico ceded its northernmost territoriesland that is now now Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Wyomingto the United States. But that land was already inhabited. What would happen to the Mexican citizens living on that land when it became part of the United States? Would they become American citizens? Or would they be treated more like Native Americans, constantly relocated and bereft of the rights afforded white Americans of European descent?
This took some wrangling. The Mexican government wanted to make sure that their citizens living in the ceded area would become full American citizens, but the government also wanted to ensure that those who preferred to live in Mexico as Mexican citizens could do so. So they struck a deal. Those Mexican citizens living in the territory changing hands would have one year to move into Mexicos new borders, where they would retain their Mexican citizenship. If they chose to stay, they would be considered American citizens.
There was just one eensy teensy problem. By law, you had to be white to be a U.S. citizen. It was 1848 after all. The Naturalization Act of 1790 read as follows:
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, That any Alien being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen thereof
While more detail was added to the statute in 1795, the requirement that only free white persons could obtain citizenship remained. In order to honor both the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and its own naturalization law, the U.S. government had to classify the formerly Mexican citizens who resided in its new territory as white. And thatyesis why Hispanics are listed under white on the census and other forms, and in the U.S. governments official accounting of statistics, etc.
What Is Whiteness?
Im not going to leave it there, though, because at this point you probably want to know more. How did our law change? When did we start including non-whites as citizens? As you might imagine, there was a bit of a problem after the Civil War. Were the freed slaves U.S. citizens? They certainly werent white! In 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment was passed to settle this question:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
The Fourteenth Amendment created birthright citizenship, and allowed nonwhites born in the U.S. to be considered citizens, but what about nonwhite immigrants who wanted to become naturalized citizens? Here, the law did not change. Naturalization was still limited to free white persons. The 1870 Naturalization Act allowed for those of African descent to become naturalized U.S. citizens, but it otherwise limited naturalization to free white persons, purposefully excluding Asians, among others. The 1906 Naturalization Act did not change this requirement, maintaining a system that offered naturalization to free white persons and those of African descent.
What happened next, you ask? Have you heard of Takao Ozawa v. United States, a case decided by the Supreme Court in 1922? Probably not! You see, while naturalization was limited to free white persons and those of African descent, what white meant exactly was a bit fuzzy. Given this, Takao Ozawa, a Japanese man who had lived in the United States for two decades, sought naturalization under the argument that he was in fact white. Ozawa was a good candidate for a case of this sort. He had graduated from high school in the U.S., attended the University of California, and converted to Christianity. He spoke English exclusively in his home and with his children, whom he sent to Sunday School.
The Supreme Court, in a unanimous ruling, found that the words white person were meant to indicate only a person of what is popularly known as the Caucasian race, which excluded the Japanese. Its worth noting that Ozawa sued for U.S. citizenship because the state of California had passed laws barring those ineligible for citizenshipsuch as himselffrom owning land. I bet you never learned about that one in your high school history class.
At this point, then, the U.S. limited naturalization to those of African or Caucasian descent. But what did Caucasian mean, exactly? Thats a good question! Have you heard of United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, decided by the Supreme Court in 1923? Probably not. Bhagat Singh Thind was an immigrant from India and a WWI veteran who had served in the U.S. army. When he heard about the Supreme Courts decision white meant Caucasian, he decided to seek naturalization based on his ancestry and the the historical geographical origins of Caucasians.
The Supreme Court, once again unanimous, disagreed. They found that:
What we now hold is that the words free white persons are words of common speech, to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word Caucasian only as that word is popularly understood.
In other words, white meant Caucasian, and Caucasian meant whoever people think of as Caucasian. It was an artificially invented distinction designed to draw racial lines and deny citizenship to men like Takao Ozawa and Bhagat Singh Thind. In case youre curious, Thind went on to earn his PhD and marry a white woman, with whom he had two children, Tara and David. He finally obtained U.S. citizenship in 1935, after Congress made all WWI veterans eligible for citizenship. But what of everyone else?
WWII made discriminating against nonwhite ethnic groups unfashionable. I know that sounds flippant, but its truein the aftermath of WWII, people looked at what happened to the Jews and realized that it was fucked up to deny citizenship to entire groups of people based on their ethnic or racial backgrounds. A lot of things changed as a result of WWIIthe United Nation was founded in 1945, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted and signed three years later. It was in this context that Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, ending the United States 172-year-old race-based naturalization requirements. The right of a person to become a naturalized citizen of the United States shall not be denied or abridged because of race or sex, the act read. Unfortunately, though, while it repealed the race-based naturalization requirements, the act maintained the countrys harsh and restrictive immigration quota system.
We havent talked about the quota system, have we?
Quotas, Quotas, Everywhere
Before 1924, our immigration policy was very open, unless you were Chinese, or, eventually, simply Asian. Those groups were excluded almost entirely, but no quotas were placed on immigrants from other areas of the world. This changed with the Immigration Act of 1924 (following the Immigration Restriction Act of 1921), which cut immigration severely. This act restricted annual immigration from any given country to 2% of the number of foreign-born individuals from that country who had been living in the U.S. in 1890. Why 1890? Because before 1890 most immigrants were from northern and western Europe while after 1890 most immigrants were from southern and eastern Europe, and southern and eastern European immigrants were viewed as inferior by many Americans. Using 1890 allowed them to severely restrict immigration from those areas while allowing a larger amount of immigration from the parts of Europe considered racially superior. (Check out this graph.)
The U.S.s new immigration restrictions need to be understood in the context of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. People often associate the Klan primarily with racism and terror against black people, and this was indeed the primary focus of the first wave of the Klan, during Reconstruction. During the 1920s the second wave of the Klan, though, had many targets, including blacks, Catholics, and eastern European immigrants, among others. The Klan was not an isolated presence, either. In fact, their dominance in states like Indiana was well known.
Theres something else I bet you didnt know. The United States obtained the Philippines from Spain in 1898 and fought a bloody war to subdue a local independence movement. Actually, that you probably did know. What you probably didnt know is that during U.S. colonization Filipinos were considered U.S. nationals (though not U.S. citizens), and were thus free to travel to live and work in the United States, exempt from the harsh immigration quotas imposed on other countries. In fact, so many Filipinos traveled to the West Coast to work that a strong anti-Filipino nativist movement grew up. The result was that the U.S. passed a law initiating the Philipinnes independence process in 1934, and simultaneously limiting Filipino immigration to 50 per year. Thats right, 50 people. And yes, our motivation for granting the Philippines independence was motivated at least partially (and perhaps even primarily) by a desire to stem the flow of Filipino migrants.
Next came WWII. The United States immigration quotas may have played a role in Anne Franks fathers failure to obtain visas to bring his family to the U.S. Anti-semetism, which could lead to a refusal to issue visas even when quota spots remained, likely also contributed. The doors of U.S. immigration did not budge in the face of chaos abroad. After WWII, though, the plight of war refugees and the recent memory of what had happened when countries closed their doors to Jews fleeing Hitler made the United States restrictive immigration policies look bad. This did not, however, mean immediate wholesale reform. After much debate, Congress passed the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, allowing 400,000 displaced persons to to move to the U.S. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, however, retained the countrys immigration antiquated quota system.
The children of the southern and eastern European immigrants who faced such opposition in the early 1900s fought in WWII, took advantage of the GI Bill to attend college, and moved into the cookie-cutter suburbs that sprang up after WWII. In a word, they became fully and unquestionably white. People stopped using terms like Italian-American and other hyphens. In this context, a quota system that discriminated against immigration from southern and eastern Europe made little sense, as President Kennedy once admitted in a speech given in Italy, pledging to bring about reform.
During the Cold War, the United States immigration quota system became a national embarrassment. It was quite clear that the system discriminated against immigrants from countries whose populations had been deemed racially inferior. International pressure also played a role in the civil rights movementJim Crow didnt look great on the international scene, as it made the United States claims to being a bastion of freedom and democracy in the midst of the Cold War an obvious farce. Congress ultimately ended the quota system set up in 1924 with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which set up a new system based on uniting families and attracting immigrants with specific skills. This system forms the basis of the United States immigration policy today, and resulted in an increased diversity of immigrants.
Refugees, skilled workers, and relatives of existing immigrants have made up the bulk of documented immigration to the U.S. since 1965. Why are there eleven million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. today? The answer to that is fairly simpleour immigration system is set up to favor skilled laborers. In fact, the U.S. offers only 5,000 visas each year for unskilled workers coming on a permanent (i.e. not temporary or seasonal) employment basis. In other words, while our current system no longer discriminates based on race or national origin, it does make distinctions based on immigrants educational background and skill sets.
Conclusion
American immigration history is fascinating, as is the history of naturalization. I suspect most Americans have never heard of Takao Ozawa or Bhagat Singh Thind. I suspect most Americans know essentially nothing about the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, or about why Hispanics are considered white on surveys or in government statistics. I suspect most Americans dont know that before 1952 you had to be white (or, since the civil war, African) to become a naturalized citizen, or that the Immigration Act of 1924 chose to use the year 1890 as an anchor for its quota system because that year best allowed them to limit immigration from eastern and southern Europe, whose populations were considered inferior.
But now you know, and that is at least something.
Patna: Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, taking brief time off from his ongoing campaign to promote prohibition in the neighboring state of Uttar Pradesh, on Monday held a meeting with the Water Resources Department to review flood situation in Bihar.
With the level of water continuing to rise steadily in all major rivers in the state, the administration is gearing up to tackle the annual flood threat that inevitably results in loss of lives, cattle, farming produce, and other properties to the tune of crores of rupees.
Rivers in Bihar including Kosi, Gandak, and the Ganges were rising at a dangerous rate with Nepal releasing 1.15 lakh cusec water in Kosi on Monday morning, officials said adding a flood alert was issued in the northern districts to warn the people of the possible flooding.
Lallan Singh, Bihar Water Resources Minister, said that the state was prepared to deal with any eventuality and there was no need to panic.
"All embankments, including Kosi embankment, is safe and people need not worry as the government has made all arrangements to minimize the impact of the flood. Relief workers and rescue experts have been deployed in all sensitive districts and those living close to the rivers have been ordered to evacuate and move to higher points," Singh said.
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About 75% of military recruits arrive at a training base with no bank account and have to be bussed to a local bank to open one, says Jill Castilla, CEO of Citizens Bank of Edmond. The bank's team is building a platform that will help service members save and build credit.
Iran is 'toying with lives' of political prisoners by denying them medical care: Amnesty International
07/19/16
Source: Amnesty International
Medical treatment withheld to punish prisoners or force them into making false confessions
Son of jailed 76-year-old British businessman Kamal Foroughi denounces shocking lack of medical care for his father
Some prisoners told they should 'confess' if they want treatment
(cartoon by Mana Neyestani, Tavana)
The Iranian authorities are callously toying with the lives of political prisoners by denying them adequate medical care - putting them at risk of irreversible damage to their health or even death - according to a new report by Amnesty International today.
The 45-page report, Health taken hostage: Cruel denial of medical care in Irans prisons, provides a grim snapshot of health care in the countrys prisons. It presents strong evidence that the judiciary, in particular the Office of the Prosecutor, and prison administrations deliberately prevent access to adequate medical care, in many cases as an intentional act of cruelty intended to intimidate, punish or humiliate political prisoners, or to extract forced confessions or statements of repentance from them.
The report gives disturbing details of 18 prisoners whove been denied medical care and are at risk of suffering permanent damage to their health.
One prisoner, the 76-year-old UK-Iranian businessman Kamal Foroughi, has been held in Tehrans Evin Prison since May 2011 after being accused and then convicted of espionage after an unfair trial in a Revolutionary Court. Despite suffering from various medical conditions and needing specialised medical tests - including screening for cancer - Foroughi was only transferred to hospital for a medical check-up last November, four-and-a-half years after being detained. This was followed by a second medical check-up in May, but the authorities have so far withheld the test results from Foroughi and his family. The Iranian authorities have also refused Foroughis repeated requests to be released or granted leave on medical grounds.
Kamal Foroughis son Kamran, who has been campaigning in the UK for his fathers release, said:
"The whole family has been shocked at the way they blocked my dad from getting the preventative medical care he desperately needed, and even when they eventually let him have health checks a number of standard and cancer-specific tests were still omitted. Three months ago dads lawyer was told by the Iranian Judiciary and Prosecutors Office that dad was on a clemency list, but he still hasnt been released and we dont know why. Dad is very old and could die any day and its Iran's choice where - in Evin prison alone, or back home surrounded by his loving family who miss him so much.
Amnesty International Middle East and North Africa Director Philip Luther said:
Denying medical care to political prisoners is cruel and utterly indefensible. They are toying with individuals lives with devastating, lasting consequences to their health. Making medical care conditional on obtaining a statement of repentance or a confession is not only a shameful exploitation of a prisoners poor health, but also a clear violation of the absolute prohibition of torture and other ill-treatment.
Prisoner in danger of going blind, another at risk of death from kidney cancer
One prisoner - Zeynab Jalalian, an Iranian Kurdish woman serving a life sentence in connection with her alleged membership of a Kurdish opposition group - is at risk of going blind because of withheld treatment. She urgently needs an eye operation but the authorities have repeatedly refused to allow her to go to a hospital. Her family believe she was injured when interrogators repeatedly hit her head against a wall, fracturing her skull and causing a brain haemorrhage and vision impairment. Intelligence officers have told her she must provide confessions before she gets treatment. Her sister, Deniz Jalalian, told Amnesty: They said that if she did so, they would not only reduce her sentence but also take her to a doctor.
In another case, prisoner of conscience Omid Kokabee, a 33-year-old physicist serving a ten-year sentence for refusing to work on military projects in Iran, complained of kidney problems for nearly five years but the authorities ignored his repeated requests for medical care. In April he was diagnosed with advanced kidney cancer and had emergency surgery to remove his right kidney. He had been waiting for a long time to be transferred to a hospital ... but the officials wouldnt agree to it. Prison doctors never even examined him, and kept prescribing painkillers, a family member said. A photograph which recently emerged showing Kokabee chained to his hospital bed when he was hospitalised on a previous occasion in 2015, caused an outcry on social media.
Doctors complicit in abuse
Prisoners interviewed by Amnesty also said that prison doctors were sometimes complicit in the abuse. They said some prison doctors consistently downplayed or outright dismissed their health problems as figments of their own imagination and treated serious conditions with painkillers or tranquillisers.
The report also provides a deeply disturbing image of the Office of the Prosecutor, which in Iran is responsible for decisions concerning medical leave and hospital transfers. The Office often refuses to authorise hospital transfers for ill prisoners even though the care they need is not available in prison, and it frequently denies requests for medical leave for critically-ill prisoners against doctors advice.
Amnesty is calling on the Iranian authorities to immediately stop denying prisoners access to adequate medical care, in line with their international obligations. The authorities must investigate the prosecution authorities and all other officials - including medical staff - who may be involved in deliberately denying medical care to prisoners.
Persian Gazelle III solar car touring Iran
07/19/16
Source: Tehran Times
TEHRAN, Jul. 19 (Mehr News Agency) - The Persian Gazelle III solar car manufactured by Iranian students at Uni. of Tehran is currently making a tour from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf to introduce environmentally friendly technologies to people across the country.
The construction of the Persian Gazelle III was finished in 2015 after 9 months. This is the third model of the Persian Gazelle solar car that has been designed and manufactured by students from the Faculty of Engineering of University of Tehran.
Karen Abrinia, the director of the Persian Gazelle Design and Manufacturing Center (PGDM), told Mehr News that the four-wheeled, two-seater car has a maximum speed of 130 kilometers per hour. He claimed that the Persian Gazelle III is the first two-seater solar car that has been manufactured in the Middle East.
The Persian Gazelle III has begun a tour from Caspian Sea to Persian Gulf on July 16 which will last for 8 days. According to Abrinia, the car will cover 2,700 kilometers of distance from Anzali Free Zone in the Caspian Sea to Kish Free Zone in the Persian Gulf during its tour.
The car has so far made a stop in Anzali Port, Rasht Port, Qazvin, and Tehran. Its next stop is Yazd, which will be today on Tuesday.
The tour aims to introduce the environmentally friendly technologies developed during these years in the PGDM center to our society including students and other people, he said.
The members of the team will answer questions and enquiries raised about the Persian Gazelle as the solar car makes its many stops along the journey.
The other purpose of this grand tour is to promote the Persian Gazelle and attract sponsors for the future activities, he added.
Persian Gazelle III went to the 2015 world solar challenge in Australia.
You can watch a video of the Persian Gazelle III tour here.
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The TV you watch perhaps has an ARM processor chip in it. So does the Amazon Echo that helps switch on the lights and air-conditioner through voice commands.
Thats just a microcosm of how deep ARM goes in our daily lives. ARMs low-power chip designs have revolutionized mobile devices and are now powering smart home devices, smart meters, weather sensors, medical devices, and industrial equipment.
ARM chips also are inside many sensor devices used in the fast-growing internet of things market. The company set itself up for growth in IoT with its dogged focus on low-power chips since the 1990s, and that vision has paid off with SoftBank announcing plans this week to buy ARM for a stunning US$32 billion.
Some analysts believe SoftBank is overpaying, but the investment could eventually pay off. Some estimate 20 billion to 50 billion connected devices will be online by 2020, and those numbers represent a big growth opportunity for ARM.
ARM will be an excellent strategic fit within the SoftBank group as we invest to capture the very significant opportunities provided by the internet of things, Masayoshi Son, CEO and chairman of SoftBank, said in a statement.
SoftBanks offer was compelling for shareholders and offers the chip company to grow, Simon Segars, CEO of ARM, said in a video explaining the sale.
ARM designs chips it licenses to manufacturers, which can tweak them to meet the needs of their devices. Apple uses ARM architecture in its iPhone and iPad, and other licensees include Samsung, Microsoft, Nvidia, and AMD. ARM generates revenue through licensing and royalties, unlike rival Intel, which designs and manufactures its own chips.
From its earliest days, ARMs focus on power efficiency over performance hasnt wavered, setting the company up for success in mobile devices, and now IoT, analysts said. An early ARM chip was used in Apples Newton handheld, which shipped in 1993 but wasnt a commercial success.
The only other guys that had a shot at [the mobile and IoT markets] were MIPS, which is now a part of Imagination Technologies, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64. But MIPS fell off the horse.
In IoT, a range of devices are powered by external power sources, but a larger number rely on batteries and energy harvesting. ARM processors like Cortex-M0 are targeted at the IoT, but many older microcontrollers are still being used because of their power efficiency features.
ARM started in 1990 as a spin-off from a collaboration between Apple and Acorn Computer Group. Acorn was the brains behind the first ARM RISC chips, which appeared in a personal computer called Archimedes in 1987.
ARMs early years were mixed, but the company started gaining attention as shipments of devices like BlackBerry started picking up in the late 1990s. Revenues started exploding in 2005, and that year, ARM shipped 1.4 billion chips for mobile devices, crossing the 1 billion threshold for the first time.
The iPhone, which launched in 2007, added to ARMs fortunes, and more than 90 billion ARM-based chips have shipped so far. In 2015 alone, 15 billion ARM chips shipped.
ARM maintained its heritage of developing low-power processors at a time when Intel and AMD cranked up clock speeds and power draw in their PC chips. The iPhone was a big breakthrough, and the mobile explosion caught rivals like Intel off-guard. Intel then took the ARM route and started focusing on power efficiency.
IoT is again changing the shape of the chip industry. Intel in April laid off 12,000 people as it redirected focus from PCs to IoT, data center products, and memory.
Over the decades, ARM microcontrollers were easily available from companies like Marvell and Texas Instruments to build and test devices, and that strategy helped build a large ecosystem, Brookwood said. By comparison, Intel chips werent as easily available, and thats another reason ARM is built into more devices.
While ARM is growing in the IoT, it has weaknesses. ARM-based chips may not be able to handle demanding tasks in medical devices, digital advertising screens, or gambling machines, where graphics and processing are key. Those devices will better run on x86 chips, said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research.
Mobile and low-power IoT devices are tailor-made for ARM, and they are markets the company should continue chasing, McGregor said. For SoftBank, those markets are low-hanging fruit that will generate instant revenue.
ARM chips could also find their way into storage and networking devices, which are growing more important to the IoT, McGregor said.
The company plans to speed up processor development and double its headcount over the next five years with SoftBanks backing. But questions remain about what ARM will do with the extra resources.
ARM has processor designs and programs in place for a range of chips, from IoT microcontrollers all the way up to beefy servers, for the next couple of years, and most semiconductor companies already have ARM licenses. So there are limited opportunities for the company to expand with its IP licensing business model, Brookwood said.
ARMs price was depressed, and SoftBank may have felt it was a good time to acquire the company, said Richard Fichera, vice president at Forrester Research.
But ARM is still a small company, and its unique business model wont change the way chipmakers like Intel, Nvidia, or AMD do business.
Theres nothing [SoftBank] can do to make ARM five times their size, Fichera said. I dont think itll transform the industry in any way.
Though SoftBank may have overpaid, ARM is well positioned to make money with its intellectual property business, and the IoT segment is a big opportunity, Fichera said.
ARM is well positioned to make money hand-over-fist with their IP business, Fichera said.
Microsofts cloud push continued to pay off last quarter, with revenue from its Azure services more than doubling from the same period last year, the company reported Tuesday.
Overall revenue for the quarter was down, however, thanks partly to a steep decline in Microsofts handset business. Total revenue for the three months ended June 30 was $20.6 billion, Microsoft said, down from $22.2 billion last year. Net profit was $3.1 billion.
Microsofts retreat from the smartphone market hurt its device sales significantly. Phone revenue sank 71 percent, after the company back pedaled from its Nokia acquisition to focus on a few models of Windows phone.
The news came shortly after Microsoft announced that it would miss its goal of having 1 billion devices running Windows 10 by the middle of 2018, in part because its smartphones arent selling well.
Microsofts Intelligent Cloud business, which includes Azure services and on-premises server software, performed better, with revenue up 7 percent to $6.7 billion. Azure compute usage more than doubled year over year. Microsoft doesnt break out a dollar figure for its Azure sales, however, so its hard to know exactly how large that business is.
Search revenue also grew, by 16 percent. More than 40 percent of search revenue in June was driven by Windows 10 devices, Microsoft said. That may have something to do with the fact that Cortana, the virtual assistant bundled with Microsofts new operating system, uses Bing to run web searches.
Microsofts productivity software business also grew significantly. The number of commercial seats of Office 365 sold grew 45 percent year-over-year, as more companies migrated to the subscription-based suite.
All in all, the quarter seems to be something of a validation for CEO Satya Nadellas focus on the cloud, with Office 365 and Azure posting strong growth. That said, the companys revenue declines still havent leveled off, despite the rise in its newer businesses.
The California State University Board of Trustees will vote Tuesday, July 19 on whether to approve naming the San Bernardino campus business school after Stater Bros. mogul Jack Brown.
If they vote no, Lawrence Rose is going to be left with a lot of announcements he cant mail out.
Brown is giving $10 million to the university, an amount twice the size of the largest single gift ever received by the school. Cal State San Bernardino officials agreed to name the business school after him the institution is already housed in a building that bears Browns name for the $100,000 he contributed to its construction but the trustees have to approve that decision.
Rose, dean of the business school, is confident enough in the trustees approval that announcements celebrating the newly renamed Jack H. Brown School of Business and Public Administration are already printed and ready to go.
Rose said the gift is the culmination of years of Browns involvement in the school, including being a part of school committees.
Weve had a really long relationship with Jack, Rose said. The donation, he added, has been a project thats evolved over many, many years.
Over those years, Brown has donated many times to the universitys business school and to a scholarship fund for single mothers named after his own mother, Rose Brown, who struggled to raise Jack on her own after his father died.
His connection to the university goes back to before it was built. He said he helped to plant 1,000 trees there when it was being considered as the site for a new California State College. It wasnt open yet when he finished his studies at Valley College, so he went to San Jose State.
The total of all of those donations, $270,000, is dwarfed by the $10 million gift.
Brown said he wanted to do something to benefit the city where he grew up.
Ive been trying to figure out what to do to help the community I care about, he said. I think helping people get a better education . . . is accomplished by this contribution. There were many people who helped me along the way and hopefully this will help others along the way.
Growing up in a blue-collar area of the city later torn down for renovation and the construction of the Carousel Mall Brown remembers throwing newspapers and mowing lawns to earn money before starting work bagging groceries at a local market. After college he continued to work his way up in the grocery business. In 1981, he became CEO of Stater Bros. and served in that capacity for 36 years. He stepped down to a position of executive chairman at the end of last year.
All my dreams started in San Bernardino and will end in San Bernardino, Brown said. I couldnt be more honored than to help others to go for their dreams.
Rose said the $10 million would be put into an endowment. He expects to tap into it in a year or two, after some interest has accrued. The plan is to use 4 percent of the money on an annual basis. That $400,000 will be a significant addition to the business schools annual $9 million budget. It will be used for attracting and retaining faculty, funding new programming and research, and on scholarships, he said.
No specific plans have been made, he said, but Im sure there will be some official celebration to mark the renaming of the school.
First, hed just like to be able to mail those announcements.
Contact the writer: mmuckenfuss@pressenterprise.com or 951-368-9595
A man accused of killing three people, including a 9-year-old boy, pleaded not guilty to criminal charges Monday in San Bernardino County Superior Court.
Trayvon Eshawn Brown, 26, of Rialto, entered his plea before Superior Court Judge Alexander R. Martinez, who presided over the arraignment. Brown faces three counts of murder with enhancements on each count for using a firearm, according to the criminal complaint filed by the San Bernardino County district attorney.
A documented gang member, Brown is accused of the July 8 slayings outside Superior Liquor at 2950 Del Rosa Ave. in San Bernardino.
Three victims Samathy Mahan, 25; Travon Hefty Lamar Williams, 26; and Travon Williams, 9 left the liquor store shortly before 9:30 p.m. when Brown confronted them, police said.
The mother of 9-year-old Travon Williams, Ebony Newman, 27, let out a cry just before the court proceedings began. Brown looked over at the grieving mother and appeared to chuckle.
They were all shot as they came out of the store, San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said Friday. Mahan ran around the corner and Brown followed him and shot him again multiple times.
Newman and three other family members were in the courtroom to watch the proceedings, but they declined to comment.
Brown, who is on post-release community supervision, is also being held on a no-bail warrant for violating the terms of release. Under the PRCS program, triple non offenders nonviolent, nonserious, nonsexual who would have been placed on parole are instead monitored by local county probation agencies as part of the California Prison Realignment Act, or Assembly Bill 109.
Brown was convicted in June 2013 of attempting to evade a peace officer with reckless driving, San Bernardino County probation spokeswoman Kimberly Epps said.
Epps said records show that Brown was in compliance with his probation and reporting according to his terms of release before the shooting.
Police said an ongoing violent history between Brown and Mahan sparked the triple homicide.
Detectives said in a written statement that a shooting June 15 happened at 2871 N. Park Ave., around the corner from the July 8 homicide scene. They say Brown and Mahan fought, and according to a witness, Brown had been shot during the altercation.
After the triple homicide, detectives began receiving dozens of calls from both anonymous and named callers who identified Brown as the shooter.
Prosecutors havent decided whether to seek the death penalty.
Martinez set the next court date for Brown for Aug. 3. Martinez set Browns bail at $3 million.
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Friends remember father, 9-year-old son killed in triple homicide
Contact the writer: doug.saunders@langnews.com, or @crimeshutterbug on Twitter
Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Corona, saw something you normally associate with California while at the Republican National Convention this week.
Calvert, who is in Cleveland for the convention, came across California Highway Patrol officers, including some from Riverside County, who were providing security.
I thanked them for everything they do to keep us safe and for the amazing job they do every day, Calvert wrote on his campaign Facebook page. Be sure to thank a cop for the service they perform keeping our communities safe.
Calvert, the Inland Empires longest-serving congressman, is the only GOP congressman from the Inland delegation who is attending the convention.
By Anjuli Davies and Olivia Oran
LONDON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Market ructions caused by Britain's decision to leave the European Union are set to widen the gulf between Wall Street and European investment banks, potentially leaving the continent without its own global champion.
The Brexit vote has pushed shares in Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE) and Credit Suisse (CSGN.S) to record lows and triggered a string of analyst downgrades, highlighting expectations that Europe's already-struggling investment banks will be pushed further to the sidelines by their U.S. counterparts.
"In our view, the uncertainty created post Brexit, if it leads to long-term negative impact on profitability, could result in further restructuring in Tier Two investment banks," JPMorgan analysts wrote in a note on July 11, downgrading their estimates for European banks in favour of their U.S. rivals.
Brexit is seen as a negative for banks on both sides of the Atlantic because the uncertainty could subdue dealmaking and trading activity. And banks may also face the cost of relocating some London-based businesses and staff to other EU cities.
But European banks will find it tougher as Brexit comes on top of post-financial crisis structural overhauls that their U.S. counterparts have largely completed.
Since Britain's vote to leave the European Union, some headhunters on Wall Street have reported getting more calls from investment bankers at European groups asking about jobs at their U.S rivals.
"People I've been in discussion with since the middle of last year have all of a sudden started saying 'you were right ... I should be more open-minded ... I don't want to be the last guy here to turn the lights off. Is it too late in the year to move?' Gary Goldstein, founder and CEO of executive search firm Whitney Partners in New York, said.
Europe's banks were already on the back foot before the vote, focused on cost-cutting and shoring up capital while more strongly-capitalised U.S banks have been able to go out to win new business.
Story continues
"We have been getting a number of calls from senior bankers at the European institutions in the U.S.," Kevin P. Mahoney at Bay Street Advisors, LLC, said.
"The concerns range from the European banks' inability to lend, and thus compete on deals going forward, to the quickly eroding value of their stock awards and overall compensation."
GLOBALLY RELEVANT
Some senior executives, worried about the risks of Wall Street dominating the region, argue that Europe needs its own investment banks to service companies at home and abroad and help to spur economic growth.
"It is in the interests of Europe at large to have a strong, globally relevant bank in Europe," Alasdair Warren, head of corporate and investment banking EMEA at Deutsche Bank told Reuters.
"If the only globally relevant banks of scale are North American, it's not politically or socially good for Europe. But of course, all institutions, irrespective of geography need to be globally competitive."
Barclays' (BARC.L) chief executive Jes Staley said earlier this year that the region risked tipping over into American dominance, which could leave Europes capital markets entirely dependent on firms based elsewhere.
European companies could also play a role in supporting their home banks. In a research paper in March, think-tank Bruegel said companies could help to bolster the continent's investment banks.
"We recommend that the big European corporates should cherish the (few) remaining European investment banks, by giving them at least one place in otherwise U.S.- dominated banking syndicates," the paper said.
"That could help to avoid complete dependence on U.S. investment banks."
WALL STREET VS THE REST
In 2007, the eight biggest European banks' FICC (fixed income, currencies and commodities) revenue was $48 billion (36.2 billion), compared with the $38 billion generated by the five biggest U.S. banks, according to data from analytics firm Tricumen.
Last year, European banks' revenue was $26 billion while U.S. banks was $43 billion. In eight years, there has been a $22 billion fall in FICC revenue at European banks and a $5 billion increase at U.S. banks. Europe's 26 percent advantage has turned into a 40 percent deficit.
European banks' total fee revenue from bond issuance, equity capital markets and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) fell from $17 billion to $13 billion between 2007 and 2015, while U.S. banks' fees remained unchanged at $23 billion.
"I would expect European banks to lose more market share to the U.S. banks," Darko Kapoor a partner at Tricumen, said.
The Wall Street banks potentially face some big Brexit costs.
The five largest U.S. banks employ around 40,000 people in London, more than in the rest of Europe combined, taking advantage of the EU "passporting" regime that allows them to offer services across the bloc.
If they have to set up new continental European outposts this could be extremely costly.
It could cost 50,000 pounds per person, on average to relocate an employee to the EU, according to consultancy Crossbridge, taking into account the costs of hiring and redundancy, new building, rent and other infrastructure and contingency costs.
U.S. investment banks have 20 percent more EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) staff in Britain than their European counterparts, according to industry analytics firm Coalition.
"Most banks (U.S. and European) have put in place a hiring freeze and are following a "wait and watch" approach. Some banks that had launched restructuring before Brexit are looking at accelerating those programs," Coalition said.
(Additional reporting by Lawrence White and Mike Stone, editing by Jane Merriman)
Heres where well be bringing you news, analysis and interesting tidbits from the Republican National Convention throughout the week, including exclusive items from our reporters with the California delegation in Cleveland. Check back frequently for the latest.
7:15 p.m. Party backs natural family units, border wall, more energy extraction on public lands
The GOP platform approved Monday in Cleveland offers a strong defense of the natural family unit and says a majority of the Supreme Court robbed Americans of their legitimate constitutional authority to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
But the New York Times reports the document also endorses a less traditionally conservative approach to criminal justice reform and supports targeted modifications to mandatory sentencing requirements.
The platform is a formal expression of the principles the party stands for going into the fall campaign.
It urges Congress to use its power to impeach more federal judges, calls for a wall along the Mexican border and advocates for more energy development on public lands.
It promises a Republican president, working with a GOP-controlled Congress, would shift the balance of power on the Supreme Court and begin reversing activist decisions, such as those legalizing abortion and supporting Obamacare.
5:49 p.m. Law and order night
Two parents from Southern California are among tonights speakers.
Both lost children in incidents that involved undocumented immigrants, and both are big supporters of Donald Trumps ideas on immigration.
Jamiel Shaw Sr., from Los Angeles, lost his son, Jamiel Shaw Jr., when he was shot in a drive-by murder. The gang member who shot the younger Shaw was an undocumented immigrant.
Shaw Jr. was 17 when he died, walking home from school. He was a standout running back who had drawn interest from Stanford and Rutgers. His killer thought he was shooting somebody else.
Shaw Sr. has spoken at Trump rallies, including an April event in Costa Mesa. At a Las Vegas rally, last July, Shaw described the killer of his son, Pedro Espinoza, as someone who was brought here when he was 4 years old, and then allowed to grow up kind of like a wild animal.
Sabine Durden has a similar story. Her son Dominic was killed in 2012, in a motorcycle accident that involved a man in a truck who was an undocumented immigrant driving without a license or insurance. Since Dominics death, Durden has appeared on CNN and Fox News, and spoken for Trump at rallies.
She is lobbying to cut federal tax money away from so-called Sanctuary Cities, which dont actively help enforce immigration laws.
5 p.m. Protesters staying in their lanes, at least initially
Groups of boisterous protesters, wildly at odds politically and in just about every other way, marched just a few blocks apart in Cleveland Monday, but never crossed paths.
One group chanted Hillary for Prison, another Dump Trump! but no major clashes were reported, at least initially. Thousands of police officers from across the country and as far away as California were on hand trying to keep the peace and guide marchers along barricade-lined corridors,the Washington Post reported.
4:24 p.m. No, really, its art
There are about 100 women wearing about zero clothes, hanging out fairly close to Quicken Loans Arena this afternoon.
The demonstration is a combination of performance art and protest, says People magazine.
Whats it about? The statement of purpose from the website of artist/naked lady organizer Spencer Tunick says the display is intended to denounce the hateful repressive rhetoric of many in the Republican Party towards women and minorities.
Its warm and muggy today in Cleveland. So comfort isnt an issue.
And dont worry, the link, by the way, is totally SFW.
3:25 p.m. Media overkill?
There are 15,000 journalists at the Republican National Convention or six for every one of the 2,500 delegates, says the Washington Post. Why so many? Well, theres the unpredictable, media magnet of Donald Trump, as well as the deep divisions in the country over his policy proposals. Theres also just a lot more online reporters these days. And then theres a threat of violence in the streets when the nation is on edge over law and order and police-community relations.
If you want to cover the fire, you have to go to the fire, said James Warren, the former managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, who now writes for Vanity Fair and the Poynter journalism institute.
2:37 p.m. Mr. Trumps Wild Ride
Talking Points Memo reports that Donald Trumps motorcade was involved in a minor traffic accident on the way to the Republican National Convention. Nobody was hurt.
Important? Proably not. But its an opportunity for the Wild Ride subhead.
1:28 p.m. Its off!
OK, the yeah/nay thing (which, if you closed your eyes, made the 2016 GOP Convention sound like a newsreel from 1932) broke down like this:
The anti-Trump crowd was actually a mix of anti-Trump folk and pro Sen. Ted Cruz folk, according to CNN and others. And the vote they wanted (but failed to get) was less about dumping Trump in 2016 and more about greasing the path for Cruz in 2020.
But that plan didnt win. So its not happening, for now.
And GOP unity? So far, its not happening either.
Heres a deeper explanation from the Washington Post.
1:18 p.m. Its on!
Some Never Trump people are on the convention floor, chanting for a floor vote that apparently would let delegates un-tether to Donald Trump.
The anti-Trump folks are screaming eye, as in please let delegates vote differently than their pledge suggests, while the pro-Trump forces are screaming nay, as in uh, didnt we just have primaries in every state and about 64,000 debates to sort this out?
Stay tuned.
1:15 p.m. Big Blues front and center
The Golden State delegation is staying at a hotel 60 miles from the Cleveland Republican convention. But California and other blue states, partly as sign of party unity, are being featured prominently right in front of the stage, Martin Wisckol on his Total Buzz blog. Heres a Washington Post map of the where the states are located on the convention floor, coded by their political leanings in presidential elections.
12:42 p.m. Trump embarrassed? Its not impossible
Politico is reporting that the Never Trump crowd has, in fact, pulled enough support to force a floor vote to Trump. The mechanics of this arent clear, for now. Also, its unlikely to win.
But were guessing itll probably bum out a certain candidate and probably a few thousand of his supporters in and outside the convention hall.
12:25 p.m Convention curtain goes up; unity fight continues
Against a backdrop of national angst over race relations and law and order, Republicans have opened their convention in Cleveland with calls for party unity, but signs indicate that is still a work in progress.
Shortly after the convention was gaveled into session, a dissident group called Delegates Unbound said in an email that it had gathered statements calling for a roll call by a majority of delegates from 10 states. Under GOP rules, a roll call can be demanded if most delegates from seven states sign such a statement.
Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich said last-ditch efforts by conservative delegates to block the presumptive nominee are silly and should stop. Gingrich, of course, is the former House speaker and, more recently, a would-be pick for vice president.
Its unclear how many people agree.
Some delegates are trying to force GOP rule changes that would allow previously pledged delegates to back any candidate theyd like. That, in turn, would weaken the power of Republican Party leaders.
The Georgia Republican suggests math isnt in the dissidents favor.
Trump carried 37 states. Hes going to be the nominee.
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Parents of those killed by undocumented immigrants speak out
Heres what Inland delegates said about floor fight
GOP leaders approve convention rules, block insurgents
Agencies use Esri technology for security
Does Californias delegation matter to national GOP?
A 29-year-old Ontario woman has been accused of stalking her ex-boyfriends pregnant wife and responding to rape fantasy ads on Craigslist, pretending to be the wife, prompting strangers to go to the wifes home.
Michelle Suzanne Hadley was charged Monday with felony stalking with a restraining order, criminal threats, attempted forcible rape and assault, and one misdemeanor count of violating a protective order, the Orange County District Attorneys Office said.
Prosecutors said Hadley dated her ex-boyfriend, a U.S. Marshals Service agent, from 2013 to 2015, before he married. The couple live in Orange County.
In June and July, Hadley is accused of sending the wife numerous emails threatening her life and the life of her unborn child. Prosecutors said Hadley routed the emails through different computers and servers to evade police.
The wife filed a restraining order June 6, but prosecutors said Hadley violated that order and stalked the woman.
Posing as the woman, Hadley responded to mens ads on Craigslist seeking partners for sexual acts resembling rape, prosecutors said. Hadley sent the men photos of the wife and details of her daily routine.
Hadley is accused of telling the responders that the victim wanted the responders to have forcible sexual intercourse with her, even if she screamed or resisted, the District Attorneys Office said. Several of the responders showed up at (the victims) residence.
One man attacked her before she was able to call for help, prosecutors said.
Anaheim police arrested Hadley on Thursday. She is being held in lieu of $1 million bail. If convicted, she faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.
Contact the writer: kpuente@ocregister.com, 714-834-3773
Michael Garrison, a 40-year-old former Marine from Winchester, was on the convention floor during the failed attempt by Donald Trump opponents to force a state-by-state roll call vote regarding the convention rules.
Garrison, who said he was about 50 feet from the convention platform, described the scene as very energetic, very loud (and) very chaotic. He does not support the Never Trump movements efforts.
Trump won fair and square, Garrison said. The fact that this small minority feels like they know better or can outweigh the will of the American people at large, its misguided.
Another California delegate, Riverside County Supervisor Marion Ashley, emailed the following observations:
Very proud to represent California as (a) delegate today!
California gave stalwart and vocal support of the the Rules Committee report. There was a huge and raucous demonstration supporting Trump and the Rules Committee. The shouting went on and on. The Rules Committee was upheld. The anti-Trump group couldnt win even though they utilized non-delegates present on the voice vote. The California delegation was the most vocal and emotional shouting Trump and USA!
It was voted on twice as six states presented a challenging resolution and asked for a roll call vote. Originally it was nine states but numerous delegates were duped into signing the petition for a resolution and taken off the petition after personally refuting their signatures. Six being not enough to force a vote, the challenge was denied. Ho-hum, another afternoon at the RNC Convention. Cant wait for tonight!
Delegate Ben Clymer Jr. of Riverside sent in these observations:
The day opened with a heads up that a small faction wanted the delegates unbound. Colorado and Utah were the main States with support from Washington and others. The California delegation was united in their support for Trump. Seeing as how Trump won approximately 70 percent of the vote Statewide in California and nearly 81 percent in our Riverside County, the support for Trump from our States delegates was obvious.
Once again, we loaded up into the buses and with a law enforcement escort headed single file down the highway into Cleveland from our location 59 miles away. Arriving in downtown, the security was unlike anything Ive seen. The Q was on absolute lock down.
Inside, the band was playing and the atmosphere was more aligned to a rock concert party than a Party with business at hand. Speaker after speaker the first session went by until we came to the vote we were all waiting for to leave bound or unbound the delegates.
Before the motion was concluded, the Utah delegation opened in protest. Immediately the California delegation responded with its own vocal response that drowned out the opposition. The commotion continued and the chair took a break. Once back in order, the motion was made and seconded to accept the rules as set by the committee.
Utah and others began their protest once more which again was drowned out by the largest delegation in the building. Chants for We want Trump broke out throughout The Q. Once the final vote was called, the Never Trump fate was sealed. The Trump Train rolled though session number one and the majority of people who voted for Trump had the voice heard.
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Live coverage from the convention
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Does Californias delegation matter to national GOP?
Danny Thompson of Victorville punk rock band Face to Face is a self-described motorcycle guy.
Now 49, Thompson said he has been riding bikes off and on since he was a kid.
These days Im super into the adventure touring bikes, Thompson said in an email. I got really into that vibe after watching Ewan McGregors Long Way Round series. The idea of packing up the bike and heading off on an adventure is really appealing. I think that in general the motorcycle culture is about that freedom to explore.
Face to Face, plus country superstar Brantley Gilbert, Social Distortion, Palm Deserts Eagles of Death Metal and more, are set to perform Saturday at the motorcycle-centric Lost Highway Festival in Devore.
The Eagles of Death Metal were playing the Paris Bataclan concert hall during the November terrorist attack that killed almost 90 people there and more at cafes and a stadium nearby. That attack, along with the deadly one at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino in December that killed 14 people and injured 22, has made safety a prime concern. John Reese, a festival co-producer, said security is always taken seriously and is a top priority at the San Manuel Amphitheater festival, which also features camping.
We spend a lot of time going through security plans, Reese said. We want to have a safe environment for attendees. Were working with the San Bernardino County Sheriffs Department. In everything we do, public safety is our job No. 1.
Besides keeping the public safe, Reese also wants to keep them entertained. There are three new elements introduced this year: flat-track racing, a wheel of death and an additional motorcycle show (as well as three others).
I think we are really appealing to people who ride motorcycles, Reese said. Thats the goal. Thats the niche. The concert is a huge part of it and the motorcycle portion is a huge part of it.
More than 17,000 people attended last years festival, which featured Toby Keith and Social Distortion, and 20,000 people are expected this year, Reese said.
We have something for everyone, Reese said. Its why we built it and how we built it. But we focus on motorcycle culture.
Contact the writer: wes.woods@langnews.com; @JournoWes; @IEMusicNow
A bowl filled with raw fish, vegetables, sauce and garnishments is taking hold as a scrumptious alternative to hitting the drive-thru. Poke has ridden a wave of popularity across the Pacific to an increasing number of restaurants in Southern California.
Pronounced po-keh, the dish with Hawaiian roots traditionally features cubed raw fish tossed with soy sauce, green onions and sesame seeds. (Think deconstructed sushi.)
Poke in its purest form is fresh and simple, said Nino Camilo, founder of the I Love Poke Festival, which has multiple events around the state. Simplicity is important.
Camilo said poke evolved from islanders using leftover scraps of fish. The pieces were put in a bowl and toppings that were typical kitchen staples such as sea salt, kukui nut and seaweed were tossed in to create the dish.
Poke certainly has fans in consumers who are looking for healthful menu options, and can also fit into the hot trend of sustainable seafood depending on the fish chosen, Annika Stensson, director of research communications for the National Restaurant Association wrote in an email. Without a crystal ball, its hard to say how long a culinary trend or emerging trend will stick around. Looking at the growing popularity of sushi over the past couple of decades indicates that there definitely is interest in uncooked fish dishes among consumers, though.
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The demand for the raw fish dish means poke establishments are popping up all over Southern California and places such as Poki Cat in Corona, The Poke Place in Rancho Cucamonga and Poki-licious which has two locations in Riverside are thriving. And Camilos festival has expanded to include events in San Diego, Orange County and San Francisco.
Poke n Salad is scheduled to open in Temecula in early August and co-owner and former sushi chef Dwayne Ciang said he plans to open locations in Murrieta and Moreno Valley next.
I wanted to start a new adventure, he said. The community deserves better quality fast and casual food.
How does it work?
Think assembly line-style a la chain restaurants Subway or Chipotle, but instead of choosing meats, cheeses and vegetables, poke bowl patrons pick chunks of raw cubed fish such as albacore or ahi tuna, salmon or yellowtail. Some spots offer scallops, cooked shrimp and crab as well.
Then, customers pick their vegetables. Options typically include lettuce, carrots, scallions, edamame, avocado, sprouts, pickled cucumber and seaweed.
Shoyu, ponzu or housemade sauces using wasabi, chili oil or Sriracha are added for zest. The concoction is then topped with sesame seeds, masago (fish eggs), furikake(dried seaweed mixture) or nothing at all, depending on preference.
Most poke bowl establishments offer small, regular and large bowls and begin with rice, if a customer chooses. The sizes determine how much fish is used.
We use smaller chunks because it enhances the flavor and melts in your mouth, said Poki Cat manager Jimmy Luo.
Corona resident Susan Lewis said she keeps returning to Poki Cat because its healthy and fast.
Its great, you get all of your sushi in a bowl, Lewis said. You can taste how fresh it is and they have a wonderful selection of toppings to choose from.
At Poki-licious in Riverside, manager Monika Perez said since opening the Riverwalk location in March, the crowds have been steadily growing.
Before working here, I had no idea what poke was, Perez said. I eat it all the time now and when I finish eating I dont feel guilty.
Many restaurants offer a a spin on poke dishes such as nachos at Devilicious Eatery & Taproom and Yard House, a poke jar at Lazy Dog Restaurant & Bar and ahi tuna poke at Bluewater Grill.
But Camilo said while those dishes are inspired by poke, they are quite different.
I love a nice simple ahi shoyu poke over rice, Camilo said. I add sesame oil, onions, sesame seeds, sea salt and seaweed. If you think about it when you go to a restaurant in California and get it with a wonton or tortilla chip, its still delicious, but thats not the Hawaiian way.
Uncle Sumos Easy Poke
Ingredients
1 teaspoon Hawaiian salt
2 teaspoons sesame oil
3 tablespoons shoyu sauce
1/2 small onion, sliced
1 pound of sashimi grade ahi or albacore tuna
red pepper flakes to taste (optional)
Procedure:
1. Put dry ingredients first and mix well.
2. Add wet ingredients and mix with both hands. Taste and adjust as needed.
Source: Nino Camilo
Contact the writer: sschulte@pressenterprise.com, 951-368-9457
More than 700 employees working at an undisclosed local warehouse and employed by Adecco Staffing have received pink slips.
A notice from the state Economic Development Department from July 1 lists the future termination of 730 jobs. Employees at the Rancho Cucamonga-based office were notified June 15, with a final termination date of Aug. 17.
The Adecco associates had been working at an undisclosed warehouse in Ontario when management decided it did not wish to utilize their services further, according to Sarah Palmer, vice president of Adecco Group North America.
We have a very large client that has a warehouse in Ontario, California, that we did all the temp staffing for, Palmer said in a phone interview. Our client has had to change direction on utilizing outside contingent labor help and as a result, unfortunately, we are having to pull off all of our associates on assignment for this client.
Palmer said the goal of the company is to always find work for its associates, and officials plan to hold an in-house job fair for the employees Wednesday.
Some of them have already been replaced, she added. That happens commonly. They start to jump ship as soon they can and some of them have been replaced. Our goal is by August to have every one of them lined up with a new job.
John Husing, chief economist for the Inland Empire Economic Partnership and an expert on the regional economy, said the layoffs dont seem to indicate any souring of business for the overall warehouse industry.
When the economy turns from being in a recession to going into recovery, in the early phases, demand for part-time workers is generally high because companies are quite insecure about how their sales and production are going to go, Husing said.
The warehouse and fulfillment sector is one of the top Inland job growth sectors, according to experts.
Jay Prag, a professor of economics and finance at the Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University, said he hopes the decision by the warehouse operator was a one-time change.
Obviously, any one firm doesnt indicate a shift in overall employment, but its a reminder of how important that sector is to us, how sensitive the Inland Empire economy is to those jobs, and a reminder that we have to stay attractive as a region and a workforce to the warehouse and logistics sector.
Contact the writer: neil.nisperos@langnews.com or @ReporterNeil on Twitter
A youth group with sympathies for the ruling NDC has accused policy think tank African Center for Energy Policy (ACEP) of pursuing an anti-government agenda over the energy crisis in the country.
The group, in a statement issued today, claimed ACEP, through its leadership, is consciously downplaying the efforts of government in fixing the three-year old crisis.
Below is a copy of the statement by the Group
The youth campaigners supporting the re-election of President John Dramani Mahama, hereby express our worry over the deliberate attempt by the African Center for Energy Policy (ACEP) to demonize efforts of government aimed at permanently ending Ghana's electricity shortfall.
We have read a news story with a screaming headline: ACEP AGAINST SECOND KARPOWER published by the media, and after digesting the arguments put forward by the think-tank and noticing the half-truths therein, we firmly conclude, that ACEP is engaging in politics to score cheap political points for the NPP flagbearer, in this election.
ACEP's contention that Ghana does not need the second KARPOWER barge, is not only wrong in logic, we see it as a well calculated error committed by the energy think-tank to inject a message of hopelessness and apprehension among the Ghanaian populace, as far as electricity distribution is concerned.
The Deputy Executive Director of ACEP, Mr. Ben Boakye in that news story was reported as saying: "We don't need the second Karpowership" and quizzed: "For what?" He went on to repeat the NPP's old propaganda message, that the three year power crisis that has rocked the country is more of a financial and fuel supply issue than the lack of generational capacity.
Such argument has been put up by ACEP, who know very well that both the first and the second KARPOWER barges do not operate on gas or light crude, hence the operators cannot be bothered about the availability or otherwise of the two types of fuel.
Challenges with FPSO Kwame Nkrumah and in Nigeria have combined to unduly deny Ghanaians our much needed gas and light crude oil, for electricity generation. Yet, ACEP says it is a finance problem. Be that as it may, ACEP knows too well that the second KARPOWER barge which is expected to arrive in Ghana by October is built to generate electricity using Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) and not light crude or gas. KARPOWER barges will as a result, continue to produce electricity for Ghanaians, without consequence to the availability of light crude oil and gas in Ghana. Challenges in Nigeria and technical faults on the FPSOs in Ghana, will have no effect on the operations of the second KARPOWER ship. ACEP is therefore wrong. On the allegation that the initial lack of light crude and gas in the country was as a result of the lack of financial capacity, we wish to remind ACEP that the supply of HFO to the KARPOWER barges is the responsibility of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) who has not failed to discharge that responsibility.
ACEP is aware that GNPC has contracted Trafigura, the reputable oil trade firm to supply the HFO to KARPOWER, and that there has not been a single day in which KARPOWER shut down because of the lack of HFO. Obviously, the ACEP argument that there is lack of funds and consequently lack of fuel supplies, does not apply to KARPOWER. It therefore makes sense for the government to bring in the second KARPOWER barge to come help relieve Ghanaians from the perennial electricity shortfalls.
From the above, we are convinced that ACEP is deliberately putting out such falsehood to scare Ghanaians and poison their minds against the John Mahama government. We know that the Executive Director of ACEP, Mr. Mohammed Amin Adam is an NPP party member and a former Chief Executive of Tamale.
We however expect him to separate his politics from the official policy think-tank role that ACEP is supposed to play in Ghana. #iChooseJM therefore appeal to Ghanaians not to trust any statement that ACEP will make on government's programs to resolve our energy challenges.
Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana
Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.
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Africas future rests in the hands of its youth and efforts must be made to ensure they thrive, Bill Gates, the philanthropist and entrepreneur, said in South Africa on Sunday.
Delivering the 2016 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture at the University of Pretoria (Mamelodi campus), Gates said he was optimistic about the future of the continent because of its young people.
He said Africa was demographically the worlds youngest continent and in the next 35 years, it is estimated that two billion babies would be born in Africa and by 2050; 40 percent of the worlds children would live in Africa hence the belief that Africas youth can be the source of a special dynamism.
Economists talk about the demographic dividend. When you have more people of working age, and fewer dependents for them to take care of, you can generate phenomenal economic growth. Rapid economic growth in East Asia in the 1970s and 1980s was partly driven by the large number of young people moving into their work force.
But for me, the most important thing about young people is the way their minds work. Young people are better than old people at driving innovation, because they are not locked in by the limits of the past. The real returns will come if we can multiply this talent for innovation by the whole of Africas growing youth population, he said.
Gates used the platform of the 14th Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture the Nelson Mandela Foundations flagship programme to honour its founder, Nelson Mandela, and to raise topical issues affecting South Africa, Africa and the rest of the world to lay out his vision of how to create a better world.
Gates, who spoke on the theme, Living Together said he had admired Mandela, whom he had met on many occasions.
He said that one topic that Nelson Mandela came back to over and over again was the power of youth
He knew what he was talking about, because he started his career as a member of the African National Congress Youth League when he was still in his twenties. Later on, he understood that highlighting the oppression of young people was a powerful way to explain why things must change. There is a universal appeal to the conviction that youth deserve a chance. I agree with Mandela about young people, and that is one reason I am optimistic about the future of this continent, said Gates.
But to exploit Africas potential, its young people needed to be given every opportunity to thrive.
We are the human beings who must take action, and we have to decide now, because this unique moment wont last forever. We must clear away the obstacles that are standing in young peoples way so they can seize all of their potential, he said.
Gates added, If young people are sick and malnourished, their bodies and their brains will never fully develop. If they are not educated well, their minds will lie dormant. If they do not have access to economic opportunities, they will not be able to achieve their goals.
But if we invest in the right things if we make sure the basic needs of Africas young people are taken care of then they will have the physical, cognitive, and emotional resources they need to change the future. Life on this continent will improve faster than it ever has. And the inequities that have kept people apart will be erased by broad-based progress that is the very meaning of the words: living together.
The co-founder of software giant, Microsoft, said issues that needed to be tackled to ensure Africas youth thrived were health and nutrition, education; productivity and economic opportunity and governance
He said health and nutrition were a top priority because when people arent healthy, they cant turn their attention to other priorities. But when health improves, life improves by every measure.
Gates said the next was education without which children could not develop the knowledge and skills to become productive contributors to society.
Then, Africas youth needed to have the economic opportunities to channel their energy and their ideas into progress.
But Gates said good governance was vital to ensure that those things happen and he urged governments to play their part.
All of these things advances in health, in education, in agricultural productivity, in energy wont happen on their own. They can only happen in the context of governments that function well enough to enable them, he said.
Gates said he believed that Africa could achieve the future it aspired to and added Africas young believe in themselves, and they believe in their countries and the future of the continent.
The priority now is to make sure they have the opportunity to turn those beliefs into action. Because young people with this sense of purpose can make the difference.
Gates recalled Nelson Mandela who said, Young people are capable, when aroused, of bringing down the towers of oppression and raising the banners of freedom. But our duty is not merely to arouse; our duty is to invest in young people, to put in place the basic building blocks so that they can build the future and iur duty is to do it now, because the innovations of tomorrow depend on the opportunities available to children today.
Other speakers of the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture includes, Bill Clinton, Former US President 2003, Archbishop Desmond Tutu -2004, Former President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa 2006, Former Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan 2007, Liberian President, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf 2008 and Former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson -2012
Source: GNA
Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.
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JAKARTA, July 19 (Reuters) - Major palm oil trader Cargill Ltd said it will suspend business with Malaysian palm oil producer IOI Corporation Bhd after the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) suspended the Malaysian firm's certificate.
"IOI Group has yet to deliver a responsible sourcing policy or a detailed sustainability implementation plan to meet our requirements," Cargill said in a statement on Monday.
"Cargill will suspend business by not entering into any new purchase contracts until IOI Group can meet our requirements and comply with our sustainable palm oil policy."
In March, the RSPO, withdrew its "sustainabliity certification" from IOI due to a complaint alleging IOI illegally chopping down rainforest in Indonesia and planted palm oil on peatlands.
The suspension of IOI's green credentials has already caused Nestle, Unilever, Mars and Kellogg to drop IOI Group as a supplier.
IOI could not be reached for a comment outside business hours. (Reporting by Fransiska Nangoy, editing by William Hardy)
The Inspector General of Police, John Kudalor has reiterated his earlier call for a complete social media ban during the November 7 general elections.
The Police administration had earlier hinted in June this year that it was considering shutting down all social media services in Ghana on Election Day. The IGPs comments generated widespread criticism and condemnation from the general public and various civil society organizations who felt such an action would represent suppression of freedom of speech.
The Police administration through its Director of Communications at the Police Service, Cephas Arthur later backtracked saying the IGP made the comments on the spur of the moment and that there were no plans in place to ban social media on November 7.
But Dr. Kudalor interacting with Police personnel during a tour of the Eastern region Tuesday categorically stated that even though no decision has been taken yet, he stands by a ban on social media on election day. He said it would be a way to counter the activities of potential troublemakers who might disrupt the election process using the various Social media platforms.
According to the IGP, he will ensure an eight-hour ban on social media during the general elections to ensure peaceful election if the need arises.
Social media is used to churn out untruths and half-baked truths and finally lies...we as the Police will not sit down for this to happen, we shall recommend that the Social Media is banned for the seven or eight hours that the election will take place after all it is nothing but Ghana first and I still stand by that, the IGP said.
Source: starrfmonline.com
Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.
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Member of Parliament (MP) for Lower Manya Constituency in the Eastern Region, Hon Emmanuel Tei Larbi has said that founder and Leader of the Progressive People's Party (PPP), Dr Paa Kwesi Nduom would never be President of Ghana despite his ownership of numerous companies across the world.
The fact that Paa Kwesi Nduom has and is managing a lot of companies around the world does not mean he is fit enough to lead this nation, the two have nothing in common, he stated.
According to him the approaches of dealing with each of the two are different and have nothing in common; therefore he shouldnt think he can have it on a silver platter.
In an interview on Citi FM breakfast show, the twice defeated presidential candidate, once on the ticket of the Convention Peoples Party (CPP) affirmed this years election would be his last attempt at Ghanas Presidency.
I have told our party that this is the election that I want to preside over and then from here on leave leadership positions to our younger people, so this is my last round. This is the last opportunity for Ghanaians to recognize the person who can do the job, if this one passes by I have done what I can the rest is up to Ghanaians, He told CITI FMs Bernard Koku Avle.
Source: Elizabeth Semiheva/Peacefmonline.com
Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.
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Mr Hassan Ayariga, the Presidential Candidate of the All Peoples Congress (APC), says the worsening economic situation in the country could be attributed to the poor leadership of the two dominant parties.
During a courtesy call on the chiefs and people of Christian Village near Achimota to climax the five day Come on Board tour in Accra, he said the economy was retrogressing and the hardships will keep worsening if Ghanaians keep voting for the two parties; the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP).
Mr Ayariga and his team began the tour at Dome through Dodowa to Abokobi and Adentan. They also visited Ayikuma in the Shai Osudoku District.
He said: The NPP and the NDC alone cannot manage this country, when political parties win power it does not mean they should not listen to others. Everybody should be brought on board to help towards the development of the country.
The main problem of this country is bad leadership and the winner takes all mentality. If the NPP wins, everything is in the hands of the party and so is the NDC with total disregard for any other party.
One should either belong to these parties before they will listen to you even if you have the solution.
Mr Ayariga said under the leadership of the APC, various sectors of the economy would receive a major boost and the widespread poverty would reduce by utilising the abundant resources the country was endowed with.
Health, education, employment have not received any major achievement for so many years. We move from one country to the other begging to improve on these sectors whiles resources are available here. Our partys vision is to improve the well being of everybody in the country making use of these resources, he said.
The APC used the occasion to introduce the executives and the parliamentary candidate for the Okaikoi North Constituency, Mr Joseph Akoto Lamptey, to the chiefs and elders at the Christian Village.
Mr Ayariga mentioned that chieftaincy, as one of the important institutions of the state, should be considered a partner in development, adding that the idea of chiefs to refrain from politics should be looked at again.
At Asofan in the Trobo Constituency, Mr Ayariga appealed to the chiefs and people to vote for the APC as the only party to address the widespread hardships of the country, particularly youth unemployment.
Look around and you will find poverty all around, a lot of the youth are not in any gainful employment. We are going to tackle this head-on by creating job opportunities for the youth, he said.
Mr Ayariga touched on agriculture as one of the sectors that the party would give priority to describing the various policies by past and present governments as inadequate to address the challenges the sector was confronted with.
Both the NPP and NDC have done little in agriculture. We are always importing food products from outside. What are we doing, is to ensure that we have enough food in the country," he said.
He appealed to Muslim youths not to allow any political party to use them to forment violence, urging them to be agents of peace in their respective communities before, during and after the election.
The Chief of Asofan, Nii Sei-Anertey Abbey, commended the APC for the respect accorded the chiefs by visiting them in its quest to occupy the highest office of the land and prayed that it achieved its goals.
Source: Daily Graphic
Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.
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Look, its only cheating if you get caught. Everyone whos ever written a University essay knows this to be an absolute truth.
But goddamn, if youre lifting unattributed blocks of text from somewhere to pass off as your own words, youve gotta pick your spots.
A first year 1,000 word undergrad essay on the importance of maintaining metaphor integrity in Shakespearean film adaptations? Sure. Go nuts. Rip that shit all you want.
But a speech at the Republican National Convention in support of your partner who is running for President? Yeah, nah. You might want to give Google Books a miss on that.
Donald Trump is currently enjoying the ultimate ego gobby that is the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. Keynote speakers as diverse as actor Scott Baio and Willie Robertson of the A&E reality TV series Duck Dynasty have spoken in favour of Trump and about how Obama is a muslim and how back in the good old days that one place on the corner sold grilled cheese and milkshakes but now theres a Whole Foods across the road what the heck?
But I digress.
Trumps wife Melania addressed the baying masses in Cleveland earlier today, with a speech that was surprisingly stirring. Despite it being her second language, Melania (who has been working as a speechwriter for the past six-odd years) captivated the crowd with her words that were at once moving, humbling, and wholly familiar.
Actually come to think of it, they were too familiar.
And that feeling of familiarity is not a coincidence, because as it turns out, a giant chunk of it was lifted pretty much verbatim from Michelle Obamas 2008 speech at the Democratic National Convention.
S-E-R-I-O-U-S-L-Y.
Cop the side-by-side comparison, why dont you.
The wife of the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee just plagiarised a speech made by the current, sitting, Democratic First Lady of the United States. Wonders: They truly never cease.
The internet being the internet, the joke machine immediately swung into overdrive, digging up a surprising amount of quotes Melania has made in the past that suddenly sound extremely suspect.
Work, work, work, work, work, work
He say me have to
Work, work, work, work, work, work! #FamousMelaniaTrumpQuotes jesseWilliams. (@iJesseWilliams) July 19, 2016
Life is like a box of chocolates Melania Trump billy eichner (@billyeichner) July 19, 2016
You wanna rumble wit the bee huh? Put a hex on ya whole family!#FamousMelaniaTrumpQuotes LEFT (@LeftSentThis) July 19, 2016
Barack and I want to thank you for your support. #FamousMelaniaTrumpQuotes Miles Tougeaux (@milestougeaux) July 19, 2016
You better call Becky with the good hair #FamousMelaniaTrumpQuotes Akilah Hughes (@AkilahObviously) July 19, 2016
I have had it with these mothahfuckin snakes on this mothahfuckin plane #FamousMelaniaTrumpQuotes Anna Kendrick (@AnnaKendrick47) July 19, 2016
Id very much like to be excluded from this narrative, one that Ive never been asked to be apart of since 2009. #FamousMelaniaTrumpQuotes Daniel Preda (@MisterPreda) July 19, 2016
Never gonna give you up. Never gonna let you down. #FamousMelaniaTrumpQuotes Julia Wilde (@Julia_SCI) July 19, 2016
Who wouldve thought after all this time such wisdom would prove to be theft?
The nerve of it all.
Source: Twitter.
Photo: Carolyn Cole/Getty.
Theres nothing like a very public lambasting to put someone in a reflective mood.
This morning, Sonia Kruger tried her best to douse the fire surrounding her ignorant call to ban Muslim immigration after the deadly terror attack in Nice, France and subsequent failed as a mother defence of herself on Twitter by clarifying what she *actually* meant.
Only problem is that what she *actually* meant is pretty much exactly what we thought, and its still v. v. bad.
Wasting no time in addressing the controversy on TODAY Extra this morning, Kruger admitted her views may have been extreme but maintained theres no simple answer to protecting our country from the atrocities of terrorism. In other words, shes hedging her bets in the hope people lay off her.
Heres the statement in full:
Before we start the show, I would like to say a few things about what happened yesterday on the Today Show. The discussion we had was centred around a newspaper article which measured the correlation of Muslim population in certain countries and the number of certain terrorist attacks. I thought the article made relevant points. We witnessed too many atrocities in the name of terrorism.
Last weeks attack on men, women and children in Nice left me in utter disbelief. I saw the image of a baby covered in a plastic sheet with a doll lying beside her and it rocked me to the very core. I imagined what that must have been like for the people of Nice, for the friends and families of the lost and the thought that it could happen here terrifies me. This type of attack affects people from all walks of life and I want to make it very clear that I have complete respect for people of all races, and religions. I acknowledge my views yesterday may have been extreme. The reaction overnight in the papers, online and via social media demonstrates that there are a myriad of opinions in Australia which I actually appreciate. It is a hugely complex and sensitive issue. Its an issue with no simple answer. And its an issue that cannot be fully discussed in a short televised segment. Is there a solution? I dont know. We elect politicians to make those calls. They analyse and then they decide and we hope they get it right. Its a privilege to live in a country such as Australia which embraces a multicultural society. But there is no simple answer here and if we are to find a solution to the situation at the very least we need to be able to discuss it.
A discussion? Yes. But that level of ignorance? Nah.
Krugers colleagues, including Karl Stefanovic and Sylvia Jeffreys, got behind her to deny assumptions that shes racist but didnt agree with her views.
Karlos himself from an immigrant family actually made a point of disagreeing with her opinion, though supporting her right to express one.
I think what is good about it is that people are talking about it because it is an issue that a lot of people have an opinion on in Australia. Like you said, Sylvia, Sonia she is not a racist, she is a nice person, I have known her for a little while. I dont agree with her opinions because most people know I come from a family of immigrants and that is how I got here.
You can watch Sonias non-apology HERE.
Source and photo: 9News.
ITS ABOOT TIME. YAH.
Netflix have bloody finally announced that new episodes of insanely popular true crime documentary series Making A Murderer are coming to your laptop screens, so you may eagerly learn even more about the grandiose failures of the American justice system while laying in a comfy bed with chips all down your front.
In case you somehow missed this hyped AF series, it follows the story of accused murderer from Wisconsin, Steven Avery.
Avery was falsely convicted of rape in the mid-80s, and spent 18 years in jail for a crime he did not commit. Not long after getting out of prison, he was accused of murdering reporter Teresa Halbach the evidence was stacked against him, but Avery says the authorities have a vendetta against him and planted evidence.
According to a Netflix press release, creators Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi are in production on episodes for the second season as we speak.
New eps will follow Avery as he challenges his conviction with new lawyer Kathleen Zellner, as will Averys co-accused Brendan Dassey with his new legal team, led by Laura Nirider and Steve Drizin.
This next chapter will provide an in-depth look at the high-stakes post-conviction process, as well as, the emotional toll the process takes on all involved.
Theres no word on how many episodes, or when well get them. But well keep you updated.
US / YOU / EVERYONE ^^
Source/Photo: Netflix.
Paul McCartney
Paul McCartney performs in concert during his "Out There Tour 2015" at the Wells Fargo Center on Sunday, June 21, 2015, in Philadelphia. (Photo by Owen Sweeney/Invision/AP)
(Owen Sweeney)
So, on Sunday, I gave you my completely arbitrary Top 21 Paul McCartney songs list.
(In case you didn't know, Sir Paul is playing at Hersheypark Stadium on Tuesday night. Hershey has declared it . We will have reporter JC Lee and photographer Sean Simmers covering (ex)Beatlemania in Hershey on Tuesday. If you have a McCartney sighting, please tag @pennlive on Twitter and Instagram).
Some of you agreed. Some of you thought it was bogus (and maybe it was, hence the mention of it being completely arbitrary). Some of you suggested I reconsider and add some better songs.
Here's the list of songs PennLive readers -- and my Facebook friends) -- thought should have been included:
"For No One," written by McCartney and credited to John Lennon and McCartney, is a baroque pop tune that appeared on "Revolver" in 1966.
"I Saw Her Standing There," was written by McCartney and Lennon and was the opening track to the Beatles debut album, "Please Please Me" in 1963 in the U.K. It was released in the U.S. as the B-side to "I Want To Hold Your Hand."
"Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five" (sometimes written as "1985"), written by McCartney and performed with Wings, was featured in the 2001 documentary DVD "Wingspan" and Wings' 1974 TV special "One Hand Clapping."
"Wanderlust," from McCartney's third solo album, "Tug of War," in 1982.
"Drive My Car" was written by McCartney with lyrical contributions from Lennon and performed by The Beatles. It was released on the British version of "Rubber Soul" in 1965 and also appeared in North America on the "Yesterday and Today" collection.
"Medicine Jar," from "Venus and Mars," Wings' fourth album in 1975.
"Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey," from the 1971 album "Ram," was written with Linda McCartney.
"Jet," written by Paul and Linda McCartney, was performed by Wings on "Band on the Run" in 1973.
"My Love," written by Paul and Linda McCartney, was performed by Wings on "Red Rose Speedway" in 1973.
"Rocky Raccoon" was written primarily by McCartney, and it appeared on The Beatles' White album. McCartney said he was inspired while playing acoustic with Lennon and Donovan in India.
"Too Many People," written by Paul and Linda McCartney, is from "Ram," 1971.
"Coming Up" from "McCartney II" in 1980 was recommended, but only the live version, seen here:
"Helter Skelter," written my McCartney and attributed to Lennon-McCartney, appears on the White album.
"Can't Buy Me Love" was released by The Beatles in 1964 on the A-side of their sixth U.K. single, with "You Can't Do That" as the B-side.
"Got To Get You Into My Life" was released in 1966 on "Revolver."
"Let 'Em In" was written by McCartney and performed by Wings on their 1976 album "Wings at the Speed of Sound."
"Magneto and Titanium Man" was the B-side to Wings' "Venus and Mars/Rock Show" in 1975.
"Every Night" was written by McCartney while he was visiting Greece and first released on "McCartney" in 1970. It was first performed live in Liverpool in 1979.
"And I Love Her," from "Hard Day's Night," from The Beatles third album, "A Hard Day's Night," was released in 1964 as a single with "If I Fell."
The live version of "Maybe I'm Amazed" with Wings:
34887_0648.jpg
Pictured is Dauphin County coroner Graham Hetrick in a promotional photograph for the Investigation Discovery series "The Coroner: I Speak for the Dead," which premiered Monday, July 18, 2016. (Photo provided)
Dauphin County coroner Graham Hetrick's new forensic series premiered Monday, and it featured a Harrisburg case.
The first episode of "The Coroner: I Speak for the Dead," which aired at 10 p.m., looked back at the case of Iris Fennel Belcher. Belcher was a 20-year-old mother found fatally shot Dec. 20, 1996, in her home along McCleaster Street in Harrisburg.
Her ex-boyfriend Tyshaunt Love, of Harrisburg, was convicted in 2006 for third-degree murder in connection to the death of Belcher. He's serving 15 to 30 years at State Correctional Facility -- Rockview in Bellefonte, about half an hour northeast of State College. The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania denied his appeal Nov. 26, 2012, according to court documents.
The episode began with Hetrick recalling his childhood above his father's funeral home in Harrisburg. He then went on to say that he's been Dauphin County's coroner for the last 25 years and has participated in close to 3,000 autopsies during that time. The coroner is an elected position in Pennsylvania.
"They say everybody has a story to tell," he narrated. "But I say every 'body' has a story to tell."
The series featured interviews with Belcher's friends and family members; and law enforcement officials who were involved in the case. It also jumped back and forth between reenactments of the crime and the investigation, from Hetrick's visit to the crime scene to his examination of Belcher's body. Actors portrayed the people who were involved in the investigation, including Hetrick.
The coroner quickly established that Belcher's death was a "crime of passion" based on her injuries.
"In this case, with Iris, you have to think about somebody being so angered after shooting a person once that they would put a gun to their lips and fire the gun again," he said. "When you think of it in that context, that is true passion and anger."
The turning point came when Love's girlfriend admitted to police that she saw him kill Belcher. She initially told police that Love was with her on the night that Belcher died, according to the episode. The show then explained that there were certain details about the case that Love's girlfriend would have only known if she had been at the crime scene.
The episode concluded by tying Hetrick's observations to what Love's girlfriend told the police, leading to a conviction.
"The Coroner: I Speak for the Dead" will return 10 p.m. Monday on Investigation Discovery. The next episode, titled "Call the Coroner," will follow Hetrick as he investigates a woman's death in her backyard. He believes that the perpetrator is a "special kind of assassin who kills for the thrill of it," according to
.
Michelle Obama
First Lady Michelle Obama waves from the podium during a sound check at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., on Monday, Sept. 3, 2012. She is slated to speak on the first night of the 2016 Democratic National Convention. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Democrats have announced the speakers who will headline the four nights of their convention in Philadelphia next week.
The convention begins Monday with the theme "United Together." In keeping with that theme, it will feature Clinton's primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and First Lady Michelle Obama, along with Astrid Silva, a "Dreamer activist" who was brought to the U.S. as an undocumented child immigrant.
Tuesday will seek to to highlight Clinton's career with the theme "A Lifetime of Fighting for Children and Families." Speakers will be former President Bill Clinton and "Mothers of the Movement" -- women whose children were killed by gun violence and in police shootings.
Wednesday's theme is "Working Together" and the evening's key speakers will be President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.
On the final night of the convention, the theme will be "Stronger Together." Hillary Clinton is expected to speak about her vision for the country. Her daughter, Chelsea, is also scheduled to speak.
Democrats say they will announce more speakers in the coming days, a list that will include politicians, advocates and celebrities.
For more details, see the convention website.
WILKES-BARRE, Pa. (AP) -- Officials have identified a correctional officer who died after a brief altercation that also killed an inmate at a Pennsylvania prison.
A corrections officer and an inmate are dead after an altercation and fall at the Luzerne County Correctional Facility, July 18, 2016.
Luzerne County Coroner William Lisman on Tuesday identified the officer as 25-year-old Kristopher Moules of Larksville.
Moules was killed Monday night at Luzerne County Correctional Facility in Wilkes-Barre. Officials previously identified the inmate as 27-year-old Timothy D. Gilliam Jr.
Lisman says both men died of multiple traumatic injuries from a fall. The inmate's death was ruled accidental. Lisman is not yet ruling on the officer's death, pending further investigation.
Officials aren't yet saying what led to the altercation or how exactly the two men died.
The Citizens' Voice quotes Gilliam's mother as saying the two fell down an elevator shaft:
"We don't know anything. They just said that they both fell five stories," Kitty Moules said, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. "He just went to work, and now he's dead."
The mother of the inmate killed in the fight, Kia Bradford of Woodbridge, N.J., said county officials told her that her son, Timothy D. Gilliam Jr., died after falling five stories down an elevator shaft.
Roger Carver.jpg
Roger Carver
(submitted)
A couple accused of having sex in a car while a five-year-old boy was in the back seat have been charged with corruption of minors, state police in Harrisburg say.
Amber Elizabeth Allman, 34, of Shippensburg, and Roger Wayne Carver, 48, of York, were charged after the incident last summer near the loading docks of Giant Food Store on Route 39, in South Hanover Township, police say.
Trooper Brent Miller said the investigation began when someone discovered a cell phone video the couple is accused of making while they were performing sex acts on each other in a car last summer.
The video was found after one of them asked a friend to copy the contents of their phone, Miller said. The video shows a child in the back seat, he said.
Northern York Regional Police began the investigation into where the video was made, Miller said, since that's where the video was discovered. The location in the video was eventually traced to South Hanover township, and was made between June and July 2015.
Carver is in York County prison on other charges. He was arrested July 6 on charges including possession of marijuana, resisting arrest and public drunkenness.
A summons was mailed to Allman.
Children & Youth Services agencies in York and Dauphin counties have been involved in the case, Miller said, and the child has been placed in other care.
george w. bush.jpg
George W. Bush is concerned he may be the last Republican president, according to Politico.
(Associated Press)
The 43rd president is concerned he may be the last Republican to win the White House.
"I'm worried that I will be the last Republican president," George W. Bush said in April, according to Politico.
He made the comment to about 1,000 people at a staff reunion in Dallas, which Politico called a "shadow convention" in its Tuesday report.
Bush's fears are shared by other Republicans who say the party's presumptive GOP nominee, Donald Trump, has pushed away Latinos with his plan for a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. He has also called for an immigration ban against Muslims and an end to certain international trade deals.
As Politico reported:
"In interviews with more than 40 of the Republican Party's leading strategists, lawmakers, fundraisers and donors, a common thread has emerged heading into the general election: Win or lose in November (and more expect to lose than not), they fear that Trump's overheated and racialized rhetoric could irreparably poison the GOP brand among the fastest-growing demographic groups in America."
Read more of Politico's report here.
cocaine.jpg
Cocaine .
(The Patriot-News/file)
Omar Caliph Aquil had good reason to downplay his criminality when he came before a federal judge for sentencing in a drug case.
The Harrisburg man insisted he was just a street-level drug dealer, a "minor participant" in an international cocaine distribution network that was rooted in the South American nation of Colombia.
U.S. Middle District Judge Yvette Kane showed her disagreement by slapping Aquil with a 70-month federal prison term.
On Tuesday, a federal appeals court panel agreed with her and rejected Aquil's challenge to his sentence.
Judge Michael A. Chagares noted in the opinion by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit that Aquil was caught as a result of a probe of a cocaine pipeline that stretched from Colombia, through Aruba and Puerto Rico to the eastern U.S. Investigators learned through wiretaps that Aquil was regularly buying cocaine from a childhood friend, Raul Vargas, a principal in the drug network.
After his arrest in October 2012, Aquil, now 38, told investigators he had been buying coke from Vargas since 2007, usually in amounts of 1 to 4 ounces. He pleaded guilty in 2015 to conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine. His plea deal included an acknowledgement that he had peddled between 196 and 280 grams of the drug in the midstate.
During his sentencing, Kane rejected Aquil's argument that he deserved a reduction in his prison sentence because he was a minor participant in the drug distribution ring. Aquil's lawyer said his client was "astounded" to learn after his arrest that Vargas was a ringleader in such a large unlawful enterprise.
Aquil was among 21 people indicted in connection with that ring. His attorney asked Kane for a 33-month prison sentence.
In denying Aquil's appeal, Charages concluded that the Harrisburg man isn't giving himself enough credit.
Aquil had to know he was part of a large and illegal network that operated beyond the borders of the U.S., the appeals court judge found. And without dealers like Aquil, that network would not have been able to function, Chagares noted.
"Aquil's actions played a significant role to the success of the venture," especially since he processed the powdered cocaine he bought into crack cocaine, the judge wrote. "The distribution and refining of cocaine was vital to the success of the enterprise."
One week before Frank Whitlock was shot to death in a Harrisburg alley, he hinted that his life was in danger.
"Sum times I be feelin like everyday mite be my last," he posted on his Facebook page at 4:06 a.m. on July 9.
A friend responded to his post, asking why he thought the end could be near.
"Cuz dats the way life is set up," he wrote. "U jus never kno but sumtimes u feel it in the air."
Exactly one week after he typed those words_ nearly to the same hour_ someone shot Whitlock dead in the 1200 block of Hunter Street. Neighbors reported hearing up to 15 gunshots in what they said sounded like a shootout.
Police put out an initial news release on Saturday, noting they found Whitlock, 27, unresponsive on a sidewalk about 3:20 a.m. Neighbors said he suffered multiple wounds to his chest, and possibly neck. Police noted that bullets had damaged multiple vehicles and homes nearby.
On Monday, police declined to provide any updates about the killing, which represented the seventh homicide in the city so far this year.
Whitlock, who also went by the nickname Frank Nitty, had been released from prison about three months ago. In fact, Whitlock spent many of his teenage years and nearly all of his adult life in custody, according to his sister, Krissy Whitlock.
"He had a beautiful heart," she said. "But he was in and out of the system since he was 13 and he didn't know anything else."
Frankie, as he liked to be called, and Krissy were raised by their grandfather. Frankie was smart, silly and a deep thinker. But he was always trying to fit in with the crowd on the street, Krissy said, looking for acceptance.
The crowd of kids and Frankie would do something, and he "was always the guy who got caught," she said. "That was Frankie. He wasn't even a good criminal."
After running into trouble as a juvenile, he was sent to the Glen Mills reform school, located south of Philadelphia, where he earned his general equivalency diploma. But once he got out of school, he got in trouble again.
A series of criminal charges, from robbery to theft, kept him locked up. He didn't celebrate a single birthday in the last 13 years outside of detention, Krissy said.
Then a series of unexpected deaths hit the family.
His grandfather died in 2013. His mother died in March, 2014. His father died eight months later. His aunt and two cousins also died in the same time frame.
When Frankie was finally released from prison in April, the city he previously knew had changed. He had few relatives left, his son was calling another man, 'Dad,' and he struggled with the challenges of adult life.
"He was just lost," Krissy said. "He wanted to do the right thing. But how do you maintain that? The truth is that my brother was scared to be free. He didn't know how to be free."
The day Frankie got out of jail, he posted a picture of his Department of Corrections identification card on Facebook and wrote, "RIP," to his old self. "Birth to a new beginning."
The first thing he wanted to do with his newfound freedom was take his 5-year-old son and nephew to the movies. He borrowed Krissy's car and was home by 9:30 p.m.
After putting the boys to bed, Frankie and Krissy stayed up all night talking.
"He had me crying," she said. "He was going through all this stuff (in prison) and nobody knew about it. They go through a lot in there. Then they come out with all these anger issues and they don't know how to deal with it."
Krissy let him stay at her house and helped him secure a job at a York warehouse. She was with him every day.
The first month went well. He got up at 4 a.m. so he could be at work on time, and continued reported to work even after he broke his foot.
On May 10, he reaffirmed his dedication to legal employment through a post on Facebook.
"I used to be addicted to the fast money," the post said. "Til I realized the slow money was keeping me free."
But Krissy could see the confusion growing in her brother.
"He was like, 'What do I do now?' In prison, you're used to being told what to do," she said. "My heart just ached for him.
The siblings toyed with the idea of starting a business together.
On May 27, Frankie posted on Facebook that he had been out of prison for two months and hadn't smoked, drank or been out partying. In mid-June, Frankie lamented the lack of an engaged father in his life and noted that he was a self-made man.
"I never had anybody in my life growin up to show me how to be a man," he wrote on Facebook. "Everything I know I had to learn on my own the best way I could thru trial n error. In prison ur forced to grow up real fast. I am the man i am today bcuz of my past. I'm not perfect but I'm continuously workin on myself n learnin how to be a better man."
But about that time, he had had moved back into the city and had stopped working. Krissy wasn't sure why he lost his job. They grew apart.
"My brother needed to find himself," she said. "I had to love him from a distance. He needed to build himself up. I couldn't make him follow me."
In the end, Frankie apparently followed the wrong things. In the days before his death, he posted several photos with a friend whom he called "my shooter." The friend appeared to be waving a gun in one photo.
Now Krissy just wants to know what happened in the 1200 block of Hunter, where her brother died on a sidewalk. Police have not revealed a possible motive.
Some neighbors reported a man and woman in a white car arguing with a group of women before the shooting.
"He was all I had, except for my son," Krissy said. "We were the only ones left. Now it's just me."
Anyone with information about Whitlock's death should call County Dispatch at 717-558-6900 and ask to speak with a detective or visit Dauphin County CrimeWatch, to submit a tip.
Tipsters can remain anonymous and are eligible for a reward of up to $2,000 for information that leads to an arrest.
WILLIAMSPORT -- "Something is not quite right here" a federal judge told a Bradford County man after sentencing him in a bath salts case to two years' probation.
U.S. Middle District Judge Matthew W. Brann Tuesday warned Justin Johnson, 36, of Athens, after giving him what he called a "fairly mild" sentence, that he would go to jail if he came back before him.
The judge did not explain his skepticism.
Johnson had pleaded guilty in February 2015 to a charge of conspiracy to distribute what is commonly known as bath salts between January 2012 and February 2014 in Lycoming, Bradford and Wyoming counties.
At the guilty plea hearing Assistant U.S. Attorney George J. Rocktashel said Johnson was responsible for distributing the equivalent of 17.191 kilograms of marijuana.
He was accused of accumulating thousands of dollars and concealing it in a warehouse and car dealership.
Johnson has paid $165,000 that represents the forfeiture of assets obtained through the proceeds from the distribution of bath salts. His sentence includes a $1,000 fine.
Johnson pleaded for probation noting he is the sole provider of a 12-year-old special needs daughter.
A co-defendant, Mark Marcoccia, 52, of Towanda, was sentenced in June on the same charge to eight years in prison and fined $1,000. He agreed to forfeit $100,000.
Brann explained Marcoccia had a state and federal record but Johnson did not.
U.S. Courthouse
The U.S. Courthouse in Harrisburg
(Matt Miller, PennLive)
A Franklin County man will serve 20 years in federal prison for producing child pornography showing a 13-year-old boy engaging in "sexually explicit conduct," U.S. Attorney Peter Smith said Tuesday.
U.S. Middle District Senior Judge Sylvia H. Rambo also ordered Martin A. Mentzer, 44, to spend 15 years on probation after his release from prison.
Mentzer was indicted last August. He pleaded guilty to a charge of sexual exploitation of children in February. In a sentencing memorandum, his lawyer, noting that Mentzer is a first-time offender, urged Rambo to impose a 15-year jail term.
The FBI, which investigated the case, said Mentzer committed his crimes over several months starting in October 2014.
A special storytime was held at Newville Borough Community Park that included a visit from the LifeNet 8-1 air medical ambulance, based out of Hagerstown, Maryland, and a visit from firefighters and apparatus from Friendship Hose Company in Newville.
Each Tuesday, the librarians at John Graham Library in Newville, part of the Cumberland County Library System, hold a storytime for kids. Sometimes the storytime comes with special guests.
Visitors have ranged from borough police and school bus drivers to farm animals and tractors and service dogs.
After the LifeNet Eurocopter EC135 touched down on the ball field at the borough park, dozens of children, who minutes earlier were listening to librarian Connie Weaver read the book, "Yellow Copter", were let loose to explore the helicopter and talk with its three-member crew.
Members of Newville's Friendship Hose Company were also nearby with an engine, rescue truck and ambulances for kids to explore.
Future storytimes are posted on the library's web site.
The "Never Trump" movement seems like it's never giving up.
Protests broke out Monday afternoon on the floor of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland after party officials waved off a last-minute push by anti-Donald Trump delegates.
Those delegates submitted signatures to try and force a vote on convention rules, and after 4 p.m. protests and shouting began as some called for a roll call vote.
Congressman Steve Womack, an Arkansas Republican, said there weren't enough signatures to yield the roll call.
Leading the push was Utah Sen. Mike Lee, a Ted Cruz supporter, who wants to change the rules for the 2020 presidential election that will close primaries and caucuses to voters who aren't registered Republicans.
"This is about the future of the party," Lee told CNN's Dana Bash during a live broadcast. "This is not about Donald Trump, this is about having a good, fair rules process...I would like to have conservative candidates in the future."
According to CNN, Trump aides and RNC staff worked the convention floor in Quicken Loans Arena to get rid of the anti-Trump signatures needed for a roll call vote.
Trump operatives also challenged the validity of various signatures, and it was enough to dodge a roll call vote, CNN reported.
According to a network broadcast:
"Staffers could be seen fanning across the floor, pulling aside delegates and coordinating their counter-efforts, and top Trump delegate wrangler Rick Gates said he was confident they can repeat their success last week when the Rules Committee met and blocked efforts to unbind the delegates.
"Our goal is to destroy them," Gates said."
Pippa Middleton is engaged and shes got the ring to prove it!
Princess Kates sister, 32, flashed her huge new rock to photographers outside her London home Tuesday morning, adding that she couldnt be happier to become the fianc e of financier James Mathews.
Miss Pippa Middleton and Mr. James Matthews are delighted to announce they became engaged on Sunday, July 17 and plan to marry next year, the pair said in a statement.
Mathews reportedly got down on one knee to propose to Middleton on Sunday during a romantic break in the beautiful surroundings of the Lake District in northwest England. The proposal was so sudden that it took friends and family completely by surprise.
They make a wonderful couple and we wish them every happiness together, proud dad Michael Middleton said in a statement Tuesday.
A Kensington Palace spokesman said, The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are absolutely delighted with the news.
An excited family friend tells PEOPLE, Woo hoo! She kept that under the radar! Good move!
Middleton and Matthews first dated in 2012 before subsequently splitting. The fitness fanatic then dated Nico Jackson for three years until they split in 2015.
Three months later, the couple re-lit their flame when, Matthews, 40, was spotted by Pippas side during a St. Barts vacation with her younger brother, James Middleton.
I saw them a couple of months walking around the village just casually strolling through the woods having a chat. They seemed very happy together, says the family friend, adding, Its wonderful news. Ive met James and a hes a really nice guy.
Want to keep up with the latest royals coverage? Click here to subscribe to the Royals Newsletter.
Matthews, who runs Eden Rock Capital Management in Londons swanky Mayfair district, also vacationed with Pippa and her parents Michael and Carole Middleton in August, at his parents hotel, Eden Rock, in St. Barts.
Princess Kates Hairdresser Richard Ward Remembers the Hair Gig of the Century
Her parents really do like him a lot and he spends quite a lot of time with the Middletons. Carole in particular is very approving. Everyone agrees that they are very well-suited in many ways, a source tells PEOPLE.
Given that shell soon be part of the family, its safe to assume that Middleton will be free to return to the white sand beaches of the Caribbean whenever she wants a fact thats not been missed by her friends.
The family have the St. Barts hotel, adds the family friend. So at least shes sorted for holidays!
Android phones
Google's Android operating system has long suffered from a problem called "fragmentation."
Unlike with the Apple iPhone, it's up to smartphone manufacturers, not Google, to push out updates to customers. So there's no guarantee that any given phone will get the operating system upgrades.
There's also a ton of different hardware, some of which does a better job supporting certain features. Contrast this with Apple's very few different hardware choices.
All of this makes life a nightmare for anybody making Android apps: There's no guarantee that an app that works on my phone will work on yours, or vice versa. Multiply that times the many millions of Android devices out there, and it's a minefield of apps that may or may not work for huge segments of your potential audience.
As Recode's Ina Fried first reported, $55 billion business-software company Salesforce has had enough of fragmentation.
Later this year, Salesforce's Android app is nixing official support for all devices except for certain recent Samsung Galaxy and Google Nexus phones, as confirmed in an official support page. Salesforce had no additional comment, except to point at that same support article.
"Due to the wide array of available Android devices, we are targeting our support to a select number of Android devices to continue improving our overall Salesforce1 for Android user experience," Salesforce writes in that article.
android fragmentation may 2016
That's probably not great news to the many Salesforce customers who use Android, but don't necessarily own Samsung or Nexus phones.
But, logically, it's a major end-run around the fragmentation problem. If Salesforce's Android developers know exactly the phones that they're dealing with, then they can guarantee that their app will work exactly as they intended it to.
Marc Benioff
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Apple isn't immune from the fragmentation problem, as reflected by the fact that Salesforce is similarly discontinuing support for devices, including the iPhone 5 and 5C.
But Apple also has a much stronger track record for getting people to upgrade to new devices and the most current operating systems, meaning that iPhone developers have fewer headaches when developing for the Apple App Store.
All in all, it's not a flattering look for Google, which has tried very hard to tamp down on fragmentation.
NOW WATCH: Here's why Android Auto is far superior to Apple CarPlay
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Court reverses ruling, allows FishPass to move ahead in Traverse City
A press release on Thursday announced that the Court of Appeals reversed the 2021 ruling that stalled the FishPass project in Traverse City.
Petroperu diversifies crude imports with purchases from Brazil, U.S.
Peru importing crude from the Americas.
HOUSTON/BUENOS AIRES
Petroleumworld.com 07 19 2016
Peru has started expanding the sources of its crude imports, slowly introducing U.S. and Brazilian grades to a slate mostly based on oil from Ecuador, Africa and Trinidad and Tobago, according to Thomson Reuters Trade Flows data.
The numbers show Peru has joined the growing list of Latin American countries increasing purchases of U.S. light crudes for their refineries since an export ban was lifted in late 2015.
"Buying other crudes is a result of a wider variety due to U.S. crude exports. We always choose the option with the best economic value for us," the chief of external markets at Peruvian state-run oil firm Petroperu, Augusto Nunez, said in an interview.
Petroperu operates a domestic network of four refineries with a joint capacity to process 94,500 barrels per day (bpd).
With almost all its refineries located along the Pacific shore in South America, Peru is a large consumer of Ecuadorian crude, as the Andean country is its closest oil source while Peruvian crude production keeps declining.
But Peru has also been looking for new crude sources in the Americas.
Petroperu's Conchan refinery in May made its first purchase of Sapinhoa crude, a grade produced offshore at Brazil's Santos basin. Another cargo arrived last month in the terminal of the 102,000-bpd La Pampilla refinery, operated by Spain's Repsol .
In separate deals, a tanker carrying 380,000 barrels of U.S. light sweet crude arrived in Conchan in early July and another one of the same size is scheduled for late July delivery, after Swiss-based trading firm Kolmar Group was awarded a crude tender by Petroperu.
Peru occasionally also buys Colombian crudes shipped from the Tumaco terminal in the Pacific or from storage tanks in Panama.
For its part, Repsol has always complemented Ecuador's Oriente and Trinidad's Galeota crudes with light grades mainly imported from Africa for the La Pampilla refinery, according to a Repsol source, who declined to be identified because they are not authorized to speak to the media.
The Suezmax tanker Copper Spirit is expected to discharge about 1 million barrels of Nigeria's Agbami light crude at La Pampilla next month, according to Reuters data.
steve king iowa
US Rep. Steve King, an Iowa Republican, shocked members of an MSNBC panel on Monday by challenging them to name a "subgroup of people" that has contributed more to civilization than white people.
The statement came as other panel members were discussing the lack of racial diversity in the Republican Party ahead of the party's convention, which started on Monday in Cleveland, Ohio.
One of the panelists, Esquire's Charles Pierce, said that the hall at the Quicken Loans Arena was "wired by loud, unhappy, dissatisfied white people."
King responded:
"This whole 'white people' business does get a little tired, Charlie ... I'd ask you to go back through history and figure out, where have these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you're talking about. Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?"
"Than white people?" host Chris Hayes attempted to clarify.
King said:
"Than than Western civilization itself that's rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the United States of America, and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world. That's all of Western civilization."
The discussion promptly devolved into chaos as all four panelists began talking over each other. Journalist April Ryan, who is African-American, was heard asking, "What about Africa? What about Asia?"
As The Washington Post dutifully points out, non-Western civilizations have made vast contributions to human civilization in astronomy, mathematics, architecture, philosophy, and countless other areas.
This is not the first time that King has waded into racial controversy.
The Iowa representative was spotted with a Confederate flag on his desk during a news segment last week, drawing the ire of his local NAACP. And last month, he pushed to block the addition of Harriet Tubman to the $20 bill, calling the move "pure political correctness."
Watch the discussion below:
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TORONTO, ON--(Marketwired - July 19, 2016) - Gran Colombia Gold Corp. (GCM.TO) (OTC PINK: TPRFF) announced today that it has received approval from the Toronto Stock Exchange (the "TSX") to commence normal course issuer bids for its Senior Unsecured Convertible Debentures due 2018 (the "2018 Debentures") and its Senior Secured Convertible Debentures due 2020 (the "2020 Debentures" and together the "Debentures"). The 2018 Debentures and 2020 Debentures currently trade on the TSX under the trading symbols GCM.DB.U and GCM.DB.V, respectively.
Under the terms of the bids the Company will have the right to purchase for cancellation up to a maximum of US$6,633,471 aggregate principal amount of 2018 Debentures and a maximum of US$9,629,597 aggregate principal amount of 2020 Debentures through the facilities of the TSX or alternative Canadian trading systems. This amount represents approximately 10% of the public float of the 2018 Debentures and 2020 Debentures, respectively, issued and outstanding as of July 11, 2016, determined in accordance with the applicable rules of the TSX. As of the date hereof, the aggregate principal amount issued and outstanding 2018 Debentures is US$63,742,176 and 2020 Debentures is US$103,294,350.
Management of the Company will determine the actual number of 2018 Debentures and 2020 Debentures that may be purchased and the timing of any such purchases, subject to compliance with applicable TSX rules. Daily purchases will be limited to US$17,154 principal amount of 2018 Debentures and US$12,279 principal amount of 2020 Debentures, other than block purchase exceptions. Purchases made pursuant to the bids will be made on the open market through the facilities of the TSX or other designated exchanges and published markets in Canada, and the price that the Company will pay for any such Debentures will be the market price at the time of the acquisition. The Company will not purchase Debentures when the market price per US$100 aggregate principal amount of Debentures exceeds US$100.
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The Company is proposing to commence the bid on July 21, 2016, and have it remain open until the earlier of July 20, 2017 or the date on which the Company has purchased the maximum number of Debentures permitted under each bid. The Company has not purchased any 2018 Debentures or 2020 Debentures during the previous 12 months.
Under the terms of the indenture governing each of the Debentures, and as further described in such documents, the Company is required to set aside certain amounts of its excess free cash for repayment, repurchase or redemption of the Debentures. In accordance with each indenture, the Company is entitled and intends to use such funds for purchases of Debentures through the normal course issuer bids. The Company intends to make the bids because it believes: (i) that the 2018 Debentures and 2020 Debentures may be undervalued from time to time in relation to its current and future business prospects; (ii) that the purchase of Debentures though the bids is the best use of any excess free cash accumulated as per the terms of the indentures governing each of the Debentures and (iii) that Debentures may become available during the period of the bids at prices that would make the purchase of Debentures for cancellation an appropriate use of available funds and in the best interests of the Company and its shareholders.
Production Update
The Company also announced today that it produced a total of 38,229 ounces of gold in the second quarter of 2016, up 21% from the first quarter of this year and up 34% from the second quarter a year ago. This brings the total production for the first half of 2016 to 69,718 ounces of gold, up 33% over the first half of 2015. The Company remains on track with its production guidance for 2016 of a total of 120,000 to 138,000 ounces for the full year.
At the Segovia Operations, second quarter 2016 gold production totalled 31,884 ounces, up 23% from the first quarter of 2016 and up 41% from the second quarter a year ago. Gran Colombia processed an average of 771 tonnes per day ("tpd") with head grades averaging 13.8 g/t at Segovia in the second quarter of 2016, an improvement from 730 tpd at an average head grade of 12.9 g/t in the first quarter of 2016 and 534 tpd at head grades averaging 15.5 g/t in the second quarter a year ago. Improved mill recovery was also a factor in the increased gold production in the second quarter of 2016. For the first half of 2016, gold production at the Segovia Operations totalled 57,883 ounces, up 41% from the first half last year. Gran Colombia expects to produce a total of 96,000 to 110,000 at its Segovia Operations for the full year 2016.
At the Marmato Operations, tonnes processed increased by 19% in the second quarter of 2016, compared with the first quarter this year, to 987 tpd with head grades averaging 2.6 g/t. This resulted in gold production of 6,345 ounces in the second quarter of 2016, up 16% from the first quarter of 2016 and up 7% from the second quarter a year ago. For the first half of 2016, gold production at the Marmato Operations totalled 11,835 ounces, up 4% from the first half last year. Gran Colombia expects to produce a total of 24,000 to 28,000 at its Marmato Operations for the full year 2016.
Q2 2016 Results Webcast
The Company announced today that it will release its financial results for the second quarter of 2016 after market close on Thursday, August 11, 2016 and will host a conference call and webcast on Friday, August 12, 2016 at 9:30 a.m. Eastern Time to discuss the results.
Webcast and call-in details are as follows:
Live Event link: http://edge.media-server.com/m/p/6swovr25
Toronto & International: 1 (514) 841-2157
North America Toll Free: 1 (866) 215-5508
Colombia Toll Free: 01 800 9 156 924
Conference ID: 42439708
A replay of the webcast will be available at www.grancolombiagold.com from Friday, August 12, 2016 until Sunday, September 11, 2016.
About Gran Colombia Gold Corp.
Gran Colombia is a Canadian-based gold and silver exploration, development and production company with its primary focus in Colombia. Gran Colombia is currently the largest underground gold and silver producer in Colombia with several underground mines in operation at its Segovia and Marmato Operations. Gran Colombia is in the midst of an expansion and modernization project at its Segovia Operations.
Additional information on Gran Colombia can be found on its website at www.grancolombiagold.com and by reviewing its profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.
Cautionary Statement on Forward-Looking Information:
This news release contains "forward-looking information". Often, but not always, forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as "plans", "expects", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates", or "believes" or variations (including negative variations) of such words and phrases, or state that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of Gran Colombia to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements are described under the caption "Risk Factors" in the Company's Annual Information Form dated as of March 30, 2016, which is available for view on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Forward-looking statements contained herein are made as of the date of this press release and Gran Colombia disclaims, other than as required by law, any obligation to update any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, results, future events, circumstances, or if management's estimates or opinions should change, or otherwise. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, the reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.
Kansas City Southern KSU reported second-quarter 2016 earnings (on an adjusted basis) of $1.22 per share, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $1.04. Earnings also improved 18.4% on a year-over-year basis, thanks to lower costs.
Kansas City Southern (KSU) Street Actual & Estimate EPS - Last 5 Quarters | FindTheCompany
Including special items, the Kansas City, MO-based railroad operator reported earnings of $1.11 per share in the second quarter of 2016, up 10% year over year. Total revenue came in at $569 million, down 3% year over year and also below the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $574 million.
The year-over-year decline can be primarily attributed to a 16% drop in revenues at the Energy segment. The Mexican peso depreciation and lower U.S. fuel prices also hurt results.
In the reported quarter, operating income came in at $220 million, up 18% year over year. Meanwhile, operating ratio (operating expenses as a percentage of revenues) improved to 61.3% in the reported quarter compared with 68.1% a year ago. Carload volumes remained flat on a year-over-year basis.
Segment Results
The Chemical & Petroleum segment contributed $122.4 million to revenues, up 6% year over year. Also, volumes improved 8% year over year while revenues per carload declined 2% from the prior-year quarter.
The Industrial & Consumer Products generated revenues of $136.1 million, down 6% year over year. Moreover, business volumes decreased 4% while revenues per carload declined 2% from the prior-year quarter.
The Agriculture & Minerals segments revenues totaled $115.1 million, up 10% year over year. On a year-over-year basis, business volumes improved 9% while revenues per carload inched up 1% on a year-over-year basis.
The Energy segment generated $37.2 million in revenues, down 16% year over year. Below par performances of Frac Sand apart from coal & petroleum coke hurt the results at the segment. Business volumes dropped 5% year over year and revenues per carload also deteriorated 12%.
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Intermodal revenues were $91.4 million, down 7% year over year. Business volumes dropped 2% while revenues per carload fell 5% year over year.
The Automotive segment accounted for $44.6 million of the total revenue, down 19% year over year. Business volumes were flat while revenues per carload dropped 19%.
Meanwhile, Other revenues totaled $21.7 million, down 8% year over year.
KANSAS CITY SOU Price, Consensus and EPS Surprise
KANSAS CITY SOU Price, Consensus and EPS Surprise | KANSAS CITY SOU Quote
Other notable releases this week
Railroad operators like Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. CP and Union Pacific Corp. UNP are slated to release their second-quarter results on Jul 20 and Jul 21, respectively.
Zacks Rank & A Key Pick
Currently, Kansas City Southern has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). A better-ranked stock in the broader transportation space is United Parcel Services Inc. UPS, carrying a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).
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By Nick Carey
CHICAGO, July 19 (Reuters) - U.S regional railroad Kansas City Southern on Tuesday reported a higher-than-expected second-quarter profit, helped by cost cutting, but its freight volumes were flat and revenue fell more than analysts had forecast.
The company saw little change in volumes during the quarter versus the same period in 2015, with a sharp increase in petroleum and food products helping to offset declines in most product categories.
Unlike the other major U.S. railroads, which have seen precipitous declines in coal volumes as utilities switch to burning cheaper natural gas, Kansas City Southern's utility coal volumes were down only 1 percent on the year.
The company said that its freight volumes were up 2 percent in June versus the same month last year.
Kansas City Southern reported a 13 percent decrease in operating expenses to $348.6 million from $399 million.
This came despite the impact of flooding in the Houston area, which shut down a bridge the railroad uses for cross-border traffic for three weeks.
The Kansas City, Missouri-based company reported second-quarter net income of $120.1 million or $1.11 per share, up 10 percent from $111.8 million or $1.01 per share a year earlier.
Results included a $34 million Mexican fuel excise tax credit for the quarter.
Analysts had on average expected earnings per share for the quarter of $1.03.
Revenue for the quarter fell 3 percent to $568.5 million from $585.8 million a year earlier. Analysts had expected revenue of $573 million.
In pre-market trading, Kansas City Southern shares slipped 0.6 percent to $95.
(Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Jeffrey Hodgson)
By Andrei Khalip
LISBON (Reuters) - Portugal has a budget cushion worth 0.3 percent of GDP to guarantee that this year's fiscal commitments are met, the government told the European Commission on Monday as it seeks to convince Brussels not to impose sanctions over its 2015 deficit.
"Sanctioning the past doesn't make political and economic sense for countries that are already taking effective action, as in the case of Portugal," Finance Minister Mario Centeno wrote in a letter to the commission on Monday.
He said Portugal was on course for a 2016 deficit "clearly below 3 percent", which is the European Union's limit, but that sanctions could jeopardise that goal.
Last week, EU finance ministers backed a sanctions procedure for Portugal and Spain after the European Commission said both countries had failed to do enough to correct excessive budget deficits for 2014 and 2015.
The commission has indicated that sanctions could be purely symbolic if the countries show sufficient commitment to further deficit cuts. A decision is expected on July 27.
"The Portuguese government is ready to adopt fiscal measures to correct any eventual deviations on the budgetary execution," the letter said, explaining that the budget had "an additional buffer of expenditure cuts" worth 0.2 percent of GDP, which are kept in reserve in case they are needed to meet the target.
These appropriations were applied to public institutions that had projected spending increases compared with 2015.
In addition, a report accompanying the letter cited further unspecified reserves worth another 0.1 percent of GDP that "can be used in case of larger deviations".
"Overall, the 2016 budget has contingency measures amounting to 542.8 million euros (453.2 million), or 0.3 percentage points of GDP," the report said, adding that so far the government's monthly monitoring process had not revealed any significant deviation.
Portugal has vowed to cut the budget deficit to 2.2 percent of GDP this year from last year's 4.4 percent, which occurred on the previous administration's watch.
Story continues
Brussels and the IMF doubt that Portugal's growth this year will be enough to halve the deficit, and expect an economic slowdown after a 1.5 percent expansion in 2015.
The government projects GDP growth of 1.8 percent, but said that, even if it came in as low as 1.4 percent, the use of the 0.2 percent buffer would still allow the nominal deficit to be cut to 2.3 percent of GDP.
(Reporting By Andrei Khalip; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
Blackspire is a name that has flown under the radar in recent times. Whatever the reason may be for that, the Canadian brand is still at it and producing up to date components such as narrow/wide and oval shaped chainrings, 1x-specific guides, and their latest offering, the Badger C carbon crankset.
The new carbon fiber cranks weigh 540 grams, including a 28-tooth narrow/wide chainring, and retail for $450 CAD with a bottom bracket and chainring of your choice. This price also includes shipping to anywhere in North America. Due to the Badger Cs only being available for purchase on Blackspire's online store, there is no USD pricing.
Badger C Crankset Details:
Intended use: cross-country / all-mountain
Length: 175mm only
Carbon construction
30mm aluminum spindle
Not compatible w/ 83mm BB shells
Weight: 540 grams (175mm, 28t chainring)
MSRP: $450 CAD (arms, BB, chainring)
www.blackspire.com Intended use: cross-country / all-mountain Length: 175mm only Carbon construction 30mm aluminum spindle Not compatible w/ 83mm BB shells Weight: 540 grams (175mm, 28t chainring) MSRP: $450 CAD (arms, BB, chainring)
The 30mm aluminum spindle is attached to the driveside crankarm while spindle length adjustment is done via a threaded collar on the non-driveside arm. The production version of the Badger C crankset will use a GXP chainring interface, making them compatible with many other offerings.
Installation
The lockring is held in place by a 2mm hex key that could cause issues for those removing their crankset fairly regularly. The bottom bracket requires the use of a proprietary outboard bearing tool, which Blackspire includes.
Performance
Corrosion visible on the spindle where the inner bearing races reside. The ends of the arms looking a little beat up. Some protective rubber booties might be good here.
Pinkbike's Take:
While not the stiffest crankset out there, their relatively low weight and competitive price mean that the Badger C arms are worth looking at. Their versatility, thanks to the adjustable spindle and GXP direct mount chainring setup, mean that they should work well for the majority of riders, just so long as you're not riding in the mud and rain every single day. - AJ Barlas
The crank employs a similar system to Race Faces Cinch setup, making it possible to fit them onto a wide variety of bikes regardless of what bottom bracket interface is being used, and a fatbike-compatible spindle can even be installed. The aluminum spindle itself is of the 30mm diameter variety, and the chainring is attached via a GXP direct mount system. The Badger C is built using carbon to keep the weight down but there will be an aluminum version available for those not interested in rocking carbon in their transmission.With so many different types of bottom bracket shells on bikes these days, the ability for the Badger Cs to fit most of them due to their adjustable bearing collar is a great option, but the correct bottom bracket is obviously required. Blackspire will offer bottom brackets to cover all options in the near future, including BB92, BB107, PF30, and 68/73mm threaded; the latter of which being the interface that I tested them with.Additionally, the GXP direct mount chainring system on the production cranks provides riders with a wide selection of options. A number of aftermarket manufacturers offer direct mount rings with the GXP fitting, in addition to Blackspires own selection, so there should be no trouble finding a chainring that suits anyones needs. The crankset will come with either a 28, 30, or 32-tooth round chainring, or oval 30 or 32-tooth chainring, depending on the rider's needs.Installing the Badger C crankset is similar to some others on the market. With the same focus on compatibility across a wide range of bottom bracket types, a number of washers of varying sizes are required to make it happen. It's quite straightforward but can take a bit of trial and error to adjust and figure out. These washers are included with the cranks and which ones are used, if any, is dependant on the bottom bracket and type of bike they're going onto. As it turned out, the bike that these were tested on - which has a 73mm threaded BB shell - didn't require any spacers.It also needs to be mentioned that the Blackspire bottom bracket requires a proprietary tool - it's slightly larger than other outboard bearing tools - which they do include with the cranks.The Badger C's use a lockring to essentially adjust the length of spindle available, but after noticing some wear on the anodized inner surface during a once-over, I reached out to Blackspire to see if I should simply remove it altogether. They said that yes, this would work given the 73mm threaded bottom bracket shell of the bike they were installed on, so off it went. I had zero issues with the cranks coming loose prior to this, nor did I after I removed it.I did find that the tiny 2mm hex key used to clamp the lockring down in place to be small and finicky, and can see some riders, especially those who aren't known for their patience or mechanical finesse, having an issue with this. It'd be nice to see some slightly larger hardware used here considering that the tiny screw is likely to round-out over time.Once setup, the cranks spun smooth and freely on their 30mm spindle and regardless of the weather ridden in, or the condition of the trails, the interface has remained creak-free and smooth to this day. That said, I have noticed some corrosion on the spindle and inner race of the bearings, indicating potential for improvements to the seals used. While this hasnt negatively affected my experience on the trail yet, it may become an issue in the future. We also had some trouble removing the cranks because of it, with the spindle requiring a fairly ham-fisted whack to break it loose and push out the driveside of the bottom bracket.Blackspire has since changed the inner bearing races to stainless steel so as to minimize that chance of any corrosion occurring, something that riders who spend a lot of time in the rain and mud will appreciate.There have been no issues or experiences with the crank being overly flexy, or too stiff for that matter, though some others provide a slightly firmer and more positive feeling under foot. Their weight is admirable yet their durability grants confidence to ride how you want. Speaking of durability, after subjecting the Badger Cs to a lot of varied riding, including plenty of rock strikes, everything continues to run as it should. The inclusion of rubber booties with the crankset will be a good addition (Blackspire will ship all production Badger C arms with protective rubber caps) but despite this, they have faired well. The shape of the crank arms is slender and foregoes any odd lumps or bumps that could catch your ankle when riding, something that's important and sometimes overlooked, especially for more aggressive riders.
2016 World Series of Poker Main Event Final Table Set; Cliff "JohnnyBax" Josephy Leads
July 19, 2016 Donnie Peters
The 2016 World Series of Poker Main Event final table has been set, and the final nine players will now take a break until the end of October when they resume to battle it out for $8,000,000 and the most coveted title in all of poker. Cliff "JohnnyBax" Josephy finished with the chip lead after bagging up 74.6 million in chips.
"I'm just elated right now, relieved and elated," Josephy said. "I had a goal, I've reached it, and now I'll set some loftier ones."
The final table was set after Joshua Weiss folded his way down to less than two big blinds before he got the last of his money in. When he finally decided to commit, it was for 850,000 from early position. Michael Ruane called from the small blind, and Gordon Vayo called out of the big blind. Ruane and Vayo checked down the runout, and the hands were tabled. Vayo had the for a pair of sevens, and Ruane had the for two pair of jacks and fives. Weiss showed the for just ace high, and that made him the 10th-place finisher in the 2016 WSOP Main Event.
Seat Player Country Chips 1 Griffin Benger Canada 26,175,000 2 Vojtech Ruzicka Czech Republic 27,300,000 3 Fernando Pons Spain 6,150,000 4 Qui Nguyen USA 67,295,000 5 Cliff Josephy USA 74,600,000 6 Michael Ruane USA 31,600,000 7 Gordon Vayo USA 49,375,000 8 Kenny Hallaert Belgium 43,325,000 9 Jerry Wong USA 10,175,000
Day 7 of the event began with 27 players left. Two quick eliminations saw Christopher Kusha and Philip Postma hit the rail, and then it was a double elimination that busted both former November Niner Antoine Saout in 25th and Adam Krach in 24th.
After that big double knockout, eight-time WSOP Circuit gold ring winner Valentin Vornicu busted in 23rd place, and he was followed out the door by Jeff Hakim, who held on for as long as he could before shoving trip aces on the river of an board and running into the for 888poker qualifier Fernando Pons.
Pons, who qualified on 888poker via a 30 satellite, bagged up 6.15 million in chips and will be the shortest stack returning to the final table.
Matthew Moss, Kakwan Lau, and Thomas Miller all went out next, setting up the final 18 players across two tables. It was at this point that the players went on a 60-minute dinner break with Josephy in the lead.
Upon their return, Andrew Christoforou went out in 18th, and then William Kassouf busted in 17th in what was by far the hand of the tournament when he clashed big in an aces-versus-kings explosion that was a heated confrontation between he and Griffin Benger. The aces held for Benger, and the noisy Kassouf was gone with a $338,288 payday.
Benger, another 888poker online qualifier for this event, won his seat via a $160 satellite and finished on 26.175 million in chips.
Jared Bleznick, a polarizing figure in the poker world who ran into some trouble earlier in the summer that resulted in a temporary ban from the WSOP, was the next to go in 16th place.
WSOP Main Event newcomer Michael Niwinski busted in 15th place to Vayo, and shortly after that Vayo move into the tournament lead when he won a pntot off Josephy. There was a bit a jockeying at the top of the leaderboard, and then seemingly out of nowhere came Qui Nguyen.
Nguyen first busted one of the field's top favorites, Tom Marchese, in 14th place, and then he took out another skilled star in James Obst on the very next hand. Both time, Nguyen simply had the best of it first with flush over flush against Marchese, and then second with a pocket pair of tens over the pocket pair of fives for Obst.
The run of Nguyen continued when he busted Mike Shin in 12th place, having queens hold up against Shin's ace-king, and the players went on break with 11 left.
After action got back underway, the tournament was abruptly altered as the tournament staff debated what to do over the stalling that was happening in the event with the big pay jumps. After 10 minutes, play resumed and action went to hand-for-hand play. The tournament staff also announced that they would monitor the action at both tables, taking away the option to call the clock from the players and enforcing it themselves should it become a problem.
John Cynn, who was the short stack up on the main feature table, moved all in for 4 million from middle position with the blinds at 250,000/500,000/75,000 and was called by Vayo in the big blind. After the other table completed action, the hands of Shin and Vayo were revealed, with Shin all in and at risk holding the against the for Vayo. The board ran out , and Shin was eliminated in 11th place for $650,000.
The final 10 players then joined up on the main stage at one table, and at this point it was Nguyen in the lead, but Josephy wasn't too far off the pace. A few hands into resumed action, Josephy worked his way back in front as both he and Nguyen climbed over 70 million.
As the hands went by, Weiss fell shorter and shorter, not finding anything he was willing to put his money in with. The feeling in the room was akin to that of blood in the water for sharks, and it seemed like only a matter of time before Weiss fell. In the end, the La Jolla, California resident put his money in with the best hand, but it didn't work out, and the 2016 WSOP Main Event final table was set.
"My wife tells me what I'm going to do for the next couple of months, but we're probably going to travel a little, take a few weeks off, and then start getting prepared," Josephy added afterwards. "I've got some work to do come November."
In second place on the leaderboard was Nguyen, who was extremely excited to have mad the final table and done so after hitting a massive rush that allowed him to finish on 67.925 million.
"This is so crazy right now, I really did not expect this to happen," Nguyen said. "It's amazing."
Vayo bagged up the third most chips at 49.375 million, and the longtime online pro was already thinking of how he's going to prepare.
"I played well, sure, but I've never ran this good in a tournament in my life," Vayo said. "I'm going to do a lot of playing, and run simulations. I have some friends that are really good poker players and hopefully they can emulate some of the styles of these guys and we can run some good simulations to prepare."
The 2016 WSOP Main Event final table will resume play on Oct. 30, 2016 at the Penn & Teller Theater inside the Rio All-Suite Las Vegas Hotel and Casino. The final nine are all guaranteed $1 million, but it's the $8 million first-place prize they'll all be gunning for.
Be sure to stay tuned to PokerNews for continued coverage of the WSOP Main Event final table and its players, brought to you by our sponsors, 888poker.
For more on Day 7 and the final table of the 2016 WSOP Main Event, check out Episode #406 of the PokerNews Podcast:
*Photo Credit: Joe Giron/WSOP (group shot), PokerPhotoArchive.com.
Want to stay atop all the latest in the poker world? If so, make sure to get PokerNews updates on your social media outlets. Follow us on Twitter and find us on both Facebook and Google+!
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First there is Donald Trump speaking of President Obama and police shootings, Theres something going on. Look, theres something going on, and then there is Rush Limbaugh claiming that when Obama says the criminal justice system is racisthes lighting a matchhes encouraging the actions that follow.
Watch courtesy of Media Matters for America:
Obama rolled out a litany of junk statistics to prove that the criminal justice system is racist. Blacks are arrested at twice the rate of whites, he complained, and they get sentences almost 10 percent longer than whites for the same crime. Look, Obama said this a couple of days before the five cops in Dallas are assassinated. When the president says this kind of stuff hes lighting a match. When the president says these kind of things hes encouraging the actions that follow. And dont for a minute think he doesnt know it. Missing from Obamas address was any mention of the massive racial differences in criminal offending and criminal records that fully account for arrest rates and sentence lengths. Blacks, for example, commit homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined.
The alternative for Republicans is that like them, we just pretend racism is dead and we live in a post racial society. Only it isnt so. Racism is with us still, and Rush Limbaugh is living proof.
Conservatives love to push the meme that we had licked racism until President Obama somehow reintroduced it into our culture. They cant explain how this might be true when it was racist white folks who got bent out of shape by Obamas election, but then this is conservatism we are talking about: facts are the last things that matter to their argument.
As ever for Limbaugh and his fellow racists, simply saying it makes it true.
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Republicans were counting on Melania Trump to make their nominee warm and likable. Instead, her speech was a chilly propaganda address that failed miserably.
One of the great contradictions of Melania Trumps speech was her background as an immigrant after the Republican Party spent much of the entire first evening of the convention telling America that all immigrants are criminals who should not be allowed into the country.
Mrs. Trump said that she worked hard in the arena of fashion. She connected with the struggles of ordinary Americans by mentioning her time living in Milan and Paris.
Trump told everybody to clap for Bob Dole, who I am not one hundred percent sure wasnt being held there against his will. Mrs. Trump said that her husband is concerned about the country, and every other sentence of her speech mentioned how great Donald is. Mrs. Trump assured America that Trump would never give up, because he never gives up on business deals, and we all know that being President Of The United States is just like a business deal.
Mrs. Trump said his performance speaks for itself. Yep, the thousands of lawsuits filed against him, bankruptcies, violations of the RICO Act related to Trump University tell us all we need to know.
What is missing in all of these moments that are meant to humanize Trump is warmth. The Trump campaign is selling Trump as a man with no flaws. What was missing in Mrs. Trumps speech was any sign that Donald Trump is a human being, and not a superhero from the planet Trumpton who was sent here to save America.
The rest of Mrs. Trumps speech was read off of a teleprompter to the degree that many were waiting for her to announce the ransom that her kidnappers were demanding in exchange for her freedom.
No one expected Melania Trump to give a professional speech. The content of the speech was awful, and if it was meant to make Trump more likable, it failed.
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In an interview with New York Magazine, Trumps ghostwriter Tony Schwartz spilled the beans on who Trump really is:
I put lipstick on a pig, he said. I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is. He went on, I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes, there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.
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But Schwartz believes that Trumps short attention span has left him with a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance. He said, Thats why he so prefers TV as his first news sourceinformation comes in easily digestible sound bites. He added, I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life. During the eighteen months that he observed Trump, Schwartz said, he never saw a book on Trumps desk, or elsewhere in his office, or in his apartment.
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If Trump is elected President, he warned, the millions of people who voted for him and believe that he represents their interests will learn what anyone who deals closely with him already knowsthat he couldnt care less about them.
Schwartz didnt just write a book about Trump. He shadowed him and listened in on Trumps phone calls. Nobody in America has a had more closeup view of how Donald Trump really operates, and the picture isnt pretty.
There is no substance to Trump. There is nothing deeper. Donald Trump is nothing more than a human being who has dedicated his life to the pursuits of ego, power, and money. This is not the kind of man who has the capacity or desire to lead a country. Trump has bought into his own myths and is going to place himself ahead of everyone else.
When Tony Schwartz says that a Trump election could mean the end of civilization, every voter should listen and vote accordingly.
Over the next four days, America is about to see a con job on the grandest stage, but no one should be fooled. A Donald Trump presidency would only serve Donald Trump.
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The Republican convention is so bad that Donald Trump ignored it and instead called into Fox News to do a live interview with Bill OReilly.
While the mother of Benghazi victim Sean Smith was speaking live at the Republican convention, Donald Trump showed how much he cared by hijacking his own convention by calling into Fox News.
Video of Trump on Fox, while his own convention is going on:
https://youtu.be/RaCpUktMUIM
Donald Trump loves to talk about how much he cares about what happened in Benghazi, and Hillary Clinton got four Americans killed, but while the mother of one of the four Americans who was killed in Benghazi, Patrica Smith, spoke to the Republican convention, Donald Trump called Fox News to talk to Bill OReilly.
In short, Trumps name wasnt being mentioned enough, so he did a phone interview to compete with his own presidential convention.
Here is what each of the three cable news channels looked like:
The main lowlight of Trumps Fox interview was his lie that Republicans held the convention in Cleveland because he wanted it in Ohio. The truth is that Republicans selected Cleveland as the location of the convention in 2014, which was a year before Trump announced that he was running for president.
The Benghazi Truthers that Trump has trotted out on stage have been a sad collection of broken people whose speaking slots reeked of cynical exploitation. Donald Trump openly competed for airtime with his convention, because his ego is so large that he cant handle not being the center of attention.
Trump convention Monday has been a blatant attempt to scare people into voting for him. It has also been so boring and bad that even Donald Trump isnt watching.
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The Republican National Convention kicked off on Monday in Cleveland, Ohio, with Make America Safe Again! set to be the opening-night theme.
A low-information voter may be easily swayed by such a simplistic slogan, but lets try to remember that no candidate seeking the presidency right now has endangered the country more than Donald Trump has all without evening getting a set of White House keys.
Lets have a quick refresher, shall we?
Since its inception, the Trump campaign has made it their mission to denigrate Muslims, whether they live here or abroad. Hes suggested that we should patrol Muslim neighborhoods, shut down Mosques and, of course, impose a religious test on those coming to the United States.
If youre a Muslim, Trump spews, you arent welcome here. If you happen to be a Muslim already living in the United States, he promises to keep an eye on you because its obvious you dont love your country.
Not only does this language alienate an entire community that we need to to be embracing and working with, but it has emboldened our enemies.
Terrorist organizations like the one in the video below have even used Trumps words to boost membership:
Look how America views Muslims, our enemies say, citing Trumps inflammatory rhetoric.
Of course, the spray-tanned billionaire hasnt just given our enemies fresh red meat; hes also done his best to damage important relationships with our allies, particularly Britain. For our adversaries, from Vladimir Putin to Kim Jong-un to Sadam Hussein, hes offered nothing but praise.
He hopes to take this reckless behavior to the White House, promising to implement torture, expand the use of nuclear weapons, and illegally drop bombs on the innocent family members of terrorists.
Dont worry, though, because Trump promises to consult himself and the shows for foreign policy advice.
The truth is that Trump and company can (and will) try to think of as many simplistic, fear-mongering slogans as they can to win over voters. But Americans shouldnt forget all the ways that the presumptive Republican nominee has already damaged Americas national security.
We shouldnt want to see what hed do when given actual power.
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Scott Baio, fresh off of his tweet in which he praised a meme calling Hillary Clinton a COUNT without the O as the best ever meme, will naturally be speaking at the Republican Convention. He was asked at the last moment after he introduced himself to Donald Trump.
Heres Baios tweet:
In his speech, Baio, a white man with a very privileged Hollywood career, will accuse Hillary Clinton of feeling entitled to the presidency. Because, you know, women do just sort of feel entitled even though weve never had a woman president.
Politico shared excerpts: We have a choice in November. We can go for Hillary Clinton: who wants to continue the same policies that are wrecking this country. Policies that make us unsafe. A woman who somehow feels entitled to the presidency . . . that she is somehow owed it.
Yes, Hillary Clinton, who ran and lost to Barack Obama in 2008, feels owed the presidency. She has no idea how hard it is, even though she served her country as Secretary of State, under the man to whom she lost. Even though she lived in the White House for eight years as a First Lady.
Or we can go for Donald Trump: A man doing this from the goodness of his heart and genuinely wants to help. A man who knows how to get things done . . . and a man who says what he means and means what he says.
In fact, Donald Trump rarely seems to mean what he says, if fact checkers are to be believed.
Hillary Clinton wants to be president for her. Donald Trump wants to be President for us.
Donald Trump talked about himself for 28 minutes, before introducing his running mate. This is not a man who is going to be president for us.
Trump is facing fraud lawsuits in both New York and California because he defrauded people in both states with the Trump University get rich scheme. This is not the behavior of a man who will be president for us. Donald Trump refuses to release his tax returns because he thinks his income is none of your business. His refusal to disclose his earnings does not suggest the transparency of man who will be president for us.
If by us Baio means Donald Trump and only Donald Trump, then yes, Trump is in for us, meaning himself.
Dont be fooled, as president, Trump will only serve his own interests. Scott Baio wants to stop progress. Donald Trump will be a president for him. There is only one choice for those who want a president for us.
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Democratic Benghazi Select Committee member Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) ripped Republicans for trying to exploit Benghazi for political gain at their convention.
Video:
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) who served on the Benghazi Select Committee spoke to MSNBC about how Trump has exploited Benghazi for political gain, But watching Mrs. Smith I have to say was just very hard. She is deeply grieving. You have to respect that grief. You dont have to respect the fact that the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign have decided to exploit this tragedy for political gain the way they have. We met with most of the family if not all of the family members and they were divided in their view of events, and I just think it terrible that to try to exploit this terrible tragedy. That the Republican Party would stoop to this.I think that this has been consummately politicized in the most blatant way.Weve never politicized a tragedy like this, and I think its really unfortunate to bring a grieving woman in front of the convention in this way.
The Republican ploy to exploit Benghazi for political gain has backfired. Patricia Smiths comments have already been fact-checked,, and it was found that there is no evidence that Hillary Clinton ever told the victims families that a video was responsible for Benghazi.
Beyond factual accuracy, there was something deplorable about putting an obviously grieving mother in front of the national spotlight to exploit her pain for political gain.
What Republicans have done is morally wrong. It was sleazy. It was distasteful and revealed that for Republicans, Benghazi has never been about the facts. For the GOP, Benghazi has always been a weapon to use against Hillary Clinton.
Instead of being motivated to support Trump, the Republican Benghazi gambit may cause disgust voters to turn off the GOP.
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The Republican convention is putting its most racist foot forward as Rep. Steve King (R-IA) told MSNBC that white people have made more contributions to history than any other sub-group.
Video:
The Washington Post recapped the exchange on MSNBC:
If youre really optimistic, you can say that this is the last time that old white people will command the Republican partys attention, its platform, its public face, Esquires Charles Pierce said. That hall is wired, he continued. That hall is wired by loud, unhappy, dissatisfied white people.
This old white people business does get a little tired, Charlie, King said. Id ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that youre talking about, where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?
Than white people? Hayes asked, clearly amazed.
Than, than Western civilization itself, King replied. Its rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world. Thats all of Western civilization.
Rep. Kings comments were straight out of white supremacy. White supremacists believe that white people are superior to all other races, or as Rep. King called every non-white person on the planet sub-groups.
Steve King said exactly what Donald Trump is selling, and the message that is being broadcast to the rest of the country is one of racism. The Republican Party is selling racism in Cleveland.
Republicans are still trying to make America forget about George W. Bush and Sarah Palin, but the stain of racism that Trump is leaving on the Republican Partys white bed sheets may not come off for decades to come.
It is day one of the Republican convention, but Trumps circus has already established a new low for the injection of race and division into our politics.
The Republican Party may never recover from Trumps four-day bender of hate that is unfolding in Cleveland.
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Its a slight twist from the Thanks, Obama narrative, because Mrs.
After it was revealed that Melania Trumps speech lifted whole parts from First Lady Michelle Obamas speech, the New York Daily News blasted the Trump campaign with a picture of a triumphant looking Donald Trump pointing at his wife, with the caption, Thanks Mrs. Obama!
For Trump, who has been demonizing Obama for his entire run, this is a debacle.
Aside from the issue that plagiarism to this degree is pretty awful and kills careers, last night Republicans were falling over themselves to point out how much better Melania Trump is than Michelle Obama.
California US Senate Candidate Thomas Del Beccaro embarrassed himself with this tweet last night:
#MelaniaTrump proved tonight she is total opposite of #MichelleO. No anger. No complaints. Just about what can happen through opportunity. Thomas Del Beccaro (@tomdelbeccaro) July 19, 2016
So really, this is a teaching moment for conservatives because what they loved Michelle Obamas words when they came out of Melania Trumps mouth. What is that all about? Gee, spot the difference and discover a bias.
It looks like its not Mrs. Obama who is angry and complaining. Seems its the bias of the viewer that imposes those negative qualities onto Mrs. Obama.
The press is pummeling the Trump campaign over the plagiarism discovery, but conservatives are bending over backwards to justify and excuse the plagiarism. The Trump campaign has said no one will be fired over this, because the press will forget about it so no biggie.
Apparently integrity is not an issue at the Trump campaign, nor is theft of another persons speech. If the press wont remember, who cares? Great motto for someone running for President.
In fact, the Trump campaign took this all the way full circle by making the meme Thanks Obama real, except its Thanks Hillary. They blamed Hillary Clinton for Melanias speech. I wish I were kidding. This is a failure to take responsibility on steroids.
Thanks Mrs. Obama! indeed. Thanks for the great words that conservatives love when they come out of a white womans mouth.
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We believe that economic uncertainties in some developed and emerging nations, soft commodity prices and forex woes played spoilsport for industries like Industrial Products in second-quarter 2016. However, the impact of such headwinds is subdued compared with first-quarter 2016. In the U.S., roughly 1% year-over-year decline in industrial production is believed to have impacted industrial machine and tool makers.
According to the Zacks Industry classification, the machinery industry is broadly grouped under Industrial Products, one of the 16 broad Zacks sectors. Per our report dated Jul 15, earnings for the Industrial Products sector are expected to decline 8.6% in the second quarter, while revenues will likely fall 5.6%.
Whats in Store for 2 Machinery Stocks, GGG and ITW?
Below we discuss briefly the expectations from the upcoming results (Apr-Jun quarter) for two machinery stocks:
Graco Inc. GGG: This machinery company is slated to release its second-quarter 2016 results on Jul 20, after the market closes. In the four trailing quarters, the company reported below-expected results in one while surpassing estimates in the rest with an average positive earnings surprise of 8.84%.
GRACO INC Price and EPS Surprise
GRACO INC Price and EPS Surprise | GRACO INC Quote
Our proven model does not conclusively show that Graco Inc. is likely to beat earnings this quarter. This is because the company lacks the right combination of two key ingredients a positive Earnings ESP (the percentage difference between the Most Accurate estimate and the Zacks Consensus Estimate) and a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), #2 (Buy) or #3 (Hold). The company currently carries a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell) and a 0.00% ESP. Over the last 60 days, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for the stock remained unchanged at 99 cents for second-quarter 2016.
Illinois Tool Works Inc. ITW: This machinery stock is gearing up to release its second-quarter 2016 results on Jul 20, before the market opens. The company reported better-than-expected results over the four trailing quarters, with an average positive earnings surprise of 1.95%.
Story continues
ILL TOOL WORKS Price and EPS Surprise
ILL TOOL WORKS Price and EPS Surprise | ILL TOOL WORKS Quote
Our proven model does not conclusively show that Illinois Tool Works will beat earnings this quarter because it currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 and a 0.00% Earnings ESP. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the stock is currently pegged at $1.40 for second-quarter 2016. (For more please read: Illinois Tool To Report Q2 Earnings: What's in Store?)
Stay tuned! Check back on our full write-up on earnings release of Illinois Tool Works Inc.
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Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report
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A 20-year-old accused of armed robbery has been sentenced to three years in prison.
Yasin Abdiasis Sufi, of Rochester, pleaded guilty in May to one count of simple robbery. In exchange for the plea, additional counts of first-degree aggravated robbery and first-degree burglary were dismissed at Thursday's sentencing. All are felonies.
He was given a 36-month term, with credit for 134 days already served.
The charges stem from an incident Feb. 8 at a Rochester apartment complex, where a man entering one of the buildings was followed to his apartment by Sufi and Adrick Deonte Mims, also 20.
Sufi brandished a handgun, the complaint says; when the victim saw the gun, he tried to leave, but was chased down by Mims and brought back to the apartment. Three other tenants were in the apartment, as well as a neighbor.
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Sufi put the gun to the heads of two of the victims, at one point ejecting the magazine to prove the weapon was real. Sufi and Mims gathered the victims on one side of the room and held them at gunpoint, court documents say, and gathered electronics and money.
Mims allegedly put the property into a backpack and left the apartment, but Sufi remained, continuing to hold the group at gunpoint. According to the reports, Sufi told the men he was robbing them because he was going to jail for an assault and needed the money. He threatened to kill them if they reported the incident to police, then left.
The victims were able to provide detailed descriptions of Sufi and Mims; they also heard Sufi's name during a phone call he received during the robbery. Social media photographs and video were used to verify their identities; Sufi was wearing a watch similar to one taken in the incident.
The assault case Sufi was referring to during the robbery was dismissed at last week's sentencing.
Mims was charged with aid and abet first-degree aggravated robbery, first-degree burglary and simple robbery, all felonies. He was released on his own recognizance in May but rearrested in June after allegedly taking part in a drive-by shooting. Mims was charged in that case with two felony counts of aiding an offender and a gross misdemeanor count of possessing a pistol without a permit.
Though he hasn't entered a plea in either case, court documents indicate a sentencing date of Sept. 13.
At least one person who drove a vehicle through yards in northwest Rochester this morning got away from police, authorities said, despite a short chase.
Officers were dispatched at 4:40 a.m. to the area of the 4900 block of 18 1/2 Avenue Northwest for a report of a dirt bike and four-wheelers driving through yards, said Capt. John Sherwin. They were unable to find anyone
An officer who was northbound on 18th Avenue, responding to a different call on 50th Street Northwest spotted a small dirt bike with no headlights, Sherwin said. The officer pursued the dirt bike for a few blocks before losing it near Gage Elementary School, the report says.
The driver was described as a white male in his late teens or early 20s, dressed in camouflage and wearing a head wrap.
A Rochester man has been sentenced to nearly three years in prison after pleading guilty to choking a woman and threatening her with a large knife.
Kyle Timothy Perteete, 25, pleaded guilty Monday to second-degree assault with a dangerous weapon, aggravated stalking and two counts of domestic assault, all felonies. Olmsted County District Court Judge Debra Jacobson immediately sentenced Perteete to 33 months in prison, with credit for 57 days served.
The investigation began the morning of June 2, when police responded to a Rochester residence for a report of a domestic assault. Officers noticed a knife with a black handle and a 10-inch blade lying on the kitchen table.
A woman at the home said she, Perteete and another man had been drinking that morning; the victim said she asked Perteete to be quiet, because a child in the home was sleeping. When she returned to the child's bedroom, Perteete followed her, grabbed her neck with one hand and began choking her.
The woman said she had trouble breathing and believed she lost consciousness for a moment.
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The victim tried to get away, but Perteete pulled her off the bed, grabbed her by the neck with both hands and continued choking her. The woman yelled, which brought the other man into the room; Perteete left the bedroom, but came back moments later with the knife.
The man again intervened and called law enforcement. Officers noted redness and several scratches on the victim's neck, the complaint says, but Perteete denied being physical with the woman.
A review of his criminal history reflects a conviction for felony strangulation and suffocation, as well as a conviction for battery. Both cases were in Wisconsin in 2015.
A Pine Island man charged with threatening Mayo Clinic and Mayo employees through a Facebook post last year has been sentenced to a year in jail, with credit for 109 days served, and ordered to complete chemical dependency treatment.
Adam Bussman, 36, pleaded guilty in April to felony counts of threats of violence-display replica of firearm and fifth-degree drug possession. An additional felony count of threats of violence-reckless disregard was dismissed at Monday's sentencing.
The charges stem from a pair of December social media posts attributed to Bussman. In the first, he was holding what appeared to be a replica of an AK-47 assault rifle, said Rochester Police Capt. John Sherwin, "expressing his displeasure with his treatment" by Mayo staff.
The next photo, the report says, is of Bussman's appointment information, with the words "intern hunting I go."
"A friend of a friend" saw the posts, Sherwin said, and reported them to Mayo security. Security, in turn, located the staff members allegedly targeted to ensure their safety, then called police.
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A preliminary search during Bussman's arrest at his home turned up less than a gram of methamphetamine in his possession.
After his initial appearance on the charges, Bussman skipped multiple court appearances; he was eventually arrested again in February.
A search of the home after that arrest recovered 15.2 grams of meth and $500 in cash; Bussman pleaded guilty in April to second-degree controlled substance crime; one count of felony first-degree drug sale was dismissed as part of a plea agreement.
He was sentenced Monday in that case to 81 months in prison, stayed for 25 years, and a second, concurrent one-year jail term.
In addition to the jail time and treatment, Bussman was also ordered to undergo a mental health examination and trespassed from Mayo Clinic properties for 25 years, unless given approval in advance.
A late-arriving proposal to turn the Rochester Armory building into a charter school will not be considered by the Rochester City Council at least not for now.
Council members on Friday received a proposal to turn the city-owned Armory currently the home of the Rochester Senior Center into a charter school, the Armory Arts Academy. It came less than a week after the council had reviewed two other proposals and months after the city's deadline for applications in a formal request for proposals process.
To allow a third proposal to enter the review process at this stage could give an unfair advantage and mar the city's request-for-proposal process in the future, said council member Nick Campion at a Monday night meeting.
"Our ability to provide a fair review could be compromised if we let an additional proposal into the process," Campion said.
Last Monday the council heard presentations from the Rochester Arts and Cultural Initiative and the Minnesota Veterans and Emergency Services Museum, the two groups that had met the city's RFP deadline of March 31.
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Council President Randy Staver had asked whether the council would agree to hear a presentation on the charter school proposal.
"We're custodians of public assets," Staver said. "Would I be remiss if I ignored new information that might provide for, potentially, the best and highest use of a public asset?"
Campion responded: "We're custodians of buildings and dollars but we're also custodians of the public trust, and we have to understand that not presenting a process that maintains integrity and transparency, it betrays our need to facilitate that public trust and it's probably more valuable than the buildings."
When it came to a vote, the council was unanimous in agreeing to not hear the Armory Arts Academy's proposal within the confines of its current RFP process but the council still maintains a few options. It could accept one the two proposals on the table; it could reject both proposals and re-issue its RFP; or it could reject the proposals and pursue a sale of the publicly owned building to a private party.
While the council for now will move ahead without hearing a detailed presentation of the charter school proposal, the concept could still weigh in the minds of council members.
"It's hard not to read over a third (proposal) and then apply that in your thinking as you move forward," council member Ed Hruska said.
"It does put us in a tough position," Hruska added. "I guess I'm OK with keeping (the process) as it is, but knowing what I know, in my mind now I've got three proposals."
After hearing the two presentations last week, Staver had said the council would move toward a decision in the next couple of weeks.
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The building should be available by the first quarter of next year and in the interim between a decision and a tenant taking residence in the Armory the city would need to work out certain agreements, said Terry Speath, city re-development director.
USDA: Farmers still assessing storm damage
ST. PAUL, The U.S. Department of Agriculture says farmers are still assessing the damage after strong thunderstorms moved across northern and central parts of Minnesota last week.
The agency said in its weekly crop progress and condition report for Minnesota on Monday that only 3.3 days were suitable for fieldwork amid reports of damaging winds, hail and excessive rain that led to flooding in some areas.
But 82 percent of Minnesota's corn is in good to excellent condition and development is about five days ahead of the normal pace. Soybeans are about eight days ahead of the five-year average, and conditions are rated 78 percent good to excellent.
Topsoil moisture supplies are rated 73 percent adequate and 26 percent surplus, while subsoil moisture is 77 percent adequate and 17 percent surplus. Associated Press
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Clinton rallies teachers
MINNEAPOLIS Hillary Clinton is trying to build support in Minnesota where caucus members overwhelmingly preferred her former rival Bernie Sanders in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
The former U.S. Secretary of State addressed thousands of members of the American Federation of Teachers at the Minneapolis Convention Center Monday night. Clinton told teachers they have some of the hardest, most important jobs in the world and that if she becomes president they will have a partner in the White House.
Clinton told the teachers she wants to raise their salaries, institute universal preschool and repair crumbling schools.
The presumptive nominee also vowed to eliminate public college and university tuition for students of families that make less than $125,000 annually. Associated Press
Police union chief: No uniform during union interviews
MINNEAPOLIS The president of the Minneapolis police union says he's been ordered not to wear his uniform during media interviews while he's representing member officers.
Minneapolis Police Federation leader Bob Kroll said he received a letter from Chief Janee Harteau ordering him to stop wearing the uniform during interviews unless he's speaking on behalf of the department.
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Kroll recently commended four off-duty Minneapolis officers working security at a Minnesota Lynx game who walked off the job because the players wore T-shirts supporting Black Lives Matter during warm-ups. Harteau criticized the officers for leaving the Target Center.
Police department spokeswoman Sgt. Catherine Michal says the letter from Harteau to Kroll was a private personnel matter. Associated Press
Attorney: Woman denies treating nanny like slave
WOODBURY The attorney for a Minnesota woman accused of beating and starving a woman she brought from China to work as a nanny says his client denies the charges.
Lili Huang, 35, of Woodbury is charged in Washington County with five felony counts, including labor trafficking, false imprisonment and assault.
Huang's attorney, Daniel S. Le, said Monday that his client "categorically denies the false allegations levied by a family friend and will be vindicated through our system of justice."
The 58-year-old woman was found wandering in the street last week. According to the complaint, she was forced to work up to 18 hours a day doing child care, cooking and cleaning. Police calculate her pay at about $1.80 an hour.
Huang remains in jail. She's due back in court Aug. 18. Associated Press
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Woman dies after driving around road barricades
GRAND VIEW, Wis. Authorities say a woman has died after driving her car around barricades on a washed-out highway in flooded northwestern Wisconsin.
A Wisconsin Department of Transportation official called 911 around 9:30 a.m. Monday to report the crash on U.S. Highway 63 just north of Grand View.
The official said the car drove around two sets of "road closed" signs and into the washed-out part of the highway, which goes down about 50 feet. The car came to rest at the bottom of the washout.
Bayfield County sheriff's authorities say the woman had to be extricated from her car and brought to the surface using ropes. She was airlifted to a hospital in Duluth, where she died. Associated Press
AUSTIN If you're wondering about the Interstate 90 bridge replacement, questions will be answered at an open house next week.
The public is invited to an open house July 28 in Austin to learn more about the replacement of the 11th Drive NE bridge over I-90, according to the Minnesota Department of Transportation.
MnDOT is scheduled to replace the bridge over I-90 in 2017, and work will include widening the bridge and adding accommodations for pedestrians.
The session will run from 4 to 6 p.m. at Austin City Hall, 500 Fourth Ave. NE. MnDOT engineers and others will be available to talk about the project, including its timing and scope.
AUSTIN More than 90 city officials from throughout the state will head to Austin for an annual summer conference.
The Coalition of Greater Minnesota Cities will host its annual summer conference Wednesday through Friday in Austin. Around 90 city officials will be attending various seminars and discussions.
Some events include a panel of legislators and transportation stakeholders to discuss the state's transportation needs and the insight into why a comprehensive transportation bill failed this year and ideas for compromise in the future.
There is also discussion of looking forward into 2017 and taking a look into which party would be better for Greater Minnesota. This will also involve dialogue between audience and officials.
RED WING Six candidates for mayor and city council seeking votes in the Aug. 9 primary election answered questions on topics ranging from the city's financial health to the role of city government on Monday night at the American Legion.
The candidates each answered questions written by residents who attended the forum. Participants included candidates for mayor, Ward 2 and the combined Wards 3 and 4 seat.
The race with the most candidates who showed up was the combined Wards 3 and 4 seat, being contested by Evan Brown, Ernest Stone and Glen Witham.
"There's a demographic trend that's concerning," said Brown, who has served as a volunteer on several city boards during the last 13 years. "We are getting older. How do we attract jobs that have benefits and a real living wage? The port authority does not focus on these issues." Getting the port authority to work more closely with the city council on jobs, he said, would help the city's finances.
Witham, who previously served as mayor of Ronnaby before moving to Red Wing three years ago, pointed to wasteful spending by the city, citing an example of the public works department, where, he said, he had seen different workers show up by themselves one by one in new trucks to a job site. "I watch what the city spends money on and shake my head," Witham said. "I do see things that seem a little extreme."
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As a person who fixes things for a living, Stone said with so much financial uncertainty in the world, spending efficiently and with accountability is needed. He criticized the building of roundabouts, favoring a focus on fixing what Red Wing has. "If we're going to spend our money, I suggest we fix what we have, enhance it," he said.
Two of the four mayoral candidates attended the forum, with Sean Dowse and Ahkeem Brown absent.
David Harris, who is running for mayor, said his focus was on affordable housing and inclusion for low-income and minority individuals in the government process. He noted Red Wing is not a place where young people seem to stay or move to. He compared Red Wing to Northfield, noting the city has two colleges, whereas Red Wing only has a vocational and technical school. "We need a college," he said, adding a liberal arts college would be a good fit for the city. "At the other end of the scale are the little kids. We need to encourage our school system."
The other mayoral candidate in attendance, Kevin Serres, also mentioned the lack of good, low-income housing. "You can't find anyplace to live in this town, and if you can't find a place to live, you can't bring people into town," he said.
Serres said the problem with the city council is its spending. Similar to Stone, he mentioned the roundabouts as a bad buy for the city. He also said the water bills were too high in the city. "This town spends money like there's no tomorrow," he said.
The final candidate attending Monday night was John Becker, who is running against Greg Boek and Adam Gettings for the Ward 2 seat.
A resident and business owner whose children and grandchildren live in Red Wing, Becker said he has served on several volunteer boards in the city. "I'm very passionate about growing our economy from within," he said. "The port authority has taken the position that you can import prosperity." Rather, he said, he'd like to see the city invest in businesses and assets that already are in Red Wing.
If you missed the candidates Monday, they, along with Ward 1 candidates Kim Beise and Thomas Day, were invited to meet and greet residents in the Foot Room at the Red Wing Public Library from 5 to 7 p.m. Wednesday.
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The general election is Nov. 8.
Rochester's biggest employer added another feather to its cap earlier this week.
Mayo Clinic was one of 42 companies in the country to receive a perfect score on the inaugural Disability Equality Index score in a survey conducted by the U.S. Business Leadership Network and the American Association of People With Disabilities.
The survey sought feedback from Fortune 1,000 companies and resulted in Mayo being recognized on the "2016 DEI Best Places to Work" list. Others that posted a perfect 100 on the Disability Equality Index include Charter Communications, Wells Fargo, Walmart, Starbucks, United Airlines and others.
"It is an honor for Mayo Clinic to be recognized among the leaders in disability-inclusion practices," said Sharonne Hayes, a Mayo Clinic cardiologist who is also director of Mayo's Office of Diversity and Inclusion. "Mayo prides itself on bringing healing, hope and inclusiveness for not just our patients, but our employees, as well."
More broadly speaking, Mayo has been ranked among the Top 100 places to work by Fortune for 13 straight years. It checked in at No. 86 this spring , down 13 spots from 2015.
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The new index focused on four categories during its analysis of popular companies. They included culture and leadership, enterprise-wide access, employment practices, and community engagement and support services.
Two keys programs helped Mayo score well on the new index. The Disability Mayo Employee Resource Group is credited with improving the work environment and patient experience, while the long-standing Return to Work Program continues to assist sick or injured employees during their transition back to work.
"We look at retention of employees with disabilities as just as important as hiring and recruiting employees with disabilities," said Jane Ryan, section head of the Return to Work program. "Our job is to find out what the obstacles are and to find a solution."
Past chair of the Disability Mayo Employee Resource Group Kristi Carrington added: "(It) gives a voice to people's concerns and stories, lets people know it's OK to talk about having a disability, and how change can be initiated. I think that's one of the best things about Mayo we have so many resources internally that we can really make things happen."
The DEI is a joint initiative of the U.S. Business Leadership Network and the American Association of People With Disabilities. It was introduced in 2012, piloted the next yearend officially launched in the fall of 2014.
CANNON FALLS A Cannon Falls father and his 1-year-old daughter were killed in a head-on crash with a semi northwest of Cannon Falls late Monday morning.
The State Patrol said Jason Calderara, 31, and his daughter, Melody Calderara, 1, died at the scene. The mother, Elizabeth M. Calderara, 26, and their son, Nicholas Calderara, 9, both of Cannon Falls, were seriously injured and taken to Regions Hospital in St. Paul, the patrol said.
The mother was in critical condition this morning, according a Regions spokesman. Because the son is a minor, the spokesman couldn't release any information on him.
The patrol said Jason Calderara was driving north on Minnesota State Highway 56 and passed a vehicle, then cut back into the northbound lane at the last second. James B. Sathre 71, of Faribault was driving a semi south on the highway behind a mini van. The driver of the mini van moved to the right shoulder and slammed on the brakes to avoid Calderara's SUV. Sathre hit the brakes, jackknifed, went into the northbound lane and hit the SUV in the front driver's side.
Sathre was not taken to a hospital.
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The crash was reported at 11:24 a.m.
MINNEAPOLIS Police officers in Minneapolis and St. Paul are being told to remain vigilant after eight officers were killed in recent shootings in Texas and Louisiana.
In a memo on Sunday, Minneapolis police Chief Janee Harteau directed all officers to ride in pairs until further notice. Harteau's memo was issued after three officers were killed Sunday in Baton Rouge.
Harteau also told her officers to protect each other, provide backup and wear their bulletproof vests.
"It is always important, but now it is critical, that each of you be on high alert and be extremely vigilant," Harteau said in her memo. She added: "Be cautious on every 911 call, even those that are often deemed 'routine.' Look for any setup calls and provide info on anything that appears suspicious."
On Monday, Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek ordered no more solo patrols for his deputies.
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For now, deputies in the agency's emergency service division which responds to 911 calls, deals with civil matters and serves warrants will start pairing up as a precaution, sheriff's office spokesman Jon Collins said.
While that means fewer squad cars patrolling city streets, Collins said, "Officer safety is a top priority so we feel it was a needed change for now."
Police-community relations have been tense in recent weeks. On July 5, Alton Sterling, who is black, was killed by officers in Baton Rouge. A day later, Philando Castile, who is also black, was shot by an officer in Falcon Heights, a suburb of St. Paul. His girlfriend livestreamed the shooting's aftermath on Facebook.
The day after Castile's death, a gunman killed five officers at a demonstration in Dallas to protest the police shootings. There have been attacks on other officers around the country, including Sunday's attack in Baton Rouge.
St. Paul police spokesman Steve Linders told the Associated Press that officers in that department are also riding in pairs. Linders said they began doing that on July 7, the day of the Dallas shootings.
Both St. Paul and Minneapolis police are monitoring potential threats and say there have been no direct threats to their officers.
KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Singapore and Malaysia are to build a high-speed rail link that will cut the travel time between the city-state and Kuala Lumpur to 90 minutes by 2026, their prime ministers said on Tuesday.
The rail link, announced in February 2013, was initially expected to be operational by 2020 but the neighbours have cited complexities for the delay.
"One can have breakfast in Kuala Lumpur, lunch in Singapore and be back in time for dinner in Kuala Lumpur. This is the shape of things to come," Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak told reporters after the signing ceremony, also attended by his Singapore counterpart, Lee Hsien Loong.
The two countries signed a memorandum of understanding for the link with a bilateral agreement to be finalised by the end of the year, both sides said.
It takes about four hours to drive the more than 300 km (190 miles) from Singapore to the Malaysian capital.
The announcement reflected a recent improvement in ties between the neighbours.
Singapore was part of Malaysia after the end of British colonial rule but they separated acrimoniously in 1965, clouding diplomatic and economic dealings for decades.
Relations have grown stronger in recent years despite an investigation by Singapore's financial authorities into a multi-billion dollar scandal involving Malaysian state fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB).
The rail link would have six stations in addition to its terminals in Singapore and Bandar Malaysia, about 7 km (4.5 miles) from Kuala Lumpur city centre, the two countries' transport authorities said in a statement.
Work on tenders for the project will start next year, Najib said. No estimate has been given for the cost but Malaysian media has reported that it could be more than $10 billion.
Rail companies from China, Japan, South Korea and Europe have expressed interest in the project.
But China is expected to have an edge after a generous winning bid from a state-owned Chinese firm for 1MDB's power assets, which was seen helping Beijing find favour in Malaysia.
(Reporting by Rozanna Latiff; Writing by A. Ananthalakshmi; Editing by Robert Birsel)
August marks the 200th issue of Rochester Magazine. During those 16-plus years, we've printed 15,000 pages, published 5 million words, and received the following letter to the editor (me):
"The so-called 'editor' of this so-called 'magazine' thinks that whatever he says is gospel. You can tell by looking at his stupid picture that he thinks he's god's gift to writers."
There's more, but it gets kind of mean.
Here's a look back at three Oddchester columns that generated some of the most hate mail.
The column: "Scrapbook of Revelations" [Jan. '05], a column that poked gentle fun at people who take scrapbooking just a little too seriously. For research, I attended a scrapbooking seminar in the Twin Cities.
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The excerpt: "9:34 a.m.: The ideal scrapbooking workplace, we are warned repeatedly, is an extension of self. Your scrapbooking station represents your personality. Examples of locations for your extension of self include and this alone was worth my $20 entry fee basement space, attic space, and those spaces that may have previously been occupied by kids who've left for college or 'spouses who've passed on.' Apparently, scrapbook wannabes everywhere are just biding their time, waiting for their husband to die so they'll finally have space to hang their ribbon spools and bear-filled 'I need a bear hug!' contact paper."
The aftermath: Many of the letters to the editor and they were actual, mailed-in letters were decorated with stickers of bears sporting word bubbles asking "Are we bear yet?" The colored paper and scalloped edges, though, didn't do much to make phrases like "I'd like to glue your [expletive deleted] lips shut with my hot glue gun" seem any friendlier.
The column: "The Idiot's Guide to Stupid Things for Dummies" [Aug. '04], a column that poked gentle fun at, among other things, advice columnist Heloise.
The excerpt: "Fumbling with your spices? Install a Lazy Susan in the bottom of your spice cupboard and spin your way to time savings. Trouble deciding which shoes to wear? Station a Lazy Susan shoe dispenser in your closet to spin your way to shoe-choice time savings. Trouble getting the kids ready on those hectic school mornings? Make each one take his or her place on a giant Lazy Susan installed in the dressing area and spin them to you for school prep time savings. From what we can gather, 'Hints from Heloise' has been written, since about 1910, by the same woman. And since she still makes public appearances, the only possible explanation is that Heloise is some half human/half automaton (internally powered by Lazy Susans) kept alive through funding from the big vinegar lobby."
The aftermath: This column, somehow, made it onto a blog for Heloise fans. And when I say "Heloise fans," I mean "people who are so rabid in their blind devotion to Heloise that they will threaten to kill any columnist who happens to make fun of their Possibly Immortal Robot Leader Who Can Save Them Pennies Per Week Through Her Recipes For Homemade Glass Cleaner."
The column: "Sex, Thighs and Videotape" [Oct. '04], a column that poked gentle fun at some of the strangest exercise videos I could find.
The excerpt: A review of "'Dancin' Grannies: Mature Fitness Video.' Women over a certain age, and I'm sure this is spelled out somewhere in our Constitution, are forbidden from publicly wearing the same high-hipped style leotards that Olivia Newton John wore in her 'Physical' video. Yet this law is broken four-fold in the opening scene of Dancin' Grannies, when lead granny Beverly and three other grannies prance into camera frame. Women over a certain age, if I understand the legal system correctly, are also forbidden from squeezing a large pink ball with their thighs or repeatedly yelling 'Tighten that buttocks!' at me. Both of those laws are broken simultaneously in song number two."
The aftermath: When this column was posted on websites that cater to seniors, I was bombarded by emails, mostly from women who stressed how beautiful the human body is at any age. A few of them including one woman who claimed to be "80 going on 40" emailed me photos of themselves in leotards. Though if you want to know the truth, these ladies to a person were kind and funny, and we had hilarious email strings that I've saved to this day. The real aftermath came when my wife found photos of elderly women in leotards on my laptop.
Olmsted County's pertussis numbers continue to creep upward and are closing in on the level seen in an outbreak in 2012.
Olmsted County Public Health reports that 23 more pertussis cases have been reported since July 14, pushing the total number to 150 as of this morning. It's by far the highest number in the state this year and the highest local number since more than 250 cases were reported in 2012.
The Minnesota county with the next highest number of pertussis cases is Hennepin with 62, according to the Minnesota Department of Health's June 30 report.
"It's spiking higher than in 2012, but if history is any indication, it might not be slowing down any time soon," said Dawn Beck, associate director of public health in Olmsted County. "We just have to kind of wait to see what comes and continue to do our thing."
Olmsted County's incident command has been activated since May 23 to assist with identifying and interviewing patients, while also helping to spread the word throughout the community. More than 50 groups have been contacted thus far in hopes of stemming the outbreak.
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Mayo Clinic Dr. Thomas Boyce, who specializes in pediatric infectious diseases, said pertussis outbreaks tend to occur once every 3 to 5 years and typically peak during the summer. The health recommendations change during an outbreak, Dr. Boyce said.
During normal times, residents are encouraged to see a doctor if a cough persists for more than two weeks. During a pertussis outbreak, Dr. Boyce says that "a patient with a cough of any type for any duration should be tested for pertussis unless there is an alternate explanation."
Once pertussis is confirmed in a patient, that person and their whole household, infected or not, are typically given antibiotics to treat the illness and help prevent its spread. Infants, in particular, are considered a "very high risk" during an outbreak, Dr. Boyce said.
Beck says that patients with pertussis should avoid public interaction until they've been on antibiotics for five days, but no such recommendations exist for uninfected household members.
"The best way to fight pertussis is to keep it from developing in the first place," Dr. Boyce said. "All infants and children as well as adult family members and caregivers need to be fully vaccinated against pertussis. If you're not sure, ask your doctor to check your vaccine record and make sure it is current.
CLEVELAND Barring a last-minute jolt to the proceedings, Donald Trump is hours away from attaining the 2016 presidential nomination despite efforts to stop him that spilled messily into the opening of the Republican National Convention.
As his wife, Melania, put it from the stage, "It would not be a Trump contest without excitement and drama."
She generated a lot of buzz with her well-received speech and, later, a controversy over some of her remarks. Two passages of her address matched nearly word-for-word the speech that Michelle Obama delivered in 2008 at the Democratic National Convention.
A senior Trump adviser, Paul Manafort, dismissed the criticism as "just absurd," and insisted that she used "words that are common words." The campaign said the speech was written by a "team of writers" who included fragments that reflected Mrs. Trump's thinking.
For a time Monday, the Cleveland arena resembled the convention-floor battles of old as aggrieved anti-Trump Republicans protested the adoption by voice vote of rules aimed at quashing an already flailing effort to deny him the prize. Instead of a manicured message of unity, viewers saw the fractured face of a party still coming to grips with the polarizing man of the moment.
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And protests outside the arena were expected to continue today, with a group of doctors and nurses, Stand Together Against Trump, planning to march. An anti-poverty group marched outside the arena on Monday.
Inevitable outcome
But to borrow the parlance of Trump the businessman, the deal will almost certainly be sealed Tuesday night.
That's when the roll call of states is set to unfold, delivering the delegates to make him the standard-bearer after a rollicking primary season that saw him vanquish 16 rivals. Typically in both parties, the roll call is heavy with ceremonial flourishes, good cheer and puffery about the virtues of each state. This time, it's also another opportunity for discord to be heard.
On Monday, the floor flight gave way to a lineup of hard-edged, prime-time speeches in which Republicans painted a grim picture of the country's future and an evener darker view of Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
Speakers accused Clinton of lying, "putting all of our children's lives at risk," and threatening the nation's security. When delegates chanted "Lock her up!," Ret. Gen. Michael Flynn responded from the podium: "You're damn right. There's nothing wrong with that."
With a rock-star entrance, Trump changed the tone and introduced his wife, Melania. She traced her own life story, coming to America from Slovenia, and painted a softer, more rounded portrait of her husband than the hard-nosed, insult-throwing candidate GOP voters have seen at every turn. She praised his "simple goodness" and his loyalty to and love of family while noting the "drama" that comes with Trump in politics.
"If you want someone to fight for you and your country, I can assure you, he is the guy," Mrs. Trump told delegates.
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Hearing double
Her speech contained a striking resemblance to Michelle Obama's when she said her parents "impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise, that you treat people with respect." Mrs. Obama, in her 2008 speech, talked being raised learning about "values, like, you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond, that you do what you say you're going to do, that you treat people with dignity and respect."
Similarly, Mrs. Trump said, "we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them." Mrs. Obama said in 2008, "we want our children and all children in this nation to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work hard for them."
The White House declined to comment Tuesday morning, but was expected to answer questions about the similarities in the remarks later in the day.
Mrs. Trump's speech was part of a four-day campaign to show the softer side of the tough-talking showman. On Tuesday night, two of Trump's children will pick up where she left off. Tiffany Trump, Trump's 22-year-old daughter from his marriage to Marla Maples, and Donald Trump Jr., his eldest son and an executive vice president at The Trump Organization, will take the podium.
Establishment backing
Former GOP presidents, the home-state governor and other top Republicans have skipped Trump's convention, but Tuesday's bill highlights some establishment support.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie planned to address the convention along with Sen. Steve Daines, who had planned to go fly-fishing in Montana.
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On Monday, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani drew cheers from the crowd as he bemoaned racial divisions, in an impassioned speech.
"What happened to 'there's no black America, there's no white America, there is just America?'" he said, alluding to comments once made by President Barack Obama.
Entertainers who took the stage Monday included actor Scott Baio and Willie Robertson, star of Duck Dynasty.
Themes of the four-day event are all rooted in Trump's Make America Great Again slogan: safe again, work again, first again and one again, in turn.
Safety was first on tap, and a succession of speakers cast Trump as the leader for perilous times and Hillary Clinton as the embodiment of a system that has left America vulnerable or worse.
Fears about violent clashes between groups supporting and opposing Trump's nomination didn't materialize on the first day of the convention. The one reported arrest as Cleveland police and law enforcement officers from across the U.S. maintained a visible presence downtown.
Charles Ramsey has law enforcement credentials that few can match. Only now, for the first time in more than 40 years, the former top cop for the District of Columbia and Philadelphia, and co-chairman of President Obama's Task Force on 21st Century Policing, finds himself advising from the sidelines.
"I've been pretty busy," he told me, "but when things like this occur of course I wish I was in the middle of it. But then there's another part of me that's probably glad I'm not in the middle of it."
Retirement hasn't diminished his willingness to address hot-button issues. For example, Ramsey doesn't share the view of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who recently said: "When you say black lives matter, that's inherently racist. Black lives matter, white lives matter, Asian lives matter, Hispanic lives matter. That's anti-American, and it's racist."
Offered Ramsey:
"I've heard people say that Black Lives Matter is a terrorist group and so forth. I mean, that kind of rhetoric just doesn't help anything. What happened in Dallas really had nothing directly to do with that particular group.
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"My only concern with them is that I wish they would show the same level of outrage whenever an individual is killed in the community."
I told Ramsey that I hear radio callers from both sides in the debate over modern policing use the word "disproportionate" with regard to police killings like that of Philando Castile in Minnesota. Critics of police say those who look like Castile get pulled over disproportionately for items like broken taillights, while supporters of law enforcement argue that, where crime is being disproportionately committed by people of color, those type of interactions are justified.
"I say everybody's right," Ramsey told me.
"There are approximately 13,000 homicides that take place in the United States every year," he said. "Those aren't police shootings, these are people killing other people, and, unfortunately, a large percentage of that occurs in many of our inner cities. We have got to face the fact that we've got issues there. Now there are drivers, there are societal issues that create an environment where that occurs. We've got extreme poverty, we've got dysfunctional educational systems, dysfunctional families; these things are long term, but they've got to be addressed and they've got to be fixed or we're not going to ever get out of this."
Ramsey has a suggestion on handling shootings like that of Castile and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, expanding on a recommendation from his task force:
"Mandate external and independent criminal investigations in cases of police use of force resulting in death, officer-involved shootings resulting in injury or death, or in-custody deaths."
In retrospect, Ramsey thinks the task force could have gone further. While making clear that he was speaking individually, he said he now thinks that each U.S. Attorney's Office should have a "federal force investigation team" that could consist of retired FBI and other federal law enforcement officials, a member from the local community, and assistant U.S. attorneys who would conduct an independent investigation of every shooting by police.
"Now, that is not a civil rights investigation," he said. "If we find during the course of the investigation that there were civil-rights violations that occurred it can always be referred."
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Citing the lack of trust in some communities for standard police investigations, he does not believe the initial task force recommendation went far enough. U.S. Rep. Patrick Meehan (R.-Pa.), himself a former U.S. attorney, had a positive reaction to Ramsey's idea.
"I think the commissioner's suggestion has real merit," Meehan said. "I would include a respected, former local officer on the investigative team who understands the community. What is needed is confidence by the community, and indeed the cops themselves, that a review is objective and professional. This could do that."
George Parry, who led Philadelphia's police brutality unit from 1978 through 1983, isn't so sure. Parry knows how hard it is to go after police for misconduct.
"It was exceedingly difficult," he said. "We faced opposition from the Police Department and even from members of the Court of Common Pleas. Judges wanted no parts of our cases. Some invented constitutional rights for officers that no one had ever heard of."
Still, he said, "I just don't see that the number of shootings rises to the level where the formation of a special unit is warranted. If you look at the stats, fatal shootings by police are negligible. The focus of the media makes it seem like a huge problem, but it is not. There are already adequate resources at the local, state, and federal level to properly investigate on an individual basis. The FBI, in connection with the U.S. Attorneys Offices, conducts a great number of investigations already as possible civil-rights violations."
Ramsey says not all departments are incapable of conducting impartial investigations. "But it's about trust, and it's about perception," he said, "and I think we have to face that reality and that is one recommendation."
In the meantime, Ramsey worries about the Democratic and Republican conventions.
"I have a lot of concerns," he said. "I mean, they are not going to be incident-free. Now that's not to say there's going to be another Dallas. Hopefully that doesn't happen again anywhere in the United States. But I do think we will have some very large demonstrations, some of which could get very unruly depending on the people that are in control of local demonstrations and how they can handle those individuals who come with a separate agenda and who just want to cause problems."
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Michael Smerconish writes for The Philadelphia Inquirer and is host of "Smerconish" on CNN.
Im still digging out from two long weeks in Washington DC teaching two concentrated summer school courses, so Im slow catching up with everything going on at the Republican convention. John and I mulled over the idea of attending the convention with press credentials, but decided against it.
But maybe we should have turned up. PoliticoPro (subscription only) reported this yesterday:
GOP platform aims to turn EPA into commission By Alex Guillen The party platform issues a new call to turn EPA into a commission made up of bipartisan members, like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. We propose to shift responsibility for environmental regulation from the federal bureaucracy to the states and to transform the EPA into an independent bipartisan commission, similar to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, with structural safeguards against politicized science, the platform says. Such a proposal was not included in the partys 2012 platform, though the idea has been floated before, including in 2013 by Steven F. Hayward, a Pepperdine University professor of public policy and conservative blogger. The new platform also takes more typical Republican shots at EPA, including seeking a prohibition on carbon dioxide regulations. It also calls for an end to the so-called sue and settle practice in which outside groups sue EPA and reach a deal in court, and it says Congress, not EPA, should set national air quality standards. The environment is too important to be left to radical environmentalists, the platform says. The environmental establishment has become a self-serving elite, stuck in the mindset of the 1970s, subordinating the publics consensus to the goals of the Democratic Party.
Ive been using the line The environment is much too important to be left to environmentalists; they just screw everything up for a long time in speeches mostly as a way of getting under the thin skin of environmentalists (works, too), and urging Republican office holders to adopt this attitude. Nice to see someone has paid attention.
Memo to GOP: I have thoughts on other parts of the platform, too.
The Media Research Centers Craig Bannister picks up President Obamas telling remarks a week ago Sunday following a meeting with Spains Prime Minister Rajoy. The White House has posted the text of their remarks here.
In the relevant exchange, President Obama toes the line of his friends in the Black Lives Matter movement and advises the police to confess to their alleged racist wrongdoing. The reporter ask Obamas: [A]s you prepare yourself to travel to Dallas, how would you advise the Black Lives Matter activists to approach this very sensitive issue situation?
Good question. Obama placed the Black Lives Matter crowd in the company of civil rights heroes of ages past and then counseled the police to own up to their alleged offenses:
There are legitimate issues that have been raised, and theres data and evidence to back up the concerns that are being expressed by these protesters. And if police organizations and departments acknowledge that theres a problem and theres an issue, then that, too, is going to contribute to real solutions. And, as I said yesterday, that is whats going to ultimately help make the job of being a cop a lot safer. It is in the interest of police officers that their communities trust them and that the kind of rancor and suspicion that exists right now is alleviated.
What complete and utter baloney. As Heather Mac Donald aptly put it in her interview with us this past October: Its appalling that the president of our country is dedicated to propagating lies about the criminal justice system, and very poisonous ones at that.
As Heather suggests, Obama could contribute to a real solution. Obama could own up to the myths and falsehoods of the virulent antipolice campaign he has relentlessly sought to turn to his own purposes.
I know, I know. Its not going to happen. He is a recidivist and a hard-core offender. And the myths and falsehoods have become Democratic Party orthodoxies.
Within minutes after Melania Trumps outstanding speech at the GOP convention last night, Democrats and anti-Trump commentators were accusing her of plagiarizing portions of a paragraph, i.e. a few phrases and sentence fragments, from Michelle Obamas 2008 convention speech. Here is the comparison, a brief portion of Michelle Obamas speech with the words that Melania Trump duplicated in bold, via the Weekly Standard:
And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you wantin life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say youre going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you dont know them, and even if you dont agree with them. And Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values, and pass them on to the next generation. Because we want our children and all children in this nation to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.
It is likely that either Mrs. Trump or her speechwriter researched convention speeches given by other prospective first ladies, and she or the speechwriter may have cribbed a few phrases and sentence fragments from Mrs. Obama. That said, the sentiments are so commonplace that they probably could be drawn from any of a hundred speeches. But, is this supposed to be some kind of scandal? One could probably think of a less important issue, but it would take a while. And I wouldnt think that either Barack Obama or Joe Biden would want to start a conversation about plagiarism.
More significantly, I think that most commentators are drawing precisely the wrong lesson from a comparison between Mrs. Trumps speech and Mrs. Obama. The New York Times, for example, headlines: Melania Trumps Speech Bears Striking Similarities to Michelle Obamas in 2008. No: what Melania Trump intended to draw (or, in any event, did draw) was a sharp contrast between herself and Michelle Obama.
Michelle Obamas best-remembered public pronouncement is her statement that [f]or the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country. Why? Because her husband was nominated for president. The heart of Melania Trumps speech, on the other hand, was not the lines that she may have borrowed from Michelle Obama, but rather this tribute to America, delivered by an immigrant:
After living and working in Milan and Paris, I arrived in New York City twenty years ago, and I saw both the joys and the hardships of daily life. On July 28th, 2006, I was very proud to become a citizen of the United States the greatest privilege on planet Earth. I cannot, or will not, take the freedoms this country offers for granted.
Do you think Michelle Obama (or Barack, for that matter) thinks it is the greatest privilege on planet Earth to be an American? No, I dont either. I suspect that one of Melania Trumps principal objectives in her speech was to draw that contrast between herself and Mr. and Mrs. Obama.
For now, at least, it seems that the Democrats have successfully negated Melania Trumps strong performance last night. We probably shouldnt be surprised: it wouldnt be the Trump campaign, after all, if a stupid, self-imposed distraction didnt cancel out a lot of good work. But over time, voters may be reminded of the real difference between Mrs. Trump and Mrs. Obama. That contrast is not entirely insignificant, because of the light it sheds, indirectly, on the vast philosophical differences between Mr. Trump and the current occupant of the White House.
Don Lemon, who hosts a news show on CNN, may have thought he had a win-win strategy when he asked Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke this question following the murder in Baton Rouge of three police officers:
I spoke to the heads of the sheriff department, the police department, and the state police down there and they told us how their hearts were reeling. Their message is peace and how theyre coming together in the country. Whats your message?
Either Clarke would have to echo this pap or come out against peace and coming together. Instead, Clarke responded: You dont believe that for one minute, do you? Clarke then proceeded to destroy Lemons attempt to reduce the lessons of Dallas and Baton Rouge to mush:
Lemon: Yeah, I believe them. I was over there. . . Clarke: Any protests over the deaths of these cops today in Baton Rogue? Lemon: I dont know that. I dont know that. Clarke: Any riots or protests over the police officers in Dallas, Texas? Lemon: What are you asking? Clarke: Its a pretty simple question. Lemon: I asked you if what your message to the people their message is one of peace. What is your message? Clarke: My message has been clear from day one, two years ago. This anti-cop sentiment from this hateful ideology called Black Lives Matter has fueled this rage against the American police officer. I predicted this two years ago. So what I want to know Lemon: With all due respect, Sheriff, do you know that this was because of that? As a law enforcement officer? Clarke: Yes. I do. Ive been watching this for two years. I predicted this. This anti-police rhetoric sweeping the country has turned out some hateful things inside of people that are now playing themselves out on the American police officer. I want to know, with all of the black-on-black violence going on in the United States of America by the way, when the tragedies happen in Louisiana and Minnesota, did you know that 21 black people were murdered across the United States? Was there any reporting on it? Was there any reporting on it?
Lemon tried to halt the rout, but Clarke was not having it.
Lemon: Sheriff, please, lets just keep the volume down. So, I understand. . . Clarke: Im looking at three dead cops this week and Im looking at five last week, and youre trying to tell me to keep it down?
As the video below shows, Clarke did not shout. Lemon was simply trying to bob-and-weave.
Lemon encouraged Clarke to preach a message of civility. Clarke responded: Don, I wish you had that message of civility toward this hateful ideology, these purveyors of hate. Thats what they do.
Lemon broke to a commercial, after which he suggested that Clarke could leave the set. In the ensuing debate, Lemon continually cut the sheriff off and several times made faces during his comments.
Unfazed, Clarke continued with his denunciation of the whole phony movement of Black Lives Matter. He noted that the movement was built on a lie the discredited hands up, dont shoot line falsely attributed to Michael Brown. Lemon admitted that the line was false, but asked, feebly, what does Michael Brown have to do with Baton Rouge, Louisiana?
Lemon must not have been listening to his own interview. The false narrative that reached a crescendo with the phony claims about Ferguson is what Clarke argues has fueled cop killings like the ones in Baton Rouge.
Asked whether he condemns the Black Lives Matter narrative, Lemon responded that hes just reporter and thus its not his job to condemn. However, Lemon was more than willing, citing President Obama, to condemn the American police departments for (allegedly) treating blacks unfairly.
Sheriff Clarke told Lemon he condemns Black Lives Matter
just like I condemn the hateful ideology of groups like the KKK. All right? I condemn it. There is no place in American discourse for that sort of vile, vitriolic hate coming out of this ideology. This has fueled and fanned the flames towards the American police officers. Theres only one group in America, one, Don, that truly cares about the lives of black people in these urban ghettos. And its the American police officer who goes out there on a daily basis, put their life on the line to protect who? Black people. So when you say we just want to have a conversation, lets have a conversation on the black-on-black crime, which kills more black males, which is more of a threat to any black male in the United States than a law enforcement officer.
The mainstream media doesnt want that conversation, as Lemon repeatedly demonstrated by refusing to discuss the matter with Clarke. Better to adopt President Obamas approach attack the police and then, when the sh*t hits the fan, call for peace, love, and understanding.
Its a sensible debate strategy. Just dont try it on Sheriff David Clarke.
You can watch the whole interview below:
NOTE: I have modified the back end of this post since it originally went up.
Adedayo Mebude, 25, is living her dream. Unlike most Nigerian youth her age, the Nasarawa State University graduate has created a niche for herself with Dharyour Leather brand of premium quality leather accessories for men and women of class, taste and style.
Although the venture was tough and challenging initially, Ms. Mebude told PREMIUM TIMES, Idris Ibrahim and Omono Okonkwo, in an exclusive interview recently that what gives her the greatest satisfaction has been that the quality of hand bags and other leather accessories manufactured for women and men who care for them could rival known designs like Prada, Louis Vuitton and others. Excerpts:
PT: Tell us a bit about what you are into right now?
Adedayo: I am into making of premium quality luxury leather accessories like handbags, purses, suitcases, duffel bags, backpacks, briefcases, fez caps, wallets and others for men and women.
PT: What is your educational background?
Adedayo: I had my primary and secondary education in Agege, Lagos State. After graduating from secondary school in 2007, I didnt get admission into tertiary institution till 2010 when I was admitted to study Home Economics and Management at Nassarawa State University, Keffi.
My course opened me up to all aspects of craft making. In fact, I learnt a lot about pattern drafting and using a sewing machine, which is related to what I do now.
In November 2014, I was posted to Abuja to undertake my National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) programme under Batch C. It was during the service year the idea of starting my own accessories line of business came to mind. I talked to a few friends about my dream and they encouraged and supported me.
PT: Whats your registered brand name and how did you start it off?
Adedayo: When I spoke with one of my cousins about my business idea, he was very excited about it. He was the one who helped me handle my companys brand registration protocols at the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC). By October 2015, Dharyour Leather was established as a registered company. That was when the seed of my lifes humble aspirations was sown.
PT: Was making bags part of your original dream? What were the initial challenges like?
Adedayo: No, I only branched into it. When I began, there were so many challenges, including the investment capital. There were times I thought I may not be able to keep the dream.
The major challenge I faced was getting the materials required for the work. Most of the time, the bulk of the materials were sourced from tandyleather.com, and sometimes, aliexpress.com, depending on what I was looking for at that particular time. Getting materials here in Nigeria was not really encouraging, because the quality of such materials, including accessories, is very poor.
The market here for leather and accessories is not very encouraging, because merchants are cutting corners. Again, the materials available for the business are never exclusive to one company. They are mass produced for profit making.
At the end of the day, one cannot get exclusive leather and accessories. This tends to remove the unique nature of products. The most important material however is the leather. If it is readily available everywhere, it takes away the value and quality of the product.
PT: How did you raise the seed capital for the business? Did you have to take loans to kick start?
Adedayo: (laughs) If one had taken loans, probably one would have shut down the business by now. I didnt take any loan. My family was a tremendous support from the very beginning till today. They always encouraged the use of talents and skills. So, I had their help in acquiring the necessary tools and materials needed to set up the business.
PT: What are the basic tools you need to start up this business?
Adedayo: The first thing I got were two sewing machines, one to sew the leather, the other to sew the lining of the bag, which was the interior part. Then, scissors, skeevers, mallet, rollers, carving tools, stamping tools, sets of needles, accessories, bag base, etc. tools differ when working with either natural or synthetic leather.
PT: Tell us about your staff strength
Adedayo: For the first collection I made, I worked with ten staff, five of who were basically for sewing the bags and the other five were into finishing, packaging and distribution of the bags.
After the first production, I had to let five staff, who were sewing, to go, because I wasnt working on anything at the time. My focus was to see how well people receive the products we put out in the market for sale. It turned out pretty good and I hope to work with more people going forward.
My staff are very experienced in bag making. Right now, I have a team of five, including myself, and we are taking orders based on requests. There is also a new collection of orders coming up. Work is in progress. We are coming out with something fresh for our customers.
PT: Are you planning to get more staff here in Abuja in view of the growing orders?
Adedayo: I have been going round the markets here in Abuja to find passionate people who are willing to work. I need people who are committed to giving their best. That way, Dharyour Leather will continue to produce great products. I am also looking at the prospects of requesting people from other states, especially Lagos, to come on board.
Soon, we will set up a cottage factory here in Abuja. So, we can always have production here in Abuja, month in and month out.
PT: In terms of staff strength, are you looking for those you can train or just specialized workers?
Adedayo: For now, I am looking for already specialized people, because I am also learning in the process. I want a scenario where everyone brings some level of specialization to the table. Later on, I can consider bringing learners on board, but not right now.
PT: Could you lead us briefly into the process of making Dharyour Leather bag?
Adedayo: First step is to have your design ready. Next step is to put the design out on brown paper or cardboard. Then, use the stencil to cut out the shape of the bag. After that, add the leather at the edges of the bag lining to give it a perfect finishing. Then, you sew the body of the bag together. The sewing is the most important thing. It cannot be rushed. The sewing and stitching has to be perfect, because that is the first thing people notice.
PT: How do you deal with leather being contraband in the country?
Adedayo: It is a major constraint to the business, because leather is the major material I use. So, I make use of other sources that have as much quality as what I used. Since I source my leather from tandyleather.com, its very expensive, especially with the current foreign exchange rate crisis. I found another website that I can get quality leather from aliexpress.com. They have companies online that produce leather in all variations.
I found a company through Aliexpress, which produces leather for me and is not as expensive as tandyleather.com. What I did afterwards was to let my clients know my challenges which would no doubt increase the price of the finished products they were paying for. For those that can afford it, they buy at the high price. For those who cannot, we still find a middle ground for them.
PT: Where are tandyleather and the recent discovery, ali express, located?
Adedayo: Tandi leather is available in the United Kingdom and also the United States of America, California to be precise. I speak to their agent online, place my orders in large quantities and they deliver everything to Nigeria and the Nigerian Customs Service lets me know they have arrived.
The other is Ali Express, they make it easier. It comes through the Post Office, then they alert me whether its being seized by Customs or not. If its seized, I have to pay a certain fee to Customs before it gets cleared and I get access to my leather. The last time my goods were seized, I had to pay as much as N125,000 to clear them.
PT: Where do you have your largest customer base?
Adedayo: My largest customer bases are in Abuja, then Lagos, Akwa Ibom and Delta States. After Abuja, I will pick Akwa Ibom and then Lagos, in that order. The turnout has been great so far. I had to use jiji.com.ng as a platform to market my bags at first, pending the time my website would be ready.
PT: How do you deliver finished products to those outside Abuja?
Adedayo: At first, we used DHL, but it was very expensive, sometimes even costing more than the price of the bags. So, we worked out another strategy, making use of less expensive platforms, like Tranex or Errand boy.
Within Abuja, I like to deliver myself, so as to get direct feedback from the client. I look forward to having my own delivery system with a request form for feedback from the customer to help me with more ideas.
PT: Are you satisfied with the business turnover so far?
Adedayo: Yes, I am. Its been a new experience for me altogether. It has helped me overcome shyness by interacting with more people than I would have done in the past.
PT: Aside jiji.com.ng, how else do you market your products?
Adedayo: Of course, through clients and even my family members, they take the bags places and people ask and they tell them. I have received calls so many times from prospective clients placing orders, because they got my contact from an already existing customer.
PT: On an average, how long does it take to make a handbag?
Adedayo: If it is natural leather, it would take me five days, because I prefer to use my hands to stitch the natural leather. But, synthetic leather would take a day and half to do everything depending on the available power supply at the time.
PT: How do you hope to sustain this business and take it to the next level?
Adedayo: I am gradually looking for investors to come into the business. I am also looking forward to raising money myself as well as looking to my familys support.
As for sustainability, it will be training other young people, so they can develop passion for this business. Having more people will bring new ideas, and this makes the business sustainable. I do not look forward to getting a loan. I am also looking forward to getting a grant from the Bank of Industry (BOI) grant for fashion outlets.
PT: Thank you for your time. We wish you good luck.
Adedayo: Thank you.
The General Officer Commanding the Nigerian Armys 1st Division, Adeniyi Oyebade, a major general, authorized last Decembers military operation that massacred at least 347 members of the Shia Muslim group in Zaria, and should be prosecuted, a judicial commission of inquiry into the killings, has said in its final report.
The commission of inquiry, set up by the Kaduna State government, indicted Mr. Oyebade and other senior army officers for the attack, PREMIUM TIMES can authoritatively report.
The panels report was submitted to Gov. Nasir el-Rufai on Friday, but its details are yet to be made public.
The killings drew worldwide condemnations, and several investigative reports said hundreds of people were killed by government troops and secretly buried in a mass grave in Zaria, Kaduna State.
The Shia Islamic movement said it lost more than a thousand members in the attack that took place between December 12 and 14 at its headquarters in Zaria.
A representative of the Kaduna State government told the commission of inquiry that 347 bodies were handed over by the army for a secret mass burial.
But despite the evidence, the army claimed it killed only seven Shiites who blocked a public road and attempted to assassinate its chief, Tukur Buratai, a lieutenant general.
It said troops only used force after it became clear that Mr. Buratais life was in danger.
The leader of the Shia group, Ibrahim El-Zakzaky, who was arrested by soldiers during the operation, has remained in custody seven months after.
The attacks were never condemned by the army hierarchy or the Muhammadu Buhari administration.
After his initial silence, Mr. Buhari later suggested during a televised interview on December 30 that the victims invited the wrath of the military upon themselves by hitting the chest of generals.
The report neither apportioned any blame to the federal government nor the army leadership, headed by Mr. Buratai.
Still, its details provide a glimpse into what was clearly a deadly use of disproportionate military force in quelling a civil unrest. The report confirmed that by any measure, the killings took place at a horrific scale.
Shooting through the blockade
The panel said it was able to confirm the death of 349 people, including a soldier. But it made clear it lacked the cooperation of military officials to establish the actual number of those killed.
The commission of inquiry listed culpable actors for civil or criminal prosecution and suggested ways of preventing similar incidents in future.
A copy of the report, exclusively obtained by PREMIUM TIMES, said the GOC of the Armys 1st Division, Kaduna, Mr. Oyebade, deployed soldiers to carry out such a large scale operation without recourse to the chain of command.
It recommends that Mr. Oyebade and other yet-to-be-disclosed officers who participated in the operation should be brought to trial before a court of competent jurisdiction.
The report, which contains 101 pages of correspondences and exhibits, starts with a recap of what transpired on December 12, 2015.
It said the Chief of Army Staff, Mr. Buratai, left Dutse, Jigawa State, at about 11:30 a.m for Zaria, where he was invited to be the reviewing officer at the passing out parade of the 73 Regular Recruits Intake of the Nigerian Army Depot.
Mr. Buratai and his entourage arrived at the Hussainiyya Baqiyyatillah shrine of the Shia group along Sokoto Road, Zaria, around 2:20 p.m.
There, the report said, he encountered members of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria in their hundreds.
A memo submitted by the Nigerian Army said the individuals were armed with dangerous weapons.
In a testimony to the commission, an officer in Mr. Buratais security detail, said after all entreaties to the protesters to leave the road failed, they decided to shoot their way through the blockade to prevent their principal from being attacked.
The next day, the report said, Mr. Oyebade deployed troops to the shrine to arrest the leaders of the Shia group, which resulted in the killings.
The panel said it established that the invasion of the IMN compound was carried out strictly on Mr. Oyebades order and without any rules of engagement, an action the commission said was at variance with the provisions of the Armed Forces Act, 1994, and the 1999 Constitution, both of which vested such authorities strictly in the president of the federal republic.
There was no evidence that there was the requisite delegation by the president to the officer who issued oral order for the deployment of the officers and men of the Nigerian Army for the cordon and search operation, the report said.
The commission rebuked military officers for refusing to give useful information that could have helped it reach a more detailed conclusion, hinting that the number of those killed could have been far higher than 349.
All the officers who testified were not forthcoming in providing full disclosure on the number of the dead, wounded and missing persons, the report said.
Similarly, the medical examiner in charge of the bodies kept at Nigerian Army medical facility in Kaduna also withheld support for the judicial panel.
It is unfortunate that the medical officer in charge of the Nigerian Army Depot Health Centre who took custody of some of the corpses was not forthcoming in giving evidence that would have enabled the commission to ascertain the actual number of people killed, the report said. The officer said he didnt even ascertain the gender of both the adult and children corpses that were deposited in his medical centre.
The report said the refusal of the Shia group, IMN, to appear and give testimony during its sittings, did not help the process in confirming the actual number of casualties.
Had IMN submitted a memo and appeared before the commission, it might have been able to shed light on the number of their members who might have lost their lives in the clashes.
Kaduna government undignified treatment of corpses
The commission was unable to determine the causes of death of the deceased victims owing to the mass burial conducted by the state without any autopsy, the report found.
The panel said the burial of all corpses of male and female Muslims in one grave violated Islamic traditions and other relevant burial laws of Kaduna State and Rule 115 of the Geneva Convention.
The commission found members of the IMN culpable in the death of an army officer, Dan Yakubu, a corporal, and recommended that those found culpable in the killing of the officer should be prosecuted.
Still, in a damning verdict, the panel said the force deployed by the army against the Shiites was disproportionate.
The Nigerian Army should intensify efforts in ensuring compliance with the rules of engagement and other legal standards in cordon and search operations at all times.
The report also recommended that soldiers should never be deployed against civilians and that the police should be better equipped for adequate response to public disturbances.
Oluremi Tinubu, the senator representing Lagos Central, has petitioned the leaderships of the All Progressives Congress and the Senate over her clash, last week, with Dino Melaye, who represents Kogi West.
The petition followed an earlier letter to the acting Inspector of Police, Ibrahim Idris, in which she asked for adequate security for fear Mr. Melaye might kill her.
The two senators, who are members of the ruling APC, clashed during a Senate closed-door session last Tuesday.
In Mrs. Tinubus letters, separately delivered to the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, and APC Chairman, John Odigie-Oyegun, Tuesday, she expressed worry that the Senate leadership had not taken action to address Mr. Melayes threatening misconduct.
She gave her account of the clash.
I was duly recognized to speak by the Senate President, after Senator Dino Melaye had spoken and berated some Senate colleagues over their perceived roles in the judicial case involving the Senate leadership, she wrote in the letter to Mr. Oyegun.
Although I remained silent and attempted no interjection during his statement, Senator Dino Melaye tried to abridge my right as a Senator by hectoring at me and interrupting my contribution. At one point, I cautioned him about the use of his language and the threats made, reminding him other Senators were there with equal right as he and represented their constituents.
In a burst of apparent rage, Senator Melaye charged at me in what can only be seen as effort to attack me. The attack was only prevented by some respectful Senators who moved to impede his path or otherwise block him from approaching closer towards me. I thank those Senators for their personal courage and sense of decorum. Senator Melaye hurled foul and vulgar language at me. What he said should never be heard in any public institution let alone the floor of the Senate. Denigrating me as a woman, Senator Melaye threatened to beat me on the floor of the Senate just because I dared to express my opinion different from his.
I am both a ranking Senator and a woman. But Senator Melaye took neither into consideration as he issued threats of rape and assault, while boasting he would face no consequence even if he fulfilled these criminal threats, Mrs. Tinubu narrated.
On Thursday, Mr. Melaye admitted to clashing with Mrs. Tinubu, but said he only hit back furiously after Mrs. Tinubu called him a thug and a dog.
Mrs. Tinubu, in her letter to Mr. Oyegun, expressed regret that her and Mr. Melaye belong to the same party, and that the silence of the Senate leadership suggested condoning the errant behaviour of the Senator.
She asked the APC leadership to investigate this matter in order to restore the public image and moral standing of the Party and APC members in the Senate.
The lawmaker wrote that Mr. Melayes conduct places the Party in disrepute and undermines the unity needed to accomplish the sober task to reform Nigeria for the better.
We must start by ensuring our own members know how to behave, according decorum, befitting their elected positions, she said.
In the letter to Mr. Saraki, Mrs. Tinubu said during the session over which you presided as the Senate President, Mr. Melaye used blatantly sexist and misogynist language offensive to every woman in Nigeria and every person who truly believes gender discrimination has no place in the Nigeria we are trying to build for ourselves and future generations.
She said she had refrained from public comments in view of the Senates integrity, but complained that Mr. Melaye, has become unmoved and has since paraded his misconduct in public as if to threaten a Female Senator is a badge of pride.
Mr. Melaye, three days ago, roamed Mrs. Tinubus Bourdillion Road neighbourhood in Lagos and then posted photographs of his adventure on social media, saying Eru Obodo (the river is never afraid of those swimming in it). The Kogi Senator made the trip apparently in response to a statement by supporters of Mrs. Tinubu daring him to visit Nigerias South-West.
Nigerias main opposition political party, the PDP, on Tuesday said the tone of conversation amongst Nigerians on social media had taken a disturbing dimension.
As a result, the party took responsibility for the role it played in fostering the toxic atmosphere, and promised to improve on the tone of its discussion going forward.
We have noticed, with a growing sense of dismay, the level of toxicity that pervades the political space with respect to discussions on national issues, the PDP said. We accept responsibility and apologise for whatever role we have played in reaching this level of toxicity.
Henceforth, we commit to focusing only on the issues and proffering cogent & competent solutions to the issues facing the nation.
The surprisingly conciliatory tone came in a series of tweets on its Twitter handle, @PdpNigeria between 9-10:00 a.m. Tuesday.
This toxicity, some of which finds expression in discussions across social media platforms, has reached the level where bridges are being burnt, personal relationships are being strained and an unnecessary tension fills what should ordinarily be patriotic and enlightening conversations on how to move the nation forward, the party said.
The Nigerian social media space had become a platform for dangerous political rhetoric, with a focus on re-tweets and likes often overshadowing constructive engagement.
Last month, the PDP said on Twitter that it had uncovered a plot to assassinate Governor Ayo Fayose of Ekiti State, a major opposition figure in the country.
Governor Fayose may have to take extra security measures to prevent Aisha Buhari or the 1st family from assassinating him, the June 21 tweet read.
In late March, the handle sparred with the Central Bank, suggesting that the bank was illegally handing out dollars to President Buharis inner circles amidst widespread scarcity of forex across the country.
First Lady Aisha Buhari got $22m forex from CBN on the instructions of Emefiele and the company sold at N362 same day. #CorruptionAndBuhari.
The PDP also tweeted that In 12 days, President Buhari has spent 6m (Six Million Pounds) in London. Change is really here.
The party said Nigerians would no longer see attacks from its handles in the future and urged its supporters to eschew abusive use of social media.
We urge our supporters and the believers in the ability of our party to provide these solutions to henceforth show more restraint and maturity as we point out the many obvious flaws of this administration and proffer solutions & alternatives to their many failures, the party said.
It ended by quoting Abraham Lincoln, a former president of the United States.
Were not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.
The PDP dominated Nigerian government at the center since 1998 until it was voted out in 2015 general elections. A protracted leadership crisis has left the party rudderless for several months.
Eunice Elisha, the Abuja preacher who was murdered over a week ago while conducting morning preaching, will be buried on July 23, her family has said.
Mrs. Elisha, 42, was murdered in the early hours of Saturday, July 9, in Kubwa, a suburb of Abuja.
Her sister, Bola Fatuashi, said the burial activities will start with a wake keeping at 5:pm on Friday, July 22, at the New Life Assembly Parish, Redeemed Christian Church of God, Kubwa.
She said lying-in-state will begin at 8: am on Saturday also in Kubwa.
Mrs. Elisha is survived by her aged parents, six siblings, her husband and seven children.
Mrs. Fatuashi had told PREMIUM TIMES that due to their aged fathers state of health, they could not relay the news to him.
We have not told my father, but my mother already knows. My mother is stronger than my aged father. We will all meet at the village, after every thing, then find a way to relay the news to him, in such manner as to prevent another tragedy, she had said.
The police say they have arrested six suspects in connection to the murder.
No further details have been provided.
The House of Representatives is picking up the Petroleum Industry Bill for a speedy consideration, its speaker, Yakubu Dogara, said Monday.
Mr. Dogara said the legislature found the initiative necessary after President Buharis administration repeatedly ignored calls to send an executive version of the bill.
The bill has remained stuck at the National Assembly since 2009 despite the huge impact experts said a petroleum industry law could have on Nigerias economy.
I have on at least three different occasions publicly requested the executive to as a matter of urgency send an executive bill on its intended reforms in the petroleum sector, Mr. Dogara said.
Presidential spokesmen, Femi Adesina and Garba Shehu as well as the Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed, did not answer nor respond to PREMIUM TIMES calls and text messages seeking comments.
Mr. Dogara said he sought to prevent past occurrences whereby the executive sent in the legislation late, consequently depriving lawmakers the much-needed time to thoroughly consider such a humongous document.
Mr. Dogara said the house was considering members-sponsored bills that would help reform the oil and gas sector.
It is deliberate that Section 44 (3) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, apart from vesting the powers to make laws in the legislature, went further to clearly invest it with powers to make laws for the management of the oil and gas sector, Mr. Dogara said.
We had hoped to avoid the situation in the last two Assemblies where the PIB was sent to the National Assembly very late in its tenure, thereby guaranteeing failure to pass the bills.
In the absence of an executive bill on the matter, two private members bills have now been introduced. We urge participants to familiarize themselves with these bills and make necessary inputs at the public hearing stage.
We also hope that this summit will craft its own version of the PIB for the attention of the National Assembly, taking into consideration all the existing drafts and also the pending bills, Mr. Dogara said.
Mr. Dogara denied media reports about the existence of an executive version of the PIB before the National Assembly, adding that lawmakers could no longer ignore the rot in the oil industry.
According to Nigeria Extractive Industry Initiative, NEITI, the PIB, if passed into law, would strengthen the capacity of indigenous Nigerian companies in the oil and gas sector to compete with international oil companies in the search and acquisition of hydrocarbons in Nigeria. The measure was also intended to reduce exploitation in the sector and limit, to the barest minimum, Federal Governments exposure to oil and gas exploration and production through joint venture operations.
Bala Zaka, a petroleum engineer, welcomed the initiative of the National Assembly.
He said early consideration of the bill was necessary to guarantee its passage within four years.
Mr. Zaka, however, urged the lawmakers to take up similar bills that were relevant to a smooth implementation of the PIB.
The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has called for the abolition of security vote for the president and governors in the country.
The president of NLC, Ayuba Wabba, said on Tuesday in Abuja that security vote had become an avenue for siphoning public funds.
The issue of security vote is another form of corruption; in fact, there was a particular state which took N1 billion in one month as security vote, he said.
It is an avenue for corruption. In good governance, all monies spent by government are budgeted and transparently applied.
That is what happens in other spheres; so for our sake, the issue of security vote should be done away with.
All monies to be spent should be transparently budgeted for, including the so-called security vote, so that it can be tracked, to prevent corruption.
Also, Mr. Wabba called for the removal of the immunity clause from the constitution, to enable the president, his deputy, governors and their deputies be prosecuted for criminal offences.
He noted that such political leaders in other parts of the world do not enjoy immunity against criminal prosecution, adding that Nigeria should not be an exception.
The NLC president said that immunity was hindering the fight against corruption and decried a situation whereby political office holders could not be prosecuted for criminal offence.
He said, Even after they leave office, they use their influence and resources they have accumulated to frustrate prosecution.
I have seen cases that lasted for eight to 14 years and were inconclusive. Some of these cases outlived the life of the administration that started the probe, due to this particular challenge.
There are some cases that started before the administration of former President Olusegun Obansajo till now, it is still ongoing.
Mr. Wabba said that nobody should be given immunity against criminal prosecution while in office.
He, therefore, stressed the need to review the constitution to address loopholes that gave room for some political leaders to steal the commonwealth. (NAN)
Troops of the Nigeria Army and operatives of the Civilian-JTF had on Tuesday gunned down 12 Boko Haram gunmen in a foiled ambush attacks in remote villages of Borno state, officials said.
The troops, in the same operation, rescued 22 civilians who had been under the captivity of the insurgents.
The spokesman for the Nigeria Army, Sani Usman, said soldiers battled hard in a difficult terrain to subdue the insurgents.
Four soldiers were injured at the end of the face off.
Colonel Usmans statement reads:
Yesterday troops of 7 Division Strike Group Team B (7 DSGB), attached to 21 Brigade, along with 4 Civilian JTF, carried out clearance operation of suspected remnants of Boko Haram terrorists in Warpaya, Zenteleye, Mubarka, Jadawa and Yerwa villages, said Mr. Usman, a colonel.
During the operations, they encountered and engaged elements of Boko Haram terrorists in Jadawa and Yerwa in which they killed 7 terrorists. Unfortunately 4 soldiers were wounded in action.
The troops also recovered one Fabrique Nationale (FN) rifle with registration number ANT 015 (B/B No 0058), 2 motorcycles and 2 mobile phones. As the operations continued, the team also intercepted some of the Boko Haram terrorists with 75 rustled cows and 25 stolen sheep.
While returning to base, the team was ambushed by suspected elements of Boko Haram terrorists. But the troops rose to the occasion and successfully cleared the ambush. They also encountered serious hardship because of bugging down of vehicles occasioned by marshy terrain.
In a related development, troops of 114 Task Force Battalion of 28 Task Force Brigade, in conjunction with some members of vigilante group, also carried out similar exercise at suspected Boko Haram terrorists hideouts at Mbale and Madube on Monday.
During the operation, the troops killed 5 Boko Haram terrorists, while some of them were believed to escape with gunshot wounds. The troops rescued 22 persons held captives by the terrorists; comprising of 10 females, 6 males and 6 children. In addition, they also recovered 2 bicycles, 2 gas cylinders and 2 Dane Guns in the process.
Similarly, troops of 115 Task Force Battalion also conducted clearance patrol at Kilekasa and Kopchi villages. While they were advancing they cleared pockets of terrorists hibernating at Pumpum and Emi villages.
Troops of 117 Task Force Battalion also conducted confidence-building patrols within Gella, Gyadkwara and Ngyahi villages, as well as Mayo Bani village. Their counterparts at 143 Battalion also conducted patrol up to Fattude, Gershisha, Wakara, Gadamayo and Barai villages. While troops of 115 Task Force Battalion along with about 60 vigilantes also carried out patrol at Kilekasa and Kopchi villages. They however observed that Kopchi has merged with Kikelasa village.
Following the reported directive of President Muhammadu Buhari that the case of the slain former Attorney General of the Federation, Bola Ige, be revisited, a former deputy governor of Osun State, Iyiola Omisore, has expressed confidence that his name will be cleared at the end of the investigation.
Mr. Ige was shot dead in his bedroom, in Bodija, Ibadan, at about 9pm on December 23, 2001 by unknown gunmen.
Mr. Omisore, who is currently facing charges of corruption, was a key suspect in the case and was detained for months as the administration of former President Olusegun Obasanjo made fruitless effort to find the killers.
Quoting sources, Vanguard reported on Monday that Mr. Buhari had also directed the acting Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, to investigate the killing of the ex-Deputy National Chairman, South-South, of the Peoples Democratic Party, Aminasoari Dikibo.
Mr. Dikibo was returning to his base from Abuja after a meeting when he was attacked by suspected assassins as he arrived Delta State. He was killed near Asaba on October 22, 2004.
In a statement by his media aide, Diran Odeyemi, on Tuesday, Mr. Omisore described the decision of the Federal Government to revisit the killing of the former Minister of Justice and Dikibo as a good and a welcome development.
He however urged the FG to extend its search towards unraveling the killers of late Funso Williams and Oduayo Olagbaju.
Mr. Omisore also advised the government and the IGP to widen the scope of their investigation to all areas rather than limiting themselves to a particular area or section.
I am particularly happy that fresh investigation will further exonerate me and others who were wrongfully framed up, suffered untold hardship before we were finally acquitted and discharged by the court, he said.
I pray that God will expose all the people and whoever is connected to all the killings under investigation while I wish the new IG the best of luck in the task.
Heavy gunshots on Monday rocked the Pantami stadium in Gombe, venue of the national convention of the National Association of Nigerian Students, NANS on Monday evening.
The umbrella body of students of tertiary institutions in Nigeria was holding a convention to elect new set of national leaders after years of factionalization of the body.
One of the delegates, Adnan Mukhtar, the secretary of the Students Union in North West University, Kano, informed PREMIUM TIMES that trouble started at about 5:30 pm when a former factional chairman of the association, Prince Miaphen was elected to chair the convention.
He said many students sustained gunshot and machete wounds after a group suspected to be loyal to one of the aspirants to the position of NANS president began shooting and attacking delegates with machetes and knives.
There has been tension between the supporters of two of the candidates for office of president, Aruna Kadiri and Chinonso Ubasi and matters came to a head when Prince was announced as the chairman of the convention
Supporters of Chinonso protested the emergence of Prince because they felt it was a ploy to ensure Kadiri wins. Prince was actually the Director General of the Kadiri campaign organization and as chairman of the convention, they felt he can work in favour of Kadiri,he said.
Mr. Mukhtar said the election of Prince was supervised by the outgoing President of NANS, Tijjani Shehu.
While Mr. Kadiri is a student of Edo State University, Mr. Ubasi, popularly known as IBB, is a student of Ebonyi state university.
Mr. Mukhtar said all the delegates have scampered away for safety, adding that he was not sure anyone would come back to the venue for the convention.
I can tell you that everyone is in serious fear now, in fact, most people have even vacated the hostel we are staying at Gombe State University for fear of the unknown, he said.
A first class traditional ruler in Plateau State, the Saf Ron Kulere, Lazarus Agai, was on Monday killed by suspected Fulani herdsmen.
A member representing Bokkos Constituency in the State House of Assembly, Sunday Muchen, confirmed the incident in a telephone interview with journalists in Jos, the Plateau State capital
Mr. Kulere, until his death was the Chairman of the Bokkos Traditional Council.
Sources said Mr. Agai was attacked and shot to death by armed herdsmen when he went to his farm in Sha village on Monday afternoon.
It was gathered that the remains of the traditional ruler were deposited in a morgue in an undisclosed hospital in Jos.
When contacted, the spokesperson of the Plateau State Police Command, Terna Tyopev, an assistant superintendent of police, said he was yet to confirm the incident.
He said he was unable to get the information on the matter from the divisional police officer of the locality.
As security agencies intensify the search for the killers of Lazarus Agaie, the first class traditional ruler of Bokkos in Plateau, more condemnations have trailed the shocking incident.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that gunmen killed the 76-year-old Saf Ron-Kulere on Monday on his way to Bokkos, after visiting his farm in Sha District of the area.
Also killed along with the monarch, who had been on the throne for 42 years, were his orderly, Sunday Wuyah, a police inspector, his wife, and his son, Shagari.
We have begun investigation into the matter and shall get to its roots. But we have not made arrests as yet, Ikedichi Iweha, spokesman of the Special Task Force (STF) in charge of security in Plateau, told NAN on Tuesday.
A member of the House of Representatives, Tim Golu (PDP, Pankshin/Kanam/Kanke), told NAN that the killing of the traditional ruler was very scary, sad and unfortunate.
I want to condemn in the strongest terms, the brutal and wicked killing of the Saf-Ron-Kulere, the oldest first class paramount ruler in Plateau.
These killings are becoming more common and the Federal Government must be proactive and beef up security in local communities so as to halt them, Mr. Golu said.
Also reacting, Jerry Useni, a senator, (PDP, Plateau South), described the incident as `terrible and wicked.
It is a shocking development; I have just been told and do not know the details, but I find this incident particularly painful because the man was a very peaceful ruler, he said.
On his part, Solomon Maren, another Rep, (PDP, Bokkos/Mangu), regretted that the monarch was killed by those he had spent much time struggling to protect.
From what I have gathered, the chief was killed because of his stance on the issue of grazing reserves.
Throughout his reign, he remained a very principled man and would tell you exactly what he feels about an issue. That was just his offence, Mr. Maren, who is from the same town with the slain chief, told NAN.
He regretted that such killings had become common in the chiefdom, and recalled that the Village Head of Makayi and the District Head of Manguna were killed in the same circumstances and by gunmen in January.
The lawmaker, however, appealed for calm among the youths of Bokkos, and cautioned them against taking the law into their hands.
It is a very dark moment in our history as a people, but we must exercise much restraint, he said.
Born in 1940, Agaie, a miner, became the District Head of Sha in 1971 and later rose to become the Saf-Ron-kulere in February 1974.
(NAN)
The police in Kano on Tuesday vowed to arrest those behind the murder of a newly-wed bride in Shaiskawa village of Danbatta Local Government Area of the state.
The Public Relations Officer of the state Police Command, Magaji Majiya, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) that the command had already commenced investigation into the incident with a view to arresting perpetrators of the dastardly act.
He did not release the name of the victim.
After we received the report of the incident around 5:30 a.m. on Sunday, the Crime Investigation Department swung into action.
As the Police reported to the scene, they found that the late bride was raped before she was stabbed to death in her matrimonial room.
We have so far launched an investigation into the incident and that will lead us to the arrest of the assailants, Majiya said.
He, however, said that the command had yet to make any arrests, but that the knife used in killing the woman had been recovered.
He reminded members of the public on the need to always be security conscious.
NAN recalls that the victim was stabbed to death on Saturday night in her room few days after her wedding and the husband returned to Abuja where he runs his business.
NAN also recalls that a similar incident happened last year when a teen bride was reportedly raped and slaughtered by hoodlums at Bachirawa quarters in Kano metropolis.(NAN).
The chairman of the Peoples Democratic Partys national caretaker committee, Ahmed Makarfi, has called for institutional reforms to shield security votes from abuse.
Mr. Makarfi, a former governor of Kaduna State, gave the advice in an interview with journalists on Tuesday in Kaduna.
He said it was important to set up a machinery for an institutional reform on how security votes are managed.
This affects not only the federal government, because if you come down to the states, you are going to find similar happenings, he said.
Even local government chairmen have security votes and you are going to find that their expenditure follows similar pattern.
Mr. Makarfi also spoke on the corruption war embarked by the Federal Government, saying that the war was not politically-motivated.
He however cautioned against targeting the wrong people so as not to derail the anti-corruption war.
According to him, the government and security agencies have the right to invite people to explain issues that might arise in the course of investigation whether you are in PDP or not, whether you are a
politician or not.
If Im to be fair, I will not say it is politics, Mr. Makarfi said. If you are invited purely on the issue of campaign funds, anybody can be invited to explain, it depends on the essence of the report.
Mr. Makarfi said in doing so, the government should avoid targeting middlemen and concentrate on those who know the source of the money being investigated.
The former governor said the government should investigate and prosecute those who approved and released public funds illegally.
The PDP national chairman also warned against investigating funds donated to political parties for campaigns, insisting that if the government wanted to do so, it must investigate all donations.
In all these issues, you have to be careful to be able to find out for what purpose the funds were meant for, because sometimes, they may not be purely for political reasons.
You have to get the facts right, because under Col. Sambo Dasuki (rtd) for instance, we had contracts and money for politics.
If you are going to look deeply, definitely religious leaders, traditional rulers and other national figures must have gotten some share too, he said.
A businesswoman, Muinat Jamiu, on Tuesday begged a Karu Upper Area Court, Abuja, to dissolve her five-year-old marriage to Adesina Jamiu for allegedly attempting to rape her first child.
Mrs. Jamiu, 30, who resides in Karu Village, told the court that her husband was in the habit of beating her 11-year-old daughter from a previous relationship at the slightest provocation.
She said her husband of had attempted to rape her daughter on several occasions.
The petitioner also said her husband had neglected his responsibilities on their four-year-old daughter and was in the habit of beating her at the slightest provocation.
Whenever I ask him for money for the upkeep of our child, he beats me up; he always promises to pay her school fees but end up not paying, Mrs. Jamiu said.
My 11-year-old daughter from a previous relationship stays with us and he attempted to rape her on several occasions whenever I am not around.
I had to take my daughter away to stay with a relative.
Last week because I refused him sex, he gave me the beating of my life to the extent that I sustained grave injuries and I have pictures to prove it.
We have been married since 2012 and I have endured lots of beatings since then, but now, I am fed up and there is no going back because I dont want to die.
Responding, Jamiu Adesina, expressed surprised that his wife could bring their issues to court.
Mr. Adesina also pleaded with the court to give them some time to go and settle their marital differences.
He said, I am surprised that she brought our issues before the court; we have always settled our issues amicably before now until she left the house with my child unceremoniously three months ago.
I always beg her whenever she provokes me or when I beat her.
I have also never attempted to rape her daughter.
Please the court should give us some time to see if we can settle, he said.
After listening to their submissions, the judge, Ibrahim Walliyulahi, adjourned the matter till July 26 for both parties to return and update the court.
You have a week to see if you can settle before then, please come on the next adjourned date to tell the court if you have been able to settle amicably.
The court said that nothing could be done on the issue of child custody until the determination and conclusion of this divorce petition. (NAN)
The Nigeria Police Force on Tuesday said it had arrested suspected killers of Olalekan Ogunranti, Managing Director of Todays prints Ltd.
Mr. Ogunranti was killed after he was kidnapped by gunmen on May 16 in Osun State.
Police said they arrested five suspects.
This is contained in a statement issued by the Force Spokesman, Don Awunah, in Abuja.
He said that following the slow pace of the investigation, the Inspector-General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, ordered the Intelligence Response Team (IRT) to take over the matter.
The Intelligence Response Team swung into action using all the technical resources of the Force available to them for the arrest of five prime suspects, the statement said.
Mr. Awunah said the police first arrested one of the suspects, Coker Daniel, whose confession led to the discovery of Mr. Ogunrantis corpse and subsequent arrest of the other suspects.
Coker Daniel, one of the suspects and a 32 year old graduate, in his confessional statement led IRT operatives to Ibukun River in Ibukun local government area of Osun state where the mutilated body of the late Olalekan Ogunranti was recovered and deposited at LAUTECH Oshogbo as other suspects were arrested in Lagos and Ondo States respectively, the statement said.
The other arrested suspects are Asimiyu Agboola, Adesina Meyidan, Ramoni Afolabi and Akeem Akorede. They were arrested in Lagos and Ondo States.
According to the statement, the suspects confessed to have kidnapped and murdered Mr. Ogunranti.
The Lagos State Police Commissioner, Fatai Owoseni, has warned kidnappers in the state to desist from the act and channel their energies to productive ventures.
Addressing journalists in Lagos on Monday, Mr. Owoseni said the government was deploying all arsenals to arrest the rising spate of kidnapping in the state.
The government has opened up lots of opportunities for people that want to access soft loans for small scale businesses and industries, Mr. Owoseni said.
The Bank of Industry (BOI) for instance is there, they have been putting up adverts, let them (kidnappers) have a change of mind, drop their weapons, access these funds that government at the state and federal level had created.
And for those of them that have certificates and saying that yes we have stopped bunkering and there is no other thing for us to do, there are platforms that have been created by government for them to be meaningfully employed.
Mr. Owoseni spoke at the end of an emergency security council meeting presided by Governor Akinwunmi Ambode and attended by heads of security agencies in the State.
The meeting came following the abduction of Yushau Oseni, the traditional ruler of Iba, a Lagos suburb, by unknown gunmen.
Mr. Owoseni said all security agencies in the State are bordered about the spate of kidnapping, adding that efforts are on to rescue Mr. Oseni and others who had been kidnapped recently.
What we want to assure the people is that we are putting efforts together to ensure that not just the monarch is rescued but also other victims of kidnapping are rescued and we bring those criminals to justice, Mr. Owoseni said.
All of us are bordered. As the people are bordered, government is bordered and law enforcement institutions in the State are bordered.
Patricia Smith Benghazi
On the first night of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, the Republican Party wanted one message to come through clearly: Remember the 2012 terror attack in Benghazi, Libya.
During an emotional speech Monday, the mother of a victim killed in the 2012 attack on the US consulate there launched into a fiery tirade against Clinton, blaming the former secretary of state for the attack.
"I have repeatedly asked Hillary Clinton to explain to me the real reason why my son is dead," said Patricia Smith, the mother of Sean Smith. "Im still waiting."
When a man waved a sign near the front of the stage that read "Hillary For Prison," Smith apparently took notice.
"Yeah, that's right. Hillary for prison. She deserves to be in stripes," she said.
Smith's emotional address was followed up by a video detailing the events surrounding Benghazi, as well as two former security officers who were stationed in Libya at the time and responded to the attack.
Several independent investigations of the attacks in Benghazi have found that the former secretary of state was not culpable of wrongdoing in the deaths of the four Americans who died in the attack.
Asked during a Democratic presidential primary debate in March to respond to Smith's comments, Clinton said that while she sympathized with Smith and "cant even imagine the grief that she has for losing her son," the victim's mother was "absolutely wrong."
"I and everybody in the administration, all the people she named the president, the vice president, Susan Rice we were scrambling to get information that was changing literally by the hour, and when we had information, we made it public. But then sometimes we had to go back and say we have new information that contradicts it," Clinton said.
NOW WATCH: Trump praised Scotland for voting to leave the EU it didn't
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By Nate Raymond
NEW YORK, July 18 (Reuters) - The son of a former United Parcel Service Inc executive was sentenced on Monday to a year in prison for orchestrating a fraudulent scheme in which he impersonated his successful father to raise money to buy the men's magazine Maxim.
Calvin Darden, a Staten Island resident who was convicted a decade ago for undertaking a previous fraud as a stockbroker, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan after pleading guilty in 2014 to wire fraud charges.
Darden, 41, had sought to avoid prison by testifying against Harvey Newkirk, his lawyer in the failed $31 million deal who was convicted last year on a wire fraud charge and sentenced in April to six months in prison.
But while Rakoff factored in the cooperation by Darden, who has already served 30 days in custody, he said it did not entirely erase his crime.
"He has spent too much of his life engaged in fraud and other misconduct," Rakoff said.
In court, Darden said he was "sorry, ashamed and embarrassed to such a degree I don't know the words."
The case marked a second round of legal troubles for Darden, the son of Calvin Darden Sr, who is a board member at Cardinal Health Inc and Target Corp and former senior vice president for operations at UPS.
In 2005, the younger Darden, then a stockbroker, pleaded guilty to New York state court charges that he stole almost $6 million from his employers and investors and used some of the money to finance a mansion with a shark aquarium.
After serving about 4-1/2 years in prison, Darden was released and met Newkirk, with whom he began pursuing the deal to buy Maxim in 2013, prosecutors said.
To finance the deal, prosecutors said Darden and Newkirk, who worked at the law firm Bryan Cave LLP, provided fake bank account statements and emails to lenders to borrow more than $8 million and try to secure another $20 million.
Darden also impersonated his father on phone calls and in emails and forged documents stating that the elder Darden would provide collateral for the deal, prosecutors said.
Story continues
His efforts led to the announcement that Maxim's then-owner, Alpha Media Group Inc, partly owned by private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management LP, would sell Maxim.
The deal fell apart, and Darden was arrested in February 2014. Alpha Media eventually sold Maxim to Biglari Holdings Inc .
The case is U.S. v. Darden, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 14-cr-00534.
(Editing by Matthew Lewis)
For the New World Order, a world government is just the beginning. Once in place they can engage their plan to exterminate 80% of the world's population, while enabling the "elites" to live forever with the aid of advanced technology. For the first time, crusading filmmaker ALEX JONES reveals their secret plan for humanity's extermination: Operation ENDGAME.
Jones chronicles the history of the global elite's bloody rise to power and reveals how they have funded dictators and financed the bloodiest warscreating order out of chaos to pave the way for the first true world empire.
Watch as Jones and his team track the elusive Bilderberg Group to Ottawa and Istanbul to document their secret summits, allowing you to witness global kingpins setting the world's agenda and instigating World War III.
to Ottawa and Istanbul to document their secret summits, allowing you to witness global kingpins setting the world's agenda and instigating World War III. Learn about the formation of the North America transportation control grid, which will end U.S. sovereignty forever.
Discover how the practitioners of the pseudo-science eugenics have taken control of governments worldwide as a means to carry out depopulation.
View the progress of the coming collapse of the United States and the formation of the North American Union.
Never before has a documentary assembled all the pieces of the globalists' dark agenda. Endgame's compelling look at past atrocities committed by those attempting to steer the future delivers information that the controlling media has meticulously censored for over 60 years. It fully reveals the elite's program to dominate the earth and carry out the wicked plan in all of human history.
Endgame is not conspiracy theory, it is documented fact in the elite's own words.
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Netflix (NFLX) The streaming giant added 1.7 million subscribers during the quarter, missing its own expectation of 2.5 million. Netflix added 160,000 memberships in the US and 1.52 million internationally.
Goldman Sachs (GS) The big bank topped Wall Street estimates, reporting earnings per share of $3.72 on revenue of $7.93 billion. Analysts were expecting earnings per share of $3 on $7.58 billion in revenue.
Microsoft (MSFT) The company is scheduled to report fourth-quarter earnings after the market closes Tuesday. Analysts are expecting earnings per share of 58 cents on revenue of $22.2 billion.
Yahoo (YHOO) The internet giant reported mixed second-quarter results, posting earnings per share of 9 cents on revenue of $1.31 billion. Analysts were expecting earnings of about 10 cents on $1.08 billion in revenue.
IBM (IBM) The enterprise technology company reported fiscal second-quarter earnings per share of $2.95 on revenue of $20.4 billion. This quarter marks IBMs 17th straight quarterly decline in revenue.
UnitedHealth (UNH) The health insurer reported adjusted earnings per share of $1.96, topping Wall Street expectations for $1.89 per share, as revenue grew 28% to $46.49 billion. The insurer also raised the bottom end of its 2016 adjusted earnings forecast range by 5 cents to $7.80 to $7.95 per share.
Monsanto (MON) Monsanto has rejected Bayers revised $55 billion buyout offer, saying it is financially inadequate. Monsanto also said it is open to further constructive conversations with Bayer.
Bloomin Brands (BLMN) The company has launched a loyalty program called Dine Rewards across many of its brands in an effort to lure more customers to its restaurants. Diners will earn 50% off their meal after three visits to Outback Steakhouse, Bonefish Grill, Carrabbas Italian Grill or Flemings Prime Steakhouse and Wine Bar.
Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) The U.S. healthcare giant reported second-quarter financial results that topped Wall Street estimates and raised its full-year financial guidance for 2016. Johnson & Johnson posted adjusted earnings per share of $1.74 on revenue of $18.5 billion.
TORRANCE, California, July 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Agile-1, a global workforce management solutions company, is proud to announce the appointment of Mr. Beat Mueller to the position of country manager for its operations in Switzerland. In his role as country manager, Beat is responsible for operations, sales and service management. He will also lead the strategic development of our client relationships and country-specific, value-added services.
Mr. Mueller comes to Agile-1 with over 14 years of experience in the human capital industry. Prior to joining the company, he was a country manager for a global staffing company and the business development director for a workforce solution provider in Europe. As an executive with one of the leading staffing agencies in Switzerland, Mr. Mueller helped to grow the company's business by offering high performance resources and talent management solutions for contract, permanent, payroll and outsourcing projects.
"There is tremendous opportunity for Agile-1 to help companies in Switzerland find competitive advantage by optimising their workforce management strategies," stated Mr. Mueller. "Globalization has dramatically increased the level of international dependency and competition in the Swiss economy, making innovation a requirement for long-term sustainability. Companies are seeking partners like Agile-1 who can provide the latest tools and ensure the highest degree of compliance, visibility, efficiency and quality throughout their workforce."
Mr. Peter Carvalho, President of Agile-1, stated the following regarding Mr. Mueller's appointment: "We are thrilled to have such an accomplished professional to guide our expansion efforts in the region. Mr. Mueller's knowledge of the industry and experience with leading large corporations to refine their workforce management strategies makes him the perfect choice to fill this important role."
Mr. Mueller will be working in the Agile-1 offices located at Turmstrasse 18, 6300 Zug, Switzerland.
About Agile-1
Agile-1 solves workforce challenges by combining innovative technologies and programmes with experienced professionals to deliver a suite of total workforce solutions. We maximise the value of your workforce by decreasing the liability and overhead associated with human capital management. Workforce challenges. Solved. Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram @Agile1Global.
Related Links
http://www.agile1.ch
SOURCE Agile-1
Platform Combines SEM Scanner Detection with NHS-developed Pressure Ulcer Management Tool
MANCHESTER, England and LOS ANGELES, July 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Medical device company Bruin Biometrics, LLC ("BBI"), is linking the SEM Scanner, its wireless point-of-care device for pressure ulcer detection, to a digital registry for pressure ulcers known as "PUNT" (Pressure Ulcer Notification Tool) as it steps up its war on a life-threatening condition that claims as many lives in the US as most cancers. Today, pressure ulcers impact nearly 5 million patients in Europe and North America with treatment costs exceeding $13B -- nearly 500,000 of those cases occur in the United Kingdom, posing a 2.1bn problem to the NHS.
BBI today announced that it has licensed PUNT, an online tool conceptualized by tissue viability expert Mark Collier and developed by United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust (ULHT), one of the largest acute hospital trusts in England.
PUNT has been used within ULHT to facilitate real-time recording of in-patient pressure injury and directly links with the Trust's patient management system to standardize and facilitate intervention and treatment. Since incorporating PUNT into pressure ulcer prevention protocols in 2011, the Trust has reduced the incidence of hospital-acquired pressure ulcers (HAPUs) by nearly 40% to 0.9%, compared with the national reported incidence rate of 4-6%.
BBI will offer PUNT as a complement to its SEM Scanner, the first and only device to reveal pressure-induced tissue damage happening beneath the skin's surface up to 10 days ahead of visual signs of damage occur (O'Brien 2015).
The addition of PUNT strengthens SEM Scanner's position as the first prevention, warning and management system for pressure ulcers. With this system, there will be one place to track and retrieve information on patient diagnosis, treatments and progress across care settings as patients move from home care to acute care and to community care settings. This system's benefits will transform pressure ulcer patient management by:
Incorporating patient diagnostic information (e.g., SEM Scanner values) as a critical data point in developing a personalized pressure ulcer care plan; Facilitating early intervention and improved compliance through alerts for clinicians, i.e. based on SEM Scanner detection of pressure injury or when assessments are overdue, and lists appropriate care interventions; Enabling patient-centered, joined-up care across care settings from prevention through recovery; and, Creating an online, electronic platform that could serve as a global pressure ulcer registry to collect and report population data, and to use evidence-based prevention and care pathways based on actual patient outcomes.
SEM Scanner is CE Mark approved and is currently in commercial launch in the EU and Canada. PUNT is currently deployed in United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust.
Quotes:
Martin Burns, BBI CEO: "Our mission is to reduce pressure ulcer incidence. The combination of the SEM Scanner to detect early stage pressure ulcers and then PUNT to manage all pressure ulcers from point of first development to discharge from care is a breakthrough. So now patients, for the first time ever, will have their wound care data be evidenced-based and transferable between care settings. This solution aligns with the needs of nurses and health systems to provide patient-centered preventative care and then demonstrate protocol compliance, even as patients transition between care settings."
Rachael Lester, BBI VP Product: "Wound care is catching up to fields like oncology which have employed advanced diagnostics and patient registry data to shift the care pathway earlier toward prevention and to personalize medicine based on a patient's specific pathogenesis. For the first time in wound care, we are combining the power of these proven tools to bring those same benefits to patients at risk for pressure ulcers."
Mark Collier, tissue viability nurse consultant at ULHT who developed PUNT and British Journal of Nursing's 2016 Pressure Care Nurse of the Year: "PUNT greatly reduced overhead and staff time required to report and monitor pressure ulcers and improved patient information management across our four hospitals."
About Pressure Ulcers
Pressure ulcers are a common medical problem that can lead to pain, disfigurement, infection and death. Also known as bedsores, pressure sores or decubitis ulcers, pressure ulcers are an area of localized damage to the skin and underlying tissue usually around an area of bony prominence, such as the sacrum, coccyx, heels, and hips that results from pressure involving shear and/or friction. Across Europe and the United States, it is estimated that 18%-25% of patients in both acute care and long-term care settings suffer from pressure ulcers, disproportionately impacting the elderly and patients with limited mobility. There are some 2.5 million pressure ulcer cases annually in the European Union, with nearly 500,000 of those cases in the United Kingdom: a 2.1bn problem to the NHS. In the US, some 2.5 million Americans develop pressure ulcers annually in acute care facilities, costing the US health system $11B. Each year, 60,000 Americans die from pressure ulcer complications such as cancer, sepsis, cellulitis, and MRSA.
About BBI
Bruin Biometrics, LLC, a pioneer in biometric-sensor based medical devices, is committed to the development of point-of-care diagnostic solutions for early detection and monitoring of chronic, preventable conditions. The company's first product is the SEM Scanner, a hand-held non-invasive device that assesses sub-epidermal moisture, a biomarker associated with localized edema in the initial inflammatory phase of pressure ulcer formation, which has been found to detect early-stage pressure ulcers as much as 10 days earlier than visual observation. Pressure ulcers affect approximately 25% of acute care hospital and long-term care patients typically the elderly and immobile. SEM Scanner is CE Mark approved and is currently in full commercial launch in the EU and Canada. SEM Scanner is not currently for sale in the United States.
BBI is also developing OrthoSonos, a non-invasive device for real-time orthopedic joint monitoring and assessment of prosthetic implant failure; and P02M, the first device for monitoring tissue oxygenation at a specific location in real time. P02M is initially being tested for continual monitoring of tissue and vascular viability in the feet of diabetics. Diabetes can cause peripheral artery disease and peripheral neuropathy, putting patients at risk for foot ulcers.
BBI is based in Los Angeles and maintains a European office in Manchester, UK.
For additional information, visit www.bruinbiometrics.com. Follow BBI on Twitter at https://twitter.com/bruinbiometrics.
Related Links
http://www.bruinbiometrics.com
SOURCE Bruin Biometrics, LLC